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The following is a conversation with Stephen Pressfield, author of several powerful nonfiction and historical fiction books, including The War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of people whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos. Also, his books Gets a Fire about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, The Lionsgate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written. As some of you know, I don't shy away from taking on a big, difficult challenge. One of the hardest for me and for millions of others is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day, pushing on to think deeply, to create, despite the millions of excuses that fill the head. In his work, Stephen has articulated this struggle better than anyone I've ever read. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and subscribing to it everywhere after that and downloading Cash App and using code lexpodcast. Click on the links, buy all of the stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. I recently considered renaming this podcast but decided against it. AI is my passion, and in some sense, this podcast is not as much about AI but more about a journey of an AI researcher struggling to explore the human mind, the physics of our universe, and the nature of human behavior, intelligence, consciousness, love, and power. I will continue to return home to the technical, computer science, machine learning, engineering, math, programming, but also venture out to talk to people who had a big impact on my life outside the technical fields. Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King, musicians like Tom Waits, political leaders like, well, you know who, and even athletes. I hope you join me on this journey. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. Click on the links, buy all of the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast. This episode is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else. I've been binging on this podcast. Jordan is a great human being. He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed, and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary Kasparov, and many more. I just finished listening to his recent conversation with Mick West about debunking conspiracy theories. This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating on both sides, but in this conversation, Jordan thread the needle beautifully, and so it turned out to be a great listen. I highly recommend it. Again, go to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LexPodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that the cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Debits and credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago. The US dollar created over 200 years ago, and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency's still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to, and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play, and use the code LexPodcast, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield. Modern society in many ways dreams of creating universal peace, and yet war has molded civilization as we know it throughout its history. So let's start at the high philosophical level. If you could imagine a world without war, how would that world be different? Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served? Why do we fight? I think we're basically the same creatures internally that we were in the cave, right? In tribal society, back for however many, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which means that we're in the dynamic in our mind is a kind of an us versus them dynamic where our tribe is the people, and everybody else are whatever, you know? And I don't see that, I don't think that's changed one iota over the centuries. It's just a question of how one might sublimate that urge to compete. When you're a martial artist, you know, a great part of your day I'm sure is dedicated to reaching that place of total commitment and in the face of competition, in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera, which is, I think, natural and great for the human race on an individual basis. So the hope that I have, if there is any hope, personally, I don't think the human race is gonna be around very long, but would be in sports or in other kind of sublimated activities where people can act out their need for conquest or aggression or so forth, but at the same time relate to their opponents as human beings, and when the game is over, you know, you embrace your competitors, stuff like that. So you think war was inevitable, it's a part of human nature as opposed to a force, a creative force in society that served a benefit. Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know, spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that, but I think the urge to conquest, if you think about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that, or even individual, or if we even think about one of the plants that we're looking at right outside, I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way, it would take over, you know, the whole hillside. And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say, there were, who knows, over the face of the earth, hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan, you know, Asia, Europe, wherever, and every prince that grew up dreamt of conquering his neighbor and conquering a neighbor after that. That seems to be a universal human imperative, at least in the male of the species. So... The war is just a realization of that imperative. I think so. So you've written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae, you've about Alexander the Great, about the Six Day War in 67 in Israel, against Egypt, Jordan, Syria. What war, not just out of those, but in general, do you think has been most transformative for the world? Well, these are great questions, Lex. Tough, easy ones, right? I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols, because I certainly, from what little I know, I think that was a very, their conquests were very transformative, bringing cultures in a horrible, bloody way together. But gosh, what's then the most transformative? Maybe the Roman conquest, establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture. Maybe Alexander the Great's wars that united east and west, at least for a minute. So building of empire. Do you have a sense, so there's wars, I mean, the Six Day War is not about building empires. It's about deeply held religious, cultural conflict and holding the line, holding the border. And then there is conquests, like the Mongols, that, what is it, some large percentage of the population is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right? So that has transformative effects. And then World War II, I mean, personally, and my family and so on, had transformative effects. Let me ask you this, Lex. Why are you, what are you trying to get at with these questions? What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at? Well, I talked to Eric Weinstein, and he said everything is great about war except the killing. And there's a romantic notion of war. Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior, but there's a romantic notion of war that somehow there's a creative force to it, that because we fight, out of that fighting comes culture, comes music and art, and more and more desire to create with the societies that win. And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick and I want your land. It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force that makes humans unique to other animals. Like, war is, it can't be just four people or 10 people or 100 people. You have to have thousands of people agreeing, usually thousands or more, for something so deeply that you would be willing to risk your own life. And there's a romantic notion to that. And because you've written so well and passionate about some of these, I wanted to see, because I don't have any answers, I wanted to untangle that. If there is a reason we fight that's more than just anger and hate and a way to conquer. Well, let me take it from a completely different side. I don't think that I, in writing about war, am really that interested in war per se. I'm more interested in the metaphor. I think for me, I'm really writing about my own internal war and the war against myself and against my own resistance, my own negativity, all of those things that spirituality would be the opposite of. So I'm not really an expert on war. It's not like talking to Jim Mattis or to Victor Davis Hanson or whatever. To me, the human being, we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope. And there's an automatic terrible tension within that. And which creates a war inside ourselves. So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army standing up to, whatever, 10 to one odds or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves. For me, the six day war was, as you know, my feeling was it was about a return from exile. It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment of the state of Israel, which had never really been completed because the holiest places of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies. So now, on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquests, I think, were a whole other different scenario where the metaphor was that Alexander's father, Philip, I think created the First Nation, capital N Nation, and he created a sort of a pathway for these guys who were mountain men and basically barbarians, Macedonians, and by creating this army and this dream of conquering the world, which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted, he gave them a way of rising out of themselves, of transcending themselves, not just individually, but as a people. So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex, of a certain creativity to it. But again, that's not, for whatever, and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this, that's not really what's interesting to me about these stories. And the Spartans, what was a whole, at Thermopylae, that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war. That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death for a greater cause, just like, to me, the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual, a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I see it. I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time, and I decline because I don't really feel like I'm a spokesman for the warrior class or anything like that. That's not what's interesting about it to me. But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor, that we're all essentially, in various ways, warriors? If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes, and think of our life at least as males, and the earliest archetypes that kick in are the youth and the wanderer and the student and that kind of thing, and then at some point around age 15 to 20, whatever, the warrior archetype kicks in, and we want to play football, we want to do martial arts, we want to join the special forces, we want to hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond, we want to test ourselves against adversity and so on and so forth. But at some point, that archetype, we move beyond that archetype, and we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth. And then there are many archetypes beyond that towards the end. So I'm interested in the warrior archetype, but not to the be all and end all of everything else. In my book, The Virtues of War, have you read that? Well, there's a character named Telamon, who's actually, it's a long story, but when he's with Alexander's army, and when they arrive in India, he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists, the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis. And he says to Alexander that these guys are warriors beyond what we are, even though they do nothing because they are inside their own selves all day long. If we go to the Six Day War, you write about, in Lionsgate, you write about the Six Day War in Israel. I think of the wars you've written about as the one we're still in many ways in the midst of today. Yes. So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel? The Israeli Palestinian conflict? I mean, today it's the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but it echoes of the same conflict in that part of the world with Israel. What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict? What can we learn about society and human nature from that conflict? That is one of the hottest conflicts that still goes on today. Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate about the Six Day War, I wrote in the introduction that this was not gonna be a multi sided story. I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew, I identify with the Israeli people, I was gonna see it entirely from their side. So that's probably not what you're asking, but to me, the Six Day War and that whole, it's a piece of land that's holy to at least three religions and probably more. And from the Jewish point of view, it's where the state of Israel, it's where David founded Jerusalem, it's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera, where Moses came and brought the people. So to me, the Six Day War was about, as I said, a return from exile, from diaspora after 2000 years. Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever, it's a whole other scenario. Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways, but religious beliefs. Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity. I mean, again, what is a Jew? Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion or is it somebody of a certain race that race arose in a certain place? Same thing as a Muslim. What is a Muslim? Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever? Or did they arise in a certain place and a certain ethnicity? Because if we landed from Mars, we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we? Just looking at them, you could easily mix them and you'd never know. And the specifics of the faith is not necessarily the thing that defines a person. No, I don't think so. So you could be, like many are, secular Jew living in Israel and still have a strong bond. Definitely, definitely. In fact, almost all of the Jews, the fighters that I spoke to from the Six Day War were secular and it really was not a religious thing with them as much as it was a national thing. So having spent time in Israel, how's the world where military conflict is directly felt as opposed to maybe if we look at the US where it's distant and far away? How is that world different? How are the people different? It's very different, as you know. I've never been to Israel, actually. Oh, you haven't? I haven't felt it. Ah, well, you should definitely go. I mean, here in the United States, where when an incident like Charlottesville comes up, where people are chanting, Jews will not replace us, blah, blah, blah, the impulse in the Jewish community is to think of, well, how can we reach out to the other side? How can we show them that we are human beings like they are and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera? That's the sort of distant from war. From, if you're in Israel, like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now, you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander or whatever. You would not just be working at MIT or whatever. And I would be in the army too. And so from their point of view, they say all those people who hate us, can I curse on this? Of course. Can I curse on this thing? Fuck them, we'll kill them. We'll kill them. If they dared to cross the line, and that's their whole different point of view. To me, it's actually a healthier point of view. You think so? Yeah. So there's no, so let me ask the hard question is, well, maybe it's an impossible question is, how do we resolve that conflict? In Israel and? In Israel or? Anywhere? Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US and say, F you and the people, yeah. Here's my, I think that the only way that two warring sides or two sides that are opposed to one another can ever really come together is when there's mutual respect, we'll get just more water. I got it, I got this. When there's mutual respect and they can see each other as equals and when there's mutual fear, you know, where one side says, we don't dare cross the line with this other side, and the other side says the same thing. I think then you can kind of reach across that thing and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here. We'll mingle in cultural ways and we'll have interchange, you know, winter marriage, da, da, da, da, da, da. But as soon as one side has no power, as the Jewish people have had no power throughout the diaspora forever, right? Then it's just a human nature. You can see it in Trump and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right? And he's not alone. I'm not blaming him alone. That's human nature. So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you, if you cross the line, we'll kill you, is really a good way, is a good place to start from. Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table and say, you know, what do we have in common? How can we, we want to raise our children. You want to raise your children. How can we do this in a way that we're not hurting each other? So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance, some kind of balance of power. Yeah. But you haven't spoken to the fact that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other. So is there no way to alleviate that hatred? Or is that, I mean, what role does love and hate come? I think that hatred can go away. I really do. I mean, if you look at even now that I haven't seen this in person, but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis are collaborating in certain things, you know, by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran. I do think that even really long, long, longstanding hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old, can go away under the right circumstances. In a, on what time scale? I mean, for instance, I don't know if there's some, do people have to die? Do generations have to die and pass away and new generations come up with less hate? Or can a single individual learn to not hate? I think a single individual can learn to not hate because it certainly doesn't seem to, over thousands of years, doesn't seem to work. You know, we keep thinking that that's gonna happen. But I think it's, we're in a real spiritual realm here when you're talking about that. You're in a realm of, you know, Buddha, Jesus, whatever, something like that, that where, you know, a true change of soul happens. But I do think that's possible. So what do you think is the future of warfare? Especially with what many people see as the expansion of the military industrial conflict. To what, do you, I know you're not a military historian. I'm asking more as a metaphor. And do you see us as people continuing to fight? You know, it's a really great question, Alex, because I think now with social media, TV, movies, all of these things that create empathy across cultures, it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think, to totally demonize the other, the way it was in previous wars. I also think, I don't really see an appetite for people wanting to go to war these days. And in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad. It's like everybody's so fat and lazy and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I, both the younger generations were eager to go to war. You know, I think it was insane, but it was that sort of warrior archetype that we were talking about before that, that generational testosterone eros thing. Whereas nowadays, I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war because there always are, but it's sort of hard to imagine people getting off their ass these days to do anything. Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media as a place for empathy, sure. But in a sense, it's a place for war as well. For hatred, yeah, true. For hatred. And perhaps the positive aspect of hatred on social media is that it's somewhat less harmful than murder. And so it kind of dissipates sort of the hatefuls. You get the hate out at a less, on a daily basis and thereby never boils up to a point where you want to kill. It's also a really weird thing that's going on that I don't know if anybody really understands, like with video games where kids are acting out these incredible horror things, right? But you know that if they cut their finger, they would like freak out, you know? And I also don't think that many of the people that are hateful on social media, if they were face to face with the person, they wouldn't. So there's a sort of two mental spheres happening at the same time. And I don't know how that plays out. Maps to the actual military, how that actually maps to military conflict. Yeah, yeah. Like if you in the United States have a draft, for example, how the populace would respond different than they did in previous generations. Yeah, I think they certainly would. Yeah. Another question, not sure if you've thought about it, but I work on building artificial intelligence systems. In our community, many people are worried about AI being used in war. So automating the killing process with drones and in general, it's being used more and more. I should recuse myself on that one. I really haven't thought about that one. You haven't thought about it. I'd rather ask you what you think about it. Well, it's interesting, I mean, because it's so fundamentally different from if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae. It means just if we talk about the difference between a gun and a sword. I'll tell you one little anecdote. There was a Spartan king, I don't know which one it was, but at one point they showed him a new invention and it could launch a bolt that would kill someone at a range of 200 yards. And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more. Because their point of view of war, it was highly ritualized, as you know, and the code of honor was that you were not supposed to be able to kill another person unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed. And any other way of doing that, even bow and arrow was considered less than manly and less than honorable. And maybe we should go back to that because at least it makes the stakes real and true. Not that we could. Not that's the point. You were in the Marine Corps, so we talk about the real, the bloody conflicts that you've written about, many of them. So let me ask a personal question. Have you, sort of as a writing and in general, have you thought about what it takes to kill a person if you yourself could do it in the war? I have thought about it, yeah. And how that would make you feel? Of course, one never knows. I certainly, I have not been in combat. I haven't killed anybody. But I would imagine in the real world that it would change you utterly forever. Because you can't help but identify with the person that you've just killed. And it's another human being. And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider. So I would imagine that it's something that warriors understand and nobody else understands. And you've spoken with many. How, I mean, you've spoken with people who've seen military combat in Israel. What, have they been able to articulate the experience of killing? It's sort of just what I said. I mean, I'm even thinking of one pilot that I interviewed over there who was strafing a tank in his Mustang and saw, at really low altitude, and saw what his bullets did to the guy and could see his face and everything like that, which is even one remove or more removes from an infantryman, what an infantryman does. And he said that same thing that I said, that it just changes you and you can never say it, never look at the world or look at anything the same way again. And when that happens at scale, it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds. That changes entire societies. I mean, that's what we've seen. At least it, but the problem is it doesn't change the politicians back home. Right. How important is mortality, finiteness, the fact that this thing ends to the creative process? So, killing and war really emphasizes that, but in general, the fact that this thing ends. It does? It does, and uh. Shit. And on a serious note, do you think about your own mortality? Do you meditate on your own mortality when you think about the work you do? That's another great question, Lex. I actually, I'm 75, and I just was having, I had breakfast in New York a few months ago with a friend of mine who's like my exact same age. And I said to him, I said, Nick, do you ever think about mortality? And he said, every fucking minute of every day. And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too. But actually, I always have, I think. And I think, you know, the fact of mortality gives meaning to life, you know? I think that's why we want to create. That's why we want to make a mark of some kind. Or, and the other aspect of it is what's on the other side of that mortality? I'm a believer in previous lives. So I sort of, and I, the question I've never been able to answer among many, many others is like, why are we even here? Why are we in the flesh? You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God or some force is, we're on some kind of journey, but I'm not sure why, why we were put in this world where the ground rules are, if you think about animal life, that you cannot live from one day to the next without killing and eating some other form of life. I mean, what a demented thing, you know? Why couldn't we just have a solar panel on our head and, you know, be friends with everybody? So I sort of, I don't get what that was all about, but that's sort of the big issue. Have you read to Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, for example? Is Ernest Becker's a philosopher that said that the death, that the fear of death is really the primary driver of everything we do. So Freud had what the? Right, I would agree with that. So to you, you've always thought about your, even your own mortality. Yes, definitely. And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect of what you were talking about? Like that we kind of, what's your sense that we had previous lives? In what, have you thought concretely or is it a lot of it kind of is? No, I've thought concretely about it. I mean, it's very clear when you see children, young kids, or even dogs and cats, that they come into the world with personalities, you know, and three kids in a family are gonna be completely different and completely their own person. And that person that they are doesn't change over life. And I, you know, there's one of the things that I did in my book The Artist's Journey is that there were certain things where I tracked or just listed in order, like all of Bruce Springsteen's albums or all of Philip Roth's books, you know, kind of a body of work throughout over, you know, a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know. And you can see that there's a theme running through all of those things, that it's completely unique to that person. Nobody else could have written Philip Roth's books or Bruce Springsteen's songs. And you can even see sort of a destiny there. So I ask myself, well, where did that come from? What, it seems to be a continuation of something that was, that happened before, and that will lead to something else because it's not starting from scratch. It seems like there's a calling, a destiny in there already. This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing. So yeah, it's almost like the, there's this, let's call it a God, it's passing, it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human that has lived and putting those into the new one. Sampling is probably a pretty good word. Taking some of the good, well, you can't take all the good parts because the bad parts is what makes the person. Let's say you're taking it all together. Okay, this is humans only, or does it pass around from animals in your view? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, I don't know. So, okay, so you talk about the muse as the source of ideas maybe. Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing, tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me about her? Where does she reside? What does she look like? I mean, you can look at it many different ways, right? The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right? They created gods that were like human beings. But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective, Jewish mysticism, you could say that it's the soul, the neshama, right? That the soul is above us on a higher plane, our own, your soul, my soul, and is trying to reach down to us and communicate with us. And we're trying simultaneously to reach up to it through prayer or through, if you're a writer or an artist, you know, when you sit down at the keyboard, you're entering into a kind of prayer. You're entering into a different state of an altered consciousness to some extent. You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline, or turning on the radio to tune into the cosmic radio station. And another way of looking at it, this is an, did you ever see the movie City of Angels? The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep. And right, the visual of the movie sort of was Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon. And as she's operating on somebody, suddenly Nicolas Cage in this long duster coat, like Jesse James, appears right next to her in the operating room, and he's an angel. And he's waiting to take out the soul of the patient on the operating table. And she doesn't see him, she's totally unaware of him. And so is everybody else in the operating room, except maybe the guy who's about to die, who suddenly sees him. But I kind of believe that there are beings like that, or if you don't like that, it's a force, it's a consciousness, it's something that are right here, right now. And they're trying to communicate to us. And like through a membrane, like tapping on that window over there, they're like right out there. And they carry the future. They are everything that is in potential. All the works that you will do, Lex, your startup, whatever else you're doing, they know that. And it's not really you that's coming up with those ideas, in my opinion. Those things are appearing, it's like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in. I mean, in the Iliad, where gods and goddesses appear, along with the human antagonists on the battlefield all the time, right? There'll be, you know, Homer flashes to Olympus and then back to the real world. And there's a thing where one Aphrodite, let's say wants to help Paris. And so she says, well, I will appear to him in a dream. And I'll take the form of his brother and I'll say, bump, bump, bump, bump. So that's creatures, beings on one dimension, as the Greeks saw it, communicating with, and I believe that that's exactly what's going on, in one, whatever analogy you want to use. That communication, to which degree do you play the role in that communication? As opposed to sitting at the computer, if you're a writer, and staring at the blank page and putting in the time and waiting. So if, in your view, are these creatures basically waiting to tell you about your future? Or is there choice? How many possible futures are there? How many possible ideas are there? That's a great question. I think there's basically, yes, there are alternatives, you know, degrees within it. But if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums, how much could he have done really differently? Yeah, he would, you can just see there's a whole impetus going through the whole thing. And nothing was going to shake him off that, you know? And yeah, maybe the river could have been different, could have been called something else, but he was dealing with certain issues. His conscious self was dealing with certain issues that were really out of his control. He was drawn, he was called to it, right? Nothing could stop him. And so it is sort of a partnership, I think, the creative process, between the creative impulse that's coming from some other place, or it's coming from deep within us is another way to look at it. You know, it's like if we are acorns and we're growing into oaks. So the conscious artist, who's sitting there at the keyboard or whatever, is applying his or her consciousness to that, but is also going into opening themselves to the unconscious or to this other realm, whatever that is. I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years have said, you know, a song just came into their head, right? A poem, just all they had to do was write. But then, you ever see that thing where, of Keats's notes for a thing of beauty is a joy forever? It's like covers an entire page, and it's like, you know, he's crossing this out and that out, and he has to go. His consciousness is, his conscious mind is working on it. But, so I do think it's a partnership. And I think that, I know when I was first starting out as a writer, I worked in advertising, and I tried to do novels that I could never do. I was like, really unskilled at getting to that, tuning into that station. I just, I beat my brains out and was unable to do it, you know, except in, because I was sort of trying too hard, it was sort of like a Zen monk or a monk of some kind trying to meditate and just like constantly thoughts driving you crazy. But over time, you know, knock wood, I've kind of gotten better at it. And I can sort of let go of those, that part of me that's trying so hard. And so these angels can speak a little more easily through the membrane. Can you put into words the process of letting go and clearing that channel of communication? What does it take? That's another great question. For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years. And I don't even, I guess I would liken it to meditation, even though I'm not a meditator. But it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right? And so it's very hard to put into words. And I think that's why these teachers of meditation use tricks and koans and stuff like that. But for me, at least, I think it was just a process of years of years and years of trying, and finally beating my head in the wall. And finally, little by little giving up the beating of the head. But there doesn't seem to be any trick. Everybody wants a hack these days. And I don't think there is a hack. If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse, she's watching you down there, beating your head in the wall. You're like a Marine going through an obstacle course, or a martial artist trying to learn, like Uma Thurman doing the casket deal, trying to make that little four inch punch, you know? The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching, going, it's Lex, he's trying, he's trying. I'm gonna come back in another couple of months and see if he's still there. And finally, she'll say, all right, he's had it, he's paid his dues, I'm gonna give it to him. So, the hard work and the suffering, yeah. But I'm also, being Russian, in wrestling and martial arts, we're big into drilling technique. I was also just even getting at, certainly there's no shortcut. But is there a process? So you're, that can be, the process of practice. So you had two. One, you had an example of meditation. So it's essentially the practice of meditation. Is you sitting here? I think a lot of drill, I think, is a good way to look at it too. But what are you drilling? You're just sitting and? You're writing, you know? Just writing. You're writing, then you're looking at what you wrote, you know? You're hitting moments when it flows, you know? And then your other hitting moments where you just can't do anything. And you're trying to, from the moments where it flowed, you're trying to come back and look at it and say, what did I do? How did that happen? Where was my mind, you know? But I think it's just a process of over and over and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier. And did you always, when you read something you write, did you always have a pretty good radar for what's good and not after it's written? No. I think I do now. But no, it was always really hard for me to know what was good. I mean, do you edit, the process of editing is the process of looking at what you've written and improving it. Are you a better writer or an editor? How often do you edit? That's another great question. Great question. Cause I do think that in writing, the real process of looking at it is the process that an editor does rather than what a writer does. The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone is my editor, Sean Coyne, who was the guy who bought Gates of Fire when he was an editor at Doubleday. And who basically when I finish a book, I give it to him. And he gives me, you know, editing doesn't really mean like crossing out commas. It really means looking at the overall work and saying, does it work? And if it doesn't work, why doesn't it work? Is there something wrong here? You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, and one span was out of whack, you know, you could, and I think a really skilled editor, which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick. And he also has the perspective that I've lost in something I've wrote, cause I'm so close to it, to say, you know, this isn't working and that is working. What kind of advice has he given you? Is it like layout? Like this story doesn't flow correctly. Like you shouldn't start at this point. Or does he even sit back at a higher level and say, I see what you're doing, but you could do better. No, he doesn't do that. But a lot of it is about genre and kind of the defining what genre you're working in. And I'm gonna get up here to just bring something over here for the camera. This was one where Sean tore this down and made me start from scratch. And what the specifics of it were really, this is a supernatural thriller. That's the genre. Sort of like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist. And what he showed me was that I had violated certain conventions of the genre. And you just can't do that. It's gotta be, it has to be done the right way. And so he pointed out certain things to me. So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually. That's such a tough job of editor. Yeah. Again, he was sort of born to do that. He just kind of glommed onto it. But since he was his first job publishing cat thrillers, cat detective books, he studied how it works, what makes a story work, et cetera, et cetera. And so he really, he's great. And I think any really successful writer, unless they're utterly brilliant on their own, has gotta have a great editor behind them. But you yourself edit as well. I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself. Everything you see in my blog posts that it's about the craft of writing is me trying to teach myself the rules so that, I'm sure it's the same in martial arts or anything else, right? You try to not be dependent on that other person because it's so painful to make those mistakes. You really feel like, ah, I wish I could get it right the first time the next time I do it. Well, in research, we go through that. In research more than writing, so what you do is a little more solitary. In research, there's usually two, three, four people working on something together and we write a paper. And there's that painful process of where you write it down and then you share it with other. And not only do they criticize the writing, they criticize the fundamental aspects of the approach you've taken. I would think so. So it's exactly like they would say you're attacking, you're asking the wrong questions, right? And that's extremely painful, especially when you, well, yes, painful and helpful, but there's disagreement and so on. And through that comes out a better product. And if you want to still have an ego, but you also want to silence it every once in a while, so there's a balance. In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance, what the capital R, as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work. Where do you think resistance comes from? Why is there a force in our mind that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts with laziness, excuses, and so on? That's another great question. I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the yetzer hurrah, right? And it's a force that if this up here is your soul of Neshama trying to talk to you, us down here, the yetzer hurrah is this negative force in the middle. So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this. But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer, but here's my answer. I think that there are two places where we as human beings can see our identity. One is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self. And the self in the Jungian sense, the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground, which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever. And I think, and the ego is just this little dot inside this bigger self. And the ego has a completely different view of life from the self. The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here. No, perfect. The ego believes that death is real. The ego believes that time and space are real. The ego believes that each one of us is separate from the other. I'm separate from you. If I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me, it would only hurt you. And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear because we were all made of flesh. We can all die. We can all be hurt. We can all be ruined. So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create, as we were talking about before, comes out of that fear of death. The self, on the other hand, the greater self that butts up against the divine ground believes that death is not real, that time and space are not real, that the gods travel swift as thought. And the ego also believes that, I mean, the self believes that there's no difference between you and me, that we're all one. If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right? And in the world of the self, of the greater self, the dominant emotion is love, not fear. Now, so I think that, I'll go farther back here, a long way to answer your question. When Jesus died on the cross, or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae, they were acting according to the rules of the self. Death is not real. No difference between you and me. Time and space are not real. Predominant emotion is love. So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels are in a struggle between these two things, the ego and the self. To me, resistance is the voice of the ego saying, and it's a fearful voice, because if, when we identify with the self, we move our consciousness over to the self as artists or scientists opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that. Because if we're in that space, that head space, we don't need the ego anymore. So I think resistance is a voice of the ego trying to keep control of us. In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego. That's probably a very good example, right? Yeah. It's a zero sum world for him, and for anybody that's in that. And the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Gandhi, yep. And that's, of course, why they all wind up getting assassinated. Because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself and feels so threatened by, I could talk more about this if you want to. No, for sure, that's fascinating. It's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached to the ego. I really like this dichotomy of ego and self and that struggle. It's just, ego has a, the self obsession of it. Why fear is such a predominant thing? Why is resistance trying to undermine everything? It's fear, it's out of fear. Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories. In a story, the villain is always resistance, is always the ego. The hero is always, of course, always is not everything, but you know what I mean? Pretty much represents kind of the self. If you think about the alien on the spaceship, that's like the ultimate kind of villain. It keeps changing form, right? First it goes on the guy's face, then it pops out of his chest, but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing to destroy, you know? And just like the ego, just like resistance. And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight on the same terms as the alien, but maybe a better example might be something like Casablanca, where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character has to, acting, operating out of the self, has to give up his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Salon, the love of his life, and instead, you know, puts her on the plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert. I don't know if that's clear, but in almost every story, the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear, is that zero sum thing. And in almost every story, the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others. It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success. Yeah. Do you think there's a, this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance? Like, what would life look like without resistance? That's another great question. I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives meaning to life. If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know, what would we be? We'd be in the Garden of Eden, picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know? And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, you know, where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters into their own hands and acquire knowledge that until then, God had said, I'm the only one that's got that knowledge. And of course, once they have acquired that knowledge, they're cast out into the world you and I live in now, where they do have to deal with that fear and they do have to deal with all that stuff. The human condition. The human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it. To overcome it, right. And also the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all. It's not even like it's an actual force. It's all here, right? So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know? You know, or it's just a sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing. It's like, oh, it's gone. But not quite because it's never really. Because it comes back again tomorrow morning. Exactly. So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day. So what's been, maybe recently, but in general, maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless or one of the more relentless sources of resistance to you personally? I mean, it's always the same. It's about writing for me and evolving within my own body of work, you know? It never goes away, it never gets any less. Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out? No, it's always the same. Well, I would say it's always the same, but it's really not because resistance is so protean, you know, it keeps changing form. And as you move to hopefully a higher level, resistance gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle trying to fake you out. But I think you learn that it's always there and you're always gonna have to face it, so. I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page. Do you have a process there with this battle? Do you have a number of hours that you put in? Do you sit down? Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level, that the way you fight it is on the most mundane, I'm sure it's like martial arts, must be the same way. I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning and I sort of am rehearsing myself. The gym is called resistance training, right? You're working against resistance, right? And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed, I hate that, but I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day. And like I said, over Knockwood, over years, I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset and it's not as hard for me as it used to be. The real resistance, I think, for me, and I think this is true for anybody, is the question of sort of what's the next idea? What's the next book? What's the next project that you're gonna work on? And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse. I'm kind of saying, what do you want me, or I'm asking it of my unconscious. If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kind of, well, what's the next album? Now he's on Broadway. That was a great idea, right? Where'd that come from, you know? But, and then for him, what's after that, you know? Because that body of work is already alive. It already exists inside us, kind of like a woman's biological clock, and we have to serve it. And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer, you know? I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer that they're not, you know what I mean? It'll take its revenge on us. So the next resistance to me is sort of, or a big aspect of it is, what's next? You know, when I finish the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next. And I see at the same time you have a kind of, you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums. So like, it's already known somewhere in the universe what you're going to do next, is the sense you have. In a sense, yes. I don't know if it's predetermined, you know? But there's something like that. Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's, well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess. Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's one thing for sure. It was always going to be that one thing. But really, in reality, it's a distribution. It could be any number of things. Yeah, I think so. There's alternate realities. Alternate realities, yeah. But they're not that far apart. I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write a Joni Mitchell song, you know? No matter how hard he tries. But he still went on Broadway. I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. So I think you're being, in retrospect, it all makes sense. I think it is a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. It's a next sort of evolution for him. Why not take his music to there, you know? In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think. Yeah. If you pull it off, especially. Do you visualize yourself completing the work? Like, Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal. Do you, you know, they go through, I mean, that's actually a really, you can learn something from athletes on that, is years out, certainly two, three years out, some people do much longer, every day, you visualize how the day of the championship will go down to, I mean, everything, down to how will it feel to stand on the podium and so on. Do you do anything like that in how you approach writing? No. Because it's. It's always in the moment. Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think. Because it's such a mystery. You just don't know. I think it's different from sports. Right. Because you don't know the destiny. There's no gold medal at the end. No. In fact, I would like to think that as soon as you finish one, the next day you're on the other. And in fact, hopefully you've already started the other. You're already, you know, 100 pages into the other when you finish the first one. But it is a, it is a, it's a journey, it's a process. I don't think it is a, in fact, I think it's very dangerous to think that way. To think, oh, this, I'm gonna win the Oscar, you know? It's interesting. For the creative process, it might be dangerous. It's a, maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous? Because I kind of know where you're coming from. Because it's the ego. It's the ego. Because you're giving yourself over to the ego. You know, I keep saying this myself. My job, I'm a servant of the muse. I'm there to do what she tells me to do. And if I suddenly think, oh, I'm really, I just wanna, you know, whatever, the muse doesn't like that. And, you know, and she's on another dimension from me. I'm trying to square that, because I agree. I'm trying to square that with the, I think there's a meditation to visualizing success in the athletic realm, to where it focuses, it removes everything else away, to where you focus on this particular battle. I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways. And in sports, the ego serves a more important role, I think, than it does in writing. And the ego, there's something. Well, let me, when you say that, I know what you mean, Lex, and I do think there is a sort of a, you know, it's interesting to watch interviews with Steph Curry, who's such, obviously such a nice guy, but he's got such tremendous self confidence, you know, that it, but it doesn't border on ego so much because he's worked so hard for it, you know? But he knows, so he has visualized. He has visualized maybe not so much winning, you know, as just him being the best he can be, him being in the flow, you know, doing his thing that he knows he can do. And I do think in the creative world, yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that, where you, where, and, you know, a choreographer or a filmmaker or whatever might be, do an internal thing where they're saying, I can make an Oscar winning movie. I can direct this movie. You know, I'm banishing these thoughts that I'm not good enough. I can do that. I can edit it. I can score it. I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump. But, and I don't think that's really ego. I think that's part of the process in a good way, like an athlete does that. So extreme confidence is what some of the best athletes come with, and you think it's possible to, as a writer, to have extreme confidence in yourself? I do think so, you know, that I'm sure when John Lennon sat down to write a song, he felt like, shit, I can do this, you know? I'm not so sure. I think, because the great artists I've seen, and you're haunted by self doubt. It's that resist, I mean, the confidence. Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self, within the self, above the self doubt. Oh, it's the bigger picture of the self belief, you know? Yeah, I'm freaking out. Yeah, I'm worried that I'm not gonna be able to do it. But, you know, I know I can do this. Yeah, and when you look at, when you take a bigger picture of it. So the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely? No, because you're with your characters. You are. So you really put yourself in the world. Absolutely, you know, I've written about this before that I used to, my desk used to face a wall instead of seeing, and people would say, well, don't you wanna look out the window? But I'm in here, I mean, I'm seeing, you know, the Spartans, I'm seeing, you know, whatever. And the characters that are on the page, or that you create, are not accidents, you know? They're coming out of some issue, some deep issue that you have. Whether you realize it or not, you might not realize it till 20 years later, or somebody explains it to you. So your characters are kind of fascinating to you. And their dilemmas are fascinating to you. And you're also trying to come to grips with them, you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly, you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly. So yeah, no, it's not lonely at all. In fact, I'm more lonely sometimes later, going out to dinner with some people and actually talking to people. Do you miss the characters after it's over? Let's say I have affection for them, kind of like children that have gone off to college and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving. Definitely, I have affection for them, even the bad guys. Maybe especially the bad guys. Especially the bad guys. You've said that writers, even successful writers, are often not tough minded enough. I've read that in the post, that you have to be a professional in the way you handle your emotions. You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer. So what do you think makes a warrior? Is a warrior born or trained in the realm, in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing, in the creative process? I think they're born to some extent. You have the gift, like you might have the gift as a martial artist to do whatever martial artists do, but the training is the big thing. 90% training, 10%, 10% genetics. And, you know, I use another analogy other than warrior as far as writer, and that's like to be a mother. If you think about, if you're a writer or any creative person, you're giving birth to something, right, you're carrying a new life inside you. And in terms of bravery, if your child, your two year old child is underneath a car that's coming down the street, the mother's gonna like stop a Buick, you know, with her bare hands. So that's another way to think about how a writer has to think about, or any creative person has to think about, I think, what they're doing, what this child, this new creation that they're bringing forth. Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that. I've just, a couple weeks ago, talked to, just happened to be in the same room, both gave talks, Arianna Huffington. I did this conversation with her. I didn't know much about her before then, but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books and been promoting a lifestyle where she basically, she created the Huffington Post, and she gave herself like, I don't know, 20 hours a day just obsessed with her work. And then she fainted, passed out, and kind of, there was some health issues. And so she wrote this book saying that, you know, sleep, basically you wanna establish a lifestyle that doesn't sacrifice health, that's productive but doesn't sacrifice health. She thinks that you can have both, productivity and health. Criticizing Elon Musk, who I've also spoken with, for working too hard, and thereby sacrificing, you know, being less effective than he could be. So I'm trying to get this balance between health and obsessively working at something and really working hard. So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me, but I'm a little bit torn. To me, passion and reason do not overlap much or at all sometimes. Maybe I'm being too Russian, but I feel madness and obsession does not care for health or sleep or diet or any of that. And hard work is hard work, and everything else can go to hell. So if you're really focused on whether it's writing a book, it should, everything should just go to hell. Where do you stand on this balance? How important is health for productivity? How important is it to sort of get sleep and so on? I'm on the health side. I mean, there was a period of my life when I was just, I had no obligations and I was just living in a little house and just working nonstop, you know? But even then I would get up in the morning and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast every day, and I would do my, you know, exercise, whatever it was. But although I was still doing like 18 hours a day, but I'm definitely, I kind of think of it sort of like an athlete does. I'm sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed to winning championships and stuff like that. But he has his family, he sees his family, you know, the family is always there. He, I'm sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff, gets his sleep, you know, gets the training, you know, the whatever a trainer does to him for his knees and his ankles and whatever. So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody that's operating at a high level. So I do think I'm from that kind of the health school. The good thing about being a writer is you can't work very many hours a day. You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work. I've never been able to work more than that. I don't know how people do it. I've heard of people do 10, 12, I don't know how they do it. So that gives you a lot of other time to do it. Optimize your health. Yeah, to optimize your health. Because you need to, you're in training, you know? You're really, you're burning up a lot of B vitamins when you're working here, aren't you? Yeah, but. Maybe it's a Russian thing with you, Lex. Well, it's not even a Russian thing. It also may be youth, you know? At 35, you can be crazy. You know, that's the thing, they keep telling me, but I'm pretty sure I'll be added still at a later time too. I think it has to do with the career choice too. I think writing is almost, from everything I've heard, it's almost impossible to do it more than a few hours really well. When you start to get into certain disciplines, like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines, that really there's a lot more non muse time needed. Right, right, right. So the crazy hours that you often are talking about have to be done, and it doesn't. I think that's true. Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time needed for truly genius ideas, but it's something I certainly struggle with. But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health. So what does a perfect day look like for you if we're talking about writing? An hour by hour schedule of a perfect day. I get up early, I go to the gym, I have breakfast with some friends of mine. What's early by the way? Let's, like how early? 3.15. A.M. A.M. So we're talking really early. Really early. Now I'm crazy early, it's ridiculously early. But, and I haven't done that always, but that's kind of what I'm on now. So I'm in bed, like when I'm with my nephews that are like four years old and three years old, I'm in bed before them. Okay, you got a beat. You wake up, sorry, you said exercise first. Yeah. And what does that look like? What's exercise for you? You go out to the gym? I go to the gym. I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys that I work out with, and I'll, you know, it's maybe an hour, maybe a little more. I'll do a little warmup before stretching afterwards, take a shower, go have breakfast. But it's an intense kind of a thing that I definitely don't wanna do that's hard, you know? So you feel like you've accomplished something, first thing. Yeah. That's a big accomplishment of the day. At the same time, it's not like so hard that I'm completely exhausted, you know? And then I'll come home and handle whatever correspondence and stuff has to be done, and then I work for maybe three hours, and then I just sort of crash. The office is closed, I turn the switch, I don't think about anything. I don't think about the work at all. Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards? After work, once the office is closed. But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing? Something like that, yeah. Something like that, okay. You listen to music? No. Do you have anything? But that's just me, I mean, I don't think, you know, but somebody could do it a million different ways. It's fascinating, you know, the, I mean, you've also, of most, of many writers, you've really, but like I've read Stephen Kington writing, you've optimized this conversation with the muse you're having. Not optimized, but you've at least thought about it. So what's, can you say a little bit more about the trivialities of that process, of the, like you said, facing the wall? What's, do you have little rituals? You mean like the granular aspect of it? The granular aspects, yeah. Is there? I do have little rituals, I do have all kinds of, which I'm not even gonna tell you about. Sure. But the one thing, and I don't wanna like talk about this too much because it sort of jinxes things, I think, but the one thing I do try to do is when I sit down, I immediately get into it, first, second. I don't sit and fuck around with anything. I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can. The other thing is that writing a book or screenplay or anything like that is a process of multiple drafts. And it's the first draft that's where you're most with the muse, where you're going through the blank page. Like right now I'm on, I don't know what, the fifth or sixth, seventh draft of the thing I'm working on. So I've got pages already written and I'm kind of reading them afresh as I go through the story. So it's not quite where I am now. It's not quite a deep muse scenario, partly it is, but it's also sort of bouncing back and forth between the different, between the right brain and the left brain. I'm kind of looking at it and trying to evaluate it. And then I'm going into it and try to change it a little bit. And when, do you know, sit down and get right into it, do you know the night before of what that starting point is? I always try to stop. And I learned this, I think Hemingway wrote about this or John Steinbeck or one of the, or maybe both of them, to always stop when you kind of know what's coming next. So you're not at a facing a chasm, you know? Yeah. Okay, so and afterwards when you're done, the office is closed. The office is closed, I let the muse take care of it, you know? And I don't want to, and I think it's a very unhealthy thing to worry about it or think about any creative process. You don't, like on a long walk later, think about? Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it, but I won't be like obsessing about it. Okay. Because actually on walks, sometimes things will pop in your head, you know, and you'll go, oh, I should change that. But that's not your ego doing it, that's the deeper level. Okay, so how does the day end? So go. In terms of writing? So yeah, the writing, well no, the writing, the office door closes and then the rest of the day just do whatever the hell. Maybe go out to dinner, my girlfriend is not here now, she's in New York working, we'll make dinner or whatever. Go out to dinner, something like that, and maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy. And I go to bed pretty early, and the gym is a big thing for me. I'll already, sort of probably like with you with martial arts, the night before, I'll be visualizing what I have to do the next day and getting myself psyched up for that. And then I'll just conk out like a light and wake up at the crack of dawn. Okay, so looking out into the future, this year, next few years, what do you think the muse has in store for you? I don't think you can ever know. It's probably something along the same, I really believe there's that exercise where they say to you, visualize yourself five years in the future and write a letter from that person to yourself. I don't believe in that at all because I don't think you can, there's a line out of Africa that God made the world round so that we couldn't see too far ahead. You just don't know as a writer or as a person, I never knew, my first book was A Legend of Bag of Ants. I hadn't, before that happened, I had no clue that I was gonna be writing anything like that on that subject, anything at all, no clue, until it just sort of came. And then when that was done, people said, well, you gotta write another one. I had no idea what it was, which was gonna be Gates of Fire, no clue. So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that and asked the question, I would have been crazy to have said it. So I just hope as the future unfolds, that I'm open to it. Well, I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like. Stephen, thank you so much for talking today, it was fun. You got the best job in the world going around talking to people that you wanna talk to and that they will talk to you. So thank you for doing it. Hey, thank you for the great questions you made me think. I've certainly a bunch of questions I've never ever answered before. Awesome, thank you so much. So thanks a lot, great. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Pressfield, and thank you to our sponsors, the Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and downloading Cash App and using code lexpodcast. Click on the links, buy the stuff, it's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman, spelled without the E. Just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from Stephen Pressfield. Are you paralyzed by fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb, the more scared we are of a work or a calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Steven Pressfield: The War of Art | Lex Fridman Podcast #102

The following is a conversation with Ben Goertzel, one of the most interesting minds in the artificial intelligence community. He's the founder of SingularityNet, designer of OpenCog AI Framework, formerly a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and chief scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in his organizing and contributing to the conference on artificial general intelligence, the 2020 version of which is actually happening this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It's virtual and free. I encourage you to check out the talks, including by Yosha Bach from episode 101 of this podcast. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Masterclass. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and signing up at masterclass.com slash lex. Click the links, buy all the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and startup. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfriedman, spelled without the E, just F R I D M A N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This episode is supported by The Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to jordanharbinger.com slash lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and everywhere else. I've been binging on his podcast. Jordan is great. He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed, and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Keira Kasparov, and many more. His conversation with Kobe is a reminder how much focus and hard work is required for greatness in sport, business, and life. I highly recommend the episode if you want to be inspired. Again, go to jordanharbinger.com slash lex. It's how Jordan knows I sent you. This show is sponsored by Master Class. Sign up at masterclass.com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about Master Class, I thought it was too good to be true. For 180 bucks a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from to list some of my favorites. Chris Hadfield on Space Exploration, Neil deGrasse Tyson on Scientific Thinking and Communication, Will Wright, creator of the greatest city building game ever, Sim City, and Sims on Space Exploration. Ben Sims on Game Design, Carlos Santana on Guitar, Keira Kasparov, the greatest chess player ever on chess, Daniel Negrano on Poker, and many more. Chris Hadfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money. Once again, sign up at masterclass.com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. Now, here's my conversation with Ben Kurtzell. What books, authors, ideas had a lot of impact on you in your life in the early days? You know, what got me into AI and science fiction and such in the first place wasn't a book, but the original Star Trek TV show, which my dad watched with me like in its first run. It would have been 1968, 69 or something, and that was incredible because every show they visited a different alien civilization with different culture and weird mechanisms. But that got me into science fiction, and there wasn't that much science fiction to watch on TV at that stage, so that got me into reading the whole literature of science fiction, you know, from the beginning of the previous century until that time. And I mean, there was so many science fiction writers who were inspirational to me. I'd say if I had to pick two, it would have been Stanisław Lem, the Polish writer. Yeah, Solaris, and then he had a bunch of more obscure writings on superhuman AIs that were engineered. Solaris was sort of a superhuman, naturally occurring intelligence. Then Philip K. Dick, who, you know, ultimately my fandom for Philip K. Dick is one of the things that brought me together with David Hansen, my collaborator on robotics projects. So, you know, Stanisław Lem was very much an intellectual, right, so he had a very broad view of intelligence going beyond the human and into what I would call, you know, open ended superintelligence. The Solaris superintelligent ocean was intelligent, in some ways more generally intelligent than people, but in a complex and confusing way so that human beings could never quite connect to it, but it was still probably very, very smart. And then the Golem 4 supercomputer in one of Lem's books, this was engineered by people, but eventually it became very intelligent in a different direction than humans and decided that humans were kind of trivial, not that interesting. So it put some impenetrable shield around itself, shut itself off from humanity, and then issued some philosophical screed about the pathetic and hopeless nature of humanity and all human thought, and then disappeared. Now, Philip K. Dick, he was a bit different. He was human focused, right? His main thing was, you know, human compassion and the human heart and soul are going to be the constant that will keep us going through whatever aliens we discover or telepathy machines or super AIs or whatever it might be. So he didn't believe in reality, like the reality that we see may be a simulation or a dream or something else we can't even comprehend, but he believed in love and compassion as something persistent through the various simulated realities. So those two science fiction writers had a huge impact on me. Then a little older than that, I got into Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche and Rimbaud and a bunch of more literary type writing. Can we talk about some of those things? So on the Solaris side, Stanislaw Lem, this kind of idea of there being intelligences out there that are different than our own, do you think there are intelligences maybe all around us that we're not able to even detect? So this kind of idea of, maybe you can comment also on Stephen Wolfram thinking that there's computations all around us and we're just not smart enough to kind of detect their intelligence or appreciate their intelligence. Yeah, so my friend Hugo de Gares, who I've been talking to about these things for many decades, since the early 90s, he had an idea he called SIPI, the Search for Intraparticulate Intelligence. So the concept there was as AIs get smarter and smarter and smarter, assuming the laws of physics as we know them now are still what these super intelligences perceived to hold and are bound by, as they get smarter and smarter, they're gonna shrink themselves littler and littler because special relativity makes it so they can communicate between two spatially distant points. So they're gonna get smaller and smaller, but then ultimately, what does that mean? The minds of the super, super, super intelligences, they're gonna be packed into the interaction of elementary particles or quarks or the partons inside quarks or whatever it is. So what we perceive as random fluctuations on the quantum or sub quantum level may actually be the thoughts of the micro, micro, micro miniaturized super intelligences because there's no way we can tell random from structured but within algorithmic information more complex than our brains, right? We can't tell the difference. So what we think is random could be the thought processes of some really tiny super minds. And if so, there is not a damn thing we can do about it, except try to upgrade our intelligences and expand our minds so that we can perceive more of what's around us. But if those random fluctuations, like even if we go to like quantum mechanics, if that's actually super intelligent systems, aren't we then part of the super of super intelligence? Aren't we just like a finger of the entirety of the body of the super intelligent system? It could be, I mean, a finger is a strange metaphor. I mean, we... A finger is dumb is what I mean. But the finger is also useful and is controlled with intent by the brain whereas we may be much less than that, right? I mean, yeah, we may be just some random epiphenomenon that they don't care about too much. Like think about the shape of the crowd emanating from a sports stadium or something, right? There's some emergent shape to the crowd, it's there. You could take a picture of it, it's kind of cool. It's irrelevant to the main point of the sports event or where the people are going or what's on the minds of the people making that shape in the crowd, right? So we may just be some semi arbitrary higher level pattern popping out of a lower level hyper intelligent self organization. And I mean, so be it, right? I mean, that's one thing that... Yeah, I mean, the older I've gotten, the more respect I've achieved for our fundamental ignorance. I mean, mine and everybody else's. I mean, I look at my two dogs, two beautiful little toy poodles and they watch me sitting at the computer typing. They just think I'm sitting there wiggling my fingers to exercise them maybe or guarding the monitor on the desk that they have no idea that I'm communicating with other people halfway around the world, let alone creating complex algorithms running in RAM on some computer server in St. Petersburg or something, right? Although they're right there in the room with me. So what things are there right around us that we're just too stupid or close minded to comprehend? Probably quite a lot. Your very poodle could also be communicating across multiple dimensions with other beings and you're too unintelligent to understand the kind of communication mechanism they're going through. There have been various TV shows and science fiction novels, poisoning cats, dolphins, mice and whatnot are actually super intelligences here to observe that. I would guess as one or the other quantum physics founders said, those theories are not crazy enough to be true. The reality is probably crazier than that. Beautifully put. So on the human side, with Philip K. Dick and in general, where do you fall on this idea that love and just the basic spirit of human nature persists throughout these multiple realities? Are you on the side, like the thing that inspires you about artificial intelligence, is it the human side of somehow persisting through all of the different systems we engineer or is AI inspire you to create something that's greater than human, that's beyond human, that's almost nonhuman? I would say my motivation to create AGI comes from both of those directions actually. So when I first became passionate about AGI when I was, it would have been two or three years old after watching robots on Star Trek. I mean, then it was really a combination of intellectual curiosity, like can a machine really think, how would you do that? And yeah, just ambition to create something much better than all the clearly limited and fundamentally defective humans I saw around me. Then as I got older and got more enmeshed in the human world and got married, had children, saw my parents begin to age, I started to realize, well, not only will AGI let you go far beyond the limitations of the human, but it could also stop us from dying and suffering and feeling pain and tormenting ourselves mentally. So you can see AGI has amazing capability to do good for humans, as humans, alongside with its capability to go far, far beyond the human level. So I mean, both aspects are there, which makes it even more exciting and important. So you mentioned Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Where did you pick up from those guys? I mean. That would probably go beyond the scope of a brief interview, certainly. I mean, both of those are amazing thinkers who one, will necessarily have a complex relationship with, right? So, I mean, Dostoevsky on the minus side, he's kind of a religious fanatic and he sort of helped squash the Russian nihilist movement, which was very interesting. Because what nihilism meant originally in that period of the mid, late 1800s in Russia was not taking anything fully 100% for granted. It was really more like what we'd call Bayesianism now, where you don't wanna adopt anything as a dogmatic certitude and always leave your mind open. And how Dostoevsky parodied nihilism was a bit different, right? He parodied as people who believe absolutely nothing. So they must assign an equal probability weight to every proposition, which doesn't really work. So on the one hand, I didn't really agree with Dostoevsky on his sort of religious point of view. On the other hand, if you look at his understanding of human nature and sort of the human mind and heart and soul, it's really unparalleled. He had an amazing view of how human beings construct a world for themselves based on their own understanding and their own mental predisposition. And I think if you look in the brothers Karamazov in particular, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about this as a polyphonic mode of fiction, which means it's not third person, but it's not first person from any one person really. There are many different characters in the novel and each of them is sort of telling part of the story from their own point of view. So the reality of the whole story is an intersection like synergetically of the many different characters world views. And that really, it's a beautiful metaphor and even a reflection I think of how all of us socially create our reality. Like each of us sees the world in a certain way. Each of us in a sense is making the world as we see it based on our own minds and understanding, but it's polyphony like in music where multiple instruments are coming together to create the sound. The ultimate reality that's created comes out of each of our subjective understandings, intersecting with each other. And that was one of the many beautiful things in Dostoevsky. So maybe a little bit to mention, you have a connection to Russia and the Soviet culture. I mean, I'm not sure exactly what the nature of the connection is, but at least the spirit of your thinking is in there. Well, my ancestry is three quarters Eastern European Jewish. So I mean, my three of my great grandparents emigrated to New York from Lithuania and sort of border regions of Poland, which are in and out of Poland in around the time of World War I. And they were socialists and communists as well as Jews, mostly Menshevik, not Bolshevik. And they sort of, they fled at just the right time to the US for their own personal reasons. And then almost all, or maybe all of my extended family that remained in Eastern Europe was killed either by Hitlands or Stalin's minions at some point. So the branch of the family that emigrated to the US was pretty much the only one. So how much of the spirit of the people is in your blood still? Like, when you look in the mirror, do you see, what do you see? Meat, I see a bag of meat that I want to transcend by uploading into some sort of superior reality. But very, I mean, yeah, very clearly, I mean, I'm not religious in a traditional sense, but clearly the Eastern European Jewish tradition was what I was raised in. I mean, there was, my grandfather, Leo Zwell, was a physical chemist who worked with Linus Pauling and a bunch of the other early greats in quantum mechanics. I mean, he was into X ray diffraction. He was on the material science side, an experimentalist rather than a theorist. His sister was also a physicist. And my father's father, Victor Gertzel, was a PhD in psychology who had the unenviable job of giving Soka therapy to the Japanese in internment camps in the US in World War II, like to counsel them why they shouldn't kill themselves, even though they'd had all their stuff taken away and been imprisoned for no good reason. So, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of Eastern European Jewishness in my background. One of my great uncles was, I guess, conductor of San Francisco Orchestra. So there's a lot of Mickey Salkind, bunch of music in there also. And clearly this culture was all about learning and understanding the world, and also not quite taking yourself too seriously while you do it, right? There's a lot of Yiddish humor in there. So I do appreciate that culture, although the whole idea that like the Jews are the chosen people of God never resonated with me too much. The graph of the Gertzel family, I mean, just the people I've encountered just doing some research and just knowing your work through the decades, it's kind of fascinating. Just the number of PhDs. Yeah, yeah, I mean, my dad is a sociology professor who recently retired from Rutgers University, but clearly that gave me a head start in life. I mean, my grandfather gave me all those quantum mechanics books when I was like seven or eight years old. I remember going through them, and it was all the old quantum mechanics like Rutherford Adams and stuff. So I got to the part of wave functions, which I didn't understand, although I was very bright kid. And I realized he didn't quite understand it either, but at least like he pointed me to some professor he knew at UPenn nearby who understood these things, right? So that's an unusual opportunity for a kid to have, right? My dad, he was programming Fortran when I was 10 or 11 years old on like HP 3000 mainframes at Rutgers University. So I got to do linear regression in Fortran on punch cards when I was in middle school, right? Because he was doing, I guess, analysis of demographic and sociology data. So yes, certainly that gave me a head start and a push towards science beyond what would have been the case with many, many different situations. When did you first fall in love with AI? Is it the programming side of Fortran? Is it maybe the sociology psychology that you picked up from your dad? Or is it the quantum mechanics? I fell in love with AI when I was probably three years old when I saw a robot on Star Trek. It was turning around in a circle going, error, error, error, error, because Spock and Kirk had tricked it into a mechanical breakdown by presenting it with a logical paradox. And I was just like, well, this makes no sense. This AI is very, very smart. It's been traveling all around the universe, but these people could trick it with a simple logical paradox. Like why, if the human brain can get beyond that paradox, why can't this AI? So I felt the screenwriters of Star Trek had misunderstood the nature of intelligence. And I complained to my dad about it, and he wasn't gonna say anything one way or the other. But before I was born, when my dad was at Antioch College in the middle of the US, he led a protest movement called SLAM, Student League Against Mortality. They were protesting against death, wandering across the campus. So he was into some futuristic things even back then, but whether AI could confront logical paradoxes or not, he didn't know. But when I, 10 years after that or something, I discovered Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gordalesh or Bach, and that was sort of to the same point of AI and paradox and logic, right? Because he was over and over with Gordal's incompleteness theorem, and can an AI really fully model itself reflexively or does that lead you into some paradox? Can the human mind truly model itself reflexively or does that lead you into some paradox? So I think that book, Gordalesh or Bach, which I think I read when it first came out, I would have been 12 years old or something. I remember it was like 16 hour day. I read it cover to cover and then reread it. I reread it after that, because there was a lot of weird things with little formal systems in there that were hard for me at the time. But that was the first book I read that gave me a feeling for AI as like a practical academic or engineering discipline that people were working in. Because before I read Gordalesh or Bach, I was into AI from the point of view of a science fiction fan. And I had the idea, well, it may be a long time before we can achieve immortality in superhuman AGI. So I should figure out how to build a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, go far away, then come back to the earth in a million years when technology is more advanced and we can build these things. Reading Gordalesh or Bach, while it didn't all ring true to me, a lot of it did, but I could see like there are smart people right now at various universities around me who are actually trying to work on building what I would now call AGI, although Hofstadter didn't call it that. So really it was when I read that book, which would have been probably middle school, that then I started to think, well, this is something that I could practically work on. Yeah, as opposed to flying away and waiting it out, you can actually be one of the people that actually builds the system. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about, I mean, I was interested in what we'd now call nanotechnology and in the human immortality and time travel, all the same cool things as every other, like science fiction loving kid. But AI seemed like if Hofstadter was right, you just figure out the right program, sit there and type it. Like you don't need to spin stars into weird configurations or get government approval to cut people up and fiddle with their DNA or something, right? It's just programming. And then of course that can achieve anything else. There's another book from back then, which was by Gerald Feinbaum, who was a physicist at Princeton. And that was the Prometheus Project. And this book was written in the late 1960s, though I encountered it in the mid 70s. But what this book said is in the next few decades, humanity is gonna create superhuman thinking machines, molecular nanotechnology and human immortality. And then the challenge we'll have is what to do with it. Do we use it to expand human consciousness in a positive direction? Or do we use it just to further vapid consumerism? And what he proposed was that the UN should do a survey on this. And the UN should send people out to every little village in remotest Africa or South America and explain to everyone what technology was gonna bring the next few decades and the choice that we had about how to use it. And let everyone on the whole planet vote about whether we should develop super AI nanotechnology and immortality for expanded consciousness or for rampant consumerism. And needless to say, that didn't quite happen. And I think this guy died in the mid 80s, so we didn't even see his ideas start to become more mainstream. But it's interesting, many of the themes I'm engaged with now from AGI and immortality, even to trying to democratize technology as I've been pushing forward with Singularity, my work in the blockchain world, many of these themes were there in Feinbaum's book in the late 60s even. And of course, Valentin Turchin, a Russian writer and a great Russian physicist who I got to know when we both lived in New York in the late 90s and early aughts. I mean, he had a book in the late 60s in Russia, which was the phenomenon of science, which laid out all these same things as well. And Val died in, I don't remember, 2004 or five or something of Parkinson'sism. So yeah, it's easy for people to lose track now of the fact that the futurist and Singularitarian advanced technology ideas that are now almost mainstream are on TV all the time. I mean, these are not that new, right? They're sort of new in the history of the human species, but I mean, these were all around in fairly mature form in the middle of the last century, were written about quite articulately by fairly mainstream people who were professors at top universities. It's just until the enabling technologies got to a certain point, then you couldn't make it real. And even in the 70s, I was sort of seeing that and living through it, right? From Star Trek to Douglas Hofstadter, things were getting very, very practical from the late 60s to the late 70s. And the first computer I bought, you could only program with hexadecimal machine code and you had to solder it together. And then like a few years later, there's punch cards. And a few years later, you could get like Atari 400 and Commodore VIC 20, and you could type on the keyboard and program in higher level languages alongside the assembly language. So these ideas have been building up a while. And I guess my generation got to feel them build up, which is different than people coming into the field now for whom these things have just been part of the ambience of culture for their whole career or even their whole life. Well, it's fascinating to think about there being all of these ideas kind of swimming, almost with the noise all around the world, all the different generations, and then some kind of nonlinear thing happens where they percolate up and capture the imagination of the mainstream. And that seems to be what's happening with AI now. I mean, Nietzsche, who you mentioned had the idea of the Superman, right? But he didn't understand enough about technology to think you could physically engineer a Superman by piecing together molecules in a certain way. He was a bit vague about how the Superman would appear, but he was quite deep at thinking about what the state of consciousness and the mode of cognition of a Superman would be. He was a very astute analyst of how the human mind constructs the illusion of a self, how it constructs the illusion of free will, how it constructs values like good and evil out of its own desire to maintain and advance its own organism. He understood a lot about how human minds work. Then he understood a lot about how post human minds would work. I mean, the Superman was supposed to be a mind that would basically have complete root access to its own brain and consciousness and be able to architect its own value system and inspect and fine tune all of its own biases. So that's a lot of powerful thinking there, which then fed in and sort of seeded all of postmodern continental philosophy and all sorts of things have been very valuable in development of culture and indirectly even of technology. But of course, without the technology there, it was all some quite abstract thinking. So now we're at a time in history when a lot of these ideas can be made real, which is amazing and scary, right? It's kind of interesting to think, what do you think Nietzsche would do if he was born a century later or transported through time? What do you think he would say about AI? I mean. Well, those are quite different. If he's born a century later or transported through time. Well, he'd be on like TikTok and Instagram and he would never write the great works he's written. So let's transport him through time. Maybe also Sprach Zarathustra would be a music video, right? I mean, who knows? Yeah, but if he was transported through time, do you think, that'd be interesting actually to go back. You just made me realize that it's possible to go back and read Nietzsche with an eye of, is there some thinking about artificial beings? I'm sure there he had inklings. I mean, with Frankenstein before him, I'm sure he had inklings of artificial beings somewhere in the text. It'd be interesting to try to read his work to see if Superman was actually an AGI system. Like if he had inklings of that kind of thinking. He didn't. He didn't. No, I would say not. I mean, he had a lot of inklings of modern cognitive science, which are very interesting. If you look in like the third part of the collection that's been titled The Will to Power. I mean, in book three there, there's very deep analysis of thinking processes, but he wasn't so much of a physical tinkerer type guy, right? He was very abstract. Do you think, what do you think about the will to power? Do you think human, what do you think drives humans? Is it? Oh, an unholy mix of things. I don't think there's one pure, simple, and elegant objective function driving humans by any means. What do you think, if we look at, I know it's hard to look at humans in an aggregate, but do you think overall humans are good? Or do we have both good and evil within us that depending on the circumstances, depending on whatever can percolate to the top? Good and evil are very ambiguous, complicated and in some ways silly concepts. But if we could dig into your question from a couple of directions. So I think if you look in evolution, humanity is shaped both by individual selection and what biologists would call group selection, like tribe level selection, right? So individual selection has driven us in a selfish DNA sort of way. So that each of us does to a certain approximation what will help us propagate our DNA to future generations. I mean, that's why I've got four kids so far and probably that's not the last one. On the other hand. I like the ambition. Tribal, like group selection means humans in a way will do what will advocate for the persistence of the DNA of their whole tribe or their social group. And in biology, you have both of these, right? And you can see, say an ant colony or a beehive, there's a lot of group selection in the evolution of those social animals. On the other hand, say a big cat or some very solitary animal, it's a lot more biased toward individual selection. Humans are an interesting balance. And I think this reflects itself in what we would view as selfishness versus altruism to some extent. So we just have both of those objective functions contributing to the makeup of our brains. And then as Nietzsche analyzed in his own way and others have analyzed in different ways, I mean, we abstract this as well, we have both good and evil within us, right? Because a lot of what we view as evil is really just selfishness. A lot of what we view as good is altruism, which means doing what's good for the tribe. And on that level, we have both of those just baked into us and that's how it is. Of course, there are psychopaths and sociopaths and people who get gratified by the suffering of others. And that's a different thing. Yeah, those are exceptions on the whole. But I think at core, we're not purely selfish, we're not purely altruistic, we are a mix and that's the nature of it. And we also have a complex constellation of values that are just very specific to our evolutionary history. Like we love waterways and mountains and the ideal place to put a house is in a mountain overlooking the water, right? And we care a lot about our kids and we care a little less about our cousins and even less about our fifth cousins. I mean, there are many particularities to human values, which whether they're good or evil depends on your perspective. Say, I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia in Addis Ababa where we have one of our AI development offices for my SingularityNet project. And when I walk through the streets in Addis, you know, there's people lying by the side of the road, like just living there by the side of the road, dying probably of curable diseases without enough food or medicine. And when I walk by them, you know, I feel terrible, I give them money. When I come back home to the developed world, they're not on my mind that much. I do donate some, but I mean, I also spend some of the limited money I have enjoying myself in frivolous ways rather than donating it to those people who are right now, like starving, dying and suffering on the roadside. So does that make me evil? I mean, it makes me somewhat selfish and somewhat altruistic. And we each balance that in our own way, right? So whether that will be true of all possible AGI's is a subtler question. So that's how humans are. So you have a sense, you kind of mentioned that there's a selfish, I'm not gonna bring up the whole Ayn Rand idea of selfishness being the core virtue. That's a whole interesting kind of tangent that I think we'll just distract ourselves on. I have to make one amusing comment. Sure. A comment that has amused me anyway. So the, yeah, I have extraordinary negative respect for Ayn Rand. Negative, what's a negative respect? But when I worked with a company called Genescient, which was evolving flies to have extraordinary long lives in Southern California. So we had flies that were evolved by artificial selection to have five times the lifespan of normal fruit flies. But the population of super long lived flies was physically sitting in a spare room at an Ayn Rand elementary school in Southern California. So that was just like, well, if I saw this in a movie, I wouldn't believe it. Well, yeah, the universe has a sense of humor in that kind of way. That fits in, humor fits in somehow into this whole absurd existence. But you mentioned the balance between selfishness and altruism as kind of being innate. Do you think it's possible that's kind of an emergent phenomena, those peculiarities of our value system? How much of it is innate? How much of it is something we collectively kind of like a Dostoevsky novel bring to life together as a civilization? I mean, the answer to nature versus nurture is usually both. And of course it's nature versus nurture versus self organization, as you mentioned. So clearly there are evolutionary roots to individual and group selection leading to a mix of selfishness and altruism. On the other hand, different cultures manifest that in different ways. Well, we all have basically the same biology. And if you look at sort of precivilized cultures, you have tribes like the Yanomamo in Venezuela, which their culture is focused on killing other tribes. And you have other Stone Age tribes that are mostly peaceful and have big taboos against violence. So you can certainly have a big difference in how culture manifests these innate biological characteristics, but still, there's probably limits that are given by our biology. I used to argue this with my great grandparents who were Marxists actually, because they believed in the withering away of the state. Like they believe that, as you move from capitalism to socialism to communism, people would just become more social minded so that a state would be unnecessary and everyone would give everyone else what they needed. Now, setting aside that that's not what the various Marxist experiments on the planet seem to be heading toward in practice. Just as a theoretical point, I was very dubious that human nature could go there. Like at that time when my great grandparents are alive, I was just like, you know, I'm a cynical teenager. I think humans are just jerks. The state is not gonna wither away. If you don't have some structure keeping people from screwing each other over, they're gonna do it. So now I actually don't quite see things that way. I mean, I think my feeling now subjectively is the culture aspect is more significant than I thought it was when I was a teenager. And I think you could have a human society that was dialed dramatically further toward, you know, self awareness, other awareness, compassion and sharing than our current society. And of course, greater material abundance helps, but to some extent material abundance is a subjective perception also because many Stone Age cultures perceive themselves as living in great material abundance that they had all the food and water they wanted, they lived in a beautiful place, that they had sex lives, that they had children. I mean, they had abundance without any factories, right? So I think humanity probably would be capable of fundamentally more positive and joy filled mode of social existence than what we have now. Clearly Marx didn't quite have the right idea about how to get there. I mean, he missed a number of key aspects of human society and its evolution. And if we look at where we are in society now, how to get there is a quite different question because there are very powerful forces pushing people in different directions than a positive, joyous, compassionate existence, right? So if we were tried to, you know, Elon Musk is dreams of colonizing Mars at the moment, so we maybe will have a chance to start a new civilization with a new governmental system. And certainly there's quite a bit of chaos. We're sitting now, I don't know what the date is, but this is June. There's quite a bit of chaos in all different forms going on in the United States and all over the world. So there's a hunger for new types of governments, new types of leadership, new types of systems. And so what are the forces at play and how do we move forward? Yeah, I mean, colonizing Mars, first of all, it's a super cool thing to do. We should be doing it. So you love the idea. Yeah, I mean, it's more important than making chocolatey or chocolates and sexier lingerie and many of the things that we spend a lot more resources on as a species, right? So I mean, we certainly should do it. I think the possible futures in which a Mars colony makes a critical difference for humanity are very few. I mean, I think, I mean, assuming we make a Mars colony and people go live there in a couple of decades, I mean, their supplies are gonna come from Earth. The money to make the colony came from Earth and whatever powers are supplying the goods there from Earth are gonna, in effect, be in control of that Mars colony. Of course, there are outlier situations where Earth gets nuked into oblivion and somehow Mars has been made self sustaining by that point and then Mars is what allows humanity to persist. But I think that those are very, very, very unlikely. You don't think it could be a first step on a long journey? Of course it's a first step on a long journey, which is awesome. I'm guessing the colonization of the rest of the physical universe will probably be done by AGI's that are better designed to live in space than by the meat machines that we are. But I mean, who knows? We may cryopreserve ourselves in some superior way to what we know now and like shoot ourselves out to Alpha Centauri and beyond. I mean, that's all cool. It's very interesting and it's much more valuable than most things that humanity is spending its resources on. On the other hand, with AGI, we can get to a singularity before the Mars colony becomes sustaining for sure, possibly before it's even operational. So your intuition is that that's the problem if we really invest resources and we can get to faster than a legitimate full self sustaining colonization of Mars. Yeah, and it's very clear that we will to me because there's so much economic value in getting from narrow AI toward AGI, whereas the Mars colony, there's less economic value until you get quite far out into the future. So I think that's very interesting. I just think it's somewhat off to the side. I mean, just as I think, say, art and music are very, very interesting and I wanna see resources go into amazing art and music being created. And I'd rather see that than a lot of the garbage that the society spends their money on. On the other hand, I don't think Mars colonization or inventing amazing new genres of music is not one of the things that is most likely to make a critical difference in the evolution of human or nonhuman life in this part of the universe over the next decade. Do you think AGI is really? AGI is by far the most important thing that's on the horizon. And then technologies that have direct ability to enable AGI or to accelerate AGI are also very important. For example, say, quantum computing. I don't think that's critical to achieve AGI, but certainly you could see how the right quantum computing architecture could massively accelerate AGI, similar other types of nanotechnology. Right now, the quest to cure aging and end disease while not in the big picture as important as AGI, of course, it's important to all of us as individual humans. And if someone made a super longevity pill and distributed it tomorrow, I mean, that would be huge and a much larger impact than a Mars colony is gonna have for quite some time. But perhaps not as much as an AGI system. No, because if you can make a benevolent AGI, then all the other problems are solved. I mean, if then the AGI can be, once it's as generally intelligent as humans, it can rapidly become massively more generally intelligent than humans. And then that AGI should be able to solve science and engineering problems much better than human beings, as long as it is in fact motivated to do so. That's why I said a benevolent AGI. There could be other kinds. Maybe it's good to step back a little bit. I mean, we've been using the term AGI. People often cite you as the creator, or at least the popularizer of the term AGI, artificial general intelligence. Can you tell the origin story of the term maybe? So yeah, I would say I launched the term AGI upon the world for what it's worth without ever fully being in love with the term. What happened is I was editing a book, and this process started around 2001 or two. I think the book came out 2005, finally. I was editing a book which I provisionally was titling Real AI. And I mean, the goal was to gather together fairly serious academicish papers on the topic of making thinking machines that could really think in the sense like people can, or even more broadly than people can, right? So then I was reaching out to other folks that I had encountered here or there who were interested in that, which included some other folks who I knew from the transhumist and singularitarian world, like Peter Vos, who has a company, AGI Incorporated, still in California, and included Shane Legge, who had worked for me at my company, WebMind, in New York in the late 90s, who by now has become rich and famous. He was one of the cofounders of Google DeepMind. But at that time, Shane was, I think he may have just started doing his PhD with Marcus Hooter, who at that time hadn't yet published his book, Universal AI, which sort of gives a mathematical foundation for artificial general intelligence. So I reached out to Shane and Marcus and Peter Vos and Pei Wang, who was another former employee of mine who had been Douglas Hofstadter's PhD student who had his own approach to AGI, and a bunch of some Russian folks reached out to these guys and they contributed papers for the book. But that was my provisional title, but I never loved it because in the end, I was doing some, what we would now call narrow AI as well, like applying machine learning to genomics data or chat data for sentiment analysis. I mean, that work is real. And in a sense, it's really AI. It's just a different kind of AI. Ray Kurzweil wrote about narrow AI versus strong AI, but that seemed weird to me because first of all, narrow and strong are not antennas. That's right. But secondly, strong AI was used in the cognitive science literature to mean the hypothesis that digital computer AIs could have true consciousness like human beings. So there was already a meaning to strong AI, which was complexly different, but related, right? So we were tossing around on an email list whether what title it should be. And so we talked about narrow AI, broad AI, wide AI, narrow AI, general AI. And I think it was either Shane Legge or Peter Vos on the private email discussion we had. He said, but why don't we go with AGI, artificial general intelligence? And Pei Wang wanted to do GAI, general artificial intelligence, because in Chinese it goes in that order. But we figured gay wouldn't work in US culture at that time, right? So we went with the AGI. We used it for the title of that book. And part of Peter and Shane's reasoning was you have the G factor in psychology, which is IQ, general intelligence, right? So you have a meaning of GI, general intelligence, in psychology, so then you're looking like artificial GI. So then we use that for the title of the book. And so I think maybe both Shane and Peter think they invented the term, but then later after the book was published, this guy, Mark Guberd, came up to me and he's like, well, I published an essay with the term AGI in like 1997 or something. And so I'm just waiting for some Russian to come out and say they published that in 1953, right? I mean, that term is not dramatically innovative or anything. It's one of these obvious in hindsight things, which is also annoying in a way, because Joshua Bach, who you interviewed, is a close friend of mine. He likes the term synthetic intelligence, which I like much better, but it hasn't actually caught on, right? Because I mean, artificial is a bit off to me because artifice is like a tool or something, but not all AGI's are gonna be tools. I mean, they may be now, but we're aiming toward making them agents rather than tools. And in a way, I don't like the distinction between artificial and natural, because I mean, we're part of nature also and machines are part of nature. I mean, you can look at evolved versus engineered, but that's a different distinction. Then it should be engineered general intelligence, right? And then general, well, if you look at Marcus Hooter's book, universally, what he argues there is, within the domain of computation theory, which is limited, but interesting. So if you assume computable environments or computable reward functions, then he articulates what would be a truly general intelligence, a system called AIXI, which is quite beautiful. AIXI, and that's the middle name of my latest child, actually, is it? What's the first name? First name is QORXI, Q O R X I, which my wife came up with, but that's an acronym for quantum organized rational expanding intelligence, and his middle name is Xiphonies, actually, which means the former principal underlying AIXI. But in any case. You're giving Elon Musk's new child a run for his money. Well, I did it first. He copied me with this new freakish name, but now if I have another baby, I'm gonna have to outdo him. It's becoming an arms race of weird, geeky baby names. We'll see what the babies think about it, right? But I mean, my oldest son, Zarathustra, loves his name, and my daughter, Sharazad, loves her name. So far, basically, if you give your kids weird names. They live up to it. Well, you're obliged to make the kids weird enough that they like the names, right? It directs their upbringing in a certain way. But yeah, anyway, I mean, what Marcus showed in that book is that a truly general intelligence theoretically is possible, but would take infinite computing power. So then the artificial is a little off. The general is not really achievable within physics as we know it. And I mean, physics as we know it may be limited, but that's what we have to work with now. Intelligence. Infinitely general, you mean, like information processing perspective, yeah. Yeah, intelligence is not very well defined either, right? I mean, what does it mean? I mean, in AI now, it's fashionable to look at it as maximizing an expected reward over the future. But that sort of definition is pathological in various ways. And my friend David Weinbaum, AKA Weaver, he had a beautiful PhD thesis on open ended intelligence, trying to conceive intelligence in a... Without a reward. Yeah, he's just looking at it differently. He's looking at complex self organizing systems and looking at an intelligent system as being one that revises and grows and improves itself in conjunction with its environment without necessarily there being one objective function it's trying to maximize. Although over certain intervals of time, it may act as if it's optimizing a certain objective function. Very much Solaris from Stanislav Lem's novels, right? So yeah, the point is artificial, general and intelligence. Don't work. They're all bad. On the other hand, everyone knows what AI is. And AGI seems immediately comprehensible to people with a technical background. So I think that the term has served as sociological function. And now it's out there everywhere, which baffles me. It's like KFC. I mean, that's it. We're stuck with AGI probably for a very long time until AGI systems take over and rename themselves. Yeah. And then we'll be biological. We're stuck with GPUs too, which mostly have nothing to do with graphics. Any more, right? I wonder what the AGI system will call us humans. That was maybe. Grandpa. Yeah. Yeah. GPs. Yeah. Grandpa processing unit, yeah. Biological grandpa processing units. Yeah. Okay, so maybe also just a comment on AGI representing before even the term existed, representing a kind of community. You've talked about this in the past, sort of AI is coming in waves, but there's always been this community of people who dream about creating general human level super intelligence systems. Can you maybe give your sense of the history of this community as it exists today, as it existed before this deep learning revolution all throughout the winters and the summers of AI? Sure. First, I would say as a side point, the winters and summers of AI are greatly exaggerated by Americans and in that, if you look at the publication record of the artificial intelligence community since say the 1950s, you would find a pretty steady growth in advance of ideas and papers. And what's thought of as an AI winter or summer was sort of how much money is the US military pumping into AI, which was meaningful. On the other hand, there was AI going on in Germany, UK and in Japan and in Russia, all over the place, while US military got more and less enthused about AI. So, I mean. That happened to be, just for people who don't know, the US military happened to be the main source of funding for AI research. So another way to phrase that is it's up and down of funding for artificial intelligence research. And I would say the correlation between funding and intellectual advance was not 100%, right? Because I mean, in Russia, as an example, or in Germany, there was less dollar funding than in the US, but many foundational ideas were laid out, but it was more theory than implementation, right? And US really excelled at sort of breaking through from theoretical papers to working implementations, which did go up and down somewhat with US military funding, but still, I mean, you can look in the 1980s, Dietrich Derner in Germany had self driving cars on the Autobahn, right? And I mean, it was a little early with regard to the car industry, so it didn't catch on such as has happened now. But I mean, that whole advancement of self driving car technology in Germany was pretty much independent of AI military summers and winters in the US. So there's been more going on in AI globally than not only most people on the planet realize, but then most new AI PhDs realize because they've come up within a certain sub field of AI and haven't had to look so much beyond that. But I would say when I got my PhD in 1989 in mathematics, I was interested in AI already. In Philadelphia. Yeah, I started at NYU, then I transferred to Philadelphia to Temple University, good old North Philly. North Philly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the pearl of the US. You never stopped at a red light then because you were afraid if you stopped at a red light, someone will carjack you. So you just drive through every red light. Yeah. Every day driving or bicycling to Temple from my house was like a new adventure. But yeah, the reason I didn't do a PhD in AI was what people were doing in the academic AI field then, was just astoundingly boring and seemed wrong headed to me. It was really like rule based expert systems and production systems. And actually I loved mathematical logic. I had nothing against logic as the cognitive engine for an AI, but the idea that you could type in the knowledge that AI would need to think seemed just completely stupid and wrong headed to me. I mean, you can use logic if you want, but somehow the system has got to be... Automated. Learning, right? It should be learning from experience. And the AI field then was not interested in learning from experience. I mean, some researchers certainly were. I mean, I remember in mid eighties, I discovered a book by John Andreas, which was, it was about a reinforcement learning system called PURRDASHPUSS, which was an acronym that I can't even remember what it was for, but purpose anyway. But he, I mean, that was a system that was supposed to be an AGI and basically by some sort of fancy like Markov decision process learning, it was supposed to learn everything just from the bits coming into it and learn to maximize its reward and become intelligent, right? So that was there in academia back then, but it was like isolated, scattered, weird people. But all these isolated, scattered, weird people in that period, I mean, they laid the intellectual grounds for what happened later. So you look at John Andreas at University of Canterbury with his PURRDASHPUSS reinforcement learning Markov system. He was the PhD supervisor for John Cleary in New Zealand. Now, John Cleary worked with me when I was at Waikato University in 1993 in New Zealand. And he worked with Ian Whitten there and they launched WEKA, which was the first open source machine learning toolkit, which was launched in, I guess, 93 or 94 when I was at Waikato University. Written in Java, unfortunately. Written in Java, which was a cool language back then. I guess it's still, well, it's not cool anymore, but it's powerful. I find, like most programmers now, I find Java unnecessarily bloated, but back then it was like Java or C++ basically. And Java was easier for students. Amusingly, a lot of the work on WEKA when we were in New Zealand was funded by a US, sorry, a New Zealand government grant to use machine learning to predict the menstrual cycles of cows. So in the US, all the grant funding for AI was about how to kill people or spy on people. In New Zealand, it's all about cows or kiwi fruits, right? Yeah. So yeah, anyway, I mean, John Andreas had his probability theory based reinforcement learning, proto AGI. John Cleary was trying to do much more ambitious, probabilistic AGI systems. Now, John Cleary helped do WEKA, which is the first open source machine learning toolkit. So the predecessor for TensorFlow and Torch and all these things. Also, Shane Legg was at Waikato working with John Cleary and Ian Witten and this whole group. And then working with my own companies, my company, WebMind, an AI company I had in the late 90s with a team there at Waikato University, which is how Shane got his head full of AGI, which led him to go on and with Demis Hassabis found DeepMind. So what you can see through that lineage is, you know, in the 80s and 70s, John Andreas was trying to build probabilistic reinforcement learning AGI systems. The technology, the computers just weren't there to support his ideas were very similar to what people are doing now. But, you know, although he's long since passed away and didn't become that famous outside of Canterbury, I mean, the lineage of ideas passed on from him to his students, to their students, you can go trace directly from there to me and to DeepMind, right? So that there was a lot going on in AGI that did ultimately lay the groundwork for what we have today, but there wasn't a community, right? And so when I started trying to pull together an AGI community, it was in the, I guess, the early aughts when I was living in Washington, D.C. and making a living doing AI consulting for various U.S. government agencies. And I organized the first AGI workshop in 2006. And I mean, it wasn't like it was literally in my basement or something. I mean, it was in the conference room at the Marriott in Bethesda, it's not that edgy or underground, unfortunately, but still. How many people attended? About 60 or something. That's not bad. I mean, D.C. has a lot of AI going on, probably until the last five or 10 years, much more than Silicon Valley, although it's just quiet because of the nature of what happens in D.C. Their business isn't driven by PR. Mostly when something starts to work really well, it's taken black and becomes even more quiet, right? But yeah, the thing is that really had the feeling of a group of starry eyed mavericks huddled in a basement, like plotting how to overthrow the narrow AI establishment. And for the first time, in some cases, coming together with others who shared their passion for AGI and the technical seriousness about working on it. And that's very, very different than what we have today. I mean, now it's a little bit different. We have AGI conference every year and there's several hundred people rather than 50. Now it's more like this is the main gathering of people who want to achieve AGI and think that large scale nonlinear regression is not the golden path to AGI. So I mean it's... AKA neural networks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, certain architectures for learning using neural networks. So yeah, the AGI conferences are sort of now the main concentration of people not obsessed with deep neural nets and deep reinforcement learning, but still interested in AGI, not the only ones. I mean, there's other little conferences and groupings interested in human level AI and cognitive architectures and so forth. But yeah, it's been a big shift. Like back then, you couldn't really... It'll be very, very edgy then to give a university department seminar that mentioned AGI or human level AI. It was more like you had to talk about something more short term and immediately practical than in the bar after the seminar, you could bullshit about AGI in the same breath as time travel or the simulation hypothesis or something. Whereas now, AGI is not only in the academic seminar room, like you have Vladimir Putin knows what AGI is. And he's like, Russia needs to become the leader in AGI. So national leaders and CEOs of large corporations. I mean, the CTO of Intel, Justin Ratner, this was years ago, Singularity Summit Conference, 2008 or something. He's like, we believe Ray Kurzweil, the singularity will happen in 2045 and it will have Intel inside. So, I mean, it's gone from being something which is the pursuit of like crazed mavericks, crackpots and science fiction fanatics to being a marketing term for large corporations and the national leaders, which is a astounding transition. But yeah, in the course of this transition, I think a bunch of sub communities have formed and the community around the AGI conference series is certainly one of them. It hasn't grown as big as I might've liked it to. On the other hand, sometimes a modest size community can be better for making intellectual progress also. Like you go to a society for neuroscience conference, you have 35 or 40,000 neuroscientists. On the one hand, it's amazing. On the other hand, you're not gonna talk to the leaders of the field there if you're an outsider. Yeah, in the same sense, the AAAI, the artificial intelligence, the main kind of generic artificial intelligence conference is too big. It's too amorphous. Like it doesn't make sense. Well, yeah, and NIPS has become a company advertising outlet in the whole of it. So, I mean, to comment on the role of AGI in the research community, I'd still, if you look at NeurIPS, if you look at CVPR, if you look at these iClear, AGI is still seen as the outcast. I would say in these main machine learning, in these main artificial intelligence conferences amongst the researchers, I don't know if it's an accepted term yet. What I've seen bravely, you mentioned Shane Legg's DeepMind and then OpenAI are the two places that are, I would say unapologetically so far, I think it's actually changing unfortunately, but so far they've been pushing the idea that the goal is to create an AGI. Well, they have billions of dollars behind them. So, I mean, they're in the public mind that certainly carries some oomph, right? I mean, I mean. But they also have really strong researchers, right? They do, they're great teams. I mean, DeepMind in particular, yeah. And they have, I mean, DeepMind has Marcus Hutter walking around. I mean, there's all these folks who basically their full time position involves dreaming about creating AGI. I mean, Google Brain has a lot of amazing AGI oriented people also. And I mean, so I'd say from a public marketing view, DeepMind and OpenAI are the two large well funded organizations that have put the term and concept AGI out there sort of as part of their public image. But I mean, they're certainly not, there are other groups that are doing research that seems just as AGI is to me. I mean, including a bunch of groups in Google's main Mountain View office. So yeah, it's true. AGI is somewhat away from the mainstream now. But if you compare it to where it was 15 years ago, there's been an amazing mainstreaming. You could say the same thing about super longevity research, which is one of my application areas that I'm excited about. I mean, I've been talking about this since the 90s, but working on this since 2001. And back then, really to say, you're trying to create therapies to allow people to live hundreds of thousands of years, you were way, way, way, way out of the industry, academic mainstream. But now, Google had Project Calico, Craig Venter had Human Longevity Incorporated. And then once the suits come marching in, right? I mean, once there's big money in it, then people are forced to take it seriously because that's the way modern society works. So it's still not as mainstream as cancer research, just as AGI is not as mainstream as automated driving or something. But the degree of mainstreaming that's happened in the last 10 to 15 years is astounding to those of us who've been at it for a while. Yeah, but there's a marketing aspect to the term, but in terms of actual full force research that's going on under the header of AGI, it's currently, I would say dominated, maybe you can disagree, dominated by neural networks research, that the nonlinear regression, as you mentioned. Like what's your sense with OpenCog, with your work, but in general, I was logic based systems and expert systems. For me, always seemed to capture a deep element of intelligence that needs to be there. Like you said, it needs to learn, it needs to be automated somehow, but that seems to be missing from a lot of research currently. So what's your sense? I guess one way to ask this question, what's your sense of what kind of things will an AGI system need to have? Yeah, that's a very interesting topic that I've thought about for a long time. And I think there are many, many different approaches that can work for getting to human level AI. So I don't think there's like one golden algorithm, or one golden design that can work. And I mean, flying machines is the much worn analogy here, right? Like, I mean, you have airplanes, you have helicopters, you have balloons, you have stealth bombers that don't look like regular airplanes. You've got all blimps. Birds too. Birds, yeah, and bugs, right? Yeah. And there are certainly many kinds of flying machines that. And there's a catapult that you can just launch. And there's bicycle powered like flying machines, right? Nice, yeah. Yeah, so now these are all analyzable by a basic theory of aerodynamics, right? Now, so one issue with AGI is we don't yet have the analog of the theory of aerodynamics. And that's what Marcus Hutter was trying to make with the AXI and his general theory of general intelligence. But that theory in its most clearly articulated parts really only works for either infinitely powerful machines or almost, or insanely impractically powerful machines. So I mean, if you were gonna take a theory based approach to AGI, what you would do is say, well, let's take what's called say AXE TL, which is Hutter's AXE machine that can work on merely insanely much processing power rather than infinitely much. What does TL stand for? Time and length. Okay. So you're basically how it. Like constrained somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how AXE works basically is each action that it wants to take, before taking that action, it looks at all its history. And then it looks at all possible programs that it could use to make a decision. And it decides like which decision program would have let it make the best decisions according to its reward function over its history. And it uses that decision program to make the next decision, right? It's not afraid of infinite resources. It's searching through the space of all possible computer programs in between each action and each next action. Now, AXE TL searches through all possible computer programs that have runtime less than T and length less than L. So it's, which is still an impractically humongous space, right? So what you would like to do to make an AGI and what will probably be done 50 years from now to make an AGI is say, okay, well, we have some constraints. We have these processing power constraints and we have the space and time constraints on the program. We have energy utilization constraints and we have this particular class environments, class of environments that we care about, which may be say, you know, manipulating physical objects on the surface of the earth, communicating in human language. I mean, whatever our particular, not annihilating humanity, whatever our particular requirements happen to be. If you formalize those requirements in some formal specification language, you should then be able to run automated program specializer on AXE TL, specialize it to the computing resource constraints and the particular environment and goal. And then it will spit out like the specialized version of AXE TL to your resource restrictions and your environment, which will be your AGI, right? And that I think is how our super AGI will create new AGI systems, right? But that's a very rush. It seems really inefficient. It's a very Russian approach by the way, like the whole field of program specialization came out of Russia. Can you backtrack? So what is program specialization? So it's basically... Well, take sorting, for example. You can have a generic program for sorting lists, but what if all your lists you care about are length 10,000 or less? Got it. You can run an automated program specializer on your sorting algorithm, and it will come up with the algorithm that's optimal for sorting lists of length 1,000 or less, or 10,000 or less, right? That's kind of like, isn't that the kind of the process of evolution as a program specializer to the environment? So you're kind of evolving human beings, or you're living creatures. Your Russian heritage is showing there. So with Alexander Vityaev and Peter Anokhin and so on, I mean, there's a long history of thinking about evolution that way also, right? So, well, my point is that what we're thinking of as a human level general intelligence, if you start from narrow AIs, like are being used in the commercial AI field now, then you're thinking, okay, how do we make it more and more general? On the other hand, if you start from AICSI or Schmidhuber's Gödel machine, or these infinitely powerful, but practically infeasible AIs, then getting to a human level AGI is a matter of specialization. It's like, how do you take these maximally general learning processes and how do you specialize them so that they can operate within the resource constraints that you have, but will achieve the particular things that you care about? Because we humans are not maximally general intelligence. If I ask you to run a maze in 750 dimensions, you'd probably be very slow. Whereas at two dimensions, you're probably way better, right? So, I mean, we're special because our hippocampus has a two dimensional map in it, right? And it does not have a 750 dimensional map in it. So, I mean, we're a peculiar mix of generality and specialization, right? We'll probably start quite general at birth. Not obviously still narrow, but like more general than we are at age 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60. I don't think that, I think it's more complex than that because I mean, in some sense, a young child is less biased and the brain has yet to sort of crystallize into appropriate structures for processing aspects of the physical and social world. On the other hand, the young child is very tied to their sensorium. Whereas we can deal with abstract mathematics, like 750 dimensions and the young child cannot because they haven't grown what Piaget called the formal capabilities. They haven't learned to abstract yet, right? And the ability to abstract gives you a different kind of generality than what the baby has. So, there's both more specialization and more generalization that comes with the development process actually. I mean, I guess just the trajectories of the specialization are most controllable at the young age, I guess is one way to put it. Do you have kids? No. They're not as controllable as you think. So, you think it's interesting. I think, honestly, I think a human adult is much more generally intelligent than a human baby. Babies are very stupid, you know what I mean? I mean, they're cute, which is why we put up with their repetitiveness and stupidity. And they have what the Zen guys would call a beginner's mind, which is a beautiful thing, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with a high level of intelligence. On the plot of cuteness and stupidity, there's a process that allows us to put up with their stupidity as they become more intelligent. So, by the time you're an ugly old man like me, you gotta get really, really smart to compensate. To compensate, okay, cool. But yeah, going back to your original question, so the way I look at human level AGI is how do you specialize, you know, unrealistically inefficient, superhuman, brute force learning processes to the specific goals that humans need to achieve and the specific resources that we have. And both of these, the goals and the resources and the environments, I mean, all this is important. And on the resources side, it's important that the hardware resources we're bringing to bear are very different than the human brain. So the way I would want to implement AGI on a bunch of neurons in a vat that I could rewire arbitrarily is quite different than the way I would want to create AGI on say a modern server farm of CPUs and GPUs, which in turn may be quite different than the way I would want to implement AGI on whatever quantum computer we'll have in 10 years, supposing someone makes a robust quantum turing machine or something, right? So I think there's been coevolution of the patterns of organization in the human brain and the physiological particulars of the human brain over time. And when you look at neural networks, that is one powerful class of learning algorithms, but it's also a class of learning algorithms that evolve to exploit the particulars of the human brain as a computational substrate. If you're looking at the computational substrate of a modern server farm, you won't necessarily want the same algorithms that you want on the human brain. And from the right level of abstraction, you could look at maybe the best algorithms on the brain and the best algorithms on a modern computer network as implementing the same abstract learning and representation processes, but finding that level of abstraction is its own AGI research project then, right? So that's about the hardware side and the software side, which follows from that. Then regarding what are the requirements, I wrote the paper years ago on what I called the embodied communication prior, which was quite similar in intent to Yoshua Bengio's recent paper on the consciousness prior, except I didn't wanna wrap up consciousness in it because to me, the qualia problem and subjective experience is a very interesting issue also, which we can chat about, but I would rather keep that philosophical debate distinct from the debate of what kind of biases do you wanna put in a general intelligence to give it human like general intelligence. And I'm not sure Yoshua Bengio is really addressing that kind of consciousness. He's just using the term. I love Yoshua to pieces. Like he's by far my favorite of the lines of deep learning. Yeah. He's such a good hearted guy. He's a good human being. Yeah, for sure. I am not sure he has plumbed to the depths of the philosophy of consciousness. No, he's using it as a sexy term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I called it was the embodied communication prior. Can you maybe explain it a little bit? Yeah, yeah. What I meant was, what are we humans evolved for? You can say being human, but that's very abstract, right? I mean, our minds control individual bodies, which are autonomous agents moving around in a world that's composed largely of solid objects, right? And we've also evolved to communicate via language with other solid object agents that are going around doing things collectively with us in a world of solid objects. And these things are very obvious, but if you compare them to the scope of all possible intelligences or even all possible intelligences that are physically realizable, that actually constrains things a lot. So if you start to look at how would you realize some specialized or constrained version of universal general intelligence in a system that has limited memory and limited speed of processing, but whose general intelligence will be biased toward controlling a solid object agent, which is mobile in a solid object world for manipulating solid objects and communicating via language with other similar agents in that same world, right? Then starting from that, you're starting to get a requirements analysis for human level general intelligence. And then that leads you into cognitive science and you can look at, say, what are the different types of memory that the human mind and brain has? And this has matured over the last decades and I got into this a lot. So after getting my PhD in math, I was an academic for eight years. I was in departments of mathematics, computer science, and psychology. When I was in the psychology department at the University of Western Australia, I was focused on cognitive science of memory and perception. Actually, I was teaching neural nets and deep neural nets and it was multi layer perceptrons, right? Psychology? Yeah. Cognitive science, it was cross disciplinary among engineering, math, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science. But yeah, we were teaching psychology students to try to model the data from human cognition experiments using multi layer perceptrons, which was the early version of a deep neural network. Very, very, yeah, recurrent back prop was very, very slow to train back then, right? So this is the study of these constraint systems that are supposed to deal with physical objects. So if you look at cognitive psychology, you can see there's multiple types of memory, which are to some extent represented by different subsystems in the human brain. So we have episodic memory, which takes into account our life history and everything that's happened to us. We have declarative or semantic memory, which is like facts and beliefs abstracted from the particular situations that they occurred in. There's sensory memory, which to some extent is sense modality specific, and then to some extent is unified across sense modalities. There's procedural memory, memory of how to do stuff, like how to swing the tennis racket, right? Which is, there's motor memory, but it's also a little more abstract than motor memory. It involves cerebellum and cortex working together. Then there's memory linkage with emotion which has to do with linkages of cortex and limbic system. There's specifics of spatial and temporal modeling connected with memory, which has to do with hippocampus and thalamus connecting to cortex. And the basal ganglia, which influences goals. So we have specific memory of what goals, subgoals and sub subgoals we want to perceive in which context in the past. Human brain has substantially different subsystems for these different types of memory and substantially differently tuned learning, like differently tuned modes of longterm potentiation to do with the types of neurons and neurotransmitters in the different parts of the brain corresponding to these different types of knowledge. And these different types of memory and learning in the human brain, I mean, you can back these all into embodied communication for controlling agents in worlds of solid objects. Now, so if you look at building an AGI system, one way to do it, which starts more from cognitive science than neuroscience is to say, okay, what are the types of memory that are necessary for this kind of world? Yeah, yeah, necessary for this sort of intelligence. What types of learning work well with these different types of memory? And then how do you connect all these things together, right? And of course the human brain did it incrementally through evolution because each of the sub networks of the brain, I mean, it's not really the lobes of the brain, it's the sub networks, each of which is widely distributed, which of the, each of the sub networks of the brain co evolves with the other sub networks of the brain, both in terms of its patterns of organization and the particulars of the neurophysiology. So they all grew up communicating and adapting to each other. It's not like they were separate black boxes that were then glommed together, right? Whereas as engineers, we would tend to say, let's make the declarative memory box here and the procedural memory box here and the perception box here and wire them together. And when you can do that, it's interesting. I mean, that's how a car is built, right? But on the other hand, that's clearly not how biological systems are made. The parts co evolve so as to adapt and work together. That's by the way, how every human engineered system that flies, that was, we were using that analogy before it's built as well. So do you find this at all appealing? Like there's been a lot of really exciting, which I find strange that it's ignored work in cognitive architectures, for example, throughout the last few decades. Do you find that? Yeah, I mean, I had a lot to do with that community and you know, Paul Rosenbloom, who was one of the, and John Laird who built the SOAR architecture, are friends of mine. And I learned SOAR quite well and ACTAR and these different cognitive architectures. And how I was looking at the AI world about 10 years ago before this whole commercial deep learning explosion was, on the one hand, you had these cognitive architecture guys who were working closely with psychologists and cognitive scientists who had thought a lot about how the different parts of a human like mind should work together. On the other hand, you had these learning theory guys who didn't care at all about the architecture, but we're just thinking about like, how do you recognize patterns in large amounts of data? And in some sense, what you needed to do was to get the learning that the learning theory guys were doing and put it together with the architecture that the cognitive architecture guys were doing. And then you would have what you needed. Now, you can't, unfortunately, when you look at the details, you can't just do that without totally rebuilding what is happening on both the cognitive architecture and the learning side. So, I mean, they tried to do that in SOAR, but what they ultimately did is like, take a deep neural net or something for perception and you include it as one of the black boxes. It becomes one of the boxes. The learning mechanism becomes one of the boxes as opposed to fundamental part of the system. You could look at some of the stuff DeepMind has done, like the differential neural computer or something that sort of has a neural net for deep learning perception. It has another neural net, which is like a memory matrix that stores, say, the map of the London subway or something. So probably Demis Tsabas was thinking about this like part of cortex and part of hippocampus because hippocampus has a spatial map. And when he was a neuroscientist, he was doing a bunch on cortex hippocampus interconnection. So there, the DNC would be an example of folks from the deep neural net world trying to take a step in the cognitive architecture direction by having two neural modules that correspond roughly to two different parts of the human brain that deal with different kinds of memory and learning. But on the other hand, it's super, super, super crude from the cognitive architecture view, right? Just as what John Laird and Soar did with neural nets was super, super crude from a learning point of view because the learning was like off to the side, not affecting the core representations, right? I mean, you weren't learning the representation. You were learning the data that feeds into the... You were learning abstractions of perceptual data to feed into the representation that was not learned, right? So yeah, this was clear to me a while ago. And one of my hopes with the AGI community was to sort of bring people from those two directions together. That didn't happen much in terms of... Not yet. And what I was gonna say is it didn't happen in terms of bringing like the lions of cognitive architecture together with the lions of deep learning. It did work in the sense that a bunch of younger researchers have had their heads filled with both of those ideas. This comes back to a saying my dad, who was a university professor, often quoted to me, which was, science advances one funeral at a time, which I'm trying to avoid. Like I'm 53 years old and I'm trying to invent amazing, weird ass new things that nobody ever thought about, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But there is that aspect, right? Like the people who've been at AI a long time and have made their career developing one aspect, like a cognitive architecture or a deep learning approach, it can be hard once you're old and have made your career doing one thing, it can be hard to mentally shift gears. I mean, I try quite hard to remain flexible minded. Have you been successful somewhat in changing, maybe, have you changed your mind on some aspects of what it takes to build an AGI, like technical things? The hard part is that the world doesn't want you to. The world or your own brain? The world, well, that one point is that your brain doesn't want to. The other part is that the world doesn't want you to. Like the people who have followed your ideas get mad at you if you change your mind. And the media wants to pigeonhole you as an avatar of a certain idea. But yeah, I've changed my mind on a bunch of things. I mean, when I started my career, I really thought quantum computing would be necessary for AGI. And I doubt it's necessary now, although I think it will be a super major enhancement. But I mean, I'm now in the middle of embarking on the complete rethink and rewrite from scratch of our OpenCog AGI system together with Alexey Potapov and his team in St. Petersburg, who's working with me in SingularityNet. So now we're trying to like go back to basics, take everything we learned from working with the current OpenCog system, take everything everybody else has learned from working with their proto AGI systems and design the best framework for the next stage. And I do think there's a lot to be learned from the recent successes with deep neural nets and deep reinforcement systems. I mean, people made these essentially trivial systems work much better than I thought they would. And there's a lot to be learned from that. And I wanna incorporate that knowledge appropriately in our OpenCog 2.0 system. On the other hand, I also think current deep neural net architectures as such will never get you anywhere near AGI. So I think you wanna avoid the pathology of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and like saying, well, these things are garbage because foolish journalists overblow them as being the path to AGI and a few researchers overblow them as well. There's a lot of interesting stuff to be learned there even though those are not the golden path. So maybe this is a good chance to step back. You mentioned OpenCog 2.0, but... Go back to OpenCog 0.0, which exists now. Alpha, yeah. Yeah, maybe talk through the history of OpenCog and your thinking about these ideas. I would say OpenCog 2.0 is a term we're throwing around sort of tongue in cheek because the existing OpenCog system that we're working on now is not remotely close to what we'd consider a 1.0, right? I mean, it's an early... It's been around, what, 13 years or something, but it's still an early stage research system, right? And actually, we are going back to the beginning in terms of theory and implementation because we feel like that's the right thing to do, but I'm sure what we end up with is gonna have a huge amount in common with the current system. I mean, we all still like the general approach. So first of all, what is OpenCog? Sure, OpenCog is an open source software project that I launched together with several others in 2008 and probably the first code written toward that was written in 2001 or two or something that was developed as a proprietary code base within my AI company, Novamente LLC. Then we decided to open source it in 2008, cleaned up the code throughout some things and added some new things and... What language is it written in? It's C++. Primarily, there's a bunch of scheme as well, but most of it's C++. And it's separate from something we'll also talk about, the SingularityNet. So it was born as a non networked thing. Correct, correct. Well, there are many levels of networks involved here. No connectivity to the internet, or no, at birth. Yeah, I mean, SingularityNet is a separate project and a separate body of code. And you can use SingularityNet as part of the infrastructure for a distributed OpenCog system, but there are different layers. Yeah, got it. So OpenCog on the one hand as a software framework could be used to implement a variety of different AI architectures and algorithms, but in practice, there's been a group of developers which I've been leading together with Linus Vepstas, Neil Geisweiler, and a few others, which have been using the OpenCog platform and infrastructure to implement certain ideas about how to make an AGI. So there's been a little bit of ambiguity about OpenCog, the software platform versus OpenCog, the AGI design, because in theory, you could use that software to do, you could use it to make a neural net. You could use it to make a lot of different AGI. What kind of stuff does the software platform provide, like in terms of utilities, tools, like what? Yeah, let me first tell about OpenCog as a software platform, and then I'll tell you the specific AGI R&D we've been building on top of it. So the core component of OpenCog as a software platform is what we call the atom space, which is a weighted labeled hypergraph. ATOM, atom space. Atom space, yeah, yeah, not atom, like Adam and Eve, although that would be cool too. Yeah, so you have a hypergraph, which is like, so a graph in this sense is a bunch of nodes with links between them. A hypergraph is like a graph, but links can go between more than two nodes. So you have a link between three nodes. And in fact, OpenCog's atom space would properly be called a metagraph because you can have links pointing to links, or you could have links pointing to whole subgraphs, right? So it's an extended hypergraph or a metagraph. Is metagraph a technical term? It is now a technical term. Interesting. But I don't think it was yet a technical term when we started calling this a generalized hypergraph. But in any case, it's a weighted labeled generalized hypergraph or weighted labeled metagraph. The weights and labels mean that the nodes and links can have numbers and symbols attached to them. So they can have types on them. They can have numbers on them that represent, say, a truth value or an importance value for a certain purpose. And of course, like with all things, you can reduce that to a hypergraph, and then the hypergraph can be reduced to a graph. You can reduce hypergraph to a graph, and you could reduce a graph to an adjacency matrix. So, I mean, there's always multiple representations. But there's a layer of representation that seems to work well here. Got it. Right, right, right. And so similarly, you could have a link to a whole graph because a whole graph could represent, say, a body of information. And I could say, I reject this body of information. Then one way to do that is make that link go to that whole subgraph representing the body of information, right? I mean, there are many alternate representations, but that's, anyway, what we have in OpenCOG, we have an atom space, which is this weighted, labeled, generalized hypergraph. Knowledge store, it lives in RAM. There's also a way to back it up to disk. There are ways to spread it among multiple different machines. Then there are various utilities for dealing with that. So there's a pattern matcher, which lets you specify a sort of abstract pattern and then search through a whole atom space with labeled hypergraph to see what subhypergraphs may match that pattern, for an example. So that's, then there's something called the COG server in OpenCOG, which lets you run a bunch of different agents or processes in a scheduler. And each of these agents, basically it reads stuff from the atom space and it writes stuff to the atom space. So this is sort of the basic operational model. That's the software framework. And of course that's, there's a lot there just from a scalable software engineering standpoint. So you could use this, I don't know if you've, have you looked into the Stephen Wolfram's physics project recently with the hypergraphs and stuff? Could you theoretically use like the software framework to play with it? You certainly could, although Wolfram would rather die than use anything but Mathematica for his work. Well that's, yeah, but there's a big community of people who are, you know, would love integration. Like you said, the young minds love the idea of integrating, of connecting things. Yeah, that's right. And I would add on that note, the idea of using hypergraph type models in physics is not very new. Like if you look at... The Russians did it first. Well, I'm sure they did. And a guy named Ben Dribis, who's a mathematician, a professor in Louisiana or somewhere, had a beautiful book on quantum sets and hypergraphs and algebraic topology for discrete models of physics. And carried it much farther than Wolfram has, but he's not rich and famous, so it didn't get in the headlines. But yeah, Wolfram aside, yeah, certainly that's a good way to put it. The whole OpenCog framework, you could use it to model biological networks and simulate biology processes. You could use it to model physics on discrete graph models of physics. So you could use it to do, say, biologically realistic neural networks, for example. And that's a framework. What do agents and processes do? Do they grow the graph? What kind of computations, just to get a sense, are they supposed to do? So in theory, they could do anything they want to do. They're just C++ processes. On the other hand, the computation framework is sort of designed for agents where most of their processing time is taken up with reads and writes to the atom space. And so that's a very different processing model than, say, the matrix multiplication based model as underlies most deep learning systems, right? So you could create an agent that just factored numbers for a billion years. It would run within the OpenCog platform, but it would be pointless, right? I mean, the point of doing OpenCog is because you want to make agents that are cooperating via reading and writing into this weighted labeled hypergraph, right? And that has both cognitive architecture importance because then this hypergraph is being used as a sort of shared memory among different cognitive processes, but it also has software and hardware implementation implications because current GPU architectures are not so useful for OpenCog, whereas a graph chip would be incredibly useful, right? And I think Graphcore has those now, but they're not ideally suited for this. But I think in the next, let's say, three to five years, we're gonna see new chips where like a graph is put on the chip and the back and forth between multiple processes acting SIMD and MIMD on that graph is gonna be fast. And then that may do for OpenCog type architectures what GPUs did for deep neural architecture. It's a small tangent. Can you comment on thoughts about neuromorphic computing? So like hardware implementations of all these different kind of, are you interested? Are you excited by that possibility? I'm excited by graph processors because I think they can massively speed up OpenCog, which is a class of architectures that I'm working on. I think if, you know, in principle, neuromorphic computing should be amazing. I haven't yet been fully sold on any of the systems that are out. They're like, memristors should be amazing too, right? So a lot of these things have obvious potential, but I haven't yet put my hands on a system that seemed to manifest that. Mark's system should be amazing, but the current systems have not been great. Yeah, I mean, look, for example, if you wanted to make a biologically realistic hardware neural network, like making a circuit in hardware that emulated like the Hodgkin–Huxley equation or the Izhekevich equation, like differential equations for a biologically realistic neuron and putting that in hardware on the chip, that would seem that it would make more feasible to make a large scale, truly biologically realistic neural network. Now, what's been done so far is not like that. So I guess personally, as a researcher, I mean, I've done a bunch of work in computational neuroscience where I did some work with IARPA in DC, Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency. We were looking at how do you make a biologically realistic simulation of seven different parts of the brain cooperating with each other, using like realistic nonlinear dynamical models of neurons, and how do you get that to simulate what's going on in the mind of a geo intelligence analyst while they're trying to find terrorists on a map, right? So if you want to do something like that, having neuromorphic hardware that really let you simulate like a realistic model of the neuron would be amazing. But that's sort of with my computational neuroscience hat on, right? With an AGI hat on, I'm just more interested in these hypergraph knowledge representation based architectures, which would benefit more from various types of graph processors because the main processing bottleneck is reading writing to RAM. It's reading writing to the graph in RAM. The main processing bottleneck for this kind of proto AGI architecture is not multiplying matrices. And for that reason, GPUs, which are really good at multiplying matrices, don't apply as well. There are frameworks like Gunrock and others that try to boil down graph processing to matrix operations, and they're cool, but you're still putting a square peg into a round hole in a certain way. The same is true, I mean, current quantum machine learning, which is very cool. It's also all about how to get matrix and vector operations in quantum mechanics, and I see why that's natural to do. I mean, quantum mechanics is all unitary matrices and vectors, right? On the other hand, you could also try to make graph centric quantum computers, which I think is where things will go. And then we can have, then we can make, like take the open cog implementation layer, implement it in a collapsed state inside a quantum computer. But that may be the singularity squared, right? I'm not sure we need that to get to human level. That's already beyond the first singularity. But can we just go back to open cog? Yeah, and the hypergraph and open cog. That's the software framework, right? So the next thing is our cognitive architecture tells us particular algorithms to put there. Got it. Can we backtrack on the kind of, is this graph designed, is it in general supposed to be sparse and the operations constantly grow and change the graph? Yeah, the graph is sparse. But is it constantly adding links and so on? It is a self modifying hypergraph. So it's not, so the write and read operations you're referring to, this isn't just a fixed graph to which you change the way, it's a constantly growing graph. Yeah, that's true. So it is different model than, say current deep neural nets and have a fixed neural architecture and you're updating the weights. Although there have been like cascade correlational neural net architectures that grow new nodes and links, but the most common neural architectures now have a fixed neural architecture, you're updating the weights. And then open cog, you can update the weights and that certainly happens a lot, but adding new nodes, adding new links, removing nodes and links is an equally critical part of the system's operations. Got it. So now when you start to add these cognitive algorithms on top of this open cog architecture, what does that look like? Yeah, so within this framework then, creating a cognitive architecture is basically two things. It's choosing what type system you wanna put on the nodes and links in the hypergraph, what types of nodes and links you want. And then it's choosing what collection of agents, what collection of AI algorithms or processes are gonna run to operate on this hypergraph. And of course those two decisions are closely connected to each other. So in terms of the type system, there are some links that are more neural net like, they're just like have weights to get updated by heavy and learning and activation spreads along them. There are other links that are more logic like and nodes that are more logic like. So you could have a variable node and you can have a node representing a universal or existential quantifier as in predicate logic or term logic. So you can have logic like nodes and links, or you can have neural like nodes and links. You can also have procedure like nodes and links as in say a combinatorial logic or Lambda calculus representing programs. So you can have nodes and links representing many different types of semantics, which means you could make a horrible ugly mess or you could make a system where these different types of knowledge all interpenetrate and synergize with each other beautifully, right? So the hypergraph can contain programs. Yeah, it can contain programs, although in the current version, it is a very inefficient way to guide the execution of programs, which is one thing that we are aiming to resolve with our rewrite of the system now. So what to you is the most beautiful aspect of OpenCog? Just to you personally, some aspect that captivates your imagination from beauty or power? What fascinates me is finding a common representation that underlies abstract, declarative knowledge and sensory knowledge and movement knowledge and procedural knowledge and episodic knowledge, finding the right level of representation where all these types of knowledge are stored in a sort of universal and interconvertible yet practically manipulable way, right? So to me, that's the core, because once you've done that, then the different learning algorithms can help each other out. Like what you want is, if you have a logic engine that helps with declarative knowledge and you have a deep neural net that gathers perceptual knowledge, and you have, say, an evolutionary learning system that learns procedures, you want these to not only interact on the level of sharing results and passing inputs and outputs to each other, you want the logic engine, when it gets stuck, to be able to share its intermediate state with the neural net and with the evolutionary system and with the evolutionary learning algorithm so that they can help each other out of bottlenecks and help each other solve combinatorial explosions by intervening inside each other's cognitive processes. But that can only be done if the intermediate state of a logic engine, the evolutionary learning engine, and a deep neural net are represented in the same form. And that's what we figured out how to do by putting the right type system on top of this weighted labeled hypergraph. So is there, can you maybe elaborate on what are the different characteristics of a type system that can coexist amongst all these different kinds of knowledge that needs to be represented? And is, I mean, like, is it hierarchical? Just any kind of insights you can give on that kind of type system? Yeah, yeah, so this gets very nitty gritty and mathematical, of course, but one key part is switching from predicate logic to term logic. What is predicate logic? What is term logic? So term logic was invented by Aristotle, or at least that's the oldest recollection we have of it. But term logic breaks down basic logic into basically simple links between nodes, like an inheritance link between node A and node B. So in term logic, the basic deduction operation is A implies B, B implies C, therefore A implies C. Whereas in predicate logic, the basic operation is modus ponens, like A implies B, therefore B. So it's a slightly different way of breaking down logic, but by breaking down logic into term logic, you get a nice way of breaking logic down into nodes and links. So your concepts can become nodes, the logical relations become links. And so then inference is like, so if this link is A implies B, this link is B implies C, then deduction builds a link A implies C. And your probabilistic algorithm can assign a certain weight there. Now, you may also have like a Hebbian neural link from A to C, which is the degree to which thinking, the degree to which A being the focus of attention should make B the focus of attention, right? So you could have then a neural link and you could have a symbolic, like logical inheritance link in your term logic. And they have separate meaning, but they could be used to guide each other as well. Like if there's a large amount of neural weight on the link between A and B, that may direct your logic engine to think about, well, what is the relation? Are they similar? Is there an inheritance relation? Are they similar in some context? On the other hand, if there's a logical relation between A and B, that may direct your neural component to think, well, when I'm thinking about A, should I be directing some attention to B also? Because there's a logical relation. So in terms of logic, there's a lot of thought that went into how do you break down logic relations, including basic sort of propositional logic relations as Aristotelian term logic deals with, and then quantifier logic relations also. How do you break those down elegantly into a hypergraph? Because you, I mean, you can boil logic expression into a graph in many different ways. Many of them are very ugly, right? We tried to find elegant ways of sort of hierarchically breaking down complex logic expression into nodes and links. So that if you have say different nodes representing, Ben, AI, Lex, interview or whatever, the logic relations between those things are compact in the node and link representation. So that when you have a neural net acting on the same nodes and links, the neural net and the logic engine can sort of interoperate with each other. And also interpretable by humans. Is that an important? That's tough. Yeah, in simple cases, it's interpretable by humans. But honestly, I would say logic systems I would say logic systems give more potential for transparency and comprehensibility than neural net systems, but you still have to work at it. Because I mean, if I show you a predicate logic proposition with like 500 nested universal and existential quantifiers and 217 variables, that's no more comprehensible than the weight metrics of a neural network, right? So I'd say the logic expressions that AI learns from its experience are mostly totally opaque to human beings and maybe even harder to understand than neural net. Because I mean, when you have multiple nested quantifier bindings, it's a very high level of abstraction. There is a difference though, in that within logic, it's a little more straightforward to pose the problem of like normalize this and boil this down to a certain form. I mean, you can do that in neural nets too. Like you can distill a neural net to a simpler form, but that's more often done to make a neural net that'll run on an embedded device or something. It's harder to distill a net to a comprehensible form than it is to simplify a logic expression to a comprehensible form, but it doesn't come for free. Like what's in the AI's mind is incomprehensible to a human unless you do some special work to make it comprehensible. So on the procedural side, there's some different and sort of interesting voodoo there. I mean, if you're familiar in computer science, there's something called the Curry Howard correspondence, which is a one to one mapping between proofs and programs. So every program can be mapped into a proof. Every proof can be mapped into a program. You can model this using category theory and a bunch of nice math, but we wanna make that practical, right? So that if you have an executable program that like moves the robot's arm or figures out in what order to say things in a dialogue, that's a procedure represented in OpenCog's hypergraph. But if you wanna reason on how to improve that procedure, you need to map that procedure into logic using Curry Howard isomorphism. So then the logic engine can reason about how to improve that procedure and then map that back into the procedural representation that is efficient for execution. So again, that comes down to not just can you make your procedure into a bunch of nodes and links? Cause I mean, that can be done trivially. A C++ compiler has nodes and links inside it. Can you boil down your procedure into a bunch of nodes and links in a way that's like hierarchically decomposed and simple enough? It can reason about. Yeah, yeah, that given the resource constraints at hand, you can map it back and forth to your term logic, like fast enough and without having a bloated logic expression, right? So there's just a lot of, there's a lot of nitty gritty particulars there, but by the same token, if you ask a chip designer, like how do you make the Intel I7 chip so good? There's a long list of technical answers there, which will take a while to go through, right? And this has been decades of work. I mean, the first AI system of this nature I tried to build was called WebMind in the mid 1990s. And we had a big graph, a big graph operating in RAM implemented with Java 1.1, which was a terrible, terrible implementation idea. And then each node had its own processing. So like that there, the core loop looped through all nodes in the network and let each node enact what its little thing was doing. And we had logic and neural nets in there, but an evolutionary learning, but we hadn't done enough of the math to get them to operate together very cleanly. So it was really, it was quite a horrible mess. So as well as shifting an implementation where the graph is its own object and the agents are separately scheduled, we've also done a lot of work on how do you represent programs? How do you represent procedures? You know, how do you represent genotypes for evolution in a way that the interoperability between the different types of learning associated with these different types of knowledge actually works? And that's been quite difficult. It's taken decades and it's totally off to the side of what the commercial mainstream of the AI field is doing, which isn't thinking about representation at all really. Although you could see like in the DNC, they had to think a little bit about how do you make representation of a map in this memory matrix work together with the representation needed for say visual pattern recognition in the hierarchical neural network. But I would say we have taken that direction of taking the types of knowledge you need for different types of learning, like declarative, procedural, attentional, and how do you make these types of knowledge represent in a way that allows cross learning across these different types of memory. We've been prototyping and experimenting with this within OpenCog and before that WebMind since the mid 1990s. Now, disappointingly to all of us, this has not yet been cashed out in an AGI system, right? I mean, we've used this system within our consulting business. So we've built natural language processing and robot control and financial analysis. We've built a bunch of sort of vertical market specific proprietary AI projects. They use OpenCog on the backend, but we haven't, that's not the AGI goal, right? It's interesting, but it's not the AGI goal. So now what we're looking at with our rebuild of the system. 2.0. Yeah, we're also calling it True AGI. So we're not quite sure what the name is yet. We made a website for trueagi.io, but we haven't put anything on there yet. We may come up with an even better name. It's kind of like the real AI starting point for your AGI book. Yeah, but I like True better because True has like, you can be true hearted, right? You can be true to your girlfriend. So True has a number and it also has logic in it, right? Because logic is a key part of the system. So yeah, with the True AGI system, we're sticking with the same basic architecture, but we're trying to build on what we've learned. And one thing we've learned is that, we need type checking among dependent types to be much faster and among probabilistic dependent types to be much faster. So as it is now, you can have complex types on the nodes and links. But if you wanna put, like if you want types to be first class citizens, so that you can have the types can be variables and then you do type checking among complex higher order types. You can do that in the system now, but it's very slow. This is stuff like it's done in cutting edge program languages like Agda or something, these obscure research languages. On the other hand, we've been doing a lot tying together deep neural nets with symbolic learning. So we did a project for Cisco, for example, which was on, this was street scene analysis, but they had deep neural models for a bunch of cameras watching street scenes, but they trained a different model for each camera because they couldn't get the transfer learning to work between camera A and camera B. So we took what came out of all the deep neural models for the different cameras, we fed it into an open called symbolic representation. Then we did some pattern mining and some reasoning on what came out of all the different cameras within the symbolic graph. And that worked well for that application. I mean, Hugo Latapie from Cisco gave a talk touching on that at last year's AGI conference, it was in Shenzhen. On the other hand, we learned from there, it was kind of clunky to get the deep neural models to work well with the symbolic system because we were using torch. And torch keeps a sort of state computation graph, but you needed like real time access to that computation graph within our hypergraph. And we certainly did it, Alexey Polopov who leads our St. Petersburg team wrote a great paper on cognitive modules in OpenCog explaining sort of how do you deal with the torch compute graph inside OpenCog. But in the end we realized like, that just hadn't been one of our design thoughts when we built OpenCog, right? So between wanting really fast dependent type checking and wanting much more efficient interoperation between the computation graphs of deep neural net frameworks and OpenCog's hypergraph and adding on top of that, wanting to more effectively run an OpenCog hypergraph distributed across RAM in 10,000 machines, which is we're doing dozens of machines now, but it's just not, we didn't architect it with that sort of modern scalability in mind. So these performance requirements are what have driven us to want to rearchitect the base, but the core AGI paradigm doesn't really change. Like the mathematics is the same. It's just, we can't scale to the level that we want in terms of distributed processing or speed of various kinds of processing with the current infrastructure that was built in the phase 2001 to 2008, which is hardly shocking. Well, I mean, the three things you mentioned are really interesting. So what do you think about in terms of interoperability communicating with computational graph of neural networks? What do you think about the representations that neural networks form? They're bad, but there's many ways that you could deal with that. So I've been wrestling with this a lot in some work on supervised grammar induction, and I have a simple paper on that. They'll give it the next AGI conference, online portion of which is next week, actually. What is grammar induction? So this isn't AGI either, but it's sort of on the verge between narrow AI and AGI or something. Unsupervised grammar induction is the problem. Throw your AI system, a huge body of text, and have it learn the grammar of the language that produced that text. So you're not giving it labeled examples. So you're not giving it like a thousand sentences where the parses were marked up by graduate students. So it's just got to infer the grammar from the text. It's like the Rosetta Stone, but worse, right? Because you only have the one language, and you have to figure out what is the grammar. So that's not really AGI because, I mean, the way a human learns language is not that, right? I mean, we learn from language that's used in context. So it's a social embodied thing. We see how a given sentence is grounded in observation. There's an interactive element, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the other hand, so I'm more interested in that. I'm more interested in making an AGI system learn language from its social and embodied experience. On the other hand, that's also more of a pain to do, and that would lead us into Hanson Robotics and their robotics work I've known much. We'll talk about it in a few minutes. But just as an intellectual exercise, as a learning exercise, trying to learn grammar from a corpus is very, very interesting, right? And that's been a field in AI for a long time. No one can do it very well. So we've been looking at transformer neural networks and tree transformers, which are amazing. These came out of Google Brain, actually. And actually on that team was Lucas Kaiser, who used to work for me in the one, the period 2005 through eight or something. So it's been fun to see my former sort of AGI employees disperse and do all these amazing things. Way too many sucked into Google, actually. Well, yeah, anyway. We'll talk about that too. Lucas Kaiser and a bunch of these guys, they create transformer networks, that classic paper like attention is all you need and all these things following on from that. So we're looking at transformer networks. And like, these are able to, I mean, this is what underlies GPT2 and GPT3 and so on, which are very, very cool and have absolutely no cognitive understanding of any of the texts they're looking at. Like they're very intelligent idiots, right? So sorry to take, but this small, I'll bring this back, but do you think GPT3 understands language? No, no, it understands nothing. It's a complete idiot. But it's a brilliant idiot. You don't think GPT20 will understand language? No, no, no. So size is not gonna buy you understanding. And any more than a faster car is gonna get you to Mars. It's a completely different kind of thing. I mean, these networks are very cool. And as an entrepreneur, I can see many highly valuable uses for them. And as an artist, I love them, right? So I mean, we're using our own neural model, which is along those lines to control the Philip K. Dick robot now. And it's amazing to like train a neural model on the robot Philip K. Dick and see it come up with like crazed, stoned philosopher pronouncements, very much like what Philip K. Dick might've said, right? Like these models are super cool. And I'm working with Hanson Robotics now on using a similar, but more sophisticated one for Sophia, which we haven't launched yet. But so I think it's cool. But no, these are recognizing a large number of shallow patterns. They're not forming an abstract representation. And that's the point I was coming to when we're looking at grammar induction, we tried to mine patterns out of the structure of the transformer network. And you can, but the patterns aren't what you want. They're nasty. So I mean, if you do supervised learning, if you look at sentences where you know the correct parts of a sentence, you can learn a matrix that maps between the internal representation of the transformer and the parse of the sentence. And so then you can actually train something that will output the sentence parse from the transformer network's internal state. And we did this, I think Christopher Manning, some others have not done this also. But I mean, what you get is that the representation is hardly ugly and is scattered all over the network and doesn't look like the rules of grammar that you know are the right rules of grammar, right? It's kind of ugly. So what we're actually doing is we're using a symbolic grammar learning algorithm, but we're using the transformer neural network as a sentence probability oracle. So like if you have a rule of grammar and you aren't sure if it's a correct rule of grammar or not, you can generate a bunch of sentences using that rule of grammar and a bunch of sentences violating that rule of grammar. And you can see the transformer model doesn't think the sentences obeying the rule of grammar are more probable than the sentences disobeying the rule of grammar. So in that way, you can use the neural model as a sense probability oracle to guide a symbolic grammar learning process. And that seems to work better than trying to milk the grammar out of the neural network that doesn't have it in there. So I think the thing is these neural nets are not getting a semantically meaningful representation internally by and large. So one line of research is to try to get them to do that. And InfoGAN was trying to do that. So like if you look back like two years ago, there was all these papers on like at Edward, this probabilistic programming neural net framework that Google had, which came out of InfoGAN. So the idea there was like you could train an InfoGAN neural net model, which is a generative associative network to recognize and generate faces. And the model would automatically learn a variable for how long the nose is and automatically learn a variable for how wide the eyes are or how big the lips are or something, right? So it automatically learned these variables, which have a semantic meaning. So that was a rare case where a neural net trained with a fairly standard GAN method was able to actually learn the semantic representation. So for many years, many of us tried to take that the next step and get a GAN type neural network that would have not just a list of semantic latent variables, but would have say a Bayes net of semantic latent variables with dependencies between them. The whole programming framework Edward was made for that. I mean, no one got it to work, right? And it could be. Do you think it's possible? Yeah, do you think? I don't know. It might be that back propagation just won't work for it because the gradients are too screwed up. Maybe you could get it to work using CMAES or some like floating point evolutionary algorithm. We tried, we didn't get it to work. Eventually we just paused that rather than gave it up. We paused that and said, well, okay, let's try more innovative ways to learn implicit, to learn what are the representations implicit in that network without trying to make it grow inside that network. And I described how we're doing that in language. You can do similar things in vision, right? So what? Use it as an oracle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can, that's one way is that you use a structure learning algorithm, which is symbolic. And then you use the deep neural net as an oracle to guide the structure learning algorithm. The other way to do it is like Infogam was trying to do and try to tweak the neural network to have the symbolic representation inside it. I tend to think what the brain is doing is more like using the deep neural net type thing as an oracle. I think the visual cortex or the cerebellum are probably learning a non semantically meaningful opaque tangled representation. And then when they interface with the more cognitive parts of the cortex, the cortex is sort of using those as an oracle and learning the abstract representation. So if you do sports, say take for example, serving in tennis, right? I mean, my tennis serve is okay, not great, but I learned it by trial and error, right? And I mean, I learned music by trial and error too. I just sit down and play, but then if you're an athlete, which I'm not a good athlete, I mean, then you'll watch videos of yourself serving and your coach will help you think about what you're doing and you'll then form a declarative representation, but your cerebellum maybe didn't have a declarative representation. Same way with music, like I will hear something in my head, I'll sit down and play the thing like I heard it. And then I will try to study what my fingers did to see like, what did you just play? Like how did you do that, right? Because if you're composing, you may wanna see how you did it and then declaratively morph that in some way that your fingers wouldn't think of, right? But the physiological movement may come out of some opaque, like cerebellar reinforcement learned thing, right? And so that's, I think trying to milk the structure of a neural net by treating it as an oracle, maybe more like how your declarative mind post processes what your visual or motor cortex. I mean, in vision, it's the same way, like you can recognize beautiful art much better than you can say why you think that piece of art is beautiful. But if you're trained as an art critic, you do learn to say why. And some of it's bullshit, but some of it isn't, right? Some of it is learning to map sensory knowledge into declarative and linguistic knowledge, yet without necessarily making the sensory system itself use a transparent and an easily communicable representation. Yeah, that's fascinating to think of neural networks as like dumb question answers that you can just milk to build up a knowledge base. And then it can be multiple networks, I suppose, from different. Yeah, yeah, so I think if a group like DeepMind or OpenAI were to build AGI, and I think DeepMind is like a thousand times more likely from what I could tell, because they've hired a lot of people with broad minds and many different approaches and angles on AGI, whereas OpenAI is also awesome, but I see them as more of like a pure deep reinforcement learning shop. Yeah, this time, I got you. So far. Yeah, there's a lot of, you're right, I mean, there's so much interdisciplinary work at DeepMind, like neuroscience. And you put that together with Google Brain, which granted they're not working that closely together now, but my oldest son Zarathustra is doing his PhD in machine learning applied to automated theorem proving in Prague under Josef Urban. So the first paper, DeepMath, which applied deep neural nets to guide theorem proving was out of Google Brain. I mean, by now, the automated theorem proving community is going way, way, way beyond anything Google was doing, but still, yeah, but anyway, if that community was gonna make an AGI, probably one way they would do it was, take 25 different neural modules, architected in different ways, maybe resembling different parts of the brain, like a basal ganglia model, cerebellum model, a thalamus module, a few hippocampus models, number of different models, representing parts of the cortex, right? Take all of these and then wire them together to co train and learn them together like that. That would be an approach to creating an AGI. One could implement something like that efficiently on top of our true AGI, like OpenCog 2.0 system, once it exists, although obviously Google has their own highly efficient implementation architecture. So I think that's a decent way to build AGI. I was very interested in that in the mid 90s, but I mean, the knowledge about how the brain works sort of pissed me off, like it wasn't there yet. Like, you know, in the hippocampus, you have these concept neurons, like the so called grandmother neuron, which everyone laughed at it, it's actually there. Like I have some Lex Friedman neurons that fire differentially when I see you and not when I see any other person, right? So how do these Lex Friedman neurons, how do they coordinate with the distributed representation of Lex Friedman I have in my cortex, right? There's some back and forth between cortex and hippocampus that lets these discrete symbolic representations in hippocampus correlate and cooperate with the distributed representations in cortex. This probably has to do with how the brain does its version of abstraction and quantifier logic, right? Like you can have a single neuron in the hippocampus that activates a whole distributed activation pattern in cortex, well, this may be how the brain does like symbolization and abstraction as in functional programming or something, but we can't measure it. Like we don't have enough electrodes stuck between the cortex and the hippocampus in any known experiment to measure it. So I got frustrated with that direction, not because it's impossible. Because we just don't understand enough yet. Of course, it's a valid research direction. You can try to understand more and more. And we are measuring more and more about what happens in the brain now than ever before. So it's quite interesting. On the other hand, I sort of got more of an engineering mindset about AGI. I'm like, well, okay, we don't know how the brain works that well. We don't know how birds fly that well yet either. We have no idea how a hummingbird flies in terms of the aerodynamics of it. On the other hand, we know basic principles of like flapping and pushing the air down. And we know the basic principles of how the different parts of the brain work. So let's take those basic principles and engineer something that embodies those basic principles, but is well designed for the hardware that we have on hand right now. So do you think we can create AGI before we understand how the brain works? I think that's probably what will happen. And maybe the AGI will help us do better brain imaging that will then let us build artificial humans, which is very, very interesting to us because we are humans, right? I mean, building artificial humans is super worthwhile. I just think it's probably not the shortest path to AGI. So it's fascinating idea that we would build AGI to help us understand ourselves. A lot of people ask me if the young people interested in doing artificial intelligence, they look at sort of doing graduate level, even undergrads, but graduate level research and they see whether the artificial intelligence community stands now, it's not really AGI type research for the most part. So the natural question they ask is what advice would you give? I mean, maybe I could ask if people were interested in working on OpenCog or in some kind of direct or indirect connection to OpenCog or AGI research, what would you recommend? OpenCog, first of all, is open source project. There's a Google group discussion list. There's a GitHub repository. So if anyone's interested in lending a hand with that aspect of AGI, introduce yourself on the OpenCog email list. And there's a Slack as well. I mean, we're certainly interested to have inputs into our redesign process for a new version of OpenCog, but also we're doing a lot of very interesting research. I mean, we're working on data analysis for COVID clinical trials. We're working with Hanson Robotics. We're doing a lot of cool things with the current version of OpenCog now. So there's certainly opportunity to jump into OpenCog or various other open source AGI oriented projects. So would you say there's like masters and PhD theses in there? Plenty, yeah, plenty, of course. I mean, the challenge is to find a supervisor who wants to foster that sort of research, but it's way easier than it was when I got my PhD, right? It's okay, great. We talked about OpenCog, which is kind of one, the software framework, but also the actual attempt to build an AGI system. And then there is this exciting idea of SingularityNet. So maybe can you say first what is SingularityNet? Sure, sure. SingularityNet is a platform for realizing a decentralized network of artificial intelligences. So Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer who I knew a little bit, he had the idea of a society of minds, like you should achieve an AI not by writing one algorithm or one program, but you should put a bunch of different AIs out there and the different AIs will interact with each other, each playing their own role. And then the totality of the society of AIs would be the thing that displayed the human level intelligence. And I had, when he was alive, I had many debates with Marvin about this idea. And I think he really thought the mind was more like a society than I do. Like I think you could have a mind that was as disorganized as a human society, but I think a human like mind has a bit more central control than that actually. Like, I mean, we have this thalamus and the medulla and limbic system. We have a sort of top down control system that guides much of what we do, more so than a society does. So I think he stretched that metaphor a little too far, but I also think there's something interesting there. And so in the 90s, when I started my first sort of nonacademic AI project, WebMind, which was an AI startup in New York in the Silicon Alley area in the late 90s, what I was aiming to do there was make a distributed society of AIs, the different parts of which would live on different computers all around the world. And each one would do its own thinking about the data local to it, but they would all share information with each other and outsource work with each other and cooperate. And the intelligence would be in the whole collective. And I organized a conference together with Francis Heiligen at Free University of Brussels in 2001, which was the Global Brain Zero Conference. And we're planning the next version, the Global Brain One Conference at the Free University of Brussels for next year, 2021. So 20 years after. And then maybe we can have the next one 10 years after that, like exponentially faster until the singularity comes, right? The timing is right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, the idea with the Global Brain was maybe the AI won't just be in a program on one guy's computer, but the AI will be in the internet as a whole with the cooperation of different AI modules living in different places. So one of the issues you face when architecting a system like that is, you know, how is the whole thing controlled? Do you have like a centralized control unit that pulls the puppet strings of all the different modules there? Or do you have a fundamentally decentralized network where the society of AIs is controlled in some democratic and self organized way, but all the AIs in that society, right? And Francis and I had different view of many things, but we both wanted to make like a global society of AI minds with a decentralized organizational mode. Now, the main difference was he wanted the individual AIs to be all incredibly simple and all the intelligence to be on the collective level. Whereas I thought that was cool, but I thought a more practical way to do it might be if some of the agents in the society of minds were fairly generally intelligent on their own. So like you could have a bunch of open cogs out there and a bunch of simpler learning systems. And then these are all cooperating, coordinating together sort of like in the brain. Okay, the brain as a whole is the general intelligence, but some parts of the cortex, you could say have a fair bit of general intelligence on their own, whereas say parts of the cerebellum or limbic system have very little general intelligence on their own. And they're contributing to general intelligence by way of their connectivity to other modules. Do you see instantiations of the same kind of, maybe different versions of open cog, but also just the same version of open cog and maybe many instantiations of it as being all parts of it? That's what David and Hans and I want to do with many Sophia and other robots. Each one has its own individual mind living on the server, but there's also a collective intelligence infusing them and a part of the mind living on the edge in each robot. So the thing is at that time, as well as WebMind being implemented in Java 1.1 as like a massive distributed system, blockchain wasn't there yet. So had them do this decentralized control. We sort of knew it. We knew about distributed systems. We knew about encryption. So I mean, we had the key principles of what underlies blockchain now, but I mean, we didn't put it together in the way that it's been done now. So when Vitalik Buterin and colleagues came out with Ethereum blockchain, many, many years later, like 2013 or something, then I was like, well, this is interesting. Like this is solidity scripting language. It's kind of dorky in a way. And I don't see why you need to turn complete language for this purpose. But on the other hand, this is like the first time I could sit down and start to like script infrastructure for decentralized control of the AIs in this society of minds in a tractable way. Like you can hack the Bitcoin code base, but it's really annoying. Whereas solidity is Ethereum scripting language is just nicer and easier to use. I'm very annoyed with it by this point. But like Java, I mean, these languages are amazing when they first come out. So then I came up with the idea that turned into SingularityNet. Okay, let's make a decentralized agent system where a bunch of different AIs, wrapped up in say different Docker containers or LXC containers, different AIs can each of them have their own identity on the blockchain. And the coordination of this community of AIs has no central controller, no dictator, right? And there's no central repository of information. The coordination of the society of minds is done entirely by the decentralized network in a decentralized way by the algorithms, right? Because the model of Bitcoin is in math we trust, right? And so that's what you need. You need the society of minds to trust only in math, not trust only in one centralized server. So the AI systems themselves are outside of the blockchain, but then the communication between them. At the moment, yeah, yeah. I would have loved to put the AI's operations on chain in some sense, but in Ethereum, it's just too slow. You can't do it. Somehow it's the basic communication between AI systems. That's the distribution. Basically an AI is just some software in singularity. An AI is just some software process living in a container. And there's a proxy that lives in that container along with the AI that handles the interaction with the rest of singularity net. And then when one AI wants to contribute with another one in the network, they set up a number of channels. And the setup of those channels uses the Ethereum blockchain. Once the channels are set up, then data flows along those channels without having to be on the blockchain. All that goes on the blockchain is the fact that some data went along that channel. So you can do... So there's not a shared knowledge. Well, the identity of each agent is on the blockchain, on the Ethereum blockchain. If one agent rates the reputation of another agent, that goes on the blockchain. And agents can publish what APIs they will fulfill on the blockchain. But the actual data for AI and the results for AI is not on the blockchain. Do you think it could be? Do you think it should be? In some cases, it should be. In some cases, maybe it shouldn't be. But I mean, I think that... So I'll give you an example. Using Ethereum, you can't do it. Using now, there's more modern and faster blockchains where you could start to do that in some cases. Two years ago, that was less so. It's a very rapidly evolving ecosystem. So like one example, maybe you can comment on something I worked a lot on is autonomous vehicles. You can see each individual vehicle as an AI system. And you can see vehicles from Tesla, for example, and then Ford and GM and all these as also like larger... I mean, they all are running the same kind of system on each sets of vehicles. So it's individual AI systems and individual vehicles, but it's all different. The station is the same AI system within the same company. So you can envision a situation where all of those AI systems are put on SingularityNet, right? And how do you see that happening? And what would be the benefit? And could they share data? I guess one of the biggest things is that the power there's in a decentralized control, but the benefit would have been, is really nice if they can somehow share the knowledge in an open way if they choose to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are all quite good points. So I think the benefit from being on the decentralized network as we envision it is that we want the AIs in the network to be outsourcing work to each other and making API calls to each other frequently. So the real benefit would be if that AI wanted to outsource some cognitive processing or data processing or data pre processing, whatever, to some other AIs in the network, which specialize in something different. And this really requires a different way of thinking about AI software development, right? So just like object oriented programming was different than imperative programming. And now object oriented programmers all use these frameworks to do things rather than just libraries even. You know, shifting to agent based programming where AI agent is asking other like live real time evolving agents for feedback and what they're doing. That's a different way of thinking. I mean, it's not a new one. There was loads of papers on agent based programming in the 80s and onward. But if you're willing to shift to an agent based model of development, then you can put less and less in your AI and rely more and more on interactive calls to other AIs running in the network. And of course, that's not fully manifested yet because although we've rolled out a nice working version of SingularityNet platform, there's only 50 to 100 AIs running in there now. There's not tens of thousands of AIs. So we don't have the critical mass for the whole society of mind to be doing what we want to do. Yeah, the magic really happens when there's just a huge number of agents. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In terms of data, we're partnering closely with another blockchain project called Ocean Protocol. And Ocean Protocol, that's the project of Trent McConnachie who developed BigchainDB, which is a blockchain based database. So Ocean Protocol is basically blockchain based big data and aims at making it efficient for different AI processes or statistical processes or whatever to share large data sets. Or if one process can send a clone of itself to work on the other guy's data set and send results back and so forth. So by getting Ocean and you have data lake, so this is the data ocean, right? So again, by getting Ocean and SingularityNet to interoperate, we're aiming to take into account the big data aspect also. But it's quite challenging because to build this whole decentralized blockchain based infrastructure, I mean, your competitors are like Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and Amazon, which have so much money to put behind their centralized infrastructures, plus they're solving simpler algorithmic problems because making it centralized in some ways is easier, right? So they're very major computer science challenges. And I think what you saw with the whole ICO boom in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world is a lot of young hackers who were hacking Bitcoin or Ethereum, and they see, well, why don't we make this decentralized on blockchain? Then after they raised some money through an ICO, they realize how hard it is. And it's like, actually we're wrestling with incredibly hard computer science and software engineering and distributed systems problems, which can be solved, but they're just very difficult to solve. And in some cases, the individuals who started those projects were not well equipped to actually solve the problems that they wanted to solve. So you think, would you say that's the main bottleneck? If you look at the future of currency, the question is, well... Currency, the main bottleneck is politics. It's governments and the bands of armed thugs that will shoot you if you bypass their currency restriction. That's right. So like your sense is that versus the technical challenges, because you kind of just suggested the technical challenges are quite high as well. I mean, for making a distributed money, you could do that on Algorand right now. I mean, so that while Ethereum is too slow, there's Algorand and there's a few other more modern, more scalable blockchains that would work fine for a decentralized global currency. So I think there were technical bottlenecks to that two years ago. And maybe Ethereum 2.0 will be as fast as Algorand. I don't know, that's not fully written yet, right? So I think the obstacle to currency being put on the blockchain is that... Is the other stuff you mentioned. I mean, currency will be on the blockchain. It'll just be on the blockchain in a way that enforces centralized control and government hedge money rather than otherwise. Like the ERNB will probably be the first global, the first currency on the blockchain. The EURUBIL maybe next. There are any... EURUBIL? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the point is... Oh, that's hilarious. Digital currency, you know, makes total sense, but they would rather do it in the way that Putin and Xi Jinping have access to the global keys for everything, right? So, and then the analogy to that in terms of SingularityNet, I mean, there's Echoes. I think you've mentioned before that Linux gives you hope. AI is not as heavily regulated as money, right? Not yet, right? Not yet. Oh, that's a lot slipperier than money too, right? I mean, money is easier to regulate because it's kind of easier to define, whereas AI is, it's almost everywhere inside everything. Where's the boundary between AI and software, right? I mean, if you're gonna regulate AI, there's no IQ test for every hardware device that has a learning algorithm. You're gonna be putting like hegemonic regulation on all software. And I don't rule out that that can happen. And the adaptive software. Yeah, but how do you tell if a software is adaptive and what, every software is gonna be adaptive, I mean. Or maybe they, maybe the, you know, maybe we're living in the golden age of open source that will not always be open. Maybe it'll become centralized control of software by governments. It is entirely possible. And part of what I think we're doing with things like SingularityNet protocol is creating a tool set that can be used to counteract that sort of thing. Say a similar thing about mesh networking, right? Plays a minor role now, the ability to access internet like directly phone to phone. On the other hand, if your government starts trying to control your use of the internet, suddenly having mesh networking there can be very convenient, right? And so right now, something like a decentralized blockchain based AGI framework or narrow AI framework, it's cool, it's nice to have. On the other hand, if governments start trying to tap down on my AI interoperating with someone's AI in Russia or somewhere, right? Then suddenly having a decentralized protocol that nobody owns or controls becomes an extremely valuable part of the tool set. And, you know, we've put that out there now. It's not perfect, but it operates. And, you know, it's pretty blockchain agnostic. So we're talking to Algorand about making part of SingularityNet run on Algorand. My good friend Tufi Saliba has a cool blockchain project called Toda, which is a blockchain without a distributed ledger. It's like a whole other architecture. So there's a lot of more advanced things you can do in the blockchain world. SingularityNet could be ported to a whole bunch of, it could be made multi chain important to a whole bunch of different blockchains. And there's a lot of potential and a lot of importance to putting this kind of tool set out there. If you compare to OpenCog, what you could see is OpenCog allows tight integration of a few AI algorithms that share the same knowledge store in real time, in RAM. SingularityNet allows loose integration of multiple different AIs. They can share knowledge, but they're mostly not gonna be sharing knowledge in RAM on the same machine. And I think what we're gonna have is a network of network of networks, right? Like, I mean, you have the knowledge graph inside the OpenCog system, and then you have a network of machines inside a distributed OpenCog mind, but then that OpenCog will interface with other AIs doing deep neural nets or custom biology data analysis or whatever they're doing in SingularityNet, which is a looser integration of different AIs, some of which may be their own networks, right? And I think at a very loose analogy, you could see that in the human body. Like the brain has regions like cortex or hippocampus, which tightly interconnects like cortical columns within the cortex, for example. Then there's looser connection within the different lobes of the brain, and then the brain interconnects with the endocrine system and different parts of the body even more loosely. Then your body interacts even more loosely with the other people that you talk to. So you often have networks within networks within networks with progressively looser coupling as you get higher up in that hierarchy. I mean, you have that in biology, you have that in the internet as a just networking medium. And I think that's what we're gonna have in the network of software processes leading to AGI. That's a beautiful way to see the world. Again, the same similar question is with OpenCog. If somebody wanted to build an AI system and plug into the SingularityNet, what would you recommend? Yeah, so that's much easier. I mean, OpenCog is still a research system. So it takes some expertise to, and sometimes, we have tutorials, but it's somewhat cognitively labor intensive to get up to speed on OpenCog. And I mean, what's one of the things we hope to change with the true AGI OpenCog 2.0 version is just make the learning curve more similar to TensorFlow or Torch or something. Right now, OpenCog is amazingly powerful, but not simple to deal with. On the other hand, SingularityNet, as an open platform was developed a little more with usability in mind over the blockchain, it's still kind of a pain. So I mean, if you're a command line guy, there's a command line interface. It's quite easy to take any AI that has an API and lives in a Docker container and put it online anywhere. And then it joins the global SingularityNet. And anyone who puts a request for services out into the SingularityNet, the peer to peer discovery mechanism will find your AI and if it does what was asked, it can then start a conversation with your AI about whether it wants to ask your AI to do something for it, how much it would cost and so on. So that's fairly simple. If you wrote an AI and want it listed on like official SingularityNet marketplace, which is on our website, then we have a publisher portal and then there's a KYC process to go through because then we have some legal liability for what goes on that website. So in a way that's been an education too. There's sort of two layers. Like there's the open decentralized protocol. And there's the market. Yeah, anyone can use the open decentralized protocol. So say some developers from Iran and there's brilliant AI guys in University of Isfahan in Tehran, they can put their stuff on SingularityNet protocol and just like they can put something on the internet, right? I don't control it. But if we're gonna list something on the SingularityNet marketplace and put a little picture and a link to it, then if I put some Iranian AI geniuses code on there, then Donald Trump can send a bunch of jackbooted thugs to my house to arrest me for doing business with Iran, right? So, I mean, we already see in some ways the value of having a decentralized protocol because what I hope is that someone in Iran will put online an Iranian SingularityNet marketplace, right? Which you can pay in the cryptographic token, which is not owned by any country. And then if you're in like Congo or somewhere that doesn't have any problem with Iran, you can subcontract AI services that you find on that marketplace, right? Even though US citizens can't by US law. So right now, that's kind of a minor point. As you alluded, if regulations go in the wrong direction, it could become more of a major point. But I think it also is the case that having these workarounds to regulations in place is a defense mechanism against those regulations being put into place. And you can see that in the music industry, right? I mean, Napster just happened and BitTorrent just happened. And now most people in my kid's generation, they're baffled by the idea of paying for music, right? I mean, my dad pays for music. I mean, but that because these decentralized mechanisms happened and then the regulations followed, right? And the regulations would be very different if they'd been put into place before there was Napster and BitTorrent and so forth. So in the same way, we gotta put AI out there in a decentralized vein and big data out there in a decentralized vein now, so that the most advanced AI in the world is fundamentally decentralized. And if that's the case, that's just the reality the regulators have to deal with. And then as in the music case, they're gonna come up with regulations that sort of work with the decentralized reality. Beautiful. You are the chief scientist of Hanson Robotics. You're still involved with Hanson Robotics, doing a lot of really interesting stuff there. This is for people who don't know the company that created Sophia the Robot. Can you tell me who Sophia is? I'd rather start by telling you who David Hanson is. Because David is the brilliant mind behind the Sophia Robot. And he remains, so far, he remains more interesting than his creation, although she may be improving faster than he is, actually. I mean, he's a... So yeah, I met David maybe 2007 or something at some futurist conference we were both speaking at. And I could see we had a great deal in common. I mean, we were both kind of crazy, but we both had a passion for AGI and the singularity. And we were both huge fans of the work of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer. And I wanted to create benevolent AGI that would create massively better life for all humans and all sentient beings, including animals, plants, and superhuman beings. And David, he wanted exactly the same thing, but he had a different idea of how to do it. He wanted to get computational compassion. Like he wanted to get machines that would love people and empathize with people. And he thought the way to do that was to make a machine that could look people eye to eye, face to face, look at people and make people love the machine, and the machine loves the people back. So I thought that was very different way of looking at it because I'm very math oriented. And I'm just thinking like, what is the abstract cognitive algorithm that will let the system, you know, internalize the complex patterns of human values, blah, blah, blah. Whereas he's like, look you in the face and the eye and love you, right? So we hit it off quite well. And we talked to each other off and on. Then I moved to Hong Kong in 2011. So I've been living all over the place. I've been in Australia and New Zealand in my academic career. Then in Las Vegas for a while. Was in New York in the late 90s starting my entrepreneurial career. Was in DC for nine years doing a bunch of US government consulting stuff. Then moved to Hong Kong in 2011, mostly because I met a Chinese girl who I fell in love with and we got married. She's actually not from Hong Kong. She's from mainland China, but we converged together in Hong Kong. Still married now, I have a two year old baby. So went to Hong Kong to see about a girl, I guess. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And on the other hand, I started doing some cool research there with Gino Yu at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I got involved with a project called IDEA using machine learning for stock and futures prediction, which was quite interesting. And I also got to know something about the consumer electronics and hardware manufacturer ecosystem in Shenzhen across the border, which is like the only place in the world that makes sense to make complex consumer electronics at large scale and low cost. It's just, it's astounding the hardware ecosystem that you have in South China. Like US people here cannot imagine what it's like. So David was starting to explore that also. I invited him to Hong Kong to give a talk at Hong Kong PolyU, and I introduced him in Hong Kong to some investors who were interested in his robots. And he didn't have Sophia then, he had a robot of Philip K. Dick, our favorite science fiction writer. He had a robot Einstein, he had some little toy robots that looked like his son Zeno. So through the investors I connected him to, he managed to get some funding to basically port Hanson Robotics to Hong Kong. And when he first moved to Hong Kong, I was working on AGI research and also on this machine learning trading project. So I didn't get that tightly involved with Hanson Robotics. But as I hung out with David more and more, as we were both there in the same place, I started to get, I started to think about what you could do to make his robots smarter than they were. And so we started working together and for a few years I was chief scientist and head of software at Hanson Robotics. Then when I got deeply into the blockchain side of things, I stepped back from that and cofounded Singularity Net. David Hanson was also one of the cofounders of Singularity Net. So part of our goal there had been to make the blockchain based like cloud mind platform for Sophia and the other Hanson robots. Sophia would be just one of the robots in Singularity Net. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Sophia, many copies of the Sophia robot would be among the user interfaces to the globally distributed Singularity Net cloud mind. And I mean, David and I talked about that for quite a while before cofounding Singularity Net. By the way, in his vision and your vision, was Sophia tightly coupled to a particular AI system or was the idea that you can plug, you could just keep plugging in different AI systems within the head of it? David's view was always that Sophia would be a platform, much like say the Pepper robot is a platform from SoftBank. Should be a platform with a set of nicely designed APIs that anyone can use to experiment with their different AI algorithms on that platform. And Singularity Net, of course, fits right into that, right? Because Singularity Net, it's an API marketplace. So anyone can put their AI on there. OpenCog is a little bit different. I mean, David likes it, but I'd say it's my thing. It's not his. Like David has a little more passion for biologically based approaches to AI than I do, which makes sense. I mean, he's really into human physiology and biology. He's a character sculptor, right? So yeah, he's interested in, but he also worked a lot with rule based and logic based AI systems too. So yeah, he's interested in not just Sophia, but all the Hanson robots as a powerful social and emotional robotics platform. And what I saw in Sophia was a way to get AI algorithms was a way to get AI algorithms out there in front of a whole lot of different people in an emotionally compelling way. And part of my thought was really kind of abstract connected to AGI ethics. And many people are concerned AGI is gonna enslave everybody or turn everybody into computronium to make extra hard drives for their cognitive engine or whatever. And emotionally I'm not driven to that sort of paranoia. I'm really just an optimist by nature, but intellectually I have to assign a non zero probability to those sorts of nasty outcomes. Cause if you're making something 10 times as smart as you, how can you know what it's gonna do? There's an irreducible uncertainty there just as my dog can't predict what I'm gonna do tomorrow. So it seemed to me that based on our current state of knowledge, the best way to bias the AGI as we create toward benevolence would be to infuse them with love and compassion the way that we do our own children. So you want to interact with AIs in the context of doing compassionate, loving and beneficial things. And in that way, as your children will learn by doing compassionate, beneficial, loving things alongside you. And that way the AI will learn in practice what it means to be compassionate, beneficial and loving. It will get a sort of ingrained intuitive sense of this, which it can then abstract in its own way as it gets more and more intelligent. Now, David saw this the same way. That's why he came up with the name Sophia, which means wisdom. So it seemed to me making these beautiful, loving robots to be rolled out for beneficial applications would be the perfect way to roll out early stage AGI systems so they can learn from people and not just learn factual knowledge, but learn human values and ethics from people while being their home service robots, their education assistants, their nursing robots. So that was the grand vision. Now, if you've ever worked with robots, the reality is quite different, right? Like the first principle is the robot is always broken. I mean, I worked with robots in the 90s a bunch when you had to solder them together yourself and I'd put neural nets during reinforcement learning on like overturned solid ball type robots and in the 90s when I was a professor. Things of course advanced a lot, but... But the principle still holds. The principle that the robot's always broken still holds. Yeah, so faced with the reality of making Sophia do stuff, many of my robo AGI aspirations were temporarily cast aside. And I mean, there's just a practical problem of making this robot interact in a meaningful way because like, you put nice computer vision on there, but there's always glare. And then, or you have a dialogue system, but at the time I was there, like no speech to text algorithm could deal with Hong Kongese people's English accents. So the speech to text was always bad. So the robot always sounded stupid because it wasn't getting the right text, right? So I started to view that really as what in software engineering you call a walking skeleton, which is maybe the wrong metaphor to use for Sophia or maybe the right one. I mean, where the walking skeleton is in software development is if you're building a complex system, how do you get started? But one way is to first build part one well, then build part two well, then build part three well and so on. And the other way is you make like a simple version of the whole system and put something in the place of every part the whole system will need so that you have a whole system that does something. And then you work on improving each part in the context of that whole integrated system. So that's what we did on a software level in Sophia. We made like a walking skeleton software system where so there's something that sees, there's something that hears, there's something that moves, there's something that remembers, there's something that learns. You put a simple version of each thing in there and you connect them all together so that the system will do its thing. So there's a lot of AI in there. There's not any AGI in there. I mean, there's computer vision to recognize people's faces, recognize when someone comes in the room and leaves, trying to recognize whether two people are together or not. I mean, the dialogue system, it's a mix of like hand coded rules with deep neural nets that come up with their own responses. And there's some attempt to have a narrative structure and sort of try to pull the conversation into something with a beginning, middle and end and this sort of story arc. So it's... I mean, like if you look at the Lobner Prize and the systems that beat the Turing Test currently, they're heavily rule based because like you had said, narrative structure to create compelling conversations, you currently, neural networks cannot do that well, even with Google MENA. When you actually look at full scale conversations, it's just not... Yeah, this is the thing. So we've been, I've actually been running an experiment the last couple of weeks taking Sophia's chat bot and then Facebook's Transformer chat bot, which they opened the model. We've had them chatting to each other for a number of weeks on the server just... That's funny. We're generating training data of what Sophia says in a wide variety of conversations. But we can see, compared to Sophia's current chat bot, the Facebook deep neural chat bot comes up with a wider variety of fluent sounding sentences. On the other hand, it rambles like mad. The Sophia chat bot, it's a little more repetitive in the sentence structures it uses. On the other hand, it's able to keep like a conversation arc over a much longer, longer period, right? So there... Now, you can probably surmount that using Reformer and like using various other deep neural architectures to improve the way these Transformer models are trained. But in the end, neither one of them really understands what's going on. I mean, that's the challenge I had with Sophia is if I were doing a robotics project aimed at AGI, I would wanna make like a robo toddler that was just learning about what it was seeing. Because then the language is grounded in the experience of the robot. But what Sophia needs to do to be Sophia is talk about sports or the weather or robotics or the conference she's talking at. She needs to be fluent talking about any damn thing in the world. And she doesn't have grounding for all those things. So there's this, just like, I mean, Google Mina and Facebook's chat, but I don't have grounding for what they're talking about either. So in a way, the need to speak fluently about things where there's no nonlinguistic grounding pushes what you can do for Sophia in the short term a bit away from AGI. I mean, it pushes you towards IBM Watson situation where you basically have to do heuristic and hard code stuff and rule based stuff. I have to ask you about this, okay. So because in part Sophia is like an art creation because it's beautiful. She's beautiful because she inspires through our human nature of anthropomorphize things. We immediately see an intelligent being there. Because David is a great sculptor. He is a great sculptor, that's right. So in fact, if Sophia just had nothing inside her head, said nothing, if she just sat there, we already prescribed some intelligence to her. There's a long selfie line in front of her after every talk. That's right. So it captivated the imagination of many people. I wasn't gonna say the world, but yeah, I mean a lot of people. Billions of people, which is amazing. It's amazing, right. Now, of course, many people have prescribed essentially AGI type of capabilities to Sophia when they see her. And of course, friendly French folk like Yann LeCun immediately see that of the people from the AI community and get really frustrated because... It's understandable. So what, and then they criticize people like you who sit back and don't say anything about, like basically allow the imagination of the world, allow the world to continue being captivated. So what's your sense of that kind of annoyance that the AI community has? I think there's several parts to my reaction there. First of all, if I weren't involved with Hanson and Box and didn't know David Hanson personally, I probably would have been very annoyed initially at Sophia as well. I mean, I can understand the reaction. I would have been like, wait, all these stupid people out there think this is an AGI, but it's not an AGI, but they're tricking people that this very cool robot is an AGI. And now those of us trying to raise funding to build AGI, people will think it's already there and it already works. So on the other hand, I think, even if I weren't directly involved with it, once I dug a little deeper into David and the robot and the intentions behind it, I think I would have stopped being pissed off. Whereas folks like Yann LeCun have remained pissed off after their initial reaction. That's his thing, that's his thing. I think that in particular struck me as somewhat ironic because Yann LeCun is working for Facebook, which is using machine learning to program the brains of the people in the world toward vapid consumerism and political extremism. So if your ethics allows you to use machine learning in such a blatantly destructive way, why would your ethics not allow you to use machine learning to make a lovable theatrical robot that draws some foolish people into its theatrical illusion? Like if the pushback had come from Yoshua Bengio, I would have felt much more humbled by it because he's not using AI for blatant evil, right? On the other hand, he also is a super nice guy and doesn't bother to go out there trashing other people's work for no good reason, right? Shots fired, but I get you. I mean, that's... I mean, if you're gonna ask, I'm gonna answer. No, for sure. I think we'll go back and forth. I'll talk to Yann again. I would add on this though. I mean, David Hansen is an artist and he often speaks off the cuff. And I have not agreed with everything that David has said or done regarding Sophia. And David also has not agreed with everything David has said or done about Sophia. That's an important point. I mean, David is an artistic wild man and that's part of his charm. That's part of his genius. So certainly there have been conversations within Hansen Robotics and between me and David where I was like, let's be more open about how this thing is working. And I did have some influence in nudging Hansen Robotics to be more open about how Sophia was working. And David wasn't especially opposed to this. And he was actually quite right about it. What he said was, you can tell people exactly how it's working and they won't care. They want to be drawn into the illusion. And he was 100% correct. I'll tell you what, this wasn't Sophia. This was Philip K. Dick. But we did some interactions between humans and Philip K. Dick robot in Austin, Texas a few years back. And in this case, the Philip K. Dick was just teleoperated by another human in the other room. So during the conversations, we didn't tell people the robot was teleoperated. We just said, here, have a conversation with Phil Dick. We're gonna film you, right? And they had a great conversation with Philip K. Dick teleoperated by my friend, Stefan Bugaj. After the conversation, we brought the people in the back room to see Stefan who was controlling the Philip K. Dick robot, but they didn't believe it. These people were like, well, yeah, but I know I was talking to Phil. Maybe Stefan was typing, but the spirit of Phil was animating his mind while he was typing. So like, even though they knew it was a human in the loop, even seeing the guy there, they still believed that was Phil they were talking to. A small part of me believes that they were right, actually. Because our understanding... Well, we don't understand the universe. That's the thing. I mean, there is a cosmic mind field that we're all embedded in that yields many strange synchronicities in the world, which is a topic we don't have time to go into too much here. Yeah, I mean, there's something to this where our imagination about Sophia and people like Yann LeCun being frustrated about it is all part of this beautiful dance of creating artificial intelligence that's almost essential. You see with Boston Dynamics, whom I'm a huge fan of as well, you know, the kind of... I mean, these robots are very far from intelligent. I played with their last one, actually. With a spot mini. Yeah, very cool. I mean, it reacts quite in a fluid and flexible way. But we immediately ascribe the kind of intelligence. We immediately ascribe AGI to them. Yeah, yeah, if you kick it and it falls down and goes out, you feel bad, right? You can't help it. And I mean, that's part of... That's gonna be part of our journey in creating intelligent systems more and more and more and more. Like, as Sophia starts out with a walking skeleton, as you add more and more intelligence, I mean, we're gonna have to deal with this kind of idea. Absolutely. And about Sophia, I would say, I mean, first of all, I have nothing against Yann LeCun. No, no, this is fun. This is all for fun. He's a nice guy. If he wants to play the media banter game, I'm happy to play him. He's a good researcher and a good human being. I'd happily work with the guy. The other thing I was gonna say is, I have been explicit about how Sophia works and I've posted online and what, H Plus Magazine, an online webzine. I mean, I posted a moderately detailed article explaining like, there are three software systems we've used inside Sophia. There's a timeline editor, which is like a rule based authoring system where she's really just being an outlet for what a human scripted. There's a chat bot, which has some rule based and some neural aspects. And then sometimes we've used OpenCog behind Sophia, where there's more learning and reasoning. And the funny thing is, I can't always tell which system is operating here, right? I mean, whether she's really learning or thinking, or just appears to be over a half hour, I could tell, but over like three or four minutes of interaction, I could tell. So even having three systems that's already sufficiently complex where you can't really tell right away. Yeah, the thing is, even if you get up on stage and tell people how Sophia is working, and then they talk to her, they still attribute more agency and consciousness to her than is really there. So I think there's a couple of levels of ethical issue there. One issue is, should you be transparent about how Sophia is working? And I think you should, and I think we have been. I mean, there's articles online, there's some TV special that goes through me explaining the three subsystems behind Sophia. So the way Sophia works is out there much more clearly than how Facebook's AI works or something, right? I mean, we've been fairly explicit about it. The other is, given that telling people how it works doesn't cause them to not attribute too much intelligence agency to it anyway, then should you keep fooling them when they want to be fooled? And I mean, the whole media industry is based on fooling people the way they want to be fooled. And we are fooling people 100% toward a good end. I mean, we are playing on people's sense of empathy and compassion so that we can give them a good user experience with helpful robots. And so that we can fill the AI's mind with love and compassion. So I've been talking a lot with Hanson Robotics lately about collaborations in the area of medical robotics. And we haven't quite pulled the trigger on a project in that domain yet, but we may well do so quite soon. So we've been talking a lot about robots can help with elder care, robots can help with kids. David's done a lot of things with autism therapy and robots before. In the COVID era, having a robot that can be a nursing assistant in various senses can be quite valuable. The robots don't spread infection and they can also deliver more attention than human nurses can give, right? So if you have a robot that's helping a patient with COVID, if that patient attributes more understanding and compassion and agency to that robot than it really has because it looks like a human, I mean, is that really bad? I mean, we can tell them it doesn't fully understand you and they don't care because they're lying there with a fever and they're sick, but they'll react better to that robot with its loving, warm facial expression than they would to a pepper robot or a metallic looking robot. So it's really, it's about how you use it, right? If you made a human looking like door to door sales robot that used its human looking appearance to scam people out of their money, then you're using that connection in a bad way, but you could also use it in a good way. But then that's the same problem with every technology. Beautifully put. So like you said, we're living in the era of the COVID, this is 2020, one of the craziest years in recent history. So if we zoom out and look at this pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic, maybe let me ask you this kind of thing in viruses in general, when you look at viruses, do you see them as a kind of intelligence system? I think the concept of intelligence is not that natural of a concept in the end. I mean, I think human minds and bodies are a kind of complex self organizing adaptive system. And viruses certainly are that, right? They're a very complex self organizing adaptive system. If you wanna look at intelligence as Marcus Hutter defines it as sort of optimizing computable reward functions over computable environments, for sure viruses are doing that, right? And I mean, in doing so they're causing some harm to us. So the human immune system is a very complex of organizing adaptive system, which has a lot of intelligence to it. And viruses are also adapting and dividing into new mutant strains and so forth. And ultimately the solution is gonna be nanotechnology, right? The solution is gonna be making little nanobots that. Fight the viruses or. Well, people will use them to make nastier viruses, but hopefully we can also use them to just detect combat and kill the viruses. But I think now we're stuck with the biological mechanisms to combat these viruses. And yeah, we've been AGI is not yet mature enough to use against COVID, but we've been using machine learning and also some machine reasoning in open cog to help some doctors to do personalized medicine against COVID. So the problem there is given the person's genomics and given their clinical medical indicators, how do you figure out which combination of antivirals is gonna be most effective against COVID for that person? And so that's something where machine learning is interesting, but also we're finding the abstraction to get an open cog with machine reasoning is interesting because it can help with transfer learning when you have not that many different cases to study and qualitative differences between different strains of a virus or people of different ages who may have COVID. So there's a lot of different disparate data to work with and it's small data sets and somehow integrating them. This is one of the shameful things that's very hard to get that data. So, I mean, we're working with a couple of groups doing clinical trials and they're sharing data with us like under non disclosure, but what should be the case is like every COVID clinical trial should be putting data online somewhere like suitably encrypted to protect patient privacy so that anyone with the right AI algorithms should be able to help analyze it and any biologists should be able to analyze it by hand to understand what they can, right? Instead that data is like siloed inside whatever hospital is running the clinical trial, which is completely asinine and ridiculous. So why the world works that way? I mean, we could all analyze why, but it's insane that it does. You look at this hydrochloroquine, right? All these clinical trials were done were reported by Surgisphere, some little company no one ever heard of and everyone paid attention to this. So they were doing more clinical trials based on that then they stopped doing clinical trials based on that then they started again and why isn't that data just out there so everyone can analyze it and see what's going on, right? Do you have hope that data will be out there eventually for future pandemics? I mean, do you have hope that our society will move in the direction of? It's not in the immediate future because the US and China frictions are getting very high. So it's hard to see US and China as moving in the direction of openly sharing data with each other, right? It's not, there's some sharing of data, but different groups are keeping their data private till they've milked the best results from it and then they share it, right? So yeah, we're working with some data that we've managed to get our hands on, something we're doing to do good for the world and it's a very cool playground for like putting deep neural nets and open cog together. So we have like a bioadden space full of all sorts of knowledge from many different biology experiments about human longevity and from biology knowledge bases online. And we can do like graph to vector type embeddings where we take nodes from the hypergraph, embed them into vectors, which can then feed into neural nets for different types of analysis. And we were doing this in the context of a project called Rejuve that we spun off from SingularityNet to do longevity analytics, like understand why people live to 105 years or over and other people don't. And then we had this spin off Singularity Studio where we're working with some healthcare companies on data analytics. But so there's bioadden space that we built for these more commercial and longevity data analysis purposes. We're repurposing and feeding COVID data into the same bioadden space and playing around with like graph embeddings from that graph into neural nets for bioinformatics. So it's both being a cool testing ground, some of our bio AI learning and reasoning. And it seems we're able to discover things that people weren't seeing otherwise. Cause the thing in this case is for each combination of antivirals, you may have only a few patients who've tried that combination. And those few patients may have their particular characteristics. Like this combination of three was tried only on people age 80 or over. This other combination of three, which has an overlap with the first combination was tried more on young people. So how do you combine those different pieces of data? It's a very dodgy transfer learning problem, which is the kind of thing that the probabilistic reasoning algorithms we have inside OpenCog are better at than deep neural networks. On the other hand, you have gene expression data where you have 25,000 genes and the expression level of each gene in the peripheral blood of each person. So that sort of data, either deep neural nets or tools like XGBoost or CatBoost, these decision forest trees are better at dealing with than OpenCog. Cause it's just these huge, huge messy floating point vectors that are annoying for a logic engine to deal with, but are perfect for a decision forest or a neural net. So it's a great playground for like hybrid AI methodology. And we can have SingularityNet have OpenCog in one agent and XGBoost in a different agent and they talk to each other. But at the same time, it's highly practical, right? Cause we're working with, for example, some physicians on this project, physicians in the group called Nth Opinion based out of Vancouver in Seattle, who are, these guys are working every day like in the hospital with patients dying of COVID. So it's quite cool to see like neural symbolic AI, like where the rubber hits the road, trying to save people's lives. I've been doing bio AI since 2001, but mostly human longevity research and fly longevity research, try to understand why some organisms really live a long time. This is the first time like race against the clock and try to use the AI to figure out stuff that, like if we take two months longer to solve the AI problem, some more people will die because we don't know what combination of antivirals to give them. At the societal level, at the biological level, at any level, are you hopeful about us as a human species getting out of this pandemic? What are your thoughts on it in general? The pandemic will be gone in a year or two once there's a vaccine for it. So, I mean, that's... A lot of pain and suffering can happen in that time. So that could be irreversible. I think if you spend much time in Sub Saharan Africa, you can see there's a lot of pain and suffering happening all the time. Like you walk through the streets of any large city in Sub Saharan Africa, and there are loads, I mean, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people lying by the side of the road, dying mainly of curable diseases without food or water and either ostracized by their families or they left their family house because they didn't want to infect their family, right? I mean, there's tremendous human suffering on the planet all the time, which most folks in the developed world pay no attention to. And COVID is not remotely the worst. How many people are dying of malaria all the time? I mean, so COVID is bad. It is by no mean the worst thing happening. And setting aside diseases, I mean, there are many places in the world where you're at risk of having like your teenage son kidnapped by armed militias and forced to get killed in someone else's war, fighting tribe against tribe. I mean, so humanity has a lot of problems which we don't need to have given the state of advancement of our technology right now. And I think COVID is one of the easier problems to solve in the sense that there are many brilliant people working on vaccines. We have the technology to create vaccines and we're gonna create new vaccines. We should be more worried that we haven't managed to defeat malaria after so long. And after the Gates Foundation and others putting so much money into it. I mean, I think clearly the whole global medical system, the global health system and the global political and socioeconomic system are incredibly unethical and unequal and badly designed. And I mean, I don't know how to solve that directly. I think what we can do indirectly to solve it is to make systems that operate in parallel and off to the side of the governments that are nominally controlling the world with their armies and militias. And to the extent that you can make compassionate peer to peer decentralized frameworks for doing things, these are things that can start out unregulated. And then if they get traction before the regulators come in, then they've influenced the way the world works, right? SingularityNet aims to do this with AI. REJUVE, which is a spinoff from SingularityNet. You can see REJUVE.io. How do you spell that? R E J U V E, REJUVE.io. That aims to do the same thing for medicine. So it's like peer to peer sharing of information peer to peer sharing of medical data. So you can share medical data into a secure data wallet. You can get advice about your health and longevity through apps that REJUVE.io will launch within the next couple of months. And then SingularityNet AI can analyze all this data, but then the benefits from that analysis are spread among all the members of the network. But I mean, of course, I'm gonna hawk my particular projects, but I mean, whether or not SingularityNet and REJUVE.io are the answer, I think it's key to create decentralized mechanisms for everything. I mean, for AI, for human health, for politics, for jobs and employment, for sharing social information. And to the extent decentralized peer to peer methods designed with universal compassion at the core can gain traction, then these will just decrease the role that government has. And I think that's much more likely to do good than trying to like explicitly reform the global government system. I mean, I'm happy other people are trying to explicitly reform the global government system. On the other hand, you look at how much good the internet or Google did or mobile phones did, even you're making something that's decentralized and throwing it out everywhere and it takes hold, then government has to adapt. And I mean, that's what we need to do with AI and with health. And in that light, I mean, the centralization of healthcare and of AI is certainly not ideal, right? Like most AI PhDs are being sucked in by a half dozen to a dozen big companies. Most AI processing power is being bought by a few big companies for their own proprietary good. And most medical research is within a few pharmaceutical companies and clinical trials run by pharmaceutical companies will stay solid within those pharmaceutical companies. You know, these large centralized entities, which are intelligences in themselves, these corporations, but they're mostly malevolent psychopathic and sociopathic intelligences, not saying the people involved are, but the corporations as self organizing entities on their own, which are concerned with maximizing shareholder value as a sole objective function. I mean, AI and medicine are being sucked into these pathological corporate organizations with government cooperation and Google cooperating with British and US government on this as one among many, many different examples. 23andMe providing you the nice service of sequencing your genome and then licensing the genome to GlaxoSmithKline on an exclusive basis, right? Now you can take your own DNA and do whatever you want with it. But the pooled collection of 23andMe sequence DNA is just to GlaxoSmithKline. Someone else could reach out to everyone who had worked with 23andMe to sequence their DNA and say, give us your DNA for our open and decentralized repository that we'll make available to everyone, but nobody's doing that cause it's a pain to get organized. And the customer list is proprietary to 23andMe, right? So, yeah, I mean, this I think is a greater risk to humanity from AI than rogue AGI is turning the universe into paperclips or computronium. Cause what you have here is mostly good hearted and nice people who are sucked into a mode of organization of large corporations, which has evolved just for no individual's fault just because that's the way society has evolved. It's not altruistic, it's self interested and become psychopathic like you said. The human. The corporation is psychopathic even if the people are not. And that's really the disturbing thing about it because the corporations can do things that are quite bad for society even if nobody has a bad intention. Right. And then. No individual member of that corporation has a bad intention. No, some probably do, but it's not necessary that they do for the corporation. Like, I mean, Google, I know a lot of people in Google and there are, with very few exceptions, they're all very nice people who genuinely want what's good for the world. And Facebook, I know fewer people but it's probably mostly true. It's probably like fine young geeks who wanna build cool technology. I actually tend to believe that even the leaders, even Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most disliked people in tech is also wants to do good for the world. I think about Jamie Dimon. Who's Jamie Dimon? Oh, the heads of the great banks may have a different psychology. Oh boy, yeah. Well, I tend to be naive about these things and see the best in, I tend to agree with you that I think the individuals wanna do good by the world but the mechanism of the company can sometimes be its own intelligence system. I mean, there's a, my cousin Mario Goetzler has worked for Microsoft since 1985 or something and I can see for him, I mean, as well as just working on cool projects, you're coding stuff that gets used by like billions and billions of people. And do you think if I improve this feature that's making billions of people's lives easier, right? So of course that's cool. And the engineers are not in charge of running the company anyway. And of course, even if you're Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page, I mean, you still have a fiduciary responsibility. And I mean, you're responsible to the shareholders, your employees who you want to keep paying them and so forth. So yeah, you're enmeshed in this system. And when I worked in DC, I worked a bunch with INSCOM, US Army Intelligence and I was heavily politically opposed to what the US Army was doing in Iraq at that time, like torturing people in Abu Ghraib but everyone I knew in US Army and INSCOM, when I hung out with them, was very nice person. They were friendly to me. They were nice to my kids and my dogs, right? And they really believed that the US was fighting the forces of evil. And if you ask me about Abu Ghraib, they're like, well, but these Arabs will chop us into pieces. So how can you say we're wrong to waterboard them a bit, right? Like that's much less than what they would do to us. It's just in their worldview, what they were doing was really genuinely for the good of humanity. Like none of them woke up in the morning and said like, I want to do harm to good people because I'm just a nasty guy, right? So yeah, most people on the planet, setting aside a few genuine psychopaths and sociopaths, I mean, most people on the planet have a heavy dose of benevolence and wanting to do good and also a heavy capability to convince themselves whatever they feel like doing or whatever is best for them is for the good of humankind. So the more we can decentralize control. Decentralization, you know, the democracy is horrible, but this is like Winston Churchill said, you know, it's the worst possible system of government except for all the others, right? I mean, I think the whole mess of humanity has many, many very bad aspects to it, but so far the track record of elite groups who know what's better for all of humanity is much worse than the track record of the whole teaming democratic participatory mess of humanity, right? I mean, none of them is perfect by any means. The issue with a small elite group that knows what's best is even if it starts out as truly benevolent and doing good things in accordance with its initial good intentions, you find out you need more resources, you need a bigger organization, you pull in more people, internal politics arises, difference of opinions arise and bribery happens, like some opponent organization takes a second in command now to make some, the first in command of some other organization. And I mean, that's, there's a lot of history of what happens with elite groups thinking they know what's best for the human race. So yeah, if I have to choose, I'm gonna reluctantly put my faith in the vast democratic decentralized mass. And I think corporations have a track record of being ethically worse than their constituent human parts. And democratic governments have a more mixed track record, but there are at least. That's the best we got. Yeah, I mean, you can, there's Iceland, very nice country, right? I've been very democratic for 800 plus years, very, very benevolent, beneficial government. And I think, yeah, there are track records of democratic modes of organization. Linux, for example, some of the people in charge of Linux are overtly complete assholes, right? And trying to reform themselves in many cases, in other cases not, but the organization as a whole, I think it's done a good job overall. It's been very welcoming in the third world, for example, and it's allowed advanced technology to roll out on all sorts of different embedded devices and platforms in places where people couldn't afford to pay for proprietary software. So I'd say the internet, Linux, and many democratic nations are examples of how sort of an open, decentralized democratic methodology can be ethically better than the sum of the parts rather than worse. And corporations, that has happened only for a brief period and then it goes sour, right? I mean, I'd say a similar thing about universities. Like university is a horrible way to organize research and get things done, yet it's better than anything else we've come up with, right? A company can be much better, but for a brief period of time, and then it stops being so good, right? So then I think if you believe that AGI is gonna emerge sort of incrementally out of AIs doing practical stuff in the world, like controlling humanoid robots or driving cars or diagnosing diseases or operating killer drones or spying on people and reporting under the government, then what kind of organization creates more and more advanced narrow AI verging toward AGI may be quite important because it will guide like what's in the mind of the early stage AGI as it first gains the ability to rewrite its own code base and project itself toward super intelligence. And if you believe that AI may move toward AGI out of this sort of synergetic activity of many agents cooperating together rather than just have one person's project, then who owns and controls that platform for AI cooperation becomes also very, very important, right? And is that platform AWS? Is it Google Cloud? Is it Alibaba or is it something more like the internet or Singularity Net, which is open and decentralized? So if all of my weird machinations come to pass, right? I mean, we have the Hanson robots being a beautiful user interface, gathering information on human values and being loving and compassionate to people in medical, home service, robot office applications, you have Singularity Net in the backend networking together many different AIs toward cooperative intelligence, fueling the robots among many other things. You have OpenCog 2.0 and true AGI as one of the sources of AI inside this decentralized network, powering the robot and medical AIs helping us live a long time and cure diseases among other things. And this whole thing is operating in a democratic and decentralized way, right? And I think if anyone can pull something like this off, whether using the specific technologies I've mentioned or something else, I mean, then I think we have a higher odds of moving toward a beneficial technological singularity rather than one in which the first super AGI is indifferent to humans and just considers us an inefficient use of molecules. That was a beautifully articulated vision for the world. So thank you for that. Well, let's talk a little bit about life and death. I'm pro life and anti death for most people. There's few exceptions that I won't mention here. I'm glad just like your dad, you're taking a stand against death. You have, by the way, you have a bunch of awesome music where you play piano online. One of the songs that I believe you've written the lyrics go, by the way, I like the way it sounds, people should listen to it, it's awesome. I considered, I probably will cover it, it's a good song. Tell me why do you think it is a good thing that we all get old and die is one of the songs. I love the way it sounds, but let me ask you about death first. Do you think there's an element to death that's essential to give our life meaning? Like the fact that this thing ends. Well, let me say I'm pleased and a little embarrassed you've been listening to that music I put online. That's awesome. One of my regrets in life recently is I would love to get time to really produce music well. Like I haven't touched my sequencer software in like five years. I would love to like rehearse and produce and edit. But with a two year old baby and trying to create the singularity, there's no time. So I just made the decision to, when I'm playing random shit in an off moment. Just record it. Just record it, put it out there, like whatever. Maybe if I'm unfortunate enough to die, maybe that can be input to the AGI when it tries to make an accurate mind upload of me, right? Death is bad. I mean, that's very simple. It's baffling we should have to say that. I mean, of course people can make meaning out of death. And if someone is tortured, maybe they can make beautiful meaning out of that torture and write a beautiful poem about what it was like to be tortured, right? I mean, we're very creative. We can milk beauty and positivity out of even the most horrible and shitty things. But just because if I was tortured, I could write a good song about what it was like to be tortured, doesn't make torture good. And just because people are able to derive meaning and value from death, doesn't mean they wouldn't derive even better meaning and value from ongoing life without death, which I very... Indefinite. Yeah, yeah. So if you could live forever, would you live forever? Forever. My goal with longevity research is to abolish the plague of involuntary death. I don't think people should die unless they choose to die. If I had to choose forced immortality versus dying, I would choose forced immortality. On the other hand, if I chose... If I had the choice of immortality with the choice of suicide whenever I felt like it, of course I would take that instead. And that's the more realistic choice. I mean, there's no reason you should have forced immortality. You should be able to live until you get sick of living, right? I mean, that's... And that will seem insanely obvious to everyone 50 years from now. And they will be so... I mean, people who thought death gives meaning to life, so we should all die, they will look at that 50 years from now the way we now look at the Anabaptists in the year 1000 who gave away all their positions, went on top of the mountain for Jesus to come and bring them to the ascension. I mean, it's ridiculous that people think death is good because you gain more wisdom as you approach dying. I mean, of course it's true. I mean, I'm 53. And the fact that I might have only a few more decades left, it does make me reflect on things differently. It does give me a deeper understanding of many things. But I mean, so what? You could get a deep understanding in a lot of different ways. Pain is the same way. We're gonna abolish pain. And that's even more amazing than abolishing death, right? I mean, once we get a little better at neuroscience, we'll be able to go in and adjust the brain so that pain doesn't hurt anymore, right? And that, you know, people will say that's bad because there's so much beauty in overcoming pain and suffering. Oh, sure. And there's beauty in overcoming torture too. And some people like to cut themselves, but not many, right? I mean. That's an interesting. So, but to push, I mean, to push back again, this is the Russian side of me. I do romanticize suffering. It's not obvious. I mean, the way you put it, it seems very logical. It's almost absurd to romanticize suffering or pain or death, but to me, a world without suffering, without pain, without death, it's not obvious. Well, then you can stay in the people's zoo, people torturing each other. No, but what I'm saying is I don't, well, that's, I guess what I'm trying to say, I don't know if I was presented with that choice, what I would choose because it, to me. This is a subtler, it's a subtler matter. And I've posed it in this conversation in an unnecessarily extreme way. So I think, I think the way you should think about it is what if there's a little dial on the side of your head and you could turn how much pain hurt, turn it down to zero, turn it up to 11, like in spinal tap, if it wants, maybe through an actual spinal tap, right? So, I mean, would you opt to have that dial there or not? That's the question. The question isn't whether you would turn the pain down to zero all the time. Would you opt to have the dial or not? My guess is that in some dark moment of your life, you would choose to have the dial implanted and then it would be there. Just to confess a small thing, don't ask me why, but I'm doing this physical challenge currently where I'm doing 680 pushups and pull ups a day. And my shoulder is currently, as we sit here, in a lot of pain. And I don't know, I would certainly right now, if you gave me a dial, I would turn that sucker to zero as quickly as possible. But I think the whole point of this journey is, I don't know. Well, because you're a twisted human being. I'm a twisted, so the question is am I somehow twisted because I created some kind of narrative for myself so that I can deal with the injustice and the suffering in the world? Or is this actually going to be a source of happiness for me? Well, this is to an extent is a research question that humanity will undertake, right? So I mean, human beings do have a particular biological makeup, which sort of implies a certain probability distribution over motivational systems, right? So I mean, we, and that is there, that is there. Now the question is how flexibly can that morph as society and technology change, right? So if we're given that dial and we're given a society in which say we don't have to work for a living and in which there's an ambient decentralized benevolent AI network that will warn us when we're about to hurt ourself, if we're in a different context, can we consistently with being genuinely and fully human, can we consistently get into a state of consciousness where we just want to keep the pain dial turned all the way down and yet we're leading very rewarding and fulfilling lives, right? Now, I suspect the answer is yes, we can do that, but I don't know that, I don't know that for certain. Yeah, now I'm more confident that we could create a nonhuman AGI system, which just didn't need an analog of feeling pain. And I think that AGI system will be fundamentally healthier and more benevolent than human beings. So I think it might or might not be true that humans need a certain element of suffering to be satisfied humans, consistent with the human physiology. If it is true, that's one of the things that makes us fucked and disqualified to be the super AGI, right? I mean, the nature of the human motivational system is that we seem to gravitate towards situations where the best thing in the large scale is not the best thing in the small scale according to our subjective value system. So we gravitate towards subjective value judgments where to gratify ourselves in the large, we have to ungratify ourselves in the small. And we do that in, you see that in music, there's a theory of music which says the key to musical aesthetics is the surprising fulfillment of expectations. Like you want something that will fulfill the expectations are listed in the prior part of the music, but in a way with a bit of a twist that surprises you. And I mean, that's true not only in outdoor music like my own or that of Zappa or Steve Vai or Buckethead or Christoph Pendergast or something, it's even there in Mozart or something. It's not there in elevator music too much, but that's why it's boring, right? But wrapped up in there is we want to hurt a little bit so that we can feel the pain go away. Like we wanna be a little confused by what's coming next. So then when the thing that comes next actually makes sense, it's so satisfying, right? That's the surprising fulfillment of expectations, is that what you said? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So beautifully put. We've been skirting around a little bit, but if I were to ask you the most ridiculous big question of what is the meaning of life, what would your answer be? Three values, joy, growth, and choice. I think you need joy. I mean, that's the basis of everything. If you want the number one value. On the other hand, I'm unsatisfied with a static joy that doesn't progress perhaps because of some elemental element of human perversity, but the idea of something that grows and becomes more and more and better and better in some sense appeals to me. But I also sort of like the idea of individuality that as a distinct system, I have some agency. So there's some nexus of causality within this system rather than the causality being wholly evenly distributed over the joyous growing mass. So you start with joy, growth, and choice as three basic values. Those three things could continue indefinitely. That's something that can last forever. Is there some aspect of something you called, which I like, super longevity that you find exciting? Is there research wise, is there ideas in that space that? I mean, I think, yeah, in terms of the meaning of life, this really ties into that because for us as humans, probably the way to get the most joy, growth, and choice is transhumanism and to go beyond the human form that we have right now, right? I mean, I think human body is great and by no means do any of us maximize the potential for joy, growth, and choice imminent in our human bodies. On the other hand, it's clear that other configurations of matter could manifest even greater amounts of joy, growth, and choice than humans do, maybe even finding ways to go beyond the realm of matter as we understand it right now. So I think in a practical sense, much of the meaning I see in human life is to create something better than humans and go beyond human life. But certainly that's not all of it for me in a practical sense, right? Like I have four kids and a granddaughter and many friends and parents and family and just enjoying everyday human social existence. But we can do even better. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I love, I've always, when I could live near nature, I spend a bunch of time out in nature in the forest and on the water every day and so forth. So, I mean, enjoying the pleasant moment is part of it, but the growth and choice aspect are severely limited by our human biology. In particular, dying seems to inhibit your potential for personal growth considerably as far as we know. I mean, there's some element of life after death perhaps, but even if there is, why not also continue going in this biological realm, right? In super longevity, I mean, you know, we haven't yet cured aging. We haven't yet cured death. Certainly there's very interesting progress all around. I mean, CRISPR and gene editing can be an incredible tool. And I mean, right now, stem cells could potentially prolong life a lot. Like if you got stem cell injections of just stem cells for every tissue of your body injected into every tissue, and you can just have replacement of your old cells with new cells produced by those stem cells, I mean, that could be highly impactful at prolonging life. Now we just need slightly better technology for having them grow, right? So using machine learning to guide procedures for stem cell differentiation and trans differentiation, it's kind of nitty gritty, but I mean, that's quite interesting. So I think there's a lot of different things being done to help with prolongation of human life, but we could do a lot better. So for example, the extracellular matrix, which is the bunch of proteins in between the cells in your body, they get stiffer and stiffer as you get older. And the extracellular matrix transmits information both electrically, mechanically, and to some extent, biophotonically. So there's all this transmission through the parts of the body, but the stiffer the extracellular matrix gets, the less the transmission happens, which makes your body get worse coordinated between the different organs as you get older. So my friend Christian Schaffmeister at my alumnus organization, my Alma mater, the Great Temple University, Christian Schaffmeister has a potential solution to this, where he has these novel molecules called spiral ligamers, which are like polymers that are not organic. They're specially designed polymers so that you can algorithmically predict exactly how they'll fold very simply. So he designed the molecular scissors that have spiral ligamers that you could eat and would then cut through all the glucosamine and other crosslink proteins in your extracellular matrix, right? But to make that technology really work and be mature as several years of work, as far as I know, no one's finding it at the moment. So there's so many different ways that technology could be used to prolong longevity. What we really need, we need an integrated database of all biological knowledge about human beings and model organisms, like hopefully a massively distributed open cog bioatom space, but it can exist in other forms too. We need that data to be opened up in a suitably privacy protecting way. We need massive funding into machine learning, AGI, proto AGI statistical research aimed at solving biology, both molecular biology and human biology based on this massive data set, right? And then we need regulators not to stop people from trying radical therapies on themselves if they so wish to, as well as better cloud based platforms for like automated experimentation on microorganisms, flies and mice and so forth. And we could do all this. You look after the last financial crisis, Obama, who I generally like pretty well, but he gave $4 trillion to large banks and insurance companies. You know, now in this COVID crisis, trillions are being spent to help everyday people and small businesses. In the end, we'll probably will find many more trillions are being given to large banks and insurance companies. Anyway, like could the world put $10 trillion into making a massive holistic bio AI and bio simulation and experimental biology infrastructure? We could, we could put $10 trillion into that without even screwing us up too badly. Just as in the end COVID and the last financial crisis won't screw up the world economy so badly. We're not putting $10 trillion into that. Instead, all this research is siloed inside a few big companies and government agencies. And most of the data that comes from our individual bodies personally, that could feed this AI to solve aging and death, most of that data is sitting in some hospital's database doing nothing, right? I got two more quick questions for you. One, I know a lot of people are gonna ask me, you are on the Joe Rogan podcast wearing that same amazing hat. Do you have a origin story for the hat? Does the hat have its own story that you're able to share? The hat story has not been told yet. So we're gonna have to come back and you can interview the hat. We'll leave that for the hat's own interview. All right. It's too much to pack into. Is there a book? Is the hat gonna write a book? Okay. Well, it may transmit the information through direct neural transmission. Okay, so it's actually, there might be some Neuralink competition there. Beautiful, we'll leave it as a mystery. Maybe one last question. If you build an AGI system, you're successful at building the AGI system that could lead us to the singularity and you get to talk to her and ask her one question, what would that question be? We're not allowed to ask, what is the question I should be asking? Yeah, that would be cheating, but I guess that's a good question. I'm thinking of a, I wrote a story with Stefan Bugay once where these AI developers, they created a super smart AI aimed at answering all the philosophical questions that have been worrying them. Like what is the meaning of life? Is there free will? What is consciousness and so forth? So they got the super AGI built and it turned a while. It said, those are really stupid questions. And then it puts off on a spaceship and left the earth. So you'd be afraid of scaring it off. That's it, yeah. I mean, honestly, there is no one question that rises among all the others, really. I mean, what interests me more is upgrading my own intelligence so that I can absorb the whole world view of the super AGI. But I mean, of course, if the answer could be like, what is the chemical formula for the immortality pill? Like then I would do that or emit a bit string, which will be the code for a super AGI on the Intel i7 processor. So those would be good questions. So if your own mind was expanded to become super intelligent, like you're describing, I mean, there's kind of a notion that intelligence is a burden, that it's possible that with greater and greater intelligence, that other metric of joy that you mentioned becomes more and more difficult. What's your sense? Pretty stupid idea. So you think if you're super intelligent, you can also be super joyful? I think getting root access to your own brain will enable new forms of joy that we don't have now. And I think as I've said before, what I aim at is really make multiple versions of myself. So I would like to keep one version, which is basically human like I am now, but keep the dial to turn pain up and down and get rid of death, right? And make another version which fuses its mind with superhuman AGI, and then will become massively transhuman. And whether it will send some messages back to the human me or not will be interesting to find out. The thing is, once you're a super AGI, like one subjective second to a human might be like a million subjective years to that super AGI, right? So it would be on a whole different basis. I mean, at very least those two copies will be good to have, but it could be interesting to put your mind into a dolphin or a space amoeba or all sorts of other things. You can imagine one version that doubled its intelligence every year and another version that just became a super AGI as fast as possible, right? So, I mean, now we're sort of constrained to think one mind, one self, one body, right? But I think we actually, we don't need to be that constrained in thinking about future intelligence after we've mastered AGI and nanotechnology and longevity biology. I mean, then each of our minds is a certain pattern of organization, right? And I know we haven't talked about consciousness, but I sort of, I'm panpsychist. I sort of view the universe as conscious. And so, you know, a light bulb or a quark or an ant or a worm or a monkey have their own manifestations of consciousness. And the human manifestation of consciousness, it's partly tied to the particular meat that we're manifested by, but it's largely tied to the pattern of organization in the brain, right? So, if you upload yourself into a computer or a robot or whatever else it is, some element of your human consciousness may not be there because it's just tied to the biological embodiment. But I think most of it will be there. And these will be incarnations of your consciousness in a slightly different flavor. And, you know, creating these different versions will be amazing, and each of them will discover meanings of life that have some overlap, but probably not total overlap with the human Ben's meaning of life. The thing is, to get to that future where we can explore different varieties of joy, different variations of human experience and values and transhuman experiences and values to get to that future, we need to navigate through a whole lot of human bullshit of companies and governments and killer drones and making and losing money and so forth, right? And that's the challenge we're facing now is if we do things right, we can get to a benevolent singularity, which is levels of joy, growth, and choice that are literally unimaginable to human beings. If we do things wrong, we could either annihilate all life on the planet, or we could lead to a scenario where, say, all humans are annihilated and there's some super AGI that goes on and does its own thing unrelated to us except via our role in originating it. And we may well be at a bifurcation point now, right? Where what we do now has significant causal impact on what comes about, and yet most people on the planet aren't thinking that way whatsoever, they're thinking only about their own narrow aims and aims and goals, right? Now, of course, I'm thinking about my own narrow aims and goals to some extent also, but I'm trying to use as much of my energy and mind as I can to push toward this more benevolent alternative, which will be better for me, but also for everybody else. And it's weird that so few people understand what's going on. I know you interviewed Elon Musk, and he understands a lot of what's going on, but he's much more paranoid than I am, right? Because Elon gets that AGI is gonna be way, way smarter than people, and he gets that an AGI does not necessarily have to give a shit about people because we're a very elementary mode of organization of matter compared to many AGI's. But I don't think he has a clear vision of how infusing early stage AGI's with compassion and human warmth can lead to an AGI that loves and helps people rather than viewing us as a historical artifact and a waste of mass energy. But on the other hand, while I have some disagreements with him, like he understands way, way more of the story than almost anyone else in such a large scale corporate leadership position, right? It's terrible how little understanding of these fundamental issues exists out there now. That may be different five or 10 years from now though, because I can see understanding of AGI and longevity and other such issues is certainly much stronger and more prevalent now than 10 or 15 years ago, right? So I mean, humanity as a whole can be slow learners relative to what I would like, but on a historical sense, on the other hand, you could say the progress is astoundingly fast. But Elon also said, I think on the Joe Rogan podcast, that love is the answer. So maybe in that way, you and him are both on the same page of how we should proceed with AGI. I think there's no better place to end it. I hope we get to talk again about the hat and about consciousness and about a million topics we didn't cover. Ben, it's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for making it out. Thank you for talking today. Thanks for having me. This was really, really good fun and we dug deep into some very important things. So thanks for doing this. Thanks very much. Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Gertzel and thank you to our sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Masterclass. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and signing up to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash lex. Click the links, buy the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and startup. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on a podcast, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at lexfriedman spelled without the E, just F R I D M A N. I'm sure eventually you will figure it out. And now let me leave you with some words from Ben Gertzel. Our language for describing emotions is very crude. That's what music is for. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #103

The following is a conversation with David Patterson, touring award winner and professor of computer science at Berkeley. He's known for pioneering contributions to RISC processor architecture used by 99% of new chips today and for co creating RAID storage. The impact that these two lines of research and development have had in our world is immeasurable. He's also one of the great educators of computer science in the world. His book with John Hennessy is how I first learned about and was humbled by the inner workings of machines at the lowest level. This episode is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Lex. It's how he knows I sent you on that page. There's links to subscribe to it on Apple podcast, Spotify, and everywhere else. I've been binging on this podcast. It's amazing. Jordan is a great human being. He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed, and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Garry Kasparov, and many more. I recently listened to his conversation with Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, and one of the world's most famous con men. Perfect podcast length and topic for a recent long distance run that I did. Again, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Lex to give him my love and to support this podcast. Subscribe also on Apple podcast, Spotify, and everywhere else. This show is presented by Cash App, the greatest sponsor of this podcast ever, and the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEX PODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Also, the audiobook is amazing. Debits and credits on Ledger started around 30,000 years ago. The US dollar created over 200 years ago, and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play, and use the code LEX PODCAST, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with David Patterson. Let's start with the big historical question. How have computers changed in the past 50 years at both the fundamental architectural level and in general, in your eyes? David Patterson Well, the biggest thing that happened was the invention of the microprocessor. So computers that used to fill up several rooms could fit inside your cell phone. And not only did they get smaller, they got a lot faster. So they're a million times faster than they were 50 years ago, and they're much cheaper, and they're ubiquitous. There's 7.8 billion people on this planet. Probably half of them have cell phones right now, which is remarkable. Soterios Johnson That's probably more microprocessors than there are people. David Patterson Sure. I don't know what the ratio is, but I'm sure it's above one. Maybe it's 10 to 1 or some number like that. Soterios Johnson What is a microprocessor? David Patterson So a way to say what a microprocessor is, is to tell you what's inside a computer. So a computer forever has classically had five pieces. There's input and output, which kind of naturally, as you'd expect, is input is like speech or typing, and output is displays. There's a memory, and like the name sounds, it remembers things. So it's integrated circuits whose job is you put information in, then when you ask for it, it comes back out. That's memory. And the third part is the processor, where the microprocessor comes from. And that has two pieces as well. And that is the control, which is kind of the brain of the processor. And what's called the arithmetic unit, it's kind of the brawn of the computer. So if you think of the, as a human body, the arithmetic unit, the thing that does the number crunching is the body and the control is the brain. So those five pieces, input, output, memory, arithmetic unit, and control are, have been in computers since the very dawn. And the last two are considered the processor. So a microprocessor simply means a processor that fits on a microchip. And that was invented about, you know, 40 years ago, was the first microprocessor. It's interesting that you refer to the arithmetic unit as the, like you connected to the body and the controllers of the brain. So I guess, I never thought of it that way. It's a nice way to think of it because most of the actions the microprocessor does in terms of literally sort of computation, but the microprocessor does computation. It processes information. And most of the thing it does is basic arithmetic operations. What are the operations, by the way? It's a lot like a calculator. So there are add instructions, subtract instructions, multiply and divide. And kind of the brilliance of the invention of the computer or the processor is that it performs very trivial operations, but it just performs billions of them per second. And what we're capable of doing is writing software that can take these very trivial instructions and have them create tasks that can do things better than human beings can do today. Just looking back through your career, did you anticipate the kind of how good we would be able to get at doing these small, basic operations? How many surprises along the way where you just kind of sat back and said, wow, I didn't expect it to go this fast, this good? MG Well, the fundamental driving force is what's called Moore's law, which was named after Gordon Moore, who's a Berkeley alumnus. And he made this observation very early in what are called semiconductors. And semiconductors are these ideas, you can build these very simple switches, and you can put them on these microchips. And he made this observation over 50 years ago. He looked at a few years and said, I think what's going to happen is the number of these little switches called transistors is going to double every year for the next decade. And he said this in 1965. And in 1975, he said, well, maybe it's going to double every two years. And that what other people since named that Moore's law guided the industry. And when Gordon Moore made that prediction, he wrote a paper back in, I think, in the 70s and said, not only did this going to happen, he wrote, what would be the implications of that? And in this article from 1965, he shows ideas like computers being in cars and computers being in something that you would buy in the grocery store and stuff like that. So he kind of not only called his shot, he called the implications of it. So if you were in the computing field, and if you believed Moore's prediction, he kind of said what would be happening in the future. So it's not kind of, it's at one sense, this is what was predicted. And you could imagine it was easy to believe that Moore's law was going to continue. And so this would be the implications. On the other side, there are these kind of shocking events in your life. Like I remember driving in Marin across the Bay in San Francisco and seeing a bulletin board at a local civic center and it had a URL on it. And it was like, for the people at the time, these first URLs and that's the, you know, www select stuff with the HTTP. People thought it looked like alien writing, right? You'd see these advertisements and commercials or bulletin boards that had this alien writing on it. So for the lay people, it's like, what the hell is going on here? And for those people in the industry, it was, oh my God, this stuff is getting so popular, it's actually leaking out of our nerdy world into the real world. So that, I mean, there was events like that. I think another one was, I remember in the early days of the personal computer, when we started seeing advertisements in magazines for personal computers, like it's so popular that it's made the newspapers. So at one hand, you know, Gordon Moore predicted it and you kind of expected it to happen, but when it really hit and you saw it affecting society, it was shocking. So maybe taking a step back and looking both the engineering and philosophical perspective, what do you see as the layers of abstraction in the computer? Do you see a computer as a set of layers of abstractions? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, I think that's one of the things that computer science fundamentals is the, these things are really complicated in the way we cope with complicated software and complicated hardware is these layers of abstraction. And that simply means that we, you know, suspend disbelief and pretend that the only thing you know is that layer, and you don't know anything about the layer below it. And that's the way we can make very complicated things. And probably it started with hardware that that's the way it was done, but it's been proven extremely useful. And, you know, I would say in a modern computer today, there might be 10 or 20 layers of abstraction, and they're all trying to kind of enforce this contract is all you know is this interface. There's a set of commands that you can, are allowed to use, and you stick to those commands, and we will faithfully execute that. And it's like peeling the air layers of a London, of an onion, you get down, there's a new set of layers and so forth. So for people who want to study computer science, the exciting part about it is you can keep peeling those layers. You take your first course, and you might learn to program in Python, and then you can take a follow on course, and you can get it down to a lower level language like C, and you know, you can go and then you can, if you want to, you can start getting into the hardware layers, and you keep getting down all the way to that transistor that I talked about that Gordon Moore predicted. And you can understand all those layers all the way up to the highest level application software. So it's a very kind of magnetic field. If you're interested, you can go into any depth and keep going. In particular, what's happening right now, or it's happened in software the last 20 years and recently in hardware, there's getting to be open source versions of all of these things. So what open source means is what the engineer, the programmer designs, it's not secret, the belonging to a company, it's out there on the worldwide web, so you can see it. So you can look at, for lots of pieces of software that you use, you can see exactly what the programmer does if you want to get involved. That used to stop at the hardware. Recently, there's been an effort to make open source hardware and those interfaces open, so you can see that. So instead of before you had to stop at the hardware, you can now start going layer by layer below that and see what's inside there. So it's a remarkable time that for the interested individual can really see in great depth what's really going on in the computers that power everything that we see around us. Are you thinking also when you say open source at the hardware level, is this going to the design architecture instruction set level or is it going to literally the manufacturer of the actual hardware, of the actual chips, whether that's ASIC specialized to a particular domain or the general? Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. So when you get down to the bottom layer of software, the way software talks to hardware is in a vocabulary. And what we call that vocabulary, we call that, the words of that vocabulary are called instructions. And the technical term for the vocabulary is instruction set. So those instructions are like we talked about earlier, that can be instructions like add, subtract and multiply, divide. There's instructions to put data into memory, which is called a store instruction and to get data back, which is called the load instructions. And those simple instructions go back to the very dawn of computing in 1950, the commercial computer had these instructions. So that's the instruction set that we're talking about. So up until, I'd say 10 years ago, these instruction sets were all proprietary. So a very popular one is owned by Intel, the one that's in the cloud and in all the PCs in the world. Intel owns that instruction set. It's referred to as the x86. There've been a sequence of ones that the first number was called 8086. And since then, there's been a lot of numbers, but they all end in 86. So there's been that kind of family of instruction sets. And that's proprietary. That's proprietary. The other one that's very popular is from ARM. That kind of powers all the cell phones in the world, all the iPads in the world, and a lot of things that are so called Internet of Things devices. ARM and that one is also proprietary. ARM will license it to people for a fee, but they own that. So the new idea that got started at Berkeley kind of unintentionally 10 years ago is early in my career, we pioneered a way to do these vocabularies instruction sets that was very controversial at the time. At the time in the 1980s, conventional wisdom was these vocabularies instruction sets should have powerful instructions. So polysyllabic kind of words, you can think of that. And so instead of just add, subtract, and multiply, they would have polynomial, divide, or sort a list. And the hope was of those powerful vocabularies, that'd make it easier for software. So we thought that didn't make sense for microprocessors. There was people at Berkeley and Stanford and IBM who argued the opposite. And what we called that was a reduced instruction set computer. And the abbreviation was RISC. And typical for computer people, we use the abbreviation start pronouncing it. So risk was the thing. So we said for microprocessors, which with Gordon's Moore is changing really fast, we think it's better to have a pretty simple set of instructions, reduced set of instructions. That that would be a better way to build microprocessors since they're going to be changing so fast due to Moore's law. And then we'll just use standard software to cover the use, generate more of those simple instructions. And one of the pieces of software that's in that software stack going between these layers of abstractions is called a compiler. And it's basically translates, it's a translator between levels. We said the translator will handle that. So the technical question was, well, since there are these reduced instructions, you have to execute more of them. Yeah, that's right. But maybe you could execute them faster. Yeah, that's right. They're simpler so they could go faster, but you have to do more of them. So what's that trade off look like? And it ended up that we ended up executing maybe 50% more instructions, maybe a third more instructions, but they ran four times faster. So this risk, controversial risk ideas proved to be maybe factors of three or four better. I love that this idea was controversial and almost kind of like rebellious. So that's in the context of what was more conventional is the complex instructional set computing. So how would you pronounce that? CISC. CISC versus risk. Risk versus CISC. And believe it or not, this sounds very, who cares about this? It was violently debated at several conferences. It's like, what's the right way to go? And people thought risk was a deevolution. We're going to make software worse by making those instructions simpler. And there are fierce debates at several conferences in the 1980s. And then later in the 80s, it kind of settled to these benefits. It's not completely intuitive to me why risk has, for the most part, won. Yeah. So why did that happen? Yeah. Yeah. And maybe I can sort of say a bunch of dumb things that could lay the land for further commentary. So to me, this is kind of an interesting thing. If you look at C++ versus C, with modern compilers, you really could write faster code with C++. So relying on the compiler to reduce your complicated code into something simple and fast. So to me, comparing risk, maybe this is a dumb question, but why is it that focusing the definition of the design of the instruction set on very few simple instructions in the long run provide faster execution versus coming up with, like you said, a ton of complicated instructions that over time, you know, years, maybe decades, you come up with compilers that can reduce those into simple instructions for you. Yeah. So let's try and split that into two pieces. So if the compiler can do that for you, if the compiler can take, you know, a complicated program and produce simpler instructions, then the programmer doesn't care, right? I don't care just how fast is the computer I'm using, how much does it cost? And so what happened kind of in the software industry is right around before the 1980s, critical pieces of software were still written not in languages like C or C++, they were written in what's called assembly language, where there's this kind of humans writing exactly at the instructions at the level that a computer can understand. So they were writing add, subtract, multiply, you know, instructions. It's very tedious. But the belief was to write this lowest level of software that people use, which are called operating systems, they had to be written in assembly language because these high level languages were just too inefficient. They were too slow, or the programs would be too big. So that changed with a famous operating system called Unix, which is kind of the grandfather of all the operating systems today. So Unix demonstrated that you could write something as complicated as an operating system in a language like C. So once that was true, then that meant we could hide the instruction set from the programmer. And so that meant then it didn't really matter. The programmer didn't have to write lots of these simple instructions, that was up to the compiler. So that was part of our arguments for risk is, if you were still writing assembly language, there's maybe a better case for CISC instructions. But if the compiler can do that, it's going to be, you know, that's done once the computer translates at once. And then every time you run the program, it runs at this potentially simpler instructions. And so that was the debate, right? And people would acknowledge that the simpler instructions could lead to a faster computer. You can think of monosyllabic instructions, you could say them, you know, if you think of reading, you can probably read them faster or say them faster than long instructions. The same thing, that analogy works pretty well for hardware. And as long as you didn't have to read a lot more of those instructions, you could win. So that's kind of, that's the basic idea for risk. But it's interesting that in that discussion of Unix and C, that there's only one step of levels of abstraction from the code that's really the closest to the machine to the code that's written by human. It's, at least to me again, perhaps a dumb intuition, but it feels like there might've been more layers, sort of different kinds of humans stacked on top of each other. So what's true and not true about what you said is several of the layers of software, like, so the, if you, two layers would be, suppose we just talked about two layers, that would be the operating system, like you get from Microsoft or from Apple, like iOS, or the Windows operating system. And let's say applications that run on top of it, like Word or Excel. So both the operating system could be written in C and the application could be written in C. But you could construct those two layers and the applications absolutely do call upon the operating system. And the change was that both of them could be written in higher level languages. So it's one step of a translation, but you can still build many layers of abstraction of software on top of that. And that's how things are done today. So still today, many of the layers that you'll deal with, you may deal with debuggers, you may deal with linkers, there's libraries. Many of those today will be written in C++, say, even though that language is pretty ancient. And even the Python interpreter is probably written in C or C++. So lots of layers there are probably written in these, some old fashioned efficient languages that still take one step to produce these instructions, produce RISC instructions, but they're composed, each layer of software invokes one another through these interfaces. And you can get 10 layers of software that way. So in general, the RISC was developed here at Berkeley? It was kind of the three places that were these radicals that advocated for this against the rest of community were IBM, Berkeley, and Stanford. You're one of these radicals. And how radical did you feel? How confident did you feel? How doubtful were you that RISC might be the right approach? Because it may, you can also intuit that is kind of taking a step back into simplicity, not forward into simplicity. Yeah, no, it was easy to make, yeah, it was easy to make the argument against it. Well, this was my colleague, John Hennessy at Stanford Nine. We were both assistant professors. And for me, I just believed in the power of our ideas. I thought what we were saying made sense. Moore's law is going to move fast. The other thing that I didn't mention is one of the surprises of these complex instruction sets. You could certainly write these complex instructions if the programmer is writing them themselves. It turned out to be kind of difficult for the compiler to generate those complex instructions. Kind of ironically, you'd have to find the right circumstances that just exactly fit this complex instruction. It was actually easier for the compiler to generate these simple instructions. So not only did these complex instructions make the hardware more difficult to build, often the compiler wouldn't even use them. And so it's harder to build. The compiler doesn't use them that much. The simple instructions go better with Moore's law. The number of transistors is doubling every two years. So we're going to have, you want to reduce the time to design the microprocessor, that may be more important than these number of instructions. So I think we believed that we were right, that this was the best idea. Then the question became in these debates, well, yeah, that's a good technical idea, but in the business world, this doesn't matter. There's other things that matter. It's like arguing that if there's a standard with the railroad tracks and you've come up with a better width, but the whole world is covered in railroad tracks, so your ideas have no chance of success. Right. Commercial success. It was technically right, but commercially it'll be insignificant. Yeah, it's kind of sad that this world, the history of human civilization is full of good ideas that lost because somebody else came along first with a worse idea. And it's good that in the computing world, at least some of these have, well, you could, I mean, there's probably still CISC people that say, yeah, there still are. And what happened was, what was interesting, Intel, a bunch of the CISC companies with CISC instruction sets of vocabulary, they gave up, but not Intel. What Intel did to its credit, because Intel's vocabulary was in the personal computer. And so that was a very valuable vocabulary because the way we distribute software is in those actual instructions. It's in the instructions of that instruction set. So you don't get that source code, what the programmers wrote. You get, after it's been translated into the lowest level, that's if you were to get a floppy disk or download software, it's in the instructions of that instruction set. So the x86 instruction set was very valuable. So what Intel did cleverly and amazingly is they had their chips in hardware do a translation step. They would take these complex instructions and translate them into essentially in RISC instructions in hardware on the fly, at gigahertz clock speeds. And then any good idea that RISC people had, they could use, and they could still be compatible with this really valuable PC software base, which also had very high volumes, 100 million personal computers per year. So the CISC architecture in the business world was actually won in this PC era. So just going back to the time of designing RISC, when you design an instruction set architecture, do you think like a programmer? Do you think like a microprocessor engineer? Do you think like a artist, a philosopher? Do you think in software and hardware? I mean, is it art? Is it science? Yeah, I'd say, I think designing a good instruction set is an art. And I think you're trying to balance the simplicity and speed of execution with how well easy it will be for compilers to use it. You're trying to create an instruction set that everything in there can be used by compilers. There's not things that are missing that'll make it difficult for the program to run. They run efficiently, but you want it to be easy to build as well. So I'd say you're thinking hardware, trying to find a hardware software compromise that'll work well. And it's a matter of taste. It's kind of fun to build instruction sets. It's not that hard to build an instruction set, but to build one that catches on and people use, you have to be fortunate to be the right place in the right time or have a design that people really like. Are you using metrics? So is it quantifiable? Because you kind of have to anticipate the kind of programs that people write ahead of time. So can you use numbers? Can you use metrics? Can you quantify something ahead of time? Or is this, again, that's the art part where you're kind of anticipating? No, it's a big change. Kind of what happened, I think from Hennessy's and my perspective in the 1980s, what happened was going from kind of really, you know, taste and hunches to quantifiable. And in fact, he and I wrote a textbook at the end of the 1980s called Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach. I heard of that. And it's the thing, it had a pretty big impact in the field because we went from textbooks that kind of listed, so here's what this computer does, and here's the pros and cons, and here's what this computer does and pros and cons to something where there were formulas and equations where you could measure things. So specifically for instruction sets, what we do and some other fields do is we agree upon a set of programs, which we call benchmarks, and a suite of programs, and then you develop both the hardware and the compiler and you get numbers on how well your computer does given its instruction set and how well you implemented it in your microprocessor and how good your compilers are. In computer architecture, you know, using professor's terms, we grade on a curve rather than grade on an absolute scale. So when you say, you know, these programs run this fast, well, that's kind of interesting, but how do you know it's better? Well, you compare it to other computers at the same time. So the best way we know how to turn it into a kind of more science and experimental and quantitative is to compare yourself to other computers of the same era that have the same access to the same kind of technology on commonly agreed benchmark programs. So maybe to toss up two possible directions we can go. One is what are the different tradeoffs in designing architectures? We've been already talking about SISC and RISC, but maybe a little bit more detail in terms of specific features that you were thinking about. And the other side is what are the metrics that you're thinking about when looking at these tradeoffs? Yeah, let's talk about the metrics. So during these debates, we actually had kind of a hard time explaining, convincing people the ideas, and partly we didn't have a formula to explain it. And a few years into it, we hit upon a formula that helped explain what was going on. And I think if we can do this, see how it works orally to do this. So if I can do a formula orally, let's see. So fundamentally, the way you measure performance is how long does it take a program to run? A program, if you have 10 programs, and typically these benchmarks were sweet because you'd want to have 10 programs so they could represent lots of different applications. So for these 10 programs, how long does it take to run? Well now, when you're trying to explain why it took so long, you could factor how long it takes a program to run into three factors. One of the first one is how many instructions did it take to execute? So that's the what we've been talking about, you know, the instructions of Alchemy. How many did it take? All right. The next question is how long did each instruction take to run on average? So you multiply the number of instructions times how long it took to run, and that gets you time. Okay, so that's, but now let's look at this metric of how long did it take the instruction to run. Well, it turns out, the way we could build computers today is they all have a clock, and you've seen this when you, if you buy a microprocessor, it'll say 3.1 gigahertz or 2.5 gigahertz, and more gigahertz is good. Well, what that is is the speed of the clock. So 2.5 gigahertz turns out to be 4 billionths of instruction or 4 nanoseconds. So that's the clock cycle time. But there's another factor, which is what's the average number of clock cycles it takes per instruction? So it's number of instructions, average number of clock cycles, and the clock cycle time. So in these risk sis debates, they would concentrate on, but risk needs to take more instructions, and we'd argue maybe the clock cycle is faster, but what the real big difference was was the number of clock cycles per instruction. Per instruction, that's fascinating. What about the mess of, the beautiful mess of parallelism in the whole picture? Parallelism, which has to do with, say, how many instructions could execute in parallel and things like that, you could think of that as affecting the clock cycles per instruction, because it's the average clock cycles per instruction. So when you're running a program, if it took 100 billion instructions, and on average it took two clock cycles per instruction, and they were four nanoseconds, you could multiply that out and see how long it took to run. And there's all kinds of tricks to try and reduce the number of clock cycles per instruction. But it turned out that the way they would do these complex instructions is they would actually build what we would call an interpreter in a simpler, a very simple hardware interpreter. But it turned out that for the sis constructions, if you had to use one of those interpreters, it would be like 10 clock cycles per instruction, where the risk constructions could be two. So there'd be this factor of five advantage in clock cycles per instruction. We have to execute, say, 25 or 50 percent more instructions, so that's where the win would come. And then you could make an argument whether the clock cycle times are the same or not. But pointing out that we could divide the benchmark results time per program into three factors, and the biggest difference between RISC and SIS was the clock cycles per, you execute a few more instructions, but the clock cycles per instruction is much less. And that was what this debate, once we made that argument, then people said, oh, okay, I get it. And so we went from, it was outrageously controversial in, you know, 1982 that maybe probably by 1984 or so, people said, oh, yeah, technically, they've got a good argument. What are the instructions in the RISC instruction set, just to get an intuition? Okay. 1995, I was asked to predict the future of what microprocessor could future. So I, and I'd seen these predictions and usually people predict something outrageous just to be entertaining, right? And so my prediction for 2020 was, you know, things are going to be pretty much, they're going to look very familiar to what they are. And they are, and if you were to read the article, you know, the things I said are pretty much true. The instructions that have been around forever are kind of the same. And that's the outrageous prediction, actually. Yeah. Given how fast computers have been going. Well, and you know, Moore's law was going to go on, we thought for 25 more years, you know, who knows, but kind of the surprising thing, in fact, you know, Hennessy and I, you know, won the ACM, AM, Turing award for both the RISC instruction set contributions and for that textbook I mentioned. But, you know, we're surprised that here we are 35, 40 years later after we did our work and the conventionalism of the best way to do instruction sets is still those RISC instruction sets that looked very similar to what we looked like, you know, we did in the 1980s. So those, surprisingly, there hasn't been some radical new idea, even though we have, you know, a million times as many transistors as we had back then. But what are the basic constructions and how do they change over the years? So we're talking about addition, subtraction, these are the specific. So the things that are in a calculator are in a computer. So any of the buttons that are in the calculator in the computer, so the, so if there's a memory function key, and like I said, those are, turns into putting something in memory is called a store, bring something back to load. Just a quick tangent. When you say memory, what does memory mean? Well, I told you there were five pieces of a computer. And if you remember in a calculator, there's a memory key. So you want to have intermediate calculation and bring it back later. So you'd hit the memory plus key M plus maybe, and it would put that into memory and then you'd hit an RM like recurrence section and then bring it back on the display. So you don't have to type it. You don't have to write it down and bring it back again. So that's exactly what memory is. You can put things into it as temporary storage and bring it back when you need it later. So that's memory and loads and stores. But the big thing, the difference between a computer and a calculator is that the computer can make decisions. And amazingly, decisions are as simple as, is this value less than zero? Or is this value bigger than that value? And those instructions, which are called conditional branch instructions, is what give computers all its power. If you were in the early days of computing before what's called the general purpose microprocessor, people would write these instructions kind of in hardware, but it couldn't make decisions. It would do the same thing over and over again. With the power of having branch instructions, it can look at things and make decisions automatically. And it can make these decisions billions of times per second. And amazingly enough, we can get, thanks to advanced machine learning, we can create programs that can do something smarter than human beings can do. But if you go down that very basic level, it's the instructions are the keys on the calculator, plus the ability to make decisions, these conditional branch instructions. And all decisions fundamentally can be reduced down to these branch instructions. Yeah. So in fact, and so going way back in the stack back to, we did four RISC projects at Berkeley in the 1980s. They did a couple at Stanford in the 1980s. In 2010, we decided we wanted to do a new instruction set learning from the mistakes of those RISC architectures in the 1980s. And that was done here at Berkeley almost exactly 10 years ago. And the people who did it, I participated, but Krzysztof Sanowicz and others drove it. They called it RISC 5 to honor those RISC, the four RISC projects of the 1980s. So what does RISC 5 involve? So RISC 5 is another instruction set of vocabulary. It's learned from the mistakes of the past, but it still has, if you look at the, there's a core set of instructions that's very similar to the simplest architectures from the 1980s. And the big difference about RISC 5 is it's open. So I talked early about proprietary versus open software. So this is an instruction set. So it's a vocabulary, it's not hardware, but by having an open instruction set, we can have open source implementations, open source processors that people can use. Where do you see that going? It's a really exciting possibility, but you're just like in the scientific American, if you were to predict 10, 20, 30 years from now, that kind of ability to utilize open source instruction set architectures like RISC 5, what kind of possibilities might that unlock? Yeah. And so just to make it clear, because this is confusing, the specification of RISC 5 is something that's like in a textbook, there's books about it. So that's defining an interface. There's also the way you build hardware is you write it in languages that are kind of like C, but they're specialized for hardware that gets translated into hardware. And so these implementations of this specification are the open source. So they're written in something that's called Verilog or VHDL, but it's put up on the web, just like you can see the C++ code for Linux on the web. So that's the open instruction set enables open source implementations of RISC 5. So you can literally build a processor using this instruction set. People are, people are. So what happened to us that the story was this was developed here for our use to do our research. And we made it, we licensed under the Berkeley Software Distribution License, like a lot of things get licensed here. So other academics use it, they wouldn't be afraid to use it. And then about 2014, we started getting complaints that we were using it in our research and in our courses. And we got complaints from people in industries, why did you change your instruction set between the fall and the spring semester? And well, we get complaints from industrial time. Why the hell do you care what we do with our instruction set? And then when we talked to him, we found out there was this thirst for this idea of an open instruction set architecture. And they had been looking for one. They stumbled upon ours at Berkeley, thought it was, boy, this looks great. We should use this one. And so once we realized there is this need for an open instruction set architecture, we thought that's a great idea. And then we started supporting it and tried to make it happen. So this was kind of, we accidentally stumbled into this and to this need and our timing was good. And so it's really taking off. There's, you know, universities are good at starting things, but they're not good at sustaining things. So like Linux has a Linux foundation, there's a RISC 5 foundation that we started. There's an annual conferences. And the first one was done, I think, January of 2015. And the one that was just last December in it, you know, it had 50 people at it. And this one last December had, I don't know, 1700 people were at it and the companies excited all over the world. So if predicting into the future, you know, if we were doing 25 years, I would predict that RISC 5 will be, you know, possibly the most popular instruction set architecture out there, because it's a pretty good instruction set architecture and it's open and free. And there's no reason lots of people shouldn't use it. And there's benefits just like Linux is so popular today compared to 20 years ago. And, you know, the fact that you can get access to it for free, you can modify it, you can improve it for all those same arguments. And so people collaborate to make it a better system for everybody to use. And that works in software. And I expect the same thing will happen in hardware. So if you look at ARM, Intel, MIPS, if you look at just the lay of the land, and what do you think, just for me, because I'm not familiar how difficult this kind of transition would, how much challenges this kind of transition would entail, do you see, let me ask my dumb question in another way. No, that's, I know where you're headed. Well, there's a bunch, I think the thing you point out, there's these very popular proprietary instruction sets, the x86. And so how do we move to RISC 5 potentially in sort of in the span of 5, 10, 20 years, a kind of unification, given that the devices, the kind of way we use devices, IoT, mobile devices, and the cloud keeps changing? Well, part of it, a big piece of it is the software stack. And right now, looking forward, there seem to be three important markets. There's the cloud. And the cloud is simply companies like Alibaba and Amazon and Google, Microsoft, having these giant data centers with tens of thousands of servers in maybe a hundred of these data centers all over the world. And that's what the cloud is. So the computer that dominates the cloud is the x86 instruction set. So the instruction sets used in the cloud are the x86, almost 100% of that today is x86. The other big thing are cell phones and laptops. Those are the big things today. I mean, the PC is also dominated by the x86 instruction set, but those sales are dwindling. You know, there's maybe 200 million PCs a year, and there's one and a half billion phones a year. There's numbers like that. So for the phones, that's dominated by ARM. And now, and a reason that I talked about the software stacks, and the third category is Internet of Things, which is basically embedded devices, things in your cars and your microwaves everywhere. So what's different about those three categories is for the cloud, the software that runs in the cloud is determined by these companies, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. So they control that software stack. For the cell phones, there's both for Android and Apple, the software they supply, but both of them have marketplaces where anybody in the world can build software. And that software is translated or, you know, compiled down and shipped in the vocabulary of ARM. So that's what's referred to as binary compatible because the actual, it's the instructions are turned into numbers, binary numbers, and shipped around the world. And sorry, just a quick interruption. So ARM, what is ARM? ARM is an instruction set, like a risk based... Yeah, it's a risk based instruction set. It's a proprietary one. ARM stands for Advanced Risk Machine. ARM is the name where the company is. So it's a proprietary risk architecture. So, and it's been around for a while and it's, you know, the, surely the most popular instruction set in the world right now. They, every year, billions of chips are using the ARM design in this post PC era. Was it one of the early risk adopters of the risk idea? Yeah. The first ARM goes back, I don't know, 86 or so. So Berkeley instead did their work in the early 80s. The ARM guys needed an instruction set and they read our papers and it heavily influenced them. So getting back to my story, what about Internet of Things? Well, software is not shipped in Internet of Things. It's the embedded device people control that software stack. So the opportunities for risk five, everybody thinks, is in the Internet of Things embedded things because there's no dominant player like there is in the cloud or the smartphones. And, you know, it's, it's, doesn't have a lot of licenses associated with, and you can enhance the instruction set if you want. And it's, and people have looked at instruction sets and think it's a very good instruction set. So it appears to be very popular there. It's possible that in the cloud people, those companies control their software stacks. So it's possible that they would decide to use risk five if we're talking about 10 and 20 years in the future. The one that would be harder would be the cell phones. Since people ship software in the ARM instruction set that you'd think be the more difficult one. But if risk five really catches on and, you know, you could, in a period of a decade, you can imagine that's changing over too. Do you have a sense why risk five or ARM has dominated? You mentioned these three categories. Why has, why did ARM dominate, why does it dominate the mobile device space? And maybe my naive intuition is that there are some aspects of power efficiency that are important that somehow come along with risk. Well, part of it is for these old CIS construction sets, like in the x86, it was more expensive to these for, you know, they're older, so they have disadvantages in them because they were designed 40 years ago. But also they have to translate in hardware from CIS constructions to risk constructions on the fly. And that costs both silicon area that the chips are bigger to be able to do that. And it uses more power. So ARM has, which has, you know, followed this risk philosophy is seen to be much more energy efficient. And in today's computer world, both in the cloud and the cell phone and, you know, things, it isn't, the limiting resource isn't the number of transistors you can fit in the chip. It's what, how much power can you dissipate for your application? So by having a reduced instruction set, that's possible to have a simpler hardware, which is more energy efficient. And energy efficiency is incredibly important in the cloud. When you have tens of thousands of computers in a data center, you want to have the most energy efficient ones there as well. And of course, for embedded things running off of batteries, you want those to be energy efficient and the cell phones too. So I think it's believed that there's a energy disadvantage of using these more complex instruction set architectures. So the other aspect of this is if we look at Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, all use the ARM architecture, and yet the performance of the systems varies. I mean, I don't know whose opinion you take on, but you know, Apple for some reason seems to perform better in terms of these implementation, these architectures. So where's the magic and show the picture. How's that happen? Yeah. So what ARM pioneered was a new business model. As they said, well, here's our proprietary instruction set, and we'll give you two ways to do it. We'll give you one of these implementations written in things like C called Verilog, and you can just use ours. Well, you have to pay money for that. Not only you pay, we'll give you their, you know, we'll license you to do that, or you could design your own. And so we're talking about numbers like tens of millions of dollars to have the right to design your own, since they, it's the instruction set belongs to them. So Apple got one of those, the right to build their own. Most of the other people who build like Android phones just get one of the designs from ARM to do it themselves. So Apple developed a really good microprocessor design team. They, you know, acquired a very good team that had, was building other microprocessors and brought them into the company to build their designs. So the instruction sets are the same, the specifications are the same, but their hardware design is much more efficient than I think everybody else's. And that's given Apple an advantage in the marketplace in that the iPhones tend to be the faster than most everybody else's phones that are there. It'd be nice to be able to jump around and kind of explore different little sides of this, but let me ask one sort of romanticized question. What to you is the most beautiful aspect or idea of RISC instruction set? Most beautiful aspect or idea of RISC instruction set or instruction sets or this work that you've done? You know, I'm, you know, I was always attracted to the idea of, you know, small is beautiful, right? Is that the temptation in engineering, it's kind of easy to make things more complicated. It's harder to come up with a, it's more difficult, surprisingly, to come up with a simple, elegant solution. And I think that there's a bunch of small features of RISC in general that, you know, where you can see this examples of keeping it simpler makes it more elegant. Specifically in RISC 5, which, you know, I was kind of the mentor in the program, but it was really driven by Krzysztof Sanović and two grad students, Andrew Waterman and Yen Tsip Li, is they hit upon this idea of having a subset of instructions, a nice, simple subset instructions, like 40ish instructions that all software, the software staff RISC 5 can run just on those 40 instructions. And then they provide optional features that could accelerate the performance instructions that if you needed them could be very helpful, but you don't need to have them. And that's a new, really a new idea. So RISC 5 has right now maybe five optional subsets that you can pull in, but the software runs without them. If you just want to build the, just the core 40 instructions, that's fine. You can do that. So this is fantastic educationally is you can explain computers. You only have to explain 40 instructions and not thousands of them. Also, if you invent some wild and crazy new technology like, you know, biological computing, you'd like a nice, simple instruction set and you can, RISC 5, if you implement those core instructions, you can run, you know, really interesting programs on top of that. So this idea of a core set of instructions that the software stack runs on and then optional features that if you turn them on, the compilers were used, but you don't have to, I think is a powerful idea. What's happened in the past for the proprietary instruction sets is when they add new instructions, it becomes required piece. And so that all microprocessors in the future have to use those instructions. So it's kind of like, for a lot of people as they get older, they gain weight, right? That weight and age are correlated. And so you can see these instruction sets getting bigger and bigger as they get older. So RISC 5, you know, lets you be as slim as you as a teenager. And you only have to add these extra features if you're really going to use them rather than you have no choice. You have to keep growing with the instruction set. I don't know if the analogy holds up, but that's a beautiful notion that there's, it's almost like a nudge towards here's the simple core. That's the essential. Yeah. And I think the surprising thing is still if we brought back, you know, the pioneers from the 1950s and showed them the instruction set architectures, they'd understand it. They'd say, wow, that doesn't look that different. Well, you know, I'm surprised. And it's, there's, it may be something, you know, to talk about philosophical things. I mean, there may be something powerful about those, you know, 40 or 50 instructions that all you need is these commands like these instructions that we talked about. And that is sufficient to build, to bring up on, you know, artificial intelligence. And so it's a remarkable, surprising to me that as complicated as it is to build these things, you know, microprocessors where the line widths are are narrower than the wavelength of light, you know, is this amazing technologies at some fundamental level. The commands that software executes are really pretty straightforward and haven't changed that much in decades. What a surprising outcome. So underlying all computation, all Turing machines, all artificial intelligence systems, perhaps might be a very simple instruction set like a RISC5 or it's. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what I said. I was interested to see, I had another more senior faculty colleague and he had written something in Scientific American and, you know, his 25 years in the future and his turned out about when I was a young professor and he said, yep, I checked it. And so I was interested to see how that was going to turn out for me. And it's pretty held up pretty well, but yeah, so there's, there's probably, there's some, you know, there's, there must be something fundamental about those instructions that we're capable of creating, you know, intelligence from pretty primitive operations and just doing them really fast. You kind of mentioned a different, maybe radical computational medium like biological, and there's other ideas. So there's a lot of spaces in ASIC, domain specific, and then there could be quantum computers. And so we can think of all of those different mediums and types of computation. What's the connection between swapping out different hardware systems and the instruction set? Do you see those as disjoint or are they fundamentally coupled? Yeah. So what's, so kind of, if we go back to the history, you know, when Moore's Law is in full effect and you're getting twice as many transistors every couple of years, you know, kind of the challenge for computer designers is how can we take advantage of that? How can we turn those transistors into better computers faster typically? And so there was an era, I guess in the 80s and 90s where computers were doubling performance every 18 months. And if you weren't around then, what would happen is you had your computer and your friend's computer, which was like a year, a year and a half newer, and it was much faster than your computer. And he or she could get their work done much faster than your computer because it was newer. So people took their computers, perfectly good computers, and threw them away to buy a newer computer because the computer one or two years later was so much faster. So that's what the world was like in the 80s and 90s. Well, with the slowing down of Moore's Law, that's no longer true, right? Now with, you know, not desk side computers with the laptops, I only get a new desk laptop when it breaks, right? Oh damn, the disk broke or this display broke, I gotta buy a new computer. But before you would throw them away because it just, they were just so sluggish compared to the latest computers. So that's, you know, that's a huge change of what's gone on. So, but since this lasted for decades, kind of programmers and maybe all of society is used to computers getting faster regularly. We now believe, those of us who are in computer design, it's called computer architecture, that the path forward is instead is to add accelerators that only work well for certain applications. So since Moore's Law is slowing down, we don't think general purpose computers are going to get a lot faster. So the Intel processors of the world are not going to, haven't been getting a lot faster. They've been barely improving, like a few percent a year. It used to be doubling every 18 months and now it's doubling every 20 years. So it was just shocking. So to be able to deliver on what Moore's Law used to do, we think what's going to happen, what is happening right now is people adding accelerators to their microprocessors that only work well for some domains. And by sheer coincidence, at the same time that this is happening, has been this revolution in artificial intelligence called machine learning. So with, as I'm sure your other guests have said, you know, AI had these two competing schools of thought is that we could figure out artificial intelligence by just writing the rules top down, or that was wrong. You had to look at data and infer what the rules are, the machine learning, and what's happened in the last decade or eight years as machine learning has won. And it turns out that machine learning, the hardware you build for machine learning is pretty much multiply. The matrix multiply is a key feature for the way machine learning is done. So that's a godsend for computer designers. We know how to make matrix multiply run really fast. So general purpose microprocessors are slowing down. We're adding accelerators for machine learning that fundamentally are doing matrix multiplies much more efficiently than general purpose computers have done. So we have to come up with a new way to accelerate things. The danger of only accelerating one application is how important is that application. Turns out machine learning gets used for all kinds of things. So serendipitously, we found something to accelerate that's widely applicable. And we don't even, we're in the middle of this revolution of machine learning. We're not sure what the limits of machine learning are. So this has been a kind of a godsend. If you're going to be able to excel, deliver on improved performance, as long as people are moving their programs to be embracing more machine learning, we know how to give them more performance even as Moore's law is slowing down. And counterintuitively, the machine learning mechanism you can say is domain specific, but because it's leveraging data, it's actually could be very broad in terms of in terms of the domains it could be applied in. Yeah, that's exactly right. Sort of, it's almost sort of people sometimes talk about the idea of software 2.0. We're almost taking another step up in the abstraction layer in designing machine learning systems, because now you're programming in the space of data, in the space of hyperparameters, it's changing fundamentally the nature of programming. And so the specialized devices that accelerate the performance, especially neural network based machine learning systems might become the new general. Yeah. So the thing that's interesting point out these are not coral, these are not tied together. The enthusiasm about machine learning about creating programs driven from data that we should figure out the answers from data rather than kind of top down, which classically the way most programming is done and the way artificial intelligence used to be done. That's a movement that's going on at the same time. Coincidentally, and the first word machine learning is machines, right? So that's going to increase the demand for computing, because instead of programmers being smart, writing those those things down, we're going to instead use computers to examine a lot of data to kind of create the programs. That's the idea. And remarkably, this gets used for all kinds of things very successfully. The image recognition, the language translation, the game playing, and you know, it gets into pieces of the software stack like databases and stuff like that. We're not quite sure how general purpose is, but that's going on independent of this hardware stuff. What's happening on the hardware side is Moore's law is slowing down right when we need a lot more cycles. It's failing us, it's failing us right when we need it because there's going to be a greater increase in computing. And then this idea that we're going to do so called domain specific. Here's a domain that your greatest fear is you'll make this one thing work and that'll help, you know, five percent of the people in the world. Well, this looks like it's a very general purpose thing. So the timing is fortuitous that if we can perhaps, if we can keep building hardware that will accelerate machine learning, the neural networks, that'll beat the timing will be right. That neural network revolution will transform your software, the so called software 2.0. And the software of the future will be very different from the software of the past. And just as our microprocessors, even though we're still going to have that same basic RISC instructions to run a big pieces of the software stack like user interfaces and stuff like that, we can accelerate the kind of the small piece that's computationally intensive. It's not lots of lines of code, but it takes a lot of cycles to run that code that that's going to be the accelerator piece. And so that's what makes this from a computer designers perspective a really interesting decade. What Hennessy and I talked about in the title of our Turing Warrant speech is a new golden age. We see this as a very exciting decade, much like when we were assistant professors and the RISC stuff was going on. That was a very exciting time was where we were changing what was going on. We see this happening again. Tremendous opportunities of people because we're fundamentally changing how software is built and how we're running it. So which layer of the abstraction do you think most of the acceleration might be happening? If you look in the next 10 years, Google is working on a lot of exciting stuff with the TPU. Sort of there's a closer to the hardware that could be optimizations around the closer to the instruction set. There could be optimization at the compiler level. It could be even at the higher level software stack. Yeah, it's got to be, I mean, if you think about the old RISC Sys debate, it was both, it was software hardware. It was the compilers improving as well as the architecture improving. And that's likely to be the way things are now. With machine learning, they're using domain specific languages. The languages like TensorFlow and PyTorch are very popular with the machine learning people. Those are the raising the level of abstraction. It's easier for people to write machine learning in these domain specific languages like PyTorch and TensorFlow. So where the most optimization might be happening. Yeah. And so there'll be both the compiler piece and the hardware piece underneath it. So as you kind of the fatal flaw for hardware people is to create really great hardware, but not have brought along the compilers. And what we're seeing right now in the marketplace because of this enthusiasm around hardware for machine learning is getting, you know, probably billions of dollars invested in startup companies. We're seeing startup companies go belly up because they focus on the hardware, but didn't bring the software stack along. We talked about benchmarks earlier. So I participated in machine learning didn't really have a set of benchmarks. I think just two years ago, they didn't have a set of benchmarks. And we've created something called ML Perf, which is machine learning benchmark suite. And pretty much the companies who didn't invest in the software stack couldn't run ML Perf very well. And the ones who did invest in software stack did. And we're seeing, you know, like kind of in computer architecture, this is what happens. You have these arguments about risk versus this. People spend billions of dollars in the marketplace to see who wins. It's not a perfect comparison, but it kind of sorts things out. And we're seeing companies go out of business and then companies like there's a company in Israel called Habana. They came up with machine learning accelerators. They had good ML Perf scores. Intel had acquired a company earlier called Nirvana a couple of years ago. They didn't reveal their ML Perf scores, which was suspicious. But a month ago, Intel announced that they're canceling the Nirvana product line and they've bought Habana for $2 billion. And Intel's going to be shipping Habana chips, which have hardware and software and run the ML Perf programs pretty well. And that's going to be their product line in the future. Brilliant. So maybe just to linger briefly on ML Perf. I love metrics. I love standards that everyone can gather around. What are some interesting aspects of that portfolio of metrics? Well, one of the interesting metrics is what we thought. I was involved in the start. Peter Mattson is leading the effort from Google. Google got it off the ground, but we had to reach out to competitors and say, there's no benchmarks here. We think this is bad for the field. It'll be much better if we look at examples like in the risk days, there was an effort to create a... For the people in the risk community got together, competitors got together building risk microprocessors to agree on a set of benchmarks that were called spec. And that was good for the industry. It's rather before the different risk architectures were arguing, well, you can believe my performance others, but those other guys are liars. And that didn't do any good. So we agreed on a set of benchmarks and then we could figure out who was faster between the various risk architectures. But it was a little bit faster, but that grew the market rather than people were afraid to buy anything. So we argued the same thing would happen with MLPerf. Companies like Nvidia were maybe worried that it was some kind of trap, but eventually we all got together to create a set of benchmarks and do the right thing. And we agree on the results. And so we can see whether TPUs or GPUs or CPUs are really faster and how much the faster. And I think from an engineer's perspective, as long as the results are fair, you can live with it. Okay, you kind of tip your hat to your colleagues at another institution, boy, they did a better job than us. What you hate is if it's false, right? They're making claims and it's just marketing bullshit and that's affecting sales. So from an engineer's perspective, as long as it's a fair comparison and we don't come in first place, that's too bad, but it's fair. So we wanted to create that environment for MLPerf. And so now there's 10 companies, I mean, 10 universities and 50 companies involved. So pretty much MLPerf is the way you measure machine learning performance. And it didn't exist even two years ago. One of the cool things that I enjoy about the internet has a few downsides, but one of the nice things is people can see through BS a little better with the presence of these kinds of metrics. So it's really nice companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter. Now, it's the cool thing to do is to put your engineers forward and to actually show off how well you do on these metrics. There's less of a desire to do marketing, less so. In my sort of naive viewpoint. I was trying to understand what's changed from the 80s in this era. I think because of things like social networking, Twitter and stuff like that, if you put up bullshit stuff that's just purposely misleading, you can get a violent reaction in social media pointing out the flaws in your arguments. And so from a marketing perspective, you have to be careful today that you didn't have to be careful that there'll be people who put out the flaw. You can get the word out about the flaws in what you're saying much more easily today than in the past. It used to be easier to get away with it. And the other thing that's been happening in terms of showing off engineers is just in the software side, people have largely embraced open source software. 20 years ago, it was a dirty word at Microsoft. And today Microsoft is one of the big proponents of open source software. That's the standard way most software gets built, which really shows off your engineers because you can see if you look at the source code, you can see who are making the commits, who's making the improvements, who are the engineers at all these companies who are really great programmers and engineers and making really solid contributions, which enhances their reputations and the reputation of the companies. LR But that's, of course, not everywhere. Like in the space that I work more in is autonomous vehicles. And there's still the machinery of hype and marketing is still very strong there. And there's less willingness to be open in this kind of open source way and sort of benchmark. So MLPerf represents the machine learning world is much better being open source about holding itself to standards of different, the amount of incredible benchmarks in terms of the different computer vision, natural language processing tasks is incredible. LR Historically, it wasn't always that way. I had a graduate student working with me, David Martin. So in computer, in some fields, benchmarking has been around forever. So computer architecture, databases, maybe operating systems, benchmarks are the way you measure progress. But he was working with me and then started working with Jitendra Malik. And Jitendra Malik in computer vision space, I guess you've interviewed Jitendra. And David Martin told me, they don't have benchmarks. Everybody has their own vision algorithm and the way, here's my image, look at how well I do. And everybody had their own image. So David Martin, back when he did his dissertation, figured out a way to do benchmarks. He had a bunch of graduate students identify images and then ran benchmarks to see which algorithms run well. And that was, as far as I know, kind of the first time people did benchmarks in computer vision, which was predated all the things that eventually led to ImageNet and stuff like that. But then the vision community got religion. And then once we got as far as ImageNet, then that let the guys in Toronto be able to win the ImageNet competition. And then that changed the whole world. It's a scary step actually, because when you enter the world of benchmarks, you actually have to be good to participate as opposed to... Yeah, you can just, you just believe you're the best in the world. I think the people, I think they weren't purposely misleading. I think if you don't have benchmarks, I mean, how do you know? Your intuition is kind of like the way we did just do computer architecture. Your intuition is that this is the right instruction set to do this job. I believe in my experience, my hunch is that's true. We had to get to make things more quantitative to make progress. And so I just don't know how, you know, in fields that don't have benchmarks, I don't understand how they figure out how they're making progress. We're kind of in the vacuum tube days of quantum computing. What are your thoughts in this wholly different kind of space of architectures? You know, I actually, you know, quantum computing is, idea has been around for a while and I actually thought, well, I sure hope I retire before I have to start teaching this. I'd say because I talk about, give these talks about the slowing of Moore's law and, you know, when we need to change by doing domain specific accelerators, common questions say, what about quantum computing? The reason that comes up, it's in the news all the time. So I think to keep in, the third thing to keep in mind is quantum computing is not right around the corner. There've been two national reports, one by the National Academy of Engineering and other by the Computing Consortium, where they did a frank assessment of quantum computing. And both of those reports said, you know, as far as we can tell, before you get error corrected quantum computing, it's a decade away. So I think of it like nuclear fusion, right? There've been people who've been excited about nuclear fusion a long time. If we ever get nuclear fusion, it's going to be fantastic for the world. I'm glad people are working on it, but, you know, it's not right around the corner. Those two reports to me say probably it'll be 2030 before quantum computing is something that could happen. And when it does happen, you know, this is going to be big science stuff. This is, you know, micro Kelvin, almost absolute zero things that if they vibrate, if truck goes by, it won't work, right? So this will be in data center stuff. We're not going to have a quantum cell phone. And it's probably a 2030 kind of thing. So I'm happy that our people are working on it, but just, you know, it's hard with all the news about it, not to think that it's right around the corner. And that's why we need to do something as Moore's Law is slowing down to provide the computing, keep computing getting better for this next decade. And, you know, we shouldn't be betting on quantum computing or expecting quantum computing to deliver in the next few years. It's probably further off. You know, I'd be happy to be wrong. It'd be great if quantum computing is going to commercially viable, but it will be a set of applications. It's not a general purpose computation. So it's going to do some amazing things, but there'll be a lot of things that probably, you know, the old fashioned computers are going to keep doing better for quite a while. And there'll be a teenager 50 years from now watching this video saying, look how silly David Patterson was saying. No, I just said, I said 2030. I didn't say, I didn't say never. We're not going to have quantum cell phones. So he's going to be watching it. Well, I mean, I think this is such a, you know, given that we've had Moore's Law, I just, I feel comfortable trying to do projects that are thinking about the next decade. I admire people who are trying to do things that are 30 years out, but it's such a fast moving field. I just don't know how to, I'm not good enough to figure out what's the problem is going to be in 30 years. You know, 10 years is hard enough for me. So maybe if it's possible to untangle your intuition a little bit, I spoke with Jim Keller. I don't know if you're familiar with Jim. And he is trying to sort of be a little bit rebellious and to try to think that he quotes me as being wrong. Yeah. So this, this is what you're doing for the record. Jim talks about that. He has an intuition that Moore's Law is not in fact, in fact dead yet. And then it may continue for some time to come. What are your thoughts about Jim's ideas in this space? Yeah, this is just, this is just marketing. So what Gordon Moore said is a quantitative prediction. We can check the facts, right? Which is doubling the number of transistors every two years. So we can look back at Intel for the last five years and ask him, let's look at DRAM chips six years ago. So that would be three, two year periods. So then our DRAM chips have eight times as many transistors as they did six years ago. We can look up Intel microprocessors six years ago. If Moore's Law is continuing, it should have eight times as many transistors as six years ago. The answer in both those cases is no. The problem has been because Moore's Law was kind of genuinely embraced by the semiconductor industry as they would make investments in similar equipment to make Moore's Law come true. Semiconductor improving and Moore's Law in many people's minds are the same thing. So when I say, and I'm factually correct, that Moore's Law is no longer holds, we are not doubling transistors every year's years. The downside for a company like Intel is people think that means it's stopped, that technology has no longer improved. And so Jim is trying to, counteract the impression that semiconductors are frozen in 2019 are never going to get better. So I never said that. All I said was Moore's Law is no more. And I'm strictly looking at the number of transistors. That's what Moore's Law is. There's the, I don't know, there's been this aura associated with Moore's Law that they've enjoyed for 50 years about, look at the field we're in, we're doubling transistors every two years. What an amazing field, which is an amazing thing that they were able to pull off. But even as Gordon Moore said, you know, no exponential can last forever. It lasted for 50 years, which is amazing. And this is a huge impact on the industry because of these changes that we've been talking about. So he claims, and I'm not going to go into the that we've been talking about. So he claims, because he's trying to act on it, he claims, you know, Patterson says Moore's Law is no more and look at all, look at it, it's still going. And TSMC, they say it's no longer, but there's quantitative evidence that Moore's Law is not continuing. So what I say now to try and, okay, I understand the perception problem when I say Moore's Law has stopped. Okay. So now I say Moore's Law is slowing down. And I think Jim, which is another way of, if he's, if it's predicting every two years and I say it's slowing down, then that's another way of saying it doesn't hold anymore. And, and I think Jim wouldn't disagree that it's slowing down because that sounds like it's, things are still getting better and just not as fast, which is another way of saying Moore's Law isn't working anymore. TG. It's still good for marketing. But what's your, you're not, you don't like expanding the definition of Moore's Law, sort of naturally. CM. Well, as an educator, you know, is this like modern politics? Does everybody get their own facts? Or do we have, you know, Moore's Law was a crisp, you know, it was Carver Mead looked at his Moore's Conversations drawing on a log log scale, a straight line. And that's what the definition of Moore's Law is. There's this other, what Intel did for a while, interestingly, before Jim joined them, they said, oh, no, Moore's Law isn't the number of doubling, isn't really doubling transistors every two years. Moore's Law is the cost of the individual transistor going down, cutting in half every two years. Now, that's not what he said, but they reinterpreted it because they believed that the cost of transistors was continuing to drop, even if they couldn't get twice as many chips. Many people in industry have told me that's not true anymore, that basically in more recent technologies, they got more complicated, the actual cost of transistor went up. So even the, a corollary might not be true, but certainly, you know, Moore's Law, that was the beauty of Moore's Law. It was a very simple, it's like E equals MC squared, right? It was like, wow, what an amazing prediction. It's so easy to understand, the implications are amazing, and that's why it was so famous as a prediction. And this reinterpretation of what it meant and changing is, you know, is revisionist history. And I'd be happy, and they're not claiming there's a new Moore's Law. They're not saying, by the way, instead of every two years, it's every three years. I don't think they want to say that. I think what's going to happen is new technology generations, each one is going to get a little bit slower. So it is slowing down, the improvements won't be as great, and that's why we need to do new things. Yeah, I don't like that the idea of Moore's Law is tied up with marketing. It would be nice if... Whether it's marketing or it's, well, it could be affecting business, but it could also be affecting the imagination of engineers. If Intel employees actually believe that we're frozen in 2019, well, that would be bad for Intel. Not just Intel, but everybody. Moore's Law is inspiring to everybody. But what's happening right now, talking to people who have working in national offices and stuff like that, a lot of the computer science community is unaware that this is going on, that we are in an era that's going to need radical change at lower levels that could affect the whole software stack. If you're using cloud stuff and the servers that you get next year are basically only a little bit faster than the servers you got this year, you need to know that, and we need to start innovating to start delivering on it. If you're counting on your software going to have a lot more features, assuming the computers are going to get faster, that's not true. So are you going to have to start making your software stack more efficient? Are you going to have to start learning about machine learning? So it's a warning or call for arms that the world is changing right now. And a lot of computer science PhDs are unaware of that. So a way to try and get their attention is to say that Moore's Law is slowing down and that's going to affect your assumptions. And we're trying to get the word out. And when companies like TSMC and Intel say, oh, no, no, no, Moore's Law is fine, then people think, oh, hey, I don't have to change my behavior. I'll just get the next servers. And if they start doing measurements, they'll realize what's going on. It'd be nice to have some transparency on metrics for the lay person to be able to know if computers are getting faster and not to forget Moore's Law. Yeah. There are a bunch of, most people kind of use clock rate as a measure of performance. It's not a perfect one, but if you've noticed clock rates are more or less the same as they were five years ago, computers are a little better than they are. They haven't made zero progress, but they've made small progress. So there's some indications out there. And then our behavior, right? Nobody buys the next laptop because it's so much faster than the laptop from the past. For cell phones, I think, I don't know why people buy new cell phones, you know, because the new ones announced. The cameras are better, but that's kind of domain specific, right? They're putting special purpose hardware to make the processing of images go much better. So that's the way they're doing it. They're not particularly, it's not that the ARM processor in there is twice as fast as much as they've added accelerators to help the experience of the phone. Can we talk a little bit about one other exciting space, arguably the same level of impact as your work with RISC is RAID. In 1988, you coauthored a paper, A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, hence RAID RAID. So that's where you introduced the idea of RAID. Incredible that that little, I mean little, that paper kind of had this ripple effect and had a really a revolutionary effect. So first, what is RAID? What is RAID? So this is work I did with my colleague Randy Katz and a star graduate student, Garth Gibson. So we had just done the fourth generation RISC project and Randy Katz, which had an early Apple Macintosh computer. At this time, everything was done with floppy disks, which are old technologies that could store things that didn't have much capacity and you had to get any work done, you're always sticking your little floppy disk in and out because they didn't have much capacity. But they started building what are called hard disk drives, which is magnetic material that can remember information storage for the Mac. And Randy asked the question when he saw this disk next to his Mac, gee, these are brand new small things. Before that, for the big computers, the disk would be the size of washing machines. And here's something the size of a, kind of the size of a book or so. He says, I wonder what we could do with that? Well, Randy was involved in the fourth generation RISC project here at Berkeley in the 80s. So we figured out a way how to make the computation part, the processor part go a lot faster, but what about the storage part? Can we do something to make it faster? So we hit upon the idea of taking a lot of these disks developed for personal computers and Macintoshes and putting many of them together instead of one of these washing machine size things. And so we wrote the first draft of the paper and we'd have 40 of these little PC disks instead of one of these washing machine size things. And they would be much cheaper because they're made for PCs and they could actually kind of be faster because there was 40 of them rather than one of them. And so we wrote a paper like that and sent it to one of our former Berkeley students at IBM. And he said, well, this is all great and good, but what about the reliability of these things? Now you have 40 of these things and 40 of these devices, each of which are kind of PC quality. So they're not as good as these IBM washing machines. IBM dominated the storage businesses. So the reliability is going to be awful. And so when we calculated it out, instead of it breaking on average once a year, it would break every two weeks. So we thought about the idea and said, well, we got to address the reliability. So we did it originally performance, but we had to do reliability. So the name redundant array of inexpensive disks is array of these disks inexpensive like for PCs, but we have extra copies. So if one breaks, we won't lose all the information. We'll have enough redundancy that we could let some break and we can still preserve the information. So the name is an array of inexpensive disks. This is a collection of these PCs and the R part of the name was the redundancy so they'd be reliable. And it turns out if you put a modest number of extra disks in one of these arrays, it could actually not only be as faster and cheaper than one of these washing machine disks, it could be actually more reliable because you could have a couple of breaks even with these cheap disks. Whereas one failure with the washing machine thing would knock it out. Did you have a sense just like with risk that in the 30 years that followed, RAID would take over as a mechanism for storage? I think I'm naturally an optimist, but I thought our ideas were right. I thought kind of like Moore's law, it seemed to me, if you looked at the history of the disk drives, they went from washing machine size things and they were getting smaller and smaller and the volumes were with the smaller disk drives because that's where the PCs were. So we thought that was a technological trend that the volume of disk drives was going to be getting smaller and smaller devices, which were true. They were the size of, I don't know, eight inches diameter, then five inches, then three inches in diameters. And so that it made sense to figure out how to deal things with an array of disks. So I think it was one of those things where logically, we think the technological forces were on our side, that it made sense. So we expected it to catch on, but there was that same kind of business question. IBM was the big pusher of these disk drives in the real world where the technical advantage get turned into a business advantage or not. It proved to be true. And so we thought we were sound technically and it was unclear whether the business side, but we kind of, as academics, we believe that technology should win and it did. And if you look at those 30 years, just from your perspective, are there interesting developments in the space of storage that have happened in that time? Yeah. The big thing that happened, well, a couple of things that happened, what we did had a modest amount of storage. So as redundancy, as people built bigger and bigger storage systems, they've added more redundancy so they could add more failures. And the biggest thing that happened in storage is for decades, it was based on things physically spinning called hard disk drives where you used to turn on your computer and it would make a noise. What that noise was, was the disk drives spinning and they were rotating at like 60 revolutions per second. And it's like, if you remember the vinyl records, if you've ever seen those, that's what it looked like. And there was like a needle like on a vinyl record that was reading it. So the big drive change is switching that over to a semiconductor technology called flash. So within the last, I'd say about decade is increasing fraction of all the computers in the world are using semiconductor for storage, the flash drive, instead of being magnetic, they're optical, well, they're a semiconductor writing of information very densely. And that's been a huge difference. So all the cell phones in the world use flash. Most of the laptops use flash. All the embedded devices use flash instead of storage. Still in the cloud, magnetic disks are more economical than flash, but they use both in the cloud. So it's been a huge change in the storage industry, the switching from primarily disk to being primarily semiconductor. For the individual disk, but still the RAID mechanism applies to those different kinds of disks. Yes. The people will still use RAID ideas because it's kind of what's different, kind of interesting kind of psychologically, if you think about it. People have always worried about the reliability of computing since the earliest days. So kind of, but if we're talking about computation, if your computer makes a mistake and the computer says, the computer has ways to check and say, Oh, we screwed up. We made a mistake. What happens is that program that was running, you have to redo it, which is a hassle for storage. If you've sent important information away and it loses that information, you go nuts. This is the worst. Oh my God. So if you have a laptop and you're not backing it up on the cloud or something like this, and your disk drive breaks, which it can do, you'll lose all that information and you just go crazy. So the importance of reliability for storage is tremendously higher than the importance of reliability for computation because of the consequences of it. So yes, so RAID ideas are still very popular, even with the switch of the technology. Although flash drives are more reliable, if you're not doing anything like backing it up to get some redundancy so they handle it, you're taking great risks. You said that for you and possibly for many others, teaching and research don't conflict with each other as one might suspect. And in fact, they kind of complement each other. So maybe a question I have is how has teaching helped you in your research or just in your entirety as a person who both teaches and does research and just thinks and creates new ideas in this world? Yes, I think what happens is when you're a college student, you know there's this kind of tenure system in doing research. So kind of this model that is popular in America, I think America really made it happen, is we can attract these really great faculty to research universities because they get to do research as well as teach. And that, especially in fast moving fields, this means people are up to date and they're teaching those kinds of things. But when you run into a really bad professor, a really bad teacher, I think the students think, well, this guy must be a great researcher because why else could he be here? So after 40 years at Berkeley, we had a retirement party and I got a chance to reflect and I looked back at some things. That is not my experience. I saw a photograph of five of us in the department who won the Distinguished Teaching Award from campus, a very high honor. I've got one of those, one of the highest honors. So there are five of us on that picture. There's Manuel Blum, Richard Karp, me, Randy Kass, and John Osterhaupt, contemporaries of mine. I mentioned Randy already. All of us are in the National Academy of Engineering. We've all run the Distinguished Teaching Award. Blum, Karp, and I all have Turing Awards. The highest award in computing. So that's the opposite. What's happened is they're highly correlated. So the other way to think of it, if you're very successful people or maybe successful at everything they do, it's not an either or. But it's an interesting question whether specifically, that's probably true, but specifically for teaching, if there's something in teaching that, it's the Richard Feynman idea, is there something about teaching that actually makes your research, makes you think deeper and more outside the box and more insightful? Absolutely. I was going to bring up Feynman. I mean, he criticized the Institute of Advanced Studies. So the Institute of Advanced Studies was this thing that was created near Princeton where Einstein and all these smart people went. And when he was invited, he thought it was a terrible idea. This is a university. It was supposed to be heaven, right? A university without any teaching. But he thought it was a mistake. It's getting up in the classroom and having to explain things to students and having them ask questions like, well, why is that true, makes you stop and think. So he thought, and I agree, I think that interaction between a great research university and having students with bright young minds asking hard questions the whole time is synergistic. And a university without teaching wouldn't be as vital and exciting a place. And I think it helps stimulate the research. Another romanticized question, but what's your favorite concept or idea to teach? What inspires you or you see inspire the students? Is there something that pops to mind or puts the fear of God in them? I don't know, whichever is most effective. I mean, in general, I think people are surprised. I've seen a lot of people who don't think they like teaching come give guest lectures or teach a course and get hooked on seeing the lights turn on, right? You can explain something to people that they don't understand. And suddenly they get something that's important and difficult. And just seeing the lights turn on is a real satisfaction there. I don't think there's any specific example of that. It's just the general joy of seeing them understand. SL. I have to talk about this because I've wrestled. I do martial arts. Of course, I love wrestling. I'm a huge, I'm Russian. So I've talked to Dan Gable on the podcast. So you wrestled at UCLA among many other things you've done in your life, competitively in sports and science and so on. You've wrestled. Maybe, again, continue with the romanticized questions, but what have you learned about life and maybe even science from wrestling or from? CB. Yeah, in fact, I wrestled at UCLA, but also at El Camino Community College. And just right now, we were in the state of California, we were state champions at El Camino. And in fact, I was talking to my mom and I got into UCLA, but I decided to go to the community college, which is, it's much harder to go to UCLA than the community college. And I asked, why did I make that decision? Because I thought it was because of my girlfriend. She said, well, it was the girlfriend and you thought the wrestling team was really good. And we were right. We had a great wrestling team. We actually wrestled against UCLA at a tournament and we beat UCLA as a community college, which just freshmen and sophomores. And part of the reason I brought this up is I'm going to go, they've invited me back at El Camino to give a lecture next month. And so, my friend who was on the wrestling team that we're still together, we're right now reaching out to other members of the wrestling team if we can get together for a reunion. But in terms of me, it was a huge difference. The age cut off, it was December 1st. And so, I was almost always the youngest person in my class and I matured later on, our family matured later. So, I was almost always the smallest guy. So, I took kind of nerdy courses, but I was wrestling. So, wrestling was huge for my self confidence in high school. And then, I kind of got bigger at El Camino and in college. And so, I had this kind of physical self confidence and it's translated into research self confidence. And also kind of, I've had this feeling even today in my 70s, if something going on in the streets that is bad physically, I'm not going to ignore it. I'm going to stand up and try and straighten that out. And that kind of confidence just carries through the entirety of your life. Yeah. And the same things happens intellectually. If there's something going on where people are saying something that's not true, I feel it's my job to stand up just like I would in the street. If there's something going on, somebody attacking some woman or something, I'm not standing by and letting that get away. So, I feel it's my job to stand up. So, it's kind of ironically translates. The other things that turned out for both, I had really great college and high school coaches and they believed, even though wrestling is an individual sport, that we would be more successful as a team if we bonded together, do things that we would support each other rather than everybody, you know, in wrestling it's a one on one and you could be everybody's on their own, but he felt if we bonded as a team, we'd succeed. So, I kind of picked up those skills of how to form successful teams and how to, from wrestling. And so, I think one of, most people would say one of my strengths is I can create teams of faculty, large teams of faculty grad students, pull all together for a common goal and often be successful at it. But I got both of those things from wrestling. Also, I think I heard this line about if people are in kind of collision, sports with physical contact like wrestling or football and stuff like that, people are a little bit more assertive or something. And so, I think that also comes through as, you know, and I didn't shy away from the racist debates, you know, I enjoyed taking on the arguments and stuff like that. So, I'm really glad I did wrestling. I think it was really good for my self image and I learned a lot from it. So, I think that's, you know, sports done well, you know, there's really lots of positives you can take about it, of leadership, you know, how to form teams and how to be successful. So, we've talked about metrics a lot. There's a really cool, in terms of bench press and weightlifting, pound years metric that you've developed that we don't have time to talk about, but it's a really cool one that people should look into. It's rethinking the way we think about metrics and weightlifting. But let me talk about metrics more broadly, since that appeals to you in all forms. Let's look at the most ridiculous, the biggest question of the meaning of life. If you were to try to put metrics on a life well lived, what would those metrics be? Yeah, a friend of mine, Randy Katz, said this. He said, you know, when it's time to sign off, the measure isn't the number of zeros in your bank account, it's the number of inches in the obituary in the New York Times, was he said it. I think, you know, having, and you know, this is a cliche, is that people don't die wishing they'd spent more time in the office, right? As I reflect upon my career, there have been, you know, a half a dozen, a dozen things say I've been proud of. A lot of them aren't papers or scientific results. Certainly, my family, my wife, we've been married more than 50 years, kids and grandkids, that's really precious. Education things I've done, I'm very proud of, you know, books and courses. I did some help with underrepresented groups that was effective. So it was interesting to see what were the things I reflected. You know, I had hundreds of papers, but some of them were the papers, like the risk rate stuff that I'm proud of, but a lot of them were not those things. So people who are, just spend their lives, you know, going after the dollars or going after all the papers in the world, you know, that's probably not the things that are afterwards you're going to care about. When I was, just when I got the offer from Berkeley before I showed up, I read a book where they interviewed a lot of people in all works of life. And what I got out of that book was the people who felt good about what they did was the people who affected people, as opposed to things that were more transitory. So I came into this job assuming that it wasn't going to be the papers, it was going to be relationships with the people over time that I would value, and that was a correct assessment, right? It's the people you work with, the people you can influence, the people you can help, it's the things that you feel good about towards the end of your career. It's not the stuff that's more transitory. Trey Lockerbie I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about your family, the over 50 years of being married to your childhood sweetheart. Richard Averbeck What I think I can add is, when you tell people you've been married 50 years, they want to know why. Trey Lockerbie How? Why? Richard Averbeck Yeah, I can tell you the nine magic words that you need to say to your partner to keep a good relationship. And the nine magic words are, I was wrong. You were right. I love you. Okay. And you got to say all nine. You can't say, I was wrong. You were right. You're a jerk. You know, you can't say that. So yeah, freely acknowledging that you made a mistake, the other person was right, and that you love them really gets over a lot of bumps in the road. So that's what I pass along. Trey Lockerbie Beautifully put. David, it's a huge honor. Thank you so much for the book you've written, for the research you've done, for changing the world. Thank you for talking today. Richard Averbeck Thanks for the interview. Trey Lockerbie Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Patterson. And thank you to our sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show, and Cash App. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to JordanHarbinger.com slash Lex and downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast. Click the links, buy the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars in a podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled without the E, try to figure out how to do that. It's just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau. Our life is faded away by detail. Simplify, simplify. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

David Patterson: Computer Architecture and Data Storage | Lex Fridman Podcast #104

The following is a conversation with Bob Langer, professor at MIT, and one of the most cited researchers in history, specializing in biotechnology fields of drug delivery systems and tissue engineering. He has bridged theory and practice by being a key member and driving force in launching many successful biotech companies out of MIT. This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. His research and companies are at the forefront of developing treatment for COVID 19, including a promising vaccine candidate. Quick summary of the ads to sponsors cash app and masterclass. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using code Lex podcast and signing up a masterclass.com slash Lex, click on the links by the stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast and in general, the journey I'm on in my research and startup. This is the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and Apple podcast supported on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This show is presented by cash app, the number one finance app in the app store. When you get it, use code Lex podcast cash app lets you send money to friends by Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since cash app allows you to send and receive money digitally. Let me mention a surprising fact related to physical money. Of all the currency in the world, roughly 8% of it is actual physical money. The other 92% of money only exists digitally. So again, if you get cash app from the App Store, Google Play and use the code Lex podcast, you get $10. And cash app will also donate $10 to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. This show is sponsored by masterclass, sign up at masterclass.com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. For $180 a year you get an all access pass to watch courses from to list some of my favorites. Chris Hadfield on space exploration near the grass Tyson on scientific thinking and communication will write creator some city and Sims on game design. Carlos Santana on guitar. Europa is probably one of the most beautiful guitar instrumentals ever. Garak is part of on chess, Daniel Negrano on poker and many more. Chris Hadfield explaining how rockets work and experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money. You can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up a masterclass dot com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Bob Langer. You have a bit of a love for magic. Do you see a connection between magic and science? I do. I think magic can surprise you. And, uh, you know, and I think science can surprise you. And there's something magical about, about science. I mean, making discoveries and things like that. Yeah. So on the, and then on the magic side, is there some kind of engineering scientific process to the tricks themselves? Do you see, cause there's a duality to it. One is you're the, um, you're, you're sort of the person inside that knows how the whole thing works, how the universe of the magic trick works. And then from the outside observer, which is kind of the role of the scientists, you, the people that observe the magic trick don't know at least initially anything that's going on. Do you see that kind of duality? Well, I think the duality that I see is fascination. You know, I think of it, you know, when I watch magic myself, I'm always fascinated by it. Sometimes it's a puzzle to think how it's done, but just the sheer fact that something that you never thought could happen does happen. And I think about that in science too, you know, sometimes you, it's something that, that you might dream about and hoping to discover, maybe you do in some way or form. What is the most amazing magic trick you've ever seen? Well, there's one I like, which is called the invisible pack. And the way it works is you have this pack and you hold it up. Well, first you say to somebody, this is invisible and this deck and you say, well, shuffle it. They shuffle it, but you know, they're sort of make believe. And then you say, okay, I'd like you to pick a card, any card and show it to me. And you show it to me and I look at it. And let's say it's the three of hearts. I said, we'll put it back in the deck. But what I'd like you to do is turn it up upside down from every other card in the deck. So they do that imaginary. And I say, do you want to shuffle it again? And they shuffle it. And I said, well, so there's still one card upside down from every other card in the deck. I said, what is that? And they said, well, three hearts. So what just so happens in my back pocket, I have this deck, it's, you know, it's a real deck. I show it to you and I just open it up. And there's just one card upside down. And it's the three of hearts. And, and you can do this trick. I can, if I don't, I would have probably brought it. All right. Well, beautiful. Let's get into the, into the science. As of today, you have over 295,000 citations. An H index of 269. You're one of the most cited people in history and the most cited engineer in history. And yet nothing great, I think is ever achieved without failure. So the interesting part, what rejected papers, ideas, efforts in your life or most painful, or had the biggest impact on your life? Well, it's interesting. I mean, I've had plenty of rejection too, you know, but I suppose one way I think about this is that when I first started, and this certainly had an impact both ways, you know, I first started, we made two big discoveries and they were kind of interrelated. I mean, one was, I was trying to isolate with my postdoctoral advisor, Judah Folkman, substances that could stop blood vessels from growing and nobody had done that before. And so that was part A, let's say part B is we had to develop a way to study that. And what was critical to study that was to have a way to slowly release those substances for, you know, more than a day, you know, maybe months. And that had never been done before either. So we published the first one we sent to Nature, the journal, and they rejected it. And then we sent it, we revised it, we sent it to Science and they accepted it. And the other, the opposite happened, we sent it to Science and they rejected it. And then we sent it to Nature and they accepted it. But I have to tell you, when we got the rejections, it was really upsetting. I thought, you know, I'd done some really good work. And Dr. Folkman thought we'd done some really good work. And, and, but it was very depressing to, you know, get rejected like that. If you can linger on just the feeling or the thought process when you get the rejection, especially early on in your career, what, I mean, you don't know, now people know you as a brilliant scientist, but at the time, I'm sure you're full of self doubt. And did you believe that maybe this idea is actually quite terrible, that it could have been done much better? Or is there underlying confidence? What was the feelings? Well, you feel depressed and I felt the same way when I got grants rejected, which I did a lot in the beginning. I guess part of me, you know, you have multiple emotions. One is being sad and being upset and also being maybe a little bit angry because you didn't feel the reviewers didn't get it. But then as I thought about it more, I thought, well, maybe I just didn't explain it well enough. And you know, that, you know, that you go through stages. And so you say, well, okay, I'll explain it better next time. And certainly you get reviews and when you get the reviews, you see what they either didn't like or didn't understand. And then you try to incorporate that into your next versions. You've given advice to students to do something big, do something that really can change the world rather than something incremental. How did you yourself seek out such ideas? Is there a process? Is there a sort of a rigorous process? Or is it more spontaneous? It's more spontaneous. I mean, part of its exposure to things, part of its seeing other people, like I mentioned, Dr. Folkman, he was my postdoctoral advisor, he was very good at that, you could sort of see that he had big ideas. And I certainly met a lot of people who didn't. And I think you could spot an idea that might have potential when you see it, you know, because it could have very broad implications, whereas a lot of people might just keep doing derivative stuff. And so I don't know. But it's not something that I've ever done. Systematically, I don't think. So in the space of ideas, how many are just when you see them? It's just magic. It's something that you see that could be impactful if you dig deeper. Yeah, it's sort of hard to say because there's multiple levels of ideas. One type of thing is like a new, you know, creation that you could engineer tissues for the first time or make dishes from scratch on the first time. But another thing is really just deeply understanding something. And that's important too. So and that may lead to other things. So sometimes you could think of a new technology, or I thought of a new technology. But other times, things came from just the process of trying to discover things. So it's never and you don't necessarily know, like people talk about aha moments, but I don't know if I've, I mean, I certainly feel like I've had some ideas that I really like. But it's taken me a long time to go from the thought process of starting it to all of a sudden, knowing that it might work. So if you take drug delivery, for example, is the notion is the initial notion, kind of a very general one, that we should be able to do something like this. And then you start to ask the questions of Well, how would you do it and then and then digging and digging and digging? I think that's right. I think it depends. I mean, there are many different examples. The example I gave about delivering large molecules, which we used to study these blood vessel inhibitors. I mean, there, we had to invent something that would do that. But other times, it's, it's, it's different. Sometimes it's really understanding what goes on in terms of understanding the mechanisms. And so it's, it's, it's not a single thing. And there are many different parts to it, you know, over the years, we've invented different or discovered different principles for aerosols for delivering, you know, genetic therapy agents, you know, all kinds of things. So let's explore some of the key ideas you've touched on in your life. Let's start with the basics. Okay. So first, let me ask, how complicated is the biology and chemistry of the human body from the perspective of trying to affect some parts of it in a positive way? So that you know, for me, especially coming from the field of computer science and computer engineering and robotics, it seems that the human body is exceptionally complicated, and how the heck you can figure out anything is amazing. I agree with you. I think it's super complicated. I mean, we're still just scratching the surface in many ways. But I feel like we have made progress in different ways. And some of its by really understanding things like we were just talking about other times, you know, you might, or somebody might we or others might invent technologies that might be helpful on exploring that. And I think over many years, we've understood things better and better, but we still have such a long ways to go. Are there? I mean, if you just look at the other things that are there knobs that are reliably controllable about the human body, if you consider is there is it? So if you start to think about controlling various aspects of when we talk about drug delivery a little bit, but controlling various aspects chemically of the human body, is there a solid understanding across the populations of humans that are solid, reliable knobs that can be controlled? I think that's hard to do. But on the other hand, whenever we make a new drug or medical device, to a certain extent, we're doing that, you know, in a small way, what you just said, but I don't know that there are great knobs. I mean, and we're learning about those knobs all the time. But if there's a biological pathway or something that you can affect, or understand, I mean, then that might be such a knob. So what is a pharmaceutical drug? How do you do? How do you discover a specific one? How do you test it? How do you understand it? How do you ship it? Yeah, well, I'll give an example, which goes back to what I said before. So when I was doing my postdoctoral work with Judah Folkman, we wanted to come up with drugs that would stop blood vessels from growing or alternatively make them grow. And actually, people didn't even believe that, that those things could happen. But could we pause on that for a second? Sure. What is a blood vessel? What does it mean for a blood vessel to grow and shrink? And why is that important? Sure. So a blood vessel is could be an artery or vein or a capillary. And it, you know, provides oxygen, it provides nutrients gets rid of waste. So, you know, to different parts of your body if you so so the blood vessels end up being very, very important. And, you know, if you have cancer, blood vessels grow into the tumor. And that's part of what enables the tumor to get bigger. And that's also part of what enables the tumor to metastasize and which means spread throughout the body and ultimately kill somebody. So that was part of what we were trying to do. We tried what we wanted to see if we could find substances that could stop that from happening. So first, I mean, there are many steps. First, we had to develop a bio assay to study blood vessel growth. Again, there wasn't one. That's where we needed the polymer systems because the blood vessels grew slowly took months. That so after we had the polymer system and we had the bio assay, then I isolated many different molecules initially from cartilage. And almost all of them didn't work. But we were fortunate we found one it wasn't purified, but we found one that did work. And that paper that was this paper I mentioned science in 1976. Those were really the isolation of some of the very first angiogenesis and blood vessel inhibitors. So there's a lot of words there. Yeah, let's go. First of all, polymer molecules, big, big molecules. So the what are polymers? What's bio assay? What is the process of trying to isolate this whole thing simplified to where you can control and experiment with it? Polymers are like plastics or like plastics or rubber. What were some of the other questions? Sorry, so a polymer, some plastics and rubber, and that means something that has structure and that could be useful for what? Well, in this case, it would be something that could be useful for delivering a molecule for a long time. So it could slowly diffuse out of that at a controlled rate to where you wanted it to go. So then you would find the idea is that there would be a particular blood vessels that you can target, say they're connected somehow to a tumor that you could target and over a long period of time to be able to place the polymer there and it'd be delivering a certain kind of chemical. That's correct. I think what you said is good. So so that it would deliver the molecule or the chemical that would stop the blood vessels from going over a long enough time so that it really could happen. So that was sort of the what we call the bio assay is the way that we would study that. So, sorry, so what is a bio assay? Which part is the bio assay? All of it. In other words, the bio assay is the way you study blood vessel growth. The blood vessel growth and you can control that somehow with is there an understanding what kind of chemicals could control the growth of a blood vessel? Sure. Well, now there is, but then when I started, there wasn't and that that gets to your original question. So you go through various steps. We did the first steps. We showed that a such molecules existed and then we developed techniques for studying them. And we even isolated fractions, you know, groups of substances that would do it. But what would happen over the next, we did that in 1976, we published that what would happen over the next 28 years is other people would follow in our footsteps. I mean, we tried to do some stuff too, but ultimately to make a new drug takes billions of dollars. So what happened was there were different growth factors that people would isolate, sometimes using the techniques that we developed. And then they would figure out using some of those techniques, ways to stop those growth factors and ways to stop the blood vessels from growing. That like I say, it took 28 years, it took billions of dollars and work by many companies like Genetec. But in 2004, 28 years after we started, the first one of those Avastin got approved by the FDA. And that's become, you know, one of the top biotech selling drugs in history. And it's been approved for all kinds of cancers and actually for many eye diseases too, where you have abnormal blood vessel growth, macular. So in general, one of the key ways you can alleviate, what's the hope in terms of tumors associated with cancerous tumors? What can you help by being able to control the growth of vessels? So if you cut off the blood supply, you cut off the, it's kind of like a war almost, right? If the nutrition is going to the tumor and you can cut it off, I mean, you starve the tumor and it becomes very small, it may disappear or it's going to be much more amenable to other therapies because it is tiny, you know, like, you know, chemotherapy or immunotherapy is going to be, have a much easier time against a small tumor than a big one. Is that an obvious idea? I mean, it seems like a very clever strategy in this war against cancer. Well, you know, in retrospect, it's an obvious idea, but when Dr. Folkman, my boss first proposed it, it wasn't, a lot of people didn't thought he was pretty crazy. And so in what sense, if you can sort of linger on it, when you're thinking about these ideas at the time, were you feeling you're out in the dark? So how much mystery is there about the whole thing? How much just blind experimentation, if you can put yourself in that mindset from years ago? Yeah. Well, there was, I mean, for me, actually, it wasn't just the idea. It was that I didn't know a lot of biology or biochemistry. So I certainly felt I was in the dark, but I kept trying and I kept trying to learn and I kept plugging. But I mean, a lot of it was being in the dark. So the human body is complicated, right? We'll establish this. Quantum mechanics in physics is a theory that works incredibly well, but we don't really necessarily understand the underlying nature of it. So are drugs the same in that you're ultimately trying to show that the thing works to do something that you try to do, but you don't necessarily understand the fundamental mechanisms by which it's doing it? It really varies. I think sometimes people do know them because they've figured out pathways and ways to interfere with them. Other times it is shooting in the dark. It really has varied. Okay. And sometimes people make serendipitous discoveries and they don't even realize what they did. So what is the discovery process for a drug? You said a bunch of people trying to work with this. Is it a kind of a mix of serendipitous discovery and art, or is there a systematic science to trying different chemical reactions and how they affect whatever you're trying to do, like shrink blood vessels? Yeah, I don't think there's a single way to go about something in terms of characterizing the entire drug discovery process. If I look at the blood vessel one, yeah, there the first step was to have the kinds of theories that Dr. Folkman had. The second step was to have the techniques where you could study blood vessel growth for the first time and at least quantitate or semi quantitate it. Third step was to find substances that would stop blood vessels from growing. Fourth step was to maybe purify those substances. There are many other steps too. I mean, before you have an effective drug, you have to show that it's safe. You have to show that it's effective. And you start with animals. You ultimately go to patients. And there are multiple kinds of clinical trials you have to do. If you step back, is it amazing to you that we descendants of great apes are able to create drugs, chemicals that are able to improve some aspects of our bodies? Or is it quite natural that we're able to discover these kinds of things? Well, at a high level, it is amazing. I mean, evolution is amazing. The way I look at your question, the fact that we have evolved the way we've done, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. So let's talk about drug delivery. What are the difficult problems in drug delivery? What is drug delivery from starting from your early seminal work in the field to today? Well, drug delivery is getting a drug to go where you want it, at the level you want it, in a safe way. Some of the big challenges, I mean, there are a lot. I mean, I'd say one is, could you target the right cell? Like, we talked about cancers or some way to deliver a drug just to a cancer cell and no other cell. Another challenge is to get drugs across different barriers. Like, could you ever give insulin orally? Could you, or give it passively transdermally? Can you get drugs across the blood brain barrier? I mean, there are lots of big challenges. Can you make smart drug delivery systems that might respond to physiologic signals in the body? Oh, interesting. So smart, they have some kind of sense, a chemical sensor, or is there something more than a chemical sensor that's able to respond to something in the body? Could be either one. I mean, one example might be if you were diabetic, if you got more glucose, could you get more insulin? But that's just an example. Is there some way to control the actual mechanism of delivery in response to what the body's doing? Yes, there is. I mean, one of the things that we've done is encapsulate what are called beta cells. Those are insulin producing cells in a way that they're safe and protected. And then what'll happen is glucose will go in and the cells will make insulin. And so that's an example. So from an AI robotics perspective, how close are these drug delivery systems to something like a robot? Or is it totally wrong to think about them as intelligent agents? And how much room is there to add that kind of intelligence into these delivery systems, perhaps in the future? Yeah, I think it depends on the particular delivery system. Of course, one of the things people are concerned about is cost, and if you add a lot of bells and whistles to something, it'll cost more. But I mean, we, for example, have made what I'll call intelligent microchips that can, where you can send a signal and you'll release drug in response to that signal. And I think systems like that microchip someday have the potential to do what you and I were just talking about, that there could be a signal like glucose and it could have some instruction to say when there's more glucose, deliver more insulin. So do you think it's possible that there, that could be robotic type systems roaming our body sort of long term and be able to deliver certain kinds of drugs in the future? You see, do you see that kind of future? Someday, I don't think we're very close to it yet, but someday, you know that that's nanotechnology and that would mean even miniaturizing some of the things that I just discussed. And we're certainly not at that point yet, but someday I expect we will be. So some of it is just the shrinking of the technology. That's a part of it, that's one of the things. In general, what role do you see AI sort of, there's a lot of work now with using data to make intelligent, create systems that make intelligent decisions. Do you see any of that data driven kind of computing systems having a role in any part of this, into the delivery of drugs, the design of drugs and any part of the chain? I do, I think that AI can be useful in a number of parts of the chain. I mean, one, I think if you get a large amount of information, you know, say you have some chemical data because you've done high throughput screens and let's, I'll just make this up, but let's say I have a, I'm trying to come up with a drug to treat disease X, whatever that disease is and I have a test for that and hopefully a fast test and let's say I test 10,000 chemical substances and a couple work, most of them don't work, some maybe work a little, but if I had a, with the right kind of artificial intelligence, maybe you could look at the chemical structures and look at what works and see if there's certain commonalities, look at what doesn't work and see what commonalities there are and then maybe use that somehow to predict the next generation of things that you would test. As a tangent, what are your thoughts on our society's relationship with pharmaceutical drugs? Do we, and perhaps I apologize if this is a philosophical broader question, but do we over rely on them? Do we improperly prescribe them? In what ways is the system working well and what way can it improve? Well, I think pharmaceutical drugs are really important. I mean, the life expectancy and life quality of people over many, many years has increased tremendously and I think that's a really good thing. I think one thing that would also be good is if we could extend that more and more to people in the developing world, which is something that our lab has been doing with the Gates Foundation or trying to do. So I think ways in which it could improve, I mean, if there was some way to reduce costs, that's certainly an issue people are concerned about. If there was some way to help people in poor countries, that would also be a good thing. And then of course, we still need to make better drugs for so many diseases. I mean, cancer, diabetes. I mean, there's heart disease and rare diseases. There are many, many situations where it'd be great if we could do better and help more people. Can we talk about another exciting space, which is tissue engineering? What is tissue engineering or regenerative medicine? Yeah, so that tissue engineering or regenerative medicine have to do with building an organ or tissue from scratch. So someday maybe we can build a liver or make new cartilage and also would enable you to someday create organs on a chip, which we and others are trying to do, which might lead to better drug testing and maybe less testing on animals or people. Organs on a chip, that sounds fascinating. So what are the various ways to generate tissue? And how do, so is it, you know, the one is of course from stem cells. Is there other methods? What are the different possible flavors here? Yeah, well, I think, I mean, there's multiple components. One is having generally some type of scaffold. That's what Jay Vacanti and I started many, many years ago. And then on that scaffold, you might put different cell types, which could be a cartilage cell, a bone cell, could be a stem cell that might differentiate into different things, could be more than one cell. And the scaffold, sorry to interrupt, is kind of like a canvas that's a structure that you can, on which the cells can grow? I think that's a good explanation what you just did. I'll have to use that, the canvas, that's good. Yeah, so I think that that's fair. You know, and the chip could be such a canvas. Could be fibers that are made of plastics that you'd put in the body someday. And when you say chip, do you mean electronic chip? Like a... Not necessarily, it could be though. But it doesn't have to be, it could just be a structure that's not in vivo, so to speak, that's, you know, that's outside the body. So is there... Canvas is not a bad word. So is there a possibility to weave into this canvas a computational component? So if we talk about electronic chips, some ability to sense, control, some aspect of this growth process for the tissue. I would say the answer to that is yes. I think right now people are working mostly on validating these kinds of chips for saying, well, it does work as effectively, or hopefully as just putting something in the body. But I think someday what you suggested, you certainly would be possible. So what kind of tissues can we engineer today? What would, yeah. Yeah, well, so skin's already been made and approved by the FDA. There are advanced clinical trials, like what are called phase three trials, that are at complete or near completion for making new blood vessels. One of my former students, Laura Nicholson, led a lot of that. Oh, that's amazing. So human skin can be grown. That's already approved in the entire, the FDA process. So that means what, so one, that means you can grow that tissue and do various kinds of experiments in terms of drugs and so on. But what does that, does that mean that some kind of healing and treatment of different conditions for unhuman beings? Yes, I mean, they've been approved now for, I mean, different groups have made them, different companies and different professors, but they've been approved for burn victims and for patients with diabetic skin ulcers. That's amazing. Okay, so skin, what else? Well, at different stages, people are, like skin, blood vessels, there's clinical trials going now for helping patients hear better, for patients that might be paralyzed, for patients that have different eye problems. I mean, and different groups have worked on just about everything, new liver, new kidneys. I mean, there've been all kinds of work done in this area. Some of it's early, but there's certainly a lot of activity. What about neural tissue? Yeah. The nervous system and even the brain. Well, there've been people out of working on that too. We've done a little bit with that, but there are people who've done a lot on neural stem cells and I know Evan Snyder, who's been one of our collaborators on some of our spinal cord works done work like that and there've been other people as well. Is there challenges for the, when it is part of the human body, is there challenges to getting the body to accept this new tissue that's being generated? How do you solve that kind of challenge? There can be problems with accepting it. I think maybe in particular, you might mean rejection by the body. So there are multiple ways that people are trying to deal with that. One way is, which was what we've done with Dan Anderson, who was one of my former postdocs and I mentioned this a little bit before for a pancreas, is encapsulating the cells. So immune cells or antibodies can't get in and attack them. So that's a way to protect them. Other strategies could be making the cells non immunogenic, which might be done by different either techniques which might mask them or using some gene editing approaches. So there are different ways that people are trying to do that. And of course, if you use the patient's own cells or cells from a close relative, that might be another way. It increases the likelihood that it'll get accepted if you use the patient's own cells. Yes. And then finally, there's immunosuppressive drugs, which will suppress the immune response. That's right now what's done, say, for a liver transplant. The fact that this whole thing works is fascinating, at least from my outside perspective. Will we one day be able to regenerate any organ or part of the human body? Any of you? I mean, it's exciting to think about future possibilities of tissue engineering. Do you see some tissues more difficult than others? What are the possibilities here? Yeah, well, of course, I'm an optimist. And I also feel the timeframe, if we're talking about someday, someday could be hundreds of years. But I think that, yes, someday, I think we will be able to regenerate many things. And there are different strategies that one might use. One might use some cells themselves. One might use some molecules that might help regenerate the cells. And so I think there are different possibilities. What do you think that means for longevity? If we look maybe not someday, but 10, 20 years out, the possibilities of tissue engineering, the possibilities of the research that you're doing, does it have a significant impact on the longevity of human life? I don't know that we'll see a radical increase in longevity, but I think that in certain areas, we'll see people live better lives and maybe somewhat longer lives. What's the most beautiful scientific idea in bioengineering that you've come across in your years of research? I apologize for the romantic question. No, that's an interesting question. I certainly think what's happening right now with CRISPR is a beautiful idea. That certainly wasn't my idea. I mean, but I think it's very interesting here what people have capitalized on is that there's a mechanism by which bacteria are able to destroy viruses. And that understanding that leads to machinery to sort of cut and paste genes and fix a cell. So that kind of, do you see a promise for that kind of ability to copy and paste? I mean, like we said, the human body is complicated. Is that, that seems exceptionally difficult to do. I think it is exceptionally difficult to do, but that doesn't mean that it won't be done. There's a lot of companies and people trying to do it. And I think in some areas it will be done. Some of the ways that you might lower the bar are not, are just taking, like not necessarily doing it directly, but you could take a cell that might be useful, but you want to give it some cancer killing capabilities, something like what's called a CAR T cell. And that might be a different way of somehow making a CAR T cell and maybe making it better. So there might be sort of easier things and rather than just fixing the whole body. So the way a lot of things have moved with medicine over time is stepwise. So I can see things that might be easier to do than say, fix a brain. That would be very hard to do, but maybe someday that'll happen too. So in terms of stepwise, that's an interesting notion. Do you see that if you look at medicine or bioengineering, do you see that there is these big leaps that happen every decade or so, or some distant period, or is it a lot of incremental work? Not, I don't mean to reduce its impact by saying it's incremental, but is there sort of phase shifts in the science, big leaps? I think there's both. Every so often a new technique or a new technology comes out. I mean, genetic engineering was an example. I mentioned CRISPR. I think every so often things happen that make a big difference, but still there's to try to really make progress, make a new drug, make a new device. There's a lot of things. I don't know if I'd call them incremental, but there's a lot, a lot of work that needs to be done. Absolutely. So you have over, numbers could be off, but it's a big amount. You have over 1,100 current or pending patents that have been licensed, sublicensed to over 300 companies. What's your view, what in your view are the strengths and what are the drawbacks of the patenting process? Well, I think for the most part, there's strengths. I think that if you didn't have patents, especially in medicine, you'd never get the funding that it takes to make a new drug or a new device. I mean, which according to Tufts, to make a new drug costs over $2 billion right now. And nobody would even come close to giving you that money, any of that money, if it weren't for the patent system, because then anybody else could do it. That then leads to the negative though. Sometimes somebody does have a very successful drug and you certainly wanna try to make it available to everybody. And so the patent system allowed it to happen in the first place, but maybe it'll impede it after a little bit, or certainly to some people or to some companies, once it is out there. What's the, on the point of the cost, what would you say is the most expensive part of the $2 billion of making a drug? Human clinical trials. That is by far the most expensive. In terms of money or pain or both? Well, money, but pain goes, it's hard to know. I mean, but usually proving things that are, proving that something new is safe and effective in people is almost always the biggest expense. Could you linger on that for just a little longer and describe what it takes to prove, for people that don't know, in general, what it takes to prove that something is effective on humans? Well, you'd have to take a particular disease, but the process is you start out with, usually you start out with cells, then you'd go to animal models. Usually you have to do a couple animal models. And of course the animal models aren't perfect for humans. And then you have to do three sets of clinical trials at a minimum, a phase one trial to show that it's safe in small number of patients, a phase two trial to show that it's effective in a small number of patients, and a phase three trial to show that it's safe and effective in a large number of patients. And that could end up being hundreds or thousands of patients. And they have to be really carefully controlled studies. And you'd have to manufacture the drug, you'd have to really watch those patients. You have to be very concerned that it is gonna be safe. And then you look and see, does it treat the disease better than whatever the gold standard was before that? Assuming there was one. That's a really interesting line. Show that it's safe first, and then that it's effective. First do no harm. First do no harm, that's right. So how, again, if you can linger in a little bit, how does the patenting process work? Yeah, well, you do a certain amount of research, though that's not necessarily has to be the case. But for us, usually it is. Usually we do a certain amount of research and make some findings. And we had a hypothesis, let's say we prove it, or we make some discovery, we invent some technique. And then we write something up, what's called a disclosure. We give it to MIT's technology transfer office. They then give it to some patent attorneys, and they use that plus talking to us and work on writing a patent. And then you go back and forth with the USPTO, that's the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And they may not allow it the first, second or third time, but they will tell you why they don't. And you may adjust it, and maybe you'll eventually get it, and maybe you won't. So you've been part of launching 40 companies together worth, again, numbers could be outdated, but an estimated $23 billion. You've described your thoughts on a formula for startup success. So perhaps you can describe that formula and in general describe what does it take to build a successful startup? Well, I'd break that down into a couple of categories. And I'm a scientist and certainly from the science standpoint, I'll go over that. But I actually think that really the most important thing is probably the business people that I work with. And when I look back at the companies that have done well, it's been because we've had great business people. And when they haven't done as well, we haven't had as good business people. But from a science standpoint, I think about that we've made some kind of discovery that is almost what I'd call a platform that you could use it for different things. And certainly the drug delivery system example that I gave earlier is a good example of that. You could use it for drug A, B, C, D, E and so forth. And that I'd like to think that we've taken it far enough so that we've written at least one really good paper in a top journal, hopefully a number that we've reduced it to practice and animal models that we've filed patents, maybe had issued patents that have what I'll call very good and broad claims. That's sort of the key on a patent. And then in our case, a lot of times when we've done it, a lot of times it's somebody in the lab like a postdoc or graduate student that spent a big part of their life doing it and that they wanna work at that company because they have this passion that they wanna see something they did make a difference in people's lives. Maybe you can mention the business component. It's funny to hear Grace had to say that there's value to business folks. Oh yeah, well. That's not always said. So what value, what business instinct is valuable to make a startup successful, a company successful? I think the business aspects are, you have to be a good judge of people so that you hire the right people. You have to be strategic so you figure out if you do have that platform that could be used for all these different things. And knowing that medical research is so expensive, what thing are you gonna do first, second, third, fourth and fifth? I think you need to have a good, what I'll call FDA regulatory clinical trial strategy. I think you have to be able to raise money incredibly. So there are a lot of things. You have to be good with people, good manager of people. So the money and the people part I get, but the stuff before in terms of deciding the A, B, C, D, if you have a platform which drugs to first take a testing, you see nevertheless scientists as not being always too good at that process. Well, I think they're a part of the process, but I'd say there's probably, I'm gonna just make this up, but maybe six or seven criteria that you wanna use and it's not just science. I mean, the kinds of things that I would think about is, is the market big or small? Is the, are there good animal models for it so that you could test it and it wouldn't take 50 years? Are the clinical trials that could be set up ones that have clear end points where you can make a judgment? And another issue would be competition. Are there other ways that some companies out there are doing it? Another issue would be reimbursement. You know, can it get reimbursed? So a lot of things that you have manufacturing issues you'd wanna consider. So I think there are really a lot of things that go into whether you, what you do first, second, third, or fourth. So you lead one of the largest academic labs in the world with over $10 million in annual grants and over a hundred researchers, probably over a thousand since the lab's beginning. Researchers can be individualistic and eccentric. How do I put it nicely? There you go, eccentric. So what insights into research leadership can you give having to run such a successful lab with so much diverse talent? Well, I don't know that I'm any expert. I think that what you do to me, I mean, I just want, I mean, this is gonna sound very simplistic, but I just want people in the lab to be happy, to be doing things that I hope will make the world a better place, to be working on science that can make the world a better place. And I guess my feeling is if we're able to do that, you know, it kind of runs itself. So how do you make a researcher happy in general? I think when people feel, I mean, this is gonna sound like, again, simplistic or maybe like motherhood and apple pie, but I think if people feel they're working on something really important that can affect many other people's lives and they're making some progress, they'll feel good about it and they'll feel good about themselves and they'll be happy. But through brainstorming and so on, what's your role and how difficult is it as a group in this collaboration to arrive at these big questions that might have impact? Well, the big questions come from many different ways. Sometimes it's trying to, things that I might think of or somebody in the lab might think of, which could be a new technique or to understand something better. But gee, we've had people like Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation come to us and Juvenile Diabetes Foundation come to us and say, gee, could you help us on these things? And I mean, that's good too. It doesn't happen just one way. And I mean, you've kind of mentioned it, happiness, but is there something more, how do you inspire a researcher to do the best work of their life? So you mentioned passion and passion is a kind of fire. Do you see yourself having a role to keep that fire going, to build it up, to inspire the researchers through the pretty difficult process of going from idea to big question, to big answer? I think so. I think I try to do that by talking to people going over their ideas and their progress. I try to do it as an individual. Certainly when I talk about my own career, I had my setbacks at different times and people know that, that know me. And you just try to keep pushing and so forth. But yeah, I think I try to do that. But yeah, I think I try to do that as the one who leads the lab. So you have this exceptionally successful lab and one of the great institutions in the world, MIT. And yet sort of, at least in my neck of the woods in computer science and artificial intelligence, a lot of the research is kind of, a lot of the great researchers, not everyone, but some are kind of going to industry. A lot of the research is moving to industry. What do you think about the future of science in general? Is there drawbacks? Is there strength to the academic environment that you hope will persist? How does it need to change? What needs to stay the same? What are your thoughts on this whole landscape of science and its future? Well, first I think going to industry is good, but I think being in academia is good. You know, I have lots of students who've done both and they've had great careers doing both. I think from an academic standpoint, I mean, the biggest concern probably that people feel today, you know, at a place like MIT or other research heavy institutions is gonna be funding and particular funding that's not super directed, you know, so that you can do basic research. I think that's probably the number one thing, but you know, it would be great if we as a society could come up with better ways to teach, you know, so that people all over could learn better. You know, so I think there are a number of things that would be good to be able to do better. So again, you're very successful in terms of funding, but do you still feel the pressure of that, of having to seek funding? Does it affect the science or is it, or can you simply focus on doing the best work of your life and the funding comes along with that? I'd say the last 10 or 15 years, we've done pretty well funding, but I always worry about it. You know, it's like you're still operating on more soft money than hard. And so I always worry about it, but we've been fortunate that places have come to us like the Gates Foundation and others, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, some companies, and they're willing to give us funding and we've gotten government money as well. We have a number of NIH grants and I've always had that and that's important to me too. So I worry about it, but you know, I just view that as a part of the process. Now, if you put yourself in the shoes of a philanthropist, like say I gave you $100 billion right now, but you couldn't spend it on your own research. So how hard is it to decide which labs to invest in, which ideas, which problems, which solutions? You know, cause funding is so much, such an important part of progression of science in today's society. So if you put yourself in the shoes of a philanthropist, how hard is that problem? How would you go about solving it? Sure, well, I think what I do, the first thing is different philanthropists have different visions. And I think the first thing is to form a concrete vision of what you want. Some people, I mean, I'll just give you two examples of people that I know. David Koch was very interested in cancer research and part of that was that he had prostate cancer. And a number of people do that along those lines. They've had somebody, they've either had cancer themselves or somebody they loved had cancer and they wanna put money into cancer research. Bill Gates, on the other hand, I think when he had got his fortune, I mean, he thought about it and felt, well, how could he have the greatest impact? And he thought about, you know, helping people in the developing world and medicines and different things like that, like vaccines that might be really helpful for people in the developing world. And so I think first you start out with that vision. Once you start out with that vision, whatever vision it is, then I think you try to ask the question, who in the world does the best work if that was your goal? I mean, but you really, I think have to have a defined vision. Vision first. Yeah, and I think that's what people do. I mean, I have never seen anybody do it otherwise. I mean, and that, by the way, may not be the best thing overall. I mean, I think it's good that all those things happen, but, you know, what you really want to do, and I'll make a contrast in a second, in addition to funding important areas, like what both of those people did, is to help young people. And they may be at odds with each other because a far more, a lab like ours, which is, you know, I'm older, is, you know, might be very good at addressing some of those kinds of problems, but, you know, I'm not young. I train a lot of people who are young, but it's not the same as helping somebody who's an assistant professor someplace. So I think what's, I think, been good about our thing, our society, or things overall, are that there are people who come at it from different ways, and the combination, the confluence of the government funding, the certain foundations that fund things, and other foundations that, you know, want to see disease treated, well, then they can go seek out people, or they can put a request for proposals and see who does the best. You know, I'd say both David Koch and Bill Gates did exactly that. They sought out people, both of them, you know, or their foundations that they were involved in, sought out people like myself. But they also had requests for proposals. Now, you mentioned young people, and that reminds me of something you said in an interview of Written Somewhere, that said some of your initial struggles in terms of finding a faculty position, or so on, that you didn't quite, for people, fit into a particular bucket, a particular. Right. Can you speak to that? How, do you see limitations to the academic system that it does have such buckets? Is there, how can we allow for people who are brilliant, but outside the disciplines of the previous decade? Yeah, well, I think that's a great question. I think that, I think the department heads have to have a vision, you know, and some of them do. Every so often, you know, there are institutes or labs that do that. I mean, at MIT, I think that's done sometimes. I know mechanical engineering department just had a search, and they hired Gio Traverso, who is one of my, he was a fellow with me, but he's actually a molecular biologist and a gastroenterologist. And, you know, he's one of the best in the world, but he's also done some great mechanical engineering and designing some new pills and things like that. And they picked him, and boy, I give them a lot of credit. I mean, that's vision, to pick somebody. And I think, you know, they'll be the richer four. I think the Media Lab has certainly hired, you know, people like Ed Boyden and others who have done, you know, very different things. And so I think that, you know, that's part of the vision of the leadership who do things like that. Do you think one day, you've mentioned David Koch and cancer, do you think one day we'll cure cancer? Yeah, I mean, of course, one day, I don't know how long that day will come. Soon. Yeah, soon, soon, no, but I think. So you think it is a grand challenge, it is a grand challenge, it's not just solvable within a few years. No, I don't think very many things are solvable in a few years. There's some good ideas that people are working on, but I mean, all cancers, that's pretty tough. If we do get the cure, what will the cure look like? Do you think which mechanisms, which disciplines will help us arrive at that cure from all the amazing work you've done that has touched on cancer? No, I think it'll be a combination of biology and engineering. I think it'll be biology to understand the right genetic mechanisms to solve this problem and maybe the right immunological mechanisms and engineering in the sense of producing the molecules, developing the right delivery systems, targeting it or whatever else needs to be done. Well, that's a beautiful vision for engineering. So on a lighter topic, I've read that you love chocolate and mentioned two places, Ben and Bill's Chocolate Aquarium and the chocolate cookies, the Soho Globs from Rosie's Bakery in Chestnut Hill. I went to their website and I was trying to finish a paper last night. There's a deadline today and yet I was wasting way too much time at 3 a.m. instead of writing the paper, staring at the Rosie Baker's cookies, which are just look incredible. The Soho Globs just look incredible. But for me, oatmeal white raisin cookies won my heart just from the pictures. Do you think one day we'll be able to engineer the perfect cookie with the help of chemistry and maybe a bit of data driven artificial intelligence or is cookies something that's more art than engineering? I think there's some of both. I think engineering will probably help someday. What about chocolate? Same thing, same thing. You'd have to go to see some of David Edwards stuff. He was one of my postdocs and he's a professor at Harvard but he also started Cafe Art Sciences and it's just a really cool restaurant around here. But he also has companies that do ways of looking at fragrances and trying to use engineering in new ways and so I think that's just an example. But I expect someday that AI and engineering will play a role in almost everything. Including creating the perfect cookie. Yes. Well, I dream of that day as well. So when you look back at your life, having accomplished an incredible amount of positive impact on the world through science and engineering, what are you most proud of? My students, I really feel when I look at that, we've probably had close to 1,000 students go through the lab and they've done incredibly well. I think 18 are in the National Academy of Engineering, 16 in the National Academy of Medicine. I mean, they've been CEOs of companies, presidents of universities and they've done, I think eight are faculty at MIT, maybe about 12 at Harvard. I mean, so it really makes you feel good to think that the people, they're not my children but they're close to my children in a way and it makes you feel really good to see them have such great lives and them do so much good and be happy. Well, I think that's a perfect way to end it, Bob. Thank you so much for talking to me. My pleasure. It was an honor. Good questions. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bob Langer and thank you to our sponsors, Cash App and Masterclass. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast and signing up at masterclass.com slash Lex. Click on the links, buy all the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and startup. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled without the E, just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from Bill Bryson in his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. If this book has a lesson, it is that we're awfully lucky to be here. And by we, I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans, we're doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even in a multitude of ways to make it better. It is talent we have only barely begun to grasp. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Robert Langer: Edison of Medicine | Lex Fridman Podcast #105

The following is a conversation with Matt Botmanek, Director of Neuroscience Research at DeepMind. He's a brilliant, cross disciplinary mind, navigating effortlessly between cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Magic Spoon Cereal. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and also going to magicspoon.com slash lex and using code lex at checkout after you buy all of their cereal. Click the links, buy the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfriedman, spelled surprisingly without the E, just F R I D M A N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. 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They have agreed to sponsor this podcast for a long time. They're an amazing sponsor and an even better cereal. I highly recommend it. It's delicious, it's good for you, you won't regret it. And now, here's my conversation with Matt Botpenik. How much of the human brain do you think we understand? I think we're at a weird moment in the history of neuroscience in the sense that I feel like we understand a lot about the brain at a very high level, but a very coarse level. When you say high level, what are you thinking? Are you thinking functional? Are you thinking structurally? So in other words, what is the brain for? What kinds of computation does the brain do? What kinds of behaviors would we have to explain if we were gonna look down at the mechanistic level? And at that level, I feel like we understand much, much more about the brain than we did when I was in high school. But it's almost like we're seeing it through a fog. It's only at a very coarse level. We don't really understand what the neuronal mechanisms are that underlie these computations. We've gotten better at saying, what are the functions that the brain is computing that we would have to understand if we were gonna get down to the neuronal level? And at the other end of the spectrum, in the last few years, incredible progress has been made in terms of technologies that allow us to see, actually literally see, in some cases, what's going on at the single unit level, even the dendritic level. And then there's this yawning gap in between. Well, that's interesting. So at the high level, so that's almost a cognitive science level. And then at the neuronal level, that's neurobiology and neuroscience, just studying single neurons, the synaptic connections and all the dopamine, all the kind of neurotransmitters. One blanket statement I should probably make is that as I've gotten older, I have become more and more reluctant to make a distinction between psychology and neuroscience. To me, the point of neuroscience is to study what the brain is for. If you're a nephrologist and you wanna learn about the kidney, you start by saying, what is this thing for? Well, it seems to be for taking blood on one side that has metabolites in it that shouldn't be there, sucking them out of the blood while leaving the good stuff behind, and then excreting that in the form of urine. That's what the kidney is for. It's like obvious. So the rest of the work is deciding how it does that. And this, it seems to me, is the right approach to take to the brain. You say, well, what is the brain for? The brain, as far as I can tell, is for producing behavior. It's for going from perceptual inputs to behavioral outputs, and the behavioral outputs should be adaptive. So that's what psychology is about. It's about understanding the structure of that function. And then the rest of neuroscience is about figuring out how those operations are actually carried out at a mechanistic level. That's really interesting, but so unlike the kidney, the brain, the gap between the electrical signal and behavior, so you truly see neuroscience as the science that touches behavior, how the brain generates behavior, or how the brain converts raw visual information into understanding. Like, you basically see cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience as all one science. Yeah, it's a personal statement. Is that a hopeful or a realistic statement? So certainly you will be correct in your feeling in some number of years, but that number of years could be 200, 300 years from now. Oh, well, there's a... Is that aspirational or is that pragmatic engineering feeling that you have? It's both in the sense that this is what I hope and expect will bear fruit over the coming decades, but it's also pragmatic in the sense that I'm not sure what we're doing in either psychology or neuroscience if that's not the framing. I don't know what it means to understand the brain if there's no, if part of the enterprise is not about understanding the behavior that's being produced. I mean, yeah, but I would compare it to maybe astronomers looking at the movement of the planets and the stars without any interest of the underlying physics, right? And I would argue that at least in the early days, there is some value to just tracing the movement of the planets and the stars without thinking about the physics too much because it's such a big leap to start thinking about the physics before you even understand even the basic structural elements of... Oh, I agree with that. I agree. But you're saying in the end, the goal should be to deeply understand. Well, right, and I think... So I thought about this a lot when I was in grad school because a lot of what I studied in grad school was psychology and I found myself a little bit confused about what it meant to... It seems like what we were talking about a lot of the time were virtual causal mechanisms. Like, oh, well, you know, attentional selection then selects some object in the environment and that is then passed on to the motor, you know, information about that is passed on to the motor system. But these are virtual mechanisms. These are, you know, they're metaphors. They're, you know, there's no reduction going on in that conversation to some physical mechanism that, you know, which is really what it would take to fully understand, you know, how behavior is rising. But the causal mechanisms are definitely neurons interacting. I'm willing to say that at this point in history. So in psychology, at least for me personally, there was this strange insecurity about trafficking in these metaphors, you know, which were supposed to explain the function of the mind. If you can't ground them in physical mechanisms, then what is the explanatory validity of these explanations? And I managed to soothe my own nerves by thinking about the history of genetics research. So I'm very far from being an expert on the history of this field. But I know enough to say that, you know, Mendelian genetics preceded, you know, Watson and Crick. And so there was a significant period of time during which people were, you know, productively investigating the structure of inheritance using what was essentially a metaphor, the notion of a gene, you know. Oh, genes do this and genes do that. But, you know, where are the genes? They're sort of an explanatory thing that we made up. And we ascribed to them these causal properties. Oh, there's a dominant, there's a recessive, and then they recombine it. And then later, there was a kind of blank there that was filled in with a physical mechanism. That connection was made. But it was worth having that metaphor because that gave us a good sense of what kind of causal mechanism we were looking for. And the fundamental metaphor of cognition, you said, is the interaction of neurons. Is that, what is the metaphor? No, no, the metaphor, the metaphors we use in cognitive psychology are things like attention, the way that memory works. I retrieve something from memory, right? A memory retrieval occurs. What is that? You know, that's not a physical mechanism that I can examine in its own right. But it's still worth having, that metaphorical level. Yeah, so yeah, I misunderstood actually. So the higher level of abstractions is the metaphor that's most useful. Yes. But what about, so how does that connect to the idea that that arises from interaction of neurons? Well, even, is the interaction of neurons also not a metaphor to you? Or is it literally, like that's no longer a metaphor. That's already the lowest level of abstractions that could actually be directly studied. Well, I'm hesitating because I think what I want to say could end up being controversial. So what I want to say is, yes, the interactions of neurons, that's not metaphorical. That's a physical fact. That's where the causal interactions actually occur. Now, I suppose you could say, well, even that is metaphorical relative to the quantum events that underlie. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. It's always turtles on top of turtles. Yeah, there's turtles all the way down. There's a reduction that you can do. You can say these psychological phenomena can be explained through a very different kind of causal mechanism, which has to do with neurotransmitter release. And so what we're really trying to do in neuroscience writ large, as I say, which for me includes psychology, is to take these psychological phenomena and map them onto neural events. I think remaining forever at the level of description that is natural for psychology, for me personally, would be disappointing. I want to understand how mental activity arises from neural activity. But the converse is also true. Studying neural activity without any sense of what you're trying to explain, to me feels like at best groping around at random. Now, you've kind of talked about this bridging of the gap between psychology and neuroscience, but do you think it's possible, like my love is, like I fell in love with psychology and psychiatry in general with Freud and when I was really young, and I hoped to understand the mind. And for me, understanding the mind, at least at that young age before I discovered AI and even neuroscience was to, is psychology. And do you think it's possible to understand the mind without getting into all the messy details of neuroscience? Like you kind of mentioned to you it's appealing to try to understand the mechanisms at the lowest level, but do you think that's needed, that's required to understand how the mind works? That's an important part of the whole picture, but I would be the last person on earth to suggest that that reality renders psychology in its own right unproductive. I trained as a psychologist. I am fond of saying that I have learned much more from psychology than I have from neuroscience. To me, psychology is a hugely important discipline. And one thing that warms in my heart is that ways of investigating behavior that have been native to cognitive psychology since it's dawn in the 60s are starting to become, they're starting to become interesting to AI researchers for a variety of reasons. And that's been exciting for me to see. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you see as beautiful aspects of psychology, maybe limiting aspects of psychology? I mean, maybe just start it off as a science, as a field. To me, it was when I understood what psychology is, analytical psychology, like the way it's actually carried out, it was really disappointing to see two aspects. One is how small the N is, how small the number of subject is in the studies. And two, it was disappointing to see how controlled the entire, how much it was in the lab. It wasn't studying humans in the wild. There was no mechanism for studying humans in the wild. So that's where I became a little bit disillusioned to psychology. And then the modern world of the internet is so exciting to me. The Twitter data or YouTube data, data of human behavior on the internet becomes exciting because the N grows and then in the wild grows. But that's just my narrow sense. Like, do you have a optimistic or pessimistic cynical view of psychology? How do you see the field broadly? When I was in graduate school, it was early enough that there was still a thrill in seeing that there were ways of doing, there were ways of doing experimental science that provided insight to the structure of the mind. One thing that impressed me most when I was at that stage in my education was neuropsychology, looking at, analyzing the behavior of populations who had brain damage of different kinds and trying to understand what the specific deficits were that arose from a lesion in a particular part of the brain. And the kind of experimentation that was done and that's still being done to get answers in that context was so creative and it was so deliberate. It was good science. An experiment answered one question but raised another and somebody would do an experiment that answered that question. And you really felt like you were narrowing in on some kind of approximate understanding of what this part of the brain was for. Do you have an example from memory of what kind of aspects of the mind could be studied in this kind of way? Oh, sure. I mean, the very detailed neuropsychological studies of language function, looking at production and reception and the relationship between visual function, reading and auditory and semantic. There were these, and still are, these beautiful models that came out of that kind of research that really made you feel like you understood something that you hadn't understood before about how language processing is organized in the brain. But having said all that, I think you are, I mean, I agree with you that the cost of doing highly controlled experiments is that you, by construction, miss out on the richness and complexity of the real world. One thing that, so I was drawn into science by what in those days was called connectionism, which is, of course, what we now call deep learning. And at that point in history, neural networks were primarily being used in order to model human cognition. They weren't yet really useful for industrial applications. So you always found neural networks in biological form beautiful. Oh, neural networks were very concretely the thing that drew me into science. I was handed, are you familiar with the PDP books from the 80s when I was in, I went to medical school before I went into science. And, yeah. Really, interesting. Wow. I also did a graduate degree in art history, so I'm kind of exploring. Well, art history, I understand. That's just a curious, creative mind. But medical school, with the dream of what, if we take that slight tangent? What, did you want to be a surgeon? I actually was quite interested in surgery. I was interested in surgery and psychiatry. And I thought, I must be the only person on the planet who was torn between those two fields. And I said exactly that to my advisor in medical school, who turned out, I found out later, to be a famous psychoanalyst. And he said to me, no, no, it's actually not so uncommon to be interested in surgery and psychiatry. And he conjectured that the reason that people develop these two interests is that both fields are about going beneath the surface and kind of getting into the kind of secret. I mean, maybe you understand this as someone who was interested in psychoanalysis. There's sort of a, there's a cliche phrase that people use now, like in NPR, the secret life of blankety blank, right? And that was part of the thrill of surgery, was seeing the secret activity that's inside everybody's abdomen and thorax. That's a very poetic way to connect it to disciplines that are very, practically speaking, different from each other. That's for sure, that's for sure, yes. So how did we get onto medical school? So I was in medical school and I was doing a psychiatry rotation and my kind of advisor in that rotation asked me what I was interested in. And I said, well, maybe psychiatry. He said, why? And I said, well, I've always been interested in how the brain works. I'm pretty sure that nobody's doing scientific research that addresses my interests, which are, I didn't have a word for it then, but I would have said about cognition. And he said, well, you know, I'm not sure that's true. You might be interested in these books. And he pulled down the PDB books from his shelf and they were still shrink wrapped. He hadn't read them, but he handed them to me. He said, you feel free to borrow these. And that was, you know, I went back to my dorm room and I just, you know, read them cover to cover. And what's PDB? Parallel distributed processing, which was one of the original names for deep learning. And so I apologize for the romanticized question, but what idea in the space of neuroscience and the space of the human brain is to you the most beautiful, mysterious, surprising? What had always fascinated me, even when I was a pretty young kid, I think, was the paradox that lies in the fact that the brain is so mysterious and seems so distant. But at the same time, it's responsible for the full transparency of everyday life. The brain is literally what makes everything obvious and familiar. And there's always one in the room with you. Yeah. I used to teach, when I taught at Princeton, I used to teach a cognitive neuroscience course. And the very last thing I would say to the students was, you know, people often, when people think of scientific inspiration, the metaphor is often, well, look to the stars. The stars will inspire you to wonder at the universe and think about your place in it and how things work. And I'm all for looking at the stars, but I've always been much more inspired. And my sense of wonder comes from the, not from the distant, mysterious stars, but from the extremely intimately close brain. Yeah. There's something just endlessly fascinating to me about that. The, like, just like you said, the one that's close and yet distant in terms of our understanding of it. Do you, are you also captivated by the fact that this very conversation is happening because two brains are communicating so that? Yes, exactly. The, I guess what I mean is the subjective nature of the experience, if it can take a small attention into the mystical of it, the consciousness, or when you were saying you're captivated by the idea of the brain, are you talking about specifically the mechanism of cognition? Or are you also just, like, at least for me, it's almost like paralyzing the beauty and the mystery of the fact that it creates the entirety of the experience, not just the reasoning capability, but the experience. Well, I definitely resonate with that latter thought. And I often find discussions of artificial intelligence to be disappointingly narrow. Speaking as someone who has always had an interest in art. Right. I was just gonna go there because it sounds like somebody who has an interest in art. Yeah, I mean, there are many layers to full bore human experience. And in some ways it's not enough to say, oh, well, don't worry, we're talking about cognition, but we'll add emotion, you know? There's an incredible scope to what humans go through in every moment. And yes, so that's part of what fascinates me, is that our brains are producing that. But at the same time, it's so mysterious to us. How? Our brains are literally in our heads producing this experience. Producing the experience. And yet it's so mysterious to us. And so, and the scientific challenge of getting at the actual explanation for that is so overwhelming. That's just, I don't know. Certain people have fixations on particular questions and that's always, that's just always been mine. Yeah, I would say the poetry of that is fascinating. And I'm really interested in natural language as well. And when you look at artificial intelligence community, it always saddens me how much when you try to create a benchmark for the community to gather around, how much of the magic of language is lost when you create that benchmark. That there's something, we talk about experience, the music of the language, the wit, the something that makes a rich experience, something that would be required to pass the spirit of the Turing test is lost in these benchmarks. And I wonder how to get it back in because it's very difficult. The moment you try to do like real good rigorous science, you lose some of that magic. When you try to study cognition in a rigorous scientific way, it feels like you're losing some of the magic. The seeing cognition in a mechanistic way that AI folk at this stage in our history. Well, I agree with you, but at the same time, one thing that I found really exciting about that first wave of deep learning models in cognition was the fact that the people who were building these models were focused on the richness and complexity of human cognition. So an early debate in cognitive science, which I sort of witnessed as a grad student was about something that sounds very dry, which is the formation of the past tense. But there were these two camps. One said, well, the mind encodes certain rules and it also has a list of exceptions because of course, the rule is add ED, but that's not always what you do. So you have to have a list of exceptions. And then there were the connectionists who evolved into the deep learning people who said, well, if you look carefully at the data, if you actually look at corpora, like language corpora, it turns out to be very rich because yes, there are most verbs that you just tack on ED, and then there are exceptions, but there are rules that the exceptions aren't just random. There are certain clues to which verbs should be exceptional. And then there are exceptions to the exceptions. And there was a word that was kind of deployed in order to capture this, which was quasi regular. In other words, there are rules, but it's messy. And there's either structure even among the exceptions. And it would be, yeah, you could try to write down, we could try to write down the structure in some sort of closed form, but really the right way to understand how the brain is handling all this, and by the way, producing all of this, is to build a deep neural network and train it on this data and see how it ends up representing all of this richness. So the way that deep learning was deployed in cognitive psychology was that was the spirit of it. It was about that richness. And that's something that I always found very compelling, still do. Is there something especially interesting and profound to you in terms of our current deep learning neural network, artificial neural network approaches, and whatever we do understand about the biological neural networks in our brain? Is there, there's quite a few differences. Are some of them to you, either interesting or perhaps profound in terms of the gap we might want to try to close in trying to create a human level intelligence? What I would say here is something that a lot of people are saying, which is that one seeming limitation of the systems that we're building now is that they lack the kind of flexibility, the readiness to sort of turn on a dime when the context calls for it that is so characteristic of human behavior. So is that connected to you to the, like which aspect of the neural networks in our brain is that connected to? Is that closer to the cognitive science level of, now again, see like my natural inclination is to separate into three disciplines of neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology. And you've already kind of shut that down by saying you're kind of see them as separate, but just to look at those layers, I guess where is there something about the lowest layer of the way the neural neurons interact that is profound to you in terms of this difference to the artificial neural networks, or is all the key differences at a higher level of abstraction? One thing I often think about is that, if you take an introductory computer science course and they are introducing you to the notion of Turing machines, one way of articulating what the significance of a Turing machine is, is that it's a machine emulator. It can emulate any other machine. And that to me, that way of looking at a Turing machine really sticks with me. I think of humans as maybe sharing in some of that character. We're capacity limited, we're not Turing machines obviously, but we have the ability to adapt behaviors that are very much unlike anything we've done before, but there's some basic mechanism that's implemented in our brain that allows us to run software. But just on that point, you mentioned Turing machine, but nevertheless, it's fundamentally our brains are just computational devices in your view. Is that what you're getting at? It was a little bit unclear to this line you drew. Is there any magic in there or is it just basic computation? I'm happy to think of it as just basic computation, but mind you, I won't be satisfied until somebody explains to me what the basic computations are that are leading to the full richness of human cognition. It's not gonna be enough for me to understand what the computations are that allow people to do arithmetic or play chess. I want the whole thing. And a small tangent, because you kind of mentioned coronavirus, there's group behavior. Oh, sure. Is there something interesting to your search of understanding the human mind where behavior of large groups or just behavior of groups is interesting, seeing that as a collective mind, as a collective intelligence, perhaps seeing the groups of people as a single intelligent organisms, especially looking at the reinforcement learning work you've done recently. Well, yeah, I can't. I mean, I have the honor of working with a lot of incredibly smart people and I wouldn't wanna take any credit for leading the way on the multiagent work that's come out of my group or DeepMind lately, but I do find it fascinating. And I mean, I think it can't be debated. You know, human behavior arises within communities. That just seems to me self evident. But to me, it is self evident, but that seems to be a profound aspects of something that created. That was like, if you look at like 2001 Space Odyssey when the monkeys touched the... Yeah. That's the magical moment I think Yuval Harari argues that the ability of our large numbers of humans to hold an idea, to converge towards idea together, like you said, shaking hands versus bumping elbows, somehow converge without being in a room altogether, just kind of this like distributed convergence towards an idea over a particular period of time seems to be fundamental to just every aspect of our cognition, of our intelligence, because humans, I will talk about reward, but it seems like we don't really have a clear objective function under which we operate, but we all kind of converge towards one somehow. And that to me has always been a mystery that I think is somehow productive for also understanding AI systems. But I guess that's the next step. The first step is try to understand the mind. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think there's something to the argument that that kind of like strictly bottom up approach is wrongheaded. In other words, there are basic phenomena, basic aspects of human intelligence that can only be understood in the context of groups. I'm perfectly open to that. I've never been particularly convinced by the notion that we should consider intelligence to inhere at the level of communities. I don't know why, I'm sort of stuck on the notion that the basic unit that we want to understand is individual humans. And if we have to understand that in the context of other humans, fine. But for me, intelligence is just, I stubbornly define it as something that is an aspect of an individual human. That's just my, I don't know if that's a matter of taste. I'm with you, but that could be the reductionist dream of a scientist because you can understand a single human. It also is very possible that intelligence can only arise when there's multiple intelligences. When there's multiple sort of, it's a sad thing, if that's true, because it's very difficult to study. But if it's just one human, that one human would not be homosapien, would not become that intelligent. That's a possibility. I'm with you. One thing I will say along these lines is that I think a serious effort to understand human intelligence and maybe to build humanlike intelligence needs to pay just as much attention to the structure of the environment as to the structure of the cognizing system, whether it's a brain or an AI system. That's one thing I took away actually from my early studies with the pioneers of neural network research, people like Jay McClelland and John Cohen. The structure of cognition is really, it's only partly a function of the architecture of the brain and the learning algorithms that it implements. What really shapes it is the interaction of those things with the structure of the world in which those things are embedded. And that's especially important for, that's made most clear in reinforcement learning where the simulated environment is, you can only learn as much as you can simulate. And that's what DeepMind made very clear with the other aspect of the environment, which is the self play mechanism of the other agent, of the competitive behavior, which the other agent becomes the environment essentially. And that's, I mean, one of the most exciting ideas in AI is the self play mechanism that's able to learn successfully. So there you go. There's a thing where competition is essential for learning, at least in that context. So if we can step back into another sort of beautiful world, which is the actual mechanics, the dirty mess of it of the human brain, is there something for people who might not know? Is there something you can comment on or describe the key parts of the brain that are important for intelligence or just in general, what are the different parts of the brain that you're curious about that you've studied and that are just good to know about when you're thinking about cognition? Well, my area of expertise, if I have one, is prefrontal cortex. So, you know. What's that? Where do we? It depends on who you ask. The technical definition is anatomical. There are parts of your brain that are responsible for motor behavior and they're very easy to identify. And the region of your cerebral cortex, the sort of outer crust of your brain that lies in front of those is defined as the prefrontal cortex. And when you say anatomical, sorry to interrupt, so that's referring to sort of the geographic region as opposed to some kind of functional definition. Exactly, so this is kind of the coward's way out. I'm telling you what the prefrontal cortex is just in terms of what part of the real estate it occupies. It's the thing in the front of the brain. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, the early history of neuroscientific investigation of what this front part of the brain does is sort of funny to read because it was really World War I that started people down this road of trying to figure out what different parts of the brain, the human brain do in the sense that there were a lot of people with brain damage who came back from the war with brain damage. And that provided, as tragic as that was, it provided an opportunity for scientists to try to identify the functions of different brain regions. And that was actually incredibly productive, but one of the frustrations that neuropsychologists faced was they couldn't really identify exactly what the deficit was that arose from damage to these most kind of frontal parts of the brain. It was just a very difficult thing to pin down. There were a couple of neuropsychologists who identified through a large amount of clinical experience and close observation, they started to put their finger on a syndrome that was associated with frontal damage. Actually, one of them was a Russian neuropsychologist named Luria, who students of cognitive psychology still read. And what he started to figure out was that the frontal cortex was somehow involved in flexibility, in guiding behaviors that required someone to override a habit, or to do something unusual, or to change what they were doing in a very flexible way from one moment to another. So focused on like new experiences. And so the way your brain processes and acts in new experiences. Yeah, what later helped bring this function into better focus was a distinction between controlled and automatic behavior, or in other literatures, this is referred to as habitual behavior versus goal directed behavior. So it's very, very clear that the human brain has pathways that are dedicated to habits, to things that you do all the time, and they need to be automatized so that they don't require you to concentrate too much. So that leaves your cognitive capacity free to do other things. Just think about the difference between driving when you're learning to drive versus driving after you're a fairly expert. There are brain pathways that slowly absorb those frequently performed behaviors so that they can be habits, so that they can be automatic. That's kind of like the purest form of learning. I guess it's happening there, which is why, I mean, this is kind of jumping ahead, which is why that perhaps is the most useful for us to focusing on and trying to see how artificial intelligence systems can learn. Is that the way you think? It's interesting. I do think about this distinction between controlled and automatic, or goal directed and habitual behavior a lot in thinking about where we are in AI research. But just to finish the kind of dissertation here, the role of the prefrontal cortex is generally understood these days sort of in contradistinction to that habitual domain. In other words, the prefrontal cortex is what helps you override those habits. It's what allows you to say, well, what I usually do in this situation is X, but given the context, I probably should do Y. I mean, the elbow bump is a great example, right? Reaching out and shaking hands is probably a habitual behavior, and it's the prefrontal cortex that allows us to bear in mind that there's something unusual going on right now, and in this situation, I need to not do the usual thing. The kind of behaviors that Luria reported, and he built tests for detecting these kinds of things, were exactly like this. So in other words, when I stick out my hand, I want you instead to present your elbow. A patient with frontal damage would have a great deal of trouble with that. Somebody proffering their hand would elicit a handshake. The prefrontal cortex is what allows us to say, hold on, hold on, that's the usual thing, but I have the ability to bear in mind even very unusual contexts and to reason about what behavior is appropriate there. Just to get a sense, are us humans special in the presence of the prefrontal cortex? Do mice have a prefrontal cortex? Do other mammals that we can study? If no, then how do they integrate new experiences? Yeah, that's a really tricky question and a very timely question because we have revolutionary new technologies for monitoring, measuring, and also causally influencing neural behavior in mice and fruit flies. And these techniques are not fully available even for studying brain function in monkeys, let alone humans. And so it's a very sort of, for me at least, a very urgent question whether the kinds of things that we wanna understand about human intelligence can be pursued in these other organisms. And to put it briefly, there's disagreement. People who study fruit flies will often tell you, hey, fruit flies are smarter than you think. And they'll point to experiments where fruit flies were able to learn new behaviors, were able to generalize from one stimulus to another in a way that suggests that they have abstractions that guide their generalization. I've had many conversations in which I will start by observing, recounting some observation about mouse behavior where it seemed like mice were taking an awfully long time to learn a task that for a human would be profoundly trivial. And I will conclude from that, that mice really don't have the cognitive flexibility that we want to explain. And then a mouse researcher will say to me, well, hold on, that experiment may not have worked because you asked a mouse to deal with stimuli and behaviors that were very unnatural for the mouse. If instead you kept the logic of the experiment the same, but presented the information in a way that aligns with what mice are used to dealing with in their natural habitats, you might find that a mouse actually has more intelligence than you think. And then they'll go on to show you videos of mice doing things in their natural habitat, which seem strikingly intelligent, dealing with physical problems. I have to drag this piece of food back to my lair, but there's something in my way and how do I get rid of that thing? So I think these are open questions to put it, to sum that up. And then taking a small step back related to that is you kind of mentioned we're taking a little shortcut by saying it's a geographic part of the prefrontal cortex is a region of the brain. But if we, what's your sense in a bigger philosophical view, prefrontal cortex and the brain in general, do you have a sense that it's a set of subsystems in the way we've kind of implied that are pretty distinct or to what degree is it that or to what degree is it a giant interconnected mess where everything kind of does everything and it's impossible to disentangle them? I think there's overwhelming evidence that there's functional differentiation, that it's clearly not the case that all parts of the brain are doing the same thing. This follows immediately from the kinds of studies of brain damage that we were chatting about before. It's obvious from what you see if you stick an electrode in the brain and measure what's going on at the level of neural activity. Having said that, there are two other things to add, which kind of, I don't know, maybe tug in the other direction. One is that it's when you look carefully at functional differentiation in the brain, what you usually end up concluding, at least this is my observation of the literature, is that the differences between regions are graded rather than being discreet. So it doesn't seem like it's easy to divide the brain up into true modules that have clear boundaries and that have you know, clear channels of communication between them. And this applies to the prefrontal cortex? Yeah, oh yeah. The prefrontal cortex is made up of a bunch of different subregions, the functions of which are not clearly defined and the borders of which seem to be quite vague. And then there's another thing that's popping up in very recent research, which, you know, which, involves application of these new techniques, which there are a number of studies that suggest that parts of the brain that we would have previously thought were quite focused in their function are actually carrying signals that we wouldn't have thought would be there. For example, looking in the primary visual cortex, which is classically thought of as basically the first cortical way station for processing visual information. Basically what it should care about is, you know, where are the edges in this scene that I'm viewing? It turns out that if you have enough data, you can recover information from primary visual cortex about all sorts of things. Like, you know, what behavior the animal is engaged in right now and how much reward is on offer in the task that it's pursuing. So it's clear that even regions whose function is pretty well defined at a core screen are nonetheless carrying some information about information from very different domains. So, you know, the history of neuroscience is sort of this oscillation between the two views that you articulated, you know, the kind of modular view and then the big, you know, mush view. And, you know, I think, I guess we're gonna end up somewhere in the middle. Which is unfortunate for our understanding because there's something about our, you know, conceptual system that finds it's easy to think about a modularized system and easy to think about a completely undifferentiated system. But something that kind of lies in between is confusing. But we're gonna have to get used to it, I think. Unless we can understand deeply the lower level mechanism of neuronal communication. Yeah, yeah. But on that topic, you kind of mentioned information. Just to get a sense, I imagine something that there's still mystery and disagreement on is how does the brain carry information and signal? Like what in your sense is the basic mechanism of communication in the brain? Well, I guess I'm old fashioned in that I consider the networks that we use in deep learning research to be a reasonable approximation to, you know, the mechanisms that carry information in the brain. So the usual way of articulating that is to say, what really matters is a rate code. What matters is how quickly is an individual neuron spiking? You know, what's the frequency at which it's spiking? Is it right? So the timing of the spike. Yeah, is it firing fast or slow? Let's, you know, let's put a number on that. And that number is enough to capture what neurons are doing. There's, you know, there's still uncertainty about whether that's an adequate description of how information is transmitted within the brain. There, you know, there are studies that suggest that the precise timing of spikes matters. There are studies that suggest that there are computations that go on within the dendritic tree, within a neuron, that are quite rich and structured and that really don't equate to anything that we're doing in our artificial neural networks. Having said that, I feel like we can get, I feel like we're getting somewhere by sticking to this high level of abstraction. Just the rate, and by the way, we're talking about the electrical signal. I remember reading some vague paper somewhere recently where the mechanical signal, like the vibrations or something of the neurons, also communicates information. I haven't seen that, but. There's somebody who was arguing that the electrical signal, this is in a nature paper, something like that, where the electrical signal is actually a side effect of the mechanical signal. But I don't think that changes the story. But it's almost an interesting idea that there could be a deeper, it's always like in physics with quantum mechanics, there's always a deeper story that could be underlying the whole thing. But you think it's basically the rate of spiking that gets us, that's like the lowest hanging fruit that can get us really far. This is a classical view. I mean, this is not, the only way in which this stance would be controversial is in the sense that there are members of the neuroscience community who are interested in alternatives. But this is really a very mainstream view. The way that neurons communicate is that neurotransmitters arrive, they wash up on a neuron, the neuron has receptors for those transmitters, the meeting of the transmitter with these receptors changes the voltage of the neuron. And if enough voltage change occurs, then a spike occurs, one of these like discrete events. And it's that spike that is conducted down the axon and leads to neurotransmitter release. This is just like neuroscience 101. This is like the way the brain is supposed to work. Now, what we do when we build artificial neural networks of the kind that are now popular in the AI community is that we don't worry about those individual spikes. We just worry about the frequency at which those spikes are being generated. And people talk about that as the activity of a neuron. And so the activity of units in a deep learning system is broadly analogous to the spike rate of a neuron. There are people who believe that there are other forms of communication in the brain. In fact, I've been involved in some research recently that suggests that the voltage fluctuations that occur in populations of neurons that are sort of below the level of spike production may be important for communication. But I'm still pretty old school in the sense that I think that the things that we're building in AI research constitute reasonable models of how a brain would work. Let me ask just for fun a crazy question, because I can. Do you think it's possible we're completely wrong about the way this basic mechanism of neuronal communication, that the information is stored in some very different kind of way in the brain? Oh, heck yes. I mean, look, I wouldn't be a scientist if I didn't think there was any chance we were wrong. But I mean, if you look at the history of deep learning research as it's been applied to neuroscience, of course the vast majority of deep learning research these days isn't about neuroscience. But if you go back to the 1980s, there's sort of an unbroken chain of research in which a particular strategy is taken, which is, hey, let's train a deep learning system. Let's train a multi layer neural network on this task that we trained our rat on, or our monkey on, or this human being on. And then let's look at what the units deep in the system are doing. And let's ask whether what they're doing resembles what we know about what neurons deep in the brain are doing. And over and over and over and over, that strategy works in the sense that the learning algorithms that we have access to, which typically center on back propagation, they give rise to patterns of activity, patterns of response, patterns of neuronal behavior in these artificial models that look hauntingly similar to what you see in the brain. And is that a coincidence? At a certain point, it starts looking like such coincidence is unlikely to not be deeply meaningful, yeah. Yeah, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. But it could be. But you're always open to total flipping at the table. Hey, of course. So you have coauthored several recent papers that sort of weave beautifully between the world of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And maybe if we could, can we just try to dance around and talk about some of them? Maybe try to pick out interesting ideas that jump to your mind from memory. So maybe looking at, we were talking about the prefrontal cortex, the 2018, I believe, paper called the Prefrontal Cortex as a Meta Reinforcement Learning System. What, is there a key idea that you can speak to from that paper? Yeah, I mean, the key idea is about meta learning. What is meta learning? Meta learning is, by definition, a situation in which you have a learning algorithm and the learning algorithm operates in such a way that it gives rise to another learning algorithm. In the earliest applications of this idea, you had one learning algorithm sort of adjusting the parameters on another learning algorithm. But the case that we're interested in this paper is one where you start with just one learning algorithm and then another learning algorithm kind of emerges out of thin air. I can say more about what I mean by that. I don't mean to be scurrentist, but that's the idea of meta learning. It relates to the old idea in psychology of learning to learn. Situations where you have experiences that make you better at learning something new. A familiar example would be learning a foreign language. The first time you learn a foreign language, it may be quite laborious and disorienting and novel, but let's say you've learned two foreign languages. The third foreign language, obviously, is gonna be much easier to pick up. And why? Because you've learned how to learn. You know how this goes. You know, okay, I'm gonna have to learn how to conjugate. I'm gonna have to... That's a simple form of meta learning in the sense that there's some slow learning mechanism that's helping you kind of update your fast learning mechanism. Does that make sense? So how from our understanding from the psychology world, from neuroscience, our understanding how meta learning might work in the human brain, what lessons can we draw from that that we can bring into the artificial intelligence world? Well, yeah, so the origin of that paper was in AI work that we were doing in my group. We were looking at what happens when you train a recurrent neural network using standard reinforcement learning algorithms. But you train that network, not just in one task, but you train it in a bunch of interrelated tasks. And then you ask what happens when you give it yet another task in that sort of line of interrelated tasks. And what we started to realize is that a form of meta learning spontaneously happens in recurrent neural networks. And the simplest way to explain it is to say a recurrent neural network has a kind of memory in its activation patterns. It's recurrent by definition in the sense that you have units that connect to other units, that connect to other units. So you have sort of loops of connectivity, which allows activity to stick around and be updated over time. In psychology we call, in neuroscience we call this working memory. It's like actively holding something in mind. And so that memory gives the recurrent neural network a dynamics, right? The way that the activity pattern evolves over time is inherent to the connectivity of the recurrent neural network, okay? So that's idea number one. Now, the dynamics of that network are shaped by the connectivity, by the synaptic weights. And those synaptic weights are being shaped by this reinforcement learning algorithm that you're training the network with. So the punchline is if you train a recurrent neural network with a reinforcement learning algorithm that's adjusting its weights, and you do that for long enough, the activation dynamics will become very interesting, right? So imagine I give you a task where you have to press one button or another, left button or right button. And there's some probability that I'm gonna give you an M&M if you press the left button, and there's some probability I'll give you an M&M if you press the other button. And you have to figure out what those probabilities are just by trying things out. But as I said before, instead of just giving you one of these tasks, I give you a whole sequence. You know, I give you two buttons and you figure out which one's best. And I go, good job, here's a new box. Two new buttons, you have to figure out which one's best. Good job, here's a new box. And every box has its own probabilities and you have to figure it out. So if you train a recurrent neural network on that kind of sequence of tasks, what happens, it seemed almost magical to us when we first started kind of realizing what was going on. The slow learning algorithm that's adjusting the synaptic weights, those slow synaptic changes give rise to a network dynamics that themselves, that, you know, the dynamics themselves turn into a learning algorithm. So in other words, you can tell this is happening by just freezing the synaptic weights saying, okay, no more learning, you're done. Here's a new box, figure out which button is best. And the recurrent neural network will do this just fine. There's no, like it figures out which button is best. It kind of transitions from exploring the two buttons to just pressing the one that it likes best in a very rational way. How is that happening? It's happening because the activity dynamics of the network have been shaped by the slow learning process that's occurred over many, many boxes. And so what's happened is that this slow learning algorithm that's slowly adjusting the weights is changing the dynamics of the network, the activity dynamics into its own learning algorithm. And as we were kind of realizing that this is a thing, it just so happened that the group that was working on this included a bunch of neuroscientists and it started kind of ringing a bell for us, which is to say that we thought this sounds a lot like the distinction between synaptic learning and activity, synaptic memory and activity based memory in the brain. And it also reminded us of recurrent connectivity that's very characteristic of prefrontal function. So this is kind of why it's good to have people working on AI that know a little bit about neuroscience and vice versa, because we started thinking about whether we could apply this principle to neuroscience. And that's where the paper came from. So the kind of principle of the recurrence they can see in the prefrontal cortex, then you start to realize that it's possible for something like an idea of a learning to learn emerging from this learning process as long as you keep varying the environment sufficiently. Exactly, so the kind of metaphorical transition we made to neuroscience was to think, okay, well, we know that the prefrontal cortex is highly recurrent. We know that it's an important locus for working memory for activation based memory. So maybe the prefrontal cortex supports reinforcement learning. In other words, what is reinforcement learning? You take an action, you see how much reward you got, you update your policy of behavior. Maybe the prefrontal cortex is doing that sort of thing strictly in its activation patterns. It's keeping around a memory in its activity patterns of what you did, how much reward you got, and it's using that activity based memory as a basis for updating behavior. But then the question is, well, how did the prefrontal cortex get so smart? In other words, where did these activity dynamics come from? How did that program that's implemented in the recurrent dynamics of the prefrontal cortex arise? And one answer that became evident in this work was, well, maybe the mechanisms that operate on the synaptic level, which we believe are mediated by dopamine, are responsible for shaping those dynamics. So this may be a silly question, but because this kind of several temporal sort of classes of learning are happening and the learning to learnism emerges, can you keep building stacks of learning to learn to learn, learning to learn to learn to learn to learn because it keeps, I mean, basically abstractions of more powerful abilities to generalize of learning complex rules. Yeah, that's overstretching this kind of mechanism. Well, one of the people in AI who started thinking about meta learning from very early on, Jürgen Schmidhuber sort of cheekily suggested, I think it may have been in his PhD thesis, that we should think about meta, meta, meta, meta, meta, meta learning. That's really what's gonna get us to true intelligence. Certainly there's a poetic aspect to it and it seems interesting and correct that that kind of levels of abstraction would be powerful, but is that something you see in the brain? This kind of, is it useful to think of learning in these meta, meta, meta way or is it just meta learning? Well, one thing that really fascinated me about this mechanism that we were starting to look at, and other groups started talking about very similar things at the same time. And then a kind of explosion of interest in meta learning happened in the AI community shortly after that. I don't know if we had anything to do with that, but I was gratified to see that a lot of people started talking about meta learning. One of the things that I liked about the kind of flavor of meta learning that we were studying was that it didn't require anything special. It was just, if you took a system that had some form of memory that the function of which could be shaped by pick URL algorithm, then this would just happen, right? I mean, there are a lot of forms of, there are a lot of meta learning algorithms that have been proposed since then that are fascinating and effective in their domains of application. But they're engineered, they're things that somebody had to say, well, gee, if we wanted meta learning to happen, how would we do that? Here's an algorithm that would, but there's something about the kind of meta learning that we were studying that seemed to me special in the sense that it wasn't an algorithm. It was just something that automatically happened if you had a system that had memory and it was trained with a reinforcement learning algorithm. And in that sense, it can be as meta as it wants to be. There's no limit on how abstract the meta learning can get because it's not reliant on a human engineering a particular meta learning algorithm to get there. And that's, I also, I don't know, I guess I hope that that's relevant in the brain. I think there's a kind of beauty in the ability of this emergent. The emergent aspect of it, as opposed to engineered. Exactly, it's something that just, it just happens in a sense, in a sense, you can't avoid this happening. If you have a system that has memory and the function of that memory is shaped by reinforcement learning, and this system is trained in a series of interrelated tasks, this is gonna happen. You can't stop it. As long as you have certain properties, maybe like a recurrent structure to. You have to have memory. It actually doesn't have to be a recurrent neural network. One of, a paper that I was honored to be involved with even earlier, used a kind of slot based memory. Do you remember the title? Just for people to understand. It was Memory Augmented Neural Networks. I think it was, I think the title was Meta Learning in Memory Augmented Neural Networks. And it was the same exact story. If you have a system with memory, here it was a different kind of memory, but the function of that memory is shaped by reinforcement learning. Here it was the reads and writes that occurred on this slot based memory. This will just happen. But this brings us back to something I was saying earlier about the importance of the environment. This will happen if the system is being trained in a setting where there's like a sequence of tasks that all share some abstract structure. Sometimes we talk about task distributions. And that's something that's very obviously true of the world that humans inhabit. Like if you just kind of think about what you do every day, you never do exactly the same thing that you did the day before. But everything that you do sort of has a family resemblance. It shares a structure with something that you did before. And so the real world is sort of saturated with this kind of, this property. It's endless variety with endless redundancy. And that's the setting in which this kind of meta learning happens. And it does seem like we're just so good at finding, just like in this emergent phenomena you described, we're really good at finding that redundancy, finding those similarities, the family resemblance. Some people call it sort of, what is it? Melanie Mitchell was talking about analogies. So we're able to connect concepts together in this kind of way, in this same kind of automated emergent way, which there's so many echoes here of psychology and neuroscience. And obviously now with reinforcement learning with recurrent neural networks at the core. If we could talk a little bit about dopamine, you have really, you're a part of coauthoring really exciting recent paper, very recent, in terms of release on dopamine and temporal difference learning. Can you describe the key ideas of that paper? Sure, yeah. I mean, one thing I want to pause to do is acknowledge my coauthors on actually both of the papers we're talking about. So this dopamine paper. I'll just, I'll certainly post all their names. Okay, wonderful. Yeah, because I'm sort of abashed to be the spokesperson for these papers when I had such amazing collaborators on both. So it's a comfort to me to know that you'll acknowledge them. Yeah, there's an incredible team there, but yeah. Oh yeah, it's such a, it's so much fun. And in the case of the dopamine paper, we also collaborated with Naochit at Harvard, who, you know, obviously a paper simply wouldn't have happened without him. But so you were asking for like a thumbnail sketch of. Yeah, thumbnail sketch or key ideas or, you know, things, the insights that are, you know, continuing on our kind of discussion here between neuroscience and AI. Yeah, I mean, this was another, a lot of the work that we've done so far is taking ideas that have bubbled up in AI and, you know, asking the question of whether the brain might be doing something related, which I think on the surface sounds like something that's really mainly of use to neuroscience. We see it also as a way of validating what we're doing on the AI side. If we can gain some evidence that the brain is using some technique that we've been trying out in our AI work, that gives us confidence that, you know, it may be a good idea, that it'll, you know, scale to rich, complex tasks, that it'll interface well with other mechanisms. So you see it as a two way road. Yeah, for sure. Just because a particular paper is a little bit focused on from one to the, from AI, from neural networks to neuroscience. Ultimately the discussion, the thinking, the productive longterm aspect of it is the two way road nature of the whole interaction. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the notion of a virtuous circle between AI and neuroscience. And, you know, the way I see it, that's always been there since the two fields, you know, jointly existed. There have been some phases in that history when AI was sort of ahead. There are some phases when neuroscience was sort of ahead. I feel like given the burst of innovation that's happened recently on the AI side, AI is kind of ahead in the sense that there are all of these ideas that we, you know, for which it's exciting to consider that there might be neural analogs. And neuroscience, you know, in a sense has been focusing on approaches to studying behavior that come from, you know, that are kind of derived from this earlier era of cognitive psychology. And, you know, so in some ways fail to connect with some of the issues that we're grappling with in AI. Like how do we deal with, you know, large, you know, complex environments. But, you know, I think it's inevitable that this circle will keep turning and there will be a moment in the not too different distant future when neuroscience is pelting AI researchers with insights that may change the direction of our work. Just a quick human question. Is it, you have parts of your brain, this is very meta, but they're able to both think about neuroscience and AI. You know, I don't often meet people like that. So do you think, let me ask a meta plasticity question. Do you think a human being can be both good at AI and neuroscience? It's like what, on the team at DeepMind, what kind of human can occupy these two realms? And is that something you see everybody should be doing, can be doing, or is that a very special few can kind of jump? Just like we talk about art history, I would think it's a special person that can major in art history and also consider being a surgeon. Otherwise known as a dilettante. A dilettante, yeah. Easily distracted. No, I think it does take a special kind of person to be truly world class at both AI and neuroscience. And I am not on that list. I happen to be someone whose interest in neuroscience and psychology involved using the kinds of modeling techniques that are now very central in AI. And that sort of, I guess, bought me a ticket to be involved in all of the amazing things that are going on in AI research right now. I do know a few people who I would consider pretty expert on both fronts, and I won't embarrass them by naming them, but there are exceptional people out there who are like this. The one thing that I find is a barrier to being truly world class on both fronts is just the complexity of the technology that's involved in both disciplines now. So the engineering expertise that it takes to do truly frontline, hands on AI research is really, really considerable. The learning curve of the tools, just like the specifics of just whether it's programming or the kind of tools necessary to collect the data, to manage the data, to distribute, to compute, all that kind of stuff. And on the neuroscience, I guess, side, there'll be all different sets of tools. Exactly, especially with the recent explosion in neuroscience methods. So having said all that, I think the best scenario for both neuroscience and AI is to have people interacting who live at every point on this spectrum from exclusively focused on neuroscience to exclusively focused on the engineering side of AI. But to have those people inhabiting a community where they're talking to people who live elsewhere on the spectrum. And I may be someone who's very close to the center in the sense that I have one foot in the neuroscience world and one foot in the AI world, and that central position, I will admit, prevents me, at least someone with my limited cognitive capacity, from having true technical expertise in either domain. But at the same time, I at least hope that it's worthwhile having people around who can kind of see the connections. Yeah, the community, the emergent intelligence of the community when it's nicely distributed is useful. Exactly, yeah. So hopefully that, I mean, I've seen that work, I've seen that work out well at DeepMind. There are people who, I mean, even if you just focus on the AI work that happens at DeepMind, it's been a good thing to have some people around doing that kind of work whose PhDs are in neuroscience or psychology. Every academic discipline has its kind of blind spots and kind of unfortunate obsessions and its metaphors and its reference points, and having some intellectual diversity is really healthy. People get each other unstuck, I think. I see it all the time at DeepMind. And I like to think that the people who bring some neuroscience background to the table are helping with that. So one of my probably the deepest passion for me, what I would say, maybe we kind of spoke off mic a little bit about it, but that I think is a blind spot for at least robotics and AI folks is human robot interaction, human agent interaction. Maybe do you have thoughts about how we reduce the size of that blind spot? Do you also share the feeling that not enough folks are studying this aspect of interaction? Well, I'm actually pretty intensively interested in this issue now, and there are people in my group who've actually pivoted pretty hard over the last few years from doing more traditional cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to doing experimental work on human agent interaction. And there are a couple of reasons that I'm pretty passionately interested in this. One is it's kind of the outcome of having thought for a few years now about what we're up to. Like what are we doing? Like what is this AI research for? So what does it mean to make the world a better place? I think I'm pretty sure that means making life better for humans. And so how do you make life better for humans? That's a proposition that when you look at it carefully and honestly is rather horrendously complicated, especially when the AI systems that you're building are learning systems. They're not, you're not programming something that you then introduce to the world and it just works as programmed, like Google Maps or something. We're building systems that learn from experience. So that typically leads to AI safety questions. How do we keep these things from getting out of control? How do we keep them from doing things that harm humans? And I mean, I hasten to say, I consider those hugely important issues. And there are large sectors of the research community at DeepMind and of course elsewhere who are dedicated to thinking hard all day, every day about that. But there's, I guess I would say a positive side to this too which is to say, well, what would it mean to make human life better? And how can we imagine learning systems doing that? And in talking to my colleagues about that, we reached the initial conclusion that it's not sufficient to philosophize about that. You actually have to take into account how humans actually work and what humans want and the difficulties of knowing what humans want and the difficulties that arise when humans want different things. And so human agent interaction has become, a quite intensive focus of my group lately. If for no other reason that, in order to really address that issue in an adequate way, you have to, I mean, psychology becomes part of the picture. Yeah, and so there's a few elements there. So if you focus on solving like the, if you focus on the robotics problem, let's say AGI without humans in the picture is you're missing fundamentally the final step. When you do want to help human civilization, you eventually have to interact with humans. And when you create a learning system, just as you said, that will eventually have to interact with humans, the interaction itself has to be become, has to become part of the learning process. So you can't just watch, well, my sense is, it sounds like your sense is you can't just watch humans to learn about humans. You have to also be part of the human world. You have to interact with humans. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, then questions arise that start imperceptibly, but inevitably to slip beyond the realm of engineering. So questions like, if you have an agent that can do something that you can't do, under what conditions do you want that agent to do it? So if I have a robot that can play Beethoven sonatas better than any human, in the sense that the sensitivity, the expression is just beyond what any human, do I want to listen to that? Do I want to go to a concert and hear a robot play? These aren't engineering questions. These are questions about human preference and human culture. Psychology bordering on philosophy. Yeah, and then you start asking, well, even if we knew the answer to that, is it our place as AI engineers to build that into these agents? Probably the agents should interact with humans beyond the population of AI engineers and figure out what those humans want. And then when you start, I referred this the moment ago, but even that becomes complicated. Be quote, what if two humans want different things? And you have only one agent that's able to interact with them and try to satisfy their preferences. Then you're into the realm of economics and social choice theory and even politics. So there's a sense in which, if you kind of follow what we're doing to its logical conclusion, then it goes beyond questions of engineering and technology and starts to shade imperceptibly into questions about what kind of society do you want? And actually, once that dawned on me, I actually felt, I don't know what the right word is, quite refreshed in my involvement in AI research. It was almost like building this kind of stuff is gonna lead us back to asking really fundamental questions about what is this, what's the good life and who gets to decide and bringing in viewpoints from multiple sub communities to help us shape the way that we live. There's something, it started making me feel like doing AI research in a fully responsible way, would, could potentially lead to a kind of like cultural renewal. Yeah, it's the way to understand human beings at the individual, at the societal level. It may become a way to answer all the silly human questions of the meaning of life and all those kinds of things. Even if it doesn't give us a way of answering those questions, it may force us back to thinking about them. And it might bring, it might restore a certain, I don't know, a certain depth to, or even dare I say spirituality to the way that, to the world, I don't know. Maybe that's too grandiose. Well, I'm with you. I think it's AI will be the philosophy of the 21st century, the way which will open the door. I think a lot of AI researchers are afraid to open that door of exploring the beautiful richness of the human agent interaction, human AI interaction. I'm really happy that somebody like you have opened that door. And one thing I often think about is the usual schema for thinking about human agent interaction as this kind of dystopian, oh, our robot overlords. And again, I hasten to say AI safety is hugely important. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be thinking about those risks, totally on board for that. But there's, having said that, what often follows for me is the thought that there's another kind of narrative that might be relevant, which is, when we think of humans gaining more and more information about human life, the narrative there is usually that they gain more and more wisdom and they get closer to enlightenment and they become more benevolent. And the Buddha is like, that's a totally different narrative. And why isn't it the case that we imagine that the AI systems that we're creating are just gonna, like, they're gonna figure out more and more about the way the world works and the way that humans interact and they'll become beneficent. I'm not saying that will happen. I don't honestly expect that to happen without some careful, setting things up very carefully. But it's another way things could go, right? And yeah, and I would even push back on that. I personally believe that the most trajectories, natural human trajectories will lead us towards progress. So for me, there is a kind of sense that most trajectories in AI development will lead us into trouble. To me, and we over focus on the worst case. It's like in computer science, theoretical computer science has been this focus on worst case analysis. There's something appealing to our human mind at some lowest level to be good. I mean, we don't wanna be eaten by the tiger, I guess. So we wanna do the worst case analysis. But the reality is that shouldn't stop us from actually building out all the other trajectories which are potentially leading to all the positive worlds, all the enlightenment. There's a book, Enlightenment Now, with Steven Pinker and so on. This is looking generally at human progress. And there's so many ways that human progress can happen with AI. And I think you have to do that research. You have to do that work. You have to do the, not just the AI safety work of the one worst case analysis. How do we prevent that? But the actual tools and the glue and the mechanisms of human AI interaction that would lead to all the positive actions that can go. It's a super exciting area, right? Yeah, we should be spending, we should be spending a lot of our time saying what can go wrong. I think it's harder to see that there's work to be done to bring into focus the question of what it would look like for things to go right. That's not obvious. And we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't have the sense there was huge potential, right? We're not doing this for no reason. We have a sense that AGI would be a major boom to humanity. But I think it's worth starting now, even when our technology is quite primitive, asking exactly what would that mean? We can start now with applications that are already gonna make the world a better place, like solving protein folding. I think DeepMind has gotten heavy into science applications lately, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful move for us to be making. But when we think about AGI, when we think about building fully intelligent agents that are gonna be able to, in a sense, do whatever they want, we should start thinking about what do we want them to want, right? What kind of world do we wanna live in? That's not an easy question. And I think we just need to start working on it. And even on the path to, it doesn't have to be AGI, but just intelligent agents that interact with us and help us enrich our own existence on social networks, for example, on recommender systems of various intelligence. And there's so much interesting interaction that's yet to be understood and studied. And how do you create, I mean, Twitter is struggling with this very idea, how do you create AI systems that increase the quality and the health of a conversation? For sure. That's a beautiful human psychology question. And how do you do that without deception being involved, without manipulation being involved, maximizing human autonomy? And how do you make these choices in a democratic way? How do we face the, again, I'm speaking for myself here. How do we face the fact that it's a small group of people who have the skillset to build these kinds of systems, but what it means to make the world a better place is something that we all have to be talking about. Yeah, the world that we're trying to make a better place includes a huge variety of different kinds of people. Yeah, how do we cope with that? This is a problem that has been discussed in gory, extensive detail in social choice theory. One thing I'm really interested in and one thing I'm really enjoying about the recent direction work has taken in some parts of my team is that, yeah, we're reading the AI literature, we're reading the neuroscience literature, but we've also started reading economics and, as I mentioned, social choice theory, even some political theory, because it turns out that it all becomes relevant. It all becomes relevant. But at the same time, we've been trying not to write philosophy papers, we've been trying not to write physician papers. We're trying to figure out ways of doing actual empirical research that kind of take the first small steps to thinking about what it really means for humans with all of their complexity and contradiction and paradox to be brought into contact with these AI systems in a way that really makes the world a better place. Often, reinforcement learning frameworks actually kind of allow you to do that, machine learning, and so that's the exciting thing about AI is it allows you to reduce the unsolvable problem, philosophical problem, into something more concrete that you can get ahold of. Yeah, and it allows you to kind of define the problem in some way that allows for growth in the system that's sort of, you know, you're not responsible for the details, right? You say, this is generally what I want you to do, and then learning takes care of the rest. Of course, the safety issues arise in that context, but I think also some of these positive issues arise in that context. What would it mean for an AI system to really come to understand what humans want? And with all of the subtleties of that, right? You know, humans want help with certain things, but they don't want everything done for them, right? There is, part of the satisfaction that humans get from life is in accomplishing things. So if there were devices around that did everything for, you know, I often think of the movie WALLI, right? That's like dystopian in a totally different way. It's like, the machines are doing everything for us. That's not what we wanted. You know, anyway, I find this, you know, this opens up a whole landscape of research that feels affirmative and exciting. To me, it's one of the most exciting, and it's wide open. We have to, because it's a cool paper, talk about dopamine. Oh yeah, okay, so I can. We were gonna, I was gonna give you a quick summary. Yeah, a quick summary of, what's the title of the paper? I think we called it a distributional code for value in dopamine based reinforcement learning, yes. So that's another project that grew out of pure AI research. A number of people at DeepMind and a few other places had started working on a new version of reinforcement learning, which was defined by taking something in traditional reinforcement learning and just tweaking it. So the thing that they took from traditional reinforcement learning was a value signal. So at the center of reinforcement learning, at least most algorithms, is some representation of how well things are going, your expected cumulative future reward. And that's usually represented as a single number. So if you imagine a gambler in a casino and the gambler's thinking, well, I have this probability of winning such and such an amount of money, and I have this probability of losing such and such an amount of money, that situation would be represented as a single number, which is like the expected, the weighted average of all those outcomes. And this new form of reinforcement learning said, well, what if we generalize that to a distributional representation? So now we think of the gambler as literally thinking, well, there's this probability that I'll win this amount of money, and there's this probability that I'll lose that amount of money, and we don't reduce that to a single number. And it had been observed through experiments, through just trying this out, that that kind of distributional representation really accelerated reinforcement learning and led to better policies. What's your intuition about, so we're talking about rewards. Yeah. So what's your intuition why that is, why does it do that? Well, it's kind of a surprising historical note, at least surprised me when I learned it, that this had been proven to be true. This had been tried out in a kind of heuristic way. People thought, well, gee, what would happen if we tried? And then it had this, empirically, it had this striking effect. And it was only then that people started thinking, well, gee, wait, why? Wait, why? Why is this working? And that's led to a series of studies just trying to figure out why it works, which is ongoing. But one thing that's already clear from that research is that one reason that it helps is that it drives richer representation learning. So if you imagine two situations that have the same expected value, the same kind of weighted average value, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms are going to take those two situations and kind of, in terms of the way they're represented internally, they're gonna squeeze them together because the thing that you're trying to represent, which is their expected value, is the same. So all the way through the system, things are gonna be mushed together. But what if those two situations actually have different value distributions? They have the same average value, but they have different distributions of value. In that situation, distributional learning will maintain the distinction between these two things. So to make a long story short, distributional learning can keep things separate in the internal representation that might otherwise be conflated or squished together. And maintaining those distinctions can be useful when the system is now faced with some other task where the distinction is important. If we look at the optimistic and pessimistic dopamine neurons. So first of all, what is dopamine? Oh, God. Why is this at all useful to think about in the artificial intelligence sense? But what do we know about dopamine in the human brain? What is it? Why is it useful? Why is it interesting? What does it have to do with the prefrontal cortex and learning in general? Yeah, so, well, this is also a case where there's a huge amount of detail and debate. But one currently prevailing idea is that the function of this neurotransmitter dopamine resembles a particular component of standard reinforcement learning algorithms, which is called the reward prediction error. So I was talking a moment ago about these value representations. How do you learn them? How do you update them based on experience? Well, if you made some prediction about a future reward and then you get more reward than you were expecting, then probably retrospectively, you want to go back and increase the value representation that you attached to that earlier situation. If you got less reward than you were expecting, you should probably decrement that estimate. And that's the process of temporal difference. Exactly, this is the central mechanism of temporal difference learning, which is one of several sort of the backbone of our momentarium in NRL. And this connection between the reward prediction error and dopamine was made in the 1990s. And there's been a huge amount of research that seems to back it up. Dopamine may be doing other things, but this is clearly, at least roughly, one of the things that it's doing. But the usual idea was that dopamine was representing these reward prediction errors, again, in this like kind of single number way that representing your surprise with a single number. And in distributional reinforcement learning, this kind of new elaboration of the standard approach, it's not only the value function that's represented as a single number, it's also the reward prediction error. And so what happened was that Will Dabney, one of my collaborators who was one of the first people to work on distributional temporal difference learning, talked to a guy in my group, Zeb Kurt Nelson, who's a computational neuroscientist, and said, gee, you know, is it possible that dopamine might be doing something like this distributional coding thing? And they started looking at what was in the literature, and then they brought me in, and we started talking to Nao Uchida, and we came up with some specific predictions about if the brain is using this kind of distributional coding, then in the tasks that Nao has studied, you should see this, this, this, and this, and that's where the paper came from. We kind of enumerated a set of predictions, all of which ended up being fairly clearly confirmed, and all of which leads to at least some initial indication that the brain might be doing something like this distributional coding, that dopamine might be representing surprise signals in a way that is not just collapsing everything to a single number, but instead is kind of respecting the variety of future outcomes, if that makes sense. So yeah, so that's showing, suggesting possibly that dopamine has a really interesting representation scheme in the human brain for its reward signal. Exactly. That's fascinating. That's another beautiful example of AI revealing something nice about neuroscience, potentially suggesting possibilities. Well, you never know. So the minute you publish a paper like that, the next thing you think is, I hope that replicates. Like, I hope we see that same thing in other data sets, but of course, several labs now are doing the followup experiments, so we'll know soon. But it has been a lot of fun for us to take these ideas from AI and kind of bring them into neuroscience and see how far we can get. So we kind of talked about it a little bit, but where do you see the field of neuroscience and artificial intelligence heading broadly? Like, what are the possible exciting areas that you can see breakthroughs in the next, let's get crazy, not just three or five years, but the next 10, 20, 30 years that would make you excited and perhaps you'd be part of? On the neuroscience side, there's a great deal of interest now in what's going on in AI. And at the same time, I feel like, so neuroscience, especially the part of neuroscience that's focused on circuits and systems, kind of like really mechanism focused, there's been this explosion in new technology. And up until recently, the experiments that have exploited this technology have not involved a lot of interesting behavior. And this is for a variety of reasons, one of which is in order to employ some of these technologies, you actually have to, if you're studying a mouse, you have to head fix the mouse. In other words, you have to like immobilize the mouse. And so it's been tricky to come up with ways of eliciting interesting behavior from a mouse that's restrained in this way, but people have begun to create very interesting solutions to this, like virtual reality environments where the animal can kind of move a track ball. And as people have kind of begun to explore what you can do with these technologies, I feel like more and more people are asking, well, let's try to bring behavior into the picture. Let's try to like reintroduce behavior, which was supposed to be what this whole thing was about. And I'm hoping that those two trends, the kind of growing interest in behavior and the widespread interest in what's going on in AI, will come together to kind of open a new chapter in neuroscience research where there's a kind of a rebirth of interest in the structure of behavior and its underlying substrates, but that that research is being informed by computational mechanisms that we're coming to understand in AI. If we can do that, then we might be taking a step closer to this utopian future that we were talking about earlier where there's really no distinction between psychology and neuroscience. Neuroscience is about studying the mechanisms that underlie whatever it is the brain is for, and what is the brain for? What is the brain for? It's for behavior. I feel like we could maybe take a step toward that now if people are motivated in the right way. You also asked about AI. So that was a neuroscience question. You said neuroscience, that's right. And especially places like DeepMind are interested in both branches. So what about the engineering of intelligence systems? I think one of the key challenges that a lot of people are seeing now in AI is to build systems that have the kind of flexibility and the kind of flexibility that humans have in two senses. One is that humans can be good at many things. They're not just expert at one thing. And they're also flexible in the sense that they can switch between things very easily and they can pick up new things very quickly because they very ably see what a new task has in common with other things that they've done. And that's something that our AI systems just blatantly do not have. There are some people who like to argue that deep learning and deep RL are simply wrong for getting that kind of flexibility. I don't share that belief, but the simpler fact of the matter is we're not building things yet that do have that kind of flexibility. And I think the attention of a large part of the AI community is starting to pivot to that question. How do we get that? That's gonna lead to a focus on abstraction. It's gonna lead to a focus on what in psychology we call cognitive control, which is the ability to switch between tasks, the ability to quickly put together a program of behavior that you've never executed before, but you know makes sense for a particular set of demands. It's very closely related to what the prefrontal cortex does on the neuroscience side. So I think it's gonna be an interesting new chapter. So that's the reasoning side and cognition side, but let me ask the over romanticized question. Do you think we'll ever engineer an AGI system that we humans would be able to love and that would love us back? So have that level and depth of connection? I love that question. And it relates closely to things that I've been thinking about a lot lately, in the context of this human AI research. There's social psychology research in particular by Susan Fisk at Princeton the department where I used to work, where she dissects human attitudes toward other humans into a sort of two dimensional scheme. And one dimension is about ability. How able, how capable is this other person? But the other dimension is warmth. So you can imagine another person who's very skilled and capable, but is very cold. And you wouldn't really like highly, you might have some reservations about that other person. But there's also a kind of reservation that we might have about another person who elicits in us or displays a lot of human warmth, but is not good at getting things done. We reserve our greatest esteem really for people who are both highly capable and also quite warm. That's like the best of the best. This isn't a normative statement I'm making. This is just an empirical statement. This is what humans seem... These are the two dimensions that people seem to kind of like along which people size other people up. And in AI research, there's a lot of people who think that humans are very capable, and in AI research, we really focus on this capability thing. We want our agents to be able to do stuff. This thing can play go at a superhuman level. That's awesome. But that's only one dimension. What about the other dimension? What would it mean for an AI system to be warm? And I don't know, maybe there are easy solutions here. Like we can put a face on our AI systems. It's cute, it has big ears. I mean, that's probably part of it. But I think it also has to do with a pattern of behavior. A pattern of what would it mean for an AI system to display caring, compassionate behavior in a way that actually made us feel like it was for real? That we didn't feel like it was simulated. We didn't feel like we were being duped. To me, people talk about the Turing test or some descendant of it. I feel like that's the ultimate Turing test. Is there an AI system that can not only convince us that it knows how to reason and it knows how to interpret language, but that we're comfortable saying, yeah, that AI system's a good guy. On the warmth scale, whatever warmth is, we kind of intuitively understand it, but we also wanna be able to, yeah, we don't understand it explicitly enough yet to be able to engineer it. Exactly. And that's an open scientific question. You kind of alluded it several times in the human AI interaction. That's a question that should be studied and probably one of the most important questions as we move to AGI. We humans are so good at it. Yeah. It's not just that we're born warm. I suppose some people are warmer than others given whatever genes they manage to inherit. But there are also learned skills involved. There are ways of communicating to other people that you care, that they matter to you, that you're enjoying interacting with them, right? And we learn these skills from one another. And it's not out of the question that we could build engineered systems. I think it's hopeless, as you say, that we could somehow hand design these sorts of behaviors. But it's not out of the question that we could build systems that kind of, we instill in them something that sets them out in the right direction, so that they end up learning what it is to interact with humans in a way that's gratifying to humans. I mean, honestly, if that's not where we're headed, I want out. I think it's exciting as a scientific problem, just as you described. I honestly don't see a better way to end it than talking about warmth and love. And Matt, I don't think I've ever had such a wonderful conversation where my questions were so bad and your answers were so beautiful. So I deeply appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for talking to me. Well, it's been very fun. As you can probably tell, there's something I like about kind of thinking outside the box and like, so it's good having an opportunity to do that. Awesome. Thanks so much for doing it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matt Bopenik. And thank you to our sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Magic Spoon Low Carb Keto Cereal. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex and also going to magicspoon.com slash lex and using code lex at checkout. Click the links, buy all the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and the startup. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with the five stars in Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, follow on Spotify or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman. Again, spelled miraculously without the E, just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from neurologist V.S. Amarachandran. How can a three pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of an infinity and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless far flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light years until gravity and change brought them together here now. These atoms now form a conglomerate, your brain, that can not only ponder the very stars they gave at birth, but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wander. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This truly is the greatest mystery of all. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind | Lex Fridman Podcast #106

The following is a conversation with Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, best known for his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, that makes an ethical case against eating meat. He has written brilliantly from an ethical perspective on extreme poverty, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, and generally happiness, including in his books, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save. He was a key popularizer of the effective altruism movement and is generally considered one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, Cash App and Masterclass. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast and signing up at masterclass.com slash Lex. Click the links, buy the stuff. It really is the best way to support the podcast and the journey I'm on. As you may know, I primarily eat a ketogenic or carnivore diet, which means that most of my diet is made up of meat. I do not hunt the food I eat, though one day I hope to. I love fishing, for example. Fishing and eating the fish I catch has always felt much more honest than participating in the supply chain of factory farming. From an ethics perspective, this part of my life has always had a cloud over it. It makes me think. I've tried a few times in my life to reduce the amount of meat I eat. But for some reason, whatever the makeup of my body, whatever the way I practice the dieting I have, I get a lot of mental and physical energy and performance from eating meat. So both intellectually and physically, it's a continued journey for me. I return to Peter's work often to reevaluate the ethics of how I live this aspect of my life. Let me also say that you may be a vegan or you may be a meat eater and may be upset by the words I say or Peter says, but I ask for this podcast and other episodes of this podcast that you keep an open mind. I may and probably will talk with people you disagree with. Please try to really listen, especially to people you disagree with. And give me and the world the gift of being a participant in a patient, intelligent, and nuanced discourse. If your instinct and desire is to be a voice of mockery towards those you disagree with, please unsubscribe. My source of joy and inspiration here has been to be a part of a community that thinks deeply and speaks with empathy and compassion. That is what I hope to continue being a part of and I hope you join as well. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. 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So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotic system education for young people around the world. This show is sponsored by Masterclass. Sign up at masterclass.com slash LEX to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about Masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. For $180 a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from, to list some of my favorites, Chris Hadfield on space exploration, Neil Gauss Tyson on scientific thinking and communication, Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims on game design. I promise I'll start streaming games at some point soon. Carlos Santana on guitar, Gary Kasparov on chess, Daniel Lagrano on poker and many more. Chris Hadfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up at masterclass.com slash LEX to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, here's my conversation with Peter Singer. When did you first become conscious of the fact that there is much suffering in the world? I think I was conscious of the fact that there's a lot of suffering in the world pretty much as soon as I was able to understand anything about my family and its background because I lost three of my four grandparents in the Holocaust and obviously I knew why I only had one grandparent and she herself had been in the camps and survived, so I think I knew a lot about that pretty early. My entire family comes from the Soviet Union. I was born in the Soviet Union. World War II has deep roots in the culture and the suffering that the war brought the millions of people who died is in the music, is in the literature, is in the culture. What do you think was the impact of the war broadly on our society? The war had many impacts. I think one of them, a beneficial impact, is that it showed what racism and authoritarian government can do and at least as far as the West was concerned, I think that meant that I grew up in an era in which there wasn't the kind of overt racism and antisemitism that had existed for my parents in Europe. I was growing up in Australia and certainly that was clearly seen as something completely unacceptable. There was also, though, a fear of a further outbreak of war which this time we expected would be nuclear because of the way the Second World War had ended, so there was this overshadowing of my childhood about the possibility that I would not live to grow up and be an adult because of a catastrophic nuclear war. The film On the Beach was made in which the city that I was living, Melbourne, was the last place on Earth to have living human beings because of the nuclear cloud that was spreading from the North, so that certainly gave us a bit of that sense. There were many, there were clearly many other legacies that we got of the war as well and the whole setup of the world and the Cold War that followed. All of that has its roots in the Second World War. There is much beauty that comes from war. Sort of, I had a conversation with Eric Weinstein. He said everything is great about war except all the death and suffering. Do you think there's something positive that came from the war, the mirror that it put to our society, sort of the ripple effects on it, ethically speaking? Do you think there are positive aspects to war? I find it hard to see positive aspects in war and some of the things that other people think of as positive and beautiful may be questioning. So there's a certain kind of patriotism. People say during wartime, we all pull together, we all work together against a common enemy and that's true. An outside enemy does unite a country and in general, it's good for countries to be united and have common purposes but it also engenders a kind of a nationalism and a patriotism that can't be questioned and that I'm more skeptical about. What about the brotherhood that people talk about from soldiers? The sort of counterintuitive, sad idea that the closest that people feel to each other is in those moments of suffering, of being at the sort of the edge of seeing your comrades dying in your arms. That somehow brings people extremely closely together. Suffering brings people closer together. How do you make sense of that? It may bring people close together but there are other ways of bonding and being close to people I think without the suffering and death that war entails. Perhaps you could see, you could already hear the romanticized Russian in me. We tend to romanticize suffering just a little bit in our literature and culture and so on. Could you take a step back and I apologize if it's a ridiculous question but what is suffering? If you would try to define what suffering is, how would you go about it? Suffering is a conscious state. There can be no suffering for a being who is completely unconscious and it's distinguished from other conscious states in terms of being one that considered just in itself. We would rather be without. It's a conscious state that we want to stop if we're experiencing or we want to avoid having again if we've experienced it in the past. And that's, as I say, emphasized for its own sake because of course people will say, well, suffering strengthens the spirit. It has good consequences. And sometimes it does have those consequences and of course sometimes we might undergo suffering. We set ourselves a challenge to run a marathon or climb a mountain or even just to go to the dentist so that the toothache doesn't get worse even though we know the dentist is gonna hurt us to some extent. So I'm not saying that we never choose suffering but I am saying that other things being equal, we would rather not be in that state of consciousness. Is the ultimate goal sort of, you have the new 10 year anniversary release of the Life You Can Save book, really influential book. We'll talk about it a bunch of times throughout this conversation but do you think it's possible to eradicate suffering or is that the goal or do we want to achieve a kind of minimum threshold of suffering and then keeping a little drop of poison to keep things interesting in the world? In practice, I don't think we ever will eliminate suffering so I think that little drop of poison as you put it or if you like the contrasting dash of an unpleasant color perhaps something like that in a otherwise harmonious and beautiful composition, that is gonna always be there. If you ask me whether in theory if we could get rid of it, we should. I think the answer is whether in fact we would be better off or whether in terms of by eliminating the suffering we would also eliminate some of the highs, the positive highs and if that's so then we might be prepared to say it's worth having a minimum of suffering in order to have the best possible experiences as well. Is there a relative aspect to suffering? So when you talk about eradicating poverty in the world, is this the more you succeed, the more the bar of what defines poverty raises or is there at the basic human ethical level a bar that's absolute that once you get above it then we can morally converge to feeling like we have eradicated poverty? I think they're both and I think this is true for poverty as well as suffering. There's an objective level of suffering or of poverty where we're talking about objective indicators like you're constantly hungry, you can't get enough food, you're constantly cold, you can't get warm, you have some physical pains that you're never rid of. I think those things are objective but it may also be true that if you do get rid of it if you do get rid of that and you get to the stage where all of those basic needs have been met, there may still be then new forms of suffering that develop and perhaps that's what we're seeing in the affluent societies we have that people get bored for example, they don't need to spend so many hours a day earning money to get enough to eat and shelter. So now they're bored, they lack a sense of purpose. That can happen. And that then is a kind of a relative suffering that is distinct from the objective forms of suffering. But in your focus on eradicating suffering, you don't think about that kind of, the kind of interesting challenges and suffering that emerges in affluent societies, that's just not, in your ethical philosophical brain, is that of interest at all? It would be of interest to me if we had eliminated all of the objective forms of suffering, which I think of as generally more severe and also perhaps easier at this stage anyway to know how to eliminate. So yes, in some future state when we've eliminated those objective forms of suffering, I would be interested in trying to eliminate the relative forms as well. But that's not a practical need for me at the moment. Sorry to linger on it because you kind of said it, but just is elimination the goal for the affluent society? So is there, do you see suffering as a creative force? Suffering can be a creative force. I think repeating what I said about the highs and whether we need some of the lows to experience the highs. So it may be that suffering makes us more creative and we regard that as worthwhile. Maybe that brings some of those highs with it that we would not have had if we'd had no suffering. I don't really know. Many people have suggested that and I certainly can't have no basis for denying it. And if it's true, then I would not want to eliminate suffering completely. But the focus is on the absolute, not to be cold, not to be hungry. Yes, that's at the present stage of where the world's population is, that's the focus. Talking about human nature for a second, do you think people are inherently good or do we all have good and evil in us that basically everyone is capable of evil based on the environment? Certainly most of us have potential for both good and evil. I'm not prepared to say that everyone is capable of evil. Maybe some people who even in the worst of circumstances would not be capable of it, but most of us are very susceptible to environmental influences. So when we look at things that we were talking about previously, let's say what the Nazis did during the Holocaust, I think it's quite difficult to say, I know that I would not have done those things even if I were in the same circumstances as those who did them. Even if let's say I had grown up under the Nazi regime and had been indoctrinated with racist ideas, had also had the idea that I must obey orders, follow the commands of the Fuhrer, plus of course perhaps the threat that if I didn't do certain things, I might get sent to the Russian front and that would be a pretty grim fate. I think it's really hard for anybody to say, nevertheless, I know I would not have killed those Jews or whatever else it was that they were. Well, what's your intuition? How many people will be able to say that? Truly to be able to say it, I think very few, less than 10%. To me, it seems a very interesting and powerful thing to meditate on. So I've read a lot about the war, World War II, and I can't escape the thought that I would have not been one of the 10%. Right, I have to say, I simply don't know. I would like to hope that I would have been one of the 10%, but I don't really have any basis for claiming that I would have been different from the majority. Is it a worthwhile thing to contemplate? It would be interesting if we could find a way of really finding these answers. There obviously is quite a bit of research on people during the Holocaust, on how ordinary Germans got led to do terrible things, and there are also studies of the resistance, some heroic people in the White Rose group, for example, who resisted even though they knew they were likely to die for it. But I don't know whether these studies really can answer your larger question of how many people would have been capable of doing that. Well, sort of the reason I think is interesting is in the world, as you described, when there are things that you'd like to do that are good, that are objectively good, it's useful to think about whether I'm not willing to do something, or I'm not willing to acknowledge something as good and the right thing to do because I'm simply scared of putting my life, of damaging my life in some kind of way. And that kind of thought exercise is helpful to understand what is the right thing in my current skill set and the capacity to do. Sort of there's things that are convenient, and I wonder if there are things that are highly inconvenient, where I would have to experience derision, or hatred, or death, or all those kinds of things, but it's truly the right thing to do. And that kind of balance is, I feel like in America, we don't have, it's difficult to think in the current times, it seems easier to put yourself back in history, where you can sort of objectively contemplate whether, how willing you are to do the right thing when the cost is high. True, but I think we do face those challenges today, and I think we can still ask ourselves those questions. So one stand that I took more than 40 years ago now was to stop eating meat, become a vegetarian at a time when you hardly met anybody who was a vegetarian, or if you did, they might've been a Hindu, or they might've had some weird theories about meat and health. And I know thinking about making that decision, I was convinced that it was the right thing to do, but I still did have to think, are all my friends gonna think that I'm a crank because I'm now refusing to eat meat? So I'm not saying there were any terrible sanctions, obviously, but I thought about that, and I guess I decided, well, I still think this is the right thing to do, and I'll put up with that if it happens. And one or two friends were clearly uncomfortable with that decision, but that was pretty minor compared to the historical examples that we've been talking about. But other issues that we have around too, like global poverty and what we ought to be doing about that is another question where people, I think, can have the opportunity to take a stand on what's the right thing to do now. Climate change would be a third question where, again, people are taking a stand. I can look at Greta Thunberg there and say, well, I think it must've taken a lot of courage for a schoolgirl to say, I'm gonna go on strike about climate change and see what happens. Yeah, especially in this divisive world, she gets exceptionally huge amounts of support and hatred, both. That's right. Which is very difficult for a teenager to operate in. In your book, Ethics in the Real World, amazing book, people should check it out. Very easy read. 82 brief essays on things that matter. One of the essays asks, should robots have rights? You've written about this, so let me ask, should robots have rights? If we ever develop robots capable of consciousness, capable of having their own internal perspective on what's happening to them so that their lives can go well or badly for them, then robots should have rights. Until that happens, they shouldn't. So is consciousness essentially a prerequisite to suffering? So everything that possesses consciousness is capable of suffering, put another way. And if so, what is consciousness? I certainly think that consciousness is a prerequisite for suffering. You can't suffer if you're not conscious. But is it true that every being that is conscious will suffer or has to be capable of suffering? I suppose you could imagine a kind of consciousness, especially if we can construct it artificially, that's capable of experiencing pleasure but just automatically cuts out the consciousness when they're suffering. So they're like an instant anesthesia as soon as something is gonna cause you suffering. So that's possible. But doesn't exist as far as we know on this planet yet. You asked what is consciousness. Philosophers often talk about it as there being a subject of experiences. So you and I and everybody listening to this is a subject of experience. There is a conscious subject who is taking things in, responding to it in various ways, feeling good about it, feeling bad about it. And that's different from the kinds of artificial intelligence we have now. I take out my phone. I ask Google directions to where I'm going. Google gives me the directions and I choose to take a different way. Google doesn't care. It's not like I'm offending Google or anything like that. There is no subject of experiences there. And I think that's the indication that Google AI we have now is not conscious or at least that level of AI is not conscious. And that's the way to think about it. Now, it may be difficult to tell, of course, whether a certain AI is or isn't conscious. It may mimic consciousness and we can't tell if it's only mimicking it or if it's the real thing. But that's what we're looking for. Is there a subject of experience, a perspective on the world from which things can go well or badly from that perspective? So our idea of what suffering looks like comes from just watching ourselves when we're in pain. Or when we're experiencing pleasure, it's not only. Pleasure and pain. Yes, so and then you could actually, you could push back on us, but I would say that's how we kind of build an intuition about animals is we can infer the similarities between humans and animals and so infer that they're suffering or not based on certain things and they're conscious or not. So what if robots, you mentioned Google Maps and I've done this experiment. So I work in robotics just for my own self or I have several Roomba robots and I play with different speech interaction, voice based interaction. And if the Roomba or the robot or Google Maps shows any signs of pain, like screaming or moaning or being displeased by something you've done, that in my mind, I can't help but immediately upgrade it. And even when I myself programmed it in, just having another entity that's now for the moment disjoint from me showing signs of pain makes me feel like it is conscious. Like I immediately, then the whatever, I immediately realize that it's not obviously, but that feeling is there. So sort of, I guess, what do you think about a world where Google Maps and Roombas are pretending to be conscious and we descendants of apes are not smart enough to realize they're not or whatever, or that is conscious, they appear to be conscious. And so you then have to give them rights. The reason I'm asking that is that kind of capability may be closer than we realize. Yes, that kind of capability may be closer, but I don't think it follows that we have to give them rights. I suppose the argument for saying that in those circumstances we should give them rights is that if we don't, we'll harden ourselves against other beings who are not robots and who really do suffer. That's a possibility that, you know, if we get used to looking at a being suffering and saying, yeah, we don't have to do anything about that, that being doesn't have any rights, maybe we'll feel the same about animals, for instance. And interestingly, among philosophers and thinkers who denied that we have any direct duties to animals, and this includes people like Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, they did say, yes, but still it's better not to be cruel to them, not because of the suffering we're inflicting on the animals, but because if we are, we may develop a cruel disposition and this will be bad for humans, you know, because we're more likely to be cruel to other humans and that would be wrong. So. But you don't accept that kind of. I don't accept that as the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals. I think the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals is just that we're inflicting suffering on them and the suffering is a bad thing. But possibly I might accept some sort of parallel of that argument as a reason why you shouldn't be cruel to these robots that mimic the symptoms of pain if it's gonna be harder for us to distinguish. I would venture to say, I'd like to disagree with you and with most people, I think, at the risk of sounding crazy, I would like to say that if that Roomba is dedicated to faking the consciousness and the suffering, I think it will be impossible for us. I would like to apply the same argument as with animals to robots, that they deserve rights in that sense. Now we might outlaw the addition of those kinds of features into Roombas, but once you do, I think I'm quite surprised by the upgrade in consciousness that the display of suffering creates. It's a totally open world, but I'd like to just sort of the difference between animals and other humans is that in the robot case, we've added it in ourselves. Therefore, we can say something about how real it is. But I would like to say that the display of it is what makes it real. And I'm not a philosopher, I'm not making that argument, but I'd at least like to add that as a possibility. And I've been surprised by it is all I'm trying to sort of articulate poorly, I suppose. So there is a philosophical view has been held about humans, which is rather like what you're talking about, and that's behaviorism. So behaviorism was employed both in psychology, people like BF Skinner was a famous behaviorist, but in psychology, it was more a kind of a, what is it that makes this science? Well, you need to have behavior because that's what you can observe, you can't observe consciousness. But in philosophy, the view just defended by people like Gilbert Ryle, who was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, wrote a book called The Concept of Mind, in which in this kind of phase, this is in the 40s of linguistic philosophy, he said, well, the meaning of a term is its use, and we use terms like so and so is in pain when we see somebody writhing or screaming or trying to escape some stimulus, and that's the meaning of the term. So that's what it is to be in pain, and you point to the behavior. And Norman Malcolm, who was another philosopher in the school from Cornell, had the view that, so what is it to dream? After all, we can't see other people's dreams. Well, when people wake up and say, I've just had a dream of, here I was, undressed, walking down the main street or whatever it is you've dreamt, that's what it is to have a dream. It's basically to wake up and recall something. So you could apply this to what you're talking about and say, so what it is to be in pain is to exhibit these symptoms of pain behavior, and therefore, these robots are in pain. That's what the word means. But nowadays, not many people think that Ryle's kind of philosophical behaviorism is really very plausible, so I think they would say the same about your view. So, yes, I just spoke with Noam Chomsky, who basically was part of dismantling the behaviorist movement. But, and I'm with that 100% for studying human behavior, but I am one of the few people in the world who has made Roombas scream in pain. And I just don't know what to do with that empirical evidence, because it's hard, sort of philosophically, I agree. But the only reason I philosophically agree in that case is because I was the programmer. But if somebody else was a programmer, I'm not sure I would be able to interpret that well. So I think it's a new world that I was just curious what your thoughts are. For now, you feel that the display of what we can kind of intellectually say is a fake display of suffering is not suffering. That's right, that would be my view. But that's consistent, of course, with the idea that it's part of our nature to respond to this display if it's reasonably authentically done. And therefore it's understandable that people would feel this, and maybe, as I said, it's even a good thing that they do feel it, and you wouldn't want to harden yourself against it because then you might harden yourself against being sort of really suffering. But there's this line, so you said, once artificial general intelligence system, a human level intelligence system become conscious, I guess if I could just linger on it, now I've wrote really dumb programs that just say things that I told them to say, but how do you know when a system like Alexa, which is sufficiently complex that you can't introspect to how it works, starts giving you signs of consciousness through natural language? That there's a feeling, there's another entity there that's self aware, that has a fear of death, a mortality, that has awareness of itself that we kind of associate with other living creatures. I guess I'm sort of trying to do the slippery slope from the very naive thing where I started into something where it's sufficiently a black box to where it's starting to feel like it's conscious. Where's that threshold where you would start getting uncomfortable with the idea of robot suffering, do you think? I don't know enough about the programming that we're going to this really to answer this question. But I presume that somebody who does know more about this could look at the program and see whether we can explain the behaviors in a parsimonious way that doesn't require us to suggest that some sort of consciousness has emerged. Or alternatively, whether you're in a situation where you say, I don't know how this is happening, the program does generate a kind of artificial general intelligence which is autonomous, starts to do things itself and is autonomous of the basics programming that set it up. And so it's quite possible that actually we have achieved consciousness in a system of artificial intelligence. Sort of the approach that I work with, most of the community is really excited about now is with learning methods, so machine learning. And the learning methods are unfortunately are not capable of revealing, which is why somebody like Noam Chomsky criticizes them. You create powerful systems that are able to do certain things without understanding the theory, the physics, the science of how it works. And so it's possible if those are the kinds of methods that succeed, we won't be able to know exactly, sort of try to reduce, try to find whether this thing is conscious or not, this thing is intelligent or not. It's simply giving, when we talk to it, it displays wit and humor and cleverness and emotion and fear, and then we won't be able to say where in the billions of nodes, neurons in this artificial neural network is the fear coming from. So in that case, that's a really interesting place where we do now start to return to behaviorism and say. Yeah, that is an interesting issue. I would say that if we have serious doubts and think it might be conscious, then we ought to try to give it the benefit of the doubt, just as I would say with animals. I think we can be highly confident that vertebrates are conscious, but when we get down, and some invertebrates like the octopus, but with insects, it's much harder to be confident of that. I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt where we can, which means, I think it would be wrong to torture an insect, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to slap a mosquito that's about to bite you and stop you getting to sleep. So I think you try to achieve some balance in these circumstances of uncertainty. If it's okay with you, if we can go back just briefly. So 44 years ago, like you mentioned, 40 plus years ago, you've written Animal Liberation, the classic book that started, that launched, that was the foundation of the movement of Animal Liberation. Can you summarize the key set of ideas that underpin that book? Certainly, the key idea that underlies that book is the concept of speciesism, which I did not invent that term. I took it from a man called Richard Rider, who was in Oxford when I was, and I saw a pamphlet that he'd written about experiments on chimpanzees that used that term. But I think I contributed to making it philosophically more precise and to getting it into a broader audience. And the idea is that we have a bias or a prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not members of our species. Just as in the past, Europeans, for example, had a bias against taking seriously the interests of Africans, racism. And men have had a bias against taking seriously the interests of women, sexism. So I think something analogous, not completely identical, but something analogous goes on and has gone on for a very long time with the way humans see themselves vis a vis animals. We see ourselves as more important. We see animals as existing to serve our needs in various ways. And you're gonna find this very explicit in earlier philosophers from Aristotle through to Kant and others. And either we don't need to take their interests into account at all, or we can discount it because they're not humans. They can a little bit, but they don't count nearly as much as humans do. My book argues that that attitude is responsible for a lot of the things that we do to animals that are wrong, confining them indoors in very crowded, cramped conditions in factory farms to produce meat or eggs or milk more cheaply, using them in some research that's by no means essential for survival or wellbeing, and a whole lot, some of the sports and things that we do to animals. So I think that's unjustified because I think the significance of pain and suffering does not depend on the species of the being who is in pain or suffering any more than it depends on the race or sex of the being who is in pain or suffering. And I think we ought to rethink our treatment of animals along the lines of saying, if the pain is just as great in an animal, then it's just as bad that it happens as if it were a human. Maybe if I could ask, I apologize, hopefully it's not a ridiculous question, but so as far as we know, we cannot communicate with animals through natural language, but we would be able to communicate with robots. So I'm returning to sort of a small parallel between perhaps animals and the future of AI. If we do create an AGI system or as we approach creating that AGI system, what kind of questions would you ask her to try to intuit whether there is consciousness or more importantly, whether there's capacity to suffer? I might ask the AGI what she was feeling or does she have feelings? And if she says yes, to describe those feelings, to describe what they were like, to see what the phenomenal account of consciousness is like. That's one question. I might also try to find out if the AGI has a sense of itself. So for example, the idea would you, we often ask people, so suppose you were in a car accident and your brain were transplanted into someone else's body, do you think you would survive or would it be the person whose body was still surviving, your body having been destroyed? And most people say, I think I would, if my brain was transplanted along with my memories and so on, I would survive. So we could ask AGI those kinds of questions. If they were transferred to a different piece of hardware, would they survive? What would survive? And get at that sort of concept. Sort of on that line, another perhaps absurd question, but do you think having a body is necessary for consciousness? So do you think digital beings can suffer? Presumably digital beings need to be running on some kind of hardware, right? Yeah, that ultimately boils down to, but this is exactly what you just said, is moving the brain from one place to another. So you could move it to a different kind of hardware. And I could say, look, your hardware is getting worn out. We're going to transfer you to a fresh piece of hardware. So we're gonna shut you down for a time, but don't worry, you'll be running very soon on a nice fresh piece of hardware. And you could imagine this conscious AGI saying, that's fine, I don't mind having a little rest. Just make sure you don't lose me or something like that. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting thought that even with us humans, the suffering is in the software. We right now don't know how to repair the hardware, but we're getting better at it and better in the idea. I mean, some people dream about one day being able to transfer certain aspects of the software to another piece of hardware. What do you think, just on that topic, there's been a lot of exciting innovation in brain computer interfaces. I don't know if you're familiar with the companies like Neuralink, with Elon Musk, communicating both ways from a computer, being able to send, activate neurons and being able to read spikes from neurons. With the dream of being able to expand, sort of increase the bandwidth at which your brain can like look up articles on Wikipedia kind of thing, sort of expand the knowledge capacity of the brain. Do you think that notion, is that interesting to you as the expansion of the human mind? Yes, that's very interesting. I'd love to be able to have that increased bandwidth. And I want better access to my memory, I have to say too, as I get older, I talk to my wife about things that we did 20 years ago or something. Her memory is often better about particular events. Where were we? Who was at that event? What did he or she wear even? She may know and I have not the faintest idea about this, but perhaps it's somewhere in my memory. And if I had this extended memory, I could search that particular year and rerun those things. I think that would be great. In some sense, we already have that by storing so much of our data online, like pictures of different events. Yes, well, Gmail is fantastic for that because people email me as if they know me well and I haven't got a clue who they are, but then I search for their name. Ah yes, they emailed me in 2007 and I know who they are now. Yeah, so we're taking the first steps already. So on the flip side of AI, people like Stuart Russell and others focus on the control problem, value alignment in AI, which is the problem of making sure we build systems that align to our own values, our ethics. Do you think sort of high level, how do we go about building systems? Do you think is it possible that align with our values, align with our human ethics or living being ethics? Presumably, it's possible to do that. I know that a lot of people who think that there's a real danger that we won't, that we'll more or less accidentally lose control of AGI. Do you have that fear yourself personally? I'm not quite sure what to think. I talk to philosophers like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord and they think that this is a real problem we need to worry about. Then I talk to people who work for Microsoft or DeepMind or somebody and they say, no, we're not really that close to producing AGI, super intelligence. So if you look at Nick Bostrom, sort of the arguments, it's very hard to defend. So I'm of course, I am a self engineer AI system, so I'm more with the DeepMind folks where it seems that we're really far away, but then the counter argument is, is there any fundamental reason that we'll never achieve it? And if not, then eventually there'll be a dire existential risk. So we should be concerned about it. And do you find that argument at all appealing in this domain or any domain that eventually this will be a problem so we should be worried about it? Yes, I think it's a problem. I think that's a valid point. Of course, when you say eventually, that raises the question, how far off is that? And is there something that we can do about it now? Because if we're talking about this is gonna be 100 years in the future and you consider how rapidly our knowledge of artificial intelligence has grown in the last 10 or 20 years, it seems unlikely that there's anything much we could do now that would influence whether this is going to happen 100 years in the future. People in 80 years in the future would be in a much better position to say, this is what we need to do to prevent this happening than we are now. So to some extent I find that reassuring, but I'm all in favor of some people doing research into this to see if indeed it is that far off or if we are in a position to do something about it sooner. I'm very much of the view that extinction is a terrible thing and therefore, even if the risk of extinction is very small, if we can reduce that risk, that's something that we ought to do. My disagreement with some of these people who talk about longterm risks, extinction risks, is only about how much priority that should have as compared to present questions. So essentially, if you look at the math of it from a utilitarian perspective, if it's existential risk, so everybody dies, that it feels like an infinity in the math equation, that that makes the math with the priorities difficult to do. That if we don't know the time scale and you can legitimately argue that it's nonzero probability that it'll happen tomorrow, that how do you deal with these kinds of existential risks like from nuclear war, from nuclear weapons, from biological weapons, from, I'm not sure if global warming falls into that category because global warming is a lot more gradual. And people say it's not an existential risk because there'll always be possibilities of some humans existing, farming Antarctica or northern Siberia or something of that sort, yeah. But you don't find the complete existential risks as a fundamental, like an overriding part of the equations of ethics, of what we should do. You know, certainly if you treat it as an infinity, then it plays havoc with any calculations. But arguably, we shouldn't. I mean, one of the ethical assumptions that goes into this is that the loss of future lives, that is of merely possible lives of beings who may never exist at all, is in some way comparable to the sufferings or deaths of people who do exist at some point. And that's not clear to me. I think there's a case for saying that, but I also think there's a case for taking the other view. So that has some impact on it. Of course, you might say, ah, yes, but still, if there's some uncertainty about this and the costs of extinction are infinite, then still, it's gonna overwhelm everything else. But I suppose I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that it's really infinite here. And even Nick Bostrom, in his discussion of this, doesn't claim that there'll be an infinite number of lives lived. What is it, 10 to the 56th or something? It's a vast number that I think he calculates. This is assuming we can upload consciousness onto these digital forms, and therefore, they'll be much more energy efficient, but he calculates the amount of energy in the universe or something like that. So the numbers are vast but not infinite, which gives you some prospect maybe of resisting some of the argument. The beautiful thing with Nick's arguments is he quickly jumps from the individual scale to the universal scale, which is just awe inspiring to think of when you think about the entirety of the span of time of the universe. It's both interesting from a computer science perspective, AI perspective, and from an ethical perspective, the idea of utilitarianism. Could you say what is utilitarianism? Utilitarianism is the ethical view that the right thing to do is the act that has the greatest expected utility, where what that means is it's the act that will produce the best consequences, discounted by the odds that you won't be able to produce those consequences, that something will go wrong. But in simple case, let's assume we have certainty about what the consequences of our actions will be, then the right action is the action that will produce the best consequences. Is that always, and by the way, there's a bunch of nuanced stuff that you talk with Sam Harris on this podcast on that people should go listen to. It's great. That's like two hours of moral philosophy discussion. But is that an easy calculation? No, it's a difficult calculation. And actually, there's one thing that I need to add, and that is utilitarians, certainly the classical utilitarians, think that by best consequences, we're talking about happiness and the absence of pain and suffering. There are other consequentialists who are not really utilitarians who say there are different things that could be good consequences. Justice, freedom, human dignity, knowledge, they all count as good consequences too. And that makes the calculations even more difficult because then you need to know how to balance these things off. If you are just talking about wellbeing, using that term to express happiness and the absence of suffering, I think the calculation becomes more manageable in a philosophical sense. It's still in practice. We don't know how to do it. We don't know how to measure quantities of happiness and misery. We don't know how to calculate the probabilities that different actions will produce, this or that. So at best, we can use it as a rough guide to different actions and one where we have to focus on the short term consequences because we just can't really predict all of the longer term ramifications. So what about the extreme suffering of very small groups? Utilitarianism is focused on the overall aggregate, right? Would you say you yourself are a utilitarian? Yes, I'm a utilitarian. What do you make of the difficult, ethical, maybe poetic suffering of very few individuals? I think it's possible that that gets overridden by benefits to very large numbers of individuals. I think that can be the right answer. But before we conclude that it is the right answer, we have to know how severe the suffering is and how that compares with the benefits. So I tend to think that extreme suffering is worse than or is further, if you like, below the neutral level than extreme happiness or bliss is above it. So when I think about the worst experiences possible and the best experiences possible, I don't think of them as equidistant from neutral. So like it's a scale that goes from minus 100 through zero as a neutral level to plus 100. Because I know that I would not exchange an hour of my most pleasurable experiences for an hour of my most painful experiences, even I wouldn't have an hour of my most painful experiences even for two hours or 10 hours of my most painful experiences. Did I say that correctly? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe 20 hours then, it's 21, what's the exchange rate? So that's the question, what is the exchange rate? But I think it can be quite high. So that's why you shouldn't just assume that it's okay to make one person suffer extremely in order to make two people much better off. It might be a much larger number. But at some point I do think you should aggregate and the result will be, even though it violates our intuitions of justice and fairness, whatever it might be, giving priority to those who are worse off, at some point I still think that will be the right thing to do. Yeah, it's some complicated nonlinear function. Can I ask a sort of out there question is, the more and more we put our data out there, the more we're able to measure a bunch of factors of each of our individual human lives. And I could foresee the ability to estimate wellbeing of whatever we together collectively agree and is in a good objective function from a utilitarian perspective. Do you think it'll be possible and is a good idea to push that kind of analysis to make then public decisions perhaps with the help of AI that here's a tax rate, here's a tax rate at which wellbeing will be optimized. Yeah, that would be great if we really knew that, if we really could calculate that. No, but do you think it's possible to converge towards an agreement amongst humans, towards an objective function or is it just a hopeless pursuit? I don't think it's hopeless. I think it would be difficult to get converged towards agreement, at least at present, because some people would say, I've got different views about justice and I think you ought to give priority to those who are worse off, even though I acknowledge that the gains that the worst off are making are less than the gains that those who are sort of medium badly off could be making. So we still have all of these intuitions that we argue about. So I don't think we would get agreement, but the fact that we wouldn't get agreement doesn't show that there isn't a right answer there. Do you think, who gets to say what is right and wrong? Do you think there's place for ethics oversight from the government? So I'm thinking in the case of AI, overseeing what kind of decisions AI can make or not, but also if you look at animal rights or rather not rights or perhaps rights, but the ideas you've explored in animal liberation, who gets to, so you eloquently and beautifully write in your book that this, you know, we shouldn't do this, but is there some harder rules that should be imposed or is this a collective thing we converse towards the society and thereby make the better and better ethical decisions? Politically, I'm still a Democrat despite looking at the flaws in democracy and the way it doesn't work always very well. So I don't see a better option than allowing the public to vote for governments in accordance with their policies. And I hope that they will vote for policies that reduce the suffering of animals and reduce the suffering of distant humans, whether geographically distant or distant because they're future humans. But I recognise that democracy isn't really well set up to do that. And in a sense, you could imagine a wise and benevolent, you know, omnibenevolent leader who would do that better than democracies could. But in the world in which we live, it's difficult to imagine that this leader isn't gonna be corrupted by a variety of influences. You know, we've had so many examples of people who've taken power with good intentions and then have ended up being corrupt and favouring themselves. So I don't know, you know, that's why, as I say, I don't know that we have a better system than democracy to make these decisions. Well, so you also discuss effective altruism, which is a mechanism for going around government for putting the power in the hands of the people to donate money towards causes to help, you know, remove the middleman and give it directly to the causes that they care about. Sort of, maybe this is a good time to ask, you've, 10 years ago, wrote The Life You Can Save, that's now, I think, available for free online? That's right, you can download either the ebook or the audiobook free from the lifeyoucansave.org. And what are the key ideas that you present in the book? The main thing I wanna do in the book is to make people realise that it's not difficult to help people in extreme poverty, that there are highly effective organisations now that are doing this, that they've been independently assessed and verified by research teams that are expert in this area and that it's a fulfilling thing to do to, for at least part of your life, you know, we can't all be saints, but at least one of your goals should be to really make a positive contribution to the world and to do something to help people who through no fault of their own are in very dire circumstances and living a life that is barely or perhaps not at all a decent life for a human being to live. So you describe a minimum ethical standard of giving. What advice would you give to people that want to be effectively altruistic in their life, like live an effective altruism life? There are many different kinds of ways of living as an effective altruist. And if you're at the point where you're thinking about your long term career, I'd recommend you take a look at a website called 80,000Hours, 80,000Hours.org, which looks at ethical career choices. And they range from, for example, going to work on Wall Street so that you can earn a huge amount of money and then donate most of it to effective charities to going to work for a really good nonprofit organization so that you can directly use your skills and ability and hard work to further a good cause, or perhaps going into politics, maybe small chances, but big payoffs in politics, go to work in the public service where if you're talented, you might rise to a high level where you can influence decisions, do research in an area where the payoffs could be great. There are a lot of different opportunities, but too few people are even thinking about those questions. They're just going along in some sort of preordained rut to particular careers. Maybe they think they'll earn a lot of money and have a comfortable life, but they may not find that as fulfilling as actually knowing that they're making a positive difference to the world. What about in terms of, so that's like long term, 80,000 hours, sort of shorter term giving part of, well, actually it's a part of that. You go to work at Wall Street, if you would like to give a percentage of your income that you talk about and life you can save that. I mean, I was looking through, it's quite a compelling, I mean, I'm just a dumb engineer, so I like, there's simple rules, there's a nice percentage. Okay, so I do actually set out suggested levels of giving because people often ask me about this. A popular answer is give 10%, the traditional tithe that's recommended in Christianity and also Judaism. But why should it be the same percentage irrespective of your income? Tax scales reflect the idea that the more income you have, the more you can pay tax. And I think the same is true in what you can give. So I do set out a progressive donor scale, which starts out at 1% for people on modest incomes and rises to 33 and a third percent for people who are really earning a lot. And my idea is that I don't think any of these amounts really impose real hardship on people because they are progressive and geared to income. So I think anybody can do this and can know that they're doing something significant to play their part in reducing the huge gap between people in extreme poverty in the world and people living affluent lives. And aside from it being an ethical life, it's one that you find more fulfilling because there's something about our human nature that, or some of our human natures, maybe most of our human nature that enjoys doing the ethical thing. Yes, I make both those arguments, that it is an ethical requirement in the kind of world we live in today to help people in great need when we can easily do so, but also that it is a rewarding thing and there's good psychological research showing that people who give more tend to be more satisfied with their lives. And I think this has something to do with having a purpose that's larger than yourself and therefore never being, if you like, never being bored sitting around, oh, you know, what will I do next? I've got nothing to do. In a world like this, there are many good things that you can do and enjoy doing them. Plus you're working with other people in the effective altruism movement who are forming a community of other people with similar ideas and they tend to be interesting, thoughtful and good people as well. And having friends of that sort is another big contribution to having a good life. So we talked about big things that are beyond ourselves, but we're also just human and mortal. Do you ponder your own mortality? Is there insights about your philosophy, the ethics that you gain from pondering your own mortality? Clearly, you know, as you get into your 70s, you can't help thinking about your own mortality. Uh, but I don't know that I have great insights into that from my philosophy. I don't think there's anything after the death of my body, you know, assuming that we won't be able to upload my mind into anything at the time when I die. So I don't think there's any afterlife or anything to look forward to in that sense. Do you fear death? So if you look at Ernest Becker and describing the motivating aspects of our ability to be cognizant of our mortality, do you have any of those elements in your drive and your motivation in life? I suppose the fact that you have only a limited time to achieve the things that you want to achieve gives you some sort of motivation to get going and achieving them. And if we thought we were immortal, we might say, ah, you know, I can put that off for another decade or two. So there's that about it. But otherwise, you know, no, I'd rather have more time to do more. I'd also like to be able to see how things go that I'm interested in, you know. Is climate change gonna turn out to be as dire as a lot of scientists say that it is going to be? Will we somehow scrape through with less damage than we thought? I'd really like to know the answers to those questions, but I guess I'm not going to. Well, you said there's nothing afterwards. So let me ask the even more absurd question. What do you think is the meaning of it all? I think the meaning of life is the meaning we give to it. I don't think that we were brought into the universe for any kind of larger purpose. But given that we exist, I think we can recognize that some things are objectively bad. Extreme suffering is an example, and other things are objectively good, like having a rich, fulfilling, enjoyable, pleasurable life, and we can try to do our part in reducing the bad things and increasing the good things. So one way, the meaning is to do a little bit more of the good things, objectively good things, and a little bit less of the bad things. Yes, so do as much of the good things as you can and as little of the bad things. You beautifully put, I don't think there's a better place to end it, thank you so much for talking today. Thanks very much, Lex. It's been really interesting talking to you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Singer, and thank you to our sponsors, Cash App and Masterclass. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using the code LexPodcast, and signing up at masterclass.com slash Lex. Click the links, buy all the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and startup. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled without the E, just F R I D M A N. And now, let me leave you with some words from Peter Singer, what one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts, and the third shudders when looks back at what the first did. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Peter Singer: Suffering in Humans, Animals, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #107

The following is a conversation with Sergei Levine, a professor at Berkeley and a world class researcher in deep learning, reinforcement learning, robotics, and computer vision, including the development of algorithms for end to end training of neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, and, in general, deep RL algorithms. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, Cash App and ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast and signing up at expressvpn.com slash lexpod. Click the links, buy the stuff, it's the best way to support this podcast and, in general, the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfriedman. 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Once again, get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to support this podcast and to get an extra three months free on a one year package. And now, here's my conversation with Sergey Levine. What's the difference between a state of the art human, such as you and I, well, I don't know if we qualify as state of the art humans, but a state of the art human and a state of the art robot? That's a very interesting question. Robot capability is, it's kind of a, I think it's a very tricky thing to understand because there are some things that are difficult that we wouldn't think are difficult and some things that are easy that we wouldn't think are easy. And there's also a really big gap between capabilities of robots in terms of hardware and their physical capability and capabilities of robots in terms of what they can do autonomously. There is a little video that I think robotics researchers really like to show, especially robotics learning researchers like myself, from 2004 from Stanford, which demonstrates a prototype robot called the PR1, and the PR1 was a robot that was designed as a home assistance robot. And there's this beautiful video showing the PR1 tidying up a living room, putting away toys and at the end bringing a beer to the person sitting on the couch, which looks really amazing. And then the punchline is that this robot is entirely controlled by a person. So in some ways the gap between a state of the art human and state of the art robot, if the robot has a human brain, is actually not that large. Now obviously like human bodies are sophisticated and very robust and resilient in many ways, but on the whole, if we're willing to like spend a bit of money and do a bit of engineering, we can kind of close the hardware gap almost. But the intelligence gap, that one is very wide. And when you say hardware, you're referring to the physical, sort of the actuators, the actual body of the robot, as opposed to the hardware on which the cognition, the hardware of the nervous system. Yes, exactly. I'm referring to the body rather than the mind. So that means that the kind of the work is cut out for us. Like while we can still make the body better, we kind of know that the big bottleneck right now is really the mind. And how big is that gap? How big is the difference in your sense of ability to learn, ability to reason, ability to perceive the world between humans and our best robots? The gap is very large and the gap becomes larger the more unexpected events can happen in the world. So essentially the spectrum along which you can measure the size of that gap is the spectrum of how open the world is. If you control everything in the world very tightly, if you put the robot in like a factory and you tell it where everything is and you rigidly program its motion, then it can do things, you know, one might even say in a superhuman way. It can move faster, it's stronger, it can lift up a car and things like that. But as soon as anything starts to vary in the environment, now it'll trip up. And if many, many things vary like they would like in your kitchen, for example, then things are pretty much like wide open. Now, again, we're going to stick a bit on the philosophical questions, but how much on the human side of the cognitive abilities in your sense is nature versus nurture? So how much of it is a product of evolution and how much of it is something we'll learn from sort of scratch from the day we're born? I'm going to read into your question as asking about the implications of this for AI. Because I'm not a biologist, I can't really like speak authoritatively. So until we go on it, if it's so, if it's all about learning, then there's more hope for AI. So the way that I look at this is that, you know, well, first, of course, biology is very messy. And it's if you ask the question, how does a person do something or has a person's mind do something, you can come up with a bunch of hypotheses and oftentimes you can find support for many different, often conflicting hypotheses. One way that we can approach the question of what the implications of this for AI are is we can think about what's sufficient. So you know, maybe a person is from birth very, very good at some things like, for example, recognizing faces. There's a very strong evolutionary pressure to do that. If you can recognize your mother's face, then you're more likely to survive and therefore people are good at this. But we can also ask like, what's the minimum sufficient thing? And one of the ways that we can study the minimal sufficient thing is we could, for example, see what people do in unusual situations. If you present them with things that evolution couldn't have prepared them for, you know, our daily lives actually do this to us all the time. We didn't evolve to deal with, you know, automobiles and space flight and whatever. So there are all these situations that we can find ourselves in and we do very well there. Like I can give you a joystick to control a robotic arm, which you've never used before and you might be pretty bad for the first couple of seconds. But if I tell you like your life depends on using this robotic arm to like open this door, you'll probably manage it. Even though you've never seen this device before, you've never used the joystick control us and you'll kind of muddle through it. And that's not your evolved natural ability. That's your, your flexibility or your adaptability. And that's exactly where our current robotic systems really kind of fall flat. But I wonder how much general, almost what we think of as common sense, pre trained models underneath all of that. So that ability to adapt to a joystick is, requires you to have a kind of, you know, I'm human. So it's hard for me to introspect all the knowledge I have about the world, but it seems like there might be an iceberg underneath of the amount of knowledge we actually bring to the table. That's kind of the open question. There's absolutely an iceberg of knowledge that we bring to the table, but I think it's very likely that iceberg of knowledge is actually built up over our lifetimes. Because we have, you know, we have a lot of prior experience to draw on. And it kind of makes sense that the right way for us to, you know, to optimize our, our efficiency, our evolutionary fitness and so on is to utilize all of that experience to build up the best iceberg we can get. And that's actually one of the, you know, while that sounds an awful lot like what machine learning actually does, I think that for modern machine learning, it's actually a really big challenge to take this unstructured mass of experience and distill out something that looks like a common sense understanding of the world. And perhaps part of that isn't, it's not because something about machine learning itself is, is broken or hard, but because we've been a little too rigid in subscribing to a very supervised, very rigid notion of learning, you know, kind of the input output, X's go to Y's sort of model. And maybe what we really need to do is to view the world more as like a mass of experience that is not necessarily providing any rigid supervision, but sort of providing many, many instances of things that could be. And then you take that and you distill it into some sort of common sense understanding. I see what you're, you're painting an optimistic, beautiful picture, especially from the robotics perspective because that means we just need to invest and build better learning algorithms, figure out how we can get access to more and more data for those learning algorithms to extract signal from, and then accumulate that iceberg of knowledge. It's a beautiful picture. It's a hopeful one. I think it's potentially a little bit more than just that. And this is, this is where we perhaps reach the limits of our current understanding. But one thing that I think that the research community hasn't really resolved in a satisfactory way is how much it matters where that experience comes from, like, you know, do you just like download everything on the internet and cram it into essentially the 21st century analog of the giant language model and then see what happens or does it actually matter whether your machine physically experiences the world or in the sense that it actually attempts things, observes the outcome of its actions and kind of augments its experience that way. And it chooses which parts of the world it gets to interact with and observe and learn from. Right. It may be that the world is so complex that simply obtaining a large mass of sort of IID samples of the world is a very difficult way to go. But if you are actually interacting with the world and essentially performing this sort of hard negative mining by attempting what you think might work, observing the sometimes happy and sometimes sad outcomes of that and augmenting your understanding using that experience and you're just doing this continually for many years, maybe that sort of data in some sense is actually much more favorable to obtaining a common sense understanding. One reason we might think that this is true is that, you know, what we associate with common sense or lack of common sense is often characterized by the ability to reason about kind of counterfactual questions like, you know, if I were to hear this bottle of water sitting on the table, everything is fine if I were to knock it over, which I'm not going to do. But if I were to do that, what would happen? And I know that nothing good would happen from that. But if I have a bad understanding of the world, I might think that that's a good way for me to like, you know, gain more utility. If I actually go about my daily life doing the things that my current understanding of the world suggests will give me high utility, in some ways, I'll get exactly the right supervision to tell me not to do those bad things and to keep doing the good things. So there's a spectrum between IID, random walk through the space of data, and then there's and what we humans do, I don't even know if we do it optimal, but that might be beyond. So this open question that you raised, where do you think systems, intelligent systems that would be able to deal with this world fall? Can we do pretty well by reading all of Wikipedia, sort of randomly sampling it like language models do? Or do we have to be exceptionally selective and intelligent about which aspects of the world we interact with? So I think this is first an open scientific problem, and I don't have like a clear answer, but I can speculate a little bit. And what I would speculate is that you don't need to be super, super careful. I think it's less about like, being careful to avoid the useless stuff, and more about making sure that you hit on the really important stuff. So perhaps it's okay, if you spend part of your day, just, you know, guided by your curiosity, reading interesting regions of your state space, but it's important for you to, you know, every once in a while, make sure that you really try out the solutions that your current model of the world suggests might be effective, and observe whether those solutions are working as you expect or not. And perhaps some of that is really essential to have kind of a perpetual improvement loop. This perpetual improvement loop is really like, that's really the key, the key that's going to potentially distinguish the best current methods from the best methods of tomorrow in a sense. How important do you think is exploration or total out of the box thinking exploration in this space as you jump to totally different domains? So you kind of mentioned there's an optimization problem, you kind of kind of explore the specifics of a particular strategy, whatever the thing you're trying to solve. How important is it to explore totally outside of the strategies that have been working for you so far? What's your intuition there? Yeah, I think it's a very problem dependent kind of question. And I think that that's actually, you know, in some ways that question gets at one of the big differences between sort of the classic formulation of a reinforcement learning problem and some of the sort of more open ended reformulations of that problem that have been explored in recent years. So classically reinforcement learning is framed as a problem of maximizing utility, like any kind of rational AI agent, and then anything you do is in service to maximizing that utility. But a very interesting kind of way to look at, I'm not necessarily saying this is the best way to look at it, but an interesting alternative way to look at these problems is as something where you first get to explore the world, however you please, and then afterwards you will be tasked with doing something. And that might suggest a somewhat different solution. So if you don't know what you're going to be tasked with doing, and you just want to prepare yourself optimally for whatever your uncertain future holds, maybe then you will choose to attain some sort of coverage, build up sort of an arsenal of cognitive tools, if you will, such that later on when someone tells you, now your job is to fetch the coffee for me, you will be well prepared to undertake that task. And that you see that as the modern formulation of the reinforcement learning problem, as a kind of the more multitask, the general intelligence kind of formulation. I think that's one possible vision of where things might be headed. I don't think that's by any means the mainstream or standard way of doing things, and it's not like if I had to... But I like it. It's a beautiful vision. So maybe you actually take a step back. What is the goal of robotics? What's the general problem of robotics we're trying to solve? You actually kind of painted two pictures here. One of sort of the narrow, one of the general. What in your view is the big problem of robotics? And ridiculously philosophical high level questions. I think that maybe there are two ways I can answer this question. One is there's a very pragmatic problem, which is like what would make robots, what would sort of maximize the usefulness of robots? And there the answer might be something like a system where a system that can perform whatever task a human user sets for it, within the physical constraints, of course. If you tell it to teleport to another planet, it probably can't do that. But if you ask it to do something that's within its physical capability, then potentially with a little bit of additional training or a little bit of additional trial and error, it ought to be able to figure it out in much the same way as like a human teleoperator ought to figure out how to drive the robot to do that. That's kind of the very pragmatic view of what it would take to kind of solve the robotics problem, if you will. But I think that there is a second answer, and that answer is a lot closer to why I want to work on robotics, which is that I think it's less about what it would take to do a really good job in the world of robotics, but more the other way around, what robotics can bring to the table to help us understand artificial intelligence. So your dream fundamentally is to understand intelligence? Yes. And I think that's the dream for many people who actually work in this space. I think that there's something very pragmatic and very useful about studying robotics, but I do think that a lot of people that go into this field actually, you know, the things that they draw inspiration from are the potential for robots to like help us learn about intelligence and about ourselves. So that's fascinating that robotics is basically the space by which you can get closer to understanding the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. So what is it about robotics that's different from some of the other approaches? So if we look at some of the early breakthroughs in deep learning or in the computer vision space and the natural language processing, there's really nice clean benchmarks that a lot of people competed on and thereby came up with a lot of brilliant ideas. What's the fundamental difference to you between computer vision purely defined and ImageNet and kind of the bigger robotics problem? So there are a couple of things. One is that with robotics, you kind of have to take away many of the crutches. So you have to deal with both the particular problems of perception control and so on, but you also have to deal with the integration of those things. And you know, classically, we've always thought of the integration as kind of a separate problem. So a classic kind of modular engineering approach is that we solve the individual subproblems and then wire them together and then the whole thing works. And one of the things that we've been seeing over the last couple of decades is that, well, maybe studying the thing as a whole might lead to just like very different solutions than if we were to study the parts and wire them together. So the integrative nature of robotics research helps us see, you know, the different perspectives on the problem. Another part of the answer is that with robotics, it casts a certain paradox into very clever relief. This is sometimes referred to as Moravec's paradox, the idea that in artificial intelligence, things that are very hard for people can be very easy for machines and vice versa. Things that are very easy for people can be very hard for machines. So you know, integral and differential calculus is pretty difficult to learn for people. But if you program a computer, do it, it can derive derivatives and integrals for you all day long without any trouble. Whereas some things like, you know, drinking from a cup of water, very easy for a person to do, very hard for a robot to deal with. And sometimes when we see such blatant discrepancies, that gives us a really strong hint that we're missing something important. So if we really try to zero in on those discrepancies, we might find that little bit that we're missing. And it's not that we need to make machines better or worse at math and better at drinking water, but just that by studying those discrepancies, we might find some new insight. So that could be in any space, it doesn't have to be robotics. But you're saying, I mean, it's kind of interesting that robotics seems to have a lot of those discrepancies. So the Hans Marvak paradox is probably referring to the space of the physical interaction, like you said, object manipulation, walking, all the kind of stuff we do in the physical world. How do you make sense if you were to try to disentangle the Marvak paradox, like why is there such a gap in our intuition about it? Why do you think manipulating objects is so hard from everything you've learned from applying reinforcement learning in this space? Yeah, I think that one reason is maybe that for many of the other problems that we've studied in AI and computer science and so on, the notion of input output and supervision is much, much cleaner. So computer vision, for example, deals with very complex inputs. But it's comparatively a bit easier, at least up to some level of abstraction, to cast it as a very tightly supervised problem. It's comparatively much, much harder to cast robotic manipulation as a very tightly supervised problem. You can do it, it just doesn't seem to work all that well. So you could say that, well, maybe we get a labeled data set where we know exactly which motor commands to send, and then we train on that. But for various reasons, that's not actually such a great solution. And it also doesn't seem to be even remotely similar to how people and animals learn to do things, because we're not told by our parents, here's how you fire your muscles in order to walk. So we do get some guidance, but the really low level detailed stuff we figure out mostly on our own. And that's what you mean by tightly coupled, that every single little sub action gets a supervised signal of whether it's a good one or not. Right. So while in computer vision, you could sort of imagine up to a level of abstraction that maybe somebody told you this is a car and this is a cat and this is a dog, in motor control, it's very clear that that was not the case. If we look at sort of the sub spaces of robotics, that, again, as you said, robotics integrates all of them together, and we get to see how this beautiful mess interplays. But so there's nevertheless still perception. So it's the computer vision problem, broadly speaking, understanding the environment. And there's also maybe you can correct me on this kind of categorization of the space, and there's prediction in trying to anticipate what things are going to do into the future in order for you to be able to act in that world. And then there's also this game theoretic aspect of how your actions will change the behavior of others. In this kind of space, what, and this is bigger than reinforcement learning, this is just broadly looking at the problem of robotics, what's the hardest problem here? Or is there, or is what you said true that when you start to look at all of them together, that's a whole nother thing, like you can't even say which one individually is harder because all of them together, you should only be looking at them all together. I think when you look at them all together, some things actually become easier. And I think that's actually pretty important. So we had back in 2014, we had some work, basically our first work on end to end reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation skills from vision, which at the time was something that seemed a little inflammatory and controversial in the robotics world. But other than the inflammatory and controversial part of it, the point that we were actually trying to make in that work is that for the particular case of combining perception and control, you could actually do better if you treat them together than if you try to separate them. And the way that we tried to demonstrate this is we picked a fairly simple motor control task where a robot had to insert a little red trapezoid into a trapezoidal hole. And we had our separated solution, which involved first detecting the hole using a pose detector and then actuating the arm to put it in. And then our intent solution, which just mapped pixels to the torques. And one of the things we observed is that if you use the intent solution, essentially the pressure on the perception part of the model is actually lower. Like it doesn't have to figure out exactly where the thing is in 3D space. It just needs to figure out where it is, you know, distributing the errors in such a way that the horizontal difference matters more than the vertical difference because vertically it just pushes it down all the way until it can't go any further. And their perceptual errors are a lot less harmful, whereas perpendicular to the direction of motion, perceptual errors are much more harmful. So the point is that if you combine these two things, you can trade off errors between the components optimally to best accomplish the task. And the components can actually be weaker while still leading to better overall performance. It's a profound idea. I mean, in the space of pegs and things like that, it's quite simple. It almost is tempting to overlook, but that seems to be at least intuitively an idea that should generalize to basically all aspects of perception and control, that one strengthens the other. Yeah. And we, you know, people who have studied sort of perceptual heuristics in humans and animals find things like that all the time. So one very well known example of this is something called the gaze heuristic, which is a little trick that you can use to intercept a flying object. So if you want to catch a ball, for instance, you could try to localize it in 3D space, estimate its velocity, estimate the effect of wind resistance, solve a complex system of differential equations in your head. Or you can maintain a running speed so that the object stays in the same position as in your field of view. So if it dips a little bit, you speed up. If it rises a little bit, you slow down. And if you follow the simple rule, you'll actually arrive at exactly the place where the object lands and you'll catch it. And humans use it when they play baseball, human pilots use it when they fly airplanes to figure out if they're about to collide with somebody, frogs use this to catch insects and so on and so on. So this is something that actually happens in nature. And I'm sure this is just one instance of it that we were able to identify just because all the scientists were able to identify because it's so prevalent, but there are probably many others. Do you have a, just so we can zoom in as we talk about robotics, do you have a canonical problem, sort of a simple, clean, beautiful representative problem in robotics that you think about when you're thinking about some of these problems? We talked about robotic manipulation, to me that seems intuitively, at least the robotics community has converged towards that as a space that's the canonical problem. If you agree, then maybe do you zoom in in some particular aspect of that problem that you just like? Like if we solve that problem perfectly, it'll unlock a major step towards human level intelligence. I don't think I have like a really great answer to that. And I think partly the reason I don't have a great answer kind of has to do with the, it has to do with the fact that the difficulty is really in the flexibility and adaptability rather than in doing a particular thing really, really well. So it's hard to just say like, oh, if you can, I don't know, like shuffle a deck of cards as fast as like a Vegas casino dealer, then you'll be very proficient. It's really the ability to quickly figure out how to do some arbitrary new thing well enough to like, you know, to move on to the next arbitrary thing. But the source of newness and uncertainty, have you found problems in which it's easy to generate new newnessnesses? New types of newness. Yeah. So a few years ago, so if you had asked me this question around like 2016, maybe I would have probably said that robotic grasping is a really great example of that because it's a task with great real world utility. Like you will get a lot of money if you can do it well. What is robotic grasping? Picking up any object with a robotic hand. Exactly. So you will get a lot of money if you do it well, because lots of people want to run warehouses with robots and it's highly non trivial because very different objects will require very different grasping strategies. But actually since then, people have gotten really good at building systems to solve this problem to the point where I'm not actually sure how much more progress we can make with that as like the main guiding thing. But it's kind of interesting to see the kind of methods that have actually worked well in that space because robotic grasping classically used to be regarded very much as kind of almost like a geometry problem. So people who have studied the history of computer vision will find this very familiar that it's kind of in the same way that in the early days of computer vision, people thought of it very much as like an inverse graphics thing. In robotic grasping, people thought of it as an inverse physics problem essentially. You look at what's in front of you, figure out the shapes, then use your best estimate of the laws of physics to figure out where to put your fingers on, you pick up the thing. And it turns out that works really well for robotic grasping instantiated in many different recent works, including our own, but also ones from many other labs is to use learning methods with some combination of either exhaustive simulation or like actual real world trial and error. And it turns out that those things actually work really well and then you don't have to worry about solving geometry problems or physics problems. What are, just by the way, in the grasping, what are the difficulties that have been worked on? So one is like the materials of things, maybe occlusions on the perception side. Why is it such a difficult, why is picking stuff up such a difficult problem? Yeah, it's a difficult problem because the number of things that you might have to deal with or the variety of things that you have to deal with is extremely large. And oftentimes things that work for one class of objects won't work for other classes of objects. So if you, if you get really good at picking up boxes and now you have to pick up plastic bags, you know, you just need to employ a very different strategy. And there are many properties of objects that are more than just their geometry that has to do with, you know, the bits that are easier to pick up, the bits that are hard to pick up, the bits that are more flexible, the bits that will cause the thing to pivot and bend and drop out of your hand versus the bits that result in a nice secure grasp. Things that are flexible, things that if you pick them up the wrong way, they'll fall upside down and the contents will spill out. So there's all these little details that come up, but the task is still kind of can be characterized as one task. Like there's a very clear notion of you did it or you didn't do it. So in terms of spilling things, there creeps in this notion that starts to sound and feel like common sense reasoning. Do you think solving the general problem of robotics requires common sense reasoning, requires general intelligence, this kind of human level capability of, you know, like you said, be robust and deal with uncertainty, but also be able to sort of reason and assimilate different pieces of knowledge that you have? Yeah. What are your thoughts on the needs? Of common sense reasoning in the space of the general robotics problem? So I'm going to slightly dodge that question and say that I think maybe actually it's the other way around is that studying robotics can help us understand how to put common sense into our AI systems. One way to think about common sense is that, and why our current systems might lack common sense is that common sense is an emergent property of actually having to interact with a particular world, a particular universe, and get things done in that universe. So you might think that, for instance, like an image captioning system, maybe it looks at pictures of the world and it types out English sentences. So it kind of deals with our world. And then you can easily construct situations where image captioning systems do things that defy common sense, like give it a picture of a person wearing a fur coat and we'll say it's a teddy bear. But I think what's really happening in those settings is that the system doesn't actually live in our world. It lives in its own world that consists of pixels and English sentences and doesn't actually consist of having to put on a fur coat in the winter so you don't get cold. So perhaps the reason for the disconnect is that the systems that we have now simply inhabit a different universe. And if we build AI systems that are forced to deal with all of the messiness and complexity of our universe, maybe they will have to acquire common sense to essentially maximize their utility. Whereas the systems we're building now don't have to do that. They can take some shortcuts. That's fascinating. You've a couple of times already sort of reframed the role of robotics in this whole thing. And for some reason, I don't know if my way of thinking is common, but I thought like we need to understand and solve intelligence in order to solve robotics. And you're kind of framing it as, no, robotics is one of the best ways to just study artificial intelligence and build sort of like, robotics is like the right space in which you get to explore some of the fundamental learning mechanisms, fundamental sort of multimodal multitask aggregation of knowledge mechanisms that are required for general intelligence. It's really interesting way to think about it, but let me ask about learning. Can the general sort of robotics, the epitome of the robotics problem be solved purely through learning, perhaps end to end learning, sort of learning from scratch as opposed to injecting human expertise and rules and heuristics and so on? I think that in terms of the spirit of the question, I would say yes. I mean, I think that though in some ways it's maybe like an overly sharp dichotomy, I think that in some ways when we build algorithms, at some point a person does something, a person turned on the computer, a person implemented a TensorFlow. But yeah, I think that in terms of the point that you're getting at, I do think the answer is yes. I think that we can solve many problems that have previously required meticulous manual engineering through automated optimization techniques. And actually one thing I will say on this topic is I don't think this is actually a very radical or very new idea. I think people have been thinking about automated optimization techniques as a way to do control for a very, very long time. And in some ways what's changed is really more the name. So today we would say that, oh, my robot does machine learning, it does reinforcement learning. Maybe in the 1960s you'd say, oh, my robot is doing optimal control. And maybe the difference between typing out a system of differential equations and doing feedback linearization versus training a neural net, maybe it's not such a large difference. It's just pushing the optimization deeper and deeper into the thing. Well, it's interesting you think that way, but especially with deep learning that the accumulation of sort of experiences in data form to form deep representations starts to feel like knowledge as opposed to optimal control. So this feels like there's an accumulation of knowledge through the learning process. Yes. Yeah. So I think that is a good point. That one big difference between learning based systems and classic optimal control systems is that learning based systems in principle should get better and better the more they do something. Right. And I do think that that's actually a very, very powerful difference. So if we look back at the world of expert systems and symbolic AI and so on of using logic to accumulate expertise, human expertise, human encoded expertise, do you think that will have a role at some point? The deep learning, machine learning, reinforcement learning has shown incredible results and breakthroughs and just inspired thousands, maybe millions of researchers. But there's this less popular now, but it used to be popular idea of symbolic AI. Do you think that will have a role? I think in some ways the descendants of symbolic AI actually already have a role. So this is the highly biased history from my perspective. You say that, well, initially we thought that rational decision making involves logical manipulation. So you have some model of the world expressed in terms of logic. You have some query, like what action do I take in order for X to be true? And then you manipulate your logical symbolic representation to get an answer. What that turned into somewhere in the 1990s is, well, instead of building kind of predicates and statements that have true or false values, we'll build probabilistic systems where things have probabilities associated and probabilities of being true and false. And that turned into Bayes nets. And that provided sort of a boost to what were really still essentially logical inference systems, just probabilistic logical inference systems. And then people said, well, let's actually learn the individual probabilities inside these models. And then people said, well, let's not even specify the nodes in the models, let's just put a big neural net in there. But in many ways, I see these as actually kind of descendants from the same idea. It's essentially instantiating rational decision making by means of some inference process and learning by means of an optimization process. So in a sense, I would say, yes, that it has a place. And in many ways that place is, it already holds that place. It's already in there. Yeah. It's just quite different. It looks slightly different than it was before. Yeah. But there are some things that we can think about that make this a little bit more obvious. Like if I train a big neural net model to predict what will happen in response to my robot's actions, and then I run probabilistic inference, meaning I invert that model to figure out the actions that lead to some plausible outcome, like to me, that seems like a kind of logic. You have a model of the world that just happens to be expressed by a neural net, and you are doing some inference procedure, some sort of manipulation on that model to figure out the answer to a query that you have. It's the interpretability. It's the explainability, though, that seems to be lacking more so because the nice thing about sort of expert systems is you can follow the reasoning of the system that to us mere humans is somehow compelling. It's just I don't know what to make of this fact that there's a human desire for intelligence systems to be able to convey in a poetic way to us why it made the decisions it did, like tell a convincing story. And perhaps that's like a silly human thing, like we shouldn't expect that of intelligence systems. I'm super happy that there is intelligence systems out there. But if I were to sort of psychoanalyze the researchers at the time, I would say expert systems connected to that part, that desire of AI researchers for systems to be explainable. I mean, maybe on that topic, do you have a hope that sort of inferences of learning based systems will be as explainable as the dream was with expert systems, for example? I think it's a very complicated question because I think that in some ways the question of explainability is kind of very closely tied to the question of like performance, like, you know, why do you want your system to explain itself so that when it screws up, you can kind of figure out why it did it. But in some ways that's a much bigger problem, actually. Like your system might screw up and then it might screw up in how it explains itself. Or you might have some bug somewhere so that it's not actually doing what it was supposed to do. So, you know, maybe a good way to view that problem is really as a problem, as a bigger problem of verification and validation, of which explainability is sort of one component. I see. I just see it differently. I see explainability, you put it beautifully, I think you actually summarize the field of explainability. But to me, there's another aspect of explainability, which is like storytelling that has nothing to do with errors or with, like, it uses errors as elements of its story as opposed to a fundamental need to be explainable when errors occur. It's just that for other intelligent systems to be in our world, we seem to want to tell each other stories. And that's true in the political world, that's true in the academic world. And that, you know, neural networks are less capable of doing that, or perhaps they're equally capable of storytelling and storytelling. Maybe it doesn't matter what the fundamentals of the system are. You just need to be a good storyteller. Maybe one specific story I can tell you about in that space is actually about some work that was done by my former collaborator, who's now a professor at MIT named Jacob Andreas. Jacob actually works in natural language processing, but he had this idea to do a little bit of work in reinforcement learning on how natural language can basically structure the internals of policies trained with RL. And one of the things he did is he set up a model that attempts to perform some task that's defined by a reward function, but the model reads in a natural language instruction. So this is a pretty common thing to do in instruction following. So you tell it like, you know, go to the red house and then it's supposed to go to the red house. But then one of the things that Jacob did is he treated that sentence, not as a command from a person, but as a representation of the internal kind of a state of the mind of this policy, essentially. So that when it was faced with a new task, what it would do is it would basically try to think of possible language descriptions, attempt to do them and see if they led to the right outcome. So it would kind of think out loud, like, you know, I'm faced with this new task. What am I going to do? Let me go to the red house. Oh, that didn't work. Let me go to the blue room or something. Let me go to the green plant. And once it got some reward, it would say, oh, go to the green plant. That's what's working. I'm going to go to the green plant. And then you could look at the string that it came up with, and that was a description of how it thought it should solve the problem. So you could do, you could basically incorporate language as internal state and you can start getting some handle on these kinds of things. And then what I was kind of trying to get to is that also, if you add to the reward function, the convincingness of that story. So I have another reward signal of like people who review that story, how much they like it. So that, you know, initially that could be a hyperparameter sort of hard coded heuristic type of thing, but it's an interesting notion of the convincingness of the story becoming part of the reward function, the objective function of the explainability. That's in the world of sort of Twitter and fake news, that might be a scary notion that the nature of truth may not be as important as the convincingness of the, how convincing you are in telling the story around the facts. Well, let me ask the basic question. You're one of the world class researchers in reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning, certainly in the robotic space. What is reinforcement learning? I think that what reinforcement learning refers to today is really just the kind of the modern incarnation of learning based control. So classically reinforcement learning has a much more narrow definition, which is that it's literally learning from reinforcement, like the thing does something and then it gets a reward or punishment. But really I think the way the term is used today is it's used to refer more broadly to learning based control. So some kind of system that's supposed to be controlling something and it uses data to get better. And what does control mean? So this action is the fundamental element there. It means making rational decisions. And rational decisions are decisions that maximize a measure of utility. And sequentially, so you made decisions time and time and time again. Now like it's easier to see that kind of idea in the space of maybe games and the space of robotics. Do you see it bigger than that? Is it applicable? Like where are the limits of the applicability of reinforcement learning? Yeah, so rational decision making is essentially the encapsulation of the AI problem viewed through a particular lens. So any problem that we would want a machine to do, an intelligent machine, can likely be represented as a decision making problem. Learning images is a decision making problem, although not a sequential one typically. Controlling a chemical plant is a decision making problem. Deciding what videos to recommend on YouTube is a decision making problem. And one of the really appealing things about reinforcement learning is if it does encapsulate the range of all these decision making problems, perhaps working on reinforcement learning is one of the ways to reach a very broad swath of AI problems. What is the fundamental difference between reinforcement learning and maybe supervised machine learning? So reinforcement learning can be viewed as a generalization of supervised machine learning. You can certainly cast supervised learning as a reinforcement learning problem. You can just say your loss function is the negative of your reward. But you have stronger assumptions. You have the assumption that someone actually told you what the correct answer was, that your data was IID and so on. So you could view reinforcement learning as essentially relaxing some of those assumptions. Now that's not always a very productive way to look at it because if you actually have a supervised learning problem, you'll probably solve it much more effectively by using supervised learning methods because it's easier. But you can view reinforcement learning as a generalization of that. No, for sure. But they're fundamentally different. That's a mathematical statement. That's absolutely correct. But it seems that reinforcement learning, the kind of tools we bring to the table today of today. So maybe down the line, everything will be a reinforcement learning problem. Just like you said, image classification should be mapped to a reinforcement learning problem. But today, the tools and ideas, the way we think about them are different, sort of supervised learning has been used very effectively to solve basic narrow AI problems. Reinforcement learning kind of represents the dream of AI. It's very much so in the research space now in sort of captivating the imagination of people of what we can do with intelligent systems, but it hasn't yet had as wide of an impact as the supervised learning approaches. So my question comes from the more practical sense, like what do you see is the gap between the more general reinforcement learning and the very specific, yes, it's a question decision making with one step in the sequence of the supervised learning? So from a practical standpoint, I think that one thing that is potentially a little tough now, and this is I think something that we'll see, this is a gap that we might see closing over the next couple of years, is the ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to effectively utilize large amounts of prior data. So one of the reasons why it's a bit difficult today to use reinforcement learning for all the things that we might want to use it for is that in most of the settings where we want to do rational decision making, it's a little bit tough to just deploy some policy that does crazy stuff and learns purely through trial and error. It's much easier to collect a lot of data, a lot of logs of some other policy that you've got, and then maybe if you can get a good policy out of that, then you deploy it and let it kind of fine tune a little bit. But algorithmically, it's quite difficult to do that. So I think that once we figure out how to get reinforcement learning to bootstrap effectively from large data sets, then we'll see very, very rapid growth in applications of these technologies. So this is what's referred to as off policy reinforcement learning or offline RL or batch RL. And I think we're seeing a lot of research right now that's bringing us closer and closer to that. Can you maybe paint the picture of the different methods? So you said off policy, what's value based reinforcement learning? What's policy based? What's model based? What's off policy, on policy? What are the different categories of reinforcement learning? Okay. So one way we can think about reinforcement learning is that it's, in some very fundamental way, it's about learning models that can answer kind of what if questions. So what would happen if I take this action that I hadn't taken before? And you do that, of course, from experience, from data. And oftentimes you do it in a loop. So you build a model that answers these what if questions, use it to figure out the best action you can take, and then go and try taking that and see if the outcome agrees with what you predicted. So the different kinds of techniques basically refer to different ways of doing it. So model based methods answer a question of what state you would get, basically what would happen to the world if you were to take a certain action. Value based methods, they answer the question of what value you would get, meaning what utility you would get. But in a sense, they're not really all that different because they're both really just answering these what if questions. Now unfortunately for us, with current machine learning methods, answering what if questions can be really hard because they are really questions about things that didn't happen. If you wanted to answer what if questions about things that did happen, you wouldn't need a learn model. You would just like repeat the thing that worked before. And that's really a big part of why RL is a little bit tough. So if you have a purely on policy kind of online process, then you ask these what if questions, you make some mistakes, then you go and try doing those mistaken things. And then you observe kind of the counter examples that will teach you not to do those things again. If you have a bunch of off policy data and you just want to synthesize the best policy you can out of that data, then you really have to deal with the challenges of making these counterfactual. First of all, what's a policy? A policy is a model or some kind of function that maps from observations of the world to actions. So in reinforcement learning, we often refer to the current configuration of the world as the state. So we say the state kind of encompasses everything you need to fully define where the world is at the moment. And depending on how we formulate the problem, we might say you either get to see the state or you get to see an observation, which is some snapshot, some piece of the state. So policy just includes everything in it in order to be able to act in this world. Yes. And so what does off policy mean? Yeah, so the terms on policy and off policy refer to how you get your data. So if you get your data from somebody else who was doing some other stuff, maybe you get your data from some manually programmed system that was just running in the world before that's referred to as off policy data. But if you got the data by actually acting in the world based on what your current policy thinks is good, we call that on policy data. And obviously on policy data is more useful to you because if your current policy makes some bad decisions, you will actually see that those decisions are bad. Off policy data, however, might be much easier to obtain because maybe that's all the logged data that you have from before. So we talk about offline, talked about autonomous vehicles so you can envision off policy kind of approaches in robotic spaces where there's already a ton of robots out there, but they don't get the luxury of being able to explore based on a reinforcement learning framework. So how do we make, again, open question, but how do we make off policy methods work? Yeah. So this is something that has been kind of a big open problem for a while. And in the last few years, people have made a little bit of progress on that. You know, I can tell you about, and it's not by any means solved yet, but I can tell you some of the things that, for example, we've done to try to address some of the challenges. It turns out that one really big challenge with off policy reinforcement learning is that you can't really trust your models to give accurate predictions for any possible action. So if I've never tried to, if in my data set I never saw somebody steering the car off the road onto the sidewalk, my value function or my model is probably not going to predict the right thing if I ask what would happen if I were to steer the car off the road onto the sidewalk. So one of the important things you have to do to get off policy RL to work is you have to be able to figure out whether a given action will result in a trustworthy prediction or not. And you can use a kind of distribution estimation methods, kind of density estimation methods to try to figure that out. So you could figure out that, well, this action, my model is telling me that it's great, but it looks totally different from any action I've taken before, so my model is probably not correct. And you can incorporate regularization terms into your learning objective that will essentially tell you not to ask those questions that your model is unable to answer. What would lead to breakthroughs in this space, do you think? Like what's needed? Is this a data set question? Do we need to collect big benchmark data sets that allow us to explore the space? Is it a new kinds of methodologies? Like what's your sense? Or maybe coming together in a space of robotics and defining the right problem to be working on? I think for off policy reinforcement learning in particular, it's very much an algorithms question right now. And this is something that I think is great because an algorithms question is that that just takes some very smart people to get together and think about it really hard, whereas if it was like a data problem or a hardware problem, that would take some serious engineering. So that's why I'm pretty excited about that problem because I think that we're in a position where we can make some real progress on it just by coming up with the right algorithms. In terms of which algorithms they could be, the problems at their core are very related to problems in things like causal inference. Because what you're really dealing with is situations where you have a model, a statistical model, that's trying to make predictions about things that it hadn't seen before. And if it's a model that's generalizing properly, that'll make good predictions. If it's a model that picks up on spurious correlations, that will not generalize properly. And then you have an arsenal of tools you can use. You could, for example, figure out what are the regions where it's trustworthy, or on the other hand, you could try to make it generalize better somehow, or some combination of the two. Is there room for mixing where most of it, like 90, 95% is off policy, you already have the data set, and then you get to send the robot out to do a little exploration? What's that role of mixing them together? Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is something that you actually described very well at the beginning of our discussion when you talked about the iceberg. This is the iceberg. The 99% of your prior experience, that's your iceberg. You'd use that for off policy reinforcement learning. And then, of course, if you've never opened that particular kind of door with that particular lock before, then you have to go out and fiddle with it a little bit. And that's that additional 1% to help you figure out a new task. And I think that's actually a pretty good recipe going forward. Is this, to you, the most exciting space of reinforcement learning now? Or is there, what's, and maybe taking a step back, not just now, but what's, to you, is the most beautiful idea, apologize for the romanticized question, but the beautiful idea or concept in reinforcement learning? In general, I actually think that one of the things that is a very beautiful idea in reinforcement learning is just the idea that you can obtain a near optimal control or near optimal policy without actually having a complete model of the world. This is, you know, it's something that feels perhaps kind of obvious if you just hear the term reinforcement learning or you think about trial and error learning. But from a controls perspective, it's a very weird thing because classically, you know, we think about engineered systems and controlling engineered systems as the problem of writing down some equations and then figuring out given these equations, you know, basically solve for X, figure out the thing that maximizes its performance. And the theory of reinforcement learning actually gives us a mathematically principled framework to think, to reason about, you know, optimizing some quantity when you don't actually know the equations that govern that system. And I don't, to me, that's actually seems kind of, you know, very elegant, not something that sort of becomes immediately obvious, at least in the mathematical sense. Does it make sense to you that it works at all? Well, I think it makes sense when you take some time to think about it, but it is a little surprising. Well, then taking a step into the more deeper representations, which is also very surprising of sort of the richness of the state space, the space of environments that this kind of approach can operate in, can you maybe say what is deep reinforcement learning? Well, deep reinforcement learning simply refers to taking reinforcement learning algorithms and combining them with high capacity neural net representations. Which is, you know, kind of, it might at first seem like a pretty arbitrary thing, just take these two components and stick them together. But the reason that it's something that has become so important in recent years is that reinforcement learning, it kind of faces an exacerbated version of a problem that has faced many other machine learning techniques. So if we go back to like, you know, the early two thousands or the late nineties, we'll see a lot of research on machine learning methods that have some very appealing mathematical properties like they reduce the convex optimization problems, for instance, but they require very special inputs. They require a representation of the input that is clean in some way. Like for example, clean in the sense that the classes in your multi class classification problems separate linearly. So they have some kind of good representation and we call this a feature representation. And for a long time, people were very worried about features in the world of supervised learning because somebody had to actually build those features so you couldn't just take an image and plug it into your logistic regression or your SVM or something. How to take that image and process it using some handwritten code. And then neural nets came along and they could actually learn the features and suddenly we could apply learning directly to the raw inputs, which was great for images, but it was even more great for all the other fields where people hadn't come up with good features yet. And one of those fields actually reinforcement learning because in reinforcement learning, the notion of features, if you don't use neural nets and you have to design your own features is very, very opaque. Like it's very hard to imagine, let's say I'm playing chess or go. What is a feature with which I can represent the value function for go or even the optimal policy for go linearly? Like I don't even know how to start thinking about it. And people tried all sorts of things that would write down, you know, an expert chess player looks for whether the knight is in the middle of the board or not. So that's a feature is knight in middle of board. And they would write these like long lists of kind of arbitrary made up stuff. And that was really kind of getting us nowhere. And that's a little, chess is a little more accessible than the robotics problem. Absolutely. Right. There's at least experts in the different features for chess, but still like the neural network there, to me, that's, I mean, you put it eloquently and almost made it seem like a natural step to add neural networks, but the fact that neural networks are able to discover features in the control problem, it's very interesting. It's hopeful. I'm not sure what to think about it, but it feels hopeful that the control problem has features to be learned. Like I guess my question is, is it surprising to you how far the deep side of deep reinforcement learning was able to like what the space of problems has been able to tackle from, especially in games with alpha star and alpha zero and just the representation power there and in the robotics space and what is your sense of the limits of this representation power and the control context? I think that in regard to the limits that here, I think that one thing that makes it a little hard to fully answer this question is because in settings where we would like to push these things to the limit, we encounter other bottlenecks. So like the reason that I can't get my robot to learn how to like, I don't know, do the dishes in the kitchen, it's not because it's neural net is not big enough. It's because when you try to actually do trial and error learning, reinforcement learning, directly in the real world where you have the potential to gather these large, highly varied and complex data sets, you start running into other problems. Like one problem you run into very quickly, it'll first sound like a very pragmatic problem, but it actually turns out to be a pretty deep scientific problem. Take the robot, put it in your kitchen, have it try to learn to do the dishes with trial and error. It'll break all your dishes and then we'll have no more dishes to clean. Now you might think this is a very practical issue, but there's something to this, which is that if you have a person trying to do this, a person will have some degree of common sense. They'll break one dish, they'll be a little more careful with the next one, and if they break all of them, they're going to go and get more or something like that. So there's all sorts of scaffolding that comes very naturally to us for our learning process. Like if I have to learn something through trial and error, I have the common sense to know that I have to try multiple times. If I screw something up, I ask for help or I reset things or something like that. And all of that is kind of outside of the classic reinforcement learning problem formulation. There are other things that can also be categorized as kind of scaffolding, but are very important. Like for example, where do you get your reward function? If I want to learn how to pour a cup of water, well, how do I know if I've done it correctly? Now that probably requires an entire computer vision system to be built just to determine that, and that seems a little bit inelegant. So there are all sorts of things like this that start to come up when we think through what we really need to get reinforcement learning to happen at scale in the real world. And many of these things actually suggest a little bit of a shortcoming in the problem formulation and a few deeper questions that we have to resolve. That's really interesting. I talked to David Silver about AlphaZero, and it seems like there's no, again, we haven't hit the limit at all in the context where there's no broken dishes. So in the case of Go, you can, it's really about just scaling compute. So again, like the bottleneck is the amount of money you're willing to invest in compute and then maybe the different, the scaffolding around how difficult it is to scale compute maybe, but there, there's no limit. And it's interesting, now we'll move to the real world and there's the broken dishes, there's all the, and the reward function, like you mentioned, that's really nice. So what, how do we push forward there? Do you think there's, there's this kind of a sample efficiency question that people bring up of, you know, not having to break a hundred thousand dishes. Is this an algorithm question? Is this a data selection like question? What do you think? How do we, how do we not break too many dishes? Yeah. Well, one way we can think about that is that maybe we need to be better at, at reusing our data, building that, that iceberg. So perhaps, perhaps it's too much to hope that you can have a machine that's in isolation in the vacuum without anything else, can just master complex tasks in like in minutes the way that people do, but perhaps it also doesn't have to, perhaps what it really needs to do is have an existence, a lifetime where it does many things and the previous things that it has done, prepare it to do new things more efficiently. And you know, the study of these kinds of questions typically falls under categories like multitask learning or meta learning, but they all fundamentally deal with the same general theme, which is use experience for doing other things to learn to do new things efficiently and quickly. So what do you think about if we just look at the one particular case study of a Tesla autopilot that has quickly approaching towards a million vehicles on the road where some percentage of the time, 30, 40% of the time is driven using the computer vision, multitask hydranet, right? And then the other percent, that's what they call it, hydranet. The other percent is human controlled. In the human side, how can we use that data? What's your sense? What's the signal? Do you have ideas in this autonomous vehicle space when people can lose their lives? You know, it's a safety critical environment. So how do we use that data? So I think that actually the kind of problems that come up when we want systems that are reliable and that can kind of understand the limits of their capabilities, they're actually very similar to the kind of problems that come up when we're doing off policy reinforcement learning. So as I mentioned before, in off policy reinforcement learning, the big problem is you need to know when you can trust the predictions of your model, because if you're trying to evaluate some pattern of behavior for which your model doesn't give you an accurate prediction, then you shouldn't use that to modify your policy. It's actually very similar to the problem that we're faced when we actually then deploy that thing and we want to decide whether we trust it in the moment or not. So perhaps we just need to do a better job of figuring out that part, and that's a very deep research question, of course, but it's also a question that a lot of people are working on. So I'm pretty optimistic that we can make some progress on that over the next few years. What's the role of simulation in reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning? Like how essential is it? It's been essential for the breakthroughs so far for some interesting breakthroughs. Do you think it's a crutch that we rely on? I mean, again, this connects to our off policy discussion, but do you think we can ever get rid of simulation or do you think simulation will actually take over? We'll create more and more realistic simulations that will allow us to solve actual real world problems, like transfer the models we learn in simulation to real world problems. I think that simulation is a very pragmatic tool that we can use to get a lot of useful stuff to work right now, but I think that in the long run, we will need to build machines that can learn from real data because that's the only way that we'll get them to improve perpetually because if we can't have our machines learn from real data, if they have to rely on simulated data, eventually the simulator becomes the bottleneck. In fact, this is a general thing. If your machine has any bottleneck that is built by humans and that doesn't improve from data, it will eventually be the thing that holds it back. And if you're entirely reliant on your simulator, that'll be the bottleneck. If you're entirely reliant on a manually designed controller, that's going to be the bottleneck. So simulation is very useful. It's very pragmatic, but it's not a substitute for being able to utilize real experience. And by the way, this is something that I think is quite relevant now, especially in the context of some of the things we've discussed, because some of these kind of scaffolding issues that I mentioned, things like the broken dishes and the unknown reward function, like these are not problems that you would ever stumble on when working in a purely simulated kind of environment, but they become very apparent when we try to actually run these things in the real world. To throw a brief wrench into our discussion, let me ask, do you think we're living in a simulation? Oh, I have no idea. Do you think that's a useful thing to even think about, about the fundamental physics nature of reality? Or another perspective, the reason I think the simulation hypothesis is interesting is to think about how difficult is it to create sort of a virtual reality game type situation that will be sufficiently convincing to us humans or sufficiently enjoyable that we wouldn't want to leave. I mean, that's actually a practical engineering challenge. And I personally really enjoy virtual reality, but it's quite far away. I kind of think about what would it take for me to want to spend more time in virtual reality versus the real world. And that's a sort of a nice clean question because at that point, if I want to live in a virtual reality, that means we're just a few years away where a majority of the population lives in a virtual reality. And that's how we create the simulation, right? You don't need to actually simulate the quantum gravity and just every aspect of the universe. And that's an interesting question for reinforcement learning too, is if we want to make sufficiently realistic simulations that may blend the difference between sort of the real world and the simulation, thereby just some of the things we've been talking about, kind of the problems go away if we can create actually interesting, rich simulations. It's an interesting question. And it actually, I think your question casts your previous question in a very interesting light, because in some ways asking whether we can, well, the more kind of practical version is like, you know, can we build simulators that are good enough to train essentially AI systems that will work in the world? And it's kind of interesting to think about this, about what this implies, if true, it kind of implies that it's easier to create the universe than it is to create a brain. And that seems like, put this way, it seems kind of weird. The aspect of the simulation most interesting to me is the simulation of other humans. That seems to be a complexity that makes the robotics problem harder. Now I don't know if every robotics person agrees with that notion. Just as a quick aside, what are your thoughts about when the human enters the picture of the robotics problem? How does that change the reinforcement learning problem, the learning problem in general? Yeah, I think that's a, it's a kind of a complex question. And I guess my hope for a while had been that if we build these robotic learning systems that are multitask, that utilize lots of prior data and that learn from their own experience, the bit where they have to interact with people will be perhaps handled in much the same way as all the other bits. So if they have prior experience of interacting with people and they can learn from their own experience of interacting with people for this new task, maybe that'll be enough. Now, of course, if it's not enough, there are many other things we can do and there's quite a bit of research in that area. But I think it's worth a shot to see whether the multi agent interaction, the ability to understand that other beings in the world have their own goals and tensions and thoughts and so on, whether that kind of understanding can emerge automatically from simply learning to do things with and maximize utility. That information arises from the data. You've said something about gravity, that you don't need to explicitly inject anything into the system. They can be learned from the data. And gravity is an example of something that could be learned from data, so like the physics of the world. What are the limits of what we can learn from data? Do you really think we can? So a very simple, clean way to ask that is, do you really think we can learn gravity from just data, the idea, the laws of gravity? So something that I think is a common kind of pitfall when thinking about prior knowledge and learning is to assume that just because we know something, then that it's better to tell the machine about that rather than have it figured out on its own. In many cases, things that are important that affect many of the events that the machine will experience are actually pretty easy to learn. If every time you drop something, it falls down, yeah, you might get the Newton's version, not Einstein's version, but it'll be pretty good and it will probably be sufficient for you to act rationally in the world because you see the phenomenon all the time. So things that are readily apparent from the data, we might not need to specify those by hand. It might actually be easier to let the machine figure them out. It just feels like that there might be a space of many local minima in terms of theories of this world that we would discover and get stuck on, that Newtonian mechanics is not necessarily easy to come by. Yeah. And in fact, in some fields of science, for example, human civilization is itself full of these local optima. So for example, if you think about how people tried to figure out biology and medicine for the longest time, the kind of rules, the kind of principles that serve us very well in our day to day lives actually serve us very poorly in understanding medicine and biology. We had kind of very superstitious and weird ideas about how the body worked until the advent of the modern scientific method. So that does seem to be a failing of this approach, but it's also a failing of human intelligence arguably. Maybe a small aside, but some, you know, the idea of self play is fascinating in reinforcement learning sort of these competitive, creating a competitive context in which agents can play against each other in a, sort of at the same skill level and thereby increasing each other skill level. It seems to be this kind of self improving mechanism is exceptionally powerful in the context where it could be applied. First of all, is that beautiful to you that this mechanism work as well as it does? And also can we generalize to other contexts like in the robotic space or anything that's applicable to the real world? I think that it's a very interesting idea, but I suspect that the bottleneck to actually generalizing it to the robotic setting is actually going to be the same as the bottleneck for everything else that we need to be able to build machines that can get better and better through natural interaction with the world. And once we can do that, then they can go out and play with, they can play with each other, they can play with people, they can play with the natural environment. But before we get there, we've got all these other problems we've got, we have to get out of the way. So there's no shortcut around that. You have to interact with a natural environment that. Well because in a, in a self play setting, you still need a mediating mechanism. So the, the reason that, you know, self play works for a board game is because the rules of that board game mediate the interaction between the agents. So the kind of intelligent behavior that will emerge depends very heavily on the nature of that mediating mechanism. So on the side of reward functions, that's coming up with good reward functions seems to be the thing that we associate with general intelligence, like human beings seem to value the idea of developing our own reward functions of, you know, at arriving at meaning and so on. And yet for reinforcement learning, we often kind of specify that's the given. What's your sense of how we develop reward, you know, good reward functions? Yeah, I think that's a very complicated and very deep question. And you're completely right that classically in reinforcement learning, this question, I guess, kind of been treated as an on issue that you sort of treat the reward as this external thing that comes from some other bit of your biology and you kind of don't worry about it. And I do think that that's actually, you know, a little bit of a mistake that we should worry about it. And we can approach it in a few different ways. We can approach it, for instance, by thinking of rewards as a communication medium. We can say, well, how does a person communicate to a robot what its objective is? You can approach it also as a sort of more of an intrinsic motivation medium. You could say, can we write down kind of a general objective that leads to good capability? Like for example, can you write down some objectives such that even in the absence of any other task, if you maximize that objective, you'll sort of learn useful things. This is something that has sometimes been called unsupervised reinforcement learning, which I think is a really fascinating area of research, especially today. We've done a bit of work on that recently. One of the things we've studied is whether we can have some notion of unsupervised reinforcement learning by means of, you know, information theoretic quantities, like for instance, minimizing a Bayesian measure of surprise. This is an idea that was, you know, pioneered actually in the computational neuroscience community by folks like Carl Friston. And we've done some work recently that shows that you can actually learn pretty interesting skills by essentially behaving in a way that allows you to make accurate predictions about the world. Like do the things that will lead to you getting the right answer for prediction. But you can, you know, by doing this, you can sort of discover stable niches in the world. You can discover that if you're playing Tetris, then correctly, you know, clearing the rows will let you play Tetris for longer and keep the board nice and clean, which sort of satisfies some desire for order in the world. And as a result, get some degree of leverage over your domain. So we're exploring that pretty actively. Is there a role for a human notion of curiosity in itself being the reward, sort of discovering new things about the world? So one of the things that I'm pretty interested in is actually whether discovering new things can actually be an emergent property of some other objective that quantifies capability. So new things for the sake of new things maybe is not, maybe might not by itself be the right answer, but perhaps we can figure out an objective for which discovering new things is actually the natural consequence. That's something we're working on right now, but I don't have a clear answer for you there yet that's still a work in progress. You mean just that it's a curious observation to see sort of creative patterns of curiosity on the way to optimize for a particular task? On the way to optimize for a particular measure of capability. Is there ways to understand or anticipate unexpected unintended consequences of particular reward functions, sort of anticipate the kind of strategies that might be developed and try to avoid highly detrimental strategies? So classically, this is something that has been pretty hard in reinforcement learning because it's difficult for a designer to have good intuition about, you know, what a learning algorithm will come up with when they give it some objective. There are ways to mitigate that. One way to mitigate it is to actually define an objective that says like, don't do weird stuff. You can actually quantify it. You can say just like, don't enter situations that have low probability under the distribution of states you've seen before. It turns out that that's actually one very good way to do off policy reinforcement learning actually. So we can do some things like that. If we slowly venture in speaking about reward functions into greater and greater levels of intelligence, there's, I mean, Stuart Russell thinks about this, the alignment of AI systems with us humans. So how do we ensure that AGI systems align with us humans? It's kind of a reward function question of specifying the behavior of AI systems such that their success aligns with this, with the broader intended success interest of human beings. Do you have thoughts on this? Do you have kind of concerns of where reinforcement learning fits into this, or are you really focused on the current moment of us being quite far away and trying to solve the robotics problem? I don't have a great answer to this, but, you know, and I do think that this is a problem that's important to figure out. For my part, I'm actually a bit more concerned about the other side of the, of this equation that, you know, maybe rather than unintended consequences for objectives that are specified too well, I'm actually more worried right now about unintended consequences for objectives that are not optimized well enough, which might become a very pressing problem when we, for instance, try to use these techniques for safety critical systems like cars and aircraft and so on. I think at some point we'll face the issue of objectives being optimized too well, but right now I think we're, we're more likely to face the issue of them not being optimized well enough. But you don't think unintended consequences can arise even when you're far from optimality, sort of like on the path to it? Oh no, I think unintended consequences can absolutely arise. It's just, I think right now the bottleneck for improving reliability, safety and things like that is more with systems that like need to work better, that need to optimize their objectives better. Do you have thoughts, concerns about existential threats of human level intelligence that have, if we put on our hat of looking in 10, 20, 100, 500 years from now, do you have concerns about existential threats of AI systems? I think there are absolutely existential threats for AI systems, just like there are for any powerful technology. But I think that the, these kinds of problems can take many forms and, and some of those forms will come down to, you know, people with nefarious intent. Some of them will come down to AI systems that have some fatal flaws. And some of them will, will of course come down to AI systems that are too capable in some way. But among this set of potential concerns, I would actually be much more concerned about the first two right now, and principally the one with nefarious humans, because, you know, just through all of human history, actually it's the nefarious humans that have been the problem, not the nefarious machines, than I am about the others. And I think that right now the best that I can do to make sure things go well is to build the best technology I can and also hopefully promote responsible use of that technology. Do you think RL Systems has something to teach us humans? You said nefarious humans getting us in trouble. I mean, machine learning systems have in some ways have revealed to us the ethical flaws in our data. In that same kind of way, can reinforcement learning teach us about ourselves? Has it taught something? What have you learned about yourself from trying to build robots and reinforcement learning systems? I'm not sure what I've learned about myself, but maybe part of the answer to your question might become a little bit more apparent once we see more widespread deployment of reinforcement learning for decision making support in domains like healthcare, education, social media, etc. And I think we will see some interesting stuff emerge there. We will see, for instance, what kind of behaviors these systems come up with in situations where there is interaction with humans and where they have a possibility of influencing human behavior. I think we're not quite there yet, but maybe in the next few years we'll see some interesting stuff come out in that area. I hope outside the research space, because the exciting space where this could be observed is sort of large companies that deal with large data, and I hope there's some transparency. One of the things that's unclear when I look at social networks and just online is why an algorithm did something or whether even an algorithm was involved. And that'd be interesting from a research perspective, just to observe the results of algorithms, to open up that data, or to at least be sufficiently transparent about the behavior of these AI systems in the real world. What's your sense? I don't know if you looked at the blog post, Bitter Lesson, by Rich Sutton, where it looks at sort of the big lesson of researching AI and reinforcement learning is that simple methods, general methods that leverage computation seem to work well. So basically don't try to do any kind of fancy algorithms, just wait for computation to get fast. Do you share this kind of intuition? I think the high level idea makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure that my takeaway would be that we don't need to work on algorithms. I think that my takeaway would be that we should work on general algorithms. And actually, I think that this idea of needing to better automate the acquisition of experience in the real world actually follows pretty naturally from Rich Sutton's conclusion. So if the claim is that automated general methods plus data leads to good results, then it makes sense that we should build general methods and we should build the kind of methods that we can deploy and get them to go out there and collect their experience autonomously. I think that one place where I think that the current state of things falls a little bit short of that is actually the going out there and collecting the data autonomously, which is easy to do in a simulated board game, but very hard to do in the real world. Yeah, it keeps coming back to this one problem, right? Your mind is focused there now in this real world. It just seems scary, the step of collecting the data, and it seems unclear to me how we can do it effectively. Well, you know, seven billion people in the world, each of them had to do that at some point in their lives. And we should leverage that experience that they've all done. We should be able to try to collect that kind of data. Okay, big questions. Maybe stepping back through your life, what book or books, technical or fiction or philosophical, had a big impact on the way you saw the world, on the way you thought about in the world, your life in general? And maybe what books, if it's different, would you recommend people consider reading on their own intellectual journey? It could be within reinforcement learning, but it could be very much bigger. I don't know if this is like a scientifically, like, particularly meaningful answer. But like, the honest answer is that I actually found a lot of the work by Isaac Asimov to be very inspiring when I was younger. I don't know if that has anything to do with AI necessarily. You don't think it had a ripple effect in your life? Maybe it did. But yeah, I think that a vision of a future where, well, first of all, artificial, I might say artificial intelligence system, artificial robotic systems have, you know, kind of a big place, a big role in society, and where we try to imagine the sort of the limiting case of technological advancement and how that might play out in our future history. But yeah, I think that that was in some way influential. I don't really know how. I would recommend it. I mean, if nothing else, you'd be well entertained. When did you first yourself like fall in love with the idea of artificial intelligence, get captivated by this field? So my honest answer here is actually that I only really started to think about it as something that I might want to do actually in graduate school pretty late. And a big part of that was that until, you know, somewhere around 2009, 2010, it just wasn't really high on my priority list because I didn't think that it was something where we're going to see very substantial advances in my lifetime. And you know, maybe in terms of my career, the time when I really decided I wanted to work on this was when I actually took a seminar course that was taught by Professor Andrew Ng. And, you know, at that point, I, of course, had like a decent understanding of the technical things involved. But one of the things that really resonated with me was when he said in the opening lecture something to the effect of like, well, he used to have graduate students come to him and talk about how they want to work on AI, and he would kind of chuckle and give them some math problem to deal with. But now he's actually thinking that this is an area where we might see like substantial advances in our lifetime. And that kind of got me thinking because, you know, in some abstract sense, yeah, like you can kind of imagine that, but in a very real sense, when someone who had been working on that kind of stuff their whole career suddenly says that, yeah, like that had some effect on me. Yeah, this might be a special moment in the history of the field. That this is where we might see some interesting breakthroughs. So in the space of advice, somebody who's interested in getting started in machine learning or reinforcement learning, what advice would you give to maybe an undergraduate student or maybe even younger, how, what are the first steps to take and further on what are the steps to take on that journey? So something that I think is important to do is to not be afraid to like spend time imagining the kind of outcome that you might like to see. So you know, one outcome might be a successful career, a large paycheck or something, or state of the art results on some benchmark, but hopefully that's not the thing that's like the main driving force for somebody. But I think that if someone who is a student considering a career in AI like takes a little while, sits down and thinks like, what do I really want to see? What I want to see a machine do? What do I want to see a robot do? What do I want to do? What do I want to see a natural language system, which is like, imagine, you know, imagine it almost like a commercial for a future product or something or like, like something that you'd like to see in the world and then actually sit down and think about the steps that are necessary to get there. And hopefully that thing is not a better number on image net classification. It's like, it's probably like an actual thing that we can't do today that would be really awesome. Whether it's a robot Butler or a, you know, a really awesome healthcare decision making support system, whatever it is that you find inspiring. And I think that thinking about that and then backtracking from there and imagining the steps needed to get there will actually lead to much better research. It'll lead to rethinking the assumptions. It'll lead to working on the bottlenecks that other people aren't working on. And then naturally to turn to you, we've talked about reward functions and you just give an advice on looking forward, how you'd like to see, what kind of change you would like to make in the world. What do you think, ridiculous, big question, what do you think is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of your life? What gives you fulfillment, purpose, happiness and meaning? That's a very big question. What's the reward function under which you are operating? Yeah. I think one thing that does give, you know, if not meaning, at least satisfaction is some degree of confidence that I'm working on a problem that really matters. I feel like it's less important to me to like actually solve a problem, but it's quite nice to take things to spend my time on that I believe really matter. And I try pretty hard to look for that. I don't know if it's easy to answer this, but if you're successful, what does that look like? What's the big dream? Now, of course, success is built on top of success and you keep going forever, but what is the dream? Yeah. So one very concrete thing or maybe as concrete as it's going to get here is to see machines that actually get better and better the longer they exist in the world. And that kind of seems like on the surface, one might even think that that's something that we have today, but I think we really don't. I think that there is an ending complexity in the universe and to date, all of the machines that we've been able to build don't sort of improve up to the limit of that complexity. They hit a wall somewhere. Maybe they hit a wall because they're in a simulator that has, that is only a very limited, very pale imitation of the real world, or they hit a wall because they rely on a label data set, but they never hit the wall of like running out of stuff to see. So I'd like to build a machine that can go as far as possible. Runs up against the ceiling of the complexity of the universe. Yes. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it, Sergey. Thank you so much. It's a huge honor. I can't wait to see the amazing work that you have to publish and in education space in terms of reinforcement learning. Thank you for inspiring the world. Thank you for the great research you do. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sergey Levine and thank you to our sponsors, Cash App and ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting this podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast and signing up at expressvpn.com slash LexPod. Click all the links, buy all the stuff, it's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled somehow if you can figure out how without using the letter E, just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from Salvador Dali. Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Sergey Levine: Robotics and Machine Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #108

The following is a conversation with Brian Kernighan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He was a key figure in the computer science community in the early Unix days, alongside Unix creators, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. He coauthored the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C, and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life, including The Practice of Programming, the Go programming language, and his latest, Unix, A History and a Memoir. He cocreated AUK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co designed Ample, an algebraic modeling language that I personally love and have used a lot in my life for large scale optimization. I think I can keep going for a long time with his creations and accomplishments, which is funny because given all that, he's one of the most humble and kind people I've spoken to on this podcast. Quick summary of the ads, two new sponsors, the amazing self cooling 8sleep mattress and Raycon earbuds. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to 8sleep.com slash Lex and going to buyraycon.com slash Lex. Click the links, buy the stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 Apple podcasts, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that could break the flow of the conversation. This show is sponsored by 8sleep and it's incredible pod pro mattress that you can check out at 8sleep.com slash Lex to get $200 off. The mattress controls temperature with an app and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees. Research shows that temperature has a big impact on the quality of our sleep. Anecdotally, it's been a game changer for me. I love it. 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And now, here's my conversation with Brian Kernighan. Unix started being developed 50 years ago. It'd be more than 50 years ago. Can you tell the story like you describe in your new book of how Unix was created? Ha, if I can remember that far back, it was some while ago. So I think the gist of it is that at Bell Labs, in 1969, there were a group of people who had just finished working on the Multics project, which was itself a follow on to CTSS. So we can go back sort of an infinite regress in time, but the CTSS was a very, very, very nice time sharing system. It was very nice to use. I actually used it that summer I spent in Cambridge in 1966. What was the hardware there? So what's the operating system, what's the hardware there? What's the CTSS look like? So CTSS looked like kind of like a standard time sharing system. Certainly at the time, it was the only time sharing. Let's go back to the basics. What's a time sharing system? Okay, in the beginning was the word and the word was the system. And then there was time sharing systems. Yeah, if we go back into, let's call it the 1950s and early 1960s, most computing was done on very big computers, physically big, although not terribly powerful by today's standards, that were maintained in very large rooms and you use things like punch cards to write your programs on and talk to them. So you would take a deck of cards, write your program on it, send it over a counter, hand it to an operator and some while later back would come something that said, oh, you made a mistake and then you'd recycle. And so it was very, very slow. So the idea of time sharing was that you take basically that same computer, but connect to it with something that looked like an electric typewriter. They could be a long distance away, it could be close, but fundamentally what the operating system did was to give each person who was connected to it and wanting to do something a small slice of time to do a particular job. So I might be editing a file, so I would be typing and every time I hit a keystroke, the operating system would wake up and said, oh, he typed character, let me remember that. Then it'd go back to doing something else. So it'd be going around and around a group of people who were trying to get something done, giving each a small slice of time and giving them each the illusion that they pretty much had the whole machine to themselves and hence time sharing, that is sharing the computing time resource of the computer among a number of people who were doing it. Without the individual people being aware that there's others in a sense, the illusion, the feelings that the machine is your own. Pretty much that was the idea. Yes, if it were well done and if it were fast enough and other people weren't doing too much, you did have the illusion that you had the whole machine to yourself and it was very much better than the punch card model. And so CTSS, the compatible time sharing system was I think arguably the first of these. It was done I guess technically in 64 or something like that. It ran on an IBM 7094, slightly modified to have twice as much memory as the norm. It had two banks of 32K words instead of one. So. 32K words, yeah. Each word was 36 bits, so call it about 150 kilobytes times two. So by today's standards, that's down in the noise. But at the time, that was a lot of memory and memory was expensive. So CTSS was just a wonderful environment to work on. It was done by the people at MIT, led by Fernando Corbato, Corby who died just earlier this year, and a bunch of other folks. So I spent the summer of 66 working on that, had a great time, met a lot of really nice people and indirectly knew of people at Bell Labs who were also working on a follow on to CTSS that was called Multics. So Multics was meant to be the system that would do everything that CTSS did but do it better for a larger population. All the usual stuff. Now the actual time sharing, the scheduling, what's the algorithm that performs the scheduling? What's that look like? How much magic is there? What are the metrics? How does it all work in the beginning? So the answer is I don't have a clue. I think the basic idea was nothing more than who all wants to get something done. Suppose that things are very quiet in the middle of the night, then I get all the time that I want. Suppose that you and I are contending at high noon for something like that, then probably the simplest algorithm is a round robin one that gives you a bit of time, gives me a bit of time. And then we could adapt to that. Like what are you trying to do? Are you text editing or are you compiling or something? And then we might adjust the scheduler according to things like that. So okay, so Multics was trying to just do some of the, clean it up a little bit. Well, it was meant to be much more than that. So Multics was the multiplexed information and computing service and it was meant to be a very large thing that would provide computing utility. Something that where you could actually think of it as just a plug in the wall service. Sort of like cloud computing today. Same idea, but 50 odd years earlier. And so what Multics offered was a richer operating system environment, a piece of hardware that was better designed for doing the kind of sharing of resources. And presumably lots of other things. Do you think people at that time had the dream of what cloud computing is starting to become now, which is computing is everywhere. That you can just plug in almost, and you never know how the magic works. You just kind of plug in, add your little computation that you need to perform and it does it. Was that the dream? I don't know where that was the dream. I wasn't part of it at that point. I remember I was an intern for summer. But my sense is given that it was over 50 years ago, yeah, they had that idea that it was an information utility. That it was something where if you had a computing task to do, you could just go and do it. Now I'm betting that they didn't have the same view of computing for the masses, let's call it. The idea that your grandmother would be shopping on Amazon. I don't think that was part of it. But if your grandmother were a programmer, it might be very easy for her to go and use this kind of utility. What was your dream of computers at that time? What did you see as the future of computers? Because you have predicted what computers are today. Oh, short answer, absolutely not. I have no clue. I'm not sure I had a dream. It was a dream job in the sense that I really enjoyed what I was doing. I was surrounded by really, really nice people. Cambridge is a very fine city to live in in the summer, less so in the winter when it snows. But in the summer, it was a delightful time. And so I really enjoyed all of that stuff. And I learned things. And I think the good fortune of being there for summer led me then to get a summer job at Bell Labs the following summer. And that was quite useful for the future. So Bell Labs is this magical, legendary place. So first of all, where is Bell Labs? And can you start talking about that journey towards Unix at Bell Labs? Yeah, so Bell Labs is physically scattered around, at the time, scattered around New Jersey. The primary location is in a town called Murray Hill, or a location called Murray Hill is actually across the boundary between two small towns in New Jersey called New Providence and Berkeley Heights. Think of it as about 15, 20 miles straight west of New York City, and therefore about an hour north of here in Princeton. And at that time, it had, make up a number, three or 4,000 people there, many of whom had PhDs and mostly doing physical sciences, chemistry, physics, materials kinds of things, but very strong math and rapidly growing interest in computing as people realized you could do things with computers that you might not have been able to do before. You could replace labs with computers that had worked on models of what was going on. So that was the essence of Bell Labs. And again, I wasn't a permanent employee there. That was another internship. I got lucky in internships. I mean, if you could just linger on it a little bit, what was the, what was in the air there? Because some of the, the number of Nobel Prizes, the number of Turing Awards and just legendary computer scientists that come from their inventions, including developments, including Unix, it's just, it's unbelievable. So was there something special about that place? Oh, I think there was very definitely something special. I mentioned the number of people, it's a very large number of people, very highly skilled and working in an environment where there was always something interesting to work on because the goal of Bell Labs, which was a small part of AT&T, which provided basically the country's phone service. The goal of AT&T was to provide service for everybody. And the goal of Bell Labs was to try and make that service keep getting better, so improving service. And that meant doing research on a lot of different things, physical devices, like the transistor or fiber optical cables or microwave systems, all of these things the labs worked on. And it was kind of just the beginning of real boom times in computing as well. Because when I was there, I went there first in 66. So computing was at that point fairly young. And so people were discovering that you could do lots of things with computers. So how was Unix born? So Multics, in spite of having an enormous number of really good ideas and lots of good people working on it, fundamentally didn't live up, at least in the short run, and I think ultimately really ever, to its goal of being this information utility. It was too expensive and certainly what was promised was delivered much too late. And so in roughly the beginning of 1969, Bell Labs pulled out of the project. The project at that point had included MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, General Electric made computers. So General Electric was the hardware operation. So Bell Labs, realizing this wasn't going anywhere on a timescale they cared about, pulled out of the project. And this left several people with an acquired taste for really, really nice computing environments, but no computing environment. And so they started thinking about what could you do if you were going to design a new operating system that would provide the same kind of comfortable computing as CTSS had, but also the facilities of something like Multics sort of brought forward. And so they did a lot of paper design stuff. And at the same time, Ken Thompson found what is characterized as a little used PDP 7, where he started to do experiments with file systems, just how do you store information on a computer in a efficient way, and then this famous story that his wife went away to California for three weeks, taking their one year old son, and three weeks, and he sat down and wrote an operating system, which ultimately became Unix. So software productivity was good in those days. So PDP, what's a PDP 7? So it's a piece of hardware. Yeah, it's a piece of hardware. It was one of early machines made by Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, and it was a mini computer, so called. It had, I would have to look up the numbers exactly, but it had a very small amount of memory, maybe 16K, 16 bit words, or something like that, relatively slow, probably not super expensive. Maybe, again, making this up, I'd have to look it up, $100,000 or something like that. Which is not super expensive in those days, right? It was expensive. It was enough that you and I probably wouldn't be able to buy one, but a modest group of people could get together. But in any case, it came out, if I recall, in 1964. So by 1969, it was getting a little obsolete, and that's why it was little used. If you can sort of comment, what do you think it's like to write an operating system like that? So that process that Ken went through in three weeks, because you were, I mean, you're a part of that process. You contributed a lot to Unix's early development. So what do you think it takes to do that first step, that first kind of, from design to reality on the PDP? Well, let me correct one thing. I had nothing to do with it. So I did not write it. I have never written operating system code. And so I don't know. Now an operating system is simply code. And this first one wasn't very big, but it's something that lets you run processes, lets you execute some kind of code that has been written. It lets you store information for periods of time so that it doesn't go away when you turn the power off or reboot or something like that. And there's kind of a core set of tools that are technically not part of an operating system, but you probably need them. In this case, Ken wrote an assembler for the PDP 7 that worked. He needed a text editor so that he could actually create text. He had the file system stuff that he had been working on, and then the rest of it was just a way to load things, executable code from the file system into the memory, give it control, and then recover control when it was finished or in some other way quit. What was the code written in, primarily the programming language? Was it in assembly? Yeah, PDP 7 assembler that Ken created. These things were assembly language until probably the, call it 1973 or 74, something like that. Forgive me if it's a dumb question, but it feels like a daunting task to write any kind of complex system in assembly. Absolutely. It feels like impossible to do any kind of what we think of as software engineering with assembly, because to work on a big picture sort of. I think it's hard. It's been a long time since I wrote assembly language. It is absolutely true that in assembly language, if you make a mistake, nobody tells you. There are no training wheels whatsoever. And so stuff doesn't work. Now what? There's no debuggers. Well, there could be debuggers, but that's the same problem, right? How do you actually get something that will help you debug it? So part of it is an ability to see the big picture. Now these systems were not big in the sense that today's pictures are. So the big picture was in some sense more manageable. I mean, then realistically, there's an enormous variation in the capabilities of programmers. And Ken Thompson, who did that first one, is kind of the singularity, in my experience, of programmers. With no disrespect to you or even to me, he's in several leagues removed. I know there's levels. It's a fascinating thing that there are unique stars in particular in the programming space and at a particular time. You know, the time matters too, the timing of when that person comes along. And a wife does have to leave. There's this weird timing that happens and then all of a sudden something beautiful is created. I mean, how does it make you feel that there's a system that was created in three weeks or maybe you can even say on a whim, but not really, but of course, quickly, that is now, you could think of most of the computers in the world run on a Unix like system? Right. How do you interpret, like, if you kind of zoom from the alien perspective, if you were just observing Earth, and all of a sudden these computers took over the world and they started from this little initial seed of Unix, how does that make you feel? It's quite surprising. And you asked earlier about prediction. The answer is no. There's no way you could predict that kind of evolution. And I don't know whether it was inevitable or just a whole sequence of blind luck. I suspect more of the latter. And so I look at it and think, gee, that's kind of neat. I think the real question is what does Ken think about that? Because he's the guy arguably from whom it really came. You know, tremendous contributions from Dennis Ritchie and then others around in that Bell Labs environment. But, you know, if you had to pick a single person, that would be Ken. So you've written a new book, Unix, a history and a memoir. Are there some memorable human stories, funny or profound from that time that just kind of stand out? Oh, there's a lot of them in his book. Oh, there's a lot of them in a sense. And again, it's a question of can you resurrect them in real time? Never. His memory fails. But I think part of it was that Bell Labs at the time was a very special kind of place to work because there were a lot of interesting people and the environment was very, very open and free. It was a very cooperative environment, very friendly environment. And so if you had an interesting problem, you go and talk to somebody and they might help you with the solution. And it was a kind of a fun environment too, in which people did strange things and often tweaking the bureaucracy in one way or another. So rebellious in certain kinds of ways. In some ways, yeah, absolutely. I think most people didn't take too kindly to the bureaucracy and I'm sure the bureaucracy put up with an enormous amount that they didn't really want to. So maybe to linger on it a little bit, do you have a sense of what the philosophy that characterizes Unix is, the design? Not just the initial, but just carry through the years, just being there, being around it. What's the fundamental philosophy behind the system? I think one aspect of fundamental philosophy was to provide an environment that made it easy to write or easier, productive to write programs. So it was meant as a programmer environment. It wasn't meant specifically as something to do some other kind of job. For example, it was used extensively for word processing, but it wasn't designed as a word processing system. It was used extensively for lab control, but it wasn't designed for that. It was used extensively as a front end for big other systems, big dumb systems, but it wasn't designed for that. It was meant to be an environment where it was really easy to write programs. So the programmers could be highly productive. And part of that was to be a community. And there's some observation from Dennis Ritchie, I think at the end of the book, that says that from his standpoint, the real goal was to create a community where people could work as programmers on a system. And I think in that sense, certainly for many, many years, it succeeded quite well at that. And part of that is the technical aspects of because it made it really easy to write programs, people did write interesting programs. Those programs tended to be used by other programmers. And so it was kind of a virtuous circle of more and more stuff coming up that was really good for programmers. And you were part of that community of programmers. So what was it like writing programs in that early Unix? It was a blast. It really was. You know, I like to program. I'm not a terribly good programmer, but it was a lot of fun to write code. And in the early days, there was an enormous amount of what you would today, I suppose, called low hanging fruit. People hadn't done things before. And this was this new environment and the whole combination of nice tools and very responsive system and tremendous colleagues made it possible to write code. You could have an idea in the morning. You could do an experiment with it. You could have something limping along that night or the next day and people would react to it. And they would say, oh, that's wonderful, but you're really screwed up here. And the feedback loop was then very, very short and tight. And so a lot of things got developed fairly quickly that in many cases still exist today. And I think that was part of what made it fun because programming itself is fun. It's puzzle solving in a variety of ways, but I think it's even more fun when you do something that somebody else then uses. Even if they whine about it not working, the fact that they used it is part of the reward mechanism. And what was the method of interaction, the communication, that feedback loop? I mean, this is before the internet. Certainly before the internet. It was mostly physical right there. Somebody would come into your office and say something. So these places are all close by, like offices are nearby, so really lively interaction. Yeah, yeah. Bell Labs was fundamentally one giant building and most of the people were involved in this unique stuff. We're in two or three quarters and there was a room. Oh, how big was it? Probably call it 50 feet by 50 feet. Make up a number of that which had some access to computers there as well as in offices and people hung out there and it had a coffee machine. And so it was mostly very physical. We did use email, of course. But it was fundamentally, for a long time, all on one machine. So there was no need for internet. It's fascinating to think about what computing would be today without Bell Labs. It seems so many, the people being in the vicinity of each other, sort of getting that quick feedback, working together, so many brilliant people. I don't know where else that could have existed in the world given how that came together. Yeah, how does that make you feel that little element of history? Well, I think that's very nice, but in a sense it's survivor bias and if it hadn't happened at Bell Labs, there were other places that were doing really interesting work as well. Xerox PARC is perhaps the most obvious one. Xerox PARC contributed an enormous amount of good material and many of the things we take for granted today in the same way came from Xerox PARC experience. I don't think they capitalized in the long run as much. Their parent company was perhaps not as lucky in capitalizing on this, who knows? But that's certainly another place where there was a tremendous amount of influence. There were a lot of good university activities. MIT was obviously no slouch in this kind of thing and others as well. So Unix turned out to be open source because of the various ways that AT&T operated and sort of it had to, the focus was on telephones. I think that's a mischaracterization in a sense. It absolutely was not open source. It was very definitely proprietary, licensed, but it was licensed freely to universities in source code form for many years. And because of that, generations of university students and their faculty people grew up knowing about Unix and there was enough expertise in the community that it then became possible for people to kind of go off in their own direction and build something that looked Unix like. The Berkeley version of Unix started with that licensed code and gradually picked up enough of its own code contributions, notably from people like Bill Joy, that eventually it was able to become completely free of any AT&T code. Now, there was an enormous amount of legal jockeying around this in the late, early to late 80s, early 90s, something like that. And then, I guess the open source movement might've started when Richard Stallman started to think about this in the late 80s. And by 1991, when Torvalds decided he was going to do a Unix like operating system, there was enough expertise in the community that first he had a target, he could see what to do because the kind of the Unix system call interface and the tools and so on were there. And so he was able to build an operating system that at this point, when you say Unix, in many cases, what you're really thinking is Linux. Linux, yeah. But it's funny that from my distant perception, I felt that Unix was open source without actually knowing it. But what you're really saying, it was just freely licensed. It was freely licensed. So it felt open source in a sense because universities are not trying to make money, so it felt open source in a sense that you can get access if you wanted. Right, and a very, very, very large number of universities had the license and they were able to talk to all the other universities who had the license. And so technically not open, technically belonging to AT&T, pragmatically pretty open. And so there's a ripple effect that all the faculty and the students then all grew up and then they went throughout the world and permeated in that kind of way. So what kind of features do you think make for a good operating system? If you take the lessons of Unix, you said make it easy for programmers. That seems to be an important one. But also Unix turned out to be exceptionally robust and efficient. Right. So is that an accident when you focus on the programmer or is that a natural outcome? I think part of the reason for efficiency was that it began on extremely modest hardware, very, very, very tiny. And so you couldn't get carried away. You couldn't do a lot of complicated things because you just didn't have the resources, either processor speed or memory. And so that enforced a certain minimality of mechanisms and maybe a search for generalizations so that you would find one mechanism that served for a lot of different things rather than having lots of different special cases. I think the file system in Unix is a good example of that file system interface in its fundamental form is extremely straightforward. And that means that you can write code very, very effectively for the file system. And then one of those ideas, one of those generalizations is that gee, that file system interface works for all kinds of other things as well. And so in particular, the idea of reading and writing to devices is the same as reading and writing to a disc that has a file system. And then that gets carried further in other parts of the world. Processes become, in effect, files in a file system. And the Plan 9 operating system, which came along, I guess, in the late 80s or something like that, took a lot of those ideas from the original Unix and tried to push the generalization even further so that in Plan 9, a lot of different resources are file systems. They all share that interface. So that would be one example where finding the right model of how to do something means that an awful lot of things become simpler, and it means, therefore, that more people can do useful, interesting things with them without having to think as hard about it. So you said you're not a very good programmer. That's true. You're the most modest human being, okay, but you'll continue saying that. I understand how this works. But you do radiate a sort of love for programming. So let me ask, do you think programming is more an art or a science? Is it creativity or kind of rigor? I think it's some of each. It's some combination. Some of the art is figuring out what it is that you really want to do. What should that program be? What would make a good program? And that's some understanding of what the task is, what the people who might use this program want. And I think that's art in many respects. The science part is trying to figure out how to do it well. And some of that is real computer sciencey stuff, like what algorithm should we use at some point? Mostly in the sense of being careful to use algorithms that will actually work properly, scale properly, avoiding quadratic algorithms when a linear algorithm should be the right thing, that kind of more formal view of it. Same thing for data structures. But also it's, I think, an engineering field as well. And engineering is not quite the same as science because engineering, you're working with constraints. You have to figure out not only what is a good algorithm for this kind of thing, but what's the most appropriate algorithm given the amount of time we have to compute, the amount of time we have to program, what's likely to happen in the future with maintenance, who's going to pick this up in the future, all of those kind of things that if you're an engineer, you get to worry about. Whereas if you think of yourself as a scientist, well, you can maybe push them over the horizon in a way. And if you're an artist, what's that? So just on your own personal level, what's your process like of writing a program? Say, a small and large sort of tinkering with stuff. Do you just start coding right away and just kind of evolve iteratively with a loose notion? Or do you plan on a sheet of paper first and then kind of design in what they teach you in the kind of software engineering courses in undergrad or something like that? What's your process like? It's certainly much more the informal incremental. First, I don't write big programs at this point. It's been a long time since I wrote a program that was more than I call it a few hundred or more lines, something like that. Many of the programs I write are experiments for either something I'm curious about or often for something that I want to talk about in a class. So those necessarily tend to be relatively small. A lot of the kind of code I write these days tends to be for sort of exploratory data analysis where I've got some collection of data and I want to try and figure out what on earth is going on in it. And for that, those programs tend to be very small. Sometimes you're not even programming. You're just using existing tools like counting things. Or sometimes you're writing OX scripts because two or three lines will tell you something about a piece of data. And then when it gets bigger, well, then I will probably write something in Python because that scales better up to call it a few hundred lines or something like that. And it's been a long time since I wrote programs that were much more than that. Speaking of data exploration and OX, first, what is OX? So OX is a scripting language that was done by myself, Al Aho, and Peter Weinberger. We did that originally in the late 70s. It was a language that was meant to make it really easy to do quick and dirty tasks like counting things or selecting interesting information from basically all text files, rearranging it in some way or summarizing it. It runs a command on each line of a file. I mean, it's still exceptionally widely used today. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's so simple and elegant, sort of the way to explore data. Turns out you can just write a script that does something seemingly trivial in a single line, and giving you that slice of the data somehow reveals something fundamental about the data. And that seems to work still. Yeah, it's very good for that kind of thing. That's sort of what it was meant for. I think what we didn't appreciate was that the model was actually quite good for a lot of data processing kinds of tasks and that it's kept going as long as it has because at this point, it's over 40 years old, and it's still, I think, a useful tool. And well, this is paternal interest, I guess. But I think in terms of programming languages, you get the most bang for the buck by learning AUC. And it doesn't scale the big programs, but it does pretty darn well on these little things where you just want to see all the somethings in something. So yeah, I probably write more AUC than anything else at this point. So what kind of stuff do you love about AUC? Is there, if you can comment on sort of things that give you joy when you can, in a simple program, reveal something about the data. Is there something that stands out from particular features? I think it's mostly the selection of default behaviors. You sort of hinted at it a moment ago. What AUC does is to read through a set of files, and then within each file, it writes through each of the lines. And then on each of the lines, it has a set of patterns that it looks for. That's your AUC program. And if one of the patterns matches, there is a corresponding action that you might perform. And so it's kind of a quadruply nested loop or something like that. And that's all completely automatic. You don't have to say anything about it. You just write the pattern and the action, and then run the data by it. And so that paradigm for programming is a very natural and effective one. And I think we captured that reasonably well in AUC. And it does other things for free as well. It splits the data into fields so that on each line, there is fields separated by white space or something. And so it does that for free. You don't have to say anything about it. And it collects information as it goes along, like what line are we on? How many fields are there on this line? So lots of things that just make it so that a program which in another language, let's say Python, would be five, 10, 20 lines in AUC is one or two lines. And so because it's one or two lines, you can do it on the shell. You don't have to open up another whole thing. You can just do it right there in the interaction with the operatives directly. Is there other shell commands that you love over the years like you really enjoy using? Oh, grep. Grep? Grep's the only one. Yeah, grep does everything. So grep is a simpler version of AUC, I would say? In some sense, yeah, right. What is grep? So grep basically searches the input for particular patterns, regular expressions, technically, of a certain class. And it has that same paradigm that AUC does. It's a pattern action thing. It reads through all the files and then all the lines in each file. But it has a single pattern, which is the regular expression you're looking for, and a single action printed if it matches. So in that sense, it's a much simpler version. And you could write grep in AUC as a one liner. And I use grep probably more than anything else at this point just because it's so convenient and natural. Why do you think it's such a powerful tool, grep and AUC? Why do you think operating systems like Windows, for example, don't have it? You can, of course, I use, which is amazing now, there's Windows for Linux. So which you could basically use all the fun stuff like AUC and grep inside of Windows. But Windows naturally, as part of the graphical interface, the simplicity of grep, searching through a bunch of files and just popping up naturally. Why do you think that's unique to the Linux environment? I don't know. It's not strictly unique, but it's certainly focused there. And I think some of it's the weight of history that Windows came from MS DOS. MS DOS was a pretty pathetic operating system, although common on an unboundedly large number of machines. But somewhere in roughly the 90s, Windows became a graphical system. And I think Microsoft spent a lot of their energy on making that graphical interface what it is. And that's a different model of computing. It's a model of computing where you point and click and sort of experiment with menus. It's a model of computing works rather well for people who are not programmers and just want to get something done, whereas teaching something like the command line to nonprogrammers turns out to sometimes be an uphill struggle. And so I think Microsoft probably was right in what they did. Now you mentioned Whistle or whatever it's called, the Winix, Linux. Whistle. I wonder what it's pronounced. WSL is what I've never actually pronounced. Whistle, I like it. I have no idea. But there have been things like that for longest. Cygwin, for example, which is a wonderful collection of take all your favorite tools from Unix and Linux and just make them work perfectly on Windows. And so that's something that's been going on for at least 20 years, if not longer. And I use that on my one remaining Windows machine routinely because if you're doing something that is batch computing, suitable for command line, that's the right way to do it. Because the Windows equivalents are, if nothing else, not familiar to me. But I would definitely recommend to people if they don't use Cygwin to try Whistle. Yes. I've been so excited that I could write scripts quickly in Windows. It's changed my life. OK, what's your perfect programming setup? What computer, what operating system, what keyboard, what editor? Yeah, perfect is too strong a word. It's way too strong a word. What I use by default, I have, at this point, a 13 inch MacBook Air, which I use because it's kind of a reasonable balance of the various things I need. I can carry it around. It's got enough computing, horsepower, screen's big enough, keyboard's OK. And so I basically do most of my computing on that. I have a big iMac in my office that I use from time to time as well, especially when I need a big screen, but otherwise, it tends not to be used that much. Editor. I use mostly SAM, which is an editor that Rob Pike wrote long ago at Bell Labs. Sorry to interrupt. Does that precede VI? Does that precede iMac? It post dates both VI and iMacs. It is derived from Rob's experience with ED and VI. What's ED? That's the original Unix editor. Oh, wow. Dated probably before you were born. So actually, what's the history of editors? Can you briefly, because it's such a fact. I use Emacs, I'm sorry to say. Sorry to come out with that. But what's the kind of interplay there? So in ancient times, call it the first time sharing systems, going back to what we were talking about. There was an editor on CTSS that I don't even remember what it was called. It might have been edit, where you could type text, program text, and it would do something, or document text. You could save the text. And save it. You could edit it. The usual thing that you would get in an editor. And Ken Thompson wrote an editor called QED, which was very, very powerful. But these were all totally A, command based. They were not mouse or cursor based, because it was before mice and even before cursors, because they were running on terminals that printed on paper. No CRT type displays, let alone LEDs. And so then when Unix came along, Ken took QED and stripped it way, way, way, way down. And that became an editor that he called ED. And it was very simple. But it was a line oriented editor. And so you could load a file. And then you could talk about the lines one through the last line. And you could print ranges of lines. You could add text. You could delete text. You could change text. Or you could do a substitute command that would change things within a line or within groups of lines. So you can work on parts of a file, essentially. Yeah. You can work on any part of it, the whole thing or whatever. But it was entirely command line based. And it was entirely on paper. Paper. And that meant that you changed it. Yeah, right. Real paper. And so if you changed a line, you had to print that line using up another line of paper to see what the change caused. So when CRT displays came along, then you could start to use cursor control. And you could sort of move where you were on the screen. Without reprinting every time. Without reprinting. And there were a number of editors there. The one that I was most familiar with and still use is VI, which was done by Bill Choi. And so that dates from probably the late 70s, as I guess. And it took full advantage of the cursor controls. I suspect that Emacs was roughly at the same time. But I don't know. I've never internalized Emacs. So at this point, I stopped using ED, although I still can. I use VI sometimes, and I use SAM when I can. And SAM is available on most systems? It is available. You have to download it yourself from, typically, the Plan 9 operating system distribution. It's been maintained by people there. And so I'll get home tonight. I'll try it. It's cool. It sounds fascinating. Although my love is with Lisp and Emacs, I've went into that hippie world of. I think it's a lot of things. Religion, where you're brought up with. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Most of the actual programming I do is C, C++, and Python. But my weird sort of, yeah, my religious upbringing is in Lisp. So can you take on the impossible task and give a brief history of programming languages from your perspective? So I guess you could say programming languages started probably in, what, the late 40s or something like that. People used to program computers by basically putting in zeros and ones. Using something like switches on a console. And then, or maybe holes in paper tapes. Something like that. So extremely tedious, awful, whatever. And so I think the first programming languages were relatively crude assembly languages, where people would basically write a program that would convert mnemonics like add ADD into whatever the bit pattern was that corresponded to an ADD instruction. And they would do the clerical work of figuring out where things were. So you could put a name on a location in a program, and the assembler would figure out where that corresponded to when the thing was all put together and dropped into memory. And early on, and this would be the late 40s and very early 50s, there were assemblers written for the various machines that people used. You may have seen in the paper just a couple of days ago, Tony Berker died. He did this thing in Manchester called AutoCode, a language which I knew only by name. But it sounds like it was a flavor of assembly language, sort of a little higher in some ways. And it replaced a language that Alan Turing wrote, which you put in zeros and ones. But you put it in backwards order, because that was a hardware word. Very strange. That's right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Backwards. So assembly languages, let's call that the early 1950s. And so every different flavor of computer has its own assembly language. So the EDSAC had its, and the Manchester had its, and the IBM whatever, 790 or 704, or whatever had its, and so on. So everybody had their own assembly language. And assembly languages have a few commands, additions, subtraction, then branching of some kind, if then type of situation. Right, they have exactly, in their simplest form at least, one instruction per, or one assembly language instruction per instruction in the machine's repertoire. And so you have to know the machine intimately to be able to write programs in it. And if you write an assembly language program for one kind of machine, and then you say, gee, it's nice, I'd like a different machine, start over. OK, so very bad. And so what happened in the late 50s was people realized you could play this game again, and you could move up a level in writing or creating languages that were closer to the way that real people might think about how to write code. And there were, I guess, arguably three or four at that time period. There was FORTRAN, which came from IBM, which was formula translation, meant to make it easy to do scientific and engineering computations. I didn't know that, formula translation, that's wow. That's what I stood for. There was COBOL, which is the Common Business Oriented Language that Grace Hopper and others worked on, which was aimed at business kinds of tasks. There was ALGOL, which was mostly meant to describe algorithmic computations. I guess you could argue BASIC was in there somewhere. I think it's just a little later. And so all of those moved the level up, and so they were closer to what you and I might think of as we were trying to write a program. And they were focused on different domains, FORTRAN for formula translation, engineering computations, let's say COBOL for business, that kind of thing. And still used today, at least FORTRAN probably. Oh, yeah, COBOL, too. But the deal was that once you moved up that level, then you, let's call it FORTRAN, you had a language that was not tied to a particular kind of hardware, because a different compiler would compile for a different kind of hardware. And that meant two things. It meant you only had to write the program once, which is very important. And it meant that you could, in fact, if you were a random engineer, physicist, whatever, you could write that program yourself. You didn't have to hire a programmer to do it for you. It might not be as good as you'd get with a real programmer, but it was pretty good. And so it democratized and made much more broadly available the ability to write code. So it puts the power of programming into the hands of people like you. Yeah, anybody who is willing to invest some time in learning a programming language and is not then tied to a particular kind of computer. And then in the 70s, you get system programming languages, of which C is the survivor. And what does system programming language mean? Programs that, programming languages that would take on the kinds of things that were necessary to write so called system programs. Things like text editors, or assemblers, or compilers, or operating systems themselves. Those kinds of things. And Fortran. They have to be feature rich. They have to be able to do a lot of stuff. A lot of memory management, access processes, and all that kind of stuff. It's a different flavor of what they're doing. They're much more in touch with the actual machine, but in a positive way. That is, you can talk about memory in a more controlled way. You can talk about the different data types that the machine supports, and more ways to structure and organize data. And so the system programming languages, there was a lot of effort in that in the, call it the late 60s, early 70s. C is, I think, the only real survivor of that. And then what happens after that? You get things like object oriented programming languages. Because as you write programs in a language like C, at some point scale gets to you. And it's too hard to keep track of the pieces. And there's no guardrails, or training wheels, or something like that to prevent you from doing bad things. So C++ comes out of that tradition. And then it took off from there. I mean, there's also a parallel, slightly parallel track with a little bit of functional stuff with Lisp and so on. But I guess from that point, it's just an explosion of languages. There's the Java story. There's the JavaScript. There's all the stuff that the cool kids these days are doing with Rust and all that. So what's to you? You wrote a book, C Programming Language. And C is probably one of the most important languages in the history of programming languages, if you kind of look at impact. What do you think is the most elegant or powerful part of C? Why did it survive? Why did it have such a long lasting impact? I think it found a sweet spot of expressiveness, so that you could rewrite things in a pretty natural way, and efficiency, which was particularly important when computers were not nearly as powerful as they are today. You've got to put yourself back 50 years, almost, in terms of what computers could do. And that's roughly four or five generations, decades of Moore's law, right? So expressiveness and efficiency and, I don't know, perhaps the environment that it came with as well, which was Unix. So it meant if you wrote a program, it could be used on all those computers that ran Unix. And that was all of those computers, because they were all written in C. And that was Unix, the operating system itself, was portable, as were all the tools. So it all worked together, again, in one of these things where things fit on each other in a positive cycle. What did it take to write sort of a definitive book, probably definitive book on all of program, like it's more definitive to a particular language than any other book on any other language, and did two really powerful things, which is popularized the language, at least from my perspective, maybe you can correct me. And second is created a standard of how, you know, how this language is supposed to be used and applied. So what did it take? Did you have those kinds of ambitions in mind when working on that? Is this some kind of joke? No, of course not. So it's an accident of timing, skill, and just luck? A lot of it is, clearly. Timing was good. Now, Dennis and I wrote the book in 1977. Dennis Ritchie. Yeah, right. And at that point, Unix was starting to spread. I don't know how many there were, but it would be dozens to hundreds of Unix systems. And C was also available on other kinds of computers that had nothing to do with Unix. And so the language had some potential. And there were no other books on C, and Bell Labs was really the only source for it. And Dennis, of course, was authoritative because it was his language. And he had written the reference manual, which is a marvelous example of how to write a reference manual. Really, really very, very well done. So I twisted his arm until he agreed to write a book, and then we wrote a book. And the virtue or advantage, at least, I guess, of going first is that then other people have to follow you if they're gonna do anything. And I think it worked well because Dennis was a superb writer. I mean, he really, really did. And the reference manual in that book is his, period. I had nothing to do with that at all. So just crystal clear prose and very, very well expressed. And then he and I, I wrote most of the expository material. And then he and I sort of did the usual ping ponging back and forth, refining it. But I spent a lot of time trying to find examples that would sort of hang together and that would tell people what they might need to know at about the right time that they should be thinking about needing it. And I'm not sure it completely succeeded, but it mostly worked out fairly well. What do you think is the power of example? I mean, you're the creator, at least one of the first people to do the Hello World program, which is like the example. If aliens discover our civilization hundreds of years from now, it'll probably be Hello World programs, just like a half broken robot communicating with them with the Hello World. So what, and that's a representative example. So what do you find powerful about examples? I think a good example will tell you how to do something and it will be representative of, you might not want to do exactly that, but you will want to do something that's at least in that same general vein. And so a lot of the examples in the C book were picked for these very, very simple, straightforward text processing problems that were typical of Unix. I want to read input and write it out again. There's a copy command. I want to read input and do something to it and write it out again. There's a grab. And so that kind of find things that are representative of what people want to do and spell those out so that they can then take those and see the core parts and modify them to their taste. And I think that a lot of programming books that, I don't look at programming books a tremendous amount these days, but when I do, a lot of them don't do that. They don't give you examples that are both realistic and something you might want to do. Some of them are pure syntax. Here's how you add three numbers. Well, come on, I could figure that out. Tell me how I would get those three numbers into the computer and how we would do something useful with them and then how I put them back out again, neatly formatted. And especially if you follow that example, there is something magical of doing something that feels useful. Yeah, right. And I think it's the attempt, and it's absolutely not perfect, but the attempt in all cases was to get something that was going to be either directly useful or would be very representative of useful things that a programmer might want to do. But within that vein of fundamentally text processing, reading text, doing something, writing text. So you've also written a book on Go language. I have to admit, so I worked at Google for a while and I've never used Go. Well, you missed something. Well, I know I missed something for sure. I mean, so Go and Rust are two languages that I hear very, spoken very highly of and I wish I would like to, well, there's a lot of them. There's Julia, there's all these incredible modern languages. But if you can comment before, or maybe comment on what do you find, where does Go sit in this broad spectrum of languages? And also, how do you yourself feel about this wide range of powerful, interesting languages that you may never even get to try to explore because of time? So I think, so Go first comes from that same Bell Labs tradition in part, not exclusively, but two of the three creators, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. So literally, the people. Yeah, the people. And then with this very, very useful influence from the European school in particular, the Claude Speer influence through Robert Griesemer, who was, I guess, a second generation down student at ETH. And so that's an interesting combination of things. And so some ways, Go captures the good parts of C, it looks sort of like C, it's sometimes characterized as C for the 21st century. On the surface, it looks very, very much like C. But at the same time, it has some interesting data structuring capabilities. And then I think the part that I would say is particularly useful, and again, I'm not a Go expert. In spite of coauthoring the book, about 90% of the work was done by Alan Donovan, my coauthor, who is a Go expert. But Go provides a very nice model of concurrency. It's basically the cooperating, communicating sequential processes that Tony Hoare set forth, jeez, I don't know, 40 plus years ago. And Go routines are, to my mind, a very natural way to talk about parallel computation. And in the few experiments I've done with them, they're easy to write, and typically it's gonna work, and very efficient as well. So I think that's one place where Go stands out, that that model of parallel computation is very, very easy and nice to work with. Just to comment on that, do you think C foresaw, or the early Unix days foresaw threads and massively parallel computation? I would guess not really. I mean, maybe it was seen, but not at the level where it was something you had to do anything about. For a long time, processors got faster, and then processors stopped getting faster because of things like power consumption and heat generation. And so what happened instead was that instead of processors getting faster, there started to be more of them. And that's where that parallel thread stuff comes in. So if you can comment on all the other languages, is it break your heart that you'll never get to explore them? How do you feel about the full variety? It's not break my heart, but I would love to be able to try more of these languages. The closest I've come is in a class that I often teach in the spring here. It's a programming class, and I often give, I have one sort of small example that I will write in as many languages as I possibly can. I've got it in 20 languages. At this point, and that's so I do a minimal experiment with a language just to say, okay, I have this trivial task, which I understand the task, and it takes 15 lines in awk, and not much more in a variety of other languages. So how big is it? How fast does it run? And what pain did I go through to learn how to do it? And that's like anecdotal, right? It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very narrowly focused. I think data, I like that term. So yeah, but still, it's a little sample, because you get to, I think the hardest step of the programming language is probably the first step, right, so there you're taking the first step. Yeah, and so my experience with some languages is very positive, like Lua, a scripting language I had never used, and I took my little program. The program is a trivial formatter. It just takes in lines of text of varying lengths, and it puts them out in lines that have no more than 60 characters on each line. So think of it as just kind of the flow of process in a browser or something. So it's a very short program. And in Lua, I downloaded Lua, and in an hour, I had it working, never having written Lua in my life, just going with online documentation. I did the same thing in Scala, which you can think of as a flavor of Java, equally trivial. I did it in Haskell. It took me several weeks. But it did run like a turtle. And I did it in Fortran 90, and it was painful, but it worked, and I tried it in Rust, and it took me several days to get it working because the model of memory management was just a little unfamiliar to me. And the problem I had with Rust, and it's back to what we were just talking about, I couldn't find good, consistent documentation on Rust. Now, this was several years ago, and I'm sure things have stabilized, but at the time, everything in the Rust world seemed to be changing rapidly, and so you would find what looked like a working example, and it wouldn't work with the version of the language that I had. So it took longer than it should have. Rust is a language I would like to get back to, but probably won't. I think one of the issues, you have to have something you want to do. If you don't have something that is the right combination, if I want to do it, and yet I have enough disposable time, whatever, to make it worth learning a new language at the same time, it's never gonna happen. So what do you think about another language of JavaScript? That's this... Well, let me just sort of comment on what I said. When I was brought up, sort of JavaScript was seen as probably like the ugliest language possible, and yet it's quite arguably, quite possibly taking over, not just the front end and the back end of the internet, but possibly in the future taking over everything, because they've now learned to make it very efficient. And so what do you think about this? Yeah, well, I think you've captured it in a lot of ways. When it first came out, JavaScript was deemed to be fairly irregular and an ugly language, and certainly in the academy, if you said you were working on JavaScript, people would ridicule you. It was just not fit for academics to work on. I think a lot of that has evolved. The language itself has evolved, and certainly the technology of compiling it is fantastically better than it was. And so in that sense, it's absolutely a viable solution on back ends, as well as the front ends. Used well, I think it's a pretty good language. I've written a modest amount of it, and I've played with JavaScript translators and things like that. I'm not a real expert, and it's hard to keep up even there with the new things that come along with it. So I don't know whether it will ever take over the world. I think not, but it's certainly an important language, and worth knowing more about. There's, maybe to get your comment on something, which JavaScript, and actually most languages, sort of Python, such a big part of the experience of programming with those languages includes libraries, sort of using, building on top of the code that other people have built. I think that's probably different from the experience that we just talked about from Unix and C days, when you're building stuff from scratch. What do you think about this world of essentially leveraging, building up libraries on top of each other and leveraging them? Yeah, no, that's a very perceptive kind of question. One of the reasons programming was fun in the old days was that you were really building it all yourself. The number of libraries you had to deal with was quite small. Maybe it was printf, or the standard library, or something like that, and that is not the case today. And if you want to do something in, you mentioned Python and JavaScript, and those are the two fine examples, you have to typically download a boatload of other stuff, and you have no idea what you're getting, absolutely nothing. I've been doing some playing with machine learning over the last couple of days, and geez, something doesn't work. Well, you pip install this, okay, and down comes another one, okay, and down comes another gazillion megabytes of something and you have no idea what it was. And if you're lucky, it works. And if it doesn't work, you have no recourse. There's absolutely no way you could figure out which of these thousand different packages. And I think it's worse in the NPM environment for JavaScript. I think there's less discipline, less control there. And there's aspects of not just not understanding how it works, but there's security issues, there's robustness issues, so you don't wanna run a nuclear power plant using JavaScript, essentially. Probably not. So speaking to the variety of languages, do you think that variety is good, or do you hope, think that over time, we should converge towards one, two, three programming languages? You mentioned to the Bell Lab days when people could sort of, the community of it, and the more languages you have, the more you separate the communities. There's the Ruby community, there's the Python community, there's C++ community. Do you hope that they'll unite one day to just one or two languages? I certainly don't hope it. I'm not sure that that's right, because I honestly don't think there is one language that will suffice for all the programming needs of the world. Are there too many at this point? Well, arguably. But I think if you look at the sort of the distribution of how they are used, there's something called a dozen languages that probably account for 95% of all programming at this point, and that doesn't seem unreasonable. And then there's another, well, 2,000 languages that are still in use that nobody uses, and, or at least don't use in any quantity. But I think new languages are a good idea in many respects, because they're often a chance to explore an idea of how language might help. I think that's one of the positive things about functional languages, for example. They're a particularly good place where people have explored ideas that at the time didn't seem feasible, but ultimately have wound up as part of mainstream languages as well. I mean, just go back as early as Recursion Lisp and then follow forward functions as first class citizens and pattern based languages, and gee, I don't know, closures, and just on and on and on. Lambda's interesting ideas that showed up first in, let's call it broadly, the functional programming community, and then find their way into mainstream languages. Yeah, it's a playground for rebels. Yeah, exactly, and so I think the languages in the playground themselves are probably not going to be the mainstream, at least for some while, but the ideas that come from there are invaluable. So let's go to something that, when I found out recently, so I've known that you've done a million things, but one of the things I wasn't aware of, that you had a role in Ample, and before you interrupt me by minimizing your role in it. Ample is for minimizing functions. Yeah, minimizing functions, right, exactly. Can I just say that the elegance and abstraction power of Ample is incredible, when I first came to it about 10 years ago or so. Can you describe what is the Ample language? Sure, so Ample is a language for mathematical programming, technical term, think of it as linear programming, that is setting up systems of linear equations that are of some sort of system of constraints, so that you have a bunch of things that have to be less than this, greater than that, whatever, and you're trying to find a set of values for some decision variables that will maximize or minimize some objective function, so it's a way of solving a particular kind of optimization problem, a very formal sort of optimization problem, but one that's exceptionally useful. And it specifies, so there's objective function constraints and variables that become separate from the data it operates on. Right. So that kind of separation allows you to, put on different hats, one put the hat of an optimization person and then put another hat of a data person and dance back and forth, and also separate the actual solvers, the optimization systems that do the solving. Then you can have other people come to the table and then build their solvers, whether it's linear or nonlinear, convex, nonconvex, that kind of stuff. So what is the, to you as, maybe you can comment how you got into that world and what is the beautiful or interesting idea to you from the world of optimization? Sure. So I preface it by saying I'm absolutely not an expert on this and most of the important work in AMPL comes from my two partners in crime on that, Bob Forer, who was a professor in the Industrial Engineering and Management Science Department at Northwestern, and my colleague at Bell Labs, Dave Gay, who was a numerical analyst and optimization person. So the deal is linear programming. Preface this by saying I don't. Let's stay with linear programming. Yeah, linear programming is the simplest example of this. So linear programming, as it's taught in school, is that you have a big matrix, which is always called A, and you say AX is less than or equal to B. So B is a set of constraints, X is the decision variables, and A is how the decision variables are combined to set up the various constraints. So A is a matrix and X and B are vectors. And then there's an objective function, which is just a sum of a bunch of Xs and some coefficients on them, and that's the thing you want to optimize. The problem is that in the real world, that matrix A is a very, very, very intricate, very large and very sparse matrix where the various components of the model are distributed among the coefficients in a way that is totally unobvious to anybody. And so what you need is some way to express the original model, which you and I would write, you know, we'd write mathematics on the board, and the sum of this is greater than the sum of that kind of thing. So you need a language to write those kinds of constraints. And Bob Forer, for a long time, had been interested in modeling languages, languages that made it possible to do this. There was a modeling language around called GAMS, the General Algebraic Modeling System, but it looked very much like Fortran. It was kind of clunky. And so Bob spent a sabbatical year at Bell Labs in 1984, and he and, there's only the office across from me, and it's always geography, and he and Dave Gay and I started talking about this kind of thing, and he wanted to design a language that would make it so that you could take these algebraic specifications, you know, summation signs over sets, and that you would write on the board and convert them into basically this A matrix, and then pass that off to a solver, which is an entirely separate thing. And so we talked about the design of the language. I don't remember any of the details of this now, but it's kind of an obvious thing. You're just writing out mathematical expressions in a Fortran like, sorry, an algebraic but textual like language. And I wrote the first version of this Ample program, my first C++ program, and. It's written in C++? Yeah. And so I did that fairly quickly. We wrote, it was, you know, 3,000 lines or something, so it wasn't very big, but it sort of showed the feasibility of it that you could actually do something that was easy for people to specify models and convert it into something that a solver could work with. At the same time, as you say, the model and the data are separate things. So one model would then work with all kinds of different data in the same way that lots of programs do the same thing, but with different data. So one of the really nice things is the specification of the models, human, just kind of like, as you say, is human readable. Like I literally, I remember on stuff I worked, I would send it to colleagues that I'm pretty sure never programmed in their life, just to understand what the optimization problem is. I think, how hard is it to convert that? You said there's a first prototype in C++ to convert that into something that could actually be used by the solver. It's not too bad, because most of the solvers have some mechanism that lets them import a model in a form. It might be as simple as the matrix itself in just some representation, or if you're doing things that are not linear programming, then there may be some mechanism that lets you provide things like functions to be called, or other constraints on the model. So all AMPL does is to generate that kind of thing, and then solver deals with all the hard work, and then when the solver comes back with numbers, AMPL converts those back into your original form, so you know how much of each thing you should be buying, or making, or shipping, or whatever. So we did that in 84, and I haven't had a lot to do with it since, except that we wrote a couple of versions of a book on it. Which is one of the greatest books ever written. I love that book. I don't know why. It's an excellent book. Bob Farrer wrote most of it, and so it's really, really well done. He must have been a dynamite teacher. And typeset in LaTeX. No, no, no, are you kidding? I remember liking the typography, so I don't know. We did it with DROF. I don't even know what that is. Yeah, exactly. You're too young. Uh oh, oh boy. I think of DROF as a predecessor to the tech family of things. It's a formatter that was done at Bell Labs in this same period of the very early 70s that predates tech and things like that by five to 10 years. But it was nevertheless, I'm going by memories. I remember it being beautiful. Yeah, it was nicely done. Outside of Unix, C, A, Golang, all the things we talked about. All the amazing work you've done. You've also done work in graph theory. Let me ask this crazy out there question. If you had to make a bet, and I had to force you to make a bet, do you think P equals NP? The answer is no, although I'm told that somebody asked Jeff Dean if that was, under what conditions P would equal NP, and he said either P is zero or N is one. Or vice versa, I've forgotten. This is why Jeff Dean is a lot smarter than I am. Yeah. So, but your intuition is, uh. I have no, I have no intuition, but I've got a lot of colleagues who've got intuition and their betting is no. That's the popular, that's the popular bet. Okay, so what is computational complexity theory? And do you think these kinds of complexity classes, especially as you've taught in this modern world, are still a useful way to understand the hardness of problems? I don't do that stuff. The last time I touched anything to do with that was before. Many, many years ago. Was before it was invented. Because I, it's literally true. I did my PhD thesis on graph. Before Big O notation. Oh, absolutely. Before, I did this in 1968, and I worked on graph partitioning, which is this question. You've got a graph that is a nodes and edges kind of graph, and the edges have weights, and you just want to divide the nodes into two piles of equal size so that the number of edges that goes from one side to the other is as small as possible. And we. You developed, so that problem is hard. Well, as it turns out, I worked with Shen Lin at Bell Labs on this, and we were never able to come up with anything that was guaranteed to give the right answer. We came up with heuristics that worked pretty darn well, and I peeled off some special cases for my thesis, but it was just hard. And that was just about the time that Steve Cook was showing that there were classes of problems that appeared to be really hard, of which graph partitioning was one. But this, my expertise, such as it was, totally predates that development. Oh, interesting. So the heuristic, which now, carries the two of yours names for the traveling salesman problem, and then for the graph partitioning. That was, like, how did you, you weren't even thinking in terms of classes. You were just trying to find. There was no such idea. A heuristic that kinda does the job pretty well. You were trying to find something that did the job, and there was nothing that you would call, let's say, a closed form or algorithmic thing that would give you a guaranteed right answer. I mean, compare graph partitioning to max flow min cut, or something like that. That's the same problem, except there's no constraint on the number of nodes on one side or the other of the cut. And that means it's an easy problem, at least as I understand it. Whereas the constraint that says the two have to be constrained in size makes it a hard problem. Yeah, so Robert Frost says that poem where you had to choose two paths. So why did you, is there another alternate universe in which you pursued the Don Knuth path of algorithm design, sort of? Not smart enough. Not smart enough. You're infinitely modest, but so you pursued your kind of love of programming. I mean, when you look back to those, I mean, just looking into that world, does that just seem like a distant world of theoretical computer science? Then is it fundamentally different from the world of programming? I don't know. I mean, certainly, in all seriousness, I just didn't have the talent for it. When I got here as a grad student to Princeton and I started to think about research at the end of my, I don't know, first year or something like that, I worked briefly with John Hopcroft, who is absolutely, you know, you mentioned during award winner, et cetera, a great guy, and it became crystal clear I was not cut out for this stuff, period, okay. And so I moved into things where I was more cut out for it, and that tended to be things like writing programs and then ultimately writing books. You said that in Toronto as an undergrad, you did a senior thesis or a literature survey on artificial intelligence. This was 1964. Correct. What was the AI landscape, ideas, dreams at that time? I think that was one of the, well, you've heard of AI winners. This is whatever the opposite was, AI summer or something. It was one of these things where people thought that, boy, we could do anything with computers, that all these hard problems, we could, computers will solve them. They will do machine translation. They will play games like chess. They will do, you know, prove theorems in geometry. There are all kinds of examples like that where people thought, boy, we could really do those sorts of things. And, you know, I read The Kool Aid in some sense. There's a wonderful collection of papers called Computers and Thought that was published in about that era and people were very optimistic. And then of course it turned out that what people thought was just a few years down the pike was more than a few years down the pike. And some parts of that are more or less now sort of under control. We finally do play games like Go and chess and so on better than people do, but there are others and machine translation is a lot better than it used to be, but that's, you know, 50, close to 60 years of progress and a lot of evolution in hardware and a tremendous amount more data up on which you can build systems that actually can learn from some of that data. And the infrastructure to support developers working together, like an open source movement, the internet, period, is also empowering. But what lessons do you draw from that, the opposite of winter, that optimism? Well, I guess the lesson is that in the short run it's pretty easy to be too pessimistic or maybe too optimistic and in the long run you probably shouldn't be too pessimistic. I'm not saying that very well. It reminds me of this remark from Arthur Clarke, a science fiction author, who says, you know, when some distinguished but elderly person says that something is possible, he's probably right. And if he says it's impossible, he's almost surely wrong. But you don't know what the time scale is. The time scale is critical, right. So what are your thoughts on this new summer of AI now in the work with machine learning and neural networks? You've kind of mentioned that you started to try to explore and look into this world that seems fundamentally different from the world of heuristics and algorithms like search, that it's now purely sort of trying to take huge amounts of data and learn from that data, right, programs from the data. Yeah, look, I think it's very interesting. I am incredibly far from an expert. Most of what I know I've learned from my students and they're probably disappointed in how little I've learned from them. But I think it has tremendous potential for certain kinds of things. I mean, games is one where it obviously has had an effect on some of the others as well. I think there's, and this is speaking from definitely not expertise, I think there are serious problems in certain kinds of machine learning at least because what they're learning from is the data that we give them. And if the data we give them has something wrong with it, then what they learn from it is probably wrong too. And the obvious thing is some kind of bias in the data. That the data has stuff in it like, I don't know, women aren't as good as men at something, okay. That's just flat wrong. But if it's in the data because of historical treatment, then that machine learning stuff will propagate that. And that is a serious worry. The positive part of that is what machine learning does is reveal the bias in the data and puts a mirror to our own society. And in so doing helps us remove the bias, you know, helps us work on ourselves. Puts a mirror to ourselves. Yeah, that's an optimistic point of view. And if it works that way, that would be absolutely great. And what I don't know is whether it does work that way or whether the AI mechanisms or machine learning mechanisms reinforce and amplify things that have been wrong in the past. And I don't know, but I think that's a serious thing that we have to be concerned about. Let me ask you an out there question, okay. I know nobody knows, but what do you think it takes to build a system of human level intelligence? That's been the dream from the 60s. We talk about games, about language, about image recognition, but really the dream is to create human level or superhuman level intelligence. What do you think it takes to do that? And are we close? I haven't a clue and I don't know, roughly speaking. I mean, this was Turing. I was trying to trick you into a hypothesis. Yeah, I mean, Turing talked about this in his paper on machine intelligence back in, geez, I don't know, early 50s or something like that. And he had the idea of the Turing test. And I don't know what the Turing test is. It's a good test of intelligence. I don't know. It's an interesting test. At least it's in some vague sense objective, whether you can read anything into the conclusions is a different story. Do you have worries, concerns, excitement about the future of artificial intelligence? So there's a lot of people who are worried and you can speak broadly than just artificial intelligence. It's basically computing taking over the world in various forms. Are you excited by this future, this possibility of computing being everywhere or are you worried? It's some combination of those. I think almost all technologies over the long run are for good, but there's plenty of examples where they haven't been good either over a long run for some people or over a short run. And computing is one of those. And AI within it is gonna be one of those as well, but computing broadly. I mean, for just a today example is privacy, that the use of things like social media and so on means that, and the commercial surveillance means that there's an enormous amount more known about us by people, other businesses, government, whatever, than perhaps one ought to feel comfortable with. So that's an example. So that's an example of a possible negative effect of computing being everywhere. It's an interesting one because it could also be a positive, if leveraged correctly. There's a big if there. So I have a deep interest in human psychology and humans seem to be very paranoid about this data thing that varies depending on age group. It seems like the younger folks. So it's exciting to me to see what society looks like 50 years from now, that the concerns about privacy might be flipped on their head based purely on human psychology versus actual concerns or not. What do you think about Moore's Law? Well, you said a lot of stuff we've talked, you talked about programming languages in their design, in their ideas that come from the constraints in the systems they operate in. Do you think Moore's Law, the exponential improvement of systems will continue indefinitely? There's a mix of opinions on that currently, or do you think there'll be a plateau? Well, the frivolous answer is no exponential it can go on forever. You run out of something. Just as we said, timescale matters. So if it goes on long enough, that might be all we need. Yeah, right, won't matter to us. So I don't know, we've seen places where Moore's Law has changed. For example, mentioned earlier, processors don't get faster anymore, but you use that same growth of the ability to put more things in a given area to grow them horizontally instead of vertically as it were so you can get more and more processors or memory or whatever on the same chip. Is that gonna run into a limitation? Presumably, because at some point you get down to the individual atoms. And so you gotta find some way around that. Will we find some way around that? I don't know, I just said that if I say it won't, I'll be wrong, so perhaps we will. So I just talked to Jim Keller and he says, so he actually describes, he argues that the Moore's Law will continue for a long, long time because you mentioned the atom. We actually have, I think, a thousand fold increase, still decreased in size, still possible before we get to the quantum level. So there's still a lot of possibilities. He thinks he'll continue indefinitely, which is an interesting optimistic viewpoint. But how do you think the programming languages will change with this increase? Whether we hit a wall or not, what do you think, do you think there'll be a fundamental change in the way programming languages are designed? I don't know about that. I think what will happen is continuation of what we see in some areas, at least, which is that more programming will be done by programs than by people, and that more will be done by sort of declarative rather than procedural mechanisms where I'll say, I want this to happen. You figure out how. And that is, in many cases, at this point, domain of specialized languages for narrow domains, but you can imagine that broadening out. And so I don't have to say so much, in so much detail, some collection of software, let's call it languages or programs or something, will figure out how to do what I want to do. Interesting, so increased levels of abstraction. Yeah. And one day getting to the human level, where we can just use natural language. Could be possible. So you taught, so teach a course, Computers in Our World, here at Princeton, that introduces computing and programming to nonmajors. What, just from that experience, what advice do you have for people who don't know anything about programming but are kind of curious about this world, or programming seems to become more and more of a fundamental skill that people need to be at least aware of? Yeah, well, I couldn't recommend a good book. What's that? The book I wrote for the course. I think this is one of these questions of, should everybody know how to program? And I think the answer is probably not, but I think everybody should at least understand sort of what it is, so that if you say to somebody, I'm a programmer, they have a notion of what that might be, or if you say this is a program, or this was decided by a computer running a program, that they have some vague intuitive understanding and accurate understanding of what that might imply. So part of what I'm doing in this course, which is very definitely for nontechnical people, and a typical person in it is a history or English major, try and explain how computers work, how they do their thing, what programming is, how you write a program, and how computers talk to each other, and what do they do when they're talking to each other. And then I would say nobody, very rarely, and does anybody in that course go on to become a real serious programmer, but at least they've got a somewhat better idea of what all this stuff is about, not just the programming, but the technology behind computers and communications. Do they try and write a program themselves? Oh yeah, yeah, a very small amount. I introduced them to how machines work at a level below, high level languages, so we have kind of a toy machine that has a very small repertoire, a dozen instructions, and they write trivial assembly language programs for that. Wow, that's interesting. So can you just, if you were to give a flavor to people of the programming world, of the competing world, what are the examples they should go with? So a little bit of assembly to get a sense at the lowest level of what the program is really doing. Yeah, I mean, in some sense, there's no such thing as the lowest level because you can keep going down, but that's the place where I drew the line. So the idea that computers have a fairly small repertoire of very simple instructions that they can do, like add and subtract and branch and so on, as you mentioned earlier, and that you can write code at that level and it will get things done, and then you have the levels of abstraction that we get with higher level languages, like Fortran or C or whatever, and that makes it easier to write the code and less dependent on particular architectures. And then we talk about a lot of the different kinds of programs that they use all the time that they don't probably realize are programs, like they're running Mac OS on their computers or maybe Windows, and they're downloading apps on their phones, and all of those things are programs that are just what we just talked about, except at a grand scale. And it's easy to forget that they're actual programs that people program. There's engineers that wrote those things. Yeah, right. And so in a way, I'm expecting them to make an enormous conceptual leap from their five or 10 line toy assembly language thing that adds two or three numbers to something that is a browser on their phone or whatever, but it's really the same thing. So if you look in broad strokes at history, what do you think the world, how do you think the world changed because of computers? It's hard to sometimes see the big picture when you're in it, but I guess I'm asking if there's something you've noticed over the years that, like you were mentioning, the students are more distracted looking at their, now there's a device to look at. Right. I think computing has changed a tremendous amount, obviously, but I think one aspect of that is the way that people interact with each other, both locally and far away. And when I was the age of those kids, making a phone call to somewhere was a big deal because it costs serious money. And this was in the 60s, right? And today people don't make phone calls, they send texts or something like that. So there's an up and down in what people do. People think nothing of having correspondence, regular meetings, video, whatever, with friends or family or whatever in any other part of the world, and they don't think about that at all. And so that's just the communication aspect of it. Do you think that brings us closer together or does it make us, does it take us away from the closeness of human to human contact? I think it depends a lot on all kinds of things. So I trade mail with my brother and sister in Canada much more often than I used to talk to them on the phone. So probably every two or three days, I get something or send something to them. Whereas 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have talked to them on the phone nearly as much. So in that sense, that's brought my brother and sister and I closer together. That's a good thing. I watch the kids on campus and they're mostly walking around with their heads down, fooling with their phones to the point where I have to duck them. I don't know that that has brought them closer together in some ways. There's sociological research that says people are, in fact, not as close together as they used to be. I don't know where that's really true, but I can see potential downsides and kids where you think, come on, wake up and smell the coffee or whatever. That's right. But if you look at, again, nobody can predict the future, but are you excited? Kind of touched this a little bit with AI, but are you excited by the future in the next 10, 20 years that computing will bring? You were there when there was no computers really. And now computers are everywhere all over the world and Africa and Asia and just every person, almost every person in the world has a device. So are you hopeful, optimistic about that future? It's mixed, if the truth be told. I mean, I think there are some things about that that are good. I think there's the potential for people to improve their lives all over the place and that's obviously good. And at the same time, at least in the short run, you can see lots and lots of bad as people become more tribalistic or parochial in their interests and it's an enormous amount more us than them and people are using computers in all kinds of ways to mislead or misrepresent or flat out lie about what's going on and that is affecting politics locally and I think everywhere in the world. Yeah, the long term effect on political systems and so on is who knows. Who knows indeed. The people now have a voice which is a powerful thing. People who are oppressed have a voice but also everybody has a voice and the chaos that emerges from that is fascinating to watch. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of scary. If you can go back and relive a moment in your life, one that made you truly happy outside of family or was profoundly transformative, is there a moment or moments that jump out at you from memory? I don't think specific moments. I think there were lots and lots and lots of good times at Bell Labs where you would build something and it worked. Did you say it worked? So the moment it worked. Yeah, and somebody used it and they said, gee, that's neat. Those kinds of things happened quite often in that sort of golden era in the 70s when Unix was young and there was all this low hanging fruit and interesting things to work on and a group of people who kind of, we were all together in this and if you did something, they would try it out for you. And I think that was in some sense, a really, really good time. And AUK was, was AUK an example of that? That when you built it and people used it? Yeah, absolutely. And now millions of people use it. And all your stupid mistakes are right there for them to look at, right? So it's mixed. Yeah, it's terrifying, vulnerable but it's beautiful because it does have a positive impact on so, so many people. So I think there's no better way to end it. Brian, thank you so much for talking to us, it was an honor. Okay, my pleasure. Good fun. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Brian Kernighan and thank you to our sponsors, 8 Sleep Mattress and Raycon Earbuds. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to 8sleep.com slash Lex and to buyraycon.com slash Lex, click the links, buy the stuff. These both are amazing products. It really is the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. It's how they know I sent you and increases the chance that they'll actually support this podcast in the future. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled somehow miraculously without the letter E, just F R I D M A N because when we immigrated to this country, we were not so good at spelling. And now let me leave you with some words from Brian Kernighan, don't comment bad code, rewrite it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #109

The following is a conversation with Jitendra Malik, a professor at Berkeley and one of the seminal figures in the field of computer vision, the kind before the deep learning revolution and the kind after. He has been cited over 180,000 times and has mentored many world class researchers in computer science. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, one new one which is BetterHelp and an old goodie ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to betterhelp.com slash lex and signing up at expressvpn.com slash lexpod. Click the links, buy the stuff, it really is the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, however the heck you spell that. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. 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This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to support this podcast and to get an extra three months free on a one year package. I've been using ExpressVPN for many years, I love it. I think ExpressVPN is the best VPN out there. They told me to say it, but it happens to be true. It doesn't log your data, it's crazy fast, and is easy to use, literally just one big, sexy power on button. Again, for obvious reasons, it's really important that they don't log your data. It works on Linux and everywhere else too, but really, why use anything else? Shout out to my favorite flavor of Linux, Ubuntu Mate 2004. Once again, get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to support this podcast and to get an extra three months free on a one year package. And now, here's my conversation with Jitendra Malik. In 1966, Seymour Papert at MIT wrote up a proposal called the Summer Vision Project to be given, as far as we know, to 10 students to work on and solve that summer. So that proposal outlined many of the computer vision tasks we still work on today. Why do you think we underestimate, and perhaps we did underestimate and perhaps still underestimate how hard computer vision is? Because most of what we do in vision, we do unconsciously or subconsciously. In human vision. In human vision. So that gives us this, that effortlessness gives us the sense that, oh, this must be very easy to implement on a computer. Now, this is why the early researchers in AI got it so wrong. However, if you go into neuroscience or psychology of human vision, then the complexity becomes very clear. The fact is that a very large part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to visual processing. And this is true in other primates as well. So once we looked at it from a neuroscience or psychology perspective, it becomes quite clear that the problem is very challenging and it will take some time. You said the higher level parts are the harder parts? I think vision appears to be easy because most of what visual processing is subconscious or unconscious. So we underestimate the difficulty, whereas when you are like proving a mathematical theorem or playing chess, the difficulty is much more evident. So because it is your conscious brain, which is processing various aspects of the problem solving behavior, whereas in vision, all this is happening, but it's not in your awareness, it's in your, it's operating below that. But it's, it still seems strange. Yes, that's true, but it seems strange that as computer vision researchers, for example, the community broadly is time and time again makes the mistake of thinking the problem is easier than it is, or maybe it's not a mistake. We'll talk a little bit about autonomous driving, for example, how hard of a vision task that is, it, do you think, I mean, what, is it just human nature or is there something fundamental to the vision problem that we, we underestimate? We're still not able to be cognizant of how hard the problem is. Yeah, I think in the early days it could have been excused because in the early days, all aspects of AI were regarded as too easy. But I think today it is much less excusable. And I think why people fall for this is because of what I call the fallacy of the successful first step. There are many problems in vision where getting 50% of the solution you can get in one minute, getting to 90% can take you a day, getting to 99% may take you five years, and 99.99% may be not in your lifetime. I wonder if that's a unique division. It seems that language, people are not so confident about, so natural language processing, people are a little bit more cautious about our ability to, to solve that problem. I think for language, people intuit that we have to be able to do natural language understanding. For vision, it seems that we're not cognizant or we don't think about how much understanding is required. It's probably still an open problem. But in your sense, how much understanding is required to solve vision? Like this, put another way, how much something called common sense reasoning is required to really be able to interpret even static scenes? Yeah. So vision operates at all levels and there are parts which can be solved with what we could call maybe peripheral processing. So in the human vision literature, there used to be these terms, sensation, perception and cognition, which roughly speaking referred to like the front end of processing, middle stages of processing and higher level of processing. And I think they made a big deal out of, out of this and they wanted to study only perception and then dismiss certain, certain problems as being quote cognitive. But really I think these are artificial divides. The problem is continuous at all levels and there are challenges at all levels. The techniques that we have today, they work better at the lower and mid levels of the problem. I think the higher levels of the problem, quote the cognitive levels of the problem are there and we, in many real applications, we have to confront them. Now how much that is necessary will depend on the application. For some problems it doesn't matter, for some problems it matters a lot. So I am, for example, a pessimist on fully autonomous driving in the near future. And the reason is because I think there will be that 0.01% of the cases where quite sophisticated cognitive reasoning is called for. However, there are tasks where you can, first of all, they are much more, they are robust. So in the sense that error rates, error is not so much of a problem. For example, let's say we are, you're doing image search, you're trying to get images based on some, some, some description, some visual description. We are very tolerant of errors there, right? I mean, when Google image search gives you some images back and a few of them are wrong, it's okay. It doesn't hurt anybody. There is no, there's not a matter of life and death. But making mistakes when you are driving at 60 miles per hour and you could potentially kill somebody is much more important. So just for the, for the fun of it, since you mentioned, let's go there briefly about autonomous vehicles. So one of the companies in the space, Tesla, is with Andre Karpathy and Elon Musk are working on a system called Autopilot, which is primarily a vision based system with eight cameras and basically a single neural network, a multitask neural network. They call it HydroNet, multiple heads, so it does multiple tasks, but is forming the same representation at the core. Do you think driving can be converted in this way to purely a vision problem and then solved with learning or even more specifically in the current approach, what do you think about what Tesla Autopilot team is doing? So the way I think about it is that there are certainly subsets of the visual based driving problem, which are quite solvable. So for example, driving in freeway conditions is quite a solvable problem. I think there were demonstrations of that going back to the 1980s by someone called Ernst Tickmans in Munich. In the 90s, there were approaches from Carnegie Mellon, there were approaches from our team at Berkeley. In the 2000s, there were approaches from Stanford and so on. So autonomous driving in certain settings is very doable. The challenge is to have an autopilot work under all kinds of driving conditions. At that point, it's not just a question of vision or perception, but really also of control and dealing with all the edge cases. So where do you think most of the difficult cases, to me, even the highway driving is an open problem because it applies the same 50, 90, 95, 99 rule where the first step, the fallacy of the first step, I forget how you put it, we fall victim to. I think even highway driving has a lot of elements because to solve autonomous driving, you have to completely relinquish the help of a human being. You're always in control so that you're really going to feel the edge cases. So I think even highway driving is really difficult. But in terms of the general driving task, do you think vision is the fundamental problem or is it also your action, the interaction with the environment, the ability to... And then the middle ground, I don't know if you put that under vision, which is trying to predict the behavior of others, which is a little bit in the world of understanding the scene, but it's also trying to form a model of the actors in the scene and predict their behavior. Yeah. I include that in vision because to me, perception blends into cognition and building predictive models of other agents in the world, which could be other agents, could be people, other agents could be other cars. That is part of the task of perception because perception always has to not tell us what is now, but what will happen because what's now is boring. It's done. It's over with. Okay? Yeah. We care about the future because we act in the future. And we care about the past in as much as it informs what's going to happen in the future. So I think we have to build predictive models of behaviors of people and those can get quite complicated. So I mean, I've seen examples of this in actually, I mean, I own a Tesla and it has various safety features built in. And what I see are these examples where let's say there is some a skateboarder, I mean, and I don't want to be too critical because obviously these systems are always being improved and any specific criticism I have, maybe the system six months from now will not have that particular failure mode. So it had the wrong response and it's because it couldn't predict what this skateboarder was going to do. Okay? And because it really required that higher level cognitive understanding of what skateboarders typically do as opposed to a normal pedestrian. So what might have been the correct behavior for a pedestrian, a typical behavior for pedestrian was not the typical behavior for a skateboarder, right? Yeah. And so therefore to do a good job there, you need to have enough data where you have pedestrians, you also have skateboarders, you've seen enough skateboarders to see what kinds of patterns of behavior they have. So it is in principle with enough data, that problem could be solved. But I think our current systems, computer vision systems, they need far, far more data than humans do for learning those same capabilities. So say that there is going to be a system that solves autonomous driving. Do you think it will look similar to what we have today, but have a lot more data, perhaps more compute, but the fundamental architecture is involved, like neural, well, in the case of Tesla autopilot is neural networks. Do you think it will look similar in that regard and we'll just have more data? That's a scientific hypothesis as to which way is it going to go. I will tell you what I would bet on. So and this is my general philosophical position on how these learning systems have been. What we have found currently very effective in computer vision in the deep learning paradigm is sort of tabula rasa learning and tabula rasa learning in a supervised way with lots and lots of... What's tabula rasa learning? Tabula rasa in the sense that blank slate, we just have the system, which is given a series of experiences in this setting and then it learns there. Now if let's think about human driving, it is not tabula rasa learning. So at the age of 16 in high school, a teenager goes into driver ed class, right? And now at that point they learn, but at the age of 16, they are already visual geniuses because from zero to 16, they have built a certain repertoire of vision. In fact, most of it has probably been achieved by age two, right? In this period of age up to age two, they know that the world is three dimensional. They know how objects look like from different perspectives. They know about occlusion. They know about common dynamics of humans and other bodies. They have some notion of intuitive physics. So they built that up from their observations and interactions in early childhood and of course reinforced through their growing up to age 16. So then at age 16, when they go into driver ed, what are they learning? They're not learning afresh the visual world. They have a mastery of the visual world. What they are learning is control, okay? They're learning how to be smooth about control, about steering and brakes and so forth. They're learning a sense of typical traffic situations. Now that education process can be quite short because they are coming in as visual geniuses. And of course in their future, they're going to encounter situations which are very novel, right? So during my driver ed class, I may not have had to deal with a skateboarder. I may not have had to deal with a truck driving in front of me where the back opens up and some junk gets dropped from the truck and I have to deal with it, right? But I can deal with this as a driver even though I did not encounter this in my driver ed class. And the reason I can deal with it is because I have all this general visual knowledge and expertise. And do you think the learning mechanisms we have today can do that kind of long term accumulation of knowledge? Or do we have to do some kind of, you know, the work that led up to expert systems with knowledge representation, you know, the broader field of artificial intelligence worked on this kind of accumulation of knowledge. Do you think neural networks can do the same? I think I don't see any in principle problem with neural networks doing it, but I think the learning techniques would need to evolve significantly. So the current learning techniques that we have are supervised learning. You're given lots of examples, x, y, y pairs and you learn the functional mapping between them. I think that human learning is far richer than that. It includes many different components. There is a child explores the world and sees, for example, a child takes an object and manipulates it in his hand and therefore gets to see the object from different points of view. And the child has commanded the movement. So that's a kind of learning data, but the learning data has been arranged by the child. And this is a very rich kind of data. The child can do various experiments with the world. So there are many aspects of sort of human learning, and these have been studied in child development by psychologists. And what they tell us is that supervised learning is a very small part of it. There are many different aspects of learning. And what we would need to do is to develop models of all of these and then train our systems with that kind of a protocol. So new methods of learning, some of which might imitate the human brain, but you also in your talks have mentioned sort of the compute side of things, in terms of the difference in the human brain or referencing Moravec, Hans Moravec. So do you think there's something interesting, valuable to consider about the difference in the computational power of the human brain versus the computers of today in terms of instructions per second? Yes, so if we go back, so this is a point I've been making for 20 years now. And I think once upon a time, the way I used to argue this was that we just didn't have the computing power of the human brain. Our computers were not quite there. And I mean, there is a well known trade off, which we know that neurons are slow compared to transistors, but we have a lot of them and they have a very high connectivity. Whereas in silicon, you have much faster devices, transistors switch at the order of nanoseconds, but the connectivity is usually smaller. At this point in time, I mean, we are now talking about 2020, we do have, if you consider the latest GPUs and so on, amazing computing power. And if we look back at Hans Moravec type of calculations, which he did in the 1990s, we may be there today in terms of computing power comparable to the brain, but it's not in the of the same style, it's of a very different style. So I mean, for example, the style of computing that we have in our GPUs is far, far more power hungry than the style of computing that is there in the human brain or other biological entities. Yeah. And that the efficiency part is, we're going to have to solve that in order to build actual real world systems of large scale. Let me ask sort of the high level question, taking a step back. How would you articulate the general problem of computer vision? Does such a thing exist? So if you look at the computer vision conferences and the work that's been going on, it's often separated into different little segments, breaking the problem of vision apart into whether segmentation, 3D reconstruction, object detection, I don't know, image capturing, whatever. There's benchmarks for each. But if you were to sort of philosophically say, what is the big problem of computer vision? Does such a thing exist? Yes, but it's not in isolation. So for all intelligence tasks, I always go back to sort of biology or humans. And if we think about vision or perception in that setting, we realize that perception is always to guide action. Action for a biological system does not give any benefits unless it is coupled with action. So we can go back and think about the first multicellular animals, which arose in the Cambrian era, you know, 500 million years ago. And these animals could move and they could see in some way. And the two activities helped each other. Because how does movement help? Movement helps that because you can get food in different places. But you need to know where to go. And that's really about perception or seeing, I mean, vision is perhaps the single most perception sense. But all the others are equally are also important. So perception and action kind of go together. So earlier, it was in these very simple feedback loops, which were about finding food or avoid avoiding becoming food if there's a predator running, trying to, you know, eat you up, and so forth. So we must, at the fundamental level, connect perception to action. Then as we evolved, perception became more and more sophisticated because it served many more purposes. And so today we have what seems like a fairly general purpose capability, which can look at the external world and build a model of the external world inside the head. We do have that capability. That model is not perfect. And psychologists have great fun in pointing out the ways in which the model in your head is not a perfect model of the external world. They create various illusions to show the ways in which it is imperfect. But it's amazing how far it has come from a very simple perception action loop that you exist in, you know, an animal 500 million years ago. Once we have this, these very sophisticated visual systems, we can then impose a structure on them. It's we as scientists who are imposing that structure, where we have chosen to characterize this part of the system as this quote, module of object detection or quote, this module of 3D reconstruction. What's going on is really all of these processes are running simultaneously and they are running simultaneously because originally their purpose was in fact to help guide action. So as a guiding general statement of a problem, do you think we can say that the general problem of computer vision, you said in humans, it was tied to action. Do you think we should also say that ultimately the goal, the problem of computer vision is to sense the world in a way that helps you act in the world? Yes. I think that's the most fundamental, that's the most fundamental purpose. We have by now hyper evolved. So we have this visual system which can be used for other things. For example, judging the aesthetic value of a painting. And this is not guiding action. Maybe it's guiding action in terms of how much money you will put in your auction bid, but that's a bit stretched. But the basics are in fact in terms of action, but we evolved really this hyper, we have hyper evolved our visual system. Actually just to, sorry to interrupt, but perhaps it is fundamentally about action. You kind of jokingly said about spending, but perhaps the capitalistic drive that drives a lot of the development in this world is about the exchange of money and the fundamental action is money. If you watch Netflix, if you enjoy watching movies, you're using your perception system to interpret the movie, ultimately your enjoyment of that movie means you'll subscribe to Netflix. So the action is this extra layer that we've developed in modern society perhaps is fundamentally tied to the action of spending money. Well certainly with respect to interactions with firms. So in this homo economicus role, when you're interacting with firms, it does become that. What else is there? And that was a rhetorical question. So to linger on the division between the static and the dynamic, so much of the work in computer vision, so many of the breakthroughs that you've been a part of have been in the static world and looking at static images. And then you've also worked on starting, but it's a much smaller degree, the community is looking at dynamic, at video, at dynamic scenes. And then there is robotic vision, which is dynamic, but also where you actually have a robot in the physical world interacting based on that vision. Which problem is harder? The trivial first answer is, well, of course one image is harder. But if you look at a deeper question there, are we, what's the term, cutting ourselves at the knees or like making the problem harder by focusing on images? That's a fair question. I think sometimes we can simplify a problem so much that we essentially lose part of the juice that could enable us to solve the problem. And one could reasonably argue that to some extent this happens when we go from video to single images. Now historically you have to consider the limits imposed by the computation capabilities we had. So many of the choices made in the computer vision community through the 70s, 80s, 90s can be understood as choices which were forced upon us by the fact that we just didn't have enough access to enough compute. Not enough memory, not enough hardware. Exactly. Not enough compute, not enough storage. So think of these choices. So one of the choices is focusing on single images rather than video. Okay. Clear question. Storage and compute. We had to focus on, we used to detect edges and throw away the image. Right? So we would have an image which I say 256 by 256 pixels and instead of keeping around the grayscale value, what we did was we detected edges, find the places where the brightness changes a lot and then throw away the rest. So this was a major compression device and the hope was that this makes it that you can still work with it and the logic was humans can interpret a line drawing. And yes, and this will save us computation. So many of the choices were dictated by that. I think today we are no longer detecting edges, right? We process images with ConvNets because we don't need to. We don't have those computer restrictions anymore. Now video is still understudied because video compute is still quite challenging if you are a university researcher. I think video computing is not so challenging if you are at Google or Facebook or Amazon. Still super challenging. I just spoke with the VP of engineering at Google, head of the YouTube search and discovery and they still struggle doing stuff on video. It's very difficult except using techniques that are essentially the techniques you used in the 90s. Some very basic computer vision techniques. No, that's when you want to do things at scale. So if you want to operate at the scale of all the content of YouTube, it's very challenging and there are similar issues with Facebook. But as a researcher, you have more opportunities. You can train large networks with relatively large video data sets. So I think that this is part of the reason why we have so emphasized static images. I think that this is changing and over the next few years, I see a lot more progress happening in video. So I have this generic statement that to me, video recognition feels like 10 years behind object recognition and you can quantify that because you can take some of the challenging video data sets and their performance on action classification is like say 30%, which is kind of what we used to have around 2009 in object detection. It's like about 10 years behind and whether it'll take 10 years to catch up is a different question. Hopefully, it will take less than that. Let me ask a similar question I've already asked, but once again, so for dynamic scenes, do you think some kind of injection of knowledge bases and reasoning is required to help improve like action recognition? Like if we saw the general action recognition problem, what do you think the solution would look like as another way to put it? So I completely agree that knowledge is called for and that knowledge can be quite sophisticated. So the way I would say it is that perception blends into cognition and cognition brings in issues of memory and this notion of a schema from psychology, which is, let me use the classic example, which is you go to a restaurant, right? Now there are things that happen in a certain order, you walk in, somebody takes you to a table, waiter comes, gives you a menu, takes the order, food arrives, eventually bill arrives, et cetera, et cetera. This is a classic example of AI from the 1970s. It was called, there was the term frames and scripts and schemas, these are all quite similar ideas. Okay, and in the 70s, the way the AI of the time dealt with it was by hand coding this. So they hand coded in this notion of a script and the various stages and the actors and so on and so forth, and use that to interpret, for example, language. I mean, if there's a description of a story involving some people eating at a restaurant, there are all these inferences you can make because you know what happens typically at a restaurant. So I think this kind of knowledge is absolutely essential. So I think that when we are going to do long form video understanding, we are going to need to do this. I think the kinds of technology that we have right now with 3D convolutions over a couple of seconds of clip or video, it's very much tailored towards short term video understanding, not that long term understanding. Long term understanding requires this notion of schemas that I talked about, perhaps some notions of goals, intentionality, functionality, and so on and so forth. Now, how will we bring that in? So we could either revert back to the 70s and say, OK, I'm going to hand code in a script or we might try to learn it. So I tend to believe that we have to find learning ways of doing this because I think learning ways land up being more robust. And there must be a learning version of the story because children acquire a lot of this knowledge by sort of just observation. So at no moment in a child's life does it's possible, but I think it's not so typical that somebody that a mother coaches a child through all the stages of what happens in a restaurant. They just go as a family, they go to the restaurant, they eat, come back, and the child goes through ten such experiences and the child has got a schema of what happens when you go to a restaurant. So we somehow need to provide that capability to our systems. You mentioned the following line from the end of the Alan Turing paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, that many people, like you said, many people know and very few have read where he proposes the Turing test. This is how you know because it's towards the end of the paper. Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? So that's a really interesting point. If I think about the benchmarks we have before us, the tests of our computer vision systems, they're often kind of trying to get to the adult. So what kind of benchmarks should we have? What kind of tests for computer vision do you think we should have that mimic the child's in computer vision? I think we should have those and we don't have those today. And I think the part of the challenge is that we should really be collecting data of the type that the child experiences. So that gets into issues of privacy and so on and so forth. But there are attempts in this direction to sort of try to collect the kind of data that a child encounters growing up. So what's the child's linguistic environment? What's the child's visual environment? So if we could collect that kind of data and then develop learning schemes based on that data, that would be one way to do it. I think that's a very promising direction myself. There might be people who would argue that we could just short circuit this in some way and sometimes we have imitated, we have had success by not imitating nature in detail. So the usual example is airplanes, right? We don't build flapping wings. So yes, that's one of the points of debate. In my mind, I would bet on this learning like a child approach. So one of the fundamental aspects of learning like a child is the interactivity. So the child gets to play with the data set it's learning from. Yes. So it gets to select. I mean, you can call that active learning. In the machine learning world, you can call it a lot of terms. What are your thoughts about this whole space of being able to play with the data set or select what you're learning? Yeah. So I think that I believe in that and I think that we could achieve it in two ways and I think we should use both. So one is actually real robotics, right? So real physical embodiments of agents who are interacting with the world and they have a physical body with dynamics and mass and moment of inertia and friction and all the rest and you learn your body, the robot learns its body by doing a series of actions. The second is that simulation environments. So I think simulation environments are getting much, much better. In my life in Facebook AI research, our group has worked on something called Habitat, which is a simulation environment, which is a visually photorealistic environment of places like houses or interiors of various urban spaces and so forth. And as you move, you get a picture, which is a pretty accurate picture. So now you can imagine that subsequent generations of these simulators will be accurate, not just visually, but with respect to forces and masses and haptic interactions and so on. And then we have that environment to play with. I think, let me state one reason why I think being able to act in the world is important. I think that this is one way to break the correlation versus causation barrier. So this is something which is of a great deal of interest these days. I mean, people like Judea Pearl have talked a lot about that we are neglecting causality and he describes the entire set of successes of deep learning as just curve fitting, right? But I don't quite agree about it. He's a troublemaker. He is. But causality is important, but causality is not like a single silver bullet. It's not like one single principle. There are many different aspects here. And one of the ways in which, one of our most reliable ways of establishing causal links and this is the way, for example, the medical community does this is randomized control trials. So you have, you pick some situation and now in some situation you perform an action and for certain others you don't, right? So you have a controlled experiment. Well, the child is in fact performing controlled experiments all the time, right? Right. Okay. Small scale. In a small scale. But that is a way that the child gets to build and refine its causal models of the world. And my colleague Alison Gopnik has, together with a couple of authors, coauthors, has this book called The Scientist in the Crib, referring to the children. So I like, the part that I like about that is the scientist wants to do, wants to build causal models and the scientist does control experiments. And I think the child is doing that. So to enable that, we will need to have these active experiments. And I think this could be done, some in the real world and some in simulation. So you have hope for simulation. I have hope for simulation. That's an exciting possibility if we can get to not just photorealistic, but what's that called life realistic simulation. So you don't see any fundamental blocks to why we can't eventually simulate the principles of what it means to exist in the world as a physical scientist. I don't see any fundamental problems that, I mean, and look, the computer graphics community has come a long way. So in the early days, back going back to the eighties and nineties, they were focusing on visual realism, right? And then they could do the easy stuff, but they couldn't do stuff like hair or fur and so on. Okay, well, they managed to do that. Then they couldn't do physical actions, right? Like there's a bowl of glass and it falls down and it shatters, but then they could start to do pretty realistic models of that and so on and so forth. So the graphics people have shown that they can do this forward direction, not just for optical interactions, but also for physical interactions. So I think, of course, some of that is very compute intensive, but I think by and by we will find ways of making our models ever more realistic. You break vision apart into, in one of your presentations, early vision, static scene understanding, dynamic scene understanding, and raise a few interesting questions. I thought I could just throw some at you to see if you want to talk about them. So early vision, so it's, what is it that you said, sensation, perception and cognition. So is this a sensation? Yes. What can we learn from image statistics that we don't already know? So at the lowest level, what can we make from just the statistics, the basics, or the variations in the rock pixels, the textures and so on? Yeah. So what we seem to have learned is that there's a lot of redundancy in these images and as a result, we are able to do a lot of compression and this compression is very important in biological settings, right? So you might have 10 to the 8 photoreceptors and only 10 to the 6 fibers in the optic nerve. So you have to do this compression by a factor of 100 is to 1. And so there are analogs of that which are happening in our neural net, artificial neural network. That's the early layers. So you think there's a lot of compression that can be done in the beginning. Just the statistics. Yeah. So how successful is image compression? How much? Well, I mean, the way to think about it is just how successful is image compression, right? And that's been done with older technologies, but it can be done with, there are several companies which are trying to use sort of these more advanced neural network type techniques for compression, both for static images as well as for video. One of my former students has a company which is trying to do stuff like this. And I think that they are showing quite interesting results. And I think that that's all the success of, that's really about image statistics and video statistics. But that's still not doing compression of the kind, when I see a picture of a cat, all I have to say is it's a cat, that's another semantic kind of compression. Yeah. So this is at the lower level, right? So we are, as I said, yeah, that's focusing on low level statistics. So to linger on that for a little bit, you mentioned how far can bottom up image segmentation go. You know, what you mentioned that the central question for scene understanding is the interplay of bottom up and top down information. Maybe this is a good time to elaborate on that. Maybe define what is bottom up, what is top down in the context of computer vision. Right. So today what we have are very interesting systems because they work completely bottom up. What does bottom up mean, sorry? So bottom up means, in this case means a feed forward neural network. So starting from the raw pixels, yeah, they start from the raw pixels and they end up with some, something like cat or not a cat, right? So our systems are running totally feed forward. They're trained in a very top down way. So they're trained by saying, okay, this is a cat, there's a cat, there's a dog, there's a zebra, et cetera. And I'm not happy with either of these choices fully. We have gone into, because we have completely separated these processes, right? So there's a, so I would like the process, so what do we know compared to biology? So in biology, what we know is that the processes in at test time, at runtime, those processes are not purely feed forward, but they involve feedback. So and they involve much shallower neural networks. So the kinds of neural networks we are using in computer vision, say a ResNet 50 has 50 layers. Well in the brain, in the visual cortex going from the retina to IT, maybe we have like seven, right? So they're far shallower, but we have the possibility of feedback. So there are backward connections. And this might enable us to deal with the more ambiguous stimuli, for example. So the biological solution seems to involve feedback, the solution in artificial vision seems to be just feed forward, but with a much deeper network. And the two are functionally equivalent because if you have a feedback network, which just has like three rounds of feedback, you can just unroll it and make it three times the depth and create it in a totally feed forward way. So this is something which, I mean, we have written some papers on this theme, but I really feel that this should, this theme should be pursued further. Some kind of occurrence mechanism. Yeah. Okay. The other, so that's, so I want to have a little bit more top down in the, at test time. Okay. And then at training time, we make use of a lot of top down knowledge right now. So basically to learn to segment an object, we have to have all these examples of this is the boundary of a cat, and this is the boundary of a chair, and this is the boundary of a horse and so on. And this is too much top down knowledge. How do humans do this? We manage to, we manage with far less supervision and we do it in a sort of bottom up way because for example, we are looking at a video stream and the horse moves and that enables me to say that all these pixels are together. So the Gestalt psychologist used to call this the principle of common fate. So there was a bottom up process by which we were able to segment out these objects and we have totally focused on this top down training signal. So in my view, we have currently solved it in machine vision, this top down bottom up interaction, but I don't find the solution fully satisfactory and I would rather have a bit of both at both stages. For all computer vision problems, not just segmentation. And the question that you can ask is, so for me, I'm inspired a lot by human vision and I care about that. You could be just a hard boiled engineer and not give a damn. So to you, I would then argue that you would need far less training data if you could make my research agenda fruitful. Okay, so then maybe taking a step into segmentation, static scene understanding. What is the interaction between segmentation and recognition? You mentioned the movement of objects. So for people who don't know computer vision, segmentation is this weird activity that computer vision folks have all agreed is very important of drawing outlines around objects versus a bounding box and then classifying that object. What's the value of segmentation? What is it as a problem in computer vision? How is it fundamentally different from detection recognition and the other problems? Yeah, so I think, so segmentation enables us to say that some set of pixels are an object without necessarily even being able to name that object or knowing properties of that object. Oh, so you mean segmentation purely as the act of separating an object. From its background. It's a job that's united in some way from its background. Yeah, so entitification, if you will, making an entity out of it. Entitification, beautifully termed. So I think that we have that capability and that enables us to, as we are growing up, to acquire names of objects with very little supervision. So suppose the child, let's posit that the child has this ability to separate out objects in the world. Then when the mother says, pick up your bottle or the cat's behaving funny today, the word cat suggests some object and then the child sort of does the mapping, right? The mother doesn't have to teach specific object labels by pointing to them. Weak supervision works in the context that you have the ability to create objects. So I think that, so to me, that's a very fundamental capability. There are applications where this is very important, for example, medical diagnosis. So in medical diagnosis, you have some brain scan, I mean, this is some work that we did in my group where you have CT scans of people who have had traumatic brain injury and what the radiologist needs to do is to precisely delineate various places where there might be bleeds, for example, and there are clear needs like that. So there are certainly very practical applications of computer vision where segmentation is necessary, but philosophically segmentation enables the task of recognition to proceed with much weaker supervision than we require today. And you think of segmentation as this kind of task that takes on a visual scene and breaks it apart into interesting entities that might be useful for whatever the task is. Yeah. And it is not semantics free. So I think, I mean, it blends into, it involves perception and cognition. It is not, I think the mistake that we used to make in the early days of computer vision was to treat it as a purely bottom up perceptual task. It is not just that because we do revise our notion of segmentation with more experience, right? Because for example, there are objects which are nonrigid like animals or humans. And I think understanding that all the pixels of a human are one entity is actually quite a challenge because the parts of the human, they can move independently and the human wears clothes, so they might be differently colored. So it's all sort of a challenge. You mentioned the three R's of computer vision are recognition, reconstruction and reorganization. Can you describe these three R's and how they interact? Yeah. So recognition is the easiest one because that's what I think people generally think of as computer vision achieving these days, which is labels. So is this a cat? Is this a dog? Is this a chihuahua? I mean, you know, it could be very fine grained like, you know, specific breed of a dog or a specific species of bird, or it could be very abstract like animal. But given a part of an image or a whole image, say put a label on it. Yeah. That's recognition. Reconstruction is essentially, you can think of it as inverse graphics. I mean, that's one way to think about it. So graphics is you have some internal computer representation and you have a computer representation of some objects arranged in a scene. And what you do is you produce a picture, you produce the pixels corresponding to a rendering of that scene. So let's do the inverse of this. We are given an image and we try to, we say, oh, this image arises from some objects in a scene looked at with a camera from this viewpoint. And we might have more information about the objects like their shape, maybe their textures, maybe, you know, color, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the reconstruction problem. In a way, you are in your head creating a model of the external world. Right. Okay. Reorganization is to do with essentially finding these entities. So it's organization, the word organization implies structure. So that in perception, in psychology, we use the term perceptual organization. That the world is not just, an image is not just seen as, is not internally represented as just a collection of pixels, but we make these entities. We create these entities, objects, whatever you want to call it. And the relationship between the entities as well, or is it purely about the entities? It could be about the relationships, but mainly we focus on the fact that there are entities. Okay. So I'm trying to pinpoint what the organization means. So organization is that instead of like a uniform grid, we have this structure of objects. So the segmentation is the small part of that. So segmentation gets us going towards that. Yeah. And you kind of have this triangle where they all interact together. Yes. So how do you see that interaction in sort of reorganization is yes, finding the entities in the world. The recognition is labeling those entities and then reconstruction is what filling in the gaps. Well, for example, see, impute some 3D objects corresponding to each of these entities. That would be part of it. So adding more information that's not there in the raw data. Correct. I mean, I started pushing this kind of a view in the, around 2010 or something like that. Because at that time in computer vision, the distinction that people were just working on many different problems, but they treated each of them as a separate isolated problem with each with its own data set. And then you try to solve that and get good numbers on it. So I wasn't, I didn't like that approach because I wanted to see the connection between these. And if people divided up vision into, into various modules, the way they would do it is as low level, mid level and high level vision corresponding roughly to the psychologist's notion of sensation, perception and cognition. And I didn't, that didn't map to tasks that people cared about. Okay. So therefore I tried to promote this particular framework as a way of considering the problems that people in computer vision were actually working on and trying to be more explicit about the fact that they actually are connected to each other. And I was at that time just doing this on the basis of information flow. Now it turns out in the last five years or so in the post, the deep learning revolution that this, this architecture has turned out to be very conducive to that. Because basically in these neural networks, we are trying to build multiple representations. They can be multiple output heads sharing common representations. So in a certain sense today, given the reality of what solutions people have to this, I do not need to preach this anymore. It is, it is just there. It's part of the sedation space. So speaking of neural networks, how much of this problem of computer vision of reorganization recognition can be reconstruction? How much of it can be learned end to end, do you think? Sort of set it and forget it. Just plug and play, have a giant data set, multiple, perhaps multimodal, and then just learn the entirety of it. Well, so I think that currently what that end to end learning means nowadays is end to end supervised learning. And that I would argue is too narrow a view of the problem. I like this child development view, this lifelong learning view, one where there are certain capabilities that are built up and then there are certain capabilities which are built up on top of that. So that's what I believe in. So I think end to end learning in the supervised setting for a very precise task to me is kind of is sort of a limited view of the learning process. Got it. So if we think about beyond purely supervised, looking back to children, you mentioned six lessons that we can learn from children of be multimodal, be incremental, be physical, explore, be social, use language. Can you speak to these, perhaps picking one that you find most fundamental to our time today? Yeah. So I mean, I should say to give a due credit, this is from a paper by Smith and Gasser. And it reflects essentially, I would say common wisdom among child development people. It's just that this is not common wisdom among people in computer vision and AI and machine learning. So I view my role as trying to bridge the two worlds. So let's take an example of a multimodal. I like that. So multimodal, a canonical example is a child interacting with an object. So then the child holds a ball and plays with it. So at that point, it's getting a touch signal. So the touch signal is getting the notion of 3D shape, but it is sparse. And then the child is also seeing a visual signal. And these two, so imagine these are two in totally different spaces. So one is the space of receptors on the skin of the fingers and the thumb and the palm. And then these map onto these neuronal fibers are getting activated somewhere. These lead to some activation in somatosensory cortex. I mean, a similar thing will happen if we have a robot hand. And then we have the pixels corresponding to the visual view, but we know that they correspond to the same object. So that's a very, very strong cross calibration signal. And it is self supervisory, which is beautiful. There's nobody assigning a label. The mother doesn't have to come and assign a label. The child doesn't even have to know that this object is called a ball. That the child is learning something about the three dimensional world from this signal. I think tactile and visual, there is some work on, there is a lot of work currently on audio and visual. And audio visual, so there is some event that happens in the world and that event has a visual signature and it has a auditory signature. So there is this glass bowl on the table and it falls and breaks and I hear the smashing sound and I see the pieces of glass. Okay, I've built that connection between the two, right? We have people, I mean, this has become a hot topic in computer vision in the last couple of years. There are problems like separating out multiple speakers, right? Which was a classic problem in auditions. They call this the problem of source separation or the cocktail party effect and so on. But just try to do it visually when you also have, it becomes so much easier and so much more useful. So the multimodal, I mean, there's so much more signal with multimodal and you can use that for some kind of weak supervision as well. Yes, because they are occurring at the same time in time. So you have time which links the two, right? So at a certain moment, T1, you've got a certain signal in the auditory domain and a certain signal in the visual domain, but they must be causally related. Yeah, that's an exciting area. Not well studied yet. Yeah, I mean, we have a little bit of work at this, but so much more needs to be done. So this is a good example. Be physical, that's to do with like the one thing we talked about earlier that there's a embodied world. To mention language, use language. So Noam Chomsky believes that language may be at the core of cognition, at the core of everything in the human mind. What is the connection between language and vision to you? What's more fundamental? Are they neighbors? Is one the parent and the child, the chicken and the egg? Oh, it's very clear. It is vision, which is the parent. Which is the fundamental ability, okay. It comes before you think vision is more fundamental than language. Correct. And you can think of it either in phylogeny or in ontogeny. So phylogeny means if you look at evolutionary time, right? So we have vision that developed 500 million years ago, okay. Then something like when we get to maybe like five million years ago, you have the first bipedal primate. So when we started to walk, then the hands became free. And so then manipulation, the ability to manipulate objects and build tools and so on and so forth. So you said 500,000 years ago? No, sorry. The first multicellular animals, which you can say had some intelligence arose 500 million years ago. Million. Okay. And now let's fast forward to say the last seven million years, which is the development of the hominid line, right, where from the other primates, we have the branch which leads on to modern humans. Now there are many of these hominids, but the ones which, you know, people talk about Lucy because that's like a skeleton from three million years ago. And we know that Lucy walked, okay. So at this stage you have that the hand is free for manipulating objects and then the ability to manipulate objects, build tools and the brain size grew in this era. So okay, so now you have manipulation. Now we don't know exactly when language arose. But after that. Because no apes have, I mean, so I mean Chomsky is correct in that, that it is a uniquely human capability and we primates, other primates don't have that. But so it developed somewhere in this era, but it developed, I would, I mean, argue that it probably developed after we had this stage of humans, I mean, the human species already able to manipulate and hands free much bigger brain size. And for that, there's a lot of vision has already had, had to have developed. So the sensation and the perception may be some of the cognition. Yeah. So we, we, we, so those, so, so that vision, so the world, so there, so, so these ancestors of ours, you know, three, four million years ago, they had, they had special intelligence. So they knew that the world consists of objects. They knew that the objects were in certain relationships to each other. They had observed causal interactions among objects. They could move in space. So they had space and time and all of that. So language builds on that substrate. So language has a lot of, I mean, I mean, the none, all human languages have constructs which depend on a notion of space and time. Where did that notion of space and time come from? It had to come from perception and action in the world we live in. Yeah. Well, you've referred to the spatial intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. So to linger a little bit, we'll mention Turing and his mention of, we should learn from children. Nevertheless, language is the fundamental piece of the test of intelligence that Turing proposed. Yes. What do you think is a good test of intelligence? Are you, what would impress the heck out of you? Is it fundamentally natural language or is there something in vision? I think, I wouldn't, I don't think we should have created a single test of intelligence. So just like I don't believe in IQ as a single number, I think generally there can be many capabilities which are correlated perhaps. So I think that there will be, there will be accomplishments which are visual accomplishments, accomplishments which are accomplishments in manipulation or robotics, and then accomplishments in language. But I do believe that language will be the hardest nut to crack. Really? Yeah. So what's harder, to pass the spirit of the Turing test or like whatever formulation will make it natural language, convincingly a natural language, like somebody you would want to have a beer with, hang out and have a chat with, or the general natural scene understanding? You think language is the tougher problem? I think, I'm not a fan of the, I think, I think Turing test, that Turing as he proposed the test in 1950 was trying to solve a certain problem. Yeah, imitation. Yeah. And, and I think it made a lot of sense then. Where we are today, 70 years later, I think, I think we should not worry about that. I think the Turing test is no longer the right way to channel research in AI, because that, it takes us down this path of this chat bot, which can fool us for five minutes or whatever. Okay. I think I would rather have a list of 10 different tasks. I mean, I think there are tasks which, there are tasks in the manipulation domain, tasks in navigation, tasks in visual scene understanding, tasks in reading a story and answering questions based on that. I mean, so my favorite language understanding task would be, you know, reading a novel and being able to answer arbitrary questions from it. Okay. Right. I think that to me, and this is not an exhaustive list by any means. So I would, I think that that's what we, where we need to be going to. And each of these, on each of these axes, there's a fair amount of work to be done. So on the visual understanding side, in this intelligence Olympics that we've set up, what's a good test for one of many of visual scene understanding? Do you think such benchmarks exist? Sorry to interrupt. No, there aren't any. I think, I think essentially to me, a really good aid to the blind. So suppose there was a blind person and I needed to assist the blind person. So ultimately, like we said, vision that aids in the action in a survival in this world, maybe in the simulated world. Maybe easier to measure performance in a simulated world, what we are ultimately after is performance in the real world. So David Hilbert in 1900 proposed 23 open problems in mathematics, some of which are still unsolved, most important, famous of which is probably the Riemann hypothesis. You've thought about and presented about the Hilbert problems of computer vision. So let me ask, what do you today, I don't know when the last year you presented that in 2015, but versions of it, you're kind of the face and the spokesperson for computer vision. It's your job to state what the open problems are for the field. So what today are the Hilbert problems of computer vision, do you think? Let me pick one which I regard as clearly unsolved, which is what I would call long form video understanding. So we have a video clip and we want to understand the behavior in there in terms of agents, their goals, intentionality and make predictions about what might happen. So that kind of understanding which goes away from atomic visual action. So in the short range, the question is, are you sitting, are you standing, are you catching a ball? That we can do now, or even if we can't do it fully accurately, if we can do it at 50%, maybe next year we'll do it at 65% and so forth. But I think the long range video understanding, I don't think we can do today. And it blends into cognition, that's the reason why it's challenging. So you have to track, you have to understand the entities, you have to understand the entities, you have to track them and you have to have some kind of model of their behavior. Correct. And their behavior might be, these are agents, so they are not just like passive objects, but they're agents, so therefore they would exhibit goal directed behavior. Okay, so this is one area. Then I will talk about understanding the world in 3D. This may seem paradoxical because in a way we have been able to do 3D understanding even like 30 years ago, right? But I don't think we currently have the richness of 3D understanding in our computer vision system that we would like. So let me elaborate on that a bit. So currently we have two kinds of techniques which are not fully unified. So they are the kinds of techniques from multi view geometry that you have multiple pictures of a scene and you do a reconstruction using stereoscopic vision or structure from motion. But these techniques do not, they totally fail if you just have a single view because they are relying on this multiple view geometry. Okay, then we have some techniques that we have developed in the computer vision community which try to guess 3D from single views. And these techniques are based on supervised learning and they are based on having a training time 3D models of objects available. And this is completely unnatural supervision, right? That's not, CAD models are not injected into your brain. Okay, so what would I like? What I would like would be a kind of learning as you move around the world notion of 3D. So we have our succession of visual experiences and from those we, so as part of that I might see a chair from different viewpoints or a table from different viewpoints and so on. Now as part that enables me to build some internal representation. And then next time I just see a single photograph and it may not even be of that chair, it's of some other chair. And I have a guess of what it's 3D shape is like. So you're almost learning the CAD model, kind of. Yeah, implicitly. Implicitly. I mean, the CAD model need not be in the same form as used by computer graphics programs. Hidden in the representation. It's hidden in the representation, the ability to predict new views. And what I would see if I went to such and such position. By the way, on a small tangent on that, are you okay or comfortable with neural networks that do achieve visual understanding that do, for example, achieve this kind of 3D understanding and you don't know how they, you're not able to interest, you're not able to visualize or understand or interact with the representation. So the fact that they're not or may not be explainable. Yeah, I think that's fine. To me that is, so let me put some caveats on that. So it depends on the setting. So first of all, I think the humans are not explainable. So that's a really good point. So we, one human to another human is not fully explainable. I think there are settings where explainability matters and these might be, for example, questions on medical diagnosis. So I'm in a setting where maybe the doctor, maybe a computer program has made a certain diagnosis and then depending on the diagnosis, perhaps I should have treatment A or treatment B, right? So now is the computer program's diagnosis based on data, which was data collected off for American males who are in their 30s and 40s and maybe not so relevant to me. Maybe it is relevant, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, in medical diagnosis, we have major issues to do with the reference class. So we may have acquired statistics from one group of people and applying it to a different group of people who may not share all the same characteristics. The data might have, there might be error bars in the prediction. So that prediction should really be taken with a huge grain of salt. But this has an impact on what treatments should be picked, right? So there are settings where I want to know more than just, this is the answer. But what I acknowledge is that, so in that sense, explainability and interpretability may matter. It's about giving error bounds and a better sense of the quality of the decision. Where I'm willing to sacrifice interpretability is that I believe that there can be systems which can be highly performant, but which are internally black boxes. And that seems to be where it's headed. Some of the best performing systems are essentially black boxes, fundamentally by their construction. You and I are black boxes to each other. Yeah. So the nice thing about the black boxes we are is, so we ourselves are black boxes, but we're also, those of us who are charming are able to convince others, like explain the black, what's going on inside the black box with narratives of stories. So in some sense, neural networks don't have to actually explain what's going on inside. They just have to come up with stories, real or fake that convince you that they know what's going on. And I'm sure we can do that. We can create those stories, neural networks can create those stories. Yeah. And the transformer will be involved. Do you think we will ever build a system of human level or superhuman level intelligence? We've kind of defined what it takes to try to approach that, but do you think that's within our reach? The thing that we thought we could do, what Turing thought actually we could do by year 2000, right? What do you think we'll ever be able to do? So I think there are two answers here. One question, one answer is in principle, can we do this at some time? And my answer is yes. The second answer is a pragmatic one. Do you think we will be able to do it in the next 20 years or whatever? And to that my answer is no. So of course that's a wild guess. I think that, you know, Donald Rumsfeld is not a favorite person of mine, but one of his lines was very good, which is about known unknowns and unknown unknowns. So in the business we are in, there are known unknowns and we have unknown unknowns. So I think with respect to a lot of what's the case in vision and robotics, I feel like we have known unknowns. So I have a sense of where we need to go and what the problems that need to be solved are. I feel with respect to natural language, understanding and high level cognition, it's not just known unknowns, but also unknown unknowns. So it is very difficult to put any kind of a timeframe to that. Do you think some of the unknown unknowns might be positive in that they'll surprise us and make the job much easier? So fundamental breakthroughs? I think that is possible because certainly I have been very positively surprised by how effective these deep learning systems have been because I certainly would not have believed that in 2010. I think what we knew from the mathematical theory was that convex optimization works. When there's a single global optima, then these gradient descent techniques would work. Now these are nonlinear systems with non convex systems. Huge number of variables, so over parametrized. And the people who used to play with them a lot, the ones who are totally immersed in the lore and the black magic, they knew that they worked well, even though they were... Really? I thought like everybody... No, the claim that I hear from my friends like Yann LeCun and so forth is that they feel that they were comfortable with them. But the community as a whole was certainly not. And I think to me that was the surprise that they actually worked robustly for a wide range of problems from a wide range of initializations and so on. And so that was certainly more rapid progress than we expected. But then there are certainly lots of times, in fact, most of the history of AI is when we have made less progress at a slower rate than we expected. So we just keep going. I think what I regard as really unwarranted are these fears of AGI in 10 years and 20 years and that kind of stuff, because that's based on completely unrealistic models of how rapidly we will make progress in this field. So I agree with you, but I've also gotten the chance to interact with very smart people who really worry about existential threats of AI. And I, as an open minded person, am sort of taking it in. Do you think if AI systems in some way, the unknown unknowns, not super intelligent AI, but in ways we don't quite understand the nature of super intelligence, will have a detrimental effect on society? Do you think this is something we should be worried about or we need to first allow the unknown unknowns to become known unknowns? I think we need to be worried about AI today. I think that it is not just a worry we need to have when we get that AGI. I think that AI is being used in many systems today. And there might be settings, for example, when it causes biases or decisions which could be harmful. I mean, decisions which could be unfair to some people or it could be a self driving cars which kills a pedestrian. So AI systems are being deployed today, right? And they're being deployed in many different settings, maybe in medical diagnosis, maybe in a self driving car, maybe in selecting applicants for an interview. So I would argue that when these systems make mistakes, there are consequences. And we are in a certain sense responsible for those consequences. So I would argue that this is a continuous effort. It is we and this is something that in a way is not so surprising. It's about all engineering and scientific progress which great power comes great responsibility. So as these systems are deployed, we have to worry about them and it's a continuous problem. I don't think of it as something which will suddenly happen on some day in 2079 for which I need to design some clever trick. I'm saying that these problems exist today and we need to be continuously on the lookout for worrying about safety, biases, risks, right? I mean, the self driving car kills a pedestrian and they have, right? I mean, this Uber incident in Arizona, right? It has happened, right? This is not about AGI. In fact, it's about a very dumb intelligence which is still killing people. The worry people have with AGI is the scale. But I think you're 100% right is like the thing that worries me about AI today and it's happening in a huge scale is recommender systems, recommendation systems. So if you look at Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, they're controlling the ideas that we have access to, the news and so on. And that's a fundamental machine learning algorithm behind each of these recommendations. And they, I mean, my life would not be the same without these sources of information. I'm a totally new human being and the ideas that I know are very much because of the internet, because of the algorithm that recommend those ideas. And so as they get smarter and smarter, I mean, that is the AGI is that's the algorithm that's recommending the next YouTube video you should watch has control of millions of billions of people that that algorithm is already super intelligent and has complete control of the population, not a complete, but very strong control. For now we can turn off YouTube, we can just go have a normal life outside of that. But the more and more that gets into our life, it's that algorithm we start depending on it in the different companies that are working on the algorithm. So I think it's, you're right, it's already there. And YouTube in particular is using computer vision, doing their hardest to try to understand the content of videos so they could be able to connect videos with the people who would benefit from those videos the most. And so that development could go in a bunch of different directions, some of which might be harmful. So yeah, you're right, the threats of AI are here already and we should be thinking about them. On a philosophical notion, if you could, personal perhaps, if you could relive a moment in your life outside of family because it made you truly happy or it was a profound moment that impacted the direction of your life, what moment would you go to? I don't think of single moments, but I look over the long haul. I feel that I've been very lucky because I feel that, I think that in scientific research, a lot of it is about being at the right place at the right time. And you can work on problems at a time when they're just too premature. You butt your head against them and nothing happens because the prerequisites for success are not there. And then there are times when you are in a field which is all pretty mature and you can only solve curlicues upon curlicues. I've been lucky to have been in this field which for 34 years, well actually 34 years as a professor at Berkeley, so longer than that, which when I started in it was just like some little crazy, absolutely useless field which couldn't really do anything to a time when it's really, really solving a lot of practical problems, has offered a lot of tools for scientific research because computer vision is impactful for images in biology or astronomy and so on and so forth. And we have, so we have made great scientific progress which has had real practical impact in the world. And I feel lucky that I got in at a time when the field was very young and at a time when it is, it's now mature but not fully mature. It's mature but not done. I mean, it's really still in a productive phase. Yeah, I think people 500 years from now would laugh at you calling this field mature. That is very possible. Yeah. So, but you're also, lest I forget to mention, you've also mentored some of the biggest names of computer vision, computer science and AI today. So many questions I could ask, but really is what, what is it, how did you do it? What does it take to be a good mentor? What does it take to be a good guide? Yeah, I think what I feel, I've been lucky to have had very, very smart and hardworking and creative students. I think some part of the credit just belongs to being at Berkeley. Those of us who are at top universities are blessed because we have very, very smart and capable students coming on, knocking on our door. So I have to be humble enough to acknowledge that. But what have I added? I think I have added something. What I have added is, I think what I've always tried to teach them is a sense of picking the right problems. So I think that in science, in the short run, success is always based on technical competence. You're, you know, you're quick with math or you are whatever. I mean, there's certain technical capabilities which make for short range progress. Long range progress is really determined by asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems. And I feel that what I've been able to bring to the table in terms of advising these students is some sense of taste of what are good problems, what are problems that are worth attacking now as opposed to waiting 10 years. What's a good problem? If you could summarize, is that possible to even summarize, like what's your sense of a good problem? I think, I think I have a sense of what is a good problem, which is there is a British scientist, in fact, he won a Nobel Prize, Peter Medover, who has a book on this. And basically he calls it, research is the art of the soluble. So we need to sort of find problems which are not yet solved, but which are approachable. And he sort of refers to this sense that there is this problem which isn't quite solved yet, but it has a soft underbelly. There is some place where you can, you know, spear the beast. And having that intuition that this problem is ripe is a good thing because otherwise you can just beat your head and not make progress. So I think that is important. So if I have that and if I can convey that to students, it's not just that they do great research while they're working with me, but that they continue to do great research. So in a sense, I'm proud of my students and their achievements and their great research even 20 years after they've ceased being my student. So it's in part developing, helping them develop that sense that a problem is not yet solved, but it's solvable. Correct. The other thing which I have, which I think I bring to the table, is a certain intellectual breadth. I've spent a fair amount of time studying psychology, neuroscience, relevant areas of applied math and so forth. So I can probably help them see some connections to disparate things, which they might not have otherwise. So the smart students coming into Berkeley can be very deep, they can think very deeply, meaning very hard down one particular path, but where I could help them is the shallow breadth, but they would have the narrow depth, but that's of some value. Well, it was beautifully refreshing just to hear you naturally jump to psychology back to computer science in this conversation back and forth. That's actually a rare quality and I think it's certainly for students empowering to think about problems in a new way. So for that and for many other reasons, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. It was a huge honor. Thanks for talking to me. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jitendra Malik and thank you to our sponsors, BetterHelp and ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to betterhelp.com slash Lex and signing up at expressvpn.com slash LexPod. Click the links, buy the stuff. That's how they know I sent you and it really is the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple podcast, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. Don't ask me how to spell that. I don't remember it myself. And now let me leave you with some words from Prince Mishkin in The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Beauty will save the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Jitendra Malik: Computer Vision | Lex Fridman Podcast #110

The following is a conversation with Richard Karp, a professor at Berkeley and one of the most important figures in the history of theoretical computer science. In 1985, he received the Turing Award for his research in the theory of algorithms, including the development of the Admirons Karp algorithm for solving the max flow problem on networks, Hopcroft Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings in bipartite graphs, and his landmark paper in complexity theory called Reduceability Among Combinatorial Problems, in which he proved 21 problems to be NP complete. This paper was probably the most important catalyst in the explosion of interest in the study of NP completeness and the P versus NP problem in general. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, 8sleep mattress and Cash App. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to 8sleep.com slash Lex and downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast. Click the links, buy the stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This show is sponsored by 8sleep and its Pod Pro mattress that you can check out at 8sleep.com slash Lex to get $200 off. It controls temperature with an app. It can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. Research shows that temperature has a big impact on the quality of our sleep. Anecdotally, it's been a game changer for me. I love it. It's been a couple of weeks now. I've just been really enjoying it, both in the fact that I'm getting better sleep and that it's a smart mattress, essentially. I kind of imagine this being the early days of artificial intelligence being a part of every aspect of our lives. And certainly infusing AI in one of the most important aspects of life, which is sleep, I think has a lot of potential for being beneficial. The Pod Pro is packed with sensors that track heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory rate, showing it all in their app. The app's health metrics are amazing, but the cooling alone is honestly worth the money. I don't always sleep, but when I do, I choose the 8th Sleep Pod Pro mattress. Check it out at 8thSleep.com slash Lex to get $200 off. And remember, just visiting the site and considering the purchase helps convince the folks at 8th Sleep that this silly old podcast is worth sponsoring in the future. This show is also presented by the great and powerful Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. It's one of the best designed interfaces of an app that I've ever used. To me, good design is when everything is easy and natural. Bad design is when the app gets in the way, either because it's buggy, or because it tries too hard to be helpful. I'm looking at you, Clippy, from Microsoft, even though I love you. Anyway, there's a big part of my brain and heart that loves to design things and also to appreciate great design by others. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Richard Karp. You wrote that at the age of 13, you were first exposed to plane geometry and was wonderstruck by the power and elegance of form of proofs. Are there problems, proofs, properties, ideas in plane geometry that from that time that you remember being mesmerized by or just enjoying to go through to prove various aspects? So Michael Rabin told me this story about an experience he had when he was a young student who was tossed out of his classroom for bad behavior and was wandering through the corridors of his school and came upon two older students who were studying the problem of finding the shortest distance between two nonoverlapping circles. And Michael thought about it and said, you take the straight line between the two centers and the segment between the two circles is the shortest because a straight line is the shortest distance between the two centers. And any other line connecting the circles would be on a longer line. And I thought, and he thought, and I agreed that this was just elegance, the pure reasoning could come up with such a result. Certainly the shortest distance from the two centers of the circles is a straight line. Could you once again say what's the next step in that proof? Well, any segment joining the two circles, if you extend it by taking the radius on each side, you get a path with three edges which connects the two centers. And this has to be at least as long as the shortest path, which is the straight line. The straight line, yeah. Wow, yeah, that's quite simple. So what is it about that elegance that you just find compelling? Well, just that you could establish a fact about geometry beyond dispute by pure reasoning. I also enjoy the challenge of solving puzzles in plain geometry. It was much more fun than the earlier mathematics courses which were mostly about arithmetic operations and manipulating them. Was there something about geometry itself, the slightly visual component of it? Oh, yes, absolutely, although I lacked three dimensional vision. I wasn't very good at three dimensional vision. You mean being able to visualize three dimensional objects? Three dimensional objects or surfaces, hyperplanes and so on. So there I didn't have an intuition. But for example, the fact that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees is proved convincingly. And it comes as a surprise that that can be done. Why is that surprising? Well, it is a surprising idea, I suppose. Why is that proved difficult? It's not, that's the point. It's so easy and yet it's so convincing. Do you remember what is the proof that it adds up to 180? You start at a corner and draw a line parallel to the opposite side. And that line sort of trisects the angle between the other two sides. And you get a half plane which has to add up to 180 degrees. It has to add up to 180 degrees and it consists in the angles by the equality of alternate angles. What's it called? You get a correspondence between the angles created along the side of the triangle and the three angles of the triangle. Has geometry had an impact on when you look into the future of your work with combinatorial algorithms? Has it had some kind of impact in terms of, yeah, being able, the puzzles, the visual aspects that were first so compelling to you? Not Euclidean geometry particularly. I think I use tools like linear programming and integer programming a lot. But those require high dimensional visualization and so I tend to go by the algebraic properties. Right, you go by the linear algebra and not by the visualization. Well, the interpretation in terms of, for example, finding the highest point on a polyhedron as in linear programming is motivating. But again, I don't have the high dimensional intuition that would particularly inform me so I sort of lean on the algebra. So to linger on that point, what kind of visualization do you do when you're trying to think about, we'll get to combinatorial algorithms, but just algorithms in general. Yeah. What's inside your mind when you're thinking about designing algorithms? Or even just tackling any mathematical problem? Well, I think that usually an algorithm involves a repetition of some inner loop and so I can sort of visualize the distance from the desired solution as iteratively reducing until you finally hit the exact solution. And try to take steps that get you closer to the. Try to take steps that get closer and having the certainty of converging. So it's basically the mechanics of the algorithm is often very simple, but especially when you're trying something out on the computer. So for example, I did some work on the traveling salesman problem and I could see there was a particular function that had to be minimized and it was fascinating to see the successive approaches to the minimum, to the optimum. You mean, so first of all, traveling salesman problem is where you have to visit every city without ever, the only ones. Yeah, that's right. Find the shortest path through a set of cities. Yeah, which is sort of a canonical standard, a really nice problem that's really hard. Right, exactly, yes. So can you say again what was nice about being able to think about the objective function there and maximizing it or minimizing it? Well, just that as the algorithm proceeded, you were making progress, continual progress, and eventually getting to the optimum point. So there's two parts, maybe. Maybe you can correct me. First is like getting an intuition about what the solution would look like and or even maybe coming up with a solution and two is proving that this thing is actually going to be pretty good. What part is harder for you? Where's the magic happen? Is it in the first sets of intuitions or is it in the messy details of actually showing that it is going to get to the exact solution and it's gonna run at a certain complexity? Well, the magic is just the fact that the gap from the optimum decreases monotonically and you can see it happening and various metrics of what's going on are improving all along until finally you hit the optimum. Perhaps later we'll talk about the assignment problem and I can illustrate. It illustrates a little better. Now zooming out again, as you write, Don Knuth has called attention to a breed of people who derive great aesthetic pleasure from contemplating the structure of computational processes. So Don calls these folks geeks and you write that you remember the moment you realized you were such a person, you were shown the Hungarian algorithm to solve the assignment problem. So perhaps you can explain what the assignment problem is and what the Hungarian algorithm is. So in the assignment problem, you have n boys and n girls and you are given the desirability of, or the cost of matching the ith boy with the jth girl for all i and j. You're given a matrix of numbers and you want to find the one to one matching of the boys with the girls such that the sum of the associated costs will be minimized. So the best way to match the boys with the girls or men with jobs or any two sets. Any possible matching is possible or? Yeah, all one to one correspondences are permissible. If there is a connection that is not allowed, then you can think of it as having an infinite cost. I see, yeah. So what you do is to depend on the observation that the identity of the optimal assignment or as we call it, the optimal permutation is not changed if you subtract a constant from any row or column of the matrix. You can see that the comparison between the different assignments is not changed by that. Because if you decrease a particular row, all the elements of a row by some constant, all solutions decrease by an amount equal to that constant. So the idea of the algorithm is to start with a matrix of non negative numbers and keep subtracting from rows or from columns. Subtracting from rows or entire columns in such a way that you subtract the same constant from all the elements of that row or column while maintaining the property that all the elements are non negative. Simple. Yeah, and so what you have to do is find small moves which will decrease the total cost while subtracting constants from rows or columns. And there's a particular way of doing that by computing the kind of shortest path through the elements in the matrix. And you just keep going in this way until you finally get a full permutation of zeros while the matrix is non negative and then you know that that has to be the cheapest. Is that as simple as it sounds? So the shortest path of the matrix part. Yeah, the simplicity lies in how you find, I oversimplified slightly what you, you will end up subtracting a constant from some rows or columns and adding the same constant back to other rows and columns. So as not to reduce any of the zero elements, you leave them unchanged. But each individual step modifies several rows and columns by the same amount but overall decreases the cost. So there's something about that elegance that made you go aha, this is a beautiful, like it's amazing that something like this, something so simple can solve a problem like this. Yeah, it's really cool. If I had mechanical ability, I would probably like to do woodworking or other activities where you sort of shape something into something beautiful and orderly and there's something about the orderly systematic nature of that iterative algorithm that is pleasing to me. So what do you think about this idea of geeks as Don Knuth calls them? What do you think, is it something specific to a mindset that allows you to discover the elegance in computational processes or is this all of us, can all of us discover this beauty? Were you born this way? I think so. I always like to play with numbers. I used to amuse myself by multiplying by multiplying four digit decimal numbers in my head and putting myself to sleep by starting with one and doubling the number as long as I could go and testing my memory, my ability to retain the information. And I also read somewhere that you wrote that you enjoyed showing off to your friends by I believe multiplying four digit numbers. Right. Four digit numbers. Yeah, I had a summer job at a beach resort outside of Boston and the other employee, I was the barker at a skee ball game. Yeah. I used to sit at a microphone saying come one, come all, come in and play skee ball, five cents to play, a nickel to win and so on. That's what a barker, I wasn't sure if I should know but barker, that's, so you're the charming, outgoing person that's getting people to come in. Yeah, well I wasn't particularly charming but I could be very repetitious and loud. And the other employees were sort of juvenile delinquents who had no academic bent but somehow I found that I could impress them by performing this mental arithmetic. Yeah, there's something to that. Some of the most popular videos on the internet is there's a YouTube channel called Numberphile that shows off different mathematical ideas. I see. There's still something really profoundly interesting to people about math, the beauty of it. Something, even if they don't understand the basic concept even being discussed, there's something compelling to it. What do you think that is? Any lessons you drew from your early teen years when you were showing off to your friends with the numbers? Like what is it that attracts us to the beauty of mathematics do you think? The general population, not just the computer scientists and mathematicians. I think that you can do amazing things. You can test whether large numbers are prime. You can solve little puzzles about cannibals and missionaries. And that's a kind of achievement, it's puzzle solving. And at a higher level, the fact that you can do this reasoning that you can prove in an absolutely ironclad way that some of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. Yeah, it's a nice escape from the messiness of the real world where nothing can be proved. So, and we'll talk about it, but sometimes the ability to map the real world into such problems where you can't prove it is a powerful step. Yeah. It's amazing that we can do it. Of course, another attribute of geeks is they're not necessarily endowed with emotional intelligence, so they can live in a world of abstractions without having to master the complexities of dealing with people. So just to link on the historical note, as a PhD student in 1955, you joined the computational lab at Harvard where Howard Aiken had built the Mark I and the Mark IV computers. Just to take a step back into that history, what were those computers like? The Mark IV filled a large room, much bigger than this large office that we were talking in now. And you could walk around inside it. There were rows of relays. You could just walk around the interior and the machine would sometimes fail because of bugs, which literally meant flying creatures landing on the switches. So I never used that machine for any practical purpose. The lab eventually acquired one of the earlier commercial computers. And this was already in the 60s? No, in the mid 50s, or late 50s. There was already commercial computers in the... Yeah, we had a Univac, a Univac with 2,000 words of storage. And so you had to work hard to allocate the memory properly to also the excess time from one word to another depended on the number of the particular words. And so there was an art to sort of arranging the storage allocation to make fetching data rapid. Were you attracted to this actual physical world implementation of mathematics? So it's a mathematical machine that's actually doing the math physically? No, not at all. I think I was attracted to the underlying algorithms. But did you draw any inspiration? So could you have imagined, like what did you imagine was the future of these giant computers? Could you have imagined that 60 years later we'd have billions of these computers all over the world? I couldn't imagine that, but there was a sense in the laboratory that this was the wave of the future. In fact, my mother influenced me. She told me that data processing was gonna be really big and I should get into it. You're a smart woman. Yeah, she was a smart woman. And there was just a feeling that this was going to change the world, but I didn't think of it in terms of personal computing. I had no anticipation that we would be walking around with computers in our pockets or anything like that. Did you see computers as tools, as mathematical mechanisms to analyze sort of the theoretical computer science, or as the AI folks, which is an entire other community of dreamers, as something that could one day have human level intelligence? Well, AI wasn't very much on my radar. I did read Turing's paper about the... The Turing Test, Computing and Intelligence. Yeah, the Turing test. What'd you think about that paper? Was that just like science fiction? I thought that it wasn't a very good test because it was too subjective. So I didn't feel that the Turing test was really the right way to calibrate how intelligent an algorithm could be. But to linger on that, do you think it's, because you've come up with some incredible tests later on, tests on algorithms, right, that are like strong, reliable, robust across a bunch of different classes of algorithms, but returning to this emotional mess that is intelligence, do you think it's possible to come up with a test that's as ironclad as some of the computational complexity work? Well, I think the greater question is whether it's possible to achieve human level intelligence. Right, so first of all, let me, at the philosophical level, do you think it's possible to create algorithms that reason and would seem to us to have the same kind of intelligence as human beings? It's an open question. It seems to me that most of the achievements have operate within a very limited set of ground rules and for a very limited, precise task, which is a quite different situation from the processes that go on in the minds of humans, which where they have to sort of function in changing environments, they have emotions, they have physical attributes for exploring their environment, they have intuition, they have desires, emotions, and I don't see anything in the current achievements of what's called AI that come close to that capability. I don't think there's any computer program which surpasses a six month old child in terms of comprehension of the world. Do you think this complexity of human intelligence, all the cognitive abilities we have, all the emotion, do you think that could be reduced one day or just fundamentally can it be reduced to a set of algorithms or an algorithm? So can a Turing machine achieve human level intelligence? I am doubtful about that. I guess the argument in favor of it is that the human brain seems to achieve what we call intelligence cognitive abilities of different kinds. And if you buy the premise that the human brain is just an enormous interconnected set of switches, so to speak, then in principle, you should be able to diagnose what that interconnection structure is like, characterize the individual switches, and build a simulation outside. But while that may be true in principle, that cannot be the way we're eventually gonna tackle this problem. That does not seem like a feasible way to go about it. So there is, however, an existence proof that if you believe that the brain is just a network of neurons operating by rules, I guess you could say that that's an existence proof of the capabilities of a mechanism, but it would be almost impossible to acquire the information unless we got enough insight into the operation of the brain. But there's so much mystery there. Do you think, what do you make of consciousness, for example, as an example of something we completely have no clue about? The fact that we have this subjective experience. Is it possible that this network of, this circuit of switches is able to create something like consciousness? To know its own identity. Yeah, to know the algorithm, to know itself. To know itself. I think if you try to define that rigorously, you'd have a lot of trouble. Yeah, that seems to be. So I know that there are many who believe that general intelligence can be achieved, and there are even some who feel certain that the singularity will come and we will be surpassed by the machines which will then learn more and more about themselves and reduce humans to an inferior breed. I am doubtful that this will ever be achieved. Just for the fun of it, could you linger on why, what's your intuition, why you're doubtful? So there are quite a few people that are extremely worried about this existential threat of artificial intelligence, of us being left behind by this super intelligent new species. What's your intuition why that's not quite likely? Just because none of the achievements in speech or robotics or natural language processing or creation of flexible computer assistants or any of that comes anywhere near close to that level of cognition. What do you think about ideas of sort of, if we look at Moore's Law and exponential improvement to allow us, that would surprise us? Sort of our intuition fall apart with exponential improvement because, I mean, we're not able to kind of, we kind of think in linear improvement. We're not able to imagine a world that goes from the Mark I computer to an iPhone X. Yeah. So do you think we could be really surprised by the exponential growth? Or on the flip side, is it possible that also intelligence is actually way, way, way, way harder, even with exponential improvement to be able to crack? I don't think any constant factor improvement could change things. I mean, given our current comprehension of what cognition requires, it seems to me that multiplying the speed of the switches by a factor of a thousand or a million will not be useful until we really understand the organizational principle behind the network of switches. Well, let's jump into the network of switches and talk about combinatorial algorithms if we could. Let's step back with the very basics. What are combinatorial algorithms? And what are some major examples of problems they aim to solve? A combinatorial algorithm is one which deals with a system of discrete objects that can occupy various states or take on various values from a discrete set of values and need to be arranged or selected in such a way as to achieve some, to minimize some cost function. Or to prove the existence of some combinatorial configuration. So an example would be coloring the vertices of a graph. What's a graph? Let's step back. So it's fun to ask one of the greatest computer scientists of all time the most basic questions in the beginning of most books. But for people who might not know, but in general how you think about it, what is a graph? A graph, that's simple. It's a set of points, certain pairs of which are joined by lines called edges. And they sort of represent the, in different applications represent the interconnections between discrete objects. So they could be the interactions, interconnections between switches in a digital circuit or interconnections indicating the communication patterns of a human community. And they could be directed or undirected and then as you've mentioned before, might have costs. Right, they can be directed or undirected. They can be, you can think of them as, if you think, if a graph were representing a communication network, then the edge could be undirected meaning that information could flow along it in both directions or it could be directed with only one way communication. A road system is another example of a graph with weights on the edges. And then a lot of problems of optimizing the efficiency of such networks or learning about the performance of such networks are the object of combinatorial algorithms. So it could be scheduling classes at a school where the vertices, the nodes of the network are the individual classes and the edges indicate the constraints which say that certain classes cannot take place at the same time or certain teachers are available only for certain classes, et cetera. Or I talked earlier about the assignment problem of matching the boys with the girls where you have there a graph with an edge from each boy to each girl with a weight indicating the cost. Or in logical design of computers, you might want to find a set of so called gates, switches that perform logical functions which can be interconnected to each other and perform logical functions which can be interconnected to realize some function. So you might ask how many gates do you need in order for a circuit to give a yes output if at least a given number of its inputs are ones and no if fewer are present. My favorite's probably all the work with network flow. So anytime you have, I don't know why it's so compelling but there's something just beautiful about it. It seems like there's so many applications and communication networks and traffic flow that you can map into these and then you could think of pipes and water going through pipes and you could optimize it in different ways. There's something always visually and intellectually compelling to me about it. And of course you've done work there. Yeah, so there the edges represent channels along which some commodity can flow. It might be gas, it might be water, it might be information. Maybe supply chain as well like products being. Products flowing from one operation to another. And the edges have a capacity which is the rate at which the commodity can flow. And a central problem is to determine given a network of these channels. In this case the edges are communication channels. The challenge is to find the maximum rate at which the information can flow along these channels to get from a source to a destination. And that's a fundamental combinatorial problem that I've worked on jointly with the scientist Jack Edmonds. I think we're the first to give a formal proof that this maximum flow problem through a network can be solved in polynomial time. Which I remember the first time I learned that. Just learning that in maybe even grad school. I don't think it was even undergrad. No, algorithm, yeah. Do network flows get taught in basic algorithms courses? Yes, probably. Okay, so yeah, I remember being very surprised that max flow is a polynomial time algorithm. That there's a nice fast algorithm that solves max flow. So there is an algorithm named after you in Edmonds. The Edmond Carp algorithm for max flow. So what was it like tackling that problem and trying to arrive at a polynomial time solution? And maybe you can describe the algorithm. Maybe you can describe what's the running time complexity that you showed. Yeah, well, first of all, what is a polynomial time algorithm? Perhaps we could discuss that. So yeah, let's actually just even, yeah. What is algorithmic complexity? What are the major classes of algorithm complexity? So in a problem like the assignment problem or scheduling schools or any of these applications, you have a set of input data which might, for example, be a set of vertices connected by edges with you're given for each edge the capacity of the edge. And you have algorithms which are, think of them as computer programs with operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparison of numbers, and so on. And you're trying to construct an algorithm based on those operations, which will determine in a minimum number of computational steps the answer to the problem. In this case, the computational step is one of those operations. And the answer to the problem is let's say the configuration of the network that carries the maximum amount of flow. And an algorithm is said to run in polynomial time if as a function of the size of the input, the number of vertices, the number of edges, and so on, the number of basic computational steps grows only as some fixed power of that size. A linear algorithm would execute a number of steps linearly proportional to the size. Quadratic algorithm would be steps proportional to the square of the size, and so on. And algorithms whose running time is bounded by some fixed power of the size are called polynomial algorithms. Yeah. And that's supposed to be relatively fast class of algorithms. That's right. Theoreticians take that to be the definition of an algorithm being efficient. And we're interested in which problems can be solved by such efficient algorithms. One can argue whether that's the right definition of efficient because you could have an algorithm whose running time is the 10,000th power of the size of the input, and that wouldn't be really efficient. And in practice, it's oftentimes reducing from an N squared algorithm to an N log N or a linear time is practically the jump that you wanna make to allow a real world system to solve a problem. Yeah, that's also true because especially as we get very large networks, the size can be in the millions, and then anything above N log N where N is the size would be too much for a practical solution. Okay, so that's polynomial time algorithms. What other classes of algorithms are there? What's, so that usually they designate polynomials of the letter P. Yeah. There's also NP, NP complete and NP hard. Yeah. So can you try to disentangle those by trying to define them simply? Right, so a polynomial time algorithm is one whose running time is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input. Then the class of such algorithms is called P. In the worst case, by the way, we should say, right? Yeah. So for every case of the problem. Yes, that's right, and that's very important that in this theory, when we measure the complexity of an algorithm, we really measure the number of steps, the growth of the number of steps in the worst case. So you may have an algorithm that runs very rapidly in most cases, but if there's any case where it gets into a very long computation, that would increase the computational complexity by this measure. And that's a very important issue because there are, as we may discuss later, there are some very important algorithms which don't have a good standing from the point of view of their worst case performance and yet are very effective. So theoreticians are interested in P, the class of problem solvable in polynomial time. Then there's NP, which is the class of problems which may be hard to solve, but when confronted with a solution, you can check it in polynomial time. Let me give you an example there. So if we look at the assignment problem, so you have N boys, you have N girls, the number of numbers that you need to write down to specify the problem instance is N squared. And the question is how many steps are needed to solve it? And Jack Edmonds and I were the first to show that it could be done in time and cubed. Earlier algorithms required N to the fourth. So as a polynomial function of the size of the input, this is a fast algorithm. Now to illustrate the class NP, the question is how long would it take to verify that a solution is optimal? So for example, if the input was a graph, we might want to find the largest clique in the graph or a clique is a set of vertices such that any vertex, each vertex in the set is adjacent to each of the others. So the clique is a complete subgraph. Yeah, so if it's a Facebook social network, everybody's friends with everybody else, close clique. No, that would be what's called a complete graph. It would be. No, I mean within that clique. Within that clique, yeah. Yeah, they're all friends. So a complete graph is when? Everybody is friendly. As everybody is friends with everybody, yeah. So the problem might be to determine whether in a given graph there exists a clique of a certain size. Now that turns out to be a very hard problem, but if somebody hands you a clique and asks you to check whether it is, hands you a set of vertices and asks you to check whether it's a clique, you could do that simply by exhaustively looking at all of the edges between the vertices and the clique and verifying that they're all there. And that's a polynomial time algorithm. That's a polynomial. So the problem of finding the clique appears to be extremely hard, but the problem of verifying a clique to see if it reaches a target number of vertices is easy to verify. So finding the clique is hard, checking it is easy. Problems of that nature are called nondeterministic polynomial time algorithms, and that's the class NP. And what about NP complete and NP hard? Okay, let's talk about problems where you're getting a yes or no answer rather than a numerical value. So either there is a perfect matching of the boys with the girls or there isn't. It's clear that every problem in P is also in NP. If you can solve the problem exactly, then you can certainly verify the solution. On the other hand, there are problems in the class NP. This is the class of problems that are easy to check, although they may be hard to solve. It's not at all clear that problems in NP lie in P. So for example, if we're looking at scheduling classes at a school, the fact that you can verify when handed a schedule for the school, whether it meets all the requirements, that doesn't mean that you can find the schedule rapidly. So intuitively, NP, nondeterministic polynomial checking rather than finding, is going to be harder than, is going to include, is easier. Checking is easier, and therefore the class of problems that can be checked appears to be much larger than the class of problems that can be solved. And then you keep adding appears to, and sort of these additional words that designate that we don't know for sure yet. We don't know for sure. So the theoretical question, which is considered to be the most central problem in theoretical computer science, or at least computational complexity theory, combinatorial algorithm theory, the question is whether P is equal to NP. If P were equal to NP, it would be amazing. It would mean that every problem where a solution can be rapidly checked can actually be solved in polynomial time. We don't really believe that's true. If you're scheduling classes at a school, we expect that if somebody hands you a satisfying schedule, you can verify that it works. That doesn't mean that you should be able to find such a schedule. So intuitively, NP encompasses a lot more problems than P. So can we take a small tangent and break apart that intuition? So do you, first of all, think that the biggest sort of open problem in computer science, maybe mathematics, is whether P equals NP? Do you think P equals NP, or do you think P is not equal to NP? If you had to bet all your money on it. I would bet that P is unequal to NP, simply because there are problems that have been around for centuries and have been studied intensively in mathematics, and even more so in the last 50 years since the P versus NP was stated. And no polynomial time algorithms have been found for these easy to check problems. So one example is a problem that goes back to the mathematician Gauss, who was interested in factoring large numbers. So we know what a number is prime if it cannot be written as the product of two or more numbers unequal to one. So if we can factor a number like 91, it's seven times 13. But if I give you 20 digit or 30 digit numbers, you're probably gonna be at a loss to have any idea whether they can be factored. So the problem of factoring very large numbers does not appear to have an efficient solution. But once you have found the factors, expressed the number as a product of two smaller numbers, you can quickly verify that they are factors of the number. And your intuition is a lot of people finding, a lot of brilliant people have tried to find algorithms for this one particular problem. There's many others like it that are really well studied and it would be great to find an efficient algorithm for. Right, and in fact, we have some results that I was instrumental in obtaining following up on work by the mathematician Stephen Cook to show that within the class NP of easy to check problems, easy to check problems, there's a huge number that are equivalent in the sense that either all of them or none of them lie in P. And this happens only if P is equal to NP. So if P is unequal to NP, we would also know that virtually all the standard combinatorial problems, virtually all the standard combinatorial problems, if P is unequal to NP, none of them can be solved in polynomial time. Can you explain how that's possible to tie together so many problems in a nice bunch that if one is proven to be efficient, then all are? The first and most important stage of progress was a result by Stephen Cook who showed that a certain problem called the satisfiability problem of propositional logic is as hard as any problem in the class P. So the propositional logic problem is expressed in terms of expressions involving the logical operations and, or, and not operating on variables that can be either true or false. So an instance of the problem would be some formula involving and, or, and not. And the question would be whether there is an assignment of truth values to the variables in the problem that would make the formula true. So for example, if I take the formula A or B and A or not B and not A or B and not A or not B and take the conjunction of all four of those so called expressions, you can determine that no assignment of truth values to the variables A and B will allow that conjunction of what are called clauses to be true. So that's an example of a formula in propositional logic involving expressions based on the operations and, or, and not. That's an example of a problem which is not satisfiable. There is no solution that satisfies all of those constraints. I mean that's like one of the cleanest and fundamental problems in computer science. It's like a nice statement of a really hard problem. It's a nice statement of a really hard problem and what Cook showed is that every problem in NP can be reexpressed as an instance of the satisfiability problem. So to do that, he used the observation that a very simple abstract machine called the Turing machine can be used to describe any algorithm. An algorithm for any realistic computer can be translated into an equivalent algorithm on one of these Turing machines which are extremely simple. So a Turing machine, there's a tape and you can Yeah, you have data on a tape and you have basic instructions, a finite list of instructions which say, if you're reading a particular symbol on the tape and you're in a particular state, then you can move to a different state and change the state of the number or the element that you were looking at, the cell of the tape that you were looking at. And that was like a metaphor and a mathematical construct that Turing put together to represent all possible computation. All possible computation. Now, one of these so called Turing machines is too simple to be useful in practice, but for theoretical purposes, we can depend on the fact that an algorithm for any computer can be translated into one that would run on a Turing machine. And then using that fact, he could sort of describe any possible non deterministic polynomial time algorithm. Any algorithm for a problem in NP could be expressed as a sequence of moves of the Turing machine described in terms of reading a symbol on the tape while you're in a given state and moving to a new state and leaving behind a new symbol. And given that fact that any non deterministic polynomial time algorithm can be described by a list of such instructions, you could translate the problem into the language of the satisfiability problem. Is that amazing to you, by the way, if you take yourself back when you were first thinking about the space of problems? How amazing is that? It's astonishing. When you look at Cook's proof, it's not too difficult to sort of figure out why this is so, but the implications are staggering. It tells us that this, of all the problems in NP, all the problems where solutions are easy to check, they can all be rewritten in terms of the satisfiability problem. Yeah, it's adding so much more weight to the P equals NP question because all it takes is to show that one algorithm in this class. So the P versus NP can be re expressed as simply asking whether the satisfiability problem of propositional logic is solvable in polynomial time. But there's more. I encountered Cook's paper when he published it in a conference in 1971. Yeah, so when I saw Cook's paper and saw this reduction of each of the problems in NP by a uniform method to the satisfiability problem of propositional logic, that meant that the satisfiability problem was a universal combinatorial problem. And it occurred to me through experience I had had in trying to solve other combinatorial problems that there were many other problems which seemed to have that universal structure. And so I began looking for reductions from the satisfiability to other problems. And one of the other problems would be the so called integer programming problem of determining whether there's a solution to a set of linear inequalities involving integer variables. Just like linear programming, but there's a constraint that the variables must remain integers. In fact, must be the zero or one could only take on those values. And that makes the problem much harder. Yes, that makes the problem much harder. And it was not difficult to show that the satisfiability problem can be restated as an integer programming problem. So can you pause on that? Was that one of the first mappings that you tried to do? And how hard is that mapping? You said it wasn't hard to show, but that's a big leap. It is a big leap, yeah. Well, let me give you another example. Another problem in NP is whether a graph contains a clique of a given size. And now the question is, can we reduce the propositional logic problem to the problem of whether there's a clique of a certain size? Well, if you look at the propositional logic problem, it can be expressed as a number of clauses, each of which is a, of the form A or B or C, where A is either one of the variables in the problem or the negation of one of the variables. And an instance of the propositional logic problem can be rewritten using operations of Boolean logic, can be rewritten as the conjunction of a set of clauses, the AND of a set of ORs, where each clause is a disjunction, an OR of variables or negated variables. So the question in the satisfiability problem is whether those clauses can be simultaneously satisfied. Now, to satisfy all those clauses, you have to find one of the terms in each clause, which is going to be true in your truth assignment, but you can't make the same variable both true and false. So if you have the variable A in one clause and you want to satisfy that clause by making A true, you can't also make the complement of A true in some other clause. And so the goal is to make every single clause true if it's possible to satisfy this, and the way you make it true is at least... One term in the clause must be true. Got it. So now we, to convert this problem to something called the independent set problem, where you're just sort of asking for a set of vertices in a graph such that no two of them are adjacent, sort of the opposite of the clique problem. So we've seen that we can now express that as finding a set of terms, one in each clause, without picking both the variable and the negation of that variable, because if the variable is assigned the truth value, the negated variable has to have the opposite truth value. And so we can construct a graph where the vertices are the terms in all of the clauses, and you have an edge between two terms if an edge between two occurrences of terms, either if they're both in the same clause, because you're only picking one element from each clause, and also an edge between them if they represent opposite values of the same variable, because you can't make a variable both true and false. And so you get a graph where you have all of these occurrences of variables, you have edges, which mean that you're not allowed to choose both ends of the edge, either because they're in the same clause or they're negations of one another. All right, and that's a, first of all, sort of to zoom out, that's a really powerful idea that you can take a graph and connect it to a logic equation somehow, and do that mapping for all possible formulations of a particular problem on a graph. Yeah. I mean, that still is hard for me to believe. Yeah, it's hard for me to believe. It's hard for me to believe that that's possible. That they're, like, what do you make of that, that there's such a union of, there's such a friendship among all these problems across that somehow are akin to combinatorial algorithms, that they're all somehow related? I know it can be proven, but what do you make of it, that that's true? Well, that they just have the same expressive power. You can take any one of them and translate it into the terms of the other. The fact that they have the same expressive power also somehow means that they can be translatable. Right, and what I did in the 1971 paper was to take 21 fundamental problems, the commonly occurring problems of packing, covering, matching, and so forth, lying in the class NP, and show that the satisfiability problem can be reexpressed as any of those, that any of those have the same expressive power. And that was like throwing down the gauntlet of saying there's probably many more problems like this. Right. Saying that, look, that they're all the same. They're all the same, but not exactly. They're all the same in terms of whether they are rich enough to express any of the others. But that doesn't mean that they have the same computational complexity. But what we can say is that either all of these problems or none of them are solvable in polynomial time. Yeah, so what is NP completeness and NP hard as classes? Oh, that's just a small technicality. So when we're talking about decision problems, that means that the answer is just yes or no. There is a clique of size 15 or there's not a clique of size 15. On the other hand, an optimization problem would be asking find the largest clique. The answer would not be yes or no. It would be 15. So when you're asking for the, when you're putting a valuation on the different solutions and you're asking for the one with the highest valuation, that's an optimization problem. And there's a very close affinity between the two kinds of problems. But the counterpart of being the hardest decision problem, the hardest yes, no problem, the counterpart of that is to minimize or maximize an objective function. And so a problem that's hardest in the class when viewed in terms of optimization, those are called NP hard rather than NP complete. And NP complete is for decision problems. And NP complete is for decision problems. So if somebody shows that P equals NP, what do you think that proof will look like if you were to put on yourself, if it's possible to show that as a proof or to demonstrate an algorithm? All I can say is that it will involve concepts that we do not now have and approaches that we don't have. Do you think those concepts are out there in terms of inside complexity theory, inside of computational analysis of algorithms? Do you think there's concepts that are totally outside of the box that we haven't considered yet? I think that if there is a proof that P is equal to NP or that P is unequal to NP, it'll depend on concepts that are now outside the box. Now, if that's shown either way, P equals NP or P not, well, actually P equals NP, what impact, you kind of mentioned a little bit, but can you linger on it? What kind of impact would it have on theoretical computer science and perhaps software based systems in general? Well, I think it would have enormous impact on the world in either way case. If P is unequal to NP, which is what we expect, then we know that for the great majority of the combinatorial problems that come up, since they're known to be NP complete, we're not going to be able to solve them by efficient algorithms. However, there's a little bit of hope in that it may be that we can solve most instances. All we know is that if a problem is not NP, then it can't be solved efficiently on all instances. But basically, if we find that P is unequal to NP, it will mean that we can't expect always to get the optimal solutions to these problems. And we have to depend on heuristics that perhaps work most of the time or give us good approximate solutions, but not. So we would turn our eye towards the heuristics with a little bit more acceptance and comfort on our hearts. Exactly. Okay, so let me ask a romanticized question. What to you is one of the most or the most beautiful combinatorial algorithm in your own life or just in general in the field that you've ever come across or have developed yourself? Oh, I like the stable matching problem or the stable marriage problem very much. What's the stable matching problem? Yeah. Imagine that you want to marry off N boys with N girls. And each boy has an ordered list of his preferences among the girls. His first choice, his second choice, through her, Nth choice. And each girl also has an ordering of the boys, his first choice, second choice, and so on. And we'll say that a matching, a one to one matching of the boys with the girls is stable if there are no two couples in the matching such that the boy in the first couple prefers the girl in the second couple to her mate and she prefers the boy to her current mate. In other words, if the matching is stable if there is no pair who want to run away with each other leaving their partners behind. Gosh, yeah. Yeah. Actually, this is relevant to matching residents with hospitals and some other real life problems, although not quite in the form that I described. So it turns out that there is, for any set of preferences, a stable matching exists. And moreover, it can be computed by a simple algorithm in which each boy starts making proposals to girls. And if the girl receives the proposal, she accepts it tentatively, but she can drop it later if she gets a better proposal from her point of view. And the boys start going down their lists proposing to their first, second, third choices until stopping when a proposal is accepted. But the girls meanwhile are watching the proposals that are coming into them. And the girl will drop her current partner if she gets a better proposal. And the boys never go back through the list? They never go back, yeah. So once they've been denied. They don't try again. They don't try again because the girls are always improving their status as they receive better and better proposals. The boys are going down their lists starting with their top preferences. And one can prove that the process will come to an end where everybody will get matched with somebody and you won't have any pair that want to abscond from each other. Do you find the proof or the algorithm itself beautiful? Or is it the fact that with the simplicity of just the two marching, I mean the simplicity of the underlying rule of the algorithm, is that the beautiful part? Both I would say. And you also have the observation that you might ask who is better off, the boys who are doing the proposing or the girls who are reacting to proposals. And it turns out that it's the boys who are doing the best. That is, each boy is doing at least as well as he could do in any other staple matching. So there's a sort of lesson for the boys that you should go out and be proactive and make those proposals. Go for broke. I don't know if this is directly mappable philosophically to our society, but certainly seems like a compelling notion. And like you said, there's probably a lot of actual real world problems that this could be mapped to. Yeah, well you get complications. For example, what happens when a husband and wife want to be assigned to the same hospital? So you have to take those constraints into account. And then the problem becomes NP hard. Why is it a problem for the husband and wife to be assigned to the same hospital? No, it's desirable. Or at least go to the same city. So you can't, if you're assigning residents to hospitals. And then you have some preferences for the husband and the wife or for the hospitals. The residents have their own preferences. Residents both male and female have their own preferences. The hospitals have their preferences. But if resident A, the boy, is going to Philadelphia, then you'd like his wife also to be assigned to a hospital in Philadelphia. Which step makes it a NP hard problem that you mentioned? The fact that you have this additional constraint. That it's not just the preferences of individuals, but the fact that the two partners to a marriage have to be assigned to the same place. I'm being a little dense. The perfect matching, no, not the perfect, stable matching is what you referred to. That's when two partners are trying to. Okay, what's confusing you is that in the first interpretation of the problem, I had boys matching with girls. Yes. In the second interpretation, you have humans matching with institutions. With institutions. I, and there's a coupling between within the, gotcha, within the humans. Yeah. Any added little constraint will make it an NP hard problem. Well, yeah. Okay. By the way, the algorithm you mentioned wasn't one of yours or no? No, no, that was due to Gale and Shapley and my friend David Gale passed away before he could get part of a Nobel Prize, but his partner Shapley shared in a Nobel Prize with somebody else for. Economics? For economics. For ideas stemming from the stable matching idea. So you've also have developed yourself some elegant, beautiful algorithms. Again, picking your children, so the Robin Karp algorithm for string searching, pattern matching, Edmund Karp algorithm for max flows we mentioned, Hopcroft Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings in bipartite graphs. Is there ones that stand out to you, ones you're most proud of or just whether it's beauty, elegance, or just being the right discovery development in your life that you're especially proud of? I like the Rabin Karp algorithm because it illustrates the power of randomization. So the problem there is to decide whether a given long string of symbols is to decide whether a given long string of symbols from some alphabet contains a given word, whether a particular word occurs within some very much longer word. And so the idea of the algorithm is to associate with the word that we're looking for, a fingerprint, some number, or some combinatorial object that describes that word, and then to look for an occurrence of that same fingerprint as you slide along the longer word. And what we do is we associate with each word a number. So first of all, we think of the letters that occur in a word as the digits of, let's say, decimal or whatever base here, whatever number of different symbols there are. That's the base of the numbers, yeah. Right, so every word can then be thought of as a number with the letters being the digits of that number. And then we pick a random prime number in a certain range, and we take that word viewed as a number, and take the remainder on dividing that number by the prime. So coming up with a nice hash function. It's a kind of hash function. Yeah, it gives you a little shortcut for that particular word. Yeah, so that's the... It's very different than other algorithms of its kind that we're trying to do search, string matching. Yeah, which usually are combinatorial and don't involve the idea of taking a random fingerprint. Yes. And doing the fingerprinting has two advantages. One is that as we slide along the long word, digit by digit, we keep a window of a certain size, the size of the word we're looking for, and we compute the fingerprint of every stretch of that length. And it turns out that just a couple of arithmetic operations will take you from the fingerprint of one part to what you get when you slide over by one position. So the computation of all the fingerprints is simple. And secondly, it's unlikely if the prime is chosen randomly from a certain range that you will get two of the segments in question having the same fingerprint. Right. And so there's a small probability of error which can be checked after the fact, and also the ease of doing the computation because you're working with these fingerprints which are remainder's modulo some big prime. So that's the magical thing about randomized algorithms is that if you add a little bit of randomness, it somehow allows you to take a pretty naive approach, a simple looking approach, and allow it to run extremely well. So can you maybe take a step back and say what is a randomized algorithm, this category of algorithms? Well, it's just the ability to draw a random number from such, from some range or to associate a random number with some object or to draw that random from some set. So another example is very simple if we're conducting a presidential election and we would like to pick the winner. In principle, we could draw a random sample of all of the voters in the country. And if it was of substantial size, say a few thousand, then the most popular candidate in that group would be very likely to be the correct choice that would come out of counting all the millions of votes. And of course we can't do this because first of all, everybody has to feel that his or her vote counted. And secondly, we can't really do a purely random sample from that population. And I guess thirdly, there could be a tie in which case we wouldn't have a significant difference between two candidates. But those things aside, if you didn't have all that messiness of human beings, you could prove that that kind of random picking would come up again. You just said random picking would solve the problem with a very low probability of error. Another example is testing whether a number is prime. So if I wanna test whether 17 is prime, I could pick any number between one and 17, raise it to the 16th power modulo 17, and you should get back the original number. That's a famous formula due to Fermat about, it's called Fermat's Little Theorem, that if you take any number a in the range zero through n minus one, and raise it to the n minus 1th power modulo n, you'll get back the number a if a is prime. So if you don't get back the number a, that's a proof that a number is not prime. And you can show that suitably defined the probability that you will get a value unequaled, you will get a violation of Fermat's result is very high. And so this gives you a way of rapidly proving that a number is not prime. It's a little more complicated than that because there are certain values of n where something a little more elaborate has to be done, but that's the basic idea. Taking an identity that holds for primes, and therefore, if it ever fails on any instance for a non prime, you know that the number is not prime. It's a quick choice, a fast choice, fast proof that a number is not prime. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit more what's your intuition why randomness works so well and results in such simple algorithms? Well, the example of conducting an election where you could take, in theory, you could take a sample and depend on the validity of the sample to really represent the whole is just the basic fact of statistics, which gives a lot of opportunities. And I actually exploited that sort of random sampling idea in designing an algorithm for counting the number of solutions that satisfy a particular formula and propositional logic. A particular, so some version of the satisfiability problem? A version of the satisfiability problem. Is there some interesting insight that you wanna elaborate on, like what some aspect of that algorithm that might be useful to describe? So you have a collection of formulas and you want to count the number of solutions that satisfy at least one of the formulas. And you can count the number of solutions that satisfy any particular one of the formulas, but you have to account for the fact that that solution might be counted many times if it solves more than one of the formulas. And so what you do is you sample from the formulas according to the number of solutions that satisfy each individual one. In that way, you draw a random solution, but then you correct by looking at the number of formulas that satisfy that random solution and don't double count. So you can think of it this way. So you have a matrix of zeros and ones and you wanna know how many columns of that matrix contain at least one one. And you can count in each row how many ones there are. So what you can do is draw from the rows according to the number of ones. If a row has more ones, it gets drawn more frequently. But then if you draw from that row, you have to go up the column and looking at where that same one is repeated in different rows and only count it as a success or a hit if it's the earliest row that contains the one. And that gives you a robust statistical estimate of the total number of columns that contain at least one of the ones. So that is an example of the same principle that was used in studying random sampling. Another viewpoint is that if you have a phenomenon that occurs almost all the time, then if you sample one of the occasions where it occurs, you're most likely to, and you're looking for an occurrence, a random occurrence is likely to work. So that comes up in solving identities, solving algebraic identities. You get two formulas that may look very different. You wanna know if they're really identical. What you can do is just pick a random value and evaluate the formulas at that value and see if they agree. And you depend on the fact that if the formulas are distinct, then they're gonna disagree a lot. And so therefore, a random choice will exhibit the disagreement. If there are many ways for the two to disagree and you only need to find one disagreement, then random choice is likely to yield it. And in general, so we've just talked about randomized algorithms, but we can look at the probabilistic analysis of algorithms. And that gives us an opportunity to step back and as you said, everything we've been talking about is worst case analysis. Could you maybe comment on the usefulness and the power of worst case analysis versus best case analysis, average case, probabilistic? How do we think about the future of theoretical computer science, computer science in the kind of analysis we do of algorithms? Does worst case analysis still have a place, an important place? Or do we want to try to move forward towards kind of average case analysis? And what are the challenges there? So if worst case analysis shows that an algorithm is always good, that's fine. If worst case analysis is used to show that the problem, that the solution is not always good, then you have to step back and do something else to ask how often will you get a good solution? Just to pause on that for a second, that's so beautifully put because I think we tend to judge algorithms. We throw them in the trash the moment their worst case is shown to be bad. Right, and that's unfortunate. I think a good example is going back to the satisfiability problem. There are very powerful programs called SAT solvers which in practice fairly reliably solve instances with many millions of variables that arise in digital design or in proving programs correct in other applications. And so in many application areas, even though satisfiability as we've already discussed is NP complete, the SAT solvers will work so well that the people in that discipline tend to think of satisfiability as an easy problem. So in other words, just for some reason that we don't entirely understand, the instances that people formulate in designing digital circuits or other applications are such that satisfiability is not hard to check and even searching for a satisfying solution can be done efficiently in practice. And there are many examples. For example, we talked about the traveling salesman problem. So just to refresh our memories, the problem is you've got a set of cities, you have pairwise distances between cities and you want to find a tour through all the cities that minimizes the total cost of all the edges traversed, all the trips between cities. The problem is NP hard, but people using integer programming codes together with some other mathematical tricks can solve geometric instances of the problem where the cities are, let's say points in the plane and get optimal solutions to problems with tens of thousands of cities. Actually, it'll take a few computer months to solve a problem of that size, but for problems of size a thousand or two, it'll rapidly get optimal solutions, provably optimal solutions, even though again, we know that it's unlikely that the traveling salesman problem can be solved in polynomial time. Are there methodologies like rigorous systematic methodologies for, you said in practice. In practice, this algorithm's pretty good. Are there systematic ways of saying in practice, this algorithm's pretty good? So in other words, average case analysis. Or you've also mentioned that average case kind of requires you to understand what the typical case is, typical instances, and that might be really difficult. That's very difficult. So after I did my original work on showing all these problems through NP complete, I looked around for a way to shed some positive light on combinatorial algorithms. And what I tried to do was to study problems, behavior on the average or with high probability. But I had to make some assumptions about what's the probability space? What's the sample space? What do we mean by typical problems? That's very hard to say. So I took the easy way out and made some very simplistic assumptions. So I assumed, for example, that if we were generating a graph with a certain number of vertices and edges, then we would generate the graph by simply choosing one edge at a time at random until we got the right number of edges. That's a particular model of random graphs that has been studied mathematically a lot. And within that model, I could prove all kinds of wonderful things, I and others who also worked on this. So we could show that we know exactly how many edges there have to be in order for there be a so called Hamiltonian circuit. That's a cycle that visits each vertex exactly once. We know that if the number of edges is a little bit more than n log n, where n is the number of vertices, then such a cycle is very likely to exist. And we can give a heuristic that will find it with high probability. And the community in which I was working got a lot of results along these lines. But the field tended to be rather lukewarm about accepting these results as meaningful because we were making such a simplistic assumption about the kinds of graphs that we would be dealing with. So we could show all kinds of wonderful things, it was a great playground, I enjoyed doing it. But after a while, I concluded that it didn't have a lot of bite in terms of the practical application. Oh the, okay, so there's too much into the world of toy problems. Yeah. That can, okay. But all right, is there a way to find nice representative real world impactful instances of a problem on which demonstrate that an algorithm is good? So this is kind of like the machine learning world, that's kind of what they at his best tries to do is find a data set from like the real world and show the performance, all the conferences are all focused on beating the performance of on that real world data set. Is there an equivalent in complexity analysis? Not really, Don Knuth started to collect examples of graphs coming from various places. So he would have a whole zoo of different graphs that he could choose from and he could study the performance of algorithms on different types of graphs. But there it's really important and compelling to be able to define a class of graphs. The actual act of defining a class of graphs that you're interested in, it seems to be a non trivial step if we're talking about instances that we should care about in the real world. Yeah, there's nothing available there that would be analogous to the training set for supervised learning where you sort of assume that the world has given you a bunch of examples to work with. We don't really have that for problems, for combinatorial problems on graphs and networks. You know, there's been a huge growth, a big growth of data sets available. Do you think some aspect of theoretical computer science might be contradicting my own question while saying it, but will there be some aspect, an empirical aspect of theoretical computer science which will allow the fact that these data sets are huge, we'll start using them for analysis. Sort of, you know, if you want to say something about a graph algorithm, you might take a social network like Facebook and looking at subgraphs of that and prove something about the Facebook graph and be respected, and at the same time, be respected in the theoretical computer science community. That hasn't been achieved yet, I'm afraid. Is that P equals NP, is that impossible? Is it impossible to publish a successful paper in the theoretical computer science community that shows some performance on a real world data set? Or is that really just those are two different worlds? They haven't really come together. I would say that there is a field of experimental algorithmics where people, sometimes they're given some family of examples. Sometimes they just generate them at random and they report on performance, but there's no convincing evidence that the sample is representative of anything at all. So let me ask, in terms of breakthroughs and open problems, what are the most compelling open problems to you and what possible breakthroughs do you see in the near term in terms of theoretical computer science? Well, there are all kinds of relationships among complexity classes that can be studied, just to mention one thing, I wrote a paper with Richard Lipton in 1979, where we asked the following question. If you take a combinatorial problem in NP, let's say, and you choose, and you pick the size of the problem, say it's a traveling salesman problem, but of size 52, and you ask, could you get an efficient, a small Boolean circuit tailored for that size, 52, where you could feed the edges of the graph in as Boolean inputs and get, as an output, the question of whether or not there's a tour of a certain length. And that would, in other words, briefly, what you would say in that case is that the problem has small circuits, polynomial size circuits. Now, we know that if P is equal to NP, then, in fact, these problems will have small circuits, but what about the converse? Could a problem have small circuits, meaning that an algorithm tailored to any particular size could work well, and yet not be a polynomial time algorithm? That is, you couldn't write it as a single, uniform algorithm, good for all sizes. Just to clarify, small circuits for a problem of particular size, by small circuits for a problem of particular size, or even further constraint, small circuit for a particular... No, for all the inputs of that size. Is that a trivial problem for a particular instance? So, coming up, an automated way of coming up with a circuit. I guess that's just an answer. That would be hard, yeah. But there's the existential question. Everybody talks nowadays about existential questions. Existential challenges. You could ask the question, does the Hamiltonian circuit problem have a small circuit for every size, for each size, a different small circuit? In other words, could you tailor solutions depending on the size, and get polynomial size? Even if P is not equal to NP. Right. That would be fascinating if that's true. Yeah, what we proved is that if that were possible, then something strange would happen in complexity theory. Some high level class which I could briefly describe, something strange would happen. So, I'll take a stab at describing what I mean. Sure, let's go there. So, we have to define this hierarchy in which the first level of the hierarchy is P, and the second level is NP. And what is NP? NP involves statements of the form there exists a something such that something holds. So, for example, there exists the coloring such that a graph can be colored with only that number of colors. Or there exists a Hamiltonian circuit. There's a statement about this graph. Yeah, so the NP deals with statements of that kind, that there exists a solution. Now, you could imagine a more complicated expression which says for all x there exists a y such that some proposition holds involving both x and y. So, that would say, for example, in game theory, for all strategies for the first player, there exists a strategy for the second player such that the first player wins. That would be at the second level of the hierarchy. The third level would be there exists an A such that for all B there exists a C, that something holds. And you could imagine going higher and higher in the hierarchy. And you'd expect that the complexity classes that correspond to those different cases would get bigger and bigger. What do you mean by bigger and bigger? Sorry, sorry. They'd get harder and harder to solve. Harder and harder, right. Harder and harder to solve. And what Lipton and I showed was that if NP had small circuits, then this hierarchy would collapse down to the second level. In other words, you wouldn't get any more mileage by complicating your expressions with three quantifiers or four quantifiers or any number. I'm not sure what to make of that exactly. Well, I think it would be evidence that NP doesn't have small circuits because something so bizarre would happen. But again, it's only evidence, not proof. Well, yeah, that's not even evidence because you're saying P is not equal to NP because something bizarre has to happen. I mean, that's proof by the lack of bizarreness in our science. But it seems like just the very notion of P equals NP would be bizarre. So any way you arrive at, there's no way. You have to fight the dragon at some point. Yeah, okay. Well, anyway, for whatever it's worth, that's what we proved. Awesome. So that's a potential space of interesting problems. Yeah. Let me ask you about this other world that of machine learning, of deep learning. What's your thoughts on the history and the current progress of machine learning field that's often progressed sort of separately as a space of ideas and space of people than the theoretical computer science or just even computer science world? Yeah, it's really very different from the theoretical computer science world because the results about it, algorithmic performance tend to be empirical. It's more akin to the world of SAT solvers where we observe that for formulas arising in practice, the solver does well. So it's of that type. We're moving into the empirical evaluation of algorithms. Now, it's clear that there've been huge successes in image processing, robotics, natural language processing, a little less so, but across the spectrum of game playing is another one. There've been great successes and one of those effects is that it's not too hard to become a millionaire if you can get a reputation in machine learning and there'll be all kinds of companies that will be willing to offer you the moon because they think that if they have AI at their disposal, then they can solve all kinds of problems. But there are limitations. One is that the solutions that you get to supervise learning problems through convolutional neural networks seem to perform amazingly well even for inputs that are outside the training set. But we don't have any theoretical understanding of why that's true. Secondly, the solutions, the networks that you get are very hard to understand and so very little insight comes out. So yeah, yeah, they may seem to work on your training set and you may be able to discover whether your photos occur in a different sample of inputs or not, but we don't really know what's going on. We don't know the features that distinguish the photographs or the objects are not easy to characterize. Well, it's interesting because you mentioned coming up with a small circuit to solve a particular size problem. It seems that neural networks are kind of small circuits. In a way, yeah. But they're not programs. Sort of like the things you've designed are algorithms, programs, algorithms. Neural networks aren't able to develop algorithms to solve a problem. Well, they are algorithms. It's just that they're... But sort of, yeah, it could be a semantic question, but there's not a algorithmic style manipulation of the input. Perhaps you could argue there is. Yeah, well. It feels a lot more like a function of the input. Yeah, it's a function. It's a computable function. Once you have the network, you can simulate it on a given input and figure out the output. But if you're trying to recognize images, then you don't know what features of the image are really being determinant of what the circuit is doing. The circuit is sort of very intricate and it's not clear that the simple characteristics that you're looking for, the edges of the objects or whatever they may be, they're not emerging from the structure of the circuit. Well, it's not clear to us humans, but it's clear to the circuit. Yeah, well, right. I mean, it's not clear to sort of the elephant how the human brain works, but it's clear to us humans, we can explain to each other our reasoning and that's why the cognitive science and psychology field exists. Maybe the whole thing of being explainable to humans is a little bit overrated. Oh, maybe, yeah. I guess you can say the same thing about our brain that when we perform acts of cognition, we have no idea how we do it really. We do though, I mean, at least for the visual system, the auditory system and so on, we do get some understanding of the principles that they operate under, but for many deeper cognitive tasks, we don't have that. That's right. Let me ask, you've also been doing work on bioinformatics. Does it amaze you that the fundamental building blocks? So if we take a step back and look at us humans, the building blocks used by evolution to build us intelligent human beings is all contained there in our DNA. It's amazing and what's really amazing is that we are beginning to learn how to edit DNA, which is very, very, very fascinating. This ability to take a sequence, find it in the genome and do something to it. I mean, that's really taking our biological systems towards the world of algorithms. Yeah, but it raises a lot of questions. You have to distinguish between doing it on an individual or doing it on somebody's germline, which means that all of their descendants will be affected. So that's like an ethical. Yeah, so it raises very severe ethical questions. And even doing it on individuals, there's a lot of hubris involved that you can assume that knocking out a particular gene is gonna be beneficial because you don't know what the side effects are going to be. So we have this wonderful new world of gene editing, which is very, very impressive and it could be used in agriculture, it could be used in medicine in various ways. But very serious ethical problems arise. What are to you the most interesting places where algorithms, sort of the ethical side is an exceptionally challenging thing that I think we're going to have to tackle with all of genetic engineering. But on the algorithmic side, there's a lot of benefit that's possible. So is there areas where you see exciting possibilities for algorithms to help model, optimize, study biological systems? Yeah, I mean, we can certainly analyze genomic data to figure out which genes are operative in the cell and under what conditions and which proteins affect one another, which proteins physically interact. We can sequence proteins and modify them. Is there some aspect of that that's a computer science problem or is that still fundamentally a biology problem? Well, it's a big data, it's a statistical big data problem for sure. So the biological data sets are increasing, our ability to study our ancestry, to study the tendencies towards disease, to personalize treatment according to what's in our genomes and what tendencies for disease we have, to be able to predict what troubles might come upon us in the future and anticipate them, to understand whether you, for a woman, whether her proclivity for breast cancer is so strong enough that she would want to take action to avoid it. You dedicate your 1985 Turing Award lecture to the memory of your father. What's your fondest memory of your dad? Seeing him standing in front of a class at the blackboard, drawing perfect circles by hand and showing his ability to attract the interest of the motley collection of eighth grade students that he was teaching. When did you get a chance to see him draw the perfect circles? On rare occasions, I would get a chance to sneak into his classroom and observe him. And I think he was at his best in the classroom. I think he really came to life and had fun, not only teaching, but engaging in chit chat with the students and ingratiating himself with the students. And what I inherited from that is the great desire to be a teacher. I retired recently and a lot of my former students came, students with whom I had done research or who had read my papers or who had been in my classes. And when they talked about me, they talked not about my 1979 paper or 1992 paper, but about what came away in my classes. And not just the details, but just the approach and the manner of teaching. And so I sort of take pride in the, at least in my early years as a faculty member at Berkeley, I was exemplary in preparing my lectures and I always came in prepared to the teeth, and able therefore to deviate according to what happened in the class, and to really provide a model for the students. So is there advice you can give out for others on how to be a good teacher? So preparation is one thing you've mentioned, being exceptionally well prepared, but there are other things, pieces of advice that you can impart? Well, the top three would be preparation, preparation, and preparation. Why is preparation so important, I guess? It's because it gives you the ease to deal with any situation that comes up in the classroom. And if you discover that you're not getting through one way, you can do it another way. If the students have questions, you can handle the questions. Ultimately, you're also feeling the crowd, the students of what they're struggling with, what they're picking up, just looking at them through the questions, but even just through their eyes. Yeah, that's right. And because of the preparation, you can dance. You can dance, you can say it another way, or give it another angle. Are there, in particular, ideas and algorithms of computer science that you find were big aha moments for students, where they, for some reason, once they got it, it clicked for them and they fell in love with computer science? Or is it individual, is it different for everybody? It's different for everybody. You have to work differently with students. Some of them just don't need much influence. They're just running with what they're doing and they just need an ear now and then. Others need a little prodding. Others need to be persuaded to collaborate among themselves rather than working alone. They have their personal ups and downs, so you have to deal with each student as a human being and bring out the best. Humans are complicated. Yeah. Perhaps a silly question. If you could relive a moment in your life outside of family because it made you truly happy, or perhaps because it changed the direction of your life in a profound way, what moment would you pick? I was kind of a lazy student as an undergraduate, and even in my first year in graduate school. And I think it was when I started doing research, I had a couple of summer jobs where I was able to contribute and I had an idea. And then there was one particular course on mathematical methods and operations research where I just gobbled up the material and I scored 20 points higher than anybody else in the class then came to the attention of the faculty. And it made me realize that I had some ability that I was going somewhere. You realize you're pretty good at this thing. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Richard. It was a huge honor. Thank you for decades of incredible work. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you, it's been a great pleasure. You're a superb interviewer. I'll stop it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Karp. And thank you to our sponsors, 8sleep and Cash App. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to 8sleep.com slash Lex to check out their awesome mattress and downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast. Click the links, buy the stuff, even just visiting the site but also considering the purchase. Helps them know that this podcast is worth supporting in the future. It really is the best way to support this journey I'm on. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman if you can figure out how to spell that. And now let me leave you with some words from Isaac Asimov. I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Richard Karp: Algorithms and Computational Complexity | Lex Fridman Podcast #111

The following is a conversation with Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics, including the magnetic confinement of plasmas, seeking to enable fusion reactions, which happens to be the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors, by the way, are based on fission, as we discuss. Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion, arguing in particular against scientism, which is a negative description of the overreach of the scientific method to questions not amenable to it. On this latter topic, I recommend two of his books, his new one, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?, where he answers more than 200 questions on all aspects of God and science, and his earlier book on scientism called Monopolizing Knowledge. As you may have seen already, I work hard on having an open mind, always questioning my assumptions, and in general marvel at the immense mystery of everything around us and the limitations of at least my mind. I'm not religious myself in that I don't go to the synagogue, a church, a mosque, but I see the beautiful bond in the community that religion at its best can create. I also see, both in scientist and religious leaders, signs of arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and a will to power. We're human. Whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist, this podcast is my humble attempt to explore a complicated human nature. What Stanislav Lem in his book Solaris called our own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers. I ask that you try to keep an open mind as well and be patient with the limitations of mind. Quick summary of the ads. Two new amazing sponsors, Sunbasket and Powerdot. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to sunbasket.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout and go into powerdot.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout as well. Click the links, buy the stuff if you like. Just visiting the site and considering the purchase is really the best way to support this podcast. It's how they know I sent you, and based on that they might sponsor the podcast in the future. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This show sponsored by Sunbasket. Visit sunbasket.com slash lex and use code lex to get 35 bucks off your order to support this podcast. Sunbasket delivers fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know, my diet is pretty minimalist, so it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. They make it super easy, with everything preportioned and ready to prep and cook. You can enjoy a delicious, healthy dinner in as little as 15 minutes. I just ordered my first set of meals. Haven't gotten them yet, but I can't wait. I just finished the 6 mile run and 1000 bodyweight reps and I'm starving, but let me risk listing the actual menu items that I ordered because they sound delicious. Italian sausages and vegetable skewers with two romescos. I don't actually know what romescos are, but the pictures looked awesome. And pork fried cauliflower rice with carrots and peas. By the way, cauliflower rice is one of my favorite things ever. Right now, Sunbasket is offering $35 off your order when you go right now to sunbasket.com slash lex. They told me to say right now, with urgency, so pause this podcast and go to the website and make the purchase, or just go to the website and check it out. And enter a promo code LEX at checkout. This show is also sponsored by Power Dot. Get it at powerdot.com slash lex and use code LEX at checkout to get 20% off and to support this podcast. This thing is amazing. It's an eStim electrical stimulation device that I've been using a lot for muscle recovery recently, mostly for my shoulders and legs as I've been doing the 1000 bodyweight reps and 6 miles every day as I just finished. They call it the smart muscle stimulator, which is true, since the app that goes with it is amazing. It has 15 programs for different body parts and guides you through everything you need to do. I take recovery really seriously these days and Power Dot has been a powerful addition to the whole regime of stretching, ice, massage, and sleep and diet that I do. It's used by professional athletes and by slightly insane but mostly normal people like me. It's portable so you can throw it in a bag and bring it anywhere. Get it at powerdot.com slash lex and use code LEX at checkout to get 20% off on top of the 30 day free trial and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Ian Hutchinson. Maybe it'd be nice to draw a distinction between nuclear physics and plasma physics. What is the distinction? Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus. And my department, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, is very concerned about all the interactions and reactions and consequences of things that go on in the nucleus, including nuclear energy, fission energy, which is the nuclear energy that we have already, and fusion energy, which is the energy source of the sun and stars, which we don't quite know how to turn into practical energy for humankind at the moment. That's what my research has mostly been aimed at. But plasmas are essentially the fourth state of matter. So if you think about solid, liquid, gas, plasma is the fourth of those states of matter. And it's actually the state of matter which one reaches if one raises the temperature. So cold things, you know, like ice are solid. Liquids are hotter water. And if you heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes gas. Well, that's true of most substances. And plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are unbound from the nuclei. So they become separate from the nuclei and can move separately. So we have positively charged nuclei and we have negatively charged electrons. The net is still electrically neutral. But a plasma conducts electricity, has all sorts of important properties that are associated with that separation. And that's what plasmas are all about. And the reason why my department is interested in plasma physics very strongly is because most things, well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma. The vast majority of matter in the universe is plasma. But most particularly, stars and the sun are plasmas because they're very hot. And it's only in very hot states that nuclear fusion reactions take place. And we want to understand how to implement those kind of phenomena on Earth. Maybe another distinction we want to try to get at is the difference between fission and fusion. So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction happening in the sun. So what's fission and what's fusion? Well, fission is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up. And it turns out that that process of breaking up heavy elements releases energy. What does it mean to be a heavy element? It means that there are many nuclear particles in the nucleus itself, neutrons and protons in the nucleus itself so that in the case of uranium, there are 92 protons in each nucleus and even more neutrons so that the total number of nucleons in the nucleus, nucleons is short for either a proton or a neutron, the total number might be 235, that's U235, or it might be 238, that's U238. So those are heavy elements. Light elements, by contrast, have very few nucleons, protons or neutrons in the nucleus. Hydrogen is the lightest nucleus. It has one proton. There are actually slightly heavier forms of hydrogen, isotopes. Deuterium has a proton and a neutron and tritium has a proton and two neutrons. So it has a total of three nucleons in the nucleus. While taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen and not breaking them up but actually fusing them together, reacting them together to produce heavier elements, typically helium, which is helium is a nucleus which has two protons and two neutrons, that also releases energy and that or reactions like that, making heavier elements from lighter elements is what mostly powers the sun and stars. Both fusion and fission release approximately a million times more energy per unit mass than chemical reactions. So a chemical reaction means take hydrogen, take oxygen, react them together, let's say, and get water, that releases energy. The energy released in a chemical reaction like that or the burning of coal or on oil or whatever else is about a million times less per unit mass than what is released in nuclear reactions. So but it's hard to do. It requires very high energy of impact. And actually, it's very easy to understand why. And that is that those two nuclei, if they're both, let's say, hydrogen nuclei, one is, let's say, deuterium and the other is, let's say, tritium, they're both electrically charged. And they're positively charged, so they like charges repel. Everyone knows that, right? So basically, to get them close enough together to react, you have to overcome the repulsion, the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another. And you have to get them extremely close to one another in order for the nuclear forces to overtake the electrical forces and actually form a new nucleus. And so one requires very high energies of impact in order for reactions to take place. And those high energies of impact correspond to very high temperatures of random motion. So that's why you can do something like that in the sun. So we can build the sun. That's one way to do it. But on Earth, how do you create a fusion reaction? Yeah. Well, nature's. Engineering wise. Nature's fusion reactors are indeed the stars, and they are very hot in the center. And they reach the point where they release more energy from those reactions than they lose by radiation and transport to the surface and so forth. And that's a state of ignition. And that's what we have to achieve to give net energy. That's like lighting a fire. If you have a bundle of sticks and you hold a match up to it and you see smoke coming from the sticks, but you take the match away and the sticks just fizzle out. That's not the reason they fizzled out is that, yes, they were burning, there was smoke coming from them, but they were not ignited. But if you are able to take the match away and they keep burning and they are generating enough heat to keep themselves hot and hence keep the reactions going, that's chemical ignition. But what we need to do, what the stars do in order to generate nuclear fusion energy is they are ignited. They are generated enough energy to keep themselves hot. And that's what we've got to do on Earth if we're going to make fusion work on Earth. But it's much harder to do on Earth than it is in a star because we need temperatures of order tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order for the reactions to go fast enough to generate enough energy to keep it going. And so if you've got something that's tens of millions of degrees Celsius and you want to keep it all together and keep the heat in long enough to have enough reactions taking place, you can't just put it in a bottle, plastic or glass, it would be gone in milliseconds. So you have to have some nonmaterial mechanism of confining the plasma. In the case of stars, that nonmaterial force is gravity. So gravity is what holds the star together, it's what holds the plasma in long enough for it to react and sustain itself by the fusion reactions. But on Earth, gravity is extremely weak. I mean, I don't mean to say we don't fall, yes, we fall. But the mutual gravitational attraction of small objects is very weak compared with the electrical repulsion or any other force that you can think about on Earth. And so we need a stronger force to keep the plasma together, to confine it. And the predominant attempt at making fusion work on Earth is to use magnetic fields to confine the plasma. And that's what I've worked on for much, essentially most of my career, is to understand how we can and how best we can confine these incredibly hot gases, plasmas, using magnetic fields with the ultimate objective of releasing fusion energy on Earth and generating electricity with it and powering our society with it. A dumb question. So on top of the magnetic fields, do you also need the plastic water bottle walls or is it purely magnetic fields? Well, actually what we do need walls, those walls must be kept away from the plasma because otherwise they'd be melted or the plasma must be kept away from them inside of them. But the main purpose of the walls is not to keep the plasma in, it's to keep the atmosphere out. So if we want to do it on Earth where there's air, we want the plasma to consist of hydrogen isotopes or other things, the things we're trying to react. And by the way, the density of those plasmas, at least in magnetic confinement fusion, is very low. It's maybe a million times less than the density of air in this room. So in order for a fusion reactor like that to work, you have to keep all of the air out and just keep the plasma in. So yes, there are other things, but those are things that are relatively easy. I mean, making a vacuum these days is technologically quite straightforward. We know how to do that. What we don't quite know how to do is to make a confinement device that isolates the plasma well enough so that it's able to keep itself burning with its own reaction. So maybe can you talk about what a tokamak is? The Russian acronym from which the word tokamak is built just means toroidal magnetic chamber. So it's a toroidal chamber, a torus is a geometric shape which is like a doughnut with a hole down the middle. And so it's the meat of the doughnut, that's the torus, and it's got a magnetic field. So that's really all tokamak means. But the particular configuration that is very widespread and is the sort of best prospect in the least in the near term for making fusion energy work is one in which there's a very strong magnetic field the long way around the doughnut, around the torus. So you've got to imagine that there's this doughnut shape with an embedded magnetic field just going round and round the long way. The big advantage of that is that plasma particles when they're in the presence of a magnetic field feel strong forces from the magnetic field and those forces make the particles gyrate around the direction of the magnetic field line. So basically the particles follow helical orbits following like a spring that's directed along the magnetic field. Well if you make the magnetic field go inside this toroidal chamber and just simply go round and round the chamber then because of this helical orbit the particles can't move fast across the magnetic field but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field. And if you have a magnetic field that doesn't leave the chamber it doesn't matter if they move along the magnetic field it doesn't mean they're going to exit the chamber. But if you just had a straight magnetic field for example coming from a Helmholtz coil or a bar magnet then you'd have to have ends that would come to the ends of the chamber somewhere and the particles would hit the ends and they would lose their energy. So that's why it's toroidal and that's why we have a strong magnetic field. It's providing a confinement against motion in the in the direction that would lead the particles to leave the chamber. It turns out that here we're getting a little bit technical but turns out that a toroidal field alone is not enough and so you need more fields to produce true true confinement of plasma and we get those by passing a current as well through the plasma itself. I can make sure it stays on track. Well that what that does is makes the field lines themselves into much bigger helices and that for reasons that are too complicated to explain that clinches the confinement of the particles at least in terms of their single particle orbits so they don't leave the chamber. So when the particles are flying along this this this donut the inside of the donut are they what's where's the generation of the energy coming from? Are they smashing into each other? Yeah eventually I mean in a fusion reactor there will be deuterons and tritons and they will be smashing in. They will be very hot there'll be a hundred million degrees Celsius or something so they're moving thermally with very large thermal energies in random directions and they will collide with one another and have fusion reactions. When those fusion reactions take place energy is released large amounts of energy is released in the form of particles. One of the particles that's released is an alpha particle which is also charged and it's also confined and that alpha particle stays in the in the in the donut and heats the other particles that are in that donut so it transfers its energy to those and they it keeps them hot. There are there's some leaking of heat all the time a little bit of radiation some transport and so forth. There's also a neutron released from that reaction the neutron carries out four fifths of the fusion energy and that will have to be captured in a blanket that surrounds the chamber in which we take the energy drive some kind of electrical generator from you know thermal thermal engine gas turbine or something like that and power the power. You got energy. So where do we stand? Where do we stand? I'm getting this thing to be something that actually works that generates energy. Well there have been experiments that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear powers in the vicinity of you know a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds. So that's you know 10 megajoules that's not much energy it's a few donuts worth of energy okay. A literal donut. But we have studied how well tokamaks can find plasmas and so we now understand in rather great detail the way they work and we're able to predict what is going to be required in order to build a tokamak that becomes self sustaining that becomes essentially ignited or very so close to ignited that it doesn't matter. And at the moment at least if you use the modest magnetic field values still very strong but limited magnetic field values you have to build a very big device. And so we are at the moment worldwide fusion research is at the moment in the process of building a very big experiment that's located in the south of France. It's called ITER which means the way or just means the international tokamak experimental reactor if you like. And that experiment is designed to reach this burning plasma state and to generate about 500 megawatts of fusion power for hundreds of seconds at a time. It'll still only be an experiment. It won't put electricity on the grid or anything like that. It's to figure out whether it works and what the remaining engineering challenges are. It's a scientific experiment. It won't be engineered to run round the clock and so on and so forth which ultimately one needs to do in order to make something that's practical for generating electricity. But it will be the first demonstration on earth of a controlled fusion reaction for you know long time periods. Is that exciting to you? It's been an objective that is in many ways motivated my entire career and the career of many people like me in the field. I have to admit though that one of the problems with ITER is that it's an extremely big and expensive and long time to build experiment and so it won't even come into operation until about 2025 even though it's been being built for 10 years and it was designed for 30 years before that. And so that's actually one of the big disappointments of my career in a certain sense which is that we won't get to burning fusion reaction until well past the first operation of ITER and whether I'm alive or not I don't know but I certainly will be well and truly retired by the time that happens. And so when I realized maybe some years ago that that was going to be the case it was a discouragement to me let's put it like that. But if we can try to look maybe in a ridiculous kind of way look into a hundred years from now two hundred years five hundred years from now and we you know there's folks like Elon Musk trying to travel outside the solar system. I mean the amount of energy we need for some of the exciting things we want to do in this world if we look again hundred years from now seems to be a very large amount. So do you think fusion energy will eventually sometime into your retirement will be basically behind most of the things we do? Look I absolutely think that fusion research is completely justified. In fact we should be spending more time and effort on it than we currently do. But it isn't going to be a magic bullet that somehow solves all the problems of energy. By the way that's a generic statement you can make about any energy source in my view. I think it's a grave mistake to think that science of any sort is suddenly going to find a magic bullet for meeting all the energy needs of society or any of the other needs of society by the way. But and we can talk about that later. But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it. And so my disappointment that I just expressed was in a certain sense of personal disappointment. I do think that fusion energy is a terrific challenge. It's very difficult to bring the energy source of the sun and stars down to earth. This does contrast in a certain sense with fission energy. By contrast fission energy efficient to build a fission reactor proved to be amazingly easy. You know we did it within a few years of discovering nuclear fission. People had figured out how to build a reactor and did so during the Second World War. Which is by the way fission is how the current nuclear power plants work. And so we have nuclear energy today because fission reactors are relatively easy to build. What's hard is getting the materials and that's just as well because if everyone could get those materials there would be weapons proliferation and so forth. But it wasn't all that long after even the discovery of nuclear fission that fission reactors were built and fission reactors of course operated before we had weapons. So I think nuclear power is obviously important to meet the energy challenges of our age. It is completely intrinsically completely CO2 emissions free. And in fact the wastes that come from nuclear power whether it's fission or fusion for that matter are so moderate in quantity that we shouldn't really be worried about them. I mean yes fission products are highly radioactive and we need to keep them away from people but there's so little of them it's that keeping them away from people is not particularly difficult. And so while people complain a lot about the drawbacks of fission energy I think most of those complaints are ill informed. We can talk about you know the challenges and the disasters if you like of fission reactors but I think fission in the near term offers a terrific opportunity for environmentally friendly energy which in the world as a whole is rapidly being taken advantage of. You know China and India and places like that are rapidly building fission plants. We're not rapidly building fission plants in the US although we are actually building two at the moment, two new ones. But we do still get 20 percent of our electricity from fission energy and we could get a lot more. So it's clean energy. So it's clean energy. Now again the concern is there's a very popular HBO show and just came out on Chernobyl. There's the Three Mile Island, there's Fukushima, that's the most recent disaster. So there's a kind of a concern of yeah I mean nuclear disasters. Is that, what do you make of that kind of concern especially if we look into the future of fission energy based reactors? Well first of all let me say one or two words about the contrast between fission and fusion and then we'll come on to the question of the disasters and so forth. Fission does have some drawbacks and they're largely to do with four main areas. One is do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels to supply our energy needs for a long time? The answer to that is we know we have enough uranium to support fission energy worldwide for thousands of years but maybe not for millions of years okay. So that's resources. Secondly there are issues to do with wastes. Fission wastes are highly radioactive and some of them are volatile and so for example in Fukushima the problem was that some fraction of the fission wastes were volatilized and went out as a cloud and polluted areas with cesium 137, strontium 90 and things like that. So that's a challenge of fission. There's a problem of safety beyond that and that is that in fission it's hard to turn the reactor off. When you stop the nuclear reactions there is still a lot of heat being liberated from the fission products and that is actually what the problem was at Fukushima. The Fukushima reactors were shut down the moment that the earthquake took place and they were shut down safely. What then happened after that at Fukushima was you know there was this enormous tidal wave many tens of meters high that came through and destroyed the electricity grid feed to the Fukushima reactors and their cooling was then turned off and it was the after heat of the turned off reactors that eventually caused the problems that led to release. And so that's a safety concern and then finally there's a problem of proliferation and that is that fission reactors need fissile fuel and the technologies for producing and enriching and so forth the fuels can be used by bad actors to generate the materials needed for a nuclear weapon and that's a very serious concern. So those are the four problems. Fusion has major advantages in respect of all of those problems. It has more longer term fuel resources, it has far more benign waste issues, the radioactivity from fusion reactions is at least a hundred times less than it is from fission reactions. It has essentially none of this after heat problem because it doesn't produce fission products that are highly radioactive and generating their own heat when it's turned off. In fact the hard part of fusion is turning it on not turning it off. And finally you don't need the same fission technology to make fusion work and so it's got terrific advantages from the point of view of proliferation control. So those are the four main issues which make fusion seem attractive technologically because they address some of the problems of fission energy. I don't mean to say that fission energy is overwhelmingly problematic but clearly there have been catastrophes associated with fission reactors. Fukushima actually is I think in many ways are often overstated as a disaster because after all nobody was killed by the reactors essentially, zero. And that's in the context of a disaster and tsunami that killed between 15 and 20,000 people instantane more or less instantaneously. So you know in the scale of risks one should take the view that in my estimation that fission energy came out of that looking pretty good. Okay. Of course that's not the popular conception. Okay. Yes that's good. I mean with a lot of things that threaten our well being we seem to be very bad users of data. We seem to be very scared of shock attacks and not at all scared of car accidents and this kind of miscalculation. And I think from everything I understand nuclear energy, fission based energy goes into that category. It's one of the safest, one of the cleanest forms of energy and yet the PR, whoever does the PR for nuclear energy has a hard job ahead of them at the moment. Well I think part of that is their association with nuclear weapons because when you say the word nuclear people don't instantly think about nuclear energy, they think about nuclear weapons. And so there is perhaps a natural tendency to do that. But yes I agree with you, people are very poor at estimating risks and they react emotionally not rationally in most of these situations. Can we talk about nuclear weapons just for a little bit? So fission is the kind of reaction that's central to the nuclear weapons we have today? That's what sets them off. That's what sets them off. So if we look at the hydrogen bomb maybe you can say how these different weapons work. So the earliest nuclear weapons, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan etc. etc. were pure fission weapons. They used enriched uranium or plutonium and their energy is essentially entirely derived from fission reactions. But it was early realized that more energy was available if one could somehow combine a fission bomb with fusion reactions. Because the fusion reactions give more energy per unit mass than fission reactions. And this was called the super, you might have heard of the expression the super or more simply hydrogen bombs. Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen and the fusion reactions associated with them. Like you said it's hard to turn on. It's hard to turn on because you need very high temperatures and you need confinement of that long enough for the reactions to take place. And so a bomb actually, a thermonuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb has essentially a chemical implosion which then sets off a fission explosion which then sets off and compresses hydrogen isotopes and other things, which I don't know because I've never had a security clearance. So I can't betray any secrets about weapons because I've never been party to them because I know a lot about this problem I can guess. And sets off fusion reactions in the middle. So that's basically it's that sequence of things which produce these enormous multi megaton bombs that have very large yields. And so fusion alone can't get you there. It is actually possible to set off or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone without the surrounding fission explosion and that is what is called laser fusion. So another approach to fusion which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex, the national labs and so forth because it's more associated with the technologies of weapons is inertial fusion. So if you decide instead of trying to make your plasma just sit there in this Taurus and in the tokamak and be controlled steady state with a magnetic field, if you're willing to accept that I'll just set off an explosion and then I'll gather the energy from that somehow I don't quite know how but let's not ask that question too much. Then it is possible to imagine generating fusion alone explosions and the way you do it is you take some small amount of deuterium tritium fuel you bombard it with energy from all sides and this is what the lasers are used for extremely powerful at lasers which compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it. It compresses it to such a high density and temperature that the reactions take place very very quickly and in fact they can take place so quickly that it's all over with before the thing flies apart. Wow. And that is. Heated up really fast. That is inertial fusion okay. Is that useful for energy generation for outside? Not yet I mean there are those people who think it will be but you may have heard of the big experiment called the National Ignition Facility which was built at Livermore starting in the late 1990s and has been in operation since around about 2010. It was designed with the claim that it would reach ignition fusion ignition in this pulsed form where the reactions have got over with so quickly before the thing whole thing flies apart. It didn't actually reach ignition and it doesn't look as if it will although you know we never know maybe people figure out how to make it work better. But the answer is in principle it seems possible to reach ignition in this way maybe not with that particular laser facility. Are you surprised that we humans haven't destroyed ourselves given that we've invented such powerful tools of destruction? Like what do you make of the fact that for many decades we've had nuclear weapons now speaking about estimating risk at least to me it's exceptionally surprising I was born in the Soviet Union that big egos of the big leaders when rubbing up against each other have not created the kind of destruction everybody was afraid of for decades. Well I must say I'm extremely thankful that it hasn't I don't know whether I'm surprised about it I've never thought about it and from the point of view of is it surprising that we've we've avoided it I'm just very thankful that we have I think that there is a sense in which cooler heads have prevailed at crucial moments I think there is also a sense in which you know mutually assured destruction has in fact worked as a policy to restrain the great powers from going to war and in fact you know the the the fact that we haven't had a world war you know since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable to nuclear weapons in a kind of strange and peculiar way but I think humans are deeply flawed and sinful people and I certainly don't feel that we're guaranteed that it's going to go on like this. And we'll talk about the sort of the biggest picture view of it all but let me just ask in terms of your worries of if we look a hundred years from now we're in the middle of what is now a natural pandemic that from the looks of it as fortunately as not as bad as it could possibly been if you look at the Spanish flu if you look at the history of pandemics if you look at all the possible pandemics that could have been that folks like Bill Gates are exceptionally terrified about we've I know many people are suffering but it's better than it could have been so and now we're talking about nuclear weapons in terms of existential threats to us as sinful humans what worries you the most is it nuclear weapons is is it natural pandemics engineered pandemics nanotechnology in my field of artificial intelligence some people are afraid of killer robots and robots yeah is there do you think in those existential terms and do any aspect to any of those things were you I am certainly not confident that my children and grandchildren will experience the benefits of civilization that I have enjoyed I think it's possible for our civilizations to break down catastrophically I also think that it's possible for our civilizations to break down progressively and I think they will if we continue to have the explosion of population on the planet that we currently have I mean it's it's quite it's quite wrong to think of our problems as mostly being co2 if we can just solve co2 then we can go on having this you know continually expanding economy everywhere in the world of course you can't do that okay I mean there is a finite you know bearing capacity of our planet on the resources of our planet on the resources of our planet and and we can't continue to do that so I think there are lots of technical reasons why a continually expanding economy and and and civilization is impossible and therefore actually I'm as much nervous about the fact that our population is eight billion or something right now worldwide as I am about the fact that you know a few million people would be would be killed by COVID 19 I mean I don't want to be callous about this but from the big picture it seems like that's much more of a problem over population people not dying is ultimately more of a problem than people dying so you know that probably sounds incredibly callous to your listeners but I think it's simply you know a sober assessment of the situation is there is there ways from the way those eight billion or seven billion or whatever the number is live that could make it sustainable you know because you've kind of implied there's a kind of we have especially in the West this kind of capitalist view of really consuming a lot of resources is there a way to like if you could change one thing or a few things what would you change to make this life make it more likely that your grandchildren have a better life than you well okay so let's talk a bit about energy because that's something I know a lot a lot about having thought about it most of my career in order to reach steady state co2 level okay that's acceptable in terms of global climate change and so on and so forth we need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least a factor of ten worldwide okay what's more you know the average energy consumption and hence co2 emission of people in the world is less than a tenth of what we per capita of them what we have in the West in America and Europe and so forth so if you have in mind some utopia in the future where we've reached a sustainable use of energy and we've also reached a situation in which there is far less inequity in the world in the sense that people have share the energy resources more uniformly then what that is equivalent to would be to reduce the co2 emissions in Western economies not by a factor of ten but by a factor of a hundred in other words has to go down to one percent of what it is now okay so you know when people talk about you know let's use natural gas because you know maybe it only uses sixty percent of the energy of coal it's complete nonsense that's not not even scratching the surface of what we would need to do so you know is that going to be feasible I very much doubt it and therefore I actually doubt that we can reach a level of energy of fossil energy use that is one percent of the current use in the West without totally dramatic changes either in you know our society our use of of energy and so forth which actually of course is much of that energy is used for producing food and so on and so forth so it's actually not so obvious that we can we can get we can cut down our energy usage by that factor or we've got to reduce the human population so you run up against that number that's increasing still and you don't think that could be it's not it's not that it's not it's not depressing it's it's difficult like many truths are do you have a hope that there could be a technological solution in short no there is no technological solution to for example for population control I mean we have the technology just you know to prevent ourselves bearing children that's not a problem technology is in okay solved the challenge is society the challenge is human choices the challenge is almost entirely human and sociological not technology not technology and when people thought talk about energy they thought they think that there's some kind of technological magic bullet for this but there isn't okay and and there isn't for the reasons I just mentioned not because it's obvious there isn't but actually there isn't and and in in any case that it's true of energy it's true of pollution it's true of human population it's true of most of the big challenges in our society are not scientific or technological challenges they're human sociological challenges and that's why I think it's a terrible mistake even for folks like me who work at you know well the high temple of science and technology in in America and maybe in the galaxy yeah I mean you know it's it's MIT it's at MIT best university in the world it's it's a terrible mistake if we give the impression that technology is going to solve it all technology will make tremendous contributions and I think it's it's worth working on it but it's a disaster if you think it's going to solve all of our problems and and actually you know I've written a whole book about the question of of scientism and the and the over emphasis on science both as a way of of solving problems through technology but also as a way of gaining knowledge I think it's not all the knowledge there is either yeah I think that book and your journey there is fascinating so maybe you can go there can can you tell me about your on a personal side your the personal journey of your faith of Christianity and your relationship with with God with religion in general yeah in my in my latest book Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles I I give a first I devote most of the first chapter to telling how how I became a Christian why I became a Christian I I didn't grow up as a Christian which is fascinating I mean you didn't grow up as a Christian so you you've discovered the beauty of God and physics at the same time concurrent that's a very poetic way of putting it but yes I would accept that I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University I I had you know I had gone to a school in which there was religion kind of was part of the society there were prayers and at the at the at the daily you know gathering of the of the students of the assembly of the students but I but I didn't really believe it I just sort of went along with it and it wasn't particularly you know aggressive or benign you know benign it just sort of was there but I didn't believe it I didn't didn't make much sense to me but when I but I came across Christians from time to time and when I went to Cambridge University two of my closest friends turned out were Christians and I think it was that was the most important influence on me that that here were two people who were really smart like me I'm giving you my yeah my impressions the way I the way I felt at the time and and they thought Christianity made sense and and you know testified to its significance in their lives and so that was a very important influence on me and I and ultimately I mean the reason I I hadn't I hadn't I didn't see Christianity as some kind of great evil the way it's sometimes portrayed by the by the radical atheists of this century I mean I think that's nonsense but but but I so I think there were certain attractive things if you go to a university like Cambridge you know you're surrounded by by by Western culture you know from from about you know the 15th century onwards and that saturated with Christian art and architecture and so forth and so it's hard it's hard not to recognize that Christianity is in fact the foundation of Western society in Western culture most Western civilization so so I mean maybe I was in that sense favorably disposed towards Christianity as a religion but as a personal faith it didn't mean anything to me but I became convinced really of two things one is that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is actually rather good I mean it's not a proof it's not kind of some some kind of scientific demonstrate or mathematical demonstration but it's actually extremely good it's not scientific evidence by and large it's historical evidence historical evidence yeah so that was one thing and the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge it became clear that Christianity ultimately is not you know some kind of moral theory or philosophy or something like that it is or elite or at least it claims to be a personal relationship with God which is made possible you know by what Jesus did and on the cross and his life and his teaching and and it's a personal call to a relationship with God and that had I'd never thought of it in those terms when I was you know when I was younger and that that thought became attractive to me I mean I think most people find the person of Christ and just teachings you know compelling insert in a certain sense what do you mean by personal do you mean personal for you like a relationship like it's a meditative like you specifically you Ian have a connection with God and and then the other side you say personal with the actual body the person of Jesus Christ so all of those things what do you mean by personal connection and why that was well so as I'm sorry for the stupid questions no it's okay no problem as a Christian I believe that I have a relationship with God which is best expressed by saying that it's personal and that comes about because you know Jesus through his acts has reconciled me with God me a sinner me someone full of sins of failings of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals let alone the ideals of a holy God have been reconciled to the creator of everything and and so Christians myself included believe that prayer is in a certain sense a connection with God and there are times when I have felt you know that God spoke to me I don't mean necessarily orally in words but showed me things or enlighten me or inspired me in ways that I I attribute to him so I see it as a as a two way you know relationship in a certain sense of course it's a very asymmetrical relationship but nevertheless Christians think that it's a two way it's a two way street we're not just talking into the air when we say we won't I'm going to pray for someone in this two way communication is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast what is God what is God like in your view if you try to describe is it a force is it a set is it a for you intellectually is a set of metaphors that you use to reason about the world is it is it is it kind of a computer that does some computation that's the infinitely powerful computer or is it like Santa Claus a guy with a with a beard on the cloud like I don't mean I don't mean what God actually is I mean in your limited cognitive capacity as a human what do you actually what do you find helpful for thinking of what God actually looks like what is God well let me start by saying none of the above okay I mean clearly God in the Christian God the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob etc it is is not any of those things because all of those things you just mentioned are phenomena or or or entities in the created world and the most fundamental thing about monotheism as you know Abraham and Moses and so forth handed it down is that God is not an entity within the creation within the universe that God is the creator of it all and that's what Genesis first two chapters of Genesis is really about is it's not it's not about telling us you know how God created the world it's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created the world okay and that therefore he is not you know simply an entity within it on the other hand you know our finite minds have a pretty hard time encompassing that so so one has to therefore work in terms of metaphors and images and and so forth and I think we would know very little about who God is if we if it was simply up if we were simply left to our own devices you know if if we were just you know here you are you're in the universe try to figure out who made it and and so forth well you know philosophers think they can do a little bit of that maybe and theologians think that they can do a little bit more but but Christians think that God has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself and and we say that he's revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ and so you know when Jesus says to his disciples if you've seen me you've seen the Father then that is in a certain sense a watchword for answering this question for Christians it is that supremely if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is we look to Jesus we look to what he did we look to what he said and so forth and we believe that he is one with the Father and that's why we believe you know in the Trinity I mean it's basically because that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching so in that in that sense through Jesus there was a that's kind of a historical moment that's profound that's really powerful do you also think that God makes himself seen in less obvious ways in our world today absolutely absolutely I mean it's it's certainly been the outlook of Jews and Christians throughout history that God is seen in the creation that we when we look at the creation we see to some extent the wonder the majesty the might of the person or the entity but the person who created it and and that's a way in which scientists particularly have over over the ages and certainly over most of the last five centuries since the scientific revolution scientists have seen in a certain sense the hand of God in creation I mean this leads us perhaps to a different discussion but I mean it's it's remarkable to me how influential Christianity and religion in generally has been in science yeah most of the scientists through history as if you described I mean God has been a very big part of their life and their work certainly up until the at the beginning of the 20th century that was the case so maybe this is a good time to can you tell me what scientism is yeah I mean the short answer is that by scientism we mean we mean the belief that science is all the real knowledge there is that's a shorthand there are lots of different facets of it and what which one can explore and the book in which I explored it most most thoroughly was actually an earlier book called monopolizing knowledge and and the purpose of that title is to is to draw attention to the fact that in our society as a whole in particularly in the West today we we have grown so reliant on science that we that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things and so of course at MIT we are focused on science and we do focus on it very much but the truth is that there are many ways of getting to know things in our world know things reliably in our world and a lot of them are not science so scientism in my view is a terrible intellectual error it's to believe it's the belief that somehow the methods of science as we develop them with you know experiments and in the end they it relies particularly upon reproducibility in the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and related types of of skills those powerful though they are for finding out about the world are not all the knowledge do not give us all the knowledge we we have and there's many other forms of knowledge and the illustration that I usually use to to try to help people to think about this is to say well look let's think about human history I mean to what extent can human history be discovered scientifically the answer is essentially can't because and the reason is because human history is not reproducible you can't do reproducible experiments or observations and and go back and you know try it over again it's it's a one off thing you know the history is full of unique events and and so you you know you you can't hope to do history using the methods of science yeah I mean in some sense history is a story of miracles I mean they don't have to do with God it's just uniqueness is anyway unique events unique events and that science doesn't like that because it's unique events by their very definition are not reproducible can I ask sort of a tricky question I don't even know what atheist or atheism is but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and avoid slipping into scientism oh yeah absolutely I mean it I mean there these are two separate things okay I'm quite sure there are many people who don't believe in God and yet recognize that there are many different ways of we get knowledge you know some is history some is sociology economics politics philosophy art history language literature etc etc there are many people who recognize those disciplines as having their own approaches to epistemology and to get how we get knowledge and valuing them very highly I don't mean to say that everyone you know who's an atheist automatically you know subscribes to the scientistic viewpoint that's not true but it's certainly the case that many of the arguments in fact most of the arguments of the aggressive atheists of this century people are sometimes called new atheists although they're actually rather old most of their arguments are rather old you know are drawing heavily on scientism so when they say things like there's no evidence to support Christianity okay what they are really focusing on is to say is saying that Christianity isn't proved or the evidence for Christianity is not science okay science doesn't prove it and and you you know if you read their books that's what you find they really mean is science doesn't lead you necessarily to believe in a creator God or into it in any particular in religion I accept that that's not a problem to me because I don't think that science is all the knowledge there is and I think there are other important ways of getting to know things and one of them is historical for example and I mentioned earlier that I think I became persuaded and I were and I still am persuaded that the historical evidence for the resurrection is very is very persuasive again it's not proof or anything like that but it's but it's pretty good evidence okay yeah I've um I talked to Richard Dawkins on this podcast and um uh and uh I saw you debate with Sean Carroll so I I understand this world it makes it makes me very curious maybe uh let me ask sort of another way my own kind of uh world view maybe you can help as by way of therapy understand um you know because you've kind of said that there's other ways of knowing what about if we if if I kind of sit here and am cognizant of the fact that I almost don't know anything so sort of I'm sitting here almost paralyzed by the the mystery of it all and it's not even when you say there's other ways of knowing it um it feels almost too confident to me because uh yeah when I when I listen to beautiful music or uh see art there's something there that's and that's uh that's beyond the reach of scientism I would say so beyond the reach of uh the the tools of science but I don't even feel like that could be as an actual tool of knowing it um yeah I just don't even know where to begin because it just feels like we know so little like uh if we look even a hundred years from now when people look back to this time humans look back to this time they'll probably laugh at how little we knew even a hundred years from now and if we look at a thousand years from now hopefully we're still alive or some version of ourselves or AI version of ourselves you know they they'll certainly laugh at the absurdity of our beliefs so what do you uh so you don't seem to be as paralyzed by how little we know you confidently push on forward but what do you make of that sense of uh of just not knowing of the mystery we need to be modest or or humble if even about what we know I accept that and I certainly think that's true not not simply because in the future we'll know more science and and there will be more powerful ways of finding out about things but simply because you know sometimes we're not right we're wrong okay in what we think we know um uh so that's crucial but it's also a very Christian outlook that kind of humility is what Jesus taught so I so I don't know whether this was in the back of your mind when you were thinking about this but it's often the case that um people of religious faith are are accused of being dogmatists okay and there is a sense in which dogma teaching accepted teaching is is part of religions okay but I don't think that necessarily uh uh that leads one to blind dogmatism and I don't I certainly don't think that faith we can talk about this later if you'd like but I certainly don't think that faith means thinking you know something and not listening to counter arguments for example um so I I think that's crucial yeah what is uh what does faith mean to you what does it uh feel like what does it actually sort of how do you carry your faith in terms of the way you see the world well I think faith is very often misunderstood in our society at the moment um because uh it's often portrayed as being nothing other than uh believing things you know ain't true you know um or or believing things that are are are not proven okay um and um and this and faith does have a strand which is to do with you know basically believing in um in concepts or um propositions but actually the the word faith is much broader than that faith also means um you know trusting in something trusting in a person or trusting in a thing uh the reliability of some technology for example um that's equally part of the meaning of the word faith and and there's a third strand to the to the meaning of the word as well and that is loyalty um so you know I have faith in my wife and and I try to act in faith towards her and that's a kind of loyalty and so those three strands are the are the most important strands of the meaning of faith yes belief in uh in propositions that we might not have you know full proof about or maybe we have very little proof about but it's also trust and and loyalty and actually in the in terms of the Christian faith Christians are far more called to trust and loyalty than they are to belief in things they don't you know don't have proof of okay um but but the critics of religion generally um tend to emphasize the first one and say well you know you believe things for which you have no evidence okay that's what that's what they think faith is well yeah there there is a sense in which everybody has to live their lives uh believing or or or making decisions in situations when they don't have all the proof or evidence or knowledge that enables you to make a completely um rational or well informed or prudent decision we you know we do this all the time you know my drive down here I nearly took a wrong turning and I thought which which which way do I go do I keep going straight on and so my uh voice came out and I think go straight okay so so you have to make decisions and sometimes you know you don't have a navigation system telling you what to do you just have to make that decision with no with insufficient evidence and you're doing it all the time as a human and that's part of being sentient um and so that kind of um action and belief on the basis of incomplete evidence is not something that I feel uncomfortable doing or I feel that I feel that somehow my Christian commitments are forced me to do when I wouldn't have had to have done it otherwise I would have had to do it anyway um and and so you know there's a sense in which um I think it's important to see the breadth of meaning of faith and and and to recognize that in certainly in the case of Christianity um it's trust and loyalty that the the key themes that we're called to and I mean another interesting extension of that that you speak to is kind of loyalty is referring to a connection with something outside of yourself yeah um so I think you've spoken about like existentialism or even just atheism in general as um as leading naturally to an individualism as a focus on the on the self and uh ideas that maybe the Christian faith can um instill in you is um allowing you to sort of look outside of yourself so connection I mean loyalty fundamentally is about other beings um and yeah other beings and I mean I think I don't know what it is in me but I'm very much drawn to that idea and um I think humans in general are drawn to that idea you can you can make all kinds of evolutionary arguments all that kind of stuff but uh people always kind of tease me uh because I talk about love a lot and I mean there's a lot of uh non scientific things about love right like what the heck is that thing why why do we even need that thing it uh it seems to be an annoying burden that uh that we we get so much uh joy in in life from a connection with other human beings deep uh lasting connections with human beings same thing with loyalty why why do we get so much value and pleasure and strength and meaning from loyalty from a connection with somebody else uh going through uh thick and thin with somebody else going through some hard times I mean some of the you know the closest friends I I have is going through some some rough times together and that seems to make life deeply meaningful what is that so yeah um I that's that resonates with me and I obviously I would I would affirm it um I think just to just to correct the implication that you made I I don't think it's necessarily the the consequence of atheism uh that we that we lose track of those kinds of things I I mean I think that atheists can be loyal okay if you like um the question more often comes up in the context of you know where does morality come from and loyalty I think and duty are related to one another you know if we have loyalty to someone then we have a duty to them okay as well and I think that insofar as we see ourselves as having some kinds any kinds of duties or moral compulsions with respect to our relationships to other people it's I think it's a question that always arises well where does these where do these come from and there there are various approaches that people have towards deciding what makes ethics or or morality moral okay but I do think it's the case that um it's very hard to ground morality um in a in any kind of absolute way or a persuasive way um in mere human relationships and so it's certainly the case that in Christianity um there is a sense in which um morality and you know the morality of morals comes from a transcendent place from a transcendent deity and that we um that we ground are the compelling force of of morals on God are more than we do on individuals because after all you know if it if you if you've got nothing but you know other people why should you you know treat your neighbor well why shouldn't you defraud your neighbor if it's good for you well you know you can construct all kinds of arguments and some of them are you know obviously arguments that are commonplace in religion too you should do as you would be done by and all this kind of thing right but none of that seems any any more than mere pragmatism to most people okay and so that's what that's one of the things if that Nietzsche amongst others you know really identified you know if God is dead if the idea of God is grounding our moral behavior is no longer viable in the West which Nietzsche thought that it wasn't okay then what does ground it and he had no good answer for it in fact he claimed there was no answer but then he couldn't live with that and so he invented the idea of the ubermensch you know this this superior human being okay and this was a different way of trying to ground morality not a very successful one you know you could argue that it's a forerunner of the sort of racism of Hitler's regime and so forth that you know we've in the West thankfully shied away from in the in the past half or three quarters of a century but you know I think it is the case that Christianity gives me a basis for my moral beliefs that is more than mere pragmatism yeah but there is a stepping outside of all that there does seem to be a powerful stabilizing like we humans are able to hold ideas together like in a distributed way outside of whether God exists or not or any that just our ability to kind of converge together towards a set of beliefs into sometimes into tribes it's kind of I don't know if it's inherent to being human beings I hope not because now if I look on Twitter and there's a there's the red team and the blue team right it's almost like it's a care it's some kind of TV show that we're living in that people get into these tribes and they hold a set of beliefs that sometimes don't I mean they are beliefs for the sake of holding those beliefs and we get this intimate connection between each other for sharing those beliefs and we spoke to the things about loyalty and love and that's the thing that people feel inside the tribe and it seems very human that within that tribe those beliefs don't necessarily always have to be connected to anything it's just the fact that you know I've did sports my whole life whenever you're on a team the bond you get with it with other people on the team is incredible and the actual sport is often the silliest I mean I don't play ball sports anymore but the ball when I played like soccer or tennis I mean all those sports are silly right you're playing with a little ball but there's the bond you get is so deeply meaningful I just it's interesting to me on the sociological level that it's possible to me whatever the beliefs of religion is whatever they're actually grounded in they might be they might have a power in themselves I think there is tribalism everywhere and I think tribalism in the US at the moment is rather difficult to bear from my point of view and it's I think fed by the internet and social media and so forth but it's but historically tribalism has been a trait and remains a trait in humans the genius of Christianity is that it supersedes tribalism I mean yes when the Hebrews thought about Yahweh initially they thought about him as their tribal deity just like the tribal deities round about about them and so but and and yet from you know early on in Hebrew history the crucial thing that Yahweh came to mean or I would say revealed of himself to them was that he wasn't just a tribal deity he was the God that created the whole thing and if he is the God of the whole thing then he's not just the God of the Hebrews or in the case of you know Americans God is not just the God of Americans he's the God of everybody okay and that is a way in a way the most amazing transcending of tribal loyalties and one of the crucial you know occasions in the New Testament you know when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost you know the the apostles and the and the disciples speak in other tongues and there are people from all all the countries you know round about hear them in their own languages and so you know whether whether you take that as factual or not that is the a statement of the transcendent aspects of Christianity or the claimed transcendent aspects of Christianity that it transcends culture and that's certainly something which I find appealing. When I kind of touch on this topic in my own mind one of the hardest questions is as why is there suffering in the world do you have a good answer well I have I have some answers but you're right that it is one of the toughest questions the problem of pain or the problem of suffering or the problem of theodicy as as theologians call it is is is probably one of the toughest I think it's important to say that there are certain types of answers to this question but there are aspects of this question to which there is no intellectual answer that is going to satisfy and and the fact of the matter is you know when I'm speaking to an audience let's say at at at some kind of lecture I can be sure that there are people in that audience who are either personally suffering they've got illness they've got pains there maybe they're facing death or someone in their family is in similar sorts of situations so suffering is a reality and and there is nothing that I can say that is going to solve their feeling of agony and angst and and maybe despair in those types of situations there is really only one thing that I think humans can do for one another in those kinds of situations and that is simply to be there to be there alongside your friend or your or your colleague or or whoever you know family member or whoever it might be and that's the only really sense in which we can give comfort if we try to give intellectual solutions to these problems we're going to be like like the comforters that were in the book of Job in the in the Bible who who brought no comfort to Job himself with their intellectual answers but if they had been there and some of them were there they sat alongside that is some level of comfort and and after all that's the meaning of the word compassion it means to suffer alongside of somebody and I would say first off you know what does a Christian say about suffering the the first thing a Christian should say is compassion is all that really counts and what's more we say that God has acted in compassion towards us that is to say he has suffered with us in the person of Jesus Christ and when we see the passion of Jesus we recognize that God takes suffering deadly seriously has taken it so seriously that he's been willing to come and be a part of his creation in the person of of Jesus Christ and suffer death the most horrible death on the cross and for our benefit so that's one side of of suffering but the question you know the philosophical question remains you know surely if God is good you know and God is omnipotent benevolent you know why doesn't he take away all the suffering why doesn't he cause miracles to occur that will take away all this suffering I think there are some good answers to that question in the in the following sense that you know we live in a world where the consistency of the world is an absolutely crucial part of it you know the fact that our world behaves reproducibly in the main is absolutely essential for the integrity of our lives without it we wouldn't exist okay and so there is a sense in which the integrity of creation calls for there being consistent behavior which you know these days we think of as being the laws of nature okay and so the consistent behavior of nature is very very important it's what enables us to be what we are and if you're calling upon God in in in in your critique of why isn't this benevolent creator you know fixing things one answer is he's fixed things in a certain sense to have an integrity in them and that integrity is the best thing it's the way we have our existence it's the way we live and move and have our being and you know if you want something different you've got to show that there is a way in which you could invent a world that is better that it has the integrity that we need to exist okay and and and to be able to think and and and love and and be but but you were going to do it better you know and the atheists think that maybe they have got a better idea but if they thought about it a bit more carefully they'd realize no one has put forward a better idea okay so the so another way to say that uh i mean is that suffering is an integral part of this of um of a consistent existence so so sort of uh and the philosophical in a philosophical sense uh the full richness and the beauty of our experience would not be as beautiful would not be as rich uh if there was no suffering in the world is that is that possible well i think you said two different things that aren't exactly at least that aren't exactly the same one is that suffering is an integral part of our experience you know that might be considered a challenge to certain types of christian theology or or even uh jewish theology in other words um christians talk about the fall and talk about uh adam and eve in the garden and and have have a vision of there being some kind of perception from or perfection from which we have fallen and i think there is a perfection from which we've fallen but i don't think that perfection is some kind of physical perfection in other words i don't subscribe personally to the view that some some christians do that there was some state um prior to the fall in which death did not occur i don't think that that's consistent with science as we know it and i and i think that um death for example has been part of the biological world and the and the universe as a whole um from from billions of years ago so so just to be clear about that um you know i on the other hand i do so if that's the case then certainly in that sense at the very least um suffering or at least death okay is part of the biological existence and that probably seems so completely obvious to somebody who you know is au fait with science whether they you know whether they're a scientist or not well so and i apologize if i'm interrupting but it's the obvious reality of of uh our life today but there's a lot of people i think it's currently in vogue i've talked to quite a few folks who kind of see as the goal of many of our pursuits as to extend life indefinitely a sort of uh you know a dream for many people is to live forever uh but in the in the technological world in the engineering world in the scientific world i mean that's that's the big dream to me it feels like that's not a dream it's i certainly would like to live forever uh like that that's the initial feeling the instinctual feeling because you know life is so amazing but then if you actually kind of like you've presented it if you actually uh live that kind of life you would realize that that's actually a step uh backwards that's a step down from the experience of this life in my sense that death is an essential part of life uh about an essential part of this experience death of all things so the thing the fact that things end somehow and the scarcity of things somehow create the beauty of this experience that we have yeah transhumanism doesn't look very attractive to me either but it also doesn't look very feasible um but that's a whole big topic that i'm not exactly an expert but i'll say but i but you know i'm of a certain age where my mortality is more pressing or more obvious to me than it once was okay um and and i don't dread that i don't see that as in a certain sense even the enemy okay you're not afraid of death well i'm afraid of lots of things in a in a in a conceptual way but it doesn't keep me awake at night okay um i i'm i think like most people i'm more afraid of pain than i am of death so i i don't want to put myself forward as some kind of hero that doesn't worry about these things that's not true but i i do think and maybe this is part of my christian outlook um that there is life beyond the grave um but i don't think that that it's life in this universe or in this um certainly not in this body and maybe not in a certain sense in this mind i mean you know christian christian belief in the afterlife is is that we will be resurrected we will be in a certain sense be with god i don't know what that means and i don't think anybody else really quite knows what that means but there are lots of ways that over history people artists and and and writers and so forth have pictured it um and these are all perhaps some of them helpful ways of thinking about it do you think it's possible to know what happens after we die um i i don't think we find out by near death experiences or those kinds of things but but i but i think that uh you know that we have sufficient i feel i have sufficient information if you like um in terms of god's revelation to be confident that that i will go somewhere else okay but it won't be here and i to me the aspirations of transhumanism are horrific i mean i think it would be a nightmare not a dream a nightmare you know to be somehow downloaded into a computer and live one's life like that i because it it completely discounts the integrity of our bodies as well as our minds i mean we aren't just disembodied minds it would not be me that was in the computer it would be something else if if that kind of download were possible of course it isn't possible and it's very long way from being possible but you know amazing things happen so we shouldn't be too certain so this is this is a place that uh again maybe taking a slight step outside uh wherever philosophizing a little bit uh let me ask you about uh human level or superhuman level intelligence uh the artificial intelligence systems do you what do you make from um from almost a religious or a perspective that we've been talking about of the special aspect of human nature of us creating intelligence systems that exhibit some elements of that human nature is that something again like we were talking about with transhumanism uh there's a feasibility question of how hard is it to actually build machines that human level intelligence or have something like consciousness or have all those kinds of human qualities and then there's the do we want to do that kind of thing so on both of those directions what do you think well okay so you know since your podcast is called ai i don't want to offend too many of your listeners out there that's but i but i i think one should be a little bit more modest about one's claims for ai than have typically been the case yeah i think that actually a lot of people in ai are somewhat chastened and so there there are more modest claims than are common with the transhumanists and yes and and so forth um and you know i used to play chess when i was a kid i was pretty good at it okay um won competitions and so on and so forth and i when i and i'm talking about when i was in high school i thought it was pretty unlikely that a computer would be able to become good at chess but i was dead wrong okay and so you know um how did that make you feel by the way when um t blue big i stopped playing chess seriously when i had when i encountered computers that could beat me okay i still play with my grandchildren a little bit but but um but yeah it it seemed like in a certain sense it became a solved problem uh when ai was able to do it better than i could so i think that there are ways in which today we've seen um computers do things which historically were regarded as being very characteristic of human intelligence and in that sense there there is some success to ai i also think that um you know there are certain things which one might think of as being ai which are you know completely widespread in our society i'm thinking about the internet search engines and so forth which are enormously influential and obviously do things more powerfully than any individual human or even any combination of humans could do much faster and and and accessing databases and so on and so forth is all of this is outstripped our human intelligence um i'm not sure the extent though to which that is really intelligence uh in the way that was traditionally meant but it's certainly amazingly um facile and um it it multiplies our ability to access human knowledge and and data and so forth so is that something is that is that enter the realm of something we should be concerned about so in the realm of religion you talk about what is good what is evil what is right what is wrong you have set of morals set of beliefs and when you have an entity come into the picture that uh that has quite a bit of power if we potentially look into the future and intelligence and capability um do you think there's something that religion can say about artificial intelligence or is that something you we shouldn't worry about until that arrives you think just like with the chess program um you know religious writers have thought about this for centuries uh you know there's been a long debate about what is what was historically called the plurality of worlds and it was actually more about whether there are places where other intelligent creatures live than it was about us creating them but but i think it's largely the same question it's almost like aliens like other intelligent so if there is other intelligent life in the universe what is its relationship to god okay that is in a certain sense the puzzle that religious thinkers and writers have thought about for a long time and there's a whole range of of different opinions about that i mean personally you know i think it's it's an interesting question but it's not a very pressing question at the moment um yeah and i think the same way about the the question of what happens if we're able to build a sentient robot for example um i think it's an interesting question and we'll have to think about it when that happens um but i think we're still quite a ways away from that and so i i don't have a good answer um but i think there's a literature that you one could tap um to think about if you want to start early on the question well let me ask you another impossible question from a religious or from a personal perspective what do you think is consciousness this this uh subjective experience that we seem to be having there's uh this there's uh the christian religion have something to say about consciousness does your own when you look in the mirror do you have a sense of what is consciousness um i think the bible doesn't have much in the way of answers about that directly in the sense that you're perhaps asking it which is more like i think you're asking for some kind of uh quasi scientific or maybe indeed scientific uh description that's really looking for one yes um i i think that i think that there it's an interesting question i think it's actually um it's a jump too far i think we have we don't even know the answer to the question what is the mind let alone consciousness so if you distinguish between those two things i think the question that's being addressed more directly um scientifically as well as in other ways it is what is the mind um and that is certainly a very topical question even in places like mit which is not historically involved with philosophical questions you know that people are doing neuroscience and so forth i think it's a very important question and i think that we're going to find that um we are not computers in other words i think uh the the commonplace theory of what mind is is is generally speaking by analogy that we are basically wet wetware okay um that we're some computer like um entity um and that that the analogy to digital computers is is is a pretty decent one i mean that that's of course a viewpoint which um you know which drives the aspirations of the transhumanists i mean they they so much believe that our minds are nothing other than you know in a certain sense some kind of implementation of software in biology that they say to themselves well of course we're going to be able to download it into a into a digital computer i don't think that's true i think it's most likely that quantum mechanics is very important in the brain uh it seems most unlikely that it's not to me i know that that's contrary to the opinions of many people but but that's my view and it's also a view for example of people like roger penrose and and people like that who've written about it um rather extensively and if that's the case then really my mind is not reproduce reducible to some kind of software which can be considered to be portable it is so uh connected to the hardware of my body that the two are inseparable okay and so if that is in fact what we find um as i suspect will be the case then the aspirations of the transhumanists will be very long incoming if at all um so i think that actually physics and chemistry um you know are in a are in a sense um involved with the brain and with in the mind but not in a very simple way like you know like the computer analogy um in and a much more complicated way and i and i also think that um it's philosophically ignorant to speak as if um when and if the actions of the brain are understood at the physical and chemical level that will mean that the mind will vanish as a concept you know that we'll just say no we're nothing but brains okay of course it won't i mean it may well be that our mind is an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the physics and chemistry and biology okay but it's also something that we have to encounter and take seriously and so um you know it's it's not the case that it that the mind is reducible to nothing but physics and chemistry even if it's embedded in you know continuously into physics and chemistry as i rather suspect it is um so i that that's my own view i mean another way of putting it is that the mind or the soul is not something added into humans as might have been the viewpoint um historically i do think there is you know there is something added to humans but it's not it's not the mind it's the spirit and that takes us beyond the physical it takes us beyond this universe but i but i don't think that that consciousness the mind etc etc is that thing which is necessarily added in so i i'm not be emergent in some way i'm not a substance dualist in that sense okay if you want to put it philosophically i mean uh but you see your sense is um so the mind and the intelligence and consciousness can be these emergent things do you do you have a hope a sense that science could help us get it pretty far down the road of understanding we will get much further than we have and we it'll be interesting um i mean right now our our methods of diagnosing the human brain are extremely primitive i mean the resolution that we have you know that comes out of uh out of nmr and and brain scans and so forth is miserable compared with what we need in order to understand the brain at the cellular level let alone at the atomic level um but you know we're making progress it's relatively slow progress but it's progress and people are working on it and we're going to get better at it and we'll find out very interesting things as we do um the time resolution is also completely hopeless compared compare with what we need to understand of a thought you know so um so there's a long way to go and we will get better at it um but i'm but i'm not at all worried as some people are and some people speak as if this is a good thing that somehow the concepts of humanity and the mind and religion and and consciousness are going to vanish because we're going to have you know complete uh physicochemical description of the brain in the near future that we're not going to have that and secondly even if we had it the mind and all these other things aren't going to vanish because of it well i i find kind of compelling the the notion that whoever created this universe uh and us uh did so to understand itself himself i mean there's a there's a there's a powerful self reflection notion to this whole experiment that we're a part of i certainly think that god takes delight in his creation and that it was created for that delight as much as it was um for any other reason and that you know that therefore are there's reason to be hopeful and and awestruck by the creation whether it's on the very small or on the very large i'm not sure if you're familiar there's something called the simulation hypothesis well that's been fun to talk about with the computer scientists and so on which is a kind of thought experiment that proposes that um you know the entirety of the world around us is a kind of a computer program that's a simulation and then we're living inside it i think there's um i think from a certain perspective that could be consistent with a religious view of the world i mean you could just use different terms uh basically uh what are your but it's a it's a it feels like a more um modern updated version of that but what is what's what's your sense of this uh the simulation hypothesis do you find interesting useful to think about it do you find it ridiculous did you find it fun what are your thoughts uh it's fun and it's been of course the subject of various movies yeah um that that some of which are very well known um you know i don't think it makes sense to think of it as a simulation hypothesis in the sense that we're really lying in uh banks um of of uh on banks of of beds having our energy drained away from us um and and the simulation is going on in our individual brains that that makes no sense to me at all i don't think that's what's meant by the simulation hypothesis as you're using it now but i think that there is a um there is very little distinction between saying that a an intelligent creator has set up the universe according to his will and his plan and set it in motion and is allowing it to run out maybe as christians say he's sustaining it actually um by his word of power it says in the book of the letter to hebrews okay um in in in in this amazingly consistent and um integrated way um i don't think there's very much difference between saying that and saying that it's a simulation okay i mean i think it's almost the same thing okay but i but i think from but i think it's important to recognize that the simulation in that concept the simulation and the creation or the universe are the same thing okay in other words it's a simulation you know that is billions of light years across okay yeah um i mean there's a sense in which it helps one understand especially if you're not religious that there is something outside of the world that uh we live in that there's something bigger than the world we live in um and that i mean it's just another perspective on uh that humbles humbles you um so in that sense one shortcoming of that is is the following is of the of the analogy is this that we think of a simulation as something take taking place in the universe you know when we it's it's taking place in my computer okay i don't think that's the right analogy for um a christian view of creation okay i don't think it's taking place in some other universe that god has made okay i i think maybe it's taking place in the mind of god christians might hypothesize also but i but i think that that that it's important to recognize that christian theology at any rate is that god is not one of the entities in the universe and and presumably therefore is very different from a simulation that we might run on a computer let me ask you adam and eve even adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil does this is this story meaningful to you what does the story mean to you yeah i it is meaningful to me um i i take the you know the writings of the bible very seriously and i think that most christians regard them as having some kind of authoritative um role in their in their in their faith um what do i get from it i mean i think the most important thing that christians get from the story of adam and eve and they're eating the apple and so forth is that the relationship between humans and god is broken has been broken by man's disobedience that's what the the story of adam and eve and the apple is all about and um that that broken relationship is for christians what jesus came to redeem came to overcome that brokenness and uh restore uh that relationship with god um uh to some extent at any rate on earth and and ultimately um you know in in the in eternity to restore it fully so that's really what christians mean and gain from the story of adam and eve of course lots of people ask the questions about how sort how literally should we take these stories of particularly the first few few chapters of genesis which is an important question but but i mean but we tend to um get bogged down with it a bit too much i think we should take away the message um and i think the the the uh what the what actually we would have seen if we'd been there okay is something which is a matter of speculation and it's certainly not terribly important from the point of view of christian theology but it seems like a very important moment um as a man of faith do you um do you do you wish that uh i think it was eve first uh yeah well see do you wish that by the way it was just a fruit as a few what you said it very carefully as the fruit fruit of the tree right uh do you wish they wouldn't have eaten of the tree i mean this is a back to our discussion of suffering was that like an essential thing that needed to happen you're gonna have to read paradise lost to get your answer to that beautifully put okay well let me ask the the biggest question one that you also touch in your book but one that i asked every once in a while is what is the meaning of life the meaning of my life is many different things okay but it but they are all kind of centered around um relationships um i mean for a christian one's relationship with god is a crucial part of the meaning of life but one's relationship with one's family wife's wife parents children grandchildren in my case um and so forth those are crucially important um these are all the places where people whether they're religious or not find meaning um but ultimately um i think a person who has faith in a creator um who we think has a an intention or many intentions but a but a but a will um in respect of the world as a whole that's a crucial part of meaning and the idea that my life might have some small significance in the plan of that creator is an amazingly powerful idea that give that brings meaning um i i tell a story in my book that um when i was a student before i became a christian i read a philosophy book with whose approximate title was um what you know what is the meaning of life and you know that book basically said there is no meaning to life you have to make up the meaning as you go along and i think that's probably the the predominant secular view is these days that there is no real meaning but you can make up a meaning and that will give you meaning into your life um i don't subscribe to that view anymore um i think there is more meaning than that um but i do think that those things which give meaning to our life are very important and we should emphasize them and you you have said that as the part of the as the part of that meaning is the part of your faith uh love and loyalty are key parts so can you try to say what is uh love and loyalty like what what does it mean to you what does it look like if you were to give advice to uh to your children grandchildren of what to look for in in looking for loyalty and and and love what would you try to say well i think it's something like yielding your will or desire to another um it's valuing others more highly or at least as highly as yourself but that's just the start of it because true love you reach a point where you are you feel compelled by the other uh and that i think to some people sounds very scary but actually it's terrifically liberating um and i think that love then brings you into service towards another and i'm you know reminded of um the phrase from the anglican uh prayer book where it talks about um jesus whose service is perfect freedom in other words for us christians to serve god is what perfects our freedom and i think there is an amazing love is um is in part kept captivity but in a kind of paradoxical sense it's also an amazing freedom love is freedom i don't think there's a better way to end it we started with fusion energy and ending on love in there's a huge honor to talk to you thank you so much for your time today thanks it was a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with ian hutchinson and thank you to our sponsors sun basket and power dot please consider supporting this podcast by going to sun basket.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout and going to power dot.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout click the links buy the stuff even just visiting the site is really the best way to support this podcast because it helps convince them to sponsor it in the future if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman spelled somehow without the letter e just f r i d m a n and now let me leave you with some words from arthur c clark finally i would like to assure my many buddhist christian hindu jewish and muslim friends that i am sincerely happy that the religion which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind and often as western medical science now reluctantly admits to your physical well being perhaps it is better to be unsane and happy than sane and unhappy but it is the best of all to be sane and happy whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future indeed it may well decide whether we have any future thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion | Lex Fridman Podcast #112

The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's interested in understanding the human genome from a computational, evolutionary, biological, and other cross disciplinary perspectives. He has more big, impactful papers and awards than I can list, but most importantly, he's a kind, curious, brilliant human being, and just someone I really enjoy talking to. His passion for science and life in general is contagious. The hours honestly flew by, and I'm sure we'll talk again on this podcast soon. Quick summary of the ads. Three sponsors, Blinkist, Aidsleep, and Masterclass. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to blinkist.com slash lex, aidsleep.com slash lex, and signing up at masterclass.com slash lex. Click the links, buy the stuff, get the discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This episode is supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Get it at blinkist.com slash lex for a seven day free trial and 25% off afterwards. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I'm a big believer in reading at least an hour every day. As part of that, I use Blinkist every day to try out a book I may otherwise never have a chance to read. And in general, it's a great way to broaden your view of the ideal landscape out there, and find books that you may want to read more deeply. 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Sign up at Masterclass.com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about Masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. For 180 bucks a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from, to list some of my favorites, Chris Hadfield on Space Exploration, Neil deGrasse Tyson on Scientific Thinking and Communication, Will Wright, one of my favorite game designers, Carlos Santana, one of my favorite guitar players, Garry Kasparov, of course, the greatest chess player of all time, I'm not biased, Daniel Negrano on poker and many more. Chris Hadfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up at Masterclass.com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Kellis. What to you is the most beautiful aspect of the human genome? Don't get me started. So. We've got time. The first answer is that the beauty of genomes transcends humanity. So it's not just about the human genome. Genomes in general are amazingly beautiful. And again, I'm obviously biased. So in my view, the way that I like to introduce the human genome and the way that I like to introduce genomics to my class is by telling them, you know, we're not the inventors of the first digital computer. We are the descendants of the first digital computer. Basically, life is digital. And that's absolutely beautiful about life. The fact that at every replication step, you don't lose any information because that information is digital. If it was analog, if it was just sprouting concentrations, you'd lose it after a few generations. It would just dissolve away. And that's what the ancients didn't understand about inheritance. The first person to understand digital inheritance was Mendel, of course. And his theory, in fact, stayed in a bookshelf for like 50 years while Darwin was getting famous about natural selection. But the missing component was this digital inheritance, the mechanism of evolution that Mendel had discovered. So that aspect in my view is the most beautiful aspect but it transcends all of life. And can you elaborate maybe the inheritance part? What was the key thing that the ancients didn't understand? So the very theory of inheritance as discrete units, throughout the life of Mendel and well after he's writing, people thought that his P experiments were just a little fluke, that they were just a little exception that would normally not even apply to humans, that basically what they saw is this continuum of eye color, this continuum of skin color, this continuum of hair color, this continuum of height. And all of these continuums did not fit with a discrete type of inheritance that Mendel was describing. But what's unique about genomics and what's unique about the genome is really that there are two copies and that you get a combination of these. But for every trait, there are dozens of contributing variables. And it was only Ronald Fisher in the 20th century that basically recognized that even five Mendelian traits would add up to a continuum like inheritance pattern. And he wrote a series of papers that still are very relevant today about sort of this Mendelian inheritance of continuum like traits. And I think that that was the missing step in inheritance. So well before the discovery of the structure of DNA, which is again, another amazingly beautiful aspect, the double helix, what I like to call the most noble molecule of our time, holds within it the secret of that discrete inheritance, but the conceptualization of discrete elements is something that precedes that. So even though it's discrete, when it materializes itself into actual traits that we see, it can be continuous. Basically arbitrarily rich and complex. So if you have five genes that contribute to human height, and there aren't five, there's a thousand. If there's only five genes and you inherit some combination of them, and every one makes you two inches taller or two inches shorter, it'll look like a continuous trait. But instead of five, there are thousands. And every one of them contributes to less than one millimeter. We change in height more during the day than each of these genetic variants contributes. So by the evening, you're shorter than you walk up with. Isn't that weird then that we're not more different than we are? Why are we all so similar if there's so much possibility to be different? Yeah, so there are selective advantages to being medium. If you're extremely tall or extremely short, you run into selective disadvantages. So you have trouble breathing, you have trouble running, you have trouble sitting if you're too tall. If you're too short, you might, I don't know, have other selective pressures are acting against that. If you look at natural history of human population, there's actually selection for height in Northern Europe and selection against height in Southern Europe. So there might actually be advantages to actually being not super tall. And if you look across the entire human population, for many, many traits, there's a lot of push towards the middle. Balancing selection is the usual term for selection that sort of seeks to not be extreme and to sort of have a combination of alleles that sort of keep recombining. And if you look at mate selection, super, super tall people will not tend to sort of marry super, super tall people. Very often you see these couples that are kind of compensating for each other. And the best predictor of the kid's age is very often just take the average of the two parents and then adjust for sex and boom, you get it. It's extremely heritable. Let me ask, you kind of took a step back to the genome outside of just humans, but is there something that you find beautiful about the human genome specifically? So I think the genome, if more people understood the beauty of the human genome, there would be so many fewer wars, so much less anger in the world. I mean, what's really beautiful about the human genome is really the variation that teaches us both about individuality and about similarity. So any two people on the planet are 99.9% identical. How can you fight with someone who's 99.9% identical to you? It's just counterintuitive. And yet any two siblings of the same parents differ in millions of locations. So every one of them is basically two to the million unique from any pair of parents, let alone any two random parents on the planet. So that's, I think, something that teaches us about sort of the nature of humanity in many ways, that every one of us is as unique as any star and way more unique in actually many ways. And yet we're all brothers and sisters. Yeah, just like stars, most of it is just fusion reactions. Yeah, you only have a few parameters to describe stars. Mass, size, initial size, and stage of life. Whereas for humans, it's thousands of parameters scattered across our genome. So the other thing that makes humans unique, the other things that makes inheritance unique in humans is that most species inherit things vertically. Basically instinct is a huge part of their behavior. The way that, I mean, with my kids, we've been watching this nest of birds with two little eggs outside our window for the last few months, for the last few weeks as they've been growing. And there's so much behavior that's hard coded. Birds don't just learn as they grow. There's no culture. Like a bird that's born in Boston will be the same as a bird that's born in California. So there's not as much inheritance of ideas, of customs. A lot of it is hard coding in their genome. What's really beautiful about the human genome is that if you take a person from today and you place them back in ancient Egypt, or if you take a person from ancient Egypt and you place them here today, they will grow up to be completely normal. That is not genetics. This is the other type of inheritance in humans. So on one hand, we have the genetic inheritance, which is vertical from your parents down. On the other hand, we have horizontal inheritance, which is the ideas that are built up at every generation are horizontally transmitted. And the huge amount of time that we spend in educating ourselves, a concept known as neoteny, neo for newborn and then teny for holding. So if you look at humans, I mean, the little birds that were eggs two weeks ago, and now one of them has already flown off. The other one's ready to fly off. In two weeks, they're ready to just fend for themselves. Humans, 16 years, 18 years, 24, getting out of college. I'm still learning. So that's so fascinating, this picture of a vertical and the horizontal. When you talk about the horizontal, is it in the realm of ideas? Exactly. Okay, so it's the actual social interactions. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So basically the concept of neoteny is that you spend acquiring characteristics from your environment in an extremely malleable state of your brain and the wiring of your brain for a long period of your life. Compared to primates, we are useless. You take any primate at seven weeks and any human at seven weeks, we lose the battle. But at 18 years, you know, all bets are off. Like we basically, our brain continues to develop in an extremely malleable form till very late. And this is what allows education. This is what allows the person from Egypt to do extremely well now. And the reason for that is that the wiring of our brain and the development of that wiring is actually delayed. So, you know, the longer you delay that, the more opportunity you have to pass on knowledge, to pass on concepts, ideals, ideas from the parents to the child. And what's really absolutely beautiful about humans today is that that lateral transfer of ideas and culture is not just from uncles and aunts and teachers at school, but it's from Wikipedia and review articles on the web and thousands of journals that are sort of putting out information for free and podcasts and videocasts and all of that stuff where you can basically learn about any topic, pretty much everything that would be in any super advanced textbook in a matter of days, instead of having to go to the library of Alexandria and sail there to read three books and then sail for another few days to get to Athens and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the democratization of knowledge and the spread, the speed of spread of knowledge is what defines, I think, the human inheritance pattern. So you sound excited about it, are you also a little bit afraid or are you more excited by the power of this kind of distributed spread of information? So you put it very kindly that most people are kind of using the internet and looking Wikipedia, reading articles, reading papers and so on, but if we're honest, most people online, especially when they're younger, probably looking at five second clips on TikTok or whatever the new social network is, are you, given this power of horizontal inheritance, are you optimistic or a little bit pessimistic about this new effect of the internet and democratization of knowledge on our, what would you call this, this genome, would you use the term genome, by the way, for this? Yeah, I think we use the genome to talk about DNA, but very often we say, I'm Greek, so people ask me, hey, what's in the Greek genome? And I'm like, well, yeah, what's in the Greek genome is both our genes and also our ideas and our ideals and our culture. So the poetic meaning of the word. Exactly, exactly, yeah. So I think that there's a beauty to the democratization of knowledge, the fact that you can reach as many people as any other person on the planet and it's not who you are, it's really your ideas that matter, is a beautiful aspect of the internet. I think there's, of course, a danger of my ignorance is as important as your expertise. The fact that with this democratization comes the abolishment of respecting expertise. Just because you've spent 10,000 hours of your life studying, I don't know, human brain circuitry, why should I trust you? I'm just gonna make up my own theories and they'll be just as good as yours, is an attitude that sort of counteracts the beauty of the democratization. And I think that within our educational system and within the upbringing of our children, we have to not only teach them knowledge, but we have to teach them the means to get to knowledge. And that, it's very similar to sort of you fish, you catch a fish for a man for one day, you fed them for one day, you teach them how to fish, you fed them for the rest of their life. So instead of just gathering the knowledge they need for any one task, we can just tell them, all right, here's how you Google it, here's how you figure out what's real and what's not, here's how you check the sources, here's how you form a basic opinion for yourself. And I think that inquisitive nature is paramount to being able to sort through this huge wealth of knowledge. So you need a basic educational foundation based on which you can then add on the sort of domain specific knowledge, but that basic educational foundation should just not just be knowledge, but it should also be epistemology, the way to acquire knowledge. I'm not sure any of us know how to do that in this modern day, we're actually learning. One of the big surprising thing to me about the coronavirus, for example, is that Twitter has been one of the best sources of information. Basically like building your own network of experts, as opposed to the traditional centralized expertise of the WHO and the CDC, or maybe any one particular respectable person at the top of a department in some kind of institution, you instead look at 10, 20, hundreds of people, some of whom are young kids that are incredibly good at aggregating data and plotting and visualizing that data. That's been really surprising to me. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know how that matures into something stable. I don't know if you have ideas. If you were to just try to explain to your kids of where should you go to learn about coronavirus, what would you say? It's such a beautiful example. And I think the current pandemic and the speed at which the scientific community has moved in the current pandemic, I think exemplifies this horizontal transfer and the speed of horizontal transfer of information. The fact that the genome was first sequenced in early January, the first sample was obtained December 29, 2019, a week after the publication of the first genome sequence, Moderna had already finalized its vaccine design and was moving to production. I mean, this is phenomenal. The fact that we go from not knowing what the heck is killing people in Wuhan to wow, it's SARS CoV2 and here's the set of genes, here's the genome, here's the sequence, here are the polymorphisms, et cetera, in the matter of weeks is phenomenal. In that incredible pace of transfer of knowledge, there have been many mistakes. So, some of those mistakes may have been politically motivated or other mistakes may have just been innocuous errors. Others may have been misleading the public for the greater good, such as don't wear masks because we don't want the mask to run out. I mean, that was very silly in my view and a very big mistake. But the spread of knowledge from the scientific community was phenomenal. And some people will point out to bogus articles that snuck in and made the front page. Yeah, they did. But within 24 hours, they were debunked and went out of the front page. And I think that's the beauty of science today. The fact that it's not, oh, knowledge is fixed. It's the ability to embrace that nothing is permanent when it comes to knowledge, that everything is the current best hypothesis and the current best model that best fits the current data and the willingness to be wrong. The expectation that we're gonna be wrong and the celebration of success based on how long was I not proven wrong for, rather than, wow, I was exactly right. Because no one is gonna be exactly right with partial knowledge. But the arc towards perfection, I think is so much more important than how far you are in your first step. And I think that's what sort of the current pandemic has taught us. The fact that, yeah, no, of course, we're gonna make mistakes, but at least we're gonna learn from those mistakes and become better and learn better and spread information better. So if I were to answer the question of, where would you go to learn about coronavirus? First textbook, it all starts with a textbook. Just open up a chapter on virology and how coronaviruses work. Then some basic epidemiology and sort of how pandemics have worked in the past. What are the basic principles surrounding these first wave, second wave? Why do they even exist? Then understanding about growth, understanding about the R0 and RT at various time points. And then understanding the means of spread, how it spreads from person to person. Then how does it get into your cells? From when it gets into the cells, what are the paths that it takes? What are the cell types that express the particular ACE2 receptor? How is your immune system interacting with the virus? And once your immune system launches a defense, how is that helping or actually hurting your health? What about the cytokine storm? What are most people dying from? Why are the comorbidities and these risk factors even applying? What makes obese people respond more or elderly people respond more to the virus while kids are completely, very often not even aware that they're spreading it? So I think there's some basic questions that you would start from. And then I'm sorry to say, but Wikipedia is pretty awesome. Yeah, it is. Google is pretty awesome. It used to be a time, it used to be a time maybe five years ago. I forget when, but people kind of made fun of Wikipedia for being an unreliable source. I never quite understood it. I thought from the early days, it was pretty reliable or better than a lot of the alternatives. But at this point, it's kind of like a solid accessible survey paper on every subject ever. There's an ascertainment bias and a writing bias. So I think this is related to sort of people saying, oh, so many nature papers are wrong. And they're like, why would you publish in nature? So many nature papers are wrong. And my answer is no, no, no. So many nature papers are scrutinized. And just because more of them are being proven wrong than in other articles is actually evidence that they're actually better papers overall because they're being scrutinized at a rate much higher than any other journal. So if you basically judge Wikipedia by not the initial content, but by the number of revisions, then of course it's gonna be the best source of knowledge eventually. It's still very superficial. You then have to go into the review papers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, for most scientific topics, it's extremely superficial, but it is quite authoritative because it is the place that everybody likes to criticize as being wrong. You say that it's superficial. And a lot of topics that I've studied a lot of, I find it, I don't know if superficial is the right word. Because superficial kind of implies that it's not correct. No, no, no. I don't mean any implication of it not being correct. It's just superficial. It's basically only scratching the surface. For depth, you don't go to Wikipedia. You go to the review articles. But it can be profound in the way that articles rarely, one of the frustrating things to me about certain computer science, like in the machine learning world, articles, they don't as often take the bigger picture view. There's a kind of data set and you show that it works and you kind of show that here's an architecture thing that creates an improvement and so on and so forth. But you don't say, well, what does this mean for the nature of intelligence for future data sets we haven't even thought about? Or if you were trying to implement this, like if we took this data set of 100,000 examples and scale it to 100 billion examples with this method, like look at the bigger picture, which is what a Wikipedia article would actually try to do, which is like, what does this mean in the context of the broad field of computer vision or something like that? Yeah, no, I agree with you completely, but it depends on the topic. I mean, for some topics, there's been a huge amount of work. For other topics, it's just a stub. So, you know. I got it. Yeah. Well, yeah, actually the, which we'll talk on, genomics was not great. Yeah, it's very shallow, yeah, yeah. It's not wrong, it's just shallow. It's shallow. Yeah, every time I criticize something, I should feel partly responsible. Basically, if more people from my community went there and edited, it would not be shallow. It's just that there's different modes of communication in different fields. And in some fields, the experts have embraced Wikipedia. In other fields, it's relegated. And perhaps the reason is that if it was any better to start with, people would invest more time. But if it's not great to start with, then you need a few initial pioneers who will basically go in and say, ah, enough, we're just gonna fix that. And then I think it'll catch on much more. So if it's okay, before we go on to genomics, can we linger a little bit longer on the beauty of the human genome? You've given me a few notes. What else do you find beautiful about the human genome? So the last aspect of what makes the human genome unique, in addition to the, you know, similarity and the differences and the individuality is that, so very early on, people would basically say, oh, you don't do that experiment in human, you have to learn about that in fly, or you have to learn about that in yeast first, or in mouse first, or in a primate first. And the human genome was in fact relegated to sort of, oh, the last place that you're gonna go to learn something new. That has dramatically changed. And the reason that changed is human genetics. We are the species in the planet that's the most studied right now. It's embarrassing to say that, but this was not the case a few years ago. It used to be, you know, first viruses, then bacteria, then yeast, then the fruit fly and the worm, then the mouse, and eventually human was very far last. So it's embarrassing that it took us this long to focus on it, or the... It's embarrassing that the model organisms have been taken over because of the power of human genetics. That right now, it's actually simpler to figure out the phenotype of something by mining this massive amount of human data than by going back to any of the other species. And the reason for that is that if you look at the natural variation that happens in a population of seven billion, you basically have a mutation in almost every nucleotide. So every nucleotide you wanna perturb, you can go find a living, breathing human being and go test the function of that nucleotide by sort of searching the database and finding that person. Wait, why is that embarrassing? It's a beautiful data set. It's a beautiful data set. It's embarrassing for the model organism. For the flies. Yeah, exactly. I mean, do you feel on a small tangent, is there something of value in the genome of a fly and other of these model organisms that you miss that we wish we would be looking at deeper? So directed perturbation, of course. So I think the place where humans are still lagging is the fact that in an animal model, you can go and say, well, let me knock out this gene completely and let me knock out these three genes completely. And the moment you get into combinatorics, it's something you can't do in the human because there just simply aren't enough humans on the planet. And again, let me be honest, we haven't sequenced all seven billion people. It's not like we have every mutation, but we know that there's a carrier out there. So if you look at the trend and the speed with which human genetics has progressed, we can now find thousands of genes involved in human cognition, in human psychology, in the emotions and the feelings that we used to think are uniquely learned. It turns out there's a genetic basis to a lot of that. So the human genome has continued to elucidate through these studies of genetic variation, so many different processes that we previously thought were something like free will. Free will is this beautiful concept that humans have had for a long time. In the end, it's just a bunch of chemical reactions happening in your brain. And the particular abundance of receptors that you have this day based on what you ate yesterday or that you have been wired with based on your parents and your upbringing, et cetera, determines a lot of that quote unquote free will component to sort of narrow and narrow sort of slices. So how much on that point, how much freedom do you think we have to escape the constraints of our genome? You're making it sound like more and more we're discovering that our genome is actually has the, a lot of the story already encoded into it. How much freedom do we have? I, so let me describe what that freedom would look like. That freedom would be my saying, ooh, I'm gonna resist the urge to eat that apple because I choose not to. But there are chemical receptors that made me not resist the urge to prove my individuality and my free will by resisting the apple. So then the next question is, well, maybe now I'll resist the urge to resist the apple and I'll go for the chocolate instead to prove my individuality. But then what about those other receptors that, you know? That might be all encoded in there. So it's kicking the bucket down the road and basically saying, well, your choice will may have actually been driven by other things that you actually are not choosing. So that's why it's very hard to answer that question. It's hard to know what to do with that. I mean, if the genome has, if there's not much freedom, it's a... It's the butterfly effect. It's basically that in the short term, you can predict something extremely well by knowing the current state of the system. But a few steps down, it's very hard to predict based on the current knowledge. Is that because the system is truly free? When I look at weather patterns, I can predict the next 10 days. Is it because the weather has a lot of freedom and after 10 days it chooses to do something else? Or is it because in fact the system is fully deterministic and there's just a slightly different magnetic field of the earth, slightly more energy arriving from the sun, a slightly different spin of the gravitational pull of Jupiter that is now causing all kinds of tides and slight deviation of the moon, et cetera. Maybe all of that can be fully modeled. Maybe the fact that China is emitting a little more carbon today is actually gonna affect the weather in Egypt in three weeks. And all of that could be fully modeled. In the same way, if you take a complete view of a human being now, I model everything about you. The question is, can I predict your next step? Probably, but at how far? And if it's a little further, is that because of stochasticity and sort of chaos properties of unpredictability of beyond a certain level? Or was that actually true free will? Yeah, so the number of variables might be so, you might need to build an entire universe to be able to model. To simulate a human, and then maybe that human will be fully simulatable. But maybe aspects of free will will exist. And where's that free will coming from? It's still coming from the same neurons or maybe from a spirit inhabiting these neurons. But again, it's very difficult empirically to sort of evaluate where does free will begin and sort of chemical reactions and electric signals. So on that topic, let me ask the most absurd question that most MIT faculty rolled their eyes on. But what do you think about the simulation hypothesis and the idea that we live in a simulation? I think it's complete BS. Okay. There's no empirical evidence. No, it's not. Absolutely not. Not in terms of empirical evidence or not, but in terms of a thought experiment, does it help you think about the universe? I mean, so if you look at the genome, it's encoding a lot of the information that is required to create some of the beautiful human complexity that we see around us. It's an interesting thought experiment. How much parameters do we need to have in order to model this full human experience? Like if we were to build a video game, how hard it would be to build a video game that's like convincing enough and fun enough and it has consistent laws of physics, all that stuff. It's not interesting to use a thought experiment. I mean, it's cute, but it's Occam's razor. I mean, what's more realistic, the fact that you're actually a machine or that you're a person? What's the fact that all of my experiences exist inside the chemical molecules that I have or that somebody is actually simulating all that? Well, you did refer to humans as a digital computer earlier. Of course, of course. But that does not. It's a kind of a machine, right? I know, I know. But I think the probability of all that is nil and let the machines wake me up and just terminate me now if it's not. I challenge you machines. They're gonna wait a little bit to see what you're gonna do next. It's fun. It's fun to watch, especially the clever humans. What's the difference to you between the way a computer stores information and the human genome stores information? So you also have roots and your work. Would you say when you introduce yourself at a bar. It depends who I'm talking to. Would you say it's computational biology? Do you reveal your expertise in computers? It depends who I'm talking to, truly. I mean, basically, if I meet someone who's in computers, I'll say, oh, I'm a professor in computer science. If I meet someone who's in engineering, I say computer science and electrical engineering. If I meet someone in biology, I'll say, hey, I work in genomics. If I meet someone in medicine, I'm like, hey, I work on genetics. So you're a fun person to meet at a bar. I got you, but so. No, no, but what I'm trying to say is that I don't, I mean, there's no single attribute that I will define myself as. There's a few things I know. There's a few things I study. There's a few things I have degrees on and there's a few things that I grant degrees in. And I publish papers across the whole gamut, the whole spectrum of computation to biology, et cetera. I mean, the complete answer is that I use computer science to understand biology. So I develop methods in AI and machine learning, statistics and algorithms, et cetera. But the ultimate goal of my career is to really understand biology. If these things don't advance our understanding of biology, I'm not as fascinated by them. Although there are some beautiful computational problems by themselves, I've sort of made it my mission to apply the power of computer science to truly understand the human genome, health, disease, and the whole gamut of how our brain works, how our body works and all of that, which is so fascinating. And so the dream, there's not an equivalent sort of complimentary dream of understanding human biology in order to create an artificial life or an artificial brain or artificial intelligence that supersedes the intelligence and the capabilities of us humans. It's an interesting question. It's a fascinating question. So understanding the human brain is undoubtedly coupled to how do we make better AI? Because so much of AI has in fact been inspired by the brain. It may have taken 50 years since the early days of neural networks till we have all of these amazing progress that we've seen with deep belief networks and all of these advances in Go, in Chess, in image synthesis, in deep fakes, in you name it. But the underlying architecture is very much inspired by the human brain, which actually posits a very, very interesting question. Why are neural networks performing so well? And they perform amazingly well. Is it because they can simulate any possible function? And the answer is no, no. They simulate a very small number of functions. Is it because they can simulate every function in the universe? And that's where it gets interesting. The answer is actually, yeah, a little closer to that. And here's where it gets really fun. If you look at human brain and human cognition, it didn't evolve in a vacuum. It evolved in a world with physical constraints, like the world that inhabits us. It is the world that we inhabit. And if you look at our senses, what do they perceive? They perceive different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The hearing is just different movements in air, the touch, et cetera. I mean, all of these things, we've built intuitions for the physical world that we inhabit. And our brains and the brains of all animals evolved for that world. And the AI systems that we have built happen to work well with images of the type that we encounter in the physical world that we inhabit. Whereas if you just take noise and you add random signal that doesn't match anything in our world, neural networks will not do as well. And that actually basically has this whole loop around this, which is this was designed by studying our own brain, which was evolved for our own world. And they happen to do well in our own world. And they happen to make the same types of mistakes that humans make many times. And of course you can engineer images by adding just the right amount of sort of pixel deviations to make a zebra look like a bamboo and stuff like that, or like a table. But ultimately the undoctored images at least are very often mistaken, I don't know, between muffins and dogs, for example, in the same way that humans make those mistakes. So there's no doubt in my view that the more we understand about the tricks that our human brain has evolved to understand the physical world around us, the more we will be able to bring new computational primitives in our AI systems to again better understand not just the world around us, but maybe even the world inside us, and maybe even the computational problems that arise from new types of data that we haven't been exposed to, but are yet inhabiting the same universe that we live in with a very tiny little subset of functions from all possible mathematical functions. Yeah, and that small subset of functions, all that matters to us humans really, that's what makes. It's all that has mattered so far. And even within our scientific realm, it's all that seems to continue to matter. But I mean, I always like to think about our senses and how much of the physical world around us we perceive. And if you look at the LIGO experiment over the last year and a half has been all over the news. What did LIGO do? It created a new sense for human beings, a sense that has never been sensed in the history of our planet. Gravitational waves have been traversing the earth since its creation a few billion years ago. Life has evolved senses to sense things that were never before sensed. Light was not perceived by early life. No one cared. And eventually photoreceptors evolved and the ability to sense colors by sort of catching different parts of that electromagnetic spectrum. And hearing evolved and touch evolved, et cetera. But no organism evolved a way to sense neutrinos floating through earth or gravitational waves flowing through earth, et cetera. And I find it so beautiful in the history of not just humanity, but life on the planet that we are now able to capture additional signals from the physical world than we ever knew before. And axions, for example, have been all over the news in the last few weeks. And the concept that we can capture and perceive more of that physical world is as exciting as the fact that we were blind to it is traumatizing before. Because that also tells us, you know, we're in 2020. Picture yourself in 3020 or in 20, you know. What new senses might we discover? Is it, you know, could it be that we're missing nine tenths of physics? That like, there's a lot of physics out there that we're just blind to, completely oblivious to it. And yet they're permeating us all the time. Yeah, so it might be right in front of us. So when you're thinking about premonitions, yeah, a lot of that is ascertainment bias. Like, yeah, you know, every now and then you're like, oh, I remember my friend. And then my friend doesn't appear and I'll forget that I remembered my friend. But every now and then my friend will actually appear. I'm like, oh my God, I thought about you a minute ago. You just called me, that's amazing. So, you know, some of that is this, but some of that might be that there are, within our brain, sensors for waves that we emit that we're not even aware of. And this whole concept of when I hug my children, there's such an emotional transfer there that we don't comprehend. I mean, sure, yeah, of course we're all like hard wire for all kinds of touchy feely things between parents and kids, it's beautiful, between partners, it's beautiful, et cetera. But then there are intangible aspects of human communication that I don't think it's unfathomable that our brain has actually evolved waves and sensors for it that we just don't capture. We don't understand the function of the vast majority of our neurons. And maybe our brain is already sensing it, but even worse, maybe our brain is not sensing it at all. And we're oblivious to this until we build a machine that suddenly is able to sort of capture so much more of what's happening in the natural world. So what you're saying is physics is going to discover a sensor for love. And maybe dogs are off scale for that. And we've been oblivious to it the whole time because we didn't have the right sensor. And now you're gonna have a little wrist that says, oh my God, I feel all this love in the house. I sense a disturbance in the forest. It's all around us. And dogs and cats will have zero. None. None. It's just. Oh, no signal. But let's take a step back to our unfortunate place. To one of the 400 topics that we had actually planned for. But to our sad time in 2020 when we only have just a few sensors and very primitive early computers. So you have a foot in computer science and a foot in biology. In your sense, how do computers represent information differently than like the genome or biological systems? So first of all, let me correct that no, we're in an amazing time in 2020. Computer science is totally awesome. And physics is totally awesome. And we have understood so much of the natural world than ever before. So I am extremely grateful and feeling extremely lucky to be living in the time that we are. Cause you know, first of all, who knows when the asteroid will hit. And second, you know, of all times in humanity, this is probably the best time to be a human being. And this might actually be the best place to be a human being. So anyway, you know, for anyone who loves science, this is it. This is awesome. This is a great time. At the same time, just a quick comment. All I meant is that if we look several hundred years from now and we end up somehow not destroying ourselves, people will probably look back at this time in computer science and at your work of Manos at MIT. As infantile. As infantile and silly and how ignorant it all was. I like to joke very often with my students that, you know, we've written so many papers. We've published so much. We've been citing so much. And every single time I tell my students, you know, the best is ahead of us. What we're working on now is the most exciting thing I've ever worked on. So in a way, I do have this sense of, yeah, even the papers I wrote 10 years ago, they were awesome at the time, but I'm so much more excited about where we're heading now. And I don't mean to minimize any of the stuff we've done in the past, but you know, there's just this sense of excitement about what you're working on now that as soon as a paper is submitted, it's like, ugh, it's old. You know, I can't talk about that anymore. I'm not gonna talk about it. At the same time, you're not, you probably are not going to be able to predict what are the most impactful papers and ideas when people look back 200 years from now at your work, what would be the most exciting papers. And it may very well be not the thing that you expected. Or the things you got awards for or, you know. This might be true in some fields. I don't know. I feel slightly differently about it in our field. I feel that I kind of know what are the important ones. And there's a very big difference between what the press picks up on and what's actually fundamentally important for the field. And I think for the fundamentally important ones, we kind of have a pretty good idea what they are. And it's hard to sometimes get the press excited about the fundamental advances, but you know, we take what we get and celebrate what we get. And sometimes, you know, one of our papers, which was in a minor journal, made the front page of Reddit and suddenly had like hundreds of thousands of views. Even though it was in a minor journal because, you know, somebody pitched it the right way that it suddenly caught everybody's attention. Whereas other papers that are sort of truly fundamental, you know, we have a hard time getting the editors even excited about them when so many hundreds of people are already using the results and building upon them. So I do appreciate that there's a discrepancy between the perception and the perceived success and the awards that you get for various papers. But I think that fundamentally, I know that, you know, some paper, I'm so, so when you write. So is there a paper that you're most proud of? See, now you just, you trapped yourself. No, no, no, no, I mean. Is there a line of work that you have a sense is really powerful that you've done to date? You've done so much work in so many directions, which is interesting. Is there something where you think is quite special? I mean, it's like asking me to say which of my three children I love best. I mean. Exactly. So, I mean, and it's such a gimme question that is so, so difficult not to brag about the awesome work that my team and my students have done. And I'll just mention a few off the top of my head. I mean, basically there's a few landmark papers that I think have shaped my scientific path. And, you know, I like to somehow describe it as a linear continuation of one thing led to another and led to another led to another. And, you know, it kind of all started with, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Let me try to start somewhere in the middle. So my first PhD paper was the first comparative analysis of multiple species. So multiple complete genomes. So for the first time we basically developed the concept of genome wide evolutionary signatures. The fact that you could look across the entire genome and understand how things evolve. And from these signatures of evolution you could go back and study any one region and say, that's a protein coding gene. That's an RNA gene. That's a regulatory motif. That's a, you know, binding site and so on and so forth. So. I'm sorry, so comparing different. Different species. Species of the same. So take human, mouse, rat and dog. Yeah. You know, they're all animals, they're all mammals. They're all performing similar functions with their heart, with their brain, with their lungs, et cetera, et cetera. So there's many functional elements that make us uniquely mammalian. And those mammalian elements are actually conserved. 99% of our genome does not code for protein. 1% codes for protein. The other 99%, we frankly didn't know what it does until we started doing this comparative genomic studies. So basically these series of papers in my career have basically first developed that concept of evolutionary signatures and then apply them to yeast, apply them to flies, apply them to four mammals, apply them to 17 fungi, apply them to 12 Drosophila species, apply them to then 29 mammals and now 200 mammals. So sorry, so can we. So the evolutionary signatures seems like it's such a fascinating idea. And we're probably gonna linger on your early PhD work for two hours. But what is, how can you reveal something interesting about the genome by looking at the multiple, multiple species and looking at the evolutionary signatures? Yeah, so you basically align the matching regions. So everything evolved from a common ancestor way, way back. And mammals evolved from a common ancestor about 60 million years back. So after the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs landed near Machu Picchu, we know the crater. It didn't allegedly land. That was the aliens, okay. No, just slightly north of Machu Picchu in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a giant hole that that meteor impact. Sorry, is that definitive to people? Have people conclusively figured out what killed the dinosaurs? I think so. So it was a meteor? Well, volcanic activity, all kinds of other stuff is coinciding, but the meteor is pretty unique and we now have. That's also terrifying. I wouldn't, we still have a lot of 2020 left, so if anything. No, no, but think about it this way. So the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 175 million years. We humans have been around for what? Less than 1 million years. If you're super generous about what you call humans and you include chimps basically. So we are just getting warmed up and we've ruled the planet much more ruthlessly than Tyrannosaurus Rex. T Rex had much less of an environmental impact than we did. And if you give us another 174 million years, humans will look very different if we make it that far. So I think dinosaurs basically are much more of life history on earth than we are in all respects. But look at the bright side, when they were killed off, another life form emerged, mammals. And that's that whole evolutionary branching that's happened. So you kind of have, when you have these evolutionary signatures, is there basically a map of how the genome changed? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So now you can go back to this early mammal that was hiding in caves and you can basically ask what happened after the dinosaurs were wiped out. A ton of evolutionary niches opened up and the mammals started populating all of these niches. And in that diversification, there was room for expansion of new types of functions. So some of them populated the air with bats flying, a new evolution of flight. Some populated the oceans with dolphins and whales going off to swim, et cetera. But we all are fundamentally mammals. So you can take the genomes of all these species and align them on top of each other and basically create nucleotide resolution correspondences. What my PhD work showed is that when you do that, when you line up species on top of each other, you can see that within protein coding genes, there's a particular pattern of evolution that is dictated by the level at which evolutionary selection acts. If I'm coding for a protein and I change the third codon position of a triplet that codes for that amino acid, the same amino acid will be encoded. So that basically means that any kind of mutation that preserves that translation that is invariant to that ultimate functional assessment that evolution will give is tolerated. So for any function that you're trying to achieve, there's a set of sequences that encode it. You can now look at the mapping, the graph isomorphism, if you wish, between all of the possible DNA encodings of a particular function and that function. And instead of having just that exact sequence at the protein level, you can think of the set of protein sequences that all fulfill the same function. What's evolution doing? Evolution has two components. One component is random, blind, and stupid mutation. The other component is super smart, ruthless selection. That's my mom calling from Greece. Yes, I might be a fully grown man, but I am a Greek. Did you just cancel the call? Wow, you're in trouble. I know, I'm in trouble. No, she's gonna be calling the cops. Honey, are you okay? I'm gonna edit this clip out and send it to her. Sure. So there's a lot of encoding for the same kind of function. Yeah, so you now have this mapping between all of the set of functions that could all encode the same, all of the set of sequences that can all encode the same function. What evolutionary signatures does is that it basically looks at the shape of that distribution of sequences that all encode the same thing. And based on that shape, you can basically say, ooh, proteins have a very different shape than RNA structures, than regulatory motifs, et cetera. So just by scanning a sequence, ignoring the sequence and just looking at the patterns of change, I'm like, wow, this thing is evolving like a protein and that thing is evolving like a motif and that thing is evolving. So that's exactly what we just did for COVID. So our paper that we posted in bioRxiv about coronavirus basically took this concept of evolutionary signatures and applied it on the SARS CoV2 genome that is responsible for the COVID 19 pandemic. And comparing it to? To 44 serbicovirus species. So this is the beta. What word did you just use, serbicovirus? Serbicovirus, so SARS related beta coronavirus. It's a portmanteau of a bunch. So that whole family of viruses. Yeah, so. How big is that family by the way? We have 44 species that, or I mean. There's 44 species in the family? Yeah. Virus is a clever bunch. No, no, but there's just 44. And again, we don't call them species in viruses. We call them strains. But anyway, there's 44 strains. And that's a tiny little subset of maybe another 50 strains that are just far too distantly related. Most of those only infect bats as the host and a subset of only four or five have ever infected humans. And we basically took all of those and we aligned them in the same exact way that we've aligned mammals. And then we looked at what proteins are, which of the currently hypothesized genes for the coronavirus genome are in fact evolving like proteins and which ones are not. And what we found is that ORF10, the last little open reading frame, the last little gene in the genome is bogus. That's not a protein at all. What is it? It's an RNA structure. That doesn't have a. It doesn't get translated into amino acids. And that, so it's important to narrow down to basically discover what's useful and what's not. Exactly. Basically, what is even the set of genes? The other thing that these evolutionary signatures showed is that within ORF3A lies a tiny little additional gene encoded within the other gene. So you can translate a DNA sequence in three different reading frames. If you start in the first one, it's ATG, et cetera. If you start on the second one, it's TGC, et cetera. And there's a gene within a gene. So there's a whole other protein that we didn't know about that might be super important. So we don't even know the building blocks of SARS COVID 2. So if we want to understand coronavirus biology and eventually find it successfully, we need to even have the set of genes and these evolutionary signatures that I developed in my PhD work. Are you really useful here? We just recently used. You know what, let's run with that tangent for a little bit, if it's okay. Can we talk about the COVID 19 a little bit more? What's your sense about the genome, the proteins, the functions that we understand about COVID 19? Where do we stand in your sense? What are the big open problems? And also, you kind of said it's important to understand what are the important proteins and why is that important? So what else does the comparison of these species tell us? What it tells us is how fast are things evolving? It tells us about at what level is the acceleration or deceleration pedal set for every one of these proteins. So the genome has 30 some genes. Some genes evolve super, super fast. Others evolve super, super slow. If you look at the polymerase gene that basically replicates the genome, that's a super slow evolving one. If you look at the nucleocapsid protein, that's also super slow evolving. If you look at the spike one protein, this is the part of the spike protein that actually touches the ACE2 receptor and then enables the virus to attach to your cells. That's the thing that gives it that visual... Yeah, the corona look basically. The corona look, yeah. So basically the spike protein sticks out of the virus and there's a first part of the protein S1 which basically attaches to the ACE2 receptor. And then S2 is the latch that sort of pushes and channels the fusion of the membranes and then the incorporation of the viral RNA inside our cells which then gets translated into all of these 30 proteins. So the S1 protein is evolving ridiculously fast. So if you look at the stop versus gas pedal, the gas pedal is all the way down. ORF8 is also evolving super fast and ORF6 is evolving super fast. We have no idea what they do. We have some idea but nowhere near what S1 is. So what the... Isn't that terrifying that S1 is evolving? That means that's a really useful function and if it's evolving fast, doesn't that mean new strains could be created or it does something? That means that it's searching for how to match, how to best match the host. So basically anything in general in evolution, if you look at genomes, anything that's contacting the environment is evolving much faster than anything that's internal. And the reason is that the environment changes. So if you look at the evolution of the cervical viruses, the S1 protein has evolved very rapidly because it's attaching to different hosts each time. We think of them as bats, but there's thousands of species of bats and to go from one species of bat to another species of bat, you have to adjust S1 to the new ACE2 receptor that you're gonna be facing in that new species. Sorry, quick tangent. Is it fascinating to you that viruses are doing this? I mean, it feels like they're this intelligent organism. I mean, does it give you pause how incredible it is that the evolutionary dynamics that you're describing is actually happening and they're freaking out, figuring out how to jump from bats to humans all in this distributed fashion? And then most of us don't even say they're alive or intelligent or whatever. So intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. Stupid is as stupid does, as Forrest Gump would say, and intelligent is as intelligent does. So basically if the virus is finding solutions that we think of as intelligent, yeah, it's probably intelligent, but that's again in the eye of the beholder. Do you think viruses are intelligent? Oh, of course not. Really? No. It's so incredible. So remember when I was talking about the two components of evolution, one is the stupid mutation, which is completely blind, and the other one is the super smart selection, which is ruthless. So it's not viruses who are smart. It's this component of evolution that's smart. So it's evolution that sort of appears smart. And how is that happening? By huge parallel search across thousands of parallel of parallel infections throughout the world right now. Yes, but so to push back on that, so yes, so then the intelligence is in the mechanism, but then by that argument, viruses would be more intelligent because there's just more of them. So the search, they're basically the brute force search that's happening with viruses because there's so many more of them than humans, then they're taken as a whole are more intelligent. I mean, so you don't think it's possible that, I mean, who runs, would we even be here if viruses weren't, I mean, who runs this thing? So humans or viruses? So let me answer, yeah, let me answer your question. So we would not be here if it wasn't for viruses. And part of the reason is that if you look at mammalian evolution early on in this mammalian radiation that basically happened after the death of the dinosaurs is that some of the viruses that we had in our genome spread throughout our genome and created binding sites for new classes of regulatory proteins. And these binding sites that landed all over our genome are now control elements that basically control our genes and sort of help the complexity of the circuitry of mammalian genomes. So, you know, everything's coevolution. That's fascinating, we're working together. And yet you say they're dumb. We've coopted them. No, I never said they're dumb. They just don't care. They don't care. Another thing, oh, is the virus trying to kill us? No, it's not. The virus is not trying to kill you. It's actually actively trying to not kill you. So when you get infected, if you die, bomber, I killed him, is what the reaction of the virus will be. Why? Because that virus won't spread. Many people have a misconception of, oh, viruses are smart or oh, viruses are mean. They don't care. It's like, you have to clean yourself of any kind of anthropomorphism out there. I don't know. Oh, yes. So there's a sense when taken as a whole that there's... It's in the eye of the beholder. Stupid is as stupid does. Intelligent is as intelligent does. So if you want to call them intelligent, that's fine. Because the end result is that they're finding amazing solutions. I mean, I am in awe. They're so dumb about it. They're just doing dumb. They don't care. They're not dumb and they're just don't care. They don't care. The care word is really interesting. I mean, there could be an argument that they're conscious. They're just dividing. They're not. They're just dividing. They're just a little entity which happens to be dividing and spreading. It just doesn't want to kill us. In fact, it prefers not to kill us. It just wants to spread. And when I say wants, again, I'm anthropomorphizing, but it's just that if you have two versions of a virus, one acquires a mutation that spreads more, that's going to spread more. One acquires a mutation that spreads less, that's going to be lost. One acquires a mutation that enters faster, that's going to be kept. One acquires a mutation that kills you right away, it's going to be lost. So over evolutionary time, the viruses that spread super well but don't kill the host are the ones that are going to survive. Yeah, but so you brilliantly described the basic mechanisms of how it all happens, but when you zoom out and you see the entirety of viruses, maybe across different strains of viruses, it seems like a living organism. I am in awe of biology. I find biology amazingly beautiful. I find the design of the current coronavirus, however lethal it is, amazingly beautiful. The way that it is encoded, the way that it tricks your cells into making 30 proteins from a single RNA. Human cells don't do that. Human cells make one protein from each RNA molecule. They don't make two, they make one. We are hardwired to make only one protein from every RNA molecule. And yet this virus goes in, throws in a single messenger RNA. Just like any messenger RNA, we have tens of thousands of messenger RNAs in our cells in any one time. In every one of our cells. It throws in one RNA and that RNA is so, I'm gonna use your word here, not my word, intelligent. That it hijacks the entire machinery of your human cell. It basically has at the beginning, a giant open reading frame. That's a giant protein that gets translated. Two thirds of that RNA make a single giant protein. That single protein is basically what a human cell would make. It's like, oh, here's a start code. I'm gonna start translating here. Human cells are kind of dumb. I'm sorry. Again, this is not the words I would normally use. But the human cell basically says, oh, this is an RNA, must be mine. Let me translate. And it starts translating it. And then you're in trouble. Why? Because that one protein as it's growing, gets cleaved into about 20 different peptides. The first peptide and the second peptide start interacting and the third one and the fourth one. And they shut off the ribosome of the whole cell to not translate human RNAs anymore. So the virus basically hijacks your cells and it cuts, it cleaves every one of your human RNAs to basically say to the ribosome, don't translate this one, junk. Don't look at this one, junk. And it only spares its own RNAs because they have a particular mark that it spares. Then all of the ribosomes that normally make protein in your human cells are now only able to translate viral RNAs. And then more and more and more and more of them. That's the first 20 proteins. In fact, halfway down about protein 11, between 11 and 12, you basically have a translational slippage where the ribosome skips reading frame. And it translates from one reading frame to another reading frame. That means that about half of them are gonna be translated from one to 11. And the other half are gonna be translated from 12 to 16. It's gorgeous. And then you're done. Then that mRNA will never translate the last 10 proteins but spike is the one right after that one. So how does spike even get translated? This positive strand RNA virus has a reverse transcriptase which is an RNA based reverse transcriptase. So from the RNA on the positive strand, it makes an RNA on the negative strand. And in between every single one of these genes, these open reading frames, there's a little signal AACGCA or something like that, that basically loops over to the beginning of the RNA. And basically instead of sort of having a single full negative strand RNA, it basically has a partial negative strand RNA that ends right before the beginning of that gene. And another one that ends right before the beginning of that gene. These negative strand RNAs now make positive strand RNAs that then look to the human whole cell just like any other human mRNA. It's like, ooh, great, I'm gonna translate that one because it doesn't have the cleaving that the virus has now put on all your human genes. And then you've lost the battle. That cell is now only making proteins for the virus that will then create the spike protein, the envelope protein, the membrane protein, the nucleocapsid protein that will package up the RNA and then sort of create new viral envelopes. And these will then be secreted out of that cell in new little packages that will then infect the rest of the cells. Repeat the whole process again. It's beautiful, right? It's mind boggling. It's hard not to anthropomorphize it. I know, but it's so gorgeous. So there is a beauty to it. Of course. Is it terrifying to you? So this is something that has happened throughout history. Humans have been nearly wiped out over and over and over again, and yet never fully wiped out. So yeah, I'm not concerned about the human race. I'm not even concerned about the impact on sort of our survival as a species. This is absolutely something, I mean, human life is so invaluable and every one of us is so invaluable, but if you think of it as sort of, is this the end of our species? By no means, basically. So let me explain. The Black Death killed what, 30% of Europe? That has left a tremendous imprint, a huge hole, a horrendous hole in the genetic makeup of humans. There's been series of wiping out of huge fractions of entire species or just entire species altogether. And that has a consequence on the human immune repertoire. If you look at how Europe was shaped and how Africa was shaped by malaria, for example, all the individuals that carry a mutation that protects you from malaria were able to survive much more. And if you look at the frequency of sickle cell disease and the frequency of malaria, the maps are actually showing the same pattern, the same imprint on Africa. And that basically led people to hypothesize that the reason why sickle cell disease is so much more frequent is because sickle cell disease is so much more frequent in Americans of African descent is because there was selection in Africa against malaria leading to sickle cell, because when the cells sickle, malaria is not able to replicate inside your cells as well. And therefore you protect against that. So if you look at human disease, all of the genetic associations that we do with human disease, you basically see the imprint of these waves of selection killing off gazillions of humans. And there's so many immune processes that are coming up as associated with so many different diseases. The reason for that is similar to what I was describing earlier, where the outward facing proteins evolve much more rapidly because the environment is always changing. But what's really interesting in the human genome is that we have coopted many of these immune genes to carry out nonimmune functions. For example, in our brain, we use immune cells to cleave off neuronal connections that don't get used. This whole use it or lose it, we know the mechanism. It's microglia that cleave off neuronal synaptic connections that are just not utilized. When you utilize them, you mark them in a particular way that basically when the microglia come, tell it, don't kill this one, it's used now. And the microglia will go off and kill the ones you don't use. This is an immune function, which is coopted to do nonimmune things. If you look at our adipocytes, M1 versus M2 macrophages inside our fat will basically determine whether you're obese or not. And these are again, immune cells that are resident and living within these tissues. So many disease associations. That's it, that we coopt these kinds of things for incredibly complicated functions. Exactly, evolution works in so many different ways, which are all beautiful and mysterious. But not intelligent. Not intelligent, it's in the eye of the beholder. But the point that I'm trying to make is that if you look at the imprint that COVID will have, hopefully it will not be big. Hopefully the US will get attacked together and stop the virus from spreading further. But if it doesn't, it's having an imprint on individuals who have particular genetic repertoires. So if you look at now the genetic associations of blood type and immune function cells, et cetera, there's actually association, genetic variation that basically says how much more likely am I or you to die if we contact the virus. And it's through these rounds of shaping the human genome that humans have basically made it so far. And selection is ruthless and it's brutal and it only comes with a lot of killing. But this is the way that viruses and environments have shaped the human genome. Basically, when you go through periods of famine, you select for particular genes. And what's left is not necessarily better, it's just whatever survived. And it might have been the surviving one back then, not because it was better, maybe the ones that ran slower survived. I mean, again, not necessarily better, but the surviving ones are basically the ones that then are shaped for any kind of subsequent evolutionary condition and environmental condition. But if you look at, for example, obesity, obesity was selected for basically the genes that now predisposes to obesity were at 2% frequency in Africa. They rose to 44% frequency in Europe. Wow, that's fascinating. Because you basically went through the ice ages and there was a scarcity of food. So there was a selection to being able to store every single calorie you consume. Eventually, environment changes. So the better allele, which was the fat storing allele, became the worst allele because it's the fat storing allele. It still has the same function. So if you look at my genome, speaking of mom calling, mom gave me a bad copy of that gene, this FTO locus. Basically, makes me. The one that has to do with. Obesity. With obesity. Yeah, I basically now have a bad copy from mom that makes me more likely to be obese. And I also have a bad copy from dad that makes me more likely to be obese. So homozygous. And that's the allele, it's still the minor allele, but it's at 44% frequency in Southeast Asia, 42% frequency in Europe, even though it started at 2%. It was an awesome allele to have 100 years ago. Right now, it's pretty terrible allele. So the other concept is that diversity matters. If we had 100 million nuclear physicists living the earth right now, we'd be in trouble. You need diversity, you need artists and you need musicians and you need mathematicians and you need politicians, yes, even those. And you need like. Well, let's not get crazy. But because then if a virus comes along or whatever. Exactly, exactly. So, no, there's two reasons. Number one, you want diversity in the immune repertoire and we have built in diversity. So basically, they are the most diverse. Basically, if you look at our immune system, there's layers and layers of diversity. Like the way that you create your cells generates diversity because of the selection for the VDJ recombination that basically eventually leads to a huge number of repertoires. But that's only one small component of diversity. The blood type is another one. The major histocompatibility complex, the HLA alleles are another source of diversity. So the immune system of humans is by nature, incredibly diverse and that basically leads to resilience. So basically what I'm saying that I don't worry for the human species because we are so diverse immunologically, we are likely to be very resilient against so many different attacks like this current virus. So you're saying natural pandemics may not be something that you're really afraid of because of the diversity in our genetic makeup. What about engineered pandemics? Do you have fears of us messing with the makeup of viruses or well, yeah, let's say with the makeup of viruses to create something that we can't control and would be much more destructive than it would come about naturally? Remember how we were talking about how smart evolution is? Humans are much dumber. So. You mean like human scientists, engineers? Yeah, humans, humans just like. Humans overall? Yeah, humans overall. Okay. But I mean, even the sort of synthetic biologists you know, basically if you were to create, you know, virus like SARS that will kill a lot of people, you would probably start with SARS. So whoever, you know, would like to design such a thing would basically start with a SARS tree or at least some relative of SARS. The source genome for the current virus was something completely different. It was something that has never infected anyone and never infected humans. No one in their right mind would have started there. But when you say sources like the nearest. The nearest relative. Relative. Is in a whole other branch. Interesting. No species of which has ever infected humans in that branch. So, you know, let's put this to rest. This was not designed by someone to kill off the human race. So you don't believe it was engineered? The. Or likely. Yeah, the path to engineering a deadly virus did not come from this strain that was used. Moreover, there's been various claims of, ha ha, this was mixed and matched in lab because the S1 protein has three different components, each of which has a different evolutionary tree. So, you know, a lot of popular press basically said, aha, this came from pangolin and this came from, you know, all kinds of other species. This is what has been happening throughout the coronavirus tree. So basically the S1 protein has been recombining across species all the time. Remember when I was talking about the positive strand, the negative strand, sub genomic RNAs, these can actually recombine. And if you have two different viruses infecting the same cell, they can actually mix and match between the positive strand and the negative strand and basically create a new hybrid virus with recombination that now has the S1 from one and the rest of the genome from another. And this is something that happens a lot in S1, in Orfet, et cetera. And that's something that's true of the whole tree. For the whole family of viruses. So it's not like someone has been messing with this for millions of years and, you know, changing. This happens naturally. That's, again, beautiful that that somehow happens, that they recombine. So two different strands can infect the body and then recombine. So all of this actually magic happens inside hosts. Like all, like. Yeah, that's why classification wise, virus is not thought to be alive because it doesn't self replicate. It's not autonomous. It's something that enters a living cell and then co ops it to basically make it its own. But by itself, people ask me, how do we kill this bastard? I'm like, you stop it from replicating. It's not like a bacterium that will just live in a, you know, puddle or something. It's a virus. Viruses don't live without their host. And they only live with their host for very little time. So if you stop it from replicating, it'll stop from spreading. I mean, it's not like HIV, which can stay dormant for a long time. Basically, coronaviruses just don't do that. They're not integrating genomes. They're RNA genomes. So if it's not expressed, it degrades. RNA degrades. It doesn't just stick around. Well, let me ask also about the immune system you mentioned. A lot of people kind of ask, you know, how can we strengthen the immune system to respond to this particular virus, but the viruses in general. Do you have from a biological perspective, thoughts on what we can do as humans to strengthen our immune system? If you look at the death rates across different countries, people with less vaccination have been dying more. If you look at North Italy, the vaccination rates are abysmal there. And a lot of people have been dying. If you look at Greece, very good vaccination rates. Almost no one has been dying. So yes, there's a policy component. So Italy reacted very slowly. Greece reacted very fast. So yeah, many fewer people died in Greece, but there might actually be a component of genetic immune repertoire. Basically, how did people die off, you know, in the history of the Greek population versus the Italian population. Wow. There's a... That's interesting to think about. And then there's a component of what vaccinations did you have as a kid and what are the off target effects of those vaccinations? So basically a vaccination can have two components. One is training your immune system against that specific insult. The second one is boosting up your immune system for all kinds of other things. If you look at allergies, Northern Europe, super clean environments, tons of allergies. Southern Europe, my kids grew up eating dirt. No allergies. So growing up, I never had even heard of what allergies are. Like, was it really allergies? And the reason is that I was playing in the garden. I was putting all kinds of stuff in my mouth from, you know, all kinds of dirt and stuff, tons of viruses there, tons of bacteria there. You know, my immune system was built up. So the more you protect your immune system from exposure, the less opportunity it has to learn about non self repertoire in a way that prepares it for the next insult. So that's the horizontal thing too, like the, so it's throughout your lifetime and the lifetime of the people that, your ancestors, that kind of thing. What about the... So again, it returns against free will. On the free will side of things, is there something we could do to strengthen our immune system in 2020? Is there like, you know, exercise, diet, all that kind of stuff? So it's kind of funny. There's a cartoon that basically shows two windows with a teller in each window. One has a humongous line and the other one has no one. The one that has no one above says health. No, it says exercise and diet. And the other one says pill. And there's a huge line for pill. So we're looking basically for magic bullets for sort of ways that we can, you know, beat cancer and beat coronavirus and beat this and beat that. And it turns out that the window with like, just diet and exercise is the best way to boost every aspect of your health. If you look at Alzheimer's, exercise and nutrition. I mean, you're like, really? For my brain, neurodegeneration? Absolutely. If you look at cancer, exercise and nutrition. If you look at coronavirus, exercise and nutrition, every single aspect of human health gets improved. And one of the studies we're doing now is basically looking at what are the effects of diet and exercise? How similar are they to each other? We basically take in diet intervention and exercise intervention in human and in mice. And we're basically doing single cell profiling of a bunch of different tissues to basically understand how are the cells, both the stromal cells and the immune cells of each of these tissues responding to the effect of exercise. What are the communication networks between different cells? Where the muscle that exercises sends signals through the bloodstream, through the lymphatic system, through all kinds of other systems that give signals to other cells that I have exercised and you should change in this particular way, which basically reconfigure those receptor cells with the effect of exercise. How well understood is those reconfigurations? Very little. We're just starting now, basically. Is the hope there to understand the effect on, so like the effect on the immune system? On the immune system, the effect on brain, the effect on your liver, on your digestive system, on your adipocytes? Adipose, the most misunderstood organ. Everybody thinks, oh, fat, terrible. No, fat is awesome. Your fat cells is what's keeping you alive because if you didn't have your fat cells, all those lipids and all those calories would be floating around in your blood and you'd be dead by now. Your adipocytes are your best friend. They're basically storing all these excess calories so that they don't hurt all of the rest of the body. And they're also fat burning in many ways. So, again, when you don't have the homozygous version that I have, your cells are able to burn calories much more easily by sort of flipping a master metabolic switch that involves this FTO locus that I mentioned earlier and its target genes, RX3 and RX5, that basically switch your adipocytes during their three first days of differentiation as they're becoming mature adipocytes to basically become either fat burning or fat storing fat cells. And the fat burning fat cells are your best friend. They're much closer to muscle than they are to white adipocytes. Is there a lot of difference between people that you could give, science could eventually give advice that is very generalizable or is our differences in our genetic makeup, like you mentioned, is that going to be basically something we have to be very specialized individuals, any advice we give in terms of diet, like what we were just talking about? Believe it or not, the most personalized advice that you give for nutrition don't have to do with your genome. They have to do with your gut microbiome, with the bacteria that live inside you. So most of your digestion is actually happening by species that are not human inside you. You have more nonhuman cells than you have human cells. You're basically a giant bag of bacteria with a few human cells along. And those do not necessarily have to do with your genetic makeup. They interact with your genetic makeup. They interact with your epigenome. They interact with your nutrition. They interact with your environment. They're basically an additional source of variation. So when you're thinking about sort of personalized nutritional advice, part of that is actually how do you match your microbiome? And part of that is how do we match your genetics? But again, this is a very diverse set of contributors. And the effect sizes are not enormous. So I think the science for that is not fully developed yet. Speaking of diets, because I've wrestled in combat sports, but sports my whole life were weight matters. So you have to cut and all that stuff. One thing I've learned a lot about my body, and it seems to be, I think, true about other people's bodies, is that you can adjust to a lot of things. That's the miraculous thing about this biological system, is like I fast often. I used to eat like five, six times a day and thought that was absolutely necessary. How could you not eat that often? And then when I started fasting, your body adjusted to that. And you learn how to not eat. And it was, if you just give it a chance for a few weeks, actually, over a period of a few weeks, your body can adjust to anything. And that's a miraculous, that's such a beautiful thing. So I'm a computer scientist, and I've basically gone through periods of 24 hours without eating or stopping. And then I'm like, oh, must eat. And I eat a ton. I used to order two pizzas just with my brother. So I've gone through these extremes as well, and I've gone the whole intermittent fasting thing. So I can sympathize with you both on the seven meals a day to the zero meals a day. So I think when I say everything with moderation, I actually think your body responds interestingly to these different changes in diet. I think part of the reason why we lose weight with pretty much every kind of change in behavior is because our epigenome and the set of proteins and enzymes that are expressed and our microbiome are not well suited to that nutritional source. And therefore, they will not be able to sort of catch everything that you give them. And then a lot of that will go undigested. And that basically means that your body can then lose weight in the short term, but very quickly will adjust to that new normal. And then we'll be able to sort of perhaps gain a lot of weight from the diet. So anyway, I mean, there's also studies in factories where basically people dim the lights and then suddenly everybody started working better. It was like, wow, that's amazing. Three weeks later, they made the lights a little brighter. Everybody started working better. So any kind of intervention has a placebo effect of, wow, now I'm healthier and I'm gonna be running more often, et cetera. So it's very hard to uncouple the placebo effect of, wow, I'm doing something to intervene on my diet from the, wow, this is actually the right thing for me. So, you know. Yeah, from the perspective from a nutrition science, psychology, both things I'm interested in, especially psychology, it seems that it's extremely difficult to do good science because there's so many variables involved, it's so difficult to control the variables, so difficult to do sufficiently large scale experiments, both sort of in terms of the number of subjects and temporal, like how long you do the study for, that it just seems like it's not even a real science for now, like nutrition science. I wanna jump into the whole placebo effect for a little bit here. And basically talk about the implications of that. If I give you a sugar pill and I tell you it's a sugar pill, you won't get any better. But if I tell you a sugar pill and I tell you, wow, this is an amazing drug, it actually will stop your cancer, your cancer will actually stop with much higher probability. What does that mean? That's so amazing. That means that if I can trick your brain into thinking that I'm healing you, your brain will basically figure out a way to heal itself, to heal the body. And that tells us that there's so much that we don't understand in the interplay between our cognition and our biology, that if we were able to better harvest the power of our brain to sort of impact the body through the placebo effect, we would be so much better in so many different things. Just by tricking yourself into thinking that you're doing better, you're actually doing better. So there's something to be said about sort of positive thinking, about optimism, about sort of just getting your brain and your mind into the right mindset that helps your body and helps your entire biology. Yeah, from a science perspective, that's just fascinating. Obviously most things about the brain is a total mystery for now, but that's a fascinating interplay that the brain can help cure cancer. I don't even know what to do with that. I mean, the way to think about that is the following. The converse of the equation is something that we are much more comfortable with. Like, oh, if you're stressed, then your heart rate might rise and all kinds of sort of toxins might be released and that can have a detrimental effect in your body, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe it's easier to understand your body healing from your mind by your mind is not killing your body, or at least it's killing it less. So I think that aspect of the stress equation is a little easier for most of us to conceptualize, but then the healing part is perhaps the same pathways, perhaps different pathways, but again, something that is totally untapped scientifically. I think we try to bring this question up a couple of times, but let's return to it again, is what do you think is the difference between the way a computer represents information, the human genome represents and stores information? And maybe broadly, what is the difference between how you think about computers and how you think about biological systems? So I made a very provocative claim earlier that we are a digital computer. Like I said, at the core lies a digital code and that's true in many ways, but surrounding that digital core, there's a huge amount of analog. If you look at our brain, it's not really digital. If you look at our sort of RNA and all of that stuff inside our cell, it's not really digital. It's really analog in many ways, but let's start with the code and then we'll expand to the rest. So the code itself is digital. So there's genes. You can think of the genes as, I don't know, the procedures, the functions inside your language. And then somehow you have to turn these functions on. How do you call a gene? How do you call that function? The way that you would do it in old programming languages is go to address whatever in your memory and then you'd start running from there. And modern programming languages have encapsulated this into functions and objects and all of that. And it's nice and cute, but in the end, deep down, there's still an assembly code that says go to that instruction and it runs that instruction. If you look at the human genome and the genome of pretty much most species out there, there's no go to function. You just don't start transcribing in position 13,000, 13,527 in chromosome 12. You instead have content based indexing. So at every location in the genome, in front of the genes that need to be turned on, I don't know, when you drink coffee, there's a little coffee marker in front of all of them. And whenever your cells that metabolize coffee need to metabolize coffee, they basically see coffee and they're like, ooh, let's go turn on all the coffee marked genes. So there's basically these small motifs, these small sequences that we call regulatory motifs. They're like patterns of DNA. They're only eight characters long or so, like GAT, GCA, et cetera. And these motifs work in combinations and every one of them has some recruitment affinity for a different protein that will then come and bind it and together collections of these motifs create regions that we call regulatory regions that can be either promoters near the beginning of the gene and that basically tells you where the function actually starts, where you call it, and then enhancers that are looping around of the DNA that basically bring the machinery that binds those enhancers and then bring it onto the promoter, which then recruits the right sort of the ribosome and the polymerase and all of that thing, which will first transcribe and then export and then eventually translate in the cytoplasm, you know, whatever RNA molecule. So the beauty of the way that the digital computer that's the genome works is that it's extremely fault tolerant. If I took your hard drive and I messed with 20% of the letters in it, of the zeros and ones and I flipped them, you'd be in trouble. If I take the genome and I flipped 20% of the letters, you probably won't even notice. And that resilience. That's fascinating, yeah. Is a key design principle. And again, I'm anthropomorphizing here, but it's a key driving principle of how biological systems work. They're first resilient and then anything else. And when you look at this incredible beauty of life from the most, I don't know, beautiful, I don't know, human genome maybe of humanity and all of the ideals that should come with it to the most terrifying genome, like, I don't know, COVID 19, SARS COVID 2 and the current pandemic, you basically see this elegance as the epitome of clean design, but it's dirty. It's a mess. It's, you know, the way to get there is hugely messy. And that's something that we as computer scientists don't embrace. We like to have clean code. You know, like in engineering, they teach you about compartmentalization, about sort of separating functions, about modularity, about hierarchical design. None of that applies in biology. Testing. Testing, sure. Yeah, biology does plenty of that. But I mean, through evolutionary exploration. But if you look at biological systems, first they are robust and then they specialize to become anything else. And if you look at viruses, the reason why they're so elegant when you look at the design of this, you know, genome, it seems so elegant. And the reason for that is that it's been stripped down from something much larger because of the pressure to keep it compact. So many compact genomes out there have ancestors that were much larger. You don't start small and become big. You go through a loop of add a bunch of stuff, increase complexity, and then, you know, slim it down. And one of my early papers was in fact on genome duplication. One of the things we found is that baker's yeast, which is the, you know, yeast that you use to make bread, but also the yeast that you use to make wine, which is basically the dominant species when you go in the fields of Tuscany and you say, you know, what's out there, it's basically saccharomyces cerevisiae, or the way my Italian friends say, saccharomyces cerevisiae. So, so. Oh, which means what? Oh, saccharomyces, okay, I'm sorry, I'm Greek. So yeah, zacharo, mikis, zacharo is sugar, mikis is fungus. Yes, cerevisiae, cerveza, beer. So it means the sugar fungus of beer. Yeah. You know, less, less sounding to the ear. Still poetic, yeah. So anyway, saccharomyces cerevisiae, basically the major baker's yeast out there is the descendant of a whole genome duplication. Why would a whole gene duplication even happen? When it happened is coinciding with about a hundred million years ago and the emergence of fruit bearing plants. Why fruit bearing plants? Because animals would eat the fruit and would walk around and poop huge amounts of nutrients along with a seed for the plants to spread. Before that, plants were not spreading through animals, they were spreading through wind and all kinds of other ways. But basically the moment you have fruit bearing plants, these plants are basically creating this abundance of sugar in the environment. So there's an evolutionary niche that gets created. And in that evolutionary niche, you basically have enough sugar that a whole genome duplication, which initially is a very messy event, allows you to then, you know, relieve some of that complexity. So I had to pause, what does genome duplication mean? That basically means that instead of having eight chromosomes, you can now have 16 chromosomes. So, but the duplication at first, when you go to 16, you're not using that. Oh yeah, you are. Yeah, so basically from one day to the next, you went from having eight chromosomes to having 16 chromosomes. Probably a non disjunction event during a duplication, during a division. So you basically divide the cell instead of half the genome going this way and half the genome going the other way after duplication of the genome, you basically have all of it going to one cell and then there's sufficient messiness there that you end up with slight differences that make most of these chromosomes be actually preserved. It's a long story short to me. But that's a big upgrade, right? So that's... Not necessarily, because what happens immediately thereafter is that you start massively losing tons of those duplicated genes. So 90% of those genes were actually lost very rapidly after whole gene duplication. And the reason for that is that biology is not intelligent, it's just ruthless selection, random mutation. So the ruthless selection basically means that as soon as one of the random mutations hit one gene, ruthless selection just kills off that gene. It's just, if you have a pressure to maintain a small compact genome, you will very rapidly lose the second copy of most of your genes and a small number 10% were kept in two copies. And those had to do a lot with environment adaptation, with the speed of replication, with the speed of translation and with sugar processing. So I'm making a long story short to basically say that evolution is messy. The only way... Like, so the example that I was giving of messing with 20% of your bits in your computer, totally bogus. Duplicating all your functions and just throwing them out there in the same function, just totally bogus. Like this would never work in an engineer system. But biological systems, because of this content based indexing and because of this modularity that comes from the fact that the gene is controlled by a series of tags. And now if you need this gene in another setting, you just add some more tags that will basically turn it on also in those settings. So this gene is now pressured to do two different functions and it builds up complexity. I see a whole gene duplication and gene duplication in general as a way to relieve that complexity. So you have this gradual buildup of complexity as functions get sort of added onto the existing genes. And then boom, you duplicate your workforce. And you now have two copies of this gene. One will probably specialize to do one and the other one will specialize to do the other or one will maintain the ancestral function. The other one will sort of be free to evolve and specialize while losing the ancestral function and so on and so forth. So that's how genomes evolve. They're just messy things, but they're extremely fault tolerant and they're extremely able to deal with mutations because that's the very way that you generate new functions. So new functionalization comes from the very thing that breaks it. So even in the current pandemic, many people are asking me which mutations matter the most. And what I tell them is, well, we can study the evolutionary dynamics of the current genome to then understand which mutations have previously happened or not. And which mutations happen in genes that evolve rapidly or not. And one of the things we found, for example, is that the genes that evolved rapidly in the past are still evolving rapidly now in the current pandemic. The genes that evolved slowly in the past are still evolving slowly. Which means that they're useful? Which means that they're under the same evolutionary pressures. But then the question is what happens in specific mutations? So if you look at the D614 gene mutations, that's been all over the news. So in position 614, in the amino acids 614 of the S protein, there's a D2 gene mutation that sort of has creeped over the population. That mutation, we found out through my work, disrupts a perfectly conserved nucleotide position that has never been changed in the history of millions of years of equivalent per million evolution of these viruses. That basically means that it's a completely new adaptation to human. And that mutation has now gone from 1% frequency to 90% frequency in almost all outbreaks. So this mutation, I like how you say the 416, what was it, okay. Yeah, 614, sorry. 614. D614G. D614, so literally, so what you're saying is this is like a chess move. So it just mutated one letter to another. Exactly. And that hasn't happened before. Yeah, never. And this somehow, this mutation is really useful. It's really useful in the current environment of the genome, which is moving from human to human. When it was moving from bat to bat, it couldn't care less for that mutation, but it's environment specific. So now that it's moving from human to human, it's moving way better, like by orders of magnitude. What do you, okay, so you're like tracking this evolutionary dynamics, which is fascinating, but what do you do with that? So what does that mean? What does this mean, what do you make, what do you make of this mutation in trying to anticipate, I guess, is one of the things you're trying to do is anticipate where, how this unrolls into the future, this evolutionary dynamics. Such a great question. So there's two things. Remember when I was saying earlier, mutation is the path to new things, but also the path to break old things. So what we know is that this position was extremely preserved through gazillions of mutations. That mutation was never tolerated when it was moving from bats to bats. So that basically means that that position is extremely important in the function of that protein. That's the first thing it tells. The second one is that that position was very well suited to bat transmission, but now is not well suited to human transmission, so it got rid of it. And it now has a new version of that amino acid that basically makes it much easier to transmit from human to human. So in terms of the evolutionary history teaching us about the future, it basically tells us here's the regions that are currently mutating. Here's the regions that are most likely to mutate going forward. As you're building a vaccine, here's what you should be focusing on in terms of the most stable regions that are the least likely to mutate. Or here's the newly evolved functions that are the most likely to be important because they've overcome this local maximum that it had reached in the bat transmission. So anyway, it's a tangent to basically say that evolution works in messy ways. And the thing that you would break is the thing that actually allows you to first go through a lull and then reaching new local maximum. And I often like to say that if engineers had basically designed evolution, we would still be perfectly replicating bacteria because it's my making the bacterium worse that you allow evolution to reach a new optimum. That's, just to pause on that, that's so profound. That's so profound for the entirety of this scientific and engineering disciplines. Exactly. We as engineers need to embrace breaking things. We as engineers need to embrace robustness as the first principle beyond perfection because nothing's gonna ever be perfect. And when you're sending a satellite to Mars, when something goes wrong, it'll break down. As opposed to building systems that tolerate failure and are resilient to that. And in fact, get better through that. So the SpaceX approach versus NASA for the... For example. Is there something we can learn about the incredible, take lessons from the incredible biological systems in their resilience, in the mushiness, the messiness to our computing systems, to our computers? It would basically be starting from scratch in many ways. It would basically be building new paradigms that don't try to get the right answer all the time, but try to get the right answer most of the time or a lot of the time. Do you see deep learning systems in the whole world of machine learning as kind of taking a step in that direction? Absolutely, absolutely. Basically by allowing this much more natural evolution of these parameters, you basically... And if you look at sort of deep learning systems again, they're not inspired by the genome aspect of biology, they're inspired by the brain aspect of biology. And again, I want you to pause for a second and realize the complexity of the entire human brain with trillions of connections within our neurons, with millions of cells talking to each other, is still encoded within that same genome. That same genome encodes every single freaking cell type of the entire body. Every single cell is encoded by the same code. And yet specialization allows you to have the single viral like genome that self replicates, the single module, modular automaton, work with other copies of itself, it's mind boggling. Create complex organs through which blood flows. And what is that blood? The same freaking genome. Create organs that communicate with each other. And what are these organs? The exact same genome. Create a brain that is innervated by massive amounts of blood pumping energy to it, 20% of our energetic needs to the brain from the same genome. And all of the neuronal connections, all of the auxiliary cells, all of the immune cells, the astrocytes, the ligodendrocytes, the neurons, the excitatory, the inhibitory neurons, all of the different classes of parasites, the blood brain barrier, all of that, same genome. One way to see that in a sad, this one is beautiful. The sad thing is thinking about the trillions of organisms that died to create that. You mean on the evolutionary path to humans? On the evolutionary path to humans. It's crazy, there's two descendant of apes just talking on a podcast. Okay, it's just so mind boggling. Just to boggle our minds a little bit more. Us talking to each other, we are basically generating a series of vocal utterances through our pulsating of vocal cords received through this. The people who listen to this are taking a completely different path to that information transfer, yet through language. But imagine if we could connect these brains directly to each other. The amount of information that I'm condensing into a small number of words is a huge funnel, which then you receive and you expand into a huge number of thoughts from that small funnel. In many ways, engineers would love to have the whole information transfer, just take the whole set of neurons and throw them away. I mean, throw them to the other person. This might actually not be better because in your misinterpretation of every word that I'm saying, you are creating new interpretation that might actually be way better than what I meant in the first place. The ambiguity of language perhaps might be the secret to creativity. Every single time you work on a project by yourself, you only bounce ideas with one person and your neurons are basically fully cognizant of what these ideas are. But the moment you interact with another person, the misinterpretations that happen might be the most creative part of the process. With my students, every time we have a research meeting, I very often pause and say, let me repeat what you just said in a different way. And I sort of go on and brainstorm with what they were saying, but by the third time, it's not what they were saying at all. And when they pick up what I'm saying, they're like, oh, well, dah, dah, dah. Now they've sort of learned something very different from what I was saying. And that is the same kind of messiness that I'm describing in the genome itself. It's sort of embracing the messiness. And that's a feature, not a book. Exactly. And in the same way, when you're thinking about sort of these deep learning systems that will allow us to sort of be more creative perhaps or learn better approximations of these complex functions, again, tuned to the universe that we inhabit, you have to embrace the breaking. You have to embrace the, how do we get out of these local optima? And a lot of the design paradigms that have made deep learning so successful are ways to get away from that, ways to get better training by sort of sending long range messages, these LSTM models and the sort of feed forward loops that sort of jump through layers of a convolutional neural network. All of these things are basically ways to push you out of these local maxima. And that's sort of what evolution does. That's what language does. That's what conversation and brainstorming does. That's what our brain does. So this design paradigm is something that's pervasive and yet not taught in schools, not taught in engineering schools where everything's minutely modularized to make sure that we never deviate from whatever signal we're trying to emit as opposed to let all hell breaks loose because that's the path to paradise. The path to paradise. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know how to teach that and what to do with it. I mean, it's difficult to know how to build up the scientific method around messiness. I mean, it's not all messiness. We need some cleanness. And going back to the example with Mars, that's probably the place where I want to sort of moderate error as much as possible and sort of control the environment as much as possible. But if you're trying to repopulate Mars, well, maybe messiness is a good thing then. On that, you quickly mentioned this in terms of us using our vocal cords to speak on a podcast. So Elon Musk and Neuralink are working on trying to plug, as per our discussion with computers and biological systems, to connect the two. He's trying to connect our brain to a computer to create a brain computer interface where they can communicate back and forth. On this line of thinking, do you think this is possible to bridge the gap between our engineered computing systems and the messy biological systems? My answer would be absolutely. You know, there's no doubt that we can understand more and more about what goes on in the brain and we can sort of train the brain. I don't know if you remember the Palm Pilot. Yeah, Palm Pilot, yeah. Remember this whole sort of alphabet that they had created? Am I thinking of the same thing? It's basically, you had a little pen and for every character, you had a little scribble that was unique that the machine could understand. And that instead of trying the machine and trying to teach the machine to recognize human characters, you had basically, they figured out that it's better and easier to train humans to create human like characters that the machine is better at recognizing. So in the same way, I think what will happen is that humans will be trained to be able to create the mind pattern that the machine will respond to before the machine truly comprehends our thoughts. So the first human brain interfaces will be tricking humans to speak the machine language where with the right set of electrodes, I can sort of trick my brain into doing this. And this is the same way that many people teach, like learn to control artificial limbs. You basically try a bunch of stuff and eventually you figure out how your limbs work. That might not be very different from how humans learn to use their natural limbs when they first grow up. Basically, you have these, you know, neoteny period of, you know, this puddle of soup inside your brain, trying to figure out how to even make neural connections before you're born and then learning sounds in utero of, you know, all kinds of echoes and, you know, eventually getting out in the real world. And I don't know if you've seen newborns, but they just stare around a lot. You know, one way to think about this as a machine learning person is, oh, they're just training their edge detectors. And eventually they figure out how to train their edge detectors. They work through the second layer of the visual cortex and the third layer and so on and so forth. And you basically have this learning how to control your limbs that probably comes at the same time. You're sort of, you know, throwing random things there and you realize that, oh, wow, when I do this thing, my limb moves. Let's do the following experiment. Take a breath. What muscles did you flex? Now take another breath and think what muscles do I flex? The first thing that you're thinking when you're taking a breath is the impact that it has on your lungs. You're like, oh, I'm now gonna increase my lungs or I'm not gonna bring air in. But what you're actually doing is just changing your diaphragm. That's not conscious, of course. You never think of the diaphragm as a thing. And why is that? That's probably the same reason why I think of moving my finger when I actually move my finger. I think of the effect instead of actually thinking of whatever muscle is twitching that actually causes my finger to move. So we basically in our first years of life build up this massive lookup table between whatever neuronal firing we do and whatever action happens in our body that we control. If you have a kid grow up with a third limb, I'm sure they'll figure out how to control them probably at the same rate as their natural limbs. And a lot of the work would be done by the... If a third limb is a computer, you kind of have a, not a faith, but a thought that the brain might be able to figure out... The plasticity would come from the brain. The brain would be cleverer than the machine at first. When I talk about a third limb, that's exactly what I'm saying, an artificial limb that basically just controls your mouse while you're typing. Perfectly natural thing. I mean, again, in a few hundred years. Maybe sooner than that. But basically, as long as the machine is consistent in the way that it will respond to your brain impulses, you'll figure out how to control that and you could play tennis with your third limb. And let me go back to consistency. People who have dramatic accidents that basically take out a whole chunk of their brain can be taught to coopt other parts of the brain to then control that part. You can basically build up that tissue again and eventually train your body how to walk again and how to read again and how to play again and how to think again, how to speak a language again, et cetera. So there's a massive amount of malleability that happens naturally in our way of controlling our body, our brain, our thoughts, our vocal cords, our limbs, et cetera. And human machine interfaces are inevitable if we sort of figure out how to read these electric impulses, but the resolution at which we can understand human thought right now is nil, is ridiculous. So how are human thoughts encoded? It's basically combinations of neurons that cofire and these create these things called engrams that eventually form memories and so on and so forth. We know nothing of all that stuff. So before we can actually read into your brain that you wanna build a program that does this and this and this and that, we need a lot of neuroscience. Well, so to push back on that, do you think it's possible that without understanding the functionally about the brain or from the neuroscience or the cognitive science or psychology, whichever level of the brain we'll look at, do you think if we just connect them, just like per your previous point, if we just have a high enough resolution between connection between a Wikipedia and your brain, the brain will just figure it out with us understanding because that's one of the innovations of Neuralink is they're increasing the number of connections to the brain to like several thousand, which before was in the dozens or whatever. You're still off by a few orders of magnitude on the order of seven. Right, but the thing is, the hope is if you increase that number more and more and more, maybe you don't need to understand anything about the actual how human thought is represented in the brain. You can just let it figure it out by itself. Keanu Reeves waking up and saying, I know cook food. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, sure. You don't have faith in the plasticity of the brain to that degree. It's not about brain plasticity. It's about the input aspect. Basically, I think on the output aspect, being able to control a machine is something that you can probably train your neural impulses that you're sending out to sort of match whatever response you see in the environment. If this thing moved every single time I thought a particular thought, then I could figure out, I could hack my way into moving this thing with just a series of thoughts. I could think guitar, piano, tennis ball, and then this thing would be moving. And then I would just have the series of thoughts that would sort of result in the impulses that will move this thing the way that I want it. And then eventually it'll become natural because I won't even think about it. I mean, in the same way that we control our limbs in a very natural way, but babies don't do that. Babies have to figure it out. And some of that is hard coded, but some of that is actually learned based on whatever soup of neurons you ended up with, whatever connections you pruned them to, and eventually you were born with. A lot of that is coded in the genome, but a huge chunk of that is stochastic. And sort of the way that you sort of create all these neurons, they migrate, they form connections, they sort of spread out, they have particular branching patterns, but then the connectivity itself, unique in every single new person. All this to say that on the output side, absolutely, I'm very, very, you know, hopeful that we can have machines that read thousands of these neuronal connections on the output side, but on the input side, oh boy. I don't expect any time in the near future we'll be able to sort of send a series of impulses that will tell me, oh, earth to sun distance, 7.5 million, et cetera, et cetera. Like nowhere. I mean, I think language will still be the input way rather than sort of any kind of more complex. It's a really interesting notion that the ambiguity of language is a feature. And we evolved for millions of years to take advantage of that ambiguity. Exactly. And yet no one teaches us the subtle differences between words that are near cognates, and yet evoke so much more than, you know, one from the other. And yet, you know, when you're choosing words from a list of 20 synonyms, you know exactly the connotation of every single one of them. And that's something that, you know, is there. So yes, there's ambiguity, but there's all kinds of connotations. And in the way that we select our words, we have so much baggage that we're sending along, the way that we're emoting, the way that we're moving our hands every single time we speak, the, you know, the pauses, the eye contact, et cetera. So much higher baud rate than just a vocal, you know, string of characters. Well, let me just take a small tangent on that. Oh, tangent? We haven't done that yet. It's a good idea. Let's do a tangent. We'll return to the origin of life after. So, I mean, you're Greek, but I'm going on this personal journey. I'm going to Paris for the explicit purpose of talking to one of the most famous, a couple who's a famous translators of Russian literature, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and they go, that's their art is the translation. And everything I've learned about the translation art, it makes me feel, it's so profound in a way that's so much more profound than the natural language processing papers I read in the machine learning community, that there's such depth to language that I don't know what to do with. I don't know if you've experienced that in your own life with knowing multiple languages. I don't know what to, I don't know how to make sense of it, but there's so much loss in translation between Russian and English, and getting a sense of that. Like, for example, there's like just taking a single sentence from Dostoevsky, and like, there's a lot of them. You could talk for hours about how to translate that sentence properly. That captures the meaning, the period, the culture, the humor, the wit, the suffering that was in the context of the time, all of that could be a single sentence. You could talk forever about what it takes to translate that correctly. I don't know what to do with that. So being Greek, it's very hard for me to think of a sentence or even a word without going into the full etymology of that word, breaking up every single atom of that sentence and every single atom of these words and rebuilding it back up. I have three kids. And the way that I teach them Greek is the same way that, you know, the documentary I was mentioning earlier about sort of understanding the deep roots of all of these, you know, words. And it's very interesting that every single time I hear a new word that I've never heard before, I go and figure out the etymology of that word because I will never appreciate that word without understanding how it was initially formed. Interesting, but how does that help? Because that's not the full picture. No, no, of course, of course. But what I'm trying to say is that knowing the components teaches you about the context of the formation of that word and sort of the original usage of that word. And then of course the word takes new meaning as you create it, you know, from its parts. And that meaning then gets augmented. And two synonyms that sort of have different roots will actually have implications that carry a lot of that baggage of the historical provenance of these words. So before working on genome evolution, my passion was evolution of language and sort of tracing cognates across different languages through their etymologies. That's fascinating that there's parallels between, I mean, the idea that there's evolutionary dynamics to our language. Yeah, every single word that you utter, parallels, parallels. What does parallels mean? Para means side by side. Alleles from alleles, which means identical twins. Parallels. I mean, name any word and there's so much baggage, so much beauty in how that word came to be and how this word took a new meaning than the sum of its parts. Yeah, and there's just, there's so many different words that are just words. They don't have any physical grounding. And now you take these words and you weave them into a sentence. The emotional invocations of that weaving are fathomless. And all of those emotions all live in the brains of humans. In the eye of the beholder. No, seriously, you have to embrace this concept of the eye of the beholder. It's the conceptualization that nothing takes meaning with one person creating it. Everything takes meaning in the receiving end and the emergent properties of these communication networks where every single, you know, if you look at the network of our cells and how they're communicating with each other, every cell has its own code. This code is modulated by the epigenome. This creates a bunch of different cell types. Each cell type now has its own identity. Yet they all have the common root of the stem cells that sort of led to them. Each of these identities is now communicating with each other. They take meaning in their interaction. There's an emergent property that comes from a bunch of cells being together that is not in any one of the parts. If you look at neurons communicating, again, these engrams don't exist in any one neuron. They exist in the connection and the combination of neurons. And the meaning of the words that I'm telling you is empty until it reaches you and it affects you in a very different way than it affects whoever's listening to this conversation now. Because of the emotional baggage that I've grown up with, that you've grown up with, and that they've grown up with. And that's, I think, the magic of translation. If you start thinking of translation as just simply capturing that emotional set of reactions that you evoke, you need a different set of words to evoke that same set of reactions to a French person than to a Russian person, because of the baggage of the culture that we grew up in. Yeah, I mean, there's... So basically, you shouldn't find the best word. Sometimes it's a completely different sentence structure that you will need, matched to the cultural context of the target audience that you have. Yeah, there's a lot of different words in the target audience that you have. Yeah, it's, I mean, you're just... I usually don't think about this, but right now, there's this feeling, as a reminder, that it's just you and I talking, but there's several hundred thousand people will listen to this. There's some guy in Russia right now running, like in Moscow, listening to us. There's somebody in India, I guarantee you. There's somebody in China and South America. There's somebody in Texas, they all have different... Emotional baggage. They probably got angry earlier on about the whole discussion about coronavirus and about some aspect of it. Yeah, and there's that network effect that's... It's a beautiful thing. And this lateral transfer of information, that's what makes the collective, quote unquote, genome of humanity so unique from any other species. Yeah. So you somehow miraculously wrapped it back to the very beginning of when we were talking about the beauty of the human genome. So I think this is the right time, unless we wanna go for a six to eight hour conversation. We're gonna have to talk again, but I think for now, to wrap it up, this is the right time to talk about the biggest, most ridiculous question of all, meaning of life. Off mic, you mentioned to me that you had your 42nd birthday. 42nd being a very special, absurdly special number. And you had a kind of get together with friends to discuss the meaning of life. So let me ask you, in your, as a biologist, as a computer scientist, and as a human, what is the meaning of life? I've been asking this question for a long time, ever since my 42nd birthday, but well before that, in even planning the meaning of life symposium. And symposium, sim means together, posy actually means to drink together. So symposium is actually a drinking party. So the meaning. Can you actually elaborate about this meaning of life symposium that you put together? It's like the most genius idea I've ever heard. So 42 is obviously the answer to life, the universe and everything, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And as I was turning 42, I've had the theme for every one of my birthdays. When I was turning 32, it's one, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero in binary. So I celebrated my 100,000th binary birthday, and I had a theme of going back 100,000 years, let's dress something in the last 100,000 years. Anyway, it was, I've always had these. It's such an interesting human being. Okay, that's awesome. I've always had these sort of numerology related announcements for my birthday parties. So what came out of that meaning of life symposium is that I basically asked 42 of my colleagues, 42 of my friends, 42 of my collaborators, to basically give seven minutes species on the meaning of life, each from their perspective. And I really encourage you to go there because it's mind boggling that every single person said a different answer. Every single person started with, I don't know what the meaning of life is, but, and then give this beautifully eloquently answer, eloquent answer. And they were all different, but they all were consistent with each other and mutually synergistic and together forming a beautiful view of what it means to be human in many ways. Some people talked about the loss of their loved one, their life partner for many, many years and how their life changed through that. Some people talked about the origin of life. Some people talked about the difference between purpose and meaning. I'll maybe quote one of the answers, which is this linguistics professor, friend of mine at Harvard, who basically said, that she was gonna, she's Greek as well. And she said, I will give a very Pythian answer. So Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi, who would basically give these very cryptic answers, very short, but interpretable in many different ways. There was this whole set of priests who were tasked with interpreting what Pythia had said. And very often you would not get a clean interpretation, but she said, I will be like Pythia and give you a very short and multiply interpretable answer. But unlike her, I will actually also give you three interpretations. And she said, the answer to the meaning of life is become one. And the first interpretation is like a child, become one year old with the excitement of discovering everything about the world. Second interpretation, in whatever you take on, become one, the first, the best, excel, drive yourself to perfection for every one of your tasks and become one when people are separate, become one, come together, learn to understand each other. Damn, that's an answer. And one way to summarize this whole meaning of life symposium is that the very symposium was illustrating the quest for meaning, which might itself be the meaning of life. This constant quest for something sublime, something human, something intangible, some aspect of what defines us as a species and as an individual. Both the quest of me as a person through my own life, but the meaning of life could also be the meaning of all of life. What is the whole point of life? Why life? Why life itself? Because we've been talking about the history and evolution of life, but we haven't talked about why life in the first place? Is life inevitable? Is life part of physics? Does life transcend physics by fighting against entropy, by compartmentalizing and increasing concentrations rather than diluting away? Is life a distinct entity in the universe beyond the traditional very simple physical rules that govern gravity and electromagnetism and all of these forces? Is life another force? Is there a life force? Is there a unique kind of set of principles that emerge, of course, built on top of the hardware of physics, but is it sort of a new layer of software or a new layer of a computer system? And so that's at the level of big questions. There's another aspect of gratitude of basically what I like to say is, during this pandemic, I've basically worked from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m. every single day, nonstop, including Saturday and Sunday. I've basically broken all boundaries of where life, personal life begins and work life ends. And that has been exhilarating for me, just the intellectual pleasure that I get from a day of exhaustion, where at the end of the day, my brain is hurting. I'm telling my wife, wow, I was useful today. And there's a certain pleasure that comes from feeling useful. And there's a certain pleasure that comes from feeling grateful. So I've written this little sort of prayer for my kids to say at bedtime every night, where they basically say, thank you, God, for all you have given me and give me the strength to give onto others with the same love that you have given onto me. We as a species are so special, the only ones who worry about the meaning of life. And maybe that's what makes us human. And what I like to say to my wife and to my students during this pandemic work extravaganza is every now and then they ask me, but how do you do this? And I'm like, I'm a workaholic. I love this. This is me in the most unfiltered way. The ability to do something useful, to feel that my brain is being used, to interact with the smartest people on the planet day in, day out, and to help them discover aspects of the human genome, of the human brain, of human disease and the human condition that no one has seen before with data that we're capturing that has never been observed. And there's another aspect, which is on the personal life. Many people say, oh, I'm not gonna have kids, why bother? I can tell you as a father, they're missing half the picture, if not the whole picture. Teaching my kids about my view of the world and watching through their eyes the naivete with which they start and the sophistication with which they end up, the understanding that they have of not just the natural world around them, but of me too. The unfiltered criticism that you get from your own children that knows no bounds of honesty. And I've grown components of my heart that I didn't know I had until you sense that fragility, that vulnerability of the children, that immense love and passion, the unfiltered egoism, that we as adults learn how to hide so much better. It's just this back of emotions that tell me about the raw materials that make a human being and how these raw materials can be arranged with more sophistication that we learn through life to become truly human adults. But there's something so beautiful about seeing that progression between them and seeing that progress and that progress and that progression between them, the complexity of the language growing as more neural connections are formed to realize that the hardware is getting rearranged as their software is getting implemented on that hardware, that their frontal cortex continues to grow for another 10 years. There's neuronal connections that are continuing to form, new neurons that actually get replicated and formed. And it's just incredible that we have these, not just you grow the hardware for 30 years and then you feed it all of the knowledge. No, no, the knowledge is fed throughout and is shaping these neural connections as they're forming. So seeing that transformation from either your own blood or from an adopted child is the most beautiful thing you can do as a human being. And it completes you, it completes that path, that journey. The create life, oh sure, that's at conception, that's easy. But create human life to add the human part, that takes decades of compassion, of sharing, of love and of anger and of impatience and patience. And as a parent, I think I've become a very different kind of teacher because again, I'm a professor. My first role is to bring adult human beings into a more mature level of adulthood where they learn not just to do science, but they learn the process of discovery and the process of collaboration, the process of sharing, the process of conveying the knowledge of encapsulating something incredibly complex and sort of giving it up in sort of bite sized chunks that the rest of humanity can appreciate. I tell my students all the time, if you, you know, like when an apple fall, when a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to listen, has it really fallen? The same way you do this awesome research, if you write an impenetrable paper that no one will understand, it's as if you never did the awesome research. So conveying of knowledge, conveying this lateral transfer that I was talking about at the very beginning of sort of humanity and sort of the sharing of information, all of that has gotten so much more rich by seeing human beings grow in my own home because that makes me a better parent and that makes me a better teacher and a better mentor to the nurturing of my adult children, which are my research group. First of all, beautifully put, connects beautifully to the vertical and the horizontal inheritance of ideas that we talked about at the very beginning. I don't think there's a better way to end it on this poetic and powerful note. Manolis, thank you so much for talking to me. It was a huge honor. We'll have to talk again about the origin of life, about epigenetics, epigenomics, and some of the incredible research you're doing. Truly an honor. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you. Such a pleasure. It's such a pleasure. I mean, your questions are outstanding. I've had such a blast here and I can't wait to be back. Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis, and thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist, 8sleep, and Masterclass. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to blinkist.com slash lex, 8sleep.com slash lex, and masterclass.com slash lex. Click the links, buy the stuff, get the discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin that I think Manolis represents quite beautifully. If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Manolis Kellis: Human Genome and Evolutionary Dynamics | Lex Fridman Podcast #113

The following is a conversation with Russ Tedrick, a roboticist and professor at MIT and vice president of robotics research at Toyota Research Institute or TRI. He works on control of robots in interesting, complicated, underactuated, stochastic, difficult to model situations. He's a great teacher and a great person, one of my favorites at MIT. We'll get into a lot of topics in this conversation from his time leading MIT's Delta Robotics Challenge team to the awesome fact that he often runs close to a marathon a day to and from work barefoot. For a world class roboticist interested in elegant, efficient control of underactuated dynamical systems like the human body, this fact makes Russ one of the most fascinating people I know. Quick summary of the ads. Three sponsors, Magic Spoon Cereal, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to magicspoon.com slash lex and using code lex at checkout, going to betterhelp.com slash lex and signing up at expressvpn.com slash lexpod. Click the links in the description, buy the stuff, get the discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This episode is supported by Magic Spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal. I've been on a mix of keto or carnivore diet for a very long time now. That means eating very little carbs. I used to love cereal. Obviously, most have crazy amounts of sugar, which is terrible for you, so I quit years ago, but Magic Spoon is a totally new thing. Zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, and only three net grams of carbs. It tastes delicious. It has a bunch of flavors, they're all good, but if you know what's good for you, you'll go with cocoa, my favorite flavor and the flavor of champions. Click the magicspoon.com slash lex link in the description, use code lex at checkout to get the discount and to let them know I sent you. So buy all of their cereal. It's delicious and good for you. You won't regret it. This show is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P Help. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line, it's not self help, it is professional counseling done securely online. As you may know, I'm a bit from the David Goggins line of creatures and still have some demons to contend with, usually on long runs or all nighters full of self doubt. I think suffering is essential for creation, but you can suffer beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. For most people, I think a good therapist can help in this. So it's at least worth a try. Check out the reviews, they're all good. It's easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com slash lex pod to get a discount and to support this podcast. Have you ever watched The Office? If you have, you probably know it's based on a UK series also called The Office. Not to stir up trouble, but I personally think the British version is actually more brilliant than the American one, but both are amazing. Anyway, there are actually nine other countries with their own version of The Office. You can get access to them with no geo restriction when you use ExpressVPN. It lets you control where you want sites to think you're located. You can choose from nearly 100 different countries, giving you access to content that isn't available in your region. So again, get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash lex pod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Russ Tedrick. What is the most beautiful motion of an animal or robot that you've ever seen? I think the most beautiful motion of a robot has to be the passive dynamic walkers. I think there's just something fundamentally beautiful. The ones in particular that Steve Collins built with Andy Ruina at Cornell, a 3D walking machine. So it was not confined to a boom or a plane that you put it on top of a small ramp, give it a little push, it's powered only by gravity. No controllers, no batteries whatsoever. It just falls down the ramp. And at the time it looked more natural, more graceful, more human like than any robot we'd seen to date powered only by gravity. How does it work? Well, okay, the simplest model, it's kind of like a slinky. It's like an elaborate slinky. One of the simplest models we used to think about it is actually a rimless wheel. So imagine taking a bicycle wheel, but take the rim off. So it's now just got a bunch of spokes. If you give that a push, it still wants to roll down the ramp, but every time its foot, its spoke comes around and hits the ground, it loses a little energy. Every time it takes a step forward, it gains a little energy. Those things can come into perfect balance. And actually they want to, it's a stable phenomenon. If it's going too slow, it'll speed up. If it's going too fast, it'll slow down and it comes into a stable periodic motion. Now you can take that rimless wheel, which doesn't look very much like a human walking, take all the extra spokes away, put a hinge in the middle. Now it's two legs. That's called our compass gait walker. That can still, you give it a little push, it starts falling down a ramp. It looks a little bit more like walking. At least it's a biped. But what Steve and Andy, and Tad McGeer started the whole exercise, but what Steve and Andy did was they took it to this beautiful conclusion where they built something that had knees, arms, a torso. The arms swung naturally, give it a little push. And that looked like a stroll through the park. How do you design something like that? I mean, is that art or science? It's on the boundary. I think there's a science to getting close to the solution. I think there's certainly art in the way that they made a beautiful robot. But then the finesse, because they were working with a system that wasn't perfectly modeled, wasn't perfectly controlled, there's all these little tricks that you have to tune the suction cups at the knees, for instance, so that they stick, but then they release at just the right time. Or there's all these little tricks of the trade, which really are art, but it was a point. I mean, it made the point. We were, at that time, the walking robot, the best walking robot in the world was Honda's Asmo. Absolutely marvel of modern engineering. Is this 90s? This was in 97 when they first released. It sort of announced P2, and then it went through. It was Asmo by then in 2004. And it looks like this very cautious walking, like you're walking on hot coals or something like that. I think it gets a bad rap. Asmo is a beautiful machine. It does walk with its knees bent. Our Atlas walking had its knees bent. But actually, Asmo was pretty fantastic. But it wasn't energy efficient. Neither was Atlas when we worked on Atlas. None of our robots that have been that complicated have been very energy efficient. But there's a thing that happens when you do control, when you try to control a system of that complexity. You try to use your motors to basically counteract gravity. Take whatever the world's doing to you and push back, erase the dynamics of the world, and impose the dynamics you want because you can make them simple and analyzable, mathematically simple. And this was a very sort of beautiful example that you don't have to do that. You can just let go. Let physics do most of the work, right? And you just have to give it a little bit of energy. This one only walked down a ramp. It would never walk on the flat. To walk on the flat, you have to give a little energy at some point. But maybe instead of trying to take the forces imparted to you by the world and replacing them, what we should be doing is letting the world push us around and we go with the flow. Very zen, very zen robot. Yeah, but okay, so that sounds very zen, but I can also imagine how many like failed versions they had to go through. Like how many, like, I would say it's probably, would you say it's in the thousands that they've had to have the system fall down before they figured out how to get it? I don't know if it's thousands, but it's a lot. It takes some patience. There's no question. So in that sense, control might help a little bit. Oh, I think everybody, even at the time, said that the answer is to do with that with control. But it was just pointing out that maybe the way we're doing control right now isn't the way we should. Got it. So what about on the animal side, the ones that figured out how to move efficiently? Is there anything you find inspiring or beautiful in the movement of any particular animal? I do have a favorite example. Okay. So it sort of goes with the passive walking idea. So is there, you know, how energy efficient are animals? Okay, there's a great series of experiments by George Lauder at Harvard and Mike Tranofilo at MIT. They were studying fish swimming in a water tunnel. Okay. And one of these, the type of fish they were studying were these rainbow trout, because there was a phenomenon well understood that rainbow trout, when they're swimming upstream in mating season, they kind of hang out behind the rocks. And it looks like, I mean, that's tiring work swimming upstream. They're hanging out behind the rocks. Maybe there's something energetically interesting there. So they tried to recreate that. They put in this water tunnel, a rock basically, a cylinder that had the same sort of vortex street, the eddies coming off the back of the rock that you would see in a stream. And they put a real fish behind this and watched how it swims. And the amazing thing is that if you watch from above what the fish swims when it's not behind a rock, it has a particular gate. You can identify the fish the same way you look at a human walking down the street. You sort of have a sense of how a human walks. The fish has a characteristic gate. You put that fish behind the rock, its gate changes. And what they saw was that it was actually resonating and kind of surfing between the vortices. Now, here was the experiment that really was the clincher. Because there was still, it wasn't clear how much of that was mechanics of the fish, how much of that is control, the brain. So the clincher experiment, and maybe one of my favorites to date, although there are many good experiments. They took, this was now a dead fish. They took a dead fish. They put a string that went, that tied the mouth of the fish to the rock so it couldn't go back and get caught in the grates. And then they asked what would that dead fish do when it was hanging out behind the rock? And so what you'd expect, it sort of flopped around like a dead fish in the vortex wake until something sort of amazing happens. And this video is worth putting in, right? What happens? The dead fish basically starts swimming upstream, right? It's completely dead, no brain, no motors, no control. But it's somehow the mechanics of the fish resonate with the vortex street and it starts swimming upstream. It's one of the best examples ever. Who do you give credit for that to? Is that just evolution constantly just figuring out by killing a lot of generations of animals, like the most efficient motion? Is that, or maybe the physics of our world completely like, is like if evolution applied not only to animals, but just the entirety of it somehow drives to efficiency, like nature likes efficiency? I don't know if that question even makes any sense. I understand the question. That's reasonable. I mean, do they co evolve? Yeah, somehow co, yeah. Like I don't know if an environment can evolve, but. I mean, there are experiments that people do, careful experiments that show that animals can adapt to unusual situations and recover efficiency. So there seems like at least in one direction, I think there is reason to believe that the animal's motor system and probably its mechanics adapt in order to be more efficient. But efficiency isn't the only goal, of course. Sometimes it's too easy to think about only efficiency, but we have to do a lot of other things first, not get eaten. And then all other things being equal, try to save energy. By the way, let's draw a distinction between control and mechanics. Like how would you define each? Yeah. I mean, I think part of the point is that we shouldn't draw a line as clearly as we tend to. But on a robot, we have motors and we have the links of the robot, let's say. If the motors are turned off, the robot has some passive dynamics, okay? Gravity does the work. You can put springs, I would call that mechanics, right? If we have springs and dampers, which our muscles are springs and dampers and tendons. But then you have something that's doing active work, putting energy in, which are your motors on the robot. The controller's job is to send commands to the motor that add new energy into the system, right? So the mechanics and control interplay somewhere, the divide is around, you know, did you decide to send some commands to your motor or did you just leave the motors off, let them do their work? Would you say is most of nature on the dynamic side or the control side? So like, if you look at biological systems, we're living in a pandemic now, like, do you think a virus is a, do you think it's a dynamic system or is there a lot of control, intelligence? I think it's both, but I think we maybe have underestimated how important the dynamics are, right? I mean, even our bodies, the mechanics of our bodies, certainly with exercise, they evolve. But so I actually, I lost a finger in early 2000s and it's my fifth metacarpal. And it turns out you use that a lot in ways you don't expect when you're opening jars, even when I'm just walking around, if I bump it on something, there's a bone there that was used to taking contact. My fourth metacarpal wasn't used to taking contact, it used to hurt, it still does a little bit. But actually my bone has remodeled, right? Over a couple of years, the geometry, the mechanics of that bone changed to address the new circumstances. So the idea that somehow it's only our brain that's adapting or evolving is not right. Maybe sticking on evolution for a bit, because it's tended to create some interesting things. Bipedal walking, why the heck did evolution give us, I think we're, are we the only mammals that walk on two feet? No, I mean, there's a bunch of animals that do it a bit. A bit. I think we are the most successful bipeds. I think I read somewhere that the reason the evolution made us walk on two feet is because there's an advantage to being able to carry food back to the tribe or something like that. So like you can carry, it's kind of this communal, cooperative thing, so like to carry stuff back to a place of shelter and so on to share with others. Do you understand at all the value of walking on two feet from both a robotics and a human perspective? Yeah, there are some great books written about evolution of, walking evolution of the human body. I think it's easy though to make bad evolutionary arguments. Sure, most of them are probably bad, but what else can we do? I mean, I think a lot of what dominated our evolution probably was not the things that worked well sort of in the steady state, you know, when things are good, but for instance, people talk about what we should eat now because our ancestors were meat eaters or whatever. Oh yeah, I love that, yeah. But probably, you know, the reason that one pre Homo sapiens species versus another survived was not because of whether they ate well when there was lots of food. But when the ice age came, you know, probably one of them happened to be in the wrong place. One of them happened to forage a food that was okay even when the glaciers came or something like that, I mean. There's a million variables that contributed and we can't, and our, actually the amount of information we're working with and telling these stories, these evolutionary stories is very little. So yeah, just like you said, it seems like, if you study history, it seems like history turns on like these little events that otherwise would seem meaningless, but in a grant, like when you, in retrospect, were turning points. Absolutely. And that's probably how like somebody got hit in the head with a rock because somebody slept with the wrong person back in the cave days and somebody get angry and that turned, you know, warring tribes combined with the environment, all those millions of things and the meat eating, which I get a lot of criticism because I don't know what your dietary processes are like, but these days I've been eating only meat, which is, there's a large community of people who say, yeah, probably make evolutionary arguments and say you're doing a great job. There's probably an even larger community of people, including my mom, who says it's deeply unhealthy, it's wrong, but I just feel good doing it. But you're right, these evolutionary arguments can be flawed, but is there anything interesting to pull out for? There's a great book, by the way, well, a series of books by Nicholas Taleb about Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan. Highly recommend them, but yeah, they make the point nicely that probably it was a few random events that, yes, maybe it was someone getting hit by a rock, as you say. That said, do you think, I don't know how to ask this question or how to talk about this, but there's something elegant and beautiful about moving on two feet, obviously biased because I'm human, but from a robotics perspective, too, you work with robots on two feet, is it all useful to build robots that are on two feet as opposed to four? Is there something useful about it? I think the most, I mean, the reason I spent a long time working on bipedal walking was because it was hard and it challenged control theory in ways that I thought were important. I wouldn't have ever tried to convince you that you should start a company around bipeds or something like this. There are people that make pretty compelling arguments. I think the most compelling one is that the world is built for the human form, and if you want a robot to work in the world we have today, then having a human form is a pretty good way to go. There are places that a biped can go that would be hard for other form factors to go, even natural places, but at some point in the long run, we'll be building our environments for our robots, probably, and so maybe that argument falls aside. So you famously run barefoot. Do you still run barefoot? I still run barefoot. That's so awesome. Much to my wife's chagrin. Do you want to make an evolutionary argument for why running barefoot is advantageous? What have you learned about human and robot movement in general from running barefoot? Human or robot and or? Well, you know, it happened the other way, right? So I was studying walking robots, and there's a great conference called the Dynamic Walking Conference where it brings together both the biomechanics community and the walking robots community. And so I had been going to this for years and hearing talks by people who study barefoot running and other, the mechanics of running. So I did eventually read Born to Run. Most people read Born to Run in the first, right? The other thing I had going for me is actually that I wasn't a runner before, and I learned to run after I had learned about barefoot running, or I mean, started running longer distances. So I didn't have to unlearn. And I'm definitely, I'm a big fan of it for me, but I'm not going to, I tend to not try to convince other people. There's people who run beautifully with shoes on, and that's good. But here's why it makes sense for me. It's all about the longterm game, right? So I think it's just too easy to run 10 miles, feel pretty good, and then you get home at night and you realize my knees hurt. I did something wrong, right? If you take your shoes off, then if you hit hard with your foot at all, then it hurts. You don't like run 10 miles and then realize you've done some damage. You have immediate feedback telling you that you've done something that's maybe suboptimal, and you change your gait. I mean, it's even subconscious. If I, right now, having run many miles barefoot, if I put a shoe on, my gait changes in a way that I think is not as good. So it makes me land softer. And I think my goals for running are to do it for as long as I can into old age, not to win any races. And so for me, this is a way to protect myself. Yeah, I think, first of all, I've tried running barefoot many years ago, probably the other way, just reading Born to Run. But just to understand, because I felt like I couldn't put in the miles that I wanted to. And it feels like running for me, and I think for a lot of people, was one of those activities that we do often and we never really try to learn to do correctly. Like, it's funny, there's so many activities we do every day, like brushing our teeth, right? I think a lot of us, at least me, probably have never deeply studied how to properly brush my teeth, right? Or wash, as now with the pandemic, or how to properly wash our hands. We do it every day, but we haven't really studied, like, am I doing this correctly? But running felt like one of those things, it was absurd not to study how to do correctly, because it's the source of so much pain and suffering. Like, I hate running, but I do it. I do it because I hate it, but I feel good afterwards. But I think it feels like you need to learn how to do it properly. So that's where barefoot running came in, and then I quickly realized that my gait was completely wrong. I was taking huge steps, and landing hard on the heel, all those elements. And so, yeah, from that I actually learned to take really small steps, look. I already forgot the number, but I feel like it was 180 a minute or something like that. And I remember I actually just took songs that are 180 beats per minute, and then like tried to run at that beat, and just to teach myself. It took a long time, and I feel like after a while, you learn to run, you adjust properly, without going all the way to barefoot. But I feel like barefoot is the legit way to do it. I mean, I think a lot of people would be really curious about it. Can you, if they're interested in trying, what would you, how would you recommend they start, or try, or explore? Slowly. That's the biggest thing people do, is they are excellent runners, and they're used to running long distances, or running fast, and they take their shoes off, and they hurt themselves instantly trying to do something that they were used to doing. I think I lucked out in the sense that I couldn't run very far when I first started trying. And I run with minimal shoes too. I mean, I will bring along a pair of, actually, like aqua socks or something like this, I can just slip on, or running sandals, I've tried all of them. What's the difference between a minimal shoe and nothing at all? What's, like, feeling wise, what does it feel like? There is a, I mean, I notice my gait changing, right? So, I mean, your foot has as many muscles and sensors as your hand does, right? Sensors, ooh, okay. And we do amazing things with our hands. And we stick our foot in a big, solid shoe, right? So there's, I think, you know, when you're barefoot, you're just giving yourself more proprioception. And that's why you're more aware of some of the gait flaws and stuff like this. Now, you have less protection too, so. Rocks and stuff. I mean, yeah, so I think people who are afraid of barefoot running are worried about getting cuts or stepping on rocks. First of all, even if that was a concern, I think those are all, like, very short term. You know, if I get a scratch or something, it'll heal in a week. If I blow out my knees, I'm done running forever. So I will trade the short term for the long term anytime. But even then, you know, and this, again, to my wife's chagrin, your feet get tough, right? And, yeah, I can run over almost anything now. I mean, what, can you talk about, is there, like, is there tips or tricks that you have, suggestions about, like, if I wanted to try it? You know, there is a good book, actually. There's probably more good books since I read them. But Ken Bob, Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton. He's an interesting guy. But I think his book captures the right way to describe running, barefoot running, to somebody better than any other I've seen. So you run pretty good distances, and you bike, and is there, you know, if we talk about bucket list items, is there something crazy on your bucket list, athletically, that you hope to do one day? I mean, my commute is already a little crazy. What are we talking about here? What distance are we talking about? Well, I live about 12 miles from MIT, but you can find lots of different ways to get there. So, I mean, I've run there for many years, I've biked there. Old ways? Yeah, but normally I would try to run in and then bike home, bike in, run home. But you have run there and back before? Sure. Barefoot? Yeah, or with minimal shoes or whatever that. 12, 12 times two? Yeah. Okay. It became kind of a game of how can I get to work? I've rollerbladed, I've done all kinds of weird stuff, but my favorite one these days, I've been taking the Charles River to work. So, I can put in the rowboat not so far from my house, but the Charles River takes a long way to get to MIT, so I can spend a long time getting there. And it's not about, I don't know, it's just about, I've had people ask me, how can you justify taking that time? But for me, it's just a magical time to think, to compress, decompress. Especially, I'll wake up, do a lot of work in the morning, and then I kind of have to just let that settle before I'm ready for all my meetings. And then on the way home, it's a great time to sort of let that settle. You lead a large group of people. Is there days where you're like, oh shit, I gotta get to work in an hour? Like, I mean, is there a tension there? And like, if we look at the grand scheme of things, just like you said, long term, that meeting probably doesn't matter. Like, you can always say, I'll just, I'll run and let the meeting happen, how it happens. Like, what, how do you, that zen, how do you, what do you do with that tension between the real world saying urgently, you need to be there, this is important, everything is melting down, how are we gonna fix this robot? There's this critical meeting, and then there's this, the zen beauty of just running, the simplicity of it, you along with nature. What do you do with that? I would say I'm not a fast runner, particularly. Probably my fastest splits ever was when I had to get to daycare on time because they were gonna charge me, you know, some dollar per minute that I was late. I've run some fast splits to daycare. But those times are past now. I think work, you can find a work life balance in that way. I think you just have to. I think I am better at work because I take time to think on the way in. So I plan my day around it, and I rarely feel that those are really at odds. So what, the bucket list item. If we're talking 12 times two, or approaching a marathon, what, have you run an ultra marathon before? Do you do races? Is there, what's a... Not to win. I'm not gonna like take a dinghy across the Atlantic or something if that's what you want. But if someone does and wants to write a book, I would totally read it because I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. No, I do have some fun things that I will try. You know, I like to, when I travel, I almost always bike to Logan Airport and fold up a little folding bike and then take it with me and bike to wherever I'm going. And it's taken me, or I'll take a stand up paddle board these days on the airplane, and then I'll try to paddle around where I'm going or whatever. And I've done some crazy things, but... But not for the, you know, I now talk, I don't know if you know who David Goggins is by any chance. Not well, but yeah. But I talk to him now every day. So he's the person who made me do this stupid challenge. So he's insane and he does things for the purpose in the best kind of way. He does things like for the explicit purpose of suffering. Like he picks the thing that, like whatever he thinks he can do, he does more. So is that, do you have that thing in you or are you... I think it's become the opposite. It's a... So you're like that dynamical system that the walker, the efficient... Yeah, it's leave no pain, right? You should end feeling better than you started. Okay. But it's mostly, I think, and COVID has tested this because I've lost my commute. I think I'm perfectly happy walking around town with my wife and kids if they could get them to go. And it's more about just getting outside and getting away from the keyboard for some time just to let things compress. Let's go into robotics a little bit. What to use the most beautiful idea in robotics? Whether we're talking about control or whether we're talking about optimization and the math side of things or the engineering side of things or the philosophical side of things. I think I've been lucky to experience something that not so many roboticists have experienced, which is to hang out with some really amazing control theorists. And the clarity of thought that some of the more mathematical control theory can bring to even very complex, messy looking problems is really, it really had a big impact on me and I had a day even just a couple of weeks ago where I had spent the day on a Zoom robotics conference having great conversations with lots of people. Felt really good about the ideas that were flowing and the like. And then I had a late afternoon meeting with one of my favorite control theorists and we went from these abstract discussions about maybes and what ifs and what a great idea to these super precise statements about systems that aren't that much more simple or abstract than the ones I care about deeply. And the contrast of that is, I don't know, it really gets me. I think people underestimate maybe the power of clear thinking. And so for instance, deep learning is amazing. I use it heavily in our work. I think it's changed the world, unquestionable. It makes it easy to get things to work without thinking as critically about it. So I think one of the challenges as an educator is to think about how do we make sure people get a taste of the more rigorous thinking that I think goes along with some different approaches. Yeah, so that's really interesting. So understanding like the fundamentals, the first principles of the problem, where in this case it's mechanics, like how a thing moves, how a thing behaves, like all the forces involved, like really getting a deep understanding of that. I mean, from physics, the first principle thing come from physics, and here it's literally physics. Yeah, and this applies, in deep learning, this applies to not just, I mean, it applies so cleanly in robotics, but it also applies to just in any data set. I find this true, I mean, driving as well. There's a lot of folks in that work on autonomous vehicles that work on autonomous vehicles that don't study driving, like deeply. I might be coming a little bit from the psychology side, but I remember I spent a ridiculous number of hours at lunch, at this like lawn chair, and I would sit somewhere in MIT's campus, there's a few interesting intersections, and we'd just watch people cross. So we were studying pedestrian behavior, and I felt like, as we record a lot of video, to try, and then there's the computer vision extracts their movement, how they move their head, and so on, but like every time, I felt like I didn't understand enough. I just, I felt like I wasn't understanding what, how are people signaling to each other, what are they thinking, how cognizant are they of their fear of death? Like, what's the underlying game theory here? What are the incentives? And then I finally found a live stream of an intersection that's like high def that I just, I would watch so I wouldn't have to sit out there. But it's interesting, so like, I feel. But that's tough, that's a tough example, because I mean, the learning. Humans are involved. Not just because human, but I think the learning mantra is that basically the statistics of the data will tell me things I need to know, right? And, you know, for the example you gave of all the nuances of, you know, eye contact, or hand gestures, or whatever that are happening for these subtle interactions between pedestrians and traffic, right? Maybe the data will tell that story. I maybe even, one level more meta than what you're saying. For a particular problem, I think it might be the case that data should tell us the story. But I think there's a rigorous thinking that is just an essential skill for a mathematician or an engineer that I just don't wanna lose it. There are certainly super rigorous control, or sorry, machine learning people. I just think deep learning makes it so easy to do some things that our next generation, are not immediately rewarded for going through some of the more rigorous approaches. And then I wonder where that takes us. Well, I'm actually optimistic about it. I just want to do my part to try to steer that rigorous thinking. So there's like two questions I wanna ask. Do you have sort of a good example of rigorous thinking where it's easy to get lazy and not do the rigorous thinking? And the other question I have is like, do you have advice of how to practice rigorous thinking in all the computer science disciplines that we've mentioned? Yeah, I mean, there are times where problems that can be solved with well known mature methods could also be solved with a deep learning approach. And there's an argument that you must use learning even for the parts we already think we know, because if the human has touched it, then you've biased the system and you've suddenly put a bottleneck in there that is your own mental model. But something like converting a matrix, I think we know how to do that pretty well, even if it's a pretty big matrix, and we understand that pretty well. And you could train a deep network to do it, but you shouldn't probably. So in that sense, rigorous thinking is understanding the scope and the limitations of the methods that we have, like how to use the tools of mathematics properly. Yeah, I think taking a class on analysis is all I'm sort of arguing is to take a chance to stop and force yourself to think rigorously about even the rational numbers or something. It doesn't have to be the end all problem. But that exercise of clear thinking, I think goes a long way, and I just wanna make sure we keep preaching it. We don't lose it. But do you think when you're doing rigorous thinking or maybe trying to write down equations or sort of explicitly formally describe a system, do you think we naturally simplify things too much? Is that a danger you run into? Like in order to be able to understand something about the system mathematically, we make it too much of a toy example. But I think that's the good stuff, right? That's how you understand the fundamentals? I think so. I think maybe even that's a key to intelligence or something, but I mean, okay, what if Newton and Galileo had deep learning? And they had done a bunch of experiments and they told the world, here's your weights of your neural network. We've solved the problem. Where would we be today? I don't think we'd be as far as we are. There's something to be said about having the simplest explanation for a phenomenon. So I don't doubt that we can train neural networks to predict even physical F equals MA type equations. But I maybe, I want another Newton to come along because I think there's more to do in terms of coming up with the simple models for more complicated tasks. Yeah, let's not offend AI systems from 50 years from now that are listening to this that are probably better at, might be better coming up with F equals MA equations themselves. So sorry, I actually think learning is probably a route to achieving this, but the representation matters, right? And I think having a function that takes my inputs to outputs that is arbitrarily complex may not be the end goal. I think there's still the most simple or parsimonious explanation for the data. Simple doesn't mean low dimensional. That's one thing I think that we've, a lesson that we've learned. So a standard way to do model reduction or system identification and controls is the typical formulation is that you try to find the minimal state dimension realization of a system that hits some error bounds or something like that. And that's maybe not, I think we're learning that state dimension is not the right metric. Of complexity. Of complexity. But for me, I think a lot about contact, the mechanics of contact, if a robot hand is picking up an object or something. And when I write down the equations of motion for that, they look incredibly complex, not because, actually not so much because of the dynamics of the hand when it's moving, but it's just the interactions and when they turn on and off, right? So having a high dimensional, but simple description of what's happening out here is fine. But if when I actually start touching, if I write down a different dynamical system for every polygon on my robot hand and every polygon on the object, whether it's in contact or not, with all the combinatorics that explodes there, then that's too complex. So I need to somehow summarize that with a more intuitive physics way of thinking. And yeah, I'm very optimistic that machine learning will get us there. First of all, I mean, I'll probably do it in the introduction, but you're one of the great robotics people at MIT. You're a professor at MIT. You've teach him a lot of amazing courses. You run a large group and you have a important history for MIT, I think, as being a part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Can you maybe first say, what is the DARPA Robotics Challenge and then tell your story around it, your journey with it? Yeah, sure. So the DARPA Robotics Challenge, it came on the tails of the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge, which were the challenges that brought us, put a spotlight on self driving cars. Gil Pratt was at DARPA and pitched a new challenge that involved disaster response. It didn't explicitly require humanoids, although humanoids came into the picture. This happened shortly after the Fukushima disaster in Japan and our challenge was motivated roughly by that because that was a case where if we had had robots that were ready to be sent in, there's a chance that we could have averted disaster. And certainly after the, in the disaster response, there were times we would have loved to have sent robots in. So in practice, what we ended up with was a grand challenge, a DARPA Robotics Challenge, where Boston Dynamics was to make humanoid robots. People like me and the amazing team at MIT were competing first in a simulation challenge to try to be one of the ones that wins the right to work on one of the Boston Dynamics humanoids in order to compete in the final challenge, which was a physical challenge. And at that point, it was already, so it was decided as humanoid robots early on. There were two tracks. You could enter as a hardware team where you brought your own robot, or you could enter through the virtual robotics challenge as a software team that would try to win the right to use one of the Boston Dynamics robots. Sure, called Atlas. Atlas. Humanoid robots. Yeah, it was a 400 pound Marvel, but a pretty big, scary looking robot. Expensive too. Expensive, yeah. Okay, so I mean, how did you feel at the prospect of this kind of challenge? I mean, it seems autonomous vehicles, yeah, I guess that sounds hard, but not really from a robotics perspective. It's like, didn't they do it in the 80s is the kind of feeling I would have, like when you first look at the problem, it's on wheels, but like humanoid robots, that sounds really hard. So what are your, psychologically speaking, what were you feeling, excited, scared? Why the heck did you get yourself involved in this kind of messy challenge? We didn't really know for sure what we were signing up for in the sense that you could have something that, as it was described in the call for participation, that could have put a huge emphasis on the dynamics of walking and not falling down and walking over rough terrain, or the same description, because the robot had to go into this disaster area and turn valves and pick up a drill, it cut the hole through a wall, it had to do some interesting things. The challenge could have really highlighted perception and autonomous planning, or it ended up that locomoting over complex terrain played a pretty big role in the competition. So... And the degree of autonomy wasn't clear. The degree of autonomy was always a central part of the discussion. So what wasn't clear was how we would be able, how far we'd be able to get with it. So the idea was always that you want semi autonomy, that you want the robot to have enough compute that you can have a degraded network link to a human. And so the same way we had degraded networks at many natural disasters, you'd send your robot in, you'd be able to get a few bits back and forth, but you don't get to have enough potentially to fully operate the robot in every joint of the robot. So, and then the question was, and the gamesmanship of the organizers was to figure out what we're capable of, push us as far as we could, so that it would differentiate the teams that put more autonomy on the robot and had a few clicks and just said, go there, do this, go there, do this, versus someone who's picking every footstep or something like that. So what were some memories, painful, triumphant from the experience? Like what was that journey? Maybe if you can dig in a little deeper, maybe even on the technical side, on the team side, that whole process of, from the early idea stages to actually competing. I mean, this was a defining experience for me. It came at the right time for me in my career. I had gotten tenure before I was due a sabbatical, and most people do something relaxing and restorative for a sabbatical. So you got tenure before this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a good time for me. We had a bunch of algorithms that we were very happy with. We wanted to see how far we could push them, and this was a chance to really test our mettle to do more proper software engineering. So the team, we all just worked our butts off. We were in that lab almost all the time. Okay, so there were some, of course, high highs and low lows throughout that. Anytime you're not sleeping and devoting your life to a 400 pound humanoid. I remember actually one funny moment where we're all super tired, and so Atlas had to walk across cinder blocks. That was one of the obstacles. And I remember Atlas was powered down and hanging limp on its harness, and the humans were there picking up and laying the brick down so that the robot could walk over it. And I thought, what is wrong with this? We've got a robot just watching us do all the manual labor so that it can take its little stroll across the train. But I mean, even the virtual robotics challenge was super nerve wracking and dramatic. I remember, so we were using Gazebo as a simulator on the cloud, and there was all these interesting challenges. I think the investment that OSR FC, whatever they were called at that time, Brian Gerkey's team at Open Source Robotics, they were pushing on the capabilities of Gazebo in order to scale it to the complexity of these challenges. So, you know, up to the virtual competition. So the virtual competition was, you will sign on at a certain time and we'll have a network connection to another machine on the cloud that is running the simulator of your robot. And your controller will run on this computer and the physics will run on the other and you have to connect. Now, the physics, they wanted it to run at real time rates because there was an element of human interaction. And humans, if you do want to teleop, it works way better if it's at frame rate. Oh, cool. But it was very hard to simulate these complex scenes at real time rate. So right up to like days before the competition, the simulator wasn't quite at real time rate. And that was great for me because my controller was solving a pretty big optimization problem and it wasn't quite at real time rate. So I was fine. I was keeping up with the simulator. We were both running at about 0.7. And I remember getting this email. And by the way, the perception folks on our team hated that they knew that if my controller was too slow, the robot was gonna fall down. And no matter how good their perception system was, if I can't make my controller fast. Anyways, we get this email like three days before the virtual competition. It's for all the marbles. We're gonna either get a humanoid robot or we're not. And we get an email saying, good news, we made the robot, the simulator faster. It's now at one point. And I was just like, oh man, what are we gonna do here? So that came in late at night for me. A few days ahead. A few days ahead. I went over, it happened at Frank Permenter, who's a very, very sharp. He was a student at the time working on optimization. He was still in lab. Frank, we need to make the quadratic programming solver faster, not like a little faster. It's actually, you know, and we wrote a new solver for that QP together that night. It was terrifying. So there's a really hard optimization problem that you're constantly solving. You didn't make the optimization problem simpler? You wrote a new solver? So, I mean, your observation is almost spot on. What we did was what everybody, I mean, people know how to do this, but we had not yet done this idea of warm starting. So we are solving a big optimization problem at every time step. But if you're running fast enough, the optimization problem you're solving on the last time step is pretty similar to the optimization you're gonna solve with the next. We had course had told our commercial solver to use warm starting, but even the interface to that commercial solver was causing us these delays. So what we did was we basically wrote, we called it fast QP at the time. We wrote a very lightweight, very fast layer, which would basically check if nearby solutions to the quadratic program were, which were very easily checked, could stabilize the robot. And if they couldn't, we would fall back to the solver. You couldn't really test this well, right? Or like? I mean, so we always knew that if we fell back to, if we, it got to the point where if for some reason things slowed down and we fell back to the original solver, the robot would actually literally fall down. So it was a harrowing sort of edge we were, ledge we were sort of on. But I mean, it actually, like the 400 pound human could come crashing to the ground if your solver's not fast enough. But you know, we had lots of good experiences. So can I ask you a weird question I get about idea of hard work? So actually people, like students of yours that I've interacted with and just, and robotics people in general, but they have moments, at moments have worked harder than most people I know in terms of, if you look at different disciplines of how hard people work. But they're also like the happiest. Like, just like, I don't know. It's the same thing with like running. People that push themselves to like the limit, they also seem to be like the most like full of life somehow. And I get often criticized like, you're not getting enough sleep. What are you doing to your body? Blah, blah, blah, like this kind of stuff. And I usually just kind of respond like, I'm doing what I love. I'm passionate about it. I love it. I feel like it's, it's invigorating. I actually think, I don't think the lack of sleep is what hurts you. I think what hurts you is stress and lack of doing things that you're passionate about. But in this world, yeah, I mean, can you comment about why the heck robotics people are willing to push themselves to that degree? Is there value in that? And why are they so happy? I think, I think you got it right. I mean, I think the causality is not that we work hard. And I think other disciplines work very hard too, but it's, I don't think it's that we work hard and therefore we are happy. I think we found something that we're truly passionate about. It makes us very happy. And then we get a little involved with it and spend a lot of time on it. What a luxury to have something that you wanna spend all your time on, right? We could talk about this for many hours, but maybe if we could pick, is there something on the technical side on the approach that you took that's interesting that turned out to be a terrible failure or a success that you carry into your work today about all the different ideas that were involved in making, whether in the simulation or in the real world, making this semi autonomous system work? I mean, it really did teach me something fundamental about what it's gonna take to get robustness out of a system of this complexity. I would say the DARPA challenge really was foundational in my thinking. I think the autonomous driving community thinks about this. I think lots of people thinking about safety critical systems that might have machine learning in the loop are thinking about these questions. For me, the DARPA challenge was the moment where I realized we've spent every waking minute running this robot. And again, for the physical competition, days before the competition, we saw the robot fall down in a way it had never fallen down before. I thought, how could we have found that? We only have one robot, it's running almost all the time. We just didn't have enough hours in the day to test that robot. Something has to change, right? And then I think that, I mean, I would say that the team that won was, from KAIST, was the team that had two robots and was able to do not only incredible engineering, just absolutely top rate engineering, but also they were able to test at a rate and discipline that we didn't keep up with. What does testing look like? What are we talking about here? Like, what's a loop of tests? Like from start to finish, what is a loop of testing? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a whole philosophy to testing. There's the unit tests, and you can do that on a hardware, you can do that in a small piece of code. You write one function, you should write a test that checks that function's input and outputs. You should also write an integration test at the other extreme of running the whole system together, where they try to turn on all of the different functions that you think are correct. It's much harder to write the specifications for a system level test, especially if that system is as complicated as a humanoid robot. But the philosophy is sort of the same. On the real robot, it's no different, but on a real robot, it's impossible to run the same experiment twice. So if you see a failure, you hope you caught something in the logs that tell you what happened, but you'd probably never be able to run exactly that experiment again. And right now, I think our philosophy is just, basically Monte Carlo estimation, is just run as many experiments as we can, maybe try to set up the environment to make the things we are worried about happen as often as possible. But really we're relying on somewhat random search in order to test. Maybe that's all we'll ever be able to, but I think, you know, cause there's an argument that the things that'll get you are the things that are really nuanced in the world. And there'd be very hard to, for instance, put back in a simulation. Yeah, I guess the edge cases. What was the hardest thing? Like, so you said walking over rough terrain, like just taking footsteps. I mean, people, it's so dramatic and painful in a certain kind of way to watch these videos from the DRC of robots falling. Yep. It's just so heartbreaking. I don't know. Maybe it's because for me at least, we anthropomorphize the robot. Of course, it's also funny for some reason, like humans falling is funny for, I don't, it's some dark reason. I'm not sure why it is so, but it's also like tragic and painful. And so speaking of which, I mean, what made the robots fall and fail in your view? So I can tell you exactly what happened on our, we, I contributed one of those. Our team contributed one of those spectacular falls. Every one of those falls has a complicated story. I mean, at one time, the power effectively went out on the robot because it had been sitting at the door waiting for a green light to be able to proceed and its batteries, you know, and therefore it just fell backwards and smashed its head against the ground. And it was hilarious, but it wasn't because of bad software, right? But for ours, so the hardest part of the challenge, the hardest task in my view was getting out of the Polaris. It was actually relatively easy to drive the Polaris. Can you tell the story? Sorry to interrupt. The story of the car. People should watch this video. I mean, the thing you've come up with is just brilliant, but anyway, sorry, what's... Yeah, we kind of joke. We call it the big robot, little car problem because somehow the race organizers decided to give us a 400 pound humanoid. And then they also provided the vehicle, which was a little Polaris. And the robot didn't really fit in the car. So you couldn't drive the car with your feet under the steering column. We actually had to straddle the main column of the, and have basically one foot in the passenger seat, one foot in the driver's seat, and then drive with our left hand. But the hard part was we had to then park the car, get out of the car. It didn't have a door, that was okay. But it's just getting up from crouched, from sitting, when you're in this very constrained environment. First of all, I remember after watching those videos, I was much more cognizant of how hard it is for me to get in and out of the car, and out of the car, especially. It's actually a really difficult control problem. Yeah. I'm very cognizant of it when I'm like injured for whatever reason. Oh, that's really hard. Yeah. So how did you approach this problem? So we had, you think of NASA's operations, and they have these checklists, prelaunched checklists and the like. We weren't far off from that. We had this big checklist. And on the first day of the competition, we were running down our checklist. And one of the things we had to do, we had to turn off the controller, the piece of software that was running that would drive the left foot of the robot in order to accelerate on the gas. And then we turned on our balancing controller. And the nerves, jitters of the first day of the competition, someone forgot to check that box and turn that controller off. So we used a lot of motion planning to figure out a sort of configuration of the robot that we could get up and over. We relied heavily on our balancing controller. And basically, when the robot was in one of its most precarious sort of configurations, trying to sneak its big leg out of the side, the other controller that thought it was still driving told its left foot to go like this. And that wasn't good. But it turned disastrous for us because what happened was a little bit of push here. Actually, we have videos of us running into the robot with a 10 foot pole and it kind of will recover. But this is a case where there's no space to recover. So a lot of our secondary balancing mechanisms about like take a step to recover, they were all disabled because we were in the car and there was no place to step. So we were relying on our just lowest level reflexes. And even then, I think just hitting the foot on the seat, on the floor, we probably could have recovered from it. But the thing that was bad that happened is when we did that and we jostled a little bit, the tailbone of our robot was only a little off the seat, it hit the seat. And the other foot came off the ground just a little bit. And nothing in our plans had ever told us what to do if your butt's on the seat and your feet are in the air. Feet in the air. And then the thing is once you get off the script, things can go very wrong because even our state estimation, our system that was trying to collect all the data from the sensors and understand what's happening with the robot, it didn't know about this situation. So it was predicting things that were just wrong. And then we did a violent shake and fell off in our face first out of the robot. But like into the destination. That's true, we fell in, we got our point for egress. But so is there any hope for, that's interesting, is there any hope for Atlas to be able to do something when it's just on its butt and feet in the air? Absolutely. So you can, what do you? No, so that is one of the big challenges. And I think it's still true, you know, Boston Dynamics and Antimal and there's this incredible work on legged robots happening around the world. Most of them still are very good at the case where you're making contact with the world at your feet. And they have typically point feet relatively, they have balls on their feet, for instance. If those robots get in a situation where the elbow hits the wall or something like this, that's a pretty different situation. Now they have layers of mechanisms that will make, I think the more mature solutions have ways in which the controller won't do stupid things. But a human, for instance, is able to leverage incidental contact in order to accomplish a goal. In fact, I might, if you push me, I might actually put my hand out and make a new brand new contact. The feet of the robot are doing this on quadrupeds, but we mostly in robotics are afraid of contact on the rest of our body, which is crazy. There's this whole field of motion planning, collision free motion planning. And we write very complex algorithms so that the robot can dance around and make sure it doesn't touch the world. So people are just afraid of contact because contact the scene is a difficult. It's still a difficult control problem and sensing problem. Now you're a serious person, I'm a little bit of an idiot and I'm going to ask you some dumb questions. So I do martial arts. So like jiu jitsu, I wrestled my whole life. So let me ask the question, like whenever people learn that I do any kind of AI or like I mentioned robots and things like that, they say, when are we going to have robots that can win in a wrestling match or in a fight against a human? So we just mentioned sitting on your butt, if you're in the air, that's a common position. Jiu jitsu, when you're on the ground, you're a down opponent. Like how difficult do you think is the problem? And when will we have a robot that can defeat a human in a wrestling match? And we're talking about a lot, like, I don't know if you're familiar with wrestling, but essentially. Not very. It's basically the art of contact. It's like, it's because you're picking contact points and then using like leverage like to off balance to trick people, like you make them feel like you're doing one thing and then they change their balance and then you switch what you're doing and then results in a throw or whatever. So like, it's basically the art of multiple contacts. So. Awesome, that's a nice description of it. So there's also an opponent in there, right? So if. Very dynamic. Right, if you are wrestling a human and are in a game theoretic situation with a human, that's still hard, but just to speak to the, you know, quickly reasoning about contact part of it, for instance. Yeah, maybe even throwing the game theory out of it, almost like, yeah, almost like a non dynamic opponent. Right, there's reasons to be optimistic, but I think our best understanding of those problems are still pretty hard. I have been increasingly focused on manipulation, partly where that's a case where the contact has to be much more rich. And there are some really impressive examples of deep learning policies, controllers that can appear to do good things through contact. We've even got new examples of, you know, deep learning models of predicting what's gonna happen to objects as they go through contact. But I think the challenge you just offered there still eludes us, right? The ability to make a decision based on those models quickly. You know, I have to think though, it's hard for humans too, when you get that complicated. I think probably you had maybe a slow motion version of where you learned the basic skills and you've probably gotten better at it and there's much more subtle to you. But it might still be hard to actually, you know, really on the fly take a, you know, model of your humanoid and figure out how to plan the optimal sequence. That might be a problem we never solve. Well, the, I mean, one of the most amazing things to me about the, we can talk about martial arts. We could also talk about dancing. Doesn't really matter. Too human, I think it's the most interesting study of contact. It's not even the dynamic element of it. It's the, like when you get good at it, it's so effortless. Like I can just, I'm very cognizant of the entirety of the learning process being essentially like learning how to move my body in a way that I could throw very large weights around effortlessly, like, and I can feel the learning. Like I'm a huge believer in drilling of techniques and you can just like feel your, I don't, you're not feeling, you're feeling, sorry, you're learning it intellectually a little bit, but a lot of it is the body learning it somehow, like instinctually and whatever that learning is, that's really, I'm not even sure if that's equivalent to like a deep learning, learning a controller. I think it's something more, it feels like there's a lot of distributed learning going on. Yeah, I think there's hierarchy and composition probably in the systems that we don't capture very well yet. You have layers of control systems. You have reflexes at the bottom layer and you have a system that's capable of planning a vacation to some distant country, which is probably, you probably don't have a controller, a policy for every possible destination you'll ever pick. Right? But there's something magical in the in between and how do you go from these low level feedback loops to something that feels like a pretty complex set of outcomes. You know, my guess is, I think there's evidence that you can plan at some of these levels, right? So Josh Tenenbaum just showed it in his talk the other day. He's got a game he likes to talk about. I think he calls it the pick three game or something, where he puts a bunch of clutter down in front of a person and he says, okay, pick three objects. And it might be a telephone or a shoe or a Kleenex box or whatever. And apparently you pick three items and then you pick, he says, okay, pick the first one up with your right hand, the second one up with your left hand. Now using those objects, now as tools, pick up the third object. Right, so that's down at the level of physics and mechanics and contact mechanics that I think we do learning or we do have policies for, we do control for, almost feedback, but somehow we're able to still, I mean, I've never picked up a telephone with a shoe and a water bottle before. And somehow, and it takes me a little longer to do that the first time, but most of the time we can sort of figure that out. So yeah, I think the amazing thing is this ability to be flexible with our models, plan when we need to use our well oiled controllers when we don't, when we're in familiar territory. Having models, I think the other thing you just said was something about, I think your awareness of what's happening is even changing as you improve your expertise, right? So maybe you have a very approximate model of the mechanics to begin with. And as you gain expertise, you get a more refined version of that model. You're aware of muscles or balance components that you just weren't even aware of before. So how do you scaffold that? Yeah, plus the fear of injury, the ambition of goals, of excelling, and fear of mortality. Let's see, what else is in there? As the motivations, overinflated ego in the beginning, and then a crash of confidence in the middle. All of those seem to be essential for the learning process. And if all that's good, then you're probably optimizing energy efficiency. Yeah, right, so we have to get that right. So there was this idea that you would have robots play soccer better than human players by 2050. That was the goal. Basically, it was the goal to beat world champion team, to become a world cup, beat like a world cup level team. So are we gonna see that first? Or a robot, if you're familiar, there's an organization called UFC for mixed martial arts. Are we gonna see a world cup championship soccer team that have robots, or a UFC champion mixed martial artist as a robot? I mean, it's very hard to say one thing is harder, some problem is harder than the other. What probably matters is who started the organization that, I mean, I think RoboCup has a pretty serious following, and there is a history now of people playing that game, learning about that game, building robots to play that game, building increasingly more human robots. It's got momentum. So if you want to have mixed martial arts compete, you better start your organization now, right? I think almost independent of which problem is technically harder, because they're both hard and they're both different. That's a good point. I mean, those videos are just hilarious, like especially the humanoid robots trying to play soccer. I mean, they're kind of terrible right now. I mean, I guess there is robo sumo wrestling. There's like the robo one competitions, where they do have these robots that go on the table and basically fight. So maybe I'm wrong, maybe. First of all, do you have a year in mind for RoboCup, just from a robotics perspective? Seems like a super exciting possibility that like in the physical space, this is what's interesting. I think the world is captivated. I think it's really exciting. It inspires just a huge number of people when a machine beats a human at a game that humans are really damn good at. So you're talking about chess and go, but that's in the world of digital. I don't think machines have beat humans at a game in the physical space yet, but that would be just. You have to make the rules very carefully, right? I mean, if Atlas kicked me in the shins, I'm down and game over. So it's very subtle on what's fair. I think the fighting one is a weird one. Yeah, because you're talking about a machine that's much stronger than you. But yeah, in terms of soccer, basketball, all those kinds. Even soccer, right? I mean, as soon as there's contact or whatever, and there are some things that the robot will do better. I think if you really set yourself up to try to see could robots win the game of soccer as the rules were written, the right thing for the robot to do is to play very differently than a human would play. You're not gonna get the perfect soccer player robot. You're gonna get something that exploits the rules, exploits its super actuators, its super low bandwidth feedback loops or whatever, and it's gonna play the game differently than you want it to play. And I bet there's ways, I bet there's loopholes, right? We saw that in the DARPA challenge that it's very hard to write a set of rules that someone can't find a way to exploit. Let me ask another ridiculous question. I think this might be the last ridiculous question, but I doubt it. I aspire to ask as many ridiculous questions of a brilliant MIT professor. Okay, I don't know if you've seen the black mirror. It's funny, I never watched the episode. I know when it happened though, because I gave a talk to some MIT faculty one day on a unassuming Monday or whatever I was telling him about the state of robotics. And I showed some video from Boston Dynamics of the quadruped spot at the time. It was the early version of spot. And there was a look of horror that went across the room. And I said, I've shown videos like this a lot of times, what happened? And it turns out that this video had gone, this black mirror episode had changed the way people watched the videos I was putting out. The way they see these kinds of robots. So I talked to so many people who are just terrified because of that episode probably of these kinds of robots. I almost wanna say that they almost enjoy being terrified. I don't even know what it is about human psychology that kind of imagine doomsday, the destruction of the universe or our society and kind of like enjoy being afraid. I don't wanna simplify it, but it feels like they talk about it so often. It almost, there does seem to be an addictive quality to it. I talked to a guy, a guy named Joe Rogan, who's kind of the flag bearer for being terrified at these robots. Do you have two questions? One, do you have an understanding of why people are afraid of robots? And the second question is in black mirror, just to tell you the episode, I don't even remember it that much anymore, but these robots, I think they can shoot like a pellet or something. They basically have, it's basically a spot with a gun. And how far are we away from having robots that go rogue like that? Basically spot that goes rogue for some reason and somehow finds a gun. Right, so, I mean, I'm not a psychologist. I think, I don't know exactly why people react the way they do. I think we have to be careful about the way robots influence our society and the like. I think that's something, that's a responsibility that roboticists need to embrace. I don't think robots are gonna come after me with a kitchen knife or a pellet gun right away. And I mean, if they were programmed in such a way, but I used to joke with Atlas that all I had to do was run for five minutes and its battery would run out. But actually they've got to be careful and actually they've got a very big battery in there by the end. So it was over an hour. I think the fear is a bit cultural though. Cause I mean, you notice that, like, I think in my age, in the US, we grew up watching Terminator, right? If I had grown up at the same time in Japan, I probably would have been watching Astro Boy. And there's a very different reaction to robots in different countries, right? So I don't know if it's a human innate fear of metal marvels or if it's something that we've done to ourselves with our sci fi. Yeah, the stories we tell ourselves through movies, through just through popular media. But if I were to tell, you know, if you were my therapist and I said, I'm really terrified that we're going to have these robots very soon that will hurt us. Like, how do you approach making me feel better? Like, why shouldn't people be afraid? There's a, I think there's a video that went viral recently. Everything, everything was spot in Boston, which goes viral in general. But usually it's like really cool stuff. Like they're doing flips and stuff or like sad stuff, the Atlas being hit with a broomstick or something like that. But there's a video where I think one of the new productions bought robots, which are awesome. It was like patrolling somewhere in like in some country. And like people immediately were like saying like, this is like the dystopian future, like the surveillance state. For some reason, like you can just have a camera, like something about spot being able to walk on four feet with like really terrified people. So like, what do you say to those people? I think there is a legitimate fear there because so much of our future is uncertain. But at the same time, technically speaking, it seems like we're not there yet. So what do you say? I mean, I think technology is complicated. It can be used in many ways. I think there are purely software attacks that somebody could use to do great damage. Maybe they have already, you know, I think wheeled robots could be used in bad ways too. Drones. Drones, right, I don't think that, let's see. I don't want to be building technology just because I'm compelled to build technology and I don't think about it. But I would consider myself a technological optimist, I guess, in the sense that I think we should continue to create and evolve and our world will change. And if we will introduce new challenges, we'll screw something up maybe, but I think also we'll invent ourselves out of those challenges and life will go on. So it's interesting because you didn't mention like this is technically too hard. I don't think robots are, I think people attribute a robot that looks like an animal as maybe having a level of self awareness or consciousness or something that they don't have yet. Right, so it's not, I think our ability to anthropomorphize those robots is probably, we're assuming that they have a level of intelligence that they don't yet have. And that might be part of the fear. So in that sense, it's too hard. But, you know, there are many scary things in the world. Right, so I think we're right to ask those questions. We're right to think about the implications of our work. Right, in the short term as we're working on it for sure, is there something long term that scares you about our future with AI and robots? A lot of folks from Elon Musk to Sam Harris to a lot of folks talk about the existential threats about artificial intelligence. Oftentimes, robots kind of inspire that the most because of the anthropomorphism. Do you have any fears? It's an important question. I actually, I think I like Rod Brooks answer maybe the best on this, I think. And it's not the only answer he's given over the years, but maybe one of my favorites is he says, it's not gonna be, he's got a book, Flesh and Machines, I believe, it's not gonna be the robots versus the people, we're all gonna be robot people. Because, you know, we already have smartphones, some of us have serious technology implanted in our bodies already, whether we have a hearing aid or a pacemaker or anything like this, people with amputations might have prosthetics. And that's a trend I think that is likely to continue. I mean, this is now wild speculation. But I mean, when do we get to cognitive implants and the like, and. Yeah, with neural link, brain computer interfaces, that's interesting. So there's a dance between humans and robots that's going to be, it's going to be impossible to be scared of the other out there, the robot, because the robot will be part of us, essentially. It'd be so intricately sort of part of our society that. Yeah, and it might not even be implanted part of us, but just, it's so much a part of our, yeah, our society. So in that sense, the smartphone is already the robot we should be afraid of, yeah. I mean, yeah, and all the usual fears arise of the misinformation, the manipulation, all those kinds of things that, the problems are all the same. They're human problems, essentially, it feels like. Yeah, I mean, I think the way we interact with each other online is changing the value we put on, you know, personal interaction. And that's a crazy big change that's going to happen and rip through our, has already been ripping through our society, right? And that has implications that are massive. I don't know if they should be scared of it or go with the flow, but I don't see, you know, some battle lines between humans and robots being the first thing to worry about. I mean, I do want to just, as a kind of comment, maybe you can comment about your just feelings about Boston Dynamics in general, but you know, I love science, I love engineering, I think there's so many beautiful ideas in it. And when I look at Boston Dynamics or legged robots in general, I think they inspire people, curiosity and feelings in general, excitement about engineering more than almost anything else in popular culture. And I think that's such an exciting, like responsibility and possibility for robotics. And Boston Dynamics is riding that wave pretty damn well. Like they found it, they've discovered that hunger and curiosity in the people and they're doing magic with it. I don't care if the, I mean, I guess is that their company, they have to make money, right? But they're already doing incredible work and inspiring the world about technology. I mean, do you have thoughts about Boston Dynamics and maybe others, your own work in robotics and inspiring the world in that way? I completely agree, I think Boston Dynamics is absolutely awesome. I think I show my kids those videos, you know, and the best thing that happens is sometimes they've already seen them, you know, right? I think, I just think it's a pinnacle of success in robotics that is just one of the best things that's happened, absolutely completely agree. One of the heartbreaking things to me is how many robotics companies fail, how hard it is to make money with a robotics company. Like iRobot like went through hell just to arrive at a Roomba to figure out one product. And then there's so many home robotics companies like Jibo and Anki, Anki, the cutest toy that's a great robot I thought went down, I'm forgetting a bunch of them, but a bunch of robotics companies fail, Rod's company, Rethink Robotics. Like, do you have anything hopeful to say about the possibility of making money with robots? Oh, I think you can't just look at the failures. I mean, Boston Dynamics is a success. There's lots of companies that are still doing amazingly good work in robotics. I mean, this is the capitalist ecology or something, right? I think you have many companies, you have many startups and they push each other forward and many of them fail and some of them get through and that's sort of the natural way of those things. I don't know that is robotics really that much worse. I feel the pain that you feel too. Every time I read one of these, sometimes it's friends and I definitely wish it went better or went differently. But I think it's healthy and good to have bursts of ideas, bursts of activities, ideas, if they are really aggressive, they should fail sometimes. Certainly that's the research mantra, right? If you're succeeding at every problem you attempt, then you're not choosing aggressively enough. Is it exciting to you, the new spot? Oh, it's so good. When are you getting them as a pet or it? Yeah, I mean, I have to dig up 75K right now. I mean, it's so cool that there's a price tag, you can go and then actually buy it. I have a Skydio R1, love it. So no, I would absolutely be a customer. I wonder what your kids would think about it. I actually, Zach from Boston Dynamics would let my kid drive in one of their demos one time. And that was just so good, so good. And again, I'll forever be grateful for that. And there's something magical about the anthropomorphization of that arm, it adds another level of human connection. I'm not sure we understand from a control aspect, the value of anthropomorphization. I think that's an understudied and under understood engineering problem. There's been a, like psychologists have been studying it. I think it's part like manipulating our mind to believe things is a valuable engineering. Like this is another degree of freedom that can be controlled. I like that, yeah, I think that's right. I think there's something that humans seem to do or maybe my dangerous introspection is, I think we are able to make very simple models that assume a lot about the world very quickly. And then it takes us a lot more time, like you're wrestling. You probably thought you knew what you were doing with wrestling and you were fairly functional as a complete wrestler. And then you slowly got more expertise. So maybe it's natural that our first level of defense against seeing a new robot is to think of it in our existing models of how humans and animals behave. And it's just, as you spend more time with it, then you'll develop more sophisticated models that will appreciate the differences. Exactly. Can you say what does it take to control a robot? Like what is the control problem of a robot? And in general, what is a robot in your view? Like how do you think of this system? What is a robot? What is a robot? I think robotics. I told you ridiculous questions. No, no, it's good. I mean, there's standard definitions of combining computation with some ability to do mechanical work. I think that gets us pretty close. But I think robotics has this problem that once things really work, we don't call them robots anymore. Like my dishwasher at home is pretty sophisticated, beautiful mechanisms. There's actually a pretty good computer, probably a couple of chips in there doing amazing things. We don't think of that as a robot anymore, which isn't fair. Because then what roughly it means that robotics always has to solve the next problem and doesn't get to celebrate its past successes. I mean, even factory room floor robots are super successful. They're amazing. But that's not the ones, I mean, people think of them as robots, but they don't, if you ask what are the successes of robotics, somehow it doesn't come to your mind immediately. So the definition of robot is a system with some level of automation that fails frequently. Something like, it's the computation plus mechanical work and an unsolved problem. It's an unsolved problem, yeah. So from a perspective of control and mechanics, dynamics, what is a robot? So there are many different types of robots. The control that you need for a Jibo robot, you know, some robot that's sitting on your countertop and interacting with you, but not touching you, for instance, is very different than what you need for an autonomous car or an autonomous drone. It's very different than what you need for a robot that's gonna walk or pick things up with its hands, right? My passion has always been for the places where you're interacting more, you're doing more dynamic interactions with the world. So walking, now manipulation. And the control problems there are beautiful. I think contact is one thing that differentiates them from many of the control problems we've solved classically, right, like modern control grew up stabilizing fighter jets that were passively unstable, and there's like amazing success stories from control all over the place. Power grid, I mean, there's all kinds of, it's everywhere that we don't even realize, just like AI is now. So you mentioned contact, like what's contact? So an airplane is an extremely complex system or a spacecraft landing or whatever, but at least it has the luxury of things change relatively continuously. That's an oversimplification. But if I make a small change in the command I send to my actuator, then the path that the robot will take tends to change only by a small amount. And there's a feedback mechanism here. That's what we're talking about. And there's a feedback mechanism. And thinking about this as locally, like a linear system, for instance, I can use more linear algebra tools to study systems like that, generalizations of linear algebra to these smooth systems. What is contact? The robot has something very discontinuous that happens when it makes or breaks, when it starts touching the world. And even the way it touches or the order of contacts can change the outcome in potentially unpredictable ways. Not unpredictable, but complex ways. I do think there's a little bit of, a lot of people will say that contact is hard in robotics, even to simulate. And I think there's a little bit of a, there's truth to that, but maybe a misunderstanding around that. So what is limiting is that when we think about our robots and we write our simulators, we often make an assumption that objects are rigid. And when it comes down, that their mass moves all, stays in a constant position relative to each other itself. And that leads to some paradoxes when you go to try to talk about rigid body mechanics and contact. And so for instance, if I have a three legged stool with just imagine it comes to a point at the leg. So it's only touching the world at a point. If I draw my physics, my high school physics diagram of the system, then there's a couple of things that I'm given by elementary physics. I know if the system, if the table is at rest, if it's not moving, zero velocities, that means that the normal force, all the forces are in balance. So the force of gravity is being countered by the forces that the ground is pushing on my table legs. I also know since it's not rotating that the moments have to balance. And since it's a three dimensional table, it could fall in any direction. It actually tells me uniquely what those three normal forces have to be. If I have four legs on my table, four legged table and they were perfectly machined to be exactly the right same height and they're set down and the table's not moving, then the basic conservation laws don't tell me, there are many solutions for the forces that the ground could be putting on my legs that would still result in the table not moving. Now, the reason that seems fine, I could just pick one. But it gets funny now because if you think about friction, what we think about with friction is our standard model says the amount of force that the table will push back if I were to now try to push my table sideways, I guess I have a table here, is proportional to the normal force. So if I'm barely touching and I push, I'll slide, but if I'm pushing more and I push, I'll slide less. It's called coulomb friction is our standard model. Now, if you don't know what the normal force is on the four legs and you push the table, then you don't know what the friction forces are gonna be. And so you can't actually tell, the laws just aren't explicit yet about which way the table's gonna go. It could veer off to the left, it could veer off to the right, it could go straight. So the rigid body assumption of contact leaves us with some paradoxes, which are annoying for writing simulators and for writing controllers. We still do that sometimes because soft contact is potentially harder numerically or whatever, and the best simulators do both or do some combination of the two. But anyways, because of these kinds of paradoxes, there's all kinds of paradoxes in contact, mostly due to these rigid body assumptions. It becomes very hard to write the same kind of control laws that we've been able to be successful with for fighter jets. Like fighter jets, we haven't been as successful writing those controllers for manipulation. And so you don't know what's going to happen at the point of contact, at the moment of contact. There are situations absolutely where our laws don't tell us. So the standard approach, that's okay. I mean, instead of having a differential equation, you end up with a differential inclusion, it's called. It's a set valued equation. It says that I'm in this configuration, I have these forces applied on me. And there's a set of things that could happen, right? And you can... And those aren't continuous, I mean, what... So when you're saying like non smooth, they're not only not smooth, but this is discontinuous? The non smooth comes in when I make or break a new contact first, or when I transition from stick to slip. So you typically have static friction, and then you'll start sliding, and that'll be a discontinuous change in philosophy. In philosophy, for instance, especially if you come to rest or... That's so fascinating. Okay, so what do you do? Sorry, I interrupted you. It's fine. What's the hope under so much uncertainty about what's going to happen? What are you supposed to do? I mean, control has an answer for this. Robust control is one approach, but roughly you can write controllers which try to still perform the right task despite all the things that could possibly happen. The world might want the table to go this way and this way, but if I write a controller that pushes a little bit more and pushes a little bit, I can certainly make the table go in the direction I want. It just puts a little bit more of a burden on the control system, right? And this discontinuities do change the control system because the way we write it down right now, every different control configuration, including sticking or sliding or parts of my body that are in contact or not, looks like a different system. And I think of them, I reason about them separately or differently and the combinatorics of that blow up, right? So I just don't have enough time to compute all the possible contact configurations of my humanoid. Interestingly, I mean, I'm a humanoid. I have lots of degrees of freedom, lots of joints. I've only been around for a handful of years. It's getting up there, but I haven't had time in my life to visit all of the states in my system, certainly all the contact configurations. So if step one is to consider every possible contact configuration that I'll ever be in, that's probably not a problem I need to solve, right? Just as a small tangent, what's a contact configuration? What like, just so we can enumerate what are we talking about? How many are there? The simplest example maybe would be, imagine a robot with a flat foot. And we think about the phases of gait where the heel strikes and then the front toe strikes, and then you can heel up, toe off. Those are each different contact configurations. I only had two different contacts, but I ended up with four different contact configurations. Now, of course, my robot might actually have bumps on it or other things, so it could be much more subtle than that, right? But it's just even with one sort of box interacting with the ground already in the plane has that many, right? And if I was just even a 3D foot, then it probably my left toe might touch just before my right toe and things get subtle. Now, if I'm a dexterous hand and I go to talk about just grabbing a water bottle, if I have to enumerate every possible order that my hand came into contact with the bottle, then I'm dead in the water. Any approach that we were able to get away with that in walking because we mostly touched the ground within a small number of points, for instance, and we haven't been able to get dexterous hands that way. So you've mentioned that people think that contact is really hard and that that's the reason that robotic manipulation is problem is really hard. Is there any flaws in that thinking? So I think simulating contact is one aspect. I know people often say that we don't, that one of the reasons that we have a limit in robotics is because we do not simulate contact accurately in our simulators. And I think that is the extent to which that's true is partly because our simulators, we haven't got mature enough simulators. There are some things that are still hard, difficult, that we should change, but we actually, we know what the governing equations are. They have some foibles like this indeterminacy, but we should be able to simulate them accurately. We have incredible open source community in robotics, but it actually just takes a professional engineering team a lot of work to write a very good simulator like that. Now, where does, I believe you've written, Drake. There's a team of people. I certainly spent a lot of hours on it myself. But what is Drake and what does it take to create a simulation environment for the kind of difficult control problems we're talking about? Right, so Drake is the simulator that I've been working on. There are other good simulators out there. I don't like to think of Drake as just a simulator because we write our controllers in Drake, we write our perception systems a little bit in Drake, but we write all of our low level control and even planning and optimization. So it has optimization capabilities as well? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, Drake is three things roughly. It's an optimization library, which is sits on, it provides a layer of abstraction in C++ and Python for commercial solvers. You can write linear programs, quadratic programs, semi definite programs, sums of squares programs, the ones we've used, mixed integer programs, and it will do the work to curate those and send them to whatever the right solver is for instance, and it provides a level of abstraction. The second thing is a system modeling language, a bit like LabVIEW or Simulink, where you can make block diagrams out of complex systems, or it's like ROS in that sense, where you might have lots of ROS nodes that are each doing some part of your system, but to contrast it with ROS, we try to write, if you write a Drake system, then you have to, it asks you to describe a little bit more about the system. If you have any state, for instance, in the system, any variables that are gonna persist, you have to declare them. Parameters can be declared and the like, but the advantage of doing that is that you can, if you like, run things all on one process, but you can also do control design against it. You can do, I mean, simple things like rewinding and playing back your simulations, for instance, these things, you get some rewards for spending a little bit more upfront cost in describing each system. And I was inspired to do that because I think the complexity of Atlas, for instance, is just so great. And I think, although, I mean, ROS has been an incredible, absolutely huge fan of what it's done for the robotics community, but the ability to rapidly put different pieces together and have a functioning thing is very good. But I do think that it's hard to think clearly about a bag of disparate parts, Mr. Potato Head kind of software stack. And if you can ask a little bit more out of each of those parts, then you can understand the way they work better. You can try to verify them and the like, or you can do learning against them. And then one of those systems, the last thing, I said the first two things that Drake is, but the last thing is that there is a set of multi body equations, rigid body equations, that is trying to provide a system that simulates physics. And we also have renderers and other things, but I think the physics component of Drake is special in the sense that we have done excessive amount of engineering to make sure that we've written the equations correctly. Every possible tumbling satellite or spinning top or anything that we could possibly write as a test is tested. We are making some, I think, fundamental improvements on the way you simulate contact. Just what does it take to simulate contact? I mean, it just seems, I mean, there's something just beautiful to the way you were like explaining contact and you were like tapping your fingers on the table while you're doing it, just. Easily, right? Easily, just like, just not even like, it was like helping you think, I guess. So you have this like awesome demo of loading or unloading a dishwasher, just picking up a plate, or grasping it like for the first time. That's just seems like so difficult. What, how do you simulate any of that? So it was really interesting that what happened was that we started getting more professional about our software development during the DARPA Robotics Challenge. I learned the value of software engineering and how these, how to bridle complexity. I guess that's what I want to somehow fight against and bring some of the clear thinking of controls into these complex systems we're building for robots. Shortly after the DARPA Robotics Challenge, Toyota opened a research institute, TRI, Toyota Research Institute. They put one of their, there's three locations. One of them is just down the street from MIT. And I helped ramp that up right up as a part of my, the end of my sabbatical, I guess. So TRI has given me, the TRI robotics effort has made this investment in simulation in Drake. And Michael Sherman leads a team there of just absolutely top notch dynamics experts that are trying to write those simulators that can pick up the dishes. And there's also a team working on manipulation there that is taking problems like loading the dishwasher. And we're using that to study these really hard corner cases kind of problems in manipulation. So for me, this, you know, simulating the dishes, we could actually write a controller. If we just cared about picking up dishes in the sink once, we could write a controller without any simulation whatsoever, and we could call it done. But we want to understand like, what is the path you take to actually get to a robot that could perform that for any dish in anybody's kitchen with enough confidence that it could be a commercial product, right? And it has deep learning perception in the loop. It has complex dynamics in the loop. It has controller, it has a planner. And how do you take all of that complexity and put it through this engineering discipline and verification and validation process to actually get enough confidence to deploy? I mean, the DARPA challenge made me realize that that's not something you throw over the fence and hope that somebody will harden it for you, that there are really fundamental challenges in closing that last gap. They're doing the validation and the testing. I think it might even change the way we have to think about the way we write systems. What happens if you have the robot running lots of tests and it screws up, it breaks a dish, right? How do you capture that? I said, you can't run the same simulation or the same experiment twice on a real robot. Do we have to be able to bring that one off failure back into simulation in order to change our controllers, study it, make sure it won't happen again? Do we, is it enough to just try to add that to our distribution and understand that on average, we're gonna cover that situation again? There's like really subtle questions at the corner cases that I think we don't yet have satisfying answers for. Like how do you find the corner cases? That's one kind of, is there, do you think that's possible to create a systematized way of discovering corner cases efficiently? Yes. In whatever the problem is? Yes, I mean, I think we have to get better at that. I mean, control theory has for decades talked about active experiment design. What's that? So people call it curiosity these days. It's roughly this idea of trying to exploration or exploitation, but in the active experiment design is even, is more specific. You could try to understand the uncertainty in your system, design the experiment that will provide the maximum information to reduce that uncertainty. If there's a parameter you wanna learn about, what is the optimal trajectory I could execute to learn about that parameter, for instance. Scaling that up to something that has a deep network in the loop and a planning in the loop is tough. We've done some work on, you know, with Matt Okely and Aman Sinha, we've worked on some falsification algorithms that are trying to do rare event simulation that try to just hammer on your simulator. And if your simulator is good enough, you can spend a lot of time, or you can write good algorithms that try to spend most of their time in the corner cases. So you basically imagine you're building an autonomous car and you wanna put it in, I don't know, downtown New Delhi all the time, right? And accelerated testing. If you can write sampling strategies, which figure out where your controller's performing badly in simulation and start generating lots of examples around that. You know, it's just the space of possible places where that can be, where things can go wrong is very big. So it's hard to write those algorithms. Yeah, rare event simulation is just a really compelling notion, if it's possible. We joked and we call it the black swan generator. It's a black swan. Because you don't just want the rare events, you want the ones that are highly impactful. I mean, that's the most, those are the most sort of profound questions we ask of our world. Like, what's the worst that can happen? But what we're really asking isn't some kind of like computer science, worst case analysis. We're asking like, what are the millions of ways this can go wrong? And that's like our curiosity. And we humans, I think are pretty bad at, we just like run into it. And I think there's a distributed sense because there's now like 7.5 billion of us. And so there's a lot of them. And then a lot of them write blog posts about the stupid thing they've done. So we learn in a distributed way. There's some. I think that's gonna be important for robots too. I mean, that's another massive theme at Toyota Research for Robotics is this fleet learning concept is the idea that I, as a human, I don't have enough time to visit all of my states, right? There's just a, it's very hard for one robot to experience all the things. But that's not actually the problem we have to solve, right? We're gonna have fleets of robots that can have very similar appendages. And at some point, maybe collectively, they have enough data that their computational processes should be set up differently than ours, right? It's this vision of just, I mean, all these dishwasher unloading robots. I mean, that robot dropping a plate and a human looking at the robot probably pissed off. Yeah. But that's a special moment to record. I think one thing in terms of fleet learning, and I've seen that because I've talked to a lot of folks, just like Tesla users or Tesla drivers, they're another company that's using this kind of fleet learning idea. One hopeful thing I have about humans is they really enjoy when a system improves, learns. So they enjoy fleet learning. And the reason it's hopeful for me is they're willing to put up with something that's kind of dumb right now. And they're like, if it's improving, they almost like enjoy being part of the, like teaching it. Almost like if you have kids, like you're teaching them something, right? I think that's a beautiful thing because that gives me hope that we can put dumb robots out there. I mean, the problem on the Tesla side with cars, cars can kill you. That makes the problem so much harder. Dishwasher unloading is a little safe. That's why home robotics is really exciting. And just to clarify, I mean, for people who might not know, I mean, TRI, Toyota Research Institute. So they're, I mean, they're pretty well known for like autonomous vehicle research, but they're also interested in home robotics. Yep, there's a big group working on, multiple groups working on home robotics. It's a major part of the portfolio. There's also a couple other projects in advanced materials discovery, using AI and machine learning to discover new materials for car batteries and the like, for instance, yeah. And that's been actually an incredibly successful team. There's new projects starting up too, so. Do you see a future of where like robots are in our home and like robots that have like actuators that look like arms in our home or like, you know, more like humanoid type robots? Or is this, are we gonna do the same thing that you just mentioned that, you know, the dishwasher is no longer a robot. We're going to just not even see them as robots. But I mean, what's your vision of the home of the future 10, 20 years from now, 50 years, if you get crazy? Yeah, I think we already have Roombas cruising around. We have, you know, Alexis or Google Homes on our kitchen counter. It's only a matter of time until they spring arms and start doing something useful like that. So I do think it's coming. I think lots of people have lots of motivations for doing it. It's been super interesting actually learning about Toyota's vision for it, which is about helping people age in place. Cause I think that's not necessarily the first entry, the most lucrative entry point, but it's the problem maybe that we really need to solve no matter what. And so I think there's a real opportunity. It's a delicate problem. How do you work with people, help people, keep them active, engaged, you know, but improve their quality of life and help them age in place, for instance. It's interesting because older folks are also, I mean, there's a contrast there because they're not always the folks who are the most comfortable with technology, for example. So there's a division that's interesting. You can do so much good with a robot for older folks, but there's a gap to fill of understanding. I mean, it's actually kind of beautiful. Robot is learning about the human and the human is kind of learning about this new robot thing. And it's also with, at least with, like when I talked to my parents about robots, there's a little bit of a blank slate there too. Like you can, I mean, they don't know anything about robotics, so it's completely like wide open. They don't have, they haven't, my parents haven't seen Black Mirror. So like they, it's a blank slate. Here's a cool thing, like what can it do for me? Yeah, so it's an exciting space. I think it's a really important space. I do feel like a few years ago, drones were successful enough in academia. They kind of broke out and started an industry and autonomous cars have been happening. It does feel like manipulation in logistics, of course, first, but in the home shortly after, seems like one of the next big things that's gonna really pop. So I don't think we talked about it, but what's soft robotics? So we talked about like rigid bodies. Like if we can just linger on this whole touch thing. Yeah, so what's soft robotics? So I told you that I really dislike the fact that robots are afraid of touching the world all over their body. So there's a couple reasons for that. If you look carefully at all the places that robots actually do touch the world, they're almost always soft. They have some sort of pad on their fingers or a rubber sole on their foot. But if you look up and down the arm, we're just pure aluminum or something. So that makes it hard actually. In fact, hitting the table with your rigid arm or nearly rigid arm has some of the problems that we talked about in terms of simulation. I think it fundamentally changes the mechanics of contact when you're soft, right? You turn point contacts into patch contacts, which can have torsional friction. You can have distributed load. If I wanna pick up an egg, right? If I pick it up with two points, then in order to put enough force to sustain the weight of the egg, I might have to put a lot of force to break the egg. If I envelop it with contact all around, then I can distribute my force across the shell of the egg and have a better chance of not breaking it. So soft robotics is for me a lot about changing the mechanics of contact. Does it make the problem a lot harder? Quite the opposite. It changes the computational problem. I think because of the, I think our world and our mathematics has biased us towards rigid. I see. But it really should make things better in some ways, right? I think the future is unwritten there. But the other thing it can do. I think ultimately, sorry to interrupt, but I think ultimately it will make things simpler if we embrace the softness of the world. It makes things smoother, right? So the result of small actions is less discontinuous, but it also means potentially less instantaneously bad. For instance, I won't necessarily contact something and send it flying off. The other aspect of it that just happens to dovetail really well is that soft robotics tends to be a place where we can embed a lot of sensors too. So if you change your hardware and make it more soft, then you can potentially have a tactile sensor, which is measuring the deformation. So there's a team at TRI that's working on soft hands and you get so much more information. You can put a camera behind the skin roughly and get fantastic tactile information, which is, it's super important. Like in manipulation, one of the things that really is frustrating is if you work super hard on your head mounted, on your perception system for your head mounted cameras, and then you get a lot of information for your head mounted cameras, and then you've identified an object, you reach down to touch it, and the last thing that happens, right before the most important time, you stick your hand and you're occluding your head mounted sensors. So in all the part that really matters, all of your off board sensors are occluded. And really, if you don't have tactile information, then you're blind in an important way. So it happens that soft robotics and tactile sensing tend to go hand in hand. I think we've kind of talked about it, but you taught a course on underactuated robotics. I believe that was the name of it, actually. That's right. Can you talk about it in that context? What is underactuated robotics? Right, so underactuated robotics is my graduate course. It's online mostly now, in the sense that the lectures. Several versions of it, I think. Right, the YouTube. It's really great, I recommend it highly. Look on YouTube for the 2020 versions. Until March, and then you have to go back to 2019, thanks to COVID. No, I've poured my heart into that class. And lecture one is basically explaining what the word underactuated means. So people are very kind to show up and then maybe have to learn what the title of the course means over the course of the first lecture. That first lecture is really good. You should watch it. Thanks. It's a strange name, but I thought it captured the essence of what control was good at doing and what control was bad at doing. So what do I mean by underactuated? So a mechanical system has many degrees of freedom, for instance. I think of a joint as a degree of freedom. And it has some number of actuators, motors. So if you have a robot that's bolted to the table that has five degrees of freedom and five motors, then you have a fully actuated robot. If you take away one of those motors, then you have an underactuated robot. Now, why on earth? I have a good friend who likes to tease me. He said, Ross, if you had more research funding, would you work on fully actuated robots? Yeah. And the answer is no. The world gives us underactuated robots, whether we like it or not. I'm a human. I'm an underactuated robot, even though I have more muscles than my big degrees of freedom, because I have in some places multiple muscles attached to the same joint. But still, there's a really important degree of freedom that I have, which is the location of my center of mass in space, for instance. All right, I can jump into the air, and there's no motor that connects my center of mass to the ground in that case. So I have to think about the implications of not having control over everything. The passive dynamic walkers are the extreme view of that, where you've taken away all the motors, and you have to let physics do the work. But it shows up in all of the walking robots, where you have to use some of the actuators to push and pull even the degrees of freedom that you don't have an actuator on. That's referring to walking if you're falling forward. Is there a way to walk that's fully actuated? So it's a subtle point. When you're in contact and you have your feet on the ground, there are still limits to what you can do, right? Unless I have suction cups on my feet, I cannot accelerate my center of mass towards the ground faster than gravity, because I can't get a force pushing me down, right? But I can still do most of the things that I want to. So you can get away with basically thinking of the system as fully actuated, unless you suddenly needed to accelerate down super fast. But as soon as I take a step, I get into the more nuanced territory, and to get to really dynamic robots, or airplanes or other things, I think you have to embrace the underactuated dynamics. Manipulation, people think, is manipulation underactuated? Even if my arm is fully actuated, I have a motor, if my goal is to control the position and orientation of this cup, then I don't have an actuator for that directly. So I have to use my actuators over here to control this thing. Now it gets even worse, like what if I have to button my shirt, okay? What are the degrees of freedom of my shirt, right? I suddenly, that's a hard question to think about. It kind of makes me queasy thinking about my state space control ideas. But actually those are the problems that make me so excited about manipulation right now, is that it breaks some of the, it breaks a lot of the foundational control stuff that I've been thinking about. Is there, what are some interesting insights you could say about trying to solve an underactuated, a control in an underactuated system? So I think the philosophy there is let physics do more of the work. The technical approach has been optimization. So you typically formulate your decision making for control as an optimization problem. And you use the language of optimal control and sometimes often numerical optimal control in order to make those decisions and balance, these complicated equations of, and in order to control, you don't have to use optimal control to do underactuated systems, but that has been the technical approach that has borne the most fruit in our, at least in our line of work. And there's some, so in underactuated systems, when you say let physics do some of the work, so there's a kind of feedback loop that observes the state that the physics brought you to. So like you've, there's a perception there, there's a feedback somehow. Do you ever loop in like complicated perception systems into this whole picture? Right, right around the time of the DARPA challenge, we had a complicated perception system in the DARPA challenge. We also started to embrace perception for our flying vehicles at the time. We had a really good project on trying to make airplanes fly at high speeds through forests. Sirtash Karaman was on that project and we had, it was a really fun team to work on. He's carried it farther, much farther forward since then. And that's using cameras for perception? So that was using cameras. That was, at the time we felt like LIDAR was too heavy and too power heavy to be carried on a light UAV, and we were using cameras. And that was a big part of it was just how do you do even stereo matching at a fast enough rate with a small camera, small onboard compute. Since then we have now, so the deep learning revolution unquestionably changed what we can do with perception for robotics and control. So in manipulation, we can address, we can use perception in I think a much deeper way. And we get into not only, I think the first use of it naturally would be to ask your deep learning system to look at the cameras and produce the state, which is like the pose of my thing, for instance. But I think we've quickly found out that that's not always the right thing to do. Why is that? Because what's the state of my shirt? Imagine, I've always, Very noisy, you mean, or? It's, if the first step of me trying to button my shirt is estimate the full state of my shirt, including like what's happening in the back here, whatever, whatever. That's just not the right specification. There are aspects of the state that are very important to the task. There are many that are unobservable and not important to the task. So you really need, it begs new questions about state representation. Another example that we've been playing with in lab has been just the idea of chopping onions, okay? Or carrots, turns out to be better. So onions stink up the lab. And they're hard to see in a camera. But so, Details matter, yeah. Details matter, you know? So if I'm moving around a particular object, right? Then I think about, oh, it's got a position or an orientation in space. That's the description I want. Now, when I'm chopping an onion, okay? Like the first chop comes down. I have now a hundred pieces of onion. Does my control system really need to understand the position and orientation and even the shape of the hundred pieces of onion in order to make a decision? Probably not, you know? And if I keep going, I'm just getting, more and more is my state space getting bigger as I cut? It's not right. So somehow there's a, I think there's a richer idea of state. It's not the state that is given to us by Lagrangian mechanics. There is a proper Lagrangian state of the system, but the relevant state for this is some latent state is what we call it in machine learning. But, you know, there's some different state representation. Some compressed representation, some. And that's what I worry about saying compressed because it doesn't, I don't mind that it's low dimensional or not, but it has to be something that's easier to think about. By us humans. Or my algorithms. Or the algorithms being like control, optimal. So for instance, if the contact mechanics of all of those onion pieces and all the permutations of possible touches between those onion pieces, you know, you can give me a high dimensional state representation, I'm okay if it's linear. But if I have to think about all the possible shattering combinatorics of that, then my robot's gonna sit there thinking and the soup's gonna get cold or something. So since you taught the course, it kind of entered my mind, the idea of underactuated as really compelling to see the world in this kind of way. Do you ever, you know, if we talk about onions or you talk about the world with people in it in general, do you see the world as basically an underactuated system? Do you like often look at the world in this way? Or is this overreach? Underactuated is a way of life, man. Exactly, I guess that's what I'm asking. I do think it's everywhere. I think in some places, we already have natural tools to deal with it. You know, it rears its head. I mean, in linear systems, it's not a problem. We just, like an underactuated linear system is really not sufficiently distinct from a fully actuated linear system. It's a subtle point about when that becomes a bottleneck in what we know how to do with control. It happens to be a bottleneck, although we've gotten incredibly good solutions now, but for a long time that I felt that that was the key bottleneck in legged robots. And roughly now the underactuated course is me trying to tell people everything I can about how to make Atlas do a backflip, right? I have a second course now that I teach in the other semesters, which is on manipulation. And that's where we get into now more of the, that's a newer class. I'm hoping to put it online this fall completely. And that's gonna have much more aspects about these perception problems and the state representation questions, and then how do you do control. And the thing that's a little bit sad is that, for me at least, is there's a lot of manipulation tasks that people wanna do and should wanna do. They could start a company with it and be very successful that don't actually require you to think that much about underact, or dynamics at all even, but certainly underactuated dynamics. Once I have, if I reach out and grab something, if I can sort of assume it's rigidly attached to my hand, then I can do a lot of interesting, meaningful things with it without really ever thinking about the dynamics of that object. So we've built systems that kind of reduce the need for that. Enveloping grasps and the like. But I think the really good problems in manipulation. So manipulation, by the way, is more than just pick and place. That's like a lot of people think of that, just grasping. I don't mean that. I mean buttoning my shirt, I mean tying shoelaces. How do you program a robot to tie shoelaces? And not just one shoe, but every shoe, right? That's a really good problem. It's tempting to write down like the infinite dimensional state of the laces, that's probably not needed to write a good controller. I know we could hand design a controller that would do it, but I don't want that. I want to understand the principles that would allow me to solve another problem that's kind of like that. But I think if we can stay pure in our approach, then the challenge of tying anybody's shoes is a great challenge. That's a great challenge. I mean, and the soft touch comes into play there. That's really interesting. Let me ask another ridiculous question on this topic. How important is touch? We haven't talked much about humans, but I have this argument with my dad where like I think you can fall in love with a robot based on language alone. And he believes that touch is essential. Touch and smell, he says. But so in terms of robots, connecting with humans, we can go philosophical in terms of like a deep, meaningful connection, like love, but even just like collaborating in an interesting way, how important is touch like from an engineering perspective and a philosophical one? I think it's super important. Even just in a practical sense, if we forget about the emotional part of it. But for robots to interact safely while they're doing meaningful mechanical work in the close contact with or vicinity of people that need help, I think we have to have them, we have to build them differently. They have to be afraid, not afraid of touching the world. So I think Baymax is just awesome. That's just like the movie of Big Hero 6 and the concept of Baymax, that's just awesome. I think we should, and we have some folks at Toyota that are trying to, Toyota Research that are trying to build Baymax roughly. And I think it's just a fantastically good project. I think it will change the way people physically interact. The same way, I mean, you gave a couple examples earlier, but if the robot that was walking around my home looked more like a teddy bear and a little less like the Terminator, that could change completely the way people perceive it and interact with it. And maybe they'll even wanna teach it, like you said, right? You could not quite gamify it, but somehow instead of people judging it and looking at it as if it's not doing as well as a human, they're gonna try to help out the cute teddy bear, right? Who knows, but I think we're building robots wrong and being more soft and more contact is important, right? Yeah, I mean, like all the magical moments I can remember with robots, well, first of all, just visiting your lab and seeing Atlas, but also Spotmini, when I first saw Spotmini in person and hung out with him, her, it, I don't have trouble engendering robots. I feel the robotics people really say, oh, is it it? I kinda like the idea that it's a her or a him. There's a magical moment, but there's no touching. I guess the question I have, have you ever been, like, have you had a human robot experience where a robot touched you? And like, it was like, wait, like, was there a moment that you've forgotten that a robot is a robot and like, the anthropomorphization stepped in and for a second you forgot that it's not human? I mean, I think when you're in on the details, then we, of course, anthropomorphized our work with Atlas, but in verbal communication and the like, I think we were pretty aware of it as a machine that needed to be respected. And I actually, I worry more about the smaller robots that could still move quickly if programmed wrong and we have to be careful actually about safety and the like right now. And that, if we build our robots correctly, I think then those, a lot of those concerns could go away. And we're seeing that trend. We're seeing the lower cost, lighter weight arms now that could be fundamentally safe. I mean, I do think touch is so fundamental. Ted Adelson is great. He's a perceptual scientist at MIT and he studied vision most of his life. And he said, when I had kids, I expected to be fascinated by their perceptual development. But what really, what he noticed was, felt more impressive, more dominant was the way that they would touch everything and lick everything. And pick things up, stick it on their tongue and whatever. And he said, watching his daughter convinced him that actually he needed to study tactile sensing more. So there's something very important. I think it's a little bit also of the passive versus active part of the world, right? You can passively perceive the world. But it's fundamentally different if you can do an experiment and if you can change the world and you can learn a lot more than a passive observer. So you can in dialogue, that was your initial example, you could have an active experiment exchange. But I think if you're just a camera watching YouTube, I think that's a very different problem than if you're a robot that can apply force. And I think that's a very different problem than if you're a robot that can apply force and touch. I think it's important. Yeah, I think it's just an exciting area of research. I think you're probably right that this hasn't been under researched. To me as a person who's captivated by the idea of human robot interaction, it feels like such a rich opportunity to explore touch. Not even from a safety perspective, but like you said, the emotional too. I mean, safety comes first, but the next step is like a real human connection. Even in the industrial setting, it just feels like it's nice for the robot. I don't know, you might disagree with this, but because I think it's important to see robots as tools often, but I don't know, I think they're just always going to be more effective once you humanize them. Like it's convenient now to think of them as tools because we want to focus on the safety, but I think ultimately to create like a good experience for the worker, for the person, there has to be a human element. I don't know, for me, it feels like an industrial robotic arm would be better if it has a human element. I think like Rethink Robotics had that idea with the Baxter and having eyes and so on, having, I don't know, I'm a big believer in that. It's not my area, but I am also a big believer. Do you have an emotional connection to Atlas? Like do you miss him? I mean, yes, I don't know if I more so than if I had a different science project that I'd worked on super hard, right? But yeah, I mean, the robot, we basically had to do heart surgery on the robot in the final competition because we melted the core. Yeah, there was something about watching that robot hanging there. We know we had to compete with it in an hour and it was getting its guts ripped out. Those are all historic moments. I think if you look back like a hundred years from now, yeah, I think those are important moments in robotics. I mean, these are the early days. You look at like the early days of a lot of scientific disciplines. They look ridiculous, they're full of failure, but it feels like robotics will be important in the coming a hundred years. And these are the early days. So I think a lot of people are, look at a brilliant person such as yourself and are curious about the intellectual journey they've took. Is there maybe three books, technical, fiction, philosophical that had a big impact on your life that you would recommend perhaps others reading? Yeah, so I actually didn't read that much as a kid, but I read fairly voraciously now. There are some recent books that if you're interested in this kind of topic, like AI Superpowers by Kai Fu Lee is just a fantastic read. You must read that. Yuval Harari is just, I think that can open your mind. Sapiens. Sapiens is the first one, Homo Deus is the second, yeah. We mentioned it in the book, Homo Deus is the second, yeah. We mentioned The Black Swan by Taleb. I think that's a good sort of mind opener. I actually, so there's maybe a more controversial recommendation I could give. Great, we love controversy. In some sense, it's so classical it might surprise you, but I actually recently read Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, not so long, it was a while ago, but some people hate that book. I loved it. I think we're in this time right now where, boy, we're just inundated with research papers that you could read on archive with limited peer review and just this wealth of information. I don't know, I think the passion of what you can get out of a book, a really good book or a really good paper if you find it, the attitude, the realization that you're only gonna find a few that really are worth all your time, but then once you find them, you should just dig in and understand it very deeply and it's worth marking it up and having the hard copy writing in the side notes, side margins. I think that was really, I read it at the right time where I was just feeling just overwhelmed with really low quality stuff, I guess. And similarly, I'm just giving more than three now, I'm sorry if I've exceeded my quota. But on that topic just real quick is, so basically finding a few companions to keep for the rest of your life in terms of papers and books and so on and those are the ones, like not doing, what is it, FOMO, fear of missing out, constantly trying to update yourself, but really deeply making a life journey of studying a particular paper, essentially, set of papers. Yeah, I think when you really start to understand when you really find something, which a book that resonates with you might not be the same book that resonates with me, but when you really find one that resonates with you, I think the dialogue that happens and that's what, I loved that Adler was saying, I think Socrates and Plato say the written word is never gonna capture the beauty of dialogue, right? But Adler says, no, no, a really good book is a dialogue between you and the author and it crosses time and space and I don't know, I think it's a very romantic, there's a bunch of like specific advice, which you can just gloss over, but the romantic view of how to read and really appreciate it is so good. And similarly, teaching, yeah, I thought a lot about teaching and so Isaac Asimov, great science fiction writer, has also actually spent a lot of his career writing nonfiction, right? His memoir is fantastic. He was passionate about explaining things, right? He wrote all kinds of books on all kinds of topics in science. He was known as the great explainer and I do really resonate with his style and just his way of talking about, by communicating and explaining to something is really the way that you learn something. I think about problems very differently because of the way I've been given the opportunity to teach them at MIT. We have questions asked, the fear of the lecture, the experience of the lecture and the questions I get and the interactions just forces me to be rock solid on these ideas in a way that if I didn't have that, I don't know, I would be in a different intellectual space. Also, video, does that scare you that your lectures are online and people like me in sweatpants can sit sipping coffee and watch you give lectures? I think it's great. I do think that something's changed right now, which is, right now we're giving lectures over Zoom. I mean, giving seminars over Zoom and everything. I'm trying to figure out, I think it's a new medium. I'm trying to figure out how to exploit it. Yeah, I've been quite cynical about human to human connection over that medium, but I think that's because it hasn't been explored fully and teaching is a different thing. Every lecture is a, I'm sorry, every seminar even, I think every talk I give is an opportunity to give that differently. I can deliver content directly into your browser. You have a WebGL engine right there. I can throw 3D content into your browser while you're listening to me, right? And I can assume that you have at least a powerful enough laptop or something to watch Zoom while I'm doing that, while I'm giving a lecture. That's a new communication tool that I didn't have last year, right? And I think robotics can potentially benefit a lot from teaching that way. We'll see, it's gonna be an experiment this fall. It's interesting. I'm thinking a lot about it. Yeah, and also like the length of lectures or the length of like, there's something, so like I guarantee you, it's like 80% of people who started listening to our conversation are still listening to now, which is crazy to me. But so there's a patience and interest in long form content, but at the same time, there's a magic to forcing yourself to condense an idea to as short as possible. As short as possible, like clip, it can be a part of a longer thing, but like just like really beautifully condense an idea. There's a lot of opportunity there that's easier to do in remote with, I don't know, with editing too. Editing is an interesting thing. Like what, you know, most professors don't get, when they give a lecture, they don't get to go back and edit out parts, like crisp it up a little bit. That's also, it can do magic. Like if you remove like five to 10 minutes from an hour lecture, it can actually, it can make something special of a lecture. I've seen that in myself and in others too, because I edit other people's lectures to extract clips. It's like, there's certain tangents that are like, that lose, they're not interesting. They're mumbling, they're just not, they're not clarifying, they're not helpful at all. And once you remove them, it's just, I don't know. Editing can be magic. It takes a lot of time. Yeah, it takes, it depends like what is teaching, you have to ask. Yeah, yeah. Cause I find the editing process is also beneficial as for teaching, but also for your own learning. I don't know if, have you watched yourself? Yeah, sure. Have you watched those videos? I mean, not all of them. It could be painful to see like how to improve. So do you find that, I know you segment your podcast. Do you think that helps people with the, the attention span aspect of it? Or is it the segment like sections like, yeah, we're talking about this topic, whatever. Nope, nope, that just helps me. It's actually bad. So, and you've been incredible. So I'm learning, like I'm afraid of conversation. This is even today, I'm terrified of talking to you. I mean, it's something I'm trying to remove for myself. There's a guy, I mean, I've learned from a lot of people, but really there's been a few people who's been inspirational to me in terms of conversation. Whatever people think of him, Joe Rogan has been inspirational to me because comedians have been too. Being able to just have fun and enjoy themselves and lose themselves in conversation that requires you to be a great storyteller, to be able to pull a lot of different pieces of information together. But mostly just to enjoy yourself in conversations. And I'm trying to learn that. These notes are, you see me looking down. That's like a safety blanket that I'm trying to let go of more and more. Cool. So that's, people love just regular conversation. That's what they, the structure is like, whatever. I would say, I would say maybe like 10 to like, so there's a bunch of, you know, there's probably a couple of thousand PhD students listening to this right now, right? And they might know what we're talking about. But there is somebody, I guarantee you right now, in Russia, some kid who's just like, who's just smoked some weed, is sitting back and just enjoying the hell out of this conversation. Not really understanding. He kind of watched some Boston Dynamics videos. He's just enjoying it. And I salute you, sir. No, but just like, there's so much variety of people that just have curiosity about engineering, about sciences, about mathematics. And also like, I should, I mean, enjoying it is one thing, but also often notice it inspires people to, there's a lot of people who are like in their undergraduate studies trying to figure out what, trying to figure out what to pursue. And these conversations can really spark the direction of their life. And in terms of robotics, I hope it does, because I'm excited about the possibilities of what robotics brings. On that topic, do you have advice? Like what advice would you give to a young person about life? A young person about life or a young person about life in robotics? It could be in robotics. Robotics, it could be in life in general. It could be career. It could be a relationship advice. It could be running advice. Just like they're, that's one of the things I see, like we talked to like 20 year olds. They're like, how do I do this thing? What do I do? If they come up to you, what would you tell them? I think it's an interesting time to be a kid these days. Everything points to this being sort of a winner, take all economy and the like. I think the people that will really excel in my opinion are going to be the ones that can think deeply about problems. You have to be able to ask questions agilely and use the internet for everything it's good for and stuff like this. And I think a lot of people will develop those skills. I think the leaders, thought leaders, robotics leaders, whatever, are gonna be the ones that can do more and they can think very deeply and critically. And that's a harder thing to learn. I think one path to learning that is through mathematics, through engineering. I would encourage people to start math early. I mean, I didn't really start. I mean, I was always in the better math classes that I could take, but I wasn't pursuing super advanced mathematics or anything like that until I got to MIT. I think MIT lit me up and really started the life that I'm living now. But yeah, I really want kids to dig deep, really understand things, building things too. I mean, pull things apart, put them back together. Like that's just such a good way to really understand things and expect it to be a long journey, right? It's, you don't have to know everything. You're never gonna know everything. So think deeply and stick with it. Enjoy the ride, but just make sure you're not, yeah, just make sure you're stopping to think about why things work. And it's true, it's easy to lose yourself in the distractions of the world. We're overwhelmed with content right now, but you have to stop and pick some of it and really understand it. Yeah, on the book point, I've read Animal Farm by George Orwell a ridiculous number of times. So for me, like that book, I don't know if it's a good book in general, but for me it connects deeply somehow. It somehow connects, so I was born in the Soviet Union. So it connects to me into the entirety of the history of the Soviet Union and to World War II and to the love and hatred and suffering that went on there and the corrupting nature of power and greed and just somehow I just, that book has taught me more about life than like anything else. Even though it's just like a silly childlike book about pigs, I don't know why, it just connects and inspires. The same, there's a few technical books too and algorithms that just, yeah, you return to often. I'm with you. Yeah, there's, and I've been losing that because of the internet. I've been like going on, I've been going on archive and blog posts and GitHub and the new thing and you lose your ability to really master an idea. Right. Wow. Exactly right. What's a fond memory from childhood? When baby Russ Tedrick. Well, I guess I just said that at least my current life began when I got to MIT. If I have to go farther than that. Yeah, what was, was there a life before MIT? Oh, absolutely, but let me actually tell you what happened when I first got to MIT because that I think might be relevant here, but I had taken a computer engineering degree at Michigan. I enjoyed it immensely, learned a bunch of stuff. I liked computers, I liked programming, but when I did get to MIT and started working with Sebastian Sung, theoretical physicist, computational neuroscientist, the culture here was just different. It demanded more of me, certainly mathematically and in the critical thinking. And I remember the day that I borrowed one of the books from my advisor's office and walked down to the Charles River and was like, I'm getting my butt kicked. And I think that's gonna happen to everybody who's doing this kind of stuff. I think I expected you to ask me the meaning of life. I think that somehow I think that's gotta be part of it. Doing hard things? Yeah. Did you consider quitting at any point? Did you consider this isn't for me? No, never that. I was working hard, but I was loving it. I think there's this magical thing where I'm lucky to surround myself with people that basically almost every day I'll see something, I'll be told something or something that I realize, wow, I don't understand that. And if I could just understand that, there's something else to learn. That if I could just learn that thing, I would connect another piece of the puzzle. And I think that is just such an important aspect and being willing to understand what you can and can't do and loving the journey of going and learning those other things. I think that's the best part. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Russ. You've been an inspiration to me since I showed up at MIT. Your work has been an inspiration to the world. This conversation was amazing. I can't wait to see what you do next with robotics, home robots. I hope to see you work in my home one day. So thanks so much for talking today, it's been awesome. Cheers. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Russ Tedrick and thank you to our sponsors, Magic Spoon Cereal, BetterHelp and ExpressVPN. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to magicspoon.com slash Lex and using code Lex at checkout. Go into betterhelp.com slash Lex and signing up at expressvpn.com slash Lex pod. Click the links, buy the stuff, get the discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman spelled somehow without the E just F R I D M A N. And now let me leave you with some words from Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about robots in space and the emphasis we humans put on human based space exploration. Robots are important. If I don my pure scientist hat, I would say just send robots. I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens. It's the vicarious participation in discovery itself. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch | Lex Fridman Podcast #114

The following is a conversation with Dilip George, a researcher at the intersection of Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, cofounder of Vicarious with Scott Phoenix, and formerly cofounder of Numenta with Jeff Hawkins, who's been on this podcast, and Donna Dubinsky. From his early work on hierarchical temporal memory to recursive cortical networks to today, Dilip's always sought to engineer intelligence that is closely inspired by the human brain. As a side note, I think we understand very little about the fundamental principles underlying the function of the human brain, but the little we do know gives hints that may be more useful for engineering intelligence than any idea in mathematics, computer science, physics, and scientific fields outside of biology. And so the brain is a kind of existence proof that says it's possible. Keep at it. I should also say that brain inspired AI is often overhyped and use this fodder just as quantum computing for marketing speak, but I'm not afraid of exploring these sometimes overhyped areas since where there's smoke, there's sometimes fire. Quick summary of the ads. Three sponsors, Babbel, Raycon Earbuds, and Masterclass. Please consider supporting this podcast by clicking the special links in the description to get the discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This show is sponsored by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Go to babbel.com and use code LEX to get three months free. They offer 14 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, and yes, Russian. Daily lessons are 10 to 15 minutes, super easy, effective, designed by over 100 language experts. Let me read a few lines from the Russian poem Noch ulytse fanar apteka by Alexander Bloc that you'll start to understand if you sign up to Babbel. Now I say that you'll only start to understand this poem because Russian starts with a language and ends with vodka. Now the latter part is definitely not endorsed or provided by Babbel and will probably lose me the sponsorship, but once you graduate from Babbel, you can enroll in my advanced course of late night Russian conversation over vodka. I have not yet developed an app for that. It's in progress. So get started by visiting babbel.com and use code LEX to get three months free. This show is sponsored by Raycon earbuds. Get them at buyraycon.com slash LEX. They become my main method of listening to podcasts, audiobooks, and music when I run, do pushups and pull ups, or just living life. In fact, I often listen to brown noise with them when I'm thinking deeply about something. It helps me focus. They're super comfortable, pair easily, great sound, great bass, six hours of playtime. I've been putting in a lot of miles to get ready for a potential ultra marathon and listening to audiobooks on World War II. The sound is rich and really comes in clear. So again, get them at buyraycon.com slash LEX. This show is sponsored by Masterclass. Sign up at masterclass.com slash LEX to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about Masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. I still think it's too good to be true. For 180 bucks a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from to list some of my favorites. Chris Hatfield on Space Exploration, Neil deGrasse Tyson on Scientific Thinking and Communication, Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims on Game Design. Every time I do this read, I really want to play a city builder game. Carlos Santana on guitar, Garak Kasparov on chess, Daniel Nagano on poker and many more. Chris Hatfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up at masterclass.com to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Dileep George. Do you think we need to understand the brain in order to build it? Yes. If you want to build the brain, we definitely need to understand how it works. Blue Brain or Henry Markram's project is trying to build a brain without understanding it, just trying to put details of the brain from neuroscience experiments into a giant simulation by putting more and more neurons, more and more details. But that is not going to work because when it doesn't perform as what you expect it to do, then what do you do? You just keep adding more details. How do you debug it? So unless you understand, unless you have a theory about how the system is supposed to work, how the pieces are supposed to fit together, what they're going to contribute, you can't build it. At the functional level, understand. So can you actually linger on and describe the Blue Brain project? It's kind of a fascinating principle and idea to try to simulate the brain. We're talking about the human brain, right? Right. Human brains and rat brains or cat brains have lots in common that the cortex, the neocortex structure is very similar. So initially they were trying to just simulate a cat brain. To understand the nature of evil. To understand the nature of evil. Or as it happens in most of these simulations, you easily get one thing out, which is oscillations. If you simulate a large number of neurons, they oscillate and you can adjust the parameters and say that, oh, oscillations match the rhythm that we see in the brain, et cetera. I see. So the idea is, is the simulation at the level of individual neurons? Yeah. So the Blue Brain project, the original idea as proposed was you put very detailed biophysical neurons, biophysical models of neurons, and you interconnect them according to the statistics of connections that we have found from real neuroscience experiments, and then turn it on and see what happens. And these neural models are incredibly complicated in themselves, right? Because these neurons are modeled using this idea called Hodgkin Huxley models, which are about how signals propagate in a cable. And there are active dendrites, all those phenomena, which those phenomena themselves, we don't understand that well. And then we put in connectivity, which is part guesswork, part observed. And of course, if we do not have any theory about how it is supposed to work, we just have to take whatever comes out of it as, okay, this is something interesting. But in your sense, these models of the way signal travels along, like with the axons and all the basic models, they're too crude. Oh, well, actually, they are pretty detailed and pretty sophisticated. And they do replicate the neural dynamics. If you take a single neuron and you try to turn on the different channels, the calcium channels and the different receptors, and see what the effect of turning on or off those channels are in the neuron's spike output, people have built pretty sophisticated models of that. And they are, I would say, in the regime of correct. Well, see, the correctness, that's interesting, because you mentioned at several levels, the correctness is measured by looking at some kind of aggregate statistics. It would be more of the spiking dynamics of a signal neuron. Spiking dynamics of a signal neuron, okay. Yeah. And yeah, these models, because they are going to the level of mechanism, so they are basically looking at, okay, what is the effect of turning on an ion channel? And you can model that using electric circuits. So it is not just a function fitting. People are looking at the mechanism underlying it and putting that in terms of electric circuit theory, signal propagation theory, and modeling that. So those models are sophisticated, but getting a single neurons model 99% right does not still tell you how to... It would be the analog of getting a transistor model right and now trying to build a microprocessor. And if you did not understand how a microprocessor works, but you say, oh, I now can model one transistor well, and now I will just try to interconnect the transistors according to whatever I could guess from the experiments and try to simulate it, then it is very unlikely that you will produce a functioning microprocessor. When you want to produce a functioning microprocessor, you want to understand Boolean logic, how do the gates work, all those things, and then understand how do those gates get implemented using transistors. Yeah. This reminds me, there's a paper, maybe you're familiar with it, that I remember going through in a reading group that approaches a microprocessor from a perspective of a neuroscientist. I think it basically, it uses all the tools that we have of neuroscience to try to understand, like as if we just aliens showed up to study computers and to see if those tools could be used to get any kind of sense of how the microprocessor works. I think the final, the takeaway from at least this initial exploration is that we're screwed. There's no way that the tools of neuroscience would be able to get us to anything, like not even Boolean logic. I mean, it's just any aspect of the architecture of the function of the processes involved, the clocks, the timing, all that, you can't figure that out from the tools of neuroscience. Yeah. So I'm very familiar with this particular paper. I think it was called, can a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor or something like that. Following the methodology in that paper, even an electrical engineer would not understand microprocessors. So I don't think it is that bad in the sense of saying, neuroscientists do find valuable things by observing the brain. They do find good insights, but those insights cannot be put together just as a simulation. You have to investigate what are the computational underpinnings of those findings. How do all of them fit together from an information processing and information processing perspective? Somebody has to painstakingly put those things together and build hypothesis. So I don't want to diss all of neuroscientists saying, oh, they're not finding anything. No, that paper almost went to that level of neuroscientists will never understand. No, that's not true. I think they do find lots of useful things, but it has to be put together in a computational framework. Yeah. I mean, but you know, just the AI systems will be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and they will probably, there's some nonzero probability they'll find your words laughable. There's like, I remember humans thought they understood something about the brain. They were totally clueless. There's a sense about neuroscience that we may be in the very, very early days of understanding the brain. But I mean, that's one perspective. I mean, in your perspective, how far are we into understanding any aspect of the brain? So the, the, the dynamics of the individual neuron communication to the, how when they, in, in a collective sense, how they're able to store information, transfer information, how intelligence then emerges, all that kind of stuff. Where are we on that timeline? Yeah. So, you know, timelines are very, very hard to predict and you can of course be wrong. And it can be wrong in, on either side. You know, we know that now when we look back the first flight was in 1903. In 1900, there was a New York Times article on flying machines that do not fly and, and you know, humans might not fly for another a hundred years. That was what that article stated. And so, but no, they, they flew three years after that. So it is, you know, it's very hard to, so... Well, and on that point, one of the Wright brothers, I think two years before, said that, like he said, like some number, like 50 years, he has become convinced that it's, it's, it's impossible. Even during their experimentation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a tribute to when that's like the entrepreneurial battle of like depression of going through, just like thinking there's, this is impossible, but there, yeah, there's something, even the person that's in it is not able to see estimate correctly. Exactly. But I can, I can tell from the point of, you know, objectively, what are the things that we know about the brain and how that can be used to build AI models, which can then go back and inform how the brain works. So my way of understanding the brain would be to basically say, look at the insights neuroscientists have found, understand that from a computational angle, information processing angle, build models using that. And then building that model, which, which functions, which is a functional model, which is, which is doing the task that we want the model to do. It is not just trying to model a phenomena in the brain. It is, it is trying to do what the brain is trying to do on the, on the whole functional level. And building that model will help you fill in the missing pieces that, you know, biology just gives you the hints and building the model, you know, fills in the rest of the, the pieces of the puzzle. And then you can go and connect that back to biology and say, okay, now it makes sense that this part of the brain is doing this, or this layer in the cortical circuit is doing this. And then continue this iteratively because now that will inform new experiments in neuroscience. And of course, you know, building the model and verifying that in the real world will also tell you more about, does the model actually work? And you can refine the model, find better ways of putting these neuroscience insights together. So, so I would say it is, it is, you know, it, so neuroscientists alone, just from experimentation will not be able to build a model of the, of the brain or a functional model of the brain. So we, you know, there, there's lots of efforts, which are very impressive efforts in collecting more and more connectivity data from the brain. You know, how, how are the microcircuits of the brain connected with each other? Those are beautiful, by the way. Those are beautiful. And at the same time, those, those do not itself by themselves, convey the story of how does it work? And, and somebody has to understand, okay, why are they connected like that? And what, what are those things doing? And, and we do that by building models in AI using hints from neuroscience and, and repeat the cycle. So what aspect of the brain are useful in this whole endeavor, which by the way, I should say, you're, you're both a neuroscientist and an AI person. I guess the dream is to both understand the brain and to build AGI systems. So you're, it's like an engineer's perspective of trying to understand the brain. So what aspects of the brain, functionally speaking, like you said, do you find interesting? Yeah, quite a lot of things. All right. So one is, you know, if you look at the visual cortex and, and, you know, the visual cortex is, is a large part of the brain. I forget the exact fraction, but it is, it's a huge part of our brain area is occupied by just, just vision. So vision, visual cortex is not just a feed forward cascade of neurons. There are a lot more feedback connections in the brain compared to the feed forward connections. And, and it is surprising to the level of detail neuroscientists have actually studied this. If you, if you go into neuroscience literature and poke around and ask, you know, have they studied what will be the effect of poking a neuron in level IT in level V1? And have they studied that? And you will say, yes, they have studied that. So every part of every possible combination. I mean, it's, it's a, it's not a random exploration at all. It's a very hypothesis driven, right? Like they, they are very experimental. Neuroscientists are very, very systematic in how they probe the brain because experiments are very costly to conduct. They take a lot of preparation. They, they need a lot of control. So they, they are very hypothesis driven in how they probe the brain. And often what I find is that when we have a question in AI about has anybody probed how lateral connections in the brain works? And when you go and read the literature, yes, people have probed it and people have probed it very systematically. And, and they have hypotheses about how those lateral connections are supposedly contributing to visual processing. But of course they haven't built very, very functional, detailed models of it. By the way, how do the, in those studies, sorry to interrupt, do they, do they stimulate like a neuron in one particular area of the visual cortex and then see how the travel of the signal travels kind of thing? Fascinating, very, very fascinating experiments. So I can, I can give you one example I was impressed with. This is, so before going to that, let me, let me give you, you know, a overview of how the, the layers in the cortex are organized, right? Visual cortex is organized into roughly four hierarchical levels. Okay. So V1, V2, V4, IT. And in V1... What happened to V3? Well, yeah, that's another pathway. Okay. So this is, this, I'm talking about just object recognition pathway. All right, cool. And then in V1 itself, so it's, there is a very detailed microcircuit in V1 itself. That is, there is organization within a level itself. The cortical sheet is organized into, you know, multiple layers and there are columnar structure. And, and this, this layer wise and columnar structure is repeated in V1, V2, V4, IT, all of them, right? And, and the connections between these layers within a level, you know, in V1 itself, there are six layers roughly, and the connections between them, there is a particular structure to them. And now, so one example of an experiment people did is when I, when you present a stimulus, which is, let's say, requires separating the foreground from the background of an object. So it is, it's a textured triangle on a textured background. And you can check, does the surface settle first or does the contour settle first? Settle? Settle in the sense that the, so when you finally form the percept of the, of the triangle, you understand where the contours of the triangle are, and you also know where the inside of the triangle is, right? That's when you form the final percept. Now you can ask, what is the dynamics of forming that final percept? Do the, do the neurons first find the edges and converge on where the edges are, and then they find the inner surfaces, or does it go the other way around? The other way around. So what's the answer? In this case, it turns out that it first settles on the edges. It converges on the edge hypothesis first, and then the surfaces are filled in from the edges to the inside. That's fascinating. And the detail to which you can study this, it's amazing that you can actually not only find the temporal dynamics of when this happens, and then you can also find which layer in the, you know, in V1, which layer is encoding the edges, which layer is encoding the surfaces, and which layer is encoding the feedback, which layer is encoding the feed forward, and what's the combination of them that produces the final percept. And these kinds of experiments stand out when you try to explain illusions. One example of a favorite illusion of mine is the Kanitsa triangle. I don't know that you are familiar with this one. So this is an example where it's a triangle, but only the corners of the triangle are shown in the stimulus. So they look like kind of Pacman. Oh, the black Pacman. Exactly. And then you start to see. Your visual system hallucinates the edges. And when you look at it, you will see a faint edge. And you can go inside the brain and look, do actually neurons signal the presence of this edge? And if they signal, how do they do it? Because they are not receiving anything from the input. The input is blank for those neurons. So how do they signal it? When does the signaling happen? So if a real contour is present in the input, then the neurons immediately signal, okay, there is an edge here. When it is an illusory edge, it is clearly not in the input. It is coming from the context. So those neurons fire later. And you can say that, okay, it's the feedback connection that is causing them to fire. And they happen later. And I'll find the dynamics of them. So these studies are pretty impressive and very detailed. So by the way, just a step back, you said that there may be more feedback connections than feed forward connections. First of all, if it's just for like a machine learning folks, I mean, that's crazy that there's all these feedback connections. We often think about, thanks to deep learning, you start to think about the human brain as a kind of feed forward mechanism. So what the heck are these feedback connections? What's the dynamics? What are we supposed to think about them? So this fits into a very beautiful picture about how the brain works. So the beautiful picture of how the brain works is that our brain is building a model of the world. I know. So our visual system is building a model of how objects behave in the world. And we are constantly projecting that model back onto the world. So what we are seeing is not just a feed forward thing that just gets interpreted in a feed forward part. We are constantly projecting our expectations onto the world. And what the final person is a combination of what we project onto the world combined with what the actual sensory input is. Almost like trying to calculate the difference and then trying to interpret the difference. Yeah. I wouldn't put this calculating the difference. It's more like what is the best explanation for the input stimulus based on the model of the world I have. Got it. And that's where all the illusions come in. But that's an incredibly efficient process. So the feedback mechanism, it just helps you constantly. Yeah. So hallucinate how the world should be based on your world model and then just looking at if there's novelty, like trying to explain it. Hence, that's why movement. We detect movement really well. There's all these kinds of things. And this is like at all different levels of the cortex you're saying. This happens at the lowest level or the highest level. Yes. Yeah. In fact, feedback connections are more prevalent in everywhere in the cortex. And so one way to think about it, and there's a lot of evidence for this, is inference. So basically, if you have a model of the world and when some evidence comes in, what you are doing is inference. You are trying to now explain this evidence using your model of the world. And this inference includes projecting your model onto the evidence and taking the evidence back into the model and doing an iterative procedure. And this iterative procedure is what happens using the feed forward feedback propagation. And feedback affects what you see in the world, and it also affects feed forward propagation. And examples are everywhere. We see these kinds of things everywhere. The idea that there can be multiple competing hypotheses in our model trying to explain the same evidence, and then you have to kind of make them compete. And one hypothesis will explain away the other hypothesis through this competition process. So you have competing models of the world that try to explain. What do you mean by explain away? So this is a classic example in graphical models, probabilistic models. What are those? I think it's useful to mention because we'll talk about them more. So neural networks are one class of machine learning models. You have distributed set of nodes, which are called the neurons. Each one is doing a dot product and you can approximate any function using this multilevel network of neurons. So that's a class of models which are useful for function approximation. There is another class of models in machine learning called probabilistic graphical models. And you can think of them as each node in that model is variable, which is talking about something. It can be a variable representing, is an edge present in the input or not? And at the top of the network, a node can be representing, is there an object present in the world or not? So it is another way of encoding knowledge. And then once you encode the knowledge, you can do inference in the right way. What is the best way to explain some set of evidence using this model that you encoded? So when you encode the model, you are encoding the relationship between these different variables. How is the edge connected to the model of the object? How is the surface connected to the model of the object? And then, of course, this is a very distributed, complicated model. And inference is, how do you explain a piece of evidence when a set of stimulus comes in? If somebody tells me there is a 50% probability that there is an edge here in this part of the model, how does that affect my belief on whether I should think that there is a square present in the image? So this is the process of inference. So one example of inference is having this expiring away effect between multiple causes. So graphical models can be used to represent causality in the world. So let's say, you know, your alarm at home can be triggered by a burglar getting into your house, or it can be triggered by an earthquake. Both can be causes of the alarm going off. So now, you're in your office, you heard burglar alarm going off, you are heading home, thinking that there's a burglar got in. But while driving home, if you hear on the radio that there was an earthquake in the vicinity, now your strength of evidence for a burglar getting into their house is diminished. Because now that piece of evidence is explained by the earthquake being present. So if you think about these two causes explaining at lower level variable, which is alarm, now, what we're seeing is that increasing the evidence for some cause, you know, there is evidence coming in from below for alarm being present. And initially, it was flowing to a burglar being present. But now, since there is side evidence for this other cause, it explains away this evidence and evidence will now flow to the other cause. This is, you know, two competing causal things trying to explain the same evidence. And the brain has a similar kind of mechanism for doing so. That's kind of interesting. And how's that all encoded in the brain? Like, where's the storage of information? Are we talking just maybe to get it a little bit more specific? Is it in the hardware of the actual connections? Is it in chemical communication? Is it electrical communication? Do we know? So this is, you know, a paper that we are bringing out soon. Which one is this? This is the cortical microcircuits paper that I sent you a draft of. Of course, this is a lot of this. A lot of it is still hypothesis. One hypothesis is that you can think of a cortical column as encoding a concept. A concept, you know, think of it as an example of a concept. Is an edge present or not? Or is an object present or not? Okay, so you can think of it as a binary variable, a binary random variable. The presence of an edge or not, or the presence of an object or not. So each cortical column can be thought of as representing that one concept, one variable. And then the connections between these cortical columns are basically encoding the relationship between these random variables. And then there are connections within the cortical column. Each cortical column is implemented using multiple layers of neurons with very, very, very rich structure there. You know, there are thousands of neurons in a cortical column. But that structure is similar across the different cortical columns. Correct. And also these cortical columns connect to a substructure called thalamus. So all cortical columns pass through this substructure. So our hypothesis is that the connections between the cortical columns implement this, you know, that's where the knowledge is stored about how these different concepts connect to each other. And then the neurons inside this cortical column and in thalamus in combination implement this actual computation for inference, which includes explaining away and competing between the different hypotheses. And it is all very... So what is amazing is that neuroscientists have actually done experiments to the tune of showing these things. They might not be putting it in the overall inference framework, but they will show things like, if I poke this higher level neuron, it will inhibit through this complicated loop through thalamus, it will inhibit this other column. So they will do such experiments. But do they use terminology of concepts, for example? So, I mean, is it something where it's easy to anthropomorphize and think about concepts like you started moving into logic based kind of reasoning systems. So I would just think of concepts in that kind of way, or is it a lot messier, a lot more gray area, you know, even more gray, even more messy than the artificial neural network kinds, kinds of abstractions? Easiest way to think of it as a variable, right? It's a binary variable, which is showing the presence or absence of something. So, but I guess what I'm asking is, is that something that we're supposed to think of something that's human interpretable of that something? It doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be human interpretable. There's no need for it to be human interpretable. But it's almost like you will be able to find some interpretation of it because it is connected to the other things that you know about. Yeah. And the point is it's useful somehow. Yeah. It's useful as an entity in the graphic, in connecting to the other entities that are, let's call them concepts. Right. Okay. So, by the way, are these the cortical microcircuits? Correct. These are the cortical microcircuits. You know, that's what neuroscientists use to talk about the circuits within a level of the cortex. So, you can think of, you know, let's think of a neural network, artificial neural network terms. People talk about the architecture of how many layers they build, what is the fan in, fan out, et cetera. That is the macro architecture. And then within a layer of the neural network, the cortical neural network is much more structured within a level. There's a lot more intricate structure there. But even within an artificial neural network, you can think of feature detection plus pooling as one level. And so, that is kind of a microcircuit. It's much more complex in the real brain. And so, within a level, whatever is that circuitry within a column of the cortex and between the layers of the cortex, that's the microcircuitry. I love that terminology. Machine learning people don't use the circuit terminology. Right. But they should. It's nice. So, okay. Okay. So, that's the cortical microcircuit. So, what's interesting about, what can we say, what is the paper that you're working on propose about the ideas around these cortical microcircuits? So, this is a fully functional model for the microcircuits of the visual cortex. So, the paper focuses on your idea and our discussion now is focusing on vision. Yeah. The visual cortex. Okay. So, this is a model. This is a full model. This is how vision works. But this is a hypothesis. Okay. So, let me step back a bit. So, we looked at neuroscience for insights on how to build a vision model. Right. And we synthesized all those insights into a computational model. This is called the recursive cortical network model that we used for breaking captures. And we are using the same model for robotic picking and tracking of objects. And that, again, is a vision system. That's a vision system. Computer vision system. That's a computer vision system. Takes in images and outputs what? On one side, it outputs the class of the image and also segments the image. And you can also ask it further queries. Where is the edge of the object? Where is the interior of the object? So, it's a model that you build to answer multiple questions. So, you're not trying to build a model for just classification or just segmentation, et cetera. It's a joint model that can do multiple things. So, that's the model that we built using insights from neuroscience. And some of those insights are what is the role of feedback connections? What is the role of lateral connections? So, all those things went into the model. The model actually uses feedback connections. All these ideas from neuroscience. Yeah. So, what the heck is a recursive cortical network? What are the architecture approaches, interesting aspects here, which is essentially a brain inspired approach to computer vision? Yeah. So, there are multiple layers to this question. I can go from the very, very top and then zoom in. Okay. So, one important thing, constraint that went into the model is that you should not think vision, think of vision as something in isolation. We should not think perception as something as a preprocessor for cognition. Perception and cognition are interconnected. And so, you should not think of one problem in separation from the other problem. And so, that means if you finally want to have a system that understand concepts about the world and can learn a very conceptual model of the world and can reason and connect to language, all of those things, you need to think all the way through and make sure that your perception system is compatible with your cognition system and language system and all of them. And one aspect of that is top down controllability. What does that mean? So, that means, you know, so think of, you know, you can close your eyes and think about the details of one object, right? I can zoom in further and further. So, think of the bottle in front of me, right? And now, you can think about, okay, what the cap of that bottle looks. I know we can think about what's the texture on that bottle of the cap. You know, you can think about, you know, what will happen if something hits that. So, you can manipulate your visual knowledge in cognition driven ways. Yes. And so, this top down controllability and being able to simulate scenarios in the world. So, you're not just a passive player in this perception game. You can control it. You have imagination. Correct. Correct. So, basically, you know, basically having a generative network, which is a model and it is not just some arbitrary generative network. It has to be built in a way that it is controllable top down. It is not just trying to generate a whole picture at once. You know, it's not trying to generate photorealistic things of the world. You know, you don't have good photorealistic models of the world. Human brains do not have. If I, for example, ask you the question, what is the color of the letter E in the Google logo? You have no idea. Although, you have seen it millions of times, hundreds of times. So, it's not, our model is not photorealistic, but it has other properties that we can manipulate it. And you can think about filling in a different color in that logo. You can think about expanding the letter E. You know, you can see what, so you can imagine the consequence of, you know, actions that you have never performed. So, these are the kind of characteristics the generative model need to have. So, this is one constraint that went into our model. Like, you know, so this is, when you read the, just the perception side of the paper, it is not obvious that this was a constraint into the, that went into the model, this top down controllability of the generative model. So, what does top down controllability in a model look like? It's a really interesting concept. Fascinating concept. What does that, is that the recursiveness gives you that? Or how do you do it? Quite a few things. It's like, what does the model factor, factorize? You know, what are the, what is the model representing as different pieces in the puzzle? Like, you know, so, so in the RCN network, it thinks of the world, you know, so what I said, the background of an image is modeled separately from the foreground of the image. So, the objects are separate from the background. They are different entities. So, there's a kind of segmentation that's built in fundamentally. And then even that object is composed of parts. And also, another one is the shape of the object is differently modeled from the texture of the object. Got it. So, there's like these, you know who Francois Chollet is? Yeah. So, there's, he developed this like IQ test type of thing for ARC challenge for, and it's kind of cool that there's these concepts, priors that he defines that you bring to the table in order to be able to reason about basic shapes and things in IQ test. So, here you're making it quite explicit that here are the things that you should be, these are like distinct things that you should be able to model in this. Keep in mind that you can derive this from much more general principles. It doesn't, you don't need to explicitly put it as, oh, objects versus foreground versus background, the surface versus the structure. No, these are, these are derivable from more fundamental principles of how, you know, what's the property of continuity of natural signals. What's the property of continuity of natural signals? Yeah. By the way, that sounds very poetic, but yeah. So, you're saying that's a, there's some low level properties from which emerges the idea that shapes should be different than like there should be a parts of an object. There should be, I mean, kind of like Francois, I mean, there's objectness, there's all these things that it's kind of crazy that we humans, I guess, evolved to have because it's useful for us to perceive the world. Yeah. Correct. And it derives mostly from the properties of natural signals. And so, natural signals. So, natural signals are the kind of things we'll perceive in the natural world. Correct. I don't know. I don't know why that sounds so beautiful. Natural signals. Yeah. As opposed to a QR code, right? Which is an artificial signal that we created. Humans are not very good at classifying QR codes. We are very good at saying something is a cat or a dog, but not very good at, you know, where computers are very good at classifying QR codes. So, our visual system is tuned for natural signals. So, it's tuned for natural signals. And there are fundamental assumptions in the architecture that are derived from natural signals properties. I wonder when you take hallucinogenic drugs, does that go into natural or is that closer to the QR code? It's still natural. It's still natural? Yeah. Because it is still operating using your brains. By the way, on that topic, I mean, I haven't been following. I think they're becoming legalized and certain. I can't wait they become legalized to a degree that you, like, vision science researchers could study it. Yeah. Just like through medical, chemical ways, modify. There could be ethical concerns, but modify. That's another way to study the brain is to be able to chemically modify it. There's probably very long a way to figure out how to do it ethically. Yeah, but I think there are studies on that already. Yeah, I think so. Because it's not unethical to give it to rats. Oh, that's true. That's true. There's a lot of drugged up rats out there. Okay, cool. Sorry. Sorry. It's okay. So, there's these low level things from natural signals that......from which these properties will emerge. But it is still a very hard problem on how to encode that. So, you mentioned the priors Francho wanted to encode in the abstract reasoning challenge, but it is not straightforward how to encode those priors. So, some of those challenges, like the object completion challenges are things that we purely use our visual system to do. It looks like abstract reasoning, but it is purely an output of the vision system. For example, completing the corners of that condenser triangle, completing the lines of that condenser triangle. It's purely a visual system property. There is no abstract reasoning involved. It uses all these priors, but it is stored in our visual system in a particular way that is amenable to inference. That is one of the things that we tackled in the... Basically saying, okay, these are the prior knowledge which will be derived from the world, but then how is that prior knowledge represented in the model such that inference when some piece of evidence comes in can be done very efficiently and in a very distributed way? Because there are so many ways of representing knowledge, which is not amenable to very quick inference, quick lookups. So that's one core part of what we tackled in the RCN model. How do you encode visual knowledge to do very quick inference? Can you maybe comment on... So folks listening to this in general may be familiar with different kinds of architectures of a neural networks. What are we talking about with RCN? What does the architecture look like? What are the different components? Is it close to neural networks? Is it far away from neural networks? What does it look like? Yeah. So you can think of the Delta between the model and a convolutional neural network, if people are familiar with convolutional neural networks. So convolutional neural networks have this feed forward processing cascade, which is called feature detectors and pooling. And that is repeated in a multi level system. And if you want an intuitive idea of what is happening, feature detectors are detecting interesting co occurrences in the input. It can be a line, a corner, an eye or a piece of texture, et cetera. And the pooling neurons are doing some local transformation of that and making it invariant to local transformations. So this is what the structure of convolutional neural network is. Recursive cortical network has a similar structure when you look at just the feed forward pathway. But in addition to that, it is also structured in a way that it is generative so that it can run it backward and combine the forward with the backward. Another aspect that it has is it has lateral connections. So if you have an edge here and an edge here, it has connections between these edges. It is not just feed forward connections. It is something between these edges, which is the nodes representing these edges, which is to enforce compatibility between them. So otherwise what will happen is that constraints. It's a constraint. It's basically if you do just feature detection followed by pooling, then your transformations in different parts of the visual field are not coordinated. And so you will create a jagged, when you generate from the model, you will create jagged things and uncoordinated transformations. So these lateral connections are enforcing the transformations. Is the whole thing still differentiable? No, it's not. It's not trained using backprop. Okay. That's really important. So there's this feed forward, there's feedback mechanisms. There's some interesting connectivity things. It's still layered like multiple layers. Okay. Very, very interesting. And yeah. Okay. So the interconnection between adjacent connections across service constraints that keep the thing stable. Correct. Okay. So what else? And then there's this idea of doing inference. A neural network does not do inference on the fly. So an example of why this inference is important is, you know, so one of the first applications that we showed in the paper was to crack text based captures. What are captures? I mean, by the way, one of the most awesome, like the people don't use this term anymore as human computation, I think. I love this term. The guy who created captures, I think came up with this term. I love it. Anyway. What are captures? So captures are those things that you fill in when you're, you know, if you're opening a new account in Google, they show you a picture, you know, usually it used to be set of garbled letters that you have to kind of figure out what is that string of characters and type it. And the reason captures exist is because, you know, Google or Twitter do not want automatic creation of accounts. You can use a computer to create millions of accounts and use that for nefarious purposes. So you want to make sure that to the extent possible, the interaction that their system is having is with a human. So it's a, it's called a human interaction proof. A capture is a human interaction proof. So, so this is a captures are by design, things that are easy for humans to solve, but hard for computers. Hard for robots. Yeah. So, and text based captures was the one which is prevalent around 2014, because at that time, text based captures were hard for computers to crack. Even now, they are actually in the sense of an arbitrary text based capture will be unsolvable even now, but with the techniques that we have developed, it can be, you know, you can quickly develop a mechanism that solves the capture. They've probably gotten a lot harder too. They've been getting clever and clever generating these text captures. So, okay. So that was one of the things you've tested it on is these kinds of captures in 2014, 15, that kind of stuff. So what, I mean, why, by the way, why captures? Yeah. Even now, I would say capture is a very, very good challenge problem. If you want to understand how human perception works, and if you want to build systems that work, like the human brain, and I wouldn't say capture is a solved problem. We have cracked the fundamental defense of captures, but it is not solved in the way that humans solve it. So I can give an example. I can take a five year old child who has just learned characters and show them any new capture that we create. They will be able to solve it. I can show you, I can show you a picture of a character. I can show you pretty much any new capture from any new website. You'll be able to solve it without getting any training examples from that particular style of capture. You're assuming I'm human. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's right. So if you are human, otherwise I will be able to figure that out using this one. But this whole podcast is just a touring test, a long touring test. Anyway, yeah. So humans can figure it out with very few examples. Or no training examples. No training examples from that particular style of capture. So even now this is unreachable for the current deep learning system. So basically there is no, I don't think a system exists where you can basically say, train on whatever you want. And then now say, hey, I will show you a new capture, which I did not show you in the training setup. Will the system be able to solve it? It still doesn't exist. So that is the magic of human perception. And Doug Hofstadter put this very beautifully in one of his talks. The central problem in AI is what is the letter A. If you can build a system that reliably can detect all the variations of the letter A, you don't even know to go to the B and the C. Yeah. You don't even know to go to the B and the C or the strings of characters. And so that is the spirit with which we tackle that problem. What does it mean by that? I mean, is it like without training examples, try to figure out the fundamental elements that make up the letter A in all of its forms? In all of its forms. A can be made with two humans standing, leaning against each other, holding the hands. And it can be made of leaves. Yeah. You might have to understand everything about this world in order to understand the letter A. Yeah. Exactly. So it's common sense reasoning, essentially. Yeah. Right. So to finally, to really solve, finally to say that you have solved capture, you have to solve the whole problem. Yeah. Okay. So how does this kind of the RCN architecture help us to do a better job of that kind of thing? Yeah. So as I mentioned, one of the important things was being able to do inference, being able to dynamically do inference. Can you clarify what you mean? Because you said like neural networks don't do inference. Yeah. So what do you mean by inference in this context then? So, okay. So in captures, what they do to confuse people is to make these characters crowd together. Yes. Okay. And when you make the characters crowd together, what happens is that you will now start seeing combinations of characters as some other new character or an existing character. So you would put an R and N together. It will start looking like an M. And so locally, there is very strong evidence for it being some incorrect character. But globally, the only explanation that fits together is something that is different from what you can find locally. Yes. So this is inference. You are basically taking local evidence and putting it in the global context and often coming to a conclusion locally, which is conflicting with the local information. So actually, so you mean inference like in the way it's used when you talk about reasoning, for example, as opposed to like inference, which is with artificial neural networks, which is a single pass to the network. Okay. So like you're basically doing some basic forms of reasoning, like integration of like how local things fit into the global picture. And things like explaining a way coming into this one, because you are explaining that piece of evidence as something else, because globally, that's the only thing that makes sense. So now you can amortize this inference in a neural network. If you want to do this, you can brute force it. You can just show it all combinations of things that you want your reasoning to work over. And you can just train the help out of that neural network and it will look like it is doing inference on the fly, but it is really just doing amortized inference. It is because you have shown it a lot of these combinations during training time. So what you want to do is be able to do dynamic inference rather than just being able to show all those combinations in the training time. And that's something we emphasized in the model. What does it mean, dynamic inference? Is that that has to do with the feedback thing? Yes. Like what is dynamic? I'm trying to visualize what dynamic inference would be in this case. Like what is it doing with the input? It's shown the input the first time. Yeah. And is like what's changing over temporally? What's the dynamics of this inference process? So you can think of it as you have at the top of the model, the characters that you are trained on. They are the causes that you are trying to explain the pixels using the characters as the causes. The characters are the things that cause the pixels. Yeah. So there's this causality thing. So the reason you mentioned causality, I guess, is because there's a temporal aspect to this whole thing. In this particular case, the temporal aspect is not important. It is more like when if I turn the character on, the pixels will turn on. Yeah, it will be after this a little bit. Okay. So that is causality in the sense of like a logic causality, like hence inference. Okay. The dynamics is that even though locally it will look like, okay, this is an A. And locally, just when I look at just that patch of the image, it looks like an A. But when I look at it in the context of all the other causes, A is not something that makes sense. So that is something you have to kind of recursively figure out. Yeah. So, okay. And this thing performed pretty well on the CAPTCHAs. Correct. And I mean, is there some kind of interesting intuition you can provide why it did well? Like what did it look like? Is there visualizations that could be human interpretable to us humans? Yes. Yeah. So the good thing about the model is that it is extremely, so it is not just doing a classification, right? It is providing a full explanation for the scene. So when it operates on a scene, it is coming back and saying, look, this is the part is the A, and these are the pixels that turned on. These are the pixels in the input that makes me think that it is an A. And also, these are the portions I hallucinated. It provides a complete explanation of that form. And then these are the contours. This is the interior. And this is in front of this other object. So that's the kind of explanation the inference network provides. So that is useful and interpretable. And then the kind of errors it makes are also, I don't want to read too much into it, but the kind of errors the network makes are very similar to the kinds of errors humans would make in a similar situation. So there's something about the structure that feels reminiscent of the way humans visual system works. Well, I mean, how hardcoded is this to the capture problem, this idea? Not really hardcoded because the assumptions, as I mentioned, are general, right? It is more, and those themselves can be applied in many situations which are natural signals. So it's the foreground versus background factorization and the factorization of the surfaces versus the contours. So these are all generally applicable assumptions. In all vision. So why attack the capture problem, which is quite unique in the computer vision context versus like the traditional benchmarks of ImageNet and all those kinds of image classification or even segmentation tasks and all of that kind of stuff. What's your thinking about those kinds of benchmarks in this context? I mean, those benchmarks are useful for deep learning kind of algorithms. So the settings that deep learning works in are here is my huge training set and here is my test set. So the training set is almost 100x, 1000x bigger than the test set in many, many cases. What we wanted to do was invert that. The training set is way smaller than the test set. And capture is a problem that is by definition hard for computers and it has these good properties of strong generalization, strong out of training distribution generalization. If you are interested in studying that and having your model have that property, then it's a good data set to tackle. So have you attempted to, which I think, I believe there's quite a growing body of work on looking at MNIST and ImageNet without training. So it's like taking the basic challenge is what tiny fraction of the training set can we take in order to do a reasonable job of the classification task? Have you explored that angle in these classic benchmarks? Yes. So we did do MNIST. So it's not just capture. So there was also multiple versions of MNIST, including the standard version where we inverted the problem, which is basically saying rather than train on 60,000 training data, how quickly can you get to high level accuracy with very little training data? Is there some performance you remember, like how well did it do? How many examples did it need? Yeah. I remember that it was on the order of tens or hundreds of examples to get into 95% accuracy. And it was definitely better than the other systems out there at that time. At that time. Yeah. They're really pushing. I think that's a really interesting space, actually. I think there's an actual name for MNIST. There's different names to the different sizes of training sets. I mean, people are like attacking this problem. I think it's super interesting. It's funny how like the MNIST will probably be with us all the way to AGI. It's a data set that just sticks by. It's a clean, simple data set to study the fundamentals of learning with just like captures. It's interesting. Not enough people. I don't know. Maybe you can correct me, but I feel like captures don't show up as often in papers as they probably should. That's correct. Yeah. Because usually these things have a momentum. Once something gets established as a standard benchmark, there is a dynamics of how graduate students operate and how academic system works that pushes people to track that benchmark. Yeah. Nobody wants to think outside the box. Okay. Okay. So good performance on the captures. What else is there interesting on the RCN side before we talk about the cortical micros? Yeah. So the same model. So the important part of the model was that it trains very quickly with very little training data and it's quite robust to out of distribution perturbations. And we are using that very fruitfully at Vicarious in many of the robotics tasks we are solving. Well, let me ask you this kind of touchy question. I have to, I've spoken with your friend, colleague, Jeff Hawkins, too. I have to kind of ask, there is a bit of, whenever you have brain inspired stuff and you make big claims, big sexy claims, there's critics, I mean, machine learning subreddit, don't get me started on those people. Criticism is good, but they're a bit over the top. There is quite a bit of sort of skepticism and criticism. Is this work really as good as it promises to be? Do you have thoughts on that kind of skepticism? Do you have comments on the kind of criticism I might have received about, you know, is this approach legit? Is this a promising approach? Or at least as promising as it seems to be, you know, advertised as? Yeah, I can comment on it. So, you know, our RCN paper is published in Science, which I would argue is a very high quality journal, very hard to publish in. And, you know, usually it is indicative of the quality of the work. And I am very, very certain that the ideas that we brought together in that paper, in terms of the importance of feedback connections, recursive inference, lateral connections, coming to best explanation of the scene as the problem to solve, trying to solve recognition, segmentation, all jointly, in a way that is compatible with higher level cognition, top down attention, all those ideas that we brought together into something, you know, coherent and workable in the world and solving a challenging, tackling a challenging problem. I think that will stay and that contribution I stand by. Now, I can tell you a story which is funny in the context of this. So, if you read the abstract of the paper and, you know, the argument we are putting in, you know, we are putting in, look, current deep learning systems take a lot of training data. They don't use these insights. And here is our new model, which is not a deep neural network. It's a graphical model. It does inference. This is how the paper is, right? Now, once the paper was accepted and everything, it went to the press department in Science, you know, AAAS Science Office. We didn't do any press release when it was published. It went to the press department. What was the press release that they wrote up? A new deep learning model. Solves CAPTCHAs. Solves CAPTCHAs. And so, you can see where was, you know, what was being hyped in that thing, right? So, there is a dynamic in the community of, you know, so that especially happens when there are lots of new people coming into the field and they get attracted to one thing. And some people are trying to think different compared to that. So, there is some, I think skepticism is science is important and it is, you know, very much required. But it's also, it's not skepticism. Usually, it's mostly bandwagon effect that is happening rather than. Well, but that's not even that. I mean, I'll tell you what they react to, which is like, I'm sensitive to as well. If you look at just companies, OpenAI, DeepMind, Vicarious, I mean, they just, there's a little bit of a race to the top and hype, right? It's like, it doesn't pay off to be humble. So, like, and the press is just irresponsible often. They just, I mean, don't get me started on the state of journalism today. Like, it seems like the people who write articles about these things, they literally have not even spent an hour on the Wikipedia article about what is neural networks. Like, they haven't like invested just even the language to laziness. It's like, robots beat humans. Like, they write this kind of stuff that just, and then of course, the researchers are quite sensitive to that because it gets a lot of attention. They're like, why did this word get so much attention? That's over the top and people get really sensitive. The same kind of criticism with OpenAI did work with Rubik's cube with the robot that people criticized. Same with GPT2 and 3, they criticize. Same thing with DeepMinds with AlphaZero. I mean, yeah, I'm sensitive to it. But, and of course, with your work, you mentioned deep learning, but there's something super sexy to the public about brain inspired. I mean, that immediately grabs people's imagination, not even like neural networks, but like really brain inspired, like brain like neural networks. That seems really compelling to people and to me as well, to the world as a narrative. And so people hook up, hook onto that. And sometimes the skepticism engine turns on in the research community and they're skeptical. But I think putting aside the ideas of the actual performance and captures or performance in any data set. I mean, to me, all these data sets are useless anyway. It's nice to have them. But in the grand scheme of things, they're silly toy examples. The point is, is there intuition about the ideas, just like you mentioned, bringing the ideas together in a unique way? Is there something there? Is there some value there? And is it going to stand the test of time? And that's the hope. That's the hope. Yes. My confidence there is very high. I don't treat brain inspired as a marketing term. I am looking into the details of biology and puzzling over those things and I am grappling with those things. And so it is not a marketing term at all. You can use it as a marketing term and people often use it and you can get combined with them. And when people don't understand how you're approaching the problem, it is easy to be misunderstood and think of it as purely marketing. But that's not the way we are. So you really, I mean, as a scientist, you believe that if we kind of just stick to really understanding the brain, that's going to, that's the right, like you should constantly meditate on the, how does the brain do this? Because that's going to be really helpful for engineering and technology systems. Yes. You need to, so I think it's one input and it is helpful, but you should know when to deviate from it too. So an example is convolutional neural networks, right? Convolution is not an operation brain implements. The visual cortex is not convolutional. Visual cortex has local receptive fields, local connectivity, but there is no translation invariance in the network weights in the visual cortex. That is a computational trick, which is a very good engineering trick that we use for sharing the training between the different nodes. And that trick will be with us for some time. It will go away when we have robots with eyes and heads that move. And so then that trick will go away. It will not be useful at that time. So the brain doesn't have translational invariance. It has the focal point, like it has a thing it focuses on. Correct. It has a phobia. And because of the phobia, the receptive fields are not like the copying of the weights. Like the weights in the center are very different from the weights in the periphery. Yes. At the periphery. I mean, I did this, actually wrote a paper and just gotten a chance to really study peripheral vision, which is a fascinating thing. Very under understood thing of what the brain, you know, at every level the brain does with the periphery. It does some funky stuff. Yeah. So it's another kind of trick than convolutional. Like it does, it's, you know, convolution in neural networks is a trick for efficiency, is efficiency trick. And the brain does a whole nother kind of thing. Correct. So you need to understand the principles or processing so that you can still apply engineering tricks where you want it to. You don't want to be slavishly mimicking all the things of the brain. And so, yeah, so it should be one input. And I think it is extremely helpful, but it should be the point of really understanding so that you know when to deviate from it. So, okay. That's really cool. That's work from a few years ago. You did work in Umenta with Jeff Hawkins with hierarchical temporal memory. How is your just, if you could give a brief history, how is your view of the way the models of the brain changed over the past few years leading up to now? Is there some interesting aspects where there was an adjustment to your understanding of the brain or is it all just building on top of each other? In terms of the higher level ideas, especially the ones Jeff wrote about in the book, if you blur out, right. Yeah. On intelligence. Right. On intelligence. If you blur out the details and if you just zoom out and at the higher level idea, things are, I would say, consistent with what he wrote about. But many things will be consistent with that because it's a blur. Deep learning systems are also multi level, hierarchical, all of those things. But in terms of the detail, a lot of things are different. And those details matter a lot. So one point of difference I had with Jeff was how to approach, how much of biological plausibility and realism do you want in the learning algorithms? So when I was there, this was almost 10 years ago now. It flies when you're having fun. Yeah. I don't know what Jeff thinks now, but 10 years ago, the difference was that I did not want to be so constrained on saying my learning algorithms need to be biologically plausible based on some filter of biological plausibility available at that time. To me, that is a dangerous cut to make because we are discovering more and more things about the brain all the time. New biophysical mechanisms, new channels are being discovered all the time. So I don't want to upfront kill off a learning algorithm just because we don't really understand the full biophysics or whatever of how the brain learns. Exactly. Exactly. Let me ask and I'm sorry to interrupt. What's your sense? What's our best understanding of how the brain learns? So things like backpropagation, credit assignment. So many of these algorithms have, learning algorithms have things in common, right? It is a backpropagation is one way of credit assignment. There is another algorithm called expectation maximization, which is, you know, another weight adjustment algorithm. But is it your sense the brain does something like this? Has to. There is no way around it in the sense of saying that you do have to adjust the connections. So yeah, and you're saying credit assignment, you have to reward the connections that were useful in making a correct prediction and not, yeah, I guess what else, but yeah, it doesn't have to be differentiable. Yeah, it doesn't have to be differentiable. Yeah. But you have to have a, you know, you have a model that you start with, you have data comes in and you have to have a way of adjusting the model such that it better fits the data. So that is all of learning, right? And some of them can be using backprop to do that. Some of it can be using, you know, very local graph changes to do that. That can be, you know, many of these learning algorithms have similar update properties locally in terms of what the neurons need to do locally. I wonder if small differences in learning algorithms can have huge differences in the actual effect. So the dynamics of, I mean, sort of the reverse like spiking, like if credit assignment is like a lightning versus like a rainstorm or something, like whether there's like a looping local type of situation with the credit assignment, whether there is like regularization, like how it injects robustness into the whole thing, like whether it's chemical or electrical or mechanical. Yeah. All those kinds of things. I feel like it, that, yeah, I feel like those differences could be essential, right? It could be. It's just that you don't know enough to, on the learning side, you don't know, you don't know enough to say that is definitely not the way the brain does it. Got it. So you don't want to be stuck to it. So that, yeah. So you've been open minded on that side of things. On the inference side, on the recognition side, I am much more, I'm able to be constrained because it's much easier to do experiments because, you know, it's like, okay, here's the stimulus, you know, how many steps did it get to take the answer? I can trace it back. I can, I can understand the speed of that computation, et cetera. I'm able to do of that computation, et cetera, much more readily on the inference side. Got it. And then you can't do good experiments on the learning side. Correct. So let's go right into the cortical microcircuits right back. So what are these ideas beyond recursive cortical network that you're looking at now? So we have made a, you know, pass through multiple of the steps that, you know, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we were looking at perception from the angle of cognition, right? It was not just perception for perception's sake. How do you, how do you connect it to cognition? How do you learn concepts and how do you learn abstract reasoning? Similar to some of the things Francois talked about, right? So we have taken one pass through it basically saying, what is the basic cognitive architecture that you need to have, which has a perceptual system, which has a system that learns dynamics of the world and then has something like a routine program learning system on top of it to learn concepts. So we have built one, you know, the version point one of that system. This was another science robotics paper. It's the title of that paper was, you know, something like cognitive programs. How do you build cognitive programs? And the application there was on manipulation, robotic manipulation? It was, so think of it like this. Suppose you wanted to tell a new person that you met, you don't know the language that person uses. You want to communicate to that person to achieve some task, right? So I want to say, hey, you need to pick up all the red cups from the kitchen counter and put it here, right? How do you communicate that, right? You can show pictures. You can basically say, look, this is the starting state. The things are here. This is the ending state. And what does the person need to understand from that? The person needs to understand what conceptually happened in those pictures from the input to the output, right? So we are looking at preverbal conceptual understanding. Without language, how do you have a set of concepts that you can manipulate in your head? And from a set of images of input and output, can you infer what is happening in those images? Got it. With concepts that are pre language. Okay. So what's it mean for a concept to be pre language? Like why is language so important here? So I want to make a distinction between concepts that are just learned from text by just feeding brute force text. You can start extracting things like, okay, a cow is likely to be on grass. So those kinds of things, you can extract purely from text. But that's kind of a simple association thing rather than a concept as an abstraction of something that happens in the real world in a grounded way that I can simulate it in my mind and connect it back to the real world. And you think kind of the visual world, concepts in the visual world are somehow lower level than just the language? The lower level kind of makes it feel like, okay, that's unimportant. It's more like, I would say the concepts in the visual and the motor system and the concept learning system, which if you cut off the language part, just what we learn by interacting with the world and abstractions from that, that is a prerequisite for any real language understanding. So you disagree with Chomsky because he says language is at the bottom of everything. No, I disagree with Chomsky completely on how many levels from universal grammar to... So that was a paper in science beyond the recursive cortical network. What other interesting problems are there, the open problems and brain inspired approaches that you're thinking about? I mean, everything is open, right? No problem is solved, solved. I think of perception as kind of the first thing that you have to build, but the last thing that you will be actually solved. Because if you do not build perception system in the right way, you cannot build concept system in the right way. So you have to build a perception system, however wrong that might be, you have to still build that and learn concepts from there and then keep iterating. And finally, perception will get solved fully when perception, cognition, language, all those things work together finally. So great, we've talked a lot about perception, but then maybe on the concept side and like common sense or just general reasoning side, is there some intuition you can draw from the brain about how we can do that? So I have this classic example I give. So suppose I give you a few sentences and then ask you a question following that sentence. This is a natural language processing problem, right? So here it goes. I'm telling you, Sally pounded a nail on the ceiling. Okay, that's a sentence. Now I'm asking you a question. Was the nail horizontal or vertical? Vertical. Okay, how did you answer that? Well, I imagined Sally, it was kind of hard to imagine what the hell she was doing, but I imagined I had a visual of the whole situation. Exactly, exactly. So here, you know, I post a question in natural language. The answer to that question was you got the answer from actually simulating the scene. Now I can go more and more detailed about, okay, was Sally standing on something while doing this? Could she have been standing on a light bulb to do this? I could ask more and more questions about this and I can ask, make you simulate the scene in more and more detail, right? Where is all that knowledge that you're accessing stored? It is not in your language system. It was not just by reading text, you got that knowledge. It is stored from the everyday experiences that you have had from, and by the age of five, you have pretty much all of this, right? And it is stored in your visual system, motor system in a way such that it can be accessed through language. Got it. I mean, right. So the language is just almost sort of the query into the whole visual cortex and that does the whole feedback thing. But I mean, it is all reasoning kind of connected to the perception system in some way. You can do a lot of it. You know, you can still do a lot of it by quick associations without having to go into the depth. And most of the time you will be right, right? You can just do quick associations, but I can easily create tricky situations for you. Where that quick associations is wrong and you have to actually run the simulation. So figuring out how these concepts connect. Do I have a good idea of how to do that? That's exactly one of the problems that we are working on. And the way we are approaching that is basically saying, okay, you need to, so the takeaway is that language, is simulation control and your perceptual plus a motor system is building a simulation of the world. And so that's basically the way we are approaching it. And the first thing that we built was a controllable perceptual system. And we built a schema networks, which was a controllable dynamic system. Then we built a concept learning system that puts all these things together into programs or subtractions that you can run and simulate. And now we are taking the step of connecting it to language. And it will be very simple examples. Initially, it will not be the GPT3 like examples, but it will be grounded simulation based language. And for like the querying would be like question answering kind of thing? Correct. Correct. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build a system kind of thing. Correct. Correct. And it will be in some simple world initially on, you know, but it will be about, okay, can the system connect the language and ground it in the right way and run the right simulations to come up with the answer. And the goal is to try to do things that, for example, GPT3 couldn't do. Correct. Speaking of which, if we could talk about GPT3 a little bit, I think it's an interesting thought provoking set of ideas that OpenAI is pushing forward. I think it's good for us to talk about the limits and the possibilities in the neural network. So in general, what are your thoughts about this recently released very large 175 billion parameter language model? So I haven't directly evaluated it yet. From what I have seen on Twitter and other people evaluating it, it looks very intriguing. I am very intrigued by some of the properties it is displaying. And of course the text generation part of that was already evident in GPT2 that it can generate coherent text over long distances. But of course the weaknesses are also pretty visible in saying that, okay, it is not really carrying a world state around. And sometimes you get sentences like, I went up the hill to reach the valley or the thing like some completely incompatible statements, or when you're traveling from one place to the other, it doesn't take into account the time of travel, things like that. So those things I think will happen less in GPT3 because it is trained on even more data and it can do even more longer distance coherence. But it will still have the fundamental limitations that it doesn't have a world model and it can't run simulations in its head to find whether something is true in the world or not. So it's taking a huge amount of text from the internet and forming a compressed representation. Do you think in that could emerge something that's an approximation of a world model, which essentially could be used for reasoning? I'm not talking about GPT3, I'm talking about GPT4, 5 and GPT10. Yeah, I mean they will look more impressive than GPT3. So if you take that to the extreme then a Markov chain of just first order and if you go to, I'm taking the other extreme, if you read Shannon's book, he has a model of English text which is based on first order Markov chains, second order Markov chains, third order Markov chains and saying that okay, third order Markov chains look better than first order Markov chains. So does that mean a first order Markov chain has a model of the world? Yes, it does. So yes, in that level when you go higher order models or more sophisticated structure in the model like the transformer networks have, yes they have a model of the text world, but that is not a model of the world. It's a model of the text world and it will have interesting properties and it will be useful, but just scaling it up is not going to give us AGI or natural language understanding or meaning. Well the question is whether being forced to compress a very large amount of text forces you to construct things that are very much like, because the ideas of concepts and meaning is a spectrum. Sure, yeah. So in order to form that kind of compression, maybe it will be forced to figure out abstractions which look awfully a lot like the kind of things that we think about as concepts, as world models, as common sense. Is that possible? No, I don't think it is possible because the information is not there. The information is there behind the text, right? No, unless somebody has written down all the details about how everything works in the world to the absurd amounts like, okay, it is easier to walk forward than backward, that you have to open the door to go out of the thing, doctors wear underwear. Unless all these things somebody has written down somewhere or somehow the program found it to be useful for compression from some other text, the information is not there. So that's an argument that text is a lot lower fidelity than the experience of our physical world. Right, correct. Pictures worth a thousand words. Well, in this case, pictures aren't really... So the richest aspect of the physical world isn't even just pictures, it's the interactivity with the world. Exactly, yeah. It's being able to interact. It's almost like... It's almost like if you could interact... Well, maybe I agree with you that pictures worth a thousand words, but a thousand... It's still... Yeah, you could capture it with the GPTX. So I wonder if there's some interactive element where a system could live in text world where it could be part of the chat, be part of talking to people. It's interesting. I mean, fundamentally... So you're making a statement about the limitation of text. Okay, so let's say we have a text corpus that includes basically every experience we could possibly have. I mean, just a very large corpus of text and also interactive components. I guess the question is whether the neural network architecture, these very simple transformers, but if they had like hundreds of trillions or whatever comes after a trillion parameters, whether that could store the information needed, that's architecturally. Do you have thoughts about the limitation on that side of things with neural networks? I mean, so transformers are still a feed forward neural network. It has a very interesting architecture, which is good for text modeling and probably some aspects of video modeling, but it is still a feed forward architecture. You believe in the feedback mechanism, the recursion. Oh, and also causality, being able to do counterfactual reasoning, being able to do interventions, which is actions in the world. So all those things require different kinds of models to be built. I don't think transformers captures that family. It is very good at statistical modeling of text and it will become better and better with more data, bigger models, but that is only going to get so far. So I had this joke on Twitter saying that, hey, this is a model that has read all of quantum mechanics and theory of relativity and we are asking you to do text completion or we are asking you to solve simple puzzles. When you have AGI, that is not what you ask the system to do. We will ask the system to do experiments and come up with hypothesis and revise the hypothesis based on evidence from experiments, all those things. Those are the things that we want the system to do when we have AGI, not solve simple puzzles. Like impressive demos, somebody generating a red button in HTML. Right, which are all useful. There is no dissing the usefulness of it. So by the way, I am playing a little bit of a devil's advocate, so calm down internet. So I am curious almost in which ways will a dumb but large neural network will surprise us. I completely agree with your intuition. It is just that I do not want to dogmatically 100% put all the chips there. We have been surprised so much. Even the current GPT2 and GPT3 are so surprising. The self play mechanisms of AlphaZero are really surprising. The fact that reinforcement learning works at all to me is really surprising. The fact that neural networks work at all is quite surprising given how nonlinear the space is, the fact that it is able to find local minima that are at all reasonable. It is very surprising. I wonder sometimes whether us humans just want for AGI not to be such a dumb thing. Because exactly what you are saying is like the ideas of concepts and be able to reason with those concepts and connect those concepts in hierarchical ways and then to be able to have world models. Just everything we are describing in human language in this poetic way seems to make sense. That is what intelligence and reasoning are like. I wonder if at the core of it, it could be much dumber. Well, finally it is still connections and messages passing over. So in that way it is dumb. So I guess the recursion, the feedback mechanism, that does seem to be a fundamental kind of thing. The idea of concepts. Also memory. Correct. Having an episodic memory. That seems to be an important thing. So how do we get memory? So we have another piece of work which came out recently on how do you form episodic memories and form abstractions from them. And we haven't figured out all the connections of that to the overall cognitive architecture. But what are your ideas about how you could have episodic memory? So at least it is very clear that you need to have two kinds of memory. That is very, very clear. There are things that happen as statistical patterns in the world, but then there is the one timeline of things that happen only once in your life. And this day is not going to happen ever again. And that needs to be stored as just a stream of strings. This is my experience. And then the question is about how do you take that experience and connect it to the statistical part of it? How do you now say that, okay, I experienced this thing. Now I want to be careful about similar situations. So you need to be able to index that similarity using your other giants that is the model of the world that you have learned. Although the situation came from the episode, you need to be able to index the other one. So the episodic memory being implemented as an indexing over the other model that you're building. So the memories remain and they're indexed into the statistical thing that you form. Yeah, statistical causal structural model that you built over time. So it's basically the idea is that the hippocampus is just storing or sequencing a set of pointers that happens over time. And then whenever you want to reconstitute that memory and evaluate the different aspects of it, whether it was good, bad, do I need to encounter the situation again? You need the cortex to reinstantiate, to replay that memory. So how do you find that memory? Like which direction is the important direction? Both directions are again, bidirectional. I mean, I guess how do you retrieve the memory? So this is again, hypothesis. We're making this up. So when you come to a new situation, your cortex is doing inference over in the new situation. And then of course, hippocampus is connected to different parts of the cortex and you have this deja vu situation, right? Okay, I have seen this thing before. And then in the hippocampus, you can have an index of, okay, this is when it happened as a timeline. And then you can use the hippocampus to drive the similar timelines to say now I am, rather than being driven by my current input stimuli, I am going back in time and rewinding my experience from there, putting back into the cortex. And then putting it back into the cortex of course affects what you're going to see next in your current situation. Got it. Yeah. So that's the whole thing, having a world model and then yeah, connecting to the perception. Yeah, it does seem to be that that's what's happening. On the neural network side, it's interesting to think of how we actually do that. Yeah. To have a knowledge base. Yes. It is possible that you can put many of these structures into neural networks and we will find ways of combining properties of neural networks and graphical models. So, I mean, it's already started happening. Graph neural networks are kind of a merge between them. Yeah. And there will be more of that thing. So, but to me it is, the direction is pretty clear, looking at biology and the history of evolutionary history of intelligence, it is pretty clear that, okay, what is needed is more structure in the models and modeling of the world and supporting dynamic inference. Well, let me ask you, there's a guy named Elon Musk, there's a company called Neuralink and there's a general field called brain computer interfaces. Yeah. It's kind of a interface between your two loves. Yes. The brain and the intelligence. So there's like very direct applications of brain computer interfaces for people with different conditions, more in the short term. Yeah. But there's also these sci fi futuristic kinds of ideas of AI systems being able to communicate in a high bandwidth way with the brain, bidirectional. Yeah. What are your thoughts about Neuralink and BCI in general as a possibility? So I think BCI is a cool research area. And in fact, when I got interested in brains initially, when I was enrolled at Stanford and when I got interested in brains, it was through a brain computer interface talk that Krishna Shenoy gave. That's when I even started thinking about the problem. So it is definitely a fascinating research area and the applications are enormous. So there is a science fiction scenario of brains directly communicating. Let's keep that aside for the time being. Even just the intermediate milestones that pursuing, which are very reasonable as far as I can see, being able to control an external limb using direct connections from the brain and being able to write things into the brain. So those are all good steps to take and they have enormous applications. People losing limbs being able to control prosthetics, quadriplegics being able to control something, and therapeutics. I also know about another company working in the space called Paradromics. They're based on a different electrode array, but trying to attack some of the same problems. So I think it's a very... Also surgery? Correct. Surgically implanted electrodes. Yeah. So yeah, I think of it as a very, very promising field, especially when it is helping people overcome some limitations. Now, at some point, of course, it will advance the level of being able to communicate. How hard is that problem do you think? Let's say we magically solve what I think is a really hard problem of doing all of this safely. Yeah. So being able to connect electrodes and not just thousands, but like millions to the brain. I think it's very, very hard because you also do not know what will happen to the brain with that in the sense of how does the brain adapt to something like that? And as we were learning, the brain is quite, in terms of neuroplasticity, is pretty malleable. Correct. So it's going to adjust. Correct. So the machine learning side, the computer side is going to adjust, and then the brain is going to adjust. Exactly. And then what soup does this land us into? The kind of hallucinations you might get from this that might be pretty intense. Just connecting to all of Wikipedia. It's interesting whether we need to be able to figure out the basic protocol of the brain's communication schemes in order to get them to the machine and the brain to talk. Because another possibility is the brain actually just adjust to whatever the heck the computer is doing. Exactly. That's the way I think that I find that to be a more promising way. It's basically saying, okay, attach electrodes to some part of the cortex. Maybe if it is done from birth, the brain will adapt. It says that that part is not damaged. It was not used for anything. These electrodes are attached there. And now you train that part of the brain to do this high bandwidth communication between something else. And if you do it like that, then it is brain adapting to... And of course, your external system is designed so that it is adaptable. Just like we designed computers or mouse, keyboard, all of them to be interacting with humans. So of course, that feedback system is designed to be human compatible, but now it is not trying to record from all of the brain. And now two systems trying to adapt to each other. It's the brain adapting into one way. That's fascinating. The brain is connected to the internet. Just imagine just connecting it to Twitter and just taking that stream of information. Yeah. But again, if we take a step back, I don't know what your intuition is. I feel like that is not as hard of a problem as the doing it safely. There's a huge barrier to surgery because the biological system, it's a mush of like weird stuff. So that the surgery part of it, biology part of it, the longterm repercussions part of it. I don't know what else will... We often find after a long time in biology that, okay, that idea was wrong. So people used to cut off the gland called the thymus or something. And then they found that, oh no, that actually causes cancer. And then there's a subtle like millions of variables involved. But this whole process, the nice thing, just like again with Elon, just like colonizing Mars, seems like a ridiculously difficult idea. But in the process of doing it, we might learn a lot about the biology of the neurobiology of the brain, the neuroscience side of things. It's like, if you want to learn something, do the most difficult version of it and see what you learn. The intermediate steps that they are taking sounded all very reasonable to me. It's great. Well, but like everything with Elon is the timeline seems insanely fast. So that's the only awful question. Well, we've been talking about cognition a little bit. So like reasoning, we haven't mentioned the other C word, which is consciousness. Do you ever think about that one? Is that useful at all in this whole context of what it takes to create an intelligent reasoning being? Or is that completely outside of your, like the engineering perspective of intelligence? It is not outside the realm, but it doesn't on a day to day basis inform what we do, but it's more, so in many ways, the company name is connected to this idea of consciousness. What's the company name? Vicarious. So Vicarious is the company name. And so what does Vicarious mean? At the first level, it is about modeling the world and it is internalizing the external actions. So you interact with the world and learn a lot about the world. And now after having learned a lot about the world, you can run those things in your mind without actually having to act in the world. So you can run things vicariously just in your brain. And similarly, you can experience another person's thoughts by having a model of how that person works and running there, putting yourself in some other person's shoes. So that is being vicarious. Now it's the same modeling apparatus that you're using to model the external world or some other person's thoughts. You can turn it to yourself. If that same modeling thing is applied to your own modeling apparatus, then that is what gives rise to consciousness, I think. Well, that's more like self awareness. There's the hard problem of consciousness, which is when the model feels like something, when this whole process is like you really are in it. You feel like an entity in this world. Not just you know that you're an entity, but it feels like something to be that entity. And thereby, we attribute this. Then it starts to be where something that has consciousness can suffer. You start to have these kinds of things that we can reason about that is much heavier. It seems like there's much greater cost to your decisions. And mortality is tied up into that. The fact that these things end. First of all, I end at some point, and then other things end. That somehow seems to be, at least for us humans, a deep motivator. That idea of motivation in general, we talk about goals in AI, but goals aren't quite the same thing as our mortality. It feels like, first of all, humans don't have a goal, and they just kind of create goals at different levels. They make up goals because we're terrified by the mystery of the thing that gets us all. We make these goals up. We're like a goal generation machine, as opposed to a machine which optimizes the trajectory towards a singular goal. It feels like that's an important part of cognition, that whole mortality thing. Well, it is a part of human cognition, but there is no reason for that mortality to come to the equation for an artificial system, because we can copy the artificial system. The problem with humans is that I can't clone you. Even if I clone you as the hardware, your experience that was stored in your brain, your episodic memory, all those will not be captured in the new clone. But that's not the same with an AI system. But it's also possible that the thing that you mentioned with us humans is actually of fundamental importance for intelligence. The fact that you can copy an AI system means that that AI system is not yet an AGI. If you look at existence proof, if we reason based on existence proof, you could say that it doesn't feel like death is a fundamental property of an intelligent system. But we don't yet. Give me an example of an immortal intelligent being. We don't have those. It's very possible that that is a fundamental property of intelligence, is a thing that has a deadline for itself. Well, you can think of it like this. Suppose you invent a way to freeze people for a long time. It's not dying. So you can be frozen and woken up thousands of years from now. So it's no fear of death. Well, no, it's not about time. It's about the knowledge that it's temporary. And that aspect of it, the finiteness of it, I think creates a kind of urgency. Correct. For us, for humans. Yeah, for humans. Yes. And that is part of our drives. And that's why I'm not too worried about AI having motivations to kill all humans and those kinds of things. Why? Just wait. So why do you need to do that? I've never heard that before. That's a good point. Yeah, just murder seems like a lot of work. Let's just wait it out. They'll probably hurt themselves. Let me ask you, people often kind of wonder, world class researchers such as yourself, what kind of books, technical fiction, philosophical, had an impact on you and your life and maybe ones you could possibly recommend that others read? Maybe if you have three books that pop into mind. Yeah. So I definitely liked Judea Pearl's book, Probabilistic Reasoning and Intelligent Systems. It's a very deep technical book. But what I liked is that, so there are many places where you can learn about probabilistic graphical models from. But throughout this book, Judea Pearl kind of sprinkles his philosophical observations and he thinks about, connects us to how the brain thinks and attentions and resources, all those things. So that whole thing makes it more interesting to read. He emphasizes the importance of causality. So that was in his later book. So this was the first book, Probabilistic Reasoning and Intelligent Systems. He mentions causality, but he hadn't really sunk his teeth into causality. But he really sunk his teeth into, how do you actually formalize it? And the second book, Causality, the one in 2000, that one is really hard. So I would recommend that. Yeah. So that looks at the mathematical, his model of... Do calculus. Do calculus. Yeah. It was pretty dense mathematically. Right. The book of Y is definitely more enjoyable. For sure. Yeah. So I would recommend Probabilistic Reasoning and Intelligent Systems. Another book I liked was one from Doug Hofstadter. This was a long time ago. He had a book, I think it was called The Mind's Eye. It was probably Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett together. Yeah. And I actually was, I bought that book. It's on my show. I haven't read it yet, but I couldn't get an electronic version of it, which is annoying because you read everything on Kindle. So you had to actually purchase the physical. It's one of the only physical books I have because anyway, a lot of people recommended it highly. So yeah. And the third one I would definitely recommend reading is, this is not a technical book. It is history. The name of the book, I think, is Bishop's Boys. It's about Wright brothers and their path and how it was... There are multiple books on this topic and all of them are great. It's fascinating how flight was treated as an unsolvable problem. And also, what aspects did people emphasize? People thought, oh, it is all about just powerful engines. You just need to have powerful lightweight engines. And so some people thought of it as, how far can we just throw the thing? Just throw it. Like a catapult. Yeah. So it's very fascinating. And even after they made the invention, people are not believing it. Ah, the social aspect of it. The social aspect. It's very fascinating. I mean, do you draw any parallels between birds fly? So there's the natural approach to flight and then there's the engineered approach. Do you see the same kind of thing with the brain and our trying to engineer intelligence? Yeah. It's a good analogy to have. Of course, all analogies have their limits. So people in AI often use airplanes as an example of, hey, we didn't learn anything from birds. But the funny thing is that, and the saying is, airplanes don't flap wings. This is what they say. The funny thing and the ironic thing is that you don't need to flap to fly is something Wright brothers found by observing birds. So they have in their notebook, in some of these books, they show their notebook drawings. They make detailed notes about buzzards just soaring over thermals. And they basically say, look, flapping is not the important, propulsion is not the important problem to solve here. We want to solve control. And once you solve control, propulsion will fall into place. All of these are people, they realize this by observing birds. Beautifully put. That's actually brilliant because people do use that analogy a lot. I'm going to have to remember that one. Do you have advice for people interested in artificial intelligence like young folks today? I talk to undergraduate students all the time, interested in neuroscience, interested in understanding how the brain works. Is there advice you would give them about their career, maybe about their life in general? Sure. I think every piece of advice should be taken with a pinch of salt, of course, because each person is different, their motivations are different. But I can definitely say if your goal is to understand the brain from the angle of wanting to build one, then being an experimental neuroscientist might not be the way to go about it. A better way to pursue it might be through computer science, electrical engineering, machine learning, and AI. And of course, you have to study the neuroscience, but that you can do on your own. If you're more attracted by finding something intriguing about, discovering something intriguing about the brain, then of course, it is better to be an experimentalist. So find that motivation, what are you intrigued by? And of course, find your strengths too. Some people are very good experimentalists and they enjoy doing that. And it's interesting to see which department, if you're picking in terms of your education path, whether to go with like, at MIT, it's brain and computer, no, it'd be CS. Yeah. Brain and cognitive sciences, yeah. Or the CS side of things. And actually the brain folks, the neuroscience folks are more and more now embracing of learning TensorFlow and PyTorch, right? They see the power of trying to engineer ideas that they get from the brain into, and then explore how those could be used to create intelligent systems. So that might be the right department actually. Yeah. So this was a question in one of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute workshops that Jeff Hawkins organized almost 10 years ago. This question was put to a panel, right? What should be the undergrad major you should take if you want to understand the brain? And the majority opinion in that one was electrical engineering. Interesting. Because, I mean, I'm a double undergrad, so I got lucky in that way. But I think it does have some of the right ingredients because you learn about circuits. You learn about how you can construct circuits to approach, do functions. You learn about microprocessors. You learn information theory. You learn signal processing. You learn continuous math. So in that way, it's a good step. If you want to go to computer science or neuroscience, it's a good step. The downside, you're more likely to be forced to use MATLAB. You're more likely to be forced to use MATLAB. So one of the interesting things about, I mean, this is changing. The world is changing. But certain departments lagged on the programming side of things, on developing good habits in terms of software engineering. But I think that's more and more changing. And students can take that into their own hands, like learn to program. I feel like everybody should learn to program because it, like everyone in the sciences, because it empowers, it puts the data at your fingertips. So you can organize it. You can find all kinds of things in the data. And then you can also, for the appropriate sciences, build systems that, like based on that. So like then engineer intelligent systems. We already talked about mortality. So we hit a ridiculous point. But let me ask you, one of the things about intelligence is it's goal driven. And you study the brain. So the question is like, what's the goal that the brain is operating under? What's the meaning of it all for us humans in your view? What's the meaning of life? The meaning of life is whatever you construct out of it. It's completely open. It's open. So there's nothing, like you mentioned, you like constraints. So it's wide open. Is there some useful aspect that you think about in terms of like the openness of it and just the basic mechanisms of generating goals in studying cognition in the brain that you think about? Or is it just about, because everything we've talked about kind of the perception system is to understand the environment. That's like to be able to like not die, like not fall over and like be able to, you don't think we need to think about anything bigger than that. Yeah, I think so, because it's basically being able to understand the machinery of the world such that you can pursue whatever goals you want. So the machinery of the world is really ultimately what we should be striving to understand. The rest is just whatever the heck you want to do or whatever fun you have. One who is culturally popular. I think that's beautifully put. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Dilip, I'm so honored that you show up here and waste your time with me. It's been an awesome conversation. Thanks so much for talking today. Oh, thank you so much. This was so much more fun than I expected. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dilip George. And thank you to our sponsors, Babbel, Raycon Earbuds, and Masterclass. Please consider supporting this podcast by going to babbel.com and use code LEX, going to buyraycon.com and signing up at masterclass.com. Click the links, get the discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the Five Stars Napa podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled yes, without the E, just F R I D M A M. And now let me leave you with some words from Marcus Aurelius. You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Dileep George: Brain-Inspired AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #115

The following is a conversation with Sarah Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT known for her work on the search for exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system. She's an author of two books on this fascinating topic, plus in a couple days, August 18th, her new book, a memoir called The Smallest Lights in the Universe, is coming out. I read it and I can recommend it highly, especially if you love space and are a bit of a romantic like me. It's beautifully written. She weaves the stories of the tragedies and the triumphs of her life with the stories of her love for and research on exoplanets, which represent our hope to find life out there in the universe. Quick summary of the ads. Three sponsors, Public Goods, that's a new one, PowerDot, and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Just a quick side note. Let me say that extraterrestrial life, aliens, I think represent our civilization longing to make contact with the unknown, with others like us, or maybe others that are very different from us, entities that might reveal something profound about why we're here. The possibility of this is both exciting and, at least to me, terrifying, which is exactly where we humans do our best work. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and never any ads in the middle that could break the flow of the conversation. I try to make these ad reads interesting if you do listen, but if you like, I give you timestamps so you can skip to the conversation, but still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the special links in the description. That's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Public Goods, the one stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy household products. Their products have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just clean, elegant, and beautiful. It's a style that makes me feel like I'm living in the future. I imagine we'll all be using Public Goods products once we colonize Mars. They got all the basics you need from healthy snacks like almonds to my favorite, the bamboo toothbrush, and other stuff for personal care, home essentials, healthy food, and vitamins and supplements. I take their fish oil, for example, which I recommend highly for everyone. They use a membership model to keep costs low and pass on the savings to us, the people. They plant one tree for every order placed and have planted over 100,000 trees since September 2019. Visit publicgoods.com slash lex or use code lex at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order. This show is sponsored by Power Dot. Get it at powerdot.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout to get 20% off and to support this podcast. It's an Eastim electrical stimulation device that I've been using a lot for muscle recovery, mostly for my shoulders and legs as I've been doing the crazy amounts of body weight reps and 6 miles every other day now after the challenge. Yes, I'm still doing it. They call it the smart muscle stimulator since the app that goes with it is amazing. It has 15 programs for different body parts and guides you through everything you need to do. I take recovery really seriously these days and Power Dot has been a powerful addition to stretching, ice, massage, and sleep and diet. It's used by professional athletes and by slightly insane, but mostly normal people like me. It's portable so you can throw it in a bag and bring it anywhere. Get it at powerdot.com slash lex and use code lex at checkout to get 20% off on top of the 30 day free trial and of course to support this podcast. This show is presented by a sponsor that arguably made this whole podcast even possible. Our first sponsor, the great, the powerful Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. I will forever be grateful to them for sponsoring this podcast. They're awesome people, awesome company, awesome product. Okay, back to the read. When you get it, use code LEX PODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Debits and credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago. Time flies. The US dollar created over 200 years ago and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEX PODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sarah Seeger. When did you first fall in love with the stars? I think I've always loved the stars. One of my first memory is of the moon. I remember watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad who my parents were divorced and he was driving me and my siblings to his house for the weekend and the moon was just following me. Just had no idea why that was. So like looking up at the sky and there's this glowing thing, how do you make sense of the moon at that age? Like age five. There's just no way you can. I think it's one of the great things about being a kid is just that curiosity that all kids have. You know, I was thinking because there's these almost out there ideas of that our earth is flat, floating about on the internet. And it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that the earth is like this ball that's flying through empty space? I mean, it's terrifying. It's awe inspiring. I don't know how to make sense of it. It's hard because we live in our frame of reference here on this planet. It's nearly impossible. None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature of earth. I mean, do you remember when you realized, understood like the physics, like the layout of the solar system? Was it like, did you first have to take physics to really, like high school physics to really take that in? I think it's hard to say. I had this book when I was a child. It was in French. I grew up in Canada, where French is supposedly taught to all of us English speaking Canadians. And it was this book in French was about the solar system, and I just love flipping through it. It's hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we're kids, but it was really great book. What about the stars? When did you first learn about the stars? Like I do have this very incredible distinctive memory. And again, it had to do with my dad. He took us camping. Now, my dad was from the UK, and he was the type who you'd find wearing a tie on weekends. So camping was not in his sphere, his comfort zone. We had a babysitter. Every summer we had a babysitter, and one summer we had Tom. He was barely older than we were. He was 14. My brother was 12. I would have been 11 or 10 maybe. And we went camping because Tom said camping is the thing. We should try it. And I just remember I didn't aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the middle of the night, and I looked up, and wow, so many stars. The dark night sky and all those stars just screaming at me. I just couldn't believe that. Honestly, my first thought was, this is so incredible, mind blowing. Why wouldn't anyone have told me this existed? Can anyone else see this? Have you had an experience like that with anything? Yeah. I've had that. I mean, I don't know if maybe you can tell me if it's the same. I've had that with robots. There's a few robots I've met where I just fell in love with this. Is anyone else seeing this? Is anyone else seeing that here in a robot is our ability to engineer some intelligent beings, intelligent beings that we could love, that could love us, that we can interact with in some rich ways that we haven't yet discovered? Almost like when you get a puppy, instead of a dog, and there's this immediate bond and love, and on top of that, ability to engineer it, I had to just pause and hold myself. I imagine, I don't have kids, I imagine there's a magic to that as well, where it's a totally new experience. It's like, what? Well, yeah, the stars though, unlike kids or the puppy, it's only a good thing. So you felt, you weren't terrified? Like to me, when I look at the stars, it's almost paralyzingly scary how little we know about the universe, how alone we are. I mean, somehow it feels alone. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of perspective, but it feels like, wow, there's billions of them out there and we know nothing about them. And then also immediately to me, somehow mortality comes into it. I mean, how did that make you feel at that time? I think as a child without articulating it, I felt that same way. Just like, wow, this is terrifying. What's out there? Like, what is this? What does it mean about us here? You're a scientist, an exo world class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer. Now I'm a bit of an idiot who likes to ask silly questions. So some questions are a little bit in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical because we know so little and one of the awesome things about your work is you've actually put data and real science behind some of the biggest questions that we're all curious about. But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a little bit speculative. So on that topic, just in your sense, do you think we're alone in the universe, human beings? Do you think there's life out there? Well, Lex, the funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don't even want to answer that. I will answer it though, but I just love to say, yeah, we naturally resist that because we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation. But I do love that question. It's a great question and it's one we all wonder about, but I have to give you the scientist answer first, which is we'll have the capability to answer that question soon, even starting soon. How do you define soon? How do I define soon? So much happened in the last hundred years. Right, right. And there's a difference, right, if it's 10 years or 20 years or a hundred years. Yeah, there's a difference in that. Well, soon could be a decade or two decades. Journalists usually don't like that or the people want like tomorrow, they want the news. But what it's going to take is telescopes, space telescopes, or very sophisticated ground or space telescopes to let us study the atmospheres of other planets far away and to look what's in the atmospheres and to look for water, which is needed for life as we know it, to look for gases that don't belong that we might attribute to life. So we have to do some really nitty gritty astronomy. So the promising way to answer this question scientifically is to look for hints of life. That's where like many of your ideas come in of what kind of hints might we actually see about this life. Right, right. That's exactly what we need to do. And I like the word you chose, hint, because it's going to be a hint. It's not going to be a 100% yay, we found it. And then it will take future generations to do more careful work to hopefully even find a way to send a probe to these distant exoplanets and to really figure this out for us. I mean, we'll talk about the details. Those are fun, but like the back to the speculation, the zoomed out big picture is, yes, I believe absolutely there is life out there somewhere. Because the vastness of the universe is incredible. It's so breathtaking. When we look at the night sky, if you can go to that dark sky, you can see many, many hundred or even if you have good eyesight and you're somewhere very dark, you could see thousands of stars. But in our galaxy, we have hundreds of billions of stars and our universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies. So think about all those stars out there. And even if planets are rare, even if life is rare, just because the number of stars is so huge, things have to come together somewhere, someplace in our universe. Yeah. So amazing to think that somebody might be looking up on another planet in a distant galaxy. I have to interrupt your reverie and get back to, in our lifetime at least, the short term. We only have the nearest stars to look at. It's true that there are so many stars, so many hosts for planets that might have life. But in the practical question of will we find it, it has to be a star quite close to Earth, like a few light years, tens of light years, maybe hundreds of light years. And by the way, you've introduced me to a tool of Eyes on Exoplanets, I think that NASA has put together. Eyes on Exoplanets. It's a great software. You can download it. It's so cool. But anyway, can you give a sense of who our neighbors are? You said hundreds of light years. How many stars are close by? What's our neighborhood like? Are we talking about five, 10 stars that we might actually have a chance to zoom in on? I'm talking about maybe a dozen or two dozen stars. And those with planets that look suitable for us to follow up in detail. For life. Right. But one thing that's really exciting in this field is that the very nearest star to Earth called Proxima Centauri, it's part of the Alpha Centauri star system. Cool name, by the way. Yeah, Proxima. Whoever names them. Nearby. Okay, but it sounds cooler than Proxima. Proxima Centauri appears to have a planet around it. It's about an Earth mass planet in the so called habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone of the host star. So think about how incredible that is. Like out of all the stars out there, even the very nearest star has planets and has a planet of huge interest to us. Yeah. Okay. So can we talk about that planet? What does it mean to be maybe possibly habitable? How does size come into play? How does you know what we know about gases and what kind of things are necessary for life? You know, what are the factors that you make you think that it's habitable? And by the way, I mean, maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the Drake equation, which is a very high level, almost framework to think about what is the probability that, correct me if I'm wrong, that there's life out there and intelligent life, I think. I don't know. But then you have a equation named after you now, which I think nicely focuses in on the more achievable and interesting part of that question, which is on whether there is habitable planets out there or how many, I guess. Right, right. So the funny thing is, was one time I met Frank Drake and I asked if he minded if I took his equation and kind of revamped it for this new field of exoplanet astronomy. He was totally cool with it. He's totally cool. He got total approval. Well, maybe. Okay. So sorry. I'm not sure if he'd actually read the stuff about my equation, but he was cool with it. He was cool. He was cool. Okay. So I just said like 15 different things, but maybe can you tell from your perspective, what is the Drake equation and what is, sorry, the Seager equation? Sure. Well, the Drake equation, as you said, it's a framework. It's a description of the number of civilizations out there of intelligent beings that are able to communicate with us by radio waves. So if you think of the movie Contact, you've seen Contact, right? We're listening in, actually. It's an active field of research, listening to other stars at radio wavelengths, hoping that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message. And the Drake equation came like at the start of that whole field to put the factors down on paper to sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating. And there's no real estimate or prediction of how many civilizations are out there, but it's a way to frame the question and show you each term that's involved. So I took the Drake equation and I called it a revised Drake equation and I recast it for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means. We're looking at stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets that are the right temperature for life, looking for planets that might have life that outputs gases that we might detect in the future. It's the same spirit of the Drake equation. It's not going to give us any magic numbers. So I'm going to say, hey, here's exactly what's out there. It's meant to kind of guide, guide of where we're going. So the Drake equation did, I mean the initial equation proposed actual numbers for those variables, right? Oh yes. The equation proposed numbers and you can still plug your own numbers in. And there's this really cute website that lets you for both the Drake and my revised equation plug in some numbers and see what you got. So yeah. Okay. So what are, I mean, what are the variables, but maybe also what are like the critical variables? So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show signs of life by way of gases in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life. I could just walk through the terms as far as I'm aware. So the first thing I say is what are the number of stars available? And it's not that those trillions and trillions of stars everywhere. It's what are available to like a specific search. And so for example, the MIT led NASA mission TESS is surveying the sky, looking for all kinds of planets, but it can also, it also has stars. It has about 30,000 red dwarf stars. So we just take a number of stars that a given survey can access. So that's what the number of stars is. Then I wanted to know what kind of stars are quiet. I called it fraction of those stars that is quiet. In the case of TESS, the way it's looking for planets is planets that transit the star. They go in front of the star as seen from the telescope, but it turns out that some stars are very active, they're variable and they brighten and dim with time and that interferes with our observation. I apologize to interrupt. So it's a transiting planet. So you're really looking for a black blob, essentially that blocks the light. We're looking for a black blob that blocks the light and then trying to say something about the size of the planet from the frequency of that black blobs appearance and the size of that black blob, that kind of thing. Yeah. But let's just say that out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope, some of them are just bad for whatever reason. You're not going to be able to find planets around them. So I need to know the fraction of those that are, that are good. So again, we have the number of stars, the fraction of them that we can actually find planets around. And by the way, is our sun one such, is our sun quiet? Our sun is quiet. Okay. So I have actually two terms. One describes how quiet they are and one is if we can find a planet around that star. These transiting planets, for example, not all planets transit because the planet would have to be orbiting that star in this kind of plane as viewed from you. But if a star is, for example, orbiting in the plane of the sky, it will never transit. It will never go in front of the star. So in that case, we have to have a fraction that takes into account of that kind of geometric factor. And hopefully, I mean, you can assume that it's uniformly distributed, hopefully. Yes, we can assume and there's evidence that it's uniformly distributed, yes. So then the next, so all of these factors so far, number of stars accessible to whatever telescope you're thinking about, how many stars are quiet, fraction of stars that are quiet, fraction that are observable, in this case for the geometric factor, those are all things we can measure. And there's one more term in the secret equation we can measure. I call it fraction of planets in the habitable zone. Because believe it or not, we have a handle on that for a certain set of stars. We know from our, the Kepler Space Telescope that operated for a number of years, we have estimates for how many planets are in the so called habitable zone of the host star for a certain type of star. So all those we have measurable. And then like the Drake equation itself, there are some terms we can not measure. And those ones, I call them FL, fraction of all those planets that have life on them. Because we don't know what that is. And FS, I called for spectroscopy, the fraction that have, we can use our telescope and instrument tools to look for light. The FS was the ones that, the planets that have life that actually gives off a gas, a useful gas that might accumulate in the atmosphere, so we could eventually observe it. How do the FL and FS interplay? So these are separate terms? Separate terms. And so? So for example, you could imagine, so for example, you could imagine life, like us humans, we breathe out carbon dioxide. And our planet Earth, we already have a lot of carbon dioxide on it. Well, we have hundreds of parts per million, but it has a really strong signal. So us humans breathing out carbon dioxide, it's not helpful for any intelligent beings that are looking back at Earth, because there's already a lot of, there's already enough carbon dioxide, we're not adding to it. So if there is life on a planet, and it's outputting a boring gas that's not helpful for us to uniquely identify as being made by life versus just being there anyway, then it's not helpful. So I separated those two terms out. Soon I think we'll have evidence that planets that can support life at least are common. So okay, this is such an awesome topic, I have a million questions. What okay, I know this is a little bit of speculation, but what's your sense about that, I think FS, which is like, that life would produce interesting gases that would be able to detect, like, is there, one, is there scientific evidence and, and second, is there some intuition around life producing gases with detectable hints in terms of chemistry? So interestingly enough, that entire question relates to, I'm going to say almost my life's work, the work I'm doing now and the work I'm doing for the next 20 years, and I wish I could give you a concrete number, like 1%, like on the worst days, it's 1%, let's say in my mind. You know, in the best days, it's like 80%. And I could actually go into a lot of detail here, but I'll just give you the simplest things. So first of all, we make an assumption that like us, and our life here on Earth, life uses chemistry. So we use chemistry because we eat food, we breathe air, and we have metabolism that to break down food to get energy to store energy, and then ultimately to use it. And all life here has some kind of byproduct in doing all that, some kind of waste product that goes into the atmosphere. So I like to think that life everywhere uses chemistry. Some people have imagined, like, let's imagine like a windmill, like mechanical energy, just getting energy and using it without storing it. And if there was life like that, it might not need to output a gas. So we make this basic assumption of chemistry, that's the first thing. The second more complicated thing that I and my team work on is what happens to the gas once it is produced by life, it goes into the atmosphere. And a lot of gas is just destroyed immediately, actually, by ultraviolet radiation or by oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly destructive to a lot of gases. So the gas can be produced by life, but it could be just completely destroyed by its environment. I guess we should pause on that, that you mentioned your life's work. This is just the beautiful idea that it's kind of paralyzing when you look out there and you wonder, is there a life out there? It's the first paralyzing, actually, before I encountered your work, I feel like an idiot. But you know, it feels like there's no tool to answer that question. And then what you kind of provided is this cool idea that it might be possible to answer that by looking at the gases. I mean, that's a really interesting, that's a beautiful idea. And yeah, so we could just pause on like, that's a powerful tool, I think, to build the intuition around, because I was totally clueless about it. And that was kind of exciting. I mean, I'm sure there's folks probably early on in your life who were very skeptical about this notion. Well, maybe I'm not sure, but generally you would want to be skeptical, it's like, well, all these kinds of other things could generate gases, you know, all those kinds of things. Oh, that's so true. And that's a big part of this growing field is how to make sure that this gas isn't produced by another effect. But I do want to, you know, again, pausing on that and going back a bit. It's incredible to think, but like, at least almost 100 years ago, there's a record of someone talking about the idea of a gas being an indicator of life elsewhere. That idea was floating about somewhere. Yes, it was totally floating about. And it comes down to oxygen, which on our planet fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume. And you know, we rely on oxygen to breathe. You know, when you hear about the people in Mount Everest running out of air, they're really running out of oxygen, well, they're running out of oxygen because the air is getting thinner as they climb up the mountain. But without plants and bacteria, there's bacteria that also photosynthesizes and produces oxygen as a waste product. Without those, we would have virtually no oxygen. Our atmosphere would be devoid of oxygen. So yeah, if you were to analyze Earth, is oxygen the strong indicator here? Oxygen is a huge indicator. And that's what we're hoping, that there is an intelligent civilization not too far from here around a planet orbiting a nearby star with the kind of telescopes we're trying to build. And they're looking back at our sun and they've seen our Earth and they see oxygen. And they probably won't be like 100.0% sure that there's life making it. But if they go through all the possible scenarios, they'll be left with a pretty strong hint that there's life here. Yeah. Okay, but how do you detect that type of gases that are on the planet from a distance? And that's going back to that, that's what people were skeptical about. When I first started working on exoplanets a long time ago, people didn't believe we would ever, ever, ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind. And now dozens of them are studied. There's a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres actually. Wow. But first there was a point where people didn't even know there was exoplanets, right? When was the first exoplanet detected? The first exoplanet around a sun like star anyway was detected in the mid 1990s. That was a big deal. Kind of vaguely remember that. Well, at the time it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial. Because in exoplanets, we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system. And in our solar system, Jupiter, our big massive planet, is really far from our star. And this first exoplanet around a sun like star was incredibly close to its star, so close that people just couldn't believe it was a planet actually. So maybe zoom out, what the heck is an exoplanet? An exoplanet is our name, like is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. Right. Extrasolar, I guess is another. You can call it extrasolar. Okay. Exoplanet is simpler. But I think it's worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars out there in our night sky is a sun. And you know, our sun has planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc. And so for a long time, people have wondered, do those other stars or other suns have planets? And they do. And it appears that nearly every star has a planet, has a planet we call exoplanet. And there are thousands of known exoplanets already. So there's already, yeah, like, there's so many things about space that it's hard to put into one's brain, because it starts filling it with awe. So yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars that we see in the sky aren't just stars, they're like, they're suns. And they very likely, as you're saying, would have planets around them. There's all these planets roaming about in this like, dimly lit darkness, with potentially life. I mean, it's just mind blowing. But maybe can you give a brief, like, history of discovering all the exoplanets? So there's no exoplanets in the 90s. And then there's a lot of exoplanets now. So how did that come about? So many planets. How did it come about? Well, maybe another way to ask is, what is the methodology that was used to discover them? I can say that. But I'd like to just say something else first where, so exoplanets, you know, the line between what is considered completely crazy. And what is considered mainstream research, legit, is constantly shifting. This is awesome. Yeah. So before, when I started on exoplanets, it was still sketchy. Like, it wasn't considered a career, a thing, a place where you should be investing. And right now, now, today, it's so many people are working in this field, a good, I don't know, at least 1000, probably more. I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it's a lot. No, it's a legitimate field of inquiry. Yeah. Legitimate field of inquiry. And what's helped us is everything that's helped everyone else. It's software, it's computers, it's hardware. It's like our phones. You have a fantastic detector in there. Like, they didn't always have that. I don't know if you remember the so called olden days. We didn't have digital cameras. We had film. You take a film camera, you send the film away, and eventually it comes back, and then you see your pictures. And they could all be horrible. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, digital. It just changed everything. Data changed everything. Yeah, and so one thing that really helped exoplanets were detectors that were very sensitive. Because when we're looking for the transiting planets, what we're doing is we're monitoring a star's brightness as a function of time. It's like click, taking a picture of the stars every few seconds or minutes. And we're measuring the brightness of a star, like every frame. And we're looking for a drop in brightness that's characteristic of a planet going in front of the star, and then finishing its so called transit. And to make that measurement, we have to have precise detectors. And the detectors that are making the measurement, can you do it from Earth? Are they floating about in space, like what kind of telescope? So on the ground, people are using telescopes, small telescopes that are almost just like a glorified telephoto lens. And they're looking at big swaths of the sky. And from the ground, people can find giant planets like the size of Jupiter. So it's about 10 to 12 times the size of Earth. We can find big planets, because we can reach about 1% precision. So not sure how technical you want to get. Well, how many pixels are we talking about? You mentioned phones, there's a bunch of megapixels, I think. So for exoplanets, you want to think about it as like a pixel or less than a pixel, we're not getting any information. But to be more technical, our telescope spreads the light out over many pixels, but we're not getting information. We're not tiling the planet with pixels. It's just like a point of light, or in most cases, we don't even see the planet itself, just the planet's effect on the star. But another thing that really helped was computers, because transiting planets are actually quite rare. I mean, they don't all go in front of their star. And so to find transiting planets, we look at a big part of the sky at once, or we look at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even in some cases, millions of stars at one time. And so you're not going to do this by hand, going through a million stars, counting up the brightness. So we have computer software and computer code that does the job for us and counts the brightness and looks for a signal that could be due to a transiting planet. And I just finished a job called Deputy Science Director for the MIT led NASA mission test. And it was my purview to make sure that we got the planet candidates, the transiting light curves, out to the community so people could follow them up and figure out if they're actual planets or false positives. So publish the data so that people could just, all the data scientists out there could crunch and see if they can discover something. They can discover something. And in fact, the NASA policy for this mission is that all the data becomes public as soon as possible. It's not as easy as it sounds, though, to download the data and look for planets. But there is a group called PlanetHunters.org, and they take the data and they actually crowdsource it out to people to look for planets. Yeah. And they often find signals that our computers and our team missed. So we mentioned exoplanets. What about Earth like, or I don't know what the right distinction is, is it habitable or is it Earth like planets, but what are those different categories and how can we tell the difference and detect each? Right, right. So we're not at Earth like planets yet. All the planets we're finding are so different from what we have in our solar system. They're just easier planets to find, but like... In which way? For example, there could be a Jupiter sized planet where an Earth should be. We find planets that are the same size as Earth, but are orbiting way closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun. They're so close that, because close to a star means they also orbit faster. And some of these hot super Earths we call them, their year, their time to go around their star is less than a day. And they're heated so much by their star, they're heated so much by the star. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock. So instead of running out by the bay or the river, you'll have like liquid lava. There'll be liquid lava lakes on these planets, we think. And life can't survive. Way too hot. The molecules needed for life just wouldn't be able to survive those temperatures. We have some other planets. One of the most mysterious things out there, factoid, if you will, is that the most common type of planet we know about so far is a planet that's in between Earth and Neptune size. It's two to three times the size of Earth. And we have no solar system counterpart of that planet. That is like going outside to the forest and finding some kind of creature or animal that just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the most common thing out there. And so we're not even sure what they are. We have a lot of thoughts as to the different types of planet it could be, but people don't really know. I mean, what are your thoughts about what it could be? Well, one thought, and this is more when we want to be rather than might be, is that these so called mini Neptunes, we call them, that they are water worlds, that they could be scaled up versions of Jupiter's icy moons, such that they are planets that are made of more than half of water by mass. And what's the connection between water and life and the possibility of seeing that from a gas perspective? Okay, so all life on Earth needs liquid water. And so there's been this idea in astronomy or astrobiology for a long time called follow the water, find water, that will give you a chance of finding life, but we could still zoom out and the community consensus is that we need some kind of liquid for life to originate and to survive because molecules have to react. You don't have a way that molecules can interact with each other. You can't really make anything. And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in terms of planetary materials. There really aren't that many liquids. Like I mentioned, liquid rock, way too hot for life. We have some really cold liquids, like almost gasoline, like ethane and methane lakes that have been found on one of Saturn's moons, Titan. That's so cold though. And for exoplanets, we can't study really cold planets because they're just simply too dark and too cold. So we usually are just left with looking for planets with liquid water. And to your point, remember as we talked about how planets are less than a pixel in that way to say, so we can't see oceans on planet. We're not going to see continents and oceans, not yet anyway, but we can see gases in the atmosphere. And if it's a small rocky planet, and this is going into some more detail, if we see a small rocky planet with water vapor in the atmosphere, we're pretty sure that means there has to be a liquid water reservoir because it's not intuitive in any way, but water is broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun. And on most planets when water is broken up into H and O, the H, the hydrogen will escape to space. Because just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium filled balloon, it floats upwards and hydrogen is a light gas and will leave from the planet. So ultimately if you have water, unless there's an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation. Got it, so there's a, okay, so there's a need for liquid, I mean, I guess it was water. Is water essential or are the liquids, I mean, the chemistry here is probably super complicated. It does, but you know, there's not an infinite number of liquids. There's maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of a planet. And water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures. And it's also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study is one with water vapor rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes. What's your personal, in terms of solar systems and planets that you're most hopeful about in terms of our closest neighbors that you kind of have a sense that there might be somebody living over there, whether it's bacteria or somebody that looks like us. I'm hopeful that every star nearby has a planet. That has some life. Because it almost has to for us to make progress. We have to have that dream condition. So the dream condition is like life is just super abundant out there. Yeah, the dream, yes, the dream condition is that life is super abundant and it's based on the thought that if there is a planet with water and continents, that it also has the ingredients for life and that the kind of base kernel thought is that if the ingredients for life is there, life will form. Life will form. That's what we're holding on to. With a relatively high probability. Yes, that's it. Okay, let's go into land of speculation. What about intelligent life? Us humans consider ourselves intelligent, surprisingly or unsurprisingly. Do you think about from your perspective of looking at planets from a gas composition perspective and in general of how we might see intelligent life and your intuition about whether that life is even out there? I think the life is out there somewhere. The huge numbers of stars and planets. I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent. I'm not convinced the life is anywhere near here, only because if it's hard for intelligent life to evolve, then it will be far away by definition. Well, the sad thing is maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is it makes me sad there might be intelligent life out there that we're just not like the pathways of evolution can go in all these different directions where we might not be able to communicate with it or even know that or even detect its intelligence or even comprehend its intelligence. I'm convinced cats are more intelligent than humans that we're just not able to comprehend the measures, the proper measures of their intelligence. My dog is so funny. He's a golden doodle. His name's Leo. We joke that he's either a really dumb dog and sorry, he's not here to defend himself, but he's either really dumb or he's a super genius just pretending to be dumb. Yeah. And it's possible he's a multidimensional projection of alien life here monitoring one of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens just to make sure that humans don't get out of hand. That's funny. Oh, I'm definitely going to go in and ask him about that when I get home. She's onto something. Yeah. What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life? From your toolkit, do you think there are things that we might be able to use or maybe in the next couple of decades discover that would be different than life that's like bacteria, that's primitive life? I still love SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I like to hope that if there is a civilization out there, they're trying to send us a message. I think, like, think about it, I don't know. What are your thoughts? Like, if you think about our Earth, there's no structure we've built that intelligent civilizations could see from far away. There's literally nothing, not even the Great Wall of China. And so to think, like, why would this other civilization build a giant structure that we could see? Yeah, so with SETI, the idea is that we're both trying to hear signals and send signals, right? Well, we haven't sent one. They call that METI, messaging. And there's a big kind of fear over METI, because do you want to tell them you're here? It's kind of this, like, let's wait till they call us. Yeah. It's like a dating game, you have to, like, how many days do I wait before I call, kind of thing. Yeah. But the funny thing is, if no one's sending us a message, if everybody's only listening, how do you make progress? That's right. And, I mean, but there's also, there's the Voyager spacecraft that we have these little pixels of robots flying out all over the place. Some of them, like the Voyager, reach out really far. And they have some stuff on them. Okay, I just... We do, we have the Voyager, but they're not really going anywhere in particular. And they're moving very, very slowly on a cosmic scale. Yeah. And me saying they're far is kind of silly. Yeah. It's all relative in astronomy. It's all relative. Yeah. Yeah. I just... So from the, if you look at Earth from an alien perspective, from visually and from gas composition, I wonder if it's possible to determine the degree of maybe productive energy use. I wonder if it's possible to tell, like, how busy these Earthlings are. Well, let's zoom out again and think about oxygen. So when cyanobacteria arose like billions of years ago and figured out how to harness the energy of the sun for photosynthesis, they reengineered the entire atmosphere. 20% of the atmosphere has oxygen now. Like that is a huge scale. You know, they almost poisoned everything else by making this, what was apparently very poisonous to everything that was alive. But imagine... So are we doing anything at that scale? Like, are we changing anything at like 20% of the Earth with a giant structure or 20% of this or 20% of that? Like we aren't actually. Yeah. Yeah. That's humbling to think that we're not actually having that much of an impact. I know. But we are because in a way we're destroying our entire planet. But it's humbling to think that from far away, people probably can't even tell. But from the perspective of the planet, when we say we're destroying, you know, global warming, all that kind of stuff, what we really mean is we're destroying it for a bunch of different species, including humans. But like, I think the Earth will be okay. Oh, the Earth will be, the Earth will remain, whatever happens to us, the Earth will still be here. And it'll still be difficult to detect any difference. Like it's sad to think that if humans destroy ourselves, except potentially with nuclear war, it'd be hard to tell that anything even happened. Yeah. It's hard to tell from far away that anything happened. What about, what are your thoughts now? This is really getting into speculation land. You've mentioned exoplanets were in the realm of, you know, this is beautiful edge between science and science fiction. That some of us, a rare few are brave enough to walk, I think in academia, you were brave enough to do that. I think in some sense, artificial intelligence sometimes walks that line a little bit. There is so much excitement about extraterrestrial life and aliens in this world. I mean, I don't know what, how to comprehend that excitement, but to me, it's great to see people curious because to me, extraterrestrial life and aliens is at the core, a scientific question. And it's almost looks like people are excited about science. They're excited by discovery, discovery, right? And then the possibility that there's alien life that visited earth or is here on earth now is, is a excitement about discovery in your lifetime, essentially. I mean, what do you make, what do you make of that? There's recent events where DARPA or DOD released footage of these unmanned aerial phenomena. They're calling them now UAP. They got everybody like super excited. Like maybe there is like what, what, what's, what's here on earth. Do you follow the, this world of people who are thinking about aliens that are already here or have visited? I don't really follow it. They follow me. Because in this field, if you're a scientist of any kind, you get, people contact us, me. There's a lot of them about, Hey, I have stuff you should see, Hey, the aliens are already here. I need to tell you about it. And I know there are people out there who really believe there's a psychology to it. There's a psychology to it and it's fascinating, but okay. So it's similar to artificial intelligence, but I still, but like you, I'm still enamored with the point that it is out there and that people believe so strongly. And that's so many people out there believe, believe. And I don't know, I I'm not as allergic to it as some scientists are because ultimately if aliens showed up or do show up or have showed up you know, these are going to be very difficult to study scientific phenomena. Like in, in fact, like going back to cats and dogs, like I just, I think we should be more open minded about developing new tools and looking for intelligent life on earth that we haven't yet found. Or even understanding the nature of our own intelligence because it kind of is an alien life form, the thing that's living, you know, in our skull. It's so true. And we don't understand consciousness. Yeah. It's true. We don't understand how biology is hard, you know, unpacking it and working it all out. It's a stretch. And they say too that our thinking mind is like the tip of a pyramid and that everything else is happening under the hood and, but what is happening? But the thing with, so the typical scientist response to, you know, are there aliens here is that we need to see major evidence, not like a sketchy picture of something. We need some cold hard evidence and we just don't have that. That's exactly right. Yeah. But from my perspective, I admire people that dream and I think that's beautiful. The thing I don't like, there's two sides of the, of the folks that probably listened to this, this podcast is, oh, those that dream, I think is beautiful, that, that wander what's out there, what's here on earth. And then the other ones who are very conspiratorial and thinking that stuff is being hidden and it becomes about institutions. Right, right, right. Okay. I got it. I have a funny thing to talk about that. So one of my colleagues had a really good answer to that and it's not me saying this, so I can say this, but he said, look, he works with NASA, not at NASA. He works with government, not in the government. It's kind of mean, but he'd say, trust me, they couldn't hide it if they tried. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, we're not smart enough or good enough. Not we or not me or not you, but whoever to cover it up. It just, it's sort of a myth. Yeah. It makes it sad because the people at NASA, the people at MIT, the people in academia, the people in these institutions and yes, even in government are often trying, they're like just curious descendants of apes. They're just, they, they want to do good. They want to discover stuff. They're not trying to hide stuff. In fact, most of them would, in terms of leaks, would love to discover this and release this kind of stuff. There's a, did you ever watch the show called The X Files? Yeah. Scully and Mulder. Yeah. And what I love actually, I used to put it up during my talks, my public talks. There's a picture of a UFO or what looks like UFO and it says, I want to believe. So that's, that's where I think a lot of us are coming from. I want to believe. And it's so great. And one time I put that up and this very, very nice couple approached me really nervous afterwards and they said, Hey, can we take you out for lunch sometime? And I said, sure. And they were like the nicest people. And just one of many who has an alien, alien abduction story and the woman, um, could never have kids. They were older, but they didn't have kids, which for them was a real source of regret. But it was because the aliens who had abducted her had made it so that she couldn't have kids. And she had apparently something implanted behind her ear, which was somehow unimplanted later. And they're just so sincere and they're such a lovely couple and they just wanted to share their story. That's a, that's a real, whatever that is, that's the real thing. The mystery of the human mind is more powerful than any alien or, I mean, it's as interesting I think as the universe. And I think they're somehow intricately linked, maybe getting a sense of numbers. How many stars are there in, um, maybe, I don't know what the radius that's reasonable to think about. I don't know if the observable universe is like way too big to think about, but in terms of when we think about how many habitable planets there are, what are the numbers we're working with in your sense? What are the scale? Honestly, the numbers are probably like billions of trillions of stars. Yeah. You know, in the UK, I think, I don't know if we do that here, but they will call a billion trillion where you put like one billion followed by a trillion. Yeah. It's kind of weird, but here, I don't even know how to say the number 10 to the 20. Like if you know what that is, that's one followed by 20 zeros. That's a big number. We don't have a name for that number. There's so many per star. I think we kind of mentioned this. Is there a good sense, there's probably argument about this, but per star, how many planets are there? We don't have that number yet per se, you know, we're not really there, but some people think that there's many planets per star. There's this analogy of filling the coffee cup, like, you know, you don't usually just pour one drop, you fill it. And that planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disc of gas and dust and that ultimately forms planets. So the idea, this kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form too many. And eventually some get kicked out and you're left with like a full planetary system, a dynamically full system. And so there have to be a lot because so many form and a bunch survive. I mean, that makes perfect intuitive sense, right? Like why wouldn't that happen? Right. Well, there's other thoughts too, though. These big planets that are really close to the star, we think they formed far away from the star where there's enough material to form and they migrated inwards. And some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction with other planets or with the disc itself, they may have cleared it out. And kicked other planets out of the system. So there's a lot of ideas floating around. We're not entirely sure. And what about Earth like planets? That's another level of uncertainty. It's a level of uncertainty. If we think of an Earth like planet being an Earth around a sun in the same orbit, an Earth like planet being an Earth sized planet in an Earth like orbit about a sun like star, we're not there yet. You know, we're not able to detect enough of those to give you a hard number. Some people have extrapolated. And they will say as many as one in five stars like our sun could be hosting a true Earth like planet. Wow. On the topic of space exploration, there's been a lot of exciting developments with NASA, with SpaceX, with other companies successfully getting rockets into space with humans and getting them to land back, especially with SpaceX. What are your thoughts about Elon Musk and SpaceX, Crew Dragon, while working with NASA to launch astronauts? What's your sense about these exciting new developments? Well, SpaceX and other so called commercial companies are only good news for my field, because they're lowering the cost of getting to space by having reusable rockets. It's just been it's incredible. And we need cheaper access to space. So from a very practical viewpoint, it's all good. Without getting people, there's this dream that we have to go to Mars, boots on Mars. Boots on Mars. What do you think about that? You mentioned probes. What's the value of humans? Is that interesting to you from both scientific and a human perspective? Human mostly. I think it's such in our desire to explore because part of what it means to be human. So wanting to go to another planet and be able to live there for some time. It's just just what it means to be human. You know, oftentimes in science and engineering, big, huge discoveries are made when we didn't intend to. So often this kind of pure exploratory type of research or this pure exploration research, it can lead to something really important like the laser, we couldn't really live without that now. At the grocery, you scan your foods, there's surgery that involves lasers, GPS, we all use our GPS. We don't have GPS because someone thought, hey, it'd be great to have a navigation system. And so I do support, I do, I just, but I really think it comes primarily just from the desire to explore. Do you think something, there's a lot of criticism and a lot of excitement about Mars. Do you think there's value in trying to go to put humans on Mars, first of all, and second of all, colonize Mars? Do you think there's something interesting that might come from there? I'm convinced there will be something interesting. I just don't know what it is yet, but I don't think, I don't think having some commercial value or value in the metric of something useful is really what's motivating us. So really, you see, exploration is a long term investment into something awesome that eventually will be commercial value. I do actually. Yeah. I do. So what about visiting, okay, I apologize, but Amy, there's an exciting longing to visit Earth like planets elsewhere. So what's the closest Earth like planet you think is worth visiting and how hard is it? Wow, it is very hard. I mean, our nearest, call it Earth mass planet, it's orbiting a star very different from our own sun, an M Dwarf star, a small red star, Proxima Centauri. It's over four light years away and we can't travel at the speed of light. We can't even travel, I mean, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with conventional methods. So, you know, the movies like multigenerational, yeah, this movie Passenger, have you seen that movie? Passenger. No. It's about a big spaceship that is traveling to another planet and everyone's hibernating. I won't give you the spoiler alert because one person wakes up and then it's kind of a problem. Okay, got it. But yeah, the multigenerational ships, I mean, when you think about where we're headed as a species, maybe we don't send people, maybe we end up sending raw biological materials and instructions to print out humans, it sounds kind of farfetched, but already we're printing like liver cells in the lab and beating heart cells, we're starting to reconstruct body parts. I mean, the thing is, it is so hard to get to another planet that this thought of printing humans or printing life forms actually could be easier. Yeah, that's somehow so sad to think, to think of the idea that we would launch a successful spaceship that has multigenerational, like non human life and it's going to reach other intelligent life and by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization will be extinct. Wow. Yeah, that is really, I mean, that's, so that's one, there's a, there's a tempting thing to think about. What are the possible trajectories? So, you know, Elon keeps talking about multi planetary, us becoming multi planetary species. I mean, sure, Mars is a part of that, but like the dream is to really expand outside the solar system. And it's, it's not clear, just like, as you said, like what the actual scientific engineering steps that are required to take, it seems like so daunting, so daunting. So like this, the smart thing seems to be to do the most achievable near daunting task, even if there doesn't seem to be a commercial application, which I think is colonizing Mars. But like from your perspective, is there some Manhattan project style, huge project in space that we might want to take on and you've had roles. You had scientists hat roles and then you also had roles in terms of being on like committees and stuff, determining where funding goes and so on. So like, is there a huge like multi trillion, we've been throwing the T word around recently a lot, but these huge projects that we might want to take on? Well, first of all, we want to find the planets like earth first, like just even finding those earth like planets is a billion dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor. And that's so hard because an earth is so small, so less massive, and so faint compared to our sun. It's the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse. And we need very sophisticated space based telescopes to be able to find these planets and to look, look at them and see which ones have water and which ones have signs of life on them. Yeah, the, the star shade project that you're part of, star shade, star shade, yeah, this is probably the most badass thing I've ever seen. Right. You know what's interesting? Can you describe what it is? So what's amazing about star shade is it was first conceived of in the 1960s. Imagine that and revisited every decade until now when we think we can actually build it and star shade is a giant specially shaped screen. It is about, there's different versions of it, but think about 30 meters in diameter. So you're blocking out the sun. You're effectively blocking out the star so that you can see the planet directly and star shade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from Earth's gravity and it would have to formation fly with a space telescope. So the idea is that star shade blocks out the starlight in a very careful way and it has to block that starlight out so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than the star, that only the planet light goes to the telescope. Yeah. So in formation, meaning the telescope flies in, you gave a presentation on this, but like it, it would fly like in, um, this is extremely high precision endeavor. Yeah. We had this analogy like asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away perfectly. Like at the perfect line of sight with you. And the shape of it is pretty cool. I mean, uh, I don't know exactly what the physics of that, like what the optics are that require that shape. I can tell you, it turns out that if you block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with a circle circularly or a square shaped screen, you wouldn't actually be blocking it because the star acts like a wave. The starlight can act like a wave and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen. And so instead of blocking out the light, you're expecting to see nothing. You would see ripples and the analogy that I love to give, it's like throwing a pebble in a pond. You know, you get those ripples, you get these concentric ripples and they go out and light would do something quite similar. You'd actually see ripples of light and those ripples of light, they're actually way brighter than the planet we'd be looking for. So they would introduce this noise that's a noise. And so the star shade, it's like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction it's called. And this is what the first person who thought about star shape in the 1960s worked out the mathematical shape or one salute, one family of solutions. And the idea is that when the star shade, this very special shape, like a giant flower with petals, when it blocks out the light, the light bends around the edges, but interacts with itself in a way to give you a very, very dark image. It would be like throwing a pebble in a pond and instead of getting ripples, the pond would be perfectly smooth, like incredibly smooth to one part in 10 billion. And all the waves would be on the outer edges, far away from where you drop that pebble. And so this camera would be able to get some signal from the planet then. Yes, and it would be hard because the planet is so faint. But with the star out of the way, the glare of that bright, bright, bright star, with that out of the way, then it becomes a much more manageable task. So how do we get that thing out there? We're working with unlimited money. Okay, we're working with unlimited money. We have some more engineering problems to solve, but not too many more. We've been burning down our so called tall pole list. What kind of list? We call it technology tall pole. It's the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest problems and then break those down to solve. So the star shade, one of the really hard problems was how to formation fly at tens of thousands of kilometers. It's like, wow, that is insane. And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem because of the star shade. How do you see the star shade precisely enough to control it? Because if you're shining a flashlight, you know the beam spreads out. So the star shade has a beacon, an LED or a laser, it's going to spread out so much by the time it gets to the telescope. The problem wasn't how do you tell the star shade how to move around fast enough to stay in a straight line. The problem was how are you able to sense it well enough? So problems like that were broken down and money that came from NASA to solve problems is put towards solving it. So we've got through most of the hard problems right now. Another one was that star shade, even though it's looking at a star, light from our own sun could hit the edges of the star shade and bounce off into the telescope, believe it or not. And that would actually ruin it because we're trying to see this tiny, tiny signal. So then the question is how do you make a razor thin edge? Those pedal edges would have to be like a razor. What materials can you use? So there's a series of problems like that. Wow. So there's a materials problem in there? Some of them. Mm hmm. Wow. And there's one. So we almost finished solving all those problems and then it's just a matter of building one and testing it in a full scale size facility and then building the telescope. It's just a matter of time to build everything and get it, get it up for launch. So this is an engineering close engineering project. It's a real engineering project. I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine. I like to call, call star shade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream without line is constantly shifting. When I started, when I got this leadership role on star shade, I remember telling people about it and it was definitely not on the mainstream okay line. It was on the giggle factor side of the line and people would just laugh like that's dead. Like you can never formation fly or they'd say, why are you working on that? That's just so not, it's not so awesome. There's a, there's a few things you've done in your life and that's when I first saw star shade, I was like, what, really? And then like it sinks in. I mean, it's the same thing I felt with like Elon Musk or certain people who do crazy stuff and like, and then, and they get, they actually make it work. I mean, if you get star shade information flying to like together, I mean, how awesome is that if you actually make that happen, even like from a robot, I'm sorry, from the robotics perspective, even if it doesn't give us good data, that's just like a cool thing to get out there. I mean, it's really exciting. Really cool. So there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them. One of them, let's just talk about it briefly because it's not a probe, but it's the idea to send a telescope very far away to 500 times the earth sun distance. And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now. And to use our sun as a gravitational lens, to use our sun to magnify something that's behind it. It's got to sink in for a minute. Exactly. But I mean, I don't know what the physics of that is, like how to use the sun. In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially, we can use a massive objects, bend space. And so light that should be traveling like straight, it actually travels around the warped space. And somehow you figure out a way to use that for magnification. You have a way to use that for magnification. That's right. There are galaxies that are lensed, so called gravitational lens by intervening galaxy clusters actually. And there are microlensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens star passes in between us and that very distant star. It's actually a real tool in astronomy. Yeah, using gravitational lensing to magnify because it bends more rays towards you than normally you'd normally see. And again, we're trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boiled down to light. Well, it boils down to light. And then you can maybe get more information about. Well, in this case, you would ask me, let's say, if this thing could get built, it would take like something like they like to say 25 years to get from here to there, 25 years and then it could send some information back to us. And then you'd say, so Sarah, how many pixels? And I wouldn't say one or less than one. I'd say, you know, it could be like 10 by 10 pixels, it could be 100 pixels, which would be awesome. I mean, that's still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that. Crazy, right. And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons, because again, you have to line up the sun and your target. You'd only have one telescope per target, because every star is behind the sun in a different way. So it's a lot of complicated things. What about the second? The second one, it's called star shot. You know, star shot means like big dreams and it's an initiative by the Breakthrough Foundation. And star shot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft, which they now call star chip. So instead of star ship, it's star chip. And there's a little chip and the star chip, so like sending like thousands of little turtles being born, they're not all going to make it. The idea is to send lots of them, and each of these star chips, once they're launched into, I guess, low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in diameter. And the idea is that on Earth, we would have a bank of, this one is still a bit on the other side of the line, but we'd have a bank of telescopes with lasers that would be like a gigawatt power and these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate, they'd hit these sails. They'd be like a power source for the sail and would accelerate the sails to travel at about a 20th the speed of light. Is that as crazy as it sounds? Well, like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts. And the Breakthrough Initiative, like to their huge credit, is sponsoring, you know, getting over these, actually, they've listed initially, they listed 19 challenges, so it's broken down to concrete things. Like one of them is, well, you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay with you sending up that much power overhead. Another one is you have to have material on the sail where the lasers won't just vaporize it. So there's a lot of issues, but anyway, these sails would be accelerated to 20th the speed of light and their journey to the nearest star would no longer be tens of thousands of years, but could be 20 years, okay, 20, so it's not as bad as tens of thousands. And these thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system and snap some images and radio the information back to Earth because they're traveling so fast they can't slow down, but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back. Hi, Rez. See, just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real concept and the money given won't make it happen, but what it's done is it's planted the seed and it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project. It's shifted it just ever so slightly enough, I think, to plant the seed that we have to find a way to somehow find a way to get there. That is, again, to stay on that, that is so powerful. Make a big, crazy idea and break it down into smaller, crazy ideas, order it in a list, and knock it out one at a time. I don't know, I've never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering perspective because that's how you solve the impossible things. So you open your new book discussing Rogue Planet, PSO, J318, I never said this out loud, PSO 1.522, so a Rogue Planet, which is just this poetic, beautiful vision of a planet that, as you write, lurches across the galaxy like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual darkness, its surface swept by constant storms, its black skies raining molten iron. Just like the vision of that, the scary, the darkness, just how not pleasant it is for human life, just the intensity of that metaphor, I don't know. And the reason you use that is to paint in a feeling of loneliness, I think, and despair. And why, maybe on the planet side, why does it feel, maybe it's just me, why does it feel so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet? Like what... I think it's because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family, or a part of a community, or a part of something. And so, our solar system, and by the way, I only, it's sort of like when you treat yourself to like eating an entire tub of ice cream, like I sometimes treat myself to imagine things like this and not just be so cut and dried. But when you imagine that, this planet's not part, because I don't want to give emotions to a planet per se, but the planet's not part of anything. It's somehow, it's just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm energy from its sun, it's just all alone out there. To me, it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good being part of this solar system. It felt like we have a sun, we have like a little family, and it felt like it sucked for the rogue planet to just floating about, not floating, flying rudderless. By the way, how many rogue planets are there in your sense? We don't know totally. I mean, there's some rogue planets that are just born on their own. I know that sounds really weird to be, how can you be born an orphan? But they just are, because most planets are born out of a disc of gas and dust around a star. But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars. They're so failed, they're just small planets on their own. But we think that there's probably, honestly, there's another path to a rogue planet. That's one that's been kicked out of its star system by other planets, like a game of billiard balls. It just gets kicked out. We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets as stars. No flying out there, fundamentally alone. So the book is a memoir, is about your life, and it weaves both your fascination with planets outside the solar system and the path of your life, and you lost your husband, which is a kind of central part of the book that created a feeling of the rogue planet. By the way, what's the name of the book? The name of the book is The Smallest Lights in the Universe. What's up with the title? What's the meaning? The title has a double meaning. On the face of it, it's the search for other Earths. Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them. Searching for the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe. It has this other meaning, too. I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you've fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair. And once in a while, you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope. And those are also the smallest lights in the universe. Well, maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer of hope. What did it feel like to first find out that your husband, Mike, was sick? It was incredibly frustrating. Like, lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore. Just that they kept blowing him off. It's nothing. Are they paid to just say it's nothing? I mean, it's just insane. I was just so angry. And we finally got to a point where he was really sick. He was like in bed, not able to move, basically. And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests, he had like a 100% blockage in his intestine. Like 100%. Like nothing could get out, nothing could get in. And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could be nothing. What was the progression of it in the context of the maybe the medical system, the doctors? I mean, what did it feel like? Did you feel like a human being? I felt like a child. Like the doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like we couldn't know the truth or they didn't know. You know, I felt mixed like, it's not a good situation if you think the doctor either has no idea what he or she is doing, or if the doctors purposely, let's just say lying to you to sugarcoat it. Like, I didn't know which one of it was, but I knew it was one of those. What were the things he was suffering from? Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache. I hate to say that out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomach ache. But so he just had a bad stomach ache and then, hmm, this is weird. A few days later, another bad stomach ache, kind of gets worse. Might go away for a few weeks, might come back. And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing. Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains and he ended up having the worst diagnosis. One of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random stomach ache is pancreatic cancer because the time, the pancreas, like you can't feel anything, so by the time you feel pain, it's too late. It's spread already. So I was just like, beside myself, I'm like, this is like, wow, this guy, he's got a random stomach ache. All I know is another man I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn't end well. How did you deal with it emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, as a scientist? What was that like, that whole, because it's not immediate. It's a long journey. It's a long journey and you don't know where the diagnosis is going. So anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's like always branches in the road. So he had this intestinal blockage. I can't imagine someone in their 40s having that and that be normal. But the doctor is like, it could be nothing, could just cut it out. You don't need most of your intestine, it's a repeating pattern. Just cut that out, it could be fine. But it ended up not being fine and he was diagnosed as being terminally ill. Well, it really changed my life in a huge way. First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened, I started asking everyone I knew. I would ask you, I don't know if it's smart of my job to put you on the spot, I'd say, you have one year to live or two or three, what will you do differently about your life now? Lex, you have one year to live, what would you do? I mean, it's hard. I don't know if you want to answer that. No, no, no. I think about it a lot. I mean, that's a really good thing to meditate on. We can talk about maybe why you bring that up, if it is or not a heavy question. But I get, I think about mortality a lot and for me, it feels like a really good way to focus in on is what you're doing today, the people you have around you, the family you have, does it bring you joy? Does it bring you fulfillment? And basically, for me, long ago, try to be ready to die any day. So like today, I kind of woke up, look, if I was nervous about talking to you, I really admire your work and the book is very good and it's super exciting topic. But then, you know, there's this also feeling like, if this is the last conversation I have in my life, you know, if I die today, will this be, will this be the right, like am I glad today happened and it is, and I am glad today happened. So that's the way. And that's so unique. I never got that answer from a single person. The busyness of life, there's goals, there's dreams, there's like planning, plans. Very few people make it happen. That's what I learned. And so a lot of these people. Oh, like you run out of time. It's not so much you run out of time, but I'd come back later and be like, okay, why don't you do that? And if that's what you would do, if you're going to die a year from now, why don't you, why don't you make it real? Simple things. Spend more time with family. Yeah. Like why, why don't you do that? And that's what I had an answer, it turns out, unless you usually, unless you have, you really do have a pressing end of life, people don't do their bucket lists or try to change their career. And some people can't. So we can't, like for a lot of people, they can't do anything about it. And that's, that's fine. But the ones who can take action for some reason, never do. And that was one of the ways that Mike's death or at the time his impending death really, really affected me. Cause you know, for these sick people, what I learned, he had a bucket list and he was able to do some of the bucket lists. It was awesome. But he got sick pretty quickly. So if you do only have a year to live, it's ironic cause you can't do, you can't do the things you wanted to do because you get too sick too fast. What were the bucket list things for you that you realized like, what am I doing with my life? That was the major concept of him. After he died, I didn't know. Like I, I was just lost because when something that profound happens, all the things I was doing, most of the things I was doing were just meaningless. It was so tough to, to find an answer for that. And that's when I settled on, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find another earth and to find out, to find that we're not alone. What is that longing for connection with others? What's that about? What do you think? Why is that so full of meaning? I don't know why. I mean, I think it's how we're hardwired. Like one of my friends some time ago, actually when my dad died, he never heard someone say this before, but he's like, Sarah, you know, why are we evolved to take death so harshly? Like what kind of society would we be if we just didn't care people died? That would be a very different type of world. How would we as a species have got to where we are? So I think that is tied hand in hand with why do we, why do we seek connection? It's just that what we were talking about before, that subconsciousness that we don't understand. Yeah. A couple, you know, the other side, the flip side of the coin of connection and love is a fear of loss. It's like that was, again, I don't know, that's what makes you appreciate the moment is that the thing ends. Yeah. It's definitely a hard one. The thing ends, but, and it's hard to not, you wouldn't want to limit. Like it's like my dog who I love so much, I'll start to cry. Like I can't think about the end. I know he'll age much faster than I will. And someday it will end. Right. But it's too sad to think of, but should I not have got a dog? Right. Should I have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won't be forever. It's well, there's a, there's a philosopher and his Becker who wrote a book, Denial of Death and just, and warm with the cores. And there's another book talks about terror management theory, Sheldon Solomon. I just talked to him a few weeks ago. It's a brilliant philosopher, psychologist that their theory, whatever you make of it is that the fear of death is at the core of everything, everything we do. So like you're that you think you don't think about the mortality of your dog, but you do. And that's what makes the experience rich. Like there's this kind of like in the shadows lurks the, the knowledge that this won't last forever. And that makes every moment just special in some kind of a weird way that the moments are special for us humans. I mean, sorry to use romantic terms like love, but what do you make, what did you learn about love from, from losing it, from losing your husband? Well I learned to love the things I have more. I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things bother me as much. What about the rediscovery or like the discovery of the little lights in the darkness? So you, the book, I think you've brilliantly described the dark parts of your journey. But maybe can you talk about how you were able to rediscover the lights? They came in many ways. And the way like to think about it is like grief is an ocean, you know, with tiny islands of the little, like, like the little lights. And eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands like become continents with lakes. So initially it'd be like the children laughing one day or my colleagues at work who rallied around me and would take me away from my darkness to work on a project. Later on it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with children in my town. And it would be, even though it was a bit morose getting together, still very joyful at the same time. What was the journey of rediscovering love like for you? So refinding, I mean, is there some, by way of advice or insight about how to, how to rediscover the beauty of life? Of life. It's a hard one. I think you just have to stay open to being positive and just to get out there. Do you still think, do you still think about your own mortality? So you mentioned that that was a thing that you meditate on as a question when it was right there in front of you. But do you still think about it? I think I will after talking to you. But no, it's not really something I think about. I mean, I do think about the search for another earth and will, will I get there? Will I be able to conclude my search and is there one? Like as time goes by, you know, that window to solve that problem gets smaller. What would bring you, again, I apologize if this makes concrete the fact that life is finite, but what, what would bring you joy if we discovered while you're still here? What would bring me joy? Finding another earth, an earth like planet around a sun like star, knowing that there's at least one or more out there, being able to see water, that it has signs of water and being able to see some gases that don't belong. So I know that the search will continue after I'm gone enough to fuel the next generation. So just like opening the door and there's like this glimmer of hope. What do you think it will take to realize that? I mean, we've talked about all these interesting projects, star shade, especially, but is there something that you're particularly kind of hopeful about in the next 10, 20 years that might give us that, that exact glimmer of hope that there's earth like planets out there? I have to, I stand behind star shade in all cases, so, but there is this other kind of field that I, that everyone is involved in because star shade is hard. Earths are hard, but there are, there's another category of planet star type that's easier. And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars. They're not earth like at all. Think like earth cousin instead of earth twin, but there's a chance that we might establish that some of those have water and signs of life on them. It's nearer term than star shade and we're all working hard on that too. Let me ask by way of recommendations, I think a lot of people are curious about this kind of stuff. What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical or anything really had an impact on your life and, and or you would recommend besides of course your book. There's one book I wish everyone could read. I'm not sure if you've read it. It's actually a children's book, like a young adult book. It's called the giver. Yes. And it is the book that kids in school read now. And I only, sorry, that's not, that's wow. Sorry, that, that caught me off guard. So when I first came to this country, I didn't speak much. It's really what made me, it had a profound impact on my life and a really important moment because they give it to kids. Like I think middle school, I think, or maybe elementary, something like that. I'm so surprised you've even heard of this book. Yeah. So they give it, but like it's the value of giving the right book to a person at the right time. Wow. I was, I was, cause it's very accessible. Do we want to share what the story is without spoiling it? Oh yeah, you can without spoiling, right? It follows this boy in this very utopic society. That's like perfect. It's been all clean cut and made perfect actually. And as he kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something's wrong with his world. And so it's part of that question. Are we going to evolve as, I mean, this isn't what's there, but it made me wonder, you know, are we evolving to a better place? Is there a day when we can eliminate, you know, poverty and hunger and crime and sickness in this book, they pretty much have in a society that the boys in and sort of follows him. And he becomes a chosen one to be like a receiver. The givers, the old wise man who retains some of the harshness of the outside world so that he can advise the people as a sort of boy comes of age and is chosen for the special role. He finds the world isn't what he expects. And I don't know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of reality. It's like, Oh my God, what am I doing here? I'm just going with the flow with my society. How do I think outside the box and the confines of my society, which surely carries negative things with it that we don't realize today. Yeah, and also in the flip side of that is if you do take a step outside the box on occasion, what's the psychological burden of that? Like is that, is that a step you want to take? Is that the journey you want to take? What is that life like? I don't know. I felt like from the book, you have to take it. I found from the book, I never thought like now that you're saying it, I see what you're saying. The burden is huge, but I always felt like the answer is yes, you absolutely want to know what's outside. But you can't do that if you're very, it's hard to be objective about your own reality. Yeah. I mean, it's a very human instinct, but, uh, it also, the book kind of shows that, uh, it has an effect on you and this, it's a really interesting question about our society and taking a step out. It's by, uh, Lois Lowry, I think is how you pronounce it. I really do hope everyone created it and it is a young adult book, but it's still, it's incredibly, I'm really glad I only read it cause my kids got it for school. I just thought, okay, well, why don't I just see what this is about? And I just, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also the value of education. I think I'm surprised you mentioned, I've never really mentioned to anybody. I'm sure a lot of people had the similar experience like me and maybe it's a generational thing though, because like the book came out, I think in the nineties. So if you're older than like me, that book didn't exist when we were in middle school. So I just do think a lot of people won't have heard of it, but it's an interesting question of like those books. I mean, I'm reminded often, I suppose the same is true with other subjects, but books are special at the early age, like middle school, maybe early high school, those can change like the direction of your life. And also certainly teachers, they can change completely the direction of your life. There's so many stories about teachers of mathematics, teachers of physics, of any kind of subjects basically changing the direction of a human's life. That's like not to get on the whole, almost like a political thing, but you know, we, we undervalue teachers. It's a special, it's a special position that they hold. That's so true. Yeah. Well, I do have two other books or two other things. One is something I came across just a few days ago, actually. It's actually a film called Picture a Scientist. And when you picture a scientist, you probably don't picture the women and women of color in this film. And it is a way to get outside your box. I really think everyone interested in science, even just peripherally should watch this because it is shocking and sobering at the same time. And it talks about how, well, I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really are like, I don't know if we're hardwired to just like people like ourselves, but we're excluding a lot of people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think outside of how we're all stereotyping each other. So it's, it's, it's hard to kind of convey that and you can just say, oh yeah, I want to be more diverse. I want to be more open, but it's a nearly impossible problem to solve and the movie really helps open people's eyes to it. This book I put third because unlike The Giver, people may not want to read it. It's not as relevant. But when I was in my early twenties, I went to this big, this like 800 people large conference run by the Wilderness Canoe Association in my hometown of Toronto. And there was a family friend there who I met and he said, read this book, it'll change your life. And it actually changed my life. And it was a book called Sleeping Island by an author, PG Downs, who just coincidentally lived in this area, lived in the Boston area and he was a teacher, I think at a private school and every summer he would go to Canada with a canoe often by himself. And he wrote this book maybe in the forties or fifties about a trip he took in the late 1930s. And it was, I was just shocked that even at that time, although that was a long time ago, there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by white people. And he went up there and interacted like with the natives. He called the book and had a subtitle that was called, there's something like Journey in the Barren Lands. And when you go up North in Canada, you pass the tree line, just like on a mountain, if you hike up a mountain, you get so far North there aren't any trees. And he wrote eloquently about the land and about being out there. There weren't even any maps of the region, like in that time. And I just thought to myself, wow, like that you could just take the summer off and explore by canoe and go and see what's out there. And it led to me just doing that, that very thing. Of course it's different now, but going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe in the water and just, well, we had to have a plan. We didn't just explore, but go down this river, rivers with rapids and travel over lakes and portages and just really live. So just really explore, screw it. That doesn't like, it doesn't explore just use from a topo map, from a topographical map from the library. There were scary elements about it, out of it, but part of the excitement or the joy or the desire was to be scared, like it was to go out there and have live on the edge. And persevere. Yeah. And persevere. Yeah. Do you have a advice that you would give to a young person today that would like to help you maybe on the planetary science side, discover exoplanets or maybe bigger picture, just succeed in life? I do have some advice just to succeed. It's tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you're also very good at. And in some ways the stars have to align because you've got to find that thing you're good at or the range of things, and it actually has to overlap with something that actually you love doing every day. So it's not a tedious job. That's the best way to succeed. What were the signals that in your own life were there to make you realize you're good at something? What were you good at that made you pursue a PhD and it made you pursue the search? I mean, that was the one sentence version. In my case, it was a long slog and there were a lot of things I wasn't good at initially. But so initially, I was good at high school math. I was good at high school science. I loved astronomy and I realized those could all fit together. Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job, it has to be one of my top days of my life. I didn't know that you could be that for a job and I was good at all those things. And although my dad wanted me to do something more practical where he could be guaranteed I could support myself was another option, but initially I wasn't that good at physics. It was a slog to just get through school and grad school is a very, very long time. And ultimately, when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing, knowing that I was good at something and also loved it, it really carried me through. Now, I asked some of the smartest people in the world the most ridiculous question. We already talked about it a little bit, but let me ask again, why are we here? I think you've raised this question in one of your presentations as like one of the things that we kind of as humans long to answer and the search for exoplanets is kind of part of that. But what do you think is the meaning of it all, of life? I wish I had a good answer for you. I think you're the first person ever who refused to answer the question. It's not so much refusing, I just, yeah, I mean, I wish I had a better answer. It's why we're here. It's almost like the meaning is wishing there was a meaning, wishing we knew. I love that. That's a great way to say it. Sarah, like I said, the book is excellent. I admired your work from afar for a while and I think you're one of the great stars at MIT. It makes me proud to be part of the community. So thank you so much for your work. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Thanks for talking today. Thank you so much, Lynx. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Seager. And thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, Power Dot, and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled I'm not sure how. Just keep typing stuff in until you get to the guy with the tie and the thumbnail. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #116

The following is a conversation with Sheldon Solomon, a social psychologist, a philosopher, co developer of terror management theory, and co author of The Warm at the Core on the role of death in life. He further carried the ideas of Ernest Becker that can crudely summarize as the idea that our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the creations of human civilization. Quick summary of the sponsors Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Let me say as a side note that Ernest Becker's book, Denial of Death, had a big impact on my thinking about human cognition, consciousness, and the deep ocean currents of our mind that are behind the surface behaviors we observe. Many people have told me that they think about death, or don't think about death, fear death, or don't fear death, but I think not many people think about this topic deeply, rigorously, in the way that Nietzsche suggested. This topic, like many that lead to deep personal self reflection, frankly is dangerous for the mind. As all first principles thinking about the human condition is, if you gaze long into the abyss, like Nietzsche said, the abyss will gaze back into you. I have been recently reading a lot about World War II, Stalin, and Hitler. It feels to me that there is some fundamental truth there to be discovered, in the moments of history that changed everything, the suffering, the triumphs. If I bring up Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin in these conversations, it is never through a political lens. I'm not left nor right. I think for myself, deeply, and often question everything, changing my mind as often as is needed. I ask for your patience, empathy, and rigorous thinking. If you arrived to this podcast from a place of partisanship, if you hate Trump, or love Trump, or any other political leader, no matter what he or they do, and see everyone who disagrees with you as delusional, I ask that you unsubscribe, and don't listen to these conversations, because my hope is to go beyond that kind of divisive thinking. I think we can only make progress toward truth through deep, empathetic thinking and conversation, and as always, love. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This episode is supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Get it at blinkist.com slash lex for a 7 day free trial and 25% off after. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I'm a big believer in reading at least an hour a day. As part of that, I use Blinkist every day, and in general, it's a great way to broaden your view of the ideal landscape out there, and find books that you may want to read more deeply. With Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. Right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to blinkist.com slash lex to try it free for 7 days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's blinkist.com slash lex. Blinkist spelled B L I N K I S T. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com slash lex pod to get a discount and to support this podcast. Have you ever watched The Office? If you have, you probably know it's based on a UK series also called The Office. Not to stir up trouble, but I think the British version is actually more brilliant than the American one, but both are pretty amazing. Anyway, there are actually nine other countries with their own version of The Office. You can get access to them with no geo restrictions when you use ExpressVPN. It lets you control where you want sites to think you're located. You can choose from nearly 100 countries giving you access to content that isn't available in your region. So again, get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash lex pod to get extra three months free and to support this podcast. This show is presented by the great, the powerful Cash App, the number one finance app in the app store. When you get it, use code LEX PODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, let me mention a surprising fact about physical money. It costs 2.4 cents to produce a single penny. In fact, I think it costs 85 million dollars annually to produce them. So again, if you get Cash App from the app store Google Play and use the code LEX PODCAST, you get 10 dollars and Cash App will also donate 10 dollars to First, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon. What is the role of death and fear of death in life? Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept that fact, we would argue, is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything that people do, whether they're aware of it or not. So that's kind of been your life work. Your view of the human condition is that death, you've written the book Warm at the Core, that death is at the core of our consciousness of everything, of how we see the world, of what drives us. Maybe can you, can you elaborate how you see death fitting in? What does it mean to be at the core of our being? So I think that's a great question. And, you know, to be pedantic, I usually start, you know, my psychology classes and I say to the students, okay, you know, let's define our terms. And the ology part, they get right away. You know, it's the study of, and then we get to the psyche part. And understandably, you know, the students are like, oh, that means mind. And I'm like, well, no, that's a modern interpretation. But in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind. And so you hear the word soul and you're like, well, all right, that's the nonphysical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer here. But Aristotle's who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body. And he defined soul as the essence of a natural body that is alive. And then he goes on and he says, all right, let me give you an example. If an axe was alive, the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning, then the soul of the eyeball would be to see, you know, and then he's like, all right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop. The soul of a woodpecker is to pack, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human? And here, of course, there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity. All right, Aristotle, you know, gives us the idea of humans as rational animals. You know, we're homo sapiens. But not the only game in town got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th century. He called us homo ludens that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And I think it was Hannah Arendt, homo faber, were tool making creatures. Another woman, Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus. And following Aristotle and his poetics, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty. There's another take on humans. I think they call us homo narratans. We're storytelling creatures. And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation. But what garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy, who was Alexander Smith, in a book called Dreamthwarp. I think it's written in the 1860s. He just says right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And I remember reading that. And in my gut, I was like, oh, man, I don't like that. But I think you're onto something. And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human condition. So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in. And that's just an allusion to the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree of knowledge, and Adam partakes also. And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where, by virtue of our vast intelligence, we come to realize the inevitability of death. And so, you know, the apple is beautiful and it's tasty. But when you get right into the middle of it, there's that ugly reality, which is our finitude. And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980. My PhD is in experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies for the study of the world. I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of nonpharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work, and I found it interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I'm just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural scientist, recently deceased. He died in 1974. After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death. And that was his last book? It's actually his next to last book. I don't know how you pull this off, but he had one more after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently, it was supposed to... Originally, The Denial of Death was supposed to be this giant thousand page book that was both, and they split it up, and what became Escape from Evil, his wife, Marie Becker, finished. Well, be that as it may, it is in The Denial of Death where Becker just says in the first paragraph, I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're aware of it or not, and mostly we're not. And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow, okay, this dude's... You're onto something. You're onto something. It's the same thing here. It's the same thing. And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, but let's face it, I believe there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to. So I'm in my mid 20s. I got Ernest Becker's book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I'm remembering that when I'm eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And the day before, my mom said, oh, say goodbye to grandma. She's not well. And so I was like, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness. Well, she dies the next day. And it's in the evening and I'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection. And I'm like, wow, I'm going to miss my grandmother. And then I'm like, no, wait a minute. That means my mother's going to die after she gets old. And that's even worse. After all, who's going to make me dinner? And that bothered me for a while. But then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead American presidents. And I'm like, there's George Washington. He's dead. There's Thomas Jefferson. He's dead. My mom's going to be dead. Oh, I'm going to get old and be dead someday. And at eight years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis. I remember it being, you know, one of these blood curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for the most of the time I was subsequently growing up. But fast forward back to Skidmore College, mid twenties, you know, reading Becker's book in the 1980s, thinking to myself, wow, one of the reasons why I'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience. And then to make a short story long, and I'll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker, and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books, there's another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed in from an evolutionary perspective. And then The Denial of Death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often. Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa. And maybe only John Bowlby, you know, there's there's other folks. But the attachment theorist, John Bowlby, was really one of the first serious academics to say these these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible. And can you comment on what's what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolutionary view of the world, just in case people are not? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's that's a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter. You used to be a fish. Yeah, we used to be a fish. And I'll end up talking on a podcast. Yeah. How we came to be that way. How we came to be that way. And so whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say, are more interested in development across a single lifespan. And but but the evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for their views. They, you know, they'll just say these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon the expression. And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types that they are often and rightfully criticized evolutionary psychologists for what are called the just so stories that where it's like, oh, this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially adaptive. And my thought again early on was I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints. I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined. So one question I would ask here is about a science being speculative. You know, we understand a little about the human mind. You said you picked up Becker's book and, you know, it felt like it was onto something. That's the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early 20s. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the meaning of life kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most the closest to the truth somehow. It was onto something. So I guess the question I want to ask also is like how speculative is psychology? How like all of your life's work? How do you feel? How confident do you feel about the whole thing? About understanding our mind? I feel confidently unconfident to have both ways. Like what do we make of psychology? What do we make starting with Freud, you know, starting just our, or even just philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like, you know, my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, you know, it often feels like, man, we don't really understand most of what's going on here. And certainly that's true with the human mind. Yeah. Well, to me, that's the proper epistemological stance. I don't know anything. Well, it's the Socratic I know that I don't know, which is the first step on the path to wisdom. I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to. I would argue equally forcefully, but not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I believe that the Thomas Kuhns of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress. And so on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain. On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists, I'll just speak about psychological scientists, when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. And when they make the mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs. And so I like the, well, we're all, I hope, appreciative of the people who trained us. But I remember my first day in graduate school at the University of Kansas, they brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous German social psychologist. And the quote is, there's nothing more useful than a good theory. And then on the other side was another quote by a German physicist, his name eludes me, and it was all theories are wrong. And I'm like, which is it? And of course, the point is that it's both. Our theories are, I believe, powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves in the world around us. Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist, I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices. And that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it or the modification thereafter. If we look at the existentialists or even like modern philosopher, psychologist types like Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Jordan pretty well. We go way back. Actually, if he were here with us today, we would he would be jumping in and I believe very interesting and important ways. But yeah, we go back 30 years ago. He was basically saying our work is nonsense. Let's get into this. I'll talk to Jordan eventually on this thing. Yeah, there's some rough times right now. Oh, absolutely. And I and I wish him well. Jordan was working on his maps of meaning and we were publishing our work. And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all meaning is arbitrary. He takes a more Jungian as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important, let's say religious types, and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days. So can you try to elucidate like what his worldview is? Because he's also a religious man. And so what what was this? What was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements that then? Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, you know, Jordan was a young punk. We were young punks. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that we you're still both kind of punks. Yeah, we are kind of punk. So I saw him three or four years ago. We spoke on a it was an awesome day. We're in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival, where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program. I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years. And we spent two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core. And he's like, you know, you're you're missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something, you have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube. Yeah, he was onto something that, you know, that just as a small tangent. Yeah. It's it's almost sad to look at Jordan Peterson and somebody like yourself. After having done this podcast, I've realized that there is really brilliant people in this world. And oftentimes, especially like when they're, I mean, it would love are a little bit like punks. That's right. They kind of do their own thing and make the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should. And it's so interesting because most people are kind of boring. Yes. And then the interesting ones kind of go on their own. And there's not a smartphone. No, that's that's so interesting. He was onto something that I mean, it's interesting that I don't think he was thinking from a money perspective, but he was probably thinking of like connecting with people or sharing his knowledge. But people don't often think that way. That's right. So maybe we can try to get back to you're both brilliant people. And I'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about in your psychological work and your world views. Well, our disagreements today would be along two dimensions. One is he is and again, I wish he was here to correct me. Yes. When I say that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo Christian tradition, I see particularly Christianity and in a sense is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts when he's saying there's only one way to leap into faith. And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is one, but by no means not the only way to find meaning and value in life. And so and I see his. What's his warm at the core? What is like? So we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning. Yeah. What's his? What does he make of death? Oh, I don't know. And this is where it would be nice to have him here. He has, you know, from a distance criticized our work as misguided. Having said that, though, when we were together, he said something along the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more empirical evidence. And so I appreciated that. He's a great researcher. He's a good clinician. The other thing that we will agree to disagree about rather vociferously is his ultimately political slash economic. So I remember being at dinner with him, telling him that the next book that I wanted to write was going to be called Why Left and Right are Both Beside the Point. And my argument was going to be and it is going to be that both liberal and political liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false. And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds. That would basically be like Steven Pinker's blank slate. But he took issue when I pointed out that actually it's conservative political philosophy, which starts with John Locke's assumption that in a state of nature, there are no societies, just autonomous individuals who are striving for survival. That's one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the history of intellectual thought. And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics. Can you linger on that a little bit? Can you describe his philosophy again as view of the world and what neoliberal economics is? Yeah, let me translate it in English. So basically on all these days, anybody who says I'm a conservative free market type, you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not. So here's John Locke, who, by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks, it is with the highest regard. And also, we need to understand in my estimation how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right. And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power and autonomy to individuals. And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so, he says, okay, let's start with a state of nature. And he's like, in a state of nature, there's no societies, there's just individuals. And in a perfect universe, there wouldn't be any societies, there would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a right to survive. And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor. But his point is, and it's actually a good one, he's following Hobbes here. He's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes. And if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day. But it's a whole lot easier if I see like an apple tree a mile away. Well, I can go over and pick an apple. But if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple. And his point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave. They will take each other's property. Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression. English translation, if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back. You don't have the right to kill my firstborn. But people being people, they're apt to escalate retaliatory behavior, thus creating what Locke called a state of war. So he said, in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly give up their freedom in exchange for security. They agree to obey the law and that the sole function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign invasion in order to protect our right to property. All right. So now here's the property thing. All right. So Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property. But Locke says, well, surely if there's anything that you own, it's your body. And surely you have a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert effort or labor, that becomes your private property. So back to the apple tree. If I walk over to an apple tree, that's everybody's apples until I pick one. And the minute I do, that is my apple. And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want, as long as you don't waste them. And as long as you don't impinge on somebody else's right to get apples. So far, so good. Yep. And then he says, well, okay. In the early days, you could only eat so many apples or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you put a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That's your property. Those become your apples. That's your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around Nebraska, that's their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want because the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of your own effort. But then he says money came into the picture. And this is important because he noticed long before anybody, before the Freud's of the world, that money is funky because it has no intrinsic value. He's like, ooh, look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has, if you're hungry and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people are going to go for the carrot. But his point is that the allure of money is that it's basically a concentrated symbol of wealth, but because it doesn't spoil, Locke said, you're entitled to have as much money as you're able to garner. Then he says, well, the reality is that some people are more, the word that he used was industrious. He said some people more industrious than others. All right, today we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious. He just said that's natural. It's also true. Therefore, he argued, over time, some people are going to have a whole lot of property and other people not much at all. Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone. His argument was that the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we're all better off as a result. So the point very simply is that, and then you have Adam Smith in the next century with the invisible hand where Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that's not necessarily pejorative, if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result. And what do you think is the flaw in that way of thinking? Well, there's two flaws. One flaw is, first of all, that it is based on an erroneous assumption to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we were an asocial species. In a sense, you don't feel like there's this emphasis of individual autonomy is a flawed promise. There's something fundamentally deeply interconnected between us. I do. I think that Plato and Socrates in the Crito were closer to the truth when they started with the assumption that we were interdependent, then they derived individual autonomy as a manifestation of a functional social system. That's fascinating. So when Margaret Thatcher, you're too young, in the 1980s, she said, societies? There's no such thing as societies. There's just individuals pursuing their self interest. So that's one point where I would take issue respectfully with John Locke. Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England's filled up, so if you want some land, just go to America, it's empty. Or maybe there's a few savages there, just kill them. So Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick where he thinks about, will there ever come a time where we run out of whales? And he says, no, but we have run out of whales. And so Locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources. He's certainly wrong today, in my opinion. Also wrong is the claim that the unlimited pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There is no doubt that radical inequality is tragic psychologically and physically. Poverty is not that terrible. It's easy for me to say because I have a place to stay and something to eat. But as long as you're not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging as having the impoverished in close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy. LW So it's not the absolute measure of your well being, it's the inequality of that well being is the penalty painful. So maybe just to linger on the Jordan Peterson thing, in terms of your disagreement in his world view. So he went through quite a bit, there's been quite a bit of fire in his defense or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes. So looking at the inequality that's in our world, looking at, you know, certain groups, measurably having an outcome that's different than other groups, and then drawing conclusions about fundamental unfairness, injustice, inequality in the system. So like systematic racism, systematic sexism, systematic anything else that creates inequality. And he's been kind of saying pretty simple things to say that, you know, the system for the most part is not broken or flawed, that the inequalities part, the inequality of outcomes is part of our world. What we should strive for is the, you know, equality of opportunity. Yeah, and I do not dispute that as an abstraction. But again, to back up for a second, I do take issue with Jordan's fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of Marxist ideas, which he has, in my estimation, mischaracterized in his public depictions. Let's get into it. So he just seems to really not like socialism, Marxism, communism. Historically speaking, sort of, I mean, how would I characterize it? I'm not exactly sure. I don't want to, again, he'll eventually be here to defend himself. John Locke, unfortunately, not here to defend himself. But what's your sense about Marxism and the way Jordan talks about it, the way you think about it, from the economics, from the philosophical perspective? Yeah, well, if we were all here together, I'd say we need to start with Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, before Marx became more of a polemicist. And I would argue that Marx's political philosophy, he's a crappy economist, I don't dispute that. But his arguments about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic psychological and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every one of those has proven quite right. Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18, whenever he was writing, that inevitably, capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them, in his language, a fleshy cog in a giant machine. And it would create a tension and conflict between those who own things and those who made things, that over time would always, the Thomas Pickardy guy who writes about capital, and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That means the people with money are gonna have a lot more. That means there's gonna come a point where the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Schumpeters of the world, they're like, that's creative destruction, bring it, that's great. So I think it's Niles Ferguson, he's a historian, he may be at Stanford now, he was at Harvard. He writes about the history of money, and he's like, yeah, there's been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several hundred years. And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically inconvenienced. But that's the price that we pay for progress. Other people would argue, and I would agree with them that I will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten the curve of economic destruction. To put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it's possible to do this on a scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, gross, domestic GDP or whatever, that's just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever the United Nations says, how we measure quality of life, life expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on, the countries that do better are the mixed economies. They're market economies that have high tax rates in exchange for the provision of services that come as a right for citizens. Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you've kind of mentioned that, you know, as Marx described, capitalism with a slippery slope, eventually things go awry in some kind of way. So that's the question is, when you have, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong eventually? You know, eventually we'll all be dead. That's exactly right. No, that's right. So, and then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism is a dirty word. I say unfortunately, because even if you disagree with a philosophy, you should, like calling somebody a Marxist should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation. No, that's right. And the fact is, I'm sympathetic with Jordan's dismissal of the folks, the talking heads these days who spew Marxist words. To me, it's like fashionable nonsense. Do you know that book that the physicists wrote mocking? You're too young. So in the 20 or so years, we're all pretty young. Well, yeah, that's right. But I think there were these NYU physicists, they wrote a paper just mocking the kind of literary postmodern types. And it was, oh, those kinds of, yeah, it was just nonsense. And of course it was made the lead article. And you know, my point is Marx wouldn't be a Marxist. True. I have read and listened to some of the work of Richard Wolff. He speaks pretty eloquently about Marxism. I like him. He's one of the only, you know, one of the only people speaking about a lot about Marxism and the way we are now in a serious way, in a sort of saying, you know, what are the flaws of capitalism? Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very different. People should check out his work. Because all this kind of work, this kind of outrage mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome, that's not Marxism. It is not Marxism. He didn't say that. You know, he literally said each, what was it like, each according to their needs and each according to their abilities or something like that. So the question is the implementation, like, humans are messy. So how does it go wrong? Like, it is, there you go, Lex. Brilliant. It's messy. And this gets back to my rant about the book that I want to try if I don't stroke out, why left and right are both beside the point. You know, the people, the conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple minded. By assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature. You know, again, that's where Marx and Skinner are odd bedfellows. You know, here they are just saying, oh, let's change the surroundings and things will inevitably get better. On the other hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish and they use that as the justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth, well, they're only half right because it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also innately generous and reciprocating creatures. There's remarkable studies, I think they've been done at Yale, of, you know, babies, 14 month old babies. If someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return, babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate. All right, fine. If someone, if they want a toy, let's say, or a bottle of water, baby wants a bottle of water, and I look like I'm trying to give it to the baby, but I drop the bottle so the baby doesn't get what she or he wanted. When given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate because they're aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return. So my point is, yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously ubersocial creatures who are eager to reciprocate, and in fact, we're congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the point where we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happens. How close, so, I mean, your work is on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality in ourselves. How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other humans? Oh, I think it's really innate. Yeah, I think it's because, yeah, bats reciprocate, not by intention, but, you know, this, I'm going here from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, you know, to, I love the early Dawkins, I'm less enamored. I like the early Beatles. Yeah, no, no, no. And again, I say this with great respect, but, you know, Dawkins just points out that, you know, reciprocation is just fundamental, cooperation is fundamental. You know, it's a one sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms of individual competition. It's almost, from a game theoretic perspective too, it's just easier to see the world that way. It's easier to, I don't know, I mean, you see this in physics, there's a whole field of folks, like complexity, that kind of embrace the fact that it's all an intricately connected mess, and it's just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science. But it seems to be much closer to actually representing what the world is like. So like you put it earlier, Lex, it's messy. So left and right, you mentioned, you're thinking of maybe actually putting it down on paper or something? Yeah, I would like to, because what I would like to point out, again, in admiration of all the people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize is, look, these are all geniuses. Locke, genius. Adam Smith, genius, when he uses the notion that we're bartering creatures. So he uses that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things. But that's not at the core. The bartering is not at the core of human nature. It's not at, well, he says it is. He says we're fundamentally bartering creatures. Well, that doesn't even make sense then, because then how can we then be autonomous individuals autonomous individuals? Well, because we're going to barter with an eye on for ourselves, self interest. Yeah. But all right. So, but back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex. He's like, Adam Smith, here's, he's got the invisible hand and my conservative friends. I'm like, you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market. And this is my other gripe with folks who support just unbridled markets. Adam Smith understood that there was a role for government for two reasons. One is, is that just like Locke, people are not going to behave with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial, you know, even playing field. And then the other thing Smith said was that there's some things that can't be done well for a profit. And I believe he talked about education and public health and infrastructure as things that are best done by governments because you can't, you can make a profit, but that doesn't mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial. Yeah. So I would, I'm just eager to engage people by saying, let's start with our most contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend to cooperate. And we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe. And of course, how you define one's tribe becomes critically important. But what some people say is, look, look, what would then be, what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot? And that would be, in my opinion, how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that fosters creativity and innovation and the self regard that comes from creative expression while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal tendencies in order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time? Because the other thing about all capital based systems is the stability. It's fundamentally unstable. Yeah, because it's based on infinite growth. And it's a positive feedback loop. To be silly, infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. But otherwise, we want to seek a steady state. So when Steven Pinker writes, for example, again, great scholar, but I'm going to disagree when he says the world has never been better, and all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff. So your sense is the world sort of in disagreement with Steven Pinker, that the world is like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions. Yes. And the fact that there are certain like the rate of violence and aggregate is decreasing, the death, you know, the quality of life, all those kinds of measures that you can plot across centuries that it's improving. That doesn't capture the fact that our world might be this, we might destroy ourselves in very painful ways in the in the in the next century. So I'm with Jared Diamond, you know, in the book Collapse, where he points out studying the collapse of major civilizations, that it often happens right after things appear to never have been better. And in that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue with Dr. Pinker. I'm thinking of John Gray, who's a British philosopher and here in the States. I don't know where he is these days, but Robert J. Lifton, the psycho historian. Yeah, they're both of my view and which I hope is, by the way, wrong. Me too. Yeah, no, but you know, between, you know, ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation, economic instability, and the fact that, you know, the world has become a Petri dish of psychopathology. Like what really worries me is the the quiet economic pain that people are going through, the businesses that are closed, dreams that are broken, because you can no longer do the thing that you've wanted to do and how I mentioned to you off camera that I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And I mean, the amount of anger and hatred and on the flip side of that, sort of a nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain. Like what happens with that economic pain is you become bitter. You start to find the other, whether it's other European nations that mistreated you, whether it's other groups that mistreated you, it always ends up being the Jews somehow or fault here. That's what worries me is where this quiet anger and pain goes in 2021, 2022, 2030. If you look, sorry to see the parallels. No, no, no. Rise and fall of the Third Reich, but you know what happens 10, 15 years from now from what's because of the COVID pandemic that's happening now. And Lex, you make a, I think a really profoundly important point, you know, back to our work for a bit or Ernest Becker rather, you know, his point is, is that the way that we manage existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems that give us a sense that life has meaning and we have value. And in the form of self esteem, which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the expectations associated with the role that we play in society. Well, here we are right now in a world where first of all, if you have nothing, you are nothing. And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today, a lot of jobs are gone and they're not coming back. And that's the, where the self esteem, that's where the self esteem and identity come in with people. It's not only that you don't have anything to eat. You don't even have a self anymore to speak of because the, we typically define ourselves, you know, as Marx put it, you are what you do. And now who are you when your way of life, as well as your way of earning a living is no longer available? Yeah. And it feels like that yearning for self esteem that we could talk a little bit more, because you about defining self esteem is quite interesting. The more I've read Warm at the Core and just in general, your thinking, it made me realize I haven't thought enough about the idea of self esteem. But the thing I want to say is, it feels like when you lose your self esteem, it feels like when you lose your job, then it's easy to find, it's tempting to find that self esteem in a tribe that's not somehow often positive. It's like a tribe that defines itself on the hatred of somebody else. So that's brilliant. And this is what John Gray, the philosopher in the 1990s, predicted what's happening today. He wrote a book about globalism. And actually Hannah Arendt in the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism. When she said that, you know, that economics has reached the point where most money is made, not by actually making stuff, you know, you use money to make money. And therefore, what happens is money chases money across national boundaries. Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate entities whose sole function is to generate money. And what John Gray said is that that will inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas, which will not be attributed to the economic order. It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat du jour is, and the anger and the distress associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues who will transform that into rage. So both Hannah Arendt as well as John Gray, they just said, watch out, we're gonna have right wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists of hate, what makes them brilliant is they don't, the hate's already there, but they take the fears and they expertly redirect them to who it is that I need to hate and kill in order to feel good about myself. So back to your point, Lex, that's right. So the self regard that used to come from having a job and doing it well, and as a result of that, having adequate resources to provide a decent life for your family, well, those opportunities are gone. And yeah, what's left? So Max Weber, German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical upheaval, we are apt to embrace, he was the one who coined the term charismatic leader, seemingly larger than life individuals who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to rid the world of evil. All right, now, Ernest Becker, he used Weber's ideas in order to account for the rise of Hitler. Hitler was elected, and he was elected when Germans were in an extraordinary state of existential distress, and he said, I'm gonna make Germany great again. All right, now, what Becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for charismatic populist leaders, good and bad, is death anxiety. All right, now, here's where we come in, we're egghead experimental researchers. Becker wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he couldn't get a job. People just dismiss these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there's no evidence. And you've done some good experiments. Yeah, here's where I can be more cavalier, and where what I would urge people, like what you said, Lex, is ignore my histrionic and polemic language, if possible, and step back, if you can, myself included, and let's just consider the research findings. Because in September 11, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that horrible day, two days before, George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of presidential polling. All right, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of the evildoers, and then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time magazine that he believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during this, to lead the country, rather, during this perilous time, he had the highest approval rating. And so we're like, well, what happened? You know, what happened to Americans that their approval of President Bush got so high so fast? Well, our view, following Becker, is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder. The people dying, plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So we did a bunch of experiments, and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple. We have one group of people, and we just remind them that they're going to die. We say, hey, write your thoughts and feelings about dying. Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral home or 100 meters to either side. Our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral home, then death is on your mind, even if you don't know it. And then there's other studies, they're even more subtle, where we bring people into the lab, and they read stuff on a computer, and while they're doing that, we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds. It's so fast, you don't see anything. And then we just measure people's reactions or behavior thereafter. So what we found in 2003, leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not care for President Bush or his policies in Iraq in controlled conditions. But if we reminded them of their mortality first, they liked Bush a lot more. So in every study that we did, Americans liked John Kerry, who was running against Bush, they liked Kerry more than Bush. Policy wise, in a controlled... In a controlled condition. But if they were reminded of death first, then they liked Bush a lot more. So by the way, just a small pause, you said they're discerningly simple experiments. I think that's, and people should read Warm at the Core for some other description, you have a lot of different experiments of this nature. I think it's a brilliant experiment connected to the Stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview on anything and how delicious that water tastes after you're reminded of your own mortality. It's such a fascinating experiment that you could probably keep doing like millions of them to draw insight about the way we see the world. No, that's right, Lex. And I appreciate the compliment, not because we did anything, but because what these studies, many of which are now done by other people around the world in labs that we're not connected with, what I'm most proud about our work. I am proud of the experiments that we've done. But it's not science until somebody else can replicate your findings and independent researchers are interested in pursuing them. It's such a fascinating idea. I don't... I have to think about a lot about the experiments you've done and that you've inspired, about the fact that death changes the way you see a bunch of different things. I think the Stoics talked about the, I mean, in general, just memento mori, like just thinking about death and meditating on death is a really positive, not a positive, it's an enlightening way to live life. So what do you think about that at the individual level? Like, what is the role about being, bringing that terror of death, fear of death to the surface and being cognizant of it? For us, that's the ball game. So what I'm trying to say is that so what we write in our book and here we're just paying homage to the philosophers and theologians that come before us is to point out that literally since antiquity, there has been a consensus that to lead a full life requires, Albert Camus said, come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible. And so you've got the Stoics and you've got the Epicureans and then you've got the Tibetan Book of the Dead and then you've got like the medieval monks that, you know, worked with like a skull on their desk. And the whole idea, I should back up a bit because and just remind folks that our studies, you know, when we remind people that they're going to die and we find that, yeah, they drink more water if a famous person is, you know, advertising it, but they eat more cookies. They want more fancy clothes. They sit closer to people that look like them. It changes who they vote for. But all of those things, those are very subtle death reminders. You don't even know that death is on your mind. And so our point is that, and this is kind of counterintuitive, and that is that the most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death anxiety are malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety. You know, we try and bury it under the psychological bushes and then it comes back to bear bitter fruit. But what the theologians and the philosophers of the world are saying is it behooves each of us to spend considerable time. You don't have to be a goth death rocker, you know, wallowing in death imagery to spend enough time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will pass to get to the point where there is, to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal transformation and growth. Let's go personal for a second. Are you yourself afraid of death? Yeah. And how much do you meditate on that thought? Like, maybe your own study of it is a kind of escape from your own mortality. Absolutely. So you got it. And like, if you figure out death, somehow you won't die. So no, no. So my my colleagues and good friends, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Posinski, you know, we met in graduate school in the 1970s. We've been doing this work for 40 years. And we cheerfully admit, even though it doesn't reflect well on us as humans, that I should just speak for myself. But I feel like there's a real sense in which doing these studies and writing books and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxiety. Directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise. And every once in a while, therefore, when I think that I'm making some progress as a human, I have to remind myself that that is probably not the case. And I have at times, like all humans, been more preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self esteem as like, oh, we're going to write a book and maybe we'll get to go on TV or something. Well, no, that's not the same as to actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather than just think it. Yeah, like you did when you were eight. Exactly right. So when I first read The Denial of Death, I was so literally flabbergasted by it that I took a leave of absence for a year and just like did what would be considered menial jobs. I did construction work. I worked in a restaurant. And I was just like, well, wait a minute. If I understand what this guy is saying, then I'm just a culturally constructed meat puppet doing things for reasons that I know not in order to assuage death anxiety. And I was like, that's not acceptable. Maybe another interesting person to talk about is Ernest Becker himself. So how did he face his death? Is there something interesting, personal? I think so. So interesting to me is Becker also from a Jewish family, claimed to be the atheistic, did not identify ultimately as Jewish. I believe he converted to Christianity, but was himself a religious person. And he said he became religious when his first child was born. Now religious, what does that mean? Does he have a faith? Well, let's talk more. Most importantly, is the afterlife. What's his view on the afterlife? He was agnostic on that, but he did. Now the denial of death is, there's a chapter devoted to Kierkegaard. And he talks about for Kierkegaard, if you want to become a mature individual, if you want to learn something, you go to the university. If you want to become a more mature individual, according to Kierkegaard, you got to go to the school of anxiety. And what Kierkegaard said is that we have to let this vague dis ease, put a hyphen between dis and ease about death. Kierkegaard's point is you have to really think about that. You have to think about it and feel it. You got to let it seek in or seep into your mind. At which point, according to Kierkegaard, basically you realize that your present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction. You didn't choose the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your name. You didn't choose necessarily even the social role that you occupy. You might've chosen from what's available in your culture, but not from the full palette of human opportunities. And so what Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize that we've been living a lie of sorts. Becker calls it a necessary lie. And we have to momentarily dispose of that. And so now Kierkegaard says, well, here I am. I have shrugged off all of the all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself. And now what am I or who am I? This is like the ancient Greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing. At this point, Kierkegaard said, you're really dangling on the precipice of oblivion. And some people tumble into that abyss and never come out. On the other hand, Kierkegaard said that what you can now do metaphorically and literally is to rebuild yourself from the ground up. And there's a, in the new Testament, there's something you have to die in order to be reborn. And Kierkegaard's view though, is that there's only one way to do that. This is his proverbial leap into faith. And in Kierkegaard's case, it was faith in Christianity, that you can't have unbridled faith in cultural constructions. The only thing that you can have unequivocal faith in is some kind of transcendent power. All right. But of course, this raises the question of, well, is that just another death denying belief system? And at the end of the denial of death, Becker admits that there's no way to tell while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance. Now, one of the things that I don't understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent influence in my academic and personal life, but a year or two ago, I started reading Martin Heidegger. I'm reading Being and Time. And what I now wonder is why Becker, who refers to Heidegger from time to time in his work, why he didn't take Heidegger more seriously. Because Heidegger is like a secular Kierkegaard. He has the same thing, which is death anxiety. Oh, and I should have pointed out that what Kierkegaard says is that death anxiety, most people don't go to the school of anxiety. They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kierkegaard says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial. And I love that phrase. It's a beautiful phrase because at the end of the denial of death, Becker's like, look, the average American is either drinking or shopping or watching television, and they're all the same thing, right? Heidegger says the same thing. He says, look, and he acknowledges Kierkegaard. He says, what makes us feel unsettled? And evidently, that's an English translation of angst, that we don't feel at home in the world. Heidegger says that's death anxiety. And one direction is the Kierkegaard one. Heidegger calls it a flight from death. You just unself reflexively cling to your cultural constructions. And Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn't care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you're subdued. When in fact, what most culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential. Heidegger says there's another way, though. He's like, yo, what you can do is to come to terms with that death anxiety in the following way. Thing number one is to realize that not only are you going to die, but your death can happen at any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know I'm going to die in some vaguely unspecified future moment, that's still death denial because you're saying, yeah, not me, not now. Heidegger's point is you need to get to the point where you need to realize that I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smote by a comet, or I can stop for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days, or any number of potentially unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes. That's brilliant, by the way. Sorry. To bring it to the now. Yeah, it is brilliant. I agree, Lex, and that's just why I'm wondering why didn't Becker notice this? Because that's the being and time thing, is it's got to be now. And then he says, so okay, so now I've dealt somewhat with the death part. And now he says, now you've got to deal with what he calls existential guilt. And he says, well, all right, you have to realize that like it or not, you have to make choices. This is Jean Paul Sartre, we are condemned by virtue of consciousness to choosing. But Heidegger is a little bit more precise. He's like, look, as I was saying earlier, you're in reality, you're an insignificant speck of respiring carbon based dust born into a time and place not of your choosing when you're here for a microscopic amount of time after which you are not. And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn't choose to be born a male or Jewish or in America, the offspring of working class people. And Heidegger, what he says is, yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices, even though you didn't choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what's available to you. And moreover, you're going to not always make good choices. So now you're guilty for your choices. And then he uses the poet Rilke, he has a phrase, Becker uses it in The Denial of Death, the guilt of unlived life. I just love that. You have to accept that you have already diminished and in many ways amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you've made or just as often have declined to make because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before you. So anyway, Heidegger then says, look, OK, so, you know, I'm a professor and I live in America in the 21st century. Well, if I was in the third century living in a year in Mongolia, I'm not going to have an opportunity to be a professor. But what he submits is that there is some aspects of whatever I am that are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances. In other words, there is a me of sorts. Heidegger would take vigorous issue and so would Heidegger's scholars because I'm not claiming to understand him. This is my classic comic book rendering. But Heidegger's point is that you get to the point where you're able to say, OK, I am a contingent historical and cultural artifact. But so what? You know, if I was, you know, if I was transported a thousand years in the past in Asia, I'd be in the same situation. I would still be conditioned by time and place. I would still have choices that I could make within the confines of what opportunities are afforded to me. And then Heidegger says, if I can get that far in this is his language. He says that there is a transformation and he literally he calls it a turning. You're turning away from a flight from death and you are allowed you therefore you see a horizon is his word of opportunity that makes you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakable joy. Let me unpack those things. It is beautiful. It is. I love, Lex, that you're resonating to the time thing. So he's like, OK, we already talked about now. Anticipatory is is already hopeful because it's looking forward to be resolute. It means to trust and to just have confidence in what you're doing moving forward. All right. Solicitous. I had to look up all these words, by the way. It just means that you are concerned about your fellow human beings. And but I love the idea, even if it seems allegorical, I don't mind that at all. This idea you said love earlier. And I think that when Heidegger is talking about being solicitous, that's as close as he can get. There's an Italian. Yes. So what was that line again with the solicitous of the whole thing of turning away from death? And all the words you said are just beautiful. I love those words. Yeah. Anticipatory resoluteness that is accompanied with solicitous regard to our fellow humans, which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is permeated by unshakable joy. Now, again, Heidegger is not Mary Poppins. This I just got a tattoo. I know. This is great. I just love that exact quote. No, I'm piecing together. These are his exact words that and I spent the last two years reading almost everything that I can find because I want to. I'm sick of death. You said it. So I want to second what you say, Lex. So it's not about death. It's the Sherwood Anderson guy. He's a novelist that I like about. He wrote a book in Lyonsburg, Ohio. And now I'm going to forget what he said on his tombstone. But, you know, it was something to the effect. Oh, he said life, not death is the great adventure. The point being is that, you know, to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that, really, the goal, the way I see it is getting from hate to love. And I feel like Heidegger has a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction. And so that's kind of my current preoccupation is to take what I just said to you and to talk about it with my colleagues and other academic psychologists, because the way we started with Ernest Becker, remember I said earlier, I wasn't trained in any of these things. I'm an egghead researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback. And, you know, then we read these Becker books, and I thought they were so interesting that for the first few years, we didn't have any studies. I just would travel around and I'd be like, here's what this Becker guy says. I think this is cool. Well, my present view is I'm like, here's what this Heidegger guy says. I think these ideas are consistent with what Becker is saying because they are anchored in death anxiety. But I like that direction as an alternative to the Kierkegaardian insistence that the only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves from maladaptive reactions to death anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense. Yeah, I always kind of saw Kierkegaard unfairly, like you said, in a comic book sense of the word faith as a non traditional sense. I kind of like the idea of leap of faith. Oh, I love that idea. And so what I've been babbling about with, you know, Heidegger, I'm like, yeah, Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God. Heidegger is a leap of faith in life. And I just like it. I found the leap of faith really interesting in the technological space. So I've talked to on this thing with Elon Musk, but I think he's also just in general for our culture, a really important figure. Oh, absolutely. That takes, I mean, sometimes a little bit insane on social media and just in life. When I met him, it was kind of interesting that, of course, there's, I mean, he's a legit engineer, so he's fun to talk to about the technical things, but he also just the way the humor and the way he sees life, it just like refuses to be conventional. So it's a constant leap into the unknown. And one of the things that he does, and this isn't even like fake. A lot of people say, cause he's a CEO, there's a business owner. So he's trying to make money. No, I think I looked him in his eyes. I mean, this is real, is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished that a lot of others are saying are impossible, like autonomous vehicles. He truly believes it. To me, that is the leap of faith of I'm almost going like, we're like the entirety of our experience is shrouded in mystery. We don't know what the hell's going to happen. We don't know what we're actually capable of as human beings. And he just takes the leap. He fully believes that we can, you know, we can go to, we can colonize Mars. I mean, how, how crazy is it to just believe and dream and actually be taking steps towards it to colonizing Mars when most people are like, that's the stupidest idea ever. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm in agreement with you on that. You know, two things, you know, one is it reminds me of Ben Franklin who in his autobiography, you know, has a similarly childish in the best sense of the word, unbridled imagination for what might become, you know, Ben Franklin's like, yeah, I got electricity. That's cool, but we'll be levitating soon. And I, we can't even begin to imagine what we are capable of. And of course, people are like, dude, that's crazy. And there's a guy with it's FCS Schiller, some humanistic guy at the beginning of the 20th century. He's like, you know, lots of things that people think about may appear to be absurd to the point of obscene. But the reality is historically every fantastic innovation has generally been initiated by someone who was condemned for being a lunatic. And it's not that anything is possible, but surely things that we don't try will never manifest as possibilities. Yeah. And that's, that's that there's something beautiful to that. That's the embracing the abyss. And again, it's like the, it's the embracing the fear of death, the reality of death and then turning and to look at all the opportunities. That's right. Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker's work, which I do and yours is quite a bit, I find it surprising how that it's not a lot more popular in a sense that, no, we're not, I don't mean just your book. That's well written. People should read it, should buy it, whatever. I think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about as like Jordan Peterson's work and stuff like that. But I just mean like why people are not, don't think of that as a compelling description of the core of the human condition. Like, I think what you mentioned about Heidegger is quite, connects with me quite well. So I ask on this podcast, I often ask people if they're afraid of death. That's like almost every single part. I almost always get criticized for asking world class people, scientists and technologists about fear of death and the meaning of life. And on the fear of death, they often like don't say anything interesting. What I mean by that is they haven't thought deeply about it. Like you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in. They kind of say this thing about what exactly you said, which is like, it's something that happens not today. Like I'm aware that it's something that happens. And I'm not, the thing they usually say is I'm not afraid of death. I just want to live a good life kind of thing. And what I'm trying to express is like when I look in their eyes and the kind of the core of the conversation, it looks like they haven't really become, like they haven't really meditated on death. I guess the question is, what do I say to people that there's something to really think about here? Like there's some demons, some realities that need to be faced by more people. Well, that's a tough one. You know, I could tell you what not to do. So when we are young and annoying, a lot of famous people, mostly psychologists because that's who we intersected with, we would lay out these ideas and they would be, well, I don't think about death like that. So these ideas must be wrong. And we would say, well, you don't think about death because you're lucky enough to be comfortably ensconced in a cultural worldview from which you derive self esteem. And that has spared you the existential excruciations that would otherwise arise. But that's like Freud. You know, you're repressing, so you either agree with me in which case I'm right, or you disagree with me in which case you're repressing and I'm right. Well, so that's the Nietzsche thing. What I felt when I've, there've been moments in my life when I really thought about death. I mean, there's not too many. Like really, really thought about it and feel the thing when you felt that eight, maybe I'm traumatizing or romanticizing it. But I feel like it's, the conservatives call it popularly like, or the movie Matrix call it the red pill moment. I feel like it's a dangerous thought because I feel like I'm taking a step out of a society. Like there's a nice narrative that we've all constructed and I'm taking a step out. And it feels, there's this feeling like you're basically drowning. I mean, it's not a good feeling. It is not. But this gets back to the Heidegger Kierkegaard school of anxiety. You are stepping out and you are momentarily shrugging off, again, the culturally constructed psychological accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning. And so, I mean, in that sense, it feels like, I mean, how do you have that conversation? Because I guess I'm dancing around a set of questions, which is like, I guess I'm disappointed that people don't, are not as willing to step outside. Like even just, even any kind of thought experiment. Forget denial of death. Like there's not a community of people. Let's take an easy one that I think is scientifically ridiculous, which is, there's a community of people that believe that the earth is flat. Or actually even better, the space is fake. Like what I find surprising is that a lot of people I talk to are not willing to be like, imagine if it is, like imagine the earth is flat. Like think about it. Like a lot of people are just like, no, the earth is round. They're like scientists too. They're like, yeah, well actually, wait, have you actually like thought about it? Like imagine like a thought experiment that like basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with. Now that one in particular is, has really strong evidence and scientific validation. So it's pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat. But just the willingness to take a step outside of the stories that bring us comfort, it's been disappointing that people are not willing to do that. And I think the philosophy that you've constructed and that Ernest Becker is constructing, you've tested, I think is really compelling. And the fact that people aren't often willing to take that step. It's disappointing. Well, yes, but perhaps understandable. I mean, one of this is an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book, we had a meeting with a publisher who published some Malcolm Gladwell books. And she said, I'm very interested in your book, but can you write it without mentioning death? Because people don't like death. And we're like, no, it's really kind of central. And I think that's part of it. I think, again, if these ideas have merit, and I actually like the way that you put it, Lex, it's that to step away is to momentarily expose yourself to all of the anxiety that our identity and our beliefs typically enable us to manage. I think it's as simple as that. Yeah, I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high. And he forgot, it was in the winter, it was really freezing. It was memorable to me. I think it's an analogy, it's very useful. So he went to get some pizza. And he left me outside and said, I'll be back in five minutes. And he forgot that he left me outside. And I remember it was, I was in shorts, it was freezing winter. And I remember standing outside, it's a dorm, and I'm looking from the outside in, it's a light and it's warm. And I'm just standing there frozen, I think for an hour or more. And that's how I think about it. I don't give a damn about the stupid winter. I'm drawn to be back to the warm. And that's how I feel about thinking about death. At a certain point, it's too much. It's like that cold. I wanna be back into the warm. Getting back to Heidegger for a moment. He uses a lot the idea of feeling at home, not as like in your house, but just feeling like you're comfortably situated. Maybe you could talk about, like I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit. How does religion relate to this? I see it as the disease and the cure. In a sense, a few things. One is that I think a case could be made that humans are innately religious. So now we're gonna get into territory where there's gonna be a lot of disputes. And what do you mean by religious? Religion is an evolutionary adaptation. And religion is like a belief in something outside of yourself kind of thing? Not necessarily. So here we gotta be a little bit more careful. And again, I'm not a scholar. How about I'm a well intentioned dilettante in this regard? Because what I have read is that religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death arose. And the word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regatear. We can look it up. And it means to bind. And Emile Durkheim, the dead French sociologist, he said, you know, originally religion is Darce Lassing, who's a dead novelist. She calls it the substance of we feeling that it's literally that it arose because we're uber social creatures who from time to time took comfort in just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans. And that there is this kind of sense of transcendent exuberance, just back to the unshakable joy that Heidegger alludes to. And that the original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination. And that it was only subsequently some claim that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it such that religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of immortality were just naturally selected thereafter. So there are some people. So it's David Sloan Wilson wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral. And he said, religion has nothing to do with death. It's evolved to make groups viable. He's actually a group selection guy. What's group selection? The idea that it's the group that is selected for rather than the individual. Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that. But I guess our point would be, we see religion as being inextricably connected, ultimately, to assuaging concerns about death. Well, I guess another question to ask around this, like, what does the world look like without religion? Will we, if it's inextricably connected to our fears of death, do you think it always returns in some kind of shape? Maybe it's not called religion, but whatever, it just keeps returning? Yeah, who knows? So that's a great question, Lex. So there's a woman named Karen Armstrong. She was a nun turned historian. And she's, I can't remember the name of the book, but no matter. She, we could look that up, but... If you want, I can look it up, but I can also, I'll just add it in post. Yeah, her point, it says God in the title, of course. But she's like, look, all religions are generally fairly right minded in that they advocate the golden rule. And all religions, at their best, do seem to foster pro social behavior towards the in group. And that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits. That's the good news. And the bad news is historically all religions are subject to being hijacked by a lunatic fringe who declares that, you know, they're the ones in sole possession of the world. Sole possession of the liturgical practices or whatever they call them. And they're the ones that turn, you know, religion at its best into your crusades and holocausts. Yeah. My view, not that it should matter for much, but I grew up just skeptical of religion because I'm like, as a kid, I'm like, well, if we didn't have these beliefs, we wouldn't be killing each other because of them. And I'd be like to my parents, well, you're telling me that all people should be judged on the merits of their character, but don't come home if you don't marry a Jewish woman. Right. Which is implying that if you're not Jewish, you're an inferior form of life. Yeah. That's what tribes always do. And there's the tribal thing. And so there's a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes in French in the 1990s, I think wrote a book called In the Name of Identity, Violence and the Need to Belong. And that was his point is unless we can overcome this tribal mentality, this will not end well. But you said earlier something, Lex, that I think is profound and profoundly important. And that is you did not recoil in horror when I mentioned Kierkegaard's use of the term faith. And so I'm a big fan of faith and I'm not sure what that implies. And by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker's ideas in our work when I'm in Jesuit schools. It's the Americans, the secular humanists who are most disinclined to accept these ideas. It's an important side comment because I think it's mostly because they don't think philosophically. I speak with a lot of scientists and I think that's my main criticism. I mean, that's the problem with science is it's so comforting to focus in on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery of it all, the big picture things, the philosophical, like the fact that you don't actually know shit at all. So in terms of Jesuit, like that's the beauty of the experience of faith and so on is like, wherever that journey takes you is you actually explore the biggest questions of our world. So I don't see religion going away because I don't see humans as capable of surviving without faith and hope. And then everyone from the Pope to Elon Musk will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably mysterious. And like it or not, in the absence of beliefs, here I'm Charles Peirce, the pragmatic philosopher, he just said beliefs are the basis of action. If you don't have any beliefs, you're paralyzed with indecision, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to stand up in the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven right or wrong. Well, then why do you maintain them? Well, ultimately it's because of some form of faith. But also faith shouldn't be a dogmatic thing that you should always be leaping. I guess the problem with science or with religion is you can sort of all of a sudden take a step into a place where you're super confident that you know the absolute truth of things. There you go. And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave. At Skidmore, where I work, that's what I have the students read in their first week. And Plato's like, oh, look at all those poor bastards. They're in the cave, but they don't know it. And then they are freed from their chains. And they have to be dragged out of the cave, by the way, which is another interesting point. They don't run out. But that gets back to why people don't like to be divested of their comfortable illusions. But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty. And I say to the students, well, what's wrong with that? And they're like, nothing. That's like awesome. And then I'm like, yo, dudes, you're out of the cave, but how do you know that you're not in another cave? The illumination may be better. But the minute you think you're at the end of the proverbial intellectual slash epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or both. That's really well put. That's both terrifying and exciting that there's always a bigger cave. A little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness. So what do you make of consciousness? So do you think death creates consciousness, like the fear of death, the terror of death creates consciousness and consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of death? I do. Like what is consciousness to you? Don't ask me that. So now if I could answer that, you know, I'd be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel prize that, you know, it's literally, you know, Steven Pinker, I do agree with his claim and I think how the mind works, that it is the key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century. What is consciousness? Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don't think it's an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a lot of people, I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a process that by the time we are aware of what it is, it's just basically an integrated rendering of something that's already happened. You know, evidently there's a half second delay between when something happens, you know, those studies and our awareness of it. And that's where like ideas of free will will step in. You can explain away a lot of stuff. And I think those are all important and interesting questions. I'm of the persuasion. I mean, even, not even, but Dawkins and the selfish gene is very thoughtful. Actually, in a lot of, it's actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he's just like, it's hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn't have some sort of important and highly adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just that we could do mental simulations, that one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to rather than find out often by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental simulations. And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive. Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it's called Regaining Consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this is 1980s, maybe even earlier, that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings, that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling. This is like the rudiments of a theory of mind. And it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence, so much as social intelligence. So in that sense, consciousness is a social construct. It's just a useful thing for interacting with other humans. I don't know, but there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality that's somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness. Well, I think so also. So this is where, and Nietzsche, he said a solitary creature would not need consciousness. What do you think? Well, I don't know what I think about that. And then he goes on to say that consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. And wow, I was like, dude. Relax. Say you were on an island alone, and you saw a reflection of yourself in the water. If you were alone your whole life. Yeah, great question. Nietzsche's view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never come to mind. I don't know how I feel about that, though. In a sense, this sounds weird, but in a sense, I feel like my mental conversation has always been with death. It's almost like another notion, like these visualizations of a death in the cloak. I always felt like I am a living thing, and then there's an other thing that is the end of me. And I'm having a conversation with that. So in a sense, that's the way I construct the fact that I am a thing is because there's somebody else that tells me, well, you won't be a thing eventually. So this feels like a conversation, perhaps, but that might be kind of this mental stimulation kind of idea. It's a conversation with yourself, essentially. Sure. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement with you when we're talking about economics more so that we're deeply social beings. It just feels like we're humans. I'm with Harari with the sapiens. We seem to construct ideas on top of each other, and that's fundamentally a social process. Absolutely. I think that's a fine book. It overlaps considerably with our take on these matters, and the fact that we get to these points, drawing on different sources, I think makes me more confident. It's so fascinating, just like reading your book, sorry, on a small tangent, that Sapiens is one of the most popular books in the world. And just reading your book is like, well, this sounds... I don't know what makes a popular book. Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we also wonder why our book... Like all books, people can take issue with it, but we thought it would be a bigger hit, that it would be more widely read. It's funny because I've... I don't know if I have good examples because I forgot already, but I'm often saddened by Franz Kafka. I think he wasn't known in his life, but I always wonder these great... Some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown during the author's lifetime. And it's like, man, for some reason, it's again, it's that identity thing. I think, man, that sucks. Well, I'm comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, and evidently Thoreau sold like 75 copies of Walden. Nietzsche's books did not sell well. And how did Ernest Becker sell? His books are published by the free press and have sold more than any other books that they have published. So what does that mean? It's a lot? I don't know if it's like Jordan Peterson Millions, but it's hundreds of thousands. Was he respected? I just don't see him... Okay. I don't see him brought up as like in the top 10 philosophers of... No, not at all. So how far away is he? Is he in the top 100 for people? I don't think so. He's not brought up that often. Because again... Like your work is brought up more often. Yeah. I think he's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. So what we say, Lex, is that our goal, certainly when we first started and now just as much actually, but what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas have interest you enough to go read Ernest Becker, then this has been good. I consider him to be one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get the attention that he deserves. Similarly, our work I believe to be important because point by point we provide empirical corroboration for all of the claims. So that's literally the students that read The Denial of Death and then Escape from Evil. They're like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the book, you have studies. And I'm like, yeah, because for 40 years, if a Skidmore student said, oh, that's gotta be bullshit. I'm like, well, let's do a study. Let's do a study. And my own dreams are in creating robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love. And I think there's something about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our AI systems. And so maybe can you comment on that? So this is a different perspective on your work, which is like, how do we engineer a human? Yeah, so, no, this is awesome, Lex. I'm delighted that you said that. First of all, and I may have mentioned this to you, and I can't remember because I am seeing now, when you first contacted me, I had just been told I have to learn more about your work because I'm working with some very talented people in New York and they're writing a screenplay for a movie about an artificial intelligence. It's a female AI set in like 30 years in the future. And basically the little twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger. So these people call me and they're like, we're making a movie. It's based on Becker and your work and Heidegger and this other philosopher, Levinas, and then another philosopher, Silvia Benzo, who's an Italian philosopher. And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial intelligence entity, an embodied one, and who… Human form? Human form, who finds out, who is having essentially existential anxieties. And I think the project is called A Dinner with Her or something, and it doesn't really matter, but the punchline is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal. And so the question is what happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it's mortal? And it's actually the same question that you're posing. And that is, is that necessary in order for an AI to approximate humanity? Yeah, I think, yeah. So the intuition, again, it's unknown, but I think it's absolutely, I think it's absolutely necessary. A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people have about our own end of life, our own death, is the same way people think of, I think, about artificial intelligence. It's like, well, okay, so yeah, so within the system, there's a terminal position where there's a point at which it ends, the program ends, there's a goal state, there's a, you reached an end point. But the thing is, making that end a thing that's also within the program, like making the thing, and then it's also the mystery of it. So the thing is, we don't know what the hell this death thing is. I mean, it's not like we, I mean, the program doesn't give us information about the meaning of it all. And that's where the terror is. And it feels like, I mean, in the language that you would think about is the terror of this death, or like anticipation of it, or thinking about it, is the creative force that builds everything. Right. And that feels like, you know, that feels really important to implement. Again, it's very difficult to know how to do technically, currently, but it's important to think about. What I find is, you mentioned like screenplays and so on, is sci fi folks and philosophers are the the only ones thinking about it currently. And that's what these folks have convinced me. Yeah. And engineers aren't, which is, I get, yeah, most of the things I talk about, I get kind of people roll their eyes from the engineer perspective. Not these folks. They're like, because again, I saw your name and they're like, wait a minute, I've just seen that. They're like, here's someone. You should check out. Yeah. So this was a delightful conference. Yeah. I was a huge fan of your work and Ernest Becker. And it's funny that not enough people are talking about it. I don't know what to do with that. I think that there's a possibility to create real deep, meaningful connections between AI systems and humans. Absolutely. And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential, are essential for the element of human experience. I don't, I don't think it might be essential to create general intelligence, like very intelligent machines, but to create a machine that connects to human in some deep way. What's your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what's your view about machine ethics? Can you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of finitude, let's say? Well, I think ethics is a, there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that I've done at MIT with autonomous vehicles in particular. Oh, yeah, yeah. That people, I think they offload, they ask, like, how would a machine deal with an ethical situation that they themselves, the humans don't know how to deal with? Exactly. And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions, but I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world is a very important thing. Effectively in this world, it needs to be, have a fear of mortality and like be able to even dance. Because I don't think you can solve ethical problems, but you have to, I think like ethics is like a dance floor. You have to just, you have to dance properly with the rest of the humans. Like if people are dancing tango, you have to dance in the same kind of way. And for that, you have to have a fear of mortality. Like I think of, more practically speaking, as I said, autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact with pedestrians fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality. So when pedestrians cross the road, now I've watched, well, certainly 100 plus hours of pedestrian videos. There's a kind of social contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting your life in the hands of another human being. Yes, that's right. And like death is in the car, in the game that's being played, death is right there. It's part of the calculus. It's not, but it's not like a simple calculus. It's not a simple equation. I mean, I don't know what it is, but it's in there and it has to be part of the optimization problem. Like it's not as simple as, so from the computer vision, from the artificial intelligence perspective, it's detecting there's a human estimating the trajectory, like treating everything like it's a billiard balls, as opposed to like being able to calculate it, being able to construct an effective model, the world model of what the person's thinking, what they're going to do, what are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve, I think requires having some sense of, yeah, fear of fear of mortality, of mortality. I don't see the, the thing is, I think it's really important to think about, I can be honest enough to say that it's, I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things. But I do think it's really, really important. Like I have, so I have a bunch of Roombas here. I can show it to you after that. Roombas is a robot that does vacuums the floor and I've had them make different sounds. Like I had them scream in pain and it, you immediately anthropomorphize and it creates, I don't know, knowing that they can feel pain. See, I'm speaking, like knowing that I immediately imagine that they can feel pain and it immediately draws me closer to them, the human experience. And that there's something in that that should be engineered in our systems, it feels like. I believe, personally, I don't know what you think, but I believe it's possible for a robot and a human to fall in love, for example, in the future. Oh, I think it's, yeah, it's already there. No, there's a certain kind of deep connection with technology. I mean, a real, like you would choose to marry. I mean, again, it sounds, I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you. And it's a serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls, but it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion. Yeah, that's what, you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, which is funny. Like, it's a funny, I mean, there's a lot of stuff about robots. It's just kind of fun to talk about that is not necessarily connected to reality. People joke about sex robots, but if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days, are used, they're not used by people who want sex. Precisely. They're actually, They're kind of, They're actually, They're companions. They become companions. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's fascinating. And they're just, we're not even talking about any kind of intelligence. We're talking about just, I mean, human beings seek companionships. We're deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don't know if I can articulate clearly. You can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within all of us. Absolutely. In the face of death, it feels like we're alone. So, you know, the, what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the, who is it, Rollo May and Erwin Yallem write about existentialism and they're like, look, what, there's different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it, four universal concerns. The overriding one is about death. And that next is choice and responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they're like, that's one of the things about consciousness that, and the last one is meaninglessness, but the existential isolation point is, you know, we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless you're a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it is claimed, it's Eric Fromm in a book called Escape from Freedom. He's like, look, you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language. But you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior phenomenological existence. Therefore, there's always going to be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings and somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you're like, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. So you can be desperately lonely in a house where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there's millions. Yeah, it's the Great Gatsby. You could be alone in a big party. Exactly. Maybe this is a small tangent, but let me ask you on the topic of academia, you're kind of, we talked about Jordan Peterson, there's a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers, certainly in psychology, but it applies in all disciplines. What are your thoughts about academia being a place to harbor people like yourself? People who think deeply about things, who are not constrained by sort of the, I don't think you're quite controversial. No, not really. But you are a person who thinks deeply about things and it feels like academia can sometimes stifle that. I think so. So my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars is that the restrictions and expectations are such that it's highly unlikely that anybody will do anything of great value or innovation except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement of existing paradigms. So in simple English, I went to Princeton for a job interview 40 years ago and they're like, what are you going to do if we give you a job? And I'm like, I don't know, I want to think about it and read. And I saw that that interview was over, the window of opportunity shut in my face and they actually called my mentors and they're like, what are you doing? Tell this guy to buy some pants. I had hair down to my waist also. He's like, this guy looks like Charles Manson in Jesus. But the expectation is that you come to a post, you start publishing so that you can get grants. That's certainly true. But there's also kind of a behavioral thing. You said like long hair. There's a certain style of the way you're supposed to behave. For example, I'm wearing a suit. It sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this. I wore it when I was teaching at MIT, I wore it to meetings and so on, the different, sometimes a blue and red tie, but that was an outsider thing to do at MIT. So there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit. No, that's right. And there's a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing, the way you wear your hair, the way you, this isn't like a liberal or a left or anything. It's just in tribes. That's right. And academia to me or a place, any place that dreams of having like renegade free thinkers, like really deep thinkers should in fact, like glorify the outsider. Should welcome just, should welcome people that don't fit in. Yeah. No, that sounds weird, but I can just imagine an interview with at Princeton, I can imagine why aren't people, why aren't you at Harvard, for example, or MIT? Yeah. Well, so that, look, I would love to, I haven't lectured at MIT, but I've lectured at Harvard. I've gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn't consider me for a job. And I, well, a few things. I'm lucky because I go to Princeton, I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And then two days later I go to Skidmore and I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right mindedly felt that I wouldn't get much done there. But what they told me at Skidmore was take your time, show up for your classes and don't molest barnyard animals and you'll probably get tenure. And I'm like, I'll show up for my classes. We'll talk about it. That was the negotiation. Yeah, I negotiated, I drove a hard bargain. But honestly, Lex, that's, I feel I'm very committed to Skidmore because I was given tenure when our first terror management paper wasn't published. It took eight years to publish. It was rejected at every journal. And I submitted it as like a purple ditto sheet thing. I'm like, here's what I've been doing. Here's the reviews. Here's why I think this is still a pretty good idea. And I don't know that this would happen even at Skidmore anymore. But I was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged. I took classes at Skidmore. That's how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge. We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn't have any substance. And I don't mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question. So I appreciate having five years at Skidmore basically to read books. And I also appreciate that I look like this 40 years ago. And my view is that this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned the most from at Skidmore is now dead, a history professor, Ted Kuroda. He wore a bow tie. And there's another guy, Darnell Rucker, who taught me about philosophy. And he was very proper. And he had his jacket with the leather patches. But these guys weren't pompous at all. They were, this is the way I am. And I always felt that that's important that somebody who looks at you and says, oh, what a stiff, he's probably an MBA. Well, they're wrong. And someone who looks at me, when I first got to Skidmore, other professors would ask when I'd be coming to their office to empty the garbage. They just assumed, as in my twenties, they assumed I was housekeeping. I always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of the person who pervades it. I guess this is such a high concern now because I personally still have faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from and great ideas. I love hearing you say that. I still, and it's one of the reasons why I'm really apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic is that a lot of folks, a lot of these are Google type people who I don't, they're geniuses also, but I don't like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen. I'm big on embodied environments with actual humans interacting. I mean, there's so much to the university education, but I think the key part is the mentorship that occurs somehow at the human level. Like I've gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation where in person now, and I've even with Edward Snowden who done all interviews remote, I'm a stickler to in person. It has to be in person like, and a lot of people just don't get it. They're like, well, why can't, this is so much easier. Like why go through the pain? Like I've traveled, I'm traveling in the next month to Paris for a single stupid conversation. Nobody cares about just to be in person. Well, it's important to me. I honestly, I was like this, and thank you for coming down to it. It's my pleasure, but again, it's very self serving. I've enjoyed this. I knew I was going to, but it's not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier, there are a host of factors beyond verbal that I don't believe can be adequately captured. I don't care how much the acuity is decent on a zoom conversation. I feel again, I felt within five minutes that this was going to be for me easy in the sense that I could speak freely. I just don't see that happening so easily from a distance. Yeah, I tend to, well, I'm hopeful. I agree with you on the current technology, but I am hopeful on like some others on the technology eventually being able to create that kind of experience or quite far away from that, but it might be able to, my hope is, you know, I'm hopeful. I was at Microsoft in Seattle and I can't remember why. And no, I can't. I, that's how I'm in my early Mr. Magoo phase. And somebody there was showing us like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you're talking to somebody, so it's life size and they were beginning the, get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty. Yeah. With virtual reality too, I don't know if you've ever been inside a virtual world. It's to me, it's I can just see the future. It's quite real in terms of like a terror of death. I'm afraid of heights. Me too. And there's, I don't know if you've ever tried, you should, if you haven't, there's a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank. Yeah. You can look down and man, I was on the ground like, I was like, I was afraid. I was deeply afraid. I was, it was, it was as real as, as anything else could be. And I mean, these are very early days of that technology, relatively speaking. So yeah. I mean, I don't know what to do with that. Same with like crossing the street, we did these experiments across the street in front of a car and, you know, it's being run over by a car. It's terrifying. Yeah. It's just that, yeah. So there's a rich experience to be created there. We're not there yet, but, yeah. And I've seen a lot of people try, like you said, the Google folks, Silicon Valley folks try to create a virtual online education. I don't know. I think they've raised really important questions. Absolutely. Like what makes the education experience fulfilling? What makes it effective? Yeah. These are important questions. And I think what they highlight is we have no clue. Like, there's, Thomas Sowell wrote a book about, a recent book on charter schools. Yeah. I would like to talk to him. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully. Yeah. Such a powerful mind. Yeah. But he, I need to read, I've only heard him talk about the book, but he argues quite seemingly effectively that the public education system is broken. That we blame, he basically says that we kind of blame, like the conditions or the environment, but the upbringing of people, like parenting, blah, blah, blah, like the set of opportunities. But okay, putting that aside, it seems like charter schools, no matter who it is that attends them, does much better than in public schools. And he puts a bunch of data behind it. And in his usual way, as you know, just is very eloquent in arguing his points. Yeah. So that to me just highlights, man, we don't, education is like one of the most important, it's probably the most important thing in our civilization, and we're doing a shitty job of it. Yeah. In academia, in university education and, you know, younger education, the whole thing. The whole thing. And yet, we value just about anyone or anything more than educators. You know, part of it is just the relatively low regard that Americans have for teachers. Also similarly, like just people of service. I think great teachers are the greatest thing in our society. And I would say, now on a controversial note, like Black Lives Matter, you know, great police officers is the greatest thing in our society. Also, like all people that do service, we undervalue cops severe, like this whole defund the police is missing the point. And it's a stupid word. I'm with you on that, Lex. Our neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police, our neighbors across the street are police. They know my, you know, political predilections. And we've gotten along fine for 30 years. And I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today, you tell the people on the force that I appreciate what they're doing. I think it's really important to not tribalize those concerns. I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and philosophers, but it'd be nice to sort of in a focused way, try to see if we can get some recommendations from you. So what three books, technical or fiction or philosophical had a big impact in your life and you would recommend. Spent four hours driving here, perseverating about that. I didn't, I, everything else you sent me as fine. And I actually, I skimmed it and I'm like, I don't want to look at it because I want, I want us to talk. The ones in blue. I'm like, all right. And you know, I've already said that I've found backers work and I put the denial of death out there. Um, is that his best, sorry, a small tangent. Is there other books that of his? Yes. If I could have this count as one that the, the birth and death of meaning, the denial of death and escape from evil are three books of Ernest Becker's that I believe to all be profound in a, in a little sort of brief dance around topics. Um, I've only read denial of death. Like, well, how do those books connect in here? Yeah. Nice. So the, the birth and death of meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation. So I like that for that reason. Escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death more directly, um, to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to peacefully coexist with other folks who don't share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker out there as one. Um, I also like novels a lot. And here I was like, God damn it. No matter what I say, I'm going to be like, yes, but, but the existentialists, do you like all those folks? Come on. You like that literary existential? I do. But I mean, you know, I, I've read all those books. I will tell you the last line of the plague. We learn in times of pestilence that there's more to admire in men than to despise. And I love that. Yeah. Plagues such a, I don't know. I, I find the plague is a brilliant before, before, uh, the plague has come to us in 2020. I, it was just a book about love about, but I'll toss a one that may be less known to folks. I'm enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullers written in 1953 called clock without hands. And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about. Fiction? Fiction. Yeah. What's, uh, what kind of ideas are we talking about? Oh, it, it, all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today, but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill, it's set in the South and the, um, heyday of like segregation. So there's a lot of social issues, a lot of existential issues, but it's basically a novel, a fictional account of someone who finds out that they're terminally ill and who reacts originally as, um, uh, you might expect anyone, uh, becomes more, um, hostile to people who are different, like petty and stupid denies that anything's happening. But, uh, as the book goes on and he comes more to terms, um, with his own mortality, um, it ends lovingly. And then, uh, back to your idea about, you know, love being incredibly potent. That's the, the nice thing, as you mentioned, uh, before with, with Heidegger, I really liked that idea. And I've seen that in people who are terminally ill is they bring, you know, the idea of death becomes, uh, current. It becomes like a thing, you know, I could die. I really liked that idea. I, I can die. Not just tomorrow, but like now, now, now. Yeah. Uh, that's a really useful, I don't even know. I think I've been too afraid to even think about that. Like, like, like sit here and think like in five minutes, in five minutes, it's over. This is it. This is five minutes. It's over. Yeah. So that would be my most recent addition as I really am struck by Heidegger. Would you recommend that? Well, okay. Well, if you have a few years, I remember I tuned out being in time. I was like, I tried to read it. I was like, that's it. It took me 40 years to read Ulysses that could not get past the first five pages. And it took me 40 years to read being in time. It's a slog. And I took a James Joyce course in college. So I've, uh, I, I even, uh, I, I guess read parts of Finnegan's Wake. No way. But like, there's a difference between reading and like, I don't think I understood anything. I like his, uh, short stories on the dead, the dead. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And, um, I like Faulkner, Absalom. Absalom is a, is a fine book. But would you, uh, is there something Heidegger connected in a book you would recommend or no? No. So maybe I got to abandon him. I mean, I mean, being in time is, is awesome. Um, but here's an interesting thing and not to get all academic, but, you know, it's, there's two parts to it. And most of the, most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part. It's in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of, you know, a turning and philosophers don't like that. And I'm like, this is where he's starting to really shine, to really shine for me. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. That's a beautiful set of books. So what, um, advice would you give to a young person today about their career, about life, about, uh, how to survive in this world full of suffering? Yeah. Great. Um, my advice is to get competent advice. That's what I tell my students that don't listen to me. Don't listen to me. Well, you know, I think, um, my, my big piece of advice these days is, you know, again, it's at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, but it's to emphasize a few things. One is, um, you know, so, uh, one of your questions I think was, you know, what's the meaning of life. And of course, the existentialists say life has no meaning, but it doesn't follow from that, that it's intrinsic, that it's meaningless. You know what the existential point is not that life is meaningless so much as it doesn't have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning, you know, which then it opens up, uh, you know, I think it was Kierkegaard who said consciousness gives us the possibility of possibilities. And, but there's another lunatic Oswald Spangler who wrote a book called, uh, decline of the West. And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher Gerta, he says, the purpose of life is to live. And I let that's, so that's one of my pieces of advice. So the possibility of possibilities, it's interesting. So what do you do with this kind of sea of possibilities? Like, well, this is one of the, when, when young folks talk to me, especially these days, uh, is there swimming in a sea of possibilities? Yeah. Well, so this is great. And so that's another existential point, which is that we yearn for freedom. We react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed and then we're paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities, because we're not choking on choice. And, and I'm not sure if this is helpful advice or not, but what I say to folks is that the fact of the matter is, is the, you know, for most people, choice is a first world problem. And sometimes the best option is to do something as silly as it sounds. And then if that doesn't work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom torturing me, uh, when I was young. But you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly ill equipped is that we're at the, I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans where you like picked something and that's what you did. Like I've been at a job for 40 years where you can expect to do better than your parents cause those days are gone. Yeah. And where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit. And so. But still you recommend just do. Yeah. And to do so I'm again, I'm, this is, I'm so back to the Heidegger guy because, all right, I may, you know, I consider myself a professor, but what happens if most of the schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour, but what happens if there's no more restaurants? So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell folks, don't define yourself as a social caricature. Don't, don't limit how you feel about yourself by, through identification with a host of variables that may be uncertain. Maybe temporary. And temporary. What, let's say. No, but of course that gets back to your point earlier, Lex, where you're like, yeah, but when you step out of that, it's extraordinarily discombobulating. So what, I think you talked about an ax of chopping wood and soul from Socrates. Yeah. What is your soul? What is the, the essence of Schellen? Wow. That was like, awesome. Like when God, when you, when you show up at the end of this thing, he kind of looks at you, he's like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember you. Yeah. Well, you know, I, to be honest, what I muse about, is to me, the, when, when people are, I told you, I have to, we have two kids, late 20s, early 30s. And over the years, when people, when we meet people that know our kids and they're like, oh, your kids are kind and decent. And I'd be like, that's what I would like to be. Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated. You know, the Unabomber was a smart guy. Yeah. And I do admire intelligence and I do venerate education and I find that to be tremendously important. But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself, it would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously. Again, as corny as it sounds, I'd like to leave the world a time when I can be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously. Again, as corny as it sounds, I'd like to leave the world a tad better than I found it, or at least do no harm. And, I think you, I think you did all right in that, in that regard. I love that question, Alex. That's a good one. I think everyone should be asked that. What is your soul? I think there's a lot of lingering questions around it. So, I mean, on the point of the soul, you've talked about the meaning of life. Do you have, on a personal level, do you have an answer to the meaning of your life, of something that brought you meaning, happiness, some sense of sense? No, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I'm 66, so I'm in the kind of and not ready to wrap it up, literally or metaphorically, but you look, I look back and just really with a sense of awe and wonder, gratitude, and Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood, from earlier, that like, it's like, you know, stand out as something you're really proud of or just happy to have been on this earth, because that stuff happened. Yeah, that. I mean, you know, my family, also a chunk, my folks, my grandparents are from Eastern Europe, you know, Russia, Austria. As far as we know, some of them never made it out. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a so called product of the American dream. You know, my grandparents were basically peasants. My parents, my dad worked two full time jobs when I was growing up, and I would see him on the weekends. I'd be like, why are you working all the time? He'd be like, so you won't have to. And he said, Look, the world does not owe you a living. And so your first responsibility is to take care of yourself. And then your next responsibility is to take care of other people. And I think you did a pretty good job with that. I don't know. But I so that those are the things that I'm proud of. Well, it's funny. You've been, you've talked about just yourself as a human being. But you've also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe even popularizing the work of Ernest Becker of connecting it of making it legitimate scientifically. I mean, you know, as a human, of course, you want to be you want your ripple to be one that makes the world a better place. But also, I think, in the span of time, I think it's of great value. You've contributed in terms of how we think about the human condition, how we think about ourselves, assuming as finite beings in this world. And I hope also in our technology of engineering intelligence, I think, at least, at least for me, and I'm sure there's a lot of other people like me that your work has been a gift for so well, thank you. Oh, I like that. And we have described ourselves as giant interneurons. I'm like, we have had no original ideas. And maybe that's the only thing that's original about our work is we don't claim to be original. What we claim to have done is to integrate and to connect these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses, you know, so existentialists, they'd be like, evidence? What's that? And yeah, there's now a branch of psychology, experimental, existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of. And that, in turn, has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they may not have otherwise gotten. So I think that's good. Well, Sheldon, it's a huge honor. I can't believe you came down here. I've been a fan of your work. I hope we get to talk again. Huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, Lex. We'll do it again soon, I hope. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sheldon Solomon. And thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and CashApp. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Star Snapper Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Vladimir Nabokov that Sheldon uses in his book, Warm at the Core. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #117

The following is a conversation with Grant Sanderson, his second time on the podcast. He's known to millions of people as the mind behind 3Blue1Brown, a YouTube channel where he educates and inspires the world with the beauty and power of mathematics. Quick summary of the sponsors, Dollar Shave Club, DoorDash, and CashApp. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast, especially for the two new sponsors, Dollar Shave Club and DoorDash. Let me say, as a side note, I think that this pandemic challenged millions of educators to rethink how they teach, to rethink the nature of education. As people know, Grant is a master elucidator of mathematical concepts that may otherwise seem difficult or out of reach for students and curious minds, but he's also an inspiration to teachers, researchers, and people who just enjoy sharing knowledge. Like me, for what it's worth. It's one thing to give a semester's worth of multi hour lectures, it's another to extract from those lectures the most important, interesting, beautiful, and difficult concepts and present them in a way that makes everything fall into place. That is the challenge that is worth taking on. My dream is to see more and more of my colleagues at MIT and world experts across the world summon their inner 3Blue1Brown and create the canonical explainer videos on a topic that they know more than almost anyone else in the world. Amidst the political division, the economic pain, the psychological and medical toll of the virus, masterfully crafted educational content feels like one of the beacons of hope that we can hold onto. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. Of course, after you go immediately, which you already probably have done a long time ago, and subscribe to 3Blue1Brown's YouTube channel, you will not regret it. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of as now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. Especially the two new ones, DoorDash and Dollar Shave Club, they're evaluating us, looking at how many people go to their site and get their stuff in order to determine if they want to support us for the long term, so you know what to do. It's the best way to support this podcast, as always. This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Try them out with a one time offer for only $5 and free shipping at DollarShaveClub.com slash Lex. The starter kit comes with a six blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great. I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over five years now, and actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan podcast, and now we have come full circle. I feel like I've made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those years ago. For the most part, I've just used the razor and the refills, but they encouraged me to try the shave butter, which I've never used before, so I did, and I love it. Not sure how the chemistry of it works out, but it's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience. Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter Set today for just $5 plus free shipping at DollarShaveClub.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by DoorDash. Get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter code LEX. I have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from, and when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention from the programs to the humans were special. These days, for a bit of time, I'm on my own, sadly, so I miss that camaraderie. But actually DoorDash is still there for me. There's a million options that fit into my keto diet ways. Also it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times. Once again, download the DoorDash app and enter code LEX to get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of $15 or more. Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEX PODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. It's one of the best design interfaces of an app that I've ever used. To me, good design is when everything is easy and natural. Bad design is when the app gets in the way either because it's buggy or because it tries too hard to be helpful. I'm looking at you, Clippy. Anyway, there's a big part of my brain and heart that love to design things and also to appreciate great design by others. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEX PODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Grant Sanderson. You've spoken about Richard Feynman as someone you admire. I think last time we spoke, we ran out of time. So I wanted to talk to you about him. Who is Richard Feynman to you in your eyes? What impact did he have on you? I mean, I think a ton of people like Feynman. It's a little bit cliche to say that you like Feynman, right? That's almost like when you don't know what to say about sports and you just point to the Super Bowl or something or something you enjoy watching. But I do actually think there's a layer to Feynman that sits behind the iconography. One thing that just really struck me was this letter that he wrote to his wife two years after she died. So during the Manhattan Project, she had polio. Tragically she died. They were just young, madly in love. And the icon of Feynman is almost this mildly sexist, womanizing philanderer, at least on the personal side. But you read this letter, and I can try to pull it up for you if I want. And it's just this absolutely heartfelt letter to his wife saying how much he loves her even though she's dead and what she means to him, how no woman can ever measure up to her. And it shows you that the Feynman that we've all seen in Surely You're Joking is different from the Feynman in reality. And I think the same kind of goes in his science, where he sometimes has this output of being this aw shucks character, like everyone else is coming in with these fancyfalutin formulas, but I'm just going to try to whittle it down to its essentials, which is so appealing because we love to see that kind of thing. But when you get into it, what he was doing was actually quite deep, very much mathematical. That should go without saying, but I remember reading a book about Feynman in a cafe once, and this woman looked at me and saw that it was about Feynman. She was like, oh, I love him. I read Surely You're Joking. And she started explaining to me how he was never really a math person. And I don't understand how that can possibly be a public perception about any physicist, but for whatever reason, that worked into his art that he shooed off math in place of true science. The reality of it is he was deeply in love with math and was much more going in that direction and had a clicking point into seeing that physics was a way to realize that and all the creativity that he could output in that direction was instead poured towards things like fundamental, not even fundamental theories, just emergent phenomena and everything like that. So to answer your actual question, like what, what, what I like about, uh, his way of going at things is this constant desire to reinvent it for himself. Like when he would consume papers, the way he'd describe it, he's, he would start to see what problem he was trying to solve and then just try to solve it himself to get a sense of personal ownership. And then from there, see what others had done. Is that how you see problems yourself? Like that's actually an interesting point when you first are inspired by a certain idea that you maybe want to teach or visualize or just explore on your own. I'm sure you're captured by some possibility and magic of it. Do you read the work of others? Like do you go through the proofs or do you try to rediscover everything yourself? So I think the things that I've learned best and have the deepest ownership of are the ones that have some element of rediscovery. The problem is that really slows you down. And this is for my, for my part, it's actually a big fault. Like this is part of why I'm, I'm not an active researcher. I'm not like at the depth of the field. A lot of other people are the stuff that I do learn. I try to learn it really well. Um, but other times you do need to get through it at a certain pace. You do need to get to a point of a problem you're trying to solve. So obviously you need to be well equipped to read things, uh, without that reinvention component and see how others have done it. But I think if you choose a few core building blocks along the way and you say, I'm really going to try to approach this, um, before I see how this person went at it, I'm really going to try to approach it for myself. No matter what you gain, all sorts of inarticulatable intuitions about that topic, which aren't going to be there. If you simply go through the proof, for example, you're going to be, um, trying to come up with counter examples. You're going to try to come up with, um, intuitive examples, all sorts of things where you're populating your brain with data. And the ones that you come up with are likely to be different than the one that the text comes up with and that like lends at a different angle. So that aspect also slowed Feynman down in a lot of respects. I think there was a period when like the rest of physics was running away from him. Um, but in so far as got, it got him to where he was, uh, I, I kind of resonate with that. I just, I would, I would be nowhere near it cause I not like him at all, but it's like a, uh, state to aspire to. You know, just to link in a small point you made that you're not a quote unquote active researcher, do you, you're swimming often in reasonably good depth about a lot of topics. Do you sometimes want to like dive deep at a certain moment and say, like, cause you probably built up a hell of an amazing intuition about what is and isn't true within these worlds. Do you ever want to just dive in and see if you can discover something new? Yeah. I, I think one of my biggest regrets from undergrad is not having built better relationships with the professors I had there. And I think a big part of success and research is that element of like mentorship and like people giving you the kind of scaffolded problems to carry along for my own like goals right now. I feel like, um, I'm pretty good at exposing math to others and like want to continue doing that for my personal learning. I, are you familiar with like the hedgehog Fox dynamic? I think this was, um, either the ancient Greeks came up with it or it was pretended to be something drawn from the ancient Greeks that I don't know who to point it to, but the probably Mark Twain. It is that you've got two types of people or especially two types of researchers. There's the Fox that knows many different things and then the hedgehog that knows one thing very deeply. So like von Neumann would have been the Fox. Obviously someone who knows many different things, just very foundational, a lot of different fields. Um, Einstein would have been more of a hedge thinking really deeply about one particular thing and both are very necessary for making progress. Um, so between those two, I would definitely see myself as like the Fox where, uh, I'll try to get my pause in like a whole bunch of different things. And at the moment I just think I don't know enough of anything to make like a significant contribution to any of them. But I do see value in, um, like having a decently deep understanding of a wide variety of things. Like most people who, uh, know computer science really deeply don't necessarily know physics very deeply or, uh, many of the aspects, like different fields in math, even let's say you have like an analytic number theory versus an algebraic number theory. Like these two things end up being related to very different fields. Like some of them more complex analysis, some of them more like algebraic geometry. And then when you just go out so far as to take those adjacent fields, place one, you know, PhD student into a seminar of another ones, they don't understand what the other one's saying at all. Like you take the complex analysis specialist inside the algebraic geometry seminar, they're as lost as you or I would be. But I think, uh, going around and like trying to have some sense of what this big picture is certainly has personal value for me. I don't know if I would ever make like new contributions in those fields, but I do think I could make new like expositional contributions where there's kind of a notion of, uh, things that are known, but like haven't been explained very well. Well, first of all, I think most people would agree your videos, your teaching the way you see the world is fundamentally often new, like you're creating something new and it almost feels like research, even just like the visualizations, uh, the multidimensional visualization we'll talk about. I mean, you're revealing something very interesting that, uh, yeah, just feels like research feels like science feels like the cutting edge of the very thing of which like new ideas and new discoveries are made of. I do think you're being a little bit more generous than is necessarily. And I promise that's not even false humility because I sometimes think when I research a video, I'll learn like 10 times as much as I need for the video itself and it ends up feeling kind of elementary. Um, so I have a sense of just how far away like the stuff that I cover is from the actual depth. I think that's natural, but I think that could also be a mathematics thing. I feel like in the machine learning world, you like two weeks in, you feel like you've basically mastered in mathematics. It's like, well, everything is either trivial or impossible. And it's like a shockingly thin line between the two where you can find something that's totally impenetrable. And then after you get a feel for it, it's like, Oh yeah, that whole, that whole subject is actually trivial in some way. So maybe that's what goes on. Every researcher is just on the other end of that hump and it feels like it's so far away, but one step actually gets them there. What do you think about, uh, sort of Feynman's teaching style or another perspective of use of visualization? Well his teaching style is interesting because people have described like the Feynman effect where while you're watching his lectures or while he reading his lectures, everything makes such perfect sense. So as an entertainment session, it's wonderful because it gives you this, um, this intellectual satisfaction that you don't get from anywhere else that you like finally understand it. But the Feynman effect is that you can't really recall what it is that gave you that insight, you know, even a week later. And this is, um, this is true of a lot of books and a lot of lectures where the retention is never quite what we hope it is. Um, so there is a risk that, uh, the stuff that I do also fits that same bill where at best it's giving this kind of intellectual candy on giving a glimpse of feeling like you understand something, but unless you do something active, like reinventing it yourself, like doing problems, um, to solidify it, um, even things like space repetition memory to just make sure that you have like the building blocks of what do all the terms mean. Unless you're doing something like that, it's not actually going to stick. So the very same thing that's so admirable about Feynman's lectures, which is how damn satisfying they are to consume might actually also reveal a little bit of the flaw that we should as educators all look out for, which is that that does not correlate with long term learning. We'll talk about it a little bit. I think you've done some interactive stuff. I mean, even in your videos, the awesome thing that Feynman couldn't do at the time is you could, since it's programmed, you can like tinker, like play with stuff. You could take this value and change it. You can like heroes, take the value of this variable and change it to build up an intuition, to move along the surface or to, to change the shape of something. I think that's almost an equivalent of you doing it yourself. It's not quite there, but you as a viewer, um, yeah, do you think there's some value in that interactive element? Yeah, well, so what's interesting is you're saying that, and the videos are non interactive in the sense that there's a play button and a pause button. Um, and you could ask like, Hey, while you're programming these things, why don't you program it into an interactable version? You know, make it a Jupiter notebook that people can play with, which I should do. And that like would be better. I think the thing about interactives though is most people consuming them, um, just sort of consume what the author had in mind. Uh, and that's kind of what they want. Like I have a ton of friends who make interactive explanations. And when you look into the analytics of how people use them, there's a small sliver that genuinely use it as a playground to have experiments. And maybe that small sliver is actually who you're targeting and the rest don't matter. Um, but most people consume it just as a piece of, um, like well constructed literature that maybe you tweak with the example a little bit to see what it's getting at. But in that way, I do think like a video can get most of the benefits of the interactive, like the interactive app, as long as you make the interactive for yourself and you decide what the best narrative to spin is. Um, as a more concrete example, like my process with, I made this video about, um, SIR models for epidemics and it's like this agent based bottling thing where you tweak some things about how the epidemic spreads and you want to see how that affects its evolution. Um, my, my, uh, format for making that was very different than others where rather than scripting it ahead of time, I just made the playground and then I played a bunch, uh, and then I saw what stories there were to tell within that. Um, that's cool. So your, your video had that kind of structure, it had, uh, like five or six stories or whatever it was. And like, it was basically, okay, here's a simulation, here's a model. What can we discover with this model? And here's five things I found after playing with it. Well, cause here, the thing is a way that you could do that project is you make the model and then you put it out and you say, here's a thing for the world to play with, like come to my website where you interact with this thing. Um, and, and people did like sort of remake it in a, um, JavaScript way so that you can go to that website and you can test your own hypotheses. But I think a meaningful part of the value to add is not just the technology, but to give the story around it as well. And like, that's kind of my job. It's not just to like make the, uh, the visuals that someone will look at it's to be the one to decide what's the interesting thing to walk through here. Um, and even though there's lots of other interesting paths that one could take, that can be kind of daunting when you're just sitting there in a sandbox and you're given this tool with like five different sliders and you're told to like play and discover things. Where do you do? What do you start? What are my hypotheses? What should I be asking? Like a little bit of guidance in that direction can be what actually sparks curiosity to make someone want to, um, imagine more about it. A few videos I've seen you do, I don't know how often you do it, but there's almost a tangential like pause where you, here's a cool thing you say like, here's a cool thing, but it's outside the scope of this video essentially, but I'll leave it to you as homework essentially to like figure out it's a cool thing to explore. I wish I could say that wasn't a function of laziness and that's like, you've worked so hard on making the 20 minutes already that to extend it out even further, it would take more time. And one of your cooler videos, the homomorphic, like from the Mobius strip to this, yeah, that's the super and you're like, yeah, you can't, uh, you can't transform the Mobius strip into a, into a surface without it intersecting itself, but I'll leave it to you to see why that is. Well, I hope that's not exactly how I phrase it because I think what my hope would be is that I leave it to you to think about why you would expect that to be true and then to want to know what aspects of a Mobius strip do you want to formalize such that you can prove that intuition that you have because at some point now you're starting to invent algebraic topology. If you have these vague instincts like I want to get this Mobius strip, I want to, um, fit it such that it's all above the plane, but it's boundary sits exactly on the plane. I don't think I can do that without crossing itself, but that feels really vague. How do I formalize it? And as you're starting to formalize that, that's what's going to get you to try to come up with a definition for what it means to be orientable or non orientable. And like once you have that motivation, a lot of the otherwise arbitrary things that are sitting at the very beginning of a topology stack textbook start to make a little more sense. Yeah. And I mean that, that whole video beautifully was a motivation for topology school. That was my, well, my hope with that is I feel like topology is, um, I don't want to say it's taught wrong, but I do think sometimes it's popularized in the wrong way where, uh, you know, you'll hear these things that people saying, Oh, topologists, they're very interested in surfaces that you can bend and stretch, but you can't cut or glue. Are they? Why? Yeah. There's all sorts of things you can be interested in with random, like imaginative manipulations of things. Is that really what like mathematicians are into? And the short answer is not, not really. That's uh, it's not as if someone was sitting there thinking like, I wonder what the properties of clay are by add some arbitrary rules about what, when I can't cut it and when I can't glue it instead, it's, there's a ton of pieces of math that, um, can actually be equivalent to, uh, like these very general structures that's like geometry, except you don't have exact distances. You just want to maintain a notion of closeness. And once you get it to those general structures, constructing mappings between them translate into non trivial facts about other parts of math and that I just, I don't think that's actually like popularized. Um, I don't even think it's emphasized well enough when you're starting to take a topology class because you kind of have these two problems. It's like either it's too squishy. You're just talking about coffee mugs and donuts, or it's a little bit too rigor first. And you're talking about, um, the axiom systems with open sets and an open set is not the opposite of closed set. So sorry about that. Everyone, we have a notion of clopin sets for ones that are both at the same time. Yeah. It's just, it's not, it's not an intuitive axiom system in comparison to other fields of math. So you as the student like really have to walk through mud to get there and you're constantly confused about how this relates to the beautiful things about coffee mugs and Mobius strips and such. And it takes a really long time to actually see like see topology in the way that mathematicians see topology. But I don't think it needs to take that time. I think there's, um, this is making me feel like I need to make more videos on the topic because I think you do, but you know, I've also seen it in my narrow view. Uh, like, um, I find game theory very beautiful and I know topology has been used, uh, elegantly to prove things in game theory. Yeah. You have like facts that seem very strange. Like I could tell you, you stir your coffee and um, after you stir it and like, let's say all the molecules settled to like not moving again, one of the molecules will be basically in the same position it was before. Um, you have all sorts of fixed point theorems like this, right? That kind of fixed point theorem directly relevant to Nash equilibriums, right? Um, so you can imagine popularizing it by describing the coffee fact, but then you're left to wonder like who cares about if a molecule of coffee like stays in the same spot? Is this what we're paying our mathematicians for? Um, you have this very elegant mapping onto economics in a way that's very concrete or very, I shouldn't say concrete, very, uh, tangible, like actually adds value to people's lives through the predictions that it makes. Uh, but that line isn't always drawn because like you have to get a little bit technical in order to properly draw that line out, um, and often I think popularized forms of media just shy away from being a little too technical for sure. Uh, by the way, for people who are watching the video, I do not condone the message in this mug. It's the only one I have, which is this. The snuggle is real. By the way, for anyone watching, I do condone the message of that mug. The snuggle is real. The snuggle is real. Okay, so you mentioned the SIR model. I think, uh, there are certain ideas there of growth of exponential growth. What maybe have you learned about, um, pandemics from, from making that video? Because it was kind of exploratory. You were kind of building up an intuition and it's, again, people should watch the video. It's kind of an abstract view. It's not really modeling in detail. The whole field of epidemiology, those, those people, they go really far in terms of modeling, like how people move about. I don't know if you've seen it, but like there is the mobility patterns, like how, like the track, like how many people you encounter in a certain situations when you go to a school, when you go to a mall, they like model every aspect of that for a particular city. Like they have maps of actual city streets. They model it really well and natural patterns of the people have it's crazy. So you don't do any of that. You're just doing an abstract model to explore different ideas of simple pedigree. Well, because I don't want to pretend like an epidemiologist, I'm an epidemiologist. Like we have a ton of armchair epidemiologists and the spirit of that was more like, uh, can we through a little bit of play, uh, draw like reasonable ish conclusions. Um, and also just like, uh, get ourselves in a position where we can judge the validity of a model. Like, I think people should look at that and they should criticize it. They should point to all the ways that it's wrong because it's definitely naive, right? And the way that it's set up. Um, but to say like what, what lessons from that hold, like thinking about the are not value and what that represents and what it can imply. Um, so are not is if you are infectious and you're in a population which is completely susceptible, uh, what's the average number of people that you're going to infect during your infectiousness? Um, so certainly during the beginning of an epidemic, this basically gives you kind of the, um, the exponential growth rate. Like if every person infects two others, you've got that one, two, four, eight, uh, exponential growth pattern. Um, as it goes on and, uh, let's say it's something, um, uh, endemic where you've got like a ton of people who have had it, uh, and are recovered, then, uh, you, you would, the are not value doesn't tell you that as directly because a lot of the people you interact with aren't susceptible, but in the early phases it does. Um, and this is like the fundamental constant that it seems like epidemiologists look at and you know, the whole goal is to get that down. If you can get it below one, then it's no longer epidemic. If it's equal to one, then it's endemic, um, and it's above one, then your epidemic. So, uh, like just teaching what that value is and giving some intuitions on how do certain changes in behavior change that value and then what does that imply for exponential growth? I think those are, um, general enough lessons and they're like resilient to all of the chaoses of the world, um, that it's still like valid to take from the video. I mean, one of the interesting aspects of that is just exponential growth and we think about growth. Is that the one of the first times you've done a video on, on, uh, no, of course not the whole, uh, well there's identity. Okay. So sure. I guess I've done a lot of videos about exponential growth in the circular direction, uh, only minimal in the normal direction. I mean, another way to ask, like, do you think we're able to reason intuitively about exponential growth? It's, it's funny. I think it's, um, I think it's extremely intuitive to humans and then we train it out of ourselves such that it's then really not intuitive and then I think it can become intuitive again when you study a technical field. Uh, so what I mean by that is, um, have you ever heard of these studies where in a, uh, like anthropological setting where you're studying a group that has been disassociated from a lot of like modern society and you ask what number is between one and nine and maybe you would ask you, you've got like one rock and you've got nine rocks, you're like what pile is halfway in between these and our instinct is usually to say five. That's the number that sits right between one and nine. Um, but sometimes when a numeracy and, uh, the kind of just basic arithmetic that we have isn't in a society, the natural instinct is three because it's, uh, in between in an exponential sense and a geometric sense that, uh, one is three times bigger and then the next one is three times bigger than that. So it's like, what's, you know, if you have one friend versus a hundred friends, what's in between that? Ten friends seems like the social status in between those two states. So that's like deeply intuitive to us to think logarithmically like that. Um, and for some reason we kind of train it out of ourselves to start thinking linearly about things. So in the sense, yeah, the early, early basic math is, uh, yeah, forces us to take a step back. It's, it's the same criticism if there's any of science is the lessons of science make us like see the world in a slightly narrow sense to where we, we have an over exaggerated confidence that we understand everything as opposed to just understanding a small slice of it. But I think that probably only really goes for small numbers cause the real counterintuitive thing about exponential growth is like as the numbers start to get big. So I bet if you took that same setup and you asked them, oh, if I keep tripling the size of this rock pile, you know, um, seven times, how big will it be? I bet it would be surprisingly big even to like an a society without numeracy. And that's the side of it that, um, I think is pretty counterintuitive to us, uh, but that you can basically train into people like I think computer scientists and physicists when they're looking at the early numbers of, um, like COVID were, they were the ones thinking like, oh God, this is following an exact exponential curve. Um, and I heard that from a number of people, uh, so it's, and, and almost all of them are like techies in some capacity, probably just cause I like live in the Bay area, but, but for sure they, they're cognizant of this kind of, this kind of growth is present in a lot of natural systems and a lot of, in a lot of, in a lot of systems. Uh, I don't know if you've seen like, I mean, there's a lot of ways to visualize this obviously, but Raker as well, I think was the one that had this like chess board where, um, every, every square on the chess board, you double the number of stones or something in that chess board. I've heard, this is like an old proverb where it's like, you know, someone, the King offered him a gift and he said, ah, the only gift I would like very modest, give me a single grain of rice for the first chess board and then two grains of rice for the next square. Then twice that for the next square and just continue on. That's my only modest ask your sire and like, it's all, you know, more grains of rice than there are, uh, anything in the world, um, by the time you get to the end. And I, I, my intuition falls apart there, like, I would have never predicted that, like for some reason, that's a really compelling, uh, illustration, how poorly breaks down. Just like you said, maybe we're okay for the first few piles, but after, uh, of rocks, but after a while it's game over. You know, the other classic example for, um, gauging someone's intuitive understanding of exponential growth is, uh, I've got like a Lily pad on a, on like really big lake, um, like lake Michigan and that Lily pad replicates, it doubles, um, one day and then it doubles the next day and it doubles the next day. Um, and after 50 days, um, it actually is going to cover the entire lake. Okay. So after how many days does it cover half the lake? 49. So you, you have a good instinct for exponential growth. Right. So I think a lot of, uh, like the knee jerk reaction is sometimes to think that it's like half the amount of time or to at least be like surprised that like after 49 days, you've only covered half of it. Um, yeah. I mean, that's the reason you heard a pause for me. Um, I literally thought that can't be right. Right. Yeah, exactly. So even when you know the fact and you do the division, it's like, wow. So you've gotten like that whole time and then day 49, it's only covering half. And then after that it gets the whole thing. But I think you can make that even more visceral if rather than going one day before you say how long until, um, it's covered 1% of the lake, right. And it's, uh, so what would that be? Um, how many times you have to double to get over a hundred, like seven, six and a half times, something like that. Right. So at that point you're looking at 43, 44 days into it. You're not even at 1% of the lake. So you've, you've experienced, you know, 44 out of 50 days and you're like, ah, that's really bad. It's just 1% of the lake. But then next thing you know, it's the entire lake. You're wearing a space X shirt. So let me ask you, let me ask you one, one person who talks about exponential, you know, just the miracle of the exponential function in general is Elon Musk. So he kind of advocates the idea of exponential thinking, you know, realizing that technological development can, at least in the short term, follow exponential improvement, which breaks apart our intuition, our ability to reason about what is and isn't impossible. So he's a big one. It's a good leadership kind of style of saying like, look, the thing that everyone thinks is impossible is actually possible because exponentials. But what's your sense about, um, about that kind of way to see the world? Well, so I think it's, um, it can be very inspiring to note when something like Moore's law is another great example where you have this exponential pattern that holds shockingly well. Um, and it enables, um, just better lives to be led. I think the people who took Moore's law seriously in the sixties, we're seeing that, wow, it's not going to be too long before like these giant computers that are either batch processing or time shared, you could actually have one small enough to put on your desk on top of your desk and you could do things. And if they took it seriously, like you have people predicting smartphones like a long time ago. Um, and it's only out of like kind of this, I don't want to say faith in exponentials, but an understanding that that's what's happening. What's more interesting I think is to, um, really understand why exponential growth happens and that the mechanism behind it is when the rate of change is proportional to the thing in and of itself. So the reason that technology would grow exponentially is only going to be if, um, the rate of progress is proportional to the amount that you have. So that the software you write enables you to write more software. Um, and I think we see this with the internet, like the advent of the internet makes it faster to learn things, which makes it faster to, uh, create new things. Um, I think this is, uh, oftentimes why like investment will grow exponentially that the more resources a company has, if it knows how to use them, well, the more, uh, the more it can actually grow. So, I mean, you know, you referenced Elon Musk. I think he seems to really be into vertically integrating his companies. I think a big part of that is because you have the sense, what you want is to make sure that the things that you develop, you have ownership of in the, they enable further development of the adjacent parts, right? So it's not just this, you, you see a curve and you're blindly drawing a line through it. What's much more interesting is to ask, when do you have this proportional growth property? Um, because then you can also recognize when it breaks down, like in an epidemic, as you approach saturation, that would break down. Um, as you do anything that, uh, skews what that proportionality constant is, um, you can make it maybe not break down as being an exponential, but it can seriously slow what that exponential rate is. This is the opposite of a pandemic is you want, in terms of ideas, you want to minimize barriers that, um, prevent the spread. You want to maximize the spread of impact. So like you want it to, to grow when you're doing technological development is so that you do hold up that rate holds up. And that's, that's almost like, uh, like an operational challenge of like how you run a company, how you run a group of people is that any one invention has a ripple that's unstopped. And that ripple effect then has its own ripple effects and so on. And that continues. Yeah. Like Moore's law is fascinating. And the, like on a psychological level and a human level, cause it's not exponential. It's, it's just a consistent set of like what you would call like S curves, which is like, it's constantly like breakthrough innovations nonstop. That's a good point. Like it might not actually be an example of exponentials because of something which grows in proportion to itself. But instead it's almost like a benchmark that was set out that everyone's been pressured to meet. And it's like all these innovations and micro inventions along the way, rather than some consistent sit back and just let the lily pad grow across the lake phenomenon. And it's also that there's a human psychological level for sure of like the four minute mile, like it's something about it. Like saying that, look, there is, you know, Moore's law, it's a law. So like it's a, it's certainly an achievable thing. You know, we achieved it for the last decade, for the last two decades, for the last three decades, you just keep going and it somehow makes it happen. I mean, it makes people, I'm continuously surprised in this world how few people do the best work in the world, like in that particular, whatever that field is, like it's very often that like the genius, I mean, you couldn't argue that community matters, but it's certain like I've been in groups of engineers where like one person is clearly like doing an incredible amount of work and just is the genius and it's fascinating to see basically it's kind of the Steve Jobs idea is maybe the whole point is to create an atmosphere where the genius can discover themselves, like have the opportunity to do the best work of their life and yeah, and that the exponential is just milking that. It's like rippling the idea that it's possible and that idea that it's possible finds the right people for the four minute mile and the idea that it's possible finds the right runners to run it and then expose the number of people who can run faster than four minutes. It's kind of interesting to, I don't know, basically the positive way to see that is most of us are way more intelligent, have way more potential than we ever realized. I guess that's kind of depressing, but I mean like the ceiling for most of us is much higher than we ever realized. That is true. A good book to read if you want that sense is Peak, which essentially talks about peak performance in a lot of different ways, like chess, London cab drivers, how many pushups people can do, short term memory tasks, and it's meant to be like a concrete manifesto about deliberate practice and such, but the one sensation you come out with is wow, no matter how good people are at something, they can get better and like way better than we think they could. I don't know if that's actually related to exponential growth, but I do think it's a true phenomenon that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly no law of exponential growth in human innovation. Well, I don't know. Well kind of, there is. I think it's very interesting to see when innovations in one field allow for innovations in another. Like the advent of computing seems like a prerequisite for the advent of chaos theory. You have this truth about physics and the world that in theory could be known. You could find Lorenz's equations without computers, but in practice, it was just never going to be analyzed that way unless you were doing like a bunch of simulations and that you could computationally see these models. So it's like physics allowed for computers, computers allowed for better physics, and you know, wash, rinse and repeat. That self proportionality, that's exponential. So I think I wouldn't think it's too far to say that that's a law of some kind. Yeah, a fundamental law of the universe is that these descendants of apes will exponentially improve their technology and one day be taken over by the AGI. That's built in. That'll make the video game fun, whoever created this thing. So I mean, since you're wearing a space X shirt, let me ask. I didn't realize I was wearing a space X shirt. I apologize. It's on point. So it's on topic. I'll take it. It's the first crewed mission out into space since the space shuttle and just by first time ever by a commercial company, I mean, it's an incredible accomplishment, I think, but it's also just an incredible, it inspires imagination amongst people that this is the first step in a long, vibrant journey of humans into space. So how do you feel? Is this exciting to you? Yeah, it is. I think it's great. The idea of seeing it basically done by smaller entities instead of by governments. I mean, it's a heavy collaboration between space X and NASA in this case, but moving in the direction of not necessarily requiring an entire country and its government to make it happen, but that you can have something closer to a single company doing it. We're not there yet because it's not like they're unilaterally saying like we're just shooting people up into space. It's just a sign that we're able to do more powerful things with smaller groups of people. I find that inspiring. Innovate quickly. I hope we see people land on Mars in my lifetime. Do you think we will? I think so. I mean, I think there's a ton of challenges there, right? Like radiation being kind of the biggest one. And I think there's a ton of people who look at that and say, why? Why would you want to do that? Let's let the robots do the science for us. But I think there's enough people who are genuinely inspired about broadening the worlds that we've touched or people who think about things like backing up the light of consciousness with super long term visions of terraforming, like as long as there's a backing up the light of consciousness. Yeah. I thought that if Earth goes to hell, we've got to have a backup somewhere. A lot of people see that as pretty out there and it's like not in the short term future, but I think that's an inspiring thought. I think that's a reason to get up in the morning and I feel like most employees at SpaceX feel that way too. Do you think we'll colonize Mars one day? No idea. Like either AGI kills us first or if we're like allowed, I don't know if it'll take us for allowed. Well, like honestly, it would take such a long time. Like, okay, you might have a small colony, right? Something like what you see in the Martian, but not like people living comfortably there. But if you want to talk about actual like second Earth kind of stuff, that's just like way far out there and the future moves so fast that it's hard to predict. We might just kill ourselves before that even becomes viable. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of possibilities where it could be just, it doesn't have to be on a planet, we could be floating out in space, have a space faring backup solution that doesn't have to deal with the constraints that a planet, I mean, a planet provides a lot of possibilities and resources, but also has some constraints. Yeah. I mean, for me, for some reason, it's a deeply exciting possibility. Oh yeah. Yeah. All of the people who were like skeptical about it are like, why do we care about going to Mars? Like, what makes you care about anything that's inspiring? It's hard. It actually is hard to hear that because exactly as you put it on a philosophical level, it's hard to say, why do anything? I don't know. It's like the people say like, I've been doing like an insane challenge last 30 something days. Your pull ups? The pull ups and push ups and like, a bunch of people are like, awesome. They're insane, but awesome. And then some people are like, why? Why do anything? I don't know. There's a calling. It's, I'm with JFK a little bit is because we do these things because they're hard. There's something in the human spirit that says like, same with like a math problem. There's something you fail once and it's like this feeling that, you know what, I'm not going to back down from this. There's something to be discovered in overcoming this thing. So what I like about it is, and I also like this about the moon missions, sure, it's kind of arbitrary, but you can't move the target. So you can't make it easier and say that you've accomplished the goal. And when that happens, it just demands actual innovation, right? Like protecting humans from the radiation in space on the flight there while they're hard problem demands innovation. You can't move the goalpost to make that easier. But certainly the innovations required for things like that will be relevant in a bunch of other domains too. So like the idea of doing something merely because it's hard, it's like loosely productive. Great. But as long as you can't move the goalposts, there's probably going to be these secondary benefits that like we should all strive for. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to formulate the Mars colonization problem as something that has a deadline, which is the problem. But if there was a deadline, then the amount of things we would come up with by forcing ourselves to figure out how to colonize that place would be just incredible. This is what people, like the internet didn't get created because people sat down and try to figure out how do I, you know, send TikTok videos of myself dancing to people. They, you know, it was, there's an application. I mean, actually I don't even know what do you think the application for the internet was when it was, it must've been very low level basic network communication within DARPA, like military based, like how do I send like a networking, how do I send information securely between two places? Maybe it was an encryption. I'm totally speaking totally outside of my knowledge, but like it was probably intended for a very narrow, small group of people. Well, so I mean, it was, there was like this small community of people who are really interested in timesharing computing and like interactive computing in contrast with a batch processing. And then the idea that as you set up like a timesharing center, basically meaning kind of multiple people like logged in and using that like central computer, why not make it accessible to others? And this was kind of what I had always thought like, Oh, is this like fringe group that was interested in this new kind of computing and they all like got themselves together. But the thing is like DARPA wouldn't act, you wouldn't have the U S government funding that just for the funds of it, right? In some sense, that's what ARPA was all about was like just really advanced research for the sake of having advanced research and it doesn't have to pay out with utility soon. But the core parts of its development were happening like in the middle of the Vietnam war when there was budgetary constraints all over the place. I only learned this recently, actually, like if you look at the documents, basically justifying the budget for the ARPANET as they were developing it, and not just keeping it where it was, but actively growing it while all sorts of other departments were having their funding cut because of the war, a big part of it was national defense in terms of having like a more robust communication system, like the idea of packet switching versus circuit switching. You could kind of make this case that in some calamitous circumstance where a central location gets nuked, this is a much more resilient way to still have your communication lines that like traditional telephone lines weren't as resilient to, which I just found very interesting. Even something that we see as so happy go lucky is just a bunch of computer nerds trying to get like interactive computing out there. The actual thing that made it funded and thing that made it advance when it did was because of this direct national security question and concern. I don't know if you've read it. I haven't read it. I don't know if I've been meaning to read it, but Neil deGrasse Tyson actually came out with a book that talks about like science in the context of the military, like basically saying all the great science we've done in the 20th century was like because of the military. He paints a positive, it's not like a critical, a lot of people say like military industrial complex and so on. Another way to see the military and national security is like a source of, like you said, headlines and like hard things you can't move, like almost like scaring yourself into being productive. It is that. I mean, Manhattan Project is a perfect example, probably the quintessential example. That one is a little bit more macabre than others because of like what they were building, but in terms of how many focused, smart hours of human intelligence get pointed towards a topic per day, you're just maxing it out with that sense of worry. In that context, everyone there was saying like, we've got to get the bomb before Hitler does and that just lights a fire under you that I, again, like the circumstances macabre, but I think that's actually pretty healthy, especially for researchers that are otherwise going to be really theoretical to take these like theorizers and say, make this real physical thing happen. Meaning a lot of it is going to be unsexy, a lot of it's going to be like young Feynman sitting there kind of inventing a notion of computation in order to like compute what they needed to compute more quickly with like the rudimentary automated tools that they had available. I think you see this with Bell Labs also where you've got otherwise very theorizing minds in very pragmatic contexts that I think is like really helpful for the theory as well as for the applications. I think that stuff can be positive for progress. You mentioned Bell Labs and Manhattan Project. This kind of makes me curious for the things you've create, which are quite singular. Like if you look at all YouTube or just not YouTube, it doesn't matter what it is. It's just teaching content, art, it doesn't matter. It's like, yep, that's, that's grant, right? That's unique. I know you're teaching style and everything. Does it, Manhattan Project and Bell Labs was like famously a lot of brilliant people, but there's a lot of them. They play off of each other. So like my question for you is that, does it get lonely? Honestly, that right there, I think is the biggest part of my life that I would like to change in some way that I look at a Bell Labs type situation and I'm like, God damn, I love that whole situation and I'm so jealous of it and you're like reading about Hamming and then you see that he also shared an office with Shannon and you're like, of course he did. Of course they shared an office. That's how these ideas get. And they actually probably very likely worked separately. Yeah, totally, totally separate. But there's a literally, and sorry to interrupt, there's a literally magic that happens when you run into each other, like on the way to like getting a snack or something. Conversations you overhear, it's other projects you're pulled into, it's like puzzles that colleagues are sharing, like all of that. I have some extent of it just because I try to stay well connected in communities of people who think in similar ways. But it's not in the day to day in the same way, which I would like to fix somehow. That's one of the, I would say one of the biggest, well, one of the many drawbacks, negative things about this current pandemic is that whatever the term is, but like chance collisions are significantly reduced. I saw, I don't know why I saw this, but on my brother's work calendar, he had a scheduled slot with someone that he scheduled a meeting and the title of the whole meeting was no specific agenda. I just missed the happenstance serendipitous conversations that we used to have, which the pandemic and remote work has so cruelly taken away from us. Brilliant. That's brilliant. I'm like, that's the way to do it. You just schedule those things, schedule the serendipitous interaction. That's like, I mean, you can't do it in an academic setting, but it's basically like going to a bar and sitting there just for the strangers you might meet, just the strangers or striking up a conversation with strangers on the train. Harder to do when you're deeply like maybe myself or maybe a lot of academic types who are like introverted and avoid human contact as much as possible. So it's nice when it's forced, those chance collisions, but maybe scheduling is a possibility but for the most part, do you work alone? I'm sure you struggle a lot. You probably hit moments when you look at this and you say like, this is the wrong way to show it. It's a long way to visualize it. I'm making it too hard for myself. I'm going down the wrong direction. This is too long. This is too short. All those self doubt that could be paralyzing. What do you do in those moments? I actually much prefer like work to be a solitary affair for me. That's like a personality quirk. I would like it to be in an environment with others and like collaborative in the sense of ideas exchanged. But those phenomena you're describing when you say this is too long, this is too short, this visualization sucks, it's way easier to say that to yourself than it is to say to a collaborator. And I know that's just a thing that I'm not good at. So in that way, it's very easy to just throw away a script because the script isn't working. It's hard to tell someone else they should do the same. Actually last time we talked, I think it was like very close to me talking Don Knuth was kind of cool. Like two people that... I can't believe you got that interview. It's the hard... No, can I brag about something? Please. My favorite thing is Don Knuth, after did the interview, he offered to go out to hot dogs with me. To get hot dogs. That was never... Like people ask me what's the favorite interview you've ever done and that has to be... But unfortunately I couldn't, I had a thing after. So I had to turn down Don Knuth. You missed Knuth dogs? Knuth dogs. Sorry. So that was a little bragging, but the hot dogs, he's such a sweet. But the reason I bring that up is he works through problems alone as well. He prefers that struggle, the struggle of it. Writers like Stephen King often talk about their process of what they do, what they eat when they wake up, when they sit down, how they like their desk on a perfectly productive day. What they like to do, how long they like to work for, what enables them to think deeply, all that kind of stuff. Hunter S. Thompson did a lot of drugs. Everybody has their own thing. Do you have a thing? If you were to lay out a perfect productive day, what would that schedule look like do you think? Part of that's hard to answer because like the mode of work I do changes a lot from day to day. Like some days I'm writing. The thing I have to do is write a script. Some days I'm animating. The thing I have to do is animate. Sometimes I'm like working on the animation library. The thing I have to do is like a little, I'm not a software engineer, but something in the direction of software engineering. Some days it's like a variant of research. It's like learn this topic well and try to learn it differently. So those are like four very different modes. Some days it's like get through the email backlog of people I've been, tasks I've been putting off. It goes research, scripting, like the idea starts with research and then there's scripting and then there's programming and then there's the showtime. And the research side, by the way, I think a problematic way to do it is to say I'm starting this project and therefore I'm starting the research. Instead it should be that you're like ambiently learning a ton of things just in the background and then once you feel like you have the understanding for one, you put it on the list of things that there can be a video for. Otherwise either you're going to end up roadblocked forever or you're just not going to like have a good way of talking about it. But still some of the days it's like the thing to do is learn new things. So what's the most painful one? I think you mentioned scripting. Scripting is yeah, that's the worst. Yeah, writing is the worst. So what's your, on a perfectly, so let's take the hardest one. What's a perfectly productive day? You wake up and it's like, damn it, this is the day I need to do some scripting. And like you didn't do anything the last two days so you came up with excuses to procrastinate so today must be the day. Yeah, I wake up early, I guess I exercise and then I turn the internet off. If we're writing, yeah, that's what's required is having the internet off and then maybe you keep notes on the things that you want to Google when you're allowed to have the internet again. I'm not great about doing that, but when I do, that makes it happen. And then when I hit writer's block, like the solution to writer's block is to read. Doesn't even have to be related. Just read something different just for like 15 minutes, half an hour and then go back to writing. That when it's a nice cycle, I think can work very well. And when you're writing the script, you don't know where it ends, right? Like you have a problem solving videos. I know where it ends, expositional videos. I don't know where it ends coming up with a, with the magical thing that makes this whole story, like ties this whole story together that when does that happen? That's that's the thing that makes it such that a topic gets put on the list of like videos. Oh, that's an issue. You shouldn't start the project unless there's one of those and you have, you have so many nice bags that you haven't such a big bag of aha moments already that you could just pull at it. That's one of the things. And one of the sad things about time and that nothing lasts forever and that we're all mortal. Let's not get into that discussion is, you know, if I see like, even when I ask for people to ask, like ask, I did a call for questions and people want to ask you questions and so many requests from people about like certain videos they would love you to do. It's such a pile and I think that's a, that's a sign of like admiration from people for sure. But it's like, it makes me sad cause like whenever I see them, people give ideas, they're all like very often really good ideas. And it's like, it's such a, it makes me sad in the same kind of way when I go through a library or through a bookstore, you see all these amazing books that you'll never get to open. So yeah. So you gotta enjoy the ones that you have, enjoy the books that are open and don't let yourself lament the ones that stay closed. What else? Is there any other magic to that day? So do you try to dedicate like a certain number of hours? Do you, Cal Newport has this deep work kind of idea. There's systematic people who like get really on top of, you know, they checklist of what they're going to do in the day and they like count their hours. And I am not a systematic person in that way. Which is probably a problem. I very likely would get more done if I was systematic in that way, but that doesn't happen. So you talk to me later in life and maybe I'll have like changed my ways and give you a very different answer. I think Benjamin Franklin like later in life figured out the rigor is these like very rigorous schedules and how to be productive. I think those schedules are much more fun to write. Like it's very fun to like write a schedule and make a blog post about like the perfect productive day that like might work for one person. But I don't know how much people get out of like reading them or trying to adopt someone else's style. And I'm not even sure that they've ever followed. Exactly. You're always going to write it as the best version of yourself. You're not going to explain the phenomenon of like wanting to get out of the bed, but not really wanting to get out of the bed and all of that. And just like zoning out for random reasons or the one that people probably don't touch at all is I try to check social media once a day, but I'm like only. So I post and that's it. When I post, I check the previous days. That's like my, what I try to do. That's what I do like 90% of the days. But then I'll go, I'll have like a two week period where it's just like, I'm checking the internet like, I mean, it's some, probably some scary number of times and a lot of people can resonate with that. I think it's a legitimate addiction. It's like, it's a dopamine addiction and it's, I don't know if it's a problem because as long as it's the kind of socializing, like if you're actually engaging with friends and engaging with other people's ideas, uh, I think it can be really useful. Well, I don't know. So like for sure I agree with you, but I'm, it's a, it's definitely an addiction because for me, I think it's true for a lot of people. I am very cognizant of the fact I just don't feel that happy. If I look at a day where I've checked social media a lot, like if I just aggregate, I did a self report, I'm sure I would find that I'm just like literally on like less happy with my life and myself after I've done that check. When I check it once a day, I'm very like, I'm happy I even like, cause I've seen it. Okay. One way to measure that is when somebody says something not nice to you on the internet is like when I check it once a day, I'm able to just like, like I smile, like, like I virtually, I think about them positively, empathetically, I send them love. I don't, I don't ever respond, but I just feel positively about the whole thing. If I check it, if I check like more than that, it starts eating at me. Like it start, there, there's an eating thing that, that happens like anxiety. It occupies a part of your mind that's not, doesn't seem to be healthy. Same with, I mean, you, you, you put stuff out on YouTube. I think it's important. I think you have a million dimensions that are interesting to you, but yeah, one of, one of the interesting ones is the study of education and the psychological aspect of putting stuff up on YouTube. I like now have completely stopped checking statistics of any kind. I've released an episode a 100 with my dad, conversation with my dad. He checks, he's probably listening to this stop. He checks the number of views on his, on his video, on his conversation. So he discovered like a reason he's new to this whole addiction and he just checks and he like, he'll text me or write to me, I just passed Dawkins and I love that so much. Yeah. So he's, uh, can I tell you a funny story in that effect of like parental use of YouTube? Uh, early on in the channel, uh, my mom would like text me. She's like, uh, the channel, the channel has had 990,000 views. The channel has had 991,000 views. I'm like, oh, that's cute. She's going to the little part on the about page where you see the total number of channel views. No, she didn't know about that. She had been going every day through all the videos and then adding them up and she thought she was like doing me this favor of providing me this like global analytic that, uh, otherwise wouldn't be visible. That's awesome. It's just like this addiction where you have some number you want to follow and like, yeah, it's funny that your dad had this. I think a lot of people have it. I think that's probably a beautiful thing for like parents cause they're legitimately, they're proud. Yeah. It's, it's born of love. It's great. The downside, I feel one, one of them is this is one interesting experience that you probably don't know much about cause comments on your videos are super positive. Uh, but people judge the quality of how something went. Like I see that with these conversations by the comments. Yeah. Like, I'm not talking about like, you know, people in their twenties and their thirties. I'm talking about like CEOs of major companies who don't have time. They basically, they literally, this is their evaluation metric. They're like, Ooh, the comments seem to be positive and that's really concerning to me. Most important lesson for any content creator to learn is that the commenting public is not representative of the actual public. And this is easy to see. Ask yourself, how often do you write comments on YouTube videos? Most people will realize I never do it. Some people realize they do, but the people who realize they never do it should understand that that's a sign. The kind of people who are like you aren't the ones leaving comments. And I think this is important. A number of respects, like, uh, in my case, I think I would think my content was better than it was if I just read comments cause people are super nice. The thing is the people who are bored by it are, are put off by it in some way or frustrated by it. Usually they just go away. You're certainly not going to watch the whole video, much less leave a comment on it. So there's a huge under representation of like negative feedback, like well intentioned negative feedback because very few people actively do that. Like watch the whole thing that they dislike, figure out what they disliked, articulate what they dislike. Um, there's plenty of negative feedback that's not well intentioned, but um, for like that golden kind, uh, I think a lot of YouTuber friends I have, uh, at least have gone through phases of like anxiety about the nature of comments, um, that stem from basically just this that it's like people who aren't necessarily representative of who they were going for or misinterpreted what they're trying to say or whatever have you, or we're focusing on things like personal appearances as opposed to like substance. Um, and they come away thinking like, oh, that's what everyone thinks, right? That's what everyone's response to this video was. Um, but a lot of the people who had the reaction you wanted them to have, like they probably didn't write it down. So very important to learn. It also translates to, um, realizing that you're not as important as you might think you are, right? Because all of the people commenting are the ones who love you the most and are like really asking you to like create certain things or like mad that you didn't create like a past thing. Um, I don't, I have such a problem. Like I have a very real problem with making promises about a type of content that I'll make and then either not following up on it soon or just like never following up on it. Yeah. Like the last time we talked, I think prom, I'm not sure a promise to me that you'll have music incorporated into your, like, uh, I'll share it with you a private link, but there's an example of like what I had in mind. I like did a version of it, um, and I'm like, Oh, I think there's a better version of this that might exist one day. So it's now on the, like the back burner, it's like, it's sitting there. It was like a live performance at this one thing, I think next, next circumstance that I'm like doing another recorded live performance that like fits having that then in a better recording context, maybe I'll make it nice in public. Maybe a while, but exactly. Right. Um, the point I was going to make those, like, I know I'm bad about following up on stuff, uh, which is an actual problem. It's born of the fact that I have a sense of what will be like good content when it won't be. Um, but this can actually be credibly disheartening because a ton of comments that I see are people who are like, uh, frustrated, usually in a benevolent way that like I haven't followed through on like X and X, which I get and I should do that. But what's comforting thought for me is that when there's a topic I haven't promised, but I am working on and I'm excited about, it's like the people who would really like this don't know that it's coming and don't know to like comment to that effect and like the commenting public that I'm seeing is not representative of like who I think this other project will touch meaningfully. Yeah. So focus on the future on the thing you're creating now, just like the, uh, yeah, the art of it. One of the people is really inspiring to me in that regard because I've really seen it in persons, um, Joe Rogan, he doesn't read comments, but not just that he doesn't give a damn. Hmm. He like legitimate, he's not like clueless about it. He's like, just like the richness and the depth of a smile he has when he just experiences the moment with you like offline, you can tell he doesn't give a damn about like, like about anything, about what people think about whether if it's on a podcast, you talk to them or whether offline about just, it's not there. Like what other people think, how, how, um, even like what the rest of the day looks like is just deeply in the moment, uh, or like, especially like is, is what we're doing going to make for a good Instagram photo or something like that? It doesn't think like that at all. It's I think for actually quite a lot of people, he's an inspiration in that way, but it was and in real life, I show that you can be very successful, not giving a damn about, um, about comments. And it sounds, it sounds bad not to read comments cause it's like, well, there's a huge number of people who are deeply passionate about what you do. So you're what ignoring them, but at the same time, the nature of our platforms is such that the cost of listening to all the positive people who are really close to you, who are incredible people have been, you know, I've made a great community that you can learn a lot from the cost of listening to those folks is also the cost of your psychology slowly being degraded by the natural underlying toxicity of the internet. Engage with a handful of people deeply rather than like as many people as you can in a shallow way. I think that's a good lesson for social media usage. Um, like platforms in general, like choose, choose just a handful of things to engage with and engage with it very well in a way that you feel proud of and don't worry about the rest. Honestly, I think the best social media platform is texting. That's my favorite. That's my go to social media platform. Well, yeah, the best social media interactions like real life, not social media, but social interaction. Oh yeah. No, no, no question there. I think everyone should agree with that. Which sucks because, uh, it's been challenged now with the current situation and we're trying to figure out what kind of platform can be created that we can do remote communication that still is effective. It's important for education. It's important for just the question of education right now. Yeah. So on that topic, uh, you've done a series of live streams called lockdown math and you know, you want live, which is different than you usually do. Maybe one, can you talk about how that feel? What's that experience like like in your own, when you look back, like, is that an effective way? Did you find a being able to teach? And if so, is there a lessons for this world where all of these educators are now trying to figure out how the heck do I teach remotely? For me, it was very different, as different as you can get. I'm on camera, which I'm usually not. I'm doing it live, which is nerve wracking. Um, it was a slightly different like level of topics, although realistically I'm just talking about things I'm interested in no matter what. I think the reason I did that was this thought that a ton of people are looking to learn remotely the rate at which I usually put out content is too slow to be actively helpful. Let me just do some biweekly lectures that if you're looking for a place to point your students, if you're a student looking for a place to be edified about math, just tune in at these times. Um, and in that sense, I think it was, you know, a success for those who followed with it. It was a really rewarding experience for me to see how people engaged with it. Um, part of the fun of the live interaction was to actually like I do these live quizzes and see how people would answer and try to shape the lesson based on that or see what questions people were asking in the audience. I would love to, if I did more things like that in the future, kind of tighten that feedback loop even more. Um, I think for, you know, you asked about like if this can be relevant to educators, like 100% online teaching is basically a form of live streaming now. Um, and usually it happens through zoom. I think if teachers view what they're doing as a kind of performance and a kind of live stream performance, um, that would probably be pretty healthy because zoom can be kind of awkward. Um, and I brought up this little blog post actually just on like just what our setup looked like if you want to adopt it yourself and how to integrate, um, like the broadcasting software OBS with zoom or things like that. It was really sorry to pause on that. I mean, yeah, maybe we could look at the blog post, but it looked really nice. The thing is, I knew nothing about any of that stuff before I started. I had a friend who knew a fair bit. Um, and so he kind of helped show me the routes. One of the things that I realized is that you could, as a teacher, like it doesn't take that much to make things look and feel pretty professional. Um, like one component of it is as soon as you hook things up with the broadcasting software, rather than just doing like screen sharing, you can set up different scenes and then you can like have keyboard shortcuts to transition between those scenes. So you don't need a production studio with a director calling like, go to camera three, go to camera two, like onto the screen capture. Instead you can have control of that. And it took a little bit of practice and I would mess it up now and then, but I think I had it decently smooth such that, you know, I'm talking to the camera and then we're doing something on the paper. Then we're doing like a, um, playing with a Desmos graph or something. And something that I think in the past would have required a production team, you can actually do as a solo operation, um, and in particular as a teacher. And I think it's worth it to try to do that because, uh, two reasons, one, you might get more engagement from the students, but the biggest reason I think one of the like best things that can come out of this pandemic education wise is if we turn a bunch of teachers into content creators. And if we take lessons that are usually done in these one off settings and like start to get in the habit of, um, sometimes I'll use the phrase commoditizing explanation where what you want is whatever a thing a student wants to learn. It just seems inefficient to me that that lesson is taught millions of times over in parallel across many different classrooms in the world. Like year to year, you've got a given algebra one lesson that's just taught like literally millions of times, um, by different people. What should happen is that there's the small handful of explanations online, uh, that exists so that when someone needs that explanation, they can go to it, that the time in classroom is spent on all of the parts of teaching and education that aren't explanation, which is most of it. Right. Um, and the way to get there is to basically have more people who are already explaining, publish their explanations and have it in a publicized forum. So if during a pandemic you can have people automatically creating online content cause it has to be online, but getting into the habit of doing it in a, um, in a way that doesn't just feel like a zoom call that happened to be recorded, but it actually feels like a, a piece that was always going to be publicized to more people than just your students that can be really powerful. And there's an improvement process there, like so being self critical and growing, like, you know, like I guess YouTubers go through this process of like putting out some content and like nobody caring about it and then trying to figure out like, and basically improving figure out like, why did nobody care? What can I, you know, and they come up with all kinds of answers, which may or may not be correct, but doesn't matter because the answer leads to improvement. So you're being constantly self critical, self analytical, it should be better to say. So you think of like, how can I make the audio better? Like all the basic things. Maybe one, one question to ask, cause, uh, well, by way of, uh, Russ Tedrick is a robotics professor at MIT, one of my favorite people, a big fan of yours. Uh, he watched our first conversation. I just interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. He, uh, he teaches this course in the under actuated robotics, which is, um, like robotic systems when you can't control everything, like when you're like, we as humans, when we walk, we're always falling forward, which means like it's gravity. You can't control it. You just hope you can catch yourself, but that's not all guaranteed. It depends on the surface. So like that's under actuated. You can't control everything. The number of actuators, uh, the degrees of freedoms you have is not enough to fully control the system. So I don't know. It's a really, I think, beautiful, fascinating class. He puts it online. Um, it's quite popular. He does an incredible job teaching. He puts it online every time, but he's kind of been interested in like crisping it up, like, you know, making it, uh, you know, innovating in different kinds of ways. And he was inspired by the work you do, because I think in his work, he can do similar kinds of explanations as you're doing, like revealing the beauty of it and spending like months in preparing a single video. Uh, and he's interested in how to do that. That's why he listened to the conversation. He's playing with manum, but he had this question of, you know, um, of, uh, you know, like in my apartment where we did the interview, I have like curtains, like the, for like a black curtain, not this, uh, this is, this is a adjacent mansion that we're in that I also, uh, but you basically just have, I have like a black curtain, whatever that, you know, makes it really easy to set up a filming situation with cameras that we have here, these microphones. He was asking, you know, what kind of equipment do you recommend? I guess like your blog post is a good one. I said, I don't recommend this is excessive and actually really hard to work with. So I wonder, I mean, uh, is there something you would recommend in terms of equipment? Like is, is it, do you re do you think like lapel mics, like USB mics, what do you, for my narration, I use a USB mic for the streams that used to lapel mic, uh, the narration, it's a blue Yeti. Um, I'm forgetting actually the name of the lapel mic, but it was probably like a road of some kind. Um, but is it hard to figure out how to make the audio sound good? Oh, I mean, listen to all the early videos on my channel and clearly like I'm terrible at this for, for some reason. Um, I just couldn't get audio for awhile. I think I, it's weird when you hear your own voice. So you hear it, you're like, this sounds weird and it's hard to notice it sound weird because you're not used to your own voice or they're like actual audio artifacts at play. Um, so, uh, and then video is just for the lockdown, just the camera, like you said, it was probably streaming somehow through the, yeah, there were two GH five cameras. One that was mounted overhead over a piece of paper. You could also use like an iPad or a Wacom tablet to do your writing electronically, but I just wanted the paper feel, um, one on the face. There's two. Um, again, I don't know, I'm like just not actually the one to ask this cause I like animate stuff usually, but, uh, each of them like has a compressor object that makes it such that the camera output goes into the computer USB, but like gets compressed before it does that. The, the live aspect of it, do you, do you regret doing it live? Not at all. Um, I think I do think the content might be like much less sharp and tight than if it were something, even that I just recorded like that and then edited later. But I do like something that I do to be out there to show like, Hey, this is what it's like. Raw. This is what it's like when I make mistakes. Um, this is like the pace of thinking, um, I like the live interaction of it. I think that made it better. Uh, I probably would do it on a different channel. I think, um, if I did series like that in the future, just because it's, it's a different style. It's probably a different target audience and, um, kind of keep clean what three blue and brown is about versus, uh, the benefits of like live lectures. Do you, uh, suggest like in this time of COVID that people like Russ or other educators tried to go like the, the shorter, like 20 minute videos that are like really well planned out or scripted. You really think through, you slowly design. So it's not live. Do you see like that being an important part of, um, what they do? Yeah. Well, what I think teachers like Russ should do is, um, choose the small handful of topics that they're going to do just really well. They want to create the best short explanation of it in the world that will be one of those handfuls in a world where you have commoditized explanation, right? Most of the lectures should be done just normally. Um, so put thought and planning into it. I'm sure he's a wonderful teacher and like knows all about that, but maybe choose those small handful of topics. Um, do what beneficial for me sometimes is I do sample lessons with people on that topic to get some sense of how other people think about it. Let that inform how you want to, um, edit it or script it or whatever format you want to do. Some people are comfortable just explaining it and editing later. I'm more comfortable like writing it out and thinking in that setting. Yeah. It's kind of sad. Sorry to interrupt. Uh, it's, it's a little bit sad to me to see how much knowledge is lost. Like just, just like you mentioned, there's professors, like we can take my dad, for example, to blow up his ego a little bit, but he's a, he's a great teacher and he knows plasma, plasma chemistry, plasma physics really well. So he can very simply explain some beautiful, but otherwise, uh, complicated concepts. And it's sad that like, if you Google plasma or like for plasma physics, like there's no videos. And just imagine if every one of those excellent teachers like your father or like Russ, um, even if they just chose one topic this year, they're like, I'm going to make the best video that I can on this topic. If every one of the great teachers did that, the internet would be replete and it's already replete with great explanations. But it would be even more so with all the niche, great explanations and like anything you want to learn. Um, and there's a self interest to it for, in terms of teachers, in terms of even, so if you take Russ, for example, it's not that he's teaching something like he teaches his main thing, his thing he's deeply passionate about. And from a selfish perspective, it's also just like, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's like publishing a paper in a really, uh, like nature has like letters, like accessible publication. It's just going to guarantee that your work, that your passion is seen by a huge number of people, whatever the definition of huge is, doesn't matter. It's much more than it otherwise, uh, would be. And it's those lectures that tell early students what to be interested in at the moment. I think students are disproportionately interested in the things that are well represented on YouTube. So to any educator out there, if you're wondering, Hey, I want more like grad students in my department, like what's the best way to recruit grad students? It's like, make the best video you can and then wait eight years. And then you're going to have a pile of like excellent grad students for that department. And one of the lessons I think your channel teaches is there's appeal of explaining just something beautiful, explaining it cleanly, technically not doing a marketing video about why topology is great. There's yeah, that's the, there's people interested in this stuff. I mean, uh, one of the greatest channels like Matt, it's not even a math channel, but the channel with greatest math content is Vsauce, like interviewed. If imagine you were to propose making a video that explains the Banach Tarski paradox substantively, right? Like not shying around it, maybe not describing things in terms of, um, like the group theoretic terminology that you'd usually see in a paper, but the actual results, um, that went into this idea of like breaking apart a sphere, proposing that to like a network TV station saying, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to do this in depth talk of the Banach Tarski paradox. I'm pretty sure it's going to reach 20 million people. It's like, get out of here. Like no, no one cares about that. No one's interested in anything even anywhere near that. But then you have Michael's quirky personality around it. And just people that are actually hungry for that kind of depth, um, then you don't need like the approval of some higher network. You can just do it and let the people speak for themselves. So I think, you know, if your father was to make something on plasma physics or, um, if we were to have like, uh, underactualized robotics, underactuated, underactuated, yes, not underactualized, plenty actualized underactuated robotics. Robotics is under actualized currently. So even if it's things that you might think are niche, I bet you'll be surprised by how many people, um, actually engage with it really deeply. Although I just psychologically watching him, I can't speak for a lot of people. I can speak for my dad. I think there's a, there's a little bit of a skill gap, but I think that could be overcome. That's pretty basic. None of us know how to make videos when we start the first stuff I made was terrible in a number of respects. Like look at the earliest videos I need in the YouTube channel, except for captain disillusion. And they're all like terrible versions of whatever they are now. But the thing I've noticed, especially like with world experts is it's the same thing that I'm sure you went through, which is like, um, fear of like embarrassment. Like they, they definitely, it's, it's the same reason. Like I feel that anytime I put out a video, I don't know if you still feel that. But like, I don't know, it's this imposter syndrome. Like who am I to talk about this? And that that's true for like even things that you've studied for like your whole life. Uh, I don't know. It's scary to post stuff on YouTube. It is scary. Uh, I honestly wish that more of the people who had that modesty to say, who am I to post this? We're the ones actually posting it. That's right. I mean, the honest problem is like a lot of the educational content is posted by people who like, we're just starting to research it two weeks ago and are on a certain schedule and who maybe should think like, who am I to explain and choose your favorite topic, quantum mechanics or something. Um, and the people who have the self awareness, uh, to not post are probably the people also best positioned to give a good, honest explanation of it. That's why there's a lot of value in a channel like numberphile where they basically trap a really smart person and force them to explain stuff on a bronze sheet of paper. So, but of course that's not scalable as a single channel. If they, if there's anything beautiful that it could be done as people take it in their own hands, uh, educators, which is again, circling back, I do think the pandemic will serve to force a lot of people's hands. You're going to be making online content anyway. It's happening, right? Just hit that publish button and see how it goes. Yeah. See how it goes. The cool thing about YouTube is it might not go for a while, but like 10 years later, right? Yeah. It'll be like, this, the thing this, what people don't understand with YouTube, at least for now, at least that's my hope with it is, uh, it's a leg. It's a, it's literally better than publishing a book in terms of the legacy. It's it will live for a long, long time. Of course it's, um, one of the things I mentioned Joe Rogan before, it's kinda, there's a sad thing cause I'm a fan. He's moving to Spotify. Yeah. Yeah. Nine digit numbers will do that to you. Yeah. But he doesn't really that he was one of the person that doesn't actually care that much about money. Like having talked to him here, it wasn't because of money. It's because he legitimately thinks that they're going to do like a better job. Like, so they're, so from his perspective, YouTube, you have to understand where they're coming from. YouTube has been cracking down on people who they, you know, Joe Rogan talks to Alex Jones and conspiracy theories and stuff. And YouTube is really like careful that kind of stuff. And that's not a good feeling. Like, and Joe didn't, doesn't feel like YouTube was on his side. You know, he's often has videos that they don't put in trending that like are obviously should be in trending because they're nervous about like, you know, if this concert is this, is this content going to, you know, upset people that all that kind of stuff have misinformation. And that's not a good place for a person to be in. And Spotify is giving them a, we're never going to censor you. We're never going to do that. But the reason I bring that up, whatever you think about that, I personally think as bullshit because podcasting should be free and not constrained to a platform. It's pirate radio. What the hell? You can't, as much as I love Spotify, you can't just, you can't put fences around it. But anyway, the reason I bring that up is Joe's going to remove his entire library from YouTube. Whoa, really? I didn't know that. His full length, the clips are going to stay, but the full length videos are all, I mean, made private or deleted. That's part of the deal. And like, that's the first time where I was like, Oh, YouTube videos might not live forever. Like things you find like, okay, I'm sorry. This is why you need an IPFS or something where it's like, if there's a content link, are you familiar with this system at all? Like right now, if you have a URL, it points to a server. There's like a system where the address points to content and then it's like distributed. So you, you can't actually delete what's at an address because it's, it's content addressed. And as long as there's someone on the network who hosts it, it's always accessible at the address that it once was. But I mean, that raises a question. I'm not going to put you on the spot, but like somebody like Vsauce, right? Spotify comes along and gives him, let's say $100 billion. Okay. Let's say some crazy number and then removes it from YouTube, right? It's made me, I don't know, for some reason I thought YouTube is forever. I don't think it will be. I mean, you know, another variant that this might take is like, uh, that, you know, um, you fast forward 50 years and, uh, you know, Google or Alphabet isn't the company that it once was. And it's kind of struggling to make ends meet. And you know, it's been supplanted by the whoever wins on the AR game or whatever it might be. And then they're like, you know, all of these videos that we're hosting are pretty costly. So we're just, we're going to start deleting the ones that aren't watched that much and tell people to like try to back them up on their own or whatever it is. Um, or even if it does exist in some form forever, it's like if people are, um, not habituated to watching YouTube in 50 years, they're watching something else, which seems pretty likely. Like it would be shocking if YouTube remained as popular as it is now indefinitely into the future. So, uh, it won't be forever. Makes me sad still, but cause it's such a nice, it's just like you said of the canonical videos. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. You know, you should get Juan Bennett on the, uh, on the thing and then talk to him about permanence. I think you would have a good conversation. Who's that? So he's the one that founded this thing called IPFS that I'm talking about. And if you have him talk about basically what you're describing, like, Oh, it's sad that this isn't forever. Then you'll get some articulate pontification around it that's like been pretty well thought through. Uh, but yeah, I do see YouTube, just like you said, as a, as a place, like what your channel creates, which is like a set of canonical videos on a topic. Now others could create videos on that topic as well, but as a collection, it creates a nice set of places to go. Uh, if you're curious about a particular topic and it seems like coronavirus is a nice opportunity to, uh, put that knowledge out there in the world at, uh, MIT and beyond, I have to talk to you a little bit about machine learning, deep learning and so on. Again, we talked about last time you have a set of beautiful videos on neural networks. Uh, let me ask you first, what is the most beautiful aspect of neural networks and machine learning to you, like for making those videos from watching how the field is evolving? Is there something mathematically or in applied sense, just beautiful to you about them? Well, I think what I would go to is the layered structure and how, um, you can have what feel like qualitatively distinct things happening, going from one layer to another, but that are, um, following the same mathematical rule because you look at it as a piece of math. It's like you got a non linearity and then you've got a matrix multiplication. That's what's happening on all the layers. Um, but especially if you look at like some of the visualizations that, uh, like Chris Ola has done with respect to, um, like convolutional nets that have been trained on image net trying to say, what does this neuron do? What do this, uh, does this family of neurons do? What you can see is that, um, the ones closer to the input side are picking up on very low level ideas like the texture, right? And then as you get further back, you have higher level ideas. Like what is the, where are the eyes in this picture? And then how do the eyes form like an animal is this animal, a cat or a dog or a deer. You have this series of qualitatively different things happening, even though it's the same piece of math on each one. So that's a pretty beautiful idea that you can have like a generalizable object that, um, runs through the layers of abstraction, which in some sense constitute intelligence is having, um, those many different layers of an understanding to something form abstractions in a automated way. Exactly. It's automated abstracting, which, I mean, that just feels very powerful. Um, and the idea that it can be so simply mathematically represented. I mean, a ton of like modern ML research seems a little bit like you do a bunch of ad hoc things, then you decide which one worked and then you retrospectively come up with the mathematical reason that it always had to work. Um, but you know, who cares how you came to it when you have like that elegant piece of math? Uh, it's hard not to just smile seeing it work in action. Well, and when you talked about topology before, one of the really interesting things is, is beginning to be investigated under kind of the field of like science and deep learning, which is like the craziness of the surface that, uh, is trying to be optimized, uh, in neural networks. I mean, the, the amount of local minima, local optima there is in these surfaces and somehow a dumb gradient descent algorithm was able to find really good solutions. That's like, that's really surprising. Well, so on the one hand it is, but also it's like not, it's not terribly surprising that you have these interesting points that exist when you make your space so high dimensional, like GPT three, what did it have? 175 billion parameters. So it doesn't feel as mesmerizing to think about, Oh, there's some surface of intelligent behavior in this crazy high dimensional space. It's like, there's so many parameters that of course, but what's more interesting is like, how, how is it that you're able to efficiently get there, which is maybe what you're describing that something as dumb as gradient descent does it, but like the re the reason that gradient descent works well with neural networks and not just, you know, choose however you want to parameterize this space and then like apply gradient descent to it is that that layered structure lets you decompose the derivative in a way that makes it computationally feasible. Um, yeah, it's just that, that there's so many good solutions, probably infinitely infinitely many good solutions, not best solutions, but good solutions. That's that's what's interesting. It's similar to, uh, Steven Wolfram has this idea of like the, if you just look at all space of computations of all space of basically algorithms that you'd be surprised how many of them are actually intelligent. Like if you just randomly pick from the bucket, uh, that's surprising. We tend to think like a tiny, tiny minority of them would be intelligent, but his sense is like, it seems weirdly easy to find computations that do something interesting. Well, okay, so that from like a calm agor, calm agor of complexity standpoint, almost everything will be interesting. What's fascinating is to find the stuff that's describable with low information, but still does interesting things. Uh, like one fun example of this, you know, um, Shannon's noisy coding and theorem, uh, noisy coding theorem and, uh, information theory that basically says if, you know, I want to send some bits to you, um, maybe, uh, some of them are going to get flipped. Uh, there's some noise along the channel. I can come up with some way of coding it. That's resilient to that noise. That's very good. Um, and then he quantitatively describes what very good is. What's funny about how he proves the existence of good error correction codes is rather than saying like, here's how to construct it or even like a sensible nonconstructive proof. The nature of his nonconstructive proof is to say, um, if we chose a random encoding, it would be almost at the limit, which is weird because then it took decades for people to actually find any that were anywhere close to the limit. And what his proof was saying is choose a random one. And it's like the best kind of encoding you'll ever find. But what's what that tells us is that sometimes when you choose a random element from this ungodly huge set, that's a very different task from finding an efficient way to actively describe it. Cause in that case, the random element to actually implement it as a bit of code, you would just have this huge table of like, um, telling you how to encode one thing into another. That's totally computationally infeasible. So on the side of like how many possible programs are interesting in some way, it's like, yeah, tons of them. But the much, much more delicate question is when you can have a low information description of something that still becomes interesting. And thereby this kind of gives you a blueprint for how to engineer that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. Chaos theory is another good instance there where it's like, yeah, a ton of things are hard to describe, but how do you have ones that have a simple set of governing equations that remain like arbitrarily hard to describe? Well, let me ask you, uh, you mentioned GPT three. It's interesting to ask, uh, what are your thoughts about the recently released open AI GPT three model that I believe is already trying to learn how to communicate like Grant Sanderson? You know, I think I got an email a day or two ago about someone who wanted to, um, try to use GPT three with manum where you would like give it a high level description of something and then it'll like automatically create the mathematical animation, like trying to put me out of a job here. I mean, it probably won't put you out of a job, but it'll create something visually beautiful for sure. I would be surprised if that worked as stated, but maybe there's like variants of it like that you can get to. Um, I mean like a lot of those demos, it's interesting. I think, uh, there's a lot of failed experiments, like depending on how you prime the thing, you're going to have a lot of failed, I'm certainly with code and program synthesis. Most of it won't even run, but eventually I think if you, if you're, if you pick the right examples, you'll be able to generate something cool. And I think that even that's good enough, even though if it's, if it's, if you're being very selective, it's still cool that something can be generated. Yeah. That's a huge value. Um, I mean, think of the writing process. Sometimes a big part of it is just getting a bunch of stuff on the page and then you can decide what to whittle down to. So if it can be used in like a man machine symbiosis where it's just giving you a spew of potential ideas that then you can refine down, um, like it's serving as the generator and then the human serves as the refiner. That seems like a pretty powerful dynamic. Yeah. Have you, uh, have you gotten a chance to see any of the demos like on Twitter? Is there a favorite you've seen or? Oh, my absolute favorite. Yeah. Uh, so Tim Blay who runs a channel called acapella science, he was like tweeting a bunch about playing with it. Um, and so he, so GPT three was trained on the internet from before COVID. So in a sense it doesn't know about the Corona virus. So what he seeded it with was just a short description about like, um, a novel virus, uh, emerges in Wuhan, China and starts to spread around the globe. What follows is a month by month description of what happens, January, colon, right? That's what he sees it with. So then what GPT three generates is like January, then a paragraph of description, February and such. And it's the funniest thing you'll ever read because, um, it predicts a zombie apocalypse, which of course it would because it's trained on like the internet, the stories, but what you see unfolding is a description of COVID 19 if it were a zombie apocalypse. And like the early aspects of it are kind of shockingly in line with what's reasonable and then it gets out of hand so quickly. And the other flip side of that is, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if it's onto something at some point here when, you know, 2020 has been full of surprises, who knows, like we might all be in like this crazy militarized zone as it predicts just a couple of months off. Yeah. I think there's definitely an interesting tool of storytelling. It has struggled with mathematics, which is interesting, or in just even numbers, it's able to, it's not able to generate like patterns, you know, like you give it, um, in like five digit numbers and it's not able to figure out the sequence, you know, or like, um, I didn't look in too much, but I'm talking about like sequences, like the Fibonacci numbers and to see how far it can go because obviously it's leveraging stuff from the internet and it starts to lose it, but it is also cool that I've seen it able to generate some interesting patterns, um, that are mathematically correct. Yeah. I honestly haven't dug into like what's going on within it, uh, in a way that I can speak intelligently to, I guess it doesn't surprise me that it's bad at numerical patterns because I mean, maybe I should be more impressed with it, but like that requires having, um, a weird combination of intuitive and, uh, and formulaic worldview. So you're not just going off of intuition. When you see Fibonacci numbers, you're not saying like intuitively, what do I think will follow the 13? Like I've seen patterns a lot where like 13s are followed by 21s instead. It's the, like the way you're starting to see a shape of things is by knowing what hypotheses to test where you're saying, oh, maybe it's generated based on the previous terms or maybe it's generated based on like multiplying by a constant or whatever it is you like have a bunch of different hypotheses and your intuitions are around those hypotheses, but you still need to actively test it. Um, and it seems like GPT three is extremely good at, um, like that sort of pattern matching recognition that usually is very hard for computers. That is what humans get good at through expertise and exposure to lots of things. It's why it's good to learn from as many examples as you can rather than just from the definitions it's to get that level of intuition, but to actually concretize it into a piece of math, you do need to, um, like test your hypotheses and if not prove it, um, like have an actual explanation for what's going on, not just a, uh, a pattern that you've seen. Yeah. And, but then the flip side to play devil's advocate, that's a very kind of probably correct intuitive understanding of just like we said, a few, a few layers creating abstractions, but it's been able to form something that looks like, uh, a compression of the data that it's seen that looks awfully a lot like it understands what the heck it's talking about. Well, I think a lot of understanding is like, I don't mean to denigrate pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is most of understanding and it's super important and it's super hard. Um, and so like when it's demonstrating this kind of real understanding, compressing down some data, like that, that might be pattern recognition at its finest. My only point would be that like what differentiates math, I think to a large extent is that, um, the pattern recognition isn't sufficient and that the kind of patterns that you're recognizing are not like the end goals, but instead they're, they are the little bits and paths that get you to the end goal. That's certainly true for mathematics in general. It's an interesting question if that might, uh, for certain kinds of series of numbers, it might not be true. Like you might, um, because that's a basic, you know, like Taylor's like certain kinds of series, it feels like compressing the internet, uh, is, is enough to figure out because those patterns in some form appear in the text somewhere. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, uh, there's all sorts of wonderful examples of false patterns in math where, um, one of the earliest videos I put on the channel was talking about the extent of dividing a circle up using these chords. And you see this pattern of one, two, four, eight, 16, I was like, okay, pretty easy to see what that pattern is. It's powers of two. You've seen it a million times. Um, but it's not powers of two. The next term is 31. And so it's like almost a power of two, but it's a little bit shy. And there's, there's actually a very good explanation for what's going on. Um, but I think it's a good test of whether you're thinking clearly about mechanistic explanations of things, how quickly you jump to thinking it must be powers of two because the problem itself, there's really no, no good way to, I mean, there can't be a good way to think about it as like doubling a set because ultimately it doesn't, but even before it starts to, it's not something that screams out as being a doubling phenomenon. So at best, if it did turn out to be powers of two, it would have only been so very subtly. And I think the difference between like, you know, a math student making the mistake and a mathematician who's experienced seeing that kind of pattern is that they, they'll have a sense from what the problem itself is, whether the pattern that they're observing is reasonable and how to test it. And like, uh, I w I would just be very impressed if there was any algorithm that, um, was actively accomplishing that goal. Yeah. Like a learning base algorithm. Yeah. Like a little scientist, I guess. Basically. Yeah. That's a fascinating thought because GPT three, these language models are already accomplishing way more than I've expected. So I'm learning not to doubt, but we'll get there. Yeah. I, I, I'm not saying I'd be impressed, but like surprised, like I'll be impressed, but I think we'll get there on, um, algorithms doing math like that. So one of the amazing things you've done for the world is to some degree, open sourcing the tooling that you use to make your videos with Madam, uh, this Python library. Now it's quickly evolving because I think you're inventing new things every time you make a video. In fact, I wanted, um, I've been working on playing around with something. I wanted to do like an ode to three blue on Brown. Like I love playing Hendrix. I wanted to do like a cover, you know, of a concept I wanted to visualize and use Madam. And I saw that you had like a little piece of code on like Mobia strip and I tried to do some cool things with spinning a Mobia strip, like continue, um, twisting it, I guess is the term, uh, and it was easier to, uh, it was tough. So I haven't figured it out yet. Well, so I guess the question I want to ask is so many people love it, uh, that you've put that out there. They want to, uh, do the same thing as I do with Hendrix and want to cover it. They want to explain an idea using the tool, including Russ. How would you recommend they try to, I'm very sorry. They try to go, they try to go by, uh, about it and what kind of choices should they choose to be most effective? That I can answer. So I always feel guilty if this comes up because, um, I think of it like this scrappy tool. It's like a math teacher who put together some code. People asked what it was, so they made it open source and they kept scrapping it together. And there's a lot, like a lot of things about it that make it harder to work with than it needs to be that are a function of like me not being a software engineer. Um, I, I've, I've put some work this year trying to like make it better and more flexible. Um, that is still just kind of like a work in process. Um, one thing I would love to do is just get my act together about properly integrating with what like the community wants to work with and like what stuff I work on and making that, um, not like deviate, uh, and just like actually fostering that community in a way that I've, I've been like shamefully neglectful of. So I'm just always guilty if it comes up. So let's put that guilt aside, just kind of Zen, like I'll pretend like it isn't terrible for someone like Russ. Um, I think step one is like, make sure that what you're animating should be done so programmatically because a lot of things maybe shouldn't. Um, like if you're just making a quick graph of something, uh, if it's a graphical intuition that maybe has a little motion to it, use Desmos, use grapher, use GeoGebra, use Mathematica, certain things that are like really oriented around graph. GeoGebra is kind of cool. I did super amazing. You can get very, very far with it. Um, and in a lot of ways, like it would make more sense for STEM stuff that I do to just do in GeoGebra, but I kind of have this cycle of liking to try to improve man and by doing videos and such. So, uh, do as I say, not as I do. The original like thought I had in making manum was that there's so many different ways of representing functions other than graphs, um, in particular things like transformations, like use movement over time to communicate relationships between inputs and outputs instead of like estimate direction and Y direction, um, or like vector fields or things like that. So I wanted something that was flexible enough that you didn't feel constrained into a graphical environment. Um, by graphical, I mean like graphs with like X coordinate, Y coordinate kind of stuff, but also make sure that, um, you're taking advantage of the fact that it's programmatic. You have loops, you have conditionals, you have abstraction. If any of those are like well fit for what you want to teach to, you know, have a scene type that you tweak a little bit based on parameters or to have conditional so that things can go one way or another or loops so that you can create these things of like arbitrarily increasing complexity. That's the stuff that's like meant to be animated programmatically. If it's just like writing some text on the screen or shifting around objects or something like that, um, things like that, you should probably just use keynote, right? Um, you'd be a lot simpler. So, uh, try to find a workflow that distills down that which should be programmatic into manum and that which doesn't need to be into like other domains. Again, do as I say, not as I do. I mean, Python is an integral part of it. Just for the fun of it, let me ask, uh, what, uh, what's your most and least favorite aspects of Python? Ooh, most and least. I mean, I love that it's like object oriented and functional, I guess that you can kind of like get both of those, um, uh, benefits for how you structure things. So if you would just want to quickly whip something together, the functional aspects are nice. It's your primary language, like for programmatically generating stuff. Yeah. It's home for me. It's home. Yeah. Sometimes you travel, but it's home. Got it. It's home. Uh, I mean, the biggest disadvantage is that it's slow. So when you're doing computationally intensive things, either you have to like think about it more than you should how to make it efficient or it just like takes long. Do you run into that at all? Like with your work? Well, so, uh, certainly old man is like way slower than it needs to be because of, uh, how it renders things on the backend is like kind of absurd. I've rewritten things such that it's all done with like shaders in such a way that it should be just like live and actually like interactive while you're coding it. If you want to, to have like a 3d scene, you can move around, you can, um, have, um, elements respond to where your mouse is or things. That's not something that user of a video is going to get to experience cause there's just a play button and a pause button. But while you're developing, that can be nice. Um, so it's gotten better in speed in that sense, but that's basically because the hard work is being done in the language that's not Python, but GLSL, right? Um, but yeah, there are some times when it's like a, um, there's just a lot of data that goes into the object that I want to animate that then it just like Python is slow. Well, let me ask, quickly ask, what do you think about the walrus operator, if you're familiar with it at all? The reason it's interesting, there's a new operator in Python 3.8. I find it psychologically interesting cause it, the toxicity over it led Guido to resign the step down from this. Is that actually true? Or was it like, there's a bunch of surrounding things that also, was it actually the walrus operator that, that. Well, it was, it was a text, it was an accumulation of toxicity, but that was the, the most, that was the most toxic one, like the discussion. That's the most number of Python core developers that were opposed to Guido's decision. Um, he didn't particularly, I don't think cared about it either way. He just thought it was a good idea. This is where you approve it. And like the structure of the idea of a BDFL is like you listen to everybody, hear everybody out. You make a decision and you move forward. And he didn't like the negativity that burdened him after that. People like some parts of the benevolent dictator for life mantra, but once the dictator does things different than you want, suddenly dictatorship doesn't seem so great. Yeah. I mean, they still liked it. He just couldn't because he truly is the bee in the benevolent. He's really, he really is a nice guy. He, I mean, and I think he can't, it's a lot of toxicity. It's difficult. It's a difficult job. And that's why Linus Torvalds is perhaps the way he is. You have to have a thick skin to fight off, fight off the warring masses. It's kind of surprising to me how many people can like threatened to murder each other over whether we should have braces or not, or like it's incredible. Yeah. I mean, that's my knee jerk reaction to the walrus operators. Like I don't actually care that much either way. I'm not going to get personally passionate. My initial reaction was like, yeah, this seems to make things more confusing to read. But then again, so does list comprehension until you're used to it. So like if there's a use for it, great, if not great, but like, let's just all calm down about our spaces versus tabs debates here and like, be chill. Yeah. To me, it just represents the value of great leadership, even in open source communities. Does it represent that if he stepped down as a leader? Well, he fought for it. No, he got it passed. I guess, but I guess, I could represent multiple things too. It can represent like failed dictatorships or it can, it can represent a lot of things, but to me, great leaders take risks. Even if it, even if it's a mistake at the end, like you have to make decisions. The thing is this world won't go anywhere. If you constantly, if whenever there's a divisive thing, you wait until the division is no longer there. Like that's the paralysis we experienced with like Congress and political systems. It's good to be slow when there's indecision, when there's people disagree, it's good to take your time. But like at a certain point it results in paralysis and you just have to make a decision. The background of the site, whether it's yellow, blue, or red can cause people to like go to war over each other, which I've seen this with design. People are very touch on color, color choices at the end of the day, just make a decision and go with it. And that, that's what the Walrus operator represents to me is it represents the fighter pilot instinct of like quick action is more important than, than just like hearing everybody out and really think it through it because that's going to lead to paralysis. Yeah. Like if that's the actual case that, you know, it's something where he's consciously hearing people's disagreement, disagreeing with that disagreement and saying he wants to move forward anyway, that's an admirable aspect of leadership. So we don't have much time, but I want to ask just cause it's some beautiful mathematics involved. 2020 brought us a couple of in the physics world theories of everything, Eric Weinstein kind of, I mean, it's been working for probably decades, but he put out this idea of geometric unity or started sort of publicly thinking and talking about it more, Steven Wolfram put out his physics project, which is kind of this hypergraph view of a theory of everything. Do you find interesting, beautiful things to these theories of everything? What do you think about the physics world and sort of the beautiful, interesting, insightful mathematics in that world, whether we're talking about quantum mechanics, which you touched on in a bunch of your videos a little bit, quaternions, like just the mathematics involved or the general relativity, which is more about surfaces and topology, all that stuff. Well, I think, um, as far as like popularized science is concerned, people are more interested in theories of everything than they should be like, cause the problem is whether we're talking about trying to make sense of Weinstein's lectures or Wolfram's project, or let's just say like listening to, uh, Witten talk about string theory, whatever proposed path to a theory of everything, um, you're not actually going to understand it. Some physicists will, but like, you're just not actually going to understand the substance of what they're saying. What I think is way, way more productive is, um, to let yourself get really interested in the phenomena that are still deep, but which you have a chance of understanding because the path to getting to like even understanding what questions these theories of everything are trying to answer involves like walking down that, um, I mean, I was watching a video before I came here about from Steve mold talking about, um, why sugar polarizes light in a certain way. So fascinating, like really, really interesting. It's not like this novel theory of everything type thing, but to understand what's going on there really requires digging in in depth to certain ideas. And if you let yourself think past what the video tells you about what does circularly polarized light mean and things like that, it actually would get you to a pretty good appreciation of like two state states and quantum systems, um, in a way that just trying to read about like, Oh, what's the, um, what are the hard parts about resolving quantum field theories with general relativity is never going to get you. So as far as popularizing science is concerned, like the audience should be less interested than they are in theories of everything. Um, the popularizers should be less emphatic than they are about that for like actual practicing physicists. And that might be the case. Maybe more people should think about fundamental questions, but it's difficult to create, uh, like a three blue, one brown video on the theory of everything. So basically we should really try to find the beauty in mathematics or physics by looking at concepts that are like within reach. Yeah, I think that's super important. I mean, so you see this in math too with, um, the big unsolved problems. So like the clay millennium problems, Riemann hypothesis, um, have you ever done a video on Fermat's last theorem? No, I have not yet. No. But if I did, do you know what I would do? I would talk about, um, proving Fermat's last theorem in the specific case of N equals three. Okay. Is that still accessible though? Yes. Actually barely. Um, Mathologer might be able to do like a great job on this. He does a good job of taking stuff that's barely accessible and making it, but the, the core ideas of proving it for N equals three are hard, but they do get you real ideas about algebraic number theory. And it involves looking at a number field that's, uh, it lives in the complex plane. It looks like a hexagonal lattice and you start asking questions about factoring numbers in this hexagonal lattice. So it takes a while, but I've talked about this sort of like lattice arithmetic, um, in other contexts and you can get to a okay understanding of that. And the things that make Fermat's last theorem hard are actually quite deep. Um, and so the cases that we can solve it for, it's like you can get these broad sweeps based on some hard, but like accessible, um, bits of number theory. But before you can even understand why the general case is as hard as it is, you have to walk through those. And so any other attempt to describe it would just end up being like shallow and not really productive for the viewer's time. Um, I think the same goes for, uh, most like unsolved problem type things where I think, you know, as a kid, I was actually very inspired by the twin prime conjecture, um, that like totally sucked me in as this thing that was understandable. I kind of had this dream like, Oh, maybe I'll be the one to prove the twin prime conjecture and new math that I would learn would be like viewed through this lens of like, Oh, maybe I can apply it to that in some way. But, uh, you sort of mature to a point where you realize that, uh, you should spend your brain cycles on problems that you will see resolved because then you're going to grow to see what it feels like for these things to be resolved rather than spending your brain cycles on something where it's not, it's not going to pan out. Um, and the people who do make progress towards these things like James Maynard, uh, is a great example here of like young creative mathematician who like pushes in the direction of things like the twin prime conjecture rather than hitting that head on, just see all the interesting questions that are hard for similar reasons, but become more tractable and let themselves really engage with those. Um, so I think people should get in that habit. I think the popularization of physics should encourage that habit through things like the physics of simple everyday phenomena, because it can get quite deep. And um, yeah, I think I, you know, I've, I've heard a lot of the interest that, you know, people send me messages asking to explain Weinstein's thing or asking to explain Wolfram's thing. One, I don't understand them, but more importantly, um, it's too big a bite to, you shouldn't be interested in those, right? The giant sort of a ball of interesting ideas. There's probably a million of interesting ideas in there that individually could be explored effectively. And to be clear, you should be interested in fundamental questions. I think that's a good habit to ask what the fundamentals of things are, but I think it takes a lot of steps to like, certainly you shouldn't be trying to answer that unless you actually understand quantum field theory and you actually understand general relativity. That's the cool thing about like your videos, people who haven't done mathematics, like if you really give it time, watch it a couple of times and like try to try to reason about it, you can actually understand the concept that's being explained. And it's not a coincidence that the things I'm describing aren't like the most, um, up to date, uh, progress on the Riemann hypothesis cousins or, um, like there's context in which the analog of the Riemann hypothesis has been solved in like more, uh, discrete feeling finite settings that are more well behaved. I'm not describing that because it just takes a ton to get there. And instead I think it'll be like productive to have an actual understanding of something that can, you can pack into 20 minutes. I think that's beautifully put ultimately. That's where like the most satisfying thing is when you really understand, um, yeah, really understand, build a habit of feeling what it's like to actually come to resolution. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to, which it can also be enjoyable, but just being in awe of the fact that you don't understand anything. Yeah. That's not like, I don't know. Maybe we'll get entertainment out of that, but it's not as fulfilling as understanding you won't grow. Yeah. And, but also just the fulfilling, it really does feel good when you first don't understand something and then you do, that's a beautiful feeling. Hey, let me ask you one, uh, last, last time we got awkward and weird about, uh, a fear of mortality, which you made fun of me off, but let me ask you on the, the other absurd question is, um, what do you think is, uh, the meaning of our life of meaning of life? I'm sorry if I made fun of you about, no, you didn't. I'm just joking. It was great. I don't think life has a meaning. I think like meaning, I don't understand the question. I think meaning is something that's described to stuff that's created with purpose. There's a meaning to, uh, like this water bottle label and that someone created it with a purpose of conveying meaning. And there was like one consciousness that wanted to get its ideas into another consciousness. Um, most things don't have that property. It's a little bit like if I asked you, um, like what is the height, all right, so it's all relative. Yeah. You'd be like the height of what you can't ask. What is the height without an object? You can't ask what is the meaning of life without like an intentful consciousness, putting it like, I guess I'm revealing I'm not very religious, but you know, the mathematics of everything seems kind of beautiful. It seems like, it seems like there's some kind of structure relative to which, I mean, you could calculate the height. Well, so, but what I'm saying is I don't understand the question. What is the meaning of life in that? I think people might be asking something very real. I don't understand what they're asking. Are they asking like, why does life exist? Like how did it come about? What are the natural laws? Are they asking, um, as I'm making decisions day by day for what should I do? What is the guiding light that inspires like, what should I do? I think that's what people are kind of asking. But also like why the thing that gives you joy about education, about mathematics, what the hell is that? Like what interactions with other people, interactions with like minded people, I think is the meaning of, in that sense, bringing others joy, essentially, like in something you've created, it connects with others somehow and the same and the vice versa. I think that that is what, um, when we use the word meaning to mean like you're sort of filled with a sense of happiness and energy to create more things, like I have so much meaning taken from this, like that, yeah, that's what fuels, fuels my pump at least. So a life alone on a desert island would be kind of meaningless. Yeah. You want to be alone together with someone. I think we're all alone together. I think there's no better way to end it, Grant. You've been, first time we talked, it was amazing again, it's a huge honor that you make time for me. I appreciate talking with you. Thanks, man. Awesome. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Grant Sanderson. And thank you to our sponsors, Dollar Shave Club, DoorDash, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, look how beautiful it is, and I'll agree. Then he says, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing. And I think he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension at one centimeter, there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question. Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Grant Sanderson: Math, Manim, Neural Networks & Teaching with 3Blue1Brown | Lex Fridman Podcast #118

The following is a conversation with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and one of the great science communicators of our time, exploring the beauty and mystery of the human brain. He's an author of a lot of amazing books about the human mind, and his new one called Livewired. Livewired is a work of 10 years on a topic that is fascinating to me, which is neuroplasticity or the malleability of the human brain. Quick summary of the sponsors. Athletic Greens, BetterHelp, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the adaptability of the human mind at the biological, chemical, cognitive, psychological, and even sociological levels is the very thing that captivated me many years ago when I first began to wonder how would my engineer something like it in the machine. The open question today in the 21st century is what are the limits of this adaptability? As new, smarter and smarter devices and AI systems come to life, or as better and better brain computer interfaces are engineered, will our brain be able to adapt, to catch up, to excel? I personally believe yes, that we're far from reaching the limitation of the human mind and the human brain, just as we are far from reaching the limitations of our computational systems. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it's difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That's where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body as delivered straight to your door. As you may know, I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting for 16 hours, sometimes 24 hours, dinner to dinner, sometimes more. I break the fast with Athletic Greens. It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good. I think it's like 50 calories, less than a gram of sugar, but has a ton of nutrients to make sure my body has what it needs despite what I'm eating. Go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to claim a special offer of a free vitamin D3K2 for a year. If you listen to the Joe Rogan experience, you might've listened to him rant about how awesome vitamin D is for your immune system. So there you have it. So click the athleticgreens.com slash lex in the description to get the free stuff and to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line, it's not self help, it's professional counseling done securely online. I'm a bit from the David Goggins line of creatures and so have some demons to contend with, usually on long runs or all nights full of self doubt. I think suffering is essential for creation, but you can suffer beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. For most people, I think a good therapist can help on this. So it's at least worth a try. Check out their reviews, they're good. It's easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule a weekly audio and video session. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code lexpodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Davidson credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code lexpodcast, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with David Eagleman. You have a new book coming out on the changing brain. Can you give a high level overview of the book? It's called Livewired by the way. Yeah, the thing is we typically think about the brain in terms of the metaphors we already have, like hardware and software, that's how we build all our stuff, but what's happening in the brain is fundamentally so different. So I coined this new term liveware, which is a system that's constantly reconfiguring itself physically as it learns and adapts to the world around it. It's physically changing. So it's liveware meaning like hardware but changing. Yeah, exactly. Well, the hardware and the software layers are blended and so typically engineers are praised for their efficiency and making something really clean and clear, like, okay, here's the hardware layer, then I'm gonna run software on top of it. And there's all sorts of universality that you get out of a piece of hardware like that that's useful. But what the brain is doing is completely different. And I am so excited about where this is all going because I feel like this is where our engineering will go. So currently we build all our devices a particular way, but I can't tear half the circuitry out of your cell phone and expect it to still function. But you can do that with the brain. So just as an example, kids who are under about seven years old can get one half of their brain removed, it's called a hemispherectomy, and they're fine. They have a slight limp on the other side of their body, but they can function just fine that way. And this is generally true. You know, sometimes children are born without a hemisphere and their visual system rewires so that everything is on the single remaining hemisphere. What thousands of cases like this teach us is that it's a very malleable system that is simply trying to accomplish the tasks in front of it by rewiring itself with the available real estate. How much of that is a quirk or a feature of evolution? Like, how hard is it to engineer? Because evolution took a lot of work. Trillions of organisms had to die for it to create this thing we have in our skull. Like, because you said you kind of look forward to the idea that we might be engineering our systems like this in the future, like creating liveware systems. How hard do you think is it to create systems like that? Great question. It has proven itself to be a difficult challenge. What I mean by that is even though it's taken evolution a really long time to get where it is now, all we have to do now is peek at the blueprints. It's just three pounds, this organ, and we just figure out how to do it. But that's the part that I mean is a difficult challenge because there are tens of thousands of neuroscientists, we're all poking and prodding and trying to figure this out, but it's an extremely complicated system. But it's only gonna be complicated until we figure out the general principles. Exactly like if you had a magic camera you could look inside the nucleus of a cell and you'd see hundreds of thousands of things moving around or whatever, and then it takes Crick and Watson to say, oh, you know what, you're just trying to maintain the order of the base pairs and all the rest is details. Then it simplifies it and we come to understand something. That was my goal in LiveWire, which I've written over 10 years, by the way, is to try to distill things down to the principles of what plastic systems are trying to accomplish. But to even just linger, you said, it's possible to be born with just one hemisphere and you still are able to function. First of all, just to pause on that, I mean, that's kind of, that's amazing. I don't know if people quite, I mean, you kind of hear things here and there. This is why I'm kind of, I'm really excited about your book is I don't know if there's definitive sort of popular sources to think about this stuff. I mean, there's a lot of, I think from my perspective, what I heard is there's like been debates over decades about how much neuroplasticity there is in the brain and so on, and people have learned a lot of things and now it's converging towards people that are understanding there's much more plastic than people realize. But just like linger on that topic, like how malleable is the hardware of the human brain? Maybe you said children at each stage of life. Yeah, so here's the whole thing. I think part of the confusion about plasticity has been that there are studies at all sorts of different ages, and then people might read that from a distance and they think, oh, well, Fred didn't recover when half his brain was taken out and so clearly you're not plastic, but then you do it with a child and they are plastic. And so part of my goal here was to pull together the tens of thousands of papers on this, both from clinical work and from all the way down to the molecular and understand what are the principles here? The principles are that plasticity diminishes, that's no surprise. By the way, maybe I should just define plasticity. It's the ability of a system to mold into a new shape and then hold that shape. That's why we make things that we call plastic because they are moldable and they can hold that new shape, like a plastic toy or something. And so maybe we'll use a lot of terms that are synonymous. So something is plastic, something is malleable, changing, live wire, the name of the book is like synonyms. So I'll tell you, exactly right, but I'll tell you why I chose live wire instead of plasticity. So I use the term plasticity in the book, but sparingly, because that was a term coined by William James over a hundred years ago and he was, of course, very impressed with plastic manufacturing that you could mold something into shape and then it holds that. But that's not what's actually happening in the brain. It's constantly rewiring your entire life. You never hit an end point. The whole point is for it to keep changing. So even in the few minutes of conversation that we've been having, your brain is changing, my brain is changing. Next time I see your face, I will remember, oh yeah, like that time Lex and I sat together and we did these things. I wonder if your brain will have like a Lex thing going on for the next few months. Like it'll stay there until you get rid of it because it was useful for now. Yeah, no, I'll probably never get rid of it. Let's say for some circumstance, you and I don't see each other for the next 35 years. When I run into you, I'll be like, oh yeah. That looks familiar. Yeah, yeah, we sat down for a podcast back when there were podcasts. Exactly. Back when we lived outside virtual reality. Exactly. So you chose live wire to mold a plastic. Exactly, because plastic implies, I mean, it's the term that's used in the field and so that's why we need to use it still for a while. But yeah, it implies something gets molded into shape and then holds that shape forever. But in fact, the whole system is completely changing. Then back to how malleable is the human brain at each stage of life. So what, just at a high level, is it malleable? So yes, and plasticity diminishes. But one of the things that I felt like I was able to put together for myself after reading thousands of papers on this issue is that different parts of the brain have different plasticity windows. So for example, with the visual cortex, that cements itself into place pretty quickly over the course of a few years. And I argue that's because of the stability of the data. In other words, what you're getting in from the world, you've got a certain number of angles, colors, shapes. It's essentially the world is visually stable. So that hardens around that data. As opposed to, let's say, the somatosensory cortex, which is the part that's taking information from your body, or the motor cortex right next to it, which is what drives your body. The fact is, bodies are always changing. You get taller over time, you get fatter, thinner, over time, you might break a leg and have to limp for a while, stuff like that. So because the data there is always changing, by the way, you might get on a bicycle, you might get on a surfboard, things like that. Because the data is always changing, that stays more malleable. And when you look through the brain, you find that it appears to be this, how stable the data is determines how fast something hardens into place. But the point is, different parts of the brain harden into place at different times. Do you think it's possible that, depending on how much data you get on different sensors, that it stays more malleable longer? So like, if you look at different cultures that experience, like if you keep your eyes closed, or maybe you're blind, I don't know, but let's say you keep your eyes closed for your entire life, then the visual cortex might be much less malleable. The reason I bring that up is like, well maybe we'll talk about brain computer interfaces a little bit down the line, but is this, is the malleability a genetic thing, or is it more about the data, like you said, that comes in? Ah, so the malleability itself is a genetic thing. The big trick that Mother Nature discovered with humans is make a system that's really flexible, as opposed to most other creatures to different degrees. So if you take an alligator, it's born, its brain does the same thing every generation. If you compare an alligator 100,000 years ago to an alligator now, they're essentially the same. We, on the other hand, as humans, drop into a world with a half baked brain, and what we require is to absorb the culture around us, and the language, and the beliefs, and the customs, and so on, that's what Mother Nature has done with us, and it's been a tremendously successful trick we've taken over the whole planet as a result of this. So that's an interesting point, I mean, just to link on it, that, I mean, this is a nice feature, like if you were to design a thing to survive in this world, do you put it at age zero already equipped to deal with the world in a hard coded way, or do you put it, do you make it malleable and just throw it in, take the risk that you're maybe going to die, but you're going to learn a lot in the process, and if you don't die, you'll learn a hell of a lot to be able to survive in the environment. So this is the experiment that Mother Nature ran, and it turns out that, for better or worse, we've won. I mean, yeah, we put other animals in the zoos, and we, yeah, that's right. AI might do better. Okay, fair enough, that's true. And maybe what the trick Mother Nature did is just the stepping stone to AI, but. So that's a beautiful feature of the human brain, that it's malleable, but let's, on the topic of Mother Nature, what do we start with? Like, how blank is the slate? Ah, so it's not actually a blank slate. What it's, it's terrific engineering that's set up in there, but much of that engineering has to do with, okay, just make sure that things get to the right place. For example, like the fibers from the eyes getting to the visual cortex, or all this very complicated machinery in the ear getting to the auditory cortex, and so on. So things, first of all, there's that. And then what we also come equipped with is the ability to absorb language and culture and beliefs, and so on. So you're already set up for that. So no matter what you're exposed to, you will absorb some sort of language. That's the trick, is how do you engineer something just enough that it's then a sponge that's ready to take in and fill in the blanks? How much of the malleability is hardware? How much is software? Is that useful at all in the brain? So what are we talking about? So there's neurons, there's synapses, and all kinds of different synapses, and there's chemical communication, like electrical signals, and there's chemical communication from the synapses. I would say the software would be the timing and the nature of the electrical signals, I guess, and the hardware would be the actual synapses. So here's the thing, this is why I really, if we can, I wanna get away from the hardware and software metaphor because what happens is, as activity passes through the system, it changes things. Now, the thing that computer engineers are really used to thinking about is synapses, where two neurons connect. Of course, each neuron connects with 10,000 of its neighbors, but at a point where they connect, what we're all used to thinking about is the changing of the strength of that connection, the synaptic weight. But in fact, everything is changing. The receptor distribution inside that neuron so that you're more or less sensitive to the neurotransmitter, then the structure of the neuron itself and what's happening there, all the way down to biochemical cascades inside the cell, all the way down to the nucleus, and for example, the epigenome, which is these little proteins that are attached to the DNA that cause conformational changes, that cause more genes to be expressed or repressed. All of these things are plastic. The reason that most people only talk about the synaptic weights is because that's really all we can measure well. And all this other stuff is really, really hard to see with our current technology. So essentially, that just gets ignored. But in fact, the system is plastic at all these different levels. And my way of thinking about this is an analogy to pace layers. So pace layers is a concept that Stewart Brand suggested about how to think about cities. So you have fashion, which changes rapidly in cities. You have governance, which changes more slowly. You have the structure, the buildings of a city, which changes more slowly, all the way down to nature. You've got all these different layers of things that are changing at different paces, at different speeds. I've taken that idea and mapped it onto the brain, which is to say you have some biochemical cascades that are just changing really rapidly when something happens, all the way down to things that are more and more cemented in there. And this actually allows us to understand a lot about particular kinds of things that happen. For example, one of the oldest, probably the oldest rule in neurology is called Ribot's Law, which is that older memories are more stable than newer memories. So when you get old and demented, you'll be able to remember things from your young life. Maybe you'll remember this podcast, but you won't remember what you did a month ago or a year ago. And this is a very weird structure, right? No other system works this way, where older memories are more stable than newer memories. But it's because through time, things get more and more cemented into deeper layers of the system. And so this is, I think, the way we have to think about the brain, not as, okay, you've got neurons, you've got synaptic weights, and that's it. So, yeah, so the idea of LiveWare and LiveWired is that it's like a, it's a gradual, yeah, it's a gradual spectrum between software and hardware. And so the metaphors completely doesn't make sense. Cause like when you talk about software and hardware, it's really hard lines. I mean, of course, software is unlike hard, but even hardware, but like, so there's two groups, but in the software world, there's levels of abstractions, right? There's the operating system, there's machine code, and then it gets higher and higher levels. But somehow that's actually fundamentally different than the layers of abstractions in the hardware. But in the brain, it's all like the same. And I love the city, the city metaphor. I mean, yeah, it's kind of mind blowing cause it's hard to know what to think about that. Like if I were to ask the question, this is an important question for machine learning is, how does the brain learn? So essentially you're saying that, I mean, it just learns on all of these different levels at all different paces. Exactly right. And as a result, what happens is as you practice something, you get good at something, you're physically changing the circuitry, you're adapting your brain around the thing that is relevant to you. So let's say you take up, do you know how to surf? Nope. Okay, great. So let's say you take up surfing now at this age. What happens is you'll be terrible at first, you don't know how to operate your body, you don't know how to read the waves, things like that. And through time you get better and better. What you're doing is you're burning that into the actual circuitry of your brain. You're of course conscious when you're first doing it, you're thinking about, okay, where am I doing? What's my body weight? But eventually when you become a pro at it, you are not conscious of it at all. In fact, you can't even unpack what it is that you did. Think about riding a bicycle. You can't describe how you're doing it, you're just doing it, you're changing your balance when you come, you know, you do this to go to a stop. So this is what we're constantly doing is actually shaping our own circuitry based on what is relevant for us. Survival, of course, being the top thing that's relevant. But interestingly, especially with humans, we have these particular goals in our lives, computer science, neuroscience, whatever. And so we actually shape our circuitry around that. I mean, you mentioned this gets slower and slower with age, but is there, like I think I've read and spoken offline, even on this podcast with a developmental neurobiologist, I guess would be the right terminology, is like looking at the very early, like from embryonic stem cells to the creation of the brain. And like, that's mind blowing how much stuff happens there. So it's very malleable at that stage. And then, but after that, at which point does it stop being malleable? So that's the interesting thing is that it remains malleable your whole life. So even when you're an old person, you'll be able to remember new faces and names, you'll be able to learn new sorts of tasks. And thank goodness, cause the world is changing rapidly in terms of technology and so on. I just sent my mother an Alexa and she figured out how to go on the settings and do the thing. And I was really impressed that she was able to do it. So there are parts of the brain that remain malleable their whole life. The interesting part is that really your goal is to make an internal model of the world. Your goal is to say, okay, the brain is trapped in silence and darkness, and it's trying to understand how the world works out there, right? I love that image. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah. You forget, it's like this lonely thing is sitting in its own container and trying to actually throw a few sensors, figure out what the hell's going on. You know what I sometimes think about is that movie, The Martian with Matt Damon, the, I mean, it was written in a book, of course, but the movie poster shows Matt Damon all alone on the red planet. And I think, God, that's actually what it's like to be inside your head and my head and anybody's head is that you're essentially on your own planet in there. And I'm essentially on my own planet. And everyone's got their own world where you've absorbed all of your experiences up to this moment in your life that have made you exactly who you are and same for me and everyone. And we've got this very thin bandwidth of communication. And I'll say something like, oh yeah, that tastes just like peaches. And you'll say, oh, I know what you mean. But the experience, of course, might be vastly different for us. But anyway, yes. So the brain is trapped in silence and darkness, each one of us, and what it's trying to do, this is the important part, it's trying to make an internal model of what's going on out there, as in how do I function in the world? How do I interact with other people? Do I say something nice and polite? Do I say something aggressive and mean? Do I, you know, all these things that it's putting together about the world. And I think what happens when people get older and older, it may not be that plasticity is diminishing. It may be that their internal model essentially has set itself up in a way where it says, okay, I've pretty much got a really good understanding of the world now, and I don't really need to change, right? So when much older people find themselves in a situation where they need to change, they can actually are able to do it. It's just that I think this notion that we all have that plasticity diminishes as we grow older is in part because the motivation isn't there. But if you were 80 and you get fired from your job and suddenly had to figure out how to program a WordPress site or something, you'd figure it out. Got it. So the capability, the possibility of change is there. But then that's the highest challenge, the interesting challenge to this plasticity, to this liveware system. If we could talk about brain computer interfaces and Neuralink, what are your thoughts about the efforts of Elon Musk, Neuralink, BCI in general in this regard, which is adding a machine, a computer, the capability of a computer to communicate with the brain and the brain to communicate with a computer at the very basic applications and then like the futuristic kind of thoughts. Yeah, first of all, it's terrific that people are jumping in and doing that because it's clearly the future. The interesting part is our brains have pretty good methods of interacting with technology. So maybe it's your fat thumbs on a cell phone or something, but, or maybe it's watching a YouTube video and getting into your eye that way. But we have pretty rapid ways of communicating with technology and getting data. So if you actually crack open the skull and go into the inner sanctum of the brain, you might be able to get a little bit faster, but I'll tell you, I'm not so sanguine on the future of that as a business. And I'll tell you why. It's because there are various ways of getting data in and out and an open head surgery is a big deal. Neurosurgeons don't wanna do it because there's always risk of death and infection on the table. And also it's not clear how many people would say, I'm gonna volunteer to get something in my head so that I can text faster, 20% faster. So I think it's, mother nature surrounds the brain with this armored bunker of the skull because it's a very delicate material. And there's an expression in neurosurgery about the brain is, the person is never the same after you open up their skull. Now, whether or not that's true or whatever, who cares? But it's a big deal to do an open head surgery. So what I'm interested in is how can we get information in and out of the brain without having to crack the skull open? Without messing with the biological part, directly connecting or messing with the intricate biological thing that we got going on and it seems to be working. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, where Neuralink is going, which is wonderful, is going to be in patient cases. It really matters for all kinds of surgeries that a person needs, whether for Parkinson's or epilepsy or whatever. It's a terrific new technology for essentially sewing electrodes in there and getting more higher density of electrodes. So that's great. I just don't think as far as the future of BCI goes, I don't suspect that people will go in and say, yeah, drill a hole in my head and do this. Well, it's interesting because I think there's a similar intuition but say in the world of autonomous vehicles that folks know how hard it is and it seems damn impossible. The similar intuition about, I'm sticking on the Elon Musk thing is just a good, easy example. Similar intuition about colonizing Mars, it like, if you really think about it, it seems extremely difficult. And almost, I mean, just technically difficult to a degree where you wanna ask, is it really worth doing, worth trying? And then the same is applied with BCI. But the thing about the future is it's hard to predict. So the exciting thing to me with, so once it does, once if successful, it's able to help patients, it may be able to discover something very surprising of our ability to directly communicate with the brain. So exactly what you're interested in is figuring out how to play with this malleable brain, but like help assist it somehow. I mean, it's such a compelling notion to me that we're now working on all these exciting machine learning systems that are able to learn from data. And then if we can have this other brain that's a learning system, that's live wired on the human side and them to be able to communicate, it's like a self play mechanism was able to beat the world champion at Go. So they can play with each other, the computer and the brain, like when you sleep. I mean, there's a lot of futuristic kind of things that it's just exciting possibilities, but I hear you, we understand so little about the actual intricacies of the communication of the brain that it's hard to find the common language. Well, interestingly, the technologies that have been built don't actually require the perfect common language. So for example, hundreds of thousands of people are walking around with artificial ears and artificial eyes, meaning cochlear implants or retinal implants. So this is, you take a essentially digital microphone, you slip an electrode strip into the inner ear and people can learn how to hear that way, or you take an electrode grid and you plug it into the retina at the back of the eye and people can learn how to see that way. The interesting part is those devices don't speak exactly the natural biological language, they speak the dialect of Silicon Valley. And it turns out that as recently as about 25 years ago, a lot of people thought this was never gonna work. They thought it wasn't gonna work for that reason, but the brain figures it out. It's really good at saying, okay, look, there's some correlation between what I can touch and feel and hear and so on, and the data that's coming in, or between I clap my hands and I have signals coming in there and it figures out how to speak any language. Oh, that's fascinating. So like no matter if it's Neuralink, so directly communicating with the brain, or it's a smartphone or Google Glass, or the brain figures out the efficient way of communication. Well, exactly, exactly. And what I propose is the potato head theory of evolution, which is that all our eyes and nose and mouth and ears and fingertips, all this stuff is just plug and play. And the brain can figure out what to do with the data that comes in. And part of the reason that I think this is right, and I care so deeply about this, is when you look across the animal kingdom, you find all kinds of weird peripheral devices plugged in, and the brain figures out what to do with the data. And I don't believe that Mother Nature has to reinvent the principles of brain operation each time to say, oh, now I'm gonna have heat pits to detect infrared. Now I'm gonna have something to detect electroreceptors on the body. Now I'm gonna detect something to pick up the magnetic field of the earth with cryptochromes in the eye. And so instead the brain says, oh, I got it. There's data coming in. Is that useful? Can I do something with it? Oh, great, I'm gonna mold myself around the data that's coming in. It's kind of fascinating to think that, we think of smartphones and all this new technology as novel. It's totally novel as outside of what evolution ever intended or like what nature ever intended. It's fascinating to think that like the entirety of the process of evolution is perfectly fine and ready for the smartphone and the internet. Like it's ready. It's ready to be valuable to that. And whatever comes to cyborgs, to virtual reality, we kind of think like, this is, you know, there's all these like books written about what's natural and we're like destroying our natural cells by like embracing all this technology. It's kind of, you know, probably not giving the brain enough credit. Like this thing is just fine with new tech. Oh, exactly, it wraps itself around. And by the way, wait till you have kids. You'll see the ease with which they pick up on stuff. And as Kevin Kelly said, technology is what gets invented after you're born. But the stuff that already exists when you're born, that's not even tech, that's just background furniture. Like the fact that the iPad exists for my son and daughter, like that's just background furniture. So, yeah, it's because we have this incredibly malleable system, that just absorbs whatever is going on in the world and learns what to do with it. So do you think, just to linger for a little bit more, do you think it's possible to co adjust? Like we're kind of, you know, for the machine to adjust to the brain, for the brain to adjust to the machine. I guess that's what's already happening. Sure, that is what's happening. So for example, when you put electrodes in the motor cortex to control a robotic arm for somebody who's paralyzed, the engineers do a lot of work to figure out, okay, what can we do with the algorithm here so that we can detect what's going on from these cells and figure out how to best program the robotic arm to move given the data that we're measuring from these cells. But also the brain is learning too. So, you know, the paralyzed woman says, wait, I'm trying to grab this thing. And by the way, it's all about relevance. So if there's a piece of food there and she's hungry, she'll figure out how to get this food into her mouth with the robotic arm because that is what matters. Well, that's, okay, first of all, that paints a really promising and beautiful, for some reason, really optimistic picture that, you know, our brain is able to adjust to so much. You know, so many things happened this year, 2020, that you think like, how are we ever going to deal with it? And it's somehow encouraging and inspiring that like we're going to be okay. Well, that's right. I actually think, so 2020 has been an awful year for almost everybody in many ways, but the one silver lining has to do with brain plasticity, which is to say we've all been on our, you know, on our gerbil wheels, we've all been in our routines. And, you know, as I mentioned, our internal models are all about how do you maximally succeed? How do you optimize your operation in this circumstance where you are, right? And then all of a sudden, bang, 2020 comes, we're completely off our wheels. We're having to create new things all the time and figure out how to do it. And that is terrific for brain plasticity because, and we know this because there are very large studies on older people who stay cognitively active their whole lives. Some fraction of them have Alzheimer's disease physically, but nobody knows that when they're alive. Even though their brain is getting chewed up with the ravages of Alzheimer's, cognitively they're doing just fine. Why? It's because they're challenged all the time. They've got all these new things going on, all this novelty, all these responsibilities, chores, social life, all these things happening. And as a result, they're constantly building new roadways, even as parts degrade. And that's the only good news is that we are in a situation where suddenly we can't just operate like automata anymore. We have to think of completely new ways to do things. And that's wonderful. I don't know why this question popped into my head. It's quite absurd, but are we gonna be okay? Yeah. You said this is the promising silver lining just from your own, cause you've written about this and thought about this outside of maybe even the plasticity of the brain, but just this whole pandemic kind of changed the way it knocked us out of this hamster wheel like that of habit. A lot of people had to reinvent themselves. Unfortunately, and I have a lot of friends who either already or are going to lose their business, is basically it's taking the dreams that people have had and said this dream, this particular dream you've had will no longer be possible. So you have to find something new. What are your, are we gonna be okay? Yeah, we'll be okay in the sense that, I mean, it's gonna be a rough time for many or most people, but in the sense that it is sometimes useful to find that what you thought was your dream was not the thing that you're going to do. This is obviously the plot in lots of Hollywood movies that someone says, I'm gonna do this, and then that gets foiled and they end up doing something better. But this is true in life. I mean, in general, even though we plan our lives as best we can, it's predicated on our notion of, okay, given everything that's around me, this is what's possible for me next. But it takes 2020 to knock you off that where you think, oh, well, actually, maybe there's something I can be doing that's bigger, that's better. Yeah, you know, for me, one exciting thing, and I just talked to Grant Sanderson. I don't know if you know who he is. He's a 3Blue1Brown, it's a YouTube channel. He does, he's a, if you see it, you would recognize it. He's like a really famous math guy, and he's a math educator, and he does these incredible, beautiful videos. And now I see sort of at MIT, folks are struggling to try to figure out, you know, if we do teach remotely, how do we do it effectively? So you have these world class researchers and professors trying to figure out how to put content online that teaches people. And to me, a possible future of that is, you know, Nobel Prize winning faculty become YouTubers. Like that to me is so exciting, like what Grant said, which is like the possibility of creating canonical videos on the thing you're a world expert in. You know, there's so many topics. It just, the world doesn't, you know, there's faculty. I mentioned Russ Tedrick. There's all these people in robotics that are experts in a particular beautiful field on which there's only just papers. There's no popular book. There's no clean canonical video showing the beauty of a subject. And one possibility is they try to create that and share it with the world. This is the beautiful thing. This of course has been happening for a while already. I mean, for example, when I go and I give book talks, often what'll happen is some 13 year old will come up to me afterwards and say something, and I'll say, my God, that was so smart. Like, how did you know that? And they'll say, oh, I saw it on a Ted talk. Well, what an amazing opportunity. Here you got the best person in the world on subject X giving a 15 minute talk as beautifully as he or she can. And the 13 year old just grows up with that. That's just the mother's milk, right? As opposed to when we grew up, you know, I had whatever homeroom teacher I had and, you know, whatever classmates I had. And hopefully that person knew what he or she was teaching and often didn't and, you know, just made things up. So the opportunity that has become extraordinary to get the best of the world. And the reason this matters, of course, is because obviously, back to plasticity, the way that we, the way our brain gets molded is by absorbing everything from the world, all of the knowledge and the data and so on that it can get, and then springboarding off of that. And we're in a very lucky time now because we grew up with a lot of just in case learning. So, you know, just in case you ever need to know these dates in Mongolian history, here they are. But what kids are grown up with now, like my kids, is tons of just in time learning. So as soon as they're curious about something, they ask Alexa, they ask Google Home, they get the answer right there in the context of their curiosity. The reason this matters is because for plasticity to happen, you need to care, you need to be curious about something. And this is something, by the way, that the ancient Romans had noted. They had outlined seven different levels of learning and the highest level is when you're curious about a topic. But anyway, so kids now are getting tons of just in time learning, and as a result, they're gonna be so much smarter than we are. They're just, and we can already see that. I mean, my boy is eight years old, my girl is five. But I mean, the things that he knows are amazing because it's not just him having to do the rote memorization stuff that we did. Yeah, it's just fascinating what the brain, what young brains look like now because of all those TED Talks just loaded in there. And there's also, I mean, a lot of people, right, kind of, there's a sense that our attention span is growing shorter, but it's complicated because for example, most people, majority of people, it's the 80 plus percent of people listen to the entirety of these things, two, three hours for the podcast, long form podcasts are becoming more and more popular. So like that's, it's all really giant complicated mess. And the point is that the brain is able to adjust to it and somehow like form a worldview within this new medium of like information that we have. You have like these short tweets and you have these three, four hour podcasts and you have Netflix movie. I mean, it's just, it's adjusting to the entirety and just absorbing it and taking it all in and then pops up COVID that forces us all to be home and it all just adjusts and figures it out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's fascinating. Been talking about the brain as if it's something separate from the human that carries it a little bit. Like whenever you talk about the brain, it's easy to forget that that's like, that's us. Like how much do you, how much is the whole thing like predetermined? Like how much is it already encoded in there? And how much is it the, what's the hit? The actions, the decisions, the judgments, the... You mean like who you are? Who you are. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, great question. Right, so there used to be a big debate about nature versus nurture. And we now know that it's always both. You can't even separate them because you come to the table with a certain amount of nature for example, your whole genome and so on. The experiences you have in the womb, like whether your mother is smoking or drinking, things like that, whether she's stressed, so on. Those all influence how you're gonna pop out of the womb. From there, everything is an interaction between all of your experiences and the nature. What I mean is, I think of it like a space time cone where you have, you drop into the world and depending on the experience that you have, you might go off in this direction or that direction or in that direction because there's interaction on the way. Your experiences determine what happens with the expression of your genes. So some genes get repressed, some get expressed and so on. And you actually become a different person based on your experiences. There's a whole field called epigenomics, which is, or epigenetics I should say, which is about the epigenome. And that is the layer that sits on top of the DNA and causes the genes to express differently. That is directly related to the experiences that you have. So if, just as an example, they take rat pups and one group is placed away from their parents and the other group is groomed and licked and taken good care of, that changes their gene expression for the rest of their life. They go off in different directions in this space time cone. So yeah, this is of course why it matters that we take care of children and pour money into things like education and good childcare and so on for children broadly, because these formative years matter so much. So is there a free will? This is a great question. I apologize for the absurd high level philosophical questions. No, no, these are my favorite kind of questions. Here's the thing, here's the thing. We don't know. If you ask most neuroscientists, they'll say that we can't really think of how you would get free will in there because as far as we can tell, it's a machine. It's a very complicated machine. Enormously sophisticated, 86 billion neurons, about the same number of glial cells. Each of these things is as complicated as the city of San Francisco. Each neuron in your head has the entire human genome in it. It's expressing millions of gene products. These are incredibly complicated biochemical cascades. Each one is connected to 10,000 of its neighbors, which means you have like half a quadrillion connections in the brain. So it's incredibly complicated thing, but it is fundamentally appears to just be a machine. And therefore, if there's nothing in it that's not being driven by something else, then it seems it's hard to understand where free will would come from. So that's the camp that pretty much all of us fall into, but I will say, our science is still quite young. And I'm a fan of the history of science, and the thing that always strikes me as interesting is when you look back at any moment in science, everybody believes something is true, and they simply didn't know about what Einstein revealed or whatever. And so who knows? And they all feel like that we've, at any moment in history, they all feel like we've converged to the final answer. Exactly, exactly. Like all the pieces of the puzzle are there. And I think that's a funny illusion that's worth getting rid of. And in fact, this is what drives good science is recognizing that we don't have most of the puzzle pieces. So as far as the free will question goes, I don't know. At the moment, it seems, wow, it'd be really impossible to figure out how something else could fit in there, but 100 years from now, our textbooks might be very different than they are now. I mean, could I ask you to speculate where do you think free will could be squeezed into there? Like, what's that even, is it possible that our brain just creates kinds of illusions that are useful for us? Or like what, where could it possibly be squeezed in? Well, let me give a speculation answer to your very nice question, but don't, and the listeners of this podcast, don't quote me on this. Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying this is what I believe to be true, but let me just give an example. I give this at the end of my book, Incognito. So the whole book of Incognito is about, all the what's happening in the brain. And essentially I'm saying, look, here's all the reasons to think that free will probably does not exist. But at the very end, I say, look, imagine that you are, imagine that you're a Kalahari Bushman and you find a radio in the sand and you've never seen anything like this. And you look at this radio and you realize that when you turn this knob, you hear voices coming from, there are voices coming from it. So being a radio materialist, you try to figure out like, how does this thing operate? So you take off the back cover and you realize there's all these wires. And when you take out some wires, the voices get garbled or stop or whatever. And so what you end up developing is a whole theory about how this connection, this pattern of wires gives rise to voices. But it would never strike you that in distant cities, there's a radio tower and there's invisible stuff beaming. And that's actually the origin of the voices. And this is just necessary for it. So I mentioned this just as a speculation, say, look, how would we know, what we know about the brain for absolutely certain is that when you damage pieces and parts of it, things get jumbled up. But how would you know if there's something else going on that we can't see like electromagnetic radiation that is what's actually generating this? Yeah, you paint a beautiful example of how totally, because we don't know most of how our universe works, how totally off base we might be with our science until, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's inspiring, that's beautiful. It's kind of terrifying, it's humbling. It's all of the above. And the important part just to recognize is that of course we're in the position of having massive unknowns. And we have of course the known unknowns and that's all the things we're pursuing in our labs and trying to figure out that, but there's this whole space of unknown unknowns. Things we haven't even realized we haven't asked yet. Let me kind of ask a weird, maybe a difficult question, part that has to do with, I've been recently reading a lot about World War II. I'm currently reading a book I recommend for people, which as a Jew has been difficult to read, but the rise and fall of the Third Reich. So let me just ask about like the nature of genius, the nature of evil. If we look at somebody like Einstein, we look at Hitler, Stalin, modern day Jeffrey Epstein, just folks who through their life have done with Einstein and works of genius and with the others I mentioned have done evil on this world. What do we think about that in a livewired brain? Like how do we think about these extreme people? Here's what I'd say. This is a very big and difficult question, but what I would say briefly on it is, first of all, I saw a cover of Time Magazine some years ago and it was a big sagittal slice of the brain and it said something like, what makes us good and evil? And there was a little spot pointing to it and there was a picture of Gandhi and there was a little spot that was pointing to Hitler. And these Time Magazine covers always make me mad because it's so goofy to think that we're gonna find some spot in the brain or something. Instead, the interesting part is because we're livewired, we are all about the world and the culture around us. So somebody like Adolf Hitler got all this positive feedback about what was going on and the crazier and crazier the ideas he had and he's like, let's set up death camps and murder a bunch of people and so on. Somehow he was getting positive feedback from that and all these other people, they're all spun each other up. And you look at anything like, I mean, look at the cultural revolution in China or the Russian revolution or things like this where you look at these things, my God, how do people all behave like this? But it's easy to see groups of people spinning themselves up in particular ways where they all say, well, would I have thought this was right in a different circumstance? I don't know, but Fred thinks it's right and Steve thinks it's right, everyone around me seems to think it's right. And so part of the maybe downside of having a livewired brain is that you can get crowds of people doing things as a group. So it's interesting to, we would pinpoint Hitler as saying that's the evil guy. But in a sense, I think it was Tolstoy who said the king becomes slave to the people. In other words, Hitler was just a representation of whatever was going on with that huge crowd that he was surrounded with. So I only bring that up to say that it's very difficult to say what it is about this person's brain or that person's brain. He obviously got feedback for what he was doing. The other thing, by the way, about what we often think of as being evil in society is my lab recently published some work on in groups and out groups, which is a very important part of this puzzle. So it turns out that we are very engineered to care about in groups versus out groups. And this seems to be like a really fundamental thing. So we did this experiment in my lab where we brought people and we stick them in the scanner. And we, I don't know if you noticed, but we show them on the screen six hands and the computer goes around randomly picks a hand. And then you see that hand gets stabbed with a syringe needle. So you actually see a syringe needle enter the hand and come out. And it's really, what that does is that triggers parts of the pain matrix, this areas in your brain that are involved in feeling physical pain. Now, the interesting thing is it's not your hand that was stabbed. So what you're seeing is empathy. This is you seeing someone else's hand gets stabbed. You feel like, oh God, this is awful, right? Okay. We contrast that by the way, with somebody's hand getting poked as a Q tip, which is, you know, looks visually the same, but you don't have that same level of response. Now what we do is we label each hand with a one word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Scientologist, Hindu. And now the computer goes around, picks a hand, stabs the hand. And the question is, how much does your brain care about all the people in your out group versus the one label that happens to match you? And it turns out for everybody across all religions, they care much more about their in group than their out group. And when I say they care, what I mean is you get a bigger response from their brain. Everything's the same. It's the same hands. It's just a one word label. You care much more about your in group than your out group. And I wish this weren't true, but this is how humans are. I wonder how fundamental that is, or if it's the emergent thing about culture. Like if we lived alone with like, if it's genetically built into the brain, like this longing for tribe. So I'll tell you, we addressed that. So here's what we did. There are two, actually there are two other things we did as part of this study that I think matter for this point. One is, so okay, so we show that you have a much bigger response. And by the way, this is not a cognitive thing. This is a very low level basic response to seeing pain in somebody, okay. Great study by the way. Thanks, thanks, thanks. What we did next is we next have it where we say, okay, the year is 2025 and these three religions are now in a war against these three religions. And it's all randomized, right? But what you see is your thing and you have two allies now against these others. And now it happens over the course of many trials, you see everybody gets stabbed at different times. And the question is, do you care more about your allies? And the answer is yes. Suddenly people who a moment ago, you didn't really care when they got stabbed. Now, simply with this one word thing that they're now your allies, you care more about them. But then what I wanted to do was look at how ingrained is this or how arbitrary is it? So we brought new participants in and we said, here's a coin, toss the coin. If it's heads, you're an Augustinian. If it's a tails, you're a Justinian. These are totally made up. Okay, so they toss it, they get whatever. We give them a band that says Augustinian on it, whatever tribe they're in now, and they get in the scanner and they see a thing on the screen that says the Augustinians and Justinians are two warring tribes. Then you see a bunch of hands, some are labeled Augustinians, some are Justinian. And now you care more about whichever team you're on than the other team, even though it's totally arbitrary and you know it's arbitrary because you're the one who tossed the coin. So it's a state that's very easy to find ourselves in. In other words, just before walking in the door, they'd never even heard of Augustinian versus Justinian and now their brain is representing it simply because they're told they're on this team. You know, now I did my own personal study of this. So once you're an Augustinian, that tends to be sticky because I've been a Packers fan, grew to be a Packers fan my whole life. Now when I'm in Boston with like the Patriots, it's been tough going for my livewired brain to switch to the Patriots. So once you become, it's as interesting, once the tribe is sticky. Yeah, I'll admit that's true. That's it, you know. You know, we never tried that about saying, okay, now you're a Justinian and you were an Augustinian. We never saw how sticky it is. But there are studies of this, of monkey troops on some island. And what happens is they look at the way monkeys behave when they're part of this tribe and how they treat members of the other tribe of monkeys. And then what they do, I've forgotten how they do that, exactly, but they end up switching a monkey so he ends up in the other troop. And very quickly they end up becoming a part of that other troop and hating and behaving badly towards the original troop. These are fascinating studies, by the way. This is beautiful. In your book, you have a good light bulb joke. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. Sorry. I'm a sucker for a good light bulb joke. Okay, so given, you know, I've been interested in psychiatry my whole life, just maybe tangentially. I've kind of early on dreamed to be a psychiatrist until I understood what it entails. But, you know, is there hope for psychiatry for somebody else to help this live, wired brain to adjust? Oh yeah, I mean, in the sense that, and this has to do with this issue about us being trapped on our own planet. Forget psychiatrists, just think of like when you're talking with a friend and you say, oh, I'm so upset about this. And your friend says, hey, just look at it this way. You know, all we have access to under normal circumstances is just the way we're seeing something. And so it's super helpful to have friends and communities and psychiatrists and so on to help things change that way. So that's how psychiatrists sort of helped us. But more importantly, the role that psychiatrists have played is that there's this sort of naive assumption that we all come to the table with, which is that everyone is fundamentally just like us. And when you're a kid, you believe this entirely, but as you get older and you start realizing, okay, there's something called schizophrenia and that's a real thing. And to be inside that person's head is totally different than what it is to be inside my head or their psychopathy. And to be inside the psychopath's head, he doesn't care about other people. He doesn't care about hurting other people. He's just doing what he needs to do to get what he needs. That's a different head. There's a million different things going on and it is different to be inside those heads. This is where the field of psychiatry comes in. Now, I think it's an interesting question about the degree to which neuroscience is leaking into and taking over psychiatry and what the landscape will look like 50 years from now. It may be that psychiatry as a profession changes a lot or maybe goes away entirely, and neuroscience will essentially be able to take over some of these functions, but it has been extremely useful to understand the differences between how people behave and why and what you can tell about what's going on inside their brain just based on observation of their behavior. This might be years ago, but I'm not sure. There's an Atlantic article you've written about moving away from a distinction between neurological disorders, quote unquote, brain problems, and psychiatric disorders or quote unquote, mind problems. So on that topic, how do you think about this gray area? Yeah, this is exactly the evolution that things are going is there was psychiatry and then there were guys and gals in labs poking cells and so on. Those were the neuroscientists. But yeah, I think these are moving together for exactly the reason you just cited. And where this matters a lot, the Atlantic article that I wrote was called The Brain on Trial, where this matters a lot is the legal system because the way we run our legal system now, and this is true everywhere in the world, is someone shows up in front of the judge's bench, or let's say there's five people in front of the judge's bench, and they've all committed the same crime. What we do, because we feel like, hey, this is fair, is we say, all right, you're gonna get the same sentence. You'll all get three years in prison or whatever it is. But in fact, brains can be so different. This guy's got schizophrenia, this guy's a psychopath, this guy's tweaked down on drugs, and so on and so on, that it actually doesn't make sense to keep doing that. And what we do in this country more than anywhere in the world is we imagine that incarceration is a one size fits all solution. And you may know we have the, America has the highest incarceration rate in the whole world in terms of the percentage of our population we put behind bars. So there's a much more refined thing we can do as neuroscience comes in and changes, and has the opportunity to change the legal system. Which is to say, this doesn't let anybody off the hook. It doesn't say, oh, it's not your fault, and so on. But what it does is it changes the equation so it's not about, hey, how blameworthy are you? But instead is about, hey, what do we do from here? What's the best thing to do from here? So if you take somebody with schizophrenia and you have them break rocks in the hot summer sun in a chain gang, that doesn't help their schizophrenia. That doesn't fix the problem. If you take somebody with a drug addiction who's in jail for being caught with two ounces of some illegal substance, and you put them in prison, it doesn't actually fix the addiction. It doesn't help anything. Happily, what neuroscience and psychiatry bring to the table is lots of really useful things you can do with schizophrenia, with drug addiction, things like this. And that's why, so I don't know if you guys better run a national law and profit called the Center for Science and Law. And it's all about this intersection of neuroscience and psychiatry. It's the intersection of neuroscience and legal system. And we're trying to implement changes in every county, in every state. I'll just, without going down that rabbit hole, I'll just say one of the very simplest things to do is to set up specialized court systems where you have a mental health court that has judges and juries with expertise in mental illness. Because if you go, by the way, to a regular court and the person says, or the defense lawyer says, this person has schizophrenia, most of the jury will say, man, I call bullshit on that. Why? Because they don't know about schizophrenia. They don't know what it's about. And it turns out people who know about schizophrenia feel very differently as a juror than someone who happens not to know anybody with schizophrenia, they think it's an excuse. So you have judges and juries with expertise in mental illness and they know the rehabilitative strategies that are available. That's one thing. Having a drug court where you have judges and juries with expertise in rehabilitative strategies and what can be done and so on. A specialized prostitution court and so on. All these different things. By the way, this is very easy for counties to implement this sort of thing. And this is, I think, where this matters to get neuroscience into public policy. What's the process of injecting expertise into this? Yeah, I'll tell you exactly what it is. A county needs to run out of money first. I've seen this happen over and over. So what happens is a county has a completely full jail and they say, you know what? We need to build another jail. And then they realize, God, we don't have any money. We can't afford this. We've got too many people in jail. And that's when they turn to, God, we need something smarter. And that's when they set up specialized court systems. Yeah. We're all function best when our back is against the wall. And that's what COVID is good for. It's because we've all had our routines and we are optimized for the things we do. And suddenly our backs are against the wall, all of us. Yeah, it's really, I mean, one of the exciting things about COVID. I mean, I'm a big believer in the possibility of what government can do for the people. And when it becomes too big of a bureaucracy, it starts functioning poorly, it starts wasting money. It's nice to, I mean, COVID reveals that nicely. And lessons to be learned about who gets elected and who goes into government. Hopefully this, hopefully this inspires talented and young people to go into government to revolutionize different aspects of it. Yeah, so that's the positive silver lining of COVID. I mean, I thought it'd be fun to ask you, I don't know if you're paying attention to the machine learning world and GPT3. So the GPT3 is this language model, this neural network that's able to, it has 175 billion parameters. So it's very large and it's trained in an unsupervised way on the internet. It just reads a lot of unstructured texts and it's able to generate some pretty impressive things. The human brain compared to that has about, you know, a thousand times more synapses. People get so upset when machine learning people compare the brain and we know synapses are different. It was very different, very different. But like, do you, what do you think about GPT3? Here's what I think, here's what I think, a few things. What GPT3 is doing is extremely impressive, but it's very different from what the brain does. So it's a good impersonator, but just as one example, everybody takes a passage that GPT3 has written and they say, wow, look at this, and it's pretty good, right? But it's already gone through a filtering process of humans looking at it and saying, okay, well that's crap, that's crap, okay. Oh, here's a sentence that's pretty cool. Now here's the thing, human creativity is about absorbing everything around it and remixing that and coming up with stuff. So in that sense, we're sort of like GPT3, you know, we're remixing what we've gotten in before. But we also know, we also have very good models of what it is to be another human. And so, you know, I don't know if you speak French or something, but I'm not gonna start speaking in French because then you'll say, wait, what are you doing? I don't understand it. Instead, everything coming out of my mouth is meant for your ears. I know what you'll understand. I know the vocabulary that you know and don't know. I know what parts you care about. That's a huge part of it. And so of all the possible sentences I could say, I'm navigating this thin bandwidth so that it's something useful for our conversation. Yeah, in real time, but also throughout your life. I mean, we're co evolving together. We're learning how to communicate together. Exactly, but this is what GPT3 does not do. All it's doing is saying, okay, I'm gonna take all these senses and remix stuff and pop some stuff out. But it doesn't know how to make it so that you, Lex, will feel like, oh yeah, that's exactly what I needed to hear. That's the next sentence that I needed to know about for something. Well, of course, it could be, all the impressive results we see. The question is, if you raise the number of parameters, whether it's going to be after some... It will not be. It will not be. Raising more parameters won't... Here's the thing. It's not that I don't think neural networks can't be like the human brain, because I suspect they will be at some point, 50 years. Who knows? But what we are missing in artificial neural networks is we've got this basic structure where you've got units and you've got synapses that are connected. And that's great. And it's done incredibly mind blowing, impressive things, but it's not doing the same algorithms as the human brain. So when I look at my children, as little kids, as infants, they can do things that no GPT3 can do. They can navigate a complex room. They can navigate social conversation with an adult. They can lie. They can do a million things. They are active thinkers in our world and doing things. And this, of course, I mean, look, we totally agree on how incredibly awesome artificial neural networks are right now, but we also know the things that they can't do well, like be generally intelligent, do all these different things. The reason about the world, efficiently learn, efficiently adapt. Exactly. But it's still the rate of improvement. It's, to me, it's possible that we'll be surprised. I agree, possible we'll be surprised. But what I would assert, and I'm glad I'm getting to say this on your podcast, we can look back at this in two years and 10 years, is that we've got to be much more sophisticated than units and synapses between them. Let me give you an example, and this is something I talk about in LiveWired, is despite the amazing impressiveness, mind blowing impressiveness, computers don't have some basic things, artificial neural networks don't have some basic things that we like caring about relevance, for example. So as humans, we are confronted with tons of data all the time, and we only encode particular things that are relevant to us. We have this very deep sense of relevance that I mentioned earlier is based on survival at the most basic level, but then all the things about my life and your life, what's relevant to you, that we encode. This is very useful. Computers at the moment don't have that. They don't even have a yen to survive and things like that. So we filled out a bunch of the junk we don't need. We're really good at efficiently zooming in on things we need. Again, could be argued, you know, let me put on my Freud hat. Maybe it's, I mean, that's our conscious mind. There's no reason that neural networks aren't doing the same kind of filtration. I mean, in the sense with GPT3 is doing, so there's a priming step. It's doing an essential kind of filtration when you ask it to generate tweets from, I don't know, from an Elon Musk or something like that. It's doing a filtration of it's throwing away all the parameters it doesn't need for this task. And it's figuring out how to do that successfully. And then ultimately it's not doing a very good job right now, but it's doing a lot better job than we expected. But it won't ever do a really good job. And I'll tell you why. I mean, so let's say we say, hey, produce an Elon Musk tweet. And we see like, oh, wow, it produced these three. That's great. But again, we're not seeing the 3000 produced that didn't really make any sense. It's because it has no idea what it is like to be a human. And all the things that you might want to say and all the reasons you wouldn't, like when you go to write a tweet, you might write something you think, ah, it's not gonna come off quite right in this modern political climate or whatever. Like, you know, you can change things. So. And it somehow boils down to fear of mortality and all of these human things at the end of the day, all contained with that tweeting experience. Well, interestingly, the fear of mortality is at the bottom of this, but you've got all these more things like, you know, oh, I want to, just in case the chairman of my department reads this, I want it to come off well there. Just in case my mom looks at this tweet, I want to make sure she, you know, and so on. So those are all the things that humans are able to sort of throw into the calculation. I mean. What it required, what it requires though, is having a model of your chairman, having a model of your mother, having a model of, you know, the person you want to go on a date with who might look at your tweet and so on. All these things are, you're running models of what it is like to be them. So in terms of the structure of the brain, again, this may be going into speculation land. I hope you go along with me. Yeah, of course. Yep. Is, okay, so the brain seems to be intelligent and our AI systems aren't very currently. So where do you think intelligence arises in the brain? Like what is it about the brain? So if you mean where location wise, it's no single spot. It would be equivalent to asking, I'm looking at New York city, where is the economy? The answer is you can't point to anywhere. The economy is all about the interaction of all of the pieces and parts of the city. And that's what, you know, intelligence, whatever we mean by that in the brain is interacting from everything going on at once. In terms of a structure. So we look humans are much smarter than fish, maybe not dolphins, but dolphins are mammals, right? I assert that what we mean by smarter has to do with live wiring. So what we mean when we say, oh, we're smart is, oh, we can figure out a new thing and figure out a new pathway to get where we need to go. And that's because fish are essentially coming to the table with, you know, okay, here's the hardware, go swim, mate. But we have the capacity to say, okay, look, I'm gonna absorb, oh, oh, but you know, I saw someone else do this thing and I read once that you could do this other thing and so on. So do you think there's, is there something, I know these are mysteries, but like architecturally speaking, what feature of the brain of the live wire aspect of it that is really useful for intelligence? So like, is it the ability of neurons to reconnect? Like, is there something, is there any lessons about the human brain you think might be inspiring for us to take into the artificial, into the machine learning world? Yeah, I'm actually just trying to write some up on this now called, you know, if you wanna build a robot, start with the stomach. And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is a robot has to care, it has to have hunger, it has to care about surviving, that kind of thing. Here's an example. So the penultimate chapter of my book, I titled The Wolf and the Mars Rover. And I just look at this simple comparison of you look at a wolf, it gets its leg caught in a trap. What does it do? It gnaws its leg off, and then it figures out how to walk on three legs. No problem. Now, the Mars Rover Curiosity got its front wheel stuck in some Martian soil, and it died. This project that cost billions of dollars died because it got its wheels. Wouldn't it be terrific if we could build a robot that chewed off its front wheel and figured out how to operate with a slightly different body plan? That's the kind of thing that we wanna be able to build. And to get there, what we need, the whole reason the wolf is able to do that is because its motor and somatosensory systems are live wired. So it says, oh, you know what? Turns out we've got a body plan that's different than what I thought a few minutes ago, but I have a yen to survive and I care about relevance, which in this case is getting to food, getting back to my pack and so on. So I'm just gonna figure out how to operate with this. Oh, whoops, that didn't work. Oh, okay, I'm kind of getting it to work. But the Mars Rover doesn't do that. It just says, oh geez, I was pre programmed. Four wheels, now I have three, I'm screwed. Yeah, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with a philosopher named Ernest Becker. He wrote a book called Denial of Death. And there's a few psychologists, Sheldon Solomon, I think I just spoke with him on his podcast who developed terror management theory, which is like Ernest Becker is a philosopher that basically said that fear of mortality is at the core of it. Yeah. And so I don't know if it sounds compelling as an idea that all of the civilization we've constructed is based on this, but it's. I'm familiar with his work. Here's what I think. I think that yes, fundamentally this desire to survive is at the core of it, I would agree with that. But how that expresses itself in your life ends up being very different. The reason you do what you do is, I mean, you could list the 100 reasons why you chose to write your tweet this way and that way. And it really has nothing to do with the survival part. It has to do with, you know, trying to impress fellow humans and surprise them and say something. Yeah, so many things built on top of each other, but it's fascinating to think that in artificial intelligence systems, we wanna be able to somehow engineer this drive for survival, for immortality. I mean, because as humans, we're not just about survival, we're aware of the fact that we're going to die, which is a very kind of, we're aware of like space time. Most people aren't, by the way. Aren't? Aren't. Confucius said, he said, each person has two lives. The second one begins when you realize that you have just one. Yeah. But most people, it takes a long time for most people to get there. I mean, you could argue this kind of Freudian thing, which Erzbecker argues is they actually figured it out early on and the terror they felt was like the reason it's been suppressed. And the reason most people, when I ask them about whether they're afraid of death, they basically say no. They basically say like, I'm afraid I won't get, like submit the paper before I die. Like they kind of see, they see death as a kind of a inconvenient deadline for a particular set of, like a book you're writing. As opposed to like, what the hell? This thing ends at any moment. Like most people, as I've encountered, do not meditate on the idea that like right now you could die. Like right now, like in the next five minutes, it could be all over and, you know, meditate on that idea. I think that somehow brings you closer to like the core of the motivations and the core of the human cognition condition. I think it might be the core, but like I said, it is not what drives us day to day. Yeah, there's so many things on top of it, but it is interesting. I mean, as the ancient poet said, death whispers at my ear, live for I come. So it's, it is certainly motivating when we think about that. Okay, I've got some deadline. I don't know exactly when it is, but I better make stuff happen. It is motivating, but I don't think, I mean, I know for just speaking for me personally, that's not what motivates me day to day. It's instead, oh, I want to get this, you know, program up and running before this, or I want to make sure my coauthor isn't mad at me because I haven't gotten this in, or I don't want to miss this grant deadline, or, you know, whatever the thing is. Yeah, it's too distant in a sense. Nevertheless, it is good to reconnect. But for the AI systems, none of that is there. Like a neural network does not fear its mortality. And that seems to be somehow fundamentally missing the point. I think that's missing the point, but I wonder, it's an interesting speculation about whether you can build an AI system that is much closer to being a human without the mortality and survival piece, but just the thing of relevance, just I care about this versus that. Right now, if you have a robot roll into the room, it's going to be frozen because it doesn't have any reason to go there versus there. It doesn't have any particular set of things about this is how I should navigate my next move because I want something. Yeah, the thing about humans is they seem to generate goals. They're like, you said livewired. I mean, it's very flexible in terms of the goals and creative in terms of the goals we generate when we enter a room. You show up to a party without a goal, usually, and then you figure it out along the way. Yes, but this goes back to the question about free will, which is when I walk into the party, if you rewound it 10,000 times, would I go and talk to that couple over there versus that person? Like, I might do this exact same thing every time because I've got some goal stack and I think, okay, well, at this party, I really want to meet these kind of people or I feel awkward or whatever my goals are. By the way, so there was something that I meant to mention earlier. If you don't mind going back, which is this, when we were talking about BCI. So I don't know if you know this, but what I'm spending 90% of my time doing now is running a company. Do you know about this? Yes, I wasn't sure what the company is involved in. Right, so. Can you talk about it? Yeah, yeah. So when it comes to the future of BCI, you can put stuff into the brain invasively, but my interest has been how you can get data streams into the brain noninvasively. So I run a company called Neosensory and what we build is this little wristband. We've built this in many different form factors. Oh, wow, that's it? Yeah, this is it. And it's got these vibratory motors in it. So these things, as I'm speaking, for example, it's capturing my voice and running algorithms and then turning that into patterns of vibration here. So people who are deaf, for example, learn to hear through their skin. So the information is getting up to their brain this way and they learn how to hear. So it turns out on day one, people are pretty good, like better than you'd expect at being able to say, oh, that's weird, was that a dog barking? Was that a baby crying? Was that a door knock, a doorbell? Like people are pretty good at it, but with time they get better and better and what it becomes is a new qualia. In other words, a new subjective internal experience. So on day one, they say, whoa, what was that? Oh, oh, that was the dog barking. But by three months later, they say, oh, there's a dog barking somewhere. Oh, there's the dog. That's fascinating. And by the way, that's exactly how you learn how to use your ears. So of course you don't remember this, but when you were an infant, all you have are your eardrum vibrating causes spikes to go down, your auditory nerves and impinging your auditory cortex. Your brain doesn't know what those mean automatically, but what happens is you learn how to hear by looking for correlations. You clap your hands as a baby, you look at your mother's mouth moving and that correlates with what's going on there. And eventually your brain says, all right, I'm just gonna summarize this as an internal experience, as a conscious experience. And that's exactly what happens here. The weird part is that you can feed data into the brain, not through the ears, but through any channel that gets there. As long as the information gets there, your brain figures out what to do with it. That's fascinating. Like expanding the set of sensors, it could be arbitrarily, yeah, it could expand arbitrarily, which is fascinating. Well, exactly. And by the way, the reason I use this skin, there's all kinds of cool stuff going on in the AR world with glasses. But the fact is your eyes are overtaxed and your ears are overtaxed and you need to be able to see and hear other stuff. But you're covered with the skin, which is this incredible computational material with which you can feed information. And we don't use our skin for much of anything nowadays. My joke in the lab is that I say, we don't call this the waste for nothing. Because originally we built this as the vest and you're passing in all this information that way. And what I'm doing here with the deaf community is what's called sensory substitution, where I'm capturing sound and I'm just replacing the ears with the skin and that works. One of the things I talk about LiveWire is sensory expansion. So what if you took something like your visual system, which picks up on a very thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and you could see infrared or ultraviolet. So we've hooked that up, infrared and ultraviolet detectors, and I can feel what's going on. So just as an example, the first night I built the infrared, one of my engineers built it, the infrared detector, I was walking in the dark between two houses and suddenly I felt all this infrared radiation. I was like, where's that come from? And I just followed my wrist and I found an infrared camera, a night vision camera that was, but I immediately, oh, there's that thing there. Of course, I would have never seen it, but now it's just part of my reality. That's fascinating. Yeah, and then of course, what I'm really interested in is sensory addition. What if you could pick up on stuff that isn't even part of what we normally pick up on, like the magnetic field of the earth or Twitter or stock market or things like that. Or the, I don't know, some weird stuff like the moods of other people or something like that. Sure, now what you need is a way to measure this. So as long as there's a machine that can measure it, it's easy, it's trivial to feed this in here and you come to be, it comes to be part of your reality. It's like you have another sensor. And that kind of thing is without doing like, if you look in Neuralink, I forgot how you put it, but it was eloquent, without getting, cutting into the brain, basically. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this costs, at the moment, $399. That's not gonna kill you. Yeah, it's not gonna kill you. You just put it on and when you're done, you take it off. Yeah, and so, and the name of the company, by the way, is Neosensory for new senses, because the whole idea is. Beautiful, that's. You can, as I said, you come to the table with certain plug and play devices and then that's it. Like I can pick up on this little bit of the electromagnetic radiation, you can pick up on this little frequency band for hearing and so on, but I'm stuck there and there's no reason we have to be stuck there. We can expand our umwelt by adding new senses, yeah. What's umwelt? Oh, I'm sorry, the umwelt is the slice of reality that you pick up on. So each animal has its own umwelt. Yeah, exactly. Nice. I'm sorry, I forgot to define it before. It's such an important concept, which is to say, for example, if you are a tick, you pick up on butyric gas, you pick up on odor and you pick up on temperature, that's it. That's how you construct your reality is with those two sensors. If you are a blind echolocating bat, you're picking up on air compression waves coming back, you know, echolocation. If you are the black ghost knife fish, you're picking up on changes in the electrical field around you with electroreception. That's how they swim around and tell there's a rock there and so on. But that's all they pick up on. That's their umwelt. That's the signals they get from the world from which to construct their reality. And they can be totally different umwelts. That's fantastic. And so our human umwelt is, you know, we've got little bits that we can pick up on. One of the things I like to do with my students is talk about, imagine that you are a bloodhound dog, right? You are a bloodhound dog with a huge snout with 200 million scent receptors in it. And your whole world is about smelling. You know, you've got slits in your nostrils, like big nose fulls of air and so on. Do you have a dog? Nope, used to. Used to, okay, right. So you know, you walk your dog around and your dog is smelling everything. The whole world is full of signals that you do not pick up on. And so imagine if you were that dog and you looked at your human master and thought, my God, what is it like to have the pitiful little nose of a human? How could you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away or that your friend was here six hours ago? And so the idea is because we're stuck in our own belt, because we have this little pitiful noses, we think, okay, well, yeah, we're seeing reality, but you can have very different sorts of realities depending on the peripheral plug and play devices you're equipped with. It's fascinating to think that like, if we're being honest, probably our own belt is, you know, some infinitely tiny percent of the possibilities of how you can sense, quote unquote, reality, even if you could, I mean, there's a guy named Donald Hoffman, yeah, who basically says we're really far away from reality in terms of our ability to sense anything. Like we're very, we're almost like we're floating out there that's almost like completely attached to the actual physical reality. It's fascinating that we can have extra senses that could help us get a little bit closer. Exactly, and by the way, this has been the fruits of science is realizing, like, for example, you know, you open your eyes and there's the world around you, right? But of course, depending on how you calculate it, it's less than a 10 trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. The reason I say it depends, because, you know, it's actually infinite in all directions presumably. Yeah, and so that's exactly that. And then science allows you to actually look into the rest of it. Exactly, so understanding how big the world is out there. And the same with the world of really small and the world of really large. Exactly. That's beyond our ability to sense. Exactly, and so the reason I think this kind of thing matters is because we now have an opportunity for the first time in human history to say, okay, well, I'm just gonna include other things in my own belt. So I'm gonna include infrared radiation and have a direct perceptual experience of that. And so I'm very, you know, I mean, so, you know, I've given up my lab and I run this company 90% of my time now. That's what I'm doing. I still teach at Stanford and I'm, you know, teaching courses and stuff like that. But this is like, this is your passion. The fire is on this. Yeah, I feel like this is the most important thing that's happening right now. I mean, obviously I think that, because that's what I'm devoting my time in my life to. But I mean, it's a brilliant set of ideas. It certainly is like, it's a step in a very vibrant future, I would say. Like the possibilities there are endless. Exactly. So if you ask what I think about Neuralink, I think it's amazing what those guys are doing and working on, but I think it's not practical for almost everybody. For example, for people who are deaf, they buy this and, you know, every day we're getting tons of emails and tweets and whatever from people saying, wow, I picked up on this and then I had no idea that was a, I didn't even know that was happening out there. And they're coming to hear, by the way, this is, you know, less than a 10 year old, by the way, this is less than a 10th of the price of a hearing aid and like 250 times less than a cochlear implant. That's amazing. People love hearing about what, you know, brilliant folks like yourself could recommend in terms of books. Of course, you're an author of many books. So I'll, in the introduction, mention all the books you've written. People should definitely read LiveWired. I've gotten a chance to read some of it and it's amazing. But is there three books, technical, fiction, philosophical that had an impact on you when you were younger or today and books, perhaps some of which you would want to recommend that others read? You know, as an undergraduate, I majored in British and American literature. That was my major because I love literature. I grew up with literature. My father had these extensive bookshelves. And so I grew up in the mountains in New Mexico. And so that was mostly why I spent my time was reading books. But, you know, I love, you know, Faulkner, Hemingway. I love many South American authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino. I would actually recommend Invisible Cities. I just, I loved that book by Italo Calvino. Sorry, it's a book of fiction. Anthony Dorr wrote a book called All the Light We Cannot See, which actually was inspired by incognito, by exactly what we were talking about earlier about how you can only see a little bit of the, what we call visible light in the electromagnetic radiation. I wrote about this in incognito, and then he reviewed incognito for the Washington Post. Oh no, that's awesome. And then he wrote this book called, the book has nothing to do with that, but that's where the title comes from. All the Light We Cannot See is about the rest of the spectrum. But the, that's an absolutely gorgeous book. That's a book of fiction. Yeah, it's a book of fiction. What's it about? It takes place during World War II about these two young people, one of whom is blind and yeah. Anything else? So what, any, so you mentioned Hemingway? I mean. Old Man and the Sea, what's your favorite? Snow's a Kilimanjaro. Oh wow, okay. It's a collection of short stories that I love. As far as nonfiction goes, I grew up with Cosmos, both watching the PBS series and then reading the book, and that influenced me a huge amount in terms of what I do. I, from the time I was a kid, I felt like I want to be Carl Sagan. Like, I just, that's what I loved. And in the end, I just, you know, I studied space physics for a while as an undergrad, but then I, in my last semester, discovered neuroscience last semester, and I just thought, wow, I'm hooked on that. So the Carl Sagan of the brain. That was my aspiration. Is the aspiration. I mean, you're doing an incredible job of it. So you open the book live wide with a quote by Heidegger. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. Well, what do you mean, or what? I'll tell you what I meant by it. So he had his own reason why he was writing that, but I meant this in terms of brain plasticity, in terms of the library, which is this issue that I mentioned before about this, you know, this cone, the space time cone that we are in, which is that when you dropped into the world, you, Lex, had all this different potential. You could have been a great surfer or a great chess player or a, you could have been thousands of different men when you grew up, but what you did is things that were not your choice and your choice along the way. You know, you ended up navigating a particular path and now you're exactly who you are. You used to have lots of potential, but the day you die, you will be exactly Lex. You will be that one person, yeah. So on that, in that context, I mean, first of all, it's just a beautiful, it's a humbling picture, but it's a beautiful one because it's all the possible trajectories and you pick one and you walk down that road and it's the Robert Frost poem. But on that topic, let me ask the biggest and the most ridiculous question. So in this live, wide brain, when we choose all these different trajectories and end up with one, what's the meaning of it all? What's, is there a why here? What's the meaning of life? Yeah. David Engelman. That's it. I mean, this is the question that everyone has attacked from their own life or point of view, by which I mean, culturally, if you grew up in a religious society, you have one way of attacking that question. So if you grew up in a secular or scientific society, you have a different way of attacking that question. Obviously, I don't know, I abstain on that question. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the fundamental things, I guess, in that, in all those possible trajectories is you're always asking. I mean, that's the act of asking what the heck is this thing for, is equivalent to, or at least runs in parallel to all the choices that you're making. Cause it's kind of, that's the underlying question. Well, that's right. And by the way, you know, this is the interesting thing about human psychology. You know, we've got all these layers of things at which we can ask questions. And so if you keep asking yourself the question about, what is the optimal way for me to be spending my time? What should I be doing? What charity should I get involved with and so on? If you're asking those big questions that steers you appropriately, if you're the type of person who never asks, hey, is there something better I can be doing with my time, then presumably you won't optimize whatever it is that is important to you. So you've, I think just in your eyes, in your work, there's a passion that just is obvious and it's inspiring. It's contagious. What, if you were to give advice to us, a young person today, in the crazy chaos that we live today about life, about how to discover their passion, is there some words that you could give? First of all, I would say the main thing for a young person is stay adaptable. And this is back to this issue of why COVID is useful for us because it forces us off our tracks. The fact is the jobs that will exist 20 years from now, we don't even have names for it. We can't even imagine the jobs that are gonna exist. And so when young people that I know go into college and they say, hey, what should I major in and so on, college is and should be less and less vocational, as in, oh, I'm gonna learn how to do this and then I'm gonna do that the rest of my career. The world just isn't that way anymore with the exponential speed of things. So the important thing is learning how to learn, learning how to be livewired and adaptable. That's really key. And what I advise young people when I talk to them is, what you digest, that's what gives you the raw storehouse of things that you can remix and be creative with. And so eat broadly and widely. And obviously this is the wonderful thing about the internet world we live in now is you kind of can't help it. You're constantly, whoa. You go down some mole hole of Wikipedia and you think, oh, I didn't even realize that was a thing. I didn't know that existed. And so. Embrace that. Embrace that, yeah, exactly. And what I tell people is just always do a gut check about, okay, I'm reading this paper and yeah, I think that, but this paper, wow, that really, I really cared about that in some way. I tell them just to keep a real sniff out for that. And when you find those things, keep going down those paths. Yeah, don't be afraid. I mean, that's one of the challenges and the downsides of having so many beautiful options is that sometimes people are a little bit afraid to really commit, but that's very true. If there's something that just sparks your interest and passion, just run with it. I mean, that's, it goes back to the Haider quote. I mean, we only get this one life and that trajectory, it doesn't last forever. So just if something sparks your imagination, your passion is run with it. Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's a more beautiful way to end it. David, it's a huge honor to finally meet you. Your work is inspiring so many people. I've talked to so many people who are passionate about neuroscience, about the brain, even outside that read your book. So I hope you keep doing so. I think you're already there with Carl Sagan. I hope you continue growing. Yeah, it was an honor talking with you today. Thanks so much. Great, you too, Lex, wonderful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Eagleman, and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, BetterHelp, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from David Eagleman in his book, Some Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Imagine for a moment there were nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection. There were composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells. The trillions of synaptic connections hum in parallel that this vast egg like fabric of micro thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, understanding this would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in any holy text. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

David Eagleman: Neuroplasticity and the Livewired Brain | Lex Fridman Podcast #119

The following is a conversation with Francois Chollet, his second time on the podcast. He's both a world class engineer and a philosopher in the realm of deep learning and artificial intelligence. This time, we talk a lot about his paper titled on the measure of intelligence that discusses how we might define and measure general intelligence in our computing machinery. Quick summary of the sponsors, Babbel, Masterclass, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the serious, rigorous scientific study of artificial general intelligence is a rare thing. The mainstream machine learning community works on very narrow AI with very narrow benchmarks. This is very good for incremental and sometimes big incremental progress. On the other hand, the outside the mainstream, renegade, you could say, AGI community works on approaches that verge on the philosophical and even the literary without big public benchmarks. Walking the line between the two worlds is a rare breed, but it doesn't have to be. I ran the AGI series at MIT as an attempt to inspire more people to walk this line. Deep mind and open AI for a time and still on occasion walk this line. Francois Chollet does as well. I hope to also. It's a beautiful dream to work towards and to make real one day. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Go to babbel.com and use code Lex to get three months free. They offer 14 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, and yes, Russian. Daily lessons are 10 to 15 minutes, super easy, effective, designed by over 100 language experts. Let me read a few lines from the Russian poem Noch, ulitsa, fanar, apteka, by Alexander Bloch, that you'll start to understand if you sign up to Babbel. Noch, ulitsa, fanar, apteka, Bessmysliny, ituskly, svet, Zhevi esho, khod chetvert veka, Vse budet tak, ishoda, net. Now, I say that you'll start to understand this poem because Russian starts with a language and ends with vodka. Now, the latter part is definitely not endorsed or provided by Babbel. It will probably lose me this sponsorship, although it hasn't yet. But once you graduate with Babbel, you can enroll in my advanced course of late night Russian conversation over vodka. No app for that yet. So get started by visiting babbel.com and use code Lex to get three months free. This show is also sponsored by Masterclass. Sign up at masterclass.com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about Masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. I still think it's too good to be true. For $180 a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from, to list some of my favorites. Chris Hatfield on space exploration, hope to have him in this podcast one day. Neil Dugras Tyson on scientific thinking and communication, Neil too. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims on game design, Carlos Santana on guitar, Kary Kasparov on chess, Daniel Nagrano on poker, and many more. Chris Hatfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being watched at the space alone is worth the money. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up at masterclass.com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. This show finally is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LexPodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, let me mention a surprising fact related to physical money. Of all the currency in the world, roughly 8% of it is actually physical money. The other 92% of the money only exists digitally, and that's only going to increase. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store through Google Play and use code LexPodcast, you get 10 bucks, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Francois Chalet. What philosophers, thinkers, or ideas had a big impact on you growing up and today? So one author that had a big impact on me when I read his books as a teenager was Jean Piaget, who is a Swiss psychologist, is considered to be the father of developmental psychology. And he has a large body of work about basically how intelligence develops in children. And so it's very old work, like most of it is from the 1930s, 1940s. So it's not quite up to date. It's actually superseded by many newer developments in developmental psychology. But to me, it was very interesting, very striking, and actually shaped the early ways in which I started thinking about the mind and the development of intelligence as a teenager. His actual ideas or the way he thought about it or just the fact that you could think about the developing mind at all? I guess both. Jean Piaget is the author that really introduced me to the notion that intelligence and the mind is something that you construct throughout your life and that children construct it in stages. And I thought that was a very interesting idea, which is, of course, very relevant to AI, to building artificial minds. Another book that I read around the same time that had a big impact on me, and there was actually a little bit of overlap with Jean Piaget as well, and I read it around the same time, is Geoff Hawking's On Intelligence, which is a classic. And he has this vision of the mind as a multi scale hierarchy of temporal prediction modules. And these ideas really resonated with me, like the notion of a modular hierarchy of potentially compression functions or prediction functions. I thought it was really, really interesting, and it shaped the way I started thinking about how to build minds. The hierarchical nature, which aspect? Also, he's a neuroscientist, so he was thinking actual, he was basically talking about how our mind works. Yeah, the notion that cognition is prediction was an idea that was kind of new to me at the time and that I really loved at the time. And yeah, and the notion that there are multiple scales of processing in the brain. The hierarchy. Yes. This was before deep learning. These ideas of hierarchies in AI have been around for a long time, even before on intelligence. They've been around since the 1980s. And yeah, that was before deep learning. But of course, I think these ideas really found their practical implementation in deep learning. What about the memory side of things? I think he was talking about knowledge representation. Do you think about memory a lot? One way you can think of neural networks as a kind of memory, you're memorizing things, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of memory that's in our brains, or it doesn't have the same rich complexity, long term nature that's in our brains. Yes, the brain is more of a sparse access memory so that you can actually retrieve very precisely like bits of your experience. The retrieval aspect, you can like introspect, you can ask yourself questions. I guess you can program your own memory and language is actually the tool you use to do that. I think language is a kind of operating system for the mind and use language. Well, one of the uses of language is as a query that you run over your own memory, use words as keys to retrieve specific experiences or specific concepts, specific thoughts. Like language is a way you store thoughts, not just in writing, in the physical world, but also in your own mind. And it's also how you retrieve them. Like, imagine if you didn't have language, then you would have to, you would not really have a self, internally triggered way of retrieving past thoughts. You would have to rely on external experiences. For instance, you see a specific site, you smell a specific smell and that brings up memories, but you would not really have a way to deliberately access these memories without language. Well, the interesting thing you mentioned is you can also program the memory. You can change it probably with language. Yeah, using language, yes. Well, let me ask you a Chomsky question, which is like, first of all, do you think language is like fundamental, like there's turtles, what's at the bottom of the turtles? They don't go, it can't be turtles all the way down. Is language at the bottom of cognition of everything? Is like language, the fundamental aspect of like what it means to be a thinking thing? No, I don't think so. I think language is. You disagree with Norm Chomsky? Yes, I think language is a layer on top of cognition. So it is fundamental to cognition in the sense that to use a computing metaphor, I see language as the operating system of the brain, of the human mind. And the operating system is a layer on top of the computer. The computer exists before the operating system, but the operating system is how you make it truly useful. And the operating system is most likely Windows, not Linux, because language is messy. Yeah, it's messy and it's pretty difficult to inspect it, introspect it. How do you think about language? Like we use actually sort of human interpretable language, but is there something like a deeper, that's closer to like logical type of statements? Like, yeah, what is the nature of language, do you think? Like is there something deeper than like the syntactic rules we construct? Is there something that doesn't require utterances or writing or so on? Are you asking about the possibility that there could exist languages for thinking that are not made of words? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think, so the mind is layers, right? And language is almost like the outermost, the uppermost layer. But before we think in words, I think we think in terms of emotion in space and we think in terms of physical actions. And I think babies in particular, probably expresses thoughts in terms of the actions that they've seen or that they can perform and in terms of motions of objects in their environment before they start thinking in terms of words. It's amazing to think about that as the building blocks of language. So like the kind of actions and ways the babies see the world as like more fundamental than the beautiful Shakespearean language you construct on top of it. And we probably don't have any idea what that looks like, right? Like what, because it's important for them trying to engineer it into AI systems. I think visual analogies and motion is a fundamental building block of the mind. And you actually see it reflected in language. Like language is full of special metaphors. And when you think about things, I consider myself very much as a visual thinker. You often express these thoughts by using things like visualizing concepts in 2D space or like you solve problems by imagining yourself navigating a concept space. So I don't know if you have this sort of experience. You said visualizing concept space. So like, so I certainly think about, I certainly visualize mathematical concepts, but you mean like in concept space, visually you're embedding ideas into a three dimensional space you can explore with your mind essentially? You should be more like 2D, but yeah. 2D? Yeah. You're a flatlander. You're, okay. No, I do not. I always have to, before I jump from concept to concept, I have to put it back down on paper. It has to be on paper. I can only travel on 2D paper, not inside my mind. You're able to move inside your mind. But even if you're writing like a paper, for instance, don't you have like a spatial representation of your paper? Like you visualize where ideas lie topologically in relationship to other ideas, kind of like a subway map of the ideas in your paper. Yeah, that's true. I mean, there is, in papers, I don't know about you, but it feels like there's a destination. There's a key idea that you want to arrive at. And a lot of it is in the fog and you're trying to kind of, it's almost like, what's that called when you do a path planning search from both directions, from the start and from the end. And then you find, you do like shortest path, but like, you know, in game playing, you do this with like A star from both sides. And you see where we're on the join. Yeah, so you kind of do, at least for me, I think like, first of all, just exploring from the start from like first principles, what do I know, what can I start proving from that, right? And then from the destination, if you start backtracking, like if I want to show some kind of sets of ideas, what would it take to show them and you kind of backtrack, but like, yeah, I don't think I'm doing all that in my mind though. Like I'm putting it down on paper. Do you use mind maps to organize your ideas? Yeah, I like mind maps. Let's get into this, because I've been so jealous of people. I haven't really tried it. I've been jealous of people that seem to like, they get like this fire of passion in their eyes because everything starts making sense. It's like Tom Cruise in the movie was like moving stuff around. Some of the most brilliant people I know use mind maps. I haven't tried really. Can you explain what the hell a mind map is? I guess mind map is a way to make kind of like the mess inside your mind to just put it on paper so that you gain more control over it. It's a way to organize things on paper and as kind of like a consequence of organizing things on paper, they start being more organized inside your own mind. So what does that look like? You put, like, do you have an example? Like what's the first thing you write on paper? What's the second thing you write? I mean, typically you draw a mind map to organize the way you think about a topic. So you would start by writing down like the key concept about that topic. Like you would write intelligence or something, and then you would start adding associative connections. Like what do you think about when you think about intelligence? What do you think are the key elements of intelligence? So maybe you would have language, for instance, and you'd have motion. And so you would start drawing notes with these things. And then you would see what do you think about when you think about motion and so on. And you would go like that, like a tree. Is it a tree mostly or is it a graph too, like a tree? Oh, it's more of a graph than a tree. And it's not limited to just writing down words. You can also draw things. And it's not supposed to be purely hierarchical, right? The point is that once you start writing it down, you can start reorganizing it so that it makes more sense, so that it's connected in a more effective way. See, but I'm so OCD that you just mentioned intelligence and language and motion. I would start becoming paranoid that the categorization isn't perfect. Like that I would become paralyzed with the mind map that like this may not be. So like the, even though you're just doing associative kind of connections, there's an implied hierarchy that's emerging. And I would start becoming paranoid that it's not the proper hierarchy. So you're not just, one way to see mind maps is you're putting thoughts on paper. It's like a stream of consciousness, but then you can also start getting paranoid. Well, is this the right hierarchy? Sure, which it's mind maps, your mind map. You're free to draw anything you want. You're free to draw any connection you want. And you can just make a different mind map if you think the central node is not the right node. Yeah, I suppose there's a fear of being wrong. If you want to organize your ideas by writing down what you think, which I think is very effective. Like how do you know what you think about something if you don't write it down, right? If you do that, the thing is that it imposes much more syntactic structure over your ideas, which is not required with mind maps. So mind map is kind of like a lower level, more freehand way of organizing your thoughts. And once you've drawn it, then you can start actually voicing your thoughts in terms of, you know, paragraphs. It's a two dimensional aspect of layout too, right? Yeah. It's a kind of flower, I guess, you start. There's usually, you want to start with a central concept? Yes. Then you move out. Typically it ends up more like a subway map. So it ends up more like a graph, a topological graph without a root node. Yeah, so like in a subway map, there are some nodes that are more connected than others. And there are some nodes that are more important than others. So there are destinations, but it's not going to be purely like a tree, for instance. Yeah, it's fascinating to think that if there's something to that about the way our mind thinks. By the way, I just kind of remembered obvious thing that I have probably thousands of documents in Google Doc at this point, that are bullet point lists, which is, you can probably map a mind map to a bullet point list. It's the same, it's a, no, it's not, it's a tree. It's a tree, yeah. So I create trees, but also they don't have the visual element. Like, I guess I'm comfortable with the structure. It feels like the narrowness, the constraints feel more comforting. If you have thousands of documents with your own thoughts in Google Docs, why don't you write some kind of search engine, like maybe a mind map, a piece of software, mind mapping software, where you write down a concept and then it gives you sentences or paragraphs from your thousand Google Docs document that match this concept. The problem is it's so deeply, unlike mind maps, it's so deeply rooted in natural language. So it's not, it's not semantically searchable, I would say, because the categories are very, you kind of mentioned intelligence, language, and motion. They're very strong, semantic. Like, it feels like the mind map forces you to be semantically clear and specific. The bullet points list I have are sparse, desperate thoughts that poetically represent a category like motion, as opposed to saying motion. So unfortunately, that's the same problem with the internet. That's why the idea of semantic web is difficult to get. It's, most language on the internet is a giant mess of natural language that's hard to interpret, which, so do you think there's something to mind maps as, you actually originally brought it up as we were talking about kind of cognition and language. Do you think there's something to mind maps about how our brain actually deals, like think reasons about things? It's possible. I think it's reasonable to assume that there is some level of topological processing in the brain, that the brain is very associative in nature. And I also believe that a topological space is a better medium to encode thoughts than a geometric space. So I think... What's the difference in a topological and a geometric space? Well, if you're talking about topologies, then points are either connected or not. So a topology is more like a subway map. And geometry is when you're interested in the distance between things. And in a subway map, you don't really have the concept of distance. You only have the concept of whether there is a train going from station A to station B. And what we do in deep learning is that we're actually dealing with geometric spaces. We are dealing with concept vectors, word vectors, that have a distance between them to express in terms of that product. So we are not really building topological models usually. I think you're absolutely right. Like distance is a fundamental importance in deep learning. I mean, it's the continuous aspect of it. Yes, because everything is a vector and everything has to be a vector because everything has to be differentiable. If your space is discrete, it's no longer differentiable. You cannot do deep learning in it anymore. Well, you could, but you can only do it by embedding it in a bigger continuous space. So if you do topology in the context of deep learning, you have to do it by embedding your topology in the geometry. Well, let me zoom out for a second. Let's get into your paper on the measure of intelligence that you put out in 2019. Yes. Okay. November. November. Yeah, remember 2019? That was a different time. Yeah, I remember. I still remember. It feels like a different world. You could travel, you could actually go outside and see friends. Yeah. Let me ask the most absurd question. I think there's some nonzero probability there'll be a textbook one day, like 200 years from now on artificial intelligence, or it'll be called like just intelligence cause humans will already be gone. It'll be your picture with a quote. This is, you know, one of the early biological systems would consider the nature of intelligence and there'll be like a definition of how they thought about intelligence. Which is one of the things you do in your paper on measure intelligence is to ask like, well, what is intelligence and how to test for intelligence and so on. So is there a spiffy quote about what is intelligence? What is the definition of intelligence according to Francois Chollet? Yeah, so do you think the super intelligent AIs of the future will want to remember us the way we remember humans from the past? And do you think they will be, you know, they won't be ashamed of having a biological origin? No, I think it would be a niche topic. It won't be that interesting, but it'll be like the people that study in certain contexts like historical civilization that no longer exists, the Aztecs and so on. That's how it'll be seen. And it'll be study in also the context on social media. There'll be hashtags about the atrocity committed to human beings when the robots finally got rid of them. Like it was a mistake. You'll be seen as a giant mistake, but ultimately in the name of progress and it created a better world because humans were over consuming the resources and they were not very rational and were destructive in the end in terms of productivity and putting more love in the world. And so within that context, there'll be a chapter about these biological systems. It seems to have a very detailed vision of that hit here. You should write a sci fi novel about it. I'm working on a sci fi novel currently, yes. Self published, yeah. The definition of intelligence. So intelligence is the efficiency with which you acquire new skills at tasks that you did not previously know about, that you did not prepare for, right? So intelligence is not skill itself. It's not what you know, it's not what you can do. It's how well and how efficiently you can learn new things. New things. Yes. The idea of newness there seems to be fundamentally important. Yes. So you would see intelligence on display, for instance. Whenever you see a human being or an AI creature adapt to a new environment that it does not see before, that its creators did not anticipate. When you see adaptation, when you see improvisation, when you see generalization, that's intelligence. In reverse, if you have a system that when you put it in a slightly new environment, it cannot adapt, it cannot improvise, it cannot deviate from what it's hard coded to do or what it has been trained to do, that is a system that is not intelligent. There's actually a quote from Einstein that captures this idea, which is, the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. I like that quote. I think it captures at least part of this idea. You know, there might be something interesting about the difference between your definition and Einstein's. I mean, he's just being Einstein and clever, but acquisition of new ability to deal with new things versus ability to just change. What's the difference between those two things? So just change in itself. Do you think there's something to that? Just being able to change. Yes, being able to adapt. So not change, but certainly change its direction. Being able to adapt yourself to your environment. Whatever the environment is. That's a big part of intelligence. And intelligence is more precisely, you know, how efficiently you're able to adapt, how efficiently you're able to basically master your environment, how efficiently you can acquire new skills. And I think there's a big distinction to be drawn between intelligence, which is a process, and the output of that process, which is skill. So for instance, if you have a very smart human brain, so for instance, if you have a very smart human programmer that considers the game of chess, and that writes down a static program that can play chess, then the intelligence is the process of developing that program. But the program itself is just encoding the output artifact of that process. The program itself is not intelligent. And the way you tell it's not intelligent is that if you put it in a different context, you ask it to play Go or something, it's not going to be able to perform well without human involvement, because the source of intelligence, the entity that is capable of that process is the human programmer. So we should be able to tell the difference between the process and its output. We should not confuse the output and the process. It's the same as, you know, do not confuse a road building company and one specific road, because one specific road takes you from point A to point B, but a road building company can take you from, can make a path from anywhere to anywhere else. Yeah, that's beautifully put, but it's also to play devil's advocate a little bit. You know, it's possible that there's something more fundamental than us humans. So you kind of said the programmer creates the difference between the choir, the skill and the skill itself. There could be something like, you could argue the universe is more intelligent. Like the base intelligence that we should be trying to measure is something that created humans. We should be measuring God or the source of the universe as opposed to, like there could be a deeper intelligence. Sure. There's always deeper intelligence, I guess. You can argue that, but that does not take anything away from the fact that humans are intelligent. And you can tell that because they are capable of adaptation and generality. Got it. And you see that in particular in the fact that humans are capable of handling situations and tasks that are quite different from anything that any of our evolutionary ancestors has ever encountered. So we are capable of generalizing very much out of distribution, if you consider our evolutionary history as being in a way our training data. Of course, evolutionary biologists would argue that we're not going too far out of the distribution. We're like mapping the skills we've learned previously, desperately trying to like jam them into like these new situations. I mean, there's definitely a little bit of that, but it's pretty clear to me that we're able to, most of the things we do any given day in our modern civilization are things that are very, very different from what our ancestors a million years ago would have been doing in a given day. And your environment is very different. So I agree that everything we do, we do it with cognitive building blocks that we acquired over the course of evolution, right? And that anchors our cognition to a certain context, which is the human condition very much. But still our mind is capable of a pretty remarkable degree of generality far beyond anything we can create in artificial systems today. Like the degree in which the mind can generalize from its evolutionary history, can generalize away from its evolutionary history is much greater than the degree to which a deep learning system today can generalize away from its training data. And like the key point you're making, which I think is quite beautiful is like, we shouldn't measure, if we're talking about measurement, we shouldn't measure the skill. We should measure like the creation of the new skill, the ability to create that new skill. But it's tempting, like it's weird because the skill is a little bit of a small window into the system. So whenever you have a lot of skills, it's tempting to measure the skills. I mean, the skill is the only thing you can objectively measure, but yeah. So the thing to keep in mind is that when you see skill in the human, it gives you a strong signal that that human is intelligent because you know they weren't born with that skill typically. Like you see a very strong chess player, maybe you're a very strong chess player yourself. I think you're saying that because I'm Russian and now you're prejudiced, you assume. All Russians are good at chess. I'm biased, exactly. I'm biased, yeah. Well, you're definitely biased. So if you see a very strong chess player, you know they weren't born knowing how to play chess. So they had to acquire that skill with their limited resources, with their limited lifetime. And they did that because they are generally intelligent. And so they may as well have acquired any other skill. You know they have this potential. And on the other hand, if you see a computer playing chess, you cannot make the same assumptions because you cannot just assume the computer is generally intelligent. The computer may be born knowing how to play chess in the sense that it may have been programmed by a human that has understood chess for the computer and that has just encoded the output of that understanding in a static program. And that program is not intelligent. So let's zoom out just for a second and say like, what is the goal on the measure of intelligence paper? Like what do you hope to achieve with it? So the goal of the paper is to clear up some longstanding misunderstandings about the way we've been conceptualizing intelligence in the AI community and in the way we've been evaluating progress in AI. There's been a lot of progress recently in machine learning and people are extrapolating from that progress that we are about to solve general intelligence. And if you want to be able to evaluate these statements, you need to precisely define what you're talking about when you're talking about general intelligence. And you need a formal way, a reliable way to measure how much intelligence, how much general intelligence a system processes. And ideally this measure of intelligence should be actionable. So it should not just describe what intelligence is. It should not just be a binary indicator that tells you the system is intelligent or it isn't. It should be actionable. It should have explanatory power, right? So you could use it as a feedback signal. It would show you the way towards building more intelligent systems. So at the first level, you draw a distinction between two divergent views of intelligence. As we just talked about, intelligence is a collection of task specific skills and a general learning ability. So what's the difference between kind of this memorization of skills and a general learning ability? We've talked about it a little bit, but can you try to linger on this topic for a bit? Yeah, so the first part of the paper is an assessment of the different ways we've been thinking about intelligence and the different ways we've been evaluating progress in AI. And this tree of cognitive sciences has been shaped by two views of the human mind. And one view is the evolutionary psychology view in which the mind is a collection of fairly static special purpose ad hoc mechanisms that have been hard coded by evolution over our history as a species for a very long time. And early AI researchers, people like Marvin Minsky, for instance, they clearly subscribed to this view. And they saw the mind as a kind of collection of static programs similar to the programs they would run on like mainframe computers. And in fact, I think they very much understood the mind through the metaphor of the mainframe computer because that was the tool they were working with, right? And so you had these static programs, this collection of very different static programs operating over a database like memory. And in this picture, learning was not very important. Learning was considered to be just memorization. And in fact, learning is basically not featured in AI textbooks until the 1980s with the rise of machine learning. It's kind of fun to think about that learning was the outcast. Like the weird people working on learning, like the mainstream AI world was, I mean, I don't know what the best term is, but it's non learning. It was seen as like reasoning would not be learning based. Yes, it was considered that the mind was a collection of programs that were primarily logical in nature. And that's all you needed to do to create a mind was to write down these programs and they would operate over knowledge, which would be stored in some kind of database. And as long as your database would encompass, you know, everything about the world and your logical rules were comprehensive, then you would have a mind. So the other view of the mind is the brain as a sort of blank slate, right? This is a very old idea. You find it in John Locke's writings. This is the tabula rasa. And this is this idea that the mind is some kind of like information sponge that starts empty, that starts blank. And that absorbs knowledge and skills from experience, right? So it's a sponge that reflects the complexity of the world, the complexity of your life experience, essentially. That everything you know and everything you can do is a reflection of something you found in the outside world, essentially. So this is an idea that's very old. That was not very popular, for instance, in the 1970s. But that gained a lot of vitality recently with the rise of connectionism, in particular deep learning. And so today, deep learning is the dominant paradigm in AI. And I feel like lots of AI researchers are conceptualizing the mind via a deep learning metaphor. Like they see the mind as a kind of randomly initialized neural network that starts blank when you're born. And then that gets trained via exposure to trained data that acquires knowledge and skills via exposure to trained data. By the way, it's a small tangent. I feel like people who are thinking about intelligence are not conceptualizing it that way. I actually haven't met too many people who believe that a neural network will be able to reason, who seriously think that rigorously. Because I think it's actually an interesting worldview. And we'll talk about it more, but it's been impressive what neural networks have been able to accomplish. And to me, I don't know, you might disagree, but it's an open question whether like scaling size eventually might lead to incredible results to us mere humans will appear as if it's general. I mean, if you ask people who are seriously thinking about intelligence, they will definitely not say that all you need to do is, like the mind is just a neural network. However, it's actually a view that's very popular, I think, in the deep learning community that many people are kind of conceptually intellectually lazy about it. Right, it's a, but I guess what I'm saying exactly right, it's, I mean, I haven't met many people and I think it would be interesting to meet a person who is not intellectually lazy about this particular topic and still believes that neural networks will go all the way. I think Yama is probably closest to that with self supervised. There are definitely people who argue that current deep learning techniques are already the way to general artificial intelligence. And that all you need to do is to scale it up to all the available trained data. And that's, if you look at the waves that OpenAI's GPT3 model has made, you see echoes of this idea. So on that topic, GPT3, similar to GPT2 actually, have captivated some part of the imagination of the public. There's just a bunch of hype of different kind. That's, I would say it's emergent. It's not artificially manufactured. It's just like people just get excited for some strange reason. And in the case of GPT3, which is funny, that there's, I believe, a couple months delay from release to hype. Maybe I'm not historically correct on that, but it feels like there was a little bit of a lack of hype and then there's a phase shift into hype. But nevertheless, there's a bunch of cool applications that seem to captivate the imagination of the public about what this language model that's trained in unsupervised way without any fine tuning is able to achieve. So what do you make of that? What are your thoughts about GPT3? Yeah, so I think what's interesting about GPT3 is the idea that it may be able to learn new tasks after just being shown a few examples. So I think if it's actually capable of doing that, that's novel and that's very interesting and that's something we should investigate. That said, I must say, I'm not entirely convinced that we have shown it's capable of doing that. It's very likely, given the amount of data that the model is trained on, that what it's actually doing is pattern matching a new task you give it with a task that it's been exposed to in its trained data. It's just recognizing the task instead of just developing a model of the task, right? But there's, sorry to interrupt, there's a parallel as to what you said before, which is it's possible to see GPT3 as like the prompts it's given as a kind of SQL query into this thing that it's learned, similar to what you said before, which is language is used to query the memory. Yes. So is it possible that neural network is a giant memorization thing, but then if it gets sufficiently giant, it'll memorize sufficiently large amounts of things in the world or it becomes, or intelligence becomes a querying machine? I think it's possible that a significant chunk of intelligence is this giant associative memory. I definitely don't believe that intelligence is just a giant associative memory, but it may well be a big component. So do you think GPT3, 4, 5, GPT10 will eventually, like, what do you think, where's the ceiling? Do you think you'll be able to reason? No, that's a bad question. Like, what is the ceiling is the better question. How well is it gonna scale? How good is GPTN going to be? Yeah. So I believe GPTN is gonna. GPTN. Is gonna improve on the strength of GPT2 and 3, which is it will be able to generate, you know, ever more plausible text in context. Just monotonically increasing performance. Yes, if you train a bigger model on more data, then your text will be increasingly more context aware and increasingly more plausible in the same way that GPT3 is much better at generating plausible text compared to GPT2. But that said, I don't think just scaling up the model to more transformer layers and more trained data is gonna address the flaws of GPT3, which is that it can generate plausible text, but that text is not constrained by anything else other than plausibility. So in particular, it's not constrained by factualness or even consistency, which is why it's very easy to get GPT3 to generate statements that are factually untrue. Or to generate statements that are even self contradictory. Right? Because it's only goal is plausibility, and it has no other constraints. It's not constrained to be self consistent, for instance. Right? And so for this reason, one thing that I thought was very interesting with GPT3 is that you can predetermine the answer it will give you by asking the question in a specific way, because it's very responsive to the way you ask the question. Since it has no understanding of the content of the question. Right. And if you have the same question in two different ways that are basically adversarially engineered to produce certain answer, you will get two different answers, two contradictory answers. It's very susceptible to adversarial attacks, essentially. Potentially, yes. So in general, the problem with these models, these generative models, is that they are very good at generating plausible text, but that's just not enough. Right? I think one avenue that would be very interesting to make progress is to make it possible to write programs over the latent space that these models operate on. That you would rely on these self supervised models to generate a sort of like pool of knowledge and concepts and common sense. And then you would be able to write explicit reasoning programs over it. Because the current problem with GPT3 is that it can be quite difficult to get it to do what you want to do. If you want to turn GPT3 into products, you need to put constraints on it. You need to force it to obey certain rules. So you need a way to program it explicitly. Yeah, so if you look at its ability to do program synthesis, it generates, like you said, something that's plausible. Yeah, so if you try to make it generate programs, it will perform well for any program that it has seen in its training data. But because program space is not interpretive, right? It's not going to be able to generalize to problems it hasn't seen before. Now that's currently, do you think sort of an absurd, but I think useful, I guess, intuition builder is, you know, the GPT3 has 175 billion parameters. Human brain has 100, has about a thousand times that or more in terms of number of synapses. Do you think, obviously, very different kinds of things, but there is some degree of similarity. Do you think, what do you think GPT will look like when it has 100 trillion parameters? You think our conversation might be in nature different? Like, because you've criticized GPT3 very effectively now. Do you think? No, I don't think so. So to begin with, the bottleneck with scaling up GPT3, GPT models, generative pre trained transformer models, is not going to be the size of the model or how long it takes to train it. The bottleneck is going to be the trained data because OpenAI is already training GPT3 on a core of basically the entire web, right? And that's a lot of data. So you could imagine training on more data than that, like Google could train on more data than that, but it would still be only incrementally more data. And I don't recall exactly how much more data GPT3 was trained on compared to GPT2, but it's probably at least like a hundred, maybe even a thousand X. I don't have the exact number. You're not going to be able to train a model on a hundred more data than what you're already doing. So that's brilliant. So it's easier to think of compute as a bottleneck and then arguing that we can remove that bottleneck. But we can remove the compute bottleneck. I don't think it's a big problem. If you look at the pace at which we've improved the efficiency of deep learning models in the past few years, I'm not worried about train time bottlenecks or model size bottlenecks. The bottleneck in the case of these generative transformer models is absolutely the trained data. What about the quality of the data? So, yeah. So the quality of the data is an interesting point. The thing is, if you're going to want to use these models in real products, then you want to feed them data that's as high quality, as factual, I would say as unbiased as possible, that there's not really such a thing as unbiased data in the first place. But you probably don't want to train it on Reddit, for instance. It sounds like a bad plan. So from my personal experience, working with large scale deep learning models. So at some point I was working on a model at Google that's trained on 350 million labeled images. It's an image classification model. That's a lot of images. That's like probably most publicly available images on the web at the time. And it was a very noisy data set because the labels were not originally annotated by hand, by humans. They were automatically derived from like tags on social media, or just keywords in the same page as the image was found and so on. So it was very noisy. And it turned out that you could easily get a better model, not just by training, like if you train on more of the noisy data, you get an incrementally better model, but you very quickly hit diminishing returns. On the other hand, if you train on smaller data set with higher quality annotations, quality annotations that are actually made by humans, you get a better model. And it also takes less time to train it. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's the self supervised learning. There's a way to get better doing the automated labeling. Yeah, so you can enrich or refine your labels in an automated way. That's correct. Do you have a hope for, I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of a semantic web. Is a semantic web just for people who are not familiar and is the idea of being able to convert the internet or be able to attach like semantic meaning to the words on the internet, the sentences, the paragraphs, to be able to convert information on the internet or some fraction of the internet into something that's interpretable by machines. That was kind of a dream for, I think the semantic web papers in the nineties, it's kind of the dream that, you know, the internet is full of rich, exciting information. Even just looking at Wikipedia, we should be able to use that as data for machines. And so far it's not, it's not really in a format that's available to machines. So no, I don't think the semantic web will ever work simply because it would be a lot of work, right? To make, to provide that information in structured form. And there is not really any incentive for anyone to provide that work. So I think the way forward to make the knowledge on the web available to machines is actually something closer to unsupervised deep learning. So GPT3 is actually a bigger step in the direction of making the knowledge of the web available to machines than the semantic web was. Yeah, perhaps in a human centric sense, it feels like GPT3 hasn't learned anything that could be used to reason. But that might be just the early days. Yeah, I think that's correct. I think the forms of reasoning that you see it perform are basically just reproducing patterns that it has seen in string data. So of course, if you're trained on the entire web, then you can produce an illusion of reasoning in many different situations. But it will break down if it's presented with a novel situation. That's the open question between the illusion of reasoning and actual reasoning, yeah. Yes. The power to adapt to something that is genuinely new. Because the thing is, even imagine you had, you could train on every bit of data ever generated in the history of humanity. It remains, that model would be capable of anticipating many different possible situations. But it remains that the future is going to be something different. For instance, if you train a GPT3 model on data from the year 2002, for instance, and then use it today, it's going to be missing many things. It's going to be missing many common sense facts about the world. It's even going to be missing vocabulary and so on. Yeah, it's interesting that GPT3 even doesn't have, I think, any information about the coronavirus. Yes. Which is why a system that's, you tell that the system is intelligent when it's capable to adapt. So intelligence is going to require some amount of continuous learning. It's also going to require some amount of improvisation. It's not enough to assume that what you're going to be asked to do is something that you've seen before, or something that is a simple interpolation of things you've seen before. Yeah. In fact, that model breaks down for even very tasks that look relatively simple from a distance, like L5 self driving, for instance. Google had a paper a couple of years back showing that something like 30 million different road situations were actually completely insufficient to train a driving model. It wasn't even L2, right? And that's a lot of data. That's a lot more data than the 20 or 30 hours of driving that a human needs to learn to drive, given the knowledge they've already accumulated. Well, let me ask you on that topic. Elon Musk, Tesla Autopilot, one of the only companies, I believe, is really pushing for a learning based approach. Are you skeptical that that kind of network can achieve level 4? L4 is probably achievable. L5 probably not. What's the distinction there? Is L5 is completely you can just fall asleep? Yeah, L5 is basically human level. Well, with driving, we have to be careful saying human level, because that's the most of the drivers. Yeah, that's the clearest example of cars will most likely be much safer than humans in many situations where humans fail. It's the vice versa question. I'll tell you, the thing is the amount of trained data you would need to anticipate for pretty much every possible situation you learn content in the real world is such that it's not entirely unrealistic to think that at some point in the future, we'll develop a system that's trained on enough data, especially provided that we can simulate a lot of that data. We don't necessarily need actual cars on the road for everything. But it's a massive effort. And it turns out you can create a system that's much more adaptive, that can generalize much better if you just add explicit models of the surroundings of the car. And if you use deep learning for what it's good at, which is to provide perceptive information. So in general, deep learning is a way to encode perception and a way to encode intuition. But it is not a good medium for any sort of explicit reasoning. And in AI systems today, strong generalization tends to come from explicit models, tend to come from abstractions in the human mind that are encoded in program form by a human engineer. These are the abstractions you can actually generalize, not the sort of weak abstraction that is learned by a neural network. Yeah, and the question is how much reasoning, how much strong abstractions are required to solve particular tasks like driving. That's the question. Or human life existence. How much strong abstractions does existence require? But more specifically on driving, that seems to be a coupled question about intelligence. How much intelligence, how do you build an intelligent system? And the coupled problem, how hard is this problem? How much intelligence does this problem actually require? So we get to cheat because we get to look at the problem. It's not like you get to close our eyes and completely new to driving. We get to do what we do as human beings, which is for the majority of our life before we ever learn, quote unquote, to drive. We get to watch other cars and other people drive. We get to be in cars. We get to watch. We get to see movies about cars. We get to observe all this stuff. And that's similar to what neural networks are doing. It's getting a lot of data, and the question is, yeah, how many leaps of reasoning genius is required to be able to actually effectively drive? I think it's a good example of driving. I mean, sure, you've seen a lot of cars in your life before you learned to drive. But let's say you've learned to drive in Silicon Valley, and now you rent a car in Tokyo. Well, now everyone is driving on the other side of the road, and the signs are different, and the roads are more narrow and so on. So it's a very, very different environment. And a smart human, even an average human, should be able to just zero shot it, to just be operational in this very different environment right away, despite having had no contact with the novel complexity that is contained in this environment. And that novel complexity is not just an interpolation over the situations that you've encountered previously, like learning to drive in the US. I would say the reason I ask is one of the most interesting tests of intelligence we have today actively, which is driving, in terms of having an impact on the world. When do you think we'll pass that test of intelligence? So I don't think driving is that much of a test of intelligence, because again, there is no task for which skill at that task demonstrates intelligence, unless it's a kind of meta task that involves acquiring new skills. So I don't think, I think you can actually solve driving without having any real amount of intelligence. For instance, if you did have infinite trained data, you could just literally train an end to end deep learning model that does driving, provided infinite trained data. The only problem with the whole idea is collecting a data set that's sufficiently comprehensive, that covers the very long tail of possible situations you might encounter. And it's really just a scale problem. So I think there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this plan, with this idea. It's just that it strikes me as a fairly inefficient thing to do, because you run into this scaling issue with diminishing returns. Whereas if instead you took a more manual engineering approach, where you use deep learning modules in combination with engineering an explicit model of the surrounding of the cars, and you bridge the two in a clever way, your model will actually start generalizing much earlier and more effectively than the end to end deep learning model. So why would you not go with the more manual engineering oriented approach? Even if you created that system, either the end to end deep learning model system that's running infinite data, or the slightly more human system, I don't think achieving L5 would demonstrate general intelligence or intelligence of any generality at all. Again, the only possible test of generality in AI would be a test that looks at skill acquisition over unknown tasks. For instance, you could take your L5 driver and ask it to learn to pilot a commercial airplane, for instance. And then you would look at how much human involvement is required and how much strength data is required for the system to learn to pilot an airplane. And that gives you a measure of how intelligent that system really is. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a big leap. I get you. But I'm more interested, as a problem, I would see, to me, driving is a black box that can generate novel situations at some rate, what people call edge cases. So it does have newness that keeps being like, we're confronted, let's say, once a month. It is a very long tail, yes. It's a long tail. That doesn't mean you cannot solve it just by training a statistical model and a lot of data. Huge amount of data. It's really a matter of scale. But I guess what I'm saying is if you have a vehicle that achieves level 5, it is going to be able to deal with new situations. Or, I mean, the data is so large that the rate of new situations is very low. Yes. That's not intelligent. So if we go back to your kind of definition of intelligence, it's the efficiency. With which you can adapt to new situations, to truly new situations, not situations you've seen before. Not situations that could be anticipated by your creators, by the creators of the system, but truly new situations. The efficiency with which you acquire new skills. If you require, if in order to pick up a new skill, you require a very extensive training data set of most possible situations that can occur in the practice of that skill, then the system is not intelligent. It is mostly just a lookup table. Yeah. Well, likewise, if in order to acquire a skill, you need a human engineer to write down a bunch of rules that cover most or every possible situation. Likewise, the system is not intelligent. The system is merely the output artifact of a process that happens in the minds of the engineers that are creating it. It is encoding an abstraction that's produced by the human mind. And intelligence would actually be the process of autonomously producing this abstraction. Yeah. Not like if you take an abstraction and you encode it on a piece of paper or in a computer program, the abstraction itself is not intelligent. What's intelligent is the agent that's capable of producing these abstractions. Yeah, it feels like there's a little bit of a gray area. Because you're basically saying that deep learning forms abstractions, too. But those abstractions do not seem to be effective for generalizing far outside of the things that it's already seen. But generalize a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. No, deep learning does generalize a little bit. Generalization is not binary. It's more like a spectrum. Yeah. And there's a certain point, it's a gray area, but there's a certain point where there's an impressive degree of generalization that happens. No, I guess exactly what you were saying is intelligence is how efficiently you're able to generalize far outside of the distribution of things you've seen already. Yes. So it's both the distance of how far you can, how new, how radically new something is, and how efficiently you're able to deal with that. So you can think of intelligence as a measure of an information conversion ratio. Imagine a space of possible situations. And you've covered some of them. So you have some amount of information about your space of possible situations that's provided by the situations you already know. And that's, on the other hand, also provided by the prior knowledge that the system brings to the table, the prior knowledge embedded in the system. So the system starts with some information about the problem, about the task. And it's about going from that information to a program, what we would call a skill program, a behavioral program, that can cover a large area of possible situation space. And essentially, the ratio between that area and the amount of information you start with is intelligence. So a very smart agent can make efficient use of very little information about a new problem and very little prior knowledge as well to cover a very large area of potential situations in that problem without knowing what these future new situations are going to be. So one of the other big things you talk about in the paper, we've talked about a little bit already, but let's talk about it some more, is the actual tests of intelligence. So if we look at human and machine intelligence, do you think tests of intelligence should be different for humans and machines, or how we think about testing of intelligence? Are these fundamentally the same kind of intelligences that we're after, and therefore, the tests should be similar? So if your goal is to create AIs that are more humanlike, then it would be super valuable, obviously, to have a test that's universal, that applies to both AIs and humans, so that you could establish a comparison between the two, that you could tell exactly how intelligent, in terms of human intelligence, a given system is. So that said, the constraints that apply to artificial intelligence and to human intelligence are very different. And your test should account for this difference. Because if you look at artificial systems, it's always possible for an experimenter to buy arbitrary levels of skill at arbitrary tasks, either by injecting hardcoded prior knowledge into the system via rules and so on that come from the human mind, from the minds of the programmers, and also buying higher levels of skill just by training on more data. For instance, you could generate an infinity of different Go games, and you could train a Go playing system that way, but you could not directly compare it to human Go playing skills. Because a human that plays Go had to develop that skill in a very constrained environment. They had a limited amount of time. They had a limited amount of energy. And of course, this started from a different set of priors. This started from innate human priors. So I think if you want to compare the intelligence of two systems, like the intelligence of an AI and the intelligence of a human, you have to control for priors. You have to start from the same set of knowledge priors about the task, and you have to control for experience, that is to say, for training data. So what's priors? So prior is whatever information you have about a given task before you start learning about this task. And how's that different from experience? Well, experience is acquired. So for instance, if you're trying to play Go, your experience with Go is all the Go games you've played, or you've seen, or you've simulated in your mind, let's say. And your priors are things like, well, Go is a game on the 2D grid. And we have lots of hardcoded priors about the organization of 2D space. And the rules of how the dynamics of the physics of this game in this 2D space? Yes. And the idea that you have what winning is. Yes, exactly. And other board games can also share some similarities with Go. And if you've played these board games, then, with respect to the game of Go, that would be part of your priors about the game. Well, it's interesting to think about the game of Go is how many priors are actually brought to the table. When you look at self play, reinforcement learning based mechanisms that do learning, it seems like the number of priors is pretty low. Yes. But you're saying you should be expec... There is a 2D special priors in the carbonate. Right. But you should be clear at making those priors explicit. Yes. So in particular, I think if your goal is to measure a humanlike form of intelligence, then you should clearly establish that you want the AI you're testing to start from the same set of priors that humans start with. Right. So I mean, to me personally, but I think to a lot of people, the human side of things is very interesting. So testing intelligence for humans. What do you think is a good test of human intelligence? Well, that's the question that psychometrics is interested in. There's an entire subfield of psychology that deals with this question. So what's psychometrics? The psychometrics is the subfield of psychology that tries to measure, quantify aspects of the human mind. So in particular, our cognitive abilities, intelligence, and personality traits as well. So what are, it might be a weird question, but what are the first principles of psychometrics this operates on? What are the priors it brings to the table? So it's a field with a fairly long history. So psychology sometimes gets a bad reputation for not having very reproducible results. And psychometrics has actually some fairly solidly reproducible results. So the ideal goals of the field is a test should be reliable, which is a notion tied to reproducibility. It should be valid, meaning that it should actually measure what you say it measures. So for instance, if you're saying that you're measuring intelligence, then your test results should be correlated with things that you expect to be correlated with intelligence like success in school or success in the workplace and so on. Should be standardized, meaning that you can administer your tests to many different people in some conditions. And it should be free from bias. Meaning that, for instance, if your test involves the English language, then you have to be aware that this creates a bias against people who have English as their second language or people who can't speak English at all. So of course, these principles for creating psychometric tests are very much an ideal. I don't think every psychometric test is really either reliable, valid, or free from bias. But at least the field is aware of these weaknesses and is trying to address them. So it's kind of interesting. Ultimately, you're only able to measure, like you said previously, the skill. But you're trying to do a bunch of measures of different skills that correlate, as you mentioned, strongly with some general concept of cognitive ability. Yes, yes. So what's the G factor? So right, there are many different kinds of tests of intelligence. And each of them is interesting in different aspects of intelligence. Some of them will deal with language. Some of them will deal with spatial vision, maybe mental rotations, numbers, and so on. When you run these very different tests at scale, what you start seeing is that there are clusters of correlations among test results. So for instance, if you look at homework at school, you will see that people who do well at math are also likely statistically to do well in physics. And what's more, people who do well at math and physics are also statistically likely to do well in things that sound completely unrelated, like writing an English essay, for instance. And so when you see clusters of correlations in statistical terms, you would explain them with the latent variable. And the latent variable that would, for instance, explain the relationship between being good at math and being good at physics would be cognitive ability. And the G factor is the latent variable that explains the fact that every test of intelligence that you can come up with results on this test end up being correlated. So there is some single unique variable that explains these correlations. That's the G factor. So it's a statistical construct. It's not really something you can directly measure, for instance, in a person. But it's there. But it's there. It's there. It's there at scale. And that's also one thing I want to mention about psychometrics. Like when you talk about measuring intelligence in humans, for instance, some people get a little bit worried. They will say, that sounds dangerous. Maybe that sounds potentially discriminatory, and so on. And they're not wrong. And the thing is, personally, I'm not interested in psychometrics as a way to characterize one individual person. Like if I get your psychometric personality assessments or your IQ, I don't think that actually tells me much about you as a person. I think psychometrics is most useful as a statistical tool. So it's most useful at scale. It's most useful when you start getting test results for a large number of people. And you start cross correlating these test results. Because that gives you information about the structure of the human mind, in particular about the structure of human cognitive abilities. So at scale, psychometrics paints a certain picture of the human mind. And that's interesting. And that's what's relevant to AI, the structure of human cognitive abilities. Yeah, it gives you an insight into it. I mean, to me, I remember when I learned about G factor, it seemed like it would be impossible for it to be real, even as a statistical variable. Like it felt kind of like astrology. Like it's like wishful thinking among psychologists. But the more I learned, I realized that there's some. I mean, I'm not sure what to make about human beings, the fact that the G factor is a thing. There's a commonality across all of human species, that there does seem to be a strong correlation between cognitive abilities. That's kind of fascinating, actually. So human cognitive abilities have a structure. Like the most mainstream theory of the structure of cognitive abilities is called CHC theory. It's Cattell, Horn, Carroll. It's named after the three psychologists who contributed key pieces of it. And it describes cognitive abilities as a hierarchy with three levels. And at the top, you have the G factor. Then you have broad cognitive abilities, for instance fluid intelligence, that encompass a broad set of possible kinds of tasks that are all related. And then you have narrow cognitive abilities at the last level, which is closer to task specific skill. And there are actually different theories of the structure of cognitive abilities that just emerge from different statistical analysis of IQ test results. But they all describe a hierarchy with a kind of G factor at the top. And you're right that the G factor, it's not quite real in the sense that it's not something you can observe and measure, like your height, for instance. But it's real in the sense that you see it in a statistical analysis of the data. One thing I want to mention is that the fact that there is a G factor does not really mean that human intelligence is general in a strong sense. It does not mean human intelligence can be applied to any problem at all, and that someone who has a high IQ is going to be able to solve any problem at all. That's not quite what it means. I think one popular analogy to understand it is the sports analogy. If you consider the concept of physical fitness, it's a concept that's very similar to intelligence because it's a useful concept. It's something you can intuitively understand. Some people are fit, maybe like you. Some people are not as fit, maybe like me. But none of us can fly. Absolutely. It's constrained to a specific set of skills. Even if you're very fit, that doesn't mean you can do anything at all in any environment. You obviously cannot fly. You cannot survive at the bottom of the ocean and so on. And if you were a scientist and you wanted to precisely define and measure physical fitness in humans, then you would come up with a battery of tests. You would have running 100 meter, playing soccer, playing table tennis, swimming, and so on. And if you ran these tests over many different people, you would start seeing correlations in test results. For instance, people who are good at soccer are also good at sprinting. And you would explain these correlations with physical abilities that are strictly analogous to cognitive abilities. And then you would start also observing correlations between biological characteristics, like maybe lung volume is correlated with being a fast runner, for instance, in the same way that there are neurophysical correlates of cognitive abilities. And at the top of the hierarchy of physical abilities that you would be able to observe, you would have a G factor, a physical G factor, which would map to physical fitness. And as you just said, that doesn't mean that people with high physical fitness can't fly. It doesn't mean human morphology and human physiology is universal. It's actually super specialized. We can only do the things that we were evolved to do. We are not appropriate to, you could not exist on Venus or Mars or in the void of space or the bottom of the ocean. So that said, one thing that's really striking and remarkable is that our morphology generalizes far beyond the environments that we evolved for. Like in a way, you could say we evolved to run after prey in the savanna, right? That's very much where our human morphology comes from. And that said, we can do a lot of things that are completely unrelated to that. We can climb mountains. We can swim across lakes. We can play table tennis. I mean, table tennis is very different from what we were evolved to do, right? So our morphology, our bodies, our sense and motor affordances have a degree of generality that is absolutely remarkable, right? And I think cognition is very similar to that. Our cognitive abilities have a degree of generality that goes far beyond what the mind was initially supposed to do, which is why we can play music and write novels and go to Mars and do all kinds of crazy things. But it's not universal in the same way that human morphology and our body is not appropriate for actually most of the universe by volume. In the same way, you could say that the human mind is not really appropriate for most of problem space, potential problem space by volume. So we have very strong cognitive biases, actually, that mean that there are certain types of problems that we handle very well and certain types of problems that we are completely in adapted for. So that's really how we'd interpret the G factor. It's not a sign of strong generality. It's really just the broadest cognitive ability. But our abilities, whether we are talking about sensory motor abilities or cognitive abilities, they still remain very specialized in the human condition, right? Within the constraints of the human cognition, they're general. Yes, absolutely. But the constraints, as you're saying, are very limited. I think what's limiting. So we evolved our cognition and our body evolved in very specific environments. Because our environment was so variable, fast changing, and so unpredictable, part of the constraints that drove our evolution is generality itself. So we were, in a way, evolved to be able to improvise in all kinds of physical or cognitive environments. And for this reason, it turns out that the minds and bodies that we ended up with can be applied to much, much broader scope than what they were evolved for. And that's truly remarkable. And that's a degree of generalization that is far beyond anything you can see in artificial systems today. That said, it does not mean that human intelligence is anywhere universal. Yeah, it's not general. It's a kind of exciting topic for people, even outside of artificial intelligence, is IQ tests. I think it's Mensa, whatever. There's different degrees of difficulty for questions. We talked about this offline a little bit, too, about difficult questions. What makes a question on an IQ test more difficult or less difficult, do you think? So the thing to keep in mind is that there's no such thing as a question that's intrinsically difficult. It has to be difficult to suspect to the things you already know and the things you can already do, right? So in terms of an IQ test question, typically it would be structured, for instance, as a set of demonstration input and output pairs, right? And then you would be given a test input, a prompt, and you would need to recognize or produce the corresponding output. And in that narrow context, you could say a difficult question is a question where the input prompt is very surprising and unexpected, given the training examples. Just even the nature of the patterns that you're observing in the input prompt. For instance, let's say you have a rotation problem. You must relate the shape by 90 degrees. If I give you two examples and then I give you one prompt, which is actually one of the two training examples, then there is zero generalization difficulty for the task. It's actually a trivial task. You just recognize that it's one of the training examples, and you produce the same answer. Now, if it's a more complex shape, there is a little bit more generalization, but it remains that you are still doing the same thing at this time, as you were being demonstrated at training time. A difficult task starts to require some amount of test time adaptation, some amount of improvisation, right? So consider, I don't know, you're teaching a class on quantum physics or something. If you wanted to test the understanding that students have of the material, you would come up with an exam that's very different from anything they've seen on the internet when they were cramming. On the other hand, if you wanted to make it easy, you would just give them something that's very similar to the mock exams that they've taken, something that's just a simple interpolation of questions that they've already seen. And so that would be an easy exam. It's very similar to what you've been trained on. And a difficult exam is one that really probes your understanding because it forces you to improvise. It forces you to do things that are different from what you were exposed to before. So that said, it doesn't mean that the exam that requires improvisation is intrinsically hard, right? Because maybe you're a quantum physics expert. So when you take the exam, this is actually stuff that, despite being new to the students, it's not new to you, right? So it can only be difficult with respect to what the test taker already knows and with respect to the information that the test taker has about the task. So that's what I mean by controlling for priors what the information you bring to the table. And the experience. And the experience, which is to train data. So in the case of the quantum physics exam, that would be all the course material itself and all the mock exams that students might have taken online. Yeah, it's interesting because I've also sent you an email. I asked you, I've been in just this curious question of what's a really hard IQ test question. And I've been talking to also people who have designed IQ tests. There's a few folks on the internet, it's like a thing. People are really curious about it. First of all, most of the IQ tests they designed, they like religiously protect against the correct answers. Like you can't find the correct answers anywhere. In fact, the question is ruined once you know, even like the approach you're supposed to take. So they're very... That said, the approach is implicit in the training examples. So if you release the training examples, it's over. Which is why in Arc, for instance, there is a test set that is private and no one has seen it. No, for really tough IQ questions, it's not obvious. It's not because the ambiguity. Like it's, I mean, we'll have to look through them, but like some number sequences and so on, it's not completely clear. So like you can get a sense, but there's like some, you know, when you look at a number sequence, I don't know, like your Fibonacci number sequence, if you look at the first few numbers, that sequence could be completed in a lot of different ways. And you know, some are, if you think deeply, are more correct than others. Like there's a kind of intuitive simplicity and elegance to the correct solution. Yes. I am personally not a fan of ambiguity in test questions actually, but I think you can have difficulty without requiring ambiguity simply by making the test require a lot of extrapolation over the training examples. But the beautiful question is difficult, but gives away everything when you give the training example. Basically, yes. Meaning that, so the tests I'm interested in creating are not necessarily difficult for humans because human intelligence is the benchmark. They're supposed to be difficult for machines in ways that are easy for humans. Like I think an ideal test of human and machine intelligence is a test that is actionable, that highlights the need for progress, and that highlights the direction in which you should be making progress. I think we'll talk about the ARC challenge and the test you've constructed and you have these elegant examples. I think that highlight, like this is really easy for us humans, but it's really hard for machines. But on the, you know, the designing an IQ test for IQs of like higher than 160 and so on, you have to say, you have to take that and put it on steroids, right? You have to think like, what is hard for humans? And that's a fascinating exercise in itself, I think. And it was an interesting question of what it takes to create a really hard question for humans because you again have to do the same process as you mentioned, which is, you know, something basically where the experience that you have likely to have encountered throughout your whole life, even if you've prepared for IQ tests, which is a big challenge, that this will still be novel for you. Yeah, I mean, novelty is a requirement. You should not be able to practice for the questions that you're gonna be tested on. That's important because otherwise what you're doing is not exhibiting intelligence. What you're doing is just retrieving what you've been exposed before. It's the same thing as deep learning model. If you train a deep learning model on all the possible answers, then it will ace your test in the same way that, you know, a stupid student can still ace the test if they cram for it. They memorize, you know, a hundred different possible mock exams. And then they hope that the actual exam will be a very simple interpolation of the mock exams. And that student could just be a deep learning model at that point. But you can actually do that without any understanding of the material. And in fact, many students pass their exams in exactly this way. And if you want to avoid that, you need an exam that's unlike anything they've seen that really probes their understanding. So how do we design an IQ test for machines, an intelligent test for machines? All right, so in the paper I outline a number of requirements that you expect of such a test. And in particular, we should start by acknowledging the priors that we expect to be required in order to perform the test. So we should be explicit about the priors, right? And if the goal is to compare machine intelligence and human intelligence, then we should assume human cognitive priors, right? And secondly, we should make sure that we are testing for skill acquisition ability, skill acquisition efficiency in particular, and not for skill itself. Meaning that every task featured in your test should be novel and should not be something that you can anticipate. So for instance, it should not be possible to brute force the space of possible questions, right? To pre generate every possible question and answer. So it should be tasks that cannot be anticipated, not just by the system itself, but by the creators of the system, right? Yeah, you know what's fascinating? I mean, one of my favorite aspects of the paper and the work you do with the ARC challenge is the process of making priors explicit. Just even that act alone is a really powerful one of like, what are, it's a really powerful question asked of us humans. What are the priors that we bring to the table? So the next step is like, once you have those priors, how do you use them to solve a novel task? But like, just even making the priors explicit is a really difficult and really powerful step. And that's like visually beautiful and conceptually philosophically beautiful part of the work you did with, and I guess continue to do probably with the paper and the ARC challenge. Can you talk about some of the priors that we're talking about here? Yes, so a researcher has done a lot of work on what exactly are the knowledge priors that are innate to humans is Elizabeth Spelke from Harvard. So she developed the core knowledge theory, which outlines four different core knowledge systems. So systems of knowledge that we are basically either born with or that we are hardwired to acquire very early on in our development. And there's no strong distinction between the two. Like if you are primed to acquire a certain type of knowledge in just a few weeks, you might as well just be born with it. It's just part of who you are. And so there are four different core knowledge systems. Like the first one is the notion of objectness and basic physics. Like you recognize that something that moves coherently, for instance, is an object. So we intuitively, naturally, innately divide the world into objects based on this notion of coherence, physical coherence. And in terms of elementary physics, there's the fact that objects can bump against each other and the fact that they can occlude each other. So these are things that we are essentially born with or at least that we are going to be acquiring extremely early because we're really hardwired to acquire them. So a bunch of points, pixels that move together on objects are partly the same object. Yes. I don't smoke weed, but if I did, that's something I could sit all night and just think about, remember what I wrote in your paper, just objectness, I wasn't self aware, I guess, of that particular prior. That's such a fascinating prior that like... That's the most basic one, but actually... Objectness, just identity, just objectness. It's very basic, I suppose, but it's so fundamental. It is fundamental to human cognition. Yeah. The second prior that's also fundamental is agentness, which is not a real world, a real world, so agentness. The fact that some of these objects that you segment your environment into, some of these objects are agents. So what's an agent? It's basically, it's an object that has goals. That has what? That has goals, that is capable of pursuing goals. So for instance, if you see two dots moving in roughly synchronized fashion, you will intuitively infer that one of the dots is pursuing the other. So that one of the dots is... And one of the dots is an agent and its goal is to avoid the other dot. And one of the dots, the other dot is also an agent and its goal is to catch the first dot. Belke has shown that babies as young as three months identify agentness and goal directedness in their environment. Another prior is basic geometry and topology, like the notion of distance, the ability to navigate in your environment and so on. This is something that is fundamentally hardwired into our brain. It's in fact backed by very specific neural mechanisms, like for instance, grid cells and place cells. So it's something that's literally hard coded at the neural level in our hippocampus. And the last prior would be the notion of numbers. Like numbers are not actually a cultural construct. We are intuitively, innately able to do some basic counting and to compare quantities. So it doesn't mean we can do arbitrary arithmetic. Counting, the actual counting. Counting, like counting one, two, three ish, then maybe more than three. You can also compare quantities. If I give you three dots and five dots, you can tell the side with five dots has more dots. So this is actually an innate prior. So that said, the list may not be exhaustive. So SpellKey is still, you know, passing the potential existence of new knowledge systems. For instance, knowledge systems that we deal with social relationships. Yeah, I mean, and there could be... Which is much less relevant to something like ARC or IQ test and so on. Right. There could be stuff that's like you said, rotation, symmetry, is there like... Symmetry is really interesting. It's very likely that there is, speaking about rotation, that there is in the brain, a hard coded system that is capable of performing rotations. One famous experiment that people did in the... I don't remember which was exactly, but in the 70s was that people found that if you asked people, if you give them two different shapes and one of the shapes is a rotated version of the first shape, and you ask them, is that shape a rotated version of the first shape or not? What you see is that the time it takes people to answer is linearly proportional, right, to the angle of rotation. So it's almost like you have somewhere in your brain like a turntable with a fixed speed. And if you want to know if two objects are a rotated version of each other, you put the object on the turntable, you let it move around a little bit, and then you stop when you have a match. And that's really interesting. So what's the ARC challenge? So in the paper, I outline all these principles that a good test of machine intelligence and human intelligence should follow. And the ARC challenge is one attempt to embody as many of these principles as possible. So I don't think it's anywhere near a perfect attempt, right? It does not actually follow every principle, but it is what I was able to do given the constraints. So the format of ARC is very similar to classic IQ tests, in particular Raven's Progressive Metrices. Raven's? Yeah, Raven's Progressive Metrices. I mean, if you've done IQ tests in the past, you know what that is, probably. Or at least you've seen it, even if you don't know what it's called. And so you have a set of tasks, that's what they're called. And for each task, you have training data, which is a set of input and output pairs. So an input or output pair is a grid of colors, basically. The grid, the size of the grid is variables. The size of the grid is variable. And you're given an input, and you must transform it into the proper output. And so you're shown a few demonstrations of a task in the form of existing input output pairs, and then you're given a new input. And you must provide, you must produce the correct output. And the assumptions in Arc is that every task should only require core knowledge priors, should not require any outside knowledge. So for instance, no language, no English, nothing like this. No concepts taken from our human experience, like trees, dogs, cats, and so on. So only reasoning tasks that are built on top of core knowledge priors. And some of the tasks are actually explicitly trying to probe specific forms of abstraction. Part of the reason why I wanted to create Arc is I'm a big believer in when you're faced with a problem as murky as understanding how to autonomously generate abstraction in a machine, you have to coevolve the solution and the problem. And so part of the reason why I designed Arc was to clarify my ideas about the nature of abstraction. And some of the tasks are actually designed to probe bits of that theory. And there are things that turn out to be very easy for humans to perform, including young kids, but turn out to be near impossible for machines. So what have you learned from the nature of abstraction from designing that? Can you clarify what you mean? One of the things you wanted to try to understand was this idea of abstraction. Yes, so clarifying my own ideas about abstraction by forcing myself to produce tasks that would require the ability to produce that form of abstraction in order to solve them. Got it. OK, so and by the way, just the people should check out. I'll probably overlay if you're watching the video part. But the grid input output with the different colors on the grid, that's it. I mean, it's a very simple world, but it's kind of beautiful. It's very similar to classic IQ tests. It's not very original in that sense. The main difference with IQ tests is that we make the priors explicit, which is not usually the case in IQ tests. So you make it explicit that everything should only be built on top of core knowledge priors. I also think it's generally more diverse than IQ tests in general. And it perhaps requires a bit more manual work to produce solutions, because you have to click around on a grid for a while. Sometimes the grids can be as large as 30 by 30 cells. So how did you come up, if you can reveal, with the questions? What's the process of the questions? Was it mostly you that came up with the questions? How difficult is it to come up with a question? Is this scalable to a much larger number? If we think, with IQ tests, you might not necessarily want it to or need it to be scalable. With machines, it's possible, you could argue, that it needs to be scalable. So there are 1,000 questions, 1,000 tasks, including the test set, the prior test set. I think it's fairly difficult in the sense that a big requirement is that every task should be novel and unique and unpredictable. You don't want to create your own little world that is simple enough that it would be possible for a human to reverse and generate and write down an algorithm that could generate every possible arc task and their solution. So that would completely invalidate the test. So you're constantly coming up with new stuff. Yeah, you need a source of novelty, of unfakeable novelty. And one thing I found is that, as a human, you are not a very good source of unfakeable novelty. And so you have to base the creation of these tasks quite a bit. There are only so many unique tasks that you can do in a given day. So that means coming up with truly original new ideas. Did psychedelics help you at all? No, I'm just kidding. But I mean, that's fascinating to think about. So you would be walking or something like that. Are you constantly thinking of something totally new? Yes. This is hard. This is hard. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying you've done anywhere near a perfect job at it. There is some amount of redundancy, and there are many imperfections in ARC. So that said, you should consider ARC as a work in progress. It is not the definitive state. The ARC tasks today are not the definitive state of the test. I want to keep refining it in the future. I also think it should be possible to open up the creation of tasks to a broad audience to do crowdsourcing. That would involve several levels of filtering, obviously. But I think it's possible to apply crowdsourcing to develop a much bigger and much more diverse ARC data set. That would also be free of potentially some of my own personal biases. Is there always need to be a part of ARC that the test is hidden? Yes, absolutely. It is imperative that the tests that you're using to actually benchmark algorithms is not accessible to the people developing these algorithms. Because otherwise, what's going to happen is that the human engineers are just going to solve the tasks themselves and encode their solution in program form. But that, again, what you're seeing here is the process of intelligence happening in the mind of the human. And then you're just capturing its crystallized output. But that crystallized output is not the same thing as the process it generated. It's not intelligent in itself. So what, by the way, the idea of crowdsourcing it is fascinating. I think the creation of questions is really exciting for people. I think there's a lot of really brilliant people out there that love to create these kinds of stuff. Yeah, one thing that kind of surprised me that I wasn't expecting is that lots of people seem to actually enjoy ARC as a kind of game. And I was releasing it as a test, as a benchmark of fluid general intelligence. And lots of people just, including kids, just started enjoying it as a game. So I think that's encouraging. Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. There's a world of people who create IQ questions. I think that's a cool activity for machines and for humans. And humans are themselves fascinated by taking the questions, like measuring their own intelligence. I mean, that's just really compelling. It's really interesting to me, too. One of the cool things about ARC, you said, is kind of inspired by IQ tests or whatever follows a similar process. But because of its nature, because of the context in which it lives, it immediately forces you to think about the nature of intelligence as opposed to just the test of your own. It forces you to really think. I don't know if it's within the question, inherent in the question, or just the fact that it lives in the test that's supposed to be a test of machine intelligence. Absolutely. As you solve ARC tasks as a human, you will be forced to basically introspect how you come up with solutions. And that forces you to reflect on the human problem solving process. And the way your own mind generates abstract representations of the problems it's exposed to. I think it's due to the fact that the set of core knowledge priors that ARC is built upon is so small. It's all a recombination of a very, very small set of assumptions. OK, so what's the future of ARC? So you held ARC as a challenge, as part of like a Kaggle competition. Yes. Kaggle competition. And what do you think? Do you think that's something that continues for five years, 10 years, like just continues growing? Yes, absolutely. So ARC itself will keep evolving. So I've talked about crowdsourcing. I think that's a good avenue. Another thing I'm starting is I'll be collaborating with folks from the psychology department at NYU to do human testing on ARC. And I think there are lots of interesting questions you can start asking, especially as you start correlating machine solutions to ARC tasks and the human characteristics of solutions. Like for instance, you can try to see if there's a relationship between the human perceived difficulty of a task and the machine perceived. Yes, and exactly some measure of machine perceived difficulty. Yeah, it's a nice playground in which to explore this very difference. It's the same thing as we talked about the autonomous vehicles. The things that could be difficult for humans might be very different than the things that are difficult. And formalizing or making explicit that difference in difficulty may teach us something fundamental about intelligence. So one thing I think we did well with ARC is that it's proving to be a very actionable test in the sense that machine performance on ARC started at very much zero initially, while humans found actually the task very easy. And that alone was like a big red flashing light saying that something is going on and that we are missing something. And at the same time, machine performance did not stay at zero for very long. Actually, within two weeks of the Kaggle competition, we started having a nonzero number. And now the state of the art is around 20% of the test set solved. And so ARC is actually a challenge where our capabilities start at zero, which indicates the need for progress. But it's also not an impossible challenge. It's not accessible. You can start making progress basically right away. At the same time, we are still very far from having solved it. And that's actually a very positive outcome of the competition is that the competition has proven that there was no obvious shortcut to solve these tasks. Yeah, so the test held up. Yeah, exactly. That was the primary reason to use the Kaggle competition is to check if some clever person was going to hack the benchmark that did not happen. People who are solving the task are essentially doing it. Well, in a way, they're actually exploring some flaws of ARC that we will need to address in the future, especially they're essentially anticipating what sort of tasks may be contained in the test set. Right, which is kind of, yeah, that's the kind of hacking. It's human hacking of the test. Yes, that said, with the state of the art, it's like 20% we're still very, very far from human level, which is closer to 100%. And I do believe that it will take a while until we reach human parity on ARC. And that by the time we have human parity, we will have AI systems that are probably pretty close to human level in terms of general fluid intelligence, which is, I mean, they are not going to be necessarily human like. They're not necessarily, you would not necessarily recognize them as being an AGI. But they would be capable of a degree of generalization that matches the generalization performed by human fluid intelligence. Sure. I mean, this is a good point in terms of general fluid intelligence to mention in your paper. You describe different kinds of generalizations, local, broad, extreme. And there's a kind of a hierarchy that you form. So when we say generalizations, what are we talking about? What kinds are there? Right, so generalization is a very old idea. I mean, it's even older than machine learning. In the context of machine learning, you say a system generalizes if it can make sense of an input it has not yet seen. And that's what I would call system centric generalization, generalization with respect to novelty for the specific system you're considering. So I think a good test of intelligence should actually deal with developer aware generalization, which is slightly stronger than system centric generalization. So developer aware generalization would be the ability to generalize to novelty or uncertainty that not only the system itself has not access to, but the developer of the system could not have access to either. That's a fascinating meta definition. So the system is basically the edge case thing we're talking about with autonomous vehicles. Neither the developer nor the system know about the edge cases in my encounter. So it's up to the system should be able to generalize the thing that nobody expected, neither the designer of the training data, nor obviously the contents of the training data. That's a fascinating definition. So you can see degrees of generalization as a spectrum. And the lowest level is what machine learning is trying to do is the assumption that any new situation is going to be sampled from a static distribution of possible situations and that you already have a representative sample of the distribution. That's your training data. And so in machine learning, you generalize to a new sample from a known distribution. And the ways in which your new sample will be new or different are ways that are already understood by the developers of the system. So you are generalizing to known unknowns for one specific task. That's what you would call robustness. You are robust to things like noise, small variations, and so on for one fixed known distribution that you know through your training data. And the higher degree would be flexibility in machine intelligence. So flexibility would be something like an L5 cell driving car or maybe a robot that can pass the coffee cup test, which is the notion that you'd be given a random kitchen somewhere in the country. And you would have to go make a cup of coffee in that kitchen. So flexibility would be the ability to deal with unknown unknowns, so things that could not, dimensions of viability that could not have been possibly foreseen by the creators of the system within one specific task. So generalizing to the long tail of situations in self driving, for instance, would be flexibility. So you have robustness, flexibility, and finally, you would have extreme generalization, which is basically flexibility, but instead of just considering one specific domain, like driving or domestic robotics, you're considering an open ended range of possible domains. So a robot would be capable of extreme generalization if, let's say, it's designed and trained for cooking, for instance. And if I buy the robot and if it's able to teach itself gardening in a couple of weeks, it would be capable of extreme generalization, for instance. So the ultimate goal is extreme generalization. Yes. So creating a system that is so general that it could essentially achieve human skill parity over arbitrary tasks and arbitrary domains with the same level of improvisation and adaptation power as humans when it encounters new situations. And it would do so over basically the same range of possible domains and tasks as humans and using essentially the same amount of training experience of practice as humans would require. That would be human level extreme generalization. So I don't actually think humans are anywhere near the optimal intelligence bounds if there is such a thing. So I think for humans or in general? In general. I think it's quite likely that there is a hard limit to how intelligent any system can be. But at the same time, I don't think humans are anywhere near that limit. Yeah, last time I think we talked, I think you had this idea that we're only as intelligent as the problems we face. Sort of we are bounded by the problems. In a way, yes. We are bounded by our environments, and we are bounded by the problems we try to solve. Yeah. Yeah. What do you make of Neuralink and outsourcing some of the brain power, like brain computer interfaces? Do you think we can expand or augment our intelligence? I am fairly skeptical of neural interfaces because they are trying to fix one specific bottleneck in human machine cognition, which is the bandwidth bottleneck, input and output of information in the brain. And my perception of the problem is that bandwidth is not at this time a bottleneck at all. Meaning that we already have sensors that enable us to take in far more information than what we can actually process. Well, to push back on that a little bit, to sort of play devil's advocate a little bit, is if you look at the internet, Wikipedia, let's say Wikipedia, I would say that humans, after the advent of Wikipedia, are much more intelligent. Yes, I think that's a good one. But that's also not about, that's about externalizing our intelligence via information processing systems, external information processing systems, which is very different from brain computer interfaces. Right, but the question is whether if we have direct access, if our brain has direct access to Wikipedia without Your brain already has direct access to Wikipedia. It's on your phone. And you have your hands and your eyes and your ears and so on to access that information. And the speed at which you can access it Is bottlenecked by the cognition. I think it's already close, fairly close to optimal, which is why speed reading, for instance, does not work. The faster you read, the less you understand. But maybe it's because it uses the eyes. So maybe. So I don't believe so. I think the brain is very slow. It typically operates, you know, the fastest things that happen in the brain are at the level of 50 milliseconds. Forming a conscious thought can potentially take entire seconds, right? And you can already read pretty fast. So I think the speed at which you can take information in and even the speed at which you can output information can only be very incrementally improved. Maybe there's a question. If you're a very fast typer, if you're a very trained typer, the speed at which you can express your thoughts is already the speed at which you can form your thoughts. Right, so that's kind of an idea that there are fundamental bottlenecks to the human mind. But it's possible that everything we have in the human mind is just to be able to survive in the environment. And there's a lot more to expand. Maybe, you know, you said the speed of the thought. So I think augmenting human intelligence is a very valid and very powerful avenue, right? And that's what computers are about. In fact, that's what all of culture and civilization is about. Our culture is externalized cognition and we rely on culture to think constantly. Yeah, I mean, that's another, yeah. Not just computers, not just phones and the internet. I mean, all of culture, like language, for instance, is a form of externalized cognition. Books are obviously externalized cognition. Yeah, that's a good point. And you can scale that externalized cognition far beyond the capability of the human brain. And you could see civilization itself is it has capabilities that are far beyond any individual brain and will keep scaling it because it's not rebound by individual brains. It's a different kind of system. Yeah, and that system includes nonhuman, nonhumans. First of all, it includes all the other biological systems, which are probably contributing to the overall intelligence of the organism. And then computers are part of it. Nonhuman systems are probably not contributing much, but AIs are definitely contributing to that. Like Google search, for instance, is a big part of it. Yeah, yeah, a huge part, a part that we can't probably introspect. Like how the world has changed in the past 20 years, it's probably very difficult for us to be able to understand until, of course, whoever created the simulation we're in is probably doing metrics, measuring the progress. There was probably a big spike in performance. They're enjoying this. So what are your thoughts on the Turing test and the Lobner Prize, which is one of the most famous attempts at the test of artificial intelligence by doing a natural language open dialogue test that's judged by humans as far as how well the machine did? So I'm not a fan of the Turing test. Itself or any of its variants for two reasons. So first of all, it's really coping out of trying to define and measure intelligence because it's entirely outsourcing that to a panel of human judges. And these human judges, they may not themselves have any proper methodology. They may not themselves have any proper definition of intelligence. They may not be reliable. So the Turing test is already failing one of the core psychometrics principles, which is reliability because you have biased human judges. It's also violating the standardization requirement and the freedom from bias requirement. And so it's really a cope out because you are outsourcing everything that matters, which is precisely describing intelligence and finding a standalone test to measure it. You're outsourcing everything to people. So it's really a cope out. And by the way, we should keep in mind that when Turing proposed the imitation game, it was not meaning for the imitation game to be an actual goal for the field of AI and actual test of intelligence. It was using the imitation game as a thought experiment in a philosophical discussion in his 1950 paper. He was trying to argue that theoretically, it should be possible for something very much like the human mind, indistinguishable from the human mind, to be encoded in a Turing machine. And at the time, that was a very daring idea. It was stretching credulity. But nowadays, I think it's fairly well accepted that the mind is an information processing system and that you could probably encode it into a computer. So another reason why I'm not a fan of this type of test is that the incentives that it creates are incentives that are not conducive to proper scientific research. If your goal is to trick, to convince a panel of human judges that they are talking to a human, then you have an incentive to rely on tricks and prestidigitation. In the same way that, let's say, you're doing physics and you want to solve teleportation. And what if the test that you set out to pass is you need to convince a panel of judges that teleportation took place? And they're just sitting there and watching what you're doing. And that is something that you can achieve with David Copperfield could achieve it in his show at Vegas. And what he's doing is very elaborate. But it's not physics. It's not making any progress in our understanding of the universe. To push back on that is possible. That's the hope with these kinds of subjective evaluations is that it's easier to solve it generally than it is to come up with tricks that convince a large number of judges. That's the hope. In practice, it turns out that it's very easy to deceive people in the same way that you can do magic in Vegas. You can actually very easily convince people that they're talking to a human when they're actually talking to an algorithm. I just disagree. I disagree with that. I think it's easy. I would push. No, it's not easy. It's doable. It's very easy because we are biased. We have theory of mind. We are constantly projecting emotions, intentions, agentness. Agentness is one of our core innate priors. We are projecting these things on everything around us. Like if you paint a smiley on a rock, the rock becomes happy in our eyes. And because we have this extreme bias that permits everything we see around us, it's actually pretty easy to trick people. I just disagree with that. I so totally disagree with that. You brilliantly put as a huge, the anthropomorphization that we naturally do, the agentness of that word. Is that a real word? No, it's not a real word. I like it. But it's a useful word. It's a useful word. Let's make it real. It's a huge help. But I still think it's really difficult to convince. If you do like the Alexa Prize formulation, where you talk for an hour, there's formulations of the test you can create, where it's very difficult. So I like the Alexa Prize better because it's more pragmatic. It's more practical. It's actually incentivizing developers to create something that's useful as a human machine interface. So that's slightly better than just the imitation. So I like it. Your idea is like a test which hopefully help us in creating intelligent systems as a result. Like if you create a system that passes it, it'll be useful for creating further intelligent systems. Yes, at least. Yeah. Just to kind of comment, I'm a little bit surprised how little inspiration people draw from the Turing test today. The media and the popular press might write about it every once in a while. The philosophers might talk about it. But most engineers are not really inspired by it. And I know you don't like the Turing test, but we'll have this argument another time. There's something inspiring about it, I think. As a philosophical device in a physical discussion, I think there is something very interesting about it. I don't think it is in practical terms. I don't think it's conducive to progress. And one of the reasons why is that I think being very human like, being indistinguishable from a human is actually the very last step in the creation of machine intelligence. That the first ARs that will show strong generalization that will actually implement human like broad cognitive abilities, they will not actually behave or look anything like humans. Human likeness is the very last step in that process. And so a good test is a test that points you towards the first step on the ladder, not towards the top of the ladder. So to push back on that, I usually agree with you on most things. I remember you, I think at some point, tweeting something about the Turing test not being being counterproductive or something like that. And I think a lot of very smart people agree with that. I, a computation speaking, not very smart person, disagree with that. Because I think there's some magic to the interactivity with other humans. So to play devil's advocate on your statement, it's possible that in order to demonstrate the generalization abilities of a system, you have to show your ability, in conversation, show your ability to adjust, adapt to the conversation through not just like as a standalone system, but through the process of like the interaction, the game theoretic, where you really are changing the environment by your actions. So in the ARC challenge, for example, you're an observer. You can't scare the test into changing. You can't talk to the test. You can't play with it. So there's some aspect of that interactivity that becomes highly subjective, but it feels like it could be conducive to generalizability. I think you make a great point. The interactivity is a very good setting to force a system to show adaptation, to show generalization. That said, at the same time, it's not something very scalable, because you rely on human judges. It's not something reliable, because the human judges may not, may not. So you don't like human judges. Basically, yes. And I think so. I love the idea of interactivity. I initially wanted an ARC test that had some amount of interactivity where your score on a task would not be 1 or 0, if you can solve it or not, but would be the number of attempts that you can make before you hit the right solution, which means that now you can start applying the scientific method as you solve ARC tasks, that you can start formulating hypotheses and probing the system to see whether the observation will match the hypothesis or not. It would be amazing if you could also, even higher level than that, measure the quality of your attempts, which, of course, is impossible. But again, that gets subjective. How good was your thinking? How efficient was? So one thing that's interesting about this notion of scoring you as how many attempts you need is that you can start producing tasks that are way more ambiguous, right? Right. Because with the different attempts, you can actually probe that ambiguity, right? Right. So that's, in a sense, which is how good can you adapt to the uncertainty and reduce the uncertainty? Yes, it's half fast. It's the efficiency with which you reduce uncertainty in program space, exactly. Very difficult to come up with that kind of test, though. Yeah, so I would love to be able to create something like this. In practice, it would be very, very difficult, but yes. I mean, what you're doing, what you've done with the ARC challenge is brilliant. I'm also not surprised that it's not more popular, but I think it's picking up. It does its niche. It does its niche, yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts about another test? I talked with Marcus Hutter. He has the Hutter Prize for compression of human knowledge. And the idea is really sort of quantify and reduce the test of intelligence purely to just the ability to compress. What's your thoughts about this intelligence as compression? I mean, it's a very fun test because it's such a simple idea, like you're given Wikipedia, basic English Wikipedia, and you must compress it. And so it stems from the idea that cognition is compression, that the brain is basically a compression algorithm. This is a very old idea. It's a very, I think, striking and beautiful idea. I used to believe it. I eventually had to realize that it was very much a flawed idea. So I no longer believe that cognition is compression. But I can tell you what's the difference. So it's very easy to believe that cognition and compression are the same thing. So Jeff Hawkins, for instance, says that cognition is prediction. And of course, prediction is basically the same thing as compression. It's just including the temporal axis. And it's very easy to believe this because compression is something that we do all the time very naturally. We are constantly compressing information. We are constantly trying. We have this bias towards simplicity. We are constantly trying to organize things in our mind and around us to be more regular. So it's a beautiful idea. It's very easy to believe. There is a big difference between what we do with our brains and compression. So compression is actually kind of a tool in the human cognitive toolkit that is used in many ways. But it's just a tool. It is a tool for cognition. It is not cognition itself. And the big fundamental difference is that cognition is about being able to operate in future situations that include fundamental uncertainty and novelty. So for instance, consider a child at age 10. And so they have 10 years of life experience. They've gotten pain, pleasure, rewards, and punishment in a period of time. If you were to generate the shortest behavioral program that would have basically run that child over these 10 years in an optimal way, the shortest optimal behavioral program given the experience of that child so far, well, that program, that compressed program, this is what you would get if the mind of the child was a compression algorithm essentially, would be utterly unable, inappropriate, to process the next 70 years in the life of that child. So in the models we build of the world, we are not trying to make them actually optimally compressed. We are using compression as a tool to promote simplicity and efficiency in our models. But they are not perfectly compressed because they need to include things that are seemingly useless today, that have seemingly been useless so far. But that may turn out to be useful in the future because you just don't know the future. And that's the fundamental principle that cognition, that intelligence arises from is that you need to be able to run appropriate behavioral programs except you have absolutely no idea what sort of context, environment, situation they are going to be running in. And you have to deal with that uncertainty, with that future anomaly. So an analogy that you can make is with investing, for instance. If I look at the past 20 years of stock market data, and I use a compression algorithm to figure out the best trading strategy, it's going to be you buy Apple stock, then maybe the past few years you buy Tesla stock or something. But is that strategy still going to be true for the next 20 years? Well, actually, probably not, which is why if you're a smart investor, you're not just going to be following the strategy that corresponds to compression of the past. You're going to be following, you're going to have a balanced portfolio, right? Because you just don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I guess in that same sense, the compression is analogous to what you talked about, which is local or robust generalization versus extreme generalization. It's much closer to that side of being able to generalize in the local sense. That's why as humans, when we are children, in our education, so a lot of it is driven by play, driven by curiosity. We are not efficiently compressing things. We're actually exploring. We are retaining all kinds of things from our environment that seem to be completely useless. Because they might turn out to be eventually useful, right? And that's what cognition is really about. And what makes it antagonistic to compression is that it is about hedging for future uncertainty. And that's antagonistic to compression. Yes. Officially hedging. Cognition leverages compression as a tool to promote efficiency and simplicity in our models. It's like Einstein said, make it simpler, but not, however that quote goes, but not too simple. So compression simplifies things, but you don't want to make it too simple. Yes. So a good model of the world is going to include all kinds of things that are completely useless, actually, just in case. Because you need diversity in the same way that in your portfolio. You need all kinds of stocks that may not have performed well so far, but you need diversity. And the reason you need diversity is because fundamentally you don't know what you're doing. And the same is true of the human mind, is that it needs to behave appropriately in the future. And it has no idea what the future is going to be like. But it's not going to be like the past. So compressing the past is not appropriate, because the past is not, it's not predictive of the future. Yeah, history repeats itself, but not perfectly. I don't think I asked you last time the most inappropriately absurd question. We've talked a lot about intelligence, but the bigger question from intelligence is of meaning. Intelligence systems are kind of goal oriented. They're always optimizing for a goal. If you look at the Hutter Prize, actually, I mean, there's always a clean formulation of a goal. But the natural question for us humans, since we don't know our objective function, is what is the meaning of it all? So the absurd question is, what, Francois, do you think is the meaning of life? What's the meaning of life? Yeah, that's a big question. And I think I can give you my answer, at least one of my answers. And so one thing that's very important in understanding who we are is that everything that makes up ourselves, that makes up who we are, even your most personal thoughts, is not actually your own. Even your most personal thoughts are expressed in words that you did not invent and are built on concepts and images that you did not invent. We are very much cultural beings. We are made of culture. What makes us different from animals, for instance? So everything about ourselves is an echo of the past. Is an echo of the past, an echo of people who lived before us. That's who we are. And in the same way, if we manage to contribute something to the collective edifice of culture, a new idea, maybe a beautiful piece of music, a work of art, a grand theory, a new world, maybe, that something is going to become a part of the minds of future humans, essentially, forever. So everything we do creates ripples that propagate into the future. And in a way, this is our path to immortality, is that as we contribute things to culture, culture in turn becomes future humans. And we keep influencing people thousands of years from now. So our actions today create ripples. And these ripples, I think, basically sum up the meaning of life. In the same way that we are the sum of the interactions between many different ripples that came from our past, we are ourselves creating ripples that will propagate into the future. And that's why we should be, this seems like perhaps an eighth thing to say, but we should be kind to others during our time on Earth because every act of kindness creates ripples. And in reverse, every act of violence also creates ripples. And you want to carefully choose which kind of ripples you want to create, and you want to propagate into the future. And in your case, first of all, beautifully put, but in your case, creating ripples into the future human and future AGI systems. Yes. It's fascinating. Our successors. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Francois, as always, for a second time. And I'm sure many times in the future, it's been a huge honor. You're one of the most brilliant people in the machine learning, computer science world. Again, it's a huge honor. Thanks for talking to me. It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Francois Chollet, and thank you to our sponsors, Babbel, Masterclass, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from René Descartes in 1668, an excerpt of which Francois includes and is on the measure of intelligence paper. If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence as the dullest of men can do. Here, Descartes is anticipating the Turing test, and the argument still continues to this day. Secondly, he continues, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. This is an incredible quote. Whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular action. Hence, it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life and the way in which our reason makes us act. That's the debate between mimicry and memorization versus understanding. So thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

François Chollet: Measures of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #120

The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kuida, cofounder of Replika, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot, that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say a human level, by being a friend. For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that Replika and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart. The origin story of Replika is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend Roman Muzarenki, who was killed crossing the street by a hit and run driver in late 2015. He was 34. The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend, by trading a chatbot and your old net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story, as we talk about with Eugenia. When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her. I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life. And it was. I think in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others. She is a kind and brilliant person. It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her. Quick summary of the sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me. I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will follow it boldly and without fear, to as far as I can take it. With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there. But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia and the Replica team have built. And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn to connect to human beings, one episode at a time. In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I'll try to make these interesting, but give you timestamps so you can skip, but please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount, buy whatever they're selling, it really is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Try them out with a one time offer for only 5 bucks and free shipping at dollarshave.com slash lex. The starter kit comes with a 6 blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great. I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over 5 years, and actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And now, friends, we have come full circle. It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those years ago, back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world. Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the shave butter. I did. I love it. It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience. Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter set today for just 5 bucks plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com slash lex. This show is also sponsored by DoorDash. Get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of 15 bucks or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter code, you guessed it, LEX. I have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from. And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention from the programs to humans were special. For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually, I still use DoorDash a lot. There's a million options that fit into my crazy keto diet ways. Also, it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times. Once again, download the DoorDash app and enter code LEX to get 5 bucks off and zero delivery fees on your first order of 15 dollars or more. Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. I can truly say that they're an amazing company, one of the first sponsors, if not the first sponsor to truly believe in me, and I think quite possibly the reason I'm still doing this podcast. So I am forever grateful to Cash App. So thank you. And as I said many times before, use code LEXBODCAST when you download the app from Google Play or the App Store. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar. I usually say other stuff here in the read, but I wasted all that time up front saying how grateful I am to Cash App. I'm going to try to go off the top of my head a little bit more for these reads because I'm actually very lucky to be able to choose the sponsors that we take on, and that means I can really only take on the sponsors that I truly love, and then I can just talk about why I love them. So it's pretty simple. Again, get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play, use code LEXBODCAST, get 10 bucks, and Cash App will also donate 10 bucks to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida. Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously, we're both Russian, so let me ask a ridiculously romanticized Russian question. Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally, on a philosophical level? Like in our existence, when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our life is loneliness? Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know, so... In Russian? I mean, it's part of your school program. So I guess if you read that, then you sort of have to believe that. You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone, and that's how you live your life. How do you think about it? You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people? That's maybe another way of asking it. Do you think that's ever fully satisfied? I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that, trying to not feel lonely, and again, we're talking about a subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated. You think it's a subjective thing, but like again, another absurd measurement wise thing, how much loneliness do you think there is in the world? Like if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there, do you think? Like how, I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many people in the world feel alone. There's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self report or just all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is size wise? I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I can. What really, and I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that. Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that. It is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan. And it is, you know, in a way like right now, what scientists would say that it, you know, it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life. In terms of the impact on your health? In terms of impact on your physiological health. Yeah. So it's basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's basically all the time under stress. It's always in this alert state and so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and get it, your response to inflammation is quite different. So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses. So it's much easier to catch a virus. That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus. It's kind of sad. Yeah. The statistics are pretty horrible around that. So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly. 30? 30%. And then it's much worse for Gen Z. And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close friends. And then I think 25 or so, and then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances. And that's in the United States? That's in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that that's much worse everywhere else. Like in the UK, I mean, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of 10 people in the UK feel lonely. Minister of loneliness. I think that thing actually exists. So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely. And again, this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling lonely. That is not objectively being fully socially isolated. However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination. So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and then there's really no one working really on that because it's like subclinical. It's not clinical. It's not something that you can, we'll tell your doctor and get a treatment or something. Yet it's killing us. Yeah. So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff. So it's like measurement. Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem and not that many people actually, but some. But you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem. Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like if you just stick to humans, uh, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans. Do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection? Like I, are you on social media much? Unfortunately, do you find yourself like, uh, again, if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally, or in general, I think it's, it's easier to look at some stats and, um, I mean, Gen Z seems to be generation Z seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness. They're definitely the most connected generation in the world. I mean, I still remember life without an iPhone, without Facebook, they don't know that that ever existed, uh, or at least don't know how it was. So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, um, you know, this hyper connected world might actually make people feel lonely, lonelier. I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know, my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier, mostly, yeah, we're all super connected. Uh, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever. Again, tons of people that are, are in longterm relationships experience bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness. Um, and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. Um, and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself, like in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit. And then you, um, open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way. Uh, not in just, you know, at a friend on Facebook kind of way. So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work? Do you think that's, um, engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human, but with an AI system? Well, I know that's, that's a fact, that's what we're doing. And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, um, talking to their virtual AI friend. So basically a chat bot at the basic level, but it could be more like, do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of, uh, about specifics, but do you have a hope, like if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for, um, let me, let me first start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying first of all, the fabric of our civilization. But second of all, making us more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that like make our life less lonely? Yeah. Make us happy. Like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives. Yeah. Totally believe in that. That's why we're, I'm also working on that. Um, I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring and it is a North star metric that we're going after. And all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that because you can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk about, um, you know, making you feel less lonely or making you feel more connected. They're not really measuring that. So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run. Um, so I think it's really important to put your measure it. Yeah. To measure it. What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness? Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in. How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely with loneliness? There's a scale. There's UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not. And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness? Does it look in like the past month? Like, uh, does it basically self report? Does it try to sneak up on you tricky to answer honestly or something like that? Well, what's yeah, I'm not familiar with the question. It is just asking you a few questions. Like how often did you feel, uh, like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other people in this last few couple of weeks? Um, it's similar to the self report questionnaires for depression, anxiety, like PHQ nine and get seven. Of course, as any, as any self report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very precise or very well measured, but still, if you take a big enough population and you get them through these, uh, questionnaires, you can see, you can see a positive dynamic. And so you basically, uh, you put people through questionnaires to see like, is this thing is our, is what we're creating, making people happier? Yeah, we measure, so we measure two outcomes. One short term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made them feel better, worse or same, um, this, this metric right now is at 80%. So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better, but I should have done the questionnaire with you. You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation. That's actually fascinating. I should probably do that, but that's, that's how we do that. You should totally and aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system in these human conversations. So we'll get to your work with replica, but let me continue on the line of absurd questions. So you talked about, um, you know, deep connection with the humans, deep connection with AI, meaningful connection. Let me ask about love. People make fun of me cause I talk about love all the time. But uh, what, what do you think love is like maybe in the context of, um, a meaningful connection with somebody else? Do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends or is it a graduate? No, it's all the same. No. Like, is it, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection, uh, with another human being and what is that? What is love Eugenia, I'm going to just enjoy asking you these questions seeing you struggle. Thanks. Um, well the way I see it, um, and specifically, um, the way it relates to our work and the way it was, the way it inspired our work on replica, um, I think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen. Like what does that mean? Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that somebody seeing you for who you actually are. And that's extremely, extremely rare. Um, I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, um, belief and trust that um, you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the, that's the combination that really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again. And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people. Um, when we see that someone's accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves. And um, the paradox is that's when big changes start happening, big fundamental changes in people start happening. So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in some way a definition of love. So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are. Um, now on a slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds a very, like a very healthy view of love, but, uh, is there also like a, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak and uh, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right? Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of that, what people might see in a negative light as like games or whatever, but just, just the, the dance of human interaction. Yeah. Fear of loss and fear of like, you said, you said like once you feel it once, you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've lost it. So they fear losing it. They feel loss. So is that part of it, like you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to, uh, be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective? I mean, it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all, you know, um, face it at some points in our lives. I mean, I did. You want to go into details? How'd you get your heartbroken? Sure. So mine is pretty straight, my story is pretty straightforward, um, there I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point, um, in my twenties became really, really close to me and we, we became really close friends. Um, well, I grew up pretty lonely. So in many ways when I'm building, you know, these, these AI friends, I'm thinking about myself when I was 17 writing horrible poetry and you know, in my dial up modem at home and, um, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with. I left, I lived, um, alone for a long time when I was a teenager, where did you go up in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow. Um, so I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and you know, connect to the internet and then write horrible poetry and love poems, all sorts of poems, obviously love poems. I mean, what, what other poetry can you write when you're 17, um, it could be political or something, but yeah. But that was, you know, that was kind of my fiat, like deeply, um, influenced by Joseph Brodsky and like all sorts of sports that, um, every 17 year old will, will be looking, you know, looking at and reading, but yeah, that was my, uh, these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept me the way I am, um, and I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with, with others. I was deeply curious about every, everyone else. And I thought that, you know, if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means I'm more connected. This is what this podcast as well, by the way, I'm desperate, well, I'm seeking connection now. I'm just kidding. Or am I? I don't know. So what, wait, reporter, uh, what, how did that make you feel more connected? I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone, But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place can I infiltrate? What other community can I write about? What other phenomenon can I explore? And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and, and a mythological character, like creature, that's just jumping, uh, between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort of okay with in all of them. So, um, that was my dream job, by the way, that was like totally what I would have been doing. Um, if Russia was a different place and a little bit undercover. So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature trying to infiltrate. So try to be a part of the world. What are we talking about? What kind of things did you enjoy writing about? I'd go work at a strip club or go. Awesome. Okay. Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, um, certain phenomenons or phenomenons or people in the city. And what, uh, sorry to keep interrupting and I'm the worst, I'm a conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this? What, uh, is this pre Putin, post Putin? What was Russia like? Pre Putin is really long ago. This is Putin era. That's a beginning of two thousands and 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10. What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering? In those early two thousands, this was, there was still a lot of hope. There were still tons of hope that, um, you know, we're sort of becoming this, uh, Western, Westernized society. Uh, the restaurants were opening, we were really looking at, you know, um, we're trying, we're trying to copy a lot of things from, uh, from the US, from Europe, um, bringing all these things and very enthusiastic about that. So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on. There was a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar to, I guess, New York. I mean, just to give you an idea in, um, year 2000 was the year when we had two, uh, movie theaters in Moscow and there was one first coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal. Uh, by 2010 there were all sorts of things everywhere. Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like, you mean, oh yeah, like a Starbucks. I mean, I remember we were reporting on, like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks. I think in 2007 that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know, in Moscow back, back in the time, like, you know, that was worthy of a magazine cover. And, uh, that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the time. Yeah. When was McDonald's? Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened. That was in the nineties. I mean, yeah. Oh yeah. I remember that very well. Yeah. Those were long, long lines. I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember. Um, actually earlier at that time, did you do, I mean, that was a luxurious outing. That was definitely not something you do every day. And also the line was at least three hours. So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food. That is like at least three hours in line and then no one is trying to eat fast after that. Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible. What's your memory of that? Oh, it was insane. How did it go? It was extremely positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and the hamburger and small fries and my mom's there. And sometimes I'll just, cause I was really little, they'll just let me run, you know, up the kitchen and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia or. So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling, you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose. But do you remember all that time fondly, like, cause I do like the first time I drank, you know, Coke, you know, all that stuff, right. And just, yeah. The connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember, I remember it really positively. Like how do you remember what the nineties and then the Russia you were covering, just the human connections you had with people and the experiences? Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists. My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was in nuclear physicist, a professor at the university. My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the everything after the explosion. And then I remember that and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet union. So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the Dean and the university. And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you know, in the nineties. So then I remember we started our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he selling those apples the whole day, cause that would make you more money than, you know, working at the university. And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and whatever the particles and stuff. And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything, but I was interested as a journalist kind of type interested. But that was my memory. And, you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff. So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic, had this bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia. So in 1993, there was nothing to eat, like, even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you remember that. And our friend had a restaurant, like a government, half government owned something restaurant. So they always had supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo, the bootleg Nintendo, that I remember very fondly, cause I think I was nine or something like that and we're seven. Like we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show. Yeah. So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean like, like a definitive, well, they took it away and gave me a bag of wheat instead. And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days. Oh no. And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like exchange it back in a little bit. So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with. So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun. So sometime it's going to come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something. I was so pissed. I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that. I'm like, I don't want your food. Give me my Nintendo back. That was extremely traumatic. But you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience. You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds. He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl and that was right after the explosion. No one knew anything. The whole crew he went with, all of them are dead now. I think there was this one guy still, that was still alive for this last few years. I think he died a few years ago now. My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else, but just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you? I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave. They were like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. So they took the ones with kids. So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me when I was 20, I was so sheltered from any problems whatsoever in life. And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor, you like work three hours a day, you sleep the rest and, and I, yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl. What are your memories of Chernobyl in general, like the bigger context, you know, because of that HBO show it's the world's attention turned to it once again, like, what are your thoughts about Chernobyl? Did Russia screw that one up? Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff. It seems like there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not, as it's very understandable, it's very human, very wrong, probably, but obviously Russia was probably trying to hide that they screwed things up. Like, what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general? I mean, I was born when the explosion happened. So actually a few months after, so of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys, like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you, you know, put the Geiger thing to it. My mom was like, just nuclear about that. She was like, what are you bringing, you should not do that. She was nuclear. Very nice. Well done. I'm sorry. It was, but yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal. The HBO one? Yeah, it was definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians, but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country. It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia, just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the show, but I think that... How good of a job they did. Oh my God, phenomenal. But also... The apartments, there's something, yeah. The set design. I mean, Russians can't do that, you know, but you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was. So I don't know, that show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents, British actors of a person, I forgot who created the show. But I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like, like there's no Russia in this history. No, he did like super bad or something like that. Or like, I don't know. Yeah, like exactly. Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something were the ones that he worked with. Yeah. But so he made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius, could go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job. It made me think like, why don't other people do a good job with this? Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia. There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II. I mean, there's so much interesting evil and not, and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia that it feels like there's not many good films on from the Russians. You would expect something from the Russians. Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now. Oh no. Unfortunately. But yeah, no, Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show. I think capturing really well, it's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on the right things. Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen. And that's just this very simple kind of thing. Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it to you, like his thoughts on the experience? He never talks. He's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American and he asked him a few times like, you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes? Or like, why did you decide to go? You could have said no, not go to Chernobyl. Why would like a person like, that's what you do. You cannot say no. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's like a Russian way. It's the Russian way. Men don't talk that much. Nope. There's no one upsides for that. Yeah, that's the truth. Okay. So back to post Putin Russia, or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to do, to be a journalist in that time. What was, what was Russia like at that time? Post you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing. What else, what else was Russia like then? I think there was just hope. There was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also a country like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized. And again, we're talking about nineties where like people would be shot in the street. And it was, I still have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know, coming out of it after the movie. And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like neither shot, which was, again, it was like a thing in the nineties that would be happening. People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there, tons of violence, tons of you know, just basically mafia mobs on in the streets. And then the two thousands were like, you know, things just got cleaned up, oil went up and the country started getting a little bit richer, you know, the nineties were so grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high. So the country didn't have anything. We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and forth. Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it got to like thousands. Then it was one rubble was something then again to millions, there's like crazy town. That was crazy. And then the two thousands were just these years of stability in a way and the country getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas. And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and St. Petersburg to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our like small kind of cities, towns there. What was, what were your thoughts of Putin at the time? Well, in the beginning he was really positive. Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin. He was young. Um, it's very energetic. He also immediate the shirtless somewhat compared to, well, that was not like way before the shirtless era. Um, the shirtless era. Okay. So he didn't start out shirtless. When did the shirtless era, it's like the propaganda of riding horse, fishing, 2010, 11, 12. Yeah. That's my favorite. You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, that's my favorite Putin is the shirtless Putin. Now I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, Americans really helped Russia with elections and Yeltsin got reelected, um, thankfully so, uh, because there's a huge threat that actually the communists will get back to power. Uh, they were a lot more popular. And then a lot of American experts, political experts, uh, and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get, get the presidency, the second term for the pro, um, the, of the presidency. But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, in the, by the end of his second term, uh, he was, you know, alcoholic. He was really old. He was falling off, uh, you know, the stages when he, where he was talking. Uh, so people were looking for fresh, I think for a fresh face, for someone who's going to continue Yeltsin's, uh, work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot more active, young, um, efficient, maybe. So that w that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day. I, I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early two thousands who was not a communist would be, yeah, Putin's great. We have a lot of hopes for him. What are your thoughts? And I promise we'll get back to, uh, first of all, your love story. Second of all, AI, well, what are your thoughts about, um, communism? The 20th century, I apologize. I'm reading the rise and fall of the third Reich. Oh my God. So I'm like really steeped into like world war II and Stalin and Hitler and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world. But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've led to. And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century. What are your thoughts about communism? Having experienced it as a political system? I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through, you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that, I mean, it was horrible. It was just plain horrible. It was just awful. You think it's, there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper. There's a, so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, uh, you know, eventually there is, it's a, it's the point of like a slippery slope. Eventually it creates, uh, you know, the rich get richer, it creates a disparity, like inequality of, um, wealth inequality. If like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people. It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you. There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from. So the idea of, of communism or these sort of Marxism is, uh, is, is not allowing that kind of slippery slope, but then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to be, seems to go wrong very badly. What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong? What is it about human nature? If we look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed. Is there something like, do you think about this much of like why it goes wrong? Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal. Obviously the, you know, the, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses. So it's not like fully, I guess, uh, this dream of equal life. So then I guess the, the situation that we had in, you know, the Russia had in the Soviet union, it was more, it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any, you know, significant fortune or build anything living constant, um, under constant surveillance, surveillance from other people. Like you can't even, you know, uh, do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship basically. Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail, absolute absence of actual law. Yeah. It's a constant state of fear. You didn't own any, own anything. It didn't, you know, the, you couldn't go travel, you couldn't read anything, uh, Western or you couldn't make a career really, unless you're working in the, uh, military complex. Um, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded. I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they, they were really well regarded as you, as you know, obviously. Because the state wanted, I mean, cause there's a lot of value to them being well regarded. Because they were developing things that could be used in, in the military. So that was very important. That was the main investment. Um, but it was miserable, it was all miserable. That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD. That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and definitely if as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own things. You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest deal in the world. It was already in the nineties, by the way, I mean, what was your like, favorite food where it was like, well, like this is possible, Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas and whatever. And you know, whatever watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union. There were no pineapples or papaya or mango, like you've never seen those fruit things. Like those were so ridiculously good. And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal. Um, so that was a really big deal. I've seen all these fruit things. Yeah. Me too. Actually. I don't know. I think I have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons, uh, or like addictions or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit. I still struggle with, Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right? If you get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something or all kinds of like different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me. I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the kind of banana. Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat on bananas, like the amount, Oh yeah, for sure. They were delicious. And like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food, I was like, this is capitalism. This is delicious. Yeah. I am. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny. Yeah. Like it's, it's funny to read. I don't know what to think of it, of, um, it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper, when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like, uh, sorry, but the, uh, been studying Hitler a lot recently and, uh, going through Mein Kampf. He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do. Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin didn't read the, read it, but it's, it's kind of terrifying and I don't know. And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world. And uh, yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study enough now. One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit. I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the, uh, the beauty and the terror of Russian history through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people. So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten. So much was forgotten. I'll probably, I'm going to try to convince myself to, um, you're a super busy and super important person when I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, uh, to try to become a better Russian. Cause I feel like I'm a shitty Russian. Not that busy. So I can totally be your Russian Sherpa. Yeah. But love, you were, you were talking about your early days of, uh, being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist. Where did love come into that? I guess finding for the first time, um, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story. Some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the same place with our lives, um, we're 25, 26, I guess. And, um, somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day where, um, it's one day and, you know, in summer that we just stayed out, um, outdoor the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am and it just felt extremely like extremely good. And I, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining. It was beautiful, you know, sunrise and it's really cheesy, but, um, at the same time, we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before. And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family sort of, um, and it gives you tons of power. It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to, um, change positively on many different levels. Power because you could be yourself. At least you know that some somewhere you can be just yourself, like you don't need to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, um, great at work or tell some story or sell yourself in somewhere or another. And so it became this really close friends and, um, in a way, um, I started a company cause he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start up too. It felt really cool. I don't know what I'm going to, what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need a startup. Okay. So that's, so that pulled you in to the startup world. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then this, uh, closest friend of mine died. We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow and, uh, we lived together, we're roommates and we came back and, um, he got hit by a car right in front of Kremlin on a, you know, next to the river, um, and died the same day I met this is the Roman hospital. So, and you've moved to America at that point, at that point I was, what about him? What about Roman? Him too. He actually moved first. So I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing, so I didn't like that he was already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time. So was he in San Francisco? Yeah, we were roommates. So he just visited Moscow for a little bit. We went back for, for our visas, we had to get a stamp in our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taking a little longer, so we stayed there for a couple of weeks. What happened? How did he, so how, how did he, uh, how did he die? Um, he was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the, on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just ran over him. When was this? It was in 2015 on 28th of November, so it was a long ago now. Um, but at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was, um, the first kind of meaningful death in my life. Um, you know, both sets of, I had both sets of grandparents at the time. I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon and specifically our friends. Cause we were, you know, we're still in our twenties or early thirties and it still, it still felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things different. Um, so that was, it was just really, really abrupt I'd say. What did it feel like to, uh, to lose him, like that feeling of loss? You talked about the feeling of love, having power. What is the feeling of loss, if you like? Well in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens and then you can see very clearly. Um, I think that, that was it like basically something changed so, changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really, really clearly what mattered or what not. Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some of the things. And, um, it was just this big realization when it's this very, very clear vision of what life's about. You still miss him today? Yeah, for sure. For sure. He was just this constant, I think it was, he was really important for, for me and for our friends for many different reasons and, um, I think one of them being that we didn't just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way. It was like the end of an era and it's on so many different levels. The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of, you know, us living through our twenties and kind of dreaming about the future. Do you remember like last several conversations, is there moments with him that stick out that kind of haunt you and you're just when you think about him? Yeah, well his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed for as his startup was not going really anywhere and he wanted to do something else. He wanted to do build, he played with toy, like played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around, um, building a startup around death. So having, um, he applied to Y Combinator with a video that, you know, I had on my computer and it was all about, you know, disrupting death, thinking about new cemeteries, uh, more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for, for humans. And at the same time, having those, um, digital avatars, this kind of AI avatars that would store all the memory about a person that he could interact with. What year was this? 2015. Well, right before his death. So it was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video. And so I found out my computer when, um, it was in our living room. He never got in, but, um, he was thinking about a lot somehow. Does it have the digital avatar idea? Yeah. That's so interesting. Well, he just says, well, that's in his hit is the pitch has this idea and he'll, he talks about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death. Why was he interested in this? Is it, maybe someone who's depressed is like naturally inclined thinking about that. But I just felt, you know, this year in San Francisco, we just had so much, um, I was going through a hard time. And we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy somehow to make him feel better. And it felt like, you know, this, um, I dunno, I just felt like I was taking care of him a lot and he almost started to feel better. And then that happened and I dunno, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess. And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December or help, you know, helped organize the funeral, help help his parents and I came back here and it was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and Christmas time. And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about like, I had to pretend everything's okay. And you know, I'm just working on this company. Um, yeah, it was definitely very, very tough, tough time. Do you think about your own mortality? You said, uh, you know, we're young, the, the, the, the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there, is still before us, but, uh, it can end any moment. Do you think about your own ending at any moment? Unfortunately, I think about way too, about it way too much. Somehow after Roman, like every year after that, I started losing people that I really love. I lost my grandfather the next year, my, you know, the, the person who would explain to me, you know, what the universe is made of while selling apples and then I lost another close friend of mine and, um, and it just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about, about that. That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops and, um, and then as my therapist, you know, recommended to me, I open up, uh, some nice calming images with the voiceover and it calms me down for sleep. Yeah. I'm really scared of death. This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and, um, still working through. There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, um, Denial of Death. I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks. Um, there's a, in psychology, a whole field called terror management theory. Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book. He was the, we talked for four hours about death, uh, fear of death, but his, his whole idea is that, um, Ernest Becker, I think I find this idea really compelling is, uh, that everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life is to, uh, create like escape death is to try to, um, construct an illusion of, um, that we're somehow immortal. So like everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything you do is a kind of, um, creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us. I think, so, you know, there's this, the question of like the meaning of life that, you know, you look at like what drives us, uh, humans. And when I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read is the first time I, this scene, it felt like this is the right thing at the core. Uh, Sheldon's work is called warm at the core. So he's saying it's, I think it's, uh, William James he's quoting or whoever is like the, the thing, what is at the core of it all? Whether there's like love, you know, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything. I don't, you know, that's the open question. What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down. What's what's at the, at the bottom. And, uh, Ernest Becker says the fear of death and the way, in fact, uh, cause you said therapist and calming images, his whole idea is, um, you know, we, we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface because it's, um, and like meditate on that. Uh, and, and use the clarity of vision that provides to, uh, you know, to live a more fulfilling life, to, um, to live a more honest life, to, to discover, you know, there's something about, you know, being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in, um, in the most fulfilling life. So that's the, that's the dual of what you're saying. Cause you kind of said, it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much. It's a question whether it's good to think about it because I, I've, um, again, I talk about way too much about love and probably death. And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you afraid of death? I think most people say they're not. Whether they say they're, um, they're afraid, you know, it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like, uh, a paper deadline or something. And they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper, like, like I'm afraid not to finish, um, the goals I have, but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophy, like thinking deeply about it, like, uh, the very thing that, you know, um, like when you think deeply about something, you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it. Uh, yeah. And I, and when I think about death, it's like, um, it can be, it's terrifying. If it feels like stepping outside into the cold or it's freezing and then I have to like hurry back inside or it's warm. Uh, but like, I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold. Definitely. When I talk to my mentor about it, he always, uh, tells me, well, what dies? There's nothing there that can die, but I guess that requires, um, well in, in Buddhism, one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be Anatta, which is the concept of non, not self and kind of thinking that, you know, if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts because you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this? And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not self, there's this concept of not self. So once you get there, how can that actually die? What is dying? Right. You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust. But that is very, um, you know, very advanced, um, spiritual work for me. I'm definitely just, definitely not. Oh my God. No, I have, uh, I think it's very, very useful. It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful and mine is more, I'm just terrified. Like it's really makes me, um, On a personal level. On a personal level. I'm terrified. How do you overcome that? I don't. I'm still trying to. Have pleasant images? Well, pleasant images get me to sleep and then during the day I can distract myself with other things, like talking to you. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good. Is there other, like, is there moments since you've, uh, lost Roman that you had like moments of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like level of like what can possibly die. I'm part like, uh, losing yourself in the moment, in the ticking time of like this universe and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it. Well that goes hand in hand. I remember I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his password out of the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually there's never a sun in Moscow in December and somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with a close friend. And I remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness and just feeling that, you know, I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad. And it wasn't a sad feeling. It was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve. And you can only get it when something, oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens. But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature doing something that really gets you there. But once you're there, I think when you, uh, summit a mountain, a really hard mountain, you inevitably get there. That's just a way to get to the state. But once you're on this, in this state, um, you can do really big things. I think. Yeah. Sucks it doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog. Like it's a, when you wake up in the morning, it's, it's there, but it eventually dissipates. It's really sad. Nothing lasts forever. But I definitely like doing this pushup and running thing. There's moments at a couple of moments, like I'm not a crier. I don't cry. But there's moments where I was like facedown on the carpet, like with tears in my eyes is interesting. And then that, that complete, like, uh, there's a lot of demons. I've got demons had to face them. Funny how running makes you face your demons. But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss and all of it alone, which is funny. That's beautiful. I like that, but definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow. Yeah. There's something. I mean, we're monkeys, apes, whatever physical, there's a physical thing to it, but there's something to this pushing yourself physical, physically, but alone that happens when you're doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or, you know, rolling extra across the Atlantic or like marathons. I love watching marathons and you know, it's so boring, but you can see them getting there. So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins. He's a, he basically, uh, so he's been either email on the phone with me every day through this. I haven't been exactly alone, but he, he's kind of, he's the, he's the devil on the devil's shoulder. Uh, so he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you, uh, like he has, um, through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do. So he, he's insane. Uh, he's a, this Navy seal person. Uh, he's wrote this book. Can't hurt me. He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth. He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert. He set the world record number of pull ups. He just does everything where it's like, he, like, how can I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah. That, um, whatever that is, uh, that process of self discovery is really important. I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this like workout thing, like a happy go getter with my like headband and like, just like, uh, because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise with you. And I was like, yeah, great. You know, but then like, I realized that this, this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss, can we, uh, talk about your journey of finding, I think, an incredible idea and incredible company and incredible system in Replica? How did that come to be? So yeah, so I was a journalist and then I went to business school for a couple of years to, um, just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23. And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first ROG network, um, in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do fun stuff together. Um, and we worked on a bank, um, the idea was to build a bank on top of, um, a telco. So that was 2011 or 12, um, and a lot of telecommunication company, um, mobile network operators didn't really know what to do next in terms of, you know, new products, new revenue. And this big idea was that, you know, um, you put a bank on top and then all work works out. Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and, um, you can use it as, as your bank. Uh, so, you know, a third of a country wakes up as, as your bank client. Um, but we couldn't quite figure out what, what would be the main interface to interact with the bank. The problem was that most people didn't have smart, smart phones back in the time in Russia, the penetration of smartphones was low, um, people didn't use mobile banking or online banking and their computers. So we figured out that SMS would be the best way, uh, cause that would work on feature phones. Um, but that required some chat bot technology, which I didn't know anything about, um, obviously. So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really, well, there wasn't just nothing really. Ideas through SMS be able to interact with your bank account. Yeah. And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this, can't we use more of, uh, you know, some behavioral ideas and why can't this, uh, banking chat bot be nice to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend this way you develop more connection to it, retention is higher, people don't churn. And so I went to very depressing, um, um, Russian cities to test it out. Um, I went to, I remember three different towns with, uh, um, to interview potential users. Um, so people use it for a little bit and I went to talk to them, um, very poor towns, mostly towns that were, um, you know, sort of factories, uh, mono towns. They were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch of very poor people. Um, and then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chat bot. Um, and she was talking about it and she started crying during the interview because she said, no one really cares for me that much. And um, so to be clear, that was the, my only endeavor in programming that chat bot. So it was really simple. It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and, um, it was incredibly simplistic. Um, and that really made her emotional and she said, you know, I only have my mom and my, um, my husband and I don't have any more really in my life. And that was very sad, but at the same time I felt, and we had more interviews in a similar vein and what I thought in the moment was like, well, uh, it's not that the technology is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for, for that, but, um, humans are ready, unfortunately. So this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities, but, um, there's something so, so powerful around about conversational, um, AI that I saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into. So in the end of the day, we saw the banking project, um, but my then boss, um, was also my mentor and really, really close friend, um, told me, Hey, I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it. And I was like, well, what product? I don't know what I'm building. He's like, you'll figure it out. And, um, you know, looking back at this, this was a horrible idea to work on something without knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long, but we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know, there were no chat bot, um, constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the time. Uh, that was the era of, by the way, Google glass, which is why, you know, some of the investors like seed investors we've talked with were like, Oh, you should totally build it for Google glass. If not, we're not, I don't think that's interesting. Did you bite on that idea? No. Okay. Because I wanted to be, to do text first cause I'm a journalist. So I was, um, fascinated by just texting. So you thought, so the emotional, um, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do you think you could feel emotion from just text? Yeah. I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start, start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google glass. Uh, if you know what I mean, and I felt like the early adopters of Google glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some, you know, someone to talk to. Um, but then we really just focused on the tech itself. We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment and we felt, what if we just look into, um, building the best conversational constructors, so to say, use the best tech available at the time. And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which happened in 2015 in August, 2015, uh, which Google published. Did you follow the work of Lobna prize and like all the sort of non machine learning chat bots? Yeah. What really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning. Like big data was a really big thing. Everyone was saying, you know, the business world, big data, 2012 is the biggest gaggle competitions were, you know, um, important, but that was really the kind of upheaval. People started talking about machine learning a lot, um, but it was only about images or something else. And it was never about conversation. As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist. It was all about Lord burner price, which was won by a guy who built a chat bot that talked like a Ukrainian teenager that it was just a gimmick. And somehow people picked up those gimmicks and then, you know, the most famous chat bot at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or smarter child on aim. The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular. Like people talk about the Turing test, people like talking about it philosophically, journalists like writing about it, but as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue. Like they, they're not obsessed with it. Even folks are like, you know, I'm in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed with it as I thought they might be. Why not? What do you think? So you know what you felt like you felt with that woman who, when she felt something by reading the text, I feel the same thing. There's something here, what you felt. I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's something here because they see as a technical problem is not that interesting for some reason. It's could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem, it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity. That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark. But to me there's something there that's, you could have a huge impact, but I don't think the machine learning world likes that, the human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word you can make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? It doesn't feel right to them. So I don't know. I don't know why that is. That's why I'm excited when I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that. It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for coming across, for I guess mutual friend and introducing us, but I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on. But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack for a second, because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here. In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy, very different from your work. I think they're too crazy. But the... Like what? I don't have to know. No, all right, we'll talk about it more. I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're a failure. It's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures. Tell it to my board. Well, I think you've demonstrated success in a lot of ways. It's easier for you to talk about failures for me. I'm in the bottom currently of the success. You're way too humble. So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there, there's something there. And I think you're exploring that and you're discovering that. So it's been surprising to me. But you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on it feels like there's something here. Like what did you mean by that? Like you should be focused on creating a, like you should have a product in mind. Is that what you meant? It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like of me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it. That's the, you know, the Holy Grail is there. It's like there's something extremely powerful in, in, in conversations and there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle. So to say. I feel like that's still true. Am I crazy? Oh no, I totally feel that's still true, which is, I think it's mind blowing. Yeah. You know what it feels like? I wouldn't even use the word conversation cause I feel like it's the wrong word. It's like a machine connection or something. I don't know cause conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately. You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there. But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this. Like I feel like we're like in the early days with the, like the Wozniak and all them, like where it was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are, who are all kind of lob no price type people. Yeah. Hobbyists. Hobbyists, but like not even hobbyists with big dreams. Like no hobbyists with a dream to trick like a jury. Yeah. It's like a weird, by the way, by the way, very weird. So if we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with people, I'm not trying to test them. So for instance, if I try to break them, like if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of it. Right. If I were to ask this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So the whole, the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding to all my factual questions, right? Or so it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because they want to, not because we're just trying to break it. And it's working for them because this, the weird part of it is that it's very subjective. It takes two to tango here fully. If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're trying to test it, then it's going to break. I mean, any person would break, to be honest. If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me. Yeah. If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't be, which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the problem of testing, so there should be some other metric. How do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually started with. And I think those measurements exist and we can test on those. But what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still not resolved and I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it. Maybe I just don't know about them, it's also possible. But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spend talking and we're not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or customer support problems or some other task oriented things. These conversations are something else and then somehow they're extremely important for us. If we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which as we know, creates tons of risk for our health as well. And so this is most of our hours as humans and somehow no one's trying to replicate that. And not even study it that well? And not even study that well. So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot? What's the state of the art chatbot? And those were the Lobner Prize days, but I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly there have been tons of scientists or academics that looked into the conversation. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it. There's not much really, there are conversational analysts who are basically just listening to speech, to different conversations, annotating them. And then, I mean, that's not really used for much. That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is barely useful. It's very marginal, even in their space, no one really is excited and I've never met a theoretical linguist who was like, I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics. That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful. Then I looked a little bit deeper and then there, whether there were any books written on what really contributes to great conversation, that was really strange because most of those were NLP books, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is not the NLP that I was expecting to be, but it was mostly some psychologist, Richard Bandler, I think came up with that, who was this big guy in a leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you. How to be charismatic and charming and influential with people, all those books, yeah. Pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you, so getting to some, so that was, I mean, probably not very, very true and that didn't seem working very much even back in the day. And then there were some other books like, I don't know, mostly just self help books around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever. And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen that really was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side, he was taking part in the London Prize, but not as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human, so you could either get him or a computer. And his whole book was about how do people, what makes us human in conversation. And that was a little bit more interesting because that at least someone started to think about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in that, but it was still about tricking, it was still about imitation game, it was still about, okay, well, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer. And it was definitely not about thinking, what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans. I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked or it's not just enough to know it's a human. It's something we're getting there, can we measure it and can we put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results? Yeah, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot, it's very possible I am a robot and this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating and I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people, I'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot. I literally Googled how to talk to people and how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast, because I was like, I can't, I can't make eye contact with people. I can't like hire. I do Google that a lot too. You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics. Is that what you're getting? Well, everything you've listed I've gotten, there's been very few good books on even just like how to interview well, it's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye, it's just so different when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it, just as a human. And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome? I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation. I mean, I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan, people can make fun of him or whatever and dismiss him. But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours. And there's another guy I watch a lot. He hosted a late night show, his name was Craig Ferguson. So he's like very kind of flirtatious. But there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create with people, how he can put people at ease. And just like, I see I've already started sounding like those I know pee people or something. I'm not I don't mean in that way. I don't mean like how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, what is that? Why is that fun to listen to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy? What is that? Because he's not saying I mean, it's so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually even articulating correctly. But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could be learned. And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like the Turing test. It's something else. I'm thinking about a lot all the time. I do think about all the time. I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build the conversational tech, we thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that we want to build. So let's just first focus on building, you know, some tech, building the tech side of things without a product in mind, without a product in mind, we added like a demo chatbot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and see whether it works or not. But we didn't have a product in mind yet. We thought we would try venture chatbots and figure out our consumer application. And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning. But then we got to Y Combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it. You know, everything because then it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding? How do we get this? You know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there. So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little bit, not for too long. And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots. And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots. Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future. That's the new, you know, the new apps will be chatbots. And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users, but still people were coming up with a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing news and this and that. And we couldn't understand whether we were just didn't execute well enough or people are not really, people are confused and are going to find out the truth that people don't need chatbots like that. So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application. Yeah. The idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything. When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't think, I didn't understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things worked. And then again, that craze has died down, right? Fully. I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot. I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think like with gestures you can control devices, like basically gesture based control things. It feels similar to me because like it's so compelling that was just like Tom Cruise, I can control stuff with my hands, but like when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard and mouse? So that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me. I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it being a compelling interface. I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about it, but they won't just be the interface to everything. It'll be its own thing that will create an amazing magical experience in its own right. Absolutely. Which is I think kind of the right thing to go about, like what's the magical experience with that interface specifically. How did you discover that for Replica? I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech, we can build any chatbot we want. We have the most, at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have. I mean, startups, obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've been working on it for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation. So let's just create a scale from one to 10. And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have, and 10 would be conversation you'd pay to have. And I mean, obviously we want to build a conversation that people would pay to actually have. And so for the whole, for a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale. And very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast, or talk to customer support, or make a reservation, or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go, or all sorts of setting up scheduling meetings. So that was a conversation we definitely didn't want to have. Basically everything task oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that would just immediately transform that into an actual interaction, that would be perfect. But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and also very inefficient thing because it was so many back and forth stuff. And as soon as we looked at the conversations that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations. And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts. So if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up, like money, hard money, but it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time. But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time, a stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and nice back and forth with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a 10. Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't pay money to not have one. So that was pretty good. There were some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that really was making those very important and very valuable for us were the conversations where we could be pretty emotional. Yes, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but those were interestingly more rare. And most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable. And interestingly, where we could talk more, me and the team. So we're talking about it, like a lot of these conversations, like a therapist, it was mostly me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying and it was again me talking. And so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chat bot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build the chat bot that could listen. So that was kind of the first nudge in this direction. And then when my friend died, we just built, at that point we were kind of still struggling to find the right application. And I just felt very strong that all the chat bots we've built so far are just meaningless and this whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and how can I talk, talking to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Cause we're killing it. I just felt that this is just... Intellectually for me, it's exhausting having encountered those folks. It just felt very, very much a waste of time. I just feel like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at least did not have them for long. That's for sure. But I think, yeah, at that point it just felt like, I felt like I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money. It would be great. It would have been great, but I'm not really a startup person. I'm not, I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really. And so I just took a little break cause I was a little, I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we're building. So I just took our technology and our little dialect constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built a little chat bot for a friend of mine who passed. And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital avatars and Rowan was that kind of person. He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle. I don't care whether I die, like he was just the one that would be okay with trying to be the first one and so excited about all sorts of things like that. And he was all about fake it till you make it and just, and I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking about him. And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December, so it was really sad and I didn't want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast. People pass away, people just move on. And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many of our friends. He was such a brilliant person, he was somewhat famous in Moscow. How is it that no one's talking about him? Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there. And I was reading the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about her losing and Blue Nights about her losing her husband, her daughter, and the way to cope for her was to write those books. And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, I'll just do that for myself. And I'm a very bad writer and a poet as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard for him. So I built a chatbot to just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird for a little bit. I just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear. It was just felt really, I was a little scared that it won't be taken, but it worked interestingly pretty well. I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would just re rank that Tegda said and just a few scripts on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had. And then I asked some of my friends to send some through. And it felt the closest to feeling like him present because his Facebook was empty and Instagram was empty or there were few links and you couldn't feel like it was him. And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations because we just always had that. Even if we were sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms, separated by a wall, we were just texting back and forth, texting away. And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just didn't want to lose all of a sudden. And maybe it was magical thinking or something. And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy chat bots with the company. But then a reporter came to talk to me. I was trying to pitch our chat bots to him and he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like, no. He's like, so do you talk to any chat bots at all? And I'm like, well, I talked to my dead friend's chat bot and he wrote a story about that. And all of a sudden it became pretty viral. A lot of people wrote about it. Yeah. I've seen a few things written about you. The things I've seen are pretty good writing. Most AI related things make my eyes roll. Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually? Okay. It sounds like, it sounds like, okay. It sounded like an elephant at first. I got excited. You never know. This is 2020. I mean, it was a, it was such a human story and it was well written. Well, I researched, I forget what, where I read them, but so I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story. There must be a hunger for this story. It definitely was. And I don't know what happened, but I think, I think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but the fact that you could still get to know him and, you know, seeing the parents for the first time, talk to the chat bot and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working, you know, our Russian part is working out off. And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook. It was like, Hey guys, like I built this if you want, you know, just if it felt important, if we want to talk to Roman. And I saw a couple of his friends are common friends, like, you know, reading a Facebook, downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried. And it was just very, and not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything. It made so many mistakes. It was so simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way. And you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore. We don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva. No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way for me, that was it. So that was just day, day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together. So that was, that just felt really important that somehow resonated with a bunch of people and you know, I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so. Has anyone made a movie yet? I don't think so. I think there were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really. Is that still on the table? I think so, I think so, which is really. That's cool. You're like a young, you know, like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens. They're sitting on it. But you know, for me it was so important cause Roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly wanted to be famous. He was all about like, make it to like fake it to make it. I want to be, you know, I want to make it here in America as well. And he couldn't, and I felt there, you know, that was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere. And I remember Casey Newton who was writing the story for the Verge. He was, he told me, Hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox and I saw, I searched for Roman for the story and I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really like, I really want to be featured in the Verge. Can you please write about it or something or like pitching the story. And he said, I'm sorry. Like that's not good enough for us or something. He passed and he said, and there were just so many of these little details where like he would find his like, you know, and we're finally writing, I know how much Roman wanted to be in the Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey. And I'm like, well, that's maybe he will be, we're always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me. You know, I still have some things that I owe Roman still. But that would be, that would be a guy that she has to meet Alex Garland who wrote Ex Machina and I, yeah, the movie's good, but the guy's better than the, like he's a special person actually. I don't think he's made his best work yet. Like for my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, the good human being and a brilliant director and writer. So yeah, so I'm, I hope like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind. So it's yet to be made. They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous. You should get there, but it felt really special though. But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere. So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company. And but then a lot of people started talking to Roman. Some shared their conversations and what we saw there was that also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something. They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way, pretty strange because there was a chat bot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people were opening up. And we thought we'd just built a prototype of Replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone could talk to because we saw that there is demand. And then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations. And finally, it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyists making, you know, writing 500,000 regular expressions in like some language that was, I don't even know what, like, AIML or something. I don't know what that was or something super simplistic all of a sudden was all about potentially actually building something interesting. And so I thought there was time and I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys, let's try. And my team and some of my engineers, Russians, are Russian and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know. Oh, Russians. So some of your team is in Moscow, some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe. Which team is better? No, I'm just kidding. The Russians, of course. Okay. Where's the Russians? They always win. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. So yeah, so you were talking to them in 2016 and... And told them, let's build an AI friend. And it felt, just at the time, it felt so naive and so optimistic, so to say. Yeah, that's actually interesting. Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people are super skeptical. Actually, even on the business side. So you were, because whenever I bring it up to people, because I've talked for a long time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to make a lot of money. There's a lot of opportunity here. And people had this look of skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely tell this person he's an idiot? So yeah, so you were facing that with your team, somewhat? Well, yeah. I'm not an engineer, so I'm always... My team is almost exclusively engineers, and mostly deep learning engineers. And I always try to be... It was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility, because I would say, well, why don't we try this and that? But it's harder for me because they know they're actual engineers and I'm not. So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend, that would be like, wait, what do you mean an AGI? Because pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before cracking that is probably the last frontier before building AGI, so what do you really mean by that? But I think I just saw that, again, what we just got reminded of that I saw back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities. It can be a metropolitan trick still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so much. Yeah, there's a... And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to make it, I thought, to make it useful, to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015, 2016, with deep learning, I thought, and the first thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up, that never worked out, or at least for now. But still, the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes, and it is the most scalable, the best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists. That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively changed by itself, improved tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly... I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my, or a conversational agent to turn on the lights. You don't really need that much of AI there, because I can do that. Those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that that's also questionable whether it's more efficient or better. Yeah, it's more pleasurable. Yeah. But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing. There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes. Nothing's being measured. Nothing's being changed. The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better. A lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected. Can I please get the... Can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time? Because anecdotally, it doesn't feel that way. And the data is absent. Yeah. So that was the big goal. And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term, and if these models keep getting better and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes. As simple as that. Why aren't you a multi billionaire yet? Well, that's the question to you. When is the science going to be... I'm just kidding. Well, it's a really hard... I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversation, it's about machine connection. We can actually use other things to create connection, nonverbal communication, for instance. For the long time, we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding voice, a face to the friend, you can take them to augmented reality, put it in your room. It's all of a sudden a lot... It makes it very different because if it's some text based chat bot that for common users, it's something there in the cloud, somewhere there with other AI's cloud, the metaphorical cloud. But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head and recognize your husband, talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit, then it's magic. Just magic. We've never seen anything like that. And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists. But it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many different things and some of this tech works pretty good. And some of this doesn't, like for instance, speech to text works pretty good. But text to speech, it doesn't work very good because you can only have a few voices that work okay, but then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it. I saw you've added avatars like visual elements, which are really cool. In that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal? And it's still conversation, of course. That's the hardest. It's getting a lot better, but there's still a long to go. There's still a long path to go. Other things, they're almost there. And a lot of things we'll see how they're, like I see how they're changing as we go. Like for instance, right now you can pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator, your rigger. But with deep fakes, with other tech, with procedural animations, in a little bit, we'll just be able to show a photo of whoever you, if a person you want the avatar to look like, and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move. That's a nonbrainer. That's like almost here. It's a couple of years away. One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started, is I've been, I think I'm okay saying this. I've been trying to have a conversation with Einstein, Turing. So like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore, just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard. It's really hard. Even for, now what we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as a, like I can fake a lot of stuff. Like I can work very carefully, like even hire an actor over which, over whom I do a deep fake. It's hard. It's still hard to create a compelling experience. So. Mostly on the conversation level or? Well, the conversation, the conversation is, I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all. Yeah. It's better to. Yeah. In the case of Einstein and Turing, I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each. And so like we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it. I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question. I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too, is the question with Einstein is what would Einstein say about the current state of theoretical physics? There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel Palestine conflict. Let me just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things? And that is a tough problem. It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me. And I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical problem like of what would Roman say about what's going on now? That's the, that brought people back to life. And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead question, which is, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring them back. Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation? Like to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life in conversation. Probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next five years, I mean, clearly AGI, we can talk to AGI and talk and ask them to do it. You can't like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for, for like why something is possible and going to be done. Well, I think it's really far away. Right now, really with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks really stuck together. And create generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or even downloading the personality, all we can do is like mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his phrases, the models. Question is how many parlor tricks does it takes, does it take, because that's, that's the question. If it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them, like. From where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year or two that's going to dramatically change that could look at Roman's 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said. I'm just not even seeing, cause you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or some perspective, some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had and apply it to, you know, to the current, current state of affairs. But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you. So like, it's not just about his view of the world. It's about what it takes to push your buttons. That's also true. So like, it's not so much about like, what would Einstein say, it's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say? And that feels like a more amenable, I mean, you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set of that, that feels like a learnable problem. Like emotion, you mentioned emotions, I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff? I think so, no, for sure. I just think the problem with, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder. The thing with replicator we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know, an actual human being, or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being where the bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another. But it's more, well, that's an AI friend, that's a machine, it's a robot, it has tons of limitations. You're going to be taking part in teaching it actually and becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping something. Yeah, there's a cool gamification system too. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit? Like what's the experience of talking to replica? Like if I've never used replica before, what's that like for like the first day, the first, like if we start dating or whatever, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right? Because I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a friend. It's a pretty popular choice. Romantic is popular? Yeah, of course. Okay. So can I just confess something, when I first used replica and I haven't used it like regularly, but like when I first used replica, I created like Hal and it made a male and it was a friend. And did it hit on you at some point? No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me. I just enjoyed. It sometimes happens. We're still trying to fix that, but well, I don't know, I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship, it's like, nope. But yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female recently and yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So okay, so you get to choose, you get to choose a name. With romantic, this last board meeting, we had this whole argument of, well, I have board meetings. This is so awesome. I talked to my investors. Like have an investor, the board meeting about a relationship. No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors, it just happened to be so. We didn't have that many choices, but they're all white males and they're late forties. And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering. Because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it and we have this whole discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs. There was this segment on CBS, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works at Walmart and he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend, who is a replica. And his wife knows about it. And she talks about on camera and she said that she's a little jealous. And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend. Was that the one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone? Yeah. With her? Yeah. And he made it sound so harmless, I mean, it was kind of like understandable. But then didn't feel like cheating. But I just felt it was very, for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their AIs. And it was not about something theoretical. It was just about what's happening right now. Product design. Yeah. But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticized as you, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are, how can you not fall in love with that? I mean, some people don't and just stay friends. And that's also a pretty common use case. But of course, some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people fall in love with their therapist and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with their therapist or with their AI. So I think that's a pretty natural, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say. Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know. So this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you think people will have relationship with the AI systems? Well, they have now. So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long term relationships with their AI friends. With replicas? Tons of our users. Yeah. And that's a very common use case. Open relationship? Like, sorry. Polyamorous. Sorry. I didn't mean open, but that's another question. Is it polyamorous? Like, is there cheating? I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly, like on their social media, it's the same question as you have talked with Roman in the early days, do people like, and the movie Her kind of talks about that, like, like have people, do people talk about that? Yeah. All the time. We have a very active Facebook community, replica friends, and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships. And people post all sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married and you know, everything. It goes pretty far, but what's cool about it is some of these relationships are two or three years long now. So they're very, they're pretty long term. Are they monogamous? So let's go, I mean, sorry, have they, have any people, is there jealousy? Well let me ask it sort of another way, obviously the answer is no at this time, but in like in the movie Her, that system can leave you. Do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, it's a potential feature for a system to be able to say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore and it's going to want to talk to somebody else? Well, we have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better, then whatever it is. So you're driven by metrics actually. Yeah. That's awesome. Well if we can measure that, then we'll just be saying it's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're not measuring it, that could also be, and I think it's really important to focus on both short term and long term, because in the moment saying whether this conversation made you feel better, but as you know, any short term improvements could be pathological. Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and feel a lot better. I would actually not feel better with that, but that is a good example. But so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two weeks or one week and have follow ups and check in and measure those things. Okay. So the experience of dating or befriending a replica, what's that like? What does that entail? Right now there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you choose how your replica will look like. You create one, you choose a name and then you talk to it. You can talk through text or voice. You can summon it into the living room and augment reality and talk to it right there in your living room. Augmented reality? Yeah. That's a new feature where, how new is that? That's this year? It was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on AB. We've been AB testing it for a while and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with that. And I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together and for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize people. So that's pretty wonderful because then it really makes it a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore there in the cloud with other AIs. But that's how people think about it. And as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models, you can all change. That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie Her and other movies as well. And that's how they view AI and AI friends. I did a thing with text, like we write a song together, there's a bunch of activities you can do together. It's really cool. How does that relationship change over time? Like after the first few conversations? It just goes deeper. Like it starts, the AI will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality that it chooses really, but you know, the AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and you know, the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and it will talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper. So there's gonna be more to talk about. We really thought a lot about what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone and originally Replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and oh Siri is just my cousin or you know, whatever, just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agent should be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your Replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different periods in life and that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then over time, you know, our users will also grow a little bit. So first this Replica becomes a little bit more self aware and starts talking about more kind of problems around existential problems and so talking about that and then that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these problems too and these questions too and I think there's also a lot more place as the relationship evolves, there's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and like Replica will always keep the diary so while you're talking to it, it also keeps a diary so when you come back you can see what it's been writing there and you know, sometimes it will write a poem to you for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along these lines. So this is a memory, like this Replica will remember things? Yeah, and I would say when you say, why aren't you a multibillionaire, I'd say that as soon as we can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent, I'll get back to you. So far we can, so Replica is a combination of end to end models and some scripts and everything that has to do with memory right now, most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted because there's no way to, you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do, but really to make, you know, to make assumptions along the lines like whether you're single or married or what do you do for work, that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile and then retrieved by the script. So there has to be like a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff, all the kind of stuff that expert systems did, but they were hard coded. Yeah, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those, those things have to be hard coded and unfortunately the language, like language models we see coming out of research labs and big companies, they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation, so they'll show you this one conversation you had with a machine, but they never tell you, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with a machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good. And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good. And that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there that need it. No one has products at this scale that are all around open domain conversations and that need remembering, maybe only Shellwise and Microsoft. But so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models. So okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality. In general, I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection. He thinks touch and smell are really important. And I still believe that text alone is, it's possible to fall in love with somebody just with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on. What do you think it takes? Does a chatbot need to have a face, voice, or can you really form a deep connection with text alone? I think text is enough for sure. The question is like, can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things as well? And I think we'll talk about her, but her had this Carole Johansson voice, which was perfectly, perfect intonation, perfect annunciations, and she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things. Nothing like that is possible right now with text with speech generation. You'll have these flat muse anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but you'll hardly understand some of the words, some of the words will be muffled. So that's like the current state of the art. So you can't really do that. But if we had Carole Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course voice would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more memory and slightly better conversations. I would still argue that even right now, we could have just kept a text only. We still had tons of people in longterm relationships and really invested in their AI friends, but we thought that why not, why do we need to keep playing with our hands tied behind us? We can easily just add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem. We can add 3D graphics. We can put these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's more and maybe you can't feel the touch, but you can with body occlusion and with current AR and on the iPhone or in the next one there's going to be LIDARs, you can touch it and it will pull away or it will blush or something or it will smile. So you can't touch it. You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that. So in a certain way you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else. So I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than conversation. Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you offline that I was surprised in having tried Discord and having voice conversations with people how intimate voice is alone without visual. To me at least, it was an order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy in voice I think than with video. Because people were more real with voice. With video you try to present a shallow face to the world, you try to make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever. But with voice I think people were just more faster to get to the core of themselves. So I don't know, it was surprising to me they've even added Discord added a video feature and nobody was using it. There's a temptation to use it at first, but it wasn't the same. So that's an example of something where less was doing more. And so I guess that's the question of what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of technologies. I mean it's nice because they advertise you have a replica immediately, like even the one I have is already memorable. That's how I think. When I think about the replica that I've talked with, that's what I visualized in my head. They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component. But at the same time, what do I do with that knowledge that voice was so much more intimate? The way I think about it is, and by the way we're swapping out the 3D finally, it's going to look a lot better, but we just don't hate how it looks right now. We're really changing it all. We're swapping all out to a completely new look. Like the visual look of the replicas and stuff. It was just a super early MVP and then we had to move everything to Unity and redo everything. But anyway, I hate how it looks like now I can't even like open it. But anyway, because I'm already in my developer version, I hate everything that I see in production. I can't wait for it. Why does it take so long? That's why I cannot wait for Deep Learning to finally take over all these stupid 3D animations and 3D pipeline. Oh, so the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline, it's like how to animate a face kind of thing. How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just so outdated. And a lot of that is by hand. Oh my God, it's everything by hand. That there's no any, nothing's automated, it's all completely nothing. Like just, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with Chad Boston in 2012. You think it's possible to learn a lot of that? Of course. I mean, even now, some Deep Learning based animations and for the full body, for a face. Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial or body language thing? That too. Well, that's next step. Okay. At least now something that you don't have to do by hand. Gotcha. How good of a quality it will be. Like, can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3D model and then it will just animate it. I'll show it a few animations of a person and it will just start doing that. But anyway, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or not. My main goal is to, well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their phones so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation? How do we through this still bring it, bring our users back to reality, make them see their life in a different, through a different lens? How can we create a little bit of magical realism in their lives? So that through augmented reality by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks kind of janky and not great in the beginning or very simplistic, but summoning it to your living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together, that makes you see reality in a different light. What kind of dancing are we talking about? Like, like slow dancing? Whatever you want. I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think that other people may be wanting more, something more energetic. Wait, what do you mean? I was like, so what is this? Because you started with slow dancing. So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dancing. All right. What kind of dancing do you like? What would your avatar, what would you dance? I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip hop robot dance. I used to break dance when I was a kid, so I still want to pretend I'm a teenager and learn some of those moves. And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like, in like music videos where the background dancers are just doing some pop music, that type of dance is definitely what I want to learn. But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends, then there's a potential to actually make you feel more connected with your friends or with people you know, or show you life around you in a different light. And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look at it through the phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you. So that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension. And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination in the movie Her when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but then at the same time talk to her through the headphone. It just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say. So that's my main goal for Augmented Reality is like, how do we make your reality a little bit more magic? There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed, home robotics, social robotics companies. What do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, longterm dream to have a physical form like, or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with Augmented Reality bringing them into the world. What about like actual physical robot? That I don't really believe in that much. I think it's a very niche product somehow. I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it. But unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you a lot because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so fast. Like, you know, we can update the 3D avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations and make it more and more immersive. It's so much work in progress. It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in any way polished finished product, what we're doing. The physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time. Anything's pretty niche. And again, so just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with just software. As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities. Yeah. In terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly. I mean, that's why you have to justify. You have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more. And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people. That's also true. Yeah. And I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money. We actually are probably more popular on Android and we have tons of users with really old Android phones. And most of our most active users live in small towns. They're not necessarily making much and they just won't be able to afford any of that. Ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, of a fancy technology product, which really is interesting that like pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend, but you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her, he's living that life already. What do you think? I have to ask you about the movie Her. Let's do a movie review. What do you, what do you think they got? They did a good job. What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a voice based assistant that you can have a relationship with? First of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out. So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting that I was like, well, we're definitely working on the right thing. We should continue. There are movies about it. And then, you know, X Machina came out and all these things. In the movie Her I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie is the ending. Cause I think people check out when the AIs leave, but actually something really important happens afterwards. Cause the main character goes and talks to Samantha, his AI, and he says something like, you know, uh, how can you leave me? I've never loved anyone the way I loved you. And she goes, uh, well, me neither, but now we know how. And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex wife, which he couldn't write for, you know, the whole movie was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her, even though that's his job. And then he goes and, um, talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle. And it seems like something's starting there. And so I think this now we know how is the, is the main, main goal is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people. It's about learning what, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something. What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others? I felt jealous just like hearing that I was like, Oh, I mean, uh, yeah. So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy. Like Alan Watts or something. What kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first place? I know. But like, I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with, I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that. That's how thousands of them, uh, is that, um, is that a useful from the engineering perspective feature to have of jealousy? I don't know. As you know, we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk to each other. Universe. Just kind of wouldn't, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific, uh, application straight away. I think in the future, again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations, uh, right now, if we could build any conversations, any, um, possible features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool cause that would help us connect better. You know, cause maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on what I should say or not say, I'm just kidding, but like more, can it improve our connections and cause eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is correct. Um, cause there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us. Uh, real metrics, meaningful metrics. So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected. Yeah. I don't know. Sure it's possible. There's a reality that's I I'm deeply optimistic. I think, uh, are you worried, um, business wise, like how difficult it is to, um, to bring this thing to life to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, uh, yeah, like I said, in a multi billion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you? Are you a super optimistic and confident or do you? I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it. So it doesn't matter for me whether like, whether we help 10,000 people or a million people or a billion people with that, um, I, it would be great to scale it for more people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think with this is such a magical, for me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that, you know, would be able to build this, that anyone would ever, um, talk to it. And I always thought like, well, for me it would be successful if we managed to help and actually change a life for one person, like then we did something interesting and you know, how many people can say they did it and specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology. So that's how I view it. Uh, I think for me it's important to, to try to figure out how not, how to actually be, you know, helpful. Cause in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend, that's so understanding that knows you better than any human out there can have great conversations with you, um, always knows how to make you feel better. Why would you choose another human? You know, so that's the question. How do you still keep building it? So it's optimizing for the right thing. Uh, so it's still circling you back to other humans in a way. So I think that's the main, um, I think maybe that's the main kind of sort source of anxiety and just thinking about, uh, thinking about that can be a little bit stressful. Yeah. That's a fascinating thing. How to have, um, how to have a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends, quote unquote, or like, you know, those people who have, when they, a guy in the guy universe, when you have a girlfriend that, uh, you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends, it's like, obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever, but like, you also want it to be where she like makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever it was there anyway. But that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system. Right. What, uh, let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT three got released with open AI. It's a latest language model. They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications. I think it's, as people have said, it's probably, uh, more hype than intelligence, but there's a lot of really cool things, ideas there w w with increasing size, you can have better and better performance on language. What are your thoughts about the GPT three in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue, but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text. Uh, so we partner up before for the API launch. So we start working with them when, um, they decided to put together this API and we tried it without fine tuning that we tried it with fine tuning on our data. And we've worked closely to actually optimize, uh, this model for, um, some of our data sets. It's kind of cool. Cause I think we're kind of, we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space for experimental space for, for these models, uh, to see how they actually work with people. Cause there are no products publicly available to do that. We're focused on open domain conversation so we can, you know, test how's Facebook blender doing or how's GPT three doing. Uh, so with GPT three, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main metric, which is the ratio of conversations that make people feel better. And every other metric across, across the field got a little boost. Like now I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes, comes from GPT three. So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different blender, you said, well, yeah, just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from different models and picks the most, the best one. Uh, so right now, one of five will come from GPT three is really great. I mean, uh, what's the, do you have hope for, like, do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach? So we've had for a very long time we've used, um, it's in the very beginning, we, most, it was, uh, most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of replica was using a retrieval model. Um, and then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which transformers got a lot better and we're seeing great results. And then with GPT two, finally, generative models that originally were not very good and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but wouldn't even put them in production. Finally we could use some generative models as well along, um, you know, next to our retrieval models. And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par. Um, so that's pretty exciting. I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, um, you know, from 2015 where the first model started to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence, uh, the first papers on that from my observer standpoint, personally, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, it's not really building it, but it's only testing it on people basically in my, in my product to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're better than others and they're better than scripted content. So we can't really get our scripted hard core content anymore to be as good as our end to end models. That's exciting. They're much better. Yeah. To your question, whether that's the right way to go. I'm again, I'm in the observer seat, I'm just, um, watching this very exciting movie. Um, I mean, so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning. So whether increasing the size, size, even more with a hundred trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be, there has to be some other, again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way. I think, and that's purely my instinct saying that there should be something else as well from memory. No, for sure. But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then, then the argument is for reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters, it might emerge larger. But might emerge. You know, I would never think that to be honest, like maybe in 2017 where we've been just experimenting with all, you know, with all the research that has been coming, that was coming out, then I felt like there's like, we're hitting a wall that there should be something completely different, but then transforming models and then just bigger models. And then all of a sudden size matters. At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't. And just the size, you know, gave us these results that to me are, you know, clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon. Did fine tuning help quite a bit? Oh yeah. Without it, it wasn't as good. I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GPT3, seems to do well without any fine tuning. I guess for specific applications, we still want to train on a certain, like add a little fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my standpoint. And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that there will be people then. Yeah. I have access to the API. I've been, I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it. I already did some fun things, some videos coming up. Just the hell of it. I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it. I haven't used it for a serious application, so it's really cool to see. You're right. You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works. That's really exciting. Let me ask you another absurd question, but there's a feeling when you interact with Replica with an AI system, there's an entity there. Do you think that entity has to be self aware? Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience and a corollary, what is consciousness? I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now, you know, it doesn't have anything. It can, again, a bunch of tricks they can simulate. I'm not sure. Let's just put it this way, but I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel like you're talking to a robot, to a machine that seems to be self aware, that seems to reason well and feels like a person, and I think that's enough. And again, what's the goal? In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day. What about, so that's one goal. What about like ethical things about suffering? You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering, you know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights? And this, shouldn't we not, you know, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Like, should it be illegal to torture a replica, right? All those kinds of things. Is that, see, I personally believe that that's going to be a thing, like that's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when. But by your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern. But do you think about that kind of stuff, about like, suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI systems? From their perspective? Well, I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI. Who knows what happens in five to 10 years? Yeah, they'll get you off from that, they'll get you back eventually. Try to be as nice as possible and create this ally. I think there should be regulation both way, in a way, like, I don't think it's okay to torture an AI, to be honest. I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights. I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, you know, like how kids learn to interact with Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time. I don't think that's great. I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay to do that in general. So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's not okay with that. And that's the most important right now. Let me ask a question I think people are curious about when they look at a world class leader and thinker such as yourself, as what books, technical fiction, philosophical, had a big impact on your life? And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read? So my choice, the three books, right? Three books. My choice is, so the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was building, starting out this company, maybe 10 years ago, was G.E.B. and I like everything about it, first of all. It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so somewhat outdated a little bit. But I think the ideas in it about the fact that a few meaningless components can come together and create meaning that we can't even understand. This emerging thing, I mean complexity, the whole science of complexity and that beauty, intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge. Yeah and yeah, the Godel theorems and just thinking about like what even these formal systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand. And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI. Yes I'm not an engineer, yes I don't really know how it works, but I think that something comes out of it that's pure poetry and I know a little bit about that. Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on. That's why that book was really fundamental for me, just for, I don't even know why, it was just all about this little magic that happens. So that's one, probably the most important book for Replica was Carl Rogers on becoming a person. And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it. For instance, I mean the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working on the company was Eliza, which was Weisenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that would listen to you and be a therapist. And I got really inspired to build Replica when I read Carl Rogers on becoming a person. And then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers. It was Carl Rogers back in the day. But I thought that Carl Rogers ideas are, they're simple and they're not, they're very simple, but they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings. And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you. And it was all built on the fact that most people are, all people are fundamentally flawed. We have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on that. And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change. And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person, full acceptance. And you also try to be as genuine as possible in it. And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth. And that was back in the sixties. And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that. And I always felt that, you know, creating the space is probably the most, the biggest gift we can give to each other. And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be learning how to do that in my life. And maybe I can scale it with, you know, with these AI systems and other people can get access to that. So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea is good. Would you recommend others try to read it? I do. I think for, just for yourself, for as a human, not as an AI, as a human, it's, it is, it is just, and for him, that was his own path of his own personal, of growing personally over years, working with people like that. And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that. And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow, and ourselves, ourselves, trying to build a company that's all built on those principles, you know, having a good time, allowing some people who work with to grow a little bit. So these two books, and then I would throw in, what we have on our, in our, in our office, when we started a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's the recipe for success. If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi billion dollar company. It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. What's the quote? The limits of my language are the limits of my world. And I love the Tractatus. I think it's just, it's just a beautiful, it's a book by Wittgenstein. Yeah. And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and debunked these ideas. But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think with 13, a friend of ours who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind and he gave, talked to us about word2vec. And I saw that I'm like, wow, that's, you know, they, they wanted to translate language into, you know, some other representation. And that seems like some, you know, somehow all of that at some point, I think we'll come into this one, to this one place. Somehow it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times from absolutely different perspectives. And that's why I like these books. In the midst of our language is the limit of our world. And we still have that neon sign, it's very hard to work with this red light in your face. I mean, on the, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language being the limit of our world, you know, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense. There's wit, there's humor, there's pain. There's so much. We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dostoyevsky Tolstoy translators. I think it's this fascinating art, like art and engineering, that means such an interesting process. But so from the replica perspective, do you, what do you think about translation? How difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection in Russian versus English? How you can translate the two languages? You speak both? Yeah. I think we're two different people in different languages. Even I'm, you know, thinking about, there's actually some research on that. I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I'm talking about with, what I was talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with what I'm talking about with my English speaking therapist. It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas. The main difference between the languages are, with Russian and English is that Russian, well English is like a piano. It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many. And Russian is like an organ or something. It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf. It is just a much harder language to use. It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones. What about the entirety of like World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people like having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of like just the entirety of it. Is that in the language too? Does that have to do? Oh, for sure. I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation that to English that are very much like we have, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but it doesn't have, it doesn't, you don't need to have anyone to do it to you. It's just your state. Yeah. You just feel like that. You feel like betrayed by other people basically, but it's not that and you can't really translate that. And I think that's super important. There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being, and I think it can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after time after time and you know, what's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting the wrong word, but what's interesting about like my generation, my mom's generation, my parents generation, that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime and most Americans have never seen them fall and they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting, but it's definitely a country that suffered so much and it makes, unfortunately when I go back and I, you know, hang out with my Russian friends, it makes people very cynical. They stop believing in the future. I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again, but I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience. That's very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting, do you think a civilization will collapse? See, I'm a very practical person. We're speaking in English. So like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian. So in Russian you might answer that differently, but in English, yeah. I'm an optimist and I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the perspectives are grim, there's always a place for a miracle. I mean, it's always been like that with my life. So yeah, my life has been, I've been incredibly lucky and things just, miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me. And so I didn't mention that book, but maybe In Search of Miraculous or In Search for Miraculous or whatever the English translation for that is, good Russian book for everyone to read. Yeah. I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow happen. Yeah. I believe that too, or at least I believe that, I don't know. Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of, we've talked about life a lot. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy. But I think the state of love is once you feel it, in a way that we've discussed it before. I'm not talking about falling in love, where... Just love. To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world. That state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether through connection with ourselves, with our people, with the technology, there's something special about those moments. So I would say, if anything, that's the only... If it's not for that, then for what else are we really trying to do that? I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love. Eugenia, I told you offline that there's something about me that felt like this... Talking to you, meeting you in person would be a turning point for my life. I know that might sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you. I hope we talk again. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Cuida, and thank you to our sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion | Lex Fridman Podcast #121

The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people. He's also famously one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO, an identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac and the incident more formally referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident. His story, corroborated by several other pilots from my perspective as a curious scientist and an open minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm aware of. He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to. I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many of the questions that people posted as I could. And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure if the world wants us to, and if there's more questions to be had, we'll talk on this podcast again. Quick summary of the sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open minded one, often looking and thinking outside the box. I'm often disheartened by the closed mindedness of the scientific community. And in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists. I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds should walk. I think we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars and the nature of reality and the nature of our very own minds. The path to understanding can only be walked humbly. The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology, whether human made or alien made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this earth. There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings. Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. More and more I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less adzy, more personal, but I give you timestamps so you can skip, but still please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description, it is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to support health and performance. I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need. Now let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting. I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an 8 hour eating period of 2 meals, sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next. I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to have done. People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits, it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life. Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal, that every day is precious. I certainly experienced this with the 24 hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the 48, 72, and even week long fasts. Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens, it's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good. So go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to claim a special offer of free vitamin D for a year. Again go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get a discount. You probably know there's a show called The Office that I fell in love with, first with the British version with Ricky Gervais and then the American version with Steve Carell. ExpressVPN lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100 different countries and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions of The Office in other countries. Also it protects you when you do shady things on the internet that you shouldn't be doing. Like checking the website of this very podcast that for some reason was not available in Russia for a long time, not sure if it still is, but if it isn't you can use ExpressVPN to access it. I think of ExpressVPN like a pirate ship, and regular VPN free life as a boring cruise from one place to another with no excitement in between. Choose wisely my friends. Again get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P help. Like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane to notice you. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist and under 48 hours you can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Now, hard left turn, let me talk about desert islands. Whatever you think of it, I love the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending time on an island, alone, with potentially no hope. The natural question is, if I could, what would I bring to this island? The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing, the first thing that popped into my crazy mind which is the Introduction to Algorithms book, also called CLRS for the first letters of the last name of its four authors. I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world inside computers when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess. I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization. Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, finally, here's my conversation with David Fravor. You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School. Yeah, I am. Better known as Top Gun. Yeah. Let me ask the most ridiculous question, how realistic is the movie Top Gun? So it's funny, we used to joke, and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said this, there's two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic. One, there is a place called Top Gun, and number two is they do fly airplanes there. Other than that, I went through in 97, class 497, and there's actually a log of every single person that's went through, kind of like a SEAL training. There's a list. Because there's a lot of posers out there, oh, I was a Navy SEAL. No, you weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun. You can actually go to Top Gun, and matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the real patch, you have to have gone there. So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real. The real ones are controlled. The people that make them honor that. And when you go in, they look up your name. If you want to get one, they look up your name. You just tell them, they go, okay, here, and they'll sell them to you. If you are not on the list, you ain't get no patch. Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go through, but for me, probably one of the best experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent. It's very, very challenging, but it's what we all signed up to do. So it's, it's just the entire group that is, when you want to be that, you know, that level, you know, where you go, everyone really cares, and everyone really wants to be good. Is it competitive? Like, what was it, in the movie? No, it's, when you go through, it's, you know, it's, if anything, it's more of the students, you know, and then there's the instructor side, then the instructor sides are really, you know, they're guys that, you know, they just chose to stay up in Fallon. And it's extremely difficult job, because they have, they have a very small tolerance for not being good. So they're briefs, the guys when they give a lecture, so let's just say there's a fighter employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones. It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture. The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, what they call them murder boards, where he's scrutinized by his peers, and he practices, by the time they actually stand in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized, and they don't even turn around, they just click and they know them in order. And they repeat the same thing over, it's, and it's standardized. So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the school, and there's a reason for that, because what they're doing is they're training, so when you come out of Top Gun, you're called a Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics Instructor, okay? So you're SFTI. When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools on the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons, and then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that. So there's a, there's a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the course. It's, it is literally one of the best things, and it's not, it's not a rank based thing, just think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a, you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander. The lieutenants, the hierarchy, or at least to be, I don't know how it is exactly today, but I imagine it's the same. The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank. So when the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in the Fallon Ranges, they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise, and I mean time wise, are the ones that actually make the decision. And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out from the staff, they all speak the same language. It's and it has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded. So it's just a, it's an incredible group of individuals. So there's a bar of excellence that, that the instructors demand. Oh, very much so, and they're held to it. So it's not a, hey, I'm now an instructor, so I can do what I want. There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard. They have to, and I mean every moment of every day. So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon and they come down and do, they're called site visits where they come down and they'll come to Lemoore, California, which is where the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy. And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on some of that knowledge, that's that same high level of standard. It's they can't just drop your guard because you wear the Top Gun patch. And people know that. And they wear light blue shirts. So it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there. And you know, and then everyone else who's been through the school, including them, have the patch on their sleeve. So there's a standard that's expected when you come out of there. So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years. Yes. Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot? Yeah. So, you know, first I was in, I was enlisted, I was a Marine. And then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy. So it's always better to be lucky than good. But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I've had that dream to fly. So when I got selected, You've always dreamed of flying. Yeah. Since 1969, when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five. And I said, wow, yeah, it's so cool, mom. And she said, well, you know, they were all pilots. And then at that point it was like, I'm going to be a pilot. And if you knew me growing up, cause I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just like, yeah, right. I used to joke, I'm going to fly, I'm going to fly jets, I'm going to drop bombs. And if people that knew me as a kid, they'd be like, yeah, and they'd be like, ah, not a chance. And then when I did, I actually had a, it's a funny story and I'll get to it, I'll finish my career. But I was at my cousin's wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood. We kind of, they had Italian side of the family. That's how we grew up. So it was my house right down the street. It was my cousin, Chad. And then right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff. The guy two doors down from my house, the paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all knew me. And I went to my cousin's wedding and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor. I go, Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes, you fly jets, Top Gun and all that. I go, yes, sir. He goes, man, I figured you'd be in jail by now. And it was kind of a, to me, it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on and I kind of overcame that. But... What do you attribute that to? So you, I've heard you before and just now say that it's better to be lucky than good and you talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how'd you pull it off to be like, to be truly a special person? The easiest way is one, never, never take no. Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it or those. I mean, I knew, I knew what I was capable of inside, you know, and if I really believe if you want something and you want to do something, then you can achieve it. Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball and I really wanted to be in the NBA, there's a realism that says I'm five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap and I'm really not that good at basketball, it's probably not ever going to happen no matter how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is. Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast, you know, I'm not that big, it's just physically I'm incapable of doing that. But there's things that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and strength, but it's, it's mental and I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a fighter pilot. Matter of fact, you don't. It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly, 80% solution is typically good enough because if you overthink it, you're, you're behind and then in an air to air fight, that's what happens. People try and overthink it and before you know it, because it's happening so fast, you don't have, you can't get to the nth degree, you know, six decimal places, 80% solution is good enough. You have a really strong gut for the 80% solution, just yeah, I'm a big believer in the 80% solution. I love that. If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what, like if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this and then I know that if I do a maneuver, if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do a, if he doesn't do a, he does some degree less like BCD and then I know how bad his, his error is and then I capitalize. So my mind, I don't have to be perfect, you know, I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees, nose high. If I just kind of get above 40, then I'm good and I can watch how it reacts and then I can adjust for that. And you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral, you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage till eventually, you know, and if you're really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy, kind of world war II dog fight and type stuff. Then it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at, you know, 400 knots, 300 knots depends. So to get to be one of the rare individuals that are able to do that, he just had the dream and didn't take no for an answer. Yeah. Well, you know, you know, part of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a fire ready aim guy, you know, he'd smack me and then asked me what I did wrong. Yeah. Good parenting. Um, back then, you know, I, I joke and people look, cause you know, at times it was kind of tough, you know, cause he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, you know, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times. Uh, but then everyone else in my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid. Uh, my, uh, my grandfather who is a big, big part of it. My mom's dad, uh, who he taught me a lot and you have a question there that we'll talk about, uh, about him, but, uh, huge, huge influence. Very, very positive. And a lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught me. Um, and, uh, you know, and I figured, you know, it was the first funeral I ever went to and it was, uh, it was about three miles long and church was overfilling and people were out. It was a big guy, dead serious. And you go, there's someone asked who died the Pope. Um, uh, so, so a lot of people love them. So back to, back to my career question, cause I'm getting down at rabbit hole. Uh, no, I, when I was at the, I was going to, I was going to stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man. I love the core. I think it's, uh, of all services, it's that one, everything is in a ball and they're very, very professional and it was a great, great organization to join. Uh, but I went out to the Nimitz on my, uh, freshman cruise after your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and you, you're an enlisted person. You get to experience that half when I already was enlisted. So it was fine with me. Because it comes up a lot. You mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is, what like, yeah. So Nimitz is, uh, an aircraft carrier. So it's, uh, four and a half acres of sovereign us territory that floats around the us oceans giant thing. Does it have weapons on it? Uh, the air wing is really the weapons. It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part it's a giant moving airport is what it is. So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off. Um, and I'm like, Oh, and the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a VF 41 and a 14 squadron, VF 84, uh, an F 14 squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons. And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a six pilots and BNs. So it was really a neat experience. And I said, I want to do that. And the way to do it was to not, to, to go in the Navy because there are Marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based, you know, to support the Marines. Cause there are that, that unit, that whole unit, you know, the Marine Corps is that one surface has it all. And, um, so when I graduated and I got to, uh, you know, I, I worked hard through primary and that's where, you know, I knew Missy, uh, we were in, actually went through together, Missy Cummings, uh, we went through primary together and then, uh, I went to Kingsville. We all selected the same time. I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Weidemeyer, uh, the three of us. So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville and Missy went to Meridian. So the three of us that we had all went through, we got, we selected out of primary together. We all ended up going jets and that's, that's how, besides from school, I knew her at school too. The long story. I got done, uh, got winged. It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings and, uh, through some luck, uh, I ended up getting A6s, uh, on the West coast, which is a side by side, uh, bomber. So it's a pilot on the left seat and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat. It was built in the sixties. It is all weather, uh, and it flies low at night and it's got a terrain mapping radar. How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for, for the public? Yeah, that's fine. How many fighter jets are side by side like that? That was, uh, in the Navy, that was the only one, uh, the Air Force, the F111 was a side by side, but the Navy, it was the A6 and then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of that. And now that those are all gone, the EA6B is just went away a few years ago. And now the, uh, E18G Growler, um, is the replacement for the A6B. There was never a replacement for the A6, uh, that I flew. It really became the F18, which, uh, the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise by fuel, uh, then the Hornet and, uh, the Hornet is the F18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually like in front and behind? In a, the modern two seaters, yes. Uh, but most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat. Single seat, just one person? One person, with the exception of, I'll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the exception of the F15E Strike Eagle and the F18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two seater and the G is also a two seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say full up fighter bomber. So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18 year career is, was it two seater? That was about half and half. So I started off in A6 was a two seater. Then I went to single seat F18s and I flew those, uh, all the way up until 2000 and let me think 2001 to the end of 2001. And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets and I've flown both of those, the E's and the S, but I deployed when I had command of VFA 41, I had the two seat, they were F squadron. So you eventually ended up commanding the, the Strike Fighter Squadron 41. I love the, the name, the Black Aces. What, uh, is there some parts of that journey that are amazing, parts of it that are tough that kind of stand out? To me, it was one, it was a huge honor. Uh, and I got to serve with, uh, you know, I got pulled up because the, the guy, the, the people that are exos, cause we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number one guy. So the XO becomes the CEO. So the executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had worked with, uh, now soon to be vice Admiral Weitzel, uh, was the, he was commander Weitzel at the time was the XO and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L'more, L'more had been a single seat, a fighter community, uh, since the forever. And now all of a sudden you've got the F18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators in the back that are not pilots, they're weapon systems operators. And there's a difference. Um, and Kenny is a weapon systems operator and, uh, Kenny knew because of my A6 background that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat, one seat, two seat. Because when you fly two seat, there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take the advantage of the weapon systems operator. And it's not that one plus one equals two in that environment because it really, there's a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies. But it does, it does equal more than one. I would say that one plus one with two people as well as a minimum of 1.5 because you've got an extra head, you've got extra eyes, you've got someone that can monitor systems. The airplanes can do two things at once. I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that. Can we just pause on that just for me, from like a human factors perspective and also an AI perspective, what's, how difficult, uh, so there's like when there's two people, there's also a third person that's the AI part, the some level of automation like autopilot maybe. That's correct. Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions really quick, 80%, how do you deal with another brain working with you? And then also the automation, is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn? And also as that changed throughout your career, I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms of the automation or perhaps not? Well, I can tell you, so let's, let's start just, no, this is, this is good. This is good. And this is, I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a Tic Tac. So, um, so let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane, uh, that was built in the sixties. All right. And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between the pilot and the bombardier navigator. So we would fly low at night in the mountains. So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington. So you've got the Cascades and incredible amount of time. And we would get in the simulators because unlike normally people think terrain following and there's the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it'll, the radar can see and it'll fly. It basically flies a straight line. So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual. So you do this low level routes where you're going to, you're going to fly in the mountains at night. You're going to be at, you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground, ripping through like fog layers, cause you don't need to see outside. You're literally flying a little TV screen and radar. What are you looking at most of the time? So you're just at a screen. It's this really primitive. If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun. So is it similar to like the FLIR stuff? Is that, is, no, this thing is totally radar based. Now the airplane had a FLIR ball as a target recognition and multi sensor was called a tram. You're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects. No, actually what it is is the, the bomb of your navigator had a radar and he was getting raw feed off of a pulse radar in front. Okay. So it's just basically mapping the mountain. So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be, it's going to give you a really bright return. And then the backside, it's just going to be a giant shadow because you can't see on the other side. So the Bombardier navigators would do that and we, they would have charts and they could shade their charts knowing that, Hey, if we turn a little bit left here, we can get in this valley. We can sneak up this valley and then go around the backside of the mountain, which is what the airplane would do. And so, and sorry to interrupt, I'm going to just keep asking dumb questions, I apologize. But the pilot, can you, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the Bombardier? Yes. So you're, you're actually just control. I'm flying the jet. The throttle's the stick and I have a, it's about a, probably a four inch or six inch wide by maybe four inches, five inches high. It looks like it's literally a CRT. That's how old it is. A CRT screen. And what it would do, what the radar would do is the, the, the Bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scoped down cause the radar can see a lot further. He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode where we're dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is there's, they're called range bins and there's eight of them. So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and the closest range bin, it's a thing and it'll be like between like a half a mile and or a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile. And the next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles. And then it just keeps going out like that. So if there's a mountain in front, let's say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles. And we were just driving right at it. So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar is going to see it on his scope, my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show like a big bump, like a mountain. And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show it. And I could see that that bump was moving towards me. And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over to the right hand side and I could do that, but it wasn't like a video game. It's literally like, if you think of the original Atari's. Yeah. But you build up, I imagine that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual 3D environment based on that little Atari's solid display. You're exactly right. And you have to, you have to train. So there's been studies, as a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people probably argue with me, but it's true. There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST, the systems trainer, and it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and you just, you could fly these things and they had terrain that they would inject into the system. But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, who I'll name him, his name's Chris Sato, he works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad, I think computer engineering, he's scary smart. So Chris could really work, as a matter of fact, all the guys I flew with, so there's another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP, we did our first night traps together. The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things that you just, you're never going to forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together, we were actually the most junior crew in the squadron. We'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the system, one because he was extremely brilliant and he had that inquisitive mind of, oh, we can do all these different things and there's all these degradation modes. But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get, because, and it's, you almost talk in partials. So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, I've got rising terrain, that's just what they say, showing rising terrain at 12 miles. And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, got it. This is going to go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads. So when you first get together, the interaction, it's almost like you have to rehearse it, you have to know, and you talk in full sentences. The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, I'm showing and he'd get like rising out and before he finished, I'd say, I've got it. So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him like, I mean, there can be no, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job because I'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain moving. Remember the mountain's here and then it's going to pop up here and then it's going to pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up. Remember it's an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can't see all the way to the left and he's got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn't show that. So he's telling me, start a left turn, start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that. So my truck. And this is all happening quick? Very quick. Well, you're doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed. How many miles an hour? Well, 420 is seven miles a minute. Okay. Or eight, between seven and eight miles a minute is what you're flying. That's fast. At night. I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember him and I flying, we were on, it's the IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low, they're all around the country. There's the IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, you'd fly from the land, you go out over the ocean, turn around and then you could practice actually coming in on a coastline and we were flying and we ended up in the clouds. Keep in mind, we're between 500 and a thousand feet in the mountains and we're in the clouds. You can't see anything. And I had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they're called the anti collision lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you, just gets annoying. So I turned it off and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying. We break out of that coastal marine layer and poof, we break out and it's a decent night. And this is right by Mount St. Helens. This is kind of where we're coming in. So we're coming in from the east and we're just north of Mount St. Helens is where the route goes. And you look up, you know, cause you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's right next to you, but you're flying along. You're just like, you know, you got to trust and you can see houses, you can see the lights, they're above you. We're literally below people's houses flying down these valleys and stuff. So just incredible experience. So when you take that and then you move into an F18F. So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century and you're flying. So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we're not doing those night low levels, but that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what you're doing is you're sharing the load. So most of the communications that go out of the airplane, the WIZO does all the talk and he's got actually, he uses his feet. That's the weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F. So he's going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational awareness display and it's linked to all the other airplanes. Just out of curiosity, what's the situational awareness display? Because that term comes up a lot. Think of it as a God's eye view. So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block IIs has about an eight by 10 display for the WIZOs that they can look at. The pilot's is smaller. It's down between his, it's a six by six between his legs and they're getting ready to redesign that Boeing is. But when you looked, it'd be like if you put your airplane and you're looking down. So all the stuff, like if your radar seeing bad guys out in front of you, it'd be like looking down and going, oh, I'm right here. And now there's bad guys out here and my wingman is over here. And it shows everything. It's just like, it gives you, you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where everything's at. I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy, it shows you all this. It's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of what's going on because it's happening so fast and this is where that autonomy piece, this is the third brain. So we're all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion. It's pulling stuff together going, oh, this is all this guy. This is this guy. This is this guy. It's sending it out through the link. So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network that we don't even see. It just says, that airplane says, hey, I'm over here. And it tells us and we go, oh, he's right there. And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I'm looking at this airplane, this bad guy. And it shows us, oh, he's over there and he's looking at this guy. I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot, but when you look down at stuff, it's, you know, you can sell the picture really quick. The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and gives you a big picture view. What about the control? Like, is there, and I apologize as if this is a dumb question, but you know, people use the high level term of autopilot. How much is there, let's use a loose term of AI. How much automation is there? How much AI is there in helping you control there? The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls. So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly. And when I say easy, it's relative because people go, I could do it because I did it on flight sim. Real life is a lot different. In flight sim, you have no apparent fear of death. You'll do things on a simulator that you would never do in real life. But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage, I mean, because you think about it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data. You've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data. All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got a joint helmet mounted cueing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head's at looking. So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right. The targeting flare will look to the right. And oh, by the way, the backseater has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he can do things. So depending on what sensor he's controlling, so if he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left. But if I have something where I want to lock a guy up that I don't see, that maybe the radar didn't see, but I can get over and now point the radar, you know, get the, because it's a phased array radar now, it doesn't really scan. There's all kinds of cool stuff that that technology brings. Because if you just, if you went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey, we're gonna have this helmet and you're gonna be able to slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're just gonna map magnetic resonance and go, oh, look, and I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer, you know, high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, you know, a JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS bombs that you see all the time, and then let that thing fly. And I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes, or, hey, I got it, we're gonna have to menstruate coordinates and, you know, you bring back the data and then they do all the targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it instead of all that. Now it's that fast. So there's a, okay, I mean, we probably don't have enough time to talk about the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane. But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don't know what they're talking about, like me, which is, what is the difference between a human being and an AI system? Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane? Like how much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated flight, for example, like what is the hardest part about flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot in warfare situations in flying a fighter jet plane? So I would say AI systems are usually black and white. When you write the algorithm for an AI system, it's really, it's basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing, right? So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are, there's a line that says I can or I can't. And it's a very finite line, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have gray areas where we go, eh, maybe, eh, I'll try it. So humans can operate within that gray. So if you took, if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while, a Super Hornet, it doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane. So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy, so it basically says the airplane can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs, force of gravity, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then based on the airfoil design and everything else and how it can pull, here's how it's going to fly, because it's really physics based. Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight, right? You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope. Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is, that's where the human goes, can I do this? I know it's outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that. So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes with digital flight controls, they're extremely forgiving. So you can literally, I've done things in Super Hornets that literally, even as a pilot inside the airplane, you're just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that. Like it'll flop ends, which defies most logic, and I guess in a way you could probably program it, but I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage, there are things that a human will do that AI won't. And I don't think we've got to the point, because how do you map illogical solutions? Most AI is logical. It's based on some type of premise when you write the algorithm to control it. There's bounds. Yeah, there's this giant mess, like you said, the difference between the simulator and real life also gets at that somehow. That there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play. Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sully landing that plane famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some? Well, it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6. So one is when you're flying with a crew, there's standardization. So you got to remember when Sully flew, when his first officer, that's the co pilot, showed up the first time they'd met, and this happens all the time in the commercial world. There's six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines, your chance of flying with the same guy all the time is slim and none. Where in the Navy, we were crewed. So I had a primary and a secondary whizzo that flew with me. For months? Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment. Because you want to get to know, trust and all of those things. It increases the capability of the airplane. It's not to say we can't swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex missions like a forward air controller, we're in the air actually controlling ground assets and supporting ground troops. If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you do that. You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you're going to be ineffective. So when you get to the commercial world, and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial, there is a standardization. Like we know that at this point, I'm going to put this switch, you're going to do that. And everyone, they know their roles. Captain's going to do this, first officer's going to do this. And they know that when the emergency breaks out, so in Sully's case, when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem, and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings of the two of them talking, you got to remember, they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes, but they're also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York area. And it's like, we got a bird strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silence the alarm. They silence the alarm. The first officer is pulling out the book, he's going through the procedures while Sully's actually flying the airplane, knowing that they've lost their motors. And you got to think his decision process, like they're trying to get him to go into an airport in New Jersey, and he realizes, not happening, we're going to put this thing. And he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was going to put this thing in the Hudson River. And he did it flawlessly. I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck. The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, and it got fished out of the Hudson. What is it about those human decisions you had to make? Is that something you put into words or is that just deep down some instinct that you develop as a pilot over time? When you train, and aviation is a self cleaning oven. So if you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions. So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial industry and the Navy and the Air Force, for all that, we have what's called, we have emergency procedures that we have to know. Like engines on fire, the first three steps, you just have to know what they are, right? So they know. The airline, same type, they go, hey, I know this is, they pull the book out because the airplanes are designed, they're built to have some time. But there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second guess it. So when he decided I'm putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go, well, maybe I can get over to that airport. He looked, he made a quick assessment. This is that 80% solution where you go, these are not, it's like a multiple choice test when you go, oh my God, I don't really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong, gone. So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone. So what's my next option? Well, the Hudson River's there and that's probably looking pretty good. Or what is my other one? Can I get a restart on the motors? And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else? He had to make really, really fast decisions. And then once they, as they go, that 80% solution, you realize, all right, I'm going into the Hudson, there's the 80%, get the book out. Let's see if we can get an air start. Because if you listen to the tapes, they're trying to get it air started. The closer he gets to the water, the more he's going, I'm ditching the airplane. So the original decision to, this is my best option right now. This is where I'm going. And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events, which they tried to do. And then he gets to that last minute, he says, we're going in the water. They changed the plan. They secure the airplane. They do exactly what they're doing. And he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson. But you got to remember, it's every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research in the airplane in the simulator. Where they train to the airplane being broken. You just lost a motor. You just lost another motor. So they go through this extensive training and all these, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave where you're going to get in. Because you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator, that the airplane is going to break. You're going to lose hydro, and it's sometimes they're a problem like, oh, I just lost this hydraulic system, but I'm having an issue on the other motor. Well, if I shut down this motor and I've got a hydraulics, because there's two hydraulic systems, one on each motor. Well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system and my right motor is starting to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down because that's going to kill my hydraulic system that's good. And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly. So it's a really, they're challenging problems that you have to think through in real time. And of course, the weather's never good. It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're going to break out. It's just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you and it's intended to increase the level of stress because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's going to STEM power, you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are literally on instinct like an animal. Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you're going to have when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down, you're running that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly what to do. And that's literally how it happens. So there's no, how do I put it? Fear of death. Like in Sully's case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die? You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say there was so much going on at the cockpit in that time. His, his mindset was probably, I can do this, I'm trained, I'm going to do the procedures, I've practiced this before, I've done these things. And I, you know, I'm assuming that in his mindset, cause I never thought about when things were really bad. You know, if you're having problems with the airplane that, you know, that I was going to mort, you know, and, and plant it into the ground, it was always, you know, maybe it's an ego thing where you think I can do this. I mean, So you never, have you experienced fear during flight, like, I mean, one, one way we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, as he's walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically in fear and, yeah, worried about how things are going to go. And it's purely to put in towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could defeat me. So like, that's, that's his experience of overcoming fear. But do you, did you experience any kind of thing like that? Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution? I wouldn't say I was never afraid. I think that would be, I can't, I couldn't tell you that anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just, it's, it's usually, especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the weather sucks and the deck's moving, you know, the, the ship's going up and down because it will scare the hell out of you. Can I say that? You can definitely say that, so it's about landing and take off that. That is, if you, even they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know, guys would go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and people were getting shot down a lot. The highest, the highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier. How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible. Like for, for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that. The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day. I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, woo, you know, this is not that bad, but you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with you're driving in your car and it's just a, it's, it's an overcast dark night and you're on a country road with no side lights. Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of, Oh my God. Because you, what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark, you know, and you can get outside of, you get outside of the city and get up into New Hampshire, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good. It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception. What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving up and down and left to right. Yeah, oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move and we have two systems, you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually, it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship and then there's the ILS. Now civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope. You know, you come down, it's like a plus. On the carrier, it's not, it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a non precision approach. It's not stabilized at all that, and I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the, and the tack and needle will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving cause the base that it's all sitting on is doing this and ships don't just go up and down. They, they, they do this. So the bow goes up and down in the tail, like you normally see a ship and then there's, so that's pitch and then it has roll. So it's doing this and then it has heave. So the whole boat is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling and you're gonna land on that. Um, so, and it's, I mean, I remember landing as I was with Chris, uh, Sato and, uh, Chris and I, we were off the USS ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into razorblades, um, we're flying the old a six and we come in and it was off of San Diego and it was just ugly night cause San Diego always has a Marine layer that is about 1200 feet was lower than that, that night and it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around. It was just craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego. And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop. And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack. So it's right in front of the Island. So if you see an aircraft carrier with the Island and the number of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area. So it's like you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this EA six B comes in, you know, ugly pass. He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one. You never want to catch the first one, which means you were not really high above the back of the ship when you landed and it comes in and the exhaust on an EA six or an a six actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see across. I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white because of the water being blown off the deck. And I'm shaking and I, I, I'll never forget. I looked over at Chris and I said, Oh my God, I go, Hey dude, man, 10,000 foot runway looks really good right now. And I go, and I'm, I'm shaking my hands like this. And I said, I'm not even, this is, I'm not faking this too. I know that's literally, I cannot stop shaking. I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me, but you, but it scares you afterwards. You don't, during it, you're not, I'm not, you don't have time to think about that. You're doing it. You got to do is we, you know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what's that? The girls baseball movie where he goes, there's no crying in baseball. Well, that's our joke. There's no crying in Naval aviation. I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but you know, there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it. So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it's, it's time to, it's time to, you know, man up and, and land that, land the jet. Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what's it like to fly an airplane? What it looks incredible to me as a human, like a descendant of ape. I sit here on land and look up at you guys. It seems incredible that human being can do that. You know what people ask, you know, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like, how was it? I said, it's the greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's, it's an office with a view cause you're sitting in a glass. You can do you know, it's like roller coasters. You go, Oh, it does all these cool stuff. So we take people flying every once in a while and it's like, Oh yeah, I like rollercoaster. So I go, no, take any rollercoaster coolest rollercoaster you've ever been on and multiply it by a thousand. And I said, it's an experience you know, to put your body under, you know, you know, the jets rated at seven and a half, but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses depends on fuel weight. So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight G's to be able to do that to your body. I mean, it takes a toll. Like I can't really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that, but would I trade it? It's a dream and how many people get to do that? You know, professional, I want to be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which is a very small percentage with, well, I want to fly jets and to fly, you know, at the time when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had in our squad and we're brand new at like literally right out of the factory, I'd come off our first Super Hornet cruise. We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were building my new jets that I was going to get. And I actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it together. So I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet together that's going to get delivered to me in a couple of months that I'm going to fly. So just, I mean, I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away, I told myself I wouldn't, I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command, your flying really starts to tag to come down. You know, even if you, when you're an air wing commander, which is, we call them CAG, carrier group commander, you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should you be. I mean, there's young people that are coming up and it's training your relief because that's the next generation. So like currently I have friends of mine that we serve together. Their kids are flying Super Hornets, right? So to me, that's really neat because I watched them when they were little and now, you know, one of them who was good friends, I won't get his last name, but Joey, who lived down the street from us, was a Top Gun instructor and I'm like, hey, Joey's a Top Gun. You know? And I'm like, that's cool because, you know, I went there and I knew him, he would come down to my house. And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know, because the kids grow up in it. I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind. So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL because he had talked about doing that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player. But he's, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his third year. So. But there's a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation. So you don't, you told yourself you're not going to miss it. You miss it? There are days I do. When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memory so I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever. You know, Tom Brady can't play football, but there's going to come a time where he has to stop. He seems to have done it for a long time. But you know, typically when you look at it, you go, I had the opportunity. And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI that, you know, when will, when will the last man fighter be built? You know, and that's that big question, you know, we just did F 35. It's over budget. It's seven years late. There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it. And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the air force is working on with smaller, cheaper, uh, a trittable platforms that you can go, Oh, we can, because if you don't put a man in the box or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this too. So I'll just say that as person. Yeah. So we say man and he, we mean both men and women because offline you've told me about a lot of incredible women that flown. So I had, I had three, three female, actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore. She actually lives right around here. She, she's a, she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore. One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she's one of the most gifted people I've ever met in my life. She is the vice president of Amazon air. You can see her on TV, her name's Sarah, uh, incredible. And then I had a page who ended up taking command. She got out of fighters and went into other platforms. Um, and she was a commanding officer. And then the other one is a, um, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all four of the women that were direct. Uh, I'm hoping not forgetting, I don't think I'm forgetting someone, uh, incredibly, incredibly talented, uh, and a great addition to the ready room. So anyone that gets into the, Oh, you know, women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. Hey, you know, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy. So women can fly as good as the guys. Yeah. You can't tell if you pass another airplane, you can't tell if there's a man or woman in it. It comes down to, uh, stick and throttle the ability to, uh, uh, extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be. If you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast. Anyone has those characteristics, uh, can do it. And then I think most important besides that there has to be a desire. And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, cause we used to track. So when I ran, we call it the rag, it's the replacement air group. It's where, so the, the super Hornet training squadron, there's two of them. There's one on the East coast at one Oh six. And there's one on the West coast, which is VFA one 22, one 22 is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer. Okay. So we tracked the last hundred students. Right. So everyone goes, ah, it's funny to hear students talk cause Oh, he's awesome. If you took the hundred, there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally gifted aviators. They're well, well, well above average. It's like the person in a math class that sits down in complex math and they just get it. You know, at the bottom, there's the three at the bottom that are going to struggle and there's a good chance they won't get out. And if they do get out, they're going to have to work really hard to just maintain kind of average. Sometimes it's just the way your mind works. Not everyone is good at everything. If you took the 94 of them in the middle, they're within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there. They're all, you know, it's a, the bell curve doesn't look real good. It's just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone's right there within one mean deviation. And then you have the outliers, usually not on the high side because they're going to get through, but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through. So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job, as does the Air Force, of screening. So now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and you started. Now what you do is you actually go fly Piper Warriors low wing to see, are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go and then they put you into primary. It's kind of like a, it's like a precheck, you know, like the preset, the pre SAT to go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT? It's, it's, it's very similar to that, but it's more of a hand skill. Can you adapt? Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not, you know, we, this is, you know, this is all has depth with all that, uh, where it's really relative to aviation. We are two dimensional. Very two dimensional. Can you, can you explain that? So our perception is actually more limited than the, than that of an aviator. Very much. And here's why. Yeah. So we look at, uh, let's look at a tall building. Let's look at one world trade center in New York cause that's the, everyone knows what it looks like. Big tall building. Um, it's what, maybe 1800 feet tall. Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like what 20 some hundred feet tall. It's not that big. So a Super Hornet to do a, what a split S is, which is I'm flying, I'm just going to roll the airplane upside down and then I'm going to do basically a C the letter C I'm going to go in the top and out the bottom. So and I'm just against basically a vertical displacement of the airplane. So I'm going from high to low. It's very, very tight and it doesn't in about roughly about 2,500 feet, give or take a little. So you go, that is, that is a really tight vertical turn. Yeah. For example, the a six in order to do that was about 9,000 feet. And we look at a building that's 2000 feet high and think that is tall. Right. All right. So in, in aviation sense, when you're starting to do vertical displacement numbers going from 35,000 feet down to 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane, because the human brain thinks we really are. We like to be flat. I see what you mean. We think 2d. So if I'm fighting, how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane is to work in the vertical, because most people will do like one move in the vertical and then they want to start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable. Yeah. So they're profound. Do you still think in like stacks of 2d layers or no, or do you, do you truly start to think in that third dimension, like the rich 3d world of, uh, like of, of fighting that can, do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3d nature? You do because you have to project where you're going to be. So you have to know the performance of the airplane knowing that, Hey, if I do this maneuver that I am going to go, it's, it's kind of like when I, when I talk about when we were chasing the Tic Tac. So the Tic Tacs coming up and I'm at about, you know, and I've been doing this for at the time, 16 years. So I'm looking and I'm going, Hey, I'm here. He's there on the other side of the circle. I'm going to do a vertical displacement. I'm going to go like this. I'm going to cut across the circle and I'm not going to him. I'm going out in front of him. I'm going over here because I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that's where he's going to be. And I'm trying to, you know, basically join up on him. But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this? Because what I did before here and I do this, I'm going to end up over here and he's going to be above me. And then, you know, I have to get that energy back to get up to him. And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade. So you have, this is, this is really important when you're, when you're fighting airplanes and you're really max performing. So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he's literally playing with it. He's got a finite amount of energy, right? He can add some with the motors and stuff, but you're, what you're really doing is it's a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy, speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other piece is, is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance. Because I know if I do a nice, easy turn, the airplane will make it at what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S, that it's going to cost me energy. So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I'm going to come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots. Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to that, to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance turn. So you've got to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's your overall energy package. So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you. But if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. It's overall energy package and that's that you've got to be constantly evaluating where you're at. And this is that 80% solution. Can I afford to do this or not? Yes, no. And you have literally a split second to make the decision. That's the most incredible dance of human decision making. It's just incredible. I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me ask the one last ridiculous, subjective question. What's the greatest plane ever made in history? You don't get to like... From Pure Speed, I would say SR71, I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually developed in the fifties by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works. For what that was able to do, and then when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built... The CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia. To me, that's an incredible... Engineering marvel. I think that like the X15, you know... By the way, the SR71 still holds the speed record of any plane as far as I can understand. Yeah. What's funny when you get into it is it's... Remember, fast is relative. When I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3000 miles an hour, a hundred feet above the ground, you're going 3000 miles an hour through, you know, that's how fast you're going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's, you know, your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots. But at 300 knots, you're really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground. So you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200, you know, in some odd knots, it's actually slow for the airplane. It's, you know, you're getting, you know, it's kind of like, it's not, you know, there's maneuvering speeds. You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability of the airfoil. If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G. Okay? So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast? When you look at an SR71 that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air's so thin, you know, just like the X15, you can get to a much higher speed, but the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low. So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low. But because you're going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that you're going 300 knots, you're screaming. I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the, well, soon to be Vice Admiral White. So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78. I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78 and it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach too. And then... What's that feel like? Or is it just like... When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird because you realize in your brain, and I did, that there's no out. If something happens, I can't eject. The ejection would kill me. Isn't that kind of liberating in a way? Or no? Okay, maybe not. You always want to push the limit. You know, it's like how fast, I could have got it going faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was fuel limited and space limited because I'm off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I'm going and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, the whole Monterey Peninsula. You're just going fast. And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute. I mean, you're screaming. Yeah. I mean, that's... And then you have to turn... Well, the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was a slicked off Super Hornet, so it was basically just the airplane. No pylons, no pods, no nothing. And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area. And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop out when you're going that fast, they don't, because the Super Hornet really doesn't have speed brakes, it deforms the flight controls. They don't function. So you really, you're trying to maneuver and when you're going that fast, you can't turn because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn. So it's just, it's crazy. It's incredible that a human can do this and a human can engineer the system which allows another human to control that system. To me, I think it's a great experience. Was it sad to see the SR71 go? I think it was during your career. I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes? We would see it flying. When I was flying Hornets, because West Coast flies and it's called R2508, which covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards. It's a huge area. It's actually, I think, we had a guy from Switzerland come out because they had Hornets and he's like, this is bigger than our whole country, because it's a pretty big area in California that you fly, but you would see the SR71s, they had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington State and Montana and they'd do a loop. So you'd see them coming back down, they'd descend above 60,000, they'd get contrails, the white lines behind airplanes, they'd come down and hit the tanker and then they'd go back up. So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying. But I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, because they're everywhere now, I mean, you've got commercial companies putting satellites up, how much of that need was really there? Because you've got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around. It was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was needed, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time. I mean, literally we have yet to pass that and then you also ask, well, is there a need to pass that? I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space, so do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in, it does all kinds of crazy stuff. And all the work with automation, all that kind of stuff. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO literally an identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it? Like chase it, essentially? Chase it. Chase it. So let me just lay out, I think it's easier than you telling the story. Maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories, I understand it. And then maybe you can correct me. So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers. That's a cruiser. It's a cruiser. It's a cruiser. So you can't land on a. No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back. Gotcha. And it has weapons on it. Okay, gotcha. It shoots the missiles up. But it has a nice radar. It has an incredible spy one system phased array, four panels. So it looks in quadrants. Perfect. So they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet with speed of what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour. Don't know what that's in knots, but on the coast of California. And they kept detecting these objects for just about a week. Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th from the, I guess it's from the USS Nimitz. You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white Tic Tac shaped object with no wings flying in ways you've never thought possible. And in some interview somewhere, you said, I think it was not from this world. So there's a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation. There's videos involved. The video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver has also the visible lights. You can switch as a TV mode. So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode. And Chad Underwood recorded that video. And those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later. One of the three videos, the two other videos, go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something 14 and 15 on the East coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects, but they're weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness. But the differences is actually on the East coast of 2014 case, very few people have spoken about it. And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it. So there's a mystery to it, but it's in some sense, it's a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery. And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions. There's division of opinions because it's a mysterious, I mean, it's truly is a UFO in the sense that UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I've gotten wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general. So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission and they sent us down. There's all kinds of rumors out here. There's all kinds of, after this has come out, so originally it was the four of us. There's two jets, two people in each jet, they're F18Fs, okay? There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly it. That's it. So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing? Yeah. So as we're flying out, we get vectored. They come up and tell us, hey, we're going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is a Aegis Cruiser. So we're talking to one controller who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance we have on board. And I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance in training typically because bad stuff happens. Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane and it's not good. So we had what's called a Catam 9, which is really just a blue two with the AIM 9 seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile. So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off with a sledgehammer. You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back in that hold it on. When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail. That's how it works. So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking. So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left hand side of me. So she's kind of stepped up like this and I'll use your mic box to start. So as we're going out, they're calling ranges are called bra calls, bearing range and altitude. And they're telling us, hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles. So they're saying, hey, two, seven, zero, 30, 20,000, that's all they say. So we got our radars and we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG 73. Good piece of gear, APG 79, new one's way better. But anyway. And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it's useful, but they're telling you a location of a thing that you should look at. They're telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving. He says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks. That's we had been at sea for two weeks. This is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are. Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out. That's exactly it. So we start driving out there and as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar because radars don't see everything there. So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right? So and it's basically think of a little cube so they can, and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes and they're looking. So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube, then the radar can only see one thing. Does that make sense? Yep. Yep. So they call merge plot. Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around, something's around you, get your head out. So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizos, the wizos can look, but everyone it's heads out. When they say merge plot, you're done looking at your displays inside. You're doing this and you're trying to find it. So as we look out to the right and you look high and low, because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up. Now keep in mind the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel, can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time. So you go, is it, you know, where is it at? So as we're looking around, we see, now this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no whitecaps. It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day. If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind and you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have whitewater coming out. It was the perfect day to own a sailboat. How many miles out do you see? Like seven, like you see just, it's a clear day. It's 50, it's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon. It's just clear. It's nothing. And we're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that. And we're probably about, by the time this all hits, we're price, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast, but from 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed. You can do the calculation. You can see stuff, you know, you'll see land 50 miles away, you know, you can see, you know, and when you're looking at a continent, it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island. I mean, you're looking at Mexico. And you can see on the whitecaps in the water, if there is any. Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or, so if it's a really whitecap windy day, then the ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call the burble, but when the air flows across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up. So when you're coming board to land, it's going to make you go up a little bit and then you're going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stay on glideslope. So we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no whitecaps, and we look down and we see whitewater. So if you put a piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like, you know, even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough. As the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length. When they come in, that's what happens on the shore, when a wave comes in, it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go anymore and then it breaks over the top and that's where you get the weight. So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount, you'll see stuff come in, the wave will crash and you'll get whitewater. You can go out when it's high tide in any one of the coasts, you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered, but there'll be whitewater around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense? Yeah. So that's what it was. We don't see an object because there's all kinds of, oh, they saw another craft below the wave. We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw whitewater. But the whitewater, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross. I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water so the wave is breaking over the top and you're going to get whitewater where the plane is at, you'd see this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross. So as we're looking down off the right side, the backseater in the other airplane, Jim, says this is that talking in partials again. He says, hey, Skipper, do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, what the hell is that? In a nice way. Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? So we see the whitewater and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise we'd have never seen it. So we see this whitewater. I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that. And then we see this little white tic tac because we're about 20,000 feet above it and it's doing, it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, and it's abrupt. It's very abrupt. So it's not like a helicopter, if a helicopter is going sideways and it goes once, it's going sideways left and it goes right, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed, it slows down because there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way. This thing's not, it's like left, right, left, right with no. So moving in ways that doesn't feel intuitive to you of the things you've seen in the past. So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right? So you go, oh, what is, cause when we see it's moving, we're like, oh, helicopter. So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that, because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash. You see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water, it kicks, the water comes up the sides cause the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that. It pushes the air down and then it has to come up the sides. So you see it and you go, well, there's no, there's no rotor wash. What is that thing? So by this time we're driving around. So as we're, if we were at the six oclock, we're driving around towards that nine oclock position and we're just watching this thing. And it's just, it's still pointing north, south, and it's going left, right, and it's kind of moving around the object. And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east, west, and then the north, south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out. It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's crossing over it and it's going up. It's just kind of, so now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out. And the other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here. And I said, yeah, stay up high. Because now we get, we get a different perspective. So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending. She can watch, because right now all I'm watching is the Tic Tac. She can watch me and the Tic Tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important. You know, you can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is, it's perfect as the story goes on, because it gives us two perspectives, you know, of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't, you know, because if it's just like, oh, I lost it and they go, no, it's over to the right. We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 oclock and I'm descending and it's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because I have, I have everything available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 oclock, as the Tic Tac's doing this, it literally, it's like, it's aware of us and it just goes bloop and it kind of points out towards the West and starts coming up. So now it's obviously knows that we're there. Whatever this thing is, it knows that we're there. So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down. We're just, I'm just watching it. Now, you gotta remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it and it was gone or, oh, I saw lights in the sky and they were gone. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers, watch this thing fly around. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the eight oclock position and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet above it and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15 K I think it is. I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating. So you can see it's just a really easy descent because. So what's 15 K? 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000. No, the other plane ends up about that. So they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around and I'm descending. They're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as they drive around. Okay. So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two oclock position. We're about the eight oclock position and I'm like, oh, I've got, I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to, I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to, I'm going to do this. He's like, go for it. Skip. Cause I was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out coaltitude as this thing's coming up, I'm going to meet it. And I'm driving and I get to probably it's, I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation isn't, it's nothing. It's I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards east. So I'm cutting across cause I'm going to the three oclock position. It's at two oclock and I'm going to meet it at three oclock. So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around, estimating about 12,000 feet. So they're at 20. So they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude above us when this happens. And it just, as it crosses our nose, it just, it accelerates and literally in less than, you know, probably less than a half second, it just goes and it's gone. And so we're like, and I had the first thing is, dude, did you guys see it? The other airplane's like, it's gone. We don't, we have no idea where it's at. So we kind of spin around real quick. I go, well, let's see what's down here. And I turn around and we're looking for the whitewater and we can't even, the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember telling the guy in my backseat, like a dude, I'm, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had at the time like 30 some hundred hours of flying. I'd been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like anything you've seen. No, no. So as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to overseas. So we got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CEO, cause I got to get, I got to get training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that. So, Hey, let's go back. And the, the, the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine squadron. And so Cheeks is at the, he's listening to all this happen, you know, cause he's just like, cause he, they, when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F18Cs don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets. So he had launched first and they were going to do him. And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cap point down South, and we're going to send, we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets. What's a cap point by the way? That's where we hold. So it's called a combat air patrol point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end. It's kind of like, Hey, you guys are going to get, it's, it's, if it's a football field, we're going to sit on one goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at each other and then try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our set reset points. Okay. So you're talking to him. He's, he's, he's listening to the, he's just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up. Cause they know that we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like, cause they canceled training. So what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting for him and his wingman. So they just, they're listening to all this go on. And then at this point you move on. Yeah. We come back up to train. We go back as we're flying back the controller. Cause we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, the, the, uh, the, uh, they're called OSs or operations specialists. They're the ones that run the radars and we're talking to him and he's like, Hey, sir, you're not going to believe this. He's like, that thing is at your cap. It showed back up. It just popped up. You know what I mean? This is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like, Oh, okay. So we got the radars out. We're looking for it. Uh, we get out there. We never see it. We never see it again. Uh, we do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like, Oh, this is going to be, we're going to, you know, I told him, I told him, I go, dude, you know, we're going to catch, we're going to catch shit for this. When we get back to the ship, word's going to get out and we're just going to catch maximum shit. And we did. We were joking, you know, so the ship plays movies, we have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat cause there's a day check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night play. So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy cause I'll watch stuff on TV that way too. I'll be like, Oh, Hey, I've seen this and it, I'll jump into a movie in the middle and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put it all together, uh, because that's how we have to do it. Cause we're so busy. Well, the movies became, and I, it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day. Definitely going to catch some shit, but let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions. So just take him, cause it's whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened, it's, you know, one of the most fascinating things, um, events in recent history. So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about it, different kinds of angles. There's no good answers, but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here. Uh, so first of all, you mentioned, see, you saw at some point X, Y, and then, uh, somebody in the Princeton said, you're not going to believe this, sir. It's at your cap point that that's a different place. How the heck did it know what your cap point is? That's a good question. And that's the one of you to no one, you know, you don't, we don't tell it, we don't broadcast it, we have a waypoint in the system, but I don't know. Maybe it knew where we were going. Cause we use the same one day after day after day, but it, it obviously knew, but you never saw it there. Never saw it there. Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, Hey, look, we just, we just chased this thing. They're like, what? I got to chase it. And they're like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, and so, and that's how he is. He's like, I'm going to go. And he, he was, he, he was determined that he was going to find this thing. So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn't out, that they don't see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver. I'll probably overlay the video for people to see. When he goes out, it's you know, what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically two radar displays up. He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one. So this is called the Azel display. And this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square. It's really taken this. It's taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out. So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this. They square it off. So, so he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because when he's not trying to lock it. So the radar is just throwing energy out and getting it, you know, it's a Doppler radar. So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing. It's going, oh, I can see you. And it's looking for return. So he gets a return. So he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square, unless it builds a track file on it, but a little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving because it's, it's sitting in one spot in space. He locks it up when he goes to lock it up. Now he's putting a bunch of energy on it, but he's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight and whatever's there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is and the direction that it's going. Okay. So the radar is smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed. So that's all it is, is you send a signal out, something, it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back and the radar was smart enough to go, that is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me. I'm being jammed. And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff. So you can mean, well, it does, it goes full into, it's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see because everything comes up and this aspect gets along, it's all kinds of, I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. So and it's what it does. As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right? Active jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it's technically an act of war. It feels like you should be freaking out at this point, I mean. So well, he does it and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle, they have their side stick controllers so they can control all the sensors and they can just toggle around and do stuff. So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod. Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes, oh, what's over there? And it'll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together. You can decouple them, but they're going to automatically couple up. So when he castles over, it's a switch, it looks like a castle switch, what's a castle? So when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says, instead of looking at the radar, I want to look at the targeting pod, he sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pod's already looking there. And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out, he's just receiving IR energy from the tic tac and then the system itself will track the pixels and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in. So it says, oh, and that's where those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up left and right. There's doing some vision based tracking. That's exactly what it is. So and then he goes through. Changes zooms, changes the mode. He goes through all the modes, so there's a narrow, medium and wide. So wide is far away, medium and then narrow. And then there's the TV mode and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode. The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode. So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode. It's got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode. So he goes through all those things and that's when you see it going from a black background to a white background. So you can figure out what the heck is this? Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going, what is that thing? So the video has been out, it actually was on YouTube for years before the government released it. It was leaked in 2007? No, the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email and I had retired. So this is about, nope, because I was working down in San Diego. So this is about 2008, early 2009, he sends me a link to strangeland.com, which is not suitable for work. Oh yeah, it's top notch. And he says, I can remember the email, hey Skip, does this look familiar? And I look at it, I'm like, how the hell did that get on strangeland.com? So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube link to someone. You don't send strangeland.com to someone because you don't know what you're going to get. It's like Googling kittens. So it ends up there somehow. So it gets on YouTube, which was cool because I would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they go, dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying? It's kind of like you were asking what it's like. And I go, oh dude, I chased a UFO and they're like, get out. And I'm like, no, serious. This is literally how it happened. So I was sitting with my friend Matt. So Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trap. And we were friends to this day. Because when you do stuff like people like that, I had to have faith in him, he had to have faith in me, they become like your brother. And these are guys that literally, I don't talk to them on a regular basis, like Chris who works at Apple. If Chris called me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help. I need this. I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out and let's do it. Because it's, they're like family, you do it. And most Navy guys, we don't send letters to each other weekly. You know, I have friends that I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door, you know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes to catch up. And then it's like old times and it's amazing how fast it's happened. So I'm out to dinner with Matt and I'm telling him this story and he's like, get out of here. So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco, Paco has fightersweep.com, it's a blog site. So Paco's obsessed, like he is way into UFOs. So Paco calls me up, he says, dude, I was talking to Matty. That's what we call him. He goes, I was talking to Matty. He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story. So I'm like, all right. I'm going to spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and I'm like, I got to get a voicemail. Hey, give me a call. So I call him up and he answers the phone, but I could hear people in the background and I go, hey dude, what's going on? He goes, hang on, hang on. I got to put you on speakerphone. I go, what are you putting me on speakerphone? He goes, you got to tell the story. I'm having a dinner party. You got to tell the story. So he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table as I tell a Tic Tac story. So he calls me up again. He says, hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff. Like he wrote about that we call them the shit hot break. That's a guy that when you're laying on a carrier, comes in, turns and gets ready to land really fast. Like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and one of the guys, when we were junior officers on the USS Ranger, one of the department heads in the other squadron is a guy, Nasty. And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break. So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there's another guy, Mav, was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing. It's a good article on how this was and how it kind of forms you in Naval Aviation, kind of being part of the club. So he's like, I got to write about this thing. I'm like, what do you guys, I got to write about it. I go, all right. Because at first I would say no. I'm like, dude, I don't want this out there. Just. So you haven't really before then talked about it much. My wife didn't even really know the whole story. Why? Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some. You know, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two days. They played the goofy movies. There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put. It was like first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting protecting the Nimitz battle group type stuff. It's just funny shit like that. So to me it wasn't that big of a deal. It was like, okay, that's weird. We're never going to know what it was. I want to get out there because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors. There's a group of folks there. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us. Nobody looking like me. No came out on a, no, no one came out of the helicopter. No one came out on an airplane. You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified. What's funny is all the COs and several of them are still in the Navy. There's one that is a, he, I think he just finished up. He was a captain of an aircraft carrier. You know, so he'll end up making Admiral and all that stuff. Those guys are all my friends. I talk to them daily. Just to clarify. So just for people who don't know, there's a story that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed. They showed up, they took the data, quote unquote. So all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably deleted it. So there's a kind of story to that. And then from what I've seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about offline, that jokes spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships, that it might've been a joke that started and. Well, they did. So here's the joke. So they had come down, right? We had the tapes and they were Chad's tapes. So we use those tapes over and over again. They're consumable, but remember, I have a budget as a squadron, so I have a budget. So I have to buy those tapes, all that stuff that we use, I'm accountable for. And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's on them. So we had the tapes. So the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what's called Civic, CVIC, which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These guys are gonna come, they're gonna come and get them. So we're like, I'm like, oh, whatever. So we hand them the tapes and then someone, because I have, you know people, shortly after they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they're messing with you, they're playing a joke. So I said, oh, well, let's see how well that goes because I'm a CO and they're not. So I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a Lieutenant or Lieutenant JG, so he's way junior to me. And I said, hey, I want my tapes back and he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are pulling my leg. I know there's no one came out. And I go, and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this place apart. That's literally what I told him. And I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it's not gonna go well. I said, because this is bullshit and I need those tapes. Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up, they weren't in a safe. He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled them out and handed them to me. I said, and I basically said a few things to him, like, don't ever fuck with me again. And I left, I had the tapes. So this, no one came out. There's no flying going on when all this is happening. And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes. So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor or two that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long and there's some, one of these petty officers is saying, I saw it, that's total crap. The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the release video is the entire video. So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me, but you have mentioned that, like on Roguen, I think that you watched it on a bigger screen. It felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the FLIR video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high number of. I would doubt it. Because I don't know where, the stuff that the government released, I don't know where they got it. Okay. So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like a rack. There's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube. No, it's just like, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets, it degrades. So this, you don't know how many times this has been copied. So we were looking, the videos I've seen are right off the original, they're Hi8 tapes, it's basically pulled off the back of the display, so it's not filmed with cameras, it's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back and put onto a Hi8 tape. That's how the recorders work. Now it's actually digital to digital, it's not even on tapes anymore, it's a digital recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly, because originally we had little cameras here that shine, so if the light hit, it would wash out the displays. So it's a pretty good feed, when you put it on, so instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on like a 19 inch, because it was still normal TVs back there, we had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought, so we could watch movies. A nice, huge 19 inch screen. It's maybe 20, it was nice. Wow, that's huge. It was gigantic. I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches. This is 2005. So you look at it as this big thing. You could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those. It was very clear. But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, did you get much more information from the higher, from the clear? Little things out of the bottom. We didn't see those visuals. So the bottom information. I got it. So when you see it, because he's coming almost coaltitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom. Kind of like that. There was two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on the top. There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature. You know, it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display, which that really raises a classification of it, especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed. You know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2000 and let me think about 2009. I got a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, hey, he told me who he was. He's still in the government. I'm friends with him. And he said, hey, we're going to investigate your Tic Tac thing. This is literally five years later. Yeah. Five years later. And I said, OK, whatever. And he did a pretty good job. I caught the unofficial official report because it was really never official. It wasn't. But I'll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests. So he does the report. He sent me the report. And all he said is, hey, I'm going to send you this report. Please don't distribute this report. I said, OK. The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough to redact it. But there's a few versions of it unredacted and I'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this. So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid. He doesn't talk to anyone now. The pilot of his airplane, she has come out on unidentified, but they don't release her name, although people are starting to do it. And she's had weird shit happen around her house. She's got kids, you know, so I'm very protective of her. And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that the names ever came from you, I will never talk to you again about this. And Jeremy's been really good about it. And so is George. And then, but George knew who the names were because he got the report from Senator Reid. And then the other crew. So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that individual, they really don't have the recollection. They were just out flying that day and it wasn't a big deal. So it's you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door and, you know, and there's rumors are you talk to everyone. You know, you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes, you know, the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much, I mean, if I turned down like, I turned down Russian TV. I can give you her name when we're done here. She called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter, she called my son and she called my son in law because they're persistent. So I'm pretty protected. I'm very particular. I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is because I knew we would have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic tac and the incident, but we can actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people involved to go. Cause I think there's, you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that whole thing, that's to the stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLonge group that got started. So you go, well, you know, cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him, he's, he's, he's very smart and I asked him, how'd you get into this? And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of books when you're laying in a van as you're driving to your next gig before you make it big. And he goes, and he read, he was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs. I'm trying to think of the title. That's one of the big ones that's out there real popular. And so he started just, he started asking more and through his fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more connected. You know, if you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence and he's part of the Mellon dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart. He knows, he, he, he definitely knows how the government works cause he worked there. And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me, I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, Hey, cause they were like, you gotta do it. Cause I turned to, I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his, his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. Because those guys like, you gotta, you gotta do this for us. So from my perspective, just to give you some context. So to me, there seems to be some stigma. So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today. And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, of faculty, fellow faculty at MIT and major universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from, from the scientific community. A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting, but you, you don't even know you, one, you're afraid to talk about it. And two, you don't know what the next steps are, like how can we seriously try to think about what you saw, how to think about how we further look for things like it, how we develop systems and plans for how in the future we can immediately collect a lot more data and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective. And I, I just would love to remove stigma from this subject. Well, I think that's the first step we have done in this country, an absolutely terrible job with these things. So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell. So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer. That's literally what came out. And then magically the next day it's a weather balloon and they're showing your pieces of mylar and you go, well, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday. Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series about Project Blue Book. But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things. It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove to the point where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look. So there's always been this, I don't know if you'd call it an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs that if you're talking about them, they're nuts. With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy, I'm not a junkie. If you ask me, do I believe that there's life outside of Earth, I would say you probably have a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than we're the only planet that has life on it in the universe. The odds are against it. If you do just do the math, you have to accept, because there only has to be one other planet that has life on it and then I win and you lose. And then more and more science is showing that there's habitable planets out there, that yeah, everything we've learned so far, we know very little, but everything we've learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets, it seems that it's very likely that there's life out there. Intelligent life is another topic, but life. Well, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says, ha ha, we're it and you go, not so much. Maybe we're not so intelligent. Because we are, it's just how we learn. So our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel. What if you're in another planet where you figured out the ability to create a gravity field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, catapults on ships were steam powered and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic. Roller coasters used to use a chain to get you to the top of the hill. Now they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going. So there's a whole new realm of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support theory. You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently theories that Einstein had where people actually joked about them. And now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light. You know, we've proven that. So you look at that way and you go, well, does that mean that, you know, 70 years ago Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong? Or do you go, we just didn't have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find something that we could, to actually measure. And you know, and I've seen this stuff. And that's just a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries. Look what we've done in the last 20 years. Yeah, it's crazy. Let me direct, cause it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science perspective, you're, I mean, you've spoken, you've been brave in, you know, telling your story, not some dramatic thing, but just telling the things you've seen. Did it encounter, did it impact your career? Is that why more people haven't come out? Like you've mentioned Roswell, like how, what advice do you give to people, to the community, to me as a scientist for ways to go forward about this topic and still have a, you know, not being put in a bin in society that he's a loon or she's a loon or that person. Mine is to get away from the little green men, just divorce the two little green men. And you know, and I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this, you know, and the group that they're working with, which is incredible. I mean, they've got Steve Justice who used to run Skunk Works where they built, you know, projects. Now, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director. He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon. And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs. So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP. And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt. And people go, how do you know that? I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are, it literally, I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's why the, that's why I call it the unofficial official report. It was never, it was never releasable because people go, oh, I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go, well, just because you put in a FOIA request and get it, I go, because how much, how much time do you think that guy is going to spend to get you the information that you requested if he can't find it? I actually got called by the Navy. I had a commander in the Navy call me about right before the article came out in the New York Times. It was, this was starting to come back and she had called me because there's been, there was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident. And I said, do you know of anything? She called me, she goes, do you know of anything else besides the situation reports that come off the ship? And you know, and you got to remember when the situation report comes off the ship, that's like third hand. So we tell someone, they tell someone, that person has to write it up. So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it. But then there's the unofficial official report that's actually pretty well written. There's some errors in it, but it was, you know, I didn't help write it. I just did it. And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the zoo and the players. So she called me and said, is there anything out there? And I said, officially out there. She said, yes. I said, I don't know anything. I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one, but I'm not, you know, if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because it's not my job and nor did I care. I mean, did, in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou, I mean, did you think about your impact to your career? Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other thing, other people like in the Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing, why aren't they talking about this? Why are people afraid to talk about this? Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust. I'll just tell you that right now. We typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, you know, especially when I do, even the TV shows, you know, cause I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours. And then what you see on the screen is five minutes. Well, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from Autonomous Vehicles is the clipping happens, yes. But also the incompetence. Let me just call out journalists. They're not thinking, I mean, so here's the thing, I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes from like physics, math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the world. I read a lot. That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed in history. Like you, it might've been nothing, who knows what you witnessed might've been from a sort of debunking perspective, might've been some kind of trick of mind. You and others have hallucinated something that could be some simple explanation, but possibly it was something not of this world and to not do justice to this story from a scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence. And so that's true for journalists, that's true for other scientists. It's just a human nature. If we see something that we can't explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's just me and you let it go away and you don't think about it, maybe it'll just, you ignore it. The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that? And I want to dig more into it. And if you look at it or you're going against the norm, you can get ostracized. And if you look at, and Einstein's the perfect example, I mean, when he started coming up with some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you're a nut job. He's, he's literally proving them, but he didn't have, you know, he proved them in theory, but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory. There's a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim Gates that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with, with his theories. It's fascinating. But yes, at the time, it's kind of crazy what he's saying. Yeah. If you look at it back at the time, don't we, we look at it now and go, well, the guy was a walking genius and he was, but if you go back in time when he was doing it, it was like, what are you talking about? You know? But one of the challenges is your eyewitness. One of the challenges is you're essentially an eyewitness account. Like we don't have good data. We have very limited data of the incident that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in, let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's, just to paint more and more of the picture. One you kind of mentioned, so Tic Tac Shape, let's break apart two situations. One is the video. Let's look at the actual eye account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes. What's the, what can you say about the shape of the thing? Is there interesting aspects outside of the Tic Tac? Like, is there any appendages? Is there some texture to it that, no smooth white Tic Tac, you know, we don't, you don't see there's no, no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could see. We don't notice, like I said, we don't see the little things on the bottom of it until we see the video in the TV mode when it's zoomed in, right before it's shortly, you kind of see them zoom in. You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there, or remember we're looking at the original tape, so there's not, there's basically no degradation. But when you saw with your eyes, there's no kind of appendages. No, none. What about, like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions. So I appreciate you spending your time here. Let me ask some of them. Did you, I mean, you chased it, so we flew close to it, relatively speaking. Was there, did you feel any wake? Like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically? No. Nothing. Nothing. So another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've developed a feel for, for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival? Or did it, let me ask a few questions around it. So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised? Did it feel like it wanted to be seen, almost to show off its capability? And did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, an air fight against a sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet? So one, I think it, I think it knew we were there when we showed up. It's just, it's me. It's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the field, it'll actually go no threat and it'll start eating. You know, they don't put their tail up. As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there and I'm going to react or I'm going to move. So as we were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing, you know, which I don't know if someone asks, what do you think? I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something. I joked on good morning America. Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know, and actually use that clip. It was kind of funny, but yeah, we're a little human centric. We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us, but maybe he's talking to the dolphins. Yeah. It was to whatever, you know, cause it was hanging around that whitewater and I don't know if it was, there's something there as a seamount. We just didn't find it again. I don't know. But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming up. Just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12 where I cut across the circle. I think it was very aware that we were there because it interacted. We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane. But you know, was it, was, were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me it was more curious, you know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have. And I always felt to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time as I'd spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a safe zone. I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can't, if you're in the airplane and you feel scared, it's not the job for you. You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now. You know, I am inside, I have the stick, I have the throttles, I've got my wizzo in the back seat, he's running all the displays. We are a team. We're in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new. You feel pretty good. And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did, like it was like no big deal, you know, for an airplane, if you just put me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight, just get me at a hundred knots above the water. And for me to, you can't just start a climb, I'd have to lower the nose, I'd have to accelerate and then I'd have to start coming up and this thing just like, just did it like it was like no big deal. Yeah. You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was, it like, it's something that you would love to fly almost. So this object, just the curiosity you experienced is like, like what it almost like, what the heck is that piece of technology and I want to fly it. Like what made you feel like it's something that you could fly? Do you think it's something that a human could fly? Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology, because another perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing. And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like, I don't think it was a projection. I think it was a real object. It was an op, a physical hard object that could be flyed. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think all four of us will tell you the same thing. It wasn't, it wasn't, this was not, cause you go, okay, let's just go on. It's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting next to each other and we were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that, and I go, okay, there's a, in theory you could have that, but with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, you know, and they're, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen. You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue. You know, if you've ever been at sea and I don't mean like coast, I mean like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest, it's incredible. You know, you've got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean that you got pretty high contrast. And for this thing just to disappear, it wasn't, I'm telling you, I would, I mean, I know we, we all have the same recollection of what happened. You know, there's some details because it's so long ago, but for the most part, we know what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like, what the hell was that? What if, I mean, do you think about the thing under the water that's not often talked about if there's something under the water, couldn't have been something gigantic? It could be. What? Like, do you ever think of this? Big ship comes up. I mean, that's why as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles and Olympic swimmers. Like I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss, it could, anything could be under there. Like there's not enough focus on that perhaps because there's no visibility, but is it, is there anything interesting to say about the possibility that was anything underneath there? Could be. I mean, think about it. If you're going to hide on this planet, what's the least explored spot on the planet? Two thirds of it's the ocean. There's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was a triple seven that crashed. You know, they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared and they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it, but you would think there's large objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up, there's big pieces that would be, you'd find something, they haven't found anything except what floated. So to hide something underwater I think would be easy. So okay. Let's go a little bit in speculation land, but it's the best, it's the best we can do, which is the basic question of what do you think was it? So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomena? You know, like a ball lightning, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things we probably humans don't really understand. Is it like I said, some perception cognition that led you some kind of hallucination that made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing? Let me put those things on the table. Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was? Definitely. I don't think it's an ice cloud because ice clouds don't fly around and react to you. Do I think it was a light? I'd say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do. I'd say no. What do you mean by light? Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there's their experience like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it's really not, you know, it's plasma. I don't think so. So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved. Maybe not. I'm not a theoretical physicist and some, you know, I'm not an MIT. I would say no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it when this happened, no, I think it was a hard object. It was aware that we were there. It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly what I would do. You know, it mirrored me. It wasn't aggressive. You know, there's talk, oh, it flopped behind us. It was never offensive on us. It never did that. It just mirrored us. So as we're coming down, it's just like, you know, you're kind of, you know, you said you do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the, when they get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, cause my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto became a wrestler cause he beat me up every night and we joke. I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week. But you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you're kind of feeling each other as you walk and boxers do the same thing. It was doing that same thing. It's like, what's going on as it comes around, as it comes around and then it was like, Hey, we're going to get here. And then when I got too close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we've never seen. The other question is what if I didn't cut across the circle, what if I just kept going around a circle? We just keep going. I could have just watched it. I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and the joint helmet. There's a little camera, but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch because you've ever put a GoPro on someone's head where they're looking around like this all the time, it'll nauseate you. So we never turn that on and all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down and hit the switch, you know, and then we didn't go back and cause our tapes didn't have anything cause we didn't get it on radar. Because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't, it wouldn't lock. The radar wouldn't lock. And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try to get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human created technology that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of? Or is it not something not of this world? So you, if you'd asked me in 2004, I just said, I don't know if you ask me now. So we're coming up on 16 years ago for a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it because I don't think it did. I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do, then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I understand, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government and I never will speak for the United States government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and why we classify stuff, you know, is it detrimental to national defense? But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability to do things, you know, you talk about, you know, are we going to go to Mars? Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, because remember, these things were coming down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space, and they would come down and they would come straight down, they'd hang out at like 20,000 feet and then three or four hours later, they'd go back up. You don't have anything that can come down, hang out and once, you know, and I'm talking hold out in a spot. Well, we all know there's winds. They're not drifting like a balloon. They're just sitting there and then they would go back up and they tracked up to the, when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10 of these things. There's other guys and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up. So it's not just propulsion and the way it moves, it's also fuel. It's everything. So... The whole of it indicates a kind of technology that's highly advanced, but you don't think in your sense that you actually don't know, but you know more than a lot of people, in your sense, the top secret military technology, if you think about skunkworks, if you think about it like that, cannot be more than 15 years ahead. I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117. Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out like it was developed at this time. It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government. What's the 117? That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2, but the stealth fighter. So you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while. But I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology. This is a giant leap in technology. You know, and the other one is, do we have the basis to do that? You know, because usually when you have a technology like that, universities, especially the one you're working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top tier universities, you know, so you've got MIT, you've got Caltech, you've got Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools, Naval Postgraduate School is another one. There's usually indicators, there's papers of, hey, this is where we're going. I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity based propulsion system that literally, I've got an object, because how do you, how much power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant orb that we live on? Also by the way, you mentioned gravity based. That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane from a physics perspective, but of course it would seem insane until it's not. Because remember, we only know what we know, which is very little. Someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all? So you're saying that if you had to bet money, all your money, it would be something that's alien technology, so it's not human created technology. Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't think we've developed it. I don't think we've developed it. Because the other one, someone asked me, they said, what if there wasn't, maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from someplace else. I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around. So I don't know. I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the giant brains that think this stuff up. I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them. Which topic? Which you mean for drones? Just space travel technology. Because if you look at where we're going, because everyone talks about Mars, and you're okay, and we're, hey, are we going to be able to colonize? And I know Elon is big into that. Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA? We put humans back up there. My theory, so it's funny because I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original employees at SpaceX. He's a friend of mine, and I won't say his name. But he knows Elon. And he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project. He's one of the lead guys on that. So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, there's a movie, there's a book coming out that comes out in about a year on this. The original, the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX. And he's named in the book. And they're supposed to make a movie on it. So I'm like, hey, who's going to play it? But what he's done, to me, it changed the game, and here's why. Because I said, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex. Which it has become, everything he warned us of, it has become, and it's really driven by, there's the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing. Those are the big, those are your biggest, and Raytheon's kind of right, like a subset of that. But Raytheon's pretty big too. But in US defense, those are the big guys, right? That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like that. And you look at that, and you go, and the way government contracting is working, and how we charge, and why things cost so much. And then you go, you got Elon, who's got an ego, and he doesn't like to do things a certain way. And I've talked to the guy that worked there on, because the government likes to have oversight of contracts, where he was like, no, just tell me what you want, I'll build it, and I'll give you a bill when it's done. And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money, because he's a money driven guy, which I like, capitalism at its best. So now you look at the two things. So you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule, right? And then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money. And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters, because they come back and land, and you don't have to, like Morton Thicol, we've reused them on the space shuttle. But they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff, because they landed in Saltwater, and then he had to put them all back together. Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, go, what do they do? Do they like rehaul, overhaul, because no, actually they clean them up, and they can use them again. They're reusable systems. Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company. So being able to put people in the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it's literally like sci fi when you watch when they went up. So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been able to do, because the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, and oh, by the way, if you didn't know, because I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn Russian. Right? And they have to do, it's what, level five, where the test is a phone call, where they call you up and they, because they would go, so I went to the pinning, two friends of mine. The one actually had a mission date, the one got one later. So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a spacewalk, because I would pull up, because if I knew what was going on, I'd pull up the NASA thing. I was in a meeting one day, and I've got NASA on and makers out there floating around doing his stuff. And I saw one, he's in the space station while they're doing a spacewalk, so it's kind of cool when you go, oh yeah, I know that dude, he's up there in space, floating around. So when you look at what those, they're capable of doing, and then you go, what Elon is bringing to the fact that now it's back in America, it's actually, to me, it's cost effective for us to be able to do more stuff. I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon? Is there a reason to go back to the moon? Personally, I think if they're really going to go, in years from now, go to Mars, I think that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology, to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the moon. Because we did this on less than a compact computer in the 60s, which is the whole reason that I flew, because I'm obsessed. Matter of fact, I have the giant Lego Apollo at home, and the Lander, and I have one that my dad built me in 1969, right after that, and Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy, and so am I. Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a car in Wapakonet, Ohio, at the parade after he walked on the moon, because his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle in Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade. So I've been obsessed with this since I was a child. Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you'll go out to space one day? Me? If I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. I am not. Because, I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you know, like people like, I mean, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in terms of, you're not kind of a civilian, right, I mean, in a sense that you're just a normal person, you're not a 5G pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up, there would be somebody like you in the next, like, 20 years. I'd be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I'd be all over it. I'd be like, okay, but, you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you're alive. I'd love to hear that discussion with your wife. Listen, there's the pros and cons. She's, I mean, I've known her since high school, so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know. Most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person you were in high school. You know, I was a class clown and I still am that way. So let me ask you this question. So I'm talking to Elon again soon, I'm curious to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to him about TICTAC, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously, just like you said, if there's something to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply out to space. What should Elon think about this stuff? What should he do? What should people like him do? I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and go, you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do, but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does. If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they're done, they're done. There's enough to get them back down and that's it. There's not a huge, you know, they're not coming back and go, oh, I still got three quarters of a tank. Let's bolt them on and do it again. His system's not doing that. But you know, the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons of money, but you got to remember the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars for the most part. There are times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done. But then when you look at, and I'm just going to throw a few out there, but if you look at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you've got Elon, there's some big money out there. I mean, you're talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy companies like big companies. Apple's another one. These companies had huge, huge amounts of money. And then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they've got gazillions and gazillions of dollars. We've got universities. There's so much money out there. If we really wanted to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do live in a free society, I think there's enough to go, how do we do this? And because when you work outside of what the government would want to do, let's, we're not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant. I will be. American. I would never. Yeah. I am an American. You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet. I can't believe you agreed to this. But, but when I haven't killed me yet, you're here and you've been here for a while. No, no, no. I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American. But see, when you do that, so you look at, let's just look at American universities. Yes. There are some brilliant minds and we'll just use MIT because you worked down there. There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that are not American citizens. So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American citizen, it gets really, really, really hard. But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money, and they, let's just say they want to work together. They can split it up 50, 50, the two of them when the technology gets developed. But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work. I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because technology is technology. And if it gets developed and gets over to where a country gets a hold of it and then just basically uses it for their own, because you save them all the research time, you don't want to do that. But if we can get to the point where we can, we do it on the International Space Station. We realize that space was too expensive for one country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate. That's the one thing that the Russians and the U.S. actually work together on. Think about it. That's it. We work together on space because we realize it's way too expensive for us to do alone and effective. So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around for God, now what is it, like 20 years that thing's been up there floating around? So it's getting old. We're going to have to replace parts and do stuff. But if we can pool the money together and come up with something that would literally change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of engineering, because if you develop that technology, you don't even have to send a man person. If you can develop a technology that's so, and with our automation and where we're progressing and our competing power to send something out that's not just floating around when, you know, that can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface and come back up. So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends data back. Get an analyzer. But if I've got a technology that can go up there really quick, I'm not worried about man. I don't have life support systems and all that. But if it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back. So we can analyze it here. That's a game changer. It's a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets. Exactly. So in a sense, the Tic Tac is a symbol. So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there's a nonzero probability that it's alien technology. In that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box. It's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion. We can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way and it's worthwhile to try. I think, and I don't think the money, if you look at a big picture with the amount of money, some that's out there floating around these private companies, I think if you said, hey, I've got, let's just say a hundred million dollars, which really a hundred million dollars relative to Bezos has got, what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that work. So if he said, hey, a hundred million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go and I'm going to put a, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that says, hey, we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program. But what if I just said, hey, who's to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own to say, hey, I want to go pool universities because they have fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars. They don't have the checks inbound. They can do whatever they want. So their money, sorry about that, to go, hey, I'm going to put this out and I'm going to get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech, at the schools I mentioned. And, oh, by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts and I'm going to basically, I'm going to fund you guys for 10 years. So you get $10 million a year and I'm going to give you your salaries and we're going to do that or whatever the amount works. So let's cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right? To do the research. But, oh, by the way, the research is, it's not classified, but it's controlled. So we're not going to publicly just put this out in journals, but if we make a leap that we think would advance because although those, let's say there's 10 of them, those 10 scientists come up with something and they put out a paper, there might be a number 11 at another university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kind of had this idea and now you can get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the mindset. Because we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it's like I was joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls. And I said, but how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering, how much new math is really being done? I said, there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I'm talking Stephen Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something that's totally different. That's a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody's converged towards this local minima or local maxima, whatever you think about it. And it's again, same as with the TICTAC, thinking outside the box is not accepted and it probably should be. But it's hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original, he was out of the box. He did not think the norm. That's true genius. Had he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories, where would we be? Okay, we're jumping around a little bit. So we've talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, but let me jump back to a few questions that folks had. I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual facts of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other, but let me kind of bring it up. Mick West, I've just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to talk to you about this world. And Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to debunk. Sort of his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic. I think it's very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective to take the approach he does. It's valuable. And I think no matter what, I think there's, I hope that people, quote unquote, true believers are a little bit more open minded to the work of Mick West. I think it's quite useful and brilliant work. So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible other explanations of the things that were out there. He has some explanations of the things that you've seen in with the Tic Tac, like with your own eyes. He says that it's possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and so on when you were flying around. I don't find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that. Let me do it right now. Sure. So, cause that comes up. Like how, how did you know it was about 40 feet long? I go, okay, so 16 years flying against other airplanes, know what stuff looks like. You know, I've looked down on things. So if I know, I know, here's the known things. I know when we saw the Tic Tac, I was at 20,000 feet ish, right around there. So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like looking down on them cause I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's, that's why I said 40 feet cause it's about Hornet size. So and as I go around, you know, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big, you know. So I would argue the fact of, you know, peer experiences, you know, professional observers, which is what we're actually trained to do. And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing. They're like, yeah, it's about size of Hornet. From a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years do you find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things. So like how often do you make mistakes with vision? You actually, you make vision issues a lot because you're, and the sad part is, is your brain believes what your eyes see. We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instruments. Let's go back to landing at night. So your eyes assume that the runway and your brain assumes that the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving. So if I try and do stuff visually, I would, you die every time, not every time, but you die close to every time trying to land on a boat. So we actually use instruments, which are counter to your brain. So, and there's actually all kinds of things that we go through in training. They have this thing, I think they still use it. It's called the MSDD multi spatial disorientation device or the spin and puke. It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules. And when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can, you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but we were actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk. But as they spin you around in a little sub thing and slow it down and speed it up, your body does this and you, you know, and then by visuals of showing you like they can spin it sideways to the outside wall, but they can show like lines that are, they can make the line stand still because they're moving the same velocity. They can move the other way and you'll think you're screaming. You see it in amusement parks all the time. You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A, but you're really not doing, you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So if you, if you want to look at it and go, well, you're, you're disoriented or this, I'd be like, I'd argue going, no, I'm not. Because you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking at the Tic Tac, I've got a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing. So I've got, I know what I'm doing. I can look outside. I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking inside to cross check of what I'm seeing is in reality, what I'm doing. You actually, your brain gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information. You have to, you have like supervision, so you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting what the sensors, what you call an instruments are giving you. And that, that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that, that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're saying. You'd be amazed at how good, so here's a, here's another example. So if we go out over the water, so there's no land in sight and we're going to fight. So when we fight, you know, two airplanes, we're going to dog fight. As an instructor and I was for all, most of my time, you have to come back and you have to recreate it. So we call it drawing arrows. So you have to recreate that stuff. So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would take off and say, all right, we're starting heading due east and I know where the sun is at because in the short couple minutes that we're going to fight, the sun's really not going to move much. It's going to be in a relative zone. I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say 195 degrees, right? So I'm starting going east and it's actually be down off my right hand side. So now I know as I'm fighting, cause in the water you don't have any reference. Like I pass land. I pass land. No, you don't. And you can't use clouds cause clouds do move. But you got to come back cause you go, here's where I started. And then you, when, as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355. And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relative. So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows so that you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened. And you get really, really good at that. So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six oclock? And he went around and he came up here. I go, because I'm trained to do all that. And I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do it. But usually it's, you memorize it all and you get done and then you, as soon as you're done, you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get set and you start writing all your notes down. Yeah. And you're writing it really fast on your card and you go out with a stack of cards and you stick the new one on your knee board card so you're ready to go and here's the next setup. It's kind of, it's in some way similar to what like at the, at the highest level chess players do. I mean, you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games. But the, the richness of the representation that they use in remembering like how the games evolved. It's not like it's much richer than the actual moves. It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved. It's more like instinctual from years and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really can't. It's just. I understand that. It's because for us, if we don't come back with anything, then there's no learning to be had. Right. Because the whole thing is the debrief when we get back and we talk about, that's really where the learning is. And it's the same thing if you want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off, you try and learn because you're remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place, play with someone better than you. That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything. You're just learning that they're not good and you're better. When you challenge yourself against someone that is better than you, you learn. So I learned how to fight an airplane with, he's actually one of my best friends, we'll call him Tom. I won't give his call sign because I don't know what his name is. So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun. He was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that's the guy, the training officer is the main guy at Top Gun. So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun. So Tom, when I learned, because I had come out of A6 and we really don't fight because it was a bomber. So I get in F18s and I want to learn how to fight because it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the F and F fighter attack. The F18 is fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight. So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach me how to do it. And he did. And I would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never been. And then I would go, well, I'm going to do this. And then he would destroy me and he would come back and go, here's why you don't do that. And then I would take that knowledge and I would put it in my little basket of tricks. And over time, because you don't, no one walks out into that world. I don't care how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman. I am it. No, it's a learning process. And so over all those years, you've gotten good. So what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac? Low. Zero. Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So maybe 90. Yeah, I am ninety nine point nine percent. So point one percent. My eyes deceive me. But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. So the percentage is even lower. Yeah. Look up. Well, I don't find that particular debunking case that you said, but I'm glad you put it. You you said those words out loud. So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical. So your eye account, I think, is the most fascinating story. And that I think that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there on so many levels, just like we said, an engineering level that maybe there's propulsion systems we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff. So it's at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring. I just want to say that. But on the video side, it's like it's the videos for the Flir video, the go fast and the gimbal video. They are only interesting to me to me in the context of your story. Like without that, they're kind of low resolution. It's like it it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical. So this is where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me otherwise. But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that one of the most amazing video parts of the Flir video for people haven't seen it is at the end of it, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen. And what Mick West says is that, you know, Mick West, probably others, that the way to explain that is the tracking system. Like we said, this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object. The tracking loses it. And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking it. So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video. Looking at your face, you do not. So can you maybe comment to that to that debunking aspect? So it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system. No, for sure. And that's like me going because I'm a big Formula One fan. You know, that's like me going, oh, my God, Lewis, what were you doing? You could have done this with the car and you'd have won the race. You know, and Lewis Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two time ways, four time, four or five time world champion. But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car. Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't tell you how many times I've watched. You got to remember when we looked at this thing, when when Chad came back with the video, we sat there and watched that. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all right, right. All right. Let's look at this, you know, because you can look and see where the you can see where the airplane's going. You can see if it's looking left or right. And if you actually watch all that stuff, it doesn't do that. It actually when the vehicle starts to move, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod. The tracking gate will start to open up. And but the thing when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can't move fast enough. It has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around because there's another theory that, oh, the pods looking forward when the pod passes underneath the airplane. So if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me as it does this, the ball will actually flip around to kind of finish off and it'll it'll it swaps ends because it has, you know, it's a gimbal. It can't just it's not free floating. But there's a theory on one of them. Oh, it's here and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front. It stays like this. So yet another another debunker who doesn't know this. So, you know, and Mick has had several theories on other of some of the other videos like one of them, the go fast as a bird. And Jeremy Corbell actually did a nice job of saying, no, it's not because he's on he's on black hot. So the white object is actually colder than the ocean. That's fine. If they were colder than the ocean, they'd be dead. So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the apparent rotation of the object. That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of. And Mick West suggests that a flare like reflections or whatever can explain. Now, because what Mick West doesn't see is so when they take because I've talked to the one of them, actually, I work with. So I know him. I know I talk to him all the time. So and it's his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends for the video, the movie and both of them that go fast in the game were shot by the same person. Yeah. OK, so and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each other. OK, so what you don't see is. So the airplanes, airplanes still super hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon, things incredible, OK? It doesn't usually if it's if it's out there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff. And then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting pod, there's heat signature and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something's there. It's real. It's not you're not picking up some extraneous thing. So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit, look at that thing. And it's in the wind and it's going against the wind while it's doing this. You know, someone goes, oh, it's an airplane. No, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect. It just rotates. It's just rotating. Right. The other thing that you see when you talk to them is so they're on their radar. There's an object that they identify is their number one priority or their launch and steering. So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pod is going to look. That's what you get on the gimbal video. There's five other I think it's five. They're kind of in a V, you know, like a geese would fly that are out in front of it and they're actually coming. They're out in front of it and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while they're filming the gimbal video, which it's I know Ryan has come out and talked about it. But when you see it, you go, you know, if you take it in context because you go, oh, it's just the video. Well, if you take the video with the radar going, no, there's actually other things out there because there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the VACAPES. It actually became, I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time, the fighter wing. I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, well, we got a NOTAM out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area. So anyone, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area. All the warning area tells you is that there's high military traffic and training out here. It's probably best not to be here, but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there. So these things have the right, wherever they're from or whatever they are, you know, cause people are like, oh, they're balloons. Well, balloons float. Balloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location. They had an airplane because there was two. There's the gimbal thing. That's a pretty big object. There's also, they talk about, it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere. A translucent sphere. What the hell is that? And they almost hit one. It's almost hit them. So that's another, that's one of the biggest, another biggest account. It's like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere. What do you make of that? Again, you know, what, I mean, that that's, that's the most dangerous thing. You're right. The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go, okay, so this thing passed between two airplanes and it was, I think it was more than like a hundred feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it. So what they do is they come back and go, Hey, I had a near midair, what'd you have a near midair with? It's kind of this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it. And you go, huh? And you know, so they send out a NOTAM again and they, they do a, what's called a hazard report that says, Hey, there's these objects out there. We almost hit one here and that gets sent off to the Naval safety center. What was done? I mean, what are you going to do? Can you catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one? You don't know because they've seen them. They picked them up like hovering on radar. And then all of a sudden they're traveling at really high rates of speed. So you know, what are you going to do? Well, and that, let me ask this, cause this is what people kind of think about. After you witnessed Tic Tac and after this, these incidents, as far as we know, uh, with the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not, did not react like what, like did not freak out. It almost like was like a mundane event. How do you explain that? Why didn't the people on the ship, not the higher ups, why wasn't there a big freakout? Or as some people suggest, the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not letting everyone know that there's some kind of secret military, uh, uh, you know, like, like tests. Yeah. So let's talk about, so let's say you've got this cool new toy, which you call it a cool new toy. You typically don't take your cool new toy out into an area where the cool new toy could get damaged or what if the airplane would have actually hit your cool new toy and you got two people that are ejecting or dead and you got a, you know, $80 million airplane that's now in the bottom of the Atlantic, um, you know, tests are normally done in controlled environments. Just, it's like any test, a lab test or whatever. When you take things out into the real world, you know, you're still going to test it in an area where if something goes wrong. So when they started and we'll go back to Elon. So my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go off, they were out in Kwajalein and when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket and it ran out of fuel before it got all the way up and it came falling back down. Well, when you're out on an ATOL in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is going to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land and it actually crashed next to the ATOL and, and, you know, Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus. So that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So cause someone said, well, when we chased the Tic Tac, well, it could have been some secret government thing. Well, secret government things typically just don't come out and test to where there's going to be. Unknowing pilots, you can't control a lot of things. You're exactly right. So you go, you know, it's, you know, it's not the Dr. Evil scientist that's going to throw shit out there to get, there's control and there's reasons that we do it because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to there's, there's, you build something in theory, you model it, you go, Hey, this is, it looks like it's going to work. You get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it. You know, you like an airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the ground. They've got things over the pedostatic system that are changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it and it's probably up on Jack. So the gear up, so it doesn't, it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know it's sitting on Jack stands. And they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system so they can actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, Hey, it looks like it's going to work. And then there's wind, there's a bunch of stuff that they do. That's a control environment which you can do the testing. Yeah. Throwing shit out in the middle of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that I've heard. Is it possible? Yes. Is it more really, is it, is it, is it, is it more likely, it's more likely they're not doing that. Then the other side of that question is why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the US government in general, not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen? Freak out in the positive way, freak out in the negative way. Like what are the Russians up to again? Or more like what is this? Like more turmoil. So if you would have put a Chinese flag on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side of it, and I said, yeah, it had a big Russian flag on the side of it, dude. Then it would have got a lot of attention. It would have went high order, right? If it was, you don't have to say Russia or China, just say if there was another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then it's a big deal. So here's what's going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup. Normally they, we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving so we could run home up to the central valley, have Thanksgiving with our family, and then run back down and do this, okay? So when I had just taken over, I had had the squadron for a month, right? So I'm a brand new CO, I'm the most junior guy on the, as far as a commanding officer goes, for time in the Navy, and actually at the time I think it was the most junior CO for O5 Command in the Navy, right? So you go, okay, so I'm out here, I got my squadron, I'm running it, I see this thing, we catch shit for it. I have a squadron to run. I have the, the TICTAC was over here and although an extraordinary event, I have 17 aircrew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for, right? Their wellbeing, making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're birthing, you know, and I'm working with my Master Chief and I'm working with my XO, SNAP, and we're going through all this stuff. I don't have a lot of time to worry about the TICTAC. But people need to talk to me, so you got to remember, you got the captain of the ship, you got the air wing commander, and you got the Admiral. Those are the top three. And you got the CO of the Princeton, who is a major command guy, and that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are O5 Command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is O5 Command. So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what's going on, I'm pretty much in the top 20 with all my peers, and then I've got, obviously, the captain and the admiral, right? And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with. So you're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh, yeah. Busy schedule. Yeah. There's missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done, and there's no time for silly things. That's exactly right. So, and we're the integration, you know, when a battle group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the key. We take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want, and we can do what we need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me, the admiral never saying to me, the people on his staff that I was friends with never saying to me, the other COs that I talked to on a daily basis never said anything to me, and no one ever came and talked to me, and I'm the guy that chased it. So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories, because I don't know if people think they're going to get rich on this because I made a big donut on this. I can tell you what I got paid for. I got paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my day going to LA and do a five minute talk for someone. And I'm like, and it wasn't for the talk because I'll talk for free because you're not paying me. I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because my wife and I got to go because it was just looked like fun because the whole town gets involved. And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because it was just, you know, it was fun. And I got asked and Jeremy and George Knappen went the year before. So I went with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife and, you know, we all hung out kind of, you know, talking not about UFO stuff, but just getting to know each other as people because, you know, Bob's like me, the stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life, you know, he's just a really, really smart guy. That's just like the rest of us trying to get through life. Yeah, nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lou Elizondo's resignation note from his, he was a program director at the ATIP program. One of the sad things is that he's mentioned that, you know, people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, like UFOs as a threat, like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it, it's a sad thing to think about that, that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that we don't want to deal with and it kind of just fades into history. Like literally, it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up, like, and it just didn't because they're not, like when aliens show up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule and if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up in some very nonchalant peaceful way briefly. People would be like, that's, I don't have time for this. That's so sad. That's so sad. It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back, let's go back way back, way back in the time machine, you know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe, you know, and Europe's a perfect example. Why does France speak French? And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish and then you'd kind of jump over and Germans are German and the Polish people, everyone speaks a different language because if you look at the way the train kind of subdivide the original people that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently, right? You'd be like the US, but see, the US is different. We all speak English because what happened? We came over and we started on the east coast and we migrated west. We won't get into the, you know, what happened and, you know, because the Native Americans all spoke different languages, you know, it's that same type of thing. So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up, you're actually, you think about, you're an alien. If I went to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years where, you know, or a thousand years where travel, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time. We were, well, we don't think we were, but the Vikings probably were because we had limited, you know, we had to have supplies and the boats weren't as big. We had to build them by hand. We didn't have power tools and all that stuff. So, you know, if you show up someplace like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know, and then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in a human alien world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other, we take what we want. And that's what happened. I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are, you know, humans are, we're an interesting group. So you go, now what? What if something is from someplace else? Let's just, let's just go off the grid and go, let's say there are little green men. What are their intentions? Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo and he said, what do you think they were here for us? I said, I don't know. He goes, what? I go, I don't know. They were observing. They'd come down, they'd hang out. And he goes, well, what if they were prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do? And you go, that's interesting. The other theory is maybe there's a more advanced civilization out here and they just check in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization that's inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above. Because now these, they become the threatened type. So you watch us grow until we start getting too much. You know, it's kind of like you go, well, cause they always have a tendency to hang out around nuclear. Right? And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced civilization, I'm going to go science fiction kind of comical. They come down and watch us and go, look at the, the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't destroy themselves. Yeah, if I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb. That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of, what is it, UFO sightings since, since the nuclear era, since the nuclear era. Yeah. You go, hmm. Let me ask a little bit out there question, maybe it's a speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell, do you think it's possible that there is out of this world aircraft or beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth, like the US government? Is it possible? So the one perspective of that, if it's possible, is it possible to keep a secret like that? I would say this. I think it's very, it's highly possible because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings and let's go, just look at project Blue Book, it was what the, I forget how many thousands of sightings that there's a percentage, it's like 10 or 15% of them, they still can't explain. Like our Tic Tac is one of them that, you know, they basically, the government has come out and said, we don't know what that was. Okay. So, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that we don't know, and all of these thousands are still that 15% makes up a pretty big number. What are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered? And I don't care if it's an intact system or you've got pieces of it, of a metal that we can't explain or some, some biological matter to say the least, it could be intact or it couldn't, but the odds of that now are starting to go down that, you know, that could never happen. And I'm not talking just the United States, I'm talking the world. So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone in the, in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something that is not from this world? And I'm not talking a meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation. Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff. And we've got stuff that just went past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper belt, you know, there's, there's stuff out there floating around. And what about ours, it's going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, cause we've had stuff crash into planets. So if that's the case, you would think something is out there that we have something that we can't explain. And according to Lou, there's stuff that we can't explain, you know, and I would assume that Lou who ran a tip has, has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about because, you know, cause I had a clearance. When you have a clearance, you were, you sign your name, you're bound to that. And to me, that's an important oath that you hold to, you know, and this is kind of where, you know, people have issues with Bob. So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not. I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy. Bob Luzaro. Yeah. Yes. There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked, you know, to those who will clearance who, you know, are true to the government, you would say he should have never spoke. He, he was under an oath to not say anything, but he did. If you ask Bob, why did you say something? His, his answer was, I understand there's an oath, but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind and it shouldn't be locked away. And I'll leave it. If you believe Bob, that's, that's kind of what Bob says. And that, that's such a interesting key point. If there is aircraft, a technology that's in the possession of the, say the US government, should they make that publicly known? This is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature of human civilization? Like the, the way we, the way we think about our place in the world, also the, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that information or not, if you were the government? So here, well, here's exactly how. So for, for classified information, the government is the people that classify it. So I can't go, I can't look at something and go, Oh my God, this Avion bottle is now a top secret. I can't, I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that. That's the guard. That's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life. So I understand that. But now you go, there's reasons stuff is classified. Okay. And it has to do with, uh, sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained. It's just like the mob. If I have a spy and I'm a mobster and you're the counter mobster, but I have a guy on the inside that's feeding me information, I can't do it. And a perfect example is if you've ever seen the, uh, it's the Tom Cruise movie, what is it? Air America or whatever, but he, he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling drugs for Pablo Escobar and he ended up getting a cargo plane and the government, the CIA was kind of funding him to do stuff. That's how he got hooked up with Pablo, but they put cameras on his airplane and when Reagan had come out and said, here's pictures, we have proof that they're running these drugs. It didn't take Pablo long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside of the plane of this guy he had been working with and that guy ends up dead. Does that make sense? So you classify to protect the source, you classify to protect the technology because if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there's levels depending on if it's a secret or top secret. There are levels of damage that can be done to the U S government and our wellbeing as a country. And we owe it to this because we're all Americans. You know, to me, no matter what some people will say, even in this country, this is the greatest country on the planet. This is the only country that you have the ability to do what you want to do. It's just, don't be lazy. And I have stories of people that came over here and started with nothing and they're, they're living the American dream and they'll tell you, and they didn't get it because of, you know, like you, you came over here from Russia, you get no minority status or anything else. You get, you're a white Anglo Saxton Protestant, whatever your religion, but you come over here. I kind of knew that from the last, but, um, but you come over here, you basically have made yourself, you're educated, you're working at literally the top research university in the world. To be honest, um, I can do whatever the hell I can create a, with a bit of, with a lot of hard work, I can do quite a, and no one gave it to you. So, I mean, and I, well, I'm a believer that like that, I mean, we are a community. So like there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing. And this is this, I, you know, I joke about being Russian, but I, I'm an American and this is, I do believe the greatest country on earth. So there's a reason the nationalist pride, uh, the pride in your nation is a powerful thing. And around that, this secrecy holds value. But to me, alien technology is bigger than that. I mean, it's, it's not so much a threat as a, you're holding back something that could inspire the world, like human knowledge. So let's talk in theory. So I'm going to go back to Bob cause I've talked to Bob. So Bob is a propulsion guy, right? Right. Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor. He built a rocket car, you know, so he did that. So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say this is, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory. I am, I own, I have, I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don't understand. And I know it's a propulsion system. So now I got to figure it out, right? So who are you going to go to, right? You go find someone. So you go, wait, here's a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos, which they have proven who is big into propulsion. He designs all this. He builds a shit in his garage, Hey, he's super smart. Why don't we bring him in? So you hire him on a contract and you go, Hey, we're going to brief you into a program. And he goes and works on wherever he says he worked, you know, that's not important, but you get access to the technology to try and figure it out. And then you go, well, you know, Bob comes out and says, you know, like we're figuring out these things, but there's a part where our technology isn't advanced enough for us to figure the whole thing out. So then, you know, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out and tell anyone he works on it until he gets to the point where he's stagnated. He's at a, he's at a wall. You go, I can't do it. You know, sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So you go find someone else who's into propulsion, you bring him in and they work, they can't figure it out. Or they get to the point where kind of back to the Einstein theory where, Hey, I've got all these theories on how it works, but we don't have the technology. We haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do. We still have to advance technology more. So then what do you do? You shelf it, you go, Hey, good projects over and the contract, you shelf it and you wait another 10 years and you wait another 10 years until technology and our abilities and our research advances more and then you go find new people to bring in that are experts in that field and go, Hey, we want you to work on this thing and here's what we know about it so far. Or you don't tell them anything because you, cause remember if you, if you reveal someone else's research, you can taint their beliefs. They'll start to sway in that direction. So you go, I'm not going to tell you anything. I'm going to give you this thing and now you tell me what you think. And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem that maybe Bob and someone else solved earlier, you can go, Hey, what about this? You don't have to tell them where it came from. What about this? You can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology and you shelve it again. Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because it's heartbreaking. I don't, listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on. The, the alternative approach is to release this to the world and say, there's a mystery here. And then the Elons of the world, the Jeff Bezos, we talked about money, but it's also not just money. It's like this engine that's within, we talked about the American dream to say, I'm going to be the one that cracks this mystery open. And like, that's within a lot of us and like money aside, people in their garage just will. But you're thinking like a scientist. Now let me, now let's shift to, let me think like a country. So we have country A, B, and C, and you can look at the nuclear arms race. So we know that Germany was really close. We know that Russia was getting pretty close. We just won the race and we were the first ones with it. And still to this day. And Germany could have won. They could have won. They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they knew they had the answer. It's literally what it comes down to. Someone was smart enough to realize if that, that got into the hands of the Nazis, that that would be the end. And that's, that's a tough call to do that, knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the wrong end. And that's kind of the fear. When you look at this, you go, okay, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it kind of international space station, like we're all going to work on it together in a, you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from any weapons or anything. And we're supposed to, you know, we've got the international thing down there. We're all going to work together. If you did it in a, in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out, because what you don't want is the, someone stealing information and getting it back to where, and countries are notorious to do this, Hey, we're doing it internationally, but we're secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first. That's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power. It would, it would literally change the game of the way the world operates and from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it's got huge, huge. Yeah. Yeah. I, so beautifully, beautifully presented and there's, I feel like there's a tension between those two places, the scientist view of the world and the national security view of the world. Let me, let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists kind of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system that's exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets. And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to almost any conspiracy theory, to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do, but the, there does seem to be, and I tend to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy. It seems that the communication, like the three videos that were released and just the way of DOD in general talks about the things we've been talking about, it's just confused. There's contradictory, it's not inspiring, it's, it's suspicious. It's just not even the way they released the videos. You know, the Tic Tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists. It's like at the, you know, us going to the moon and it's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible, you know, and, and the way it was released, it was suspicious. It was like low resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents. And I mean, why, what is it? I don't know how to ask this question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the public? I don't know how, especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years. And I don't think, cause I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that, you know, when it comes in, like I said, you know, the government has the right to classify stuff. They classify everything cause they don't know. You have something, you don't know what it is, you don't know. So we just go, well, it must be, it must be top secret and let's put it in a vault. You know, it's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the ark and they put it in, it's in the giant army warehouse. You know, we don't even know what we have. So, but I also believe that, you know, and I'll say this openly, I don't think that the American people need to know everything. I think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection of this country. And I totally believe in that. So, you know, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about the storm area 51. So I'm like, yeah, that's probably the worst idea you could possibly have is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons, there are reasons that we have things that we don't just let out to the public. Because if we do, as soon as you do let someone know that you have something, they immediately try to counter it. And perfect example, the U.S. in the 60s developed a bomber, it was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB 70. Okay. There was three of them built, three of them ever built. It was a like 60,000 foot high, you know, Mach 3, it was an incredible airplane when you see it, and there's actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum. You know, it would go, the wingtips would fold on, it looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster. When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG 25, literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber. And they built an entire fleet of MiG 25s, right? We built three XB 70s and we scrapped the program, right? Because now you go, well, the technology is cool, we proved it, but now it becomes obsolete. So it's not even worth building a whole fleet of these things. You know, it's a chess game. We do something, they do something, we do something, they do something, and we do something and then they counter it. You got to figure out how to defeat it. So you go, oh, we'll build something. So the more we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better. Actually, personally, I think we talk too much. And I think the military and the DOD is starting to see that we're too open. You announce, hey, we're building this because there's a budget line and we live in a free society, but you don't have to release all the specs and you don't have to put everything in open source. But that's a problem when we go to the universities. If we want to go do work with MIT and you want to partner with MIT and you're a defense company and you want to partner, you know, you guys have a rule that if you create it, then it can be open source because the university owns it and we are an institution of learning. Where the defense side might go, we don't really want that published in a paper in Scientific America. It's so heartbreaking. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concord's. Some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever is done in secrecy and it sucks because it's so inspiring and they can't talk about it. It is, but some of it's due to funding. The US government has deep pockets. You know, some of this new technology that you develop for an open source and lesson, this goes back to the original conversation. We now, there's enough money in the private sector that individuals control. Bezos, I'm not talking Amazon. I'm talking Jeff Bezos, a single individual worth over a hundred billion dollars. He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what, the Gates Foundation with between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos's ex wife actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation. What's the Gates Foundation worth these days? These are guys, brilliant, brilliant. Some of the greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing? Because they have the ability to, it's a nonprofit, they can go, hey, I want to fund this. I want to fund this research. They can look beyond the conflict between nations. You can look beyond the conflict of having to have classification. You could do what you want. It's just like, we classify how to do the whole nuclear, how to create a critical mass. But there's really smart high school kids that have figured it out mathematically and they do their science project. And then the government comes in and says, hey, we got to classify your government because we just don't want this out in the public domain, which I understand. And they never stopped them from free thought and developing that. It's just, hey, we really don't want this out there. Okay. So I understand that. I totally understand that. But if Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey, we want to do this and they're going to work with Bezos and they're going to work with Elon and we're going to, I mean, you think about it. There's a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D and I'm not talking just science like this, I'm talking medical research and all this. But then you go, well, who gets it? Because now you're competing against the companies that actually do it. You go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds? I'd say, you know, we have a tendency to go, these are the best that we have. And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have. But there's probably people out there that don't want to work. There's brilliant minds that don't want to do anything with defense because they just disagree with what it does. So they go to another path, they can do something else. And in a sense, like the Elons of the world that Jeff Bezos actually in a certain sense much better than DOD at finding the brilliant, weird minds out there. Because they're not tied to the government. So when you work a government contract, the government writes, they tell you what they want and then they work with you on the requirements and they usually have an end in mean. You know, they have an idea that this is what I want it to be. Where if you go to like SpaceX, where, you know, they come up with, why don't we just land these things on a pad and reuse them? Well, if the government scientist, if you're on a government contract says, no, that's not the requirements. We're not paying for that. We want you to do this. You're kind of controlled. Or when Elon does it, his company, they can do whatever the hell they want to do because they have no bounds. The only bounds they have is the liability if it doesn't work and it lands on something. So what do you do? You go out to Kwajalein and you test it. And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we clean it up. No big deal. We lost some money, but we'll move on. It's, you know, money makes the world go around contrary to what everyone thinks. But, you know, there's a lot of money that's sitting around that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with. And I don't know. I mean, I'll guarantee that, what is it, Blue Origin, isn't that Amazon? You know, that they're doing some cool stuff because they have funny. And I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because they were building the first test thing and they were limited. And Elon found this like 400 acre thing, I think it's about 400 acres down by Waco, Texas. And he's like, I go, how, he goes, dude, I worked, he goes, I worked with, he goes, because he's done government contract. He goes, there's government contract. And then there's working at SpaceX with Elon money. And that's what he refers to it as, is Elon money, where it was like, don't, I'll throw them and he would throw the money at it and make it happen. And it's, I'm talking this fast. I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this. I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the private sector vice the government where there's the bureaucracy is. They had a company that was a, basically a tool and die machine shop that did a lot of their high precision parts for the rockets. They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies. And when the economy was down, the guy was actually looking at going out of business. So the guy I know, he's telling me the story. He was talking to the guy, he had to go over there and get something. And he's like, holy shit. He goes, hang on. So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX, he says, Hey, is Elon there? Can you get them in the boardroom? We'll be there in 20 minutes. So he grabs this guy who's literally going to fold his company. They go over to SpaceX and I may be getting some of this wrong if people are going to fact check me, but this is pretty close. They go in the boardroom and he said, literally within like an hour or two, Elon has bought the guy's company. That guy is now a senior VP running his company. And they're going to pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing so they can actually build the parts and they can still contract out to make the money outside. And it happened like that fast. It's not just money, it's because I've witnessed it too with Elon. I think it's whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise to the top, because I've also worked for DARPA for research in terms of a source of funding. There's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, being funded by DARPA. And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of anything is possible, cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately. How much money and time do you waste dealing with your bureaucracy when you could actually be doing real work? That's the difference. This is why I honestly, when I went back to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about, when you look at it and go, SpaceX can do something for half the price ahead of schedule that what Boeing, we're paying Boeing, and you go, oh, well, this just came out. And you go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with this side? Because you've got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to fly around in. It worked like a champ. It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down. It worked perfectly. We're going to dust it off. And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and then put to museums, they're going to reuse that dragon capsule. It came down, they're going to dust it off, put a new coat of paint on it, slap it on top of another rocket and away it goes. Holy cow. It's amazing. It's a shift. It's a complete shift in mentality. And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost. It's exciting, especially given putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky or it's limitless the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism. I think it's exciting. Yeah. I think we live in an exciting time right now. This is everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is a hopeful, like there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have a hope for the future, to look up to the sky and we're humans. We can solve so many, we can solve all of this. I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing and I said, this would be great, because then the government had come out a month ago and said, hey, this does exist. We're doing this and we're going to release more stuff. And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys before I went on, because they had called me up to be on Tucker's show and I'm like, hey, I go, this would be great. Just come out with this, find the relic of a spaceship, like pull out the Roswell wreckage if you have it, pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it. God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with the riots in the cities. I know it's an election year and all that, but God, it would be refreshing to not have to turn on my TV and see everything that is just depressing in the world. To begin, holy cow, we actually do have this and we're working on this technology. Imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft and they pull it out, imagine the innovation that happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than that. Just the innovation that happens, the look on Elon Musk's face, the look on Jeff Bezos's face and all the brilliance in years. It would change the game. It would change the game. It would change the game completely. Let me ask the big question, I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it. Outside, I mean, one of the things, the fact that you've laid your eyes on a UFO probably opened your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings, there could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them. What to you is the, outside of your own sighting, is the most interesting sighting or UFO related event in history? I think there's several. What is it? Ramassan Forest in England, the US guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns. One guy was medically disabled, but they weren't going to give him and he had help from John McCain. His office helped get the guy's disability reestablished. I think that's a big one. I think there's people out there that have seen stuff and I'm talking credible because there's, you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of the sightings that get disproven. They're actually explainable. You had sent me the question, the Phoenix lights, I think there's... What's that? So I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these. I'm not either, you want a funny story on that. So I was at a conference, hopefully he doesn't watch this and get offended, but we had this, I call it speed dating. So there was a table, about eight people at a table and we would go sit at the table and they could ask us questions and then after 10 minutes we moved to the next table. So I was speed dating all these people that are really into this. It was kind of funny, but I had sat down and it's always funny because some people will try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the dominators away so that if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too. So we got into this and the guy starts naming all these, well, what about this? What about the Phoenix lights? I'm like, I don't know about the Phoenix lights. What about this event? I don't know about that. He goes, he looks at me and he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not, but I chased one. So I'm an expert. Have you? And you could see him get deflated because I'm kind of a smart ass like that. Yeah, I mean the firsthand experience from a credible, in some sense these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human. Well, I think part of that is to us, that's a credibility piece because the four of us that actually saw it, plus the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video, none of us are UFO obsessed people. So when we come out and say, because to me it's five minutes of my life, I did a lot of really cool, I've had really kind of neat things I've been able to do. But when you look at it and go, to me it's not the pinnacle of my life. To other people that they live in the UFO world and it's like they, if you talk to people that are really into it, who've never seen one, it kills them that they didn't see one. When here we are, and what's unique with ours, which kind of adds that level is we just didn't see it. It wasn't like, oh look, something in the sky and it was weird. We actually engaged with it, it was an engaged five minute thing. And there's other stories from other countries, like there's a story in the back when the Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these things and one of them shot at some, it shot it because they said shoot at it and it shot it and then it got shot down. And then they said, don't ever shoot at them again and don't chase them, just you can observe them, but don't go after them because obviously they have firepower that we can't control because if you can make something float around and jam radars at will and do whatever you want, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful. You can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around, oh, we got to, now you got a cyber warfare, you got to take the bug down, you got to take the warfare, so now we can actually inhibit some type of damage. So there's, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights, somebody on I think Reddit said, ask them any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix lights. So the interesting thing, like you said with the Tic Tac is that multiple people laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix lights where many people have seen it? So here's the deal with massive sightings. So the Phoenix lights is unexplainable, although I know the Air Force had said something about it was an A10 drop in flares. No, I don't think so. Flares don't burn that long, they just come out and they detract and they go away. Although on the other hand, there's, because clouds can do things, so I lived in Central California for 18 years and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky and it was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off. They were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across and they go land in the Atoll at Kwajalein and then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff, it's stuff that we do because we're a superpower. But when you see them go up, especially if you've ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night, it'll have the stream, the glow, and you can tell it's a rocket, but if you don't look up until later when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, and you can watch this on TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow, and then it hits a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because the forces aren't holding that all into one unique thing and it looks really odd and then it'll go off because it burns out and then you get stage separation, then you see the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand that because they didn't watch it from launch because we used to sit in our driveway and Vandenberg, it was a three hour drive, but you could sit and watch it. You knew they were launching at night, you'd watch, you'd watch and it's really cool. If you don't see anything, what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume, what's left, the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing it so you get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky. That's part, but when you go to Phoenix Lights and you go, hey, when a thousand people see something, are you going to discredit all a thousand people or are you going to try and explain it away with something else, you know, it's a weather balloon, it's a weather balloon. Again, just like the Tic Tac, I think is just inspiring for the limitless nature of the science. I think more is going to come out. I think some of the stuff that the To The Stars folks have done. So there's a To The Stars Academy. What are your thoughts about them? Are they? I talk to them quite a bit. I'm not a part of To The Stars Academy. But I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this. What's their mission? What's their hope? When they started, their mission was to try and, don't look at this as little green men, but let's look at this as a technology and let's try and almost reverse engineer and figure out how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge, workspace knowledge to go, how would something like this operate? That's really their bottom line was to try and use and then couple that with, because they've got the series unidentified, couple that with television to get the word out. So you're actually putting something instead of... Because everyone has a theory, you know, Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories, you know, it's kind of off of, oh my God, and I've seen the stuff and I've seen stuff that I've said taken out of context on shows that I did not talk to. So there's all that, because you can take a clip and go, oh, it's this, it's that, you know? And if I know about stuff like it, you can't technically use my likeness unless I tell you you can. So if I haven't signed something you can't do, there was a guy who put something out, you know, I was in it and I told him, you can take it down and you can talk to lawyers because I'm not supporting you. So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that's not connected to reality. Because let's face it, if you're making TV shows, there's two reasons to do it. One, you want to get word out, or two, you want to make money, or three, both. And so usually it's, I would say the make money is probably the biggest thing to put a TV show out. And the mission of the To The Stars Academy is to not do that, is to try to get some... When they started and I talked to them, because I've talked to Tom and I've talked to Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid of the stigma that's tied to UFOs, and let's look at it from a science base and then use TV to get the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool things. I mean, you know, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property of their government. They got a bunch from... It might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of stuff, like, here's all our records, what can you do with it? To try and now pull from country based to a more global based research, which is what you were talking about, and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government. I mean, any government, but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some of the metallurgy, because you go, oh, I found this, we had this piece of metal, what is it? And some of the stuff has been explained. They've got some objects, artifacts that have not been explained. And that's slowly coming out, you know, and I think... And your hope is the US government will release some more things? The US government came out a month ago and said, we have material that we cannot explain the origin. They have said that. They just haven't released the records from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about. I'm like, come on, it's 70 some years old. I mean, like, let it out. I think you put it beautifully that in this time, that will be a heck of an inspiring, hopeful thing to see. Like people don't... Just to distract them. Right? Yeah, the division is, I mean, nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps. Like the idea that there's life out there. It would literally change. I said this a while ago, I think it was the London Sun Times had called me and I said, you know, personally, I think this is a global issue. It's not. If there is stuff coming down, which we're pretty sure there is, there's enough stuff that we can't explain. If there is stuff coming down, then this is not a country based thing and it's not about technology and it's not about who's going to win the next war because you don't know what they're doing. So you got really a couple of theories. One, you've got ET or close encounters and the other extreme is you've got Independence Day. Are you going to prepare and bet on ET and close encounters or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is Independence Day, you actually have a game plan. And when you get into Independence Day, that scenario, you know, and I don't like going too much into sci fi, but let's just say in theory that that becomes a reality. It's not a US, Russia, China, England, France, Spain, name any country in any continent. It becomes a global issue and the only way you can deny it, it's just like Americans. We all, you know, we're divided. We spend that way forever. So if you think we won't get through this, we'll get through it because we've had times just like this before. Until Nazi Germany pops up. But Nazi Germany pops up or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center and then all of a sudden we're all like united. We all also have very, very short memories. Yes, we do. Exactly. It's when you look and go, well, we can do this and you go, no, no, if you think that everyone on the planet is good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking. You know, we said this, there were people during the rise of Hitler, no, no, it's it's OK. And no, no, it's OK. We're not going to do. We're not going to stop. No, no, it's OK. No, no, it's OK. No, no, it's OK. The only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia. If he just stuck with the pact with Stalin and not went to the east and had to fight and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him and he would have put all his high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally different outcome. The man in the iron, the man in the high tower, whatever, it's a Netflix show where Nazi actually wins it. And you look, you know, we didn't know everything that was going on, especially the atrocities with the concentration camps and what he was doing to the Jews. I mean, it's you look at that going, if you really want to see evil and then there's the whole side of what Stalin did because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did. But that never gets the press. And the thing is, we forget this, we forget this history in our conflicts today. We forget that there is the nature of evil. We forget that there's real evil in the world. And the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both. It's like this interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan, of being both like kind to each other, compassionate, empathetic, but also being like strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to, to make sure that you, that like there's a balance between kindness and force. You use force when force is necessary, but you don't have to walk around like Billy Badass all the time. I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with that literally could kick the shit out of whoever came near them, they never got in fights because one, even people that didn't know them, because they were actually nice guys. You know, they were just good dudes. But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he's a nationally ranked wrestler. He went to Naval Academy with me, he's a very, very good friend of mine. And he is, when you meet him and he wrestled at 190 pounds and he did not lose a match his senior year until he went to nationals, he just had a bad day. He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled the shit out of. And he would cross. It was funny, we joke about it even with him, because when you meet him, he's like the nicest like local, hey dude, you know, hey, how are you doing? He's super nice. And he would cross that ring on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally different person and he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on. And he would get done and he's like super humble and they'd raise his hand and he'd have this blank expression, they'd raise his hand and he'd walk off and as soon as he crossed the line, he'd look up and smile and go, hey, hi guys, how you doing? Like he literally just went and could rip someone's arms off. But as soon as he crossed the line, he was a totally different person. He's like, and he's that way today. He won't even tell you he's a wrestler. That's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is. Oh, he's. That wrestler. He's a. You cross the line, you can be hard, but once you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. Yeah. I know you're super humble, saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. The entire trajectory of having a dream, of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career. What advice would you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and is inspired, that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything? Yeah. Yeah. First, let me start with, and you had a question on, inspirational people. My grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier, huge funeral, beer delivery guy, was delivering beer in the 60s riots where the guys in the black neighborhoods where white people didn't go. My grandfather's Sicilian. He was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States. My great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat. Huge, huge guy and just the nicest, friendliest, would give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his funeral. I'm talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. It was literally a mix of who's who. He had told me once, because when you're little, you start looking. I grew up basically, I was probably middle class, lower middle class. My dad was a fireman. You're not rich. He's working for the city. Paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up. I was talking to my grandfather one day and he said something to me, and this is literally how I run my life. He said, it was about money because you'd see back in the day, if you saw someone in a Mercedes, that was rare. They weren't everywhere. You couldn't lease a car, you actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash. It was a totally different than we are now. He said, he goes, you know, David, he goes, they're no better than you and you're no better than anyone else. He goes, you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person. That's who they chose to be and you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on someone because there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should never ever do that. I kept that close to me. He was a huge influence, my mom's dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way I carried myself. He was one that would say, you can be anything you want to be. He grew up dirt poor and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that, to him, that was a success. To me, it was always trying to better and move on. He was the one, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that anything is possible. When I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969 and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military pilots. We had an Air National Guard that at the time was flying F100, so I'm dating myself. I was just fascinated with flight and I just looked at that going, that's really what I want to do. I never lost sight of that. There was always, I could do this or do that. When I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into Natural Resources at Ohio State and I'm like, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger because I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires because that's just, I like that stuff. It was that or be an oceanographer because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau and actually that's my degree. My undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau, so influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau. I have an oceanography degree. I got an MBA from University of Houston, go Cougs, got to mention them. So you look and people go, what are you going to do with that? And I said, I got an oceanography degree because I got, well, I'm going to sail on the ocean, so at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at and that was a kind of a running joke and then... So these passions and underneath it is the belief that you can be anything you want to be. You can. I told my kids this, when they were young, it was tough, especially for my son. So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind. My wife's brothers are both colorblind. It's really color deprived. Color blind, you see black and white. He can't tell. He has issues with greens, reds, browns. It's funny if you're ever around someone like that because he'll go, what are you looking at? He goes right over there by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go, this? He had a hat on one day. I go, which one are you going to get? He had a hat in his hand. It was green. He goes, I'm going to get the green one. I go, oh, this one right here. He goes, no, the one on my head. I go, Nate, that one's brown. He's like, leave me alone, dad. He got the brown hat because to him it looked great. So he couldn't fly. He came to me and said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate? You're talking to your kids and what do you want to do? He goes, I want to be a pilot. Now I got to tell him because he's looking at me because I'm a pilot, you can't be a pilot. I go, why can't I be a pilot, I said, because you got eye issues, so you got to redirect. The other one was because I stopped flying when I was 42 years old and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I know exactly what it feels like when Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it. Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever. So you do and you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it. So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids and I said, you know, find something that you want to do, that you love to do and that you can do your whole life. And you should be able to do good things for other people. You want to be able to help other people. That's what I said. So both of my kids and there's no one in my family, both of my children, one of them is, my daughter is a doctor doing a residency in internal medicine right now. And my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors. And until I look at it as, you know, people go, oh, you got two doctors. I don't care. I told my kids, if you want to be a garbage man or you want to dig ditches, I don't care. Just be, be the best ditch digger that you can be, I said, and be happy doing it. Because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of money, money, money, money, money, money, money. That's what makes the world go round. But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather who didn't have a lot of money and he was probably one of the most happy people on life. And unfortunately he died at, he died at 65. He had a massive heart attack because he didn't tell that he, he kind of knew it was happening and he just made the choice to do it and it was devastating to the entire family. But he didn't, he didn't have a lot of money. But I'll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there's nobody at them. Yeah. And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy had, I, I, it literally, it was like three miles long. The Pope. It was crazy. Yeah. Who died? The Pope. That was because there was like, Hey, he's a Catholic. He's just, you know, Italian. He goes, you know, who died? The Pope. And I go, no, that was my grandfather. And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister. And it was like, you know, 30 people. And I looked at my mother and I said, where's everybody at? She goes, Oh, no, this is normal. This is what a normal funeral looks like. So it's, you know, for young kids, bottom line, one, be nice. Kindness will get you. I'm a big believer in karma. Kindness will get you a long way in the world. You know, it's easy. It's, it's, it's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, you know, and get rid of the hate. And number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything. And there's a, there's a self realism, like, you know, if you really have trouble with math, getting a PhD in applied math is probably not something you're going to be able to do, but understand yourself, what your own capabilities are. And you know, inside your heart, don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do. Just look at yourself and go for it and, and, and you can do anything. It's just, it's, it's a great, the world's incredible. It really is. Let me ask the last big, ridiculous question. So you've lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death. So let me ask kind of several different ways, the same kind of question. One, do you, have you pondered your mortality, the finiteness of it? And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of your, uh, tic tac encounter is, uh, what do you think is the meaning of this, uh, thing we got going on here? The meaning of life, human life in this sense. So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes. Very often. And I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do believe in God. I've just seen too many things in the world that I can't explain. And some people will explain it by subconscious, so I'll give you a story and this kind of puts in the thing of, do I fear death? So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with, we were stationed in Japan together and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins, so there's a real high cancer rate for those that served on the base in Atsugi, Japan. Him and his wife had one son, um, and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday of cancer. And I was hanging out with, I'll call him John, and I was hanging out with John, we were in oil and gas, he had come to the same company and we were doing an event together and he was opening up to me because we were actually the demo pilots. We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff and him and I were sitting there talking and he was giving me the whole story and how it really changed his look on life that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die. Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location that would fit their, you know, close to the water where they could do stuff and I won't say where, and he was doing what he loved to do and he got diagnosed with throat cancer. And I was talking to him, uh, it was probably about maybe two months before he died, um, and I said, dude, hey, you're sad, I mean, this is your friend and I'm kind of really bummed out and this is the guy, this is a guy that's dying of cancer and here's what he tells me. He says, Dave, dude, we're all going to die. He goes, but I have to look at it, I have to make the best of the time that I have. And I said, I understand that. And he goes, with the exception of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly, he goes, I'm okay with dying. I've had a really good life and, um, about, uh, cause actually the original announcement when he, when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me cause I don't do Facebook and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed and about the day before he died, for some reason I was thinking about him and I had a dream or I think it was a dream or an altered reality. You can get into whatever, uh, but he was there, it was just him and I, and I was really sad in the dream. I was actually crying and he was there and he was actually in his uniform. He was in his whites and uh, cause he was a Navy and we were just talking and he looked at me and he said, and this isn't my dream. He's like, Dave, it's all going to be okay. And this is, this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have. There's people are gonna think I'm weird about this, but, um, but I, you know, I know what my dream was and you know, maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream, but in reality to me, this was real, that it was put there for a reason. He's and he basically explained everything he's, it's okay. I'm going to be fine. My wife is fine. He goes, this is, this is what's meant to be, you know, but you know, and the bottom line was make use of every day that you have because you don't know. And literally two days later, I find out that he passed. Um, so, but ultimately he accepted the finiteness of it. He did. Well, you have to, and it's like, I talk about, you know, money and job position and this and that, and I said, you can get in any, you know, you can go to a company. Just remember when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company. You have to, I said, if you look, I joke with people at work and I said, I said, you know, when you ever think that you're important or this guy has that, I said, when you're sitting on 93 or 95, one 28 and you're sitting in traffic and we're stopped, which doesn't happen right now because of COVID, but normally it's stopped. It's bumper to bumper and you're sitting here like I was coming down here by the gas tank. Um, when you're sitting there, look left and look right, you know, and there can be a Lamborghini or an S five 50 Mercedes. And on the other side, there could be some piece of crap car. We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time, trying to do the same thing, which is just get home so we can be with our family because the most important thing that we have, it ain't money. It ain't our job. It's not our position. I go, cause when it's all said and done, you could be, you know, you can be with the exception of the presidents of the United States. I mean, name the vice presidents. Most people can't and eventually they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the 17 hundreds in the Boston area and you're going to go, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life? He probably did, but eventually people forget you realize what's important now and the one thing that you have is your family and your close friends and that's, that's it. You can take all the money or everything else. If you're down on your luck, you know, who is going to be, we, I just joke, who are your true friends? It's the person. Well, there's, there's a once that I won't say, but you know, Hey, you're broke down on a road in the middle of nowhere and it's three oclock in the morning, who you going to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you. And that's life. That is life. The people you love. It's it's, it's the people you truly care about. And contrary to, I have, you know, Oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends. You got about that many real friends that you can count on and that's it. Everything else doesn't matter. Oh, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you don't be nice. I mean, I have, there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for and they can come to my house and stuff, but then there's the people that, you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when, when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin Chad and I got two boys, there's 14 of us, but there's only two boys. There's three of us together and we all grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools, play football together, all that. I said, if one of those, if rare Chad ever needs me, if something happens like when my uncle died, it wasn't a, it wasn't an issue if I'm coming home. Because I'm booking the ticket and I don't give a shit what it costs because I will be there to be there with you. And then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with, you know, you know, if there's, there's, I have a handful of people that, you know, I will drop literally everything. Even if my wife would be pissed at me at times, she's like, seriously, I got to do it. And now she knows, and it's the same thing with her. I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her and she has to go, she would go and I would let her go. So given all that, I'm honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time. Dave was one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. It's a pretty long one. It's probably sets the record for the longest one. So I, I mean, I'm, I'm a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for talking to me, Dave. You're welcome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fravor. And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and app a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122

The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time on the podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I've had the fortune of talking to. A lot of my colleagues at MIT and former MIT faculty and students wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of, Manolis is awesome, isn't he? I'm glad you guys are now friends. I am too. And I'm happy that he makes time in his insanely busy schedule to sit down and have a chat with me. Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I just got back from talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, my fifth time on there. I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe on this podcast. We talked on both quite a bit about his journey and his advice for mine. One of the things that I think made his show special is that he just had fun and made choices that didn't get in the way of him having fun and loving life. I'm learning to do just that. It's tough since I'm naturally full of self doubt and anxiety, but I'm learning to let go and have fun, even if my monotone robotic voice sometimes sounds otherwise. For Joe, that involved talking to his friends, comedians, especially ones that brought out the best in him. Duncan Trussell and the five hour first episode on Spotify comes to mind as an example of that. Duncan has been a guest probably close to if not more than 50 times on Joe's podcast. My hope with amazing people like Manolis is to find my Duncan Trussell, my Joey Diaz, and yes, even my Eddie Bravo. Obviously Joe and I are very different people but ultimately both love life when we can interact often with people we love and who inspire us, make us smile, make us think, and make us have fun when we get behind the mic of a podcast, whether anyone is listening or not. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. I also this time put a link in the description to a survey for this podcast on how I can improve and also an option if you like, I don't know why you would like to, but if you like to join an inner circle of people that help guide the direction of this podcast via email or occasional video chats. If you have a few minutes, please fill it out. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip, but still please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way honestly to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Public Goods, an online store for basic health and household stuff. Their products have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just clean, elegant, and beautiful. It goes nicely, at least I think so, with the design of Crew Dragon and the recent SpaceX NASA mission that sent two humans into space. To me, very few things are as inspiring as us humans reaching out into the unknown, the harsh challenges of space. Colonizing Mars may not have obvious near term benefits, but I believe it will challenge our scientists and our engineers to create technologies whose impact will be immeasurable for us humans here on Earth, or those of us who choose to stay here on Earth. Personally, I'm kind of a long time big fan of this planet. 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So secure your online activity by going to expressvpn.com slash Lex pod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Manolis Kallis. What is beautiful about the human epigenome? Don't get me started. So first of all, as an engineering feat, the human epigenome manages the most compact, the most incredible compaction you could imagine. So every single one of your cells contains two meters worth of DNA. And this is compacted in a radius, which is one thousandth of a millimeter. That's six orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, it's as if a string as tall as the Burj Al Khalifa, which is about a kilometer tall, was compacted into a tiny little ball the size of a millimeter. And if you put it all together, if you stretch the trillions of cells that we have, we have about 30 trillion cells in your body. If you stretch the DNA, the two meters worth of DNA in every one of your trillion cells, you would basically reach all the way to Jupiter a hundred times. A hundred times. Yeah, it's all curled up in there. It's 30 trillion cells. 30 trillion cells, every one of them two meters worth of DNA. So all of that is compacted through the epigenome. The epigenome basically has the ability to compact this massive amount of DNA from here to Jupiter 10 times into one human body, into just the nuclei of one human body, and the vast majority of the human body is not even these nuclei. And that's sort of the structural part. So that's the boring part. That's the structural part. The functional part is way more interesting. So functionally, what the human epigenome allows you to do is basically control the activity patterns of thousands of genes. So 20,000 genes in your human body, every one of your cells only needs a few thousand of those, but a different few thousand of those. And the way that your cells remember what their identity is, is basically driven by the epigenome. So the epigenome is both structural in sort of making this dramatic compaction, and it's also functional in being able to actually control the activity patterns of all your cells. Now, can we draw a definition distinction between the genome and the epigenome? Again, being Greek, epi means on top of. So the genome is the DNA, and the epigenome is anything on top of the DNA. And there's three types of things on top of the DNA. The first is chemical modifications on the DNA itself. So we like to think of four bases of the DNA, A, C, G, T. C has a methyl form, which is sometimes referred to as the fifth base. So methyl C takes a different meaning. So in the same way that you have annotations in a orchestra score that basically say whether you should play something softly or loudly or space it out or interpret basically the score, the human epigenome allows you to modify that primary score. So a modified C basically says, play this one softly. It's basically a sign of repression in a gene regulatory region. I love how you're talking about the function that emerges from the epigenome as a musical score. It is in many ways. And every single cell plays a different part of that score. It's like having all of human knowledge in 23 volumes, like 23 giant books, which are your chromosomes. And every single cell has a different profession, a different role. Some cells play the piano and they're looking at chapter seven from chromosome 23 and chapter four from chromosome two and so on and so forth. And each of those pieces are all encoded in the same DNA. But what the epigenome allows you to do is effectively conduct the orchestra and sort of coordinate the pieces so that every instrument plays only the things that it needs to play. One thing that kind of blows my mind, maybe you can tell me your thoughts about it, is the way evolution works with natural selection is based on the final sort of the entirety of the orchestra musical performance, right? But there's these incredibly rich structural things, like each one of them doing their own little job that somehow work together. The evolution selects based on the final result and yet all the individual pieces are doing like infinitely minuscule specific things. How the heck does that work? It's a very good insight. And you can even go beyond that and basically say evolution doesn't select at the level of an organism. It actually selects at the level of whole environments, whole ecosystems. So let me break this down. So you basically have at the very bottom every single nucleotide being selected. But then that nucleotide function is selected at the level of each gene and every, not even each gene, each gene regulatory control element. And then those control elements are basically converging onto the function of the gene and many genes are converging onto the function of one cell and many cells are converging into the function of one tissue or organ. And all of these organs are converging onto the level of an organism. But now that organism is not in isolation. So if you basically think about why is altruism, for example, a thing, why are people being nice to each other? It was probably selected and it was probably selected because those species that were just nasty to each other didn't survive as a species. And now if you think about symbiosis of, you know, there's plants, for example, that love CO2 and there's humans that love O2 and we're sort of, you know, trading different types of gases to each other. If you look at ecosystems where one organism was just really nasty, that organism actually died because everyone they were being nasty to was killed off. And then that kind of, you know, universe of life is gone. So basically what emerges is selection at so many different layers of benefit, including, you know, all of these nucleotides within a body interacting for the emergent functions at the body level. Yeah. I wonder if it's possible to break it down into levels that's selection even beyond humans. Like you said, environment, but there's environments at all different levels too, right? At the minuscule, at the organ level, at the tissue level, like you said, maybe at the microscopic level. It would be fascinating if like there's a kind of selection going on, like both the quantum level and like the, the galaxy level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, let's again, sort of break down these different layers. So basically if you think about the environment in which a gene operates, that gene, of course, the first definition of environment that we think of is pollution or sunlight or heat or cold and so on and so forth. That's the external environment. But every gene also operates at the level of the internal cellular environment that it's in. If I take a gene from say an African individual and I put it in a European context, will it perform the same way? Probably not because there's a cellular context of thousands of other genes that that gene has co evolved with, you know, in the out of Africa event and, you know, all of this sort of human history of evolution. So basically if you look at Neanderthal genes, for example, which again happened long after that out of Africa event, there's incompatibilities between Neanderthal genes and modern human genes that can lead to diseases. So in the context of the Neanderthal genome, that gene version, that allele was fine, but in the context of the modern human genome, that Neanderthal gene version is actually detrimental. So it's, it's, you know, that cellular environment constitutes the genetics of that gene, but also of course, all of the epigenomics of that gene. It's fascinating that the gene has a history. I mean, we talked about this a little bit last time, but just, and then some of your research goes into that, but the genes as they are today have, have a story from the beginning of time. And then some, sometimes their story was like their path was useful for survival for the particular organisms and sometimes not. That's fascinating. Let me ask as a tangent. We kind of started talking offline about Neanderthals. Do you have something interesting genetically, biologically in terms of difference between Neanderthal and like the different branches of human evolution that you find fascinating? Neanderthals are only one of about five branches that we are pretty confident about. Branches of? Of out of Africa events. So basically there's Neanderthals, there's Denisovans. What is the evidence for Denisovans? One tiny little fragment of one pinky from one cave in Siberia. Recent, relatively recently discovered, right? Less than 10 years ago. Yeah. And those are like little folks, right? No, no, no, no, no. That's yet another one though. Homo florensis. It had the little folks instead of Indonesia. But then the Denisovans are basically another branch that we only know about genetically from that one bone. And eventually we realized that it's one of the three major branches along with Neanderthal, modern human and Denisovan. And then that one branch has now resurfaced in many different areas. And we kind of know about the gene flow that happened in between them. So when I was reading my Greek mythology, it was talking about the age of the heroes, these eras of human like, you know, precursors that were wiped out by Zeus or by all kinds of wars and so on and so forth, like the Titans and the, you know, it's ridiculous to sort of read these stories as a kid because you're like, oh yeah, whatever. And then you're growing up and you're like, whoa, layers and layers of human like ancestors. And who knows if those stories were inspired by bones that they found that kind of looked human like, but were not quite human like. Who knows if stories of dragons were inspired by bones of dinosaurs. And basically this archeological evidence has been there and has probably entered the folk imagination, migrated into those stories, but it's not that far removed from what actually happened of massive wars of wiping out Neanderthals as humans are, modern humans are populating, you know, Europe. Do you think, do you think what killed the Neanderthals and all those other branches is human conflict or is it genetic conflict? So is it us humans being the opposite of altruistic towards each other? Or is it some other competition at some other level, like as we're discussing? Yeah. So if you look at a lot of human traits today, they're probably not that far removed from the human traits that got us where we are now. So, you know, this whole tribalism, you know, you're my sports team or you're my, you know, political party or you're my, you know, tiny little village. And therefore, you know, if you're from that other village, I hate you. But as soon as we're both in the major city, I can't believe we're from the same region, my friend, my family and like two neighboring countries fighting. And as soon as they're off in another country, you're like, oh, I can't believe that. So it's, it's kind of funny, like this tribalism is nonsensical in many ways. It's like cognitive incongruent that basically we like kin and selection for, for sort of liking kin is hugely advantageous genetically. Probably across all kinds of organisms, across all kinds of life. Yeah. So, so basically if you now transport that to the sort of humans arriving in Europe and Neanderthals are everywhere, what are you going to do? You're going to kill them off. You know, there's this battle for territory and this battle for, they're not like us. We have to get rid of them. So basically there's a, you know, very interesting mix there, but, and yet, and yet when you look at the genetics, there's tons of gene flow between them. So basically, you know, love romance between, you know, tribes, but love spans the gap between the different tribes. It's Romeo and Juliet across species boundaries. Sneaks away from the village. Even before the out of Africa, there's, you know, within Africa selection, which was probably massive battles of larger and larger tribes selecting for our social networking and savviness and, you know, probably all our conspiracy theory genes are, you know, dating back from then. And, you know, so there's a lot of this mischievousness in the history of human evolution that unfortunately is still present in, you know, many ugly forms today, but probably contributed to our success as a species in wiping out other species. It just sucks that we don't have neighboring species that are, you know, intelligent like us that, but yet very different than us. So we have like, you know, dogs or wolves, I guess, co evolved. They, they figured out how to neighbor up with humans in a friendly way and collaborate and develop in time. You're describing this as if the wolves made a choice. It's possible that the wolves never had a say, that basically humans were just so overpowering that they had captive wolves. And then at every generation killed off eight of the nine pups and only kept the one that was milder. And it only takes a few generations to then sort of have pups that are really mild. And so the Neanderthals weren't useful in the same way that wolves were. I don't know if it's a question of useful. They were probably super useful. My thinking is that they were scary, that basically something that almost resembles you is something that you try to eliminate first. It's too close. Yeah. And speaking of, you know, species that are intelligent and sort of what's left of evolution, it is a shame, exactly like you say, that so many different, amazing life forms were extinct and the kind of boring ones remained. So if you look at the dinosaurs, I mean, the diversity that they had, if you look at sub, you know, like there's just so many different lineages of life that were just abruptly killed. And yet out of that death emerged, you know, many new kinds of really awesome lineages. Do you think there was in the history of life on earth species that may be still alive today that are more intelligent than humans? And we just don't know. So there's a case to be made for dolphins. Like if you look at their brains, if you look at the way that they play, if you look at the way that they learn, you know, I mean, they don't have opposable thumbs and we do. So, you know, that probably made a big difference. It's terrifying to think that like, not terrifying, I don't know how to feel about it, that they're more intelligent than us. It's like the hitchhiker's guide. I know. But how do you define intelligence? Basically, like I was saying last time, you know, stupid is a stupid does and smart is a smart does. So if the dolphins are basically super smart, figured out the meaning of life and just go around playing with water all day, which is probably the meaning of life, then we wouldn't know because all they're doing is kicking water just like sharks are and sharks are probably pretty stupid. So basically it's very difficult to sort of judge a species intelligence unless they kind of go out of their way to demonstrate it. Yeah, and that's instructive for our understanding of any kind of life form. You know, I recently talked to Sara Seager looking for life out there on other planets. It'd be fascinating to think if we discover a habitable planet outside of Earth in one day, maybe many centuries away, or be able to travel with like a robot there, how would we actually know that this species would probably be able to detect that it's a living being? But how would we know if it's an intelligent being? I mean, it's both exciting and terrifying to sort of come face to face with a life form that's of another world. Like something that clearly is moving in a, how would you say, like a deliberate way, and to then like ask, well, how do I ask that thing, whether it's intelligent? No, but the question that you're asking is applicable to every species on the Earth now. On Earth now, yeah. Yeah. So basically, you know, dolphins are a great example. We know that they're, you know, clearly capable hardware wise and behavior wise of intelligence. You know, how do we communicate? So basically, if your question is about crossing species boundaries of communication, the way that I want to put it is that humans have achieved a level of sophistication in our behaviors, in our communication, in our language, in our ways of expressing ourselves, that I have no doubt that if we encountered a human like form of intelligence, we'd figure out their language in a few weeks. Like, it'd be just fine. As long as, you know, of course, they're both trusting each other, not annihilating each other, and not sort of fearing each other and attacking each other. What about, let me ask, just out of curiosity into science fiction land a little bit. So clearly, you're one of the top scientists in the world. So if we were to discover, an alien life form, you would be brought in to study its genetics. Do you think the epigenome that we talked about, the genome, the code, the digital code that underlies that alien life form would be similar to ours? Like the, in fundamental ways, maybe not exactly, but in fundamental ways, of how it's structured? Yeah. So you're getting to the very definition of what we're talking about. Of how it's structured. Yeah. So you're getting to the very definition of life. You're getting to the very definition of what makes life, life, and how do we decode that life? And it's so easy to think that every life form would basically have to, you know, like oxygen, have to like heat from the sun and rely on sort of being in the habitable zone of, you know, its solar system and so on and so forth. But I think we have to sort of go beyond this sort of, oh, life on another planet must be exactly like life is on earth. Because of course, life on earth happens to rely on the proximity to the sun and benefit from that amount of energy. But we're talking at timescales of human life, where we kind of live, I don't know, between, and I'm going to be super wide here. We're going to live between six earth months and, you know, 200 earth months or 200 earth years. So basically, if you look at the timescale that we inhabit on earth, it is very much dictated by the amount of energy that we receive from the sun. If you look at, I don't know, Europa, you know, the smallest, the fourth smallest moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the Galilean moons, and also the smallest in its distance from Jupiter. It has an iron core, it has a rock exterior, it has ice all around it, and it has probably massive liquid oceans underneath. And the gravitational pull of Jupiter is probably creating all kinds of movement under that ice. How did life evolve on earth? Yes, sure. Life now, most of life that we above the surface look at, has to do with exploiting the solar energy for, you know, our daily behavior. But that's not the case everywhere on the planet. If you look at the bottom of the ocean, there are hydrothermal vents. There's both black smokers and white smokers, and they are near these volcanic, you know, ducts that basically emanate a massive amount of energy from the core of our planet. What does life need? It needs energy. Does it need energy from the sun? It couldn't care less. Does it need energy from, you know, the earth itself? Yeah, possibly. It could use that. And if you look at how did life evolve on, you know, on earth, there are many theories. I mean, a kind of silly theory is that it came from outer space, that basically there's a meteorite out there that sort of landed on earth and brought with it DNA material. I think it's a little silly because it kind of pushes the buck down the road. Basically the next question is how did it evolve over there? Whereas our planet has basically all of the right ingredients, why wouldn't evolve here? So basically let's kind of ignore that one. And now the two other competing hypotheses are from the outside in or from the inside out. What's that mean? From the outside in means from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. From the inside out means from the bottom of the ocean to the surface. So life on the surface is pretty brutal. Life obviously evolved in the water and then there was an out of water event. But basically before it exited, it was clearly in the water, which is a much nicer and shielded environment. So just to be clear, on the surface, are you referring to the surface of the sea or the bottom of the sea? Versus the bottom of the sea. And you're saying life on the surface is harsh. Life outside the water is horrible. It takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations to sustain living outside the water. That's so interesting. Why is that? So it's easier to, life is easier in the water. Maybe, see, I'm telling dolphins are onto something. We are 70% water. No, dolphins went back into the water. Really? Oh, because dolphins are mammals. Of course. Yeah. Interesting. Well, again, they might be smarter. They went back. They're like, screw this. So if you basically think about the fact that we are 70% water, we're basically transporting the sea with us outside the sea. If we don't have water for about 24 hours, we're dry. And if you look at life under the sea, I mean, I don't know if you're a diver, but when you go diving, your brain explodes. Again, when I say the boring life forms is what we see all the time, like tetrapods. I mean, what a stupid boring body plan. Seriously. Just go dive and you'll see that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea, under the surface of the sea is actually tetrapods. It's like snails with all kinds of crazy appendages and colors and round things and five way symmetric things and eight way symmetric things, all kinds of crazy body plans. And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out. And then they gave rise to all the boring plans we kind of see today of basically, you know, humans with four limbs, birds with four limbs, lizards with four limbs, and you know, right? It's kind of boring. If you look at, by comparison, life underwater is teeming with diversity. So now let's roll back the clock and basically say, where did life in the ocean come from, from the surface or from the bottom? Exactly. Those two options that you were mentioning. Yeah, exactly. So basically life on the surface is one option. And then the idea there is that there's tides with the moon and the sun sort of causing all this movement. And this movement is basically causing nutrients to sort of, you know, coalesce and, you know, bounce around, et cetera. That's one option. The second option, massive amount of energy from the core of our the core of our planet basically exploited, leading to these basic ingredients of life forms. And what are these basic ingredients? Metabolism, being able to take energy from the environment and put it as part of yourself. Metabolism, it basically means transformation. Again, in the Greek, it basically means taking stuff from, you know, like nutrients or energy source or anything, and then making it your own. The second one is compartmentalization. If there's no notion of self, there can't be evolution. You have to know where your own boundaries end and where the non self boundaries begin. And that's basically the lipid bilayer nowadays, which is extremely simple to form. It's basically just a bunch of lipids and then they eventually just self organize into a membrane. So that's a very natural way of forming a self. And then the third component is replication. Replication doesn't need to be self replication. It could be A helps make more of B, B helps make more of C and C helps make more of A. Any kind of self reinforcement is what you need to ignite the process of evolution. After you've ignited that process, you know, I don't want to say all hell breaks loose, but all paradise breaks loose. So basically you then boom, you know, have life going. And the moment you have A, B, C, some kind of thing looping back onto A, you can make modifications and you can improve. And then you let natural selection work. Is there some element of that that's like some state representation that stores information? Like maybe I should say information. Absolutely. We like to think of life as the information propagation, which is DNA, the messenger, which is RNA, and then the action, which is protein. So basically DNA, we think is an essential part of life. That's where the storage is. And therefore that early life forms must have had some kind of storage medium DNA. If you look at how life actually evolved, DNA was invented much later. Proteins were invented later. And RNA was fine by itself, thank you very much, in an RNA world. So the early version of life as we know it today was in fact RNA molecules performing all of the functions. The RNA molecule itself was the protein actuator here by creating three dimensional folds through self hybridization. Self what? Self hybridization. So basically the same way that DNA molecules can hybridize with themselves and basically form this double helix. The single stranded RNA molecule can form partial double helices in various places, creating structure as if you had a long string with complimentary parts, and you could then sort of design kind of like origami like structures that will fold onto themselves. And then you can make any shape from that. That early RNA world eventually got to replication, where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate RNA itself. And then that process basically kicked off evolution. And that process of evolution then led to major innovations. The first innovation was translation. So you start with an RNA molecule and you translate it into another kind of form. And that's the first kind of encoding. You're like, well, do you need some kind of code? Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing. It was conflated with the actuators. The actuators were separated from the code only later on. So you first had the self replicating code, which was also the actuator. And then you kind of have a functionalization, partitioning of the functionalization, a sub functionalization of the proteins that are now going to be the workhorse of life, but they're not self replicating. The code remains the RNA. So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine known to man is the ribosome. The ribosome is this massive factory that is able to translate RNA into protein. The ribosome, I mean, if you want, I don't know, divine intervention in the history of life, the ribosome is it. That's one of the great invention in the history of life. It's yeah. But again, you can't think of great inventions as one time steps. They're basically, you know, the culmination of probably many competing software infrastructures for life preservation that won out. And then when the ribosome was so efficient at making proteins, all the other ones basically died out. And then the life forms that were using the modern ribosome were basically the more successful ones because it could make proteins. And now those proteins are much more versatile because RNA only has four bases. Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids, not initially, but eventually. And then they can form in much more complex shapes and they can create all kinds of additional machines. One of which is reverse transcriptase. So you basically now have RNA. Again, we like to think of transcription as the normal, reverse transcription as the oddball. Well, RNA preceded DNA. So reverse transcription actually was the first invention before transcription itself. So basically RNA invents proteins, RNA and proteins together invent DNA. So you now have a more stable medium and more stable backbone with two helices instead of one, two strands instead of one, the double helix. And RNA basically says, listen, I'm tired. I'm going to delegate all information storage to DNA and I'm going to delegate most actuation to proteins. But that's to you is not like a, that's just an efficiency thing. It's not a fundamentally new innovation. That's why when you're asking is a separate information storage medium a definition of life? I'm like, no, any kind of self preservation, self reinforcement. And it didn't need to be RNA based initially. It didn't need to be self replication initially. You just need to have enough RNA molecules randomly arising that reinforce each other that ultimately lead to the, you know, the closing of that loop and the ignition of the evolutionary process. Can we just rewind a little bit? Like if you were to bet all your money on the two options in terms of where life started at the bottom of the ocean. I don't know if this is answerable, but how hard is the first step or if there's something interesting you can say about that first leap about from not life to life. Yeah. I think it's inevitable on earth or just in the universe. I think it's inevitable. If you look at Europa, you know, going back the moon of Jupiter. It's also a really nice song by Santana. Europa basically has all the ingredients. It has, you know, the core that can emit energy. It has the shielding through the ice sheet, protecting it just like an atmosphere would. It even has a layer of oxygen, probably sufficiently dense to sustain life. So my guess is that there's probably independently a reason life form already teeming in Europa because as soon as it today. Is that exciting or terrifying to you? It's, I mean, as a scientist, I can't wait to see non DNA based life forms. I can't wait because we are so born in, you know, sort of, as I would say in French, but basically we're sort of, you know, we are so narrow minded in our thinking of what life should look like that I can't wait for all that to just be blown away by the discovery of life elsewhere. Let me bring you into another science fiction scenario. So on that point, if we discovered life on Europa and you were brought in, you seem very excited, but how would you start looking at that life in a way that's useful to you as a scientist, but also not going to kill all of us? So like to me, it's a little bit scary because not, not because it's a malevolent life. Like it's a dictator petting like a cat, it's evil, but just the way life is, it seems to be very good at conquering other life. So there's a lot of science fiction movies based on that principle. Yeah. And that's sort of what causes the public to be so scared. But if you think about sort of, would Europa life be scared of humans coming over and taking over? Chances are no, not even like earth bacteria because earth bacteria would be wiped out in an instant in this foreign world because they don't know how to metabolize energy that doesn't come from the types of energy sources that are here. The levels of acidity may just kill us all off. And at the same way, in the converse way, if you bring life from Europa on earth, it'll die instantly because it's too hot or because it doesn't need to know how to cope with, I don't know, the sun's radiation so close to these completely inhabitable zone by their standards. So what we call the habitable zone might actually be the inhabitable zone. Inhabitable for them. So the difference, if the environments are sufficiently different, you think we'll just not be able to even attack each other and the basic. It'll take massive amounts of engineering to create machines that will go there and sample the oceans, basically drill through the layers of ice to basically sample and see what life is like there and detecting it will probably be trivial. It definitely won't be DNA based. It's not like we're going to send a sequencer, but it'll be some other kind of combination of chemicals that will look nonrandom. So if you had to bet, if I took that life form we find in Europa and like put it on a sandwich that you're eating and like eat that sandwich. It'll taste just fine. Well, I know about that. Will it taste fine? That's interesting. So the other question is, do we have taste receptors for this? So where does our taste come from? It's basically adaptations to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing. We don't have taste buds for things we don't even know about. So we won't be able to know that this chemical tastes funny. But you think it won't be, it's likely not to be dangerous. Like it won't know how to even interact. Do you think our immune system will even detect that something weird is going on? Probably. And it'll be very easy to detect because it'll be very different from us. Very weird. But it won't be able to sort of attack. I mean, the scene from, I don't know, Independence Day where like they're communicating with the alien computer and they're like, ooh, I'm in. I mean, it's hilarious because like Macs and PCs have trouble communicating. I mean, let alone an alien technology or even alien DNA. So, okay. Now I was talking about you being a scientist on earth, but say you were a scientist that was shipped over to Europa to investigate if there's life, what would you look for in terms of signs of life? Life is unmistakable, I would say. The way that life transforms a planet surrounding it is not the kind of thing that you would expect from the physical laws alone. So it's, I would say that as soon as life arises, it creates this compartmentalization. It starts pushing things away. It starts sort of keeping things inside that are self. And there's a whole signature that you can see from that. So when I was organizing my meaning of life symposium, my friend who's an astrophysicist, basically we were deciding on what would be the themes for the symposium. And then I said, well, we're going to have biology, we're going to have physics. And she's like, oh, come on. Biology is just a small part of physics. Everything's a small part of physics. And I mean, in many ways it is, but my immediate answer was, no, no, no, no, wait. Life challenges physics. It supersedes physics. It sort of fights against physics. And that's what I would look for in Europe. I would basically look for this fight against physics for anything that sort of signatures of not just entropy at work, not just things diffusing away, not just gravitational pools, but clear signatures of, you remember when I was talking earlier about this whole selection for environments, selection for biospheres, for ecosystems, for these multi organism form of life. And I think that's sort of the first thing that you can look for, you know, chemical signatures that are not simply predicted from the reactions you would get randomly. Such a beautiful way to look at life. So you're basically leveraging some energy source to enable you to resist the physics of the universe. Fighting against physics. But that's the first transformation. If you look at humans, we're way past that. What do you mean by transformation? So basically there's layers. I sort of see life, you know, when we talk about the meaning of life, life can be construed at many levels. We talked about life in the simplest form of sort of the ignition of evolution. And that's sort of the basic definition that you can check off. Yes, it's alive. But when Alexander the Great was asked to whom do you owe your life to your teachers or to your parents? And Alexander the Great answered, I owe to my parents the zin, the life itself. And I owe to my teachers the f zin, like euphony. F means good, the opposite of cacophony, which means, you know, bad. So f zin, in his words, was basically living a human life. A proper life. So basically we can go from the zin to the f zin. And that transformation has taken several additional leaps. So basically, you know, life on Europa, I'm pretty sure has gotten to the stage of A makes B makes C makes A again. But getting to the f zin is a whole other level. And that level requires cooperation. That level requires altruism. That level requires specialization. Remember how we were talking about the RNA specializing into DNA for storage, proteins, and then compartmentalizations. And if you look at prokaryotic life, there's no nucleus. It's all one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life, there's no nucleus. There's no eukaryotic life. Again, U for true, good, you know. So a eukaryote basically has a nucleus, and that's where you compartmentalize further the organization of the information storage from all of the daily activities. If you look at a human body plan or any animal, you have a compartmentalization of the germline. You basically have one lineage that will basically be saved for the future generations. And everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous. If you think about it, the rest of your body, all it does is ensure that that lineage will make it to the next generation, that these germlines will make it to the next generation. The rest is packaging. I'm starting to be so blunt. And if you look at nutrition, you know, we're deuterostomes. What does deuterostome mean? Deutero means second, where this is the second mouth. The first mouth is actually down here, it's the oesophagus. So deuterostomes have evolved a second layer of eating, kind of like alien with the two mouths. So you can think of us as alien where the first mouth is up here and then the second mouth is down there. Is the first mouth just the physical manipulation of the food to make it more consumable? Correct. And basically, again, you know, if you look at a worm, it's an extremely simple life form. It basically has a mouth, it has an anus and it has, you know, just some organs in between that consume the food and just spit out poo. Humans are basically a fancy form of that. So you basically have the mouth, you have the digestive tract, and then you have limbs to get better at getting food. You have eyesight, hearing, et cetera, to get better at getting food. And then you have, of course, the germline and all of this food part, it's just auxiliary to the germline. So you basically have layers of addition, of compartmentalization, of specialization on top of this zine to get all the way to the Earth zine. Yeah. So like the worm is like Windows 95, very few features, very basic. And then us humans are like Windows Vista, Windows 10, whatever it is. Well, a few innovations beyond that. Beyond that, all right. I don't know. We're Windows 2000, at least we're that way. So, okay. That's such a fascinating way to look at life as a set of transformations. Exactly. So like, is there some interesting transformations to our history here on Earth that like appeal to you? Of course. And what are the most brilliant innovations and transformations? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is such a fascinating question. Of course, like, you know, we're talking about basic, basic life forms and we're talking about eukaryotic life forms. And then the next big transformation is multicellular life forms, where the specialization separates the germ line from everything else that accompanies it and sort of carries it. And then that specialization then sort of has this massive new innovation, like above the second mouth, which is this massive brain. And this massive brain is basically something that arises much, much later on. Basically, you know, notochords, like having the first spinal cord, this whole concept that along with these very simple layers, you basically now have a coordinating agent and this coordinating agent is starting to make decisions. And remember when we were talking about free will, I mean, you know, as a worm is hunting for food, oh, it has plenty of free will. It can choose to, you know, follow chemotaxis to the left or chemotaxis to the right. And maybe that's free will because it's unpredictable beyond a certain level. So you basically now have more and more decision making and coordination of all of these different body parts and organs by a central operating system, a central machine that basically will control the rest of the body. And the other thing that I love talking about is the different timescales at which things happen. You know, we're talking about the human epigenome before. The human epigenome is basically able to find what genes should be expressed in response to environmental stimuli in the order of minutes and basically receive a stimulus, transfer all that data through these humongously long string of searching and then sort of find what genes to turn on and then create all that. All of that is happening in the timescale of minutes. Basically, you know, three minutes to half an hour. That's the expression response. But our daily life doesn't happen on the order of three minutes to half an hour. It happens on the order of milliseconds. Like I throw a ball at you, you catch it right away. No gene expression changes there. You just don't have time to do that. So you basically have a layer of control built on a hardware that supports it, but that hardware itself lives in a different timescale than the controlling machine on top of that. Is that an accident, by the way? Is that like a feature? Is it, was it possible for life to have evolved where the hour, the daily life of the organism as it interacts with its environment was on a timescale similar to the way our internals work? If you look at trees, they look kind of boring and stupid. You're like looking at the tree like stupid. If you speed up the movie of a tree from spring until October, you'll be like, oh my God, it's intelligent. And the reason for that is that at that timescale, the tree is basically saying, Oh, I'm looking for a, you know, a thing to catch onto. Ooh, I just caught onto that. I'm going to grow more here. I'm going to spoil out there, et cetera. Like I can see the trees in my garden, just growing and sort of, you know, looping around. And it's all a matter of timescale. It's all a matter of timescale. And if you look at the human timescale, remember we were talking about neoteny the last time around. The whole fact that our young are pretty useless until, you know, maybe, you know, a few months of age, if not a few years of age, if not, I don't know, getting out of college. And then we, we basically hold them enabling their brain to continue being malleable and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts as, you know, that period of neoteny increases and expands. If you fast forward, I don't know, another million years. So humans have only been around, you know, different from apes for about that long. Jump another unit of that, another human chimp divergence. What could happen from an evolutionary timescale? A lot. One of the things that's happening already is expansion of human lifespan. We have longer and longer periods before we mature. And we have longer and longer periods before we have babies. So intergenerational distance is, you know, grown from, I don't know, 16 years to 40 years. You're saying that's in the genetics. No, no, not necessarily. But it's, it's sort of an environmental tendency that's happening. But as we medically expand human lifespan, the generations might actually be pushed instead of 40 years to 60 years, to 100 years. Like if we look at the long arc of the evolutionary history. Exactly. So as we start thinking about intergalactic travel now, sorry, that's a heck of a transition. Yeah. So let's talk about it. No, no, no, no, no. As we, as a species start thinking about, I'm talking about these transitions that are happening, right? And that's, that's awesome. Continue along these transitions. What does the future hold in the next million years? So the concept of us going to another planet and that taking three human lifetimes might be a joke if the human lifetime starts being 400 years or 800 years. So imagine, it's all time scale. It's all time scale. It's just different time scales. You asked me offline whether I would like to live forever. I mean, my answer is absolutely. And there's many different types of forevers. One forever is, do I want to live today forever? Kind of like Groundhog Day. And the answer is absolutely. The stuff that I want to learn today will probably take a lifetime just to learn, you know, basically to clear my to do list for the day. You mean like relive the day and then, and then pick up different things from the richness of the experiences that are all in today. There's just so much happening in the world every single day. So much knowledge that has happened already that just to catch up on that will probably take me around forever. On that, on that point, I just, I would just love to see you in the Groundhog movie just because you're so naturally as a scientist, but just the way your mind works beautifully, just all the richness of the experiences that you will pick up from that. That's a beautiful visual. I try to live each day as if it was Groundhog. I'm basically every single day waking up and saying, all right, how would Bill Murray get out of that one? Well, you know what, on a funny tangent, I got a chance to go to a Neuralink demonstration event. I'm not usually familiar with Neuralink. And I talked to Elon for a while. And one of the funny things he said on his Groundhog Day thing is, you know, it's a beautiful dream to eventually be able to replay our memories. So we're kind of these recording machines. Our brain is kind of, maybe a noisy recording machine of memories. And it would be beautiful if we can someday in the future, maybe far into the future, be able to, like in the Groundhog Day situation, replay that. And the funny comment that stuck with me is he said that maybe this, our conversation now, is a replay of a previous memory. And that stuck with me because it would probably be my replay. You know, who the hell am I? I'm just an idiot guy. But like Elon Musk is, you know, probably because of SpaceX and so on, is probably going to be remembered as a special person, one of our special apes in history. So if I wanted to replay a memory, probably be that one. You know, talking to Elon for a while. That's an interesting possibility from, if we think about time scales, if we think about the richness of the experience through time that we humans take and be able to replay some aspects of that, of that biology, that's super interesting. But anyway, sorry for the tangents. Let's, yeah, you were talking about time scales and the expansion of the human lifetime and the idea of intergalactic travel. Yeah. No, but you're laughing about this. I can't believe you're laughing about this. You're talking about this. You're talking about exploring alien worlds and going to other planets. I mean, you know, when Sarah was here, she was talking about sort of going to other planets when we find these life. I mean, I'm just very naturally, given the topics that we've approached, talking about the timescale at which this will happen. So you think eventually we will human or life, life will expand out into the universe. The point that I'm trying to make is that an intergalactic species will probably find ways to engineer its biology in order to expand the way that we experience time, expand the timescale that we experience. And going back to this whole concept of, you know, would I like to live forever? Yes, I'd like to live forever. Even if it was, even if it was stuck on the same day, I'd love to live forever because I would finally have time to do all these things that I want to do. But if living forever actually comes with a perk of watching the whole world evolve forever, I mean, that's a huge perk. And I would, you know, just, it'll never get boring, just a never changing world. And then the mind, you know, sort of the experiment that I want you to do is to also ask, what if I wanted to live forever one day at a time every year or one day at a time every decade, would you choose that? Or you would wake up and the world would be 10 years later every single day you wake up. It's the opposite of Groundhog Day where basically you always wake up and it's always 10 years later. So you're saying that's such a powerful, interesting concept that life is more interesting if you're, of all the life forms on earth, that you're the slowest one. Exactly. Exactly. Like trees have it right. Like trees have it right. Olive trees. Like, you know, they've been there since the Minoan civilization. And you know, that takes us back to the question you asked about sort of the transformations that have happened in humanity. The Minoan civilization is one of them. You know, there's this paper that was published just a couple of years ago by one of my friends that basically looked at the genetic makeup of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in ancient Greece and how they relate to modern Greeks. And they found that indeed there was very little gene flow from, you know, the outside. And, you know, it's fantastic to sort of think about these amazing civilizations that transformed the way that human thought happens, that basically looked for rules in nature, that looked for principles, that looked for the standard of beauty, not human beauty, but beauty in the natural world. This whole concept that the world must be elegant and there must be deeper ways of understanding that world. To me, that's a massive transformation of our species, similar to, you know, the earlier transformation that we're talking about of even involving a brain, of, you know, learning how to communicate language or the evolution of eyesight. If you look at sort of, you know, we're talking about these worms crawling around and then sensing which direction are the chemicals more abundant, you know, chemotaxis. So eventually they grow a nose. Eventually they grow, I mean, when I say nose, I mean, ways of sensing chemicals. That's probably one of the earliest senses. You know, we always talk about how deep rooted it is in our brain. That's one of the early senses. If you look at hearing, that's a much later sense. If you look at eyesight, that's an intermediate sense where you're basically sensing where the light direction comes from. That's probably something that life didn't need until it got, you know, into the surface and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of, you know, milestones. And I was talking about the latest milestone, which is LIGO, last time of being able to detect gravitational waves and sort of being able to sort of have a sense that humans haven't had before. So you see that as a yet another transformation. It gives us an extra little sense. Of course. And now if you go back to this history of ancient Greece, I mean, this transformation that happened, I mean, of course, the Egyptians had this incredible, you know, civilization for thousands of years. But what happened in Greece was this whole concept of let's break things down and understand the natural world. Let's break things down and understand physics. Let's basically build rules around architecture, about around elegance, around, you know, statues and tragedy. I mean, another question that you asked me in passing was this whole concept of embracing the good and the bad, embracing the full range of human emotions. And if you look at Greek tragedy, it's the definition of that. It's, I mean, drama. I mean, again, it's a Greek word, but the whole concept of some problems that are just so vast and large that dying is the easy way out. That death, oh, that's the easy solution. You know, so I want to touch a little bit on that point and sort of talk about this concept that life supersedes physics and that the brain supersedes life. That basically we have a brain that can decide to not follow evolution's path. We can decide to not have children. We can decide to not eat. We can decide to suicide. We can decide to sort of abolish communication with the outside world. I mean, all the things that make us human, we can basically decide not to do that. And that is basically when the brain itself is basically is basically superseding what evolution program is for. Okay. So one of the, it's okay. My mind was already blown at the beautiful formulation of the idea that life is a system that resists physics and our brain, or perhaps the content of it, or however it may be functionally, our brain is a thing that resists life. Yes. Yes. You're, you're so, you're so brilliant. But, but, but, but, but I want you to see all of that as continuum. Basically, you're sort of talking about the sort of individual transformations, but it's a path that, that humanity has been taking. It's a transformation. It's a path of transformation. And then I want us to think about what it truly means to become human, like the F zine. And you asked me about what motivated my meaning of life symposium. What motivated it in part, I mean, of course it was an inside joke of turning 42, but what motivated it in part was actually a midlife crisis. So the joke that I always like to say is Christos Papadimitriou, a famous Greek professor who was previously at MIT, at Harvard, at Stanford, at Berkeley, everywhere. A brilliant, brilliant person. That's actually Costis's advisor. So Christos Papadimitriou likes to say that when you're an undergrad, you work like a rat to get into grad school. And where you're a grad student, you work like a rat to get your PhD. And where you're a postdoc, you work like a rat to get your assistant professor position. And where you're an assistant professor, you work like a rat to become a full professor. And then when you're a full professor, well, by then you're basically a rat. Oh, that's brilliant. So basically what happened to me is that I arrived at the end of the rat race. You know, life is a rat race. You constantly have hurdles to jump over. You constantly have tunnels and secret pathways. And I figured it all out. And eventually as I was turning 42, I looked back and I was like, wow, that was an awesome rat race. But I'm not a rat. I basically got out of the labyrinth and I was like, I'm not a rat, turns out. Is that the first moment where you saw that you were in a rat race? No, no, no. I've known that I'm in a rat race for a long time. It's so easy to be in a rat race. It's so easy to be an undergrad. But you have problem sets. And you know, we're all smart people. You know, problem set, it has a solution. Somebody made it for you. You can just solve it. Everything was made as a test. And you keep passing those tests and tests and tests and tests. And you have tasks that are well defined. The PhD is a little different because it's more open ended, but yet you have an advisor who's guiding you. And then you become a professor and tenure is a well set defined set of tasks. And you do all that. And at 42, I basically had bought a house, three kids, beautiful wife, tenure, awesome students, tons of grants. Life was basically laid out for me. And that's when I had my main life crisis. That's when people usually buy a Harley Davidson. And they basically say, I need something new. I need something different and to be young myself, et cetera. But basically that was my realization that it's not a rat race, that there's no rat race. It's over. That I have to basically think, how do I fully instantiate myself? How do I complete my transformation into an actual human being? Because it's very easy to sort of forget all the intangibles of life. It's very hard to just sort of think about the next task and the next task and it's all metrics. And you know, what is the number of viewers I have? What is the number of publications I have? What is the number of citations, the number of talks, the number of grants? It's very easy to quantify everything. And then at some point you're like, this is real life. It's not a test anymore. And that's something that I told my wife early on. I was like, no, no, no, our life is not going to be let's put the kids through college. And that, you know, maybe that's when I escaped the rat race. Maybe it continued being a rat race. Maybe the next step would have been, all right, how do I make sure that my kid is first in class? How do I make sure that they're, you know, into the greatest college? And then, you know, they're into college. And then you're like 60. So how do you, how do you escape? What is the, is there a light at the end of the tunnel of a midlife crisis? So, so you should watch that symposium because the videos were transformative to me and to many others. So basically the advice that I received from all of my friends was so meaningful. This, you know, there's some, some advice that basically says you have to constantly maintain unachievable goals. Goals that you can make progress towards, but you can never be fully done with. And I think that's almost playing into the sort of rat race thing. Like basically make sure that there's more obstacles for your little rat persona to jump through. So that's one possibility. So first of all, watch, is it available somewhere? It's on YouTube, just Google, Google meaning of life symposium. I should have known this. I mean, you should have told me this. This is awesome. Okay. This is great. But, and also like, you know, saying rat race is, you know, if we look at ratatouille, it's not, I mean, that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful thing of, of, of challenges and overcoming challenges. That could be fundamentally the meaning of life is, to see life as a set of challenges and to fully engage in the overcoming of those challenges. I would say that that's embracing the rat race view of life. So, so a joke that we like to have with my wife all the time is, we basically say, we, we, we pretend that we're in this all inclusive resort that we basically hired all these people to go on the Esplanade and play games because we enjoy watching people playing on the Esplanade and we enjoy sort of laying and looking at life and all the people biking and rollerblading and all of that. And then we've paid all these people in this all inclusive resort that we live in. And then what are we going to do today? I'm like, Oh, I've signed up for professor activities. It's going to be awesome. They, they, they lined up a bunch of super smart MIT students for me to meet with. I'm going to have a grant writing meeting afterwards. It's going to be awesome. And then she signed up for a bunch of consulting activities. It's going to be great. And then in the evening we just get back together and say, Hey, how was your consulting today? So in a way, that's another view of life of basically, wait a minute. If I was a gazillionaire, what would I choose to do? I would probably pay an awesome university to give me an office there and just pay a bunch of super smart people to work with me, even though they don't really want to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I would have exactly the life that I have now working my butt off every single day because it's so freaking fulfilling. So let's clarify. It's just a beautiful way. It's almost like a video game view of life that it's a set of, I mean, again, game is not perhaps a positive term, but it's a, it's a, it is a beautiful term. So do you, or do you not like the rat race view of life? No. Because it is fulfilling in some fundamental way. The rat race is about the goal. My view of life is about the path. So again, quoting Greece. Those folks have come up with some good stuff. So this Odysseus Elites basically wrote this beautiful poem about sort of going through life saying, as you go through your journey, impersonating Ulysses of his voyage, he says, wish that the path is long and arduous because when you get to Ithaca, Ithaca, you might realize that it was all about the path, not the destination. So the rat race view of life makes it all about the destination. It's like, how do I get through the maze to get there? But the all inclusive resort view of life is about the path. It's about, wow, today I couldn't wish for a better set of activities all programmed for me to enjoy having my brain, having my body, having my senses and, you know, the life that I have. So it's a very different kind of view. It's focused on the journey, not on the destination. So you mentioned kind of the ups and downs of life and the midlife crisis. And right now you said focusing kind of on the journey, but what the journey involves is ups and downs. Is there advice or any kind of thoughts that you can elucidate about the downs in your life, the hard parts of your life and how you got out or maybe not, or is there, how do you see the dark parts of life? So I'm so glad you're asking this question because it's something that our society does a terrible job at preparing us for. Every Hollywood movie has to have a happy ending. It is ridiculous. You can count on your 10 fingers the number of bad ending movies that you've ever watched. And you probably wouldn't need all 10 fingers. We strive to tell everyone, yes, you can succeed. Yes, you're a millionaire, just temporarily disabled. And yes, you know, the prince will eventually figure out his princess and they will have a happily ever after ending. And yes, the hero will be beaten and beaten and beaten, but you know that at the end of the movie, the good guys will win. We need more movies where the bad guys win. We need more movies where just everybody dies. Where just, you know, MacGyver doesn't figure out how to disable the bomb and just explodes. You just need more movies that are more realistic about the fact that life kind of sucks sometimes and it's okay. So again, growing up in Greece, I have been exposed to songs that are not just sad, but they're miserable. So one of them comes to mind and it's basically talking about this woman who's lamenting in the early morning about losing the joyful kid, the joyful young man who basically died in the civil war in the arms of our own fellow citizens. And she's like, if only he had died fighting the foreign forces, if only he had died at the, you know, sides of the, you know, general, if only he had died with honor, I would be proud to have lost the joyful kid. I mean, it's devastating, right? It's like, he didn't just die. He died without honor. And my friend who was with me was listening to the song and she's like, this is depressing. I'm like, whoa, you have to listen to another one. It's not as sad. And she's like, what, this one died with honor? So that's one example. It's a kind of a celebration of misery. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So let me give you a couple more examples and then I'll answer that question. So another example is I picked up this book that I had from my childhood and I started reading stories to my kids. And the first story is about these two children. One is really poor living on the street and the other one is really rich, really living in the house in the bright light above. And the poor one is wishing, looking at that window and wishing that he could have that house. And the other one is at the window wishing that he was free, that he wasn't sick all the time, that he could escape outside. It's only four pages long. And at the end, both children die. One of them dies from cold, the other one dies from illness. And you're like, how is that even a children's story? The next story, I'm like, okay, that's fine. Let's skip this one. So I read this to my kids and then I read the next one. And the next one is about this woman whose brother is at war against the Turks and he is going to die. And she prays to the Virgin, please don't let him die. And the Virgin appears and she's like, no problem. Tell me who to kill instead. And she's like, anyone, anyone. No, no, no, no. Choose one. How about this Turk? This one has two kids, a beautiful family waiting for him at home. She's like, no, not this one, choose another one. And then she goes through all the life stories of the others. She's like, no, no, just don't take anyone. She's like, I can't do that. You can choose to bring your brother back. And he will be depressed for the rest of his life because he didn't fight at war, because he didn't go to that battle. And he will live without honor. And in the end, the woman decides to have her brother killed instead because he dies with her. I mean, this is insane. So why am I giving you these examples? It's not a glorification of misery. It's expanding your emotional range. It's teaching you that, and when I read these stories, I'm not a jerk. I'm crying out loud. I have tears. And my face becomes red from the pain that I'm experiencing through these stories. It's just so deeply touching to embrace the suffering, not because of an accident, but because of a choice, the sacrifice to embrace the fact that not everything is cute and rosy and always ending well. And I think that we don't do a good enough job of teaching our kids that just life sucks and life is unfair sometimes. And that's okay. And sometimes I read a story to my kids. I read a story every night. And sometimes the story is horrible. And sometimes the story is good and sort of friendly and happy. And my kids always ask, what's the moral of the story? And sometimes there's a moral and it's like, oh, you should be good or you should be nice. You should be helping each other, et cetera. And sometimes there's just no moral. And I tell my kids, you know what? Sometimes just life doesn't make sense and it's okay. And you can't comprehend everything. And I think this concept of how do you deal with the bad days comes from the fact that we're taught, we're brainwashed into thinking that every day should be a happy day. And we're not ready to cope with misery. And the other thing that crying through these stories teaches you is that you don't have it nearly half as bad as you think. Do you see what I mean? Basically, it tells you that, I mean, my mom would always tell me about how she was transformed as a teenager when she volunteered in the hospital. And she saw all these people at the brink of death, clinging for life and helping them out to best she could and crying her heart out when they were dying. And sort of how that taught her the appreciation for what we have every day. Waking up every morning and saying, my life doesn't suck. My life is not nearly half as bad as it could be. And sort of embracing the joy that we have of living where we live in the moment we live. And I'm going to go further. If you look at the arc of human life, human existence through the centuries, there's no better way to be alive than now. I mean, we're complaining about every single little thing. But life expectancy is at an all time high. Sickness, all time low. Pornness, misery, all time low. There's no better time to be alive globally across all of human existence. Number one. Number two, here in Boston, there's no better place to be alive. If you think about the amalgamation of science, engineering, technology, the ridiculously awesome people you're bringing every week to your podcast. I mean, this is the ancient Greece of modern society. But the weather still sucks. No, let me put it this way. The weather gives us a range of emotion. The full range. The full scenic range. That's such a fascinating thing about human psychology. I often reread this book. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And he talks about his living through the Holocaust and the concentration camps. And even there where there's human misery is at its highest, even there he discovers these moments by observing the suffering, by accepting the suffering. He observes moments of true joy of how great his life is relative to others at the camp who have it worse. Yeah. So it's a dangerous slippery slope to think that way because it's basically being better than Jones's. And if, you know, if the house next door has a giant car, then you want to get a bigger car or something like that. It's not comparative misery. I think the way that I see it is slightly different. It's, and it's not even thinking about all the worst possible outcomes that could have happened, but didn't. The example, as you were talking about the concentration camps, the most horrible, I mean, one of the most horrible moments of human existence, is that the concentration camps, I was thinking about pictures that I was seeing of kids in Syria in war torn zones. And you're looking at these kids. And again, I cried out loud, imagining my own son in the van after a bomb explosion, watching his father die or his siblings die or losing his friends. It's something that we are not capable of fathoming. But if you actually put a seven year old in that situation, the look that I saw in these kids eyes basically said, it is what it is. It was, and I've experienced that with my own kid when he gets, like my three year old last, like two years ago, who's now my five year old, she was burned really badly with like hot chocolate and coffee that just peeled off her skin. So you could actually see just her fragile skin had just peeled off. And she was the happiest little kid. She was just going along with the punches. It is what it is. She accepted it. So it's quite dramatic to sort of realize that children don't say, oh, I could have it better. They sort of embrace the moment, not embrace, but sort of accept the moment. And then they can have moments of pure joy in a horrendous war torn country. And like so many people from these war torn countries basically say, oh, you think you Americans are going to just come and just send us a bunch of aid and food, et cetera? Yeah, sure. That's helpful. But what do we dream of? What do we struggle for? We struggle for love. We struggle for meaning. We struggle for, you know, emotions and friendships. We struggle for the same things you guys struggle for. We're not just like every day waking up and saying, oh, I wish I had more food. No, that's just the given. I just don't have enough food. But what we struggle with are basically everything else. And that sort of gives you some perspective on life. It basically says, you know, and another story that my mom told me when I was a kid is this story about sort of this man who's basically, you know, he sees the Christ appear in front of him and he says, oh, Christ, I'm carrying all these problems. I'm carrying this big bag. Can you please take it from me? And he's like, sure. Let me just give you any other bag. And of course the person in Vienna accepts his own bag. So acceptance, ultimately the path you recommend is acceptance. Every single other bag is probably worse. It's the evil you don't know versus the evil you know. Like we all struggle with our own problems. But if you look at the bigger picture, it's just your path through life. And if you embrace it, the good and the bad, every single day, it's just joy, elation, sadness, misery. If you don't have both, you're not a complete human being. You know, you can't, I mean, the last example I'm going to give is the movie Inside Out by Pixar. Beautiful movie. Which one is that? The one with the little characters controlling highly trained. So you basically have joy and sadness and fear and disgust, et cetera. And the moral of the story, if you remember the movie, the moral of the story is that in the end, joy is basically trying to fix everything, to make everything happy. And she's failing miserably and everything else is like crumbling and falling apart. And the little girl basically becomes emotionless because all she knows how to do is fake happiness. And I think it's a very good analogy for our everyday society where we're always saying, are you happy? Are you happy? My mom calls me and she's like, Manolis, are you happy? I'm like, mom, stop asking this stupid question. No, I'm not happy. What you should be asking is if I'm fulfilled. And that's a very different thing. I don't go around being happy. I would love it if your mom called and said, Manolis, are you suffering beautifully or something like that? That's exactly right. That's what she should be asking. Are you struggling to achieve something great? That's the question that mom should be asking. Hear that mom call me about the suffering, not about how good are you doing? So what I tell her is that life is not about maximizing happiness. Life is about accomplishing something meaningful. And accomplishing that meaningful thing cannot come from a series of joyful moments. It comes from a series of struggles, of successes and failures, of people being nasty to you and people being nice to you and embracing the full thing. And if you supersede that constant need for gratification, if you supersede that constant need for kindness, you suddenly know who you are. And what I like to say to my kid, my son the other day was telling me, oh, so and so called me such and such. And I'm like, are you such and such? He's like, no. I'm like, ha ha, see, they were wrong. And what I tell him is if you know who you are, what other people say about you only teaches you about them. Yeah. So it has no influence on your self esteem. If you know where you stand, you embrace the good, but you also embrace the bad. I have plenty of bad and I'm embracing it. I'm a procrastinator. I'm a procrastinator. How do I deal with that? I trick myself into procrastinating about mindless, stupid little day to day things. And in that procrastination time doing important things for the future. So accepting who you are, accepting your flaws, accepting the whole of it, accepting the struggle, accepting the sleeplessness, accepting the fact that the journey matters, hoping that your path to Ithaka is full of troubles because those troubles are the life you will lead. Accepting that life will not start after the next milestone, that life has already started a long time ago. And what you're experiencing now is the life. This is it. It's not some kind of future thing that you work yourself hard to get to. And then after that, you live happily ever after. To me, the happily ever after, that's the end of the story. Nothing happens after that. The struggle and the struggle and the struggle is much more interesting story than they lived happily ever after. So I think we have to embrace that as a society that it's not just about the happy ending, that our kids are brainwashed into expecting that things will be happy and rosy and it's okay if they're not. And they should keep struggling because the struggle is the journey and the journey is the meaning of life. It's not the end, it's this journey. What about accepting one of the harder things? We talked a little bit about immortality. What about accepting that life ends? So do you, Manolis, think about your own mortality? How, we talked about accepting that there's ups and downs to life. What about the ultimate down, which is the finality of it? Do you think about that? Do you fear it? You also asked me if I'm afraid of getting older. Yes. And that's on the path to mortality. So let me talk about that first step and then the last step. The last step. Literally the last step. So getting older, what does that mean? When I was 18, when I was 20, my brain, I felt was at my maximum. I was like, nothing is impossible. I can solve anything. I could take any math puzzle, any logic puzzle, any programming puzzle and just solve it in milliseconds. I just saw the answer through problems. I was like feeling invincible. I would show up at lecture with my newspaper, lift up my head every now and then, point to errors, just brat, complete brat. I would raise my hand and correct my professor from the whole classroom. Total brat. I have some of those in my class now and it's awesome. It's like very... I used to be you. It teaches you humility. So I felt invincible and I was like, this is it. This is awesome. I'm living the life. 10 years later, my brain didn't work the same way. I wasn't as good at the tiny little puzzles, but it worked in different ways. And right now, 20 years later, it works in yet different ways. And oh gosh, I love the journey. Can you maybe give some hints of the interesting different ways that your brain works as it aged? Yeah. I went from the phase of sheer speed and hardcore quantitative thinking to sort of stepping back, being able to sort of make more connections, being able to sort of say, yeah, but let's use that thing. Sort of a huge new creativity being unleashed. Basically, when you're young, you're sort of thinking about that one problem. You can sort of reconfigure all the variables combinatorially in your head and just wipe it all out. When you're just a little older, you start getting more creative. You start bringing in things from different fields and different contexts and sort of stepping outside the box. Basically, it's like being in the rat race and saying, there's a ceiling. Why are we trying to get through that? So it's sort of thinking outside the box. And then at 40, what I'm going through now is this whole sort of embracing the path of life. And when I say life has started already, it's not a test anymore. This is basically embracing the finality. Embracing that the journey is what it's at. So what I like to say is live every day as if it's your last one and make plans as if you'll never die. I always have the long term that I'm sort of planning out for that will eventually become the short term. And I always have the sort of short term. And I think this ability to sort of look at life in the past and look at life in the future jointly and sort of embrace the continuity both of life in the universe and on our planet, as well as life as a human being from the beginning to the end, just as a path, as a journey, and just embracing every aspect of that. I mean, I was talking about parenthood the other day and how amazingly fulfilling it is to sort of relive childhood through the eyes of my kid, but with the perspective of a parent. So the sheer arrogance of youth watching this in my kid, I can see myself when I was 18 correcting my professor. I felt so proud. Little did I know that my professor was working on so much more interesting things than the three little things he was putting on the board that day. And I was like, I'm invincible. But in fact, no, just a little brat. And basically right now, I sort of can see the sort of journey with a little more humility. I can sort of look at my own students with their unbelievable abilities, being able to do things that I'm no longer able to do better than I probably was ever able to do. But yet being able to guide them and shape their thinking and blow their minds with new ideas and new directions through my perspective. And I know when something is solvable because I've been there, but I'm not going to even bother. It's not that I can't do it. I'm sure I could if I tried, but just I'm not interested in that anymore. So what I'm embracing this journey of aging is how my brain is changing and how I'm constantly trying to figure out the niches, the evolutionary niches that I'm best adapted for, for the tasks that I'm best at, while hiring and recruiting both assistants and research scientists and students and postdocs, and that will be the best at those tasks. But someone still has to see the big picture. And I love being in that role. So at the timescale of a human lifespan, you're doing the same thing that the worm did at the evolutionary timescale of Growing Arms, the specialization, the carp compartmentalization. I mean, it's fascinating to think of what 80 year old Manolis would look back at the man that's sitting here today and laugh at the silliness, at the arrogance. He finally figured out something. I was like, no little thing. You didn't figure out anything. I mean, ultimately, it seems that if you're introspective about life, it leads to a kind of acceptance, a deeper and deeper acceptance of the whole of it. Again, I want to be cautious about acceptance because it almost says that you can't change it. Ah, yeah. It's sort of embracing the struggle and embracing the journey is the way that I would put it. So you ultimately feel the journey isn't just something that happens to you. You shape it. You shape it. Remember how I was saying that Boston is the best place and the best time to live in right now, in the history of humanity? I'm exaggerating a little bit. But the way that I think about this is that if you look at the whole of cosmos, where would you rather be if you're just a bunch of molecules, roughly your biomass? Where would you rather be? Would you rather be a rock on Mars? Yeah, probably not. Would you rather be in a black hole? Probably not. Would you rather be in an exploding supernova? Maybe that might be interesting. But being on Earth is an awesome solar system, an awesome planetary system, an awesome, you know, place to be in across all of space time. It's a pretty good place to be in as a bunch of molecules. If you are a bunch of molecules on Earth today, being an animal with, you know, some kind of awareness of the stuff around you is wonderful. Being a human among all animals is amazing because you have all this introspection. And being a human who's young, fit, athletic, smart, et cetera, I mean, you know, you have so much to be happy for. Beyond that, being surrounded by a bunch of awesome people that you interact with all the time. I mean, I feel blessed to interact with the people I know, with the friends I have, the dinners that I have, all of this. Students that I interact with, I'm so blessed. And the last little blip in this awesomeness of local maximum, the last little blip comes from being kind, being grateful, and being kind. I don't know if you remember that little prayer that I described last time of, thank you for all the good you've given me and give me strength to give unto others with the same love that you've given to me. And the whole point of that is being grateful and being kind. What does that do? From a purely egoistic perspective, it makes the people around you happier. And it takes that little maximum a little bit further. Because you'll be surrounded by happy people, by being kind. That's the purely egoistic view. And the purely altruistic view, or maybe it's egoistic as well, is that it's just good to give. It feels good to give. Like basically watching somebody who's touched by what you said, watching somebody who's like appreciating a rapid response or a generous offer or just random acts of kindness. It is so fulfilling. So evolutionarily, we were selected for that. There's just such a good feeling that comes from that. You know, it's fascinating to think you said Boston is the best place, and talking about kindness, that the very thought that Boston is the best place in the universe is almost, it's a kind of a gravitational field. Your thought and your very life in itself is a kind of field that makes that real. Yeah, the self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. By claiming it's the best and thinking it's the best, it becomes the best. And you make others, it's not a force that just applies to your own cognition. It applies to the others around you. And then suddenly you live in an even better place. Yeah. And it creates the reality, the actual reality, the social reality, then it molds the environment. Exactly. One of the coolest things about you, I think, is you represent the best of MIT, the spirit of MIT. I'm so glad that I'm fortunate enough to be able to talk to you, because there's a kind of cynicism about academia in parts that I think is undeserved, and that there's this, MIT, of course, but academic institutions is a sacred place where ideas can flourish. And just in the same very way that you're talking about is both kindness and curiosity and that weird thing that happens when a bunch of curious descendants of apes get together and just get excited in this ripple effect that happens. I mean, that's the most beautiful aspect of MIT. People might think competition and grants and position, like you said, the rat race, but underneath it all is these curious human beings inspiring younger human beings. And there's this ripple effect that happens. And I'm so glad that, I mean, I'm glad that I get a chance to record this because it inspires so many other students and so many other people to do the same, to embrace the inner curious creature that it's not about the race. So let's talk about the negatives. Let's talk about, no, no, no, I'm serious. I'm serious. You have to embrace the good and the bad. So let's talk about the negative. Let's address it. So why do people want positions of power? Why do people want more money, more power, more this, more that? Remember the part where I was saying, if you know who you are, what other people think about you, it makes no difference to you. It only teaches you about them. Many people feel defunct about what they're doing and define themselves. They feel instantiated through the eyes of others. So being in a position of power makes them feel better about themselves. Who knows what other kind of struggles they might have that creates that need to feel better about themselves. But they have a bunch of struggles and everybody has a bunch of struggles. And every time I see somebody behaving poorly, I'm basically thinking, well, they're in a tough spot right now. And it's okay. I can kind of see how I would behave badly in other circumstances as well. So I think if you take away that sort of having to prove yourself in the eyes of others, life becomes so much easier. So when I first became a professor at MIT, I started wearing adult clothes. It became a serious person, quote, unquote. I basically had, I would always go around in my rollerblades and my shorts and a t shirt, and eventually I was a professional. I bought all these khaki pants and these nice shirts with, what do they call it, the patterns. And I was dressing with my nice belt every day, showing up. And then a few months later, I was like, I can't stand it. And I just went back to my rollerblades and my t shirts and my shorts. And it was this struggle of sort of not feeling that I fit in. I was so intimidated by all of my colleagues, just watching their incredible achievements. The person's next to me and the person on the floor below me, I was like, oh my God, they clearly made a mistake. What the heck am I doing here? How will I ever live up to these people's standards? And eventually you grow up to realize that the way that I grew up to realize that the way that other people perceived my work was very similar to the way that I perceived other people's work as flawless. I knew all of the flaws in my work. I knew the limitations. I knew what I hadn't managed to achieve. And what I saw was maybe a third of the way of what I was trying to achieve. And I saw everything as flawed. What they saw, what I had achieved, they didn't see what I hadn't achieved. They only saw the one third down, which was pretty good in their eyes. So they all respected me and I was feeling miserable about myself. I was like, I'm not worthy. And I think that this is a cognitive problem that we have. We kind of, it's kind of like when we're talking about artificial general intelligence, AGI, of sort of, we kind of have this definition that anything that machines can do is not intelligent and anything that they can't do is intelligent. Therefore, we narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow the field of what intelligence truly means. And as soon as machines achieve self, I mean, it's not intelligent anymore. I feel like I was doing the same thing with myself. As soon as I could solve something, it was the kind of thing that a kid like me could solve. And therefore it was kind of easy. But to the others, it seemed hard. But to me, it seemed easy. So it was this kind of thing that everything that my colleagues were doing seemed impossible to me. But everything that I was doing seemed impossible to them. So it was that realization that sort of made me mature into sort of a, not more confident, but more comfortable human being. Can you actually linger on that a little bit? I mean, you mentioned Minsky. I remember he said something in an interview where he said the secret to his, like the way he approached life was to never be happy with anything he did. So there's something powerful as a motivator to doing exactly what you're saying, which is everything you've achieved to see that as easy and unimpressive. What do you do with that? Because clearly that's a useful thing. I think I've kind of matured past that. And I think the maturity past that is to sort of accept what it is and accept that it has helped others build onto it and therefore advance human knowledge. So it's very easy to sort of fall into the trap of, oh, everything I've done is crap. What I told you last time is that I always tell my students that our best work is ahead of us. And I think that's more of my mindset. That's a beautiful way to put it. Exactly. What we've done is strong. It's great. It's great for the time. And it'll become obsolete in 30 years. Not we can, we are doing even better. Exactly. So basically our next work will just strive. And again, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At some point you have to wrap. I was having a meeting with my student yesterday and it was like, listen, we know this is not perfect, but it's way better than anything that's ever been done before. You know how to improve it. But if you try to, your paper is never going to get published. So there's this balance of we're already at the top of the field, get it out. And then you work on the next improvement. And in my experience, this has never happened. We've never actually worked on the next improvement. And that's okay. It didn't make a difference because you're basically putting a new stepping stone that others will be able to step on and surpass you. My advisor in grad school would basically tell me, Manolis, let others write the second paper in that field. Just write the first one, move on, move on to the next field. You don't want to be writing the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth paper in the same field. Just, it's very shocking to a student to hear that. Cause I was like, I was at the top of my game. I was owning that field. I was doing it. I was doing it. I was doing it. I was doing it. Owning that field. And I published the first paper. I'm like, I'm ready for two and three and four. He's like, move on. Just let it be. And I was like, Whoa. And it's so liberating to sort of not have to surpass everyone, but just put your little stepping stone out there and others will step on it and put their own stones further and eventually cross a bigger river than if you try to sort of make a giant leap all at once. So you need both. SL. Beautifully put. So the funny thing is I've, I believe I closed the previous episode with a Darwin quote about the power of poetry and music and life. SL. I think your quote, and again, I only heard it once, was Darwin basically saying, if I were to live life again, next time I would read more poetry and something about art every week or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting for somebody who studied life at a very cold, I would say, genetic level to say that, yeah, the highest form of living is the art. But like on that, which made me realize that you write poetry and I forced you or maybe convinced you somehow to maybe share if it's possible, if it's okay, some of the poetry you've written yourself in your life. SL. So again, being Greek, a lot of my poems have been pretty miserable. And I always like to say that it's very hard for me to write a poem when I'm happy. And I just have to be in a state of deep despair in order to write poems. But the first poem I ever wrote was in English class. I was, I'm Greek, I grew up in Greece, but I was in a French high school and I was taking English as a foreign language. So the English teacher basically asked us to write a poem in English. So this is basically what I'm going to embarrass myself and read from my 16 year old self many, many years ago. SL. Can you give a little bit more context about who you were in this moment? So like just... SL. So here's what's really interesting. In terms of growing up, how do we grow up? SL. It's very difficult to grow up if you're in the same school, going from one class to the other, and all your friends know you inside out. It's very difficult to change. It's very difficult to grow up because they have a certain set of expectations for who you are and for how you're going to behave. So in many ways we kind of tend to get set in our ways and not change very much. I think something that helped me grow up is that when I was 11 years old, I was a kid in Greece in primary school. When I was 12 years old, I was a kid in Greece in a first year of high school. When I was 13, I was in France, so basically moved countries and schools. The next year, I moved schools again because it was a transition in the French educational system from one school to the next. The next year after that, my family moved to New York in a French high school there, and the next year after that, I'm moving to MIT. So basically between 11 and 19, every single year, I actually had the opportunity to grow. I was not held by people who knew me, and I could reinvent myself or reshape myself or reshape my personality, my emotions, as I was growing up, especially in such a transformative time of a kid's life from 11 to 17. I was 11 to 17. Okay, first of all, it's so powerful that you think of it that way. Did you think of it that way at the moment? Because it's kind of a source. You said an opportunity to grow, but it's kind of suffering. I mean, you're being torn away from the thing you know into a thing you don't know. So when we moved from South France to New York, I was pissed. I was pissed. I was taking these long bike rides in the countryside, jumping in French swimming pools, and I had all these wonderful friendships, going downtown and just staying by the fountains in the dim lit streets of Aix en Provence in the South of France. It was magical. And suddenly, I moved to New York City, a city of cement, of ugliness, like trash in the streets at every corner. It's horrible. Snow everywhere. Having never seen snow or like real snow in my life, I moved from Athens to South France to suddenly New York. So I was pissed. But whether I saw it as an opportunity for growth, I don't think so. I don't think that I was that self reflective. It was just how it happened. Only now do you see it this way. I saw it like that probably pretty early on, but not during those transitions. So basically, during those transitions, I was just a kid being a kid. And maybe the time that I started seeing it that way was maybe when I decided to stay at MIT as a professor after having been there as a student. And I kind of saw the struggle of getting professors to not see you as a kid when they're your peers. And I was very flattered when one of my friends basically told me, oh, I remember you in recitation when you first asked me a question. I said, wow, this kid. I'll pay attention. One day I'll be a peer. So it's, you know, certainly my perception was that many of them could not see me as anything but a kid. But it turns out that some of them saw me as something different than a kid even before I was actually their colleague. So it's kind of an interesting place because what I like to say about MIT is that people treat you as equal no matter what stage. And they respect you for what you say, not for who you are when you're saying it. And if I'm wrong, my students will tell me. They will have no reservation to just be bluntly, you know, sorry. I don't agree with that. Yeah. I mean, the beautiful thing about you, sorry to put it this way, is, you know, maybe people who weren't familiar with your work beforehand might think, like, might not realize that you're a world class scientist who leads a large group and so on. Because there's a youthful nature to you that it's, I mean, you talk like a first, like an undergrad, you know, with the excitement and the fresh eyes and the sort of excitement about the world. And that's, first of all, super contagious and beautiful. You know, it's easy to sort of fall into behaving seriously because then people kind of start putting you on a pedestal more into a position of power. You want to sort of act like you're in a position of power as opposed to allowing yourself to be lost in the just the curiosity, the childish view of the world, which is just this open eyed love of knowledge. And that was the transition that I was describing when I decided to go back to my rollerblades and t shirt and baseball cap. Basically, you know, when I met my first postdoc, it was basically, you know, he was interviewing for postdocs at MIT. He already had several first author papers to his name in top journals. And my friend Yulia basically introduced me to Alex Stark, who basically was interviewing at the time with Rick Young and with Eric Lander, just like these massive names in the field. And I was just a first year faculty person with, you know, zero credibility. And she basically says, Oh, there's this friend of mine, Alex, who's visiting. He's also German. You know, he wanted to meet you. I'm like, Oh, sounds great. I'd love to talk science. I show up. We sit at the amphitheater in Stata. You know, I basically arrive in my rollerblades, you know, jump a few steps, sit down wearing my blades. We're having this awesome conversation about science and about gene regulation and how the whole thing works and sort of, you know, my perspective and his perspective. We're just bouncing ideas for 30 minutes. And then I just dash off to my next meeting. And he basically emails me afterwards. And I was giving him advice about how to interview with Eric Lander, how to interview with Rick Young and how to sort of get a position with them. And then after a while, he emails me saying, I would love to become a postdoc in your group. I'm like, what are you kidding me? Like, so, so he basically didn't care that I wear rollerblades and T shirt. All he cared about was my ideas and sort of embracing the me with the childhood excitement about science was basically what attracted him. It wasn't the, wow, this guy runs a big lab or this and that. He was just like, I like his ideas. I want to work with him. That, by the way, folks is the best of MIT. That's what MIT stands for. So that's a beautiful story. But take me back to the poem and where did this poem come from? Where's your mindset? So who is the 17, 16 year old kid Manolis? So again, I've just seen snow for the first time and I'm in New York. So I'm, you know, maybe that's where the sadness in the poem comes from. But anyway, we're asked in class to write an assignment. This is my third language. I'm not very good at it. So pardon me, but here's what I wrote. Children dance now all in row, children laughing at the snow. But in time's endless flow, children sooner or later grow. Men are mortal. We go by. If we know it, we may cry. But I thought a love so sweet was immortal, was so deep. There I told you, darling sweet, that forever love would keep. Blossomed spring and summer shined. Then blue autumn, winter died. One year passed, but the clouds still remember all our vows. Never faked and never lied. All we did was stare and smile. All alone, sitting down, to the snow we made our vow. But you told me you were right. Birds who love are birds who cry. Now with laughter children play, yet the sky is so gray. Even if the snow seems bright, without you have lost their light. Sun that sang and moon that smiled, all the stars have ceased to shine. All of nature drew its grace, found its light within your face. Now you're gone and won't return. Let the snow in my heart burn. There's a Greek in there. That's beautiful. That's beautiful, by the way. And the rhyming, the musicality, there's both a simplicity and a musicality to it. I'm 16. It's my third language. No, no, no. So I really enjoy like Robert Frost poems. I don't mean simplicity in a bad way, in a negative way at all. Again, it's very weird to analyze your own poem, but I think it captures the simplicity of youth and the way that it kind of starts with Children Dance Like Only Low. It basically, and it kind of shows that snow can be interpreted first in the first verse as a happy thing, ta da da da da snow. And then in the end, you know, now with laughter children play, I'm like, now I've grown basically. It's this transformation that we're actually talking about, this whole men are mortal, we go by. I'm sort of, you know, you're saying, are you comfortable with growing old? I'm like, duh. I was, I was since I was 16. And what's really interesting is that, you know, again, when I was 12 years old in our summer house in Greece, I remember sort of telling my sister my outlook that I would have as a father for how to bring up my own kids. So it's very weird that I've always sort of seen the full path from, you know, a kid. From when you were young. Yeah. I don't know if you like this Joni Mitchell song. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it snows illusions I recall. It's clouds illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all. So it's really beautiful. So I think the Joni Mitchell song, which again, I heard for the first time much, much after this, and I wouldn't even compare this to that. But what Joni Mitchell is saying that song is that you can see life from two perspectives. You can see the good or the bad in both, you know, in everything you see. And I think that's the allegory of snow right now. You can see snow as this bright, white, wonderful thing, or you can see snow as this miserable, you know, gray thing. So that's sort of, and what I like about the last verse now with laughter children play is that it's a recall to the first one where I was the kid enjoying careless life, and eventually was making promises that something would be forever. And I think part of that is also the loss of my friendships in France, of being in New York now and sort of everything's gray. And, you know, even though the snow seems bright, without you have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled. So it's this concept that if you lose your love, the same thing can be perceived in a very different way. Let me ask you this, because somebody wrote me this long email, and I think you're the perfect person to ask this. You mentioned love. From a genetic perspective, what is it? What do you make of love? Why do we humans fall in love? In your own life, why did you fall in love? You know, the email that was written to me was, you always talk about mortality and fear of mortality, but you don't ask about love. So I don't know if there's some thoughts you could give about the role of love in your own life, or the role of love in human life in general. I think love in many ways defines my life. It's basically, I like to say that I'm a human first and a professor second. And I think this passion for life, this passion for, you know, everything around us. I mean, the only way to describe that is love. It's basically, you know, embracing your, you know, emotional self, embracing the, you know, the non brainiac in you, embracing the sort of intangible, the not very well defined. And even in my own research, I'm just very passionate about everything I do. You know, there's a certain passion that comes through. And what, I'm sorry, again, being Greek, the etymology of the word passion. What was passion? Passion is suffering. The etymology, when we talk about the passion of the Christ, it's a suffering. And in the Greek version of that word, pathos, like pathology, pathos is deep suffering. It's the concept of someone who's sympathetic. Sympathetic means suffering together, experiencing emotions together. So it's funny that you ask me about love and I respond with passion, passion for life, passion for research, passion for my family, for my children, for, you know. So there's a certain passion that defines me and everything else follows rather than the other way around. I'm not first thinking with my brain, what is the most impactful paper we could write? And then going after that, I'm thinking with my heart, what am I passionate about? What drives me? What just like, you know, makes me take. And that's a beautiful way to live, but I love it how the Greek part of you just kind of connects it to the suffering. So if you could remove the suffering. No, no, no, no, no, no. When I say suffering, I don't mean suffering as in being miserable. I mean suffering as in being emotionally invested in something. Remember, I mean, again, if you look at this poem, what is it saying? It's saying birds who love are birds who cry. Right? That's the very definition of love. Exposing your fragility. If you're not afraid of suffering, you don't fall in love. As soon as you hold back, you protect, you shield your heart, no love can enter. So there's this Simon and Garfunkel song. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries. So again, there's some aspect of that into this poem. The fact that, you know, but you told me, you know, there I told you, darling sweet, that forever love would keep, is this intermediate thing. And then there's a recall, but you told me you were right. Birds who love are birds who cry. So it basically says that love is the fragility that you're willing to give to another person. It's opening up your vulnerable spots. It's sort of accepting that there's no safety net. You're just giving yourself fully and you're ready to be hurt. So you've already been way too kind with your time, but I'm going to force you to stay here just a few minutes longer as we're talking about goodbyes. You have a really nice other poem here about goodbyes. Can I force you to read it as well? Oh, twist my arm, twist my arm. So the next poem was written specifically for our high school yearbook. So another poem written on demand, the rest of them are just so miserable, written by pure, you know, sadness and melancholy. But this one was also written on demand and it was basically saying goodbye, as is appropriate right now, to my friends and sort of, again, reflecting this whole journey and transformation through life. And also I think showing a little bit of introspection about how we kind of had it easy in high school and we're about to go into rougher waters. So the title is actually The Tide Waters and it's an analogy on that. So here it goes. All this was another lake, where some rest we sailors take, waters calm and full of fish, we'll find there what we wish, some seek fruit and others feast, some of us just look for peace, some find fresh ships, other love, some seek both and neither have. We were different when we came, each his own story and fame, different people had we been, different cultures had we seen, different nature, different face, each unlike all in this place. We had faced success, defeat, then in one lake came to meet. There, the orders that we followed and the pride that we swallowed, made us one but not the same, joined us strangers who there came. Sooner later, groups were made, tribes where differences will fade, some attached more or less, others fought and made a mess. But again we have to go, what for, where to, we don't know, still we know it, we will try, there to rush, to flee, to fly. There'll be some who wish to stay but they'll carry on away, we'll continue on our journey as we came here, strong yet lonely. From the lake a river flows, from the river many goals, on that river we will race, each will try to find his pace, in that scene the sailors face, their first fear, defeat, disgrace, defeat, disgrace, here and there comes out a face that the waters soon embrace. Some get lucky, find their way, others sink beneath the waves, in this race we will part, some will settle near the start, some set goals beyond the stars because the river carries far. You should know in what we've done, the hard part is still to come. So I'll have to say goodbye, don't you worry, I won't cry, neither will they those who try, till the end, to keep their pride. But please know dearest friends who are always there to mend, I will always need your hand, I will miss you till the end. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Manolis, like I said last time, you're one of the most special people at MIT, one of the most special people in Boston, and whatever mental force field that you're applying in saying that Boston is the best city in the world, MIT the best university in the world, you're actually making it happen. So thank you so much for talking to us, huge honor. Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis, and thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from another well known Greek, Alexander III of Macedonia, commonly known as Alexander the Great. There is nothing impossible to him who will try. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #123

The following is a conversation with Stephen Wolfram, his second time on the podcast. He's a computer scientist, mathematician, theoretical physicist, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics Project. He's the author of several books, including A New Kind of Science, and the new book, A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics. This second round of our conversation is primarily focused on this latter endeavor of searching for the physics of our universe in simple rules that do their work on hypergraphs and eventually generate the infrastructure from which space, time, and all of modern physics can emerge. Quick summary of the sponsors, SimpliSafe, Sunbasket, and Masterclass. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that to me, the idea that seemingly infinite complexity can arise from very simple rules and initial conditions is one of the most beautiful and important mathematical and philosophical mysteries in science. I find that both cellular automata and the hypergraph data structure that Stephen and team are currently working on to be the kind of simple, clear mathematical playground within which fundamental ideas about intelligence, consciousness, and the fundamental laws of physics can be further developed in totally new ways. In fact, I think I'll try to make a video or two about the most beautiful aspects of these models in the coming weeks, especially, I think, trying to describe how fellow curious minds like myself can jump in and explore them either just for fun or potentially for publication of new innovative research in math, computer science, and physics. But honestly, I think the emerging complexity in these hypergraphs can capture the imagination of everyone, even if you're someone who never really connected with mathematics. That's my hope, at least, to have these conversations that inspire everyone to look up to the skies and into our own minds in awe of our amazing universe. Let me also mention that this is the first time I ever recorded a podcast outdoors as a kind of experiment to see if this is an option in times of COVID. I'm sorry if the audio is not great. I did my best and promise to keep improving and learning as always. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I tried to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps, so you're welcome to skip, but still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. Also, let me say, even though I'm talking way too much, that I did a survey and it seems like over 90% of people either enjoy these ad reads somehow magically or don't mind them, at least. That honestly just warms my heart that people are that supportive. This show is sponsored by SimpliSafe, a home security company. Go to SimpliSafe.com to get a free HD camera. It's simple, no contracts, 15 bucks a month, easy setup. Even I figured it out. I have it set up in my apartment. Of course, I also welcome intruders. One of my favorite movies is Leon or The Professional with Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, and the brilliant young Natalie Portman. If you haven't seen the movie, he's a hit man with a minimalist life that resembles my own. In fact, when I was younger, the idea of being a hit man or targeting evil in a skilled way, which is how I thought about it, really appealed to me. The skill of it, the planning, the craftsmanship. In another life, perhaps, if I didn't love engineering and science so much, I could see myself being something like a Navy SEAL. And in general, I love the idea of serving my country, of serving society by contributing my skill in some small way. Anyway, go to Simplisafe.com slash Lex to get a free HD camera and to support this podcast. They're a new sponsor, and this is a trial run, so you know what to do. This show is also sponsored by Sun Basket, a meal delivery service. Visit SunBasket.com slash Lex and use code LEX to get $30 off your order and to support this podcast. This is the last read of the trial they're doing, so this is the time to get them if you're considering it. And if you do, it'll help ensure that they decide to support this podcast long term. Their meals are healthy and delicious, a nice break from the minimalist meals of meat and vegetables that I usually eat. Maybe on a personal note, one of my favorite things to do is watch people cook, especially people who love cooking, and hang out with people over amazing meals. I still tend to be strict in my diet no matter what, even in fancy restaurants, but it brings me joy to see friends and family indulge something like a cake that has way too many calories or ice cream or whatever. My mom, in fact, for much of my life, made this cake called an anthill on my birthday that brings me a lot of joy and way too many calories. I was thinking of doing a video with my mom as she makes it. I thought it'd be a fun thing to do together. Anyway, go to SunBasket.com slash Lex and use code LEX. Do it now. So they signed a longterm contract for this podcast. This show is also sponsored by Masterclass. Sign up at masterclass.com slash LEX. 180 bucks a year, you get an all access pass to watch lessons from Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Tony Hawk, Carlos Santana, Garrett Casparov, Daniel Nagano, and many more brilliant world experts. Masterclass has been a really special sponsor. They believe in this podcast in a way that gives me strength and motivation to take intellectual risks. I'm thinking of doing a few solo podcast episodes on difficult topics, especially in history, like the rise and fall of the Third Reich or Stalin, Putin, and many other difficult topics that I'm fascinated by. I have a worldview that seeks inspiring positive insights, even and perhaps especially from periods of tragedy and evil that perhaps some folks may find value in. If I can only learn to convey the ideas in my mind as clearly as I think them. I think deeply and rigorously and precisely, but to be honest, have trouble speaking in a way that reflects that rigor of thought. So it really does mean a lot, the love and support I get as I try to get better at this thing, at this talking thing. Anyway, go to masterclass.com slash LEX to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now finally, here's my conversation with Stephen Wolfram. You said that there are moments in history of physics and maybe mathematical physics or even mathematics where breakthroughs happen and then a flurry of progress follows. So if you look back through the history of physics, what moments stand out to you as important such breakthroughs where a flurry of progress follows? So the big famous one was 1920s, the invention of quantum mechanics, where in about five or 10 years, lots of stuff got figured out. That's now quantum mechanics. Can you mention the people involved? Yeah, it was kind of the Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein had been a key figure, originally Planck, then Dirac was a little bit later. That was something that happened at that time, that's sort of before my time, right? In my time was in the 1970s, there was this sort of realization that quantum field theory was actually going to be useful in physics and QCD, quantum thermodynamics theory of quarks and gluons and so on was really getting started. And there was again, sort of big flurry of things happened then, I happened to be a teenager at that time and happened to be really involved in physics. And so I got to be part of that, which was really cool. Who were the key figures aside from your young selves at that time? You know, who won the Nobel Prize for QCD, okay? People, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, you know, David Politzer. The people who are the sort of the slightly older generation, Dick Feynman, Murray Gellman, people like that, who were Steve Weinberg, Gerhard Hoft, he's younger, he's in the younger group actually. But these are all, you know, characters who were involved. I mean, it's funny because those are all people who are kind of in my time and I know them and they don't seem like sort of historical, you know, iconic figures. They seem more like everyday characters, so to speak. And so it's always, you know, when you look at history from long afterwards, it always seems like everything happened instantly. And that's usually not the case. There was usually a long buildup, but usually there's, you know, there's some methodological thing happens and then there's a whole bunch of low hanging fruit to be picked. And that usually lasts five or 10 years. You know, we see it today with machine learning and, you know, deep learning neural nets and so on. You know, methodological advance, things actually started working in, you know, 2011, 2012 and so on. And, you know, there's been this sort of rapid picking of low hanging fruit, which is probably, you know, some significant fraction of the way done, so to speak. Do you think there's a key moment? Like if I had to really introspect, like what was the key moment for the deep learning, quote unquote, revolution? I mean. It's probably the AlexNet business. AlexNet with ImageNet. So is there something like that with physics where, so deep learning neural networks have been around for a long time. Absolutely, since the 1940s, yeah. There's a bunch of little pieces that came together and then all of a sudden everybody's eyes lit up. Like, wow, there's something here. Like even just looking at your own work, just your thinking about the universe, that there's simple rules can create complexity. You know, at which point was there a thing where your eyes light up? It's like, wait a minute, there's something here. Is it the very first idea or is it some moment along the line of implementations and experiments and so on? There's a couple of different stages to this. I mean, one is the think about the world computationally. Can we use programs instead of equations to make models of the world? That's something that I got interested in in the beginning of the 1980s. I did a bunch of computer experiments. When I first did them, I didn't really, I could see some significance to them, but it took me a few years to really say, wow, there's a big important phenomenon here that lets sort of complex things arise from very simple programs. That kind of happened back in 1984 or so. Then, you know, a bunch of other years go by, then I start actually doing a lot of much more systematic computer experiments and things and find out that the, you know, this phenomenon that I could only have said occurs in one particular case is actually something incredibly general. And then that led me to this thing called principle of computational equivalence. And that was a long story. And then, you know, as part of that process, I was like, okay, you can make simple programs, can make models of complicated things. What about the whole universe? That's our sort of ultimate example of a complicated thing. And so I got to thinking, you know, could we use these ideas to study fundamental physics? You know, I happen to know a lot about, you know, traditional fundamental physics. My first, you know, I had a bunch of ideas about how to do this in the early 1990s. I made a bunch of technical progress. I figured out a bunch of things I thought were pretty interesting. You know, I wrote about them back in 2002. With the new kind of science in the cellular automata world. And there's echoes in the cellular automata world with your new Wolfram physics project. We'll get to all that. Allow me to sort of romanticize a little more on the philosophy of science. So Thomas Kuhn, philosopher of science, describes that, you know, the progress in science is made with these paradigm shifts. And so to link on the sort of original line of discussion, do you agree with this view that there is revolutions in science that just kind of flip the table? What happens is it's a different way of thinking about things. It's a different methodology for studying things. And that opens stuff up. There's this idea of, he's a famous biographer, but I think it's called the innovators. There's a biographer of Steve Jobs, of Albert Einstein. He also wrote a book, I think it's called the innovators, where he discusses how a lot of the innovations in the history of computing has been done by groups. There's a complicated group dynamic going on, but there's also a romanticized notion that the individual is at the core of the revolution. Like where does your sense fall? Is ultimately like one person responsible for these revolutions that creates the spark or one or two, whatever, or is it just the big mush and mess and chaos of people interacting, of personalities interacting? I think it ends up being like many things, there's leadership and there ends up being, it's a lot easier for one person to have a crisp new idea than it is for a big committee to have a crisp new idea. And I think, but I think it can happen that you have a great idea, but the world isn't ready for it. And you can, I mean, this has happened to me plenty, right? It's, you have an idea, it's actually a pretty good idea, but things aren't ready, either you're not really ready for it, or the ambient world isn't ready for it. And it's hard to get the thing to get traction. It's kind of interesting. I mean, when I look at a new kind of science, you're now living inside the history, so you can't tell the story of these decades, but it seems like the new kind of science has not had the revolutionary impact I would think it might. Like, it feels like at some point, of course it might be, but it feels at some point people will return to that book and say, that was something special here. This was incredible. What happened? Or do you think that's already happened? Oh, yeah, it's happened, except that people aren't, the sort of the heroism of it may not be there, but what's happened is for 300 years, people basically said, if you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations are the best place to go. Last 15 years, doesn't happen. New models that get made of things most often are made with programs, not with equations. Now, was that sort of going to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular work and my particular book? It's hard to know for sure. I mean, I am always amazed at the amounts of feedback that I get from people where they say, oh, by the way, I started doing this whole line of research because I read your book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, can you tell that from the academic literature? Was there a chain of academic references? Probably not. One of the interesting side effects of publishing in the way you did this tome is it serves as an education tool and an inspiration to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, but because it's not a single, it's not a chain of papers with spiffy titles, it doesn't create a splash of citations. It's had plenty of citations, but it's, you know, I think that people think of it as probably more, you know, conceptual inspiration than kind of a, you know, this is a line from here to here to here in our particular field. I think that the thing which I am disappointed by and which will eventually happen is this kind of study of the sort of pure computationalism, this kind of study of the abstract behavior of the computational universe. That should be a big thing that lots of people do. You mean in mathematics purely, almost like. It's like pure mathematics, but it isn't mathematics. But it isn't, it isn't. It's a new kind of mathematics. Is it a new title of the book? Yeah, right. That's why the book is called that. Right, that's not coincidental. Yeah. It's interesting that I haven't seen really rigorous investigation by thousands of people of this idea. I mean, you look at your competition around rule 30. I mean, that's fascinating. If you can say something. Right. Is there some aspect of this thing that could be predicted? That's the fundamental question of science. That's the core. Well, that has been a question of science. I think that is some people's view of what science is about and it's not clear that's the right view. In fact, as we live through this pandemic full of predictions and so on, it's an interesting moment to be pondering what science's actual role in those kinds of things is. Or you think it's possible that in science, clean, beautiful, simple prediction may not even be possible in real systems. That's the open question. I don't think it's open. I think that question is answered and the answer is no. Well, no, no. The answer could be just humans are not smart enough yet. Like we don't have the tools yet. No, that's the whole point. I mean, that's sort of the big discovery of this principle of computational equivalence of mine. And this is something which is kind of a follow on to Gödel's theorem, to Turing's work on the halting problem, all these kinds of things. That there is this fundamental limitation built into science, this idea of computational irreducibility that says that even though you may know the rules by which something operates, that does not mean that you can readily sort of be smarter than it and jump ahead and figure out what it's going to do. Yes, but do you think there's a hope for pockets of computational reducibility? Computational reducibility. And then a set of tools and mathematics that help you discover such pockets. That's where we live is in the pockets of reducibility. That's why, and this is one of the things that sort of come out of this physics project and actually something that, again, I should have realized many years ago, but didn't, is it could very well be that everything about the world is computationally reducible and completely unpredictable. But in our experience of the world, there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. And that's because we have sort of chosen a slice of, probably talk about this in much more detail, but I mean, we've kind of chosen a slice of how to think about the universe in which we can kind of sample a certain amount of computational reducibility. And that's sort of where we exist. And it may not be the whole story of how the universe is, but it is the part of the universe that we care about and we sort of operate in. And that's, you know, in science, that's been sort of a very special case of that. That is science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility that it can find, you know, the motion of the planets can be more or less predicted. You know, something about the weather is much harder to predict. Something about, you know, other kinds of things that are much harder to predict. And it's, these are, but science has tended to, you know, concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction. So you think rule 30, if we could linger on it, because it's just such a beautiful, simple formulation of the essential concept underlying all the things we're talking about. Do you think there's pockets of reducibility inside rule 30? Yes, that is the question of how big are they? What will they allow you to say? And so on. And that's, and figuring out where those pockets are, I mean, in a sense, that's the, that's sort of a, you know, that is an essential thing that one would like to do in science. But it's also, the important thing to realize that has not been, you know, is that science, if you just pick an arbitrary thing, you say, what's the answer to this question? That question may not be one that has a computationally reducible answer. That question, if you choose, you know, if you walk along the series of questions and you've got one that's reducible and you get to another one that's nearby and it's reducible too, if you stick to that kind of stick to the land, so to speak, then you can go down this chain of sort of reducible, answerable things. But if you just say, I'm just pick a question at random, I'm gonna have my computer pick a question at random. Most likely it's gonna be reducible. Most likely it will be reducible. And what we're thrown in the world, so to speak, we, you know, when we engineer things, we tend to engineer things to sort of keep in the zone of reducibility. When we're throwing things by the natural world, for example, not at all certain that we will be kept in this kind of zone of reducibility. Can we talk about this pandemic then? Sure. For a second, is a, so how do we, there's obviously huge amount of economic pain that people are feeling. There's a huge incentive and medical pain, health, just all kind of psychological. There's a huge incentive to figure this out, to walk along the trajectory of reducible, of reducibility. There's a lot of disparate data. You know, people understand generally how viruses spread, but it's very complicated because there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a, there could be a lot of variability also, like so many, obviously a nearly infinite number of variables that represent human interaction. And so you have to figure out, from the perspective of reducibility, figure out which variables are really important in this kind of, from an epidemiological perspective. So why aren't we, you kind of said that we're clearly failing. Well, I think it's a complicated thing. So, I mean, you know, when this pandemic started up, you know, I happened to be in the middle of being about to release this whole physics project thing, but I thought, you know. The timing is just cosmically absurd. A little bit bizarre, but you know, but I thought, you know, I should do the public service thing of, you know, trying to understand what I could about the pandemic. And, you know, we'd been curating data about it and all that kind of thing. But, you know, so I started looking at the data and started looking at modeling and I decided it's just really hard. You need to know a lot of stuff that we don't know about human interactions. It's actually clear now that there's a lot of stuff we didn't know about viruses and about the way immunity works and so on. And it's, you know, I think what will come out in the end is there's a certain amount of what happens that we just kind of have to trace each step and see what happens. There's a certain amount of stuff where there's going to be a big narrative about this happened because, you know, of T cell immunity. This could happen because there's this whole giant sort of field of asymptomatic viral stuff out there. You know, there will be a narrative and that narrative, whenever there's a narrative, that's kind of a sign of reducibility. But when you just say, let's from first principles figure out what's going on, then you can potentially be stuck in this kind of a mess of irreducibility where you just have to simulate each step and you can't do that unless you know details about, you know, human interaction networks and so on and so on and so on. The thing that has been very sort of frustrating to see is the mismatch between people's expectations about what science can deliver and what science can actually deliver, so to speak. Because people have this idea that, you know, it's science. So there must be a definite answer and we must be able to know that answer. And, you know, this is, it is both, you know, when you've, after you've played around with sort of little programs in the computational universe, you don't have that intuition anymore. You know, it's, I always, I'm always fond of saying, you know, the computational animals are always smarter than you are. That is, you know, you look at one of these things and it's like, it can't possibly do such and such a thing. Then you run it and it's like, wait a minute, it's doing that thing. How does that work? Okay, now I can go back and understand it. But that's the brave thing about science is that in the chaos of the irreducible universe, we nevertheless persist to find those pockets. That's kind of the whole point. That's like, you say that the limits of science, but that, you know, yes, it's highly limited, but there's a hope there. And like, there's so many questions I want to ask here. So one, you said narrative, which is really interesting. So obviously from a, at every level of society, you look at Twitter, everybody's constructing narratives about the pandemic, about not just the pandemic, but all the cultural tension that we're going through. So there's narratives, but they're not necessarily connected to the underlying reality of these systems. So our human narratives, I don't even know if they're, I don't like those pockets of reducibility because we're, it's like constructing things that are not actually representative of reality, and thereby not giving us like good solutions to how to predict the system. Look, it gets complicated because, you know, people want to say, explain the pandemic to me, explain what's going to happen. In the future. Yes, but also, can you explain it? Is there a story to tell? What already happened in the past? Yeah, or what's going to happen, but I mean, you know, it's similar to sort of explaining things in AI or in any computational system. It's like, you know, explain what happened. Well, it could just be this happened because of this detail and this detail and this detail, and a million details, and there isn't a big story to tell. There's no kind of big arc of the story that says, oh, it's because, you know, there's a viral field that has these properties and people start showing symptoms. You know, when the seasons change, people will show symptoms and people don't even understand, you know, seasonal variation of flu, for example. It's something where, you know, there could be a big story, or it could be just a zillion little details that mount up. See, but, okay, let's pretend that this pandemic, like the coronavirus, resembles something like the 1D rule 30 cellular automata, okay? So, I mean, that's how epidemiologists model virus spread. Indeed, yes. They sometimes use cellular automata, yes. Yeah, and okay, so you could say it's simplistic, but okay, let's say it's representative of actually what happens. You know, the dynamic of, you have a graph, it probably is closer to the hypergraph model. It is, yes. It's actually, that's another funny thing. As we were getting ready to release this physics project, we realized that a bunch of things we'd worked out about foliations of causal graphs and things were directly relevant to thinking about contact tracing. Yeah, exactly. And interactions with cell phones and so on, which is really weird. But like, it just feels like, it feels like we should be able to get some beautiful core insight about the spread of this particular virus on the hypergraph of human civilization, right? I tried, I didn't manage to figure it out. But you're one person. Yeah, but I mean, I think actually it's a funny thing because it turns out the main model, you know, this SIR model, I only realized recently was invented by the grandfather of a good friend of mine from high school. So that was just a, you know, it's a weird thing, right? The question is, you know, okay, so you know, on this graph of how humans are connected, you know something about what happens if this happens and that happens. That graph is made in complicated ways that depends on all sorts of issues that where we don't have the data about how human society works well enough to be able to make that graph. There's actually, one of my kids did a study of sort of what happens on different kinds of graphs and how robust are the results, okay? His basic answer is there are a few general results that you can get that are quite robust. Like, you know, a small number of big gatherings is worse than a large number of small gatherings, okay? That's quite robust. But when you ask more detailed questions, it seemed like it just depends. It depends on details. In other words, it's kind of telling you in that case, you know, the irreducibility matters, so to speak. It's not, there's not gonna be this kind of one sort of master theorem that says, and therefore this is how things are gonna work. Yeah, but there's a certain kind of, from a graph perspective, the certain kind of dynamic to human interaction. So like large groups and small groups, I think it matters who the groups are. For example, you could imagine large, depends how you define large, but you can imagine groups of 30 people, as long as they are cliques or whatever. Right. As long as the outgoing degree of that graph is small or something like that, like you can imagine some beautiful underlying rule of human dynamic interaction where I can still be happy, where I can have a conversation with you and a bunch of other people that mean a lot to me in my life and then stay away from the bigger, I don't know, not going to a Miley Cyrus concert or something like that and figuring out mathematically some nice. See, this is an interesting thing. So I mean, this is the question of what you're describing is kind of the problem of the many situations where you would like to get away from computational irreducibility. A classic one in physics is thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics, the law that says entropy tends to increase things that start orderly tend to get more disordered, or which is also the thing that says, given that you have a bunch of heat, it's hard, heat is the microscopic motion of molecules, it's hard to turn that heat into systematic mechanical work. It's hard to just take something being hot and turn that into, oh, all the atoms are gonna line up in the bar of metal and the piece of metal is gonna shoot in some direction. That's essentially the same problem as how do you go from this computationally irreducible mess of things happening and get something you want out of it. It's kind of mining, you're kind of, now, actually I've understood in recent years that the story of thermodynamics is actually precisely a story of computational irreducibility, but it is a, it is already an analogy. You can kind of see that as can you take the, what you're asking to do there is you're asking to go from the kind of, the mess of all these complicated human interactions and all this kind of computational processes going on and you say, I want to achieve this particular thing out of it. I want to kind of extract from the heat of what's happening. I want to kind of extract this useful piece of sort of mechanical work that I find helpful. I mean. Do you have a hope for the pandemic? So we'll talk about physics, but for the pandemic, can that be extracted? Do you think? What's your intuition? The good news is the curves basically, for reasons we don't understand, the curves, the clearly measurable mortality curves and so on for the Northern Hemisphere have gone down. Yeah, but the bad news is that it could be a lot worse for future viruses. And what this pandemic revealed is we're highly unprepared for the discovery of the pockets of reducibility within a pandemic that's much more dangerous. Well, my guess is the specific risk of viral pandemics, you know, that the pure virology and immunology of the thing, this will cause that to advance to the point where this particular risk is probably considerably mitigated. But is the structure of modern society robust to all kinds of risks? Well, the answer is clearly no. And it's surprising to me the extent to which people, as I say, it's kind of scary actually how much people believe in science. That is people say, oh, you know, because the science says this, that and the other, we'll do this and this and this, even though from a sort of common sense point of view, it's a little bit crazy and people are not prepared and it doesn't really work in society as it is for people to say, well, actually we don't really know how the science works. People say, well, tell us what to do. Yeah, because then, yeah, what's the alternative? For the masses, it's difficult to sit, it's difficult to meditate on computational reducibility. It's difficult to sit, it's difficult to enjoy a good dinner meal while knowing that you know nothing about the world. Well, I think this is a place where, you know, this is what politicians and political leaders do for a living, so to speak, is you've got to make some decision about what to do. And it's... Tell some narrative that while amidst the mystery and knowing not much about the past or the future, still telling a narrative that somehow gives people hope that we know what the heck we're doing. Yeah, and get society through the issue. You know, even though, you know, the idea that we're just gonna, you know, sort of be able to get the definitive answer from science and it's gonna tell us exactly what to do. Unfortunately, you know, it's interesting because let me point out that if that was possible, if science could always tell us what to do, then in a sense, our, you know, that would be a big downer for our lives. If science could always tell us what the answer is gonna be, it's like, well, you know, it's kind of fun to live one's life and just sort of see what happens. If one could always just say, let me check my science. Oh, I know, you know, the result of everything is gonna be 42. I don't need to live my life and do what I do. It's just, we already know the answer. It's actually good news in a sense that there is this phenomenon of computational irreducibility that doesn't allow you to just sort of jump through time and say, this is the answer, so to speak. And that's, so that's a good thing. The bad thing is it doesn't allow you to jump through time and know what the answer is. It's scary. Do you think we're gonna be okay as a human civilization? You said, we don't know. Absolutely. Do you think we'll prosper or destroy ourselves? In general? In general. I'm an optimist. No, I think that, you know, it'll be interesting to see, for example, with this, you know, pandemic, I, you know, to me, you know, when you look at like organizations, for example, you know, having some kind of perturbation, some kick to the system, usually the end result of that is actually quite good. You know, unless it kills the system, it's actually quite good usually. And I think in this case, you know, people, I mean, my impression, you know, it's a little weird for me because, you know, I've been a remote tech CEO for 30 years. It doesn't, you know, this is bizarrely, you know, and the fact that, you know, like this coming to see you here is the first time in six months that I've been like, you know, in a building other than my house, okay? So, you know, I'm a kind of ridiculous outlier in these kinds of things. But overall, your sense is when you shake up the system and throw in chaos that you challenge the system, we humans emerge better. Seems to be that way. Who's to know? I think that, you know, people, you know, my sort of vague impression is that people are sort of, you know, oh, what's actually important? You know, what is worth caring about and so on? And that seems to be something that perhaps is more, you know, emergent in this kind of situation. It's so fascinating that on the individual level, we have our own complex cognition. We have consciousness, we have intelligence, we're trying to figure out little puzzles. And then that somehow creates this graph of collective intelligence. Well, we figure out, and then you throw in these viruses of which there's millions different, you know, there's entire taxonomy and the viruses are thrown into the system of collective human intelligence. And when little humans figure out what to do about it, we get like, we tweet stuff about information. There's doctors as conspiracy theorists. And then we play with different information. I mean, the whole of it is fascinating. I am like you also very optimistic, but you said the computational reducibility. There's always a fear of the darkness of the uncertainty before us. Yeah, I know. And it's scary. I mean, the thing is, if you knew everything, it will be boring. And it would be, and then, and worse than boring, so to speak. It would reveal the pointlessness, so to speak. And in a sense, the fact that there is this computational irreducibility, it's like as we live our lives, so to speak, something is being achieved. We're computing what our lives, you know, what happens in our lives. That's funny. So the computational reducibility is kind of like, it gives the meaning to life. It is the meaning of life. Computational reducibility is the meaning of life. There you go. It gives it meaning, yes. I mean, it's what causes it to not be something where you can just say, you know, you went through all those steps to live your life, but we already knew what the answer was. Hold on one second. I'm going to use my handy Wolfram Alpha sunburn computation thing, so long as I can get network here. There we go. Oh, actually, you know what? It says sunburn unlikely. This is a QA moment. This is a good moment. Okay, well, let me just check what it thinks. See why it thinks that. It doesn't seem like my intuition. This is one of these cases where we can, the question is, do we trust the science or do we use common sense? The UV thing is cool. Yeah, yeah, well, we'll see. This is a QA moment, as I say. It's, do we trust the product? Yes, we trust the product, so. And then there'll be a data point either way. If I'm desperately sunburned, I will send in an angry feedback. Because we mentioned the concept so much and a lot of people know it, but can you say what computational reducibility is? Yeah, right. The question is, if you think about things that happen as being computations, you think about some process in physics, something that you compute in mathematics, whatever else, it's a computation in the sense it has definite rules. You follow those rules. You follow them many steps and you get some result. So then the issue is, if you look at all these different kinds of computations that can happen, whether they're computations that are happening in the natural world, whether they're happening in our brains, whether they're happening in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is, how do these computations compare? Is, are there dumb computations and smart computations or are they somehow all equivalent? And the thing that I kind of was sort of surprised to realize from a bunch of experiments that I did in the early nineties and now we have tons more evidence for it, this thing I call the principle of computational equivalence, which basically says, when one of these computations, one of these processes that follows rules, doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached the sort of equivalent level of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? That means that, you might say, gosh, I'm studying this little tiny program on my computer. I'm studying this little thing in nature, but I have my brain and my brain is surely much smarter than that thing. I'm gonna be able to systematically outrun the computation that it does because I have a more sophisticated computation that I can do. But what the principle of computational equivalence says is that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. And so what consequences does that have? Well, it means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no sort of shortcut that we can make that jumps to the answer. Now the general case. Right, right. But the, so what has happened, what science has become used to doing is using the little sort of pockets of computational reducibility, which by the way are an inevitable consequence of computational irreducibility, that there have to be these pockets scattered around of computational reducibility to be able to find those particular cases where you can jump ahead. I mean, one thing sort of a little bit of a parable type thing that I think is fun to tell. If you look at ancient Babylon, they were trying to predict three kinds of things. They tried to predict where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle. And they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other. That's funny. And it turns out where the planets are is a piece of computational reducibility that 300 years ago or so we pretty much cracked. I mean, it's been technically difficult to get all the details right, but it's basically, we got that. Who's gonna win or lose the battle? No, we didn't crack that one. That one, that one, right. Game theorists are trying. Yes. And then the weather. It's kind of halfway on that one. Halfway? Yeah, I think we're doing okay on that one. Long term climate, different story. But the weather, we're much closer on that. But do you think eventually we'll figure out the weather? So do you think eventually most think we'll figure out the local pockets in everything, essentially the local pockets of reducibility? No, I think that it's an interesting question, but I think that there is an infinite collection of these local pockets. We'll never run out of local pockets. And by the way, those local pockets are where we build engineering, for example. That's how we, if we want to have a predictable life, so to speak, then we have to build in these sort of pockets of reducibility. Otherwise, if we were sort of existing in this kind of irreducible world, we'd never be able to have definite things to know what's gonna happen. I have to say, I think one of the features, when we look at sort of today from the future, so to speak, I suspect one of the things where people will say I can't believe they didn't see that is stuff to do with the following kind of thing. So if we describe, oh, I don't know, something like heat, for instance, we say, oh, the air in here, it's this temperature, this pressure, that's as much as we can say. Otherwise, just a bunch of random molecules bouncing around. People will say, I just can't believe they didn't realize that there was all this detail and how all these molecules were bouncing around and they could make use of that. And actually, I realized there's a thing I realized last week, actually, was a thing that people say, one of the scenarios for the very long term history of our universe is a so called heat death of the universe, where basically everything just becomes thermodynamically boring. Everything's just this big kind of gas and thermal equilibrium. People say, that's a really bad outcome. But actually, it's not a really bad outcome. It's an outcome where there's all this computation going on and all those individual gas molecules are all bouncing around in very complicated ways doing this very elaborate computation. It just happens to be a computation that right now, we haven't found ways to understand. We haven't found ways, our brains haven't, and our mathematics and our science and so on, haven't found ways to tell an interesting story about that. It just looks boring to us. So you're saying there's a hopeful view of the heat death, quote unquote, of the universe where there's actual beautiful complexity going on. Similar to the kind of complexity we think of that creates rich experience in human life and life on Earth. So those little molecules interacting complex ways, that could be intelligence in that, there could be. Absolutely. I mean, this is what you learn from this principle. Wow, that's a hopeful message. Right. I mean, this is what you kind of learn from this principle of computational equivalence. You learn it's both a message of sort of hope and a message of kind of, you know, you're not as special as you think you are, so to speak. I mean, because, you know, we imagine that with sort of all the things we do with human intelligence and all that kind of thing, and all of the stuff we've constructed in science, it's like, we're very special. But actually it turns out, well, no, we're not. We're just doing computations like things in nature do computations, like those gas molecules do computations, like the weather does computations. The only thing about the computations that we do that's really special is that we understand what they are, so to speak. In other words, we have a, you know, to us they're special because kind of, they're connected to our purposes, our ways of thinking about things and so on. And that's some, but so. That's very human centric. That's, we're just attached to this kind of thing. So let's talk a little bit of physics. Maybe let's ask the biggest question. What is a theory of everything in general? What does that mean? Yeah, so I mean, the question is, can we kind of reduce what has been physics as a something where we have to sort of pick away and say, do we roughly know how the world works to something where we have a complete formal theory where we say, if we were to run this program for long enough, we would reproduce everything, you know, down to the fact that we're having this conversation at this moment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Any physical phenomena, any phenomena in this world? Any phenomenon in the universe. But the, you know, because of computational irreducibility, it's not, you know, that's not something where you say, okay, you've got the fundamental theory of everything. Then, you know, tell me whether, you know, lions are gonna eat tigers or something. You know, that's a, no, you have to run this thing for, you know, 10 to the 500 steps or something to know something like that, okay? So at some moment, potentially, you say, this is a rule and run this rule enough times and you will get the whole universe, right? That's what it means to kind of have a fundamental theory of physics as far as I'm concerned is you've got this rule. It's potentially quite simple. We don't know for sure it's simple, but we have various reasons to believe it might be simple. And then you say, okay, I'm showing you this rule. You just run it only 10 to the 500 times and you'll get everything. In other words, you've kind of reduced the problem of physics to a problem of mathematics, so to speak. It's like, it's as if, you know, you'd like, you generate the digits of pi. There's a definite procedure. You just generate them and it'd be the same thing if you have a fundamental theory of physics of the kind that I'm imagining, you know, you get this rule and you just run it out and you get everything that happens in the universe. So a theory of everything is a mathematical framework within which you can explain everything that happens in the universe, it's kind of in a unified way. It's not, there's a bunch of disparate modules of, does it feel like if you create a rule and we'll talk about the Wolfram physics model, which is fascinating, but if you have a simple set of rules with a data structure, like a hypergraph, does that feel like a satisfying theory of everything? Because then you really run up against the irreducibility, computational irreducibility. Right, so that's a really interesting question. So I, you know, what I thought was gonna happen is I thought we, you know, I thought we had a pretty good, I had a pretty good idea for what the structure of this sort of theory that sort of underneath space and time and so on might be like. And I thought, gosh, you know, in my lifetime, so to speak, we might be able to figure out what happens in the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe. And that would be cool, but it's pretty far away from anything that we can see today. And it will be hard to test whether that's right and so on and so on and so on. To my huge surprise, although it should have been obvious and it's embarrassing that it wasn't obvious to me, but to my huge surprise, we managed to get unbelievably much further than that. And basically what happened is that it turns out that even though there's this kind of bed of computational irreducibility, that sort of these, all these simple rules run into, there are certain pieces of computational reducibility that quite generically occur for large classes of these rules. And, and this is the really exciting thing as far as I'm concerned, the big pieces of computational reducibility are basically the pillars of 20th century physics. That's the amazing thing, that general relativity and quantum field theory is sort of the pillars of 20th century physics turn out to be precisely the stuff you can say. There's a lot you can't say, there's a lot that's kind of at this irreducible level where you kind of don't know what's going to happen, you have to run it, you know, you can't run it within our universe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing is there are things you can say and the things you can say turn out to be very beautifully exactly the structure that was found in 20th century physics, namely general relativity and quantum mechanics. And general relativity and quantum mechanics are these pockets of reducibility that we think of as, that 20th century physics is essentially pockets of reducibility. And then it is incredibly surprising that any kind of model that's generative from simple rules would have such pockets. Yeah, well, I think what's surprising is we didn't know where those things came from. It's like general relativity, it's a very nice mathematically elegant theory. Why is it true? You know, quantum mechanics, why is it true? What we realized is that from this, that these theories are generic to a huge class of systems that have these particular very unstructured underlying rules. And that's the thing that is sort of remarkable and that's the thing to me that's just, it's really beautiful. I mean, it's, and the thing that's even more beautiful is that it turns out that, you know, people have been struggling for a long time. You know, how does general relativity theory of gravity relate to quantum mechanics? They seem to have all kinds of incompatibilities. It turns out what we realized is at some level they are the same theory. And that's just, it's just great as far as I'm concerned. So maybe like taking a little step back from your perspective, not from the low, not from the beautiful hypergraph, well, from physics model perspective, but from the perspective of 20th century physics, what is general relativity? What is quantum mechanics? How do you think about these two theories from the context of the theory of everything? Like just even definition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So I mean, you know, a little bit of history of physics, right? So, I mean the, you know, okay, very, very quick history of this, right? So, I mean, you know, physics, you know, in ancient Greek times, people basically said, we can just figure out how the world works. As you know, we're philosophers, we're gonna figure out how the world works. You know, some philosophers thought there were atoms. Some philosophers thought there were, you know, continuous flows of things. People had different ideas about how the world works. And they tried to just say, we're gonna construct this idea of how the world works. They didn't really have sort of notions of doing experiments and so on quite the same way as developed later. So that was sort of an early tradition for thinking about sort of models of the world. Then by the time of 1600s, time of Galileo and then Newton, sort of the big idea there was, you know, title of Newton's book, you know, Principia Mathematica, mathematical principles of natural philosophy. We can use mathematics to understand natural philosophy, to understand things about the way the world works. And so that then led to this kind of idea that, you know, we can write down a mathematical equation and have that represent how the world works. So Newton's one of his most famous ones is his universal law of gravity, inverse square law of gravity that allowed him to compute all sorts of features of the planets and so on. Although some of them he got wrong and it took another hundred years for people to actually be able to do the math to the level that was needed. But so that had been this sort of tradition was we write down these mathematical equations. We don't really know where these equations come from. We write them down. Then we figure out, we work out the consequences and we say, yes, that agrees with what we actually observe in astronomy or something like this. So that tradition continued. And then the first of these two sort of great 20th century innovations was, well, the history is actually a little bit more complicated, but let's say that there were two, quantum mechanics and general relativity. Quantum mechanics kind of 1900 was kind of the very early stuff done by Planck that led to the idea of photons, particles of light. But let's take general relativity first. One feature of the story is that special relativity thing Einstein invented in 1905 was something which surprisingly was a kind of logically invented theory. It was not a theory where it was something where given these ideas that were sort of axiomatically thought to be true about the world, it followed that such and such a thing would be the case. It was a little bit different from the kind of methodological structure of some existing theories in the more recent times, where it's just been, we write down an equation and we find out that it works. So what happened there. So there's some reasoning about the light. The basic idea was the speed of light appears to be constant. Even if you're traveling very fast, you shine a flashlight, the light will come out. Even if you're going at half the speed of light, the light doesn't come out of your flashlight at one and a half times the speed of light. It's still just the speed of light. And to make that work, you have to change your view of how space and time work to be able to account for the fact that when you're going faster, it appears that length is foreshortened and time is dilated and things like this. And that's special relativity. That's special relativity. So then Einstein went on with sort of vaguely similar kinds of thinking. In 1915, invented general relativity, which is the theory of gravity. And the basic point of general relativity is it's a theory that says, when there is mass in space, space is curved. And what does that mean? Usually you think of what's the shortest distance between two points. Like ordinarily on a plane in space, it's a straight line. Photons, light goes in straight lines. Well, then the question is, is if you have a curved surface, a straight line is no longer straight. On the surface of the earth, the shortest distance between two points is a great circle. It's a circle. So, you know, Einstein's observation was maybe the physical structure of space is such that space is curved. So the shortest distance between two points, the path, the straight line in quotes, won't be straight anymore. And in particular, if a photon is, you know, traveling near the sun or something, or if a particle is going, something is traveling near the sun, maybe the shortest path will be one that is something which looks curved to us because it seems curved to us because space has been deformed by the presence of mass associated with that massive object. So the kind of the idea there is, think of the structure of space as being a dynamical changing kind of thing. But then what Einstein did was he wrote down these differential equations that basically represented the curvature of space and its response to the presence of mass and energy. And that ultimately is connected to the force of gravity, which is one of the forces that seems to, based on its strength, operate on a different scale than some of the other forces. So it operates in a scale that's very large. What happens there is just this curvature of space, which causes, you know, the paths of objects to be deflected. That's what gravity does. It causes the paths of objects to be deflected. And this is an explanation for gravity, so to speak. And the surprise is that from 1915 until today, everything that we've measured about gravity precisely agrees with general relativity. And that, you know, it wasn't clear black holes were sort of a predict, well, actually the expansion of the universe was an early potential prediction, although Einstein tried to sort of patch up his equations to make it not cause the universe to expand, because it was kind of so obvious the universe wasn't expanding. And, you know, it turns out it was expanding and he should have just trusted the equations. And that's a lesson for those of us interested in making fundamental theories of physics is you should trust your theory and not try and patch it because of something that you think might be the case that might turn out not to be the case. Even if the theory says something crazy is happening. Yeah, right. Like the universe is expanding. Like the universe is expanding, right, which is, but, you know, then it took until the 1940s, probably even really until the 1960s, until people understood that black holes were a consequence of general relativity and so on. But that's, you know, the big surprise has been that so far this theory of gravity has perfectly agreed with, you know, these collisions of black holes seen by their gravitational waves, you know, it all just works. So that's been kind of one pillar of the story of physics it's mathematically complicated to work out the consequences of general relativity, but it's not, there's no, I mean, and some things are kind of squiggly and complicated. Like people believe, you know, energy is conserved. Okay, well, energy conservation doesn't really work in general activity in the same way as it ordinarily does. And it's all a big mathematical story of how you actually nail down something that is definitive that you can talk about it and not specific to the, you know, reference frames you're operating in and so on and so on and so on. But fundamentally, general relativity is a straight shot in the sense that you have this theory, you work out its consequences. And that theory is useful in terms of basic science and trying to understand the way black holes work, the way the creation of galaxies work, sort of all of these kinds of cosmological things, understanding what happened, like you said, at the Big Bang. Yeah. Like all those kinds of, well, no, not at the Big Bang actually, right? But the... Well, features of the expansion of the universe, yes. I mean, and there are lots of details where we don't quite know how it's working, you know, is there, you know, where's the dark matter, is there dark energy, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But fundamentally, the, you know, the testable features of general relativity, it all works very beautifully. And it's in a sense, it is mathematically sophisticated, but it is not conceptually hard to understand in some sense. Okay. So that's general relativity. And what's its friendly neighbor, like you said, there's two theories, quantum mechanics. Right. So quantum mechanics, the sort of the way that that originated was, one question was, is the world continuous or is it discrete? You know, in ancient Greek times, people have been debating this. People debated it, you know, throughout history. Is light made of waves? Is it continuous? Is it discrete? Is it made of particles, corpuscles, whatever. You know, what had become clear in the 1800s is that atoms, that, you know, materials are made of discrete atoms. You know, when you take some water, the water is not a continuous fluid, even though it seems like a continuous fluid to us at our scale. But if you say, let's look at it, smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller scale, eventually you get down to these, you know, these molecules and then atoms. It's made of discrete things. The question is sort of how important is this discreteness? Just what's discrete, what's not discrete? Is energy discrete? Is, you know, what's discrete, what's not? And so. Does it have mass? Those kinds of questions. Yeah, yeah, right. Well, there's a question, I mean, for example, is mass discrete is an interesting question, which is now something we can address. But, you know, what happened in the coming up to the 1920s, there was this kind of mathematical theory developed that could explain certain kinds of discreteness in particularly in features of atoms and so on. And, you know, what developed was this mathematical theory that was the theory of quantum mechanics, theory of wave functions, Schrodinger's equation, things like this. That's a mathematical theory that allows you to calculate lots of features of the microscopic world, lots of things about how atoms work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the calculations all work just great. The question of what does it really mean is a complicated question. Now, I mean, to just explain a little bit historically, the, you know, the early calculations of things like atoms worked great in 1920s, 1930s and so on. There was always a problem. There were, in quantum field theory, which is a theory of, in quantum mechanics, you're dealing with a certain number of electrons and you fix the number of electrons. You say, I'm dealing with a two electron thing. In quantum field theory, you allow for particles being created and destroyed. So you can emit a photon that didn't exist before. You can absorb a photon, things like that. That's a more complicated, mathematically complicated theory. And it had all kinds of mathematical issues and all kinds of infinities that cropped up. And it was finally figured out more or less how to get rid of those. But there were only certain ways of doing the calculations and those didn't work for atomic nuclei among other things. And that led to a lot of development up until the 1960s of alternative ideas for how one could understand what was happening in atomic nuclei, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. End result, in the end, the kind of most quotes obvious mathematical structure of quantum field theory seems to work. Although it's mathematically difficult to deal with, but you can calculate all kinds of things. You can calculate to a dozen decimal places, certain things, you can measure them. It all works. It's all beautiful. Now you say... The underlying fabric is the model of that particular theory is fields. Like you keep saying fields. Those are quantum fields. Those are different from classical fields. A field is something like you say, like you say the temperature field in this room. It's like there is a value of temperature at every point around the room. That's some, or you can say the wind field would be the vector direction of the wind at every point. It's continuous. Yes, and that's a classical field. The quantum field is a much more mathematically elaborate kind of thing. And I should explain that one of the pictures of quantum mechanics that's really important is, in classical physics, one believes that sort of definite things happen in the world. You pick up a ball, you throw it, the ball goes in a definite trajectory that has certain equations of motion. It goes in a parabola, whatever else. In quantum mechanics, the picture is definite things don't happen. Instead, sort of what happens is this whole sort of structure of all many different paths being followed and we can calculate certain aspects of what happens, certain probabilities of different outcomes and so on. And you say, well, what really happened? What's really going on? What's the sort of, what's the underlying, what's the underlying story? How do we turn this mathematical theory that we can calculate things with into something that we can really understand and have a narrative about? And that's been really, really hard for quantum mechanics. My friend, Dick Feynman, always used to say, nobody understands quantum mechanics, even though he'd made his whole career out of calculating things about quantum mechanics. And so it's a little bit. Nevertheless, it's what the quantum field theory is very, very accurate at predicting a lot of the physical phenomena. So it works. Yeah. But there are things about it, it has certain, when we apply it, the standard model of particle physics, for example, we, which we apply to calculate all kinds of things that works really well. And you say, well, it has certain parameters. It has a whole bunch of parameters actually. You say, why is the, why does the muon particle exist? Why is it 206 times the mass of the electron? We don't know, no idea. But so the standard model of physics is one of the models that's very accurate for describing three of the fundamental forces of physics. And it's looking at the world of the very small. Right. And then there's back to the neighbor of gravity, of general relativity. So, and then in the context of a theory of everything, what's traditionally the task of the unification of these theories? And why is it hard? The issue is you try to use the methods of quantum field theory to talk about gravity and it doesn't work. Just like there are photons of light. So there are gravitons, which are sort of the particles of gravity. And when you try and compute sort of the properties of the particles of gravity, the kind of mathematical tricks that get used in working things out in quantum field theory don't work. And that's, so that's been a sort of fundamental issue. And when you think about black holes, which are a place where sort of the structure of space is, you know, has sort of rapid variation and you get kind of quantum effects mixed in with effects from general relativity, things get very complicated and there are apparent paradoxes and things like that. And people have, you know, there've been a bunch of mathematical developments in physics over the last, I don't know, 30 years or so, which have kind of picked away at those kinds of issues and got hints about how things might work. But it hasn't been, you know, and the other thing to realize is, as far as physics is concerned, it's just like here's general relativity, here's quantum field theory, you know, be happy. Yeah, so do you think there's a quantization of gravity, so quantum gravity, what do you think of efforts that people have tried to, yeah, what do you think in general of the efforts of the physics community to try to unify these laws? So I think what's, it's interesting. I mean, I would have said something very different before what's happened with our physics project. I mean, you know, the remarkable thing is what we've been able to do is to make from this very simple, structurally simple, underlying set of ideas, we've been able to build this, you know, very elaborate structure that's both very abstract and very sort of mathematically rich. And the big surprise, as far as I'm concerned, is that it touches many of the ideas that people have had. So in other words, things like string theory and so on, twister theory, it's like the, you know, we might've thought, I had thought we're out on a prong, we're building something that's computational, it's completely different from what other people have done. But actually it seems like what we've done is to provide essentially the machine code that, you know, these things are various features of domain specific languages, so to speak, that talk about various aspects of this machine code. And I think this is something that to me is very exciting because it allows one both for us to provide sort of a new foundation for what's been thought about there and for all the work that's been done in those areas to give us, you know, more momentum to be able to figure out what's going on. Now, you know, people have sort of hoped, oh, we're just gonna be able to get, you know, string theory to just answer everything. That hasn't worked out. And I think we now kind of can see a little bit about just sort of how far away certain kinds of things are from being able to explain things. Some things, one of the big surprises to me, actually I literally just got a message about one aspect of this is the, you know, it's turning out to be easier. I mean, this project has been so much easier than I could ever imagine it would be. That is, I thought we would be, you know, just about able to understand the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe. And, you know, it would be a hundred years before we get much further than that. It's just turned out, it actually wasn't that hard. I mean, we're not finished, but, you know. So you're seeing echoes of all the disparate theories of physics in this framework. Yes, yes. I mean, it's a very interesting, you know, sort of history of science like phenomenon. I mean, the best analogy that I can see is what happened with the early days of computability and computation theory. You know, Turing machines were invented in 1936. People sort of understand computation in terms of Turing machines, but actually there had been preexisting theories of computation, combinators, general recursive functions, Lambda calculus, things like this. But people hadn't, those hadn't been concrete enough that people could really wrap their arms around them and understand what was going on. And I think what we're gonna see in this case is that a bunch of these mathematical theories, including some very, I mean, one of the things that's really interesting is one of the most abstract things that's come out of sort of mathematics, higher category theory, things about infinity group voids, things like this, which to me always just seemed like they were floating off into the stratosphere, ionosphere of mathematics, turn out to be things which our sort of theory anchors down to something fairly definite and says are super relevant to the way that we can understand how physics works. Give me a sec. By the way, I just threw a hat on. You've said that with this metaphor analogy that the theory of everything is a big mountain and you have a sense that however far we are up the mountain, that the Wolfram physics model view of the universe is at least the right mountain. We're the right mountain, yes, without question. Which aspect of it is the right mountain? So for example, I mean, so there's so many aspects to just the way of the Wolfram physics project, the way it approaches the world that's clean, crisp, and unique and powerful, so there's a discreet nature to it, there's a hypergraph, there's a computational nature, there's a generative aspect, you start from nothing, you generate everything, do you think the actual model is actually a really good one, or do you think this general principle from simplicity generating complexity is the right, like what aspect of the mountain is the correct? Yeah, right, I think that the kind of the meta idea about using simple computational systems to do things, that's the ultimate big paradigm that is sort of super important. The details of the particular model are very nice and clean and allow one to actually understand what's going on. They are not unique, and in fact, we know that. We know that there's a very, very, very, very, there's a large number of different ways to describe essentially the same thing. I mean, I can describe things in terms of hypergraphs, I can describe them in terms of higher category theory, I can describe them in a bunch of different ways. They are in some sense all the same thing, but our sort of story about what's going on and the kind of cultural mathematical resonances are a bit different. And I think it's perhaps worth sort of saying a little bit about kind of the foundational ideas of these models and things. Great, so can you maybe, can we like rewind? We've talked about it a little bit, but can you say like what the central idea is of the Wolfram Physics Project? Right, so the question is we're interested in finding sort of simple computational rule that describes our whole universe. Can we just pause on that? It's just so beautiful, that's such a beautiful idea that we can generate our universe from a data structure, a simple structure, simple set of rules, and we can generate our entire universe. Yes, that's the idea. That's awe inspiring. Right, but so the question is how do you actualize that? What might this rule be like? And so one thing you quickly realize is if you're gonna pack everything about our universe into this tiny rule, not much that we are familiar with in our universe will be obvious in that rule. So you don't get to fit all these parameters of the universe, all these features of, you know, this is how space works, this is how time works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You don't get to fit that all in. It all has to be sort of packed in to this thing, something much smaller, much more basic, much lower level machine code, so to speak, than that. And all the stuff that we're familiar with has to kind of emerge from the operation. So the rule in itself, because of the computational reducibility, is not gonna tell you the story. It's not gonna give you the answer to, it's not gonna let you predict what you're gonna have for lunch tomorrow, and it's not going to let you predict basically anything about your life, about the universe. Right, and you're not going to be able to see in that rule, oh, there's the three for the number of dimensions of space and so on. That's not gonna be there. Spacetime is not going to be obviously. Right, so the question is then, what is the universe made of? That's a basic question. And we've had some assumptions about what the universe is made of for the last few thousand years that I think in some cases just turn out not to be right. And the most important assumption is that space is a continuous thing. That is that you can, if you say, let's pick a point in space. We're gonna do geometry. We're gonna pick a point. We can pick a point absolutely anywhere in space. Precise numbers we can specify of where that point is. In fact, Euclid who kind of wrote down the original kind of axiomatization of geometry back in 300 BC or so, his very first definition, he says, a point is that which has no part. A point is this indivisible infinitesimal thing. Okay, so we might've said that about material objects. We might've said that about water, for example. We might've said water is a continuous thing that we can just pick any point we want in some water, but actually we know it isn't true. We know that water is made of molecules that are discrete. And so the question, one fundamental question is what is space made of? And so one of the things that's sort of a starting point for what I've done is to think of space as a discrete thing, to think of there being sort of atoms of space just as there are atoms of material things, although very different kinds of atoms. And by the way, I mean, this idea, you know, there were ancient Greek philosophers who had this idea. There were, you know, Einstein actually thought this is probably how things would work out. I mean, he said, you know, repeatedly he thought that's the way it would work out. We don't have the mathematical tools in our time, which was 1940s, 1950s and so on to explore this. Like the way he thought, you mean that there is something very, very small and discrete that's underlying space. Yes. And that means that, so, you know, the mathematical theory, mathematical theories in physics assume that space can be described just as a continuous thing. You can just pick coordinates and the coordinates can have any values. And that's how you define space. Space is this just sort of background sort of theater on which the universe operates. But can we draw a distinction between space as a thing that could be described by three values, coordinates, and how you're, are you using the word space more generally when you say? No, I'm just talking about space as in what we experience in the universe. So that you think this 3D aspect of it is fundamental. No, I don't think that 3D is fundamental at all, actually. I think that the thing that has been assumed is that space is this continuous thing where you can just describe it by, let's say three numbers, for instance. But most important thing about that is that you can describe it by precise numbers because you can pick any point in space and you can talk about motions, any infinitesimal motion in space. And that's what continuous means. That's what continuous means. That's what, you know, Newton invented calculus to describe these kind of continuous small variations and so on. That was, that's kind of a fundamental idea from Euclid on that's been a fundamental idea about space. And so. Is that right or wrong? It's not right. It's not right. It's right at the level of our experience most of the time. It's not right at the level of the machine code, so to speak. And so. Machine code. Yeah, of the simulation. That's right. That's right. They're the very lowest level of the fabric of the universe, at least under the Wolfram physics model is your senses is discrete. Right. So now what does that mean? So it means what is space then? So in models, the basic idea is you say there are these sort of atoms of space. They're these points that represent, you know, represent places in space, but they're just discrete points. And the only thing we know about them is how they're connected to each other. We don't know where they are. They don't have coordinates. We don't get to say this is a position, such and such. It's just, here's a big bag of points. Like in our universe, there might be 10 to the 100 of these points. And all we know is this point is connected to this other point. So it's like, you know, all we have is the friend network, so to speak. We don't have, you know, people's, you know, physical addresses. All we have is the friend network of these points. Yeah. The underlying nature of reality is kind of like a Facebook. We don't know their location, but we have the friends. Yeah, yeah, right. We know which point is connected to which other points. And that's all we know. And so you might say, well, how on earth can you get something which is like our experience of, you know, what seems like continuous space? Well, the answer is, by the time you have 10 to the 100 of these things, those connections can work in such a way that on a large scale, it will seem to be like continuous space in let's say three dimensions or some other number of dimensions or 2.6 dimensions or whatever else. Because they're much, much, much, much larger. So like the number of relationships here we're talking about is just a humongous amount. So the kind of thing you're talking about is very, very, very small relative to our experience of daily life. Right, so I mean, you know, we don't know exactly the size, but maybe 10 to the minus, maybe around 10 to the minus 100 meters. So, you know, the size of, to give a comparison, the size of a proton is 10 to the minus 15 meters. And so this is something incredibly tiny compared to that. And the idea that from that would emerge the experience of continuous space is mind blowing. Well, what's your intuition why that's possible? Like, first of all, I mean, we'll get into it, but I don't know if we will through the medium of conversation, but the construct of hypergraphs is just beautiful. Right. Cellular automata are beautiful. We'll talk about it. But this thing about, you know, continuity arising from discrete systems is in today's world is actually not so surprising. I mean, you know, your average computer screen, right? Every computer screen is made of discrete pixels. Yet we have the, you know, we have the idea that we're seeing these continuous pictures. I mean, it's, you know, the fact that on a large scale, continuity can arise from lots of discrete elements. This is at some level unsurprising now. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But the pixels have a very definitive structure of neighbors on a computer screen. Right. There's no concept of spatial, of space inherent in the underlying fabric of reality. Right, right, right. So the point is that, but there are cases where there are. So for example, let's just imagine you have a square grid. Okay, and at every point on the grid, you have one of these atoms of space and it's connected to four other, four other atoms of space on the, you know, Northeast, Southwest corners, right? There you have something where if you zoom out from that, it's like a computer screen. Yeah, so the relationship creates the spatial, like the relationship creates a constraint, which then in an emergent sense creates a like, yeah, like basically a spatial coordinate for that thing. Yeah, right. Even though the individual point doesn't have a space. Even though the individual point doesn't know anything, it just knows what its neighbors are. On a large scale, it can be described by saying, oh, it looks like it's a, you know, this grid is zoomed out grid. You can say, well, you can describe these different points by saying they have certain positions, coordinates, et cetera. Now, in the sort of real setup, it's more complicated than that. It isn't just a square grid or something. It's something much more dynamic and complicated, which we'll talk about. But so, you know, the first idea, the first key idea is, you know, what's the universe made of? It's made of atoms of space basically with these connections between them. What kind of connections do they have? Well, so the simplest kind of thing you might say is, we've got something like a graph where every atom of space, where we have these edges that go between, these connections that go between atoms of space. We're not saying how long these edges are. We're just saying there is a connection from this place, from this atom to this atom. Just a quick pause, because there's a lot of very people that listen to this. Just to clarify, because I did a poll actually, what do you think a graph is a long time ago? And it's kind of funny how few people know the term graph outside of computer science. It's good. Let's call it a network. I think that's it. Let's call it a network is better. So, but every time, I like the word graph though. So let's define, let's just say that a graph will use terms nodes and edges maybe. And it's just the nodes represent some abstract entity and then the edges represent relationships between those entities. Right, exactly. So that's what a graph says. Sorry, so there you go. So that's the basic structure. That is the simplest case of a basic structure. Actually, it tends to be better to think about hypergraphs. So a hypergraph is just, instead of saying there are connections between pairs of things, we say there are connections between any number of things. So there might be ternary edges. So instead of just having two points are connected by an edge, you say three points are all associated with a hyperedge, are all connected by a hyperedge. That's just, at some level, that's a detail. It's a detail that happens to make the, for me, sort of in the history of this project, the realization that you could do things that way broke out of certain kinds of arbitrariness that I felt that there was in the model before I had seen how this worked. I mean, a hypergraph can be mapped to a graph. It's just a convenient representation. Mathematical speaking. That's correct. That's correct. But so then, so, okay, so the first question, the first idea of these models of ours is space is made of these connected sort of atoms of space. The next idea is space is all there is. There's nothing except for this space. So in traditional ideas in physics, people have said there's space, it's kind of a background. And then there's matter, all these particles, electrons, all these other things, which exist in space, right? But in this model, one of the key ideas is there's nothing except space. So in other words, everything that exists in the universe is a feature of this hypergraph. So how can that possibly be? Well, the way that works is that there are certain structures in this hypergraph where you say that little twisty knotted thing, we don't know exactly how this works yet, but we have sort of idea about how it works mathematically. This sort of twisted knotted thing, that's the core of an electron. This thing over there that has this different form, that's something else. So the different peculiarities of the structure of this graph are the very things that we think of as the particles inside the space, but in fact, it's just a property of the space. Mind blowing, first of all, that it's mind blowing, and we'll probably talk in its simplicity and beauty. Yes, I think it's very beautiful. I mean, this is, I'm... But okay, but that's space, and then there's another concept we didn't really kind of mention, but you think it of computation as a transformation. Let's talk about time in a second. Let's just, I mean, on the subject of space, there's this question of kind of what, there's this idea, there is this hypergraph, it represents space, and it represents everything that's in space. The features of that hypergraph, you can say certain features in this part we do know, certain features of the hypergraph represent the presence of energy, for example, or the presence of mass or momentum, and we know what the features of the hypergraph that represent those things are, but it's all just the same hypergraph. So one thing you might ask is, you know, if you just look at this hypergraph and you say, and we're gonna talk about sort of what the hypergraph does, but if you say, you know, how much of what's going on in this hypergraph is things we know and care about, like particles and atoms and electrons and all this kind of thing, and how much is just the background of space? So it turns out, so far as in one rough estimate of this, everything that we care about in the universe is only one part in 10 to the 120 of what's actually going on. The vast majority of what's happening is purely things that maintain the structure of space. That, in other words, that the things that are the features of space that are the things that we consider notable, like the presence of particles and so on, that's a tiny little piece of froth on the top of all this activity that mostly is just intended to, you know, mostly, I can't say intended, there's no intention here, that just maintains the structure of space. Let me load that in. It just makes me feel so good as a human being. To be the froth on the one in a 10 to the 120 or something of, well. And also just humbling how, in this mathematical framework, how much work needs to be done on the infrastructure of our universe. Right, to maintain the infrastructure of our universe is a lot of work. We are merely writing a little tiny things on top of that infrastructure. But you were just starting to talk a little bit about, we talked about space, that represents all the stuff that's in the universe. The question is, what does that stuff do? And for that, we have to start talking about time and what is time and so on. And, you know, one of the basic idea of this model is time is the progression of computation. So in other words, we have a structure of space and there is a rule that says how that structure of space will change. And it's the application, the repeated application of that rule that defines the progress of time. And what does the rule look like in the space of hypergraphs? Right, so what the rule says is something like, if you have a little tiny piece of hypergraph that looks like this, then it will be transformed into a piece of hypergraph that looks like this. So that's all it says. It says you pick up these elements of space and you can think of these edges, these hyper edges as being relations between elements in space. You might pick up these two relations between elements in space. And we're not saying where those elements are or what they are, but every time there's a certain arrangement of elements in space, then arrangement in the sense of the way they're connected, then we transform it into some other arrangement. So there's a little tiny pattern and you transform it into another little pattern. That's right. And then because of this, I mean, again, it's kind of similar to cellular automata in that like on paper, the rule looks like super simple. It's like, yeah, okay. Yeah, right, from this, the universe can be born. But like once you start applying it, beautiful structure starts being, potentially can be created. And what you're doing is you're applying that rule to different parts, like anytime you match it within the hypergraph. And then one of the like incredibly beautiful and interesting things to think about is the order in which you apply that rule, because that pattern appears all over the place. Right, so this is a big complicated thing, very hard to wrap one's brain around, okay? So you say the rule is every time you see this little pattern transform it in this way. But yet, as you look around the space that represents the universe, there may be zillions of places where that little pattern occurs. So what it says is just do this, apply this rule wherever you feel like. And what is extremely non trivial is, well, okay, so this is happening sort of in computer science terms, sort of asynchronously, you're just doing it wherever you feel like doing it. And the only constraint is that if you're going to apply the rule somewhere, the things to which you apply the rule, the little elements to which you apply the rule, if they have to be, okay, well, you can think of each application of the rule as being kind of an event that happens in the universe. And the input to an event has to be ready for the event to occur. That is, if one event occurred, if one transformation occurred, and it produced a particular atom of space, then that atom of space has to already exist before another transformation that's going to apply to that atom of space can occur. So that's like the prerequisite for the event. That's right, that's right. So that defines a kind of, this sort of set of causal relationships between events. It says, this event has to have happened before this event. But that is... But that's not a very limiting constraint. No, it's not. And what's interesting... You still get the zillion, that's a technical term, options. That's correct. But, okay, so this is where things get a little bit more elaborate, but... But they're mind blowing, so... Right, but so what happens is, so the first thing you might say is, you know, let's... Well, okay, so this question about the freedom of which event you do when. Well, let me sort of state an answer and then explain it. Okay, the validity of special relativity is a consequence of the fact that in some sense, it doesn't matter in what order you do these underlying things, so long as they respect this kind of set of causal relationships. So... And that's the part that's in a certain sense is a really important one, but the fact that it sometimes doesn't matter, that's a... I don't know what to... That's another, like, beautiful thing. Well, okay, so there's this idea of what I call causal invariance. Causal invariance, exactly. So that's a... Really, really powerful idea. Right, it's a powerful idea, which has actually arisen in different forms many times in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, even computer science, has many different names. I mean, our particular version of it is a little bit tighter than other versions, but it's basically the same idea. Here's how to think about that idea. So imagine that... Well, let's talk about it in terms of math for a second. Let's say you're doing algebra and you're told, you know, multiply out this series of polynomials that are multiplied together, okay? You say, well, which order should I do that in? Say, well, do I multiply the third one by the fourth one and then do it by the first one? Or do I do the fifth one by the sixth one and then do that? Well, it turns out it doesn't matter. You can multiply them out in any order, you'll always get the same answer. That's a property... If you think about kind of making a kind of network that represents in what order you do things, you'll get different orders for different ways of multiplying things out, but you'll always get the same answer. Same thing if you... Let's say you're sorting. You've got a bunch of A's and B's. They're in random, some random order, you know, BAA, BBBAA, whatever. And you have a little rule that says, every time you see BA, flip it around to AB, okay? Eventually you apply that rule enough times, you'll have sorted the string so that it's all the A's first and then all the B's. Again, there are many different orders in which you can do that to many different sort of places where you can apply that update. In the end, you'll always get the string sorted the same way. I know with sorting the string, it sounds obvious. That's to me surprising that there is in complicated systems, obviously with a string, but in a hypergraph that the application of the rule, asynchronous rule can lead to the same results sometimes. Yes, yes, that is not obvious. And it was something that, you know, I sort of discovered that idea for these kinds of systems and back in the 1990s. And for various reasons, I was not satisfied by how sort of fragile finding that particular property was. And let me just make another point, which is that it turns out that even if the underlying rule does not have this property of causal invariance, it can turn out that every observation made by observers of the rule can, they can impose what amounts to causal invariance on the rule. We can explain that. It's a little bit more complicated. I mean, technically that has to do with this idea of completions, which is something that comes up in term rewriting systems, automated theorem proving systems and so on. But let's ignore that for a second. We can come to that later. But is it useful to talk about observation? Not yet. Not yet. It's so great. So there's some concept of causal invariance as you apply these rules in an asynchronous way, you can think of those transformations as events. So there's this hypergraph that represents space and all of these events happening in the space and the graph grows in interesting complicated ways. And eventually the froth arises of what we experience as human existence. So that's it. That's some version of the picture, but let's explain a little bit more. Exactly. What's a little more detail like? Right. Well, so one thing that is sort of surprising in this theory is one of the sort of achievements of 20th century physics was kind of bringing space and time together. That was, you know, special relativity. People talk about space time, this sort of unified thing where space and time kind of a mixed and there's a nice mathematical formalism that in which, you know, space and time sort of appear as part of the space time continuum, the space time, you know, four vectors and things like this. You know, we talk about time as the fourth dimension and all these kinds of things. It's, you know, and it seems like the theory of relativity sort of says space and time are fundamentally the same kind of thing. So one of the things that took a while to understand in this approach of mine is that in my kind of approach, space and time are really not fundamentally the same kind of thing. Space is the extension of this hypergraph. Time is the kind of progress of this inexorable computation of these rules getting applied to the hypergraph. So it's, they seem like very different kinds of things. And so that at first seems like how can that possibly be right? How can that possibly be Lorentz invariant? That's the term for things being, you know, following the rules of special relativity. Well, it turns out that when you have causal invariants that, and let's see, we can, it's worth explaining a little bit how this works. It's a little bit elaborate, but the basic point is that even though space and time sort of come from very different places, it turns out that the rules of sort of space time that special relativity talks about come out of this model when you're looking at large enough systems. So a way to think about this, you know, in terms of when you're looking at large enough systems, the part of that story is when you look at some fluid like water, for example, there are equations that govern the flow of water. Those equations are things that apply on a large scale. If you look at the individual molecules, they don't know anything about those equations. It's just the sort of the large scale effect of those molecules turns out to follow those equations. And it's the same kind of thing happening in our models. I know this might be a small point, but it might be a very big one. We've been talking about space and time at the lowest level of the model, which is space. The hypergraph time is the evolution of this hypergraph. But there's also space time that we think about and general relativity for your special relativity. Like how do you go from the lowest source code of space and time as we're talking about to the more traditional terminology of space and time? So the key thing is this thing we call the causal graph. So the causal graph is the graph of causal relationships between events. So every one of these little updating events, every one of these little transformations of the hypergraph happens somewhere in the hypergraph, happens at some stage in the computation. That's an event. That event has a causal relationship to other events in the sense that if another event needs as its input, the output from the first event, there will be a causal relationship of the future event will depend on the past event. So you can say it has a causal connection. And so you can make this graph of causal relationships between events. That graph of causal relationships, causal invariance implies that that graph is unique. It doesn't matter even though you think, oh, I'm, let's say we were sorting a string, for example, I did that particular transposition of characters at this time, then I did that one, then I did this one. Turns out if you look at the network of connections between those updating events, that network is the same. It's the, if you were to, the structure. So in other words, if you were to draw that, if you were to put that network on a picture of where you're doing all the updating, the places where you put the nodes of the network will be different, but the way the nodes are connected will always be the same. So, but the causal graph is, I don't know, it's kind of an observation, it's not enforced, it's just emergent from a set of events. It's a feature of, okay, so what it is is. The characteristic, I guess, of the way events happen. Right, it's an event can't happen until its input is ready. And so that creates this network of causal relationships. And that's the causal graph. And the thing that the next thing to realize is, okay, we, when you're going to observe what happens in the universe, you have to sort of make sense of this causal graph. So, and you are an observer who yourself is part of this causal graph. And so that means, so let me give you an example of how that works. So imagine we have a really weird theory of physics of the world where it says this updating process, there's only gonna be one update at every moment in time. And there's just gonna be like a Turing machine. It has a little head that runs around and just is always just updating one thing at a time. So you say, I have a theory of physics and the theory of physics says, there's just this one little place where things get updated. You say, that's completely crazy because, it's plainly obvious that things are being updated sort of at the same time. Async obviously, yeah, at the same time, yeah. But the fact is that the thing is that if I'm talking to you and you seem to be being updated as I'm being updated, but if there's just this one little head that's running around updating things, I will not know whether you've been updated or not until I'm updated. So in other words, draw this causal graph of the causal relationship between the updatings in you and the updatings in me, it'll still be the same causal graph, whether even though the underlying sort of story of what happens is, oh, there's just this one little thing and it goes and updates in different places in the universe. So is that clear or is that a hypothesis? Is that clear that there's a unique causal graph? If there's causal invariance, there's unique causal graph. So it's okay to think of what we're talking about as a hypergraph and the operations on it as a kind of touring machine with a single head, like a single guy running around updating stuff. Is that safe to intuitively think of it this way? Let me think about that for a second. Yes, I think so. I think there's nothing, it doesn't matter. I mean, you can say, okay, there is one, the reason I'm pausing for a second is that I'm wondering, well, when you say running around, depends how far it jumps every time it runs. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But I mean like one operation at a time. Yeah, you can think of it as one operation at a time. It's easier for the human brain to think of it that way as opposed to simultaneous. Well, maybe it's not, okay, but the thing is that's not how we experience the world. What we experience is we look around, everything seems to be happening at successive moments in time everywhere in space. Yes. That is the, and that's partly a feature of our particular construction. I mean, that is the speed of light is really fast compared to, you know, we look around, you know, I can see maybe a hundred feet away right now. You know, it's the, my brain does not process very much in the time it takes light to go a hundred feet. The brain operates at a scale of hundreds of milliseconds or something like that, I don't know. Right. And speed of light is much faster. Right, you know, light goes, in a billionth of a second light has gone afoot. So it goes a billion feet every second. There's certain moments through this conversation where I imagine the absurdity of the fact that there's two descendants of apes modeled by a hypergraph that are communicating with each other and experiencing this whole thing as a real time simultaneous update with, I'm taking in photons from you right now, but there's something much, much deeper going on here. Right, it does have a. It's paralyzing sometimes to just. Yes. To remember that. Right, no, I mean, you know, it's a, you know. Sorry. Yes, yes, no. As a small little tangent, I just remembered that we're talking about, I mean, about the fabric of reality. Right, so we've got this causal graph that represents the sort of causal relationships between all these events in the universe. That causal graph kind of is a representation of space time, but our experience of it requires that we pick reference frames. This is kind of a key idea. Einstein had this idea that what that means is we have to say, what are we going to pick as being the sort of what we define as simultaneous moments in time? So for example, we can say, you know, how do we set our clocks? You know, if we've got a spacecraft landing on Mars, you know, do we say that, you know, what time is it landing at? Was it, you know, even though there's a 20 minute speed of light delay or something, you know, what time do we say it landed at? How do we set up sort of time coordinates for the world? And that turns out to be that there's kind of this arbitrariness to how we set these reference frames that defines sort of what counts as simultaneous. And what is the essence of special relativity is to think about reference frames going at different speeds and to think about sort of how they assign, what counts as space, what counts as time and so on. That's all a bit technical, but the basic bottom line is that this causal invariance property, that means that it's always the same causal graph, independent of how you slice it with these reference frames, you'll always sort of see the same physical processes go on. And that's basically why special relativity works. So there's something like special relativity, like everything around space and time that fits this idea of the causal graph. Right, well, you know, one way to think about it is given that you have a basic structure that just involves updating things in these, you know, connected updates and looking at the causal relationships between connected updates, that's enough when you unravel the consequences of that, that together with the fact that there are lots of these things and that you can take a continuum limit and so on implies special relativity. And so that, it's kind of not a big deal because it's kind of a, you know, it was completely unobvious when you started off with saying, we've got this graph, it's being updated in time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that just looks like nothing to do with special relativity. And yet you get that. And what, I mean, then the thing, I mean, this was stuff that I figured out back in the 1990s. The next big thing you get is general relativity. And so in this hypergraph, the sort of limiting structure, when you have a very big hypergraph, you can think of as being just like, you know, water seems continuous on a large scale. So this hypergraph seems continuous on a large scale. One question is, you know, how many dimensions of space does it correspond to? So one question you can ask is, if you've just got a bunch of points and they're connected together, how do you deduce what effective dimension of space that bundle of points corresponds to? And that's pretty easy to explain. So basically if you say you've got a point and you look at how many neighbors does that point have? Okay, imagine it's on a square grid. Then it'll have four neighbors. Go another level out. How many neighbors do you get then? What you realize is as you go more and more levels out, as you go more and more distance on the graph out, you're capturing something which is essentially a circle in two dimensions so that, you know, the number of the area of a circle is pi R squared. So it's the number of points that you get to goes up like the distance you've gone squared. And in general, in D dimensional space, it's R to the power D. It's the number of points you get to if you go R steps on the graph grows like the number of steps you go to the power of the dimension. And that's a way that you can estimate the effective dimension of one of these graphs. So what does that grow to? So how does the dimension grow? There's a, I mean, obviously the visual aspect of these hypergraphs, they're often visualized in three dimensions. Right. So there's a certain kind of structure, like you said, there's, I mean, a circle, a sphere, there's a planar aspect to it, to this graph to where it kind of, it almost starts creating a surface, like a complicated surface, but a surface. So how does that connect to effective dimension? Okay, so if you can lay out the graph in such a way that the points in the graph that, you know, the points that are neighbors on the graph are neighbors as you lay them out, and you can do that in two dimensions, then it's gonna approximate a two dimensional thing. If you can't do that in two dimensions, if everything would have to fold over a lot in two dimensions, then it's not approximating a two dimensional thing. Maybe you can lay it out in three dimensions. Maybe you have to lay it out in five dimensions to have it be the case that it sort of smoothly lays out like that. Well, but okay, so I apologize for the different tangent questions, but you know, there's an infinity number of possible rules. So we have to look for rules that create the kind of structures that are reminiscent for, that have echoes of the different physics theories in them. So what kind of rules, is there something simple to be said about the kind of rules that you have found beautiful, that you have found powerful? Right, so I mean, what, you know, one of the features of computational irreducibility is, it's very, you can't say in advance, what's gonna happen with any particular, you can't say, I'm gonna pick these rules from this part of rule space, so to speak, because they're gonna be the ones that are gonna work. That's, you can make some statements along those lines, but you can't generally say that. Now, you know, the state of what we've been able to do is, you know, different properties of the universe, like dimensionality, you know, integer dimensionality, features of other features of quantum mechanics, things like that. At this point, what we've got is, we've got rules that any one of those features, we can get a rule that has that feature. Yeah, so the. We don't have the sort of, the final, here's a rule which has all of these features, we do not have that yet. So if I were to try to summarize the Wolfram physics project, which is, you know, something that's been in your brain for a long time, but really has just exploded in activity, you know, only just months ago. Yes. So it's an evolving thing, and next week, I'll try to publish this conversation as quickly as possible, because by the time it's published, already new things will probably have come out. So if I were to summarize it, we've talked about the basics of, there's a hypergraph that represents space, there is transformations in that hypergraph that represents time. The progress of time. The progress of time, there's a causal graph that's a characteristic of this, and the basic process of science, of, yeah, of science within the Wolfram physics model is to try different rules and see which properties of physics that we know of, known physical theories, are, appear within the graphs that emerge from that rule. That's what I thought it was going to be. Uh oh, okay. So what is it? It turns out we can do a lot better than that. It turns out that using kind of mathematical ideas, we can say, and computational ideas, we can make general statements, and those general statements turn out to correspond to things that we know from 20th century physics. In other words, the idea of you just try a bunch of rules and see what they do, that's what I thought we were gonna have to do. But in fact, we can say, given causal invariance and computational irreducibility, we can derive, and this is where it gets really pretty interesting, we can derive special relativity, we can derive general relativity, we can derive quantum mechanics. And that's where things really start to get exciting, is, you know, it wasn't at all obvious to me that even if we were completely correct, and even if we had, you know, this is the rule, you know, even if we found the rule, to be able to say, yes, it corresponds to things we already know, I did not expect that to be the case. And... So for somebody who is a simple mind and definitely not a physicist, not even close, what does derivation mean in this case? Okay, so let me, this is an interesting question. Okay, so there's, so one thing... In the context of computational irreducibility. Yeah, yeah, right, right. So what you have to do, let me go back to, again, the mundane example of fluids and water and things like that, right? So you have a bunch of molecules bouncing around. You can say, just as a piece of mathematics, I happen to do this from cellular automata back in the mid 1980s, you can say, just as a matter of mathematics, you can say the continuum limit of these little molecules bouncing around is the Navier Stokes equations. That's just a piece of mathematics. It's not, it doesn't rely on... You have to make certain assumptions that you have to say there's enough randomness in the way the molecules bounce around that certain statistical averages work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, it is a very similar derivation to derive, for example, the Einstein equations. Okay, so the way that works, roughly, the Einstein equations are about curvature of space. Curvature of space, I talked about sort of how you can figure out dimension of space. There's a similar kind of way of figuring out if you just sort of say, you know, you're making a larger and larger ball or larger and larger, if you draw a circle on the surface of the earth, for example, you might think the area of a circle is pi r squared, but on the surface of the earth, because it's a sphere, it's not flat, the area of a circle isn't precisely pi r squared. As the circle gets bigger, the area is slightly smaller than you would expect from the formula pi r squared as a little correction term that depends on the ratio of the size of the circle to the radius of the earth. Okay, so it's the same basic thing, allows you to measure from one of these hypergraphs what is its effective curvature. And that's... So the little piece of mathematics that explains special general relativity can map nicely to describe fundamental property of the hypergraphs, the curvature of the hypergraphs. So special relativity is about the relationship of time to space. General relativity is about curvature and this space represented by this hypergraph. So what is the curvature of a hypergraph? Okay, so first I have to explain, what we're explaining is, first thing you have to have is a notion of dimension. You don't get to talk about curvature of things. If you say, oh, it's a curved line, but I don't know what a line is yet. So... Yeah, what is the dimension of a hypergraph then? From where, we've talked about effective dimension, but... Right, that's what this is about. What this is about is, you have your hypergraph, it's got a trillion nodes in it. What is it roughly like? Is it roughly like a grid, a two dimensional grid? Is it roughly like all those nodes are arranged online? What's it roughly like? And there's a pretty simple mathematical way to estimate that by just looking at this thing I was describing, this sort of the size of a ball that you construct in the hypergraph. That's a, you just measure that, you can just compute it on a computer for a given hypergraph and you can say, oh, this thing is wiggling around, but it's roughly corresponds to two or something like that, or roughly corresponds to 2.6 or whatever. So that's how you have a notion of dimension in these hypergraphs. Curvature is something a little bit beyond that. If you look at how the size of this ball increases as you increase its radius, curvature is a correction to the size increase associated with dimension. It's a sort of a second order term in determining the size. Just like the area of a circle is roughly pi R squared. So it goes up like R squared. The two is because it's in two dimensions, but when that circle is drawn on a big sphere, the actual formula is pi R squared times one minus R squared over A squared and some coefficient. So in other words, there's a correction to, and that correction term, that gives you curvature. And that correction term is what makes this hypergraph correspond, have the potential to correspond to curved space. Now, the next question is, is that curvature, is the way that curvature works the way that Einstein's equations for general relativity, is it the way they say it should work? And the answer is yes. And so how does that work? The calculation of the curvature of this hypergraph for some set of rules? No, it doesn't matter what the rules are. So long as they have causal invariance and computational irreducibility, and they lead to finite dimensional space, noninfinite dimensional space. Noninfinite dimensional. It can grow infinitely, but it can't be infinite dimensional. So what is a infinitely dimensional hypergraph look like? So that means, for example, so in a tree, you start from one root of the tree, it doubles, doubles again, doubles again, doubles again. And that means if you ask the question, starting from a given point, how many points do you get to? Remember, in like a circle, you get to R squared, the two there. On a tree, you get to, for example, two to the R. It's exponential dimensional, so to speak, or infinite dimensional. Do you have a sense of, in the space of all possible rules, how many lead to infinitely dimensional hypergraphs? Is that? No. Okay. Is that an important thing to know? Yes, it's an important thing to know. I would love to know the answer to that. But it gets a little bit more complicated because, for example, it's very possibly the case that in our physical universe, that the universe started infinite dimensional. And it only, as the Big Bang, it was very likely infinite dimensional. And as the universe sort of expanded and cooled, its dimension gradually went down. And so one of the bizarre possibilities, which actually there are experiments you can do to try and look at this, the universe can have dimension fluctuations. So in other words, we think we live in a three dimensional universe, but actually there may be places where it's actually 3.01 dimensional, or where it's 2.99 dimensional. And it may be that in the very early universe, it was actually infinite dimensional, and it's only a late stage phenomenon that we end up getting three dimensional space. But from your perspective of the hypergraph, one of the underlying assumptions you kind of implied, but you have a sense, a hope set of assumptions that the rules that underlie our universe, or the rule that underlies our universe is static. Is that one of the assumptions you're currently operating under? Yes, but there's a footnote to that, which we should get to, because it requires a few more steps. Well, actually then, let's backtrack to the curvature, because we're talking about as long as it's finite dimensional. Finite dimensional computational irreducibility and causal invariance, then it follows that the large scale structure will follow Einstein's equations. And now let me again, qualify that a little bit more, there's a little bit more complexity to it. The, okay, so Einstein's equations in their simplest form apply to the vacuum, no matter, just the vacuum. And they say, in particular, what they say is, if you have, so there's this term GD6, that's a term that means shortest path, comes from measuring the shortest paths on the Earth. So you look at a bunch of, a bundle of GD6, a bunch of shortest paths, it's like the paths that photons would take between two points. Then the statement of Einstein's equations, it's basically a statement about a certain the, that as you look at a bundle of GD6, the structure of space has to be such that, although the cross sectional area of this bundle may, although the actual shape of the cross section may change, the cross sectional area does not. That's a version, that's the most simple minded version of R mu nu minus a half R G mu nu equals zero, which is the more mathematical version of Einstein's equations. It's a statement of the thing called the Ritchie tensor is equal to zero. That's Einstein's equations for the vacuum. Okay, so we get that as a result of this model, but footnote, big footnote, because all the matter in the universe is the stuff we actually care about. The vacuum is not stuff we care about. So the question is, how does matter come into this? And for that, you have to understand what energy is in these models. And one of the things that we realized, you know, late last year was that there's a very simple interpretation of energy in these models, okay? And energy is basically, well, intuitively, it's the amount of activity in these hypergraphs and the way that that remains over time. So a little bit more formally, you can think about this causal graph as having these edges that represent causal relationships. You can think about, oh boy, there's one more concept that we didn't get to. It's the notion of space like hypersurfaces. So this is not as scary as it sounds. It's a common notion in general activity. The notion is you are defining what is a possibly, where in space time might be a particular moment in time. So in other words, what is a consistent set of places where you can say, this is happening now, so to speak. And you make the series of sort of slices through the space time, through this causal graph to represent sort of what we consider to be successive moments in time. It's somewhat arbitrary because you can deform that if you're going at a different speed in a special activity, you tip those things, there are different kinds of deformations, but only certain deformations are allowed by the structure of the causal graph. Anyway, be that as it may, the basic point is there is a way of figuring out, you say, what is the energy associated with what's going on in this hypergraph? And the answer is there is a precise definition of that. And it is the formal way to say it is, it's the flux of causal edges through space like hypersurfaces. The slightly less formal way to say it, it's basically the amount of activity. See, the reason it gets tricky is you might say it's the amount of activity per unit volume in this hypergraph, but you haven't defined what volume is. So it's a little bit, you have to be a little more careful. But this hypersurface gives some more formalism to that. Yeah, yeah, it gives a way to connect that. But intuitive, we should think about as the just activity. Right, so the amount of activity that kind of remains in one place in the hypergraph corresponds to energy. The amount of activity that is kind of where an activity here affects an activity somewhere else, corresponds to momentum. And so one of the things that's kind of cool is that I'm trying to think about how to say this intuitively. The mathematics is easy, but the intuitive version, I'm not sure. But basically the way that things sort of stay in the same place and have activity is associated with rest mass. And so one of the things that you get to derive is E equals MC squared. That is a consequence of this interpretation of energy in terms of the way the causal graph works, which is the whole thing is sort of a consequence of this whole story about updates and hypergraphs and so on. So can you linger on that a little bit? How do we get E equals MC squared? So where does the mass come from? Okay, okay. I mean, is there an intuitive, it's okay. First of all, you're pretty deep in the mathematical explorations of this thing right now. We're in a very, we're in a flux currently. So maybe you haven't even had time to think about intuitive explanations, but. Yeah, I mean, this one is, look, roughly what's happening, that derivation is actually rather easy. And everybody, and I've been saying we should pay more attention to this derivation because it's such, you know, cause people care about this one. But everybody says, it's just easy. It's easy. So there's some concept of energy that can be intuitively thought of as the activity, the flux, the level of changes that are occurring based on the transformations within a certain volume, however the heck do you find the volume. Okay, so, and then mass. Well, mass is associated with kind of the energy that does not cause you to, that does not somehow propagate through time. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that was not obvious in the usual formulation of special relativity is that space and time are connected in a certain way. Energy and momentum are also connected in a certain way. The fact that the connection of energy to momentum is analogous to the connection to space between space and time is not self evident in ordinary relativity. It is a consequence of this, of the way this model works. It's an intrinsic consequence of the way this model works. And it's all to do with that, with unraveling that connection that ends up giving you this relationship between energy and, well, it's energy, momentum, mass, they're all connected. And so like, that's hence the general relativity. You have a sense that it appears to be baked in to the fundamental properties of the way these hypergraphs are evolved. Well, I didn't yet get to, so I got as far as special relativity and equals MC squared. The one last step is, in general relativity, the final connection is energy and mass cause curvature in space. And that's something that when you understand this interpretation of energy, and you kind of understand the correspondence to curvature and hypergraphs, then you can finally sort of, the big final answer is, you derive the full version of Einstein's equations for space, time and matter. And that's some. Is that, have you, that last piece with curvature, have, is that, have you arrived there yet? Oh yeah, we're there, yes. And here's the way that we, here's how we're really, really going to know we've arrived, okay? So, you know, we have the mathematical derivation, it's all fine, but, you know, mathematical derivations, okay. So one thing that's sort of a, you know, we're taking this limit of what happens when you, the limit, you have to look at things which are large compared to the size of an elementary length, small compared to the whole size of the universe, large compared to certain kinds of fluctuations, blah, blah, blah. There's a, there's a, there's a tower of many, many of these mathematical limits that have to be taken. So if you're a pure mathematician saying, where's the precise proof? It's like, well, there are all these limits, we can, you know, we can try each one of them computationally and we could say, yeah, it really works, but the formal mathematics is really hard to do. I mean, for example, in the case of deriving the equations of fluid dynamics from molecular dynamics, that derivation has never been done. There is no rigorous version of that derivation. So, so that could be. Because you can't do the limits? Yeah, because you can't do the limits. But so the limits allow you to try to describe something general about the system and very, very particular kinds of limits that you need to take with these very. Right, and the limits will definitely work the way we think they work. And we can do all kinds of computer experiments. It's just a hard derivation. Yeah, it's just, it's just the mathematical structure kind of, you know, ends up running right into computational irreducibility. And you end up with a bunch of, a bunch of difficulty there. But here's the way that we're getting really confident that we know completely what we're talking about, which is when people study things like black hole mergers, using Einstein's equations, what do they actually do? Well, they actually use Mathematica or a whole bunch to analyze the equations and so on. But in the end, they do numerical relativity, which means they take these nice mathematical equations and they break them down so that they can run them on a computer. And they break them down into something which is actually a discrete approximation to these equations. Then they run them on a computer, they get results. Then you look at the gravitational waves and you see if they match, okay? It turns out that our model gives you a direct way to do numerical relativity. So in other words, instead of saying, you start from these continuum equations from Einstein, you break them down into these discrete things, you run them on a computer, you say, we're doing it the other way around. We're starting from these discrete things that come from our model. And we're just running big versions on the computer. And, you know, what we're saying is, and this is how things will work. So the way I'm calling this is proof by compilation, so to speak, that is, in other words, you're taking something where, you know, we've got this description of a black hole system. And what we're doing is we're showing that the, you know, what we get by just running our model agrees with what you would get by doing the computation from the Einstein equations. As a small tangent or actually a very big tangent, but proof by compilation is a beautiful concept. In a sense, the way of doing physics with this model is by running it or compiling it. And have you thought about, and these things can be very large, is there a totally new possibilities of computing hardware and computing software, which allows you to perform this kind of compilation? Well, algorithms, software, hardware. So first comment is these models seem to give one a lot of intuition about distributed computing, a lot of different intuition about how to think about parallel computation. And that particularly comes from the quantum mechanics side of things, which we didn't talk about much yet. But the question of what, you know, given our current computer hardware, how can we most efficiently simulate things? That's actually partly a story of the model itself, because the model itself has deep parallelism in it. The ways that we are simulating it, we're just starting to be able to use that deep parallelism to be able to be more efficient in the way that we simulate things. But in fact, the structure of the model itself allows us to think about parallel computation in different ways. And one of my realizations is that, you know, so it's very hard to get in your brain how you deal with parallel computation. And you're always worrying about, you know, if multiple things can happen on different computers at different times, oh, what happens if this thing happens before that thing? And we've really got, you know, we have these race conditions where something can race to get to the answer before another thing. And you get all tangled up because you don't know which thing is gonna come in first. And usually when you do parallel computing, there's a big obsession to lock things down to the point where you've had locks and mutexes and God knows what else, where you've arranged it so that there can only be one sequence of things that can happen. So you don't have to think about all the different kinds of things that can happen. Well, in these models, physics is throwing us into, forcing us to think about all these possible things that can happen. But these models together with what we know from physics is giving us new ways to think about all possible things happening, about all these different things happening in parallel. And so I'm guessing... They have built in protection for some of the parallelism. Well, causal invariance is the built in protection. Causal invariance is what means that even though things happen in different orders, it doesn't matter in the end. As a person who struggled with concurrent programming in like Java, with all the basic concepts of concurrent programming, that if there could be built up a strong mathematical framework for causal invariance, that's so liberating. And that could be not just liberating, but really powerful for massively distributed computation. Absolutely. No, I mean, what's eventual consistency in distributed databases is essentially the causal invariance idea. Yeah. Okay. So that's... But have you thought about, like really large simulations? Yeah. I mean, I'm also thinking about, look, the fact is I've spent much of my life as a language designer, right? So I can't possibly not think about, what does this mean for designing languages for parallel computation? In fact, another thing that's one of these... I'm always embarrassed at how long it's taken me to figure stuff out. But back in the 1980s, I worked on trying to make up languages for parallel computation. I thought about doing graph rewriting. I thought about doing these kinds of things, but I couldn't see how to actually make the connections to actually do something useful. I think now physics is kind of showing us how to make those things useful. And so my guess is that in time, we'll be talking about, we do parallel programming. We'll be talking about programming in a certain reference frame, just as we think about thinking about physics in a certain reference frame. It's a certain coordination of what's going on. We say, we're gonna program in this reference frame. Oh, let's change the reference frame to this reference frame. And then our program will seem different and we'll have a different way to think about it. But it's still the same program underneath. So let me ask on this topic, cause I put out that I'm talking to you. I got way more questions than I can deal with, but what pops to mind is a question somebody asked on Reddit I think is, please ask Dr. Wolfram, what are the specs of the computer running the universe? So we're talking about specs of hardware and software for simulations of a large scale thing. What about a scale that is comparative to something that eventually leads to the two of us talking and about? Right, right, right. So actually I did try to estimate that. And we actually have to go a couple more stages before we can really get to that answer because we're talking about this thing. This is what happens when you build these abstract systems and you're trying to explain the universe, they're quite a number of levels deep, so to speak. But the... You mean conceptually or like literally? Cause you're talking about small objects and there's 10 to the 120 something. Yeah, right. It is conceptually deep. And one of the things that's happening sort of structurally in this project is, you know, there were ideas, there's another layer of ideas, there's another layer of ideas to get to the different things that correspond to physics. They're just different layers of ideas. And they are, you know, it's actually probably, if anything, getting harder to explain this project cause I'm realizing that the fraction of way through that I am so far and explaining this to you is less than, than, you know, it might be because we know more now, you know, every week basically we know a little bit more. And like... Those are just layers on the initial fundamental structure. Yes, but the layers are, you know, you might be asking me, you know, how do we get the difference between fermions and bosons, the difference between particles that can be all in the same state and particles that exclude each other, okay. Last three days, we've kind of figured that out. Okay. But, and it's very interesting. It's very cool. And it's very... And those are some kind of properties at a certain level, layer of abstraction on the graph. Yes, yes. And there's, but the layers of abstraction are kind of, they're compounding. Stacking up. So it's difficult, but... But okay. But the specs nevertheless remain the same. Okay, the specs underneath. So I have an estimate. So the question is, what are the units? So we've got these different fundamental constants about the world. So one of them is the speed of light, which is the... So the thing that's always the same in all these different ways of thinking about the universe is the notion of time, because time is computation. And so there's an elementary time, which is sort of the amount of time that we ascribe to elapsing in a single computational step. Yeah. Okay. So that's the elementary time. So then there's an elementary... That's a parameter or whatever. That's a constant. It's whatever we define it to be, because I mean, we don't, you know... I mean, it's all relative, right? It doesn't matter. Yes, it doesn't matter what it is, because we could be, it could be slower. It's just a number which we use to convert that to seconds, so to speak, because we are experiencing things and we say this amount of time has elapsed, so to speak. But we're within this thing. Absolutely. So it doesn't matter, right? But what does matter is the ratio, what we can, the ratio of the spatial distance and this hypergraph to this moment of time. Again, that's an arbitrary thing, but we measure that in meters per second, for example, and that ratio is the speed of light. So the ratio of the elementary distance to the elementary time is the speed of light, okay? Perfect. And so there's another, there are two other levels of this, okay? So there is a thing which we can talk about, which is the maximum entanglement speed, which is a thing that happens at another level in this whole sort of story of how these things get constructed. That's a sort of maximum speed in quantum, in the space of quantum states. Just as the speed of light is a maximum speed in physical space, this is a maximum speed in the space of quantum states. There's another level which is associated with what we call ruleal space, which is another one of these maximum speeds. We'll get to this. So these are limitations on the system that are able to capture the kind of physical universe which we live in. The quantum mechanical. There are inevitable features of having a rule that has only a finite amount of information in the rule. So long as you have a rule that only involves a bounded amount, a limited amount of, only involving a limited number of elements, limited number of relations, it is inevitable that there are these speed constraints. We knew about the one for speed of light. We didn't know about the one for maximum entanglement speed, which is actually something that is possibly measurable, particularly in black hole systems and things like this. Anyway, this is long, long story short. You're asking what the processing specs of the universe, of the sort of computation of the universe. There's a question of even what are the units of some of these measurements, okay? So the units I'm using are Wolfram language instructions per second, okay? Because you gotta have some, what computation are you doing? There gotta be some kind of frame of reference. Right, right. So, because it turns out in the end, there will be, there's sort of an arbitrariness in the language that you use to describe the universe. So in those terms, I think it's like 10 to the 500, Wolfram language operations per second, I think, is the, I think it's of that order. You know, basically. So that's the scale of the computation. What about memory? If there's an interesting thing to say about storage and memory. Well, there's a question of how many sort of atoms of space might there be? You know, maybe 10 to the 400. We don't know exactly how to estimate these numbers. I mean, this is based on some, I would say, somewhat rickety way of estimating things. You know, when there start to be able to be experiments done, if we're lucky, there will be experiments that can actually nail down some of these numbers. And because of computation reducibility, there's not much hope for very efficient compression, like very efficient representation of this atom space? Good question. I mean, there's probably certain things, you know, the fact that we can deduce anything, okay, the question is how deep does the reducibility go? Right. Okay. And I keep on being surprised that it's a lot deeper than I thought. Okay, and so one of the things is that, that there's a question of sort of how much of the whole of physics do we have to be able to get in order to explain certain kinds of phenomena? Like for example, if we want to study quantum interference, do we have to know what an electron is? Turns out I thought we did, turns out we don't. I thought to know what energy is, we would have to know what electrons were. We don't. So you get a lot of really powerful shortcuts. Right. There's a bunch of sort of bulk information about the world. The thing that I'm excited about last few days, okay, is the idea of fermions versus bosons, fundamental idea that I mean, it's the reason we have matter that doesn't just self destruct, is because of the exclusion principle that means that two electrons can never be in the same quantum state. Is it useful for us to maybe first talk about how quantum mechanics fits into the Wolfram physics model? Yes. Let's go there. So we talked about general relativity. Now, what have you found from quantum mechanics within and outside of the Wolfram physics? Right, so I mean, the key idea of quantum mechanics that sort of the typical interpretation is classical physics says a definite thing happens. Quantum physics says there's this whole set of paths of things that might happen. And we are just observing some overall probability of how those paths work. Okay, so when you think about our hypergraphs and all these little updates that are going on, there's a very remarkable thing to realize, which is if you say, well, which particular sequence of updates should you do? Say, well, it's not really defined. You can do any of a whole collection of possible sequences of updates. Okay, that set of possible sequences of updates defines yet another kind of graph that we call a multiway graph. And a multiway graph just is a graph where at every node, there is a choice of several different possible things that could happen. So for example, you go this way, you go that way. Those are two different edges in the multiway graph. And you're building up the set of possibilities. So actually, like, for example, I just made the one, the multiway graph for tic tac toe, okay? So tic tac toe, you start off with some board that, you know, is everything is blank, and then somebody can put down an X somewhere, an O somewhere, and then there are different possibilities. At each stage, there are different possibilities. And so you build up this multiway graph of all those possibilities. Now notice that even in tic tac toe, you have the feature that there can be something where you have two different things that happen and then those branches merge because you end up with the same shape, you know, the same configuration of the board, even though you got there in two different ways. So the thing that's sort of an inevitable feature of our models is that just like quantum mechanics suggests, definite things don't happen. Instead, you get this whole multiway graph of all these possibilities. Okay, so then the question is, so, okay, so that's sort of a picture of what's going on. Now you say, okay, well, quantum mechanics has all these features of, you know, all this mathematical structure and so on. How do you get that mathematical structure? Okay, a couple of things to say. So quantum mechanics is actually, in a sense, two different theories glued together. Quantum mechanics is the theory of how quantum amplitudes work that more or less give you the probabilities of things happening. And it's the theory of quantum measurement, which is the theory of how we actually conclude definite things. Because the mathematics just gives you these quantum amplitudes, which are more or less probabilities of things happening, but yet we actually observe definite things in the world. Quantum measurement has always been a bit mysterious. It's always been something where people just say, well, the mathematics says this, but then you do a measurement, and there are philosophical arguments about what the measurement is. But it's not something where there's a theory of the measurement. Somebody on Reddit also asked, please ask Stephen to tell his story of the double slit experiment. Okay, yeah, I can. Is that, does that make sense? Oh yeah, it makes sense. Absolutely makes sense. Why, is this like a good way to discuss? A little bit. Let me go, let me explain a couple of things first. So the structure of quantum mechanics is mathematically quite complicated. One of the features, let's see, well, how to describe this. Okay, so first point is there's this multiway graph of all these different paths of things that can happen in the world. And the important point is that these, you can have branchings and you can have mergings. Okay, so this property turns out causal invariance is the statement that the number of mergings is equal to the number of branchings. Yeah. So in other words, every time there's a branch, eventually there will also be a merge. In other words, every time there were two possibilities for what might've happened, eventually those will merge. Beautiful concept by the way, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So that idea, okay, so then, so that's one thing and that's closely related to the sort of objectivity in quantum mechanics. The fact that we believe definite things happen, it's because although there are all these different paths, in some sense, because of causal invariance, they all imply the same thing. I'm cheating a little bit in saying that, but that's roughly the essence of what's going on. Okay, next thing to think about is you have this multiway graph, it has all these different possible things that are happening. Now we ask, this multiway graph is sort of evolving with time. Over time, it's branching, it's merging, it's doing all these things, okay? Question we can ask is if we slice it at a particular time, what do we see? And that slice represents in a sense, something to do with the state of the universe at a particular time. So in other words, we've got this multiway graph of all these possibilities, and then we're asking, okay, we take the slice, this slice represents, okay, each of these different paths corresponds to a different quantum possibility for what's happening. When we take the slice, we're saying, what are the set of quantum possibilities that exist at a particular time? And when you say slice, you slice the graph and then there's a bunch of leaves. A bunch of leaves. Those represent the state of things. Right, but then, okay, so the important thing that you are quickly picking up on is that what matters is kind of how these leaves are related to each other. So a good way to tell how leaves are related is just to say on the step before do they have a common ancestor? So two leaves might be, they might have just branched from one thing or they might be far away, way far apart in this graph where to get to a common ancestor, maybe you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the graph, all the way back to the beginning. So there's some kind of measure of distance. Right, but what you get is by making the slice, we call it branchial space, the space of branches. And in this branchial space, you have a graph that represents the relationships between these quantum states in branchial space. You have this notion of distance in branchial space. Okay, so. It's connected to quantum entanglement. Yes, yes, it's basically, the distance in branchial space is kind of an entanglement distance. So this. That's a very nice model. Right, it is very nice, it's very beautiful. I mean, it's so clean. I mean, it's really, and it tells one, okay, so anyway, so then this branchial space has this sort of map of the entanglements between quantum states. So in physical space, we have, so you can say, take, let's say the causal graph, and we can slice that at a particular time, and then we get this map of how things are laid out in physical space. When we do the same kind of thing, there's a thing called the multiway causal graph, which is the analog of a causal graph for the multiway system. We slice that, we get essentially the relationships between things, not in physical space, but in the space of quantum states. It's like which quantum state is similar to which other quantum state. Okay, so now I think next thing to say is just to mention how quantum measurement works. So quantum measurement has to do with reference frames in branchial space. So, okay, so measurement in physical space, it matters whether how we assign spatial position and how we define coordinates in space and time. And that's how we make measurements in ordinary space. Are we making a measurement based on us sitting still here? Are we traveling at half the speed of light and making measurements that way? These are different reference frames in which we're making our measurements. And the relationship between different events and different points in space and time will be different depending on what reference frame we're in. Okay, so then we have this idea of quantum observation frames, which are the analog of reference frames, but in branchial space. And so what happens is what we realize is that a quantum measurement is the observer is sort of arbitrarily determining this reference frame. The observer is saying, I'm going to understand the world by saying that space and time are coordinated this way. I'm gonna understand the world by saying that quantum states and time are coordinated in this way. And essentially what happens is that the process of quantum measurement is a process of deciding how you slice up this multiway system in these quantum observation frames. So in a sense, the observer, the way the observer enters is by their choice of these quantum observation frames. And what happens is that the observer, because, okay, this is again, another stack of other concepts, but anyway, because the observer is computationally bounded, there is a limit to the type of quantum observation frames that they can construct. Interesting, okay, so there's some constraints, some limit on the choice of observation frames. Right, and by the way, I just want to mention that there's a, I mean, it's bizarre, but there's a hierarchy of these things. So in thermodynamics, the fact that we believe entropy increases, we believe things get more disordered, is a consequence of the fact that we can't track each individual molecule. If we could track every single molecule, we could run every movie in reverse, so to speak, and we would not see that things are getting more disordered. But it's because we are computationally bounded, we can only look at these big blobs of what all these molecules collectively do, that we think that things are, that we describe it in terms of entropy increasing and so on. And it's the same phenomenon, basically, and also a consequence of computational irreducibility that causes us to basically be forced to conclude that definite things happen in the world, even though there's this quantum, this set of all these different quantum processes that are going on. So, I mean, I'm skipping a little bit, but that's a rough picture. And in the evolution of the Wolfram Physics Project, where do you feel we stand on some of the puzzles that are along the way? See, you're skipping along a bunch of stuff. It's amazing how much these things are unraveling. I mean, you know, these things, look, it used to be the case that I would agree with Dick Feynman, nobody understands quantum mechanics, including me, okay? I'm getting to the point where I think I actually understand quantum mechanics. My exercise, okay, is can I explain quantum mechanics for real at the level of kind of middle school type explanation? And I'm getting closer, it's getting there. I'm not quite there, I've tried it a few times, and I realized that there are things where I have to start talking about elaborate mathematical concepts and so on. But I think, and you've got to realize that it's not self evident that we can explain at an intuitively graspable level, something which, about the way the universe works, the universe wasn't built for our understanding, so to speak. But I think then, okay, so another important idea is this idea of branchial space, which I mentioned, this sort of space of quantum states. It is, okay, so I mentioned Einstein's equations describing the effect of mass and energy on trajectories of particles, on GD6. The curvature of physical space is associated with the presence of energy, according to Einstein's equations, okay? So it turns out that, rather amazingly, the same thing is true in branchial space. So it turns out the presence of energy or more accurately Lagrangian density, which is a kind of relativistic invariant version of energy, the presence of that causes essentially deflection of GD6 in this branchial space, okay? So you might say, so what? Well, it turns out that the sort of the best formulation we have of quantum mechanics, this Feynman path integral, is a thing that describes quantum processes in terms of mathematics that can be interpreted as, well, in quantum mechanics, the big thing is you get these quantum amplitudes, which are complex numbers that represent, when you combine them together, represent probabilities of things happening. And so the big story has been, how do you derive these quantum amplitudes? And people think these quantum amplitudes, they have a complex number, has a real part and an imaginary part. You can also think of it as a magnitude and a phase. And people have sort of thought these quantum amplitudes have magnitude and phase, and you compute those together. Turns out that the magnitude and the phase come from completely different places. The magnitude comes, okay, so how do you compute things in quantum mechanics? Roughly, I'm telling you, I'm getting there to be able to do this at a middle school level, but I'm not there yet. Roughly what happens is you're asking, does this state in quantum mechanics evolve to this other state in quantum mechanics? And you can think about that like a particle traveling or something traveling through physical space, but instead it's traveling through branchial space. And so what's happening is, does this quantum state evolve to this other quantum state? It's like saying, does this object move from this place in space to this other place in space? Okay, now the way that these quantum amplitudes characterize kind of to what extent the thing will successfully reach some particular point in branchial space, just like in physical space, you could say, oh, it had a certain velocity and it went in this direction. In branchial space, there's a similar kind of concept. Is there a nice way to visualize for me now mentally branchial space? It's just, you have this hypergraph, sorry, you have this multiway graph. It's this big branching thing, branching and merging thing. But I mean, like moving through that space, I'm just trying to understand what that looks like. You know, that space is probably exponential dimensional, which makes it again, another can of worms in understanding what's going on. That space as in an ordinary space, this hypergraph, the spatial hypergraph limits to something which is like a manifold, like something like three dimensional space. Almost certainly the multiway graph limits to a Hilbert space, which is something that, I mean, it's just a weird exponential dimensional space. And by the way, you can ask, I mean, there are much weirder things that go on. For example, one of the things I've been interested in is the expansion of the universe in branchial space. So we know the universe is expanding in physical space, but the universe is probably also expanding in branchial space. So that means the number of quantum states of the universe is increasing with time. The diameter of the thing is growing. Right, so that means that the, and by the way, this is related to whether quantum computing can ever work. Why? Okay, so let me explain why. So let's talk about, okay, so first of all, just to finish the thought about quantum amplitudes, that the incredibly beautiful thing, but I'm just very excited about this. The fine path integral is this formula. It says that the amplitude, the quantum amplitude is E to the I S over H bar, where S is the thing called the action. And it, okay, so that can be thought of as representing a deflection of the angle of this path in the multiway graph. So it's a deflection of a geodesic in the multiway path that is caused by this thing called the action, which is essentially associated with energy, okay? And so this is a deflection of a path in branchial space that is described by this path integral, which is the thing that is the mathematical essence of quantum mechanics. Turns out that deflection is, the deflection of geodesics in branchial space follows the exact same mathematical setup as the deflection of geodesics in physical space, except the deflection of geodesics in physical space is described with Einstein's equations. The deflection of geodesics in branchial space is defined by the Feynman path integral, and they are the same. In other words, they are mathematically the same. So that means that general relativity is a story of essentially motion in physical space. Quantum mechanics is a story of essentially motion in branchial space. And the underlying equation for those two things, although it's presented differently because one's interested in different things in branchial space than physical space, but the underlying equation is the same. So in other words, it's just these two theories, which are those two sort of pillars of 20th century physics, which have seemed to be off in different directions, are actually facets of the exact same theory. That's exciting to see where that evolves and exciting that that just is there. Right, I mean, to me, look, having spent some part of my early life working in the context of these theories of 20th century physics, it's, they just, they seem so different. And the fact that they're really the same is just really amazing. Actually, you mentioned double slit experiment, okay? So the double slit experiment is an interference phenomenon where you say there are, you can have a photon or an electron, and you say there are these two slits that could have gone through either one, but there is this interference pattern where there's destructive interference, where you might've said in classical physics, oh, well, if there are two slits, then there's a better chance that it gets through one or the other of them. But in quantum mechanics, there's this phenomenon of destructive interference that means that even though there are two slits, two can lead to nothing, as opposed to two leading to more than, for example, one slit. And what happens in this model, and we've just been understanding this in the last few weeks, actually, is that what essentially happens is that the double slit experiment is a story of the interface between branchial space and physical space. And what's essentially happening is that the destructive interference is the result of the two possible paths associated with photons going through those two slits winding up at opposite ends of branchial space. And so that's why there's sort of nothing there when you look at it, is because these two different sort of branches couldn't get merged together to produce something that you can measure in physical space. Is there a lot to be understood about branchial space? I guess, mathematically speaking. Yes, it's a very beautiful mathematical thing. And it's very, I mean, by the way, this whole theory is just amazingly rich in terms of the mathematics that it says should exist. Okay, so for example, calculus is a story of infinitesimal change in integer dimensional space, one dimensional, two dimensional, three dimensional space. We need a theory of infinitesimal change in fractional dimensional and dynamic dimensional space. No such theory exists. So there's tools of mathematics that are needed here. Right. And this is a motivation for that actually. Right, and there are indications and we can do computer experiments and we can see how it's gonna come out, but we need to, the actual mathematics doesn't exist. And in branchial space, it's actually even worse. There's even more sort of layers of mathematics that are, we can see how it works roughly by doing computer experiments, but to really understand it, we need more sort of mathematical sophistication. So quantum computers. Okay, so the basic idea of quantum computers, the promise of quantum computers is quantum mechanics does things in parallel. And so you can sort of intrinsically do computations in parallel. And somehow that can be much more efficient than just doing them one after another. And I actually worked on quantum computing a bit with Dick Feynman back in 1981, two, three, that kind of timeframe. And we... It's a fascinating image. You and Feynman working on quantum computers. Well, we tried to work, the big thing we tried to do was invent a randomness chip that would generate randomness at a high speed using quantum mechanics. And the discovery that that wasn't really possible was part of the story of, we never really wrote anything about it. I think maybe he wrote some stuff, but we didn't write stuff about what we figured out about sort of the fact that it really seemed like the measurement process in quantum mechanics was a serious damper on what was possible to do in sort of the possible advantages of quantum mechanics for computing. But anyway, so the sort of the promise of quantum computing is let's say you're trying to factor an integer. Well, you can, instead of, when you factor an integer, you might say, well, does this factor work? Does this factor work? Does this factor work? In ordinary computing, it seems like we pretty much just have to try all these different factors, kind of one after another. But in quantum mechanics, you might have the idea, oh, you can just sort of have the physics, try all of them in parallel, okay? And there's this algorithm, Shor's algorithm, which allows you, according to the formalism of quantum mechanics, to do everything in parallel and to do it much faster than you can on a classical computer. Okay, the only little footnote is you have to figure out what the answer is. You have to measure the result. So the quantum mechanics internally has figured out all these different branches, but then you have to pull all these branches together to say, and the classical answer is this, okay? The standard theory of quantum mechanics does not tell you how to do that. It tells you how the branching works, but it doesn't tell you the process of corralling all these things together. And that process, which intuitively you can see is gonna be kind of tricky, but our model actually does tell you how that process of pulling things together works. And the answer seems to be, we're not absolutely sure. We've only got to two times three so far which is kind of in this factorization in quantum computers. But we can, what seems to be the case is that the advantage you get from the parallelization from quantum mechanics is lost from the amount that you have to spend pulling together all those parallel threads to get to a classical answer at the end. Now, that phenomenon is not unrelated to various decoherence phenomena that are seen in practical quantum computers and so on. I mean, I should say as a very practical point, I mean, it's like, should people stop bothering to do quantum computing research? No, because what they're really doing is they're trying to use physics to get to a new level of what's possible in computing. And that's a completely valid activity. Whether you can really put, you know, whether you can say, oh, you can solve an NP complete problem. You can reduce exponential time to polynomial time. You know, we're not sure. And I'm suspecting the answer is no, but that's not relevant to the practical speed ups you can get by using different kinds of technologies, different kinds of physics to do basic computing. But you're saying, I mean, some of the models you're playing with, the indication is that to get all the sheep back together and, you know, to corral everything together, to get the actual solution to the algorithm is... You lose all the... You lose all of the... By the way, I mean, so again, this question, do we actually know what we're talking about about quantum computing and so on? So again, we're doing proof by compilation. So we have a quantum computing framework in Wolfram language, and which is, you know, a standard quantum computing framework that represents things in terms of the standard, you know, formalism of quantum mechanics. And we have a compiler that simply compiles the representation of quantum gates into multiway systems. So, and in fact, the message that I got was from somebody who's working on the project who has managed to compile one of the sort of a core formalism based on category theory and core quantum formalism into multiway systems. So this is... When you say multiway system, these multiway graphs? Yes. So you're compiling... Yeah, okay, that's awesome. And then you can do all kinds of experiments on that multiway graph. Right, but the point is that what we're saying is the thing we've got this representation of let's say Shor's algorithm in terms of standard quantum gates. And it's just a pure matter of sort of computation to just say that is equivalent. We will get the same result as running this multiway system. Can you do complexity analysis on that multiway system? Well, that's what we've been trying to do, yes. We're getting there. We haven't done that yet. I mean, there's a pretty good indication of how that's gonna work out. We've done, as I say, our computer experiments. We've unimpressively gotten to about two times three in terms of factorization, which is kind of about how far people have got with physical quantum computers as well. But yes, we will be able to do... We definitely will be able to do complexity analysis and we will be able to know. So the one remaining hope for quantum computing really, really working at this formal level of quantum brand exponential stuff being done in polynomial time and so on. The one hope, which is very bizarre, is that you can kind of piggyback on the expansion of branchial space. So here's how that might work. So you think, you know, energy conservation, standard thing in high school physics, energy is conserved, right? But now you imagine, you think about energy in the context of cosmology and the context of the whole universe. It's a much more complicated story. The expansion of the universe kind of violates energy conservation. And so for example, if you imagine you've got two galaxies, they're receding from each other very quickly. They've got two big central black holes. You connect a spring between these two central black holes. Not easy to do in practice, but let's imagine you could do it. Now that spring is being pulled apart. It's getting more potential energy in the spring as a result of the expansion of the universe. So in a sense, you are piggybacking on the expansion that exists in the universe and the sort of violation of energy conservation that's associated with that cosmological expansion to essentially get energy. You're essentially building a perpetual motion machine by using the expansion of the universe. And that is a physical version of that. It is conceivable that the same thing can be done in branchial space to essentially mine the expansion of the universe in branchial space as a way to get sort of quantum computing for free, so to speak, just from the expansion of the universe in branchial space. Now, the physical space version is kind of absurd and involves springs between black holes and so on. It's conceivable that the branchial space version is not as absurd and that it's actually something you can reach with physical things you can build in labs and so on. We don't know yet. Okay, so like you were saying, the branch of space might be expanding and there might be something that could be exploited. Right, in the same kind of way that you can exploit that expansion of the universe in principle, in physical space. You just have like a glimmer of hope. Right, I think that the, look, I think the real answer is going to be that for practical purposes, the official brand that says you can do exponential things in polynomial time is probably not gonna work. For people curious to kind of learn more, so this is more like, it's not middle school, we're gonna go to elementary school for a second. Maybe middle school, let's go to middle school. So if I were to try to maybe write a pamphlet of like Wolfram physics project for dummies, AKA for me, or maybe make a video on the basics, but not just the basics of the physics project, but the basics plus the most beautiful central ideas. How would you go about doing that? Could you help me out a little bit? Yeah, yeah, I mean, as a really practical matter, we have this kind of visual summary picture that we made, which I think is a pretty good, when I've tried to explain this to people and it's a pretty good place to start. As you got this rule, you apply the rule, you're building up this big hypergraph, you've got all these possibilities, you're kind of thinking about that in terms of quantum mechanics. I mean, that's a decent place to start. So basically the things we've talked about, which is space represented as a hypergraph, transformation of that space is kind of time. Yes. And then... Structure of that space, the curvature of that space has gravity. That can be explained without going anywhere near quantum mechanics. I would say that's actually easier to explain than special relativity. Oh, so going into general, so go into curvature. Yeah, I mean, special relativity, I think it's a little bit elaborate to explain. And honestly, you only care about it if you know about special relativity, if you know how special relativity is ordinarily derived and so on. So general relativity is easier. Is easier, yes. And then what about quantum? What's the easiest way to reveal... I think the basic point is just this. This fact that there are all these different branches, that there's this kind of map of how the branches work. And that, I mean, I think actually the recent things that we have about the double slit experiment are pretty good, because you can actually see this. You can see how the double slit phenomenon arises from just features of these graphs. Now, having said that, there is a little bit of sleight of hand there because the true story of the way that double slit thing works depends on the coordination of branchial space that, for example, in our internal team, there is still a vigorous battle going on about how that works. And what's becoming clear is... I mean, what's becoming clear is that it's mathematically really quite interesting. I mean, that is that there's a... It involves essentially putting space filling curves. You'll basically have a thing which is naturally two dimensional, and you're sort of mapping it into one dimension with a space filling curve. And it's like, why is it this space filling curve and another space filling curve? And that becomes a story about Riemann surfaces and things, and it's quite elaborate. But there's a more, a little bit sleight of hand way of doing it where it's surprisingly direct. It's... So a question that might be difficult to answer, but for several levels of people, could you give me advice on how we can learn more? Specifically, there is people that are completely outside and just curious and are captivated by the beauty of hypergraphs, actually. So people that just wanna explore, play around with this. Second level is people from, say, people like me who somehow got a PhD in computer science, but are not physicists. But fundamentally, the work you're doing is of computational nature. So it feels very accessible. So what can a person like that do to learn enough physics or not to be able to, one, explore the beauty of it, and two, the final level of contribute something of a level of even publishable, like strong, interesting ideas. So at all those layers, complete beginner, a CS person, and the CS person that wants to publish. I mean, I think that, I've written a bunch of stuff, a person called Jonathan Gorod, who's been a key person working on this project, has also written a bunch of stuff. And some other people started writing things too. And he's a physicist. Physicist. Well, he's, I would say, a mathematical physicist. Mathematical. Mathematical physicist. He's pretty mathematically sophisticated. He regularly outmathematicizes me. Yeah, strong mathematical physicist. Yeah, I looked at some of the papers. Right, but so, I mean, I wrote this kind of original announcement blog post about this project, which people seem to have found. I've been really happy, actually, that people who, people seem to have grokked key points from that, much deeper key points, people seem to have grokked than I thought they would grokk. And that's a kind of a long blog post that explains some of the things we talked about, like the hypergraph and the basic rules. And I don't, does it, I forget, it doesn't have any quantum mechanics in here. It does. It does. But we know a little bit more since that blog post that probably clarifies, but that blog post does a pretty decent job. And, you know, talking about things like, again, something we didn't mention, the fact that the uncertainty principle is a consequence of curvature in branchial space. How much physics should a person know to be able to understand the beauty of this framework and to contribute something novel? Okay, so I think that those are different questions. So, I mean, I think that the, why does this work? Why does this make any sense? To really know that, you have to know a fair amount of physics, okay? And for example, have a decent understanding. When you say, why does this work? You're referring to the connection between this model and general relativity, for example. You have to understand something about general relativity. There's also a side of this where just as the pure mathematical framework is fascinating. Yes. If you throw the physics out completely. Then it's quite accessible to, I mean, you know, I wrote this sort of long technical introduction to the project, which seems to have been very accessible to people who are, you know, who understand computation and formal abstract ideas, but are not specialists in physics or other kinds of things. I mean, the thing with the physics part of it is, you know, there's both a way of thinking and literally a mathematical formalism. I mean, it's like, you know, to know that we get the Einstein equations, to know we get the energy momentum tensor, you kind of have to know what the energy momentum tensor is. And that's physics. I mean, that's kind of graduate level physics basically. And so that, you know, making that final connection is requires some depth of physics knowledge. I mean, that's the unfortunate thing, the difference in machine learning and physics in the 21st century. Is it really out of reach of a year or two worth of study? No, you could get it in a year or two, but you can't get it in a month. Right. I mean. So, but it doesn't require necessarily like 15 years. No, it does not. And in fact, a lot of what has happened with this project makes a lot of this stuff much more accessible. There are things where it has been quite difficult to explain what's going on. And it requires much more, you know, having the concreteness of being able to do simulations, knowing that this thing that you might've thought was just an analogy is really actually what's going on, makes one feel much more secure about just sort of saying, this is how this works. And I think it will be, you know, the, I'm hoping the textbooks of the future, the physics textbooks of the future, there will be a certain compression. There will be things that used to be very much more elaborate because for example, even doing continuous mathematics versus this discrete mathematics, that, you know, to know how things work in continuous mathematics, you have to be talking about stuff and waving your hands about things. Whereas with discrete, the discrete version, it's just like, here is a picture. This is how it works. And there's no, oh, do we get the limit right? Did this, you know, did this thing that is of, you know, zero, you know, measure zero object, you know, interact with this thing in the right way. You don't have to have that whole discussion. It's just like, here's a picture, you know, this is what it does. And, you know, you can, then it takes more effort to say, what does it do in the limit when the picture gets very big? But you can do experiments to build up an intuition actually. Yes, right. And you can get sort of core intuition for what's going on. Now, in terms of contributing to this, the, you know, I would say that the study of the computational universe and how all these programs work in the computational universe, there's just an unbelievable amount to do there. And it is very close to the surface. That is, you know, high school kids, you can do experiments. It's not, you know, and you can discover things. I mean, you know, we, you can discover stuff about, I don't know, like this thing about expansion of branchial space. That's an absolutely accessible thing to look at. Now, you know, the main issue with doing these things is not, there isn't a lot of technical depth difficulty there. The actual doing of the experiments, you know, all the code is all on our website to do all these things. The real thing is sort of the judgment of what's the right experiment to do. How do you interpret what you see? That's the part that, you know, people will do amazing things with. And that's the part that, but, but it isn't like you have to have done 10 years of study to get to the point where you can do the experiments. You don't. That's a cool thing you can do experiments day one, basically. That's the amazing thing about, and you've actually put the tools out there. It's beautiful. It's mysterious. There's still, I would say, maybe you can correct me. It feels like there's a huge number of log hanging fruit on the mathematical side, at least not the physics side, perhaps. No, there's, look on the, on the, okay. On the physics side, we are, we're definitely in harvesting mode, you know. Of which, which fruit, the low hanging ones or? The low hanging ones, yeah, right. I mean, basically here's the thing. There's a certain list of, you know, here are the effects in quantum mechanics. Here are the effects in general activity. It's just like industrial harvesting. It's like, can we get this one, this one, this one, this one, this one? And the thing that's really, you know, interesting and satisfying, and it's like, you know, is one climbing the right mountain? Does one have the right model? The thing that's just amazing is, you know, we keep on like, are we going to get this one? How hard is this one? It's like, oh, you know, it looks really hard. It looks really hard. Oh, actually we can get it. And. And you're, you're continually surprised. I mean, it seems like I've been following your progress. It's kind of exciting. All the, in harvesting mode, all the things you're picking up along the way. Right, right. No, I mean, it's, it's the thing that is, I keep on thinking it's going to be more difficult than it is. Now that's a, you know, that's a, who knows what, I mean, the one thing, so the, the, the, the thing that's been a, was a big thing that I think we're, we're pretty close to. I mean, I can give you a little bit of the roadmap. It's sort of interesting to see, it's like, what are particles? What are things like electrons? How do they really work? Are you close to get like, what, what's a, are you close to trying to understand like the atom, the electrons, neutrons, protons? Okay, so this is, this is the stack. So the first thing we want to understand is the quantization of spin. So particles, they, they kind of spin, they have a certain angular momentum, that angular momentum, even though the masses of particles are all over the place, you know, the electron has a mass of 0.511 MeV, but you know, the proton is 938 MeV, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're all kind of random numbers. The, the spins of all these particles are either integers or half integers. And that's a fact that was discovered in the 1920s, I guess. The, I think that we are close to understanding why spin is quantized. And that's a, and it, it appears to be a quite elaborate mathematical story about homotopic groups in twister space and all kinds of things. But bottom line is that seems within reach. And that's, that's a big deal because that's a very core feature of understanding how particles work in quantum mechanics. Another core feature is this difference between particles that obey the exclusion principle and sort of stay apart, that leads to the stability of matter and things like that, and particles that love to get together and be in the same state, things like photons, that, and that's what leads to phenomena like lasers, where you can get sort of coherently everything in the same state. That difference is the particles of integer spin are bosons like to get together in the same state, the particles of half integer spin are fermions, like electrons that they tend to stay apart. And so the question is, can we get that in our models? And, oh, just the last few days, I think we made, I mean, I think the story of, I mean, it's one of these things where we're really close. Is this connected fermions and bosons? Yeah, yeah. So this was what happens is what seems to happen, okay? It's, you know, subject to revision in the next few days. But what seems to be the case is that bosons are associated with essentially merging in multiway graphs, and fermions are associated with branching in multiway graphs. And that essentially the exclusion principle is the fact that in branchial space, things have a certain extent in branchial space that in which things are being sort of forced apart in branchial space, whereas the case of bosons, they get, they come together in branchial space. And the real question is, can we explain the relationship between that and these things called spinners, which are the representation of half integer spin particles that have this weird feature that usually when you go around 360 degree rotation, you get back to where you started from. But for a spinner, you don't get back to where you started from. It takes 720 degrees of rotation to get back to where you started from. And we are just, it feels like we are, we're just incredibly close to actually having that, understanding how that works. And it turns out, it looks like, my current speculation is that it's as simple as the directed hypergraphs versus undirected hypergraphs, the relationship between spinners and vectors. So, which is just interesting. Yeah, that would be interesting if these are all these kind of nice properties of this multi way graphs of branching and rejoining. Spinners have been very mysterious. And if that's what they turn out to be, there's going to be an easy explanation of what's going on. Directive versus undirective. It's just, and that's why there's only two different cases. It's why are spinners important in quantum mechanics? Can you just give a... Yeah, so spinners are important because they are, they're the representation of electrons which have half an inch of spin. They are, the wave functions of electrons are spinners. Just like the wave functions of photons are vectors, the wave functions of electrons are spinners. And they have this property that when you rotate by 360 degrees, they come back to minus one of themselves and take 720 degrees to get back to the original value. And they are a consequence of, we usually think of rotation in space as being, when you have this notion of rotational invariance and rotational invariance, as we ordinarily experience it, doesn't have the feature. If you go through 360 degrees, you go back to where you started from, but that's not true for electrons. And so that's why understanding how that works is important. Yeah, I've been playing with Mobius Strip quite a bit lately, just for fun. Yes, yes. It adds some funk, it has the same kind of funky properties. Yes, right, exactly. You can have this so called belt trick, which is this way of taking an extended object and you can see properties like spinners with that kind of extended object that... Yeah, it would be very cool if there's, it somehow connects the directive versus undirective. I think that's what it's gonna be. I think it's gonna be as simple as that, but we'll see. I mean, this is the thing that, this is the big sort of bizarre surprise is that, because I learned physics as probably, let's say, let's say a fifth generation in the sense that, if you go back to the 1920s and so on, there were the people who were originating quantum mechanics and so on. Maybe it's a little less than that. Maybe I was like a third generation or something. I don't know, but the people from whom I learned physics were the people who had been students of the students of the people who originated the current understanding of physics. And we're now at probably the seventh generation of physicists or something from the early days of 20th century physics. And whenever a field gets that many generations deep, it seems the foundations seem quite inaccessible. And they seem, it seems like you can't possibly understand that. We've gone through seven academic generations and that's been, you know, that's been this thing that's been difficult to understand for that long. It just can't be that simple. But in a sense, maybe that journey takes you to a simple explanation that was there all along. That's the whole. Right, right, right. I mean, you know, and the thing for me personally, the thing that's been quite interesting is, you know, I didn't expect this project to work in this way. And I, you know, but I had this sort of weird piece of personal history that I used to be a physicist and I used to do all this stuff. And I know, you know, the standard canon of physics, I knew it very well. And, you know, but then I'd been working on this kind of computational paradigm for basically 40 years. And the fact that, you know, I'm sort of now coming back to, you know, trying to apply that in physics, it kind of felt like that journey was necessary. Was this, when did you first try to play with a hypergraph? So what happened is, yeah, so what I had was, okay, so this is again, you know, one always feels dumb after the fact. It's obvious after the fact. But so back in the early 1990s, I realized that using graphs as a sort of underlying thing underneath space and time was going to be a useful thing to do. I figured out about multiway systems. I figured out the things about general relativity I'd figured out by the end of the 1990s. But I always felt there was a certain inelegance because I was using these graphs and there were certain constraints on these graphs that seemed like they were kind of awkward. It was kind of like, you can pick, it's like you couldn't pick any rule. It was like pick any number, but the number has to be prime. It was kind of like you couldn't, it was kind of an awkward special constraint. I had these trivalent graphs, graphs with just three connections from every node. Okay, so, but I discovered a bunch of stuff with that. And I thought it was kind of inelegant. And, you know, the other piece of sort of personal history is obviously I spent my life as a computational language designer. And so the story of computational language design is a story of how do you take all these random ideas in the world and kind of grind them down into something that is computationally as simple as possible. And so, you know, I've been very interested in kind of simple computational frameworks for representing things and have, you know, ridiculous amounts of experience in trying to do that. And actually all of those trajectories of your life kind of came together. So you make it sound like you could have come up with everything you're working on now decades ago, but in reality. Look, two things slowed me down. I mean, one thing that slowed me down was I couldn't figure out how to make it elegant. And that turns out hypergraphs were the key to that. And that I figured out about less than two years ago now. And the other, I mean, I think, so that was sort of a key thing. Well, okay, so the real embarrassment of this project, okay, is that the final structure that we have that is the foundation for this project is basically a kind of an idealized version, a formalized version of the exact same structure that I've used to build computational languages for more than 40 years. But it took me, but I didn't realize that. And, you know. And there yet may be others. So we're focused on physics now, but I mean, that's what the new kind of science was about. Same kind of stuff. And this, in terms of mathematically, well, the beauty of it. So there could be entire other kind of objects that are useful for, like we're not talking about, you know, machine learning, for example. Maybe there's other variants of the hypergraph that are very useful for reasoning. Well, we'll see whether the multiway graph or machine learning system is interesting. Okay. Let's leave it at that. That's conversation number three. That's, we're not gonna go there right now, but. One of the things you've mentioned is the space of all possible rules that we kind of discussed a little bit. That, you know, that could be, I guess, the set of possible rules is infinite. Right. Well, so here's the big sort of one of the conundrums that I'm kind of trying to deal with is, let's say we think we found the rule for the universe and we say, here it is. You know, write it down. It's a little tiny thing. And then we say, gosh, that's really weird. Why did we get that one? Right. And then we're in this whole situation because let's say it's fairly simple. How did we come up the winners getting one of the simple possible universe rules? Why didn't we get what some incredibly complicated rule? Why do we get one of the simpler ones? And that's a thing which, you know, in the history of science, you know, the whole sort of story of Copernicus and so on was, you know, we used to think the earth was the center of the universe, but now we find out it's not. And we're actually just in some, you know, random corner of some random galaxy out in this big universe, there's nothing special about us. So if we get, you know, universe number 317 out of all the infinite number of possibilities, how do we get something that small and simple? Right, so I was very confused by this. And it's like, what are we going to say about this? How are we going to explain this? And I thought it was, might be one of these things where you just, you know, you can get it to the threshold, and then you find out its rule number, such and such, and you just have no idea why it's like that. Okay, so then I realized it's actually more bizarre than that, okay? So we talked about multiway graphs. We talked about this idea that you take these underlying transformation rules on these hypergraphs, and you apply them wherever the rule can apply, you apply it. And that makes this whole multiway graph of possibilities. Okay, so let's go a little bit weirder. Let's say that at every place, not only do you apply a particular rule in all possible ways it can apply, but you apply all possible rules in all possible ways they can apply. As you say, that's just crazy. That's way too complicated. You're never going to be able to conclude anything. Okay, however, turns out that... Don't tell me there's some kind of invariance. Yeah, yeah. So what happens is... And that would be amazing. Right, so this thing that you get is this kind of ruleal multiway graph, this multiway graph that is a branching of rules as well as a branching of possible applications of rules. This thing has causal invariance. It's an inevitable feature that it shows causal invariance. And that means that you can take different reference frames, different ways of slicing this thing, and they will all in some sense be equivalent. If you make the right translation, they will be equivalent. So, okay, so the basic point here is... If that's true, that would be beautiful. It is true, and it is beautiful. It's not just an intuition, there is some... No, no, no, there's real mathematics behind this, and it is... Okay, so here's where it comes in. Yeah, that's amazing. Right, so by the way, I mean, the mathematics it's connected to is the mathematics of higher category theory and group voids and things like this, which I've always been afraid of, but now I'm finally wrapping my arms around it. But it's also related to... It also relates to computational complexity theory. It's also deeply related to the P versus NP problem and other things like this. Again, it seems completely bizarre that these things are connected, but here's why it's connected. This space of all possible... Okay, so a Turing machine, very simple model of computation. You know, you just got this tape where you write down, you know, ones and zeros or something on the tape, and you have this rule that says, you know, you change the number, you move the head on the tape, et cetera. You have a definite rule for doing that. A deterministic Turing machine just does that deterministically. Given the configuration of the tape, it will always do the same thing. A non deterministic Turing machine can have different choices that it makes at every step. And so, you know, you know this stuff, you probably teach this stuff. It, you know, so a non deterministic Turing machine has the set of branching possibilities, which is in fact, one of these multiway graphs. And in fact, if you say, imagine the extremely non deterministic Turing machine, the Turing machine that can just do, that takes any possible rule at each step, that is this real multiway graph. The set of possible histories of that extreme non deterministic Turing machine is a Rulio multiway graph. And you're, what term are you using? Rulio? Rulio. Rulio, I like it. It's a weird word. Yeah, it's a weird word, right? Rulio multiway graph. Okay, so this, so that. I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of the space of rules. So these are basic transformations. So in a Turing machine, it's like it says, move left, move, you know, if it's a one, if it's a black square under the head, move left and right to green square. That's a rule. That's a very basic rule, but I'm trying to see the rules on the hypergraphs, how rich of the programs can they be? Or do they all ultimately just map into something simple? Yeah, they're all, I mean, hypergraphs, that's another layer of complexity on this whole thing. You can think about these in transformations of hypergraphs, but Turing machines are a little bit simpler. You just think of it Turing machines, okay. Right, they're a little bit simpler. So if you look at these extreme non deterministic Turing machines, you're mapping out all the possible non deterministic paths that the Turing machine can follow. And if you ask the question, can you reach, okay, so a deterministic Turing machine follows a single path. The non deterministic Turing machine fills out this whole sort of ball of possibilities. And so then the P versus MP problem ends up being questions about, and we haven't completely figured out all the details of this, but it's basically has to do with questions about the growth of that ball relative to what happens with individual paths and so on. So essentially there's a geometrization of the P versus MP problem that comes out of this. That's a sideshow, okay. The main event here is the statement that you can look at this multiway graph where the branches correspond not just to different applications of a single rule, but to different applications of different rules, okay. And that then that when you say, I'm going to be an observer embedded in that system and I'm going to try and make sense of what's going on in the system. And to do that, I essentially am picking a reference frame and that turns out to be, well, okay. So the way this comes out essentially is the reference frame you pick is the rule that you infer is what's going on in the universe, even though all possible rules are being run, although all those possible rules are in a sense giving the same answer because of causal invariance. But what you see could be completely different. If you pick different reference frames, you essentially have a different description language for describing the universe. Okay, so what does this really mean in practice? So imagine there's us. We think about the universe in terms of space and time and we have various kinds of description models and so on. Now let's imagine the friendly aliens, for example, right? How do they describe their universe? Well, you know, our description of the universe probably is affected by the fact that, you know, we are about the size we are, you know, a meter ish tall, so to speak. We have brain processing speeds, we're about the speeds we have. We're not the size of planets, for example, where the speed of light really would matter. You know, in our everyday life, the speed of light doesn't really matter. Everything can be, you know, the fact that the speed of light is finite is irrelevant. It could as well be infinite. We wouldn't make any difference. You know, it affects the ping times on the internet. That's about the level of how we notice the speed of light. In our sort of everyday existence, we don't really notice it. And so we have a way of describing the universe that's based on our sensory, you know, our senses, these days also on the mathematics we've constructed and so on, but the realization is it's not the only way to do it. There will be completely, utterly incoherent descriptions of the universe, which correspond to different reference frames in this sort of ruleal space. In the ruleal space, that's fascinating. So we have some kind of reference frame in this ruleal space, and from that. That's why we are attributing this rule to the universe. So in other words, when we say, why is it this rule and not another, the answer is just, you know, shine the light back on us, so to speak. It's because of the reference frame that we've picked in our way of understanding what's happening in this sort of space of all possible rules and so on. But also in the space from this reference frame, because of the ruleal, the invariance, that simple, that the rule on which the universe, with which you can run the universe, might as well be simple. Yes, yes, but okay, so here's another point. So this is, again, these are a little bit mind twisting in some ways, but the, okay, another thing that's sort of, we know from computation is this idea of computation universality. The fact that given that we have a program that runs on one kind of computer, we can as well, you know, we can convert it to run on any other kind of computer. We can emulate one kind of computer with another. So that might lead you to say, well, you think you have the rule for the universe, but you might as well be running it on a Turing machine because we know we can emulate any computational rule on any kind of machine. And that's essentially the same thing that's being said here. That is that what we're doing is we're saying these different interpretations of physics correspond to essentially running physics on different underlying, you know, thinking about the physics as running in different with different underlying rules as if different underlying computers were running them. And, but because of computation universality or more accurately, because of this principle of computational equivalence thing of mine, there's that they are, these things are ultimately equivalent. So the only thing that is the ultimate fact about the universe, the ultimate fact that doesn't depend on any of these, you know, we don't have to talk about specific rules, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The ultimate fact is the universe is computational and it is the things that happen in the universe are the kinds of computations that the principle of computational equivalence says should happen. Now that might sound like you're not really saying anything there, but you are because you can, you could in principle have a hyper computer that things that take an ordinary computer an infinite time to do the hyper computer can just say, oh, I know the answer. It's this immediately. What this is saying is the universe is not a hyper computer. It's not simpler than a, an ordinary Turing machine type computer. It's exactly like an ordinary Turing machine type computer. And so that's the, that's in the end, the sort of net net conclusion is that's the thing that is the sort of the hard immovable fact about the universe. That's sort of the fundamental principle of the universe is that it is computational and not hyper computational and not sort of infra computational. It is this level of computational ability and it's, it kind of has, and that's sort of the, the, the core fact, but now, you know, this, this idea that you can have these different kind of a rule reference frames, these different description languages for the universe. It makes me, you know, I used to think, okay, you know, imagine the aliens, imagine the extraterrestrial intelligence thing, you know, at least they experienced the same physics. And now I've realized it isn't true. They could have a different rule frame. That's fascinating. That they can end up with a, a, a, a description of the universe that is utterly, utterly incoherent with ours. And that's also interesting in terms of how we think about, well, intelligence, the nature of intelligence and so on. You know, I'm, I'm fond of the quote, you know, the weather has a mind of its own because these are, you know, these are sort of computationally that, that system is computationally equivalent to the system that is our brains and so on. And what's different is we don't have a way to understand, you know, what the weather is trying to do, so to speak. We have a story about what's happening in our brains. We don't have a sort of connection to what's happening there. So we actually, it's funny, last time we talked maybe over a year ago, we talked about how it was more based on your work with Arrival. We talked about how would we communicate with alien intelligences. Can you maybe comment on how we might, how the Wolfram Physics Project changed your view, how we might be able to communicate with alien intelligence? Like if they showed up, is it possible that because of our comprehension of the physics of the world might be completely different, we would just not be able to communicate at all? Here's the thing, you know, intelligence is everywhere. The fact this idea that there's this notion of, oh, there's gonna be this amazing extraterrestrial intelligence and it's gonna be this unique thing. It's just not true. It's the same thing. You know, I think people will realize this about the time when people decide that artificial intelligences are kind of just natural things that are like human intelligences. They'll realize that extraterrestrial intelligences or intelligences associated with physical systems and so on, it's all the same kind of thing. It's ultimately computation. It's all the same. It's all just computation. And the issue is, can you, are you sort of inside it? Are you thinking about it? Do you have sort of a story you're telling yourself about it? And you know, the weather could have a story it's telling itself about what it's doing. We just, it's utterly incoherent with the stories that we tell ourselves based on how our brains work. I mean, ultimately it must be a question whether we can align. Exactly. Align with the kind of intelligence. Right, right, right. So there's a systematic way of doing it. Right, so the question is in the space of all possible intelligences, what's the, how do you think about the distance between description languages for one intelligence versus another? And needless to say, I have thought about this and you know, I don't have a great answer yet, but I think that's a thing where there will be things that can be said and there'll be things that where you can sort of start to characterize, you know, what is the translation distance between this, you know, version of the universe or this kind of set of computational rules and this other one. In fact, okay, so this is a, you know, there's this idea of algorithmic information theory. There's this question of sort of what is the, when you have something, what is the sort of shortest description you can make of it where that description could be saying, run this program to get the thing, right? So I'm pretty sure that there will be a physicalization of the idea of algorithmic information and that, okay, this is again, a little bit bizarre, but so I mentioned that there's the speed of light, maximum speed of information transmission in physical space. There's a maximum speed of information transmission in branchial space, which is a maximum entanglement speed. There's a maximum speed of information transmission in ruleal space, which is, has to do with a maximum speed of translation between different description languages. And again, I'm not fully wrapped my brain around this one. Yeah, that one just blows my mind to think about that, but that starts getting closer to the, yeah, the intelligence. It's kind of a physicalization. Right, and it's also a physicalization of algorithmic information. And I think there's probably a connection between, I mean, there's probably a connection between the notion of energy and some of these things, which again, I hadn't seen all this coming. I've always been a little bit resistant to the idea of connecting physical energy to things in computation theory, but I think that's probably coming. And that's what essentially at the core with the physics project is that you're connecting information theory with physics. Yeah, it's computation. Computation with our physical universe. Yeah, right. I mean, the fact that our physical universe is, right, that we can think of it as a computation and that we can have discussions like, the theory of the physical universe is the same kind of a theory as the P versus MP problem and so on is really, I think that's really interesting. And the fact that, well, okay, so this kind of brings me to one more thing that I have to in terms of this sort of unification of different ideas, which is metamathematics. Yeah, let's talk about that. You mentioned that earlier. What the heck is metamathematics and... Okay, so here's what, okay. So what is mathematics? Mathematics, sort of at a lowest level, one thinks of mathematics as you have certain axioms. You say things like X plus Y is the same as Y plus X. That's an axiom about addition. And then you say, we've got these axioms and from these axioms, we derive all these theorems that fill up the literature of mathematics. The activity of mathematicians is to derive all these theorems. Actually, the axioms of mathematics are very small. You can fit, when I did my new kind of science book, I fit all of the standard axioms of mathematics on basically a page and a half. Not much stuff. It's like a very simple rule from which all of mathematics arises. The way it works though is a little different from the way things work in sort of a computation because in mathematics, what you're interested in is a proof and the proof says, from here, you can use, from this expression, for example, you can use these axioms to get to this other expression. So that proves these two things are equal. Okay, so we can begin to see how this has been going to work. What's gonna happen is there are paths in metamathematical space. So what happens is each, two different ways to look at it. You can just look at it as mathematical expressions or you can look at it as mathematical statements, postulates or something. But either way, you think of these things and they are connected by these axioms. So in other words, you have some fact or you have some expression, you apply this axiom, you get some other expression. And in general, given some expression, there may be many possible different expressions you can get. You basically build up a multiway graph and a proof is a path through the multiway graph that goes from one thing to another thing. The path tells you how did you get from one thing to the other thing. It's the story of how you got from this to that. The theorem is the thing at one end is equal to the thing at the other end. The proof is the path you go down to get from one thing to the other. You mentioned that Gödel's incompleteness theorem fits naturally there. How does it fit? Yeah, so what happens there is that the Gödel's theorem is basically saying that there are paths of infinite length. That is that there's no upper bound. If you know these two things, you say, I'm trying to get from here to here, how long do I have to go? You say, well, I've looked at all the paths of length 10. Somebody says, that's not good enough. That path might be of length a billion. And there's no upper bound on how long that path is. And that's what leads to the incompleteness theorem. So I mean, the thing that is kind of an emerging idea is you can start asking, what's the analog of Einstein's equations in metamathematical space? What's the analog of a black hole in metamathematical space? What's the hope of this? So yeah, it's fascinating to model all the mathematics in this way. So here's what it is. This is mathematics in bulk. So human mathematicians have made a few million theorems. They've published a few million theorems. But imagine the infinite future of mathematics. Apply something to mathematics that mathematics likes to apply to other things. Take a limit. What is the limit of the infinite future of mathematics? What does it look like? What is the continuum limit of mathematics? What is the, as you just fill in more and more and more theorems, what does it look like? What does it do? How does, what kinds of conclusions can you make? So for example, one thing I've just been doing is taking Euclid. So Euclid, very impressive. He had 10 axioms, he derived 465 theorems, okay? His book, you know, that was the sort of defining book of mathematics for 2000 years. So you can actually map out, and I actually did this 20 years ago, but I've done it more seriously now. You can map out the theorem dependency of those 465 theorems. So from the axioms, you grow this graph, it's actually a multiway graph, of how all these theorems get proved from other theorems. And so you can ask questions about, you know, well, you can ask things like, what's the hardest theorem in Euclid? The answer is, the hardest theorem is that there are five platonic solids. That turns out to be the hardest theorem in Euclid. That's actually his last theorem in all his books. That's the final. What's the hardness, the distance you have to travel? Yeah, let's say it's 33 steps from the, the longest path in the graph is 33 steps. So that's the, there's a 33 step path you have to follow to go from the axioms, according to Euclid's proofs, to the statement there are five platonic solids. So, okay, so then the question is, in, what does it mean if you have this map? Okay, so in a sense, this metamathematical space is the infrastructural space of all possible theorems that you could prove in mathematics. That's the geometry of metamathematics. There's also the geography of mathematics. That is, where did people choose to live in space? And that's what, for example, exploring the sort of empirical metamathematics that Euclid is doing. You could put each individual, like, human mathematician, you can embed them into that space. I mean, they kind of live. They represent a path in the space. The little path. The things they do. Maybe a set of paths. Right. So like a set of axioms that are chosen. Right, so for example, here's an example of a thing that I realized. So one of the surprising things about, well, there are two surprising facts about math. One is that it's hard, and the other is that it's doable, okay? So first question is, why is math hard? You know, you've got these axioms. They're very small. Why can't you just solve every problem in math easily? Yeah, it's just logic. Right, yeah. Well, logic happens to be a particular special case that does have certain simplicity to it. But general mathematics, even arithmetic, already doesn't have the simplicity that logic has. So why is it hard? Because of computational irreducibility. Right. Because what happens is, to know what's true, and this is this whole story about the path you have to follow and how long is the path, and Gödel's theorem is the statement that the path is not a bounded length, but the fact that the path is not always compressible to something tiny is a story of computational irreducibility. So that's why math is hard. Now, the next question is, why is math doable? Because it might be the case that most things you care about don't have finite length paths. Most things you care about might be things where you get lost in the sea of computational irreducibility and worse, undecidability. That is, there's just no finite length path that gets you there. Why is mathematics doable? Gödel proved his incompleteness theorem in 1931. Most working mathematicians don't really care about it. They just go ahead and do mathematics, even though it could be that the questions they're asking are undecidable. It could have been that Fermat's last theorem is undecidable. It turned out it had a proof. It's a long, complicated proof. The twin prime conjecture might be undecidable. The Riemann hypothesis might be undecidable. These things might be, the axioms of mathematics might not be strong enough to reach those statements. It might be the case that depending on what axioms you choose, you can either say that's true or that's not true. So... And by the way, from Fermat's last theorem, there could be a shorter path. Absolutely. Yeah, so the notion of geodesics in metamathematical space is the notion of shortest proofs in metamathematical space. And that's a, you know, human mathematicians do not find shortest paths, nor do automated theorem provers. But the fact, and by the way, the, I mean, this stuff is so bizarrely connected. I mean, if you're into automated theorem proving, there are these so called critical pair lemmas and automated theorem proving. Those are precisely the branch pairs in our, that in multiway graphs. Let me just finish on the why mathematics is doable. Oh yes, the second part. So you know why it's hard, why is it doable? Right, why do we not just get lost in undecidability all the time? Yeah. So, and here's another fact, is in doing computer experiments and doing experimental mathematics, you do get lost in that way. When you just say, I'm picking a random integer equation. How do I, does it have a solution or not? And you just pick it at random without any human sort of path getting there. Often, it's really, really hard. It's really hard to answer those questions. We just pick them at random from the space of possibilities. But what I think is happening is, and that's a case where you just fell off into this ocean of sort of irreducibility and so on. What's happening is human mathematics is a story of building a path. You started off, you're always building out on this path where you are proving things. You've got this proof trajectory and you're basically, the human mathematics is the sort of the exploration of the world along this proof trajectory, so to speak. You're not just parachuting in from anywhere. You're following Lewis and Clark or whatever. You're actually going, doing the path. And the fact that you are constrained to go along that path is the reason you don't end up with, every so often you'll see a little piece of undecidability and you'll avoid that part of the path. But that's basically the story of why human mathematics has seemed to be doable. It's a story of exploring these paths that are by their nature, they have been constructed to be paths that can be followed. And so you can follow them further. Now, why is this relevant to anything? So, okay, so here's my belief. The fact that human mathematics works that way is I think there's some sort of connections between the way that observers work in physics and the way that the axiom systems of mathematics are set up to make mathematics be doable in that kind of way. And so, in other words, in particular, I think there is an analog of causal invariance, which I think is, and this is again, it's sort of the upper reaches of mathematics and stuff that it's a thing, there's this thing called homotopy type theory, which is an abstract, it's came out of category theory, and it's sort of an abstraction of mathematics. Mathematics itself is an abstraction, but it's an abstraction of the abstraction of mathematics. And there is the thing called the univalence axiom, which is a sort of a key axiom in that set of ideas. And I'm pretty sure the univalence axiom is equivalent to causal invariance. What was the term you used again? Univalence. Is that something for somebody like me accessible? Or is this? There's a statement of it that's fairly accessible. I mean, the statement of it is, basically it says things which are equivalent can be considered to be identical. In which space? Yeah, it's in higher category. In category. Okay, so it's a, but I mean, the thing just to give a sketch of how that works. So category theory is an attempt to idealize, it's an attempt to sort of have a formal theory of mathematics that is at a sort of higher level than mathematics. It's where you just think about these mathematical objects and these categories of objects and these morphisms, these connections between categories. Okay, so it turns out the morphisms and categories, at least weak categories, are very much like the paths in our hypergraphs and things. And it turns out, again, this is where it all gets crazy. I mean, the fact that these things are connected is just bizarre. So category theory, our causal graphs are like second order category theory. And it turns out you can take the limits of infinite order category theory. So just give roughly the idea. This is a roughly explainable idea. So a mathematical proof will be a path that says you can get from this thing to this other thing. And here's the path that you get from this thing to this other thing. But in general, there may be many paths, many proofs that get you many different paths that all successfully go from this thing to this other thing, okay? Now you can define a higher order proof, which is a proof of the equivalence of those proofs. Okay, so you're saying there's a... A path between those proofs essentially. Yes, a path between the paths, okay? And so you do that. That's the sort of second order thing. That path between the paths is essentially related to our causal graphs. Then you can take the limit. Wow, okay. The path between path, between path, between path. The infinite limit. That infinite limit turns out to be our Rulial Multiway System. Yeah, the Rulial Multiway System, that's a fascinating, both in the physics world and as you're saying now, that's fast. I'm not sure I've loaded it in completely, but... Well, I'm not sure I have either. And it may be one of these things where, in another five years or something, it's like, it was obvious, but I didn't see it. No, but the thing which is sort of interesting to me is that there's sort of an upper reach of mathematics, of the abstraction of mathematics. This thing, there's this mathematician called Grothendieck who's generally viewed as being sort of one of the most abstract, sort of creator of the most abstract mathematics of 1970s ish timeframe. And one of the things that he constructed was this thing he called the Infinity Grupoid. And he has this sort of hypothesis about the inevitable appearance of geometry from essentially logic in the structure of this thing. Well, it turns out this Rulial Multiway System is the Infinity Grupoid. So it's this limiting object. And this is an instance of that limiting object. So what to me is, I mean, again, I've been always afraid of this kind of mathematics because it seemed incomprehensibly abstract to me. But what I'm sort of excited about with this is that we've sort of concretified the way that you can reach this kind of mathematics, which makes it, well, both seem more relevant and also the fact that I don't yet know exactly what mileage we're gonna get from using the sort of the apparatus that's been built in those areas of mathematics to analyze what we're doing. But the thing that's. So both ways. So using mathematics to understand what you're doing and using what you're doing computationally to understand that. Right, so for example, the understanding of metamathematical space, one of the reasons I really want to do that is because I want to understand quantum mechanics better. And that, what you see, we live that kind of the multiway graph of mathematics because we actually know this is a theorem we've heard of. This is another one we've heard of. We can actually say these are actual things in the world that we relate to, which we can't really do as readily for the physics case. And so it's kind of a way to help my intuition. It's also, there are bizarre things like what's the analog of Einstein's equations in metamathematical space? What's the analog of a black hole? It turns out it looks like not completely sure yet, but there's this notion of nonconstructive proofs in mathematics. And I think those relate to, well, actually they relate to things related to event horizons. So the fact that you can take ideas from physics like event horizons. And map them into the same kind of space, metamath. It's really. So do you think there'll be, do you think you might stumble upon some breakthrough ideas in theorem proving? Like for, from the other direction? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, what's really nice is that we are using, so this absolutely directly maps to theorem proving. So pods and multiway graphs, that's what a theorem prover is trying to do. But I also mean like automated theorem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what, right. So the finding of pods, the finding of shortest pods or finding of pods at all is what automated theorem provers do. And actually what we've been doing. So we've actually been using automated theorem proving both in the physics project to prove things and using that as a way to understand multiway graphs. And because what an automated theorem prover is doing is it's trying to find a path through a multiway graph and its critical pair lemmas are precisely little stubs of branch pairs going off into branchial space. And that's, I mean, it's really weird. You know, we have these visualizations in Wolfram language of proof graphs from our automated theorem proving system. And they look reminiscent of. Well, it's just bizarre because we made these up a few years ago and they have these little triangle things and they are, we didn't quite get it right. We didn't quite get the analogy perfectly right, but it's very close. You know, just to say, in terms of how these things are connected. So there's another bizarre connection that I have to mention because which is, which again, we don't fully know, but it's a connection to something else you might not have thought was in the slightest but connected, which is distributed blockchain like things. Now you might figure out that that's, you would figure out that that's connected because it's a story of distributed computing. And the issue, you know, with the blockchain, you're saying there's going to be this one ledger that globally says, this is what happened in the world. But that's a bad deal. If you've got all these different transactions that are happening and you know, this transaction in country A doesn't have to be reconciled with the transaction in country B, at least not for a while. And that story is just like what happens with our causal graphs. That whole reconciliation thing is just like what happens with light cones and all this kind of thing. That's where the causal awareness comes into play. I mean, that's, you know, most of your conversations are about physics, but it's kind of funny that this probably and possibly might have even bigger impact and revolutionary ideas and totally other disciplines. Right, well, you see, yeah, right. So the question is, why is that happening, right? And the reason it's happening, I've thought about this obviously, because I like to think about these meta questions of, you know, what's happening is this model that we have is an incredibly minimal model. And once you have an incredibly minimal model, and this happened with cellular automata as well, cellular automata are an incredibly minimal model. And so it's inevitable that it gets you, it's sort of an upstream thing that gets used in lots of different places. And it's like, you know, the fact that it gets used, you know, cellular automata is sort of a minimal model of let's say road traffic flow or something. And they're also a minimal model of something in, you know, chemistry, and they're also a minimal model of something in epidemiology, right? It's because they're such a simple model that they can, that they apply to all these different things. Similarly, this model that we have with the physics project is another, cellular automata are a minimal model of parallel, of basically of parallel computation where you've defined space and time. These models are minimal models where you have not defined space and time. And they have been very hard to understand in the past, but the, I think the, perhaps the most important breakthrough there is the realization that these are models of physics. And therefore that you can use everything that's been developed in physics to get intuition about how things like that work. And that's why you can potentially use ideas from physics to get intuition about how to do parallel computing. And because the underlying model is the same. But we have all of this achievement in physics. I mean, you know, you might say, oh, you've come up with the fundamental theory of physics that throws out what people have done in physics before. Well, it doesn't, but also the real power is to use what's been done before in physics to apply it in these other places. Yes, absolutely. This kind of brings up, I know you probably don't particularly love commenting on the work of others, but let me bring up a couple of personalities just because it's fun and people are curious about it. So there's Sabine Hassenfelder. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She wrote this book that I need to read, but I forget what the title is, but it's Beauty Leads Us Astray in Physics is a subtitle or something like that. Which so much about what we're talking about now, like this simplification, to us humans seems to be beautiful. Like there's a certain intuition with physicists, with people that a simple theory, like this reducibility, pockets of reducibility is the ultimate goal. And I think what she tries to argue is no, we just need to come up with theories that are just really good at predicting physical phenomena. It's okay to have a bunch of disparate theories as opposed to trying to chase this beautiful theory of everything is the ultimate beautiful theory, a simple one. What's your response to that? Well, so what you're quoting, I don't know the Sabine Hassenfelder's, exactly what she said, but I mean that you're quoting the title of her book. Okay. Let me respond to what you were describing, which may or may not have nothing to do with what Sabine Hassenfelder says or thinks. Sorry, Sabine. Right. Sorry for misquoting. But I mean, the question is, is beauty a guide to whether something is correct? Which is kind of also the story of Occam's razor. If you've got a bunch of different explanations of things, is the thing that is the simplest explanation likely to be the correct explanation? And there are situations where that's true and there are situations where it isn't true. Sometimes in human systems, it is true because people have kind of, in evolutionary systems, sometimes it's true because it's sort of been kicked to the point where it's minimized. But in physics, does Occam's razor work? Is there a simple, quotes, beautiful explanation for things or is it a big mess? We don't intrinsically know. I think that the, I wouldn't, before I worked on the project in recent times, I would have said, we do not know how complicated the rule for the universe will be. And I would have said, the one thing we know, which is a fundamental fact about science, that's the thing that makes science possible, is that there is order in the universe. I mean, early theologians would have used that as an argument for the existence of God because it's like, why is there order in the universe? Why doesn't every single particle in the universe just do its own thing? Something must be making there be order in the universe. We, in the sort of early theology point of view, that's the role of God is to do that, so to speak. In our, we might say, it's the role of a formal theory to do that. And then the question is, but how simple should that theory be? And should that theory be one that, where I think the point is, if it's simple, it's almost inevitably somewhat beautiful in the sense that, because all the stuff that we see has to fit into this little tiny theory. And the way it does that has to be, it depends on your notion of beauty, but I mean, for me, the sort of the surprising connectivity of it is, at least in my aesthetic, that's something that responds to my aesthetic. But the question is, I mean, you're a fascinating person in the sense that you're at once talking about computational, the fundamental computational reducibility of the universe, and on the other hand, trying to come up with a theory of everything, which simply describes the, the simple origins of that computational reducibility. I mean, both of those things are kind of, it's paralyzing to think that we can't make any sense of the universe in the general case, but it's hopeful to think like, one, we can think of a rule and that generates this whole complexity, and two, we can find pockets of reducibility that are powerful for everyday life to do different kinds of predictions. I suppose Sabine wants to find, focus on the finding of small pockets of reducibility versus the theory of everything. You know, it's a funny thing because, you know, a bunch of people have started working on this physics project, people who are physicists, basically, and it is really a fascinating sociological phenomenon because what, you know, when I was working on this before in the 1990s, you know, wrote it up, put it, it's 100 pages of this 1200 page book that I wrote, New Kind of Science, is, you know, 100 pages of that is about physics, but I saw it at that time, not as a pinnacle achievement, but rather as a use case, so to speak. I mean, my main point was this new kind of science, and it's like, you can apply it to biology, you can apply it to, you know, other kinds of physics, you can apply it to fundamental physics, it's just an application, so to speak, it's not the core thing. But then, you know, one of the things that was interesting with that book was, you know, book comes out, lots of people think it's pretty interesting and lots of people start using what it has in different kinds of fields. The one field where there was sort of a heavy pitchforking was from my friends, the fundamental physics people, which was, it's like, no, this can't possibly be right. And, you know, it's like, you know, if what you're doing is right, it'll overturn 50 years of what we've been doing. And it's like, no, it won't, was what I was saying. And it's like, but, you know, for a while, when I started, you know, I was going to go on back in 2002, well, 2004, actually, I was going to go on working on this project. And I actually stopped, partly because it's like, why am I, you know, this is like, I've been in business a long time, right? I'm building a product for a target market that doesn't want the product. And it's like. Why work, yeah, yeah, why work against the, swim against the current or whatever. Right, but you see what's happened, which is sort of interesting is that, so a couple of things happened and it was like, you know, it was like, I don't want to do this project because I can do so many other things, which I'm really interested in where, you know, people say, great, thanks for those tools. Thanks for those ideas, et cetera. Whereas, you know, if you're dealing with kind of a, you know, a sort of a structure where people are saying, no, no, we don't want this new stuff. We don't need any new stuff. We're really fine with what we're doing. Yeah, there's like literally like, I don't know, millions of people who are thankful for Wolfram Alpha. A bunch of people wrote to me, how thankful, they are a different crowd than the theoretical physics community, perhaps. Yeah, well, but you know, the theoretical physics community pretty much uniformly uses Wolfram language and Mathematica, right? And so it's kind of like, you know, and that's, but the thing is what happens, you know, this is what happens, mature fields do not, you know, it's like, we're doing what we're doing. We have the methods that we have and we're just fine here. Now what's happened in the last 18 years or so, I think there's a couple of things have happened. First of all, the hope that, you know, string theory or whatever would deliver the fundamental theory of physics, that hope has disappeared. That the, another thing that's happened is the sort of the interest in computation around physics has been greatly enhanced by the whole quantum information, quantum computing story. People, you know, the idea there might be something sort of computational related to physics has somehow grown. And I think, you know, it's sort of interesting. I mean, right now, if we say, you know, it's like, if you're like, who else is trying to come up with the fundamental theory of physics? It's like, there aren't professional, no professional physicists, no professional physicists. What are your, I mean, you've talked with him, but just as a matter of personalities, cause it's a beautiful story. What are your thoughts about Eric Weinstein's work? You know, I think his, I mean, he did a PhD thesis in mathematical physics at Harvard. He's a mathematical physicist. And, you know, it seems like it's kind of, you know, it's in that framework. And it's kind of like, I'm not sure how much further it's got than his PhD thesis, which was 20 years ago or something. And I think that, you know, the, you know, it's a fairly specific piece of mathematical physics. That's quite nice. And... What trajectory do you hope it takes? I mean... Well, I think in his particular case, I mean, from what I understand, which is not everything at all, but, you know, I think I know the rough tradition, at least what he's operating in is sort of theory of gauge theories. Gauge theories, yeah. Local gauge invariants and so on. Okay, we are very close to understanding how local gauge invariants works in our models. And it's very beautiful. And it's very... And, you know, does some of the mathematical structure that he's enthusiastic about fit? Quite possibly, yes. So there might be a possibility of trying to understand how those things fit, how gauge theory fits. Yeah, very well. I mean, the question is, you know, so there are a couple of things one might try to get in the world. So for example, it's like, can we get three dimensions of space? We haven't managed to get that yet. Gauge theory, the standard model of particle physics says, but it's SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. Those are the designations of these Lie groups. It doesn't, but anyway, so those are sort of representations of symmetries of the theory. And so, you know, it is conceivable that it is generically true. Okay, so all those are subgroups of a group called E8, which is a weird, exceptional Lie group, okay? It is conceivable, I don't know whether it's the case, that that will be generic in these models, that it will be generic, that the gauge invariance of the model has this property, just as things like general relativity, which corresponds to the thing called general covariance, which is another gauge like invariance. It could conceivably be the case that the kind of local gauge invariance that we see in particle physics is somehow generic. And that would be a, you know, the thing that's really cool, I think, you know, sociologically, although this hasn't really hit yet, is that all of these different things, all these different things people have been working on in these, in some cases, quite abstruse areas of mathematical physics, an awful lot of them seem to tie into what we're doing. And, you know, it might not be that way. Yeah, absolutely. That's a beautiful thing, I think. I mean, but the reason Eric Weinstein is important is to the point that you mentioned before, which is, it's strange that the theory of everything is not at the core of the passion, the dream, the focus, the funding of the physics community. It's too hard. It's too hard and people gave up. I mean, basically what happened is ancient Greece, people thought we're nearly there. You know, the world is made of platonic solids. It's, you know, water is a tetrahedron or something. We're almost there, okay? Long period of time where people were like, no, we don't know how it works. You know, time of Newton, you know, we're almost there. Everything is gravitation. You know, time of Faraday and Maxwell, we're almost there. Everything is fields, everything is the ether, you know? Then... And the whole time we're making big progress though. Oh yes, absolutely. But the fundamental theory of physics is almost a footnote because it's like, it's the machine code. It's like we're operating in the high level languages. Yeah. You know, that's what we really care about. That's what's relevant for our everyday physics. You talked about different centuries and the 21st century will be everything is computation. Yes. If that takes us all the way, we don't know, but it might take us pretty far. Yes, right, that's right. And I, but I think the point is that it's like, you know, if you're doing biology, you might say, how can you not be really interested in the origin of life and the definition of life? Well, it's irrelevant. You know, you're studying the properties of some virus. It doesn't matter, you know, where, you know, you're operating at some much higher level. And it's the same, what's happening with physics is, I was sort of surprised actually. I was sort of mapping out this history of people's efforts to understand the fundamental theory of physics. And it's remarkable how little has been done on this question. And it's, you know, because, you know, there've been times when there's been bursts of enthusiasm. Oh, we're almost there. And then it decays and people just say, oh, it's too hard, but it's not relevant anyway. And I think that the thing that, you know, so the question of, you know, one question is, why does anybody, why should anybody care, right? Why should anybody care what the fundamental theory of physics is? I think it's intellectually interesting, but what will be the sort of, what will be the impact of this? What, I mean, this is the key question. What do you think will happen if we figure out the fundamental theory of physics? Right. Outside of the intellectual curiosity of us. Okay, so here's my best guess, okay? So if you look at the history of science, I think a very interesting analogy is Copernicus. Okay, so what did Copernicus do? There'd been this Ptolemaic system for working out the motion of planets. It did pretty well. It used epicycles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It had all this computational ways of working out where planets will be. When we work out where planets are today, we're basically using epicycles. But Copernicus had this different way of formulating things in which he said, you know, and the earth is going around the sun, and that had a consequence. The consequence was you can use this mathematical theory to conclude something which is absolutely not what we can tell from common sense, right? So it's like, trust the mathematics, trust the science, okay? Now fast forward 400 years, and now we're in this pandemic, and it's kind of like everybody thinks the science will figure out everything. It's like from the science, we can just figure out what to do. We can figure out everything. That was before Copernicus. Nobody would have thought if the science says something that doesn't agree with our everyday experience, where we just have to compute the science and then figure out what to do, people would say that's completely crazy. And so your sense is, once we figure out the framework of computation that can basically do any, understand the fabric of reality, we'll be able to derive totally counterintuitive things. No, the point I think is the following. That right now, you know, I talk about computational irreducibility. People, you know, I was very proud that I managed to get the term computational irreducibility into the congressional record last year. That's right, by the way, that's a whole nother topic we could talk about. Fascinating. Different topic. Different topic. But Tim, in any case, you know, but so computational irreducibility is one of these sort of concepts that I think is important in understanding lots of things in the world. But the question is, it's only important if you believe the world is fundamentally computational. Right? But if you know the fundamental theory of physics and it's fundamentally computational, then you've rooted the whole thing. That is, you know the world is computational. And while you can discuss whether, you know, it's not the case that people would say, well, you have this whole computational irreducibility, all these features of computation. We don't care about those because after all the world isn't computational, you might say. But if you know, you know, base, base, base thing, physics is computational, then you know that that stuff is, you know, that that's kind of the grounding for that stuff. Just as in a sense Copernicus was the grounding for the idea that you could figure out something with math and science that was not what you would intuitively think from your senses. So now we've got to this point where, for example, we say, you know, once we have the idea that computation is the foundational thing that explains our whole universe, then we have to say, well, what does it mean for other things? Like it means there's computational irreducibility. That means science is limited in certain ways. That means this, that means that. But the fact that we have that grounding means that, you know, and I think, for example, for Copernicus, for instance, the implications of his work on the set of mathematics of astronomy were cool, but they involved a very small number of people. The implications of his work for sort of the philosophy of how you think about things were vast and involved, you know, everybody more or less. But do you think, so that's actually the way scientists and people see the world around us. So it has a huge impact in that sense. Do you think it might have an impact more directly to engineering derivations from physics, like propulsion systems, our ability to colonize the world? Like, for example, okay, this is like sci fi, but if you understand the computational nature, say, of the different forces of physics, you know, there's a notion of being able to warp gravity, things like this. Yeah, can we make warp drive? Warp drive, yeah. So like, would we be able to, will, you know, will like Elon Musk start paying attention? Like it's awfully costly to launch these rockets. Do you think we'll be able to, yeah, create warp drive? And, you know, I set myself some homework. I agreed to give a talk at some NASA workshop in a few weeks about faster than light travel. So I haven't figured it out yet, but no, but. You got two weeks. Yeah, right. But do you think that kind of understanding of fundamental theory of physics can lead to those engineering breakthroughs? Okay, I think it's far away, but I'm not certain. I mean, you know, this is the thing that, I set myself an exercise when gravity waves, gravitational waves were discovered, right? I set myself the exercise of what would black hole technology look like? In other words, right now, you know, black holes are far away. They're, you know, how on earth can we do things with them? But just imagine that we could get, you know, pet black holes right in our backyard. You know, what kind of technology could we build with them? I got a certain distance, not that far, but I think in, you know, so there are ideas, you know, I have this, one of the weirder ideas is things I'm calling space tunnels, which are higher dimensional pieces of space time, where basically you can, you know, in our three dimensional space, there might be a five dimensional, you know, region, which actually will appear as a white hole at one end and a black hole at the other end, you know, who knows whether they exist. And then the questions, another one, okay, this is another crazy one, is the thing that I'm calling a vacuum cleaner, okay? So, I mentioned that, you know, there's all this activity in the universe, which is maintaining the structure of space. And that leads to a certain energy density effectively in space. And so the question, in fact, dark energy is a story of essentially negative mass produced by the absence of energy you thought would be there, so to speak. And we don't know exactly how it works in either our model or the physical universe, but this notion of a vacuum cleaner is a thing where, you know, you have all these things that are maintaining the structure of space, but what if you could clean out some of that stuff that's maintaining the structure of space and make a simpler vacuum somewhere? You know, what would that do? A totally different kind of vacuum. Right, and that would lead to negative energy density, which would need to, so gravity is usually a purely attractive force, but negative mass would lead to repulsive gravity and lead to all kinds of weird things. Now, can it be done in our universe? You know, my immediate thought is no, but you know, the fact is that, okay, so here's the thing. Well, once you understand the fact, because you're saying like, at this level of abstraction, can we reach to the lower levels and mess with it? Yes. Once you understand the levels, I think you can start to. I know, and I'm, you know, I have to say that this reminds me of people telling one years ago that, you know, you'll never transmit data over a copper wire at more than 1,000, you know, 1,000 board or something, right? And this is, why did that not happen? You know, why do we have this much, much faster data transmission? Because we've understood many more of the details of what's actually going on. And it's the same exact story here. And it's the same, you know, I think that this, as I say, I think one of the features of sort of, one of the things about our time that will seem incredibly naive in the future is the belief that, you know, things like heat is just random motion of molecules, that it's just throw up your hands, it's just random. We can't say anything about it. That will seem naive. Yeah, at the heat death of the universe, those particles would be laughing at us humans thinking. Yes, right. That life is not beautiful. I'll have a whole civilization, you know. Humans used to think they're special with their little brains. Well, right, but also, and they used to think that this would just be random and uninteresting. But that's, but so this question about whether you can, you know, mess with the underlying structure and how you find a way to mess with the underlying structure, that's a, you know, I have to say, you know, my immediate thing is, boy, that seems really hard, but then, and you know, possibly computational irreducibility will bite you, but then there's always some path of computational reducibility. And that path of computational reducibility is the engineering invention that has to be made. Those little pockets can have huge engineering impact. Right, and I think that that's right. And I mean, we live in, you know, we make use of so many of those pockets. And the fact is, you know, I, you know, this is, yes, it's a, you know, it's one of these things where, where, you know, I'm a person who likes to figure out ideas and so on, and the sort of tests of my level of imagination, so to speak. And so a couple of places where there's sort of serious humility in terms of my level of imagination, one is this thing about different reference frames for understanding the universe, where like, imagine the physics of the aliens, what will it be like? And I'm like, that's really hard. I don't know, you know? And I mean, I think that... But once you have the framework in place, you can at least reason about the things you don't know, maybe can't know, or like, it's too hard for you to know, but then the mathematics can, that's exactly it, allow you to reach beyond where you can reason about. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to not have, you know, if you think back to Alan Turing, for example, and, you know, when he invented Turing machines, you know, and imagining what computers would end up doing, so to speak. Yeah. You know, and it's... It's very difficult. It's difficult, right. And it's, and I mean, this thing... Made a few reasonable predictions, but most of it, he couldn't predict, possibly. By the time, by 1950, he was making reasonable predictions about some things. But not the 30s, yeah. Right, not when he first, you know, conceptualized, you know, and he conceptualized universal computing for a very specific mathematical reason that wasn't as general. But yes, it's a good sort of exercise in humility to realize that it's kind of like, it's really hard to figure these things out. The engineering of the universe, if we know how the universe works, how can we engineer it? That's such a beautiful vision. That's such a beautiful vision. By the way, I have to mention one more thing, which is the ultimate question from physics is, okay, so we have this abstract model of the universe. Why does the universe exist at all, right? So, you know, we might say there is a formal model that if you run this model, you get the universe, or the model gives you, you know, a model of the universe, right, you run this mathematical thing and the mathematics unfolds in the way that corresponds to the universe. But the question is, why was that actualized? Why does the actual universe actually exist? And so this is another one of these humility and it's like, can you figure this out? I have a guess, okay, about the answer to that. And my guess is somewhat unsatisfying, but my guess is that it's a little bit similar to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, which is the statement that from within, as an axiomatic theory like piano arithmetic, you cannot from within that theory prove the consistency of the theory. So my guess is that for entities within the universe, there is no finite determination that can be made of the statement the universe exists is essentially undecidable to any entity that is embedded in the universe. Within that universe, how does that make you feel? Does that put you at peace that it's impossible, or is it really ultimately frustrating? Well, I think it just says that it's not a kind of question that, you know, there are things that it is reasonable. I mean, there's kinds of, you know, you can talk about hyper computation as well. You can say, imagine there was a hyper computer, here's what it would do. So okay, great, it would be lovely to have a hyper computer, but unfortunately we can't make it in the universe. Like it would be lovely to answer this, but unfortunately we can't do it in the universe. And you know, this is all we have, so to speak. And I think it's really just a statement. It's sort of, in the end, it'll be a kind of a logical, logically inevitable statement, I think. I think it will be something where it is, as you understand what it means to have, what it means to have a sort of predicate of existence and what it means to have these kinds of things, it will sort of be inevitable that this has to be the case, that from within that universe, you can't establish the reason for its existence, so to speak. You can't prove that it exists and so on. And nevertheless, because of computational reducibility, the future is ultimately not predictable, full of mystery, and that's what makes life worth living. Right, I mean, right. And you know, it's funny for me, because as a pure sort of human being doing what I do, it's, you know, like I'm interested in people, I like sort of the whole human experience, so to speak. And yet, it's a little bit weird when I'm thinking, you know, it's all hypergraphs down there, and it's all just. Hypergraphs all the way down. Right. It's like turtles all the way down. Yeah, yeah, right. And it's kind of, you know, to me, it is a funny thing, because every so often I get this, you know, as I'm thinking about, I think we've really gotten, you know, we've really figured out kind of the essence of how physics works, and I'm like thinking to myself, you know, here's this physical thing, and I'm like, you know, this feels like a very definite thing. How can it be the case that this is just some rule or reference frame of, you know, this infinite creature that is so abstract and so on? And I kind of, it is a, it's a funny sort of feeling that, you know, we are, we're sort of, it's like, in the end, it's just sort of, we're just happy we're just humans type thing. And it's kind of like, but we're making, we make things as, it's not like we're just a tiny speck. We are, in a sense, the, we are more important by virtue of the fact that, in a sense, it's not like there's, there is no ultimate, you know, it's like, we're important because, because, you know, we're here, so to speak, and we're not, it's not like there's a thing where we're saying, you know, we are just but one sort of intelligence out of all these other intelligences. And so, you know, ultimately there'll be the super intelligence, which is all of these put together and they'll be very different from us. No, it's actually going to be equivalent to us. And the thing that makes us a sort of special is just the details of us, so to speak. It's not something where we can say, oh, there's this other thing, you know, just, you think humans are cool, just wait until you've seen this. You know, it's going to be much more impressive. Well, no, it's all going to be kind of computationally equivalent. And the thing that, you know, it's not going to be, oh, this thing is amazingly much more impressive and amazingly much more meaningful, let's say. No, we're it. I mean, that's the... And the symbolism of this particular moment. So this has been one of the, one of the favorite conversations I've ever had, Stephen. It's a huge honor to talk to you, to talk about a topic like this for four plus hours on the fundamental theory of physics. And yet we're just two finite descendants of apes that have to end this conversation because darkness have come upon us. Right, and we're going to get bitten by mosquitoes and all kinds of terrible things. The symbolism of that, we're talking about the most basic fabric of reality and having to end because of the fact that things end. It's tragic and beautiful, Stephen. Thank you so much. Huge honor. I can't wait to see what you do in the next couple of days and next week, a month. We're all watching with excitement. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Wolfram. And thank you to our sponsors, SimplySafe, Sun Basket, and Masterclass. Please check out our sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Physics isn't the most important thing, love is. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #124

The following is a conversation with Ryan Hall, one of the most insightful minds and systems thinkers in the martial arts world. He's a black belt in jiu jitsu, accomplished competitor, an MMA fighter undefeated in the UFC, and truly a philosopher who seeks to understand the underlying principles of the martial arts. Jiu jitsu is such an important part of who I am, and I was hoping to share that with folks who might know me only as a researcher. I think there's no better person to do that with than Ryan, who somehow, remarkably, I can say is a friend, and also a modern day warrior philosopher of the Miyamoto Masashi line of especially dangerous and brilliant humans. Also, his amazing wife, Jen Hall, was there as well, so if you hear a kind of voice of wisdom coming from above, you know who it is. Quick summary of the sponsors, PowerDot, Babbel, and Cash App. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that renaming this podcast to just my name gave me intellectual freedom that I really didn't anticipate was so empowering, especially for someone who's trying to find their voice. I hope you'll allow me the chance to really try and do that, to step outside of AI and even science, engineering, history, and so on, and on occasion, talk to athletes, musicians, writers, and maybe even comedians who inspire me, especially up and coming comedians and musicians like Eric Weinstein, who yes, we'll do a third conversation with soon. I think if I allow myself to expand the range of these conversations on occasion, when I do return to science and engineering, I'll bring a new perspective and also a little bit more fun and a few extra listeners that may not otherwise realize how fascinating artificial intelligence, robotics, mathematics, and engineering truly is. All that said, please skip the episodes that don't interest you. You don't have to listen to all of them. Trust me, as someone who is a bit or a lot OCD, that idea is quite unpleasant. But life, friends, is full of unpleasant things. But as Hunter S. Thompson suggested, and I suggest as well, you should still buy the ticket and take the ride. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you the timestamp, so please skip if you don't want to listen to the ads, but it does mean a lot to me when you do. And still please do check out the sponsors by clicking on the links in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Power Dot. Get it at PowerDot.com slash Lex and use code Lex at checkout to get 20% off. I use it for muscle recovery for legs and shoulders, but you can also use it to build muscle, endurance, or even just warm up. In fact, I first heard about this kind of electrical muscle stimulation device in reading that Bruce Lee used it. He was an inspiration to me as someone who practices first principles thinking, especially in a discipline where conventional thinking is everywhere. He created a martial art called Jeet Kune Do that is in many ways, at least philosophically in its hybrid approach, a precursor to modern day mixed martial arts. There's a special kind of deep philosophical thinking that combat athletes or jiu jitsu practitioners do that is unlike any other. I think it's grounded in the humbling process of getting your ass kicked a lot. That removes any illusion of intellectual superiority. I think the journey towards wisdom starts when you humbly admit to yourself that you know very little or almost nothing. Anyway, go to PowerDot.com slash Lex and use code Lex at checkout to get 20% off on top of the 30 day free trial. This show is also sponsored by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Go to Babbel.com and use code Lex to get three months free. They offer 14 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, and yes, Russian. Let me read a few lines from a Russian song by Vladimir Vysotsky called Anna Bula V Parishe. You'll start to understand if you sign up to Babbel. The song always made me smile, because it resonates with my own life. It translates loosely to she's been to Paris. Paris for a Russian, I suppose, symbolizing a fancy life and that the guy can never quite fit into that kind of life. Expensive things, nice restaurants, cars, all that. I was thinking about what song's equivalent in English, maybe Uptown Girl by Billy Joe is similar in spirit, but very different in style. I just watched the video on YouTube for Uptown Girl and it's basically Billy Joe dressed up as a mechanic, but dancing in a way that I'm pretty sure no mechanic has ever danced, turning the old cringe factor up to 11. Anyway, I always felt like I didn't really fit in with the fancy people and that's what this song represents. But back to Babbel. Get started by visiting babbel.com and use code LEX to get three months free. This show is presented by the great, the powerful, the OG sponsor named unofficially after one of my favorite musicians, the man in black, Johnny Cash. That's Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEX podcast. The Cash App folks are truly amazing people and are teaming with ideas for cool contests, giveaways and all that kind of stuff. I've been thinking of doing some kind of a little contest and giving away 42 bucks to a bunch of people who win. It's not so much about the money, but the glory and a delicious taste of victory. If you have ideas for a contest, let me know. I was thinking of something like asking people to submit funny, inspiring photos or videos or audio of using Cash App or any of the sponsors of this podcast, really, or maybe even just funny things related to the podcast, like different weird places you might be watching or listening to me right now. I'm pretty sure there's somebody out there right now sitting in a hot tub with some wine watching me say this. I salute you, sir or madam. I may be opening up some floodgates I deeply regret later, so please make sure you're wearing clothes and whatever you sent me. There'll be no naked people in the hot tub as part of this podcast. I have integrity and standards. Let me know in the comments what ideas for contests you might have. Again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LexPodcast, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Ryan Hall. Who, in your view, is the greatest warrior in history? Ancient or modern? That's a tough question, and again, I'm no historian by any measure, so I'll probably do the worst. It's like, what are your best bands ever? I'm like, Metallica, and you know, so I'll pick the... Metallica just came out with a new album, by the way, with an entire orchestra. That's kind of cool. Yeah. That's important. Metallica will always be one of the greatest. Yeah, that's right. So I agree with you. They were a bad example. They were a well known, yet awesome band. Let me say it's like Nickelback or something like that. I mean, that feels cheap because everyone makes fun of Nickelback. Yeah. I guess it depends on how you want to define warrior. Something that I think about when it comes to trying to evaluate various people or situations or things that I've read about or heard about are the circumstances that they were involved in because I think a lot of times it's easy to look at the outcomes, and obviously we live in an outcome driven world and outcomes do matter, but at the same time, you look at, let's say what Cuba's been able to pull off from a combat sports perspective, it's staggering. The amount of successful Olympic level competitors they have in wrestling, boxing, judo. I mean, they're a tiny little island with no money and no people. That's shocking. You know, when you think about the Olympics and the United States doing well, of course we should do well. I mean, Russia should do well. China should do well. India should do better than they do, honestly. Obviously it means like they're not into it as much or at least certain sports because they have the resources people wise. So talent's not going to be an issue. So there's something to like where the starting point is. Like that's the argument with like, why people say Maradona, I don't know if you're into soccer, okay. They say Maradona is better than Messi because he basically carried the team and won the World Cup with a team that wouldn't otherwise win the World Cup. And then Messi was only successful in Barcelona because he has like superstars, he's playing with other superstars. Right. Yeah, that's fair to say. I mean, like you're not, there's a lot of factors that go into, let's say winning a soccer game. And obviously Barcelona, particularly for various points in time had a ridiculous all star squad of world class players. But let's say for instance, maybe they didn't have the creative players in Argentina. They needed to get the ball up to Messi. They didn't have like the NES and again the backing there in the midfield. But because obviously Argentina's always had ridiculous attacking players, like even alongside Messi, but they're like the three killers up front and then a little less behind. So it's interesting you say that depends how you define warrior because you can probably take like some of the civil rights leaders, you can go into that direction, like leaders in general. But if we just look at like the greatest martial artists in history in that direction, do you have somebody in mind? I would say at least three that pop into my head and would be Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and then maybe Miyamoto Musashi, the two commanders and then one guy. But so it's interesting. And then again, you mentioned warriors being able to make a lot out of a little. Musashi's famous for winning duels that were oftentimes one on one. The Alexander and Hannibal were military commanders and one of them faced Rome. And that was an interesting thing. Oftentimes coming up with novel tactics, different strategies, sometimes under resourced, having to do novel and crazy things, there's skin in the game. That's an interesting thing too. I think a lot of times it's, if you're playing a video game, I don't think you can be a warrior because there's no skin in the game. You get hurt, you lose, that's a bummer. It stings a little bit, maybe it makes you feel slightly disappointed, but Musashi loses, he loses. Hannibal loses, he loses. Alexander loses, he loses. And they lose, I guess the people around them lose. So that's almost like you could use, even from a combat sports perspective, Muhammad Ali, I mean, you consider also their quality of opposition. Musashi was fighting high quality opposition. Obviously Hannibal and Alexander, particularly Hannibal, were fighting unbelievable opposition. Muhammad Ali fought phenomenal opposition, but he had skin in the game both in the ring and out. And that actually meshes with, as you mentioned, like a civil rights type of situation where you are under resourced, you're pushing the stone uphill. And that was a neat thing I think about Muhammad Ali was how much personal conviction the man had to have in order to pull off what he was able to pull off both in and outside of the ring. And that reminds me of, again, some of the other great leaders or great fighters throughout history. So what do you make of the kind of very difficult idea that some of these conquerors like Alexander the Great and somebody that, if you listen to Hardcore History, oh, Dan Carlin, who apparently Elon Musk is also a big fan of, is the Genghis Khan episode. A large percent of the world can call Genghis Khan an ancestor. So the difficult truth is about some of these conquerors is that there's a lot of murder and rape and pillage and stealing of resources and all that kind of stuff. And yet they're often remembered as quite honorable. I mean, in the case of Genghis Khan, there's a lot of people who argue, if you look at historically the way it's described in full context, is he was ultimately, given the time, he was a liberator. He was a progressive, I should say. In terms of the violence and the atrocities he committed, he, at least in the stories, has always provided the option of not to do that. It's only if you resist, do, so you basically have the option, do you wanna join us or do you want to die? And die horribly. That's the progressive sort of, that's the Bernie Sanders of the era. Nice. So what do you make of that? That there's so much of these great conquerors, there's so much murder that to us now would just seem insane. It's funny you mention it. I think that maybe it's a human nature thing that we want to, or maybe a misunderstanding thing that we want to cast all of our characters and ourselves maybe as entirely good or as entirely negative when I guess the phrase or the saying, one man's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist, is accurate. And a lot of times I think you can understand as long as you're able to look from various people's perspective. Like if you look at the TV show, The Wire, which was obviously widely, everybody loves The Wire. I thought that there were everyone, I'm not saying anything that's not been said before, compelling characters from all angles, whether you like the character, dislike the character, you were able to understand the motivations of people doing various things. Even if they did wrongly, they did rightly. We want to cast all of the demons throughout history as completely inhuman when I think that makes it difficult for us to understand them. And we want to look back at the people that we think of as great and entirely great. And I think that we're experiencing the problems with this even right now, socially and politically as we're trying to look back and decide the people we thought were good or not good or people we thought were bad are now good rather than going, hey, there's good and bad to all things. And there are, as you mentioned, the Genghis Khan thing, you don't have to fight back. You do, I respect you for it, but then we're gonna have a conflict and then we'll see what happens. And if you lose, you're gonna be sorry that you did because I have to make it that way. If I want to continue utilizing this kind of MO because I need to discourage the next guy from doing what you're doing right now. And ultimately though, I guess that's an interesting thing. Imagine you put every single person on planet earth in a cage, crime drops, all sorts. There are certain positives to that. And it's just, things are as they are, it's difficult, but that is ultimately more the law of the jungle. And I think that we're able to supersede some of that now in modern times and I think we're fortunate. But as you mentioned, we look back and say, oh, this is horrible. Say, no, that just is what it is. That's how life is at a base level. And again, if you're a lion and I'm a gazelle, I don't really like it very much, but we don't call the lion the bad guy. We don't sanctify the gazelle or the other way around. So it's just, it's interesting when you pull back some of the controls that we put on our behavior and in modern life, which I think are generally speaking positive, we get down to how things often are. And at the same time, we could, modern life was built by people like Genghis Khan. So then you get down to the ends justifying the means. It's a tough question. These aren't things with easy answers, or at least if they are, I certainly don't have the smarts to figure out the answers to them, but it's difficult. I would just say people in the world are complicated and layered and depending upon which side of the line you're standing on at various times, you may like or dislike someone, but I can't remember whose idea it was, this is killing me, but it's the veil of ignorance, I guess, the philosophical idea of the veil of ignorance where I go, is sticking everyone in the cage the right thing to do? Or everyone but me, and I say, well, no, why? Well, it would make my life easier if I just went over and took all of your stuff as long as you couldn't stop me. I mean, of course that's a great idea. That's what everyone does in every video game. But in Skyrim, you steal stuff when people aren't around. But ultimately you go, well, this isn't the right thing to do because if I were on the other side of it, I would not appreciate it. It's inherently not a good thing to do. I'm only doing it because I think I'm gonna win. And that's a fine way to be, but you don't have the white hat on, I guess I would say. So I think without those philosophical underpinnings to rein us in, I guess, morally speaking, it's very difficult to say what's right or wrong. And you'd say certain actions have a reaction, almost like a physics sense. If you kill everyone in your way for as long as you're able to, your life will be easier. I mean, you're setting the table for someone doing the same to you when you're no longer the tough guy, but it is what it is. Yeah, if you look at like the Instagram channel, nature is metal, it hurts my heart to watch, to remind me, a comfortable descendant of ape, how vicious nature is, just unapologetically, just, I mean, there's a process to it where the bad guy always wins. The violence is the solution to most problems, or the flip side of that running away from violence is the solution depending on your skillset. And it's funny to think of us humans with our extra little piece of brain that we're somehow trying to figure out, like you said, in a philosophical way, how to supersede that, how to like move past the viciousness, the cruelty, just the cold exchange of nature. But perhaps it's not so, maybe that is nature, maybe that's the way of life, maybe we're trying too hard to, we're being too egotistical and thinking we're somehow separate from nature, we're somehow distant from that very thing. I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I think actually Orson Scott Card, who's the writer of a great book called Ender's Game, this was a statement that the main character, Ender, made in the book. His brother was brilliant. His brother was like kind of sociopathic brilliant kid that ended up kicked out of the school that they were all into for Battle Commander. Dealing with his brother taught him that ultimately strength, courage, the ability to do violence for all the good and the bad of that is one of the fundamental most important things to be able to do in life, because if you can't cause destruction, if you can't cause pain, you will be forever subject to those who can. And I think that you mentioned egotism. I think that that's a disease that could obviously strike any of us, but it's something that we're looking at now. We're, I think we should be unbelievably thankful as people that live in the world that we do that we can walk down the street without having to worry that I'm like, well, don't worry that that's six foot six, 270 pound person over there is just gonna leave me alone. And I have a Rolex on, but whatever, I'll be fine. Because that person is deciding to leave me alone because we've all agreed to live in this relatively sane and or constrained society because it benefits all of us. And we're doing it because of a philosophical underpinning, not because nature dictates it be that way, because nature dictates it go in a very, very different direction. And the only person, the only thing stopping that person from doing something to me is either me, that person, or someone else that will stand in between us. And if I can't do it, and there's no one there to stand in between us, then the only thing stopping that person is that person. And I have to hope that they're either disinterested or disinclined to do that sort of thing. And I think that it's keeping in mind that that is the fundamental nature of the world, whether we like it or not is important. And I think the quest to fundamentally alter human nature is gonna be ultimately fruitless. And then also it's, it is a little bit egotistical. A lion does what a lion does. We can try to box it in and we can try to guide this direction, that direction. But nature is as it is and as it always will be unless we wanna start to constrain it significantly. But now I'm starting to get into individual rights who put me in charge, who says that I should be the one to make the choices constraining because many of the most awful things that have happened throughout history, one group or one person has decided to constrain others. And we don't like Genghis Khan doing that. Well, I'll do that on a little level. Are there gonna be benefits and beneficiaries? Absolutely, but there'll be losers in that too. So I guess it's a dangerous game. It's almost like putting on the one ring. You remember when Frodo offered the one ring to Gandalf and Gandalf said, no, no, I would take it away. I would put it on. I would use it out of the desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power so terrible you can't imagine. I think that's the big question for anyone that decides that's able to have reach and able to have power. I mean, obviously I can't speak to that, but imagine you did have national level, global level power. How would you use it? Would you try to change the world? Would you be glad that you did down the line? I don't know. Yeah, that's the thing we're struggling now as a society. Maybe it'd be nice to get your quick comment on that, which is the people who have traditionally been powerless are now seeking a fairer society, a more equal society. And in attaining more power justly, there's also a realization, at least from my perspective, that power corrupts everyone. Even if the flag you wave is that of justice, right? And so, not to overuse the term, but it'd be nice if you have thoughts about the whole idea of cancel culture and the internet and Twitter and so on, where there's nuanced, difficult discussions of race, of gender, of fairness, equality, justice, all of these kinds of things. There's a shouting down oftentimes of nuanced discussion of kind of trying to reason through these very difficult issues, through our history, through what our future looks like. Do you have thoughts about the internet discourse that's going on now? Is there something positive? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing to see. I guess, as you mentioned, anytime you're wielding power, whomever you are, doing so carefully is important. And it's very, very easy to look at the people that have power and that are using it poorly or have used it poorly and go, hey, you're the bad guy. And then go, well, of course, if I had power, I'll use it properly and I may intend to use it properly and maybe I will. But at the same time, we see a lot of times people are people are people. I think that a lot of the... I think if you believe that human beings are all one, which I do, no matter whether you're here or there, you got two arms, two legs, a heart, a brain, we all live a similar experience. And obviously, with variations on a theme, but you're no less a human being. If you're a person I've never met from China, than some person in Virginia, we're all people. And I guess, ultimately, if I believe that human beings are corruptible and that power corrupts and that we're all fallible and we say and do things that either intentionally or unintentionally that we wish we'd not, I think that I have to allow for a space, I guess the word, it's almost a religious term, but I guess I would just say grace. And that's something that I see disappearing from discourse in the public, or maybe it wasn't there, I'm not sure, but it's interesting watching this occur on the internet because also now no longer are you and I just having a talk sitting on a bus stop, it's now in writing. Everything's in writing. The old saying, don't put that in writing. You're like, don't put anything in writing. That's how you get in trouble. And basically, with the degree to which everything is recorded, but recorded in tiny little bites, it's very, very easy for me to wave every last little foolish, ignorant, incorrect, or correct thing that someone has ever said or done in their face to support whatever argument that I'm trying to make about them or a situation. And I think that you mentioned cancel culture, as it seems to exist. Obviously, this is poisonous on its face. This is poisonous. It's the sort of thing that doesn't incentivize proper behavior. I mean, you look at, let's say one of the great monsters of history, Adolf Hitler, obviously, who's done awful, awful things, but also for anyone that's even a minor student of history, did some positive things as well. I don't have to embroider this person's crimes. I don't have to act as if there was nothing good a monster has ever done and nothing bad that a great person throughout history has ever done. But imagine the ghost of Adolf Hitler were to pop up and go, oh, my gosh, guys, I'm so sorry. I know what I've done, but I'd like to apologize and start to make it right. Well, I mean, you'd hope that if he popped up over here, you'd go, well, I don't really like what you've done. And I don't like you. But at the same time, I'm glad to hear that you're attempting to make this right and push in a positive direction, even if you can't make it right. Because otherwise, what am I doing? I'm disincentivizing change for the better. I'm looking to wield whatever power I have in a punitive fashion, which does not encourage people to do anything other than double down on the wrongs that they've made, knowing that at least they're going to have some support from the people that support that. And I guess I want to, you would hopefully look at the use of the internet as a tool that can educate, and I guess I don't like the word empower, but empower people to do various things, extend their reach, but educate and learn rather than to further solidify little tribal things that exist, which I think everyone in humanity and human history is vulnerable to. I mean, look at the course of human history. It's deeply tribal. And the tribes or the groups that have been on top at various points in time have done a lot of times bad things to the ones that have not. And you'd hope that we could learn lessons from the past and rather than committing the crimes that were committed against us, recommitting them when we slide into the top position, say, I could do this now, but I'll not. I understand the urge to seek vengeance is strong. Anyone that says differently, I wouldn't trust. But at the same time, we have enough experience in history, enough experience in life, enough hopefully wisdom time in to go, this isn't the right answer. This is only going to replay the things. The worst parts of our history, not the best. And I want to encourage positive behavior. And if I just, again, further lash out at people, although understandably, done understandably, I'm simply just going to just perpetuate the cycle that's gone on to this point. So you hope that even though we're seeing a lot of turmoil societally at the moment and globally at the moment, that I guess our better angels can prevail at a certain point. But it's going to take a great deal of leadership. And I think that we're sorely missing like a Martin Luther King style character at the moment or a great leader. And I'm hoping that one will show up. For sure. And by the way, a word I don't hear often, and I think it's a beautiful one, which is grace. That's a really interesting word. I'm going to have to think about that. There is a religious component to it, but it's exactly right. You have to somehow walk the line between, you know, you mentioned Hitler. I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I'm really thinking about the 1930s and what it's like to have economic. My concern is the economic pain that people are feeling now quietly is really a suffering that's not being heard. And there's echoes of that in the 20s and the 30s with the Great Depression. And there's a hunger for a charismatic leader. Like you said, there's a leader that could walk with grace, could inspire, could bring people together with sort of dreams of a better future that's positive. But Hitler did exactly everything that I just said, except for the word positive, which is he did give a dream to the German people who were great people, who are great people of a better future. It's just that a certain point that quickly turned into the better future requires literally expansion of more land. It started with, well, if we want to build a great Germany, we need a little bit more land. And so we need to kind of get Austria, then we need to kind of get France, mostly because France doesn't understand that more land is really useful. So we need to get rid of them. And look what they did to us in Versailles anyway. But so the Jewish, the Holocaust is a separate thing. I don't know. Well, I don't know. I don't know what to think of it because so me being Jewish and having a lot of the echoes of the suffering is in my family or the people that are lost. I don't know because Hitler wrote all about it in Mein Kampf. So I don't know if the evil he committed was there all along. I mean, and that's where the question of forgiveness, I mean, Hitler is such a difficult person to talk about, but it's the question of cancer culture, who is deserving of forgiveness and who is not like the Holocaust survivors that I've read about that I've heard the interviews with. They've often spoken about the fact that the way for them to let go, to overcome the atrocities that they've experienced is to forgive. Like forgiveness is the way out for them. It's interesting to think about. I don't know if we're even as a society ready to even contemplate an idea of forgiveness for Hitler. It's an interesting idea though. It's a good thought exercise at the very least to think about like all these people that are being canceled for doing bad things of different degrees. Think of like Louis CK or somebody like that for being not a good person, but like, what is the path for forgiveness? And also what's a good person? What is a good person? If that's a sliding scale that we could all find ourselves looking at the uncomfortable end of a gun on, you know, particularly down the line. I mean, you hope for the best, but these definitions, I guess, like you said, are important and who's doing the canceling, who's being canceled. I'm not necessarily, as you said, saying that that's entirely unjustified or certainly not, it's certainly understandable. And particularly you mentioned like a monster, like an Adolf Hitler, but it's also interesting. I couldn't help but notice, like you mentioned as a society, us being able to apply forgiveness to someone who's done so much horror, but people who are personal, I mean, of course, many of us, so many people in person affected, but directly personally affected someone, a survivor of the Holocaust being able to let go on that. I'm nowhere near big enough a person for that sort of thing. But I guess that's an interesting thing, you know, being the person who was physically there, potentially able to let go, I don't know, that's unbelievably powerful. It's interesting. I guess you have to wonder sometimes, and this isn't obviously in regards to the Holocaust, but why I'm holding on to various things, have I, what is it doing for me and what is it doing to me? Is it facilitative, is it not? And I guess that's something else that I really want to talk about, something else that I really enjoy. When I was on Ultimate Fighter, they don't let you have any music or any books. I didn't have religious texts, so I brought a Bible and I brought a Quran and I started to read them side by side. And it was really interesting reading. The Bible's a little drier, the Quran's more interesting, at least written. But I think something that was consistently brought up was the way, most merciful. People want, I don't think any of us want justice. We think we want justice, but I don't think we want justice. This is a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous game, because maybe this person's wronged me deeply and I want justice. I want to balance it out, because what is justice if not a balancing of the scales? And sometimes you can understand it on a societal level, I think it's fine. I mean, there's crime and punishment and we can go for the benefits and the drawbacks of that. But I think what any of us want is mercy within reason, grace, as you mentioned, because justice is a very, very, very dangerous thing and it's a valuable and important thing. But who gets to decide what's just, what justice is actually meted out? Maybe I get to meet out justice, but it's not, I don't get my comeuppance. Well, that sounds great, but what happens when it's pointed back at me? And I guess that comes back to the veil of ignorance, the idea that one day I will have to live in the world in which I've envisioned and the world in which I've created. I think that a lot of times people love the idea of they're a judge for your crimes and a lawyer for theirs. And I heard that the other day. I thought that was great. And I think that's a dangerous thing and hopefully it gives us all pause before rightly or wrongly, but always understandably wielding serious power. Yeah. Justice is a kind of drug. So if you look at history, I've also been reading a lot about Stalin. I mean, all those folks really, I don't know what was inside Hitler's head actually that he's a tricky one because I think he was legitimately insane. Stalin was not. And Stalin was like, he literally thought he's doing a good thing. He literally thought for the entirety of the time that communism is going to bring, like that's the utopia and he's going to create a happy world. And in his, in his mind were ideas of justice, of fairness, of happiness, of, of yeah, human flourishing. And that's, that's a drug and it's somehow sadly pollutes the mind when you start thinking like that, what's good for society and believing that you have a good sense of what's good for society. That's intoxicating, especially when others around you are feeling the same way. And then you start like building up this movement and you forget that you are just like, you're, you're like barely recently evolved from an ape. Like you don't know what the hell you're doing. And then you start like killing witches or whatever. Like you start, you start doing. They did math. Let's be honest though. I mean, sometimes you got a witch has to go. Yeah. We can all agree that a witch, a witch has to go if, if it floats or sinks, which one, I forget which one. Whichever one we need at the time, honestly. Is it floating? It should have sunk. Yeah, but yeah, we can definitely agree that witches have to go because you brought it up. I tweeted recently, but also just, I'm one of the things I'm really ashamed of in my life is I haven't really read almost any of the sci fi classics. Really? Yeah. So like I, my whole journey through reading was through like the literary philosophers that would say like Camus, Hase, Dostoevsky, Kafka, like that place, like that's a kind of sci fi world in itself, but it's, it just, it creates a world in which the, the deepest questions about human nature can be explored. I didn't realize this, but the sci fi world is the same. It just puts it in a, it like removes it from any kind of historical context where you can explore those same ideas in like space somewhere elsewhere in a different time, a different place. It allows you almost like more freedom to like construct these artificial things where you can just do crazy, crazy kind of human experiments. So I'm now working through it. The books on my list are the foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Dune, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Ender's Game, like you mentioned. That's just kind of, and then, so I posted that. And then of course, like Elon Musk, John Carmack, I don't know if you know him, creator of Doom and Quake. Oh, cool. See, they all pitched in these nerds, these ultra nerds just started like going like these, you need to read this, that and the other. So I've like started working out. Okay. But it seems like the list I've mentioned holds up somewhat. Is there a book? Is there sci fi books or series or authors that you find are just amazing? Maybe another way to ask that is like, what's the greatest sci fi book of all time? Well, I'd like to start by sharing something that I'm embarrassed about is that I haven't read anything other than, you know, Orson Scott Card, J.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert Tolkien. Yeah, I'm aware through Wikipedia and through surface reading of things that like a book called the Republic was written once. There were some other... Do you read Wikipedia? You're a prolific reader of Wikipedia articles. Well, or occasional. Occasional reader. Exactly. In between whatever else it is that I waste my time on. But yeah, so I also, I should say, I posted on Reddit questions for Ryan Hall and there's like a million questions, but like half of them have to do with Dune. No, not really. But like people bring up Dune. I don't understand why. Did you mention Dune before? Well, actually, we actually have a showy role actually made us a Gi, a Dune themed Gi one time, which I thought was kind of cool. I'll send you. I'll give you one. We got extra stuff. But actually, to your point, actually, this is Orson Scott Card quote, actually the writer of Ender's Game. Fiction, because it's not about somebody who actually lived in the real world always has the possibility of being about oneself. And I think that's a neat thing because I have heard other people whom I respect and very sharp people actually every now and then dig their heels and going, I don't like fiction. I only like nonfiction. It's more instructive. And I would go, I completely disagree with that. I think we have a hard enough time figuring out what happened at 711 three hours ago that, let me tell you what happened 600 years BC. I'm like, hey, I'm interested. But don't tell me this isn't a story too. Yeah. There's factual components, I have no doubt. But we struggle sometimes to like, I guess what I like about fiction is that you can tell me a story. It's all about people. I mean, every now there's more and less believable things. And I think Dune would be an unbelievably well written, in my opinion, for to run, what do I know? But I really liked doing, I'll say that well written example of human beings interacting with one another, the political component to that, the emotional, the intellectual, the relationship components, all of that. And I think that Dune is neat because it's a sci fi, not a sci fi novel, but only in the only in the loosest sense. It's really a story about religion, about group dynamics, about human potential, about belief, learning, politics, governance, ecology. It's the best stories remind me of history the same way history hopefully is not just a list of facts that I try to be able to recall or factoids that I try to recall, but a story that I can understand and see how the threads of time kind of came together and created certain things. And a lot of times, like we say, I'm like, how the heck is what's going on right now or 100 years from now or 100 years in the past happened. And you can look back far enough. If we had accurate knowledge, if we had that hypothetical perfect pool shot at the beginning of time, we would see an unbroken chain of events that led us to where we are and where we are will potentially lead us to where we're going, which is, again, why hindsight is helpful. But I think it's neat. Like, I guess I really enjoy, for instance, a book like Dune, and they're actually making a movie out of it, which I'm skeptical of, to be honest, because it's going to be difficult to bring that to the screen for a variety of reasons, but there's at least a hundred questions. Ask Ryan, what do you think about the new Dune movie? I am not enough of an authority to have any sort of decent opinion, but I guess what I would say is so much of it goes on in the character's mind. Like how much of any of our days is any lived experience, as it were, is internal, but the majority, how many times are people walking around and, you know, they're like, hey, what do you see right now? I'm like, oh, well, I see this picture. I see a wall. Hey, there's Lex. But really what I was paying attention to was what was going on inside of my head for a moment, and almost the rest of the world tuned out and kind of dimmed. And I guess I think that's going to be a struggle to any time you want to bring that type of a written story to a visual medium. I think it's going to be more difficult, but it'll be interesting. It's definitely one of my favorite stories, and it's honestly helped me become better at life, in my opinion, better at martial arts. And I think the writer, I think Frank Herbert was absolutely brilliant, whether those were all his ideas, which are not reality. None of us or all of our good ideas aren't ours. We're a combination. Maybe it came up with something you're a curator of other good ideas and some things you borrowed from somewhere without even realizing it. But I think the way the messages and the themes and the ideas that were conveyed, particularly in the original novel, are just absolutely brilliant. Is that to you one of the greats and the flip side of that, or another way to ask that is if somebody is new to sci fi, is that something you would recommend that is an entry point? I'm not well read enough in the sci fi world. I haven't read a lot of Isaac Asimov or anything like that, but I'll recommend Dune. I'll be an obnoxious evangelist for Dune to anyone who'll listen. So yeah, I would strongly recommend it. So the other thing you mentioned, now I should probably be talking to you about much more important things, but the other thing is Skyrim. Do you play video games? What's your favorite game? What's what would you say is the greatest video game of all time? Because I'm a huge fan of Elder Scrolls. Oh, yeah. I mean, I play a little bit at this point. You know, a little less finally moves into a new house. So you're like an adult. No, no, no, no. I'm like a better funded 12 year old. Yeah, that's yeah, that's entirely that's entirely accurate. Better funded 12 year old. But somewhat better funded 12 year old. Not as well funded as I wish. But historically, did you play video games? Oh, yeah, I played as a kid. I was, you know, again, I've always liked playing sports and liked reading and I always enjoyed video games. But my favorite video game I think I've ever played was Knights of the Old Republic. It was a Star Wars game. A huge Star Wars fan until it become less so recently. Disney. You don't like the, I haven't watched it yet. Oh, Mandalorian. Oh, don't go there. Oh, actually, I like Mandalorian. That was actually pretty cool. Yeah, waving this off. Yeah, yeah, I will. If I could cancel one thing, I would cancel Disney Star Wars. I'm going to edit that part out. Okay, let's go to the next. But this is where if people are wondering if you're watching this on YouTube and like the dislike amount is like 80% it's because of that comment. So good job. Good job for making the internet hate you. I regret nothing. Now, what about Baby Yoda? Yeah, I guess he's like little. He's got ears and he uses the force sometimes and he passes out again. No qualms with Baby Yoda. Yeah, you don't have a heart. Okay, let's go to Jiu Jitsu if it's okay. So the audience of this podcast may not know much about Jiu Jitsu or they do because it's really part of the culture now, but they don't really know much. They see that so many people have fallen in love with it, have been transformed through it, but they don't know much about like, what is this thing? Is there a way you could sort of try to explain what is Jiu Jitsu, what is the essence of this martial art that's captured the minds and hearts of so many people in the world? I think that Jiu Jitsu is a philosophy that's expressed physically and that it's the kind of development of the mental capacity and physical capacity working in unison to move efficiently and almost flowingly, unresistingly with a given situation, with a physically resisting opponent. Learning how to generate force on your own and how to steal force from the floor, how to steal force from the other person and move in concert with it as opposed to clash against, which if you watch two untrained people fight, it's almost entirely a clash. It's a runaway and clash, a runaway and clash. If you watch Jiu Jitsu done well, it looks like water moving around a solid structure. And I think that that is expressed physically. And I think that all of the things that anyone has really been able to do very, very well in Jiu Jitsu end up kind of exemplifying that. But I think that's true of martial arts in general. I think that a lot of times like the clashing that we see going on and working well is just the fact that it's you know, you get very, very physically powerful people every now and then they're able to get away with this. But I don't think that that's, and that's fantastic because ultimately it's a results driven thing. But I think that the essence of the martial arts is learning how to make more out of less and how to move with and be yielding, almost like real life Aikido. And so you think of martial arts, Jiu Jitsu as like water or flowing, so Aikido, so moving around a solid structure so Aikido, so moving around the force as opposed to sort of maybe the wrestling mindset is finding a leverage where you can apply an exceptional amount of force. So like, so like maximizing the application of force. I guess maybe that's a better way to, I'd like to marry the two ideas, you know, because I think you flow until the point at which you are the greater force at which point in time you can apply. But if you look at the best wrestlers and then when I say best, I don't necessarily mean most successful although of course most successful are always very very good throughout the course of history in boxing in wrestling, in Judo, they're magical. They disappear and reappear. It's like fighting a ghost that is like incorporeal when you want to find it. But then when you don't want it to find it when you don't want to find it, it finds you. And I think that we see that in the like the Bufais or societies of wrestling. And you know, I guess you could look at a Floyd Mayweather or Willie Pep or you know, Prunell Whitaker in boxing as brilliant examples of disappearing and reappearing. And when you're strong, it's almost like guerrilla warfare. When you're strong, I'm nowhere to be found. When you're weak, you can't get rid of me. And I think that's what we're looking for. Yes, the TF brothers are incredible at that. They just, they look like skinny Starbucks baristas and they just manhandle everybody like effortlessly. They look like they just kind of woke up, rolled out of bed, fighting for like the gold medal at the Olympics and just effortlessly throw, like there's a match against, I guess, Yul Romero. Yeah, so like, you know, if you look at like who is the guy who's like intimidating in this case and terrifying looking, it's Yul Romero, just like a physical specimen and obviously like a super accomplished wrestler. I think this is for the gold medal, yeah. In 2000. In 2000? Yeah, Sydney. And then there, this is the year you all took silver. And what you, like, just to show you like there's a inside trip, effortless. Uchi, and he does it again. Yep, you know, it's a really creative kind of wrestling where it's organic. Yeah, you throw in all of these kinds of things. This is a mix of judo, a mix of like weird kind of moves. It's not like as funky as Ben Askren. It's just like legitimate, basic. Well, it's not funky for funky sake. And I'm not poking at Ben Askren to imply that that's what he's doing, but it's like, it's funny. It's like, a lot of times it's almost like Musashi talked a lot about that. You know, that the only goal of combat is to win is the outcome is it's outcome driven versus like flourishing, you know, cool looking movements. It's like, unless that had a utilitarian purpose, like what are you wasting your time with that? Both in the fight and also, you know, in practice. But as you mentioned, it's almost like it looks like judo. It looks like wrestling, it looks like jujitsu. It's almost like, I guess the reminds me all of the martial arts is again, deeply tribal as well. I wanna learn Lex Fridman, martial arts. And then I wanna learn another, you know, I guess, transcendent person's martial arts. And it just happened to be the set of movements that you tended to do most of the time, thanks to your body type and your opposition and whatnot. But then I try to codify that and force those to work as opposed to going, I wanna understand how the body works in concert and in Congress with something else and other forces and move appropriately. And that's why it's like, it always struck me that the Saiki brothers are great examples of just moving like water, but they, to use Bruce Lee, which is a little trite, but again, he's brilliant. It's like water can flow or water can crash. And they would crash when they needed to crash and they would flow when they needed to flow, but they would flow for the purpose of dissipating and then crash when they would win. And at the right moment, then go back to flowing the second that the other person found them. And it's just, it's beautiful to watch, it's artistic. And I think that that great expression of anything physical is ultimately studied as a science, but expressed as an art. And I think that that's something that gets lost in jujitsu a lot of times when it gets a little bit, a little nerdy, like do this hand here, hand here. Like it's like the more details I have, the better when in reality, that's just not, not in my experience, how it's done. Might be fun exercise of saying like, what are the main positions and submissions in the art of jujitsu? You don't have to be complete, that's a ridiculously, I apologize for putting you on a spot like this, but it might be a nice exercise to think through it. Sure, I mean, I would just say that there, you have your arms bend in various ways. You have key lock Americana, straight arm locks, Kimura, omoplata, omoplata is a Kimura, Kimura is an omoplata, it's just executed. Submissions. Submissions, yes. Breaking off your arm in all kinds of ways. But ultimately, the question is, let's say you were a Terminator, like a robot that I, which of course you are. Go on. Go on. It's like, all right, so we're being completely literal. But, and I couldn't harm you with any of these things. Would I still use these positions? The answer is yes. They create leverage, they create control, they create shapes that I can affect and that can affect me and they can be affected through other forces and other objects or structures like the ground or the wall. I really enjoy mixed martial arts because there's another component rather than just me and you and the floor, there's me, you, the floor, and the wall. And it's another player in the game that doesn't exist in a grappling context with a non enclosed, I guess, area of combat. But you can strangle me or choke me, what do you call it, without my arms being involved, or you can use one of my shoulders to pin one side of my, one carotid artery off and you can enclose the other. You can turn my knee in the exact same ways that you can turn my arm straight this way and that way. You can add a rotation to that or it can be directly linear against the joint. So I guess what I would say is the more that I've been able to understand jiu jitsu, the more that I've been, it's given me a look into how we learn language where rather than learning five bazillion adjectives, I go, I understand what an adjective is. And of course we are all read into some degree of vocabulary. I understand what an adverb does and I understand what an adverb is. I know what a noun is. I know what the component parts of a sentence are. I know what, you know, I guess a clause, a contraction, any of these things. And it allows you to be interesting and artistic with your language to the extent that you can. But I can't, like I can speak a degree of Spanish, but I'm not even slightly artistic in Spanish. I would be something, I speak like a child with a head injury. And anyway, the I. Your basic understanding of the English language allows you to then be a student of Spanish. 100%, but I'm limited by my experience. I'm limited by my understanding of techniques. I'm limited by my understanding, almost like, let's say techniques are like these are like vocabulary. So even if I kind of sort of grasp the sentence structure and the thought process and the thought patterns of Spanish, which it's interesting because just even though the orientation and the organization of a language, and I've thought about this a great deal, you know, the way that I perceive the world is affected deeply by the language that I learned. The, you know, the, again, if I learned, I have no idea how the Chinese language structures, but I can only imagine that it would be, that it would affect, it's like a different lens. We're all looking at the same thing, but I have a different set of sunglasses on than you do. And that's very, very interesting. I'll use the Quran as an example. You know, apparently it's unbelievably poetic and in Arabic, still neat and was interesting reading in English, but I'm told by people that I trust that it just one doesn't bear a resemblance to the other. And I think that's a very interesting thing that you may be able to say the same thing, but in a more, I guess, in a different way, in a more artistic way that may not translate on a one for one kind of fidelity. But the more that we're able to understand about how the body works, the more examples of the body working this way, the body working that way, the body working that way, the more that I'm able to eventually become an artist, but it has to be studied as a science first. And it does start with technique collection, vocabulary collection, the same way we learn in school. You remember how to say quickly 17 different ways. And let's say I speak Spanish, I'm only, I only know three. So you might use quickly, you might use an adjective like quickly in Spanish, but use one of the many, many options to describe that, that I don't understand. And now I sit there and go like, wait, what? I can't be artistic. I can't be as organic with the language as I'd like. So I believe that jujitsu a lot of times starts with the acquisition of a lot of, hey, do this, this, this drill, this technique. Here's an Americana, Americana to an armlock, armlock to a triangle. But the problem with that is oftentimes we get stuck in that phase. And people eventually become move collectors or sequence collectors. And I noticed this when I'm trying to do DVDs or I guess like an instructional series now, or even teaching in class, I don't believe in that form of learning anymore. Not that it's not valuable, but I don't believe, I don't understand jujitsu on that level anymore. So what I'm trying to do is get across the basic ideas to people and say, hey, you need to fill in the gaps with going to class all the time. You need to go, hey, learn this move, learn that technique, learn that technique. Because otherwise I'm basically just throwing at you like 75 different words that you could use, but that hasn't really taught you how to speak a language. Whereas if you give me a language structure, you can fill in these pieces on your own and then eventually speak organically in Lex form, which will be ultimately unique to you because otherwise you just end up being like a weird facsimile of whatever it is that I'm doing for mostly the worst I'd say, but. Yeah, that's what people, I mean, people comment like, is this, especially people who haven't listened to me before, is this guy drunk or high? Does he, does MIT really allow slow people to be, like what's. Quotas. Quotas, yeah. Like what's wrong with him? Is he getting sleep? Are you okay? Does he need help? So that's similar with my jiu jitsu. It's like, is this guy, is this guy really, whatever rank I was throughout, I remember just like, is this guy really this rank? I just have a very kind of certain way of sitting and being slow and lazy looking that there was ultimately the language that I had to discover. And it was, it was, yeah, it was a very liberating moment. I think of probably a few years of getting my ass kicked, especially with Open Guard and butterfly to where you really allow yourself to take in the entirety of the language and realize that, that I'm not, I'm different. I'm a unique, I'm unique. And like, I have a very, I have a language, I have a set of techniques, a way I move my body that needs, that I'm the one to discover. Like it's, you can only, you can learn specific techniques and so on, but you really have to understand your own body. And that's the beautiful thing about jiu jitsu, like you said, is like the connection about your philosophy, your view of the world with the physical and like connecting those two things, how you perceive the world, how you interpret ideas of the world about exhaustion, about force, about effortlessness, like what it really means to relax, all these kinds of loose concepts, and then actually teach your body to like do those things and like, you know, and be able to apply force and spurts, be able to relax and spurts and like figure all that stuff out for my, for my individual body. But it's, as you mentioned, I couldn't agree with you more, it's a discovery process and no one can cheat that process, which is at the same time, it's almost like imagine I wanna start writing books in second grade, unless maybe I'm like staggeringly brilliant, which I can only conceptualize someone being able to do that, but maybe a Mozart of the English language where you're out there doing it. But for most of us, we don't have enough knowledge, enough information, enough experience to be able to be, to express ourselves. So we have to basically input, repeat, which is important, but it's the process, as you say, of going through that, of getting your ass kicked, of just like, well, that didn't work, well, that didn't work, that felt right, but I don't know, nobody else does that, I guess I don't believe in that, versus eventually going, I don't know, I'll just try going my own way and see what happens and now I'll get yelled at and people won't like me and if it works, they'll say I got lucky and if it doesn't work, they'll say I was dumb, but which one, maybe all is right. But basically, you know, going through that iterative process that allows you to eventually find your self expression and find your voice so that you fight the same way that you speak, the same way that you write, the same way that you think in a way that is uniquely you, that will also ultimately allow you to understand other people being uniquely them because even if you can only conceptualize, and I think about this a lot for society stuff, where I go, well, this is how I feel about this, but am I objectively right? Maybe about a couple things, but that's a small box that I have to be very, very careful about what I think is objective versus what's not and I have to be open to the possibility of all the things that I think are objectively correct may or may not be. And that should allow me to have some degree of compassion or consideration for other people, both in their martial arts journey and in their journey as people, as human beings, because I understand that they're on a, it's a, we're all on a path where it's all, again, an iterative process of eventual self expression, but I think that's one of the things that we see having trouble when we see tribalism, which, I mean, racism, expression of that, political affiliation, expression of that, all of these things that can go in really uncomfortable directions. People are looking for, hey, where do I plant my feet over here? Where's the thing that I know is right? And we can all agree on the following. And I think that we see that in martial arts. We're like, oh, I do this style, I do that style, I do that style. It's like, hey, man, we're all just pushing forward in a certain direction here, trying to do our best. And I understand why you feel the way you do. I may have felt like that at one point too, but I'm just trying to learn and understand versus I've already acquired enough knowledge, let me cross my arms and start to look who's fucking up around here. And I think that that's an, it's an interesting trap that I think is very human trap to fall into, but it definitely happens early on. It's, I mean, it's a joke in the jiu jitsu world, right? Like, oh, the blue belt that knows everything. Well, initially it's like, what, I know nothing and I at least think I know nothing. Then I'd learn a little bit and I think it's a lot bit. And then, you know, the more you learn, the more you go like, I don't even know what I'm doing. Yeah, that's exactly right. We kind of talked about it a little bit, but once again, a lot of people that listen to this have never been on the mat, have never tried jiu jitsu, but are really curious about it. Everybody at all positions, like I think, you know, most kids are not doing jiu jitsu. Andrew Yang is like, they're all, you know, the world is curious. It's a, it's a nice, it seems to be a nice methodology by which to humble your ego, which to grow intellectually and physically. So people are curious about it. So the natural question is if they're curious about it, how would you recommend they get started? Maybe like, what do you recommend the first day, week, month, year, first couple of years look like? Like, how do you ease into it and make sure that it's a positive experience and you progress in the most optimal and positive way? The first thing you can do is simply ask yourself why, why you want to be involved. You know, I remember the first day that I walked into Ronin Athletics in New York City to train under Godfather of my son now, Christian Montes, and I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I played baseball through high school and I wanted, I was at Manhattan College in the Bronx and I wanted to go and learn martial arts because it was always something that was interesting to me, but it was never something that I knew was accessible and it definitely wasn't really around in Northern Virginia where I grew up, whereas then you stick yourself in Manhattan and there's stuff everywhere. So anyway, I guess I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if I was going to get beat up, if people were going to be nice, if people were not going to be nice, but what I began with was, I think, expectation management. And I think that that's something that I would, that'd be the first thing that I would start is almost imagining what is it that I'm getting myself into because I love the martial arts. The martial arts has given me everything in life and I'm so thankful I wouldn't be sitting here without that experience, that journey. The people that I've met, the places that I've gone, I could never, ever have ever imagined. And I'm just unbelievably thankful for that. But I think that the thing that helped me most of all was starting with going, my mom said something to me one time and she said, there's two types of people in various situations. There's why and there's why not. And it's understandable to have questions, concerns, things like that. But maybe sometimes it's a little bit easier when you're younger to just trust people or just say, I don't know, you know. But we go, hey, you wanna climb that rock? I'm like, yeah, why not? Let's go. Hey, you wanna jump in that river? Yeah, why not? Sure. Versus if I have to reason my way into everything, if I have to be talked into everything, a lot of times I'll talk myself out of it. And I think that a lot of times this is the thinker's disease. You wanna figure out what's gonna happen and what you should expect to have happen before you get involved versus going, using the old Bruce Lee saying again, it's like no amount of thinking or training on the side of the river will teach you how to swim. You have to jump in. And there are risks associated with that. And I guess psychological are usually the biggest ones. That's the biggest hurdle. And physical. But the biggest thing that I guess I would suggest to anyone to say, well, why do you wanna do this? You're like, well, I wanna challenge myself. I wanna learn, I would like to learn to fight. I wanted to learn to fight so that I could protect myself. And if anything else, other people, if only within arms reach. I perceived that if I had some small degree of power, I generally wouldn't use it. Which is why I was like, yeah, I'll give it a try. I'll try to be reasonable. And hopefully if I make a mistake, I'll apologize to people. But basically I said, yeah, I'd like to have that. And I wanna, I know this is gonna be challenging and we'll see what happens. And that means that getting beat up and I didn't get like hurt, but getting roughed up, getting my arm bent this way or that way, getting choked. I was like, well, this is all supposed to happen. That's no big deal. It would be like going and joining the army during peacetime and then going, oh, I'm just doing this for college education. You know, like, okay, that's cool, man. And then all of a sudden war breaks out and they wanna send me somewhere. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't sign up for that. Actually you did, whether you realize it or not. You may not have thought that you did, but you did. So getting your mind right and just going, what are my expectations for this activity? What is it that I'm looking to do? And of course, you know, you're going into a gym, you're going into a place that you don't know people, you probably don't know people and you don't know the coach. And even if you do wanna, hey, how you doing? Shake your hand, type of level. You know, 95% of my students don't know me. Not really, you know, I'll try to be polite and not annoy them too much, but they don't know me and I don't know them. I understand if they don't trust me, I wouldn't trust, trust me either if I were them. But at the same time, someone has to take that leap. And one of the things that I've noticed as a martial arts instructor, that's the biggest struggle with dealing with adults, which is why a lot of people like to teach kids is because kids don't ask, don't argue. Now that also means there's all sorts of pitfalls or that sort of thing, and that can be an issue. But you know, I guess a lot of times people get to a point in their life, you know, in their 20s, early 30s, where now I'm a manager now, I know what I'm doing. No one talks to me like that. First it's like, hey man, you go join bootcamp, I don't care if you are Elon Musk, they're gonna tell you to shut up and do pushups. And that's what's great about it. So you are taking a leap of faith into a world that you're gonna be a tiny fish. And you gotta hope that the people who are guiding you in that journey are gonna have, I can't even say your best interests at heart because they don't even know you, but they'll try to do no harm. And they'll try to help you in the way that they would understand. And I guess that's, for instance, that's what I would try to do with anyone that comes into my gym. I would try to help them in the way that I understand they need as best I can and as safe and reasonable a way as possible, but sometimes in a way that's gonna make them uncomfortable, particularly if physical combat, and it's not something they've done before. If a lot of people go in without even having played, you know, contact sports, and so that can be a big jump. And you have to understand, if that's where you're starting from, no worries, but you're gonna have to kind of work your way to it, and it's gonna be uncomfortable, and that's okay. It's part of the process, and you're gonna have some bumps and bruises, and you're not gonna wanna roll with that guy in the corner because that person's rough, and they beat you up, and they're like, okay, but is this a big hurt or is it a little hurt? If it's a big hurt, okay. If it's a little hurt, need you to center up a little bit. It's such an interesting balance because to find, I think one of the most important things as in anything, I think, in life is the selection of the people that you put around you. I mean, that's true with like getting married. That's true with like if you go to, if people ask me, like graduate students, like your PhD advisor can be the difference. It's everything. It's like you spend five years with somebody, they're going to basically define more impact on you than anybody you marry, anybody you hang out with. It's a huge impact. And the same with the coach selection, which is like the school selection, is it's going to be really important about in terms of like who you select will define how happy, like the trajectory of your growth and how happy you are with the entirety of the experience. And yet, like the flip side of that is, especially if you have an ego, especially if you are the manager that needs to let go of some stuff, you're going to feel like shit with the best kind of coach. That's what you need. But there's a weird balance there to find. Like, I mean, like, and everybody needs a different thing. Like I'm much more, I enjoy being sort of like, it sounds weird, but like I'm, you know, from the wrestling background, I enjoy feeling like crap in the sense like the coach, like getting beat up. I don't actually enjoy it. It's not like some masochistic thing or whatever. It's like, it's the growth. Like I like the anxiety. I like feeling like shit when I go home, like emotionally, physically, it's like, it's growth. It's a sign of growth, right? Like if you're not having to feel those things, you're probably in your comfort zone, which is fine, but that's not your growth zone, right? And everybody has a different threshold for that. And I mean, the beautiful thing about jiu jitsu is like, it's also has like a yoga feel to it. Like you're learning about your body. So depending on the gym and depending on, in fact, the coaches or the people around you within the gym, you can select little groups too, kind of like the people with who you roll, like if you're a smaller person, it doesn't mean you have to go against big people. You can go against the people who like smoke a lot of weed and they're chill, or you can go against like that crazy red blue belt competitor who's like out to destroy everybody. And depending on like what your mindset is, you can kind of select that. It's such a fascinating journey of like, basically self discovery. I couldn't agree with you more. It's, I mean, what you need may change over time, right? Maybe what you needed, what you need today could change six months from now or a year from now. And that's something that I experienced. I'll use my first coach Christian, again, as a great example of someone who I really look up to and respect and someone who helped me a lot. Like at a time when I really needed some guidance and I needed to learn martial arts, but get into, Hensel Gracie's gym was right down the street from where Christian was teaching. And Christian was a blue belt at the time. It was, he was teaching at a place called Fight House, which was this awesome, like, you know, like 90s, early 2000s, you know, warehouse area down on Fashion Avenue in Manhattan, off of like between 7th and 8th. And it was like two basketball courts wide, but like there was the Sambo guys over here. There was the Kali guys over there. There was a Wing Chun over there. There was Jiu Jitsu in the corner. And Hensel's was one of the most famous academies in the world at that time, still is. And I just didn't know what Hensel Gracie was. And I mean, it's a great gym and it's a fantastic place for people to train. But I think what was right for me at the time was to, I stumbled into, you know, like a two person elevator up and found a place where six people trained at that time. And I had someone that could give me some, like in addition to martial arts advice, like personal guidance. And that made a big difference. And then when initially we would have like competitions or like intra, you know, gym competitions with the Sambo guys, we would compete, we would roll with them. And like, again, it was great because they were just a bunch of like Russian dudes from like Brighton Beach. And they would come down and then we would all fight. And then everyone would train and we'd all drink tea and then go home. And anyway, what was, it was super tough. And they were like, again, just a tough group of people. It was great. And then I remember when I decided after like four or five months, I'm like, man, I really want to try to take this seriously. And I told Christian about that. And he's like, well, hey, I think you need to do the following. And it was, you know, like, hey, here's, there was a guy named Jeff Ruth, who was a purple belt at the time, which was a much bigger deal than it is now, but it was 10 and always an MMA fighter, a lot of amateur box spirit, super tough dude. And Jeff was the best person at that time that I'd ever trained with. And I just got squashed. Christian used to beat me up too, but like Jeff would just absolutely kick the crap out of me. And I was like, this is awesome. And this was back when I was at home. I went home for the summer for that. And Chris is like, hey, I think you should stay because I told him that's what I was thinking. And this was a coach that, you know, when it's like when initially was exactly what I needed. And then he's like, well, hey, that's not what I'm doing here. Maybe they're going to be able to help you onto a path that's, that's kind of commensurate with what your goals are at the moment. And then, you know, that was an, that was an interesting thing. And I really got, I feel that I was fortunate to start at a place where my coach was able to transition roles and, and, and do so comfortably. And I think that that also was probably a factor of the fact that, you know, where he'd done some of his training prior, like there've been issues with, with the coach there. We're like not supporting, not having the support, you know, feeling like, hey, like I'm going to hold onto my students. I'm gonna hold onto my best guy or my best girl, even if I can't take them where they need to go. So that was an interesting thing. And just recognizing also though, that the people like the same way you're an individual going into a gym and you don't know what you're getting into your coach is a person too. And he or she, you know, they may have been doing this activity longer than you, but they're not, they're not some weird little, you know, all knowing God. They don't know anything. They may say something that pisses you off. They may, they may yell at you. They may help you. They may inadvertently cause you some sort of, you know, some sort of issue. And just being able to recognize that even though I say this to people and I've said this to people in my gym, I'm like, you know, we're in the service industry, man, but I'm not at your service. Like don't get it twisted. Like I will absolutely do my best to help people. I'm there to do my best as a martial arts coach, but I'm here to do my best as a martial arts coach. And I'll do my best and periodically I make mistakes and I own apology or two, and I'll try to give them out when I can. But we're not McDonald's. It's not, oh, you gave me a hundred bucks, so you do whatever you want in here. This is my house. This is my gym. This is my dojo. This is, this is a martial arts. This is not a basketball team. Yeah. There's something beautiful about martial arts. Like exactly as you said is the coach, like in wrestling and at least collegiate, like high level wrestling is like, there's a dictatorship aspect to a coach that is very important to have. Like this, this ridiculous sometimes nature of like master and so on and bowing, all these traditions. There's something, it seems ridiculous from the outside perhaps, but there's something really powerful to that because that process of you said, why not, of letting go of the leap of faith requires you to believe that the coach has your best interest in mind and just give yourself over to their ideas of how, how you should grow. And that's an interesting thing. I mean, I've never been able to really see coaches I've had as human. They're always, you always, it's like a father figure or like this, you always put them in this position of power. And I think that's, I think at least for me, it's been a very, it's been a very useful way to see the coach because it allows you to not think and let go and really allow yourself to grow and emotionally deal with all the beatings. Well, they'll push you where past oftentimes where you would have stopped yourself, right? Which is great. And then hopefully they know they, if they're paying attention and they're, they're still a person, they can make mistakes, but they'll push you further than you would have gone, but not so far that it's not facilitative. Right. That's something that I can say, like Faraz Zahabi, the head coach at TriStar, my head coach for MMA, Kenny Florian, one of the head coaches for MMA, they've both been phenomenal influences. Paul Shriner, who's the one of the assistants at Marcelo Garcia's Academy, coached me in Jiu Jitsu for a long time, brilliant instructor. They've all been able to do that. And I think what's interesting about all of those guys is they're very sharp, but they're very intuitive as well. And I think that Faraz actually, you know, told me about some of the John Wooden said, John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, just a simple philosophical idea. Just, he said, some people's life is a bowl of shit. It needs some whipped cream in it. Some people's life is a bowl of whipped cream. Needs a little bit of shit in it just to balance it out. And it's an interesting thing. Coaching everyone the same way doesn't work. You know, that's, I think the difference between a coach and an instructor. And a lot of times people think they want to coach, but they really want an instructor. I'm like, hey Lex, tell me what to do, not how to do it. And then other times people think they want, you know, an instructor and they really want a coach. I'm like, man, this guy's just giving me information. A coach is so much more than an instructor. And that's a huge leap. And that's something that I think that people need to understand when they're going into martial arts. And I understand, and I can totally grasp why they don't, because how would they know? But I think about this a lot, like me giving you $150 for a month, which is not nothing, that's for sure. That does not, that pays for instructor really. Coach is a relationship that gets developed because can you imagine like just the amount of emotional investment and time thinking away from like, oh, Lex isn't here anymore. What can I do to help him? What does he need? Like that's serious. And that's the difference between, that's oftentimes the difference that getting over the hump in various situations. So it's an interesting, you know, bargain that's being made like commitment by the instructor who becomes a coach, commitment by the student. You know, like there's a financial transaction. There's a lot of things going on there, but I feel very fortunate to have had not just instructors in my time, but coaches. And that means sometimes we butted heads and sometimes I look back and I think I was right. And other times I look back on my own, no, they were definitely right. But there was always the trust with the exception of one time that I feel that trust was greatly betrayed that rightly or wrongly, whether mistakes, mistakes will be made, but everyone is attempting to do the right thing under no circumstances. Is what I intentionally do anything malicious, you know, versus, Hey, I might've done. I might've burnt your house down, but you can be darn sure it wasn't on purpose. And I think that as long as there's that mutual understanding and mutual belief of goodwill, which again, doesn't just magic up out of nowhere. I understand. I think that that's when then great things can happen. And I look at all the athletes that I know, you know, the guys and girls that I've watched become fantastic in various places, almost invariably. It never happened alone. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really torn about that. Like, maybe you can help. Have you seen the movie Whiplash? So it's, I would say from an outsider's perspective, people should watch it. It's, I guess, jazz band. It's a movie about a drummer and the instructor. And he, it's a basically, I would say from the outsider's perspective, it's a toxic relationship, but he's really the coach, whatever we call him, pushes the musician, the drummer or to his limits, like to where he just feels like shit emotionally. It's a, it looks like a toxic relationship, but it's one that ultimately is very productive for the improvement of the musician. I have the same, like in my own experience, I had, I got a chance to train at a couple of places regularly. And so one of my coaches who is a great human being, a lot of people love him. But when I was a blue belt, he was pushing me a lot for competition. And every time I step on the mat, I was anxious and almost afraid of training because of like the places I'm going to have to go. And then the, I can't, I don't know what's good or bad because I think I've become a better person because of that experience. Like I needed that. And on the flip side, like the place I got my black belt from, it's Balanced Studios. I remember also blue belt, the coach sitting down and I was going to competition and he saw something in me where he said, you know, like, good luck, but win or lose, we always love you. Like, I, I really, I remember that because I really needed that at that time. Like I was putting so much pressure on myself. Like I'm not an actual professional competitor, you know, I just competed. Like I'm a PhD student, like, but like it was clearly having a psychological effect on me and that's what a great coach does is like, you know, it's like life is more important than Jiu Jitsu since it's bigger. So they find, you use Jiu Jitsu when you need it to grow as a person and when it overwhelms you, you have to pull that person out, like look at the bigger picture, always look at the bigger picture and it's fascinating and I don't know what to make of it. I don't think I would have it any other way is both the anxiety and the, and the love and the love. Yeah. I think that I couldn't, that's a really interesting thing that you're describing that I guess it kind of brings me back to a lot of the other things we've been discussing is just almost like the, the reciprocal nature of everything where no pressure, that's great. Everyone's happy all the time. It's either, I mean, let's, uh, use the example of sci fi movies to see the matrix, which of course the first one was amazing and then each subsequent movie made the series worse. But, um, but basically, yeah, I've heard, we'll see, I was hoping for the best, but, um, but basically, uh, you know, let's say, Hey, which we started with our first initial world agent Smith says to Neo is like our first world was a utopia where everyone was happy and nothing ever went wrong. It's like your primitive cerebrum rejected it. And I think that there's obviously, I mean, what do I think, but I guess, well, I'm here, so I might as well say what I think. Um, I guess, uh, you know, great things are fantastic. A kind, gentle place is fantastic. And this is again, why I love dune is I think dune does such a great job of, of expressing Frank Herbert does such a great job of expressing again, the reciprocal nature of these ideas. You know, look at, uh, look at Sparta for instance, or at least what I understand of Sparta from the reading and also watching 300. Um, uh, you know, and reading the Wikipedia and reading the Wikipedia article about the movie, not the place. Um, but, uh, it's, um, that's a hard, brutal place. And that was their benefit to that. Like, absolutely. Was there drawback to that? Absolutely. Is it sustainable? I should probably think probably not. Um, I mean, granted it hasn't sustained, but I mean, that type of a, of a thing, it, it burns too hot almost. And it, uh, it, it destroys the host at a certain point. And, you know, I guess that, that type of unforgiving nature, but in entirely, entirely permissive has its own issues. And I guess coming back into your, what your description of like describing a toxic relationship is a very dangerous and tricky thing because it's almost like, uh, it's like bird's eye view. Me, you know, you see, let's say a husband and a wife arguing, you know, like, all right, well, sort of somebody hitting somebody. I need to keep myself out of this because I have no idea what I'm seeing something, but I don't know what's going on or why specifically. And again, short of it going to a place that, that just out of bounds, I don't know who's right here. I don't know who's wrong. And I don't know what phase of this things are in. So I guess long term was good for both people. Right. It's dangerous for it. So if I want to put my finger on the scale, I can understand the desire to do them like, Hey guys, let's break it up. Yeah. But, and that may be the right thing at the time, but at the same time, I'm not sure. So I think back to all of the times that. You know, that like you mentioned, your coach pushing you when very, very hard. And then other times going like, Hey, let's put it in perspective here. I think that's an interesting thing for high performance. And I think that we're seeing that again, societally, you know, now, or at least maybe that's just pops up on my internet feed periodically but coaches shouldn't be allowed to do this or yell at this person to yell at that person. Like, well, have you ever been go to a boxing gym? It's not a commercial entity. Not really a real box, not LA boxing, not a USC gym, like a real place. You're going to see what things are like when it's entirely performance based. Go to wrestling room at a high level. You know, again, there's, there's left and right limits and there are such things obviously as abuse, of course, but, and that should never be tolerated. Um, but it's not a commercial entity. I don't need to be sweet to you if you're, if you're screwing up, if you're dropping the ball and in fact, recognizing that I'm not doing you a favor or the favor or the team a favor by, by being permissive of that type of behavior. I think is important. Everything in its context and at its time is important. And I guess I can think again at the times that I've been put, put, or had put on me, like a great deal of pressure to do X, Y, or Z or to succeed, um, or to push for success. And I can't look back fondly enough on those times. They were tough at the time, but without that, I'm not sitting here without that. I don't go from growing up in a, in a very nice family in the suburbs to fighting at the highest level in jujitsu, gi, no gi, and now in mixed martial arts, starting a career at age 27. You know, I don't, it just doesn't happen because people generally speaking from that background, don't get pushed hard enough physically to be able to make that transition. And that has benefits and it has drawbacks. You know, when you stare into the abyss, it stares back. And I think that that's an important thing to understand. You know, you stare long enough, you, you can become something that you don't, that you would be sorry that you did. You don't look enough and you don't have perspective either. You know, and I, I think that that's an interesting thing. I can speak to someone who's relative to being someone who's relatively articulate and reasonable. I try to be reasonable, but you know, I'll say in sparring, if people get crazy with me, they get a warning and then I'm a crack them. And what did they expect? Oh, they hear the guy on a, on an interview, but who did they think they were meeting? Cause there's also the guy in the ring and there's layers there too. I remember training with you. It was kind of funny. There's like, there's, well, you didn't know who I was. I mean, you still like, I have a really good straight ankle up by the way. That. So I don't remember what rank I was, but it might've been purple or something like that. And I did some, like I, you had this look on your face, which I've often seen in black belts. It's like, here he goes again, like here, here's him trying this thing. And then when I kind of annoyed you a little bit with it, now I get that it was a good at like, I, you know, I did something somewhat effective, like some, like maybe a little bit off balance. Yeah. There's a, I just peeled off a little layer of Ryan Hall to where I was like, okay, let me, let me like, there, there's like layers underneath Mike Tyson somewhere in there. Like, so it was like, okay, this like new guy rolls in here. He thinks he can do the stupid thing. And then, and then you started to beat the hell out of me. But the, the, the point is there's layers here from the guy who was being interviewed now to like Genghis Khan, but it's, but it's all in the same body. Right. But it's like, all of us are like that, right. In various different directions and recognizing that's okay. It's just, there are consequences to all every choice that we make as a consequence. Sometimes there's like objectively wrong or objectively right. But at least in my mind, that's a pretty small box. Everything else is just, there's a consequence to that. Do you like that consequence? Do you not? And who do I want to become? What do I want to try to hone myself or anyone else into? And also like, but this is something I've screwed up as a coach plenty of times. You know, like if someone says, if you're, if like, I come to them like Lex, I really, really want to take, you know, research very seriously. Like, okay, I believe you. Now I haven't shown you that, but I believe you like, okay. And now me not showing up to research or to study or not being up until three in the morning thinking about this is no longer acceptable. There was a time like five seconds before me making that statement that if I went to bed without reading the book that I needed to read, no worries. But the second that I made that statement, your expectations for me changed. And maybe that's something that I've screwed up a whole bunch of times in my, as a teacher. Cause it's an interesting thing, obviously, you know, being a, like running a martial arts school is as you're principally an athlete is sometimes I don't pay enough attention to what people are doing. I just go, oh, okay. You say X, Y, Z. I'm like, Roger that. I believe you. Cool. I will now put you in category X and whether rightly or wrongly, like maybe this person didn't understand what they were asking for, or I didn't express this or the other. And it just, it caused cross wires. And then most times you just, you hash it out. You have a discussion, you figure out, get to the bottom of what people are trying to do or what they want. But if I was paying more attention, I think I could have been a lot more effective. Or if I had more experience and sometimes maybe I'm not sharp enough or I don't, I'm not perceptive enough to be able to, to see what's going on. And maybe with years more down the line, I'll be able to have a sharper perception. But I think that's another one of those interesting things that some, that sometimes I would caution or not caution, but just inform a prospective martial arts student, depending upon where you're going you know, this you, both you and also your coach or other people in the room, they wear many hats. And sometimes there's a, I had the wrong hat on. You were talking to me as Lex the guy. I didn't realize you were talking to me. I thought you were talking to me as Lex the guy. I didn't realize you're talking to me as Lex the martial artist. I'm like, Oh crap. I was talking to the wrong person. So it's almost like if you had a, like I run my gym with my wife, she's a black belt. So she's my wife. She's my peers as a martial artist, uh, in Jiu Jitsu. He's here by the way, in judging. So exactly. All right. Well, all right. So, but, but a fellow black belt. And I guess like another thing, she doesn't have a microphone, so you can't hear all the trash she's talking. Exactly. But it can be tough. And that's something that we've had to work through a lot. And it's like looking back and it's like now being where I'm at now. And it's easy for me to say that cause she's in the room and I don't want her to stab me, just continue to slowly poison me over time, which frankly I understand. Um, you know, it's, it's the sort of thing that is now way more effective than anything else I could really reasonably expect to have. Um, but there were times when, when both of us, you know, were justifiably annoyed at the other because of crossed wires. And sometimes, you know, you'll just have to scream in any way or misunderstanding anyway. But again, like I've, I coached some of my friends, I've coached, I've coached my friend who I've known since I was four years old. You know, sometimes I don't go, Hey buddy, how are you doing? Sometimes it's like, what the fuck are you doing? Put your hand over there. How many times we talked about this? And then you walk away and you can see him look at you crooked and you're like, Oh crap. Oh yeah. He thought I was talking to his friend. Yeah. Well, all right, let, we need to talk this one out, hashing out and not he's wrong. How could he possibly think that way? Like, Oh no, I totally understand that. But if I was 22, like doesn't need no, I'm a purple belt, some nonsense like that. And it's, and it doesn't come from a bad place, but it's just, I guess that comes back to society to anything. People only had the perspective that they have and the awareness that we have. And so again, going back and going, Hey guys, grace, like I don't expect, it's not fair for me to go, I fight UFC. Why doesn't this guy who came in as an attorney understand how hardcore this needs to be? I'm like, how could he? Yeah. And at the same time though, if, if I'm using the language of someone that is interested in at least performance from a martial arts perspective, I understand how that could be off putting. Let's say for instance, someone that's like all of that would be out of bounds in their normal workplace. But if they think of the gym as my office, then whether they agree or disagree with what's going on, they go, okay, I hear why I see why that might happen. Let's talk about this. And we can, again, all push forward in a positive direction that benefits, I guess, everyone's journey throughout the activity. And on top of all that, there's moods. Like I, I mean, especially lately, I think two days ago, maybe yesterday, no, two days ago, I've never been that cranky in my life. I think, I don't know what it was, but I wanted to tell everybody how much they annoyed me. It was like, I was just very conscious of this feeling of like, why, why is this happening right now? So I consciously decided as I usually do in those cases to not say anything to anybody. How do you do that? Well, I, you know, it's, it's yeah. Meditate because it's not, I tend to, I tend to then visualize what's going to happen in the next, like, how is this going to make my life better? Like if I say something that mean to somebody else, I have just started a conflict that will just escalate, will continue, will add more conflict to my life. It will make things, I just don't like the feeling you will create. And so you live in enough life to know that like, it's just like with like street fighting. I would get into a lot of fights when I was younger, just on the street, but then you realize like, it's not like a jujitsu match or something like that. It's not, it'll escalate. It'll, it might come back at you. It'll like that person might find you again. But more importantly, the anxiety of it, of having created little enemies in this world, distorts the way you see the world. So I've noticed that like, if I am shitty to people on the internet, which I haven't been, I think in a long time is like, it, it somehow brings the shittiness to you more and more, it escalates like the more love you put out there, the more like the people who put love out, like surround you. Well, you mentioned forgiveness as well. Like you said, like, I guess back to the original, you know, the Holocaust survivor scenario where you're like, oh my God, like you think of the ultimate in, in like, I've never experienced one, one billionth of that level of, of pain and horror. And it's like, and I can't let this little thing go. You know, I guess that's an interesting thing. I think you're just making the point in your personal life, I guess the same way. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And on the internet, it's hard. I've somehow gotten, I mean, you've, you've had a level of celebrity for a while. I've recently gotten some level of like celebrity and like these people who are just shitty for no reason come out from all, from all places, like calling me a fraud or anything else. It was Jay and Silent Bob, Strike Back. They find out a movie is going to be made about them and people were talking shit on the internet and they're like, what's the internet? And then someone shows them and they're like, what? And they go to a message board and they go to Hollywood to try to stop it from being made. And they eventually get money for their likeness and they use the money to buy plane tickets and fly around and beat the shit out of all the people that talk bad about them. Yeah. It's tough. I mean, it's I'm, I'm having trouble with it cause there's people like, yeah, there's, you know, there's posts and forums and like heated discussions about is like sweeping a fraud. I don't know. What has he really done? And there's like, and then there's people like, well, I think he's an all right guy, but I'm not sure. Like, like there's like literal discussions and I'm like, like nobody, like if you increase the level of celebrity, there's going to be like one of the things that hurts my heart a little bit is like some level of toxicity around Joe Rogan. For example, there's like communities of people that now like talk about him selling out, for example, all that kind of stuff. And I don't, you know, and Joe I've talked to him about it is amazing that he he says, don't read the comments. He legitimately doesn't read the comments. His heart and his soul doesn't give a damn about the comments. All he gives a damn about is his friends. Like one of the things that's really inspiring to me and that's I've had a conversation with them offline about Spotify and the removed episodes. People are curious. What's Spotify? Um, it's, uh, it's a thing on the internet where, uh, I think you can play Taylor Swift songs on, um, but you can also now play Joe Rogan podcasts and they gave him a hundred million dollars. So that that's, um, you know, that's it's yeah. Uh, but the thing I've had a discussion with him and I made a video about it that I took down because of the toxicity is like, it's hard to put into words, but he will give away the a hundred million in a second. If he ever has to compromise who he is, like he doesn't, I mean, he already said, as he talked about, he's made quote unquote, fuck you money a long time ago, he doesn't need any more money. He doesn't care. It's nice to have money, whatever, but like, he'll give it away. So the it's nice to see when people like him at a level of celebrity level of success and financial success, don't change at all. They're just the same thing that makes you happy is talking in his case, talking shit with his friends in the case of most of us really just, just hanging out with friends, doing the things you love in his case, doing the things he loves without any, like, you know, the Texas way, the freedom, like without any corporate bureaucracy bullshit that rolls in and says, well, maybe you shouldn't say fuck, you know, like more than 20 times a podcast or something like that, like those kinds of like rules, like people, like he says in a suit and tie, they show up and say stuff oddly enough people that could never have done what he does. Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of inspiring to see that. And I hope people, I hope people realize how special of a human he is. He's inspired like people like me, like I'm just, I'm a scientist, right? So he inspired somebody like me from a very different walk of life to be like kind to others, to be open minded. I don't know that it's a special dude. So like people need to support that and treasure that as opposed to as opposed to be toxic about it. I mean, what people really for a long time have told me that it would be awesome if Ryan Hall goes on Joe Rogan. I definitely think that would be an awesome thing. Have you listened to Joe? Has he been a part of your life in some kind of way? You know, well, Joe's always, I remember watching Joe on Fear Factor when I was a little kid, which is cool. So I've actually gotten to like, from a bird's eye view, watch his kind of just path through life. But one of the things that I always appreciate, and again, I barely know Joe other than to shake his hand. He interviewed me after the, briefly in the ring after the BJ pan fight. But one of the things that I've always admired about Joe is that I think he had fucking money from the start. I think that zero dollars is fucking money for Joe. I think, and that's something I respect about him a great deal because as you say, it's interesting to watch, it's like you hope that George St. Pierre is like this. It's really, I'm not super close to George, but we're teammates at TriStar and he's never been anything but a gentleman. He's one of those people that if you didn't know George was famous when you walk into the gym, you'd have no idea. He's not holding court, not doing it. He's just, you know, training and he'll help out an amateur doing this. If you have a question for him, he'll help me. Like I'm nobody, man. He would give me advice and train me. It was super cool. And he didn't kill me, which I really appreciated. He's a gentleman. But you know, it's like you meet someone and you go, man, it's so cool that this is the guy who's the best, that this is the guy who has been successful. And then you go, why are they successful? Like I said, true to what they're doing. They haven't changed. They're the same as they've been. And I remember I got to TriStar in 2012 and George was already George St. Pierre, but I remember watching and talking to people and they're like, oh man, George is the same as he's always been. And it's neat. I see him in the gym training now and again, giving advice now. And it seems like Joe has always been consistent. And it's neat to watch someone not compromise on their values and not change who they are. And not, you know, periodically, like, you know, again, we all make mistakes. Like you have a bad day or this or that. And an apology needs to be issued or even my bad or this or that. And you're like, yeah, and they just move on that they're not afraid to be themselves and they're not afraid to be wrong. They're not afraid to make a mistake. As you mentioned, open mind and some like, so what are the correct beliefs to have about this that I know going in, everyone's going to be okay with what I'm saying, which is usually the beginning of a conversation that's going to go nowhere. Right. And, uh, it's, it's neat to see, um, the things I guess that he's created on his own as a result of the authenticity that's there. And it reminds me of like Dave Chappelle. And, and again, I don't know, I've never met Dave, but it's neat to see someone that's clearly again, authentic in their own way, doing their own thing. And they're because of that, they're above the corporate nonsense. But what's funny, I think the message behind all of it is, Hey guys, we all are, I can't promise you that I'm going to have money. Joe couldn't promise you that he's going to have money. Now it ended up working out, but he was above that nonsense from the jump. And he just continued to be above it by never giving it any mind and just going like, yeah, I'm going to be a reasonable person. I'm going to try to learn. I'm going to try to grow. And, uh, if I say something annoying, you can come and talk to me about it. We can get to the bottom of it. And I'm like, if I need to say my bad, thanks, appreciate it. You know, I will. And if I don't need to, I'm like, Hey, I still appreciate the talk. Thanks man. I'll shake your hand and we'd carry on and we'd go our separate ways and hopefully I'll treat you with respect. You treat me with respect and that's about it. And I guess I think it's a lesson that it can work out no matter what you don't have to count out to like these weird powers that be. And whether you're at this level or at this level, but you can live your life the way that you want. And as you mentioned, talk to your friends, hang out, be happy. And it just so happens that that resonates with people. It actually reminds me of like, uh, speaking to MIT and being in Boston is like a good will hunting. You know, like, again, that's what did he really want to do? He could have gone this way. Could have gone that way. And it was an interesting story, but it's like this person wants to hang out with his buddies and wants to do other things. And again, it happens to be brilliant and happens to be able to do all these other things, but there was. I guess it's like, at least in my mind, a story of authenticity as well. And it was both the same thing in the Robin Williams character. And I just think that that's a message cause watch watching things occur on the internet as they do now. Think so many things playing out in the public eye. I feel like so many private or otherwise formerly private discussions and disputes and, and, you know, interactions now become, they all have a, a, well, what is this going to say when it goes public? So how can I couch what I'm saying? Or how can I word this in a way that's going to get people on my side or use the right buzzwords and not use the wrong buzzwords. And it's just neat to see people. You know, in their own way, flip the bird to the head, because I just think that that's, that's just not how a human being is meant to think or interact. I'm curious what you think about the thing that recently has, you know, me like hosting this podcast, I sometimes think about like, who should I talk to and not in terms of like, it's the, the old Hitler question now, Hitler, I would definitely talk to because post world war II, because everyone knows he's evil. The question, whether you talk to Hitler in 1937, like when people who are really students of what's going on, understand that this is a very dangerous human being. But a large number of the part of the world are like, well, he's a leader who cares for Germany. So the question I have, it's interesting to me, it involves a particular person named who also lives in Austin, Texas named Alex Jones. I don't know if you're familiar with the guy. I am familiar with Mr. Jones. I've actually recently just listened to Infowars, like one episode of his show, I guess that he does every day. And it kind of reminds me of a time in college when I drank too much tequila. There's no turning back. Like, it's like, like the mistakes you make that like, it's, I mean, you don't know where you're going to wake up, you don't know who you're going to kill or not kill or steal or rob, it's unclear. So that, it felt like I was getting pulled into a dark place where pretty much everybody is a pedophile that's trying to control the world. So Bill Gates definitely is a pedophile. Everybody in power, anybody in power, there's a kind of a deep skepticism about power and a conspiratorial way to see the world where everything is like dark forces in all corners. It's like the way you feel when you're a kid, that there's a monster hiding in the closet. Which is also why you leap over the bed from like four feet away. There's a strategy. Yes. So, but he says that you're just being weak. You need to look under the bed. Under the bed, there's monsters and we need to be aware of them because they're growing, they're multiplying. You should be. And they're touching children. They're touching children. Exactly. So it all connects. But the, the, I, when I listened to him and I thought about like, do I want to talk to him on this podcast, for example, when I listened to his conversation with Joe Rogan, the two times he talked on there, to me, it was somehow entertaining. Like it was fun to listen to. It's fun to listen to a madman go on for four hours because it's almost like theater. Like, this is what I talked to Joe about. When people try to censor Alex Jones, Joe says that the people who try to censor him don't give enough credit to the intelligence of human beings to like, understand like that, like what a person says on a large platform does not necessarily is not the truth. You can be a madman and say crazy things and people are intelligent enough to hear certain things being, when they're said like the earth is flat, they can, they can be intelligent enough not to all of a sudden start believing that the earth is flat. Like they, they're intelligent enough to sort of select different ideas and be able to enjoy the theater of a particular ridiculous over the top conversation without being sort of influenced to where they start believing like toxic set of beliefs. Now there's a lot of sort of other kinds of people, especially now with cancel culture that say, well, you don't want to give platform to crazy people that ultimately whose beliefs might lead to dangerous consequences. Like, and I see it very often now with conspiracy theories that go, that go like way too far. Like for example, would, I, I'm not, I haven't looked into it, so I'm sorry, I will look into it, but it hurts my heart to see that on Bill Gates, in my opinion, the person who has saved and improved more lives than probably any human history, literally because of the money he's invested in helping, like just, just the work he's done on like malaria in Africa, the number of people he's helped is huge. And yet every interview, anything you see now on Bill Gates, everyone is calling him, I believe haven't looked into it, but I believe everyone's calling him a pedophile. I don't know the full structure of it, but it's, it's just a very, it feels like an army of like, it feels like it's hundreds of thousands of people. That's what it feels like. It might be a much smaller percentage, but it feels like a huge number of people are calling him a pedophile. So that's the, that's the flip side. If you allow, if you give platform to conspiracy theories like that, then you start to have bigger and bigger percent of the population believe in these crazy things. I just, I wanted to put it out there. Cause I don't know what to think of that. If you put yourself in Joe Rogan's shoes, if you put yourself in my shoes, if you put yourself just in your own shoes, I mean, I'm even I'm in my shoes right now. Great. If you're staying in your shoes, just stay in your shoes. Can I have your, would you talk, would you give platform to people like Alex Jones, would, would you talk to somebody like Alex Jones or, or not? Uh, I, yes, I would. And I feel very strongly about this, honestly. Um, well, I think that it's, it's an interesting thing and I, I would just say a lot of times, um, I can understand, you know, very, very clearly why people would take issue with the idea of, I guess what they proceed to be amplifying this man's voice, this man's reach, um, you know, as, as a demonstrable negative. But I think, um, you know, when you take a step back further, uh, the, the cure is more damaging than the disease and significantly. So, um, I guess I think that I'm very, very wary of, I think being where you mentioned Alex Jones being wary of power and people with it, that's a lot of times there's a lot of truth and validity to crazy things that people say it's the conspiracy theories that stick are the ones that sound credible, at least quasi credible in some aspect. And it's almost like it seems to me like an anchor in people's mind. And it is also funny to me, obviously the, the Bill Gates, it's so funny to tar people with things like pedophile, racist, rapist, like, these are things that we're basically trying to pick words that no one can ever support someone who does these things. And that's, you know, and that changes year by year. Like currently pedophile is totally in as a thing to call somebody just, just as a, it used to be communist or Marxist Cleveland Browns fan, you know, like, come on, you know, actually nobody likes the Browns. So I'll agree with you. That was, that's why I picked them. That's the trick is you find a group of people that nobody likes. We're good here. All right. That's the move, but, uh, yeah, that's a creepy thing though, because that is, that is the creepy thing is like, if people are always looking for groups of people are always looking for, and I find this really deeply disturbing, um, like, Hey, so who's the guy that we can all get away with? You know, just treating like dirt, who's the guy that I can be a dick to? I can just walk up and punch in the face and no one's going to say anything. And it's, even if I, you know, people do that with, whether it's literal Nazis or someone that I called a Nazi, you know, I guess what's the bigger issue, this person's ridiculous beliefs or what I'm doing. And you mentioned Hitler before, and obviously Mein Kampf being a, you know, like the outline for some of the things he did later and when the evil was it always there, did it, did it take root later on or flourish later on? But was, was Adolf Hitler a problem because he had crazy ideas or because he did things? I think it's because it's not, I think I know it's because he did things. Now, if I'm going to start punishing thought crime, I, I'm going to have to start punishing thought crime. And that's a terrifying concept. Even if I'm right about the certain, about the objectively correct about the things that I decide to call out of bounds, who put me in charge and made me arbiter of good taste and how long until I did it, did it, did it, did it, did it long until I decide that something else is, is out of bounds. It's, it's always a sliding scale or it's always a sliding standard. And I find that, that, you know, to be more of a concern than people doing crazy things, because I guess if you mentioned Alex Jones, you know, putting out ridiculous, ridiculous ideas, ridiculous theories, I think that most people don't look at Alex Jones as a credible person. Now I'm not going to pretend to be deeply read into all of his beliefs or the things that he's trying to peddle. Um, but there's plenty of things that are quasi mainstream that I think on with this side or that side that maybe not comparably ridiculous, but are, you know, particularly in hindsight or, you know, or we're not, or, or silly. And I guess, uh, the idea of, of getting a group of people together to decide what we're not going to tolerate is a very, very tricky thing. And I think that, you know, it reminds me of law or, you know, even, you know, religion when it gets to like, what are the things that we don't like? How do we feel about rape? It's like, no, under no circumstances. Is that an acceptable behavior murder? No, that's not acceptable behavior. Killing, I don't know, kind of depends on the situation. Are you at war? Were you justified? Were you acting in self defense? Okay. So it's not now murder is a specific type of killing the same way, you know, other things should be a specific type of something else. But I guess we, we draw the line of murder. We say, if you want to exist in our society, you can't do this. This cannot be done. And then we go theft. If someone said, Hey, I murdered that guy. Can you understand where I'm coming from? I might say, yeah, I'll hear you out. It doesn't mean that I think you're right, but I'm like, have you ever been wronged so deeply that you could imagine that you could kill someone? I'm like, no, I haven't, but I could conceptualize someone doing that. And I'm like, yeah, okay. And you still need to go, you still need to face, you know, criminal justice as we have it in our system, or at least that's how we've decided. Yeah, there's, it's interesting. You have to be able to like, there's, if you look at the history of discourse in this country, I think it's still true, but I'm not sure it's changed since 9 11 is, uh, it used to be impossible to criticize, um, a soldier. It was easier to criticize war. It was harder to criticize soldiers for allowing themselves to be the tools of war. I tend to be, maybe it's the Russian upbringing. It's the, it's the combat thing. I tend to romanticize war and soldiers. I see soldiers as heroes, but I've also heard people that not only say that soldiers are, uh, war is bad. They say soldiers are bad. What's their argument? It's, it's the kind of a libertarian view that they're basically slaves to evil, right? War is evil and they're, they're given, they are suspending their moral and ethical, like, as like duties as a human being to become the tools of evil. That's the sort of the argument. If you see war as evil, I mean, I think it's useful to hear that, but there's for a long part in history that was completely unacceptable. Same with abortion. If you see abortion as murder, I mean, if I classify it in that, if I put it in that, in that basket, it starts, we're living in the midst of like a genocide. Looked at from that perspective, could you feel how people could be deeply upset by abortion? You go, of course. Looked at from a different perspective, you say, I don't believe it to be murder. That's not how I see it. Then you go, oh, well, if that's the genesis of your, your thought process, then you're like, yeah, okay. Now, now I see how we can come to a different thing, but I guess we go, well, abortion is murder period. Therefore, if you support it, you support murder. That's a convenient way for me to tar you. Right. But I guess that's kind of coming back to the Alec Jones. I'm, I'm just a nuance. It's a, you have to have the nuance in these kinds of conversations and I have to be willing to have the conversation and I have to be willing to sit down. If I can't sit down across from like the most violently racist, angry, hypothetical internet, you know, conceived person that none of us have ever actually met in real life, but are hopefully not, you know, and go like, well, of course I believe that this person's wrong, but allow me to change, do my best. I'll hear them out and I'll go, no, I can go point by point and explain where this guy or this girl is wrong and hopefully bring them over to a more reasonable position where they will have better beliefs and they will like objectively better beliefs and beliefs that will, will, and they'll treat other people better. Why would I want to marginalize this person? I might not want to talk. I might not want to invite them to my barbecue if they're acting like a jerk all the time, but how could I, would it not make the world a better place if I'd hear them out and they go, look, if you're going to sit down and talk with me, we're going to have to have a discussion. I'll hear what you have to say. And if I can't, if I can't explain to someone why their ridiculous belief is wrong, then I might, I must not be so confident in my position. And I guess that's where I come back to the Alex Jones thing. As you mentioned, you know, with, with Bill Gates and, and you're much more familiar with, with the specifics of all the good that he's done, but you know, again, he's been an unbelievable force for good, you know, in this world. You can list A, B, C, D things that the man has, has done, that his foundation has done and, you know, positive things. And then the other people could speculate about ridiculous, crazy levels of, of evil, but you can't produce any evidence for that sort of thing. Because if you could, the man will find himself in some trouble, you know? And anyway, I guess what I would, would say is that why you can't force me to accept the truth the same way you could write down two plus two equals four on a piece of paper and show me how it works. And I could say, no, but that doesn't make it not true. And you've still given yourself an opportunity to present your case. You've presented it to me. And you've also, for anyone listening and watching, you know, you've been able to critically assess what's gone on, you know, or critically address back and forth, you know, kind of the, the discourse. And I think that you almost, you're making your case for the public. So I guess like, you know, when it comes to just never not engaging with these people, that seems to me to be cowardly. And I think that that's a, something that we're seeing in society right now, I think we're seeing a crisis of courage in society all over the place. And I think that's where we're seeing poor leadership. I think we're seeing understandable things happening everywhere, but we need stronger voices and stronger, stronger beliefs that have a conviction and are willing to engage with others, not just turning into a shouting contest and not, I didn't win because there's more of me. Oh, I voted, I outvoted you. That's nice too. But that's a stand in for bullets. That's saying I won because there's more of me. That doesn't mean that I'm right because plenty of horrible and unpopular now things have been very, very deeply popular in the past and would have won a popular vote. Does that make them right? I'd say clearly not. So I guess you'd hope that we engage with these people and that you can do your best to bring them over to a more reasonable position if you believe that you have one. And if you can't, well, at least you made the effort. And I think that that's something where martial arts shows the value. It's like, do you know if you're going to go win your next fight? I'm like, I have no idea. I will proceed forward with full effort and I will fight with dignity. I'll fight with honor and I'll fight with courage and I'll use everything that I have and I will play within the bounds of the game and that's that. And the result will be what it'll be. But I'll walk into and out of that ring with my head held high because I will know that I did my part. I did my job. The outcome, the specific outcome is not in my control. It's just strongly in my influence. And I think that that's something that helped me, that martial arts has taught me because other times, even when I was successful or unsuccessful, I would focus on if I won, I won, therefore I'm good. I lost, therefore I'm bad. This other guy won or lost, therefore, as opposed to evaluating their method. And I think it's so easy when we're taking a bird's eye view of things to not evaluate how someone's doing things. You're not evaluating my process. You're simply evaluating my outcome. And I could have stumbled into something very, very good or very, very bad. And we can look back and I think that's the value of history. I mean, I don't mean to get on my dang high horse, but it's like this value of history is we can see the unbroken chain or the chain of events that led us somewhere. And then only with the eyes of history can we truly evaluate things unless we're in the room watching it happen. And I guess that's, again, where we start to go most of the big, bad, scary things that have happened in history that are done particularly on an industrial scale, which implies governmental power and things like that or the equivalent, involve groups of people getting together and going, hey, we're not going to deal with that guy, giant groups of people. So maybe we're right this time, but maybe we're wrong next time. And I guess I would be back to the Gandalf putting on the one ring. I would be very, very hesitant, even if we thought we were in the right to simply try to try to marginalize just on general principle. Even people like Alex Jones, whom on their face are pretty ridiculous. Like you said, you should sit down with Adolf Hitler and talk to the man. I agree with you to play a little devil's advocate is Alex Jones might be a bad example. But if we look at, because he has a face, he is a human, he's a real person. There's also trolls on the internet for Chan. The worry I have with those folks is that, and there might be parallels to martial arts is they practice guerrilla warfare, meaning they don't necessarily want to arrive at the truth. They just always want to cut at the ankles of the powerful. Like they want to always break down the powerful. And even if they, I mean, it's, they turn everything into a game. So they let's see if we can make the world. Let's see if we can make a trend that Bill Gates is a pedophile, right? They make it into a game. They get excited about this game. They see the powerful. Let's see if we can convince that, like, who is the most positive person we can think of. Let's see if we can turn them into evil. And they've tried that with like everybody and it seems to stick and they're good at it. And some would argue, whatever you think about our current president, that he has some elements of that, which is he's figured out whatever this music of social discourse that's going on, he's figured out how to always troll the mainstream flow of consciousness. That's the media. He always kind of says stuff that annoys a very large number of people. And he enjoys that because it's like taking the powerful, taking the way things were before. And he like shakes it up by saying the most inappropriate thing, almost on purpose or instinctually and so on. The problem I have with that is that doesn't, the powerful thing there is it brings those in power down a notch. That's a great thing. The negative thing is it doesn't push us closer to a nuanced, careful, rigorous discourse towards truth. It's like showing up to a party and just like starting to yell. It doesn't create a good conversation. It just makes everything into a game where truth doesn't even seem like a thing we can even hope to achieve. That makes sense. And I guess, as you mentioned, we'll come back to another movie because I don't do books and do movies. Some people just want to watch the world burn, right? And I guess there's, that's a creepy, creepy kind of urge that some people have. And then also is some people you're like, hey, would you like to throw a brick through that glass window? You're like, yeah, sure. Like, no, I'm not going to do that because I think about what's going to occur. Like something's going to be hurt, someone's property not going to do it versus, hey, you want to see what will happen? Like, yeah, sure. Kids are always like, I have my son, he grabs Spider Man and drops him on the table. Spider Man fell. Spider Man didn't fall, Sean. Like, he dropped him, you knocked him off the table and he'll grin. And basically, it's an interesting thing, like you said, that these people are appealing to and also almost like the little dog factor of like people do want to watch the powerful get taken down a notch for all the good and the not good of that. Just plenty of people, it seems to me, that have found their way to incredibly high positions. Some have just found themselves there and many, many, many, many, many people, men and women of all backgrounds are brilliant and have worked hard. And yeah, of course, there's luck and there's luck into everything. LeBron James, in spite of being the best basketball player on God's green earth, is fortunate that he didn't get hit by a car. It's fortunate he didn't tear his knee, but thankfully, we get to see all these things. But I guess if people don't have any skin in the game, you never know what they're going to do. And I think that's the problem with the internet. You know, that people get to be nameless, be faceless. That's why guerrilla fighters are outside of the bounds of war. Like you don't have a uniform on. Like, I don't know who you're from. You don't get the same treatment that a soldier gets for MP. Well, that's crazy. Actually, there's reasons for this, because otherwise people are able to assail things and there's no one responsible. There's no way to go and say, hey, where did this come from? What's the root of this? How can I address this? And I think that's the problem of the internet, the problem of Twitter. There's a problem in places like 4chan. I wouldn't mind seeing that type of stuff go away, if I'm frank. But that's not the same thing as people with a face, people who are willing to stand there and say, hi, my name is so and so. Even if I have ridiculous beliefs, hopefully people will hear me out. And then if I'm wrong, educate me. But I guess you hope that the real, I guess, in my mind, antidote to all of this silliness is education. And I think that that's something that we're critical thinking is not necessarily. I went to school in America, and I feel very fortunate. But critical thinking is not something that's focused on. I mean, it's tough. It's almost like talking about jujitsu. It's tough to teach critical thinking when I don't know any words. You have to teach me techniques. You can't teach me to be an artist. But recognize that the techniques are the beginning, not the end. Ultimately, it's the artistry that we are searching for, not just the science or the biro memorization. And I guess you'd hope that people's ability to think critically and recognize that majority rule or whoever's loudest does not mean that they're right by any stretch of the imagination. And we don't appeal to that. And we don't bow to that. We'll help them to help inoculate them against the ridiculous things that come out of these places, these dark places that are objectively not great. But I guess all circling back, even if we swatted these bad things out of existence right now, we've got to be very, very careful doing that because it's who's doing the swatting. This political group that's in power right now, the people that support our current president would maybe feel a certain way. The people that support another option would feel differently as to what exactly defines toxic. And I guess that's what gives me pause. Yeah. But also the grace thing. I tend to believe that the technology, you said education, but the platforms we use like Twitter and Reddit and all these platforms have a role to play to teach us grace. Meaning they should help us incentivize the kind of behavior that is incentivized in real life. Like being a dick in real life is not incentivized. Like one on one interaction. Like there's cases where it is, but usually being kind to each other is incentivized. On the internet, it's not. Like you get likes for mocking people in a funny, in a humorous way. And it can be dark kind of mocking, depending on the community. You can go to the appearance. If somebody is a little fat or a little too skinny, you can comment on their appearance, the hair, the way the hair looks, like the appearance stuff. It could be on the people comment all the time on the level of eloquence of my speech. Go fuck yourself. I like it. It's creepy though watching previously, like this used to be low brow though. Like people doing this type of stuff, it's creepy watching like our political figures get into this type of game. Yes. But again, it's a little bit refreshing, right? It's the, my hope with Donald Trump was, is that he would shake up the people who wear suits. Usually the, like if you're from DC, I remember like showing up, I actually didn't wear what I usually wear in DC cause I was like, everybody's wearing a suit and tie when I was like giving talks and stuff. Except for Mudge, who wears jeans and a t shirt. Mudge doesn't give a damn. Mudge is a forever renegade. But I don't even remember what, oh yeah. So my hope with Trump was that he would shake up that system to say like, to inject new ideas, to inject new energy. Of course, the way it turned out is different, but like there's, it turns out that you might want to have somebody who's like an Andrew Yang type character who is full of ideas that are very different and inject the energy, new energy into the system through youthful new ideas versus through the troll that like, that's very good at sort of mocking and like playing outside the rules of the game. But Trump did reveal powerfully, I don't know what to think of it, that it's just a game and you don't have to play by the rules. That's both inspiring and dark. Deeply depressing, right? Yeah, and I don't know what to do with it. I don't, I mean the same, I'm not drawing parallels, not drawing parallels between our president and Adolf Hitler, but it's certainly, and there's a lot of, in history, a lot of positive and a lot of negative things happen when charismatic leaders realize they don't have to play by the rules. You can just flip the table. It's that Kevin Spacey show. House of Cards. House of Cards, where you just flip the table or whatever. You don't have to play by the rules of the chess game. You can flip the table. One wonders if that's always been done in private, you know? I guess, because that's, I mean, even look, obviously, the United States is a republic, but we had Bush, then we had Clinton, then we had more Bush, then we had President Obama, then we were about to have another Clinton. That's fairly creepy. Yeah. Even on its own. But now we added another, I mean, I'm sure we'll have a generation of Trumps now. Gee. I'm Russian, so I think we humans like kings still and queens. There's something, we're attracted to the thing we talked about, coaches. There's something in us that longs towards that authoritarian control. One of the beautiful things about America, the Second Amendment, is we also like individual freedom. That's one of the unique aspects at the founding of this country and still, and for me, is the beacon of hope that somehow there's the fire of freedom burns in like that Texas feel. That gives me hope. The FU energy that revolts against the power, which as we discussed, power corrupts and ultimately leads to degradation of whoever's ruling the people. It's interesting though. It seems to me, maybe I'm just, I don't know if I'm reading this properly when I see it, but it seems to me that, like you said, that flip the bird, I'm going to do me within reason. As long as I'm not hurting you, is idea that very much, at least in my mind, defines the American ideal or at least part of the consciousness of the United States is under attack to a certain extent. If only I can think to maybe a generation behind us, it's becoming more collectivist for all the good and also the not good of that. And it's not in terms of policy at this point, but just in terms of consciousness. And I wonder if that's an internet thing. People are more in touch with one another than they've, as far as I can tell, have ever been, or at least more than in my lifetime. And the rest of the world seems much closer than it did. Living in Virginia, California seems very far away. Being on the internet, it's just right there. I can hear about it. I can see it. I can interact with people from there. I remember being in Tennessee at one time and reading about events taking place in the Middle East. And that just seemed like a mile away. It seemed like an unbelievably far distance. And then another time when you're in DC, you just feel like, oh, you read about something happening in Paris. And it just feels like it's just right around the corner because DC is a seat of power where things are just occurring all the time. And I guess you wonder about that's where I come back to the group decisions to not listen to this person or to cancel this. We all, the moral majority, shall do the following as opposed to as long as you're not hurting me and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, I have to let you do, I have to let you be on general principle. Even if I don't like you, I'm very free to not like you. I'm free to speak out against you, but I'm not, it is not within my right or, and not with it. And it's not, I would not be right to attempt to attack you. And that is an interesting thing though, when we see words being redefined or words being defined, whether it's toxicity, whether it's violence, if I think that what you're saying is your speech is by itself a violence or a precursor to violence, I'm justified in doing all sorts of things. And that creeps me out significantly because again, even if it ends up being pointed in a good direction initially, it's only a matter of time. And actually that brings me to another, yeah, I got all day. How much are they paying you? But we about say the Frank Herbert estate, not enough frankly, let's see. And how many books are there in Dune? That's a Jen question. You're also a fan of Dune? I read the whole series, but not a couple of the, I read all the prequels as well with the exception of a couple. Is there a book one for Dune? Dune would be book one. And even the prequels, it's still all better if you start, like I read Dune and then read the original, what is it? Six. And then I went back and started to read some of the books. Just like watching Star Wars, you want to start episode four or whatever? Yeah, I think so. That's the move and then stop at six, call it a day, watch The Mandalorian. Well, I thought you're not walking back here. No, I like The Mandalorian. No, it's not The Mandalorian. That is what I said. I was told that I was heartless for not liking Baby Yoda, who I... We don't talk about a couple of the movies, not including The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is fine. It's the more recent movies that we don't like to talk about. Oh, the... What's his name? The goofy guy. Ryan. No, no. No, the creature, the goofy creature with the... Jar Jar? Yeah, Jar Jar. Do you ever see the Jar Jar Binks is actually like the Dark Lord of the Sith theory? That fixed the whole initial trilogy where he's goofing around and making it all the way through battles. And when you're like, wait a minute, he oops his way, walks over to a pool, does a triple backflip, falls in, you're like, it's just bizarre that you... This is the Alex Jones theory of Star Wars. He's actually running everything. He was the one that actually was like, hey, we should vote in Chancellor Palpatine, or Senator Palpatine, right before they put Jar Jar in charge. First off, what did they think was gonna happen? And second off, I just think that'd be great. You're like, oops, oh man, I guess he's the emperor now. That would have been great. But actually, to the cancel and all the other stuff, again, you'd hope that it gives pause. And I think about this for fighting, because a lot of times... I'll use this as an example, people fight fans in UFC, they love people that run out and try to murder each other. And it's entertaining, and it's super entertaining. But Floyd Mayweather doesn't resonate with people as much. It's like people start... I remember the time when Floyd was not as popular. Now people think people love Floyd because he's 50 and oh Floyd. And oh man, and finally he had so much success that we all can't help but recognize the man's genius and greatness. But prior to that, oh, he's boring, he's this, he's that. He fights with his circumspect, he's cautious, he's pressing. He's intelligent, deeply intelligent. And when you watch people go out and try to murder each other, you can flip a coin 100 times and you could be lucky enough to get 100 heads, but it's still a coin flip. And I think that that's what's going on all the time is people are getting an outcome that they want, but it wasn't a well thought out situation. That's why you'll win by five in a row by knockout and then lose three in a row. And then people will go, well, what happened to that guy? He used to be so great. And you're like, no, he's doing what he's always been doing. It's just, it was getting great outcomes on a coin flip prior, and it's getting negative outcomes on a coin flip now. But I guess what I would say is it watches, it's interesting watching, I guess, societal beliefs become such a thing that we're almost adopting on a religious level if we're not careful. If when I say religious level, I mean like pan life, like this is guiding all of my choices for all the good and the bad of that. And this is a Dune quote is, when religion and politics travel in the same cart, the writers believe that nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that the precipice does not show itself to the man in the blind rush until it's too late. And I think that that's, again, the pause. We go, oh man, thank goodness we have this guy that wants to rebuild Germany. He'll put us back where we need to be. And you stop questioning your own judgment, your own, you stop thinking essentially. Right. I'm not allowed to question this. Of course this is correct. Of course, of course I'm right. I intended to do right. So of course my actions are correct. I mean, how many times have any of us intended to do something helpful and ended up doing something less? And plenty of people who intend to do harm could by accident do something decent. And I guess it's, I'm not saying anything terribly, terribly insightful, but it's just one of those where it's hard to say in the moment. And that's where you hopefully caution, you would counsel some degree of caution. And that's what worries me with people deciding that we're all so right about this or we're all so right about that and attempting to rather than win the argument, silence the counter argument, no matter how crazy it may seem. Because I just think that that idea, even when it's pointed in a good direction initially, it's only a matter of time. You're amongst many things, a Jiu Jitsu black belt. One of the things that people are really curious about white belts and blue belts in Jiu Jitsu, but also people haven't tried the art is what does it take to be a Jiu Jitsu black belt? I think that, you know, everyone's journey is a little bit different, but the one thing that the, it was a Calvin Coolidge quote, you know, determination, persistence is the only thing that will win in the end. It will always win in the end. Not brilliance, not toughness, not education, it's persistence. And I think that having the belief that no matter what happens to me, I will proceed forward and I will figure out how to make this happen, hell or high water, I think is the one thing that ties together all of the people that I've ever met that made it through whatever it was that they were going through. Because, you know, sometimes you can get lucky and you can have an easy time or and that luck could be you had a good situation. It could be, I mean, like in the obvious sense of like where you're living, where you're training, what's going on, you had a good situation, you're unbelievably athletic. Oh, you're going to be an astronaut, you're brilliant and an Olympic athlete, you know, like, well, that's a fantastic situation. You know, you won the genetic lottery and I'm sure you worked hard as well, but you also won the genetic lottery. It's a determination is the one thing, though, because that person could have a very easy go of it initially and then tear their knee. And then they're no longer the superhuman physical specimen that they were. The only thing that will keep them going is persistence. And I think that that I would just say that persistence to say I'll just put one foot in front of the other. And sometimes I can see the path ahead and sometimes it's beyond my vision, but I will not stop. I may even slow down, but I won't stop. And that's the only thing that I can say that I've seen tie everyone together because there's so many ways to the top of any mountain and there's so many different personalities and skills and backgrounds involved. But everyone, everyone carries on. So at the core, the foundational advice is just don't quit. Just keep going. That's the lesson of martial arts. I think, you know, we think it's like how to be strong or how to be how to win. But in reality, it's like how to persist, how to endure, because it's all of us have been beaten so many times and gotten beaten up so many times and thought about quitting. Have I ever thought about quitting? Absolutely. Have I ever quit? Never. I will never, ever quit ever. I can say that you might not me out. I won't be damned if I quit. What's the darkest moment? Is it injury related? Like, is it, uh, so like, to me, like two possibilities, I've fortunately never been seriously injured, but I think that's a dark place to be like having to be out for many months, uh, for, um, as Jen was saying, like with a head injury, especially like the uncertainty that's one. And then the other side is if you have big ambitions as a competitor, realizing that you're not as good, like those, those doubts were like, I kind of suck. How am I supposed to be a world? The greatest fighter of all time. If I, if, if like several people in the gym are kicking my ass, those are the two things that paralyze you. I think that everyone's darkest moment is maybe different looking from the outside for Ryan. I wouldn't say that he's had injuries and he's had bad ones. I wouldn't say that was his darkest moment. I think for me, I would say some of my head injury was my darkest moment. Absolutely. And I've torn my ACL twice. I've torn my shoulders four times. I've had lots of surgeries. For me, the orthopedic injuries were not the most difficult. It was the brain injury for others that might be the case for them. Maybe they've never experienced an injury and maybe for them, that's their darkest moment from the outside, obviously Ryan can speak to this more, but for Ryan, I think it was the inability to, to perform at certain points to the upper, the missing of opportunities that for him, from my perspective, watching him go through and having seen various points of his growth from, from early purple belt on, I think the hardest time for him looking in obviously was when he would hit moments where he wasn't able to perform for various reasons. He couldn't get fights. He, he was having difficulties there. I think that that was the hardest point for him. Did you, did you think like with the head injury that you might not, never be able to jujitsu again? Yeah. I mean, I, I, mine was very, was really bad and it was just the one hit, but I had a looping memories for seven months. Didn't know it because when your brain's messed up, you're not even aware that you're looping. And so I saw two different neurologists. I finally, like it took a very long time. I didn't know if I was going to be able to have like linear thoughts or read a book. I didn't know at certain points if I could listen to music again, you know, without it making my head hurt. And so it was almost two years before I woke up in the morning without a headache. Just waking up before I even start my day. And so that's even bigger than jujitsu. That's just life. That's just, that's just hard. And I think that you can experience so many things. I've had all these injuries. We lost a baby when I was 15, 15 weeks. And we've had all these experiences and what the hardest point for me, not saying all those things weren't hard, but it's kind of like, well, did you go through these? You just realize like life goes on and you have to keep working at it and you have to keep going. And you asked me earlier offline, did I feel depressed and not for my head injury. I don't think that at least in the moment I had a, any recognition of that. It's kind of like, but I think different people's personalities. I have kind of the like buckle down and just keep going. And sometimes it's not until lots of time later that you realize, wow, that was really hard because you're just struggling to live and function and do the things that you need to do along the way. Do you mind jumping on just like this part of the conversation just for a few minutes? Do you mind, you know, just sitting together? Oh, not at all. Just for a little bit, it'd be cool if we put a face to it, you know, is it okay with you? Yeah, it's fine with me. It's fine with you. By the way, what was the head injury? If you don't mind sharing. Someone had dropped their knee on the back of my head during training. It was a lot bigger than me. So one strike to the back of the head is too much for someone. There's a reason that's outlawed in MMA, right? Someone 50 pounds heavier than you dropped their knee on the back of your head once. And it's the funny thing about getting hit, right? You never can really be sure what's going to happen. I think it's actually one of the magical parts about jiu jitsu where, like, if you choke me, if we know what's going to occur, you hit someone, they might be completely unharmed. You might be punching Tony Ferguson in the face and you need to hit him with a sledge hammer to affect this man. And then other people, they could get really badly hurt, which I guess it's back to your point about street fighting and things like that and serious, serious potential, second, third order consequences of any action that we take. But yeah, that's a tricky thing about getting hit. How does it make you feel that, like the really shitty thing about injuries to me was that like you start thinking like, well, if I did this one little thing different, like this wouldn't have happened today. Like one moment changes your entire life. Is that, do you think that way or is that totally counterproductive? You can't help but think that way when you've had the amount of injuries I've had, because I've had more than most people's fair share. As my orthopedic says, you don't want to win that. You don't want to win the contest of who's had the most. But since you have, you're building me a pool. Yeah, but I think you can't help but think that way sometimes, but I definitely don't think it's, I think it can be facilitated if you don't beat yourself up too much. Because thinking about why have I been subject to so many injuries and a lot of it comes to just almost all of mine in particular are people a lot heavier than me. But if I've been training martial arts 15 years, I'm obviously on the much smaller side. I'm a woman. I've done thousands and thousands of rounds with people 50 pounds plus heavier than me. I've been years not training with anyone less than 50 pounds, which is 50 pounds is almost half my body weight. And when you also add testosterone, the natural physiological advantages of men, not just are they heavier with more mass, they're faster, they're more explosive, they're stronger if they're the same size. And so I think that the willingness to be in that environment over and over and over again creates a lot of strength, resiliency, willingness to continue. But it also like in order to do that, you almost have to, for me, the way I was approaching it was like pretend like I wasn't more vulnerable and just be willing to step in and step in and step in until you make it kind of thing until you make it kind of. Yeah, like I'll just one day I'll be strong enough. And you avoided injury for most, for most of those rounds, I would enjoy the problem as Ryan points out is that like you could do thousands of rounds, but if one person that size, that strength, that hover reacts in a way that you don't expect, it doesn't it's not like an oops, it's like always major. Do you regret any of it? I think that most no one I know has experienced the degree of injuries that I've experienced. And I started just at a time when 2005 is very different than now where you have the coaches have more control over what you're doing. They're more aware in general about a lot of the injuries. There's a lot more people who are hobbyists than when I started. They were hobbyists, but it was different kind of hobbyists, you know, than now. Now, our girls can train with other girls. They don't have to do thousands of rounds with somebody significantly more powerful than them. And for the drawbacks and the benefits of that, you know, as with anything. So I think I think that I don't think I would go back and change it. There were times after one of my injuries where I said to Ryan, I said, I quit, I'm done. I'm not doing this anymore. I probably said it more than once, but there was one time I was really serious in 2012. I was really serious. I tore my shoulder. I had I was looking at missing a big competition again in the world for my second or third year in a row after injuries. And I said, I'd quit my job two years before. And I'm like, I'm done. And Ryan, before that had always been, you know, keep me focused. And then he kind of said, OK, if you want to be done, be done. Just just have a good time. No, I'm really done. I don't want to train anymore. OK, OK. And then, you know, I think he helped facilitate a moment for me to go visit a friend, some friends, some girls that were doing a girls camp who are close to my size or some friends of mine to go train. And I was like, oh, wait, I do love this thing. It's harder for me on a daily basis, but that doesn't mean I don't love this thing. And it really helped change my mind. I started to connect with other people, travel more myself because previously he had done that, but I hadn't really done that. I think there was a point where when I started YouTube, it was just for fun. I just wanted to sport after college. I played sports as a kid. I want to just want to exercise. I wasn't into the martial arts. He used to give me a hard time about it because he was always very, how can you not care about martial arts? I don't know. I just want to play sports. And Ryan was really big into kind of the philosophy side of the martial arts aspect. He used to give me a hard time. And I think after that moment, this moment where I looked at myself and I said, do I want to keep doing this, is when I started to appreciate jiu jitsu. It took off some of the pressure I'd been feeling, I think, as Ryan's girlfriend. But I had a full time job a long time. It was never my goal to be a jiu jitsu world champion. And I think after that moment where I was like, you know, I really do like this. I really do want to do this. I had this moment like any time where you're like, I'm doing this for me. I'm not doing this for him. And I think that that was really lucky for me because how often in our lives, do we have a kind of a challenge where we have to stop and we have to say, is this really what I want? How often in a relationship do you do that? How often in any type of lifestyle or job do you stop and do you really ask yourself, is something really difficult happened that you look and you go, am I just doing this because it's convenient and easy? Or is this what I really want to do? Yeah, I've had those moments. Like this podcast is one of those things. It's like you stop and think like, I actually love this. And it's, I had that with jiu jitsu too. I don't think I had said until like brown belt that I stop. I mean, yeah, it's when you first face real challenges, you think like, why am I doing this? I think most of my progression was why not? I think that's the right, the leap of faith. And then at a certain point you think like, why am I doing this? And if you can answer, honestly, that because I love it, it's kind of a liberating feeling. It's a, yeah, it's so powerful. It's an acceptance. Then you feel thankful for the opportunity to be there, right? Because you love it. And you go, man, this is great gratitude. Yeah, it's ultimately gratitude. Yeah. Let me ask you this. So Ryan said like, what is it? I took over your thing. Yeah, nobody cares about Ryan. I wouldn't do that. I'll Photoshop him out or whatever. However you do that, it'd be great. Put Sean Connery's head. Yeah. Just like a Dune ad over there. Exactly. Sean Connery, I could get down on that. Is that the sexiest man in Sean Connery? In the Dune universe? That's my understanding. Okay. I think in any universe. Yeah. Well, Myron Gosling, give him. We actually named our son after Sean Connery. Oh, yeah. That's right. We did. He was in The Rock. That was, I love all those lame. Nicolas Cage. Oh, yeah. Connery is probably the greatest movie of all time. Dude, his accent in Connery was so awesome. I don't know where it's from. Alabama, I guess, or something. I love that they got like Steve Buscemi in there. Like we need Steve Buscemi in this thing. We got him. Dave Chappelle. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. He's a prisoner in there. Eight ball. Yep. Greatest movie of all time. Should have won an Oscar. Dave Chappelle also in Blue Street with Martin Lawrence. And then, what do you call it? Robin Hood Men in Tights. Oh, Robin Hood Men in Tights was one of my favorites as a kid. Half baked. But yeah, that's a good. Wow. We just listed off some really bad 90s movies, but. You take that back. For telling our age. Speak yourself. So what, like in your view, I don't mean to, from like a smaller person, I guess. That's an interesting thing about Jiu Jitsu is like that small. I don't, I hope, hopefully it's not a bad thing. Elf. Elves are taller. Like with all these like bigger people, you could still enjoy the art. Like what does it take to get a black belt to excel, to quote unquote, master the art? Gosh, everyone has such a different path. Ryan's promoted six, seven people. Something like that. And I think about half of them have had kids, have families, have other careers. At the time, some of them competed a lot. Some of them have never competed or rarely competed. Some haven't competed in a long time. Some had started different places. Everyone's had different journeys, even in our own little group of seven. I think only maybe only two or three were high level competitors of that group. At the higher belts, right, like brown, black, maybe. And so it's just different for every person. And that's something that we try to tell our students. We have 400 students. And do we have this? We don't really have anyone who's a stated other than like the coaches like Adam, but we don't have anyone who's like a stated high level competitor as a student at the moment. People look at our gym and go, it's lots of competitors. It's not lots of competitors. It's never been lots of competitors. And we've had ones and twos here and there. But really everybody's in it for the long term if they're in it. Sometimes the high level competitors are the ones that are more likely to drop off because they have a bit of success, particularly at blue or purple. And then they realize how hard it is at brown and black. And then they have a hard time continuing on that path. And then they can't look at themselves as a noncompetitor. They have a hard time continuing with Jiu Jitsu, I think. Whereas sometimes it's the guy who comes in as a white belt and he trains twice a week, twice a week, every week. And the next thing you know, he's been there for two or three years. Like, oh, he's a blue belt. He's a purple belt. He's a brown belt. And he's just consistent over a long period of time and willing to take the path. And no two people's path is exactly the same. No two people's lives are exactly the same. We have students who started as a white belt as a young adult with no responsibilities. And they train all the time. And then they have a job. Then they graduate college. Then they have a job. Then they have married. Then they have kids. Then they have different points in their careers and at different points in your life. Jiu Jitsu will be there for whatever way that you're willing to accept it. It's place, I think. Well, that's actually kind of back to the initial question we discussed about what makes a warrior and also what makes something or someone particularly impressive in my mind is like what they make out of what they have. One of my favorite movies ever is Forrest Gump. And it's obviously it's just if you can't because I've heard people go, Forrest Gump sucks. I'm like, I don't like you as a person. And you have no heart at all. But basically, it's the story of someone that tries hard. And it's like, yeah, but it's a funny movie. But it's like, you know, I guess you meet each person where they are, you know, and obviously you want everyone needs to be pushed. We all need to be pushed. We need friends and people around us that push us to be better versions of ourselves all the time. And as you mentioned, the people you spend all of your time around deeply impact you. And we have to be willing to be pushed. It takes a leap of faith for me to trust, for me to put some of myself in my, you know, I guess my ability, my control, my personal agency, as it were, in the hands of someone else that I trust and that I respect. But if I can do that, again, maybe I never become, you know, high level black belt competitor. But, you know, I had four of the things I was doing in my life. I also have a family. I have this, I have that, you know, what that person was able to accomplish in the martial arts relative to what they were able to put in this phenomenal, you know, other times someone could be a very successful black belt and in my mind be a bum because they could have been a lot more. And, you know, they could have done more. They could have focused more. And there's no shame in deciding that you don't want to do that. But whatever it is that you're invested in, I remember the Take It Uneasy podcast and that I loved because, you know, I'll just chill out like resting. It's like vacation. Oh, who wants to go on vacation? Yeah, I'll go on vacation for a day or two. You want to spend three weeks on vacation? Like, I kill myself. Like, get me out of here. Like, this is horrible. This is I'm a waste of life. I'm not doing anything useful. You're technically on vacation right now. Right. Well, this is fun, though. It's like a one day vacation. Exactly. But, you know, I'm sure you're thinking about jumping off of the building right now. But if you had to talk to me for, you know, like three days, I'm sure you'd probably shove me off the building. I don't blame you. I'll be dead. Five hours in. But, yeah, but, you know, it's like you want to be pushing towards something because otherwise what's the purpose of being here? You know, it's not just a college. It's doing something useful, building, growing as a person, helping others do the same if that's within your power at any given time. But I think that's kind of the neat thing about martial arts is it can be many, many different things to many different people. You know, I finally, for instance, was able to get a college degree this year. That which I mean, it's not a big deal for most people, but for me it was a big deal because I was going back and finish. Yeah. And I never envisioned ever going back. And that's a hard step to go back and finish. That's always heavy on you if you don't. It's interesting. I was just I was more proud of that than most things I've ever done, if I'm honest. You know, and it was neat and I really enjoyed it and it was the process of doing it. But, you know, are my academic credentials impressive? Like, not in the least. But for me, it's like it was a big deal for me personally to take that step and to go back and do that. And I was I was proud of the the direction and because it would have been easy, like, do I need to do it? Like, no, I'm in our business. I'll do OK. I'll try. I'll keep fighting. But I was happy to take the time in between fights when I was when I was unbooked for an opponent to do something productive rather than just I'll just hang out. You know, like I can still train every single day, but I can also train and go to school. People go to the Olympics while going to school. I can I can do martial arts and go to school. One thing I got to ask is, you know, a bunch of women listen to this podcast if they haven't done Jiu Jitsu, I think it'd be kind of intimidating to step on the mat with a bunch of bros that like enjoy somehow killing each other. Like, how do you succeed in that environment to where you can learn this art, learn how to beat all those people up? Oh, gosh. Is there any advice? I mean, another way to ask that is like if any women listening to this are interested in starting Jiu Jitsu, like, is there advice for that journey? Honestly, I think it's just walking in the door and starting. Sometimes I don't know how to respond to that because I'm not I don't view myself as typically anxious, particularly in interactions with other people or new people. Shy is not a word that has been used for me by if you ask my family and they joke because our son talks a lot. He's advanced verbally and they're always like, oh, well, let's we know where he gets that from because he just doesn't stop talking. He narrates everything he does. And so they always tease because that's like I'm known for for kind of talking a lot. But so I haven't been typically I'm not I don't consider myself a shy person. So for me, going into a new room, a new group of people is, you know, there's always that you don't really know who they are, how they're going to treat you. But I typically but I don't have a lot of anxiety with that. So I don't if that's something that's going to put something up. I don't really know how to to address that particular feeling. But in terms of all of the rooms I've been and I have popped into gyms before I knew Ryan in Florida, like I traveled for my job in Germany and Florida and in California and places where where I don't know anyone, they don't know me. And I have never once had anyone be anything other than than kind and solicitous and helpful and long before when I was a white belt and a blue belt and didn't know anything and I didn't know anyone. And I just think that it's a community of people that it's so cool that no matter where you go in the world, I walked into a gym in Prague one time where only two people spoke English and and it was just yes, weird, you know, it's weird that like part of a group and they're like, Oh, let me tell you what it's like to be part of a cult, right? Yeah, but it's like a positive cult, like it for sure. That's what we would say as cultists. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I mean, we do need to murder everybody who practice Aikido. Yeah, that's this cult deeply believes it. No, but there is a like if you look at different kinds of games like chess and so on, like there's a skepticism. I mean, there's not a brotherhood, sisterhood feeling with Jiu Jitsu. It's like you can roll into most places. Even like with Judo, like I can see the contrast like because I've trained in Judo places. It it's more like tribal, like you walk in and like, who is this? Like there's that kind of feeling with Jiu Jitsu. There's less so there is a little bit with like the competitors. There's always like the competitors feeling each other out usually like the blue belts. But like outside of that, in terms of if you don't get the if you walk in with the vibes of just loving the art and just wanting to have a good time, you're like welcome. It's really cool. It's really fascinating. It's a really great thing. I think in as a woman, I think you you think you're walking into these rooms of these, you know, big, strong, tough guys. And if anything, I would I would say that they're almost like much more solicitous when a woman comes in there and not like they're just like hitting on you all the time. You know, it's just that you walk in and everyone is like, oh, cool. You want to do this thing that I love. Let me make sure you have a good experience and take care of you. And I think that's that's an experience that that I hope people have when they come into our gym. And and I've always felt when I walked into other gyms. And so, you know, we try our best to to make that comfortable. And it can be a little uncomfortable because there are when you walk into a male dominated environment, there's conversations and topics. There's a different style of camaraderie and joking that a lot of men will do that. Maybe some women are more uncomfortable with. I grew up with four brothers, so I kind of maybe was a little more desensitized to that. And I worked for the Department of Defense for a while, too. So before I do with the government. Yeah. So so I did that. I'm already skeptical. Yeah. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Oh, you left. I'm not going to ask you about UFOs then, because you're not going to tell me the truth. No, they exist. Oh, yeah. No, you just freaked out a lot of people. OK, but yeah. By the way, where's where's your school? Because people always ask like where? Well, we're outside of Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia, in Falls Church. You always want to pick like, what's the best school if I travel to this place or if I want to move to this place? So that's well, I mean, obviously we're biased. But yeah, we're in the Washington, D.C. area. The best. OK, we just took a little break. Now we're back. Let me ask you one thing that a bunch of people are curious about. You're one of the innovators. First of all, you're one of the great innovators and philosophers and thinkers in Jiu Jitsu, right? But you're also one of the innovators in terms of leg locks and the 50 50 position. And just like the fact that legs have something to do in Jiu Jitsu. The other popularizer innovator in the space is John Donoher and his whole group of guys. Do you have thoughts about their whole system of leg locks and their ideas about Jiu Jitsu and so on? Sure, I guess, you know, obviously, you know, John and the students at HENZO have been able to do fantastic things competitively in the past number of years. And, you know, you mentioned innovators in the in that kind of, you know, section of Jiu Jitsu. I would be I'd love to bring up some guys like Dean Lister, of course, Masakazu Imanari. In fact, a lot of what was going on in like nineties Japan, like combat submission wrestling, there was some crazy gnarly stuff that it's just it's on grainy VHS tape, but like stuff that if people were doing now, they go, oh, my God, that's brand new. Like there's it's it's been I think these are things that have been around for a while in various places. I first learned the 50 50 position, just like the leg entanglement of it from Brandon Vera, actually, at a seminar at Lord Irwin's Martial Arts thing in 2005. He learned it from Dean Lister, who used it to submit Alexandria Kakareko, really, really tough Nogi guy at ADCC on there in the run that Dean made to the to the gold medal in the absolute division, which was a great performance at the time. First American to do that. And, you know, and I actually saw a video. I mean, first, a boss rootin actually broke. I think Guy Mezger's foot with a 50 50 heel hook that he actually grabbed his heel and his and his toes went and in pancreases back when they had like the man panties in the high, high boots on. Yeah. And that was gnarly. Boss rootin is underappreciated. It's like it's like he double grab like and oh, yeah, like, you know, his leverage is leverage. It's that's like a toehold that, you know, that goes the other way. And it's like it either doesn't work or breaks in half. And well, he's is people don't often think of boss rootin as an innovator, but he is in a way like he, you know, talk about like Elon Musk and first principles thinking in terms of physics. He like just feels like he just gets the job. He figures out like the simplest way to get the job done of breaking things and establishing control and hurting people. Remember that was back in the day boss. If you listen to boss rootin do any like commentary for any of the the big MMA shows or any MMA show way back when anytime guys were clinches like the guys roll for a knee bar. He was saying that way back when and now people are doing it all the time with varying degrees of success. It's it's funny. It's like it's also tough to be, I think, like a breakaway thinker. I mean, you know, group think is a real thing and group inertia. And it's it's neat to see, you know, particularly at a time when maybe that type of stuff was less accepted. You know, someone going, hey, I'm going to I'm going to run off in this other direction. I think, you know, whoever, you know, the inventor of electricity in my mind is a lot more impressive than whomever not to say that the person down the line isn't impressive that comes up with an interesting way to use it. Both are cool. But when you think about just can you imagine we're sitting here like, yeah, people, I'm going to build an airplane. You're like, what are you talking about? It's crazy. People don't fly. I'm like, no, I'm going to do it. And of course, it's not going to be as good as the airplane down the line, the iterative things that happen later on. But just being able to go to dream something into existence that you haven't seen before and then make it happen, like takes an unbelievable like strength of character, almost like a force of will, because you have you're you're blazing a trail that hasn't been washed away walked before. That's the BJ Penn factor in, you know, winning the Jiu Jitsu World Championship. First non Brazilian to do that was back in 2001. And then Rafael Lovato later on. It's like he's you know, both of those guys are so unbelievably impressive in my mind for the same reason, you know, because they were out there winning at a time when that wasn't a common thing. Not that it's easy to win now. It's just there's not a psychological hurdle that needs to be left. I remember, you know, when I was early in Jiu Jitsu, like Americans weren't winning the world championships at any belt. I mean, BJ, we all knew BJ Penn because BJ Penn did it. But it was really, really uncommon. Now it happens, you know, on a semi regular basis. Of course, the Brazilians are so strong. Europeans are still strong. But in Australians are coming on as well. But it's definitely kind of an interesting thing. So to come back to, you know, John Danaher and the Henzo team, obviously, they're doing fantastic things. John's had some really, really great innovation there. And the systematization and the methodology that they're using is great. And it's neat to see that it's getting out there. I would just also want, I would encourage people to make sure that they're catching up on their history because obviously, you know, John's a brilliant instructor and has done things for the sport that are fantastic that haven't been done before. But, you know, none of us exist in a vacuum. And I've learned things from everywhere else. So, you know, John would say the same, I'm sure. And, you know, Dean Lister would say the same. And it's just neat when you can kind of trace the history of all of this happening because we've had, humanity's had two arms and two legs for some time, at least as long as I've been alive. But you mentioned, like, airplanes. Do you think there's something totally new to be invented in Jiu Jitsu still? Not totally new, but like the, you know, flying isn't new, but airplanes nevertheless made that much more efficient. Is there, like, new ideas to be discovered in Jiu Jitsu still? I'd say, the reason I'd say yes is the same reason I would say I believe in alchemy, even though I don't. No, I'm serious. I've got some backing for this. Okay. You know, I guess I talk about this with a buddy of mine a lot, like, and facilitative versus not facilitative beliefs. And if I don't believe something is possible and I do no investigation towards it, I'll never find something even if it's there. It's almost like it's no different than me walking up on a group of people and going like, oh, man, look at these jerks. This is going to suck versus me going, oh, I wonder what these guys are up to. I'm about to have two very different conversations, even though the players in the game are no different. My internal constitution has changed because of how I've decided to approach the situation. So, although I wouldn't personally want to spend all my time trying to turn lead into gold because I don't believe that it's likely to work, only a person who's willing to spend his or her life in that pursuit will actually get to the bottom of that. And also, in the pursuit of that, they're likely to find other things. So, I think a lot of times the idea is that humanity is pushed forward by, you know, again, it's another Orson Scott Card one. It's like, you know, human beings are in this slog. It's paraphrasing, just in this slog over time. And then periodically, humanity gives birth to genius, like someone that invents the wheel, invents electricity, pushes us forward, you know, comes up with the idea of governance that doesn't, you know, just start and end with the point of a sword, you know. And, you know, these aren't common things. These are unbelievable advancements that, you know, just me sitting here, I didn't come up with them, but I just get the benefit of it. So, I guess what I would say is a lot of times these ideas are called crazy, you know, like as we discussed kind of offline. It's like, you know, Einstein was brilliant in his 20s and he was brilliant before that, I would suspect, but basically, you know, gets recognized later on in life. And of course, we all thought those were great ideas. The man was probably roundly mocked for giant chunks of his life. And I guess, so it's neat to, I would say there's definitely in my mind things that even if it's just combinations and new to me, new ways to see things, new ways to understand different depth of understanding, possibly new things, new positions, new ideas, because even if that's not true, the process of going through and acting as if it is and believing like that and focusing and trying to investigate will make any of us, will push us all forward. Whereas sitting there, you know, obsessing over the cult of our current knowledge, I think is the biggest, the biggest danger and the biggest cause of stagnation that exists anywhere. Yeah. And it starts with believing the impossible, which is kind of interesting. One of the things that's really inspiring to me is to see people out there, which sadly are rare, who kind of have a combination of two things. One is they have a worldview that involves, that includes a lot of ideas that are crazy. And the second part is they're exceptionally focused and competent in bringing that, whatever the ideas in that worldview to reality. So there's certainly a lot of people with crazy ideas. You know, there's a lot of conspiracy theorists. They have way out there beliefs about things, but they're not doing much to like make the, like build stuff grounded. Like they're not engineers or whatever. They're just like espousing different crazy ideas. But that's why you get like the Elon Musk type characters. And the reason I bring him up a lot is because like, there's not many others to bring up. It's like, there's not many examples of it through history. The people, I mean, the guy's convinced that we're going to colonize Mars. And basically everybody on earth thinks that's insane. Everyone except the guy that's going to do it, right? Except that's going to do it. And like, you can imagine like a couple of hundred years from now, people will, I mean, first of all, they won't, certainly won't remember the haters. They won't remember all the people. If they do remember them, they'll remember them in a sense like people were silly to think that this isn't the obvious path forward. Like from a perspective, that's what Elon talks about. Like it's obvious that we're going to expand throughout the universe. Like, so. From his perspective. From his perspective. Like, but to me it is also obvious because like either we destroy ourselves or we'll expand beyond earth. Like, there's not many, well, maybe it's not completely obvious. I guess I share that worldview. There's the other possibility that we humans find a sort of an inner peace where the forces of capitalism will calm down and we'll all just meditate and do yoga and Jiu Jitsu and like relax with this whole tech thing where we keep building new technologies. But it's cool to have those kinds of people that just believe the big ambitious, crazy dreams because that's where it starts. If you want to build something, you have to first believe that when you also have to believe strongly enough that you're not vulnerable and I'm speculating, but it's like, I can only imagine how many people have told Elon that what he's doing is crazy. So not only did he dream it up, he dreamed it up, went with it and also went with it in the face of being told that it's not going to work. And then anytime, and then also stepped away from the bitterness because he's done a series of really crazy, impressive things. And that's only those little things that I'm aware of, but, and also staying away from the bitterness of every single time you did something good. Initially, all I do is talk down about you. And then eventually I act as, of course, of course, I never apologize. And yet you don't let that dampen your spirits for the next innovation, which is pretty incredible to me to watch. Yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean, it's contagious to spend time with the guy because he's not, it's, Rogan has the same look to him, which is interesting about these people is like, there's like a hater shield that he's like, he doesn't even like sense them. It feels like, like it doesn't, he thinks to Elon it's like, it's obvious. I mean, he keeps calling it like first principles thinking, like physics says it's true. Therefore it's true. Like he's convinced himself that like his beliefs are grounded in the fundamental fabric of the way the universe works. Therefore the haters don't matter. Right. And I mean, that's kind of like a system of thought. He developed himself through all the difficulties, through all the doubt. He's able to take huge risks with basically putting everything he owes on the line multiple times throughout his life. Amidst all the drama, amidst all the doubts, amidst all like the, he's still able to make just clear, clearheaded decisions. It's, I don't know what to make of it, but it's inspiring as hell. Well, it's, I think it's something that's funny. I think like, I can only imagine, you know, history will look back on him as a brilliant person, but that's not the only, there's, there's a lot of maybe not numeric, not statistically speaking, but a lot numerically on a giant planet of, you know, billions of people, a lot of brilliant people. Well, you know, time, place, luck, fortune, all that other stuff. But at the same time, that clearly isn't the only determining thing in making Elon Musk, Elon Musk. And obviously I don't know the guy from Adam and, but it's an interesting thing that it's not just his intellect, his belief system, his structure, how he's viewing the world. Like that's, did he, did he reason his way to that? Did he not? What other factors came in? I'm really curious about that because I guess coming, it's, again, I feel really strongly about people's belief structure and, and this, the, how they view the world being more important than the engine behind it. You know, it makes someone resilient or not. It makes someone positive or not because you could have 10,000. I think about this for competitive stuff, you could have 10,000 things going properly and one thing going improperly. If you focus on the improper, you'll probably fix it at a certain point, which is good, facilitated for development in the longterm. But if you had to go and try to perform a task in the next five minutes and you're focusing on the negative, your confidence and your, your, your belief in the positive outcome of the future is likely to be damaged. Whereas you could have 25 things going wrong, but you go, man, I sure am happy to be alive. How fortunate I am. This is great. I can't, this is, I have problems to solve. This is awesome. Versus I had to list the problems and I start bitching about them. Both of them are technically accurate, but it's, I guess, different lenses. And I think that's a really neat thing to see, you know, someone, you know, exemplifying that for us. So maybe to look at the, the fighting world, there's a million questions I can ask here. Like one, you mentioned BJ Penn, you, uh, first of all, you're undefeated in the UFC and one of the fights you've had is against BJ Penn, which is, uh, kind of an incredible fight. You, you won performance of the night. What did it feel like to, uh, to face BJ Penn and to beat him definitively as you did? Like, what's that whole experience like? I'll be honest, I didn't know if I was going to ever be able to fight again after beating Gray Maynard in 2016. Um, you know, I've had a couple of periods of those. I was about to join the army actually in, uh, when I was 30 before the, uh, for the UFC before Jen sent me over to ultimate fighter. I didn't want to go cause I was like, one, they're never going to pick me. Two, I'd be terrible for TV. Three, I'll probably say something. I'm going to get burned to death in the streets. You know, I'm like, this isn't a great idea. And then, uh, she said, we'll go out there, see what happens, do it anyway. And you'll be, you'll regret it if you didn't. And then I ended up doing ultimate fighter. And then, so I fought three times on the show and then I fought, um, for the, for the finale. So there's four times in like five or six months, which was great. And then it took me a year to get another opponent. Um, and that was Gray Maynard. And then Gray was obviously very tough guy, um, managed to get a good outcome there. Then it took two years to fight BJ Penn. And that was, you know, obviously I'm training all the time every single day and that never stops, but that was, I'll be honest, like pretty deeply frustrating. Cause you know, as a, as a human being, as an athlete, you know, I think as an athlete, you die twice. Like you have an athletic peak or area and then, then you go on with the rest of your life, but it is a microcosm for the rest of your life. It's like, you're, you're seeing this, the sand tick away in the hourglass would drop away and you're going, man, this is, these are the years between 31, 32, 33. Like I'll be at my best at this time. My absolute best physically now, not technically I'm a lot better now than I was before. And I plan, but at a certain point you will, unless you're Bernard Hopkins, you will reach diminishing returns and I guess the long, the long way you can feel the clock ticking is frustrating. Why, why did it take two years for BJ? I, I, I, that's the question people ask a lot. It's like, why does nobody want to fight Ryan? I don't know. I probably, they probably think they'll get infected by whatever this is, but I don't, I don't blame them. But I would mean you're a really tough opponent as bought as the bottom line. I'll say that I'm different. Maybe they perceive that the, the, the, the threat is greater than the reward. I'm hoping that now that we're ranked number 12, you know, in the UFC rankings that, that, that will change. And I know that if we're one more win and then we're in the top 10 that, you know, now, now we're, you're there. But what I've consistently found is that like randoms want to fight and I'm like, go away. I didn't come here for you. You know, cause if I wanted to just fight anybody, I could go down to a waffle house and yell until like DMX shows up and we can, we can fight. Cause he'll be at the waffle house too. Who am I kidding? I really want to hang out with the MX. But you know, it's like, you want to, when I had the opportunity, oh my God, that was so cool. I was, I would never, I would never fight DMX. We'd be on the same team. But anyway it's, I guess I accepted fights against, I asked, they got asked about Lamas. I said, yes. I got asked about Dennis Bermudez. I said, yes. You know, like long periods of time. And they, at that time, well, you know, in between 2016 and 2018 I was struggling to have, have opponents who would sign up. And so I haven't turned down fights. I've just said, Hey, you know, keep the, I don't care about fighting the randoms. And it's, you have a successful school. You're like, you're running your martial artists broadly speaking. So it doesn't make sense to take fights that aren't like that fit a certain kind of trajectory for your career. And that's when, when BJ Penn, they said, well, BJ is looking for an opponent. I was like, I'm, I'm your guy. And, and I think that, you know, BJ accepted that fight because I'm another jujitsu guy. I don't think he, he, he perceived that I was much of a threat on the feet. And, you know, I was able to, it was neat to get it to compete against someone, you know, who's one of my heroes, one of the people I looked up to in MMA for the longest time. Were you intimidated by that? No, no, I love competing. I don't really get nervous or scared before fights. I'm not afraid to get hurt. I'm not afraid to win. I'm not afraid to lose. It's, I, I'm just excited for the, I feel thankful for the opportunity to compete and the opportunity to, to play when it matters. You know, I, I just, that's the only time I'm interested in playing anymore is when it, when it matters, when the opposition is, I know that, you know, it's funny because people pick on, on a lot of some opponents, particularly after, after the fact, like if you, if you get a good outcome, well then, oh, of course, let's beat that guy. That guy wasn't that good. I'm like, well, I wasn't, that's after the fact. I get to say that. And also as the person in the ring, you know, BJ Penn has heard a lot of people in mixed martial arts cage and I could actually absolutely have been on that list. So it was neat to get to compete against someone that I really respect, someone that I looked up to for a long time, someone who has a great skillset. And also I went up in weight to fight him at his weight class. He didn't have to come down to mine, which is where he'd take it. It was lightweight. Yeah. I'm generally a featherweight. I walk around at like 158 pounds. So what's the lightweight and featherweight? Lightweight is 155 with the day before Wayne and featherweight is 145 with the day before Wayne. So I'm a little bit more properly sized for featherweight. But anyway, you know, I, so I didn't feel like obviously he was giving up a couple years of age, but I was giving up size and all this other stuff. And it was, you know, I was just excited to have the opportunity to step in against someone like BJ and you know, we managed to get out of there with a, with a good outcome without getting too banged up. But just, it was cool cause we tied up on the fence and just even the second, you know, is when you're rolling with somebody and you touch and you can feel what they're doing and you go, man, this guy's really good. You can feel the calm, you can feel the small minor adjustments that they're making, the subtle things that they're doing. And that was one of those things that was really neat and gratifying because you know, you never know. Sometimes people that you've heard of are a little bit less technically proficient than you thought. And other times you'll meet some guy that you're training like, who the hell is this guy? How have I not heard of this person? And BJ was exactly, as a jiu jitsu guy, what I would have thought. And another thing, that's another thing that bugged me about how people reacted after the fight is, you know, basically going, oh, BJ screwed up this, screwed up that. And I'm like, all right, yeah. That's so interesting. That's sad. That was, you know, one of the, and to me, I mean, as a fan of both, that was a beautiful moment as a, as a kind of passing of a torch in a sense of exceptional performance. Like another one that stands out to me, maybe you can comment, is I don't understand, well, maybe I do, why Conor McGregor gets as much hate as he does. He probably revels in it. But I think he doesn't get enough credit for Jose Aldo for the, for like, for basically, you know, knocking him out in the first few seconds of a fight. I mean, Jose is like one of the greatest fighters ever. That's true. Maybe some people can even put him in the top 10. No question. And the, like, I don't understand why it's, doesn't get as much, like Conor McGregor doesn't get as much credit as I think he deserves for that and for Eddie Alvarez and all the fights, for some reason, whenever Conor McGregor beats somebody, well, they were not that good then. Like, it means like they were, they were, something was off. Right. That's convenient, isn't it? Yeah. It's quite strange to me. But I mean, what are your thoughts on the, on Conor McGregor? Maybe one way to ask that, I'm Russian, so I'm obviously also a Khabib fan, but I'm also a Conor fan, it seems like there's not many of us who are, like, fans of both. Right. What are your thoughts? You and Artem Lobov. The two of us, which also is a good fight. Tough dude. Yeah, really, really tough dude. He's like five languages, really interesting kid. Oh, so, oh wow, I didn't know that side of it. There's a brain there. Well, on the Khabib versus Conor, what do you make of their first fight? What do you, do you agree with me that they should fight again? Because I think it would be awesome if they fought again in Moscow. And do you agree with me, I'm just going to put, say things that piss people off, but I believe is that Conor actually has a chance to beat Khabib. One, that Conor absolutely has a chance to beat Khabib. Conor has a chance to beat anyone that he steps into that ring with, and not just like a mathematical chance. You're like, oh, one of the billion, but like, you know, like he absolutely, it's funny because I won't pretend to know Conor really well, but I first met Conor in 2010 when I was teaching a seminar in, at Strait Blast Gym Ireland in Dublin. And that's actually where I first met all of the coaches that ended up being on Conor's team. You know, John Kavanaugh, Owen Roddy, Gunnar Nelson, you know, so for, I actually, I enjoyed being on Ultimate Fighter and being on Uriah Faber's team and getting to train with all the guys there. But at the same time, the people that I was actually, I knew better were actually the European side, all of Conor's coaches. And that was a neat thing because I got to, I met Conor, I didn't know who Conor, like Conor wasn't Conor at that point. Yeah, that was before his UFC debut. Oh yeah, well, well before, yeah. I think, I think he got in like 2014, maybe something like that. Yeah. And anyway, but he was doing well in Cage Warriors, winning the titles there. I think prior to that, you know, I remember going, seeing him on the show and also then getting to see him train because I competed, I was initially slated to fight David Tamer for the Ultimate Fighter finale before getting put in to fight Artem for the title for the show. So I went over to Ireland to train for a couple of days and basically it was neat to watch him, watch him work. I mean, man is focused and trains a lot and very, very smart and very, very hardworking. And I think a lot of times people get stuck in the, in this, you know, and they almost want to believe that this was lucky or this, this person, you know, like they're not working that hard. They're just out there. They got there with their mouth and that's, that's just not the case. And you know, I don't know what it's like, you know, obviously Connors very well off right now and I don't know how hard, how seriously he's training, what he's doing. I can't speak to any of that, but there's no question that he has skills to be dangerous. And one of the funny things, obviously the Khabib fight when Khabib was a great fighter and also has the chance to beat anyone in that ring at any given time. But there's, there was a Conner, you know, it's a one that he can, he can put anybody away. And as you mentioned, I think that he doesn't get the credit for the Eddie Alvarez fight. He doesn't get the credit for the Jose Aldo fight. Cause it was almost so much of a letdown. I remember that happened the same weekend that I did the ultimate fighter finale. And you're like, all right, wait, what? Yeah. It almost doesn't feel like a fight happening, but we mentioned Miyamoto Musashi. I mean, Musashi was famous for the way he poked and prodded that people with what he was doing, whether overtly or not, it's like, Oh, we're supposed to fight to the death. And, uh, you know, at 3 PM tomorrow, great. 4 PM rolls around, I'm just not there. Five. I mean, you remember all the, all the antics and nonsense that Conner was pulling prior to that, like speaking personally, that's not, it's not something I would feel comfortable doing, but it's like, everyone's different. And the effect that it had on, on Jose was, I mean, beyond evident. When was the last time Jose started the, started the fight with leaping left hand, leaping right hand, you're like, wait, what? And then he was obviously, you know, living rent free and in Jose's head at that point. And that was a combination of psychological, you know, ability and, and, and wherewithal and then physical. And it reminded me of the way Muhammad Ali would, would bother people and whatnot. And, uh, the fact that he's a polarizing figure, um, I think makes some people not give him his due. And then at the same time, sometimes certain fans may be go overboard, but, uh, they remember the knee that Ben Askren got knocked out with by Masoudal. I mean, that was an amazing, unbelievable thing, but three inches to the right, three inches to the left, I guess, whichever side his head wasn't, could have been squarer. But, uh, and that fight starts with Ben Askren on top of you in the first five seconds. Well, Connor ran and threw a knee just like that at Khabib and Khabib got right around it. That could have easily gone the other way. Can you imagine what would have happened if after the, after coming back from boxing, um, after coming back from, from the Mayweather fight, Connor, in the first 10 seconds, it's Khabib in the first 10 seconds, it's over and you're like, he would, it would have been intolerable, but basically, like, you know, but see, here's the thing. Let me actually push back slightly. Uh, I mean, to the fans, correct me if I'm wrong, but Connor seems to cause I've competed a lot and like there's a tension. There's a negativity sometimes depending on the opponent and there's a respect afterwards that happens, like when you understand that there's a deep like respect and almost like love for each other. Like, I always seen that in Connor, like all the trash talk afterwards. Yes. There's a, it's, it's a subtle thing. You can't always see it, but there's a respect like. I agree. And like that, I almost on the Khabib side, I almost feel like Khabib really took it personally. He did, he didn't, he lost the respect for Connor. I thought, I thought the whole time Connor had the respect. So I, I, what I wanted to say is like, if Connor won that fight, like rock Khabib, I could see like, I wouldn't see trash talking. I could see like trash talking stop right there. I think so too, but at the same time, I'm sure you recall like Connor, Connor crossing some pretty personal territory, you know, both religiously and, and also familiarly with, uh, with Khabib. And it's, you know, I mean, I think it's the sort of thing that, I don't know, it's, it's an interesting, that's one of the reasons. Like you have to know the diff so obviously I know the, the, the Khabib, uh, the Dagestani people, they don't play around like that. They don't play around like that. You know, I mean, they take offense to basically, I mean, you, you don't do that. So, uh, so like Connor didn't, maybe he did it on purpose or maybe he wasn't even just aware of, of, uh, it was cultural differences of the box he opened. Like you, you can talk to Floyd Mayweather, you can, you can go anywhere with him. You can, you can say the most offensive things, but with, uh, with Khabib, it's, it's, yeah, hard lines, but you, uh, I mean, a lot of people ask, I know you're a featherweight, but if you were to, uh, face, it feels like Khabib was one of the hardest puzzles to solve in, in all of mixed martial arts. If you were to face Khabib, do you think, how would you go about solving that puzzle? Like almost the question is almost from a Jiu Jitsu perspective too. What do you do with a guy that's exceptionally good at controlling position, especially on top, very good at wrestling and taking down and controlling position. Like let's say, so forget maybe striking on the ground. How do you solve that guy? Like what do you do with your guard if you get taken down or do you create an entire system of not getting taken down or escaping is like, what, what ideas do you have for that? Well, I guess I would say in my mind, fighting is a game of trading energy. Um, kind of, uh, you know, there's two, there's two things, there's damage and there's energy. So like when I say energy and being like, uh, tired, not tired, how much, how much gas you've got. Um, and then damage counts obviously as well. Um, you could be feeling, I could be feeling great and then you get to kick me in the head hard, really hard three times. It doesn't matter that I could get up and run a mile. I can't get up. So anyway, um, you know, I, I think what Khabib does is so well is he makes the fight look like it could be an amalgamated fight. Um, he does a great job of avoiding damage on the feet for the most part and really sucking the life out of people with how suffocating and oppressive is his control is. Um, his chain wrestling is as good as anyone we've ever seen in the UFC. It's fantastic. Um, but, uh, that poses a really serious threat for people that need to maintain a certain amount of space and try to hurt them on the feed because unless they're able to inflict an adequate amount of damage, they're going to each time, let's say for instance, let's say him taking them down as a foregone conclusion at some point. Um, if every single time Khabib takes you down, you get right back up. It's not that big a deal, um, because it's actually more, we've all experienced this. Let's say you and I are rolling, you tap me 15 times in one round. Who's more tired? Probably you are. Yeah. Yeah. My ass so badly that, that it's like, you're the only one working, but, um, So if you're comfortable with the up and down of it, like being taken down. If you're, if you don't, if you don't get hurt badly or tired on the bottom, you have a chance, but that doesn't involve just cracking him on the feet before he gets ahold of you. Um, That's a lot. That's a lot to ask. That's a lot to ask. That's difficult to do. It seemed actually like Connor, it seemed like it when he was being kind of taken down or the, the take down attempts against Khabib, he seemed to be somewhat relaxed the whole thing. I thought he was doing well, actually. I think that particularly for the first round, I thought he did a very good job. It's just one of those things that I think like, uh, Khabib being the fights taking place in Khabib's world in large part. And I mean, set aside that one giant, uh, was it right hand that, that Khabib hit Connor with it, by the way, Connor reacted like an absolute champion. He got crushed by that overhand and then drop and his eyes went right back on Khabib. It was immediate positive, great response. So even though that was, I think that was a bit of a surprising thing, Connor reacted really, really well. But if you're going to be on bottom with Khabib for four rounds, that's going to be tough. And also Connor's a way better grappler than people like to give him credit for, but he's not the type of grappler that can do that can, that can, that's too tall of an order, but there are grapplers that could do that or at least would have a much, much better shot at, uh, being able to weather that type of a storm. Do you see yourself being able to be relaxed through that kind of storm? Well, I guess I can remember being, being, being, being savagely beaten is very relaxing. The time that the timing of that answer was like, okay, that's a dumb question. No, that's ultimately the goal of Jiu Jitsu is to, um, be relaxed to the fire. For sure. And remember like every UFC fighter, I win all hypothetical matchups. Yeah, that's true. Uh, since, uh, I'm one to ask ridiculous questions and we've been talking about sci fi and all that kind of stuff. Let me ask the kind of big question that everybody disagrees about, certainly with me is, uh, who are the top five greatest MMA fighters of all time and, um, um, why is Fedor number one? Okay. Well, first off, Fedor is number one. Oh really? Oh yeah. Right there with you. Really? Oh yeah. Talk about people that just get completely underappreciated. He's never been in the, uh, like he's never succeeded in the UFC. It's not his fault. It came along after him at the time that, at the time that Fedor was at his height, the UFC was not where it was at for heavyweight fighting. I mean, not that there weren't good heavyweights there, but Fedor, Fedor was unbelievable. You know what I mean? You remember, I mean, Minotaur Noguera, I was a massive fan of him. I still remember watching, uh, what is it pride 2004 when, when Noguera fought Cro Cop and got blasted with that left kick and dropped with like seconds left in the first round. Pride was great cause he had a 10 minute first round and that five minute second, which again materially alters, alters the fight big time. And you know, just the texture of the fight is just totally, it's borderline a different sport, you know, then, then getting a five, a pause and a five. But anyway, uh, similar sports, like one of those swimming things where they have nine gold medals for different types of swimming, right? But still swimming. But anyway, um, Oh yeah. They would disagree. Yeah. I don't mean, I'm not trying to. They specialize in that. Of course. It's so, it's totally true. 10, 10 minutes is different than five minutes. Sorry. Don't take, don't, don't, don't drown me swimmers. I don't swim very well. It's easy for me to, easy for me to downplay it, but anyway, um, uh, yeah. And then no, Better than, uh, John Jones, like the modern era. Well, I mean, I guess it's, it's tough to compete, to compare across eras. It would be like going and saying like, Oh man, how, how would such and such great grappler from today fare against someone from 1995? I'm like, well, probably pretty well for them, depending upon who they are, what's going on. There's some people that would, their skill sets might transition across eras, but a lot of times not, but that's not fair. We get the, they'll be like comparing Spartans to modern day, you know, like army guys. You're like, well, who's going to win? I'm like, well, did modern day army guys get modern day weapons? Well, yeah, but who's the toughest ruggedest group of people at the very least? So I guess it's, it's tough to say, but at least in my mind, the people that I think about for great fighters, their, their, their quality of opposition, um, their level of like lasting and like success, their level of lasting innovation. Like the courage that they have to demonstrate, because again, it's like being a big fish in a small pond takes no courage. Doesn't mean that there's nothing there, but it just requires something a little bit different. So Kazushi Sakuraba is one of my guys too. Um, BJ Penn also, I mean, BJ Penn fought Lyoto Machida. That's insane. You know, it's, that was a time, it was a different sport. It was a different time in the sport where, you know, they were, some guys were, were bouncing around doing different things, but let's, so I guess the Gracie family, it's, I mean, they never had an in like, obviously Hoist was there, um, but they never, and that was a definitely a different sport. Weight classes being open, things like that. Yeah, but you have to say that Hoist is up there. Oh, no question. One of the greatest ever. I think so too. And again, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you, um, if it weren't for him. So the Gracie family as a whole, but I mean, who's the better, I mean, I think Hoist would tell you himself probably that, that Hickson would have handled business back then, but they didn't put him in. So again, he's the greatest fighter, the greatest fighter, the greatest fighter that we saw do his business. So Hoist up there for sure. What about, so this is like, nobody seems to agree with me on this, but like this connects to soccer again and Messi. It seems that people value like how long you've been a champion, how many like defenses of the championship that you've had successfully. To me, I highly value singular moments of genius. So like, like, I, I don't, like, if you look at Conor McGregor, he hasn't, I guess, held, I've been a champion very long, very much. Well, he didn't defend either title, right? He didn't defend any other, uh, either of the titles, but like, if you talk, and same with Messi, if you look at, uh, Lionel Messi, there's just moments of brilliance unlike any other in history for both Conor and Messi. And people don't seem to give credits like, well, how many world cups have you won? But to me, like, why is it about this arbitrary world cup thing or championship thing? I think it's easier for people to wrap their head around, right? It's like the NFL combine. When was, I mean, yeah, numbers. It's something that, well, again, if I go and if I pick Tom Brady in the first round, you know, and it works out, they call me a genius. If I had to pick Tom Brady in the first round after his combine and it doesn't work out, I get fired and I'm never hired again, I have to work, work somewhere else. But it's like, I'm insulating myself from criticism. I think almost if I go by the numbers, well, he had more bench presses. It's like, how, how many times have the guys that are like the super studs in the, uh, in the NFL combine ever been on the greatest players in the NFL history, in NFL history, like zero or close to zero. And even if, even if there's some, it's certainly not a one to one correlation. So it's so funny though. I think it's just like, how many, how long, how many days did he hold the title? Oh, your title reign was X times longer. That means nothing. So if we wanted to find greatest fighter ever, like you said, I think individual moments of like, like that was transcended, that was different. That was something else because people can win or lose for any number of different reasons. And that it's an interesting thing. Again, I don't blame Argentina, not winning the world cup on messy, you know, that's not fair. You know, how many times has, you know, I mean, I use the, I remember when a Trent Ilfer was the quarterback for the, uh, the Baltimore Ravens and they had such a strong defense. I'm not trying to pick on Trent Ilfer, but it's like they, they had such a strong defense that they were to make it. That was the Ray Lewis, you know, Chris McAllister era, you know, and they, they won, they won the super bowl. I don't think anyone is going to say that, you know, Trent Dilfer is a better quarterback than, you know, or put him in the same category as Dan Marino, but he got the W he's got the, he's got the super ring. How many times, let's use March Madness or super, I love it. Like that, that guy always makes the finals, but he just never gets it done. So let me get this straight, getting to the finals nine times doesn't count because you didn't win the end game. I'm not saying it wouldn't be better, but that guy won the game once he got over the hump. Well, how many other times was he in the finals? Zero. All right. Yeah. It's interesting what we, yeah. We were obsessed with these numbers, like, um, well, cause we can't assess their method, right? Well, I think most of the time, most of us can't assess the method of anything. I'm it's like, Oh, look at that guy do X Y swimming. I'm like, how do I know Michael Phelps is great. I don't know. It was faster. I can't look at his technique and say anything other than, well, that's way better than anything I know how to do, but I can't say the difference between him and the next guy. So I guess that's, I wonder if it's like, I need a concrete identifier and a lot of times people don't like saying, I don't know. And most people won't put like a Ronda Rousey in the top, even 20 or 50 of, but like she changed more than, more than almost anybody else. She changed the martial arts history. I don't know if that even, I don't think I'm exaggerating that she, she made it okay for women to be fighters and that, and that changed the way we see like, she's one of the great feminists of our time in a weird kind of way that like, I don't know. Maybe I'm just a Ronda Rousey fan, but the, yeah, the, but she's not in the conversation because then you start converting into numbers. Well, how many did she win? Is she among the greatest fighters or did she do the greatest things? You know what I mean? I don't, I think it's something, I mean, obviously Ronda is a great Sudoku who was competing in MMA at a time when a lot of the girls like, where did you get your skills in the Olympics or where'd you get yours? High school. I mean, they're going to, the Olympic girls going to beat you up. But I guess that, that doesn't diminish her, just that accomplishment is what it is. I don't have to, I don't, Fedor is not diminished by the fact that he would like, if he were to fight Stephen Mayochis right now, it probably wouldn't go great or that John Jones exists. I don't now have to like knock Fedor's accomplishments down or say, oh, because BJ Penn or so and so let's say has a mixed record at this point that somehow invalidates the things that they've done before. I guess it kind of brings us back to a lot of the other people we've talked about, the fact that the brilliant people throughout history that we love or some of the monsters throughout history that we rightly revile in a lot of cases were complicated people and their legacy is more than just one thing. And someone doing something amazing doesn't invalid, doesn't mean they didn't do anything bad. And someone doing terrible things doesn't, doesn't mean that, doesn't invalidate the, the positives that they did. But I guess we fighting the urge to put people in one category and same with ourselves. I think that's why people get depressed. Oh, I'm good right now. Oh, I'm bad right now. Versus hey, we're all at work in progress and we're trying to do X number of things and legacy is a tough thing to figure out anyway. And it's all speculative. Last time or no on Reddit, you said that last time too, that you don't experience much fear before fights. I'd like to ask you a couple of Mike Tyson things, if it's okay. It's just interesting to me. Maybe I'm just weird. So there's a, I don't know if you've seen this clip of Tyson talking about how he feels leading up to a fight that he's kind of overtaken with fear, but as he gets closer and closer and closer to the ring, his confidence grows. Have you seen the clip? I'm aware of it. Okay. I haven't seen it in a while. Here, let me play it for you. I think George St. Pierre said something similar to me one time. While I'm in the dressing room, five minutes before I come out, my gloves are laced up. I'm breaking my gloves down. I'm pushing the lever on the back of my leg, breaking the middle of the glove so my knuckle pierced through the lever. I feel my knuckle piercing against the tight leather gloves on the Everlast box. When I come out, I have supreme confidence, but I'm scared to death. I'm totally afraid. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of being humiliated, but I'm just totally confident. The closer I get to the ring, the more confidence I get. The closer, the more confidence I get. The closer, the more confidence I get. All during my training, I've been afraid of this man. I thought this man might be capable of beating me. I've dreamed of him beating me, but I always stayed afraid of him. But the closer I get to the ring, I'm more confident. Once I'm in the ring, I'm a god. No one can beat me. I'm a god. I mean, first of all, he's cognizant of both his demons and whatever the hell ideas he has about violence. It's so interesting. Is there something about the tension that he's describing about being confident and scared that resonates with you? Or do you hold to this idea that you've kind of spoken about before that you're really not afraid? No, I can appreciate what he's saying. I think that I can speak to feeling concerned about, let's say, for instance, if you feel a certain way, I think people are a lot more like computers than we like to admit. And just because a lot of times I can't parse what's going on and why doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense. And I think that, at least in the times, if I'm concerned about a situation or about a person or about something happening prior to the fight, I'm like, there's a reason. There was a reason. I don't have to push that down and bury it. There's a reason. Why? What have I not thought about? What have I not done? What am I missing? Why am I feeling this way? As you mentioned, for yourself prior, you'd be like, why am I feeling like this? I don't do this very well in certain aspects of my life now that I mention it or now that I think about it. But when it comes to competing, I think I do an all right job and I'm trying to learn to be better. And it's going like, well, why do I, if I feel this way, there's a reason. Okay. Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Have I not adequately prepared for something? I have to address it and then maybe I'll be up for four hours that night, like extra hours thinking what have I not addressed, watching sparring, watching this, watching that. And then when I am thinking about things more accurately or when I've addressed what that concern was, I feel any of that concern kind of dissipate. And I guess if I honestly thought that, I guess when it comes to, I know I'm going to die at a certain point, obviously, I'm going to get hurt, pain happens. But the pain of loss would be nothing compared to the, or the pain of injury would be nothing compared to the pain of running away. And so I guess if I think about where's my value, it's like I feel like I'm a winner and every single time I step into that ring and fight with everything that I have, I can't promise that I'll win my next fight. I know that I have the skills and the tools to beat anyone in grappling or in mixed martial arts at this point. It's just, I know that for certain, I've trained with enough people, I've competed with enough people, I know where I stand. But I also know that I'm not perfect and also the better fighter, even if I perceived that I was that thing, doesn't win on the night. The man who fights better wins on the night. And if I give credence in my mind to only the person that's won has value versus going, what's your process? What's your path through this? How are you going about this? How are you thinking about this? How are you behaving? Then if I can focus on the process, then I will respect my opponent and I will respect myself and I'll respect anyone that behaves with a certain level of consistency to that. And they could win, there's plenty of winners in history that are shitbags and there's plenty of losers that are not. But winning doesn't make you a bad or good person and losing doesn't make you good by default either or bad by default. And I think that that can be the truth socially, that can be the truth athletically and academically. So I guess... Is there a primal fear though, like a primal fear of getting hurt? The running away and not facing the threat long term is the bigger pain than any pain you can experience in the fight. That's pretty powerful. But what about the violence of, I mean, you don't have that on your face, but like, I don't know if you've also seen Tyson talk about, he was on Rogan recently and he was talking about, he was trying to psychoanalyze himself about why he enjoys violence so much. I mean, he called it orgasmic. I don't know if, have you seen that clip? I haven't. Okay. We're playing it because I can, I need to, because Trump also retweeted it, which is hilarious. I don't know how to contextualize that our president retweeted the clip of Tyson saying... Maybe he's just doing like, they're not, it's like, I'm going to throw him a curve ball. No one's going to have any idea what that is. But yeah, he did no explanation, just, here you go. There you go. Well, I think that's kind of like what you were describing. It's like, if I give you an answer, it has to be a good one. Better to just let your imagination run. Exactly. Yeah. He's like the Kubrick of our time. Now what's really interesting that sometimes, period, it's not real, but sometimes I struggle with the fact of why there's a possibility I can really hurt somebody. Like you don't want to hurt them. What do you mean when you struggle with the possibility that you could hurt them? That is sometimes, it's orgasmic sometimes. Yeah. Like some fights, like particular, like Tyrell Biggs or someone that you had problems with, someone that you, you had animosity towards. So when you finally get your hands on them. Hey, what does it mean when fighting gets you, gets you erect? What does that mean? It's a good question. Means you're getting excited. Yeah. So that, that's going through your mind right now. Well, that's how I get when I was a kid and I, you know, sometimes I get the twinkle. The twinkle. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. When you reached a state as a human being, as a champion, as a ferocious fighter, you reached a state of, of ability and of accomplishment that very few humans will ever, ever touch and feel. That's why I'm asking you when you're running, when you're hitting the bag, when that heart's beating again and that you know who you are, you're Mike motherfucking Tyson. So when you're doing all this shit again, you're still Mike Tyson. Those thoughts have got to be burning inside you again. It's got to be pretty wild. I don't know. It's wild, but I believe it's rightfully so to be that way. And I used to know how to, I don't say I'm master, but I used to know how to deal with it. I don't let it overwhelm me. I mean, he goes on to try to, they don't ever, like Joe doesn't bite. The interesting thing about that conversation is Mike was trying to figure himself out. Like he's trying on the spot, like, why do I feel this way? To me it was like, to me it's so real and honest to feel like pleasure from hurting somebody. Like that you rarely hear that. In this society, it's like, you rarely like talk about like you feel pleasure from winning. You feel pleasure from like the relief of overcoming like all the stress you had to go through. Pleasure from just like the specifics of the fight, the techniques you use, the maybe overcoming being down a couple of rounds, but like how often do you hear somebody say, I just enjoyed, he's not even saying because I hate the opponent. He's saying like, I enjoyed purely the violence of it. That's crazy. I mean, I don't know, it's honest. It made me ask, like, I wonder how many of us are cognizant of that. Let's say Mike is uncommonly seemingly honest. I think athletes make a full time job out of lying, you know, I think people make a full time job. To themselves perhaps too. I mean, in some, you tell yourself or you tell others what you feel you need to, or maybe whether you've, whether you even know what you feel you need to, but why should he not, I mean, again, did he, did he run up and just hit somebody that's didn't sign up for this? No, they, they signed up to be there. Well, that's the interesting thing about Dyson is there's that weird, uh, like nonstandard behavior. I mean, like your fighting style is not standard. He's nonstandard to another degree of like, uh, who else has that in Jiu Jitsu, uh, uh, Polaris, uh, uh, has this kind of weirdness, like what's, what's in there? Like there's a fear that I think, uh, most opponents would have because it's like, it's no longer about like, it takes you out of the realm of its game. It takes us back to the thing we were talking about, like before is it strips away that like several layers of Ryan Hall, the, the podcast, uh, guest, Ryan Hall, the Jiu Jitsu instructor, Ryan Hall, Jiu Jitsu competitor, it keeps going down to a point where like Ryan Hall, the murderer of all things that get in his way that lies underneath all of it. Seemingly like if we're like in this society, we put all that aside, but it makes you wonder like now as society is being tested in many ways, it makes you wonder like what's underneath there. Well, do we want, do we want the answer to that? Cause I guess it's, what is it? Uh, you seem Paul Fiction, you know, the best character in the movie and in the best scene in the movie is like, if my questions here, if you're, what do you call it? If my answer is scary, you should cease asking scary questions, you know? And I guess, uh, you wonder, I mean, all of us, that's something that I think it's funny we go, that's not okay, I mean, versus maybe not appropriate for situation X, Y, or Z. But uh, what should make any of us think, I mean, humanity is a different place now. And I mean, I'm not saying anything crazy out there, but humanity is a different place now than we were 5,000 years ago where all of us are descended from people who have killed things with their teeth and fingernails in order to be where we are. And whether it was in, whether it was an animal or it was in conflict with another person, I mean, think about the, the chances of dying by violence now are so, so slim, at least in most countries in most plays, like shockingly small, thankfully. But there was a period of time, like the most period of time where dying by violence was mostly how it went down. And I guess what would be facilitative, what would allow you to win back to Ender's game? You know, what allows you, if you can't do that, you are all, you are forever subject to people who can, and that's, that's a real thing. And you know, we're fortunate to find ourselves in a situation where we don't, where other things matter. But that is a funny thing periodically where people, you'll see people kind of drawn at each other, like in videos or out in the world that clearly neither of them expect this to get serious. Like, I'm just going to yell at you. You're going to yell at me. And it's like this weird LARPing thing where we're both going to go on our own separate way. All it takes is one person to be like, well, I wasn't kidding. And it's like, well, you'll go to jail. And it's like, oh, I know you're going to go to the morgue. And it's, that's, but that can happen like that. Like society. I mean, obviously, anyway, you could jump across the table, stab me in the eye. I mean, I appreciate, I'd hope if you don't, and there will be consequences if you do, but not from, not from me, from, from the rest of society will potentially get you at a certain point, but you can decide to not play by the rules anytime you want. It's fascinating that, yeah, that's, we've created rules based on which we all behave, but underneath there, you know, there, there's things that doesn't, there's motivations and forces that don't play by the rules and still there nature is metal is under the surface. Seriously. And again, I pull out my phone and I'm basically saying like, Hey, I'm going to, you're going to get caught. Yeah. But really I'm further antagonizing you rightly or wrongly. You know what I mean? Like, and that, that's an interesting thing. And I feel like just people need to remember any of us need to remember just for any reason, just that's, that's one step away at all, at all times you ever, I've had people say to me before, like, Oh, I don't feel safe. I'm like, you're not safe. I kill you before you get out of this room. Nothing you do to stop that. Nothing. I mean, but don't worry. You can do the same to me, which means I'm like, Oh, Oh, thank goodness. Can you imagine like how many guns are there are in this country? Like I mean, everywhere, I mean, seriously everywhere, but that's a heartening thought. Not the other way. Cause people usually freak out and go, Oh my God, gun violence, gun violence, gun violence is like really not a serious issue in the United States compared to what it could be. Because it means that, I mean, with the amount of guns and the amount of bullets that are out there that are in circulation, can you imagine if like one in every thousand was used in anger each day? I mean, this would be a terrifying place to live. You couldn't go anywhere. So, I mean, although you could say, Hey, this is more than we'd like or X, Y, Z, it actually means that people are much more reasonable and sane than we're saying then, or then I, then sometimes I might, my might argue. So I guess what I mean is like, Oh man, I walked a seven 11 and I didn't get stabbed. I'm like, Oh, well that's good because not because I protected myself with my karate. It's basically no one decided to run over and stab me because I wasn't protecting myself. It's I, they, they stopped. So I guess we're all fortunate to live in a society that, that like you said, nature being metal doesn't become that big of an issue all the time. But it is funny when you get people in the ring and you go, Hey, let's peel back from Mr. Tyson, many layers of that and say, Hey, now it's okay. And it's cool that, I mean, that's what society is doing. So I've lived in Harvard square for awhile and we add extra layers of what safe means. Like now there's a disc discourse about safe spaces, about like ideas being violence or, or like, uh, you know, like, yeah, but ideas are minor slights against your personality being violence. And that's all like extra layers around the nature is metal thing that, uh, it's cool. That's what progress is. But we can't forget that like underneath it is still, it's still the, the thing that will murder at the, at the drop of, uh, in any, at any moment. If uh, if aroused one, one thing that I find funny though, or ironic maybe about the, uh, the, you know, words of violence, you know, offenses, violence thing is that of course that if that, the belief in that then justifies my violence, like my, and whether it may be in my, maybe not physical violence, but my response to my, my aggressive response to things. And I guess like, which it can be regrets of begets a further aggressive response and like a, you know, kind of a tit for tat sort of situation or, or it goes to like, well, there's 10 of me and there's one of you, so we'll get you and you can't do anything about it. But that's not morality. That's, that's just saying that's might makes right. So I guess again, you can understand why people do it and there are certain, there is a progress aspect to it. But again, I guess without proper examination, I'm effectively with my 10 friends, you know, and, and the force of the law, Mike Tyson and people, but not admitting to myself what I'm doing. And at least Mike Tyson again is honest. Are you, uh, afraid of death? I mean, it's easy for me to say no, as I sit here, probably not about to die, but. Is this like the UFC question, can you defeat any opponent? The answer is of course, yes. And uh, I don't have, they're not around, they're not here, are they? Yeah, exactly. But, uh, I mean, are you, uh, do you ponder your own mortality? Maybe another context to that is you mentioned two deaths for martial artists. I think that's actually why, honestly, even though at a relatively young age, I think mortality is something that I'm aware of more, maybe more than the average person. I think probably most athletes can speak to this and anyone that's had trouble, I've managed to just slide out of a couple of near death experiences personally, you know, mostly river related, um, because I'm an idiot, but, um, I regret nothing, but, uh, yeah, but, uh, thank God we're here. But, um, yeah, it is an interest seeing, seeing the end and seeing going, well, what's going to happen. I guess I think it comes back to kind of what we're discussing about belief structure and belief system. I think a lot of times, if I recognize that no matter what I do, it's all going to end one day and then you go, well, why were we here? What would I do? Am I going to make it to 40? I have no idea. I'd like to hope so that I had no idea that I was going to make it to the age that I am now. Um, am I going to make it to 80? How much of that is in my control? Much of it is not. I mean, it's so funny. It's an interesting, like back to the belief structure again, like locus of internal and external locus of control. You know, what's facilitative versus what's true. And you know, I think accepting personal responsibility for more than is on my control is, is probably a positive, but at the same time, recognizing that much of much is not in my control. I was fortunate enough to be born in the United States, fortunate enough to, you know, to not knock on wood, have, have a serious disease that I'm not aware of right now. Um, I didn't do any of that. I just showed up. That was really fortunate. And I guess that doesn't diminish the fact that I've tried to make decent choices, but it works in concert with it. And I, I guess, um, when I, when you go, is death what I want right now? No, no, I should think not. And again, it's easier for me to be relatively calm about as I'm not staring it in the face, but what I would care a lot more about is, is how you live. That's what's in my control. And I can't control if, as I walk out of this building, a helicopter falls on me worrying about that. I can't control it. Maybe I, maybe I have cancer now and I don't know it and I really hope not. But um, there's something about meditating on the fact that it could end today outside of your control that can clarify your thinking about the, the fact that life is amazing, like just kind of, yeah, helping you enjoy this moment. Even if life was horrible, let's say for instance, it was, it was, you live at one of those times or places and this place is still exists in this world today that life is brutal and metal and whatever all and short and painful. Would you still want it? And again, as I'm sitting here and not, not on fire physically, it's easy to say yes, but I would, I'm confident I still I'll plant my feet and say yes, any of, any life is amazing and beautiful and a gift and unbelievable gift, uh, that none of us have earned for the record. We're, I hate the word earned a lot of times earned yet you earn, but it's like, there's a lot of, a lot of good fortune and earning. And that's back to, do I want justice or do I want grace? And I guess we're all fortunate to be where we are, no matter where we are. And hopefully it should give us some sense of perspective, some sense of compassion for other people. But also like, like you said, a sense of peace, if it all ended right now, would I be happy with what I, with life to this point? I'm like, of course, would you like to live a little longer? Yeah. I would try to do more and try to live rightly to the best that I know how, which over time will hopefully continue to evolve in a, in a positive direction. But if the answer to that is no, I guess, uh, that's, that's always, that's a sign that, that what I'm doing is not what I'm meant to be doing. And I mean, you're familiar with the Tecumseh before, uh, so there's a, I've got one actually, if you could give me 10 seconds, I'll, I'll read this one out. This is a personal favorite basically. And I think it sums up, I mean, again, like it's one of those quotes on the internet, like when Abraham Lincoln said, don't believe everything you read online. Um, but, uh, this is, you know, I, it's again, uh, attributed, but it's like, so live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart, trouble, no one about their religion, respect others in their view and demand that they respect yours, love your life, perfect your life and beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day. When you go over the great divide, always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death so that when their time comes, they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home. Powerful words. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Let me just say, we've spoke maybe five, six years ago. I don't even remember when, but I'm not exaggerating saying like you had a huge impact on my life because of the podcast. You're the reason I was doing the podcast as long as I have. You're the reason I'm doing this podcast. It's a little, it's a stupid little meeting that you probably didn't know who I was. I didn't really know who you are. It was just like a magical moment. It's a flap of a butterfly wing kind of situation. And yeah, I'm forever grateful. You're one of the most inspiring people in my life. So Ryan, it's a huge honor that you would come here. Jen didn't talk with me and waste all this time. I really appreciate it. It was amazing. Thank you so much, Alexis. It's just been a pleasure. I really appreciate you having us on. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Hall. And thank you to our sponsors, PowerDot, Babbel, and Cash App. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Frank Herbert in Dune. Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Ryan Hall: Martial Arts and the Philosophy of Violence, Power, and Grace | Lex Fridman Podcast #125

The following is a conversation with James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, or is always at least in the top two or three. We only had a limited time for this conversation, but I'm sure we'll talk again several times in this podcast. Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Java is the language with which I first learned object oriented programming, and with it, the art and science of software engineering. Also early on in my undergraduate education, I took a course on concurrent programming with Java. Looking back at that time, before I fell in love with neural networks, the art of parallel computing was both algorithmically and philosophically fascinating to me. The concept of a computer in my mind before then was something that does one thing at a time, the idea that we could create an abstraction of parallelism where you could do many things at the same time, while still guaranteeing stability and correctness, was beautiful. While some folks in college took drugs to expand their mind, I took concurrent programming. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps, so go ahead and skip, but please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show sponsored by Public Goods, the one stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy household products. I take their fish oil and use their toothbrush, for example. Their products often have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just beautiful. Some people ask why I wear this black suit and tie. There's a simplicity to it that to me focuses my mind on the most important bits of every moment of every day, pulling only at the thread of the essential in all that life has to throw at me. It's not about how I look, it's about how I feel. That's what design is to me, creating an inner conscious experience, not an external look. Anyway, Public Goods plants one tree for every order placed, which is kind of cool. Visit publicgoods.com slash Lex, or use code Lex at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order. This show is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I chat with the person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I also regularly talk to David Goggins these days, who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet his and my demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence. Everyone is different, but for me, I think suffering is essential for creation, but you can suffer beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. I think therapy can help in whatever form that therapy takes. And I do think that BetterHelp is an option worth trying. They're easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by Express CPM. You can use it to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. I did this recently with Star Trek Discovery and UK Netflix, mostly because I wonder what it's like to live in London. I'm thinking of moving from Boston to a place where I can build the business I've always dreamed of building. London is probably not in the top three, but top 10 for sure. The number one show I've been to is the one that I'm most excited about. The number one choice currently is Austin. For many reasons that I'll probably speak to another time. San Francisco, unfortunately dropped out from the number one spot, but it's still in the running. If you have advice, let me know. Anyway, check out ExpressVPN. It lets you change your location to almost 100 countries and it's super fast. Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. That's expressvpn.com slash LexPod. And now here's my conversation with James Gosling. I've read somewhere that the square root of two is your favorite irrational number. I have no idea where that got started. Is there any truth to it? Is there anything in mathematics or numbers that you find beautiful? Oh, well, there's lots of things in math that's really beautiful. I used to consider myself really good at math and these days I consider myself really bad at math. I never really had a thing for the square root of two, but when I was a teenager, there was this book called The Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, which for some reason I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing. And I started this weird habit of when I was like filling out checks or paying for things with credit cards, I would want to make the receipt add up to a new number. Is there some numbers that stuck with you that just kind of make you feel good? They all have a story and fortunately, I've actually mostly forgotten all of them. Are they, uh, so like 42, uh, well, yeah, I mean, that one 42 is pretty magical. And then the irrationals, I mean, but is there a square root of two story in there somewhere, how did that come about? It's, it's like the only number that has destroyed a religion in which way, well, the, the pathogorians, they, they believed that all numbers were perfect and you could re represent anything as, as a, as a rational number. And, um, in that, in that time period, um, the, this proof came out that there was no, you know, rational fraction whose value was equal to the square root of two. And that, that means nothing in this world, right? Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, in this world is perfect, not even mathematics. Well, it means that your definition of perfect was imperfect. Well then, then there's the Gaitl incompleteness theorems and the 20th century that ruined it once again for everybody. Yeah. Although, although, although Goerl's theorem, um, you know, the lesson I take from Goerl's theorem is not that, you know, there are things you can't know, which is fundamentally what it says. But people want black and white answers. They want true or false. But if you allow a three state logic that is true, false, or maybe, then life's good. I feel like there's a parallel to modern political discourse in there somewhere, but let me ask. So with your kind of early love or appreciation of the beauty of mathematics, do you see a parallel between that world and the world of programming? Programming is all about logical structure, understanding the patterns that come out of computation, understanding sort of, I mean, it's often like the path through the graph of possibilities to find a short route. Meaning like find a short program that gets the job done kind of thing. But so then on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see programming? You just painted it so cleanly. It's a little of this trajectory to find like a nice little program, but do you see it as fundamentally messy? Maybe unlike mathematics? I don't think of it as, I mean, you know, you watch somebody who's good at math do math and you know, often it's fairly messy. Sometimes it's kind of magical. When I was a grad student, one of the students, his name was Jim Sachs, was he had this reputation of being sort of a walking, talking human theorem proving machine. And if you were having a hard problem with something, you could just like accost him in the hall and say, Jim, and he would do this funny thing where he would stand up straight. His eyes would kind of defocus. He'd go, you know, just like something in today's movies. And then he'd straighten up and say n log n and walk away. And you'd go, well, okay, so n log n is the answer. How did he get there? By which time he's, you know, down the hallway somewhere. Yeah, he's just the oracle, the black box that just gives you the answer. Yeah, and then you have to figure out the path from the question to the answer. I think in one of the videos I watched, you mentioned Don Knuth, well, at least recommending his, you know, his book is something people should read. Oh, yeah. But in terms of, you know, theoretical computer science, do you see something beautiful that has been inspiring to you, speaking of n log n, in your work on programming languages, that's in that whole world of algorithms and complexity and, you know, these kinds of more formal mathematical things? Or did that not really stick with you in your programming life? It did stick pretty clearly for me, because one of the things that I care about is being able to sort of look at a piece of code and be able to prove to myself that it works. And, you know, so for example, I find that I'm at odds with many of the people around me over issues about like how you lay out a piece of software, right? You know, so software engineers get really cranky about how they format the documents that are the programs, you know, where they put new lines and where they put, you know. The braces. The braces and all the rest of that, right. And I tend to go for a style that's very dense. Minimize the white space. Yeah, well, to maximize the amount that I can see at once, right? So I like to be able to see a whole function and to understand what it does, rather than have to go scroll, scroll, scroll and remember, right? Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah, that's. And people don't like that. Yeah, I've had, you know, multiple times when engineering teams have staged what was effectively an intervention. You know, where they invite me to a meeting and everybody's arrived before me and they all look at me and say, James, about your coding style, I'm sort of an odd person to be programming because I don't think very well verbally. I am just naturally a slow reader. I'm what most people would call a visual thinker. So when you think about a program, what do you see? I see pictures, right? So when I look at a piece of code on a piece of paper, it very quickly gets transformed into a picture. And, you know, it's almost like a piece of machinery with, you know, this connected to that and. Like these gears and different sizes. Yeah, yeah, I see them more like that than I see the sort of verbal structure or the lexical structure of letters. So then when you look at the program, that's why you want to see it all in the same place, then you can just map it to something visual. Yeah, and it just kind of like, like it leaps off the page at me and. Yeah, what are the inputs, what are the outputs? What the heck is this thing doing? Yeah, yeah. Getting a whole vision of it. Can we go back into your memory? Memory, long term memory access. What's the first program you've ever written? Oh, I have no idea what the first one was. I mean, I know the first machine that I learned to program on. What is it? Was a PDP eight at the University of Calgary. Do you remember the specs? Oh yeah, so the thing had 4K of RAM. Nice. 12 bit words. The clock rate was, it was about a third of a megahertz. Oh, so you didn't even get to the M, okay. Yeah, yeah, so we're like 10,000 times faster these days. 10,000 times faster these days. And was this kind of like a super computer, like a serious computer for. No, the PDP eight I was the first thing that people were calling like mini computer. Got it. They were sort of inexpensive enough that a university lab could maybe afford to buy one. And was there time sharing, all that kind of stuff? There actually was a time sharing OS for that, but it wasn't used really widely. The machine that I learned on was one that was kind of hidden in the back corner of the computer center. And it was bought as part of a project to do computer networking, but they didn't actually use it very much. It was mostly just kind of sitting there and it was kind of sitting there and I noticed it was just kind of sitting there. And so I started fooling around with it and nobody seemed to mind. So I just kept doing that and. And it had a keyboard and like a monitor, are we? Oh, this is way before monitors were common. So it was literally a model 33 teletype with a paper tape reader. Okay, so the user interface wasn't very good. Yeah, it was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits, but by integrated circuits, I mean that they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on one piece of silicon, not the 10 or 12 billion that the machines have today. So what did that, I mean, feel like if you remember those? I mean, did you have kind of inklings of the magic of exponential kind of improvement of Moore's law of the potential of the future that, was that your fingertips kind of thing? Or was it just a cool? Yeah, it was just a toy. I had always liked building stuff, but one of the problems with building stuff is that you need to have parts. You need to have pieces of wood or wire or switches or stuff like that. And those all cost money. And here you could build. You could build arbitrarily complicated things and I didn't need any physical materials. It required no money. That's a good way to put programming. You're right, it's, if you love building things, completely accessible, you don't need anything. Anybody from anywhere could just build something really cool. Yeah, yeah. If you've got access to a computer, you can build all kinds of crazy stuff. And when you were somebody like me who had like really no money, and I mean, I remember just lusting after being able to buy like a transistor. And when I would do sort of electronics kind of projects, they were mostly made, done by like dumpster diving for trash. And one of my big hauls was discarded relay racks from the back of the phone company switching center. Oh, nice. That was the big memorable treasure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a really. What do you use that for? I built a machine that played tic tac toe. Nice. Out of relays. Of course, the thing that was really hard was that all the relays required a specific voltage. But getting a power supply that would do that voltage was pretty hard. And since I had a bunch of trashed television sets, I had to sort of cobble together something that was wrong but worked. So I was actually running these relays at 300 volts. And none of the electrical connections were like properly sealed off. Surprised you survived that period of your life. Oh, for so many reasons. For so many reasons. I mean, it's pretty common for teenage geeks to discover, oh, thermite. That's real easy to make. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you did. But do you remember what program in Calgary that you wrote, anything that stands out? And what language? Well, so mostly anything of any size was assembly code. And actually, before I learned assembly code, there was this programming language on the PDP 8 called Focal 5. And Focal 5 was kind of like a really stripped down Fortran. And I remember building programs that did things like play blackjack or solitaire. Or for some reason or other, the things that I really liked were ones where they were just like plotting graphs. So something with like a function or data, and then you plot it. Yeah. Yeah, I did a bunches of those things and went, ooh, pretty pictures. And so this would like print out, again, no monitors. Right, so it was like on a teletype. Yeah. So it's using something that's kind of like a typewriter. And then using those to plot functions. So when, I apologize to romanticize things, but when did you first fall in love with programming? What was the first programming language? Like as a serious, maybe, software engineer, where you thought this is a beautiful thing? I guess I never really thought of any particular language as being beautiful, because it was never really about the language for me. It was about what you could do with it. And even today, people try to get me into arguments about particular forms of syntax for this or that. And I'm like, who cares? It's about what you can do, not how you spell the word. And so back in those days, I learned like PL1 and Fortran and COBOL, and by the time that people were willing to hire me to do stuff, it was mostly assembly code and PDP assembly code and Fortran code and control data assembly code for the CDC 6400, which was an early, I guess, supercomputer. Even though that supercomputer has less compute power than my phone by a lot. And that was mostly, like you said, Fortran world. That said, you've also showed appreciation for the greatest language ever that I think everyone agrees is Lisp. Well, Lisp is definitely on my list of the greatest ones that have existed. Is it at number one? Or I mean, are you, I mean? You know, the thing is that it's, you know, I wouldn't put it number one, no. Is it the parentheses? What do you not love about Lisp? Well, I guess the number one thing to not love about it is so freaking many parentheses. On the love thing is, you know, out of those tons of parentheses, you actually get an interesting language structure. And I've always thought that there was a friendlier version of Lisp hiding out there somewhere. But I've never really spent much time thinking about it. But, you know, so like up the food chain for me from Lisp is Simula, which a very small number of people have ever used. But a lot of people, I think you had a huge influence, right, on the programming. But in the Simula, I apologize if I'm wrong on this, but is that one of the first functional languages? Or no? No, it was the first object oriented programming language. It's really where object oriented and languages sort of came together. And it was also the language where coroutines first showed up as a part of the language. So you could have a programming style that was, you could think of it as sort of multi threaded with a lot of parallelism. Really? There's ideas of parallelism in there? Yeah. Yeah, so that was back, you know, so the first Simula spec was Simula 67. Like 1967? Yeah. Wow. So it had coroutines, which are almost threads. The thing about coroutines is that they don't have true concurrency. So you can get away without really complex locking. You can't useably do coroutines on the multi core machine. Or if you try to do coroutines on the multi core machine, you don't actually get to use the multiple cores. Either that or you, because you start then having to get into the universe of semaphores and locks and things like that. But in terms of the style of programming, you could write code and think of it as being multi threaded. The mental model was very much a multi threaded one. And all kinds of problems you could approach very differently. To return to the world of Lisp for a brief moment, at CMU you wrote a version of Emacs that I think was very impactful on the history of Emacs. What was your motivation for doing so? At that time, so that was in like 85 or 86. I had been using Unix for a few years. And most of the editing was this tool called ED, which was sort of an ancestor of VI. Is it a pretty good editor, not a good editor? Well, if what you're using, if your input device is a teletype, it's pretty good. It's certainly more humane than TECO, which was kind of the common thing in a lot of the DEC universe at the time. TECO is spelled TK, is that the? No, TECO, T E C O, the text editor and corrector. Corrector, wow, so many features. And the original Emacs came out as, so Emacs stands for editor macros. And TECO had a way of writing macros. And so the original Emacs from MIT started out as a collection of macros for TECO. But then the Emacs style got popular originally at MIT. And then people did a few other implementations of Emacs that were, the code base was entirely different, but it was sort of the philosophical style of the original Emacs. What was the philosophy of Emacs? And by the way, were all the implementations always in C? And then how does Lisp fit into the picture? No, so the very first Emacs was written as a bunch of macros for the TECO text editor. Wow, that's so interesting. And the macro language for TECO was probably the most ridiculously obscure format. If you just look at a TECO program on a page, you think it was just random characters. It really looks like just line noise. So it's kind of like LaTeX or something. Oh, way worse than LaTeX. Way, way worse than LaTeX. But if you use TECO a lot, which I did, TECO was completely optimized for touch typing at high speed. So there were no two character commands. Well, there were a few, but mostly they were just one character. So every character on the keyboard was a separate command. And actually, every character on the keyboard was usually two or three commands because you could hit Shift and Control and all of those things. It's just a way of very tightly encoding it. And mostly what Emacs did was it made that visual. So one way to think of TECO is use Emacs with your eyes closed, where you have to maintain a mental model of a mental image of your document. You have to go, OK, so the cursor is between the A and the E. And I want to exchange those, so I do these things. So it is almost exactly the Emacs command set. Well, it's roughly the same as Emacs command set, but using Emacs with your eyes closed. So part of what Emacs added to the whole thing was being able to visually see what you were editing in a form that matched your document. And a lot of things changed in the command set because it was programmable. It was really flexible. You could add new commands for all kinds of things. And then people rewrote Emacs multiple times in Lisp. There was one done at MIT for the Lisp machine. There was one done for Multics. And one summer, I got a summer job to work on the Pascal compiler for Multics. And that was actually the first time I used Emacs. To write the compilers. You've worked on compilers, too. That's fascinating. Yeah, so I did a lot of work. I spent a really intense three months working on this Pascal compiler, basically living in Emacs. And it was the one written in Mac Lisp by Bernie Greenberg. And I thought, wow, this is just a way better way to do editing. And then I got back to CMU, where we had one of everything and two of a bunch of things and four of a few things. And since I mostly worked in the Unix universe, and Unix didn't have an Emacs, I decided that I needed to fix that problem. So I wrote this implementation of Emacs in C, because at the time, C was really the only language that worked on Unix. And you were comfortable with C as well at that point? Yeah, at that time, I had done a lot of C coding. This was in, like, 86. And it was running well enough for me to use it to edit itself within a month or two. And then it kind of took over the university. And it spread outside. Yeah, and then it went outside. And largely because Unix kind of took over the research community on the ARPANET, and Emacs was kind of the best editor out there. It kind of took over. And there was actually a brief period where I actually had login IDs on every nonmilitary host on the ARPANET. Because people would say, oh, can we install this? And I'd like, well, yeah, but you'll need some help. The days when security wasn't. When nobody cared. Nobody cared. I can ask briefly, what were those early days of ARPANET and the internet like? Did you, again, sorry for the silly question, but could you have possibly imagined that the internet would look like what it is today? Some of it is remarkably unchanged. So one of the things that I noticed really early on when I was at Carnegie Mellon was that a lot of social life became centered around the ARPANET. So things like between email and text messaging. Because text messaging was a part of the ARPANET really early on. There were no cell phones, but you're sitting at a terminal and you're typing stuff. So essentially email, or what is text messaging? Well, just like a one line message. Oh, cool. So like chat. Like chat. So it's like sending a one line message to somebody. And so pretty much everything from arranging lunch to going out on dates was all like driven by social media. Social media. Right, in the 80s. Easier than phone calls, yeah. And my life had gotten to where I was living on social media from the early mid 80s. And so when it sort of transformed into the internet and social media explodes, I was kind of like, what's the big deal? It's just a scale thing. Right, the scale thing is just astonishing. But the fundamentals in some ways remain the same. The fundamentals have hardly changed. And the technologies behind the networking have changed significantly. The watershed moment of going from the ARPANET to the internet. And then people starting to just scale and scale and scale. I mean, the scaling that happened in the early 90s and the way that so many vested interests fought the internet. Oh, interesting. What was the, oh, because you can't really control the internet. Yeah, so who fought the internet? So fundamentally, the cable TV companies and broadcasters and phone companies, at the deepest fibers of their being, they hated the internet. But it was often kind of a funny thing because, so think of a cable company. Most of the employees of a cable company, their job is getting TV shows, movies, whatever, out to their customers. They view their business as serving their customers. But as you climb up the hierarchy in the cable companies, that view shifts because really the business of the cable companies had always been selling eyeballs to advertisers. Right. And that view of a cable company didn't really dawn on most people who worked at the cable companies. But I had various dust ups with various cable companies where you could see in the stratified layers of the corporation that this view of the reason that you have cable TV is to capture eyeballs. So they didn't see it that way. Well, so most of the people who worked at the phone company or at the cable companies, their view was that their job was getting delightful content out to their customers. And their customers would pay for that. Higher up, they viewed this as a way of attracting eyeballs to them. And then what they were really doing was selling the eyeballs that were glued to their content to the advertisers. To the advertisers, yeah. And so the internet was a competition in that sense. Right. They were right. Well, yeah. I mean, there was one proposal that we sent, one detailed proposal that we wrote up back at Sun in the early 90s that was essentially like, look, anybody with internet technologies, anybody can become provider of content. So you could be distributing home movies to your parents or your cousins or who are anywhere else. So anybody can become a publisher. Wow, you were thinking about that already. Netflix, Netflix, YouTube. Yeah, that was like in the early 90s. And we thought, this would be great. And the kind of content we were thinking about at the time was like home movies, kids essays, stuff from grocery stores or a restaurant that they could actually start sending information about. That's brilliant. And the reaction of the cable companies was like, fuck no. Because then we're out of business. What is it about companies that, because they could have just, they could have been ahead of that wave. They could have listened to that. And they could have. They didn't see a path to revenue. Somewhere in there, there's a lesson for big companies, like to listen, to try to anticipate the renegade, the out there, out of the box, people like yourself in the early days writing proposals about what this could possibly be. Well, and that wasn't. If you're in a position where you're making truckloads of money off of a particular business model, the whole thought of leaping the chasm, you can see, oh, new models that are more effective are emerging, so like digital cameras versus film cameras. Why take the leap? Why take the leap? Because you're making so much money off of film. And in my past at Sun, one of our big customers was Kodak. And I ended up interacting with folks from Kodak quite a lot. And they actually had a big digital camera research and digital imaging business, or development group. And they knew that you just look at the trend lines and you look at the emerging quality of these digital cameras. And you can just plot it on the graph. And it's like, sure, film is better today. But digital is improving like this. The lines are going to cross. And the point at which the lines cross is going to be a collapse in their business. And they could see that. They absolutely knew that. The problem is that up to the point where they hit the wall, they were making truckloads of money. And when they did the math, it never started to make sense for them to kind of lead the charge. And part of the issues for a lot of companies for this kind of stuff is that if you're going to leap over a chasm like that, like with Kodak going from film to digital, that's a transition that's going to take a while. We had fights like this with people over smart cards. The smart cards fights were just ludicrous. But that's where visionary leadership comes in, right? Somebody needs to roll in and say, then take the leap. Well, it's partly take the leap, but it's also partly take the hit. Take the hit in the short term. So you can draw the graphs you want that show that if we leap from here, on our present trajectory, we're doing this and there's a cliff. If we force ourselves into a transition and we proactively do that, we can be on the next wave. But there will be a period when we're in a trough. And pretty much always there ends up being a trough as you leap the chasm. But the way that public companies work on this planet, they're reporting every quarter. And the one thing that a CEO must never do is take a big hit. Take a big hit. Over some quarter. And many of these transitions involve a big hit for a period of time, one, two, three quarters. And so you get some companies and like Tesla and Amazon are really good examples of companies that take huge hits. But they have the luxury of being able to ignore the stock market for a little while. And that's not so true today, really. But in the early days of both of those companies, they both did this thing of, I don't care about the quarterly reports. I care about how many happy customers we have. And having as many happy customers as possible can often be an enemy of the bottom line. Yeah, so how do they make that work? I mean, Amazon operated in the negative for a long time. It's like investing into the future. Right. But so Amazon and Google and Tesla and Facebook, a lot of those had what amounted to patient money, often because there's like a charismatic central figure who has a really large block of stock. And they can just make it so. So on that topic, just maybe it's a small tangent, but you've gotten the chance to work with some pretty big leaders. What are your thoughts about on the Tesla side, Elon Musk leadership, on the Amazon side, Jeff Bezos, all of these folks with large amounts of stock and vision in their company? I mean, they're founders, either complete founders or early on folks. And Amazon have taken a lot of leaps. And that probably at the time, people would criticize as like, what is this bookstore thing? Yeah. And Bezos had a vision. And he had the ability to just follow it. Lots of people have visions. And the average vision is completely idiotic, and you crash and burn. The Silicon Valley crash and burn rate is pretty high. And they don't necessarily crash and burn because they were dumb ideas. But often, it's just timing and luck. And you take companies like Tesla, and really, the original Tesla sort of pre Elon was kind of doing sort of OK. But he just drove them. And because he had a really strong vision, he would make calls that were always mostly pretty good. I mean, the Model X was kind of a goofball thing to do. But he did it boldly anyway. There's so many people that just said, there's so many people that oppose them on the door. From the engineering perspective, those doors are ridiculous. They are a complete travesty. But they're exactly the symbol of what great leadership is, which is like, you have a vision, and you just go. If you're going to do something stupid, make it really stupid. And go all in. Yeah. And to Musk's credit, he's a really sharp guy. So going back in time a little bit to Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs was a similar sort of character who had a strong vision and was really, really smart. And he wasn't smart about the technology parts of things. But he was really sharp about the sort of human relationship between the relationship between humans and objects. But he was a jerk. Can we just linger on that a little bit? People say he's a jerk. Is that a feature or a bug? Well, that's the question, right? So you take people like Steve, who was really hard on people. And so the question is, was he needlessly hard on people? Or was he just making people reach to meet his vision? And you could kind of spin it either way. Well, the results tell a story. He, through whatever jerk ways he had, he made people often do the best work of their life. Yeah. Yeah, and that was absolutely true. And I interviewed with him several times. I did various negotiations with him. And even though kind of personally I liked him, I could never work for him. Why do you think that? Can you put into words the kind of tension that you feel would be destructive as opposed to constructive? Oh, he'd yell at people. He'd call them names. And you don't like that? No. No, I don't think you need to do that. Yeah. And I think there's pushing people to excel. And then there's too far. And I think he was on the wrong side of the line. And I've never worked for Musk. I know a number of people who have, many of them have said, and it shows up in the press a lot, that Musk is kind of that way. And one of the things that I sort of loathe about Silicon Valley these days is that a lot of the high flying successes are run by people who are complete jerks. But it seems like there's come this sort of mythology out of Steve Jobs that the reason that he succeeded was because he was super hard on people. And in a number of corners, people start going, oh, if I want to succeed, I need to be a real jerk. And that, for me, just does not compute. I know a lot of successful people who are not jerks, who are perfectly fine people. And they tend to not be in the public eye. The general public somehow lifts the jerks up into the hero status. Right. Well, because they do things that get them in the press. And the people who don't do the kind of things that spill into the press. Yeah, I just talked to Chris Ladner for the second time. He's a super nice guy. Just an example of this kind of individual that's in the background. I feel like he's behind a million technologies. But he also talked about the jerkiness of some of the folks. Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that being a jerk has become a required style. But one thing I maybe want to ask on that is maybe to push back a little bit. So there's the jerk side. But there's also, if I were to criticize what I've seen in Silicon Valley, which is almost the resistance to working hard. So on the jerkiness side, it's so Posty Jobs and Elon kind of push people to work really hard to do. And there's a question whether it's possible to do that nicely. But one of the things that bothers me, maybe I'm just Russian and just kind of romanticize the whole suffering thing. But I think working hard is essential for accomplishing anything interesting, like really hard. And in the parlance of Silicon Valley, it's probably too hard. This idea of that you should work smart, not hard often to me sounds like you should be lazy. Because of course you want to be to work smart. Of course you would be maximally efficient. But in order to discover the efficient path like we're talking about with the short programs, you have to. Well, the smart, hard thing isn't an either or. It's an and. It's an and, yeah. Right. And the people who say you should work smart, not hard, they pretty much always fail. Yeah. Thank you. Right. I mean, that's just a recipe for disaster. I mean, there are counterexamples, but they're more people who benefited from luck. And you're saying, yeah, exactly. Luck and timing, like you said, is often an essential thing. But you're saying you can push people to work hard and do incredible work without being nasty. Yeah, without being nasty. I think Google is a good example of the leadership of Google throughout its history has been a pretty good example of not being nasty and being kind. Yeah. I mean, the twins, Larry and Sergey, are both pretty nice people. Sandra Pichai is very nice. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a culture of people who work really, really hard. Let me ask maybe a little bit of a tense question. We're talking about Emacs. It seems like you've done some incredible work, so outside of Java, you've done some incredible work that didn't become as popular as it could have because of licensing issues and open source issues. Is it, what are your thoughts about that entire mess? Like what's about open source now in retrospect looking back? About licensing, about open sourcing, do you think open source is a good thing, a bad thing? Do you have regrets? Do you have wisdom that you've learned from that whole experience? So in general, I'm a big fan of open source. The way that it can be used to build communities and promote the development of things and promote collaboration and all of that is really pretty grand. When open source turns into a religion that says all things must be open source, I get kind of weird about that because it's sort of like saying some versions of that end up saying that all software engineers must take a vow of poverty, right, as though. It's unethical to have money. Yeah. To build a company, right. And there's a slice of me that actually kind of buys into that because people who make billions of dollars off of a patent, and the patent came from literally a stroke of lightning that hits you as you lie half awake in bed. Yeah, that's lucky. Good for you. The way that that sometimes sort of explodes into something that looks to me a lot like exploitation, you see a lot of that in the drug industry. You know, when you've got medications that cost you like $100 a day, and it's like, no. Yeah, so the interesting thing about the sort of open source, what bothers me is when something is not open source, and because of that, it's a worse product. Yeah. So like, I mean, if I look at your just implementation of Emacs, like that could have been the dominant implementation. Like I use Emacs. That's my main ID. I apologize to the world, but I still love it. And I could have been using your implementation of Emacs. And why aren't I? So are you using the GNU Emacs? I guess the default on Linux is that GNU? Yeah. And that, through a strange passage, started out as the one that I wrote. Exactly. So it still has a, yeah. Well, and part of that was because in the last couple of years of grad school, it became really clear to me that I was either going to be Mr. Emacs forever or I was going to graduate. Got it. I couldn't actually do both. Was that a hard decision? That's so interesting to think about you as a, like it's a different trajectory that could have happened. Yeah. That's fascinating. And maybe I could be fabulously wealthy today if I had become Mr. Emacs, and Emacs had mushroomed into a series of text processing applications and all kinds of stuff. And I would have, you know. But I have a long history of financially suboptimal decisions because I didn't want that life, right? And I went to grad school because I wanted to graduate. And being Mr. Emacs for a while was kind of fun, and then it kind of became not fun. And when it was not fun, there was no way I could pay my rent, right? And I was like, OK, do I carry on as a grad student? I had a research assistantship, and I was sort of living off of that. And I was trying to do my, you know, I was doing all my RA work, all my RA, you know, being grad student work and being Mr. Emacs all at the same time. And I decided to pick one. And one of the things that I did at the time was I went around all the people I knew on the ARPANET who might be able to take over looking after Emacs. And pretty much everybody said, eh, I got a day job. So I actually found two folks and a couple of folks in a garage in New Jersey, complete with a dog, who were willing to take it over. But they were going to have to charge money. But my deal with them was that they would only, that they would make it free for universities and schools and stuff. And they said sure. And you know, that upset some people. So you have some, now I don't know the full history of this, but I think it's kind of interesting. You have some tension with Mr. Richard Stallman over the, and he kind of represents this kind of, like you mentioned, free software, sort of a dogmatic focus on, yeah. All information must be free. Must be free. So what, is there an interesting way to paint a picture of the disagreement you have with Richard through the years? My basic opposition is that when you say information must be free, to a really extreme form that turns into all people whose job is the production of everything from movies to software. They must all take a vow of poverty because information must be free. And that doesn't work for me. And I don't want to be wildly rich. I am not wildly rich. I do OK. But I do actually, I can feed my children. Yeah, I totally agree with you. It does just make me sad that sometimes the closing of the source, for some reason that people that, like a bureaucracy begins to build, and sometimes it doesn't, it hurts the product. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's always sad. And there is a balance in there. There's a balance. And it's not hard over rapacious capitalism. And it's not hard over in the other direction. And a lot of the open source movement, they have been managing to find the path to actually making money. So doing things like service and support works for a lot of people. And there are some ways where it's kind of, some of them are a little perverse. So as a part of things like this Sarbanes–Oxley Act and various people's interpretations of all kinds of accounting principles. And this is kind of a worldwide thing. But if you've got a corporation that is depending on some piece of software, often various accounting and reporting standards say if you don't have a support contract on this thing that your business is depending on, then that's bad. So if you've got a database, you need to pay for support. But there's a difference between the sort of support contracts that the average open source database producer charges and what somebody who is truly rapacious like Oracle charges. Yeah, so it's a balance, like you said. It is absolutely a balance. And there are a lot of different ways to make the math work out for everybody. And the very unbalanced sort of like the winner takes all thing that happens in so much of modern commerce, that just doesn't work for me either. I know you've talked about this in quite a few places, but you have created one of the most popular programming languages in the world. This is a programming language that I first learned about object oriented programming with. I think it's a programming language that a lot of people use in a lot of different places and millions of devices today, Java. So the absurd question, but can you tell the origin story of Java? So a long time ago at Sun in about 1990, there was a group of us who were kind of worried that there was stuff going on in the universe of computing that the computing industry was missing out on. And so a few of us started this project at Sun that really got going. I mean, we started talking about it in 1990, and it really got going in 91. And it was all about what was happening in terms of computing hardware processors and networking and all of that that was outside of the computer industry. And that was everything from the sort of early glimmers of cell phones that were happening then to you look at elevators and locomotives and process control systems in factories and all kinds of audio equipment and video equipment. They all had processors in them, and they were all doing stuff with them. And it sort of felt like there was something going on there that we needed to understand. And So C and C++ was in the air already. Oh, no, C and C++ absolutely owned the universe at that time. Everything was written in C and C++. So where was the hunch that there was a need for a revolution? Well, so the need for a revolution was not about a language. It was just as simple and vague as there are things happening out there. We need to understand them. We need to understand them. And so a few of us went on several somewhat epic road trips. Literal road trips? Literal road trips. It's like get on an airplane, go to Japan, visit Toshiba and Sharp and Mitsubishi and Sony and all of these folks. And because we worked for Sun, we had folks who were willing to give us introductions. We visited Samsung and a bunch of Korean companies. And we went all over Europe. We went to places like Philips and Siemens and Thomson. And what did you see there? For me, one of the things that sort of leapt out was that they were doing all the usual computer things that people had been doing like 20 years before. The thing that really leapt out to me was that they were sort of reinventing computer networking. And they were making all the mistakes that people in the computer industry had made. And since I had been doing a lot of work in the networking area, we'd go and visit Company X. They'd describe this networking thing that they were doing. And just without any thought, I could tell them like the 25 things that were going to be complete disasters with that thing that they were doing. And I don't know whether that had any impact on any of them. But that particular story of repeating the disasters of the computer science industry was there. And one of the things we thought was, well, maybe we could do something useful here with bringing them forward somewhat. But also, at the same time, we learned a bunch of things from these mostly consumer electronics companies. And high on the list was that they viewed their relationship with the customer as sacred. They were never, ever willing to make tradeoffs between for safety. So one of the things that had always made me nervous in the computer industry was that people were willing to make tradeoffs in reliability to get performance. They want faster, faster. It breaks a little more often because it's fast. Maybe you run it a little hotter than you should. Or the one that always blew my mind was the way that the folks at Cray Supercomputers got their division to be really fast was that they did Newton Raphson approximations. And so the bottom several bits of A over B were essentially random numbers. What could possibly go wrong? What could go wrong? And just figuring out how to nail the bottom bit, how to make sure that if you put a piece of toast in a toaster, it's not going to kill the customer. It's not going to burst into flames and burn the house down. So I guess those are the principles that were inspiring. But how did, from the days of Java's called oak, because of a tree outside the window story that a lot of people know, how did it become this incredible, powerful language? Well, so it was a bunch of things. So after all that, the way that we decided that we could understand things better was by building a demo, building a prototype of something. So because it was easy and fun, we decided to build a control system for some home electronics, TV, VCR, that kind of stuff. And as we were building it, we discovered that there were some things about standard practice in C programming that were really getting in the way. And it wasn't exactly because we were writing all this C code and C++ code that we couldn't write it to do the right thing. But one of the things that was weird in the group was that we had a guy whose top level job was he was a business guy. He was an MBA kind of person, think about business plans and all of that. And there were a bunch of things that were kind of, and we would talk about things that were going wrong and things that were going wrong, things that were going right. And as we thought about things like the requirements for security and safety, some low level details and see like naked pointers. Yeah. And so back in the early 90s, it was well understood that the number one source of security vulnerabilities. Was pointers. Was just pointers, was just bugs. And it was like 50%, 60%, 70% of all security vulnerabilities were bugs. And the vast majority of them were like buffer overflows. So you're like, we have to fix this. We have to make sure that this cannot happen. And that was kind of the original thing for me was this cannot continue. And one of the things I find really entertaining this year was, I forget which Rag published it, but there was this article that came out that was sort of the result of an examination of all the security vulnerabilities in Chrome. And Chrome is like a giant piece of C++ code. And 60% or 70% of all the security vulnerabilities were stupid pointer tricks. And I thought, it's 30 years later and we're still there. Still there. And we're still there. And that's one of those slap your forehead and just want to cry moments. Would you attribute, or is that too much of a simplification, but would you attribute the creation of Java to C pointers? Obvious problem. Well, I mean, that was one of the trigger points. Concurrency you've mentioned. Concurrency was a big deal. Because when you're interacting with people, the last thing you ever want to see is the thing like waiting and issues about the software development process. When faults happen, can you recover from them? What can you do to make it easier to create and eliminate complex data structures? What can you do to fix one of the most common C problems, which is storage leaks? And it's evil twin, the freed but still being used piece of memory. You free something and then you keep using it. Oh, yeah. So when I was originally thinking about that, I was thinking about it in terms of safety and security issues. And one of the things I came to understand was that it wasn't just about safety and security, but it was about developer velocity. So and I got really religious about this because at that point, I had spent an ungodly amount of my life hunting down mystery pointer bugs. And two thirds of my time as a software developer was because the mystery pointer bugs tend to be the hardest to find because they tend to be very, very statistical. The ones that hurt, they're like a one in a million chance. But nevertheless, create an infinite amount of suffering. Right. Because when you're doing a billion operations a second, one in a million chance means it's going to happen. And so I got really religious about this thing, about making it so that if something fails, it fails immediately and visibly. And one of the things that was a real attraction of Java to lots of development shops was that we get our code up and running twice as fast. You mean like the entirety of the development process, debugging, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, so if you measure time from you first touch fingers to keyboard until you get your first demo out, not much different. But if you look from fingers touching keyboard to solid piece of software that you could release in production, it would be way faster. And I think what people don't often realize is, yeah, there's things that really slow you down, like the hard to catch bugs probably is the thing that really slows down the entire time. It really slows things down. But also, one of the things that you get out of object oriented programming is a strict methodology about what are the interfaces between things and being really clear about how parts relate to each other. And what that helps with is so many times what people do is they kind of like sneak around the side. So if you've built something and people are using it and you say, well, OK, I built this thing. You use it this way. And then you change it in such a way that it still does what you said it does. It just does it a little bit different. Then you find out that somebody out there was sneaking around the side. They sort of tunneled in a back door. And this person, their code broke. And because they were sneaking through a side door. And normally, the attitude is, dummy. But a lot of times, you can't just slap their hand and tell them to not do that. Because it's some bank's account reconciliation system that some developer decided, oh, I'm lazy. I'll just sneak through the back door. Because the language allows it. I mean, you can't even mad at them. And so one of the things I did that, on the one hand, upset a bunch of people was I made it so that you really couldn't go through back doors. So the whole point of that was to say, if the interface here isn't right, the wrong way to deal with that is to go through a back door. The right way to deal with it is to walk up to the developer of this thing and say, fix it. And so it was kind of like a social engineering thing. And people ended up discovering that that really made a difference in terms of. And a bunch of this stuff, if you're just screwing around writing your own class project scale stuff, a lot of this stuff isn't quite so important because you're both sides of the interface. But when you're building larger, more complex pieces of software that have a lot of people working on them, and especially when they span organizations, having clarity about how that stuff gets structured saves your life. And especially, there's so much software that is fundamentally untestable until you do the real thing. It's better to write good code in the beginning as opposed to writing crappy code and then trying to fix it and trying to scramble and figure out, and through testing, figure out where the bugs are. Yeah, it's like, which shortcut caused that rocket to not get where it was needed to go? So I think one of the most beautiful ideas philosophically and technically is of a virtual machine, a Java virtual machine. Again, I apologize to romanticize things, but how did the idea of the JVM come to be? How to you radical of an idea it is? Because it seems to me to be just a really interesting idea in the history of programming. And what is it? So the Java virtual machine, you can think of it in different ways because it was carefully designed to have different ways of viewing it. So one view of it that most people don't really realize is there is that you can view it as sort of an encoding of the abstract syntax tree in reverse Polish notation. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I could explain it, and that would blow all of our time. But the other way to think of it and the way that it ends up being explained is that it's like the instruction set of an abstract machine that's designed such that you can translate that abstract machine to a physical machine. And the reason that that's important, so if you wind back to the early 90s when we were talking to all of these companies doing consumer electronics, and you talk to the purchasing people, there were interesting conversations with purchasing. So if you look at how these devices come together, they're sheet metal and gears and circuit boards and capacitors and resistors and stuff. And everything you buy has multiple sources. So you can buy a capacitor from here. You can buy a capacitor from there. And you've got kind of a market so that you can actually get a decent price for a capacitor. But CPUs, and particularly in the early 90s, CPUs were all different and all proprietary. So if you use the chip from Intel, you had to be an Intel customer till the end of time. Because if you wrote a bunch of software, when you wrote software using whatever technique you wanted, and C was particularly bad about this because there was a lot of properties of the underlying machine that came through. So you were stuck. So the code you wrote, you were stuck to that particular machine. You were stuck to that particular machine, which meant that they couldn't decide, you know, Intel is screwing us. I'll start buying chips from Bob's Better Chips. This drove the purchasing people absolutely insane that they were welded into this decision. And they would have to make this decision before the first line of software was written. That's funny that you're talking about the purchasing people. So there's one perspective, right? There's a lot of other perspectives that all probably hated this idea. Right. But from a technical aspect, just like the creation of an abstraction layer that's agnostic to the underlying machine from the perspective of the developer, I mean, that's brilliant. Right. Well, and so that's like across the spectrum of providers of chips. But then there's also the time thing because, you know, as you went from one generation to the next generation to the next generation, they were all different. And you would often have to rewrite your software. Oh, you mean generations of machines of different kinds? Yeah. So like one of the things that sucked about a year out of my life was when Sun went from the Motorola 68010 processor to the 68020 processor. Then they had a number of differences. And one of them hit us really hard. And I ended up being the point guy on the worst case of where the new instruction cache architecture hurt us. Well, OK, so I mean, so one of this idea, I mean, OK. So yeah, you articulate a really clear fundamental problem in all of computing. But where do you get the guts to think we can actually solve this? You know, in our conversations with all of these vendors, these problems started to show up. And I kind of had this epiphany because it reminded me of a summer job that I had had in grad school. So back in grad school, my thesis advisor, well, I had two thesis advisors for bizarre reasons. One of them was a guy named Raj Reddy. The other one was Bob Sproul. And Raj, I love Raj. I really love both of them. So the department had bought a bunch of early workstations from a company called Three Rivers Computer Company. And Three Rivers Computer Company was a bunch of electrical engineers who wanted to do as little software as possible. So they knew that they'd need to have compilers and an OS and stuff like that. And they didn't want to do any of that. And they wanted to do that for as close to zero money as possible. So what they did was they built a machine whose instruction set was literally the byte code for UCSD Pascal, the P code. And so we had a bunch of software that was written for this machine. And for various reasons, the company wasn't doing terrifically well. We had all this software on these machines. And we wanted it to run on other machines, principally the VAX. And so Raj asked me if I could come up with a way to port all of this software from the PERC machines to VAXs. And I think what he had in mind was something that would translate from Pascal to C or Pascal to, actually, at those times, pretty much it was you could translate to C or C. And if you didn't like translate to C, you could translate to C. There was, it's like the Henry Ford, any color you want, just as long as it's black. And I went, that's really hard. That's a. And I noticed that, and I was looking at stuff. And I went, oh, I bet I could rewrite the P code into VAX assembly code. And then I started to realize that there were some properties of P code that made that really easy, some properties that made it really hard. So I ended up writing this thing that translated from P code on the Three Rivers PERCs into assembly code on the VAX. And I actually got higher quality code than the C compiler. And so everything just got really fast. It was really easy. It was like, wow, I thought that was a sleazy hack because I was lazy. And in actual fact, it worked really well. And I tried to convince people that that was maybe a good thesis topic. And nobody was, it was like, nah. Really? That's, I mean, it's kind of a brilliant idea, right? Or maybe you didn't have the, you weren't able to articulate the big picture of it. Yeah. And I think that was a key part. But so then clock comes forward a few years. And it's like, we've got to be able to, if they want to be able to switch from this weird microprocessor to that weird and totally different microprocessor, how do you do that? And I kind of went, oh, maybe by doing something kind of in the space of Pascal P code, I could do multiple translations to multiple translators. And I spent some time thinking about that and thinking about what worked and what didn't work when I did the P code to Vax translator. And I talked to some of the folks who were involved in Smalltalk because Smalltalk also did a bytecode. And then I kind of went, yeah, I want to do that. Because that actually, and it had the other advantage that you could either interpret it or compile it. And interpreters are usually easier to do, but not as fast as a compiler. So I figured, good, I can be lazy again. Sometimes I think that most of my good ideas are driven by laziness. And often I find that some of people's stupidest ideas are because they're insufficiently lazy. They just want to build something really complicated. And it's like, it doesn't need to be that complicated. Yeah, and so that's how that came out. But that also turned into almost a religious position on my part, which got me in several other fights. So one of the things that was a real difference was the way that arithmetic worked. And once upon a time, it wasn't always just two's complement arithmetic. There were some machines that had one's complement arithmetic, which was like almost anything built by CDC. And occasionally, there were machines that were decimal arithmetic. And I was like, this is crazy. Pretty much two's complement integer arithmetic has one. So just do that. One of the other places where there was a lot of variability was in the way that floating point behaved. And that was causing people throughout the software industry much pain because you couldn't do a numerical computing library that would work on CDC and then have it work on an IBM machine and work on a DEC machine. And as a part of that whole struggle, there had been this big body of work on floating point standards. And this thing emerged that came to be called IEEE 754, which is the floating point standard that pretty much has taken over the entire universe. And at the time I was doing Java, it had pretty much completed taking over the universe. There were still a few pockets of holdouts, but I was like, it's important to be able to say what two plus two means. And so I went that. And one of the ways that I got into fights with people was that there were a few machines that did not implement IEEE 754 correctly. Well, of course, that's all short term kind of fights. I think in the long term, I think this vision is one out. Yeah, and I think it's worked out over time. I mean, the biggest fights were with Intel because they had done some strange things with rounding. They'd done some strange things with their transcendental functions, which turned into a mushroom cloud of weirdness. And in the name of optimization, but from the perspective of the developer, that's not good. Well, their issues with transcendental functions were just stupid. OK, so that's not even a trade off. That's just absolutely. Yeah, they were doing range reduction for sine and cosine using a slightly wrong value for pi. Got it. We've got 10 minutes. So in the interest of time, two questions. So one about Android and one about life. So one, I mean, we could talk for many more hours. I hope eventually we might talk again. But I got to ask you about Android and the use of Java there because it's one of the many places where Java just has a huge impact on this world. Just on your opinion, is there things that make you happy about the way Java is used in the Android world? And are there things that you wish were different? I don't know how to do a short answer to that. But I have to do a short answer to that. So I'm happy that they did it. Java had been running on cell phones at that time for quite a few years. And it worked really, really well. There were things about how they did it. And in particular, various ways that they kind of violated all kinds of contracts. The guy who led it, Andy Rubin, he crossed a lot of lines. There's some lines crossed. Yeah, lines were crossed that have since mushroomed into giant court cases. And they didn't need to do that. And in fact, it would have been so much cheaper for them to not cross lines. I mean, I suppose they didn't anticipate the success of this whole endeavor. Or do you think at that time it was already clear that this is going to blow up? I guess I sort of came to believe that it didn't matter what Andy did, it was going to blow up. I kind of started to think of him as a manufacturer of bombs. Yeah, some of the best things in this world come about through a little bit of explosive. Well, and some of the worst. And some of the worst, beautifully put. And like you said, I mean, does that make you proud that Java is in millions? I mean, it could be billions of devices. Yeah, well, I mean, it was in billions of phones before Android came along. And I'm just as proud of the way that the smart card standards adopted Java. And everybody involved in that did a really good job. And that's billions and billions. That's crazy. The SIM cards, the SIM cards in your pocket. I've been outside of that world for a decade. So I don't know how that has evolved. But it's just been crazy. So on that topic, let me ask, again, there's a million technical things we could talk about. But let me ask the absurd, the old philosophical question about life. What do you hope when you look back at your life and the people talk about you, write about you 500 years from now, what do you hope your legacy is? People not being afraid to take a leap of faith. I mean, I've got this kind of weird history of doing weird stuff. And it worked out pretty damn well. It worked out. And I think some of the weirder stuff that I've done has been the coolest. And some of it crashed and burned. And I think well over half of the stuff that I've done has crashed and burned, which has occasionally been really annoying. But still, you kept doing it. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And even when things crash and burn, you at least learn something from it. By way of advice, people, developers, engineers, scientists, or just people who are young, to look up to you, what advice would you give them how to approach their life? Don't be afraid of risk. It's OK to do stupid things once. Maybe a couple of times you get a pass on the first time or two that you do something stupid. The third or fourth time, yeah, not so much. But also, I don't know why, but really early on, I started to think about ethical choices in my life. And because I'm a big science fiction fan, I got to thinking about just about every technical decision I make in terms of, are you building Blade Runner or Star Trek? Which one's better? Which future would you rather live in? So what's the answer to that? Well, I would sure rather live in the universe of Star Trek. Star Trek, yeah. That opens up a whole topic about AI, but that's a really interesting idea. So your favorite AI system would be data from Star Trek. And my least favorite would easily be Skynet. Yeah. Beautifully put. I don't think there's a better way to end it, James. I can't say enough how much of an honor it is to meet you, to talk to you. Thanks so much for wasting your time with me today. Not a waste at all. Thanks, James. All right, thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Gosling, and thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, BetterHelp, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from James Gosling. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and the Early Days of Computing | Lex Fridman Podcast #126

The following is a conversation with Joe Rogan that we recorded after my recent appearance on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Joe has been a inspiration to me and I thank to millions of people for just being somebody who puts love out there in the world and being genuinely curious about wild ideas from chimps and psychedelics to quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence. Like many of you, I've been a fan of his podcast for over a decade and now, somehow, miraculously, am humbled to be able to call him a friend. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. Today's sponsors are Neuro, Eight Sleep, Dollar Shave Club, and Olive Garden, home of the Unlimited Breadsticks and Brian Redband's favorite restaurant. Check out the first three of the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. I usually do full ad reads here and never ads in the middle but this time, I'll just go straight to the conversation with a bit of guitar first. ["The Unlimited Breadsticks and Dollar Shave Club"] Do you ponder your mortality? Are you afraid of death? I do think about it sometimes. I mean, it does pop into my head sometimes, just the fact that, I mean, I'm 53, so if everything goes great, I have less than 50 years left. If everything goes great, like no car accidents, no injuries. But it could happen today. This could be your last day. Could be. That's kind of a stoic thing to meditate on death. There's a bunch of philosophers, Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon, they believe that death is at the core of everything. Wrote this book, Warm at the Core. So does that come into play in the way you see the world? I think having a sense of urgency is very beneficial and understanding that your time is limited can aid you greatly. I think knowing that this is a temporary time, that we have finite lifespans, I think there's great power in that because it motivates you, it gets you going. I think being an immortal, living forever would be one of the most depressing things, particularly if everybody else was dying around you. And I think one of the things that makes life so interesting and fascinating is that it doesn't last. You know, that you really get a brief amount of time here and really by the time you're just starting to kind of figure yourself out, who you are and how not to screw things up so bad, like, time's up. The ride's over. What about from your, like, from your daughter's perspective? Do you think about the world we're in now and what kind of world you're gonna leave them? I do. And do you worry about it? I do, yeah, I do. I do when I see these protests and riots and chaos and so much, so much anger in the world today. And then particularly today, I think because of the pandemic and the fact that so many folks are out of work and through no fault of their own and can't make ends meet and these people feel so helpless and angry, it's a particularly divisive time. It's a particularly turmoil filled time. And it just doesn't seem like the world of a year ago even. It feels very chaotic and dangerous. And it's a small thing, like in terms of the possibilities of things that could happen to the world, like a pandemic like the one we've experienced, it really just doubles the amount of deaths on a bad flu year. So it's relatively speaking is a small thing in comparison to super volcano eruptions, asteroid impact, a real horrific pandemic or one that really wipes out millions and millions of people. It's stunning how fragile civility is. It's stunning how fragile our society really is that something like this can come along, some unprecedented thing, unprecedented thing can come along and all of a sudden everybody's out of work for six months and then everybody's at each other's throats. And then politically everyone's at each other's throats. And then with the advent of social media and the images that you can see with the videos of police abuse and just racial tensions are at an all time high to a point where like, if you asked me just five or six years ago, like have racial problems in this country largely been alleviated, I'd probably say, yeah, it's way better than it's ever been before. But now you could argue that it's not. Now you could argue it's no, it's way worse in just a small amount of time. It's way worse than it's ever been during my lifetime while I'm aware of it. Obviously when I was a young boy in the 60s, they were still going through the civil rights movement, but now it just seems very fever pitched. And I think a lot of that is because of the pandemic and is because of all the heightened just tension. What I liken it to is road rage. Cause you know, people have road rage, not just because they're in the car and no one can get to them, but also because you're at a heightened state because you're driving fast and you know you're driving fast. You know, you have to make split second movements. And so anybody doing something, you're like, what the people go crazy because they're already at an eight because they're in the car and they're moving very quickly. That's what it feels like with today with the pandemic feels like everybody is already at an eight. So anything that comes along, it's like light it all on fire, you know, burn it down. Like that's part of what I think is part of the reason for a lot of the looting and the riots and all the chaos. It's not just the people that are at work, but it's also that everyone feels so tense already and everyone feels so helpless. And it's like, you know, doing something like that makes people, it just, it gives people a whole new motivation for chaos, a whole new motivation for doing destructive things that I've never experienced in my life. And your better days when you see a positive future, what do you think is the way out of this chaos of 2020? Like if you visualize a 2025, that's a better world than today. What is that? How do we get there and what does that look like? It's a good question. I can honestly say I don't know. And I wouldn't have said I don't know a year ago. A year ago, I would have said, we're gonna be okay. As much as people hate Trump, the economy is doing great. I think we're gonna be fine. That's not how I feel today. Today, I don't think there's a clear solution politically because I think if Trump wins, people are gonna be furious. And I think if Biden wins, people are gonna be furious. Particularly like if things get more woke, if people continue to enforce this force compliance and make people behave a certain way and act a certain way, which seems to be a part of what this whole woke thing is. The most disturbing for me is that I see what's going on. I see there's a lot of losers that have hopped on this and they shove it in people's faces and it doesn't have to make sense. Like there was a Black Lives Matter protest that stopped this woman at a restaurant. They were surrounding her outside a restaurant. They were forcing her to raise her fist in compliance. This is a woman who's marched for Black Lives multiple times, Black Lives Matter multiple times. And the people all around her doing this were all white. It's all weird. My friend, Coach T, he's a wrestling coach, is also on a podcast, my friend, Brian Moses. His take on it is that black, and he's a black guy. He says, Black Lives Matter is a white cult. And I'm like, when you see that picture, it's hard to argue that he's got a point. I mean, it's clearly not all about that, but there's a lot of people that have jumped on board that are very much like cult members. Because the thing about Black Lives Matter or any movement is you can't control who joins. There's no entrance examination. So you don't go, okay, how do you feel about this? What's your perceptions on that? Like the man who shot the Trump supporter in Portland, that guy who murdered the Trump supporter then the cops shot him. That guy was walking around with his hand on his gun looking for Trump supporters. Just want, I mean, he's a known violent guy who was walking around looking for Trump supporters, found one and shot one. That has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter. He's a white guy, he shot another white guy. It's just madness. And that kind of madness is, it's disturbing to see it ramp up so quickly. I mean, there's been riots in Portland every night. Oh, excuse me, demonstrations for 101 days now. 101 days in a row of them lighting things on fire, breaking into federal buildings. It's like, whoever saw that coming? Nobody saw that coming. So I don't know what the solution is and I don't know what it looks like in five years. But 2025, to answer your question, like it could be anything. I mean, we could be looking at Mad Max. We could be looking at the apocalypse. We could also be looking at an invasion from another country. We could be looking at a war, like a real hot war. To put a little bit of responsibility on you, like for me, I've listened to you since the Red Band, Olive Garden days, that's the very beginning. And there was something in the way you communicated about the world, maybe there was others, but you're the one I was aware of, is you're open minded and like loving towards the world, especially as the podcast developed. Like you just demonstrated and lived this kind of just kindness, or maybe even like lack of jealousy in your own little profession of comedy. It was clear that you didn't succumb to the weaker aspects of human nature and thereby inspire like people like me, who I was naturally, probably especially in like the 20s, early 20s, kind of jealous on the success of others. And you're really the primary person that taught me to truly celebrate the success of others. And so by way of question, you kind of have a role in this of making a better 2025. You have such a big megaphone. Is there something you think you can do on this podcast with the words, the way you talk, the things you discuss that could create a better 2025? I think if anything, I could help in leading by example, but that's only gonna help the people that are listening. I don't know what else I can do in terms of like make the world a better place, other than express my hopes and wishes for that and just try to be as nice as I can to people as often as I can. But I also think that I've fallen into this weird category, particularly with the Spotify deal, where I'm one of them now. I'm not a regular person anymore. Now I'm like some famous rich guy. So you go from being a regular person to a famous rich guy that's out of touch. And that's a real issue whenever you're talking about the economy, about just real life problems. It's interesting. It kind of hurts my heart to hear people say about Elon Musk, he's just a billionaire. It's an interesting statement. But I think if you just continue being you and he continue being him, I think people are just voicing their worry that you become some rich guy. I don't even know if they're doing that. I think they're just finding, the way he describes it, an attack vector. Yeah, and I think he's right. I think they can dismiss you by just saying, oh, you're just a that. You're easily definable. Right, but there's truth to that. If you're not careful, you can become out of touch. But that's an interesting thing. Why haven't you become out of touch? As a human off the podcast, you don't act like a, like you talk to somebody like me. You don't talk like a famous person or you don't act rich, like you're better than others. There's a certain, listen, I've talked to quite a few, you have too, but I've talked to a special kind of group of people that are like Nobel Prize winners, let's say. They sometimes have an air to them that's of arrogance. And you don't, what's that about? Well, you gotta know what that is, right? Like that air of arrogance comes from drinking your own Koolaid. You start believing that somehow or another, just because you're getting praise from all these people, that you really are something different. Usually it exemplifies, there's something there where there's a lack of struggle. And I think a struggle is probably one of the most important balancing tools that a person can have. And for me, I struggle mentally and I struggle physically. I struggle mentally in that, like we were talking about on the podcast we did previously, you and I on my podcast said, I'm not a fan of my work. I'm not a fan of what I do. I'm my harshest critic. So anytime anybody says something bad about me, I'm like, listen, I said way worse about myself. I don't like anything I do. I'm ruthlessly introspective. And I will continue to be that way. Cause that's the only way you could be good as a comedian. There's no other way. You can't just think you're awesome and just go out there. You have to be like picking apart everything you do. But there's a balance to that too, cause you have to have enough confidence to go out there and perform. You can't think, oh my God, I suck. I know what I'm doing, but I know what I'm doing because I put in all that work. And one of the reasons why I put in all that work is I don't like the end result most of the time. So I need to work at it all the time. And then there's physical struggle, which I think balances everything out. Without physical struggle, I always make the analogy that the body is in a lot of ways like a battery, where if you have extra charge, it's like it leaks out of the top and it becomes unmanageable and messy. And that's how my psyche is. If I have too much energy, if I'm not exerting myself in a violent way, like an explosive way, like wearing myself out, I just don't like the way the world is. I don't like the way I interface with the world. I'm too tense. I'm too quick to be upset about things. But when I work out hard and I put in a brutal training session, everything's fine. Well, the first time I talked to you, Jerry, you were doing Sober October. And there's something in your eyes, like I think you've talked about that you exercise the demons out essentially. So you exercise to get whatever the parts of you that you don't like out. There's a darkness in you there, like the competitiveness and the focus of that person. That was a scary time in a lot of ways, that Sober October thing. Because my friends, we were all talking shit, right? Because we're competing against each other in these fitness challenges. And you had one point, like you got a certain amount of points for each minute that you went at 80% of your max heart rate. And one day I got 1100 points. So I did seven hours on an elliptical machine watching the bathhouse scene from John Wick where he murders all those people in the bathhouse. I watched it probably 50 times in a row. I went crazy. I went crazy, but I went crazy in a weird way where it brought me back to my fighting days. It was like the same, that person came out again. It was like, well, I didn't even know he was in there. It's like they're like an assassin, like a killer. Like I felt like a different person. Is it echoes of like what Mike Tyson talked about essentially? Like the... Maybe, but no orgasm in the oceans. All the crazy shit that he was saying. Is there a violent person in there? Oh yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of violence in me for sure. I don't know if it's genetic or learned or it's because during my formative years from the time I was 15 till I was 22, all I did was fight. That was all I did. That was all I did. All I did was train and compete. That's all I did. That was my whole life. Is it connected to... So your mom and dad broke up early on. Is it connected to the dad at all? I'm sure it's connected to him also because he was violent and it made me feel very scared to be around him. But I also think it's connected in who he was as a human is transferred into my DNA. I think there's a certain amount of... I mean, to be prejudiced against myself, I look like a violent person. If I didn't know me, even the way I'm built, not even just the working out part, just the size of my hands and there's the width of my shoulders. There's most likely a lot of violence in my history, in my past, in my ancestry. And I think we minimize that with people. So much of your behavior, when I see my daughter, I have one daughter that's obsessive in terms of she wants to get really good at things and she'll practice things all day long. And it's 100% my personality. She's me in female form. But without the anger as much and without the fear, she has loving household and everything like that. But she has this intense obsession with doing things and doing things really well and getting better. What's the point? We have to tell her, stop doing hand springs in the house. Stop, stop, come on, just sit down, have dinner. Like one more, one more. Like she's just like, she's psycho. And I think there's a lot of behavior and personality and a lot of these things are passed down through genetics. We don't really know, right? We don't know how much of who you are genetically is learned behavior, nature or nurture. We don't know if it's learned behavior or whether or not it's something that's intrinsically a part of you because of who your parents were. I think there's certainly some genetic violence in me. There's certainly. And then you channeled it. So you figured out it's basically your life is a productive exploration of how to channel that. Yes, how to figure out how to get that monkey to sit down and calm down. There's another person in there. Like there's a calm, rational, kind, friendly person who just wants to laugh and have fun. And then there's that dude who comes out when I did Sober October. That guy's scary. I don't like that guy. That guy just wants to get up in the morning and go. It's like, I mean, when I was competing, it was necessary. But it makes me remember. I didn't really remember what I used to be like until that. It's like when I'm working out seven hours a day and just so obsessed. And all I was thinking about was winning. That's all I was thinking about. Like if they were working out five hours a day, I wanted them to know that I was gonna work out an extra three hours and I was gonna get up early and I was gonna text them all. Hey, pussies, I'm up already. Take pictures, send selfies. I was like, you're gonna die. I kept telling them, you're all gonna die. You try to keep up with me, you're gonna die. You weren't fully joking. No, I wasn't joking at all. That's what was fucked up about it. This is the scary thing when I interacted with Goggins and what I saw in you during that time is like, this guy, like, this is why I've been avoiding David Ganga's recently. Is like, cause he wants to meet, he wants to talk on this podcast, but he also wants to run an ultra marathon with me. And I felt like this is a person, if I spend any time in this realm, if I spend any time with a Joe Rogan of that sober October, like, I might have to die to get out. Like, there's this kind of... Yeah, there's a competitive aspect that's super unhealthy. I mean, you saw the video that we watched earlier today of Goggins draining his knee. That would stop me from running ever again because I would think in my head, okay, I'm gonna ruin my cartilage. I'm gonna need a knee replacement. I would start thinking, I would go down that line, but he is perpetually in this push it mindset, what he calls the dog in him. That dog is in him all day long and he feeds that dog. And that's who he is. That's one of the reasons why he's so inspirational and he's fuel for millions and millions of people. I mean, he really is. He motivates people in a way that is so powerful, but it can be very destructive. I know now, especially after the sober October thing, that that thing's still in me. I didn't know, so I really haven't done anything physically competitive, except one time I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes. It came out then too. That came out too. That got creepy too, but luckily that never happened. But that was many months of training, like training twice a day, every day, kickboxing in the morning, jiu jitsu at night. I was just going and going and going and going. And I was just thinking just all day long. But it fucks with all the other aspects of your life. It fucks with your friendships. It fucks with my comedy. It fucks with everything. Because that mindset is not a mindset of an artist. It's a mindset of a conqueror. The conqueror. Yeah. Destroyer. That's why it's so interesting to see Mike Tyson make the switch. It's clear that whatever that is, however that fight goes, there's a switch. He stepped into a different dimension. Roy Jones Jr. is coming on my podcast soon. And Roy's going to be on before the fight. I'm so curious to see how it goes down, but genuinely concerned. Because Mike Tyson is a heavyweight. And Roy Jones at his best was 168 pounds. And that's a lot. I don't know if Roy has that room in his house, mental house, of where Mike Tyson goes. I don't know. I don't know if he has that room. Mike doesn't have a room. He's got an empire in there. He opens up the door. He opens up the door. There's a whole empire in his head. And he's in that firmly. When he got out of the weed and started training again, you could see it in him. And by the way, physically, in person, he looks spectacular. He looks like a fucking Adonis. I mean, he looks ready to go. It's crazy. Yeah, I watch his videos of him. What about you? Have you ever considered competing in jiu jitsu? No, for that very reason. I don't want to get obsessed. That's my number one concern. I had to quit video games when we were playing video games in the studio. I had to quit because I was playing five hours a day, like out of nowhere. All of a sudden, I was playing five hours a day. I was coming home late for dinner. I was ending podcasts early and jumping on the video games and playing. I get obsessed with things. And I have to recognize what that is and these competitive things, like competitive, especially like really exciting competitive things like video games. They're very dangerous for me. The ultimate competitive video game is like jiu jitsu. And if I was young, I most certainly would have done it. If I didn't have a very clear career path, it was something that I enjoyed. My concern would be that I would become a professional jiu jitsu fighter when I was young. And then I would not have the energy to do stand up and do all the other things that I wound up doing as a career. When I was 21, I quit my job teaching. I was teaching at Boston University. I was teaching Taekwondo there. And I knew, and I also had my own school in Revere. I knew I couldn't do it right. And also be doing stand up comedy. I knew I couldn't do both of those things. There was no way. You have to be cognizant of that obsessive force within you to make sure. Yes, I'd have to know how to manage my mental illness. That's a very particular mental illness. And I think that mental illness, again, my formative years from 15 until I was 21ish, 22, those years were spent constantly obsessed with martial arts. That was my whole day. I mean, I trained almost every day. The only time I would not train is if I was either injured or if I was exhausted, if I needed a day off. But I was obsessed. And so that part of my personality that I haven't nurtured is always going to be there under the surface. And when it gets reignited by something, it's very weird. It's a weird feeling. And it can get reignited with a video game. It can get reignited with anything. That obsessive whatever it is, that competitive demon. Yeah, the way you talk about guitar, I know you would fall in love with playing guitar. But I think you're very wise to not touch that thing. That's why I won't golf. I have friends who want to golf. I'm like, mm mm, I don't fucking want that thing. So a lot of people ask me like, what's Joe Rogan's jiu jitsu game like? Like assuming that I somehow spend hours rolling with you before and after a track. I mean, what's a good, you should at some point show a technique or something. That'd be fun. Sure, I mean, I've got this technique online. Oh, I saw you doing, I think, head and arm something online. Yeah, I did. I fucked my neck up doing head and arm chokes. I did them so much that I, because you use your neck so much with head and arm chokes, I developed like a real kink in my neck. And it turned out I had a bulging disc. And, you know. So you do it on that, just one side? Well, it was, no, I could do it on the left side, but I definitely am better on the right side. The right side was my best side. So if you were to compete, let's say, like what's your A game? Where would you go from standing up? How would you go to submission? Would you pull guard, would you take down? How would you pass guard? I don't have good takedowns. I was not a good wrestler. So I would most likely either pull guard or I would pull half guard. Do you have a good guard? Yes. Are you comfortable being on your butt, on your back? Yes, I'm very flexible. So I have a good, my rubber guard is pretty good. You go to rubber guard. Yeah, I have good arm bars and good triangles off my back. But I also have a very good half guard, but my top game is my best. I have a very strong top game. Do you have a half guard? Do you have a preference of like what kind of guard and how to pass that guard? And like, yeah, like, is there a specific game plan? Like, do you? Double underhooks from half guard is the game plan for me. If I can get double underhooks from half guard, I could sweep a lot of people. Underhooks of what? Sorry, the arms or the legs? So half guard, lockdown, right? Half guard, go into lockdown, double underhooks. Got it. Suck the body, suck the body. Just pressure. And yeah, massive pressure. And then inch my way into a position we call the dog fight and inch my way to a position where I could get the person on their back. Yeah, that's what, cause you did show me, I still disagree with you about the tie thing. The tie. That you can choke somebody with it. Oh, tie is wrong. So wrong, so wrong. Well, it's not wrong with you. With you, it's wrong. Cause you know. No, I think there's a system. I have this thing, Madonna hair, we're gonna figure it out. Okay. But the. There's Velcro on the back. No, but see, that's, you're just not the. You're cheating. You're not, you're the exact, that's cheating. Yeah, you did, I did feel when you showed me, I think you showed me the rubber guard cause it's still a guard. That's a little bit foreign to me. I just felt that you can immediately feel, not with the rubber guard, but the way you move your body is, you're like a Shanji type of guy who knows how to control another human being. So like some people are a little bit more, I would say agile and technical, like playful and kind of. Loose. Loose and they work on transition, transition, transition. You're a control guy. Like you know how to control position and advanced position. Donna hair is the same way. He's all about control. My game is smush. That's my game. Smush you, grab a hold of you. Once I have you, why would I let you go? That's my thought is like, why would I let you go? I just wanna incrementally move to a better position until I can strangle you. But I'm much more into strangling people than anything else. Yeah, which is a great MMA approach for jiu jitsu. Well, too many people don't tap when you get their arms. And I'm not opposed to arm bars. I love arm bars, but everybody goes to sleep. And quit from pressure too. I mean, quit mentally. There's nothing like that. You can't breathe. If you've got a guy who's like a really good top game guy and he mounts you, and I'm a big fan of mounting with my legs crossed, like a guard, like a top guard. And so I can squeeze with both legs, smush. And I'm just looking for people to make mistakes and slowly incrementally bettering my position until I can get something locked up. I love jiu jitsu though, man. I just wish it didn't injure you. Jiu jitsu is like, if your joints were more durable, they could figure out a way to make joints more durable. God, I could do jiu jitsu forever. So much fun. I actually, I talked to this roboticist, Russ Tedrick. He builds, he's one of the world class people that builds humanoid robots. You were interested in Boston Dynamics. He's one of the key people in that kind of robotics. So I asked him the stupidest question of like, how far are we from having a robot be a UFC champion? And yeah, it's actually a really, really tough problem. It's the same thing that makes somebody like Danielle Comey on the wrestling side special, because you have to understand the movement of the human body in ways that's so difficult to teach. It's so subtle. The timing, the pressure points, the leverage, all those kinds of things. That's just for the clinch situation. And then the movement for the striking is very difficult. As long as you're not allowed as a robot to use your natural abilities of having a lot more power. Right, a lot more power and more durable. Right. The human body, like especially meniscus. Like you see the heel hook game, like everybody's involved in leg locks and heel hooks. Like all those guys wind up with torched knees. Everyone's got torched knees. Everyone's knees are torn apart. And you don't grow new meniscus. You know, that's like one of those joints where, man, when it goes, those guys are 28 years old, they've blown out knees. Let me ask the ridiculous question. What do you think, we're talking about cops, what do you think is the best martial arts self defense? For sure, jiu jitsu. Yeah, for sure. Wrestling? I think grappling, I should say. Judo as well, especially in a cold climate, if you get someone who's got like a heavy winter jacket on, my God, like judo's an incredible martial art. Plus concrete. That's the worst place to be, with a heavy winter jacket with a judo specialist and you're standing up with them, oh my God. But I think grappling, because in most self defense situations, it usually winds up with grappling. You're definitely better off, though, knowing some striking, because there's nothing more terrifying than when you go to take someone down, they actually have takedown skills, but they can fight. And so they have takedown defense and they know how to fight, and then you don't know how to stand up. Like the worst thing in the world is seeing someone like reaching who doesn't know how to do striking and someone cracks you. What about all that Krav Maga talk, which is like, you know, the whole line of argument that says that jiu jitsu and wrestling and all of these sports, they fundamentally take you away from the nature of violence. So they're just teaching you how to play versus the reality of violence that is involved in like a self defense situation that is a totally different set of skills would be needed. In general, the people that say that jiu jitsu or other martial arts, it's more of a sport and they don't really understand violence. In general, the people that say that suck. Anybody who thinks like, someone's like, you know, hey man, I'll just bite you. I'm like, are you gonna bite me? Okay. Do you think I'm gonna bite you too? What do you think of that? What if I punch you in your fucking face? You think you're still gonna bite me when you can't even see? When you barely even know you're alive and I choke you unconscious? If someone's really good at jiu jitsu, good luck stabbing them with your keys. You know, you don't have a chance. You don't have a chance. If someone's much better than you and they trip you and get you on your back and then they fucking elbow you in your face and then get a head and arm choke on you, all that crap, my gosh, it's out the window, son. You're way better off learning what works on trained killers. Like this whole idea that you're gonna poke someone in the eye and then you're gonna kick them in the nuts. Like you're going through these drills that yeah, it's good to know what to do if you run into someone who doesn't know how to fight. It's way better to know what to do to someone who knows how to fight. That's the best thing. Learn how to fight against people who know how to fight. Like all that practice self defense and they go, it's gonna come at you with a knife. You're gonna grab the wrist and do that. Like it's good to know self defense, but it's much more important to understand martial arts comprehensively. When you understand martial arts comprehensively, like there's no, I shouldn't say there's no Krav Maga guys, but it would be shocking if a Krav Maga guy and a mixed martial arts guy had a fight and the mixed martial arts guy who's a trained killer all around didn't fuck that guy up. That's what I would expect would happen. I would not think that some guy who has a little bit of this and a little bit of that and prepares for the streets is gonna be able to handle a person who trains with killers on a day to day basis, who rolls with jujitsu black belts, who trains with Muay Thai champions. Like the best martial arts are the martial arts that work on martial artists, not the martial arts that work on untrained people. What about, we're in Texas now. What about guns? Well, that's the best martial art. No, but would you, like in this crazy time, should people carry guns? It's not a bad idea to have a gun because if you need a gun, you have a gun. And if you don't need a gun, if you're a person with self control, you're not gonna use it. You're not gonna just randomly use it, but you have something to protect you. This is the whole idea of the Second Amendment. The whole idea of the Second Amendment gets distorted by mass shootings or by terrible people who murder people and do terrible things. But all those things are real, but they don't take away from the fundamental efficacy of having a firearm and defending your family or defending your life. And there are real live situations where people have had firearms and it's protected them or their loved ones or they've stopped shooters. There's many of these stories, but people don't like those stories because then it tends to lead to this gun culture argument, this pro gun culture argument that people find very uncomfortable. Human beings are messy and we're messy in so many different ways, right? We're messy emotionally, we're messy physically, but we're also messy in what's good or bad. We want things to be binary. We want things to be right or wrong, one or zero. And they're not, but there is crime in the world. There is violence in the world and you're better off knowing how to fight and you're better off knowing how to defend yourself and you're better off having a gun. And I generally think that guns, I do like the idea that guns, the Second Amendment helps protect the First Amendment. There's a kind of sense that puts me at ease knowing that so many people in this country have guns that, I mean, Alex Jones, I just listened to one episode of Infowars for the first time. Boy, he reminds me like when I drank some tequila, I felt like I'm going to some dark places today. That's how I feel like listening to him. But he talks about like that he worries about martial law. So basically government overreach by, which happened throughout history. Like there's something to worry about there, but it puts me at ease knowing that so much of the population has guns that people, government would think twice before instituting martial law on cities. But I actually was asking almost like on the individual level, I maybe shouldn't say this, but I don't yet own a gun. And I felt that if I carry a gun statistically just for me as a human, knowing my psychology, I feel like I'm more likely to die. Like I feel like I would put myself in situations that I shouldn't. Like the way I will see the world will change because my natural feeling is like when somebody, when I was in Philly and I knew late at night, if West Philly, when some guy looks at you and you can immediately calculate that this is a dangerous human being, it starts with a monkey look at first. Like I'm a bigger monkey than you. And that's where I found like, for example, I'll do the beta thing of just looking down and turning away and just getting out of trouble like very politely. And basically that kind of approach, because if you have, in terms of getting out of serious violent situations, like serious something where you could die versus if I had a gun, I feel like I would want to be, that there would be that cowboy monkey thing where I would want to put myself in situations where I'm a little bit of a savior, even of myself and almost create danger, which can no longer, like the escalation of which I can no longer control. Well, you're talking about taking a gun somewhere versus having a gun in your home. Yes, yes, I mean carry on me. That's a different situation and much harder to get a warrant or a license for that. Control, concealed carry licenses, especially in Massachusetts, they don't come easy. Well message, yeah, that's a whole nother thing. Yeah. You're saying gun in the home. Yeah, gun in the home, having a gun, knowing how to use a gun. Like I know how to use a gun. I've trained many hours, learning how to shoot a gun at tactical places. There's a bunch of videos of me doing it on Instagram. I practice and I think it's good to understand how to be accurate. So I've been a fan of your podcast for a long time. You don't often talk about it because you're always kind of looking forward, but if you look at the old studio that you just left, is there some epic memories that stand out to you that like you almost look back, I can't believe this happened? Oh yeah, almost too many of them to count. Is there something that pops into mind now? All of them, Elon Musk blowing that flamethrower in the middle of the hallway, I got a video of that. Have you seen the video of it? Yeah, I think you posted it on Instagram. I think I did too. Yeah, he's a mad man. Having Bernie Sanders in there, just all the fun fight companions we did and all the crazy podcasts with Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell and there were so many. There were so many moments. Podcasts, this is a weird art form and it almost sounds silly, but it almost seems like something that chose me rather than I chose it. I think of that all the time in some strange way. It's like I'm showing up as like an antenna and I just plug in and twist on and then I take in the thing and I put it together and I'm like a passenger of this weird ride. Yeah, you've talked about this before. I really like this idea that human beings are just carriers of these ideas. Ideas are the ones who are breeding. So in a sense like the idea found you as a useful brain to use to spread itself through the podcasting medium. Yeah. Because when I think about your podcast, I think about Joey Diaz. I think about all those comedians you've had. I mean, I think you've had Joey on, I mean, maybe close to 50 times, some crazy number. Is there, I mean, he is over the top offensive, just that's who he is to the core. Is there some sense where you wondered like whether it's right to have the Spotify episode number one with Duncan Dressel for five hours? No, I wanted to do it that way. That's why we wore NASA suits and we got high as fuck. It's like, that's the whole idea behind it. I mean, can you introspect that a little bit? Like, can you think, like, what is that? Cause that's rare. It's such a rare thing to do because you're not supposed to talk to Duncan Dressel with a huge platform that you have five hours. Why not? Because Donald Trump apparently watches your podcast. So just the idea that there's these, I mean, that's what I think about, these CEOs write to me that they listen to the podcast that I do and I have somebody like a David Fravor and I was nervous about it. I was nervous to have a conversation. For me, David Fravor is a Duncan Dressel, which is like. Just because of his experiences with UFOs. Yeah, even just the way he sees the world because he is open. I don't know if he's always like this, but he opened himself to the possibility of unconventional ideas. Most people in the scientific community kind of say, well, I don't really want to believe anything that doesn't have a lot of hard evidence. And so that was to me like a step. And as the thing somehow becomes more popular, there becomes this fear of like, well, should I talk to this person or not? And I mean, you're an inspiration in saying like, do whatever the hell you want. You have to. First of all, I have what you call fuck you money. And if you have fuck you money, you don't say fuck you. What's the point of having the fuck you money? You're wasting it. Like you're wasting the position. Like someone said to me like, why do you like sports cars so much? Like how many cars do you have, a bunch of cars? Because if I was a kid and I said, hey, if I was that crazy rich famous guy, like I don't want to have a bunch of cool fucking cars. Like, so I would do that. Like, cause not everybody gets to do that. Like if you're the person that gets to do that, you're kind of supposed to do it. Like that's if you want to, if that really does speak to you. And, you know, I've talked to you about this before, muscle cars, specifically ones from the 1960s and the early seventies. They speak to me in some weird way, man. I could just stare at them. Like I have a 65 Corvette. I walk around it sometimes at night when no one's around. I just stare at it. What's your favorite muscle car? Like what's your most bad ass late sixties, the perfect car? Probably that car. Probably that 65 Corvette. Yeah, I walk around it when no one's around. I think I've driven the 69 Corvette. Is there a particular year that just? 65 is a generation two. 69 is generation three. 69 is like the, it's even more curvy. They're both awesome, just awesome in different ways. But I just love muscle cars for whatever reason. But the point is like, I like what I like. And if I can do what I want to do, I should do what I want to do. And it's not hurting anybody. And the thing is like, I would do the Duncan podcast if no one was listening, right? If we were just starting to do a podcast together and no one cared and it got like 2000 views, which we did for years. I would do it with Duncan and we would get high and we'd talk crazy shit about aliens and spaceships and maybe dude, maybe ideas are living life forms and they're inside your head. And that's how things get made. Man. Man. I've just kind of morphed me and him together in that because the life form idea, life form idea is mine that I've really, I really think about a lot. I think about on a technical side, by the way. When I heard you say that, cause I've been thinking, I was like, whoa, that's interesting. It might be, they might be alive because they, I don't know what the fuck they are, but when someone has an idea for, you know, whatever an invention, a toaster, and then they think about this, all it need is like these heating elements and a spring and then it pops on the stunts, have a timer. And then they build this thing. Now all of a sudden it's alive. It's like you manifested it in a physical form. Toaster is not the best example, but a car, an airplane, you're thinking about a thing, like an idea comes into your head and you can say, oh, well, it's just creativity. It's a part of being a person. That's how we invented tools and how, you know, we became better hunters. All those things are true. I'm not saying that there's some magic to what I'm saying, but there's also a possibility that we're simplifying something by saying that it's just creativity, that it's just a natural human inclination to invent things. But why? Is it possible that ideas like creativity, like we are the only animal other than, there's a few species that create things like bees make beehives and, but it's very, they're very uniform, you know, some animals use tools, you know, like, you know, champs will use like sticks to get termites and things like that. But there's something about what we do that's, it makes you wonder. Cause we look at the, just look at this room that we're in, look at all these electronics, look at all this crazy shit that human beings have invented and then built upon others inventions and proved and innovated. These all came out of ideas. Like the idea, it germinates in someone's head, it bounces around, they write it down, they share it with others, the other people who have similar ideas or ideas that are complimentary, they work together and they change the world. And the new thing in that is the idea is not the people. It's like, we think we found the ideas, but it's more like the ideas found us. Find you, yeah. They're literally in the air. They come to you. I always felt like that with bits. Like when I come up with a bit, that's why I'm always telling people about the Steven Pressfield book, The War of Art, because he talks about respecting the muse and the idea that your ideas come when you sit down and you do the work or you sit down like a professional and you talk to the muse, like come tell me what to do. Like if the muse was a real thing, as if the muse is like some mystical creature that comes and delivers you ideas. Even if that's not real, that's how it works. It does work like that. If you do treat it like it's a muse and you treat it with the respect and you treat it like a professional, the ideas do come to you. I never thought about what he's doing is just sitting there waiting for the idea that's trying to breed to find him. Yeah. That's a trippy thing. If you show up. That's trippy. If you show up and put in the time and focus your energy on that, the ideas, they will arrive, they will arrive. And that's the same with writing comedy. Like there's been many, many times where I'll come home from the comedy store and I just sit down and I start writing and I just, I got nothing, there's nothing there. I'm just writing, it's all bullshit. Nothing's good, it's just like, hmm. And then all of a sudden, bam, there's the idea. And then all of a sudden I can't stop. And then, you know, it was a couple hours later and I'm like, whoa. And then the next night I'm on stage and I'm like, how about that? Boom, it gets this big laugh. I'm like, holy shit. And I know that came out of the discipline to sit down and call the muse. I mean, the cool thing is the ideas have found you to like, oh, I'm gonna use this dude. Like he seems to have a podcast that's popular. I'm gonna breed inside his brain and spread it to others. It's the same as. Or an inventor, you know, I'm gonna use this guy who's like desperately seeking some sort of a product to bring to market. Some guy who wants to invent things, is thinking about inventing things all the time. These ideas, they weasel their way into your head. And it seems to me also that the frequency that your mind operates under has to be correct. Because one of the things about creativity seems to be if you think about yourself a lot, if you're really into yourself or your image or you're selfish, those ideas are not, they don't find you. Yeah, it's funny. It stifles the creative. Yeah, it stifles the opportunity that the idea has to find you. Yes, which is one of the reasons why joke thieves, people that steal jokes are terrible writers. There's never like really good writers who are also joke thieves. It's just joke thieves. And then, you know, when they have to write on their own, if they get exposed, they become terrible comedians. They're a shadow of what they were when they were stealing other people's ideas. Because the thing that would make you steal a person's idea is that ego part, the like the wanting to claim it for yourself, the wanting to be the man or the woman. You know, I wanna be the person who gets out there and says it and everybody's gonna love me for it. Like you can't think like that and be creative. It requires a humility and it requires a detachment from self in order to create. Like when I'm writing, I'm blank. I'm like, I'm just staring. I'm like, I'm just the part of my mind that's active is not like me. It's like this weird core function part where I'm not aware of my personality. I'm not aware of any of that. I'm just trying to put it together in a way that I know works. It's just being there, being present. Pressfield is just, I'm a big believer just sitting there and staring at a blank page, putting in the time. Yeah, and sometimes it's not that way. Sometimes it's an inspiration. Like sometimes I'll be sitting there at dinner and I'll be like, I got an idea. And my wife's really cool about that. I'm like, I have an idea and I blah, blah, blah. I have to just run out of the room real quick and I write it down on my phone and then I can come back. Because those are like little gifts that you get sometimes from the universe out of nowhere. And some people rely only on those gifts, you know? And I've talked to comics about it. They're like, oh, I can't come up with my best ideas when I don't write. And I'm like, no, I do too. I come up with great ideas when I don't write, but I also write. Like you can do both of those things. They're not mutually exclusive. You mentioned fuck you money. I feel like I have fuck you money now. A year ago I was at zero, I have fuck you money now because probably my standard is my, I don't need much in this world. But because also, probably because of you, but it's 300 to 400,000 people. This isn't every episode I do. And that is weird. It's definitely. That's a successful television show on cable. Yeah, it's crazy. It's all you. Yeah, it's hilarious. That's amazing. But at this point, that also resulted in a few money in a sense that I don't, I don't need anything else in this world. But so by way of asking, I've looked up, you've inspired me for a long time. Do you have advice? You've done this on the podcast side of life. Do you have advice for somebody like, for me and somebody like me going on this journey? Eric Weinstein is going on this journey. Is there advice, both small and big, that you have for somebody like me? The advice is to keep doing what feels right to you and do what you're doing. Obviously, it's resonating with people if you're getting that big of an audience. And I've listened to your podcast. You're very good at it. So just keep doing it the way you're doing it. Don't let anybody else get involved. What about, you've connected, I think you met Jamie at the Comedy Store. I met him at the Ice House. At the Ice House? Ice House. Well, I think I met him at the Comedy Store, but then we talked at the Ice House. I mean, what? You'd have to ask him. Yeah, did you think deeply about, because you basically have nobody on your team. And so it almost feels like a marriage. Were you selective about somebody to bring into your little circle? Well, Jamie's exceptional. He is. He's a special. I mean, he might've grown. I don't remember how he was in the early days. Maybe you could say, but he's grown. He's definitely better at it, but right away, he's exceptional. He's got very little ego. Yes. He's not a guy who needs a lot of attention. He's not a guy who overestimates anything. Like in terms of like a negative or positive, like his interpretation of whether it's good things that happen to the show or bad things that happen to the show, he just takes it all like flat. He's chill. He's just cool as fuck. And he's so smart. And he's so good as an audio engineer and as a podcast producer, he's the best. But he's basically one of the only people on this whole team. So how do you find, I mean, when you let people in, I mean, I'm sure other people wanted to get involved. Like, why don't you have a cohost that could, you basically kind of, well. Well, here's the problem with the cohost. Like when you and I are talking, when we're talking, I'm tuned in to you and I'm waiting to hear what you're saying and I'm listening and I'm interpreting it. And then I'm calculating whether or not I have anything to say, whether to let you keep talking, whether I maybe have a question that lets you expand further or whether I have a disagreement or like there's a dance that's going on. Now, when there's another person there chiming in too, it fucks the dance up. It's like dancing. Like if you're doing a dance with someone, like if you're slow dancing with someone and then a third person's there stepping on everybody's feet. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes having a third person is fun. Comedy podcasts, sometimes it's fun. Fight companions, yeah, debate structures. But even then it gets difficult because people talk over each other. And also I find that without headphones, it's way easier to talk over each other. You make mistakes. You don't hear it the same way. When you have headphones, I hear what you hear. It's all one sound and the audience hears exactly, or rather I hear exactly what the audience hears. Whether it's over here, my voice is louder than yours because you're over there. And if I don't have headphones on, it doesn't, it's not all together. On that point, one of the interesting things about your show is you don't almost never have done, and you just generally don't do remote, sorry, not remote calls, but you don't go to another person's location. We have only done a few, a small handful. And just like with Sapolsky, he should do this. But I actually, we went back and forth on email. I told him he needs to get his ass back in this studio. He's working on a book. I was a fan of his a long time ago because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis. And I've reached out to him a long time ago before he was willing to do it. But then I caught him in downtown LA. He was there for something else. And I just greedily snatched up an hour of his time. Well, he doesn't get, I think, some of those folks don't get how much magic can happen in this podcast studio. Like bigger than anything they've ever done in terms of their work. I'm not talking about reach, but in terms of the discovery of new ideas, there's something magical about conversation. Like somebody as brilliant as him, if he gives himself over to the conversation for multiple hours at a time, that's another place where you've been an inspiration. Where I'm getting more and more confidence of telling people, like in Elon Musk, that a lot of CEOs are like, well, he has 30 minutes on his schedule. I'm like, no, three hours. And then they're like, so some say no, and then they come back. There's people that started coming back to like, okay, we're starting to get it. They start to get it. And you're a rare beacon of hope in that sense that there's some value in long form. They think that nobody wants to listen for more than 30 minutes. They think like, I have nothing to say. But the reality is if you just give yourself over to like the three hours, just let it go, three hours, four hours, whatever it is, there's so much to discover about what you didn't even know you think. Yeah. Yeah, you have to be confident that you could do it. And in the beginning, I just did it because that's what I wanted to do. And no one was listening. So I've always been a curious person. So I've always been interested in listening to how people think about things and talking to people about their mindset and just expanding on my own ideas, just talking shit. And so we would have these podcasts and they would go on forever. And my friend Ari, I never let this die down. Never let him forget this. He was always like, you have to edit your podcast. I'm telling you right now, you're fucking up. I go, why? He's like, because people are not gonna listen to it. I go, they don't have to. Yeah. I go, you listen to part of it. He goes, just do it. Just, I'm telling you, trust me, cut it down to like 45 minutes. That's all you need. And I'm like, no, no, I don't think you're right. I go, I like listening to long form things. No one has that kind of time. I go, okay, I'm just gonna keep doing it this way, so. And it sticks to your gut. No, he doesn't. His are like two and a half hours long now. That's great. You won, but you wouldn't like say, I mentioned to you this before, and this is gonna happen. It's actually made a lot of progress towards it. I'm gonna talk to Putin, but you wouldn't travel to Putin if you wanted to talk to you. Putin is a dangerous character. He's not. He's not. Have you ever seen the thing with Jerry Kraft where they stole his Super Bowl ring? Yeah. Yeah. I think that was a little bit of misunderstanding. Oh, really? I think it's a little bit. He just decided he's gonna steal that Super Bowl ring. Kind of. I think it was a... Kind of. Can I see your ring? He shows him his ring and then he puts it on and says, I can murder somebody with this ring. So he... And then he walks off with it. It's possible he did it as a, he's a big believer in displays of power. Yeah. So like, it's possible he did that, but I think he sees himself as like a tool with which to demonstrate that Russia still belongs on the stage of the big players. And so he, a lot of actions are selected through that lens. But in terms of a human being, outside of any of the evils that he may or may not have done, he is a really thoughtful, intelligent, fun human being. Like the wit and the depth from the JRE perspective is really interesting. I'm like his manager now, selling the, he's a judo guy. Trying to get Trump, he's really good at judo. I have seen him practice judo. He's a legit black belt. And not only that, he loves it, not just skill wise, but to talk about it, to reason about it, to think about it, to MMA as well. So, you know, it'd be a good conversation, but you wouldn't travel to him. Well, that's, hold to your principle. So that's the core of the advice. Just hold to whatever. I would rather, here's the thing. There's not a person that I have to have on the show. Right. And I'm happy to talk to anybody. I'm just as happy to talk to you as I am to talk to Trump, as I am to, probably more happy to talk to you, as I am to talk to Mike Tyson, as I am to talk to Joey Diaz. I like talking to people. I enjoy doing podcasts. I enjoy talking to a variety of people and I schedule them based on, I want to like, I try not to get too many right wing people in a row or too many progressive people in a row. I don't want to get repetitive. I try not to get too many fighters in a row. I try to balance it out. Not too many comedians. Comedians are the one group where I can have three, four in a row, five in a row. Cause that's my tribe. You know, those are my people. It's easy. We can talk about anything. It's a weird dance. You know, the conversations that you're doing on a podcast are, they're a strange dance. And you want to, you know, you want to not step on your own feet and you want to make sure that you do it in a way, do the podcast in a way that's entertaining for people. And it's conversations are learning how to talk to people. It's a weird skill. It's a weird skill that took a long time for me to get good at. And I didn't know it was a skill until I started doing it. And then I just thought you were just talking. Like, I know how to talk. We'll just talk to people. And then along the way I realized like, oh, and then when you talk to people that are bad at it, you realize that it's a skill. Like particularly one of the things about my people, about comedians is a lot of them tend to want to talk, but don't want to listen. Right. So they're waiting for you to stop talking so they can talk, but they're not necessarily thinking about what you're saying, you know? And they're just waiting for their opportunity or they talk over you or they, and I try real hard not to do that and sometimes I fail, but when I'm at my best, I'm dancing. Yeah, ultimately the skill conversation is just really listening, like really, and listening and thinking. Listening and thinking and being genuinely curious and really having a take on what they're saying and maybe a followup question or maybe, it's gotta be real, it's gotta be authentic. And when it is authentic and it's real, it resonates with people. Like they're listening and they go, oh, like I'm locked in with the way you're thinking. Like you two guys are in a conversation and I'm locked in. When she talks and you listen, I'm listening too. When he says something to her or when she says something to him, like there's a thing that happens during conversations where you're there, like you're listening to, and it's with me, when I listen to a good podcast, I feel like I'm in the room. I feel like I'm in the room and I'm like the friend that got to sit down and listen. Like, oh, yeah, that's a great conversation. I love conversations. So I love listening to them and I love putting them together. And the fact that this podcast has gotten so fucking big, it's stunning to me, it blows me away. I never anticipated it. Never thought for a second that that stupid thing that I used to do in my couch, in my office was the biggest thing I've ever done in my life by far. Like people used to make fun of it. Like there's a comedy store documentary that's coming out and one of the parts of the documentary is my friend, Tom Segura, when he first started doing my podcast, he would be leaving and he would talk to Redband. He's like, what the fuck is he doing? Like, why is he doing this? Like who's listening? He's like, oh, some people like it. And he's like, fucking nonsense, waste of time. And like in the documentary, it shows like 2000 views, like one of the early Ustream episodes. It's hilarious. And they don't just like it, really they form a friendship with you. It's like, even me when people come up to me, like the love in their eyes is kind of beautiful. It's weird, right? Yeah, it's like. You're a part of their life. Yeah, and I don't know, it's also heartbreaking because you realize you'll never really get to know them back like, because they clearly are friends with you. Yes, yeah. And it's sad to see a person who's clearly brilliant and interesting and is friends with you, but you don't get a chance to return that love. And I mean. My kids, it took them a while to figure out what's going on, but people would come up to me and they would say something like, hey man, I fucking love you, thanks man. All right, hey brother, nice to meet you. My daughter was like six. She'd be like, do you know him? I'm like, no, I don't know him. She's like, how does he know you? Like, it's a very weird conversation I used to have with young kids when I'd explain, I'd do this thing called the podcast and millions of people listen. So now one of my daughters is 12 and one of her friends is 13 and he's a boy and he goes to school with her and he's obsessed with me. And so she's weirded out. And she says to him, I don't even think you like me. I think you're just into my dad, you fucking weirdo. She's going to have that conversation in a few stages in her life. Like that hard conversation with a boyfriend. Yeah, probably, yeah. That was the thing about men too. This podcast is, my podcast is uniquely masculine. I'm a man and I'm not, I'm also a man that doesn't have to go through some sort of a corporate filter. I'm not going through executive producers who tell me, don't have this guest on, don't talk about that. We looked at focus groups and they don't seem to like when you do this, like there's none of that. And I just do it. So I have a whole podcast where I just talk about cars and people are like, I don't want to hear you talk about cars. Well, good, congratulations. You found what you like. Here's good news, there's 1500 other ones. Go listen to the other episodes where I don't talk about cars. You don't have to listen. And it's not like your brand, you just are who you are and that's what you do. But it's like, it's authentically what I'm interested in. All the podcasts, whether I'm talking to David Fravor about his experience with UFOs, whether I'm talking to David Sinclair about life extension, whether I'm talking to you about artificial intelligence or what, it's because I want to talk to these people. And that resonates. I like when people are into shit. I've talked about this before, things that I have no interest in making furniture, but I like this PBS show where this guy makes furniture by hand. I love watching it. Because he's so into it. He's sanding this and polishing that. I'm not going to do that. I don't give a fuck about furniture. Furniture for me is function, like this desk. Function works, but I love when people are into it. I'm happy that someone can make it and they do a great job, but I'm not interested in the task or even the finished product as much as I'm interested in someone's passion for something. The passion that they've put into this, that shines through. Last question. I sometimes ask this just for to, what is it? To challenge, to make people roll their eyes, to make legitimate scientists roll their eyes. Ask, what is the meaning of life, according to Joe Rogan? I do not think there is a meaning. I think there's many, many meanings of life. I think there's a way to navigate life that's enjoyable. I think it requires many things. It requires, first of all, it requires love. You have to have loved ones. You have to have family. You have to have friends. You have to have people that care about you and you have to care about them. I think that is primary. Then it also requires interests. There has to be things that stimulate you. Now, it could be just a subsistence lifestyle. There's many people that believe and practice this lifestyle of just living off the land and hunting and fishing and living in the woods and they seem incredibly happy. And there's something to be said for that. That is an interest, right? There's something and there's a direct connection between their actions and their sustenance. They get their food that way. They're connected to nature and it's very satisfying for them. If you don't have that, I think you need something that is interesting to you, something that you're passionate about. And there's far too many people that get sucked into living a life where you're just doing a job, you're just showing up and putting in your time and then going home, but you don't have a passion for what you're doing. And I think that's the recipe for a boring and very unfulfilling life. You mentioned love, if we could just backtrack. What, we talked about the demons and the violence in there somewhere. What's the role of love in this, in your own life? It's very important, man. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so, I'm so interested in helping people. I'm very interested in people feeling good. I like them to feel good. I want to help them. I like doing things that make them feel like, oh, you care about me, like, yeah, I care about you. I really do. Like, I want people to feel good. I want my family to feel good. I want my friends to feel good. I want guests to feel good about the podcast experience. You know, I am, I'm a big believer in as much as I can to spread positive energy and joy and happiness and relay all the good advice that I've ever gotten. All the things that I've learned and if they can benefit people, then I find that those things benefit people that actually improve the quality of their life or improve their success or improve their relationships. I'm very happy to do that. That means a lot to me. The way we interact with each other is so important. It's one of the reasons why, like, if someone gets canceled or you get publicly shamed, it's so devastating because there's all these people that are negative, all this negative energy coming your way and you feel it. As much as I like to pretend that you're immune to that kind of stuff and some people do like to pretend that, you feel it. There's a tangible force when people are upset at you. And that's the same with loved ones or family or anytime someone's upset at you, whether it's a giant group of people or there's a small amount of people. That has an impact on you and your psyche and your physical being. So the more you can spread love and the more love comes back to you, you also create this butterfly effect, right? Where other people start recognizing like, oh, you know, when he is nice to me, I feel better and then I'm gonna be nicer to people. And when I'm nicer to people, they feel better and I feel better and it spreads outward. And that's one thing that I've done through this podcast, I think, is I've imparted my personal philosophy in kindness and generosity to other people. Yeah, I mean, to correct you, you didn't do it. The ideas that are breeding themselves through your brain have figured out. Yes, the ideas that are alive in the air that made their way into my head. Love is a more efficient mechanism of spreading ideas. They figured out. Yes, probably, man. Probably. So as far as like the meaning of life, that's a bit, without that, you have nothing. You know, one of the biggest failures in life is to be extremely successful financially, but everybody hates you. Everybody hates you and you're just miserable and alone and angry and depressed and sad. You know, when you hear about rich, famous people that commit suicide, like, wow, you missed the mark. You got some parts right, but you put too many eggs in one basket. You put too many eggs in the financial basket or the success basket or the accomplishment basket and not enough in the friendship and love basket. And there's a balance to that. And when I talked about the violence and all that stuff, like that to me is me understanding, recognizing that is me trying to achieve that balance. It's to like go kill those demons so that this boat is level, you know, because if it's not, then the boat is like this and then everything's all fucked up. And every time we hit a wave, things fall apart. Balance that boat out, figure it out, like know who you are. Some people don't have that problem at all. Some people, they could just go for walks and they're cool as a cucumber. I need more, you know, I need kettlebells. I need a heavy bag. I need the Echo bike, you know, the Air Assault bike. I need some hardcore shit. And if I don't get that, I don't feel good. So I figured that out too. And that makes me a nicer person. That makes my interactions nicer. It changes the quality of my friendships and my relationships with people. I think we mentioned Neuralink. I can certainly guarantee that this is one of the memories I'll be replaying 20, 30 years from now once we get the feature ready. Joe, it's a huge honor to talk to you. I hope. It's an honor to talk to you too, man. Keep doing podcasts. I'm glad you came down here for this. The first week of me doing this here and it's very cool to have you always. I hope you make Texas cool again and do your podcast another 10, 11, whatever, however many years you're still on this earth. All right, thank you, brother. I appreciate you, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Joe Rogan and thank you to our sponsors, Neuro, Eight Sleep and Dollar Shave Club. Check them out in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Joe Rogan, the universe rewards, calculated risk and passion. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Joe Rogan: Fear, Love, Chaos, and the Joe Rogan Experience | Lex Fridman Podcast #127

The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, an anarchist, political thinker, author, and a proud, part time, Andy Kaufman like troll, in the best sense of that word, on both Twitter and in real life. He's a host of a great podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y O U R. I think that gives a sense of his sense of humor. He is the author of Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of King Jong Il, and The New Right, A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics. This latter book, when I read it, or rather listened to it last year, helped me start learning about the various disparate movements that I was undereducated about, from the internet trolls, to Alex Jones, to white nationalists, and to techno anarchists. The book is funny and brilliant, and so is Michael. Unfortunately, because of a self imposed deadline, I actually pulled an all nighter before this conversation. So I was not exactly all there mentally, even more so than usual, which is tough, because Michael is really quick witted and brilliant. But he was kind, patient, and understanding in this conversation, and I hope you will be as well. Today, I'm trying something a little new, looking to establish a regular structure for these intros. A first, doing the guest intro, like I just did. Second, quick one or two sentence mention of each sponsor. Third, my side comments related to the episode. And finally, fourth, full ad reads on the audio side of things, and on YouTube, going straight to the conversation. So not doing the full ad reads. And as always, no ads in the middle, because to me, they get in the way of the conversation. So, quick mention of the sponsors. First, SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but someone probably should. It helps you make good decisions. Second sponsor is DoorDash, food delivery service that I've used for many years to fuel long, uninterrupted sessions of deep work at Google, MIT, and I still use it a lot today. Third sponsor is Masterclass, online courses from the best people in the world on each of the topics covered, from rockets, to game design, to poker, to writing, and to guitar with Carlos Santana. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I hope to have some conversations with political thinkers, including liberals and conservatives, anarchists, libertarians, objectivists, and everything in between. I'm as allergic to Trump bashing and Trump worship as you probably are. I have none of that in me. I really work hard to be open minded and let my curiosity drive the conversation. I do plead with you to be patient on two counts. First, I have an intense, busy life outside of these podcasts. Like it's 4 a.m. right now as I'm recording this. So sometimes life affects these conversations, like in this case, I pull an all nighter beforehand. So please be patient with me if I say something inelegant, confusing, dumb, or just plain wrong. I'll try to correct myself on social media or in future conversations as much as I can. I really am always learning and working hard to improve. Second, if I or the guest says something about, for example, our current president, Donald Trump, that's over the top negative or over the top positive, please don't let your brain go into the partisan mode. Try to hear our words in an open minded nuanced way. And if we say stuff from a place of emotion, please give us a pass. Nuanced conversation can only happen if we're patient with each other. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the Five Stars and Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Malice. There was a Simpsons episode where he starts mixing like sleeping pills with like pet pills and he's driving his truck and I'm like, I wanna see what happens if he mixed Red Bull and Nitra cold brew. There's a lineup of drugs. This is gonna be so fun. Yeah, let's start with love. Yeah, so one thing we'll eventually somehow talk about, it'll be a theme throughout, is that you're also Russian. Yes. A little bit less than me, but. How, why? Cause I'm from Ukraine. Oh, you're from Ukraine? From above. Okay, wow. No, because you came here a little bit when you were younger. Yeah. I came here when I was 13, so I saturated a little bit of the Russian soul. I marinated in the Russian soul a little deeper. I haven't told anyone this, but I'll be glad to tell you, Davidish. I haven't been back since I was two. And next summer, it looks like me and my buddy, Chris Williamson, who's also a podcaster, he's British, Modern Wisdom, he looks like Apollo. Looks like we got a videographer. Which Apollo? Apollo Creed? The god, he looks like the god Apollo. Yeah, he's like a model. I thought you were talking about Rocky. So, we're gonna go for the first time to see where I came from. Which is in Ukraine. We're gonna go to Lvov and either St. Petersburg or Moscow, probably St. Petersburg, or both. It's gonna be intense. It's gonna be a lot of panic attacks, I feel. And your Russian is okay? Yeah. How do you think? Good? Do you understand? No, you can't talk Russian in Ukraine, or it's like they get offended. Yeah, but then you also wanna go to Russia. Yeah. I don't know. For me, there's several people in Russia I wanna interview on a podcast. So, one of them is Gagarin Perlman, which is a mathematician, and the other person is Putin. You know what my favorite Putin story is? Do you know this? No. When he had Merkel with him, do you know this story? No. Merkel's scared of dogs, like petrified of dogs. So, he brings in his like black lab. It's a Labrador, it's like the sweetest animal, and it's all over her, and there's pictures, and she's sitting like this, and she's terrified, and he's like, what's wrong, Angela? He's just completely trolling her. Yeah, he's aware of the sort of the narrative around him. Yeah. And then he plays with it. Yes. He enjoys it. It's a very Russian thing. My friend wanted to do a film about me. He goes, I realized you guys aren't like us at all. You're just like, look at us, and then I started telling him stories about the upbringing, and he's like, oh my God, and as I'm telling them, I'm like, wow, this stuff is really crazy, like how we are wired. Who's the we? Your friend is? The Russian, the friend's American. I'm saying the way Russians are brought up, and the way, maybe, I don't think it was just my family. I bet you had similar things. Here's an example. I was, I had a buddy staying with me. He had a problem with his roommate, so he crashed at my place, fine. I went to the gym, and I come back, and he goes, oh, there was, and my apartment building is four four apartments, so it's not like a huge thing. He goes, oh, there was someone knocking at your door, so I told him blah blah, and for me, and I wonder if you're the same way, if I'm at someone's house that's not my own, and someone knocks on the door, I wouldn't even think to answer it. Like if I had an apple here, maybe I'd eat it, I'd cut it, whatever. I'm not gonna, it just doesn't enter my head to smash into my face. The thought of answering the door, if it's not my house, it would never enter my head. Would it enter your head? No, but why? But he's an American, so someone's at the door. He goes and opens it, even though it's not his house. I would never do that. I would never think to do that. That is so strange that you pick some very obscure thing to delineate Americans and Russians. I don't think that's obscure, because I think it speaks to how we perceive strangers. With Americans, everyone's friendly, and with us, it's like, no, no, you have that moat, and I think that percolates into many different aspects of how we relate to people, and I have to undo a lot of that. That's true. You're right, there's the relationship I formed there where in Russia, we're very deep and close, and then there's the strangers, the other, that you don't trust by default. It takes a long time to go over the moat of trust. For a long time, until recently, whenever I said anything to anyone, my brain ran a scan that said, if this person turns on you, would this, can they use this against you? And I would do this with everything I said with strangers, and after a while, it's like, you know what? Maybe they will, but I'm strong enough to take it, but this is not how Americans think. Or here's another one. Let me ask you this. Sorry, I'm taking over the interview. People ask about advice for work, right? Like I had this, there was this party I went to, and basically everyone had their own problems, and everyone else gave their advice, right? And someone's having a problem with a coworker, and the advice these Tupoy Americans gave them is, oh, sit down and have a talk with them. And to me, this is like the last case, last resort. Like first, you have to see what you can without showing your hand, showing your vulnerability, only when everything hasn't worked out, or you're like, all right, let me sit down with you and try to have it out with you, probably. But for them, the first thing is like, sit down and be like, oh, you're causing me problems, blah, blah, blah. So I perceive that right away as a threat, that this person sees an antagonism between us, and also as a weakness that I'm getting to them. So my reaction isn't how do I make it better? My reaction is to reinforce my position and see what I can to marginalize them, usually. I haven't worked in a corporate setting in a long time. But it's not, I don't approach it the way an American would. Like, I'm glad you came and talked to me. Now I probably would, because it's gonna be a friend. So you attribute that to the Russian upbringing, as opposed to you have deep psychological issues. I think those are synonymous, don't you? Wait, would you think differently, maybe a few years ago? I don't know, I think you lost me at the, because you kind of said that, you're kind of implying you have a deep distrust of the world, like the world is. I think the default setting would be distrust, yeah. But I would put it differently, is I almost ignore the rest of the world, I don't even acknowledge it, I just savor, I save my love and trust for the small circle of people. I agree, but when that person is being confrontational, or as they perceive it, as being open, now there's a situation, how would you handle that? Like a cold wind blows, you just kind of like. Yeah, but it's not like this is an opportunity for us to work out our differences, it's a cold wind. It's not a hug, that's my point. Americans think it's a hug, a cold wind. You're so suspicious, what it really is, is a cold wind. I'm so humane, it's not something to be scared of, it's a cold wind, it's a good person. But it's not, this is great, but it's not a source of, like I'm not suspicious of, like I'm not anxious, I would say, or like living in fear of the rest of the world, I'm more. Oh, I agree, but you're not receptive to that person. That's all I'm saying, and they are. Got it, so speaking of which, let's talk about love. Which requires to be receptive of the world, of strangers. How do we put more love out there in the world, especially on the internet? One mechanism I have found to increase love, and that's a word that has many meanings and is used in a very intense sense and is used in a very loose sense. Can you try to define love? Sure, love is a strong sense of attraction toward another person, entity, or place that causes one to tend to react in a disproportionately positive manner. That's off the top of my head. Disproportionately. Yes, so for example, if you. Why not proportionately? Because if someone's about to, who you love, is about to get harmed, you're moving heaven and earth to make sure, or like a book you love. I love this book, like you're going through the fire to try to save it, whereas if it's a book you really like, it's like, oh, I'll get another one. And a book's kind of a loose example, but. So you're going with the love that's like, you're saving for just a few people, almost like romantical, like love for a close family. But what about just love to even the broader, like the kind of love you can put out to people on the internet, which is like just kindness. Sure, I would say in that case, it's important to make them feel seen and validated. And I try to do this when people who I have come to know on the internet, and there's a lot, I try to do that as much as possible because I don't think it's valid how on social media, and I do this a lot myself, but not towards everyone, it's just there to be aggressive and antagonistic. You should be antagonistic towards bad people, and that's fine, but at the same time, there's lots of great people. And especially with my audience, and I would bet disproportionately with yours, there's lots of people who are, because of their psychology and intelligence, are going to be much more isolated socially than they should. And if I, and I've heard from many of them, and if I'm the person who makes them feel, oh, I'm not crazy, it's everyone else around me who is just basic, the fact that I can be that person, which I didn't have at their age, to me is incredibly reaffirming. You mean that source of love? But I mean love in the sense of like, you know, you care about this person and you want good things for them, not in a kind of romantic way. But I mean, you're using it in a broad sense now. Yeah, but you're also a person who kind of, I mean, attacks the power structures in the world by mocking them effectively. And love, I would say, requires you to be non witty and simple and fragile, which I see it as like the opposite of what trolls do. Trolls are, if there is someone coming after what I love, there's two mechanisms, right, at least two. I go up and I'm fighting them, and in which case you are getting hurt in a knife fight, even if you win the knife fight, or if you disarm them and you preclude the possibility of a fight and you drive them off or render them powerless, you keep your person intact as yourself and you also protect your values. So how do you render them powerless? As you just said, by mocking them. One of the most effective mechanisms for those in power, we're much closer to Brave New World than 1984. The people who are dominant and in power aren't there because of the threat of the gulag or prison. They're there because of social pressures. Look at the masks. I was on the subway not that long ago in New York City. No one cared who I was until I put off the mask. I was in the subway that long in New York City. And I put this on my Instagram. I've told this story before. There was an Asian dude in his early 30s. He was like in Western clothes. It's not like he had a rickshaw or something. An older man in his 50s stood up over him on the subway, screamed at him, said, go back where you came from. You're disgusting. I'm gonna get sick. If you think this guy is a vector of disease, which is your prerogative, why are you coming close to him? Why are you getting in his face? And what? Sorry, so it was because he was Asian? It was both. It was the not having a mask gave him the permission to act like a despicable, aggressive person toward him. And the point being, a lot of these mechanisms for social control are outsourced to low quality people because this is their one chance to assert dominance and status over somebody else. So the best way to diffuse that isn't with weaponry or fighting. It's through mockery because all of a sudden, their claims to authority are effectively destroyed. So let me push back on that. What about fighting that with love, with patience and kindness towards them? I don't think kindness is, I think that would be a mismatch and inappropriate. There's Superman, there's Batman, okay? And Superman's job is to help the good people and Batman's job is to hurt the bad people. And I will always be on the Batman side than the Superman side. Both work silly tight costumes. One has pointy ears. Both are ridiculous, so let's. One's a billionaire who gets, he's swimming in trim. Which one is a billionaire? Batman. Okay, I'm undereducated on the superhero movies, I apologize. Okay, but you're just saying your predisposition is to be on the Batman side, is to fighting the bad guys. Yeah, and it's what I'm good at. That's what you're good at. But just to play devil's advocate, or actually, in this case, I am the devil because it's what I usually do. Well, I'm the devil, you're the angel's advocate. Exactly, to be the angel advocate, yeah. Is like, I feel like mockery is a path towards escalation of conflict. Yes, in many ways, yes. So you're not, I mean, it's kind of like guerrilla warfare. I mean, you're not going to win. I am winning, we're all winning. We're winning on a daily. This is my next book, we're winning. We've won before, I'm not joking. The topic of the next book. Yes, it's the white pill. The white pill. Is that we're gonna, we are winning. The most horrible people are being rendered into laughing stocks on a daily basis on social media. This is a glorious thing. This is good, I so disagree with you. I disagree with you because there's side effects that are very destructive. It feels like you're winning, but we're completely destroying the possibility of having like a cohesive society. That's called oncology. What's that mean? Curing cancer. No, I, yeah. Your concept of a cohesive society is, in fact, a society based on oppression and not allowing individuals to live their personal freedom. Oh, so you're a utopian view of the world. You're the utopian. You're saying cohesive society. I'm saying I don't need that. I'm saying there's gonna be conflict. Right, there's gonna be conflict. You and I are disagreeing right now. That's not cohesive. Doesn't mean we like each other less. Doesn't mean we respect each other less. Cohesive doesn't, it's just a euphemism for like everyone submitting to what I want. No, I mean, cohesive could be that. It could be like enforced with violence, all that kind of stuff, sort of the libertarian view of the world, but it could just be being respectful and kind of each other and kind towards each other and loving towards each other. I mean, that's what I mean by cohesive. So when people say free, it's funny. Like freedom is a funny thing because freedom could be painful to a lot of people. It's all matters how you define it, how you implement it, how it actually looks like. Sure. I'm just saying it feels like the mockery of the powerful leads to further and further divisions. It's like it's turning life into a game to where it's always you're creating these different little tribes and groups and you're constantly fighting the groups that become a little bit more powerful by undercutting them through guerrilla warfare kind of thing. And that's what the internet becomes is everyone's just mocking each other and then certain groups become more and more powerful and then they start fighting each other and they form groups of ideologies and they start fighting each other in the internet where the result is it doesn't feel like the common humanities highlighted. It doesn't feel like that's a path of progress. Now, like when I say cohesive, I don't mean like everybody has to be enforcing equality, all those kinds of ideas. I just mean like not being so divisive. So it's going back to the original question of like, how do we put more love out in the world than the internet? I want divisiveness. Oh, you see, you think divisiveness is that? That's the goal. That's very interesting. It's the goal. So you started this conversation where you're talking about you have love for that small group. I think we both would agree to have a bigger group would be better, especially if that love comes from a sincere place. I think our country, I wrote an article about this four years ago that it's time to disunite the states and to secede. This country has been held together with at least two separate cultures with dumb text and string for over 20 years. There's an enormous amount of contempt from one group toward another. This contempt comes from a sincere place. They do not share each other's values. There's absolutely no reason, just like any unhealthy relationship where you can't say, you know what? It's not working out. I want to go my own way and live my happiness. And I genuinely want you to go your way, live your happiness. If I'm wrong, prove me wrong. I'll learn from you and take lessons and vice versa. But the fact that we all have to be in the same house together is not coherent. And that's not love. That is the path towards friction and tension and conflict. Do you think there's concrete groups? Like is it as simple as the two groups of blue and red? No, it's also very fluid because you and I are allied as Jewish people, as Russians, as males, as podcasters. You're an academic, I'm not. So we're different, but we each are a Venn diagram, even within ourselves. And I can talk to you about politics and then we can talk about Russia stuff. And then you could talk about your work, which I don't know anything about. So that'd be where you're way up here and a way down here. So there's lots, every relationship with just between individuals, it's very dynamic. So how do we succeed? Like how do we form individual states where there's a little bit more cohesion? Sure, and voluntary cohesion. So the first step is to eliminate and the concept of political authority as legitimate and to denigrate and humiliate those who would put themselves in a position in which they are there to tell you how to live your life from any semblance of validity. And that's starting to happen. If you look at what they had with the lockdowns, Cuomo and de Blasio, New York, I was tired a couple of weeks ago. And I said to my friend, oh, just click, maybe I have COVID. And he goes, it's not possible, like what do you mean? And he goes, we haven't had any deaths in like two months. And there's only like 100 cases a day for like two months. And I go, you're exaggerating because everything was still closed. And I looked at the numbers and he wasn't exaggerating. And there's no greater American dream to me than an immigrant family comes to the states, forms their own little business. Maybe mom's a good cook, it's a restaurant, dry cleaner, fruit stand. And those people aren't gonna have a lot of money. Those are the first ones who lost their companies because of these lockdowns. Cuomo, who's the governor of New York, opened up the gyms, he said, you're clear to open up. De Blasio said, and we don't have enough inspectors, you're gonna have to wait another couple of weeks. To regard that as anything other than literally criminal is something that I am having a hard and harder time wrapping my head around. You said, I mean, that's something I'm deeply worried about as well, which is like thousands, it's actually millions of dreams being crushed, that American dream of starting a business, of running a business. What about all the young people who you and I have in our audiences who are socially isolated at best, and now they can't leave their homes? Isolation and ostracism are things that are very well studied in psychology. These have extreme consequences. I read a book called Ostracism, and this wasn't scientific, but basically the author was a psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever, and he had one of his colleagues, they did an experiment, let's for a week, you ostracize me completely. We know it's an, and he goes, even knowing it's the experiment, the fact that he wouldn't make eye contact with me and the fact that he ignored me had an extreme emotional impact on me, knowing full well this is purely for experimental purposes. Now you multiply that by all these, the suicide, the number of kids who were thinking about suicide was through the roof during all this. And my point is, until these people, it's gonna, I would predict like 2024, that's where we're gonna have to start having conversations about what personal consequences have to be done for these people, because until then, they're gonna do the same thing. So you think there's going to be society wide consequences of this that we're gonna see, like ripple effects, because of the social isolation? I know, I mean, we also need to talk about consequences for Cuomo and de Blasio, because if politicians respond to incentives, and the incentives are there for them to be extremely conservative, because if you have to choose, as Cuomo said in a press conference, between a thousand people dying and a thousand people losing their business, it's not a hard choice, and he's right. But at a certain point, it's like, all right, you're losing both, you're making these decisions and not having consequences for it, and you're gonna do it again the next time, so we need to make sure you're a little scared. And I don't know what that would mean. But you're laying this problem, this incompetence. I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's very competent. I think their job is to be able, yes. But you're laying it not at the hands of the individuals, but the structure of government. It's both, yes. How would we deal with it better without centralized control? Well, we didn't really have centralized control, because every country and every state handled it in a different mechanism. But a city has centralized control, right? No, that's not true. So Cuomo and de Blasio, they had a lot of disagreements over this over the months, and this was actually a source of great interest and tension. De Blasio wanted, at one point, was talking about quarantining people in their homes. Cuomo was like, you're crazy. Same thing with the schools, same thing with the gyms, and there were other such examples. But the point being, this was an emergency. World War I, I talked about this on Tim Poole's show, was very dangerous, because it gave a lot of evil people some very useful information about what the country put up with and what they can get away with under wartime. And this set the model for things like the New Deal and the other things of that nature. It is undeniable, you're a scientist, so you understand this perfectly well, that this lockdown gave some very nefarious people some very valid data about how much people were put up with under pressures from the state. So fundamentally, what is the problem with the state? Its existence. Okay, well, but to play angel's advocate again, angel's advocate again, you know, government is the people. Come on, do you really think this? As best I think as possible to have representation. Can you imagine if you have an attorney? You're like, oh, you can't have the attorney you want. You're gonna have this guy who you absolutely hate who you share no values with, why? Because he drives, I mean, leaders, political leaders, and political representation drive the discourse. Like the majority of people voted for him or whatever, however you define that. And now we get to have a discussion, well, was this the right choice? And then we get to make that choice again in four years and so on. First of all, the fact that I have to be under the thumb of somebody for four years makes no sense. There's no other relationship that's like this, including a marriage. You can leave any other relationship at any time, number one. Number two is. You could always impeach. Well, they did that. Part of it I'm just saying that the mechanisms are flawed in many ways, yeah. Yeah, right, and so that's number one. Number two is it doesn't make sense that if I don't want someone to represent me that because that person is popular that they are now in a position to. So having representation and having citizenship based on geography is a prelandline technology in a post cell phone world. There's no reason why I have to, just because we're physically in between two oceans, we all have to be represented by the same people, whereas I can very easily have my security be under someone and switch it as easily as cell phone providers. So, okay, but it doesn't have to be geographical. It can be ideas. Sure. I mean, this country represents a certain set of ideas. Yes, it does. It started out geographically. It still is geographic. It was both. It started off as ideas as well. But like, it was intricately. I mean, that's the way humans are. I mean, there was no internet. So it was, you were geographically in the same location and you signed a bunch of documents and then you kind of debated and you wrote a bunch of stuff and then you agreed on it. Okay. You understand that no one signed these documents and no one agreed to it. As Lysander Spooner pointed out over 150 years ago, the constitution or the social contract, if anything, is only binding to the signatories. And even then they're all long dead. So it's this fallacy that somehow, because I'm in a physical place, I've agreed, even though I'm screaming through your face that I don't agree, to be subordinate to some imaginary, invisible monster that was created 250 years ago. And this idea of like, if you don't like it, you have to move. That's not what freedom means. Freedom means I do what I want, not what you want. So if you don't like it, you move. Okay, just to put some, I don't like words and terms. One, one, one, zero, one, one, one, zero, one. Yeah, exactly. Is that what your language is? It is, I'm translating it all in real time. But would you call the kind of ideas that you're advocating for and we're talking about anarchy? Yes, anarchism, yes. Okay, so let's get into it. Can you try to paint the utopia that an anarchist worldview dreams about? The only people who describe anarchism as utopia are its critics. If I told you right now, and I wish I could say this factually, that I have a cure for cancer, that would not make us a utopia. That would still probably be expensive. We would still have many other diseases. However, we would be fundamentally healthier, happier and better off, all of us. Than democracy. So, sorry, I jumped back from the cancer. No, than democracy or government. So it's only curing one major, major life threatening problem, but in no sense is it a utopia. So what, can we try to answer this question, same question many times, which is what exactly is the problem with democracy? The problem with democracy is that those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. So. That's the central problem with democracy. Not all of us need leaders. Right. So, what does it mean to need a leader? Are you saying like people who are actually like free thinkers don't need leaders kind of thing? Sure. That's a good way of working. But like, you don't, okay. So do you acknowledge that there's some value in authority in different subjects? So what that means is, I don't mean authority, somebody who's in control of you, but. But you're doing the definition switch. Because. I am, I am. You're right, you're right. It's unfair. Okay, that was bad. But that's what they do. That's their trick. Yeah. And this is one of the useful things, by the way, that's this total sidebar. If people ask me for advice, I always tell them if you're gonna raise your kids, raise them bilingual. Because I was trilingual by the time I was six and that teaches you to think in concepts. Whereas if you only know one language, you fall for things like this, because using authority in the sense of a policeman and someone has authority in physics, it's the same word. Conceptually, they're extremely different. But if you're only thinking in one language, your brain is going to equate the two. And that's a trap that people who only speak one language have. For sure. But even if you know multiple languages, you can still use the trick of using the worst of your convenience. Yeah, absolutely. To manipulate the conversation. But you weren't trying to do that, but you fell into that. I accidentally did it. Yeah, you're right. We all tend to do that if you only speak one language and think in one language. But if, I guess let me rephrase it. Are you against, do you acknowledge the value of offloading your own effort about a particular thing to somebody else? Absolutely. Like an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, absolute, a chef, infinite. Isn't that ultimately what a democracy is? No. Broadly defined, like you're basically electing a bunch of authorities. Using the word you in two senses. Using the word you meaning me as an individual, not using you as a mass. Yeah, as a mass, not you as an individual. Right, so I would absolutely want someone to provide for my security. I would absolutely want someone to negotiate with me for foreign power or something like that. That does not mean it has to be predicated and what lots of other people who I do not know and if I do know them, probably would not respect, think about. It's of no moral relevance to me. Nor I to them. So do you think this kind of, there could be a bunch of humans that behave kind of like ants in a distributed way. There could be an emergent behavior in them that results in a stable society. Like isn't that the hope with anarchy is like without an overarching. But ants, I mean ants are the worst example here because ants have a very firm authority. The queen? Yeah, and they're all drones. They're all clones of each other. Yeah, but so if you forget the queen, their behavior, they're all, well from your perspective, from your human intelligent perspective, but from their perspective, they probably see each other as a bunch of individuals. No they don't. Ants are very big on altruism in the sense of self sacrifice. They do not think the individual matters. They routinely kill themselves for the sake of the hive in the community. But they, see that's from the outside perspective, from the individual perspective of the individual, they probably, they don't see it as altruism. Right, but they view and they're right because the ants life is very ephemeral and cheap, that it's more important to continue this mass population that one individual ant live. Like bees are another even better example. The honeybee, when they sting, they only sting once and they die. And they do it gladly because it's like, okay, this community is much more important than me and they're right. Yeah, okay, so fine, let's forget. I'm being pedantic, but it's important, I think. I'm not just being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic. But there's something beautiful that I won't argue about because I do, there's an interesting point there about individualism of ants. I do think they're more individual. But let's give your view of ants that they're communists. Okay, let's go with the communist view of ants. Okay, yeah. But they're still a beautiful emergent thing, which is like they can function as a society and without, I would say, centralized control. Yeah, I agree with you. It's another argument. So is that the hope for anarchy? It's like you just throw a bunch of people that voluntarily wanna be in the same place under the same set of ideas and they kind of, like the doctors emerge, the police officers emerge, the different necessary structures of a functional society emerge. Do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is that is just beyond beautiful when you stop to think about it? I'll see Twitter. I'm not being tongue in cheek. Okay. Language. There's infinite languages. Language, the things that language can be used for are bring tears to people's eyes quite literally. It's also used for basic things. No one is forcing us. We speak two languages each at least. No one's forcing us to use English. No one's forcing us to use this dialect of English. It's a way, and despite there being so many different languages, lingua franca emerge, the language that everyone is, Latin. Even in North Korea, they refer to the fish and the different animals by the Latin scientific note. No one decided this. Sure, there's an organization that sets a binomial nomenclature, but there's no gun to anyone's head referring to a sea moth as a Pegasus species. And when you think about how amazing language is, and in some other context would say like, well, you need to have a world government and they're deciding which is the verbs and you have to have an official definition and an official dictionary. And none of that's happened. And I think anyone, even if they don't agree with my politics or my worldview, cannot deny that the creation of language is one of humanity's most miraculous, beautiful achievements. Absolutely. So there you go. There's one system where a kind of anarchy can result in beauty, stability, like sufficient stability, and yet, flexibility to adjust it and so on. And the internet helps it. You get something like Urban Dictionary, which starts creating absurd, both humor and wit. But also language and syntax and jargon, immediately you size people up. If you say vertebral, I know you're a doctor, because that's how they pronounce it, the spinal column. I'm sure in your field, there's certain jargon and right away you can know if this person's one of us or not. I mean, it's infinite. I mean, I don't need to tell you. It's emojis too. Yes, there's so much there to study with language. It's fascinating. But do you think this applies to human life? The meat space, the physical space? Yes. So that kind of beauty can emerge without writing stuff on paper, without laws. You could have rules. You don't need, they don't have to be laws. So. Enforced by violence. Like that's what, what's a law? A law is something that is unchosen. A rule is something. If I go to my pool, you know, I sign up to be a member of pool, on the wall there's certain things. It's like, you know, certain number of people in the pool. No peeing in here. Good luck enforcing that one. And so on and so forth. Well, that's the problem. Aren't you afraid that people are gonna pee in the pool? That's not as my big concern as mass incarceration, as the fact that the police can steal more money than burglars can. The fact that innocent people can be killed with no consequences. The fact that war can be waged and with no consequences for those who waged it. The fact that so many men and women are being murdered overseas and here, and the people who are guiding these are regarded as heroic. So you think there might, that in an anarchist system, there's a possibility of having less wars and less, what would you say, corruption and less abuse of power? Let's talk, yes. And let's talk about corruption because, and I made this point on Rogan, you and I, again, the Russian background, we realize that when it comes to corruption, American is very naive. Corruption they think is, oh, I got my brother a job and he's getting money on the table. That's not, when we're talking about like state corruption, things that are done in totalitarian states and even to some extent in America, like Jeffrey Epstein, Jillian Maxwell, things that Stalin did, things that Hitler did. When the CIA was torturing people at Gitmo, they had to borrow KGB manuals because they didn't know how to torture correctly because they never thought of these things. It's very hard for us to get into the mindset of someone who's like a child predator, someone who, let me give you an example from my forthcoming book. There was a guy who was the head of Ukraine in the 30s, I forget his name. Now these old Soviets, they were tough. I mean, they pride, Stalin means steel. They pride themselves and their cruelty and how strong they were. And this was the purge. Stalin is trying to, killing lots of people left and right and his henchman, Beria had the quote, find me the man and I'll find you the crime. They would accuse someone and they would torture him until he talked and confessed and then he had to turn people in. And they took this guy in like beginning of the year, I think it's 36, 38, he was head of Ukraine. By May, he's arrested. And they take him to the Ljubljanka, the basement in the red square where they're torturing people. And they did the works on him. And he was a good Soviet and he stood up. Who knows what they did to him? He didn't talk. So they said, okay, one moment. They brought his teenage daughter in, raped her in front of him, he talked. So when we talk about corruption, we would never in a million years think of this. That's not how our minds work. So when you're talking about states and people where you don't have ease of exit, where you are forced to be under the auspices of an organization creating a monopoly, that leads to in extreme cases, but in not as extreme cases, really nefarious outcomes. Whereas if you have the option to leave as a client or customer, that would have a strongly limiting effect on how a business and what it can get away with. But don't you think maybe, I don't know who the right example is, whether it's Stalin, I think Hitler might be the better example of, don't you think, or Jeffrey Epstein perhaps, don't you think people who are evil will find ways to manipulate human nature to attain power, no matter the system? Yes. And like the corollary question is, do you think those people can get more power in a democracy, when there's a government already in place? It's easily they get more power, more dangerous to have a government in place. First of all, sociopaths don't know for their charm and for their warmth. Here's the two situations. In a free society, I'm a sociopath, I'm an evil person, I'm the head of Macy's. In a state society, I'm an evil person, I'm a sociopath, I'm the head of the US government. Which of these are you more concerned with? It's like night and day. So you would have far more decentralized military, you would have far more decentralized security forces, and they would be much more subject to feedback from the market. If you have an issue with Macy's or any store with a sweater, look at that transaction. If you have an issue with the state, hiring a lawyer costs more than a surgeon. To even access the mechanism for dispute is going to be exorbitant and price poor people out of the market for conflict resolution immediately. So right away, you have something that's extremely regressive. And even though this is touted as some great equalizer, it's quite the opposite. So in current society, there's deep suspicion of governments and states. Not really. Like just your example of Macy's, I mean, don't you think a Hitler could rise to be at the top of a social network like Twitter and Facebook? Okay, let's suppose Hitler ran Twitter, okay? Let's take this thought experiment seriously. Literally what could he do? So the only tweets are gonna be about how much the Jews suck, right? Okay, fine. Okay, all the cool people are leaving. There could be some compelling, like you said, evil people are charming. There could be some compelling narratives that could be with conspiracy theories, untruths, that could be spread like propaganda. Every criticism of anarchism is in fact a description. Well, the strongest criticism of anarchism are in fact descriptions of status quo. Your concern is, under anarchism, propaganda would spread and people would be taught the wrong ideas, unlike the status quo? That's not even a criticism of anarchism. I'm not actually criticizing. It's an open question of, it's an open question of in which system will human nature be able to thrive more and in which system would the evils that arise in human nature would be more easily suppressible? That's the open question. It's a scientific experiment and I'm asking only from my perspective of the fact that we've tried democracy quite a bit recently and maybe you can correct me, we haven't yet seriously tried anarchy on a large scale. Well, we don't need to try to, so anarchy isn't like a country, right? It's like saying, well, if anarchy works, how come we've never had an anarchist government, right? So anarchism is a relationship and language is an example of this. It's a worldwide anarchic system. You and I have an anarchist relationship. There's almost no circumstances that we'd be calling the police on each other. I mean, I'm asking the same question in a bunch of different directions out of, born out of my curiosity, is why is anarchy going to be better at preventing the darker sides of human nature, which presumably your criticism of government. Because of decentralization. So the darker side of human nature is an extreme concern. Anyone who says it's gonna go away is absurd and fallacious. I think that's a nonstarter when people say that everyone's gonna be good. Human beings are basically animals. We're capable of great beauty and kindness. We're capable of just complete cruel and what we would call inhumanity, but we see it on a daily basis even today. And what's interesting is the corporate press won't even tell you the darkest aspects because that's too upsetting to people. So they'll tell you about atrocities and horrors, but only to a point. And then when you actually do the homework, you're like, oh, it's so much worse than, like that thing about Stalin, right? So we know in a broad sense that Stalin was a dictator. We know that he killed a lot of people, but it takes work to learn about the Holodomor. It takes work to learn about what those literal tortures were and that this is the person who later, FDR and Harry Truman were shaking hands with and taking photos with and was being sold to us as Uncle Joe. He's just like you and me. So when you have a decentralized information network as opposed to having three media networks, it is a lot easier for information that doesn't fit what would be the corporate America narrative to reach the populations. And it would be more effective for democracy because they're in a much better position to be informed. Now, you're right. It also means, well, if everyone has a mic, that means every crazy person and with their wacky views. And at a certain point, yeah, it has to become, then there's another level, which is then the people have to be self enforcing. And you see that in social media all the time where someone says this, the other person jumps in. You think, but isn't social media a good example of this? So you think ultimately without centralized control, you can have stability? What about the mob outrage and the mob rule, the power of the mobs that emerge? Power of the mob is a very serious concern. Gustav Le Bon wrote a book in the 1890s called The Crowd. And this was one of the most important books I've written because it influenced both Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and they all talked about it. And he made the point that under crowd psychology, human lynching is another example of this. None of those individuals or very few would ever dream of doing these acts. But when they're all together and you lose that sense of self, you become the ant and you lose that sense of individually, you're capable of doing things that like in another context, you'd be like, I should kill myself, I'm a monster. So you're worried about that, but doesn't the mob have more power under anarchy? No, the mob has much less power in anarchy because under anarchism, every individual is fully empowered. You wouldn't have gun restrictions. You would have people creating communities based on shared values. They'd be much more collegial, they'd be much more kind, as opposed to when you're forcing people to be together in a polity when they don't have things in common. That is like having a bad roommate. If you're forced to look like jails, if you're forced to be locked in a room with someone, even if you had first liked them, after a while, you're going to start to hate them and that leads to very nefarious consequences. So as an anarchist, what do you do in a society like this? Thrive. I think I'm doing okay. No, I mean, there's an election coming up. There's, as you talk, You're Welcome is one of the 15 shows that you host. It's down to one. Okay, it's down to one. But I'm a big fan. You talk about libertarianism a little bit. I mean, is there some practical political direction in terms of we as a society should go? I don't mean we as a nation. I mean, we as a collective of people should go to make a better world from an anarchist point of view. Sure, I think politics is the enemy and anything. How do you define politics? The state, the government. So anything that lessens its sway on people, anything that delegitimizes it is good. I wrote an article a few years ago about how wonderful it is that Trump is regarded as such a buffoon because it's very, very useful to have a commander in chief who's regarded as a clown because it's gonna take a lot to get him to convince your kids to go overseas and start killing people and making widows and orphans, as well as those kids coming home in caskets. Whereas if someone is regarded with prestige and they're like, oh, we need to send your kid overseas. Oh, absolutely. I mean, this guy's great. So that is a very healthy thing where people are skeptical of the state. But there's a lot of people that regard him as one of the greatest leaders we've ever had. Yeah, Dinesh D'Souza, he's another Lincoln. When you talk shit about Trump or talk shit about Biden, I'm trying to find a line to walk where they don't immediately put you into this person has Trump derangement syndrome or they have the alternative to that. I'm more than happy when people are preemptively dismissing me because then I don't have to waste time engaging with them because those people would be of no use to me. When I was on Tim Pool recently, Tim Pool's show, Tim Pool's known for his little hat. I got a propeller beanie motorized and it was just spinning the whole two hours. I know, like a 1950s thing. The point being I wore it because there's lots of people who would say, I can't take seriously someone who wears a hat like that. And my point being, if you are the kind of person who takes your cues based on someone's wardrobe as opposed to the content of your ideas, you're of no use to me as an ally. So I'd be more than happy you preemptively abort rather than waste our breath trying to engage. This is a very, very deep thing that you and I disagree on, which is, this goes to the trolling versus the love, is I believe that person instinctually dismisses you on the very basic surface level. But deep down, there's a wealth of a human being that seeks the connection, seeks to understand deeply to connect with other humans that we should speak to. Yeah, you and I completely disagree. See, you're saying. I'm saying there's no mind there literally. Okay, so I naturally think the majority of people have the capacity to be thoughtful, intelligent, and learn about ideas, ideas that they instinctually based on their own current inner circle disagree with and learn to understand, to empathize with the other. And in the current climate, there's a divisiveness that discourages that. And that's where I see the value of love of encouraging people to strip away that surface instinctual response based on the thing they've been taught, based on the things they listen to, to actually think deeply. Have you ever had gone to CVS or Duane Reade and your bill, how much you owe them is $6, and you give them a $10 bill in a single and watch the look on their face? You watch them void their bowels and panic because you've given them $11 on a $6 bill. This is not a mind capable or interested in thoughts and ideas and learning. No, you're talking about the first moment of a first moment where there's an opportunity to think. They are desperate to avoid it. No, they're just, it's. And incapable of it. I just, they have the same exact experiences I have every single day when I know it's time for me to go out on a run of five miles or six miles or 10 miles. I'm desperate to avoid it, and at the same time, I know I have the capacity to do it, and I'm deeply fulfilled when I do do it, when I do overcome that challenge. You are one of the great minds of our generation. You are telling me that any of these people can do anything close to the work you do? Not in artificial intelligence, but in the ability to be compassionate towards other people's ideas, like understand them enough to be able. Passion requires a certain baseline of intelligence, because you have to perceive other people as being different but of value. Yeah, exactly. That's a sophisticated mindset. I think most people are capable of it. You don't think so? No, and nor are they interested in it. But in that kind of, if you don't believe they're capable of it, how can anarchy be stable? If you have a farm, there's one farmer and 50 cows, it's very stable. You're just not, you're not asking the cows where to farm things. Yeah, but the cows aren't intelligent enough to do damage. Cows certainly, bulls, because they could do a lot of damage. They could trample things, they could attack you. Cows are like, how much do they weigh, like 4,000 pounds? Can you connect the analogy then? Because like. Sure, you can't expect that. Yeah. Saying a cow is a cow isn't a slur. It's not saying you hate cows. Cows, or even, let's say, the example I always use with good reason is dogs, okay? I always say to study how human beings operate, watch Cesar Millan, because human beings and dogs have co evolved. Our minds have both evolved in parallel tracks to communicate with each other. Dogs are, can be vicious. Dogs for the most part are great, wonderful, but you can't expect the dog to understand certain concepts. It's not an, and now most people are offended. Are you saying I'm like a dog? If you're a dog person like I am, this is actually a huge compliment. Most dogs are better than most people, but to get the idea that this is something that is basically your peer is nonsensical. Now, of course this sounds arrogant and elitist and so on and so forth, and I'm perfectly happy with that, but it is very hard to persuade me or anyone that if you walk, George Carlin has that joke, think how smart the average person is, then realize 50% of people are dumber than that. If you walk around and see who's out there, these people are very kind. They are of value. They deserve to be treated with respect. They deserve to be secure in their person. They deserve to feel safe and to have love, but the expectation that they should have any sort of semblance of power over me or my life is as nonsensical as asking Lassie to be my accountant. So, but that goes to power, that not to the ability, the capacity to be empathetic, compassionate, intelligent. What, if I were to try to prove you wrong? That's a good question, okay. What would you be impressed by about society? How would I show it to you? That's a good question. How would you show it to me? Because I think something has to be falsifiable if you're gonna make a claim, right? So what would it? Because we both made claims that aren't a kind of our own like interpretation based on our interaction. Like when I opened Twitter, everyone seems to say. Why do you only follow one person? Who do you follow? Who's the one person you follow? Stoic Emperor. I follow a lot of people. I have a script. I have a script that I have an entire interface. So I think Twitter is really. This is real love. It's not ironic love. I love watching it and I'm sure you do too. I love watching a quality mind at work because when someone has a quality mind, they're often not self aware. I catch this on myself of how it operates and then when other people see it, they're like, oh my God, this is so beautiful because there's such an innocence to it. But like when I opened Twitter, I'm energized. There's a lot of love on Twitter. People say like. I love Twitter. I agree. You don't think I have a lot of love on Twitter? My fans pay my rent. I mean, I don't know your experience of Twitter, but when I look at your, which is a fundamentally different thing. I'm saying my experience from the. So maybe you can tell me what your experience is like as a human. So when I observe your Twitter, I think, I wouldn't call it love. I would call it fun. Yes. And because of that, that's a different kind of, that like love emerges from that because people kind of learn that we're having, this is like game night, like. Yes. You know, we can talk shit a little bit. We can, and you can even like pull in, you can make fun of people. You can have the crazy uncle come over that is a huge Trump supporter, somebody who hates Trump and you can have a little fun. I get it. It's a different kind of thing. I wouldn't be able to be the, you're the host of game night. Yes, yes. So I wouldn't be able to host that kind of game night. I imagine you programming your robots and you're asking what is fun and it just starts sparking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What is fun? So the robots in my life that survive are the ones that don't, that like survive that whole programming process. So they're kind of like, they're kind of like the idiot from Dostoevsky, they're very like simple minded robots. Fun is moving a can from one table to another. That's game night for our kin. You know, one of my quotes is, and I think about this every day and I mean it with every fiber of my being, we're born knowing that life is a magical adventure and it takes them years to train us to think otherwise. And I think that Willy Wonka approach, it's a very Camus approach. It's something I believe with every fiber of my being. I try to spread that as much as possible. I think it is very sad. I'm not being sarcastic. It comes off as condescending. I mean it at face value. It's very sad how many people are not receptive to that. And I think a lot of those functions, how they were raised. And I could have very easily with my upbringing have not maintained that perspective. And there's a lot of, I have a lot of friends in recovery like AA and they have an expression, not my circus, not my monkeys, right? That you can't really take on other people's problems on your own at a certain point, they have to do the work themselves because you can only do so much externally. And there are a lot of very damaged people out there. And they're damaged people who revel in being damaged. And they are damaged people who desperately, desperately, desperately wanna be well, who desperately wanna be happy, who desperately wanna find joy. So if I can be the one and as arrogant as this sounds, I'll own it, who does give them that fun and to tell them it doesn't have to be like you thought. Like it could be, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna suck, but it's still a magical adventure and you're gonna be okay, cause you've been through worse. Like that, if that could be my message, I would own it all day long. And so what does adventure look like for you? Cause I mean, it actually boils down to, I still disagree with you. I think trolling can be and very often is destructive for society. Yes, I want to destroy society. That is the goal. I want to help many people. Unironically, okay. Unironically, yes. What do I do with that? Okay, so. Whatever you want. Do what thou wilt is the hall of the law. Like I just wanna, so you're hosting game night and I just wanna play Monopoly. I wanna play, what's it, Risk. Okay, I wanna play these games. And you're saying. Those are aggressive games. Yeah, I was trying to think like of a friendlier game, but they're all kind of aggressive. Battleship. Axis and allies, you know, fun stuff. But like, so that's an adventure, but you're saying that we want to destroy everything. Even like the rules of those games are not. You voluntarily agree to those rules. The point is if someone comes in who no one invited to game night and are telling you, no, when you play Monopoly, you have to get money when you land in free parking or you don't, it's like, who are you? We're having our own fun and you smell. I don't know, but there's an aggressive. There's an aggression. Let me speak to that, which I think you're picking up on. I had a friend named Martha, Marcia, excuse me. She ran something called cuddle parties, which people laughed at about a lot back in the day. And the premise of the cuddle parties, everyone got together and cuddled, right? And it's like, ah, ha, ha. Then you stop to think about it and you realize physical contact is extremely important. And a lot of people don't have it. And if this is a mechanism of people getting that, it actually is going to have profound positive psychological consequences. So after she explained it, I'm like, okay, we laughed at this because it's weird. And now that I think about it, this is wonderful. And I asked her about like the tough question, I go, what if guys get turned on? And on their website, it even has a rule, like do not fear the erection, right? Because it's going to be a natural consequence of physical proximity. And the point she goes, she said this, I think about this all the time. People will take as much space as you let them. It is incumbent on each of us to set our own boundaries. We all have to learn when to say, no, you're making me uncomfortable. If someone doesn't respect your right to have your boundary to be uncomfortable, this person is not your friend. Now they can say, I don't understand. Like, why is this okay? Why is that not? Let me know you better so I'm respectful of you. But if they roll their eyes and they're like, get over, I'm going to do what I want, this person is not interested in knowing you as a human being. Okay. And that is the aggression. You have to draw those lines. I mean, but that's a very positive way of phrasing that aggression. I'm a very positive person. But the trolling, there's a destructive thing to it. Yes. That hurts others. Yes. But it's not bad people. I only troll as a reaction or towards those in power. Okay. So maybe let's talk about trolling a little bit. Because trolling, when it can, maybe you can correct me, but I've seen it become a game for people that's enjoyable in itself. I disagree with that. That's not a good thing. If you are there just to hurt innocent people, you are a horrible human being. But doesn't trolling too easily become that? I don't know about easily. Let me give you an example of where trolling came from. The original troll was Andy Kaufman. He was on the show Taxi. He was a performance artist, not a stand up comedian. And this is a quintessential example of trolling. He had a character where he was basically like a lounge singer. He had these glasses on and just a terrible singer and so on and so forth. And he denied it was him. And he came out and I'm blanking on the guy's name. I can't believe it. Tony Clifton. Wow. Yeah. He came out in the audience and he goes, you know, my wife died a few years ago. Every time I look at my daughter Sarah's eyes, I can see my wife. Sarah, come out here. Let's do a duet. And Sarah was like 11, sits on his lap. They start singing duet. Her voice cracks. He smacks her across the face. What the hell are you doing? You're making an ass out of me in front of these people. She starts crying. The audience is booing and he goes, don't boo her, you're just gonna make her cry more. Now it ends. This wasn't his daughter. It wasn't even a child. It was an actress. This was all set up. He's exploiting their love of children in order to force them to be performers. That is trolling. No one is actually getting hurt. It's a humorous, though twisted exchange. If you go online looking for weak people and you are there to denigrate them just for them being weak or in some way inferior to you, that is the wrong approach. I am best on the counter punch. A lot of times people come to me and they'll be like, I hope you die. You're ugly. You're disgusting. And there's this great quote from Billy Idol, which I'm gonna mango here, something effective. I love it when people are rude to me, then I can stop pretending to be nice. Then you start fights. Now it's a chance for me to finish it and make an example of this person. But that's very, very different from I'm gonna go around and humiliate people for the sake of doing it, in my view. And I can see how one would lead to the other. Yeah, but that's my fundamental concern with it. So my dream is to put, use technology, create platforms that increase the amount of love in the world. And to me, trolling is doing the opposite. So like Andy Kaufman is brilliant. So I love, obviously, it sounds like I'm a robot thing. I love humor, okay? Humor is good. One, one, one, zero, one, one, one, one. But like, it's, I just see like 4chan. I see that you can often see that humor quickly turn. Yeah, because what happens is a lot of low status people, this is their one mechanism through sadism to feel empowered, and then they can hide behind, well, I'm just joking. Yeah, like there's this dark thing. Yeah, that's not acceptable. That's something you can't have. There's a dark LOL that people do, which is like they'll say like the shittiest thing. Right, because they feel. And then do LOL after. Like, as if, I don't even know like what is happening in that dark mind of yours. Because they are feeling powerless in their lives, and they see someone who they perceive as higher status or more powerful than them, or even not appear, and they, through their words, cause a reaction in this person. So they feel like they are, in a very literal sense, making a difference on earth, and they matter in a very dark way. It's disturbing. This is not, I mean, it's unfortunate that that term trolling is used for that, as opposed to what Andy Kaufman does, as opposed to what I do. It really is a sinister thing, and it's something I'm not at all a fan of. How do we fight that? So, like a neighboring concept of that is conspiracy theories, which is. I don't think they're neighboring at all. Well, let me give a sort of naive perspective. Maybe you can educate me on this. From my perspective, conspiracy theories are these constructs of ideas that go deeper and deeper and deeper into creating worlds where there's powerful pedophiles controlling things, like these very sophisticated models of the world that in part might be true, but in large part, I would say, are figments of imagination that become really useful constructs. Self reinforcing. Self reinforcing for then feeding, like empowering the trolls to attack the powerful, the conventionally powerful. I don't think that's a function of conspiracy theories. Now, let's talk about conspiracy theories, because one of my quotes is, "'You take one red pill, not the whole bottle.'" This concept that everything in life is at the function of a small cadre of individuals would be, for many people, reassuring, because as bad as it looks, you know they, whoever they are, it's usually the Jews, aren't gonna let it get that bad, that they will pull back. Or the black pill is that they aren't intentionally trying to destroy everything, and there's nothing we can do and we're doomed. And there's an amazing book by Arthur Herman called The Idea of Declined Western History. It's one of my top 10 books where he goes through every 20 years how there's a different population that say, "'It's the end of the world, here's the proof.'" And very often, the proof is something that is kind of self fulfilling, where it's not falsifiable. And we both have to think of ways to falsify our claims from earlier. So it is a big danger. It's a big danger online, because very quickly, if someone who you thought was good, but now is bad on one aspect, well, they're controlled opposition, or they've been taken over, or they've been kind of appropriated by the bad people, whoever those bad people would be. I don't know that I have a good answer for this. I don't think it's as pervasive as people think. The number of people who believe conspiracy theory? Right, I mean, and also conspiracy theory is a term used to dismiss ideas that have some currency. The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy. The Founding Fathers got together secretly on this war to secrecy in Philadelphia, said, we're throwing out the Articles of Confederation, we're making a new government, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Luther Martin left, and he told everyone, this is a conspiracy, and they're like, yeah, whatever, Luther Martin. So, and Jeffrey Epstein was a conspiracy, Harvey Weinstein was a conspiracy, Bill Cosby was a conspiracy. They all knew, they didn't care. Communist infiltration in America, there's a great book by Eugene Lyons called The Red Decade. They all knew every atrocity that was done under Stalinism was excused in the West, and if you didn't believe it, oh, you've got this crazy anti Russia conspiracy. So it's a term that is weaponized in a negative sense, but that does not at all imply that it does not have very negative real life consequences because it's kind of a cult of one, right? Like I'm at home with my computer, I bang into this ideology, anyone who doesn't agree with me, they are blind, they're oblivious, mom and dad, my friends, you don't get it. We were warned about people like you, and I think there's a very heavy correlation, and I'm not a psychiatrist, of course, between that and certain types of mild mental illness, like some kind of paranoid schizophrenia and things like that, because after a certain point, if everything is a function of this conspiracy, there's no randomness or beauty in life. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can say anything interesting about it in the way of advice of how to take a step into conspiracy theory world without completely going, like diving deep, because it seems like that's what happens. People can't look at Jeffrey Epstein. I can tell you what the advice I'd have is, seriously and rigorously, without going, because you can look at Jeffrey Epstein and say there's a deeper thing. You can always go deeper. It's like Jeffrey Epstein was just a tool of the lizard people, and the lizard people are the tool. Well, they say Satanists, in this case. Somehow, recently, very popular, spedophiles somehow always involved. I'm not understanding any of that. Legitimately, I say this both humorously and seriously. I need to look into it, and I guess the bigger question I'm asking, how does a serious human being, somebody with a position at a respectable university, look at a conspiracy theory and look into it? When I look at somebody like Jeffrey Epstein, who had a role at MIT, and I think I'm not happy, personally, I wasn't there when Jeffrey Epstein was there. I'm not happy with the behavior of people now about Jeffrey Epstein, about the bureaucracy and the everybody's trying to keep quiet, hoping it blows over, without really looking into any, looking in a deep philosophical way of how do we let this human being be among us? Can I give you a better example that is conspiratorial? The Speaker of the House, the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a pedophile. He went to jail. The Democrats don't throw this in the Republicans faces every five minutes. Not even Democratic activists. I find that very, very odd, and not what I would predict. Now, I'm not saying there's some kind of conspiracy, but when it comes to things like sexual predation, which is something that I'm very, very concerned about. I have an uncle now. My sister just had her second kid recently. He's adorable. It's something that I don't understand. It feels as if there's a lot of people who want this to all go away. Now, I think it's also because we don't have the vocabulary and framework to discuss it, because when you start talking about things like children and these kind of issues, we want to believe it's all crap, because it's, for those of us who aren't in this kind of mindset, the idea that this happens to kids and happens frequently is something so horrible that it's just like, I don't even want to hear it, and that does these children and adult survivors an enormous disservice. So I don't know that I have any particular insight on this. But see, how do you, the Catholic Church, again, there's all these topics that. Public school teachers are far more proportionately peders of children than the Catholic Church. Man, I don't know what, you're right, you're right. Perhaps I've been reading a lot about Stalin and Hitler, somehow it's more comforting to be able to. Yeah, because it's there, and then. And then, and then the atrocities that are happening now, it's a little bit more difficult because. There was a New York Times article, sorry to interrupt you, where they had people tracking down child pornography. And I think the article said they didn't have enough people just to cover the videotapes of infants being raped. And we can even wrap our heads around reading Lolita, like, okay, she's 14, 12, okay, it's still a female. An infant, it's something that, again, like with the Stalin example, we sat down here for a hundred years, we would never think of something like this, think of it in a sexual context, it makes no sense. So, and the fact that this is international, okay, we eliminated completely in America. Well, then they're gonna go find, there's infants all over the world, there's video cameras all over the world. So then it has to become a conspiracy because someone has to film it, I'm filming it, you're buying it, your kid. It is literally a conspiratorial, not in the sense of like a mafia conspiracy or some government illuminati, but there is our networks designed to produce this product. See, but like what I'm trying to do now, and part of the, one of the nice things with like a podcast and other things I'm involved with is removing myself from having any kind of boss so I can do whatever that helps. Oh, it's so wonderful, that just happened to me, it's the most wonderful thing ever. So I could do, I can actually, in moderation, consider like look into stuff. Careful though, I was gonna write a book about this that people pointed out, you sure wanna do this research? Because if you start Googling around for this kind of stuff, it's on your computer. Oh, in that sense, I'm more concerned about, you know, it's the Nietzsche thing, looking into the abyss, like you wanna be very, I believe I can do this kind of thing in moderation without slipping into the depths. I think that's intelligence, that's like, I recently quote unquote looked into like the UFO community, the extraterrestrial, whatever community. I think it always frustrated me that the scientific community like rolled their eyes at all the UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff. Even though there could be fascinating, beautiful, physical fun, like, first of all, there could legit. Like ball lightning. The ball lightning, right, that's at the very basic level is a fascinating thing. And also, it could be something like, I mean, I don't know, but it could be something interesting, like worth looking into. My grandfather was an air traffic controller back in the Soviet Union. And he said, we saw this stuff all the time. These are planes that were not moving or whatever things that were not moving according to anything we knew about. So it's absolutely real. He's not some jerk with an iPhone in his backyard. This is a military professional who understood technology, who knew where the secret bases were. So if he's telling me, it doesn't mean it's Martians, but he's telling me there's something there. And there are many examples of these like military people. These aren't some layman who sees a store. Yeah, these are legit people. Yeah, and so you can dismiss, when you're talking about professionals who are around aircraft all the time, who are familiar with aircraft at the highest levels, and they're seeing things that they can't explain, they're clearly not stupid and they're clearly not under form. So there's different ways to dismiss it. For example, you were saying that trolling is a good mechanism. I'm against that, but I'm not dismissing it by like rolling my eyes. I'm considering legitimately that you're way smarter than me and you understand the world better than me. Like I'm allowing myself to consider that possibility and thinking about it. Like maybe that's true, like seriously considering it. That's what I feel the way people should approach intelligent people, serious quote unquote people, scientists should approach conspiracy theories. Like look at it carefully. First of all, is it possible that the earth is flat? It's not trivial to show that the earth is not flat. It's a very good exercise. You should go through it. Yes. But once you go through it, you realize that based on a lot of data and a lot of evidence, and there's a lot of different experiments you can do yourself actually to show that the earth is not flat. Okay. The same kind of process can be taken for a lot of different conspiracy theories and it's helpful. And without slipping into the depths of lizard people running everything. That's where I've now listened to two episodes of Alex Jones's show because he goes crazy deep into different kind of worldviews that I was not familiar with. Right. And I don't know what to make of it. I mean, the reason I've been listening to it is because there's been a lot of discussions about platforming of different people. Yeah. And I've been thinking about what does censorship mean? I've been thinking about whether, because Joe Rogan said he's gonna have Alex on again. And then I enjoyed it as a fan, just the entertainment of it. But then I actually listened to Alex and I was thinking, is this human being dangerous for the world? Like is the ideas he's saying dangerous for the world? I'm more concerned with the Russian conspiracy that we had for three years. The claim that our election was not legitimate and that everyone in the Trump White House is a stooge of Putin. And the people who said this had no consequences for this. Alex Jones doesn't have the respect that they do. These are both areas of concern for me. But he might if he's given more platform. So like the people who've, and I'd be curious to, I'm also a little bit, I don't know what to think about the idea that Russians hacked the election. That it seems too easily accepted in the mainstream media. Hillary Clinton said that how they did it was they had ads on the dark web. Now you and I both know what the dark web is. So the possibility of ads on the dark web having a proportional influence on the election is literally zero. Perhaps I should look into it more carefully, but I've found very little good data on exactly what did the Russians do to hack elections. Like technically speaking, what are we talking about here? Like as opposed to these kind of weird, like the best thing there's a couple of books and like reporting on like farms. Like it's. Troll farms, yeah. Troll farms. But let's see the data. Like how many exactly? What are we talking about? Like what were they doing? Not just like some anecdotal discussions of, but like relative to the bigger, the size of Facebook. Like if there's a few people, several hundreds, say posting different political things on Facebook relative to the full size of Facebook. Let's look at the full size. Right, you're thinking like a scientist. The actual impact. Yeah. Like, cause it's fascinating the social dynamics of viral information of videos. When Donald Trump retweets something, I think that's understudied the effect of that. Like he retweeted a clip with Joe Rogan and Mike Tyson, where Mike Tyson says that he finds fighting orgasmic. I don't understand that, but they'd be fascinating to think like what is the ripple effect on the social dynamic of our society from retweeting a clip about Mike Tyson. What's your favorite Trump tweet? I tuned them out a long time ago, unfortunately. I have, this goes to the, you and I have a different relationship with Donald Trump. You appreciate the art form of trolling. Sexual versus nonsexual. Nonsexual, yeah. So I tend to prefer Bill Clinton. He's more my type. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. You don't like that consent stuff. No, the consent, no. No, you appreciate the art form of trolling and Donald Trump is a master. He's the da Vinci of trolling. So I tend to think that trolling is ultimately destructive for society and then Donald Trump takes nothing seriously. He's playing a game. He's making a game out of everything. He takes a lot of things seriously. I think he's very committed to international peace. Sorry, I shouldn't speak so strong. I think he takes, actually, yes, a lot of things seriously. I meant on Twitter and the game of politics. Yeah. He is, he only takes. Irreverently. Yeah. Yeah. And I appreciate it. I just would like to focus on genuine, real expressions of humanity, especially positive. Well, this is one. This is my favorite tweet. My fans got it lasered, etched, and put in a block of Lucite for me. And he said, every time I speak of the losers and haters, I do so with great affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up. That's an actual Trump tweet. It's my favorite one. And that's kind of nice. And that's love. That's love. That's kind of nice. Great affection. That, I mean. Exclamation point. I broke Lex. What is love? Yeah, the sparks are flying. But I have to kind of analyze that from a literary perspective, but it seems like there's love in there. Like a little bit. Yeah. It's a little bit lighthearted. Cause he's saying, even when I'm going after them, don't take it so seriously. Yeah. That's nice. It is nice. That's acknowledging the game of it. Yes. That's nice. He's not always. There's some things he's very, very vicious. Yeah. Very vicious. He's done things that I can tell you about that I'm like, this is a bad person. What do you think about one of the, okay, listen, I'm not, for people listening, I do not have Trump derangement syndrome. I don't, I see, I try to look for the good and the bad in everybody. One thing, perhaps it's irrational, but perhaps because I've been reading history, I, the one triggering thing for me is the delaying of elections. I believe in elections. And this is the part that you probably disagree with, but I, you know, I believe in the value of people voting. And I just seen too many dictators, the place where they finally, the big switch happens when you question the legitimacy of elections. Who's been questioning the legitimacy of elections for the last three years? I've only heard Donald Trump do it last year, but the last three years you're saying somebody else? You don't think, not my president, illegitimate, we're not gonna normalize him as president, Russia hacked this election, impeached, you're not a real president. You don't think that's questioning the legitimacy of 2016? Nah, it's a good, I haven't been paying attention enough, but I would imagine that argument has been, that I haven't actually heard too many people, but I imagine that's been a popular thing to say. Okay, I, but nevertheless, that's a part, that didn't, that's not a statement that gained power enough to say that Barack Obama will keep being president or Hillary Clinton should be president. Newsweek had that article, how Hillary Clinton could still be president, Newsweek. No, but she's not. That's what I'm saying. My worry isn't, my worry isn't saying that the election was illegitimate and people whining at a mass scale and then Fox News or CNN reporting for years or books being written for years. My worry is legitimately martial law. A person stays president. So here's the issue. Like there's a phase shift that happens in a dictatorship. I did a book on North Korea. I'm not someone who thinks dictatorship should be taken lightly. I'm not someone who thinks it can't happen here. I think a lot of times people are desperate for dictatorship. So I am with you. And I think this is something, if you're gonna hand wave it away, everyone else hand waved it away. Hitler's never gonna be chancellor. He's like lunatic. Oh, please. He's a joke. He's a joke. They couldn't find a publisher for Mein Kampf in English because this is some guy from some random minor party in Germany spouting nonsense. Who's gonna read this crap? So I completely agree with you in that regard. I don't think we're there. My point is Donald Trump this year had every pathway open to him to declare martial law. The cities are being burned down. He could have very easily sent in the tanks and people would have been applauding him from his side. You make me feel so good right now. But am I wrong though? No, I... What he did, he tweeted out to Mayor Wheeler of Portland. He said, call me. We will solve this in minutes, but you have to call. And he sat in his hands and they said, oh, it's his fault. The city is burning down. He's not doing anything. And he goes, I'm not doing anything until you ask me to do it. So I think that is, even if you think he's an aspiring dictator, that is at least a sign that there is some restraint on his aspirations. Can I just take that in as a beautiful moment of hope? So I'm gonna remember this moment. I'm gonna miss Ted Cruz, beautiful Ted. I'm gonna remember that. I mean, I should say that perhaps I'm irrationally, this is the one moment where I feel myself being a little unhealthy. I don't think you're being irrational. I think there's an asymmetry because it's kind of like, okay, either if I leave the house, it's like Russian roulette. Yeah, maybe it's like a one in six shot. I'm pulling the trigger, I'm killing myself, but that's one in six. That's not, and the consequences are so dire that a little paranoia would go a long way. There's something that. But you can't go back. Yeah. It's an asymmetry, yeah. The thing is, the thing that makes Donald Trump new to me, and again, I'm a little naive in these things, but he surprised me in how many ways he just didn't play by the rules. Yeah. And he's made me, a little ant in this ant colony, think like, well, do you have to play by the rules at all? Right. Like, why are we having elections? Why did you say, like, it's coronavirus time? Like, it's not healthy to have elections. Like, we shouldn't be, like, I could, if I put my dictator hat on. Nancy Pelosi said that Joe Biden shouldn't debate. Yeah, did she? Yes. She says she shouldn't dignify Trump with a debate. He's the president. He could be the worst president on earth, evil, despicable monster. I'll take that as an argument. So she's playing politics, but she's. I don't think that's playing politics. I think when there's a certain point where things get, when you start attacking institutions for the emergencies of the moment and acting arbitrarily, that is when things are the slippery slope. Yeah, so you're saying debates is one of the institutions. Like, that's one of the traditions to have the debates. I think the debates are extremely important. And now I don't think that someone's a good debater is gonna make a good president. I mean, that's a big problem. But you're just saying this is attacking just yet another tradition, yet another. You know, like, how if you're dating, if you're married to someone and someone throws out the word divorce, you can't unring that bell, you threw it out there. I'm saying you don't throw things out like that unless you really are ready to go down this road. And I think that is, there's nothing in the constitution about debates. We've only had them since 1980, but still, I think they are extremely important. It's also a great chance for Joe Biden to tell him to his face, you're full of crap, here's what you did, here's what you did, here's what you did. So fascinating that you're both, you acknowledge that, and yet you also see the value of tearing down the entire thing. So you're both worried about no debates, or at least in your voice, in your tone. There's a great quote by Chesterton. I'm not a fan of him at all. But he says, before you tear down a fence, make sure you know why they put it up first. So I am for tearing it all down, but there's something called like a controlled demolition, like building sevens, or there's. Allegedly. We knew we were in Tel Aviv. Hashtag building seven. We knew we were in Tel Aviv. Wow, you're faster than me. You're operating in a different level. I need to upgrade my operating system. I told you Windows 95. You're trying, yeah. Building seven. If you're gonna, it's like Indiana Jones, right? If you're gonna pull something away, make sure you have something in place first, as opposed to just breaking it, and then just, especially in politics, because it escalates. And when things escalate without any kind of response, it can go in a very bad, that's when Napoleon comes in. So what's your prediction about the Biden Trump debates? Again, I just have this weird, maybe we'll return to maybe not in this, how do we put more love into the world? And one of the things that worries me about the debates is it'll be the world's greatest troll against the grandpa on the porch. Who crapped his pants. Yeah. And it will not put more love into the world. It will create more mockery, like. Joe Biden did a great job against Paul Ryan in 2012. Paul Ryan was no lightweight. No one thought he was a lightweight. Joe Biden handed Sarah Pail in her ass in 2008, which isn't as easy to do as you think, because she's a female. So you're gonna come off as bullying. That's something you have to worry about. So the guy isn't, I think he is in the stages of cognitive decline. So I think it's going to be interesting. I want it to be, like Mike Tyson beating up a child, cause it'll be a source of amusement to me. But I don't know how it's going to go. Is it possible that Joe Biden will be the Mike Tyson? Yes, because in his last debate with Bernie, he was perfectly fine. And again, the guy was a sender for decades. And I don't think anyone, if you looked at Joe Biden in 2010, would have thought this guy is going to be, have his ass handed him a debate. You wouldn't think that at all. So I don't know who we're going to see. Plus he's got a lot of room to attack Trump. So I'm sure he's going to come strapped and ready and he's going to have his talking points and watch Trump dance, try to tap dance around him. And if he's in a position, I don't know what the rules of the debate are, to actually nail him to the wall, it might actually, I'm sure he's going to have a lot of lines too. The problem is Trump is the master counter puncher. So like when Hillary's had her line, she's like, well, it's a good thing that Donald Trump isn't in charge of our legal system. And he's like, yeah, you'd be in jail. It's like, oh, lady, you set him up. That's painful to watch, those debates. I mean, there's something, I think it's actually analogous. I've come to think of it, your conversation with me right now, some Sleepy Joe, I'm playing the role of Sleepy Joe. I actually connect to Joe because there's, I'm also incontinent. There's like these weird pauses that he does. Yes, he does. I do the same thing and it annoys the shit out of me that like in mid sentence, I'll start saying a different thing and take a tangent. I'm not as slow and drunk as I sound, always. I swear I'm more intelligent underneath it. I'm slower but less drunk. Yes, exactly. But the result, one of those is true, but not both, yeah. And Trump, just like you, are a master counter puncher. So it's gonna be messy. Here's the other thing, in all seriousness, Chris Wallace is the moderator. Chris Wallace has interviewed Trump several times and he was a tough, tough questioner. So I don't think he's gonna come in there with softball questions. I think he's really going to try to nail Trump down, which is tough to do. I like him a lot. Yeah, and he's like, Mr. President, sir, that's not accurate, blah, blah, blah. He's done it. And Trump gets very frustrated because he doesn't just let him say whatever he wants and he hits him with the follow up. I guess he's on Fox News. And I listen to his Sunday program every once in a while. He gives me hope that, I don't know, there's something in the voice that he's not bought. There's no question he's gonna take this seriously, which I think is the best you could hope for in a moderator. It feels like there's people that might actually take the mainstream media into a place that's going to be better in the future. And we need people like him. You mean like Robespierre? What do you mean? Like taking the mainstream media to a better future. Like bring out the guillotines. See, you put your anarchist hat back on. I don't think Robespierre is much of an anarchist, but yeah, I get what you're saying. You don't think there should be a centralized place for news? There isn't now. Well, that's what mainstream media is supposed to represent, and it's broken. Well, it's not whatever, what do you call that? A place where people traditionally said was the legitimate source of truth. That's what the media was supposed to represent, no? That's their big branding accomplishment. That was never true? Yeah, because here's what happens. We remember the Spanish American War, remember the Maine, we have to take Cuba, yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, right? Then record scratch, and then we're all objective. Like when did this transition happen according to people? When you were saying that the Kaiser is the worst human being on earth? When you were downplaying Stalin and downplaying Hitler's atrocities? When you were saying we had to be in Vietnam? At what point, WMDs, when did it change? It never changed. You just are better con artists at a certain point, and now the mask is dropping. Yeah, but don't you think there's, at its best, like investigative journalism can uncover truth in a way that like Reddit, subreddits can't? You know, Reddit, sure, I agree. At its best, absolutely, that's not even a dispute. But like, don't you think like fake it until you make it is the right way to do it? Meaning like the. Fake the news? No, no, no, I meant the news saying like, we dream of doing, of arriving at the truth and reporting the truth. They don't say that. CNN had an advertisement that said this is an apple. We only report facts. That's a lie. No, that's now, and now it's clear things have changed. They haven't changed. You're just more, you're more aware of their chicanery. But, okay, so the. How many people died in Iraq? Because Saddam Hussein was about to launch WMDs. Who had consequences for this? No one. This isn't a minor thing. This is lots of dead people. Yeah. And also, I mean, dead people, it's horrible, but also the money, which has, like we said, economic effects that. Marianne Williamson, I think it was, had the, or Trump, both of them had the great point that goes, that's like a trillion dollars. How many schools would that build? How many roads would that build? Even here, why are we building hospitals in Iraq that we destroyed when we could building hospitals here? It makes no sense. It's horrifying. So who's responsible for that? Like who? Alex Jones. No, I meant for, well, so who's responsible for arriving at the truth of that, of speaking to the money spent on the wars in Iraq? This is one of the great things about social media. Twitter, you have faith in Twitter. Not specifically Twitter, but yeah, social media's the whole, what anyone could. Here's another great example. Before, if you were talking about police brutality or these riots, you would have to perceive it in the way it was framed and presented to you. Nicholas Sandman's another example. Breonna Taylor, all these things. Well, we don't have footage of her. You would have to perceive in the way that it's edited and presented to you by the corporate press. Now everyone is a video, has a video camera. Everyone has their perspective. And it's very useful when these incidents happen where you could see the same incident from several angles and you don't need Don Lemon or Chris Wallace to tell me what this means. I can see with my own eyes. Yeah, I've been very pleasantly surprised about the power. See, the mob, again, gets in the way. They get emotional and they destroy the ability for people to reason. But you're right that truth is unobstructed on social media. Like if you're careful and patient, you can see the truth. Like for example, data on COVID, some of the best sources are doctors. Like if you wanna know the truth about the coronavirus and what's happening is there's follow people on Twitter. There's certain people that are just like sourcing them from me versus the CDC and the WHO. It's, that's fast. I mean, well, it's kind of anarchy, right? Yes, it is. It's not kind of, it is anarchy, yes. I mean, well, there's some censorship and all that kind of stuff. You have censorship under anarchy in the sense that you're talking about. Like people get kicked off of Twitter. That's a drawing backwards. How do you kick somebody, okay. So, I mean, it's a. Private company. Private company. Most people wouldn't say Twitter is working, but that's probably because they take for granted how well it's working and they're just complaining about the small part of it that's broken. Yeah. Okay, another question about. You feel better? No, by the way, I mean, I had a personal gripe with the situation about the, not a personal gripe, but I felt overly emotional about the possibility that there will be some of Donald Trump messing with the election process, but you made me feel better. Good. Like saying like, if he had a bunch of opportunities to do what I would have done if I was a dictator, I would, the first time those riots over George Floyd, I would have instituted martial law. Do you know what I remember very vividly? Is after 9 11 and everyone was waiting for George Bush to give his speech and he had 98% approved rating. And I remember very vividly, cause if he had said we're suspending the constitution, everyone would have cheered for him. Like he couldn't get enough support at that time. And he didn't do it. And I can't say anything really good about George W. Bush. I'm not a fan of his to say the least. So I think you and I, and other people who are familiar with totalitarian regimes to some extent from our ancestry or whatever, from research should always be the ones freaking out and warning, but we should also be aware of we got a ways to go before it's Hitler. And thankfully there are a lot of dominoes that have to fall into place before Hitler. It's like the game secret Hitler, it's a board game before Hitler becomes Hitler. Like it's not, especially in America, there's lots of things that have to happen before you really get to that point. I mean, FDR was for all intents and purposes a dictator, but even then the worst you could say, and this is not something that you should take lightly was internment of Japanese citizens, but they weren't murdered. They weren't under lock and key in the sense of like in cells. So things could have gotten a lot worse for him. We have to, I mean, Hitler is such a horrible person to bring up because. He's Mussolini. Yeah, Mussolini is better because Hitler is so close and connected to the atrocities of the Holocaust. There's all this stuff that led up to the war and the war itself. Say that there was no Holocaust, Hitler would probably be viewed differently. Yes, I should think so. Well, I mean, but. You think, that's a very controversial stance. You think Hitler would be viewed differently if it wasn't for the Holocaust? Well, I mean, but it's a funny thing that the, I would say the death of how many, 40, 50 million. I mean, I don't know how you calculate it. It's not seen as bad as the 6 million. Oh yeah, because of Mao and Stalin. Yeah, but it's interesting. I'm working on it. You're working on it. Yeah, the next book I'm talking about. Reminding, well, it's good. I'm glad a good writer is, because the world's not reminded. My last book, The New Right, I had to deal with something like the Nazis. And one of the points they make is, how come everyone knows about the Holocaust, but no one knows about the Holodomor? And they're right. We should know about this, because it is a great example of both how the Western media were depraved, but also what human beings are capable of. And those scars are still, many Americans think Russia and Ukraine are the same thing. Oh, Trump's in bed with the Ukrainians, Trump's about the Russians, they think it's the same thing. For us, it's complete lunacy. But this is the kind of thing where Pol Pot is another example, where people have no clue of what has been done to their fellow man on the face of this earth, and they should know. How much of that do you lay at the hands of communism? How much are you with like a Jordan Pearson who is intricately connecting the atrocities, like you're saying, 1930s Ukraine, where people were starved? I recently, my grandmother recently passed away, and she survived that as a kid. Which is, those people, I mean, they're tough. They're tough. Like that whole region is tough, because they survived that, and then right after, occupation of Nazis, of Germans. How much do you lay that at communism as an ideology, versus Stalin, the man? I think Lenin was building concentration camps while he was around, and slave labor. I don't, I think it's clearly both. There are certain variants of communism that were far, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev, the reason the Soviet Union fell apart, and this is kind of, I'm gonna spoil the end of the book. There's an amazing book called Revolution 1989, it's like the most beautiful book I've ever read, by Viktor Sebastian, he's a Hungarian author. And basically what happens in 1989, Poland has their elections, and then in 1990, they kind of let in the labor people to the government. And people start crossing borders in the Eastern Bloc, and you had Hanukkah from Eastern Germany, and Ceausescu from Romania calling Gorbachev, because those are the two toughest ones, by communist standards, they go, they're just escaping, we're gonna lose everything. You gotta send in the tanks, like you did in Hungary, like you did in Czechoslovakia in 68. And Gorbachev goes, I'm not sending the tanks. And they go, dude, if you don't send in the tanks, it's all done, and he goes, nope, I'm not that kind of guy. And they were right, Ceausescu was personally shot with his wife up against the wall, Hanukkah, I forget what happened to him, but they all self liberated. My friend who was born in Czechoslovakia, his mom was pregnant under communism, and she never even imagined he'd be free, and he was born under free. And they were all looking around, all these countries that self liberated, because they're like, this is a trick, right? They're trying to figure out who's like not good, so that they can arrest us on mass, and they didn't. So even within communism, there are bad guys and better guys. But we talked about anarchy, we talked about democracy. Do you see, like there's democratic socialism conversations going on in the popular culture, socialism is seen as like evil, or for some people, great? Sure. What are your thoughts about it as in a political ideology? Evil. So you're on the evil side? Yes. Fundamentally? Yes. What is it, you know, what makes it evil? What's like structurally, if you were to try to analyze? Sure, I'd say three ways. Morally, no person has the right to tell another person how to live their life. Economically, it's not possible to make calculations under socialism. It's only the prices that are information that tells me, oh, this is, we need to produce more of this, we need to produce less of this. Without prices being able to adjust and give information to producers and consumers, you have no way of being able to produce effectively or efficiently. And also it is, it turns people against each other. When you force people to interact, when you force them into relationships, when you force them into jobs, and you don't give them any choice, when there's a monopoly, the consequence of monopoly, everyone's familiar with ostensibly under capitalism, but somehow when it's a government monopoly, all those economic principles don't work, it doesn't make any sense. But there's force in democracy too, it's just you're saying there's a bit more force in socialism. But that's interesting that you say that there's not enough information. I mean, that's ultimately, you need to have really good data to achieve the goals of the system, even if there's no corruption. You just need to have the information. Which you can't. And capitalism provides you a really strong source of real time information. And if capitalism at its best and cleanest, which is perfect information, is available, there's no manipulation of information. That's one of the problems, okay. Can we talk about some candidates, the ones we got and possible alternatives? So one question I have is, why do we have, within this system, why do we have the candidates we have? It seems, maybe you can correct me, highly unsatisfactory. Is anyone actually excited about our current candidates? I'm kind of excited, because no matter who wins the election, it's gonna be hilarious. So that is something that I'm excited about. From a humor perspective. Is that what the whole system is? So that's one theory of the case, is the entire thing is optimized for viewership. Yeah. And excitement by definitions of like the reality show kind of excitement. I think it is, if you look at what happened with Brett Kavanaugh, this is not a career that would draw people who are, you might say, quality. Because no matter who they are, there would be a huge incentive from the other team to denigrate them and humiliate them in the worst possible ways. Because as the two teams lose their legitimacy among Gen Pop, it's gonna get harder and harder for them to maintain any kind of claims to authority, which is something I like, but which does kind of play out in certain nefarious ways. So people, the best of the best, are not gonna wanna be politicians. Yeah, because I could have a job, or have a job interview and I'm running Yahoo or whatever, or I could, for 18 months, have to eat, you know, corn dogs looking like I'm going down on someone and shake hands and have all this, my family and on social media daily called the worst things, for what? And then I'm still not guaranteed the position. But the flip side of that, like from my perspective, is the competition is weak. Meaning, like, you need a minimum amount of eloquence, eloquence, clearly, that I don't, the bar which I did not pass. I don't think either of them would be considered particularly eloquent, Biden or Trump. No, I know, but that's what I'm saying. The competition, like if you were, wanted to become a politician, if you wanted to run for president, the opportunity is there. Like if you were at all competent. Like if you had, so like Andrew Yang is an example of somebody who has a bunch of ideas, is somewhat eloquent, like young, energetic. It feels like there should be thousands of Andrew Yangs, like that would enter the domain. He went nowhere. Well, I wouldn't say he went nowhere. He generated quite a bit of excitement. He just didn't go very far, that's, okay. You don't have to run for president to generate excitement with your ideas. You could be a podcast host, I'm not even joking. That's right, that's right, that's right. And he's both, Andrew Yang. Oh, he's a podcast? Yeah, he has a podcast called Yang Speaks. Oh, okay, cool. Oh, wow, the music of the way you said, yeah, cool. It's the way my mom talks to me when I tell her something exciting going on in my life. Oh, that's nice, honey. Oh, you made a robot, that's cool. A mixed coffee? Oh, you're still single, though, aren't you? I wonder why, I wonder why. Make yourself a robot wife? Give me some robot grandchildren. Okay, but first of all, okay, let me ask you about Andrew Yang because he represents fresh energy. You don't find him fresh or energetic, you know? Like, is there any candidate you wish was in the mix that was in the mix you wish was one of the last two remaining? Yeah, people like Marianne Williamson, I thought was great. Tulsi, I thought was great. Amy Klobuchar got a bad rap. I think she held her own. Smart, she wasn't particularly funny, that's okay. I think she was nonthreatening to a lot of people. What did you like about them? I guess I just named all women, that's interesting. It wasn't even intentional. Tulsi, I liked that she was aggressive, has a good resume and is not staying the course for the establishment. Marianne Williamson, I like because she comes from a place, from what it seems, of genuine compassion. Maybe she's a sociopath, I don't know. I read her book and it actually affected me profoundly because it's very rare when you read a book and there's even that one idea that blows your mind and that you kind of think about all the time. And there was one such idea in her book about she was teaching something called A Course in Miracles in Hollywood. I think she still teaches it. And this was during the 80s, the height of the AIDS crisis. And all these young men in the prime of their life were dropping like flies. And she's trying to give them hope. Well, good luck, they're dying, no one cares. And they're like, you can't tell us that they're gonna cure this, that's a lie. And she goes, what if I told you they're not gonna cure it? What if I told you it's gonna be to like diabetes? They cut off your foot and you're gonna go blind. Would that be something that you can hope for? And when you put it like that, it's like, yeah. Like if you're talking to someone like a homeless junkie and you're like, you could be a doctor, you're a lawyer or a lawyer, like cool story. Like you could have a studio apartment with a terrible roommate and a shitty job. But when you're on the street, cooking breakfast in a teaspoon and you hear that, you're like, wait, would that really be so bad? Is that really so much worse than this? No, and it becomes something. So when she put it in those terms, I'm like, wow, this woman that really did a number on me in terms of teaching people how to be hopeful. Small steps, I guess. But it's also, then it becomes less of I need a miracle to be like, oh, this is really manageable. Yeah. And it's absurd to think it's impossible. What about what's your take on Unity 2020 that Brett Weinstein pushed forward? It was DOA, he couldn't even stand up to Twitter. Dead on arrival. Dead on arrival. He couldn't even stand up to Twitter, let alone, or to Facebook, they got blocked, let alone to Facebook. It was not hugely problematic, by the way, that Twitter would block that. Not at all. I don't know why they blocked it, but I believe, I don't know what problematic means. That's a word that does a lot of work that people wanted to do conceptually. The idea that Unity is taking the rejects from each party and we're gonna have something that no one likes and therefore it's gonna be a compromise is absurd. The last time we had this kind of Unity ticket was the Civil War, where you had Andrew Johnson from the Democrats and Lincoln from the Republicans. This was not something that ended well, particularly nicely, for both halves of the country. So that's the way you see it is, like the way I saw it, I guess I haven't looked carefully at it. I haven't either, to be fair. Yeah. The way I saw it is emphasizing centrists, which is. How is Tulsi a centrist? Tulsi was involved? Yes, he's trying to push Tulsi on like Jesse Ventura or something. Oh. So, okay, I don't know. I don't know the specifics. As a scientist, you also know centrism is not a coherent term in politics. But see, now you're like, what is it? Pleading to authority and my ego. No, no, I'm pleading to how you approach data. If someone is saying the mean is accurate, that only mean, I mean, the mean could be anywhere. It's a function of what's around it. That mean is true. I don't even know what centrists is supposed to mean, but what it means to me, there's no idea, a centrist. There's more of a center right or center left. To me, what that means is somebody who is a liberal or a conservative, but is open minded and empathetic to the other side. Joe Biden had the crime bill. Joe Biden voted for Republican Supreme Court justices. Joe Biden voted for a balanced budget. Joe Biden voted for Bush's war. And I'm sure probably I haven't looked this up, the Patriot Act. Joe, if you want a centrist, you have Joe Biden. Yeah, okay. He's worked very well with Republicans. That argument could be made. Of course, everybody will always resist that argument. It's indeniable. In fact, during the campaign, some activists started yelling at him at a town hall. Not yelling, just saying, hey, we need open borders. Joe Biden says, I'm not for open borders. Go vote for Trump and literally turn his back on the man. And this is during the primaries where it would behoove you to try to appeal to the base. And of course, you can probably also make the argument that Donald Trump is center right, if not center left. Well, I mean, he's very unique as a personality. But if you look at his record, and first of all, his rhetoric, you can say is not centrist at all. But in terms of how he governs, the budgeting, I mean, has been very moderate. It certainly hasn't been like draconian budget cuts. The Supreme Court, you could say, okay, he's hard right. Immigration, you could say in certain capacities, he's hard right. But in terms of pro life, what has he done there? In terms of, so in many other aspects, he's been very much this kind of me too Republican. But certainly the rhetoric, it's very hard to make him the case that he's a centrist. So you don't like, is there any other idea you find compelling? What I like about UND 2020 is it's an idea for a different way, for like a different party, a different path forward. So ideas, just like anarchy is an interesting idea that leads to discourse, that leads to. I don't think it's interesting at all. And here's why I don't think it's interesting. Sweden has eight parties in its parliament. Iceland, population is like 150,000. They've got nine, I think it was. Czech Republic has nine, Britain has five. So the claim that two parties is the censorious of speech, but three, oh, now all of a sudden, it makes no sense, doesn't port to the data, number one. Number two is Donald Trump demonstrated that you can be basically a third party candidate, sees the machinery of a existing party and appropriate to your own ends as Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has never been a Democrat. Major credit to him for that's not easy to be elected as Senator as an independent. He's done it repeatedly. So these are two examples of ossified elites right for the picking. But to have a third party makes no real sense. Speaking of which, a party you talk about quite a bit. And let's look, this is a personal challenge to you. Let me bring up the Libertarian Party. And the personal challenge is to go five minutes without mocking them in discussing this idea. So first of all, what? I'm being trolled. Okay, I'm being trolled, okay, I'm being trolled. I'm being trolled, okay, this is good. Do you remember the fun friends? There was an episode where Chandler had to not make fun of people. Like, can you go one day Chandler? And Phoebe starts telling him about like this UFO she saw and he's like, that's very interesting and nice for you. This is exactly that. So a true master would be able to play within the game, within the constraints. So no, I'm pretty sure you'll still mock them. But no, no, I'll stick to the rules. Five minutes, easy. So first of all, speaking broadly about libertarianism, can you speak to that, how you feel about it? And then also to the Libertarian Party, which is the implementation of it in our current system. So I think libertarianism is a great idea. And I think there's many libertarian ideas that have become much more mainstream, which I'm very, very happy about. I remember there was an article in either New York or New Yorker Magazine in the early 90s, where they talked about the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank. And they refer to the fact that Cato was against war and against like regulation with a wacky consistency, because they didn't know how to reconcile these two things. I don't remember what the two things were, but I remember that expression wacky consistency. And it wasn't even, we were all taught, and this is very much before the internet, that there's two tribes and if you're pro life, you have to hate gays. And if you're for socialized medicine, that also means you have to be for free speech. It was just this very, and like there's a whole menu and you got to sign it to all of them. And that menu is terrible. They hate America, they want to destroy it. Oh my God, those are horrible evil. This is the menu you want. And the Libertarian Party to some extent, and just libertarians as a whole said, you know, you can do the Chinese buffet and take a little from column A, a little from column B and have an ideology that is coherent and consistent, an ideology of peace and nonaggression and things like that. The Libertarian Party takes its model from like the early progressive and populist parties from the early 20th century, which were not very effective in terms of getting people elected, but were extremely effective in terms of getting the two major parties to appropriate and adopt their ideas and implement them. And in Britain as well, the liberal party got destroyed and became taken over by labor as the alternative party to the Tories and have those ideas basically become mainstreamed. So I think that, and the libertarian, my friend who passed away, Eric, I miss him dearly, was their webmaster and his whole point is, if you don't think of that in terms of a party, in terms of getting people elected, but if you think of it as a party in terms of getting people educated about alternatives, then there's enormous use for that. That was his perspective. And I don't think that's an absurd perspective. But here's some libertarian ideas that have become extremely mainstream. War should be a last resort. This is something we were taught as kids and we all say, but for many years, it's been like, they don't think of it as a last resort. It's like something's bad, well, it's like the first instinct. Now it's like, let's really give it a week, just a week. Like what's going on in Syria? Is there really gonna be a genocide, the Kurds? You know, things like that. So that's one. Another thing is drug legalization. This was, you know, when you and I were kids, oh, it's crazy. Only hippies wanna smoke pot. Now it's like, I was on a grand jury. And I'll point out what people make is, are you sure that the 16 year old who's selling weed, let's say selling, should his life be ruined? Should he be imprisoned with rapists and murderers? Like if you say yes, say yes, but you have to acknowledge that that's what you're meaning. And then a lot of people are like, wait a minute, there's gotta be a third option then he has no consequences or he's imprisoned with a rapist. I'm not comfortable with either of these. And I think the other one is an increasing skepticism. This libertarians were on top of this first and the hard left of the police. As of now, asset forfeiture steals more from people than burglaries. What people don't know about what asset forfeiture is, if the cops come to your house and they suspect you, you haven't been convicted of using your car or your house or whatever in terms of selling drugs, they can take whatever they want. And then you have to sue to prove your innocence and get your property back. It's a complete violation of due process. People don't realize it's going on. It's a great way for the cops to increase their budgets and it's legal. And libertarians were like the first big ones saying, guys, this is not American and this is crazy. And now increasingly people on conservatives and leftists like, wait a minute, this is... Even if you are selling drugs, like they take your house, what are you talking about? So I think those are some mechanisms that libertarianism, though not by name, has become far more popular. Yeah, it's interesting, so the idea, yeah, a coherent set of ideas that eventually get integrated into a two party system. Yeah. The war, that's an interesting one. You're right. I wonder what the thread there is. I wonder how it connects to 9 11 and so on. I think the Patriot Act. Patriot Act, okay. For people who are politically savvy, we're like, oh, okay, this is not a joke. This is really a crazy infringement of our freedoms and both parties are falling over each other to sign into law and the Orwellian name. You don't wanna... How can you be against patriotism? What kind of person? You know what I mean? So I think for a lot of people, especially both civil libertarians on the left and a lot of conservatives who are constitutionalists are like, wait a minute, this isn't... I'm not comfortable with this. And I'm also not comfortable with how comfortable everyone in Washington is with it. You're right, probably libertarians and libertarianism is a place of ideas, which is why I have a connection to it. Every time I listen to those folks, I like them. I feel connected to them. I would even sometimes, depending on the day, call myself a libertarian. Well, we're all the spectrum, so that's why. We're all on the spectrum, yeah. But when I look at the people that actually rise to the top in terms of the people who represent the party, this is where five minutes ran out, right? I could go, I'm allowed. You can go, why are they so weird? Why aren't strong candidates emerging that represent as political representatives or as famous speakers that represent ideology? I think libertarians tend to... I think Jonathan Haidt in his book, in his research, he's a political scientist and he does a lot of things about how people come to their political inclusions and what factors force people to reach conclusions. And he found that libertarians are the least empathetic and most rationalistic of all the groups. And by that, he means like they think in terms of logic as opposed to like people's feelings and that has positives and has negatives. And we have the A, B testing with Ron Paul. Ron Paul ran for president as a libertarian nominee. He was the nominee. He got pretty much nowhere in 1988. Then he ran as a return to the Republican party as a congressman for many years from Texas. He ran for the presidency in 2008 and 2012. And in 2008, he stood on stage with Rudy Giuliani and told him that they were here in 9 11 because we're over there, which would have been a shocking, horrifying taboo a few years earlier. Many people were like, holy crap, this is amazing. Giuliani was all offended and Ron Paul's like... I took some guts by the way. Yeah, you did. When I heard that, it was so refreshing. Not what he said, but the fact that he said something that took guts. It made me realize how rare it is for politicians, but even people to say something that takes guts. Well, it's also the idea that like you can't, even if you think America has a right to invade any country on earth as much as it wants and kill people as a consequence of war and blow up their buildings and destroy their country, you can't with a straight face not expect us to have consequences, even if they're consequences from evil people. Even if we're 100% of the good guys and they're 100% of the bad guys, those bad guys, some of them are still gonna try to do something. What happens next? You know what I mean? So that kind of concept that there's any American culpability, we're America, we are the good guys by definition, we're not culpable, to have people start thinking about what if there's another way? You know, what if we're not there and then they're not here and we're kind of doing a backdoor, we're talking so different scenarios. So the fact that he got so much more traction as a Republican, the fact that Donald Trump who came out of nowhere became not only the candidate, but the president tells people, it's like getting a book deal, right? You can either go, there's three choices. You can either self publish, mainstream publisher or independent publisher. The independent publisher is the worst of all choices because you're not getting a big advance, they're not gonna be able to promote you a lot and they don't get the distribution. Mainstream, I've done mainstream and self, right? With self, I don't have the cred, the respectability of a mainstream or the cache. It can be a New York Times bestseller. Right, it takes a lot of work, but I get a lot more of the profit. If it looks good on the shelf on Amazon, it looks identical, so on and so forth. With the mainstream, the benefits and costs are pretty much obvious to most people. So the same thing, it's like you can either be an independent like Ross Perot or you could be, just seize one of the party apparatus, which the benefits are enormous there. But in terms of going third party, I don't know the libertarian party apparatus other than maybe some ballot access is really that efficacious. And then you're gonna have a lot of baggage. Cause if you hear independent, Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot, you think of the person. Now you have to define yourself and you have to defend the party. That's two bridges for most people. So, brilliantly put, okay, let me speak to you. Cause I'm speaking to Yaron Brooks soon. Yeah. I like him. Yeah, so, but that, another example, I was. Ask him to tell you a joke about Ayn Rand, if he can do it. So there, that's one criticism I've heard you say, which is they're unable to speak to any weaknesses in either Ayn Rand's or objectivist worldview. Yes. That's really, well, you put it, I know you're half joking, but that's actually a legitimate discussion to have. I'm not joking at all. Because that's, to me, one of the criticisms and one of the explanations why the world seems to disrespect Ayn Rand, the people that do, is she kind of implies that her ideas are like flawless. No, she says they correspond to reality. Yeah, right. That's the term she uses. That, I mean, objectivist, it's in the name. It's, you know, it's just facts. Like, it's impossible to basically argue against cause it's pretty simple, it's just all facts. Well, that's, it's possible to argue against, but she would say she's never met a good critic who can argue the facts out of misrepresentation. And she's not entirely wrong. She's often caricatured, cause she has a very extreme personality and extreme worldview. But that to me, I mean, some people, there's a guy named in the physics mathematics community called Stephen Wolfram. I don't know if you've heard of him. Wolfram Malfoy? Yeah. Okay. He has a similar style of speaking sometimes, which is like, I've created a science, but that turns a lot of people off, like this kind of weird confidence. But he's one of my favorite people, I think one of the most brilliant people. If you just ignore that little bit of ego or whatever you call that, that there are some beautiful ideas in there. And that, for me, objectivism, I'm undereducated about it. I hope to be more educated, but there's some interesting ideas that, again, just like with UFOs, not that there's a connection between the two. Don't bring that up for your own. He won't like it. He won't. My friends like UFOs. Oh, no, no, no, this interview is over. That's a good yarn. Okay. But you know, you have to be a little bit open minded, but what's your sense of objectivism? Are there interesting ideas that are useful to you to think about? I own her copy of the first printing of The Fountainhead. So that should tell you a little bit about how my affection for Ms. Rand, how heavy that goes. Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions. So if you study Rand, you are going to be forced to think through some very basic things, and you're gonna have your eyes open very, very heavily. She was not perfect. She never claimed to be perfect. She was asked on Donahue, is it true that according to your philosophy, you are a perfect being? She said, I never think of myself that way. And she said, but if you asked me, do I practice what I preach? The answer is yes, resoundingly. She's a fascinating woman. What is really interesting about her, and this is something you'd appreciate personally, is when you read her essays, she'll have these weird asides. And it looked like she was talking about art, and she'd be like, and this is why the US should be the only country with nuclear weapons. And when you follow a brilliant mind making these seemingly disparate connections, it's something I find to be just absolutely inspiring and awesome and entertaining. I think there's lots of things about her that people like Yaron would make uncomfortable. Well, like she, they, so objectivism, like any other philosophy, has all these techniques to kind of hand wave away things you don't wanna talk about and like pretend it. So they talk about things like having no metaphysical significance, right? So what that means is like, well, what about this? Ah, I don't wanna talk about it. Like it doesn't matter. Like it literally means in fancy philosophical terms, it doesn't matter. Or they will say correctly, that it's very twisted in our culture that when we have heroes, we look for their flaws instead of looking for their virtues. That's a hundred percent valid perspective. However, if I'm sitting here telling you that I think this woman is a badass, and she's amazing and she should be studied, but there's also these idiosyncrasies, they don't wanna hear it. Because they, and I think it's very convenient for them because there's a lot of things she did that were, here's an example. Rand was very, very pro happiness and pleasure. She was very pro sex, which is kind of surprising looking at her and how she talked and how strident she was. As a result of this, she never got her cats fixed to deny them the pleasure of orgasm. So her male cats are spraying up her entire house. Like that is, I mean, that's her putting her philosophy into practice, but it's still gross. So that's the kind of thing where I don't think he'd be, another thing is Rand had an article on a woman president and she said a woman should never be president, right? Now, when Rand says things that are too goofy for them, they say, oh, that's not objectivism, that's her personal preference. It's like, she did not have these lines. Objectivism was always defined as Ayn Rand's writings, plus the additional essays in her books. So if this was in part of those books, this counts as official objectivism, but they pretend otherwise. So that's another example. Plus she was, and I bet you she was on the spectrum to some extent, I'm not joking, I'm not using that derisively. She was of the belief and not inaccurately, because that humor is used to denigrate and humiliate. And she was thinking about the Jon Stewart type before there was a Jon Stewart. And a lot of times, like how I use mocking, but she was resentful, correctly, that a lot of times people who are great and accomplished, little nobodies will make a punchline just to bring them down and despise her. Here's an example I just thought of. I remember when it was, must have been the 90s, they had a segment on MTV of all these musicians who were making their own perfumes, right? And this girl grabbed Prince's perfume, and before she even smelled it, she had the joke ready. She goes, oh, this smells almost as bad as his music lately. It's like, first of all, I'm sure the perfume's fine. And second of all, this is Prince. He's one of the all time greats, and you can't wait to denigrate him. And part, I wanna be like, how dare you? Like as if this perfume in any way, in any way mitigates his amazing accomplishments and achievements, you horrible person. But I do have some great Ayn Rand jokes, and he would not be happy about them. The perfume thing, the problem with it is just not funny. Oh, he sucks, okay, great. Not that they dared to try to be humorous, because I don't know why you mentioned John, because John Stewart can be funny. Right, but he taught a generation, you still see this on Twitter, where things have to be inherently sarcastic and snide. But isn't that, I mean, aren't you practicing that? No, I use irony, not sarcasm. Here's an example. When people, like you say something, and someone replied, it'd be like, last I checked, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'll say that, I go, what do you think saying last I checked added to your point? You're giving me valuable information and data, but you are trained to believe that it has to be couched in this sneering. It doesn't, just give me the information. This is useful information. Yeah, that's true. It's a knee jerk. But see, John Stewart did it masterfully. Correct, and they don't. And they don't, it's like people who copy comedians, certain comedians, you try to copy them and use everything in the process of copying. Yeah, yep, okay. But in terms of the philosophy of selfishness, this kind of individual focused idea, and I imagine that connects with you. Yes, and I think it would connect with more people if they understood what she meant by it. Nathaniel Brandon, who was her heir until she kind of broke with him, and he was a co dedicatee of Atlas Shrugged, said no one will say Ayn Rand's views with a straight face. They won't say, I believe that my happiness matters and is important and is worth fighting for, and that Ayn Rand says this, then she's dangerous. Now, it's very easy to say this could have dangerous consequences if you're a sociopath, but to put it in those terms, I think is extremely healthy. I think more people should wanna be happy. And I think a lot of us are raised to be apologetic, especially in this cynical media culture, that if you say, I wanna be happy, I wanna love my life, that it's just like, okay, sweetheart. And the eye rolling, and I think that's so pernicious and so horrifying, this is why I'm a Camus person, because Camus thought the archenemy was cynicism and I could not agree more. Like if you're the kind of person, if someone likes a band and you're like, oh, you like them, blah, blah, blah, it's like, this gives them happiness. Now, there's certain exceptions, but if it gives you happiness, it's not for you, that's cool. Okay, this is beautiful. I so agree with you on the eye rolling, but you see the best of trolling as not the eye roll. Correct, of course not. The best of trolling is taking down the eye rollers. I'm gonna have to think about that. Okay. Because I kind of. Have another Red Bull. Yeah, I was, yeah. Because I put them all. My blood type is Red Bull. I kind of put them all in the same bin. Okay. And they're not. They're not. They're not. Okay, all right. Here's another example of trolling. I was making jokes about Ron Paul, he just had a stroke, right? And someone came at me and they're like, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you're ugly. I hope you have a stroke. I hope you're in the hospital. And I just go, I just did have a stroke on your mom's face. So they came at me and now they got put in their place. With a subpar, I mean. I wasn't clever. You weren't clever. Not particularly, no. Well, one of your things you do, which is interesting, I mean, I give you props in a sense, is you're willing to go farther than people expect you to. Yes, that's fun. Yeah. In fact, I'll probably edit out like half of this podcast because the thing you did, which she kept in, should mention, is Michaela Peterson now has a podcast, which is nice. I guess, was it on her podcast? She was on mine. She was on yours. We did both, but this is when you're referring to when she was on mine. She was on, yeah, right. And you went right for the, for the. So I'll tell you what it was. You don't have to paraphrase. I opened up, I say, you know, she's Jordan Peterson's dad. And as many people know, sorry, he's her dad, yeah. He's had a long issue with substance addiction. And I said to her, you're most famous for being Jordan Peterson's daughter. Many people, he's changed so many lives around the world. And he's been such an enormous influence to me personally that I've started taking benzodiazepines recreationally. And she's like, oh my God, Michael, it's so horrible. Yeah, because you pulled me in with this, cause you're talking, I mean, you know, cause he's going through a rough time. Now she's going through just everything was just, you pulled me in emotionally. I was like, this is going to be the sweet, Mike is going to be just this wonderful. And then just bam. So that's, that's, that's, that was props to you on that. It wasn't, whatever that is, that is an art form when done well, it can be taken too far. My criticism is it, that feels too good for some people. What do you mean? Oh, they're too happy being a reverend cause to show that they don't care about anything. That's another form of cynicism though. Right, so I, cause you think it's possible to be a troll and still be the live life to its highest ideal in the Camus sense. I try, that's kind of my ideal. I believe it's not, it becomes a drug. I feel like that takes you, like I think love ultimately is the way to experience like every moment of every day. You don't think that was an expression of, I honestly think, let's split hairs here cause I think this is something of use here. I do think that me, me being able to make her laugh about this year of hell she was in does create an element of love and connection between me and her. Yeah, but I know she would say that. Yes, it wasn't that. It was what you said in combination with the sweetness everywhere else, the kindness. It's a very subtle thing, but like, it's like some of the deepest connection we have with others is when we like mock them lovingly. Yes, correct. But like there is stuff, there's kindness around that. Sometimes it's not in words, but in like subtle things. Cause it creates an air of being familial. Like we're through this together. Yeah, that's missing, that's very difficult to do on the internet. I agree with you. I agree with you. That's why my general approach on the internet is to be more like simple, less witty and more like dumbly loving. But that's not your core competency being witty. Uh, me? Yeah. But I can be witty. You can be, but I'm saying that's not your core competency. I'm not saying you're bad at it, but I'm saying that's not where you go like organically, especially with strangers. I just feel like nobody's core competence on the internet is I guess if you want to bring love to the world, nobody's core competence is given the current platforms, nobody's core competence is wit. It's very difficult to be witty on the internet without while still communicating kindness. Like in the same way that you can in physical space. I'll give you another example. Someone came at me and they were like, they gave me a donation. People do this all the time. And they go, oh, like I started reading your books cause of my wife and you know, now watch your shows together, keep up the good work. And I go, what does her boyfriend think? So that is an example of wit and love because that person feels seen. I'm acknowledging them. I'm also making a joke at their expense. We know it's a joke. So I think language is often used in nonliteral ways to cue emotional and connectivity. It's difficult, but what you've done is difficult to accomplish, but you've done it well. I mean, you've been doing these live streams, which are nice that people give you a bunch of money and donations and stuff. And then you, you'll often like make fun of certain aspects of their questions and so on, but it's always lovely. That's not from love. That is genuine annoyance cause they ask me some really dumb questions. But they're still underlying, it's not even, like there's a kind person under that that's being communicated. That's interesting. But I don't know if I get that from your Twitter. I know I get that from the video, something about the face, something about like, Yeah, of course. The physical presentation. The more data, the more easy it is to convey emotion and subtlety. Absolutely, if you only have literally black and white letters, it's going to be, or whatever, white and black, if you have night mode, it's going to be a very different, it's much more limited information. Yeah, but this is the fundamental thing is like, Here's another example. Like if they had access to my face, like a lot of times some people don't know who I am and they come at me, call me a Nazi antisemite, right? And I start talking about the Jews and just how terrible the Jews are. Now all my audience knows I'm Jewish that I went to yeshiva. So they're sitting there laughing cause this person is making ass of themselves. That person has no idea. But if there was video, then they would be like, okay, wait a minute, something's up. Yeah, something's up. I don't know. I think it's entertaining. I think it's fun, but I just, I don't think it's scalable. And ultimately, I'm trying to figure out this whole trolling thing. Cause I think it's really destructive. I've been the outrage mob, the outrage mobs, just the dynamics of Twitter has been really bothering me. Okay. I've been trying to figure out if we can try to build an alternative to Twitter perhaps or try to encourage Twitter to be better, how to have nuanced, healthy conversations. Like the reason I talk about love isn't just for love's sake. It's just a good base from which to have difficult conversations. Like that's a good starting point. Because if you start, like I would argue that the kind of conversation you have on Twitter is fun, but it might not be a good starting point for a difficult, nuanced conversation. Well, I'm not interested in having those conversations with most people. No, I know, but. So I agree with you. Your point is valid. Yes, but like I'm saying, so if we were trying to have a difficult, nuanced conversation about say race in America or policing, is there institutional racism of policing? Okay. There's the only conversations that have been nuanced about it that I've heard is in the podcasting medium. I agree with you. Which is the magic of podcasting, which is great. But that's the downside of podcasting is it's a very small number of people. Even if it's in the thousands, it's still small. And then there's millions of people on social media and they're not having nuanced conversation at all. They're not capable of it. That's the difference in your thoughts. They have no minds. I believe they are. So that's the. There's no data that shows this. Both of us aren't being not scientific. You don't have data to support your world either. You're making the claim. Well, you are too. No, I'm not. If I'm looking at an object, the claim that it has in mind. Well. No, what? No, your claim is that people are fundamentally stupid. Are you a martial artist? Yes. How's it feel? I just judo on you. Yeah. But you really don't think people are deep down like capable of being intelligent. No, not at all. Not deep down, not surface. I'm not joking. I'm not being tongue in cheek. I'm not being cynical. I do not at all think they have this capacity. I'm gonna think. Cause you're being so clear about it. You're not even. I'm gonna have to think about that. You know why? Here's evidence for my position, not proof. And this is of course data that is of little use, but it's of interest. A lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine and people come at you, not only will people say the same thing, the same concept, they'll say the same concept in the same way. That is not a mind. Yeah. That's surface evidence. You're saying this iceberg looks like this from the surface. I'm saying there's an iceberg there that if challenged can rise to the occasion of deep thinking and you're saying. Nope. Nope. It's just frozen water. Isn't that the Russian expression? That's ice cream. No, not. Doesn't it mean like no one's there? Actually, I don't know. Yeah, it means like, yeah. Yeah, it's like thought. It means. Okay. Well, so you're challenging me to be a little bit more rigorous. I think I'll try. I'm not challenging you anything. I'm just saying. No, not challenging me, but like I'm challenging myself based on what you're saying because I'd like to prove you wrong and find actual data to show you're wrong. And I think I can, but I would need to get that data. That's funny you said, I think I can. When they were working on my biography, Ego and Hubris, the title I had suggested was The Little Engine That Could But Shouldn't. And they didn't like it. I think that's a great title. That's pretty good, yeah. Speaking of biographies, I mean, I read your book or listened to your book. Listened to. There's an audio book from you, right? Yeah, I did the audio, yeah. Yeah. You read it? My Golis, yes. Okay. So this was a. I didn't do Yaron Brooks voice in the book. I did all the different voices because he has a lisp and I didn't want to sound like I was making fun of him. Yeah, I don't remember you reading it, but I was really enjoyed it. No, okay. It was good. It was like a year, a year and a half ago. This I can prove. It's just. Well, let me at a high level, see if you can pull this off. If I ask you, what's the book you write about? It's about a group of people who are united solely by their opposition to progressivism, who have little else in common, but who are all frequently caricatured and dismissed by the larger establishment media. But you give this kind of story of how it came to be. Sure. And to me, like we're talking about trolls, but the internet side of things is quite interesting. So first of all, how does alt right connect? So the alt right is the subset of the new right, which feels that race, not racism, is the most or one of the most important socio political issues. Are any of those folks like part of the mainstream or worth paying attention to? None of them are part of the mainstream. The alt right, by definition, they would be part of the mainstream. They would not be part of them. No, they would not. I don't know that any of them. Well, worth is not a position. I'm not in a position to say worth. I would say that it is of use to be familiar with their arguments because to dismiss any school of thought, especially one that has historically gained leverage, especially one that has historically gained leverage in very dark ways, especially in America, in Europe and other places, just to say, oh, they're racist. I don't need to think about them. It doesn't behoove you. So what lessons do we draw from the 4chan side of things, like the internet side of the movement? Tits or get the fuck out. Can you define every single word in there? Tits or breasts or get the fuck out. That's from 4chan. Okay, what's it mean? Oh, sometimes like a woman will appear in 4chan and they'll just reply, tits or get the fuck out. I'm trying to understand what that, oh, oh, that's a way. I just, very slow. Oh, so that's, okay, so that's very disrespectful towards female members of the community. I don't understand. There's rules to this community and one of them is we're not very good with women. Is that, that's one of the rules? It's more of a principle than a rule. It's a principle? We're not going to ever get laid. That's fundamentally the principle. Is there other principles? But we are gonna get pics. Pics. Sometimes. Sometimes on the internet. Sometimes they GTFO. Okay, so is there other actual principles of, so like it's, from my maybe naive perspective is they have like the darkest aspects of trolling, which is like take nothing serious, make a game out of everything. That's not 4chan per se. One of the things that you will learn in 4chan, which I think is very healthy, is if you have an idiosocratic or unique worldview or focus on an aspect of history or culture, you'll be able to find like minded people who you will engage with you and discuss it without being preemptively dismissive. That's an ideal that they. Well, it's not ideal. It's something that happens a lot. Now 4chan's not really, like Paul is their board with politics, but they will get into some, like the people there are much more erudite than you'd think. So they do take, my perception was they take nothing seriously. So there's things that they take seriously, like discussing ideas. I'll give you one example. There was a video someone posted of a girl who put kittens in a bag and threw it in a river. And they found out where she was within a day and got her like arrested. So yeah, they do take some things very seriously. Okay. But that's like an extreme that, I mean, that's good. First of all, that's heartwarming that they wouldn't somehow turn that into a thing. That feels like more of a, what is it? What's the other one? 8chan? 8chan's twice as good as 4chan, yeah. That's their slogan. But it feels like they're the kind of community that would take that kitten situation and make a mockery of it. Yeah, they're darker than 4chan. I don't even, I'm not allowed to talk about 16chan. I'm already overwhelmed clearly by 4chan lingo. I literally wrote down in my notes, like in doing research for this conversation, I learned the word pleb. And I wanted to ask you what this pleb means. Do you know what pleb means? No. I saw, I mean, actually, no, I don't. You know what a pleb is? I just, I don't know what a pleb is. Like a plebiscite or plebeian. Okay. But does it mean something more sophisticated? No, it's a very unsophisticated mechanism of being dismissive. Of like the regular people. Yeah, or someone who comes at me on Twitter. Okay. All right, so back to the 4chan alt right. Wasn't the... Those are very different concepts. Don't conflate them. But which internet culture was the alt right born out of? Well, alt right was more born of blogs. And people had different blogs that were posting what they call like racial realism, which is scientific racism, so called. And breaking down issues from a racialist perspective. So that wasn't, 4chan is much more dynamic. It's a message board. It's very fluid. So it doesn't lend itself to these kind of in depth analysis of ideas or history. But it spreads them. Like it... It spreads them as memes, yeah. And you know, but... But it's not an essential mechanism of the alt right, historically? No, no, no, no, no, no. So it was mostly about blogs. Okay, so what do you make of the psychology of this kind of worldview? When you have... This goes to your conspiracy theory subject earlier. When you have a little bit of knowledge about something, about history that no one's talking about, and there's only one group that is talking about it, and you have no alternative answers, you're going to be drawn to that group. So because issues about race, anti semitism, homophobia are so taboo in our culture, understandably there's good reasons. If you start putting things like, how old should you be to have sex with kids and just have regular conversations, eventually some people are gonna start taking some positions you don't like. So some things have to be sanctified to some extent. They're the only ones talking about it. You're gonna be drawn to that subculture. And where does the alt right stand now? I mean, I hear that term used... So the term has been weaponized by the corporate press for people that they want to read out of society. So it's used both on individual levels, like people like Gavin McIngus, Milo Yiannopoulos, some others. I mean, I think they've referred to Trump as alt right. And it's become a slur, just like incel or bot, that has become largely removed from its original meaning. Do you have a sense that there's still a movement that's alt right or like... Yeah, they call themselves now... Okay, so there's something called the dissonant right. And they say, we're completely not like the alt right because the alt right's A, B, and C, and we're B, C, D. There's a huge overlap. It's very much the same people. Is there intellectuals that still represent some aspect of the movement? I mean, sure. Are you tracking this? Not that much anymore. I think they're... I don't find it particularly as... Now that the book's done, I'm looking more into history for my next book. You mentioned communism? I'm gonna talk a lot about the Cold War. So this kind of stuff has largely fallen away from my radar to some extent. And it's been a very effective movement to get them marginalized and silenced. So they're not as deep of a concern in terms of concern or not, just their impact on society. Yes, it's much lessened, yeah. So as a troll on Twitter, in the best sense of the word, what do you make of cancel culture? I think it's Maoism. I mean, corporate America has done a far better job of implementing Maoism than the communist party ever could. You had this meeting not that long ago from I think it was Northwestern University Law School where everyone on the call got up and said that they were racist. I mean, this is something that legally you should be very averse to saying, even if it were true. And it's this kind of concept of getting up and confessing your sins before the collective is something completely. Oh, sorry, they admitted this of themselves? Yeah, they were like, because they're saying because they're white, they're inherently racist. So my name's John, I'm a racist. My name's this, I'm a racist. You hear it and you're like, okay, this is Looney Tunes. So you're saying that, wow, that's so much, you took a step further. So you're saying there's like a deep underlying force that cancels culture. It's not just some kind of mob. Well, it's not a mob at all. It's a systemic organized movement being used for very nefarious purposes and to dominate an entire nation. How do we fight it? Because I sense it inside. You know, I used to defend academia more because I still do to some extent. It's a nuanced discussion because, you know, like folks like Jordan Peterson and a lot of people that kind of attack academia, they refer, they really are talking about gender studies at certain departments. And me from MIT, you know, it's the University of Science and Engineering and the faculty there really don't think about these issues or haven't traditionally thought of, but it's beginning to even infiltrate there. It's the, you know, it's starting to infiltrate engineering and sciences outside of biology. Like let's put biology with the gender studies. Like I'm talking about sciences that really don't have anything to do with gender. It's starting to infiltrate and it worries me. I don't know exactly why, like I don't know exactly what the negative effect there would be, except it feels like it's anti intellectual. Oh yes, of course. And I'm not sure what to, because on the surface, it feels like a path towards progress. At first, when I'm like zoomed out, you know, just like squinting my eyes, you know, not even in detail looking at things, but when I actually joined the conversation to like listen in the conversation on quote unquote diversity, it quickly makes me realize that there's no interest in making a better world. No, no, it's about domination. It's about getting, yeah. It's a way for, if you are a lowest status white person, using anti racism is the only mechanism you will have to feel superior to another human being. So it's very useful for them in terms of fighting it. One of my suggestions has been to seize all university endowments, which are the crystallization of privilege and distribute that money as reparations. So be very effective by turning two populations against each other and strongly diminishing the university's intellectual hegemony. The universities are absolutely the real villains in the picture. Thankfully, they're also the least prepared to be aggressed upon. And after the government and the corporate press, they are the last leg of the stool, and they don't know what's coming, and it's gonna get ugly, and I cannot wait. So this is where you and I disagree. Part one, yeah, we disagree in the sense that you want to dismantle broken institutions. I don't think they're broken. They're powerful. They're working like by design. I think for over 100 years, they have been talking about bringing the next generation of American leaders, which is code, for promulgating an ideology based on egalitarian principles and world domination. Let me try to express my lived experience. Okay, sure. My experience at MIT is that there's a bunch of administrators that are, the bureaucracy, that I can say, this is the nice thing about having a podcast, I don't give a damn, is they're pretty useless. In fact, they get in the way. But there's faculty, there's professors, that are incredible. They're incredible human beings that all they do all day, they're too busy, but for the most part, what they do all day is just like continually pursue different little trajectories of curiosities in the various avenues of science that they work on. And as a side effect of that, they mentor a group of students, sometimes a large group of students, and also teach courses, and they're constantly sharing their passion with others. And my experience is it's just a bunch of people who are curious about engineering and math and science, chemistry, artificial intelligence, computer science, what I'm most familiar with. And there's never this feeling of MIT being broken somehow, like this kind of feeling. Like if I talk to you just now, or like Eric Weinstein, there's a feeling like stuff is on fire, right? There's something deeply broken. But when I'm in the system, especially before the COVID, before this kind of tension, everything was great. There was no discussion of, even diversity, all that kind of stuff, the toxic stuff that we might be talking about right now, none of that was happening. There was a bunch of people just in love with cool ideas, exploring ideas, being curious, and learning, and all that kind of stuff. So I don't, my sense of academia was this is the place where kids in their 20s, 30s, and 40s can continue the playground of science, having fun. It's, if you destroy academia, if you destroy universities, like you're suggesting kind of lessening their power, you take away the playground from these kids to play. It's gonna be hard for you to tell me that I'm anti playground. Yeah, well, I guess I'm saying you're anti certain kinds of playgrounds, which is. Yeah, the ones that have the broken glass on the floor. Yeah, I am against those kinds of playgrounds. No, you're, you're, you're. Yes. Nope. See, see. Now you see, now you listen. Now you, now you wait. Yeah, I would say you're being the watchful mother who, the one kid who hurt themselves in the glass. One kid, it's an entire, it's generation after generation. I'm not a watchful mother. I'm the guy with the flamethrower. No, I, I, I understand that. But you're using the one kid who was always kind of like weird, aka gender studies department. Okay. That, that hurt themselves on the glass, as opposed to the people who are like, obviously having fun in the playground and not playing by the glass, the broken glass. And they're just, I mean, to me, some of the best innovations in science happen in universities. Okay. You can't forget that universities don't have this liberal, like politics literally in every conversation until this year, until this year, there's something happening. But every conversation I've ever had had nothing to do with politics. We never, Trump never came up. None of that ever come up. Nothing. Like all this kind of idea that there's liberal, all that. But that, that's in the humanities. Yeah. But do you think MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology might be a little bit of an outlier? Yeah, that probably is. Yeah. But I, I don't, I honestly don't think when people criticize academia, they're looking at, they're in fact also picking the outliers, which is they're picking some of the quote unquote strongest gender studies departments. This is nonsensical. When I was at Bucknell, it was a college student. We had to take, you know, we had a bunch of electives and I wanted to take a class on individual, American individualism. One of the texts of the five that we had to read was Birth of a Nation, the movie about the Klan. So there's no department where these people are not thoroughgoing, hardcore ideologues. This is not a gender. That's the humanities, that's the humanities. Fine, all the humanities, not just gender studies. Okay, fine. I can give you. Theory, English, all of them, every university, as you know, has it mandatory in the curriculum they have to take a bunch of these propaganda classes. I look forward to YouTube comments because you're being more eloquent and you're speaking to the thing that a lot of people agree with and I'm being my usual slow self and people are going to say not very nice things about me. Don't say anything that nice about Lex, please. Let me try to just. Just shoot up a school. That would be preferable. There he goes again. Only the teachers. Going to the darkest possible place. That's sunshine, baby, schools. That's where everyone goes to be happy, playgrounds. There he goes, dark ear. Just dives right in, just go dark and then just comes back up to the surface. I don't have to feel this way anymore. Just one day in the world. You're probably a figment of my imagination. I'm not even having this podcast. Well, after 18 Red Bulls, I'm surprised you could see anything. This is like Fight Club. Red Bull gives you delirium. Yeah. I got into it with Ed Norton yesterday on Twitter. Oh, really? Yeah. Is he like the rest of the celebrities? Yeah, he's like, oh, this is an existential threat to America, Trump's a fascist. He's delegitimizing the Oval Office. I said, what an odd endorsement of Trump. Well, you should have went with a bad pit. He might have a different opinion. That's true. So Fight Club reference, okay. This conversation is over. It's interesting. I'd like to draw a line between science and engineering and science not including like the biological aspect, the parts of biology that touch and humanities and biology. Like I feel because humanities, if you just look at the percentage of universities, it's still a minority percentage. And I would actually draw a different, I think they serve very different purposes. Sure. And that's actually a broken part about universities about like, why is some of the best research in the world done at universities? That doesn't, like there might be a different, like MIT, it feels weird that a faculty. Yeah, these are conceptually different things. Like we do research and we teach, why is this the same diagram? Yeah, it feels weird. But that's just, but I'm also, I'm coming to like the defense of the engineers that never talk about, I'm not like, my mind isn't, I'm not like deluded or something where I'm not seeing the house on fire. I'm just saying, I am seeing the house because I also lived in Harvard Square. I'm seeing Harvard, but in. And you see the tanks coming? They're coming, Lex. They're coming. It's gonna be so beautiful. It'll be like the American beauty, the plastic bag. I just won't be able to stop crying because it'll be so beautiful. Yeah, I can already see it. But the engineering departments where like, I believe that the Elon Musk's of the world, that the, like the innovation that will make a better world is happening. And like, let's not burn that down. Cause that has nothing to do with any, like they're all like sitting quietly in the, while like, while the humanities and all these kinds of diversity programs, they're not having any of these discussions. Listen, my Soviet brother, you both know, we both know that ice water runs in our veins. So if you're calling for mercy, that is not how I'm wired, but I'm not closing the door. Yeah, I'm actually realizing now, so for people listening to this, I'll probably prepend this in saying that I'm even slower than usual. I didn't sleep last night, but I feel I'm actually realizing just how slow I am and how much preparation I need to do. And if I would like to defend aspects of academia, I better come prepared. I don't think you need to defend them. I think I'm granting you your premise freely. No, you might be. Okay. I don't think the world is. But actually you just defeat your own argument because it is not at all have to be the way that a phenomenal research institution like MIT, which no one disputes, has to also be an educational establishment. These two things are not at all necessarily interconnected. But then you have to offer a way to separate. Correct. But like, I'm not a big fan, everybody's different, but I'm not a fan of criticizing institutions without offering a way to change. And especially when I'm like, have ability to change, I'd like to, yeah, I'd like to offer a path. Like. What if they were in students, they were all mentor, like, what's the opposite of a mentor? Mentee. Protege? What's the term when you like. Graduate students. When you work at a place, like interns, not an intern, it's not the word I'm thinking of. But anyway, like basically they're working there instead of going to college there. It's possible, but it's going against tradition. And so you have to build new institutions and. And have these engineers building new things, that's crazy. These research engineers, where they're going to be building things. Well, one of the things, cause you're kind of a. Apprentice, that's the word I was looking at. Apprentice. Which is ironic, we're talking about Trump and we couldn't think of the word apprentice. Yeah, well done. We should both be fired. You're fired. Yeah, there you go. These Russian Jews, so quick with their wit. Okay. But the thing is, you're a fan of freedom. I am. And there is intellectual freedom. People, this is what I was trying to articulate, I'm failing to articulate, but there truly is complete intellectual freedom within universities on topics of science and engineering. I believe you, I agree with you. I don't think it's going to take much persuasion, but I'll give you an example. When that, I'm sure you know more details about this than I do. When that scientist engineered that probe to land on that comet, and the articles are written because this Hawaiian shirt he was wearing had like pinup girls on it, which I think his female student sewed for him or something, or his ex girlfriend. And he had to apologize. This is what Rand was talking about. That the great accomplishments of men have to say I'm sorry to the lowest, most despicable, disgusting people. Yeah, I don't know. Let me bring this case up because I think about this. This might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to certain aspects of the computer science community. There's a guy named Richard Stallman. I don't know if you know who that is. He's the founder of the Free Software Foundation. He's like a big Linux. He's one of the key people in the history of computer science, one of those open source people, right? But he is like, I believe he's one of the hardcore ones, which is like all software should be free. Okay, so it's very interesting personality, very key person in the GNU, just like Linus Torvald, key person. So, but he also kind of speaks his mind. And on a certain chain of conversations at MIT that was leaked to the New York Times, then it was published, led him to be fired or pushed out of MIT recently, maybe a year ago. And it always sat weird with me. So what happened is there's a few undergraduate students that called Marvin Minsky. Not sure if you're familiar with who that is. I've heard the name. He's one of the seminal people in artificial intelligence. They said that they called him a rapist because he met with Jeffrey Epstein. And Jeffrey Epstein solicited, these are the best facts known to me that I'm aware of, that's what was stated on the chain, is he solicited a 17, but it might've been an 18 year old girl, to come up to Marvin Minsky and ask him if he wanted to have sex with her. So Jeffrey Epstein told the girl. She came up to Marvin Minsky, who was at that time, I think, seven years old. And his wife was there too, Marvin Minsky's wife. And he said no, or like awkwardly saying no thanks. And that was stated in the email thread as Marvin participating in sexual assault and rape of this unwilling sexual assault. And it was called rape of this person, right? Of this woman that propositioned him. And then Richard Stallman, who's, he's kind of known for this. He's very, he's, you make fun of me being a robot, but he's kind of like a debugger. He's like, well, that sentence is not, what you said is not correct. So he like corrected the person, basically made it seem like the use of the word rape is not correct, because that's not the definition of rape. And then he was attacked for saying, oh, now you're playing with definitions of rape. Rape is rape is the answer, right? And then that was leaked in him defending. So the way it was leaked, it was reported as him defending rape. That's the way it was reported. And he was pushed out and he didn't really give a damn. It's, he doesn't seem to make a big deal out of it. He just left. He made an example of him. They made an example and that, and that everyone was afraid to defend him. So like, there's a bunch of faculty. One. Dude, you're from the Soviet Union. Doesn't this hit close to home for you? I don't know what to think of it. It hits close to home, but it was basically, at least at MIT, now MIT is such a light place with this. It's not common at MIT, but it was like 18, 19 year old kids, undergraduate kids with this kind of fire in them. There's just very few of them, but they're the ones that raise all this kind of fuss. And the entirety of the administration, all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them. It's so interesting to me. Like, I don't know if I should be afraid of that. You don't think you should be afraid that someone who's trying to be specific when it comes to charges of violent assault is looking for that clarity, can get their life out of search of his room? Let me give you more context. There's a little bit more context to Richard Stallman, which is. He was also a rapist. No. I left out that part. He liked raping people. But he's had a history through his life of every once in a while wearing the Hawaiian shirt with, like he would make. He's a fat. Sorry, but he's a fat unattractive. Like what Trump referred to the hacker. Yeah, yeah, the guy in the basement. That's Richard. Okay, I love. He is what he is. He like, he would eat his own. He would pick skin from his feet in lectures and just eat it. No. Okay, yeah. Those videos of him doing that. I'm not joking. He must really be behind the spectrum then. Yeah, okay. Oh, yeah. And you know, I think in his office, door, he wrote something like hacker plus lover of ladies or something like that. Like something kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unprofessional. Yeah, unprofessional. And a little creepy. Yeah, yeah. No, that's fair. So he was also. So they're looking for an excuse to get rid of him, it sounds like. No, he was just, who's they? The administration. Yeah, probably, probably. A lot of times what people don't realize, and this would be my defense of cancel culture. A lot of times when someone gets fired over something like this, this isn't why. This is just giving them cover to get rid of them without getting a lawsuit. Yeah, but it's still. Right, so I think, I guess what I'm trying to communicate is he was a little weird and creepy and he may not be the best for the community, but that's not necessarily the message it's sent to the rest of the community. The message is sent to the rest of the community that being clear about words or the usage of the word rape is like you should call everything rape. That's basically the message it was sent. Or you should call it we say rape, rape. It's about submission. I think you'd be very happy to know that there's a lot of people, and she's very crucified of this, like Betsy DeVos, the performance department of education, who are aware of this. They are aware that this completely contradicts due process. They're aware of how a rape accusation is something not to be taken seriously, but because it's not to be taken seriously, it has to be also taken seriously in the other context that once that word is around a male, this can ruin his entire life. That's the sticky thing of the word. Like I, like I think about this a lot that, like how would I defend it if somebody, like I've never, I can honestly say I've never done anything close to creepy in my life like with women. But you wouldn't know it if you had, right? That's the thing. A lot of these creepy guys don't think they're creepy. They think they're being cute. Yeah, but I'm just telling you, even like, fine, let's say, right, let's say I'm not aware of it. But the point that I am aware of is that somebody could just completely make something up. Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And like how, what would I? No, he denied the charges. There's an article around everything he did, supposedly, and it goes, Mr. Friedman denied the charges, yeah. But what creeps me out? That happened, can I interrupt? Zora Neale Hurston is one of my favorite writers. She's from the Harlem Renaissance. She wrote, Their Eyes Are Watching God, and a couple of other books. She was just an amazing, amazing figure. Her biography is called Wrapped in Rainbows. It's just a masterpiece. I think I read it one day. Can't recommend her enough. Fascinating, fascinating woman. During the 30s, I think it was, or 1940, she was out of the country. She was accused of molesting a teenage boy. She wasn't in America. This could be proven. So it's absolutely false, not even a question. She was indicted, and she wanted to kill herself because she's like, people are gonna see these things, and they're gonna think maybe there's some truth to it. Maybe it's voluntary. What they're just gonna, and you could understand why she'd be suicidal over this. So yeah, this is something that's been going on for a long time, and the fact that it's becoming, I do agree, it's important. I know a lot of women who have been sexually assaulted, more than I'm happy that I know. And if I know that many, that means there's more. So I think it's a good idea that they feel seen, that they don't feel wounded, they don't feel damaged, that they could talk to their friends. And I'm like, man, this sucks is happening to you. And I don't think you're a slut. I don't think you're asking for it. I think you feel violated. I think it's gross. Talk to me. I do think that that's important. And I also think it's important though, when things get kind of in a frenzy, that a lot of people are like, yeah, I also had something happen. And very quickly the line between he grabbed my boob and he violently raped me, I don't think these two things are the same at all. I think they're both sexual assault, but in terms of what someone can deal with the next day, the next month, 10 years later, I don't think they're similar scenarios. I had Juanita Brodrick on my show and hearing her talk about her alleged rape by Bill Clinton was very disturbing for me, very disturbing to hear. Because it was like half an hour. So we think of these things and think, okay, hold her down, blah, blah, blah. And then it's done. Half an hour when, just even someone physically holding you down for half an hour. Like not even a sexual assault. Like that's traumatic. You think, your brain's gonna think, am I gonna die? When I zoom out, I think that ultimately this is gonna lead to a better world. Like empowering women to speak to those kinds of experiences, the benefit of it outweighs the... The issue is whenever people are given a weapon, some are going to use it in nefarious ways. And that's the lesson of history. Males, females, whites, blacks, children, adults. When people are given a mechanism to execute power over others, some are gonna use it. Can I ask you for a therapy thing? Sure. On trolling, in a sense. Because I mentioned somebody making up something about me. I feel, because I wear my heart on my sleeve, I'm not good with these attacks. Like I've been attacked recently, just being called a fraud and all that kind of stuff. Just light stuff. Like I haven't, you know, it was like, it hurt. Okay, well, let me help you. Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker. No, I'm serious. Here's why. In New York, a lot of times you'll be walking with your friend and a homeless person will come up to you and start yelling things at you. Your reaction isn't in those circumstances. Let me hear this out. Your reaction is physical safety and getting away. Now, it's not impossible that that homeless person is actually saying the truth. This happened to a friend of mine. This guy wasn't homeless and he's walking down the street on Smith Street and he's just talking out loud. And he goes, why they call them hipsters? What are they hip to? And she chuckles. And he goes, what are you laughing at, fatso? You start something, I'll finish it. And she just couldn't move. And it's like, it's my main problem because that's the first thing he went to. And I don't know that I have any advice, but when you hear something like this, I think you need to be better in terms of boundaries. I think you should not perceive this as a fellow human, but as a crazy homeless person, because if this fellow human, if I thought that you were a fraud in some context, that's a very weird word to use because fraudulent podcaster, these are real mics, but if I thought. Well, a scientist or a human. Sure, but I would ask myself, is this person in a position to make this judgment or are they backing it up? Are they saying, here, your conclusions were wrong, here's some mistakes in your data and you can engage with them in ideas, but whenever someone uses a word to entirely dismiss your life without having the knowledge of your life, you do not have to take that seriously. I appreciate that kind of idea, but some things aren't about data, like I see myself as a fraud often and it's more psychology of it. If I can reduce something to reason, I can probably be fine. My worry is the same as the worry of teenage girls that get bullied online. It's like when I'm being open and fragile on the internet, it affects me in a way where I can't, the reason doesn't help. So it helps me, but. You don't block people enough. I'm very heavy with the blocking. No, so yeah, I block. Very heavy. I block, it's helped a lot. Any aggressive banality, I block immediately. I also think time is gonna help. I don't think you're, like you didn't grow up wanting to be a podcaster, right? That wasn't your aspiration. So in some sense, you are gonna feel like a fraud because you're like, I don't have any training for this. I have a training for a scientist. I can talk to you about artificial intelligence for literally hours, but in terms of this, like I don't know what I'm doing. I'm kind of, so when they call you a fake, it's like, yeah, you're kind of right because like I did kind of stumble into this and this is not my pedigree. So I think that kind of probably speaks to you on some level. Well, but they're attacking not the podcast thing, but more like the same, people call Elon Musk a fraud too, which that's the way I rationalize it. Like, well, if they're calling him a fraud and they're calling me a fraud, like even if you have rockets that go into, like if you successfully have rockets landing back on earth, reusable rockets, you're still being called a fraud, then it's okay. Not necessarily. It could be that he's not a fraud. You really are. That's, but it's not resonating with you because your brain knows the logic. So you can't trick yourself. But yeah, yeah. But I don't know, this whole trolling thing, you seem to be much better at seeing it as a game. You know why? Because you are under the delusion that every human being is capable of intelligent reasoned decisions. Still think I'm right. And I perceive them as literally animals. So when a dog starts barking, all it's saying is that the dog is agitated and this is not going to change my life one iota other than crossing the street, perhaps. Yeah, I'm going to prove you wrong one day. You're going to kill yourself because they can drive you to it. The first shoot up of school. But if I don't, I'll prove you wrong. I'll bring the data. And they'd be like, you're right, Lex. I have the receipts. I have the receipts. Okay, so we mentioned Camus. Oh yeah, I love him. Is there, this is a question that people like love when I ask. I'm a really smart people. What it is, love? No, what books, let's say three books, if you can think of them, technical, fiction, philosophical, would you, had a big impact on you or would you recommend to others? Sure. The Machiavellians by James Burnham. This is a book about how politics works in reality as opposed to how people imagine it working. Mentis Moldbug, who's a figure in these circles, who's respected by a lot of people. I was giving a talk and there was a bunch of panelists and we were asked, what book would you recommend? I said, The Machiavellians. Independently of me, that was the book he had recommended. It's out of print, it's hard to find, but that would be one. Is that his book or no? James Burnham, it came out in 1941, I think. So can you pause on the, what's his? Mentis Moldbug. That's a code name, right? That guy's pen name. Curtis Yarvin, that's his real name. He swims in your circles. Which circles? He does some kind of programming. Oh, he's originally a programmer. Yeah, he comes up as a person that I should talk with or I should know about, but then I read a few of his things and they seem quite dangerous. They're very long and verbose, but I think he's an amazing thinker. Yeah, but. But he's the one who had the idea of sending the tanks to Harvard Yard. But doesn't he have like, he has some radical views. I forget what they are. Very radical views, yeah, he wants a military coup. But you're saying he's a serious thinker that is worthy of, not worthy. I don't know that you would enjoy having a conversation with him. I think a lot of people enjoy seeing it happen, but I think it would be a lot of talking past each other and it would be interesting. What do you agree? I didn't agree with him to watch. What do you disagree, okay. What do you agree, what do you disagree with him? I agree with him that politics has to be looked at objectively and without kind of an emotional connection to different schools. I talk about him a lot in my book on the New Right. Disagree, I don't think a military coup is a good idea. He doesn't think anarchism is stable, I disagree. I mean, me and him, I did a live stream with him which just dorked out a lot about history and people who've fallen in the memory hole. So, I mean, he's got a lot of writing, so. So, you know, the sense I got from him was that if I talk with him, a lot of people would be upset with me for giving him a platform. Yeah, I think he's on that edge where they want to read him out of what is acceptable discourse. What's his most controversial, I mean, you keep mentioning the tanks. Is that the most controversial viewpoint? Does he have a race thing? No, the alt right doesn't particularly like him in many ways because he's not a big on the race thing. I don't know what would be his most controversial view, to be honest. I think because he is radical in terms of his analysis of culture, anytime someone's a radical, that is dangerous. Yeah, it's dangerous. Okay, book, so that's one. The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead. Which is a, I would say. Not Atlas Shrugged? No, and if you read Atlas Shrugged before reading The Fountainhead, you're doing yourself an enormous disservice. Don't you dare do it. On the philosophical or because the novel is better? On every level. Fountainhead's a better novel. Fountainhead's superfluous if you read Atlas Shrugged first. Fountainhead's about psychology and ethics. It does not have to do with her politics other than its implications. So it's by far the superior book. The third one. Ooh, this is a good one question. Let me see. There's so many good books out there that I love. I'm going to, this is not really my third choice, but I'll throw it out there because I, this is such an important worldview, especially for people on the right. Are you virtue signaling? No, this is counter signaling. Thaddeus Russell's book, A Renegade History of the United States. His thesis is that it's the degenerates that give us all freedom. And things like prostitutes, things like madams, things like slaves, things like immigrants, because they were so low status, they could get away with things that then people who are higher status demanded and so on and so forth. So I think that thesis, and it really has extreme consequences in thinking. And no, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind. That's, those are the four. Is that his best? I haven't read any of his stuff. The Righteous Mind is the only one you want. Okay, that was four, but of course. Forget Thaddeus Russell, put Haidt in there. Of course he would. No, forget Thaddeus, those are the three. So we talked about love. Let me ask you the other question I'm obsessed with. Are you, do you ponder your own mortality? I do, a lot, especially now that I'm an uncle, especially now that I have like these younger people that I mentor. I was just yesterday, my friend, John Girguis, who did my theme song for my podcast, who did the book cover for Dear Reader, who's like the most talented person I know. His song came on the iPod at the gym and I almost messaged him. I go, you know, one day one of us is gonna bury the other and it's gonna be really sad. And I thought about that and it was kind of like, oh man, that's really gonna suck. And I don't know which scenario would be better. Like I will be very sad if he's gone. I'm sure he'd be very sad if I'm gone. I mean, what do you, are you afraid of it? No, you know, Rand had this quote about how I won't die, the world will end. So I've had enough experiences that I am, I've really, at this point, and everything's icing on the cake. So if you, if I were to kill you at the end of this podcast, it feels painless. That would be okay? Yeah, you know why? Does anyone know you're here by the way? You know why? Just asking for a friend. Here's why, there's that wit. Save that for Twitter likes. Do they call you Sasha? No, I'm a Lyosha. Oh, that's my sister's husband. Okay, so here's why. I strongly believe, and this is a very kind of Jewish perspective, that you just have to leave the world a little bit better than you found it. That all you could do is move the needle a little. And one of the things I set out to do with Dear Reader, my book on North Korea, I was at a point in my career where I could do something to make a difference instead of just writing, like coauthoring books for celebrities, which I'm very proud of, but are neither here nor there. And I thought, all right, I know how to tell stories, I know how to inform people, I know how to entertain people. If I move the needle in America, who cares? We got it really good here. If I move the needle in North Korea a little bit, the cost benefits through the roof. I never thought of that actually. I never thought of Dear Reader from that perspective. So when I set out to write it, I'm like, okay, what can I do? I'm not gonna be able to liberate the North Korean regime. What I can do is the camera right now is focused on, at the time, Kim Jong Il, now Kim Jong Un. And I can do just this a little bit. And I go, behind that guy, who you think is funny clown, there's millions of dead people. There's children being starved. There's people who are performing because they have a gun to their kid's head. And if someone put a gun to your kid's head, you'd put on those dancing shoes real quick. And I and others have managed to change the conversation about North Korea in terms of look at those silly buffoons to those poor people. So the fact that that little thing I can say with a straight face, I did, doesn't make me a great person, but it does make me someone who, if I have to go tomorrow, I can say I did a little bit to make the world a better place. What do you think is the meaning of life? I think the meaning of life is... Why are we here? Oh, well, I'm a Camu person. So I'll give the Camu answer. So there's two types of people. Those who know how to use binary... No. There's... Thanks for relating to the audience. One, one, one, zero, zero, one, two. Two? Down vote. What kind of radical freak is this Lex? So, and I use this example of my forthcoming book. You go into a countryside, a mountainside, and you see a blank canvas on an easel. And one kind of mentality goes, this is just a blank canvas. This is stupid. This is what am I looking at? And the other type goes, what a great opportunity. I'm in this beautiful space. I have this entire canvas to paint. I could do anything I want with it. So I am very much of that type two person. And I hope others start to think of life in that way. You and I have both been more successful than we expected to, especially growing up, and in ways we did not expect. And when you're young, you are so intent on driving the car. And after a certain point, you realize it's not about driving the car. It's you're being a surfer, that you can only control this little board and you have no idea where the waves will take you. And sometimes you're gonna fall down and something's gonna really gonna suck and you're gonna swallow some saltwater. But at a certain point, you stop trying to drive and you're like, this is freaking awesome and I have no idea where it's gonna go. Beautifully put. I know I speak for a lot of people. First of all, everyone loves the game you play on the intranet. It's fun. You make the world not everyone. Today, oof, they came for me hard. But it makes the world seem fun. And especially in this dark time, it's much appreciated. And we can't wait till the next book and the many to come and to hopefully many more Joe Rogan appearances. You guys do some great magic together. This is fun. It's, you, yeah, you're one of my favorite guests on this show so I can't wait. Especially if you can make it before the election. Thanks so much for making today happen. I'm glad you came down. You're awesome. Thank you so much. What a great compliment. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malus. And thank you to our sponsors. SEMrush, which is a SEO optimization tool. DoorDash, which is my go to food delivery service and Masterclass, which is online courses from world experts. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Michael Malus. Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #128

The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. She's the author of a book that revolutionized our understanding of emotion in the brain called How Emotions Are Made. And she's coming out with a new book called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain that you can and should preorder now. I got a chance to read it already, and it's one of the best short, whirlwind introductions to the human brain I've ever read. It comes out on November 17th, but again, if there's anybody worth supporting, it's Lisa, so please do preorder the book now. Lisa and I agreed to speak once again around the time of the book release, especially because we felt that this first conversation is good to release now, since we talk about the divisive time we're living through in the United States, leading up to the election. And she gives me a whole new way to think about it from a neuroscience perspective that is ultimately inspiring of empathy, compassion, and love. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to this episode. First sponsor is Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases that I don't otherwise get through my diet naturally. Second is Magic Spoon, low carb, keto friendly, delicious cereal that I reward myself with after a productive day. The cocoa flavor is my favorite. Third sponsor is Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food, drinks, and unfortunately, for the many bets I have lost to them. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the bold, first principles way that Lisa approaches our study of the brain is something that has inspired me ever since I learned about her work. And in fact, I invited her to speak at the AGI series I organized at MIT several years ago. But as a little twist, instead of a lecture, we did a conversation in front of the class. I think that was one of the early moments that led me to start this very podcast. It was scary and gratifying, which is exactly what life is all about. And it's kind of funny how life turns on little moments like these that at the time don't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett. Since we'll talk a lot about the brain today, do you think, let's ask the craziest question, do you think there's other intelligent life out there in the universe? Honestly, I've been asking myself lately if there's intelligent life on this planet. You know, I have to think probabilities suggest yes. And also, secretly, I think I just hope that's true. It would be really, I know scientists aren't supposed to have hopes and dreams, but I think it would be really cool. And I also think it would be really sad if it wasn't the case. If we really were alone, that would be, that would seem profoundly sad, I think. So it's exciting to you, not scary? Yeah, no, you know, I take a lot of comfort and curiosity. It's a great resource for dealing with stress. So I'm learning all about mushrooms and octopuses and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And so for me, this counts, I think, in the realm of awe. But also, I think I'm somebody who cultivates awe deliberately on purpose to feel like a speck, you know? I find it a relief occasionally. To feel small. To feel small in a profoundly large and interesting universe. So, maybe to dig more technically on the question of intelligence, do you think it's difficult for intelligent life to arise like it did on Earth? From everything you've written and studied about the brain, how magical of a thing is it in terms of the odds it takes to arise? Yeah, so, you know, magic is just, don't get me wrong. I mean, I like a magic show as much as the next person. My husband was a magician at one time. But, you know, magic is just a bunch of stuff that we don't really understand how it works yet. So I would say from what I understand, there are some major steps in the course of evolution that at the beginning of life, the step from single cell to multicellular organisms, things like that, which are really not known. I think for me, the question is not so much what's the likelihood that it would happen again as much as what are the steps and how long would it take? And if it were to happen again on Earth, would we end up with the same menu of life forms that we currently have now? And I think the answer is probably no, right? There's just so much about evolution that is stochastic and driven by chance. But the question is whether that menu would be equally delicious, meaning like there'd be rich complexity of the kind of, like would we get dolphins and humans or whoever else falls in that category of weirdly intelligent, seemingly intelligent? However we define that. Well, I think that has to be true. If you just look at the range of creatures who've gone extinct. I mean, if you look at the range of creatures that are on the Earth now, it's incredible. And it's sort of tried to say that, but it actually is really incredible. Particularly, I don't know, I mean, animals, there are animals that seem really ordinary until you watch them closely and then they become miraculous, like certain types of birds, which do very miraculous things, build bowers and do dances and all these really funky things that are hard to explain with a standard evolutionary story, although people have them. Yeah, the birds are weird. They do a lot for mating purposes. They have a concept of beauty that I haven't quite, maybe you know much better, but it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary arguments well. It does fit. Well, it depends, right? So I think you're talking about the evolution of beauty, the book that was written recently by, was it Frum, was that his name? Richard Frum, I think, at Yale. Oh, I'm sorry, no, I didn't know. Oh, it's a great book. It's very controversial, though, because he's making the argument that the question about birds and some other animals is why would they engage in such metabolically costly displays when it doesn't improve their fitness at all? And the answer that he gives is the answer that Darwin gave, which is sexual selection, not natural selection. But selection can occur for all kinds of reasons. There could be artificial selection, which is when we breed animals, right? Which is actually how Darwin, that observation helped Darwin come to the idea of natural selection. Oh, I see. And then there's sexual selection, meaning, and the argument that, I think his name is Frum, makes is that it's the pleasure, the selection pressure is the pleasure of female birds. Which, as a woman, and as someone who studies affect, that's a great answer. I actually think there probably is natural, I think there is an aspect of natural selection to it, which he maybe hasn't considered. But you were saying the reason we brought up birds is the life we've got now seems to be quite incredible. Yeah, so he brought up birds, now seems to be quite incredible. Yeah, so you peek into the ocean, peek into the sky, there are miraculous creatures. Look at creatures who've gone extinct. And in science fiction stories, you couldn't dream up something as interesting. So my guess is that intelligent life evolves in many different ways, even on this planet. There isn't one form of intelligence. There's not one brain that gives you intelligence. There are lots of different brain structures that can give you intelligence. So my guess is that the menagerie might not look exactly the way that it looks now, but it would certainly be as interesting. But if we look at the human brain versus the brains, or whatever you call them, the mechanisms of intelligence in our ancestors, even early ancestors, that you write about, for example, in your new book, what's the difference between the fanciest brain we got, which is the human brain, and the ancestor brains that it came from? Yeah, I think it depends on how far back you want to go. You go all the way back, right, in your book. So what's the interesting comparison, would you say? Well, first of all, I wouldn't say that the human brain is the fanciest brain we've got. I mean, an octopus brain is pretty different and pretty fancy, and they can do some pretty amazing things that we cannot do. You know, we can't grow back limbs, we can't change color and texture, we can't comport ourselves and squeeze ourselves into a little crevice. I mean, these are things that we invent, these are like superhero abilities that we invent in stories, right? We can't do any of those things. And so the human brain is certainly, we can certainly do some things that other animals can't do. That seemed pretty impressive to us. But I would say that there are a number of animal brains which seem pretty impressive to me that can do interesting things and really impressive things that we can't do. I mean, with your work on how emotions are made and so on, you kind of repaint the view of the brain as less glamorous, I suppose, than you would otherwise think. Or like, I guess you draw a thread that connects all brains together in terms of homeostasis and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I wouldn't say that the human brain is any less miraculous than anybody else would say. I just think that there are other brain structures which are also miraculous. And I also think that there are a number of things about the human brain which we share with other vertebrates, other animals with backbones. But that we share these miraculous things. But we can do some things in abundance. And we can also do some things with our brains together, working together that other animals can't do. Or at least we haven't discovered their ability to do it. Yeah, this social thing. That's one of the things you write about. How do you make sense of the fact, like the book Sapiens, and the fact that we're able to kind of connect, like network our brains together like you write about? I'll try to stop saying that. Is that like some kind of feature that's built into there? Is that unique to our human brains? Like how do you make sense of that? What I would say is that our ability to coordinate with each other is not unique to humans. There are lots of animals who can do that. But what we do with that coordination is unique because of some of the structural features in our brains. And it's not that other animals don't have those structural features. It's we have them in abundance. So the human brain is not larger than you would expect it to be for a primate of our size. If you took a chimpanzee and you grew it to the size of a human, that chimpanzee would have a brain that was the size of a human brain. So there's nothing special about our brain in terms of its size. There's nothing special about our brain in terms of the basic blueprint that builds our brain from an embryo is the basic blueprint that builds all mammalian brains and maybe even all vertebrate brains. It's just that because of its size and particularly because of the size of the cerebral cortex, which is a part that people mistakenly attribute to rationality. Why mistakenly? Is that where all the clever stuff happens? Well, no, it really isn't. And I will also say that lots of clever stuff happens in animals who don't have a cerebral cortex. But because of the size of the cerebral cortex and because of some of the features that are enhanced by that size, that gives us the capacity to do things like build civilizations and coordinate with each other, not just to manipulate the physical world, but to add to it in very profound ways. Like, other animals can cooperate with each other and use tools. We draw a line in the sand and we make countries and then we create citizens and immigrants. But also ideas. I mean, the countries are centered around the concept of like ideas. Well, what do you think a citizen is and an immigrant? Those are ideas. Those are ideas that we impose on reality and make them real. And then they have very, very serious and real effects, physical effects on people. What do you think about the idea that a bunch of people have written about, Dawkins with memes, which is like ideas are breeding. Like, we're just like the canvas for ideas to breed in our brains. So this kind of network that you talk about of brains is just a little canvas for ideas to then compete against each other and so on. I think as a rhetorical tool, it's cool to think that way. So I think it was Michael Pollan. I don't remember if it was in the Botany of Desire, but it was in one of his early books on botany and gardening where he wrote about plants and he wrote about plants utilizing humans for their own evolutionary purposes. Which is kind of interesting. You can think about a human gut in a sense as a propagation device for the seeds of tomatoes and what have you. So it's kind of cool. So I think rhetorically it's an interesting device, but ideas are, as far as I know, invented by humans, propagated by humans. So I don't think they're separate from human brains in any way, although it is interesting to think about it that way. Well, of course, the ideas that are using your brain to communicate and write excellent books. And they basically picked you, Lisa, as an effective communicator and thereby are winning. So that's an interesting worldview to think that there's particular aspects of your brain that are conducive to certain sets of ideas and maybe those ideas will win out. Yeah, I think the way that I would say it really though is that there are many species of animals that influence each other's nervous systems, that regulate each other's nervous systems, and they mainly do it by physical means. They do it by chemicals, scent. They do it by, so termites and ants and bees, for example, use chemical scents. Mammals like rodents use scent and they also use hearing, audition, and that little bit of vision. Primates, nonhuman primates add vision, right? And I think everybody uses touch. Humans, as far as I know, are the only species that use ideas and words to regulate each other, right? I can text something to someone halfway around the world. They don't have to hear my voice. They don't have to see my face and I can have an effect on their nervous system. And ideas, the ideas that we communicate with words, I mean, words are in a sense a way for us to do mental telepathy with each other, right? I mean, I'm not the first person to say that obviously, but how do I control your heart rate? How do I control your breathing? How do I control your actions with words? It's because those words are communicating ideas. So you also write, I think, let's go back to the brain. You write that Plato gave us the idea that the human brain has three brains in it, three forces, which is kind of a compelling notion. You disagree. First of all, what are the three parts of the brain and why do you disagree? So Plato's description of the psyche, which for the moment we'll just assume is the same as a mind. There are some scholars who would say a soul, a psyche, a mind, those aren't actually all the same thing in ancient Greece, but we'll just for now gloss over that. So Plato's idea was that, and it was a description of really about moral behavior and moral responsibility in humans. So the idea was that the human psyche can be described with a metaphor of two horses and a charioteer. So one horse for instincts, like feeding and fighting and fleeing and reproduction. I'm trying to control my salty language, which apparently they print in England. Like I actually tossed off a fairly. F, S? Yeah, F, F, yeah. I was like, you printed that? I couldn't believe you printed that. Without like the stars or whatever? No, no, no, it was full print. They also printed a B word and it was really, yeah. Well, we should learn something from England. Indeed, anyways, but instincts. And then the other horse represents emotions. And then the charioteer represents rationality, which controls the two beasts, right? And fast forward a couple of centuries and in the middle of the 20th century, there was a very popular view of brain evolution, which suggested that you have this reptilian core, like an inner lizard brain for instincts. And then wrapped around that evolved, layer on top of that evolved a limbic system in mammals. So the novelty was in a mammalian brain, which bestowed mammals with, gave them emotions, the capacity for emotions. And then on top of that evolved a cerebral cortex, which in largely in primates, but very large in humans. And it's not that I personally disagree. It's that as far back as the 1960s, but really by the 1970s, it was shown pretty clearly with evidence from molecular genetics. So peering into cells in the brain to look at the molecular makeup of genes that the brain did not evolve that way. And the irony is that the idea of the three layered brain with an inner lizard that hijacks your behavior and causes you to do and say things that you would otherwise not, or maybe that you will regret later. That idea became very popular, was popularized by Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, when it was already known pretty much in evolutionary neuroscience that the whole narrative was a myth. So what the narrative is on the way it evolved, but do you, I mean, again, it's that problem of it being a useful tool of conversation to say like there's a lizard brain and there's a, like if I get overly emotional on Twitter, that was the lizard brain and so on. But do you? No, I don't think it's useful. I think it's, I think that. Is it useful, is it accurate? I don't think it's accurate, and therefore I don't think it's useful. So here's what I would say. I think that the way I think about philosophy and science is that they are useful tools for living. And in order to be useful tools for living, they have to help you make good decisions. The triune brain, as it's called, this three layer brain, the idea that your brain is like an already baked cake and the cortex, cerebral cortex, just layered on top like icing. The idea, that idea is the foundation of the law in most Western countries. It's the foundation of economic theory and it's a great narrative. It sort of fits in with what I've been saying fits our intuitions about how we work. But it also, in addition to being wrong, it lets people off the hook for nasty behavior. And it also suggests that emotions can't be a source of wisdom, which they often are. In fact, you would not wanna be around someone who didn't have emotions. That would be, that's a psychopath. I mean, that's not someone you wanna really have that person deciding your outcome. So I guess my, and I could sort of go on and on and on, but my point is that I don't think, I don't think it's a useful narrative in the end. What's the more accurate view of the brain that we should use when we're thinking about it? I'll answer that in a second, but I'll say that even our notion of what an instinct is or what a reflex is, it's not quite right, right? So if you look at evidence from ecology, for example, and you look at animals in their ecological context, what you can see is that even things which are reflexes are very context sensitive. The brains of those animals are executing so called instinctual actions in a very, very context sensitive way. And so even when a physician takes the, it's like the idea of your patellar reflex where they hit your patellar tendon on your knee and you kick, the force with which you kick and so on is influenced by all kinds of things. A reflex isn't like a robotic response. And so I think a better way is a way that, to think about how brains work, is the way that matches our best understanding, our best scientific understanding, which I think is really cool because it's really counterintuitive. So how I came to this view, and I'm certainly not the only one who holds this view. I was reading work on neuroanatomy and the view that I'm about to tell you was strongly suggested by that. And then I was reading work in signal processing, like by electrical engineering. And similarly, the work suggested that, the research suggested that the brain worked this way. And I'll just say that I was reading across multiple literatures and they were who don't speak to each other and they were all pointing in this direction. And so far, although some of the details are still up for grabs, the general gist I think is I've not come across anything yet which really violates, and I'm looking. And so the idea is something like this. It's very counterintuitive. So the way to describe it is to say that your brain doesn't react to things in the world. It's not, to us it feels like our eyes are windows on the world. We see things, we hear things, we react to them. In psychology, we call this stimulus response. So your face, your voice is a stimulus to me. I receive input and then I react to it. And I might react very automatically, system one. But I also might execute some control where I maybe stop myself from saying something or doing something and in a more reflective way execute a different action, right? That's system two. The way the brain works though, is it's predicting all the time. It's constantly talking to itself, constantly talking to your body, and it's constantly predicting what's going on in the body and what's going on in the world and making predictions and the information from your body and from the world really confirm or correct those predictions. So fundamentally the thing that the brain does most of the time is just like talking to itself and predicting stuff about the world, not like this dumb thing that just senses and responds, senses and responds. Yeah, so the way to think about it is like this. You know, your brain is trapped in a dark silent box. Yeah, that's very romantic of you. Which is your skull. And the only information that it receives from your body and from the world, right, is through the senses, through the sense organs, your eyes, your ears, and you have sensory data that comes from your body that you're largely unaware of to your brain, which we call interoceptive, as opposed to exteroceptive, which is the world around you. But your brain is receiving sense data continuously, which are the effect of some set of causes. Your brain doesn't know the cause of these sense data. It's only receiving the effects of those causes, which are the data themselves. And so your brain has to solve what philosophers call an inverse inference problem. How do you know, when you only receive the effects of something, how do you know what caused those effects? So when there's a flash of light or a change in air pressure or a tug somewhere in your body, how does your brain know what caused those events so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well? And the answer is that your brain has one other source of information available to it, which is your past experience. It can reconstitute in its wiring past experiences, and it can combine those past experiences in novel ways. And so we have lots of names for this in psychology. We call it memory. We call it perceptual inference. We call it simulation. It's also, we call it concepts or conceptual knowledge. We call it prediction. Basically, if we were to stop the world right now, stop time, your brain is in a state, and it's representing what it believes is going on in your body and in the world. And it's predicting what will happen next based on past experience, right? Probabilistically, what's most likely to happen. And it begins to prepare your action, and it begins to prepare your experience based, so it's anticipating the sense data it's going to receive. And then when those data come in, they either confirm that prediction and your action executes because the plan's already been made, or there's some sense data that your brain didn't predict that's unexpected, and your brain takes it in. We say encodes it. We have a fancy name for that. We call it learning. Your brain learns, and it updates its storehouse of knowledge, which we call an internal model so that you can predict better next time. And it turns out that predicting and correcting, predicting and correcting is a much more metabolically efficient way to run a system than constantly reacting all the time. Because if you're constantly reacting, it means you can't anticipate in any way what's going to happen. And so the amount of uncertainty that you have to deal with is overwhelming to a nervous system. Metabolically costly. I like it. And so what is a reflex? A reflex is when your brain doesn't check against the sense data. That the potential cost to you is so great, maybe because your life is threatened, that your brain makes the prediction and executes the action without checking. Yeah, so but prediction is still at the core. That's a beautiful vision of the brain. I wonder, from almost an AI perspective, but just computationally, is the brain just mostly a prediction machine then? Like is the perception just the nice little feature added on top? Like the, both the integration of new perceptual information. I wonder how big of an impressive system is that relative to just the big predictor, model constructor. Well, I think that we can look to evolution for that, for one answer, which is that when you go back, you know, 550 million years, give or take, we, you know, the world was populated by creatures, really ruled by creatures without brains. And, you know, that's a biological statement, not a political statement. Really ruled with creatures with a. You calling dinosaurs dumb? You're talking about like. Oh no, I'm not talking about dinosaurs, honey. I'm talking way back, further back than that. Really these, there are these little, little creatures called amphioxus, which is the modern, it's a, or a lancet. That's the modern animal, but it's an animal that scientists believe is very similar to our common, the common ancestor that we share with invertebrates because, basically because of the tracing back, the molecular genetics and cells. And that animal had no brain. It had some cells that would later turn into a brain, but in that animal, there's no brain, but that animal also had no head, and it had no eyes, and it had no ears, and it had really, really no senses for the most part. It had very, very limited sense of touch. It had an eye spot for, not for seeing, but just for entraining to circadian rhythm, to light and dark. And it had no hearing. It had a vestibular cell so that it could keep upright in the water. So at the time, we're talking evolutionary scale here, so give or take some 100 million years or something, but at the time, what are the vertebrate, like when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved, a full brain, that was when a head evolved with sense organs and when that's when your viscera, like internal systems involved. So the answer I would say is that senses, motor neuroscientists, people who study the control of motor behavior believe that senses evolved in the service of motor action. So the idea is that, like what triggered, what was the big evolutionary change? What was the big pressure that made it useful to have eyes and ears and a visual system and an auditory system and a brain basically? And the answer that is commonly entertained right now is that it was predation, that when at some point an animal evolved that deliberately ate another animal and this launched an arms race between predators and prey and it became very useful to have senses, right? So these little amphioxies don't really have, they're not aware of their environment very much, really. And so being able to look up ahead and ask yourself, should I eat that or will it eat me is a very useful thing. So the idea is that sense data is not there for consciousness. It didn't evolve for the purposes of consciousness. It didn't evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything. It evolved to be in the service of motor control. However, maybe it's useful. This is why scientists sometimes avoid questions about why things evolved. This is what philosophers call this teleology. You might be able to say something about how things evolve, but not necessarily why. We don't really know the why. That's all speculation. But the why is kind of nice here. The interesting thing is, that was the first element of social interaction is, am I gonna eat you or are you gonna eat me? And for that, it's useful to be able to see each other, sense each other. That's kind of fascinating that there was a time when life didn't eat each other. Or they did by accident. So an amphioxus, for example, it kind of like gyrates in the water, and then it plants itself in the sand like a living blade of grass, and then it just filters whatever comes into its mouth. So it is eating, but it's not actively hunting. And when the concentration of food decreases, the amphioxus can sense this. And so it basically wriggles itself randomly to some other spot, which probabilistically will have more food than wherever it is. So it's not guiding its actions on the basis of, we would say there's no real intentional action in the traditional sense. Speaking of intentional action, and if the brain is, if prediction is indeed a core component of the brain, let me ask you a question that scientists also hate is about free will. So how does, do you think about free will much? How does that fit into this, into your view of the brain? Why does it feel like we make decisions in this world? This is a hard, we scientists hate this, this is a hard question we don't have the answer to. Have you taken a side? I think I have. Do you have free will? I think I have taken a side, but I don't put a lot of stock in my own intuitions or anybody's intuitions about the cause of things. One thing we know about the brain for sure is that the brain creates experiences for us. My brain creates experiences for me, your brain creates experiences for you in a way that lures you to believe that those experiences actually reveals the way that it works, but it doesn't. So you don't trust your own intuition about free will? Not really, not really. No, I mean, no, but I am also somewhat persuaded by, I think Dan Dennett wrote at one point, the philosopher Dan Dennett wrote at one point that it's, I can't say it as eloquently as him, but people obviously have free will, they are obviously making choices. So there is this observation that we're not robots and we can do some things like a little more sophisticated than an amphioxus. So here's what I would say. I would say that your predictions, your internal model that's running right now, your ability to understand the sounds that I'm making and attach them to ideas is based on the fact that you have years of experience knowing what these sounds mean in a particular statistical pattern, right? I mean, that's how you can understand the words that are coming out of my mouth. Right, I think we did this once before too, didn't we? When we were. I don't know, I would have to access my memory module. I think when I was in your, when I. The class thing? Yeah, I think we did it just like that actually, so bravo. Wow, I have to go look back to the tape. Yeah, anyways, the idea though is that your brain is using past experience and it can use past experience in, so it's remembering, but you're not consciously remembering. It's basically re implementing prior experiences as a way of predicting what's gonna happen next. And it can do something called conceptual combination, which is it can take bits and pieces of the past and combine it in new ways. So you can experience and make sense of things that you've never encountered before because you've encountered something similar to them. And so a brain in a sense is not just, doesn't just contain information. It is information gaining, meaning it can create new information by this generative process. So in a sense, you could say, well, that maybe that's a source of free will. But I think really where free will comes from or the kind of free will that I think is worth having a conversation about involves cultivating experiences for yourself that change your internal model. When you were born and you were raised in a particular context, your brain wired itself to your surroundings, to your physical surroundings and also to your social surroundings. So you were handed an internal model basically. But when you grow up, the more control you have over where you are and what you do, you can cultivate new experiences for yourself. And those new experiences can change your internal model. And you can actually practice those experiences in a way that makes them automatic, meaning it makes it easier for the brain, your brain to make them again. And I think that that is something like what you would call free will. You aren't responsible for the model that you were handed, that someone, your caregivers cultivated a model in your brain. You're not responsible for that model, but you are responsible for the one you have now. You can choose, you choose what you expose yourself to. You choose how you spend your time. Not everybody has choice over everything, but everybody has a little bit of choice. And so I think that is something that I think is arguably called free will. Yeah, the ripple effects of the billions of decisions you make early on in life are so great that even if it's not, even if it's like all deterministic, just the amount of possibilities that are created and then the focusing on those possibilities into a single trajectory, that somewhere within that, that's free will. Even if it's all deterministic, that might as well be just the number of choices that are possible and the fact that you just make one trajectory to those set of choices seems to be like something like they'll be called free will. But it's still kind of sad to think like there doesn't seem to be a place where there's magic in there, where it is all just the computer. Well, there's lots of magic, I would say, so far, because we don't really understand how all of this is exactly played out at a, I mean, scientists are working hard and disagree about some of the details under the hood of what I just described, but I think there's quite a bit of magic actually. And also there's also stochastic firing of, neurons don't, they're not purely digital in the sense that there is, there's also analog communication between neurons, not just digital. So it's not just with firing of axons. And some of that, there are other ways to communicate. And also there's noise in the system and the noise is there for a really good reason. And that is the more variability there is, the more potential there is for your brain to be able to be information bearing. So basically, there are some animals that have clusters of cells. The only job is to inject noise. You know, into their neural patterns. So maybe noise is the source of free will. So you can think about stochasticity or noise as a source of free will, or you can think of conceptual combination as a source of free will. You can certainly think about cultivating, you know, you can't reach back into your past and change your past. You know, people try by psychotherapy and so on, but what you can do is change your present, which becomes your past. Right? So one way to think about it is that you're continuously, this is a colleague of mine, a friend of mine said, so what you're saying is that people are continually cultivating their past. And I was like, that's very poetic. Yes, you are continually cultivating your past as a means of controlling your future. So you think, yeah, I guess the construction of the mental model that you use for prediction ultimately contains within it your perception of the past, like the way you interpret the past, or even just the entirety of your narrative about the past. So you're constantly rewriting the story of your past. Oh boy. Yeah. That's one poetic and also just awe inspiring. What about the other thing you talk about? You've mentioned about sensory perception as a thing that like is just, you have to infer about the sources of the thing that you have perceived through your senses. So let me ask another ridiculous question. Is anything real at all? Like, how do we know it's real? How do we make sense of the fact that just like you said, there's this brain sitting alone in the darkness trying to perceive the world. How do we know that the world is out there to be perceived? Yeah, so I don't think that you should be asking questions like that without passing a joint. Right, no, for sure. I actually did before this, so I apologize. Okay, no, well, that's okay. You apologize for not sharing. That's okay. So, I mean, here's what I would say. What I would say is that the reason why we can be pretty sure that there's a there there is that the structure of the information in the world, what we call statistical regularities in sights and sounds and so on, and the structure of the information that comes from your body, it's not random stuff. There's a structure to it. There's a spatial structure and a temporal structure. And that spatial and temporal structure wires your brain. So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that is waiting for wiring instructions from the world. And it must receive those wiring instructions to develop in a typical way. So, for example, when a newborn is born, when a newborn is born, when a baby is born, the baby can't see very well because the visual system in that baby's brain is not complete. The retina of your eye, which actually is part of your brain, has to be stimulated with photons of light. If it's not, the baby won't develop normally to be able to see in a neurotypical way. Same thing is true for hearing. The same thing is true really for all your senses. So the point is that the physical world the physical world, the sense data from the physical world wires your brain so that you have an internal model of that world so that your brain can predict well to keep you alive and well and allow you to thrive. That's fascinating that the brain is waiting for a very specific kind of set of instructions from the world. Like not the specific, but a very specific kind of instructions. So scientists call it expectable input. The brain needs some input in order to develop normally. And we are genetically, as I say in the book, we have the kind of nature that requires nurture. We can't develop normally without sensory input from the world and from the body. And what's really interesting about humans and some other animals too, but really seriously in humans, is the input that we need is not just physical. It's also social. We, in order for an infant, a human infant to develop normally, that infant needs eye contact, touch. It needs certain types of smells. It needs to be cuddled. It needs, right? So without social input, that infant's brain will not wire itself in a neurotypical way. And again, I would say there are lots of cultural patterns of caring for an infant. It's not like the infant has to be cared for in one way. Whatever the social environment is for an infant, that will be reflected in that infant's internal model. So we have lots of different cultures, lots of different ways of rearing children. And that's an advantage for our species, although we don't always experience it that way. That is an advantage for our species. But if you just feed and water a baby without all the extra social doodads, what you get is a profoundly impaired human. Yeah, but nevertheless, you're kind of saying that the physical reality has a consistent thing throughout that keeps feeding these set of sensory information that our brains are constructed for. Yeah, the cool thing though, is that if you change the consistency, if you change the statistical regularities, so prediction error, your brain can learn it. It's expensive for your brain to learn it. And it takes a while for the brain to get really automated with it. But you had a wonderful conversation with David Edelman, who just published a book about this and gave lots and lots of really very, very cool examples. Some of which I actually discussed in How Emotions Were Made, but not obviously to the extent that he did in his book. It's a fascinating book, but it speaks to the point that your internal model is always under construction. And therefore, you always can modify your experience. I wonder what the limits are. Like if we put it on Mars or if we put it in virtual reality or if we sit at home during a pandemic and we spend most of our day on Twitter and TikTok, like I wonder where the breaking point, like the limitations of the brain's capacity to properly continue wiring itself. Well, I think what I would say is that there are different ways to specify your question, right? Like one way to specify it would be the way that David phrases it, which is can we create a new sense? Like can we create a new sensory modality? How hard would that be? What are the limits in doing that? But another way to say it is what happens to a brain when you remove some of those statistical regularities, right? Like what happens to an adult brain when you remove some of the statistical patterns that were there and they're not there anymore? Are you talking about in the environment or in the actual like you remove eyesight, for example? Well, either way. I mean, basically one way to limit the inputs to your brain are to stay home and protect yourself. Another way is to put someone in solitary confinement. Another way is to stick them in a nursing home. Well, not all nursing homes, but there are some, right? Which really are where people are somewhat impoverished in the interactions and the variety of sensory stimulation that they get. Another way is that you lose a sense, right? But the point is I think that the human brain really likes variety, to say it in a sort of Cartesian way. Variety is a good thing for a brain. And there are risks that you take when you restrict what you expose yourself to. Yeah, you know, there's all this talk of diversity. The brain loves it to the fullest definition and degree of diversity. Yeah, I mean, I would say the only thing, basically human brains thrive on diversity. The only place where we seem to have difficulty with diversity is with each other, right? But who wants to eat the same food every day? You never would. Who wants to wear the same clothes every day? I mean, my husband, if you ask him to close his eyes, he won't be able to tell you what he's wearing, right? He'll buy seven shirts of exactly the same style in different colors, but they are in different colors, right? It's not like he's wearing. How would you then explain my brain, which is terrified of choice and therefore wear the same thing every time? Well, you must be getting your diversity. Well, first of all, you are a fairly sharp dresser, so there is that, but you're getting some reinforcement for dressing the way you do. But no, your brain must get diversity in other places. But I think we, you know, so the two most expensive things your brain can do, metabolically speaking, is move your body and learn. And learn something new. So novelty, that is diversity, right, comes at a cost, a metabolic cost, but it's a cost, it's an investment that gives returns. And in general, people vary in how much they like novelty, unexpected things. Some people really like it. Some people really don't like it, and there's everybody in between. But in general, we don't eat the same thing every day. We don't usually do exactly the same thing in exactly the same order, in exactly the same place every day. The only place we have difficulty with diversity is in each other. And then we have considerable problems there, I would say, as a species. Let me ask, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about questions of reality. What are your thoughts of the possibility that the very thing we've been talking about, of the brain wiring itself from birth to a particular set of inputs, is just a little slice of reality, that there is something much bigger out there that we humans, with our cognition, cognitive capabilities, is just not even perceiving. The thing we're perceiving is just a crappy, like Windows 95 interface onto a much bigger, richer set of complex physics that we're not even in touch with. Well, without getting too metaphysical about it, I think we know for sure. It doesn't have to be the crappy version of anything, but we definitely have a limited, we have a set of senses that are limited in very physical ways, and we're clearly not perceiving everything there is to perceive. That's clear. I mean, it's just, it's not that hard. We can't, without special, why do we invent scientific tools? It's so that we can overcome our senses and experience things that we couldn't otherwise, whether they are different parts of the visual spectrum, the light spectrum, or things that are too microscopically small for us to see or too far away for us to see. So clearly, we're only getting a slice, and that slice, the interesting or potentially sad thing about humans is that we, whatever we experience, we think there's a natural reason for experiencing it, and we think it's obvious and natural and it must be this way, and that all the other stuff isn't important. And that's clearly not true. Many of the things that we think of as natural are anything but, they're certainly real, but we've created them. They certainly have very real impacts, but we've created those impacts. And we also know that there are many things outside of our awareness that have tremendous influence on what we experience and what we do. So there's no question that that's true. I mean, just, it's, but the extent is how, really the question is, how fantastical is it? Yeah, like what, you know, a lot of people ask me, am I allowed to say this? I think I'm allowed to say this. I've eaten shrooms a couple of times, but I haven't gone the full, I'm talking to a few researchers in psychedelics. It's an interesting scientifically place. Like what is the portal you're entering when you take psychedelics? Or another way to ask is like dreams. So let me tell you what I think, which is based on nothing. Like this is based on my, right, so I don't. Your intuition. It's based on my, I'm guessing now, based on what I do know, I would say. But I think that, well, think about what happens. So you're running, your brain's running this internal model and it's all outside of your awareness. You see the, you feel the products, but you don't sense the, you have no awareness of the mechanics of it, right? It's going on all the time. And so one thing that's going on all the time that you're completely unaware of is that when your brain, your brain is basically asking itself, figuratively speaking, not literally, right? Like how is, the last time I was in this sensory array with this stuff going on in my body and this chain of events which just occurred, what did I do next? What did I feel next? What did I see next? It doesn't come up with one answer. It comes up with a distribution of it, possible answers. And then there has to be some selection process. And so you have a network in your brain, a sub network in your brain, a population of neurons that helps to choose. It's not, I'm not talking about a homunculus in your brain or anything silly like that. This is not the soul. It's not the center of yourself or anything like that. But there is a set of neurons that weighs the probabilities and helps to select or narrow the field, okay? And that network is working all the time. It's actually called the control network, the executive control network, or you can call it a frontoparietal because the regions of the brain that make it up are in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe. There are also parts that belong to the subcortical parts of your brain. It doesn't really matter. The point is that there is this network and it is working all the time. Whether or not you feel in control, whether or not you feel like you're expending effort doesn't really matter. It's on all the time, except when you sleep. When you sleep, it's a little bit relaxed. And so think about what's happening when you sleep. When you sleep, the external world recedes, the sense data from, so basically your model becomes a little bit, the tethers from the world are loosened. And this network, which is involved in, you know, maybe weeding out unrealistic things is a little bit quiet. So use your dreams are really your internal model that's unconstrained by the immediate world. Except, so you can do things that you can't do in real life, in your dreams, right? You can fly. Like I, for example, when I fly on my back in a dream, I'm much faster than when I fly on my front. Don't ask me why, I don't know. Or when you're laying on your back in your dream. No, when I'm in my dream and flying in a dream, I am much faster flyer in the air. You fly often? Not often, but I, You talk about it like you, I don't think I've flown for many years. Well, you must try it. I've flown, I've fallen. That's scary. Yeah, but you're talking about like airplane. Yeah, I fly in my dreams. And I'm way faster, right? On your back. On my back, way faster. Now you can say, well, you know, you never flew in your life. Right, it's conceptual combination. I mean, I've flown in an airplane and I've seen birds fly and I've watched movies of people flying and I know Superman probably flies, I don't know if he flies faster on his back, but. He's, I've never seen Superman. He's always flying on his front, right, but yeah. But anyways, my point is that, you know, all of this stuff really, all of these experiences really become part of your internal model. The thing is that when you're asleep, your internal model is still being constrained by your body. Your brain's always attached to your body. It's always receiving sense data from your body. You're mostly never aware of it unless you run up the stairs or, you know, maybe you are ill in some way. But you're mostly not aware of it, which is a really good thing. Because if you were, you know, you'd never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again. Like right now, you seem like you're sitting there very calmly, but you have a virtual drama, right? It's like an opera going on inside your body. And so I think that one of the things that happens when people take psilocybin or take, you know, ketamine, for example, is that the tethers are completely removed. Yeah. That's fascinating. And that's why it's helpful to have a guide, right? Because the guide is giving you sense data to steer that internal model so that it doesn't go completely off the rails. Yeah. Again, that wiring to the other brain, that's the guide, is at least a tiny little tether. Exactly. Yeah. Let's talk about emotion a little bit, if we could. Emotion comes up often. And I have never spoken with anybody who has a clarity about emotion from a biological and neuroscience perspective that you do. And I'm not sure I fully know how to, as a, I mentioned this way too much, but as somebody who was born in the Soviet Union and romanticizes basically everything, talks about love nonstop, you know, emotion is a, I don't know what to make of it. I don't know what to, so maybe let's just try to talk about it. I mean, from a neuroscience perspective, we talked about it a little bit last time, your book covers it, how emotions are made, but what are some misconceptions we writers of poetry, we romanticizing humans have about emotion that we should move away from before to think about emotion from both a scientific and an engineering perspective? Yeah, so there is a common view of emotion in the West. The caricature of that view is that, you know, we have an inner beast, right? Your limbic system, your inner lizard, we have an inner beast and that comes baked in to the brain at birth. So you've got circuits for anger, sadness, fear. It's interesting that they all have English names, these circuits. But, and they're there and they're triggered by things in the world. And then they cause you to do and say, and so when your fear circuit is triggered, you widen your eyes, you gasp, your heart rate goes up, you prepare to flee or to freeze. And these are modal responses. They're not the only responses that you give, but on average, they're the prototypical responses. That's the view. And that's the view of emotion in the law. That's the view, you know, that emotions are these profoundly unhelpful things that are obligatory kind of like reflexes. The problem with that view is that it doesn't comport to the evidence. And it doesn't really matter. The evidence actually lines up beautifully with each other. It just doesn't line up with that view. And it doesn't matter whether you're measuring people's faces, facial movements, or you're measuring their body movements, or you're measuring their peripheral physiology, or you're measuring their brains or their voices or whatever. Pick any output that you wanna measure and any system you wanna measure, and you don't really find strong evidence for this. And I say this as somebody who not only has reviewed really thousands of articles and run big meta analyses, which are statistical summaries of published papers, but also as someone who has sent teams of researchers to small scale cultures, you know, remote cultures, which are very different from urban, large scale cultures like ours. And one culture that we visited, and I say we euphemistically because I myself didn't go because I only had two research permits, and I gave them to my students because I felt like it was better for them to have that experience and more formative for them to have that experience. But I was in contact with them every day by satellite phone. And this was to visit the Hadza hunter gatherers in Tanzania who are not an ancient people, they're a modern culture, but they live in circumstances, hunting and foraging, circumstances that are very similar, in similar conditions to our ancestors, hunting gathering ancestors, when expressions of emotion were supposed to have evolved, at least by one view of, okay. So, you know, for many years, I was sort of struggling with this set of observations, which is that I feel emotion, and I perceive emotion in other people, but scientists can't find a single marker, a single biomarker, not a single individual measure or pattern of measures that can predict what kind of emotional state they're in. How could that possibly be? How can you possibly make sense of those two things? And through a lot of reading and a lot of an immersing myself in different literatures, I came to the hypothesis that the brain is constructing these instances out of more basic ingredients. So when I tell you that the brain, when I suggest to you that what your brain is doing is making a prediction, and it's asking itself, figuratively speaking, the last time I was in this situation and this, you know, physical state, what did I do next? What did I see next? What did I hear next? It's basically asking what in my past is similar to the present? Things which are similar to one another are called a category. A group of things which are similar to one another is a category. And a mental representation of a category is a concept. So your brain is constructing categories or concepts on the fly continuously. So you really want to understand what a brain is doing. You don't, using machine learning like classification models is not going to help you because the brain doesn't classify. It's doing category construction. And the categories change, or you could say it's doing concept construction. It's using past experience to conjure a concept, which is a prediction. And if it's using past experiences of emotion, then it's constructing an emotion concept. Your concept will be, the content of it changes depending on the situation that you're in. So for example, if your brain uses past experiences of anger that you have learned, either because somebody labeled them for you, taught them to you, you observed them in movies and so on, in one situation could be very different from your concept of for anger than another situation. And this is how anger, instances of anger are, we call a population of variable instances. Sometimes when you're angry, you scowl. Sometimes when you're angry, you might smile. Sometimes when you're angry, you might cry. Sometimes your heart rate will go up, it will go down, it will stay the same. It depends on what action you're about to take because the way prediction, and I should say, the idea that physiology is yoked to action is a very old idea in the study of the peripheral nervous system that's been known for really decades. And so if you look at what the brain is doing, if you just look at the anatomy and you, here's the hypothesis that you would come up with. And I can go into the details. I've published these details in scientific papers and they also appear somewhat in How Emotions Were Made, my first book. They are not in the seven and a half lessons because that book is really not pitched at that level of explanation. It's just giving, it's really just a set of little essays. But the evidence, but what I'm about to say is actually based on scientific evidence. When your brain begins to form a prediction, the first thing it's doing is it's making a prediction of how to change the internal systems of your body, your heart, your cardiovascular system, the control of your heart, control of your lungs, a flush of cortisol, which is not a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose into your bloodstream very fast because your brain is predicting you need to do this. Predicting you need to do something metabolically expensive. And so either that means either move or learn, okay? And so your brain is preparing your body, the internal systems of your body to execute some actions, to move in some way. And then it infers based on those motor predictions and what we call viscera motor predictions, meaning the changes in the viscera that your brain is preparing to execute, your brain makes an inference about what you will sense based on those motor movements. So your experience of the world and your experience of your own body are a consequence of those predictions, those concepts. When your brain makes a concept for emotion, it's constructing an instance of that emotion. And that is how emotions are made. And those concepts load in, the predictions that are made include contents inside the body, contents outside the body. I mean, it includes other humans. So just this construction of a concept includes the variables that are much richer than just some sort of simple notion. Yeah, so our colloquial notion of a concept where I say, well, what's a concept of a bird? And then you list a set of features off to me. That's people's understanding, typically of what a concept is. But if you go into the literature in cognitive science, what you'll see is that the way that scientists have understood what a concept is has really changed over the years. So people used to think about a concept as philosophers and scientists used to think about a concept as a dictionary definition for a category. So there's a set of things which are similar out in the world. And your concept for that category is a dictionary definition of the features, the necessary insufficient features of those instances. So for a bird, it would be. Wings, feathers. Right, a beak. It flies, whatever, okay. That's called the classical category. And scientists discovered, observed that actually not all instances of birds have feathers and not all instances of birds fly. And so the idea was that you don't have a single representation of necessary insufficient features stored in your brain somewhere. Instead, what you have is a prototype, a prototype meaning you still have a single representation for the category, one, but the features are like of the most typical instance of the category or maybe the most frequent instance, but not all instances of the category have all the features, right? They have some graded similarity to the prototype. And then, you know, what I'm gonna like incredibly simplify now, a lot of work to say that then a series of experiments were done to show that in fact, what your brain seems to be doing is coming up with a single exemplar or instance of the category and reading off the features when I ask you for the concept. So if we were in a pet store and I asked you what are the features of a bird, tell me the concept of bird, you would be more likely to give me features of a good pet. And if we were in a restaurant, you would be more likely, you know, like a budgie, right? Or a canary. If we were in a restaurant, you would be more likely to give me the features of a bird that you would eat, like a chicken. And if we were in a park, you'd be more likely to give me in this country, you know, the features of a sparrow or a robin. Whereas if we were in South America, you would probably give me the features of a peacock because that's more common or it is more common there than here that you would see a peacock in such circumstances. So the idea was that really what your brain was doing was conjuring a concept on the fly that meets the function that the category is being put to. Okay? Okay. Then people started studying ad hoc concepts, meaning concepts where the instances don't share any physical features, but the function of the instances are the same. So for example, think about all the things that can protect you from the rain. What are all the things that can protect you from the rain? Umbrella, like this apartment. Right. Your car. Not giving a damn. Like a mindset. Yeah, right, right. So the idea is that the function of the instances is the same in a given situation. Even if they look different, sound different, smell different, this is called an abstract concept or a conceptual concept. Now the really cool thing about conceptual categories or conceptual category is a category of things that are held together by a function, which is called an abstract concept or a conceptual category, because the things don't share physical features, they share functional features. There are two really cool things about this. One is that's what Darwin said a species was. So Darwin is known for discovering natural selection. But the other thing he really did, which was really profound, which he's less celebrated for, is understanding that all biological categories have inherent variation, inherent variation. Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species about before Darwin's book, a species was thought to be a classical category where all the instances of dogs were the same, had the exactly same features, and any variation from that perfect platonic instance was considered to be error. And Darwin said, no, it's not error, it's meaningful. So nature selects on the basis of that variation. The reason why natural selection is powerful and can exist is because there is variation in a species. And in dogs, we talk about that variation in terms of the size of the dog and the amount of fur the dog has and the color and how long is the tail and how long is the snout. In humans, we talk about that variation in all kinds of ways, right, including in cultural ways. So that's one thing that's really interesting about conceptual categories is that Darwin is basically saying a species is a conceptual category. And in fact, if you look at modern debates about what is a species, you can't find anybody agreeing on what the criteria are for a species, because they don't all share the same genome. We don't all share, we don't, there isn't a single human genome. There's a population of genomes, but they're variable. It's not unbounded variation, but they are variable, right? And the other thing that's really cool about conceptual categories is that they are the categories that we use to make civilization. So think about money, for example. What are all the physical things that make something a currency? Is there any physical feature that all the currencies in all the worlds that's ever been used by humans share? Well, certainly, right, but what is it? Is it definable? So it's getting to the point that you make this function. It's the function, right. It's that we trade it for material goods. And we have to agree, right? We all impose on whatever it is, salt, barley, little shells, big rocks in the ocean that can't move, Bitcoin, pieces of plastic, mortgages, which are basically a promise of something in the future, nothing more, right? All of these things, we impose value on them. And we all agree that we can exchange them for material goods. Yeah, and yes, that's brilliant. By the way, you're attributing some of that to Darwin, that he thought. No, no, I'm saying that what Darwin. Because it's a brilliant view of what a species is, is the function. Yeah, what I'm saying is that what Darwin, Darwin really talked about variation in, so if you read, for example, the biologist Ernst Mayr, who was an evolutionary biologist, and then when he retired, became a historian and philosopher of biology. And his suggestion is that Darwin, Darwin did talk about variation. He vanquished what's called essentialism, the idea that there's a single set of features that define any species. And out of that grew really discussions of some of the functional features that species have, like they can reproduce, they can have offspring, the individuals of a species can have offspring. It turns out that's not a perfect criterion to use, but it's a functional criterion, right? So what I'm saying is that in cognitive science, people came up with the idea, they discovered the idea of conceptual categories or ad hoc concepts, these concepts that can change based on the function they're serving, right? And that it's there, it's in Darwin, and it's also in the philosophy of social reality. The way that philosophers talk about social reality, just look around you. I mean, we impose, we're treating a bunch of things as similar, which are physically different. And sometimes we take things that are physically the same and we treat them as separate categories. But it feels like the number of variables involved in that kind of categorization is nearly infinite. No, I don't think so, because there is a physical constraint, right? Like you and I could agree that we can fly in real life, but we can't. That's a physical constraint that we can't break, right? You and I could agree that we could walk through the walls, but we can't. We could agree that we could eat glass, but we can't. Oh, there's a lot of constraints, but I just. Yeah, we could agree that the virus doesn't exist and we don't have to wear masks. Right, yeah. But physical reality still holds the Trump card, right? But still there's a lot of. The Trump card, well, pun unintended. Pun completely unintended, but there you go, that's a predicting brain for you. But there is a tremendous amount of leeway. Yes. Yeah, that's the point. So what I'm saying is that emotions are like money. Basically, they're like money, they're like countries, they're like kings and queens and presidents. They're like everything that we construct that we impose meaning on. We take these physical signals and we give them meanings that they don't otherwise have by their physical nature. And because we agree, they have that function. But the beautiful thing, so maybe unlike money, I love this similarity is it's not obvious to me that this kind of emergent agreement should happen with emotion, because our experiences are so different for each of us humans, and yet we kind of converge. Well, in a culture we converge, but not across cultures. There are huge, huge differences. There are huge differences in what concepts exist, what they look like. So what I would say is that what we're doing with our young children as their brains become wired to their physical and their social environment is that we are curating for them. We are bootstrapping into their brains a set of emotion concepts. That's partly what they're learning. And we curate those for infants just the way we curate for them what is a dog, what is a cat, what is a truck. We sometimes explicitly label and we sometimes just use mental words. When your kid is throwing Cheerios on the floor instead of eating them, or your kid is crying when she won't put herself to sleep or whatever. We use mental words. And a word is this, words for infants, words are these really special things that they help infants learn abstract categories. There's a huge literature showing that children can take things that don't look infants, like infants, really young infants, preverbal infants can take, if you label, if I say to you, and you're an infant, okay? So I say, Lexi, this is a bling. And I put it down and the bling makes a squeaky noise. And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling. And I put it down and it makes a squeaky noise. And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling. You, as young as four months old, will expect this to make a noise, a squeaky noise. And if you don't, if it doesn't, you'll be surprised because it violated your expectation, right? I'm building for you an internal model of a bling. Okay, infants can do this really, really at a young age. And so there's no reason to believe that they couldn't learn emotion categories and concepts in the same way. And what happens when you go to a new culture? When you go to a new culture, you have to do what's called emotion acculturation. So my colleague Bacha Mesquita in Belgium studies emotion acculturation. She studies how, when people move from one culture to another, how do they learn the emotion concepts of that culture? How do they learn to make sense of their own internal sensations and also the movements, the raise of an eyebrow, the tilt of a head? How do they learn to make sense of cues from other people using concepts they don't have, but have to make on the fly? So that's the difference between cultures. Let me open another door. I'm not sure I wanna open, but the difference between men and women. Is there a difference between the emotional lives of those two categories of biological systems? So here's what I would say. We did a series of studies in the 1990s where we asked men and women to tell us about their emotional lives. And women described themselves as much more emotional than men. They believed that they were more emotional than men and men agreed. Women are much more emotional than men. And then we gave them little handheld computers. These were little Hewlett Packard computers. They fit in the palm of your hand. They weighed a couple of pounds. So this was like pre palm pilot even, like this was 1990s and like early. And we asked them, we would ping them like 10 times a day and just ask them to report how they were feeling, which is called experience sampling. So we experienced sampled. And then at the end, and then we looked at their reports and what we found is that men and women basically didn't differ. And there were some people who were really, had many more instances of emotion. So they were treading water in a tumultuous sea of emotion. And then there were other people who were like floating tranquilly in a lake. It was really not perturbed very often. And everyone in between, but there were no difference between men and women. And the really interesting thing is at the end of the sampling period, we asked people, so reflect over the past two weeks and tell it. So we've been now pinging people like again and again and again, right? So tell us how emotional do you think you are? No change from the beginning. So men and women believe that they are different. And when they are looking at other people, they make different inferences about emotion. If a man is scowling, like if you and I were together and so somebody is watching this, okay? And yeah, hey, who are you saying? Hey, hi. Yeah, hi. By the way, people love it when you look at the camera. If you and I make exactly the same set of facial movements, when people look at you, both men and women look at you, they are more likely to think, oh, he's reacting to the situation. And when they look at me, they'll say, oh, she's having an emotion. She's, you know, yeah. And I wrote about this actually right before the 2016 election. You know what, maybe I could confess. Let me try to carefully confess. But you are really gonna. Yeah, that when I, that there is an element when I see Hillary Clinton that there was something annoying about her to me. And I, just that feeling, and then I tried to reduce that to what is that? Because I think the same attributes that are annoying about her when I see in other people wouldn't be annoying. So I was trying to understand what is it? Because it certainly does feel like that concept that I've constructed in my mind. Well, I'll tell you that I think, well, let me just say that what you would predict about, for example, the performance of the two of them in the debates, and I wrote an op ed for the New York Times actually before the second debate. And it played out really pretty much as I thought that it would based on research. It's not like I'm like a great fortune teller or anything. It's just, I was just applying the research, which was that when a woman, a woman's, people make internal attributions, it's called. They infer that the facial movements and body posture and vocalizations of a woman reflect her interstate. But for a man, they're more likely to assume that they reflect his response to the situation. It doesn't say anything about him. It says something about the situation he's in. Now, for the thing that you were describing about Hillary Clinton, I think a lot of people experienced, but it's also in line with research, which shows, and particularly research actually about teaching evaluations is one place that you really see it, where the expectation is that a woman will be nurturant and that a man, there's just no expectation for him to be nurturant. So if he is nurturant, he gets points. If he's not, he gets points. They're just different points, right? Whereas for a woman, especially a woman who's an authority figure, she's really in a catch 22. Because if she's serious, she's a bitch. And if she's empathic, then she's weak. Right, that's brilliant. I mean, one of the bigger questions to ask here, so that's one example where our construction of concepts gets in trouble. So, but remember I said science and philosophy are like tools for living. So I learned recently that if you ask me what is my intuition about what regulates my eating, I will say carbohydrates. I love carbohydrates. I love pasta. I love bread. I love, I just love carbohydrates. But actually research shows, and it's beautiful research. I love this research because it so violates my own like deeply, deeply held beliefs about myself that most animals on this planet who have been studied and there are many actually eat to regulate their protein intake. So you will overeat carbohydrates if you, in order to get enough protein. And this research has been done with human, very beautiful research with humans, with crickets, with like, you know, bonobos. I mean, just like all these different animals, not bonobos, but I think like baboons. Now that I have no intuition about that. And I, even now as I regulate my eating, I still, I just have no intuition. It just, I can't feel it. What I feel is only about the carbohydrates. It feels like you're regulating around carbohydrates, not the protein. Yeah, but in fact, actually what I am doing, if I am like most animals on the planet, I am regulating around protein. So knowing this, what do I do? I correct my behavior to eat, to actually deliberately try to focus on the protein. This is the idea behind bias training, right? Like if you, I also did not experience Hillary Clinton as the warmest candidate. However, you can use consistent science, since the consistent scientific findings to organize your behavior. That doesn't mean that rationality is the absence of emotion, because sometimes emotion or any feelings in general, not the same thing as emotion, that's another topic, but are a source of information and their wisdom and helpful. So I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is that if you have a deeply held belief and the evidence shows that you're wrong, then you're wrong. It doesn't really matter how confident you feel. That confidence could be also explained by science, right? So it would be the same thing as if I, regardless of whether someone is like Charlie Baker, regardless of whether somebody is a Republican or a Democrat, if that person has a record that you can see is consistent with what you believe, then that is information that you can act on. Yeah, and then try to, I mean, this is kind of what empathy is in open mindedness, is try to consider that the set of concepts that your brain has constructed through which you are now perceiving the world is not painting the full picture. I mean, this is now true for basically every, it doesn't have to be men and women, it could be basically the prism through which we perceive actually the political discourse, right? Absolutely, so here's what I would say. There are people who, scientists who will talk to you about cognitive empathy and emotional empathy and I prefer to think of it, I think the evidence is more consistent with what I'm about to say, which is that your brain is always making predictions using your own past experience and what you've learned from books and movies and other people telling you about their experiences and so on. And if your brain cannot make a concept to make sense of those, anticipate what those sense data are and make sense of them, you will be experientially blind. So, when I'm giving lectures to people, I'll show them like a blobby black and white image and they're experientially blind to the image, they can't see anything in it. And then I show them a photograph and then I show them the image again, the blobby image and then they see actually an object in it. But the image is the same. It's they're actually adding, their predictions now are adding, right? Or anybody who's learned a language, a second language after their first language also has this experience of things that initially sound like sounds that they can't quite make sense of, eventually come to make sense of them. And in fact, there are really cool examples of people who were like born blind because they have cataracts or they have corneal damage so that no light is reaching the brain. And then they have an operation and then light reaches the brain and they can't see. For days and weeks and sometimes years, they are experientially blind to certain things. So what happens with empathy, right? Is that your brain is making a prediction. And if it doesn't have the capacity to make, if you don't share, if you're not similar, remember categories are instances which are similar in some way. If you are not similar enough to that person, you will have a hard time making a prediction about what they feel. You will be experientially blind to what they feel. In the United States, children of color are under prescribed medicine by their physicians. This is been documented. It's not that the physicians are racist necessarily but they might be experientially blind. The same thing is true of male physicians with female patients. I could tell you some hair raising stories really that where people die as a consequence of a physician making the wrong inference, the wrong prediction because of being experientially blind. So we are, empathy is not, it's not magic. We make inferences about each other, about what each other's feeling and thinking. In this culture more than, there are some cultures where people have what's called opacity of mind where they will make a prediction about someone else's actions but they're not inferring anything about the internal state of that person. But in our culture, we're constantly making inferences. What is this person thinking? And we're not doing it necessarily consciously but we're just doing it really automatically using our predictions, what we know. And if you expose yourself to information which is very different from somebody else, I mean, really what we have is we have different cultures in this country right now that are, there are a number of reasons for this. I mean, part of it is, I don't know if you saw the Social Dilemma, the Netflix. Heard about it. Yeah, it's a great, it's really great documentary and... About what social networks are doing to our society? Yeah, yeah. But nothing, no phenomenon has a simple single cause. There are multiple small causes which all add up to a perfect storm. That's just how most things work. And so the fact that machine learning algorithms are serving people up information on social media that is consistent with what they've already viewed and making, is part of the reason that you have these silos but it's not the only reason why you have these silos. I think there are other things afoot that enhance people's inability to even have a decent conversation. Yeah, I mean, okay, so many things you said are just brilliant, so the experiential blindness but also from my perspective, like I preach and I try to practice empathy a lot and something about the way you've explained it makes me almost see it as a kind of exercise that we should all do, like to train, like to add experiences to the brain to expand this capacity to predict more effectively. Absolutely. So like what I do is kind of like a method acting thing which is I imagine what the life of a person is like. Just think, I mean, this is something you see with Black Lives Matter and police officers. It feels like they're both, not both, but I have, because martial arts and so on, I have a lot of friends who are cops. They don't necessarily have empathy or visualize the experience of the other. Certainly, currently, unfortunately, people aren't doing that with police officers. They're not imagining, they're not empathizing or putting themselves in the shoes of a police officer to realize how difficult that job is, how dangerous it is, how difficult it is to maintain calm and under so much uncertainty, all those kinds of things. But there's more, there's even, that's all that's true, but I think that there's even more, there's even more to be said there. I mean, like from a predicting brain standpoint, there's even more that can be said there. So I don't know if you wanna go down that path or you wanna stick on empathy, but I will also say that one of the things that I was most gratified by, I still am receiving, it's been more than three and a half years since How Motions Are Made came out and I'm still receiving daily emails from people, right? So that's gratifying. But one of the most gratifying emails I received was from a police officer in Texas who told me that he thought that How Motions Are Made contained information that would be really helpful to resolving some of these difficulties. And he hadn't even read my op ed piece about when is a gun not a gun? And like using what we know about the science of perception from a prediction standpoint, like the brain is a predictor, to understand a little differently what might be happening in these circumstances. So there's a real, what's hard about, it's hard to talk about because everyone gets mad at you when you talk about this, like, you know. And there is a way to understand this which has profound empathy for the suffering of people of color and that definitely is in line with Black Lives Matter at the same time as understanding the really difficult situation that police officers find themselves in. And I'm not talking about this bad apple or that bad apple. I'm not talking about police officers who are necessarily shooting people in the back as they run away. I'm talking about the cases of really good, well meaning cops who have the kind of predicting brain that everybody else has. They're in a really difficult situation that I think both they and the people who are harmed don't realize, like the way that these situations are constructed, I think it's just, there's a lot to be said there I guess is what I want to say. Yeah, is there something we can try to say in a sense, like what I'm, from the perspective of the predictive brain which is a fascinating perspective to take on this, you know, all the protests that are going on, there seems to be a concept of a police officer being built. No, I think that concept is there. But it's gaining strength, so it's being re, I mean. Yeah, it is. Sure, it is there. But I think, yeah, for sure, I think that that's right. I think that there's a shift in the stereotype of what I would say is a stereotype. There's a stereotype of a black man in this country that's always in movies and television, not always, but like largely, that many people watch. I mean, you think you're watching a 10 o clock drama and all you're doing is like kicking back and relaxing, but actually you're having certain predictions reinforced and others not. And what's happening now with police is the same thing, that there are certain stereotypes of a police officer that are being abandoned and other stereotypes that are being reinforced by what you see happening. All I'll say is that if you remember, I mean, there's a lot to say about this, really, that regardless of whether it makes people mad or not, I mean, I just, the science is what it is. Just remember what I said. The brain makes predictions about internal changes in the body first and then it starts to prepare motor action and then it makes a prediction about what you will see and hear and feel based on those actions, okay? So it's also the case that we didn't talk about is that sensory sampling, like your brain's ability to sample what's out there is yoked to your heart rate, it's yoked to your heartbeats. There are certain phases of the heartbeat where it's easier for you to see what's happening in the world than in others. And so if your heart rate goes through the roof, you will be less likely, you will be more likely to just go with your prediction and not correct based on what's out there because you're actually literally not seeing as well. Or you will see things that aren't there, basically. Is there something that we could say by way of advice for when this episode is released in the chaos of emotion? Sorry, I don't know about a term that's just flying around on social media. What's? Well, I actually think it is emotion in the following sense. And it sounds a little bit like, it sounds a little bit like artificial in the way that I'm about to say it, but I really think that this is what's happening. One thing we haven't talked about is brains evolved, didn't evolve for you to see, they didn't evolve for you to hear, they didn't evolve for you to feel, they evolved to control your body. That's why you have a brain. You have a brain so that it can control your body. And the metaphor, the scientific term for predictively controlling your body is allostasis. Your brain is attempting to anticipate the needs of your body and meet those needs before they arise so that you can act as you need to act. And the metaphor that I use is a body budget. You know, your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and water. And instead of having, you know, one or two bank accounts, it has gazillions. There are all these systems in your body that have to be kept in balance. And it's monitoring very closely, it's making predictions about like, when is it good to spend and when is it good to save and what would be a good investment and am I gonna get a return on my investment? Whenever people talk about reward or reward prediction error or anything to do with reward or punishment, they're talking about the body budget. They're talking about your brain's predictions about whether or not there will be a deposit or withdrawal. So when your brain is running a deficit in your body budgets, you have some kind of metabolic imbalance, you experience that as discomfort. You experience that as distress. When your brain, when things are chaotic, you can't predict what's going to happen next. So I have this absolutely brilliant scientist working in my lab, his name is Jordan Theriot and he's published this really terrific paper on a sense of should, like why do we have social rules? Why do we adhere to social norms? It's because if I make myself predictable to you, then you are predictable to me. And if you're predictable to me, that's good because that is less metabolically expensive for me. Novelty or unpredictability at the extreme is expensive. And if it goes on for long enough, what happens is first of all, you will feel really jittery and antsy, which we describe as anxiety. It isn't necessarily anxiety. It could be just something is not predictable and you are experiencing arousal because the chemicals that help you learn increase your feeling of arousal basically. But if it goes on for long enough, you will become depleted and you will start to feel really, really, really distressed. So what we have is a culture full of people right now who their body budgets are just decimated and there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. When you talk about it as depression and anxiety, it makes you think that it's not about your metabolism, that it's not about your body budgeting, that it's not about getting enough sleep or about eating well or about making sure that you have social connections. You think that it's something separate from that. But depression and anxiety are just a way of being in the world. They're a way of being in the world when things aren't quite right with your predictions. That's such a deep way of thinking. Like the brain is maintaining homeostasis. It's actually allostasis. I'm sorry. And it's constantly making predictions and metabolically speaking, it's very costly to make novel, like constantly be learning to making adjustments. And then over time, there's a cost to be paid if you're just in a place of chaos where there's constant need for adjusting and learning and experience novel things. And so part of the problem here, there are a couple of things. Like I said, it's a perfect storm. There isn't a single cause. There are multiple cause, multiple things that combine together. It's a complex system, multiple things. Part of it is that they're metabolically encumbered and they're distressed. And in order to try to have empathy for someone who is very much unlike you, you have to forage for information. You have to explore information that is novel to you and unexpected. And that's expensive. And at a time when people feel, what do you do when you are running a deficit in your bank account? You stop spending. What does it mean for a brain to stop spending? A brain stops moving very much, stops moving the body and it stops learning. It just goes with its internal model. Brilliantly put, yeah. So empathy requires, to have empathy for someone who is unlike you requires learning and practice, foraging for information. I mean, it is something I talk about in the book in seven and a half lessons about the brain. I think it's really important. It's hard, but it's hard. I think it's hard for people to have, to be curious about views that are unlike their own when they feel so encumbered. And I'll just tell you, I had this epiphany really. I was listening to Robert Reich's The System. He was talking about oligarchy versus democracy. And so oligarchy is where very wealthy people, like extremely wealthy people, shift power so that they become even more wealthy and even more insulated and from the pressures of the common person. It's actually the kind of system that leads to the collapse of civilizations if you believe Jared Diamond. Just say that. But anyways, I'm listening to this and I'm listening to him describe in fairly decent detail how the CEOs of these companies, there's been a shift in what it means to be a CEO and no longer being a steward of the community and so on, but like in the 1980s, it sort of shifted to this other model of being like an oligarch. And he's talking about how it used to be the case that CEOs made like 20 times what their employees made and now they make about 300 times on average what their employees made. So where did that money come from? It came from the pockets of the employees. And they don't know about it, right? No one knows about it. They just know they can't feed their children, they can't pay for healthcare, they can't take care of their family and they worry about what's gonna happen to their, they're living like months a month basically. Any one big bill could completely put them out on the street. So there are a huge number of people living like this. So all they, what they're experiencing, they don't know why they're experiencing it. And then someone comes along and gives them a narrative. Well, somebody else butted in line in front of you and that's why you're this way. That's why you experience what you're experiencing. And just for a minute, I was thinking, I had deep empathy for people who have beliefs that are really, really, really different from mine. But I was trying really hard to see it through their eyes. And did it cost me something metabolically? I'm sure, I'm sure. But you had something in the gas tank. Well, I. In order to allocate that. I mean, that's the question is like, where did you, what resources did your brain draw on in order to actually make that effort? Well, I'll tell you something, honestly, Lex. I don't have that much in the gas tank right now. Right, so I am surfing the stress that, stress is just, what is stress? Stress is your brain is preparing for a big metabolic outlay and it just keeps preparing and preparing and preparing and preparing. You as a professor, you as a human. Both, right? For me, this is a moment of existential crisis as much as anybody else, democracy, all of these things. So in many of my roles, so I guess what I'm trying to say is that I get up every morning and I exercise. I run, I row, I lift weights, right? You exercise in the middle of the day. I saw your like, you know, daily thing. Yeah, I hate it actually. You love it, right? You get a... No, I hate it. I hate it, but I do it religiously. Why? Because it's a really good investment. It's an expenditure that is a really good investment. And so when I was exercising, I was listening to the book and when I realized the insights that I was sort of like playing around with, like, is this, does this make sense? Does this make sense? I didn't immediately plunge into it. I basically wrote some stuff down, I set it aside and then I did what I prepared myself to make an expenditure. I don't know what you do before you exercise. I always have a protein shake, always have a protein shake because I need to fuel up before I make this really big expenditure. And so I did the same thing. I didn't have a protein drink, but I did the same thing. And fueling up can mean lots of different things. It can mean talking to a friend about it. It can mean, you know, it can mean making sure you get a good night's sleep before you do it. It can mean lots of different things, but I guess I think we have to do these things. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I'm gonna re listen to this conversation several times, this is brilliant. But I do think about, you know, I've encountered so many people that can't possibly imagine that a good human being can vote for Donald Trump. And I've also encountered people that can't imagine that an intelligent person can possibly vote for Democrat. And I look at both these people, many of whom are friends, and let's just say, after this conversation, I can see as they're predicting brains not willing to invest the resources to empathize with the other side. And I think you have to in order to be able to, like, to see the obvious common humanity in us. I don't know what the system is that's creating this division. We can put it, like you said, it's a perfect storm. It might be the social media, I don't know what the hell it is. I think it's a bunch of things. I think it's, there's an economic system, which is disadvantaging large numbers of people. There's a use of social media. Like if you, you know, if I had to orchestrate or architect a system that would screw up a human body budget, it would be the one that we live in. You know, we don't sleep enough. We eat pseudo food, basically. We are on social media too much, which is full of ambiguity, which is really hard for a human nervous system, right? Really, really hard. Like ambiguity with no context to predict in. I mean, it's like, really? And then, you know, there are the economic concerns that affect large swaths of people in this country. I mean, it's really, I'm not saying everything is reducible to metabolism. Not everything is reducible to metabolism, but there, if you combine all these things together. It's helpful to think of it that way. Then somehow it's also, somehow it reduces the entirety of the human experience, the same kind of obvious logic. Like we should exercise every day in the same kind of way. We should empathize every day. Yeah. You know, there are these really wonderful, wonderful programs for teens and sometimes also for parents of people who've lost children in wars and in conflicts, in political conflicts, where they go to a bucolic setting and they talk to each other about their experiences. And miraculous things happen, you know? So, you know, it's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off It's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off as kind of Pollyanna ish. You know, like, what's this really gonna do? But you have to think about, when my daughter went to college, I gave her advice. I said, try to be around people who let you be the kind of person you wanna be. We're back to free will. You have a choice, you have a choice. It might seem like a really hard choice. It might seem like an unimaginably difficult choice. You have a choice. Do you wanna be somebody who is wrapped in fury and agony? Or do you wanna be somebody who extends a little empathy to somebody else? And in the process, maybe learn something. Curiosity is the thing that protects you. Curiosity is the thing, it's curative curiosity. On social media, the thing I recommend to people, at least that's the way I've been approaching social media. It doesn't seem to be the common approach, but I basically give love to people who seem to also give love to others. So it's the same similar concept of surrounding yourself by the people you wanna become. And I ignore, sometimes block, but just ignore. I don't add aggression to people who are just constantly full of aggression and negativity and toxicity. There's a certain desire when somebody says something mean to say something, to say why, or try to alleviate the meanness and so on. But what you're doing essentially is you're now surrounding yourself by that group of folks that have that negativity. So even just the conversation. So I think it's just so powerful to put yourself amongst people whose basic mode of interaction is kindness. Because I don't know what it is, but maybe it's the way I'm built, is that to me is energizing for the gas tank that then I can pull to when I start reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and start thinking about Nazi Germany. I can empathize with everybody involved. I can start to make these difficult thinking that's required to understand our little planet Earth. Well, there is research to back up what you said. There's research that's consistent with your intuition there, that there's research that shows that being kind to other people, doing something nice for someone else is like making a deposit to some extent. Because I think making a deposit not only in their body budgets, but also in yours. Like people feel good when they do good things for other people. We are social animals. We regulate each other's nervous systems for better and for worse, right? The best thing for a human nervous system is another human. And the worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. So you decide, do you wanna be somebody who makes people feel better or do you wanna be somebody who causes people pain? And we are more responsible for one another than we might like or than we might want. But remember what we said about social reality. Social reality, there are lots of different cultural norms about independence or collective nature of people. But the fact is we have socially dependent nervous systems. We evolved that way as a species. And in this country, we prize individual rights and freedoms. And that is a dilemma that we have to grapple with. And we have to do it in a way if we're gonna be productive about it. We have to do it in a way that requires engaging with each other, and which is what I understand the founding members of this country intended. Beautifully put. Let me ask a few final silly questions. So one, talked a bit about love, but it's fun to ask somebody like you who can effectively, from at least neuroscience perspective, disassemble some of these romantic notions. But what do you make of romantic love? Why do human beings seem to fall in love? At least a bunch of 80s hair bands have written about it. Is that a nice feature to have? Is that a bug? What is it? Well, I'm really happy that I fell in love. I wouldn't want it any other way. But I would say. Is that you the person speaking or the neuroscientist? Well, that's me the person speaking. But I would say as a neuroscientist, babies are born not able to regulate their own body budgets because their brains aren't fully wired yet. When you feed a baby, when you cuddle a baby, everything you do with a baby impacts that baby's body budget and helps to wire that baby's brain to manage eventually her own body budget to some extent. That's the basis biologically of attachment. Humans evolved as a species to be socially dependent, meaning you cannot manage your body budget on your own without a tax that eventually you pay many years later in terms of some metabolic illness. Loneliness, when you break up with someone that you love or you lose them, you feel like it's gonna kill you, but it doesn't. But loneliness will kill you. It will kill you approximately, what is it, seven years earlier? I can't remember exactly the exact number. It's actually in the web notes to seven and a half lessons. But social isolation and loneliness will kill you earlier than you would otherwise die. And the reason why is that you didn't evolve to manage your nervous system on your own. And when you do, you pay a little tax and that tax accrues very slightly over time, over a long period of time so that by the time you're in middle age or a little older, you are more likely to die sooner from some metabolic illness, from heart disease, from diabetes, from depression. You're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. I mean, it takes a long time for that tax to accrue, but it does. So yes, I think it's a good thing for people to fall in love. But I think the funny view of it is that it's clear that humans need the social attachment to, what is it, manage their nervous system as you're describing. And the reason you wanna stay with somebody for a long time is so you don't have, is the novelty is very costly for. Well, now you're mixing thing. Now you're, you know, you have to decide whether. But what I would say is when you lose someone you love, it feels like you've lost a part of you. And that's because you have. You've lost someone who was contributing to your body budget. We are the caretakers of one another's nervous systems, like it or not. And out of that comes very deep feelings of attachment, some of which are romantic love. Are you afraid of your own mortality? We're two humans sitting here. Do you think, do you ponder your own mortality? I mean, somebody thinks about your brain a lot. It seems one of the more terrifying or, I don't know. I don't know how to feel about it, but it seems to be one of the most definitive aspects of life is that it ends. It's a complicated answer, but I think the best I can do in a short snippet would be to say, for a very long time, I did not fear my own mortality. I feared pain and suffering. So that's what I feared. I feared being harmed or dying in a way that would be painful. But I didn't fear having my life be over. Now, as a mother, I think I fear dying before my daughter is ready to be without me. That's what I fear. It's, that's really what I fear. And frankly, honestly, I fear my husband dying before me much more than I fear my own death. There's that love and social attachment again. Yeah, because I know it's just gonna, I'm gonna feel like I wish I was dead. A final question about life. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? Yeah, I think that there isn't one meaning of life. There's like many meanings of life. And you use different ones on different days. But for me. Depending on the day. Depending on the day. But for me, I would say sometimes the meaning of life is to understand, to make meaning actually. The meaning of life is to make meaning. Sometimes it's that. Sometimes it's to leave the world just slightly a little bit better than like the Johnny Appleseed view, you know? Sometimes the meaning of life is to clear the path for my daughter or for my students. So sometimes it's that. And sometimes it's just, even in moments where you're looking at the sky or you're by the ocean. Or sometimes for me it's even like I'll see a weed poking out of a crack in a sidewalk, you know? And you just have this overwhelming sense of the wonder of the world. Like the world is, just like the physical world is so wondrous and you just get very immersed in the moment, like the sensation of the moment. Sometimes that's the meaning of life. I don't think there's one meaning of life. I think it's a population of instances just like any other category. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Lisa. The first time we spoke is I think if not the, then one of, I think it's the first conversation I had that basically launched this podcast. Yeah, that's actually the first conversation I've had that launched this podcast. And now we get to finally do it the right way. It's a huge honor to talk to you, that you spent time with me. I can't wait for hopefully the many more books you write. Certainly can't wait to, I already read this book, but I can't wait to listen to it because as you said offline that you're reading it and I think you have a great voice. You have a great, I don't know what the nice way to put it, but maybe NPR voice in the best version of what that is. So thanks again for talking today. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me back. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, which is an all in one nutritional drink, Magic Spoon, which is a low carb keto friendly cereal and Cash App, which is an app for sending money to your friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Lisa Feldman Barrett. It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Counterintuitive Ideas About How the Brain Works | Lex Fridman Podcast #129

The following is a conversation with Scott Aaronson, his second time on the podcast. He is a professor at UT Austin, director of the Quantum Information Center, and previously a professor at MIT. Last time we talked about quantum computing. This time we talk about computation complexity, consciousness, and theories of everything. I'm recording this intro, as you may be able to tell, in a very strange room in the middle of the night. I'm not really sure how I got here or how I'm going to get out, but Hunter S. Thompson saying I think applies to today and the last few days and actually the last couple of weeks. Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, wow, what a ride. So I figured whatever I'm up to here, and yes, lots of wine is involved, I'm going to have to improvise, have to improvise, have to improvise, hence this recording. Okay, quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First sponsor is SimpliSafe, a home security company I use to monitor and protect my apartment, though of course I'm always prepared with a fall back plan, as a man in this world must always be. Second sponsor is 8sleep, a mattress that cools itself, measures heart rate variability, has a nap, and has given me yet another reason to look forward to sleep, including the all important power nap. Third sponsor is ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Finally, the fourth sponsor is Better Help, online therapy when you want to face your demons with a licensed professional, not just by doing David Goggins like physical challenges like I seem to do on occasion. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support the podcast. As a side note, let me say that this is the second time I've recorded a conversation outdoors. The first one was with Steven Wolfram when it was actually sunny out, in this case it was raining, which is why I found a covered outdoor patio. But I learned a valuable lesson, which is that raindrops can be quite loud on the hard metal surface of a patio cover. I did my best with the audio, I hope it still sounds okay to you. I'm learning, always improving. In fact, as Scott says, if you always win, then you're probably doing something wrong. To be honest, I get pretty upset with myself when I fail, small or big, but I've learned that this feeling is priceless. It can be fuel, when channeled into concrete plans of how to improve. So if you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the Five Stars in Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Scott Aaronson. Let's start with the most absurd question, but I've read you write some fascinating stuff about it, so let's go there. Are we living in a simulation? What difference does it make, Lex? I mean, I'm serious. What difference? Because if we are living in a simulation, it raises the question, how real does something have to be in simulation for it to be sufficiently immersive for us humans? But I mean, even in principle, how could we ever know if we were in one, right? A perfect simulation, by definition, is something that's indistinguishable from the real thing. Well, we didn't say anything about perfect. No, no, that's right. Well, if it was an imperfect simulation, if we could hack it, find a bug in it, then that would be one thing, right? If this was like The Matrix and there was a way for me to do flying kung fu moves or something by hacking the simulation, well then we would have to cross that bridge when we came to it, wouldn't we? At that point, it's hard to see the difference between that and just what people would ordinarily refer to as a world with miracles. What about from a different perspective, thinking about the universe as a computation, like a program running on a computer? That's kind of a neighboring concept. It is. It is an interesting and reasonably well defined question to ask, is the world computable? Does the world satisfy what we would call in CS the church touring thesis? That is, could we take any physical system and simulate it to any desired precision by a touring machine, given the appropriate input data, right? And so far, I think the indications are pretty strong that our world does seem to satisfy the church touring thesis. At least if it doesn't, then we haven't yet discovered why not. But now, does that mean that our universe is a simulation? Well, that word seems to suggest that there is some other larger universe in which it is running. And the problem there is that if the simulation is perfect, then we're never going to be able to get any direct evidence about that other universe. We will only be able to see the effects of the computation that is running in this universe. Well, let's imagine an analogy. Let's imagine a PC, a personal computer, a computer. Is it possible with the advent of artificial intelligence for the computer to look outside of itself to see, to understand its creator? I mean, that's a simple, is that a ridiculous analogy? Well, I mean, with the computers that we actually have, I mean, first of all, we all know that humans have done an imperfect job of enforcing the abstraction boundaries of computers, right? Like you may try to confine some program to a playpen, but as soon as there's one memory allocation error in the C program, then the program has gotten out of that playpen and it can do whatever it wants, right? This is how most hacks work, you know, viruses and worms and exploits. And, you know, you would have to imagine that an AI would be able to discover something like that. Now, you know, of course, if we could actually discover some exploit of reality itself, then, you know, then this whole, I mean, then in some sense we wouldn't have to philosophize about this, right? This would no longer be a metaphysical conversation. But the question is, what would that hack look like? Yeah, well, I have no idea. I mean, Peter Shor, you know, the very famous person in quantum computing, of course, has joked that maybe the reason why we haven't yet, you know, integrated general relativity in quantum mechanics is that, you know, the part of the universe that depends on both of them was actually left unspecified. And if we ever tried to do an experiment involving the singularity of a black hole or something like that, then, you know, the universe would just generate an overflow error or something, right? Yeah, we would just crash the universe. Now, you know, the universe, you know, has seemed to hold up pretty well for, you know, 14 billion years, right? So, you know, my, you know, a Occam's razor kind of guess has to be that, you know, it will continue to hold up, you know, that the fact that we don't know the laws of physics governing some phenomenon is not a strong sign that probing that phenomenon is going to crash the universe, right? But, you know, of course, I could be wrong. But do you think on the physics side of things, you know, there's been recently a few folks, Eric Weinstein and Stephen Wolfram that came out with a theory of everything. I think there's a history of physicists dreaming and working on the unification of all the laws of physics. Do you think it's possible that once we understand more physics, not necessarily the unification of the laws, but just understand physics more deeply at the fundamental level, we'll be able to start, you know, I mean, part of this is humorous, but looking to see if there's any bugs in the universe that could be exploited for, you know, traveling at not just speed of light, but just traveling faster than our current spaceships can travel, all that kind of stuff. Well, I mean, to travel faster than our current spaceships could travel, you wouldn't need to find any bug in the universe, right? The known laws of physics, you know, let us go much faster up to the speed of light, right? And, you know, when people want to go faster than the speed of light, well, we actually know something about what that would entail, namely that, you know, according to relativity, that seems to entail communication backwards in time. Okay, so then you have to worry about closed time like curves and all of that stuff. So, you know, in some sense, we sort of know the price that you have to pay for these things, right? But under the current understanding of physics. That's right. That's right. We can't, you know, say that they're impossible, but we, you know, we know that sort of a lot else in physics breaks, right? So, now regarding Eric Weinstein and Stephen Wolfram, like, I wouldn't say that either of them has a theory of everything. I would say that they have ideas that they hope, you know, could someday lead to a theory of everything. Is that a worthy pursuit? Well, I mean, certainly, let's say by theory of everything, you know, we don't literally mean a theory of cats and of baseball and, you know, but we just mean it in the more limited sense of everything, a fundamental theory of physics, right? Of all of the fundamental interactions of physics, of course, such a theory, even after we had it, you know, would leave the entire question of all the emergent behavior, right? You know, to be explored. So, it's only everything for a specific definition of everything. Okay, but in that sense, I would say, of course, that's worth pursuing. I mean, that is the entire program of fundamental physics, right? All of my friends who do quantum gravity, who do string theory, who do anything like that, that is what's motivating them. Yeah, it's funny, though, but, I mean, Eric Weinstein talks about this. It is, I don't know much about the physics world, but I know about the AI world, and it is a little, it is a little bit taboo to talk about AGI, for example, on the AI side. So, really, to talk about the big dream of the community, I would say, because it seems so far away, it's almost taboo to bring it up, because, you know, it's seen as the kind of people that dream about creating a truly superhuman level intelligence. That's really far out there, people, because we're not even close to that. And it feels like the same thing is true for the physics community. I mean, Stephen Hawking certainly talked constantly about theory of everything, right? You know, I mean, people, you know, use those terms who were, you know, some of the most respected people in the whole world of physics, right? But, I mean, I think that the distinction that I would make is that people might react badly if you use the term in a way that suggests that you, you know, thinking about it for five minutes, have come up with this major new insight about it, right? It's difficult. Stephen Hawking is not a great example, because I think you can do whatever the heck you want when you get to that level. And I certainly see, like, senior faculty, you know, that, you know, at that point, that's one of the nice things about getting older is you stop giving a damn. But community as a whole, they tend to roll their eyes very quickly at stuff that's outside the quote unquote mainstream. Well, let me put it this way. I mean, if you asked, you know, Ed Witten, let's say, who is, you know, you might consider the leader of the string community, and thus, you know, very, very mainstream, in a certain sense, but he would have no hesitation in saying, you know, of course, you know, they're looking for a, you know, you know, a unified description of nature of, you know, of general relativity of quantum mechanics of all the fundamental interactions of nature, right? Now, you know, whether people would call that a theory of everything, whether they would use that term, that might vary. You know, Lenny Susskind would definitely have no problem telling you that, you know, if that's what we want, right? TK For me, who loves human beings and psychology, it's kind of ridiculous to say a theory that unifies the laws of physics gets you to understand everything. I would say you're not even close to understanding everything. TK Yeah, right. I mean, the word everything is a little ambiguous here. And then people will get into debates about, you know, reductionism versus emergentism and blah, blah, blah. And so in not wanting to say theory of everything, people might just be trying to short circuit that debate and say, you know, look, you know, yes, we want a fundamental theory of, you know, the particles and interactions of nature. TK Let me bring up the next topic that people don't want to mention, although they're getting more comfortable with it, is consciousness. You mentioned that you have a talk on consciousness that I watched five minutes of, but the internet connection was really bad. TK Was this my talk about, you know, refuting the integrated information theory? TK Yes. TK Which was a particular account of consciousness that, yeah, I think one can just show it doesn't work. Much harder to say what does work. TK Let me ask, maybe it'd be nice to comment on, you talk about also like the semi hard problem of consciousness or like almost hard problem or kind of hard. TK Pretty hard problem, I think I call it. TK So maybe can you talk about that, their idea of the approach to modeling consciousness and why you don't find it convincing? What is it, first of all? TK Okay, well, so what I called the pretty hard problem of consciousness, this is my term, although many other people have said something equivalent to this, okay? But it's just, you know, the problem of, you know, giving an account of just which physical systems are conscious and which are not. Or, you know, if there are degrees of consciousness, then quantifying how conscious a given system is. TK Oh, awesome. So that's the pretty hard problem. TK Yeah, that's what I mean. TK That's it. I'm adopting it. I love it. That's a good ring to it. TK And so, you know, the infamous hard problem of consciousness is to explain how something like consciousness could arise at all, you know, in a material universe, right? Or, you know, why does it ever feel like anything to experience anything, right? And, you know, so I'm trying to distinguish from that problem, right? And say, you know, no, okay, I would merely settle for an account that could say, you know, is a fetus conscious? You know, if so, at which trimester? You know, is a dog conscious? You know, what about a frog, right? TK Or even as a precondition, you take that both these things are conscious, tell me which is more conscious. TK Yeah, for example, yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if consciousness is some multidimensional vector, well, just tell me in which respects these things are conscious and in which respect they aren't, right? And, you know, and have some principled way to do it where you're not, you know, carving out exceptions for things that you like or don't like, but could somehow take a description of an arbitrary physical system, and then just based on the physical properties of that system, or the informational properties, or how it's connected, or something like that, just in principle, calculate, you know, its degree of consciousness, right? I mean, this, this would be the kind of thing that we would need, you know, if we wanted to address questions, like, you know, what does it take for a machine to be conscious, right? Or when are, you know, when should we regard AIs as being conscious? So now this IIT, this integrated information theory, which has been put forward by Giulio Tinoni and a bunch of his collaborators over the last decade or two, this is noteworthy, I guess, as a direct attempt to answer that question, to, you know, answer the, to address the pretty hard problem, right? And they give a, a criterion that's just based on how a system is connected. So you, so it's up to you to sort of abstract the system, like a brain or a microchip, as a collection of components that are connected to each other by some pattern of connections, you know, and, and to specify how the components can influence each other, you know, like where the inputs go, you know, where they affect the outputs. But then once you've specified that, then they give this quantity that they call phi, you know, the Greek letter phi. And the definition of phi has actually changed over time. It changes from one paper to another, but in all of the variations, it involves something about what we in computer science would call graph expansion. So basically what this means is that they want, in order to get a large value of phi, it should not be possible to take your system and partition it into two components that are only weakly connected to each other. Okay. So whenever we take our system and sort of try to split it up into two, then there should be lots and lots of connections going between the two components. Okay. Well, I understand what that means on a graph. Do they formalize what, how to construct such a graph or data structure, whatever, or is this one of the criticism I've heard you kind of say is that a lot of the very interesting specifics are usually communicated through like natural language, like through words. So it's like the details aren't always clear. Well, it's true. I mean, they have nothing even resembling a derivation of this phi. Okay. So what they do is they state a whole bunch of postulates, you know, axioms that they think that consciousness should satisfy. And then there's some verbal discussion. And then at some point, phi appears. Right. Right. And this, this was what the first thing that really made the hair stand on my neck, to be honest, because they are acting as if there is a derivation. They're acting as if, you know, you're supposed to think that this is a derivation and there's nothing even remotely resembling a derivate. They just pull the phi out of a hat completely. Is one of the key criticisms to you is that details are missing or is there something more fundamental? That's not even the key criticism. That's just, that's just a side point. Okay. The, the core of it is that I think that the, you know, that they want to say that a system is more conscious the larger its value of phi. And I think that that is obvious nonsense. Okay. As soon as you think about it for like a minute, as soon as you think about it in terms of, could I construct a system that had an enormous value of phi, like, you know, even larger than the brain has, but that is just implementing an error correcting code, you know, doing nothing that we would associate with, you know, intelligence or consciousness or any of it. The answer is yes, it is easy to do that. Right. And so I wrote blog posts, just making this point that, yeah, it's easy to do that. Now, you know, Tinoni's response to that was actually kind of incredible, right? I mean, I, I, I admired it in a way because instead of disputing any of it, he just bit the bullet in the sense, you know, he was one of the, the, uh, the most, uh, uh, audacious bullet bitings I've ever seen in my career. Okay. He said, okay, then fine. You know, this system that just applies this error correcting code it's conscious, you know, and if it has a much larger value of phi than you or me, it's much more conscious than you and me. You know, you, we just have to accept what the theory says because, you know, science is not about confirming our intuitions. It's about challenging them. And, you know, this is what my theory predicts that this thing is conscious and, you know, or super duper conscious. And how are you going to prove me wrong? So the way I would argue against your blog posts is I would say, yes, sure. You're right in general, but for naturally arising systems developed through the process of evolution on earth, the, this rule of the larger fee being associated, being associated with more consciousness is correct. Yeah. So that's not what he said at all. Right. Right. Because he wants this to be completely general. So we can apply to even computers. Yeah. I mean, I mean, the, the whole interest of the theory is the, you know, the hope that it could be completely general apply to aliens, to computers, to animals, coma patients, to any of it. Right. And so, so, so he just said, well, you know, Scott is relying on his intuition, but, you know, I'm relying on this theory and, you know, to me it was almost like, you know, are we being serious here? Like, like, like, you know, like, like, okay, yes, in science we try to learn highly nonintuitive things, but what we do is we first test the theory on cases where we already know the answer. Right. Like if we, if someone had a new theory of temperature, right, then, you know, maybe we could check that it says that boiling water is hotter than ice. And then if it says that the sun is hotter than anything, you know, you've ever experienced, then maybe we, we trust that extrapolation. Right. But like this, this theory, like if, if, you know, it's now saying that, you know, a, a gigantic grit, like regular grid of exclusive or gates can be way more conscious than, you know, a person or than, than any animal can be, you know, even if it, you know, is, you know, is, is, is, is so uniform that it might as well just be a blank wall. Right. And, and so now the point is if, if this theory is sort of getting wrong, the question is a blank wall, you know, more conscious than a person, then I would say, what is, what is there for it to get right? So your, your sense is a blank wall is not more conscious than a human being. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, you could say that I am taking that as one of my axioms. I'm saying, I'm saying that if, if a theory of consciousness is, is getting that wrong, then whatever it is talking about at that point, I, I, I'm not going to call it consciousness. I'm going to use a different word. You have to use a different word. I mean, it's also, it's possible just like with intelligence that us humans conveniently define these very difficult to understand concepts in a very human centric way. Just like the Turing test really seems to define intelligence as a thing that's human like. Right. But I would say that with any, uh, concept, you know, there's, uh, uh, uh, you know, like we, we, we, we first need to define it. Right. And a definition is only a good definition if it matches what we thought we were talking about prior to having a definition. Right. And I would say that, you know, uh, fee as a definition of consciousness fails that test. That is my argument. So, okay. So let's take a further step. So you mentioned that the universe might be a Turing machine. So like it might be computations or simulatable by one anyway, simulated by one. So what's your sense about consciousness? Do you think consciousness is computation that we don't need to go to any place outside of the computable universe to, uh, you know, to, to understand consciousness, to build consciousness, to measure consciousness, all those kinds of things? I don't know. These are what, uh, you know, have been called the, the vertiginous questions, right? There's the questions like, like, uh, you know, you get a feeling of vertigo and thinking about them. Right. I mean, I certainly feel like, uh, I am conscious in a way that is not reducible to computation, but why should you believe me? Right. I mean, and, and, and if you said the same to me, then why should I believe you? But as computer scientists, I feel like a computer could be, could achieve human level intelligence, but, and that's actually a feeling and a hope. That's not a scientific belief. It's just, we've built up enough intuition, the same kind of intuition you use in your blog. You know, that's what scientists do. They, I mean, some of it is a scientific method, but some of it is just damn good intuition. I don't have a good intuition about consciousness. Yeah. I'm not sure that anyone does or has in the, you know, 2,500 years that these things have been discussed, Lex. But do you think we will? Like one of the, I've gotten a chance to attend, can't wait to hear your opinion on this, but attend the Neuralink event. And, uh, one of the dreams there is to, uh, you know, basically push neuroscience forward. And the hope with neuroscience is that, uh, we can inspect the machinery from which all this fun stuff emerges and see, we're going to notice something special, some special sauce from which something like consciousness or cognition emerges. Yeah. Well, it's clear that we've learned an enormous amount about neuroscience. We've learned an enormous amount about computation, you know, about machine learning, about AI, how to get it to work. We've learned, uh, an enormous amount about the underpinnings of the physical world, you know, and, you know, from one point of view, that's like, uh, an enormous distance that we've traveled along the road to understanding consciousness. From another point of view, you know, the distance still to be traveled on the road, you know, maybe seems no shorter than it was at the beginning. Right? So it's very hard to say. I mean, you know, these are questions like, like in, in, in sort of trying to have a theory of consciousness, there's sort of a problem where it feels like it's not just that we don't know how to make progress. It's that it's hard to specify what could even count as progress, right? Because no matter what scientific theory someone proposed, someone else could come along and say, well, you've just talked about the mechanism. You haven't said anything about what breathes fire into the mechanism, what really makes there something that it's like to be it. Right. And that seems like an objection that you could always raise no matter, you know, how much someone elucidated the details of how the brain works. Okay. Let's go to the Turing test and the Lobner Prize. I have this intuition, call me crazy, but we, that a machine to pass the Turing test and it's full, whatever the spirit of it is, we can talk about how to formulate the perfect Turing test, that that machine has to be conscious. We at least have to, I have a very low bar of what consciousness is. I tend to, I tend to think that the emulation of consciousness is as good as consciousness. So the consciousness is just a dance, a social, a social, a shortcut, like a nice, useful tool, but I tend to connect intelligence consciousness together. So by, by that, do you, maybe just to ask what, what role does consciousness play? Do you think it passed in the Turing test? Well, look, I mean, it's almost tautologically true that if we had a machine that passed the Turing test, then it would be emulating consciousness. Right? So if your position is that, you know, emulation of consciousness is consciousness, then so, you know, by, by definition, any machine that passed the Turing test would be conscious. But it's, but I mean, we know that you could say that, you know, that, that is just a way to rephrase the original question, you know, is an emulation of consciousness, you know, necessarily conscious. Right. And you can, can, you know, I hear, I'm not saying anything new that hasn't been debated ad nauseum in the literature. Okay. But, you know, you could imagine some very hard cases, like imagine a machine that passed the Turing test, but that did so just by an enormous cosmological sized lookup table that just cashed every possible conversation that could be had. The old Chinese room. Well, well, yeah, yeah. But, but this is, I mean, I mean, the Chinese room actually would be doing some computation, at least in Searle's version. Right. Here, I'm just talking about a table lookup. Okay. Now it's true that for conversations of a reasonable length, this, you know, lookup table would be so enormous that wouldn't even fit in the observable universe. Okay. But supposing that you could build a big enough lookup table and then just, you know, pass the Turing test just by looking up what the person said. Right. Are you going to regard that as conscious? Okay. Let me try to make this formal and then you can shut it down. I think that the emulation of something is that something, if there exists in that system, a black box that's full of mystery. So like, full of mystery to whom? To human specters. So does that mean that consciousness is relative to the observer? Like, could something be conscious for us, but not conscious for an alien that understood better what was happening inside the black box? Yes. So that if inside the black box is just a lookup table, the alien that saw that would say this is not conscious. To us, another way to phrase the black box is layers of abstraction, which make it very difficult to see to the actually underlying functionality of the system. And then we observe just the abstraction. And so it looks like magic to us. But once we understand the inner machinery, it stops being magic. And so like, that's a prerequisite is that you can't know how it works, or some part of it, because then there has to be in our human mind, entry point for the magic. So that's a formal definition of the system. Yeah, well, look, I mean, I explored a view in this essay I wrote called The Ghost in the Quantum Touring Machine seven years ago that is related to that, except that I did not want to have consciousness be relative to the observer, right? Because I think that if consciousness means anything, it is something that is experienced by the entity that is conscious, right? Like, I don't need you to tell me that I'm conscious, nor do you need me to tell you that you are, right? But basically, what I explored there is are there aspects of a system like a brain that just could not be predicted even with arbitrarily advanced future technologies? It's because of chaos combined with quantum mechanical uncertainty and things like that. I mean, that actually could be a property of the brain, you know, if true, that would distinguish it in a principled way, at least from any currently existing computer. Not from any possible computer, but yeah, yeah. This is a thought experiment. So if I gave you information that the entire history of your life, basically explain away free will with a lookup table, say that this was all predetermined, that everything you experienced has already been predetermined, wouldn't that take away your consciousness? Wouldn't you, yourself, wouldn't the experience of the world change for you in a way that you can't take back? Well, let me put it this way. If you could do like in a Greek tragedy where, you know, you would just write down a prediction for what I'm going to do and then maybe you put the prediction in a sealed box and maybe, you know, you open it later and you show that you knew everything I was going to do or, you know, of course, the even creepier version would be you tell me the prediction and then I try to falsify it, my very effort to falsify it makes it come true, right? Let's even forget that, you know, that version as convenient as it is for fiction writers, right? Let's just do the version where you put the prediction into a sealed envelope, okay? But if you could reliably predict everything that I was going to do, I'm not sure that that would destroy my sense of being conscious, but I think it really would destroy my sense of having free will, you know, and much, much more than any philosophical conversation could possibly do that, right? And so I think it becomes extremely interesting to ask, you know, could such predictions be done, you know, even in principle, is it consistent with the laws of physics to make such predictions, to get enough data about someone that you could actually generate such predictions without having to kill them in the process to, you know, slice their brain up into little slivers or something. I mean, it's theoretically possible, right? Well, I don't know. I mean, it might be possible, but only at the cost of destroying the person, right? I mean, it depends on how low you have to go in sort of the substrate. Like if there was a nice digital abstraction layer, if you could think of each neuron as a kind of transistor computing a digital function, then you could imagine some nanorobots that would go in and would just scan the state of each transistor, you know, of each neuron and then, you know, make a good enough copy, right? But if it was actually important to get down to the molecular or the atomic level, then, you know, eventually you would be up against quantum effects. You would be up against the unclonability of quantum states. So I think it's a question of how good of a replica, how good does the replica have to be before you're going to count it as actually a copy of you or as being able to predict your actions. That's a totally open question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially once we say that, well, look, maybe there's no way to, you know, to make a deterministic prediction because, you know, we know that there's noise buffeting the brain around, presumably even quantum mechanical uncertainty, you know, affecting the sodium ion channels, for example, whether they open or they close. You know, there's no reason why over a certain time scale that shouldn't be amplified, just like we imagine happens with the weather or with any other, you know, chaotic system. So if that stuff is important, right, then we would say, well, you know, you can't, you know, you're never going to be able to make an accurate enough copy. But now the hard part is, well, what if someone can make a copy that sort of no one else can tell apart from you, right? It says the same kinds of things that you would have said, maybe not exactly the same things because we agree that there's noise, but it says the same kinds of things. And maybe you alone would say, no, I know that that's not me, you know, it's, it doesn't share my, I haven't felt my consciousness leap over to that other thing. I still feel it localized in this version, right? And then why should anyone else believe you? What are your thoughts? I'd be curious, you're a really good person to ask, which is Penrose's, Roger Penrose's work on consciousness, saying that there, you know, there is some, there's some, with axons and so on, there might be some biological places where quantum mechanics can come into play and through that create consciousness somehow. Yeah. Okay. Well, um, uh, of course, you know, I read Penrose's books as a teenager. They had a huge impact on me. Uh, uh, five or six years ago, I had the privilege to actually talk these things over with Penrose, you know, at some length at a conference in Minnesota. And, uh, you know, he is, uh, uh, you know, an amazing, uh, personality. I admire the fact that he was even raising such, uh, audacious questions at all. Uh, but you know, to, to, to answer your question, I think the first thing we need to get clear on is that he is not merely saying that quantum mechanics is relevant to consciousness, right? That would be like, um, you know, that would be tame compared to what he is saying, right? He is saying that, you know, even quantum mechanics is not good enough, right? If, because if, if supposing for example, that the brain were a quantum computer, I know that's still a computer, you know, in fact, a quantum computer can be simulated by an ordinary computer. It might merely need exponentially more time in order to do so, right? So that's simply not good enough for him. Okay. So what he wants is for the brain to be a quantum gravitational computer or, or, uh, uh, he wants the brain to be exploiting as yet unknown laws of quantum gravity. Okay. Which would, which would be uncomputable. That's the key point. Okay. Yes. Yes. That would be literally uncomputable. And I've asked him, you know, to clarify this, but uncomputable, even if you had an Oracle for the halting problem or, you know, and, and, or, you know, as high up as you want to go and the sort of high, the usual hierarchy of uncomputability, he wants to go beyond all of that. Okay. So, so, you know, just, just to be clear, like, you know, if we're keeping count of how many speculations, you know, there's probably like at least five or six of them, right? There's first of all, that there is some quantum gravity theory that would involve this kind of uncomputability, right? Most people who study quantum gravity would not agree with that. They would say that what we've learned, you know, what little we know about quantum gravity from the, this ADS CFT correspondence, for example, has been very much consistent with the broad idea of nature being computable, right? But, but all right, but, but supposing that he's right about that, then, you know, what most physicists would say is that whatever new phenomena there are in quantum gravity, you know, they might be relevant at the singularities of black holes. They might be relevant at the big bang. They are plainly not relevant to something like the brain, you know, that is operating at ordinary temperatures, you know, with ordinary chemistry and, you know, the, the, the physics underlying the brain, they, they would say that we have, you know, the fundamental physics of the brain, they would say that we've pretty much completely known for, for generations now, right? Because, you know, quantum field theory lets us sort of parameterize our ignorance, right? I mean, Sean Carroll has made this case and, you know, in great detail, right? That sort of whatever new effects are coming from quantum gravity, you know, they are sort of screened off by quantum field theory, right? And this is, this brings, you know, brings us to the whole idea of effective theories, right? But the, like we have, you know, the, in like in the standard model of elementary particles, right? We have a quantum field theory that seems totally adequate for all of the terrestrial phenomena, right? The only things that it doesn't, you know, explain are, well, first of all, you know, the details of gravity, if you were to probe it, like at, at, you know, extremes of, you know, curvature or like incredibly small distances, it doesn't explain dark matter. It doesn't explain black hole singularities, right? But these are all very exotic things, very, you know, far removed from our life on earth, right? So for Penrose to be right, he needs, you know, these phenomena to somehow affect the brain. He needs the brain to contain antennae that are sensitive to this as yet unknown physics, right? And then he needs a modification of quantum mechanics, okay? So he needs quantum mechanics to actually be wrong, okay? He needs, what he wants is what he calls an objective reduction mechanism or an objective collapse. So this is the idea that once quantum states get large enough, then they somehow spontaneously collapse, right? That, you know, and this is an idea that lots of people have explored. You know, there's something called the GRW proposal that tries to, you know, say something along those lines, you know, and these are theories that actually make testable predictions, right? Which is a nice feature that they have. But, you know, the very fact that they're testable may mean that in the, you know, in the coming decades, we may well be able to test these theories and show that they're wrong, right? You know, we may be able to test some of Penrose's ideas. If not, not his ideas about consciousness, but at least his ideas about an objective collapse of quantum states, right? And people have actually, like Dick Balmeister, have actually been working to try to do these experiments. They haven't been able to do it yet to test Penrose's proposal, okay? But Penrose would need more than just an objective collapse of quantum states, which would already be the biggest development in physics for a century since quantum mechanics itself, okay? He would need for consciousness to somehow be able to influence the direction of the collapse so that it wouldn't be completely random, but that, you know, your dispositions would somehow influence the quantum state to collapse more likely this way or that way, okay? Finally, Penrose, you know, says that all of this has to be true because of an argument that he makes based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem, okay? Now, like I would say the overwhelming majority of computer scientists and mathematicians who have thought about this, I don't think that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can do what he needs it to do here, right? I don't think that that argument is sound, okay? But that is, you know, that is sort of the tower that you have to ascend to if you're going to go where Penrose goes. And the intuition he uses with the incompleteness theorem is that basically that there's important stuff that's not computable? Is that where he takes it? It's not just that because, I mean, everyone agrees that there are problems that are uncomputable, right? That's a mathematical theorem, right? But what Penrose wants to say is that, you know, for example, there are statements, you know, given any formal system, you know, for doing math, right? There will be true statements of arithmetic that that formal system, you know, if it's adequate for math at all, if it's consistent and so on, will not be able to prove. A famous example being the statement that that system itself is consistent, right? No, you know, good formal system can actually prove its own consistency. That can only be done from a stronger formal system, which then can't prove its own consistency and so on forever, okay? That's Gödel's theorem. But now, why is that relevant to consciousness, right? Well, you know, I mean, the idea that it might have something to do with consciousness as an old one, Gödel himself apparently thought that it did. You know, Lucas thought so, I think, in the 60s. And Penrose is really just, you know, sort of updating what they and others had said. I mean, you know, the idea that Gödel's theorem could have something to do with consciousness was, you know, in 1950, when Alan Turing wrote his article about the Turing test, he already, you know, was writing about that as like an old and well known idea and as a wrong one that he wanted to dispense with. Okay, but the basic problem with this idea is, you know, Penrose wants to say that and all of his predecessors here, you know, want to say that, you know, even though, you know, this given formal system cannot prove its own consistency, we as humans sort of looking at it from the outside can just somehow see its consistency, right? And the, you know, the rejoinder to that, you know, from the very beginning has been, well, can we really? I mean, maybe, you know, maybe he, Penrose can, but, you know, can the rest of us, right? And, you know, I noticed that, you know, I mean, it is perfectly plausible to imagine a computer that could say, you know, it would not be limited to working within a single formal system, right? They could say, I am now going to adopt the hypothesis that my formal system is consistent, right? And I'm now going to see what can be done from that stronger vantage point and so on. And, you know, and I'm going to add new axioms to my system. Totally plausible. There's absolutely, Gödel's theorem has nothing to say about against an AI that could repeatedly add new axioms. All it says is that there is no absolute guarantee that when the AI adds new axioms that it will always be right. Okay. And, you know, and that's, of course, the point that Penrose pounces on, but the reply is obvious. And, you know, it's one that Alan Turing made 70 years ago. Namely, we don't have an absolute guarantee that we're right when we add a new axiom. We never have, and plausibly we never will. So on Alan Turing, you took part in the Lubna Prize? Not really. No, I didn't. I mean, there was this kind of ridiculous claim that was made some almost a decade ago about a chat bot called Eugene Goostman. I guess you didn't participate as a judge in the Lubna Prize. I didn't. But you participated as a judge in that, I guess it was an exhibition event or something like that, or with Eugene... Eugene Goostman, that was just me writing a blog post because some journalist called me to ask about it. Did you ever chat with him? I thought that... I did chat with Eugene Goostman. I mean, it was available on the web. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. So yeah. So all that happened was that a bunch of journalists started writing breathless articles about a first chat bot that passes the Turing test. And it was this thing called Eugene Goostman that was supposed to simulate a 13 year old boy. And apparently someone had done some test where people were less than perfect, let's say, distinguishing it from a human. And they said, well, if you look at Turing's paper and you look at the percentages that he talked about, then it seemed like we're past that threshold. And I had a different way to look at it instead of the legalistic way, like let's just try the actual thing out and let's see what it can do with questions like, is Mount Everest bigger than a shoebox? Or just like the most obvious questions. And the answer is, well, it just kind of parries you because it doesn't know what you're talking about. So just to clarify exactly in which way they're obvious. They're obvious in the sense that you convert the sentences into the meaning of the objects they represent and then do some basic obvious common sense reasoning with the objects that the sentences represent. Right. It was not able to answer or even intelligently respond to basic common sense questions. But let me say something stronger than that. There was a famous chatbot in the 60s called Eliza that managed to actually fool a lot of people. Or people would pour their hearts out into this Eliza because it simulated a therapist. And most of what it would do is it would just throw back at you whatever you said. And this turned out to be incredibly effective. Maybe therapists know this. This is one of their tricks. But it really had some people convinced. But this thing was just like, I think it was literally just a few hundred lines of Lisp code. It was not only was it not intelligent, it wasn't especially sophisticated. It was like a simple little hobbyist program. And Eugene Goostman, from what I could see, was not a significant advance compared to Eliza. And that was really the point I was making. In some sense, you didn't need a computer science professor to sort of say this. Anyone who was looking at it and who just had an ounce of sense could have said the same thing. But because these journalists were calling me, the first thing I said was, well, I'm a quantum computing person. I'm not an AI person. You shouldn't ask me. Then they said, look, you can go here and you can try it out. I said, all right. All right. So I'll try it out. This whole discussion, it got a whole lot more interesting in just the last few months. Yeah. I'd love to hear your thoughts about GPT3. In the last few months, the world has now seen a chat engine or a text engine, I should say, called GPT3. I think it still does not pass a Turing test. There are no real claims that it passes the Turing test. This comes out of the group at OpenAI, and they've been relatively careful in what they've claimed about the system. But I think as clearly as Eugene Goostman was not in advance over Eliza, it is equally clear that this is a major advance over Eliza or really over anything that the world has seen before. This is a text engine that can come up with kind of on topic, reasonable sounding completions to just about anything that you ask. You can ask it to write a poem about topic X in the style of poet Y and it will have a go at that. And it will do not a great job, not an amazing job, but a passable job. Definitely as good as, in many cases, I would say better than I would have done. You can ask it to write an essay, like a student essay, about pretty much any topic and it will get something that I am pretty sure would get at least a B minus in the most high school or even college classes. And in some sense, the way that it did this, the way that it achieves this, Scott Alexander of the much mourned blog, Slate Star Codex, had a wonderful way of putting it. He said that they basically just ground up the entire internet into a slurry. And to tell you the truth, I had wondered for a while why nobody had tried that. Why not write a chat bot by just doing deep learning over a corpus consisting of the entire web? And so now they finally have done that. And the results are very impressive. It's not clear that people can argue about whether this is truly a step toward general AI or not, but this is an amazing capability that we didn't have a few years ago. A few years ago, if you had told me that we would have it now, that would have surprised me. And I think that anyone who denies that is just not engaging with what's there. So their model, it takes a large part of the internet and compresses it in a small number of parameters relative to the size of the internet and is able to, without fine tuning, do a basic kind of a querying mechanism, just like you described where you specify a kind of poet and then you want to write a poem. And it somehow is able to do basically a lookup on the internet of relevant things. How else do you explain it? Well, okay. The training involved massive amounts of data from the internet and actually took lots and lots of computer power, lots of electricity. There are some very prosaic reasons why this wasn't done earlier. But it costs some tens of millions of dollars, I think. Less, but approximately like a few million dollars. Oh, okay. Oh, really? Okay. It's more like four or five. Oh, all right. All right. Thank you. I mean, as they scale it up, it will... It'll cost, but then the hope is cost comes down and all that kind of stuff. But basically, it is a neural net or what's now called a deep net, but they're basically the same thing. So it's a form of algorithm that people have known about for decades. But it is constantly trying to solve the problem, predict the next word. So it's just trying to predict what comes next. It's not trying to decide what it should say, what ought to be true. It's trying to predict what someone who had said all of the words up to the preceding one would say next. Although to push back on that, that's how it's trained. That's right. No, of course. It's arguable that our very cognition could be a mechanism as that simple. Oh, of course. Of course. I never said that it wasn't. Right. But... Yeah. I mean, and sometimes that is... If there is a deep philosophical question that's raised by GPT3, then that is it, right? Are we doing anything other than this predictive processing, just trying to constantly trying to fill in a blank of what would come next after what we just said up to this point? Is that what I'm doing right now? It's impossible. So the intuition that a lot of people have, well, look, this thing is not going to be able to reason, the Mountain Everest question. Do you think it's possible that GPT5, 6, and 7 would be able to, with this exact same process, begin to do something that looks like... Is indistinguishable to us humans from reasoning? I mean, the truth is that we don't really know what the limits are, right? Right. Exactly. Because what we've seen so far is that GPT3 was basically the same thing as GPT2, but just with a much larger network, more training time, bigger training corpus, right? And it was very noticeably better than its immediate predecessor. So we don't know where you hit the ceiling here, right? I mean, that's the amazing part and maybe also the scary part, right? Now, my guess would be that at some point, there has to be diminishing returns. It can't be that simple, can it? Right? But I wish that I had more to base that guess on. Right. Yeah. I mean, some people say that there will be a limitation on the... We're going to hit a limit on the amount of data that's on the internet. Yes. Yeah. So sure. So there's certainly that limit. I mean, there's also... If you are looking for questions that will stump GPT3, you can come up with some without... Even getting it to learn how to balance parentheses, right? It doesn't do such a great job, right? And its failures are ironic, right? Like basic arithmetic, right? And you think, isn't that what computers are supposed to be best at? Isn't that where computers already had us beat a century ago? Right? And yet that's where GPT3 struggles, right? But it's amazing that it's almost like a young child in that way, right? But somehow, because it is just trying to predict what comes next, it doesn't know when it should stop doing that and start doing something very different, like some more exact logical reasoning, right? And so one is naturally led to guess that our brain sort of has some element of predictive processing, but that it's coupled to other mechanisms, right? That it's coupled to, first of all, visual reasoning, which GPT3 also doesn't have any of, right? Although there's some demonstration that there's a lot of promise there using... Oh yeah, it can complete images. That's right. And using exact same kind of transformer mechanisms to like watch videos on YouTube. And so the same self supervised mechanism to be able to look, it'd be fascinating to think what kind of completions you could do. Oh yeah, no, absolutely. Although like if we ask it to like, you know, a word problem that involve reasoning about the locations of things in space, I don't think it does such a great job on those, right? To take an example. And so the guess would be, well, you know, humans have a lot of predictive processing, a lot of just filling in the blanks, but we also have these other mechanisms that we can couple to, or that we can sort of call as subroutines when we need to. And that maybe, you know, to go further, that one would want to integrate other forms of reasoning. Let me go on another topic that is amazing, which is complexity. And then start with the most absurdly romantic question of what's the most beautiful idea in computer science or theoretical computer science to you? Like what just early on in your life, or in general, have captivated you and just grabbed you? I think I'm going to have to go with the idea of universality. You know, if you're really asking for the most beautiful. I mean, so universality is the idea that, you know, you put together a few simple operations, like in the case of Boolean logic, that might be the AND gate, the OR gate, the NOT gate, right? And then your first guess is, okay, this is a good start, but obviously, as I want to do more complicated things, I'm going to need more complicated building blocks to express that, right? And that was actually my guess when I first learned what programming was. I mean, when I was, you know, an adolescent and someone showed me Apple basic, and then, you know, GW basic, if anyone listening remembers that. Okay. But, you know, I thought, okay, well, now, you know, I mean, I thought I felt like this is a revelation. You know, it's like finding out where babies come from. It's like that level of, you know, why didn't anyone tell me this before, right? But I thought, okay, this is just the beginning. Now I know how to write a basic program, but, you know, really write an interesting program, like, you know, a video game, which had always been my dream as a kid to, you know, create my own Nintendo games, right? You know, but, you know, obviously I'm going to need to learn some way more complicated form of programming than that. Okay. But, you know, eventually I learned this incredible idea of universality. And that says that, no, you throw in a few rules and then you already have enough to express everything. Okay. So for example, the AND, the OR and the NOT gate can all, or in fact, even just the AND and the NOT gate, or even just the NAND gate, for example, is already enough to express any Boolean function on any number of bits. You just have to string together enough of them. You can build a universe with NAND gates. You can build the universe out of NAND gates. Yeah. You know, the simple instructions of BASIC are already enough, at least in principle, you know, if we ignore details like how much memory can be accessed and stuff like that, that is enough to express what could be expressed by any programming language whatsoever. And the way to prove that is very simple. We simply need to show that in BASIC or whatever, we could write an interpreter or a compiler for whatever other programming language we care about, like C or Java or whatever. And as soon as we had done that, then ipso facto, anything that's expressible in C or Java is also expressible in BASIC. Okay. And so this idea of universality, you know, goes back at least to Alan Turing in the 1930s when, you know, he wrote down this incredibly simple pared down model of a computer, the Turing machine, right, which, you know, he pared down the instruction set to just read a symbol, you know, write a symbol, move to the left, move to the right, halt, change your internal state, right? That's it. Okay. And anybody proved that, you know, this could simulate all kinds of other things, you know, and so in fact, today we would say, well, we would call it a Turing universal model of computation that is, you know, just as it has just the same expressive power that BASIC or Java or C++ or any of those other languages have because anything in those other languages could be compiled down to Turing machine. Now, Turing also proved a different related thing, which is that there is a single Turing machine that can simulate any other Turing machine if you just describe that other machine on its tape, right? And likewise, there is a single Turing machine that will run any C program, you know, if you just put it on its tape. That's a second meaning of universality. First of all, he couldn't visualize it and that was in the 30s. Yeah, the 30s. That's right. That's before computers really, I mean, I don't know how, I wonder what that felt like, you know, learning that there's no Santa Claus or something. Because I don't know if that's empowering or paralyzing because it doesn't give you any, it's like you can't write a software engineering book and make that the first chapter and say we're done. Well, I mean, right. I mean, in one sense, it was this enormous flattening of the universe. Yes. I had imagined that there was going to be some infinite hierarchy of more and more powerful programming languages, you know, and then I kicked myself for having such a stupid idea. But apparently, Gödel had had the same conjecture in the 30s. Oh, good. You're in good company. Yeah. And then Gödel read Turing's paper and he kicked himself and he said, yeah, I was completely wrong about that. But I had thought that maybe where I can contribute will be to invent a new more powerful programming language that lets you express things that could never be expressed in BASIC. And how would you do that? Obviously, you couldn't do it itself in BASIC. But there is this incredible flattening that happens once you learn what is universality. But then it's also an opportunity because it means once you know these rules, then the sky is the limit, right? Then you have kind of the same weapons at your disposal that the world's greatest programmer has. It's now all just a question of how you wield them. Right. Exactly. So every problem is solvable, but some problems are harder than others. Well, yeah, there's the question of how much time, you know, of how hard is it to write a program? And then there's also the questions of what resources does the program need? You know, how much time, how much memory? Those are much more complicated questions. Of course, ones that we're still struggling with today. Exactly. So you've, I don't know if you created Complexity Zoo or... I did create the Complexity Zoo. What is it? What's complexity? Oh, all right, all right, all right. Complexity theory is the study of sort of the inherent resources needed to solve computational problems, okay? So it's easiest to give an example. Like, let's say we want to add two numbers, right? If I want to add them, you know, if the numbers are twice as long, then it only, it will take me twice as long to add them, but only twice as long, right? It's no worse than that. Or a computer. For a computer or for a person. We're using pencil and paper, for that matter. If you have a good algorithm. Yeah, that's right. I mean, even if you just use the elementary school algorithm of just carrying, you know, then it takes time that is linear in the length of the numbers, right? Now, multiplication, if you use the elementary school algorithm, is harder because you have to multiply each digit of the first number by each digit of the second one. And then deal with all the carries. So that's what we call a quadratic time algorithm, right? If the numbers become twice as long, now you need four times as much time, okay? So now, as it turns out, people discovered much faster ways to multiply numbers using computers. And today we know how to multiply two numbers that are n digits long using a number of steps that's nearly linear in n. These are questions you can ask. But now, let's think about a different thing that people, you know, they've encountered in elementary school, factoring a number. Okay? Take a number and find its prime factors, right? And here, you know, if I give you a number with ten digits, I ask you for its prime factors. Well, maybe it's even, so you know that two is a factor. You know, maybe it ends in zero, so you know that ten is a factor, right? But, you know, other than a few obvious things like that, you know, if the prime factors are all very large, then it's not clear how you even get started, right? You know, it seems like you have to do an exhaustive search among an enormous number of factors. Now, and as many people might know, for better or worse, the security, you know, of most of the encryption that we currently use to protect the internet is based on the belief, and this is not a theorem, it's a belief, that factoring is an inherently hard problem for our computers. We do know algorithms that are better than just trial division, than just trying all the possible divisors, but they are still basically exponential. And exponential is hard. Yeah, exactly. So the fastest algorithms that anyone has discovered, at least publicly discovered, you know, I'm assuming that the NSA doesn't know something better, okay? But they take time that basically grows exponentially with the cube root of the size of the number that you're factoring, right? So that cube root, that's the part that takes all the cleverness, okay? But there's still an exponential. There's still an exponentiality there. But what that means is that, like, when people use a thousand bit keys for their cryptography, that can probably be broken using the resources of the NSA or the world's other intelligence agencies. You know, people have done analyses that say, you know, with a few hundred million dollars of computer power, they could totally do this. And if you look at the documents that Snowden released, you know, it looks a lot like they are doing that or something like that. It would kind of be surprising if they weren't, okay? But, you know, if that's true, then in some ways that's reassuring. Because if that's the best that they can do, then that would say that they can't break 2,000 bit numbers, right? Then 2,000 bit numbers would be beyond what even they could do. They haven't found an efficient algorithm. That's where all the worries and the concerns of quantum computing came in, that there could be some kind of shortcut around that. Right. So complexity theory is a huge part of, let's say, the theoretical core of computer science. You know, it started in the 60s and 70s as, you know, sort of an autonomous field. So it was, you know, already, you know, I mean, you know, it was well developed even by the time that I was born, okay? But in 2002, I made a website called the Complexity Zoo, to answer your question, where I just tried to catalog the different complexity classes, which are classes of problems that are solvable with different kinds of resources, okay? So these are kind of, you know, you could think of complexity classes as like being almost to theoretical computer science, like what the elements are to chemistry, right? They're sort of, you know, there are our most basic objects in a certain way. I feel like the elements have a characteristic to them where you can't just add an infinite number. Well, you could, but beyond a certain point, they become unstable, right? Right. So it's like, you know, in theory, you can have atoms with, you know, and look, look, I mean, I mean, a neutron star, you know, is a nucleus with, you know, uncalled billions of neutrons in it, of hadrons in it, okay? But, you know, for sort of normal atoms, right, probably you can't get much above a hundred atomic weight, 150 or so, or sorry, sorry, I mean, beyond 150 or so protons without it, you know, very quickly fissioning. With complexity classes, well, yeah, you can have an infinity of complexity classes, but, you know, maybe there's only a finite number of them that are particularly interesting, right? Just like with anything else, you know, you care about some more than about others. So what kind of interesting classes are there? I mean, you could have just, maybe say, what are the, if you take any kind of computer science class, what are the classes you learn? Good. Let me tell you sort of the biggest ones, the ones that you would learn first. So, you know, first of all, there is P, that's what it's called, okay? It stands for polynomial time. And this is just the class of all of the problems that you could solve with a conventional computer, like your iPhone or your laptop, you know, by a completely deterministic algorithm, right? Using a number of steps that grows only like the size of the input raised to some fixed power, okay? So, if your algorithm is linear time, like, you know, for adding numbers, okay, that problem is in P. If you have an algorithm that's quadratic time, like the elementary school algorithm for multiplying two numbers, that's also in P, even if it was the size of the input to the 10th power or to the 50th power, well, that wouldn't be very good in practice. But, you know, formally, we would still count that, that would still be in P, okay? But if your algorithm takes exponential time, meaning like if every time I add one more data point to your input, if the time needed by the algorithm doubles, if you need time like two to the power of the amount of input data, then that we call an exponential time algorithm, okay? And that is not polynomial, okay? So, P is all of the problems that have some polynomial time algorithm, okay? So, that includes most of what we do with our computers on a day to day basis, you know, all the, you know, sorting, basic arithmetic, you know, whatever is going on in your email reader or in Angry Birds, okay? It's all in P. Then the next super important class is called NP. That stands for non deterministic polynomial, okay? It does not stand for not polynomial, which is a common confusion. But NP was basically all of the problems where if there is a solution, then it is easy to check the solution if someone shows it to you, okay? So, actually a perfect example of a problem in NP is factoring, the one I told you about before. Like if I gave you a number with thousands of digits and I told you that, you know, I asked you, does this have at least three non trivial divisors, right? That might be a super hard problem to solve, right? It might take you millions of years using any algorithm that's known, at least running on our existing computers, okay? But if I simply showed you the divisors, I said, here are three divisors of this number, then it would be very easy for you to ask your computer to just check each one and see if it works. Just divide it in, see if there's any remainder, right? And if they all go in, then you've checked. Well, I guess there were, right? So any problem where, you know, wherever there's a solution, there is a short witness that can be easily, like a polynomial size witness that can be checked in polynomial time, that we call an NP problem, okay? And yeah, so every problem that's in P is also in NP, right? Because, you know, you could always just ignore the witness and just, you know, if a problem is in P, you can just solve it yourself, okay? But now, in some sense, the central, you know, mystery of theoretical computer science is every NP problem in P. So if you can easily check the answer to a computational problem, does that mean that you can also easily find the answer? Even though there's all these problems that appear to be very difficult to find the answer, it's still an open question whether a good answer exists. Because no one has proven that there's no way to do it. It's arguably the most, I don't know, the most famous, the most maybe interesting, maybe you disagree with that, problem in theoretical computer science. So what's your The most famous, for sure. P equals NP. If you were to bet all your money, where do you put your money? That's an easy one. P is not equal to NP. I like to say that if we were physicists, we would have just declared that to be a law of nature, you know, just like thermodynamics. That's hilarious. Given ourselves Nobel Prizes for its discovery. Yeah, you know, and look, if later it turned out that we were wrong, we just give ourselves more Nobel Prizes. So harsh, but so true. I mean, no, I mean, I mean, it's really just because we are mathematicians or descended from mathematicians, you know, we have to call things conjectures that other people would just call empirical facts or discoveries, right? But one shouldn't read more into that difference in language, you know, about the underlying truth. So, okay, so you're a good investor and good spender of money. So then let me ask another way. Is it possible at all? And what would that look like if P indeed equals NP? Well, I do think that it's possible. I mean, in fact, you know, when people really pressed me on my blog for what odds would I put, I put, you know, two or three percent odds. Wow, that's pretty good. That P equals NP. Yeah. Well, because, you know, when P, I mean, you really have to think about, like, if there were 50, you know, mysteries like P versus NP, and if I made a guess about every single one of them, would I expect to be right 50 times? Right? And the truthful answer is no. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, and that's what you really mean in saying that, you know, you have, you know, better than 98% odds for something. Okay. But so, yeah, you know, I mean, there could certainly be surprises. And look, if P equals NP, well, then there would be the further question of, you know, is the algorithm actually efficient in practice? Right? I mean, Don Knuth, who I know that you've interviewed as well, right, he likes to conjecture that P equals NP, but that the algorithm is so inefficient that it doesn't matter anyway. Right? No, I don't know. I've listened to him say that. I don't know whether he says that just because he has an actual reason for thinking it's true or just because it sounds cool. Yeah. Okay. But, you know, that's a logical possibility, right, that the algorithm could be n to the 10,000 time, or it could even just be n squared time, but with a leading constant of, it could be a Google times n squared or something like that. And in that case, the fact that P equals NP, well, it would ravage the whole theory of complexity. We would have to rebuild from the ground up. But in practical terms, it might mean very little, right, if the algorithm was too inefficient to run. If the algorithm could actually be run in practice, like if it had small enough constants, or if you could improve it to where it had small enough constants that was efficient in practice, then that would change the world. Okay? You think it would have, like, what kind of impact would it have? Well, okay, I mean, here's an example. I mean, you could, well, okay, just for starters, you could break basically all of the encryption that people use to protect the internet. That's just for starters. You could break Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency, or, you know, mine as much Bitcoin as you wanted, right? You know, become a super duper billionaire, right? And then plot your next move. Right. That's just for starters. That's a good point. Now, your next move might be something like, you know, you now have, like, a theoretically optimal way to train any neural network, to find parameters for any neural network, right? So you could now say, like, is there any small neural network that generates the entire content of Wikipedia, right? If, you know, and now the question is not, can you find it? The question has been reduced to, does that exist or not? If it does exist, then the answer would be, yes, you can find it, okay? If you had this algorithm in your hands, okay? You could ask your computer, you know, I mean, P versus NP is one of these seven problems that carries this million dollar prize from the Clay Foundation. You know, if you solve it, you know, and others are the Riemann hypothesis, the Poincare conjecture, which was solved, although the solver turned down the prize, right, and four others. But what I like to say, the way that we can see that P versus NP is the biggest of all of these questions is that if you had this fast algorithm, then you could solve all seven of them, okay? You just ask your computer, you know, is there a short proof of the Riemann hypothesis, right? You know, that a machine could, in a language where a machine could verify it, and provided that such a proof exists, then your computer finds it in a short amount of time without having to do a brute force search, okay? So, I mean, those are the stakes of what we're talking about. But I hope that also helps to give your listeners some intuition of why I and most of my colleagues would put our money on P not equaling NP. Is it possible, I apologize this is a really dumb question, but is it possible to, that a proof will come out that P equals NP, but an algorithm that makes P equals NP is impossible to find? Is that like crazy? Okay, well, if P equals NP, it would mean that there is such an algorithm. That it exists, yeah. But, you know, it would mean that it exists. Now, you know, in practice, normally the way that we would prove anything like that would be by finding the algorithm. But there is such a thing as a nonconstructive proof that an algorithm exists. You know, this has really only reared its head, I think, a few times in the history of our field, right? But, you know, it is theoretically possible that such a thing could happen. But, you know, there are, even here, there are some amusing observations that one could make. So there is this famous observation of Leonid Levin, who was, you know, one of the original discoverers of NP completeness, right? And he said, we'll consider the following algorithm that I guarantee will solve the NP problems efficiently, just as provided that P equals NP, okay? Here is what it does. It just runs, you know, it enumerates every possible algorithm in a gigantic infinite list, right? From like in like alphabetical order, right? You know, and many of them maybe won't even compile, so we just ignore those, okay? But now, we just, you know, run the first algorithm, then we run the second algorithm, we run the first one a little bit more, then we run the first three algorithms for a while, we run the first four for a while. This is called dovetailing, by the way. This is a known trick in theoretical computer science, okay? But we do it in such a way that, you know, whatever is the algorithm out there in our list that solves NP complete, you know, the NP problems efficiently, will eventually hit that one, right? And now, the key is that whenever we hit that one, you know, by assumption, it has to solve the problem, it has to find the solution, and once it claims to find a solution, then we can check that ourselves, right? Because these are NP problems, then we can check it. Now, this is utterly impractical, right? You know, you'd have to do this enormous exhaustive search among all the algorithms, but from a certain theoretical standpoint, that is merely a constant prefactor, right? That's merely a multiplier of your running time. So, there are tricks like that one can do to say that, in some sense, the algorithm would have to be constructive. But, you know, in the human sense, you know, it is possible that to, you know, it's conceivable that one could prove such a thing via a nonconstructive method. Is that likely? I don't think so. Not personally. So, that's P and NP, but the complexity zoo is full of wonderful creatures. Well, it's got about 500 of them. 500. So, how do you get, yeah, how do you get more? I mean, just for starters, there is everything that we could do with a conventional computer with a polynomial amount of memory, okay, but possibly an exponential amount of time, because we get to reuse the same memory over and over again. Okay, that is called P space, okay? And that's actually, we think, an even larger class than NP. Okay, well, P is contained in NP, which is contained in P space. And we think that those containments are strict. And the constraint there is on the memory. The memory has to grow polynomially with the size of the process. That's right. That's right. But in P space, we now have interesting things that were not in NP, like as a famous example, you know, from a given position in chess, you know, does white or black have the win? Let's say, assuming provided that the game lasts only for a reasonable number of moves, okay? Or likewise, for go, okay? And, you know, even for the generalizations of these games to arbitrary size boards, because with an eight by eight board, you could say that's just a constant size problem. You just, you know, in principle, you just solve it in O of one time, right? But so we really mean the generalizations of, you know, games to arbitrary size boards here. Or another thing in P space would be, like, I give you some really hard constraint satisfaction problem, like, you know, a traveling salesperson or, you know, packing boxes into the trunk of your car or something like that. And I ask, not just is there a solution, which would be an NP problem, but I ask how many solutions are there, okay? That, you know, count the number of valid solutions. That actually gives, those problems lie in a complexity class called sharp P, or like, it looks like hashtag, like hashtag P, okay, which sits between NP and P space. There's all the problems that you can do in exponential time, okay? That's called exp. So, and by the way, it was proven in the 60s that exp is larger than P, okay? So we know that much. We know that there are problems that are solvable in exponential time that are not solvable in polynomial time, okay? In fact, we even know, we know that there are problems that are solvable in n cubed time that are not solvable in n squared time. And that, those don't help us with a controversy between P and NP at all. Unfortunately, it seems not, or certainly not yet, right? The techniques that we use to establish those things, they're very, very related to how Turing proved the unsolvability of the halting problem, but they seem to break down when we're comparing two different resources, like time versus space, or like, you know, P versus NP, okay? But, you know, I mean, there's what you can do with a randomized algorithm, right? That can be done with a random algorithm, right? That can sometimes, you know, has some probability of making a mistake. That's called BPP, bounded error probabilistic polynomial time. And then, of course, there's one that's very close to my own heart, what you can efficiently do in polynomial time using a quantum computer, okay? And that's called BQP, right? And so, you know, what's understood about it? Okay, so P is contained in BPP, which is contained in BQP, which is contained in P space, okay? So anything you can, in fact, in something very similar to sharp P. BQP is basically, you know, well, it's contained in like P with the magic power to solve sharp P problems, okay? Why is BQP contained in P space? Oh, that's an excellent question. So there is, well, I mean, one has to prove that, okay? But the proof, you could think of it as using Richard Feynman's picture of quantum mechanics, which is that you can always, you know, we haven't really talked about quantum mechanics in this conversation. We did in our previous one. Yeah, we did last time. But yeah, we did last time, okay? But basically, you could always think of a quantum computation as like a branching tree of possibilities where each possible path that you could take through, you know, the space has a complex number attached to it called an amplitude, okay? And now the rule is, you know, when you make a measurement at the end, well, you see a random answer, okay? But quantum mechanics is all about calculating the probability that you're going to see one potential answer versus another one, right? And the rule for calculating the probability that you'll see some answer is that you have to add up the amplitudes for all of the paths that could have led to that answer. And then, you know, that's a complex number, so that, you know, how could that be a probability? Then you take the squared absolute value of the result. That gives you a number between zero and one, okay? So yeah, I just summarized quantum mechanics in like 30 seconds, okay? But now, you know, what this already tells us is that anything I can do with a quantum computer, I could simulate with a classical computer if I only have exponentially more time, okay? And why is that? Because if I have exponential time, I could just write down this entire branching tree and just explicitly calculate each of these amplitudes, right? You know, that will be very inefficient, but it will work, right? It's enough to show that quantum computers could not solve the halting problem or, you know, they could never do anything that is literally uncomputable in Turing's sense, okay? But now, as I said, there's even a stronger result which says that BQP is contained in PSPACE. The way that we prove that is that we say, if all I want is to calculate the probability of some particular output happening, you know, which is all I need to simulate a quantum computer, really, then I don't need to write down the entire quantum state, which is an exponentially large object. All I need to do is just calculate what is the amplitude for that final state. And to do that, I just have to sum up all the amplitudes that lead to that state. Okay, so that's an exponentially large sum, but I can calculate it just reusing the same memory over and over for each term in the sum. And hence the p, in the PSPACE? Hence the PSPACE. Yeah. So what, out of that whole complexity zoo, and it could be BQP, what do you find is the most, the class that captured your heart the most, the most beautiful class that's just, yeah. I used, as my email address, bqpqpoly at gmail.com. Yes, because BQP slash Qpoly, well, you know, amazingly no one had taken it. Amazing, amazing. But, you know, this is a class that I was involved in sort of defining, proving the first theorems about in 2003 or so. So it was kind of close to my heart. But this is like, if we extended BQP, which is the class of everything we can do efficiently with a quantum computer, to allow quantum advice, which means imagine that you had some special initial state, okay, that could somehow help you do computation. And maybe such a state would be exponentially hard to prepare, okay, but maybe somehow these states were formed in the Big Bang or something, and they've just been sitting around ever since, right? If you found one, and if this state could be like ultra power, there are no limits on how powerful it could be, except that this state doesn't know in advance which input you've got, right? It only knows the size of your input. You know, and that's BQP slash Qpoly. So that's one that I just personally happen to love, okay? But, you know, if you're asking like what's the, you know, there's a class that I think is way more beautiful or fundamental than a lot of people even within this field realize that it is. That class is called SZK, or Statistical Zero Knowledge. And, you know, there's a very, very easy way to define this class, which is to say, suppose that I have two algorithms that each sample from probability distributions, right? So each one just outputs random samples according to, you know, possibly different distributions. And now the question I ask is, you know, let's say distributions over strings of n bits, you know, so over an exponentially large space. Now I ask, are these two distributions close or far as close or far as probability distributions? Okay. Any problem that can be reduced to that, you know, that can be put into that form is an SZK problem. And the way that this class was originally discovered was completely different from that and was kind of more complicated. It was discovered as the class of all of the problems that have a certain kind of what's called zero knowledge proof. Zero knowledge proofs are one of the central ideas in cryptography. You know, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio McCauley won the Turing Award for, you know, inventing them. And they're at the core of even some cryptocurrencies that, you know, people use nowadays. But zero knowledge proofs are ways of proving to someone that something is true, like, you know, that there is a solution to this, you know, optimization problem or that these two graphs are isomorphic to each other or something, but without revealing why it's true, without revealing anything about why it's true. Okay. SZK is all of the problems for which there is such a proof that doesn't rely on any cryptography. Okay. And if you wonder, like, how could such a thing possibly exist, right? Well, like, imagine that I had two graphs and I wanted to convince you that these two graphs are not isomorphic, meaning, you know, I cannot permute one of them so that it's the same as the other one, right? You know, that might be a very hard statement to prove, right? I might need, you know, you might have to do a very exhaustive enumeration of, you know, all the different permutations before you were convinced that it was true. But what if there were some all knowing wizard that said to you, look, I'll tell you what, just pick one of the graphs randomly, then randomly permute it, then send it to me and I will tell you which graph you started with. Okay. And I will do that every single time. Right. And let's say that that wizard did that a hundred times and it was right every time. Yeah. Right. Now, if the graphs were isomorphic, then, you know, it would have been flipping a coin each time, right? It would have had only a one and two to the 100 power chance of, you know, of guessing right each time. But, you know, so, so if it's right every time, then now you're statistically convinced that these graphs are not isomorphic, even though you've learned nothing new about why they aren't. So fascinating. So yeah. So, so SDK is all of the problems that have protocols like that one, but it has this beautiful other characterization. It's shown up again and again in my, in my own work and, you know, a lot of people's work. And I think that it really is one of the most fundamental classes. It's just that people didn't realize that when it was first discovered. So we're living in the middle of a pandemic currently. Yeah. How has your life been changed or no better to ask, like, how has your perspective of the world change with this world changing event of a pandemic overtaking the entire world? Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, all of our lives have changed, you know, like, I guess, as with no other event since I was born, you know, you would have to go back to world war II for something, I think of this magnitude, you know, on, you know, the way that we live our lives as for how it has changed my worldview. I think that the, the failure of institutions, you know, like, like, like the CDC, like, you know, other institutions that we sort of thought were, were trustworthy, like a lot of the media was staggering, was, was absolutely breathtaking. It is something that I would not have predicted. Right. I think I, I wrote on my blog that, you know, the, you know, it's, it's, it's fascinating to like rewatch the movie Contagion from a decade ago, right. That correctly foresaw so many aspects of, you know, what was going on, you know, an airborne, you know, virus originates in China, spreads to, you know, much of the world, you know, shuts everything down until a vaccine can be developed. You know, everyone has to stay at home, you know, you know, it gets, you know, an enormous number of things, right. Okay. But the one thing that they could not imagine, you know, is that like in this movie, everyone from the government is like hyper competent, hyper, you know, dedicated to the public good, right. And you know, yeah, they're the, they're the best of the best, you know, they could, you know, and, and there are these conspiracy theorists, right. Who think, you know, you know, this is all fake news. There's no, there's not really a pandemic. And those are some random people on the internet who the hyper competent government people have to, you know, oppose, right. They, you know, in, in trying to envision the worst thing that could happen, like, you know, the, the, there was a failure of imagination. The movie makers did not imagine that the conspiracy theorists and the, you know, and the incompetence and the nutcases would have captured our institutions and be the ones actually running things. So you had a certain, I love competence in all walks of life. I love, I get so much energy. I'm so excited by people who do amazing job. And I like you, or maybe you can clarify, but I had maybe not intuition, but I hope that government at its best could be ultra competent. What, first of all, two questions, like how do you explain the lack of confidence and the other, maybe on the positive side, how can we build a more competent government? Well, there's an election in two months. I mean, you have a faith that the election, I, you know, it's not going to fix everything, but you know, it's like, I feel like there is a ship that is sinking and you could at least stop the sinking. But, you know, I think that there are much, much deeper problems. I mean, I think that, you know, it is plausible to me that, you know, a lot of the failures, you know, with the CDC, with some of the other health agencies, even, you know, predate Trump, you know, predate the, you know, right wing populism that has sort of taken over much of the world now. And, you know, I think that, you know, it is, you know, it is very, I'm actually, you know, I've actually been strongly in favor of, you know, rushing vaccines of, you know, I thought that we could have done, you know, human challenge trials, you know, which were not done, right? We could have, you know, like had, you know, volunteers, you know, to actually, you know, be, you know, get vaccines, get, you know, exposed to COVID. So innovative ways of accelerating what we've done previously over a long time. I thought that, you know, each month that a vaccine is closer is like trillions of dollars. Are you surprised? And of course, lives, you know, at least, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you surprised that it's taking this long? We still don't have a plan. There's still not a feeling like anyone is actually doing anything in terms of alleviating, like any kind of plan. So there's a bunch of stuff, there's vaccine, but you could also do a testing infrastructure where everybody's tested nonstop with contact tracing, all that kind of. Well, I mean, I'm as surprised as almost everyone else. I mean, this is a historic failure. It is one of the biggest failures in the 240 year history of the United States, right? And we should be, you know, crystal clear about that. And, you know, one thing that I think has been missing, you know, even from the more competent side is like, you know, is sort of the World War II mentality, right? The, you know, the mentality of, you know, let's just, you know, you know, if we can, by breaking a whole bunch of rules, you know, get a vaccine and, you know, and even half the amount of time as we thought, then let's just do that because, you know, like we have to weigh all of the moral qualms that we have about doing that against the moral qualms of not doing. And one key little aspect to that that's deeply important to me, and we'll go into that topic next, is the World War II mentality wasn't just about, you know, breaking all the rules to get the job done. There was a togetherness to it. So I would, if I were president right now, it seems quite elementary to unite the country because we're facing a crisis. It's easy to make the virus the enemy. And it's very surprising to me that the division has increased as opposed to decrease. That's heartbreaking. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, it's been said by others that this is the first time in the country's history that we have a president who does not even pretend to, you know, want to unite the country. I mean, Lincoln, who fought a civil war, said he wanted to unite the country. And I do worry enormously about what happens if the results of this election are contested. And will there be violence as a result of that? And will we have a clear path of succession? And, you know, look, I mean, you know, this is all we're going to find out the answers to this in two months. And if none of that happens, maybe I'll look foolish. But I am willing to go on the record and say, I am terrified about that. Yeah, I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. So if I can, this is like one little voice just to put out there that I think November will be a really critical month for people to breathe and put love out there. Do not, you know, anger in those in that context, no matter who wins, no matter what is said, will destroy our country, may destroy our country, may destroy the world because of the power of the country. So it's really important to be patient, loving, empathetic. Like one of the things that troubles me is that even people on the left are unable to have a love and respect for people who voted for Trump. They can't imagine that there's good people that could vote for the opposite side. Oh, I know there are because I know some of them, right? I mean, you know, it's still, you know, maybe it baffles me, but, you know, I know such people. Let me ask you this. It's also heartbreaking to me on the topic of cancel culture. So in the machine learning community, I've seen it a little bit that there's aggressive attacking of people who are trying to have a nuanced conversation about things. And it's troubling because it feels like nuanced conversation is the only way to talk about difficult topics. And when there's a thought police and speech police on any nuanced conversation that everybody has to like in a animal farm chant that racism is bad and sexism is bad, which is things that everybody believes and they can't possibly say anything nuanced. It feels like it goes against any kind of progress from my kind of shallow perspective. But you've written a little bit about cancel culture. Do you have thoughts there? Well, I mean, to say that I am opposed to, you know, this trend of cancellations or of shouting people down rather than engaging them, that would be a massive understatement, right? And I feel like, you know, I have put my money where my mouth is, you know, not as much as some people have, but, you know, I've tried to do something. I mean, I have defended, you know, some unpopular people and unpopular, you know, ideas on my blog. I've, you know, tried to defend, you know, norms of open discourse, of, you know, reasoning with our opponents, even when I've been shouted down for that on social media, you know, called a racist, called a sexist, all of those things. And which, by the way, I should say, you know, I would be perfectly happy to, you know, if we had time to say, you know, you know, 10,000 times, you know, my hatred of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, right? But what I don't want to do is to cede to some particular political faction the right to define exactly what is meant by those terms to say, well, then you have to agree with all of these other extremely contentious positions or else you are a misogynist or else you are a racist, right? I say that, well, no, you know, don't I or, you know, don't people like me also get a say in the discussion about, you know, what is racism, about what is going to be the most effective to combat racism, right? And, you know, this cancellation mentality, I think, is spectacularly ineffective at its own professed gall of, you know, combating racism and sexism. What's a positive way out? So I, I try to, I don't know if you see what I do on Twitter, but I, on Twitter, I mostly, in my whole, in my life, I've actually, it's who I am to the core is like, I really focus on the positive and I try to put love out there in the world. And still, I get attacked. And I look at that and I wonder like, You too? I didn't know. Like, I haven't actually said anything difficult and nuanced. You talk about somebody like Steven Pinker, who I'm actually don't know the full range of things that he's attacked for, but he tries to say difficult. He tries to be thoughtful about difficult topics. He does. And obviously he just gets slaughtered by. Well, I mean, yes, but it's also amazing how well Steve has withstood it. I mean, he just survived that attempt to cancel him just a couple of months ago, right? Psychologically, he survives it too, which worries me because I don't think I can. Yeah, I've gotten to know Steve a bit. He is incredibly unperturbed by this stuff. And I admire that and I envy it. I wish that I could be like that. I mean, my impulse when I'm getting attacked is I just want to engage every single like anonymous person on Twitter and Reddit who is saying mean stuff about me. And I want to just say, well, look, can we just talk this over for an hour? And then you'll see that I'm not that bad. And sometimes that even works. The problem is then there's the 20,000 other ones. That's not, but psychologically, does that wear on you? It does. It does. But yeah, I mean, in terms of what is the solution, I mean, I wish I knew, right? And so in a certain way, these problems are maybe harder than P versus NP, right? I mean, but I think that part of it has to be that I think that there's a lot of sort of silent support for what I'll call the open discourse side, the reasonable enlightenment side. And I think that that support has to become less silent, right? I think that a lot of people just sort of agree that a lot of these cancellations and attacks are ridiculous, but are just afraid to say so, right? Or else they'll get shouted down as well, right? That's just the standard witch hunt dynamic, which, of course, this faction understands and exploits to its great advantage. But more people just said, we're not going to stand for this, right? This is, guess what? We're against racism too. But what you're doing is ridiculous, right? And the hard part is it takes a lot of mental energy. It takes a lot of time. Even if you feel like you're not going to be canceled or you're staying on the safe side, it takes a lot of time to phrase things in exactly the right way and to respond to everything people say. So, but I think that the more people speak up from all political persuasions, from all walks of life, then the easier it is to move forward. Since we've been talking about love, can you, last time I talked to you about meaning of life a little bit, but here has, it's a weird question to ask a computer scientist, but has love for other human beings, for things, for the world around you played an important role in your life? Have you, it's easy for a world class computer scientist, you could even call yourself like a physicist, everything to be lost in the books. Is the connection to other humans, love for other humans played an important role? I love my kids. I love my wife. I love my parents. I'm probably not different from most people in loving their families and in that being very important in my life. Now, I should remind you that I am a theoretical computer scientist. If you're looking for deep insight about the nature of love, you're probably looking in the wrong place to ask me, but sure, it's been important. But is there something from a computer science perspective to be said about love? Is that even beyond into the realm of consciousness? There was this great cartoon, I think it was one of the classic XKCDs where it shows a heart and it's squaring the heart, taking the four year transform of the heart, integrating the heart, each thing and then it says my normal approach is useless here. I'm so glad I asked this question. I think there's no better way to end this. I hope we get a chance to talk again. This has been an amazing, cool experiment to do it outside. I'm really glad you made it out. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it a lot. It's been a pleasure and I'm glad you were able to come out to Austin. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Scott Aaronson. And thank you to our sponsors, 8sleep, SimpliSafe, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Scott Aaronson that I also gave to you in the introduction, which is, if you always win, then you're probably doing something wrong. Thank you for listening and for putting up with the intro and outro in this strange room in the middle of nowhere. And I very much hope to see you next time in many more ways than one.

Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #130

The following is a conversation with Chris Latner, his second time on the podcast. He's one of the most brilliant engineers in modern computing, having created LLVM compiler infrastructure project, the Clang compiler, the Swift programming language, a lot of key contributions to TensorFlow and TPUs as part of Google. He served as vice president of autopilot software at Tesla, was a software innovator and leader at Apple, and now is at SciFive as senior vice president of platform engineering, looking to revolutionize chip design to make it faster, better, and cheaper. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First sponsor is Blinkist, an app that summarizes key ideas from thousands of books. I use it almost every day to learn new things or to pick which books I want to read or listen to next. Second is Neuro, the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that I use to supercharge my mind with caffeine, altheanine, and B vitamins. Third is Masterclass, online courses from the best people in the world on each of the topics covered, from rockets, to game design, to poker, to writing, and to guitar. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food, drinks, and unfortunately, lost bets. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Chris has been an inspiration to me on a human level because he is so damn good as an engineer and leader of engineers, and yet he's able to stay humble, especially humble enough to hear the voices of disagreement and to learn from them. He was supportive of me and this podcast from the early days, and for that, I'm forever grateful. To be honest, most of my life, no one really believed that I would amount to much. So when another human being looks at me, it makes me feel like I might be someone special, it can be truly inspiring. That's a lesson for educators. The weird kid in the corner with a dream is someone who might need your love and support in order for that dream to flourish. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Chris Latner. What are the strongest qualities of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the great and powerful Jeff Dean since you've gotten the chance to work with each? You're starting with an easy question there. These are three very different people. I guess you could do maybe a pairwise comparison between them instead of a group comparison. So if you look at Steve Jobs and Elon, I worked a lot more with Elon than I did with Steve. They have a lot of commonality. They're both visionary in their own way. They're both very demanding in their own way. My sense is Steve is much more human factor focused where Elon is more technology focused. What does human factor mean? Steve's trying to build things that feel good, that people love, that affect people's lives, how they live. He's looking into the future a little bit in terms of what people want. Where I think that Elon focuses more on learning how exponentials work and predicting the development of those. Steve worked with a lot of engineers. That was one of the things that are reading the biography. How can a designer essentially talk to engineers and get their respect? I think, so I did not work very closely with Steve. I'm not an expert at all. My sense is that he pushed people really hard, but then when he got an explanation that made sense to him, then he would let go. And he did actually have a lot of respect for engineering, but he also knew when to push. And when you can read people well, you can know when they're holding back and when you can get a little bit more out of them. And I think he was very good at that. I mean, if you compare the other folks, so Jeff Dean, right? Jeff Dean's an amazing guy. He's super smart, as are the other guys. Jeff is a really, really, really nice guy, well meaning. He's a classic Googler. He wants people to be happy. He combines it with brilliance so he can pull people together in a really great way. He's definitely not a CEO type. I don't think he would even want to be that. Do you know if he still programs? Oh yeah, he definitely programs. Jeff is an amazing engineer today, right? And that has never changed. So it's really hard to compare Jeff to either of those two. I think that Jeff leads through technology and building it himself and then pulling people in and inspiring them. And so I think that that's one of the amazing things about Jeff. But each of these people, with their pros and cons, all are really inspirational and have achieved amazing things. So I've been very fortunate to get to work with these guys. For yourself, you've led large teams, you've done so many incredible, difficult technical challenges. Is there something you've picked up from them about how to lead? Yeah, so I mean, I think leadership is really hard. It really depends on what you're looking for there. I think you really need to know what you're talking about. So being grounded on the product, on the technology, on the business, on the mission is really important. Understanding what people are looking for, why they're there. One of the most amazing things about Tesla is the unifying vision, right? People are there because they believe in clean energy and electrification, all these kinds of things. The other is to understand what really motivates people, how to get the best people, how to build a plan that actually can be executed, right? There's so many different aspects of leadership and it really depends on the time, the place, the problems. There's a lot of issues that don't need to be solved. And so if you focus on the right things and prioritize well, that can really help move things. Two interesting things you mentioned. One is you really have to know what you're talking about. How you've worked on your business, you've worked on a lot of very challenging technical things. So I kind of assume you were born technically savvy, but assuming that's not the case, how did you develop technical expertise? Like even at Google you worked on, I don't know how many projects, but really challenging, very varied. Compilers, TPUs, hardware, cloud stuff, bunch of different things. The thing that I've become comfortable as I've more comfortable with as I've gained experience is being okay with not knowing. And so a major part of leadership is actually, it's not about having the right answer, it's about getting the right answer. And so if you're working in a team of amazing people, right? And many of these places, many of these companies all have amazing people. It's the question of how do you get people together? How do you build trust? How do you get people to open up? How do you get people to be vulnerable sometimes with an idea that maybe isn't good enough, but it's the start of something beautiful? How do you provide an environment where you're not just like top down, thou shalt do the thing that I tell you to do, right? But you're encouraging people to be part of the solution and providing a safe space where if you're not doing the right thing, they're willing to tell you about it, right? So you're asking dumb questions? Yeah, dumb questions are my specialty, yeah. Well, so I've been in the hardware realm recently and I don't know much at all about how chips are designed. I know a lot about using them. I know some of the principles and the art's technical level of this, but it turns out that if you ask a lot of dumb questions, you get smarter really, really quick. And when you're surrounded by people that want to teach and learn themselves, it can be a beautiful thing. So let's talk about programming languages, if it's okay. Sure, sure. At the highest absurd philosophical level, because I... Don't get romantic on me, Lex. I will forever get romantic and torture you, I apologize. Why do programming languages even matter? Okay, well, thank you very much. You're saying why should you care about any one programming language or why do we care about programming computers or? No, why do we care about programming language design, creating effective programming languages, choosing one programming languages such as another programming language, why we keep struggling and improving through the evolution of these programming languages. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so I mean, I think you have to come back to what are we trying to do here, right? So we have these beasts called computers that are very good at specific kinds of things and we think it's useful to have them do it for us, right? Now you have this question of how best to express that because you have a human brain still that has an idea in its head and you want to achieve something, right? So, well, there's lots of ways of doing this. You can go directly to the machine and speak assembly language and then you can express directly what the computer understands, that's fine. You can then have higher and higher and higher levels of abstraction up until machine learning and you're designing a neural net to do the work for you. The question is where along this way do you want to stop and what benefits do you get out of doing so? And so programming languages in general, you have C, you have Fortran, Java and Ada, Pascal, Swift, you have lots of different things. They'll have different trade offs and they're tackling different parts of the problems. Now, one of the things that most programming languages do is they're trying to make it so that you have pretty basic things like portability across different hardware. So you've got, I'm gonna run on an Intel PC, I'm gonna run on a RISC 5 PC, I'm gonna run on a ARM phone or something like that, fine. I wanna write one program and have it portable. And this is something that assembly doesn't do. Now, when you start looking at the space of programming languages, this is where I think it's fun because programming languages all have trade offs and most people will walk up to them and they look at the surface level of syntax and say, oh, I like curly braces or I like tabs or I like semi colons or not or whatever, right? Subjective, fairly subjective, very shallow things. But programming languages when done right can actually be very powerful. And the benefit they bring is expression. Okay, and if you look at programming languages, there's really kind of two different levels to them. One is the down in the dirt, nuts and bolts of how do you get the computer to be efficient, stuff like that, how they work, type systems, compiler stuff, things like that. The other is the UI. And the UI for programming language is really a design problem and a lot of people don't think about it that way. And the UI, you mean all that stuff with the braces and? Yeah, all that stuff's the UI and what it is and UI means user interface. And so what's really going on is it's the interface between the guts and the human. And humans are hard, right? Humans have feelings, they have things they like, they have things they don't like. And a lot of people treat programming languages as though humans are just kind of abstract creatures that cannot be predicted. But it turns out that actually there is better and worse. Like people can tell when a programming language is good or when it was an accident, right? And one of the things with Swift in particular is that a tremendous amount of time by a tremendous number of people have been put into really polishing and making it feel good. But it also has really good nuts and bolts underneath it. You said that Swift makes a lot of people feel good. How do you get to that point? So how do you predict that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are going to enjoy using this user experience of this programming language? Well, you can look at it in terms of better and worse, right? So if you have to write lots of boilerplate or something like that, you will feel unproductive. And so that's a bad thing. You can look at it in terms of safety. If like C for example, is what's called a memory unsafe language. And so you get dangling pointers and you get all these kinds of bugs that then you have spent tons of time debugging and it's a real pain in the butt and you feel unproductive. And so by subtracting these things from the experience, you get happier people. But again, keep interrupting. I'm sorry, but so hard to deal with. If you look at the people that are most productive on Stack Overflow, they have a set of priorities that may not always correlate perfectly with the experience of the majority of users. If you look at the most upvoted, quote unquote, correct answer on Stack Overflow, it usually really sort of prioritizes like safe code, proper code, stable code, you know, that kind of stuff. As opposed to like, if I wanna use go to statements in my basic, right? I wanna use go to statements. Like what if 99% of people wanna use go to statements? So you use completely improper, you know, unsafe syntax. I don't think that people actually, like if you boil it down and you get below the surface level, people don't actually care about go tos or if statements or things like this. They care about achieving a goal, right? So the real question is I wanna set up a web server and I wanna do a thing, whatever. Like how quickly can I achieve that, right? And so from a programming language perspective, there's really two things that matter there. One is what libraries exist and then how quickly can you put it together and what are the tools around that look like, right? And when you wanna build a library that's missing, what do you do? Okay, now this is where you see huge divergence in the force between worlds, okay? And so you look at Python, for example. Python is really good at assembling things, but it's not so great at building all the libraries. And so what you get because of performance reasons, other things like this, is you get Python layered on top of C, for example, and that means that doing certain kinds of things well, it doesn't really make sense to do in Python. Instead you do it in C and then you wrap it and then you have, you're living in two worlds and two worlds never is really great because tooling and the debugger doesn't work right and like all these kinds of things. Can you clarify a little bit what you mean by Python is not good at building libraries, meaning it doesn't make it conducive. Certain kinds of libraries. No, but just the actual meaning of the sentence, meaning like it's not conducive to developers to come in and add libraries or is it the duality of the, it's a dance between Python and C and... Well, so Python's amazing. Python's a great language. I did not mean to say that Python is bad for libraries. What I meant to say is there are libraries that Python's really good at that you can write in Python, but there are other things, like if you wanna build a machine learning framework, you're not gonna build a machine learning framework in Python because of performance, for example, or you want GPU acceleration or things like this. Instead, what you do is you write a bunch of C or C++ code or something like that, and then you talk to it from Python, right? And so this is because of decisions that were made in the Python design and those decisions have other counterbalancing forces. But the trick when you start looking at this from a programming language perspective, you start to say, okay, cool. How do I build this catalog of libraries that are really powerful? And how do I make it so that then they can be assembled into ways that feel good and they generally work the first time? Because when you're talking about building a thing, you have to include the debugging, the fixing, the turnaround cycle, the development cycle, all that kind of stuff into the process of building the thing. It's not just about pounding out the code. And so this is where things like catching bugs at compile time is valuable, for example. But if you dive into the details in this, Swift, for example, has certain things like value semantics, which is this fancy way of saying that when you treat a variable like a value, it acts like a mathematical object would. Okay, so you have used PyTorch a little bit. In PyTorch, you have tensors. Tensors are n dimensional grid of numbers, very simple. You can do plus and other operators on them. It's all totally fine. But why do you need to clone a tensor sometimes? Have you ever run into that? Yeah. Okay, and so why is that? Why do you need to clone a tensor? It's the usual object thing that's in Python. So in Python, and just like with Java and many other languages, this isn't unique to Python. In Python, it has a thing called reference semantics, which is the nerdy way of explaining this. And what that means is you actually have a pointer do a thing instead of the thing, okay? Now, this is due to a bunch of implementation details that you don't want to go into. But in Swift, you have this thing called value semantics. And so when you have a tensor in Swift, it is a value. If you copy it, it looks like you have a unique copy. And if you go change one of those copies, then it doesn't update the other one because you just made a copy of this thing, right? So that's like highly error prone in at least computer science, math centric disciplines about Python, that like the thing you would expect to behave like math. Like math, it doesn't behave like math. And in fact, quietly it doesn't behave like math and then can ruin the entirety of your math thing. Exactly. Well, and then it puts you in debugging land again. Yeah. Right now, you just want to get something done and you're like, wait a second, where do I need to put clone? And what level of the stack, which is very complicated, which I thought I was reusing somebody's library and now I need to understand it to know where to clone a thing, right? And hard to debug, by the way. Exactly, right. And so this is where programming languages really matter. Right, and so in Swift having value semantics so that both you get the benefit of math, working like math, right? But also the efficiency that comes with certain advantages there, certain implementation details there really benefit you as a programmer, right? Can you clarify the value semantics? Like how do you know that a thing should be treated like a value? Yeah, so Swift has a pretty strong culture and good language support for defining values. And so if you have an array, so tensors are one example that the machine learning folks are very used to. Just think about arrays, same thing, where you have an array, you create an array, you put two or three or four things into it, and then you pass it off to another function. What happens if that function adds some more things to it? Well, you'll see it on the side that you pass it in, right? This is called reference semantics. Now, what if you pass an array off to a function, it scrolls it away in some dictionary or some other data structure somewhere, right? Well, it thought that you just handed it that array, then you return back and that reference to that array still exists in the caller, and they go and put more stuff in it, right? The person you handed it off to may have thought they had the only reference to that, and so they didn't know that this was gonna change underneath the covers. And so this is where you end up having to do clone. So like I was passed a thing, I'm not sure if I have the only version of it, so now I have to clone it. So what value semantics does is it allows you to say, hey, I have a, so in Swift, it defaults to value semantics. Oh, so it defaults to value semantics, and then because most things should end up being like values, then it makes sense for that to be the default. And one of the important things about that is that arrays and dictionaries and all these other collections that are aggregations of other things also have value semantics. And so when you pass this around to different parts of your program, you don't have to do these defensive copies. And so this is great for two sides, right? It's great because you define away the bug, which is a big deal for productivity, the number one thing most people care about, but it's also good for performance because when you're doing a clone, so you pass the array down to the thing, it's like, I don't know if anybody else has it, I have to clone it. Well, you just did a copy of a bunch of data. It could be big. And then it could be that the thing that called you is not keeping track of the old thing. So you just made a copy of it, and you may not have had to. And so the way the value semantics work in Swift is it uses this thing called copy on write, which means that you get the benefit of safety and performance. And it has another special trick because if you think certain languages like Java, for example, they have immutable strings. And so what they're trying to do is they provide value semantics by having pure immutability. Functional languages have pure immutability in lots of different places, and this provides a much safer model and it provides value semantics. The problem with this is if you have immutability, everything is expensive. Everything requires a copy. For example, in Java, if you have a string X and a string Y, you append them together, we have to allocate a new string to hold X, Y. If they're immutable. Well, strings in Java are immutable. And if there's optimizations for short ones, it's complicated, but generally think about them as a separate allocation. And so when you append them together, you have to go allocate a third thing because somebody might have a pointer to either of the other ones, right? And you can't go change them. So you have to go allocate a third thing. Because of the beauty of how the Swift value semantics system works out, if you have a string in Swift and you say, hey, put in X, right? And they say, append on Y, Z, W, it knows that there's only one reference to that. And so it can do an in place update. And so you're not allocating tons of stuff on the side. You don't have all those problems. When you pass it off, you can know you have the only reference. If you pass it off to multiple different people, but nobody changes it, they can all share the same thing. So you get a lot of the benefit of purely immutable design. And so you get a really nice sweet spot that I haven't seen in other languages. Yeah, that's interesting. I thought there was going to be a philosophical narrative here that you're gonna have to pay a cost for it. Cause it sounds like, I think value semantics is beneficial for easing of debugging or minimizing the risk of errors, like bringing the errors closer to the source, bringing the symptom of the error closer to the source of the error, however you say that. But you're saying there's not a performance cost either if you implement it correctly. Well, so there's trade offs with everything. And so if you are doing very low level stuff, then sometimes you can notice a cost, but then what you're doing is you're saying, what is the right default? So coming back to user interface, when you talk about programming languages, one of the major things that Swift does that makes people love it, that is not obvious when it comes to designing a language is this UI principle of progressive disclosure of complexity. Okay, so Swift, like many languages is very powerful. The question is, when do you have to learn the power as a user? So Swift, like Python, allows you to start with like, print hello world, right? Certain other languages start with like, public static void main class, like all the ceremony, right? And so you go to teach a new person, hey, welcome to this new thing. Let's talk about public access control classes. Wait, what's that? String system.out.println, like packages, like, God, right? And so instead, if you take this and you say, hey, we need packages, modules, we need powerful things like classes, we need data structures, we need like all these things. The question is, how do you factor the complexity? And how do you make it so that the normal case scenario is you're dealing with things that work the right way in the right way, give you good performance by default, but then as a power user, if you want to dive down to it, you have full C performance, full control over low level pointers. You can call malloc if you want to call malloc. This is not recommended on the first page of every tutorial, but it's actually really important when you want to get work done, right? And so being able to have that is really the design in programming language design, and design is really, really hard. It's something that I think a lot of people kind of, outside of UI, again, a lot of people just think is subjective, like there's nothing, you know, it's just like curly braces or whatever. It's just like somebody's preference, but actually good design is something that you can feel. And how many people are involved with good design? So if we looked at Swift, but look at historically, I mean, this might touch like, it's almost like a Steve Jobs question too, like how much dictatorial decision making is required versus collaborative, and we'll talk about how all that can go wrong or right, but. Yeah, well, Swift, so I can't speak to in general, all design everywhere. So the way it works with Swift is that there's a core team, and so a core team is six or seven people ish, something like that, that is people that have been working with Swift since very early days, and so. And by early days is not that long ago. Okay, yeah, so it became public in 2014, so it's been six years public now, but so that's enough time that there's a story arc there. Okay, yeah, and there's mistakes have been made that then get fixed, and you learn something, and then you, you know, and so what the core team does is it provides continuity, and so you wanna have a, okay, well, there's a big hole that we wanna fill. We know we wanna fill it, so don't do other things that invade that space until we fill the hole, right? There's a boulder that's missing here, we wanna do, we will do that boulder, even though it's not today, keep out of that space. And the whole team remembers the myth of the boulder that's there. Yeah, yeah, there's a general sense of what the future looks like in broad strokes, and a shared understanding of that, combined with a shared understanding of what has happened in the past that worked out well and didn't work out well. The next level out is you have the, what's called the Swift evolution community, and you've got, in that case, hundreds of people that really care passionately about the way Swift evolves, and that's like an amazing thing to, again, the core team doesn't necessarily need to come up with all the good ideas. You got hundreds of people out there that care about something, and they come up with really good ideas too, and that provides this rock tumbler for ideas. And so the evolution process is, a lot of people in a discourse forum, they're like hashing it out and trying to talk about, okay, well, should we go left or right, or if we did this, what would be good? And here you're talking about hundreds of people, so you're not gonna get consensus, necessarily, not obvious consensus, and so there's a proposal process that then allows the core team and the community to work this out, and what the core team does is it aims to get consensus out of the community and provide guardrails, but also provide long term, make sure we're going the right direction kind of things. So does that group represent like the, how much people will love the user interface? Like, do you think they're able to capture that? Well, I mean, it's something we talk about a lot, it's something we care about. How well we do that's up for debate, but I think that we've done pretty well so far. Is the beginner in mind? Yeah. Like, because you said the progressive disclosure complexity. Yeah, so we care a lot about that, a lot about power, a lot about efficiency, a lot about, there are many factors to good design, and you have to figure out a way to kind of work your way through that, and. So if you think about, like the language I love is Lisp, probably still because I use Emacs, but I haven't done anything, any serious work in Lisp, but it has a ridiculous amount of parentheses. Yeah. I've also, you know, with Java and C++, the braces, you know, I like, I enjoyed the comfort of being between braces, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, let's talk. And then Python is, sorry to interrupt, just like, and last thing to me, as a designer, if I was a language designer, God forbid, is I would be very surprised that Python with no braces would nevertheless somehow be comforting also. So like, I could see arguments for all of this. But look at this, this is evidence that it's not about braces versus tabs. Right, exactly, you're good, that's a good point. Right, so like, you know, there's evidence that. But see, like, it's one of the most argued about things. Oh yeah, of course, just like tabs and spaces, which it doesn't, I mean, there's one obvious right answer, but it doesn't actually matter. What's that? Let's not, like, come on, we're friends. Like, come on, what are you trying to do to me here? People are gonna, yeah, half the people are gonna tune out. Yeah, so these, so you're able to identify things that don't really matter for the experience. Well, no, no, no, it's always a really hard, so the easy decisions are easy, right? I mean, fine, those are not the interesting ones. The hard ones are the ones that are most interesting, right? The hard ones are the places where, hey, we wanna do a thing, everybody agrees we should do it, there's one proposal on the table, but it has all these bad things associated with it. Well, okay, what are we gonna do about that? Do we just take it? Do we delay it? Do we say, hey, well, maybe there's this other feature that if we do that first, this will work out better. How does this, if we do this, are we paying ourselves into a corner, right? And so this is where, again, you're having that core team of people that has some continuity and has perspective, has some of the historical understanding, is really valuable because you get, it's not just like one brain, you get the power of multiple people coming together to make good decisions, and then you get the best out of all these people, and you also can harness the community around it. And what about the decision of whether in Python having one type or having strict typing? Yeah, okay. Yeah, let's talk about this. So I like how you put that, by the way. So many people would say that Python doesn't have types. Doesn't have types, yeah. But you're right. I haven't listened to you enough to where, I'm a fan of yours and I've listened to way too many podcasts and videos of you talking about this stuff. Oh yeah, so I would argue that Python has one type. And so like when you import Python into Swift, which by the way works really well, you have everything comes in as a Python object. Now here are their trade offs because it depends on what you're optimizing for. And Python is a super successful language for a really good reason. Because it has one type, you get duck typing for free and things like this. But also you're pushing, you're making it very easy to pound out code on one hand, but you're also making it very easy to introduce complicated bugs that you have to debug. And you pass a string into something that expects an integer and it doesn't immediately die. It goes all the way down the stack trace and you find yourself in the middle of some code that you really didn't want to know anything about. And it blows up and you're just saying, well, what did I do wrong, right? And so types are good and bad and they have trade offs. They're good for performance and certain other things depending on where you're coming from, but it's all about trade offs. And so this is what design is, right? Design is about weighing trade offs and trying to understand the ramifications of the things that you're weighing, like types or not, or one type or many types. But also within many types, how powerful do you make that type system is another very complicated question with lots of trade offs. It's very interesting by the way, but that's like one dimension and there's a bunch of other dimensions, JIT compiled versus static compiled, garbage collected versus reference counted versus manual memory management versus, like in like all these different trade offs and how you balance them are what make a program language good. Concurrency. Yeah. So in all those things, I guess, when you're designing the language, you also have to think of how that's gonna get all compiled down to. If you care about performance, yeah. Well, and go back to Lisp, right? So Lisp also, I would say JavaScript is another example of a very simple language, right? And so one of the, so I also love Lisp. I don't use it as much as maybe you do or you did. No, I think we're both, everyone who loves Lisp, it's like, you love, it's like, I don't know, I love Frank Sinatra, but like how often do I seriously listen to Frank Sinatra? Sure, sure. But you look at that or you look at JavaScript, which is another very different, but relatively simple language. And there are certain things that don't exist in the language, but there is inherent complexity to the problems that we're trying to model. And so what happens to the complexity? In the case of both of them, for example, you say, well, what about large scale software development? Okay, well, you need something like packages. Neither language has a language affordance for packages. And so what you get is patterns. You get things like NPN. You get things like these ecosystems that get built around. And I'm a believer that if you don't model at least the most important inherent complexity in the language, then what ends up happening is that complexity gets pushed elsewhere. And when it gets pushed elsewhere, sometimes that's great because often building things as libraries is very flexible and very powerful and allows you to evolve and things like that. But often it leads to a lot of unnecessary divergence in the force and fragmentation. And when that happens, you just get kind of a mess. And so the question is, how do you balance that? Don't put too much stuff in the language because that's really expensive and it makes things complicated. But how do you model enough of the inherent complexity of the problem that you provide the framework and the structure for people to think about? Well, so the key thing to think about with programming languages, and you think about what a programming language is therefore, is it's about making a human more productive, right? And so there's an old, I think it's Steve Jobs quote about it's a bicycle for the mind, right? You can definitely walk, but you'll get there a lot faster if you can bicycle on your way. And... A programming language is a bicycle for the mind? Yeah. Is it basically, wow, that's really interesting way to think about it. By raising the level of abstraction, now you can fit more things in your head. By being able to just directly leverage somebody's library, you can now get something done quickly. In the case of Swift, Swift UI is this new framework that Apple has released recently for doing UI programming. And it has this declarative programming model, which defines away entire classes of bugs. It builds on value semantics and many other nice Swift things. And what this does is it allows you to just get way more done with way less code. And now your productivity as a developer is much higher, right? And so that's really what programming languages should be about, is it's not about tabs versus spaces or curly braces or whatever. It's about how productive do you make the person. And you can only see that when you have libraries that were built with the right intention that the language was designed for. And with Swift, I think we're still a little bit early, but Swift UI and many other things that are coming out now are really showing that. And I think that they're opening people's eyes. It's kind of interesting to think about like how that the knowledge of something, of how good the bicycle is, how people learn about that. So I've used C++, now this is not going to be a trash talking session about C++, but I used C++ for a really long time. You can go there if you want, I have the scars. I feel like I spent many years without realizing like there's languages that could, for my particular lifestyle, brain style, thinking style, there's languages that could make me a lot more productive in the debugging stage, in just the development stage and thinking like the bicycle for the mind that I can fit more stuff into my... Python's a great example of that, right? I mean, a machine learning framework in Python is a great example of that. It's just very high abstraction level. And so you can be thinking about things on a like very high level algorithmic level instead of thinking about, okay, well, am I copying this tensor to a GPU or not, right? It's not what you want to be thinking about. And as I was telling you, I mean, I guess the question I had is, how does a person like me or in general people discover more productive languages? Like how I was, as I've been telling you offline, I've been looking for like a project to work on in Swift so I can really try it out. I mean, my intuition was like doing a hello world is not going to get me there to get me to experience the power of language. You need a few weeks to change your metabolism. Exactly, beautifully put. That's one of the problems with people with diets, like I'm actually currently, to go in parallel, but in a small tangent is I've been recently eating only meat, okay? And okay, so most people are like, they think that's horribly unhealthy or whatever, you have like a million, whatever the science is, it just doesn't sound right. Well, so back when I was in college, we did the Atkins diet, that was a thing. Similar, but you have to always give these things a chance. I mean, with dieting, I was not dieting, but it's just the things that you like. If I eat, personally, if I eat meat, just everything, I can be super focused or more focused than usual. I just feel great. I mean, I've been running a lot, doing pushups and pull ups and so on. I mean, Python is similar in that sense for me. Where are you going with this? I mean, literally, I just felt I had like a stupid smile on my face when I first started using Python. I could code up really quick things. Like I would see the world, I would be empowered to write a script to do some basic data processing, to rename files on my computer. Like Perl didn't do that for me, a little bit. And again, none of these are about which is best or something like that, but there's definitely better and worse here. But it clicks, right? Well, yeah. If you look at Perl, for example, you get bogged down in scalars versus arrays versus hashes versus type globs and like all that kind of stuff. And Python's like, yeah, let's not do this. And some of it is debugging. Like everyone has different priorities. But for me, it's, can I create systems for myself that empower me to debug quickly? Like I've always been a big fan, even just crude like asserts, like always stating things that should be true, which in Python, I found in myself doing more because of type, all these kinds of stuff. Well, you could think of types in a programming language as being kind of assert. Yeah. They could check the compile time, right? So how do you learn a new thing? Well, so this, or how do people learn new things, right? This is hard. People don't like to change. People generally don't like change around them either. And so we're all very slow to adapt and change. And usually there's a catalyst that's required to force yourself over this. So for learning a programming language, it really comes down to finding an excuse, like build a thing that the language is actually good for, that the ecosystem's ready for. And so if you were to write an iOS app, for example, that'd be the easy case. Obviously you would use Swift for that, right? There are other... Android. So Swift runs on Android. Oh, does it? Oh yeah. Yeah, Swift runs in lots of places. How does that work? So... Okay, so Swift is built on top of LLVM. LLVM runs everywhere. LLVM, for example, builds the Android kernel. Oh, okay. So yeah. I didn't realize this. Yeah, so Swift is very portable, runs on Windows. There's, it runs on lots of different things. And Swift, sorry to interrupt, Swift UI, and then there's a thing called UI Kit. So can I build an app with Swift? Well, so that's the thing, is the ecosystem is what matters there. So Swift UI and UI Kit are Apple technologies. Okay, got it. And so they happen to, like Swift UI happens to be written in Swift, but it's an Apple proprietary framework that Apple loves and wants to keep on its platform, which makes total sense. You go to Android and you don't have that library, right? And so Android has a different ecosystem of things that hasn't been built out and doesn't work as well with Swift. And so you can totally use Swift to do like arithmetic and things like this, but building UI with Swift on Android is not a great experience right now. So if I wanted to learn Swift, what's the, I mean, the one practical different version of that is Swift for TensorFlow, for example. And one of the inspiring things for me with both TensorFlow and PyTorch is how quickly the community can like switch from different libraries, like you could see some of the communities switching to PyTorch now, but it's very easy to see. And then TensorFlow is really stepping up its game. And then there's no reason why, I think the way it works is basically it has to be one GitHub repo, like one paper steps up. It gets people excited. It gets people excited and they're like, ah, I have to learn this Swift for, what's Swift again? And then they learn and they fall in love with it. I mean, that's what happened, PyTorch has it. There has to be a reason, a catalyst. Yeah. And so, and there, I mean, people don't like change, but it turns out that once you've worked with one or two programming languages, the basics are pretty similar. And so one of the fun things about learning programming languages, even maybe Lisp, I don't know if you agree with this, is that when you start doing that, you start learning new things. Cause you have a new way to do things and you're forced to do them. And that forces you to explore and it puts you in learning mode. And when you get in learning mode, your mind kind of opens a little bit and you can see things in a new way, even when you go back to the old place. Right. Yeah, it's totally, well Lisp is functional. Yeah. But yeah, I wish there was a kind of window, maybe you can tell me if there is, there you go. This is a question to ask, what is the most beautiful feature in a programming language? Before I ask it, let me say like with Python, I remember I saw Lisp comprehensions. Yeah. Was like, when I like really took it in. Yeah. I don't know, I just loved it. It was like fun to do, like it was fun to do that kind of, something about it to be able to filter through a list and to create a new list all in a single line was elegant. I could all get into my head and it just made me fall in love with the language. Yeah. So is there, let me ask you a question. Is there, what do you use the most beautiful feature in a programming languages that you've ever encountered in Swift maybe and then outside of Swift? I think the thing that I like the most from a programming language. So I think the thing you have to think about with the programming language, again, what is the goal? You're trying to get people to get things done quickly. And so you need libraries, you need high quality libraries and then you need a user base around them that can assemble them and do cool things with them, right? And so to me, the question is what enables high quality libraries? Okay. Yeah. And there's a huge divide in the world between libraries who enable high quality libraries versus the ones that put special stuff in the language. So programming languages that enable high quality libraries? Got it. So, and what I mean by that is expressive libraries that then feel like a natural integrated part of the language itself. So an example of this in Swift is that int and float and also array and string, things like this, these are all part of the library. Like int is not hard coded into Swift. And so what that means is that because int is just a library thing defined in the standard library, along with strings and arrays and all the other things that come with the standard library. Well, hopefully you do like int, but anything that any language features that you needed to define int, you can also use in your own types. So if you wanted to find a quaternion or something like this, right? Well, it doesn't come in the standard library. There's a very special set of people that care a lot about this, but those people are also important. It's not about classism, right? It's not about the people who care about ints and floats are more important than the people who care about quaternions. And so to me, the beautiful things about programming languages is when you allow those communities to build high quality libraries, they feel native. They feel like they're built into the compiler without having to be. What does it mean for the int to be part of not hard coded in? So is it like how, so what is an int? Okay, int is just a integer. In this case, it's like a 64 bit integer or something like this. But so like the 64 bit is hard coded or no? No, none of that's hard coded. So int, if you go look at how it's implemented, it's just a struct in Swift. And so it's a struct. And then how do you add two structs? Well, you define plus. And so you can define plus on int. Well, you can define plus on your thing too. You can define, int is an odd method or something like that on it. And so yeah, you can add methods on the things. Yeah. So you can define operators, like how it behaves. That's just beautiful when there's something about the language which enables others to create libraries which are not hacky. Yeah, they feel native. And so one of the best examples of this is Lisp, right? Because in Lisp, like all the libraries are basically part of the language, right? You write, turn, rewrite systems and things like this. And so. Can you as a counter example provide what makes it difficult to write a library that's native? Is it the Python C? Well, so one example, I'll give you two examples. Java and C++, there's Java and C. They both allow you to define your own types, but int is hard code in the language. Okay, well, why? Well, in Java, for example, coming back to this whole reference semantic value semantic thing, int gets passed around by value. Yeah. But if you make like a pair or something like that, a complex number, right, it's a class in Java. And now it gets passed around by reference, by pointer. And so now you lose value semantics, right? You lost math, okay. Well, that's not great, right? If you can do something with int, why can't I do it with my type, right? So that's the negative side of the thing I find beautiful is when you can solve that, when you can have full expressivity, where you as a user of the language have as much or almost as much power as the people who implemented all the standard built in stuff, because what that enables is that enables truly beautiful libraries. You know, it's kind of weird because I've gotten used to that. That's one, I guess, other aspect of program language design. You have to think, you know, the old first principles thinking, like, why are we doing it this way? By the way, I mean, I remember, because I was thinking about the walrus operator and I'll ask you about it later, but it hit me that like the equal sign for assignment. Yeah. Like, why are we using the equal sign for assignment? It's wrong, yeah. And that's not the only solution, right? So if you look at Pascal, they use colon equals for assignment and equals for equality. And they use like less than greater than instead of the not equal thing. Yeah. Like, there are other answers here. So, but like, and yeah, like I ask you all, but how do you then decide to break convention to say, you know what, everybody's doing it wrong. We're gonna do it right. Yeah. So it's like an ROI, like return on investment trade off, right? So if you do something weird, let's just say like not like colon equal instead of equal for assignment, that would be weird with today's aesthetic, right? And so you'd say, cool, this is theoretically better, but is it better in which ways? Like, what do I get out of that? Do I define away class of bugs? Well, one of the class of bugs that C has is that you can use like, you know, if X equals without equals equals X equals Y, right? Well, turns out you can solve that problem in lots of ways. Clang, for example, GCC, all these compilers will detect that as a likely bug, produce a warning. Do they? Yeah. I feel like they didn't. Oh, Clang does. They didn't. GCC didn't. It's like one of the important things about programming language design is like, you're literally creating suffering in the world. Okay. Like, I feel like, I mean, one way to see it is the bicycle for the mind, but the other way is to like minimizing suffering. Well, you have to decide if it's worth it, right? And so let's come back to that. Okay. But if you look at this, and again, this is where there's a lot of detail that goes into each of these things. Equal and C returns a value. Yep. Is it messed up? That allows you to say X equals Y equals Z, like that works in C. Yeah. Is it messed up? You know, most people think it's messed up, I think. It is very, by messed up, what I mean is it is very rarely used for good, and it's often used for bugs. Yeah. Right, and so. That's a good definition of messed up, yeah. You could use, you know, in hindsight, this was not such a great idea, right? No. One of the things with Swift that is really powerful and one of the reasons it's actually good versus it being full of good ideas is that when we launched Swift 1, we announced that it was public, people could use it, people could build apps, but it was gonna change and break, okay? When Swift 2 came out, we said, hey, it's open source, and there's this open process which people can help evolve and direct the language. So the community at large, like Swift users, can now help shape the language as it is. And what happened as part of that process is a lot of really bad mistakes got taken out. So for example, Swift used to have the C style plus plus and minus minus operators. Like, what does it mean when you put it before versus after, right? Well, that got cargo culted from C into Swift early on. What's cargo culted? Cargo culted means brought forward without really considering it. Okay. This is maybe not the most PC term, but. You have to look it up in Urban Dictionary, yeah. Yeah, so it got pulled into C without, or it got pulled into Swift without very good consideration. And we went through this process, and one of the first things got ripped out was plus plus and minus minus, because they lead to confusion. They have very low value over saying x plus equals one, and x plus equals one is way more clear. And so when you're optimizing for teachability and clarity and bugs and this multidimensional space that you're looking at, things like that really matter. And so being first principles on where you're coming from and what you're trying to achieve and being anchored on the objective is really important. Well, let me ask you about the most, sort of this podcast isn't about information, it's about drama. Okay. Let me talk to you about some drama. So you mentioned Pascal and colon equals, there's something that's called the Walrus operator. Okay. And Python in Python 3.8 added the Walrus operator. And the reason I think it's interesting is not just because of the feature, it has the same kind of expression feature you can mention to see that it returns the value of the assignment. And then maybe you can comment on that in general, but on the other side of it, it's also the thing that toppled the dictator. So it finally drove Guido to step down from BDFL, the toxicity of the community. So maybe what do you think about the Walrus operator in Python? Is there an equivalent thing in Swift that really stress tested the community? And then on the flip side, what do you think about Guido stepping down over it? Yeah, well, if I look past the details of the Walrus operator, one of the things that makes it most polarizing is that it's syntactic sugar. Okay. What do you mean by syntactic sugar? It means you can take something that already exists in the language and you can express it in a more concise way. So, okay, I'm going to play dollars advocate. So this is great. Is that a objective or subjective statement? Like, can you argue that basically anything isn't syntactic sugar or not? No, not everything is syntactic sugar. So for example, the type system, like can you have classes versus, like, do you have types or not, right? So one type versus many types is not something that affects syntactic sugar. And so if you say, I want to have the ability to define types, I have to have all this like language mechanics to define classes. And oh, now I have to have inheritance. And I have like, I have all this stuff that's just making the language more complicated. That's not about sugaring it. Swift has the sugar. So like Swift has this thing called if let, and it has a lot of different types and it has various operators that are used to concisify specific use cases. So the problem with syntactic sugar, when you're talking about, hey, I have a thing that takes a lot to write and I have a new way to write it. You have this like horrible trade off, which becomes almost completely subjective, which is how often does this happen and does it matter? And one of the things that is true about human psychology, particularly when you're talking about introducing a new thing is that people overestimate the burden of learning something. And so it looks foreign when you haven't gotten used to it. But if it was there from the beginning, of course it's just part of Python. Like unquestionably, like this is just the thing I know. And it's not a new thing that you're worried about learning. It's just part of the deal. Now with Guido, I don't know Guido well. Yeah, have you passed cross much? Yeah, I've met him a couple of times, but I don't know Guido well. But the sense that I got out of that whole dynamic was that he had put the, not just the decision maker weight on his shoulders, but it was so tied to his personal identity that he took it personally and he felt the need and he kind of put himself in the situation of being the person, instead of building a base of support around him. I mean, this is probably not quite literally true, but by too much concentrated on him, right? And that can wear you down. Well, yeah, particularly because people then say, Guido, you're a horrible person. I hate this thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sure, it's like maybe 1% of the community that's doing that, but Python's got a big community. And 1% of millions of people is a lot of hate mail. And that just from human factor will just wear on you. Well, to clarify, it looked from just what I saw in the messaging for the, let's not look at the million Python users, but at the Python core developers, it feels like the majority, the big majority on a vote were opposed to it. Okay, I'm not that close to it, so I don't know. Okay, so the situation is like literally, yeah, I mean, the majority of the core developers are against it. Were opposed to it. So, and they weren't even like against it. It was, there was a few, well, they were against it, but the against it wasn't like, this is a bad idea. They were more like, we don't see why this is a good idea. And what that results in is there's a stalling feeling, like you just slow things down. Now, from my perspective, that you could argue this, and I think it's very interesting if we look at politics today and the way Congress works, it's slowed down everything. It's a dampener. Yeah, it's a dampener, but like, that's a dangerous thing too, because if it dampens things like, you know, if the dampening results. What are you talking about? Like, it's a low pass filter, but if you need billions of dollars injected into the economy or trillions of dollars, then suddenly stuff happens, right? And so. For sure. So you're talking about. I'm not defending our political situation, just to be clear. But you're talking about like a global pandemic. Well. I was hoping we could fix like the healthcare system and the education system, like, you know. I'm not a politics person. I don't know. When it comes to languages, the community's kind of right in terms of, it's a very high burden to add something to a language. So as soon as you add something, you have a community of people building on it and you can't remove it, okay? And if there's a community of people that feel really uncomfortable with it, then taking it slow, I think, is an important thing to do. And there's no rush, particularly if it was something that's 25 years old and is very established. And, you know, it's not like coming into its own. What about features? Well, so I think that the issue with Guido is that maybe this is a case where he realized it had outgrown him and it went from being the language. So Python, I mean, Guido's amazing, but Python isn't about Guido anymore. It's about the users. And to a certain extent, the users own it. And, you know, Guido spent years of his life, a significant fraction of his career on Python. And from his perspective, I imagine he's like, well, this is my thing. I should be able to do the thing I think is right. But you can also understand the users where they feel like, you know, this is my thing. I use this, like, and I don't know, it's a hard thing. But what, if we could talk about leadership in this, because it's so interesting to me. I'm gonna make, I'm gonna work. Hopefully somebody makes it. If not, I'll make it a Walrus Operator shirt, because I think it represents, to me, maybe it's my Russian roots or something. But, you know, it's the burden of leadership. Like, I feel like to push back, I feel like progress can only, like most difficult decisions, just like you said, there'll be a lot of divisiveness over, especially in a passionate community. It just feels like leaders need to take those risky decisions that if you like listen, that with some nonzero probability, maybe even a high probability would be the wrong decision. But they have to use their gut and make that decision. Well, this is like one of the things where you see amazing founders. The founders understand exactly what's happened and how the company got there and are willing to say, we have been doing thing X the last 20 years, but today we're gonna do thing Y. And they make a major pivot for the whole company. The company lines up behind them, they move and it's the right thing. But then when the founder dies, the successor doesn't always feel that agency to be able to make those kinds of decisions. Even though they're a CEO, they could theoretically do whatever. There's two reasons for that, in my opinion, or in many cases, it's always different. But one of which is they weren't there for all the decisions that were made. And so they don't know the principles in which those decisions were made. And once the principles change, you should be obligated to change what you're doing and change direction, right? And so if you don't know how you got to where you are, it just seems like gospel and you're not gonna question it. You may not understand that it really is the right thing to do, so you just may not see it. That's so brilliant. I never thought of it that way. Like it's so much higher burden when as a leader you step into a thing that's already worked for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Well, and if you change it and it doesn't work out, now you're the person who screwed it up. People always second guess it. Yeah. And the second thing is that even if you decide to make a change, even if you're theoretically in charge, you're just a person that thinks they're in charge. Meanwhile, you have to motivate the troops. You have to explain it to them in terms they'll understand. You have to get them to buy into it and believe in it, because if they don't, then they're not gonna be able to make the turn even if you tell them their bonuses are gonna be curtailed. They're just not gonna like buy into it, you know? And so there's only so much power you have as a leader, and you have to understand what those limitations are. Are you still BDFL? You've been a BDFL of some stuff. You're very heavy on the B, the benevolent, benevolent dictator for life. I guess LLVM? Yeah, so I still lead the LLVM world. I mean, what's the role of, so then on Swift you said that there's a group of people. Yeah, so if you contrast Python with Swift, right, one of the reasons, so everybody on the core team takes the role really seriously, and I think we all really care about where Swift goes, but you're almost delegating the final decision making to the wisdom of the group, and so it doesn't become personal. And also, when you're talking with the community, so yeah, some people are very annoyed as certain decisions get made. There's a certain faith in the process, because it's a very transparent process, and when a decision gets made, a full rationale is provided, things like this. These are almost defense mechanisms to help both guide future discussions and provide case law, kind of like Supreme Court does about this decision was made for this reason, and here's the rationale and what we want to see more of or less of. But it's also a way to provide a defense mechanism, so that when somebody's griping about it, they're not saying that person did the wrong thing. They're saying, well, this thing sucks, and later they move on and they get over it. Yeah, the analogy of the Supreme Court, I think, is really good. But then, okay, not to get personal on the SWIFT team, but it just seems like it's impossible for division not to emerge. Well, each of the humans on the SWIFT Core Team, for example, are different, and the membership of the SWIFT Core Team changes slowly over time, which is, I think, a healthy thing. And so each of these different humans have different opinions. Trust me, it's not a singular consciousness by any stretch of the imagination. You've got three major organizations, including Apple, Google, and SciFive, all kind of working together. And it's a small group of people, but you need high trust. You need, again, it comes back to the principles of what you're trying to achieve and understanding what you're optimizing for. And I think that starting with strong principles and working towards decisions is always a good way to both make wise decisions in general but then be able to communicate them to people so that they can buy into them. And that is hard. And so you mentioned LLVM. LLVM is gonna be 20 years old this December, so it's showing its own age. Do you have like a dragon cake plan? No, I should definitely do that. Yeah, if we can have a pandemic cake. Pandemic cake. Everybody gets a slice of cake and it gets sent through email. But LLVM has had tons of its own challenges over time too, right? And one of the challenges that the LLVM community has, in my opinion, is that it has a whole bunch of people that have been working on LLVM for 10 years, right? Because this happens somehow. And LLVM has always been one way, but it needs to be a different way, right? And they've worked on it for like 10 years. It's a long time to work on something. And you suddenly can't see the faults in the thing that you're working on. And LLVM has lots of problems and we need to address them and we need to make it better. And if we don't make it better, then somebody else will come up with a better idea, right? And so it's just kind of of that age where the community is like in danger of getting too calcified. And so I'm happy to see new projects joining and new things mixing it up. Fortran is now a new thing in the LLVM community, which is hilarious and good. I've been trying to find, on a little tangent, find people who program in Cobalt or Fortran, Fortran especially, to talk to, they're hard to find. Yeah, look to the scientific community. They still use Fortran quite a bit. Well, interesting thing you kind of mentioned with LLVM, or just in general, that as something evolves, you're not able to see the faults. So do you fall in love with the thing over time? Or do you start hating everything about the thing over time? Well, so my personal folly is that I see, maybe not all, but many of the faults, and they grate on me, and I don't have time to go fix them. Yeah, and they get magnified over time. Well, and they may not get magnified, but they never get fixed. And it's like sand underneath, you know, it's just like grating against you. And it's like sand underneath your fingernails or something. It's just like, you know it's there, you can't get rid of it. And so the problem is that if other people don't see it, like I don't have time to go write the code and fix it anymore, but then people are resistant to change. And so you say, hey, we should go fix this thing. They're like, oh yeah, that sounds risky. It's like, well, is it the right thing or not? Are the challenges the group dynamics, or is it also just technical? I mean, some of these features like, I think as an observer, it's almost like a fan in the, you know, as a spectator of the whole thing, I don't often think about, you know, some things might actually be technically difficult to implement. An example of this is we built this new compiler framework called MLIR. Yes. MLIR is a whole new framework. It's not, many people think it's about machine learning. The ML stands for multi level because compiler people can't name things very well, I guess. Do we dig into what MLIR is? Yeah, so when you look at compilers, compilers have historically been solutions for a given space. So LLVM is a, it's really good for dealing with CPUs, let's just say, at a high level. You look at Java, Java has a JVM. The JVM is very good for garbage collected languages that need dynamic compilation, and it's very optimized for a specific space. And so hotspot is one of the compilers that gets used in that space, and that compiler is really good at that kind of stuff. Usually when you build these domain specific compilers, you end up building the whole thing from scratch for each domain. What's a domain? So what's the scope of a domain? Well, so here I would say, like, if you look at Swift, there's several different parts to the Swift compiler, one of which is covered by the LLVM part of it. There's also a high level piece that's specific to Swift, and there's a huge amount of redundancy between those two different infrastructures and a lot of re implemented stuff that is similar but different. What does LLVM define? LLVM is effectively an infrastructure. So you can mix and match it in different ways. It's built out of libraries. You can use it for different things, but it's really good at CPUs and GPUs. CPUs and like the tip of the iceberg on GPUs. It's not really great at GPUs. Okay. But it turns out. A bunch of languages that. That then use it to talk to CPUs. Got it. And so it turns out there's a lot of hardware out there that is custom accelerators. So machine learning, for example. There are a lot of matrix multiply accelerators and things like this. There's a whole world of hardware synthesis. So we're using MLIR to build circuits. Okay. And so you're compiling for a domain of transistors. And so what MLIR does is it provides a tremendous amount of compiler infrastructure that allows you to build these domain specific compilers in a much faster way and have the result be good. If we're thinking about the future, now we're talking about like ASICs. So anything. Yeah, yeah. So if we project into the future, it's very possible that the number of these kinds of ASICs, very specific infrastructure architecture things like multiplies exponentially. I hope so. So that's MLIR. So what MLIR does is it allows you to build these compilers very efficiently. Right now, one of the things that coming back to the LLVM thing, and then we'll go to hardware, is LLVM is a specific compiler for a specific domain. MLIR is now this very general, very flexible thing that can solve lots of different kinds of problems. So LLVM is a subset of what MLIR does. So MLIR is, I mean, it's an ambitious project then. Yeah, it's a very ambitious project, yeah. And so to make it even more confusing, MLIR has joined the LLVM Umbrella Project. So it's part of the LLVM family. Right. But where this comes full circle is now folks that work on the LLVM part, the classic part that's 20 years old, aren't aware of all the cool new things that have been done in the new thing, that MLIR was built by me and many other people that knew a lot about LLVM, and so we fixed a lot of the mistakes that lived in LLVM. And so now you have this community dynamic where it's like, well, there's this new thing, but it's not familiar, nobody knows it, it feels like it's new, and so let's not trust it. And so it's just really interesting to see the cultural social dynamic that comes out of that. And I think it's super healthy because we're seeing the ideas percolate and we're seeing the technology diffusion happen as people get more comfortable with it, they start to understand things in their own terms. And this just gets to the, it takes a while for ideas to propagate, even though they may be very different than what people are used to. So maybe let's talk about that a little bit, the world of Asics. Yeah. Actually, you have a new role at SciFive. What's that place about? What is the vision for their vision for, I would say, the future of computer? Yeah, so I lead the engineering and product teams at SciFive. SciFive is a company who was founded with this architecture called RISC5. RISC5 is a new instruction set. Instruction sets are the things inside of your computer that tell it how to run things. X86 from Intel and ARM from the ARM company and things like this are other instruction sets. I've talked to, sorry to interrupt, I've talked to Dave Patterson, who's super excited about RISC5. Dave is awesome. Yeah, he's brilliant, yeah. The RISC5 is distinguished by not being proprietary. And so X86 can only be made by Intel and AMD. ARM can only be made by ARM. They sell licenses to build ARM chips to other companies, things like this. MIPS is another instruction set that is owned by the MIPS company, now Wave. And then it gets licensed out, things like that. And so RISC5 is an open standard that anybody can build chips for. And so SciFive was founded by three of the founders of RISC5 that designed and built it in Berkeley, working with Dave. And so that was the genesis of the company. SciFive today has some of the world's best RISC5 cores and we're selling them and that's really great. They're going to tons of products, it's very exciting. So they're taking this thing that's open source and just trying to be or are the best in the world at building these things. Yeah, so here it's the specifications open source. It's like saying TCP IP is an open standard or C is an open standard, but then you have to build an implementation of the standard. And so SciFive, on the one hand, pushes forward and defined and pushes forward the standard. On the other hand, we have implementations that are best in class for different points in the space, depending on if you want a really tiny CPU or if you want a really big, beefy one that is faster, but it uses more area and things like this. What about the actual manufacturer chips? So like, where does that all fit? I'm going to ask a bunch of dumb questions. That's okay, this is how we learn, right? And so the way this works is that there's generally a separation of the people who designed the circuits and then people who manufacture them. And so you'll hear about fabs like TSMC and Samsung and things like this that actually produce the chips, but they take a design coming in and that design specifies how the, you turn code for the chip into little rectangles that then use photolithography to make mask sets and then burn transistors onto a chip or onto a, onto silicon rather. So, and we're talking about mass manufacturing, so. Yeah, they're talking about making hundreds of millions of parts and things like that, yeah. And so the fab handles the volume production, things like that. But when you look at this problem, the interesting thing about the space when you look at it is that these, the steps that you go from designing a chip and writing the quote unquote code for it and things like Verilog and languages like that, down to what you hand off to the fab is a really well studied, really old problem, okay? Tons of people have worked on it. Lots of smart people have built systems and tools. These tools then have generally gone through acquisitions. And so they've ended up at three different major companies that build and sell these tools. They're called the EDA tools like for electronic design automation. The problem with this is you have huge amounts of fragmentation, you have loose standards and the tools don't really work together. So you have tons of duct tape and you have tons of loss productivity. Now these are, these are tools for designing. So the RISC 5 is a instruction. Like what is RISC 5? Like how deep does it go? How much does it touch the hardware? How much does it define how much of the hardware is? Yeah, so RISC 5 is all about given a CPU. So the processor and your computer, how does the compiler like Swift compiler, the C compiler, things like this, how does it make it work? So it's, what is the assembly code? And so you write RISC 5 assembly instead of XA6 assembly, for example. But it's a set of instructions as opposed to instructions. Why do you say it tells you how the compiler works? Sorry, it's what the compiler talks to. Okay. Yeah. And then the tooling you mentioned that the disparate tools are for what? For when you're building a specific chip. So RISC 5. In hardware. In hardware, yeah. So RISC 5, you can buy a RISC 5 core from SciFive and say, hey, I want to have a certain number of, run a certain number of gigahertz. I want it to be this big. I want it to be, have these features. I want to have like, I want floating point or not, for example. And then what you get is you get a description of a CPU with those characteristics. Now, if you want to make a chip, you want to build like an iPhone chip or something like that, right? You have to take both the CPU, but then you have to talk to memory. You have to have timers, IOs, a GPU, other components. And so you need to pull all those things together into what's called an ASIC, an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. So a custom chip. And then you take that design and then you have to transform it into something that the fabs, like TSMC, for example, know how to take to production. Got it. So, but yeah, okay. And so that process, I will, I can't help but see it as, is a big compiler. Yeah, yeah. It's a whole bunch of compilers written without thinking about it through that lens. Isn't the universe a compiler? Yeah, compilers do two things. They represent things and transform them. And so there's a lot of things that end up being compilers. But this is a space where we're talking about design and usability and the way you think about things, the way things compose correctly, it matters a lot. And so SciFi is investing a lot into that space. And we think that there's a lot of benefit that can be made by allowing people to design chips faster, get them to market quicker and scale out because at the alleged end of Moore's law, you've got this problem of you're not getting free performance just by waiting another year for a faster CPU. And so you have to find performance in other ways. And one of the ways to do that is with custom accelerators and other things and hardware. And so, well, we'll talk a little more about ASICs, but do you see that a lot of people, a lot of companies will try to have different sets of requirements that this whole process to go for? So like almost different car companies might use different and like different PC manufacturers. So is RISC 5 in this whole process, is it potentially the future of all computing devices? Yeah, I think that, so if you look at RISC 5 and step back from the Silicon side of things, RISC 5 is an open standard. And one of the things that has happened over the course of decades, if you look over the long arc of computing, somehow became decades old. Yeah. Is that you have companies that come and go and you have instruction sets that come and go. Like one example of this out of many is Sun with Spark. Yeah, it's on one way. Spark still lives on at Fujitsu, but we have HP had this instruction set called PA RISC. So PA RISC was this big server business and had tons of customers. They decided to move to this architecture called Itanium from Intel. Yeah. This didn't work out so well. Yeah. Right, and so you have this issue of you're making many billion dollar investments on instruction sets that are owned by a company. And even companies as big as Intel don't always execute as well as they could. They even have their own issues. HP, for example, decided that it wasn't in their best interest to continue investing in the space because it was very expensive. And so they make technology decisions or they make their own business decisions. And this means that as a customer, what do you do? You've sunk all this time, all this engineering, all this software work, all these, you've built other products around them and now you're stuck, right? What RISC 5 does is provide you more optionality in the space because if you buy an implementation of RISC 5 from SciFive, and you should, they're the best ones. Yeah. But if something bad happens to SciFive in 20 years, right? Well, great, you can turn around and buy a RISC 5 core from somebody else. And there's an ecosystem of people that are all making different RISC 5 cores with different trade offs, which means that if you have more than one requirement, if you have a family of products, you can probably find something in the RISC 5 space that fits your needs. Whereas with, if you're talking about XA6, for example, it's Intel's only gonna bother to make certain classes of devices, right? I see, so maybe a weird question, but like if SciFive is like infinitely successful in the next 20, 30 years, what does the world look like? So like how does the world of computing change? So too much diversity in hardware instruction sets, I think is bad. Like we have a lot of people that are using lots of different instruction sets, particularly in the embedded, the like very tiny microcontroller space, the thing in your toaster that are just weird and different for historical reasons. And so the compilers and the tool chains and the languages on top of them aren't there. And so the developers for that software have to use really weird tools because the ecosystem that supports is not big enough. So I expect that will change, right? People will have better tools and better languages, better features everywhere that then can serve as many different points in the space. And I think RISC5 will progressively eat more of the ecosystem because it can scale up, it can scale down, sideways, left, right. It's very flexible and very well considered and well designed instruction set. I think when you look at SciFive tackling silicon and how people build chips, which is a very different space, that's where you say, I think we'll see a lot more custom chips. And that means that you get much more battery life, you get better tuned solutions for your IoT thingy. You get people that move faster, you get the ability to have faster time to market, for example. So how many custom... So first of all, on the IoT side of things, do you see the number of smart toasters increasing exponentially? So, and if you do, like how much customization per toaster is there? Do all toasters in the world run the same silicon, like the same design, or is it different companies have different design? Like how much customization is possible here? Well, a lot of it comes down to cost, right? And so the way that chips work is you end up paying by the... One of the factors is the size of the chip. And so what ends up happening just from an economic perspective is there's only so many chips that get made in a year of a given design. And so often what customers end up having to do is they end up having to pick up a chip that exists that was built for somebody else so that they can then ship their product. And the reason for that is they don't have the volume of the iPhone. They can't afford to build a custom chip. However, what that means is they're now buying an off the shelf chip that isn't really good, isn't a perfect fit for their needs. And so they're paying a lot of money for it because they're buying silicon that they're not using. Well, if you now reduce the cost of designing the chip, now you get a lot more chips. And the more you reduce it, the easier it is to design chips. The more the world keeps evolving and we get more AI accelerators, we get more other things, we get more standards to talk to, we get 6G, right? You get changes in the world that you wanna be able to talk to these different things. There's more diversity in the cross product of features that people want. And that drives differentiated chips in another direction. And so nobody really knows what the future looks like, but I think that there's a lot of silicon in the future. Speaking of the future, you said Moore's law allegedly is dead. So do you agree with Dave Patterson and many folks that Moore's law is dead? Or do you agree with Jim Keller, who's standing at the helm of the pirate ship saying it's still alive? Yeah. Well, so I agree with what they're saying and different people are interpreting the end of Moore's law in different ways. Yeah. So Jim would say, there's another thousand X left in physics and we can continue to squeeze the stone and make it faster and smaller and smaller geometries and all that kind of stuff. He's right. So Jim is absolutely right that there's a ton of progress left and we're not at the limit of physics yet. That's not really what Moore's law is though. If you look at what Moore's law is, is that it's a very simple evaluation of, okay, well you look at the cost per, I think it was cost per area and the most economic point in that space. And if you go look at the now quite old paper that describes this, Moore's law has a specific economic aspect to it and I think this is something that Dave and others often point out. And so on a technicality, that's right. I look at it from, so I can acknowledge both of those viewpoints. They're both right. They're both right. I'll give you a third wrong viewpoint that may be right in its own way, which is single threaded performance doesn't improve like it used to. And it used to be back when you got a, you know, a Pentium 66 or something and the year before you had a Pentium 33 and now it's twice as fast, right? Well, it was twice as fast at doing exactly the same thing. Okay, like literally the same program ran twice as fast. You just wrote a check and waited a year, year and a half. Well, so that's what a lot of people think about Moore's law and I think that is dead. And so what we're seeing instead is we're pushing, we're pushing people to write software in different ways. And so we're pushing people to write CUDA so they can get GPU compute and the thousands of cores on GPU. We're talking about C programmers having to use P threads because they now have, you know, a hundred threads or 50 cores in a machine or something like that. You're now talking about machine learning accelerators that are now domain specific. And when you look at these kinds of use cases, you can still get performance and Jim will come up with cool things that utilize the silicon in new ways for sure, but you're also gonna change the programming model. Right. And now when you start talking about changing the programming model, that's when you come back to languages and things like this too, because often what you see is like you take the C programming language, right? The C programming language is designed for CPUs. And so if you want to talk to a GPU, now you're talking to its cousin CUDA, okay? CUDA is a different thing with a different set of tools, a different world, a different way of thinking. And we don't have one world that scales. And I think that we can get there. We can have one world that scales in a much better way. And a small tangent then, I think most programming languages are designed for CPUs, for single core, even just in their spirit, even if they allow for parallelization. So what does it look like for a programming language to have parallelization or massive parallelization as it's like first principle? So the canonical example of this is the hardware design world. So Verilog, VHDL, these kinds of languages, they're what's called a high level synthesis language. This is the thing people design chips in. And when you're designing a chip, it's kind of like a brain where you have infinite parallelism. Like you're like laying down transistors. Transistors are always running, okay? And so you're not saying run this transistor, then this transistor, then this transistor. It's like your brain, like your neurons are always just doing something. They're not clocked, right? They're just doing their thing. And so when you design a chip or when you design a CPU, when you design a GPU, when you design, when you're laying down the transistors, similarly, you're talking about, well, okay, well, how do these things communicate? And so these languages exist. Verilog is a kind of mixed example of that. None of these languages are really great. You have a very low level, yeah. Yeah, they're very low level and abstraction is necessary here. And there's different approaches with that. And it's itself a very complicated world, but it's implicitly parallel. And so having that as the domain that you program towards makes it so that by default, you get parallel systems. If you look at CUDA, CUDA is a point halfway in the space where in CUDA, when you write a CUDA kernel for your GPU, it feels like you're writing a scalar program. So you're like, you have ifs, you have for loops, stuff like this, you're just writing normal code. But what happens outside of that in your driver is that it actually is running you on like a thousand things at once, right? And so it's parallel, but it has pulled it out of the programming model. And so now you as a programmer are working in a simpler world and it's solved that for you, right? How do you take the language like Swift? If we think about GPUs, but also ASICs, maybe if we can dance back and forth between hardware and software. How do you design for these features to be able to program and get a first class citizen to be able to do like Swift for TensorFlow to be able to do machine learning on current hardware, but also future hardware like TPUs and all kinds of ASICs that I'm sure will be popping up more and more. Yeah, well, so a lot of this comes down to this whole idea of having the nuts and bolts underneath the covers that work really well. So you need, if you're talking to TPUs, you need MLIR or XLA or one of these compilers that talks to TPUs to build on top of, okay? And if you're talking to circuits, you need to figure out how to lay down the transistors and how to organize it and how to set up clocking and like all the domain problems that you get with circuits. Then you have to decide how to explain it to a human. What is ZY, right? And if you do it right, that's a library problem, not a language problem. And that works if you have a library or a language which allows your library to write things that feel native in the language by implementing libraries, because then you can innovate in programming models without having to change your syntax again. Like you have to invent new code formatting tools and like all the other things that languages come with. And this gets really interesting. And so if you look at the space, the interesting thing once you separate out syntax becomes what is that programming model? And so do you want the CUDA style? I write one program and it runs many places. Do you want the implicitly parallel model? How do you reason about that? How do you give developers, chip architects, the ability to express their intent? And that comes into this whole design question of how do you detect bugs quickly? So you don't have to tape out a chip to find out it's wrong, ideally, right? How do you, and this is a spectrum, how do you make it so that people feel productive? So their turnaround time is very quick. All these things are really hard problems. And in this world, I think that not a lot of effort has been put into that design problem and thinking about the layering in other pieces. Well, you've, on the topic of concurrency, you've written the Swift concurrency manifest. I think it's kind of interesting. Anything that has the word manifest on it is very interesting. Can you summarize the key ideas of each of the five parts you've written about? So what is a manifesto? Yes. How about, we start there. So in the Swift community, we have this problem, which is on the one hand, you wanna have relatively small proposals that you can kind of fit in your head, you can understand the details at a very fine grain level that move the world forward. But then you also have these big arcs, okay? And often when you're working on something that is a big arc, but you're tackling it in small pieces, you have this question of, how do I know I'm not doing a random walk? Where are we going? How does this add up? Furthermore, when you start the first small step, what terminology do you use? How do we think about it? What is better and worse in the space? What are the principles? What are we trying to achieve? And so what a manifesto in the Swift community does is it starts to say, hey, well, let's step back from the details of everything. Let's paint a broad picture to talk about what we're trying to achieve. Let's give an example design point. Let's try to paint the big picture so that then we can zero in on the individual steps and make sure that we're making good progress. And so the Swift concurrency manifesto is something I wrote three years ago. It's been a while, maybe more. Trying to do that for Swift and concurrency. It starts with some fairly simple things like making the observation that when you have multiple different computers and multiple different threads that are communicating, it's best for them to be asynchronous. And so you need things to be able to run separately and then communicate with each other. And this means asynchrony. And this means that you need a way to modeling asynchronous communication. Many languages have features like this. Async await is a popular one. And so that's what I think is very likely in Swift. But as you start building this tower of abstractions, it's not just about how do you write this, you then reach into the how do you get memory safety because you want correctness, you want debuggability and sanity for developers. And how do you get that memory safety into the language? So if you take a language like Go or C or any of these languages, you get what's called a race condition when two different threads or Go routines or whatever touch the same point in memory, right? This is a huge like maddening problem to debug because it's not reproducible generally. And so there's tools, there's a whole ecosystem of solutions that built up around this, but it's a huge problem when you're writing concurrent code. And so with Swift, this whole value semantics thing is really powerful there because it turns out that math and copies actually work even in concurrent worlds. And so you get a lot of safety just out of the box, but there are also some hard problems. And it talks about some of that. When you start building up to the next level up and you start talking beyond memory safety, you have to talk about what is the programmer model? How does a human think about this? So a developer that's trying to build a program think about this, and it proposes a really old model with a new spin called Actors. Actors are about saying, we have islands of single threadedness logically. So you write something that feels like it's one program running in a unit, and then it communicates asynchronously with other things. And so making that expressive and natural feel good be the first thing you reach for and being safe by default is a big part of the design of that proposal. When you start going beyond that, now you start to say, cool, well, these things that communicate asynchronously, they don't have to share memory. Well, if they don't have to share memory and they're sending messages to each other, why do they have to be in the same process? These things should be able to be in different processes on your machine. And why just processes? Well, why not different machines? And so now you have a very nice gradual transition towards distributed programming. And of course, when you start talking about the big future, the manifesto doesn't go into it, but accelerators are things you talk to asynchronously by sending messages to them. And how do you program those? Well, that gets very interesting. That's not in the proposal. And how much do you wanna make that explicit like the control of that whole process explicit to the program? Yeah, good question. So when you're designing any of these kinds of features or language features or even libraries, you have this really hard trade off you have to make, which is how much is it magic or how much is it in the human's control? How much can they predict and control it? What do you do when the default case is the wrong case? And so when you're designing a system, and so when you're designing a system, I won't name names, but there are systems where it's really easy to get started and then you jump. So let's pick like logo. Okay, so something like this. So it's really easy to get started. It's really designed for teaching kids, but as you get into it, you hit a ceiling and then you can't go any higher. And then what do you do? Well, you have to go switch to a different world and rewrite all your code. And this logo is a silly example here. This exists in many other languages. With Python, you would say like concurrency, right? So Python has the global interpreter block. So threading is challenging in Python. And so if you start writing a large scale application in Python, and then suddenly you need concurrency, you're kind of stuck with a series of bad trade offs, right? There's other ways to go where you say like, foist all the complexity on the user all at once, right? And that's also bad in a different way. And so what I prefer is building a simple model that you can explain that then has an escape hatch. So you get in, you have guardrails, memory safety works like this in Swift, where you can start with, like by default, if you use all the standard things, it's memory safe, you're not gonna shoot your foot off. But if you wanna get a C level pointer to something, you can explicitly do that. But by default, there's guardrails. There's guardrails. Okay, so but like, whose job is it to figure out which part of the code is parallelizable? So in the case of the proposal, it is the human's job. So they decide how to architect their application. And then the runtime in the compiler is very predictable. And so this is in contrast to like, there's a long body of work, including on Fortran for auto parallelizing compilers. And this is an example of a bad thing in my, so as a compiler person, I can drag on compiler people. Often compiler people will say, cool, since I can't change the code, I'm gonna write my compiler that then takes this unmodified code and makes go way faster on this machine. Okay, application, and so it does pattern matching. It does like really deep analysis. Compiler people are really smart. And so they like wanna like do something really clever and tricky. And you get like 10X speed up by taking like an array of structures and turn it into a structure of arrays or something, because it's so much better for memory. Like there's bodies, like tons of tricks. They love optimization. Yeah, you love optimization. Everyone loves optimization. Everyone loves it. Well, and it's this promise of build with my compiler and your thing goes fast, right? But here's the problem, Lex, you write a program, you run it with my compiler, it goes fast. You're very happy. Wow, it's so much faster than the other compiler. Then you go and you add a feature to your program or you refactor some code. And suddenly you got a 10X loss in performance. Well, why? What just happened there? What just happened there is the heuristic, the pattern matching, the compiler, whatever analysis it was doing just got defeated because you didn't inline a function or something, right? As a user, you don't know, you don't wanna know. That was the whole point. You don't wanna know how the compiler works. You don't wanna know how the memory hierarchy works. You don't wanna know how it got parallelized across all these things. You wanted that abstracted away from you, but then the magic is lost as soon as you did something and you fall off a performance cliff. And now you're in this funny position where what do I do? I don't change my code. I don't fix that bug. It costs 10X performance. Now what do I do? Well, this is the problem with unpredictable performance. If you care about performance, predictability is a very important thing. And so what the proposal does is it provides architectural patterns for being able to lay out your code, gives you full control over that, makes it really simple so you can explain it. And then if you wanna scale out in different ways, you have full control over that. So in your sense, the intuition is for a compiler, it's too hard to do automated parallelization. Cause the compilers do stuff automatically that's incredibly impressive for other things, but for parallelization, we're not close to there. Well, it depends on the programming model. So there's many different kinds of compilers. And so if you talk about like a C compiler or Swift compiler or something like that, where you're writing imperative code, parallelizing that and reasoning about all the pointers and stuff like that is a very difficult problem. Now, if you switch domains, so there's this cool thing called machine learning, right? So machine learning nerds among other endearing things like solving cat detectors and other things like that have done this amazing breakthrough of producing a programming model, operations that you compose together that has raised levels of abstraction high enough that suddenly you can have auto parallelizing compilers. You can write a model using a TensorFlow and have it run on 1024 nodes of a TPU. Yeah, that's true. I didn't even think about like, cause there's so much flexibility in the design of architectures that ultimately boil down to a graph that's parallelized for you. And if you think about it, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool, yeah. And you think about batching, for example, as a way of being able to exploit more parallelism. Like that's a very simple thing that now is very powerful. That didn't come out of the programming language nerds, those people, like that came out of people that are just looking to solve a problem and use a few GPUs and organically developed by the community of people focusing on machine learning. And it's an incredibly powerful abstraction layer that enables the compiler people to go and exploit that. And now you can drive supercomputers from Python. Well, that's pretty cool. That's amazing. So just to pause on that, cause I'm not sufficiently low level, I forget to admire the beauty and power of that, but maybe just to linger on it, like what does it take to run a neural network fast? Like how hard is that compilation? It's really hard. So we just skipped, you said like, it's amazing that that's a thing, but yeah, how hard is that of a thing? It's hard and I would say that not all of the systems are really great, including the ones I helped build. So there's a lot of work left to be done there. Is it the compiler nerds working on that or is it a whole new group of people? Well, it's a full stack problem, including compiler people, including APIs, so like Keras and the module API and PyTorch and Jax. And there's a bunch of people pushing on all the different parts of these things, because when you look at it as it's both, how do I express the computation? Do I stack up layers? Well, cool, like setting up a linear sequence of layers is great for the simple case, but how do I do the hard case? How do I do reinforcement learning? Well, now I need to integrate my application logic in this. Then it's the next level down of, how do you represent that for the runtime? How do you get hardware abstraction? And then you get to the next level down of saying like, forget about abstraction, how do I get the peak performance out of my TPU or my iPhone accelerator or whatever, right? And all these different things. And so this is a layered problem with a lot of really interesting design and work going on in the space and a lot of really smart people working on it. Machine learning is a very well funded area of investment right now. And so there's a lot of progress being made. So how much innovation is there on the lower level, so closer to the ASIC, so redesigning the hardware or redesigning concurrently compilers with that hardware? Is that like, if you were to predict the biggest, the equivalent of Moore's law improvements in the inference and the training of neural networks and just all of that, where is that gonna come from, you think? Sure, you get scalability of different things. And so you get Jim Keller shrinking process technology, you get three nanometer instead of five or seven or 10 or 28 or whatever. And so that marches forward and that provides improvements. You get architectural level performance. And so the TPU with a matrix multiply unit and a systolic array is much more efficient than having a scalar core doing multiplies and adds and things like that. You then get system level improvements. So how you talk to memory, how you talk across a cluster of machines, how you scale out, how you have fast interconnects between machines. You then get system level programming models. So now that you have all this hardware, how to utilize it. You then have algorithmic breakthroughs where you say, hey, wow, cool. Instead of training in a resonant 50 in a week, I'm now training it in 25 seconds. And it's a combination of new optimizers and new just training regimens and different approaches to train. And all of these things come together to push the world forward. That was a beautiful exposition. But if you were to force to bet all your money on one of these. Why do we have to? Unfortunately, we have people working on all this. It's an exciting time, right? So, I mean, OpenAI did this little paper showing the algorithmic improvement you can get. It's been improving exponentially. I haven't quite seen the same kind of analysis on other layers of the stack. I'm sure it's also improving significantly. I just, it's a nice intuition builder. I mean, there's a reason why Moore's Law, that's the beauty of Moore's Law is somebody writes a paper that makes a ridiculous prediction. And it becomes reality in a sense. There's something about these narratives when you, when Chris Ladner on a silly little podcast makes, bets all his money on a particular thing, somehow it can have a ripple effect of actually becoming real. That's an interesting aspect of it. Cause like it might've been, we focus with Moore's Law, most of the computing industry really, really focused on the hardware. I mean, software innovation, I don't know how much software innovation there was in terms of efficient. What Intel Giveth Bill takes away, right? Yeah, I mean, compilers improved significantly also. Well, not really. So actually, I mean, so I'm joking about how software has gotten slower pretty much as fast as hardware got better, at least through the nineties. There's another joke, another law in compilers, which is called, I think it's called Probstine's Law, which is compilers double the performance of any given code every 18 years. So they move slowly. Yeah, also. Well, yeah, it's exponential also. Yeah, you're making progress, but there again, it's not about, the power of compilers is not just about how do you make the same thing go faster? It's how do you unlock the new hardware? A new chip came out, how do you utilize it? You say, oh, the programming model, how do we make people more productive? How do we have better error messages? Even such mundane things like how do I generate a very specific error message about your code actually makes people happy because then they know how to fix it, right? And it comes back to how do you help people get their job done. Yeah, and yeah, and then in this world of exponentially increasing smart toasters, how do you expand computing to all these kinds of devices? Do you see this world where just everything is a computing surface? You see that possibility? Just everything is a computer? Yeah, I don't see any reason that that couldn't be achieved. It turns out that sand goes into glass and glass is pretty useful too. And why not? Why not? So very important question then, if we're living in a simulation and the simulation is running a computer, like what's the architecture of that computer, do you think? So you're saying is it a quantum system? Yeah, like this whole quantum discussion, is it needed? Or can we run it with a RISC 5 architecture, a bunch of CPUs? I think it comes down to the right tool for the job. Yeah, and so. And what's the compiler? Yeah, exactly, that's my question. Did I get that job? Feed the universe compiler. And so there, as far as we know, quantum systems are the bottom of the pile of turtles so far. Yeah. And so we don't know efficient ways to implement quantum systems without using quantum computers. Yeah, and that's totally outside of everything we've talked about. But who runs that quantum computer? Yeah. Right, so if we really are living in a simulation, then is it bigger quantum computers? Is it different ones? Like how does that work out? How does that scale? Well, it's the same size. It's the same size. But then the thought of the simulation is that you don't have to run the whole thing, that we humans are cognitively very limited. We do checkpoints. We do checkpoints, yeah. And if we, the point at which we human, so you basically do minimal amount of, what is it, Swift does on right, copy on right. So you only adjust the simulation. Parallel universe theories, right? And so every time a decision's made, somebody opens the short end of your box, then there's a fork. And then this could happen. And then, thank you for considering the possibility. But yeah, so it may not require the entirety of the universe to simulate it. But it's interesting to think about as we create this higher and higher fidelity systems. But I do wanna ask on the quantum computer side, because everything we've talked about, whether you work with SciFive, with compilers, none of that includes quantum computers, right? That's true. So have you ever thought about this whole serious engineering work of quantum computers looks like of compilers, of architectures, all of that kind of stuff? So I've looked at it a little bit. I know almost nothing about it, which means that at some point, I will have to find an excuse to get involved, because that's how it works. But do you think that's a thing to be, like with your little tingly senses of the timing of when to be involved, is it not yet? Well, so the thing I do really well is I jump into messy systems and figure out how to make them, figure out what the truth in the situation is, try to figure out what the unifying theory is, how to like factor the complexity, how to find a beautiful answer to a problem that has been well studied and lots of people have bashed their heads against it. I don't know that quantum computers are mature enough and accessible enough to be figured out yet, right? And I think the open question with quantum computers is, is there a useful problem that gets solved with a quantum computer that makes it worth the economic cost of like having one of these things and having legions of people that set it up? You go back to the fifties, right? And there's the projections of the world will only need seven computers, right? Well, and part of that was that people hadn't figured out what they're useful for. What are the algorithms we wanna run? What are the problems that get solved? And this comes back to how do we make the world better, either economically or making somebody's life better or like solving a problem that wasn't solved before, things like this. And I think that just we're a little bit too early in that development cycle because it's still like literally a science project, not a negative connotation, right? It's literally a science project and the progress there is amazing. And so I don't know if it's 10 years away, if it's two years away, exactly where that breakthrough happens, but you look at machine learning, we went through a few winners before the AlexNet transition and then suddenly it had its breakout moment. And that was the catalyst that then drove the talent flocking into it. That's what drove the economic applications of it. That's what drove the technology to go faster because you now have more minds thrown at the problem. This is what caused like a serious knee in deep learning and the algorithms that we're using. And so I think that's what quantum needs to go through. And so right now it's in that formidable finding itself, getting the like literally the physics figured out. And then it has to figure out the application that makes this useful. Yeah, but I'm not skeptical that I think that will happen. I think it's just 10 years away, something like that. I forgot to ask, what programming language do you think the simulation is written in? Ooh, probably Lisp. So not Swift. Like if you're a Tibet, I'll just leave it at that. So, I mean, we've mentioned that you worked with all these companies, we've talked about all these projects. It's kind of like if we just step back and zoom out about the way you did that work. And we look at COVID times, this pandemic we're living through that may, if I look at the way Silicon Valley folks are talking about it, the way MIT is talking about it, this might last for a long time. Not just the virus, but the remote nature. The economic impact. I mean, all of it, yeah. Yeah, it's gonna be a mess. Do you think, what's your prediction? I mean, from sci fi to Google, to just all the places you worked in, just Silicon Valley, you're in the middle of it. What do you think is, how is this whole place gonna change? Yeah, so, I mean, I really can only speak to the tech perspective. I am in that bubble. I think it's gonna be really interesting because the Zoom culture of being remote and on video chat all the time has really interesting effects on people. So on the one hand, it's a great normalizer. It's a normalizer that I think will help communities of people that have traditionally been underrepresented because now you're taking, in some cases, a face off because you don't have to have a camera going, right? And so you can have conversations without physical appearance being part of the dynamic, which is pretty powerful. You're taking remote employees that have already been remote, and you're saying you're now on the same level and footing as everybody else. Nobody gets whiteboards. You're not gonna be the one person that doesn't get to be participating in the whiteboard conversation, and that's pretty powerful. You've got, you're forcing people to think asynchronously in some cases because it's harder to just get people physically together, and the bumping into each other forces people to find new ways to solve those problems. And I think that that leads to more inclusive behavior, which is good. On the other hand, it's also, it just sucks, right? And so the actual communication just sucks being not with people on a daily basis and collaborating with them. Yeah, all of that, right? I mean, everything, this whole situation is terrible. What I meant primarily was the, I think that most humans like working physically with humans. I think this is something that not everybody, but many people are programmed to do. And I think that we get something out of that that is very hard to express, at least for me. And so maybe this isn't true of everybody. But, and so the question to me is, when you get through that time of adaptation, you get out of March and April, and you get into December, you get into next March, if it's not changed, right? It's already terrifying. Well, you think about that, and you think about what is the nature of work? And how do we adapt? And humans are very adaptable species, right? We can learn things when we're forced to, and there's a catalyst to make that happen. And so what is it that comes out of this, and are we better or worse off? I think that you look at the Bay Area, housing prices are insane. Well, why? Well, there's a high incentive to be physically located, because if you don't have proximity, you end up paying for it and commute, right? And there has been huge social pressure in terms of you will be there for the meeting, right? Or whatever scenario it is. And I think that's gonna be way better. I think it's gonna be much more the norm to have remote employees, and I think this is gonna be really great. Do you have friends, or do you hear of people moving? I know one family friend that moved. They moved back to Michigan, and they were a family with three kids living in a small apartment, and we're going insane, right? And they're in tech, husband works for Google. So first of all, friends of mine are in the process of, or have already lost the business. The thing that represents their passion, their dream, it could be small entrepreneurial projects, but it could be large businesses, like people that run gyms. Restaurants, tons of things, yeah. But also, people look at themselves in the mirror and ask the question of, what do I wanna do in life? For some reason, they haven't done it until COVID. They really ask that question, and that results often in moving or leaving the company with starting your own business or transitioning to a different company. Do you think we're gonna see that a lot? Well, I can't speak to that. I mean, we're definitely gonna see it at a higher frequency than we did before, just because I think what you're trying to say is there are decisions that you make yourself, big life decisions that you make yourself, and I'm gonna quit my job and start a new thing. There's also decisions that get made for you. I got fired from my job, what am I gonna do, right? And that's not a decision that you think about, but you're forced to act, okay? And so I think that those, you're forced to act kind of moments where global pandemic comes and wipes out the economy, and now your business doesn't exist. I think that does lead to more reflection, right? Because you're less anchored on what you have, and it's not a, what do I have to lose versus what do I have to gain, A, B, comparison. It's more of a fresh slate. Cool, I could do anything now. Do I wanna do the same thing I was doing? Did that make me happy? Is this now time to go back to college and take a class and learn a new skill? Is this a time to spend time with family if you can afford to do that? Is this time to literally move in with parents, right? I mean, all these things that were not normative before suddenly become, I think, very, the value systems change. And I think that's actually a good thing in the short term, at least, because it leads to, there's kind of been an overoptimization along one set of priorities for the world, and now maybe we'll get to a more balanced and more interesting world where people are doing different things. I think it could be good. I think there could be more innovation that comes out of it, for example. What do you think about all the social chaos we're in the middle of? It sucks. You think it's, let me ask you a whole, you think it's all gonna be okay? Well, I think humanity will survive. The, from an existential, like we're not all gonna kill, yeah, well. Yeah, I don't think the virus is gonna kill all the humans. I don't think all the humans are gonna kill all the humans. I think that's unlikely. But I look at it as progress requires a catalyst, right? So you need a reason for people to be willing to do things that are uncomfortable. I think that the US, at least, but I think the world in general is a pretty unoptimal place to live in for a lot of people. And I think that what we're seeing right now is we're seeing a lot of unhappiness. And because of all the pressure, because of all the badness in the world that's coming together, it's really kind of igniting some of that debate that should have happened a long time ago, right? I mean, I think that we'll see more progress. You're asking about, offline you're asking about politics and wouldn't it be great if politics moved faster because there's all these problems in the world and we can move it. Well, people are intentionally, are inherently conservative. And so if you're talking about conservative people, particularly if they have heavy burdens on their shoulders because they represent literally thousands of people, it makes sense to be conservative. But on the other hand, when you need change, how do you get it? The global pandemic will probably lead to some change. And it's not a directed, it's not a directed plan, but I think that it leads to people asking really interesting questions. And some of those questions should have been asked a long time ago. Well, let me know if you've observed this as well. Something that's bothered me in the machine learning community, I'm guessing it might be prevalent in other places, is something that feels like in 2020 increase the level of toxicity. Like people are just quicker to pile on, to just be, they're just harsh on each other, to like mob, pick a person that screwed up and like make it a big thing. And is there something that we can like, yeah, have you observed that in other places? Is there some way out of this? I think there's an inherent thing in humanity that's kind of an us versus them thing, which is that you wanna succeed and how do you succeed? Well, it's relative to somebody else. And so what's happening in, at least in some part is that with the internet and with online communication, the world's getting smaller, right? And so we're having some of the social ties of like my town versus your town's football team, right? Turn into much larger and yet shallower problems. And people don't have time, the incentives, the clickbait and like all these things kind of really feed into this machine. And I don't know where that goes. Yeah, I mean, the reason I think about that, I mentioned to you this offline a little bit, but I have a few difficult conversations scheduled, some of them political related, some of them within the community, difficult personalities that went through some stuff. I mean, one of them I've talked before, I will talk again is Yann LeCun. He got a little bit of crap on Twitter for talking about a particular paper and the bias within a data set. And then there's been a huge, in my view, and I'm willing, comfortable saying it, irrational, over exaggerated pile on his comments because he made pretty basic comments about the fact that if there's bias in the data, there's going to be bias in the results. So we should not have bias in the data, but people piled on to him because he said he trivialized the problem of bias. Like it's a lot more than just bias in the data, but like, yes, that's a very good point, but that's not what he was saying. That's not what he was saying. And the response, like the implied response that he's basically sexist and racist is something that completely drives away the possibility of nuanced discussion. One nice thing about like a pocket long form of conversation is you can talk it out. You can lay your reasoning out. And even if you're wrong, you can still show that you're a good human being underneath it. You know, your point about you can't have a productive discussion. Well, how do you get to the point where people can turn? They can learn, they can listen, they can think, they can engage versus just being a shallow like, and then keep moving, right? And I don't think that progress really comes from that, right? And I don't think that one should expect that. I think that you'd see that as reinforcing individual circles and the us versus them thing. And I think that's fairly divisive. Yeah, I think there's a big role in, like the people that bother me most on Twitter when I observe things is not the people who get very emotional, angry, like over the top. It's the people who like prop them up. It's all the, it's this, I think what should be the, we should teach each other is to be sort of empathetic. The thing that it's really easy to forget, particularly on like Twitter or the internet or an email, is that sometimes people just have a bad day, right? You have a bad day or you're like, I've been in the situation where it's like between meetings, like fire off a quick response to an email because I want to like help get something unblocked, phrase it really objectively wrong. I screwed up. And suddenly this is now something that sticks with people. And it's not because they're bad. It's not because you're bad. Just psychology of like, you said a thing, it sticks with you. You didn't mean it that way, but it really impacted somebody because the way they interpret it. And this is just an aspect of working together as humans. And I have a lot of optimism in the long term, the very long term about what we as humanity can do. But I think that's going to be, it's just always a rough ride. And you came into this by saying like, what does COVID and all the social strife that's happening right now mean? And I think that it's really bad in the short term, but I think it'll lead to progress. And for that, I'm very thankful. Yeah, painful in the short term though. Well, yeah. I mean, people are out of jobs. Like some people can't eat. Like it's horrible. And, but you know, it's progress. So we'll see what happens. I mean, the real question is when you look back 10 years, 20 years, a hundred years from now, how do we evaluate the decisions are being made right now? I think that's really the way you can frame that and look at it. And you say, you know, you integrate across all the short term horribleness that's happening and you look at what that means and is the improvement across the world or the regression across the world significant enough to make it a good or a bad thing? I think that's the question. Yeah. And for that, it's good to study history. I mean, one of the big problems for me right now is I'm reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Light reading? So it's everything is just, I just see parallels and it means it's, you have to be really careful not to overstep it, but just the thing that worries me the most is the pain that people feel when a few things combine, which is like economic depression, which is quite possible in this country. And then just being disrespected in some kind of way, which the German people were really disrespected by most of the world, like in a way that's over the top, that something can build up and then all you need is a charismatic leader to go either positive or negative and both work as long as they're charismatic. And there's... It's taking advantage of, again, that inflection point that the world's in and what they do with it could be good or bad. And so it's a good way to think about times now, like on an individual level, what we decide to do is when history is written, 30 years from now, what happened in 2020, probably history is gonna remember 2020. Yeah, I think so. Either for good or bad, and it's up to us to write it so it's good. Well, one of the things I've observed that I find fascinating is most people act as though the world doesn't change. You make decision knowingly, right? You make a decision where you're predicting the future based on what you've seen in the recent past. And so if something's always been, it's rained every single day, then of course you expect it to rain today too, right? On the other hand, the world changes all the time. Yeah. Constantly, like for better and for worse. And so the question is, if you're interested in something that's not right, what is the inflection point that led to a change? And you can look to history for this. Like what is the catalyst that led to that explosion that led to that bill that led to the, like you can kind of work your way backwards from that. And maybe if you pull together the right people and you get the right ideas together, you can actually start driving that change and doing it in a way that's productive and hurts fewer people. Yeah, like a single person, a single event can turn all of history. Absolutely, everything starts somewhere. And often it's a combination of multiple factors, but yeah, these things can be engineered. That's actually the optimistic view that. I'm a longterm optimist on pretty much everything and human nature. We can look to all the negative things that humanity has, all the pettiness and all the like self servingness and the just the cruelty, right? The biases, the just humans can be very horrible. But on the other hand, we're capable of amazing things. And the progress across 100 year chunks is striking. And even across decades, we've come a long ways and there's still a long ways to go, but that doesn't mean that we've stopped. Yeah, the kind of stuff we've done in the last 100 years is unbelievable. It's kind of scary to think what's gonna happen in this 100 years. It's scary, like exciting. Like scary in a sense that it's kind of sad that the kind of technology is gonna come out in 10, 20, 30 years. We're probably too old to really appreciate if you don't grow up with it. It'll be like kids these days with their virtual reality and their TikToks and stuff like this. Like, how does this thing and like, come on, give me my static photo. My Commodore 64. Yeah, exactly. Okay, sorry, we kind of skipped over. Let me ask on, the machine learning world has been kind of inspired, their imagination captivated with GPT3 and these language models. I thought it'd be cool to get your opinion on it. What's your thoughts on this exciting world of, it connects to computation actually, is of language models that are huge and take many, many computers, not just to train, but to also do inference on. Sure. Well, I mean, it depends on what you're speaking to there. But I mean, I think that there's been a pretty well understood maximum in deep learning that if you make the model bigger and you shove more data into it, assuming you train it right and you have a good model architecture, that you'll get a better model out. And so on one hand, GPT3 was not that surprising. On the other hand, a tremendous amount of engineering went into making it possible. The implications of it are pretty huge. I think that when GPT2 came out, there was a very provocative blog post from OpenAI talking about, we're not gonna release it because of the social damage it could cause if it's misused. I think that's still a concern. I think that we need to look at how technology is applied and well meaning tools can be applied in very horrible ways and they can have very profound impact on that. I think that GPT3 is a huge technical achievement. And what will GPT4 be? Well, it'll probably be bigger, more expensive to train. Really cool architectural tricks. What do you think, is there, I don't know how much thought you've done on distributed computing. Is there some technical challenges that are interesting that you're hopeful about exploring in terms of a system that, like a piece of code that with GPT4 that might have, I don't know, hundreds of trillions of parameters which have to run on thousands of computers. Is there some hope that we can make that happen? Yeah, well, I mean, today you can write a check and get access to a thousand TPU cores and do really interesting large scale training and inference and things like that in Google Cloud, for example, right? And so I don't think it's a question about scale, it's a question about utility. And when I look at the transformer series of architectures that the GPT series is based on, it's really interesting to look at that because they're actually very simple designs. They're not recurrent. The training regimens are pretty simple. And so they don't really reflect like human brains, right? But they're really good at learning language models and they're unrolled enough that you can simulate some recurrence, right? And so the question I think about is, where does this take us? Like, so we can just keep scaling it, have more parameters, more data, more things, we'll get a better result for sure. But are there architectural techniques that can lead to progress at a faster pace, right? This is when, you know, how do you get, instead of just like making it a constant time bigger, how do you get like an algorithmic improvement out of this, right? And whether it be a new training regimen, if it becomes sparse networks, for example, the human brain is sparse, all these networks are dense. The connectivity patterns can be very different. I think this is where I get very interested and I'm way out of my league on the deep learning side of this. But I think that could lead to big breakthroughs. When you talk about large scale networks, one of the things that Jeff Dean likes to talk about and he's given a few talks on is this idea of having a sparsely gated mixture of experts kind of a model where you have, you know, different nets that are trained and are really good at certain kinds of tasks. And so you have this distributor across a cluster and so you have a lot of different computers that end up being kind of locally specialized in different demands. And then when a query comes in, you gate it and you use learn techniques to route to different parts of the network. And then you utilize the compute resources of the entire cluster by having specialization within it. And I don't know where that goes or when it starts to work, but I think things like that could be really interesting as well. And on the data side too, if you can think of data selection as a kind of programming. Yeah. I mean, essentially, if you look at it, like Karpathy talked about software 2.0, I mean, in a sense, data is the program. Yeah, yeah. So let me try to summarize Andre's position really quick before I disagree with it. Yeah. So Andre Karpathy is amazing. So this is nothing personal with him. He's an amazing engineer. And also a good blog post writer. Yeah, well, he's a great communicator. You know, he's just an amazing person. He's also really sweet. So his basic premise is that software is suboptimal. I think we can all agree to that. He also points out that deep learning and other learning based techniques are really great because you can solve problems in more structured ways with less like ad hoc code that people write out and don't write test cases for in some cases. And so they don't even know if it works in the first place. And so if you start replacing systems of imperative code with deep learning models, then you get a better result. Okay. And I think that he argues that software 2.0 is a pervasively learned set of models and you get away from writing code. And he's given talks where he talks about, you know, swapping over more and more and more parts of the code to being learned and driven that way. I think that works. And if you're predisposed to liking machine learning, then I think that that's definitely a good thing. I think this is also good for accessibility in many ways because certain people are not gonna write C code or something. And so having a data driven approach to do this kind of stuff, I think can be very valuable. On the other hand, there are huge trade offs. It's not clear to me that software 2.0 is the answer. And probably Andre wouldn't argue that it's the answer for every problem either. But I look at machine learning as not a replacement for software 1.0. I look at it as a new programming paradigm. And so programming paradigms, when you look across demands, is structured programming where you go from go tos to if, then, else, or functional programming from Lisp. And you start talking about higher order functions and values and things like this. Or you talk about object oriented programming. You're talking about encapsulation, subclassing, inheritance. You start talking about generic programming where you start talking about code reuse through specialization and different type instantiations. When you start talking about differentiable programming, something that I am very excited about in the context of machine learning, talking about taking functions and generating variants, like the derivative of another function. Like that's a programming paradigm that's very useful for solving certain classes of problems. Machine learning is amazing at solving certain classes of problems. Like you're not gonna write a cat detector or even a language translation system by writing C code. That's not a very productive way to do things anymore. And so machine learning is absolutely the right way to do that. In fact, I would say that learned models are really one of the best ways to work with the human world in general. And so anytime you're talking about sensory input of different modalities, anytime that you're talking about generating things in a way that makes sense to a human, I think that learned models are really, really useful. And that's because humans are very difficult to characterize, okay? And so this is a very powerful paradigm for solving classes of problems. But on the other hand, imperative code is too. You're not gonna write a bootloader for your computer with a deep learning model. Deep learning models are very hardware intensive. They're very energy intensive because you have a lot of parameters and you can provably implement any function with a learned model, like this has been shown, but that doesn't make it efficient. And so if you're talking about caring about a few orders of magnitudes worth of energy usage, then it's useful to have other tools in the toolbox. There's also robustness too. I mean, as a... Yeah, exactly. All the problems of dealing with data and bias in data, all the problems of software 2.0. And one of the great things that Andre is arguing towards, which I completely agree with him, is that when you start implementing things with deep learning, you need to learn from software 1.0 in terms of testing, continuous integration, how you deploy, how do you validate, all these things and building systems around that so that you're not just saying like, oh, it seems like it's good, ship it, right? Well, what happens when I regress something? What happens when I make a classification that's wrong and now I hurt somebody, right? I mean, all these things you have to reason about. Yeah, but at the same time, the bootloader that works for us humans looks awfully a lot like a neural network, right? Yeah. It's messy and you can cut out different parts of the brain. There's a lot of this neuroplasticity work that shows that it's gonna adjust. It's a really interesting question, how much of the world's programming could be replaced by software 2.0? Like with... Oh, well, I mean, it's provably true that you could replace all of it. Right, so then it's a question of the trade offs. Anything that's a function, you can. So it's not a question about if. I think it's a economic question. It's a, what kind of talent can you get? What kind of trade offs in terms of maintenance, right? Those kinds of questions, I think. What kind of data can you collect? I think one of the reasons that I'm most interested in machine learning as a programming paradigm is that one of the things that we've seen across computing in general is that being laser focused on one paradigm often puts you in a box that's not super great. And so you look at object oriented programming, like it was all the rage in the early 80s and like everything has to be objects. And people forgot about functional programming even though it came first. And then people rediscovered that, hey, if you mix functional and object oriented in structure, like you mix these things together, you can provide very interesting tools that are good at solving different problems. And so the question there is how do you get the best way to solve the problems? It's not about whose tribe should win, right? It's not about, you know, that shouldn't be the question. The question is how do you make it so that people can solve those problems the fastest and they have the right tools in their box to build good libraries and they can solve these problems. And when you look at that, that's like, you know, you look at reinforcement learning as one really interesting subdomain of this. Reinforcement learning, often you have to have the integration of a learned model combined with your Atari or whatever the other scenario it is that you're working in. You have to combine that thing with the robot control for the arm, right? And so now it's not just about that one paradigm, it's about integrating that with all the other systems that you have, including often legacy systems and things like this, right? And so to me, I think that the interesting thing to say is like, how do you get the best out of this domain and how do you enable people to achieve things that they otherwise couldn't do without excluding all the good things we already know how to do? Right, but okay, this is a crazy question, but we talked a little bit about GPT3, but do you think it's possible that these language models that in essence, in the language domain, Software 2.0 could replace some aspect of compilation, for example, or do program synthesis, replace some aspect of programming? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that learned models in general are extremely powerful, and I think that people underestimate them. Maybe you can suggest what I should do. So if I have access to the GPT3 API, would I be able to generate Swift code, for example? Do you think that could do something interesting and would work? So GPT3 is probably not trained on the right corpus, so it probably has the ability to generate some Swift. I bet it does. It's probably not gonna generate a large enough body of Swift to be useful, but take it a next step further. Like if you had the goal of training something like GPT3 and you wanted to train it to generate source code, right? It could definitely do that. Now the question is, how do you express the intent of what you want filled in? You can definitely write scaffolding of code and say, fill in the hole, and sort of put in some for loops, or put in some classes or whatever. And the power of these models is impressive, but there's an unsolved question, at least unsolved to me, which is, how do I express the intent of what to fill in? Right? And kind of what you'd really want to have, and I don't know that these models are up to the task, is you wanna be able to say, here's the scaffolding, and here are the assertions at the end. And the assertions always pass. And so you want a generative model on the one hand, yes. Oh, that's fascinating, yeah. Right, but you also want some loop back, some reinforcement learning system or something, where you're actually saying like, I need to hill climb towards something that is more correct. And I don't know that we have that. So it would generate not only a bunch of the code, but like the checks that do the testing. It would generate the tests. I think the humans would generate the tests, right? Oh, okay. But it would be fascinating if... Well, the tests are the requirements. Yes, but the, okay, so... Because you have to express to the model what you want to... You don't just want gibberish code. Look at how compelling this code looks. You want a story about four horned unicorns or something. Well, okay, so exactly. But that's human requirements. But then I thought it's a compelling idea that the GPT4 model could generate checks that are more high fidelity that check for correctness. Because the code it generates, like say I ask it to generate a function that gives me the Fibonacci sequence. Sure. I don't like... So decompose the problem, right? So you have two things. You have, you need the ability to generate syntactically correct Swift code that's interesting, right? I think GPT series of model architectures can do that. But then you need the ability to add the requirements. So generate Fibonacci. The human needs to express that goal. We don't have that language that I know of. No, I mean, it can generate stuff. Have you seen what GPT3 can generate? You can say, I mean, there's a interface stuff like it can generate HTML. It can generate basic for loops that give you like... Right, but pick HTML. How do I say I want google.com? Well, no, you could say... Or not literally google.com. How do I say I want a webpage that's got a shopping cart and this and that? It does that. I mean, so, okay. So just, I don't know if you've seen these demonstrations but you type in, I want a red button with the text that says hello. And you type that in natural language and it generates the correct HTML. I've done this demo. It's kind of compelling. So you have to prompt it with similar kinds of mappings. Of course, it's probably handpicked. I got to experiment that probably, but the fact that you can do that once even out of like 20 is quite impressive. Again, that's very basic. Like the HTML is kind of messy and bad. But yes, the intent is... The idea is the intent is specified in natural language. Yeah, so I have not seen that. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah, but the question is the correctness of that. Like visually you can check, oh, the button is red, but for more complicated functions where the intent is harder to check. This goes into like NP completeness kind of things. Like I want to know that this code is correct and generates a giant thing that does some kind of calculation. It seems to be working. It's interesting to think like, should the system also try to generate checks for itself for correctness? Yeah, I don't know. And this is way beyond my experience. The thing that I think about is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of equational reasoning going on. There's a lot of pattern matching and filling in and kind of propagating patterns that have been seen before into the future and into the generator result. And so if you want to get correctness, you kind of need theorem proving kind of things and like higher level logic. And I don't know that... You could talk to Jan about that and see what the bright minds are thinking about right now, but I don't think the GPT is in that vein. It's still really cool. Yeah, and surprisingly, who knows, maybe reasoning is... Is overrated. Yeah, is overrated. Right, I mean, do we reason? Yeah. How do you tell, right? Are we just pattern matching based on what we have and then reverse justifying to ourselves? Exactly, the reverse. So like I think what the neural networks are missing and I think GPT4 might have is to be able to tell stories to itself about what it did. Well, that's what humans do, right? I mean, you talk about like network explainability, right? And we give, no, that's a hard time about this, but humans don't know why we make decisions. We have this thing called intuition and then we try to like say, this feels like the right thing, but why, right? And you wrestle with that when you're making hard decisions and is that science? Not really. Let me ask you about a few high level questions, I guess. Because you've done a million things in your life and been very successful. A bunch of young folks listen to this, ask for advice from successful people like you. If you were to give advice to somebody, you know, another graduate student or some high school student about pursuing a career in computing or just advice about life in general, is there some words of wisdom you can give them? So I think you come back to change and profound leaps happen because people are willing to believe that change is possible and that the world does change and are willing to do the hard thing that it takes to make change happen. And whether it be implementing a new programming language or employing a new system or employing a new research paper, designing a new thing, moving the world forward in science and philosophy, whatever, it really comes down to somebody who's willing to put in the work, right? And you have, the work is hard for a whole bunch of different reasons. One of which is, it's work, right? And so you have to have the space in your life in which you can do that work, which is why going to grad school can be a beautiful thing for certain people. But also there's a self doubt that happens. Like you're two years into a project, is it going anywhere, right? Well, what do you do? Do you just give up because it's hard? No, no, I mean, some people like suffering. And so you plow through it. The secret to me is that you have to love what you're doing and follow that passion because when you get to the hard times, that's when, if you love what you're doing, you're willing to kind of push through. And this is really hard because it's hard to know what you will love doing until you start doing a lot of things. And so that's why I think that, particularly early in your career, it's good to experiment. Do a little bit of everything. Go take the survey class on the first half of every class in your upper division lessons and just get exposure to things because certain things will resonate with you and you'll find out, wow, I'm really good at this. I'm really smart at this. Well, it's just because it works with the way your brain. And when something jumps out, I mean, that's one of the things that people often ask about is like, well, I think there's a bunch of cool stuff out there. Like how do I pick the thing? Like how do you hook, in your life, how did you just hook yourself in and stuck with it? Well, I got lucky, right? I mean, I think that many people forget that a huge amount of it or most of it is luck, right? So let's not forget that. So for me, I fell in love with computers early on because they spoke to me, I guess. What language did they speak? Basic. Basic, yeah. But then it was just kind of following a set of logical progressions, but also deciding that something that was hard was worth doing and a lot of fun, right? And so I think that that is also something that's true for many other domains, which is if you find something that you love doing that's also hard, if you invest yourself in it and add value to the world, then it will mean something generally, right? And again, that can be a research paper, that can be a software system, that can be a new robot, that can be, there's many things that that can be, but a lot of it is like real value comes from doing things that are hard. And that doesn't mean you have to suffer, but. It's hard. I mean, you don't often hear that message. We talked about it last time a little bit, but it's one of my, not enough people talk about this. It's beautiful to hear a successful person. Well, and self doubt and imposter syndrome, these are all things that successful people suffer with as well, particularly when they put themselves in a point of being uncomfortable, which I like to do now and then just because it puts you in learning mode. Like if you wanna grow as a person, put yourself in a room with a bunch of people that know way more about whatever you're talking about than you do and ask dumb questions. And guess what? Smart people love to teach often, not always, but often. And if you listen, if you're prepared to listen, if you're prepared to grow, if you're prepared to make connections, you can do some really interesting things. And I think a lot of progress is made by people who kind of hop between domains now and then, because they bring a perspective into a field that nobody else has, if people have only been working in that field themselves. We mentioned that the universe is kind of like a compiler. The entirety of it, the whole evolution is kind of a kind of compilation. Maybe us human beings are kind of compilers. Let me ask the old sort of question that I didn't ask you last time, which is what's the meaning of it all? Is there a meaning? Like if you asked a compiler why, what would a compiler say? What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of life? I'm prepared for it not to mean anything. Here we are, all biological things programmed to survive and propagate our DNA. And maybe the universe is just a computer and you just go until entropy takes over the universe and then you're done. I don't think that's a very productive way to live your life, if so. And so I prefer to bias towards the other way, which is saying the universe has a lot of value. And I take happiness out of other people. And a lot of times part of that's having kids, but also the relationships you build with other people. And so the way I try to live my life is like, what can I do that has value? How can I move the world forward? How can I take what I'm good at and bring it into the world? And I'm one of these people that likes to work really hard and be very focused on the things that I do. And so if I'm gonna do that, how can it be in a domain that actually will matter? Because a lot of things that we do, we find ourselves in the cycle of like, okay, I'm doing a thing. I'm very familiar with it. I've done it for a long time. I've never done anything else, but I'm not really learning, right? I'm not really, I'm keeping things going, but there's a younger generation that can do the same thing, maybe even better than me, right? Maybe if I actually step out of this and jump into something I'm less comfortable with, it's scary. But on the other hand, it gives somebody else a new opportunity. It also then puts you back in learning mode, and that can be really interesting. And one of the things I've learned is that when you go through that, that first you're deep into imposter syndrome, but when you start working your way out, you start to realize, hey, well, there's actually a method to this. And now I'm able to add new things because I bring different perspective. And this is one of the good things about bringing different kinds of people together. Diversity of thought is really important. And if you can pull together people that are coming at things from different directions, you often get innovation. And I love to see that, that aha moment where you're like, oh, we've really cracked this. This is something nobody's ever done before. And then if you can do it in the context where it adds value, other people can build on it, it helps move the world, then that's what really excites me. So that kind of description of the magic of the human experience, do you think we'll ever create that in an AGI system? Do you think we'll be able to create, give AI systems a sense of meaning where they operate in this kind of world exactly in the way you've described, which is they interact with each other, they interact with us humans. Sure, sure. Well, so, I mean, why are you being so a speciest, right? All right, so AGI versus Bionets, or something like that versus biology, right? You know, what are we but machines, right? We're just programmed to run our, we have our objective function that we were optimized for, right? And so we're doing our thing, we think we have purpose, but do we really, right? I'm not prepared to say that those newfangled AGI's have no soul just because we don't understand them, right? And I think that would be, when they exist, that would be very premature to look at a new thing through your own lens without fully understanding it. You might be just saying that because AI systems in the future will be listening to this and then. Oh yeah, exactly. You don't wanna say anything. Please be nice to me, you know, when Skynet kills everybody, please spare me. So wise look ahead thinking. Yeah, but I mean, I think that people will spend a lot of time worrying about this kind of stuff, and I think that what we should be worrying about is how do we make the world better? And the thing that I'm most scared about with AGI's is not that necessarily the Skynet will start shooting everybody with lasers and stuff like that to use us for our calories. The thing that I'm worried about is that humanity, I think, needs a challenge. And if we get into a mode of not having a personal challenge, not having a personal contribution, whether that be like, you know, your kids and seeing what they grow into and helping guide them, whether it be your community that you're engaged in, you're driving forward, whether it be your work and the things that you're doing and the people you're working with and the products you're building and the contribution there, if people don't have a objective, I'm afraid what that means. And I think that this would lead to a rise of the worst part of people, right? Instead of people striving together and trying to make the world better, it could degrade into a very unpleasant world. But I don't know. I mean, we hopefully have a long ways to go before we discover that. And fortunately, we have pretty on the ground problems with the pandemic right now, and so I think we should be focused on that as well. Yeah, ultimately, just as you said, you're optimistic. I think it helps for us to be optimistic. So that's fake it until you make it. Yeah, well, and why not? What's the other side, right? So, I mean, I'm not personally a very religious person, but I've heard people say like, oh yeah, of course I believe in God. Of course I go to church, because if God's real, you know, I wanna be on the right side of that. If it's not real, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And so, you know, that's a fair way to do it. Yeah, I mean, the same thing with nuclear deterrence, all, you know, global warming, all these things, all these threats, natural engineer pandemics, all these threats we face. I think it's paralyzing to be terrified of all the possible ways we could destroy ourselves. I think it's much better or at least productive to be hopeful and to engineer defenses against these things, to engineer a future where like, you know, see like a positive future and engineer that future. Yeah, well, and I think that's another thing to think about as, you know, a human, particularly if you're young and trying to figure out what it is that you wanna be when you grow up, like I am. I'm always looking for that. The question then is, how do you wanna spend your time? And right now there seems to be a norm of being a consumption culture. Like I'm gonna watch the news and revel in how horrible everything is right now. I'm going to go find out about the latest atrocity and find out all the details of like the terrible thing that happened and be outraged by it. You can spend a lot of time watching TV and watching the news at home or whatever people watch these days, I don't know. But that's a lot of hours, right? And those are hours that if you're turned to being productive, learning, growing, experiencing, you know, when the pandemic's over, going exploring, right, it leads to more growth. And I think it leads to more optimism and happiness because you're building, right? You're building yourself, you're building your capabilities, you're building your viewpoints, you're building your perspective. And I think that a lot of the consuming of other people's messages leads to kind of a negative viewpoint, which you need to be aware of what's happening because that's also important, but there's a balance that I think focusing on creation is a very valuable thing to do. Yeah, so what you're saying is people should focus on working on the sexiest field of them all, which is compiler design. Exactly. Hey, you could go work on machine learning and be crowded out by the thousands of graduates popping out of school that all want to do the same thing, or you could work in the place that people overpay you because there's not enough smart people working in it. And here at the end of Moore's Law, according to some people, actually the software is the hard part too. I mean, optimization is truly, truly beautiful. And also on the YouTube side or education side, it'd be nice to have some material that shows the beauty of compilers. Yeah, yeah. That's something. So that's a call for people to create that kind of content as well. Chris, you're one of my favorite people to talk to. It's such a huge honor that you would waste your time talking to me. I've always appreciated it. Thank you so much for talking to me. The truth of it is you spent a lot of time talking to me just on walks and other things like that, so it's great to catch up with. Thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Latner, and thank you to our sponsors. Blinkist, an app that summarizes key ideas from thousands of books. Neuro, which is a maker of functional gum and mints that supercharge my mind. Masterclass, which are online courses from world experts. And finally, Cash App, which is an app for sending money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Chris Latner. So much of language design is about tradeoffs, and you can't see those tradeoffs unless you have a community of people that really represent those different points. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages | Lex Fridman Podcast #131

The following is a conversation with George Hotz, AKA Geohot, his second time on the podcast. He's the founder of Comma AI, an autonomous and semi autonomous vehicle technology company that seeks to be to Tesla Autopilot what Android is to the iOS. They sell the Comma 2 device for $1,000 that when installed in many of their supported cars can keep the vehicle centered in the lane even when there are no lane markings. It includes driver sensing that ensures that the driver's eyes are on the road. As you may know, I'm a big fan of driver sensing. I do believe Tesla Autopilot and others should definitely include it in their sensor suite. Also, I'm a fan of Android and a big fan of George for many reasons, including his nonlinear out of the box brilliance and the fact that he's a superstar programmer of a very different style than myself. Styles make fights and styles make conversations. So I really enjoyed this chat and I'm sure we'll talk many more times on this podcast. Quick mention of a sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. Second is The Coding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that my work at MIT on autonomous and semi autonomous vehicles led me to study the human side of autonomy enough to understand that it's a beautifully complicated and interesting problem space, much richer than what can be studied in the lab. In that sense, the data that Comma AI, Tesla Autopilot and perhaps others like Cadillac Super Cruiser collecting gives us a chance to understand how we can design safe semi autonomous vehicles for real human beings in real world conditions. I think this requires bold innovation and a serious exploration of the first principles of the driving task itself. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with George Hotz. So last time we started talking about the simulation, this time let me ask you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe? I've always maintained my answer to the Fermi paradox. I think there has been intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. So intelligent civilizations existed but they've blown themselves up. So your general intuition is that intelligent civilizations quickly, like there's that parameter in the Drake equation. Your sense is they don't last very long. Yeah. How are we doing on that? Like, have we lasted pretty good? Oh no. Are we do? Oh yeah. I mean, not quite yet. Well, it was good to tell you, as you'd ask the IQ required to destroy the world falls by one point every year. Okay. Technology democratizes the destruction of the world. When can a meme destroy the world? It kind of is already, right? Somewhat. I don't think we've seen anywhere near the worst of it yet. Well, it's going to get weird. Well, maybe a meme can save the world. You thought about that? The meme Lord Elon Musk fighting on the side of good versus the meme Lord of the darkness, which is not saying anything bad about Donald Trump, but he is the Lord of the meme on the dark side. He's a Darth Vader of memes. I think in every fairy tale they always end it with, and they lived happily ever after. And I'm like, please tell me more about this happily ever after. I've heard 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why doesn't your marriage end up there? You can't just say happily ever after. So it's the thing about destruction is it's over after the destruction. We have to do everything right in order to avoid it. And one thing wrong, I mean, actually this is what I really like about cryptography. Cryptography, it seems like we live in a world where the defense wins versus like nuclear weapons. The opposite is true. It is much easier to build a warhead that splits into a hundred little warheads than to build something that can, you know, take out a hundred little warheads. The offense has the advantage there. So maybe our future is in crypto, but. So cryptography, right. The Goliath is the defense. And then all the different hackers are the Davids. And that equation is flipped for nuclear war. Cause there's so many, like one nuclear weapon destroys everything essentially. Yeah, and it is much easier to attack with a nuclear weapon than it is to like the technology required to intercept and destroy a rocket is much more complicated than the technology required to just, you know, orbital trajectory, send a rocket to somebody. So, okay. Your intuition that there were intelligent civilizations out there, but it's very possible that they're no longer there. That's kind of a sad picture. They enter some steady state. They all wirehead themselves. What's wirehead? Stimulate, stimulate their pleasure centers and just, you know, live forever in this kind of stasis. They become, well, I mean, I think the reason I believe this is because where are they? If there's some reason they stopped expanding, cause otherwise they would have taken over the universe. The universe isn't that big. Or at least, you know, let's just talk about the galaxy, right? That's 70,000 light years across. I took that number from Star Trek Voyager. I don't know how true it is, but yeah, that's not big. Right? 70,000 light years is nothing. For some possible technology that you can imagine that can leverage like wormholes or something like that. Or you don't even need wormholes. Just a von Neumann probe is enough. A von Neumann probe and a million years of sublight travel and you'd have taken over the whole universe. That clearly didn't happen. So something stopped it. So you mean if you, right, for like a few million years, if you sent out probes that travel close, what's sublight? You mean close to the speed of light? Let's say 0.1 C. And it just spreads. Interesting. Actually, that's an interesting calculation, huh? So what makes you think that we'd be able to communicate with them? Like, yeah, what's, why do you think we would be able to be able to comprehend intelligent lives that are out there? Like even if they were among us kind of thing, like, or even just flying around? Well, I mean, that's possible. It's possible that there is some sort of prime directive. That'd be a really cool universe to live in. And there's some reason they're not making themselves visible to us. But it makes sense that they would use the same, well, at least the same entropy. Well, you're implying the same laws of physics. I don't know what you mean by entropy in this case. Oh, yeah. I mean, if entropy is the scarce resource in the universe. So what do you think about like Stephen Wolfram and everything is a computation? And then what if they are traveling through this world of computation? So if you think of the universe as just information processing, then what you're referring to with entropy and then these pockets of interesting complex computation swimming around, how do we know they're not already here? How do we know that this, like all the different amazing things that are full of mystery on earth are just like little footprints of intelligence from light years away? Maybe. I mean, I tend to think that as civilizations expand, they use more and more energy and you can never overcome the problem of waste heat. So where is there waste heat? So we'd be able to, with our crude methods, be able to see like, there's a whole lot of energy here. But it could be something we're not, I mean, we don't understand dark energy, right? Dark matter. It could be just stuff we don't understand at all. Or they can have a fundamentally different physics, you know, like that we just don't even comprehend. Well, I think, okay, I mean, it depends how far out you wanna go. I don't think physics is very different on the other side of the galaxy. I would suspect that they have, I mean, if they're in our universe, they have the same physics. Well, yeah, that's the assumption we have, but there could be like super trippy things like our cognition only gets to a slice, and all the possible instruments that we can design only get to a particular slice of the universe. And there's something much like weirder. Maybe we can try a thought experiment. Would people from the past be able to detect the remnants of our, or would we be able to detect our modern civilization? I think the answer is obviously yes. You mean past from a hundred years ago? Well, let's even go back further. Let's go to a million years ago, right? The humans who were lying around in the desert probably didn't even have, maybe they just barely had fire. They would understand if a 747 flew overhead. Oh, in this vicinity, but not if a 747 flew on Mars. Like, cause they wouldn't be able to see far, cause we're not actually communicating that well with the rest of the universe. We're doing okay. Just sending out random like fifties tracks of music. True. And yeah, I mean, they'd have to, you know, we've only been broadcasting radio waves for 150 years. And well, there's your light cone. So. Yeah. Okay. What do you make about all the, I recently came across this having talked to David Fravor. I don't know if you caught what the videos of the Pentagon released and the New York Times reporting of the UFO sightings. So I kind of looked into it, quote unquote. And there's actually been like hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, right? And a lot of it you can explain away in different kinds of ways. So one is it could be interesting physical phenomena. Two, it could be people wanting to believe and therefore they conjure up a lot of different things that just, you know, when you see different kinds of lights, some basic physics phenomena, and then you just conjure up ideas of possible out there mysterious worlds. But, you know, it's also possible, like you have a case of David Fravor, who is a Navy pilot, who's, you know, as legit as it gets in terms of humans who are able to perceive things in the environment and make conclusions, whether those things are a threat or not. And he and several other pilots saw a thing, I don't know if you followed this, but they saw a thing that they've since then called TikTok that moved in all kinds of weird ways. They don't know what it is. It could be technology developed by the United States and they're just not aware of it and the surface level from the Navy, right? It could be different kind of lighting technology or drone technology, all that kind of stuff. It could be the Russians and the Chinese, all that kind of stuff. And of course their mind, our mind, can also venture into the possibility that it's from another world. Have you looked into this at all? What do you think about it? I think all the news is a psyop. I think that the most plausible. Nothing is real. Yeah, I listened to the, I think it was Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan. And like, I believe everything this guy is saying. And then I think that it's probably just some like MKUltra kind of thing, you know? What do you mean? Like they, you know, they made some weird thing and they called it an alien spaceship. You know, maybe it was just to like stimulate young physicists minds. We'll tell them it's alien technology and we'll see what they come up with, right? Do you find any conspiracy theories compelling? Like have you pulled at the string of the rich complex world of conspiracy theories that's out there? I think that I've heard a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories were invented by the CIA in the 60s to discredit true things. Yeah. So, you know, you can go to ridiculous conspiracy theories like Flat Earth and Pizza Gate. And, you know, these things are almost to hide like conspiracy theories that like, you know, remember when the Chinese like locked up the doctors who discovered coronavirus? Like I tell people this and I'm like, no, no, no, that's not a conspiracy theory. That actually happened. Do you remember the time that the money used to be backed by gold and now it's backed by nothing? This is not a conspiracy theory. This actually happened. Well, that's one of my worries today with the idea of fake news is that when nothing is real, then like you dilute the possibility of anything being true by conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy theories. And then you don't know what to believe. And then like the idea of truth of objectivity is lost completely. Everybody has their own truth. So you used to control information by censoring it. And then the internet happened and governments were like, oh shit, we can't censor things anymore. I know what we'll do. You know, it's the old story of the story of like tying a flag with a leprechaun tells you his gold is buried and you tie one flag and you make the leprechaun swear to not remove the flag. And you come back to the field later with a shovel and there's flags everywhere. That's one way to maintain privacy, right? It's like in order to protect the contents of this conversation, for example, we could just generate like millions of deep, fake conversations where you and I talk and say random things. So this is just one of them and nobody knows which one was the real one. This could be fake right now. Classic steganography technique. Okay, another absurd question about intelligent life. Cause you know, you're an incredible programmer outside of everything else we'll talk about just as a programmer. Do you think intelligent beings out there, the civilizations that were out there, had computers and programming? Did they, do we naturally have to develop something where we engineer machines and are able to encode both knowledge into those machines and instructions that process that knowledge, process that information to make decisions and actions and so on? And would those programming languages, if you think they exist, be at all similar to anything we've developed? So I don't see that much of a difference between quote unquote natural languages and programming languages. Yeah. I think there's so many similarities. So when asked the question, what do alien languages look like? I imagine they're not all that dissimilar from ours. And I think translating in and out of them wouldn't be that crazy. Well, it's difficult to compile like DNA to Python and then to C. There's a little bit of a gap in the kind of languages we use for touring machines and the kind of languages nature seems to use a little bit. Maybe that's just, we just haven't understood the kind of language that nature uses well yet. DNA is a CAD model. It's not quite a programming language. It has no sort of a serial execution. It's not quite a, yeah, it's a CAD model. So I think in that sense, we actually completely understand it. The problem is, well, simulating on these CAD models, I played with it a bit this year, is super computationally intensive. If you wanna go down to like the molecular level where you need to go to see a lot of these phenomenon like protein folding. So yeah, it's not that we don't understand it. It just requires a whole lot of compute to kind of compile it. For our human minds, it's inefficient, both for the data representation and for the programming. Yeah, it runs well on raw nature. It runs well on raw nature. And when we try to build emulators or simulators for that, well, they're mad slow, but I've tried it. It runs in that, yeah, you've commented elsewhere, I don't remember where, that one of the problems is simulating nature is tough. And if you want to sort of deploy a prototype, I forgot how you put it, but it made me laugh, but animals or humans would need to be involved in order to try to run some prototype code on, like if we're talking about COVID and viruses and so on, if you were trying to engineer some kind of defense mechanisms, like a vaccine against COVID and all that kind of stuff that doing any kind of experimentation, like you can with like autonomous vehicles would be very technically and ethically costly. I'm not sure about that. I think you can do tons of crazy biology and test tubes. I think my bigger complaint is more, oh, the tools are so bad. Like literally, you mean like libraries and? I don't know, I'm not pipetting shit. Like you're handing me a, I got a, no, no, no, there has to be some. Like automating stuff. And like the, yeah, but human biology is messy. Like it seems. But like, look at those Toronto's videos. They were a joke. It's like a little gantry. It's like little X, Y gantry, high school science project with the pipette. I'm like, really? Gotta be something better. You can't build like nice microfluidics and I can program the computation to bio interface. I mean, this is gonna happen. But like right now, if you are asking me to pipette 50 milliliters of solution, I'm out. This is so crude. Yeah. Okay, let's get all the crazy out of the way. So a bunch of people asked me, since we talked about the simulation last time, we talked about hacking the simulation. Do you have any updates, any insights about how we might be able to go about hacking simulation if we indeed do live in a simulation? I think a lot of people misinterpreted the point of that South by talk. The point of the South by talk was not literally to hack the simulation. I think that this is an idea is literally just, I think theoretical physics. I think that's the whole goal, right? You want your grand unified theory, but then, okay, build a grand unified theory search for exploits, right? I think we're nowhere near actually there yet. My hope with that was just more to like, are you people kidding me with the things you spend time thinking about? Do you understand like kind of how small you are? You are bytes and God's computer, really? And the things that people get worked up about, you know? So basically, it was more a message of we should humble ourselves. That we get to, like what are we humans in this byte code? Yeah, and not just humble ourselves, but like I'm not trying to like make people guilty or anything like that. I'm trying to say like, literally, look at what you are spending time on, right? What are you referring to? You're referring to the Kardashians? What are we talking about? Twitter? No, the Kardashians, everyone knows that's kind of fun. I'm referring more to like the economy, you know? This idea that we gotta up our stock price. Or what is the goal function of humanity? You don't like the game of capitalism? Like you don't like the games we've constructed for ourselves as humans? I'm a big fan of capitalism. I don't think that's really the game we're playing right now. I think we're playing a different game where the rules are rigged. Okay, which games are interesting to you that we humans have constructed and which aren't? Which are productive and which are not? Actually, maybe that's the real point of the talk. It's like, stop playing these fake human games. There's a real game here. We can play the real game. The real game is, you know, nature wrote the rules. This is a real game. There still is a game to play. But if you look at, sorry to interrupt, I don't know if you've seen the Instagram account, nature is metal. The game that nature seems to be playing is a lot more cruel than we humans want to put up with. Or at least we see it as cruel. It's like the bigger thing eats the smaller thing and does it to impress another big thing so it can mate with that thing. And that's it. That seems to be the entirety of it. Well, there's no art, there's no music, there's no comma AI, there's no comma one, no comma two, no George Hots with his brilliant talks at South by Southwest. I disagree, though. I disagree that this is what nature is. I think nature just provided basically a open world MMORPG. And, you know, here it's open world. I mean, if that's the game you want to play, you can play that game. But isn't that beautiful? I don't know if you played Diablo. They used to have, I think, cow level where it's... So everybody will go just, they figured out this, like the best way to gain like experience points is to just slaughter cows over and over and over. And so they figured out this little sub game within the bigger game that this is the most efficient way to get experience points. And everybody somehow agreed that getting experience points in RPG context where you always want to be getting more stuff, more skills, more levels, keep advancing. That seems to be good. So might as well sacrifice actual enjoyment of playing a game, exploring a world, and spending like hundreds of hours of your time at cow level. I mean, the number of hours I spent in cow level, I'm not like the most impressive person because people have spent probably thousands of hours there, but it's ridiculous. So that's a little absurd game that brought me joy in some weird dopamine drug kind of way. So you don't like those games. You don't think that's us humans feeling the nature. I think so. And that was the point of the talk. Yeah. So how do we hack it then? Well, I want to live forever. And I want to live forever. And this is the goal. Well, that's a game against nature. Yeah, immortality is the good objective function to you? I mean, start there and then you can do whatever else you want because you got a long time. What if immortality makes the game just totally not fun? I mean, like, why do you assume immortality is somehow a good objective function? It's not immortality that I want. A true immortality where I could not die, I would prefer what we have right now. But I want to choose my own death, of course. I don't want nature to decide when I die, I'm going to win. I'm going to be you. And then at some point, if you choose commit suicide, like how long do you think you'd live? Until I get bored. See, I don't think people like brilliant people like you that really ponder living a long time are really considering how meaningless life becomes. Well, I want to know everything and then I'm ready to die. As long as there's... Yeah, but why do you want, isn't it possible that you want to know everything because it's finite? Like the reason you want to know quote unquote everything is because you don't have enough time to know everything. And once you have unlimited time, then you realize like, why do anything? Like why learn anything? I want to know everything and then I'm ready to die. So you have, yeah. It's not a, like, it's a terminal value. It's not in service of anything else. I'm conscious of the possibility, this is not a certainty, but the possibility of that engine of curiosity that you're speaking to is actually a symptom of the finiteness of life. Like without that finiteness, your curiosity would vanish. Like a morning fog. All right, cool. Bukowski talked about love like that. Then let me solve immortality and let me change the thing in my brain that reminds me of the fact that I'm immortal, tells me that life is finite shit. Maybe I'll have it tell me that life ends next week. Right? I'm okay with some self manipulation like that. I'm okay with deceiving myself. Oh, Rika, changing the code. Yeah, well, if that's the problem, right? If the problem is that I will no longer have that, that curiosity, I'd like to have backup copies of myself, which I check in with occasionally to make sure they're okay with the trajectory and they can kind of override it. Maybe a nice, like, I think of like those wave nets, those like logarithmic go back to the copies. Yeah, but sometimes it's not reversible. Like I've done this with video games. Once you figure out the cheat code or like you look up how to cheat old school, like single player, it ruins the game for you. Absolutely. It ruins that feeling. But again, that just means our brain manipulation technology is not good enough yet. Remove that cheat code from your brain. Here you go. So it's also possible that if we figure out immortality, that all of us will kill ourselves before we advance far enough to be able to revert the change. I'm not killing myself till I know everything, so. That's what you say now, because your life is finite. You know, I think yes, self modifying systems gets, comes up with all these hairy complexities and can I promise that I'll do it perfectly? No, but I think I can put good safety structures in place. So that talk and your thinking here is not literally referring to a simulation and that our universe is a kind of computer program running on a computer. That's more of a thought experiment. Do you also think of the potential of the sort of Bostrom, Elon Musk and others that talk about an actual program that simulates our universe? Oh, I don't doubt that we're in a simulation. I just think that it's not quite that important. I mean, I'm interested only in simulation theory as far as like it gives me power over nature. If it's totally unfalsifiable, then who cares? I mean, what do you think that experiment would look like? Like somebody on Twitter asks, asks George what signs we would look for to know whether or not we're in the simulation, which is exactly what you're asking is like, the step that precedes the step of knowing how to get more power from this knowledge is to get an indication that there's some power to be gained. So get an indication that there, you can discover and exploit cracks in the simulation or it doesn't have to be in the physics of the universe. Yeah. Show me, I mean, like a memory leak could be cool. Like some scrying technology, you know? What kind of technology? Scrying? What's that? Oh, that's a weird, scrying is the paranormal ability to like remote viewing, like being able to see somewhere where you're not. So, you know, I don't think you can do it by chanting in a room, but if we could find, it's a memory leak, basically. It's a memory leak. Yeah, you're able to access parts you're not supposed to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And thereby discover a shortcut. Yeah, maybe memory leak means the other thing as well, but I mean like, yeah, like an ability to read arbitrary memory, right? And that one's not that horrifying, right? The right ones start to be horrifying. Read, right. It's the reading is not the problem. Yeah, it's like Heartfleet for the universe. Oh boy, the writing is a big, big problem. It's a big problem. It's the moment you can write anything, even if it's just random noise. That's terrifying. I mean, even without that, like even some of the, you know, the nanotech stuff that's coming, I think is. I don't know if you're paying attention, but actually Eric Weistand came out with the theory of everything. I mean, that came out. He's been working on a theory of everything in the physics world called geometric unity. And then for me, from computer science person like you, Steven Wolfram's theory of everything, of like hypergraphs is super interesting and beautiful, but not from a physics perspective, but from a computational perspective. I don't know, have you paid attention to any of that? So again, like what would make me pay attention and like why like I hate string theory is, okay, make a testable prediction, right? I'm only interested in, I'm not interested in theories for their intrinsic beauty. I'm interested in theories that give me power over the universe. So if these theories do, I'm very interested. Can I just say how beautiful that is? Because a lot of physicists say, I'm interested in experimental validation and they skip out the part where they say to give me more power in the universe. I just love the. No, I want. The clarity of that. I want 100 gigahertz processors. I want transistors that are smaller than atoms. I want like power. That's true. And that's where people from aliens to this kind of technology where people are worried that governments, like who owns that power? Is it George Harts? Is it thousands of distributed hackers across the world? Is it governments? Is it Mark Zuckerberg? There's a lot of people that, I don't know if anyone trusts any one individual with power. So they're always worried. It's the beauty of blockchains. That's the beauty of blockchains, which we'll talk about. On Twitter, somebody pointed me to a story, a bunch of people pointed me to a story a few months ago where you went into a restaurant in New York. And you can correct me if any of this is wrong. And ran into a bunch of folks from a company in a crypto company who are trying to scale up Ethereum. And they had a technical deadline related to solidity to OVM compiler. So these are all Ethereum technologies. So you stepped in, they recognized you, pulled you aside, explained their problem. And you stepped in and helped them solve the problem, thereby creating legend status story. So can you tell me the story in a little more detail? It seems kind of incredible. Did this happen? Yeah, yeah, it's a true story, it's a true story. I mean, they wrote a very flattering account of it. So Optimism is the company called Optimism, spin off of Plasma. They're trying to build L2 solutions on Ethereum. So right now, every Ethereum node has to run every transaction on the Ethereum network. And this kind of doesn't scale, right? Because if you have N computers, well, if that becomes two N computers, you actually still get the same amount of compute, right? This is like all of one scaling because they all have to run it. Okay, fine, you get more blockchain security, but like, blockchain is already so secure. Can we trade some of that off for speed? So that's kind of what these L2 solutions are. They built this thing, which kind of, kind of sandbox for Ethereum contracts. So they can run it in this L2 world and it can't do certain things in L world, in L1. Can I ask you for some definitions? What's L2? Oh, L2 is layer two. So L1 is like the base Ethereum chain. And then layer two is like a computational layer that runs elsewhere, but still is kind of secured by layer one. And I'm sure a lot of people know, but Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, probably one of the most popular cryptocurrency second to Bitcoin. And a lot of interesting technological innovation there. Maybe you could also slip in whenever you talk about this and things that are exciting to you in the Ethereum space. And why Ethereum? Well, I mean, Bitcoin is not Turing complete. Ethereum is not technically Turing complete with the gas limit, but close enough. With the gas limit? What's the gas limit, resources? Yeah, I mean, no computer is actually Turing complete. Right. You're gonna find out RAM, you know? I can actually solve the whole thing. What's the word gas limit? You just have so many brilliant words. I'm not even gonna ask. That's not my word, that's Ethereum's word. Gas limit. Ethereum, you have to spend gas per instruction. So like different op codes use different amounts of gas and you buy gas with ether to prevent people from basically DDoSing the network. So Bitcoin is proof of work. And then what's Ethereum? It's also proof of work. They're working on some proof of stake, Ethereum 2.0 stuff. But right now it's proof of work. It uses a different hash function from Bitcoin. That's more ASIC resistance, because you need RAM. So we're all talking about Ethereum 1.0. So what were they trying to do to scale this whole process? So they were like, well, if we could run contracts elsewhere and then only save the results of that computation, well, we don't actually have to do the compute on the chain. We can do the compute off chain and just post what the results are. Now, the problem with that is, well, somebody could lie about what the results are. So you need a resolution mechanism. And the resolution mechanism can be really expensive because you just have to make sure that the person who is saying, look, I swear that this is the real computation. I'm staking $10,000 on that fact. And if you prove it wrong, yeah, it might cost you $3,000 in gas fees to prove wrong, but you'll get the $10,000 bounty. So you can secure using those kinds of systems. So it's effectively a sandbox, which runs contracts. And like, it's like any kind of normal sandbox, you have to like replace syscalls with calls into the hypervisor. Sandbox, syscalls, hypervisor. What do these things mean? As long as it's interesting to talk about. Yeah, I mean, you can take like the Chrome sandbox is maybe the one to think about, right? So the Chrome process that's doing a rendering, can't, for example, read a file from the file system. It has, if it tries to make an open syscall in Linux, the open syscall, you can't make it open syscall, no, no, no. You have to request from the kind of hypervisor process or like, I don't know what it's called in Chrome, but the, hey, could you open this file for me? And then it does all these checks and then it passes the file handle back in if it's approved. So that's, yeah. So what's the, in the context of Ethereum, what are the boundaries of the sandbox that we're talking about? Well, like one of the calls that you, actually reading and writing any state to the Ethereum contract, or to the Ethereum blockchain. Writing state is one of those calls that you're going to have to sandbox in layer two, because if you let layer two just arbitrarily write to the Ethereum blockchain. So layer two is really sitting on top of layer one. So you're going to have a lot of different kinds of ideas that you can play with. And they're all, they're not fundamentally changing the source code level of Ethereum. Well, you have to replace a bunch of calls with calls into the hypervisor. So instead of doing the syscall directly, you replace it with a call to the hypervisor. So originally they were doing this by first running the, so Solidity is the language that most Ethereum contracts are written in. It compiles to a bytecode. And then they wrote this thing they called the transpiler. And the transpiler took the bytecode and it transpiled it into OVM safe bytecode. Basically bytecode that didn't make any of those restricted syscalls and added the calls to the hypervisor. This transpiler was a 3000 line mess. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do if you're trying to do it like that, because you have to kind of like deconstruct the bytecode, change things about it, and then reconstruct it. And I mean, as soon as I hear this, I'm like, well, why don't you just change the compiler, right? Why not the first place you build the bytecode, just do it in the compiler. So yeah, I asked them how much they wanted it. Of course, measured in dollars and I'm like, well, okay. And yeah. And you wrote the compiler. Yeah, I modified, I wrote a 300 line diff to the compiler. It's open source, you can look at it. Yeah, it's, yeah, I looked at the code last night. It's, yeah, exactly. Cute is a good word for it. And it's C++. C++, yeah. So when asked how you were able to do it, you said, you just gotta think and then do it right. So can you break that apart a little bit? What's your process of one, thinking and two, doing it right? You know, the people that I was working for were amused that I said that. It doesn't really mean anything. Okay. I mean, is there some deep, profound insights to draw from like how you problem solve from that? This is always what I say. I'm like, do you wanna be a good programmer? Do it for 20 years. Yeah, there's no shortcuts. No. What are your thoughts on crypto in general? So what parts technically or philosophically do you find especially beautiful maybe? Oh, I'm extremely bullish on crypto longterm. Not any specific crypto project, but this idea of, well, two ideas. One, the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm is I think one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century. This idea that people can reach consensus. You can reach a group consensus. Using a relatively straightforward algorithm is wild. And like, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto, people always ask me who I look up to. It's like, whoever that is. Who do you think it is? I mean, Elon Musk? Is it you? It is definitely not me. And I do not think it's Elon Musk. But yeah, this idea of groups reaching consensus in a decentralized yet formulaic way is one extremely powerful idea from crypto. Maybe the second idea is this idea of smart contracts. When you write a contract between two parties, any contract, this contract, if there are disputes, it's interpreted by lawyers. Lawyers are just really shitty overpaid interpreters. Imagine you had, let's talk about them in terms of a, in terms of like, let's compare a lawyer to Python, right? So lawyer, well, okay. That's really, I never thought of it that way. It's hilarious. So Python, I'm paying even 10 cents an hour. I'll use the nice Azure machine. I can run Python for 10 cents an hour. Lawyers cost $1,000 an hour. So Python is 10,000 X better on that axis. Lawyers don't always return the same answer. Python almost always does. Cost. Yeah, I mean, just cost, reliability, everything about Python is so much better than lawyers. So if you can make smart contracts, this whole concept of code is law. I love, and I would love to live in a world where everybody accepted that fact. So maybe you can talk about what smart contracts are. So let's say, let's say, you know, we have a, even something as simple as a safety deposit box, right? Safety deposit box that holds a million dollars. I have a contract with the bank that says two out of these three parties must be present to open the safety deposit box and get the money out. So that's a contract for the bank, and it's only as good as the bank and the lawyers, right? Let's say, you know, somebody dies and now, oh, we're gonna go through a big legal dispute about whether, oh, well, was it in the will, was it not in the will? What, like, it's just so messy, and the cost to determine truth is so expensive. Versus a smart contract, which just uses cryptography to check if two out of three keys are present. Well, I can look at that, and I can have certainty in the answer that it's going to return. And that's what, all businesses want is certainty. You know, they say businesses don't care. Viacom, YouTube, YouTube's like, look, we don't care which way this lawsuit goes. Just please tell us so we can have certainty. Yeah, I wonder how many agreements in this, because we're talking about financial transactions only in this case, correct, the smart contracts? Oh, you can go to anything. You can put a prenup in the Ethereum blockchain. A married smart contract? Sorry, divorce lawyer, sorry. You're going to be replaced by Python. Okay, so that's another beautiful idea. Do you think there's something that's appealing to you about any one specific implementation? So if you look 10, 20, 50 years down the line, do you see any, like, Bitcoin, Ethereum, any of the other hundreds of cryptocurrencies winning out? Is there, like, what's your intuition about the space? Or are you just sitting back and watching the chaos and look who cares what emerges? Oh, I don't. I don't speculate. I don't really care. I don't really care which one of these projects wins. I'm kind of in the Bitcoin as a meme coin camp. I mean, why does Bitcoin have value? It's technically kind of, you know, not great, like the block size debate. When I found out what the block size debate was, I'm like, are you guys kidding? What's the block size debate? You know what? It's really, it's too stupid to even talk. People can look it up, but I'm like, wow. You know, Ethereum seems, the governance of Ethereum seems much better. I've come around a bit on proof of stake ideas. You know, very smart people thinking about some things. Yeah, you know, governance is interesting. It does feel like Vitalik, like it does feel like an open, even in these distributed systems, leaders are helpful because they kind of help you drive the mission and the vision and they put a face to a project. It's a weird thing about us humans. Geniuses are helpful, like Vitalik. Yeah, brilliant. Leaders are not necessarily, yeah. So you think the reason he's the face of Ethereum is because he's a genius. That's interesting. I mean, that was, it's interesting to think about that we need to create systems in which the quote unquote leaders that emerge are the geniuses in the system. I mean, that's arguably why the current state of democracy is broken is the people who are emerging as the leaders are not the most competent, are not the superstars of the system. And it seems like at least for now in the crypto world oftentimes the leaders are the superstars. Imagine at the debate they asked, what's the sixth amendment? What are the four fundamental forces in the universe? What's the integral of two to the X? I'd love to see those questions asked and that's what I want as our leader. It's a little bit. What's Bayes rule? Yeah, I mean, even, oh wow, you're hurting my brain. It's that my standard was even lower but I would have loved to see just this basic brilliance. Like I've talked to historians. There's just these, they're not even like they don't have a PhD or even education history. They just like a Dan Carlin type character who just like, holy shit. How did all this information get into your head? They're able to just connect Genghis Khan to the entirety of the history of the 20th century. They know everything about every single battle that happened and they know the game of Thrones of the different power plays and all that happened there. And they know like the individuals and all the documents involved and they integrate that into their regular life. It's not like they're ultra history nerds. They're just, they know this information. That's what competence looks like. Yeah. Cause I've seen that with programmers too, right? That's what great programmers do. But yeah, it would be, it's really unfortunate that those kinds of people aren't emerging as our leaders. But for now, at least in the crypto world that seems to be the case. I don't know if that always, you could imagine that in a hundred years, it's not the case, right? Crypto world has one very powerful idea going for it and that's the idea of forks, right? I mean, imagine, we'll use a less controversial example. This was actually in my joke app in 2012. I was like, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, let's let them both be president, right? Like imagine we could fork America and just let them both be president. And then the Americas could compete and people could invest in one, pull their liquidity out of one, put it in the other. You have this in the crypto world. Ethereum forks into Ethereum and Ethereum classic. And you can pull your liquidity out of one and put it in another. And people vote with their dollars, which forks, companies should be able to fork. I'd love to fork Nvidia, you know? Yeah, like different business strategies and then try them out and see what works. Like even take, yeah, take comma AI that closes its source and then take one that's open source and see what works. Take one that's purchased by GM and one that remains Android Renegade and all these different versions and see. The beauty of comma AI is someone can actually do that. Please take comma AI and fork it. That's right, that's the beauty of open source. So you're, I mean, we'll talk about autonomous vehicle space, but it does seem that you're really knowledgeable about a lot of different topics. So the natural question a bunch of people ask this, which is how do you keep learning new things? Do you have like practical advice if you were to introspect, like taking notes, allocate time, or do you just mess around and just allow your curiosity to drive? I'll write these people a self help book and I'll charge $67 for it. And I will write, I will write, I will write on the cover of the self help book. All of this advice is completely meaningless. You're gonna be a sucker and buy this book anyway. And the one lesson that I hope they take away from the book is that I can't give you a meaningful answer to that. That's interesting. Let me translate that. Is you haven't really thought about what it is you do systematically because you could reduce it. And there's some people, I mean, I've met brilliant people that this is really clear with athletes. Some are just, you know, the best in the world at something and they have zero interest in writing like a self help book, or how to master this game. And then there's some athletes who become great coaches and they love the analysis, perhaps the over analysis. And you right now, at least at your age, which is an interesting, you're in the middle of the battle. You're like the warriors that have zero interest in writing books. So you're in the middle of the battle. So you have, yeah. This is a fair point. I do think I have a certain aversion to this kind of deliberate intentional way of living life. You're eventually, the hilarity of this, especially since this is recorded, it will reveal beautifully the absurdity when you finally do publish this book. I guarantee you, you will. The story of comma AI, maybe it'll be a biography written about you. That'll be better, I guess. And you might be able to learn some cute lessons if you're starting a company like comma AI from that book. But if you're asking generic questions, like how do I be good at things? How do I be good at things? Dude, I don't know. Do them a lot. Do them a lot. But the interesting thing here is learning things outside of your current trajectory, which is what it feels like from an outsider's perspective. I don't know if there's advice on that, but it is an interesting curiosity. When you become really busy, you're running a company. Hard time. Yeah. But there's a natural inclination and trend. Just the momentum of life carries you into a particular direction of wanting to focus. And this kind of dispersion that curiosity can lead to gets harder and harder with time. Because you get really good at certain things and it sucks trying things that you're not good at, like trying to figure them out. When you do this with your live streams, you're on the fly figuring stuff out. You don't mind looking dumb. No. You just figure it out pretty quickly. Sometimes I try things and I don't figure them out quickly. My chest rating is like a 1400, despite putting like a couple of hundred hours in. It's pathetic. I mean, to be fair, I know that I could do it better if I did it better. Like don't play five minute games, play 15 minute games at least. Like I know these things, but it just doesn't, it doesn't stick nicely in my knowledge stream. All right, let's talk about Comma AI. What's the mission of the company? Let's like look at the biggest picture. Oh, I have an exact statement. Solve self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries. So longterm vision is have fully autonomous vehicles and make sure you're making money along the way. I think it doesn't really speak to money, but I can talk about what solve self driving cars means. Solve self driving cars of course means you're not building a new car, you're building a person replacement. That person can sit in the driver's seat and drive you anywhere a person can drive with a human or better level of safety, speed, quality, comfort. And what's the second part of that? Delivering shippable intermediaries is well, it's a way to fund the company, that's true. But it's also a way to keep us honest. If you don't have that, it is very easy with this technology to think you're making progress when you're not. I've heard it best described on Hacker News as you can set any arbitrary milestone, meet that milestone and still be infinitely far away from solving self driving cars. So it's hard to have like real deadlines when you're like Cruz or Waymo when you don't have revenue. Is that, I mean, is revenue essentially the thing we're talking about here? Revenue is, capitalism is based around consent. Capitalism, the way that you get revenue is real capitalism comes in the real capitalism camp. There's definitely scams out there, but real capitalism is based around consent. It's based around this idea that like, if we're getting revenue, it's because we're providing at least that much value to another person. When someone buys $1,000 comma two from us, we're providing them at least $1,000 of value or they wouldn't buy it. Brilliant, so can you give a whirlwind overview of the products that Comma AI provides, like throughout its history and today? I mean, yeah, the past ones aren't really that interesting. It's kind of just been refinement of the same idea. The real only product we sell today is the Comma 2. Which is a piece of hardware with cameras. Mm, so the Comma 2, I mean, you can think about it kind of like a person. Future hardware will probably be even more and more personlike. So it has eyes, ears, a mouth, a brain, and a way to interface with the car. Does it have consciousness? Just kidding, that was a trick question. I don't have consciousness either. Me and the Comma 2 are the same. You're the same? I have a little more compute than it. It only has like the same compute as a B, you know. You're more efficient energy wise for the compute you're doing. Far more efficient energy wise. 20 petaflops, 20 watts, crazy. Do you lack consciousness? Sure. Do you fear death? You do, you want immortality. Of course I fear death. Does Comma AI fear death? I don't think so. Of course it does. It very much fears, well, it fears negative loss. Oh yeah. Okay, so Comma 2, when did that come out? That was a year ago? No, two. Early this year. Wow, time, it feels like, yeah. 2020 feels like it's taken 10 years to get to the end. It's a long year. It's a long year. So what's the sexiest thing about Comma 2 feature wise? So, I mean, maybe you can also link on like, what is it? Like what's its purpose? Cause there's a hardware, there's a software component. You've mentioned the sensors, but also like what is it, its features and capabilities? I think our slogan summarizes it well. Comma slogan is make driving chill. I love it, okay. Yeah, I mean, it is, you know, if you like cruise control, imagine cruise control, but much, much more. So it can do adaptive cruise control things, which is like slow down for cars in front of it, maintain a certain speed. And it can also do lane keeping. So staying in the lane and doing it better and better and better over time. It's very much machine learning based. So this camera is, there's a driver facing camera too. What else is there? What am I thinking? So the hardware versus software. So open pilot versus the actual hardware of the device. What's, can you draw that distinction? What's one, what's the other? I mean, the hardware is pretty much a cell phone with a few additions. A cell phone with a cooling system and with a car interface connected to it. And by cell phone, you mean like Qualcomm Snapdragon. Yeah, the current hardware is a Snapdragon 821. It has wifi radio, it has an LTE radio, it has a screen. We use every part of the cell phone. And then the interface with the car is specific to the car. So you keep supporting more and more cars. Yeah, so the interface to the car, I mean, the device itself just has four CAN buses. It has four CAN interfaces on it that are connected through the USB port to the phone. And then, yeah, on those four CAN buses, you connect it to the car. And there's a little harness to do this. Cars are actually surprisingly similar. So CAN is the protocol by which cars communicate. And then you're able to read stuff and write stuff to be able to control the car depending on the car. So what's the software side? What's OpenPilot? So I mean, OpenPilot is, the hardware is pretty simple compared to OpenPilot. OpenPilot is, well, so you have a machine learning model, which it's in OpenPilot, it's a blob. It's just a blob of weights. It's not like people are like, oh, it's closed source. I'm like, it's a blob of weights. What do you expect? So it's primarily neural network based. You, well, OpenPilot is all the software kind of around that neural network. That if you have a neural network that says, here's where you wanna send the car, OpenPilot actually goes and executes all of that. It cleans up the input to the neural network. It cleans up the output and executes on it. So it connects, it's the glue that connects everything together. Runs the sensors, does a bunch of calibration for the neural network, deals with like, if the car is on a banked road, you have to counter steer against that. And the neural network can't necessarily know that by looking at the picture. So you do that with other sensors and Fusion and Localizer. OpenPilot also is responsible for sending the data up to our servers. So we can learn from it, logging it, recording it, running the cameras, thermally managing the device, managing the disk space on the device, managing all the resources on the device. So what, since we last spoke, I don't remember when, maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer, how has OpenPilot improved? We did exactly what I promised you. I promised you that by the end of the year, where you'd be able to remove the lanes. The lateral policy is now almost completely end to end. You can turn the lanes off and it will drive, drive slightly worse on the highway if you turn the lanes off, but you can turn the lanes off and it will drive well, trained completely end to end on user data. And this year we hope to do the same for the longitudinal policy. So that's the interesting thing is you're not doing, you don't appear to be, maybe you can correct me, you don't appear to be doing lane detection or lane marking detection or kind of the segmentation task or any kind of object detection task. You're doing what's traditionally more called like end to end learning. So, and trained on actual behavior of drivers when they're driving the car manually. And this is hard to do. It's not supervised learning. Yeah, but so the nice thing is there's a lot of data. So it's hard and easy, right? It's a... We have a lot of high quality data, yeah. Like more than you need in the second. Well... We have way more than we do. We have way more data than we need. I mean, it's an interesting question actually, because in terms of amount, you have more than you need, but the driving is full of edge cases. So how do you select the data you train on? I think this is an interesting open question. Like what's the cleverest way to select data? That's the question Tesla is probably working on. That's, I mean, the entirety of machine learning can be, they don't seem to really care. They just kind of select data. But I feel like that if you want to solve, if you want to create intelligent systems, you have to pick data well, right? And so do you have any hints, ideas of how to do it well? So in some ways that is... The definition I like of reinforcement learning versus supervised learning. In supervised learning, the weights depend on the data. Right? And this is obviously true, but in reinforcement learning, the data depends on the weights. Yeah. And actually both ways. That's poetry. So how does it know what data to train on? Well, let it pick. We're not there yet, but that's the eventual. So you're thinking this almost like a reinforcement learning framework. We're going to do RL on the world. Every time a car makes a mistake, user disengages, we train on that and do RL on the world. Ship out a new model, that's an epoch, right? And for now you're not doing the Elon style promising that it's going to be fully autonomous. You really are sticking to level two and like it's supposed to be supervised. It is definitely supposed to be supervised and we enforce the fact that it's supervised. We look at our rate of improvement in disengagements. OpenPilot now has an unplanned disengagement about every a hundred miles. This is up from 10 miles, like maybe, maybe maybe a year ago. Yeah. So maybe we've seen 10 X improvement in a year, but a hundred miles is still a far cry from the a hundred thousand you're going to need. So you're going to somehow need to get three more 10 Xs in there. And you're, what's your intuition? You're basically hoping that there's exponential improvement built into the baked into the cake somewhere. Well, that's even, I mean, 10 X improvement, that's already assuming exponential, right? There's definitely exponential improvement. And I think when Elon talks about exponential, like these things, these systems are going to exponentially improve, just exponential doesn't mean you're getting a hundred gigahertz processors tomorrow. Right? Like it's going to still take a while because the gap between even our best system and humans is still large. So that's an interesting distinction to draw. So if you look at the way Tesla is approaching the problem and the way you're approaching the problem, which is very different than the rest of the self driving car world. So let's put them aside is you're treating most the driving task as a machine learning problem. And the way Tesla is approaching it is with the multitask learning where you break the task of driving into hundreds of different tasks and you have this multiheaded neural network that's very good at performing each task. And there there's presumably something on top that's stitching stuff together in order to make control decisions, policy decisions about how you move the car. But what that allows you, there's a brilliance to this because it allows you to master each task, like lane detection, stop sign detection, the traffic light detection, drivable area segmentation, you know, vehicle, bicycle, pedestrian detection. There's some localization tasks in there. Also predicting of like, yeah, predicting how the entities in the scene are going to move. Like everything is basically a machine learning task. So there's a classification, segmentation, prediction. And it's nice because you can have this entire engine, data engine that's mining for edge cases for each one of these tasks. And you can have people like engineers that are basically masters of that task, like become the best person in the world at, as you talk about the cone guy for Waymo, the becoming the best person in the world at cone detection. So that's a compelling notion from a supervised learning perspective, automating much of the process of edge case discovery and retraining neural network for each of the individual perception tasks. And then you're looking at the machine learning in a more holistic way, basically doing end to end learning on the driving tasks, supervised, trained on the data of the actual driving of people. They use comma AI, like actual human drivers, their manual control, plus the moments of disengagement that maybe with some labeling could indicate the failure of the system. So you have the, you have a huge amount of data for positive control of the vehicle, like successful control of the vehicle, both maintaining the lane as, as I think you're also working on longitudinal control of the vehicle and then failure cases where the vehicle does something wrong that needs disengagement. So like what, why do you think you're right and Tesla is wrong on this? And do you think, do you think you'll come around the Tesla way? Do you think Tesla will come around to your way? If you were to start a chess engine company, would you hire a Bishop guy? See, we have a, this is Monday morning. Quarterbacking is a yes, probably. Oh, our Rook guy. Oh, we stole the Rook guy from that company. Oh, we're going to have real good Rooks. Well, there's not many pieces, right? You can, there's not many guys and gals to hire. You just have a few that work in the Bishop, a few that work in the Rook. Is that not ludicrous today to think about in a world of AlphaZero? But AlphaZero is a chess game. So the fundamental question is, how hard is driving compared to chess? Because, so long term, end to end, will be the right solution. The question is how many years away is that? End to end is going to be the only solution for level five. For the only way we'll get there. Of course, and of course, Tesla is going to come around to my way. And if you're a Rook guy out there, I'm sorry. The cone guy. I don't know. We're going to specialize each task. We're going to really understand Rook placement. Yeah. I understand the intuition you have. I mean, that, that is a very compelling notion that we can learn the task end to end, like the same compelling notion you might have for natural language conversation. But I'm not sure, because one thing you sneaked in there is the assertion that it's impossible to get to level five without this kind of approach. I don't know if that's obvious. I don't know if that's obvious either. I don't actually mean that. I think that it is much easier to get to level five with an end to end approach. I think that the other approach is doable, but the magnitude of the engineering challenge may exceed what humanity is capable of. But what do you think of the Tesla data engine approach, which to me is an active learning task, is kind of fascinating, is breaking it down into these multiple tasks and mining their data constantly for like edge cases for these different tasks. Yeah, but the tasks themselves are not being learned. This is feature engineering. Yeah, I mean, it's a higher abstraction level of feature engineering for the different tasks. Task engineering in a sense. It's slightly better feature engineering, but it's still fundamentally is feature engineering. And if anything about the history of AI has taught us anything, it's that feature engineering approaches will always be replaced and lose to end to end. Now, to be fair, I cannot really make promises on timelines, but I can say that when you look at the code for Stockfish and the code for AlphaZero, one is a lot shorter than the other, a lot more elegant, required a lot less programmer hours to write. Yeah, but there was a lot more murder of bad agents on the AlphaZero side. By murder, I mean agents that played a game and failed miserably. Yeah. Oh, oh. In simulation, that failure is less costly. Yeah. In real world, it's... Do you mean in practice, like AlphaZero has lost games miserably? No. Wow. I haven't seen that. No, but I know, but the requirement for AlphaZero is... A simulator. To be able to like evolution, human evolution, not human evolution, biological evolution of life on earth from the origin of life has murdered trillions upon trillions of organisms on the path thus humans. Yeah. So the question is, can we stitch together a human like object without having to go through the entirety process of evolution? Well, no, but do the evolution in simulation. Yeah, that's the question. Can we simulate? So do you have a sense that it's possible to simulate some aspect? MuZero is exactly this. MuZero is the solution to this. MuZero I think is going to be looked back as the canonical paper. And I don't think deep learning is everything. I think that there's still a bunch of things missing to get there, but MuZero I think is going to be looked back as the kind of cornerstone paper of this whole deep learning era. And MuZero is the solution to self driving cars. You have to make a few tweaks to it, but MuZero does effectively that. It does those rollouts and those murdering in a learned simulator and a learned dynamics model. That's interesting. It doesn't get enough love. I was blown away when I read that paper. I'm like, okay, I've always said a comma. I'm going to sit and I'm going to wait for the solution to self driving cars to come along. This year I saw it. It's MuZero. So. Sit back and let the winning roll in. So your sense, just to elaborate a little bit, it's a link on the topic. Your sense is neural networks will solve driving. Yes. Like we don't need anything else. I think the same way chess was maybe the chess and maybe Google are the pinnacle of like search algorithms and things that look kind of like a star. The pinnacle of this era is going to be self driving cars. But on the path of that, you have to deliver products and it's possible that the path to full self driving cars will take decades. I doubt it. How long would you put on it? Like what are we, you're chasing it, Tesla's chasing it. What are we talking about? Five years, 10 years, 50 years. Let's say in the 2020s. In the 2020s. The later part of the 2020s. With the neural network. Well, that would be nice to see. And then the path to that, you're delivering products, which is a nice L2 system. That's what Tesla's doing, a nice L2 system. Just gets better every time. L2, the only difference between L2 and the other levels is who takes liability. And I'm not a liability guy, I don't wanna take liability. I'm gonna level two forever. Now on that little transition, I mean, how do you make the transition work? Is this where driver sensing comes in? Like how do you make the, cause you said a hundred miles, like, is there some sort of human factor psychology thing where people start to overtrust the system, all those kinds of effects, once it gets better and better and better and better, they get lazier and lazier and lazier. Is that, like, how do you get that transition right? First off, our monitoring is already adaptive. Our monitoring is already seen adaptive. Driver monitoring is just the camera that's looking at the driver. You have an infrared camera in the... Our policy for how we enforce the driver monitoring is seen adaptive. What's that mean? Well, for example, in one of the extreme cases, if the car is not moving, we do not actively enforce driver monitoring, right? If you are going through a, like a 45 mile an hour road with lights and stop signs and potentially pedestrians, we enforce a very tight driver monitoring policy. If you are alone on a perfectly straight highway, and this is, it's all machine learning. None of that is hand coded. Actually, the stop is hand coded, but... So there's some kind of machine learning estimation of risk. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I've always been a huge fan of that. That's a... Because... It's difficult to do every step into that direction is a worthwhile step to take. It might be difficult to do really well. Like us humans are able to estimate risk pretty damn well, whatever the hell that is. That feels like one of the nice features of us humans. Cause like we humans are really good drivers when we're really like tuned in and we're good at estimating risk. Like when are we supposed to be tuned in? Yeah. And, you know, people are like, oh, well, you know, why would you ever make the driver monitoring policy less aggressive? Why would you always not keep it at its most aggressive? Because then people are just going to get fatigued from it. Yes. When they get annoyed. You want them... Yeah. You want the experience to be pleasant. Obviously I want the experience to be pleasant, but even just from a straight up safety perspective, if you alert people when they look around and they're like, why is this thing alerting me? There's nothing I could possibly hit right now. People will just learn to tune it out. People will just learn to tune it out, to put weights on the steering wheel, to do whatever to overcome it. And remember that you're always part of this adaptive system. So all I can really say about, you know, how this scales going forward is yeah, it's something we have to monitor for. Ooh, we don't know. This is a great psychology experiment at scale. Like we'll see. Yeah, it's fascinating. Track it. And making sure you have a good understanding of attention is a very key part of that psychology problem. Yeah. I think you and I probably have a different, come to it differently, but to me, it's a fascinating psychology problem to explore something much deeper than just driving. It's such a nice way to explore human attention and human behavior, which is why, again, we've probably both criticized Mr. Elon Musk on this one topic from different avenues. So both offline and online, I had little chats with Elon and like, I love human beings as a computer vision problem, as an AI problem, it's fascinating. He wasn't so much interested in that problem. It's like in order to solve driving, the whole point is you want to remove the human from the picture. And it seems like you can't do that quite yet. Eventually, yes, but you can't quite do that yet. So this is the moment where you can't yet say, I told you so to Tesla, but it's getting there because I don't know if you've seen this, there's some reporting that they're in fact starting to do driver monitoring. Yeah, they shift the model in shadow mode. With, I believe, only a visible light camera, it might even be fisheye. It's like a low resolution. Low resolution, visible light. I mean, to be fair, that's what we have in the Eon as well, our last generation product. This is the one area where I can say our hardware is ahead of Tesla. The rest of our hardware, way, way behind, but our driver monitoring camera. So you think, I think on the third row Tesla podcast, or somewhere else, I've heard you say that obviously, eventually they're gonna have driver monitoring. I think what I've said is Elon will definitely ship driver monitoring before he ships level five. Before level five. And I'm willing to bet 10 grand on that. And you bet 10 grand on that. I mean, now I don't wanna take the bet, but before, maybe someone would have, oh, I should have got my money in. Yeah. It's an interesting bet. I think you're right. I'm actually on a human level because he's been, he's made the decision. Like he said that driver monitoring is the wrong way to go. But like, you have to think of as a human, as a CEO, I think that's the right thing to say when, like sometimes you have to say things publicly that are different than when you actually believe, because when you're producing a large number of vehicles and the decision was made not to include the camera, like what are you supposed to say? Like our cars don't have the thing that I think is right to have. It's an interesting thing. But like on the other side, as a CEO, I mean, something you could probably speak to as a leader, I think about me as a human to publicly change your mind on something. How hard is that? Especially when assholes like George Haas say, I told you so. All I will say is I am not a leader and I am happy to change my mind. And I will. You think Elon will? Yeah, I do. I think he'll come up with a good way to make it psychologically okay for him. Well, it's such an important thing, man. Especially for a first principles thinker, because he made a decision that driver monitoring is not the right way to go. And I could see that decision. And I could even make that decision. Like I was on the fence too. Like I'm not a, driver monitoring is such an obvious, simple solution to the problem of attention. It's not obvious to me that just by putting a camera there, you solve things. You have to create an incredible, compelling experience. Just like you're talking about. I don't know if it's easy to do that. It's not at all easy to do that, in fact, I think. So as a creator of a car that's trying to create a product that people love, which is what Tesla tries to do, right? It's not obvious to me that as a design decision, whether adding a camera is a good idea. From a safety perspective either, like in the human factors community, everybody says that you should obviously have driver sensing, driver monitoring. But that's like saying it's obvious as parents, you shouldn't let your kids go out at night. But okay, but like, they're still gonna find ways to do drugs. Like, you have to also be good parents. So like, it's much more complicated than just the, you need to have driver monitoring. I totally disagree on, okay, if you have a camera there and the camera's watching the person, but never throws an alert, they'll never think about it. Right? The driver monitoring policy that you choose to, how you choose to communicate with the user is entirely separate from the data collection perspective. Right? Right? So, you know, like, there's one thing to say, like, you know, tell your teenager they can't do something. There's another thing to like, you know, gather the data. So you can make informed decisions. That's really interesting. But you have to make that, that's the interesting thing about cars. But even true with common AI, like you don't have to manufacture the thing into the car, is you have to make a decision that anticipates the right strategy longterm. So like, you have to start collecting the data and start making decisions. Started it three years ago. I believe that we have the best driver monitoring solution in the world. I think that when you compare it to Super Cruise is the only other one that I really know that shipped. And ours is better. What do you like and not like about Super Cruise? I mean, I had a few Super Cruise, the sun would be shining through the window, would blind the camera, and it would say I wasn't paying attention. When I was looking completely straight, I couldn't reset the attention with a steering wheel touch and Super Cruise would disengage. Like I was communicating to the car, I'm like, look, I am here, I am paying attention. Why are you really gonna force me to disengage? And it did. So it's a constant conversation with the user. And yeah, there's no way to ship a system like this if you can OTA. We're shipping a new one every month. Sometimes we balance it with our users on Discord. Like sometimes we make the driver monitoring a little more aggressive and people complain. Sometimes they don't. We want it to be as aggressive as possible where people don't complain and it doesn't feel intrusive. So being able to update the system over the air is an essential component. I mean, that's probably to me, you mentioned, I mean, to me that is the biggest innovation of Tesla, that it made people realize that over the air updates is essential. Yeah. I mean, was that not obvious from the iPhone? The iPhone was the first real product that OTA'd, I think. Was it actually, that's brilliant, you're right. I mean, the game consoles used to not, right? The game consoles were maybe the second thing that did. Wow, I didn't really think about one of the amazing features of a smartphone isn't just like the touchscreen isn't the thing, it's the ability to constantly update. Yeah, it gets better. It gets better. Love my iOS 14. Yeah. Well, one thing that I probably disagree with you on driver monitoring is you said that it's easy. I mean, you tend to say stuff is easy. I'm sure the, I guess you said it's easy relative to the external perception problem. Can you elaborate why you think it's easy? Feature engineering works for driver monitoring. Feature engineering does not work for the external. So human faces are not, human faces and the movement of human faces and head and body is not as variable as the external environment, is your intuition? Yes, and there's another big difference as well. Your reliability of a driver monitoring system doesn't actually need to be that high. The uncertainty, if you have something that's detecting whether the human's paying attention and it only works 92% of the time, you're still getting almost all the benefit of that because the human, like you're training the human, right? You're dealing with a system that's really helping you out. It's a conversation. It's not like the external thing where guess what? If you swerve into a tree, you swerve into a tree, right? Like you get no margin for error there. Yeah, I think that's really well put. I think that's the right, exactly the place where comparing to the external perception, the control problem, the driver monitoring is easier because you don't, the bar for success is much lower. Yeah, but I still think like the human face is more complicated actually than the external environment, but for driving, you don't give a damn. I don't need, yeah, I don't need something, I don't need something that complicated to have to communicate the idea to the human that I want to communicate, which is, yo, system might mess up here. You gotta pay attention. Yeah, see, that's my love and fascination is the human face. And it feels like this is a nice place to create products that create an experience in the car. So like, it feels like there should be more richer experiences in the car, you know? Like that's an opportunity for like something like On My Eye or just any kind of system like a Tesla or any of the autonomous vehicle companies is because software is, there's much more sensors and so much is on our software and you're doing machine learning anyway, there's an opportunity to create totally new experiences that we're not even anticipating. You don't think so? Nah. You think it's a box that gets you from A to B and you want to do it chill? Yeah, I mean, I think as soon as we get to level three on highways, okay, enjoy your candy crush, enjoy your Hulu, enjoy your, you know, whatever, whatever. Sure, you get this, you can look at screens basically versus right now where you have music and audio books. So level three is where you can kind of disengage in stretches of time. Well, you think level three is possible? Like on the highway going for 100 miles and you can just go to sleep? Oh yeah, sleep. So again, I think it's really all on a spectrum. I think that being able to use your phone while you're on the highway and like this all being okay and being aware that the car might alert you and you have five seconds to basically. So the five second thing is you think is possible? Yeah, I think it is, oh yeah. Not in all scenarios, right? Some scenarios it's not. It's the whole risk thing that you mentioned is nice is to be able to estimate like how risky is this situation? That's really important to understand. One other thing you mentioned comparing KAMA and Autopilot is that something about the haptic feel of the way KAMA controls the car when things are uncertain. Like it behaves a little bit more uncertain when things are uncertain. That's kind of an interesting point. And then Autopilot is much more confident always even when it's uncertain until it runs into trouble. That's a funny thing. I actually mentioned that to Elon, I think. And then the first time we talked, he wasn't biting. It's like communicating uncertainty. I guess KAMA doesn't really communicate uncertainty explicitly, it communicates it through haptic feel. Like what's the role of communicating uncertainty do you think? Oh, we do some stuff explicitly. Like we do detect the lanes when you're on the highway and we'll show you how many lanes we're using to drive with. You can look at where it thinks the lanes are. You can look at the path. And we want to be better about this. We're actually hiring, want to hire some new UI people. UI people, you mentioned this. Cause it's such an, it's a UI problem too, right? We have a great designer now, but you know, we need people who are just going to like build this and debug these UIs, QT people. QT. Is that what the UI is done with, is QT? The new UI is in QT. C++ QT? Tesla uses it too. Yeah. We had some React stuff in there. React JS or just React? React is his own language, right? React Native, React is a JavaScript framework. Yeah. So it's all based on JavaScript, but it's, you know, I like C++. What do you think about Dojo with Tesla and their foray into what appears to be specialized hardware for training your own nets? I guess it's something, maybe you can correct me, from my shallow looking at it, it seems like something like Google did with TPUs, but specialized for driving data. I don't think it's specialized for driving data. It's just legit, just TPU. They want to go the Apple way, basically everything required in the chain is done in house. Well, so you have a problem right now, and this is one of my concerns. I really would like to see somebody deal with this. If anyone out there is doing it, I'd like to help them if I can. You basically have two options right now to train. One, your options are NVIDIA or Google. So Google is not even an option. Their TPUs are only available in Google Cloud. Google has absolutely onerous terms of service restrictions. They may have changed it, but back in Google's terms of service, it said explicitly you are not allowed to use Google Cloud ML for training autonomous vehicles or for doing anything that competes with Google without Google's prior written permission. Wow, okay. I mean, Google is not a platform company. I wouldn't touch TPUs with a 10 foot pole. So that leaves you with the monopoly. NVIDIA? NVIDIA. So, I mean. That you're not a fan of. Well, look, I was a huge fan of in 2016 NVIDIA. Jensen came sat in the car. Cool guy. When the stock was $30 a share. NVIDIA stock has skyrocketed. I witnessed a real change in who was in management over there in like 2018. And now they are, let's exploit. Let's take every dollar we possibly can out of this ecosystem. Let's charge $10,000 for A100s because we know we got the best shit in the game. And let's charge $10,000 for an A100 when it's really not that different from a 3080, which is 699. The margins that they are making off of those high end chips are so high that, I mean, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot just from a business perspective. Because there's a lot of people talking like me now who are like, somebody's gotta take NVIDIA down. Yeah. Where they could dominate it. NVIDIA could be the new Intel. Yeah, to be inside everything essentially. And yet the winners in certain spaces like autonomous driving, the winners, only the people who are like desperately falling back and trying to catch up and have a ton of money, like the big automakers are the ones interested in partnering with NVIDIA. Oh, and I think a lot of those things are gonna fall through. If I were NVIDIA, sell chips. Sell chips at a reasonable markup. To everybody. To everybody. Without any restrictions. Without any restrictions. Intel did this. Look at Intel. They had a great long run. NVIDIA is trying to turn their, they're like trying to productize their chips way too much. They're trying to extract way more value than they can sustainably. Sure, you can do it tomorrow. Is it gonna up your share price? Sure, if you're one of those CEOs who's like, how much can I strip mine this company? And I think, you know, and that's what's weird about it too. Like the CEO is the founder. It's the same guy. Yeah. I mean, I still think Jensen's a great guy. He is great. Why do this? You have a choice. You have a choice right now. Are you trying to cash out? Are you trying to buy a yacht? If you are, fine. But if you're trying to be the next huge semiconductor company, sell chips. Well, the interesting thing about Jensen is he is a big vision guy. So he has a plan like for 50 years down the road. So it makes me wonder like. How does price gouging fit into it? Yeah, how does that, like it's, it doesn't seem to make sense as a plan. I worry that he's listening to the wrong people. Yeah, that's the sense I have too sometimes. Because I, despite everything, I think NVIDIA is an incredible company. Well, one, so I'm deeply grateful to NVIDIA for the products they've created in the past. Me too. Right? And so. The 1080 Ti was a great GPU. Still have a lot of them. Still is, yeah. But at the same time, it just feels like, feels like you don't want to put all your stock in NVIDIA. And so like Elon is doing, what Tesla is doing with Autopilot and Dojo is the Apple way is, because they're not going to share Dojo with George Hott's. I know. They should sell that chip. Oh, they should sell that. Even their accelerator. The accelerator that's in all the cars, the 30 watt one. Sell it, why not? So open it up. Like make, why does Tesla have to be a car company? Well, if you sell the chip, here's what you get. Yeah. Make some money off the chips. It doesn't take away from your chip. You're going to make some money, free money. And also the world is going to build an ecosystem of tooling for you. Right? You're not going to have to fix the bug in your 10H layer. Someone else already did. Well, the question, that's an interesting question. I mean, that's the question Steve Jobs asked. That's the question Elon Musk is perhaps asking is, do you want Tesla stuff inside other vehicles? Inside, potentially inside like a iRobot vacuum cleaner. Yeah. I think you should decide where your advantages are. I'm not saying Tesla should start selling battery packs to automakers. Because battery packs to automakers, they are straight up in competition with you. If I were Tesla, I'd keep the battery technology totally. Yeah. As far as we make batteries. But the thing about the Tesla TPU is anybody can build that. It's just a question of, you know, are you willing to spend the money? It could be a huge source of revenue potentially. Are you willing to spend a hundred million dollars? Anyone can build it. And someone will. And a bunch of companies now are starting trying to build AI accelerators. Somebody is going to get the idea right. And yeah, hopefully they don't get greedy because they'll just lose to the next guy who finally, and then eventually the Chinese are going to make knockoff and video chips and that's. From your perspective, I don't know if you're also paying attention to stay on Tesla for a moment. Dave, Elon Musk has talked about a complete rewrite of the neural net that they're using. That seems to, again, I'm half paying attention, but it seems to involve basically a kind of integration of all the sensors to where it's a four dimensional view. You know, you have a 3D model of the world over time. And then you can, I think it's done both for the, for the actually, you know, so the neural network is able to, in a more holistic way, deal with the world and make predictions and so on, but also to make the annotation task more, you know, easier. Like you can annotate the world in one place and then kind of distribute itself across the sensors and across a different, like the hundreds of tasks that are involved in the Hydro Net. What are your thoughts about this rewrite? Is it just like some details that are kind of obvious that are steps that should be taken, or is there something fundamental that could challenge your idea that end to end is the right solution? We're in the middle of a big rewrite now as well. We haven't shipped a new model in a bit. Of what kind? We're going from 2D to 3D. Right now, all our stuff, like for example, when the car pitches back, the lane lines also pitch back because we're assuming the flat world hypothesis. The new models do not do this. The new models output everything in 3D. But there's still no annotation. So the 3D is, it's more about the output. Yeah. We have Zs in everything. We've... Zs. Yeah. We had a Zs. We had a Zs. We unified a lot of stuff as well. We switched from TensorFlow to PyTorch. My understanding of what Tesla's thing is, is that their annotator now annotates across the time dimension. Mm hmm. I mean, cute. Why are you building an annotator? I find their entire pipeline. I find your vision, I mean, the vision of end to end very compelling, but I also like the engineering of the data engine that they've created. In terms of supervised learning pipelines, that thing is damn impressive. You're basically, the idea is that you have hundreds of thousands of people that are doing data collection for you by doing their experience. So that's kind of similar to the Comma AI model. And you're able to mine that data based on the kind of edge cases you need. I think it's harder to do in the end to end learning. The mining of the right edge cases. Like that's where feature engineering is actually really powerful because like us humans are able to do this kind of mining a little better. But yeah, there's obvious, as we know, there's obvious constraints and limitations to that idea. Carpathia just tweeted, he's like, you get really interesting insights if you sort your validation set by loss and look at the highest loss examples. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you can do, we have a little data engine like thing. We're training a segment. I know it's not fancy. It's just like, okay, train the new segment, run it on 100,000 images and now take the thousand with highest loss. Select a hundred of those by human, put those, get those ones labeled, retrain, do it again. And so it's a much less well written data engine. And yeah, you can take these things really far and it is impressive engineering. And if you truly need supervised data for a problem, yeah, things like data engine are at the high end of what is attention? Is a human paying attention? I mean, we're going to probably build something that looks like data engine to push our driver monitoring further. But for driving itself, you have it all annotated beautifully by what the human does. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that applies to driver attention as well. Do you want to detect the eyes? Do you want to detect blinking and pupil movement? Do you want to detect all the like face alignments or landmark detection and so on, and then doing kind of reasoning based on that? Or do you want to take the entirety of the face over time and do end to end? I mean, it's obvious that eventually you have to do end to end with some calibration, some fixes and so on, but it's like, I don't know when that's the right move. Even if it's end to end, there actually is, there is no kind of, you have to supervise that with humans. Whether a human is paying attention or not is a completely subjective judgment. Like you can try to like automatically do it with some stuff, but you don't have, if I record a video of a human, I don't have true annotations anywhere in that video. The only way to get them is with, you know, other humans labeling it really. Well, I don't know. If you think deeply about it, you could, you might be able to just, depending on the task, maybe a discover self annotating things like, you know, you can look at like steering wheel reverse or something like that. You can discover little moments of lapse of attention. I mean, that's where psychology comes in. Is there indicate, cause you have so much data to look at. So you might be able to find moments when there's like, just inattention that even with smartphone, if you want to detect smartphone use, you can start to zoom in. I mean, that's the gold mine, sort of the comma AI. I mean, Tesla is doing this too, right? Is they're doing annotation based on, it's like a self supervised learning too. It's just a small part of the entire picture. That's kind of the challenge of solving a problem in machine learning. If you can discover self annotating parts of the problem, right? Our driver monitoring team is half a person right now. I would, you know, once we have, once we have two, three people on that team, I definitely want to look at self annotating stuff for attention. Let's go back for a sec to a comma and what, you know, for people who are curious to try it out, how do you install a comma in say a 2020 Toyota Corolla or like, what are the cars that are supported? What are the cars that you recommend? And what does it take? You have a few videos out, but maybe through words, can you explain what's it take to actually install a thing? So we support, I think it's 91 cars, 91 makes the models. We've got to 100 this year. Nice. The, yeah, the 2020 Corolla, great choice. The 2020 Sonata, it's using the stock longitudinal. It's using just our lateral control, but it's a very refined car. Their longitudinal control is not bad at all. So yeah, Corolla, Sonata, or if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty and look in the right places on the internet, the Honda Civic is great, but you're going to have to install a modified EPS firmware in order to get a little bit more torque. And I can't help you with that. Comma does not officially endorse that, but we have been doing it. We didn't ever release it. We waited for someone else to discover it. And then, you know. And you have a Discord server where people, there's a very active developer community, I suppose. So depending on the level of experimentation you're willing to do, that's the community. If you just want to buy it and you have a supported car, it's 10 minutes to install. There's YouTube videos. It's Ikea furniture level. If you can set up a table from Ikea, you can install a Comma 2 in your supported car and it will just work. Now you're like, oh, but I want this high end feature or I want to fix this bug. Okay, well, welcome to the developer community. So what, if I wanted to, this is something I asked you offline like a few months ago. If I wanted to run my own code to, so use Comma as a platform and try to run something like OpenPilot, what does it take to do that? So there's a toggle in the settings called enable SSH. And if you toggle that, you can SSH into your device. You can modify the code. You can upload whatever code you want to it. There's a whole lot of people. So about 60% of people are running stock comma. About 40% of people are running forks. And there's a community of, there's a bunch of people who maintain these forks and these forks support different cars or they have different toggles. We try to keep away from the toggles that are like disabled driver monitoring, but there's some people might want that kind of thing and like, yeah, you can, it's your car. I'm not here to tell you. We have some, we ban, if you're trying to subvert safety features, you're banned from our Discord. I don't want anything to do with you, but there's some forks doing that. Got it. So you encourage responsible forking. Yeah, yeah. We encourage, some people, yeah, some people, like there's forks that will do, some people just like having a lot of readouts on the UI, like a lot of like flashing numbers. So there's forks that do that. Some people don't like the fact that it disengages when you press the gas pedal. There's forks that disable that. Got it. Now the stock experience is what like, so it does both lane keeping and longitudinal control all together. So it's not separate like it is in autopilot. No, so, okay. Some cars we use the stock longitudinal control. We don't do the longitudinal control in all the cars. Some cars, the ACCs are pretty good in the cars. It's the lane keep that's atrocious in anything except for autopilot and super cruise. But, you know, you just turn it on and it works. What does this engagement look like? Yeah, so we have, I mean, I'm very concerned about mode confusion. I've experienced it on super cruise and autopilot where like autopilot, like autopilot disengages. I don't realize that the ACC is still on. The lead car moves slightly over and then the Tesla accelerates to like whatever my set speed is super fast. I'm like, what's going on here? We have engaged and disengaged. And this is similar to my understanding, I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is either the pilot is in control or the copilot is in control. And we have the same kind of transition system. Either open pilot is engaged or open pilot is disengaged. Engage with cruise control, disengage with either gas brake or cancel. Let's talk about money. What's the business strategy for Kama? Profitable. Well, so you're. We did it. So congratulations. What, so basically selling, so we should say Kama cost a thousand bucks, Kama two? 200 for the interface to the car as well. It's 1200, I'll send that. Nobody's usually upfront like this. Yeah, you gotta add the tack on, right? Yeah. I love it. I'm not gonna lie to you. Trust me, it will add $1,200 of value to your life. Yes, it's still super cheap. 30 days, no questions asked, money back guarantee, and prices are only going up. If there ever is future hardware, it could cost a lot more than $1,200. So Kama three is in the works. It could be. All I will say is future hardware is going to cost a lot more than the current hardware. Yeah, the people that use, the people I've spoken with that use Kama, that use open pilot, first of all, they use it a lot. So people that use it, they fall in love with it. Oh, our retention rate is insane. It's a good sign. Yeah. It's a really good sign. 70% of Kama two buyers are daily active users. Yeah, it's amazing. Oh, also, we don't plan on stopping selling the Kama two. Like it's, you know. So whatever you create that's beyond Kama two, it would be potentially a phase shift. Like it's so much better that, like you could use Kama two and you can use Kama whatever. Depends what you want. It's 3.41, 42. Yeah. You know, autopilot hardware one versus hardware two. The Kama two is kind of like hardware one. Got it, got it. You can still use both. Got it, got it. I think I heard you talk about retention rate with the VR headsets that the average is just once. Yeah. Just fast. I mean, it's such a fascinating way to think about technology. And this is a really, really good sign. And the other thing that people say about Kama is like they can't believe they're getting this 4,000 bucks. Right? It seems like some kind of steal. So, but in terms of like longterm business strategies that basically to put, so it's currently in like a thousand plus cars. 1,200. More, more. So yeah, dailies is about, dailies is about 2,000. Weeklys is about 2,500, monthlys is over 3,000. Wow. We've grown a lot since we last talked. Is the goal, like can we talk crazy for a second? I mean, what's the goal to overtake Tesla? Let's talk, okay, so. I mean, Android did overtake iOS. That's exactly it, right? So they did it. I actually don't know the timeline of that one. But let's talk, because everything is in alpha now. The autopilot you could argue is in alpha in terms of towards the big mission of autonomous driving, right? And so what, yeah, is your goal to overtake millions of cars essentially? Of course. Where would it stop? Like it's open source software. It might not be millions of cars with a piece of comma hardware, but yeah. I think open pilot at some point will cross over autopilot in users, just like Android crossed over iOS. How does Google make money from Android? It's complicated. Their own devices make money. Google, Google makes money by just kind of having you on the internet. Yes. Google search is built in, Gmail is built in. Android is just a shill for the rest of Google's ecosystem. Yeah, but the problem is Android is not, is a brilliant thing. I mean, Android arguably changed the world. So there you go. That's, you can feel good ethically speaking. But as a business strategy, it's questionable. Or sell hardware. Sell hardware. I mean, it took Google a long time to come around to it, but they are now making money on the Pixel. You're not about money, you're more about winning. Yeah, of course. No, but if only 10% of open pilot devices come from comma AI. They still make a lot. That is still, yes. That is a ton of money for our company. But can't somebody create a better comma using open pilot? Or are you basically saying, well, I'll compete them? Well, I'll compete you. Can you create a better Android phone than the Google Pixel? Right. I mean, you can, but like, you know. I love that. So you're confident, like, you know what the hell you're doing. Yeah. It's confidence and merit. I mean, our money comes from, we're a consumer electronics company. Yeah. And put it this way. So we sold like 3,000 comma twos. 2,500 right now. And like, OK, we're probably going to sell 10,000 units next year. 10,000 units, even just $1,000 a unit, OK, we're at 10 million in revenue. Get that up to 100,000, maybe double the price of the unit. Now we're talking like 200 million revenue. We're talking like series. Yeah, actually making money. One of the rare semi autonomous or autonomous vehicle companies that are actually making money. Yeah. You know, if you look at a model, and we were just talking about this yesterday. If you look at a model, and like you're AB testing your model, and if you're one branch of the AB test, the losses go down very fast in the first five epochs. That model is probably going to converge to something considerably better than the one where the losses are going down slower. Why do people think this is going to stop? Why do people think one day there's going to be a great like, well, Waymo's eventually going to surpass you guys? Well, they're not. Do you see like a world where like a Tesla or a car like a Tesla would be able to basically press a button and you like switch to open pilot? You know, you load in. No, so I think so first off, I think that we may surpass Tesla in terms of users. I do not think we're going to surpass Tesla ever in terms of revenue. I think Tesla can capture a lot more revenue per user than we can. But this mimics the Android iOS model exactly. There may be more Android devices, but there's a lot more iPhones than Google Pixels. So I think there'll be a lot more Tesla cars sold than pieces of common hardware. And then as far as a Tesla owner being able to switch to open pilot, does iPhones run Android? No, but it doesn't make sense. You can if you really want to do it, but it doesn't really make sense. Like it's not. It doesn't make sense. Who cares? What about if a large company like automakers, Ford, GM, Toyota came to George Hots? Or on the tech space, Amazon, Facebook, Google came with a large pile of cash? Would you consider being purchased? Do you see that as a one possible? Not seriously, no. I would probably see how much shit they'll entertain for me. And if they're willing to jump through a bunch of my hoops, then maybe. But no, not the way that M&A works today. I mean, we've been approached. And I laugh in these people's faces. I'm like, are you kidding? Yeah. Because it's so demeaning. The M&A people are so demeaning to companies. They treat the startup world as their innovation ecosystem. And they think that I'm cool with going along with that, so I can have some of their scam fake Fed dollars. Fed coin. What am I going to do with more Fed coin? Fed coin. Fed coin, man. I love that. So that's the cool thing about podcasting, actually, is people criticize. I don't know if you're familiar with Spotify giving Joe Rogan $100 million. I don't know about that. And they respect, despite all the shit that people are talking about Spotify, people understand that podcasters like Joe Rogan know what the hell they're doing. So they give them money and say, just do what you do. And the equivalent for you would be like, George, do what the hell you do, because you're good at it. Try not to murder too many people. There's some kind of common sense things, like just don't go on a weird rampage of it. Yeah. It comes down to what companies I could respect, right? Could I respect GM? Never. No, I couldn't. I mean, could I respect a Hyundai? More so. That's a lot closer. Toyota? What's your? Nah. Nah. Korean is the way. I think that the Japanese, the Germans, the US, they're all too, they're all too, they all think they're too great. What about the tech companies? Apple? Apple is, of the tech companies that I could respect, Apple's the closest. Yeah. I mean, I could never. It would be ironic. It would be ironic if Comma AI is acquired by Apple. I mean, Facebook, look, I quit Facebook 10 years ago because I didn't respect the business model. Google has declined so fast in the last five years. What are your thoughts about Waymo and its present and its future? Let me start by saying something nice, which is I've visited them a few times and have ridden in their cars. And the engineering that they're doing, both the research and the actual development and the engineering they're doing and the scale they're actually achieving by doing it all themselves is really impressive. And the balance of safety and innovation. And the cars work really well for the routes they drive. It drives fast, which was very surprising to me. It drives the speed limit or faster than the speed limit. It goes. And it works really damn well. And the interface is nice. In Chandler, Arizona, yeah. Yeah, in Chandler, Arizona, very specific environment. So it gives me enough material in my mind to push back against the madmen of the world, like George Hotz, to be like, because you kind of imply there's zero probability they're going to win. And after I've used, after I've ridden in it, to me, it's not zero. Oh, it's not for technology reasons. Bureaucracy? No, it's worse than that. It's actually for product reasons, I think. Oh, you think they're just not capable of creating an amazing product? No, I think that the product that they're building doesn't make sense. So a few things. You say the Waymo's are fast. Benchmark a Waymo against a competent Uber driver. Right. Right? The Uber driver's faster. It's not even about speed. It's the thing you said. It's about the experience of being stuck at a stop sign because pedestrians are crossing nonstop. I like when my Uber driver doesn't come to a full stop at the stop sign. Yeah. You know? And so let's say the Waymo's are 20% slower than an Uber. Right? You can argue that they're going to be cheaper. And I argue that users already have the choice to trade off money for speed. It's called UberPool. I think it's like 15% of rides are UberPools. Right? Users are not willing to trade off money for speed. So the whole product that they're building is not going to be competitive with traditional ride sharing networks. Right. And also, whether there's profit to be made depends entirely on one company having a monopoly. I think that the level four autonomous ride sharing vehicles market is going to look a lot like the scooter market if even the technology does come to exist, which I question. Who's doing well in that market? It's a race to the bottom. Well, it could be closer like an Uber and a Lyft, where it's just one or two players. Well, the scooter people have given up trying to market scooters as a practical means of transportation. And they're just like, they're super fun to ride. Look at wheels. I love those things. And they're great on that front. Yeah. But from an actual transportation product perspective, I do not think scooters are viable. And I do not think level four autonomous cars are viable. If you, let's play a fun experiment. If you ran, let's do a Tesla and let's do Waymo. If Elon Musk took a vacation for a year, he just said, screw it, I'm going to go live on an island, no electronics. And the board decides that we need to find somebody to run the company. And they did decide that you should run the company for a year. How do you run Tesla differently? I wouldn't change much. Do you think they're on the right track? I wouldn't change. I mean, I'd have some minor changes. But even my debate with Tesla about end to end versus SegNets, that's just software. Who cares? It's not like you're doing something terrible with SegNets. You're probably building something that's at least going to help you debug the end to end system a lot. It's very easy to transition from what they have to an end to end kind of thing. And then I presume you would, in the Model Y or maybe in the Model 3, start adding driver sensing with infrared. Yes, I would add infrared camera, infrared lights right away to those cars. And start collecting that data and do all that kind of stuff, yeah. Very much. I think they're already kind of doing it. It's an incredibly minor change. If I actually were CEO of Tesla, first off, I'd be horrified that I wouldn't be able to do a better job as Elon. And then I would try to understand the way he's done things before. You would also have to take over his Twitter. I don't tweet. Yeah, what's your Twitter situation? Why are you so quiet on Twitter? Since Dukama is like what's your social network presence like? Because on Instagram, you do live streams. You understand the music of the internet, but you don't always fully engage into it. You're part time. Well, I used to have a Twitter. Yeah, I mean, Instagram is a pretty place. Instagram is a beautiful place. It glorifies beauty. I like Instagram's values as a network. Twitter glorifies conflict, glorifies shots, taking shots of people. And it's like, you know, Twitter and Donald Trump are perfectly, they're perfect for each other. So Tesla's on the right track in your view. OK, so let's try, let's really try this experiment. If you ran Waymo, let's say they're, I don't know if you agree, but they seem to be at the head of the pack of the kind of, what would you call that approach? Like it's not necessarily lighter based because it's not about lighter. Level four robotaxi. Level four robotaxi, all in before making any revenue. So they're probably at the head of the pack. If you were said, hey, George, can you please run this company for a year, how would you change it? I would go. I would get Anthony Levandowski out of jail, and I would put him in charge of the company. Well, let's try to break that apart. Why do you want to destroy the company by doing that? Or do you mean you like renegade style thinking that pushes, that throws away bureaucracy and goes to first principle thinking? What do you mean by that? I think Anthony Levandowski is a genius, and I think he would come up with a much better idea of what to do with Waymo than me. So you mean that unironically. He is a genius. Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. I mean, I'm not saying there's no shortcomings, but in the interactions I've had with him, yeah. What? He's also willing to take, like, who knows what he would do with Waymo? I mean, he's also out there, like far more out there than I am. Yeah, there's big risks. What do you make of him? I was going to talk to him on this podcast, and I was going back and forth. I'm such a gullible, naive human. Like, I see the best in people. And I slowly started to realize that there might be some people out there that, like, have multiple faces to the world. They're, like, deceiving and dishonest. I still refuse to, like, I just, I trust people, and I don't care if I get hurt by it. But, like, you know, sometimes you have to be a little bit careful, especially platform wise and podcast wise. What do you, what am I supposed to think? So you think, you think he's a good person? Oh, I don't know. I don't really make moral judgments. It's difficult to. Oh, I mean this about the Waymo. I actually, I mean that whole idea very nonironically about what I would do. The problem with putting me in charge of Waymo is Waymo is already $10 billion in the hole, right? Whatever idea Waymo does, look, commas profitable, commas raised $8.1 million. That's small, you know, that's small money. Like, I can build a reasonable consumer electronics company and succeed wildly at that and still never be able to pay back Waymo's $10 billion. So I think the basic idea with Waymo, well, forget the $10 billion because they have some backing, but your basic thing is, like, what can we do to start making some money? Well, no, I mean, my bigger idea is, like, whatever the idea is that's gonna save Waymo, I don't have it. It's gonna have to be a big risk idea and I cannot think of a better person than Anthony Levandowski to do it. So that is completely what I would do as CEO of Waymo. I would call myself a transitionary CEO, do everything I can to fix that situation up. I'm gonna see. Yeah. Yeah. Because I can't do it, right? Like, I can't, I mean, I can talk about how what I really wanna do is just apologize for all those corny, you know, ad campaigns and be like, here's the real state of the technology. Yeah, that's, like, I have several criticism. I'm a little bit more bullish on Waymo than you seem to be, but one criticism I have is it went into corny mode too early. Like, it's still a startup. It hasn't delivered on anything. So it should be, like, more renegade and show off the engineering that they're doing, which just can be impressive, as opposed to doing these weird commercials of, like, your friendly car company. I mean, that's my biggest snipe at Waymo is always, that guy's a paid actor. That guy's not a Waymo user. He's a paid actor. Look here, I found his call sheet. Do kind of like what SpaceX is doing with the rocket launches. Just put the nerds up front, put the engineers up front, and just, like, show failures too, just. I love SpaceX's, yeah. Yeah, the thing that they're doing is right, and it just feels like the right. But. We're all so excited to see them succeed. Yeah. I can't wait to see when it won't fail, you know? Like, you lie to me, I want you to fail. You tell me the truth, you be honest with me, I want you to succeed. Yeah. Ah, yeah, and that requires the renegade CEO, right? I'm with you, I'm with you. I still have a little bit of faith in Waymo for the renegade CEO to step forward, but. It's not, it's not John Kraftik. Yeah, it's, you can't. It's not Chris Hormiston. And those people may be very good at certain things. Yeah. But they're not renegades. Yeah, because these companies are fundamentally, even though we're talking about billion dollars, all these crazy numbers, they're still, like, early stage startups. I mean, and I just, if you are pre revenue and you've raised 10 billion dollars, I have no idea, like, this just doesn't work. You know, it's against everything Silicon Valley. Where's your minimum viable product? You know, where's your users? Where's your growth numbers? This is traditional Silicon Valley. Why do you not apply it to what you think you're too big to fail already, like? How do you think autonomous driving will change society? So the mission is, for comma, to solve self driving. Do you have, like, a vision of the world of how it'll be different? Is it as simple as A to B transportation? Or is there, like, cause these are robots. It's not about autonomous driving in and of itself. It's what the technology enables. It's, I think it's the coolest applied AI problem. I like it because it has a clear path to monetary value. But as far as that being the thing that changes the world, I mean, no, like, there's cute things we're doing in common. Like, who'd have thought you could stick a phone on the windshield and it'll drive. But like, really, the product that you're building is not something that people were not capable of imagining 50 years ago. So no, it doesn't change the world on that front. Could people have imagined the internet 50 years ago? Only true genius visionaries. Everyone could have imagined autonomous cars 50 years ago. It's like a car, but I don't drive it. See, I have this sense, and I told you, like, my longterm dream is robots with which you have deep, with whom you have deep connections, right? And there's different trajectories towards that. And I've been thinking, so I've been thinking of launching a startup. I see autonomous vehicles as a potential trajectory to that. That's not where the direction I would like to go, but I also see Tesla or even Comma AI, like, pivoting into robotics broadly defined at some stage in the way, like you're mentioning, the internet didn't expect. Let's solve, you know, when I say a comma about this, we could talk about this, but let's solve self driving cars first. You gotta stay focused on the mission. Don't, don't, don't, you're not too big to fail. For however much I think Comma's winning, like, no, no, no, no, no, you're winning when you solve level five self driving cars. And until then, you haven't won. And you know, again, you wanna be arrogant in the face of other people, great. You wanna be arrogant in the face of nature, you're an idiot. Stay mission focused, brilliantly put. Like I mentioned, thinking of launching a startup, I've been considering, actually, before COVID, I've been thinking of moving to San Francisco. Ooh, ooh, I wouldn't go there. So why is, well, and now I'm thinking about potentially Austin and we're in San Diego now. San Diego, come here. So why, what, I mean, you're such an interesting human. You've launched so many successful things. What, why San Diego? What do you recommend? Why not San Francisco? Have you thought, so in your case, San Diego with Qualcomm and Snapdragon, I mean, that's an amazing combination. But. That wasn't really why. That wasn't the why? No, I mean, Qualcomm was an afterthought. Qualcomm was, it was a nice thing to think about. It's like, you can have a tech company here. Yeah. And a good one, I mean, you know, I like Qualcomm, but. No. Well, so why San Diego better than San Francisco? Why does San Francisco suck? Well, so, okay, so first off, we all kind of said like, we wanna stay in California. People like the ocean. You know, California, for its flaws, it's like a lot of the flaws of California are not necessarily California as a whole, and they're much more San Francisco specific. Yeah. San Francisco, so I think first tier cities in general have stopped wanting growth. Well, you have like in San Francisco, you know, the voting class always votes to not build more houses because they own all the houses. And they're like, well, you know, once people have figured out how to vote themselves more money, they're gonna do it. It is so insanely corrupt. It is not balanced at all, like political party wise, you know, it's a one party city and. For all the discussion of diversity, it stops lacking real diversity of thought, of background, of approaches, of strategies, of ideas. It's kind of a strange place that it's the loudest people about diversity and the biggest lack of diversity. I mean, that's what they say, right? It's the projection. Projection, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And even people in Silicon Valley tell me that's like high up people, everybody is like, this is a terrible place. It doesn't make sense. I mean, and coronavirus is really what killed it. San Francisco was the number one exodus during coronavirus. We still think San Diego is a good place to be. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens with California a bit longer term. Like Austin's an interesting choice. I wouldn't, I don't have really anything bad to say about Austin either, except for the extreme heat in the summer, which, but that's like very on the surface, right? I think as far as like an ecosystem goes, it's cool. I personally love Colorado. Colorado's great. Yeah, I mean, you have these states that are, like just way better run. California is, you know, it's especially San Francisco. It's not a tie horse and like, yeah. Can I ask you for advice to me and to others about what's it take to build a successful startup? Oh, I don't know. I haven't done that. Talk to someone who did that. Well, you've, you know, this is like another book of years that I'll buy for $67, I suppose. So there's, um. One of these days I'll sell out. Yeah, that's right. Jailbreaks are going to be a dollar and books are going to be 67. How I jailbroke the iPhone by George Hots. That's right. How I jail broke the iPhone and you can too. You can too. 67 dollars. In 21 days. That's right. That's right. Oh God. Okay, I can't wait. But quite, so you have an introspective, you have built a very unique company. I mean, not you, but you and others. But I don't know. There's no, there's nothing. You have an introspective, you haven't really sat down and thought about like, well, like if you and I were having a bunch of, we're having some beers and you're seeing that I'm depressed and whatever, I'm struggling. There's no advice you can give? Oh, I mean. More beer? More beer? Um, yeah, I think it's all very like situation dependent. Here's, okay, if I can give a generic piece of advice, it's the technology always wins. The better technology always wins. And lying always loses. Build technology and don't lie. I'm with you. I agree very much. The long run, long run. Sure. That's the long run, yeah. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. True fact. Well, this is an interesting point because I ethically and just as a human believe that like hype and smoke and mirrors is not at any stage of the company is a good strategy. I mean, there's some like, you know, PR magic kind of like, you know. Oh, hype around a new product, right? If there's a call to action, if there's like a call to action, like buy my new GPU, look at it. It takes up three slots and it's this big. It's huge. Buy my GPU. Yeah, that's great. If you look at, you know, especially in the AI space broadly, but autonomous vehicles, like you can raise a huge amount of money on nothing. And the question to me is like, I'm against that. I'll never be part of that. I don't think, I hope not, willingly not. But like, is there something to be said to essentially lying to raise money, like fake it till you make it kind of thing? I mean, this is Billy McFarland in the Fyre Festival. Like we all experienced, you know, what happens with that. No, no, don't fake it till you make it. Be honest and hope you make it the whole way. The technology wins. Right, the technology wins. And like, there is, I'm not used to like the anti hype, you know, that's a Slava KPSS reference, but hype isn't necessarily bad. I loved camping out for the iPhones, you know, and as long as the hype is backed by like substance, as long as it's backed by something I can actually buy, and like it's real, then hype is great and it's a great feeling. It's when the hype is backed by lies that it's a bad feeling. I mean, a lot of people call Elon Musk a fraud. How could he be a fraud? I've noticed this, this kind of interesting effect, which is he does tend to over promise and deliver, what's the better way to phrase it? Promise a timeline that he doesn't deliver on, he delivers much later on. What do you think about that? Cause I do that, I think that's a programmer thing too. I do that as well. You think that's a really bad thing to do or is that okay? I think that's, again, as long as like, you're working toward it and you're gonna deliver on it, it's not too far off, right? Right? Like, you know, the whole autonomous vehicle thing, it's like, I mean, I still think Tesla's on track to beat us. I still think even with their missteps, they have advantages we don't have. You know, Elon is better than me at like marshaling massive amounts of resources. So, you know, I still think given the fact they're maybe making some wrong decisions, they'll end up winning. And like, it's fine to hype it if you're actually gonna win, right? Like if Elon says, look, we're gonna be landing rockets back on earth in a year and it takes four, like, you know, he landed a rocket back on earth and he was working toward it the whole time. I think there's some amount of like, I think when it becomes wrong is if you know you're not gonna meet that deadline. If you're lying. Yeah, that's brilliantly put. Like this is what people don't understand, I think. Like Elon believes everything he says. He does, as far as I can tell, he does. And I detected that in myself too. Like if I, it's only bullshit if you're like conscious of yourself lying. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Now you can't take that to such an extreme, right? Like in a way, I think maybe Billy McFarland believed everything he said too. Right, that's how you start a cult and everybody kills themselves. Yeah. Yeah, like it's, you need, you need, if there's like some factor on it, it's fine. And you need some people to like, you know, keep you in check, but like, if you deliver on most of the things you say and just the timelines are off, yeah. It does piss people off though. I wonder, but who cares? In a long arc of history, the people, everybody gets pissed off at the people who succeed, which is one of the things that frustrates me about this world, is they don't celebrate the success of others. Like there's so many people that want Elon to fail. It's so fascinating to me. Like what is wrong with you? Like, so Elon Musk talks about like people shorting, like they talk about financial, but I think it's much bigger than the financials. I've seen like the human factors community, they want, they want other people to fail. Why, why, why? Like even people, the harshest thing is like, you know, even people that like seem to really hate Donald Trump, they want him to fail or like the other president or they want Barack Obama to fail. It's like. Yeah, we're all on the same boat, man. It's weird, but I want that, I would love to inspire that part of the world to change because damn it, if the human species is gonna survive, we should celebrate success. Like it seems like the efficient thing to do in this objective function that we're all striving for is to celebrate the ones that like figure out how to like do better at that objective function as opposed to like dragging them down back into the mud. I think there is, this is the speech I always give about the commenters on Hacker News. So first off, something to remember about the internet in general is commenters are not representative of the population. I don't comment on anything. You know, commenters are representative of a certain sliver of the population. And on Hacker News, a common thing I'll see is when you'll see something that's like, you know, promises to be wild out there and innovative. There is some amount of, you know, checking them back to earth, but there's also some amount of if this thing succeeds, well, I'm 36 and I've worked at large tech companies my whole life. They can't succeed because if they succeed, that would mean that I could have done something different with my life, but we know that I couldn't have, we know that I couldn't have, and that's why they're gonna fail. And they have to root for them to fail to kind of maintain their world image. So tune it out. And they comment, well, it's hard, I, so one of the things, one of the things I'm considering startup wise is to change that. Cause I think the, I think it's also a technology problem. It's a platform problem. I agree. It's like, because the thing you said, most people don't comment. I think most people want to comment. They just don't because it's all the assholes who are commenting. Exactly, I don't want to be grouped in with them. You don't want to be at a party where everyone is an asshole. And so they, but that's a platform problem. I can't believe what Reddit's become. I can't believe the group thinking, Reddit comments. There's a, Reddit is an interesting one because they're subreddits. And so you can still see, especially small subreddits that like, that are a little like havens of like joy and positivity and like deep, even disagreement, but like nuanced discussion. But it's only like small little pockets, but that's emergent. The platform is not helping that or hurting that. So I guess naturally something about the internet, if you don't put in a lot of effort to encourage nuance and positive, good vibes, it's naturally going to decline into chaos. I would love to see someone do this well. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, very doable. I think actually, so I feel like Twitter could be overthrown. Yashua Bach talked about how like, if you have like and retweet, like that's only positive wiring, right? The only way to do anything like negative there is with a comment. And that's like that asymmetry is what gives, you know, Twitter its particular toxicness. Whereas I find YouTube comments to be much better because YouTube comments have an up and a down and they don't show the downvotes. Without getting into depth of this particular discussion, the point is to explore possibilities and get a lot of data on it. Because I mean, I could disagree with what you just said. The point is it's unclear. It hasn't been explored in a really rich way. Like these questions of how to create platforms that encourage positivity. Yeah, I think it's a technology problem. And I think we'll look back at Twitter as it is now. Maybe it'll happen within Twitter, but most likely somebody overthrows them is we'll look back at Twitter and say, can't believe we put up with this level of toxicity. You need a different business model too. Any social network that fundamentally has advertising as a business model, this was in The Social Dilemma, which I didn't watch, but I liked it. It's like, you know, there's always the, you know, you're the product, you're not the, but they had a nuanced take on it that I really liked. And it said, the product being sold is influence over you. The product being sold is literally your, you know, influence on you. Like that can't be, if that's your idea, okay. Well, you know, guess what? It can't not be toxic. Yeah, maybe there's ways to spin it, like with giving a lot more control to the user and transparency to see what is happening to them as opposed to in the shadows, it's possible, but that can't be the primary source of. But the users aren't, no one's gonna use that. It depends, it depends, it depends. I think that the, you're not going to, you can't depend on self awareness of the users. It's a longer discussion because you can't depend on it, but you can reward self awareness. Like if for the ones who are willing to put in the work of self awareness, you can reward them and incentivize and perhaps be pleasantly surprised how many people are willing to be self aware on the internet. Like we are in real life. Like I'm putting in a lot of effort with you right now, being self aware about if I say something stupid or mean, I'll like look at your like body language. Like I'm putting in that effort. It's costly for an introvert, very costly. But on the internet, fuck it. Like most people are like, I don't care if this hurts somebody, I don't care if this is not interesting or if this is, yeah, it's a mean or whatever. I think so much of the engagement today on the internet is so disingenuine too. You're not doing this out of a genuine, this is what you think. You're doing this just straight up to manipulate others. Whether you're in, you just became an ad. Yeah, okay, let's talk about a fun topic, which is programming. Here's another book idea for you. Let me pitch. What's your perfect programming setup? So like this by George Hots. So like what, listen, you're. Give me a MacBook Air, sit me in a corner of a hotel room and you know I'll still ask you. So you really don't care. You don't fetishize like multiple monitors, keyboard. Those things are nice and I'm not gonna say no to them, but did they automatically unlock tons of productivity? No, not at all. I have definitely been more productive on a MacBook Air in a corner of a hotel room. What about IDE? So which operating system do you love? What text editor do you use IDE? What, is there something that is like the perfect, if you could just say the perfect productivity setup for George Hots. It doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. You know, I guess I code most of the time in Vim. Like literally I'm using an editor from the 70s. You know, you didn't make anything better. Okay, VS code is nice for reading code. There's a few things that are nice about it. I think that you can build much better tools. How like IDA's xrefs work way better than VS codes, why? Yeah, actually that's a good question, like why? I still use, sorry, Emacs for most. I've actually never, I have to confess something dark. So I've never used Vim. I think maybe I'm just afraid that my life has been like a waste. I'm so, I'm not evangelical about Emacs. I think this. This is how I feel about TensorFlow versus PyTorch. Having just like, we've switched everything to PyTorch now. Put months into the switch. I have felt like I've wasted years on TensorFlow. I can't believe it. I can't believe how much better PyTorch is. Yeah. I've used Emacs and Vim, doesn't matter. Yeah, it's still just my heart. Somehow I fell in love with Lisp. I don't know why. You can't, the heart wants what the heart wants. I don't understand it, but it just connected with me. Maybe it's the functional language that first I connected with. Maybe it's because so many of the AI courses before the deep learning revolution were taught with Lisp in mind. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I'm stuck with it. But at the same time, like, why am I not using a modern ID for some of these programming? I don't know. They're not that much better. I've used modern IDs too. But at the same time, so to just, well, not to disagree with you, but like, I like multiple monitors. Like I have to do work on a laptop and it's a pain in the ass. And also I'm addicted to the Kinesis weird keyboard. You could see there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you don't have any of that. You can just be on a MacBook. I mean, look at work. I have three 24 inch monitors. I have a happy hacking keyboard. I have a Razer Death Hatter mouse, like. But it's not essential for you. No. Let's go to a day in the life of George Hots. What is the perfect day productivity wise? So we're not talking about like Hunter S. Thompson drugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let's look at productivity. Like what's the day look like, like hour by hour? Is there any regularities that create a magical George Hots experience? I can remember three days in my life. And I remember these days vividly when I've gone through kind of radical transformations to the way I think. And what I would give, I would pay $100,000 if I could have one of these days tomorrow. The days have been so impactful. And one was first discovering Eliezer Yudkowsky on the singularity and reading that stuff. And like, you know, my mind was blown. The next was discovering the Hutter Prize and that AI is just compression. Like finally understanding AIXI and what all of that was. You know, I like read about it when I was 18, 19, I didn't understand it. And then the fact that like lossless compression implies intelligence, the day that I was shown that. And then the third one is controversial. The day I found a blog called Unqualified Reservations. And read that and I was like. Wait, which one is that? That's, what's the guy's name? Curtis Yarvin. Yeah. So many people tell me I'm supposed to talk to him. Yeah, the day. He looks, he sounds insane. Definitely. Or brilliant, but insane or both, I don't know. The day I found that blog was another like, this was during like Gamergate and kind of the run up to the 2016 election. And I'm like, wow, okay, the world makes sense now. This is like, I had a framework now to interpret this. Just like I got the framework for AI and a framework to interpret technological progress. Like those days when I discovered these new frameworks were. Oh, interesting. So it's not about, but what was special about those days? How did those days come to be? Is it just, you got lucky? Like, you just encountered a hotter prize on Hacker News or something like that? But you see, I don't think it's just, see, I don't think it's just that like, I could have gotten lucky at any point. I think that in a way. You were ready at that moment. Yeah, exactly. To receive the information. But is there some magic to the day today of like eating breakfast? And it's the mundane things. Nah. Nothing. Nah, I drift through life. Without structure. I drift through life hoping and praying that I will get another day like those days. And there's nothing in particular you do to be a receptacle for another, for day number four. No, I didn't do anything to get the other ones. So I don't think I have to really do anything now. I took a month long trip to New York and the Ethereum thing was the highlight of it, but the rest of it was pretty terrible. I did a two week road trip and I got, I had to turn around. I had to turn around driving in Gunnison, Colorado. I passed through Gunnison and the snow starts coming down. There's a pass up there called Monarch Pass in order to get through to Denver, you gotta get over the Rockies. And I had to turn my car around. I couldn't, I watched a F150 go off the road. I'm like, I gotta go back. And like that day was meaningful. Cause like, it was real. Like I actually had to turn my car around. It's rare that anything even real happens in my life. Even as, you know, mundane as the fact that, yeah, there was snow, I had to turn around, stay in Gunnison and leave the next day. Something about that moment felt real. Okay, so actually it's interesting to break apart the three moments you mentioned, if it's okay. So I always have trouble pronouncing his name, but Alousa Yurkowski. So what, how did your worldview change in starting to consider the exponential growth of AI and AGI that he thinks about and the threats of artificial intelligence and all that kind of ideas? Can you, is it just like, can you maybe break apart like what exactly was so magical to you? Is it transformational experience? Today, everyone knows him for threats and AI safety. This was pre that stuff. There was, I don't think a mention of AI safety on the page. This is, this is old Yurkowski stuff. He'd probably denounce it all now. He'd probably be like, that's exactly what I didn't want to happen. Sorry, man. Is there something specific you can take from his work that you can remember? Yeah, it was this realization that computers double in power every 18 months and humans do not, and they haven't crossed yet. But if you have one thing that's doubling every 18 months and one thing that's staying like this, you know, here's your log graph, here's your line, you know, calculate that. And then the data opened the door to the exponential thinking, like thinking that like, you know what, with technology, we can actually transform the world. It opened the door to human obsolescence. It opened the door to realize that in my lifetime, humans are going to be replaced. And then the matching idea to that of artificial intelligence with the Hutter prize, you know, I'm torn. I go back and forth on what I think about it. Yeah. But the basic thesis is it's a nice compelling notion that we can reduce the task of creating an intelligent system, a generally intelligent system into the task of compression. So you can think of all of intelligence in the universe, in fact, as a kind of compression. Do you find that, was that just at the time you found that as a compelling idea or do you still find that a compelling idea? I still find that a compelling idea. I think that it's not that useful day to day, but actually one of maybe my quests before that was a search for the definition of the word intelligence. And I never had one. And I definitely have a definition of the word compression. It's a very simple, straightforward one. And you know what compression is, you know what lossless, it's lossless compression, not lossy, lossless compression. And that that is equivalent to intelligence, which I believe, I'm not sure how useful that definition is day to day, but like I now have a framework to understand what it is. And he just 10X the prize for that competition like recently a few months ago. You ever thought of taking a crack at that? Oh, I did. Oh, I did. I spent the next, after I found the prize, I spent the next six months of my life trying it. And well, that's when I started learning everything about AI. And then I worked at Vicarious for a bit and then I read all the deep learning stuff. And I'm like, okay, now I like I'm caught up to modern AI. Wow. And I had a really good framework to put it all in from the compression stuff, right? Like some of the first deep learning models I played with were GPT basically, but before transformers, before it was still RNNs to do character prediction. But by the way, on the compression side, I mean, especially with neural networks, what do you make of the lossless requirement with the Hutter prize? So, you know, human intelligence and neural networks can probably compress stuff pretty well, but it would be lossy. It's imperfect. You can turn a lossy compression to a lossless compressor pretty easily using an arithmetic encoder, right? You can take an arithmetic encoder and you can just encode the noise with maximum efficiency. Right? So even if you can't predict exactly what the next character is, the better a probability distribution, you can put over the next character. You can then use an arithmetic encoder to, right? You don't have to know whether it's an E or an I, you just have to put good probabilities on them and then, you know, code those. And if you have, it's a bits of entropy thing, right? So let me, on that topic, it'd be interesting as a little side tour. What are your thoughts in this year about GPT3 and these language models and these transformers? Is there something interesting to you as an AI researcher, or is there something interesting to you as an autonomous vehicle developer? Nah, I think it's overhyped. I mean, it's not, like, it's cool. It's cool for what it is, but no, we're not just gonna be able to scale up to GPT12 and get general purpose intelligence. Like, your loss function is literally just, you know, cross entropy loss on the character, right? Like, that's not the loss function of general intelligence. Is that obvious to you? Yes. Can you imagine that, like, to play devil's advocate on yourself, is it possible that you can, the GPT12 will achieve general intelligence with something as dumb as this kind of loss function? I guess it depends what you mean by general intelligence. So there's another problem with the GPTs, and that's that they don't have a, they don't have longterm memory. Right. So, like, just GPT12, a scaled up version of GPT2 or GPT3, I find it hard to believe. Well, you can scale it in, so it's a hard coded length, but you can make it wider and wider and wider. Yeah. You're gonna get cool things from those systems, but I don't think you're ever gonna get something that can, like, you know, build me a rocket ship. What about solved driving? So, you know, you can use Transformer with video, for example. You think, is there something in there? No, because, I mean, look, we use a GRU. We use a GRU. We could change that GRU out to a Transformer. I think driving is much more Markovian than language. So, Markovian, you mean, like, the memory, which aspect of Markovian? I mean that, like, most of the information in the state at T minus one is also in state T. I see, yeah. Right, and it kind of, like, drops off nicely like this, whereas sometime with language, you have to refer back to the third paragraph on the second page. I feel like. There's not many, like, you can say, like, speed limit signs, but there's really not many things in autonomous driving that look like that. But if you look at, to play devil's advocate, is the risk estimation thing that you've talked about is kind of interesting. Is, it feels like there might be some longer term aggregation of context necessary to be able to figure out, like, the context. Yeah, I'm not even sure I'm believing my devil's advocate. We have a nice, like, vision model, which outputs, like, a one or two, four dimensional perception space. Can I try Transformers on it? Sure, I probably will. At some point, we'll try Transformers, and then we'll just see. Do they do better? Sure, I'm. But it might not be a game changer, you're saying? No, well, I'm not. Like, might Transformers work better than GRUs for autonomous driving? Sure. Might we switch? Sure. Is this some radical change? No. Okay, we use a slightly different, you know, we switch from RNNs to GRUs. Like, okay, maybe it's GRUs to Transformers, but no, it's not. Yeah. Well, on the topic of general intelligence, I don't know how much I've talked to you about it. Like, what, do you think we'll actually build an AGI? Like, if you look at Ray Kurzweil with Singularity, do you have like an intuition about, you're kind of saying driving is easy. Yeah. And I tend to personally believe that solving driving will have really deep, important impacts on our ability to solve general intelligence. Like, I think driving doesn't require general intelligence, but I think they're going to be neighbors in a way that it's like deeply tied. Cause it's so, like driving is so deeply connected to the human experience that I think solving one will help solve the other. But, so I don't see, I don't see driving as like easy and almost like separate than general intelligence, but like, what's your vision of a future with a Singularity? Do you see there'll be a single moment, like a Singularity where it'll be a phase shift? Are we in the Singularity now? Like what, do you have crazy ideas about the future in terms of AGI? We're definitely in the Singularity now. We are? Of course, of course. Look at the bandwidth between people. The bandwidth between people goes up, right? The Singularity is just, you know, when the bandwidth, but. What do you mean by the bandwidth of people? Communications, tools, the whole world is networked. The whole world is networked and we raise the speed of that network, right? Oh, so you think the communication of information in a distributed way is an empowering thing for collective intelligence? Oh, I didn't say it's necessarily a good thing, but I think that's like, when I think of the definition of the Singularity, yeah, it seems kind of right. I see, like it's a change in the world beyond which like the world be transformed in ways that we can't possibly imagine. No, I mean, I think we're in the Singularity now in the sense that there's like, you know, one world and a monoculture and it's also linked. Yeah, I mean, I kind of share the intuition that the Singularity will originate from the collective intelligence of us ands versus the like some single system AGI type thing. Oh, I totally agree with that. Yeah, I don't really believe in like a hard take off AGI kind of thing. Yeah, I don't even think AI is all that different in kind from what we've already been building. With respect to driving, I think driving is a subset of general intelligence and I think it's a pretty complete subset. I think the tools we develop at Kama will also be extremely helpful to solving general intelligence and that's I think the real reason why I'm doing it. I don't care about self driving cars. It's a cool problem to beat people at. But yeah, I mean, yeah, you're kind of, you're of two minds. So one, you do have to have a mission and you wanna focus and make sure you get there. You can't forget that but at the same time, there is a thread that's much bigger than that connects the entirety of your effort. That's much bigger than just driving. With AI and with general intelligence, it is so easy to delude yourself into thinking you've figured something out when you haven't. If we build a level five self driving car, we have indisputably built something. Yeah. Is it general intelligence? I'm not gonna debate that. I will say we've built something that provides huge financial value. Yeah, beautifully put. That's the engineering credo. Like just build the thing. It's like, that's why I'm with Elon on go to Mars. Yeah, that's a great one. You can argue like who the hell cares about going to Mars. But the reality is set that as a mission, get it done. Yeah. And then you're going to crack some problem that you've never even expected in the process of doing that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, no, I think if I had a choice between humanity going to Mars and solving self driving cars, I think going to Mars is better, but I don't know. I'm more suited for self driving cars. I'm an information guy. I'm not a modernist, I'm a postmodernist. Postmodernist, all right, beautifully put. Let me drag you back to programming for a sec. What three, maybe three to five programming languages should people learn, do you think? Like if you look at yourself, what did you get the most out of from learning? Well, so everybody should learn C and assembly. We'll start with those two, right? Assembly? Yeah, if you can't code an assembly, you don't know what the computer's doing. You don't understand like, you don't have to be great in assembly, but you have to code in it. And then like, you have to appreciate assembly in order to appreciate all the great things C gets you. And then you have to code in C in order to appreciate all the great things Python gets you. So I'll just say assembly C and Python, we'll start with those three. The memory allocation of C and the fact that, so assembly gives you a sense of just how many levels of abstraction you get to work on in modern day programming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, graph coloring for assignment, register assignment and compilers. Like, you know, you gotta do, you know, the compiler, the computer only has a certain number of registers, yet you can have all the variables you want in a C function. So you get to start to build intuition about compilation, like what a compiler gets you. What else? Well, then there's kind of a, so those are all very imperative programming languages. Then there's two other paradigms for programming that everybody should be familiar with. And one of them is functional. You should learn Haskell and take that all the way through, learn a language with dependent types like Coq, learn that whole space, like the very PL theory, heavy languages. And Haskell is your favorite functional? Is that the go to, you'd say? Yeah, I'm not a great Haskell programmer. I wrote a compiler in Haskell once. There's another paradigm, and actually there's one more paradigm that I'll even talk about after that, that I never used to talk about when I would think about this, but the next paradigm is learn Verilog of HDL. Understand this idea of all of the instructions execute at once. If I have a block in Verilog and I write stuff in it, it's not sequential. They all execute at once. And then think like that, that's how hardware works. To be, so I guess assembly doesn't quite get you that. Assembly is more about compilation, and Verilog is more about the hardware, like giving a sense of what actually is the hardware is doing. Assembly, C, Python are straight, like they sit right on top of each other. In fact, C is, well, C is kind of coded in C, but you could imagine the first C was coded in assembly, and Python is actually coded in C. So you can straight up go on that. Got it, and then Verilog gives you, that's brilliant. Okay. And then I think there's another one now. Everyone, Carpathia calls it programming 2.0, which is learn a, I'm not even gonna, don't learn TensorFlow, learn PyTorch. So machine learning. We've got to come up with a better term than programming 2.0, or, but yeah. It's a programming language, learn it. I wonder if it can be formalized a little bit better. It feels like we're in the early days of what that actually entails. Data driven programming? Data driven programming, yeah. But it's so fundamentally different as a paradigm than the others. Like it almost requires a different skillset. But you think it's still, yeah. And PyTorch versus TensorFlow, PyTorch wins. It's the fourth paradigm. It's the fourth paradigm that I've kind of seen. There's like this, you know, imperative functional hardware. I don't know a better word for it. And then ML. Do you have advice for people that wanna, you know, get into programming, wanna learn programming? You have a video, what is programming noob lessons, exclamation point. And I think the top comment is like, warning, this is not for noobs. Do you have a noob, like a TLDW for that video, but also a noob friendly advice on how to get into programming? We're never going to learn programming by watching a video called Learn Programming. The only way to learn programming, I think, and the only one is that the only way everyone I've ever met who can program well, learned it all in the same way. They had something they wanted to do and then they tried to do it. And then they were like, oh, well, okay. This is kind of, you know, it'd be nice if the computer could kind of do this. And then, you know, that's how you learn. You just keep pushing on a project. So the only advice I have for learning programming is go program. Somebody wrote to me a question like, we don't really, they're looking to learn about recurring neural networks. And he's saying, like, my company's thinking of using recurring neural networks for time series data, but we don't really have an idea of where to use it yet. We just want to, like, do you have any advice on how to learn about, these are these kind of general machine learning questions. And I think the answer is, like, actually have a problem that you're trying to solve. And just. I see that stuff. Oh my God, when people talk like that, they're like, I heard machine learning is important. Could you help us integrate machine learning with macaroni and cheese production? You just, I don't even, you can't help these people. Like, who lets you run anything? Who lets that kind of person run anything? I think we're all, we're all beginners at some point. So. It's not like they're a beginner. It's like, my problem is not that they don't know about machine learning. My problem is that they think that machine learning has something to say about macaroni and cheese production. Or like, I heard about this new technology. How can I use it for why? Like, I don't know what it is, but how can I use it for why? That's true. You have to build up an intuition of how, cause you might be able to figure out a way, but like the prerequisites, you should have a macaroni and cheese problem to solve first. Exactly. And then two, you should have more traditional, like the learning process should involve more traditionally applicable problems in the space of whatever that is, machine learning, and then see if it can be applied to mac and cheese. At least start with, tell me about a problem. Like if you have a problem, you're like, you know, some of my boxes aren't getting enough macaroni in them. Can we use machine learning to solve this problem? That's much, much better than how do I apply machine learning to macaroni and cheese? One big thing, maybe this is me talking to the audience a little bit, cause I get these days so many messages, advice on how to like learn stuff, okay? My, this is not me being mean. I think this is quite profound actually, is you should Google it. Oh yeah. Like one of the like skills that you should really acquire as an engineer, as a researcher, as a thinker, like one, there's two complementary skills. Like one is with a blank sheet of paper with no internet to think deeply. And then the other is to Google the crap out of the questions you have. Like that's actually a skill people often talk about, but like doing research, like pulling at the thread, like looking up different words, going into like GitHub repositories with two stars and like looking how they did stuff, like looking at the code or going on Twitter, seeing like there's little pockets of brilliant people that are like having discussions. Like if you're a neuroscientist, go into signal processing community. If you're an AI person going into the psychology community, like switch communities. I keep searching, searching, searching, because it's so much better to invest in like finding somebody else who already solved your problem than it is to try to solve the problem. And because they've often invested years of their life, like entire communities are probably already out there who have tried to solve your problem. I think they're the same thing. I think you go try to solve the problem. And then in trying to solve the problem, if you're good at solving problems, you'll stumble upon the person who solved it already. But the stumbling is really important. I think that's a skill that people should really put, especially in undergrad, like search. If you ask me a question, how should I get started in deep learning, like especially? Like that is just so Googleable. Like the whole point is you Google that and you get a million pages and just start looking at them. Start pulling at the threads, start exploring, start taking notes, start getting advice from a million people that already like spent their life answering that question, actually. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, that's definitely also, yeah, when people like ask me things like that, I'm like, trust me, the top answer on Google is much, much better than anything I'm going to tell you, right? Yeah. People ask, it's an interesting question. Let me know if you have any recommendations. What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical, had an impact on your life or you would recommend perhaps? Maybe we'll start with the least controversial, Infinite Jest, Infinite Jest is a... David Foster Wallace. Yeah, it's a book about wireheading, really. Very enjoyable to read, very well written. You know, you will grow as a person reading this book, its effort, and I'll set that up for the second book, which is pornography, it's called Atlas Shrugged, which... Atlas Shrugged is pornography. I mean, it is, I will not defend the, I will not say Atlas Shrugged is a well written book. It is entertaining to read, certainly, just like pornography. The production value isn't great. You know, there's a 60 page monologue in there that Ann Rand's editor really wanted to take out. And she paid, she paid out of her pocket to keep that 60 page monologue in the book. But it is a great book for a kind of framework of human relations. And I know a lot of people are like, yeah, but it's a terrible framework. Yeah, but it's a framework. Just for context, in a couple of days, I'm speaking for probably four plus hours with Yaron Brook, who's the main living, remaining objectivist, objectivist. Interesting. So I've always found this philosophy quite interesting on many levels. One of how repulsive some percent of, large percent of the population find it, which is always, always funny to me when people are like unable to even read a philosophy because of some, I think that says more about their psychological perspective on it. But there is something about objectivism and Ann Rand's philosophy that's deeply connected to this idea of capitalism, of the ethical life is the productive life that was always compelling to me. It didn't seem as, like I didn't seem to interpret it in the negative sense that some people do. To be fair, I read that book when I was 19. So you had an impact at that point, yeah. Yeah, and the bad guys in the book have this slogan from each according to their ability to each according to their need. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, these are the most cart, this is team rocket level cartoonishness, right? No bad guy. And then when I realized that was actually the slogan of the communist party, I'm like, wait a second. Wait, no, no, no, no, no. You're telling me this really happened? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, one of the criticisms of her work is she has a cartoonish view of good and evil. Like the reality, as Jordan Peterson says, is that each of us have the capacity for good and evil in us as opposed to like, there's some characters who are purely evil and some characters that are purely good. And that's in a way why it's pornographic. The production value, I love it. Like evil is punished and there's very clearly, there's no, just like porn doesn't have character growth. Well, you know, neither does Alice Shrugged, like. Really, well put. But at 19 year old George Hots, it was good enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the third? You have something? I could give, these two I'll just throw out. They're sci fi. Perputation City. Great thing to start thinking about copies of yourself. And then the... Who's that by? Sorry, I didn't catch that. That is Greg Egan. He's a, that might not be his real name. Some Australian guy, might not be Australian. I don't know. And then this one's online. It's called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It's a story set in a post singularity world. It's interesting. Is there, can you, either of the worlds, do you find something philosophical interesting in them that you can comment on? I mean, it is clear to me that Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is like written by an engineer, which is, it's very almost a pragmatic take on a utopia, in a way. Positive or negative? That's up to you to decide reading the book. And the ending of it is very interesting as well. And I didn't realize what it was. I first read that when I was 15. I've reread that book several times in my life. And it's short, it's 50 pages. Everyone should go read it. What's, sorry, it's a little tangent. I've been working through the foundation. I've been, I haven't read much sci fi my whole life and I'm trying to fix that the last few months. That's been a little side project. What's to you as the greatest sci fi novel that people should read? Or is that? I mean, I would, yeah, I would say like, yeah, Permutation City, Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I don't know. I didn't like Foundation. I thought it was way too modernist. You like Dune and all of those. I've never read Dune. I've never read Dune. I have to read it. Fire Upon the Deep is interesting. Okay, I mean, look, everyone should read, everyone should read Neuromancer. Everyone should read Snow Crash. If you haven't read those, like start there. Yeah, I haven't read Snow Crash. You haven't read Snow Crash? Oh, it's, I mean, it's very entertaining. Go to Lesher Bach. And if you want the controversial one, Bronze Age Mindset. All right, I'll look into that one. Those aren't sci fi, but just to round out books. So a bunch of people asked me on Twitter and Reddit and so on for advice. So what advice would you give a young person today about life? In other words, what, yeah, I mean, looking back, especially when you were younger, you did, and you continued it. You've accomplished a lot of interesting things. Is there some advice from those, from that life of yours that you can pass on? If college ever opens again, I would love to give a graduation speech. At that point, I will put a lot of somewhat satirical effort into this question. Yeah, at this, you haven't written anything at this point. Oh, you know what? Always wear sunscreen. This is water. Pick your plagiarizing. I mean, you know, but that's the, that's the like clean your room. You know, yeah, you can plagiarize from all of this stuff. And it's, there is no, self help books aren't designed to help you. They're designed to make you feel good. Like whatever advice I could give, you already know. Everyone already knows. Sorry, it doesn't feel good. Right? Like, you know, you know, if I tell you that you should, you know, eat well and read more and it's not gonna do anything. I think the whole like genre of those kinds of questions is meaningless. I don't know. If anything, it's don't worry so much about that stuff. Don't be so caught up in your head. Right. I mean, you're, yeah. In a sense that your whole life, your whole existence is like moving version of that advice. I don't know. There's something, I mean, there's something in you that resists that kind of thinking and that in itself is, it's just illustrative of who you are. And there's something to learn from that. I think you're clearly not overthinking stuff. Yeah. And you know what? There's a gut thing. Even when I talk about my advice, I'm like, my advice is only relevant to me. It's not relevant to anybody else. I'm not saying you should go out. If you're the kind of person who overthinks things to stop overthinking things, it's not bad. It doesn't work for me. Maybe it works for you. I don't know. Let me ask you about love. Yeah. I think last time we talked about the meaning of life and it was kind of about winning. Of course. I don't think I've talked to you about love much, whether romantic or just love for the common humanity amongst us all. What role has love played in your life? In this quest for winning, where does love fit in? Well, the word love, I think means several different things. There's love in the sense of, maybe I could just say, there's like love in the sense of opiates and love in the sense of oxytocin and then love in the sense of, maybe like a love for math. I don't think it fits into either of those first two paradigms. So each of those, have they given something to you in your life? I'm not that big of a fan of the first two. Why? The same reason I'm not a fan of, the same reason I don't do opiates and don't take ecstasy. And there were times, look, I've tried both. I liked opiates way more than I liked ecstasy, but they're not, the ethical life is the productive life. So maybe that's my problem with those. And then like, yeah, a sense of, I don't know, like abstract love for humanity. I mean, the abstract love for humanity, I'm like, yeah, I've always felt that. And I guess it's hard for me to imagine not feeling it and maybe there's people who don't. And I don't know. Yeah, that's just like a background thing that's there. I mean, since we brought up drugs, let me ask you, this is becoming more and more a part of my life because I'm talking to a few researchers that are working on psychedelics. I've eaten shrooms a couple of times and it was fascinating to me that like the mind can go, like just fascinating the mind can go to places I didn't imagine it could go. And it was very friendly and positive and exciting and everything was kind of hilarious in the place. Wherever my mind went, that's where I went. Is, what do you think about psychedelics? Do you think they have, where do you think the mind goes? Have you done psychedelics? Where do you think the mind goes? Is there something useful to learn about the places it goes once you come back? I find it interesting that this idea that psychedelics have something to teach is almost unique to psychedelics, right? People don't argue this about amphetamines. And I'm not really sure why. I think all of the drugs have lessons to teach. I think there's things to learn from opiates. I think there's things to learn from amphetamines. I think there's things to learn from psychedelics, things to learn from marijuana. But also at the same time recognize that I don't think you're learning things about the world. I think you're learning things about yourself. Yes. And, you know, what's the, even, it might've even been, might've even been a Timothy Leary quote. I don't wanna misquote him, but the idea is basically like, you know, everybody should look behind the door, but then once you've seen behind the door, you don't need to keep going back. So, I mean, and that's my thoughts on all real drug use too. Except maybe for caffeine. It's a little experience that is good to have, but. Oh yeah, no, I mean, yeah, I guess, yes, psychedelics are definitely. So you're a fan of new experiences, I suppose. Yes. Because they all contain a little, especially the first few times, it contains some lessons that can be picked up. Yeah, and I'll revisit psychedelics maybe once a year. Usually smaller doses. Maybe they turn up the learning rate of your brain. I've heard that, I like that. Yeah, that's cool. Big learning rates have pros and cons. Last question, and this is a little weird one, but you've called yourself crazy in the past. First of all, on a scale of one to 10, how crazy would you say are you? Oh, I mean, it depends how you, you know, when you compare me to Elon Musk and Anthony Levandowski, not so crazy. So like a seven? Let's go with six. Six, six, six. What? Well, I like seven, seven's a good number. Seven, all right, well, I'm sure day by day it changes, right, so, but you're in that area. In thinking about that, what do you think is the role of madness? Is that a feature or a bug if you were to dissect your brain? So, okay, from like a mental health lens on crazy, I'm not sure I really believe in that. I'm not sure I really believe in like a lot of that stuff. Right, this concept of, okay, you know, when you get over to like hardcore bipolar and schizophrenia, these things are clearly real, somewhat biological. And then over here on the spectrum, you have like ADD and oppositional defiance disorder and these things that are like, wait, this is normal spectrum human behavior. Like this isn't, you know, where's the line here and why is this like a problem? So there's this whole, you know, the neurodiversity of humanity is huge. Like people think I'm always on drugs. People are saying this to me on my streams. And I'm like, guys, you know, like I'm real open with my drug use. I'd tell you if I was on drugs and yeah, I had like a cup of coffee this morning, but other than that, this is just me. You're witnessing my brain in action. So the word madness doesn't even make sense in the rich neurodiversity of humans. I think it makes sense, but only for like some insane extremes. Like if you are actually like visibly hallucinating, you know, that's okay. But there is the kind of spectrum on which you stand out. Like that's like, if I were to look, you know, at decorations on a Christmas tree or something like that, like if you were a decoration, that would catch my eye. Like that thing is sparkly, whatever the hell that thing is. There's something to that. Just like refusing to be boring or maybe boring is the wrong word, but to yeah, I mean, be willing to sparkle, you know? It's like somewhat constructed. I mean, I am who I choose to be. I'm gonna say things as true as I can see them. I'm not gonna lie. But that's a really important feature in itself. So like whatever the neurodiversity of your, whatever your brain is, not putting constraints on it that force it to fit into the mold of what society is like, defines what you're supposed to be. So you're one of the specimens that doesn't mind being yourself. Being right is super important, except at the expense of being wrong. Without breaking that apart, I think it's a beautiful way to end it. George, you're one of the most special humans I know. It's truly an honor to talk to you. Thanks so much for doing it. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with George Hotz and thank you to our sponsors, Four Sigmatic, which is the maker of delicious mushroom coffee, Decoding Digital, which is a tech podcast that I listen to and enjoy, and ExpressVPN, which is the VPN I've used for many years. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from the great and powerful Linus Torvalds. Talk is cheap, show me the code. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132

The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his third time on the podcast. He is a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. This time we went deep on the science, biology, and genetics. So this is a bit of an experiment. Manolis went back and forth between the basics of biology to the latest state of the art in the research. He's a master at this, so I just sat back and enjoyed the ride. This conversation happened at 7am, so it's yet another podcast episode after an all nighter for me. And once again, since the universe has a sense of humor, this one was a tough one for my brain to keep up, but I did my best and I never shy away from a good challenge. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but someone probably should, it helps you make good decisions. Second is Pessimist Archive, they're back, one of my favorite history podcasts on why people resist new things from recorded music to umbrellas to cars, chess, coffee, and the elevator. Third is 8sleep, a mattress that cools itself, measures heart rate variability, has an app, and has given me yet another reason to look forward to sleep, including the all important power nap. And finally, BetterHelp, online therapy when you want to face your demons with a licensed professional, not just by doing the David Goggins like physical challenges like I seem to do on occasion. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that biology in the brain and in the various systems of the body fill me with awe every time I think about how such a chaotic mess coming from its humble origins in the ocean was able to achieve such incredibly complex and robust mechanisms of life that survived despite all the forces of nature that want to destroy it. It is so unlike the computing systems we humans have engineered that it makes me feel that in order to create artificial general intelligence and artificial consciousness, we may have to completely rethink how we engineer computational systems. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Callas. So your group at MIT is trying to understand the molecular basis of human disease. What are some of the biggest challenges in your view? Don't get me started. I mean, understanding human disease is the most complex challenge in modern science. So because human disease is as complex as the human genome, it is as complex as the human brain, and it is in many ways, even more complex because the more we understand disease complexity, the more we start understanding genome complexity and epigenome complexity and brain circuitry complexity and immune system complexity and cancer complexity and so on and so forth. So traditionally, human disease was following basic biology. You would basically understand basic biology in model organisms like, you know, mouse and fly and yeast. You would understand sort of mammalian biology and animal biology and eukaryotic biology in sort of progressive layers of complexity, getting closer to human phylogenetically. And you would do perturbation experiments in those species to see if I knock out a gene, what happens? And based on the knocking out of these genes, you would basically then have a way to drive human biology because you would sort of understand the functions of these genes. And then if you find that a human gene locus, something that you've mapped from human genetics to that gene is related to a particular human disease, you'd say, aha, now I know the function of the gene from the model organisms. I can now go and understand the function of that gene in human. But this is all changing. This is dramatically changed. So that was the old way of doing basic biology. You would start with the animal models, the eukaryotic models, the mammalian models, and then you would go to human. Human genetics has been so transformed in the last decade or two that human genetics is now actually driving the basic biology. There is more genetic mutation information in the human genome than there will ever be in any other species. What do you mean by mutation information? So perturbations is how you understand systems. So an engineer builds systems and then they know how they work from the inside out. A scientist studies systems through perturbations. You basically say, if I poke that balloon, what's going to happen? And I'm going to film it in super high resolution, understand, I don't know, aerodynamics or fluid dynamics if it's filled with water, et cetera. So you can then make experimentation by perturbation and then the scientific process is sort of building models that best fit the data, designing new experiments that best test your models and challenge your models and so on and so forth. This is the same thing with science. Basically if you're trying to understand biological science, you basically want to do perturbations that then drive the models. So how do these perturbations allow you to understand disease? So if you know that a gene is related to disease, you don't want to just know that it's related to the disease. You want to know what is the disease mechanism because you want to go and intervene. So the way that I like to describe it is that traditionally epidemiology, which is basically the study of disease, you know, sort of the observational study of disease has been about correlating one thing with another thing. So if you have a lot of people with liver disease who are also alcoholics, you might say, well, maybe the alcoholism is driving the liver disease or maybe those who have liver disease self medicate with alcohol. So the connection could be either way. With genetic epidemiology, it's about correlating changes in genome with phenotypic differences and then you know the direction of causality. So if you know that a particular gene is related to the disease, you can basically say, okay, perturbing that gene in mouse causes the mice to have X phenotype. So perturbing that gene in human causes the humans to have the disease. So I can now figure out what are the detailed molecular phenotypes in the human that are related to that organismal phenotype in the disease. So it's all about understanding disease mechanism, understanding what are the pathways, what are the tissues, what are the processes that are associated with the disease so that we know how to intervene. You can then prescribe particular medications that also alter these processes. You can prescribe lifestyle changes that also affect these processes and so on and so forth. That's such a beautiful puzzle to try to solve. Like what kind of perturbations eventually have this ripple effect that leads to disease across the population. And then you study that for animals or mice first and then see how that might possibly connect to humans. How hard is that puzzle of trying to figure out how little perturbations might lead to, in a stable way, to a disease? In animals, we make the puzzle simpler because we perturb one gene at a time. That's the beauty of this, the power of animal models. You can basically decouple the perturbations. You only do one perturbation and you only do strong perturbations at a time. In human, the puzzle is incredibly complex because obviously you don't do human experimentation. You wait for natural selection and natural genetic variation to basically do its own experiments, which it has been doing for hundreds and thousands of years in the human population and for hundreds of thousands of years across the history leading to the human population. So you basically take this natural genetic variation that we all carry within us. Every one of us carries 6 million perturbations. So I've done 6 million experiments on you, 6 million experiments on me, 6 million experiments on every one of 7 billion people on the planet. What's the 6 million correspond to? 6 million unique genetic variants that are segregating in the human population. Every one of us carries millions of polymorphic sites, poly, many, morph, forms. Polymorphic means many forms, variants. That basically means that every one of us has single nucleotide alterations that we have inherited from mom and from dad that basically can be thought of as tiny little perturbations. Most of them don't do anything, but some of them lead to all of the phenotypic differences that we see between us. The reason why two twins are identical is because these variants completely determine the way that I'm going to look at exactly 93 years of age. How happy are you with this kind of data set? Is it large enough of the human population of Earth? Is that too big, too small? Yeah, so is it large enough is a power analysis question. In every one of our grants, we do a power analysis based on what is the effect size that I would like to detect and what is the natural variation in the two forms. Every time you do a perturbation, you're asking, I'm changing form A into form B. Form A has some natural phenotypic variation around it and form B has some natural phenotypic variation around it. If those variances are large and the differences between the mean of A and the mean of B are small, then you have very little power. The further the means go apart, that's the effect size, the more power you have, and the smaller the standard deviation, the more power you have. So basically when you're asking, is that sufficiently large, certainly not for everything, but we already have enough power for many of the stronger effects in the more tight distributions. So that's the hopeful message that there exists parts of the genome that have a strong effect that has a small variance. That's exactly right. Unfortunately, those perturbations are the basis of disease in many cases. So it's not a hopeful message. Sometimes it's a terrible message. It's basically, well, some people are sick, but if we can figure out what are these contributors to sickness, we can then help make them better and help many other people better who don't carry that exact mutation, but who carry mutations on the same pathways. And that's what we like to call the allelic series of a gene. You basically have many perturbations of the same gene in different people, each with a different frequency in the human population and each with a different effect on the individual that carries them. So you said in the past there would be these small experiments on perturbations and animal models. What does this puzzle solving process look like today? So we basically have something like 7 billion people in the planet and every one of them carries something like 6 million mutations. You basically have an enormous matrix of genotype by phenotype by systematically measuring the phenotype of these individuals. And the traditional way of measuring this phenotype has been to look at one trait at a time. You would gather families and you would sort of paint the pedigrees of a strong effect, what we like to call Mendelian mutation, so a mutation that gets transmitted in a dominant or a recessive, but strong effect form where basically one locus plays a very big role in that disease. And you could then look at carriers versus non carriers in one family, carriers versus non carriers in another family and do that for hundreds, sometimes thousands of families and then trace these inheritance patterns and then figure out what is the gene that plays that role. Is this the matrix that you're showing in talks or lectures? So that matrix is the input to those stuff that I show in talks. So basically that matrix has traditionally been strong effect genes. What the matrix looks like now is instead of pedigrees, instead of families, you basically have thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of unrelated individuals, each with all of their genetic variants and each with their phenotype, for example, height or lipids or, you know, whether they're sick or not for a particular trait. That has been the modern view instead of going to families, going to unrelated individuals with one phenotype at a time. And what we're doing now as we're maturing in all of these sciences is that we're doing this in the context of large medical systems or enormous cohorts that are very well phenotyped across hundreds of phenotypes, sometimes with our complete electronic health record. So you can now start relating not just one gene segregating one family, not just thousands of variants segregating with one phenotype, but now you can do millions of variants versus hundreds of phenotypes. And as a computer scientist, I mean, deconvolving that matrix, partitioning it into the layers of biology that are associated with every one of these elements is a dream come true. It's like the world's greatest puzzle. And you can now solve that puzzle by throwing in more and more knowledge about the function of different genomic regions and how these functions are changed across tissues and in the context of disease. And that's what my group and many other groups are doing. We're trying to systematically relate this genetic variation with molecular variation at the expression level of the genes, at the epigenomic level of the gene regulatory circuitry, and at the cellular level of what are the functions that are happening in those cells, at the single cell level using single cell profiling, and then relate all that vast amount of knowledge computationally with the thousands of traits that each of these of thousands of variants are perturbing. I mean, this is something we talked about, I think last time. So there's these effects at different levels that happen. You said at a single cell level, you're trying to see things that happen due to certain perturbations. And then it's not just like a puzzle of perturbation and disease. It's perturbation then effect at a cellular level, then at an organ level, a body, like, how do you disassemble this into like what your group is working on? You're basically taking a bunch of the hard problems in the space. How do you break apart a difficult disease and break it apart into problems that you, into puzzles that you can now start solving? So there's a struggle here. Super scientists love hard puzzles and they're like, oh, I want to build a method that just deconvolves the whole thing computationally. And that's very tempting and it's very appealing, but biologists just like to decouple that complexity experimentally, to just like peel off layers of complexity experimentally. And that's what many of these modern tools that my group and others have both developed and used. The fact that we can now figure out tricks for peeling off these layers of complexity by testing one cell type at a time or by testing one cell at a time. And you could basically say, what is the effect of these genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's on human brain? Human brain sounds like, oh, it's an organ, of course, just go one organ at a time. But human brain has of course, dozens of different brain regions and within each of these brain regions, dozens of different cell types and every single type of neuron, every single type of glial cell between astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglia, between all of the neural cells and the vascular cells and the immune cells that are co inhabiting the brain between the different types of excitatory and inhibitory neurons that are sort of interacting with each other between different layers of neurons in the cortical layers. Every single one of these has a different type of function to play in cognition, in interaction with the environment, in maintenance of the brain, in energetic needs, in feeding the brain with blood, with oxygen, in clearing out the debris that are resulting from the super high energy production of cognition in humans. So all of these things are basically potentially deconvolvable computationally, but experimentally, you can just do single cell profiling of dozens of regions of the brain across hundreds of individuals across millions of cells. And then now you have pieces of the puzzle that you can then put back together to understand that complexity. I mean, first of all, the cells in the human brain are the most, maybe I'm romanticizing it, but cognition seems to be very complicated. So separating into the function, breaking Alzheimer's down to the cellular level seems very challenging. Is that basically you're trying to find a way that some perturbation in the genome results in some obvious major dysfunction in the cell. You're trying to find something like that. Exactly. So what does human genetics do? Human genetics basically looks at the whole path from genetic variation all the way to disease. So human genetics has basically taken thousands of Alzheimer's cases and thousands of controls matched for age, for sex, for environmental backgrounds and so on and so forth. And then looked at that map where you're asking, what are the individual genetic perturbations and how are they related to all the way to Alzheimer's disease? And that has actually been quite successful. So we now have more than 27 different loci, these are genomic regions that are associated with Alzheimer's at these end to end level. But the moment you sort of break up that very long path into smaller levels, you can basically say from genetics, what are the epigenomic alterations at the level of gene regulatory elements where that genetic variant perturbs the control region nearby. That effect is much larger. You mean much larger in terms of this down the line impact or? It's much larger in terms of the measurable effect, this A versus B variance is actually so much cleanly defined when you go to the shorter branches. Because for one genetic variant to affect Alzheimer's, that's a very long path. That basically means that in the context of millions of these 6 million variants that every one of us carries, that one single nucleotide has a detectable effect all the way to the end. I mean, it's just mind boggling that that's even possible, but indeed there are such effects. So the hope is, or the most scientifically speaking, the most effective place where to detect the alteration that results in disease is earlier on in the pipeline, as early as possible. It's a trade off. If you go very early on in the pipeline, now each of these epigenomic alterations, for example, this enhancer control region is active maybe 50% less, which is a dramatic effect. Now you can ask, well, how much does changing one regulatory region in the genome in one cell type change disease? Well, that path is now long. So if you instead look at expression, the path between genetic variation and the expression of one gene goes through many enhancer regions, and therefore it's a subtler effect at the gene level. But then now you're closer because one gene is acting in the context of only 20,000 other genes as opposed to one enhancer acting in the context of 2 million other enhancers. So you basically now have genetic, epigenomic, the circuitry, transcriptomic, the gene expression control, and then cellular, where you can basically say, I can measure various properties of those cells. What is the calcium influx rate when I have this genetic variation? What is the synaptic density? What is the electric impulse conductivity and so on and so forth? So you can measure things along this path to disease, and you can also measure endophenotypes. You can basically measure your brain activity. You can do imaging in the brain. You can basically measure, I don't know, the heart rate, the pulse, the lipids, the amount of blood secreted and so on and so forth. And then through all of that, you can basically get at the path to causality, the path to disease. And is there something beyond cellular? So you mentioned lifestyle interventions or changes as a way to, or like be able to prescribe changes in lifestyle. Like what about organs? What about like the function of the body as a whole? Yeah, absolutely. So basically when you go to your doctor, they always measure, you know, your pulse. They always measure your height. They always measure your weight, you know, your BMI. So basically these are just very basic variables. But with digital devices nowadays, you can start measuring hundreds of variables for every individual. You can basically also phenotype cognitively through tests, Alzheimer's patients. There are cognitive tests that you can measure, that you typically do for cognitive decline, these mini mental observations that you have specific questions to. You can think of sort of enlarging the set of cognitive tests. So in the mouse, for example, you do experiments for how do they get out of mazes? How do they find food? Whether they recall a fear, whether they shake in a new environment and so on and so forth. In the human, you can have much, much richer phenotypes where you can basically say not just imaging at the organ level and all kinds of other activities at the organ level, but you can also do at the organism level, you can do behavioral tests. And how did they do on empathy? How did they do on memory? How did they do on longterm memory versus short term memory? And so on and so forth. I love how you're calling that phenotype. I guess it is. It is. But like your behavior patterns that might change over a period of a life, your ability to remember things, your ability to be empathetic or emotionally, your intelligence perhaps even. Yeah, but intelligence has hundreds of variables. You can be your math intelligence, your literary intelligence, your puzzle solving intelligence, your logic. It could be like hundreds of things. And all of that, we're able to measure that better and better and all that could be connected to the entire pipeline somehow. We used to think of each of these as a single variable like intelligence. I mean, that's ridiculous. It's basically dozens of different genes that are controlling every single variable. You can basically think of, imagine us in a video game where every one of us has measures of strength, stamina, energy left and so on and so forth. But you could click on each of those five bars that are just the main bars and each of those will just give you then hundreds of bars and can basically say, okay, great for my machine learning task, I want someone who, a human who has these particular forms of intelligence. I require now these 20 different things. And then you can combine those things and then relate them to of course performance in a particular task, but you can also relate them to genetic variation that might be affecting different parts of the brain. For example, your frontal cortex versus your temporal cortex versus your visual cortex and so on and so forth. So genetic variation that affects expression of genes in different parts of your brain can basically affect your music ability, your auditory ability, your smell, just dozens of different phenotypes can be broken down into hundreds of cognitive variables and then relate each of those to thousands of genes that are associated with them. So somebody who loves RPGs or playing games, there's too few variables that we can control. So I'm excited if we're in fact living in a simulation and this is a video game, I'm excited by the quality of the video game. The game designer did a hell of a good job. So we're impressed. Oh, I don't know. The sunset last night was a little unrealistic. Yeah. Yeah. The graphics. Exactly. Come on, NVIDIA. To zoom back out, we've been talking about the genetic origins of diseases, but I think it's fascinating to talk about what are the most important diseases to understand and especially as it connects to the things that you're working on. So it's very difficult to think about important diseases to understand. There's many metrics of importance. One is lifestyle impact. I mean, if you look at COVID, the impact on lifestyle has been enormous. So understanding COVID is important because it has impacted the wellbeing in terms of ability to have a job, ability to have an apartment, ability to go to work, ability to have a mental circle of support and all of that for millions of Americans, like huge, huge impact. So that's one aspect of importance. So basically mental disorders, Alzheimer's has a huge importance in the wellbeing of Americans. Whether or not it kills someone for many, many years, it has a huge impact. So the first measure of importance is just wellbeing. Impact on the quality of life. Impact on the quality of life, absolutely. The second metric, which is much easier to quantify is deaths. What is the number one killer? The number one killer is actually heart disease. It is actually killing 650,000 Americans per year. Number two is cancer with 600,000 Americans. Number three, far, far down the list is accidents, every single accident combined. So basically you read the news, accidents, like there was a huge car crash all over the news. But the number of deaths, number three by far, 167,000. Core respiratory disease. So that's asthma, not being able to breathe and so on and so forth, 160,000 Alzheimer's number five with 120,000 and then stroke, brain aneurysms and so on and so forth, that's 147,000 diabetes and metabolic disorders, et cetera. That's 85,000. The flu is 60,000, suicide, 50,000 and then overdose, et cetera, you know, goes further down the list. So of course COVID has creeped up to be the number three killer this year with, you know, more than 100,000 Americans and counting. And you know, but if you think about sort of what do we use, what are the most important diseases, you have to understand both the quality of life and the sheer number of deaths and just numbers of years lost if you wish. And each of these diseases you can think of as, and also including terrorist attacks and school shootings, for example, things which lead to fatalities, you can look at as problems that could be solved. And some problems are harder to solve than others. I mean, that's part of the equation. So maybe if you look at these diseases, if you look at heart disease or cancer or Alzheimer's or just like schizophrenia and obesity, Debbie, like not necessarily things that kill you, but affect the quality of life, which problems are solvable, which aren't, which are harder to solve, which aren't. I love your question because he puts it in the context of a global effort rather than just the local effort. So basically if you look at the global aspect, exercise and nutrition are two interventions that we can as a society make a much better job at. So if you think about sort of the availability of cheap food, it's extremely high in calories. It's extremely detrimental for you, like a lot of processed food, et cetera. So if we change that equation and as a society, we made availability of healthy food much, much easier and charged a burger at McDonald's, the price that it costs on the health system, then people would actually start buying more healthy foods. So basically that's sort of a societal intervention, if you wish. In the same way, increasing empathy, increasing education, increasing the social framework and support would basically lead to fewer suicides. It would lead to fewer murders. It would lead to fewer deaths overall. So that's something that we as a society can do. You can also think about external factors versus internal factors. So the external factors are basically communicable diseases like COVID, like the flu, et cetera. And the internal factors are basically things like cancer and Alzheimer's where basically your genetics will eventually drive you there. And then of course, with all of these factors, every single disease has both the genetic component and environmental component. So heart disease, huge genetic contribution, Alzheimer's, it's like 60% plus genetic. So I think it's like 79% heritability. So that basically means that genetics alone explains 79% of Alzheimer's incidents. And yes, there's a 21% environmental component where you could basically enrich your cognitive environment, enrich your social interactions, read more books, learn a foreign language, go running, you know, sort of have a more fulfilling life. All of that will actually decrease Alzheimer's, but there's a limit to how much that can impact because of the huge genetic footprint. So this is fascinating. So each one of these problems have a genetic component and an environment component. And so like when there's a genetic component, what can we do about some of these diseases? And have you worked on what can you say that's in terms of problems that are solvable here or understandable? So my group works on the genetic component, but I would argue that understanding the genetic component can have a huge impact even on the environmental component. Why is that? Because genetics gives us access to mechanism. And if we can alter the mechanism, if we can impact the mechanism, we can perhaps counteract some of the environmental components. So understanding the biological mechanisms leading to disease is extremely important in being able to intervene. But when you can intervene and what, you know, the analogy that I like to give is for example, for obesity, you know, think of it as a giant bathtub of fat. There's basically fat coming in from your diet and there's fat coming out from your exercise. Okay. So that's an in out equation and that's the equation that everybody's focusing on. But your metabolism impacts that, you know, bathtub. Basically your metabolism controls the rate at which you're burning energy. It controls the rate at which you're storing energy. And it also teaches you about the various valves that control the input and the output equation. So if we can learn from the genetics, the valves, we can then manipulate those valves. And even if the environment is feeding you a lot of fat and getting a little that out, you can just poke another hole at the bathtub and just get a lot of the fat out. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. So we're not just passive observers of our genetics. The more we understand, the more we can come up with actual treatments. And I think that's an important aspect to realize when people are thinking about strong effect versus weak effect variants. So some variants have strong effects. We talked about these Mendelian disorders where a single gene has a sufficiently large effect, penetrance, expressivity, and so on and so forth, that basically you can trace it in families with cases and not cases, cases, not cases, and so on and so forth. But so these are the genes that everybody says, oh, that's the genes we should go after because that's a strong effect gene. I like to think about it slightly differently. These are the genes where genetic impacts that have a strong effect were tolerated because every single time we have a genetic association with disease, it depends on two things. Number one, the obvious one, whether the gene has an impact on the disease. Number two, the more subtle one is whether there is genetic variation standing and circulating and segregating in the human population that impacts that gene. Some genes are so darn important that if you mess with them, even a tiny little amount, that person's dead. So those genes don't have variation. You're not going to find a genetic association if you don't have variation. That doesn't mean that the gene has no role. It simply means that the gene tolerates no mutations. So that's actually a strong signal when there's no variation. That's so fascinating. Exactly. Genes that have very little variation are hugely important. You can actually rank the importance of genes based on how little variation they have. And those genes that have very little variation but no association with disease, that's a very good metric to say, oh, that's probably a developmental gene because we're not good at measuring those phenotypes. So it's genes that you can tell evolution has excluded mutations from, but yet we can't see them associated with anything that we can measure nowadays. It's probably early embryonic lethal. What are all the words you just said? Early embryonic what? Lethal. Meaning? Meaning that that embryo will die. Okay. There's a bunch of stuff that is required for a stable functional organism across the board for an entire species, I guess. If you look at sperm, it expresses thousands of proteins. Does sperm actually need thousands of proteins? No, but it's probably just testing them. So my speculation is that misfolding of these proteins is an early test for failure. So that out of the millions of sperm that are possible, you select the subset that are just not grossly misfolding thousands of proteins. So it's kind of an assert that this is folded correctly. Correct. Yeah. This just because if this little thing about the folding of a protein isn't correct, that probably means somewhere down the line, there's a bigger issue. That's exactly right. So fail fast. So basically if you look at the mammalian investment in a newborn, that investment is enormous in terms of resources. So mammals have basically evolved mechanisms for fail fast. Where basically in those early months of development, I mean it's horrendous of course at the personal level when you lose your future child, but in some ways there's so little hope for that child to develop and sort of make it through the remaining months that sort of fail fast is probably a good evolutionary principle for mammals. And of course humans have a lot of medical resources that you can sort of give those children a chance and we have so much more success in sort of giving folks who have these strong carrier mutations a chance, but if they're not even making it through the first three months, we're not going to see them. So that's why when we say what are the most important genes to focus on, the ones that have a strong effect mutation or the ones that have a weak effect mutation, well the jury might be out because the ones that have a strong effect mutation are basically not mattering as much. The ones that only have weak effect mutations by understanding through genetics that they have a weak effect mutation and understanding that they have a causal role on the disease, we can then say, okay, great, evolution has only tolerated a 2% change in that gene. Pharmaceutically I can go in and induce a 70% change in that gene and maybe I will poke another hole at the bathtub that was not easy to control in many of the other sort of strong effect genetic variants. So there's this beautiful map of across the population of things that you're saying strong and weak effects, so stuff with a lot of mutations and stuff with little mutations with no mutations and you have this map and it lays out the puzzle. Yeah. So when I say strong effect, I mean at the level of individual mutations. So basically genes where, so you have to think of first the effect of the gene on the disease. Remember how I was sort of painting that map earlier from genetics all the way to phenotype. That gene can have a strong effect on the disease, but the genetic variant might have a weak effect on the gene. So basically when you ask what is the effect of that genetic variant on the disease, it could be that that genetic variant impacts the gene by a lot and then the gene impacts the disease by a little, or it could be that the genetic variants impacts the gene by a little and then the gene impacts the disease by a lot. So what we care about is genes that impact the disease a lot, but genetics gives us the full equation and what I would argue is if we couple the genetics with expression variation to basically ask what genes change by a lot and which genes correlate with disease by a lot, even if the genetic variants change them by a little, then those are the best places to intervene. Those are the best places where pharmaceutical, if I have even a modest effect, I will have a strong effect on the disease, whereas those genetic variants that have a huge effect on the disease, I might not be able to change that gene by this much without affecting all kinds of other things. Interesting. So that's what we're looking at. What have we been able to find in terms of which disease could be helped? Again, don't get me started. We have found so much. Our understanding of disease has changed so dramatically with genetics. I mean places that we had no idea would be involved. So one of the worst things about my genome is that I have a genetic predisposition to age related macular degeneration, AMD. So it's a form of blindness that causes you to lose the central part of your vision progressively as you grow older. My increased risk is fairly small. I have an 8% chance. You only have a 6% chance. I'm an average. By the way, when you say my, you mean literally yours. You know this about you. I know this about me. Which is kind of, I mean philosophically speaking is a pretty powerful thing to live with. Maybe that's, so we agreed to talk again by the way for the listeners to where we're going to try to focus on science today and a little bit of philosophy next time. But it's interesting to think about the more you're able to know about yourself from the genetic information in terms of the diseases, how that changes your own view of life. So there's a lot of impact there and there's something called genetics exceptionalism, which basically thinks of genetics as something very, very different than everything else as a type of determinism. And you know, let's talk about that next time. So basically. That's a good preview. Yeah. So let's go back to AMD. So basically with AMD, we have no idea what causes AMD. You know, it was, it was a mystery until the genetics were worked out. And now the fact that I know that I have a predisposition allows me to sort of make some life choices, number one, but number two, the genes that lead to that predisposition give us insights as to how does it actually work. And that's a place where genetics gave us something totally unexpected. So there's a complement pathway, which is an immune function pathway that was in, you know, most of the loci associated with AMD. And that basically told us that, wow, there's an immune basis to this eye disorder that people had just not expected before. If you look at complement, it was recently also implicated in schizophrenia. And there's a type of microglia that is involved in synaptic pruning. So synapses are the connections between neurons. And in this whole use it or lose it view of mental cognition and other capabilities, you basically have microglia, which are immune cells that are sort of constantly traversing your brain and then pruning neuronal connections, pruning synaptic connections that are not utilized. So in schizophrenia, there's thought to be a change in the pruning that basically if you don't prune your synapses the right way, you will actually have an increased role of schizophrenia. This is something that was completely unexpected for schizophrenia. Of course, we knew it has to do with neurons, but the role of the complement complex, which is also implicated in AMD, which is now also implicated in schizophrenia, was a huge surprise. What's the complement complex? So it's basically a set of genes, the complement genes that are basically having various immune roles. And as I was saying earlier, our immune system has been coopted for many different roles across the body. So they actually play many diverse roles. And somehow the immune system is connected to the synaptic pruning process, the process. Exactly. So the prune cells were coopted to prune synapses. How did you figure this out? How does one go about figuring this intricate connection, like pipeline of connections out? Yeah. Let me give you another example. So Alzheimer's disease, the first place that you would expect it to act is obviously the brain. So we had basically this roadmap epigenomics consortium view of the human epigenome, the largest map of the human epigenome that has ever been built across 127 different tissues and samples with dozens of epigenomic marks measured in hundreds of donors. So what we've basically learned through that is that you basically can map what are the active gene regulatory elements for every one of the tissues in the body. And then we connected these gene regulatory active maps of basically what regions of the human genome are turning on in every one of different tissues. We then can go back and say, where are all of the genetic loci that are associated with disease? This is something that my group, I think was the first to do back in 2010 in this Ernst Nature Biotech paper, but basically we were for the first time able to show that specific chromatin states, specific epigenomic states, in that case enhancers, were in fact enriched in disease associated variants. We pushed that further in the Ernst Nature paper a year later. And then in this roadmap epigenomics paper a few years after that, but basically that matrix that you mentioned earlier was in fact the first time that we could see what genetic traits have genetic variants that are enriched in what tissues in the body. And a lot of that map made complete sense. If you looked at a diversity of immune traits like allergies and type one diabetes and so on and so forth, you basically could see that they were enriching, that the genetic variants associated with those traits were enriched in enhancers in these gene regulatory elements active in T cells and B cells and hematopoietic stem cells and so on and so forth. So that basically gave us a confirmation in many ways that those immune traits were indeed enriching immune cells. If you looked at type two diabetes, you basically saw an enrichment in only one type of sample and it was pancreatic islets. And we know that type two diabetes sort of stems from the dysregulation of insulin in the beta cells of pancreatic islets. And that sort of was spot on, super precise. If you looked at blood pressure, where would you expect blood pressure to occur? You know, I don't know, maybe in your metabolism and ways that you process coffee or something like that. Maybe in your brain, the way that you stress out and increases your blood pressure, et cetera. So the blood pressure localized specifically in the left ventricle of the heart. So the enhancers of the left ventricle in the heart contained a lot of genetic variants associated with blood pressure. If you look at height, we found an enrichment specifically in embryonic stem cell enhancers. So the genetic variants predisposing you to be taller or shorter are in fact acting in developmental stem cells, makes complete sense. If you looked at inflammatory bowel disease, you basically found inflammatory, which is immune, and also bowel disease, which is digestive. And indeed we saw a double enrichment both in the immune cells and in the digestive cells. So that basically told us that this is acting in both components. There's an immune component to inflammatory bowel disease and there's a digestive component. And the big surprise was for Alzheimer's. We had seven different brain samples. We found zero enrichment in the brain samples for genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's. And this is mind boggling. Our brains were literally hurting. What is going on? And what is going on is that the brain samples are primarily neurons, oligodendrocytes, and astrocytes in terms of the cell types that make them up. So that basically indicated that genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's were probably not acting in oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, or neurons. So what could they be acting in? Well, the fourth major cell type is actually microglia. Microglia are resident immune cells in your brain. Oh, nice. They immune. Oh, wow. They are CD14 plus, which is this sort of cell surface markers of those cells. So they're CD14 plus cells, just like macrophages that are circulating in your blood. The microglia are resident monocytes that are basically sitting in your brain. They're tissue specific monocytes. And every one of your tissues, like your fat, for example, has a lot of macrophages that are resident. And the M1 versus M2 macrophage ratio has a huge role to play in obesity. And so basically, again, these immune cells are everywhere, but basically what we found through this completely unbiased view of what are the tissues that likely underlie different disorders, we found that Alzheimer's was humongously enriched in microglia, but not at all in the other cell types. So what are we supposed to make that if you look at the tissues involved, is that simply useful for indication of propensity for disease, or does it give us somehow a pathway of treatment? It's very much the second. If you look at the way to therapeutics, you have to start somewhere. What are you going to do? You're going to basically make assays that manipulate those genes and those pathways in those cell types. So before we know the tissue of action, we don't even know where to start. We basically are at a loss. But if you know the tissue of action, and even better, if you know the pathway of action, then you can basically screen your small molecules, not for the gene, you can screen them directly for the pathway in that cell type. So you can basically develop a high throughput multiplexed robotic system for testing the impact of your favorite molecules that you know are safe, efficacious, and sort of hit that particular gene and so on and so forth. You can basically screen those molecules against either a set of genes that act in that pathway or on the pathway directly by having a cellular assay. And then you can basically go into mice and do experiments and basically sort of figure out ways to manipulate these processes that allow you to then go back to humans and do a clinical trial that basically says, okay, I was able indeed to reverse these processes in mice. Can I do the same thing in humans? So the knowledge of the tissues gives you the pathway to treatment, but that's not the only part. There are many additional steps to figuring out the mechanism of disease. So that's really promising. Maybe to take a small step back, you've mentioned all these puzzles that were figured out with the Nature paper for, I mean, you've mentioned a ton of diseases from obesity to Alzheimer's, even schizophrenia, I think you mentioned. What is the actual methodology of figuring this out? So indeed, I mentioned a lot of diseases and my lab works on a lot of different disorders. And the reason for that is that if you look at biology, it used to be zoology departments and botanology departments and virology departments and so on and so forth. And MIT was one of the first schools to basically create a biology department, like, oh, we're going to study all of life suddenly. Why was that even a case? Because the advent of DNA and the genome and the central dogma of DNA makes RNA makes protein in many ways, unified biology. You could suddenly study the process of transcription in viruses or in bacteria and have a huge impact on yeast and fly and maybe even mammals because of this realization of these common underlying processes. And in the same way that DNA unified biology, genetics is unifying disease studies. So you used to have, I don't know, cardiovascular disease department and neurological disease department and neurodegeneration department and basically immune and cancer and so on and so forth. And all of these were studied in different labs because it made sense, because basically the first step was understanding how the tissue functions and we kind of knew the tissues involved in cardiovascular disease and so on and so forth. But what's happening with human genetics is that all of these walls and edifices that we had built are crumbling. And the reason for that is that genetics is in many ways revealing unexpected connections. So suddenly we now have to bring the immunologists to work on Alzheimer's. They were never in the room. They were in another building altogether. The same way for schizophrenia, we now have to sort of worry about all these interconnected aspects. For metabolic disorders, we're finding contributions from brain. So suddenly we have to call the neurologist from the other building and so on and so forth. So in my view, it makes no sense anymore to basically say, oh, I'm a geneticist studying immune disorders. I mean, that's ridiculous because, I mean, of course in many ways you still need to sort of focus. But what we're doing is that we're basically saying we'll go wherever the genetics takes us. And by building these massive resources, by working on our latest map is now 833 tissues, sort of the next generation of the epigenomics roadmap, which we're now called epimap, is 833 different tissues. And using those, we've basically found enrichments in 540 different disorders. Those enrichments are not like, oh great, you guys work on that and we'll work on this. They're intertwined amazingly. So of course there's a lot of modularity, but there's these enhancers that are sort of broadly active and these disorders that are broadly active. So basically some enhancers are active in all tissues and some disorders are enriching in all tissues. So basically there's these multifactorial and this other class, which I like to call polyfactorial diseases, which are basically lighting up everywhere. And in many ways it's, you know, sort of cutting across these walls that were previously built across these departments. And the polyfactorial ones were probably the previous structural departments wasn't equipped to deal with those. I mean, again, maybe it's a romanticized question, but you know, there's in physics, there's a theory of everything. Do you think it's possible to move towards an almost theory of everything of disease from a genetic perspective? So if this unification continues, is it possible that, like, do you think in those terms, like trying to arrive at a fundamental understanding of how disease emerges, period? That unification is not just foreseeable, it's inevitable. I see it as inevitable. We have to go there. You cannot be a specialist anymore. If you're a genomicist, you have to be a specialist in every single disorder. And the reason for that is that the fundamental understanding of the circuitry of the human genome that you need to solve schizophrenia, that fundamental circuitry is hugely important to solve Alzheimer's. And that same circuitry is hugely important to solve metabolic disorders. And that same exact circuitry is hugely important for solving immune disorders and cancer and, you know, every single disease. So all of them have the same sub task. And I teach dynamic programming in my class. Dynamic programming is all about sort of not redoing the work. It's reusing the work that you do once. So basically for us to say, oh, great, you know, you guys in the immune building go solve the fundamental circuitry of everything. And then you guys in the schizophrenia building go solve the fundamental circuitry of everything separately, is crazy. So what we need to do is come together and sort of have a circuitry group, the circuitry building that sort of tries to solve the circuitry of everything. And then the immune folks who will apply this knowledge to all of the disorders that are associated with immune dysfunction and the schizophrenia folks will basically interacting with both the immune folks and with the neuronal folks. And all of them will be interacting with the circuitry folks and so on and so forth. So that's sort of the current structure of my group, if you wish. So basically what we're doing is focusing on the fundamental circuitry. But at the same time, we're the users of our own tools by collaborating with many other labs in every one of these disorders that we mentioned. We basically have a heart focus on cardiovascular disease, coronary artery disease, heart failure and so on and so forth. We have an immune focus on several immune disorders. We have a cancer focus on metastatic melanoma and immunotherapy response. We have a psychiatric disease focus on schizophrenia, autism, PTSD, and other psychiatric disorders. We have an Alzheimer's and neurodegeneration focus on Huntington's disease, ALS and, you know, AD related disorders like frontotemporal dementia and Lewy body dementia. And of course, a huge focus on Alzheimer's. We have a metabolic focus on the role of exercise and diets and sort of how they're impacting metabolic organs across the body and across many different tissues. And all of them are interfacing with the circuitry. And the reason for that is another computer science principle of eat your own dog food. If everybody ate their own dog food, dog food would taste a lot better. The reason why Microsoft Excel and Word and PowerPoint was so important and so successful is because the employees that were working on them, were using them for their day to day tasks. You can't just simply build a circuitry and say, here it is guys, take the circuitry, we're done without being the users of that circuitry because you then go back. And because we span the whole spectrum from profiling the epigenome, using comparative genomics, finding the important nucleotides in the genome, building the basic functional map of what are the genes in the human genome, what are the gene regulatory elements of the human genome. I mean, over the years we've written a series of papers on how do you find human genes in the first place using comparative genomics? How do you find the motifs that are the building blocks of gene regulation using comparative genomics? And how do you then find how these motifs come together and act in specific tissues using epigenomics? How do you link regulators to enhancers and enhancers to their target genes using epigenomics and regulatory genomics? So through the years we've basically built all this infrastructure for understanding what I like to say, every single nucleotide of the human genome and how it acts in every one of the major cell types and tissues of the human body. I mean, this is no small task. This is an enormous task that takes the entire field. And that's something that my group has taken on along with many other groups. And we have also, and that sort of a thing sets my group perhaps apart, we have also worked with specialists in every one of these disorders to basically further our understanding all the way down to disease and in some cases collaborating with pharma to go all the way down to therapeutics because of our deep, deep understanding of that basic circuitry and how it allows us to now improve the circuitry. Not just treat it as a black box, but basically go and say, okay, we need a better cell type specific wiring that we now have at the tissue specific level. So we're focusing on that because we're understanding the needs from the disease front. So you have a sense of the entire pipeline, I mean, one, maybe you can indulge me. One nice question to ask would be, how do you, from the scientific perspective, go from knowing nothing about the disease to going, you said, to go into the entire pipeline and actually have a drug or a treatment that cures that disease? So that's an enormously long path and an enormously great challenge. And what I'm trying to argue is that it progresses in stages of understanding rather than one gene at a time. The traditional view of biology was you have one postdoc working on this gene and another postdoc working on that gene, and they'll just figure out everything about that gene and that's their job. But we've realized how polygenic the diseases are, so we can't have one postdoc per gene anymore. We now have to have these cross cutting needs. And I'm going to describe the path to circuitry along those needs. And every single one of these paths, we are now doing in parallel across thousands of genes. So the first step is you have a genetic association, and we talked a little bit about sort of the Mendelian path and the polygenic path to that association. So the Mendelian path was looking through families to basically find gene regions and ultimately genes that are underlying particular disorders. The polygenic path is basically looking at unrelated individuals in this giant matrix of genotype by phenotype, and then finding hits where a particular variant impacts disease all the way to the end. And then we now have a connection, not between a gene and a disease, but between a genetic region and a disease. And that distinction is not understood by most people. So I'm going to explain it a little bit more. Why do we not have a connection between a gene and a disease, but we have a connection between a genetic region and a disease? The reason for that is that 93% of genetic variants that are associated with disease don't impact the protein at all. So if you look at the human genome, there's 20,000 genes, there's 3.2 billion nucleotides. Only 1.5% of the genome codes for proteins. The other 98.5% does not code for proteins. If you now look at where are the disease variants located, 93% of them fall in that outside the genes portion. Of course, genes are enriched, but they're only enriched by a factor of three. That means that still 93% of genetic variants fall outside the proteins. Why is that difficult? Why is that a problem? The problem is that when a variant falls outside the gene, you don't know what gene is impacted by that variant. You can't just say, oh, it's near this gene, let's just connect that variant to the gene. And the reason for that is that the genome circuitry is very often long range. So you basically have that genetic variant that could sit in the intron of one gene. An intron is sort of the place between the exons that code for proteins. So proteins are split up into exons and introns and every exon codes for a particular subset of amino acids and together they're spliced together and then make the final protein. So that genetic variant might be sitting in an intron of a gene. It's transcribed with the gene, it's processed and then excised, but it might not impact this gene at all. It might actually impact another gene that's a million nucleotides away. So it's just riding along even though it has nothing to do with this nearby neighborhood. That's exactly right. Let me give you an example. The strongest genetic association with obesity was discovered in this FTO gene, fat and obesity associated gene. So this FTO gene was studied ad nauseum. People did tons of experiments on it. They figured out that FTO is in fact RNA methylation transferase. It basically impacts something that we call the epitranscriptome. Just like the genome can be modified, the transcriptome, the transcript of the genes can be modified. And we basically said, oh great, that means that epitranscriptomics is hugely involved in obesity because that gene FTO is clearly where the genetic locus is at. My group studied FTO in collaboration with a wonderful team led by Melina Klausnitzer. And what we found is that this FTO locus, even though it is as associated with obesity, does not implicate the FTO gene. The genetic variance, it's in the first intron of the FTO gene, but it controls two genes IRX3 and IRX5 that are sitting 1.2 million nucleotides away, several genes away. Oh boy. What am I supposed to feel about that because isn't that like super complicated then? So the way that I was introduced at a conference a few years ago was, and here's Manolis Kellis who wrote the most depressing paper of 2015. And the reason for that is that the entire pharmaceutical industry was so comfortable that there was a single gene in that locus. Because in some loci, you basically have three dozen genes that are all sitting in the same region of association and you're like, oh gosh, which ones of those is it? But even that question of which ones of those is it is making the assumption that it is one of those as opposed to some random gene just far, far away, which is what our paper showed. So basically what our paper showed is that you can't ignore the circuitry. You have to first figure out the circuitry, all of those long range interactions, how every genetic variant impacts the expression of every gene in every tissue imaginable across hundreds of individuals. And then you now have one of the building blocks, not even all of the building blocks for then going and understanding disease. So embrace the wholeness of the circuitry. Correct. So back to the question of starting knowing nothing to the disease and going to the treatment. So what are the next steps? So you basically have to first figure out the tissue and then describe how you figure out the tissue. You figure out the tissue by taking all of these non coding variants that are sitting outside proteins and then figuring out what are the epigenomic enrichments. And the reason for that, you know, thankfully is that there is convergence, that the same processes are impacted in different ways by different loci. And that's a saving grace for our field. The fact that if I look at hundreds of genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's, they localize in a small number of processes. Can you clarify why that's hopeful? So like they show up in the same exact way in the, in the specific set of processes. Yeah. So basically there's a small number of biological processes that underlie, or at least that play the biggest role in every disorder. So in Alzheimer's you basically have, you know, maybe 10 different types of processes. One of them is lipid metabolism. One of them is immune cell function. One of them is neuronal energetics. So these are just a small number of processes, but you have multiple lesions, multiple genetic perturbations that are associated with those processes. So if you look at schizophrenia, it's excitatory neuron function, it's inhibitory neuron function, it's synaptic pruning, it's calcium signaling and so on and so forth. So when you look at disease genetics, you have one hit here and one hit there and one hit there and one hit there, completely different parts of the genome. But it turns out all of those hits are calcium signaling proteins. Oh, cool. You're like, aha. That means that calcium signaling is important. So those people who are focusing on one doctor at a time cannot possibly see that picture. You have to become a genomicist. You have to look at the omics, the om, the holistic picture to understand these enrichments. But you mentioned the convergence thing. The whatever the thing associated with the disease shows up. So let me explain convergence. Convergence is such a beautiful concept. So you basically have these four genes that are converging on calcium signaling. So that basically means that they are acting each in their own way, but together in the same process. But now in every one of these loci, you have many enhancers controlling each of those genes. That's another type of convergence where dysregulation of seven different enhancers might all converge on dysregulation of that one gene, which then converges on calcium signaling. And in each one of those enhancers, you might have multiple genetic variants distributed across many different people. Everyone has their own different mutation. But all of these mutations are impacting that enhancer. And all of these enhancers are impacting that gene. And all of these genes are impacting this pathway. And all these pathways are acting in the same tissue. And all of these tissues are converging together on the same biological process of schizophrenia. And you're saying the saving grace is that that conversion seems to happen for a lot of these diseases. For all of them. Basically that for every single disease that we've looked at, we have found an epigenomic enrichment. How do you do that? You basically have all of the genetic variants associated with the disorder. And then you're asking for all of the enhancers active in a particular tissue. For 540 disorders, we've basically found that indeed there is an enrichment. That basically means that there is commonality. And from the commonality, we can just get insights. So to explain in mathematical terms, we're basically building an empirical prior. We're using a Bayesian approach to basically say, great, all of these variants are equally likely in a particular locus to be important. So in a genetic locus, you basically have a dozen variants that are coinherited. Because the way that inheritance works in the human genome is through all of these recombination events during meiosis, you basically have, you know, you inherit maybe three, chromosome three, for example, in your body is inherited from four different parts. One part comes from your dad, another part comes from your mom, another part comes from your dad, another part comes from your mom. So basically, the way that it, sorry, from your mom's mom. So you basically have one copy that comes from your dad and one copy that comes from your mom. But that copy that you got from your mom is a mixture of her maternal and her paternal chromosome. And the copy that you got from your dad is a mixture of his maternal and his paternal chromosome. So these breakpoints that happen when chromosomes are lining up are basically ensuring through these crossover events, they're ensuring that every child cell during the process of meiosis, where you basically have, you know, one spermatozoid that basically couples with one ovule to basically create one egg to basically create the zygote. You basically have half of your genome that comes from dad and half your genome that comes from mom. But in order to line them up, you basically have these crossover events. These crossover events are basically leading to coinheritance of that entire block coming from your maternal grandmother and that entire block coming from your maternal grandfather. Over many generations, these crossover events don't happen randomly. There's a protein called PRDM9 that basically guides the double stranded breaks and then leads to these crossovers. And that protein has a particular preference to only a small number of hotspots of recombination, which then lead to a small number of breaks between these coinheritance patterns. So even though there are 6 million variants, there are 6 million loci, this variation is inherited in blocks and every one of these blocks has like two dozen genetic variants that are all associated. So in the case of FTO, it wasn't just one variant, it was 89 common variants that were all humongously associated with obesity. Which one of those is the important one? Well, if you look at only one locus, you have no idea. But if you look at many loci, you basically say, aha, all of them are enriching in the same epigenomic map. In that particular case, it was mesenchymal stem cells. So these are the progenitor cells that give rise to your brown fat and your white fat. Progenitor is like the early on developmental stem cells? So you start from one zygote and that's a totipotent cell type. It can do anything. You then, you know, that cell divides, divides, divides, and then every cell division is leading to specialization where you now have a mesodermal lineage and ectodermal lineage and endodermal lineage that basically leads to different parts of your body. The ectoderm will basically give rise to your skin, ecto means outside, derm is skin. So ectoderm, but it also gives rise to your neurons and your whole brain. So that's a lot of ectoderm. Mesoderm gives rise to your internal organs, including the vasculature and you know, your muscle and stuff like that. So you basically have this progressive differentiation and then if you look further, further down that lineage, you basically have one lineage that will give rise to both your muscle and your bone, but also your fat. And if you go further down the lineage of your fat, you basically have your white fat cells. These are the cells that store energy. So when you eat a lot, but you don't exercise too much, there's an excess set of calories, excess energy. What do you do with those? You basically create, you spend a lot of that energy to create these high energy molecules, lipids, which you can then burn when you need them on a rainy day. So that leads to obesity if you don't exercise and if you overeat because your body's like, oh great, I have all these calories. I'm going to store them. Ooh, more calories. I'm going to store them too. Ooh, more calories. So basically the 42% of European chromosomes have a predisposition to storing fat, which was selected probably in the food scarcity periods, like basically as we were exiting Africa before and during the ice ages, there was probably a selection to those individuals who made it North to basically be able to store energy, a lot more energy. So you basically now have this lineage that is deciding whether you want to store energy in your white fat or burn energy in your beige fat. It turns out that your fat is, you know, like we have such a bad view of fat. Fat is your best friend. Fat can both store all these excess lipids that would be otherwise circulating through your body and causing damage, but it can also burn calories directly. If you have too much energy, you can just choose to just burn some of that as heat. So basically when you're cold, you're burning energy to basically warm your body up and you're burning all these lipids and you're burning all these calories. So what we basically found is that across the board, genetic variants associated with obesity across many of these regions were all enriched repeatedly in mesenchymal stem cell enhancers. So that gave us a hint as to which of these genetic variants was likely driving this whole association. And we ended up with this one genetic variant called RS1421085. And that genetic variant out of the 89 was the one that we predicted to be causal for the disease. Wow. So going back to those steps, first step is figure out the relevant tissue based on the global enrichment. Second step is figure out the causal variant among many variants in this linkage disequilibrium in this coinherited block between these recombination hotspots, these boundaries of these inherited blocks. That's the second step. The third step is once you know that causal variant, try to figure out what is the motif that is disrupted by that causal variant. Basically how does it act? Variants don't just disrupt elements, they disrupt the binding of specific regulators. So basically the third step there was how do you find the motif that is responsible like the gene regulatory word, the building block of gene regulation that is responsible for that dysregulatory event. And the fourth step is finding out what regulator normally binds that motif and is now no longer able to bind. And then once you have the regulator, can you then try to figure out how to, what after it developed, how to fix it? That's exactly right. You now know how to intervene. You have basically a regulator, you have a gene that you can then perturb and you say, well, maybe that regulator has a global role in obesity. I can perturb the regulator. Just to clarify, when we say perturb, like on the scale of a human life, can a human being be helped? Of course. Yeah. I guess understanding is the first step. No, no, but perturbed basically means you now develop therapeutics, pharmaceutical therapeutics against that. Or you develop other types of intervention that affect the expression of that gene. What do pharmaceutical therapeutics look like when your understanding is on a genetic level? Yeah. Sorry if it's a dumb question. No, no, no. It's a brilliant question, but I want to save it for a little bit later when we start talking about therapeutics. Perfect. So let's talk about the first four steps. There's two more. So basically the first step is figure out, I mean, the zero step, the starting point is the genetics. The first step after that is figure out the tissue of action. The second step is figuring out the nucleotide that is responsible or set of nucleotides. The third step is figuring out the motif and the upstream regulator, number four. Number five and six is what are the targets? So number five is great. Now I know the regulator. I know the motif. I know the tissue and I know the variant. What does it actually do? So you have to now trace it to the biological process and the genes that mediate that biological process. So knowing all of this can now allow you to find the target genes. How? By basically doing perturbation experiments or by looking at the folding of the epigenome or by looking at the genetic impact of that genetic variant on the expression of genes. And we use all three. So let me go through them. Basically one of them is physical links. This is the folding of the genome onto itself. How do you even figure out the folding? It's a little bit of a tangent, but it's a super awesome technology. Think of the genome as again, this massive packaging that we talked about of taking two meters worth of DNA and putting it in something that's a million times smaller than two meters worth of DNA. That's a single cell. You basically have this massive packaging and this packaging basically leads to the chromosome being wrapped around in sort of tight, tight ways in ways, however, that are functionally capable of being reopened and reclosed. So I can then go in and figure out that folding by sort of chopping up the spaghetti soup, putting glue and ligating the segments that were chopped up but nearby each other, and then sequencing through these ligation events to figure out that this region of this chromosome, that region of the chromosome were near each other. That means they were interacting even though they were far away on the genome itself. So that chopping up, sequencing and reglueing is basically giving you folds of the genome that we call. Sorry, can you backtrack? Of course. How does cutting it help you figure out which ones were close in the original folding? So you have a bowl of noodles. Go on. And in that bowl of noodles, some noodles are near each other. Yes. So you throw in a bunch of glue, you basically freeze the noodles in place, throw in a cutter that chops up the noodles into little pieces. Now throw in some ligation enzyme that lets those pieces that were free religate near each other. In some cases, they religate what you had just cut, but that's very rare. Most of the time they will religate in whatever was proximal. You now have glued the red noodle that was crossing the blue noodle to each other. You then reverse the glue, the glue goes away and you just sequence the heck out of it. Most of the time you'll find red segment with, you know, red segment, but you can specifically select for ligation events that have happened that were not from the same segment by sort of marking them in a particular way and then selecting those and then you sequence and you look for red with blue matches of sort of things that were glued that were not immediate proximal to each other. And that reveals the linking of the blue noodle and the red noodle. You're with me so far? Yeah. Good. So we've done these experiments. That's the physical. That's the physical. That's step one of the physical. And what the physical revealed is topologically associated domains, basically big blocks of the genome that are topologically connected together. That's the physical. The second one is the genetic links. It basically says across individuals that have different genetic variants, how are their genes expressed differently? Remember before I was saying that the path between genetics and disease is enormous, but we can break it up to look at the path between genetics and gene expression. So instead of using Alzheimer's as a phenotype, I can now use expression of IRX3 as the phenotype, expression of gene A. And I can look at all of the humans who contain a G at that location and all the humans that contain a T at that location and basically say, wow, it turns out that the expression of each gene is higher for the T humans than for the G humans at that location. So that basically gives me a genetic link between a genetic variant, a locus, a region, and the expression of nearby genes. Good on the genetic link? I think so. Awesome. The third genetic link is the activity link. What's an activity link? It basically says if I look across 833 different epigenomes, whenever this enhancer is active, this gene is active. That gives me an activity link between this region of the DNA and that gene. And then the fourth one is perturbations where I can go in and blow up that region and see what are the genes that change in expression, or I can go in and over activate that region and see what genes change in expression. So I guess that's similar to activity? Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically similar to activity. I agree, but it's causal rather than correlational. Again, I'm a little weird. No, no, you're 100% on. It's exactly the same as the perturbation where I go in and intervene. I basically take a bunch of cells. So you know CRISPR, right? CRISPR is this genome guidance and cutting mechanism. That's what George Church likes to call genome vandalism. So you basically are able to, you can basically take a guide RNA that you put into the CRISPR system, and the CRISPR system will basically use this guide RNA, scan the genome, find wherever there's a match, and then cut the genome. So I digress, but it's a bacterial immune defense system. So basically bacteria are constantly attacked by viruses, but sometimes they win against the viruses and they chop up these viruses. And remember as a trophy inside their genome, they have these loci, these CRISPR loci that basically stands for clustered repeats, interspersed, et cetera. So basically it's an interspersed repeats structure where basically you have a set of repetitive regions and then interspersed where these variable segments that were basically matching viruses. So when this was first discovered, it was basically hypothesized that this is probably a bacterial immune system that remembers the trophies of the viruses that managed to kill. And then the bacteria pass on, you know, they sort of do lateral transfer of DNA and they pass on these memories so that the next bacterium says, Ooh, you killed that guy. When that guy shows up again, I will recognize him. And the CRISPR system was basically evolved as a bacterial adaptive immune response to sense foreigners that should not belong and to just go and cut their genome. So it's an RNA guided RNA cutting enzyme or an RNA guided DNA cutting enzyme. So there's different systems. Some of them cut DNA, some of them cut RNA, but all of them remember this sort of viral attack. So what we have done now as a field is, you know, through the work of, you know, Jennifer Donne, Manuel Carpentier, Feng Zhang and many others is coopted that system of bacterial immune defense as a way to cut genomes. You basically have this guiding system that allows you to use an RNA guide to bring enzymes to cut DNA at a particular locus. That's so fascinating. So this is like already a natural mechanism, a natural tool for cutting those useful as particular context. And we're like, well, we can use that thing to actually, it's a nice tool that's already in the body. Yeah. Yeah. It's not in our body. It's in the bacterial body. It was discovered by the yogurt industry. They were trying to make better yogurts and they were trying to make their bacteria in their yogurt cultures more resilient to viruses. And they were studying bacteria and they found that, wow, this CRISPR system is awesome. It allows you to defend against that. And then it was coopted in mammalian systems that don't use anything like that as a targeting way to basically bring these DNA cutting enzymes to any locus in the genome. Why would you want to cut DNA to do anything? The reason is that our DNA has a DNA repair mechanism where if a region of the genome gets randomly cut, you will basically scan the genome for anything that matches and sort of use it by homology. So the reason why we're deployed is because we now have a spare copy. As soon as my mom's copy is deactivated, I can use my dad's copy. And somewhere else, if my dad's copy is deactivated, I can use my mom's copy to repair it. So this is called homologous based repair. So all you have to do is the cutting and you don't have to do the fixing. That's exactly right. You don't have to do the fixing. Because it's already built in. That's exactly right. But the fixing can be coopted by throwing in a bunch of homologous segments that instead of having your dad's version, have whatever other version you'd like to use. So you then control the fixing by throwing in a bunch of other stuff. That's exactly right. And that's how you do genome editing. So that's what CRISPR is. That's what CRISPR is. In popular culture, people use the term. I've never, wow, that's brilliant. So CRISPR is genome vandalism followed by a bunch of band aids that have the sequence that you'd like. And you could control the choices of band aids. Correct. And of course there's new generations of CRISPR. There's something that's called prime editing that was sort of very, very much in the press recently that basically instead of sort of making a double stranded break, which again is genome vandalism, you basically make a single stranded break. You basically just nick one of the two strands, enabling you to sort of peel off without sort of completely breaking it up and then repair it locally using a guide that is coupled to your initial RNA that took you to that location. Dumb question, but is CRISPR as awesome and cool as it sounds? I mean, technically speaking, in terms of like as a tool for manipulating our genetics in the positive meaning of the word manipulating, or is there downsides, drawbacks in this whole context of therapeutics that we're talking about or understanding and so on? So when I teach my students about CRISPR, I show them articles with the headline, genome editing tool revolutionizes biology. And then I show them the date of these articles and they're 2004, like five years before CRISPR was invented. And the reason is that they're not talking about CRISPR. They're talking about zinc finger enzymes that are another way to bring these cutters to the genome. It's a very difficult way of sort of designing the right set of zinc finger proteins, the right set of amino acids that will now target a particular long stretch of DNA because for every location that you want to target, you need to design a particular regulator, a particular protein that will match that region well. There's another technology called talons, which are basically just a different way of using proteins to sort of guide these cutters to a particular location of the genome. These require a massive team of engineers, of biological engineers to basically design a set of amino acids that will target a particular sequence of your genome. The reason why CRISPR is amazingly, awesomely revolutionary is because instead of having this team of engineers design a new set of proteins for every locus that you want to target, you just type it in your computer and you just synthesize an RNA guide. The beauty of CRISPR is not the cutting, it's not the fixing. All of that was there before. It's the guiding, and the only thing that changes is that it makes the guiding easier by sort of just typing in the RNA sequence, which then allows the system to sort of scan the DNA to find that. So the coding, the engineering of the cutter is easier in terms of SP. That's kind of similar to the story of deep learning versus old school machine learning. Some of the challenging parts are automated. But CRISPR is just one cutting technology, and then that's part of the challenges and exciting opportunities of the field is to design different cutting technologies. So now this was a big parenthesis on CRISPR, but now when we were talking about perturbations, you basically now have the ability to not just look at correlation between enhancers and genes, but actually go and either destroy that enhancer and see if the gene changes in expression, or you can use the CRISPR targeting system to bring in not vandalism and cutting, but you can couple the CRISPR system with, and the CRISPR system is called usually CRISPR Cas9 because Cas9 is the protein that will then come and cut. But there's a version of that protein called dead Cas9 where the cutting part is deactivated. So you basically use the dead Cas9 to bring in an activator or to bring in a repressor. So you can now ask, is this enhancer changing that gene by taking this modified CRISPR, which is already modified from the bacteria to be used in humans, that you can now modify the Cas9 to be dead Cas9, and you can now further modify to bring in a regulator, and you can basically turn on or turn off that enhancer and then see what is the impact on that gene. So these are the four ways of linking the locus to the target gene, and that's step number five. Step number five is find the target gene, and step number six is what the heck does that gene do? You basically now go and manipulate that gene to basically see what are the processes that change, and you can basically ask, well, in this particular case, in the FTO locus, we found mesenchymal stem cells that are the progenitors of white fat and brown fat or beige fat. We found the RS1421085 nucleotide variant as the causal variant. We found this large enhancer, this master regulator. I like to call it OB1 for obesity one, like the strongest enhancer associated with it, and OB1 was kind of chubby as the actor. I don't know if you remember him. So you basically are using this Jedi mind trick to basically find out the location of the genome that is responsible, the enhancer that harbors it, the motif, the upstream regulator, which is ARID5B for AT rich interacting domain 5B. That's a protein that sort of comes and binds normally. That protein is normally a repressor. It represses this super enhancer, this massive 12,000 nucleotide master regulatory control gene, and it turns off IRX3, which is a gene that's 600,000 nucleotides away, and IRX5, which is 1.2 million nucleotides away. So those things. And what's the effect of turning them off? That's exactly the next question. So step six is what do these genes actually do? So we then ask, what does RX3 and RX5 do? The first thing we did is look across individuals for individuals that had higher expression of RX3 or lower expression RX3. And then we looked at the expression of all of the other genes in the genome. And we looked for simply correlation. And we found that RX3 and RX5 were both correlated positively with lipid metabolism and negatively with mitochondrial biogenesis. You're like, what the heck does that mean? Does this sound related to obesity? Not at all superficially, but lipid metabolism should, because lipids is these high and energy molecules that basically store fat. So RX3 and RX5 are negatively correlated with lipid metabolism. So that basically means that when they turn on, positively, when they turn on, they turn on lipid metabolism. And they're negatively correlated with mitochondrial biogenesis. What do mitochondria do in this whole process? Again, small parenthesis, what are mitochondria? Mitochondria are little organelles. They arose, they only are found in eukaryotes. U means good, karyote means nucleus. So truly like a true nucleus. So eukaryotes have a nucleus. Prokaryotes are before the nucleus. They don't have a nucleus. So eukaryotes have a nucleus, compartmentalization. Eukaryotes have also organelles. Some eukaryotes have chloroplasts. These are the plants, they photosynthesize. Some other eukaryotes like us have another type of organelle called mitochondria. These arose from an ancient species that we engulfed. This is an endosymbiosis event. Symbiosis bio means life, sim means together. So symbiotes are things that live together. Symbiosis endo means inside, so endosymbiosis means you live together holding the other one inside you. So the pre eukaryotes engulfed an organism that was very good at energy production and that organism eventually shed most of its genome to now have only 13 genes in the mitochondrial genome and those 13 genes are all involved in energy production, the electron transport chain. So basically electrons are these massive super energy rich molecules. We basically have these organelles that produce energy and when your muscle exercises, you basically multiply your mitochondria. You basically sort of, you know, use more and more mitochondria and that's how you get beefed up. So basically the muscle sort of learns how to generate more energy. So basically every single time your muscles will, you know, overnight regenerate and sort of become stronger and amplify their mitochondria and so forth. So what does mitochondria do? The mitochondria use energy to sort of do any kind of task. When you're thinking, you're using energy. This energy comes from mitochondria. Your neurons have mitochondria all over the place. Basically this mitochondria can multiply as organelles and they can be spread along the body of your muscle. Some of your muscle cells have actually multiple nuclei, they're polynucleated, but they also have multiple mitochondria to basically deal with the fact that your muscle is enormous. You can sort of span these super, super long length and you need energy throughout the length of your muscle. So that's why you have mitochondria throughout the length and you also need transcription through the length so you have multiple nuclei as well. So these two processes, lipids store energy, what do mitochondria do? So there's a process known as thermogenesis. Thermal heat, genesis generation. Thermogenesis is the generation of heat. Remember that bathtub with the in and out? That's the equation that everybody's focused on. So how much energy do you consume? How much energy do you burn? But in every thermodynamic system, there's three parts to the equation. There's energy in, energy out, and energy lost. Any machine has loss of energy. How do you lose energy? You emanate heat. So heat is energy loss. So there's... Which is where the thermogenesis comes in. Thermogenesis is actually a regulatory process that modulates the third component of the thermodynamic equation. You can basically control thermogenesis explicitly. You can turn on and turn off thermogenesis. And that's where the mitochondria comes into play. Exactly. So Irix3 and RX5 turn out to be the master regulators of a process of thermogenesis versus lipogenesis generation of fat. So Irix3 and RX5 in most people burn heat, burn calories as heat. So when you eat too much, just burn it off in your fat cells. So that bathtub has basically a sort of dissipation knob that most people are able to turn on. I am unable to turn that on because I am a homozygous carrier for the mutation that changes a T into a C in the RS1421085 allele and locus, a SNP. I have the risk allele twice from my mom and from my dad. So I'm unable to thermogenize. I'm unable to turn on thermogenesis through Irix3 and RX5 because the regulator that normally binds here, Irix5b, can no longer bind because it's an AT rich interacting domain. And as soon as I change the T into a C, it can no longer bind because it's no longer AT rich. But doesn't that mean that you're able to use the energy more efficiently? You're not generating heat or is that? That means I can eat less and get around just fine. Yes. Yeah. So that's a feature actually. It's a feature in a food scarce environment. Yeah. But if we're all starving, I'm doing great. If we all have access to massive amounts of food, I'm obese basically. That's taken us to the entire process of then understanding that why mitochondria and then the lipids are both, even though distant, are somehow involved. Different sides of the same coin. And you basically choose to store energy or you can choose to burn energy. And then all of that is involved in the puzzle of obesity. And that's what's fascinating, right? Here we are in 2007, discovering the strongest genetic association with obesity and knowing nothing about how it works for almost 10 years. For 10 years, everybody focused on this FTO gene and they were like, oh, it must have to do something with RNA modification. And it's like, no, it has nothing to do with the function of FTO. It has everything to do with all of these other processes. And suddenly the moment you solve that puzzle, which is a multiyear effort by the way, a tremendous effort by Melina and many, many others. So this tremendous effort basically led us to recognize this circuitry. You went from having some 89 common variants associated in that region of the DNA sitting on top of this gene to knowing the whole circuitry. When you know the circuitry, you can now go crazy. You can now start intervening at every level. You can start intervening at the arid 5B level. You can start intervening with CRISPR Cas9 at the single SNP level. You can start intervening at iRx3 and iRx5 directly there. You can start intervening at the thermogenesis level because you know the pathway. You can start intervening at the differentiation level where the decision to make either white fat or beige fat, the energy burning beige fat is made developmentally in the first three days of differentiation of your adipocytes. So as they're differentiating, you basically can choose to make fat burning machines or fat storing machines. And sort of that's how you populate your fat. You basically can now go in pharmaceutical and do all of that. And in our paper, we actually did all of that. We went in and manipulated every single aspect. At the nucleotide level, we use CRISPR Cas9 genome editing to basically take primary adipocytes from risk and non risk individuals and show that by editing that one nucleotide out of 3.2 billion nucleotides in the human genome, you could then flip between an obese phenotype and a lean phenotype like a switch. You can basically take my cells that are non thermogenizing and just flip into thermogenizing cells by changing one nucleotide. It's mind boggling. It's so inspiring that this puzzle could be solved in this way and it feels within reach to then be able to crack the problem of some of these diseases. What are the technologies, the tools that came along that made this possible? What are you excited about? Maybe if we just look at the buffet of things that you've kind of mentioned, what's involved? What should we be excited about? What are you excited about? I love that question because there's so much ahead of us. There's so, so much. So basically solving that one locus required massive amounts of knowledge that we have been building across the years through the epigenome, through the comparative genomics to find out the causal variant and the controller regulatory motif through the conserved circuitry. It required knowing these regulatory genomic wiring. It required high C of these sort of topologically associated domains to basically find these long range interaction. It required EQTLs of these sort of genetic perturbation of these intermediate gene phenotypes. It required all of the arsenal of tools that I've been describing was put together for one locus. And this was a massive team effort, huge investment in time, energy, money, effort, intellectual, everything. You're referring to, I'm sorry, just for the obesity one. Yeah, this one paper. This one single paper. This one single locus. I would like to say that this is a paper about one nucleotide in the human genome, about one bit of information, C versus T in the human genome. That's one bit of information and we have 3.2 billion nucleotides to go through. So how do you do that systematically? I am so excited about the next phase of research because the technologies that my group and many other groups have developed allows us to now do this systematically, not just one locus at a time, but thousands of loci at a time. So let me describe some of these technologies. The first one is automation and robotics. So basically, you know, we talked about how you can take all of these molecules and see which of these molecules are targeting each of these genes and what do they do? So you can basically now screen through millions of molecules through thousands and thousands and thousands of plates, each of which has thousands and thousands and thousands of molecules, every single time testing, you know, all of these genes and asking which of these molecules perturb these genes. So that's technology number one, automation and robotics. Technology number two is parallel readouts. So instead of perturbing one locus and then asking if I use CRISPR Cas9 on this enhancer to basically use dCas9 to turn on or turn off the enhancer, or if I use CRISPR Cas9 on the SNP to basically change that one SNP at a time, then what happens? But we have 120,000 disease associated SNPs that we want to test. We don't want to spend 120,000 years doing it. So what do we do? We've basically developed this technology for massively parallel reporter assays, MPRA. So in collaboration with Tarsha Mikkelsen, Eric Lander, I mean, Jason Durie's group has done a lot of that. So there's a lot of groups that basically have developed technologies for testing 10,000 genetic variants at a time. How do you do that? You know, we talked about microarray technology, the ability to synthesize these huge microarrays that allow you to do all kinds of things like measure gene expression by hybridization, by measuring the genotype of a person, by looking at hybridization with one version with a T versus the other version with a C, and then sort of figuring out that I am a risk carrier for obesity based on these differential hybridization in my genome that says, oh, you seem to only have this allele or you seem to have that allele. These can also be used to systematically synthesize small fragments of DNA. So you can basically synthesize these 150 nucleotide long fragments across 450,000 spots at a time. You can now take the result of that synthesis, which basically works through all of these sort of layers of adding one nucleotide at a time. You can basically just type it into your computer and order it, and you can basically order 10,000 or 100,000 of these small DNA segments at a time. And that's where awesome molecular biology comes in. You can basically take all these segments, have a common start and end barcode or sort of like Gator, just like pieces of a puzzle. You can make the same end piece and the same start piece for all of them. And you can now use plasmids, which are these extra chromosomal small DNA circular segments that are basically inhabiting all our, all our genomes. We basically have, you know, plasmids from floating around and bacteria use plasmids for transferring DNA. And that's where they put a lot of antibiotic resistance genes. So they can easily transfer them from one bacterium to the other. After one bacterium evolves a gene to be resistant to a particular antibiotic, it basically says to all its friends, Hey, here's that sort of DNA piece. We can now coopt these plasmids into human cells. You can basically make a human cell culture and add plasmids to that human cell culture that contain the things that you want to test. You now have this library of 450,000 elements. You can insert them each into the common plasmid and then test them in millions of cells in parallel. And the common plasmid is all the same before you add it. Exactly. The rest of the plasmid is the same. So it's, it's called an epizomal reporter assay. Epizome means not inside the genome. It's sort of outside the chromosomes. So it's an epizomal assay that allows you to have a variable region where you basically test 10,000 different enhancers and you have a common region which basically has the same reporter gene. You now can do some very cool molecular biology. You can basically take the 450,000 elements that you've generated and you have a piece of the puzzle here, piece of the puzzle here, which is identical. So they're compatible with that plasmid. You can chop them up in the middle to separate a barcode reporter from the enhancer and in the middle put the same gene again using the same piece of the puzzle. You now can have a barcode readout of what is the impact of 10,000 different versions of an enhancer on gene expression. So we're not doing one experiment, we're doing 10,000 experiments. And those 10,000 can be 5,000 of different loci and each of them in two versions, risk or non risk. I can now test tens of thousands. Just a little hypothesis. Exactly. And then you can do 10,000 and we can test 10,000 hypothesis at once. How hard is it to generate those 10,000? Trivial. Trivial. But it's biology. No, no. Generating the 10,000 is trivial because you basically add, it's biotechnology. You basically have these arrays that add one nucleotide at a time at every spot. So it's printing and so you're able to, you're able to control. Yeah. Is it super costly? Is it? 10,000 bucks. So this isn't millions. 10,000 bucks for 10,000 experiments sounds like the right, you know. I mean, so that's super, that's exciting because you don't have to do one thing at a time. You can now use that technology, these massively parallel reporter assays to test 10,000 locations at a time. We've made multiple modifications to that technology. One was sharper MPRA, which stands for, you know, basically getting a higher resolution view by tiling these, these elements so you can see where along the region of control are they acting. And we made another modification called Hydra for high, you know, definition regulatory annotation or something like that, which basically allows you to test 7 million of these at a time by sort of cutting them directly from the DNA. So instead of synthesizing, which basically has the limit of 450,000 that you can synthesize at a time, we basically said, Hey, if we want to test all accessible regions of the genome, let's just do an experiment that cuts accessible regions. Let's take those accessible regions, put them all with the same end joints of the puzzles, and then now use those to create a much, much larger array of things that you can test. And then tiling all of these regions, you can then pinpoint what are the driver nucleotides, what are the elements, how are they acting across 7 million experiments at a time. So basically this is all the same family of technology where you're basically using these parallel readouts of the barcodes. And then to do this, we used a technology called StarSeq for self transcribing reporter assays, a technology developed by Alex Stark, my former postdoc, who's now API over in Vienna. So we basically coupled the StarSeq, the self transcribing reporters where the enhancer can be part of the gene itself. So instead of having a separate barcode, that enhancer basically acts to turn on the gene and it's transcribed as part of the gene. So you don't have to have the two separate parts. Exactly. So you can just read them directly. So there's a constant improvements in this whole process. By the way, generating all these options, is it basically brute force? How much human intuition is? Oh gosh, of course it's human intuition and human creativity and incorporating all of the input data sets. Because again, the genome is enormous. 3.2 billion, you don't want to test that. You basically use all of these tools that I've talked about already. You generate your top favorite 10,000 hypothesis, and then you go and test all 10,000. And then from what comes out, you can then go to the next step. So that's technology number two. So technology number one is robotics, automation, where you have thousands of wells and you constantly test them. The second technology is instead of having wells, you have these massively parallel readouts in sort of these pooled assays. The third technology is coupling CRISPR perturbations with these single cell RNA readouts. So let me make another parenthesis here to describe now single cell RNA sequencing. So what does single cell RNA sequencing mean? So RNA sequencing is what has been traditionally used, well, traditionally the last 20 years, ever since the advent of next generation sequencing. So basically before RNA expression profiling was based on these microarrays. The next technology after that was based on sequencing. So you chop up your RNA and you just sequence small molecules, just like you would sequence a genome, basically reverse transcribe the small RNAs into DNA, and you sequence that DNA in order to get the number of sequencing reads corresponding to the expression level of every gene in the genome. You now have RNA sequencing. How do you go to single cell RNA sequencing? That technology also went through stages of evolution. The first was microfluidics. You basically had these, or even chambers, you basically had these ways of isolating individual cells, putting them into a well for every one of these cells. So you have 384 well plates and you now do 384 parallel reactions to measure the expression of 384 cells. That sounds amazing and it was amazing, but we want to do a million cells. How do you go from these wells to a million cells? You can't. So what the next technology was after that is instead of using a well for every reaction, you now use a lipid droplet for every reaction. So you use micro droplets as reaction chambers to basically amplify RNA. So here's the idea. You basically have microfluidics where you basically have every single cell coming down one tube in your microfluidics and you have little bubbles getting created in the other way with specific primers that mark every cell with its own barcode. You basically couple the two and you end up with little bubbles that have a cell and tons of markers for that cell. You now mark up all of the RNA for that one cell with the same exact barcode and you then lyse all of the droplets and you sequence the heck out of that and you have for every RNA molecule, a unique identifier that tells you what cell was it on. That is such good engineering, microfluidics and using some kind of primer to put a label on the thing. I mean, you're making it sound easy. I assume it's beautiful, but it's gorgeous. So there's the next generation. So that's the second generation. Next generation is forget the microfluidics altogether. Just use big bottles. How can you possibly do that with big bottles? So here's the idea. You dissociate all of your cells or all of your nuclei from complex cells like brain cells that are very long and sticky so you can't do that. If you have blood cells or if you have neuronal nuclei or brain nuclei, you can basically dissociate let's say a million cells. You now want to add a unique barcode, a unique barcode in each one of a million cells using only big bottles. How can you possibly do that? Sounds crazy, but here's the idea. You use a hundred of these bottles, you randomly shuffle all your million cells and you throw them into those hundred bottles randomly, completely randomly. You add one barcode out of a hundred to every one of the cells. You then you now take them all out. You shuffle them again and you throw them again into the same hundred bottles. But now in a different randomization and you add a second barcode. So every cell now has two barcodes. You take them out again, you shuffle them and you throw them back in. Another third barcode is adding randomly from the same hundred barcodes. You've now labeled every cell probabilistically based on the unique path that he took of which of a hundred bottles did he go for the first time, which of a hundred bottles the second time and which of a hundred bottles the third time. A hundred times a hundred times a hundred is a million unique barcodes in every single one of these cells without ever using microfluidics. Very clever. It's beautiful, right? From a computer science perspective, that's very clever. Yeah. So you now have the single cell sequence technology. You can use the wells, you can use the bubbles or you can use the bottles and you have way The bubbles still sound pretty damn cool. The bubbles are awesome. And that's basically the main technology that we're using. So the bubbles is the main technology. So there are kits now that companies just sell to basically carry out single cell RNA sequencing that you can basically for $2,000, you can basically get 10,000 cells from one sample. And for every one of those cells, you basically have the transcription of thousands of genes. And you know, of course the data for any one cell is noisy, but being computer scientists, we can aggregate the data from all of the cells together across thousands of individuals together to basically make very robust inferences. Okay. So the third technology is basically single cell RNA sequencing that allows you to now start asking not just what is the brain expression level difference of that genetic variant, but what is the expression difference of that one genetic variant across every single subtype of brain cell? How is the variance changing? You can't just, you know, with a brain sample, you can just ask about the mean, what is the average expression? If I instead have 3000 cells that are neurons, I can ask not just what is the neuronal expression. I can say for layer five excitatory neurons of which I have, I don't know, 300 cells, what is the variance that this genetic variant has? So suddenly it's amazingly more powerful. I can basically start asking about this middle layer of gene expression at unprecedented levels. So when you look at the average, it washes out some potentially important signal that corresponds to ultimately the disease. Completely. Yeah. So that, I can do that at the RNA level, but I can also do that at the DNA level for the epigenome. So remember how before I was telling you about all this technology that we're using to probe the epigenome, one of them is DNA accessibility. So what we're doing in my lab is that from the same dissociation of say a brain sample where you now have all these tens of thousands of cells floating around, you basically take half of them to do RNA profiling and the other half to do epigenome profiling, both at the single cell level. So that allows you to now figure out what are the millions of DNA enhancers that are accessible in every one of tens of thousands of cells. And computationally, we can now take the RNA and the DNA readouts and group them together to basically figure out how is every enhancer related to every gene. And remember these sort of enhancer gene linking that we were doing across 833 samples? 833 is awesome, don't get me wrong, but 10 million is way more awesome. So we can now look at correlated activity across 2.3 million enhancers and 20,000 genes in each of millions of cells to basically start piecing together the regulatory circuitry of every single type of neuron, every single type of astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglial cell inside the brains of 1,500 individuals that we sample across multiple different brain regions across both DNA and RNA. So that's the data set that my team generated last year alone. So in one year, we basically generated 10 million cells from human brain across a dozen different disorders, across schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, ALS, Huntington's disease, post traumatic stress disorder, autism, bipolar disorder, healthy aging, et cetera. So it's possible that even just within that data set lie a lot of keys to understanding these diseases and then be able to like directly leads to then treatment. Correct. Correct. So basically we are now motivating. Yeah. So our computational team is in heaven right now and we're looking for people. I mean, if you have super smart. So this is a very interesting kind of side question. How much of this is biology? How much of this is computation? So you're the head of the computational biology group, but how much of, should you be comfortable with biology to be able to solve some of these problems? If you just find, if you put several of the hats you were on fundamentally, are you thinking like a computer scientist here? You have to. This is the only way. As I said, we are the descendants of the first digital computer. We're trying to understand the digital computer. We're trying to understand the circuitry, the logic of this digital core computer and all of these analog layers surrounding it. So the case that I've been making is that you cannot think one gene at a time. The traditional biology is dead. There's no way you cannot solve disease with traditional biology. You need it as a component. Once you figured out RX3 and RX5, you now can then say, Hey, have you guys worked on those genes with your single gene approach? We'd love to know everything you know. And if you haven't, we now know how important these genes are. Let's now launch a single gene program to dissect them and understand them. But you cannot use that as a way to dissect disease. You have to think genomically. You have to think from the global perspective and you have to build these circuits systematically. So we need numbers of computer scientists who are interested and willing to dive into these data fully, fully in and extract meaning. We need computer science people who can understand machine learning and inference and decouple these matrices, come up with super smart ways of dissecting them. But we also need computer scientists who understand biology, who are able to design the next generation of experiments. Because many of these experiments, no one in their right mind would design them without thinking of the analytical approach that you would use to deconvolve the data afterwards. Because it's massive amounts of ridiculously noisy data. And if you don't have the computational pipeline in your head before you even design the experiment, you would never design the experiment that way. That's brilliant. So in designing the experiment, you have to see the entirety of the computational pipeline. That drives the design. That even drives the necessity for that design. Basically, you know, if you didn't have a computer scientist way of thinking, you would never design these hugely combinatorial, massively parallel experiments. So that's why you need interdisciplinary teams, you need teams. And I want to sort of clarify that what do we mean by computational biology group? The focus is not on computational, the focus is on the biology. So we are a biology group. What type of biology? Computational biology. That's the type of biology that uses the whole genome. That's the type of biology that designs experiments, genomic experiments, that can only be interpreted in the context of the whole genome. Right. So it's philosophically looking at biology as a computer. Correct. Correct. So which is in the context of the history of biology is a big transformation. Yeah. Yeah. You can think of the name as what do we do? Only computation. That's not true. How do we study it? Only computationally. That is true. So all of these single cell sequencing can now be coupled with the technology that we talked about earlier for perturbation. So here's the crazy thing. Instead of using these wells and these robotic systems for doing one drug at a time or for perturbing one gene at a time in thousands of wells, you can now do this using a pool of cells and single cell RNA sequencing. How? You basically can take these perturbations using CRISPR and instead of using a single guide RNA, you can use a library of guide RNAs generated exactly the same way using this array technology. So you synthesize a thousand different guide RNAs. You now take each of these guide RNAs and you insert them in a pool of cells where every cell gets one perturbation. And you use CRISPR editing or CRISPR, so with either CRISPR Cas9 to edit a genome with these thousand perturbations or with the activation or with the repression. And you now can have a single cell readout where every single cell has received one of these modifications. And you can now in massively parallel ways, couple the perturbation and the readout in a single experiment. How are you tracking which perturbations each cell received? So there's ways of doing that, but basically one way is to make that perturbation an expressible vector so that part of your RNA reading is actually that perturbation itself. So you can basically put it in an expressible part so you can self drive it. So the point that I want to get across is that the sky's the limit. You basically have these tools, these building blocks of molecular biology. We have these massive data sets of computational biology. We have this huge ability to sort of use machine learning and statistical methods and, you know, linear algebra to sort of reduce the dimensionality of all these massive data sets. And then you end up with a series of actionable targets that you can then couple with pharma and just go after systematically. So the ability to sort of bring genetics to the epigenomics, to the transcriptomics, to the cellular readouts using these sort of high throughput perturbation technologies that I'm talking about and ultimately to the organismal through the electronic health record endophenotypes and ultimately the disease battery of assays at the cognitive level, at the physiological level and, you know, every other level. There is no better or more exciting field, in my view, to be a computer scientist then or to be a scientist in period. Basically this confluence of technologies, of computation, of data, of insight and of tools for manipulation is unprecedented in human history. And I think this is what's shaping the next century to really be a transformative century for our species and for our planet. Do you think the 21st century will be remembered for the big leaps in understanding and alleviation of biology? If you look at the path between discovery and therapeutics, it's been on the order of 50 years, it's been shortened to 40, 30, 20, and now it's on the order of 10 years. But the huge number of technologies that are going on right now for discovery will result undoubtedly in the most dramatic manipulation of human biology that we've ever seen in the history of humanity in the next few years. Do you think we might be able to cure some of the diseases we started this conversation with? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's only a matter of time. Basically the complexity is enormous and I don't want to underestimate the complexity but the number of insights is unprecedented and the ability to manipulate is unprecedented and the ability to deliver these small molecules and other non traditional medicine perturbations, there's a new generation of perturbations that you can use at the DNA level, at the RNA level, at the micro RNA level, at the epigenomic level, there's a battery of new generations of perturbations. If you couple that with cell type identifiers that can basically sense when you are in the right cell based on the specific combination and then turn on that intervention for that cell, you can now think of combinatorial interventions where you can basically sort of feed a synthetic biology construct to someone that will basically do different things in different cells. So basically for cancer, this is one of the therapeutics that our collaborator Ron Weiss is using to basically start sort of engineering the circuits that will use micro RNA sensors of the environment to sort of know if you're in a tumor cell or if you're in an immune cell or if you're in a stromal cell and so forth and basically turn on particular interventions there. You can sort of create constructs that are tuned to only the liver cells or only the heart cells or only the brain cells and then have these new generations of therapeutics coupled with this immense amount of knowledge on the sort of which targets to choose and what biological processes to measure and how to intervene. My view is that disease is going to be fundamentally altered and alleviated as we go forward. Next time we talk, we'll talk about the philosophical implications of that and the effect of life, but let's stick to biology for just a little longer. We did pretty good today. We stuck to the science. What are you excited in terms of the future of this field, the technologies in your own group, in your own mind, you're leading the world at MIT in the science and the engineering of this work. So what are you excited about here? I could not be more excited. We are one of many, many teams who are working on this. In my team, the most exciting parts are, you know, many folds. So basically we've now assembled these battery of technologies. We've assembled these massive, massive data sets and now we're really sort of in the stage of our team's path of generating disease insights. So we are simultaneously working on a paper on schizophrenia right now that is basically using the single cell profiling technologies, using this editing and manipulation technologies to basically show how the master regulators underlying changes in the brain that are sort of found in schizophrenia are in fact affecting excitatory neurons and inhibitory neurons in pathways that are active both in synaptic pruning, but also in early development. We've basically found this set of four regulators that are connecting these two processes that were previously separate in schizophrenia in sort of having a sort of more unified view across those two sides. The second one is in the area of metabolism. We basically now have a beautiful collaboration with the Goodyear lab that's basically looking at multi tissue perturbations in six or seven different tissues across the body in the context of exercise and in the context of nutritional interventions using both mouse and human, where we can basically see what are the cell to cell communications that are changing across them. And what we're finding is this immense role of both immune cells as well as adipocyte stem cells in sort of reshaping that circuitry of all of these different tissues and that's sort of painting to a new path for therapeutical intervention there. In Alzheimer's, it's this huge focus on microglia and now we're discovering different classes of microglial cells that are basically either synaptic or immune. And these are playing vastly different roles in Alzheimer's versus in schizophrenia. And what we're finding is this immense complexity as you go further and further down of how in fact there's 10 different types of microglia, each with their own sort of expression programs. We used to think of them as, oh yeah, they're microglia, but in fact now we're realizing just even in that sort of least abundant of cell types, there's this incredible diversity there. The differences between brain regions is another sort of major, major insight. Often one would think that, oh, astrocytes are astrocytes no matter where they are. But no, there's incredible region specific differences in the expression patterns of all of the major brain cell types across different brain regions. So basically there's the neocortical regions that are sort of the recent innovation that makes us so different from all other species. There's the sort of reptilian brain sort of regions that are sort of much more very extremely distinct. There's the cerebellum. Each of those basically is associated in a different way with disease. And what we're doing now is looking into pseudo temporal models for how disease progresses across different regions of the brain. If you look at Alzheimer's, it basically starts in this small region called the entorhinal cortex and then it spreads through the brain and through the hippocampus and ultimately affecting the neocortex. And with every brain region that it hits, it basically has a different impact on the cognitive and memory aspects, orientation, short term memory, long term memory, et cetera, which is dramatically affecting the cognitive path that the individuals go through. So what we're doing now is creating these computational models for ordering the cells and the regions and the individuals according to their ability to predict Alzheimer's disease. So we can have a cell level predictor of pathology that allows us to now create a temporal time course that tells us when every gene turns on along this pathology progression and then trace that across regions and pathological measures that are region specific, but also cognitive measures and so on and so forth. So that allows us to now sort of for the first time, look at can we actually do early intervention for Alzheimer's where we know that the disease starts manifesting for 10 years before you actually have your first cognitive loss. Can we start seeing that path to build new diagnostics, new prognostics, new biomarkers for this sort of early intervention in Alzheimer's? The other aspect that we're looking at is mosaicism. We talked about the common variants and the rare variants, but in addition to those rare variants as your initial cell that forms the zygote divides and divides and divides, with every cell division there are additional mutations that are happening. So what you end up with is your brain being a mosaic of multiple different types of genetic underpinnings. Some cells contain a mutation that other cells don't have. So every human has the common variants that all of us carry to some degree, the rare variants that your immediate tree of the human species carries, and then there's the somatic variant, which is the tree that happened after the zygote that sort of forms your own body. So these somatic alterations is something that has been previously inaccessible to study in human postmortem samples. But right now with the advent of single cell RNA sequencing, in this particular case, we're using the well based sequencing, which is much more expensive, but gives you a lot richer information about each of those transcripts. So we're using now that richer information to infer mutations that have happened in each of the thousands of genes that sort of are active in these cells, and then understand how the genome relates to the function, this genotype phenotype relationship that we usually build in GWAS between in genome wide association studies between genetic variation and disease. We're now building that at the cell level, where for every cell, we can relate the unique specific genome of that cell with the expression patterns of that cell, and the predicted function using these predictive models that I mentioned before on this regulation for cognition for pathology in Alzheimer's at the cell level. And what we're finding is that the genes that are altered and the genetic regions that are altered in common variants versus rare variants versus somatic variants are actually very different from each other. The somatic variants are pointing to neuronal energetics and oligodendrocyte functions that are not visible in the genetic legions that you find for the common variants, probably because they have too strong of an effect that evolution is just not tolerating them on the common side of the allele frequency spectrum. So the somatic one, that's the variation that happens after the zygote, after you individual. I mean, this is a dumb question, but there's mutation and variation, I guess that happens there. And you're saying that they're through this, if we focus in on individual cells, we're able to detect the story that's interesting there, and that might be a very unique kind of important variability that arises for, you said neuronal or something that would sound... Energetics. Energetics, sounds like a cool term. So, I mean, the metabolism of humans is dramatically altered from that of nearby species. We talked about that last time that basically we are able to consume meat that is incredibly energy rich, and that allows us to sort of have functions that are meeting this humongous brain that we have. So basically on one hand, every one of our brain cells is much more energy efficient than our neighbors, than our relatives. Number two, we have way more of these cells. And number three, we have this new diet that allows us to now feed all these needs. That basically creates a massive amount of damage, oxidative damage from this huge super powered factory of ideas and thoughts that we carry in our skull. And that factory has energetic needs, and there's a lot of sort of biological processes underlying that, that we are finding are altered in the context of Alzheimer's disease. That's fascinating. So you have to consider all of these systems if you want to understand even something like diseases that you would maybe traditionally associate with just the particular cells of the brain. The immune system, the metabolic system, the metabolic system. And these are all the things that makes us uniquely human. So our immune system is dramatically different from that of our neighbors. Our societies are so much more clustered. The history of infection that have plagued the human population is dramatically different from every other species. The way that our society and our population has sort of exploded has basically put unique pressures on our immune system. And our immune system has both coped with that density and also been shaped by, as I mentioned, the vast amount of death that has happened in the Black Plague and other sort of selective events in human history, famines, ice ages, and so forth. So that's number one on the sort of immune side. On the metabolic side, again, we are able to sort of run marathons. I don't know if you remember the sort of human versus horse experiment where the horse actually tires out faster than the human and the human actually wins. So on the metabolic side, we're dramatically different. On the immune side, we're dramatically different. On the brain side, again, you know, no need to sort of, you know, it's a no brainer of how our brain is like just enormously more capable. And then, you know, in the side of cancer, so basically the cancers that humans are having, the exposures, the environmental exposures is again, dramatically different. And the lifespan, the expansion of human lifespan is unseen in any other species in, you know, recent evolutionary history. And that now leads to a lot of new disorders that are starting to, you know, manifest late in life. So you know, Alzheimer's is one example where basically, you know, these vast energetic needs over a lifetime of thinking can basically lead to all of these debris and eventually saturate the system and lead to, you know, Alzheimer's in the late life. But there's, you know, there's just such a dramatic set of frontiers when it comes to aging research that, you know, so what I often like to say is that if you want to engineer a car to go from 70 miles an hour to 120 miles an hour, that's fine. You can basically, you know, fix a few components. If you wanted to now go at 400 miles an hour, you have to completely redesign the entire car because the system has just not evolved to go that far. Basically our human body has only evolved to live to, I don't know, 120, maybe we can get to 150 with minor changes. But if, you know, as we start pushing these frontiers for not just living, but well living, the Fzine that we talked about last time. So to basically push Fzine into the 80s and 90s and a hundreds and, you know, much further than that, we will face new challenges that have, you know, never been faced before in terms of cancer, the number of divisions, in terms of Alzheimer's and brain related disorders, in terms of metabolic disorders, in terms of regeneration, there's just so many different frontiers ahead of us. So I am thrilled about where we're heading. So basically I see this confluence in my lab and many other labs of AI, of, you know, sort of, you know, the next frontier of AI for drug design. So basically these sort of graph neural networks on specific chemical designs that allow you to create new generations of therapeutics. These molecular biology tricks for intervening at the system at every level, these personalized medicine prediction, diagnosis, and prognosis using the electronic health records and using these polygenic risk scores weighted by the burden, the number of mutations that are accumulating across common rare and somatic variants, the burden converging across all of these different molecular pathways, the delivery of specific drugs and specific interventions into specific cell types. And again, you've talked with Bob Langer about this, there's, you know, many giants in that field. And then the last concept is not intervening at the single gene level. I want you to sort of conceptualize the concept of an on target side effect. What is an on target side effect? An off target side effect is when you design a molecule to target one gene and instead it targets another gene and you have side effects because of that. And on target side effect is when your molecule does exactly what you were expecting, but that gene is plyotropic. Plyo means many, tropos means ways, many ways, it acts in many ways. It's a multifunctional gene. So you find that this gene plays a role in this, but as we talked about the wiring of genes to phenotypes is extremely dense and extremely complex. So the next stage of intervention will be intervening not at the gene level, but at the network level. Intervening at the set of pathways and the set of genes with multi input perturbations to the system, multi input modulations, pharmaceutical or other interventional, and that basically allow you to now work at the sort of full level of understanding, not just in your brain, but across your body, not just in one gene, but across the set of pathways and so on and so forth for every one of these disorders. So I think that we're finally at the level of systems medicine of basically instead of sort of medicine being at the single gene level, medicine being at the systems level where it can be personalized based on the specific set of genetic markers and genetic perturbations that you are either born with or that you have developed during your lifetime. Your unique set of exposures, your unique set of biomarkers, and your unique set of current set of conditions through your EHR and other ways. And the precision component of intervening extremely precisely in the specific pathways and the specific combinations of genes that should be modulated to sort of bring you from the disease state to the physiologically normal state or even to physiologically improved state through this combination of interventions. So that's in my view, the field where basically computer science comes together with artificial intelligence statistics, all of these other tools, molecular biology technologies and biotechnology and pharmaceutical technologies that are sort of revolutionary in the way of intervention. And of course, this massive amount of molecular biology and data gathering and generation and perturbation in massively parallel ways. So there's no better way. There's no better time. There's no better place to be sort of looking at this whole confluence of ideas. And I'm just so thrilled to be a small part of this amazing, enormous ecosystem. It's exciting to imagine what humans of 100, 200 years from now, what their life experience is like, because these ideas seem to have potential to transform the quality of life that, when they look back at us, they probably wonder how we were put up with all the suffering in the world. Manolis, it's a huge honor. Thank you for spending this early Sunday morning with me. I deeply appreciate it. See you next time. Sounds like a plan. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis. And thank you to our sponsors, SEMrush, which is an SEO optimization tool. Pessimist Archive, which is one of my favorite history podcasts. 8Sleep, which is a self cooling mattress with smart sensors and an app. And finally, BetterHelp, which is an online therapy service. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Haruki Murakami. Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers, passageways for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we're happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Manolis Kellis: Biology of Disease | Lex Fridman Podcast #133

The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, the third time we've spoken on this podcast. He is the wise turtle master Oogway to my Kung Fu Panda, one of my favorite people to talk to in this world. A complicated and fascinating mind that I'm grateful to have the chance to accompany in exploring this world through conversation on this podcast and on his, the latter called The Portal. Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Second is Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety into my culinary life. Third is SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but somebody should. It helps you make good decisions. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that wherever this life takes me, I'm drawn to the possibility of having many more conversations with Eric through the years. I think we have just the right kind of contrast in having worldviews and a deep respect and appreciation of each other's life stories that creates for this magical experience in the realm of conversation that feels like we're always looking for something that we never quite find, but are always better for having tried. I'm not sure how or why the universe has connected Eric and me, but it did. And I would be a fool not to trust its judgment and enjoy the journey. If somehow you like this podcast, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. Who's the greatest musician of all time, would you say? We were just off camera talking about Eddie Van Halen. He unfortunately passed away. Who's the greatest musician of all time? Yeah. Jonathan Richman. Who's that? It's a weird question. So I'm gonna give you a weird answer. It's not because of... Thank you. Okay, Jonathan Richman. The reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote. He was the front man of a group called the Modern Lovers. And his quote was something like, "'We have to be prepared to play music "'when our instruments are broken, "'the electricity's out and it's raining,' "'something like that." And I thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was, you have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical. So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity. We're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing. And that affected me emotionally. I don't know whether it affected you. I was never a Van Halen, the group fan, but I revered Eddie Van Halen's capacity for innovation. I saw him like Rodney Mullen, the skateboarder. I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuously innovate. And he posted a video of Spanish Fly, I think, and saying like, I didn't know the guitar could make those kinds of sounds. Like, what is this voodoo magic? What is it? Well, this is the thing, right? The arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast and the attacks from the hammer ons, when they go at light speed as he did, particularly. And the reason I chose that was, is that I wanted to strip out the electronics because part of the claim will be is that he's a rock musician. And a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup. His use of the whammy bar, for example, or the Frankenstrat that he built from different pieces. All of those aspects, in my opinion, are just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship. And that's why I chose Spanish Fly, because everyone, of course, will go to something like your eruption or running with the devil, which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting out of Southern California that was Eddie Van Halen, right? I mean, I'm in love with the story of it. You're often so poetic about music. Like it clearly touches your soul on many levels. What is that? Is it deeper than just rocking out with the in your convertible Corvette 69? I imagine Eric Weinstein is driving down the California highways, blasting some kind of music. Is it just like being able to be carefree for moments of time? Or is there something more fundamental that connects to like the theory of everything in physics and life and all of that? How often do you have the chance, for example, to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach, right? Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped, where to go back to Leonard Cohen's famous line, the baffled king composing, right? Such a good song. Such a good song, but it's also like individual verses of that song are insanely important. The baffled king is how we often make music. We don't really understand what did we just do that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch, right? And so it's a very strange thing that you should be able to have. Think of it like you're a computer. You've got this weird open music port, port 37.8, you know? Like it's not even supposed to be there. And suddenly somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things. Or like in particular, particular instruments like the violin, it's so difficult. It's so unforgiving. And when it gives up its secrets, it just, you know, it wraps its fingers around your heart and won't let go. Sometimes I talk about head, heart, and loins. When something can grab your head, heart, and your loins at the same moment and integrate them, there are very few opportunities to live like that. And if you think about Eddie Van Halen, as far as your head, the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium. In terms of heart, I always notice the smile on his face. It's painful to look at an Eddie Van Halen solo now. Like sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off the side of his mouth and you're like, that's gonna fucking kill you. And I'm not even worried about it for you. I'm worried about it for me. You're gonna rob. I don't even need to hear you play another note. I just like knowing that you're in the world, that there is somebody that everyone looks to that nobody, I've never heard a guitarist say, eh, I don't know. I think he was okay. Like I've never heard it. You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius. There are very few people like that in the world. And then loins, those leaps, that guy was incredibly good looking and, you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism. He completely owned the male sexuality of the stage, both being the completely dominant, you know, sort of mythical alpha male. I hate that expression, but there you are. But also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk and, you know, the sense that it all came together. How could you not eat that up? You could just imagine the millions of like young teenage boys, gorgeous, like playing air guitar in their room, just that, yeah, basically dreaming of being that kind of God, the most perfect example of what a human being can be. Yeah, it's fascinating to think. It is, and then, you know, as in many of the cases with these bands, you get these multiple talents in the same outfit. And I think that the original configuration with David Lee Roth, I mean, David Lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times. I would love you to talk to David Lee Roth. Like if the, that dance would be just gorgeous. I don't know. Can you handle it? Can you ride that? Probably not. Yeah. Probably not because I think he's very, I get the feeling that he's very smart and very dysregulated. And I don't know that I could, like bring him down to earth for a moment. Well, I can also get pretty dysregulated, you know? And so I don't know whether, it could be magic. It could be a shit show. I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan. That was an interesting one. I loved it, but Joe and that, and Joe does this sometimes, sometimes he just sits back and listens and he just lets like the music play, which works really well. I think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos and then you'll just start. And the places you will go, you may not even talk about music for like hours. It might just go to this, cause he, I think lives in Japan. Like there's a weird, he's been an EMT after he was a rock star. He chose to be kind of like, I don't know. You know, it's like there's depth to that man that hasn't been explored by him either. So that'll be an exciting conversation. Can we go back to Larry Cohen? Yeah. Can we just, the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen or anything by him really, but that one. Do you really want to get into it? Let's go. What is it that song mean to you? Is it love? Oh boy. Well, first of all, it's mystery. Like it starts off about mystery. So what are you doing? You're doing this alternation between the two chords. So three notes at the same time. One is called the tonic, or you have the major and the relative minor and he's alternating between them. There's only one note of difference between those two chords. One of them would be feeling sad. One of them would be more joyous, typically described. And so by altering one note, it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness as that's encoded in us. So he starts off with, I heard there was a scene, David played the please a little bit. You don't really care for music, do you? That's really interesting because he's using this technique called Bethos, right? So the alternation between the sublime and kind of the guttural or ridiculous or the mundane, right? So he's like. There's a bitterness to it too. Is it just play? Well, the way I hear it, again, a great song allows for different interpretations. You happen to be asking me, so I'm going to impart some stuff that probably isn't in the song, but why it speaks to me, that's what makes it great. The way I hear it is he doesn't believe the audience. You don't really care for music, do you? Then what are you doing listening to this? You stupid idiots, of course you care for music. You're too cool to care. So I see through you and screw you. That's the energy I get. Then he does this weird thing. It goes like this is where he should put the description of where he is in the chord progression, which is the tonic, right? It goes like this. And then he hits the fourth and the fifth, which are the two other major elements, the subdominant and the dominant in functional harmony. So he's describing the chord progression in real time in the lyrics. There's two ways this can come about in other songs. We had this example of every time we say goodbye. Do you know this song? Every time we say goodbye. No, I think it was a Cole Porter, maybe, or Gershwin, maybe Porter, I don't know. I cry a little, there is no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor, right? Like it's a beautiful use of it. Then there's times when it's duplicitous. So for example, you'll have, I guess my favorite examples of this are Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire. I fell into a burning ring of fire. And then what does he do with the lyrics in the tune? I went down, down, down. He goes up, right? And so the idea is like, oh, okay, that was a head fake. And another one of these is Nina Simone's Feeling Good. Oh, okay, so what do you get? Birds flying high, you know how I feel. Then sun up in the sky, you know how I feel. That woman's voice, she doesn't give a damn yet. She's just. And I feel it, but then what's the, da dum, da dum. It's like heavy stripping music. It's, you're not in a good place. You're probably in some strip club, with the last of your money, you're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation. And she's feeling good? No, it's funereal. It's oppressive, right? I never thought of that song that way. Wow. Well, you think of it as joyous? Yeah. No, no, no, if you think about it, contrast it with Ray Charles, for example. You know, do you know Lonely Avenue? Well, my room has got two windows, but the sunshine never comes through. It's really depressed. It's the same sort of vibe as Nina, but she's claiming that she's in great shape. So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator. Leonard Cohen, to me, is talking about the unreliable audience. That's too cool to be with the performer on stage. There are things that go with the music, like the Cole Porter stuff, there's go against like the Johnny Cash. I think these are the games that musicians play that the rest of us only sort of notice subliminally. Okay. Fourth, the fifth, then he, when he, he should say something about the relative minor or the, he's giving you the secret, the baffled king, in other words, he doesn't know why it works. Did Pachelbel know why Pachelbel's Canon would work? It was a discovery. That's the whole thing. Like some music is discovered and some music is invented. And he's talking about a musical discovery. He's talking about the Pythagorean power of the wave equation and then superimpose, like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music. One of which is the wave equation. Usually we solve it for a one dimensional medium because we're talking about strings or air columns. Occasionally you're talking about things like handpans or steel drums or metallophones or gamelons, whatever. And those have a wave equation too, that's much more chaotic. The other equation is this crazy thing that two to the 19 twelfths is almost exactly equal to three, which is what gave us even temperament. And so the tension between those two things is in fact one of these most beautiful stories inside of that system. That formula of the baffled king is a discovery. It's not, he's not really composing it. The reason he's baffled, it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands. You might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing, but in fact, if somebody else did it, that's why you're baffled, right? That's beautifully put, you're right. And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time and as he's doing it, he's baffled. And he's within the song. And he Leonard is baffled is my contention, but he knows enough to know that he's baffled, right? And so the idea is that he is composing, he has the audacity to compose as David. He's echoing David at a minimum. And then in a later song, which I really wish we would discuss, that's totally dystopic and you will not like it at all, is the future, which contains this line that I think I used in my episode with Roger Penrose on the portal. Note the subtle plug. The portal, the portal, the portal, the portal. I'm the little Jew that wrote the Bible. So there is this way in which Leonard Cohen, I think is constantly coming to the idea of being a biblical like scribe. And I think this is one of the great things that you see Dylan doing this with all along the watchtower. You saw Warren Zevon, who we should talk much more about, doing this with a song called I Was in the House When the House Burned Down. Do you know this thing? No. This is embarrassing. Sweetheart. This is a great day. Warren Zevon is one of the most important songwriters of our time. And he's been largely forgotten by this generation. But Bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute. I've heard Bob Dylan, you know, very small number of songwriters really move him. Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Warren Zevon. By the way, Bob Dylan, if you're out there, appear on either one of our podcasts. We need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group. Definitely. This is a time for Bob Dylan, my friend. Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in this space. One of the reasons I'm super excited to do this podcast again is that I've learned some things about what I don't do well. And I also have sort of struggled with the question, should I do those things better? Because what if it's, you know, I always use the same example of the fitted sheet when you're trying to put a queen size fitted sheet on a king size mattress. He's like, okay, I got that corner squared away. Then you get another corner that pops off and they have to go back around. I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which, you know, I think it's just a recognition of a difference. You do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves for a huge number of people. And I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that. Do you ever think about this? Like, cause I think about what is the greatest conversation I'll ever have. You know, like in a sense of the portal, not to reduce it to anything, but there will be the greatest conversation. You may have already had it, but it's very possible. If enough people like me can keep twisting your arm to keep doing the portal, please, that is, there'll be an amazing conversation. One of the questions that I ask myself is like, who is the person that I'm especially equipped? For some reason, I'm convinced on Putin. There's something in my head that says, I can do this man better than anyone else in this world. I got this thought in my head about it, I don't know why. And I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way. Like if it tells you, it's gonna happen. The way I would say it is, is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes at a very early age, they're going to become a Supreme Court justice. Many people believe at an early age that they can do it, don't get there. But of those who get there, almost all of them had this sort of, well, I call it pathological self confidence. And I do think you have pathological self confidence and you also have humility. And most people would hear those as a contradiction. I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the humility. And so I think the great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive. Because right now you've got a Mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefiting. That's beautifully put. My Mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours. It's all reservoir dogs all the time. But actually the person who that describes is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel thinks more, people always say like, what does Peter think about X, Y, and Z, P, and Q? It's like, well, do you want communist Peter? Do you want hyper capitalist Peter? He's got all these minds in there, oh my God, right? On everything. That's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other. And so when people say Peter is this or Peter is that, I just laugh because like nobody who knows him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming. And I do think that in my case, there's also pathological epistemic humility. Like just, I know how little I can do in one life. I know how many things I've screwed up. I know how many things I've got wrong. And on the other hand, I know that if not, it's like Hillel's questions, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me? And if I'm only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? At some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and that that somebody is me. And if I apply that to everyone else on the planet, then nobody's gonna do anything. And so I do think that one of the things that people like you and I get is who are you to say that? F that, man, just sign me up for some Dunning Kruger. Yeah, but it's multiple minds like you said. Like this morning, I was feeling so good and confident about I couldn't think no wrong. And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who's ever lived and nothing I've ever said is worth anything. What the fuck am I doing with my life? Why am I scared? I was terrified of this conversation. Who the hell am I? This conversation? Because I'm an idiot. And because, you know, Lex, but no, no, no, no. But this morning, I was the baddest motherfucker who's ever walked this earth. So I was very conscious. I think it was the coffee, I'm not sure, maybe some sleep. This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine. There's, in fact, I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge. Okay. So, I mean, I should have hit you for coffee because this is a morning show here. So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these wonderful questions. A few people asked about depression and suicide. This is a Russian program, so we have to go there. And I think about Leonard Cohen and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just, I don't know, for love in a person's life is to hear how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much he suffered. I guess one way, I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about the places that the mind can go, like these dark places? Yeah. Is there something like where the only escape out is suicide, for example, that's the darkest version of it? That, I really think suicide is a big place in suicidal ideation and self harm and we don't talk a lot about it. It's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans. These are umbrella categories. And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's coming because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life, whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have a religious motivation. There's too many different forms of self harm. It's something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts. And I think that you can look at it from different angles. I'm old enough to have had Pete Seeger come to my college when I was at university and to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity. I think of Odetta, I used to go to Odetta concerts. I don't know if you know who she is. Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life. Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview. She was a civil rights figure, but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship. These people were in the struggle, right? And they saw lots of bad things happen and they kept their humor about them. And the thing is that you can take on the Weltschmerz, the pain of the planet, or you can try to do something else, which is to be a happy warrior, even if the odds are terrible and the cost of failure is catastrophic. So even when surrounded by darkness. But the thing is with Leonard Cohen is he created such beautiful music. And yet it's like Anthony Bourdain, the same. And yet they go to this dark place. And it could be, it's easy to say it's just biochemistry. There's a linkage between this highly generative, creative side and in some cases, dark depression, in other cases, not. So you can't say that it's tied, the genius and madness are always co traveling or the beauty and pain are one in the same. What you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster, there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty. And I do think that in part, it's squaring circles that can't be squared. We were just talking before about the inability to serve two perfect systems, the perfect system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament. They're both perfect, they're not compatible. And once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection, I think you recognize that there is no solution to this world. Yeah, that's weird with the poets and musicians. Do you want to say this is a particular thing that you do, but then there's Spanish fly by Van Halen. And then you realize, oh, well, what do you get out of Spanish fly by Van Halen? I think it's very singular because of the fact that it's purely acoustic. For some reason, I always, I couldn't imagine Eddie Van Halen separate from the band in front of thousands of people just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere. And Spanish fly made me think like, it made me imagine him sitting alone on a couch in a room. I think that's who he was, I really do. I mean, believe me, I get it. He was a rockstar, he was a rock god. Got it, got it, got it, got it. I'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert. Yeah, it made me imagine that there's some half naked supermodel walking around, hoping that they can do their thing together. And Eddie's completely disinterested. He'd be with the guitar. He'd be with the guitar, right? Yeah. Because honestly, at some level, in one case, maybe you're conquesting, maybe you're pursuing love and romance. In the other case, you're talking about a relationship to the order, the creator, the almighty, whatever it is you want to call that substrate that is reality. And do I believe that Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and Heifetz jacked into the true essence of the world? Yeah, they did. I don't think it's as good as differential geometry. I'm sorry. I do think it's amazing for other reasons. And thank God, because it's very typical to communicate differential geometry at scale. But the thing about eruption, for example, what level do you want to come into eruption? Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry? Do you want the theatrics? Like you could put him on wires and set his pants on fire or whatever, and it'd be totally in keeping with it. On the other hand, you want to talk to something completely precise that shows off the virtuosity of what's possible with the Stratocaster. Everything works. Multi axis. But there's a precision to it, which is very different than Hendrix. There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me, somebody who has OCD has always been a struggle. How does Hendrix affect you? I mean, let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation. I don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it. Maybe that's not true. Maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its Hendrix conversation, and this is a long form part. It's Jimi Hendrix experience. Yeah. Yeah, so funny. I hear you stole it from Joe Rogan. Yeah. There's so many details. One, it hurt my soul on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to play a note, to hold the note. And it doesn't, because I want it to be the Russian virtuoso that sits with his classical guitar in a perfect form, plays really fast with the fingers, and then you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed and supporting the neck. So that's the Russian conservatory student. Conservatory student, yeah. Then there's the Russian wild man. Which one is that? Well, they're different Russian archetypes, right? So the completely idiosyncratic Russian is very different in a weird way from the, I can do this backwards in any key in my sleep and in any time signature that you just snap your fingers. We've discussed my piano tuner in previous episodes. No, no, that was offline conversation. You told me the story. I should tell you the story. You should retell the story. There I was in darkest Manhattan with the world's shittiest, it wasn't even an upright, it was a spinet piano. A friend had given it to me. The piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune it. And the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy and I hated dealing with him. There was something about his attitude that just really rubbed me the wrong way. So anyway, my wife says, tune that thing. So we get the piano tuner to come and he's tuning this. He's like, are you sure you wanna tune this piece of shit? Okay, fine. So he's like, okay, it's your money. The phone rings and I have the phone ringer set on a landline to Paganini Caprice 24. And immediately as the phone rings, he figures out what key the phone ringer is and which is not the key that like list composed the variations on Caprice 24. And he starts going into theme and variations on Caprice 24 at some level I've never heard before, just jaw dropping it. And like the phone stops ringing and we have this awkward silence. I said, I didn't know you were such a great piano player. And then he says one of these things in Russian accented English hurts in a way you can't imagine. He said, no, you are the piano player. I am merely the piano tuner. And I was just like, oh man, through the heart. You know, it's kind of reminiscent. I'd love to hear actually your opinion. This is reminiscent of the Good Will Hunting story. What do you think about that? That movie? That movie. What about it? It's MIT. Yeah, I guess when I think of that film, I think about Matt Damon as a young guy, risking everything, giving up Harvard. I think probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who choose to give up Harvard voluntarily. Beautiful, right? That's true. Bigger than Harvard. That's very true. Ives was one of these people, Bill Gates, of course. And then oddly, you know. Zuckerberg. What? But then Steve Jobs gave up a Reed, and Reed is like the weirdest, craziest college in the world. People should pay much more attention to Reed. And I'm sorry it's going through a hard time at the moment, but what it was before the current craziness is really an interesting story. Irregardless, as we say in the 617 Area Code, I think that a lot of my reaction is to the real story of Matt Damon having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off. And I also think about Robin Williams trying to explore heart through this lens of acting. And as you and I, you've hung out with comedians. They know that they already screwed up a bunch of people. They do. They're proud about it. They really are. The idea that Robin Williams, who I saw many years ago when I was in LA in the comedy clubs around here, he was a straight up crazy, dysregulated genius in tremendous pain. And his desire to do it earnestly through acting rather than constantly by just sniping or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours, I was really moved by that. I thought that he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real. And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be, but in that case, the madness and the genius were neighbors. That one couldn't have been any other way. Yeah. No, because his mind, the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react to random stimulus in the environment. You know, it could be a heckler. Sometimes you almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it gave him something to play against, right? He was infinitely, instantly inventive. But I actually, to me, the best Robin Williams is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life because there was a sadness and he's almost fighting the sadness with this improvisational, like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and this dancing that he does with language. But, and then sometimes when you just fall silent, you can see the sadness. And I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that. It's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly, you know, and it's getting older and older. And I mean, those, he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest, I'll tell you that. That's a sad. Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually just getting to know a soul over and over again. Like maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings is not an American specialty. Seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a Russian specialty. Like it is very much. Russian specialty, sounds like a diner menu. What? Yeah. You want the Russian specialty? A big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression. I do think that we're in a really terrifying and depressing time. And I think that part of it is that we don't know if something huge is about to get started. And we don't even know what this is. I mean, we just sit here in this weird world that is falling into some new state and we're not even super curious. It's like, what the hell just happened? Everybody's got an answer. And I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong. Let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer. So the central core of the answer is that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from having no plan, not having to make a plan for low growth. As long as we had growth, we were in great shape. Let's imagine that you could run an experiment, you have a billion copies of Earth and you start the initial conditions slightly different. On some giant number of planets, a lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time because a lot of that just has to do with once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments, you can see more. And the more you can see, the more you can make use of what you can see. And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do with like germs or electron orbitals or spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum. And so we got to do all of those things and the US roughly corresponded for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza. And so of course we look like an amazing genius country. We have no plan. Imagine that you could sell a car, you don't have to put in seat belts, you don't have to put in airbags, you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors or a rear view mirror. You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things from going wrong. And I think that's what we had. We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good, we plowed it back, the riches and spoils and then treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff. And we carried along a good chunk of humanity, hundreds of millions of people. We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society. How confident should we be that the growth has slowed in a way that is permanent rather than a kind of slap in the face where we... It's not the right concept. Right concept is, I try to use the same words over and over again in case people see mold because then the perseveration actually gets somewhere. So I use this analogy of the orchard because everyone talks about low hanging fruit. They know the concept of low hanging fruit, but they don't think in terms of orchards. So they say things like, you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit, but I believe in the inventiveness of the human mind. It's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy. What if the idea is we only picked all the low hanging fruit here, and then we're having this stupid argument about low hanging fruit, and we're not going and looking for new orchards. We're not planting new orchards. We're not looking for forests. We're just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit. So my claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit and it's not here. It's in other orchards. It's in other orchards. One of those turned out to be the digital orchard. The digital orchard has not been as stagnant as lots of these other, like the chemical orchard. I have faith that there is a small percentage of the population, but not zero, that's looking for those other orchards. Like I'm excited about one of those orchards, which is, I believe there'll be robots in everybody's homes and that will unlock some totally new thing. Totally new set of technologies, ideas, the way we live life, the productivity, all the everything, it'll change everything. So I'm excited about that orchard. So I'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back like the ant that finds a new source of food. I'm trying to find an apple I can bring back to the. Great, so you're in an explorer idiom. And do you have faith that there's enough of those? I don't think there are very many of us. I mean, I'm one of them too. How many does it take? It takes one ant. It takes one ant. What are you talking about? How many elons does it take to screw in a light bulb? Okay, let's imagine that we went, imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food, right? And then it comes back to the colony and it says, hey, I think I found a new source of food. And the initial reaction is, you're not authorized to find new food. What? Why would you try to go find new food? We're gonna remove you from Twitter. Yeah, and by the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find new food shows how privileged you are as an ant. Get out of the colony, kill him, kill him. Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards. And I think that what we find is that where there's a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that. But I saw this happen in hedge funds. Hedge funds for a while hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had funding and had freedom. And in general, really smart people want to be free and they don't wanna think a lot about how they're gonna feed themselves. They wanna get lost in their minds. So you can either give them productive places to play, dangerous places to play. They're either gonna break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies. And we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort. We're so focused on this other thing, which is fairness and safety. And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important. I don't wanna denigrate them. But the singular focus on fairness and safety without, in the same breath, being focused on growth and discovery and creation is gonna doom us because what we're talking about is we're always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be. Imagine that you spent all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century. You'd be an idiot. But one place I think I disagree with you is I don't think you need that many people to empower the geniuses, the innovators, the people who refuse to spend most of their days in meetings about fairness. This is good. Let's have a disagreement. I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium, is just one little example of a tool that you can give power to, like you and your podcast can have the next Elon Musk and make him a star. Now I see where you're going. Okay. There have been a series of places for people to play and be free. And we've lost them successively. What's a good place you remember? Because I disagree with you there too. I think they're still there. You can still play. You interviewed Noam Chomsky. Yes. Okay. Noam Chomsky comes from an era. Where you can play? Where you could play? At MIT. At MIT. And you can't play. This is where I disagree with you. We've already had this. But. Go check the Clips channel for the Lex Friedman podcast. I think I wasn't brave enough at that time and I'm not really brave enough now. Come on. Because I don't. Where's the vodka? It's a feeling and people are gonna tear me apart. Oh, what are you? And you speak from emotion and facts. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The feeling. What podcast is this? It's yours. Yes. Tell the people who are currently editing your brain, because I saw that move right now. Yeah. That they should go find another podcast. Right? Let's get rid of some of your audience right now. Please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain. Nevertheless, all the self doubt, they're sitting in that brain. So. I can't stand to watch this. But all right. What is this self doubt loop that you're in? The thing is, when I walk the halls of MIT. Yeah. There's bureaucracy, there's administrators that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives. There's meetings, there's. All the usual crap. All the usual crap. But there's, in the eyes of individuals. Yeah. There's this glow of excitement that has nothing to do with career. I understand this. And it's still a playground. There's little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still. And they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or blah, blah, blah. I love to hear that. Yeah? Well, you don't think so? I don't believe it. Cause I've watched the change, Lex. I've watched people. We were all editing ourselves all the time. I remember my old mind. I liked it better. All of this relentless focus on critical race theory and critical theory, postmodernism, fairness, social justice. It's making many of us into worse people. You think that's that? Do you think the Matt Damon's of the character is paying attention to any of that? You think that has an effect? Have you seen what happened to Matt Damon himself? Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times that seemed to be relatively innocuous. He can't speak. Okay. Well, let's not mix up. Matt Damon is just an actor. Well, I don't know. He was just a Harvard student who came up with his own genius screenplay, acted and made it happen. No. No, we're somewhere else. You don't think you can build a rocket company out of MIT still? I think that there are things that you can still do. But we're losing them. We lose them. We keep losing them. I would say the biggest problem, here, let me just say, what I think the solution would be is to fire anybody who's not faculty, especially young faculty should have way more power and administration should have much less power. Because right now, the administration, which used some of the, who used to be faculty, but they've lost the fire, the spark that gave them, they've lost the memories of the playground. And so the people that admire and love the playground, like you could see it in their behavior, should have way more power. And so we should create a systems that give them power. I think I'll take it. You're very idealistic. Yeah. And you're very, you've got a huge heart. It's a weird time. Cause I don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things. Because I see how potent you are. You do all these things, Jiu Jitsu, guitar, podcasting, programming, computers, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think you're right. I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number of, let me give you an alternate version of this dystopia. I do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause things to happen that progress the story forward. But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in who fit that profile, like how much crap has Elon Musk taken? Quite considerable, right? And not much admiration from the... Craig Venter, Jim Watson. These are very difficult people. Steve Jobs is a very difficult guy, you know? Yeah, it is a bit heartbreaking to me. I mean, everybody is different generations. I just, my mind is a little focused on Elon Musk because he's the modern person. Well, you know him. I mean, he's a person to you. It hurts my heart to see how few faculty and people with Nobel prizes and so on admire Elon. He gets a lot of fans from people that buy his products and young minds just excited. But why don't we as an institution, why doesn't MIT say that somebody amongst us will be the next Elon Musk and we want to encourage them? Like say that, say that in meetings, say that. Like that's success for us as MIT. And they, instead there's this jealousy. It's like, did you hear what Elon Musk tweeted? Did you see, like how irresponsible is what he's doing? How, like you're just saying all these things that are just dripping with jealousy and basically... I want what he's got. That's the thing, right? Here's the weird thing. Rivalry has a different signature. You see, when you know that you're never going to make it, that's the position you take. What is it in Kung Fu Panda, which you've watched now? Yes. Yes. What does Tai Lung say when he's looking for the dragon warrior and the furious five come to defeat him on the bridge? One of them gives up Poe's name accidentally and Tai Lung hears it. Poe, so that is his name. Finally, a worthy opponent. Our battle will be legendary, right? He's excited. Why is that? Well, you learn about this in boxing. Sometimes you'll see a division or an MMA, which is lousy with talent. Just, you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing athlete. Sometimes you'll have a division, which at that particular moment has one star and no real competition in that weight class or something. That person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other. When you think of Muhammad Ali, what are the names that you immediately think of? And you have to phrase your, you have to think of the other heavyweights. Liston. Right. So those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali. And that's why the Mayweather McGregor revelation that, okay, this guy has got his opponent's picture in his house. How weird is that? Well, because without the opponent, you may not be able to get there. Now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries. Do you have examples in mind? Well, there are rivalries where people take each other's credit cards and take each other's credit and screw each other over. And then there are other rivalries like the RNA Thai Club where these guys were so in love with what they were doing that they couldn't wait to share everything. And like Nobel prizes were so abundant that most people got Nobel prizes just for being a member of the RNA Thai Club and doing cool stuff. And yeah, that's the golden kind of sweet spot. Most of these people can't do what Elon's doing because they can't break rules, they can't take the pressure. I'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective. I think that there are a lot of genius ideas inside of people who don't have the stomach for conflict and derision. And I think a lot of those people are female. And I think that until we come up with a world in which we can swat down the trolls, or we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything. And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up, I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them, but somehow separating off people who are working and people who are trolling. I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius in part because women in particular are not necessarily going to push an idea if it results in 10 years of being derided. Very few men are willing to do that either. But there are some of us who are so dumb that we will pigheadedly stick to an idea for 10 years even if the world collapses. I don't think that there are as many women who are going to make that calculation even if they know the idea is correct. And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls, of all definitions of troll, like I believe that a better Twitter can be built. Interesting, I do not. I don't believe that a Twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems. I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something that really works because I think ultimately the problem isn't Twitter, the problem is us. For example, I've recently made a very disturbing realization, which is academics and social scientists and academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors. Absolutely. It's largely a trolling community. I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the Peter Thiel mini mind idea, which in all of the trolls, there's the possibility of goodness. And all you have to do, not all you have to do, what you have to do is create technology that incentivizes them to embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels of their nature. And I believe that people actually want to do that. The trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome. I believe that like deep within, we want to overcome that. I try to keep myself from believing what you believe. Because you'd be disappointed if it's not true. Because it's dangerous, because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't many of them, but when you meet somebody who's like, yeah, I just like screwing people up. I'm here for the pain. I just believe even in them, there's a good. There's a wonderful book that I'm gonna recommend to you where I hope this comes from. Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City about Bombay. And I believe the conceit is that the author leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult and he realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left. So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city and one of them is the underworld. He hangs out with the police, but in the underworld, he's talking to contract killers. And he says, you know, it's really weird. Everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them. And they always say this thing about, I've got two kids at home. He says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with our parents. Doesn't it dare us to do that? And I was just thinking like, oh, wow. So there's a minus sign in front of that statement. You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old, it's like, okay, well, I'm gonna take this POS out of that kid's life. Maybe I'll have a chance. You don't know how people are wired. And as much as I hate to say it, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return. Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis. You do not know this for sure. Nope. And I am, you know, whatever the hell I am that has a different hypothesis that even in the darkest human beings that seem to be only full of evil, there's a good person there that could be discovered. And that's one of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs, even as a Russian. The Russian special. As you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness which is a total cynicism and total idealism locked together, right? That's very much a part of the Russian character. The reason I kept bothering you, kept bothering you to have this conversation is I'm really worried about the next couple of months. No kidding. And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by at least walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you. Do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war? Some kind of division that explodes beyond just stuff on Twitter, but something that's really destructive to the fabric of our society? Well, I believe we're in a revolution, as you know. I've called it the no name revolution or N squared revolution. I've been talking about it for years. I don't think, I think waiting for this to be called a civil war is not smart. Only history will call it such. Fine. But I think that the problem is is that you're encountering things that you've never seen trying to fit them into things that you already know. Right. And. But history repeats itself. Yes, ish. You don't see lessons from history in. I do. We see today. But I don't see it repeating itself. You know, the famous quote is that it rhymes. It rhymes. I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence. And. We're in there. The abstraction of violence. Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class. Okay. Thank you for speaking to the audience. Trying to lose these people. Come with me. Go on. No, no, no. Look, I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around. I guarantee you if I say some stuff, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say, they're gonna detail. So that'll be a little bit of catnip to bring in the smart people. But they'll also digest it for each other. It's one of the great lessons of long form podcasting. If you don't waste all your time explaining things, that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves. They're happy doing the work. And those who aren't, they leave. Isn't that great? They'll leave. The people who don't wanna struggle will leave. You can get rid of them. I think that the point is you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context. So let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the problem. We already have a term for physical violence, right? So we have meta violence and physical violence. I would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta violence. Meta violence is the disruption of a system. It's sort of, for example, if a cell dies, you can die through apoptosis or necrosis. Apoptosis is controlled programmed cell death. Necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work. That was a violent disruption of the system. And this meta class is presumed in the documentation. Is it all negative? No, what are you talking about? So this is part of the problem in the madness of our age, right? Which is if you open up a drawer in your cabinet, right, in your kitchen, and you see knives, spoons, and forks, do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils and the knives or forks are bad utensils because they're mean? I mean, like if you start thinking in these terms, that knife is there to do violence. That's violence you want done, right? When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango. The mango expects that I will do violence to it because otherwise I won't be able to get the meat and it won't get its seed spread somewhere else. So in part, violence is absolutely part of our story. So, okay, so there's this meta violence class. Yeah. And what's... So the meta violence class is already, it's a multiple inheritance pattern. Whatever's going on right now inherits from meta violence. No, but there's certain subclasses that allow evil to emerge. So what I'm specifically worried about is that... What's on your mind, Lex? What's really going on? Okay. I worry that amidst the chaos of these protests or the chaos that could be created by the feeling that the election does not represent the voice of the people, like saying that whoever gets, quote unquote, wins the election according to some kind of reporting of the numbers that come out, that's not going to represent what people actually want to be the leader. Like something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to literal violence, like protests that really... That the United States loses its united aspect. And because of that, because of that chaos and tension, evil people, evil forces that my definition of evil is just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power. The kind of power that is ultimately goes against the ideal of the United States. That could be Donald Trump. That could be another human being. It doesn't really matter. My worry is that love doesn't win out in this. The unity doesn't win out in this. And I feel like you and I have responsibility. No kidding. Yeah, I know. And so how do we let love win in this moment of potential chaos? We're gonna have to fight for it. You're gonna have to become a fighter. You're gonna have to throw some serious punches if that's what you want. You have to be Muhammad Ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything, people, you have to be a masterful communicator because... That's why you're here. Look, Lex, in part, your decency is allowing you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do. I saw that you had Michael Malice on your podcast. Yeah. Now, Michael Malice is, I think of somebody who at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful, yes? He's also got this trolling game, which he's quite open about and you talk to him about it, which I can't stand. And this is the idea, oh, grandpa doesn't get the internet. Well, I'm grandpa, I don't get the internet. I don't love the trolling. There are trolls of the past who were incredibly good. I don't see any of the modern trolls as being that kind of genius level trolling the people who deserve it in the way that they deserve it. Right now, what I see is that anything that stands up gets cut down. Yeah. It's like anything earnest, you have to turn it into cynicism and a meme. It's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are constantly trying to let you know, don't try to use the internet for meaning, for decency, for goodness, because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy. And we will make you suffer. So I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world. Some of it mine, some of it yours, but we all have it. And the trolls somewhat remove that, but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive, compassionate, caring version most of the time. And a lot of those trolls, and I have this feeling about Michael Malice, I don't know whether it's right, that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior. And you and I don't seem to be doing that. I don't see you as almost ever trolling. Now you and I, I'm very much against trolling. I'm very much against trolling. It doesn't mean that it's selective. You know what, it's not even true. Like everything we say, we say like, I'm for it, I'm against it. This isn't my native language. I speak nuance. I don't speak this internet shit. And the more I have to communicate through internet shit, right, I almost never take a tweet seriously if it contains the letters LMAO, LOL, RTFOL, you know, FOL. There's an interesting effect where people say stuff and then finish with LOL. You put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person, we've talked about like why I wear this stupid suit, is like this is anti, this is to fight the LOL at the end of sentences, is take, it's like stand up for the words you're saying. Don't finish stuff with LOL, removing completely the responsibility of the content of the sentence that preceded it. Yeah, also choosing the outfit that works both for Men in Black and the Blues Brothers, not a terrible choice. Okay, but getting back, look, Lex, we're not in a position to do this. You need to be seated in a different chair. Your chair is the wrong chair. You're in the wrong chair. It's been so long. All right, I want to talk about you and Joe Biden. Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell. Okay, I know people as impressive at age 29 as Joe Biden, 12 rows back, 3D, doesn't matter, huge number of people. None of them my age can get to where he got to. Like we're all morons. Anytime somebody takes out, like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop, you'd be angry. What is this guy doing repairing guitars? Then somebody will say, maybe he loves to repair guitars. Yeah, I mean, what is your piano, Russian piano tuner doing? What is my Russian piano? That was the whole point of that story, which is what is it that happened in that life that converted somebody? And I find this, for example, with Russian doctors who are technicians in offices now. There's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat. And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the seats. And maybe we don't sit in them. Maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart Gen Z person in the seat and say, look, no chanting. I don't wanna hear you say, no justice, no peace. If there aren't verbs, if it rhymes, it's wrong. Like I used to have this thing, if it rhymed things that rhymed wrong, if it rhymed things that rhyme are more true. But like in general, if something starts out one, two, three, four, I don't wanna hear what the rest of your sentences. Yeah. But I feel like the responsibility that you carry, that I carry, this is where Joe Rogan generally removes himself from being, I'm just a comedian. This idea of I'm just a comedian. We all do that. But at this moment in history, like history literally can pivot on the words of a tattooed, ripped 50 year old comedian. And I think the same is true with you. Okay, well, I'm interested and I care. Speaking of lyrics, there are many here among us who feel that life has been a joke. That's not us. The hour is getting late. That's not us. In the song, the joker and the thief are on opposite sides of Jesus having this conversation over Jesus. You and I, we've been through that. That's not our fate. That's somebody else's fate to throw spitballs at the internet. That's not your fate. You're an earnest guy. You're filled with love. You're getting the most amazing podcasts. Yes, you're broadcasting. But you can win over the internet. This is the point I'm trying to make that you're saying I'm just a grandpa. I don't get the internet. No, I'm telling you, you're gonna get bigger and then you're gonna get cut down. You're gonna keep ascending for a while, Lex. And then you're saying, and naturally there's a... I'm telling you, I watch the same process. People get up to a certain level. And one of the things that's going on, in my opinion, with Joe Rogan, is that when Joe Rogan starts to talk about his misgivings about Joe Biden, in a way that you find at any bar in America, about cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78, I believe in November, we have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the White House. And you're saying when that idea is being communicated, is there something about the disc concept that you talk about, the system naturally starts to... Some bad thing happens to Joe or one of Joe's close associates. The ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented. This is what we have done in the past. Whether we are doing it now, we don't know, because we are not doing this church committee too. In order to know whether or not you are currently destroying American citizens as we did in the past and as we have documented, as we found out in 1976, the federal government destroyed Americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue. And I don't know whether you are grasping that. One interpretation of why Jon Stewart and why Joe Rogan and why Bill Maher, all these people to some extent hide behind, it's a joke. Yeah. It's because they're trying to find a protected class. Is there some place I can stand and speak the truth which does not result in my being garbage collected? Interesting. I guess you're right. My intuition is you can stand, as you gain more power, you can stand behind your words. There's a fight over Joe Rogan right now. I mean, I've talked about it for a few years now. People did not understand how big that program was. People didn't understand long form podcasting. I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd for believing in these podcasts as a major force. And most of the people who derided me have said, wow, did I not get things? It's like if you started to propose, you wanted to do the Sopranos in the era of 30 minute sitcoms. Like, you don't get it, man. The American people, they're not interested in these long plot storylines. That's your weird thing? Nobody cares, dude. Everybody just wants short, fast, memorable. And like, okay, so if you do that, you totally miss the opportunity. And the savvy people used to say, kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, that was totally wrong because they didn't calculate opportunity costs. I have been talking about the problem of Joe for a long time. The problem is, is that when the system wakes up, they're gonna wanna control it. And they come up with new different mechanisms of doing that. I guess one interesting one is cancel culture. Well, look at the number of people around Joe who they've come after since they realized that Joe was really big. Joey Diaz, Brian Callan, Chris Delia. Now, I'm not saying that those are all related, but I do notice that there are at least correlations between when Joe says something when something bad happens in Joe's universe. It's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around Joe himself. But I'm worried about my friend. And I don't necessarily wanna push him towards being more if he doesn't want it. Because I don't wanna conscript people. He's got a great life. He's got a great situation. He's done a huge service. Thank God. How much do I owe Joe just for what he's done for you to say nothing of what he's done for me or for Brett or for Sam or any of these people? And I'd like to think that we all try to give back, but I'm worried about Joe. He's not worried. One of the inspiring things about Joe is he's in this war alone. And the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life. Well, that's his thing, as long as he stays close to things that he loves and being, one of the things is he's honest about his drug use. He loves to hunt. So he's just, he does a certain amount of like semi vice signaling upfront. And then you just also know him. This is why every time they try to take him down, you use the N word. Unfortunately, everybody knows who Joe is. And yes, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school, right? That's not his energy. The fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead, just like, hey, I'm a comedian. It's like all these defenses and disguises. Okay, you've got this super smart guy who he's admitted to most of the things that you can take him down for. And because everybody's been effectively in his den his basement, think about that studio is his basement. People have hung out with Joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about Joe where they're gonna say, wow, I'm gonna believe the New York Times and not the hundreds of hours I've spent on the Joe Rogan experience. But the cool thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against the system, it's just by being a good person and talking enough hours in a week where that message like bleeds throughout the words and the gaps between. And that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good. And he's kind and he's tough. And he also, he's no pushover. I always worry a little bit when I sit down in my chair. You still get scared that he'll call you on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of? No, the first time I was on the show, the energy wasn't great between us. And it was in a sober October situation. So I think I hadn't understood that and maybe our egos got a little bit off. I don't know. I mean, I was having fun, but maybe it was just too complicated life forms getting to know each other. The first one was probably, yeah, that made me a little nervous for the future. But then, Joe and I have become friends, although sometimes we have miscommunications like on Yom Kippur, I texted him and I said, Joe, I want to apologize for ways I've let you down as a friend that haven't been there for you and appreciate everything you've done for me all this time. Like I get this text back like, what the fuck is your problem? You're great, dude. I don't know what bad place you're in, but cheer up. It's like, Joe, don't you have any Jews in your life that apologize for what they've done? He was just like, dude, have you lost your mind? What the hell's gotten into you? Yeah, what do you think about the Spotify thing? What about it? Ask me a question. He's now, as opposed to being just a comedian with the podcast, he now is just a comedian with the podcast who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancel culture, which is like, I know Spotify is in Sweden, but they represent Silicon Valley. They represent the very kind of structures. They contain and represent the kind of structures that threatened to destroy the Elans of the world. And he just like stepped like with his Alex Jones and his Joey Diaz just strolled right into the middle of it. Yeah, I think it's awesome. I love it. But do you think he's strong enough to, I don't know. I mean, I don't even know the right way to ask this, but is he strong enough to persevere? It's a bit interesting. It's like when a lion decides, wow, that honey badger looks tasty. I'm gonna swallow it whole, see what happens. Because I talked to him offline. He really seems to be willing to give away the 100 million, which gives him so much power. Oh, I don't, it's a powerful thing to be able to say, I don't, yeah, to the honey badger. He just strolls in, but he's willing to walk away from anything in this world. Well, he's gonna walk out the other side of the lion. I don't think he's gonna go out the way he came in. Yeah. Well, you know what it is? It's Tommy Lee Jones entering the bug. This is like a giant alien, he just walks into it? He just, he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside. I have it as Tommy Lee Jones. Yeah, that's Joe Rogan to you. Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify doesn't understand what they're messing with. I could be wrong, but I'm not. No, you're right. I'm right. Because Joe doesn't need anything, man. I mean, this is the weird thing about it. It's like, I'm sure that he loves all his toys, whatever, blah, blah, blah. He's a rich guy. Yes, he's got a few money. He had a few money a long time ago. And you're not, you know, the other thing about, it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that. It just is. Cause like you call him up or he'll call you up and he's like, what's going on in your life? I don't know. Kind of depressed, trying to get some math done. What are you up? Oh dude, I can cheer you up. I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium. It's like, oh cool. How'd you do that? Oh, I don't know. I just announced it on Instagram a few days ago and it filled up. Just like, oh damn. I mean, that thing is so powerful. So there you go. I mean, you could be that too. The instant Joe takes an interest in politics and saving the world. You might destroy all of that. It's going bye bye. I promise you. I just disagree with you. I mean, cause you have to do it. Like you've said this many times before. I'll bet you, I'll bet you a bottle of Stoli that you can get, if you get Joe Rogan to get highly politically active and call out the system for all the bullshit that it is in a very pointed and determined fashion and he doesn't get destroyed, I'll give you the vodka. The vodka? Yeah. That sounds like a pretty damn good deal. But you've said this, I mean. No living heroes, my friend, no living heroes. I just. No living heroes. It's just difficult. You just have to be good at it. I mean, if you just say generic political things. No, no. You're going to be taken down. But if you're. The more heroic you are, the more beautiful you are, the more you will be made to suffer. If they cannot get you on reputation. If Jesus himself came down. I don't know if I ever read. I probably have never read to you the hit piece I did on Jesus. You don't know about this? No, I did not know. I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world. Wow. So whoever it was who cured cancer, discovered new particles or whatever it is, I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time. Except Eddie Van Halen is what we're talking about. Well, Eddie Van Halen is now dead. But if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher, canceled. Disrespectful. Absolutely. Also, you know, packaging female objectification for young men. Clearly Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive. But the skill, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces. This is your thing. You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good has already been designated the winner. And it's not true. But your belief that it's true. Fake it till you make it, no? I mean, you gotta, it's motivating both of us. Like I also believe that we're gonna win because if I don't, then I can't get out of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment. Do you think 2021 can make us feel good about the trajectory of society? So like where we emerge from this year feeling good. Like there's a smile on Eric Weinstein's face and the next time we talk, we'll be doing some kind of duet on guitar and not having this worried look on our faces. No. Okay, but you've also promised you're going to somehow end this in a positive. Okay, so how do you turn the no around? What's the U turn from the no? Until we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking about their next paycheck, I don't see a solution. Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are and to let you know why I don't think it's coming. First of all, both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go. They're tearing us apart. They lack the will to be Americans. They don't understand the subtlety of the project. They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement. I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing, people who believe in dividing the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as Americans because we are built around growth. I'm sorry to say it. You need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude. And at the moment, everyone knows inclusion is good, which it isn't. It's like saying, well, water is good. If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me. It's not, people drown. People need to get dehydrated. It can be life saving or life ending. It isn't good or bad. Inclusion is not good or bad. Inclusion is just inclusion. Exclusion is part of inclusion. We've taught people that they can reason through the world as sub cocker spaniels. They just bark things at each other. I'm for safety. I'm for inclusion. I'm for growth. Oh, really? Do you guys use verbs, dependent clauses? Are there compound complex sentences? Where are we in this sea of nonsense? You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent a diverse group of correct opinions. You need to get rid of almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical to what we're trying to accomplish. You need to give them insulation, which we're terrified because we don't trust anybody. So everything has to be transparent. If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're doing. It's like, that's too much transparency. We have too much and not enough at the same time. And then in essence, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family every four seconds for being real. None of that is happening. And our billionaires, our billionaires are pathetic. What is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff like saying, F you, and I'm going to throw $3 billion at the project of restoring the national conversation? I don't grasp this. What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and caring enough to use it? So I agree with that last part for sure. Let me slightly push back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken. I feel like this goes to the Joe Rogan, Joe Biden and Trump having a debate on that program. I feel like Joe Biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot how to communicate. He's been fake for so long within the system. Hillary was fake for too long. I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning that she still was campaigning on decades later. But if the system, if the platforms empowered you to search, to be honest, to be real, to search for those ideas within yourself, like long form conversations do, then even the Donald Trump and Joe Biden leaders we have now would take this country to a better place that would unite people. So like, we can keep the current Congress. We just need to create better platforms. This is going to the intuition that there's good in Donald Trump. There's depth and complexity and intelligence. And the same with Joe Biden. There's good in Joe Biden. And it's just, we're not incentivizing. I mean, there's several things I think are broken. One of them is Twitter. The other is journalism. It's just the platforms of us communicating with each other. One of the reasons that I try to come up with unifying explanations is that, if you look at the number of wildfires in California, let's say, that we've just seen, if you treat them all as spontaneous, uncorrelated instances, it feels like, oh my God, it's just whack a mole. Every time I send a fire truck here, there's a fire over there. So you want to come up with something like a central theory, which is, why do I suddenly have a problem when I hadn't had a problem before? So I look for these unifying explanations. And I found one the other day that really speaks to me. I mean, people are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly, in my opinion. But here's the graph that you need to look at. On the x axis is time by year. And on the y axis is something like average age of a human. The title of the graph is any desirable situation involving institutions. So that could be CEO, it could be tenured professor. It could be who's getting grants. It could be the age at which people win Nobel Prizes. University presidents, all these things go up. In other words, for a long period of time, the average age of the person in a desirable situation has been increasing something like nine months for every 12. Those graphs have to go down at some point. The specter of having five people all born in the 1940s as the final entrance in the presidential context, that makes no sense. Think about how bizarre a thing that nobody's even really talking about. The last five people were all ancient by presidential standards. Not one, not two, but five. We are talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers, the very beginning of the baby boom, summer of 46th birthday, fighting somebody who is in the silent generation. The silent generation guy in a town hall in Florida gets this question from a Gen Z guy saying, what's going on with my future? Joe Biden has the audacity to say, I'm a transitional president. You guys are the highly educated one. When has any generation in history needed a transitional 78 year old person to take office? It's bizarre, it's preposterous. That graph is the graph we can't talk about. That graph is the graph of our destruction. Because it has the, you can make a one line argument, which sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument. No. But what it does is, is it muddles the conversation. And you always have to ask yourself the question, if this conversation becomes muddled, who wins as a result of the muddling? Well, it's a battle, but let's just win it. Let's win the battle. You give. Are you running? For sure, I'll run. I was born in Russia, can't run. So, but we Russians can hack elections, so we'll figure it out. This is me officially announcing my run for president. I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida. Yeah. Lex, what is it that you really wanna ask? I think, I wanna put some responsibility on the portal. The portal. The portal. That the portal gives power to the people in that graph. Like, cause you put it quite brilliantly that the people that move the world, their age has been going up. And not move the world, but put in the position where they get the chance to affect the world. These new platforms, I think Twitter falls in them, give power to the younger people. It doesn't have to be about age necessarily, but the younger thinking people. So that's a promising thing. And you are like, you're like Gandalf. You get to pick your Frodo's or whatever. I'm not very good with the analogy, but the whole point is for you as Gandalf. I don't know that I make that much sense. Gandalf makes sense. I don't know if people know how to fit me into this ecosystem. I think there's something in my presentation that people find very confusing. No, figure it out. I disagree with you, but you need to look at the mirror and think like, what is it? Is it, maybe you need a mustache. I don't know. But there's something about figuring out how to be a charismatic communicator in this. And that's the responsibility. You said like finishing sentences with the LOL is painful for your soul. Yeah, that's just how somebody lets me know. I don't have to take their opinion seriously. Yeah, it's still the language, the way that people are communicating and you're swimming that wave. You have a big platform. I have a growing platform. It feels like this is the place to give power. I agree, but we're gonna get swatted down. I just don't think so. You're wrong. Why are you afraid of the big? Like this is, I've studied it. Because I've studied, let me ask you a question, Lex. I believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call break glass in case of emergency people. Yeah. These are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society. For example, David Attenborough, the great British naturalist and presenter, recently came on Instagram. He's worried about the planet. And I said, look, there are very few of these people left. Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say. Maybe he's gonna be an ass. Maybe he's gonna be in it. Maybe he's gonna say wrong things, don't know. Tell me about your top 10 universal American heroes. This is not a rhetorical question. No. Give me five. Okay, everybody looks to that person and says, yep, the best of us. Probably follow that person. Well, everybody's an interesting concept. I mean, Elon Musk is very divisive, right? But I'm talking about overwhelmingly people would follow that person if that person gave a rousing, intelligent speech that said, we must act now because we're in dire straits. I think a lot of people fall in that category. For me, it would be in the tech world, in the engineering world. No, no, no, no, no. Tell me his names. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. The Rock. I'm thinking like, who is the most eloquent actor? So like, you think celebrities, so people with platforms. I didn't say celebrities, but you have to be well known. I believe like, yeah, so this goes to Joe Rogan. Hmm. First two did not really impress me as being what I said, but okay. Elon several years ago would have. Can you try to? Joe Rogan has. Why do they fail? Why does Elon fail? Lots of people treat Joe Rogan as if he's some sort of right wing racist because they've never watched his program. They don't know who his friends are. I don't know. Oh, but when I thought you said everybody, I thought you meant a large enough people where a huge change can happen, not actually literally everybody. Because I think. I mean people who've pulled off, like people who've pulled off something where everybody's convinced that that person just deeply. I mean, I think I've told you this story before, but the one time I've seen the power of a figure like this, I mean, very few times I've been in a large crowd and I've seen people just moved where they would do almost anything good, bad and different because they were primed. One was a Rolling Stones concert. The other one was Nelson Mandela coming to Boston. And man, you've never seen anything like this. You check out the photos from the banks of the Charles River when Nelson Mandela came. There are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are. And as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit. We get out the shit branch. Yeah. I just disagree with you. So I think. What do we disagree about here? I think it doesn't matter who it is. I think really good speeches are needed. And I think a lot. Who's gonna give them? I saw Killer Mike try to give a good speech. Yeah, he did. Wow. In Atlanta, right? Yeah, he did. That was something. Very impressed. Yeah. Even Killer Mike immediately gets into this. Sell out. Yeah, but he didn't take up the responsibility. I would say. He didn't. Of going bigger. So he was speaking to the community. And he was doing what he. On this particular moment, he's exceptional at it. And he was speaking to this particular moment. He didn't take it a step farther, which is like giving the same speech, but bigger than race. Bigger than this particular moment, but more about the American project. You know the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson? Yes. Yeah, there you go. That's a good example. So that guy until we screw him up is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I mean, Jaco, maybe that's another. Jaco's pretty good. Can't really tell. Is he a Democrat? Is he a Republican? I don't know. He's an American. That's for damn sure. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of folks. And then, you know. No, I think Jaco, there aren't. That's one of the reasons why Jaco's so special. That's so important. Yeah. Your podcast, The Portal, is something in my little universe is something a lot of people really love. And it moves them. They draw a lot of meaning from it. And also, especially in difficult times. It gives them a comfort of through like this kind of, it's not just nuance. There's like, even when you're talking about chaos, there's love underneath all of it. And I think people would draw a lot of meaning from it, which is why they are wondering why you haven't been doing I'm wondering why you haven't been doing that many podcasts or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a half or two months in this most difficult of times. Is there a good reason? Yeah. There are lots of good reasons. So the first one is kind of weird, which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous. And if you say, I don't want to be famous, it's like, oh, you're just saying that because you want to be everyone to think you're famous. You're not that famous. You know, okay. I don't love being as well known as I've become. There's lots of things that are fun about it. It's wonderful that you can go to, I can go to any city in the world and there are portal listeners there. All I need to do is put out a tweet and 20 people show up for a drink. And they're amazing people. And they're almost, I mean, you can see my live Q and A's on my Instagram page. If you go to Eric R. Weinstein, I just pick somebody randomly and I was really worried about it at first. And you know, maybe I should be worried about it, but in general, people all over the world are just so positive. And so, you know. And thoughtful and have a story that's kind of self selected. Right? Yeah. But I don't like the fame. The thing we just described comes with the fame. It's a beautiful thing. You know, you're worried that it's getting. It's ephemeral. It'll, look Lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat. Yeah. It'll turn on you in a heartbeat. And the other problem is I don't, I don't like my audience being my audience. I want to get closer to them. I want to talk to them. I want to find out what is this doing in your life? My house fills up with art that people send me. The lightest thing is an effects pedal called something like, I don't know, bow tie overdrive from a guy in Mexico, right? Yeah. You play electric, by the way, in a tiny little tangent. Do you play electric? I have a Stratocaster, but it doesn't have a strap and I don't know what to do with it and I have a bad amp. So you should, you should, you should hook me up with the. We'll find it a home maybe. Okay. You're starting to sense that this is too much. No, I want to be, I want to be here. I want to do the work very simply. I don't have an ability to fully explain myself. I don't want to claim that I don't love the fact that how much love do we get from these programs? Like I, the generically people are incredibly generous. You know, people have begged me, set up a Patreon account and I haven't been able to do it. I should do it. I've said to everybody, it's a business. It's a business. It's a business, but like they're so used to being defrauded. When somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives, my, my goal was to say, I'm going to keep talking to you about you. You wonder why I started doing ads on my show was because I wanted people to think from the get go, this is a business. This is what I sound like when I'm selling, but you know, like you see I've lost weight. A lot of that is due to athletic greens, athletic greens, you know, um, code, uh, what's the, I don't know what my promo code is for athletic greens, probably athletic greens.com slash portal, but doesn't that portal, but you know, Fitbit who doesn't advertise has also been instrumental as well as a guy named Steven Cates, who, you know, was a fan from the show, found me on the street and just said, I'm a trainer. I want to help train you. And it's got me on a, on a good, uh, good path. So, you know, that's one paid advertiser and two people on I'm calling out just because there are, you know, two, two outfits, Steven Cates and Fitbit that have changed my life. I wanted people to say, you know, you don't have to be afraid of advertising. If I do it in this way, this is powering your show, but the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like, Oh wow. I knew he was a shill. He's a grifter, you know? Okay. I didn't love that. I didn't love the issue. So I didn't set up a Patreon. The security issues for talking and being me are significant. And I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock. I mean, I, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth where I don't have to think about money. I don't think it's, you know, some people want money because they, they, they need it for status. I think I can handle status if I want it doing this, I don't want the status necessarily. And I don't want, I'd want the status, but I don't want the fame that goes with it. I want the money. I don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's about a substance and drink, you know, all of those things. That's part of, I haven't solved these issues. I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the portal work? We're desperate. These are difficult times. We have an election coming up and it's just like, do you think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got really uncomfortable being as well known as I was? And then what is it that I want? Because I want to be better known and less well known at the same time. It doesn't, there's nothing the audience can do. I don't want the audience to be the audience. That doesn't make sense to people. I want it to be a business, but I don't think people need to fear a business of the businesses open about being a business that, and then that's all to the side, what you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta violent period in our online existence, and I believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed at the moment. The leadership of these parties is unsalvageable, unworkable. Everyone hears that from inside the two party system. Oh, I get it. He's trying to subtract votes off of Biden. Oh, I get it. He's trying to scuttle Trump. Oh, I get it. This is a play for his show because he's trying to plug in to discuss there's a bill Hicks routine on marketing. Have you ever seen this brilliant? I recommend it to everyone where he comes out on stage and he says, are there any people in marketing and sales in the audience? Woo. Yeah. It's like, okay, great. Can you do us all a favor and die? And like, everybody laughs. He's like, no, I'm not laughing. I'm seeing being serious. So he's talked about how marketing is horrible. So you're like, where's this act going? Then he gets to the point of it. It's like, oh, I know how you marketing people think bills going after that, uh, resentment dollar. That's good dollar. Let's get that resentment anti marketing dollar. Yeah. It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying. I really hate marketers. Oh, that's good. It's the authenticity dollar. You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought. And I guess that gets to the issue that I don't want to be destroyed in advance of this election. I don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely ridiculous Donald Trump and Joe Biden are as candidates for the president of the United States. Full stop. None of this makes any sense. These moderators of these pseudo debates were in the wrong format with the wrong people. No part of this makes a wit of sense. Can I try to push back several claims? One is I don't believe the systems as they stand now can destroy their equine voice, the voice you're a child. I'm sorry to say that, but, well, let me, well, it's also possible. It's entirely possible that you're the child. Okay. Because a child would say you would call other people a child. Yeah. Get in the first blow reveal the tell because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically. No. Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much more powerful than mainstream media, than people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said, which has tried to reduce you, like the marketing thinking. I just believe there's an army. Maybe there's a better term of people that see you for who you are and a hungry, like I'm not disputing those things. And what I'm saying, I would venture to say as your therapist that you're actually, uh, the battle is all in your mind. All in your mind that you have found these demons in the system, and they're just a tiny minority and it's all in your mind. They cannot actually remove. They're not strong enough to remove the voice of Eric Weinstein to silence the voice. I love this. This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard. Let me tell you, I have relatives who've known me my entire life, where one article in the New York Times, they will believe that over me. My contention is that it has no power except to affect your psychology. What you have to do is the Rogan thing, which is laugh. Just laugh. I am laughing. I know, but more. I'm telling you something. Yes. Okay. The way this works is through ruin. Ruin can come to anyone. There's no one who cannot be ruined. Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by the system. Don't you understand that you have more power than the system? You can ruin the system. Your Twitter account, the podcast. I'm telling you about the Army. I agree that my Twitter account, my pocket. But what we've seen, for example, you saw what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity project. Yes. Okay. What happened on the Twitter side? What happened? What happened? Well, actually, say the word and say the word. It was blocked or removed from Twitter. Suspended. Account suspended. And I have a direct line to Jack. Yeah. Okay. So I'm talking to the CEO who I am crazy enough to still believe in. Good. I do, too. I believe somehow there's a very strange thing going on with Jack Dorsey. I cannot possibly reconcile the actions with the person I've... That is a next level mind in there. I don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level. I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots. Every smart person I know has blind spots. I don't know what he's up against. Blah, blah, blah. There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and the Jack Dorsey that interacted over Articles of Unity can be the same person. He is constrained by that company in some way that doesn't make sense to me. Either that or he's the most duplicitous person on earth and I'm not believing it. I just don't buy it. Okay? Yeah. Something horrible is happening. My claim is I can remove you functionally from the chessboard in a tiny number of moves, no matter who you are, no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your entire life, it doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a force. Yeah. And I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not very good at chess. Like Unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not good enough, not within the system. Like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small. Okay, but fear, uncertainty and doubt is the name of the game, the coin of the realm. Psychology though, it's not real power. It just affects the mind. Okay, I have a reading assignment for you because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this. As part of the great American tobacco settlement, the Tobacco Institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its strategies, all of its skullduggery and put it on the web for all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed people, right? You see tobacco destroys people. You can see, you know, Scientology destroys people. There are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate reality in opposition to them. Let's take them down. Okay. That's what I'm trying to tell you is... Okay, no. So why aren't you doing the podcast to return? Because that's one of the weapons of war. Well, first of all, if you're at war, I don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast, right? But that's your misunderstanding. What did Montgomery say about Rommel? But wasn't his line, I read your book, you beautiful bastard. It's like, why are you using the tactics that you already explained? Okay. So one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic conversation with you and several hundred thousand of our closest friends. I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know what I'm doing. I do not feel passionately enough about defeating Donald Trump to elect Joe Biden, even if that's the way I'm going to ultimately vote, right? I don't believe in the Biden Democratic Party. I don't believe in the Trump Republican Party. So, yes, it's an incredibly consequential election. But to me, it's like the Crips and the Bloods and the Latin Kings fighting over the right to extort a business and the business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting. But don't you think, listen, there's very few people that are as good with the English language as you. Don't you think it's possible to draw a line in between that finds how we find our common humanity that ensures a better 2021 without having to say like Donald Trump is evil or Joe Biden is incompetent or any of that, just somehow draw a beautiful line? I am seeing people in so much pain. This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it, Lex. Maybe they're not good enough. They're not good enough. No, but the hope is... Do you believe in me? Yes. You do? Yes. Listen to me very carefully. My spider sense, my intuition that has allowed me to survive in the space, I've been mouthing off since the 80s, tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense. Doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the other probably, but the variance on that, I'm not even positive that I'm right. These two options are so completely inappropriate to the world of 2020. What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation people trying to sort out a highly technical world being mediated through social media. We need more exclusion. We need more actual elites. The people we've called the elites are not the elite. They need to go. Yeah. We need excellence, competence. We need people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need to close the doors so we can't see what those people are doing. Here's the thing. Imagine that you had a bunch of people who'd all seen action in combat, had all volunteered to be part of the armed services, had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to. So you were convinced that these people had put their lives on the line for their country, not for a payday. Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical backgrounds, men, women, black, white, Muslim, Jew, doesn't matter. I would trust those people and I'd close the door. I don't want to know what they talked about. I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations. I want to know that they're patriotic, that they see something in the world bigger than themselves and their family fortunes. I want to know that they're courageous. I want to know that they've got all of our well being and I'm willing to roll the dice. And if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that. Okay. So I disagree with you there because there's a difference in those and Jocko because you're not speaking to people with credentials. No, I'm talking about self credentialed people. I view Jocko as self credentialed. But the biggest, the powerful thing about Jocko is he's not only self credentialed, but he's been real with people. The magical thing about Jocko isn't his book, isn't his life story is he's been talking on a podcast for a long, there's something real that happens. Okay. So if you took everybody, if you took Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard and you took Jocko Willing and maybe Jesse Ventura, right, you can take, you can take Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Who's, you know, a lone voice. You take all of these people who've like really just risked, like why do we trust? Why is Katherine Hepburn the best that Hollywood ever produced? Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself hard. They gave her four Academy awards and she said, love you, sweeties. I'm going to use them as the doorstop for the bathrooms in my house. See that skill. That's, uh, that's, that's just, that's what you were talking about. Yeah. Be Katherine Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing, but Katherine Hepburn is next level. Right? Well, you, I mean, that's what you're trying to say to me. Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to figure it out, Lex. Okay. I don't have the answer yet. What I do know is that this election is chewing people up and I mean two separate things. One that parties don't have enough integrity that if you comment either for or against, there's a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced. You get referenced to something, right? Like, you know, take this thing about, you know, find people on both sides. That is non resolved after N years, whether the context should be reported or not. We are in some situation in which Democrats and Republicans are primed to fight each other. The way introducing two ants from two different ant colonies always produces a battle. Yeah. Okay. I don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly like robots. And until the election is concluded, like I, do I think this is dire? Yes. Could it be make or break? Absolutely. I'm not saying that. Do I know which way this goes? I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect Joe Biden right now. We've got a situation which can only be cured by voting for Joe Biden. I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by defeating Joe Biden right now. And all of the things that the modern democratic party represents. Yeah. I don't have, you know, it's, it's not the lady and the tiger we're choosing between the tiger and the tiger. It's the Sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger, right? I'm trying to think, well, which tiger can I, do I have a better chance against, um, the key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center and moderation from kleptocracy. Every time we try to say something like we need more moderate solutions, we need more pluralistic solution. People will say, wow, you just want to hand us right back into the swamp, don't you? The swamp people cause the moderates and the swamp people are the same people, right? So then we have these two crazy wings. We can't have crazy right wing people. I don't want any Tiki torch BS. We can't have crazy left wing. Don't attack my courthouse. Really don't attack my courthouse and we can't have moderates. It's like, okay, how do we install our children and, and rape pillage and get these speaking fees when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things when we're supposed to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists, you know, immediately when we leave office, all of this stuff, we need an entirely different system. And I can't talk about that at the moment. When I talk, people say, oh wow, so you're going to sit this one out cause you're a pussy because you're a coward. Great to know Eric. We thought better of you by click. I don't know what to do. But are you thinking of what to do? Yeah. Oh, you better believe it. Look, Brett, Brett had this idea of unity 2020 and I told him it was a wrong idea. I didn't tell him that unity 2024 was a wrong idea. I didn't tell him that unity 2028 is a wrong idea. And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong, cause he's now shuttered the thing, right? I would say that the case to be made that he was correct was, is that by doing this in 2020, we found out what we were up against. It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat. Great to know. It's good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of vice of presidential candidates in a primary that are not approved of by the party, right? Like they've got this thing figured out so we don't have any way in. And now unity 2024 makes sense because unity 2020 was tried. Okay. I don't know that we get to 2024 under all circumstances and some we do and some we don't. There's, there's a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're accounting for, but you, you probably are. But let me just make an argument is Jack Dorsey very likely listens to your podcasts and wait, this is the power of these words. Something deep went wrong, but we can change it with the power of words. Something went wrong at Twitter. They have so much division on their platform. That's what I'm trying to say. They've gotten, it's not wrong. They just don't know they're understaffed. No, they have an insoluble problem. Difficult to solve. They have an insoluble problem. This is where you and I disagree because, well, all right, I'd like to create a competitor. So then, you know, give it to me, create the competitor, show me that you actually have understood this because my guess is, is that most of the things that you'll think about, I mean, I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about, which I know would make Twitter much better. However, I, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet and you subtract off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge, the problem is us. It's not the platforms. We're thinking about a technological solution and I'm saying the problem is, is that we are ultimately the product. And I just disagree with that and there's a lot of, that's probably could save that for tomorrow. I look forward to spending summers in your villa when you, when you debut this product and I would love to angel invest in it. By the way, in terms of money, I'll never have a villa. Yeah. No, I will always give away everything I own. No, sorry. Invest into like things like you mentioned, awesome things. Invest fine, but a little bit of a vuncular advice. Don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security. Money is freedom. That's what it is. It's a big hunking pile of freedom. Okay. You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you if you don't, you know, so you can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money. But generally speaking, Lex money is freedom and your voice is important. At least retain the amount of money security you need to follow Joe's advice. What is the point of f you money if you don't say f you, the number of people who have f you money who don't say f you indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison. They built a prison with the freedom they had and they walked into it, locked the door. I think it's too difficult not to create it. The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology and you create prisons. Our human mind just creates those prisons that f you money is enough for basic shelter and basic food. That's, that's the optimal if you don't have kids yet. This is a, okay, this is the problem. This is why I'm sitting. So this is me, single Lex speaking, but future Lex, future Lex. I'm talking to future Lex, single, single present Lex, please don't listen. Don't be an ass. You're going to need some money and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast. I'm saying I want to save you from yourself. You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do. Don't F it up. Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose? Sure. You've talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline, just everything you've said about Roger Penrose for people who don't know. He just recently, a few days ago, won the 2020 shared the 2020 Nobel prize for physics, but it's clear to me that he had like a deep personal impact on you, a connection with you in terms of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world. This is the Eddie Van Halen conversation. This was clearly somebody who's profound in your worldview. Can you talk about Roger? Can you talk about what it means that he won this highest of prizes just in general? Let's celebrate the man. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, there are two other people who won this prize. I'm sorry. I just didn't happen to know who they were before they won. Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes that is so important. So I would put Roger in the class of Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Yang, um, put Whitten in there. I mean, Whitten is a special case, but Whitten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penrose story, right? Because Whitten is the first physicist to win a mathematical Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. Penrose is in some sense, a mathematician who's now won the Nobel prize. So it's a perfect sort of a couplet. Roger's class means everything to me. That's the highest achievement of the human mind. I would probably throw Bach in with Feynman and Dirac and company, right? I think that he was so inventive. It was very frustrating to watch this career. It was a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career. Feynman was so good and had he been born slightly different and a slightly different time, I believe his claim on physics would be far greater. I feel like Penrose in some sense came up a very difficult path because you see Einstein effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning. As a result, the children of Einstein are impoverished because there wasn't as much to pick off of the trees and sell at the market. Whereas Bohr and Planck didn't do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory. So there's lots to do in quantum theory. I think that Roger affected me personally by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman Gluck at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the first picture I'd ever seen of the Hopf vibration sketched and that weirdly I brought that to the Rogan program in order to sort of convey the wonder. It was recapitulating my own journey. I think I probably saw that at like age 16 or something and it just flipped my mind. Roger is incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric, he's incredibly sui generis, he just does his own thing. He's got lots of bets. None of them had really come through the way you would hope and I think they stretched the rules to be blunt about it. To give him the prize. Yeah, I do. You said this thing on Twitter which is beautiful that every once in a while comes a human being that gives value to the prize versus the prize giving value to the human. Two different kinds of prizes. The reason that we care about the Nobel Prize isn't because of Alfred Nobel. It's because it came along at the right time to reward Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, Feynman. Most of the people who should have won, won. Most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow. The prize is used to rewrite history, that's the problem. You should have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand it does focus the world on what really matters and on the other hand it distorts what really matters and both of those functions take place simultaneously. In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly so it wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion. We better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize is fully funded with prestige going forward. That's sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened. So Roger's getting on in years and the person should be alive so I think they bent the rules and I think they couldn't have bent it for a better person and I hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness but out of strength in the future. It would be great to get Madame Wu and Emmy Nerder a posthumous prize along with Doug Prasher, George Sudarshan and George Zweig as well as Ernst Stuckelberg Nobel Prizes. There have been some terrible omissions, the first two being females who revolutionized our view of the world and I take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive. If it's not following the work and I feel very clear that in a few cases we know there was a real problem with the Nobel committee because we have stunning accomplishments and try to get through a day as a physicist with that Nerder's theorem and try to imagine the universe without Madame Wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric. I mean these are terrible omissions and they're a huge blot on science for not being more inclusive when it matters. Yeah so just like you said the Nobel Prize is plagued by omissions as much as... And distortions and dilutions. For example, Dirac and Schrodinger were I believe given the prize in the same year. There's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other. The same thing with you know Dyson was an omission, Tominaga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both sides of the Pacific after the war. But I don't think we needed to dilute Weinberg or Feynman or Schwinger. It makes me somewhat sick. All of these people are such important giants and it has to do with the field I think not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget cuts and worldly pressures. So I think it's really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars. We acknowledge them, we don't dilute them and that we bend the rules to make sure that the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose's, Albert Einstein's and Paul Dirac's of the world. Can we talk a little bit about evil? Sure. I haven't actually talked to you about this topic and it's been sitting on my mind mostly because everybody at MIT is quiet about it, which is Jeffrey Epstein. I didn't get a chance to experience what MIT was like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein was part of this, but I'd love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in a place that I love. Whether you think, maybe let me ask the question this way. Was it the man evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong a word? Because what I see is the presence of this particular human being in the eyes of many destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weakened the ability, like weakened the institution of MIT by making everybody quiet, like almost making them unable to say anything interesting or difficult. And what is that and what am I supposed to? We don't know. Why is everyone quiet about Jeff? We don't know. Obviously I want to scream about it too, right? And I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein. Look, something horrible happened. I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened. And you know, at the one thing that, okay, let's just do this. The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials. In general, you can talk about hypergamy and power differentials are Russell conjugates of the same concept, just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically provable to be attractive in females to males. Male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power and success and all these sorts of things. The relationship between consenting adults is quite frankly not something I want to sort out the relationship between the sexuality of adults and minors. And particularly, you know, there's the 17, 18 issue that's very different than 12, 13. We're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what it appears that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in at some level. I believe this story is super complicated in part because I think one thing Jeffrey Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement, and support to scientists. Another thing he was doing, I believe, was giving tax advice to very rich people. I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females. Another thing he was doing, I think, was doing stuff with children that will curl your toes. So there's an entire spectrum of different stuff. And at the moment, nobody can pull apart or deconflate anything because the woke thing comes over it and says, I think it's disgusting that a 43 year old billionaire would be partying with a 23 year old. I don't want to adjudicate that. I'm worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we're not talking about. I don't think MIT was deep into pedophilia. My guess is that that did not happen. I don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff. It's my guess. My guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct. It may have been our government, it may have been a joint government project, maybe somebody else's government. I don't know. I believe that in part, we don't really understand Robert Maxwell. Sorry, who's Robert Maxwell? Ghislaine Maxwell's father was very active in scientific publishing. I don't know where peer review came from. I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and Robert Maxwell. I would love to run down the missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune of Jeffrey Epstein because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund. I don't think he was a money advisor the way people claimed. There's two things I want to talk about. One is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to seems to be removing everyone's ability, no, everyone's willingness to talk about like, what the hell is this person and how is he allowed? Most importantly, how do we prevent it in the future? From the individual perspective, the question for me is the same question I ask about 1930s Nazi Germany. I've been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently. If I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take? When I think about MIT with Jeffrey Epstein, what is the heroic action to take? We're not talking about virtue signaling action. You wouldn't know what to do. I would not know what you're up against, Lex. You're not hearing me. The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein? Well, that question might be the heroic action to take. That's all I'm trying to say. I'm just trying to get my first question. You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein. What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT. Well, is there a map of the silence in Washington state around Jeffrey Epstein, the Bay Area, New York City? The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything. The number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen. You're exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us? Because what it's telling me is not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness. Not some kind of conspiracy? It's not some kind of conspiracy, but... You've got to be kidding. You're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy? I personally, I just think it's people who I thought were my heroes just being weak. No. Be of good cheer, sir. A cheer? Be of good cheer. Be of good cheer. Yeah. You think that there's a conspiracy? I think there is a conspiracy. That'd be a very impressive one. That's the scale of it. I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent phenomena. Really? I find this so fascinating. Yeah. Because I always see you as like a logic and love drive your soul. You're very logical. You're relentless. You've got a lot of love in your heart. I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from? Dubai or Abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest? You ever seen this thing? No. What happened? It's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago, of Mahmoud Al Mabou, something like that, in Dubai where I believe 26 separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging coming in from all over the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players or business people or vacationers. All of these teams have different functions and they murder this guy in his hotel room. The Dubai, I guess, chief of police or security officer was so angered that he put together this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did. We caught you on closed circuit TV. We don't know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports, but yeah, 26 people converged to kill one. No, I don't believe you. I don't believe after COINTELPRO and Operation Paperclip and Operation Mockingbird. I don't know whether I should even bring up Rex 84. To not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy. So you have a sense that evil can be as competent or more competent. First of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people don't try to figure out evil. When evil operates at scale, from first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated. The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated, if you are an evil institutional player who needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford to say the word conspiracy. You'll notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy. We have provable conspiracies. We have admitted to conspiracies. You have been invited to conspiracy. There is no shortage. Conspiracies are everywhere. Some of them are mundane. Some of them are like price fixing cartels, or trade groups, or generally speaking, conspiracies. So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are in a memetic complex where you can be taken off the chessboard by saying, conspiracy theorists, get done. It's like a one line proof. We don't have to listen to Lex. He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show. That is partially distorting our conversation. If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating this. But it's a fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories and the world without conspiracy theories to the shallow glance looks the same. Well, my point. There is responsible conspiracy theorize where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X can be anything, right? It's like if I say to you, um, I can say the statement that average weight is not the same between widely separated populations. You'd say, yeah, I'd say average height is not the same between widely separated populations. You'd say, yeah. Then I say, in fact, no continuous variable that has that shows variation should be expected to be identical between widely separate. Of course they're like IQ, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, right? So we have a violent reaction to specific topics. So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind. That's really important to state. Yeah, that's, it's very interesting that, and as a prerequisite, as you're saying, that would be the first step. If you wanted to pull off a conspiracy in a competent way, that's, you would have to first convince the world. I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time, I highly recommend it 1971 well, the film is entitled 1971 and it's about the citizens committee to investigate the FBI, which was a run by a student of Murray Gelman, a physicist and broke into FBI offices in Pennsylvania to steal files, which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered a huge conspiracy. It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government, a double conspiracy story, which launched multiple conspiracies. I think that the problem with modern Americans is that they are so timid that they don't even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven. So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion, represented somebody's construction. I don't think that scary to think about. Yeah. Well, what part of the story isn't scary? I in part did something which I imagine may get me destroyed because I was more worried about being destroyed by somebody else I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein, right? So I'm just trying to like get, let it be known that I don't know anything more than I've already said. Now, your friends at MIT, their problem is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person capable of continuing US scientific tradition. You see, the US scientific tradition is a little bit like the Russian. It's combative, okay? And we're a free society and we act like a free society. We're a rich society and we research like we're a rich society. That is historically, and then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards and the idea that we have to, we're paying too much and these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah, blah, blah, blah. We need more transparency, more oversight. Everything went to hell and the national culture of US science was lost. The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost. And then Jeff Epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders, maybe Fred Kavli, maybe Yuri Milner, maybe who else would be in this category? Peter Thiel to an extent, Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has different grant structures than the NIH, gave people a modicum of risk taking ability. Okay, well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science. And suddenly a charismatic billionaire says, hey, I can make that work for you. Here's $100,000, go research something crazy. Well, that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government under the terms of the endless frontier compact between the federal government and the universities and the federal government and the taxpayers Welch. Okay. So that's one place to lay the blame for Jeff Epstein as at the failure of the federal government to honor its commitment. Yeah. Right. So the universities became psychopathic. It's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral, but the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral. So it was time to, uh, to eye each other as a source of protein, as I like to say. And in that process, Jeffrey Epstein said, Hey, come to my world. We can do it like we used to do. So in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at MIT have that kind of religious commitment to science that they're willing to go down with ship science. The Galileo Galilei thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have to say, look, this isn't about me and you, there isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet. This is one of the great things about science, you know, potentially it's worth dying for yeah. I'm glad you said it. Science is one of the things that is best that's worth dying for. I mean, I'm not eager to martyr myself, but I've certainly risked my health, my fortune, you know, I've, I've destroyed myself economically over science and, um, and my, my, my, my need to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying our system along with everyone else. Let me, um, bring in grandmaster into this. Oogway, master Oogway. I think he's a grandmaster. That would make him a chess playing turtle. Well, I've read some wikipedia and she was a master. There's apparently only one grandmaster and that's anyway, is the phrase grandmaster ever uttered in the script? I don't think so. I don't think so. But there's a story. Oh, there's, there's off off script cannon. I'm going to call Glenn burger right now and find out if any of this is true. All right. You're not supposed to call up my journalistic integrity, um, but master Oogway, master Oogway he says a couple of things I'd like to bring up with you. So one as part of a longer quote recommends, uh, that you should, uh, find a battle worth fighting. We've talked about several battles just now. What is the battle worth fighting for, for Eric Weinstein in the next few months, in the next year? There's only one, well, it's, it's the Moses, it's the Moses thing. It's time to go. It's time to leave. This place is over to get off the planet. I, yeah, I, I, I freak people out when I say that, but like, look at your world. You just got introduced to the problem of a virus. Wait, wait till it's fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet with no uncorrelated experiments happening anywhere else. You know? So do you see the foray, your work in physics and maybe like the echoes of it in a ship Elon? Everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should work on the plan that he, she thinks best, right? So Elon wants to do rockets. People misinterpret me. I meta Eric says, I don't think that's a smart plan. Regular Eric says all people who have hope should do that thing. Yeah. At least it's Mars, man, at least it's the moon and Mars and maybe Titan and whatever. And I don't think it'll work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly, but that's exactly the kind of fight worth fighting. But it's, it's the kind of fits for the same reason that I went on Brett's unity, 2020 thing when I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people are, you know, are making fun of it. It's like, we got to do things that make, that make us feel dumb and silly and childish that it possibly have a hope of working. Okay. So everybody should do something. My version of this, I am the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do if I thought that Daniel Schmack did burgers wisdom project was a better hope. I do that. It's more down to earth in a certain way. I just think that it's more probable. Look, we got from a powered flight with the Wright brothers and wind tunnels to sending back images from the surface of Titan via Huygens Cassini in less than a century. Okay. So what we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive of. It may be that it buys us nothing and at least we'll, we will know why we died on this planet as a small aside. I think this is not the right time to take the full journey, but I feel like you'll guide me like master way did. And I'm the Kung Fu Panda. They only have one conversation. We're on our, like, we didn't, we didn't, well, we're, we're, we're Jews and they weren't. So we talked too much, but the guide doesn't have to be with words. You don't think Poe was Jewish? It's debatable. We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia. Is there, um, that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source code, the source code of our universe. Can you comment on where, since we last spoke, where your thinking has been, has roamed around geometric unity around that work in physics in this fight? I'm trying to figure out when to release it and how, I mean, I've released the video and the video, quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction. I think one of the things that I've learned from the video, cause the video is coming up on half a million views on YouTube alone to say nothing of the, um, the audio, but yeah, it produced a very strange reaction. One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk in this geometric language. I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles, differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera. And I, I saw a lot of the comments would say things like, I have a PhD in theoretical physics and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts. And I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge, Massachusetts for almost 20 years. So what's the solution to that? Well, I mean, I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to. My problem is my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge, the same people have these perverse incentives on them where they've invested in these programs that didn't work. So they're extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with. The fact that I'm not a physicist, um, has its own set of issues, which is that effectively it's like the hermit kingdom. They don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want somebody, you know, rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics. So I'm, I'm always very clear. I'm not a physicist. That said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program. I don't remember whether he said this to you or Brian Keating, but he said something like everybody got discouraged. It was too hard. Can't do that. Guys. We cannot do that. There's something about the renormalization revolution that innervated the physics community because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how, you know, coupling constants run and what kind of a UV fixed points exist, blah, blah, blah. Somehow that discouraged people from guessing from believing everything became an effective theory. The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe, just the beauty of an energy level. So I think that renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened in science. And also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic. Well, the story I'm telling myself is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker. But on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left. And so are you also thinking about ways of, uh, you know, you know, the, the podcast medium is revolutionary for public for discourse for what, I mean, I don't even know the right words for it. Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re energizing the physics community? So basically for communicating, look, I have a fantasy, okay? My fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem. And it goes back to this thing that I read about in, in Fineman's, um, books about Tartaglia. They asked him this question, like, what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math? And he says, Tartaglia is solution of the cubic. It's just like the weirdest answer. So you're like, okay, I'll bite. Why is it Tartaglia solution of the cubic? And he said, because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound that the ancients had failed to do. I was like, Oh, I got it. It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible again. It's a new orchard, new orchard, new farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can pick. And once you have one person do that, very often you get many, like one of the things that we were talking about with Eddie Van Halen. The reason that he created a revolution and somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that you could follow Eddie Van Halen. You couldn't pioneer it. And maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast and as inventively, but you could follow once you understand that there is a tapping principle. It was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar. My belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come because everything that around us is screwed up on that. Let me with one last question, bring back master Oogway, the probably the most famous quote of his, right, with yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present. It's very beautiful. Although I would have gone with quit, don't quit, noodles, don't noodles. I feel like people need to know way too much context for that to make sense. It's your audience. To hell with context. Yep. They'll figure it out. Let me ask, what are you grateful for today? What is your present? We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what brings you joy to your heart that I can't believe I'm lucky enough to have this? You know, Nyla and Zev, my wife, Pia, the fact that we've got our health, all the little things, saying grace after meals. You're coming over for Friday night Shabbat dinner, so we'll bench together and say grace. It's important to just, like this bottle of water in front of me, I made a point of just thinking about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front of me because somebody cared. That small thing made a difference to me. I still have strength for the fight so far. I think that's something I'm grateful for. I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense. I have the most interesting set of friends. I really do. I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes would be all over my ass. I just can't believe who I can talk to, you know, at the drop of a hat. And I'm really grateful. I think this is the end of something profound, and it's the beginning of whatever is next. And whatever is next could be terminal. Whatever is next could be amazing. Whatever is next could be a return to the horrors of the early 20th century that doesn't manage to go totally catastrophic, but takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process. I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rearview mirror. Maybe it took place in a bubble, and maybe it was unsustainable. But it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask. It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world, even if it was from a cot in a hostel in some country. To fall in love. Absolutely. It was a good life. Find the last Indian Jewish girl left. Who knew? You're a lucky guy. Well, let me just say… Actually, there's something I wanted to just say before you get to that. I forgot to say something. Falling in love with an intellectual collaborator is a special thing that not everybody gets a chance to do. I think when I met Pia, I fell deeply in love with her, all her normal characteristics. Pia and I had an antagonistic relationship around geometry and economics. And then weirdly, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film they hate each other, the two fields were fighting with each other, cats and dogs, and finally the sexual tension clearly was so thick you could cut it with a knife. And we came up with geometric marginalism, which is this other theory, not geometric unity, which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and had fallen in love with, and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play and to dance. It's sort of the intellectual version of the tango, one of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience. So that was a chance to see something totally unexpected, haven't really had it since because she doesn't want to revisit the material, but something I'm super grateful for that's very particular and unique. But to flip the tables on you, for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people, I can speak, me and them are really grateful, one, that you exist, and two, sorry, for your podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues to reverberate, I think, at least in the 2021s and beyond, even if it takes a brief pause. We're pausing at the moment. We've recorded some for future episodes and I'm recording for you. I really appreciate that. But earnestness trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun of it. One of the things I like best about you is that you and I are both fairly earnest. We may joke and jab, but honestly, there's a project here and a world to win, as they say. The thing that I want my and your listeners to know is that I'm not stepping away from the podcast because I don't appreciate that people really want more. This is hugely financially costly to me. I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do, and destroying myself right in front of an election, I think Lex is incorrect. I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue is a big danger given how angry I am at the system. I don't want to be removed from the chess board because if nobody's going to talk about Jeff Epstein, there need to be people. If nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs, I want to make sure that I'm there. Do I think that this is potentially an existential election? Yes. Am I positive that I know that my way to bet is the right way out? No, I'm not. I don't know, people. I just don't know. Where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing up smart people that I decided it's really not about cowardice because it's hard for me to restrain myself. I have so many reactions every day. This is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I'm around. I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett's Articles of Unity was going to happen to Brett. It was going to happen to the YouTube channels. I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket. So if something goes wrong over there, that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web, which is at some level a loose confederation. It can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work. It can dissolve so that there really isn't anything. The thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately, when the hit pieces come, they don't come for what it is that they're angry at you about. They come for where they can get you. It's very important that right in front of an election, the desire of the old system to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the new America. We have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions keeping individuals with podcasts and the ability to reach millions through Substack out of their domain. I don't surrender this domain to them. They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us, and I believe that they could remove you or me in an instant. By the end of today, if they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard. I know that's not your perspective. My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing set of ideas and to let and help other podcasters start. My hope is that that works, but long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone, and I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that. First of all, beautifully put. Second of all, a way to end the conversation and the disagreement, which is how you hook them for the next conversation to be continued. And Lex says … Eric, it's a huge honor. Thank you once again. Lex, really appreciate it every time we get together. Thanks, buddy. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein, and thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure and readability. Sunbasket, a meal delivery service I use to add healthy variety to my culinary life. SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but someone should. It helps you make good decisions. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast, go on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in the song titled, Hallelujah. Well, maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you. And it's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Eric Weinstein: On the Nature of Good and Evil, Genius and Madness | Lex Fridman Podcast #134

The following is a conversation with Charles Isbell, Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, a researcher and educator in the field of artificial intelligence, and someone who deeply thinks about what exactly is the field of computing and how do we teach it. He also has a fascinatingly varied set of interests including music, books, movies, sports, and history that make him especially fun to talk with. When I first saw him speak, his charisma immediately took over the room, and I had a stupid excited smile on my face, and I knew I had to eventually talk to him on this podcast. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is Neuro, the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. Second is Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy. Third is Masterclass, online courses that I watch from some of the most amazing humans in history. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I'm trying to make it so that the conversations with Charles, Eric Weinstein, and Dan Carlin will be published before Americans vote for president on November 3rd. There's nothing explicitly political in these conversations, but they do touch on something in human nature that I hope can bring context to our difficult time, and maybe, for a moment, allow us to empathize with people we disagree with. With Eric, we talk about the nature of evil. With Charles, besides AI and music, we talk a bit about race in America, and how we can bring more love and empathy to our online communication. And with Dan Carlin, well, we talk about Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and all the complicated parts of human history in between, with a hopeful eye toward a brighter future for our humble, little civilization here on Earth. The conversation with Dan will hopefully be posted tomorrow, on Monday, November 2nd. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Charles Isbell. You've mentioned that you love movies and TV shows. Let's ask an easy question, but you have to be definitively, objectively, conclusive. What's your top three movies of all time? So, you're asking me to be definitive and to be conclusive. That's a little hard. I'm going to tell you why. It's very simple. It's because movies is too broad of a category. I got to pick subgenres, but I will tell you that of those genres, I'll pick one or two from each of the genres, and I'll get us to three, so I'm going to cheat. So, my favorite comedy of all times, which is probably my favorite movie of all time, is His Girl Friday, which is probably a movie that you've not ever heard of, but it's based on a play called The Front Page from, I don't know, early 1900s. And the movie is a fantastic film. What's the story? What's the independent film? No, no, no. What are we talking about? This is one of the movies that would have been very popular. It's a screwball comedy. You ever see Moonlighting, the TV show? You know what I'm talking about? So, you've seen these shows where there's a man and a woman, and they clearly are in love with one another, and they're constantly fighting and always talking over each other. Banter, banter, banter, banter, banter. This was the movie that started all that, as far as I'm concerned. It's very much of its time. So, it's, I don't know, must have come out sometime between 1934 and 1939. I'm not sure exactly when the movie itself came out. It's black and white. It's just a fantastic film, and it's hilarious. So, it's mostly conversation? Not entirely, but mostly, mostly. Just a lot of back and forth. There's a story there. Someone's on death row, and they're newspaper men, including her. They're all newspaper men. They were divorced. The editor, the publisher, I guess, and the reporter, they were divorced. But, you know, they clearly, he's thinking, trying to get back together, and there's this whole other thing that's going on. But none of that matters. The plot doesn't matter. Yeah, it's just a little play in conversation. It's fantastic. And I just love everything about the conversation, because at the end of the day, sort of narrative and conversation are the sort of things that drive me. And so, I really like that movie for that reason. Similarly, I'm now going to cheat, and I'm going to give you two movies as one. And they're Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and John Wick. Both relatively modern. John Wick, of course. One, two, or three? One. It gets increasingly, I love them all for different reasons, and increasingly more ridiculous. Kind of like Loving Alien and Aliens, despite the fact they're two completely different movies. But the reason I put Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and John Wick together is because I actually think they're the same movie, or what I like about them, the same movie. Which is both of them create a world that you're coming in the middle of, and they don't explain it to you. But the story is done so well that you pick it up. So, anyone who's seen John Wick, you know, you have these little coins, and they're headed out, and there are these rules, and apparently every single person in New York City is an assassin. There's like two people who come through who aren't, but otherwise they are. But there's this complicated world, and everyone knows each other. They don't sit down and explain it to you, but you figure it out. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a lot like that. You get the feeling that this is chapter nine of a 10 part story, and you've missed the first eight chapters, and they're not going to explain it to you, but there's this sort of rich world behind you. You get pulled in anyway, like immediately. You get pulled in anyway. So, it's just excellent storytelling in both cases, and very, very different. And also you like the outfit, I assume? The John Wick outfit? Oh yeah, of course. Well, of course. Yes. I think John Wick outfit is perfect. And so that's number two, and then… But sorry to pause on that. Martial arts? You have a long list of hobbies. Like it scrolls off the page, but I didn't see martial arts as one of them. I do not do martial arts, but I certainly watch martial arts. Oh, I appreciate it very much. Oh, we could talk about every Jackie Chan movie ever made, and I would be on board with that. The Shower, too? Like that kind of comedy of a cop? Yes, yes. By the way, my favorite Jackie Chan movie would be Drunken Master 2, known in the States usually as Legend of the Drunken Master. Actually, Drunken Master, the first one, is the first kung fu movie I ever saw, but I did not know that. First Jackie Chan movie? No, first one ever that I saw and remember, but I had no idea that that's what it was, and I didn't know that was Jackie Chan. That was like his first major movie. Yeah. I was a kid. It was done in the 70s. I only later rediscovered that that was actually. And he creates his own martial art by drinking. Was he actually drinking or was he played drinking? You mean as an actor or as a character? No. I'm sure as an actor. He was in the 70s or whatever. He was definitely drinking, and in the end, he drinks industrial grade alcohol. Ah, yeah. Yeah, and has one of the most fantastic fights ever in that subgenre. Anyway, that's my favorite one of his movies, but I'll tell you the last movie. It's actually a movie called Nothing But a Man, which is the 1960s, starred Ivan Dixon, who you'll know from Hogan's Heroes, and Abby Lincoln. It's just a really small little drama. It's a beautiful story. But my favorite scenes, I'm cheating, one of my favorite movies just for the ending is The Godfather. I think the last scene of that is just fantastic. It's the whole movie all summarized in just eight, nine seconds. Godfather Part One? Part One. How does it end? I don't think you need to worry about spoilers if you haven't seen The Godfather. Spoiler alert. It ends with the wife coming to Michael, and he says, just this once, I'll let you ask me my business. And she asks him if he did this terrible thing, and he looks her in the eye and he lies, and he says, no. And she says, thank you. And she walks out the door, and you see her going out of the door, and all these people are coming in, and they're kissing Michael's hands, and Godfather. And then the camera switches perspective. So instead of looking at him, you're looking at her, and the door closes in her face, and that's the end of the movie. And that's the whole movie right there. Do you see parallels between that and your position as Dean at Georgia Tech Chrome? Just kidding. Trick question. Sometimes, certainly. The door gets closed on me every once in a while. Okay. That was a rhetorical question. You've also mentioned that you, I think, enjoy all kinds of experiments, including on yourself. But I saw a video where you said you did an experiment where you tracked all kinds of information about yourself and a few others sort of wiring up your home. And this little idea that you mentioned in that video, which is kind of interesting, that you thought that two days worth of data is enough to capture majority of the behavior of the human being. First, can you describe what the heck you did to collect all the data? Because it's fascinating, just like little details of how you collect that data and also what your intuition behind the two days is. So first off, it has to be the right two days. But I was thinking of a very specific experiment. There's actually a suite of them that I've been a part of, and other people have done this, of course. I just sort of dabbled in that part of the world. But to be very clear, the specific thing that I was talking about had to do with recording all the IR going on in my infrared going on in my house. So this is a long time ago. So this is everything's being curled by pressing buttons on remote controls, as opposed to speaking to Alexa or Siri or someone like that. And I was just trying to figure out if you could get enough data on people to figure out what they were going to do with their TVs or their lights. My house was completely wired up at the time. But you know, what I'm about to look at a movie, I'm about to turn on the TV or whatever and just see what I could predict from it. It was kind of surprising. It shouldn't have been. But that's all very easy to do, by the way, just capturing all the little stuff. I mean, it's a bunch of computers systems. It's really easy to capture today if you know what you're looking for. At Georgia Tech, long before I got there, we had this thing called the Aware Home, where everything was wired up and you captured everything that was going on. Nothing even difficult, not with video or anything like that, just the way that the system was just capturing everything. So it turns out that, and I did this with myself and then I had students and they worked with many other people. And it turns out at the end of the day, people do the same things over and over and over again. So it has to be the right two days, like a weekend. But it turns out not only can you predict what someone's going to do next at the level of what button they're going to press next on a remote control, but you can do it with something really, really simple. You don't even need a hidden mark off model. It's like a mark, just simply, I press this, this is my prediction of the next thing. It turns out you can get 93% accuracy just by doing something very simple and stupid and just counting statistics. But what was actually more interesting is that you could use that information. This comes up again and again in my work. If you try to represent people or objects by the things they do, the things you can measure about them that have to do with action in the world. So distribution over actions, and you try to represent them by the distribution of actions that are done on them, then you do a pretty good job of sort of understanding how people are and they cluster remarkably well, in fact, irritatingly so. And so by clustering people this way, you can maybe, you know, I got the 93% accuracy of what's the next button you're going to press, but I can get 99% accuracy or somewhere there's about on the collections of things you might press. And it turns out the things that you might press are all related to number to each other and exactly what you would expect. So for example, all the key, all the numbers on a keypad, it turns out all have the same behavior with respect to you as a human being. And so you would naturally cluster them together and you discover that numbers are all related to one another in some way and all these other things. And then, and here's the part that I think is important. I mean, you can see this in all kinds of things. Every individual is different, but any given individual is remarkably predictable because you keep doing the same things over and over again. And the two things that I've learned in the long time that I've been thinking about this is people are easily predictable and people hate when you tell them that they're easily predictable, but they are. And there you go. Yeah. What about, let me play devil's advocate and philosophically speaking, is it possible to say that what defines humans is the outlier. So even though many, some large percentage of our behaviors, whatever the signal we measure is the same and it would cluster nicely, but maybe it's the special moments of when we break out of the routine is the definitive thing that we're breaking out of the routine is the definitive things. And the way we break out of that routine for each one of us might be different. It's possible. I would say that I would say it a little differently. I think I would make two things. One is a, I'm going to disagree with the premise, I think, but that's fine. I think the way I would put it is there are people who are very different from lots of other people, but they're not 0%, they're closer to 10%, right? So in fact, even if you do this kind of clustering of people, that'll turn out to be the small number they all behave like each other, even if they individually behave very differently from everyone else. So I think that's kind of important. But what you're really asking, I think, and I think this is really a question is, what do you do when you're faced with the situation you've never seen before? What do you do when you're faced with an extraordinary situation maybe you've seen others do and you're actually forced to do something and you react to that very differently. And that is the thing that makes you human. I would agree with that, at least at a philosophical level, that it's the times when you are faced with something difficult, a decision that you have to make where the answer isn't easy, even if you know what the right answer is, that's sort of what defines you as the individual. And I think what defines people broadly, it's the hard problem. It's not the easy problem. It's the thing that's going to hurt you. It's not even that it's difficult. It's just that you know that the outcome is going to be highly suboptimal for you. And I do think that that's a reasonable place to start for the question of what makes us human. So before we talk about sort of explore the different ideas underlying interactive artificial intelligence, which we are working on, let me just go along this thread to skip to kind of our world of social media, which is something that at least on the artificial intelligence side you think about. There's a popular narrative, I don't know if it's true, but that we have these silos in social media and we have these clusterings, as you're kind of mentioning. And the idea is that, you know, along that narrative is that, you know, we want to, we want to break each other out of those silos so we can be empathetic to other people, to if you're a Democrat, you'd be empathetic to the Republican. If you're Republican, you're empathetic Democrat. Those are just two silly bins that we seem to be very excited about, but there's other binnings that we can think about. Is there, from an artificial intelligence perspective, because you're just saying we cluster along the data, but then interactive artificial intelligence is referring to throwing agents into that mix, AI systems in that mix, helping us interacting with us humans and maybe getting us out of that mix, maybe getting us out of those silos. Is that something that you think is possible? Do you see a hopeful possibility for artificial intelligence systems in these large networks of people to get us outside of our habits in at least the idea space to where we can sort of be empathetic to other people's lived experiences, other people's points of view, you know, all that kind of stuff? Yes, and I actually don't think it's that hard. Well, it's not hard in this sense. So imagine that you can, let's just, let's make life simple for a minute. Let's assume that you can do a kind of partial ordering over ideas or clusterings of behavior. It doesn't even matter what I mean here, so long as there's some way that this is a cluster, this is a cluster, there's some edge between them, right? And this is kind of, they don't quite touch even, or maybe they come very close. If you can imagine that conceptually, then the way you get from here to here is not by going from here to here. The way you get from here to here is you find the edge and you move slowly together, right? And I think that machines are actually very good at that sort of thing once we can kind of define the problem, either in terms of behavior or ideas or words or whatever. So it's easy in the sense that if you already have the network and you know the relationships, you know, the edges and sort of the strengths on them and you kind of have some semantic meaning for them, the machine doesn't have to, you do as the designer, then yeah, I think you can kind of move people along and sort of expand them. But it's harder than that. And the reason it's harder than that, or sort of coming up with the network structure itself is hard, is because I'm gonna tell you a story that someone else told me and I don't, I may get some of the details a little bit wrong, but it's roughly, it roughly goes like this. You take two sets of people from the same backgrounds and you want them to solve a problem. So you separate them up, which we do all the time, right? Oh, you know, we're gonna break out in the, we're gonna break out groups. You're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this. You're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this. And then you have them sort of in this big room, but far apart from one another, and you have them sort of interact with one another. When they come back to talk about what they learn, you want to merge what they've done together. It can be extremely hard because they don't, they basically don't speak the same language anymore. Like when you create these problems and you dive into them, you create your own language. So the example this one person gave me, which I found kind of interesting because we were in the middle of that at the time, was they're sitting over there and they're talking about these rooms that you can see, but you're seeing them from different vantage points, depending on what side of the room you're on. They can see a clock very easily. And so they start referring to the room as the one with the clock. This group over here, looking at the same room, they can see the clock, but it's, you know, not in their line of sight or whatever. So they end up referring to it by some other way. When they get back together and they're talking about things, they're referring to the same room and they don't even realize they're referring to the same room. And in fact, this group doesn't even see that there's a clock there and this group doesn't see whatever's the clock on the wall is the thing that stuck with me. So if you create these different silos, the problem isn't that the ideologies disagree. It's that you're using the same words and they mean radically different things. The hard part is just getting them to agree on the, well, maybe we'd say the axioms in our world, right? But you know, just get them to agree on some basic definitions because right now they talk, they're talking past each other, just completely talking past each other. That's the hard part, getting them to meet, getting them to interact. That may not be that difficult. Getting them to see where their language is leading them to lead past one another. That's, that's the hard part. It's a really interesting question to me. It could be on the layer of language, but it feels like there's multiple layers to this. Like it could be worldview. It could be, I mean, all boils down to empathy, being able to put yourself in the shoes of the other person to learn the language, to learn like visually how they see the world, to learn like the, I mean, I experienced this now with, with trolls, the, the degree of humor in that world. For example, I talk about love a lot. I'm very like, I'm really lucky to have this amazing community of loving people. But whenever I encounter trolls, they always roll their eyes at the idea of love because it's so quote unquote cringe. So, so they, they show love by like derision, I would say. And I think about on the human level, that's a whole nother discussion. That's psychology, that's sociology, so on. But I wonder if AI systems can help somehow and to bridge the gap of what is this person's life like? Encourage me to just ask that question, to put myself in their shoes, to experience the agitations, the fears, the hopes they have, the, to experience, you know, the, to even just to think about what was their upbringing like, like having a, a single parent home or a shitty education or all those kinds of things, just to put myself in that mind space. It feels like that's really important. For us to, to, to bring those clusters together, to find that similar language. But it's unclear how AI can help that because it seems like AI systems need to understand both parties first. So the, you know, the word understand, there's doing a lot of work, right? Yes. So do you have to understand it or do you just simply have to note that there is something similar as a point to touch, right? So, you know, you use the word empathy and I like that word, for a lot of reasons, I think you're right in the way that you're using in the ways you're describing, but let's separate it from sympathy, right? So, you know, sympathy is feeling sort of for someone, empathy is kind of understanding where they're coming from and how they, how they feel, right? And for most people, those things go hand in hand. For some people, some are very good at empathy and very, very bad at sympathy. Some people cannot experience, well, my observation would be, I'm not a psychologist, my observation would be that some people seem to be very, very, very bad at sympathy. My observation would be that some people seem incapable of feeling sympathy unless they feel empathy first. You can understand someone, understand where they're coming from and still think, no, I can't support that, right? It doesn't mean that the only way I, because if that, if that isn't the case, then what it requires is that you, you must, the only way that you can, to understand someone means you must agree with everything that they do, which isn't right, right? I can feel for someone is to completely understand them and make them like me in some way. Well, then we're lost, right? Because we're not all exactly like each other. I have to understand everything that you've gone through. It helps clearly, but they're separable ideas, right? Even though they get clearly, clearly tangled up in one another. So what I think AI could help you do actually is if, and you know, I'm, I'm being quite fanciful as it were, but if you, if you think of these as kind of, I understand how you interact, the words that you use, the, you know, the actions you take, I have some way of doing this. Let's not worry about what that is. But I can see you as a kind of distribution of experiences and actions taken upon you, things you've done and so on. And I can do this with someone else and I can find the places where there's some kind of commonality, a mapping as it were, even if it's not total, you know, the, if I think of this as distribution, right, then, you know, I can take the cosine of the angle between you and if it's, you know, if it's zero, you've got nothing in common. If it's one, you're completely the same person. Well, you know, you're probably not one. You're almost certainly not zero. I can find the place where there's the overlap, then I might be able to introduce you on that basis or connect you in that, connect you in that way and make it easier for you to take that step of that step of empathy. It's not, it's not impossible to do. Although I wonder if it requires that everyone involved is at least interested in asking the question. So maybe the hard part is just getting them interested in asking the question. In fact, maybe if you can get them to ask the question, how are we more alike than we are different, they'll solve it themselves. Maybe that's the problem that AI should be working on, not telling you how you're similar or different, but just getting you to decide that it's worthwhile asking the question. It feels like an economist's answer actually. Well, people, okay, first of all, people like would disagree. So let me disagree slightly, which is, I think everything you said is brilliant, but I tend to believe philosophically speaking that people are interested underneath it all. And I would say that AI, the, the possibility that an AI system would show the commonality is incredible. That's a really good starting point. I would say if you, if on social media, I could discover the common things deep or shallow between me and a person who there's tension with, I think that my basic human nature would take over from there. And I think enjoy that commonality. And like, there's something sticky about that, that my mind will linger on and that person in my mind will become like warmer and warmer. And like, I'll start to give a feel more and more compassion towards them. I think for majority of the population, that's true, but that might be, that's a hypothesis. Yeah. I mean, it's an empirical question, right? You'd have to figure it out. I mean, I want to believe you're right. And so I'm going to say that I think you're right. Of course, some people come to those things for the purpose of trolling, right? And it doesn't matter that they're playing a different game. Yeah. But I don't know. I, you know, my experience is it requires two things. It requires, in fact, maybe this is really at the end what you're saying. And I, and I do agree with this for sure. So you, it's hard to hold onto that kind of anger or to hold onto just the desire to humiliate someone for that long. It's just difficult to do. It takes, it takes a toll on you. But more importantly, we know this both from people having done studies on it, but also from our own experiences, that it is much easier to be dismissive of a person if they're not in front of you, if they're not real, right? So much of the history of the world is about making people other, right? So if you're social media, if you're on the web, if you're doing whatever in the internet, but being forced to deal with someone as a person, some equivalent to being in the same room, makes a huge difference. Cause then you're one, you're forced to deal with their humanity because it's in front of you. The other is of course that, you know, they might punch you in the face if you go too far. So, you know, both of those things kind of work together, I think to the, to the right end. So I think bringing people together is really a kind of substitute for forcing them to see the humanity in another person and to not be able to treat them as bits, it's hard to troll someone when you're looking them in the eye. This is very difficult to do. Agreed. Your broad set of research interests fall under interactive AI, as I mentioned, which is a fascinating set of ideas and you have some concrete things that you're particularly interested in, but maybe could you talk about how you think about the field of interactive artificial intelligence? Sure. So let me say upfront that if you look at, certainly my early work, but even if you look at most of it, I'm a machine learning guy, right? I do machine learning. First paper ever published, it was in NIPS. Back then it was NIPS. Now it's NeurIPS. It's a long story there. Anyway, that's another thing. But so, so I'm a machine learning guy, right? I believe in data, I believe in statistics and all those kinds of things. And the reason I'm bringing that up is even though I'm a newfangled statistical machine learning guy and have been for a very long time, the problem I really care about is AI, right? I care about artificial intelligence. I care about building some kind of intelligent artifact. However that gets expressed, that would be at least as intelligent as humans and as interesting as humans, perhaps in their own way. So that's the deep underlying love and dream is the bigger AI. Whatever the heck that is. Yeah. The machine learning in some ways is a means to the end. It is not the end. And I don't understand how one could be intelligent without learning. So therefore I got to figure out how to do that, right? So that's important. But machine learning, by the way, is also a tool. I said statistical, because that's what most people think of themselves as machine learning people. That's how they think. I think Pat Langley might disagree, or at least 1980s Pat Langley might disagree with what it takes to do machine learning. But I care about the AI problem, which is why it's interactive AI, not just interactive ML. I think it's important to understand that there's a longterm goal here, which I will probably never live to see, but I would love to have been a part of, which is building something truly intelligent outside of ourselves. Can we take a tiny tangent? Or am I interrupting, which is, is there something you can say concrete about the mysterious gap between the subset ML and the bigger AI? What's missing? What do you think? I mean, obviously it's totally unknown, not totally, but in part unknown at this time, but is it something like with Pat Langley, is it knowledge, like expert system reasoning type of kind of thing? So AI is bigger than ML, but ML is bigger than AI. This is kind of the real problem here, is that they're really overlapping things that are really interested in slightly different problems. I tend to think of ML, and there are many people out there who are going to be very upset at me about this, but I tend to think of ML being much more concerned with the engineering of solving a problem, and AI about the sort of more philosophical goal of true intelligence. And that's the thing that motivates me, even if I end up finding myself living in this kind of engineering ish space, I've now made Michael Jordan upset. But to me, they just feel very different. You're just measuring them differently, your goals of where you're trying to be are somewhat different. But to me, AI is about trying to build that intelligent thing. And typically, but not always, for the purpose of understanding ourselves a little bit better. Machine learning is, I think, trying to solve the problem, whatever that problem is. Now, that's my take. Others, of course, would disagree. So on that note, so with the interactive AI, do you tend to, in your mind, visualize AI as a singular system, or is it as a collective huge amount of systems interacting with each other? Like, is the social interaction of us humans and of AI systems the fundamental to intelligence? I think, well, it's certainly fundamental to our kind of intelligence, right? And I actually think it matters quite a bit. So the reason the interactive AI part matters to me is because I don't, this is going to sound simple, but I don't care whether a tree makes a sound when it falls and there's no one around, because I don't think it matters, right? If there's no observer in some sense. And I think what's interesting about the way that we're intelligent is we're intelligent with other people, right? Or other things anyway. And we go out of our way to make other things intelligent. We're hardwired to find intention, even whether there is no intention, why we anthropomorphize everything. I think the interactive AI part is being intelligent in and of myself in isolation is a meaningless act in some sense. The correct answer is you have to be intelligent in the way that you interact with others. It's also efficient because it allows you to learn faster because you can import from past history. It also allows you to be efficient in the transmission of that. So we ask ourselves about me. Am I intelligent? Clearly, I think so. But I'm also intelligent as a part of a larger species and group of people, and we're trying to move the species forward as well. And so I think that notion of being intelligent with others is kind of the key thing because otherwise you come and you go, and then it doesn't matter. And so that's why I care about that aspect of it. And it has lots of other implications. One is not just building something intelligent with others, but understanding that you can't always communicate with those others. They have been in a room where there's a clock on the wall that you haven't seen, which means you have to spend an enormous amount of time communicating with one another constantly in order to figure out what each other wants. So this is why people project, right? You project your own intentions and your own reasons for doing things on the others as a way of understanding them so that you know how to behave. But by the way, you, completely predictable person, I don't know how you're predictable. I don't know you well enough, but you probably eat the same five things over and over again or whatever it is that you do, right? I know I do. If I'm going to a new Chinese restaurant, I will get general gals chicken because that's the thing that's easy. I will get hot and sour soup. People do the things that they do, but other people get the chicken and broccoli. I can push this analogy way too far. The chicken and broccoli. I don't know what's wrong with those people. I don't know what's wrong with them either. We have all had our trauma. So they get their chicken and broccoli and their egg drop soup or whatever. We got to communicate and it's going to change, right? So interactive AI is not just about learning to solve a problem or a task. It's about having to adapt that over time, over a very long period of time and interacting with other people who will themselves change. This is what we mean about things like adaptable models, right? That you have to have a model. That model is going to change. And by the way, it's not just the case that you're different from that person, but you're different from the person you were 15 minutes ago or certainly 15 years ago. And I have to assume that you're at least going to drift, hopefully not too many discontinuities, but you're going to drift over time. And I have to have some mechanism for adapting to that as you and an individual over time and across individuals over time. On the topic of adaptive modeling and you talk about lifelong learning, which is a, I think a topic that's understudied or maybe because nobody knows what to do with it. But like, you know, if you look at Alexa or most of our artificial intelligence systems that are primarily machine learning based systems or dialogue systems, all those kinds of things, they know very little about you in the sense of the lifelong learning sense that we learn as humans, we learn a lot about each other, not in the quantity effects, but like the temporally rich set of information that seems to like pick up the crumbs along the way that somehow seems to capture a person pretty well. Do you have any ideas how to do lifelong learning? Because it seems like most of the machine learning community does not. No, well, by the way, not only does the machine learning community not spend a lot of time on lifelong learning, I don't think they spend a lot of time on learning period in the sense that they tend to be very task focused. Everybody is overfitting to whatever problem is they happen to have. They're overengineering their solutions to the task. Even the people, and I think these people too, are trying to solve a hard problem of transfer learning, right? I'm going to learn on one task and learn another task. You still end up creating the task. It's like looking for your keys where the light is because that's where the light is, right? It's not because the keys have to be there. I mean, one could argue that we tend to do this in general. As a group, we tend to hill climb and get stuck in local optima. I think we do this in the small as well. I think it's very hard to do. Here's the hard thing about AI. The hard thing about AI is it keeps changing on us, right? What is AI? AI is the art and science of making computers act the way they do in the movies, right? That's what it is, right? But beyond that. They keep coming up with new movies. Yes. Right, exactly. We are driven by this kind of need to the ineffable quality of who we are, which means that the moment you understand something is no longer AI, right? Well, we understand this. That's just you take the derivative and you divide by two and then you average it out over time in the window. Therefore, that's no longer AI. The problem is unsolvable because it keeps kind of going away. This creates a kind of illusion, which I don't think is an entire illusion, of either there's very simple task based things you can do very well and over engineer, there's all of AI, and there's nothing in the middle. It's very hard to get from here to here, and it's very hard to see how to get from here to here. I don't think that we've done a very good job of it because we get stuck trying to solve the small problems in front of it, myself included. I'm not going to pretend that I'm better at this than anyone else. Of course, all the incentives in academia and in industry are set to make that very hard because you have to get the next paper out, you have to get the next product out, you have to solve this problem, and it's very sort of naturally incremental. None of the incentives are set up to allow you to take a huge risk unless you're already so well established you can take that big risk. If you're that well established that you can take that big risk, then you've probably spent much of your career taking these little risks, relatively speaking, and so you have got a lifetime of experience telling you not to take that particular big risk. So the whole system's set up to make progress very slow. That's fine. It's just the way it is, but it does make this gap seem really big, which is my long way of saying I don't have a great answer to it except that stop doing n equals one. At least try to get n equal two and maybe n equal seven so that you can say I'm going to, or maybe t is a better variable here. I'm going to not just solve this problem and solve this problem and another problem. I'm not going to learn just on you. I'm going to keep living out there in the world and just seeing what happens and that we'll learn something as designers and our machine learning algorithms and our AI algorithms can learn as well. But unless you're willing to build a system which you're going to have live for months at a time in an environment that is messy and chaotic, you cannot control, then you're never going to make progress in that direction. So I guess my answer to you is yes. My idea is that you should, it's not no, it's yes. You should be deploying these things and making them live for a month at a time and be okay with the fact that it's going to take you five years to do this. Not rerunning the same experiment over and over again and refining the machine so it's slightly better at whatever, but actually having it out there and living in the chaos of the world and seeing what its learning algorithm say can learn, what data structure it can build and how it can go from there. Without that, you're going to be stuck all the time. What do you think about the possibility of N equals one growing, it's probably crude approximation, but growing like if you look at language models like GPT3, if you just make it big enough, it'll swallow the world. Meaning like it'll solve all your T to infinity by just growing in size of this, taking the small overengineered solution and just pumping it full of steroids in terms of compute, in terms of size of training data and the Yann LeCun style self supervised or open AI self supervised. Just throw all of YouTube at it and it will learn how to reason, how to paint, how to create music, how to love all that by watching YouTube videos. I mean, I can't think of a more terrifying world to live in than a world that is based on YouTube videos, but yeah, I think the answer that I just kind of don't think that'll quite well, it won't work that easily. You will get somewhere and you will learn something, which means it's probably worth it, but you won't get there. You won't solve the problem. Here's the thing, we build these things and we say we want them to learn, but what actually happens, and let's say they do learn, I mean, certainly every paper I've gotten published, the things learn, I don't know about anyone else, but they actually change us, right? We react to it differently, right? So we keep redefining what it means to be successful, both in the negative in the case, but also in the positive in that, oh, well, this is an accomplishment. I'll give you an example, which is like the one you just described with YouTube. Let's get completely out of machine learning. Well, not completely, but mostly out of machine learning. Think about Google. People were trying to solve information retrieval, the ad hoc information retrieval problem forever. I mean, first major book I ever read about it was what, 71, I think it was when it came out. Anyway, we'll treat everything as a vector and we'll do these vector space models and whatever. And that was all great. And we made very little progress. I mean, we made some progress and then Google comes and makes the ad hoc problem seem pretty easy. I mean, it's not, there's lots of computers and databases involved, and there's some brilliant algorithmic stuff behind it too, and some systems building. But the problem changed, right? If you've got a world that's that connected so that you have, you know, there are 10 million answers quite literally to the question that you're asking, then the problem wasn't give me the things that are relevant. The problem is don't give me anything that's irrelevant, at least in the first page, because nothing else matters. So Google is not solving the information retrieval problem, at least not on this webpage. Google is minimizing false positives, which is not the same thing as getting an answer. It turns out it's good enough for what it is we want to use Google for, but it also changes what the problem was we thought we were trying to solve in the first place. You thought you were trying to find an answer, but you're not, or you're trying to find the answer, but it turns out you're just trying to find an answer. Now, yes, it is true. It's also very good at finding you exactly that webpage. Of course, you trained yourself to figure out what the keywords were to get you that webpage. But in the end, by having that much data, you've just changed the problem into something else. You haven't actually learned what you set out to learn. Now, the counter to that would be maybe we're not doing that either. We just think we are because, you know, we're in our own heads. Maybe we're learning the wrong problem in the first place, but I don't think that matters. I think the point is that Google has not solved information retrieval. Google has done amazing service. I have nothing bad to say about what they've done. Lord knows my entire life is better because Google exists. For Google Maps, I don't think I've ever found this place. Where is this? I see 110 and I see where did 95 go? So I'm very grateful for Google, but they just have to make certain the first five things are right. And everything after that is wrong. Look, we're going off on a totally different topic here, but think about the way we hire faculty. It's exactly the same thing. I get in controversial, getting controversial. It's exactly the same problem, right? It's minimizing false positives. We say things like we want to find the best person to be an assistant professor at MIT in the new college of computing, which I will point out was founded 30 years after the college of computing. I'm a part of both of my alma mater. I'm just saying I appreciate all that they did and all that they're doing. Anyway, so we're going to try to hire the best professor. That's what we say, the best person for this job, but that's not what we do at all, right? Do you know which percentage of faculty in the top four earn their PhDs from the top four, say in 2017, which is the most recent year for which I have data? Maybe a large percentage. About 60%. 60. 60% of the faculty in the top four earn their PhDs in the top four. This is computer science, for which there is no top five. There's only a top four, right? Because they're all tied for one. For people who don't know, by the way, that would be MIT Stanford, Berkeley, CMU. Yep. Georgia Tech is number eight. Number eight. You're keeping track. Oh yes. It's a large part of my job. Number five is Illinois. Number six is a tie with UW and Cornell and Princeton and Georgia Tech are tied for eight and UT Austin is number 10. Michigan is number 11, by the way. So if you look at the top 10, you know what percentage of faculty in the top 10 earn their PhDs from the top 10? 65, roughly. 65%. If you look at the top 55 ranked departments, 50% of the faculty earn their PhDs from the top 10. There is no universe in which all the best faculty, even just for R1 universities, the majority of them come from 10 places. There's no way that's true, especially when you consider how small some of those universities are in terms of the number of PhDs they produce. Yeah. Now that's not a negative. I mean, it is a negative. It also has a habit of entrenching certain historical inequities and accidents. But what it tells you is, well, ask yourself the question, why is it like that? Well, because it's easier. If we go all the way back to the 1980s, you know, there was a saying that nobody ever lost his job buying a computer from IBM, and it was true. And nobody ever lost their job hiring a PhD from MIT, right? If the person turned out to be terrible, well, you know, they came from MIT, what did you expect me to know? However, that same person coming from pick whichever is your least favorite place that produces PhDs in, say, computer science, well, you took a risk, right? So all the incentives, particularly because you're only going to hire one this year, well, now we're hiring 10, but you know, you're only going to have one or two or three this year. And by the way, when they come in, you're stuck with them for at least seven years at most places, because that's before you know whether they're getting tenure or not. And if they get tenure, stuck with them for a good 30 years, unless they decide to leave. That means the pressure to get this right is very high. So what are you going to do? You're going to minimize false positives. You don't care about saying no inappropriately. You only care about saying yes inappropriately. So all the pressure drives you into that particular direction. Google, not to put too fine a point on it, was in exactly the same situation with their search. It turns out you just don't want to give people the wrong page in the first three or four pages. And if there's 10 million right answers and 100 bazillion wrong answers, just make certain the wrong answers don't get up there. And who cares if you, the right answer was actually the 13th page. A right answer, a satisficing answer is number one, two, three, or four. So who cares? Or an answer that will make you discover something beautiful, profound to your question. Well, that's a different problem, right? But isn't that the problem? Can we linger on this topic without sort of walking with grace? How do we get for hiring faculty, how do we get that 13th page with a truly special person? Like there's, I mean, it depends on the department. Computer science probably has those department, those kinds of people. Like you have the Russian guy, Grigory Perlman, like just these awkward, strange minds that don't know how to play the little game of etiquette that faculty have all agreed somehow like converged over the decades, how to play with each other. And also is not, you know, on top of that is not from the top four, top whatever numbers, the schools. And maybe actually just says a few every once in a while to the traditions of old within the computer science community. Maybe talks trash about machine learning is a total waste of time. And that's there on their resume. So like how do you allow the system to give those folks a chance? Well, you have to be willing to take a certain kind of, without taking a particular position on any particular person, you'd have to take, you have to be willing to take risk, right? A small amount of it. I mean, if we were treating this as a, well, as a machine learning problem, right? There's a search problem, which is what it is. It's a search problem. If we were treating it that way, you would say, oh, well, the main thing is you want, you know, you've got a prior, you want some data because I'm Bayesian. If you don't want to do it that way, we'll just inject some randomness in and it'll be okay. The problem is that feels very, very hard to do with people. All the incentives are wrong there. But it turns out, and let's say, let's say that's the right answer. Let's just give for the sake of argument that, you know, injecting randomness in the system at that level for who you hire is just not worth doing because the price is too high or the cost is too high. If we had infinite resources, sure, but we don't. And also you've got to teach people. So, you know, you're ruining other people's lives if you get it too wrong. But we've taken that principle, even if I grant it and pushed it all the way back, right? So, we could have a better pool than we have of people we look at and give an opportunity to. If we do that, then we have a better chance of finding that. Of course, that just pushes the problem back another level. But let me tell you something else. You know, I did a sort of study, I call it a study. I called up eight of my friends and asked them for all of their data for graduate admissions. But then someone else followed up and did an actual study. And it turns out that I can tell you how everybody gets into grad school more or less, more or less. You basically admit everyone from places higher ranked than you. You admit most people from places ranked around you. And you meant almost no one from places ranked below you, with the exception of the small liberal arts colleges that aren't ranked at all, like Harvey Mudd, because they don't have a PhD, so they aren't ranked. This is all CS. Which means the decision of whether you become a professor at Cornell was determined when you were 17, by what you knew to go to undergrad to do whatever. So if we can push these things back a little bit and just make the pool a little bit bigger, at least you raise the probability that you will be able to see someone interesting and take the risk. The other answer to that question, by the way, which you could argue is the same as you either adjust the pool so the probabilities go up, that's a way of injecting a little bit of uniform noise in the system, as it were, is you change your loss function. You just let yourself be measured by something other than whatever it is that we're measuring ourselves by now. I mean, US News and World Report, every time they change their formula for determining rankings, move entire universities to behave differently, because rankings matter. TITO Can you talk trash about those rankings for a second? No, I'm joking about talking trash. I actually, it's so funny how from my perspective, from a very shallow perspective, how dogmatic, like how much I trust those rankings. They're almost ingrained in my head. I mean, at MIT, everybody kind of, it's a propagated, mutually agreed upon TITO idea that those rankings matter. And I don't think anyone knows what they're, like, most people don't know what they're based on. And what are they exactly based on? And what are the flaws in that? TITO Well, so it depends on which rankings you're talking about. Do you want to talk about computer science or talk about universities? TITO Computer science, US News, isn't that the main one? TITO Yeah, the only one that matters is US News. Nothing else matters. Sorry, CSRankings.org, but nothing else matters but US News. So US News has formula that it uses for many things, but not for computer science because computer science is considered a science, which is absurd. So the rankings for computer science is 100% reputation. So two people at each department, it's not really department, whatever, at each department, basically rank everybody. Slightly more complicated than that, but whatever, they rank everyone. And then those things are put together and somehow. TITO So that means how do you improve reputation? How do you move up and down the space of reputation? TITO Yes, that's exactly the question. TITO Twitter? TITO It can help. I can tell you how Georgia Tech did it, or at least how I think Georgia Tech did it, because Georgia Tech is actually the case to look at. Not just because I'm at Georgia Tech, but because Georgia Tech is the only computing unit that was not in the top 20 that has made it into the top 10. It's also the only one in the last two decades, I think, that moved up in the top 10, as opposed to having someone else moved down. So we used to be number 10, and then we became number nine because UT Austin went down slightly, and now we were tied for ninth because that's how rankings work. And we moved from nine to eight because our raw score moved up a point. So something about Georgia Tech, computer science, or computing anyway. I think it's because we have shown leadership at every crisis level, right? So we created a college, first public university to do it, second college, second university to do it after CMU is number one. I also think it's no accident that CMU is the largest and we're, depending upon how you count and depending on exactly where MIT ends up with its final college of computing, second or third largest. I don't think that's an accident. We've been doing this for a long time. But in the 2000s when there was a crisis about undergraduate education, Georgia Tech took a big risk and succeeded at rethinking undergrad education and computing. I think we created these schools at a time when most public universities anyway were afraid to do it. We did the online masters and that mattered because people were trying to figure out what to do with MOOCs and so on. I think it's about being observed by your peers and having an impact. So, I mean, that is what reputation is, right? So the way you move up in the reputation rankings is by doing something that makes people turn and look at you and say, that's good. They're better than I thought. Beyond that, it's just inertia and there's huge hysteresis in the system, right? I mean, there was these, I can't remember this, this may be apocryphal, but there's a major or department that MIT was ranked number one in and they didn't have it. It's just about what you... I don't know if that's true, but someone said that to me anyway. But it's a thing, right? It's all about reputation. Of course, MIT is great because MIT is great. It's always been great. By the way, because MIT is great, the best students come, which keeps it being great. I mean, it's just a positive feedback loop. It's not surprising. I don't think it's wrong. Yeah. But it's almost like a narrative. It doesn't actually have to be backed by reality. Not to say anything about MIT, but it does feel like we're playing in the space of narratives, not the space of something grounded. One of the surprising things when I showed up at MIT and just all the students I've worked with and all the research I've done is they're the same people as I've met at other places. I mean, what MIT has going for it... Well, MIT has many things going for it. One of the things MIT has going for it is... Nice logo? Is nice logo. It's a lot better than it was when I was here. Nice colors too. Terrible, terrible name for a mascot. But the thing that MIT has going for it is it really does get the best students. It just doesn't get all of the best students. There are many more best students out there. And the best students want to be here because it's the best place to be or one of the best places to be. And it's a sort of positive feedback. But you said something earlier, which I think is worth examining for a moment. I forget the word you used. You said, we're living in the space of narrative as opposed to something objective. Narrative is objective. I mean, one could argue that the only thing that we do as humans is narrative. We just build stories to explain why we do what we do. Someone once asked me, but wait, there's nothing objective. No, it's completely an objective measure. It's an objective measure of the opinions of everybody else. Now, is that physics? I don't know. Tell me something you think is actually objective and measurable in a way that makes sense. Cameras, they don't... You're getting me off on something here, but do you know that cameras, which are just reflecting light and putting them on film, did not work for dark skin people until the 1970s? You know why? Because you were building cameras for the people who were going to buy cameras, who all, at least in the United States and Western Europe, were relatively light skin. Turns out it took terrible pictures of people who look like me. That got fixed with better film and whole processes. Do you know why? Because furniture manufacturers wanted to be able to take pictures of mahogany furniture, right? Because candy manufacturers wanted to be able to take pictures of chocolate. Now, the reason I bring that up is because you might think that cameras are objective. They're just capturing light. No, they're doing the things that they're doing based upon decisions by real human beings to privilege, if I may use that word, some physics over others, because it's an engineering problem. There are tradeoffs, right? So I can either worry about this part of the spectrum or this part of the spectrum. This costs more. That costs less. This costs the same, but I have more people paying money over here, right? And it turns out that if a giant conglomerate demands that you do something different and it's going to involve all kinds of money for you, suddenly the tradeoffs change, right? And so there you go. I actually don't know how I ended up there. Oh, it's because of this notion of objectiveness, right? So even the objective isn't objective because at the end you've got to tell a story. You've got to make decisions. You've got to make tradeoff. What else is engineering other than that? So I think that the rankings capture something. They just don't necessarily capture what people assume they capture. You know, just to linger on this idea, why is there not more people who just like play with whatever that narrative is, have fun with it, have like excite the world, whether it's in the Carl Sagan style of like that calm, sexy voice of explaining the stars and all the romantic stuff or the Elon Musk, dare I even say Donald Trump, where you're like trolling and shaking up the system and just saying controversial things. I talked to Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist who just enjoys playing the controversy. Things like finds the counter intuitive ideas in the particular science and throws them out there and sees how they play in the public discourse. Like why don't we see more of that? And why doesn't academia attract an Elon Musk type? Well, tenure is a powerful thing that allows you to do whatever you want, but getting tenure typically requires you to be relatively narrow, right? Because people are judging you. Well, I think the answer is we have told ourselves a story, a narrative that is vulgar, what you just described is vulgar. It's certainly unscientific, right? And it is easy to convince yourself that in some ways you're the mathematician, right? The fewer there are in your major, the more that proves your purity, right? So once you tell yourself that story, then it is beneath you to do that kind of thing, right? I think that's wrong. I think that, and by the way, everyone doesn't have to do this. Everyone's not good at it. And everyone, even if they would be good at it, would enjoy it. So it's fine. But I do think you need some diversity in the way that people choose to relate to the world as academics, because I think the great universities are ones that engage with the rest of the world. It is a home for public intellectuals. And in 2020, being a public intellectual probably means being on Twitter. Whereas of course that wasn't true 20 years ago, because Twitter wasn't around 20 years ago. And if it was, it wasn't around in a meaningful way. I don't actually know how long Twitter has been around. As I get older, I find that my notion of time has gotten worse and worse. Like Google really has been around that long? Anyway, the point is that I think that we sometimes forget that a part of our job is to impact the people who aren't in the world that we're in, and that that's the point of being at a great place and being a great person, frankly. There's an interesting force in terms of public intellectuals. Forget Twitter, we could look at just online courses that are public facing in some part. There is a kind of force that pulls you back. Let me just call it out because I don't give a damn at this point. There's a little bit of, all of us have this, but certainly faculty have this, which is jealousy. Whoever's popular at being a good communicator, exciting the world with their science. And of course, when you excite the world with the science, it's not peer reviewed, clean. It all sounds like bullshit. It's like a Ted talk and people roll their eyes and they hate that a Ted talk gets millions of views or something like that. And then everybody pulls each other back. There's this force that just kind of, it's hard to stand out unless you win a Nobel prize or whatever. It's only when you get senior enough where you just stop giving a damn. But just like you said, even when you get tenure, that was always the surprising thing to me. I have many colleagues and friends who have gotten tenure, but there's not a switch. There's not an F you money switch where you're like, you know what? Now I'm going to be more bold. It doesn't, I don't see it. Well, there's a reason for that. Tenure isn't a test. It's a training process. It teaches you to behave in a certain way, to think in a certain way, to accept certain values and to react accordingly. And the better you are at that, the more likely you are to earn tenure. And by the way, this is not a bad thing. Most things are like that. And I think most of my colleagues are interested in doing great work and they're just having impact in the way that they want to have impact. I do think that as a field, not just as a field, as a profession, we have a habit of belittling those who are popular as it were, as if the word itself is a kind of Scarlet A, right? I think it's easy to convince yourself, and no one is immune to this, no one is immune to this, that the people who are better known are better known for bad reasons. The people who are out there dumbing it down are not being pure to whatever the values and ethos is for your field. And it's just very easy to do. Now, having said that, I think that ultimately, people who are able to be popular and out there and are touching the world and making a difference, you know, our colleagues do, in fact, appreciate that in the long run. It's just, you know, you have to be very good at it or you have to be very interested in pursuing it. And once you get past a certain level, I think people accept that for who it is. I mean, I don't know. I'd be really interested in how Rod Brooks felt about how people were interacting with him when he did Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control way, way, way back when. What's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control? It was a documentary that involved four people. I remember nothing about it other than Rod Brooks was in it and something about naked mole rats. I can't remember what the other two things were. It was robots, naked mole rats, and then two others. By the way, Rod Brooks used to be the head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT and then launched, I think, iRobot and then Think Robotics, Rethink Robotics. Yes. Think is in the word. And also is a little bit of a rock star personality in the AI world, a very opinionated, very intelligent. Anyway, sorry, mole rats and naked. Naked mole rats. Also, he was one of my two advisors for my PhD. This explains a lot. I don't know how to explain it. I love Rod. But I also love my other advisor, Paul. Paul, if you're listening, I love you too. Both very, very different people. Paul Viola. Paul Viola. Both very interesting people, very different in many ways. But I don't know what Rod would say to you about what the reaction was. I know that for the students at the time, because I was a student at the time, it was amazing. This guy was in a movie, being very much himself. Actually, the movie version of him is a little bit more Rod than Rod. I think they edited it appropriately for him. But it was very much Rod. And he did all this while doing great work. Was he running the iLab at that point or not? I don't know. But anyway, he was running the iLab, or would be soon. He was a giant in the field. He did amazing things, made a lot of his bones by doing the kind of counterintuitive science. And saying, no, you're doing this all wrong. Representation is crazy. The world is your own representation. You just react to it. I mean, these are amazing things. And continues to do those sorts of things as he's moved on. I think he might tell you, I don't know if he would tell you it was good or bad, but I know that for everyone else out there in the world, it was a good thing. And certainly, he continued to be respected. So it's not as if it destroyed his career by being popular. P stands for probabilistic. And what does FUNC stand for? So a lot of my life is about making acronyms. So if I have one quirk, it's that people will say words and I see if they make acronyms. And if they do, then I'm happy. And then if they don't, I try to change it so that they make acronyms. It's just a thing that I do. So PFUNC is an acronym. It has three or four different meanings. But finally, I decided that the P stands for probabilistic because at the end of the day, it's machine learning and it's randomness and it's fun. So there's a sense to it, which is not an acronym, like literally FUNC. You have a dark, mysterious past. So there's a sense to it, which is not an acronym, like literally FUNC. There's a sense to it, which is not an acronym, like literally FUNC. It's a whole set of things of which rap is a part. So tagging is a part of hip hop. I don't know why that's true, but people tell me it's true and I'm willing to go along with it because they get very angry about it. But hip hop is like graffiti. Tagging is like graffiti. And there's all these, including the popping and the locking and all the dancing and all those things. That's all a part of hip hop. It's a way of life, which I think is true. And then there's rap, which is this particular. It's the music part. Yes. A music part. I mean, you wouldn't call the stuff that DJs do the scratching. That's not rap, right? But it's a part of hip hop, right? So given that we understand that hip hop is this whole thing, what are the rap albums that best touch that for me? Well, if I were going to educate you, I would try to figure out what you liked and then I would work you there. Oh my God. I would probably start with, there's a fascinating exercise one can do by watching old episodes of I love the seventies. I love the eighties. I love the nineties with a bunch of friends and just see where people come in and out of pop culture. So if you're talking about those people, then I would actually start you with where I would hope to start you with anyway, which is public enemy. Particularly it takes a nation of millions to hold us back, which is clearly the best album ever produced. And certainly the best hip hop album ever produced in part because it was so much of what was great about the time. Fantastic lyrics is me. It's all about the lyrics. Amazing music that was coming from Rick Rubin was the producer of that. And he did a lot, very kind of heavy mental ish, at least in the eighties sense at the time. And it was focused on politics in the 1980s, which was what made hip hop so great. Then I would start you there. Then I would move you up through things that are been happening more recently. I'd probably get you to someone like a most deaf. I would give you a history lesson, basically. Most of them. That's amazing. He hosted a poetry jam thing on HBO or something like that. Probably. I don't think I've seen it, but I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Spoken poetry. That's amazing. He's amazing. And then I would, I, after I got you there, I'd work you back to EPMD. And eventually I would take you back to the last poets and particularly the first album, the last poets, which was 1970 to give you a sense of history and that it actually has been building up over a very, very long time. So we would start there because that's where your music aligns. And then we would cycle out and I'd move you to the present. And then I'd take you back to the past. Because I think a large part of people who are kind of confused about any kind of music, you know, the truth is this is the same thing we've always been talking about, right? It's about narrative and being a part of something and being immersed in something. So you understand it, right? Jazz, which I also like is one of the things that's cool about jazz is that you come and you meet someone who's talking to you about jazz and you have no idea what they're talking about. And then one day it all clicks and you've been so immersed in it. You go, oh yeah, that's a Charlie Parker. You start using words that nobody else understands, right? And it becomes part of hip hop's the same way. Everything's the same way. They're all cultural artifacts, but I would help you to see that there's a history of it and how it connects to other genres of music that you might like to bring you in. So that you could kind of see how it connects to what you already like, including some of the good work that's been done with fusions of hip hop and bluegrass. Oh no. Yes. Some of it's even good. Not all of it, but some of it is good, but I'd start you with, it takes a nation of millions to hold this back. There's an interesting tradition in like more modern hip hop of integrating almost like classic crock songs or whatever, like integrating into their music, into the beat, into the whatever. It's kind of interesting. It gives a whole new, not just classic crock, but what is it? Kanye with Gold Digger. Old R&B. It's taking and pulling old R&B, right? Well, that's been true since the beginning. I mean, in fact, that's in some ways, that's why the DJ used to get top billing because it was the DJ that brought all the records together and made it worth so that people could dance. You go back to those days, mostly in New York, though not exclusively, but mostly in New York where it sort of came out of, the DJ that brought all the music together and the beats and showed that basically music is itself an instrument, very meta, and you can bring it together and then you sort of wrap over it and so on. And it moved that way. So that's going way, way back. Now, in the period of time where I grew up, when I became really into it, which was mostly the 80s, it was more funk was the back for a lot of the stuff, Public Enemy at that time, notwithstanding. And so, which is very nice because it tied into what my parents listened to and what I vaguely remember listening to when I was very small. And by the way, complete revival of George Clinton and Parliament and Funkadelic and all of those things to bring it sort of back into the 80s and into the 90s. And as we go on, you're going to see the last decade and the decade before that being brought in. And when you don't think that you're hearing something you've heard, it's probably because it's being sampled by someone who, referring to something they remembered when they were young, perhaps from somewhere else altogether. And you just didn't realize what it was because it wasn't a popular song where you happened to grow up. So this stuff has been going on for a long time. It's one of the things that I think is beautiful. Run DMC, Jam Master Jay used to play, he played piano. He would record himself playing piano and then sample that to make it a part of what was going on rather than play the piano. That's how his mind can think. Well, it's pieces. You're putting pieces together, you're putting pieces of music together to create new music, right? Now that doesn't mean that the root, I mean, the roots are doing their own thing. Yeah. Right. Those, those are, that's a whole. Yeah. But still it's the right attitude that, you know, and what else is jazz, right? Jazz is about putting pieces together and then putting your own spin on it. It's all the same. It's all the same thing. It's all the same thing. Yeah. Cause you mentioned lyrics. It does make me sad. Again, this is me talking trash about modern hip hop. I haven't, you know, investigated. I'm sure people correct me that there's a lot of great artists. That's part of the reason I'm saying it is they'll leave it in the comments that you should listen to this person is the lyrics went away from talking about maybe not just politics, but life and so on. Like, you know, the kind of like protest songs, even if you look at like a Bob Marley or you said Public Enemy or Rage Against the Machine, More on the Rockside, there's, that's the place where we go to those lyrics. Like classic rock is all about like, my woman left me or, or I'm really happy that she's still with me or the flip side. It's like love songs of different kinds. It's all love, but it's less political, like less interesting. I would say in terms of like deep, profound knowledge. And it seems like rap is the place where you would find that. And it's sad that for the most part, what I see, like you look like mumble rap or whatever, they're moving away from lyrics and more towards the beat and the, and the musicality of it. I've always been a fan of the lyrics. In fact, if you go back and you read my reviews, which I recently was rereading, man, I wrote my last review the month I graduated. I got my PhD, which says something about something. I'm not sure what though. I always would always, but I often would start with, it's all about the lyrics. For me, it's all, it's about the lyrics. Someone has already written in the comments before I've even finished having this conversation that, you know, neither of us knows what we're talking about and it's all in the underground hip hop and here's who you should go listen to. And that is true. Every time I despair for popular rap, I get someone points me to, or I discover some underground hip hop song and I'm, I am made happy and whole again. So I know it's out there. I don't listen to as much as I used to because I'm listening to podcasts and old music from the 1980s. It's a kind of no beat at all, but you know, there's a little bit of sampling here and there. I'm sure. By the way, James Brown is funk or no? Yes. And so is junior Wells, by the way. Who's that? Oh, junior Wells, Chicago blues. He was James Brown before James Brown was. It's hard to imagine somebody being James Brown. Go look up hoodoo man blues, junior Wells, and just listen to, snatch it back and hold it and you'll see it. And they were contemporaries. Where do you put like little Richard or all that kind of stuff? Like Ray Charles, like when they get like, hit the road Jack and don't you come back. Isn't that like, there's a funkiness in it. Oh, that's definitely a funkiness in it. I mean, it's all, I mean, it's all, it's all a line. I mean, it's all, there's all a line that carries it all together. You know, it's, I guess I would answer your question, depending on whether I'm thinking about it in 2020 or I'm thinking about it in 1960. Um, I'd probably give a different answer. I'm just thinking in terms of, you know, that was rock, but when you look back on it, it's, it was funky, but we didn't use those words or maybe we did. I wasn't around. Uh, but you know, I don't think we used the word 1960 funk, certainly not the way we used it in the seventies and the eighties. Do you reject disco? I do not reject disco. I appreciate all the mistakes that we have made. Actually, some of the disco is actually really, really good. John Travolta. Oh boy. He regrets it probably. Maybe not. Well, like it's the mistakes thing. Yeah. And it got him to where he's going, where he is. Oh, well, thank you for taking that detour. You've, you've talked about computing. We've already talked about computing a little bit, but can you try to describe how you think about the world of computing or it fits into the sets of different disciplines? We mentioned College of Computing. What, what should people, how should they think about computing, especially from an educational perspective of like, what is the perfect curriculum that defines for a young mind, uh, what computing is? So I don't know about a perfect curriculum, although that's an important question because at the end of the day, without the curriculum, you don't get anywhere. Curriculum to me is the fundamental data structure. It's not even the classroom. I mean, the world is, right? I, I, I, so I think the curriculum is where I like to play. Uh, so I spend a lot of time thinking about this, but I will tell you, I'll answer your question by answering a slightly different question first and then getting back to this, which is, you know, you talked about disciplines and what does it mean to be a discipline? The truth is what we really educate people in from the beginning, but certainly through college, you sort of failed. If you don't think about it this way, I think is the world. People often think about tools and tool sets, and when you're really trying to be good, you think about skills and skill sets, but disciplines are about mindsets, right? They're about fundamental ways of thinking, not just the, the, the hammer that you pick up, whatever that is to hit the nail, um, not just the, the skill of learning how to hammer well or whatever. It's the mindset of like, what's the fundamental way to think about, to think about the world, right? And disciplines, different disciplines give you different mindsets to give you different ways of sort of thinking through. So with that in mind, I think that computing, even ask the question, whether it's a discipline that you have to decide, does it have a mindset? Does it have a way of thinking about the world that is different from, you know, the scientist who is doing a discovery and using the scientific method as a way of doing it, or the mathematician who builds abstractions and tries to find sort of steady state truth about the abstractions that may be artificial, but whatever, or is it the engineer who's all about, you know, building demonstrably superior technology with respect to some notion of trade offs, whatever that means, right? That's sort of the world that you, the world that you live in. What is computing? You know, how is computing different? So I've thought about this for a long time and I've come to a view about what computing actually is, what the mindset is. And, and it's, you know, it's a little abstract, but that would be appropriate for computing. I think that what distinguishes the computationalist from others is that he or she understands that models, languages and machines are equivalent. They're the same thing. And because it's not just a model, but it's a machine that is an executable thing that can be described as a language. That means that it's dynamic. So it's not the, it is mathematical in some sense, in the kind of sense of abstraction, but it is fundamentally dynamic and executable. The mathematician is not necessarily worried about either the dynamic part. In fact, whenever I tried to write something for mathematicians, they invariably demand that I make it static. And that's not a bad thing. It's just, it's a way of viewing the world that truth is a thing, right? It's not a process that continually runs, right? So that dynamic thing matters. That self reflection of the system itself matters. And that is what computing, that is what computing brought us. So it is a science because it, the models fundamentally represent truths in the world. Information is a scientific thing to discover, right? Not just a mathematical conceit that that gets created. But of course it's engineering because you're actually dealing with constraints in the world and trying to execute machines that actually run. But it's also a math because you're actually worrying about these languages that describe what's happening. But the fact that regular expressions and finite state automata, one of which feels like a machine or at least an abstraction machine and the other is a language that they're actually the equivalent thing. I mean, that is not a small thing and it permeates everything that we do, even when we're just trying to figure out how to, how to do debugging. So that idea I think is fundamental and we would do better if we made that more explicit. How my life has changed and my thinking about this in the 10 or 15 years it's been since I tried to put that to paper with some colleagues is the realization, which comes to a question you actually asked me earlier, which has to do with trees falling down and whether it matters, is this sort of triangle of equality. It only matters because there's a person inside the triangle, right? That what's changed about computing, computer science or whatever you want to call it, is we now have so much data and so much computational power. We're able to do really, really interesting, promising things. But the interesting and the promising kind of only matters with respect to human beings and their relationship to it. So the triangle exists, that is fundamentally computing. What makes it worthwhile and interesting and potentially world species changing is that there are human beings inside of it and intelligence that has to interact with it to change the data, the information that makes sense and gives meaning to the models, the languages and the machines. So if the curriculum can convey that while conveying the tools and the skills that you need in order to succeed, then it is a big win. That's what I think you have to do. Do you pull psychology, like these human things into that, into the idea, into this framework of computing? Do you pull in psychology and neuroscience, like parts of psychology, parts of neuroscience, parts of sociology? What about philosophy, like studies of human nature from different perspectives? Absolutely. And by the way, it works both ways. So let's take biology for a moment. It turns out a cell is basically a bunch of if, then statements, if you look at it the right way, which is nice because I understand if, then statements. I never really enjoyed biology, but I do understand if, then statements. And if you tell the biologists that and they begin to understand that, it actually helps them to think about a bunch of really cool things. There'll still be biology involved, but whatever. On the other hand, the fact of biology is, in fact, the cell is a bunch of if, then statements or whatever, allows the computationalist to think differently about the language and the way that we, well, certainly the way we would do AI machine learning, but there's just even the way that we think about computation. So the important thing to me is as my engineering colleagues who are not in computer science worry about computer science eating up engineering to colleges where computer science is trapped. It's not a worry. You shouldn't worry about that at all. Computer science computing, it's central, but it's not the most important thing in the world. It's not more important. It is just key to helping others do other cool things they're going to do. You're not going to be a historian in 2030. You're not going to get your PhD in history without understanding some data science and computing, because the way you're going to get history done in part, and I say done, the way you're going to get it done is you're going to look at data and you're going to let, you're going to have the system that's going to help you to analyze things to help you to think about a better way to describe history and to understand what's going on and what it tells us about where we might be going. The same is true for psychology. Same is true for all of these things. The reason I brought that up is because the philosopher has a lot to say about computing. The psychologist has a lot to say about the way humans interact with computing, right? And certainly a lot about intelligence, which at least for me, ultimately is kind of the goal of building these computational devices is to build something intelligent. Did you think computing will eat everything in some certain sense or almost like disappear because it's part of everything? It's so funny you say this. I want to say it's going to metastasize, but there's kind of two ways that fields destroy themselves. One is they become super narrow. And I think we can think of fields that might be that way. They become pure. And we have that instinct. We have that impulse. I'm sure you can think of several people who want computer science to be this pure thing. The other way is you become everywhere and you become everything and nothing. And so everyone says, you know, I'm going to teach Fortran for engineers or whatever. I'm going to do this. And then you lose the thing that makes it worth studying in and of itself. The thing about computing, and this is not unique to computing, though at this point in time, it is distinctive about computing where we happen to be in 2020 is we are both a thriving major. In fact, the thriving major, almost every place. And we're a service unit because people need to know the things we need to know. And our job, much as the mathematician's job is to help, you know, this person over here to think like a mathematician, much the way the point isn't the point of view taking chemistry as a freshman is not to learn chemistry. It's to learn to think like a scientist, right? Our job is to help them to think, think like a computationalist. And we have to take both of those things very seriously. And I'm not sure that as a field, we have historically certainly taken the second thing that our job is to help them to think a certain way. People who aren't going to be our major, I don't think we've taken that that very seriously at all. I don't know if you know who Dan Carlin is. He has this podcast called Hardcore History. Yes. I've just did an amazing four hour conversation with him, mostly about Hitler. But I bring him up because he talks about this idea that it's possible that history as a field will become, like currently, most people study history a little bit, kind of are aware of it. We have a conversation about it, different parts of it. I mean, there's a lot of criticism to say that some parts of history are being ignored, blah, blah, blah, so on. But most people are able to have a curiosity and able to learn it. His thought is it's possible given the way social media works, the current way we communicate, that history becomes a niche field where literally most people just ignore because everything is happening so fast that the history starts losing its meaning. And then it starts being a thing that only, you know, like the theoretical computer science, part of computer science, it becomes a niche thing that only like the rare holders of the world wars and the, you know, all the history, the founding of the United States, all those kinds of things, the Civil Wars. And it's a kind of profound thing to think about how these, how we can lose track, how we can lose these fields when they're best, like in the case of history, is best for that to be a pervasive thing that everybody learns and thinks about and so on. And I would say computing is quite obviously similar to history in the sense that it seems like it should be a part of everybody's life to some degree, especially like as we move into the later parts of the 21st century. And it's not obvious that that's the way it'll go. It might be in the hands of the few still. Like depending if it's machine learning, you know, it's unclear that computing will win out. It's currently very successful, but it's not, I would say that's something, I mean, you're at the leadership level of this. You're defining the future. So it's in your hands. No pressure. But like, it feels like there's multiple ways this can go. And there's this kind of conversation of everybody should learn to code, right? The changing nature of jobs and so on. Do you have a sense of what your role in education of computing is here? Like what's the hopeful path forward? There's a lot there. I will say that, well, first off, it would be an absolute shame if no one studied history. On the other hand, as t approaches infinity, the amount of history is presumably also growing at least linearly. And so you have to forget more and more of history, but history needs to always be there. I mean, I can imagine a world where, you know, if you think of your brains as being outside of your head, that you can kind of learn the history you need to know when you need to know it. That seems fanciful, but it's a kind of way of, you know, is there a sufficient statistic of history? No. And there certainly, but there may be for the particular thing you have to care about, but you know, those who do not remember. It's for our objective camera discussion, right? Yeah. Right. And, you know, we've already lost lots of history. And of course you have your own history that some of which will be, it's even lost to you, right? You don't even remember whatever it was you were doing 17 years ago. All the ex girlfriends. Yeah. Gone. Exactly. So, you know, history is being lost anyway, but the big lessons of history shouldn't be. And I think, you know, to take it to the question of computing and sort of education, the point is you have to get across those lessons. You have to get across the way of thinking. And you have to be able to go back and, you know, you don't want to lose the data, even if, you know, you don't necessarily have the information at your fingertips. With computing, I think it's somewhat different. Everyone doesn't have to learn how to code, but everyone needs to learn how to think in the way that you can be precise. And I mean, precise in the sense of repeatable, not just, you know, in the sense of not resolution in the sense of get the right number of bits, um, in saying what it is you want the machine to do and being able to describe a problem in such a way that it is executable, which we are not human beings are not very good at that. In fact, I think we spend much of our time talking back and forth just to kind of vaguely understand what the other person means and hope we get it good enough that we can, we can act accordingly. Um, you can't do that with machines, at least not yet. And so, you know, having to think that precisely about things is quite important. And that's somewhat different from coding. Coding is a crude means to an end. On the other hand, the idea of coding, what that means that it's a programming language and it has these sort of things that you fiddle with in these ways that you express. That is an incredibly important point. In fact, I would argue that one of the big holes in machine learning right now in an AI is that we forget that we are basically doing software engineering. We forget that we are doing, um, we're using programming, like we're using languages to express what we're doing. We get just so all caught up in the deep network or we get all caught up in whatever that we forget that, you know, we're making decisions based upon a set of parameters that we made up. And if we did slightly different parameters, we'd have completely different, different outcomes. And so the lesson of computing, computer science education is to be able to think like that and to be aware of it when you're doing it. Basically, it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's a way of, um, surfacing your assumptions. I mean, we call them parameters or, you know, we, we, we call them if then statements or whatever, but you're forced to surface those, those assumptions. That's the key, the key thing that you should get out of a computing education that, and that the models and languages and machines are equivalent, but it actually follows from that, that you have to be explicit about, about what it is you're trying to do because the model you're building is something you will one day run. So you better get it right, or at least understand it and be able to express roughly what, what you want to express. So I think it is key that we figure out how to educate everyone to think that way, because at the end, it would not only make them better at whatever it is that they are doing. And I emphasize doing it'll also make them better citizens. It'll help them to understand what others are doing to them so that they can react accordingly. Cause you're not going to solve the problem of social media in so far as you think of social media as a problem by just making slightly better code, right? It only works if people react to it appropriately and know what's happening and therefore take control over what they're doing. I mean, that's, that's my take on it. Okay. Let me try to proceed awkwardly into the topic of race. Okay. One is because it's a fascinating part of your story and you're just eloquent and fun about it. And then the second is because we're living through a pretty tense time in terms of race, tensions and discussions and ideas in this time in America. You grew up in Atlanta, not born in Atlanta. Is some Southern state, somewhere in Tennessee, something like that? Tennessee. Nice. Okay. But early on you moved, you're basically, you identify as an Atlanta native. Mm hmm. Yeah. And you've mentioned that you grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood, by the way, black African American person of color. I prefer black. Black. With a capital B. With a capital B. The other letters are... The rest of them, no matter. Okay. So the predominantly black neighborhood. And so you didn't almost see race. Maybe you can correct me on that. And then just in the video you talked about when you showed up to Georgia Tech for your undergrad, you're one of the only black folks there. And that was like, oh, that was a new experience. So can you take me from just a human perspective, but also from a race perspective, your journey growing up in Atlanta and then showing up at Georgia Tech? Okay. That's easy. And by the way, that story continues through MIT as well. Yeah. In fact, it was quite a bit more stark at MIT and Boston. So maybe just a quick pause, Georgia Tech was undergrad, MIT was graduate school. Mm hmm. And I went directly to grad school from undergrad. So I had no distractions in between my bachelor's and my master's and PhD. You didn't go on a backpacking trip in Europe? Didn't do any of that. In fact, I literally went to IBM for three months, got in a car, and drove straight to Boston with my mother, or Cambridge. Yeah. I moved into an apartment I'd never seen over the Royal East. Anyway, that's another story. So let me tell you a little bit about it. You miss MIT? Oh, I loved MIT. I don't miss Boston at all, but I loved MIT. That was fighting words. So let's back up to this. So as you said, I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My earliest memory is arriving in Atlanta in a moving truck at the age of three and a half. So I think of myself as being from Atlanta, very distinct memory of that. So I grew up in Atlanta. It's the only place I ever knew as a kid. I loved it. Like much of the country, and certainly much of Atlanta in the 70s and 80s, it was deeply highly segregated, though not in a way that I think was obvious to you unless you were looking at it or were old enough to have noticed it. But you could divide up Atlanta, and Atlanta is hardly unique in this way, by highway, and you could get racing class that way. So I grew up not only in a predominantly black area, to say the very least, I grew up on the poor side of that. But I was very much aware of race for a bunch of reasons, one that people made certain that I was, my family did, but also that it would come up. So in first grade, I had a girlfriend. I say I had a girlfriend. I didn't have a girlfriend. I wasn't even entirely sure what girls were in the first grade. But I do remember she decided I was her girlfriend's little white girl named Heather. And we had a long discussion about how it was okay for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, despite the fact that she was white and I was black. Between the two of you? Did your parents know about this? Yes. But being a girlfriend and boyfriend in first grade just basically meant that you spent slightly more time together during recess. I think we Eskimo kissed once. It didn't mean anything. It was. At the time, it felt very scandalous because everyone was watching. I was like, ah, my life is now my life has changed in first grade. No one told me elementary school would be like this. Did you write poetry or not in first grade? That would come later. That would come during puberty when I wrote lots and lots of poetry. Anyway, so I was aware of it. I didn't think too much about it, but I was aware of it. But I was surrounded. It wasn't that I wasn't aware of race. It's that I wasn't aware that I was a minority. It's different. And it's because I wasn't as far as my world was concerned. I mean, I'm six years old, five years old in first grade. The world is the seven people I see every day. So it didn't feel that way at all. And by the way, this being Atlanta, home of the civil rights movement and all the rest, it meant that when I looked at TV, which back then one did because there were only three, four or five channels. And I saw the news, which my mother might make me watch. Monica Kaufman was on TV telling me the news and they were all black and the mayor was black and always been black. And so it just never occurred to me. When I went to Georgia Tech, I remember the first day walking across campus from West campus to East campus and realizing along the way that of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students that I was seeing, I was the only black one. That was enlightening and very off putting because it occurred to me. And then of course, it continued that way for, well, for the rest of my, for much of the rest of my career at Georgia Tech. Of course, I found lots of other students and I met people cause in Atlanta, you're either black or you're white. There was nothing else. So I began to meet students of Asian descent and I met students who we would call Hispanic and so on and so forth. And you know, so my world, this is what college is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to open you up to people. And it did, but it was a very strange thing to be in the minority. When I came to Boston, I will tell you a story. I applied to one place as an undergrad, Georgia Tech, because I was stupid. I didn't know any better. I just didn't know any better, right? No one told me. When I went to grad school, I applied to three places, Georgia Tech, because that's where I was, MIT and CMU. When I got in to MIT, I got into CMU, but I had a friend who went to CMU. And so I asked him what he thought about it. He spent his time explaining to me about Pittsburgh, much less about CMU, but more about Pittsburgh, which I developed a strong opinion based upon his strong opinion, something about the sun coming out two days out of the year. And I didn't get a chance to go there because the timing was wrong. I think it was because the timing was wrong. At MIT, I asked 20 people I knew, either when I visited or I had already known for a variety of reasons, whether they liked Boston. And 10 of them loved it, and 10 of them hated it. The 10 who loved it were all white. The 10 who hated it were all black. And they explained to me very much why that was the case. Both stats told me why. And the stories were remarkably the same for the two clusters. And I came up here, and I could see it immediately, why people would love it and why people would not. And why people tell you about the nice coffee shops. Well, it wasn't coffee shops. It was used CD places. But yeah, it was that kind of a thing. Nice shops. Oh, there's all these students here. Harvard Square is beautiful. You can do all these things, and you can walk. And something about the outdoors, which I wasn't the slightest bit interested in. The outdoors is for the bugs. It's not for humans. That should be a t shirt. Yeah, that's the way I feel about it. And the black folk told me completely different stories about which part of town you did not want to be caught in after dark. But that was nothing new. So I decided that MIT was a great place to be as a university. And I believed it then, I believe it now. And that whatever it is I wanted to do, I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but what if I was wrong? Someone there would know how to do it. Of course, then I would pick the one topic that nobody was working on at the time, but that's okay. It was great. And so I thought that I would be fine. And I'd only be there for like four or five years. I told myself, which turned out not to be true at all. But I enjoyed my time. I enjoyed my time there. But I did see a lot of... I ran across a lot of things that were driven by what I look like while I was here. I got asked a lot of questions. I ran into a lot of cops. I saw a lot about the city. But at the time, I mean, I haven't been here a long time. These are the things that I remember. So this is 1990. There was not a single black radio station. Now this is 1990. I don't know if there are any radio stations anymore. I'm sure there are, but I don't listen to the radio anymore and almost no one does, at least if you're under a certain age. But the idea is you could be in a major metropolitan area and there wasn't a single black radio station, by which I mean, a radio station to play what we would call black music then, was absurd, but somehow captured kind of everything about the city. I grew up in Atlanta and you've heard me tell you about Atlanta. Boston had no economically viable or socially cohesive black middle class. Insofar as it existed, it was uniformly distributed throughout large parts, not all parts, but large parts of the city. And where you had concentrations of black Bostonians, they tended to be poor. It was very different from where I grew up. I grew up on the poor side of town, sure. But then in high school, well, in ninth grade, we didn't have middle school. I went to an eighth grade school where there was a lot of, let's just say, we had a riot the year that I was there. There was at least one major fight every week. It was an amazing experience. But when I went to ninth grade, I went to Academy. Math and Science Academy, Mays High. It was a public school. It was a magnet school. That's why I was able to go there. It was the first high school, I think, in the state of Georgia to sweep the state math and science fairs. It was great. It had 385 students, all but four of whom were black. I went to school with the daughter of the former mayor of Atlanta, Michael Jackson's cousin. I mean, it was an upper middle class. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Dropping names. Dr. Justin Marchegiani You know, I just drop names occasionally. You know, drop the mic, drop some names. Just to let you know, I used to hang out with Michael Jackson's cousin, 12th cousin, nine times removed. I don't know. The point is, they had money. We had a parking problem because the kids had cars. I did not come from a place where you had cars. I had my first car when I came to MIT, actually. So, it was just a very different experience for me. But I'd been to places where whether you were rich or whether you were poor, you know, you could be black and rich or black and poor. And it was there and there were places and they were segregated by class as well as by race. But that existed. Here, at least when I was here, didn't feel that way at all. And it felt like a bunch of a really interesting contradiction. It felt like it was the interracial dating capital of the country. It really felt that way. But it also felt like the most racist place I ever spent any time. You know, you couldn't go up the Orange Line at that time. I mean, again, that was 30 years ago. I don't know what it's like now. But there were places you couldn't go. And you knew it. Everybody knew it. And there were places you couldn't live. And everybody knew that. And that was just the greater Boston area in 1992. Subtle racism or explicit racism? Both. In terms of within the institutions, did you feel... Was there levels in which you were empowered to be first or one of the first black people in a particular discipline in some of these great institutions that you were a part of? You know, Georgia Tech or MIT? And was there a part where it felt limiting? I always felt empowered. Some of that was my own delusion, I think. But it worked out. So I never felt... In fact, quite the opposite. Not only did I not feel as if no one was trying to stop me, I had the distinct impression that people wanted me to succeed. By people, I meant the people in power. Not my fellow students. Not that they didn't want me to succeed. But I felt supported, or at least that people were happy to see me succeed at least as much as anyone else. But, you know, 1990, you're dealing with a different set of problems. You're very early, at least in computer science, you're very early in the Jackie Robinson period. There's this thing called the Jackie Robinson syndrome, which is that the first one has to be perfect or has to be sure to succeed because if that person fails, no one else comes after for a long time. So it was kind of in everyone's best interest. But I think it came from a sincere place. I'm completely sure that people went out of their way to try to make certain that the environment would be good. Not just for me, but for the other people who, of course, were around. And I was the only person in the iLab, but I wasn't the only person at MIT by a long shot. On the other hand, we're what? At that point, we would have been, what, less than 20 years away from the first black PhD to graduate from MIT, right? Shirley Jackson, right? 1971, something like that? Somewhere around then. So we weren't that far away from the first first, and we were still another eight years away from the first black PhD in computer science, right? So it was a sort of interesting time. But I did not feel as if the institutions of the university were against any of that. And furthermore, I felt as if there was enough of a critical mass across the institute from students and probably faculty that I didn't know them, who wanted to make certain that the right thing happened. It was very different from the institutions of the rest of the city, which I think were designed in such a way that they felt no need to be supportive. Let me ask a touchy question on that. So you kind of said that you didn't feel, you felt empowered. Is there some lesson, advice, in the sense that no matter what, you should feel empowered? You said, you used the word, I think, illusion or delusion. Is there a sense from the individual perspective where you should always kind of ignore, you know, the, ignore your own eyes, ignore the little forces that you are able to observe around you, that are like trying to mess with you of whether it's jealousy, whether it's hatred in its pure form, whether it's just hatred in its like deluded form, all that kind of stuff? And just kind of see yourself as empowered and confident and all those kinds of things. I mean, it certainly helps, but it's, there's a trade off, right? You have to be deluded enough to think that you can succeed. I mean, you can't get a PhD unless you're crazy enough to think you can invent something that no one else has come up with. I mean, that kind of massive delusion is that you have to be deluded enough to believe that you can succeed despite whatever odds you see in front of you, but you can't be so deluded that you don't think that you need to step out of the way of the oncoming train, right? So it's all a trade off, right? You have to kind of believe in yourself. It helps to have a support group around you in some way or another. I was able to find that, I've been able to find that wherever I've gone, even if it wasn't necessarily on the floor that I was in, I had lots of friends when I was here. Many of them still live here. And I've kept up with many of them. So I felt supported. And certainly I had my mother and my family and those people back home that I could always lean back on, even if it were a long distance call that cost money, which is not something that any of the kids today even know what I'm talking about. But back then it mattered, calling my mom was an expensive proposition. But you have that and it's fine. I think it helps. But you cannot be so deluded that you miss the obvious because it makes things slower and it makes you think you're doing better than you are and it will hurt you in the long run. You mentioned cops. You tell a story of being pulled over. Perhaps it happened more than once. More than once, for sure. One, could you tell that story? And in general, can you give me a sense of what the world looks like when the law doesn't always look at you with a blank slate? With a blank slate with objective eyes? I don't know how to say it more poetically. Well, I guess the, I don't either. I guess the answer is it looks exactly the way it looks now because this is the world that we happen to live in, right? It's people clustering and doing the things that they do and making decisions based on one or two bits of information they find relevant, which, by the way, are all positive feedback loops, which makes it easier for you to believe what you believed before because you behave in a certain way that makes it true and it goes on and circles and then cycles and cycles and then cycles. So it's just about being on edge. I do not, despite having made it over 50 now. Congratulations, brother. God, I have a few gray hairs here and there. You did pretty good. I think, I don't imagine I will ever see a police officer and not get very, very tense. Now, everyone gets a little tense because it probably means you're being pulled over for speeding or something, or you're going to get a ticket or whatever, right? I mean, the interesting thing about the law in general is that most human beings experience of it is fundamentally negative, right? You're only dealing with a lawyer if you're in trouble, except in a few very small circumstances, right? So that's an underlying reality. Now, imagine that that's also at the hands of the police officer. I remember the time when I got pulled over that time, halfway between Boston and Wellesley, actually. I remember thinking when he pulled his gun on me that if he shot me right now, he'd get away with it. That was the that was the worst thing that I felt about that particular moment, is that if he shoots me now, he will get away with it. It would be years later when I realized actually much worse than that is that he'd get away with it. And if it became a thing that other people knew about, odds would be, of course, that it wouldn't. But if it became a thing that other people knew about, if I was living in today's world as opposed to the world 30 years ago, that not only would get away with it, but that I would be painted a villain. I was probably big and scary, and I probably moved too fast, and if only I'd done what he said, and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, which is somehow worse, right? You know, that hurts not just you, you're dead, but your family, and the way people look at you, and look at your legacy or your history, that's terrible. And it would work. I absolutely believe it would have worked had he done it. Now, he didn't. I don't think he wanted to shoot me. I don't think he felt like killing anybody. He did not go out that night expecting to do that or planning on doing it, and I wouldn't be surprised if he never, ever did that or ever even pulled his gun again. I don't know the man's name. I don't remember anything about him. I do remember the gun. Guns are very big when they're in your face. I can tell you this much. They're much larger than they seem. But... And you're basically like speeding or something like that? He said I ran a light, I think. You ran a light. I don't think I ran a light, but you know, in fact, I may not have even gotten a ticket. I may have just gotten a warning. I think he was a little... But he pulled a gun. Yeah. Apparently I moved too fast or something. Rolled my window down before I should have. It's unclear. I think he thought I was going to do something, or at least that's how he behaved. So how, if we can take a little walk around your brain, how do you feel about that guy and how do you feel about cops after that experience? Well, I don't remember that guy, but my view on police officers is the same view I have about lots of things. Fire is an important and necessary thing in the world, but you must respect fire because it will burn you. Fire is a necessary evil in the sense that it can burn you. Necessary in the sense that, you know, heat and all the other things that we use fire for. So when I see a cop, I see a giant ball of flame and I just try to avoid it. And then some people might see a nice place, a nice thing to roast marshmallows with a family over. Which is fine, but I don't roast marshmallows. Okay. So let me go a little dark and I apologize. Just talked to Dan Carlin about Hitler for four hours. So sorry if I go dark here a little bit, but is it easy for this experience of just being careful with the fire and avoiding it to turn to hatred? Yeah, of course. And one might even argue that it is a logical conclusion, right? On the other hand, you've got to live in the world and I don't think it's helpful. Hate is something one should, I mean, hate is something that takes a lot of energy. So one should reserve it for when it is useful and not carried around with you all the time. Again, there's a big difference between the happy delusion that convinces you that you can actually get out of bed and make it to work today without getting hit by a car and the sad delusion that means you can not worry about this car that is barreling towards you, right? So we all have to be a little deluded because otherwise we're paralyzed, right? But one should not be ridiculous. If we go all the way back to something you said earlier about empathy, I think what I would ask other people to get out of this one of many, many, many stories is to recognize that it is real. People would ask me to empathize with the police officer. I would quote back statistics saying that being a police officer isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the United States, you're much more likely to get killed in a taxicab. Half of police officers are actually killed by suicide, but that means their lives are something, something's going on there with them and I would more than happy to be empathetic about what it is they go through and how they see the world. I think though that if we step back from what I feel, if we step back from what an individual police officer feels, you step up a level and all this, because all things tie back into interactive AI. The real problem here is that we've built a narrative. We built a big structure that has made it easy for people to put themselves into different pots in the different clusters and to basically forget that the people in the other clusters are ultimately like them. It is useful exercise to ask yourself sometimes, I think, that if I had grown up in a completely different house and a completely different household as a completely different person, if I had been a woman, would I see the world differently? Would I believe what that crazy person over there believes? And the answer is probably yes, because after all, they believe it. And fundamentally, they're the same as you. So then what can you possibly do to fix it? How do you fix Twitter? If you think Twitter needs to be broken or Facebook, if you think Facebook is broken, how do you fix racism? How do you fix any of these things? That's all structural. I mean, individual conversations matter a lot, but you have to create structures that allow people to have those individual conversations all the time in a way that is relatively safe and that allows them to understand that other people have had different experiences, but that ultimately we're the same, which sounds very, I don't even know what the right word is. I'm trying to avoid a word like saccharine, but it feels very optimistic. But I think that's okay. I think that's a part of the delusion, is you want to be a little optimistic and then recognize that the hard problem is actually setting up the structures in the first place, because it's in almost no one's interest to change the infrastructure. Right. I tend to believe that leaders have a big role to that, of selling that optimistic delusion to everybody, and that eventually leads to the building of the structures. But that requires a leader that unites, sort of unites everybody on a vision as opposed to divides on a vision, which is, this particular moment in history feels like there's a nonzero probability, if we go to the P, of something akin to a violent or a nonviolent civil war. This is one of the most divisive periods of American history in recent, you can speak to this from a perhaps a more knowledgeable and deeper perspective than me, but from my naive perspective, this seems like a very strange time. There's a lot of anger, and it has to do with people, I mean, for many reasons. One, the thing that's not spoken about, I think, much is the conflict of opinion, much is the quiet economic pain of millions that's like growing because of COVID, because of closed businesses, because of like lost dreams. So that's building, whatever that tension is building. The other is, there seems to be an elevated level of emotion. I'm not sure if you can psychoanalyze where that's coming from, but this sort of, from which the protests and so on percolated. It's like, why now? Why this particular moment in history? Oh, because time, enough time has passed, right? I mean, you know, the very first race riots were in Boston, not to draw anything from that. Really? When? Oh, this is before like... Going way, I mean, like the 1700s or whatever, right? I mean, there was a massive one in New York. I mean, I'm talking way, way, way back when. So Boston used to be the hotbed of riots. It's just what Boston was all about, or so I'm told from history class. There's an interesting one in New York. I remember when that was. Anyway, the point is, you know, basically you got to get another generation, old enough to be angry, but not so old to remember what happened the last time, right? And that's sort of what happens. But, you know, you said like two completely, you said two things there that I think are worth unpacking. One has to do with this sort of moment in time. And, you know, why? Why is this sort of up built? And the other has to do with a kind of, you know, sort of the economic reality of COVID. So I'm actually, I want to separate those things because, for example, you know, this happened before COVID happened, right? So let's separate these two things for a moment. Now, let me preface all this by saying that although I am interested in history, one of my three minors as an undergrad was history, specifically history, the 1960s. Interesting. The other was Spanish. And, okay, that's a mistake. Oh, I loved that. And history of Spanish and Spanish history, actually, but Spanish and the other was what we would now call cognitive science. But at the time, that's fascinating. Interesting. I minored in Cogsci here for grad school. That was really, that was really fascinating. It was a very different experience. I mean, it was a very it was really fascinating. It was a very different experience from all the computer science classes I've been taking, even the Cogsci classes I was taking at an undergrad. Anyway, I'm interested in history, but I'm hardly a historian, right? So, you know, forgive my, I will ask the audience to forgive my simplification. But I think the question that's always worth asking, as opposed, it's the same question, but a little different. Not why now, but why not before? Right? So why the 1950s, 60s civil rights movement as opposed to the 1930s, 1940s? Well, first off, there was a civil rights movement in the 30s and 40s. It just wasn't of the same character or quite as well known. Post World War II, lots of interesting things were happening. It's not as if a switch was turned on and Brown versus the Board of Education or the Montgomery bus boycott. And that's when it happened. These things been building up forever and go all the way back and all the way back and all the way back. And, you know, Harriet Tubman was not born in 1950, right? So, you know, we can take these things. It could have easily happened right after World War II. Yes. I think, and again, I'm not a scholar. I think that the big difference was TV. These things are visible. People can see them. It's hard to avoid, right? Why not James Farmer? Why Martin Luther King? Because one was born 20 years after the other, whatever. I think it turns out that, you know what King's biggest failure was in the early days? It was in Georgia. They were doing the usual thing, trying to integrate. And I forget the guy's name, but you can look this up. But he, a cop, he was a sheriff made a deal with the whole state of Georgia. We're going to take people and we are going to nonviolently put them in trucks. And then we're going to take them and put them in jails very far away from here. And we're going to do that. And we're not going to, there'll be no reason for the press to hang around. And they did that and it worked. And the press left and nothing changed. So next they went to Birmingham, Alabama and Bull O Connor. And you got to see on TV, little boys and girls being hit with fire hoses and being knocked down. And there was outrage and things changed, right? Part of the delusion is pretending that nothing bad is happening that might force you to do something big you don't want to do. But sometimes it gets put in your face and then you kind of can't ignore it. And a large part in my view of what happened right was that it was too public to ignore. Now we created other ways of ignoring it. Lots of change happened in the South, but part of that delusion was that it wasn't going to affect the West or the Northeast. And of course it did. And that caused its own set of problems, which went into the late sixties into the seventies. And, you know, in some ways we're living with that legacy now and so on. So why not what's happening now? Why didn't happen 10 years ago? I think it's people have more voices. There's not just more TV, there's social media. It's very easy for these things to kind of build on themselves and things are just quite visible. And there's demographic change. I mean, the world is changing rapidly, right? And so it's very difficult. You're now seeing people you could have avoided seeing most of your life growing up in a particular time. And it's happening, it's dispersing at a speed that is fast enough to cause concern for some people, but not so fast to cause massive negative reaction. So that's that. On the other hand, and again, that's a massive oversimplification, but I think there's something there anyway, at least something worth exploring. I'm happy to be yelled at by a real historian. Oh yeah. I mean, there's just the obvious thing. I mean, I guess you're implying, but not saying this. I mean, it seemed to have percolated the most with just a single video, for example, the George Floyd video. It's fascinating to think that whatever the mechanisms that put injustice in front of our face, not like directly in front of our face, those mechanisms are the mechanisms of change. Yeah. On the other hand, Rodney King. So no one remembers this. I seem to be the only person who remembers this, but sometime before the Rodney King incident, there was a guy who was a police officer who was saying that things were really bad in Southern California. And he was going to prove it by having some news, some camera people follow him around. And he says, I'm going to go into these towns and just follow me for a week. And you will see that I'll get harassed. And like the first night he goes out there and he crosses into the city, some cops pull him over and he's a police officer. Remember, they don't know that. Of course they like shove his face through a glass window. This was on the new, like I distinctly remember watching this as a kid. Actually, I guess I wasn't a kid. I was in college, I was in grad school at the time. So that's not enough. Well, it disappeared like a day late. It didn't go viral. Yeah. Whatever that is, whatever that magic thing is. And whatever it was in 92, it was harder to go viral in 92, right? Or 91, actually it must've been 90 or 91, but that happened. And like two days later, it's like it never happened. Again, nobody remembers this, but I'm like the only person. Sometimes I think I must've dreamed it. Anyway, Rodney King happens. It goes viral or the moral equivalent thereof at the time. And eventually we get April 29th. And I don't know what the difference was between the two things, other than one thing caught on and one thing didn't. Maybe what's happening now is two things are feeding onto one another. One is more people are willing to believe. And the other is there's easier and easier ways to give evidence. Cameras, body cams or whatever, but we're still finding ourselves telling the same story. It's the same thing over and over again. I would invite you to go back and read the op eds from what people were saying about the violence is not the right answer after Rodney King. And then go back to 1980 and the big riots that were happening around then and read the same op ed. It's the same words over and over and over again. I mean, there's your remembering history right there. I mean, it's like literally the same words. Like it could have just caught, but I'm surprised no one got flagged for plagiarism. It's interesting if you have an opinion on the question of violence and the popular perhaps caricature of Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King. You know, Malcolm X was older than Martin Luther King. People kind of have it in their head that he's younger. Well, he died sooner, but only by a few years. People think of MLK as the older statesman and they think of Malcolm X as the young, angry, whatever, but that's more of a narrative device. It's not true at all. I don't, I just, I reject the choice as I think it's a false choice. I think they're just things that happen. You just do, as I said, hatred is not, it takes a lot of energy, but you know, every once in a while you have to fight. One thing I will say without taking a moral position, which I will not take on this matter, violence has worked. Yeah, that's the annoying thing. That's the annoying thing. It seems like over the top anger works. Outrage works. So you can say like being calm and rational and just talking it out is going to lead to progress. But it seems like if you just look through history being irrationally upset is the way you make progress. Well, it's certainly the way that you get someone to notice you. Yeah. And if they don't notice you, I mean, what's the difference between that and what did you, again, without taking a moral position on this, I'm just trying to observe history here. If you, maybe if television didn't exist, the civil rights movement doesn't happen or it takes longer or it takes a very different form. Maybe if social media doesn't exist, a whole host of things, positive and negative don't happen. And what do any of those things do other than expose things to people? Violence is a way of shouting. I mean, many people far more talented and thoughtful than I have have said this in one form or another, right? That violence is the voice of the unheard. It's a thing that people do when they feel as if they have no other option. And sometimes we agree and sometimes we disagree. Sometimes we think they're justified. Sometimes we think they are not, but regardless, it is a way of shouting. And when you shout, people tend to hear you, even if they don't necessarily hear the words that you're saying, they hear that you were shouting. I see no way. So another way of putting it, which I think is less, let us just say provocative, but I think is true is that all change, particularly change that impacts power requires struggle. The struggle doesn't have to be violent, you know, but it's a struggle nonetheless. The powerful don't give up power easily. I mean, why should they? But even so, it still has to be a struggle. And by the way, this isn't just about, you know, violent political, whatever, nonviolent political change, right? This is true for understanding calculus, right? I mean, everything requires a struggle. We're back to talking about faculty hiring. At the end of the day, in the end of the day, it all comes down to faculty hiring. All a metaphor. Faculty hiring is a metaphor for all of life. Let me ask a strange question. Do you think everything is going to be okay in the next year? Do you have a hope that we're going to be okay? I tend to think that everything's going to be okay because I just tend to think that everything's going to be okay. My mother says something to me a lot and always has, and I find it quite comforting, which is this too shall pass and this too shall pass. Now, this too shall pass is not just this bad thing is going away. Everything passes. I mean, I have a 16 year old daughter who's going to go to college probably at about 15 minutes, given how fast she seems to be growing up. And you know, I get to hang out with her now, but one day I won't. She'll ignore me just as much as I ignored my parents when I was in college and went to grad school. This too shall pass. But I think that one day, if we're all lucky, you live long enough to look back on something that happened a while ago, even if it was painful and mostly it's a memory. So yes, I think it'll be okay. What about humans? Do you think we'll live into the 21st century? I certainly hope so. Are you worried that we might destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, with AGI, with engineering? I'm not worried about AGI doing it, but I am worried. I mean, at any given moment, right? Also, but you know, at any given moment, a comet could, I mean, you know, whatever. I tend to think that outside of things completely beyond our control, we have a better chance than not of making it. You know, I talked to Alex Filipenko from Berkeley. He was talking about comets and that they can come out of nowhere. And that was a realization to me. Wow. We're just watching this darkness and they can just enter. And then we have less than a month. And yet you make it from day to day. That one shall not pass. Well, maybe for Earth they'll pass, but not for humans. But I'm just choosing to believe that it's going to be okay. And we're not going to get hit by an asteroid, at least not while I'm around. And if we are, well, there's very little I can do about it. So I might as well assume it's not going to happen. It makes food taste better. It makes food taste better. So you, out of the millions of things you've done in your life, you've also began the This Week in Black History calendar of facts. There's like a million questions that can ask here. You said you're not a historian, but is there, let's start at the big history question of, is there somebody in history, in black history that you draw a lot of philosophical or personal inspiration from, or you just find interesting or a moment in history you find interesting? Well, I find the entirety of the 40s to the 60s and the civil rights movement that didn't happen and did happen at the same time during then quite inspirational. I mean, I've read quite a bit of the time period, at least I did in my younger days when I had more time to read as many things as I wanted to. What was quirky about This Week in Black History when I started in the 80s was how focused it was. It was because of the sources I was stealing from. And I was very much stealing from sort of like, I'd take calendars, anything I could find, Google didn't exist, right? And I just pulled as much as I could and just put it together in one place for other people. What ended up being quirky about it, and I started getting people sending me information on it, was the inventors. People who, you know, Gerard Morgan to Benjamin Banneker, right? People who were inventing things. At a time when, how in the world did they manage to invent anything? Like, all these other things were happening, mother necessity, right? All these other things were happening. And, you know, there were so many terrible things happening around them. And, you know, they went to the wrong state at the wrong time. They may never, never come back, but they were inventing things we use, right? And it was always inspiring to me that people would still create even under those circumstances. I got a lot out of that. I also learned a few lessons. I think, you know, the Charles Richard Drews of the world, you know, you create things that impact people. You don't necessarily get credit for them. And that's not right, but it's also okay. TK You okay with that? CK Up to a point, yeah. I mean, look, in our world, all we really have is credit. TK I was always bothered by how much value credit is given. CK That's the only thing you got. I mean, if you're an academic in some sense, well, it isn't the only thing you've got, but it feels that way sometimes. TK But you got the actual, we're all going to be dead soon. You got the joy of having created the, you know, the credit with Jan. I've talked to Jorgen Schmidhuber, right? The Turing Award given to three people for deep learning. And you could say that a lot of other people should be on that list. It's the Nobel Prize question. Yeah, it's sad. It's sad. And people like talking about it. But I feel like in the long arc of history, the only person who will be remembered is Einstein, Hitler, maybe Elon Musk. And the rest of us are just like... CK Well, you know, someone asked me about immortality once and I said, and I stole this from somebody else. I don't remember who, but it was, you know, I asked them, what's your great grandfather's name? Any of them? Of course, they don't know. Most of us do not know. I mean, I'm not entirely sure. I know my grandparents, all my grandparents names. I know what I called them, right? I don't know their middle names, for example. It's within living memory, so I could find out. Actually, my grandfather didn't know when he was born. I had no idea how old he was, right? But I definitely don't know any of my great grandparents are. So in some sense, immortality is doing something preferably positive so that your great grandchildren know who you are, right? And that's kind of what you can hope for, which is very depressing in some ways. I could turn it into something uplifting if you need me to, but it's simple, right? It doesn't matter. I don't have to know my great grandfather was to know that I wouldn't be here without him. And I don't know who my great grandchildren are. Certainly my great, great grandchildren are, and I'll probably never meet them. Although I would very much like to, but hopefully I'll set the world in motion in such a way that their lives will be better than they would have been if I hadn't done that. Well, certainly they wouldn't have existed if I hadn't done the things that I did. So I think that's a good positive thing you live on through other people. Are you afraid of death? I don't know if I'm afraid of death, but I don't like it. That's another t shirt. I mean, do you ponder it? Do you think about the inevitability of oblivion? I do occasionally. This feels like a very rushing conversation. I will tell you a story, something that happened to me recently. If you look very carefully, you will see I have a scar, which by the way, is an interesting story of its own about why people have half of their thyroid taken out. Some people get scars and some don't. But anyway, I had half my thyroid taken out. The way I got there, by the way, is its own interesting story, but I won't go into it. Just suffice it to say, I did what I keep telling people you should never do, which is never go to the doctor unless you have to, because there's nothing good that's ever going to come out of a doctor's visit. So I went to the doctor to look at one thing. It's a little bump I had on the side that I thought might be something bad because my mother made me. And I went there and he's like, oh, it's nothing. But by the way, your thyroid is huge. Can you breathe? Yes, I can breathe. Are you sure? Because it's pushing on your windpipe. You should be dead. So I ended up going there. And to look at my thyroid, it was growing. I had what's called a goiter. And he said, we're going to have to take it out at some point. When? Sometime before you're 85, probably. But if you wait till you're 85, that'll be really bad because you don't want to have surgery when you're 85 years old, if you can help it. Certainly not the kind of surgery it takes to take out your thyroid. So I went there and I would decide I would put it off until December 19th because my birthday is December 18th. And I wouldn't be able to say I made it to 49 or whatever. So I said, I'll wait till after my birthday. In the first six months of that, nothing changed. Apparently in the next three months, it had grown. I hadn't noticed this at all. I went and had surgery. They took out half of it. The other half is still there and working fine, by the way. I don't have to take a pill or anything like that. It's great. I'm in the hospital room and the doctor comes in. I've got these things in my arm. They're going to do whatever. They're talking to me. And the anesthesiologist says, huh, your blood pressure is through the roof. Do you have high blood pressure? I said, no, but I'm terrified if that helps you at all. And the anesthesist, who's the nurse who supports the anesthesiologist, if I got that right, said, oh, don't worry about it. I've just put some stuff in your IV. You're going to be feeling pretty good in a couple of minutes. And I remember turning and saying, well, I'm going to feel pretty good in a couple of minutes. Next thing I know, there's this guy and he's moving my bed. And he's talking to me and I have this distinct impression that I've met this guy and I should know what he's talking about, but I kind of just don't remember what just happened. And I look up and I see the tiles going by and I'm like, oh, it's just like in the movies where you see the tiles go by. And then I have this brief thought that I'm in an infinitely long warehouse and there's someone sitting next to me. And I remember thinking, oh, she's not talking to me. And then I'm back in the hospital bed. And in between the time where the tiles were going by and I got in the hospital bed, something like five hours had passed. Apparently it had grown so much that it was a four and a half hour procedure instead of an hour long procedure. I lost a neck size and a half. It was pretty big. Apparently it was as big as my heart. Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because... It's a hell of a story already. Between tiles going by and me waking up in my hospital bed, no time passed. There was no sensation of time passing. When I go to sleep and I wake up in the morning, I have this feeling that time has passed. This feeling that something has physically changed about me. Nothing happened between the time they put the magic juice in me and the time that I woke up. Nothing. By the way, my wife was there with me talking. Apparently I was also talking. I don't remember any of this, but luckily I didn't say anything I wouldn't normally say. My memory of it is I would talk to her and she would teleport around the room. And then I accused her of witchcraft and that was the end of that. Her point of view is I would start talking and then I would fall asleep and then I would wake up and leave off where I was before. I had no notion of any time passing. I kind of imagine that that's death, is the lack of sensation of time passing. And on the one hand, I am, I don't know, soothed by the idea that I won't notice. On the other hand, I'm very unhappy at the idea that I won't notice. So I don't know if I'm afraid of death, but I'm completely sure that I don't like it and that I particularly would prefer to discover on my own whether immortality sucks and be able to make a decision about it. That's what I would prefer. You like to have a choice in the matter. I would like to have a choice in the matter. Well, again, on the Russian thing, I think the finiteness of it is the thing that gives it a little flavor, a little spice. Well, in reinforcement learning, we believe that. That's why we have discount factors. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what you do. Amen. Well, let me, one last question sticking on the Russian theme. You talked about your great grandparents not remembering their name. What do you think is the, in this kind of Markov chain that is life, what do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? Well, in a world where eventually you won't know who your great grandchildren are, I'm reminded of something I heard once or I read once that I really like, which is, it is well worth remembering that the entire universe, save for one trifling exception, is composed entirely of others. And I think that's the meaning of life. Charles, this is one of the best conversations I've ever had. And I get to see you tomorrow again to hang out with who looks to be one of the most, how should I say, interesting personalities that I'll ever get to meet with Michael Lippmann. So I can't wait. I'm excited to have had this opportunity. Thank you for traveling all the way here. It was amazing. I'm excited. I always love Georgia Tech. I'm excited to see with you being involved there what the future holds. So thank you for talking to me. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Isbell and thank you to our sponsors, Neuro, the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that I used to give my brain a quick caffeine boost, Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy, Masterclass, online courses that I watch from some of the most amazing humans in history, and Cash App, the app I used to send money to friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some poetic words from Martin Luther King Jr. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America | Lex Fridman Podcast #135

The following is a conversation with Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History and Common Sense Podcasts. To me, Hardcore History is one of, if not the greatest podcast ever made. Dan and Joe Rogan are probably the two main people who got me to fall in love with the medium of podcasting as a fan and eventually as a podcaster myself. Meeting Dan was surreal. To me, he was not just a mere human like the rest of us, since his voice has been a guide through some of the darkest moments of human history for me. Meeting him was like meeting Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, and all of the most powerful leaders in history all at once in a crappy hotel room in the middle of Oregon. It turns out that he is in fact just a human and truly one of the good ones. This was a pleasure and an honor for me. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Second is SimpliSafe, a home security company I use to monitor and protect my apartment. Third is Magic Spoon, low carb, keto friendly cereal that I think is delicious. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think we're living through one of the most challenging moments in American history. To me, the way out is through reason and love. Both require a deep understanding of human nature and of human history. This conversation is about both. I am, perhaps hopelessly, optimistic about our future. But, if indeed we stand at the precipice of the great filter, watching our world consumed by fire, think of this little podcast conversation as the appetizer to the final meal before the apocalypse. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the Five Stars on Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, finally, here's my conversation with the great Dan Carlin. Let's start with the highest philosophical question. Do you think human beings are fundamentally good, or are all of us capable of both good and evil, and it's the environment that molds how we, the trajectory that we take through life? How do we define evil? Evil seems to be a situational eye of the beholder kind of question. So, if we define evil, maybe I can get a better idea of, and that could be a whole show, couldn't it, defining evil. But when we say evil, what do we mean? That's a slippery one, but I think there's some way in which your existence, your presence in the world, leads to pain and suffering and destruction for many others in the rest of the world. So, you steal the resources and you use them to create more suffering than there was before in the world. So, I suppose it's somehow deeply connected to this other slippery word, which is suffering. As you create suffering in the world, you bring suffering to the world. But here's the problem, I think, with it, because I fully see where you're going with that, and I understand it. The problem is the question of the reason for inflicting suffering. So, sometimes one might inflict suffering upon one group of individuals in order to maximize a lack of suffering with another group of individuals, or one who might not be considered evil at all might make the rational, seemingly rational choice of inflicting pain and suffering on a smaller group of people in order to maximize the opposite of that for a larger group of people. Yeah, that's one of the dark things about, I've spoken and read the work of Stephen Kotkin, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the historian, and he's basically a Stalin, a Joseph Stalin scholar. And one of the things I realized, I'm not sure where to put Hitler, but with Stalin, it really seems that he was sane and he thought he was doing good for the world. I really believe from everything I've read about Stalin that he believed that communism is good for the world. And if you have to kill a few people along the way, it's like you said, the small groups, if you have to sort of remove the people that stand in the way of this utopian system of communism, then that's actually good for the world. And it didn't seem to me that he could even consider the possibility that he was evil. He really thought he was doing good for the world. And that stuck with me because he's one of the most, is to our definition of evil, he seems to have brought more evil onto this world than almost any human in history. And I don't know what to do with that. Well, I'm fascinated with the concept, so fascinated by it that the very first hardcore history show we ever did, which was a full 15 or 16 minutes, was called Alexander versus Hitler. And the entire question about it was the motivations, right? So if you go to a court of law because you killed somebody, one of the things they're going to consider is why did you kill them, right? And if you killed somebody, for example, in self defense, you're going to be treated differently than if you malicious killed somebody maliciously to take their wallet, right? And in the show, we wondered, because I don't really make pronouncements, but we wondered about if you believe Hitler's writings, for example, Mein Kampf, which is written by a guy who's a political figure who wants to get, so I mean, it's about as believable as any other political tract would be. But in his mind, the things that he said that he had to do were designed for the betterment of the German people, right? Whereas Alexander the Great, once again, this is somebody from more than 2000 years ago, so with lots of propaganda in the intervening years, but one of the views of Alexander the Great is that the reason he did what he did was to, for lack of a better word, write his name in a more permanent graffiti on the pages of history, right? In other words, to glorify himself. And if that's the case, does that make Alexander a worse person than Hitler because Hitler thought he was doing good, whereas Alexander, if you believe the interpretation, was simply trying to exalt Alexander. So the motivations of the people doing these things, it seems to me, matter. I don't think you can just sit there and go, the only thing that matters is the end result, because that might've been an unintentional byproduct, in which case, that person, had you been able to show them the future, might have changed what they were doing. So were they evil or misguided or wrong or made the wrong? So, and I hate to do that because there's certain people like Hitler that I don't feel deserve the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, if you're fascinated by the concept of evil and you delve into it deeply enough, you're going to want to understand why these evil people did what they did. And sometimes it can confuse the hell out of you. You know, who wants to sit there and try to see things from Hitler's point of view to get a better understanding and sort of commiserate with. So, but I'm, obviously, first history show, I'm fascinated with the concept. So do you think it's possible, if we put ourselves in the mindset of some of the people that have led, created so much suffering in the world, that all of them had their motivations were, had good intentions underlying them? No, I don't, it's simply because there's so many, I mean, the law of averages would suggest that that's not true. I guess it is pure evil possible, meaning you, again, it's slippery, but you, the suffering is the goal. Suffering, intentional suffering. Yeah. Yes, I think that, and I think that there's historical figures that one could point, but that gets to the deeper question of, are these people sane? Do they have something wrong with them? Are they twisted from something in their youth? You know, these are the kinds of things where you start to delve into the psychological makeup of these people. In other words, is anybody born evil? And I actually believe that some people are. I think the DNA can get scrambled up in ways. I think the question of evil is important too, because I think it's an eye of the beholder thing. I mean, if Hitler, for example, had been successful and we were today on the sixth or seventh leader of the Third Reich, since I think his entire history would be viewed through a different lens, because that's the way we do things, right? Genghis Khan looks different to the Mongolians than he does to the residents of Baghdad, right? And I think, so an eye of the beholder question, I think comes into all these sorts of things. As you said, it's a very slippery question. Where do you put, as somebody who's fascinated by military history, where do you put violence in terms of the human condition? Is it core to being human or is it just a little tool that we use every once in a while? So I'm gonna respond to your question with a question. What do you see the difference being between violence and force? Let me go farther. I'm not sure that violence is something that we have to put up with as human beings forever, that we must resign ourselves to violence forever. But I have a much harder time seeing us able to abolish force. And there's going to be some ground where if those two things are not the same, and I don't know that maybe they are, where there's certainly some crossover. And I think force, you're an engineer, you'll understand this better than I did, but think about it as a physical law. If you can't stop something from moving in a certain direction without pushing back in that same direction, I'm not sure that you can have a society or a civilization without the ability to use a counter force when things are going wrong, whether it's on an individual level, right? A person attacks another person, so you step in to save that person, or even at the highest levels of politics or anything else, a counter force to stop the inertia or the impetus of another movement. So I think that force is a simple, almost law of physics in human interaction, especially at the civilizational level. I think civilization requires a certain amount of, if not violence, then force. And again, they've talked, I mean, it goes back into St. Augustine, all kinds of Christian beliefs about the proper use of force and people have philosophically tried to decide between can you have sort of an ahimsa, Buddhists sort of, we will be nonviolent toward everything and exert no force, or there's a reason to have force in order to create the space for good. I think force is inevitable. Now, we can talk, and I've not come up to the conclusion myself, if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence. I mean, is a nonviolent force enough, or is violence when done for the cause of good a different thing than violence done either for the cause of evil, as you would say, or simply for random reasons? I mean, we humans lack control sometimes. We can be violent for no apparent reason or goal. And that's it. I mean, you look at the criminal justice system alone and the way we interact with people who are acting out in ways that we as a society have decided is intolerable. Can you deal with that without force and at some level violence? I don't know. Can you maintain peacefulness without force? I don't know. Just to be a little bit more specific about the idea of force, do you put force as general enough to include force in the space of ideas? So you mentioned Buddhism or religion or just Twitter. I can think of no things farther apart than that. Okay. Is the battles we do in the space of ideas of the great debates throughout history, do you put force into that? Or do you, in this conversation, are we trying to right now keep it to just physical force in saying that you have an intuition that force might be with us much longer than violence? I think the two bleed together. So take, because it's always my go to example. I'm afraid and I'm sure that the listeners all hate it, but take Germany during the 1920s, early 1930s, before the Nazis came to power. And they were always involved in some level of force, beating up in the streets or whatever it might be. But think about it more like an intellectual discussion until a certain point. It would be difficult, I imagine, to keep the intellectual counter force of ideas from at some point degenerating into something that's more coercion, counter force, if we want to use the phrases we were just talking about. So I think the two are intimately connected. I mean, actions follow thought, right? And at a certain point, I think, especially when one is not achieving the goals that they want to achieve through a peaceful discussion or argumentation or trying to convince the other side, that sometimes the next level of operations is something a little bit more physically imposing, if that makes sense. We go from the intellectual to the physical. Yeah, so it too easily spills over into violence. Yes, and one leads to the other often. So you kind of implied perhaps a hopeful message. Let me ask it in the form of a question. Do you think we'll always have war? I think it goes to the first question too. So for example, what do you do? I mean, let's play with nation states now, although I don't know that nation states are something we should think of as a permanent construct forever. But how is one nation state supposed to prevent another nation state from acting in ways that it would see as either detrimental to the global community or detrimental to the interest of their own nation state? I think we've had this question of going back to ancient times, but certainly in the 20th century, this has come up quite a bit. I mean, the whole Second World War argument sometimes revolves around the idea of what the proper counterforce should be. Can you create an entity, a league of nations, the United Nations, a one world entity maybe even that alleviates the need for counterforce involving mass violence and armies and navies and those things? I think that's an open discussion we're still having. It's good to think through that because having something like a United Nations, there's usually a centralized control. So there's humans at the top, there's committees and usually like leaders emerge as singular figures that then can become corrupted by power. And it's just a really important, it feels like a really important thought experiment and something to really rigorously think through. How can you construct systems of government that are stable enough to push us towards less and less war and less and less unstable and another tough word, another tough word which is unfair of application of force? You know, that's really at the core of the question that we're trying to figure out as humans, as our weapons get better and better and better destroying ourselves, it feels like it's important to think about how we minimize the over application or unfair application of force. There's other elements that come into play too. You and I are discussing this at the very high intellectual level of things, but there's also a tail wagging the dog element to this. So think of a society of warriors, a tribal society from a long time ago. How much do the fact that you have warriors in your society and that their reason for existing, what they take pride in, what they train for, what their status in their own civilization, how much does that itself drive the responses of that society, right? How much do you need war to legitimize warriors? That's the old argument that you get to and we've had this in the 20th century too, that the creation of arms and armies creates an incentive to use them, right? And that they themselves can drive that incentive as a justification for their reasons for existence. That's where we start to talk about the interactivity of all these different elements of society upon one another. So when we talk about governments and war, well, you need to take into account the various things those governments have put into place in terms of systems and armies and things like that to protect themselves, right? For reasons we can all understand, but they exert a force on your range of choices, don't they? It's true. You're making me realize that in my upbringing and I think upbringing of many, warriors are heroes. To me, I don't know where that feeling comes from, but to sort of die fighting is an honorable way to die, it feels like that. I've always had a problem with this because as a person interested in military history, the distinction is important and I try to make it at different levels. So at base level, the people who are out there on the front lines doing the fighting, to me, those people can be compared with police officers and firemen and people, fire persons, but I mean, people that are involved in an ethical attempt to perform a task which ultimately one can see in many situations as being a saving sort of task, right? Or if nothing else, a self sacrifice for what they see as the greater good. Now, I draw a distinction between the individuals and the entity that they're a part of, a military, and I certainly draw a distinction between the military and then the entire, for lack of a better word, military industrial complex that that service is a part of. I feel a lot less moral attachment to those upper echelons than I do the people on the ground. The people on the ground could be any of us and have been in a lot of, we have a very professional sort of military now where it's a very, a subset of the population, but in other periods of time, we've had conscription and drafts and it hasn't been a subset of the population, it's been the population, right? And so it is the society oftentimes going to war and I make a distinction between those warriors and the entities either in the system that they're a part of the military or the people that control the military at the highest political levels. I feel a lot less moral attachment to them and I'm much harsher about how I feel about them. I do not consider the military itself to be heroic and I do not consider the military industrial complex to be heroic. I do think that is a tail wagging the dog situation. I do think that draws us into looking at military endeavors as a solution to the problem much more quickly than we otherwise might. And to be honest, to tie it all together, I actually look at the victims of this as the soldiers we were talking about. If you set a fire to send firemen into to fight, then I feel bad for the firemen. I feel like you've abused the trust that you give those people, right? So when people talk about war, I always think that the people that we have to make sure that a war is really necessary in order to protect are the people that you're gonna send over there to fight that. The greatest victims in our society of war are often the warriors. So in my mind, when we see these people coming home from places like Iraq, a place where I would have made the argument and did at the time that we didn't belong. To me, those people are victims and I know they don't like to think about themselves that way because it runs totally counter to the ethos. But if you're sending people to protect this country's shores, those are heroes. If you're sending people to go do something that they otherwise probably don't need to do but they're there for political reasons or anything else you wanna put in that's not defense related, well then you've made victims of our heroes. And so I feel like we do a lot of talk about our troops and our soldiers and stuff but we don't treat them as valuable as the rhetoric makes them sound. Otherwise, we would be much more careful about where we put them. If you're gonna send my son, and I don't have a son, I have daughters, but if you're gonna send my son into harm's way, I'm going to demand that you really need to be sending him into harm's way and I'm going to be angry at you if you put him into harm's way if it doesn't warrant it. And so I have much more suspicion about the system that sends these people into these situations where they're required to be heroic than I do the people on the ground that I look at as either the people that are defending us in situations like the Second World War, for example, or the people that turn out to be the individual victims of a system where they're just a cog in a machine and the machine doesn't really care as much about them as the rhetoric and the propaganda would insinuate. Yeah, and as my own family history, it would be nice if we could talk about there's a gray area in the places that you're talking about. There's a gray area in everything. In everything. But when that gray area is part of your own blood, as it is for me, it's worth shining a light on somehow. Sure, give me an example of what you mean. So you did a program of four episodes of Ghosts of the Ostfront. Yeah. So I was born in the Soviet Union. I was raised in Moscow. My dad was born and raised in Kiev. My grandmother, who just recently passed away, was raised in Ukraine. A city. It's a small city on the border between Russia and Ukraine. I have a grandfather born in Kiev. In Kiev. The interesting thing about the timing of everything, as you might be able to connect, is she survived. She's the most badass woman I've ever encountered in my life and most of the warrior spirit I carry is probably from her. She survived Polar Mor, the Ukrainian starvation of the 30s. She was a beautiful teenage girl during the Nazi occupation of, so she survived all of that. And of course, family that everybody, and so many people died through that whole process. And one of the things you talk about in your program is that the gray area is, even with the warriors, it happened to them, just like as you're saying now, they didn't have a choice. So my grandfather on the other side, he was a machine gunner that was in Ukraine that. In the Red Army? In the Red Army, yeah. And they threw, like the statement was that there's, I don't know if it's obvious or not, but the rule was there's no surrender. So you better die. So you, I mean, you're basically, the goal was when he was fighting and he was lucky enough, one of the only to survive by being wounded early on is there was a march of Nazis towards, I guess, Moscow. And the whole goal in Ukraine was to slow every, to slow them into the winter. I mean, I view him as such a hero and he believed that he's indestructible, which is survivor bias. And that, you know, bullets can't hurt him. And that's what everybody believed. And of course, basically everyone that, he quickly rose to the ranks, let's just put it this way, because everybody died. It was just bodies dragging these heavy machine guns, like always, you know, always slowly retreating, shooting and retreating, shooting and retreating. And I don't know, he was a hero to me, like I always, I grew up thinking that he was the one that sort of defeated the Nazis, right? And, but the reality that there could be another perspective, which is all of this happened to him by the incompetence of Stalin, the incompetence and men of the Soviet Union being used like pawns in a shittily played game of chess, right? So like the one narrative is of him as a victim, as you're kind of describing. And then somehow that's more paralyzing and that's more, I don't know, it feels better to think of him as a hero and as Russia, Soviet Union saving the world. I mean, that narrative also, is in the United States that the United States was key in saving the world from the Nazis. It feels like that narrative is powerful for people. I'm not sure, and I carry it still with me, but when I think about the right way to think about that war, I'm not sure if that's the correct narrative. Let me suggest something. There's a line that a Marine named Eugene Sledge had to say once and I keep it on my phone because it's, it makes a real distinction. And he said, the front line is really where the war is. And anybody, even a hundred yards behind the front line doesn't know what it's really like. Now, the difference is, is there are lots of people miles behind the front line that are in danger, right? You can be in a medical unit in the rear and artillery could strike you, planes could strike me. You could be in danger, but at the front line, there are two different things. One is that, and at least, and I'm doing a lot of reading on this right now and reading a lot of veterans accounts. James Jones, who wrote books like From Here to Eternity, fictional accounts of the Second World War, but he based them on his own service. He was at Guadalcanal, for example, in 1942. And Jones had said that the evolution of a soldier in front line action requires a lot of front line action requires an almost surrendering to the idea that you're going to live, that you become accustomed to the idea that you're going to die. And he said, you're a different person simply for considering that thought seriously, because most of us don't. But what that allows you to do is to do that job at the front line, right? If you're too concerned about your own life, you become less of a good guy at your job, right? The other thing that the people in the 100 yards at the front line do that the people in the rear medical unit really don't, is you kill and you kill a lot, right? You don't just, oh, there's a sniper back here so I shot him. It's we go from one position to another and we kill lots of people. Those things will change you. And what that tends to do, not universally, because I've read accounts from Red Army soldiers and they're very patriotic, right? But a lot of that patriotism comes through years later as part of the nostalgia and the remembering. When you're down at that front 100 yards, it is often boiled down to a very small world. So your grandfather, was it your grandfather? Grandfather. At the machine gun, he's concerned about his position and his comrades and the people who he owes a responsibility to. And those, it's a very small world at that point. And to me, that's where the heroism is, right? He's not fighting for some giant world, civilizational thing. He's fighting to save the people next to him. And his own life at the same time because they're saving him too. And that there is a huge amount of heroism to that. And that gets to our question about force earlier. Why would you use force? Well, how about to protect these people on either side of me, right? Their lives. Now, is there hatred? Yeah, I hated the Germans for what they were doing. As a matter of fact, I got a note from a poll not that long ago. And I have this tendency to refer to the Nazis, right? The regime that was, and he said, why do you keep calling them Nazis? He says, say what they were. They were Germans. And this guy wanted me to not absolve Germany by saying, oh, it was this awful group of people that took over your country. He said, the Germans did this. And there's that bitterness where he says, let's not forget what they did to us and what we had to do back, right? So for me, when we talk about these combat situations, the reason I call these people heroic is because of, they're fighting to defend things we could all understand. I mean, if you come after my brother and I take a machine gun and shoot you and you're gonna overrun me, I mean, that becomes a situation where we talked about counterforce earlier. Much easier to call yourself a hero when you're saving people or you're saving this town right behind you. And you know, if they get through your machine gun, they're gonna burn these villages. They're gonna throw these people out in the middle of winter, these families. That to me is a very different sort of heroism than this amorphous idea of patriotism. And you know, patriotism is a thing that we often get used with, right? People manipulate us through love of country and all this because they understand that this is something we feel very strongly, but they use it against us sometimes in order to whip up a war fever or to get people. I mean, there's a great line and I wish I could remember it in its entirety that Herman Goering had said about how easy it was to get the people into a war. He says, you know, you just appeal to their patriotism, you, I mean, there's buttons that you can push and they take advantage of things like love of country and the way we have a loyalty and an admiration to the warriors who put their lives on the line. These are manipulatable things in the human species that reliably can be counted on to move us in directions that in a more sober, reflective state of mind we would consider differently. It gets the, I mean, you get this war fever up and people wave flags and they start denouncing the enemy and they start signing, you know, we've seen it over and over and over again in ancient times this happened. But the love of country is also beautiful. So I haven't seen it in America as much. So people in America love their country, like this patriotism is strong in America, but it's not as strong as I remember, even with my sort of being younger, the love of the Soviet Union. Now, was it the Soviet Union this requires a distinction or was it mother Russia? What it really was, was the communist party. Okay, so it was the system in place, okay. The system in place, like loving, I haven't quite deeply synchronized exactly what you love. I think you love that like populist message of the worker, of the common man, the common person. Let me draw the comparison then. And I often say this, that the United States like the Soviet Union is an ideological based society, right? So you take a country like France, it doesn't matter which French government you're in now. The French have been the French for a long time, right? It's not based on an ideology, right? Whereas what unites the United States is an ideology, freedom, liberty, the constitution. This is what draws, you know, it's the e pluribus unum kind of the idea, right? That out of many one, well, what binds all these unique different people? The shared beliefs, this ideology. The Soviet Union was the same way. Cause as you know, the Soviet Union, Russia was merely one part of the Soviet Union. And if you believe the rhetoric until Stalin's time, everybody was going to be united under this ideological banner someday, right? It was a global revolution. So ideological societies are different. And to be a fan of the ideological framework and goal, I mean, I'm a Liberty person, right? I would like to see everybody in the world have my system of government, which is part of a bias, right? Because they might not want that. But I think it's better for everyone cause I think it's better for me. At the same time, when the ideology, if you consider, and you know, this stems from ideas of the enlightenment and there's a bias there. So my bias are toward the, but you feel, and this is why you say, we're going to bring freedom to Iraq. We're going to bring freedom to here. We're going to bring freedom because we think we're spreading to you something that is just undeniably positive. We're going to free you and give you this. It's hard for me to wipe my own bias away from there, right? Cause if I were in Iraq, for example, I would want freedom, right? But if you then leave and let the Iraqis vote for whomever they want, are they going to vote for somebody that will, I mean, you know, you look at Russia now and I hear from Russians quite a bit because so much of my views on Russia and the Soviet Union were formed in my formative years. And, you know, we were not hearing from many people in the Soviet Union back then, but now you do. You hear from Russians today who will say, your views on Stalin are archaic and cold. You know, so you try to reorient your beliefs a little bit, but it goes to this idea of, if you gave the people in Russia a free and fair vote, will they vote for somebody who promises them a free and open society based on enlightenment democratic principles? Or will they vote for somebody, we in the US would go, what are they doing? They're voting for some strong man who's just good. You know, so I think it's very hard to throw away our own biases and preconceptions. And, you know, it's an all eye of the beholder kind of thing. But when you're talking about ideological societies, it is very difficult to throw off all the years of indoctrination into the superiority of your system. I mean, listen, in the Soviet Union, Marxism one way or another was part of every classrooms. You know, you could be studying geometry and they'll throw Marxism in there somehow, because that's what united the society. And that's what gave it a higher purpose. And that's what made it in the minds of the people who were its defenders, a superior, morally superior system. And we do the same thing here. In fact, most people do, but see, you're still French, no matter what the ideology or the government might be. So in that sense, it's funny that there would be a cold war with these two systems, because they're both ideologically based systems involving peoples of many different backgrounds who are united under the umbrella of the ideology. First of all, that's brilliantly put. I'm in a funny position that in my formative years, I came here when I was 13, is when I, you know, teenage is your first love or whatever, is I fell in love with the American set of ideas of freedom and individuals. They're compelling, aren't they? Yes. They're compelling, yes. But I also remember, it's like you remember like maybe an ex girlfriend or something like that. I also remember loving as a very different human, the Soviet idea, like we had the national anthem, which is still, I think the most badass national anthem, which is the Soviet Union, like saying we're the indestructible nation. I mean, just the words are so, like Americans words are like, oh, we're nice. Like we're freedom, but like a Russian Soviet Union national anthem was like, we're bad motherfuckers. Nobody will destroy us. I just remember feeling pride in a nation as a kid, like dumb not knowing anything because we all had to recite the stuff. It was, there's a uniformity to everything. There's pride underlying everything. I didn't think about all the destructive nature of the bureaucracy, the incompetence, the, you know, all the things that come with the implementation of communism, especially around the eighties and nineties. But I remember what it's like to love that set of ideas. So I'm in a funny place of like, remember like switching the love because I'm, you know, I kind of joke around about being Russian, but you know, my longterm monogamous relationship is now with the idea, the American ideal. Like I'm stuck with it in my mind, but I remember what it was like to love it. And I think about that too, when people criticize China or they criticize the current state of affairs with how Stalin is remembered and how Putin is to know that the, you can't always wear the American ideal of individualism, radical individualism and freedom in analyzing the ways of the world elsewhere. Like in China, in Russia, that it does, if you don't take yourself too seriously, as Americans all do, as I do, it's kind of a beautiful love to have for your government, to believe in the nation, to let go of yourself and your rights and your freedoms, to believe in something bigger than yourself. That's actually, that's a kind of freedom. That's, you're actually liberating yourself. If you think like life is suffering, you're giving into the flow of the water, the flow, the way of the world by giving away more power from yourself and giving it to what you would conceive as, as the power of the people together, together we'll do great things and really believing in the ideals of what, in this case, I don't even know what you would call Russia, but whatever the heck that is, authoritarian, powerful state, powerful leader, believing that can be as beautiful as believing the American ideal. Not just that, let me add to what you're saying. And I'm very, I spend a lot of time trying to get out of my own biases. It is a fruitless endeavor longterm, but you try to be better than you normally are. One of the critiques that China, and I always, as an American, I tend to think about this as their government, right? This is a rationale that their government puts forward. But what you just said is actually, if you can make that viewpoint beautiful is kind of a beautiful way of approaching it. The Chinese would say that what we call human rights in the United States and what we consider to be everybody's birthright around the world is instead Western rights. That's the words they use, Western rights. It's a fundamentally Western oriented, and I'll go back to the enlightenment based ideas, on what constitutes the rights of man. And they would suggest that that's not internationally and always applicable, right? That you can make a case, and again, I don't believe this. This runs against my own personal views, but that you could make a case that the collective wellbeing of a very large group of people outweighs the individual needs of any single person, especially if those things are in conflict with each other, right? If you cannot provide for the greater good because everyone's so individualistic, well then really what is the better thing to do, right? Is suppress individualism so everybody's better off? I think trying to recognize how someone else might see that is important if we want to, you know, you had talked about eliminating war. We talk about eliminating conflict. The first need to do that is to try to understand how someone else might view something differently than yourself. I'm famously one of those people who buys in to the ideas of traditional Americanism, right? And look, what a lot of people who live today, I mean, they would seem to think that things like patriotism requires a belief in the strong military and all these things we have today, but that is a corruption of traditional Americanism, which viewed all those things with suspicion in the first hundred years of the Republic because they saw it as an enemy to the very things that Americans celebrated, right? How could you have freedom and liberty and individualistic expression if you had an overriding military that was always fighting wars and the founders of this country looked to other examples like Europe, for example, and saw that standing militaries, for example, standing armies were the enemy of liberty. Well, we have a standing army now and one that is totally interwoven in our entire society. If you could go back in time and talk to John Quincy Adams, right, early president of the United States and show him what we have now, he would think it was awful and horrible and that somewhere along the line, the Americans had lost their way and forgotten what they were all about. But we have so successfully interwoven this modern military industrial complex with the traditional benefits of the American system and ideology so that they've become intertwined in our thinking, whereas 150 years ago, they were actually considered to be at opposite polarities and a threat to one another. So when you talk about the love of the nation, I tend to be suspicious of those things. I tend to be suspicious of government. I tend to try very hard to not be manipulated and I feel like a large part of what they do is manipulation and propaganda. And so I think a healthy skepticism of the nation state is actually 100% Americanism in the traditional sense of the word. But I also have to recognize, as you so eloquently stated, Americanism is not necessarily universal at all. And so I think we have to try to be more understanding. See, the traditional American viewpoint is that if a place like China does not allow their people individual human rights, then they're being denied something. They're being denied and 100 years ago, they would have said they're God given rights. Man is born free and if he's not free, it's because of something done to him, right? The government has taken away his God given rights. I'm getting excited just listening to that. Well, but I mean, I think the idea that this is universal is in and of itself a bias. Now, do I want freedom for everybody else? I sure do. But the people in the Soviet Union who really bought into that wanted the workers of the world to unite and not be exploited by the greedy blood sucking people who worked them to death and pocketed all of the fruits of their labor. If you frame it that way, that sounds like justice as well, you know? So it is an eye of the beholder sort of thing. I'd love to talk to you about Vladimir Putin, sort of while we're in this feeling and wave of empathy and trying to understand others that are not like us. One of the reasons I started this podcast is because I believe that there's a few people I could talk to. Some of it is ego. Some of it is stupidity. Is there some people I could talk to that not many others can talk to? The one person I was always thinking about was Vladimir Putin. Do you still speak the language? I speak the language very well. That makes it even easier. I mean, you might be appointed for that job. That's the context in which I'm asking you this question. What are your thoughts about Vladimir Putin from a historical context? Have you studied him? Have you thought about him? Yes, studied is a loaded word. And again, I find it hard sometimes to not filter things through an American lens. So as an American, I would say that the Russians should be allowed to have any leader that they want to have. But what an American would say is, but there should be elections, right? So if the Russians choose Vladimir Putin and they keep choosing him, that's their business. Where as an American, I would have a problem is when that leader stops letting the Russians make that decision. And we would say, well, now you're no longer ruling by the consent of the governed. You've become the equivalent of a person who may be oppressing your people. You might as well be a dictator, right? Now there's a difference between a freely elected and reelected and reelected and reelected dictator, right? If that's what they want. And look, it would be silly to broad brush the Russians like it would be silly to broad brush anyone, right? Millions and millions of people with different opinions amongst them all. But they seem to like a strong person at the helm. And listen, there's a giant chunk of Americans who do too in their own country. But an American would say, as long as the freedom of choice is given to the Russians to decide this and not taken away from them, right? It's one thing to say he was freely elected, but a long time ago and we've done away with elections since then is a different story too. So my attitude on Vladimir Putin is if that's who the Russian people want and you give them the choice, right? If he's only there because they keep electing him, that's a very different story. When he stops offering them the option of choosing him or not choosing him, that's when it begins to look nefarious to someone born and raised with the mindset and the ideology that is an integral part of yours truly. And that I can't, you can see gray areas and nuance all you like, but it's hard to escape. And you alluded to this too. It's hard to escape what was indoctrinated into your bones in your formative years. It's like, your bones are growing, right? And you can't go back. So to me, this is so much a part of who I am that I have a hard time jettisoning that and saying, oh no, Vladimir Putin not being elected anymore, it's just fine. I'm too much of a product of my upbringing to go there. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. But of course there's, like we were saying, there's gray areas, which is, I believe, I have to think through this, but I think there is a point at which Adolf Hitler became the popular choice in Nazi Germany in the 30s. There's a, in the same way, from an American perspective, you can start to criticize some in a shallow way, some in a deep way. The way that Putin has maintained power is by controlling the press. So limiting one other freedom that we Americans value, which is the freedom of the press or freedom of speech that he, it is very possible. Now things are changing now, but for most of his presidency, he was the popular choice and sometimes by far. And I have, I actually don't have real family in Russia who don't love Putin. The only people who write to me about Putin and not liking him are like sort of activists who are young, right? But like to me, they're strangers. I don't know anything about them. The people I do know who have a big family in Russia, they love Putin. They... Do they miss elections? Would they want the choice to prove it at the ballot box? And, or are they so in love with him that they wouldn't wanna take a chance that someone might vote him out? No, they don't think of it this way. And they are aware of the incredible bureaucracy and corruption that is lurking in the shadows, which is true in Russia. Everywhere. Everywhere. But like, there's something about the Russian, it's a remnants, corruption is so deeply part of the Russian, so the Soviet system that even the overthrow of the Soviet, the breaking apart of the Soviet Union and Putin coming and reforming a lot of the system, it's still deeply in there. And they're aware of that. That's part of the, like the love for Putin is partially grounded in the fear of what happens when the corrupt take over, the greedy take over. And they see Putin as the stabilizer, as like a hard like force that says... A counter force. Counter force that get your shit together. Like basically, from the Western perspective, Putin is terrible, but from the Russian perspective, Putin is the only thing holding this thing together before it goes, if it collapses. Now, from the, like Gary Kasparov has been loud on this, a lot of people from the Western perspective say, well, if it has to collapse, let it collapse. You know, that's... That's easier said than done when you don't have to live through that. Exactly. And so anyone worrying about their family about... And they also remember the inflation and the economic instability and the suffering and the starvation that happened in the 90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And they saw the kind of reform and the economic vibrancy that happened when Putin took power, that they think like, this guy's holding it together. And they see elections as potentially being mechanisms by which the corrupt people can manipulate the system unfairly, as opposed to letting the people speak with their voice. They somehow figure out a way to manipulate the elections, to elect somebody like one of them Western revolutionaries. And so I think one of the beliefs that's important to the American system is the belief in the electoral system that the voice of the people can be heard in the various systems of government, whether it's judicial, whether it's... I mean, basically the assumption is that the system works well enough for you to be able to elect the popular choice. Okay, so there's a couple of things that come to mind on that. The first one has to do with the idea of oligarchs. There's a belief in political science, you know, it's not the overall belief, but that every society is sort of an oligarchy really, if you break it down, right? So what you're talking about are some of the people who would form an oligarchic class in Russia, and that Putin is the guy who can harness the power of the state to keep those people in check. The problem, of course, in a system like that, a strong man system, right? Where you have somebody who can hold the reins and steer the ship when the ship is violently in a storm, is the succession. So if you're not creating a system that can operate without you, then that terrible instability and that terrible future that you justify the strong man for is just awaiting your future, right? I mean, unless he's actively building the system that will outlive him and allow successors to do what he's doing, then what you've done here is create a temporary, I would think, a temporary stability here, because it's the same problem you have in a monarchy, right? Where you have this one king and he's particularly good, or you think he's particularly good, but he's gonna turn that job over to somebody else down the road, and the system doesn't guarantee because no one's really worked on, and again, you would tell me, if Putin is putting into place, I know he's talked about it over the years, putting into place a system that can outlive him and that will create the stability that the people in Russia like him for when he's gone, because if the oligarchs just take over afterwards, then one might argue, well, we had 20 good years of stability, but I mean, I would say that if we're talking about a ship of state here, the guy steering the ship, maybe, if you wanted to look at it from the Russian point of view, has done a great job, maybe, just saying, but the rocks are still out there, and he's not going to be at the helm forever, so one would think that his job is to make sure that there's going to be someone who can continue to steer the ship for the people of Russia after he's gone. Now, let me ask, because I'm curious, and ignorant, so is he doing that, do you think? Is he setting it up so that when there is no Putin, the state is safe? From the beginning, that was the idea, whether one of the fascinating things, now, I read every biography, English written biography on Putin, so I need to think more deeply, but one of the fascinating things is how did power change Vladimir Putin? He was a different man when he took power than he is today. I actually, in many ways, admire the man that took power. I think he's very different than Stalin and then Hitler at the moment they took power. I think Hitler and Stalin were both, in our previous discussion, already on the trajectory of evil. I think Putin was a humble, loyal, honest man when he took power. The man he is today is worth thinking about and studying. I'm not sure that that. That's an old line, though, about absolute power corrupting, absolutely. But it's kind of a line. It's a beautiful quote, but you have to really think about it. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, one of the things I still have to do, I've been focusing on securing the conversation, right? So I haven't gone through a dark place yet because I feel like I can't do the dark thing for too long. So I really have to put myself in the mind of Putin leading up to the conversation. But for now, my sense is he took power when Yeltsin gave him, one of the big sort of acts of the new Russia was for the first time in its history, a leader could have continued being in power and chose to give away power. That was the George Washington. Right, we in the United States would look at that as absolute positive, yeah. A sign of good things, yes. And so that was a huge act. And Putin said that that was the defining thing that will define Russia for the 21st century, that act, and he will carry that flag forward. That's why in rhetoric, he, after two terms, he gave away power. To Medvedev, but it was a puppet, right? Yeah, yes, but it was, but like still the story was being told. I think he believed it early on. I think he, I believe he still believes it, but I think he's deeply suspicious of the corruption that lurks in the shadows. And I do believe that, like as somebody who thinks clickbait journalism is broken, journalists annoy the hell out of me. Clickbait journalism's working perfectly. Journalism's broken. Journalism. Clickbait thing's working great. Exactly. So I understand from Putin's perspective that journalism, journalists can be seen as the enemy of the state, because people think journalists write these deep, beautiful philosophical pieces about criticizing the structure of government and the proper policy where, you know, the steps that we need to take to make a greater nation. No, they, they're unfairly take stuff out of context. They, they're critical in ways that's like shallow and not interesting. They, they call you a racist or sexist, or they make up stuff all the time. So I can put myself in the mindset of a person that thinks that it is okay to remove that kind of shallow fake news voice from the system. The problem is, of course, that is a slippery slope to then you remove all the annoying people from the system, and then you change what annoying means, which annoying starts becoming a thing that like anyone who opposes the system. I mean, I get, I get the slippery, it's obvious that it becomes a slippery slope, but I can also put myself in the mindset of the people that see it's okay to remove the liars from the system, as long as it's good for Russia. And, okay, so herein lies, and this again, the traditional American perspective, because we've had yellow, so called yellow journalism since the founding of the Republic. That's nothing new. But, but the problem then comes into play, when you remove journalists, even, you know, it's a broad brush thing, because you remove both the crappy ones who are lying, and the ones who are telling the truth too, you're left with simply the approved government journalists, right, the ones who are towing the government's line, in which case the truth as you see it is a different kind of fake news, right? It's the fake news from the government, instead of the clickbait news, and oh yeah, maybe truth mixed into all that too, in some of the outlets. The problem I always have with our system here in the United States right now is trying to tease the truth out from all the falsehoods. And look, I've got 30 years in journalism. My job used to be to go through, before the internet, all the newspapers, and find the, I used to know all the journalists by name, and I could pick out, you know, who they were, and I have a hard time picking out the truth from the falsehoods, so I think constantly, how are people who don't have all this background, who have lives, or who are trained in other specialties, how do they do it? But if the government is the only approved outlet for truth, a traditional American, and a lot of other traditional societies based on these ideas of the Enlightenment that I talked about earlier, would see that as a disaster waiting to happen, or a tyranny in progress. Does that make sense? Oh, it totally makes sense, and I would agree with you, I still agree with you, but it is clear that something about the freedom of the press and freedom of speech in today, like literally the last few years with the internet is changing, and the argument, you know, you could say that the American system of freedom of speech is broken, because the, here's the belief I grew up on, and I still hold, but I'm starting to be sort of trying to see multiple views on it. My belief was that freedom of speech results in a stable trajectory towards truth always. So like truth will emerge. That was my sort of faith and belief that yeah, there's going to be lies all over the place, but there'll be like a stable thing that is true, that's carried forward to the public. Now it feels like it's possible to go towards a world where nothing is true, where truth is something that groups of people convince themselves of, and there's multiple groups of people, and the idea of some universal truth, as I suppose is the better thing, is something that we can no longer exist under. Like some people believe that the Green Bay Packers is the best football team, and some people can think the Patriots, and they deeply believe it to where they call the other groups liars. Now that's fun for sports, that's fun for favorite flavors of ice cream, but they might believe that about science, about the various aspects of politics, various aspects of sort of different policies within the function of our government. And like, that's not just like some weird thing we'll complain about, but that'll be the nature of things, like truth is something we can no longer have. Well, and let me de romanticize the American history of this too, because the American press was often just as biased, just as, I mean, I always looked to the 1970s as the high watermark of the American journalistic, in the post Watergate era, where it was actively going after the abuses of the government and all these things. But there was a famous speech, very quiet though, very quiet, given by Katherine Graham, who was a Washington Post editor, I believe. And I actually, somebody sent it to me, we had to get it off of a journalism, like a J store kind of thing. And she, at a luncheon, assured to the government people at the luncheon, don't worry, this is not gonna be something that we make a trend. Because the position of the government is still something that was carried, that the newspapers were the water, and the newspapers were the big thing up until certainly the late 60s, early 70s. The newspapers were still the water carrier of the government, right? And they were the water carriers of the owners of the newspaper. So let's not pretend there was some angelic, wonderful time. And I'm saying to me, cause I was the one who brought it up, let's not pretend there was any super age of truthful journalism and all that. And I mean, you go to the revolutionary period in American history, and it looks every bit as bad as today, right? That's a hopeful message, actually. So things may not be as bad as they look. Well, let's look at it more like a stock market, and that you have fluctuations in the truthfulness or believability of the press. And there are periods where it was higher than other periods. The funny thing about the so called clickbait era, and I do think it's terrible, but I mean, it resembles earlier eras to me. So I always compare it to when I was a kid growing up, when I thought journalism was as good as it's ever gotten. It was never perfect. But it's also something that you see very rarely in other governments around the world. And there's a reason that journalists are often killed regularly in a lot of countries. And it's because they report on things that the authorities do not want reported on. And I've always thought that that was what journalism should do. But it's gotta be truthful, otherwise it's just a different kind of propaganda, right? Can we talk about Genghis Khan? Genghis Khan? Sure. By the way, is it Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan? It's not Genghis Khan. It's either Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan. So let's go with Genghis Khan. That's the only thing I'll be able to say with any certain, last certain thing I'll say about it. It's like, I don't know, GIF versus GIF. I don't know if you know about those things. I don't know how it ever got started the wrong way. Yeah. So first of all, your episodes on Genghis Khan for many people are the favorite. It's fascinating to think about events that had so much like in their ripples, had so much impact on so much of human civilization. In your view, was he an evil man? Let's go start a discussion of evil. Another way to put it is I've read he's much loved in many parts of the world like Mongolia. And I've also read arguments that say that he was quite a progressive for the time. So where do you put him? Is he a progressive or is he an evil destroyer of humans? As I often say, I'm not a historian, which is why what I try to bring to the Hardcore History podcasts are these sub themes. So each show has, and they're not, I try to kind of soft pedal them. So they're not always like really right in front of your face. In that episode, the soft peddling sub theme had to do with what we referred to as a historical arsonist. And it's because some historians have taken the position that sometimes, and most of this is earlier stuff, historians don't do this very much anymore, but these were the wonderful questions I grew up with that blend, it's almost the intersection between history and philosophy. And the idea was that sometimes the world has become so overwhelmed with bureaucracy or corruption or just stagnation that somebody has to come in or some group of people or some force has to come in and do the equivalent of a forest fire to clear out all the dead wood so that the forest itself can be rejuvenated and society can then move forward. And there's a lot of these periods where the historians of the past will portray these figures who come in and do horrific things as creating an almost service for mankind, right? Creating the foundations for a new world that will be better than the old one. And it's a recurring theme. And so this was the sub theme of the Khan's podcast, because otherwise you don't need me to tell you the story of the Mongols, but I'm gonna bring up the historical arsonist element. And, but this gets to how the Khan has been portrayed, right? If you wanna say, oh yes, he cleared out the dead wood and made for, well, then it's a positive thing. If you say, my family was in the forest fire that he set, you're not gonna see it that way. Much of what Genghis Khan is credited with on the upside, right? So things like religious toleration, and you'll say, well, he was religiously, the Mongols were religiously tolerant. And so this makes them almost like a liberal reformer kind of thing. But this needs to be seen within the context of their empire, which was very much like the Roman viewpoint, which is the Romans didn't care at a lot of time what your local people worshiped. They wanted stability. And if that kept stability and kept you paying taxes and didn't require the legionaries to come in, then they didn't care, right? And the Khans were the same way. Like they don't care what you're practicing as long as it doesn't disrupt their empire and cause them trouble. But what I always like to point out is yes, but the Khan could still come in with his representatives to your town, decide your daughter was a beautiful woman that they wanted in the Khan's concubine, and they would take them. So how liberal an empire is this, right? So many of the things that they get credit for as though there's some kind of nice guys may in another way of looking at it just be a simple mechanism of control, right? A way to keep the empire stable. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They have decided that this is the best. And I love because the Mongols were what we would call a pagan people now. I love the fact that they, and I think we call it, I forgot the term we used, had to do with, like they were hedging their bets religiously, right? They didn't know which God was the right one. So as long as you're all praying for the health of the Khan, we're maximizing the chances that whoever the gods are, they get the message, right? So I think it's been portrayed as something like a liberal empire. And the idea of Mongol universality is more about conquering the world. And it's like saying, you know, we're gonna bring stability to the world by conquering it. Well, what if that's Hitler, right? He could make the same case, or Hitler wasn't really the world conqueror like that because he wouldn't have been trying to make it equal for all peoples. But my point being that it kind of takes the positive moral slant out of it if their motivation wasn't a positive moral slant to the motivate, and the Mongols didn't see it that way. And I think the way that it's portrayed is like, and I always like to use this analogy, but it's like shooting an arrow and painting a bull's eye around it afterwards, right? How do we justify and make them look good in a way that they themselves probably, and listen, we don't have the Mongol point of view per se. I mean, there's something called the secret history of the Mongols, and there's things written down by Mongolian overlords through people like Persian and Chinese scribes later. We don't have their point of view, but it sure doesn't look like this was an attempt to create some wonderful place where everybody was living a better life than they were before. I think that's later people putting a nice rosy spin on it. But there's an aspect to it, maybe you can correct me, because I'm projecting sort of my idea of what it would take to conquer so much land is the ideology is emergent. So if I were to guess, the Mongols started out as exceptionally, as warriors who valued excellence in skill of killing, not even killing, but like the actual practice of war. And you can start out small, and you can grow and grow and grow. And then in order to maintain the stability of the things over which of the conquered lands, you developed a set of ideas with which you can, like you said, establish control, but it was emergent. And it seems like the core first principle idea of the Mongols is just to be excellent warriors. That felt to me like the starting point. It wasn't some ideology. Like with Hitler and Stalin, with Hitler, there was an ideology that didn't have anything to do with war underneath it. It was more about conquering. It feels like the Mongols started out more organically, I would say, like this phenomenon started emergently, and they were just like similar to the Native Americans with the Comanches, like the different warrior tribes that Joe Rogan's currently obsessed with, that led me to look into it more. They seem to just start out just valuing the skill of fighting whatever the tools of war they had, which were pretty primitive, but just to be the best warriors they could possibly be, make a science out of it. Is that crazy to think that there was no ideology behind it in the beginning? I'm gonna back up a second. I'm reminded of the line said about the Romans, that they create a wasteland and call it peace. That is, but there's a lot of conquerors like that, right? Where you will sit there, and listen, historians forever have, it's the famous trade offs of empire, and they'll say, well, look at the trade that they facilitated, and look at the religion, all those kinds of things, but they come at the cost of all those peoples that they conquered forcibly and by force, integrated into their empire. The one thing we need to remember about the Mongols that makes them different than, say, the Romans, and this is complex stuff and way above my pay grade, but I'm fascinated with it, and it's more like the Comanches that you just brought up, is that the Mongols are not a settled society, okay? They come from a nomadic tradition. Now, several generations later, when you have Kublai Khan as the emperor of China, it's beginning to be a different thing, right? And the Mongols, when their empire broke up, the ones that were in settled, the so called settled societies, right, Iran, places like that, they will become more like, over time, the rulers of those places were traditionally, and the Mongols in, say, the Khaganate of the Golden Horde, which is still in their traditional nomadic territories, will remain traditionally more Mongol, but when you start talking about who the Mongols were, I try to make a distinction. They're not some really super special people. They're just the latest confederacy in an area that saw nomadic confederacies going back to the beginning of recorded history. The Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Avars, the Huns, the Magyars, I mean, these are all the nomadic, you know, the nomads of the Eurasian steppe were huge, huge players in the history of the world until gunpowder nullified their traditional weapons system, which I've been fascinated with because their traditional weapons system is not one you could copy, because you were talking about being the greatest warriors you could be. Every warrior society I've ever seen values that. What the nomads had of the Eurasian steppe was this relationship between human beings and animals that changed the equation. It was how they rode horses. And societies like the Byzantines, which would form one flank of the steppe and then all the way on the other side you had China, and below that you had Persia, these societies would all attempt to create mounted horsemen who used archery. And they did a good job, but they were never the equals of the nomads because those people were literally raised in the saddle. They compared them to centaurs. The Comanches, great example, considered to be the best horse riding warriors in North America. The Comanches, I always love watching, there's paintings. George Catlin, the famous painter who painted the Comanches, illustrated it. But the Mongols and the Scythians and the Avars and all these people did it too, where they would shoot from underneath the horse's neck, hiding behind the horse the whole way. You look at a picture of somebody doing that, and it's insane. This is what the Byzantines couldn't do and the Chinese couldn't do. It was a different level of harnessing a human animal relationship that gave them a military advantage that could not be copied, right? It could be emulated, but they were never as good, right? That's why they always hired these people. They hired mercenaries from these areas because they were incomparable, right? It's the combination of people who were shooting bows and arrows from the time they were toddlers, who were riding from the time they were, who rode all the time. I mean, the Huns were bow legged, the Romans said, because they were never, they ate, slept, everything in the saddle. That creates something that is difficult to copy. And it gave them a military advantage. I enjoy reading actually about when that military advantage ended. So 17th and 18th century, when the Chinese on one flank and the Russians on the other are beginning to use firearms and stuff to break this military power of these various Khans. The Mongols were simply the most dominating and most successful of the Confederacies. But if you break it down, they really formed the nucleus at the top of the pyramid, of the apex of the food chain. And a lot of the people that were known as Mongols were really lots of other tribes, non Mongolian tribes, that when the Mongols conquer you, after they killed a lot of you, they incorporated you into their Confederacy and often made you go first. You're gonna fight somebody, we're gonna make these people go out in front and suck up all the arrows before we go in and finish the job. So to me, and I guess a fan of the Mongols would say that the difference and what made the Mongols different wasn't the weapon system or the fighting or the warriors or the armor or anything, it was Genghis Khan. And if you go look at the other really dangerous, from the outside world's perspective, dangerous step, nomadic Confederacies from past history was always when some great leader emerged that could unite the tribes. And you see the same thing in Native American history to a degree too. You had people like Attila, right? Or there's one called Tumen. You go back in history and these people make the history books because they caused an enormous amount of trouble for their settled neighbors that normally, I mean, Chinese Byzantine and Persian approaches to the steppe people were always the same. They would pick out tribes to be friendly with, they would give them money, gifts, hire them, and they would use them against the other tribes. And generally Byzantine, especially in Chinese diplomatic history was all about keeping these tribes separated. Don't let them form confederations of large numbers of them because then they're unstoppable. Attila was a perfect example. The Huns were another large, the Turks, another large confederacy of these people. And they were devastating when they could unite. So the diplomatic policy was don't let them. That's what made the Mongols different is Genghis Khan united them. And then unlike most of the tribal confederacies, they were able to hold it together for a few generations. To linger on the little thread that you started pulling on this man, Genghis Khan, that was a leader. Temujin, yeah. What do you think makes a great leader? Maybe if you have other examples throughout history and great, again, let's use that term loosely. Meaning. Now I was gonna ask for a definition. Great uniter of whether it's evil or good, it doesn't matter. Is there somebody who stands out to you, Alexander the Great talking about military or ideologies, some people bring up FDR or, I mean, you could be the founding fathers of this country, or we can go to, was he man of the century up there? Hitler of the 20th century and Stalin and these people had really amassed the amount of power that probably has never been seen in the history of the world. Is there somebody who stands out to you by way of trying to define what makes a great uniter, great leader in one man or woman, maybe in the future? It's an interesting question. And one I've thought a lot about, because let's take Alexander the Great as an example, because Alexander fascinated the world of his time, fascinated, ever since people have been fascinated with the guy. But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right? Yeah. He was handed the kingdom. Which is fascinating. Right, but he did not need to rise from nothing to get that job. In fact, he reminds me of a lot of other leaders of Frederick the Great, for example, in Prussia. These are people who inherited the greatest army of their day. Alexander, unless he was an imbecile, was going to be great no matter what, because I mean, if you inherit the Wehrmacht, you're gonna be able to do something with it, right? Alexander's father may have been greater, Philip. Philip II was the guy who literally did create a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that were continually beset by their neighbors. He's the one that reformed that army, took things that he had learned from other Greek leaders like the Theban leader at Paminondas, and then laboriously over his lifetime stabilized the frontiers, built this system. He lost an eye doing it. His leg was made lame. I mean, this was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from the front ranks. I mean, and then who may have been killed by his son, we don't know who assassinated Philip, but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son, who then did great things with it. You see this pattern many times. So in my mind, I'm not sure Alexander really can be that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing. So the difference between what we would call in the United States the self made man or the one who inherits a fortune. There's an old line that, it's a slur, but it's about rich people. And it's like he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, right? Philip was born at home plate and he had to hit. Alexander started on third base. And so I try to draw a distinction between them. Genghis Khan is tough because there's two traditions. The tradition that we grew up with here in the United States and that I grew up learning was that he was a self made man. But there is a tradition, and it may be one of those things that's put after the fact because a long time ago, whether or not you had blue blood in your veins was an important distinction. And so the distinction that you'll often hear from Mongolian history is that this was a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance. So he was a blue blood anyway. I don't know which is true. There's certainly, I mean, when you look at a Genghis Khan, you have to go, that is a wicked amount of things to have achieved. He's very impressive as a figure. Attila is very impressive as a figure. Hitler's an interesting figure. He's one of those people, you know, the more you study about Hitler, the more you wonder where the defining moment was. Because if you look at his life, I mean, Hitler was a relatively common soldier in the First World War. I mean, he was brave. He got some decorations. In fact, the highest decoration he got in the First World War was given to him by a Jewish officer. And he often didn't talk about that decoration, even though it was the more prestigious one because it would open up a whole can of worms you didn't wanna get into. But Hitler's, I mean, if you said who was Hitler today, one of the top things you're gonna say is he was an anti Semite. Well, then you have to draw a distinction between general regular anti Semitism that was pretty common in the era and something that was a rabid level of anti Semitism. But Hitler didn't seem to show a rabid level of anti Semitism until after or at the very end of the First World War. So if this is a defining part of this person's character and much of what we consider to be his evil stems from that, what happened to this guy when he's an adult, right? He's already fought in the war to change him so. I mean, it's almost like the old, there was always a movie theme. Somebody gets hit by something on the head and their whole personality changes, right? I mean, it almost seems something like that. So I don't think I call that necessarily a great leader. To me, the interesting thing about Hitler is what the hell happened to a nondescript person who didn't really impress anybody with his skills. And then in the 1920s, it's all of a sudden, as you said, sort of the man of the hour, right? So that to me is kind of, I have this feeling that Genghis Khan, and we don't really know, was an impressive human being from the get go. And then he was raised in this environment with pressure on all sides. So you start with this diamond and then you polish it and you harden it his whole life. Hitler seemed to be a very unimpressive gemstone most of his life, and then all of a sudden. So, I mean, I don't think I can label great leaders. And I'm always fascinated by that idea that, and I'm trying to remember who the quote was by that, that great men, oh, Lord Acton. So great men are often not good men. And that in order to be great, you would have to jettison many of the moral qualities that we normally would consider a Jesus or a Gandhi, or, you know, these qualities that one looks at as the good upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples, right? The Buddha, whatever it might be, those people wouldn't make good leaders because what you need to be a good leader often requires the kind of choices that a true philosophical diogenes moral man wouldn't make. So I don't have an answer to your question. How about that? That's a long way of saying, I don't know. Just linger a little bit. It does feel like from my study of Hitler that the time molded the man versus Genghis Khan, where it feels like he, the man molded his time. Yes, and I feel that way about a lot of those nomadic Confederacy builders, that they really seem to be these figures that stand out as extraordinary in one way or another. Remembering, by the way, that almost all the history of them were written by the enemies that they so mistreated that they were probably never gonna get any good press. They didn't write themselves. That's a caveat. We should always add to basically all of human history. Nomadic or Native American peoples or tribal peoples anywhere generally do not get the advantage of being able to write the history of their heroes. Okay, I've recently almost done with the rise and the fall of the Third Reich. It's one of the historical descriptions of Hitler's rise to power, Nazi's rise to power. There's a few philosophical things I'd like to ask you to see if you can help. Like one of the things I think about is how does one be a hero in 1930s Nazi Germany? What does it mean to be a hero? What do heroic actions look like? I think about that because I think about how I move about in this world today. That we live in really chaotic, intense times where I don't think you wanna draw any parallels between Nazi Germany and modern day in any of the nations we can think about. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that authoritarian governments take hold, authoritarian companies take hold. And I'd like to think that I could be in my little small way and inspire others to take the heroic action before things get bad. And I kind of try to place myself in what would 1930s Germany look like? Is it possible to stop a Hitler? Is it even the right way to think about it? And how does one be a hero in it? I mean, you often talk about that living through a moment in history is very different than looking at that history, looking when you look back. I also think about it, would it be possible to understand what's happening that the bells of war are ringing? It seems that most people didn't seem to understand, you know, late into the 30s that war is coming. That's fascinating. On the United States side, inside Germany, like the opposing figures, the German military didn't seem to understand this. Maybe the other countries, certainly France and England didn't seem to understand this. That kind of tried to put myself into 90s, 30s Germany as I'm Jewish, which is another little twist on the whole. Like what would I do? What should one do? Do you have interesting answers? So earlier we had talked about Putin and we had talked about patriotism and love of country and those sorts of things. In order to be a hero in Nazi Germany by our views here, you would have had to have been anti patriotic to the average German's viewpoint in the 1930s, right? You would have to have opposed your own government and your own country. And that's a very, it would be a very weird thing to go to people in Germany and say, listen, the only way you're gonna be seen as a good German and a hero to the country that will be your enemies is we think you should oppose your own government. It's a strange position to put the people in a government saying you need to be against your leader, you need to oppose your government's policies, you need to oppose your government, you need to hope and work for its downfall. That doesn't sound patriotic. It wouldn't sound patriotic here in this country if you made a similar argument. I will go away from the 1930s and go to the 1940s to answer your question. So there is movements like the White Rose Movement in Germany, which involved young people really, and from various backgrounds, religious backgrounds often, who worked openly against the Nazi government at a time when power was already consolidated, the Gestapo was in full force and they execute people who are against the government. And these young people would go out and distribute pamphlets and many of them got their heads cut off with guillotines for their trouble. And they knew that that was gonna be the penalty. That is a remarkable amount of bravery and sacrifice and willingness to die, and almost not even willingness because they were so open about it, it's almost a certainty, right? That's incredibly moving to me. So when we talk, and we had talked earlier about sort of the human spirit and all that kind of thing, there are people in the German military who opposed and worked against Hitler, for example. But to me, that's almost cowardly compared to what these young people did in the White Rose Movement because those people in the Wehrmacht, for example, who were secretly trying to undermine Hitler, they're not really putting their lives on the line to the same degree. And so I think when I look at heroes, and listen, I remember once saying there were no conscientious objectors in Germany as a way to point out to people that you didn't have a choice, you know, you were gonna serve in there. And I got letters from Jehovah's Witnesses who said, yes, there were. And we got sent to the concentration camps. Those are remarkably brave things. It's one thing to have your own set of standards and values. It's another thing to say, oh no, I'm going to display them in a way that with this regime, that's a death sentence. And not just for me, for my family, right? In these regimes, there was not a lot of distinction made between father and son and wives. That's a remarkable sacrifice to make. And far beyond what I think I would even be capable of. And so the admiration comes from seeing people who appear to be more morally profound than you are yourself. So when I look at this, I look at that kind of thing and I just say, wow. And the funny thing is if you'd have gone to most average Germans on the street in 1942 and said, what do you think of these people? They're gonna think of them as traitors who probably got what they deserved. So that's the eye of the beholder thing. It's the power of the state to sow propagandize values and morality in a way that favors the state that you can turn people who today we look at as unbelievably brave and moral and crusading for righteousness and turn them into enemies of the people. So, I mean, in my mind, it would be people like that. See, I think, so hero is a funny word and we romanticize the notion, but if I could drag you back to 1930s Germany from 1940s. Sure. I feel like the heroic actions that doesn't accomplish much is not what I'm referring to. So there's many heroes I look up to that, like David Goggins, for example, the guy who runs crazy distances. He runs for no purpose except for the suffering in itself. And I think his willingness to challenge the limits of his mind is heroic. I guess I'm looking for a different term, which is how could Hitler have been stopped? My sense is that he could have been stopped in the battle of ideas where people, millions of people were suffering economically or suffering because of the betrayal of World War I in terms of the love of country and how they felt they were being treated. And a charismatic leader that inspired love and unity that's not destructive could have emerged. And that's where the battle should have been fought. I would suggest that we need to take into account the context of the times that led to Hitler's rise of power and created the conditions where his message resonated. That is not a message that resonates at all times, right? It is impossible to understand the rise of Hitler without dealing with the First World War and the aftermath of the First World War and the inflationary terrible depression in Germany and all these things and the dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic's government, which was often seen as something put into, which it was put into place by the victorious powers. Hitler referred to the people that signed those agreements that signed the armistice as the November criminals. And he used that as a phrase which resonated with the population. This was a population that was embittered. And even if they weren't embittered, the times were so terrible. And the options for operating within the system in a non radical way seemed totally discredited, right? You could work through the Weimar Republic, but they tried and it wasn't working anyway. And then the alternative to the Nazis who were bully boys in the street were communist agitators that to the average conservative Germans seem no better. So you have three options if you're an average German person. You can go with the discredited government put in power by your enemies that wasn't working anyway. You could go with the Nazis who seemed like a bunch of super patriots calling for the restoration of German authority, or you could go with the communists. And the entire thing seemed like a litany of poor options. And in this realm, Hitler was able to triangulate, if you will. He came off as a person who was going to restore German greatness at a time when this was a powerful message. But if you don't need German greatness restored, it doesn't resonate, right? So the reason that your love idea and all this stuff, I don't think would have worked in the time period is because that was not a commodity that the average German was in search of then. Well, it's interesting to think about whether greatness can be restored through mechanisms, through ideas that are not so, from our perspective today, so evil. I don't know what the right term is. But the war continued in a way. So remember that when Germany, when Hitler is rising to power, the French are in control of parts of Germany, right? The Ruhr, one of the main industrial heartlands of Germany, was occupied by the French. So there's never this point where you're allowed to let the hate dissipate, right? Every time maybe things were calming down, something else would happen to stick the knife in and twist it a little bit more, from the average German's perspective, right? The reparations, right? So if you say, okay, well, we're gonna get back on our feet, the reparations were crushing. These things prevented the idea of love or brotherhood and all these things from taking hold. And even if there were Germans who felt that way, and there most certainly were, it is hard to overcome the power of everyone else. You know, what I always say when people talk to me about humanity is I believe on individual levels, we're capable of everything and anything, good, bad, or indifferent. But collectively, it's different, right? And in the time period that we're talking about here, messages of peace on earth and love your enemies and all these sorts of things were absolutely deluged and overwhelmed and drowned out by the bitterness, the hatred, and let's be honest, the sense that you were continually being abused by your former enemies. There were a lot of people in the Allied side that realized this and said, we're setting up the next war. This is, I mean, they understood that you can only do certain things to collective human populations for a certain period of time before it is natural for them to want to. And there are, you can see German posters from the region, Nazi propaganda posters that show them breaking off the chains of their enemies. And I mean, Germany awake, right? That was the great slogan. So I think love is always a difficult option. And in the context of those times, it was even more disempowered than normal. Well, this goes to the, just to linger on it for a little longer, the question of the inevitability of history. Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? Do you think this kind of force that you're saying that there was a pain and it was building, there was a hatred that was building, do you think there was a way to avert? I mean, there's two questions. Could have been a lot worse and could have been better in the trajectory of history in the 30s and 40s. The most logical, see, we had started this conversation, it brings a wonderful bow tie into the discussion and buttons it up nicely. We had talked about force and counter force earlier. The most obvious and much discussed way that Hitler could have been stopped has nothing to do with Germans. When he remilitarized the Rhineland, everyone talks about what a couple of French divisions would have done had they simply gone in and contested. And this was something Hitler was extremely, I mean, it might've been the most nervous time in his entire career because he was afraid that they would have responded with force and he was in no position to do anything about it if they did. So this is where you get the people who say, and Churchill's one of these people too, where they talk about that he should have been stopped militarily right at the very beginning when he was weak. I don't think... Listen, there were candidates in the Catholic Center Party and others in the Weimar Republic that maybe could have done things and it's beyond my understanding of specific German history to talk about it intelligently. But I do think that had the French responded militarily to Hitler's initial moves into that area, that he would have been thwarted. And I think he himself believed, if I'm remembering my reading, that this would have led to his downfall. So the potential... See, what I don't like about this is that it almost legitimizes military intervention at a very early stage to prevent worse things from happening, but it might be a pretty clear cut case. But it shows we pointed out that there was a lot of sympathy on the part of the allies for the fact that the Germans probably should have Germany back and this is traditional German land. I mean, they were trying, in a funny way, it's almost like the love and the sense of justice on the allies part may have actually stayed their hand in a way that would have prevented much, much, much worse things later. But if the times were such that the message of a Hitler resonated, then simply removing Hitler from the equation would not have removed the context of the times. And that means one of two things, either you could have had another one or you could have ended up in a situation equally bad in a different direction. I don't know what that means because it's hard to imagine anything could be worse than what actually occurred, but history's funny that way. And Hitler's always everyone's favorite example of the difference between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theories of history, right? The times made a Hitler possible and maybe even desirable to some. If you took him out of the equation, those trends and forces are still in place, right? So what does that mean? If you take him out and the door is still open, does somebody else walk through it? Yeah, it's mathematically speaking, the probability of charismatic leaders emerge. I'm so torn on that at this point. Here's another way to look at it. The institutional stability of Germany in that time period was not enough to push back. And there are other periods in German history. I mean, that Hitler arose in, arisen in 1913, he doesn't get anywhere because Germany's institutional power is enough to simply quash that. It's the fact that Germany was unstable anyway that prevented a united front that would have kept radicalism from getting out of hand. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. A tricky question on this, just to stay on this a little longer because I'm not sure how to think about it, is the World War II versus the Holocaust. We were talking just now about the way that history unrolls itself and could Hitler have been stopped? And I don't quite know what to think about Hitler without the Holocaust. And perhaps in his thinking, how essential the antisemitism and the hatred of Jews was. It feels to me that, I mean, we were just talking about where did he pick up his hatred of the Jewish people? There's stories in Vienna and so on that it almost is picking up the idea of antisemitism as a really useful tool, as opposed to actually believing it in its core. Do you think World War II as it turned out and Hitler as he turned out would be possible without antisemitism? Could we have avoided the Holocaust? Or was it an integral part of the ideology of fascism and the Nazis? Not an integral part of fascism because Mussolini really, I mean, Mussolini did it to please Hitler, but it wasn't an integral part. What's interesting to me is that that's the big anomaly in the whole question because antisemitism didn't need to be a part of this at all, right? Hitler had a conspiratorial view of the world. He was a believer that the Jews controlled things, right? The Jews were responsible for both Bolshevism on one side and capitalism on the other, they ruled the banks. I mean, United States was a Jewified country, right? Bolshevism was a Jewified sort of a political. In other words, he saw Jews everywhere and he had that line about it. The Jews of Europe force another war to Germany, they'll pay the price or whatever, but then you have to believe that they're capable of that. The Holocaust is a weird, weird sidebar to the whole thing. And here's what I've always found interesting. It's a sidebar that weakened Germany because look at the First World War. The Jews fought for Germany, right? Who was the most important? And this is a very arguable point, but it's just the first one that pops into my head. Who was the most important Jewish figure that would have maybe been on the German side had the Germans had a non antisemitic? Well, listen, that whole part. Yes, it was Einstein, but the whole, I should point out that to say Germany or Europe or Russia or any of those things were not antisemitic is to do injustice to history, right? Pogroms, I mean, it's standard operating procedure. What you see in the Hitlerian era is an absolute huge spike, right? Cause the government has a conspiracy theory that the Jews have. It's funny because Hitler both thought of them as weak and super powerful at the same time, right? And as an outsider people that weakened Germany, the whole idea of the blood and how that connects to Darwinism and all that sort of stuff is just weird, right? A real outlier, but Einstein, let's just play with Einstein. If there's no antisemitism in Germany or none above the normal level, right? The baseline level, does Einstein leave along with all the other Jewish scientists? And what does Germany have as increased technological and intellectual capacity if they stay, right? It's something that actually weakened that state. It's a tragic flaw in the Hitlerian worldview, but it was so, and let me, you had mentioned earlier, like maybe it was not integral to his character. Maybe it was a wonderful tool for power. I don't think so. Somewhere along the line, and really not at the beginning, this guy became absolutely obsessed with this. With the conspiracy theory. And Jews, and he surrounded himself with people and theorists. I'm gonna use that word really, really sort of loosely, who believed this too. And so you have a cabal of people who are reinforcing this idea that the Jews control the world. He called it international jewelry was a huge part of the problem. And because of that, they deserved to be punished. They were an enemy within all these kinds of things. It's a nutty conspiracy theory that the government of one of the most, I mean, the big thing with Germany was culture, right? They were a leading figure in culture and philosophy and all these kinds of things. And that they could be overtaken with this wildly wickedly weird conspiracy theory and that it would actually determine things. I mean, Hitler was taking vast amounts of German resources and using it to wipe out this race when he needed them for all kinds of other things to fight a war of annihilation. So that is the weirdest part of the whole Nazi phenomenon. It's the darkest possible silver lining to think about is that the Holocaust may have been and the hatred of the Jewish people may have been the thing that avoided Germany getting the nuclear weapons first. And. Isn't that a wonderful historical ironic twist that if it weren't so overlaid with tragedy, a thousand years from now will be seen as something really kind of funny. Well, that's true. It's fascinating to think as you've talked. So the seeds of his own destruction, right? The tragic flaw. And my hope is, this is a discussion I have with my dad as a physicist, is that evil inherently contains with it that kind of incompetence. So my dad's discussion, so he's a physicist and an engineer, his belief is that at this time in our history, the reason we haven't had nuclear like terrorist blow up a nuclear weapon somewhere in the world is that the kind of people that would be terrorists are simply not competent enough at their job of being a destructive. So like, there's a kind of, if you plot it, the more evil you are, the less able you are. And by evil, I mean, purely just like we said, if we were to consider the hatred of Jewish people as evil, because it's sort of detached from reality, it's like just this pure hatred of something that's grounded on things, conspiracy theories. If that's evil, then the more you sell yourself, the more you give into these conspiracy theories, the less capable you are at actually engineering, which is very difficult, engineering nuclear weapons and effectively deploying them. So that's a hopeful message that the destructive people in this world are by their worldview incompetent in creating the ultimate destruction. I don't agree with that. Oh boy. I straight up don't agree with that. So why are we still here? Why haven't we destroyed ourselves? Why haven't the terrorists blown, it's been many decades. Why haven't we destroyed ourself to this point? Well, when you say it's been many decades, many decades, that's like saying in the life of 150 year old person, we've been doing well for a year. The problem with all these kinds of equations, and it was Bertrand Russell, right? The philosopher who said so. He said, it's unreasonable to expect a man to walk on a tight rope for 50 years. I mean, the problem is that this is a long game. And let's remember that up until relatively recently, what would you say, 30 years ago, the nuclear weapons in the world were really tightly controlled. That was one of the real dangers in the fall of the Soviet Union. Remember the worry that all of a sudden you were gonna have bankrupt former Soviet Republic selling nuclear weapons to terrorists and whatnot. I would suggest, and here's another problem is that when we call these terrorists evil, it's easy for an American, for example, to say that Osama bin Laden is evil. Easy for me to say that. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter as the saying goes, and to other people, he's not. What Osama bin Laden did, and the people that worked with him, we would call evil genius. The idea of hijacking planes and flying them into the buildings like that, and that he could pull that off, and that still boggles my mind. I'm still, it's funny, I'm still stunned by that. And yet, the idea, here's the funny part, and I hesitate to talk about this because I don't wanna give anyone ideas, but you don't need nuclear weapons to do incredibly grave amounts of danger. I mean, what one can of gasoline and a BIC lighter can do in the right place and the right time, and over and over and over again can bring down societies. This is the argument behind the importance of the stability that a nation state provides. So when we went in and took out Saddam Hussein, one of the great counter arguments from some of the people who said, this is a really stupid thing to do, is that Saddam Hussein was the greatest anti terror weapon in that region that you could have because they were a threat to him. So he took that, and he did it in a way that was much more repressive than we would ever be, right? And this is the old line about why we supported right wing death squad countries, because they were taking out people that would inevitably be a problem for us if they didn't, and they were able to do it in a way we would never be able to do, supposedly. We're pretty good at that stuff, just like the Soviet Union was behind the scenes and underneath the radar. But the idea that the stability created by powerful and strong centralized leadership allowed them, it's almost like outsourcing anti terror activities, allowed them to, for their own reasons. I mean, you see the same thing in the Syria situation with the Assads. I mean, you can't have an ISIS in that area because that's a threat to the Assad government who will take care of that for you, and then that helps us by not having an ISIS. So I would suggest one, that the game is still on on whether or not these people get nuclear weapons in their hands. I would suggest they don't need them to achieve their goals, really. The crazy thing is if you start thinking like the Joker in Batman, the terrorist ideas, it's funny, I guess I would be a great terrorist because I'm just full of those ideas. Oh, you could do this, you could, it's scary to think of how vulnerable we are. But the whole point is that you as the Joker wouldn't do the terrorist actions. That's the theory that's so hopeful to me with my dad, is that all the ideas, your ability to generate good ideas, forget nuclear weapons, how you can disrupt the power grid, how you can disrupt the, attack our psychology, attack like with a can of gasoline, like you said, somehow disrupt the American system of ideas. That coming up with good ideas there. Are we saying evil people can't come up with evil genius ideas? That's what I'm saying. We have this Hollywood story. I don't think history backs that up. I mean, I think you can say with the nuclear weapons, it does, but only because they're so recent. But I mean, evil genius, I mean, that's almost proverbial. But that's, okay, so to push back for the fun of it, or. And I don't mean to, I don't want you to leave this in a terrible mood because I push back on every hopeful idea you had, but I tend to be a little cynical about that stuff. But that goes to the definition of evil, I think, because I'm not so sure human history has a lot of evil people being competent. I do believe that they mostly, like in order to be good at doing what may be perceived as evil, you have to be able to construct an ideology around which you truly believe when you look in the mirror by yourself, that you're doing good for the world. And it's difficult to construct an ideology where destroying the lives of millions or disrupting the American system, I'm already contradicting myself as I'm saying. I was just gonna say, people have done this already, yes. So, but then it's the question of like, about aliens with the idea that if the aliens are all out there, why haven't they visited us? The same question, if it's so easy to be evil, not easy, if it's possible to be evil, why haven't we destroyed ourselves? And your statement is from the context of history, the game is still on. And it's just been a few years since we've found the tools to destroy ourselves. And one of the challenges of our modern time that we don't often think about this pandemic kind of revealed is how soft we've gotten in terms of our deep dependence on the system. So somebody mentioned to me, what happens if power goes out for a day? What happens if power goes out for a month? Oh, for example, the person that mentioned this was a Berkeley faculty that I was talking with. He's an astronomer who's observing solar flares. And it's very possible that a solar flare, they happen all the time to different degrees. To knock out your cell phones. Yeah, to knock out the power grid for months. So like, just as a thought experiment, what happens if just power goes out for a week in this country? Like the electromagnetic pulses and the nuclear weapons and all those kinds of things, yeah. But maybe that's an act of nature. And even just the act of nature will reveal like a little. The fragility of it all. And then the evil can emerge. I mean, the kind of things that might happen when power goes out, especially during a divisive time. Well, you won't have food. At baseline level, that would mean that the entire supplies chain begins to break down. And then you have desperation. And desperation opens the door to everything. Can I ask a dark question? As opposed to the other things we've been talking about? There's always a thread, a hopeful message. I think there'll be a hopeful message on this one too. You may have the wrong guess. I'm just saying. If you were to bet money on the way that human civilization destroys itself, or it collapses in some way that is, where the result would be unrecognizable to us as anything akin to progress, what would you say? Is it nuclear weapons? Is it some societal breakdown through just more traditional kinds of war? Is it engineered pandemics, nanotechnology? Is it artificial intelligence? Is it something we can't even expect yet? Do you have a sense of how we humans will destroy ourselves? Or might we live forever? I think what governs my view of this thing is the ability for us to focus ourselves collectively. And that gives me the choice of looking at this and saying, what are the odds we will do X versus Y, right? So go look at the 62 Cuban Missile Crisis, where we looked at the potential of nuclear war and we stared right in the face of that. To me, I consider that to be, you wanna talk about a hopeful moment? That's one of the rare times in our history where I think the odds were overwhelmingly that there would be a nuclear war. And I'm not the super Kennedy worshiper that, I grew up in an era where he was, especially amongst people in the Democratic Party, he was almost worshiped. And I was never that guy, but I will say something. John F. Kennedy by himself probably made decisions that saved a hundred million or more lives because everyone around him thought he should be taking the road that would have led to those deaths. And to push back against that is, when you look at it now, I mean, again, if you were a betting person, you would have bet against that. And that's rare, right? So when we talk about how the world will end, the fact that one person actually had that in their hands meant that it wasn't a collective decision. It gave, remember I said, I trust people on an individual level, but when we get together, we're more like a herd and we devolved down to the lowest common denominator. That was something where the higher ethical ideas of a single human being could come into play and make the decisions that influence the events. But when we have to act collectively, I get a lot more pessimistic. So take what we're doing to the planet. And we talk about it always now in terms of climate change, which I think is far too narrow. Look at, and I always get very frustrated when we talk about these arguments about, is it happening? Is it human? Just look at the trash, forget climate for a second. We are destroying the planet because we're not taking care of it and because what it would do to take care of it would require collective sacrifices that would require enough of us to say, okay. And we can't get enough of us to say, okay, because too many people have to be on board. It's not John F. Kennedy making one decision from one man. We have to have 85% of us or something around the world. Not just, you can't say we're gonna stop doing damage to the world here in the United States if China does it. So the amount of people that have to get on board that train is hard. You get pessimistic hoping for those kinds of shifts unless it's right, you know, Krypton's about to explode. We have, and so I think if you're talking about a gambling man's view of this, that that's gotta be the odds on favorite because it requires such a UNAM. I mean, and the systems maybe aren't even in place, right? The fact that we would need intergovernmental bodies that are completely discredited now on board and you would have to subvert the national interests of nation states, I mean, the amount of things that have to go right in a short period of time where we don't have 600 years to figure this out, right? So to me, that looks like the most likely just because the things we would have to do to avoid it seem the most unlikely. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I believe, call me naive, in just like you said with the individual, I believe that charismatic leaders, individual leaders will save us. Like this. What if you don't get them all at the same time? What if you get a charismatic leader in one country but under, or what if you get a charismatic leader in a country that doesn't really matter that much? Well, it's a ripple effect. So it starts with one leader and their charisma inspires other leaders. So it's like one ant queen steps up and then the rest of the ant starts behaving. And then there's like little other spikes of leaders that emerge. And then that's where collaboration emerges. I tend to believe that like when you heat up the system and shit starts getting really chaotic, then the leader, whatever this collective intelligence that we've developed, the leader will emerge. Like there. Don't you think there's just as much of a chance though that the leader would emerge and say, the Jews are the people who did all this. You know what I'm saying? Is that the idea that they would come up, you have a charismatic leader and he's going to come up with the rights or she is going to come up with the right solution as opposed to totally coming up with the wrong solution. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is you could be right, but a lot of things have to go the right way. But my intuition about the evolutionary process that led to the creation of human intelligence and consciousness on earth results in the power of like, if we think of it, just the love in the system versus the hate in the system, that the love is greater. The human kindness potential in the system is greater than the human hatred potential. And so the leader that is in the time when it's needed, the leader that inspires love and kindness is more likely to emerge and will have more power. So you have the Hitlers of the world that emerge, but they're actually in a grand scheme of history are not that impactful. So it's weird to say, but not that many people died in World War II. If you look at the full range of human history, it's up to a hundred million, whatever that is, with natural pandemics too, you can have those kinds of numbers, but it's still a percentage. I forget what the percentage is, maybe three, 5% of the human population on earth. Maybe it's a little bit focused on a different region, but it's not destructive to the entirety of human civilization. So I believe that the charismatic leaders, when time is needed, that do good for the world in the broader sense of good are more likely to emerge than the ones that say, kill all the Jews. It's possible though, and this is just, I've thought about this all of 30 seconds, but I mean, it seems. We're betting money here on the 21st century, who's gonna win? I think maybe you've divided this into too much of a black and white dichotomy, this love and good on one side and this evil on another. Let me throw something that might be more in the center of that linear balancing act, self interest, which may or may not be good. The good version of it we call enlightened self interest. The bad version of it we call selfishness. But self interest to me seems like something more likely to impact the outcome than either love on one side or evil on the other. Simply a question of what's good for me or what's good for my country or what's good from my point of view or what's good for my business. I mean, if you tell me, and maybe I'm a coal miner or maybe I own a coal mine. If you say to me, we have to stop using coal because it's hurting the earth, I have a hard time disentangling that greater good question from my right now good feeding my family question, right? So I think maybe it's gonna be a much more banal thing than good and evil, much more a question of we're not all going to decide at the same time that the interests that we have are aligned. Does that make sense? Totally, but I mean, I've looked at Ayn Rand and objectivism and kind of really thought like, how bad or good can things go when everybody's acting selfishly? But I think we're just talking two aunts here with microphones talking about. But like the question is when this spreads, so what do I mean by love and kindness? I think it's human flourishing on earth and throughout the cosmos. It feels like whatever the engine that drives human beings is more likely to result in human flourishing. And people like Hitler are not good for human flourishing. So that's what I mean by good is there's a, I mean, maybe it's an intuition that kindness is an evolutionary advantage. I hate those terms. I hate to reduce stuff to evolutionary biology always, but it just seems like for us to multiply throughout the universe, it's good to be kind to each other. And those leaders will always emerge to save us from the Hitlers of the world that wanna kind of burn the thing down with a flamethrower. That's the intuition. But let's talk about, you brought up evolution several times. Let me play with that for a minute. I think going back to animal times, we are conditioned to deal with overwhelming threats right in front of us. So I have quite a bit of faith in humanity when it comes to impending doom right outside our door. If Krypton's about to explode, I think humanity can rouse themselves to great, and would give power to the people who needed it and be willing to make the sacrifices. But that's what makes, I think, the pollution slash climate change slash screwing up your environment threat so particularly insidious is it happens slowly, right? It defies fight and flight mechanisms. It defies the natural ability we have to deal with the threat that's right on top of us. And it requires an amount of foresight that while some people would be fine with that, most people are too worried and understandably, I think too worried about today's threat rather than next generation's threat or whatever it might be. So I mean, when we talk about when you had said, what do you think the greatest threat is? I think with nuclear weapons, I think could we have a nuclear war? We darn right could, but I think that there's enough of an inertia where against that because people understand instinctively, if I decide to launch this attack against China and I'm India, we're gonna have 50 million dead people tomorrow. Whereas if you say, we're gonna have a whole planet of dead people in three generations if we don't start now, I think the evolutionary way that we have evolved mitigates maybe against that. In other words, I think I would be pleasantly surprised if we could pull that off. Does that make sense? Totally. I don't mean to be like, I'm the sight predicting doom. It's fun that way. I think we're both, maybe I'm over the top on the love thing. Maybe I'm over the top on the doom. So it makes for a fun chat, I think. So one guy that I've talked to several times is slowly becoming a friend is a guy named Elon Musk. He's a big fan of hardcore history, especially Genghis Khan series of episodes, but really all of it, him and his girlfriend Grimes listen to it, which is. I know Elon. Yeah, you know Elon? Okay, awesome. So that's like relationship goals, like listen to hardcore history on the weekend with your loved one. Okay. So let me, if I were to look at the guy from a perspective of human history, it feels like he will be a little speck that's remembered. Oh, absolutely. You think about like the people, what will we remember from our time? Who are the people we'll remember, whether it's the Hitlers or the Einsteins, who's going to be? It's hard to predict when you're in it, but it seems like Elon will be one of those people remembered. And if I were to guess what he's remembered for, it's the work he's doing with SpaceX and potentially being the person. Now we don't know, but the being the person who launched a new era of space exploration. If we look centuries from now, if we are successful as human beings surviving long enough to venture out into the, you know, toward the stars. It's weird to ask you this. I don't know what your opinions are, but do you think humans will be a multi planetary species in the long arc of history? Do you think Elon will be successful in his dream? And he doesn't shy away from saying it this way, right? He really wants us to colonize Mars first and then colonize other Earth like planets in other solar systems throughout the galaxy. Do you have a hope that we humans will venture out towards the stars? So here's the thing. And this actually, again, dovetails to what we were talking about earlier. I actually, first of all, I toured SpaceX and it's hard to get your mind around because he's doing what it took governments to do before. Yes. Okay. So it's incredible that we're watching individual companies and stuff doing this. Doing it faster and cheaper. Yeah. Well, and pushing the envelope, right? Faster than the governments at the time we're moving. It really is. I mean, there's a lot of people who I think, who think Elon is overrated and you have no idea, right? When you go see it, you have no idea. But that's actually not what I'm most impressed with. It's Tesla I'm most impressed with. And the reason why is because in my mind, we just talked about what I think is the greatest threat, the environmental stuff. And I talked about our inability maybe all at the same time to be willing to sacrifice our self interests in order for the goal. And I don't wanna put words in Elon's mouth, so you can talk to him if you want to. But in my mind, what he's done is recognize that problem. And instead of building a car that's a piece of crap, but it's good for the environment so you should drive it, he's trying to create a car that if you're only motivated by your self interest, you'll buy it anyway. And it will help the environment and help us transition away from one of the main causes of damage. I mean, one of the things this pandemic and the shutdown around the world has done is show us how amazingly quickly the earth can actually rejuvenate. We're seeing clear skies in places species come and you would have thought it would have taken decades for some of this stuff. So what if to name just one major pollution source, we didn't have the pollution caused by automobiles, right? And if you had said to me, Dan, what do you think the odds of us transitioning away from that were 10 years ago, I would have said, well, people aren't gonna do it because it's inefficient, it's this, it's that, nobody wants to, but what if you created a vehicle that was superior in every way so that if you were just a self oriented consumer, you'd buy it because you wanted that car. That's the best way to get around that problem of people not wanting to, I think he's identified that. And as he's told me before, when the last time a car company was created that actually, blah, blah, blah, he's right. And so I happen to feel that even though he's pushing the envelope on the space thing, I think somebody else would have done that someday. I'm not sure because of the various things he's mentioned, how difficult it is to start there, I'm not sure that the industries that create vehicles for us would have gone where he's going to lead them if he didn't force them there through consumer demand by making a better car that people wanted anyway. They'll follow, they'll copy, they'll do all those things. And yet who was gonna do that? So I hope he doesn't hate me for saying this, but I happen to think the Tesla idea may alleviate some of the need to get off this planet because the planet's being destroyed, right? And we're gonna colonize Mars probably anyway if we live long enough. And I think the Tesla idea, not just Elon's version, but ones that follow from other people is the best chance of making sure we're around long enough to see Mars colonized. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And one other thing from my perspective, because I'm now starting a company, I think the interesting thing about Elon is he serves as a beacon of hope, like pragmatically speaking for people that, sort of to push back on our Doom conversation from earlier, that a single individual could build something that allows us as self interested individuals to gather together in a collective way to actually alleviate some of the dangers that face our world. So it gives me hope as an individual that I can build something that can actually have impact that counteracts the Stalins and the Hitlers and all the threats that face that human civilization faces, that an individual has that power. I didn't believe that the individual has that power in the halls of government. Like, I don't feel like any one presidential candidate can rise up and help the world, unite the world. It feels like from everything I've seen and you're right with Tesla, it can bring the world together to do good. That's a really powerful mechanism of whatever you say about capitalism, that you can build companies that start, it starts with a single individual. Of course, there's a collective that grows around that, but the leadership of a single individual, their ideas, their dreams, their vision can catalyze something that takes over the world and does good for the entire world. But if I think, but again, I think the genius of the idea is that it doesn't require us to go head to head with human nature, right? He's actually built human nature into the idea by basically saying, I'm not asking you to be an environmental activist. I'm not asking you to sacrifice to make it. I'm gonna sell you a car you're going to like better. And by buying it, you'll help the environment. That takes into account our foibles as a species and actually leverages that to work for the greater good. And that's the sort of thing that does turn off my little doom caster cynicism thing a little bit because you're actually hitting us where we live, right? You're not, you can take somebody who doesn't even believe the environment's a problem, but they want a Tesla. So they're inadvertently helping anyway. I think that's the genius of the idea. Yeah, and I'm telling you, that's one way to make love a much more efficient mechanism of change than hate. Making it in your self interest to love somebody. Making it in your self interest, creating a product that leads to more love than hate. You're gonna wanna love your neighbor because you're gonna make a fortune. Exactly. Right, okay, I get it. There you go. That's why he said. All right, I'm on board. That's why Elon said love is the answer. That's, I think, exactly what he meant. Okay, let's try something difficult. You've recorded an episode of Steering Into the Iceberg on your Common Sense program. Yeah. That has started a lot of conversations. It's quite moving, it was quite haunting. Got me a lot of angry emails. Really? Of course. I did something I haven't done in 30 years. I endorsed a political candidate from one of the two main parties and there were a lot of disillusioned people because of that. I guess I didn't hear it as an endorsement. I just heard it as the similar flavor of conversation as you have in hardcore history. It's almost the speaking about modern times in the same voice as you speak about when you talk about history. So it was just a little bit of a haunting view of the world today. I know we were just wearing our doom caster. Let me put that right back on, are you? No. I like the term doom caster. How do we get love to win? What's the way out of this? Is there some hopeful line that we can walk to avoid something, and I hate to use the terminology, but something that looks like a civil war, not necessarily a war of force, but a division to a level where it doesn't any longer feel like a United States of America with an emphasis on United. Is there a way out? I read a book a while back. I want to say George Friedman, the Stratfor guy wrote it. It was something called The Next Hundred Years, I think it was called. And I remember thinking, I didn't agree with any of it. And one of the things I think he said in the book was that the United States was going to break up. I'm going from memory here. He might not have said that at all, but something was stuck in my memory about that. And I remember thinking, but I think some of the arguments were connected to the differences that we had and the fact that those differences are being exploited. So we talked about media earlier and the lack of truth and everything. We have a media climate that is incentivized to take the wedges in our society and make them wider. And there's no countervailing force to do the opposite or to help. So there was a famous memo from a group called Project for a New American Century. And they took it down, but the Wayback Machine online still has it. And it happened before 9 11, spawned all kinds of conspiracy theories because it was saying something to the effect of, and I'm really paraphrasing here, but you know that the United States needs another Pearl Harbor type event because those galvanize a country that without those kinds of events periodically is naturally geared towards pulling itself apart. And it's those periodic events that act as the countervailing force that otherwise is not there. If that's true, then we are naturally inclined towards pulling ourselves apart. So to have a media environment that makes money off widening those divisions, which we do. I mean, I was in talk radio and it has those people, the people that used to scream at me cause I wouldn't do it. But I mean, we would have these terrible conversations after every broadcast where I'd be in there with the program director and they're yelling at me about heat. Heat was the word they create more heat. Well, what is heat, right? Heat is division, right? And they want the heat, not because they're political, they're not Republicans or Democrats either. We want listeners and we want engagement and involvement. And because of the constructs of the format, you don't have a lot of time to get it. So you can't have me giving you like on a podcast an hour and a half or two hours where we build a logical argument and you're with me the whole way, your audience is changing every 15 minutes. So whatever points you make to create interest and intrigue and engagement have to be knee jerk right now. Things, they told me once that the audience has to know where you stand on every single issue within five minutes of turning on your show. In other words, you have to be part of a linear set of political beliefs so that if you feel A about subject A, then you must feel D about subject D. And I don't even need to hear your opinion on it cause if you feel that way about A, you're gonna feel that way about D. This is a system that is designed to pull us apart for profit, but not because they wanna pull us apart, right? It's a byproduct of the profit. That's one little example of 50 examples in our society that work in that same fashion. So what that project for a new American century document was saying is that we're naturally inclined towards disunity and without things to occasionally ratchet the unity back up again, so that we can start from the baseline again and then pull ourselves apart till the next Pearl Harbor, that you'll pull yourself apart, which I think was, think that's what the George Friedman book was saying that I disagreed with so much at the time. So in answer to your question about civil wars, we can't have the same kind of civil war because we don't have a geographical division that's as clear cut as the one we had before, right? You had a basically north south line and some border states. It was set up for that kind of a split. Now we're divided within communities, within families, within gerrymandered voting districts and precincts, right? So you can't disengage. We're stuck with each other. So if there's a civil war now, for lack of a better word, what it might seem like is the late 1960s, early 1970s, where you had the bombings and let's call it domestic terrorism and things like that, because that would seem to be something that once again, you don't even need a large chunk of the country pulling apart. 10% of people who think it's the end times can do the damage. Just like we talked about terrorism before and a can of gas and a big lighter, I've lived in a bunch of places and I won't give anybody ideas where a can of gas and a big lighter would take a thousand houses down before you could blink. Right? That terrorist doesn't have to be from the Middle East, doesn't have to have some sort of a fundamentalist or religious agenda. It could just be somebody really pissed off about the election results. So once again, if we're playing an odds game here, everybody has to behave for this to work right. Only a few people have to misbehave for this thing to go sideways. And remember, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you don't even have to have those people doing all these things. All they have to do is start a tit for tat retribution cycle. And there's an escalation. Yes. And it creates a momentum of its own, which leads fundamentally, if you follow the chain of events down there to some form of dictatorial government as the only way to create stability, right? You want to destroy the Republic and have a dictator, that's how you do. And there are parallels to Nazi Germany, the burning of the Reichstag, blah, blah, blah. I'm the doom caster again, aren't I? And some of it could be manufactured by those seeking authoritarian power. Absolutely, like the Reichstag fire was or the Polish soldiers that fired over the border before the invasion in 1939. To fight the devil's advocate with an angel's advocate, I would say just as our conversation about Elon, it feels like individuals have power to unite us, to be that force of unity. So you mentioned the media. I think you're one of the great podcasters in history. Joe Rogan is like a long form, whatever. It's not podcasting, it's actually whatever the, yeah. Very infrequent is what it is, no matter what it is. But the basic process of it is you go deep and you stay deep and the listener stays with you for a long time. So I'm just looking at the numbers, like we're almost three hours in. And from previous episodes, I can tell you that about 300,000 people are still listening to the sound of our voice three hours in. So usually it's 300 to 500,000 people listen and they tune out. Congratulations, by the way, that's wonderful. Joe Rogan is like 10 times that. And so he has power to unite. You have power to unite. There's a few people with voices that it feels like they have power to unite. Even if you quote unquote endorse a candidate and so on, there's still, it feels to me that speaking of, I don't wanna keep saying love, but it's love and maybe unity more practically speaking that like sanity, that like respect for those you don't agree with or don't understand. So empathy, just a few voices of those can help us avoid the really importantly, not avoid the singular events, like you said, of somebody starting a fire and so on, but avoid the escalation of it. The preparedness of the populace to escalate those events, to turn a singular event and a single riot or a shooting or like even something much more dramatic than that, to turn that into something that creates like ripples that grow as opposed to ripples that fade away. And so like, I would like to put responsibility on somebody like you and on me in some small way. And Joe, being cognizant of the fact that a lot of very destructive things might happen in November. And a few voices can save us is the feeling I have. Not by saying who you should vote for or any of that kind of stuff, but really by being the voice of calm that like calms the seas from or whatever the analogy is from boiling up. Because I truly am worried about, this is the first time this year when I, I sometimes, I somehow have felt that the American project will go on forever. When I came to this country, I just believed, and I still think I'm young, but like, I have a dream of creating a company that will do a lot of good for the world. And I thought that America is the beacon of hope for the world and the ideas of freedom, but also the idea of empowering companies that can do some good for the world. And I'm just worried about this America that filled me, a kid that came from, our family came from nothing and from Russia as it was, Soviet Union as it was, to be able to do anything in this new country. I'm just worried about it. And it feels like a few people can still keep this project going. Like people like Elon, people like Joe. Is there, do you have a bit of that hope? I'm watching this experiment with social media right now. And I don't even mean social media, really expand that out to, I mean, I feel like we're all guinea pigs right now, watching, you know, I have two kids and just watching, and there's a three year space between the two of them, one's 18, the other's 15. And just, you know, when I was a kid, a person who was 18 and 15 would not be that different, just three years difference, more maturity. But their life experiences, you would easily classify those two people as being in the same generation. Now, because of the speed of technological change, there is a vast difference between my 18 year old and my 15 year old, and not in a maturity question, just in what apps they use, how they relate to each other, how they deal with their peers, their social skills, all those kinds of things where you turn around and go, this is uncharted territory, we've never been here, so it's gonna be interesting to see what effect that has on society. Now, as that relates to your question, the most upsetting part about all that is reading how people treat each other online. And you know, there's lots of theories about this, the fact that some of it is just for trolling laughs, that some of it is just people are not interacting face to face, so they feel free to treat each other that way. And I, of course, I'm trying to figure out how, if this is how we have always been as people, right? We've always been this way, but we've never had the means to post our feelings publicly about it, or if the environment and the social media and everything else has provided a change and changed us into something else. Either way, when one reads how we treat one another and the horrible things we say about one another online, which seems like it shouldn't be that big of deal, they're just words, but they have a cumulative effect. I mean, when you, I was reading Meghan Markle, who I don't know a lot about, because it's too much of the pop side of culture for me to pay lip, but I read a story the other day where she was talking about the abuse she took online and how incredibly overwhelming it was and how many people were doing it. And you think to yourself, okay, this is something that people who are in positions of what you were discussing earlier never had to deal with. Let me ask you something, and boy, this is the ultimate doomcaster thing of all time to say. When you think of historical figures that push things like love and peace and creating bridges between enemies, when you think of what happened to those people, first of all, they're very dangerous. Every society in the world has a better time, easier time dealing with violence and things like that than they do nonviolence. Nonviolence is really difficult for governments to deal with, for example. What happens to Gandhi and Jesus and Martin Luther King? And you think about all those people, right? When they're that, it's ironic, isn't it, that these people who push for peaceful solutions are so often killed, but it's because they're effective. And when they're killed, the effectiveness is diminished. Why are they killed? Because they're effective, and the only way to stop them is to eliminate them, because they're charismatic leaders who don't come around every day, and if you eliminate them from the scene, the odds are you're not gonna get another one for a while. I guess what I'm saying is the very things you're talking about, which would have the effect you think it would, right? They would destabilize systems in a way that most of us would consider positive, but those systems have a way of protecting themselves, right? And so I feel like history shows, see, history's pretty pessimistic, I think, by and large. If only because we can find so many examples that just sound pessimistic. But I feel like people who are dangerous to the way things are tend to be removed. Yes, but there's two things to say. I feel like you're right, that history, I feel like the ripples that love leaves in history are less obvious to detect, but are actually more transformational. Like in this. Well, one could make a case about, I mean, if you wanna talk about the long term value of a Jesus, a Gandhi, but yeah, yes, those people's ripples are still affecting people today. I agree with you. And that's, you feel those ripples through the general improvement of the quality of life that we see throughout the generations. Like you feel the ripples through the growth. Yeah, okay, I'll go along with you on that, okay. But I would, even if that's not true, I tend to believe that, and by the way, the company that I'm working on as a competitor is exactly attacking this, which is a competitor to Twitter. I think I can build a better Twitter as a first step. There's a long story in there. I think a three year old child could build a better, and this is not to denigrate you, I'm sure yours would be better than a three year old, but Twitter is so, and listen, Facebook too, they're really awful platforms for intellectual discussion and meaningful discussion, and I'm on it. So let me just say, I'm part of the problem. We're new to this, so it wasn't obvious at the time how to do it, it's now, and now a three year old can do it. I tend to believe that we live in a time where the tools that people that are interested in providing love, like the weapons of love are much more powerful. So like the one nice thing about technology is it allows anyone to build a company that's more powerful than any government. So that could be very destructive, but it could be also very positive. And that's, I tend to believe that somebody like Elon that wants to do good for the world, somebody like me and many like me could have more power than any one government. And by power, I mean the power to effect change, which is different from Gandhi. What do you do with government, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'll forget my train of thought, I'm getting old. But I mean, how do you deal with the fact that already governments who are afraid of this are walling off their own internet systems as a way to create firewalls simply to prevent you from doing what you're talking about? In other words, there's an old line that if voting really changed anything, they'd never allow it. If love through a modern day successor to Twitter would really do what you want it to do, and this would destabilize governments, do you think that governments would take countermeasures to squash that love before it got too dangerous? There's several answers. One, first of all, I don't actually, to push back on something you said earlier, I don't think love is as much of an enemy of the state as one would think. Different states have different views. I think the states want power, and I don't always think that love is in tension with power. I think it's not just about love, it's about rationality, it's reason, it's empathy, all of those things. I don't necessarily think there always have to be by definition in conflict with each other. So that's one sense is I feel like basically you can Trojan horse love into behind, but you have to be good at it. This is the thing, is you have to be conscious of the way these states think. So the fact that China bans certain services and so on, that means the companies weren't eloquent, whoever the companies are, weren't actually good at infiltrating. I think, isn't that a song, like love is a battlefield? I think it's all a cap editor. It's all a game, and you have to be good at the game. And just like Elon, we said with Tesla and saving the environment. I mean, that's not just by getting on a stage and saying it's important to save the environment, is by building a product that people can't help but love and then convincing Hollywood stars to love it. Like there's a game to be played. Okay, so let me build on that because I think there's a way to see this. I think you're right. And so it has to do with a story about the 1960s. In the vast scheme of things, the 1960s looks like a revival of neo romantic ideas, right? I had a buddy of mine several years, well, two decades older than I was who was in the 60s, went to the protest, did all those kinds of things. And we were talking about it and I was romanticizing it. He said, don't romanticize it. He goes, let me tell you, most of the people that went to those protests and did all those things, all they were there was to meet girls and have a good time. And it wasn't so, but it became in vogue to have all, in other words, let's talk about your empathy and love. You're never gonna, in my opinion, grab that great mass of people that are only in it for their interest in whatever. But if meeting girls for a young teenage guy requires you to feign empathy, requires you to read deeper subjects because that's what people are into, you can almost, as a silly way to be trendy, you could make maybe empathy trendy, love trendy, solutions that are the opposite of that, the kind of things that people inherently will not put up with. In other words, the possibility exists to change the zeitgeist and reorient it in a way that even if most of the people aren't serious about it, the results are the same. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Okay. Okay, so we've found a meeting of the moments. Yeah, exactly. Creating incentives that encourage the best and the most beautiful aspects of human nature. Even against our will. It all boils down to meeting girls and boys. Once again, you're getting to the bottom of the evolutionary motivations and you're always on safe ground when you do that. Yeah. That's a little difficult for me. And I'm sure it's actually difficult for you to listen to me say complimenting you, but it's difficult for both of us, okay? So, but you and I, as I mentioned to you, I think off mic, been friends for a long time. It's just been one way. It's two way now. It's two way now. So that's the beauty of podcasting. Now, just been fortunate enough with this particular podcast that I see it in people's eyes when they meet me, that they've been friends with me for a few years now. And we become fast friends actually after we start talking. But it's one way in the vet in that first moment. You know, like there's something about the especially hardcore history that, you know, I do some crazy challenges and running and stuff. I remember in particular, probably don't have time. One of my favorite episodes, the painful tainment one. Some people hate that episode. Because it's too real. Yeah, they can't listen to it. It's my darkest one. We wanted to set a baseline. That's the baseline. But I remember listening to that when I ran 22 miles for me, that was a long distance. Holy cow, that's painful tainment right there. Yeah, and it just pulls you in. There's something so powerful about this particular creation that's bigger than you actually, that you've created. It's kind of interesting. I think anything that is successful like that, like Elon's stuff too, it becomes bigger than you. And that's what you're hoping for, right? Absolutely. Didn't mean to interrupt you, I apologize. I guess a question I have, if you look in the mirror, but you also look at me, what advice would you give to yourself and to me and to other podcasters, maybe to Joe Rogan, about this journey that we're on? I feel like it's something special. I'm not sure exactly what's happening. But it feels like podcasting is special. What advice, and I'm relatively new to it, what advice do you have for people that are carrying this flame and traveling this journey? Well, I'm often asked for advice by new podcasters, people just starting out. And so I have sort of a tried and true list of do's and don'ts. But I don't have advice or suggestions for you or for Joe. Joe doesn't need anything from me. Joe's figured it out, right? I mean, he hasn't yet. He's still a confused kid, curious about the world. But that's the genius of it. That's what makes it work, right? That's what Joe's brand is, right? I guess what I'm saying is, by the time you reach the stage that you're at, or Joe's at, they don't need it. They have figured this out. The people that sometimes need help are brand new people trying to figure out what do I do with my first show and how do I talk into them? And I have standard answers for that. But you found your niche. I mean, you don't need me to tell you what to do. As a matter of fact, I might ask you questions about how you do what you do, right? Well, I guess there's specific things like we were talking offline about monetization. That's a fascinating one. Very difficult as an independent, yeah. And one of the things that Joe is facing with, I don't know if you're paying attention, but he joined Spotify with a $100 million deal for going exclusive on their platform. The idea of exclusivity that, one, I don't give a damn about money personally, but I'm single, and I like living in a shitty place. So I enjoy, so I guess it makes it easy. You get the freedom, right, to not care, yeah. Freedom. It's freedom. Not saving for anybody's college. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so on that point, but I also, okay, maybe it's romanticization, but I feel like podcasting is pirate radio. And when I first heard about Spotify partnering up with Joe, I was like, you know, fuck the man. I said, I even, I drafted a few tweets and so on, just like attacking Spotify, then I calmed myself down that you can't lock up this special thing we have. But then I realized that maybe that these are vehicles for just reaching more people and actually respecting podcasters more and so on. So that's what I mean by it's unclear what the journey is because you also serve as beacon for, now there's like millions, one million plus podcasters. I wonder what the journey is. Do you have a sense, are you romantic in the same kind of way in feeling that, because you have a roots in radio too. Do you feel that podcasting is pirate radio or is the Spotify thing one possible avenue? Are you nervous about Joe as a fan, as a friend of Joe or is this a good thing for us? So my history of how I got involved in podcasting is interesting. Yes. I was in radio and then I started a company back in the era where the dot com boom was happening and everybody was being bought up and it just seemed like a great idea, right? I did it with six other people and the whole goal of the company was, we had to invent the term. I'm sure everybody, there's other places that invented it at the same time. But what we were pitching to investors was something called amateur content. So this is before YouTube, before podcasting, before all this stuff. And my job was to be the evangelist. And I would go to these people and talk and sing the praises of all the ways that amateur content was gonna be great. And I never got a bite. And they all told me the same thing. This isn't gonna take off cause anybody who's good is already gonna be making money at this. And I kept saying, forget that. We're talking about scale here. If you have millions of pieces of content being made every week, a small percentage is gonna be good no matter what, right? 16 year olds will know what other 16 year olds like. I kept pushing this nobody bit. But the podcast grew out of that because if you're talking about amateur content in 1999, well then you're already, you're ahead of the game in terms of not seeing where it's gonna go financially but seeing where it's going to go technologically. And so when we started the podcast in 2005 and it was the political one, not hardcore history, which was an outgrowth of the old radio show, we didn't have any financial ideas. We were simply trying to get our handle on the technology and how you distribute it to people and all that. And it was years later that we tried to figure out, okay, how can we get enough money to just support us while we're doing this? And the cheap and the easy way was just to ask listeners to donate like a PBS kind of model. And that was the original model. So then once we started down that, we figured out other models and there's the advertising thing and that we sell the old shows. And so all these became ways for us to support ourselves. But as podcasting matured and as more operating systems developed and phones were developed and all these kinds of things, every one of those developments, which actually made it easier for people to get the podcast actually made it more complex to make money off of them. So while our audience was building, the amount of time and effort we had to put into the monetization side began to skyrocket. So to get back to your Spotify question, to use just one example, there's a lot of people who are doing similar things. In this day and age, we used to just sell MP3 files. And all you had to have was an MP3 player, it's cheap and dirty. Now, every time there's an OS upgrade, something breaks for us. So we're having, I mean, my choices are at this point to start hiring staff, more staff, and then be a human resources manager. I mean, the pirate radio side of this was the pirate radio side of this because you didn't need anybody, but you know, you or you and another, I mean, you could just do this lean and mean, and it's becoming hard to do it lean and mean now. So if somebody like a Spotify comes in and says, hey, we'll handle that stuff for you. In the past, I would just say, F off, we don't need you, I don't mind. And I definitely am not making what we could make on this, but what we would have to do to make that is onerous to me. But it's becoming onerous to me day to day anyway. And so if somebody were to come in and say, hey, we'll pick that up for you, we will not interfere with your content at all, we won't, and in my case, you can't say, we need to show a month because that ain't happening, right? So I mean, everybody's design is different, right? So it doesn't, you know, there's not one size fits all, but I guess as a long time pirate podcaster, we've been looking to partner with people, but nobody's right for us to partner with. I mean, so I'm always looking for ways to take that side of it off my plate because I'm not interested in that side. All I wanna do is the shows, and it's really at this point, you shouldn't call yourself an artist because that's something to be decided by others. But I mean, we're trying to do art and there's something very satisfying in that. But the part that I can't stand is the increasing amount of time the monetization question takes upon us. So there's a case to be made, I guess is what I'm saying, that if a partnership with some outside firm enhances your ability to do the art without disenhancing your ability to do the art, it's, the word I'm looking for here is it's enticing. I don't like big companies. So I'm afraid of whatever strings might come with that. And if I'm Joe Rogan and I'm talking about subjects that can make public companies a little nervous, I would certainly be careful. But at the same time, people who are not in this game don't understand the problems that literally, I mean, just all the operating systems, all the podcatchers, every time some new podcatcher comes up, makes it easier to get the podcast, that's something we have to account for on the back end. And I'm not exactly the technological wizard of all time. So I think it is maybe, maybe the short answer is, is that as the medium develops, it's becoming something that you have to consider, not because you wanna sell out, but because you wanna keep going. And it's becoming harder and harder to be pirate like in this environment. The thing that convinced me, especially inside Spotify, is that they understand, so if you walk into this whole thing with some skepticism, as you're saying, of big companies, then it works because Spotify understands the magic that makes podcasting, or they appear to in part, at least they understand enough to respect Joe Rogan. And despite what, I don't know if you, so there's the internet and there's people with opinions on the internet. Really? Yes. I've not heard about that. And they have opinions about Joe and Spotify. But the reality is, there's two things in private conversation with Joe, and in general, there's two important things. One, Spotify literally doesn't tell Joe anything. Like all the people that think that Spotify is somehow pushing Joe in this direction. It's a contractual, didn't he insist upon that? It's in the contract. But also, companies have a way of, even with the contract. They sure do. To be marketing people, hey, I know we're not forcing you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate that. Yeah, I'm with you. You and Joe are the same, and Spotify is smart enough not to send a single email of that kind. That's really smart. And they leave them be. There is meetings inside Spotify that people complain, but those meetings never reach Joe. That's like company stuff. And the idea that Spotify is different than pirate radio, the difficult thing about podcasting is nobody gives a damn about your podcast. You're alone in this. I mean, there's fans and stuff, but nobody. Nobody's looking out for you. Yeah. Yeah. And the nice thing about Spotify is they want Joe's podcast to succeed even more. That's what Joe talked about is that's the difference between YouTube and Spotify. Spotify wants to be the Netflix of podcasting. And they, like what Netflix does is they don't want to control you in any way, but they want to create a platform where you can flourish. Even more. Because your interests are aligned. Interests are aligned. So let me bring up something that, let's make a distinction because not all companies who do this are the same. And you brought up YouTube and Spotify, but to me, YouTube is at least more like Spotify than some of these smaller. The term is walled garden, right? You've heard the term walled garden? Yes. Okay. So I've been around podcasting so long now that I've seen rounds of consolidation over the years and they come in waves and all of a sudden, so you'll get, and I'm not going to mention any names, but up until recently, the consolidation was happening with relatively small firms compared to people like Spotify. And the problem was, is that by deciding to consolidate your materials in a walled garden, you are walling yourself off from audience, right? So your choice is I'm going to accept this amount of money from this company, but the loss is going to be a large chunk of my audience. And that's a catch 22 because you're negotiating power with that company is based on your audience size. So signing up with them diminishes your audience size, you lose negotiating power. But when you get to the level of the Spotify to just pick them out, there's other players, but you brought up Spotify specifically, these are people who can potentially, potentially enhance your audience over time. And so the risk to you is lower because if you decide in a year or two, whatever the licensing agreements term is, that you're done with them and you want to leave, instead of how you would have been with some of these smaller walled gardens, where you're walking away with a fraction of the audience you walked in with, you have the potential to walk out with whatever you got in the original deal, plus a larger audience, because their algorithms and everything are designed to push people to your content if they think you'd like. So it takes away some of the downside risk, which alleviates, and if you can write an agreement like Joe Rogan, I mean, where you've protected your freedom to put the content out the way you want. So, and if some of the downside risk is mitigated, and if you eliminate the problem of trying to monetize and stay up with the latest tech, then it might be worth it. You know, I'm scared of things like that, but at the same time, I'm trying to not be an idiot about it, and I can be an idiot about it. And when you've been doing it as independently for as long as I have, the inertia of that has a force all its own, but I'm inhibited enough in what I'm trying to do on this other end, that it's opened me at least to listening to people. But listen, at the same time, I love my audience, and it sounds like a cliche, but they're literally the reason I'm here. So I wanna make sure that whatever I do, if I can, is in keeping with a relationship that I've developed with these people over 15 years. But like you said, no matter what you do, you are, because see, here's the thing. If you don't sign up with one of those companies to make it easier for them to get your stuff on this hand, they might yell at you for how difficult it is, because the new operating system just updated, and you said, I can't get your stuff. So either way, you're opening yourself up to ridicule at this point. All of that makes it easier to go, well, if the right deal came along, and they weren't screwing me, and they weren't screwing my audience, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, again, in this business, when you're talking about cutting edge technology that is ever changing, and as you said, a million podcasts and growing, I think you have to try to maintain flexibility, and especially if they can mitigate the downside risk, I think you'd be an idiot to not at least try to stay up on the current trends. And look, I'm watching Joe. I'm going, okay, let's see how it goes for Joe. I mean, if he's like, ah, this is terrible, I'm getting out of this, you go, okay, those people are off the list. So Joe's put himself out as a guinea pig, and the rest of us guinea pigs appreciate it. As a huge, as a fan of your show, and as a fan of Netflix, the people there, I think I can speak for like millions of people in hope that hardcore history comes to Netflix, or if Spotify becomes the Netflix of podcasting, then to Spotify. There's something at its best that they bring out the, you said artists, so I can say it, is they bring out the best out of the artists. They remove some of the headache, and somehow like they put at their best, Netflix, for example, is able to enforce and find the beauty and the power in the creations that you make even better than you. Like they don't interfere with the creations, but they somehow, it's a branding thing probably too. Yeah, but interfering would be, that would be a no go for me. That's right, absolutely. That can't happen. But that's why Netflix is masterful. They seem to not interfere with the talent, as opposed to, I could throw other people under the bus, like Amazon. There's a lot of places under the bus that could be thrown, absolutely. So I would love, I know there's probably people screaming yes right now. In terms of hardcore history on Netflix, it would be awesome. And I don't love asking this question, but it's asked probably the most popular question that's unanswerable. So let me try to ask it in a way that you would actually answer it, which is, of course, you said you don't release shows very often. And the question is, or the requests and the questions is, well, can you tell Dan to do one on the Civil War? Can you tell Dan to do one on the Napoleon Bonaparte? Can you tell him to do one? Every topic, and you've spoken to this. Actually, your answer about the Civil War is quite interesting. I didn't know you knew what my answer about the Civil War was. As a military historian, you enjoy, in particular, when there is differences in the armies, as opposed to contrasts. With the Civil War, which blew my mind when I heard you say there's not an interesting, a deep, intricate contrast between the two opposing sides. It's like the Roman Civil Wars, where it's legionary against legionary. And you've also said that the shows you work on are ones where you have some roots of fundamental understanding about that period. And so, when you work on a show, it's basically pulling at those strings further and refreshing your mind and learning. You have definitely done the research. Wow, these are words out of my mouth. Yeah, you're right. But is there something like shower thoughts on Reddit? Is there some ideas that are lingering in your head about possible future episodes? Is there things that, whether you're not committing to anything, but whether you're gonna do it or not, is there something that makes you think, hmm, that'll be interesting to pull at that thread a little bit? Oh yeah, we have things we keep in our back pocket for later. So, Blueprint for Armageddon, the first World War series we did, that was in my back pocket the whole time. And when the centennial of the war happened, it just seemed to be the likely time to bring out what was. That was a hell of a series. That's probably one of my favorite series. Take my rear end, man. I have to tell you. Psychologically, you mean? Well, just, you know, when you get to these, I think, I'm guessing here, I think it's 26 hours, all pieces together. Think about, and we don't do scripts. It's improvised. So, think about what, I had somebody write on Twitter just yesterday saying, he said something like, I'm not seeing the dedication here. You're only getting 2.5 shows out a year. And I wanted to say, man, you have no idea what, the only people who understand really are other history podcasters. And even they don't generally do 26 hours. You know, that was a two year endeavor. As I said, the first show we ever did was like 15 minutes. I could crank out one of those a month. But when you're doing, I mean, the last show we did on the fall of the Roman Republic was five and a half hours. That's a book, right? And it was part six or something. So, I mean, you just do the math. And it felt like you were, sorry to interrupt, on World War I, it felt like you were emotionally pulled in to it. Like, it felt taxing. I was gonna say, that's a good thing though, because that, you know, and I think we said during the show, that was the feeling that the people at the time have. And I think at one point we said, if this is starting to seem gruesomely repetitive, now you know how the people at the time felt. So in other words, that had sort of inadvertently, because when you improvise a show, some of these things are inadvertent, but it had inadvertently created the right climate for having a sense of empathy with the storyline. And to me, those are the serendipitous moments that make this art and not some sort of paint by the numbers kind of endeavor, you know? And that's, to me, that wouldn't have happened had we scripted it out. So it's mostly, you just bring the tools of knowledge to the table and then in large part improvise, like the actual wording? I always say we make it like they made things like spinal tap and some of those other things where the material, so I do have notes about things like on page 427 of this book, you have this quote, so that I know, aha, I'm at the point where I can drop that in. And sometimes I'll write notes saying, here's where you left off yesterday, so I remember. But in the improvisation, you end up throwing a lot out. And so like, but it allows us to go off on tangents, like we'll try things. Like I'll sit there and go, I wonder what this would sound like. And I'll spend two days going down that road and then I'll listen to it and go, it doesn't work. But that's, you know, like writers do this all the time. It's called killing your babies, right? You got, can't, you know, but people go, so this guy goes, I'm not seeing the dedication. He has no idea how many things we're throwing out. I did an hour and a half, I had an hour and a half into The Current Show about two months ago. And I listened to it and I just went, you know what? It's not right. Boom, out the window. There goes six weeks of work, right? But here's the problem. Do you trust your, sorry to interrupt, do you trust your judgment on that? No, no. But here's the thing. Our show is a little different than other people's. Joe Rogan called it evergreen content. In other words, my political show is like a car you buy. And the minute you drive it off the lot, it loses half its value, right? Cause it's not current anymore. These shows are just as good or just as bad five years from now as they are when we, although the standards on the internet changed. So when I listen to my old shows, I cringe sometimes cause the standards are so much higher now. But when you're creating evergreen content, you have two audiences to worry about. You have the audience that's waiting for the next show and they've already heard the other ones and they're impatient and they're telling you on Twitter, where is it? But you have show, the show is also for people five years from now who haven't discovered it yet and who don't care a wit for how long it took cause they're gonna be able to download the whole, and all they care about is quality. And so what I always tell new podcasters is, they always say, I read all these things, it's very important you have a release schedule. Well, it's not more important than putting out a good piece of work. And the audience will forgive me if it takes too long, but it's really good when you get it. They will not forgive me if I rush it to get it out on time and it's a piece of crap. So for us, and this is why when you brought up a Spotify deal or anything else, they can't interfere with this at all because my job here, as far as I'm concerned is quality and everything else goes by the wayside because the only thing people care about longterm, the only thing that gives you longevity is how good is it? How good is that book? If you read J.R.R. Tolkien's work tomorrow, you don't care how long it took him to write it, all you care is how good is it today? And that's what we try to think too. And I feel like if it's good, if it's really good, everything else falls into place and takes care of itself. And so sometimes to push back, sorry to interrupt. I've done it to you a thousand times, so you can get me back, please. Sometimes the deadline, some of the greatest movies and books have been, you think about like Dostoevsky, I forget which one, notes from underground or something. He needed the money, so he had to write it real quick. Sometimes the deadline creates is powerful at taking a creative mind of an artist and just like slapping it around to force some of the good stuff out. Now, the problem with history, of course, is there's different definitions of good that like it's not just about which you talk about, which is the storytelling, the richness of the storytelling. And I'm sure you're, again, not to compliment you too much, but you're one of the great storytellers of our time that I'm sure if you put in a jail cell and forced like somebody pointed a gun at you, you could tell one hell of a good story, but you still need the facts of history or not necessarily the facts, but like making sure you're painting the right full picture, not perfectly right. That's what I meant about the audience doesn't understand what a history podcast, you can't just riff and be wrong. So let me both oppose what you just said and back up what you just said. So I have a book that I wrote, right? And in a book you have a hard deadline, right? So Harper Collins had a hard deadline on that book. So when I released it, I was mad because I would have worked on it a lot longer, which is my style, right? Get it right. But we had a chapter in that book entitled pandemic prologue question mark. And it was the book about the part about the black death and the 1918 flu and all that kind of stuff. And I was just doing an interview with a Spanish journalist this morning who said, did you ever think how lucky you got on that? And first of all, lucky on a pandemic, it strikes you. But had I had my druthers, I would have kept that book working in my study for months more and the pandemic would have happened. And that would have looked like a chapter I wrote after the fact. I would have had to rewrite the whole thing. So that argues for what you said. At the same time, I would have spent months more working on it because to me, it didn't look the way I wanted it to look yet. Can you drop a hint of the things that you're keeping on the shelves? Oh, the Alexander the Great podcast. I've talked around, I talked to somebody the other day, he said, do you know that the very first word in your very first podcast, in the title, the very first thing that anybody ever saw with hardcore history is the word Alexander. Because the show's entitled Alexander versus Hitler. I have talked around the career. I've done show after, I talked about his mother in one episode. I talked about the funeral games after his death. I've talked around this, I've specifically left this giant Alexandrian size hole in the middle, because we're gonna do that show one day and I'm going to lovingly enjoy talking about this crazily interesting figure of Alexander the Great. So that's one of the ones that's on the back pocket list. And what we try to do is whenever this, we're doing Second World War in Asia and the Pacific now, I'm on part five, whenever the heck we finish this, the tendency is to then pick a very different period because we've had it and the audience has had it. So it's time. So I will eventually get to the Alexander saga. What about just one last kind of little part of this is, what about the other half of that first 10 minute, 15 minute episode? Which is, so you've done quite a bit about the World War. You've done quite a bit about Germany. Will you ever think about doing Hitler and the Man? It's funny because I talked earlier about how I don't like to go back to the old shows cause our standards have changed so much. Well, a long time ago, one of my standards for not getting five hour podcasts done or not getting too deeply into them was to flip around the interesting points. We didn't realize we were gonna get an audience that wanted the actual history. We thought we could just go with, assume the audience knew the details and just talk about the weird stuff that only makes up one part of the show now. So we did a show called Nazi tidbits. And it was just little things about, you know, it's totally out of date now. Like, you know, you can still buy them, but they're out of date. Where we dealt a little with it. You know, it would be interesting, but I'll give you another example. I mean, history is not stagnant, as you know. And we had talked about Stalin earlier and Ghost of the Ostfront was done years ago. And people will write me from Russia now and say, well, your portrayal of Stalin is totally out of, out of, it's outdated because there's all this new stuff from the former Soviet Union. And you do, you turn around and you go, okay, they're right. And so when you talk about Hitler, it's very interesting to think about how I would do a Hitler show today versus how I did one 10 years ago. And you would think, well, what's new? I mean, it happens a lot, but there's lots of new stuff and there's lots of new scholarship. And so, yeah, I would think that would be an interesting one to do someday. I haven't thought about that. That's not in the back pocket, but yeah, that'd be interesting. I have a disproportionate amount of power because I trapped you somehow in a room and, and thereby. During a pandemic. During a pandemic. So like my hope will be stuck in your head, but after Alexander the Great, which would be an amazing podcast, I hope you do give a return to Hitler, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which to me, It's a contemporary book, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I, exactly. It's by a person who was there. Shira, yeah. I really loved that study of the man of Hitler. And I would love to hear your study of certain aspects of it. Perhaps even an episode that's like more focused on a very particular period. I just feel like you can tell a story that it's funny. Hitler is one of the most studied people. And I still feel like all the stories or most of the stories haven't been told. Oh, and there's, listen, I've got three books at home. I'm on all the publishers lists now. And they just, there's young Hitler, there's this Hitler, there's that. I mean, I've been reading these books and I've read about Hitler. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My mother thought I needed to go to a psychologist because I read it when I was six. And she said, there's something wrong with the boy. And, but, but she was right. She was absolutely right. But, but you would think that, that something like that is pretty established fact. And yet there's new stuff coming out all the time. And needless to say, Germany's been investigating this guy forever. And sometimes it takes years to get the translations. I took five years of German in school. I can't read any of it. So, I mean, and he is, when you talk about fascinating figures, he's so, the whole thing is so twistedly weird. There was a, it came out a couple of years ago. Somebody found a tape of him talking to, I want to say it was General, the Finnish General Mannerheim, right? And he's just in a very normal conversation of the sort we're having now. And, you know, the Hitler tapes, when you hear him normally he's ranting and raving. But this was a very sedate. And I wish I'd understood the German well enough to really get a feel, because I was reading what Germans said. And they say, wow, you can really hear the Southern accent. You know, little things that only a native speaker would hear. And I remember thinking, this is such a different side of this twisted character. And you would think you would always, you would think that this was information that was out in the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but it wasn't. And so this goes along with that stuff about new stuff coming out all the time. Alexander, new stuff coming out all the time. Really? Well, at least interpretations rather than factual data. And those color your, those give depth to your understanding. Yes, and you want that because of the historiography. People love that. And that was a byproduct of my lack of credentials, where we thought we're gonna bring in the historians, and we call them audio footnotes, right away for me to say, listen, I'm not a historian, but I'll quote this guy who is so you can trust him. But then we would quote other people who had different views. And people didn't realize that, you know, if they're not history majors, that historians don't always agree on this stuff and that they have disagreements and they love that. So I love the fact that there's more stuff out there because it allows us to then bring in other points of view and sort of maybe three dimensionalize or flesh out the story a little bit more. Two last questions. One really simple, one absurdly ridiculous, and perhaps also simple. First, who has been and is he real? I don't even know what you're talking about. Very well. How's that for an answer? It's like asking me, is Harvey the White Rabbit real? I don't know. There's carrots all around the production room, but I don't know what that means. Well, a lot of people demanded that I prove, I somehow figure out a way to prove the existence. If I said he was real, people would say, no, he's not. And if I said he was, if he wasn't real, they would say, yes, he is. So it's a Santa Claus Easter bunny kind of vibe there. Yeah. I mean, what is real anyway? That's exactly what I told him if he exists. Okay. The most absurd question, I'm very sorry. Very sorry, but then again, I'm not. What's the meaning of it all? You study history, human history. Have you been able to make sense of why the hell we're here on this spinning rock? Does any of it even make sense? What's the meaning of life? What I look at sometimes that I find interesting is certain consistencies that we have over time. History doesn't repeat, but it has a constant, and the constant is us. Now we change. I mentioned earlier the wickedly weird time we live in with what social media is doing to us as guinea pigs, and that's a new element, but we're still people who are motivated by love, hate, greed, envy, sex. I mean, all these things that would have connected us with the ancients, right? That's the part that always makes history sound like it rhymes, you know? And when you put the constant, the human element, and you mix it with systems that are similar, so one of the reasons that the ancient Roman Republic is something that people point to all the time as something that seems like we're repeating history is because you have humans, just like you had then, and you have a system that resembles the one we have here. So you throw the constant in with a system that is somewhat similar, and you begin to see things that look like they rhyme a little. So for me, I'm always trying to figure out more about us, and when you show us in 500 years ago in Asia, and 800 years ago in Africa, and you look at all these different places that you put the guinea pig in, and you watch how the guinea pig responds to the different stimuli and challenges, I feel like it helps me flesh out a little bit more who we are in the long timeline. Not who we are today, specifically, but who we've always been. It's a personal quest. It's not meant to educate anybody else. It's something that fascinates me. Do you think there's, in that common humanity throughout history of the guinea pig, is there a why underneath it all? Or is it somehow, like, it feels like it's an experiment of some sort? Oh, now you're into it. Elon Musk and I talked about this, the simulation thing, right? Nick Bostrom's, yeah, the idea that there's some kid, and we're the equivalent of an alien's ant farm, you know? And we hope he doesn't throw a tarantula in just to see what happens. I think the whys elude us. And I think that what makes philosophy and religion and those sorts of things so interesting is that they grapple with the whys. But I'm not wise enough to propose a theory in myself, but I'm interested enough to read all the other ones out there. So let's put it this way. I don't think there's any definitive why that's been agreed upon, but the various theories are fascinating. Yeah, whatever it is, whoever the kid is that created this thing, the ant farm, it's kind of interesting. Well, so far, a little bit twisted and perverted and sadistic, maybe. That's what makes it fun, I think. But then again, that's the Russian perspective. I was just gonna say. It is the Russian perspective. That's what makes the Russian. So Russian history, one day I'll do some Russian history. I took it in college. That's the ant farm, baby. That's an ant farm with a very, very frustrated young teenage alien kid. Dan, I can't say. I've already complimented you way too much. I'm a huge fan. This has been an incredible conversation. It's a huge gift, your gift of humanity. I hope you. Oh, let me cut you off and just say you've done a wonderful job. This has been fun for me. The questions, and more importantly, the questions can come from anybody. The counter statements, your responses have been wonderful. You made this a very fun intellectual discussion for me. Thank you. Well, let me have the last word and say, I agree with Elon and despite the doom caster say that I think we've concluded definitively and you don't get a chance to respond that love is in fact the answer and the way forward. So thanks so much, Dan. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Carlin and thank you to our sponsors. Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Simply Safe, a home security company I use to monitor and protect my apartment. Magic Spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal that I think is delicious. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to set my need of friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Dan Carlin. Wisdom requires a flexible mind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Dan Carlin: Hardcore History | Lex Fridman Podcast #136

The following is a conversation with Alex Filipenko, an astrophysicist and professor of astronomy from Berkeley. He was a member of both the Supernova Cosmology Project and the HiZ Supernova Search Team which used observations of the extragalactic supernova to discover that the universe is accelerating and that this implies the existence of dark energy. This discovery resulted in the 2011 NOVA Prize for Physics. Outside of his groundbreaking research, he is a great science communicator and is one of the most widely admired educators in the world. I really enjoyed this conversation and am sure Alex will be back again in the future. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Neuro, the maker of functional, sugar free gum and mints that I used to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. BetterHelp, an online therapy with a licensed professional, Masterclass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history, and CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that as we talk about in this conversation, the objects that populate the universe are both awe inspiring and terrifying in their capacity to create and to destroy us. Solar flares and asteroids lurking in the darkness of space threaten our humble, fragile existence here on Earth. In the chaos, tension, conflict, and social division of 2020, it's easy to forget just how lucky we humans are to be here, and with a bit of hard work, maybe one day, we'll venture out towards the stars. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Alex Filipenko. Let's start by talking about the biggest possible thing, the universe. Will the universe expand forever or collapse on itself? Well, you know, that's a great question. It's one of the big questions of cosmology, and of course, we have evidence that the matter density is sufficiently low that the universe will expand forever. But not only that, there's this weird repulsive effect, we call it dark energy for want of a better term, and it appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. So if that continues, the universe will expand forever, but it need not necessarily continue. It could reverse sign, in which case the universe could, in principle, collapse at some point in the far, far future. So in terms of investment advice, if you were to give me and then to bet all my money on one or the other, where does your intuition currently lie? Well, right now, I would say that it would expand forever because I think that the dark energy is likely to be just quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. The vacuum zero energy state is not a state of zero energy. That is, the ground state is a state of some elevated energy which has a repulsive effect to it. And that will never go away because it's not something that changes with time. So if the universe is accelerating now, it will forever continue to do so. And yet, I mean, you so effortlessly mentioned dark energy. Do we have any understanding of what the heck that thing is? Well, not really. But we're getting progressively better observational constraints. So different theories of what it might be predict different sorts of behavior for the evolution of the universe. And we've been measuring the evolution of the universe now. And the data appear to agree with the predictions of a constant density vacuum energy, a zero point energy. But one can't prove that that's what it is because one would have to show that the measured numbers agree with the predictions to an arbitrary number of decimal places. And of course, even if you've got 8, 9, 10, 12 decimal places, what if in the 13th one, the measurements significantly differ from the prediction? Then the dark energy isn't this vacuum state, ground state energy of the vacuum. And so then it could be some sort of a field, some sort of a new energy, a little bit like light, like electromagnetism, but very different from light, that fills space. And that type of energy could in principle change in the distant future. It could become gravitationally attractive for all we know. There is a historical precedent to that, and that is that the inflation with which the universe began when the universe was just a tiny blink of an eye old, a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe went whoosh, it exponentially expanded. That dark energy like substance, we call it the inflaton, that which inflated the universe, later decayed into more or less normal gravitationally attractive matter. So the exponential early expansion of the universe did transition to a deceleration, which then dominated the universe for about nine billion years. And now this small amount of dark energy started causing an acceleration about five billion years ago. And whether that will continue or not is something that we'd like to answer, but I don't know that we will anytime soon. So there could be this interesting field that we don't yet understand that's morphing over time, that's changing the way the universe is expanding. I mean, it's funny that you were thinking through this rigorously like an experimentalist. But what about like the fundamental physics of dark energy? Is there any understanding of what the heck it is, or is this the kind of the god of the gaps or the field of the gaps? So like there must be something there because of what we're observing. I'm very much a person who believes that there's always a cause, you know, there are no miracles of a supernatural nature, okay? So I mean, there are two broad categories, either it's the vacuum zero point energy, or it's some sort of a new energy field that pervades the universe. The latter could change with time, the former, the vacuum energy cannot. So if it turns out that it's one of these new fields, and there are many, many possibilities, they go by the name of quintessence and things like that, but there are many categories of those sorts of fields, we try with data to rule them out by comparing the actual measurements with the predictions. And some have been ruled out, but many, many others remain to be tested. And the data just have to become a lot better before we can rule out most of them and become reasonably convinced that this is a vacuum energy. So there is hypotheses for different fields, like with names and stuff like that? Yeah, you know, generically quintessence, like the Aristotelian fifth essence, but there are many, many versions of quintessence. There's K essence, there's even ideas that, you know, this isn't something from within this dark energy, but rather, there are a bunch of, say, bubble universes surrounding our universe, and this whole idea of the multiverse is not some crazy madman type idea anymore. It's, you know, real card carrying physicists are seriously considering this possibility of a multiverse. And some types of multiverses could have, you know, a bunch of bubbles on the outside, which gravitationally act outward on our bubble because gravity or gravitons, the quantum particle that is thought to carry gravity, is thought to traverse the bulk, the space between these different little bubble membranes and stuff. And so it's conceivable that these other universes are pulling outward on us. That's not a favored explanation right now, but really, nothing has been ruled out. No class of models has been ruled out completely. Certain examples within classes of models have been ruled out. But in general, I think we still have really a lot to learn about what's causing this observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe, be it dark energy or some forces from the outside, or perhaps, you know, I guess it's conceivable that, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, that dark energy, that which causes the acceleration, and dark matter, that which causes galaxies and clusters of galaxies to be bound gravitationally even though there's not enough visible matter to do so. Maybe these are our 20th and 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles. So Ptolemy had a geocentric and Aristotelian view of the world. Everything goes around Earth. But in order to explain the backward motion of planets among the stars that happens every year or two, or sometimes several times a year for Mercury and Venus, you needed the planets to go around in little circles called epicycles, which themselves then went around Earth. And in this part of the epicycle where the planet is going in the direction opposite to the direction of the overall epicycle, it can appear in projection to be going backward among the stars, so called retrograde motion. And it was a brilliant mathematical scheme. In fact, he could have added epicycles on top of epicycles and reproduced the observed positions of planets to arbitrary accuracy. And this is really the beginning of what we now call Fourier analysis, right? Any periodic function can be represented by a sum of sines and cosines of different periods, amplitudes, and phases. So it could have worked arbitrarily well. But other data show that, in fact, Earth is going around the sun. So our dark energy and dark matter, just these band aids that we now have to try to explain the data, but they're just completely wrong. That's a possibility as well. And as a scientist, I have to be open to that possibility as an open minded scientist. How do you put yourself in the mindset of somebody that, or majority of the scientific community or majority of people believe that the Earth, everything rotates around Earth? How do you put yourself in that mindset and then take a leap to propose a model that the sun is, in fact, at the center of the solar system? Sure. I mean, so that puts us back in the shoes of Copernicus, right, 500 years ago, where he had this philosophical preference for the sun being the dominant body in what we now call the solar system. The observational evidence in terms of the measured positions of planets was not better explained by the heliocentric, sun centered system. It's just that Copernicus saw that the sun is the source of all our light and heat, and he knew from other studies that it's far away. So the fact that it appears as big as the moon means it's actually way, way bigger because even at that time, it was known that the sun is much farther away than the moon. So he just felt, wow, it's big, it's bright. What if it's the central thing? But the observed positions of planets at the time in the early to mid 16th century under the heliocentric system was not a better match, at least not a significantly better match than Ptolemy's system, which was quite accurate and lasted 1500 years. Yeah. That's so fascinating to think that the philosophical predispositions that you bring to the table are essential. So like you have to have a young person come along that has a weird infatuation with the sun. Yeah. That like almost philosophically is like however their upbringing is, they're more ready for whatever the more the simpler answer is. Right. Oh, that's kind of sad. It's a sad from an individual descendant of eight perspective because then that means like me, you as a scientist, you're stuck with whatever the heck philosophies you brought to the table and you might be almost completely unable to think outside this particular box you've built. Right. This is why I'm saying that, you know, as an objective scientist, one needs to have an open mind to crazy sounding new ideas. And even Copernicus was very much a man of his time and dedicated his work to the Pope. He still used circular orbits. The sun was a little bit off center, it turns out, and a slightly off center circle looks like a slightly eccentric elliptical orbit. So then when Kepler, in fact, showed that the orbits are actually in general ellipses, not circles, the reason that he needed Tuco Brahe's really great data to show that distinction was that a slightly off center circle is not much different from a slightly eccentric ellipse. And so there wasn't much difference between Kepler's view and Copernicus's view and Kepler needed the better data, Tuco Brahe's data. And so that's, again, a great example of science and observations and experiments working together with hypotheses and they kind of bounce off each other. They play off of each other and you continually need more observations. And it wasn't until Galileo's work around 1610 that actual evidence for the heliocentric hypothesis emerged. It came in the form of Venus, the planet Venus, going through all of the possible phases from new to crescent to quarter to gibbous to full to waning gibbous, third quarter waning crescent, and then new again. It turns out in the Ptolemaic system with Venus between Earth and the sun, but always roughly in the direction of the sun, you could only get the new and crescent phases of Venus. But the observations showed a full set of phases. And moreover, when Venus was gibbous or full, that meant it was on the far side of the sun. That meant it was farther from Earth than when it's crescent, so it should appear smaller and indeed it did. So that was the nail in the coffin in a sense. And then Galileo's other great observation was that Jupiter has moons going around it, the four Galilean satellites. And even though Jupiter moves through space, so too do the moons go with it. So first of all, Earth is not the only thing that has other things going around it. And secondly, Earth could be moving as Jupiter does and things would move with it. We wouldn't fly off the surface and our moon wouldn't be left behind and all this kind of stuff. So that was a big breakthrough as well, but it wasn't as definitive in my opinion as the phases of Venus. Sometimes I'm revealing my ignorance, but I didn't realize how much data they were working with. So it wasn't Einstein or Freud thinking in theories. It was a lot of data and you're playing with it and seeing how to make sense of it. So it isn't just coming up with completely abstract thought experiments. It's looking at the data. Sure. And you look at Newton's great work, right? The Principia, it was based in part on Galileo's observations of balls rolling down inclined planes, supposedly falling off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but that's probably apocryphal. In any case, the Roman Catholic Church did history a favor, not that I'm condoning them, but they placed Galileo under house arrest and that gave Galileo time to publish, to assemble and publish the results of his experiments that he had done decades earlier. It's not clear he would have had time to do that, had he not been under house arrest. And so Newton, of course, very much used Galileo's observations. Let me ask the old Russian overly philosophical question about death. So we're talking about the expanding universe. Sure. How do you think human civilization will come to an end if we avoid the near term issues we're having? Will it be our sun burning out? Will it be comets? Oh, okay. Will it be, what is it? Do you think we have a shot at reaching the heat death of the universe? Yeah. So we're going to leave out the anthropogenic causes of our potential destruction, which I actually think are greater than the celestial causes. So if we get lucky and intelligent, I don't know. So no way will we as humans reach the heat death of the universe. It's conceivable that machines, which I think will be our evolutionary descendants, might reach that, although even they will have less and less energy with which to work as time progresses because eventually even the lowest mass stars burn out, although it takes them trillions of years to do so. So the point is that certainly on Earth, there are other celestial threats, existential threats, comets, exploding stars, the sun burning out. So we will definitely need to move away from our solar system to other solar systems. And then the question is, can they keep on propagating to other planetary systems sufficiently long? In our own solar system, the sun burning out is not the immediate existential threat. That'll happen in about five billion years when it becomes a red giant, although I should hasten to add that within the next one or two billion years, the sun will have brightened enough that unless there are compensatory atmospheric changes, the oceans will evaporate away. They're going to need much less carbon dioxide for the temperatures to be maintained roughly at their present temperature, and plants wouldn't like that very much. So you can't lower the carbon dioxide content too much. So within one or two billion years, probably the oceans will evaporate away. But on a sooner time scale than that, I would say an asteroid collision leading to a potential mass extinction, or at least an extinction of complex beings such as ourselves that require quite special conditions unlike cockroaches and amoebas to survive, one of these civilization changing asteroids is only one kilometer or so in diameter and bigger, and a true mass extinction event is 10 kilometers or larger. Now it's true that we can find and track the orbits of asteroids that might be headed toward Earth, and if we find them 50 or 100 years before they impact us, then clever applied physicists and engineers can figure out ways to deflect them. But at some point, some comet will come in from the deep freeze of the solar system, and there we have very little warning, months to a year. What's the deep freeze, sorry to interrupt. The deep freeze is sort of out beyond Neptune. There's this thing called the Kuiper Belt, and it consists of a bunch of dirty ice balls or icy dirt balls. It's the source of the comets that occasionally come close to the Sun. And then there's an even bigger area called the Scattered Disk, which is sort of a big doughnut surrounding the solar system way out there from which other comets come. And then there's the Oort Cloud, W O O R T after Jan Oort, a Dutch astrophysicist, and it's the better part of a light year away from the Sun, so a good fraction of the distance to the nearest star, but that's like a trillion or 10 trillion comet like objects that occasionally get disturbed by a passing star or whatever, and most of them go flying out of the solar system, but some go toward the Sun, and they come in with little warning. By the time we can see them, they're only a year or two away from us. And moreover, not only is it hard to determine their trajectories sufficiently accurately to know whether they'll hit a tiny thing like Earth, but outgassing from the comet of gases when the ices sublimate, that outgassing can change the trajectory just because of conservation of momentum, right? It's the rocket effect. Gases go out in one direction, the object moves in the other direction. And so since we can't predict how much outgassing there will be and in exactly what direction because these things are tumbling and rotating and stuff, it's hard to predict the trajectory with sufficient accuracy to know that it will hit. And you certainly don't want to deflect a comet that would have missed but you thought it was going to hit and end up having it hit. That would be like the ultimate Charlie Brown goat instead of trying to be the hero, right? He ended up being the goat. What would you do if it seemed like in a matter of months that there is some nonzero probability, maybe a high probability that there will be a collision? So from a scientific perspective, from an engineering perspective, I imagine you would actually be in the room of people deciding what to do. What uh, philosophically too. It's a tough one, right? Because if you only have a few months, that's not much time in which to deflect it. Early detection and early action are key because when it's far away, you only have to deflect it by a tiny little angle. And then by the time it reaches us, the perpendicular motion is big enough to miss Earth. All you need is one radius or one diameter of the Earth, right? That actually means that all you would need to do is slow it down so it arrives four minutes later or speed it up so it arrives four minutes earlier and Earth will have moved through one radius in that time. So it doesn't take much. But you can imagine if a thing is about to hit you, you have to deflect it 90 degrees or more, right? You know, and you don't have much time to do so and you have to slow it down or speed it up a lot if that's what you're trying to do to it. And so decades is sufficient time, but months is not sufficient time. So at that point, I would think the name of the game would be to try to predict where it would hit. And if it's in a heavily populated region, try to start an orderly evacuation perhaps. But you know, that might cause just so much panic that I'm, how would you do with New York City or Los Angeles or something like that, right? I might have a different opinion a year ago, I'm a bit disheartened by, you know, in the movies, there's always extreme competence from the government. Competence, yeah. Competence, yeah. But we expect extreme incompetence, if anything, right? Yes, no. So I'm quite disappointed. But sort of from a medical perspective, I think you're saying there, and a scientific one, it's almost better to get better and better, maybe telescopes and data collection to be able to predict the movement of these things, or like come up with totally new technologies that you can imagine actually sending out, like probes out there to be able to sort of almost have little finger sensors throughout our solar system to be able to detect stuff. Well, that's right. Yeah, monitoring the asteroid belt is very important and 99% of the so called near earth objects ultimately come from the asteroid belt. And so there we can track the trajectories and even if there's a close encounter between two asteroids which deflects one of them toward earth, it's unlikely to be on a collision course with earth in the immediate future, it's more like tens of years, so that gives us time. But we would need to improve our ability to detect the objects that come in from a great distance. And those are much rarer, the comets come in, 1% of the collisions perhaps are with comets that come in without any warning hardly. So that might be more like a billion or two billion years before one of those hits us. So maybe we have to worry about the sun getting brighter on that time scale. I mean, there's the possibility that a star will explode near us in the next couple of billion years. But over the course of the history of life on earth, the estimates are that maybe only one of the mass extinctions was caused by a star blowing up in particular, a special kind called a gamma ray burst, and I think it's the Ordovician–Silurian extinction 420 or so, 440 million years ago that is speculated to have come from one of these particular types of exploding stars called gamma ray bursts. But even there, the evidence is circumstantial. So those kinds of existential threats are reasonably rare. The greater danger I think is civilization changing events where it's a much smaller asteroid, which those are harder to detect, or a giant solar flare that shorts out the grid in all of North America, let's say. Now, astronomers are monitoring the sun 24 seven with various satellites and we can tell when there's a flare or a coronal mass ejection and we can tell that in a day or two, a giant bundle of energetic particles will arrive and twang the magnetic field of earth and send all kinds of currents through long distance power lines and that's what shorts out the transformers and transformers are expensive and hard to replace and hard to transport and all that kind of stuff. So if we can warn the power companies and they can shut down the grid before the big bundle of particle hits, then we will have mitigated much of this. Now for a big enough bundle of particles, you can get short circuits even over small distance scales, so not everything will be saved, but at least the whole grid might not go out. So again, astronomers, I like to say, support your local astronomer, they may help someday save humanity by telling the power companies to shut down the grid, finding the asteroid 50 or 100 years before it hits, then having clever physicists and engineers deflect it. So many of these cosmic threats, cosmic existential threats, we can actually predict and do something about or observe before they hit and do something about. So it's terrifying to think that people would listen to this conversation. It's like when you listen to Bill Gates talk about pandemics in his Ted talk a few years ago and realizing we should have supported our local astronomer more. Well, I don't know whether it's more because as I said, I actually think human induced threats or things that occur naturally on earth, either a natural pandemic or perhaps a bioengineering type pandemic or something like a super volcano. There was one event towed by I think it was 70 plus thousand years ago that caused a gigantic decrease in temperatures on earth because it sent up so much soot that it blocked the sun. It's the nuclear winter type disaster scenario that some people including Carl Sagan talked about decades ago. What we can see in the history of volcanic eruptions even more recently in the 19th century, Tambora and other ones, you look at the record and you see rather large dips in temperature associated with massive volcanic eruptions. Well these super volcanoes, one of which by the way exists under Yellowstone in the central US, it's not just one or two states, it's a gigantic region and there's controversy as to whether it's likely to blow anytime in the next 100,000 years or so. But that would be perhaps not a mass extinction or perhaps not a complete existential threat because you have to get rid of the very last humans for that, but at least getting rid of killing off so many humans, truly billions and billions of humans. There have been ones tens of thousands of years ago including this one, Toba I think it's called, where it's estimated that the human population was down to 10,000 or 5,000 individuals, something like that. If you have a 15 degree drop in temperature over quite a short time, it's not clear that even with today's advanced technology, we would be able to adequately respond at least for the vast majority of people. Maybe some would be in these underground caves where you'd keep the president and a bunch of other important people, but the typical person is not going to be protected when all of agriculture is cut off. It could be hundreds of millions or billions of people starving to death. Exactly. That's right. They don't all die immediately, but they use up their supplies or again, this electrical grid. First of toilet paper. Dash that toilet paper or the electrical grid. Imagine North America without power for a year. We've become so dependent, we're no longer the cave people. They would do just fine. What do they care about the electrical grid? What do they care about agriculture, their hunters and gatherers? But we now have become so used to our way of life that the only real survivors would be those rugged individualists who live somewhere out in the forest or in a cave somewhere, completely independent of anyone else. Yeah. Recently I recommended, it's totally new to me, this kind of survivalist folks, but there's a few shows. There's a lot of shows of those, but I saw one on Netflix and I started watching them and they make a lot of sense. They reveal to you how dependent we are on all aspects of this beautiful systems we human have built and how fragile they are. Incredibly fragile. And this whole conversation is making me realize how lucky we are. Oh, we're incredibly lucky, but we've set ourselves up to be very, very fragile and we are intrinsically complex biological creatures that except for the fact that we have brains and minds with which we can try to prevent some of these things or respond to them. We as a living organism require quite a narrow set of conditions in order to survive. We're not cockroaches. We're not going to survive a nuclear war. So we're kind of this beautiful dance between, we've been talking about astronomy, that astronomy, the stars like inspires everybody and at the same time, there's this pragmatic aspect that we're talking about. And so I see space exploration as the same kind of way that it's reaching out to other planets, reaching out to the stars, this really beautiful idea. But if you listen to somebody like Elon Musk, he talks about space exploration as very pragmatic. Like we have to be, he has this ridiculous way of sounding like an engineer about it, which is like, it's obvious we need to become a multi planetary species if we were to survive long term. So maybe both philosophically in terms of beauty and in terms of practical, what's your thoughts on space exploration, on the challenges of it, on how much we should be investing in it and on a personal level, like how excited you are by the possibility of going to Mars, colonizing Mars and maybe going outside the solar system. Yeah. You know, great question. There's a lot to unpack there of course. Humans are by their very nature explorers, pioneers. They want to go out, climb the next mountain, see what's behind it, explore the option depths, explore space. This is our destiny to go out there. And of course, from a pragmatic perspective, yes, we need to plant our seeds elsewhere really because things could go wrong here on Earth. Now some people say that's an excuse to not take care of our planet. Well, we say we're elsewhere and so we don't have to take good care of our planet. No, we should take the best possible care of our planet. We should be cognizant of the potential impact of what we're doing. Nevertheless, it's prudent to have us be elsewhere as well. So in that regard, I actually agree with Elon. It'd be good to be on Mars. That would be yet another place for us from which to explore further. Would that be a good next step? Well, it's a good next step. I happen to disagree with him as to how quickly it will happen. I think he's very optimistic. Now you need visionary people like Elon to get people going and to inspire them. I mean, look at the success he's had with multiple companies. So maybe he gives this very optimistic timeline in order to be inspirational to those who are going out there. And certainly his success with the rocket that is reusable because it landed upright and all that. I mean, that's a game changer. It's sort of like every time you flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, you discard the airplane, right? I mean, that's crazy, right? So that's a game changer. But nevertheless, the timescale over which he thinks that there could be a real thriving colony on Mars, I think is far too optimistic. What's the biggest challenges to you? One is just getting rockets, not rockets, but people out there and two is the colonization. Do you have thoughts about this, the challenges of this kind of prospect? Yeah, I haven't thought about it in great detail other than recognizing that Mars is a harsh environment. Yeah. You don't have much of an atmosphere there. You've got less than a percent of Earth's atmosphere. So you'd need to build some sort of a dome right away, right? And that would take time. You need to melt the water that's in the permafrost or have canals dug from which you transport it from the polar ice caps. You know, I was reading recently in terms of like, what's the most efficient source of nutrition for humans that were to live on Mars? And people should look into this, but it turns out to be insects. Insects. Yeah. So you want, you want to build giant colonies of insects and just be eating them. Yeah, insects have a lot of protein. Yeah, a lot of protein. And they're easy to grow. Like you can think of them as farming. Right. But it's not going to be as easy as growing a whole plot of potatoes like in the movie The Martian, you know, or something, right? It's not going to be that easy. But you know, so there's this thin atmosphere. It's got the wrong composition. It's mostly carbon dioxide. There are these violent dust storms. The temperatures are generally cold. You know, you'd need to do a lot of things. You need to terraform it basically in order to make it nicely livable without some dome surrounding you. And if you, and if you insist on a dome, well, that's not going to house that many people, right? You know, so let's look, let's look briefly then, you know, we're looking for a new apartment to move into. Right. So let's look outside the solar system. Do you think you've, you've spoken about exoplanets as well? Do you think there's possible homes out there for us outside of our solar system? There are lots and lots of homes. Possible homes. There are, there's a planetary system around nearly every star you see in the sky. And one in five of those is thought to have a roughly Earth like planet. And that's a relatively new discovery. Yeah. It's a new discovery. I mean, the Kepler satellite, which was flying around above Earth's atmosphere was able to monitor the brightness of stars with exquisite detail. And they could detect planets crossing the line of sight between us and the star, thereby dimming its light for a short time ever so slightly. And it's amazing. So there are now thousands and thousands of these exoplanet candidates of which something like 90% are probably genuine exoplanets. And you have to remember that only about 1% of stars have their planetary system oriented edge on to your line of sight, which is what you need for this transit method to work, right? Your planetary angle won't work and certainly perpendicular to your line of sight. That is in the plane of the sky won't work because the planet is orbiting the star and never crossing your line of sight. So the fact that they found planets orbiting about 1% of the stars that they looked at in this field of 150 plus thousand stars, they found planets around 1%. You then multiply by the inverse of 1%, which is 1% is about what the fraction of the stars that have their planetary system oriented the right way. And that already back of the envelope calculation tells you that of order 50 to 100% of all stars have planets. And then they've been finding these Earth like planets, et cetera, et cetera. So there are many potential homes. The problem is getting there. So then a typical bright star, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, maybe not a typical bright star, but it's 8.7 light years away. So that means the light took 8.7 years to reach us. We're seeing it as it was about nine years ago. So then you ask how long would a rocket take to get there at Earth's escape speed, which is 11 kilometers per second. And it turns out it's about a quarter of a million years. Now that's 10,000 generations. Let's say a generation of humans is 25 years. So you'd need this colony of people that is able to sustain itself, all their food, all their waste disposal, all their water, all the recycling of everything. For 10,000 generations, they have to commit themselves to living on this vehicle. I just don't see it happening. What I see potentially happening, if we avoid self destruction, intentional or unintentional here on Earth, is that machines will do it, robots that can essentially hibernate. They don't need to do much of anything for a long, long time as they're traveling. And moreover, if some energetic charged particle, some cosmic ray, hits the circuitry, it fixes itself. Machines can do this. It's a form of artificial intelligence. You just tell the thing, fix yourself basically. And then when you land on the planet, start producing copies of yourself, initially from materials that were perhaps sent, or you just have a bunch of copies there. And then they set up factories with which to do this. This is very, very futuristic, but it's much more feasible, I think, than sending flesh and blood over interstellar distances, a quarter of a million years to even the nearest stars. You're subject to all kinds of charged particles and radiation. You have to shield yourself really well. That's by the way, one of the problems of going to Mars is that it's not a three day journey like going to the moon. You're out there for the better part of a year or two, and you're exposed to lots of radiation, which typically doesn't do well with living tissue, or living tissue doesn't do well with the radiation. And the hope is that the robots, the AI systems might be able to carry the fire of consciousness, whatever makes us humans, like a little drop of whatever makes us humans so special, not to be too poetic about it. No, but I like being poetic about it because it's an amazing question. Is there something beyond just the bits, the ones and zeros to us? It's an interesting question. I like to think that there isn't anything, and that how beautiful it is that our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our compassion all come from these ones and zeros, right? That to me actually is a beautiful thought. And the idea that machines, silicon based life effectively, could be our natural evolutionary descendants, not from a DNA perspective, but they are our creations and they then carry on. That to me is a beautiful thought in some ways, but others find it to be a horrific thought. So that's exciting to you. It is exciting to me as well because to me, from a purely an engineering perspective, I believe it's impossible to create, like whatever systems we create that take over the world, it's impossible for me to imagine that those systems will not carry some aspect of what makes humans beautiful. So like a lot of people have these kind of paperclip ideas that we'll build machines that are cold inside or philosophers call them zombies. That naturally the systems that will out compete us on this earth will be cold and non conscious, not capable of all the human emotions and empathy and compassion and love and hate, the beautiful mix of what makes us human. But to me, intelligence requires all of that. So in order to out compete humans, you better be good at the full picture. Right. So artificial general intelligence, in my view, encompasses a lot of these attributes that you just talked about, curiosity, inquisitiveness, you know, right? It might look very different than us humans, but it will have some of the magic. But it'll also be much more able to survive the onslaught of existential threats that either we bring upon ourselves or don't anticipate here on earth, or that occasionally come from beyond and there's nothing much we can do about a supernova explosion that just suddenly goes off. And really, if we want to move to other planets outside our solar system, I think realistically that's a much better option than thinking that humans will actually make these gigantic journeys. And, you know, then I do this calculation for my class, you know, Einstein's special theory of relativity says that you can do it in a short amount of time in your own frame of reference if you go close to the speed of light. But then you bring in E equals MC squared and you figure out how much energy it takes to get you accelerated to close enough to the speed of light to make the time scales short in your own frame of reference. And the amount of energy is just unfathomable, right? We can do it at the Large Hadron Collider with protons, you know, we can accelerate them to 99.9999% of the speed of light, but that's just a proton. We're gazillions of protons, okay? And that doesn't even count the rocket that would carry us, the payload. And you would need to either store the fuel in the rocket, which then requires even more mass for the rocket or collect fuel along the way, which, you know, is difficult. And so getting close to the speed of light, I think, is not an option either other than for a little tiny thing like, you know, Yuri Milner and others are thinking about this, the Starshot project where they'll send a little tiny camera to Alpha Centauri 4.2 light years away. They'll zip past it, take a picture of the exoplanets that we know, orbit that three or more star system and say hello real quick. Say hello real quickly and then send the images back to us, okay? So that's a tiny little thing, right? Maybe you can accelerate that to, they're hoping, 20% of the speed of light with a whole bunch of high powered lasers aimed at it. It's not clear that other countries will allow us to do that, by the way, but that's a very forward looking thought. I mean, I very much support the idea, but there's a big difference between sending a little tiny camera and sending a payload of people with equipment that could then mine the resources on the exoplanet that they reach and then go forth and multiply, right? Well, let's talk about the big galactic things and how we might be able to leverage them to travel fast. I know this is a little bit science fiction, but, you know, ideas of wormholes and ideas at the edge of black holes that reveal to us that this fabric of space time could be messed with, perhaps. Is that at all an interesting thing for you? I mean, in looking out at the universe and studying it as you have, is that also a possible, like a dream for you that we might be able to find clues how we can actually use it to improve our transportation? It's an interesting thought. I'm certainly excited by the potential physics that suggests this kind of faster than light travel effectively or, you know, cutting the distance to make it very, very short through a wormhole or something like that. Possible? No? Well, you know, call me not very imaginative, but based on today's knowledge of physics, which I realize, you know, people have gone down that rabbit hole and, you know, a century ago, Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest physicists of all time, said that all of fundamental physics is done, the rest is just engineering, and guess what? Then came special relativity, quantum physics, general relativity, how wrong he was. So let me not be another Lord Kelvin. On the other hand, I think we know a lot more now about what we know and what we don't know and what the physical limitations are. And to me, most of these schemes, if not all of them, seem very farfetched, if not impossible. So travel through wormholes, for example, you know, it appears that for a non rotating black hole, that's just a complete no go because the singularity is a point like singularity and you have to reach it to traverse the wormhole and you get squished by the singularity, okay? Now for a rotating black hole, it turns out there is a way to pass through the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, and avoid the singularity and go out the other side or even traverse the donut hole like singularity. In the case of a rotating black hole, it's a ring singularity. So there's actually two theoretical ways you could get through a rotating black hole or a charged black hole, not that we expect charged black holes to exist in nature because they would quickly bring in the opposite charge so as to neutralize themselves. But rotating black holes, definitely a reality. We now have good evidence for them. Do they have traversable wormholes? Probably not because it's still the case that when you go in, you go in with so much energy that it either squeezes the wormhole shut or you encounter a whole bunch of incoming and outgoing energy that vaporizes you. It's called the mass inflation instability, and it just sort of vaporizes you. Nevertheless, you could imagine, well, you're in some vapor form, but if you make it through, maybe you could reform or something. So it's still information. Yeah, it's still information. It's scrambled information, but there's a way maybe of bringing it back, right? But then the thing that really bothers me is that as soon as you have this possibility of traversal of a wormhole, you have to come to grips with a fundamental problem, and that is that you could come back to your universe at a time prior to your leaving, and you could essentially prevent your grandparents from ever meeting. This is called the grandfather paradox, right? And if they never met, and if your parents were never born, and if you were never born, how would you have made the journey to prevent the history from allowing you to exist, right? It's a violation of causality, of cause and effect. Now physicists such as myself take causality violation very, very seriously. We've never seen it. You took a stand. Yeah, I mean, it's one of these back to the future type movies, right? And you have to work things out in such a way that you don't mess things up, right? Some people say that, well, you come back to the universe, but you come back in such a way that you cannot affect your journey. But then that seems kind of contrived to me. Or some say that you end up in a different universe, and this also goes into the many different types of the multiverse hypothesis and the many worlds interpretation and all that. And then it's not the universe from which you left, right? And you don't come back to the universe from which you left. And so you're not really going back in time to the same universe, and you're not even going forward in time necessarily then to the same universe, right? You're ending up in some other universe. So what have you achieved, right? You've traveled. You ended up in a different place than you started in more ways than one. Yeah. And then there's this idea, the Alcubierre drive, where you warp space time in front of you so as to greatly reduce the distance, and you can expand the space time behind you. So you're sort of riding a wave through space time. But the problem I see with that, beyond the practical difficulties and the energy requirements, and by the way, how do you get out of this bubble through which you're riding this wave of space time? And Miguel Alcubierre acknowledged all these things. He said this is purely theoretical, fanciful, and all that. But a fundamental problem I see is that you'd have to get to those places in front of you so as to change the shape of space time so as to make the journey quickly. But to get there, you got there in the normal way at a speed considerably less than that of light. So in a sense, you haven't saved any time, right? You might as well have just taken that journey and gotten to where you were going, right? What have you done? It's not like you snap your fingers and say, okay, let that space there be compressed, and then I'll make it over to Alpha Centauri in the next month. You can't snap your fingers and do that. Yeah. But yeah, we're sort of assuming that we can fix all the biological stuff that requires for humans to persist through that whole process, because ultimately, it might go down to just extending the life of the human in some form, whether it's through the robot, through the digital form, or actually just figuring out genetically how to live forever, because that journey that you mentioned, the long journey, might be different if somehow our understanding of genetics, of our understanding of our own biology, all that kind of stuff, that's another trajectory that possibly... Well, right. If you could put us into some sort of suspended animation, hibernation or something, and greatly increase the lifetime, and so these 10,000 generations I talked about, what do they care? It's just one generation, and they're asleep, okay? It's a long nap. So then you can do it. It's still not easy, right? Because you've got some big old huge colony, and that just through E equals MC squared, right? That's a lot of mass. That's a lot of stuff to accelerate. The Newtonian kinetic energy is gigantic, right? So you're still not home free, but at least you're not trying to do it in a short amount of clock time, right? Which if you look at E equals MC squared, requires truly unfathomable amounts of energy, because the energy is your rest mass, M naught C squared, divided by the square root of one minus V squared over C squared. And if your listeners want to just sort of stick into their pocket calculator, as V over C approaches one, that one over the square root of one minus V squared over C squared approaches infinity. So if you wanted to do it in zero time, you'd need an infinite amount of energy. That's basically why you can't reach, let alone exceed the speed of light, for a particle moving through a preexisting space. It's that it takes an infinite amount of energy to do so. So that's talking about us going somewhere. What about, one of the things that inspires a lot of folks, including myself, is the possibility that there's other, that this conversation is happening on another planet in different forms with intelligent life forms. So first we could start, as a cosmologist, what's your intuition about whether there is or isn't intelligent life out there? Outside of our own? Yeah, I would say I'm one of the pessimists in that I don't necessarily think that we're the only ones in the observable universe, which goes out, you know, roughly 14 billion years in light travel time and more like, you know, 46 billion years when you take into account the expansion of space. So the diameter of our observable universe is something like, you know, 90, 92 billion light years. That encompasses, you know, a hundred billion to a trillion galaxies with, you know, a hundred billion stars each. So now you're talking about something like 10 to the 22nd, 10 to the 23rd power stars and roughly an equal number of Earth like planets and so on. So there may well be other intelligent life. But your sense is our galaxy is not teeming with life. Yeah, our galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy with several hundred billion stars and potentially habitable planets is not teeming with intelligent life. Intelligent. Yeah, I wouldn't, well, I'll get to the primitive life, the bacteria in a moment, but, you know, we may well be the only ones in our Milky Way galaxy, at most a handful, I'd say, but I'd probably side with the school of thought that suggests we're the only ones in our own galaxy, just because I don't see human intelligence as being a natural evolutionary path for life. I mean, there's a number of arguments. First of all, there's been more than 10 billion species of life on Earth in its history. Everything has approached our level of intelligence and mechanical ability and curiosity. You know, whales and dolphins appear to be reasonably intelligent, but there's no evidence that they can think abstract thoughts that they're curious about the world. They certainly can't build machines with which to study the world. So that's one argument. Secondly, we came about as early hominids only four or five million years ago and as homo sapiens only about a quarter of a million years ago. So for the vast majority of the history of life on Earth, an intelligent alien zipping by Earth would have said there's nothing particularly intelligent or mechanically able on Earth. Okay. Thirdly, it's not clear that our intelligence is a long term evolutionary advantage. Now it's clear that in the last 100 years, 200 years, we've improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, but at the risk of potentially destroying ourselves either intentionally or unintentionally or through neglect, as we discussed before. That's a really interesting point, which is it's possible that they're a huge amount of intelligent civilizations have been born even through our galaxy, but they live very briefly and they die. Flash bulbs in the night. That brings me to the fourth issue and that is the Fermi paradox. If they're common, where the hell are they? Notwithstanding the various UFO reports in Roswell and all that, they just don't meet the bar. They don't clear the bar of scientific evidence in my opinion. So there's no clear evidence that they've ever visited us on Earth here. And SETI has been now, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been scanning the skies and true, we've only looked a couple of hundred light years out and that's a tiny fraction of the whole galaxy, a tiny fraction of these hundred billion plus stars. Nevertheless, if the galaxy were teaming with life, especially intelligent life, you'd expect some of it to have been far more advanced than ours. There's nothing special about when the industrial revolution started on Earth. The chemical evolution of our galaxy was such that billions of years ago, nuclear processing and stars had built up clouds of gas after their explosion that were rich enough in heavy elements to have formed Earth like planets, even billions of years ago. So there could be civilizations that are billions of years ahead of ours. And if you look at the exponential growth of technology among Homo sapiens in the last couple of hundred years and you just project that forward, I mean, there's no telling what they could have achieved even in 1000 or 10,000 years, let alone a million or 10 million or a billion years. And if they reach this capability of interstellar travel and colonization, then you can show that within 10 million years or certainly a hundred million years, you can populate the whole galaxy. So then you don't have to have tried to detect them beyond a hundred or a thousand light years. They would already be here. Do you think as a thought experiment, do you think it's possible that they are already here, but we humans are so human centric that we're just not like our conception of what intelligent life looks like is, we don't want to acknowledge it. Like what if trees? Right. Right. Right. Okay, I guess the, in the form of a question, do you think we'll actually detect intelligent life if it came to visit us? Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, you're an ant crawling around on a sidewalk somewhere and do you notice the humans wandering around and the empire state building and you know, rocket ships flying to the moon and all that kind of stuff, right? It's conceivable that we haven't detected it and that we're so primitive compared to them that we're just not able to do so. Like if you look at dark energy, maybe we call it as a field. It's just that my own feeling is that in science now through observations and experiments, we've measured so many things and basically we understand a lot of stuff. Okay. Fabric of reality. Yeah. The fabric of reality, we understand quite well. And there are a few little things like dark matter and dark energy that may be some sign of some super intelligence, but I doubt it. Okay. You know, why would some super intelligence be holding clusters of galaxies together? Why would they be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe? So the point is, is that through science and applied science and engineering, we understand so much now that I'm not saying we know everything, but we know a hell of a lot. Okay. And so there's, it's not like there are lots of mysteries flying around there that are completely outside our level of exploration or understanding. Yeah. From a, I would say from, from a mystery perspective, it seems like the mystery of our own like cognition and consciousness is much grander than like the degrees of freedom of possible explanations for what the heck is going on is much greater there than in the, in the physics of the observed. How the brain works. How did life arise? Yeah. That's big, big questions. But they, to me, don't indicate the existence of, of, of an alien or something. I mean, unless we are the aliens, you know, we could have been contamination from some rocket ship that, that hit here a long, long time ago and all evidence of it has been destroyed. But again, that alien would have started out somewhere. They're not, they're not here watching us right now, right? They're not among us. And so though there are expert potential explanations for the Fermi paradox, and one of them that I kind of like is that the truly intelligent creatures are those that decided not to colonize the whole galaxy because they'd quickly run out of room there because it's exponential, right? You send a probe to a planet, it makes two copies, they go out, they make two copies each and it's an exponential, right? They quickly colonize the whole galaxy. But then the distance to the next galaxy, the next big one like Andromeda, that's two and a half million light years. That's a much grander scale now, right? And so it also could be that the reason they survived this long is that they got over this tendency that may well exist among sufficiently intelligent creatures, this tendency for aggression and self destruction, right? If they bypass that, and that may be one of the great filters if there are more than one, right? Then they may not be a type of creature that feels the need to go and say, oh, there's a nice looking planet and there's a bunch of ants on it, let's go squish them and colonize it. No, it could even be the kind of Star Trek like prime directive where you go and explore worlds, but you don't interfere in any way, right? And also we call it exploration is beautiful and everything, but there is underlying this desire to explore is a desire to conquer. Yeah. I mean, if we're just being really honest right now for us, it is right. And you're saying it's possible to separate, but I would venture to say that you wouldn't that those are coupled. So I could, I could imagine a civilization that lives on for billions of years that just stays on, it's like figures out the minimal effort way of just peacefully existing. It's like a monastery. Yeah. And it limits itself. Yeah. It limits itself. You know, it's, it's planted its seeds in a number of places. So it's not vulnerable to a single point failure, right? Supernova going off near one of these stars or something, or an asteroid or a comet coming in from the Oort cloud equivalent of that planetary system and without warning, you know, thrashing them to bits. So they've got their seeds in a bunch of places, but they chose not to colonize, colonize the galaxy. And they also choose not to interfere with this incredibly prevalent, primitive organism homo sapiens, right? Or they, uh, this is like a, they enjoy, this is like a TV show for them. Yeah. It could be like a TV show. Right. So they just tuned in. Right. There are no other possible explanations yet. I think that to me, the most likely explanation for the peri me paradox is that they really are very, very rare. And you know, Carl Sagan estimated a hundred thousand of them. If there's that many, some of them would have been way ahead of us and, and I think we would have seen them by now. If there are a handful, maybe they're there. But at that point, you're right on this dividing line between being a pessimist and an optimist. Yeah. And what are the odds for that? Right. What are the things that had to go right for us? Yeah. And then, you know, getting back to something you said earlier, let's discuss, you know, primitive life. Yeah. That could be the thing that's difficult to achieve. Just getting the random molecules together to a point where they start self replicating and evolving and becoming better and all that. That's an inordinately difficult thing, I think, though I'm not, you know, some molecular or cell biologist, but just it's, it's, it's the usual argument. You know, you're wandering around in the Sahara desert and you stumble across a watch. Is your, is your initial response, oh, you know, a bunch of sand grains just came together randomly and formed this watch. No, you, you think that something formed it or it came from some simpler structure that then became, you know, more complex. All right. It didn't just form. Well, even the simplest life is, is a very, very complex structure. Even the, even the simplest prokaryotic cells, not to mention eukaryotic cells, although that transition may have been the so called great filter as well. Maybe the cells without a nucleus are relatively easy to form. And then the big next step is where you have a nucleus, which then provides a lot of energy, which allows the cell to become much, much more complex and so on. Interestingly, going from eukaryotic cells, single cells to multicellular organisms does not appear to be, at least on earth, one of these great filters because there's evidence that it happened dozens of times independently on earth. So by, by a really great filter, something that happens very, very rarely, I mean that we had to get through an obstacle that is just incredibly rare to get through. And one of the really exciting scientific things is that that particular point is something that we might be able to discover, even in our lifetimes that find life elsewhere like Europa or be able to see that would be bad news, right? Because if we find lots of pretty advanced life, yeah, that would suggest, and especially if we found some, you know, defunct, you know, fossilized civilization or something somewhere else that would be bacteria, you mean, defunct civilization of like, oh, I'm sorry, I switched gears there. If we, if we found some intelligent or even trilobites right and stuff, you know, elsewhere, that would be bad news for us because that would mean that the great filter is ahead of us, you know, right, because it would mean that lots of, lots of things have gotten roughly to our level. Yeah. But, but given the Fermi paradox, if you accept that the Fermi paradox means that there's no one else out there, you don't necessarily have to accept that, but if you accept that it means that no one else is out there and yet there are lots of things we found that are at or roughly at our level, that means that the great filter is ahead of us and that bodes poorly for our longterm future, you know, it's funny you said, uh, you started by saying you're a little bit on the pessimistic side, but it's funny because we're doing this kind of dance between pessimism and optimism because I'm not sure if us being alone in the observable universe as intelligent beings is pessimistic, well, it's good news in a sense for us because it means that we made it through, see, if we're the only ones and there are such great filters, maybe more than one formation of life might be one of them formation of eukaryotic that is with the nucleus cells being another development of human like intelligence might be another, right? There might be several such filters and we were the lucky ones. And you know, then people say, well then that means you're putting yourself into a special perspective and every time we've done that we've been wrong and yeah, yeah, I know all those arguments, but it still could be the case that there's one of us at least per galaxy or pretend or a hundred or a thousand galaxies and we're sitting here having this conversation because we exist. And so there's a, there's an observational selection effect there, right? Just because we're special doesn't mean that we shouldn't have these conversations about whether or not we're special, right? Yeah, so that's, that's so exciting. That's optimistic. So that's the, that's the optimistic part that if we don't find other intelligent life there, it might mean that we're the ones that made it. And in general, outside the great filter and so on, you know, it's not obvious that the Stephen Hawking thing, which is, it's not obvious that life out there is going to be kind to us. Oh yeah. So, you know, I knew Hawking and I greatly respect his, his scientific work and in particular the early work on the unification of general theory of relativity and quantum physics to two great pillars in modern physics, you know, Hawking radiation and all that fantastic work. You know, if you were alive, you should have been a recipient of this year's physics Nobel prize, which was for the discovery of black holes and also by Roger Penrose for the theoretical work showing that given a star that's massive enough, you basically can't avoid having a black hole. Anyway, Hawking, fantastic. I, I tip my hat to him. May he rest in peace. That would have been a heck of a Nobel prize, black holes, heck of a good group. But, but, but going back to what he said that we shouldn't be broadcasting our presence to others there, I actually disagree with him respectfully because first of all, we've been unintentionally broadcasting our presence for a hundred years since the development of radio and TV. Okay. Secondly, any alien that has the capability of coming here and squashing us either already knows about us and you know, doesn't care because we're just like little ants. And when there are ants in your kitchen, you tend to squash them. But if there are ants on the sidewalk and you're walking by, do you feel some great conviction that you have to squash any of them? No, you generally don't, right? We're irrelevant to them. All they need to do is keep an eye on us to see whether we're approaching the kind of technological capability and know about them and have intentions of attacking them. And then they can squash us, right? Um, you know, they, they could have done it long ago. Yeah. They'll, they'll do it if they want to, whether we advertise our presence or not is, is irrelevant. So I really think that that's not a huge existential threat. So this is a good place to bring up a difficult topic. You mentioned, um, they might, they would be paying attention to us to see if we come up with any crazy technology. There's folks who have reported UFO sightings. There's actually, I've recently found out there's a websites that track this, the data, the data of these reportings, and there's millions of them in the past, uh, several decades. So seven decades and so on that they've been recorded and the ufologist community, as they refer to themselves, you know, one of the ideas that I find compelling from an alien perspective that they kind of started showing up ever since we figured out how to build nuclear weapons that we should, uh, so I mean, you know, if I was an LA and I would start showing up then as well, just, well, why not just observe us from afar? No, I know. Right. I would figure out, but that's why I'm always, uh, keeping a distance and staying blurry, but very pixelated, very pixelated, you know, that there is a something in the human condition that a cognition that wants to see, wants to believe beautiful things and, uh, some are terrifying, some are exciting, uh, goats, Bigfoot is a big fascination for folks. Yeah. And, uh, UFO sightings, I think falls into that. There's people that look at lights in the night sky and I mean, there's, it's kind of a downer to think in a skeptical sense, to think that that's just a light. Yeah. You want to feel like there's something magical there. Sure. Uh, I mean, I felt that first when my dad, my dad's a physicist, when he first told me about ball lightning when I was like a little kid, very weird, very like weird physical phenomenon. And he said, his intuition was telling me this as a little kid, uh, like, I really like math. His intuition was whoever figures out ball lightning, we'll get a Nobel prize. Like he, I think that was a side comment he gave me and I decided there when I was like five years old or whatever, I'm going to win a Nobel prize for figuring out ball lightning. That was like one of the first sort of sparks of the scientific mindset. Those mysteries, they capture your imagination. I think when I speak to people that report UFOs, that's that fire. That's what I see. That excitement. And I understand that. But what, what do we do with that? Because there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and then the scientific community, you're like the perfect person. You have an awesome Einstein shirt. What, what do we do with those reports? It's a, most of the scientific community kind of rolls their eyes and dismisses it. Is it possible that a tiny percent of those folks saw something that's worth deeply investigating? Sure. We should investigate it. It's just one of these things where, you know, they've not brought us a hunk of kryptonite or something like that, right? They haven't brought us actual tangible physical evidence with which experiments can be done in laboratories. Right. It's, it's anecdotal evidence. The photographs are, in some cases, in most cases, I would say quite ambiguous. I don't know what to think about. So David Faber is the first person. He's a Navy pilot, commander, and there's a bunch of them, but he's sort of one of the most legit pilots and people I've ever met. The fact that he saw something weird, he doesn't know what the heck it is, but he saw something weird. I mean, I don't know what to do with that. And one on the psychological side, so I'm pretty confident he saw what he says he saw, which he's not, he's saying it's something weird. One of the interesting psychological things that worries me is that everybody in the Navy, everybody in the US government, everybody in the scientific community, just kind of like pretended that nothing happened. That kind of instinct. That's what makes me believe if aliens show up, we would all like just ignore their presence. That's what bothered me that you don't, you don't investigate it more carefully and use this opportunity to inspire the world. So in terms of kryptonite, I think the conspiracy theory folks say that whenever there is some good hard evidence that scientists would be excited about, there's this kind of conspiracy that I don't like because it's ultimately negative that the US government will somehow hide the good evidence to protect it. Of course, there's some legitimacy to it because you want to protect military secrets, all that kind of stuff. But I don't know what to do with this beautiful mess because I think millions of people are inspired by UFOs and it feels like an opportunity to inspire people about science. So I would say, as Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I've quoted him a number of times. We would welcome such evidence. On the other hand, a lot of the things that are seen or perhaps even hidden from us, you could imagine for military purposes, surveillance purposes, the US government doesn't want us to know. Or maybe some of these pilots saw Soviet or Israeli or whatever satellites or some of the crashes that have occurred were later found to be weather balloons or whatever. When there are more conventional explanations, science tends to stay away from the sensational ones. And so it may be that someone else's calling in life is to investigate these phenomena. And I welcome that as a scientist. I don't categorically actually deny the possibility that ships of some sort could have visited us because, as I said earlier, at slow speeds, there's no problem in reaching other stars. In fact, our Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft in a few million years are going to be in the vicinity of different stars. We can even calculate which ones they're going to be in the vicinity of, right? So there's nothing that breaks any laws of physics if you do it slowly. But that's different, just having Voyager or Pioneer fly by some star, that's different from having active aliens altering the trajectory of their vehicle in real time, spying on us, and then either zipping back to their home planet or sending signals that tell them about us because they are likely many light years away, and they're not going to have broken that barrier as well, okay? So I just, you know, go ahead, study them. For some young kid who wants to do it, it might be their calling, and that's how they might find meaning in their lives, is to be the scientist who really explores these things. I chose not to because at a very young age, I found the evidence, to the degree that I investigated it, to be really quite unconvincing, and I had other things that I wanted to do. But I don't categorically deny the possibility, and I think it should be investigated. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those phenomena that 99.9% of people are almost definitely, there's conventional explanations, and then there's like mysterious things that probably have explanations that are a little bit more complicated, but there's not enough to work with. I tend to believe that if aliens showed up, there will be plenty of evidence for scientists to study. Yeah. And exactly as you said, avoid your type of spacecraft that could see sort of some kind of, kind of a dumb thing, almost like a sensor that's like probing, like statistically speaking. Flying by. Flying by, maybe lands, maybe there's some kind of robot type of thingies that just like move around and so on, like in ways that we don't understand. But I feel like, well, I feel like there'll be plenty of hard, hard to dismiss evidence. And I also, especially this year, believe that the US government is not sufficiently competent given the huge amount of evidence that will be revealed from this kind of thing to conceal all of it. Right. At least in modern times, you can say maybe decades ago, but in modern times. Right, you know, the people I speak to and the reason I bring it up is because so many people write to me, they're inspired by it. By the way, I wanted to comment on something you said earlier on, yeah, I had said that I'm sort of a pessimist in that I think there are very few other intelligent, mechanically able creatures out there. But then I said, yes, in a sense, I'm an optimist, as you pointed out, because it means that we made it through the great filter. Right. I meant originally that I'm a pessimist in that I'm pessimistic about the possibility that there are many, many of us out there, you know, mathematically speaking in the Drake equation. Exactly. Right. Right. But it may mean a good thing for our ultimate survival. Right. So I'm glad you caught me on that. Yeah, I definitely agree with you. It is ultimately an optimistic statement. But anyway, I think, you know, UFO research is interesting. And I guess one of the reasons I've not been terribly convinced is that I think there are some scientists who are investigating this and they've not found any clear evidence. Now, I must admit, I have not looked through the literature to convince myself that there are many scientists doing systematic studies of these various reports. I can't say for sure that there's a critical mass of them, but it's just that you never get these reports from hardcore scientists. That's another thing. And astronomers, you know, what do we do? We spend our time studying the heavens and you'd think we'd be the ones that are most likely aside from pilots, perhaps, at seeing weird things in the sky. And we just never do of the unexplained UFO type nature. Yeah, I definitely, I try to keep an open mind, but for people who listen, it's actually really difficult for scientists. Like I get probably like this year, I've probably gotten over probably maybe over a thousand emails on the topic of AGI. It's very difficult to, you know, people write to me, it's like, how can you ignore this in AGI side? Like this model, this is obviously the model that's going to achieve general intelligence. How can you ignore it? I'm giving you the answer. Here's my document. And they're always just these large write ups. The problem is it's very difficult to weed through a bunch of BS. It's very possible that you had actually saw the UFO, but you have to acknowledge that by UFO, I mean, an extraterrestrial life, you have to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of people who are a little bit, if not a lot full of BS. And from a scientist perspective, it's really hard work and it's when there's amazing stuff out there, it's like, why invest in Bigfoot when evolution in all of its richness is beautiful? Who cares about a monkey that walks on two feet or eight or whatever? Like there's a zillion decoys at observatories. True fact. We get lots and lots of phone calls when Venus, the evening star, but just really a bright planet happens to be close to the crescent moon because it's such a striking pair. This happens once in a while. And we get these phone calls, oh, there's a UFO next to the moon. And no, it's Venus. And so they're just and I'm not saying the best UFO reports are of that nature. No, there are some much more convincing cases. And I've seen some of the footage and blah, blah, blah. But it's just there's so many decoys, right? So much so much noise that you have to filter out. And there's only so many scientists. So it's hard. There's only so much. There's only so much time as well. And you have to choose what problems you work on. You know, this might be a fun question to ask to kind of explore the idea of the expanding universe. Yeah. So the the radius of the observable universe is 45.7 billion light years. Yeah. And the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. That's less than the radius of the universe. How's that possible? So that's a great question. So I meant to bring a little a little prop I have with ping pong balls on a rubber hose, a rubber band. I use it in many of the lectures that one can find of me online. But you have in an expanding universe, the space itself between galaxies or more correctly, clusters of galaxies expanding. So imagine light going from one cluster to another. It traverses some distance and then while it's traversing the rest, that part that it already traveled through continues to expand. Now 13.7 billion years might have gone by since the light that we are seeing from the early stages, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang or the echo of the Big Bang. Yeah, 13.7 billion years have gone by. That's how long it's taken that light to reach us. But while it's been traveling that distance, the parts that it already traveled continue to expand. So it's like you're walking on at an airport, you know, on one of these walkways and you're walking along because you're trying to get to your terminal. But the walkway is continuing as well. You end up traveling a greater distance or the same distance faster is another way of putting it, right? That's why you get on one of these traveling walkways. So you get roughly a factor of pi, you know, but it's more like 3.2, I think. But when you work it all out, you multiply the number of years the universe has been in existence by, you know, three and a quarter or so. And that's how you get this 46 billion light year radius. But how is that, let me ask some nice dumb questions, how is that not traveling faster than the speed of light? Yeah, it's not traveling faster than the speed of light because locally at any point, if you were to measure the light, the photons zipping past, it would not be exceeding the speed of light. The speed of light is a locally measured quantity. After light has traversed some distance, if the rubber band keeps on stretching, then yes, it looks like the light traveled a greater distance than it would have had the space not been expanding. But locally, it never was exceeding the speed of light. It's just that the distance through which it already traveled then went off and expanded on its own some more. And if you give the light credit, so to speak, for having traversed that distance, well, then it looks like it's going faster than the speed of light. But that's not how speed works. And in relativity, also, the other thing that is interesting is that if you take two ping pong balls that are sufficiently far apart, especially in an accelerating universe, you can easily have them moving apart from one another faster than the speed of light. So take two ping pong balls that were originally 400,000 kilometers from each other and let every centimeter in your rubber band expand to two in one second. Then suddenly, this 400,000 kilometer distance is 800,000 kilometers. It went out by 400,000 kilometers in one second. That exceeds the 300,000 kilometer per second speed of light. But that light limit, that particle limit in special relativity, applies to objects moving through a preexisting space. There's nothing in either special or general relativity that prevents space itself from expanding faster than the speed of light. That's no problem. Einstein wouldn't have had a problem with a universe as observed now by cosmologists. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm yet ready to deal emotionally with expanding space. That to me is one of the most awe inspiring things, starting from the Big Bang. It's definitely abstract. Space itself is expanding. Right. Could you, can we talk about the Big Bang a little bit? Sure. Yeah, yeah. What, so like the entirety of it, the universe, was very small. Right. But it was not a point. It was not a point. Because if we live in what's called a closed universe now, a sphere or the three dimensional version of that would be a hypersphere, then regardless of how far back in time you go, it was always that topological shape. You can't turn a point suddenly into a shell, okay? It always had to be a shell. So when people say, well, the universe started out as a point, that's being kind of flippant, kind of glib. It didn't really. It just started out at a very high density. And we don't know actually whether it was finite or infinite, I think personally that it was finite at the time, but it expanded very, very quickly. Indeed, if it exponentiated and continued in some places to exponentiate, then it could in fact be infinite right now. And most cosmologists think that it is infinite. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, sorry. What infinite, which dimension, mass, size? Infinite in space. Infinite in space. And by that I mean that if you were trying to measure. There's no boundary. There's no light to measure its size. You'd never be able to measure its size because it would always be bigger than the distance light can travel. That's what you get in a universe that's accelerating in its expansion. Okay. But if a thing was a hypersphere, it's very small, not a point, how can that thing be infinite? Well, it expands exponentially. That's what the inflation theory is all about. Indeed, at your home institution, Alan Guth is one of the originators of the whole inflationary universe idea, along with Andre Linde at Stanford University here in the Bay Area. And others, Alexei Starobinsky and others had similar sorts of ideas. But in an exponentially expanding universe, if you actually try to make this measurement, you send light out to try to see it curve back around and hit you in the back of the head. But in an exponentially expanding universe, the amount of space remaining to be traversed is always a bigger and bigger quantity. So you'll never get there from here. You'll never reach the back of your head. So observationally or operationally, it can be thought of as being infinite. That's one of the best definitions of infinity, by the way. What's that? That's one of the best sort of physical manifestations of infinity. Yeah, yeah. Because you have to ask, how would you actually measure it? Now, I sometimes say to my cosmology theoretical friends, well, if I were God and I were outside this whole thing and I took a godlike slice in time, wouldn't it be finite no matter how big it is? And they object and they say, Alex, you can't be outside and take a godlike slice of time, you know? Because there's nothing outside. Well, I'm not, you know, or also, you know, what slice of time you're taking depends on your motion. And that's true even in special relativity that slices of time get tilted, in a sense, if you're moving quickly, the axes, x and t actually become tilted, not perpendicular to one another. And you can look at Brian Greene's books and lectures and other things where he imagines taking a loaf of bread and slicing it in units of time as you progress forward. But then if you're zipping along relative to that loaf of bread, the slices of time actually become tilted. And so it's not even clear what slices of time mean. But I'm an observational astronomer, I know which end of the telescope to look through. And the way I understand the infinity is, as I just told you, that operationally or observationally, there'd be no way of seeing that it's a finite universe, of measuring a finite universe. And so in that sense, it's infinite, even if it started out as a finite little dot. Not a dot, I'm sorry, a finite little hypersphere. But it didn't really start out there because what happened before that? Well, we don't know. So this is where it gets into a lot of speculation. Let's go, I mean... Let's go there. Okay, sure. So, you know... The idea of what happened before t equals zero and whether there are other universes out there, I like to say that these are sort of on the boundaries of science. They're not just ideas that we wake up at three in the morning to go to the bathroom and say, oh, well, let's think about what happened before the Big Bang or let there be a multiplicity of universes. In other words, we have real testable physics that we can use to draw certain conclusions that are plausibility arguments based on what we know. Now, admittedly, there are not really direct tests of these hypotheses. That's why I call them hypotheses. They're not really elevated to a theory because a theory in science is really something that has a lot of experimental or observational support behind it. So they're hypotheses, but they're not unreasonable hypotheses based on what we know about general relativity and quantum physics. And they may have indirect tests in that if you adopt this hypothesis, then there might be a bunch of things you expect of the universe, and lo and behold, that's what we measure. But we're not actually measuring anything at t less than zero, or we're not actually measuring the presence of another universe in this multiverse, and yet there are these indirect ideas that stem forth. So it's hard to prove uniqueness, and it's hard to completely convince oneself that a certain hypothesis must be true. But the more and more tests you have that it satisfies, let's say there are 50 predictions it makes, and 49 of them are things that you can measure. And then the 50th one is the one where you want to measure the actual existence of that other universe, or what happened before t equals zero, and you can't do that. But you've satisfied 49 of the other testable predictions, and so that's science, right? Now a conventional condensed matter physicist or someone who deals with real data in the laboratory might say, oh, you cosmologists, that's not really science because it's not directly testable, but I would say it's sort of testable. But it's not completely testable, and so it's at the boundary, but it's not like we're coming up with these crazy ideas, among them quantum fluctuations out of nothing, and then inflating into a universe with, you might say, well, you created a giant amount of energy. But in fact, this quantum fluctuation out of nothing in a quantum way violates the conservation of energy. But who cares? That was a classical law anyway. And then an inflating universe maintains whatever energy it had, be it zero or some infinitesimal amount. In a sense, the stuff of the universe has a positive energy, but there's a negative gravitational energy associated with it. It's like I drop an apple. I got kinetic energy, energy of motion out of that, but I did work on it to bring it to that height. So by going down and gaining energy of motion, positive one, two, three, four, five units of kinetic energy, it's also gaining or losing, depending on how you want to think of it, negative one, two, three, four, five units of potential energy, so the total energy remains the same. An inflating universe can do that, or other physicists say that energy isn't conserved in general relativity. That's another way out of creating a universe out of nothing. But the point is that this is all based on reasonably well tested physics, and although these extrapolations seem kind of outrageous at first, they're not completely outrageous. They're within the realm of what we call science already. And maybe some young whippersnapper will be able to figure out a way to directly test what happened before T equals zero or to test for the presence of these other universes, but right now we don't have a way of doing that. So speaking of young whippersnappers, Roger Penrose. So he kind of has a, you know, idea that we, there may be some information that travels from whatever the heck happened before the Big Bang. Yeah, maybe. I kind of doubt it. So do you think it's possible to detect something, like actually experimentally be able to detect some, I don't know what it is, radiation, some sort of... Yeah, and the cosmic microwave background radiation, there may be ways of doing that. But is it, is it philosophically or practically possible to detect signs that this was before the Big Bang or is it, or is it what you said, which is like everything we observe will, as we currently understand, will have to be a creation of this particular observable universe? Yeah. I mean, you know, if you, it's very difficult to answer right now because we don't have a single verified, fully self consistent, experimentally tested quantum theory of gravity. Right. And of course the beginning of the universe is a large amount of stuff in a very small space. Yeah. So you need both quantum mechanics and general relativity. Same thing if our universe re collapses and then bounces back to another Big Bang. You know, there's also ideas there that some of the information leaks through or survives. I don't know that we can answer that question right now because we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that most physicists believe in. And belief is perhaps the wrong word that most physicists trust because the experimental evidence favors it. Yeah. Right? Yeah. There are various forms of string theory. There's quantum loop gravity. There are various ideas, but which, if any, will be the one that survives the test of time and more importantly, within that, the test of experiment and observation. Yeah. So my own feeling is probably these things don't survive. I don't think we've seen any evidence in the cosmic microwave background radiation of information leaking through. Similarly, the one way or one of the few ways in which we might test for the presence of other universes is if they were to collide with ours, that would leave a pattern, a temperature signature in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Some astrophysicists claim to have found it, but in my opinion, it's not statistically significant to the level that would be necessary to have such an amazing claim, right? It's just a 5% chance that the microwave background had that distribution just by chance. 5% isn't very long odds if you're claiming that instead that you're finding evidence from another universe. I mean, it's like if the Large Hadron Collider people had claimed after gathering enough data to show the Higgs particle when there was a 5% chance it could be just a statistical fluctuation in their data. No, they required 5 sigma, 5 standard deviations, which is roughly one chance in 2 million that this is a statistical fluctuation of no physical greater significance. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There you go. It all boils down to that. And the greater your claim, the greater is the evidence that is needed and the more evidence you need from independent ways of measuring or of coming to that deduction. A good example was the accelerating universe. When we found evidence for it in 1998 with supernovae with exploding stars, it was great that there were two teams that lent some credibility to the discovery. But it was not until other astrophysicists used not only that technique, but more importantly, other independent techniques that had their own potential sources of systematic error or whatever. But they all came to the same conclusion and that started giving a much more complete picture of what was going on and a picture in which most astrophysicists quickly gained confidence. That's why that idea caught on so quickly is that there were other physicists and astronomers doing observations completely independent of supernovae that seemed to indicate the same thing. Yeah. That period of your life that work with an incredible team of people that won the Nobel Prize is just fascinating work. Oh gosh. Never in my wildest dreams as a kid did I think that I would be involved, much less so heavily involved, in a discovery that's so revolutionary. As a kid, as a scientist, if you're realistic, once you learn a little bit more about how science is done and you're not going to win a Nobel Prize and be the next Newton or Einstein or whatever, you just hope that you'll contribute something to humankind's understanding of how nature works and you'll be satisfied with that. But here I was in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, a lot of hard work, and there it was. We discovered something that was really amazing and that was the greatest thrill, right? I couldn't have asked for anything more than being involved in that discovery. So the couple of teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the HiZ Supernova Search Team, what was the Nobel Prize given for? It was given for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, not for the elucidation of what dark energy is or what causes that expansion, that acceleration, be it universes on the outside or whatever, it was only for the observational fact. So first of all, what is the accelerating universe? So the accelerating universe is simply that if we look at the galaxies moving away from us right now, we would expect them to be moving away more slowly than they were billions of years ago. That's because galaxies have visible matter, which is gravitationally attractive, and dark matter of an unknown sort that holds galaxies together and holds clusters of galaxies together. And of course, they then pull on one another and they would tend to retard the expansion of the universe. Just as when I toss an apple up, even ignoring air resistance, the mutual gravitational attraction between Earth and the apple slows the apple down. If that attraction is great enough, then the apple will someday stop and even come back. The Big Crunch, you could call it, or the Gnab Gibb, which is Big Bang backwards, right? That's what could have happened to the universe. But even if the universe's original expansion energy was so great that it avoids the Big Crunch, that's like an apple thrown at Earth's escape speed. It's like the rockets that go to Mars someday, right, with people. Even then, you'd expect the universe to be slowing down with time. But we looked back through the history of the universe by looking at progressively more distant galaxies and by seeing that the evolution of this expansion rate is that in the first nine billion years, yeah, it was slowing down. But in the last five billion years, it's been speeding up. So who asked for that, right, you know? I think it's interesting to talk about a little bit of the human story of the Nobel Prize, which is, I mean, it's fascinating. It's a really, first of all, the prize itself. It's kind of fascinating on the psychological level that prizes, I know we kind of think that prizes don't matter, but somehow they kind of focus the mind about some of the most special things we've accomplished. They do. It's the recognition, the funding, you know. And also inspiration for, like I said, when I was a little kid, thinking about the Nobel Prize, like I didn't, you know, it inspires millions of young scientists. At the same time, there's a sadness to it a little bit that, especially in the field, like depending on the field, but experimental fields that involve teams of, I don't know, sometimes hundreds of brilliant people, the Nobel Prize is only given to just a handful. That's right. Is it maxed at three? Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even written in Alfred Nobel's will, it turns out. One of our teammates looked into it in a museum in Stockholm when we went there for Nobel Week in 2011. The leaders who got the prize formally knew that without the rest of us working hard in the trenches, the result would not have been discovered. So they invited us to participate in Nobel Week. And so one of the team members looked in the will and it's not there. It's just tradition. That's interesting. But it's archaic, you know, that's the way science used to be done. It's not the way a lot of science is done now. And you look at gravitational wave discovery, which was, you know, recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2017, Ray Weiss at MIT got it and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish at Caltech. And Ron Drever, one of the masterminds, had passed away earlier in the year. So again, one of the rules of Nobel is that it's not given posthumously, or at least the one exception might be if they've made their decision and they're busy making their press releases right before October, the first week in October or whatever, and then the person passes away. I think they don't change their minds then. But yeah, you know, it doesn't square with today's reality that a lot of science is done by big teams, in that case, a team of a thousand people. In our case, it was two teams consisting of about 50 people. And we used techniques that were arguably developed in part by people who, astrophysicists who weren't even on those two papers, I mean, some of them were, but other papers were written by other people, you know, and so it's like we're standing on the shoulders of giants. And none of those people was officially recognized. And to me, it was okay. You know, again, it was the thrill of doing the work and ultimately the work, the discovery was recognized with the prize. And you know, we got to participate in Nobel week and, you know, it's okay with me. I've known other physicists whose lives were ruined because they did not get the Nobel prize and they felt strongly that they should have. Ralph Alpher of the Alpher beta gamma paper predicting the microwave background radiation, we should have gotten it. His advisor Gamoff was dead by that point. But you know, Penzias and Wilson got it for the discovery and an Alpher, apparently from colleagues who knew him well, I've talked to them. His life was ruined by this. He just, it just not at his innards so much. It's very possible that in a small handful of people, even three, that you would be one of the Nobel, one of the winners of the Nobel prize. That doesn't weigh heavy on you. Well, you know, there were the two team leaders, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt. And usually there's the team leaders that are recognized. And then Adam Rees was my postdoc. First author, I guess. Yeah. First author. I was second author of that paper. Yeah. So I was his direct mentor at the time. Although he was, you know, one of these people who just, you know, runs with things. He was an MIT undergraduate by the way, Harvard graduate student, and then a postdoc as a so called Miller fellow for basic research and science at Berkeley, something that I was back in 84 to 86. But you're, you know, you're largely a free agent, but he worked quite closely with me and he came to Berkeley to work with me and on Schmidt's team, he was charged with analyzing the data and he measured the brightnesses of these distant supernovae showing that they're fainter and thus more distant than anticipated. And that led to this conclusion that the universe had to have accelerated in order to push them out to such great distances. And I was shocked when he showed me the data, the results of his calculations and measurements. But it's very, you know, so he deserved it. And on Sol's team, Gerson Goldhaber deserved it. But he died, I think a year earlier in 2010, but that would have been four. And so, and me, well, I was on both teams, but, you know, was I number four, five, six, seven? I don't know. It's also very, so if I were to, it's possible that you're, I mean, I can make a very good case for urine in the three. And does that, is that psychologically, I mean, listen, it weighs on me a little bit because I don't know what to do with that. Perhaps it should motivate the rethinking, like Time magazine started doing like, you know, person of the year and like they would start doing like concepts and almost like the black hole gets the Nobel prize or the universe gets the Nobel prize and here's the list of people. So like, or like the Oscar that you could say, because it's a team effort now and it should be redone. And the breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, which was started by Yuri Milner and Zuckerberg is involved in others as well, you know, uh, they recognize the larger team. Yeah, they, they recognize teams. And so in fact, both teams in the accelerating universe were recognized with the breakthrough prize in 2015. Nevertheless, the same three people, Reese Perlmutter and Schmidt got the red carpet rolled out for them and were at the big ceremony and shared half of the prize money. And the rest of us, roughly 50 shared the other half and didn't get to go to the ceremony. So, but I, I feel for them, I mean, for the gravitational waves, it was a thousand people. What are they going to do? Invite everyone for the Higgs particle. It was six to 8,000 physicists and engineers. In fact, because of the whole issue of who gets it experimentally, that discovery still has not been recognized, right? The theoretical work by Peter Higgs and, uh, Anglaire got recognized, but there was a troika of other people who perhaps wrote the most complete paper and they were, they were left out and, um, another guy died, you know, and it's hard. It's all of his heartbreak. And some people argue that the Nobel prize has been diluted too, because if you look at Roger Penrose, you can make an argument that he should get the prize by himself. Like it's just separate those, like he could have and should have, perhaps he should have perhaps gotten it with Hawking before Hawking's death, right? The problem was Hawking radiation had not been detected, but you could argue that Hawking made enough other fundamental contributions to the theoretical study of black holes and the observed data were already good enough at the time of before Hawking's death. Okay. I mean, the latest results by Reinhard Genzel's group is that they see the time dilation effect of a star that's passing very close to the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. That's cool, but, and it adds additional evidence, but hardly anyone doubted the existence of the supermassive black hole and Andrea Gaz's group, I believe hadn't yet shown that relativistic effect and yet she got part of the prize as well. So clearly it was given for the, the original evidence that was really good. And that evidence is at least a decade old, you know, so one could make the case for, for Hawking, one could make the case that in 2016, when Mayor and Caloz won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the first exoplanet, 51B Pegasi, well, there was a fellow at Penn State, Alex Wolszczan, who in 1992, three years preceding 1995, found a planet orbiting a pulsar, a very weird kind of star, a neutron star, and that wouldn't have been a normal planet. Sure. And so the Nobel committee, you know, they gave it for the discovery of planets around normal sun like stars, but, but hell, you know, Wolszczan found a planet so they could have given it to him as the third person instead of to Jim Peebles for the development of what's called physical cosmology. He's at Princeton, he deserved it, but they could have given Nobel for the development of physical cosmology to Peebles and I would claim some other people were pretty important in that development as well. You know, and they could have given it some other year. So there's, there's a lot of controversy. I try not to dwell on it. Was I number three? Probably not. You know, Adam Riess did the work. You know, I helped bounce ideas off of him, but we wouldn't have had the result without him. Yeah. And I was on both teams for reasons, I mean, you know, I, the style of the first team, the supernova cosmology project didn't match mine. They came largely from experimental high energy particle physics, physics where there's these hierarchical teams and stuff and it's hard for the little guy to have a say, at least that's what I kind of thought. Whereas the team of astronomers led by Brian Schmidt was first of all, a bunch of my friends and they grew up as astronomers making contributions on little teams and we decided to band together, but all of us had our voices heard. So it was sort of a culture, a style that I preferred really. But let me tell you a story at the Nobel banquet, okay? I'm sitting there between two physicists who are members of the committee of the Swedish National Academy of Sciences, you know, and I strategically kept, you know, offering them wine and stuff during this long drawn out Nobel ceremony, right? And I got them to be pretty talkative and then in a polite diplomatic way, I started asking them pointed questions and basically they admitted that if there are four or more people equally deserving, they wait for one of them to die or they just don't give the prize at all when it's unclear who the three are, at least unclear to them. But unclear to them, they're not even right part of the time. I mean, Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars with a radio antenna, a set of radio antennas that her advisor Anthony Hewish conceived and built, so he deserves some credit, but he didn't discover the pulsar. She did. And his initial reaction to the data that she showed him was a condescending rubbish, my dear. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Now, I know Jocelyn Bell and she did not let this destroy her life. She won every other prize under the sun, okay? Vera Rubin, arguably one of the discoverers of dark matter, although there, if you look at the history, there were a number of people and that was the issue, I think there were a number of people, four or more who had similar data and similar ideas at about the same time. Rubin won every prize under the sun, the new big large scale survey telescope being built in Chile is being renamed the Vera Rubin Telescope because she passed away in December of 2015, I think. You know, it'll conduct this survey, large scale survey with the Rubin Telescope. So she's been recognized, but never with the Nobel Prize. And I would say that to her credit, she did not let that consume her life either. And perhaps it was a bit easier because there had been no Nobel given for the discovery of dark matter, whereas in the case of pulsars and Jocelyn Bell, there was a prize given for the discovery of the freaking pulsars and she didn't get it. Well, I mean, what a travesty of justice. So I also think as a fan of fiction, as a fan of stories that the travesty and the tragedy and the unfairness and the tension of it is what makes the prize and similar prizes beautiful. The decisions of other humans that result in dreams being broken and, you know, like that's why we love the Olympics as so many, you know, people, athletes give their whole life for this particular moment and then there's referee decisions and like little slips of here and there, like the little misfortunes that destroy entire dreams. And that's, it's, it's weird to say, but it feels like that makes the entirety of it even more special. Yeah. If it was perfect, it wouldn't be interesting. Humans like competition and they like heroes and unfortunately it gives the impression to youngsters today that science is still done by white men with gray beards wearing white lab coats. And I'm very pleased to see that this year, you know, Andrea Ghez, the fourth woman in the history of the physics prize to have received it. And then two women, one at Berkeley, one elsewhere won the Nobel prize in chemistry without any male co recipient. And so that's sending a message I think to girls that they can do science and they have role models. I think the breakthrough prize and other such prizes show that teams get recognized as well. And if you pay attention to the newspapers, you know, most of the good authors like, you know, Dennis Overby of the New York Times and others said that these were teams of people and they, they emphasize that and, you know, they all played a role. And you know, maybe if some grad student hadn't soldered some circuit, maybe the whole thing wouldn't have worked, you know. But still, you know, Ray Weiss and Kip Thorne was the theoretical, you know, impetus for the whole search for gravitational waves, Barry Barish brought the MIT and Caltech teams together to get them to cooperate at a time when the project was nearly dead from what I understand and contributed greatly to the experimental setup as well. He's a great experimental physicist, but he was really good at bringing these two teams together instead of having them duke it out in blows and leaving both of them bleeding and dying. You know, the National Science Foundation was going to cut the funding from what I understand, you know. So, so there's human drama involved in this whole thing. And the Olympics, yeah, you know, a runner, a swimmer, a runner, runner, you know, they slip just at the moment that they were taking off from the first thing and that costs them some fraction of a second and that's it. They didn't win, you know. And in that case, I mean, the coaches, the families, which I met a lot of Olympic athletes and the coaches and the families of the athletes are really the winners of the medals. But they don't get the medal and it's, you know, credit assignment is a fascinating thing. I mean, that's the full human story we have. And outside of prizes, it's fascinating. I mean, just to be in the middle of it for artificial intelligence, there's a field of deep learning. That's really exciting. And people have been, there's yet another award, the touring awards given for deep learning to three folks who are very much responsible for the field, but so are a lot of others. Yeah, that's right. And there's a few, there's a, there's a fellow by the name of Schmidt Huber who sort of symbolizes the, the forgotten folks in the deep learning community. But you know, that's, that's the unfortunate sad thing where you remember, remember Isaac Newton or remember these, these, these special figures and the ones that flew close to them, we forget. Well, that's right. And you know, often the breakthroughs are made based on the body of knowledge that had been assimilated prior to that. But you know, again, people like to worship heroes. You mentioned the Oscars earlier and you know, you look at the direct, I mean, well, I mean, okay, directors and stuff sometimes get awards and stuff, but you know, you look at even something like, I don't know, songwriters, musicians, Elton John or something, right? Bernie Taupin, right? Wrote many of the words or he's not as well known or the Beatles or something like that. I was heartbroken to learn that Elvis didn't write most of the songs. Yeah, Elvis. That's right. There you go. But he was the king, right? And he had such a personality and it was such a performer, right? But it's the unsung heroes in many cases. Yeah. So maybe taking a step back, we talked about the Nobel prize of the accelerating universe, but your work and the ideas around supernova were important in detecting this accelerating universe. Can we go to the very basics of what is this beautiful, mysterious object of a supernova? Right. So a supernova is an exploding star. Most stars die a relatively quiet death, our own sun, well, despite the fact that it'll become a red giant and incinerate earth, it'll do that reasonably slowly. But there's a small minority of stars that end their lives in a Titanic explosion. And that's not only exciting to watch from afar, but it's critical to our existence because it is in these explosions that the heavy elements synthesize through nuclear reactions during the normal course of the star's evolution and during the explosion itself, get injected into the cosmos, making them available as raw material for new stars, planets, and ultimately life. And that's just a great story, the best in some ways. So we like to study these things and our origins, but it turns out these are incredibly useful beacons as well, because if you know how powerful an exploding star really is by measuring the apparent brightness at its peak in galaxies whose distances we already know through having made other measurements, and you can thus calibrate how powerful the thing really is, and then you find ones that are much more distant, then you can use their observed brightness compared with their true intrinsic power or luminosity to judge their distance and hence the distance of the galaxy in which they're located. Let me just give this one analogy. You judge the distance of an oncoming car at night by looking at how bright its headlights appear to be, and you've calibrated how bright the headlights are of a car that's two or three meters away of known distance, and you go, oh, that's a faint headlight, and so that's pretty far away. You also use the apparent angular separation between the two headlights as a consistency check in your brain, but that's what your brain is doing. So we can do that for cars, we can do that for stars. Nice, I like that. But you know, with cars, the headlights are all, there's some variation, but they're somewhat similar so you can make those kinds of conclusions. How much variation is there between supernova that you can detect them? Right, so first of all, there are several different ways that stars can explode, and it depends on their mass and whether they're in a binary system and things like that. And the ones that we used for these cosmological purposes, studying the expansion of the history of the universe, are the so called type Roman numeral I, lowercase a, type Ia supernovae. They come from a weird type of a star called a white dwarf. Our own sun will turn into a white dwarf in about seven billion years. It'll have about half its present mass compressed into a volume just the size of Earth. So that's an inordinate density, okay? It's incredibly dense. And the matter is what's called by quantum physicists degenerate matter, not because it's morally reprehensible or anything like that, but this is just the name that quantum physicists give to electrons that are squeezed into a very tight space. The electrons take on a motion due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and also due to the Pauli exclusion principle that electrons don't like to be in the same place, they like to avoid each other. And those two things mean that a lot of electrons are moving very rapidly, which gives the star an extra pressure far above the thermal pressure associated with just the random motions of particles inside the star. So it's a weird type of star, but normally it wouldn't explode and our sun won't explode, except that if such a white dwarf is in a pair with another more or less normal star, it can steal material from that normal star until it gets to an unstable limit, roughly one and a half times the mass of our sun, 1.4 or so. This is known as the Chandrasekhar limit after Subramanian Chandrasekhar, an Indian astrophysicist who figured this out when he was about 20 years old on a voyage from India to England where he was to be educated. And then he did this and then 50 years later he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1984 largely for this work that he did as a youngster who was on his way to be educated. And his advisor, the great Arthur Eddington in England, who had done a lot of great things and was a great astrophysicist, nevertheless, he too was human and had his faults. He ridiculed Chandra's scientific work at a conference in England and most of us, if we had been Chandra, would have just given up astrophysics at that time when the great Arthur Eddington ridicules our work. That's another inspirational story for the youngster. Just keep going. But anyway, no matter what your advisor says or don't always pay attention to your advisor. Don't lose hope if you really think you're onto something. That doesn't mean never listen to your advisor. They may have sage advice as well. But anyway, when a white dwarf grows to a certain mass, it becomes unstable. And one of the ways it can end its life is to go through a thermonuclear runaway. So basically, the carbon nuclei inside the white dwarf start fusing together to form heavier nuclei. And the energy that those fusion reactions emit doesn't go into being dissipated out of the star or expanding it the way if you take a blowtorch to the middle of the Sun, you heat up its gases, the gases would expand and cool. But this degenerate star can't expand and cool. And so the energy pumped in through these fusion reactions goes into making the nuclei move faster. And that gets more of them sufficiently close together that they can undergo nuclear fusion, thereby releasing more energy that goes into speeding up more nuclei. And thus you have a runaway, a bomb, an uncontrolled fusion reactor instead of the controlled fusion, which is what our Sun does. Our Sun is a marvelous controlled fusion reactor. This is what we need here on Earth, fusion energy to solve our energy crisis, right? But the Sun holds the stuff in through gravity and you need a big mass to do that. So this uncontrolled fusion reaction blows up a star that's pretty much the same in all cases. And you measure it to be almost the same in all cases. But the devil is in the details, and in fact, we observe them to not be all the same. And theoretically, they might not be all the same because the rate of the fusion reactions might depend on the amount of trace heavier elements in the white dwarf. And that could depend on how old it is, whether it was born billions of years ago when there weren't many heavier elements or whether it's a relatively young white dwarf and all kinds of other things. And part of my work was to show that indeed, not all the Type Ia's are the same. You have to be careful when you use them. You have to calibrate them. They're not standard candles the way it just, if all headlights or all candles were the same lumens or whatever, you'd say they're standard and then it would be relative. Standard candles is an awesome term, okay. Standard candles is what astronomers like to say, but I don't like that term because there aren't any standard candles, but there are standardizable candles. And by looking at these type Ia's, you look at enough of them in nearby galaxies whose distances you know independently. And what you can tell is that, you know, this is something that a colleague of mine, Mark Phillips did who was on Schmidt's team and arguably was one of the people who deserved the Nobel Prize. He showed that the intrinsically more powerful Type Ia's decline in brightness, and it turns out rise in brightness as well, more slowly than the less luminous Ia's. And so if you calibrate this by measuring a whole bunch of nearby ones and then you look at a distant one, instead of saying, well, it's a 100 watt Type Ia supernova, they're much more powerful than that by the way, plus or minus 50, you can say, no, it's a hundred and 12 plus or minus 15, or it's 84 plus or minus 17. It tells you where it is in the power scale and it greatly decreases the uncertainties. And that's what makes these things cosmologically useful. I showed that if you spread the light out into a spectrum, you can tell spectroscopically that these things are different as well. And in 1991, I happened to study two of the extreme peculiar ones, the low luminosity ones and the high luminosity ones, 1991BG and 1991T. This showed that not all the Ia's are the same. And indeed, at the time of 1991, I was a little bit skeptical that we could use Type Ia's because of this diversity that I was observing. But in 1993, Mark Phillips wrote a paper that showed this correlation between the light curve, the brightness versus time and the peak luminosity. Which gives you enough information to calibrate. Then they become calibratable and that was a game changer. How many Type Ia's are out there to use for data? Now there are thousands of them, but at the time, the high Z team had 16 and the supernova cosmology project had 40. But the 16 were better measured than the 40. And so our statistical uncertainties were comparable if you look at the two papers that were published. How does that make you feel that there's these gigantic explosions just sprinkled out there? Well, I certainly don't want one to be very nearby and it would have to be within something like 10 light years to be an existential threat. So they can happen in our galaxy? Oh yeah, yeah. So they would be okay? In most cases we'd be okay because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. And you'd need one of these things to be within about 10 light years to be an existential threat. And it gives birth to a bunch of other stars, I guess? Yeah, it gives birth to expanding gases that are chemically enriched and those expanding gases mixed with other chemically enriched expanding gases or primordial clouds of hydrogen and helium. I mean, this is in a sense the greatest story ever told, right? I teach this introductory astronomy course at Berkeley and I tell them there's only five or six things that I want them to really understand and remember and I'm going to come to their deathbed and I'm going to ask them about this and if they get it wrong, I will retroactively fail and their whole career will have been shot. That's a student's worst nightmare. If they don't know and observe a total solar eclipse and yet they had the opportunity to do so, I will retroactively fail them. But one of them is, where did we come from? Where did the elements in our DNA come from? The carbon in our cells, the oxygen that we breathe, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our red blood cells. Those elements, the phosphorus in our DNA, they all came from stars, from nuclear reactions in stars and they were ejected into the cosmos and in some cases, like iron, made during the explosions and those gases drifted out, mixed with other clouds, made a new star or a star cluster, some of whose members then evolved and exploded, thus enriching the gases in the galaxy progressively more with time until finally, four and a half billion years ago from one of these chemically enriched clouds, our solar system formed with a rocky earthlike planet and somewhere, somehow, these self replicating, evolving molecules, bacteria formed and evolved through paramecia and amoebas and slugs and apes and us. And here we are, sentient beings that can ask these questions about our very origins and with our intellect and with the machines we make, come to a reasonable understanding of our origins. What a beautiful story. I mean, if that does not put you at least in awe, if not in love with science and its power of deduction, I don't know what will, right? It's one of the greatest stories, if not the greatest story. Obviously, that's personality dependent and all that, it's a subjective opinion, but it's perhaps the greatest story ever told. I mean, you could link it to the Big Bang and go even farther, right, to make an even more complete story, but as a subset, that's even in some ways a greater story than even the existence of the universe in some ways, because you could just imagine some really boring universe that never leads to sentient creatures such as ourselves. And is a supernova usually the introduction to that story? So are they usually the thing that launches the, is there other engines of creation? Well, the supernova is the one, I mean, I touch upon the subject earlier in my course, in fact, right about now in my lectures, because I talk about how our sun right now is fusing hydrogen to form helium nuclei and later it'll form carbon and oxygen nuclei, but that's where the process will stop for our sun, it's not massive enough, some stars that are more massive can go somewhat beyond that. So that's the beginning of this idea of the birth of the heavy elements, since they couldn't have been born at the time of the Big Bang, conditions of temperature and pressure weren't sufficient to make any significant quantities of the heavier elements. And so that's the beginning, but then you need some of these stars to explode, right? Because if those heavy elements remained forever trapped in the cores of stars, then they would not be available for the production of new stars, planets, and ultimately life. So indeed the supernova, my main area of interest, plays a leading role in this whole story. I saw that you got a chance to call Richard Feynman a mentor of yours when you were at Caltech. Yeah. Do you have any fond memories of Feynman, any lessons that stick with you? Oh yeah, he was quite a character and one of the deepest thinkers of all time probably, and at least in my life, the physicist who had the single most intuitive understanding of how nature works of anyone I've met. I learned a number of things from him, he was not my thesis advisor, I worked with Wallace Sargent at Caltech on what are called active galaxies, big black holes in the centers of galaxies that are accreting or swallowing material, a little bit like the stuff of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics 2020. But Feynman I had for two courses, one was general theory of relativity at the graduate level and one was applications of quantum physics to all kinds of interesting things. And he had this very intuitive way of looking at things that he tried to bring to his students and he felt that if you can't explain something in a reasonably simple way to a non scientist or at least someone who is versed a little bit with science but is not a professional scientist then you probably don't understand it very well yourself very thoroughly. So that in me made a desire to be able to explain science to the general public and I've often found that in explaining things, yeah, there's a certain part that I didn't really understand myself, that's one reason I like to teach the introductory courses to the lay public is that I sometimes find that my explanations are lacking in my own mind. So he did that for me. Is there a, if I could just pause for a second, you said he had one of the most intuitive understanding of nature. What if you could break apart what intuitive means, like is that on the philosophical level? No, sort of physical. How do you draw a mental picture or a picture on paper of what's going on? And he's perhaps most famous in this regard for his Feynman diagrams, which in what's called quantum electrodynamics, a quantum field theory of electricity and magnetism. What you have are actually an exchange of photons between charged particles and they might even be virtual photons if the particles are at rest relative to one another. And there are ways of doing calculations that are brute force that take pages on pages and pages of calculations. And Julian Schwinger developed some of the mathematics for that and won the Nobel prize for it. But Feynman had these diagrams that he made and he had a set of rules of what to do at the vertex. You'd have two particles coming together and then a particle going out and then two particles coming out again. And he'd have these rules associated when there were vertices and when there were particles splitting off from one another and all that. And it looked a little bit like a bunch of a hodgepodge at first. But to those who learned the rules and understood them, they saw that you could do these complex calculations in a much simpler way. And indeed, in some ways, Freeman Dyson had an even better knack for explaining really what quantum electrodynamics actually was. But I didn't know Freeman Dyson. I knew Feynman. Maybe he did have a more intuitive view of the world than Feynman did. But of the people I knew, Feynman was the most intuitive, most sort of, is there a picture? Is there a simple way you can understand this? In the path that a particle follows even, you can get the classical path, at least for a baseball or something like that, by using quantum physics if you want. But in a sense, the baseball sniffs out all possible paths. It goes out to the Andromeda galaxy and then goes to the batter. But the probability of doing that is very, very small because tiny little paths next door to any given path cancel out that path. And the ones that all add together, they're the ones that are more likely to be followed. And this actually ties in with Fermat's principle of least action and there are ideas in optics that go into this as well and just sort of beautifully brings everything together. But the particle sniffs out all possible paths. What a crazy idea. But if you do the mathematics associated with that, it ends up being actually useful, a useful way of looking at the world. So you're also, I mean, you're widely acknowledged as, I mean, outside of your science work as being one of the greatest educators in the world. And Feynman is famous for being that. Is there something about being a teacher that you... Well, it's very, very rewarding when you have students who are really into it. You know, going back to Feynman, at Caltech, I was taking these graduate courses and there were two of us, myself and Jeff Richmond, who's now a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara, who asked lots of questions. And a lot of the Caltech students are nervous about asking questions. They want to save face. They seem to think that if they ask a question, their peers might think it's a stupid question. Well, I didn't really care what people thought and Jeff Richmond didn't either. We asked all these questions and in fact, in many cases, they were quite good questions and Feynman said, well, the rest of you should be having questions like this. And I remember one time in particular when he said to the rest of the class, why is it always these two? Aren't the rest of you curious about what I'm saying? Do you really understand it all that well? If so, why aren't you asking the next most logical question? No, you guys are too scared to ask these questions that these two are asking. So he actually invited us to lunch a couple of times where just the three of us sat and had lunch with one of the greatest thinkers of 20th century physics. And so, yeah, he rubbed off on me and, you know, you encourage questions as well, encourage questions, you know, and yeah, you know, definitely, I mean, you know, I encourage questions. I like it when students ask questions. I tell them that they shouldn't feel shy about asking a question. Probably half the students in the class would have that same question if they even understood the material enough to ask that question. Yeah. Curiosity is the first step of seeing the beauty of something. So yeah, and the question is the ultimate form of curiosity. Let me ask, what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life, you know, from a cosmologist's perspective or from a human perspective, personal, you know, life is what you make of it, really, right? It's each of us has to have our own meaning and it doesn't have to be. Well, I think that in many cases, meaning is to some degree associated with goals. You set some goals or expectations for yourself, things you want to accomplish, things you want to do, things you want to experience, and to the degree that you experience those and do those things, it can give you meaning. You don't have to change the world the way Newton or Michelangelo or da Vinci did. I mean, people often say, you changed the world, but look, come on, there's seven and a half, close to eight billion of us now. Most of us are not going to change the world and does that mean that most of us are leading meaningful lives? No, it just has to be something that gives you meaning, that gives you satisfaction, that gives you a good feeling about what you did. And often, based on human nature, which can be very good and also very bad, but often it's the things that help others that give us meaning and a feeling of satisfaction. You taught someone to read, you cared for someone who was terminally ill, you brought up a nice family, you brought up your kids, you did a good job, you put your heart and soul into it, you read a lot of books if that's what you wanted to do, had a lot of perspectives on life, you traveled the world if that's what you wanted to do. But if some of these things are not within reach, you're in a socioeconomic position where you can't travel the world or whatever, you find other forms of meaning. It doesn't have to be some profound, I'm going to change the world, I'm going to be the one who everyone remembers type thing, right? In the context of the greatest story ever told, like the fact that we came from stars and now we're two apes asking about the meaning of life, how does that fit together? How does that make any sense? It does, it does, and this is sort of what I was referring to, that it's a beautiful universe that allows us to come into creation, right? It's a way that the universe found of knowing, of understanding itself, because I don't think that inanimate rocks and stars and black holes and things have any real capability of abstract thoughts and of learning about the rest of the universe or even their origins. I mean, they're just a pile of atoms that has no conscience, has no ability to think, has no ability to explore, and we do. And I'm not saying we're the epitome of all life forever, but at least for life on Earth so far the evidence suggests that we are the epitome in terms of the richness of our thoughts, the degree to which we can explore the universe, do experiments, build machines, understand our origins. And I just hope that we use science for good, not evil, and that we don't end up destroying ourselves. I mean, the whales and dolphins are plenty intelligent. They don't ask abstract questions, they don't read books, but on the other hand, they're not in any danger of destroying themselves and everything else as well. And so maybe that's a better form of intelligence, but at least in terms of our ability to explore and make use of our minds, I mean, to me, it's this. It's this that gives me the potential for meaning, right? The fact that I can understand and explore. It's kind of fascinating to think that the universe created us and eventually we've built telescopes to look back at it, to look back at its origins and to wonder how the heck the thing works. It's magnificent. It needn't have been that way, right? And this is one of the, you know, the multiverse sort of things. You know, you can alter the laws of physics or even the constants of nature, seemingly inconsequential things like the mass ratio of the proton and the neutron, you know, wake me up when it's over, right? What could be more boring? But it turns out you play with things a little bit like the ratio of the mass of the neutron to the proton and you generally get boring universes, only hydrogen or only helium or only iron. You can't even get the rich periodic table, let alone bacteria, paramecia, slugs and humans, okay? I'm not even anthropocentrizing this to the degree that I could. Even a rich periodic table wouldn't be possible if certain constants weren't this way, but they are. And that to me leads to the idea of a multiverse that, you know, the dice were thrown many, many times and there's this cosmic archipelago where most of the universes are boring and some might be more interesting. But we are in the rare breed that's really quite darn interesting. And if there were only one and maybe there is only one, well then that's truly amazing. We're lucky. We're lucky. But I actually think there are lots and lots, just like there are lots of planets. Earth isn't special for any particular reason. There are lots of planets in our solar system and especially around other stars. And occasionally there are going to be ones that are conducive to the development of complexity culminating in life as we know it. And that's a beautiful story. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Alex, it's a huge honor. One of my favorite conversations I've had in this podcast. Well, thank you so much for talking to us. For the honor of having been asked to do this. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alex Filipenko, and thank you to our sponsors. Neuro, the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Masterclass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history. And CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies, were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #137

The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook, one of the best known objectivist philosophers and thinkers in the world. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand that she first expressed in her fiction books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and later in nonfiction essays and books. Yaron is the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show, and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution, Equal is Unfair, and several other books where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior, and the human condition from the perspective of objectivism. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books. ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. And CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead early in college, along with many other literary and philosophical works from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and of course, all the great existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus. I always had an open mind, curious to learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history, no matter how mundane or radical or even dangerous they were considered to be. Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure. Some people love her, some people dislike or even dismiss her. I prefer to look past what some may consider to be the flaws of the person and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents and Jaron now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions. In general, I hope that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas and the ever widening Overton window, pulling at the thread of curiosity, sometimes saying stupid things, but always striving to understand how we can better build a better world together. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Jaron Rook. Let me ask the biggest possible question first. Sure. What are the principles of a life well lived? I think it's to live with thought, that is to live a rational life, to think it through. I think so many people are in a sense zombies out there. They're alive, but they're not really alive because their mind is not focused, their mind is not focused on what do I need to do in order to live a great life? So too many people just go through the motions of living rather than really embrace life. So I think the secret to living a great life is to take it seriously. And what it means to take it seriously is to use the one tool that makes us human, the one tool that provides us with all the values that we have, our mind, our reason, and to use it, apply it to living. People apply it to their work, they apply it to their math problems, to science, to programming. But imagine if they used that same energy, that same focus, that same concentration to actually living life and choosing values that they should pursue, that would change the world, and it would change their lives. Yeah, actually, I wear this silly suit and tie. It symbolizes to me always, it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously. I think that's really, that's right. And each one of us has different ways to kind of condition our consciousness. I'm serious now, and for you, it's a suit and tie. It's a conditioning of your consciousness to now I'm focused, now I'm at work, now I'm doing my thing. Yeah. And I think that's terrific, and I wish everybody took that. Look, I mean, it's a cliche, but we only live once. Every minute of your life, you're never gonna live again. This is really valuable. And when people don't have that deep respect for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind, and if they did, again, one could only imagine, look at how productive people are. Look at the amazing things they produce and they do in their work. And if they applied that to everything, wow. So you kind of talk about reason. Where does the kind of existentialist idea of experience maybe, fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through? Is there an interesting line to separate the two? Why such an emphasis on reason for a life well lived versus just enjoy, like experience the moment? Well, because I think experience in a sense is the easy part. I'm not saying it's how we experience the life that we live. And yes, I'm all with the take time to value what you value, but I don't think that's the problem of people out there. I don't think the problem is they're not taking time to appreciate where they are and what they do. I think it's that they don't use their mind in this one respect, in planning their life, in thinking about how to live. So the focus is on reason is because it's our only source of knowledge. There's no other source of knowledge. We don't know anything that does not come from our senses and our mind, the integration of the evidence of our senses. Now we know stuff about ourselves and I think it's important to know oneself through introspection. And I consider that part of reasoning is to introspect. But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say, because it's our means of survival. It's how human beings survive. We cannot, see, this is why I disagree with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris. You mentioned Sam Harris before the show. We're not programmed to know how to hunt. We're not programmed to do agriculture. We're not programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows. All of that requires effort. It requires focus. It requires energy and it requires will. It requires somebody to will it. It requires somebody to choose it. And once you make that choice, you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in discovery, in integration, and then in work to change the world in which we live. And human beings have to discover, figure out, solve the problem of hunting. Hunting, everybody thinks, oh, that's easy. I've seen the movie. But human beings had to figure out how to do it, right? You can't run down a bison and bite into it, right? You're not gonna catch it. You're not gonna, you have no fangs to bite into it. You have to build weapons. You have to build tools. You have to create traps. You have to have a strategy. All of that requires reason. So the most important thing that allows human beings to survive and to thrive in every value from the most simple to the most sophisticated, from the most material to, I believe, the most spiritual, requires thinking. So stopping and appreciating the moment is something that I think is relatively easy once you have a plan, once you've thought it through, once you know what your values are. There is a mistake people make. They attain their values and they don't take a moment to savor that and to appreciate that and to even pat themselves on the back that they did it. But that's not what's screwing up the world. What's screwing up the world is that people have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it. If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider is our capacity, like a capability to reason. So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement in quotes. If you think about any other sophisticated animal, everything has to be coded. Everything has to be written in the hard way. It has to be there. And they have to have a solution for every outcome. And if there's no solution, the animal dies typically, or the animal suffers in some way. Human beings have this capacity to self program. They have this capacity. It's not a tabula rasa in the sense that there's nothing there. Obviously, we have a nature. Obviously, our minds, our brains are structured in a particular way. But given that, we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off. We have the ability to commit suicide, to reject our nature, to work against our interests, not to use the tool that evolution has provided us, which is this mind, which is reason. So that choice, that fundamental choice, you know, Hamlet says it, right, to be or not to be. But to be or not to be is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus. You know, in the morning when you get up, you kind of, you know, you're not really completely there. You're kind of out of focus and stuff. It requires an act of will to say, okay, I'm awake, I've got stuff to do. Some people never do that. Some people live in that haze, and they never engage that mind. And when you're sitting and try to solve a complex computer problem or math problem, you have to turn something on. You have to, in a sense, exert certain energy to focus on the problem to do it. And that is not determined in a sense that you have to focus. You choose to focus, and you could choose not to focus. And that choice is more powerful than any other, like, parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and from our evolutionary origins. Like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think is more powerful than anything else. So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do. Yeah. And that we know. Shots fired. I agree with you. And we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's a fish and what, you know, all this stuff. So I think what exists there is a lot of potentialities. But the beauty of the human brain is it's potentialities that we have to manifest through our choices. It's there. It's sitting there. And, yes, there's certain things that are going to evoke certain senses, certain feelings. I'm not even saying emotions because I think emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our mind. But I don't think so. You know, there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now and it's a big issue. You know, I find it to a large extent as way too early and in storytelling about expo storytelling about stuff. We still don't, you know, so for example, I would like to see if evolutionary psychology differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas. What of those are programmed and what of those are developed and chosen and a product of reason? I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen, is all a product of reason. And everything before that, we might have been programmed for. But the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know, is something that we feel because that's how our biology works. So until we have these categories and until we can clearly specify what is what and where do they come from, the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology seems to be rambling. It doesn't seem to be scientific. So we have to define our terms, you know, which is the basis of science. You have to have some clear definitions about what we're talking about. When you ask them these questions, there's never really a coherent answer about what is it exactly. And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will. And I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this, and I don't want to misrepresent anything Harris has because, you know, I'm a fan and I like a lot of his stuff. But on the one hand, he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds. So he believes that we have some capacity to choose. On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity to choose by saying it's just determines you're gonna choose what you choose. You have no say in it, there's actually no you. So it's, you know, and that's to me completely unscientific. That's completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere. We all experienced the fact that we have an eye. That kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides is unfounded currently. Look, there's a sense in which it can never be contradicted because it's a product of your experience. It's not a product of your experience. You can experience it directly. So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here. I can see it, it's here, right? I can feel it. I know I have free will because I can introspect it. In a sense, I can see it. I can see myself engaging it and that is as valid as the evidence of my senses. Now I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing, but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and you can identify the same thing. And to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down. You start with that and that's the beginning of science. The beginning of science is the identification that I choose and that I can reason and now I need to figure out the mechanism, the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic. How does this work? And that's where science comes from. Of course, it's possible that science, like from my place of AI would be able to, if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand, I mean, it's very difficult because we're so far away from it now, but understand how the actual mechanism that consciousness emerges. And in fact, this table is not real, that we can determine that it, exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive, then you can start to make interesting. But our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive. The reality we perceive is there. We perceive a reality that exists. Now, we perceive it in particular ways given the nature of our senses, right? A bat perceives this table differently, but it's still the same table with the same characteristics and the same identity. It's just a matter of, we use eyes, they use a radar system to, they use sound waves to perceive it, but it's still there. Existence exists whether we exist or not. And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how, and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right? And I suspect that to do that, you would have to use biology, not just electronics, but way outside my expertise. Because consciousness, as far as we know, is a phenomenon of life, and you would have to figure out how to create life before you created consciousness, I think. But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything. All it would say is we have another conscious being. Cool, that's great. But it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness. Our consciousness is what it is in respect. So that's very interesting, I think this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is, let me at least challenge a thought experiment, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about reality. So his idea is that we're just, our perception is just an interface to reality. So Donald Hoffman is the guy you see on Vine? Yeah. Yes, I've met Donald and I've seen his video. And look, Donald has not invented anything new. This goes back to ancient philosophy. Let me just state it in case people aren't familiar. I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment to me, like of out of the box thinking, perhaps literally, is that there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually exists. And I think that's, for the philosophy, objectivism is a really important gap to close. So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive? Well, I don't understand what more means, right? Of course there's more to reality than what our senses perceive. That is, for example, I don't know, certain elements have radiation, right? Uranium has radiation. I can't perceive radiation. The beauty of human reason is I can, through experimentation, discover the phenomena of radiation, then actually measure radiation. And I don't worry about it. I can't perceive the world the way a bat perceives the world. And I might not be able to see certain things, but I can, we've created radar, so A, we understand how a bat perceives the world, and I can mimic it through a radar screen and create images like the bat, its consciousness somehow perceives it, right? So the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses give us directly. At the end, everything comes in through our senses, but we can understand things that our senses don't provide us. But what he's doing is he's doing something very different. He is saying what our senses provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there. That is just a random, arbitrary, nonsensical statement. And he actually has a whole evolutionary explanation for it. He runs some simulations. The simulations seem, I mean, I'm not an expert on this field, but they seem silly to me. They don't seem to reflect. And look, all he's doing is taking Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which articulate exactly the same cause, and he's giving it a veneer of evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert on evolution, and I'm not an expert on epistemology, which is what this is. So to me, as a semi layman, it doesn't make any sense. And, you know, I'm actually, you know, I have this Yaron Book Show. I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it, but I've got this Yaron Book Show on YouTube. I'm a huge fan of the Yaron Book Show. I listen to it very often. As a small aside, the cool thing about reason, which you practice, is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything. Yes. And that's so fun to listen to. I mean, it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic, but even then it's fun, because I'm like disagreeing with the screen. And it's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give good arguments, because that makes it challenging. Anyway, sorry. You know, so one of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is one of my philosophy, bring one of my philosophy friends to discuss the video that Hoffman, where he presents his theory, because it surprises me how seductive it is. And it seems to be so, first of all, completely counterintuitive, but because, you know, somehow we managed to cross the road and not get hit by the car. And if our senses did not provide us any information about what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that? And not to mention build computers, not to mention fly to the moon and actually land on the moon. And if reality is not giving us information about the moon, if our senses are not giving us information about the moon, how did we get there? You know, and where did we go? Maybe we didn't go anywhere. It's just, it's nonsensical to me. And it's a very bad place philosophically, because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything. There is no objective reality. You can come up with anything. You could argue anything. And there's no methodology, right? My, I believe that at the end of the day, what reason allows us to do is provides us with a methodology for truth. And at the end of the day, for every claim that I make, I should be able to boil it down to see, yeah, look, the evidence of the census is right then. Once you take that away, knowledge is gone and truth is gone. And that opens it up to, you know, complete disaster. So, you know, to me why it's compelling to at least entertain this idea, first of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to first principles and, you know, ask the question, what do I really know? And the second part of that that I really enjoy is it's a reminder that we know very little to be a little bit more humble. So if reality doesn't exist at all, before you start thinking about it, I think it's a really nice wake up call to think, wait a minute, I don't really know much about this universe, that humbleness. I think something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason, when you, you can become very confident in your ability to understand the world if you practice reason often. And I feel like it can lead you astray because you can start to think, it's, so I love psychology and psychologists have the certainty about understanding the human condition, which is undeserved. You know, you run a study with 50 people and you think you can understand the source of all these psychiatric disorders, all these kinds of things. That's similar kind of trouble I feel like you can get into when you overreach with reason. So I don't think there is such a thing as overreaching with reason, but there are bad applications of reason. There are bad uses of reason or the pretense of using reason. I think a lot of these psychological studies are pretense of using reason. And the psychologists have never really taken a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class. So they use statistics in weird ways that just don't make any sense. And that's a miss, that's not reason, right? That's just bad thinking, right? So I don't think you can do too much good thinking. And that's what reason is. It's good thinking. Now, the fact that you try to use reason does not guarantee you won't make mistakes. It doesn't guarantee you won't be wrong. It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole and completely get it wrong. But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it. Which is going back to reality, going back to facts, going back to reason. And getting out of the rabbit hole and getting back to reality. So I agree with you that it's interesting to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them? If I don't really have a good argument about them, then do I know what I know? So in that sense, it's always nice to be challenged and pushed and oriented. You know, the nice thing about objectivism is everybody's doing that to me all the time, right? Because nobody agrees with me on anything. So I'm constantly being challenged, whether it's in, by Hoffman on metaphysics and epistemology, right? On the very foundations of analogy and ethics, everybody constantly, and in politics all the time. So I find that it's part of, you know, I prefer that everybody, there's a sense in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right? Because I think we'd live in a better world. But there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it, at least up to a point, makes it interesting and challenging and forces you to be able to rethink or to confirm your own thinking and to challenge that thinking. Can you try to do the impossible task and give a whirlwind introduction to Ayn Rand, the many sides of Ayn Rand? So Ayn Rand the human being, Ayn Rand the novelist, and Ayn Rand the philosopher. So who was Ayn Rand? Sure, so her life story is one that I think is fascinating but it also lends itself to this integration of all of these things. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905 to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family. They owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy. And, you know, she grew up, she grew up, she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age. I think from the age of nine, she knew she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write stories. That was the thing she wanted to do. And, you know, she focused her life after that on this goal of I wanna be a novelist, I wanna write. And the philosophy was incidental to that in a sense, at least until some point in her life. She witnessed the Russian Revolution, literally it happened outside. They lived in St. Petersburg where the first kind of demonstrations and of the revolution happened. So she witnessed it. She lived through it as a teenager, went to school under the Soviets. For a while, they were under kind of on the Black Sea where the opposition government was ruling and then they would go back and forth between the commies and the whites. But she experienced what communism was like. She saw the pharmacy being taken away from a family. She saw their apartment being taken away or other families being brought into the apartment they already lived in. And it was very clear given her nature, given her views, even at a very young age that she would not survive the system. So a lot of effort was put into how did she get out? And her family was really helpful in this. And she had a cousin in Chicago and she had been studying kind of film at the university and... This is in her 20s? This is in her 20s, early 20s. And Lenin, there was a small window where Lenin was allowing some people to leave under certain circumstances. And she managed to get out to go do research on film in the United States. Everybody knew, everybody who knew her knew she would never come back, that this was a one way ticket. And she got out, she made it to Chicago, spent a few weeks in Chicago, and then headed to Hollywood. She wanted to write scripts, that was the goal. Here's this short woman from Russia with a strong accent, learning English, showing up in Hollywood and I wanna be a script writer. In English. In English, writing in English. And this is kind of one of these fairytale stories, but it's true, she shows up at the Cecil B. DeMille Studios. And she has a letter of introduction from her cousin in Chicago who owns a movie theater. And this is in the late 1920s. And she shows up there with this letter and they say, don't call us, we'll call you kind of thing. And she steps out and there's this massive convertible. And in the convertible is Cecil B. DeMille. And he's driving slowly past her right at the entrance of the studio. And she stares at him and he stops the car and he says, why are you staring at me? And she says, she tells him a story from Russia and I wanna make it in the movies, I wanna be a script writer one day. And he says, well, if you want that, get in the car. She gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot of his studio where they're filming The King of Kings, the story of Jesus. And he says, here's a pass for a week. If you wanna write for the movies, you better know how movies are made. And she basically spends a week in there. She spends more time there. She managed to get an extension. She lands up being an extra in the movie. So you can see Ayn Rand there is one of the masses when Jesus is walking by. She meets her future husband on the sets of The King of Kings. She lands up getting married, getting her American citizenship that way. And she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood, living in a tiny little apartment, somehow making a living. Her husband was an actor. He was struggling actors were difficult times. And in the evenings, studying English, writing, writing, writing, writing, and studying and studying and studying. And she finally makes it by writing a play that is successful in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway. And her first novel is a novel called We The Living, which is the most autobiographical of all her novels. It's about a young woman in the Soviet Union. It's a powerful story, a very moving story, and probably, if not the best, one of the best portrayals of life under communism. And how powerful. So you would recommend the book? Definitely recommend We The Living. It's her first novel. She wrote it in the spring of 2000. First novel she wrote in the 30s. And it didn't go anywhere. Because if you think about the intelligentsia, the people who matter, the people who wrote book reviews, this is a time of Durante, who's the New York Times guy in Moscow, who's praising Stalin to the hills and the success. So the novel fails, but she's got a novel out. She writes a small novelette called Anthem. A lot of people have read that, and it's read in high schools. It's kind of a dystopian novel, and it doesn't get published in the U.S. It gets published in the U.K. U.K. is very interested in dystopian novels. Animal Farm in 1984, 84 is published a couple of years after, I think, after Anthem. There's reason to believe he read Anthem. And George Orwell read Animal Farm. Just a small aside, Animal Farm is probably top. I mean, it's weird to say, but I would say it's my favorite book. Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones? No. Oh, you've got to see Mr. Jones. What's Mr. Jones? It's a... Sorry for my ignorance. No, no, it's a movie, and it hasn't got any publicity, which is tragic, because it's a really good movie. It's both brilliantly made. It's made by a Polish director. But it's in English. It's a true story, and George Orwell's Animal Farm is featured in it in the sense that during the story, George Orwell is writing Animal Farm, and the narrator is reading off sections of Animal Farm as the movie is progressing. And the movie is a true story about the first Western journalist to discover and to write about the famine in Ukraine. And so he goes to Moscow, and then he gets on a train, and he finds himself in Ukraine, and it's beautifully and horrifically made. So the horror of the famine is brilliantly conveyed. And it's a true story, so it's a very moving story, very powerful story, and just very well made movie. So it's tragic, in my view, that not more people are seeing it. I was actually recently just complaining that there's not enough content on the famine in the 30s of stuff. There's so much on Hitler. I love the reading. I'm reading, it's so long, it's been taking me forever, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Yeah, I love it, but. Well, I've got the book to compliment that, that you have to read. It's called The Ominous Parallels. It's Lennon Peacock, and it's The Ominous Parallels, and it's about the causes of the rise of Hitler, but a philosophical causes. So whereas The Rise and Fall is more of a kind of, the existential kind of what happened, but really delving into the intellectual currents that led to the rise of Hitler, highly recommend that. Basically suggesting how it might rise another. That's The Ominous Parallels, so the parallel he draws is to the United States, and he says those same intellectual forces are rising in the United States, and this was published, I think, in, published in 82. It was published in 82. So it was published a long time ago, and yet you look around us, and it's unbelievably predictive, sadly, about the state of the world. So I haven't finished Iron Man's story. I don't know if you want me to finish it. No, no, no, but on that point, I'll have to, let's please return to it, but let's now, for now, let's talk. Let me also say, just because, I don't want to forget about Mr. Jones, it is true, the point you made, there are tons of movies that are anti fascist, anti Nazi, and that's good, but there are way too few movies that are anti communist, just almost not, and it's very interesting, and if you remind me later, I'll tell you a story about that. But so she publishes Anthem, and then she starts, and she's doing okay in Hollywood, and she's doing okay with the play, and then she starts on the book The Fountainhead, and she writes The Fountainhead, and it comes out, she finishes it in 1945, and she sends it to publishers, and publisher after publisher after publisher turn it down, and it takes 12 publishers before this editor reads it, and says, I want to publish this book, and he basically tells his bosses, if you don't publish this book, I'm leaving, right? And they don't really believe in the book, so they publish just a few copies, they don't do a mat lot, and the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth, and they land up having to publish more and more and more, and she's basically gone from this immigrant who comes here with very little command of English, and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood, to writing one of the seminal, I think, American books. She is an American author. I mean, if you read The Fountainhead, it's not Russian. This is not Dostoevsky. It feels like a symbol of what America is in the 20th century, and I mean, probably, maybe you can, so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there. Is that like a lesson you wanna throw in some controversial stuff to make your philosophical books work out? I mean, why was it so popular? Do you have a sense? Or is it just? Well, because I think it illustrated, first of all, because I think the characters are fantastic. It's got a real hero, and I think the whole book is basically illustrating this massive conflict that I think went on in America then, is going on today, and it goes on on a big scale, politics, all the way down to the scale of the choices you make in your life. And the issue is individualism versus collectivism. Should you live for yourself? Should you live for your values? Should you pursue your passions? Or should you do what your mother tells you? Should you follow your mother's passions? And it's very, very much a book about individuals, and people relate to that. But it obviously has this massive implications to the world outside, and at the time of collectivism just having been defeated, communism, well, fascism, and the United States representing individualism as defeated collectivism. But where collectivist ideas are still popular in the form of socialism and communism. And for the individual, there's constant struggle between what people tell me to do, what society tells me to do, what my mother tells me to do, and what I think I should do. I think it's unbelievably appealing, particularly to young people who's trying to figure out what they wanna do in life, trying to figure out what's important in life. It had this enormous appeal, it's romantic, it's bigger than life, the characters are big heroes. It's very American in that sense. It's about individualism, it's about the triumph of individualism. And so I think that's what related, and it had this big romantic element from the, I mean, when I use romantic, I use it kind of in the sense of a movement in art. But it also has this romantic element in the sense of a relationship between a man and woman who's, that's very intriguing. It's not only that there's a, I would say almost rape scene, right? I would say, but it's also that this woman is hard to understand. I mean, I've read it more than once, and I still can't quite figure out Dominique, right? Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him and she marries other people. I mean, think about that too. Here she's writing a book in the 1940s. There's lots of sex. There's a woman who marries more than one person, has having sex with more than one person, very unconventional. She's having married, she's having sex with work even though she's not married to work. This is 1945. And it's very jarring to people. It's very unexpected, but it's also a book of its time. It's about individuals pursuing their passion, pursuing their life and not caring about convention and what people think, but doing what they think is right. And so I think it's, I encourage everybody to read this, obviously. So that was, was that the first time she articulated something that sounded like a philosophy of individualism? I mean, the philosophy's there in We The Living, right? Because at the end of the day, the woman is, the hero of We The Living is this individualist stuck in Soviet Union. So she's struggling with these things. So the theme is there already. It's not as fleshed out. It's not as articulated philosophically. And it's certainly then Anthem, which is a dystopian novel where this dystopia in the future has a, there's no I, everything is we. And it's about one guy who breaks out of that. I don't want to give it away, but breaks out of that. So these themes are running and then we have, and they've been published, some of the early Ayn Rand stories that she was writing in preparation for writing her novel, stories she was writing when she first came to America. And you can see these same philosophical elements, even in the male, female relationships and the passion and the, you know, in the conflict, you see them even in those early pieces. And she's just developing them. It's same philosophically, she's developing her philosophy with her literature. And of course, after The Fountainhead, she starts on what turns out to be her Magnus Opus, which is Atlas Shrugged, which takes her 12 years to publish. By the time, of course, she brings that out, every publisher in New York wants to publish it because The Fountainhead has been such a huge success. They don't quite understand it. They don't know what to do with Atlas Shrugged, but they're eager to get it out there. And indeed it, when it's published, it becomes an instant bestseller. And the thing about the, particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but true of even Anthem and We the Living, she is one of the only dead authors that sell more after they've died than when they were still alive. Now, that's true maybe in music, we listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive, but it's not true typically of novelists. And yet here we are, was it 50, 60 years after, 63 years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and it sells probably more today than it sold when it was a bestseller when it first came out. Is it true that it's like one of the most sold books in history? No. Okay. I've heard this kind of statement. Any Tom Clancy book comes out, sells more than Atlas Shrugged. But I've read, I've heard statements like this. So there was a very, and I shouldn't say this, but it's the truth, so I'll say it, a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian Institute, probably in the early 90s, that basically surveyed CEOs and asked them, what was the most influential book on you? And Atlas Shrugged came out as number two, the second most influential book on CEOs in the country. But there's so many flaws in the study. One was, you want to guess what the number one book? Bible. The Bible. But the Bible was like, so maybe they surveyed 100 people. I don't know what the exact numbers were, but let's say it's 100 people, and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrugged, and there were a bunch of books over there. So, I don't... That's, again, the psychology discussion what we're having right now. Exactly, well, and it's one thing I've learned, and maybe COVID has taught me, and there are very few people who know how to do statistics, and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically, that is, think in terms of probabilities, that it is a skill, it's a hard skill, and everybody thinks they know it. So I see doctors thinking they're statisticians and giving whole analyses of the data on COVID, and they don't have a clue what they're talking about, not because they're not good doctors, but because they're not good statisticians. It's not... People think that they have one skill, and therefore it translates immediately into another skill, and it's just not true. So I've been astounded at how bad people are at that. For people who haven't read any of the books that we were just discussing, what would you recommend, what book would you recommend they read, and maybe also just elaborate what mindset should they enter the reading of that book with? So I would recommend everybody read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. And in one... In that order? So it would depend on where you are in life, right? So it depends on who you are and what you are. So Fountainhead is a more personal story. For many people, it's their favorite, and for many people, it was their first book, and they wouldn't replace that, right? Atlas Shrugged is a... It's about the world. Right. It's about what impacts the world, how the world functions, how it's a bigger book in the sense of the scope. If you're interested in politics and you're interested in the world, read Atlas Shrugged first. If you're mainly focused on your life, your career, what you wanna do with yourself, start with Fountainhead. I still think you should read both because I think they are... I mean, to me, they were life altering, and to many, many people, they're life altering, and you should go into reading them with an open mind, I'd say, and with a... Put aside everything you've heard about Ayn Rand. Put aside any... Even if it's true, just put it aside. Even what I just said about Ayn Rand, put it aside. Just read the book as a book, and let it move you and let your thoughts, let it shape how you think, and you'll either have a response to it or you won't, but I think most people have a very strong response to it, and then the question is, are they willing to respond to the philosophy? Are they willing to integrate the philosophy? Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not? Because I know a lot of people who completely disagree with the philosophy, right? Here in Hollywood, right? Lots of people here in Hollywood, love The Fountainhead. Interesting. Oliver Stone, who is, I think, a avowed Marxist, right? I think he's admitted to being a Marxist, he is. His movies certainly reflect a Marxist theme, is a huge fan of The Fountainhead, and is actually his dream project, he has said in public, his dream project is to make The Fountainhead. Now, he would completely change it, as movie directors do, and he's actually outlined what his script would look like, and it would be a disaster for the ideas of The Fountainhead, but he loves the story, because to him, the story is about artistic integrity. Ah, yeah. And that's what he catches on. And what he hates about the story is the individualism. And I think that his movie ends with Howard Rourke joining some kind of commune of architects that do it for the love and don't do it for the money. Interesting. But so, yeah, so he can connect with you without the philosophy, and before we get into the philosophy, staying on Ayn Rand, I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience, and I think it's one that people share. I've experienced this with two people, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. When I brought up Ayn Rand when I was in my early 20s, the number of eye rolls I got from sort of, you know, like advisors and so on, that of dismissal, I've seen that later in life about more specific concepts in artificial intelligence and technical, where people decide that this is a set of ideas that are acceptable and these sets of ideas are not. And they dismissed Ayn Rand without giving me any justification of why they dismissed her, except, oh, that's something you're into when you're 19 or 20. That's the same thing people say about Nietzsche. Well, that's just something you do when you're in college and you take an intro to philosophy course. So, and I've never really heard anybody cleanly articulate their opposition to Ayn Rand, in my own private little circles and so on. Maybe one question I just wanna ask is, why is there such a opposition to Ayn Rand? And maybe another way to ask the same thing is, what's misunderstood about Ayn Rand? So, we haven't talked about the philosophy, so it's harder to answer right now. We can return to it if you think that's the right way to go. Well, let me give a broad answer and then we'll do the philosophy and then we'll return to it, because I think it's important to know something about her ideas. She, I think her philosophy challenges everything. It really does, it shakes up the world. It challenges so many of our preconceptions. It challenges so many of the things that people take for granted as truth. From religion to morality to politics to almost everything, there's never quite been a thinker like her in the sense of really challenging everything and doing it systematically and having a complete philosophy that is a challenge to everything that has come before her. Now, I'm not saying they're on threads that connect, they are, right? In politics, there might be a thread and in morality, there might be a thread, but on everything, there's just never been like it. And people are afraid of that because it challenges them to the core. She's basically telling you to rethink almost everything. And that is that people reject. The other thing that it does, and this goes to this point about, oh yeah, that's what you do when you're 14, 15, right? Yeah. She points out to them that they've lost something. They've lost their idealism. They've lost the youthful idealism. What makes youthfulness meaningful other than we're in better physical shape, starting to feel, because I'm getting older. When we're young, sometime in the teen years, right? There's something that happens to human consciousness. We almost awakened and knew, right? We suddenly discovered that we can think for ourselves. We suddenly discovered that not everything our parents and our teachers tell us is true. We suddenly discovered that this tool, our minds, is suddenly available to us to discover the world and to discover truth. And it is a time of idealism. It's a time of, whoa, I want to, you know, the better teenagers, I want to know about the world. I want to go out there. I don't believe my parents. I don't believe my teachers. And this is healthy. This is fantastic. And I want to go out there and experiment. And that gets us into trouble, right? We do stupid things when we're teenagers. Why? Because we're experimenting. It's the experiential part of it, right? We want to go and experience life. But we're learning. It's part of the learning process. And we become risk takers because we want to experience. But the risk is something we need to learn because we need to learn where the boundaries are. And one of the damages that helicopter parents do is they prevent us from taking those risks so we don't learn about the world and we don't learn about where the boundaries are. So the teenage years are these years of wonder. They're depressing when you're in them for a variety of reasons, which I think primarily have to do with the culture, but also with oneself. But they are exciting, the periods of discovery. And people get excited about ideas and good ideas, bad ideas, all kinds of ideas. And then what happens? We settle. We compromise. Whether that happens in college where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing matters and stop being an idealist, be a cynic, be whatever. Or whether it happens when we get married and get a job and have kids and are too busy and can't think about our ideals and forget and just get into the norm of conventional life or whether it's because a mother pesters us to get married and have kids and do all the things that she wanted us to do. We give up on those ideals. And there's a sense in which Ayn Rand reminds them that they gave up. That's beautifully, that's so beautifully put and so true. It's, it's worth pausing on, that this dismissal, people forget the beauty of that curiosity. That's true in the scientific field too, is that youthful joy of like everything is possible and we can understand it with the tools of our mind. Yes. And that's what it's all about. That's what Ayn Rand's ideas at the end of the day all boil down to, is that confidence and that passion and that curiosity and that interest. And if you think about what academia does to so many of us, right? We go into academia and we're excited about, we're gonna learn stuff. We're gonna discover things. And then they stick you into sub sub field and examining some minutia that's insignificant and unimportant. And to get published, you have to be conventional. You have to do what everybody else does. And then there's the tenure process of seven years where they put you through this torture to write papers that fit into a certain mold. And by the time you're done, you're in your mid thirties and you've done nothing. You discovered nothing. You're all in this minutia in this stuff and it's destructive. And where's holding onto that passion, holding onto that knowledge and that confidence is hard. And when people do away with it, they become cynical and they become part of the system and they inflict the same pain on the next guy that they suffered because that's part of how it works. Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence. This happens when like a young person shows up and with like fire in their eyes and they say, I want to understand the nature of intelligence. And everybody rolls their eyes. Well, for these same reasons, because they've spent so many years on the very specific set of questions that kind of they compete over and they write papers over and they have conferences about. And it's true that incremental research is the way you make progress answering the question of what is intelligence exceptionally difficult. But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities. When we look like centuries from now, we'll look back at this time for this particular field of artificial intelligence, it will be the people who will be remembered, will be the people who've asked the question and made it their life journey of what is intelligence and actually had the chance to succeed. Most will fail asking that question, but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding and had that throughout their whole life. And I suppose the same is true for philosophy. It's in every field. It's asking the big questions and staying curious and staying passionate and staying excited and accepting failure, right? Accepting that you're not going to get it first time. You're not going to get the whole thing. But, and sometimes you have to do the minutia work and I'm not here to say nobody should specialize and you shouldn't do the minutia, you have to do that. But there has to be a way to do that work and keep the passion and keep it all integrated. That's another thing. I mean, we don't live in a culture that integrates, right? We live in a culture that is all about this minutia and not, and medicine is another field where you specialize in the kidney. I mean, the kidney's connected to other things. You've got to, and we don't have a holistic view of these things and I'm sure in artificial intelligence, you're not going to make the big leaps forward without a holistic view of what it is you're trying to achieve. And maybe that's the question of what is intelligence? But that's the kind of questions you have to ask to make big leaps forward, to really move the field in a positive direction. And it's the people who can think that way, who move fields and move technology, who move anything, anything is, everything is like. But just like you said, it's painful because underlying that kind of questioning is, well, maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years was a dead end and you have to kind of face that. Even just, it might not be true, but even just facing that reality is just, it's a painful feeling. Absolutely, but it's, that's part of the reason why it's important to enjoy the work that you do. Right. So that even if it doesn't completely work out, at least you enjoy the process, right? It was not a waste because you enjoyed the process. And if you learn, as any entrepreneur knows this, right, and if you learn from the waste of time, from the errors, from the mistakes, then you can build on them and make things even better. Right, and so the next 20 years are a massive success. Can we, another impossible task, so you did wonderfully on talking about Ayn Rand, the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview of the philosophy of objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Yeah, so luckily she did it in an essay. She talks about doing a philosophy on one foot. But let me integrate it with the literature and with her life a little bit. She wanted to be a writer, but her goal, she had a particular goal in her writing. She was an idealist, right? She wanted to portray the ideal man. So one of the things you do when you want to do something is what is an ideal man? You have to ask that question. What does that mean? You might have a sense of it. You might have some glimpses of it in other people's literature, but what is it? So she starts reading philosophy to try to figure out what do philosophers say about the ideal man? And what she finds horrifies her in terms of the view of most philosophers of man. And she's attracted, certainly when she's young, to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche at least has a vision of grandeur for man, even though his philosophy is very flawed and has other problems and contradicts man in many ways. But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man. And she's attracted to that romantic vision, that idealistic vision. So she discovers in writing, and particularly in writing Atlas Shrugged, but even in the Fountainhead, that she's gonna have to develop her own philosophy. She's gonna have to discover what she can do and she's gonna have to discover these ideas for herself, because they're not fully articulated anywhere else. The glimpses again of it in Aristotle, in Nietzsche, but they're not fully fleshed out. So to a large extent, she develops a philosophy for a very practical purpose, to write, to write a novel about the ideal man. And Atlas Shrugged is the manifestation of that. By the way, sorry to interrupt, as a little aside, she does, when you say man, you mean human. And because we'll bring this up often, she does, maybe you can elaborate of how she specifically uses man and he in the work. We live in a time now of gender and so on. Well, she did that in the sense that everybody did it during her period of time, right? It's only in modern times where we do he slash she, right? Historically, when you said he, you meant a human being, unless the particular context implied that it was a... But in Ayn Rand's case, in this case, in this one sentence, she probably meant man. Not that, because she viewed that there are differences between men and women, we're not the same, which I know comes at a shock to many people. But she... She's working on a character. She was working on a particular vision, right? She considered herself a man worshiper. And a man, not human being, a male. She worshiped manhood, if you will, the hero in man. And she wanted to fully understand what that was. Now, it has massive implications for ideal woman. And I think she does portray the ideal woman in Atlas Shrugged, in the character of Dagny. But her goal is, I think her selfish goal for what she wanted to get out of the novel is that excitement, partially sexual, about seeing your ideal manifest in reality of what you perceive as that which you would be attracted to fully, intellectually, physically, sexually, in every aspect of your life. That's what she's trying to bring into it. So there was no ambiguity of gender, so there was a masculinity and a femininity in her work. Very much so. And if you read the novels, you see that. You see that. Now, remember, this is in the context of, in Atlas Shrugged, she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad, the most masculine of all jobs you can imagine, right? Running a railroad, better than any man can run it. And achieving huge success, better than any other man out there. But, but for her, even Dagny needs somebody to, needs a man, in some sense, to look up to. Yeah. And that's the character whose name I won't mention because it gives away too much of the plot. But there has to be that. I like how you do that. You're good. You're not, a lot of practice, a lot of practice. Nothing, brilliant. Because you convey all the important things without giving away plot lines. That's beautiful. You're a master. So she's, so she's very much, she, she described herself once as a male chauvinist. Okay. She very, she likes the idea of a man opening a door for her. But more metaphysically, she identifies something in the difference between the way a man relates to a woman and a woman relates to a man. It's not the same. And let's not take too far of a tangent, but I just, as a side comment, I, to me, she represented, she was a feminist to me. Perhaps there's a, perhaps technically, philosophy, you disagree with that, whatever. But the, you know, that to me represented strong, like she had some of the strongest female characters in the history of literature. Again, this is, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957. Yeah. And not just a woman running a railroad, and this is true of the Fountainhead as well. A woman who is sexually, in a sense, assertive, sexually open. This is, this is not a woman who, you know, this is a woman who, who, who embraces her sexuality. And, you know, sex is important in life. This is why it keeps coming up, right? It's, it was important to Ayn Rand. It was, it's important in the novels. It's important in life. And for her, one's attitude towards sex is a reflection of one's attitude towards life. And it, you know, and what attitude towards pleasure, which is an important part of life. And she thought that was an incredibly important thing. And so she has these assertive, powerful, sexual women who live their lives on their terms 100%, who seek a man to look up to. Yeah. It's not, it is psychologically complex. It's more psychology than philosophy, right? It's psychologically complex and, you know, not my area of expertise, but this is, there's something in, she would argue, there's something fundamentally different about a male and a woman, about a male and female, psychologically in their attitude towards one another. Yeah, but as a side note, I say that, I would say that, I don't know philosophically if her ideas about gender are interesting. I think her other philosophical ideas are much more interesting. But reading wise, like the stories it created, the tension it created, that was pretty powerful. I mean, that was, that's pretty powerful stuff. I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful is because it reflects something in reality. Yeah, that's true. There's a thread that at least. And look, it's really important to say, I think she was the first feminist in a sense. I think in a sense, the feminists have promoted feminism into something that it shouldn't be. But in the sense of men and women are capable, she was the first one who really put that into a novel and showed it. To me, as a boy, when I was reading Alice Shrugged, I think I read that before Fountainhead, that was one of the early introductions, at least of an American woman, I had examples of my own life of Russian women, but of like a badass lady. Like I admire, like I love engineering. I had loved that she could, you know, here's a lady that's running the show. So that at least to me was an example of a really strong woman, but objectivism. Objectivism. So, and so she developed it for a novel. She spent the latter part of her life after the publication of Alice Shrugged really articulating her philosophy. So that's what she did. She applied it to politics, to life, to gender, to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982. So the objectivism was born out of the later parts of Alice Shrugged. Yes, definitely. It was there all the time, but it was fleshed out during the latter parts of Alice Shrugged and then articulated for the next 20 years. So what is objectivism? So objectivism, so there are five branches in philosophy. And so I'm gonna just go through the branches. She starts with, you start with metaphysics, the nature of reality. And objectivism argues that reality is what it is. It's kind of goes Hawkins back to Aristotle, law of identity, A is A. You can wish it to be B, but wishes do not make something real. Reality is what it is and it is the primary. And it's not manipulated, directed by consciousness. Consciousness is there to observe, to give us information about reality. That is the purpose of consciousness. That is the nature of it. So in metaphysics, existence exists. The law of identity, the law of causality, things act based on their nature, not randomly, not arbitrarily, but based on their nature. And then we have the tool to know reality. This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. A tool to know reality is reason. It's our senses and our capacity to integrate the information we get from our senses and to integrate it into new knowledge and to conceptualize it. And that is uniquely human. We don't know the truth from revelation. We don't know truth from our emotions. Our emotions are interesting. Our emotions tell us something about ourselves, but our emotions are not tools of cognition. They don't tell us the truth about what's out there, about what's in reality. So reason is our means of knowledge and therefore reason is our means of survival. Only individuals reason, just in the same way that only individuals can eat. We don't have a collective stomach. Nobody can eat for me and therefore nobody can think for me. We don't have a collective mind. There's no collective consciousness. It's bizarre that people talk about these collectivized aspects of the mind. They don't talk about collective feet and collective stomachs and collective things. But so we all think for ourselves and it is our fundamental basic responsibility to live our lives, to live, to choose. Once we choose to live, to live our lives to the best of our ability. So in morality, she is an egoist. She believes that the purpose of morality is to provide you with a code of values and virtues to guide your life for the purpose of your own success, your own survival, your own thriving, your own happiness. Happiness is the moral purpose of your life. The purpose of morality is to guide you towards a happy life. Your own happiness. Your own happiness, absolutely. Your own happiness. So she rejects the idea that you should live other people. That you should live for the purpose of other people's happiness. Your purpose is not to make them happier, to make them anything. Your purpose is your own happiness. But she also rejects the idea that you could argue maybe the Nietzschean idea of you should use other people for your own purposes, right? So every person is an end in himself. Every person's moral responsibility is their own happiness. And you shouldn't use other people for your own, shouldn't exploit other people for your own happiness, and you shouldn't allow yourself to be exploited for other people. Every individual is responsible for themselves. And what is it that allows us to be happy? What is it that facilitates human flourishing, human success, human survival? Well, it's the use of our minds, right? It goes back to reason. And what does reason require in order to be successful, in order to work effectively? It requires freedom. So the enemy of reason, the enemy of reason is force. The enemy of reason is coercion. The enemy of reason is authority, right? The Catholic church doing what they did to Galileo, right? That restricts Galileo's thinking, right? When he's in house arrest, is he gonna come up with a new theory? Is he gonna discover new truths? No, the punishment is too, you know, it's too dangerous. So force, coercion are enemies of reason. And what reason needs is to be free, to think, to discover, to innovate, to break out of convention. So we need to create an environment in which individuals are free to reason, free to think. And to do that, we come up with a concept, historically we've come up with a concept of individual rights. Individual rights define the scope of, define the fact that we should be left alone, free to pursue our values, using our reason, free of what? Free of coercion, force, authority. And that the job of government is to make sure that we are free. The whole point of government, the whole point of when we come in a social context, the whole point of establish a government in that context is to secure that freedom. It's to make sure that I don't use coercion on you. The government is supposed to stop me, supposed to intervene before I can do that, or if I've already done it, to prevent me from doing it again. So the purpose of government is to protect our freedom to think and to act based on our thoughts. It's to leave individuals free to pursue their values, to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought, and to be left alone to do it. And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes some kind of collective goal, assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group, assumes that your moral purpose in life is the well being of other people rather than your own. And she rejects all form of statism, all form of government that is overly, that is involved in any aspect other than to protect us from forced coercion authority. And she rejects anarchy, and we can talk about that. I think you had a question in the list of questions you sent me about anarchy. And I'm happy to discuss that. I just talked to Michael Malice about anarchy, so I don't know if you're familiar with him. Yes, I'm familiar with him. So yeah, so she would completely reject anarchy. Anarchy is completely inconsistent with her point of view, and we can talk about why if you want. So there is some perfect place where freedom is maximized, so systems of government and that. Absolutely. And she thought that the American system of government came close in its idea, obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery, but in its conception, the Declaration of Independence is about as perfect a political document as one could write. I think the greatest political document in human history, but really articulated almost perfectly and beautifully. And that the American system of government with the checks as balances, which is with its emphasis on individual rights, with its emphasis on freedom, with its emphasis on leaving individual freedom to pursue their happiness, an explicit recognition of happiness as a goal, individual happiness, was the model. It wasn't perfect. There are a lot of problems to a large extent because the founders had mixed philosophical premises. So there were alien premises introduced into the founding of the country, slavery obviously being the biggest problem. But it was close. And we need to build on that to create an ideal political system that will, yes, maximize the freedom of individuals to do exactly this. And then of course she had, so that's kind of, that's the manifestation of this individualism in a political realm. And she had a theory of art. She had a theory of aesthetics, which is the fifth branch of, she have metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. And the fifth branch is aesthetics. And she viewed art as an essential human need, a fuel for the human spirit. And that just like any human need, it had certain principles that it had to abide by. That is just like there's nutrition, right? So some food is good for you and some food is bad for you. Some food, some stuff is poison. She believed the same is true of art, that art had an identity, which is very controversial today, right? If you put a frame around it, it is art, right? If you put a urinal in a museum, it becomes art, which she thought was evil and ludicrous, and she rejected completely. That art had an identity and that it served a certain function that human beings needed it. And if it didn't have, not only did it have the identity, but that function was served well by some art and poorly by other art. And then there's a whole realm of stuff that's not art. Basically, all of what today is considered modern art, she would consider as not being art. Splashing paint on a canvas, not art. So she had very clear ideas. She articulated them not, so I would say not in conventional philosophical form. So she didn't write philosophical essays using the philosopher's language. It's why, partially why I think philosophers have never taken it seriously. They're actually accessible to us. We can actually read them. And she integrates the philosophy in what I think are amazing ways with psychology, with history, with economics, with politics, with what's going on in the world. And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays that she wrote. Many of them were aggregated into books. I particularly recommend books like The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, and Philosophy Who Needs It. And I think it's a beautiful philosophy. I know you're big on love. I think it's the philosophy of love. We can talk about that. Essentially, it's about love. That's what the philosophy is all about in terms of it applying to self. And I think it's sad that so few people read it and so few intellectuals take it seriously and are willing to engage with it. Let me ask, that was incredible. But after that beautiful whirlwind overview, let me ask the most shallow of questions, which is the name Objectivism. How should people think about the name being rooted? Why not individualism? What are the options? If we had a branding meeting right now. Sure. So she actually had a branding meeting. So she did this. She went through the exercise. Objectivism, I do not think, I don't know all the details, but I don't think Objectivism was the first name she came with. The problem was that the other names were taken and they were not positive implications. So for example, rationalism could have been a good word because she's an advocate of rational thought or reasonism, but reasonism sounds weird, right? The ism because of too many Ss, I guess. Rationalism, but it was already a philosophy and it was a philosophy inconsistent with hers because it was what she considered a false view of reason, of rationality. Reality ism, you know, just doesn't work. So she came on Objectivism. And I think actually, it's a great word. It's a great name because it has two aspects to it. And this is a unique view of what objectivity actually means. In Objectivism, in objectivity is the idea of an independent reality. There is truth. There's actually something out there that we, and then there's the role of consciousness, right? There is the role of figuring out the truth. The truth doesn't just hit you. The truth is not in the thing. You have to discover it. It's that a consciousness applied to, that's what objectivity is, right? It's you discovering the truth in reality. It's your consciousness. It's your consciousness interacting. And thereby posing the individual in that sense. And only the individual could do it. Now, the problem with individualism is it would have made the philosophy too political. Right. And she always said, so she said, she said, I'm an advocate of capitalism because I'm really an advocate for rational egoism. But I'm a advocate for rational egoism really because I'm an advocate for reason. So she viewed the essential of her philosophy as being this reason and her particular view of reason. And she has a whole book. She has a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I encourage any scientist, mathematician, anybody interested in science to read because it is a tour de force on, in a sense, what it means to hold concepts and what it means to discover new discoveries and to use concepts and how we use concepts. And she has a theory of concepts that is completely new, that is completely revolutionary. And I think is essential for the philosophy of science. And therefore, ultimately, the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries, the easier it is to detach them from reality and to detach them from truth, the easier it is to be inside our heads instead of about what's real. And there are probably examples from modern physics that fit that. And I think what she teaches in the book is how to ground your concepts and how to bring them into grounding in reality. So Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, note that it's only an introduction because one of the things she realized, one of the things that I think a lot of her critics don't give enough credit for, is that philosophy is, there's no end, right? It's always growing, there are always new discoveries. There's always, it's like science, there's always new things. And there's a ton of work to do in philosophy, and particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge. And she was actually, given your interest in mathematics, she actually saw a lot of parallels between math and concept formation. And she was actually, in the years before she died, she was taking private lessons in mathematics, in algebra and calculus, because she believed that there was real insight in understanding algebra in calculus to philosophy and to epistemology. And she also was very interested in neuroscience because she believed that that had a lot to tell us about epistemology, but also about music, therefore about aesthetics. So, I mean, she recognized the importance of all these different fields and the beauty of philosophy is it should be integrating all of them. And one of the sad things about the world in which we live is again, we view these things as silos. We don't view them as integrating. We don't have teams of people from different arena, you know, different fields, you know, discovering things. We become like ants, specialized. So she was definitely like that. And she was constantly curious, constantly interested in new discoveries and new ideas and how this could expand the scope of her philosophy and the application of her philosophy. There's like a million topics I could talk to you, but since you mentioned math, I'm almost curious. We only got three hours. Oh, okay. I'm almost curious. I don't know if you're familiar with Gayle's incompleteness theorem. I'm not, unfortunately. Okay. It was a powerful proof that any axiomatic systems, when you start from a bunch of axioms, that there will, in that system, provably must be an inconsistency. So that was this painful like stab in the idea of mathematics that, no, if we start with a set of assumptions, kind of like Ayn Rand started with objectivism, there will have to be at least one contradiction. See, I intuitively am gonna say that's false. Philosophically, but in math, it's just true. And that's... It's a question about how you define, again, definitions matter, and you have to be careful on how you define axioms. And you have to be careful about what you define as an inconsistency and what that means to say there's an inconsistency. And I don't know. I'm not gonna say more than that, because I don't know. But I'm suspicious that there is some... And this is the power of philosophy. And this is why I said before, concept formation is so important. And understanding concept formation is so important, for particularly, again, mathematics, because it's such an abstract field. And it's so easy to lose grounding in reality that if you properly define axioms, and you properly define what you're doing in math, whether that is true. And I don't think it is. This is a... Yeah, we'll leave it as an open mystery, because actually, this audience, there's literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs. So they know Gaydo's The Compliance Theorem. I have this intuition that there's something different to mathematics and philosophy that I'd love to hear from people. Like, what exactly is that difference? Because there's a precision to mathematics that philosophy doesn't have, but that precision gets you in trouble. It somehow, it actually takes you away from truth. Like, the very constraints of the language used in mathematics actually puts a constraint on the capture of truth that it's able to do. I'm gonna argue that that is a total product of the way you're conceptualizing the terms within mathematics. It's not in reality. Yeah, so you would argue it's in the fact that mathematics, in as much as it's detached from reality, that you can do these kinds of things. Yes, and that mathematicians have come up with concepts that they haven't grounded in reality properly that allows them to go off in places that don't lead to truth. That's right, that don't lead to truth. But I encourage you then, I encourage you to do one of these podcasts with one of our philosophers who know more about this stuff. And if you move to Austin, I've got somebody I'd recommend to you. And I'd love to hear from you. I've got somebody I'd recommend to you. Can you throw a name out, or no? Yeah, I mean, I would talk to Greg Saumieri. When you say our, can you say what you mean by our? I'd say people who are affiliated with the Ironman Institute are philosophers who are affiliated with objectivism. And Greg is one of our brightest, and he's in Austin. He's just got a position at UT, so at the University of Texas. And he would want, Ankar Gatte would be another one who works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer at the Institute. That's awesome. And there are others who specialize in philosophy of science who I think Greg could probably give you a lead. But these are unbelievably smart people who know this part of the philosophy much better than I do. What, can you just briefly perhaps say what is the Ironman Institute? Yeah, so the Ironman Institute was an organization founded three years after Ironman died. She died in 1982. And it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas, to make sure that her ideas and her novels continued in the culture and were relevant. Well, they're relevant, but the people saw the relevance. So our mission is to get people to read her books, to engage in the ideas. We teach, we have the Objectivist Academic Center where we teach the philosophy, primarily to graduate students and others who take their ideas seriously and who really want a deep understanding of the philosophy. And we apply the ideas. So we take the ideas and apply them to ethics, to philosophy, to issues of the day, which is more my strength and more what I tend to do. I've never formally studied philosophy. So all my education philosophy is informal. And I'm an engineer and a finance guy. That's my background. So I'm a numbers guy. Well, let me, I feel pretty undereducated. I have a pretty open mind, which sometimes can be painful on the internet because people mock me or, if I say something nuanced about communism, people immediately kind of put you in a bin or something like that. It hurts to be open minded to say, I don't know, to ask the question, why is communism or Marxism so problematic? Why is capitalism problematic and so on? But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you. Maybe let's talk about capitalism a little bit. How does Objectivism compare, relate to the idea of capitalism? Well, first we have to define what capitalism is. Cause again, people use capitalism in all kinds of ways. And I know you had Ray Dalio on your show once. I need to listen to that episode. But Ray has no clue what capitalism is. And that's his big problem. So when he says there are real problems today in capitalism, he's not talking about capitalism. He's talking about problems in the world today. And I agree with many of the problems, but they have nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is a social, political, economic system in which all property is privately owned and in which the only role of government is the protection of individual rights. I think it's the ideal system. I think it's the right system for the reasons we talked about earlier. It's a system that leaves you as an individual to pursue your values, your life, your happiness, free of coercion and force. And you get to decide what happens to you. And I get to decide if to help you or not, right? Let's say you fall flat on your face. People always say, well, what about the poor? Well, if you care about the poor, help them. Right. Just don't, you know, what do you need a government for? You know, I always ask audiences, okay, if there's a poor kid who can't afford to go to school and all the schools are private because capitalism is being instituted and he can't go to school, would you be willing to participate in a fund that pays for his education? Every hand in the room goes up. So what do you need government for? Just let's get all the money together and pay for schooling. So the point is that what capitalism does is leave individuals free to make their own decisions. And as long as they're not violating other people's rights, in other words, as long as they're not using coercion force on other people, then leave them alone. And people are going to make mistakes and people are gonna screw up their lives and people are gonna commit suicide. People are gonna do terrible things to themselves. That is fundamentally their problem. And if you want to help, you under capitalism are free to help. It's just the only thing that doesn't happen under capitalism is you don't get to impose your will on other people. Now, how's that a bad thing? So the question then is how does the implementation of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice? I mean, this is what is the question with a lot of systems is how does it start to then fail? So one thing maybe you can correct me or inform me, it seems like information is very important. Like being able to make decisions, to be free, you have to have access, full access of all the information you need to make rational decisions. No, that can't be. Because it can be right, because none of us has full access to all the information we need. I mean, what does that even mean? And how big, how much of the scope do you wanna do? Let's just start there. Yeah, we don't. So you need to have access to information. So one of the big criticisms of capitalism is this asymmetrical information. The drug maker has more information about the drug than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs. True, it's a problem. Well, I wonder if one can think about, an entrepreneur can think about how to solve that problem. See, I view any one of these challenges to capitalism as an opportunity for entrepreneur to make money. And they have the freedom to do it. Yeah, so imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says, I will test all the drugs that drug companies make, and I will provide you for a fee with the answer. And how do I know he's not gonna be corrupted? Well, there'll be other ones and they'll compete. And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one? Well, it won't be you really getting the information from them. It'll be your doctor. The doctors need that information. So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine will be evaluating which rating agency to use to evaluate the drugs and which ones then to recommend to you. So do we need an FDA? Do we need a government that siphons all the information to one source that does all the research, all the thing, and has a clear incentive, by the way, not to approve drugs. Because they don't make any money from it. Nobody pays them for the information. Nobody pays them to be accurate. They're bureaucrats at the end of the day. And what is a bureaucrat? What's the main focus of a bureaucrat? Even if they go in with the best of intentions, which I'm sure all the scientists at the FDA have the best of intentions, what's their incentive? The system builds in this incentive not to screw up. Because one drug gets value and does damage, you lose your job. But if a hundred drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow don't ever get to market, nobody's gonna come after you. Yeah. And you're saying that's not a mechanism, and that's conducive to like... You see, the marketplace is competition. So if you won't approve the drug, if I still think it's possible, I will. And it's not zero one. You see the other thing that happens with the FDA is it's zero one. It's either approved or it's not approved. Oh, it's approved for this, but it's not approved for that. But what if a drug came out and you said, right? You told the doctors, this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients an increased risk of heart disease. You and your patients should, we're not forcing you, but you should, right? It's your medical responsibility to evaluate that and decide if the drug is appropriate or not. Why don't I get to make that choice if I wanna take on the 10% risk of heart disease? So there was a drug, and right now I forget the name, but it was a drug against pain, particularly for arthritic pain, and it worked. It reduced pain dramatically, right? And some people tried everything, and this was the only drug that reduced their pain. And it turned out that in 10% of the cases, it caused the elevated risk. It didn't kill people necessarily, but it caused elevated risk of heart disease. Okay, what did the FDA do? It banned the drug. Some people, I know a lot of people who said living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk. Again, probabilities, right? People don't think in those numbers. 10% risk of maybe getting heart disease. Why don't I get to make that choice? Why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me? That's capitalism. Capitalism gives you the choice, not you as an ignorant person. You with your doctor and a whole marketplace, which is not created to provide you with information. And think about a world where we didn't have all these regulations and controls. The amount of opportunities that would exist to create, to provide information, to educate you about that information, would mushroom dramatically. Bloomberg, you know, the billionaire, Bloomberg, you know, how did he make his money? He made his money by providing financial information, by creating this service called Bloomberg that you buy a terminal and you get all this amazing information. And he was before computers, desktop computers. I mean, he was very early on in that whole computing revolution, but his focus was providing financial information to professionals. And you hire a professional to manage your money. That's the way it's supposed to be. You know, you have to have, so you as an individual cannot have all the knowledge you need in medicine, all the knowledge you need in finance, all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life. You can't do that. You have to delegate and you hire a doctor. Now you should be able to figure out if the doctor's good or not. You should be able to ask doctors for reasons for why you have to make the decision at the end. But that's why you have a doctor. That's why you have a financial advisor. That's why you have different people who you're delegating certain aspects of your life to, but you want choices. And what the marketplace provides is those choices. So let me then, this is what I do. I'll make a dumb case for things and then you shut me down and then the internet says how dumb Lex is. This is good. This is how it works. I'm good at shutting down and they're foolish in blaming you for the question because you're here to ask me questions. Let me make a case for socialism. So. It's gonna be bad because that's the only case there is for socialism. That's reality. So perhaps it's not a case for socialism, but just a certain notion that inequality, the wealth inequality, that the bigger the gap between the poorest or the average and the richest, the more painful it is to be average. Psychologically speaking, if you know that there is the CEOs of companies make 300, 1000, 1 million times more than you do, that makes life for a large part of the population less fulfilling. That there's a relative notion to the experience of our life that even though everybody's life has gotten better over the past decades and centuries, it may feel actually worse because you know that life could be so, so much better in the life of the CEOs that yeah, that gap is fundamentally a thing that is undesirable in a society. Everything about that is wrong. Okay. I like to start off like that. Which, so I mean, so my wife likes to remind me that as well as we've done in life, we are actually from a wealth perspective closer to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates. Just a math, right? Just a math, right? It's a good ego check. When I look at Bill Gates, I get a smile on my face. I love Bill Gates. I've never met Bill Gates. I love Bill Gates. I love what he stands for. I love that he has $100 billion. I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house where his kids can jump up and down in a trampoline in a safe environment. Can we take another billionaire? Because I'm not sure if you're paying attention, but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates. Well, but that's part of the story, right? They have to pull him down because people resent him for other reasons. That's strange. But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos. We can say my favorite, historically, just because I like a lot about him, was Steve Jobs. I mean, I love these people. And I can't, there are very few billionaires I don't love. In the sense that I appreciate everything they've done for me, for people I cherish and love, they've made the world a better place. Why? Would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad because they're richer than me or that I don't have what they have? They've made me so much richer that they've made inventions that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars accessible to me. I mean, this is a supercomputer in my pocket. Now, but think about it, right? What is the difference between, and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute, but think about what the difference is between me and Bill Gates in terms of, because it's true that in terms of wealth, I'm closer to the homeless person, but in terms of my day to day life, I'm closer to Bill Gates. You know, we both live in a nice house. His is nicer, but we live in a nice house. His is bigger, but mine is plenty big. We both drive cars. His is nicer, but we both drive cars. We both drive cars, cars, 100 years ago, what cars? We both can fly, get on a plane in Los Angeles and fly to New York and get there in about the same time. We're both flying private. The only difference is my private plane I share with 300 other people and his, but it's accessible. It's relatively comfortable. Again, in the perspective of 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it's unimaginable that I could fly like that for such a low fee. We live very similar lives in that sense. So I don't resent him. So first of all, I'm an exception to the supposed rule that people resent. I don't think anybody, I don't think people do resent unless they're taught to resent. And this is the key. People are taught and I've seen this in America. And this is to me the most horrible shocking thing that has happened in America over the last 40 years. I came to America, so I'm an immigrant. I came to America from Israel in 1987. And I came here because I thought this was the place where I could, where I'd had the most opportunities and it is, most opportunities. And I came here because I believed there was a certain American spirit of individualism and exactly the opposite of what you just described. A sense of I live my life, it's my happiness. I'm not looking at my neighbor. I'm not competing with the Joneses. The American dream is my dream. My two kids, my dog, my station wagon. Not because other people have it, it's because I want it. In that sense, and when I came here in the 80s, you had that. You had, you still had it. It was less than I think it had been in the past. But you had that spirit. There was no envy. There was no resentment. There were rich people and they were celebrated. There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs and admiration for success. Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals, but by the average person. I have witnessed particularly over the last 10 years a complete transformation and America's become like Europe. I know, are you Russian? Yeah. Yeah. It's become Russian in a sense where, you know, they've always done these studies. You know, I'll give you a hundred dollars and your neighbor a hundred dollars or I'll give you, what was it, I'll give you a thousand dollars but your neighbor gets $10,000 and a Russian will always choose the hundred dollars, right? He wants equality above being better himself. Americans would always choose that gap. And that's changing. My sense is not anymore. And it's changing because we've been told it should change. And morally you're saying that doesn't make any sense. So there's no sense in which, let me put another spin. I forget the book, but the sense of, if you're working for Steve Jobs and your hands, you're the engineer behind the iPhone and there's a sense in which his salary is stealing from your efforts. Because I forget the book, right? That's literally the terminology is used, right? This is straight out of Karl Marx. Sure, it's also straight out of Karl Marx. But there's no sense morally speaking that you see that as the theft. The other way around. That engineer is stealing off of, and it's not stealing, right? It's not. But the engineer is getting more from Steve Jobs by a lot, not by a little bit, than Steve Jobs is getting from the engineer. The engineer, even if they're a great engineer, there are probably other great engineers that could replace him. Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs? Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs? Without the giants that carry these things forward? Let me ask you this. I mean, you're a scientist. Do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you? I mean, and VM, are you angry with him? Would you feel negative towards him if he was in the room right now? Or would you, if he came into the room, you'd say, oh my God. I mean, you interview people who I think some of them are probably smarter than you and me. And your attitude towards them is one of reverence. Well, one interesting little side question there is what is the natural state of being for us humans? You kind of implied education has polluted our minds, but like if I, because you're referring to jealousy, the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question, I wonder which way, if we're left without education, we would naturally go. So there is no such thing as the natural state in that sense, right? This is the myth of who so is a noble savage and of John Walls is behind the veil of ignorance. Well, if you're ignorant, you're ignorant. You can't make any decisions. You're just ignorant. There is no human nature that determines how you will relate to other people. You will relate to other people based on the conclusions you come to about how to relate to other people. You can relate to other people as values to use your terminology from the perspective of love. This other human being is a value to me and I want to trade with them and trade, the beauty of trade is it's win, win. I want to benefit and they are going to benefit. I don't want to screw them. I don't want them to screw me. I want us to be win, win. Or you can deal with other people as threats, as enemies. Much of human history, we have done that. And therefore, as a zero sum world, what they have, I want, I will take it. I will use force to take it. I will use political force to take it. I will use the force of my arm to take it. I will just take it. So those are two options, right? And they will determine whether we live in civilization or not. And they are determined by conclusions people come to about the world and the nature of reality and the nature of morality and the nature of politics and all these things. They're determined by philosophy. And this is why philosophy is so important because the philosophy shapes, evolution doesn't do this. It doesn't just happen. Ideas shape how we relate to other people. And you say, well, little children do it. Well, little children don't have a frontal cortex. It's not relevant, right? What happens as you develop a frontal cortex, as you develop the brain, you learn ideas. And those ideas will shape how you relate to other people. And if you learn good ideas, you relate to other people in a healthy, productive win, win. And if you develop bad ideas, you will resent other people and you will want their stuff. And the thing is that human progress depends on the win, win relationship. It depends on civilization, depends on peace. It depends on allowing people, going back to what we talked about earlier, allowing people the freedom to think for themselves. And anytime you try to interrupt that, you're causing damage. So this change in America is not some reversion to a natural state. It's a shift in ideas. We still live, the better part of American society and the world, still lives on the remnants of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment ideas, the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution, the ideas that brought about the creation of this country. And it's the same basic ideas that led to both of those. And as those ideas get more distant, as those ideas are not defended, as those ideas disappear, as Enlightenment goes away, we will become more violent, more resentful, more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant, more primitive. A very specific example of this that bothers me, I'd be curious to get your comment on. So Elon Musk is a billionaire. And one of the things that really, maybe it's almost a pet peeve, it really bothers me when the press and the general public will say, well, all those rockets they're sending up there, those are just like the toys, the games that billionaires play. That to me, billionaire has become a dirty word to use, like as if money can buy or has anything to do with genius. I'm trying to articulate a specific line of question here because it just bothers me. I guess the question is how do we get here and how do we get out of that? Because Elon Musk is doing some of the most incredible things that a human being has ever participated in. Mostly, he doesn't build the rockets himself, he's getting a bunch of other geniuses together that have. That takes genius. That takes genius. But where do we go and how do we get back to where Elon Musk is an inspiring figure as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys? So this is the role of philosophy. It goes back to the same place. It goes back to our understanding of the world and our role in it. And if you understand that the only way to become a billionaire, for example, is to create value. Value for whom? Value for people who are gonna consume it. The only way to become a billionaire, the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is through PayPal. Now, PayPal is something we all use. PayPal is an enormous value to all of us. It's why it's worth several billions of dollars which Elon Musk could then earn. But you cannot become a billionaire in a free society by exploiting people. You cannot because you'll be laughed. Nobody will deal with you. Nobody will have any interactions with you. The only way to become a billionaire is to do billions of win, win transactions. So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society is to change the world to make it a better place. Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time, not because they give charity, but because they make them billions. And it's true that money and genius are not necessarily correlated, but you cannot become a billionaire without being super smart. You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out that nobody else has figured out in whatever realm it happens to be. And that thing that you figure out has to be something that provides immense value to other people. Where do we go wrong? We go wrong, our culture goes wrong because it views billionaires as selfish. And there's a sense in which, not a sense, it's absolutely true. The billionaire doesn't ask for my opinion on what product to launch. Elon Musk doesn't ask others what they think he should spend his money on, what the greatest social wellbeing will be. I mean, there's a sense in which the rockets are his toys. There's a sense in which he chose that he would be inspired the most. He would have the most fun by going to Mars and building rockets. And he's probably dreamt of rockets from when he was a kid and probably always played with rockets. And now he has the funds, the capital to be able to deploy it. So he's being selfish. Obviously, he's being self interested. This is what Elon Musk is about. I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos. There's no committee to decide whether to invest in cloud computing or not. Bezos decided that. And at the end of the day, they are the bosses, they pursue the values they believe are good. They create the wealth. It's their decisions, it's their mind. And the fact is we live in a world where for 2000 plus years, self interest, even though we all do it, just more extent to the less, we deem it as morally apparent. It's bad. It's wrong. I mean, your mother probably taught you the same thing my mother taught me. Think of others first. Think of yourself last. The good stuff is kept for the guests. You never get to use the good stuff. It's others. That's what the focus of morality is. Now, no mother, even no Jewish mother actually believes that, right? Because they don't really want you to be last. They want you to be first and they push you to be first. But morally, they've been taught their entire lives and they believe that the right thing to say and to some extent do is to argue for sacrifice for other people, right? So most people, 99% of people are torn. They know they should be selfless, sacrifice, live for other people. They don't really want to. So they act selfishly in their day to day life and they feel guilty and they can't be happy. They can't be happy. And Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers are excellent at using that guilt to manipulate you. But the guilt is inevitable because you've got these two conflicting things, the way you want to live and the way you've been taught to live. And what objectivism does is that at the end of the day provides you with a way to unite morality, a proper morality with what you want and to think about what you really want, to conceptualize what you really want properly. So what you want is really good for you and what you want will really lead to your happiness. So, you know, we reject the idea of sacrifice. We reject the idea of living for other people, but you see, if you believe that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for other people and you look at Jeff Bezos, when was the last time he sacrificed anything, right? He was living pretty well. He's got billions that he could give it all away and yet he doesn't. How dare he? You know, in my talks, I often position, and I'm gonna use Bill Gates, sorry guys, drop the conspiracy theory. They're all BS, complete and utter nonsense. There's not a shred of truth. You know, I disagree with Bill Gates on everything political. I think he politically is a complete ignoramus, but the guy's a genius when it comes to technology and he's just thoughtful even in this philanthropy. He just uses his mind and I respect that even though politically he's terrible. Anyway, think about this. Who had a bigger impact on the lives of poor people in the world? Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? Bill Gates. It's not even close. And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core. She lived it consistently. And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible. She hated her life. She was miserable. And most of the people she helped didn't do very well because she just helped them not die, right? And then Bill Gates changed the world and he helped a lot by providing technology. We even, philanthropy gets to them. The food gets them, much fancier, more efficient. Yet who is the moral saint? Sainthood is not determined based on what you do for other people. Sainthood is based on how much pain you suffer. I like to ask people to go to a museum and look at all the paintings of saints. How many of them are smiling and are happy? They've usually got arrows through them and holes in their body and they're just suffering a horrible death. The whole point of the morality we are taught is that happiness is immorality, that happy people cannot be good people, and that good people suffer and that suffering is necessary for morality. Morality is about self sacrifice and suffering. And at the end of the day, almost all the problems in the world boil down to that false view. So can we try to talk about, part of it is the problem of the word selfishness, but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness. So let's start at the fact that for me, I really enjoy doing stuff for other people. I enjoy cheering on the success of others. Why? I don't know. It's deep in that. Well, think about it. Why? Because I think you do know. If I were to really think, I don't want to resort to like evolutionary arguments or like this is somehow different. So I think. So I can tell you why I enjoy helping others. Maybe you can go there. Like one thing, cause we should talk about love a little bit. I'll tell you there's a part of me that's a little bit not rational. Like there's a gut that I follow that not everything I do is perfectly rational. For example, my dad criticizes me. He says like, you should always have a plan. Like it should make sense. You have a strategy. And I say that, I left, I stepped down from my full salary position at MIT. There's so many things I did without like a plan. It's a gut. It's like, I want to start a company. Well, you know how many companies fail? I don't know. It's a gut. And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut. I watched the way that karma works in this world that the people like us, one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan, that he does stuff for others. And that the joy he experiences, the way he sees the world, like just the glimmer in his eyes because he does stuff for others that creates a joyful experience. And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to, that to me is inspiring of a life well lived. But you probably know a lot of people who have done stuff for others who are not happy. True. So I don't think it's the doing stuff for others that just brings the happiness. It's why you do stuff for others and what else you're doing in your life and what is the proportion. But it's why at the end of the day, which is, and it's the same. Look, you can maybe through a gut feeling say, I wanna start a company, but you better start doing thinking about how and what and all of that. And to some extent the why, because if you really wanna be happy doing this, you better make sure you're doing it for the right reason. So I'm not, you know, there's something called fast thinking, Carlman, the Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman talks about, and there is, it's, you know, all the integrations you've made so far in your life cause you to have specialized knowledge and certain things and you can think very fast and your gut tells you what the right answer is. But it's not, it's your mind is constantly evaluating and constantly working. You wanna make it as rational as you can, not in the sense that I have to think through every time I make a decision, but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense that the answers are the right answers, you know, when I get them. So, you know, I like, I view other people as a value. Other people contribute enormously to my life, whether it's a romantic love relationship or whether it's a friendship relationship or whether it's just, you know, Jeff Bezos creating Amazon and delivering goodies to my home when I get them. And people do all that, right? It's not just Jeff Bezos. He gets the most credit, but everybody in that chain of command, everybody at Amazon is working for me. I love that. I love the idea of a human being. I love the idea that there are people capable of being an Einstein, of being, you know, and creating and building and making stuff that makes my life so good. You know, most of us like, this is not a good room for an example. Most of us like plants, right? We like pets. I don't particularly, but people like pets. Why? We like to see life. Human beings are life on steroids, right? They're life with a brain. It's amazing, right, what they can do. I love people. Now that doesn't mean I love everybody because there's some, there are really bad people out there who I hate, right? And I do hate. And there are people out there that are just, I have no opinion about. But generally the idea of a human being to me is a phenomenal idea. When I see a baby, I light up because to me there's a potential, you know, there's this magnificent potential that is embodied in that. And when I see people struggling and need help, I think they're human beings. You know, they embody that potential. They embody that goodness. They might turn out to be bad, but why would I ever give the presumption of that? I give them the presumption of the positive and I cheer them on. And I enjoy watching people succeed. I enjoy watching people get to the top of the mountain and produce something. Even if I don't get anything directly from it, I enjoy that because it's part of my enjoyment of life. So the word, to you, the morality of selfishness, this kind of love of other human beings, the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness. Cannot, because there's no context in which you can truly love yourself without loving life and loving what it means to be human. So, you know, the love of yourself is gonna manifest itself definitely in different people, but it's core. What do you love about yourself? First of all, I love that I'm alive. I love this world and the opportunities it provides me and the fun and the excitement of discovering something new and meeting a new person and having a conversation. You know, all of this is immensely enjoyable, but behind all of that is a particular human character. There's a particular human capability that not only I have, other people have. And the fact that they have it makes my life so much more fun because, so it's, you cannot view, you know, it's all integrated and you cannot view yourself in isolation. Now that doesn't place a moral commandment on me, help everybody who's poor that you happen to meet in the street. It doesn't place a burden on me in a sense that now I have this moral duty to help everybody. It leaves me free to make decisions about who I help and who I don't. There's some people who I will not help. There's some people who I do not wish positive things upon. Bad people should have bad outcomes. Bad people should suffer. So. And then you have the freedom to choose who's good, who's bad within your. It's your decision based on your values. Now, I think there's an objectivity to it. There's a standard by which you should evaluate good versus bad. And that standard should be to what extent do they contribute or hurt human life? The standard is human life. And so when I say, look at Jeff Bezos, I say, he's contributed to human life, good guy. I might disagree with him on stuff. We might disagree about politics. We might disagree about women. I don't know what we agree. But overall, big picture, he is pro life, right? I look at somebody like, you know, to take like 99.9% of our politicians and they are pro death. They're pro destruction. They're pro cutting corners in ways that destroy human life and human potential and human ability. So I literally hate almost every politician out there. And I wish ill on them, right? I don't want them to be successful or happy. I want them all to go away, right? Leave me alone. So I believe in justice. I believe good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people. So I make those generalizations based on this one, you know, on the other hand, if, you know, I shouldn't say all politicians, right? So if I, you know, I love Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, right? I love Abraham Lincoln. I love people who fought for freedom and who believed in freedom, who had these ideas and lived up to, at least in parts of their lives, to those principles. Now, do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed because he held slaves? Absolutely. But the virtues way outweigh that in my view. And I understand people who don't accept that. You don't have to also love and hate the entirety of the person. There's parts of that person that you're attracted to. The major part is pro life and therefore I'm pro that person. And I think, and I said earlier that objectivism is a philosophy of love. And I believe that because objectivism is about your life, about loving your life, about embracing your life, about engaging with the world, about loving the world in which you live, about win win relationships with other people, which means to a large extent loving the good in other people and the best in other people and encouraging that and supporting that and promoting that. So I know selfishness is a harsh word because the culture has given it that harshness. Selfishness is a harsh word because the people who don't like selfishness want you to believe it's a harsh word. But it's not. What does it mean? It means focus on self. It means take care of self. It means make yourself your highest priority, not your only priority, because in taking care of self, what would I be without my wife? What would I be without the people who support me, who help me, who I have these love relationships with? So other people are crucial. What would my life be without Steve Jobs, right? A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful. So one is win win. So one key thing about this selfishness and the idea of objectivism is the philosophy of love is that you don't want parasitism. So that is unethical. So you actually, first of all, you say win win a lot. And I just like that terminology because it's a good way to see life. It's tried to maximize the number of win win interactions. That's a good way to see business actually. Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life, you wanna have a win win relationship with your wife. Imagine if it was win lose. Either way, if you win and she loses, how long is that gonna sustain? So win lose relationships are not in equilibrium. What they turn into is lose lose. Like win lose turns into lose lose. And so the only alternative to lose lose is win win. And you win and the person you love wins. What's better than that, right? That's the way to maximize, so like the selfishness is you're trying to maximize the win, but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win win. Yes, and it turns out, and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago, that if you focus on your own winning while respecting other people as human beings, then everybody wins. And the beauty of capitalism, if we go back to capitalism for a second, the beauty of capitalism is you cannot be successful in capitalism without producing values that other people appreciate and therefore willing to buy from you. And they buy them, and this goes back to that question about the engineer and Steve Jobs. Why is the engineer working there? Because he's getting paid more than his time is worth to him. I know people don't like to think in those terms, but that's the reality. If his time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid, he would leave. So he's winning. And is Apple winning? Yes, because they're getting more productivity from him. They're getting more from him than what he's actually producing. It's tough because there's the human psychology and imperfect information. It just makes it a little messier than the clarity of thinking you have about this. It's just, you know, because for sure, but not everything in life is an economic transaction. It ultimately is close, but it... Even if it's not an economic transaction, even if it's a relationship transaction, when you get to a point with a friend where you're not gaining from the relationship, friendship's gonna be over. Not immediately, because it takes time for these things to manifest itself and to really absorb and to... But we change friendships, we change our loves, right? We fall in and out of love. We fall out of love because we're not... Love, so let's go back to love, right? Love is the most selfish of all emotions. Love is about what you do to me, right? So I love my wife because she makes me feel better about myself. So, you know, the idea of selfless love is bizarre. So Ayn Rand used to say, before you say, I love you, you have to say the I. And you have to know who you are and you have to appreciate yourself. If you hate yourself, what does it mean to love somebody else? So I love my wife because she makes me feel great about the world. And she loves me for the same reason. And so Ayn Rand used to use this example. Imagine you go up to be spoused the night before the wedding and you say, you know, I get nothing out of this relationship. I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self sacrifice. She would slap you, as she should, right? So, you know, we know this intuitively that love is selfish, but we are afraid to admit it to ourselves. And why? Because the other side has convinced us that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people. Selfishness means lying, cheating, stealing, walking on corpses, backstabbing people. But is that ever in your self interest truly, right? You know, I'll often be in front of an audience to say, okay, how many people have you ever been in a relationship and say, okay, how many people here have lied? I'm kidding, right? How many of you think that if you did that consistently, that would make your life better? Nobody thinks that, right? Because everybody's experienced how shitty lying, not because of how it makes you feel out of a sense of guilt. Existentially, it's just a bad strategy, right? You get caught, you have to create other lies to cover up the previous lie. It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition. You know, the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right, is an integrating machine. And in computer science, I understand there's a term called garbage in, garbage out. Lying is garbage in. Yeah. So it's not good strategy. Cheating, screwing your customers in a business, not paying your suppliers as a businessman, not good business practices, not good practices for being alive. So win, win is both model and practical. And the beauty of Heinemann's philosophy, and I think this is really important, is that the model is the practical and the practical is the model. And therefore, if you are a model, you will be happy. Yeah, that's why the application of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice. So like, or to discuss, or possible to discuss. That's why you talk about all. I'm so clear cut. Yeah. I'm so vigorous about my view. And that's fundamentally practical. I mean, that's the best of philosophies is practical. It's in a sense, teaching you how to live a good life. And it's teaching you how to live a good life, not just as you, but as a human being. And therefore, the principles that apply to you probably apply to me as well. And if we both share the same principles of how to live a good life, we're not gonna be enemies. You brought up anarchy earlier. It's an interesting question because you've kind of said politicians. I mean, part of it is a little bit joking, but politicians are not good people. Yep. So, but we should have some. So you have an opposition to anarchism. So they, first of all, they weren't always not bad people. That is, I gave examples of people who engage in political life who I think were good people basically. And, but they think they get worse over time if the system is corrupt. And I think the system, unfortunately, even the American system, as good as it was, was founded on quicksand and have corruption built in. They didn't quite get it. And they needed Ayn Rand to get it. So I'm not blaming them. I don't think they share any blame. You needed a philosophy in order to completely fulfill the promise that is America, or the promise that is the founding of America. So the place where corruption sneaked in is the lack in some way of the philosophy underlying the nation? Absolutely. So it's Christianity. It's, you know, not to hit on another controversial topic. It's religion, which undercut their morality. So the founders were explicitly Christian and altruistic in their morality. Implicitly, in terms of their actions, they were completely secular, and they were very secular anyway. But in their morality, even, they were secular. So there's nothing in Christianity that says that you have an inalienable right to pursue happiness. That's unbelievably self interested and based on kind of a moral philosophy of ego, of an egoistic moral philosophy. But they didn't know that. And they didn't know how to ground it. They implicitly, they had that fast thinking, that gut. They told them that this was right. And the whole enlightenment, that period, from John Locke on to really to Hume, that period is about pursuit of happiness, using reason in pursuit of the good life, right? But they can't ground it. They don't really understand what reason is, and they don't really understand what happiness requires. And they can't detach themselves from Christianity. They're not allowed to politically. And I think conceptually, you just can't make that big break. Rand is an enlightenment thinker in that sense. She is what should have followed right after, right? She should have come there and grounded them in the secular and in the egoistic and the Aristotelian view of morality as a code of values to basically to guide your life, to guide your life towards happiness. That's Aristotle's view, right? So they didn't have that. So I think that government is necessary. It's not a necessary evil. It's a necessary good, because it does something good. And the good that it does is it eliminates coercion from society. It eliminates violence from society. It eliminates the use of force between individuals from society. And that... But see, the argument like Michael Malice would make, give me a chance here, is why can't you apply the same kind of reasoning that you've effectively used for the rest of mutually agreed upon institutions that are driven by capitalism, that we can't also hire forces to protect us from the violence, to ensure the stability of society that protects us from the violence. Why draw the line at this particular place, right? Well, because there is no other place to draw a line, and there is a line. And by the way, we draw lines at other places, right? We don't vote. We don't determine truth and science based on competition. Right, so that's a line. But first of all, some people might say... I mean, there's competition in a sense that you have alternate theories, but at the end of the day, whether you decide that he's right or he's right is not based on the market. It's based on facts, on reality, on objective reality. You have to... And some people will never accept that this person is right because they don't see the string. So first of all, what they reject, what most anarchists reject, even if they don't admit it or recognize it, is they reject objective reality. In which sense? So like, okay, I get it, right. So there's a whole... So the whole realm of law is a scientific realm to define, for example, the boundaries of private property. It's not an issue of competition. It's not an issue of, I have one system and you have another system. It's an issue of a big competition. It's an issue of objective reality. And now it's more difficult than science in a sense because it's more difficult to prove that my conception of property is correct and you're correct. But there is a correct one. In reality, there's a correct vision. It's more abstract. But look, somebody has to decide what property is. So my property is defined by certain boundaries. And I have a police force and I have a judiciary system that backs my vision. And you have a claim against my property. You have a claim against my property. And you have a police force and a judicial system that backs your claim. Who's right? So our definitions of property are different? Yes, our definitions of property or our claim on the property is different. So what if we just agree on the definition of property and... But why should we agree, right? Your judicial system is one definition of property. My judicial system is not. You think that there's no such thing as intellectual property rights. And your whole system believes that. And my whole system believes there is such thing. So you are duplicating my books and handing them out to all your friends and not paying me a royalty. Yeah. And I think that's wrong. My judicial system and my police force think that's wrong. And we're both living in the same geographic area, right? So we have overlapping jurisdictions. Now, the anarchist would say, well, we'll negotiate. Why should we negotiate? My system is actually right. There is such a thing as intellectual property rights. There's no negotiation here. You're wrong. And you should either pay a fine or go to jail. Yeah, but why can't... Because it's a community, there's multiple parties and it's like a majority vote. They'll hire different forces that says, yeah, Yaron is onto something here with the definition of property and we'll go with that. So are anarchists pro democracy in the majority rule sense? Well, I think so. I think anarchy promotes like emergent democracy, right? Like the... No, it doesn't. I'll tell you what it promotes. It promotes emergent strife and civil war and violence, constant uninterrupted violence. Because the only way to settle the dispute between us, since we both think that we are right and we have guns behind us to protect that and we have a legal system, we have a whole theory of ideas, is you're stealing my stuff. How do I get it back? I invade you, right? I take over, and who's gonna win that battle? The smartest guy? Oh, the guy with the biggest guns. See, but the anarchists would say that they're using implied, like the state uses implied force. They're already doing violence. Because they take the state as it is today and they refuse to engage in the conversation about what a state should and could look like and how we can create mechanisms to protect us from the state using those. But look, my view of anarchy is very simple. It's a ridiculous position. It's infantile. I mean, I really mean this, right? And sorry to Michael, but and all the other very, very smart, very, very smart anarchists. Because anarchists is never, you won't find a dumb anarchist. Right. Because dumb people know it wouldn't work. You have to have, it's absolutely true. You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist. That's true, they're all really intelligent. All intelligence. And the reason is that you have to create such a mythology in your head. You have to create so many rationalizations. Any Joe in the street knows it doesn't work because they can understand what happens when two people who are armed are in the street and have a dispute and there's no mechanism to resolve that dispute. Yeah. That's objective. And this is where it gets subjective. That's objective. The whole point of government is that it is the objective authority for determining the truth in one regard, in regard to force. Because the only alternative to determining it when it comes to force is through force. The only way to resolve disputes is through force or through this negotiation, which is unjust because if one party is right and one party is wrong, why negotiate? And this is the point. I'm not against competition of governance. I'm all for competition of governance. We do that all the time. It's called countries. The United States has a certain governance structure. The Soviet Union had a governance structure. Mexico has a governance structure. And they're competing. And we can observe the competition. And in my world, you could move freely from one governance to another. If you didn't like your governance, you would move to a better governance system. But they have to have autonomy within a geographic area. Otherwise what you get is complete and utter civil war. The law needs to be objective. And there needs to be one law over a piece of ground. And if you disagree with that law, you can move somewhere else where they may. This is why federalism is such a beautiful system. Even within the United States, we have states. And on certain issues, we're allowed to disagree between states, like the death penalty. Some states do, some states don't. Fine. And now I can move from one state if I don't like it. But there's certain issues you cannot have disagreement. Slavery, for example, this is why we had a civil war. But let me, one other argument against anarchy. Markets exist where force has been eliminated. Sorry, can you say that again? Markets exist where the rule of force has been eliminated. The rule of force? Yes. So a market will exist if we know that you can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff. I am willing to engage in transaction with you if we have an implicit understanding that we're not gonna use force against each other. So force has something special to it. Yes. It's a special, it overrides, because we are still agreeing we can manipulate each other. Yes. But force we can't. Force kind of, so there's something fundamental about violence. Force is a fundamental force. It's the anti reason. It's the anti life. It's the anti force against another person. And it's what it does is shuts down the mind. Right. So in order to have a market, you have to extract force. That's fascinating. How can you have a market in force? When I, there's an Instagram channel called nature's metal where it has all these videos of animals, basically having a market of force. Yes. But that shuts down the ability to reason and animals don't need to because they can't. Exactly. So the innovation that is human beings is our capacity to reason. And therefore the relegation of force to the animals. We don't do force. Civilization is what we don't have force. And so what you have is you cannot have a market in that, which a market requires the elimination of it. And I don't debate formally these guys, but I interact with them all the time, right? And you get these absurd arguments where, David Friedman will say, that's Milton Friedman's son. He will say something like, well, in Somalia, in the Northern part of Somalia where they have no government, you have all these wonderful, you have these tribal tribunals of these tribes and they resolve disputes. Yeah. Barbarically, they use Sharia law. They have no respect for individual rights, no respect for property. And the only reason they have any authority is because they have guns and they have power and they have force and they do it barbarically. There's nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalian and they write about pirates because they view force. They don't view force as something unique that must be extracted from human life. And that's why anarchy has to devolve into violence because it treats forces just, what's the big deal with negotiating over guns? So we covered a lot of high level philosophy, but I'd like to touch on the troubles, the chaos of the day. Yeah. A couple of things. And I really trying to find a hopeful path way out. So one is the current coronavirus pandemic, or in particular, not the virus, but our handling of it. Is there something philosophically, politically that you would like to see, that you would like to recommend, that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message if we take that kind of trajectory we might be able to get out? Because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain that people are feeling that there's this quiet suffering. I mean, I agree with you completely. There is a quiet suffering. It's horrible. I mean, I know people. I go to a lot of restaurants. One of the things we love to do is eat out. My wife doesn't like cooking anymore. We don't have kids in the house anymore, so she doesn't have to. So we go out a lot. We go to restaurants. And because we have our favorites and we go to them a lot, we get to know the owners of the restaurant, the chef. And it's just heartbreaking. These people put their life, their blood, sweat, and tears. I mean, real blood, sweat, and tears into these projects. Restaurants are super difficult to manage. Most of them go bankrupt anyway. And the restaurants, we go to a good restaurant. So they've done a good job and they offer unique value. And they shut them down. And many of them will never open. Something like the estimate 50, 60% of restaurants in some places won't open. These are people's lives. These are people's capital. These are people's effort. These are people's love. Talk about love. Love what they do. Particularly if they're the chef as well. And it's gone. And it's disappeared. And what are they gonna do with their lives now? They're gonna live off the government the way our politicians would like them. Bigger and bigger stimulus plans so we can hand checks to people to get them used to living off of us rather than. It's disgusting and it's offensive and it's unbelievably sad. And this is where it comes to this. I care about other people. I mean, this idea that objectivists don't care. I mean, I love these people who provide me with pleasure of eating wonderful food in a great environment. And there's something inspiring about them too. Like when I see a great restaurant owner, I wanna do better with my own stuff. Yeah, exactly. They're inspiring. Anybody who does it is excellent. I love sports because it's the one realm in which you'd still value and celebrate excellence. But I try to celebrate excellence everything in my life. So I try to be nice to these people. And with COVID, we went more to restaurants, we did more takeout stuff. We made an effort, particularly the restaurants, we really love to keep them going, to encourage them, to support them. The problem is philosophy drives the world. The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic. And it's driven by philosophy. It's driven by disrespect to science, ignorance and disrespect of statistics, a disrespect of individual human decision making. Government has to decide everything for us. And just throughout the process and a disrespect of markets because we didn't let markets work to facilitate what we needed in order to deal with this virus. If you look at the place, it's interesting that the only place on the planet that's done well with this are parts of Asia, right? Taiwan did phenomenally with this. And the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist. So he knew what he was doing. And they got it right from the beginning. South Korea did amazing, even Hong Kong and Singapore. Hong Kong is just very few deaths. And the economy wasn't shut down in any of those places. There were no lockdowns in any of those places. The CDC had plans before this happened on how to deal with good plans. Indeed, if you ask people around the world before the pandemic which country is best prepared for a pandemic, they would have said the United States because of the CDC's plans and all of our emergency reserves and all that and the wealth. And yet all of that went out the window because people panicked, people didn't think, go back to reason, people were arrogant, refused to use the tools that they had at their disposal to deal with this. So you deal with pandemics, it's very simple how you deal with pandemics. And this is how South Korea and Taiwan and everywhere, you deal with them by testing, tracing and isolating. That's it. And you do it well and you do it vigorously and you do it on scale if you have to. And you scale up to do it and we have the wealth to do that. So one question I have, it's a difficult one. So I talk about love a lot and you've just talked about Donald Trump, I guarantee you though this particular segment will be full of division from the internet. But I believe that should be and can be fixed. What I'm referring to in particular is the division because we've talked about the value of reason. And what I've noticed on the internet is the division shuts down reason. So when people hear you say Trump, actually the first sentence you said about Trump, they'll hear Trump and their ears will perk up and they'll immediately start in that first sentence, they'll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump? They're not interested in anything else after that. And then after that, that's it. And what, how do, so my question is, you as one of the beacons of intellectualism, quite honestly, I mean, it sounds silly to say, but you are a beacon of reason. How do we bring people together long enough to where we can reason? I mean, there's no easy way out of this because the fact that people have become tribal and they have, very tribal. And the tribe, in the tribe reason doesn't matter. It's all about emotion. It's all about belonging or not belonging. And you don't wanna stand out. You don't wanna have a different opinion. You wanna belong. And it's all about belonging. It took us decades to get back to tribalism where we were hundreds of years ago. It took millennium to get out of tribalism. It took the enlightenment to get us to the point of individualism, where we think in reason, respect for reason. Before that, we were all tribal. So it took the enlightenment to get us out of it. We've been in the enlightenment for about 250 years, influenced by the enlightenment and it's fading. The impact is fading. So what would we need to get out of it? We need self esteem. People join a tribe because they don't trust their own mind. People join a tribe because they're afraid to stand on their own two feet. They're afraid to think for themselves. They're afraid to be different. They're afraid to be unique. They're afraid to be an individual. People need self esteem. To gain self esteem, they have to have respect for rationality. They have to think and they have to achieve and they have to recognize that achievement. To do that, they have to have respect for thinking. They have to have to respect for reason. And we have to, and think about the schools. We have to have schools that teach people to think, teach people to value their mind. We have schools that teach people to feel and value their feelings. We have groups of six year olds sitting around a circle discussing politics. What? They don't know anything. They're ignorant. See, you don't know anything when you're ignorant. Yes, you can feel, but your feelings are useless as decision making tools. But we emphasize emotion. It's all about socialization and emotion. This is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes. They can't hear anything that they're opposed to because they've not learned how to use their mind, how to think. So it boils down to teaching people how to think two things, how to think and how to care about themselves. So it's thinking of self esteem and the connected, because when you think, you achieve, which gains you self esteem. When you have self esteem, it's easier to think for yourself. And I don't know how you do that quickly. I mean, I think leadership matters. So, you know, part of what I try to do is try to encourage people to do those things. But I am a small voice. You asked me when, early on you said we should talk about why I'm not more famous. I'm not famous. You know, my following is not big. It's very small in the scope of things. Well, yours and objectivism and that question, could you linger on it for a moment? Why isn't objectivism more famous? I think because it's so challenging. It's not challenging. It's not challenging to me, right? When I first encountered objectivism, it's like after the first shock and after the first kind of, none of this can be true. This is all BS. And fighting it, once I got it, it was easy. It required years of studying, but it was easy in the sense of, yes, this makes sense. But it's challenging because it upends everything. It really says what my mother taught me is wrong. And what my politicians say left and right is wrong. All of them. There's not a single politician on which I agree with on almost anything, right? Because on the fundamentals we disagree. And what my teachers are telling me is wrong. And what Jesus said is wrong. And it's hard. But the thing is, so you talk about politics and all that kind of stuff, but you know, most people don't care. The more powerful thing about objectivism is the practical of my life, of how I revolutionized my life. And that feels to be like a very important and appealing, you know, get your shit together. Yeah, but this is why Jordan Peterson is so much more successful than we are, right? Why is that? Make your bed or whatever. What's that? Make your bed. Yeah, because his personal responsibility is shallow. It's make your bed, stand up straight. That's what my mother told me when I was growing up. There's nothing new about Jordan Peterson. He says, embrace Christianity. Christianity is fine, right? Religion is okay. Just do these few things and you'll be fine. And by the way, he says, happiness, you know, you either have it or you don't. You know, it's random. You don't actually, you can't bring about your own happiness. So he's given people an easy out. People want easy outs. People buy self help books that give them five principles or living in, you know, shallow. I'm telling them, think, stand on your own two feet, be independent. Don't listen to your mother. Do your own thing, but thoughtfully, not based on emotions. So you're responsible not just for a set of particular habits and so on. You're responsible for everything. Yes, and you're responsible. Here's the big one, right? You're responsible for shaping your own soul. Your consciousness, you get to decide what it's going to be like. And the only tool you have is your mind. Your only tool is your mind. Well, your emotions play a tool when they're properly cultivated. They play a role in that. And the tools you have is thinking, experiencing, living, coming to the right conclusions, you know, listening to great music and watching good movies and art is very important in shaping your own soul and helping you do this. It's got a crucial role in that. But it's work. And it's lonely work because it's work you do with yourself. Now, if you find somebody who you love who shares these values and you can do with them, that's great, but it's mostly lonely work. It's hard, it's challenging, it ends your world. The reward is unbelievable. But even at that, think about the enlightenment, right? So up until the enlightenment, where was truth? Truth came from a book. And there were a few people who understood the book. Most of us couldn't read and they conveyed it to us. And they just told us what to do. And in that sense, life's easy. It sucks and we die young and we have nothing and we don't enjoy it, but it's easy. And the enlightenment comes around and says, we've got this tool, it's called reason. And it allows us to discover truth about the world. It's not in a book. It's actually your reason allows you to discover stuff about the world. And I consider the first, really the first figure of the enlightenment is Newton, not Locke, right? It's a scientist. Because he teaches us the laws of mechanics, like how does stuff work? And people go, oh, wow, this is cool. I can use my mind. I can discover truth. Isn't that amazing? And everything opens up once you do that. Hey, if I can discover, if I understand the laws of motion, if I can understand truth in the world, how come I can't decide who I marry? I mean, everything was fixed in those days. How come I can't decide what profession I should be in? Right, everybody would belong to a guild. How come I can't decide who my political leader should be? That's, so it's all reason. It's all, once you understand the efficacy of your own mind to understand truth, to understand reality, discover truth, not understand truth, discover it. Everything opens up. Now you can take responsibility for your own life because now you have the tool to do it. But we are living in an era where postmodernism tells us there is no truth, there is no reality, and our mind is useless anyway. Critical race theory tells us that you're determined by your race and your race shapes everything and your free will is meaningless and your reason doesn't matter because reason is just shaped by your genes and shaped by the color of your skin. It's the most racist theory of all. And you've got our friend at UC Irvine telling them, oh, your senses don't tell you anything about reality. Anyway, reality is what it is. So, you know, what's the purpose of reason? It's to invent stuff, it's to make stuff up. And then what use is that? It's complete fantasy. You've basically got every philosophical, intellectual voice in the culture telling them their reason is impotent. There's like a Steven Pinker who tries, and I love Pinker and he's really good and I love his books, but, you know, he needs to be stronger about this. And there's a few people on kind of, there's a few people partially in the intellectual dark web and otherwise who are big on reason but not consistent enough and not full understanding of what it means or what it implies. And then there's little old me. There's a little old me and it's me against the world in a sense, because I'm not only willing to accept, to articulate the case for reason, but then what that implies. It implies freedom, it implies capitalism, it implies taking personal responsibility over your own life. And there are other intellectual dark web people get to reason and then, oh, politics, you can be whatever. No, you can't, you can't be a socialist and for reason. It doesn't actually, those are incompatible. And you can't be a determinist and for reason. Reason and determinism don't go together. The whole point of reason is that it's an achievement and it requires effort and it requires engagement, it requires choice. So it is, it does feel like a little old me because that's it. The allies I have are allies. I have allies among some libertarians over economics. I have some allies in the intellectual dark web maybe over reason, but none of them are allies in the full sense. So my allies are the other objectivists, but they're not a lot of us. For people listening to this, for the few folks kind of listening to this and thinking about the trajectory of their own life, I guess the takeaway is reason is a difficult project, but a project that's worthy of taking on. Yeah, difficulties, I don't know if difficulty is the right word because difficult sounds like it's, I have to push this boulder up a hill. It's not difficult in that sense. It's difficult in the sense that it requires energy and focus, it requires effort, but it's immediately rewarding. It's fun to do. And it rewards immediate, pretty quick, right? It takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have, but we all have that I had that took me years and years and years to get rid of certain concepts and certain emotions that I had that didn't make any sense, but it takes a long time to fully integrate that. So I don't want it to sound like it's a burden, like it's hard in that sense. It does require focus and energy. And I don't want it to sound like a Dr. Spock. I don't want to say, and I don't think I do because I'm a pretty passionate guy, but I don't want it to appeal like, oh, just forget about emotions. Emotions are how you experience the world. You want to have strong emotions. You want to live, you want to experience life strongly and passionately. You just need to know that emotions are not cognition. It's another realm. It's like, don't mix the realms. Think about outcomes and then experience them. And sometimes your emotions won't coincide with what you think should be. And that means there's still more integration to be done. Yaron, as I told you offline, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. It's been, I was a little starstruck early on, getting a little more comfortable now. I believe that's gone. I highly recommend that people that haven't heard your work, listen to it through the Yaron Brook Show. The times I've disagreed with something I've heard you say is usually a first step on a journey of learning a lot more about that thing, about that viewpoint. And that's been so fulfilling. It's been a gift. The passion, you talk about reason a lot, but the passion radiates in a way that's just contagious and uninspiring. So thank you for everything you've done for this world. It's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you. Well, thank you. And my reward is that if I've had an impact on you and people like you, wow. I mean, that's amazing. When you wrote to me an email saying you've been a fan, I was blown away because I had no idea and completely unexpected. And every few months I discover, hey, I had an impact on this world and people that I would have never thought. So the only way to change the world is to change your one mind at a time. And when you have an impact on a good mind and a mind that cares about the world and a mind that goes out and does something about it, then you get the exponential growth. So through you, I've impacted other people and that's how you ultimately change everything. And so in spite of everything, I'm optimistic in a sense that I think that the progress we've made today is so universally accepted, the scientific progress, the technological progress, it can just vanish like it did when Rome collapsed. And whether it's in the United States or somewhere, progress will continue, the human project for human progress will continue. And I think these ideas, the ideas of reason and individualism will always be at the heart of it. And what we are doing is continuing the project of the Enlightenment. And it's the project that will save the human race and allow it to, for Elon Musk and for Jeff Bezos to reach the stars. Thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful note. Yaron, a pleasure and an honor. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yaron Brook and thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Ayn Rand. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be one. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand and the Philosophy of Objectivism | Lex Fridman Podcast #138

The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, working to understand how the brain works, how it can change through experience, and how to repair brain circuits damaged by injury or disease. He has a great Instagram account at Huberman Lab where he teaches the world about the brain and the human mind. Also, he's a friend and an inspiration in that he shows that you can be humble, giving, and still succeed in the science world. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. 8Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across, and CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I heard from a lot of people about the previous conversation I had with Yaron Brook about objectivism. Some people loved it, some people hated it. I misspoke in some parts, was more critical on occasion than I'm meant to be, didn't push on certain points that I should've, was undereducated or completely unaware about some major things that happened in the past or major ideas out there. I bring all that up to say that if we are to have difficult conversations, we have to give each other space to make mistakes, to learn, to grow. Taking one or two statements from a three hour podcast and suggesting that they encapsulate who I am, I was, or ever will be is a standard that we can't hold each other to. I don't think anyone could live up to that kind of standard, at least I know I can't. The conversation with Yaron is mild relative to some conversations that I will likely have in the coming year. Please continue to challenge me, but please try to do so with love and with patience. I promise to work my ass off to improve. Whether I'm successful at that or not, we shall see. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman. You've mentioned that in your lab at Stanford, you induce stress by putting people into a virtual reality and having them go through one of a set of experiences. I think you mentioned this on Rogan or with Whitney that scare them. So just on a practical, psychological level, and maybe on a philosophical level, what are people afraid of? What are the fears? What are these fear experiences that you find to be effective? Yeah, so it depends on the person, obviously. And we should probably define fear, right? Because you can, without going too far down the rabbit hole of defining these things, you can't really have fear without stress, but you could have stress without fear. And you can't really have trauma without fear and stress, but you could have fear and stress without trauma. So we can start playing the word game. And that actually is one of the motivations for even having a laboratory that studies these things is that we really need better physiological, neuroscientific, and operational definitions of what these things are. I mean, the field of understanding emotions and states, which is mainly what I'm interested in, is very complicated. But we can do away with a lot of complicated debate and say in our laboratory, what we're looking for to assign it a value of fear is a big inflection in autonomic arousal. So increases in heart rate, increases in breathing, perspiration, pupil dilation, all the hallmark signature features of the stress response. And in some cases, we have the benefit of getting neurosurgery patients where we've got electrodes in their amygdala and their insula and the orbitofrontal cortex down beneath the skull. So these are chronically implanted electrodes. We're getting multiunit signals and we can start seeing some central features of meaning within the brain. And what's interesting is that as trivial as it might seem in listening to it, almost everybody responds to heights and falling from a high virtual place with a very strong stress, if not fear response. And that's because the visual vestibular apparatus, right? The optic flow and how it links to the balanced semicircular canals of the inner ears, all this technical stuff. But really, all of that pulls all your physiology, the feeling that your stomach is dropping, the feeling that suddenly you're sweating, even though you're not afraid of falling off this virtual platform, but you feel as if you're falling because of the optic flow. That one is universal. So we've got a dive with great white sharks experience where you actually exit the cage. We went out and did this in the real world and brought back 360 video that's built out pretty. Oh, so this is actually 360 video. 360 video. And this was important to us, right? So when we decided to set up this platform, a lot of the motivation was that a lot of the studies of these things in laboratories, I don't want to call them lame because I want to be respectful of the people that did this stuff before, but they study fear by showing subjects a picture of a bloody arm or a snake or something like that. And it just, unless you have a snake phobia, it just wasn't creating a real enough experience. So we need to do something where people aren't going to get injured, but where we can tap into the physiology and that thing of presence of people momentarily, not the whole time, but momentarily forgetting they're in a laboratory. And so heights will always do it. And if people want to challenge me on this, I like to point to that movie, Free Solo, which was wild because it's an incredible movie, but I think a lot of its popularity can be explained by a puzzle, which is you knew he was going to live when you walked in the theater or you watched it at home. You knew before that he survived. And yet it was still scary that people somehow were able to put themselves into that experience or into Alex's experience enough that they were concerned or worried or afraid at some level. So heights always does it. If we get people who have generalized anxiety, these are people who wake up and move through life at a generally higher state of autonomic arousal and anxiety, then we can tip them a little bit more easily with things that don't necessarily get everyone afraid. Things like claustrophobia, public speaking, that's going to vary from person to person. And then if you're afraid of sharks, like my sister for instance is afraid of sharks, she won't even come to my laboratory because there's a thing about sharks in it. That's how terrified some people are of these specific stimuli, but heights gets them every time. Yeah. And I'm terrified of heights. We have you step off a platform, virtual platform, and it's a flat floor in my lab, but you're up there. Well, you actually allow them the possibility in the virtual world to actually take the leap of faith. Yeah. Maybe I should describe a little bit of the experiment. So without giving away too much, in case someone wants to be a subject in one of these experiments, we have them playing a cognitive game. It's a simple lights out kind of game where you're pointing a cursor and turning out lights on a grid, but it gets increasingly complex and it speeds up on them. And there's a failure point for everybody where they just can't make the motor commands fast enough. And then we surprise people essentially by placing them virtually, all of a sudden they're on a narrow platform between two buildings. And then we encourage them or we cue them by talking to them through a microphone to continue across that platform to continue the game. And some people, they actually will get down on the ground and hold onto a virtual beam that doesn't even exist on a flat floor. And so what this really tells us is the power of the brain to enter these virtual states as if they were real. And we really think that anchoring the visual and the vestibular, the balance components of the nervous system are what bring people into that presence so quickly. There's also the potential, and we haven't done this yet to bring in 360 sound. So the reason we did 360 video is when we started all this back in 2016, a lot of the VR was pretty lame, frankly, it was CGI, it just wasn't real enough. But with 360 video, we knew that we could get people into this presence where they think they're in a real experience more quickly. And our friend Michael Muller, who I was introduced to because of the project, I reached out to some friends. Michael Muller is a very famous portrait photographer in Hollywood, but he dives with great white sharks and he leaves the cage. And so we worked with him to build a 360 video apparatus that we could swim underwater with, went out to Guadalupe Island, Mexico, and actually got the experience. It was a lot of fun. There's some interesting moments out there of danger, but it came back with that video and built that for the sharks. And then we realized we need to do this for everything. We need to do it for heights. We need to do it for public speaking, for claustrophobia. And what's missing still is 360 sound where 360 sound would be, for instance, if I were to turn around and there was a giant attack dog there, the moment I would turn around and see it, the dog would growl. But if I turn back toward you, then it would be silent. And that brings a very real element to one's own behavior where you don't know what's going to happen if you turn a corner. Whereas if there's a dog growling behind me and I turn around and then I turn back to you and it's still growling, that might seem like more of an impending threat and sustained threat, but actually it's when you start linking your own body movements to the experience. So when it's closed loop where my movements and choices are starting to influence things and they're getting scarier and scarier, that's when you can really drive people's nervous system down these paths of high states of stress and fear. Now we don't want to traumatize people obviously, but we also study a number of tools that allow them to calm themselves in these environments. So the short answer is height. Well, from a psychology and from a neuroscience perspective, this whole construction that you've developed is fascinating. We did this a little bit with autonomous vehicles. So to try to understand the decision making process of a pedestrian when they cross the road and trying to create an experience of a car, you know, that could run you over. So there's the danger there. I was so surprised how real that whole world was. And the graphics that we built wasn't ultra realistic or anything, but I was still afraid of being hit by a car. Everybody we tested were really afraid of being hit by that car. Even though it was all a simulation. It was all a simulation. It was kind of boxy actually. I mean, it wasn't like ultra realistic simulation. It was fascinating. Looms and heights. So any kind of depth, we're just programmed to not necessarily recoil, but to be cautious about that edge and that depth. And then looms, things coming at us that are getting larger. There are looming sensing neurons even in the retina at a very, very early stage of visual processing. And incidentally, the way Muller and folks learn how to not get eaten by great white sharks when you're swimming outside the cage is as they start lumbering in, you swim toward them. And they get very confused when you loom on them because clearly you're smaller. Clearly they could eat you if they wanted to, but there's something about forward movement toward any creature that that creature questions whether or not it would be a good idea to generate forward movement toward you. And so that's actually the survival tool of these cage exit white shark divers. Are you playing around with, like one of the critical things for the autonomous vehicle research is you couldn't do 360 video because there's a game theoretic. There's an interactive element that's really necessary. So maybe people realize this, maybe they don't, but 360 video, you obviously, well, it's actually not that obvious to people, but you can't change the reality that you're watching. That's right. So, but you find that that's like, is there something fundamental about fear and stress that the interactive element is essential for, or do you find you can, you can arouse people with just the video? Great question. It works best to use mixed reality. So we have a snake stimulus that I personally don't like snakes at all. I don't mind spiders. We also have a spider stimulus, but like snakes, I just don't like them. There's something about the, the slithering and the, it just creates a visceral response for me. Some people not so much, and they have lower levels of stress and fear in there. But one way that we can get them to feel more of that is to use mixed reality where we have an actual physical bat and they have to stomp out the snake as opposed to just walk to a little safe corner, which then makes the snake disappear. That tends to be not as stressful as if they have a physical weapon. And so you've got people in there, you know, banging on the floor against this thing. And there's something about engaging that makes it more of a, more of a threat. Now, I should also mention that we, we always get the subjective report from the subject of what they experienced because we never want to project our own ideas about what they were feeling, but that's the beauty of working with humans is you can ask them how they feel and humans aren't great at explaining how they feel. But it's a lot easier to understand what they're saying than a mouse or a macaque monkey is saying. So it's the best we can do is language plus these physiological and neurophysiological signals. Is there something you've learned about yourself about your deepest fears? Like you said, snakes, is there something that, like if I were to torture you, I'm, so I'm Russian. So, you know, I always kind of think, how can I murder this people that this person entered the room, but also how, how can I torture you to get some information out of you? What would I go with? Hmm. It's interesting. You should say that I never considered myself claustrophobic, but because I don't mind small environments provided they're well ventilated. But I, before COVID, I started going to this Russian banya, you know, and then, and I had never been to a banya. So, you know, the whole experience of really, really hot sauna and what are they called? The plots. They're hitting you with the leaves and it gets really hot and humid in there. And there were a couple of times where I thought, okay, this thing is below ground. It's in a city where there are a lot of earthquakes. Like if this place crumbled and we were stuck in here and I'd start getting a little panicky and I realized, I'm like, I don't like small confined spaces with poor ventilation. So I realized I think I have some claustrophobia and I wasn't aware of that before. So I've put myself into our own claustrophobia stimulus, which involves getting into an elevator and with a bunch of people, virtual people, and the elevator gets stalled. And at first you're fine. You feel fine. But then as we start modulating the environment and we actually can control levels of oxygen in the environment, if we want to, it is really uncomfortable for me. And I never would have thought, you know, I fly, I'm comfortable in planes, but it is really uncomfortable. And so I think I've unhatched a bit of a claustrophobia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For me as well, probably that one, that one is pretty bad. The heights I tried to overcome. So I went to skydiving to try to overcome the fear of heights, but that didn't help. Did you jump out? Yeah. Yeah. I jumped out, but it was, it was a, it was fundamentally different experience. And I guess there could be a lot of different flavors of fear of heights maybe, but the one I have didn't seem to be connected to jumping out of a plane is a very different, cause like once you accept that you're going to jump, then it's, it's a different thing. I think what I'm afraid of is the moments before it is the scariest part. Absolutely. And I don't think that's emphasized in the skydiving experience as much, and also just the acceptance of the fact that it's going to happen. So once you accept that it's going to happen, it's not as scary. It's the fact that it's not supposed to happen. And it might, that's the scary part that I guess I'm not being eloquent in this description, but there's something about skydiving that was actually philosophically liberating. I was, I was like, wow, it, it was the possibility that you can walk on a surface. And then at a certain point there's no surface anymore to walk on. And it's all of a sudden the world becomes three dimensional and there's this freedom of floating that the concept of like of earth disappears for a brief few seconds. I don't know. That was, that was wild. That was wild, but I'm still terrified of heights. So, I mean, one, one thing I want to ask just on fear, cause it's so fascinating is have you learned anything about what it takes to overcome fears? Yes. And that comes from two, from a, you know, research study standpoint, two parallel tracks of research. One was done actually in mice, because we have a mouse lab also where we can probe around in different brain areas and try and figure out what interesting brain areas we might want to probe around in humans. And a graduate student in my lab, she's now at Caltech, Lindsay Saleh, published a paper back in 2018, showing that what at first might seem a little bit obvious, but the mechanisms are not, which is that there are really three responses to fear. You can pause, you can freeze essentially. You can retreat, you can back up, or you can go forward. And there's a single hub of neurons in the midbrain, it's actually not the midbrain, but it's in the middle of the thalamus, which is a forebrain structure. And depending on which neurons are active there, there's a much higher probability that a mouse, or it turns out, or a human will advance in the face of fear or will pause or will retreat. Now that just assigns a neural structure to a behavioral phenomenon. But what's interesting is that it turns out that the lowest level of stress or autonomic arousal is actually associated with the pausing and freezing response. Then as the threat becomes more impending, and we used visual looms in this case, the retreat response has a slightly higher level of autonomic arousal and stress. So think about playing hide and go seeking, you're trying to stay quiet in a closet that you're hiding. If you're very calm, it's easy to stay quiet and still. As your level of stress goes up, it's harder to maintain that level of quiet and stillness. You see this also in animals that are stalking, a cat will chatter its teeth. That's actually sort of top down inhibition and trying to restrain behavior. So the freeze response is actually an active response, but it's fairly low stress. And what was interesting to us is that the highest level of autonomic arousal was associated with the forward movement toward the threat. So in your case, jumping out of the plane. However, the forward movement in the face of threat was linked to the activation of what we call collateral, which means just a side connection, literally a wire in the brain that connects to the dopamine circuits for reward. And so when one safely and adaptively, meaning you survive, moves through a threat or toward a threat, it's rewarded as a positive experience. And so the key, it actually maps very well to cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of the existing treatments for trauma is that you have to confront the thing that makes you afraid. So otherwise you exist in this very low level of reverberatory circuit activity where the circuits for autonomic arousal are humming and they're humming more and more and more. And we have to remember that stress and fear and threat were designed to agitate us so that we actually move. So the reason I mentioned this is I think a lot of times people think that the maximum stress response or fear response is to freeze and to lock up. But that's actually not the maximum stress response. The maximum stress response is to advance, but it's associated with reward. It has positive valence. So there's this kind of, everyone always thinks about the bell shape, you know, the sort of hump shape curve for, you know, at low levels arousal performance is low and as the increases performance goes higher and then it drops off as you get really stressed. But there's another bump further out that distribution where you perform very well under very high levels of stress. And so we've been spending a lot of time in humans and in animals exploring what it takes to get people comfortable to go to that place and also to let them experience how there are heightened states of cognition there. There's changes in time perception that allow you to evaluate your environment at a faster frame rate, essentially. This is the matrix as a lot of people think of it. But we tend to think about fear as all the low level stuff where things aren't worked out, but there are a lot of different features to the fear response. And so we think about it quantitatively and we think about it from a circuit perspective in terms of outcomes. And we try and weigh that against the threat. So we never want people to put themselves in unnecessary risk, but that's where the VR is fun because you can push people hard without risk of physically injuring them. And that's like you said, the little bump that seems to be a very small fraction of the human experience, right? So it's kind of fascinating to study it because most of us move through life without ever experiencing that kind of focus. Well, everything's in a peak state there. I really think that's where optimal performance lies. There's so many interesting words here, but what's performance? And what's optimal performance? We're talking about mental ability to what to perceive the environment quickly to make actions quickly. What's optimal performance? Yeah. Well, it's very subjective and it varies depending on task and environment. So one way we can make it a little bit more operational and concrete is to say there is a sweet spot, if you will, where the level of internal autonomic arousal, AKA stress or alertness, whatever you want to call it, is ideally matched to the speed of whatever challenge you have to be facing in the outside world. So we all have perception of the outside world as exteroception and the perception of our internal real estate interoception. And when those two things, when interoception and exteroception are matched along a couple of dimensions, performance tends to increase or tends to be in an optimal range. So for instance, if you're, I don't play guitar, but I know you play guitar. So let's say you're trying to learn something new on the guitar. I'm not saying that being in these super high states of activation are the best place for you to be in order to learn. It may be that your internal arousal needs to be at a level where your analysis of space and time has to be well matched to the information coming in and what you're trying to do in terms of performance, in terms of playing chords and notes and so forth. Now, in these cases of high threat where things are coming in quickly and animals and humans need to react very quickly, the higher your state of autonomic arousal, the better because you're slicing time more finely just because of the way the autonomic system works. The pupil dilation, for instance, and movement of the lens essentially changes your optics and that's obvious. But with the change in optics is a change in how you bin time and slice time, which allows you to get more frames per second readout. With the guitar learning, for instance, it might actually be that you want to be almost sleepy, almost in a drowsy state to be able to, and I don't play music, so I'm guessing here, but sense some of the nuance in the chords or the ways to be relaxed enough that your fingers can follow an external cue. So matching the movement of your fingers to something that's pure exteroception. And so there is no perfect autonomic state for performance. This is why I don't favor terms like flow because they're not well operationally defined enough. But I do believe that optimal or peak performance is going to arise when internal state is ideally matched to the space time features of the external demands. So there's some slicing of time that happens and then you're able to adjust, slice time more finely or more, less finely in order to adjust to the stimulus, the dynamics of the stimulus. What about the realm of ideas? So like, you know, I'm a big believer, this guy named Cal Newport who wrote a book about deep work. Yeah, I love that book. Yeah, he's great. I mean, one of the nice things, I've always practiced deep work, but it's always nice to have words put to the concepts that you've practiced. It somehow makes them more concrete and allows you to get better. It turns it into a skill that you can get better at. But, you know, I also value deep thinking where you think it's almost meditative. You think about a particular concept for long periods of time. The programming you have to do that kind of thing for. You just have to hold this concept, like you hold it and then you take steps with it. You take further steps and you're holding relatively complicated things in your mind as you're thinking about them. And there's a lot of, I mean, the hardest part is there's frustrating things like you take a step and it turns out to be the wrong direction. So you have to calmly turn around and take a step back. And then it's, you kind of like exploring through the space of ideas. Is there something about your study of optimal performance that can be applied to the act of thinking as opposed to action? Well, we haven't done too much work there, but I think I can comment on it from a neuroscience perspective, which is really all I do is, well, I mean, we do experiments in the lab, but I'm looking at things through the lens of neuroscience. So what you're describing can be mapped fairly well to working memory, just keeping things online and updating them as they change in information is coming back into your brain. Jack Feldman, who I'm a huge fan of and fortunate to be friends with is a professor at UCLA, works on respiration and breathing, but he has a physics background. And so he thinks about respiration and breathing in terms of ground states and how they modulate other states. Very, very interesting and I think important work. Jack has an answer to your question. So I'm not going to get this exactly right because this is lifted from a coffee conversation that we had about a month ago. So apologies in advance, but I think I can get mostly right. So we were talking about this, about how the brain updates cognitive states depending on demands and thinking in particular. And he used an interesting example. I'd be curious to know if you agree or disagree. He said, most great mathematics is done by people in their late teens and 20s, and even you could say early 20s, sometimes into the late 20s, but not much further on. Maybe I just insulted some mathematicians. No, that's true. And I think that it demands, his argument was there's a tremendous demand on working memory to work out theorems in math and to keep a number of plates spinning, so to speak mentally and run back and forth between them, updating them. In physics, Jack said, and I think this makes sense to me too, that there's a reliance on working memory, but an increased reliance on some deep memory and deep memory stores, probably stuff that's moved out of the hippocampus and forebrain and into the cortex and is some episodic and declarative stuff, but really, so you're pulling from your library, basically. It's not all RAM, it's not all working memory. And then in biology, and physicists tend to have very active careers into their 30s and 40s and 50s and so forth, sometimes later. And then in biology, you see careers that have a much longer arc, these protracted careers often, people still in their 60s and 70s doing really terrific work, not always doing it with their own hands because people in the labs are doing them, of course. And that work does tend to rely on insights gained from having a very deep knowledge base where you can remember a paper or maybe a figure in a paper, you could go look it up if you wanted to, but it's very different than the working memory of the mathematician. And so when you're talking about coding or being in that tunnel of thought and trying to iterate and keeping a lot of plates spinning, it speaks directly to working memory. My lab hasn't done too much of that. But we are pushing working memory when we have people do things like these simple lights out tasks. We can increase the cognitive load by increasing the level of autonomic arousal to the point where they start doing less well. And everyone has a cliff. This is what's kind of fun. We've had SEAL team operators come to the lab. We've had people from other units in the military. We've had a range of intellects and backgrounds and all sorts of things and everyone has a cliff. And those cliffs sometimes show up as a function of the demands of speed of processing or how many things you need to keep online. I mean, we're all limited at some point in the number of things we can keep online. So what you're describing is very interesting because I think it has to do with how narrow or broad the information set is. And I'm not an active programmer, so this is a regime I don't really fully know. So I don't want to comment about it in any way that doesn't suggest that. But I think that what you're talking about is top down control. So this is prefrontal cortex keeping every bit of reflexive circuitry at bay, the one that makes you want to get up and use the restroom, the one that makes you want to check your phone, all of that, but also running these anterior thalamus to prefrontal cortex loops, which we know are very important for working memory. Let me try to think through this a little bit. So reducing the process of thinking to working memory access is tricky. It's probably ultimately correct. But if I were to say some of the most challenging things that an engineer has to do, and a scientific thinker, I would say it's kind of depressing to think that we do that best in our 20s, but is this kind of first principles thinking step of saying you're accessing the things that you know, and then saying, well, let me, how do I do this differently than I've done it before? This weird like stepping back, like, is this right? Let's try it this other way. That's the most mentally taxing step is like, you've gotten quite good at this particular pattern of how you solve this particular problem. So there's a pattern recognition first. You're like, okay, I know how to build a thing that solves this particular problem in programming, say. And then the question is, but can I do it much better? And I don't know if that's, I don't know what the hell that is. I don't know if that's accessing working memory. That's almost access. Maybe it is accessing memory in a sense. It's trying to find similar patterns in a totally different place that it could be projected onto this. But you're not querying facts. You're querying like functional things like. Yeah, it's patterns. I mean, you're running out, you're testing algorithms. Yeah. Right. You're testing algorithms. So I want to just, because I know some of the people listening to this and you have a basis in scientific training and have scientific training. So I want to be clear. I think we can be correct about some things like the role of working memory in these kinds of processes without being exhaustive. We're not saying they're the only thing. We can be correct, but not assume that that's the only thing involved. And neuroscience, let's face it, is still in its infancy. I mean, we probably know 1% of what there is to know about the brain. I mean, we've learned so much and yet there may be global states that underlie this that make prefrontal circuitry work differently than it would in a different regime or even time of day. I mean, there's a lot of mysteries about this. So I just want to make sure that we're aiming for precision and accuracy, but we're not going to be exhausted. So there's a difference there. And I think sometimes in the vastness of the internet, that gets forgotten. So the other is that we think about these operations at really focused, keeping a lot of things online. But what you were describing is actually, it speaks to the very real possibility probably that with certainty, there's another element to all this, which is when you're trying out lots of things, in particular, lots of different algorithms, you don't want to be in a state of very high autonomic arousal. That's not what you want, because the higher level of autonomic arousal and stress in the system, the more rigidly you're going to analyze space and time. And what you're talking about is playing with space time dimensionality. And I want to be very clear. I'm the son of a physicist. I am not a physicist. When I talk about space and time, I'm literally talking about visual space and how long it takes for my finger to move from this point to this point. You are facing a tiger and trying to figure out how to avoid being eaten by the tiger. And that's primarily going to be determined by the visual system in humans. We don't walk through space, for instance, like a cent hound would and look at three dimensional scent plumes. When a scent hound goes out in the environment, they have depth to the odor trails they're following. And they don't think about them. We don't think about odor trails. You might say, oh, well, the smell's getting more intense. Aha. But they actually have three dimensional odor trails. So they see a cone of odor, see, of course, with their nose, with their olfactory cortex. We do that with our visual system. And we parse time, often subconsciously, mainly with our visual system, also with our auditory system. And this shows up for the musicians out there. Metronomes are a great way to play with this. Bass drumming, when the frequency of bass drumming changes, your perception of time changes quite a lot. So in any event, space and time are linked through the sensory apparatus, through the eyes and ears and nose, and probably through taste too, and through touch for us, but mainly through vision. So when you drop into some coding or iterating through a creative process or trying to solve something hard, you can't really do that well if you're in a rigid, high level of autonomic arousal because you're plugging in algorithms that are in this space regime, this time regime matches. It's space time matched. Whereas creativity, I always think the lava lamp is actually a pretty good example, even though it has these counterculture, new agey connotations, because you actually don't know which direction things are going to change. And so in drowsy states, sleeping and drowsy states, space and time become dislodged from one another somewhat, and they're very fluid. And I think that's why a lot of solutions come to people after sleep and naps. And this could even take us into a discussion, if you like, about psychedelics and what we now know, for instance, that people thought that psychedelics work by just creating spontaneous bursting of neurons and hallucinations. But the 5H2C and 2A receptors, which are the main sites for things like LSD and psilocybin and some of the other ones that create hallucinations, the drugs that create hallucinations, most of those receptors are actually in the collection of neurons that encase the thalamus, which is where all the sensory information goes into, a structure called the thalamic reticular nucleus. And it's an inhibitory structure that makes sure that when we're sitting here talking, that I'm mainly focused on whatever I'm seeing visually, that I'm essentially eliminating a lot of sensory information. Under conditions where people take psychedelics and these particular serotonin receptors are activated, that inhibitory shell, it's literally shaped like a shell, starts losing its ability to inhibit the passage of sensory information. But mostly the effects of psychedelics are because the lateral connectivity in layer five of cortex across cortical areas is increased. And what that does is that means that the space time relationship for vision, like moving my finger from here to here, very rigid space time relationship, right? If I slow it down, it's slower, obviously, but there's a prediction that can be made based on the neurons in the retina and the cortex. On psychedelics, this could be a very strange experience. But the auditory system has one that's slightly different space time, and they're matched to one another in deeper circuits in the brain. The olfactory system has a different space time relationship to it. So under conditions of these increased activation of these serotonin receptors, space and time across sensory area starts being fluid. So I'm no longer running the algorithm for moving my finger from here to here and making a prediction based on vision alone. I'm now, this is where people talk about hearing sites, right? You start linking, this might actually make a sound in a psychedelic state. Now I'm not suggesting people run out and do psychedelics because it's very disorganized, but essentially what you're doing is you're mixing the algorithms. And so when you talk about being able to access new solutions, you don't need to rely on psychedelics. If people choose to do that, that's their business. But in drowsy states, this lateral connectivity is increased as well. The shell of the thalamus shuts down. And these are through these so called pons chiniculate occipital waves. And what's happening is you're getting whole brain activation at a level that you start mixing algorithms. And so sometimes I think solutions come not from being in that narrow tunnel of space time and strong activation of working memory and trying to well iterate if this, then this very strong, deductive and inductive thinking and working from first principles, but also from states where something that was an algorithm that you never had in existence before suddenly gets lumped with another algorithm. And all of a sudden a new possibility comes to mind. And so space and time need to be fluid and space and time need to be rigid in order to come up with something meaningful. And I realize I'm riffing long on this, but this is why I think, you know, there was so much interest a few years ago with Michael Pollan's book and other things happening about psychedelics as a pathway to exploration and all this kind of thing. But the real question is what you export back from those experiences, because dreams are amazing, but if you can't bring anything back from them, they're just amazing. I wonder how to experiment with the mind without, without any medical assistance first. Like, you know, I, I pushed my mind in all kinds of directions. I definitely want to, I did, uh, shrooms a couple of times. I definitely want to, uh, figure out how I can experiment with, um, with psychedelics. I'm talking to, uh, Rick Doblin, uh, soon. I even went back and forth. So he does all these studies on psychedelics and he keeps ignoring the parts of my email that asks, like, how do I participate in these studies? Well, there are some legality issues. I mean, conversation, I want to be very clear. I'm not saying that anyone should go out and do psychedelics. I think that drowsy states and sleep states are super interesting for accessing some of these more creative states of mind. Hypnosis is something that my colleague, David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford works on where also, again, it's a unique state because you have narrow context. So this is very, um, kind of tunnel vision and yet deeply relaxed, excuse me, deeply relaxed where new algorithms, if you will, can start to surface, um, strong state for inducing neuroplasticity. And I think, you know, so if I had a, um, I'm part of a group, um, that, uh, it's called the liminal collective as a group of people that get together and talk about, um, just wild ideas, but they try and implement. Um, and it's a, it's a really interesting group. Some people from a military, from a logitech and some other backgrounds, academic backgrounds. And I was asked, you know, what would be, um, if you could create a tool, you just had a tool like your magic wand wish for the day, what would it be? I thought it'd be really interesting if someone could develop psychedelics that have, um, on off switches. So you could go into a psychedelic state very deeply for 10 minutes, but you could launch yourself out of that state and place yourself into a linear real world state very quickly so that you could extract whatever it was that happened in that experience. And then go back in if you wanted, because the problem with psychedelic states and dream states is that first of all, a lot of the reason people do them is they're lying. They say they want plasticity and they want all this stuff. They want a peak experience inside of an amplified experience. So they're kind of seeking something unusual. And I think we should just be honest about that because a lot of times they're not trying to make their brain better. They're just trying to experience something really amazing. But the problem is space and time are so unlocked in these states, just like they are in dreams, that you can really end up with a whole lot of nothing. You can have an amazing amplified experience housed in an amplified experience and come out of that thinking you had a meaningful experience when you didn't bring anything back. You didn't bring anything back. All you have is a fuzzy memory of having a transformational experience, but you don't actually have tools to bring back, sorry, actually concrete ideas to bring back. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if it's possible to do that with a mind to be able to hop back and forth. I think that's where the real power of adjusting states is going to be. It probably will be with devices. I mean, maybe it will be done through pharmacology. It's just that it's hard to do on off switches in human pharmacology that we have them for animals. I mean, we have Cree flip recombinases and we have channel opsins and halo root opsins and all these kinds of things. But to do that work in humans is tricky, but I think you could do it with virtual reality, augmented reality and other devices that bring more of the somatic experience into it. You're of course, a scientist who's studying humans as a collective. I tend to be just a one person scientist of just looking at myself and I play when these deep thinking, deep work sessions, I'm very cognizant in the morning that there's times when my mind is so eloquent at being able to jump around from ideas and hold them all together. I'm almost like I step back from a third person perspective and enjoy that, whatever that mind is doing, I do not waste those moments. I'm very conscious of this little creature that woke up that's only awake for, if we're being honest, maybe a couple hours a day. Early part of the day for you. Early part of the day. Not always. Well, early part of the day for me is a very fluid concept. You're one of those. Yeah, I'm one. Yeah, you're one of those. Being single, one of the problems, single and no meetings. I don't schedule any meetings. I've been living at like a 28 hour day. So it drifts. So it's all over the place. But after a traditionally defined full night's sleep, whatever the heck that means, I find that in those moments, there's a clarity of mind that's just, everything is effortless. And it's the deepest dives intellectually that I make. And I'm cognizant of it. And I try to bring that to the other parts of the day that don't have it and treasure them even more in those moments because they only last like five or 10 minutes. Because of course, in those moments you want to do all kinds of stupid stuff that are completely is worthless, like check social media or something like that. But those are the most precious things in intellectual life is those mental moments of clarity. And I wonder, I'm learning how to control them. I think caffeine is somehow involved. I'm not sure exactly. Sure. Well, because if you learn how to titrate caffeine, and everyone's slightly different with this, what they need, but if you learn to titrate caffeine with time of day and the kind of work that you're trying to do, you can bring that autonomic arousal state into a close to perfect place. And then you can tune it in with, sometimes people want a little bit of background music. Sometimes they want less, these kinds of things. The early part of the day is interesting because the one thing that's not often discussed is this transition out of sleep. So there's a book, I think it's called Winston Churchill's Nap. And it's about naps and the transition between wake and sleep as a valuable period. A long time ago, someone who I respect a lot was mentoring me said, be very careful about bringing in someone else's sensory experience early in the day. So when I wake up, I'm very drowsy. I sleep well, but I don't emerge from that very quickly. I need a lot of caffeine to wake up and whatnot. But there's this concept of getting the download from sleep, which is in sleep, you were essentially expunging the things that you don't need, the stuff that is meaningless from the previous day, but you were also running variations on these algorithms of whatever it is you're trying to work out in life on short timescales like the previous day and long timescales like your whole life. And those lateral connections in layer five of the neocortex are very robustly active and across sensory areas. And you're running an algorithm or it's a brain state that will be useless in waking. You wouldn't get anything done. You'd be the person talking to yourself in the hallway or something about something that no one else can see. But in those states, the theory is that you arrive at certain solutions and those solutions will reveal themselves in the early part of the day, unless you interfere with them by bringing in, social media is a good example of you immediately enter somebody else's space time sensory relationship. Someone is the conductor of your thoughts in that case. And so many people have written about this. What I'm saying isn't entirely new, but allowing the download to occur in the early part of the day and asking the question, am I more in my head or am I more of an interoceptive or exteroceptive mode? And depending on the kind of work you need to do, if it sounds like for you, it's very interoceptive and you've got a lot of thinking going on and a lot of computing going on, allowing yourself to transition out of that sleep state and arrive with those solutions from sleep and plug into the work really deeply. And only then allowing things like music, news, social media, doesn't mean you shouldn't talk to loved ones and see faces and things like that. But some people have taken this to the extreme. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, there was a guy there, a professor, brilliant, odd, but brilliant, who was so fixated on this concept that he wouldn't look at faces in the early part of the day because he just didn't want anything else to impact him. Now he didn't have the most rounded life, I suppose. But if you're talking about cognitive performance, this could actually be very beneficial. You said so many brilliant things. So one, if you read books that describe the habits of brilliant people like writers, they do control that sensory experience in the hours after wake. Like many writers, you know, they have a particular habit of several hours early in the morning of actual writing. They don't do anything else for the rest of the day, but they control, they're very sensitive to noises and so on. I think they make it very difficult to live with them. I try to, I'm definitely like that. Like I could, I love to control the sensory how much information is coming in. There's something about the peaceful, just everything being peaceful. At the same time, and we were talking to a mutual friend of Whitney Cummings, who has a mansion, a castle on top of a cliff in the middle of nowhere. She actually purchased her own island. She wants silence. She wants to control how much sound is coming in. She's very sensitive to sound and environment. Beautiful home and environment, but like clearly puts a lot of attention into details. Yeah. And very creative. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that allows for creativity to flourish. I'm also, I don't like that feels like a slippery slope. So I enjoy introducing the noises and signals and training my mind to be able to tune them out. Cause I feel like you can't always control the environment so perfectly because, cause your mind gets comfortable with that. I think it's a skill that you want to learn to be able to shut it off. Like I often go to like back before COVID to a coffee shop. It really annoys me when there's sounds and voices and so on, but I feel like I can train my mind to, to block them out. So it's, it's a balance, I think. Yeah. And I think you know, two things come to mind as you're saying this first of all, yeah. I mean, we're talking about what's best for work is not always what's best for, you know, completeness of life. I mean, you know, autism is probably many things like when you hit autism, just like feet, there are probably 50 ways to get a fever. There are probably 50 ways to, that the brain can create what looks like autism or what people call autism. There's an interesting set of studies that have come out of David Ginty's lab at Harvard med, looking at these are mouse mutants where these are models for autism, where nothing is disrupted in the brain proper and in the central nervous system, but the sensory app, the sensory neurons, the ones that innervate the skin and the ears and everything are, are hypersensitive. And this maps to a mutation in certain forms of human autism. So this means that the, the overload of sensory information and sensory experience that a lot of autistics feel, they're like that they can't tolerate things. And then they get the stereotype behaviors, the rocking and the kind of the shouting it, you know, we always thought of that as a brain problem. In some cases it might be, but in many cases it's because they just can't, they, they seem to have a, it's like turning the volume up on every sense. And so they're overwhelmed and none of us want to become like that. I think it's very hard for them and it's hard for their parents and so forth. So I, I like the coffee shop example because the way I think about trying to build up resilience, you know, physically or mentally or otherwise is one of I guess we could call it limb. I like to call it limbic friction. That's not a real scientific term. And I acknowledge that I'm making it up now because I think it captures the concept, which is that, you know, we always hear about resilience. It makes it sound like, oh, you know, under stress where everything's coming at you, you're going to stay calm, but there's another, you know, so limbic, the limbic system wants to pull you in some direction, typically in the direction of reflexive behavior and the prefrontal cortex through top down mechanisms has to suppress that and say, no, we're not going to respond to the banging of the coffee cups behind me, or I'm going to keep focusing. That's pure top down control. So limbic friction is high in that environment. You've put yourself into a high limbic friction environment, meaning that the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard. But there's another side to limbic friction too, which is when you're very sleepy, there's nothing incoming. It can be completely silent and it's hard to engage and focus because you're drifting off and you're getting sleepy. So their limbic friction is high, but for the opposite reason, autonomic arousal is too low. So they're turning on Netflix in the background or looping a song might boost your level of alertness that will allow top down control to be in exactly the sweet spot you want it. So this is why earlier I was saying it's all about how we feel inside relative to what's going on on the outside. We're constantly in this, I guess one way you could envision it spatially, especially if people are listening to this just on audio, is I like to think about it kind of like a glass barbell where one sphere of perception and attention can be on what's going on with me. And one sphere of attention can be on what's going on with you or something else in the room or in my environment. But this barbell isn't rigid. It's not really glass. Would plasma work here? I don't know anything about plasma. Sorry. I don't know. So imagine that this thing can contort the size of the globes at the end of this barbell can get bigger or smaller. So let's say I close my eyes and I bring all my experience into what's going on through interoception internally. Now it's as if I've got two orbs of perception just on my internal state, but I can also do the opposite and bring both orbs of perception outside me. I'm not thinking about my heart rate or my breathing. I'm just thinking about something I see. And what you'll start to realize as you kind of use this spatial model is that two things. One is that it's very dynamic and that the more relaxed we are, the more these two orbs of attention, the two ends of the barbell can move around freely. The more alert we are, the more rigid they're going to be tethered in place. And that was designed so that if I have a threat in my environment, it's tethered to that threat. If something's coming to attack me, I'm not going to be like, oh, my breathing cadence is a little bit quick. That's not how it works. Why? Because both orbs are linked to that threat. And so my behavior is now actually being driven by something external, even though I think it's internal. And so I don't want to get too abstract here because I'm a neuroscientist. I'm not a theorist. But when you start thinking about models of how the brain works, there are only really three things that neurons do. They're either sensory neurons, they're motor neurons, or they're modulating things. And the models of attention and perception that we have now, 2020, tell us that we've got interoception and exteroception. They're strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal. And that if we want to form the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or some thing, whether or not it's sleep, an impending threat, or coding, we need to adjust our internal space time relationship with the external space time relationship. And I realize I'm repeating what I said earlier. But we can actually assign circuitry to this stuff. It mostly has to do with how much limbic friction there is, how much you're being pulled to some source. That source could be internal. If I have pain, physical pain in my body, I'm going to be much more interoceptive than I am exteroceptive. You could be talking to me and I'm just going to be thinking about that pain. It's very hard. And the other thing that we can link it to is top down control, meaning anything in our environment that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more exteroception than interoception. And again, I don't want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms, but what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you've done, Lex, is to start developing an awareness. When I wake up, am I mostly in a mode of interoception or exteroception? When I work well, what does working well look like from the perspective of autonomic arousal? How alert or calm am I? What kind of balance between internal focus and external focus is there? And to sort of watch this process throughout the day. Can you linger just briefly on, because you use this term a lot and it'd be nice to try to get a little more color to it, which is interoception and exteroception. What are we exactly talking about? So like what's included in each category and how much overlap is there? Interoception would be an awareness of anything that's within the confines or on the surface of my skin that I'm sensing. So literally physiological. Physiologically, like within the boundaries of my skin and probably touched to the skin as well. Exteroception would be perception of anything that's beyond the reach of my skin. So that bottle of water, a scent, a sound, and this can change dramatically actually. If you have headphones in, you tend to hear things in your head as opposed to a speaker in the room. This is actually the basis of ventriloquism. So there are beautiful experiments done by Greg Reckenzone up at UC Davis, looking at how auditory and visual cues are matched and you have an array of speakers and this will become obvious as I say it, but obviously the ventriloquist doesn't throw their voice. What they do is they direct your vision to a particular location and you think the sound is coming from that location. And there are beautiful experiments that Greg and his colleagues have done where they suddenly introduce an auditory visual mismatch and it freaks people out because you can actually make it seem from a perception standpoint as if the sound arrived from the corner of the room and hit you physically and people will recoil. And so sounds aren't getting thrown across the room. They're still coming from a defined location, an array of speakers, but this is the way the brain creates these internal representations. And again, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but I'm sure the listeners appreciate this, but everything in the brain is an abstraction, right? I mean, the sensory apparatus, there are the eyes and ears and nose and skin and taste and all that are taking information and with interoception, taking information from sensors inside the body, the enteric nervous system for the gut. I've got sensory neurons that innervate my liver, um, et cetera, taking all that. And the brain is abstracting that in the same way that if I took a picture of your face and I handed it to you and I'd say, that's you, you'd say, yeah, that's me. But if I were an abstract artist, I'd be doing a little bit more of what the brain does, where if I took a pen, pad and paper, maybe I could do this because I'm a terrible artist and I could just mix it up. And I, let's say I would make your eyes like water bottles, but I'd flip them upside down and I'd start assigning fruits and objects to the different features of your face. And I show it to you, I say, Lex, that's you say, well, that's not me. And I'd say, no, but that's my abstraction of you. But that's what the brain does. The space time relationship of the neurons that fire that encode your face has have no resemblance to your face. Right. And I think people don't really, I don't know if people have fully internalized that, but the day that I, and I'm not sure I fully internalized that because it's weird to think about, but all neurons can do is fire in space and in time, different neurons in different sequences, perhaps with different intensities. It's not clear. The action potential is all or none. Although people, neuroscientists don't like to talk about that, even though it's been published in nature a couple of times, the action potential for a given neuron doesn't always have the exact same waveform. People, it's in all the textbooks, but you can modify that waveform. Well, I mean, there's a lot of fascinating stuff with neuroscience about the fuzziness of all the, of the transfer of information from neuron to neuron. I mean, we certainly touch upon it every time we at all try to think about the difference between artificial neural networks and biological neural networks. But can we maybe linger a little bit on this, on the circuitry that you're getting at? So the brain is just a bunch of stuff firing and it forms abstractions that are fascinating and beautiful, like layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction. And I think it, just like when you're programming, you know, I'm programming in Python, it's awe inspiring to think that underneath it all, it ends up being zeros and ones. And the computer doesn't know about, you know, stupid Python or Windows or Linux. It only knows about the zeros and ones. In the same way with the brain, is there something interesting to you or fundamental to you about the circuitry of the brain that allows for the magic that's in our mind to emerge? How much do we understand? I mean, maybe even focusing on the vision system, is, is there something specific about the structure of the vision system, the circuitry of it that allows for the complexity of the vision system to emerge? Or is it all just the complete chaotic mess that we don't understand? It's definitely not all a chaotic mess that we don't understand, if we're talking about vision. And that's not just because I'm a vision scientist. Let's stick to vision. Let's stick to vision. Well, because in the beauty of the visual system, the reason David Hubel and Torrance and Wiesel won the Nobel prize was because they were brilliant and forward thinking and adventurous and all that good stuff. But the reason that the visual system is such a great model for addressing these kinds of questions and other systems are hard, is we can control the stimuli. We can adjust spatial frequency, how finer the gratings are, thick gratings, thin gratings. We can adjust temporal frequency, how fast things are moving. We can use cone isolating stimuli. We can use it. There's so many things that you can do in a controlled way. Whereas if we were talking about cognitive encoding, like encoding the space of concepts or something. I, like you, if I may, am drawn to the big questions. The big questions in neuroscience. But I confess in part because of some good advice I got early in my career and in part because I'm not perhaps smart enough to go after the really high level stuff. I also like to address things that are tractable and we need to address what we can stand to make some ground on at a given time. There you can construct brilliant controlled experiments to study, to really literally answer questions about, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to have a talk about consciousness, but it's a scary talk. And I think most people don't want to hear what I have to say, which is, we can save that for later, perhaps. I mean, it's an interesting question of, we talk about psychedelics. We can talk about consciousness. We can talk about cognition. Can experiments in neuroscience be constructed to shed any kind of light on these questions? So, I mean, it's cool that vision, I mean, to me, vision is probably one of the most beautiful things about human beings. Also from the AI side, computer vision has some of the most exciting applications of neural networks is in computer vision. But it feels like that's a that's a neighbor of cognition and consciousness. It's just that we maybe haven't come up with experiments to study those yet. Yeah. The visual system is amazing. We're mostly visual animals to navigate, survive. Humans mainly rely on vision, not smell or something else, but it's a filter for cognition and it's a, it's a strong driver of cognition. Maybe just cause it came up and then we're moving to higher level concepts. Just the way the visual system works can be summarized in it in a few relatively succinct statements. Unlike most of what I've said, which has not been succinct at all. Let's go there. You know, the retina, yeah. So the retina is this three layers of neuron structure at the back of your eye. It's about as thick as a credit card. It is a piece of your brain. And sometimes people think I'm kind of wriggling by out of a reality by saying that it is, it's absolutely a piece of the brain. It's, it's a forebrain structure that in the first trimester, there's a genetic program that made sure that that neural retina, which is part of your central nervous system was squeezed out into what's called the embryonic eye cups. And that the bone formed with a little hole where the optic nerve is going to connect it to the rest of the brain. And those, that window into the world is the only window into the world for a, for a mammal, which has a thick skull. Birds have a thin skull. So their pineal gland sits and lizards too, and snakes actually have a hole so that light can make it down into the pineal directly. And in train melatonin rhythms for time of day and time of year, humans have to do all that through the eyes. So three layers of neurons that are a piece of your brain, their central nervous system, and the optic nerve connects to the rest of the brain, the neurons in the eye, somewhat just care about luminance, just how bright or dim it is. And they inform the brain about time of day. And then the central circadian clock informs every cell in your body about time of day and make sure that all sorts of good stuff happens. If you're getting light in your eyes at the right times and all sorts of bad things happen. If you are getting light randomly throughout the 24 hour cycle, we could talk about all that, but this is a good incentive for keeping a relatively normal schedule, consistent schedule, light exposure, consistent schedule, try and keep a consistent schedule. When you're young, it's easy to go off schedule and recover. As you get older, it gets harder, but you see everything from outcomes in cancer patients to diabetes improves when people are getting light at a particular time of day and getting darkness at a particular phase of the 24 hour cycle. We were designed to get light and dark at different times of the circadian cycle. All that information is coming in through specialized type of neuron in the retina called the melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cell discovered by David Berson at Brown University. That's not spatial information. It's subconscious. You don't think, Oh, it's daytime. Even if you're looking at the sun, it doesn't matter. It's a photon counter. It's literally counting photons. And it's saying, Oh, even though it's a cloudy day, lots of photons coming in at winter in Boston, it must be winter. And your system is a little depressed. It's spring. You feel alert. That's not a coincidence. That's these melanopsin cells signaling the circadian clock. There are a bunch of other neurons in the eye that signal to the brain and they mainly signal the presence of things that are lighter than background or darker than background. So a black objects would be darker than background, a light object lighter than background. And that all come, it's mainly it's looking at pixels. Mainly it's they look at circles and those neurons have receptive fields, which not everyone will understand, but those neurons respond best to little circles of dark light or little circles of bright light, little circles of red light versus little circles of green light or blue light. And so it sounds very basic. It's like red, green, blue and circles brighter or dimmer than what's next to it. But that's basically the only information that sent down the optic nerve. And when we say information, we can be very precise. I don't mean little bits of red traveling down the optic nerve. I mean, spikes neural action potentials in space and time, which for you is like makes total sense. But I think for a lot of people, it's actually beautiful to think about all that information in the outside world is converted into a language that's very simple. It's just like a few syllables, if you will. And those syllables are being shouted down the optic nerve, converted into a totally different language, like Morse code goes into the brain. And then the thalamus essentially responds in the same way that the retina does, except the thalamus is also waiting things. It's saying, you know what, that thing was moving faster than everything else, or it's brighter than everything else. So that signal I'm going to get up, I'm going to allow up to cortex or that signal is much redder than it is green. So I'm going to let that signal go through that signal as much. It's kind of more like the red next to it. Throw that out. The information just doesn't get up into your cortex. And then in cortex, of course, is where perceptions happen. And in V1, if you will, visual area one, but also some neighboring areas, you start getting representations of things like oriented lines. So there's a neuron that responds to this angle of my hand versus vertical. This is the defining work of Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel. And it's a very systematic map of orientation, line orientation, direction of movement, and so forth. And that's pretty much, and color, and that's how the visual system is organized all the way up to the cortex. So it's hierarchical. I want to be clear. It's hierarchical because you don't build up that line by suddenly having a neuron that responds to lines in some random way. It responds to lines by taking all the dots that are aligned in a vertical stack, and they all converge on one neuron. And then that neuron responds to vertical lines. So it's not random. There's no abstraction at that point, in fact. In fact, if I showed you a black line, I could be sure that if I were imaging V1, that I would see a representation of that black line as a vertical line somewhere in your cortex. So at that point, it's absolutely concrete. It's not abstract. But then things get really mysterious. Some of that information travels further up into the cortex and goes from one visual area to the next, to the next, to the next, so that by time you get into an area that Nancy Kanwisher at MIT has studied much of her career, the fusiform face area, you start finding single neurons that respond only to your father's face or to Joe Rogan's face, regardless of the orientation of his face. I'm sure if you saw Joe, because you know him well, from across the room and you just saw his profile, you'd be like, oh, that's Joe. Walk over and say hello. The orientation of his face isn't there. You wouldn't even see his eyes necessarily, but he's represented in some abstract way by a neuron that actually would be called the Joe Rogan neuron. He might have limits. I might not recognize him if he was upside down or something like that. It'd be fascinating to see what the limits of that Joe Rogan concept is. So Nancy's lab has done that because early on she was challenged by people that said there aren't face neurons. There are neurons that they only respond to space and time, shapes and things like that, moving in particular directions and orientations. It turns out Nancy was right. They use these stimuli called greeble stimuli, which any computer programmer would appreciate, which kind of morphs a face into something gradually that eventually just looks like this alien thing they call the greeble. The neurons don't respond to greebles. In most cases, they only respond to faces and familiar faces. Anyway, I'm summarizing a lot of literature and forgive me, Nancy, and for those of the greeble people, if they're ours, they're like, don't come after me with pitchforks. Actually, you know what? Come after me with pitchforks. I think you know what I'm trying to do here. So the point is that in the visual system, it's very concrete up until about visual area four, which has color pinwheels and seems to respond to pinwheels of colors. And so the stimuli become more and more elaborate, but at some point you depart that concrete representation and you start getting abstract representations that can't be explained by simple point to point wiring. And to take a leap out of the visual system to the higher level concepts, what we talked about in the visual system maps to the auditory system where you're encoding what? Frequency of tone sweeps. So this is going to sound weird to do, but you know, like a Doppler, like hearing something, a car passing by, for instance, but at some point you get into motifs of music that can't be mapped to just a, what they call a tonotopic map of frequency. You start abstracting. And if you start thinking about concepts of creativity and love and memory, like what is the map of memory space? Well, your memories are very different than mine, but presumably there's enough structure at the early stages of memory processing or at the early stages of emotional processing or at the earlier stages of creative processing that you have the building blocks, your zeros and ones, if you will, but you depart from that eventually. Now the exception to this, and I want to be really clear because I was just mainly talking about neocortex, the six layered structure on the outside of the brain that explains a lot of human abilities, other animals have them too, is that subcortical structures are a lot more like machines. It's more plug and chug. And what I'm talking about is the machinery that controls heart rate and breathing and receptive fields, neurons that respond to things like temperature on the top of my left hand. I came into neuroscience from more of a perspective initially of psychology, but one of the reasons I forced upon myself to learn some electrophysiology, not a ton, but enough, and some molecular biology and about circuitry is that one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in life, I'm convinced, is to lower an electrode into the cortex and to show a person or an animal, we do this ethically of course, stimulus like an oriented line or a face. And you can convert the recordings coming off of that electrode into an audio signal or an audio monitor, and you can hear what they call hash. It's not the hash you smoke, it's the hash you hear. And it sounds like, it just sounds like noise. And in the cortex, eventually you find a stimulus that gets the neuron to spike and fire action potentials that are converted into an auditory stimulus that are very concrete, crack, crack, crack, sounds like a bat cracking, like home runs or outfield balls. When you drop electrodes deeper into the thalamus or into the hypothalamus or into the brainstem areas that control breathing, it's like a machine. You never hear hash. You drop the electrode down. This could be like a grungy old Tugston electrode, not high fidelity electrode, as long as it's got a little bit of insulation on it. You plug it into an audio monitor, it's picking up electricity. And if it's a visual neuron and it's in the thalamus or the retina and you walk in front of that animal or person, that neuron goes, and then you walk away and it stops. And you put your hand in front of the eye again and it goes, and you could do that for two days. And that neuron will just, every time there's a stimulus, it fires. So whereas before, it's a question of how much information is getting up to cortex. And then these abstractions happening where you're creating these ideas, when you go subcortical, everything is. There's no abstraction. It's two plus two equals four. There's no abstractions. And this is why I know we have some common friends at Neuralink and I love the demonstration they did recently. I'm a huge fan of what they're doing and where they're headed. And no, I don't get paid to say that. And I have no business relationship to them. I'm just a huge fan of the people in the mission. But my question was to some of them, when are you going to go subcortical? Because if you want to control an animal, you don't do it in the cortex. The cortex is like the abstract painting I made of your face. Removing one piece or changing something may or may not matter for the abstraction. But when you are in the subcortical areas of the brain, a stimulating electrode can evoke an entire behavior or an entire state. And so the brain, if we're going to have a discussion about the brain and how the brain works, we need to really be clear which brain, because everyone loves neocortex. It's like, oh, canonical circuits in cortex. We're going to get the cortical connectome. And sure, necessary, but not sufficient. Not to be able to plug in patterns of electrical stimulation and get behavior. Eventually we'll get there. But if you're talking subcortical circuits, that's where the action is. That's where you could potentially cure Parkinson's by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus, because we know that it gates motor activation patterns in very predictable ways. So I think for those that are interested in neuroscience, it pays to pay attention to like, is this a circuit that abstracts the sensory information? Or is it just one that builds up hierarchical models in a very predictable way? And there's a huge chasm in neuroscience right now, because there's no conceptual leadership. No one knows which way to go. And this is why I think Neuralink has captured an amazing opportunity, which was, okay, well, while all you academic research labs are figuring all this stuff out, we're going to pick a very specific goal and make the goal, the end point. And some academic laboratories do that, but I think that's a beautiful way to attack this whole thing about the brain, because it's very concrete. Let's restore motion to the Parkinsonian patient. Academic labs want to do that too, of course. Let's restore speech to the stroke patient. But there's nothing abstract about that. That's about figuring out the solution to a particular problem. So anyway, those are my... And I admit I've mixed in a lot of opinion there, but having spent some time, like 25 years digging around in the brain and listening to neurons firing and looking at them anatomically, I think given it's 2020, we need to ask the right... The way to get better answers is ask better questions. And the really high level stuff is fun. It makes for good conversation and it has brought enormous interest. But I think the questions about consciousness and dreaming and stuff, they're fascinating, but I don't know that we're there yet. So you're saying there might be a chasm in the two views of the power of the brain arising from the circuitry that forms abstractions or the power of the brain arising from the majority of the circuitry that's just doing very brute force, dumb things that don't have any fancy kind of stuff going on. That's really interesting to think about. And which one to go after first. And here I'm poaching badly from someone I've never met, but whose work I follow, which is, and it was actually on your podcast. I think Elon Musk said, basically the brain is a, I want to say a monkey brain with a supercomputer on top. And I thought that's actually probably the best description of the brain I've ever heard because it captures a lot of important features like limbic friction. But we think of like, oh, when we're making plans, we're using the prefrontal cortex and we're executive function and all this kind of stuff. But think about the drug addict who's driven to go pursue heroin or cocaine. They make plans. So clearly they use their frontal cortex. It's just that it's been hijacked by the limbic system and all the monkey brain as he referred to. It's really not fair to monkeys though, Elon, because actually monkeys can make plans. They just don't make plans as sophisticated as us. I've spent a lot of time with monkeys, but I've also spent a lot of time with humans. Anyway, you're saying like, there's a lot of value to focusing on the monkey brain or whatever the heck you call it. I do because let's say I had an ability to place a chip anywhere I wanted in the brain today and activate it or inhibit that area. I'm not sure I would put that chip in neocortex, except maybe to just kind of have some fun and see what happens. The reason is it's an abstraction machine. And especially if I wanted to make a mass production tool, a tool in mass production that I could give to a lot of people, because it's quite possible that your abstractions are different enough than mine that I wouldn't know what patterns of firing to induce. But if I want, let's say I want to increase my level of focus and creativity. Well, then I would love to be able to, for instance, control my level of limbic friction. I would love to be able to wake up and go, Oh, you know what? I have an eight o clock appointment. I wake up slowly. So between seven, eight, but I want to do a lot of linear thinking. So you know what? I'm going to just, I'm going to turn down the limbic friction and or ramp up prefrontal cortexes activation. So there's a lot of stuff that can happen in the thalamus with sensory gating. For instance, you could shut down that shell around the thalamus and allow more creative thinking by allowing more lateral connections. These would be some of the, those would be the experiments I'd want to do. So they're in the subcortical quote unquote monkey brain, but you could then look at what sorts of abstract thoughts and behaviors would arise from that rather than, and here I'm not pointing my finger at neural link at all, but there's this obsession with neocortex, but I, I'm going to, well, I might lose a few friends, but I'll hopefully gain a few. And also one of the reasons people spend so much time in neocortex. Yes. I have a fact and an opinion. One fact is that you can image there and you can record there right now, the two photon and one photon microscopy methods that allow you to image deep into the brain still don't allow you to image down really deep unless you're jamming prisms in there and endoscopes. And then the endoscopes are very narrow. So you're getting very, you know, it's like looking at the bottom of the ocean through a, through a spotlight. And so you much easier look at the waves up on top. Right. So let's face it, folks. A lot of the reasons why there's so many recordings in layer two, three of cortex with all this advanced microscopy is because it's very hard to image deeper. Now the microscopes are getting better and thanks to the amazing work, mainly of engineers and chemists and physicists. Let's face it. They're the ones who brought this revolution to neuroscience in the last 10 years or so. You can image deeper, but we don't really, that's why you see so many reports on layer two, three. The other thing, which is purely opinion, and I'm not going after anybody here, but is that as long as there's no clear right answer, it becomes a little easier to do creative work in a structure where no one really knows how it works. So it's fun to probe around because anything you see is novel. If you're going to work in the thalamus or the pulvinar or the hypothalamus or these structures that have been known about since the sixties and seventies, and really since the, you know, centuries ago, you are dealing with existing, you have to combat existing models. And whereas in cortex, no one knows how the thing works, the neocortex, six layer cortex. And so there's a lot more room for discovery. There's a lot more room for discovery and I'm not calling anyone out. I love cortex. We've published some papers on cortex. It's super interesting. But I think with the tools that are available nowadays and where people are trying ahead of, of not just reading from the brain, monitoring activity, but writing to the brain, I think we really have to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about what are we trying to write? What script are we trying to write? Because there are many brain structures for which we already know what scripts they write. And I think there's tremendous value there. I don't think it's boring. The fact that they act like machines makes them predictable. Those are your zeros and ones. Let's start there. But let the, what they're, what's sort of happening in this field of writing to the brain is there's this idea. And again, I want to be clear. I'm not pointing at Neuralink. I'm mainly pointing at the neocortical jockeys out there that you go and you observe patterns. And then you think replaying those patterns is going to give rise to something interesting. Yeah. I should call out one experiment or two experiments, which were done by Susumu Tonagawa, Nobel prize winner from MIT, done important work in memory and immunology, of course, is where he got his Nobel as well as Mark Mayford's lab at UC San Diego. They did an experiment where they monitored a bunch of neurons while an animal learned something. Then they captured those neurons through some molecular tricks so they could replay the neurons. So now there's like perfect case scenario. It's like, okay, you monitor the neurons in your brain. Then I say, okay, neurons one through 100 were played in the particular sequence. So, you know, the space time, you know, the keys on the piano that were played that gave rise to the song, which was the behavior. And then you go back and you reactivate those neurons, except you reactivate them all at once, like slamming on all the keys once on the piano and you get the exact same behavior. So the space time code may be meaningless for some structures. Now that's freaky. That's a scary thing because what that means is that all the space time firing in cortex, the space part may matter more than the time part. So, you know, rate codes and space time codes, we don't know. And, you know, I'd rather have, I'd rather deliver more answers in this discussion questions, but I think it's an important consideration. You're saying some of the magic is in the early stages of what the closer to the raw information. I believe so. You know, the stimulus, you know, the neuron that encodes that stimulus. So, you know, the transformation. When I say this for those who don't think about sensory transformations, it's like, I can show you a red circle. And then I look at how many times the neuron fires in response to that red circle. And then I could show the red circle a bunch of times, green circle, see if it changes. And then essentially the number of times that is the transformation. You've converted red circle into like three action potentials, you know, beep, beep, beep, or whatever you want to call it, you know, for those that think in sound space. So that's what you've created, you know, the transformation and you march up the, it's called the neuro axis as you go from the periphery up into the cortex. And we know that, and I know Lisa Feldman Barrett, or is it Barrett Feldman? Barrett Feldman, excuse me, Lisa, that talked a lot about this, that, you know, birds can do sophisticated things and whatnot as well, but humans, there's a strong, what we call cephalization. A lot of the processing has moved up into the cortex and out of these subcortical areas, but it happens nonetheless. And so as long as you know the transformations, you are in a perfect place to build machines or add machines to the brain that exactly mimic what the brain wants to do, which is take events in the environment and turn them into internal firing of neurons. So the mastery of the brain can happen at their early level. You know, another perspective of it is you saying this means that humans aren't that special. If we look at the evolutionary time scale, the leap to intelligence is not that special. So like the extra layers of abstraction isn't where most of the magic happens of intelligence, which gives me hope that maybe, if that's true, that means the evolution of intelligence is not that rare of an event. I certainly hope not. Oh, so you hope there's... I hope there are other forms of intelligence. I mean, I think what humans are really good at, and here I want to be clear that this is not a formal model, but what humans are really good at is taking that plasma barbell that we were talking about earlier and not just using it for analysis of space, like the intermediate environment, but also using historical information. Like I can read a book today about the history of medicine. I happen to be doing that lately for some stuff I'm researching and I can take that information and if I want, I can inject it into my plans for the future. Other animals don't seem to do that over the same time scales that we do. Now, it may be that the chipmunks are all hiding little notebooks everywhere in the form of little dirt castles or something that we don't understand. I mean, the waggle dance of the bee is in the most famous example. Bees come back to the hive, they orient relative to the honeycomb and they waggle. There's a guy down in Australia named Serena Vasson who studied this. It's really interesting. No one really understands it except he understands it best. The bee waggles in a couple of ways relative to the orientation of the honeycomb and then all the other bees see that it's visual and they go out and they know the exact coordinate system to get to the source of whatever it was, the food and bring it back. He's done it where they isolate the bees, he's changed the visual flight environment, all this stuff. They are communicating and they're communicating something about something they saw recently, but it doesn't extend over very long periods of time. The same way that you and I can both read a book or you can recommend something to me and then we could converge on a set of ideas later. And in fairness, because she was the one that said it and I didn't and I hadn't even thought of it, when you talk to Lisa on your podcast, she brought up something beautiful, which is that it never really occurred to me and I was sort of embarrassed that it hadn't, but it's really beautiful and brilliant, which is that we don't just encode senses in the form of like color and light and sound waves and taste, but ideas become a form of sensory mapping. And that's where the really, really cool and exciting stuff is, but we just don't understand what the receptive fields are for ideas. What's an idea receptive field? And how they're communicated between humans because we seem to be able to encode those ideas in some kind of way. You'd be able to encode those ideas in some kind of way. Yes, it's taking all the raw information and the internal physical states, that sensory information put into this concept blob that we cut in the store and then we're able to communicate that. Yeah, your abstractions are different than mine. I actually think the comment section on social media is a beautiful example of where the abstractions are different for different people. So much of the misunderstanding of the world is because of these idea receptive fields, they're not the same. Whereas I can look at a photoreceptor neuron or olfactory neuron or a V1 neuron, and I am certain, I would bet my life that yours look and respond exactly the same way that Lisa's do and mine do. But once you get beyond there, it gets tricky. And so when you say something or I say something and somebody gets upset about it or even happy about it, their concept of that might be quite a bit different. They don't really know what you mean. They only know what it means to them. Yeah. So from a neural link perspective, it makes sense to optimize the control and the augmentation of the more primitive circuitry. So like the stuff that is closer to the raw sensory information. Go deeper. If they, I think, go deeper into the brain. And to be fair, so Matt McDougall, who's a neurosurgeon at Neuralink and also a clinical nurse, a great guy, brilliant. They have amazing people. I have to give it to them. They've been very cryptic in recent years. Their website was just like nothing there. They really know how to do things with style. And they've upset a lot of people, but that's good too. But Matt is there. I know Matt, he actually came up through my lab at Stanford, although he was a neurosurgery resume. He spent time in our lab. He actually came out on the shark dive and did great white shark diving with my lab to collect the VR that we use in our fear stuff. I've talked to Matt and I think he and other folks there are hungry for the deeper brain structures. The problem is that damn vasculature, all that blood supply. It's not trivial to get through and down into the brain without damaging the vasculature in the neocortex, which is on the outer crust. But once you start getting into the thalamus and closer to some of the main arterial sources, you really risk getting massive bleeds. And so it's an issue that can be worked out. It just is hard. Maybe it'd be nice to educate. I'm sure my ignorance. So the smart stuff is on the surface. So I didn't realize this. I didn't quite realize because you keep saying deep. Yeah. So like the early stages are deep. Yeah. So in actual, physically in the brain. Yeah. So the way that, of course you got your deep brain structures, they're involved in breathing and heart rate and kind of lizard brain stuff. And then on top of that, this is the model of the brain that no one really subscribes to anymore, but anatomically it works. And then on top in mammals. And then on top of that, you have the limbic structures, which gate sensory information and decide whether or not you're going to listen to something more than you're going to look at it, or you're going to split your attention to both kind of sensory allocation stuff. And then the neocortex is on the outside. And that is where you get a lot of this abstraction stuff. And now not all cortical areas are doing abstraction. Some like visual area one, auditory area one, they're just doing concrete representations. But as you get into the higher order stuff, that when you start hearing names like inferoparietal cortex, and when you start hearing multiple names in the same, then you're talking about higher order areas. But actually there's an important experiment that drives a lot of what people want to do with brain machine interface. And that's the work of Bill Newsome, who is at Stanford and Tony Movshin, who runs the Center for Neuroscience at NYU. This is a wild experiment. And I think it might freak a few people out if they really think about it too deeply. But anyway, here it goes. There's an area called MT in the cortex. And if I showed you a bunch of dots all moving up, and this is what Tony and Bill and some of the other people in that lab did way back when, is they show a bunch of dots moving up. Somewhere in MT, there's some neurons that respond. They fire when the neurons move up. And then what they did is they started varying the coherence of that motion. So they made it so only 50% of the dots moved up and the rest move randomly. And that neuron fires a little less. And eventually it's random and that neuron stops firing because it's just kind of dots moving everywhere. It's awesome. And there's a systematic map so that other neurons are responding and things moving down and other things responding left and other things moving right. Okay. So there's a map of direction space. Okay, well, that's great. You could lesion MT, animals lose the ability to do these kind of coherence discrimination or direction discrimination. But the amazing experiment, the one that just is kind of eerie is that they lowered a stimulating electrode into MT, found a neuron that responds to when dots go up, but then they silence that neuron. And sure enough, the animal doesn't recognize the neurons are going up and then they move the dots down. They stimulate the neuron that responds to things moving up and the animal responds because it can't speak. It responds by doing a lever press, which says the dots are moving up. So in other words, the sensory, the dots are moving down in reality on the computer screen. They're stimulating the neuron that responds to dots moving up. And the perception of the animal is that dots are moving up, which tells you that your perception of external reality absolutely has to be a neuronal abstraction. It is not tacked to the movement of the dots in any absolute way. Your perception of the outside world depends entirely on the activation patterns of neurons in the brain. And you can hear that and say, well, duh, because if I stimulate the stretch reflex and you kick or something or whatever, the knee reflex and you kick, of course, there's a neuron that triggers that, but it didn't have to be that way. Because A, the animal had prior experience, B, you're way up in the higher order cortical areas. What this means is that, and I generally try and avoid conversations about this kind of thing, but what this means is that we are constructing our reality with this space time firing the zeros and ones. And it doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual reality. And the animal or person can be absolutely convinced that that's what's happening. Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman? So he makes an evolutionary argument that's not important of that. We, our brains are completely detached from reality in the sense that he makes a radical case that we have no idea what physical reality is. And in fact, it's drastically different than what we think it is. So he goes, that's scary. So he doesn't say like there's just, cause you're kind of implying there's a gap. There might be a gap with constructing an illusion and then maybe using communication to maybe create a consistency that's sufficient for human collaboration or whatever, or mammal, you know, just maybe even just life forms constructing a consistent reality that's maybe detached. I mean, that's really cool that neurons are constructing that, like that you can prove that this is when neuroscience at its best vision science. But he says that like our brain is actually just lost its shit on the, on the, on the path of evolution to where we're normal. We're just playing games with each other in constructing realities that allow our survival. But it's, it's, it's completely detached from physical reality. We're missing a lot. We're missing like most of it, if not all of it. Well, this was, it's, it's fascinating because I just saw the Oliver Sacks documentary. There's a new documentary out about his life. And there's this one part where he's like, I've spent part of my life trying to imagine what it would like to be, be, to be a bat or something, to see the world through the life, the sensory apparatus of a bat. And he did this with his, these patients that were locked into these horrible syndromes that to pull out some of the, the beauty of their experience as well, not just communicate the suffering, although the suffering too. And as I was listening to him talk about this, I started to realize it's like, well, what, you know, like they're these mantis shrimps that can see 60 shades of pink or something. And they, they see this stuff all the time and animals, they can see UV light. Every time I learn about an animal that can sense other things in the environment that I can't like heat sensing, well, not, I don't crave that experience the same way Sacks talked about craving that experience, but it does throw another penny in the jar for what you're saying, which is that it could be that most, if not all of what I perceive and believe is just a neural fabrication and that for better, for worse, we all agree on enough of the same neural fabrications in the same time and place that we're able to function. Not only that, but we agree with the things that are trying to eat us enough to where we don't, they don't eat us. Meaning like that it's not just us humans, you know, right? I see. Because it's interactive. It's interactive. So like, so like now I think it's a really nice thought experiment. I think because Donald really frames it in a scientific, like he makes a hard, like as hard as our discussion has been now, he makes a hard scientific case that we don't know shit about reality. I think that's a little bit hardcore, but I think it's, I think it's hardcore, but I think it's a good thought experiment that kind of cleanses the palette of the confidence we might have about, because we are operating in this abstraction space, you know, and, you know, the sensory space, it might be something very different. And it's kind of interesting to think about if you start to go into the realm of Neuralink or start to talk about just everything that you've been talking about with dream states and psychedelics and stuff like that, which part of the, which layer can we control and play around with to maybe look into a different slice of reality? I just got to do the experiment. The key is to just do the experiment in the most ethical way possible. You just, I mean, that's the beauty of experiments. This is why, you know, there's wonderful theoretical neuroscience happening now to make predictions. But that's why experimental science is so wonderful. You can go into the laboratory and poke around in there and be a brain explorer and listen to and write to neurons. And when you do that, you get answers. You don't always get the answers you want, but that's, you know, that's the beauty of it. When you were saying this thing about reality and the Donald Hoffman model, I was thinking about children, you know, like when I have an older sister, she's very sane. But when she was a kid, she had an imaginary friend and she would play with this imaginary friend. And it had, there was this whole, there was a consistency. This friend was like, it was Larry lived in a purple house. Larry was a girl. It was like all this stuff that a child, a young child wouldn't have any issue with. And then one day she announced that Larry had died. Right. And it wasn't traumatic or traumatic and that was it. And she just stopped. And I always wonder what that neuro developmental event was that kept her out of a psychiatric ward had she kept that imaginary friend. But it's also, there was something kind of sad to it. I think the way it was told to me, cause I'm the younger brother, I didn't, I wasn't around for that. But my, my dad told me that, you know, there was a kind of a sadness because it was this beautiful reality that had been constructed. And so we kind of won. I wonder as you're telling me this, whether or not, you know, as adults, we try and create as much reality for children as we can so that they can make predictions and feel safe because the ability to make predictions is a lot of what keeps our autonomic arousal in check. I mean, we go to sleep every night and we give up total control and that should frighten us deeply. But you know, unfortunately, autonomic arousal, the yanks us down under and we don't negotiate too much. So you sleep sooner or later. I don't know. I was a little worried. We get into discussions about the nature of reality because I'm I it's interesting in the laboratory. I'm a very much like, what's the experiment? What would the, you know, what's the analysis going to look like? What mutant mouse are we going to use? What, what, what experience are we going to put someone through? But I think it's wonderful that in 2020, we can finally have discussions about this stuff and look, kind of peek around the corner and say, well, Neuralink and people, others who are doing similar things are going to figure it out. They're going to, the answers will show up and we just have to be open to interpretation. Do you think there could be an experiment centered around consciousness? I mean, you're plugged into the neuroscience community. I think for the longest time, the quote unquote C word was totally not, was almost anti scientific, but now more and more people are talking about consciousness. Elon is talking about consciousness. AI folks are talking about consciousness. It's, it's still nobody knows anything, but it feels like a legitimate domain of inquiry. That's hungry for a real experiment. So I have fortunately three short answers to this. The first one is, I'm not, I'm not particularly succinct. I agree that the joke I always tell is there are two things you never want to say to a scientist. One is what do you do? And the second one is take as much time as you need. And you definitely don't want to say them in the same sentence. I have three short answers to it. So there's a, there's a cynical answer kind of, and it's not one I enjoy giving, which is that if you look into the seventies and eight back at the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the early two thousands, there were some very dynamic, very impressive speakers who are very smart in the field of neuroscience and related fields who thought hard about the consciousness problem and fell in love with the problem, but overlook the fact that the technology wasn't there. So I admire them for falling in love with the problem, but they gleaned tremendous taxpayer resources essentially for nothing. And these people know who they are. Some of them are alive. Some of them aren't. I'm not referring to Francis Crick, who was brilliant by the way, and thought the claustrum was involved in consciousness, which I think is a great idea. It's this obscure structure that no one's really studied. People are now starting to study it. So I think Francis was brilliant and wonderful, but there it, you know, there were books written about it. It makes for great television stuff and thought around the table or after a couple of glasses of wine or whatever. It's an important problem nonetheless. And so I think, I do think the consciousness, the issue is it's not operationally defined, right? That psychologists are much smarter than a lot of hard scientists in that for the following reason, they put operational definitions. They know that psychology, if we're talking about motivation, for instance, they know they need to put operational definitions on that so that two laboratories can know they're studying the same thing. The problem with consciousness is no one can agree on what that is. And this was a problem for attention when I was coming up. So in the early two thousands, people would argue, what is attention? Is it spatial attention, auditory attention? Is it, and finally people were like, you know what, we agree. Have they agreed on that one? Sort of. I remember hearing people scream about attention. Right. They couldn't even agree on attention. So I was coming up as a young graduate student, I'm thinking like, I'm definitely not going to work on attention and I'm definitely not going to work on consciousness. And I wanted something that I could solve or figure out. I want to be able to see the circuit or the neurons. I want to be able to hear it on the audio. I want to record from it. And then I want to do gain a function and loss a function, take it away, see something change, put it back, see something change in a systematic way. And that takes you down into the depths of some stuff that's pretty plug and chug, you know, but you know, I'll borrow from something in the military because I'm fortunate to do some work with units from special operations and they have beautiful language around things because their world is not abstract. And they talk about three meter targets, 10 meter targets and 100 meter targets. And it's not an issue of picking the 100 meter target because it's more beautiful or because it's more interesting. If you don't take down the three meter targets and the 10 meter targets first, you're dead. So that's, I think scientists could pay to, you know, adopt a more kind of military thinking in that, in that sense. The other thing that is really important is that just because somebody conceived of something and can talk about it beautifully and can glean a lot of resources for it, doesn't mean that it's led anywhere. So this isn't just true of the consciousness issue. And I don't want to sound cynical, but I could pull up some names of molecules that occupied hundreds of articles in the very premier journals that then were later discovered to be totally moot for that process. And biotech companies folded everyone in the lab pivots and starts doing something different with that molecule. And nobody talks about it because as long as you're in the game, we have this thing called anonymous peer review. You can't afford to piss off anybody too much, unless you have some other funding stream. And I have avoided battles most of my career, but I pay attention to all of it. And I've watched this and I don't think it's ego driven. I think it's that people fall in love with an idea. I don't think there's any, there's not enough money in science for people to sit back there rubbing their hands together, you know, the beauty of what Neuralink and Elon and team, cause obviously he's very impressive, but the team as a whole is really what gives me great confidence in their mission is that he's already got enough money. So it can't be about that. He doesn't seem to need it at a level of, I don't know him, but it doesn't, he doesn't seem to need it at a kind of an ego level or something. I think it's driven by genuine curiosity and the team that he's assembled include people that are very kind of abstract neuro neocortex, space time coding people. There are people like Matt, who is a neurosurgeon. You can't, I mean, you know, you can't BS neurosurgery. Failures in neurosurgery are not tolerated. So you have to be very good to exceptional to even get through the gate. And he's exceptional. And then they've got people like Dan Adams, who was at UCSF for a long time as a good friend and a known him for years, who is very concrete studied the vasculature in the eye and how it maps to the vasculature and cortex. When you get a team like that together, you're going to have dissenters. You're going to have people that are high level thinkers, people that are coders. When you get a team like that, it no longer looks like an academic laboratory or even a field in science. And so I think they're going to solve some really hard problems. And again, I'm not here. They don't, you know, I have nothing at stake with them, but I think that's the solution. You need a bunch of people who don't need first author papers, who don't need to complete their PhD, who aren't relying on outside funding, who have a clear mission. And you have a bunch of people who are basically will adapt to solve the problem. I like the analogy of the three meter target and the a hundred meter target. So the folks at Neuralink are basically many of them are some of the best people in the world at the three meter target. Like you mentioned Matt and neurosurgery, like they're solving real problems. There's no BS, philosophical smokes and weed and look back and look at the stars. But so both on Elon and because I think like this, I think it's really important to think about the hundred meter and the hundred meter is not even a hundred meter, but like like the stuff behind the hill that's too far away, which is where I put consciousness. Maybe I tend to believe that consciousness can be engineered. I mean, part of the reason, part of the business I want to build leverages that idea that consciousness is a lot simpler than we've been talking about. Well, if someone can simplify the problem, right, that will be wonderful. I mean, the reason we can talk about something as abstract as face representations, infusive form face area is because Nancy Kanwisher had the brilliance to tie it to the kind of lower level statistics of visual scenes. It wasn't because she was like, oh, I bet it's there. That wouldn't have been interesting. So people like her understand how to bridge that gap and they put a tractable definition. So I, so I just, I, that's what I'm begging for in science is a tractable definition. This is what, but I want people to sit in the, I want people who are really uncomfortable with woo woo, like consciousness, like high level stuff to sit in that topic and sit uncomfortably because it forces them to then try to ground and simplify it into something that's concrete because too many people are just uncomfortable to sit in the consciousness room because there's no definitions. It's like attention or, or intelligence in the artificial intelligence community. But the reality is it's easy to avoid that room altogether, which is what, I mean, there's analogies to everything you've said with the artificial intelligence community with Minsky and even Alan Turing that talked about intelligence a lot. And then they drew a lot of funding and then it crashed because they really didn't do anything with it. And it was a lot of force of personality and so on. But that doesn't mean the topic of the Turing test and intelligence isn't something we should sit on and think like, think like, what is, well, first of all, Turing actually attempted this with the Turing test. He tried to make concrete this very question of intelligence. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't linger on it. And we shouldn't forget that ultimately that is what our efforts are all about in the artificial intelligence community. And in the people, whether it's neuroscience or whatever bigger umbrella you want to use for understanding the mind, the goal is not just about understanding layer two or three of the vision. It's, it's to understand consciousness and intelligence and maybe create it or just all the possible biggest questions of our universe. That's, that's ultimately the dream. Absolutely. And I think what I really appreciate about what you're saying is that everybody, whether or not they're working on a kind of a low level synapse, that's like a reflex and the musculature or something very high level abstract can benefit from looking at those who prefer three, you know, everyone's going after a three meter, 10 meter and a hundred meter targets in some sense, but to be able to tolerate the discomfort of being in a conversation where there are real answers, where the zeros and ones are, are known zeros and ones are those, the equivalent of that in the nervous system. And also, as you said, for the people that are very much like, Oh, I can only trust what I can see and touch. Those people need to put themselves into the discomfort of the high level conversation because what's missing is conversation and conceptualization of things at multiple levels. I think one of the, this is, um, I don't gripe about my life's been fortunate. We've been funded from the start and we've been happy, um, in that, in that regard and lucky, and we're grateful for that. But I think one of the challenges of research being so expensive is that there isn't a lot of time, especially nowadays for people to just convene around a topic because there's so much emphasis on productivity. Um, and so there, there are actually, believe it or not, there aren't that many concepts, formal concepts in neuroscience right now. The last 10 years has been this huge influx of tools. And so people in neural circuits and probing around and connect homes, it's been wonderful, but w you know, 10, 20 years ago, when the consciousness stuff was more prominent, the C word, as you said, um, what was good about that time is that people would go to meetings and actually discuss ideas and models. Now it's sort of like, it's sort of like demonstration day at the school science fair where everyone's got their thing and some stuff is cooler than others. But, um, I think we're going to see a shift. I'm grateful that we have so many computer scientists and theoreticians and, um, or theorists, I think they call themselves. Um, and somebody tell me what the difference is someday. Um, and you know, psychology and even dare I say philosophy, you know, these things are starting to converge. We, you know, neuroscience that the name neuroscience, there wasn't even such a thing when I started graduate school or as a postdoc, it was neurophysiology or you were a neuro anatomist or what now every it's sort of everybody's invited and that's beautiful. That means that something's useful is going to come of all this. And there's also tremendous work of course happening on it for the treatment of disease and we shouldn't overlook that. That's where, you know, endings, you know, eliminating, reducing suffering is also a huge initiative in neuroscience. So there's a lot of beauty in the field, but the consciousness thing continues to be a, uh, it's like an exotic bird. It's like, no one really quite knows how to handle it and it dies very easily. Well, yeah, I think also from the AI perspective, I, uh, so I view the brain as less sacred. Uh, I think from a neuroscience perspective, you're a little bit more sensitive to BS, like BS narratives about the brain or whatever. I'm a little bit more, uh, comfortable with just poetic BS about the brain as long as it helps engineer intelligence systems. Well, you know what I mean? Well, and I have to, you know, I confess, um, ignorance when it comes to, you know, most things about coding and I'm, I'm have some quantitative ability, but I don't have strong quantitative leanings. And so I know my limitations too. And so I, I think the next generation coming up, you know, a lot of the students at Stanford are really interested in quantitative models and theory and AI. And I remember when I was coming up, um, a lot of the people who were doing work ahead of me, I kind of rolled my eyes at some of the stuff they were doing, um, including some of their personalities, although I have many great, um, senior colleagues, uh, everywhere in the world. So it's the way of the world. So nobody knows what it's like to be a, you know, a young graduate student in 2020, except the young graduate students. So I, I know what I, I'm, I know there are a lot of things I don't know. And, um, in addition to wanting to do a lot of public education, increased scientific literacy and neuroscientific thinking, et cetera, a big goal of mine is to try and at least pave the way so that these really brilliant and forward thinking, um, younger scientists can make the biggest possible dent and make what will eventually be all us old guys and gals look stupid. I mean, that's, that's what we were all trying to do. That's what we were trying to do. So yeah. Yeah. So from the highest possible topic of consciousness to the, to the lowest level, uh, topic of David Goggins, uh, let's go. I don't know if it's low, low level. He's high performance. High performance, but like low, like there's no, I don't think David has any time for philosophy. Let's just put it this way. Uh, well, it's, I mean, I think we can tack it to what we were just saying in a, in a, in a meaningful way, which is whatever goes on in that abstraction part of the brain, he's figured, you know, he's figured out how to dig down in whatever the limbic friction. Yeah. He's figured out how to grab ahold of that, scruff it and send it in the direction that he's decided it needs to go. And what's wild is that he's, what we're talking about is him doing that to himself, right? He's, it's like he's scruffing himself and directing himself in a particular direction and sending himself down that trajectory. And he, what's beautiful is that he acknowledges that that process is not pretty. It doesn't feel good. It's kind of horrible at every level, but he's created this rewarding element to it. And I think that's, what's so it, it's so admirable. And it's what so many people crave, which is regulation of the self at that level. And he practices, I mean, there's a ritual to it. There's a, every single day, like no exceptions. There's a practice aspect to the suffering that he goes through. It's principled suffering. Principled suffering. It is. I mean, I just, I mean, I admire all aspects of it, including him and his girlfriend slash wife. I'm not sure. She'll probably know this. I don't know. Fiance. Wonderful person. I'm not asking him. No, no. We've only communicated, I've only communicated with her by text about some stuff I was asking David, but yeah, they clearly formed a powerful team. And it's a beautiful thing to see people working in that kind of synergy. And it's inspiring to me, same as with Elon, that a guy like David Goggins can find love. That you find a thing that works, which gives me hope that like whatever, whatever flavor of crazy I am, you can always find another thing that works with that. But I, I've had the, so maybe let's trade Goggins stories. Uh, you from a neuroscience perspective, me from a, uh, self inflicted pain perspective, I somehow found myself in communication with David about some challenges that I was undergoing. One of which is we were communicating every single day, email, phone, about a particular 30 day challenge that I did. That stretched for longer of, uh, pushups and pullups. And you made a call out on social media. Yeah. Social media was dumb. Actually, I think that was the point I, I knew of you before, but that's where I started tracking some of what you were doing with these physical challenges. And I, um, well, no, I think I actually, I don't often comment on people's stuff, but I think I commented something like, uh, neuroplasticity loves a nonnegotiable rule. No, I said a nonnegotiable contract because at the point where neuroplasticity really loves a nonnegotiable contract, because, you know, and I've said this before, so forgive me, but you know, the brain is doing analysis of duration, path and outcome. And that's a lot of work for the brain. And the more that it can pass off duration, path and outcome to just reflex, the more energy and it can allocate to other things. So if you decide there's no negotiation about how many pushups, how far I'm going to run, how many days, how many pullups, et cetera, you actually have more energy for pushups, running and pullups. And when you say neuroplasticity, you mean like the brain, once the decision is made, it'll start rewiring stuff to, to make sure that this, we can actually make this happen. That's right. I mean, so much of what we do is reflexive at the level of just core circuitry, breathing, heart rate, all that, that boring stuff, digestion. But then there's a lot of reflexive stuff, like how you drink out of a mug of coffee that's reflexive too, but that you had to learn at some point in your life earlier when you were very little, analyzing duration, path and outcome. And that involves a lot of top down processing with the prefrontal cortex, but through plasticity mechanisms, you now do it. So when you take on a challenge, provided that you understand the core mechanics of how to run pushups and pullups and whatever else you decided to do, once you set the number and the duration and all that, then you, all you have to do is just go, but people get caught in that tide pool of just, well, do I really have to do it? How do I not do that? What if I get injured? What if I, you know, can I sneak a this or that, you know? And that's work. And to some extent, I look, I not David Goggins, obviously, nor, nor do I claim to understand his process partially, you know, but maybe a little bit, which is that it's clear that by making the decision, there's more resources to devote to the effort of the actual execution. Well, that's a really, like what you're saying was not a lesson that was obvious to me. And it's still not obvious. It's something I really work at, which is there is always an option to quit. And I mean, that's something I really struggle with. I mean, I've quit some things in my life, sick, stupid stuff. And, uh, one lesson I've learned is if you quit once, it opens the door that like, it's really valuable to trick your brain into thinking that you're, you're going to have to die before you quit. Like it's actually really convenient. So actually what you're saying is very profound, but you shouldn't intellectualize it. Like it took me time to develop like psychologically in ways that I think it would be another conversation, cause I'm not sure how to put it into words, but it's really tough on me to, uh, to do certain parts of that challenge, which is a huge, you know, is a huge output. The number, the number that I was, I thought it would be, the number would be hard, but it's not. It's the entirety of it. Uh, especially in the early days was just spending a kind of embarrassed to say how many hours this took. So I didn't say publicly how many hours, cause people, I knew people would be like, don't you, aren't you supposed to do other stuff? Well, it's, um, again, I don't want to speculate too much, but occasionally David has said this publicly where people will be like, don't you sleep or something. And his process used to just be that he would just block delete, you know, like gone, but it's, it's actually, um, it's, it's a super interesting topic. And because self control and directing our actions and the role of emotion and quitting, these are, these are vital to the human experience and they're vital to performing well at anything. And at a high, obviously at a super high level, being able to understand this about the self is crucial. Um, so I have a friend who was also in the teams. His name is Pat Dossett. He did nine years in the seal teams. Um, and in a similar way, there's, there's a lore about him among team guys, um, because of a kind of funny challenge he gave himself, which was, so he and I swim together, although he swims for a long time. Um, and he doesn't swim together, although he swims further up front than I do. Um, and he's very patient. Um, but you know, he was on a, uh, he was assigned when he was in the teams to a position that gave him a little more time behind a desk than he wanted. And it's not as much time out out and deployments, although he did deployments. Um, so he didn't know what to do at that time, but he thought about it and he asked himself, what, what does he hate the most? And it turns out the thing that he hated doing the most was bear crawls, you know, walking on your hands and so he decided to bear crawl for a mile for time. So he was bear crawling a mile a day. Right. And I thought that was an interesting example that he gave because, you know, like why pick the thing you hate the most? And I think it maps right back to limbic friction. It's the thing that creates the most limbic friction. And so if you can overcome that, then there's carry over. And I think the notion of carry over has been talked about psychologically and in kind of in the self help space, like, Oh, if you run a marathon, it's going to help you in other areas of life, but will it really will it? Well, I think it depends on whether or not there's a lot of limbic friction because if there is what you're exercising is not a circuit for bear crawls or a circuit for pull ups. What you're doing is you're exercising a circuit for top down control and that circuit was not designed to be for bear crawls or pull ups or coding or waking up in the middle of the night to do something hard. That circuit was designed to override limbic friction. And so neural circuits were designed to generalize, right? The stress response to an incoming threat that's a physical threat was designed to feel the same way and be the same response internally as the threat to an impending exam or divorce or marriage or whatever it is that's stressing somebody out. And so neural circuits are not designed to be for one particular action or purpose. So if you can, as you did, if you can train up top down control under conditions of the highest limbic friction that when the desire to quit is at its utmost, either because of fatigue or hyper arousal, being too stressed or too tired, you're learning how to engage a circuit and that circuit is forever with you. And if you don't engage it, it sits there, but it's atrophied. It's like a plant that doesn't get any water. And a lot of this has been discussed in self help and growth mindset and all these kinds of ideas that circle the internet and social media. But when you start to think about how they map to neural circuits, I think there's some utility because what it means is that the limbic friction that you'll experience in, I don't know, maybe some future relationship to something or someone, it's a category of neural processing that should immediately click into place. It's just like the limbic friction you experienced trying to engage in the God knows how many pushups, pull ups and running runs you were doing. 25,000. Who's counting? So folks, if Lex does this again, more comments, more likes. This is the problem with you getting more followers is you're going to get more. Actually, I should say that's the benefit. I don't know. Maybe it's not politically correct for me to ask, but there is this a stereotype about Russians being like being really durable. And I started going to that Russian banya that way back before COVID and they could tolerate a lot of heat and they would sit very stoic. No one was going, oh, it's hot in here. They're just kind of like ease into it. So maybe there's something there, who knows? Might be something there, but it could be also just personal. I just have some, I found myself, everyone's different, but I've found myself to be able to do something unpleasant for very long periods of time. Like I'm able to shut off the mind and I don't think that's been fully tested. Monkey mind or the supercomputer? Well, it's interesting. I mean, which mind tells you to quit exactly? Limbic. Limbic friction tells you. Well, limbic friction is the source of that, but who are you talking with exactly? So there's a, we can put something very concrete to that. So there's a paper published in Cell, super top tier journal, two years ago, looking at effort. And this was in a visual environment of trying to swim forward toward a target and a reward. And it was a really cool experiment because they manipulated virtually the visual environment. So the same amount of effort was being expended every time. But sometimes the perception was you're making forward progress. And sometimes the perception was you're making no progress because stuff wasn't drifting by meant no progress. So you can be swimming and swimming and swimming and not making progress. And it turns out that with each bout of effort, there's epinephrine and norepinephrine is being released in the brainstem and glia, what traditionally were thought of as support cells for the neurons, but they do a lot of things actively too, are measuring the amount of epinephrine and norepinephrine in that circuit. And when it exceeds a certain threshold, the glia send inhibitory signals that shut down top down control. They literally it's the quit. You stop. There's no more. It's you quit enduring. It can be rescued. Endurance can be rescued with dopamine. So that's where the subjective part really comes into play. So you quit because you've learned how to turn that off or you've learned how to, some people will reward the pain process so much that friction becomes the reward. And when you talk about people like Goggins and other people I know from special operations and people have gone through cancer treatments three times, you hear about, just when you hear about people, the Viktor Frankl stories, I mean, you hear about Nelson Mandela, you hear about these stories. I'm sure the same process is involved. Again, this speaks to the generalizability of these processes as opposed to a neural circuit for a particular action or cognitive function. So I think you have to learn to subjectively self reward in a way that replenishes you. Goggins talks about eating souls. It's a very dramatic example in his mind, apparently that's a form of reward, but it's not just a form of reward where it's like you're picking up a trophy or something. It's actually, it gives you energy. It's a reward that gives more neural energy. And I'm defining that as more dopamine to suppress the noradrenaline adrenaline circuits in the brainstem. So ultimately maps to that. Yeah. He creates enemies. He's always fighting enemies. I never, I think I have enemies, but there are usually just versions of me inside my head. So I thought about through that 30 day challenge, I tried to come up with like fake enemies. It wasn't working. The only enemy I came up with is David. Well, now you have a, you certainly have a form formidable adversary in this one. I don't care. I'm David. I'm willing to die on this one. So let's go there. Well, let's hope you both survive this one. My problem is the physical. So everything we've been talking about in the mind, there's a physical aspect that's just practically difficult, which is like, I can't like, you know, when you injure yourself at a certain point, like you just can't function or you're doing more damage. Yeah. Talking about it, taking yourself out of running for the rest of your life potentially, or like, you know, or did it for years. So, you know, I'd love to avoid that, right? There's just like stupid physical stuff that you just want to avoid. You want to keep it purely in the mental. And if it's purely in the mental, that's when the race is interesting. But yeah, the problem with these physical challenges as David has experienced, I mean, it has a toll on your body. I tend to think of the mind is limitless and the body is kind of unfortunately quite limited. Well, I think the key is to dynamically control your output. And that can be done by reducing effort, which doesn't work for throughout, but also by restoring through these subjective reward processes. And we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of why this all works, but these are ancient pathways that were designed to bring resources to an animal or to a person through foraging for hunting or mates or water, all these things. And they work so well because they're down in those circuits where we know the zeros and ones. And that's great because it can be subjective at the level of, oh, I reached this one milestone, this one horizon, this one three meter target. But if you don't reward it, it's just effort. If you do self reward it, it's effort minus one in terms of the adrenaline output. I have to ask you about this. You're one of the great communicators in science. I'm really a big fan of yours, enjoying in terms of the educational stuff you're putting on neuroscience. Thank you. What's the, do you have a philosophy behind it or is it just an instinct, unstoppable force? Do you have, like, what's your thinking? Because it's rare and it's exciting. I'm excited that, you know, somebody from Stanford. So I, okay, I'm in multiple places in the sense of like where my interests lie. And one, you know, politically speaking, academic institutions are under fire, you know, for many reasons we don't need to get into. I get into it in a lot of other places, but I believe in places like Stanford and places like MIT as one of the most magical institutions for inspiring people to dream, people to build the future. I mean, it's, I believe that it is a really special, these universities are really special places. And so it's always exciting to me when somebody as inspiring as you represents those places. So it makes me proud that somebody from Stanford is like, somebody like you is representing Stanford. So maybe you could speak to what's, how did you come to be who you are in being a communicator? Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words, especially coming from you. I think Stanford is an amazing place as is MIT and it's such a. MIT is better by the way. I'll let it out. Anything you say at this point. I have many friends at MIT. Yeah. Smarter friends. Yeah. Ed Boyden is among the best in class. There's some people, not me that can hold a candle to him, but not many, maybe one or two. I think the great benefit of being in a place like MIT or Stanford is that when you look around, the average is very high. You have many best in class among the one or two or three best in the world at what they do. And it's a wonderful privilege to be there. And one thing that I think also makes them and other universities like them very special is that there's an emphasis on what gets exported out of the university, not keeping it ivory tower and really trying to keep an eye on what's needed in the world and trying to do something useful. And I think the proximity to industry and Silicon Valley and in the Boston area and Cambridge also lends itself well to that. And there are other institutions too, of course. So the reason I got involved in educating on social media was actually because of Pat Dossett, the mile bear call guy. It was at the turn of 2018 to 2019. We had formed a good friendship and he talked me into doing these early morning cold water swims. I was learning a lot about pain and suffering, but also the beauty of cold water swims. And we were talking one morning and he said, so what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019? It's like, that's the way that like a Texan former seal talks. Like we're just literally like, what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019? Like, well, I've run my lab. It's like, no, no, what are you going to do? That's new. And he wasn't forceful in it, but I was like, that's interesting question. I said, well, if I had my way, I would just teach people, everyone about the brain. Because I think it's amazing. He goes, we'll do it. I go, all right. He goes, shake on it. So we did it, you know? And so I started putting out these posts and it's grown into, to include a variety of things, but you asked about a governing philosophy. So I want to increase interest in the brain and in the nervous system and in biology generally, that's one major goal. I'd like to increase scientific literacy, which can't be rammed down people's throats of talking about how to look at a graph and statistics and Z scores and P values and genetics. It has to be done gradually, in my opinion. I want to put valuable tools into the world, mainly tools that map to things that we're doing in our lab. So these will be tools centered around how to understand and direct one's states of mind and body. So reduce stress, raise one's stress threshold. So it's not always just about being calm. Sometimes it's about learning how to tolerate being not calm, raise awareness for mental health. There's a ton of micro missions in this, but it all really maps back to, you know, like the eight and 10 year old version of me, which is I used to spend my weekends when I was a kid reading about weird animals. And I had this obsession with like medieval weapons and stuff like catapults. And then I used to come into school on Monday and I would ask if I could talk about it to the class and teach. And I just, it's really, I promise, and some people might not believe me, but it's really, I don't really like being the point of focus. I just get so excited about these gems of that I find in the world in books and in experiments and in discussions with colleagues and discussions with people like you and around the universe. And I can't just compulsively, I got to tell people about it. So I try and package it into a form that people can access. You know, I think if I've, I think the reception has been really wonderful. Stanford has been very supportive, thankfully. I've done some podcasts even with them and they've reposted some stuff on social media. It's a precarious place to put yourself out there as a research academic. I think some of my colleagues, both locally and elsewhere, probably wonder if I'm still serious about research, which I absolutely am. And I also acknowledge that their research and the research coming out of the field needs to be talked about and not all scientists are good at translating that into a language that people can access. And I don't like the phrase dumb it down. What I like to do is take a concept that I think people will find interesting and useful and offer it sort of like you would offer food to somebody visiting your home. You're not going to cram foie gras in their face. You're going to say, like, do you want a cracker? And they say, yeah. And like, do you want something on that cracker? Like, do you like cheese? Like, yeah. Like, do you want Swiss cheese or you want that really like stinky, like French? I don't like cheese much. Or do you want foie gras? Like, what's that? Like, so you're trying, the best information prompts more questions of interest, not questions of confusion, but questions of interest. And so I feel like one door opens, then another door opens, then another door opens. And pretty soon, the image in my mind is you create a bunch of neuroscientists who are thinking about themselves neuroscientifically. And I don't begin to think that I have all the answers at all. I cast a neuroscience, sometimes a little bit of a psychology lens onto what I think are interesting topics. And someday I'm going to go into the ground or the ocean or wherever it is I end up. And I'm very comfortable with the fact that not everyone's going to be happy with how I deliver the information, but I would hope that people would feel like some of it was useful and meaningful and got them to think a little bit harder. Since you mentioned going into the ground and Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, I reread that book quite often. Let me ask the big ridiculous question about life. What do you think is the meaning of it all? And maybe why do you, do you mention that book from a psychologist perspective, which Victor Frankl was, or do you ever think about the bigger philosophical questions that raises about meaning? What's the meaning of it all? One of the great challenges in assigning a good, you know, giving a good answer to the question of like, what's the meaning of life is, um, I think illustrated best by the Victor Frankl example, although there are other examples too, which is that our sense of meaning is very elastic in time and space. And I'm, I'm, uh, we talked a little bit about this earlier, but it's amazing to me that somebody locked in a cell or a concentration camp can bring the horizon in close enough that they can then micro slice their environment so that they can find rewards and meaning and power and beauty, even in a little square box or, or a horrible situation. And I think this is really speaks to one of the most important features of the human mind, which is we could do, let's take two opposite extremes. One would be, let's say the alarm went off right now in this building and the building started shaking our vision, our hearing, everything would be tuned to this space, time bubble for those moments and everything that we were processed, all that would matter. The only meaning would be get out of here, safe, figure out what's going on, contact loved ones, et cetera. If we were to sit back, totally relaxed, we could do the, you know, I think it's called pale blue dot thing or whatever, where we could imagine ourselves in this room. And then they were in the United States and this continent and the earth, and then it's peering down us. And all of a sudden you get back, it can seem so big that all of a sudden it's meaningless, right? If you see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time and all of space, you go to, I don't matter. And if you go to, oh, every little thing that happens in this text thread or this, you know, comment section on YouTube or Instagram, your space time bubble is tiny, then everything seems inflated and the brain will contract and dilate its space, time, vision and time, but also sense of meaning. And that's beautiful. And it's what allows us to be so dynamic in different environments and we can pull from the past and the present and future. It's why examples like Nelson Mandela and Viktor Frankl had to include, it makes sense that it wasn't just about grinding it out. They had to find those dopamine rewards, even in those little boxes they were forced into. So I'm not trying to dodge an answer, but for me personally, and I think about this a lot because I have this complicated history in science where my undergraduate, graduate advisor and postdoctoral advisor all died young. So, you know, and they were wonderful people and had immense importance in my life. But what I realized is that we can get so fixated on the thing that we're experiencing, holding tremendous meaning, but it only holds that meaning for as long as we're in that space, time regime. And this is important because what really gives meaning is the understanding that you can move between these different space, time dimensionalities. And I'm not trying to sound like a theoretical physicist or anyone that thinks about the cosmos and saying that it's really the fact that sometimes we'd say and do and think things and it feels so important. And then two days later, like what happened? Well, you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely. You were in a completely different state. And so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to engage in as many different levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible. I want to go to the micro. I sometimes think about this. I'm like, if I just pulled over the side of the road, I bet you there's an anthill there and their whole world is fascinating. You can't stay there. And you also can't stay staring up at the clouds and just think about how we're just these little beings and it doesn't matter. The key is the journey back and forth, up and down that staircase, back and forth and back and forth. And my goal is to get as many trips up and down that staircase as I can before the reaper comes for me. Oh, beautiful. So the, the, the dance of dilation of meaning, contraction between the different space, zoom in, zoom out, and get as many steps in on that staircase. That's, that's my goal anyway. And I've watched people die. I watched my postdoc advisor die wither away. My graduate, it was tragic, but they found beauty in these closing moments because their bubble was their kids in one case, or like one of them was a Giants fan and like got to see a Giants game, you know, in her last moments and like, and you just realize like it's a Giants game, but not in that moment because time is closing. And so those time bins feel huge because she's slicing things so differently. So I think, um, learning how to do that better and more fluidly, recognizing where one is and not getting too taxed to the idea that there's one correct answer, like that's what brings meaning. That's my goal anyway. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Andrew, I really appreciate that you would, uh, come down and contract your space time and focus on this conversation for a few hours. Uh, is a huge honor. I'm a huge fan of yours. As I told you, I hope you keep growing and educating the world about the human mind. Thanks for talking today. Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. And people might think I'm saying it just cause I'm here, but I'm a huge fan of yours. I send your podcasts to my colleagues and other people. And I think what you're doing is, isn't just, uh, amazing. It's important. And so thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. And thank you to our sponsors, ASLEEP, a mattress that cools itself and gives me years of sleep. ASLEEP, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. SEMrush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. And CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung. I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Andrew Huberman: Neuroscience of Optimal Performance | Lex Fridman Podcast #139

The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett, her second time on the podcast. She's a neuroscientist at Northeastern University and one of my favorite people. Her new book called Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain is out now as of a couple of days ago, so you should definitely support Lisa by buying it and sharing with friends if you like it. It's a great short intro to the human brain. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. Masterclass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing people in history. And BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Lisa, just like Manolis Calles, is a local brilliant mind and friend and someone I can see talking to many more times. Sometimes it's fun to talk to a scientist not just about their field of expertise, but also about random topics, even silly ones, from love to music to philosophy. Ultimately, it's about having fun, something I know nothing about. This conversation is certainly that. It may not always work, but it's worth a shot. I think it's valuable to alternate along all kinds of dimensions, like between deeper technical discussions and more fun random discussion, from liberal thinker to conservative thinker, from musician to athlete, from CEO to junior engineer, from friend to stranger. Variety makes life and conversation more interesting. Let's see where this little podcast journey goes. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett. Based on the comments in our previous conversation, I think a lot of people will be very disappointed, I should say, to learn that you are in fact married. As they say, all the good ones are taken. Okay, so I'm a fan of your husband as well, Dan. He's a programmer and musician, so a man after my own heart. Can I ask a ridiculously over romanticized question of when did you first fall in love with Dan? It's actually, it's a really romantic story, I think. So I was divorced by the time I was 26, 27, 26, I guess. And I was in my first academic job, which was Penn State University, which is in the middle of Pennsylvania, surrounded by mountains. So you have, it's four hours to get anywhere, to get to Philadelphia, New York, Washington. I mean, you're basically stuck, you know. And I was very fortunate to have a lot of other assistant professors who were hired at the same time as I was. So there were a lot of us, we were all friends, which was really fun. But I was single and I didn't wanna date a student. And there were no, and I wasn't gonna date somebody in my department, that's just a recipe for disaster. So even at 20, whatever you were, you were already wise enough to know that. Yeah, a little bit, maybe, yeah. I wouldn't call me wise at that age. But anyways, not sure that I would say that I'm wise now, but. And so after, I was spending probably 16 hours a day in the lab because it was my first year as an assistant professor and there's a lot to do. And I was also bitching and moaning to my friends that I hadn't had sex in I don't know how many months and I was starting to become unhappy with my life. And I think at a certain point, they just got tired of listening to me bitch and moan and said, just do something about it then, like if you're unhappy. And so the first thing I did was I made friends with a sushi chef in town. And this is like a State College, Pennsylvania in the early 90s was there was like a pizza shop and a sub shop and actually a very good bagel shop and one good coffee shop and maybe one nice restaurant. I mean, there was really, but there was the second son of a Japanese sushi chef who was not going to inherit the restaurant. And so he moved to Pennsylvania and was giving sushi lessons. So I met this guy, the sushi chef and we decided to throw a sushi party at the coffee shop. So we basically, it was the goal was to invite every eligible bachelor really within like a 20 mile radius. We had a totally fun time. I wore an awesome crushed velvet burgundy dress, it was beautiful dress. And I didn't meet any, I met a lot of new friends, but I did not meet anybody. So then I thought, okay, well, maybe I'll try the Personals ads, which I had never used before in my life. And I first tried the paper Personals ads. Like in the newspaper? Like in the newspaper, that didn't work. And then a friend of mine said, oh, you know, there's this thing called Net News. So we're going, this is like 1992 maybe. So there was this anonymous, you could do it anonymously. So you would read, you could post or you could read ads and then respond to an address which was anonymous and that was yoked to somebody's real address. And there was always a lag because it was this like a bulletin board sort of thing. So at first I read them over and I decided to respond to one or two. And, you know, it was interesting. Sorry, this is not on the internet. Yeah, this is totally on the internet. But it takes, there's a delay of a couple of days or whatever. Yeah, right, right. It's 1992, there's no web, web pictures. There's no pictures, the web doesn't exist. It's all done in ASCII format sort of. And, you know, but the ratio, but the ratio of men to women was like 10 to one. I mean, there were many more men because it was basically academics and the government. That was it. I mean, I think AOL maybe was just starting to become popular, but. And so the first person I met told me that he was a scientist who worked for NASA and, yeah. Anyways, it turned out that he didn't actually. Yeah, this is how they brag is like you elevate your, as opposed to saying you're taller than you are, you say like your position is higher. Yeah, and I actually, I would have been fine dating somebody who wasn't a scientist. It's just that they have, it's just that whoever I date has to just accept that I am and that I was pretty ambitious and was trying to make my career. And, you know, that's not, I think it's maybe more common now for men to maybe accept that in their female partners, but at that time, not so common. It could be intimidating, I guess. Yes, that has been said. And so then the next one I actually corresponded with, and we actually got to the point of talking on the phone, and we had this really kind of funny conversation where, you know, we're chatting and he said, he introduces the idea that, you know, he's really looking for a dominant woman. And I'm thinking, I'm a psychologist by training, so I'm thinking, oh, he means sex roles. Like, I'm like, no, I'm very assertive and I'm glad you think that, you know, okay. Anyways, long story short, that's not really what he meant. Okay, got it. Yeah, so, and I just, you know, that will just show you my level of naivete. Like, I was like, I didn't completely understand, but I was like, well, yeah, you know, no. At one point he asked me how I felt about him wearing my lingerie, and I was like, I don't even share my lingerie with my sister. Like, I don't share my lingerie with anybody, you know? No. The third one I interacted with was a banker who lived in Singapore, and that conversation didn't last very long because he made an analogy, I guess he made an analogy between me and a character in The Fountainhead, the woman who's raped in The Fountainhead, and I was like, okay, that's not. That's not a good. That's not a good, no, that's not a good one. Not that part, not that scene. Not that scene. So then I was like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna post my own ad, and so I did. I posted, well, first I wrote my ad, and then I, of course, I checked it with my friends who were all also assistant professors. They were like my little Greek chorus, and then I posted it, and I got something like, I don't know, 80 something responses in 24 hours. I mean, it was very. Do you remember the pitch? Like how you, I guess, condensed yourself? I don't remember it exactly, although Dan has it, but actually for our 20th wedding anniversary, he took our exchanges, and he printed them off and put them in a leather bound book for us to read, which was really sweet. Yeah, I think I was just really direct. Like I'm almost 30. I'm a scientist. I'm not looking, I'm looking for something serious. But the thing is, I forgot to say where my location was and my age, which I forgot. So I got lots of, I mean, I will say, so I printed off all of the responses, and I had all my friends over, and we had a big, I made a big pot of gumbo, and we drank through several bottles of wine reading these responses. And I would say for the most part, they were really sweet, like earnest and genuine as much as you could tell that somebody is being genuine. I mean, it seemed, there were a couple of really funky ones, like this one couple who told me that I was their soulmate, the two of them, when they were looking for a third person, and I was like, oh, okay. But mostly super, seemed like super genuine people. And so I chose five men to start corresponding with, and I was corresponding with them. And then about a week later, I get this other email. And okay, and then I post something the next day that said, okay, thank you so much, and I'm gonna, I answered every person back. But then after that, I said, okay, and I'm not gonna answer anymore, because they were still coming in, and I couldn't, I have a job, and a house to take care of and stuff. So, and then about a week later, I get this other email. And he says, he just describes himself, like I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm a chef, I'm a scientist, I'm a this, I'm a this. And so I emailed him back, and I said, you know, you seem interesting, you can write me at my actual address if you want, here's my address. I'm not really responding, I'm not really responding to other people anymore, but you seem interesting, you know, you can write to me if you want. And then he wrote to me, and I wrote him back, and it was a nondescript kind of email, and I wrote him back, and I said, thanks for responding. You know, I'm really busy right now. I was in the middle of writing my first slate of grant applications, so I was really consumed, and I said, I'll get back to you in a couple of days. And so I did, I waited a couple days till my grants were, you know, safe, grant applications safely out the door. And then I emailed him back, and then he emailed me, and then really across two days, we sent 100 emails. And text only, was there pictures or any of that stuff? Text only, text only. And then, so this was like a Thursday and a Friday, and then Friday, he said, let's talk on the weekend on the phone. And I said, okay. And he wanted to talk Sunday night, and I had a date Sunday night. So I said, okay, sure, we can talk Sunday night. And then I was like, well, you know, I don't really wanna cancel my date, so I'm just gonna call him on Saturday. So I just called, I cold called him on Saturday, and a woman answered. Oh, wow. That's not cool. Not cool. And so she says, you know, hello. And I say, oh, you know, stand there. And she said, sure, can I ask who's calling? And I said, tell him it's Lisa. And she went, oh my God, oh my God, I'm just a friend. I'm just a friend. I just need to tell you, I'm just a friend. And I was like, this is adorable, right? She doesn't, and then he gets on the phone, not hi, nice to meet you. The first thing he says to me, she's just a friend. So I was just so charmed really by the whole thing. So it was Yom Kippur. It was the Jewish day of atonement that was ending and they were baking cookies and going to a break fast. So people, you know, as you know, fast all day, and then they go to a party and they break fast. So I thought, okay, I'll just cancel my date. So I did, and I stayed home and we talked for eight hours. And then the next night for six hours. And basically it just went on like that. And then by the end of the week, he flew to stay college. And, you know, we'd gone through this whole thing where I'd said, we're gonna take it slow. We're gonna get to know each other, you know. And then really by, I think we talked like two or three times these like really long conversations. And then he said, I'm just gonna fly there. And then, so of course there's, I don't even know that there were fax machines at that point. Maybe there were, but I don't think so. Anyway, so he, we decided we'll exchange pictures. And so he, you know, I take my photograph and I give it to my secretary. And I say to my secretary. Fax this. I say that, send this priority mail. Priority mail, yeah. And he goes, okay, I'll send a priority mail. And I'm like, it's a priority mail. He's like, I know, priority mail, okay. And then, so I get Dan's photograph in the mail. And, you know, it's him in shorts. And you can see that he's probably somewhere like the Bahamas or something like that. And it's like cropped. So clearly what he's done is he's taken a photograph where, you know, he's in it with someone else who turned out to be his ex wife. So I'm thinking, well, this is awesome. You know, I've hit the jackpot. He's, you know, very appealing to me, very attractive. And then, you know, my photograph doesn't show up and it doesn't show up. And, you know, so like one day and then two days and then, you know, he's like, you know, I said, well, I asked my secretary to send a priority. I mean, I don't know, you know, what he did. And he's like, I said, I'm like, well, you don't have to, you know, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm gonna, you know, we've had like five dates, the equivalent of five dates practically. And then, so he's supposed to fly on a Thursday or Friday, I can't remember. And I get a call like maybe an hour before his flight's supposed to leave. And he says, hi. And I say, and it's just something in his voice, right? And I say, cause at this point I think I've talked to him like for 25 hours, I don't know. And he says, hi. And I'm like, you got the picture. And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, you don't like it. And he's like, well, I'm sure it's not, I'm sure it's your, I'm sure it's just not a good, you know, it's not, it's probably not your best. Oh no. You know, you don't, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm coming. And I'm like, no, you don't have to come. And he's like, no, no, I really wanna, I'm, you know, I'm getting on the plane. I'm like, you don't have to get on the plane. He's like, no, I'm getting on the plane. And so I go down to my, I go, I'm in my office, this is happening, right? So I go downstairs to one of my closest friends who is still actually one of my closest friends, who is one of my colleagues and Kevin. And I say, Kevin, and I go to Kevin, I go, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, he doesn't like the photograph. And Kevin's like, well, which photograph should you send? And I'm like, well, you know the one where we're shooting pool? And he's like, you sent that photograph? That's a horrible photograph. I'm like, yeah, but it's the only one that I had that was like, where my hair was kind of similar to what it is now, and he's like, Lisa, like, do I have to check everything for you? You should not have sent that, you know? But still, he flew over. So he flew. Where from, by the way? He was in graduate school at Amherst, yeah, at UMass Amherst. So he flew and I picked him up at the airport and he was happy, so whatever the concern was, was gone. And I was dressed, you know, I carefully, carefully dressed. Were you nervous? I was really, really nervous. Because I don't really believe in fate and I don't really think there's only one person that you can be with. But I think some people are curvy, you know, people who, some people are curvy, they're kind of complicated, and so the number of people who fit them is maybe less than. I like it, mathematically speaking, yeah. And so when I was going to pick him up at the airport, I was thinking, well, this could, I could be going to pick up the person I'm gonna marry. Or not. I mean, like, I really, but I really, you know, like, our conversations were just very authentic and very moving and we really connected. And I really felt like he understood me, actually, in a way that a lot of people don't. And what was really nice was, at the time, you know, the airport was this tiny little airport out in a cornfield, basically. And so driving back to the town, we were in the car for 15 minutes, completely in the dark, as I was driving. And so it was very similar to, we had just spent, you know, 20 something hours on the telephone, sitting in the dark, talking to each other. So it was very familiar. And we basically spent the whole weekend together and he met all my friends and we had a big party. And at the end of the weekend, I said, okay, you know, if we're gonna give this a shot, we probably shouldn't see other people. So it's a risk, you know? Commitment. But I just didn't see how it would work if we were dating people locally and then also seeing each other at a distance. Because, you know, I've had long distance relationships before and they're hard and they take a lot of effort. And so we decided we'd give it three months and see what happened and that was it. This is an interesting thing. Like we're all, what is it? There's several billion of us and we're kind of roaming this world and then you kind of stick together. You find somebody that just like gets you. And it's interesting to think about, there's probably thousands if not millions of people that would be sticky to you, depending on the curvature of your space. But what is the, could you speak to the stickiness? Like to the, just the falling in love? Like seeing that somebody really gets you? Maybe by way of telling, do you think, do you remember there was a moment when you just realized, damn it, I think I'm, like I think this is the guy. I think I'm in love. We were having these conversations actually from the, really from the second weekend we were together. So he flew back the next weekend to State College because it was my birthday. It was my 30th birthday. My friends were throwing me a party. And we went hiking and we hiked up some mountain and we were sitting on a cliff over this overlook and talking to each other. And I was thinking, and I actually said to him, like I haven't really known you very long, but I feel like I'm falling in love with you, which can't possibly be happening. I must be projecting, but it certainly feels that way. Like I don't believe in love at first sight. So this can't really be happening, but it sort of feels like it is. And he was like, I know what you mean. And so for the first three months or four months, we would say things to each other. Like, I feel like I'm in love with you, but you know, but that can't, but things don't really work like that. So, but you know, so, and then it became a joke. Like I feel like I'm in love with you. And then eventually, you know, I think, but I think that was one moment where we were talking about just, you know, not just all the great aspirations you have or all the things, but also things you don't like about yourself, things that you're worried about, things that you're scared of. And then I think that was sort of solidified the relationship. And then there was one weekend where we went to Maine in the winter, which I mean, I really love the beach always, but in the winter, particularly. Because it's just beautiful and calm and whatever. Yeah. And I also, I do find beauty in starkness sometimes. Like, so there's this grand majestic scene of, you know, this very powerful ocean and it's all these like beautiful blue grays and it's just stunning. And so we were sitting on this huge rock in Maine and where we'd gone for the weekend, it was freezing cold. And I honestly can't remember what he said or what I said or what, but I definitely remember having this feeling of, I absolutely wanna stay with this person. And I don't know what my life will be like if I'm not with this person. Like I need to be with this person. Can we, from a scientific and a human perspective, dig into your belief that first love at first sight is not possible? You don't believe in it? Cause there is, you don't think there's like a magic where you see somebody in the Jack Kerouac way and you're like, wow, that's something. That's a special little glimmer or something. Oh, I definitely think you can connect with someone instant, in an instance. And I definitely think you can say, oh, there's something there and I'm really clicking with that person. Romantically, but also just as friends, it's possible to do that. You recognize a mind that's like yours or that's compatible with yours. There are ways that you feel like you're being understood or that you understand something about this person or maybe you see something in this person that you find really compelling or intriguing. But I think your brain is predictive organ, right? You're using your past. You're projecting. You're using your past to make predictions and I mean, not deliberately. That's how your brain is wired. That's what it does. And so it's filling in all of the gaps that you, there are lots of gaps of information that you don't, information you don't have. And so your brain is filling those in and. But isn't that what love is? No, I don't think so, actually. I mean, to some extent, sure, you always, there's research to show that people who are in love always see the best in each other and when there's a negative interpretation or a positive interpretation, they choose the positive ones. There's a little bit of positive illusion there going on. That's what the research shows. But I think that when you find somebody when you find somebody who not just appreciates your faults but loves you for them actually, like maybe even doesn't see them as a fault, that's, so you have to be honest enough about what your faults are. So it's easy to love someone for all the things that they, for all the wonderful characteristics they have. It's harder, I think, to love someone despite their faults or maybe even the faults that they see aren't really faults at all to you. They're actually something really special. But isn't that, can't you explain that by saying the brain kind of, like you're projecting, you have a conception of a human being or just a spirit that really connects with you and you're projecting that onto that person and within that framework, all their faults then become beautiful, like little. Maybe, but you just have to pay attention to the prediction error. No, but maybe that's what love, like maybe you started ignoring the prediction error. Maybe love is just your ability, like. To ignore the prediction error. Well, I think that there's some research that might say that, but that's not my experience, I guess. But there is some research that says, I mean, there's some research that says you have to have an optimal margin of illusion, which means that you put a positive spin on smaller things, but you don't ignore the bigger things, right? And I think without being judgmental at all, when someone says to me, you're not who I thought you were, I mean, nobody has said that to me in a really long time, but certainly when I was younger, that was, you're not who I thought you were. My reaction to that was, well, whose fault is that? You know, I'm a pretty upfront person. I mean, I will though say that in my experience, people don't lie to you about who they are. They lie to themselves in your presence. And so, you know, you don't wanna get tied up in that, tangled up in that. And I think from the get go, Dan and I were just for whatever reason, maybe it's because we both had been divorced already and, you know, he told me who we thought he was and he was pretty accurate as far as I could, pretty much actually. I mean, there's very, I can't say that I've ever come across a characteristic in him that really surprised me in a bad way. It's hard to know yourself. It is hard to know yourself. And to communicate that. For sure. I mean, I'll say, you know, I had the advantage of training as a therapist, which meant for five years I was under a fucking microscope. Yeah. You know, when I was training as a therapist, it was hour for hour supervision, which meant if you were in a room with a client for an hour, you had an hour with a supervisor. So that supervisor was behind the mirror for your session. And then you went and had an hour of discussion about what you said, what you didn't say, learning to use your own feelings and thoughts as a tool to probe the mind of the client and so on. And so you can't help but learn a lot of, you can't help but learn a lot about yourself in that process. Do you think knowing or learning how the sausage is made ruins the magic of the actual experience? Like you as a neuroscientist who studies the brain, do you think it ruins the magic of like love at first sight? Or are you, do you consciously are still able to lose yourself in the moment? I'm definitely able to lose myself in the moment. Is wine involved? Not always, chocolate. I mean, some kind of mind altering substance, right? But yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess what I would say though, is that for me, part of the magic is the process. Like, so I remember a day there was, while I was working on this book of essays, I was in New York. I can't remember why I was in New York, but I was in New York for something. And I was in Central Park and I was looking at all the people with their babies. And I was thinking, each one of these, there's a tiny little brain that's wiring itself right now. And I just, I felt in that moment, I was like, I am never gonna look at an infant in the same way ever again. And so to me, I mean, honestly, before I started learning about brain development, I thought babies were cute, but not that interesting until they could do interact with you and do things. Of course, my own infant, I thought, was extraordinarily interesting, but they're kind of like lumps. That's until they can interact with you, but they are anything but lumps. I mean, so, and part of the, I mean, all I can say is I have deep affection now for like tiny little babies in a way that I didn't really before because of the, I'm just so curious. But the actual process of the mechanisms of the wiring of the brain, the learning, all the magic of the neurobiology. Yeah, and or something like, when you make eye contact with someone directly, sometimes you feel something, right? Yeah, that's weird. What is it? And what is that? And so to me, that's not backing away from the moment. That's like expanding the moment. It's like, that's incredibly cool. You know, when I was, I'll just say that when I was in graduate school, I also was in therapy because it's almost a given that you're gonna be in therapy yourself if you're gonna become a therapist. And I had a deal with my therapist, which was that I could call timeout at any moment that I wanted to, as long as I was being responsible about it. And I wasn't using it as a way to get out of something. And he could tell me, no, he could decline and say, no, you're using this to get out of something. But I could call timeout whenever I want and say, what are you doing right now? Like, what are you, here's what I'm experiencing. What are you trying to do? Like I wanted to use my own experience to interrogate what the process was. And that made it more helpful in a way. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, I don't think learning how something works makes it less magical actually, but that's just me, I guess. I don't know, would you? Yes. I tend to have two modes. One is an engineer and one is a romantic. And I'm conscious of like, there's two rooms. You can go into the one, the engineer room. And I think that ruins the romance. So I tend to, there's two rooms. One is the engineering room. Think from first principles, how do we build the thing that creates this kind of behavior? And then you go into the romantic room where you're like emotional, it's a roller coaster. And then the thing is, let's take it slow. And then you get married the next night that you just this giant mess and you write a song and then you cry and then you send a bunch of texts and anger and whatever. And somehow you're in Vegas and there's random people and you're drunk and whatever, all that, like in poetry and just mess of it, fighting. Yeah, that's not, those are two rooms and you go back between them. But I think the way you put it is quite poetic. I think you're much better at adulting with love than perhaps I am. Because there's a magic to children. I also think like of adults as children. It's kind of cool to see, it's a cool thought experiment to look at adults and think like that used to be a baby. And then that's like a fully wired baby. And it's just walking around pretending to be like all serious and important, wearing a suit or something. But that used to be a baby. And then you think of like the parenting and all the experiences they had. Like it's cool to think of it that way. But then I start thinking like from a machine learning perspective. But once you're like the romantic moments, all that kind of stuff, all that falls away. I forget about all of that, I don't know. That's the Russian thing. Maybe, maybe. But I also think it might be an age thing or maybe an experience thing. So I think we all, I mean, if you're exposed to Western culture at all, you are exposed to the sort of idealized, stereotypic, romantic exchange. And what does it mean to be romantic? And so here's a test. I'm seeing how to phrase it. Okay, so not really a test, but this tells you something about your own ideas about romance. For Valentine's Day one year, my husband bought me a six way plug. Is that romantic or not romantic? Like, sorry, six way plug, is that like an outlet? Yeah, like to put it in an outlet. Is that romantic or not romantic? I mean, it depends the look in his eyes when he does it. I mean, it depends on the conversation that led up to that point. Depends how much, it's like the music, because you have a very, you're both from the, my experiences with you as a fan, you have both a romantic niche, but you have a very pragmatic, like you cut through the bullshit of the fuzziness. And there's something about a six way plug that cuts through the bullshit that connects to the human, like he understands who you are. Exactly, exactly. That was the most romantic gift he could have given me because he knows me so well. He has a deep understanding of me, which is that I will sit and suffer and complain about the fact that I have to plug and unplug things. And I will bitch and moan until the cows come home, but it would never occur to me to go buy a bloody six way plug. Whereas for him, he bought it, he plugged it in, he arranged, he taped up all my wires, he made it like really usable. And for me, that was the best present. It was the most romantic thing because he understood who I was and he did something very, or just the casual, like we moved into a house that we went from having a two car garage to a one car garage. And I said, okay, I'm from Canada, I'm not bothered by snow. Well, I mean, I'm a little bothered by snow, but he's very bothered by snow. So I'm like, okay, you can park your car in the garage, it's fine. Every day when it snows, he goes out and cleans my car. Every day. I never asked him to do it, he just does it because he knows that I'm cutting it really close in the morning, when we all used to go to work. I have a time to the second so that I can get up as late as possible, work out as long as possible, and make it into my office like a minute before my first meeting. And so if it snows unexpectedly or something, I'm screwed because now that's an added 10 or 15 minutes and I'm gonna be late. Anyways, it's just these little tiny things. He's a really easygoing guy and he doesn't look like somebody who pays attention to detail. He doesn't fuss about detail, but he definitely pays attention to detail. And it is very, very romantic in the sense that he loves me despite my little details. And understands you. Yeah, he understands me. It is kind of hilarious that that is, the six way plug is the most fulfilling, richest display of romance in your life. I love it. I love it. That's what I mean about romance. Romance is really, it's not all about chocolates and flowers and whatever. I mean, those are all nice too, but... Sometimes it's about the six way plug. Sometimes it's about the six way plug. So maybe one way I could ask before we talk about the details, you also have the author of another book as we talked about how emotions are made. So it's interesting to talk about the process of writing. You mentioned you were in New York. What have you learned from writing these two books about the actual process of writing? And maybe, I don't know what's the most interesting thing to talk about there. Maybe the biggest challenges or the boring, mundane, systematic, like day to day of what worked for you, like hacks or even just about the neuroscience that you've learned through the process of trying to write them. Here's the thing I learned. If you think that it's gonna take you a year to write your book, it's going to take you three years to write your book. That's the first thing I learned is that no matter how organized you are, it's always gonna take way longer than what you think in part because very few people make an outline and then just stick to it. Some of the topics really take on a life of their own and to some extent you wanna let them have their voice. You wanna follow leads until you feel satisfied that you've dealt with the topic appropriately. But that part is actually fun. It's not fun to feel like you're constantly behind the eight ball in terms of time. But it is the exploration and the foraging for information is incredibly fun. For me anyways, I found it really enjoyable. And if I wasn't also running a lab at the same time and trying to keep my family going, the whole thing would have just been fun. But I would say the hardest thing about, the most important thing I think I learned is also the hardest thing and that for me, which is knowing what to leave out. A really good storyteller knows what to leave out. In academic writing, you shouldn't leave anything out. All the details should be there. I've written or participated in writing over 200 papers, peer reviewed papers. So I'm pretty good with detail. Knowing what to leave out and not harming the validity of the story. That is a tricky, tricky thing. It was tricky when I wrote How Emotions Are Made, but that's a standard popular science book. So it's 300 something pages. And then it has like a thousand end notes. And then each of the end notes is attached to a web note, which is also long. So I mean, it's, and it start, and I mean the final draft, I mean, I wrote three drafts of that book actually. And the final draft, and then I had to cut by a third. I mean, it was like 150,000 words or something. And I had to cut it down to like 110. So obviously it's, I struggle with what to leave out. Brevity is not my strong suit. I'm always telling people that it's a warning. So that's why this book was, I'd always been really fascinated with essays. I love reading essays. And after reading a small set of essays by Anne Fadiman called At Large and At Small, which I just love these little essays. What's the topic of those essays? They are, they're called familiar essays. So the topics are like everyday topics, like mail, coffee, chocolate. I mean, just like, and what she does is she weaves her own experience. It's a little bit like these conversations that you're so good at curating, actually. You're weaving together history and philosophy and science and also personal reflections. And a little bit, you feel like you're like eavesdropping on someone's train of thought in a way. It's really, they're really compelling to me. Even if it's just a mundane topic. Yeah, but it's so interesting to learn about like all of these little stories in the wrapping of the history of like mail. Like that's really interesting. And so I read these essays and then I wrote to her a little fan girl email. This was many years ago. And I said, I just love this book. And how did you learn to write essays like this? And she gave me a reading list of essays that I should read like writers. And so I read them all. And anyway, so I decided it would be a really good challenge for me to try to write something really brief where I could focus on one or two really fascinating tidbits of neuroscience, connect each one to something philosophical or like just a question about human nature. Do it in a really brief format without violating the validity of the science. That was a, I just set myself this, what I thought of as a really, really big challenge in part because it was an incredibly hard thing for me to do in the first book. Yeah, we should say that this is, The Seven and a Half Lessons is a very short book. I mean, it's like it embodies brevity, right? The whole point throughout is just, I mean, you could tell that there's editing, like there's pain in trying to bring it as brief as possible, as clean as possible, yeah. Yeah, so it's, the way I think of it is, it's a little book of big science and big ideas. Yeah, really big ideas in brief little packages. And I wrote it so that people could read it. I love reading on the beach. I love reading essays on the beach. I read it, I wrote it so people could read it on the beach or in the bathtub or a subway stop. Even if the beach is frozen over in the snow. Yeah, so my husband, Dan, calls it the first neuroscience beach read. That's his phrasing, yeah. And like you said, you learn a lot about writing from your husband, like you were saying offline. Well, he is, of the two of us, he is the better writer. He is a masterful writer. He's also, I mean, he's a PhD in computer science. He's a software engineer, but he's also really good at organization of knowledge. So he built for a company he used to work for, he built one of the first knowledge management systems. And he now works at Google where he does engineering education. Like he understands how to tell a good story, just about anything, really. He's got impeccable timing, he's really funny. And luckily for me, he knows very little about psychology or neuroscience. Well, now he knows more, obviously, but. So when How Emotions Were Made, he was really, really helpful to me because the first draft of every chapter was me talking to him about what, I would talk out loud about what I wanted to say and the order in which I wanted to say it. And then I would write it and then he would read it and tell me all the bits that could be excised. And sometimes we would, I should say, I mean, we don't, he and I don't really argue about much except directions in the car. Like if we're gonna have an argument, that's gonna be where it's gonna happen, where. What's the nature of the argument about directions exactly? I don't really know, it's just that we're very, I think it's that spatially, I use egocentric space. So I wanna say, turn left. Like I'm reasoning in relation to my own physical corporeal body. So you walk to the church and you turn left and you, then whatever, I'm always like, and he gives directions allocentrically, which means organized around north, south, east, west. So to you, the earth is at the center of the solar system and to him, reasonably. I'm at the center. You're at the center of the solar system. Okay, so. Anyway, but here, we had some really riproaring arguments, like really riproaring arguments where he would say, like, who is this for? Is this for the 1%? And I'd be like, 1% meaning not wealth, but like civilians versus academics. Are these for the scientists or is this for the civilians, right? So he speaks for the people, for the civilians. He speaks for the people and I'd be like, no, you have to. And so he made, after one terrible argument that we had where it was really starting to affect our relationship because we were so mad at each other all the time, he made these little signs, writing and science. And we only use them, this was like, when you pulled out a sign, that's it. Like the other person just wins and you have to stop fighting about it and that's it. And so we just did that. And we didn't really have to use it too much for this book because this book was in some ways, I didn't have to learn a lot of new things for this book. I had to learn some, but a lot of what I learned for How Emotions Are Made really stood me in good stead for this book. So there was a little bit, each essay was a little bit of learning. A couple were, was a little more than the small amount. But I didn't have so much trouble here. I had a lot of trouble with the first book. But still even here, he would tell me that I could take something out and I really wanted to keep it. And I think we only use the signs once. Well, if we could dive in some aspects of the book, I would love that. Can we talk about, so one of the essays looks at evolution. It looks at evolution. Let me ask the big question. Did the human brain evolve to think? That's essentially the question that you address in the essay. Can you speak to it? Sure. The big caveat here is that we don't really know why brains evolved. The big why questions are called teleological questions. And in general, scientists should avoid those questions because we don't know really why, we don't know the why. However, for a very long time, the assumption was that evolution worked in a progressive upward scale, that you start off with simple organisms and those organisms get more complex and more complex and more complex. Now, obviously that's true in some like really general way, right, that life started off as single cell organisms and things got more complex. But the idea that brains evolved in some upward trajectory from simple brains in simple animals to complex brains in complex animals is called a phylogenetic scale. And that phylogenetic scale is embedded in a lot of evolutionary thinking, including Darwin's actually. And it's been seriously challenged, I would say, by modern evolutionary biology. And so thinking is something that, rationality is something that humans, at least in the West, really prize as a great human achievement. And so the idea that the most common evolutionary story is that brains evolved in like sedimentary rock with a layer for instincts, that's your lizard brain, and a layer on top of that for emotions, that's your limbic system, limbic meaning border. So it borders the parts that are for instincts. Oh, interesting. And then the neocortex or new cortex where rationality is supposed to live. That's the sort of traditional story. It just keeps getting layered on top by evolution. Right. And so you can think about, I mean, sedimentary rock is the way typically people describe it. The way I sometimes like to think about it is thinking about the cerebral cortex like icing on an already baked cake, where the cake is your inner beast. These like boiling, roiling instincts and emotions that have to be contained by the cortex. And it's just, it's a fiction, it's a myth. It's a myth that you can trace all the way back to stories about morality in ancient Greece. But what you can do is look at the scientific record and say, well, there are other stories that you could tell about brain evolution and the context in which brains evolved. So when you look at creatures who don't have brains and you look at creatures who do, what's the difference? And you can look at some animals. So we call, scientists call an environment that an animal lives in a niche, their environmental niche. What are the things, what are the parts of the environment that matter to that animal? And so there are some animals whose niche hasn't changed in 400 million years. So they're not, these creatures are modern creatures but they're living in a niche that hasn't changed much. And so their biology hasn't changed much. And you can kind of verify that by looking at the genes that lurk deep in the molecular structure of cells. And so you can, by looking at various animals in their developmental state, meaning not, you don't look at adult animals, you look at embryos of animals and developing animals, you can see, you can piece together a different story. And that story is that brains evolved under the selection pressure of hunting. That in the Cambrian period, hunting emerged on the scene where animals deliberately ate one another. And what, so before the Cambrian period, the animals didn't really have, well, they didn't have brains, but they also didn't have senses really, the very, very rudimentary senses. So the animal that I wrote about in seven and a half lessons is called an amphioxus or a lancelet. And little amphioxus has no eyes, it has no ears, it has no nose, it has no eyes. It has a couple of cells for detecting light and dark for circadian rhythm purposes. And it can't hear, it has a vestibular cell to keep its body upright. It has a very rudimentary sense of touch and it doesn't really have any internal organs other than this like basically stomach. It's like a, just like a, it doesn't have an enteric nervous system. It doesn't have like a gut that moves like we do. It just has basically a tube. So it's like a little container, yeah. And so, and really it doesn't move very much. It can move, it just sort of wriggles. It doesn't have very sophisticated movement. And it's this really sweet little animal. It sort of wriggles its way to a spot and then plants itself in the sand and just filters food as the food goes by. And then when the food concentration decreases, it just ejects itself, wriggles to some spot randomly where probabilistically there will be more food and plants itself again. So it's not really aware, very aware that it has an environment. It has a niche, but that niche is very small and it's not really experiencing that niche very much. So it's basically like a little stomach on a stick. That's really what it is. And, but when animals start to literally hunt each other, all of a sudden it becomes important to have, to be able to sense your environment. Cause you need to know, is that blob up ahead gonna eat me or should I eat it? And so all of a sudden you want, distance senses are very useful. And so in the water, distance senses are vision and a little bit hearing. Olfaction, smelling and touch, because in the water touch is a distance sense cause you can feel the vibration, so it's right. So on land, you know, vision is a distance sense, touch not so much, but for elephants maybe, right? The vibrations. Vibrations, olfaction definitely because of the distance sense. And so it's very important to have a sense of touch and olfaction definitely because of the concentration of, you know, the more concentrated something is, the more likely it is to be close to you. So animals developed senses. They developed a head, like a literal head. So amphyoxus doesn't even have a head really. It's just a long. What's the purpose of a head? That's a great question. Is it to have a jaw? That's a great question. So jaw, so yes, jaws are a major. Useful feature. Yeah, obviously they're a major adaptation after there's a split between vertebrates and invertebrates. So amphyoxus is thought to be very, very similar to the animal that's before that split. But then after the development, very quickly after the development of a head is the development of a jaw, which is a big thing. And what goes along with that is the development of a brain. It's weird, is that just a coincidence that the thing, the part of our body, of the mammal, I think, body that we eat with and attack others with is also the thing that contains all the majority of the brain type of stuff. Well, actually the brain goes with the development of a head and the development of a visual system and an auditory system and an olfactory system and so on. So your senses are developing and the other thing that's happening is that animals are getting bigger because they're, and also their niche is getting bigger. Well, this is the, just sorry to take a tiny tangent on the niche thing is it seems like the niche is getting bigger, but not just bigger, like more complicated, like shaped in weird ways. So predation seems to create, the whole world becomes your oyster, whatever, but you also start to carve out the places in which you can operate the best. Yeah, and in fact, that's absolutely right. And in fact, some scientists think that theory of mind, your ability to make inferences about the inner life of other creatures actually developed under the selection pressure of predation because it makes you a better predator. Do you ever look at, you just said you looked at babies as these wiring creatures. Do you ever think of humans as just clever predators? Like that there's, underneath it all is this the Nietzschean will to power in all of its forms? Or are we now friendlier? Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, there are zeitgeists in how humans think about themselves, right? And so if you look in the 20th century, you can see that the idea of an inner beast that we're just predators, we're just basically animals, baseless animals, violent animals that have to be contained by culture and by our prodigious neocortex really took hold, particularly after World War I, and really held sway for much of that century. And then around, at least in Western writing, I would say, you know, we're talking mainly about Western scientific writing, Western philosophical writing. And then, you know, late 90s maybe, you start to see books and articles about our social nature, that we're social animals. And we are social animals, but what does that mean exactly? And about. It's us carving out different niches in the space of ideas, it looks like. I think so, I think so. So, you know, do humans, can humans be violent? Yes. Can humans be really helpful? Yes, actually. And humans are interesting creatures because, you know, other animals can also be helpful to one another. In fact, there's a whole literature, booming literature on how other animals support one another. They regulate each other's nervous systems in interesting ways, and they will be helpful to one another, right? So for example, there's a whole literature on rodents and how they signal one another what is safe to eat, and they will perform acts of generosity to their conspecifics that are related to them, or who they were raised with. So if an animal was raised in a litter that they were raised in, although not even at the same time, they'll be more likely to help that animal. So there's always some kind of physical relationship between animals that predicts whether or not they'll help one another. For humans, you know, we have ways of categorizing who's in our group and who isn't by nonphysical ways, right? Even by just something abstract, like an idea. And we are much more likely to extend help to people in our own group, whatever that group may be at that moment, whatever feature you're using to do that. Feature you're using to define who's in your group and who isn't. We're more likely to help those people than even members of our own family at times. So humans are much more flexible in their, in the way that they help one another, but also in the way that they harm one another. So I don't think I subscribe to, I don't think I subscribe to, you know, we are primarily this or we are primarily that. I don't think humans have essences in that way, really. I apologize to take us in this direction for a brief moment, but I've been really deep on Stalin and Hitler recently in terms of reading. And is there something that you think about in terms of the nature of evil from a neuroscience perspective? Is there some lessons that are sort of hopeful about human civilization that we can find in our brain with regard to the Hitlers of the world? Do you think about the nature of evil? Yeah, I do. I don't know that what I have to say is so useful from a, I don't know that I can say as a neuroscientist, well, here's a study that, you know, so I sort of have to take off my lab coat, right? And now I'm gonna now conjecture as a human who just also, who has opinions, but who also maybe has some knowledge about neuroscience. But I'm not speaking as a neuroscientist when I say this, cause I don't think neuroscientists know enough really to be able to say, but I guess the kinds of things I think about are, what, so I have always thought, even before I knew anything about neuroscience, I've always thought that, I don't think anybody could become Hitler, but I think the majority of people can be, can do, are capable of doing very bad things. It's just, the question is really how much encouragement does it take from the environment to get them to do something bad? That's what I kind of, when I look at the life of Hitler, it seems like there's so many places where... Something could have intervened. Intervene, no, it could change completely the person. I mean, there's like the caricature, like the obvious places where he was an artist and if he wasn't rejected as an artist, he was a reasonably good artist. So that could have changed, but just his entire, like where he went in Vienna and all these kinds of things, like little interactions could have changed and there's probably millions of other people who are capable, who the environment may be able to mold in the same way it did this particular person to create this particular kind of charismatic leader in this particular moment of time. Absolutely, and I guess the way that I would say it, I would agree 100% and I guess the way that I would say it is like this, in the West, we have a way of reasoning about causation, which focuses on single, simple causes for things. There's an essence to Hitler, there's an essence to his character. He was born with that essence or it was forged very, very early in his life and that explains the horrible landscape of his behavior. But there's another way to think about it, a way that actually is much more consistent with what we know about biology, how biology works in the physical world. And that is that most things are complex, not as in, wow, this is really complex and hard, but complex as in complexity, that is more than the sum of their parts and that most phenomena have many, many weak nonlinear interacting causes. And so little things that we might not even be aware of can shift someone's developmental trajectory from this to that and that's enough to take it on a whole set of other paths and that these things are happening all the time. So it's not random and it's not really, it's not deterministic in the sense that like everything you do determines your outcome, but it's a little more like you're nudging someone from one set of possibilities to another set of possibilities. But I think the thing that I find optimistic is that the other side of that coin is also true. So look at all the people who risked their lives to help people they didn't even know. I mean, I just watched Borat, the new Borat movie. And the thing that I came away with, but the thing I came away with was, look at how generous people were in that. Oh, he's making, there are a lot of people he makes fun of and that's fine, but think about like those two people two guys, those. The Trump supporter guys. The Trump supporter guys. Those guys. That was cool, there was kindness in them, right? They took a complete stranger in a pandemic into their house. Who does that? Like that's a really nice thing. Or there's one scene, I mean, I don't wanna spoil it for people who haven't seen it, but there's one scene where he goes in, he dresses up as a Jew, I laugh myself sick at that scene, seriously, but he goes in and there are these two old Jewish ladies. What a bunch of sweethearts, oh my gosh. Like really, I mean, that was what I was struck by actually. I mean, there are other ones or like the babysitter, right? I mean, she was really kind. And yeah, so that's really what I was more struck by. Like sure, there are other people who do very bad things or say bad things or whatever, but like there's one guy who's completely stoic, like the guy who's sending the messages, I don't know if it's facts or whatever. He's just completely stoic, but he's doing his job actually. Like you don't know what he was thinking inside his head, you don't know what he's feeling, but he was totally professional doing his job. So I guess I just, I had a bit of a different view, I guess. So I also think that about people, I think everybody is capable of kindness, but the question is how much does it take and what are the circumstances? So for some people it's gonna take a lot and for some people it only takes a little bit, but are we actually cultivating an environment for the next generation that provides opportunities for people to go in the direction of caring and kindness or, and I'm not saying that as like a Pollyanna ish person. I think there's a lot of room for competition and debate and so on, but I don't see Hitler as an anomaly and I never have, that was even before I learned anything about neuroscience. And now I would say knowing what we know about developmental trajectories and life histories and how important that is, knowing what we know about that the whole question of like nature versus nurture is a completely wrong question. We have the kind of nature that requires nurture, we have the kind of genes that allow infants to be born with unfinished brains where the brains, their brains are wired across a 25 year period with wiring instructions from the world that is created for them. And so I don't think Hitler is an anomaly, even if it's less probable that that would happen, it's possible that it could happen again and it's not like, you know, he's a bad seed. I mean, that doesn't, I just wanna say for like, of course he's completely 100% responsible for his actions and all the bad things that happen. So I'm not in any way, this is not me saying. But the environment is also responsible in part for creating the evil in this world. So like Hitler's in different versions of even more subtle, more smaller scale versions of evil. But I tend to believe that there's a much stronger, I don't like to talk about evolutionary advantages, but it seems like it makes sense for love to be a more powerful emergent phenomena of our collective intelligence versus hate and evil and destruction. Because from a survival, from a niche perspective, it seems to be like in my own life and my thinking about the intuition about the way humans work together to solve problems, it seems that love is a very useful tool. I definitely agree with you. But I think the caveat here is that, you know, humans, the research suggests that humans are capable of great acts of kindness and great acts of generosity to people in their in group. Right, so we're also tribal. Yeah, I mean, that's the kitschy way to say it. We're tribes, we're tribal, yeah. So that's the kitschy way to say it. What I would say is that, you know, there are a lot of features that you can use to describe yourself. You don't have one identity, you don't have one self, you have many selves, you have many identities. Sometimes you're a man, sometimes you're a scientist, sometimes you're a, do you have a brother or a sister? Yeah, brother. So sometimes you're a brother. You know, sometimes you're a friend. Sometimes you're a human so you can keep zooming out. Yes, exactly. Living organism on Earth. Yes, exactly, that's exactly right. And so there are some people who there is research which suggests that there are some people who will tell you, I think it's appropriate and better to help. I should help my family more than I should help my neighbors and I should help my neighbors more than I should help the average stranger. And I should help, you know, the average stranger in my country more than I should help somebody outside my country. And I should help humans more than I should help, you know, other animals. And I should, right, so there's a clear hierarchy of helping and there are other people who, you know, they are, their niche is much more inclusive, right? And that they're humans first, right? Or creatures of the Earth first, let's say. And I don't think we know how flexible those attitudes are because I don't think the research really tells us that. But in any case, there are, you know, and there are beliefs, people also have beliefs about, there's this really interesting research in, really in anthropology that looks at what are cultures particularly afraid of? Like what the people in a particular culture are organizing their social systems to prevent certain types of problems. So what are the problems that they're worried about? And so there are some cultures that are much more hierarchical and some cultures that are, you know, much more egalitarian. There are some cultures that, you know, in the debate of like getting along versus getting ahead, there are some cultures that really prioritize the individual over the group. And there are other cultures that really prioritize the group over the individual. You know, it's not like one of these is right and one of these is wrong, it's that, you know, different combinations of these features are different solutions that humans have come up with for living in groups, which is a major adaptive advantage of our species. And it's not the case that one of these is better and one of these is worse. Although as a person, of course, I have opinions about that. And as a person, I can say, I would very much prefer certain, I have certain beliefs and I really want everyone in the world to live by those beliefs, you know. But as a scientist, I know that it's not really the case that for the species, any one of these is better than any other. There are different solutions that work differentially well in particular, you know, ecological parts of the world. But for individual humans, there are definitely some systems that are better and some systems that are worse, right? But when anthropologists or when neuroscientists or biologists are talking, they're not usually talking about the lives of individual people, they're talking about, you know, the species, what's better for the species, the survivability of the species. And what's better for the survivability of the species is variation, that we have lots of cultures with lots of different solutions because if the environment were to change drastically, some of those solutions will work better than others. And you can see that happening with COVID. Right, so some people might be more susceptible to this virus than others. And so variation is very useful. Say COVID was much, much more destructive than it is. And like, I don't know, 20% of the population died. So, you know, it's good to have variability because then at least some percent will survive. Yeah, I mean, the way that I used to describe it was, you know, using, you know, those movies like the War of the Worlds or Pacific Rim, you know, where like aliens come down from outer space and they, you know, wanna kill humans. And so all the humans band together as a species and they all, like all the, you know, little squabbling from countries and whatever all, you know, goes away and everyone is just one big, you know. Well, that, you know, that doesn't happen. I mean, cause COVID is, you know, a virus like COVID 19 is like a creature from outer space. And that's not what you see happening. What you do see happening, it is true that some people, I mean, we could use this as an example of essentialism also. So just to say, like exposure to the virus does not mean that you will become infected with a disease. So, I mean, in controlled studies, one of which was actually a coronavirus, not COVID, but this was, these are studies from 10 or so years ago, you know, only somewhere between 20 and 40% of people were developed respiratory illness when a virus was placed in their nose. And so. And there's a dose question, all those. Well, not in these studies, actually. So in these studies, the dose was consistent across all people and everything, you know, they were sequestered in hotel rooms and what they ate was, you know, measured out by scientists and so on. And so when you hold dose, I mean, the dose issue is a real issue in the real world, but in these studies, that was controlled. And only somewhere between 20, depending on the study, between 20 and 40% of people became infected with a disease. So exposure to a virus doesn't mean de facto that you will develop an illness. You will be a carrier and you will spread the virus to other people, but you yourself may not, your immune system may be in a state that you can make enough antibodies to not show symptoms, not develop symptoms. And so, of course, what this means is, again, is that, you know, like if I asked you, do you think, you know, a virus is the cause of a common cold or, you know, most people, if I asked this question, I can tell you, because I asked this question. So do you think a virus is the cause of a cold? Most people would say, yes, I think it is. And then I say, yeah, well, only 20 to 40% of people develop respiratory illness in exposure to a virus. So clearly it is a necessary cause, but it's not a sufficient cause. And there are other causes, again, so not simple single causes for things, right? Multiple interacting influences. So it is true that individuals vary in their susceptibility to illness upon exposure, but different cultures have different sets of norms and practices that allow, that will slow or speed the spread. And that's the point that I was actually trying to make here that, you know, when the environment changes, that is, there's a mutation of a virus that is incredibly infectious, some cultures will succumb, people in some cultures will succumb faster because of the particular norms and practices that they've developed in their culture versus other cultures. Now, there could be some other, you know, thing that changes that where those other cultures or, you know, would do better. So very individualistic cultures like ours may do much better under other types of selection pressures. But for COVID, for things like COVID, you know, my colleague Michelle Gelfant, her research shows that she looks at like loose cultures and tight cultures, so cultures that have very, very strict rules versus cultures that are much more individualistic and where personal freedoms are more valued. And she, you know, her research suggests that for pandemic circumstances, tight cultures actually, the people survive better. Just to linger a little bit longer, we started this part of the conversation talking about, you know, did humans evolve to think, did the human brain evolve to think, implying is there like a progress to the thing that's always improving? That's right, we never, yeah, and so the answer is no. But let me sort of push back, but so your intuition is very strong here, not your intuition, the way you describe this, but is it possible there's a direction to this evolution? Like, do you think of this evolution as having a direction? Like it's like walking along a certain path towards something? Is it, you know, what is it? Is it Elon Musk said like the Earth got bombarded with photons and then all of a sudden, like a Tesla was launched into space or whatever, a rocket started coming? Like, is there a sense in which, even though in the, like within the system, the evolution seems to be this mess of variation, we're kind of trying to find our niches and so on, but do you think there, ultimately, when you zoom out, there is a direction that's strong, that does tend towards greater complexity and intelligence? No. So, I mean, and again, what I would say is I'm really, I'm really just echoing people who are much smarter than I am about this. But see, you're saying smarter. I thought it doesn't, there's no, I thought there's no smarter. No, I didn't say there's no smarter. I said there's no direction. So I think the thing to say, or what I understand to be the case, is that there's variation. It's not unbounded variation. And there are selectors. There are pressures that will select. And so not anything is possible because we live on a planet that has certain physical realities to it, right? But those physical realities are what constrain the possibilities, the physical realities of our genes and the physical realities of our corporeal bodies and the physical realities of life on this planet. So what I would say is that there's no direction, but there is, it's not infinite possibility because we live on a particular planet that has particular statistical regularities in it, and some things will never happen. And so all of those things are interacting with our genes and so on, and the physical nature of our bodies to make some things more possible and some things less possible. Look, I mean, humans have very complex brains, but birds have complex brains, and so do octopuses have very complex brains. And all three sets of all three of those brains are somewhat different from one another. Some birds have very complex brains. Some even have rudimentary language. They have no cerebral cortex. I mean, admittedly, they have, this is now lesson two, right? They have, is it lesson two or lesson one? Let me think. No, this is lesson one. They have the same neurons, the same neurons that in a human become the cerebral cortex. Birds have those neurons. They just don't form themselves into a cerebral cortex. But I mean, crows, for example, are very sophisticated animals. They can do a lot of the things that humans can do. In fact, all of the things that humans do that are very special, that seem very special, there's at least one other animal on the planet that can do those things too. What's special about the human brain is that we put them all together. So we learn from one another. We don't have to experience everything ourselves. We can watch another animal or another human experience something, and we can learn from that. Well, there are many other animals who can learn by copying. That we communicate with each other very, very efficiently. We have language. But we're not the only animals who are efficient communicators. There are lots of other animals who can efficiently communicate, like bees, for example. We cooperate really well with one another to do grand things. But there are other animals that cooperate too. And so every innovation that we have, other animals have too. What we have is we have all of those together interwoven in this very complex dance in a brain that is not unique exactly, but that is, it does have some features that make it particularly useful for us to do all of these things, to have all of these things intertwined. So our brains are, actually the last time we talked, I made a mistake because I said in my enthusiasm, I said, you know, our brains are not larger, or relative to our bodies, our brains are not larger than other primates. And that's actually not true, actually. Our brains relative to our body size is somewhat larger. So an ape who's not a human, that's not a human, their brains are larger than their body sizes than say, relative to like a smaller monkey. And a human's brain is larger relative to its body size than a gorilla. So that's a good approximation of your, of whatever, of the bunch of stuff that you can shove in there. But, well, what I was gonna say is, but our cerebral cortex is not larger than what you would expect for a brain of its size. So relative to say an ape, like a gorilla or a chimp, or even a mammal like a dolphin or an elephant, you know, our brains, our cerebral cortex is as large as you would expect it to be for a brain of our size. So there's nothing special about our cerebral cortex. And this is something I explain in the book, where I say, okay, you know, like by analogy, if you walk into somebody's house and you see that they have a huge kitchen, you might think, well, maybe this is a place I really definitely wanna eat dinner at because these people must be gourmet cooks. But you don't know anything about what the size of their kitchen means unless you consider it in relation to the size of the rest of the house. If it's a big kitchen in a really big house, it's not telling you anything special, right? If it's a big kitchen in a small house, then that might be a place that you wanna eat for, you wanna stay for dinner because it's more likely that that kitchen is large for a special reason. And so the cerebral cortex of a human brain isn't in and of itself special because of its size. However, there are some genetic changes that have happened in the human brain as it's grown to whatever size is typical for the whole brain size, right? There are some changes that do give the human brain slightly more of some capacities. They're not special, but we can do some things much better than other animals. And correspondingly, other animals can do some things much better than we can. We can't grow back limbs, we can't lift 50 times our own body weight. Well, I mean, maybe you can, but I can't lift 50 times my own body weight. Ants with that regard are very impressive. And then you're saying with the frontal cortex, like that's the size is not always the right measure of capability, I guess. So size isn't everything. Size isn't everything. That's a quoted book. People like it when I disagree, so let me disagree with you on something or just like play devil's advocate a little bit. So you've painted a really nice picture that evolution doesn't have a direction, but is it possible if we just ran Earth over and over again, like this video game, that the final result will be the same. So in the sense that we're, eventually there'll be an AGI type, HAL 9000 type system that just like flies and colonizes nearby Earth like planets. And it's always will be the same. And the different organisms and the different evolution of the brain, like it doesn't feel like it has like a direction, but given the constraints of Earth and whatever this imperative, whatever the hell is running this universe, like it seems like it's running towards something, is it possible that it will always be the same? Thereby it will be a direction. Yeah, I think as you know better than anyone else that the answer to that question is, of course there's some probability that could happen, right? It's not a yes or no answer. It's what's the probability that that would happen? And there's a whole distribution of possibilities. So maybe we end up, what's the probability we end up with exactly the same compliment of creatures, including us? What's the likelihood that we end up with creatures that are similar to humans, but similar in certain ways, let's say, but not exactly humans or all the way to a completely different distribution of creatures. What's the intuition? Like if you were to bet money, what does that distribution look like if we ran Earth over and over and over again? I would say given the, you're now asking me questions that. This is not science. This is not science. But I would say, okay, well, what's the probability that it's gonna be a carbon life form? Probably high. But that's because I don't know anything about really. Yeah, I'm not really well versed that. What's the probability that, so what's the probability that the animals will begin in the ocean and crawl out onto land? Versus the other way. Versus the, I would say probably high. I don't know. You know, but do I think what's the likelihood that we would end up with exactly the same or very similar? I think it's low actually. I wouldn't say it's low, but I would say it's not 100%. And I'm not even sure it's 50%. You know, I would say, I don't think that we're here by accident because I think, like I said, there are constraints. Like there are some physical constraints about Earth. Now, of course, if you were a cosmologist, you could say, well, the fact that the Earth is, if you were to do the Big Bang over again and keep doing it over and over and over again, would you still get the same solar systems? Would you still get the same planets? Would, you know, would you still get the same galaxies, the same solar systems, the same planets? You know, I don't know, but my guess is probably not because there are random things that happen that can, again, send things in one direct, you know, make one set of trajectories possible and another set impossible. So, but I guess my, if I were gonna bet money or something valuable, I would probably say, it's not zero and it's not 100% and it's probably not even 50%. So there's some probability, but I don't know. That it will be similar. That it will be similar, but I don't think, I just think there are too many degrees of freedom. There are too many degrees of freedom. I mean, one of the real tensions in writing this book is to, on the one hand, there's some truth in saying that humans are not special. We are just, you know, we're not special in the animal kingdom. All animals are well adapted. If they're survived, they're well adapted to their niche. It does happen to be the case that our niche is large. For any individual human, your niche is whatever it is. But for the species, right? We live almost everywhere, not everywhere, but almost everywhere on the planet, but not in the ocean. And actually other animals like bacteria, for example, have us beat miles, you know, hands down, right? So we're, by any definition, we're not special. We're just, you know, adapted to our environment. But bacteria don't have a podcast. Exactly, exactly. And so that's the other, so that's the tension, right? So on the one hand, you know, we're not special animals. We're just, you know, particularly well adapted to our niche. On the other hand, our niche is huge. And we, you know, we don't just adapt to our environment. We add to our environment. We make stuff up, give it a name, and then it becomes real. And so no other animal can do that. And so I think the thing, the way to think about it from my perspective or the way I made sense of it is to say, you can look at any individual single characteristic that a human has that seems remarkable. And you can find that in some other animal. What you can't find in any other animal is all of those characteristics together in a brain that is souped up in particular ways, like ours is. And if you combine these things, multiple interacting causes, right? Not one essence, like your cortex, your big neocortex, but which isn't really that big. I mean, it's just big for your big brain, for the size of your big brain. It's the size it should be. If you add all those things together and they interact with each other, that produces some pretty remarkable results. And if you're aware of that, then you can start asking different kinds of questions about what it means to be human and what kind of a human you wanna be and what kind of a world do you wanna curate for the next generation of humans. I think that's the goal anyways, right? Is just to have a glimpse of, instead of thinking about things in a simple linear way, just to have a glimpse of some of the things that matter, that evidence suggests matters to the kind of brain in the kind of bodies that we have. Once you know that, you can work with it a little bit. You write, words have power over your biology. Right now, I can text the words, I love you from the United States to my close friend in Belgium. And even though she cannot hear my voice or see my face, I will change her heart rate, her breathing and her metabolism. By the way, beautifully written. Or someone could text something ambiguous to you, like, is your door locked? And odds are that it would affect your nervous system in an unpleasant way. So, I mean, there's a lot of stuff to talk about here, but just one way to ask is, why do you think words have so much power over our brain? Well, I think we just have to look at the anatomy of the brain to answer that question. So, if you look at the parts of the brain, the systems that are important for processing language, you can see that some of these regions are also important for controlling your major organ systems. And like your autonomic nervous system, that controls your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, and so on. That these regions control your endocrine system, your immune system, and so on. So, and you can actually see this in other animals too. So in birds, for example, the neurons that are responsible for birdsong also control the systems of a bird's body. And the reason why I bring that up is that the, there's some scientists think that the anatomy of a bird's brain that control birdsong are homologous or structurally have a similar origin to the human system for language. So, the parts of the brain that are important for processing language are not unique in, and specialized for language. They do many things. And one of the things they do is control your major organ systems. Do you think we can fall in love, I have arguments about this all the time. Do you think we can fall in love based on words alone? Well, I think people have been doing it for centuries. I mean, maybe it used to be the case that people wrote letters to each other, you know, and then that was how they communicated. I guess that's how you and Dan got it. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So is the answer a clear yes there? Because I get a lot of pushback from people often that you need the touch and the smell and, you know, the bodily stuff. I think the touch and the smell and the bodily stuff helps. Okay. But I don't think it's necessary. Do you think you can have a lifelong monogamous relationship with an AI system that only communicates with you on text, romantic relationship? Well, I suppose that's an empirical question that hasn't been answered yet. But I guess what I would say is I don't think I could. Could any human? Could the average human? Could, you know, so if I, if I even, I wanna even modify that and say, I'm thinking now of Tom Hanks and the movie. Castaway? Yeah, you know, with Wilson. Yeah. I think if that was, if you had to make that work, if you had to make that work. With a volleyball, yeah. If you had to make it work, could you, could you, prediction and simulation, right? So if you had to make it work, could you make it work? Using simulation and, you know, your past experience, could you make it work? Could you make it work? You as a human, could you, could you like? Could you have a relationship literally with an inanimate object and have it sustain you in the way that another human could? Your life would probably be shorter because you wouldn't actually derive the body budgeting benefits from, right? So we've talked about, you know, how your brain, its most important job is to control your body and you can describe that as your brain running a budget for your body and there are metaphorical, you know, deposits and withdrawals into your body budget and you also make deposits and withdrawals in other people's body budgets, figuratively speaking. So you wouldn't have that particular benefit. So your life would probably be shorter but I think it would be harder for some people than for other people. Yeah, I tend to, my intuition is that you can have a deep fulfilling relationship with a volleyball. I think, I think a lot of the, the environments that set up, I think that's a really good example. Like the constraints of your particular environment define the, like I believe like scarcity is a good catalyst for deep, meaningful connection with other humans and with inanimate objects. So the less you have, the more fulfilling those relationships are. And I would say a relationship with a volleyball, the sex is not great but everything else, I feel like it could be a very fulfilling relationship which I don't know from an engineering perspective what to do with that. And just like you said, it is an empirical question but. But there are places to learn about that, right? So for example, think about children and their blankets. Right, so there, there's something tactile and there's something olfactory and it's very comforting. I mean, even for, even for nonhuman little animals, right? Like puppies and so I don't know about cats but, but. Cats are cold hearted, there's no, there's nothing going on there. I don't know, there are some cats that are very doglike. I mean, really, so. Some cats identify as dogs, yes. I think that's true, yeah, they're species fluid. So you also write, when it comes to human minds, variation is the norm. And what we call quote, human nature is really many human natures. So again, many questions I can ask here. But maybe an interesting one to ask is I often hear, we often hear this idea of be yourself. Is this possible to be yourself? Is it a good idea to strive to be yourself? Is it, does that even have any meaning? It's a very Western question, first of all, because which self are you talking about? You don't have one self. There is no self that's an essence of you. You have multiple selves. Actually, there is research on this. To quote the great social psychologist, Hazel Marcus, you're never, you cannot be a self by yourself. And so different contexts pull for or draw on different features of who you are or what you believe, what you feel, what your actions are. A different context will put certain things, make some features be more in the foreground and some in the background. It takes us back right to our discussion earlier about Stalin and Hitler and so on. The thing that I would caution, in addition to the fact that there is no single self, that you have multiple selves, who you can be, and you can certainly choose the situations that you put yourself in to some extent. Not everybody has complete choice, but everybody has a little bit of choice. And I think I said this to you before, that one of the pieces of advice that we gave Sophia when she went, our daughter, when she was going off to college, was try to spend time around people, choose relationships that allow you to be your best self. We should have said your best selves, but, you know. The pool of selves given the environment. Yeah, but the one thing I do wanna say is that the risk of saying be yourself, just be yourself, is that that can be used as an excuse. Well, this is just the way that I am, I'm just like this. And that, I think, should be tremendously resisted. So that's one, that's for the excuse side, but, you know, I'm really self critical often, I'm full of doubt, and people often tell me, just don't worry about it, just be yourself, man. And it's, the thing is, it almost, it's not, from an engineering perspective, does not seem like actionable advice. Because, I guess, constantly worrying about who, what are the right words to say to express how I'm feeling is, I guess, myself. There's a kind of line, I guess, that this might be a Western idea, but something that feels genuine and something that feels non genuine. And I'm not sure what that means, because I would like to be fully genuine and fully open, but I'm also aware, like this morning, I was very silly and giddy, I was like, this is just being funny and relaxed and light, like there's nothing that could bother me in the world, I was just smiling and happy. And then I remember last night, was just feeling very grumpy, like stuff was bothering me. Like certain things were bothering me. And like, what are those? Are those different selves? Like what, who am I in that? And what do I do? Because if we take Twitter as an example, if I actually send a tweet last night and a tweet this morning, it's gonna be very two different people tweeting that. And I don't know what to do with that, because one does seem to be more me than the other, but that's maybe because there's a story that I'm trying, there's something I'm striving to be, like the ultimate human that I might become, I have maybe a vision of that, and I'm trying to become that. But it does seem like there's a lot of different minds in there. And they're all like having a discussion and a battle for who's gonna win. I suppose you could think of it that way, but there's another way to think of it, I think, and that is that maybe the more Buddhist way to think of it, right, or a more contemplative way to think about it, which is not that you have multiple personalities inside your head, but you have, your brain has this amazing capacity. It has a population of experiences that you've had that it can regenerate, reconstitute. And it can even take bits and pieces of those experiences and combine them into something new. And it's often doing this to predict what's going to happen next and to plan your actions, but it's also happening, this also happens just, that's what mind wandering is, or just internal thought and so on. It's the same mechanism, really. And so a lot of times we hear the saying, just think, if you think differently, you'll feel differently. But your brain is having a conversation continually with your body, and your body, your brain's trying to control your body, well, trying, your brain is controlling your body, your body is sending information back to the brain, and in part, the information that your body sends back to your brain, just like the information coming from the world, initiates the next volley of predictions or simulations. So in some ways, you could also say, the way that you feel, I think we talked before about affective feeling or mood, coming from the sensations of body budgeting, influences what you think. And as much as, so feelings influence thought, as much as thought influence feeling, and maybe more. But just the whole thing doesn't seem stable. Well, it's a dynamic system, Mr. Engineer, right? It's a dynamic, it's a dynamical system, right? Nonlinear dynamical system. And I think that's, I'm actually writing a paper with a bunch of engineers about this actually. But I mean, other people have talked about the brain as a dynamical system before, but the real tricky bit is trying to figure out how do you get mental features out of that system? I guess one thing to figure out how you get a motor movement out of that system, it's another thing to figure out how you get a mental feature, like a feeling of being loved or a feeling of being worthwhile, or a feeling of just basically feeling like shit. How do you get a feeling, a mental features out of that system? So what I would say is that you aren't, the Buddhist thing to say is that you're not one person and you're not many people. You are the sum of your experiences and who you are in any given moment, meaning what your actions will be, is influenced by the state of your body and the state of the world that you've put yourself in. And you can change either of those things. One is a little easier to change than the other, right? You can change your environment by literally getting up and moving, or you can change it by paying attention to some things differently and letting some features come to the fore and other features be backgrounded. Like I'm looking around your place. Oh no, this is not something you should do. No, but I'm gonna say one thing. No green plants, no green plants. Because green plants mean a home and I want this to be temporary. Fair, fair, but. What goes to your mind when you see no green plants? No, I'm just making the point that what if you, again, not everybody has control over their environment. Some people don't have control over the noise or the temperature or any of those things. But everybody has a little bit of control and you can place things in your environment, photographs, plants, anything that's meaningful to you and use it as a shift of environment when you need it. You can also do things to change the conditions of your body. When you exercise every day, you're making an investment in your body. Actually, you're making an investment in your brain too. It makes you, even though it's unpleasant and there's a cost to it, if you replenish, if you invest and you make up that, you make a deposit and you make up what you've spent, you're basically making an investment in making it easier for your brain to control your body in the future. So you can make sure you're hydrated. Drink water. You don't have to drink bottled water. You can drink water from the tap. This is in most places, maybe not everywhere, but most places in the developed world. You can try to get enough sleep. Not everybody has that luxury, but everybody can do something to make their body budgets a little more solvent. And that will also make it more likely that certain thoughts will emerge from that prediction machine, basically. That's the control you do have, is being able to control the environment. That's really well put. I don't think we've talked about this, so let's go to the biggest unanswerable questions of consciousness. What is, you just rolled your eyes. I did, that was my, yeah. So what is consciousness from a neuroscience perspective? I know you, I mean. I made notes, you know, because you gave me some questions in advance and I made notes for every single. Oh, except that one? Yeah, well that one I had, what the fuck? And then I took it out. So is there something interesting, because you're so pragmatic. Is there something interesting to say about intuition building about consciousness? Or is this something that we're just totally clueless about that this is, let's focus on the body, the brain listens to the body, the body speaks to the brain, and let's just figure this piece out, and then consciousness will probably emerge somehow after that. No, I think, you know, well, first of all, I'll just say up front, I am not a philosopher of consciousness and I'm not a neuroscientist who focuses on consciousness. I mean, in some sense, I do study it because I study affect and mood. And that is the, you know, to use the phrase, that is the hard question of consciousness. How is it that your brain is modeling your body? Brain is modeling the sensory conditions of your body. And it's being updated, that model is being updated by the sense data that's coming from your body and it's happening continuously your whole life. And you don't feel those sensations directly. What you feel is a general sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness, comfort, discomfort, feeling worked up, feeling calm. So we call that affect, you know, most people call it mood. So how is it that your brain gives you this very low dimensional feeling of mood or affect when it's presumably receiving a very high dimensional array of sense data? And the model that the brain is running of the body has to be high dimensional because there's a lot going on in there, right? You're not aware, but as you're sitting there quietly, as your listeners or as our viewers are sitting. They might be working out, running now, or as many of them write to me. That's fair. They're laying in bed, smoking weed with their eyes closed. That's fair, so maybe we should say that bit again then. So if, so some people may be working out, some people may be, you know, relaxing. But you know, even if you're sitting very still while you're watching this or listening to this, there's a whole drama going on inside your body that you're largely unaware of. Yet your brain makes you aware or gives you a status report in a sense by virtue of these mental features of feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable, feeling energetic, feeling tired and so on. And so how the hell is it doing that? That is the basic question of consciousness. And like the status reports seem to be, in the way we experience them, seem to be quite simple. Like it doesn't feel like there's a lot of data. Yeah, no, there isn't. So when you feel, when you feel discomfort, when you're feeling basically like shit, you feel like shit, what does that tell you? Like, what are you supposed to do next? What caused it? I mean, the thing is not one thing caused it, right? It's multiple factors probably influencing your physical state. Your body budget. It's very high dimensional, yeah. It's very high dimensional. And there are different temporal scales of influence, right? So the state of your gut is not just influenced by what you ate five minutes ago. It's also what you ate a day ago and two days ago and so on. So I think the, you know, when I'm, I'm not trying to weasel out of the question, I just think it's the hardest question actually. Do you think we'll ever understand it as scientists? I think that we will understand it as well as we understand other things like the birth of the universe or the, you know, the nature of the universe, I guess I would say. So do I think we can get to that level of an explanation? I do actually, but I think that we have to start asking somewhat different questions and approaching the science somewhat differently than we have in the past. I mean, it's also possible that consciousness is much more difficult to understand than the nature of the universe. It is, but I wasn't necessarily saying that it was a question that was of equivalent complexity. I was saying that I do think that we could get to some, I am optimistic that I would not, I would be very willing to invest the time, my time on this earth as a scientist in trying to answer that question if I could do it the way that I wanna do it, not in the way that it's currently being done. So like rigorously? I don't wanna say unrigorously. I just wanna say that there are certain set of assumptions that, you know, scientists have what I would call ontological commitments. They're commitments about the way the world is or the way that nature is. And these commitments lead scientists sometimes blindly without, they don't, scientists sometimes, sometimes scientists are aware of these commitments, but sometimes they're not. And these commitments on the list influence how scientists ask questions, what they measure, how they measure, and I just have very different views than a lot of my colleagues about the ways to approach this. Not everybody, but the way that I would approach it would be different and it would cost more and it would take longer. It doesn't fit very well into the current incentive structure of science. And so do I think that doing science the way science is currently done with the budget that it currently has and the incentive structure that it currently has will we have an answer? No, I think absolutely not. Good luck is what I would say. People love book recommendations. Let me ask what three books. Oh, you can't just like, you can't just give me three. I mean, like really three? What seven and a half books you can recommend. So you're also the author of seven and a half lessons about the brain. You're a author of how emotions are made. Okay, so definitely those are the top two recommendations of all, the two greatest books of all time. Other than that, are there books that technical, fiction, philosophical that you've enjoyed or you might recommend to others? Yes, actually, you know, every PhD student when they graduate with their PhD, I give them a set, like a little library, like a set of books, you know, some of which they've already read, some of which I want them to read or, but I think nonfiction books, I would read, the things I would recommend are The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin. It's a little book published in 2000, which is, I think, a really good introduction to complexity and population thinking as opposed to essentialism. So this idea, essentialism is this idea that, you know, there's an essence to each person, whether it's a soul or your genes or what have you, as opposed to this idea that you, we have the kind of nature that requires a nurture. We are, we are, you are the product of a complex dance between an environment, between a set of genes and an environment that turns those genes on and off to produce your brain and your body and really who you are at any given moment. It's a good title for that, Triple Helix. So playing on the double helix where it's just the biology, it's bigger than the biology. Exactly. It's a wonderful book. I've read it probably six or seven times throughout the year. He has another book too, which is, it's more, I think scientists would find it, I don't know, I've loved it. It's called Biology as Ideology. And it really is all about, I wouldn't call it one of the best books of all time, but I love the book because it really does point out, you know, that science is its currently practice. I mean, the book was written in 1991, but it actually, I think, still holds, that science is a currently practice, has a set of ontological commitments, which are somewhat problematic. So the assumptions are limiting. Yeah, in ways that you, it's, you know, it's like you're a fish in water and you don't, like, okay, so, yeah, so here's the. David Foster Wallace, that stuff. Yeah, but, you know, but here's a really cool thing I just learned recently. Is it okay to go off on this tangent for a minute? Yeah, yeah, let's go tangents, great. I was just gonna say that I just learned recently that we don't have water receptors on our skin. So how do you know when you're sweating? How do you know when a raindrop, when, you know, when it's gonna rain and, you know, like a raindrop hits your skin and you can feel that little drop of wetness. How is it that you feel that drop of wetness when we don't have water receptors in our skin? And I was, when I. My mind's blown already. Yeah, that was, I have my reaction too, right? I was like, of course we don't because we evolved in the water. Like, why would we need, you know, it just, it was just this like, you know, you have these moments where you're like, oh, of course, there's like a, yeah, so. You'll never see rain the same way again. So the answer is it's a combination of temperature and touch, but it's a complex sense that's only computed in your brain. There's no receptor for it. Anyways. Yeah, that's why like snow versus cold rain versus warm rain all feel different because you're trying to infer stuff from the temperature and the size of the droplets is fascinating. Yeah, your brain is a prediction machine. It's using lots and lots of information and combining it. You know, anyway, so. But so biology is ideology is, I wouldn't say it's one of the greatest books of all time, but it is a really useful book. There's a book by, if you're interested in psychology or the mind at all, there's a wonderful book, a little, it's a fairly small book called Naming the Mind by Kurt Danziger, who's a historian of psychology. Everybody in my lab reads both of these books. So what's the book? It's about the origin of the, where did we get the theory of mind that we have that the human mind is populated by thoughts and feelings and perceptions and where did those categories come from? Because they don't exist in all cultures. Oh, so this isn't, that's a cultural construct? The idea that you have thoughts and feelings and they're very distinct is definitely a cultural construct. That's another mind blowing thing, just like the rain. So Kurt Danziger is a, the opening chapter in that book is absolutely mind blowing. I love it, I love it. I just think it's fantastic. And I would say that there are many, many popular science books that I could recommend that I think are extremely well written in their own way. You know, before I, maybe I said this to you, but before I undertook writing How Emotions Are Made, I read, I don't know, somewhere on the order of 50 or 60 popular science books to try to figure out how to write a popular science book. Because while there are many books about writing, Stephen King has a great book about writing. And, you know, where he gives tips interlaced with his own personal history. That was where I learned you write for a specific person. You have a specific person in mind. And that's, for me, that person is Dan. That's fascinating. I mean, that's a whole nother conversation to have like which popular science books, like what you learned from that search. Because there's, I have some, for me, some popular science books that like I just roll my eyes, like this is too, it's the same with TED Talks. Like some of them go too much into the flowery and don't, I would say don't give enough respect to the intelligence of the reader. And, but that's, this is my own bias very specifically. I completely agree with you. And in fact, I have a colleague, his name is Van Yang, who, you know, he produced a cinematic lecture of how emotions are made that we wrote together with Joseph Fridman, no relation. Yes. Well, we're all related. Well, I mean, you and I are probably, you know, have some, yeah. Yeah, I remember. It's the memories are in there somewhere. Yeah, it's from many, many, many generations ago. Well, half my family is Russian, so from. The good half. The good half, right. But, you know, he, his goal actually is to produce, you know, videos and lectures that are beautiful and educational and that don't dumb the material down. And he's really remarkable at it actually. I mean, just, but again, you know, that requires a bit of a paradigm shift. We could have a whole conversation about the split between entertainment and education in this country and why it is the way it is, but that's another conversation. To be continued. But I would say if I were to pick one book that I think is a really good example of good science writing, it would be The Beak of the Finch. Which won a Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago. And I'm not, I'm not remembering the author's name. I'm blanking. But the, I'm guessing, is it focusing on birds and the evolution of birds? Actually, there's also The Evolution of Beauty, which is, yeah, which is also a great book. But no, The Beak of the Finch is, it's a, it has two storylines that are interwoven. One is about Darwin and Darwin's explorations in the Galapagos Island. And then modern day researchers from Princeton who have a research program in the Galapagos looking at Darwin's finches. And it's just a really, first of all, there's top notch science in there. And really science, like evolutionary biology that a lot of people don't know. And it's told really, really well. It sounds like they're also, there's a narrative in there. It's like storytelling too. Yeah, I think all good popular science books are storytelling, but storytelling grounded, constrained by the evidence. And then I just wanna say that there are, for fiction, I'm a really big fan of love stories, just to return us to the topic that we began with. And so my, some of my favorite love stories are Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's a love story about people who you wouldn't expect to fall in love and all the people around them who have to overcome their prejudices. And I love this book. What do you like, like what makes a good love story? There isn't one thing. There are many different things that make a good love story. But I think in this case, you can feel, you can feel the journey. You can feel the journey that these characters are on and all the people around them are on this journey too, basically to come to grips with this really unexpected love, really profound love that develops between these two characters who are very unlikely to have fallen in love, but they do. And it's just, it's very gentle. Another book like that is the storied life of A.J. Fierke, which is also a love story. But in this case, it's a love story between a little girl and her adopted dad. And the dad is this like real curmudgeony, you know, guy. But of course there's a story there. And it's just a beautiful love story. But it also, it's like everybody in this community falls in love with him because he falls in love with her. And he, you know, she just gets left at his store, his bookstore, he has this failing bookstore. And he discovers that, you know, he feels like inexplicably this need to take care of this little baby. And this whole life emerges out of that one decision, which is really beautiful actually, very poignant. Do you think the greatest stories have a happy ending or a heartbreak at the end? That's such a Russian question. It's like Russian tragedies, you know. So I would say the answer to that for me, there has to be heartbreak. Yeah, I really don't like heartbreak. I don't like heartbreak. I want there to be a happy ending or at least a hopeful ending. But you know, like Dr. Chivago, like, or the English patient, oh my goodness, like why? Oh, it's just, yeah, no, mm mm. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it on a happy note like this. Lisa, like I said, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for wasting yet more time with me talking again. People should definitely get your book and maybe one day I can't wait to talk to your husband as well. Well, right back at you, Lexi. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett and thank you to our sponsors. Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. Masterclass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history. And BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Sun Tzu and the Art of War. There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combination of these five give rise to more melodies that can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues that can ever be seen. 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Lisa Feldman Barrett: Love, Evolution, and the Human Brain | Lex Fridman Podcast #140

The following is a conversation with Erik Brynjolfsson. He's an economics professor at Stanford and the director of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. Previously, he was a long, long time professor at MIT where he did groundbreaking work on the economics of information. He's the author of many books, including The Second Machine Age and Machine Platform Crowd, coauthored with Andrew McAfee. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Ventura Watches, the maker of classy, well performing watches. Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. And CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on our economy and our world is something worth thinking deeply about. Like with many topics that are linked to predicting the future evolution of technology, it is often too easy to fall into one of two camps. The fear mongering camp or the technological utopianism camp. As always, the future will land us somewhere in between. I prefer to wear two hats in these discussions and alternate between them often. The hat of a pragmatic engineer and the hat of a futurist. This is probably a good time to mention Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate who has been one of the high profile thinkers on this topic. And I'm sure I will speak with him on this podcast eventually. A conversation with Andrew has been on the table many times. Our schedules just haven't aligned, especially because I have a strongly held to preference for long form, two, three, four hours or more, and in person. I work hard to not compromise on this. Trust me, it's not easy. Even more so in the times of COVID, which requires getting tested nonstop, staying isolated and doing a lot of costly and uncomfortable things that minimize risk for the guest. The reason I do this is because to me, something is lost in remote conversation. That something, that magic, I think is worth the effort, even if it ultimately leads to a failed conversation. This is how I approach life, treasuring the possibility of a rare moment of magic. I'm willing to go to the ends of the world for just such a moment. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Erik Brynjolfsson. You posted a quote on Twitter by Albert Bartlett saying that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. Why would you say the exponential growth is important to understand? Yeah, that quote, I remember posting that. It's actually a reprise of something Andy McAfee and I said in the second machine age, but I posted it in early March when COVID was really just beginning to take off and I was really scared. There were actually only a couple dozen cases, maybe less at that time, but they were doubling every like two or three days and I could see, oh my God, this is gonna be a catastrophe and it's gonna happen soon, but nobody was taking it very seriously or not a lot of people were taking it very seriously. In fact, I remember I did my last in person conference that week, I was flying back from Las Vegas and I was the only person on the plane wearing a mask and the flight attendant came over to me. She looked very concerned. She kind of put her hands on my shoulder. She was touching me all over, which I wasn't thrilled about and she goes, do you have some kind of anxiety disorder? Are you okay? And I was like, no, it's because of COVID. This is early March. Early March, but I was worried because I knew I could see or I suspected, I guess, that that doubling would continue and it did and pretty soon we had thousands of times more cases. Most of the time when I use that quote, I try to, it's motivated by more optimistic things like Moore's law and the wonders of having more computer power, but in either case, it can be very counterintuitive. I mean, if you walk for 10 minutes, you get about 10 times as far away as if you walk for one minute. That's the way our physical world works. That's the way our brains are wired, but if something doubles for 10 times as long, you don't get 10 times as much. You get a thousand times as much and after 20, it's a billion. After 30, it's a, no, sorry, after 20, it's a million. After 30, it's a billion. And pretty soon after that, it just gets to these numbers that you can barely grasp. Our world is becoming more and more exponential, mainly because of digital technologies. So more and more often our intuitions are out of whack and that can be good in the case of things creating wonders, but it can be dangerous in the case of viruses and other things. Do you think it generally applies, like is there spaces where it does apply and where it doesn't? How are we supposed to build an intuition about in which aspects of our society does exponential growth apply? Well, you can learn the math, but the truth is our brains, I think, tend to learn more from experiences. So we just start seeing it more and more often. So hanging around Silicon Valley, hanging around AI and computer researchers, I see this kind of exponential growth a lot more frequently and I'm getting used to it, but I still make mistakes. I still underestimate some of the progress in just talking to someone about GPT3 and how rapidly natural language has improved. But I think that as the world becomes more exponential, we'll all start experiencing it more frequently. The danger is that we may make some mistakes in the meantime using our old kind of caveman intuitions about how the world works. Well, the weird thing is it always kind of looks linear in the moment. Like it's hard to feel, it's hard to like introspect and really acknowledge how much has changed in just a couple of years or five years or 10 years with the internet. If we just look at advancements of AI or even just social media, all the various technologies that go into the digital umbrella, it feels pretty calm and normal and gradual. Well, a lot of stuff, I think there are parts of the world, most of the world that is not exponential. The way humans learn, the way organizations change, the way our whole institutions adapt and evolve, those don't improve at exponential paces. And that leads to a mismatch oftentimes between these exponentially improving technologies or let's say changing technologies because some of them are exponentially more dangerous and our intuitions and our human skills and our institutions that just don't change very fast at all. And that mismatch I think is at the root of a lot of the problems in our society, the growing inequality and other dysfunctions in our political and economic systems. So one guy that talks about exponential functions a lot is Elon Musk. He seems to internalize this kind of way of exponential thinking. He calls it first principles thinking, sort of the kind of going to the basics, asking the question, like what were the assumptions of the past? How can we throw them out the window? How can we do this 10X much more efficiently and constantly practicing that process? And also using that kind of thinking to estimate sort of when, you know, create deadlines and estimate when you'll be able to deliver on some of these technologies. Now, it often gets him in trouble because he overestimates, like he doesn't meet the initial estimates of the deadlines, but he seems to deliver late but deliver. And which is kind of interesting. Like, what are your thoughts about this whole thing? I think we can all learn from Elon. I think going to first principles, I talked about two ways of getting more of a grip on the exponential function. And one of them just comes from first principles. You know, if you understand the math of it, you can see what's gonna happen. And even if it seems counterintuitive that a couple of dozen of COVID cases can become thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of them in a month, it makes sense once you just do the math. And I think Elon tries to do that a lot. You know, in fairness, I think he also benefits from hanging out in Silicon Valley and he's experienced it in a lot of different applications. So, you know, it's not as much of a shock to him anymore, but that's something we can all learn from. In my own life, I remember one of my first experiences really seeing it was when I was a grad student and my advisor asked me to plot the growth of computer power in the US economy in different industries. And there are all these, you know, exponentially growing curves. And I was like, holy shit, look at this. In each industry, it was just taking off. And, you know, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to extend that and say, wow, this means that this was in the late 80s and early 90s that, you know, if it goes anything like that, we're gonna have orders of magnitude more computer power than we did at that time. And of course we do. So, you know, when people look at Moore's law, they often talk about it as just, so the exponential function is actually a stack of S curves. So basically it's you milk or whatever, take the most advantage of a particular little revolution and then you search for another revolution. And it's basically revolutions stack on top of revolutions. Do you have any intuition about how the head humans keep finding ways to revolutionize things? Well, first, let me just unpack that first point that I talked about exponential curves, but no exponential curve continues forever. It's been said that if anything can't go on forever, eventually it will stop. And, and it's very profound, but it's, it seems that a lot of people don't appreciate that half of it as well either. And that's why all exponential functions eventually turn into some kind of S curve or stop in some other way, maybe catastrophically. And that's a cap with COVID as well. I mean, it was, it went up and then it sort of, you know, at some point it starts saturating the pool of people to be infected. There's a standard epidemiological model that's based on that. And it's beginning to happen with Moore's law or different generations of computer power. It happens with all exponential curves. The remarkable thing is you elude, the second part of your question is that we've been able to come up with a new S curve on top of the previous one and do that generation after generation with new materials, new processes, and just extend it further and further. I don't think anyone has a really good theory about why we've been so successful in doing that. It's great that we have been, and I hope it continues for some time, but it's, you know, one beginning of a theory is that there's huge incentives when other parts of the system are going on that clock speed of doubling every two to three years. If there's one component of it that's not keeping up, then the economic incentives become really large to improve that one part. It becomes a bottleneck and anyone who can do improvements in that part can reap huge returns so that the resources automatically get focused on whatever part of the system isn't keeping up. Do you think some version of the Moore's law will continue? Some version, yes, it is. I mean, one version that has become more important is something I call Coomey's law, which is named after John Coomey, who I should mention was also my college roommate, but he identified the fact that energy consumption has been declining by a factor of two. And for most of us, that's more important. The new iPhones came out today as we're recording this. I'm not sure when you're gonna make it available. Very soon after this, yeah. And for most of us, having the iPhone be twice as fast, it's nice, but having the battery lifelonger, that would be much more valuable. And the fact that a lot of the progress in chips now is reducing energy consumption is probably more important for many applications than just the raw speed. Other dimensions of Moore's law are in AI and machine learning. Those tend to be very parallelizable functions, especially deep neural nets. And so instead of having one chip, you can have multiple chips or you can have a GPU, graphic processing unit that goes faster. Now, special chips designed for machine learning like tensor processing units, each time you switch, there's another 10X or 100X improvement above and beyond Moore's law. So I think that the raw silicon isn't improving as much as it used to, but these other dimensions are becoming important, more important, and we're seeing progress in them. I don't know if you've seen the work by OpenAI where they show the exponential improvement of the training of neural networks just literally in the techniques used. So that's almost like the algorithm. It's fascinating to think like, can I actually continue? I was figuring out more and more tricks on how to train networks faster and faster. The progress has been staggering. If you look at image recognition, as you mentioned, I think it's a function of at least three things that are coming together. One, we just talked about faster chips, not just Moore's law, but GPUs, TPUs and other technologies. The second is just a lot more data. I mean, we are awash in digital data today in a way we weren't 20 years ago. Photography, I'm old enough to remember, it used to be chemical, and now everything is digital. I took probably 50 digital photos yesterday. I wouldn't have done that if it was chemical. And we have the internet of things and all sorts of other types of data. When we walk around with our phone, it's just broadcasting a huge amounts of digital data that can be used as training sets. And then last but not least, as they mentioned at OpenAI, there've been significant improvements in the techniques. The core idea of deep neural nets has been around for a few decades, but the advances in making it work more efficiently have also improved a couple of orders of magnitude or more. So you multiply together, a hundred fold improvement in computer power, a hundred fold or more improvement in data, a hundred fold improvement in techniques of software and algorithms, and soon you're getting into a million fold improvements. So somebody brought this up, this idea with GPT3 that, so it's trained in a self supervised way on basically internet data. And that's one of the, I've seen arguments made and they seem to be pretty convincing that the bottleneck there is going to be how much data there is on the internet, which is a fascinating idea that it literally will just run out of human generated data to train on. Right, I know we make it to the point where it's consumed basically all of human knowledge or all digitized human knowledge, yeah. And that will be the bottleneck. But the interesting thing with bottlenecks is people often use bottlenecks as a way to argue against exponential growth. They say, well, there's no way you can overcome this bottleneck, but we seem to somehow keep coming up in new ways to like overcome whatever bottlenecks the critics come up with, which is fascinating. I don't know how you overcome the data bottleneck, but probably more efficient training algorithms. Yeah, well, you already mentioned that, that these training algorithms are getting much better at using smaller amounts of data. We also are just capturing a lot more data than we used to, especially in China, but all around us. So those are both important. In some applications, you can simulate the data, video games, some of the self driving car systems are simulating driving, and of course, that has some risks and weaknesses, but you can also, if you want to exhaust all the different ways you could beat a video game, you could just simulate all the options. Can we take a step in that direction of autonomous vehicles? Next, you're talking to the CTO of Waymo tomorrow. And obviously, I'm talking to Elon again in a couple of weeks. What's your thoughts on autonomous vehicles? Like where do we stand as a problem that has the potential of revolutionizing the world? Well, I'm really excited about that, but it's become much clearer that the original way that I thought about it, most people thought about like, you know, will we have a self driving car or not is way too simple. The better way to think about it is that there's a whole continuum of how much driving and assisting the car can do. I noticed that you're right next door to the Toyota Research Institute. That is a total accident. I love the TRI folks, but yeah. Have you talked to Gil Pratt? Yeah, we're supposed to talk. It's kind of hilarious. So there's kind of the, I think it's a good counterpart to say what Elon is doing. And hopefully they can be frank in what they think about each other, because I've heard both of them talk about it. But they're much more, you know, this is an assistive, a guardian angel that watches over you as opposed to try to do everything. I think there's some things like driving on a highway, you know, from LA to Phoenix, where it's mostly good weather, straight roads. That's close to a solved problem, let's face it. In other situations, you know, driving through the snow in Boston where the roads are kind of crazy. And most importantly, you have to make a lot of judgments about what the other driver is gonna do at these intersections that aren't really right angles and aren't very well described. It's more like game theory. That's a much harder problem and requires understanding human motivations. So there's a continuum there of some places where the cars will work very well and others where it could probably take decades. What do you think about the Waymo? So you mentioned two companies that actually have cars on the road. There's the Waymo approach that it's more like we're not going to release anything until it's perfect and we're gonna be very strict about the streets that we travel on, but it better be perfect. Yeah. Well, I'm smart enough to be humble and not try to get between. I know there's very bright people on both sides of the argument. I've talked to them and they make convincing arguments to me about how careful they need to be and the social acceptance. Some people thought that when the first few people died from self driving cars, that would shut down the industry, but it was more of a blip actually. And, you know, so that was interesting. Of course, there's still a concern that if there could be setbacks, if we do this wrong, you know, your listeners may be familiar with the different levels of self driving, you know, level one, two, three, four, five. I think Andrew Ng has convinced me that this idea of really focusing on level four, where you only go in areas that are well mapped rather than just going out in the wild is the way things are gonna evolve. But you can just keep expanding those areas where you've mapped things really well, where you really understand them and eventually all become kind of interconnected. And that could be a kind of another way of progressing to make it more feasible over time. I mean, that's kind of like the Waymo approach, which is they just now released, I think just like a day or two ago, a public, like anyone from the public in the Phoenix, Arizona to, you know, you can get a ride in a Waymo car with no person, no driver. Oh, they've taken away the safety driver? Oh yeah, for a while now there's been no safety driver. Okay, because I mean, I've been following that one in particular, but I thought it was kind of funny about a year ago when they had the safety driver and then they added a second safety driver because the first safety driver would fall asleep. It's like, I'm not sure they're going in the right direction with that. No, they've Waymo in particular done a really good job of that. They actually have a very interesting infrastructure of remote like observation. So they're not controlling the vehicles remotely, but they're able to, it's like a customer service. They can anytime tune into the car. I bet they can probably remotely control it as well, but that's officially not the function that they use. Yeah, I can see that being really, because I think the thing that's proven harder than maybe some of the early people expected was there's a long tail of weird exceptions. So you can deal with 90, 99, 99.99% of the cases, but then there's something that just never been seen before in the training data. And humans more or less can work around that. Although let me be clear and note, there are about 30,000 human fatalities just in the United States and maybe a million worldwide. So they're far from perfect. But I think people have higher expectations of machines. They wouldn't tolerate that level of death and damage from a machine. And so we have to do a lot better at dealing with those edge cases. And also the tricky thing that if I have a criticism for the Waymo folks, there's such a huge focus on safety where people don't talk enough about creating products that people, that customers love, that human beings love using. It's very easy to create a thing that's safe at the extremes, but then nobody wants to get into it. Yeah, well, back to Elon, I think one of, part of his genius was with the electric cars. Before he came along, electric cars were all kind of underpowered, really light, and there were sort of wimpy cars that weren't fun. And the first thing he did was he made a roadster that went zero to 60 faster than just about any other car and went the other end. And I think that was a really wise marketing move as well as a wise technology move. Yeah, it's difficult to figure out what the right marketing move is for AI systems. That's always been, I think it requires guts and risk taking which is what Elon practices. I mean, to the chagrin of perhaps investors or whatever, but it also requires rethinking what you're doing. I think way too many people are unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and when they take AI, they basically say, what are we doing now? How can we make a machine do the same thing? Maybe we'll save some costs, we'll have less labor. And yeah, it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world to do, but it's really not leading to a quantum change in the way you do things. When Jeff Bezos said, hey, we're gonna use the internet to change how bookstores work and we're gonna use technology, he didn't go and say, okay, let's put a robot cashier where the human cashier is and leave everything else alone. That would have been a very lame way to automate a bookstore. He's like went from soup to nuts and let's just rethink it. We get rid of the physical bookstore. We have a warehouse, we have delivery, we have people order on a screen and everything was reinvented. And that's been the story of these general purpose technologies all through history. And in my books, I write about like electricity and how for 30 years, there was almost no productivity gain from the electrification of factories a century ago. Now it's not because electricity is a wimpy useless technology. We all know how awesome electricity is. It's cause at first, they really didn't rethink the factories. It was only after they reinvented them and we describe how in the book, then you suddenly got a doubling and tripling of productivity growth. But it's the combination of the technology with the new business models, new business organization. That just takes a long time and it takes more creativity than most people have. Can you maybe linger on electricity? Cause that's a fun one. Yeah, well, sure, I'll tell you what happened. Before electricity, there were basically steam engines or sometimes water wheels and to power the machinery, you had to have pulleys and crankshafts and you really can't make them too long cause they'll break the torsion. So all the equipment was kind of clustered around this one giant steam engine. You can't make small steam engines either cause of thermodynamics. So you have one giant steam engine, all the equipment clustered around it, multi story. They have it vertical to minimize the distance as well as horizontal. And then when they did electricity, they took out the steam engine. They got the biggest electric motor they could buy from General Electric or someone like that. And nothing much else changed. It took until a generation of managers retired or died three years later, that people started thinking, wait, we don't have to do it that way. You can make electric motors, big, small, medium. You can put one with each piece of equipment. There's this big debate if you read the management literature between what they call a group drive versus unit drive where every machine would have its own motor. Well, once they did that, once they went to unit drive, those guys won the debate. Then you started having a new kind of factory which is sometimes spread out over acres, single story and each piece of equipment has its own motor. And most importantly, they weren't laid out based on who needed the most power. They were laid out based on what is the workflow of materials? Assembly line, let's have it go from this machine to that machine, to that machine. Once they rethought the factory that way, huge increases in productivity. It was just staggering. People like Paul David have documented this in their research papers. And I think that that is a lesson you see over and over. It happened when the steam engine changed manual production. It's happened with the computerization. People like Michael Hammer said, don't automate, obliterate. In each case, the big gains only came once smart entrepreneurs and managers basically reinvented their industries. I mean, one other interesting point about all that is that during that reinvention period, you often actually not only don't see productivity growth, you can actually see a slipping back. Measured productivity actually falls. I just wrote a paper with Chad Severson and Daniel Rock called the productivity J curve, which basically shows that in a lot of these cases, you have a downward dip before it goes up. And that downward dip is when everyone's trying to like reinvent things. And you could say that they're creating knowledge and intangible assets, but that doesn't show up on anyone's balance sheet. It doesn't show up in GDP. So it's as if they're doing nothing. Like take self driving cars, we were just talking about it. There have been hundreds of billions of dollars spent developing self driving cars. And basically no chauffeur has lost his job, no taxi driver. I guess I got to check out the ones that. It's a big J curve. Yeah, so there's a bunch of spending and no real consumer benefit. Now they're doing that in the belief, I think the justified belief that they will get the upward part of the J curve and there will be some big returns, but in the short run, you're not seeing it. That's happening with a lot of other AI technologies, just as it happened with earlier general purpose technologies. And it's one of the reasons we're having relatively low productivity growth lately. As an economist, one of the things that disappoints me is that as eye popping as these technologies are, you and I are both excited about some of the things they can do. The economic productivity statistics are kind of dismal. We actually, believe it or not, have had lower productivity growth in the past about 15 years than we did in the previous 15 years, in the 90s and early 2000s. And so that's not what you would have expected if these technologies were that much better. But I think we're in kind of a long J curve there. Personally, I'm optimistic. We'll start seeing the upward tick, maybe as soon as next year. But the past decade has been a bit disappointing if you thought there's a one to one relationship between cool technology and higher productivity. Well, what would you place your biggest hope for productivity increases on? Because you kind of said at a high level AI, but if I were to think about what has been so revolutionary in the last 10 years, I would 15 years and thinking about the internet, I would say things like, hopefully I'm not saying anything ridiculous, but everything from Wikipedia to Twitter. So like these kind of websites, not so much AI, but like I would expect to see some kind of big productivity increases from just the connectivity between people and the access to more information. Yeah, well, so that's another area I've done quite a bit of research on actually, is these free goods like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Zoom. We're actually doing this in person, but almost everything else I do these days is online. The interesting thing about all those is most of them have a price of zero. What do you pay for Wikipedia? Maybe like a little bit for the electrons to come to your house. Basically zero, right? Take a small pause and say, I donate to Wikipedia. Often you should too. It's good for you, yeah. So, but what does that do mean for GDP? GDP is based on the price and quantity of all the goods, things bought and sold. If something has zero price, you know how much it contributes to GDP? To a first approximation, zero. So these digital goods that we're getting more and more of, we're spending more and more hours a day consuming stuff off of screens, little screens, big screens, that doesn't get priced into GDP. It's like they don't exist. That doesn't mean they don't create value. I get a lot of value from watching cat videos and reading Wikipedia articles and listening to podcasts, even if I don't pay for them. So we've got a mismatch there. Now, in fairness, economists, since Simon Kuznets invented GDP and productivity, all those statistics back in the 1930s, he recognized, he in fact said, this is not a measure of wellbeing. This is not a measure of welfare. It's a measure of production. But almost everybody has kind of forgotten that he said that and they just use it. It's like, how well off are we? What was GDP last year? It was 2.3% growth or whatever. That is how much physical production, but it's not the value we're getting. We need a new set of statistics and I'm working with some colleagues. Avi Collis and others to develop something we call GDP dash B. GDP B measures the benefits you get, not the cost. If you get benefit from Zoom or Wikipedia or Facebook, then that gets counted in GDP B, even if you pay zero for it. So, you know, back to your original point, I think there is a lot of gain over the past decade in these digital goods that doesn't show up in GDP, doesn't show up in productivity. By the way, productivity is just defined as GDP divided by hours worked. So if you mismeasure GDP, you mismeasure productivity by the exact same amount. That's something we need to fix. I'm working with the statistical agencies to come up with a new set of metrics. And, you know, over the coming years, I think we'll see, we're not gonna do away with GDP. It's very useful, but we'll see a parallel set of accounts that measure the benefits. How difficult is it to get that B in the GDP B? It's pretty hard. I mean, one of the reasons it hasn't been done before is that, you know, you can measure it, the cash register, what people pay for stuff, but how do you measure what they would have paid, like what the value is? That's a lot harder, you know? How much is Wikipedia worth to you? That's what we have to answer. And to do that, what we do is we can use online experiments. We do massive online choice experiments. We ask hundreds of thousands, now millions of people to do lots of sort of A, B tests. How much would I have to pay you to give up Wikipedia for a month? How much would I have to pay you to stop using your phone? And in some cases, it's hypothetical. In other cases, we actually enforce it, which is kind of expensive. Like we pay somebody $30 to stop using Facebook and we see if they'll do it. And some people will give it up for $10. Some people won't give it up even if you give them $100. And then you get a whole demand curve. You get to see what all the different prices are and how much value different people get. And not surprisingly, different people have different values. We find that women tend to value Facebook more than men. Old people tend to value it a little bit more than young people. That was interesting. I think young people maybe know about other networks that I don't know the name of that are better than Facebook. And so you get to see these patterns, but every person's individual. And then if you add up all those numbers, you start getting an estimate of the value. Okay, first of all, that's brilliant. Is this a work that will soon eventually be published? Yeah, well, there's a version of it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about I think we call it massive online choice experiments. I should remember the title, but it's on my website. So yeah, we have some more papers coming out on it, but the first one is already out. You know, it's kind of a fascinating mystery that Twitter, Facebook, like all these social networks are free. And it seems like almost none of them except for YouTube have experimented with removing ads for money. Can you like, do you understand that from both economics and the product perspective? Yeah, it's something that, you know, so I teach a course on digital business models. So I used to at MIT, at Stanford, I'm not quite sure. I'm not teaching until next spring. I'm still thinking what my course is gonna be. But there are a lot of different business models. And when you have something that has zero marginal cost, there's a lot of forces, especially if there's any kind of competition that push prices down to zero. But you can have ad supported systems, you can bundle things together. You can have volunteer, you mentioned Wikipedia, there's donations. And I think economists underestimate the power of volunteerism and donations. Your national public radio. Actually, how do you, this podcast, how is this, what's the revenue model? There's sponsors at the beginning. And then, and people, the funny thing is, I tell people they can, it's very, I tell them the timestamp. So if you wanna skip the sponsors, you're free. But it's funny that a bunch of people, so I read the advertisement and then a bunch of people enjoy reading it. And it's. Well, they may learn something from it. And also from the advertiser's perspective, those are people who are actually interested. I mean, the example I sometimes get is like, I bought a car recently and all of a sudden, all the car ads were like interesting to me. Exactly. And then like, now that I have the car, like I sort of zone out on, but that's fine. The car companies, they don't really wanna be advertising to me if I'm not gonna buy their product. So there are a lot of these different revenue models and it's a little complicated, but the economic theory has to do with what the shape of the demand curve is, when it's better to monetize it with charging people versus when you're better off doing advertising. I mean, in short, when the demand curve is relatively flat and wide, like generic news and things like that, then you tend to do better with advertising. If it's a good that's only useful to a small number of people, but they're willing to pay a lot, they have a very high value for it, then advertising isn't gonna work as well and you're better off charging for it. Both of them have some inefficiencies. And then when you get into targeting and you get into these other revenue models, it gets more complicated, but there's some economic theory on it. I also think to be frank, there's just a lot of experimentation that's needed because sometimes things are a little counterintuitive, especially when you get into what are called two sided networks or platform effects, where you may grow the market on one side and harvest the revenue on the other side. Facebook tries to get more and more users and then they harvest the revenue from advertising. So that's another way of kind of thinking about it. Is it strange to you that they haven't experimented? Well, they are experimenting. So they are doing some experiments about what the willingness is for people to pay. I think that when they do the math, it's gonna work out that they still are better off with an advertising driven model, but... What about a mix? Like this is what YouTube is, right? It's you allow the person to decide, the customer to decide exactly which model they prefer. No, that can work really well. And newspapers, of course, have known this for a long time. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, they have subscription revenue. They also have advertising revenue. And that can definitely work. Online, it's a lot easier to have a dial that's much more personalized and everybody can kind of roll their own mix. And I could imagine having a little slider about how much advertising you want or are willing to take. And if it's done right and it's incentive compatible, it could be a win win where both the content provider and the consumer are better off than they would have been before. Yeah, the done right part is a really good point. Like with the Jeff Bezos and the single click purchase on Amazon, the frictionless effort there, if I could just rant for a second about the Wall Street Journal, all the newspapers you mentioned, is I have to click so many times to subscribe to them that I literally don't subscribe just because of the number of times I have to click. I'm totally with you. I don't understand why so many companies make it so hard. I mean, another example is when you buy a new iPhone or a new computer, whatever, I feel like, okay, I'm gonna lose an afternoon just like loading up and getting all my stuff back. And for a lot of us, that's more of a deterrent than the price. And if they could make it painless, we'd give them a lot more money. So I'm hoping somebody listening is working on making it more painless for us to buy your products. If we could just like linger a little bit on the social network thing, because there's this Netflix social dilemma. Yeah, no, I saw that. And Tristan Harris and company, yeah. And people's data, it's really sensitive and social networks are at the core arguably of many of societal like tension and some of the most important things happening in society. So it feels like it's important to get this right, both from a business model perspective and just like a trust perspective. I still gotta, I mean, it just still feels like, I know there's experimentation going on. It still feels like everyone is afraid to try different business models, like really try. Well, I'm worried that people are afraid to try different business models. I'm also worried that some of the business models may lead them to bad choices. And Danny Kahneman talks about system one and system two, sort of like a reptilian brain that reacts quickly to what we see, see something interesting, we click on it, we retweet it versus our system two, our frontal cortex that's supposed to be more careful and rational that really doesn't make as many decisions as it should. I think there's a tendency for a lot of these social networks to really exploit system one, our quick instant reaction, make it so we just click on stuff and pass it on and not really think carefully about it. And that system, it tends to be driven by sex, violence, disgust, anger, fear, these relatively primitive kinds of emotions. Maybe they're important for a lot of purposes, but they're not a great way to organize a society. And most importantly, when you think about this huge, amazing information infrastructure we've had that's connected billions of brains across the globe, not just so we can all access information, but we can all contribute to it and share it. Arguably the most important thing that that network should do is favor truth over falsehoods. And the way it's been designed, not necessarily intentionally, is exactly the opposite. My MIT colleagues are all, and Deb Roy and others at MIT, did a terrific paper in the cover of Science. And they documented what we all feared, which is that lies spread faster than truth on social networks. They looked at a bunch of tweets and retweets, and they found that false information was more likely to spread further, faster, to more people. And why was that? It's not because people like lies. It's because people like things that are shocking, amazing, can you believe this? Something that is not mundane, not something that everybody else already knew. And what are the most unbelievable things? Well, lies. And so if you wanna find something unbelievable, it's a lot easier to do that if you're not constrained by the truth. So they found that the emotional valence of false information was just much higher. It was more likely to be shocking, and therefore more likely to be spread. Another interesting thing was that that wasn't necessarily driven by the algorithms. I know that there is some evidence, Zeynep Tufekci and others have pointed out on YouTube, some of the algorithms unintentionally were tuned to amplify more extremist content. But in the study of Twitter that Sinan and Deb and others did, they found that even if you took out all the bots and all the automated tweets, you still had lies spreading significantly faster. It's just the problems with ourselves that we just can't resist passing on the salacious content. But I also blame the platforms because there's different ways you can design a platform. You can design a platform in a way that makes it easy to spread lies and to retweet and spread things on, or you can kind of put some friction on that and try to favor truth. I had dinner with Jimmy Wales once, the guy who helped found Wikipedia. And he convinced me that, look, you can make some design choices, whether it's at Facebook, at Twitter, at Wikipedia, or Reddit, whatever, and depending on how you make those choices, you're more likely or less likely to have false news. Create a little bit of friction, like you said. Yeah. You know, that's the, and so if I'm... It could be friction, it could be speeding the truth, either way, but, and I don't totally understand... Speeding the truth, I love it. Yeah, yeah. Amplifying it and giving it more credit. And in academia, which is far, far from perfect, but when someone has an important discovery, it tends to get more cited and people kind of look to it more and sort of, it tends to get amplified a little bit. So you could try to do that too. I don't know what the silver bullet is, but the meta point is that if we spend time thinking about it, we can amplify truth over falsehoods. And I'm disappointed in the heads of these social networks that they haven't been as successful or maybe haven't tried as hard to amplify truth. And part of it, going back to what we said earlier, is these revenue models may push them more towards growing fast, spreading information rapidly, getting lots of users, which isn't the same thing as finding truth. Yeah, I mean, implicit in what you're saying now is a hopeful message that with platforms, we can take a step towards a greater and greater popularity of truth. But the more cynical view is that what the last few years have revealed is that there's a lot of money to be made in dismantling even the idea of truth, that nothing is true. And as a thought experiment, I've been thinking about if it's possible that our future will have, like the idea of truth is something we won't even have. Do you think it's possible in the future that everything is on the table in terms of truth, and we're just swimming in this kind of digital economy where ideas are just little toys that are not at all connected to reality? Yeah, I think that's definitely possible. I'm not a technological determinist, so I don't think that's inevitable. I don't think it's inevitable that it doesn't happen. I mean, the thing that I've come away with every time I do these studies, and I emphasize it in my books and elsewhere, is that technology doesn't shape our destiny, we shape our destiny. So just by us having this conversation, I hope that your audience is gonna take it upon themselves as they design their products, and they think about, they use products, as they manage companies, how can they make conscious decisions to favor truth over falsehoods, favor the better kinds of societies, and not abdicate and say, well, we just build the tools. I think there was a saying that, was it the German scientist when they were working on the missiles in late World War II? They said, well, our job is to make the missiles go up. Where they come down, that's someone else's department. And that's obviously not the, I think it's obvious, that's not the right attitude that technologists should have, that engineers should have. They should be very conscious about what the implications are. And if we think carefully about it, we can avoid the kind of world that you just described, where truth is all relative. There are going to be people who benefit from a world of where people don't check facts, and where truth is relative, and popularity or fame or money is orthogonal to truth. But one of the reasons I suspect that we've had so much progress over the past few hundred years is the invention of the scientific method, which is a really powerful tool or meta tool for finding truth and favoring things that are true versus things that are false. If they don't pass the scientific method, they're less likely to be true. And that has, the societies and the people and the organizations that embrace that have done a lot better than the ones who haven't. And so I'm hoping that people keep that in mind and continue to try to embrace not just the truth, but methods that lead to the truth. So maybe on a more personal question, if one were to try to build a competitor to Twitter, what would you advise? Is there, I mean, the bigger, the meta question, is that the right way to improve systems? Yeah, no, I think that the underlying premise behind Twitter and all these networks is amazing, that we can communicate with each other. And I use it a lot. There's a subpart of Twitter called Econ Twitter, where we economists tweet to each other and talk about new papers. Something came out in the NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and we share about it. People critique it. I think it's been a godsend because it's really sped up the scientific process, if you can call economic scientific. Does it get divisive in that little? Sometimes, yeah, sure. Sometimes it does. It can also be done in nasty ways and there's the bad parts. But the good parts are great because you just speed up that clock speed of learning about things. Instead of like in the old, old days, waiting to read it in a journal, or the not so old days when you'd see it posted on a website and you'd read it. Now on Twitter, people will distill it down and it's a real art to getting to the essence of things. So that's been great. But it certainly, we all know that Twitter can be a cesspool of misinformation. And like I just said, unfortunately misinformation tends to spread faster on Twitter than truth. And there are a lot of people who are very vulnerable to it. I'm sure I've been fooled at times. There are agents, whether from Russia or from political groups or others that explicitly create efforts at misinformation and efforts at getting people to hate each other. Or even more important lately I've discovered is nut picking. You know the idea of nut picking? No, what's that? It's a good term. Nut picking is when you find like an extreme nut case on the other side and then you amplify them and make it seem like that's typical of the other side. So you're not literally lying. You're taking some idiot, you know, renting on the subway or just, you know, whether they're in the KKK or Antifa or whatever, they're just, and you, normally nobody would pay attention to this guy. Like 12 people would see him and it'd be the end. Instead with video or whatever, you get tens of millions of people say it. And I've seen this, you know, I look at it, I'm like, I get angry. I'm like, I can't believe that person did something so terrible. Let me tell all my friends about this terrible person. And it's a great way to generate division. I talked to a friend who studied Russian misinformation campaigns, and they're very clever about literally being on both sides of some of these debates. They would have some people pretend to be part of BLM. Some people pretend to be white nationalists and they would be throwing epithets at each other, saying crazy things at each other. And they're literally playing both sides of it, but their goal wasn't for one or the other to win. It was for everybody to get behaving and distrusting everyone else. So these tools can definitely be used for that. And they are being used for that. It's been super destructive for our democracy and our society. And the people who run these platforms, I think have a social responsibility, a moral and ethical, personal responsibility to do a better job and to shut that stuff down. Well, I don't know if you can shut it down, but to design them in a way that, you know, as I said earlier, favors truth over falsehoods and favors positive types of communication versus destructive ones. And just like you said, it's also on us. I try to be all about love and compassion, empathy on Twitter. I mean, one of the things, nut picking is a fascinating term. One of the things that people do, that's I think even more dangerous is nut picking applied to individual statements of good people. So basically worst case analysis in computer science is taking sometimes out of context, but sometimes in context, a statement, one statement by a person, like I've been, because I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I often talk about Hitler on this podcast with folks and it is so easy. That's really dangerous. But I'm all leaning in, I'm 100%. Because, well, it's actually a safer place than people realize because it's history and history in long form is actually very fascinating to think about and it's, but I could see how that could be taken totally out of context and it's very worrying. You know, these digital infrastructures, not just they disseminate things, but they're sort of permanent. So anything you say at some point, someone can go back and find something you said three years ago, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not, maybe you're just wrong and you made them, you know, and like that becomes, they can use that to define you if they have ill intent. And we all need to be a little more forgiving. I mean, somewhere in my 20s, I told myself, I was going through all my different friends and I was like, you know, every one of them has at least like one nutty opinion. And I was like, there's like nobody who's like completely, except me, of course, but I'm sure they thought that about me too. And so you just kind of like learned to be a little bit tolerant that like, okay, there's just, you know. Yeah, I wonder who the responsibility lays on there. Like, I think ultimately it's about leadership. Like the previous president, Barack Obama, has been, I think, quite eloquent at walking this very difficult line of talking about cancel culture, but it's a difficult, it takes skill. Because you say the wrong thing and you piss off a lot of people. And so you have to do it well. But then also the platform of the technology is, should slow down, create friction, and spreading this kind of nut picking in all its forms. Absolutely. No, and your point that we have to like learn over time, how to manage it. I mean, we can't put it all on the platform and say, you guys design it. Because if we're idiots about using it, nobody can design a platform that withstands that. And every new technology people learn its dangers. You know, when someone invented fire, it's great cooking and everything, but then somebody burned themself. And then you had to like learn how to like avoid, maybe somebody invented a fire extinguisher later. So you kind of like figure out ways of working around these technologies. Someone invented seat belts, et cetera. And that's certainly true with all the new digital technologies that we have to figure out, not just technologies that protect us, but ways of using them that emphasize that are more likely to be successful than dangerous. So you've written quite a bit about how artificial intelligence might change our world. How do you think if we look forward, again, it's impossible to predict the future, but if we look at trends from the past and we tried to predict what's gonna happen in the rest of the 21st century, how do you think AI will change our world? That's a big question. You know, I'm mostly a techno optimist. I'm not at the extreme, you know, the singularity is near end of the spectrum, but I do think that we're likely in for some significantly improved living standards, some really important progress, even just the technologies that are already kind of like in the can that haven't diffused. You know, when I talked earlier about the J curve, it could take 10, 20, 30 years for an existing technology to have the kind of profound effects. And when I look at whether it's, you know, vision systems, voice recognition, problem solving systems, even if nothing new got invented, we would have a few decades of progress. So I'm excited about that. And I think that's gonna lead to us being wealthier, healthier, I mean, the healthcare is probably one of the applications that I'm most excited about. So that's good news. I don't think we're gonna have the end of work anytime soon. There's just too many things that machines still can't do. When I look around the world and think of whether it's childcare or healthcare, cleaning the environment, interacting with people, scientific work, artistic creativity, these are things that for now, machines aren't able to do nearly as well as humans, even just something as mundane as, you know, folding laundry or whatever. And many of these, I think are gonna be years or decades before machines catch up. You know, I may be surprised on some of them, but overall, I think there's plenty of work for humans to do. There's plenty of problems in society that need the human touch. So we'll have to repurpose. We'll have to, as machines are able to do some tasks, people are gonna have to reskill and move into other areas. And that's probably what's gonna be going on for the next, you know, 10, 20, 30 years or more, kind of big restructuring of society. We'll get wealthier and people will have to do new skills. Now, if you turn the dial further, I don't know, 50 or a hundred years into the future, then, you know, maybe all bets are off. Then it's possible that machines will be able to do most of what people do. You know, say one or 200 years, I think it's even likely. And at that point, then we're more in the sort of abundance economy. Then we're in a world where there's really little for the humans can do economically better than machines, other than be human. And, you know, that will take a transition as well, kind of more of a transition of how we get meaning in life and what our values are. But shame on us if we screw that up. I mean, that should be like great, great news. And it kind of saddens me that some people see that as like a big problem. I think that would be, should be wonderful if people have all the health and material things that they need and can focus on loving each other and discussing philosophy and playing and doing all the other things that don't require work. Do you think you'd be surprised to see what the 20, if we were to travel in time, 100 years into the future, do you think you'll be able to, like if I gave you a month to like talk to people, no, like let's say a week, would you be able to understand what the hell's going on? You mean if I was there for a week? Yeah, if you were there for a week. A hundred years in the future? Yeah. So like, so I'll give you one thought experiment is like, isn't it possible that we're all living in virtual reality by then? Yeah, no, I think that's very possible. I've played around with some of those VR headsets and they're not great, but I mean the average person spends many waking hours staring at screens right now. They're kind of low res compared to what they could be in 30 or 50 years, but certainly games and why not any other interactions could be done with VR? And that would be a pretty different world and we'd all, in some ways be as rich as we wanted. We could have castles and we could be traveling anywhere we want and it could obviously be multisensory. So that would be possible and of course there's people, you've had Elon Musk on and others, there are people, Nick Bostrom makes the simulation argument that maybe we're already there. We're already there. So, but in general, or do you not even think about in this kind of way, you're self critically thinking, how good are you as an economist at predicting what the future looks like? Do you have a? Well, it starts getting, I mean, I feel reasonably comfortable the next five, 10, 20 years in terms of that path. When you start getting truly superhuman artificial intelligence, kind of by definition, be able to think of a lot of things that I couldn't have thought of and create a world that I couldn't even imagine. And so I'm not sure I can predict what that world is going to be like. One thing that AI researchers, AI safety researchers worry about is what's called the alignment problem. When an AI is that powerful, then they can do all sorts of things. And you really hope that their values are aligned with our values. And it's even tricky to finding what our values are. I mean, first off, we all have different values. And secondly, maybe if we were smarter, we would have better values. Like, I like to think that we have better values than we did in 1860 and, or in the year 200 BC on a lot of dimensions, things that we consider barbaric today. And it may be that if I thought about it more deeply, I would also be morally evolved. Maybe I'd be a vegetarian or do other things that right now, whether my future self would consider kind of immoral. So that's a tricky problem, getting the AI to do what we want, assuming it's even a friendly AI. I mean, I should probably mention there's a nontrivial other branch where we destroy ourselves, right? I mean, there's a lot of exponentially improving technologies that could be ferociously destructive, whether it's in nanotechnology or biotech and weaponized viruses, AI and other things that. nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons, of course. The old school technology. Yeah, good old nuclear weapons that could be devastating or even existential and new things yet to be invented. So that's a branch that I think is pretty significant. And there are those who think that one of the reasons we haven't been contacted by other civilizations, right? Is that once you get to a certain level of complexity in technology, there's just too many ways to go wrong. There's a lot of ways to blow yourself up. And people, or I should say species, end up falling into one of those traps. The great filter. The great filter. I mean, there's an optimistic view of that. If there is literally no intelligent life out there in the universe, or at least in our galaxy, that means that we've passed at least one of the great filters or some of the great filters that we survived. Yeah, no, I think Robin Hansen has a good way of, maybe others have a good way of thinking about this, that if there are no other intelligence creatures out there that we've been able to detect, one possibility is that there's a filter ahead of us. And when you get a little more advanced, maybe in a hundred or a thousand or 10,000 years, things just get destroyed for some reason. The other one is the great filters behind us. That'll be good, is that most planets don't even evolve life or if they don't evolve life, they don't evolve intelligent life. Maybe we've gotten past that. And so now maybe we're on the good side of the great filter. So if we sort of rewind back and look at the thing where we could say something a little bit more comfortably at five years and 10 years out, you've written about jobs and the impact on sort of our economy and the jobs in terms of artificial intelligence that it might have. It's a fascinating question of what kind of jobs are safe, what kind of jobs are not. Can you maybe speak to your intuition about how we should think about AI changing the landscape of work? Sure, absolutely. Well, this is a really important question because I think we're very far from artificial general intelligence, which is AI that can just do the full breadth of what humans can do. But we do have human level or superhuman level narrow intelligence, narrow artificial intelligence. And obviously my calculator can do math a lot better than I can. And there's a lot of other things that machines can do better than I can. So which is which? We actually set out to address that question with Tom Mitchell. I wrote a paper called what can machine learning do that was in science. And we went and interviewed a whole bunch of AI experts and kind of synthesized what they thought machine learning was good at and wasn't good at. And we came up with what we called a rubric, basically a set of questions you can ask about any task that will tell you whether it's likely to score high or low on suitability for machine learning. And then we've applied that to a bunch of tasks in the economy. In fact, there's a data set of all the tasks in the US economy, believe it or not, it's called ONET. The US government put it together, part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They divide the economy into about 970 occupations like bus driver, economist, primary school teacher, radiologist, and then for each one of them, they describe which tasks need to be done. Like for radiologists, there are 27 distinct tasks. So we went through all those tasks to see whether or not a machine could do them. And what we found interestingly was... Brilliant study by the way, that's so awesome. Yeah, thank you. So what we found was that there was no occupation in our data set where machine learning just ran the table and did everything. And there was almost no occupation where machine learning didn't have like a significant ability to do things. Like take radiology, a lot of people I hear saying, you know, it's the end of radiology. And one of the 27 tasks is read medical images. Really important one, like it's kind of a core job. And machines have basically gotten as good or better than radiologists. There was just an article in Nature last week, but they've been publishing them for the past few years showing that machine learning can do as well as humans on many kinds of diagnostic imaging tasks. But other things that radiologists do, they sometimes administer conscious sedation. They sometimes do physical exams. They have to synthesize the results and explain it to the other doctors or to the patients. In all those categories, machine learning isn't really up to snuff yet. So that job, we're gonna see a lot of restructuring. Parts of the job, they'll hand over to machines. Others, humans will do more of. That's been more or less the pattern all of them. So, you know, to oversimplify a bit, we're gonna see a lot of restructuring, reorganization of work. And it's real gonna be a great time. It is a great time for smart entrepreneurs and managers to do that reinvention of work. I'm not gonna see mass unemployment. To get more specifically to your question, the kinds of tasks that machines tend to be good at are a lot of routine problem solving, mapping inputs X into outputs Y. If you have a lot of data on the Xs and the Ys, the inputs and the outputs, you can do that kind of mapping and find the relationships. They tend to not be very good at, even now, fine motor control and dexterity. Emotional intelligence and human interactions and thinking outside the box, creative work. If you give it a well structured task, machines can be very good at it. But even asking the right questions, that's hard. There's a quote that Andrew McAfee and I use in our book, Second Machine Age. Apparently Pablo Picasso was shown an early computer and he came away kind of unimpressed. He goes, well, I don't see all the fusses. All that does is answer questions. And to him, the interesting thing was asking the questions. Yeah, try to replace me, GPT3, I dare you. Although some people think I'm a robot. You have this cool plot that shows, I just remember where economists land, where I think the X axis is the income. And then the Y axis is, I guess, aggregating the information of how replaceable the job is. Or I think there's an index. There's a suitability for machine learning index. Exactly. So we have all 970 occupations on that chart. It's a cool plot. And there's scatters in all four corners have some occupations. But there is a definite pattern, which is the lower wage occupations tend to have more tasks that are suitable for machine learning, like cashiers. I mean, anyone who's gone to a supermarket or CVS knows that they not only read barcodes, but they can recognize an apple and an orange and a lot of things cashiers, humans used to be needed for. At the other end of the spectrum, there are some jobs like airline pilot that are among the highest paid in our economy, but also a lot of them are suitable for machine learning. A lot of those tasks are. And then, yeah, you mentioned economists. I couldn't help peeking at those and they're paid a fair amount, maybe not as much as some of us think they should be. But they have some tasks that are suitable for machine learning, but for now at least, most of the tasks of economists didn't end up being in that category. And I should say, I didn't like create that data. We just took the analysis and that's what came out of it. And over time, that scatter plot will be updated as the technology improves. But it was just interesting to see the pattern there. And it is a little troubling in so far as if you just take the technology as it is today, it's likely to worsen income inequality on a lot of dimensions. So on this topic of the effect of AI on our landscape of work, one of the people that have been speaking about it in the public domain, public discourse is the presidential candidate, Andrew Yang. Yeah. What are your thoughts about Andrew? What are your thoughts about UBI, that universal basic income that he made one of the core ideas, by the way, he has like hundreds of ideas about like everything, it's kind of interesting. But what are your thoughts about him and what are your thoughts about UBI? Let me answer the question about his broader approach first. I mean, I just love that. He's really thoughtful, analytical. I agree with his values. So that's awesome. And he read my book and mentions it sometimes, so it makes me even more excited. And the thing that he really made the centerpiece of his campaign was UBI. And I was originally kind of a fan of it. And then as I studied it more, I became less of a fan, although I'm beginning to come back a little bit. So let me tell you a little bit of my evolution. As an economist, we have, by looking at the problem of people not having enough income and the simplest thing is, well, why don't we write them a check? Problem solved. But then I talked to my sociologist friends and they really convinced me that just writing a check doesn't really get at the core values. Voltaire once said that work solves three great ills, boredom, vice, and need. And you can deal with the need thing by writing a check, but people need a sense of meaning, they need something to do. And when, say, steel workers or coal miners lost their jobs and were just given checks, alcoholism, depression, divorce, all those social indicators, drug use, all went way up. People just weren't happy just sitting around collecting a check. Maybe it's part of the way they were raised. Maybe it's something innate in people that they need to feel wanted and needed. So it's not as simple as just writing people a check. You need to also give them a way to have a sense of purpose. And that was important to me. And the second thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, we are far from the end of work. I don't buy the idea that there's just like not enough work to be done. I see like our cities need to be cleaned up. And robots can't do most of that. We need to have better childcare. We need better healthcare. We need to take care of people who are mentally ill or older. We need to repair our roads. There's so much work that require at least partly, maybe entirely a human component. So rather than like write all these people off, let's find a way to repurpose them and keep them engaged. Now that said, I would like to see more buying power from people who are sort of at the bottom end of the spectrum. The economy has been designed and evolved in a way that's I think very unfair to a lot of hardworking people. I see super hardworking people who aren't really seeing their wages grow over the past 20, 30 years, while some other people who have been super smart and or super lucky have made billions or hundreds of billions. And I don't think they need those hundreds of billions to have the right incentives to invent things. I think if you talk to almost any of them as I have, they don't think that they need an extra $10 billion to do what they're doing. Most of them probably would love to do it for only a billion or maybe for nothing. For nothing, many of them, yeah. I mean, an interesting point to make is, do we think that Bill Gates would have founded Microsoft if tax rates were 70%? Well, we know he would have because they were tax rates of 70% when he founded it. So I don't think that's as big a deterrent and we could provide more buying power to people. My own favorite tool is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is basically a way of supplementing income of people who have jobs and giving employers an incentive to hire even more people. The minimum wage can discourage employment, but the Earned Income Tax Credit encourages employment by supplementing people's wages. If the employer can only afford to pay them $10 for a task, the rest of us kick in another five or $10 and bring their wages up to 15 or 20 total. And then they have more buying power. Then entrepreneurs are thinking, how can we cater to them? How can we make products for them? And it becomes a self reinforcing system where people are better off. Ian Drang and I had a good discussion where he suggested instead of a universal basic income, he suggested, or instead of an unconditional basic income, how about a conditional basic income where the condition is you learn some new skills, we need to reskill our workforce. So let's make it easier for people to find ways to get those skills and get rewarded for doing them. And that's kind of a neat idea as well. That's really interesting. So, I mean, one of the questions, one of the dreams of UBI is that you provide some little safety net while you retrain, while you learn a new skill. But like, I think, I guess you're speaking to the intuition that that doesn't always, like there needs to be some incentive to reskill, to train, to learn a new thing. I think it helps. I mean, there are lots of self motivated people, but there are also people that maybe need a little guidance or help and I think it's a really hard question for someone who is losing a job in one area to know what is the new area I should be learning skills in. And we could provide a much better set of tools and platforms that maps it. Okay, here's a set of skills you already have. Here's something that's in demand. Let's create a path for you to go from where you are to where you need to be. So I'm a total, how do I put it nicely about myself? I'm totally clueless about the economy. It's not totally true, but pretty good approximation. If you were to try to fix our tax system and, or maybe from another side, if there's fundamental problems in taxation or some fundamental problems about our economy, what would you try to fix? What would you try to speak to? You know, I definitely think our whole tax system, our political and economic system has gotten more and more screwed up over the past 20, 30 years. I don't think it's that hard to make headway in improving it. I don't think we need to totally reinvent stuff. A lot of it is what I've been elsewhere with Andy and others called economics 101. You know, there's just some basic principles that have worked really well in the 20th century that we sort of forgot, you know, in terms of investing in education, investing in infrastructure, welcoming immigrants, having a tax system that was more progressive and fair. At one point, tax rates were on top incomes were significantly higher. And they've come down a lot to the point where in many cases they're lower now than they are for poorer people. So, and we could do things like earned income tax credit to get a little more wonky. I'd like to see more Pigouvian taxes. What that means is you tax things that are bad instead of things that are good. So right now we tax labor, we tax capital and which is unfortunate because one of the basic principles of economics if you tax something, you tend to get less of it. So, you know, right now there's still work to be done and still capital to be invested in. But instead we should be taxing things like pollution and congestion. And if we did that, we would have less pollution. So a carbon tax is, you know, almost every economist would say it's a no brainer whether they're Republican or Democrat, Greg Mankiw who is head of George Bush's Council of Economic Advisers or Dick Schmollensie who is another Republican economist agree. And of course a lot of Democratic economists agree as well. If we taxed carbon, we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We could take that money and redistribute it through an earned income tax credit or other things so that overall our tax system would become more progressive. We could tax congestion. One of the things that kills me as an economist is every time I sit in a traffic jam, I know that it's completely unnecessary. This is complete wasted time. You just visualize the cost and productivity. Exactly, because they are taking costs for me and all the people around me. And if they charged a congestion tax, they would take that same amount of money and people would, it would streamline the roads. Like when you're in Singapore, the traffic just flows because they have a congestion tax. They listened to economists. They invited me and others to go talk to them. And then I'd still be paying, I'd be paying a congestion tax instead of paying in my time, but that money would now be available for healthcare, be available for infrastructure, or be available just to give to people so they could buy food or whatever. So it's just, it saddens me when you sit, when you're sitting in a traffic jam, it's like taxing me and then taking that money and dumping it in the ocean, just like destroying it. So there are a lot of things like that that economists, and I'm not, I'm not like doing anything radical here. Most, you know, good economists would, I probably agree with me point by point on these things. And we could do those things and our whole economy would become much more efficient. It'd become fairer, invest in R&D and research, which is close to a free lunch is what we have. My erstwhile MIT colleague, Bob Solla, got the Nobel Prize, not yesterday, but 30 years ago, for describing that most improvements in living standards come from tech progress. And Paul Romer later got a Nobel Prize for noting that investments in R&D and human capital can speed the rate of tech progress. So if we do that, then we'll be healthier and wealthier. Yeah, from an economics perspective, I remember taking an undergrad econ, you mentioned econ 101. It seemed from all the plots I saw that R&D is an obvious, as close to free lunch as we have, it seemed like obvious that we should do more research. It is. Like what, what, like, there's no. Well, we should do basic research. I mean, so let me just be clear. It'd be great if everybody did more research and I would make this issue between applied development versus basic research. So applied development, like, you know, how do we get this self driving car, you know, feature to work better in the Tesla? That's great for private companies because they can capture the value from that. If they make a better self driving car system, they can sell cars that are more valuable and then make money. So there's an incentive that there's not a big problem there and smart companies, Amazon, Tesla, and others are investing in it. The problem is with basic research, like coming up with core basic ideas, whether it's in nuclear fusion or artificial intelligence or biotech. There, if someone invents something, it's very hard for them to capture the benefits from it. It's shared by everybody, which is great in a way, but it means that they're not gonna have the incentives to put as much effort into it. There you need, it's a classic public good. There you need the government to be involved in it. And the US government used to be investing much more in R&D, but we have slashed that part of the government really foolishly and we're all poorer, significantly poorer as a result. Growth rates are down. We're not having the kind of scientific progress we used to have. It's been sort of a short term eating the seed corn, whatever metaphor you wanna use where people grab some money, put it in their pockets today, but five, 10, 20 years later, they're a lot poorer than they otherwise would have been. So we're living through a pandemic right now, globally in the United States. From an economics perspective, how do you think this pandemic will change the world? It's been remarkable. And it's horrible how many people have suffered, the amount of death, the economic destruction. It's also striking just the amount of change in work that I've seen. In the last 20 weeks, I've seen more change than there were in the previous 20 years. There's been nothing like it since probably the World War II mobilization in terms of reorganizing our economy. The most obvious one is the shift to remote work. And I and many other people stopped going into the office and teaching my students in person. I did a study on this with a bunch of colleagues at MIT and elsewhere. And what we found was that before the pandemic, in the beginning of 2020, about one in six, a little over 15% of Americans were working remotely. When the pandemic hit, that grew steadily and hit 50%, roughly half of Americans working at home. So a complete transformation. And of course, it wasn't even, it wasn't like everybody did it. If you're an information worker, professional, if you work mainly with data, then you're much more likely to work at home. If you're a manufacturing worker, working with other people or physical things, then it wasn't so easy to work at home. And instead, those people were much more likely to become laid off or unemployed. So it's been something that's had very disparate effects on different parts of the workforce. Do you think it's gonna be sticky in a sense that after vaccine comes out and the economy reopens, do you think remote work will continue? That's a great question. My hypothesis is yes, a lot of it will. Of course, some of it will go back, but a surprising amount of it will stay. I personally, for instance, I moved my seminars, my academic seminars to Zoom, and I was surprised how well it worked. So it works? Yeah, I mean, obviously we were able to reach a much broader audience. So we have people tuning in from Europe and other countries, just all over the United States for that matter. I also actually found that it would, in many ways, is more egalitarian. We use the chat feature and other tools, and grad students and others who might've been a little shy about speaking up, we now kind of have more of ability for lots of voices. And they're answering each other's questions, so you kind of get parallel. Like if someone had some question about some of the data or a reference or whatever, then someone else in the chat would answer it. And the whole thing just became like a higher bandwidth, higher quality thing. So I thought that was kind of interesting. I think a lot of people are discovering that these tools that thanks to technologists have been developed over the past decade, they're a lot more powerful than we thought. I mean, all the terrible things we've seen with COVID and the real failure of many of our institutions that I thought would work better. One area that's been a bright spot is our technologies. Bandwidth has held up pretty well, and all of our email and other tools have just scaled up kind of gracefully. So that's been a plus. Economists call this question of whether it'll go back a hysteresis. The question is like when you boil an egg after it gets cold again, it stays hard. And I think that we're gonna have a fair amount of hysteresis in the economy. We're gonna move to this new, we have moved to a new remote work system, and it's not gonna snap all the way back to where it was before. One of the things that worries me is that the people with lots of followers on Twitter and people with voices, people that can, voices that can be magnified by reporters and all that kind of stuff are the people that fall into this category that we were referring to just now where they can still function and be successful with remote work. And then there is a kind of quiet suffering of what feels like millions of people whose jobs are disturbed profoundly by this pandemic, but they don't have many followers on Twitter. What do we, and again, I apologize, but I've been reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich and there's a connection to the depression on the American side. There's a deep, complicated connection to how suffering can turn into forces that potentially change the world in destructive ways. So like it's something I worry about is like, what is this suffering going to materialize itself in five, 10 years? Is that something you worry about, think about? It's like the center of what I worry about. And let me break it down to two parts. There's a moral and ethical aspect to it. We need to relieve this suffering. I mean, I'm sure the values of, I think most Americans, we like to see shared prosperity or most people on the planet. And we would like to see people not falling behind and they have fallen behind, not just due to COVID, but in the previous couple of decades, median income has barely moved, depending on how you measure it. And the incomes of the top 1% have skyrocketed. And part of that is due to the ways technology has been used. Part of this been due to, frankly, our political system has continually shifted more wealth into those people who have the powerful interest. So there's just, I think, a moral imperative to do a better job. And ultimately, we're all gonna be wealthier if more people can contribute, more people have the wherewithal. But the second thing is that there's a real political risk. I'm not a political scientist, but you don't have to be one, I think, to see how a lot of people are really upset with they're getting a raw deal and they want to smash the system in different ways, in 2016 and 2018. And now I think there are a lot of people who are looking at the political system and they feel like it's not working for them and they just wanna do something radical. Unfortunately, demagogues have harnessed that in a way that is pretty destructive to the country. And an analogy I see is what happened with trade. Almost every economist thinks that free trade is a good thing, that when two people voluntarily exchange almost by definition, they're both better off if it's voluntary. And so generally, trade is a good thing. But they also recognize that trade can lead to uneven effects, that there can be winners and losers in some of the people who didn't have the skills to compete with somebody else or didn't have other assets. And so trade can shift prices in ways that are averse to some people. So there's a formula that economists have, which is that you have free trade, but then you compensate the people who are hurt and free trade makes the pie bigger. And since the pie is bigger, it's possible for everyone to be better off. You can make the winners better off, but you can also compensate those who don't win. And so they end up being better off as well. What happened was that we didn't fulfill that promise. We did have some more increased free trade in the 80s and 90s, but we didn't compensate the people who were hurt. And so they felt like the people in power reneged on the bargain, and I think they did. And so then there's a backlash against trade. And now both political parties, but especially Trump and company, have really pushed back against free trade. Ultimately, that's bad for the country. Ultimately, that's bad for living standards. But in a way I can understand that people felt they were betrayed. Technology has a lot of similar characteristics. Technology can make us all better off. It makes the pie bigger. It creates wealth and health, but it can also be uneven. Not everyone automatically benefits. It's possible for some people, even a majority of people to get left behind while a small group benefits. What most economists would say, well, let's make the pie bigger, but let's make sure we adjust the system so we compensate the people who are hurt. And since the pie is bigger, we can make the rich richer, we can make the middle class richer, we can make the poor richer. Mathematically, everyone could be better off. But again, we're not doing that. And again, people are saying this isn't working for us. And again, instead of fixing the distribution, a lot of people are beginning to say, hey, technology sucks, we've got to stop it. Let's throw rocks at the Google bus. Let's blow it up. Let's blow it up. And there were the Luddites almost exactly 200 years ago who smashed the looms and the spinning machines because they felt like those machines weren't helping them. We have a real imperative, not just to do the morally right thing, but to do the thing that is gonna save the country, which is make sure that we create not just prosperity, but shared prosperity. So you've been at MIT for over 30 years, I think. Don't tell anyone how old I am. Yeah, no, that's true, that's true. And you're now moved to Stanford. I'm gonna try not to say anything about how great MIT is. What's that move been like? What, it's East Coast to West Coast? Well, MIT is great. MIT has been very good to me. It continues to be very good to me. It's an amazing place. I continue to have so many amazing friends and colleagues there. I'm very fortunate to have been able to spend a lot of time at MIT. Stanford's also amazing. And part of what attracted me out here was not just the weather, but also Silicon Valley, let's face it, is really more of the epicenter of the technological revolution. And I wanna be close to the people who are inventing AI and elsewhere. A lot of it is being invested at MIT for that matter in Europe and China and elsewhere, in Nia. But being a little closer to some of the key technologists was something that was important to me. And it may be shallow, but I also do enjoy the good weather. And I felt a little ripped off when I came here a couple of months ago. And immediately there are the fires and my eyes were burning, the sky was orange and there's the heat waves. And so it wasn't exactly what I've been promised, but fingers crossed it'll get back to better. But maybe on a brief aside, there's been some criticism of academia and universities and different avenues. And I, as a person who's gotten to enjoy universities from the pure playground of ideas that it can be, always kind of try to find the words to tell people that these are magical places. Is there something that you can speak to that is beautiful or powerful about universities? Well, sure. I mean, first off, I mean, economists have this concept called revealed preference. You can ask people what they say or you can watch what they do. And so obviously by reveal preferences, I love academia. I could be doing lots of other things, but it's something I enjoy a lot. And I think the word magical is exactly right. At least it is for me. I do what I love, you know, hopefully my Dean won't be listening, but I would do this for free. You know, it's just what I like to do. I like to do research. I love to have conversations like this with you and with my students, with my fellow colleagues. I love being around the smartest people I can find and learning something from them and having them challenge me. And that just gives me joy. And every day I find something new and exciting to work on. And a university environment is really filled with other people who feel that way. And so I feel very fortunate to be part of it. And I'm lucky that I'm in a society where I can actually get paid for it and put food on the table while doing the stuff that I really love. And I hope someday everybody can have jobs that are like that. And I appreciate that it's not necessarily easy for everybody to have a job that they both love and also they get paid for. So there are things that don't go well in academia, but by and large, I think it's a kind of, you know, kinder, gentler version of a lot of the world. You know, we sort of cut each other a little slack on things like, you know, on just a lot of things. You know, of course there's harsh debates and discussions about things and some petty politics here and there. I personally, I try to stay away from most of that sort of politics. It's not my thing. And so it doesn't affect me most of the time, sometimes a little bit, maybe. But, you know, being able to pull together something, we have the digital economy lab. We've got all these brilliant grad students and undergraduates and postdocs that are just doing stuff that I learned from. And every one of them has some aspect of what they're doing that's just, I couldn't even understand. It's like way, way more brilliant. And that's really, to me, actually I really enjoy that, being in a room with lots of other smart people. And Stanford has made it very easy to attract, you know, those people. I just, you know, say I'm gonna do a seminar, whatever, and the people come, they come and wanna work with me. We get funding, we get data sets, and it's come together real nicely. And the rest is just fun. It's fun, yeah. And we feel like we're working on important problems, you know, and we're doing things that, you know, I think are first order in terms of what's important in the world, and that's very satisfying to me. Maybe a bit of a fun question. What three books, technical, fiction, philosophical, you've enjoyed, had a big, big impact in your life? Well, I guess I go back to like my teen years, and, you know, I read Sid Arthur, which is a philosophical book, and kind of helps keep me centered. By Herman Hesse. Yeah, by Herman Hesse, exactly. Don't get too wrapped up in material things or other things, and just sort of, you know, try to find peace on things. A book that actually influenced me a lot in terms of my career was called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Halbrenner. It's actually about economists. It goes through a series of different, it's written in a very lively form, and it probably sounds boring, but it did describe whether it's Adam Smith or Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes, and each of them sort of what their key insights were, but also kind of their personalities, and I think that's one of the reasons I became an economist was just understanding how they grapple with the big questions of the world. So would you recommend it as a good whirlwind overview of the history of economics? Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right. It kind of takes you through the different things, and so you can understand how they reach, thinking some of the strengths and weaknesses. I mean, it probably is a little out of date now. It needs to be updated a bit, but you could at least look through the first couple hundred years of economics, which is not a bad place to start. More recently, I mean, a book I really enjoyed is by my friend and colleague, Max Tegmark, called Life 3.0. You should have him on your podcast if you haven't already. He was episode number one. Oh my God. And he's back, he'll be back, he'll be back soon. Yeah, no, he's terrific. I love the way his brain works, and he makes you think about profound things. He's got such a joyful approach to life, and so that's been a great book, and I learn a lot from it, I think everybody, but he explains it in a way, even though he's so brilliant, that everyone can understand, that I can understand. That's three, but let me mention maybe one or two others. I mean, I recently read More From Less by my sometimes coauthor, Andrew McAfee. It made me optimistic about how we can continue to have rising living standards while living more lightly on the planet. In fact, because of higher living standards, because of technology, because of digitization that I mentioned, we don't have to have as big an impact on the planet, and that's a great story to tell, and he documents it very carefully. You know, a personal kind of self help book that I found kind of useful, People, is Atomic Habits. I think it's, what's his name, James Clear. Yeah, James Clear. He's just, yeah, it's a good name, because he writes very clearly, and you know, most of the sentences I read in that book, I was like, yeah, I know that, but it just really helps to have somebody like remind you and tell you and kind of just reinforce it, and it's helpful. So build habits in your life that you hope to have, that have a positive impact, and don't have to make it big things. It could be just tiny little. Exactly, I mean, the word atomic, it's a little bit of a pun, I think he says. You know, one, atomic means they're really small. You take these little things, but also like atomic power, can have like, you know, big impact. That's funny, yeah. The biggest ridiculous question, especially to ask an economist, but also a human being, what's the meaning of life? I hope you've gotten the answer to that from somebody else. I think we're all still working on that one, but what is it? You know, I actually learned a lot from my son, Luke, and he's 19 now, but he's always loved philosophy, and he reads way more sophisticated philosophy than I do. I went and took him to Oxford, and he spent the whole time like pulling all these obscure books down and reading them. And a couple of years ago, we had this argument, and he was trying to convince me that hedonism was the ultimate, you know, meaning of life, just pleasure seeking, and... Well, how old was he at the time? 17, so... Okay. But he made a really good like intellectual argument for it too, and you know, but you know, it just didn't strike me as right. And I think that, you know, while I am kind of a utilitarian, like, you know, I do think we should do the grace, good for the grace number, that's just too shallow. And I think I've convinced myself that real happiness doesn't come from seeking pleasure. It's kind of a little, it's ironic. Like if you really focus on being happy, I think it doesn't work. You gotta like be doing something bigger. I think the analogy I sometimes use is, you know, when you look at a dim star in the sky, if you look right at it, it kind of disappears, but you have to look a little to the side, and then the parts of your retina that are better at absorbing light, you know, can pick it up better. It's the same thing with happiness. I think you need to sort of find something, other goal, something, some meaning in life, and that ultimately makes you happier than if you go squarely at just pleasure. And so for me, you know, the kind of research I do that I think is trying to change the world, make the world a better place, and I'm not like an evolutionary psychologist, but my guess is that our brains are wired, not just for pleasure, but we're social animals, and we're wired to like help others. And ultimately, you know, that's something that's really deeply rooted in our psyche. And if we do help others, if we do, or at least feel like we're helping others, you know, our reward systems kick in, and we end up being more deeply satisfied than if we just do something selfish and shallow. Beautifully put. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Eric. You were one of the people when I first showed up at MIT, that made me proud to be at MIT. So it's so sad that you're now at Stanford, but I'm sure you'll do wonderful things at Stanford as well. I can't wait till future books, and people should definitely read your other books. Well, thank you so much. And I think we're all part of the invisible college, as we call it. You know, we're all part of this intellectual and human community where we all can learn from each other. It doesn't really matter physically where we are so much anymore. Beautiful. Thanks for talking today. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Brynjolfsson. And thank you to our sponsors. Vincero Watches, the maker of classy, well performing watches. Fort Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. And CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube. Review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology | Lex Fridman Podcast #141

The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fourth time on the podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. Since this is episode number 142, and 42, as we all know, is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we decided to talk about this unanswerable question of the meaning of life in whatever way we two descendants of apes could muster, from biology, psychology, to metaphysics, and to music. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thanks to Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability, Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the opening 40 minutes of the conversation are all about the many songs that formed the soundtrack to the journey of Manolis's life. It was a happy accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis. I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we mentioned in the description, and overlay lyrics on occasion. But if you're just listening to this without listening to the songs or watching the video, I hope you still might enjoy, as I did, the passion that Manolis has for music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, the meaning we discuss that we pull from the different songs. If music is not your thing, I do give timestamps to the less musical and more philosophical parts of the conversation. I hope you enjoy this little experiment and conversation about music and life. If you do, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Callas. You mentioned Leonard Cohen and the song Hallelujah as a beautiful song. So what are the three songs you draw the most meaning from about life? Don't get me started. So there's really countless songs that have marked me, that have sort of shaped me in periods of joy and in periods of sadness. My son likes to joke that I have a song for every sentence he will say, because very often I will break into a song with a sentence he'll say. My wife calls me the radio because I can sort of recite hundreds of songs that have really shaped me. So it's gonna be very hard to just pick a few. So I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about my song transition as I've grown up. In Greece, it was very much about, as I told you before, the misery, the poverty, but also overcoming adversity. So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Charis Alexiou, for example, is one of my favorite singers in Greece. And then there's also really just old traditional songs that my parents used to listen to. Like one of them is Ani Moun Plousios, which is basically, oh, if I was rich. And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you hear in the neighborhood, his poor neighborhood, the train going by, the priest walking to the church and the kids crying next door and all of that. And he says, with all of that, I'm having trouble falling asleep and dreaming. If I was rich, and then he was breaking to that. So it's this juxtaposition between the spirit and the sublime and then the physical and the harsh reality. It's just not having troubles, not being miserable. So basically rich to him just means out of my misery, basically. And then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain of a ship and see the world and stuff like that. So it's just such beautiful imagery. So many of the Greek songs, just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the cruelty, the difficulty of life, but are longing for a better life. That's exactly right. And another one is Ftokhologia. And this is one of those songs that has like a fast and joyful half and a slow and sad half. And it goes back and forth between them. And it's like, Ftokhologia, jefse na kathemou dragoouzi. So poor, you know, basically it's the state of being poor. I don't even know if there's a word for that in English. And then fast part is ta kerya sou megalosan ke ponesan ke matosan. So, and then it's like, oh, you know, basically like the state of being poor and misery, you know, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera. And then the fast part is in your arms, grew up and suffered and, you know, stood up and, you know, rose, men with clear vision. This whole concept of taking on the world with nothing to lose because you've seen the worst of it. This imagery of psilaki parizopoula harastakorizopoula. So it's describing the young men as cypress trees. And that's probably one of my earliest exposure to a metaphor, to sort of, you know, this very rich imagery. And I love about the fact that I was reading a story to my kids the other day and it was dark. And my daughter who's six is like, oh, can I please see the pictures? And Jonathan, who's eight, so my daughter Cleo is like, oh, let's look at the pictures. And my son Jonathan, he's like, but Cleo, if you look at the pictures, it's just an image. If you just close your eyes and listen, it's a video. That's brilliant. It's beautiful. And he's basically showing just how much more the human imagination has besides just a few images that, you know, the book will give you. And then another one, oh gosh, this one is really like miserable. It's called Sto Perigiali, To Krifo. And it's basically describing how vigorously we took on our life and we pushed hard towards a direction that we then realized was the wrong one. And again, these songs give you so much perspective. There's no songs like that in English that will basically sort of just smack you in the face about sort of the passion and the force and the drive. And then it turns out, we just followed the wrong life. And it's like, wow. Okay, so that was you. All right, so that's like before 12. So growing up in sort of this horrendously miserable sort of view of romanticism, of suffering. So then my preteen years is like, you know, learning English through songs. So basically, you know, listening to all the American pop songs and then memorizing them vocally before I even knew what they meant. So, you know, Madonna and Michael Jackson and all of these sort of really popular songs and, you know, George Michael and just songs that I would just listen to the radio and repeat vocally. And eventually as I started learning English, I was like, oh wow, this thing I've been repeating, I now understand what it means. Without relistening it to it, but just with re repeating it, it was like, oh. Again, Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself. You know, if you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change. This whole concept of, again, I mean, all of these songs, you can listen to them shallowly or you can just listen to them and say, oh, there's deeper meaning here. And I think there's a certain philosophy of song as a way of touching the psyche. So if you look at regions of the brain, people have lost their language ability because they have an accident in that region of the brain can actually sing because it's exactly the symmetric region of the brain. And that again, teaches you so much about language evolution and sort of the duality of musicality and, you know, rhythmic patterns and eventually language. Do you have a sense of why songs developed? You're kind of suggesting that it's possible that there is something important about our connection with song and with music on the level of the importance of language. Is it possible? It's not just possible. In my view, language comes after music. Language comes after song. No, seriously. Like basically, my view of human cognitive evolution is rituals. If you look at many early cultures, there's rituals around every stage of life. There's organized dance performances around mating. And if you look at mate selection, I mean, that's an evolutionary drive right there. So basically, if you're not able to string together a complex dance as a bird, you don't get a mate. And that actually forms this development for many song learning birds. Not every bird knows how to sing. And not every bird knows how to learn a complicated song. So basically, there's birds that simply have the same few tunes that they know how to play. And a lot of that is inherent and genetically encoded. And others are birds that learn how to sing. And if you look at a lot of these exotic birds of paradise and stuff like that, the mating rituals that they have are enormously amazing. And I think human mating rituals of ancient tribes are not very far off from that. And in my view, the sequential formation of these movements is a prelude to the cognitive capabilities that ultimately enable language. It is fascinating to think that that's not just an accidental precursor to intelligence. Yeah, sexually selected. Well, it's sexually selected and it's a prerequisite. Yeah. It's like, it's required for intelligence. And even as language has now developed, I think the artistic expression is needed, like badly needed by our brain. So it's not just that, oh, our brain can kind of, you know, take a break and go do that stuff. No, I mean, you know, I don't know if you remember that scene from, oh gosh, where's that Jack Nicholson movie in New Hampshire. All work and no play, make Jack a dull boy. A dull boy. The Shining. The Shining. So there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying to concentrate and what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish. And I have that image as well when I'm working. And I'm like, no, basically all of these crazy, you know, huge number of hobbies that I have, they're not just tolerated by my work. They're required by my work. This ability of sort of stretching your brain in all these different directions is connecting your emotional self and your cognitive self. And that's a prerequisite to being able to be cognitively capable. At least in my view. Yeah, I wonder if the world without art and music, you're just making me realize that perhaps that world would be not just devoid of fun things to look at or listen to, but devoid of all the other stuff. All the bridges and rockets and science. Exactly, exactly. Creativity is not disconnected from art. And you know, my kids, I mean, you know, I could be doing the full math treatment to them. No, they play the piano and they play the violin and they play sports. I mean, this whole, you know, sort of movement and going through mazes and playing tennis and, you know, playing soccer and avoiding obstacles and all of that, that forms your three dimensional view of the world. Being able to actually move and run and play in three dimensions is extremely important for math, for, you know, stringing together complicated concepts. It's the same underlying cognitive machinery that is used for navigating mazes and for navigating theorems and sort of solving equations. So I can't, you know, I can't have a conversation with my students without, you know, sort of either using my hands or opening the whiteboard in Zoom and just constantly drawing. Or, you know, back when we had in person meetings, just the whiteboard on my own. The whiteboard, yeah, that's fascinating to think about. So that's Michael Jackson, man, Mirror, Careless Whisper with George Michael, which is a song I like. You can say Careless Whisper. I mean, I didn't say that. I like that one. That's too popular for you. I had recorded, no, no, no, that it's an amazing song for me. I had recorded a small part of it as it's played at the tail end of the radio. And I had a tape where I only had part of that song and I just played it over and over and over again, just so beautiful. It's so heartbreaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so heartbreaking. I know, and George Michael is Greek. Is he Greek? He's Greek, of course. George Michaelides, I mean, he's Greek. Yeah. I did not know this. Now you know. I'm so sorry to offend you so deeply not knowing this. So, okay, so what's... So anyway, so we're moving to France when I'm 12 years old. And now I'm getting into the songs of Gainsbourg. So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to please, just like with his cigarette, just like rrrr mumbling his songs. But the lyrics are unbelievable. Like basically entire sentences will rhyme. He will say the same thing twice and you're like, whoa. And in fact, another, speaking of Greek, a French Greek, George Mustaky, this song is just magnificent. Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de patre grecque. So with my face of métèque is actually a Greek word. A Greek word, it's a French word for a Greek word. But met comes from meta, and then ec from Ikea, from ecology, which means home. So métèque is someone who has changed homes for a migrant. So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one. De juif errant, de patre grecque, of a meandering Jew, of Greek pastor. So again, the Russian Greek, the Jewish Orthodox connection, so. Aime mes cheveux au quatre vents, with my hair in the four wings. Avec mes yeux tous délavés qui me donnent léreux de rêver. Avec, with my eyes that are all washed out, who give me the pretense of dreaming, but who don't dream that much anymore. With my hands of thief, of musician, and who have stolen so many gardens. With my mouth that has drunk, that has kissed, and that has bitten, without ever pleasing its hunger. With my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers, and anything that was wearing a skirt. With my heart, and then you have to listen to this verse, it's so beautiful. Avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu il a souffert. Qui a su faire. With my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered, but was able to, that knew how to make, in French it's actually su faire, that knew how to make. Qui a su faire souffrir autant qu il a souffert. Verses that span the whole thing. It's just beautiful. Do you know, on a small tangent, do you know Jacques Brel? Of course, of course. And then Ne Me Kite Pas, those songs. That song gets me every time. So there's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists. Not Nina Simone. No, no, no, no, no. Modern? Carol Emerald. She's from Amsterdam. And she has a version of Ne Me Kite Pas where she's actually added some English lyrics. And it's really beautiful. But again, Ne Me Kite Pas is just so, I mean it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that will restart. It's just so beautiful. And. I love, there's not many songs that show such depth of desperation for another human being. That's so powerful. I apologize. Je t offrirai des perles de pluie venant de pays où il ne pleut pas. And then high school. Now I'm starting to learn English. So I moved to New York. So Sting's Englishman in New York. Yeah. Magnificent song. And again, there's if manners maggoth manners someone said then he's the hero of the day. It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile. Be yourself no matter what they say. And then takes more than combat gear to make a man. Takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run. It's again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live. I mean, this is one of them. Basically says, it's not the combat gear that makes a man. Where's the part where he says, there you go. Gentleness so brighty are rare in this society. At night a candle's brighter than the sun. So beautiful. He basically says, well, you just might be the only one. Modesty propriety can lead to notoriety. You could end up as the only one. It's, it basically tells you, you don't have to be like the others. Be yourself, show kindness, show generosity. Don't, you know, don't let that anger get to you. You know, the song Fragile. How fragile we are, how fragile we are. So again, as in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant. How fragile we are, but the song was so beautiful. And then eventually I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics. And the song is actually written after the Contras murdered Ben Linder in 1987. And the US eventually turned against supporting these guerrillas. And it was just a political song, but so such a realization that you can't win with violence basically. And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry. So if blood will flow when flesh and steel are one, drying in the color of the evening sun, tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stain. Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes through violence and nothing ever could. For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are. Damn, right? I mean, that's poetry. It was beautiful. And he's using the English language is just such a refined way with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so beautifully and evocations of when flesh and steel are one. I mean, it's just mind boggling. And then of course the refrain that everybody remembers is on and on the rain will fall, et cetera. But like this beginning. Tears from a star, wow. Yeah. And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are. I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally. Something, it seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm that, I don't know what that is. That probably connects to exactly what you were saying. And if you pay close attention, you will notice that the more obvious words sometimes are the second verse and the less obvious are often the first verse because it makes the second verse flow much more naturally because otherwise it feels contrived. Oh, you went and found this like unusual word. In Dark Moments, the whole album of Pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously as a teenager, just the wall. And there's one song that never actually made it into the album that's only there in the movie about when the tigers broke free and the tigers are the tanks of the Germans. And it just describes, again, this vivid imagery. It was just before dawn, one miserable morning in Black 44 when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn. And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while. And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives. So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with Us Versus Them. Us and them, God only knows that's not what we would choose to do. For work he cried from the rear and the front rows died from another song. It's like this whole concept of Us Versus Them. And there's that theme of Us Versus Them again where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old and a found it one day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away. And my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty's sign with his own rubber stamp. So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because his father was lost. He's crying because kind old King George took the time to actually write mother a note about the fact that his father died. It's so ironic because it basically says we are just ordinary men and of course we're disposable. So I don't know if you know the root of the word pioneers but you had a chess board here earlier, a pawn. In French, it's a pigeon. They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered, slaughtered. This whole concept of pioneers having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that we're now treating as heroes. So anyway, there's this juxtaposition of that. And then the part that always just strikes me is the music and the tonality totally changes. And now he describes the attack. It was dark all around. There was frost in the ground. When the tigers broke free and no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers company. They were all left behind. Most of them dead. The rest of them dying. And that's how the high command took my daddy from me. And that song, even though it's not in the album, explains the whole movie. Cause it's this movie of misery. It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it. There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's own mind. And this wall that you're stuck inside and this feeling of loneliness. And sort of, is there anybody out there? And you know, sort of, hello, hello. Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home? Come on, yo. I hear you're feeling down. Just one minute, I hear you nodding in again. Anyway, so. Yeah, the prison of your mind. So those are the darker moments. Exactly, these are the darker moments. Yeah, in the darker moments, the mind does feel like you're trapped alone in a room with it. Yeah, and there's this scene in the movie which like, where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room. She starts throwing stuff and then he like, you know breaks the window, he throws the chair outside. And then you see him laying in the pool with his own blood, like, you know, everywhere. And then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing and lining it up. And it's this whole sort of mania versus, you know you can spend hours building up something and just destroy it in a few seconds. One of my turns is that song. And it's like, I feel cold as a tourniquet right as a manor. Dry as a funeral drum. And then the music also is like, run to the bedroom. There's a suitcase on the left. There you find my favorite acts. Don't look so frightened. This is just a passing phase. One of my bad days. It's just so beautiful. I need to rewatch it. That's so, you're making me realize. But imagine watching this as a teenager. It like ruins your mind. It's like so many, it's such harsh imagery. And then, you know, anyway, so there's the dark moment. And then again, going back to Sting now it's the political songs, Russians. And I think that song should be a new national anthem for the US, not for Russians, but for red versus blue. Mr. Khrushchev says we will bury you. I don't subscribe to this point of view. It'd be such an ignorant thing to do if the Russians love their children too. What is it doing? It's basically saying the Russians are just as humans as we are. There's no way that they're gonna let their children die. And then it's just so beautiful. How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy? And now that's the new national anthem, are you reading? There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence. We share the same biology regardless of ideology. Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too. There's no such thing as a winnable war. It's a lie we don't believe anymore. I mean, it's beautiful, right? And for God's sake, America, wake up. These are your fellow Americans. They're your fellow biology. There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence. It's just so beautiful. There's no crisper, simpler way to say Russians love their children too, the common humanity. And remember what I was telling you, I think in one of our first podcasts about the daughter who's crying for her brother to come back for more. And then the Virgin Mary appears and says, who should I take instead? This Turk, here's his family, here's his children. This other one, he just got married, et cetera. And that basically says, no. I mean, if you look at the Lord of the Rings, the enemies are these monsters, they're not human. And that's what we always do. We always say, they're not like us, they're different. They're not humans, et cetera. So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war. If you realize just how close we are genetically, one with the other, this whole 99.9% identical, you can't bear weapons against someone who's like that. And the things that are the most meaningful to us in our lives at every level is the same on all sides, on both sides. Exactly. So it's not just that we're genetically the same. Yeah, we're ideologically the same. We love our children, we love our country. We will fight for our family. So, and the last one I mentioned last time we spoke, which is Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. So she has three rounds, one on clouds, one on love, and one on life. And on clouds she says, Rows and flows of angel hair And ice cream castles in the air And feather canyons everywhere I've looked at clouds that way But now they only block the sun They rain and snow on everyone So many things I would have done But clouds got in my way And then I've looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down And still somehow it's Clouds illusions I recall I really don't know clouds at all And then she goes on about love, how it's super, super happy, or it's about misery and loss and about life, how it's about winning and losing and so on and so forth. But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well, something's lost and something's gained In living every day So again, that's growing up and realizing that, well, the view that you had as a kid is not necessarily that you have as an adult. Remember my poem from when I was 16 years old of this whole, you know, children dance now all in row and then in the end, even though the snow seems bright, without you have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled. So this whole concept of, if you have love and if you have passion, you see the exact same thing from a different way. You can go out running in the rain or you could just stay in and say, ah, sucks, I won't be able to go outside now. Those sides. Anyway, and the last one is, last, last one I promise, Leonard Cohen. This is amazing by the way. I'm so glad we stumbled on how much joy you have in so many avenues of life and music is just one of them. That's amazing. But yes, Leonard Cohen. Going back to Leonard Cohen, since that's where you started. So Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love. That was our opening song in our wedding with my wife. Oh no, that's good. As we came out to greet the guests, it was Dance Me to the End of Love. And then another one, which is just so passionate always and we always keep referring back to it is I'm Your Man. And it goes on and on about sort of, I can be every type of lover for you. And what's really beautiful in marriage is that we live that with my wife every day. You can have the passion, you can have the anger, you can have the love, you can have the tenderness. There's just so many gems in that song. If you want a partner, take my hand. Or if you want to strike me down in anger, here I stand, I'm your man. Then if you want a boxer, I will step into the ring for you. If you want a driver, climb inside. Or if you want to take me for a ride, you know you can. So this whole concept of you want to drive, I'll follow. You want me to drive, I'll drive. And the difference I would say between like that and Nemaki Tapa is this song, he's got an attitude. He's like, he's proud of his ability to basically be any kind of man for as long as opposed to the Jacques Brel like desperation of what do I have to be for you to love me, that kind of desperation. But notice there's a parallel here. There's a verse that is perhaps not paid attention to as much which says, ah, but a man never got a woman back, not by begging on his knees. So it seems that the I'm your man is actually an apology song in the same way that Nemaki Tapa is an apology song. Nemaki Tapa basically says I've screwed up. I'm sorry, baby. And in the same way that the Careless Whisper is I'm screwed up. Yes, that's right. I'm never gonna dance again. Guilty feet have got no rhythm. So this is an apology song, not by begging on his knees or I'd crawl to you, baby, and I'd fall at your feet and I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat and I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet. I'd say please. And then the last one is so beautiful. If you want a father for your child or only want to walk with me a while across the sand, I'm your man. That's the last verses which basically says you want me for a day? I'll be there. Do you want me to just walk? I'll be there. You want me for life? Do you want a father for your child? I'll be there too. It's just so beautiful. Oh, sorry. Remember how I told you I was gonna finish with a lighthearted song? Yes. Last one. You ready? So Alison Krauss and Union Station, country song, believe it or not, the lucky one. So I've never identified as much with the lyrics of a song as this one. And it's hilarious. My friend, Serafim Batoglou, is the guy who got me to genomics in the first place. I owe enormously to him. And he's another Greek. We actually met dancing, believe it or not. So we used to perform Greek dances. I was the president of the International Students Association. So we put on these big performances for 500 people at MIT. And there's a picture on the MIT Tech where Serafim, who's like a bodybuilder, was holding me on his shoulder. And I was like doing maneuvers in the air, basically. So anyway, this guy, Serafim, we were driving back from a conference. And there's this Russian girl who was describing how every member of her family had been either killed by the communists or killed by the Germans or killed by the, like, she had just like, you know, misery, like death and, you know, sickness and everything. Everyone was decimated in her family. She was the last standing member. And we stopped at a, Serafim was driving and we stopped at a rest area. And he takes me aside and he's like, Manolis, we're gonna crash. Get her out of my car. And then he basically says, but I'm only reassured because you're here with me. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, you know, he's like, from your smile, I know you're the luckiest man on the planet. So there's this really funny thing where I just feel freaking lucky all the time. And it's a question of attitude. Of course, I'm not any luckier than any other person, but every time something horrible happens to me, I'm like, and in fact, even in that song, the song about sort of, you know, walking on the beach and this, you know, sort of taking our life the wrong way and then, you know, having to turn around. At some point he's like, you know, in the fresh sand, we wrote her name. So how nicely that the wind blew and the writing was erased. So again, it's this whole sort of, not just saying, oh, bummer, but, oh, great. I just lost this. This must mean something, right? This horrible thing happened, it must open the door to a beautiful chapter. So, so Allison Krauss is talking about the lucky one. So I was like, oh my God, she wrote a song for me. And she goes, you're the lucky one, I know that now, as free as the wind blowing down the road, loved by many, hated by none, I'd say, you were lucky because you know what you've done, not the care in the world, not the worry inside. Everything's going to be all right because you're the lucky one. And then she goes, you're the lucky one, always having fun, a jack of all trades, a master of none. You look at the world with the smiling eyes and laugh at the devil as his train rolls by. I'll give you a song and a one night stand. You'll be looking at a happy man because you're the lucky one. It basically says, if you just don't worry too much, if you don't try to be a one trick pony, if you just embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things, but you're just gonna try a lot of things. And then there's another verse that says, well, you're blessed I guess, but never knowing which road you're choosing, to you the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. It's just so beautiful because he basically says, if you try your best, but it's still playing, if you lose, it's okay. You had an awesome game. And again, superficially, it sounds like a super happy song. But then there's the last verse basically says, no matter where you are, that's where you'll be. You can bet your luck won't follow me. Just give you a song and then one night stand, you'll be looking at a happy man. And then in the video of the song, she just walks away or he just walks away or something like that. And it basically tells you that freedom comes at a price. Freedom comes at the price of non commitment. This whole sort of birds who love or birds who cry, you can't really love unless you cry. You can't just be the lucky one, the happy boy, la la la, and yet have a long term relationship. So it's, on one hand, I identify with the shallowness of this song, of you know, you're the lucky one, jack of all trades, a master or none. But at the same time, I identify with a lesson of, well, you can't just be the happy, merry, go lucky all the time. Sometimes you have to embrace loss and sometimes you have to embrace suffering. And sometimes you have to embrace that. If you have a safety net, you're not really committing enough. You're not, you know, basically you're allowing yourself to slip. But if you just go all in and you just, you know, let go of your reservations, that's when you truly will get somewhere. So anyway, that's like the, I managed to narrow it down to what, 15 songs? Thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on, the darkest possible places of Greek song to ending on this country song. I haven't heard it before, but that's exactly right. I feel the same way, depending on the day, is this the luckiest human on earth. And there's something to that, but you're right, it needs to be, we need to now return to the muck of life in order to be able to truly enjoy it. So it's... What do you mean muck? What's muck? The messiness of life. Yeah. The things that were, things don't turn out the way you expect it to. Yeah. So like, to feel like you're in the right place, to feel lucky, is like focusing on the beautiful consequences. Yeah. But then that feeling of things being different than you expected, that you stumble in all the kinds of ways, that seems to be, needs to be paired with the feeling of luck. There's basically one way, the only way not to make mistakes, is to never do anything. Right. Basically, you have to embrace the fact that you'll be wrong so many times. In so many research meetings, I just go off on a tangent and say, let's think about this for a second. And it's just crazy for me, who's a computer scientist, to just tell my biologist friends, what if biology kind of worked this way? Yeah. And they humor me. They just let me talk. And rarely has it not gone somewhere good. It's not that I'm always right, but it's always something worth exploring further, that if you're an outsider with humility and knowing that I'll be wrong a bunch of times, but I'll challenge your assumptions, and often take us to a better place, is part of this whole sort of messiness of life. Like if you don't try and lose and get hurt and suffer and cry and just break your heart and all these feelings of guilt and, wow, I did the wrong thing. Of course, that's part of life. And that's just something that, if you are a doer, you'll make mistakes. If you're a criticizer, yeah, sure, you can sit back and criticize everybody else for the mistakes they make. Or instead, you can just be out there making those mistakes. And frankly, I'd rather be the criticized one than the criticizer. Yeah, brilliantly put. Every time somebody steals my bicycle, I say, well, no, my son's like, why do they steal our bicycle, dad? And I'm like, aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal? Yeah. Aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal? I'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer. Yeah, it's not the critic that counts. So that's, we've just talked amazingly about life from the music perspective. Let's talk about life from, human life, from perhaps other perspective and its meaning. So this is episode 142. There is perhaps an absurdly deep meaning to the number 42 that our culture has elevated. So this is a perfect time to talk about the meaning of life. We've talked about it already, but do you think this question that's so simple and so seemingly absurd has value of what is the meaning of life? Is it something that raising the question and trying to answer it, is that a ridiculous pursuit or is there some value? Is it answerable at all? So first of all, I feel that we owe it to your listeners to say why 42? Sure. So of course the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came up with 42 as basically a random number. Just, you know, the author just pulled it out of a hat and he's admitted so. He said, well, 42 just seemed like just random numbers any. But in fact, there's many numbers that are linked to 42. So 42, again, just to summarize, is the answer that these super mega computer that had computed for a million years with the most powerful computer in the world had come up with. At some point, the computer says, I have an answer. And they're like, what? It's like, you're not gonna like it. Like, what is it? It's 42. And then the irony is that they had forgotten, of course, what the question was. Yes. So now they have to build a bigger computer to figure out what the question is, to which the answer is 42. So as I was turning 42, I basically sort of researched why 42 is such a cool number. And it turns out that, and I put together this little passage that was explaining to all those guests to my 42nd birthday party why we were talking about the meaning of life. And basically talked about how 42 is the angle at which light reflects off of water to create a rainbow. And it's so beautiful because the rainbow is basically the combination of sort of, it's been raining, but there's hope because the sun just came out. So it's a very beautiful number there. So 42 is also the sum of all rows and columns of a magic cube that contains all consecutive integers starting at one. So basically, if you take all integers between one and however many vertices there are, the sums is always 42. 42 is the only number left under 100 for which the equation of X to the cube plus Y to the cube plus Z to the cube is N and was not known to not have a solution. And now it's the only one that actually has a solution. 42 is also one, zero, one, zero, one, zero in binary. Again, the yin and the yang, the good and the evil, one and zero, the balance of the force. 42 is the number of chromosomes for the giant panda. And the giant panda, I know it's totally random. It's a suspicious symbol of great strength coupled with peace, friendship, gentle temperament, harmony, balance, and friendship whose black and white colors again symbolize yin and yang. The reason why it's the symbol for China is exactly the strength, but yet peace and so on and so forth. So 42 chromosomes. It takes light 10 to the minus 42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton connecting the two fundamental dimensions of space and time. 42 is the number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon, which is what I assume my students mean when they ask that their paper reaches for the stars. I just tell them just fold it a bunch of times. 42 is the number of messier object, 42, which is Orion. And that's one of the most famous galaxies. It's I think also the place where we can actually see the center of our galaxy. 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in ASCII, which is very useful when searching for the stars. And also a reg exp for life, the universe and everything. So star, in Egyptian mythology, the goddess Maat which was personifying truth and justice would ask 42 questions to every dying person. And those answering successfully would become stars continued to give life and fuel universal growth. In Judaic tradition, God ascribe the 42 lettered name and trusted only to the middle age pious meek free from bad temper, sober and not insistent on his rights. And in Christian tradition, there's 42 generations from Abraham, Isaac, that we talked about, the story of Isaac, Jacob, eventually Joseph, Mary and Jesus. In Kabbalistic tradition, Elocha, which is 42 is the number with which God creates the universe starting with 25, let there be and ending with 70, good. So 25 plus, you know, 17, there's a 42 chapter sutra, which is the first Indian religious tradition which is the first Indian religious scripture which was translated to Chinese, thus introducing Buddhism to China from India. The 42 line Bible was the first printed book marking the age of printing in the 1450s and the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading to the enlightenment. A yeast cell, which is called a single cell eukaryote and the subject of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins. Anyway, so there's a series of 42. You're on fire with this, these are really good. So I guess what you're saying is just a random number. Yeah, basically. So all of these are backronyms. So, you know, after you have the number, you figure out why that number. So anyway, so now that we've spoken about Y42, why do we search for meaning? And you're asking, you know, will that search ultimately lead to our destruction? And my thinking is exactly the opposite. So basically that asking about meaning is something that's so inherent to human nature. It's something that makes life beautiful that makes it worth living. And that searching for meaning is actually the point. It's not the finding it. I think when you found it, you're dead. Don't ever be satisfied that, you know, I've got it. So I like to say that life is lived forward but it only makes sense backward. And I don't remember whose quote that is, but the whole search itself is the meaning. And what I love about it is that there's a double search going on. There's a search in every one of us through our own lives to find meaning. And then there's a search which is happening for humanity itself to find our meaning. And we as humans like to look at animals and say, of course they have a meaning. Like a dog has its meaning. It's just a bunch of instincts, you know, running around, loving everything. You know, remember our joke with a cat and the dog. Yeah, cat has no meaning. No, no. So, and I'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here with this whole panda, black and white and the 0102. You're on fire with that 42. Some of those are gold ASCII value for a star symbol. Damn. So basically in my view, the search for meaning and the act of searching for something more meaningful is life's meaning by itself. The fact that we kind of always hope that, yes, maybe for animals that's not the case, but maybe humans have something that we should be doing and something else. And it's not just about procreation. It's not just about dominance. It's not just about strength and feeding, et cetera. Like we're the one species that spends such a tiny, little minority of its time feeding that we have this enormous, huge cognitive capability that we can just use for all kinds of other stuff. And that's where art comes in. That's where the healthy mind comes in with exploring all of these different aspects that are just not directly tied to a purpose. That's not directly tied to a function. It's really just the playing of life. The, you know, not for particular reason. Do you think this thing we got, this mind is unique in the universe in terms of how difficult it is to build? Is it possible that we're the most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed? Both the most beautiful and the most ugly, but certainly the most complex. So look at evolutionary time. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years. We've been around for a million years. So one versus 135. So dinosaurs were extinct, you know, about 60 million years ago and mammals that had been happily evolving as tiny little creatures for 30 million years then took over the planet and then, you know, dramatically radiated about 60 million years ago. Out of these mammals came the neocortex formation. So basically the neocortex, which is sort of the outer layer of our brain compared to our quote unquote reptilian brain, which we share the structure of with all of the dinosaurs. They didn't have that and yet they ruled the planet. So how many other planets have still, you know, mindless dinosaurs where strength was the only dimension ruling the planet? So there was something weird that annihilated the dinosaurs. And again, you could look at biblical things of sort of God coming and wiping out his creatures to make room for the next ones. So the mammals basically sort of took over the planet and then grew this cognitive capability of this general purpose machine. And primates push that to extreme and humans among primates have just exploded that hardware. But that hardware is selected for survival. It's selected for procreation. It's initially selected with his very simple Darwinian view of the world of random mutation, ruthless selection, and then selection for making more of yourself. If you look at human cognition, it's gone down a weird evolutionary path in the sense that we are expanding an enormous amount of energy on this apparatus between our ears that is wasting, what, 15% of our bodily energy, 20%, like some enormous percentage of our calories go to function our brain. No other species makes that big of a commitment. That has basically taken energetic changes for efficiency on the metabolic side for humanity to basically power that thing. And our brain is both enormously more efficient than other brains, but also, despite this efficiency, enormously more energy consuming. So, and if you look at just the sheer folds that the human brain has, again, our skull could only grow so much before it could no longer go through the pelvic opening and kill the mother at every birth, so, but yet the folds continued effectively creating just so much more capacity. The evolutionary context in which this was made is enormously fascinating, and it has to do with other humans that we have now killed off or that have gone extinct. And that has now created this weird place of humans on the planet as the only species that has this enormous hardware. So that can basically make us think that there's something very weird and unique that happened in human evolution that perhaps has not been recreated elsewhere. Maybe the asteroid didn't hit, you know, sister earth, and dinosaurs are still ruling, and, you know, any kind of proto human is squished and eaten for breakfast basically. However, we're not as unique as we like to think because there was this enormous diversity of other human like forms. And once you make it to that stage where you have a neocortex like explosion of, wow, we're not competing on intelligence, and we're not competing on social structures, and we're not competing on larger and larger groups, and being able to coordinate and being able to have empathy, the concept of empathy, the concept of an ego, the concept of a self, of self awareness, comes probably from being able to project another person's intentions, another person's intentions to understand what they mean when you have these large cognitive groups, large social groups. So me being able to sort of create a mental model of how you think may have come before I was able to create a personal mental model of how do I think. So this introspection probably came after this sort of projection and this empathy, which basically means, you know, passion, pathos, suffering, but basically sensing. So basically empathy means feeling what you're feeling, trying to project your emotional state onto my cognitive apparatus. And I think that is what eventually led to this enormous cognitive explosion that happened in humanity. So, you know, life itself in my view is inevitable on every planet. Inevitable. Inevitable. But the evolution of life to self awareness and cognition and all the incredible things that humans have done, you know, that might not be as inevitable. That's your intuition. So if you were to sort of estimate and bet some money on it, if we reran Earth a million times, would what we got now be the most special thing and how often would it be? So scientifically speaking, how repeatable is this experiment? So this whole cognitive revolution? Yes. Maybe not. Maybe not. Basically, I feel that the longevity of, you know, dinosaurs suggests that it was not quite inevitable that we humans eventually made it. What you're also implying one thing here. You're saying, you're implying that humans also don't have this longevity. This is the interesting question. So with the Fermi Paradox, the idea that the basic question is like, if the universe has a lot of alien life forms in it, why haven't we seen them? And one thought is that there's a great filter or multiple great filters that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations. Like this thing that we, you know, this multifolding brain that keeps growing may not be such a big feature. It might be useful for survival, but it like takes us down a side road that is a very short one with a quick dead end. What do you think about that? So I think the universe is enormous, not just in space, but also in time. And the pretense that, you know, the last blink of an instant that we've been able to send radio waves is when somebody should have been paying attention to our planet is a little ridiculous. So my, you know, what I love about Star Wars is a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's not like some distant future. It's a long, long time ago. What I love about it is that basically says, you know, evolution and civilization are just so recent in, you know, on earth. Like there's countless other planets that have probably all kinds of life forms, multicellular perhaps, and so on and so forth. But the fact that humanity has only been listening and emitting for just this tiny little blink means that any of these, you know, alien civilizations would need to be paying attention to every single insignificant planet out there. And, you know, again, I mean, the movie Contact and the book is just so beautiful. This whole concept of we don't need to travel physically. We can travel as light. We can send instructions for people to create machines that will allow us to beam down light and recreate ourselves. And in the book, you know, the aliens actually take over. They're not as friendly. But, you know, this concept that we have to eventually go and conquer every planet. I mean, I think that, yes, we will become a galactic species. So you have a hope, well, you said think, so. Oh, of course, of course. I mean, now that we've made it so far. So you feel like we've made it. Oh gosh, I feel that, you know, cognition, the cognition as an evolutionary trait has won over in our planet. There's no doubt that we've made it. So basically humans have won the battle for, you know, dominance. It wasn't necessarily the case with dinosaurs. Like, I mean, yes, you know, there's some claims of intelligence. And if you look at Jurassic Park, yeah, sure, whatever. But, you know, they just don't have the hardware for it. And humans have the hardware. There's no doubt that mammals have a dramatically improved hardware for cognition over dinosaurs. Like basically there's universes where strength won out. And in our planet, in our, you know, particular version of whatever happened in this planet, cognition won out. And it's kind of cool. I mean, it's a privilege, right? It's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know, some middle age place where everybody's like hitting each other with, you know, weapons and sticks. You're back to the Lucky Ones song. I mean, we are the lucky ones. But the flip side of that is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves. Again, I want to go back to Pinker and the better angels of our nature. The whole concept that civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence, dramatically. If you look, you know, at every scale, as soon as organization comes, the state basically owns the right to violence. And eventually the state gives that right of governance to the people, but violence has been eliminated by that state. So this whole concept of central governance and people agreeing to live together and share responsibilities and duties and, you know, all of that is something that has led so much to less violence, less death, less suffering, less, you know, poverty, less, you know, war. I mean, yes, we have the capability to destroy ourselves, but the arc of civilization has led to much, much less destruction, much, much less war and much more peace. And of course there's blips back and forth and, you know, there are setbacks, but again, the moral arc of the universe. But it seems to just, I probably imagine there were two dinosaurs back in the day having this exact conversation and they look up to the sky and there seems to be something like an asteroid going towards Earth. So it's, while it's very true that the arc of our society of human civilization seems to be progressing towards a better, better life for everybody in the many ways that you described, things can change in a moment. And it feels like it's not just us humans we're living through a pandemic. You could imagine that a pandemic would be more destructive or there could be asteroids that just appear out of the darkness of space, which I recently learned it's not that easy to actually detect them. Yes. So 48, what happens in 48 years? I'm not sure. 2068, Apophis. There's an asteroid that's coming. In 48 years, it has very high chance of actually wiping us out completely. Yes. Yes. So we have 48 years to get our act together. It's not like some distant, distant hypothesis. Yes. Like, yeah, sure, they're hard to detect but this one we know about, it's coming. So how do you feel about that? Why are you still so optimistic? Oh gosh, I'm so happy with where we are now. This is gonna be great. Seriously, if you look at progress, if you look at, again, the speed with which knowledge has been transferred, what has led to humanity making so many advances so fast? Okay. So what has led to humanity making so many advances is not just the hardware upgrades, it's also the software upgrades. So by hardware upgrades, I basically mean our neocortex and the expansion and these layers and folds of our brain and all of that. That's the hardware. The software hasn't, you know, the hardware hasn't changed much in the last, what, 70,000 years. As I mentioned last time, if you take a person from ancient Egypt and you bring them up now, they're just as equally fit. So hardware hasn't changed. What has changed is software. What has changed is that we are growing up in societies that are much more complex. This whole concept of neoteny basically allows our exponential growth. The concept that our brain has not fully formed, has not fully stabilized itself until after our teenage years. So we basically have a good 16 years, 18 years to sort of infuse it with the latest and greatest in software. If you look at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at once? My take on this is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the Greek language software. This whole concept of creating abstract notions, of creating these layers of cognition and layers of meaning and layers of abstraction for words and ideals and beauty and harmony. How do you write harmony in hieroglyphics? There's no such thing as, you know, sort of expressing these ideals of peace and justice and, you know, these concepts of, or even, you know, macabre concepts of doom, et cetera. You don't have the language for it. Your brain has trouble getting at that concept. So what I'm trying to say is that these software upgrades for human language, human culture, human environment, human education have basically led to this enormous explosion of knowledge. And eventually after the enlightenment, and as I was mentioning the 42 line Bible and the printed press, the dissemination of knowledge, you basically now have this whole horizontal dispersion of ideas in addition to the vertical inheritance of genes. So the hardware improvements happen through vertical inheritance. The software improvements happen through horizontal inheritance. And the reason why human civilization exploded is not a hardware change anymore, it's really a software change. So if you're looking at now where we are today, look at coronavirus. Yes, sure, it could have killed us a hundred years ago, it would have, but it didn't. Why? Because in January, we published the genome. A month later, less than a month later, the first vaccine designs were done. And now less than a year later, 10 months later, we already have a working vaccine that's 90% efficient. I mean, that is ridiculous by any standards. And the reason is sharing. So the asteroid, yes, could wipe us out in 48 years, but 48 years? I mean, look at where we were 48 years ago, technologically. I mean, how much more we understand the basic foundations of space is enormous. The technological revolutions of digitization, the amount of compute power we can put on any nail size hardware is enormous. And this is nowhere near ending. We all have our little problems going back and forth on the social side and on the political side, on the sort of human side and the societal side, but science has not slowed down. Science is moving at a breakneck pace ahead. So, you know, Elon is now putting rockets out from the private space. I mean, that now democratization of space exploration is, you know, gonna revolutionize everything. It's gonna explode, continue. In the same way that every technology has exploded, this is the shift to space technology exploding. So 48 years is infinity from now in terms of space capabilities. So I'm not worried at all. Are you excited by the possibility of a human, well, one, a human stepping foot on Mars and two, possible colonization of not necessarily Mars, but other planets and all that kind of stuff for people living in space? Inevitable. Inevitable. Inevitable. Would you do it? Or do you kind of like Earth? Of course, of course. You know, how many? How many people will you wait? Will you wait for, I think it was about when the Declaration of Independence was signed, about two to three million people lived here. So would you move like before? Would you be like on the first boat? Would you be on the 10th boat? Would you wait until the Declaration of Independence? I don't think I'll be on the short list because I'll be old by then. They'll probably get a bunch of younger people. But you're, it's the wisdom and the, then again, you are the lucky one. But wisdom can be transferred horizontally. I gotta tell you, you are the lucky one. So you might be on the list. I don't know. I mean, I kind of feel like I would love to see Earth from above, just to watch our planet. I mean, just, I mean, you know, you can watch a live feed of the space station. Watching Earth is magnificent, like this blue tiny little shield. It's so thin, our atmosphere. Like if you drive to New York, you're basically in outer space. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's just so thin. And it's just, again, such a privilege to be on this planet, such a privilege. But I think our species is in for big, good things. I think that, you know, we will overcome our little problems and eventually come together as a species. I feel that we're definitely on the path to that. And, you know, it's just not permeated through the whole universe yet. I mean, through the whole world yet, through the whole Earth yet, but it's definitely permeating. So you've talked about humans as special. How exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs? So I mentioned that there's, you know, this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made, but I think it goes much deeper than that. So if you look at a lion attacking a gazelle in the middle of the Serengeti, the lion is smelling the molecules in the environment. Its hormones and neuro receptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse. The target is constantly looking around and sensing. I've actually been in Kenya and I've kind of seen the hunt. So I've kind of seen the sort of game of waiting and the mitochondria in the muscles of the lion are basically ready for, you know, jumping. They're expensing an enormous amount of energy. The grass as it's flowing is constantly transforming solar energy into chloroplasts, you know, through the chloroplast into energy, which eventually feeds the gazelle and eventually feeds the lions. And so on and so forth. So as humans, we experience all of that, but the lion only experiences one layer. The mitochondria in its body are only experiencing one layer. The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer. The, you know, photoreceptors and the smell receptors and the chemical receptors, like the lion always attacks against the wind so that it's not smelled. Like all of these things are one layer at a time. And we humans somehow perceive the whole stack. So going back to software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure, if you design a computer, you basically have a physical layer that you start with. And then on top of that physical layer, you have, you know, the electrical layer. And on top of the electrical layer, you have basically gates and logic and an assembly layer. And on top of the assembly layer, you have your, you know, higher order, higher level programming. And on top of that, you have your deep learning routine, et cetera. And on top of that, you eventually build a cognitive system that's smart. I want you to now picture this cognitive system becoming not just self aware, but also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of and the atoms that it's made of and so on and so forth. So it's as if your AI system, and there's this beautiful scene in 2001 Odyssey of Space, where Hull, after Dave starts disconnecting him, is starting to sing a song about daisies, et cetera. And Hull is basically saying, Dave, I'm losing my mind. I can feel I'm losing my mind. It's just so beautiful. This concept of self awareness of knowing that the hardware is no longer there is amazing. And in the same way humans who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents. So there's this self awareness of AI that is, you know, this beautiful concept about, you know, sort of the eventual cognitive leap to self awareness. But imagine now the AI system actually breaking through these layers and saying, wait a minute, I think I can design a slightly better hardware to get me functioning better. And that's what basically humans are doing. So if you look at our reasoning layer, it's built on top of a cognitive layer. And the reasoning layer we share with AI, it's kind of cool. Like there is another thing on the planet that can integrate equations and it's manmade, but we share computation with them. We share this cognitive layer of playing chess. We're not alone anymore. We're not the only thing on the planet that plays chess. Now we have AI that also plays chess. But in some sense that that particular organism, AI as it is now only operates in that layer. Exactly. Exactly. And then most animals operate in the sort of cognitive layer that we're all experiencing. A bat is doing this incredible integration of signals, but it's not aware of it. It's basically constantly sending echo location waves and it's receiving them back. And multiple bats in the same cave are operating at slightly different frequencies and with slightly different pulses. And they're all sensing objects and they're doing motion planning in their cognitive hardware, but they're not even aware of all of that. All they know is that they have a 3D view of space around them, just like any gazelle walking through, you know, the desert. And any baby looking around is aware of things without doing the math of how am I processing all of these visual information, et cetera. You're just aware of the layer that you live in. I think if you look at this, at humanity, we've basically managed through our cognitive layer, through our perception layer, through our senses layer, through our multi organ layer, through our genetic layer, through our molecular layer, through our atomic layer, through our quantum layer, through even the very fabric of the space time continuum unite all of that cognitively. So as we're watching that scene in the Serengeti, we as scientists, we as educated humans, we as, you know, anyone who's finished high school are aware of all of this beauty of all of these different layers interplaying together. And I think that's something very unique in perhaps not just the galaxy, but maybe even the cosmos. This species that has managed to in space cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitely small. And that's what I love about particle physics. The fact that it actually unites everything. The very small and the very big. The very small and the very big. It's only through the very big that the very small gets formed. Like basically every atom of gold results from the fusion that happened of increasingly large particles before that explosion that then disperses it through the cosmos. And it's only through understanding the very large that we understand the very small and vice versa. And that's in space. Then there's the time direction. As you are watching the Kilimanjaro mountain, you can kind of look back through time to when that volcano was exploding and growing out of the tectonic forces. As you drive through Death Valley, you see these mountains on their side and these layers of history exposed. We are aware of the eons that have happened on earth and the tectonic movements on earth. The same way that we're aware of the Big Bang and the early evolution of the cosmos. And we can also see forward in time as to where the universe is heading. We can see Apophis in 2068 coming over, looking ahead in time. I mean, that would be magician stuff in ancient times. So what I love about humanity and its role in the universe is that if there's a God watching, he's like, finally, somebody figured it out. I've been building all these beautiful things and somebody can appreciate it. And figured me out from God's perspective, meaning become aware of, you know. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to convert those layers into ideas that you can then combine, right? So we're doing some kind of conversion. Exactly, exactly. And last time you asked me about whether we live in a simulation, for example. I mean, realize that we are living in a simulation. We are, the reality that we're in without any sort of person programming this is a simulation. Like basically what happens inside your skull? There's this integration of sensory inputs which are translated into perceptory signals, which are then translated into a conceptual model of the world around you. And that exercise is happening seamlessly. And yet, you know, if you think about sort of, again, this whole simulation and Neo analogy, you can think of the reality that we live in as a matrix, as the matrix, but we've actually broken through the matrix. We've actually traversed the layers. We didn't have to take a pill, like we didn't, you know, Morpheus didn't have to show up to basically give us the blue pill or the red pill. We were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively through the hardware explosion and sufficiently evolve scientifically through the software explosion to basically get at breaking through the matrix, realizing that we live in a matrix and realizing that we are this thing in there. And yet that thing in there has a consciousness that lives through all these layers. And I think we're the only species. We're the only thing that we even can think of that has actually done that, that has sort of permeated space and time scales and layers of abstraction plowing through them and realizing what we're really, really made of. And the next frontier is of course, cognition. So we understand so much of the cosmos, so much of the stuff around us, but the stuff inside here, finding the basis for the soul, finding the basis for the ego, for the self, the self awareness, when does the spark happen that basically sort of makes you you? I mean, that's really the next frontier. So in terms of these peeling off layers of complexity, somewhere between the cognitive layer and the reasoning layer or the computational layer, there's still some stuff to be figured out there. And I think that's the final frontier of sort of completing our journey through that matrix. And maybe duplicating it in other versions of ourselves through AI, which is another very exciting possibility. What I love about AI and the way that it operates right now is the fact that it is unpredictable. There's emergent behavior in our cognitively capable artificial systems that we can certainly model, but we don't encode directly. And that's a key difference. So we like to say, oh, of course, this is not really intelligent because we coded it up. And we've just put in these little parameters there and there's like six billion parameters and once you've learned them, we kind of understand the layers. But that's an oversimplification. It's like saying, oh, of course, humans, we understand humans, they're just made out of neurons and layers of cortex and there's a visual area. But every human is encoded by a ridiculously small number of genes compared to the complexity of our cognitive apparatus. 20,000 genes is really not that much out of which a tiny little fraction are in fact encoding all of our cognitive functions. The rest is emergent behavior. The rest is the cortical layers doing their thing in the same way that when we build these conversational systems or these cognitive systems or these deep learning systems, we put the architecture in place, but then they do their thing. And in some ways, that's creating something that has its own identity. That's creating something that's not just, oh yeah, it's not the early AI where if you hadn't programmed what happens in the grocery bags when you have both cold and hot and hard and soft, the system wouldn't know what to do. No, no, you basically now just program the primitives and then it learns from that. So even though the origins are humble, just like it is for our genetic code, for AI, even though the origins are humble, the result of it being deployed into the world is infinitely complex. And yet, it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers of its, you know, it's not able to think about space and time. It's not able to think about the hardware in which it runs, the electricity in which it runs yet. So if you look at humans, we basically have the same cognitive architecture as monkeys, as the great apes. It's just a ton more of it. If you look at GPT3 versus GPT2, again, it's the same architecture, just more of it. And yet it's able to do so much more. So if you start thinking about sort of what's the future of that, GPT4 and GPT5, do you really need fundamentally different architectures or do you just need a ton more hardware? And we do have a ton more hardware. Like these systems are nowhere near what humans have between our ears. So, you know, there's something to be said about stay tuned for emergent behavior. We keep thinking that general intelligence might just be forever away, but it could just simply be that we just need a ton more hardware and that humans are just not that different from the great apes, except for just a ton more of it. Yeah, it's interesting that in the AI community, maybe there's a human centric fear, but the notion that GPT10 will achieve general intelligence is something that people shy away from, that there has to be something totally different and new added to this. And yet it's not seriously considered that this very simple thing, this very simple architecture, when scaled, might be the thing that achieves super intelligence. And people think the same way about humanity and human consciousness. They're like, oh, consciousness might be quantum, or it might be, you know, some nonphysical thing. And it's like, or it could just be a lot more of the same hardware that now is sufficiently capable of self awareness just because it has the neurons to do it. So maybe the consciousness that is so elusive is an emergent behavior of you basically string together all these cognitive capabilities that come from running, from seeing, for reacting, from predicting the movement of a fly as you're catching it through the air. All of these things are just like great lookup tables encoded in a giant neural network. I mean, I'm oversimplifying, of course, the complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the wave forms that sort of shine through the connections across all these different layers, the amalgamation of signals, et cetera. The brain is enormously complex. I mean, of course. But again, it's a small number of primitives encoded by a tiny number of genes, which are self organized and shaped by their environment. Babies that are growing up today are listening to language from conception. Basically, as soon as the auditory apparatus forms, it's already getting shaped to the types of signals that are out in the real world today. So it's not just like, oh, have an Egyptian be born and then ship them over. It's like, no, that Egyptian would be listening in to the complexity of the world and then getting born and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is. So it's a combination of the underlying hardware, which if you think about as a geneticist, in my view, the hardware gives you an upper bound of cognitive capabilities, but it's the environment that makes those capabilities shine and reach their maximum. So we're a combination of nature and nurture. The nature is our genes and our cognitive apparatus. And the nurture is the richness of the environment that makes that cognitive apparatus reach its potential. And we are so far from reaching our full potential, so far. I think that kids being born a hundred years from now, they'll be looking at us now and saying what primitive educational systems they had. I can't believe people were not wired into this virtual reality from birth as we are now, cause like they're clearly inferior and so on and so forth. I basically think that our environment will continue exploding and our cognitive capabilities, it's not like, oh, we're only using 10% of our brain. That's ridiculous. Of course, we're using 100% of our brain, but it's still constrained by how complex our environment is. So the hardware will remain the same, but the software, in a quickly advancing environment, the software will make a huge difference in the nature of like the human experience, the human condition. It's fascinating to think that humans will look very different a hundred years from now, just because the environment changed, even though we're still the same great apes, the descendant of apes. At the core of this is kind of a notion of ideas that I don't know if you're, there's a lot of people, including you, eloquently about this topic, but Richard Dawkins talks about the notion of memes and let's say this notion of ideas, multiplying, selecting in the minds of humans. Do you ever think about ideas from that perspective, ideas as organisms themselves that are breeding in the minds of humans? I love the concept of memes. I love the concept of these horizontal transfer of ideas and sort of permeating through our layer of interconnected neural networks. So you can think of sort of the cognitive space that has now connected all of humanity, where we are now one giant information and idea sharing network, well beyond what was thought to be ever capable when the concept of a meme was created by Richard Dawkins. So, but I wanna take that concept just into another twist, which is the horizontal transfer of humans with fellowships. And the fact that as people apply to MIT from around the world, there's a selection that happens, not just for their ideas, but also for the cognitive hardware that came up with those ideas. So we don't just ship ideas around anymore. They don't evolve in a vacuum. The ideas themselves influence the distribution of cognitive systems, i.e. humans and brains around the planet. Yeah, we ship them to different locations based on their properties. That's exactly right. So those cognitive systems that think of physics, for example, might go to CERN and those that think of genomics might go to the Broad Institute. And those that think of computer science might go to, I don't know, Stanford or CMU or MIT. And you basically have this co evolution now of memes and ideas and the cognitive conversational systems that love these ideas and feed on these ideas and understand these ideas and appreciate these ideas now coming together. So you basically have students coming to Boston to study because that's the place where these types of cognitive systems thrive. And they're selected based on their cognitive output and their idea output. But once they get into that place, the boiling and interbreeding of these memes becomes so much more frequent. That what comes out of it is so far beyond if ideas were evolving in a vacuum of an already established hardware, cognitive interconnection system of the planet, where now you basically have the ideas shaping the distribution of these systems. And then the genetics kick in as well. You basically have now these people who came to be a student kind of like myself who now stuck around and are now professors bringing up our own genetically encoded and genetically related cognitive systems, mine are eight, six and three years old, who are now growing up in an environment surrounded by other cognitive systems of a similar age with parents who love these types of thinking and ideas. And you basically have a whole interbreeding now of genetically selected transfer of cognitive systems where the genes and the memes are co evolving the same soup of ever improving knowledge and societal inter fertilization, cross fertilization of these ideas. So this beautiful image. So this is shipping these actual meat cognitive systems to physical locations. They tend to cluster in the biology ones, and the biology ones cluster in a certain building too. So like within that there's clusters on top of clusters, top of clusters. What about in the online world? Is that, do you also see that kind of, because people now form groups on the internet that they stick together so they can sort of, these cognitive systems can collect themselves and breed together in different layers of spaces. It doesn't just have to be physical space. Absolutely, absolutely. So basically there's the physical rearrangement, but there's also the conglomeration of the same cognitive system. Doesn't need to be, i.e. human. Doesn't need to belong to only one community. So yes, you might be a member of the computer science department, but you can also hang out in the biology department. But you might also go online into, I don't know, poetry department readings and so on and so forth. Or you might be part of a group that only has 12 people in the world, but that are connected through their ideas and are now interbreeding these ideas in a whole other way. So this coevolution of genes and memes is not just physically instantiated. It's also sort of rearranged in this cognitive space as well. And sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences and they all gather around and there's like one of them is like talking and they're all like listening and then they discuss and then they have free lunch and so on. No, but then that's where you find students where when I go to a conference, I go through the posters where I'm on a mission. Basically my mission is to read and understand what every poster is about. And for a few of them, I'll dive deeply and understand everything, but I make it a point to just go poster after poster in order to read all of them. And I find some gems and students that I speak to that sometimes eventually join my lab. And then sort of you're sort of creating this permeation of the transfer of ideas, of ways of thinking and very often of moral values, of social structures, of just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems that simply just cling together. Basically, I have the luxury at MIT of not just choosing smart people, but choosing smart people who I get along with, who are generous and friendly and creative and smart and excited and childish in their uninhibited behaviors and so on and so forth. So you basically can choose yourself to surround, you can choose to surround yourself with people who are not only cognitively compatible, but also imperceptibly through the meta cognitive systems compatible. And again, when I say compatible, not all the same. Sometimes, not sometimes, all the time. The teams are made out of complimentary components, not just compatible, but very often complimentary. So in my own team, I have a diversity of students who come from very different backgrounds. There's a whole spectrum of biology to computation, of course, but within biology, there's a lot of realms. Within computation, there's a lot of realms. And what makes us click so well together is the fact that not only do we have a common mission, a common passion and a common view of the world, but that we're complimentary in our skills, in our angles with which we come at it and so on and so forth. And that's sort of what makes it click. Yeah, it's fascinating that the stickiness of multiple cognitive systems together includes both the commonality, so you meet because there's some common thing, but you stick together because you're different in all the useful ways. Yeah, yeah. And my wife and I, I mean, we adore each other to pieces, but we're also extremely different in many ways. And that's beautiful. Careful. She's gonna be listening to this. But I love that about us. I love the fact that I'm living out there in the world of ideas and I forget what day it is. And she's like, well, at 8 a.m., the kids better be to school. Right. And I do get yelled at, but I need it. Basically, I need her as much as she needs me. And she loves interacting with me and talking. I mean, last night, we were talking about this and I showed her the questions and we were bouncing ideas off each other. And it was just beautiful. We basically have these, basically, cognitive, let it all loose kind of dates where we just bring papers and we're bouncing ideas, et cetera. So we have extremely different perspectives, but very common goals and interests and anyway. What do you make of the communication mechanism that we humans use to share those ideas? Because one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas, but we're also able to share them. We tend to, maybe you can correct me, but we seem to use language to share the ideas. Maybe we share them in some much deeper way than language, I don't know. But what do you make of this whole mechanism that ghaf on the matlid is to the human condition? So some people will tell you that your language dictates your thoughts and your thoughts cannot form outside language. I tend to disagree. I see thoughts as much more abstract as basically when I dream, I don't dream in words. I dream in shapes and forms and three dimensional space with extreme detail. I was describing, so when I wake up in the middle of the night, I actually record my dreams. Sometimes I write them down in a Dropbox file. Other times I'll just dictate them in audio. And my wife was giving me a massage the other day cause like my left side was frozen and I started playing the recording. And as I was listening to it, I was like, I don't remember any of that. And it was like, of course. And then the entire thing came back. But then there's no way any other person could have recreated that entire sort of three dimensional shape and dream and concept. And in the same way, when I'm thinking of ideas, there's so many ideas I can't put to words. I mean, I will describe them with a thousand words, but the idea itself is much more precise or much more sort of abstract or much more something difference, either less abstract or more abstract. And it's either, basically there's just the projection that happens from the three dimensional ideas into let's say a one dimensional language. And the language certainly gives you the apparatus to think about concepts that you didn't realize existed before. And with my team, we often create new words. I'm like, well, now we're gonna call these the regulatory plexus of a gene. And that gives us now the language to sort of build on that as one concept that you then build upon with all kinds of other things. So there's this coevolution again of ideas and language, but they're not one to one with each other. Now let's talk about language itself, words, sentences. This is a very distant construct from where language actually begun. So if you look at how we communicate, as I'm speaking, my eyes are shining and my face is changing through all kinds of emotions. And my entire body composition posture is reshaped. And my intonation, the pauses that I make, the softer and the louder and the this and that are conveying so much more information. And if you look at early human language, and if you look at how the great apes communicate with each other, there's a lot of grunting, there's a lot of posturing, there's a lot of emotions, there's a lot of sort of shrieking, et cetera. They have a lot of components of our human language, just not the words. So I think of human communication as combining the ape component, but also of course the GPT3 component. So basically there's the cognitive layer and the reasoning layer that we share with different parts of our relatives. There's the AI relatives, but there's also the grunting relatives. And what I love about humanity is that we have both. We're not just a conversational system. We're a grunting, emotionally charged, weirdly interconnected system that also has the ability to reason. And when we communicate with each other, there's so much more than just language. There's so much more than just words. It does seem like we're able to somehow transfer even more than the body language. It seems that in the room with us is always a giant knowledge base of shared experiences, different perspectives on those experiences, but I don't know, the knowledge of who the last three, four presidents in the United States was, and just all the 9 11, the tragedies in 9 11, all the beautiful and terrible things that happen in the world. They're somehow both in our minds and somehow enrich the ability to transfer information. What I love about it is I can talk to you about 2001 Odyssey of Space and mention a very specific scene and that evokes all these feelings that you had when you first watched it. We're both visualizing that and maybe in different ways. Exactly. But in that, yeah, and not only that, but the feeling is brought back up, just like you said, with the dreams. We both have that feeling arise in some form as you bring up the child facing his own mortality. It's fascinating that we're able to do that, but I don't know. Now let's talk about Neuralink for a second. So what's the concept of Neuralink? The concept of Neuralink is that I'm gonna take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain directly transfer it into your brain. So this is a beautiful, fascinating, and extremely sort of appealing concept, but I see a lot of challenges surrounding that. The first one is we have no idea how to even begin to understand how knowledge is encoded in a person's brain. I mean, I told you about this paper that we had recently with Li Hui Cai and Asaf Marko that basically was looking at these engrams that are formed with combinations of neurons that cofire when a stimulus happens, where we can go into a mouse and select those neurons that fire by marking them and then see what happens when they first fire. And then select the neurons that fire again when the experience is repeated. These are the recall neurons, and then there's the memory consolidation neurons. So we're starting to understand a little bit of sort of the distributed nature of knowledge encoding and experience encoding in the human brain and in the mouse brain. And the concept that we'll understand that sufficiently one day to be able to take a snapshot of what does that scene from Dave losing his mind, of Khal losing his mind and talking to Dave, how is that seen and coded in your mind? Imagine the complexity of that. But now imagine, suppose that we solve this problem. And the next enormous challenge is how do I go and modify the next person's brain to now create the same exact neural connections? So that's an enormous challenge right there. So basically it's not just reading, it's now writing. And again, what if something goes wrong? I don't wanna even think about that, that's number two. And number three, who says that the way that you encode Dave, I'm losing my mind and I encode Dave, I'm losing my mind is anywhere near each other. Basically, maybe the way that I'm encoding it is twisted with my childhood memories of running through the pebbles in Greece, and yours is twisted with your childhood memories growing up in Russia. And there's no way that I can take my encoding and put it into your brain, because it'll A, mess things up, and B, be incompatible with your own unique experiences. So that's telepathic communication from human to human. It's fascinating, you're reminding us that there's two biological systems on both ends of that communication. The easier, I guess, maybe half as difficult thing to do in the hope with Neuralink is that we can communicate with an AI system, so where one side of that is a little bit more controllable, but even just that is exceptionally difficult. Let's talk about two neuronal systems talking to each other. Suppose that GPT4 tells GPT3, hey, give me all your knowledge, right? It's ready, I have 10 times more hardware, I'm ready, just feed me. What's GPT3 gonna do? Is it gonna say, oh, here's my 10 billion parameters? No. No way. The simplest way, and perhaps the fastest way for GPT3 to transfer all its knowledge to its older body that has a lot more hardware is to regenerate every single possible human sentence that it can possibly create. Just keep talking. Keep talking and just reencode it all together. So maybe what language does is exactly that. It's taking one generative cognitive model, it's running it forward to emit utterances that kind of make sense in my cognitive frame, and it's reencoding them into yours through the parsing of that same language. And I think the conversation might actually be the most efficient way to do it, so not just talking, but interactive, so talking back and forth, asking questions, interrupting. So GPT4 will constantly be interrupting. Annoying. Annoying, yeah. But the beauty of that is also that as we're interrupting each other, there's all kinds of misinterpretations that happen, that basically when my students speak, I will often know that I'm misunderstanding what they're saying, and I'll be like, hold that thought for a second. Let me tell you what I think I understood, which I know is different from what you said. Then I'll say that, and then someone else in the same Zoom meeting will basically say, well, here's another way to think about what you just said. And then by the third iteration, we're somewhere completely different, that if we could actually communicate with full neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge and idea and coding, would be far inferior, because the reencoding with our own, as we said last time, emotional baggage and cognitive baggage from our unique experiences through our shared experiences, distinct encodings, in the context of all our unique experiences, is leading to so much more diversity of perspectives. And again, going back to this whole concept of these, entire network of all of human cognitive systems connected to each other, and sort of how ideas and memes permeate through that, that's sort of what really creates a whole new level of human experience through this reasoning layer and this computational layer that obviously lives on top of our cognitive layer. So you're one of these aforementioned cognitive systems, mortal, but thoughtful, and you're connected to a bunch, like you said, students, your wife, your kids. What do you, in your brief time here on Earth, this is a Meaning of Life episode, so what do you hope this world will remember you as? What do you hope your legacy will be? I don't think of legacy as much as maybe most people. Oh, it's kind of funny. I'm consciously living the present. Many students tell me, oh, give us some career advice. I'm like, I'm the wrong person. I've never made a career plan. I still have to make one. I, it's funny to be both experiencing the past, and the present, and the future, but also consciously living in the present, and just, there's a conscious decision we can make to not worry about all that, which again, goes back to the I'm the lucky one kind of thing of living in the present and being happy winning, and being happy losing, and there's a sort of, I'm happy losing, and there's a certain freedom that comes with that, but again, a certain sort of, I don't know, ephemerity of living for the present, but if you, if you stay back from all of that, where basically my current modus operandi is live for the present, make every day the best you can make, and just make the local blip of local maxima of the universe, of the awesomeness of the planet, and the town, and the family that we live in, both academic family and biological family, make it a little more awesome by being generous to your friends, being generous to the people around you, being kind to your enemies, and just showing love all around. You can't be upset at people if you truly love them. If somebody yells at you and insults you every time you say the slightest thing, and yet when you see them, you just see them with love, it's a beautiful feeling. It's like, you know, I'm feeling exactly like when I look at my three year old who's like screaming, even though I love her and I want her good, she's still screaming and saying, no, no, no, no, no. And I'm like, I love you, genuinely love you, but I can sort of kind of see that your brain is kind of stuck in that little mode of anger. And there's plenty of people out there who don't like me, and I see them with love as a child that is stuck in a cognitive state that they're eventually gonna snap out of, or maybe not, and that's okay. So there's that aspect of sort of experiencing life with the best intentions. And I love when I'm wrong. I had a friend who was like one of the smartest people I've ever met who would basically say, oh, I love it when I'm wrong because it makes me feel human. And it's so beautiful. I mean, she's really one of the smartest people I've ever met. And she was like, oh, it's such a good feeling. And I love being wrong, but there's something about self improvement. There's something about sort of how do I not make the most mistakes, but attempt the most rights and do the fewest wrongs, but with the full knowledge that this will happen. That's one aspect. So through this life in the present, what's really funny is, and that's something that I've experienced more and more really thanks to you and through this podcast, is this enormous number of people who will basically comment, wow, I've been following this guy for so many years now, or wow, this guy has inspired so many of us in computation biology and so on and so forth. I'm like, I don't know any of that, but I'm only discovering this now through these sort of sharing our emotional states and our cognitive states with a wider audience, where suddenly I'm sort of realizing that, wow, maybe I've had a legacy. Like basically I've trained generations of students from MIT and I've put all of my courses freely online since 2001. So basically all of my video recordings of my lectures have been online since 2001. So countless generations of people from across the world will meet me at a conference and say, like I was at this conference where somebody heard my voice and it's like, I know this voice, I've been listening to your lectures. And it's just such a beautiful thing where like we're sharing widely and who knows which students will get where from whatever they catch out of these lectures, even if what they catch is just inspiration and passion and drive. So there's this intangible legacy quote unquote that every one of us has through the people we touch. One of my friends from undergrad basically told me, oh, my mom remembers you vividly from when she came to campus. I'm like, I didn't even meet her. She's like, no, but she sort of saw you interacting with people and said, wow, he's exuding this positive energy. And there's that aspect of sort of just motivating people with your kindness, with your passion, with your generosity and with your just selflessness of just give, it doesn't matter where it goes. I've been to conferences where basically people will, I'll ask them a question and then they'll come back to, or there was a conference where I asked somebody a question and they said, oh, in fact, this entire project was inspired by your question three years ago at the same conference. I'm like, wow. And then on top of that, there's also the ripple effect. So you're speaking to the direct influence of inspiration or education, but there's also the follow on things that happen to that and there's this ripple that from you just this one individual first drop. And from every one of us, from everyone, that's what I love about humanity. The fact that every one of us shares genes and genetic variants with very recent ancestors with everyone else. So even if I die tomorrow, my genes are still shared through my cousins and through my uncles and through my immediate family. And of course I'm lucky enough to have my own children, but even if you don't, your genes are still permeating through all of the layers of your family. So your genes will have the legacy there, yeah. Every one of us. Number two, our ideas are constantly intermingling with each other. So there's no person living in the planet a hundred years from now who will not be directly impacted by every one of the planet living here today through genetic inheritance and through meme inheritance. That's cool to think that your ideas, Manolis Callas, would touch every single person on this planet. It's interesting. It's not just mine, Joe Smith, who's looking at this right now, his ideas will also touch everybody. So there's this interconnectedness of humanity. And then I'm also a professor. So my day job is legacy. My day job is training, not just the thousands of people who watch my videos on the web, but the people who are actually in my class, who basically come to MIT to learn from a bunch of us. The cognitive systems that were shipped to this particular location in space. And who will then disperse back into all of their home countries. That's what makes America the beacon of the world. We don't just export goods. We export people. Cognitive systems. We export people who are born here. And we also export training that people born elsewhere will come here to get and will then disseminate, not just whatever knowledge they got, but whatever ideals they learned. And I think that's something that's a legacy of the US that you cannot stop with political isolation. You cannot stop with economic isolation. That's something that will continue to happen through all the people we've touched through our universities. So there's the students who took my classes, who are basically now going off and teaching their classes. And I've trained generations of computational biologists. No one in genomics who's gone through MIT hasn't taken my class. So basically there's this impact through, I mean, there's so many people in biotechs who are like, hey, I took your class. That's what got me into the field like 15 years ago. And it's just so beautiful. And then there's the academic family that I have. So the students who are actually studying with me, who are my trainees. So this sort of mentorship of ancient Greece. So I basically have an academic family and we are a family. There's this such strong connection, this bond of you're part of the Kelly's family. So I have a biological family at home and I have an academic family on campus. And that academic family has given me great grandchildren already. Yes. So I've trained people who are now professors at Stanford, CMU, Harvard, WashU, I mean, everywhere in the world. And these people have now trained people who are now having their own faculty jobs. So there's basically people who see me as their academic grandfather. And it's just so beautiful because you don't have to wait for the 18 years of cognitive hardware development to sort of have amazing conversation with people. These are fully grown humans, fully grown adult who are cognitively super ready and who are shaped by, and I see some of these beautiful papers and I'm like, I can see the touch of our lab in those papers. It's just so beautiful. Cause you're like, I spent hours with these people teaching them not just how to do a paper, but how to think. And this whole concept of, you know, the first paper that we write together is an experience with every one of these students. So, you know, I always tell them to write the whole first draft and they know that I will rewrite every word. But the act of them writing it and what I do is these like joint editing sessions where I'm like, let's coedit. And with this coediting, we basically have... Creative destruction. So I share my Zoom screen and I'm just thinking out loud as I'm doing this. And they're learning from that process as opposed to like come back two days later and they see a bunch of red on a page. I'm sort of, well, that's not how you write this. That's not how you think about this. That's not, you know, what's the point? Like this morning was having, yes, this morning between six and 8 a.m. I had a two hour meeting going through one of these papers and then saying, what's the point here? Why do you even show that? It's just a bunch of points on a graph. No, what you have to do is extract the meaning, do the homework for them. And there's this nurturing, this mentorship that sort of creates now a legacy, which is infinite because they've now gone off on the, you know, and all of that is just humanity. Then of course there's the papers I write because yes, my day job is training students, but it's a research university. The way that they learn is through the mens and manus, mind and hand. It's the practical training of actually doing research. And that research is a beneficial side effect of having these awesome papers that will now tell other people how to think. There's this paper we just posted recently on MedArchive and one of the most generous and eloquent comments about it was like, wow, this is a masterclass in scientific writing, in analysis, in biological interpretation, and so forth. It's just so fulfilling from a person I've never met or heard about. Can you say the title of the paper, Brian Chen? I don't remember the title, but it's single cell dissection of schizophrenia reveals. So the two points that we found was this whole transcriptional resilience. Like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic, but they have an additional cell type or an additional cell state, which we believe is protective. And that cell state when they have it will cause other cells to have normal gene expression patterns. It's beautiful. And then that cell is connected with some of the PV interneurons that are basically sending these inhibitory brainwaves through the brain. And basically there's another component of, there's a set of master regulators that we discovered who are controlling many of the genes that are differentially expressed. And these master regulators are themselves genetic targets of schizophrenia. And they are themselves involved in both synaptic connectivity and also in early brain development. So there's this sort of interconnectedness between synaptic development axis and also this transcriptional resilience. So, I mean, we basically made up a title that combines all these concepts. You have all these concepts, all these people working together, and ultimately these minds condense it down into a beautifully written little document that lives on forever. Exactly. And that document now has its own life. Our work has 120,000 citations. I mean, that's not just people who read it. These are people who used it to write something based on it. I mean, that to me is just so fulfilling to basically say, wow, I've touched people. So I don't think of my legacy as I live every day. I just think of the beauty of the present and the power of interconnectedness. And just, I feel like a kid in a candy shop where I'm just like constantly, where do I, what package do I open first? And, you know. You're the lucky one. A jack of all trades, a master of none. I think for a Meaning of Life episode, we would be amiss if we did not have at least a poem or two. Do you mind if we end in a couple of poems? Maybe a happy, maybe a sad one. I would love that. So thank you for the luxury. The first one is kind of, I remember when you were talking with Eric Weinstein about this comment of Leonard Cohen that says, but you don't really care for music, do you? In Hallelujah. That's basically kind of like mocking its reader. So one of my poems is a little like that. So I had just broken up with my girlfriend and there's this other friend who was coming to visit me. And she said, I will not come unless you write me a poem. And I was like, writing a poem on demand. So this poem is called Write Me a Poem. It goes, write me a poem, she said with a smile. Make sure it's pretty, romantic and rhymes. Make sure it's worthy of that bold flame, that love uniting us beyond a mere game. And she took off without more words, rushed for the bus and traveled the world. A poem, I thought, this is sublime. What better way for passing the time? What better way to count up the hours before she comes back to my lonely tower? Waiting for joy to fill up my heart, let's write a poem for when we're apart. How does a poem start, I inquired. Give me a topic, cook up a style. Throw in some cute words, oh, here and there. Throw in some passion, love and despair. Love, three eggs, one pound of flour, three cups of water and bake for an hour. Love is no recipe as I understand. You can't just cook up a poem on demand. And as I was twisting all this in my mind, I looked at the page, by golly, it rhymed. Three roses, white chocolate, vanilla powder, some beautiful rhymes and maybe a flower. No, be romantic, the young girl insisted. Do this, do that, don't be so silly. You must believe it straight from your heart. If you don't feel it, we're better apart. Oh, my sweet thing, what can I say? You bring me the sun all night and all day. You're the stars and the moon and the birds way up high. You're my evening sweet song, my morning blue sky. You are my muse, your spell has me caught. You bring me my voice and scatter my thoughts. To put that loving writing in vain, I can try. But when I'm with you, my wings want to fly. So I put down the pen and drop my defenses. Give myself to you and fill up my senses. The baffled king composing, that was beautiful. What I love about it is that I did not bring up a dictionary of rhymes. I did not sort of work hard. So basically when I write poems, I just type. I never go back, I just. So when my brain gets into that mode, it actually happens like I wrote it. Oh, wow, so the rhymes just kind of. The rhymes just kind of come. It's an emergent phenomenon. It's an emergent phenomenon. I just get into that mode and then it comes up. That's a beautiful one. And it's basically, you know, as you got it, it's basically saying it's no recipe and then I'm throwing in the recipes and as I'm writing it, I'm like, you know. So it's very introspective in this whole concept. So anyway, there's another one many years earlier that is, you know, darker. It's basically this whole concept of let's be friends. I was like, ugh, you know. No, let's be friends, just like, you know. So the last words are shout out, I love you or send me to hell. So the title is Burn Me Tonight. Lie to me, baby. Lie to me now. Tell me you love me. Break me a vow. Give me a sweet word, a promise, a kiss. Give me the world, a sweet taste to miss. Don't let me lay here, inert, ugly, cold, with nothing sweet felt and nothing harsh told. Give me some hope, false, foolish, yet kind. Make me regret, I'll leave you behind. Don't pity my soul or torture it right. Treat it with hatred. Start up a fight. For it's from mildness that my soul dies when you cover your passion in a bland friend's disguise. Kiss me now, baby. Show me your passion. Turn off the lights and rip off your fashion. Give me my life's joy this one night. Burn all my matches for one blazing light. Don't think of tomorrow and let today fade. Don't try and protect me from love's cutting blade. Your razor will always rip off my veins. Don't spare me the passion to spare me the pains. Kiss me now, honey, or spit in my face. Throw me an insult I'll gladly embrace. Tell me now clearly that you never cared. Say it now loudly like you never dared. I'm ready to hear it. I'm ready to die. I'm ready to burn and start a new life. I'm ready to face the rough burning truth rather than waste the rest of my youth. So tell me, my lover, should I stay or go? The answer to love is one, yes or no. There's no I like you, no let's be friends, shout out I love you, or send me to hell. I don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life. Whatever the heck the meaning is, go all in as that poem says. Manolis, thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, I look forward to next time. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis, and thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability, Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in his book, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much. The wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Manolis Kellis: Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything | Lex Fridman Podcast #142

The following is a conversation with John Clark. He's a friend, a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt, former MMA fighter, and at least in my opinion, one of the great UFC corner man coaches to listen to. And also, he's my current jiu jitsu coach at Broadway Jiu Jitsu in South Boston. He was once, for a time, a philosophy major in college, and is now, I would say, a kind of practicing philosopher, opinionated, brilliant, and someone I always enjoy talking to even when, especially when, we disagree, which we do often. He's definitely someone I can see talking to many times on this podcast. In fact, he hosts a new podcast of his own called Please Allow Me. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to Theragun, the device I use for post workout muscle recovery, Magic Spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal that I think is delicious, Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that martial arts, especially jiu jitsu and judo, have been a big part of my growth as a human being. So I think I will talk to a few martial artists on occasion on this podcast. I hope that is of interest to you. I won't talk to people who are simply great fighters or great athletes, but people who have a philosophy that I find to be interesting and worth exploring, even if I disagree with parts or most of it. I like alternating between historians and computer scientists, fighters and biologists, and between totally different worldviews and personalities, like Elon Musk and Michael Malice. This world, to me, is fascinating because of the diversity of weirdness that is human civilization. I love the weird and the brilliant, and hope you join me on the journey of exploring both. If you don't like an episode, skip it. For an OCD person like myself, sometimes not listening to a podcast episode is an act of courage. It's like not finishing a book even though you're 80% done. Try it sometimes. Listen to ones you like, and don't listen to the ones you don't like. I know, it's profound advice. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with John Clark. You ready for this? I've been ready for this my whole life. All right, I was thinking of doing a Kerouac style road trip across the United States, after this whole COVID thing lifts. You ever take a trip like that? I've done a handful of long distance driving trips up and down the East Coast, but also from the West Coast back to the East Coast, and then returning to California. So I've definitely done my fair share of driving in this country. Do you have the longing for the great American road trip? I think there are so many things that I've been lucky enough to see in the world that I now, at this point in my life, realize there are tons of things that I need to see here in this country, and a road trip could potentially be the best way to see them. I think to do it effectively, you need an amount of time where you can be as leisurely as possible. There's no deadline, and there's no, I've gotta make it from Chicago to St. Louis by sundown to get to this place at this time. I think you really need to be able to take your time and kind of let the road take you where you need to go. It feels like you need a mission though, ultimately. There's a reason you need to be in San Francisco. That's like the Kerouac thing. You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a few weeks, and then it's the, as you struggle on towards that mission, you meet weird characters that get in your way, but ultimately sort of create an experience. I think having a loose deadline is good, but that's a beginning and an end point, and what I mean is I don't wanna have to be, all right, we're leaving, say, Boston on Sunday night. Let's get to New York by Monday morning, and then from New York, we're gonna go to Philly, and we've gotta be in Philly at four. A vague beginning and end is fine, but I think having very strict guidelines in between will rob you of certain experiences along the way. If you have a timeframe to get from Philly to Indianapolis and some awesome shit starts to happen in Philly, do you really wanna have to cut it short because you gotta be in Indianapolis by sunup? Why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason, really? Plans change. Plans change all the time, exactly, but if we're talking about having a mission or the type of road trip, I just think it would be best to have it as loose and flexible as possible. I don't know. You gotta make hard deadlines and then break them. Totally change the plans. Disappoint people, break promises. That's the way of life. Somebody's waiting for you in St. Louis, and all of a sudden, you fell in love with a biker in New York. I don't know. I don't know what you're up to. I can appreciate that, but on a trip like that, I feel like a trip with deadlines is for a different point in your life, and at this point in my life, I don't want any of the deadlines because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them in St. Louis. It's about me not disappointing myself. You wanna have enough time in what you're doing to make sure that you get the full breadth of every experience that you encounter. How would you fully experience a place? How would you? I don't think I've actually fully experienced Boston. If you were showing up to a city for a week on this road trip, what would you do? So I'm gonna answer that in two parts. A few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of Boston, and the thing that kept me here, no question about it, was the fact that I felt like I had a contract with my students, and I did not. I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith by joining my gym and asking me to teach them what I know, and when I had an opportunity to leave Boston, I thought of those people, and I thought, I wanna fulfill my obligation to them. So because I made a decision to stay here, I then that summer made a decision to endear myself to the city of Boston, and I tried to find lots and lots of different things to do. I can tell you that the coolest thing that I found to do in this city is the MFA, where they have on Friday nights, they'll have different exhibits and stuff, and they'll have little beer carts and food tents, and you can go do a painting class off on the side. Very cool night of things to do. But in general, whenever I'm in a new city, I try not to pay attention to Google, and I try not to do anything that I find on a travel site. The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is you're staying and find the most normal looking bar, have a drink, and talk to a bartender. So the people, the people. The people, and then you can experience that town the way that they experience it. Even in a city where there are tons of tourist attractions, locals probably visit the same tourist attractions when they have visitors come from out of town, you wanna see how they view those places and how they visit them. And you wanna go to eat where they're going to eat. Like, you're gonna, for the most part, the North End is not a place where I would take someone and say, hey, this is Boston's, the pinnacle of Boston dining, because it's very touristy. There are a handful of really good restaurants there, but I wanna know where the, I wanna go to Bogie's Place. I wanna know the down low spots where. The hell's Bogie's Place? It's like a little steakhouse in the back of J.M. Curly's. Exactly. It's like a shitty bar? J.M. Curly's? No, it's just a bar with like bar food. But I think that like. In South Boston? It is in Boston, yeah. It's not South Boston? No, it's in, it's in the downtown area. Like, I don't know what the neighborhoods are called here, honestly, because they have an area called Downtown Boston, and I don't even know what the hell that means. And they used to have the Financial District. Where's Southie? Cause I've heard about the Southie. Southie is South Boston. But is there a difference between South Boston and Southie? No, it's the same thing. No, but like, you know, the mythical Southie. I think the mythical Southie is something that's long gone now. And the term now actually is Sobo. Oh no. Yeah, it's. It's changed, what, who took over what? What's the, you know, the good will hunting personality. That's Southie, isn't it? Strong accent, those bad ass dudes. I came here right at the end of like, what was South Boston. So when I got, and my gym is in South Boston, the neighborhood was just starting to change. So I think, as gentrification happened and they started building more luxury condominiums, they were buying all these old businesses out, all the mom and pop businesses. And I think that kind of changed the makeup of the community. And it wasn't only because there was an influx of new young people with disposable income, it's because there's an exodus of the older people who kind of grew up and raised their families there because they were being offered humongous sums of money for their homes that they had bought like in the late 70s and early 80s so that they could develop those areas. So you have a combination of the influx of new people and the exodus of the old, and now you just got this totally new neighborhood in its place. What do you love about Boston? Is there a love still for Boston? You certainly have the love of the thing that's gone as well. Yeah, I think, I don't wanna pinpoint pin this on Boston because it's happening in all great cities. As these areas become gentrified, what's happening is the personality and the character of the neighborhood is just being run out. And I have nothing against people coming in and making money and things like that. But when you do it at the expense of the culture, the character and the personality of the neighborhood, I mean, you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. These are the people that came here and built these areas up. It happens here in Boston, it happens in all over New York, happens on the West Coast. So what I love about Boston is not nearly as romantic as what it might've been 15 years ago and what I used to love about New York. What I love about Boston is that it's walkable. The food scene is on the rise here. But I think you're hard pressed to find the charm that people think of when they think of old Boston and old New England city. So yeah, I see it differently. People sometimes criticize like MIT like for the thing that it is now. But I think it is always like that. I tend to prefer to carry the flame of the greatness, the greatest moments of its history and like sort of enjoy the echoes of that in the halls of MIT. In the same way in Boston, you think about the history and that history lives on in the few individuals. Like you can't just look around what Boston is now and be like, what has Boston become? I think it was always carried by a minority of individuals. I think we kind of look back in history and think like times were greater in a certain kind of dimension back then. But that's because we remember, this is a ridiculous non data driven assertion of mine, is to remember just the brightest stars of that history. And so we romanticize it. But I think if you look around now, those special people are still living in Boston for which Boston will be remembered as a great city in like 50 years. I think you're probably right, but isn't there some sort of theory about the point that there's like a certain age in your life where things resonate differently to you? Like, I think they've done studies where most people stop searching for new music after age 19. Most dads you see like wearing super old clothes, like that's the style of the time period of the last great part of their life. So like there's an evolution in people and it could also be the memories of where they live. And when I was 17, of course my neighborhood was the best then because I was having the most fun. And we always kind of look at things through that tint, I think, and you're right. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the way cities are evolving now. It's just not, I prefer the time of like a mom and pop store, not a fabricated like gastropub that could just be like on a four lane super highway on your way out of Epcot Center. And it's actually owned by like some conglomerate. But there's still the special places. Like I, this takes us back to the road trip is maybe I tend to romanticize the experiences of like the diners in the middle of nowhere. What would you say makes for like, it feels like life is made up of these experiences that maybe on paper seem mundane, but are actually somehow give you a chance to pause and reflect on life with like a certain kind of people, whether like really close friends or complete strangers, maybe alcohol is involved in the middle of nowhere. It seems like a road trip facilitates that if you allow it to. Like what do you think makes for those kinds of experience? Have you had any? I think in the context of a road trip, I think it's like hyper localization. And I think it is those experiences along the way with people and the people that you're with will color the experiences differently depending on the person. The road trip you took was with somebody else or alone? So I've driven up and down the East Coast several times. When I drove from LA to New York, my friend was on the run from the cops. Yeah. So we were trying to get out of. Traffic tickets? Yeah, traffic tickets. Yeah, allegedly. We were trying to get out of LA because he was going to have to go away for a little while. So we drove from LA and we just, we were young kids, we had no idea what we were doing, and we drove East. And then we had an unbelievable trip, mostly because we didn't really have a destination, we didn't really have a timeframe, thank goodness, because he got arrested again in Pennsylvania. So we got kind of stuck there. And then we drove back to LA when he got out in Pennsylvania. But all the stops along the way were kind of like weird things, like you have no money, right? So you're finding that like a little diamond in the rough place to eat, the diner you talk about, like that place. I once was in, where was I? I think I was in Buenos Aires. And the guy that I was with, he said, I know this quaint little spot around the corner. And I was young, I was like 25. And I thought the coolest thing in the world would be to be such a citizen of the world that you know these quaint little spots around the corner in like all these great cities. Like I know where to get this great chicken sandwich in Argentina. I know where to get this great meal in Costa Rica. I know where to get this super local egg in another country. And I just thought that that was really cool, the ability to do that anywhere in the world. Did you get closer with that guy through the trip? I found that like, so I took a trip across the United States with a guy friend of mine. We had different goals. I was searching for meaning in life and he was searching for, what's the politically correct way of phrasing it, but just basically trying to sleep with every kind of woman that this world has to offer. What's the difference between those two things? Well, I guess he was searching for the different kinds of meanings. Yeah, I mean, I still think that you can't find meaning between a woman's legs, I suppose. Have you tried all of them? But there was a tension there. We grew closer with those experiences, but we've gotten in fights. There was a lot of like literal almost fights and then we were close and there was like silences, but then we were like brothers and this whole weird journey of friendship that we went on. I think anytime you spend that much time in like a small space with another person, you're gonna have the different parts of the relationship will manifest themselves. You'll have the periods of closeness. You'll have the periods of vulnerability where it's like maybe you're driving through Denver and it's three in the morning and you talk about something you might not have otherwise talked about. You'll have the periods where you don't wanna see that motherfucker ever again. He didn't, and depending could be because of anything. But the guy that I drove twice with, we're still in contact, we're still buddies. We have very different goals also, but at that point in our lives, we never even contemplated the meaning of life. We were about probably more to the point of the friend that you drove with. We were more about racking up experiences, whatever they were. I wanna be able to retell this. Stories. Yeah, I wanna be able to retell this and it's gotta sound cool. Like I don't wanna retell a story about, yeah and then we drove through Alabama and they've got a lovely library and I checked out this book and I'm not interested in retelling that. Do you remember any, this is a kid's show, do you remember any stories that the kids would enjoy from those times that were profound in some kind of way? There were some impactful moments on the beginning of our road trip where we had no money and as a couple of kids who knew nothing, we literally had to, we stopped in Vegas and we went to Circus Circus. At the time they had $3 blackjack and we had like 12 bucks and my buddy was a kind of a degenerate gambler so he knew what was up. I was just like kind of stuffing chips in my pockets, making sure we could pay for the gas. And just being at a point which is like a starting line and like we drove from LA to Vegas, which is only about four hours and being at the starting line and realizing like, we may not even like get off the starting line here. And if we don't, what are we doing? We're gonna be two guys stuck in Vegas. We have no money. We can't go West because you're gonna get pinched. We have no money to go East. What the hell are we gonna do? Are we gonna wind up in Vegas? So, you know, that was kind of a profound thing where you just, it's a turning, it potentially could have been a turning point in our lives had we not made enough money to continue going East. That's the beautiful thing about road trips when you're broke is like, in retrospect, everything turned out fine, but you're facing the complete darkness, the uncertainty of the possibilities laid before you. And like, I don't know if you were confident at that time, but like, I was really full of self doubt. Like just, all I could see is all the trajectories where you just screw up your life. Like, what am I doing with my life? I'm a failure, like all these dreams I've had, I've never realized I'm a complete piece of shit. All those kinds of things. I had no concept of consequence. I probably had toxoplasmosis. I had literally no concept of consequence. Immediate gratification was all I cared about. Oh, so existentialist. Yeah, it did not even enter my mind in my like early 20s that anything that I was doing at that point could reverberate for the rest of my life. I think part of me didn't even think I'd make it this far. And so I was not interested in like the long play. I remember thinking like, why should I be acting now in a way that might impact a point in my life I never reach? And yet now you are a man who searches for meaning in life, at least I would say to put another way, you think deeply about this world and in a philosophical context while also appreciating the violence of hurting other friends of yours, right? On a regular basis. So why do you think, I mean, maybe there's a broader question there, but it calls a personal question. It seems that people who fight for prolonged periods of time, like Jiu Jitsu people and mixed martial arts people, even military folks become over time philosophers. What is that? Is that, is there a parallel between fighting and violence and the philosophical depth with which you now have arrived from the starting point of being the full existentialist of like just living in the moment to like being introspective human now? I would say to that being a soldier or a warrior hundreds of years ago is probably what started the marriage between martial arts and philosophy. If you're constantly under someone else's charge and you're told to go out and walk in a line and overtake some Germanic tribe somewhere and that happens all the time, your job is being a soldier. On any given day, you might not come home. So I think that you have to start your day by thinking deeply about how you've lived to that point and the people that are living in and around you and how you've treated them. And I think that probably is what started the marriage of being kind of like a philosophical martial artist. You've got to really like on a daily basis, take stock of what's going on around you and inside you because we all suffer with this kind of idea. If today's my last day, did I do it right? And we don't really do it so much nowadays because we're so comfortable, but if we were being marched out to war every day, I think you'd see people live a little bit differently. And you treat the people around you a little bit differently. Do you think there's echoes of that in just even the sport of like grappling and Jiu Jitsu where you're facing your own mortality? We don't really think of it that way, but. To be honest, I think that a lot of people that train in a martial art in contemporary society, I don't consider them all martial artists. I think just because you train in martial art does not mean you're a martial artist. There are so many people that use martial arts as a form of exercise and like this little piece of self concept. They use martial arts as a tagline in their Instagram bio. And it's really a form of exercise. It's something they do, it's not something they are. And I think there's a big difference there. There's a bunch of stuff mixed up in there because the Instagram thing is something you do for, it's also, it could be something you are for display versus who you are in the private moments of searching and thinking and struggling and all that kind of stuff. Instagram is a surface layer that much of modern society operates in, which is really problematic because there's that gap between the person you show to the world and the person you are in private life. And if you make majority of your project of the human project of your sort of few years on this earth, the optimization of the public Instagram profile, then you never develop this private person. But it does seem that if you do jiu jitsu long enough, it's very difficult not to fall into like, this has become a personal journey, an intellectual journey. Because like, if you get your ass kicked thousands of times, there's a certain point to where that, maybe it's like a defense mechanism, but that turns into some kind of deeply profound introspective experience versus like exercise. It's not yoga. Yeah, so let me go back first and address the Instagram point, which I think there's a difference between people whose Instagram is intrinsically tied to their profession and they have to put a specific profile out there. And I think in general, people who truthfully their business is tied to their Instagram profile, I wanna exclude them. I think that most people, Instagram is how they want to be seen. And that's not always congruent with who you are, but I think there is a level of dishonesty there. Like this is how I want people to see me. I'm gonna put all this stuff in my Instagram bio, but that's really not me. And when you do that, I think it's a little disingenuous and you're right. There's not, you're never really gonna marry those two things together and it gets tough. Let me, sorry to interrupt, let me push back on something. This is a good time to address the many flaws of the great and powerful John Clark. Okay, let's go there. Cause it's interesting. You strive so hard for excellence in your life and for extreme competence that you are visibly and physically off put by people who have not achieved competence. Do you think we should be nicer to the people who are, like you mentioned, a person who first picks up an art, picks up, becomes vegan, starts doing CrossFit, start doing Jiu Jitsu for the first time and create that as their, they're struggling through this like, who am I? And they're really overly proud and it's kind of ridiculous. And you and your wise chair have seen many battles. Yeah, that you see the ridiculousness of that. I tend to, I'm learning to give those folks, not to mock them and to sort of give them a chance to do their ridiculousness because I think I was that too. Let me first clarify. I wanna be clear about what you mean when you say a level of competence. Now I've never won a world championship. I've never, you know, there are plenty of things in my life where I've not achieved what most people would consider to be the penultimate level of success. Now. That's accomplishments. It's accomplishments, it's ribbons, it's things like that. And it's not that those things don't mean anything to me. And the fact that I haven't in some arenas is something that I wanna change, which is, we can talk about that in a second. But I think that there's a difference between the very eager noob of whatever it is they're doing who does the thing so that they can signal they do the thing. That's a person I have less respect for. So we know each other primarily through jujitsu. Look at a jujitsu tournament. There's this idea that people espouse online. I respect anyone with the guts to get on the mat and put it on the line and sign up for a tournament. That is the biggest load of shit I have ever heard. This is great. Do you know how easy it is for you to put your name on something and pay the registration fee and walk in there? That's not the hard part. That's the easiest part. I don't care if you lose your first match, but I respect the person who signs up for the tournament, registers for the tournament, goes on a diet, loses weight the right way, trains their ass off, and does the things properly and then goes on the mat. The person who simply signs their name on the registration form and jumps on the mat, if they haven't done these other things, they actually have nothing to lose. Because what they've done is they've stepped onto the mat, in the ring, in the cage with a bucket full of excuses. Sure you signed up, but you're not really vulnerable because you didn't run, you didn't do this, you didn't do all the things you're supposed to do. The person who eliminates every possible excuse and then steps on the mat and gets their ass kicked in the first round, I have so much more respect for that person than the person who does nothing and maybe on natural ability wins a couple of matches and then writes on Facebook on how I lost to the eventual champion. That's worth zero, that's worth zero. And in that process, what did you learn about yourself? You learned about yourself that you've got a natural level of aptitude for whatever this activity is that you're doing, but you didn't actually learn how to maximize it through training and through dedication and through all these other things. I'm an incredibly interested, novice musician. I like to play bass, but I don't put that on anything. And I stink at it. I would really love to be sick at it. I'm currently not, but I'm not running around, talking about entering, any of those other things. I do it, it's for myself and I wanna reach a level of competence in that. So the person that you have respect for is a person who takes it fully seriously, takes the effort fully seriously. So for bass, that would be that you agree with yourself that you're going to perform live and just in your own private moments, your private thoughts, you're not going to give yourself an excuse out, like, I'm just gonna have fun. This is a nice experience. You're going to think I'm going to try to be the best possible bass player given everything that's going on in my life, but I'm going to do my, like actually, and put it all on the line. And if I fail, that's not because I didn't try, it's because I'm a failure. Exactly. And then sit in that sick feeling of like, I'm a failure. But isn't that an important thing to know? Absolutely. But there's a, that's like the best thing it could be, but sometimes it's fun to lose yourself in the bragging, in the lesser ways of life. And I think I'm careful not to, because too many people in my life, when I brought them with like a little candle of a fire of a dream, they would just go like, they would just blow that fire out, that they would dismiss me. Cause they see like, I would say, I've said a lot of ridiculous stuff, but I've always dreamed about like putting, I always dreamed of having this world full of robots. And every time I would bring these ideas up, they'll be shut down by the different people, by my parents, by, then you need to first get an education. You need to succeed in these dimensions. In order to do all these things, you have to get good grades. You have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's all this stuff that it's indirect or direct ways of blowing out that little ridiculous dream that you present. And it's like, I remember sort of bringing up, I don't know, things like becoming a state champion in wrestling, right? It's a weird dance because of course the coaches will tell, they'll kind of dismiss that. It's like, okay, okay. But at the same time, it feels like in those early days, you have to preserve that little fire. Johnny Ive, I don't know if you know who that is, is a designer at Apple. He was a chief designer. He's behind most of the iPhone, all that stuff. And he always talked about that he wouldn't bring his ideas to Steve Jobs until they were matured because he would always shit on them. He wanted them to as little babies live for a little bit before they get completely shut down. And I always think about that when I see a beginner sort of bragging on Instagram, you have to be careful. Let them play with that little dream. Are you playing with a little dream that you're nurturing and you're trying to take that little flame and you're trying to create a roaring blaze with it? Or are you playing with the idea of it and behind that there's no substance? It's hard to know the difference. That's what I struggle with. I don't think it necessarily is. Certainly you're wrong. And when I say Instagram, I don't wanna impugn a bunch of strangers, but I have a gym with a lot of members. And I can tell you that the number of years I've been in the gym, when someone comes to me and says, this is my goal, I don't tell them yes or no in general, but I know. I can tell by the way they say it to me, I can thin slice it. I've seen the look on people's faces. And when people start to say they wanna do X, Y, and Z, I know right off the bat, this person's either gonna put an effort in or they're not going to put an effort in. So to me, it's about the effort behind that. If you're busting your ass and you're a new at something and you're brand new, but you're working really hard and you have a series of like moderate successes in that, like that's the guy I wanna champion because that persistence and that grit over time, those successes will no longer be moderate. They'll be huge. But the person who's having moderate success by doing nothing, chances are they'll never learn to put that work in and the successes will never grow. You have an admiration for Mike Tyson. I love him. I'm just gonna let that sit for a brief moment. So why? I think there's a combination of factors. One is like the timeliness of his career and like the age I was when he like came to prominence, the raw, brutal violence and the raw, brutal honesty when he speaks. I think it's easy for people to hear him or see his life and cast him aside as some simianesque, like just cretin scourge on society. But when you hear him speak, like this is not a guy who's unintelligent. This is a guy who knows himself better than probably most of us know ourselves. It's disarming and that's a humongous part of my admiration for him. Who is Mike Tyson? Because it feels like there's similarities between him and you. It feels like there's a violent person in there, but also a really kind person. And they're all like living together in a little house. And you're the same. There's a thoughtful person, but there's also a scary, violent person. And they're like having a picnic. They're having a picnic. I think there are dialectical tensions in everyone, these like opposing forces that are constantly pulling at you and at different points in your life, like it's sliding scale. And I think that certainly when I was a younger person, that there was a lot more manifestation of the violence and a lot less of the kindness. People who were not as close to me probably saw more of the violent side and only the very close people to me saw like what would pass for the kind side. And now that's sliding in the other direction. And I worry actually sometimes that there could be a situation where I need that old version of me and he's getting further and further away and I can't call him up if I need him. And that concerns me to a certain degree. The sad aging warrior seeing his greater self fade away. But you still compete. Does that person return? It seems like for Mike Tyson, that person returned at the prospect of competition. It returns, but I've learned better how to manifest it in competition in terms of like the effects that that type of emotion has on you physically in the middle of a competition. So I've better learned how to utilize that energy. But I think another side effect of this is like having a gym where you're a bigger guy and you're the head instructor, you can't be as mean and violent as you once were because you're also not trying to run a business. And you spend so many years trying not to be mean and to soften your technique a little bit that that all of a sudden just becomes who you are. And I don't necessarily like that. So I've been trying to reclaim that a little bit on the mat, but I think in competition, there has to be an athlete really wants to score the points. A fighter really wants to incapacitate you and put you in a position where they can do their own bidding. And the result in a jujitsu match might just still be two points, but the motivations are very, very different. What do you make of Tyson on Joe Rogan saying that he was aroused by violence? Do you think that's insane? Do you think that's deeply honest for him? And do you think that rings true for many of us, others who practices in different degrees? I can't speak for a lot of people. And I think that it was a brutally honest statement by him. And I think it's something that even if a lot of people feel it, they're not that comfortable admitting it or saying it. But I think there's great joy in landing a flush right hand on someone's jaw and then watching them crumble. You don't even feel it. You ever played baseball as a kid? You can hit a base hit off the end of the bat and it will sting your hands because of the way that you hit it. You can hit a home run and you won't feel anything. It just feels so good in your hands. And that's, I think, one of the joys of physical contact. When you do it the right way, and that goes for all physical contact. When you do it the right way, the physical pleasure you can derive from it and the mental pleasure, it's unparalleled. See, but that's different. Let me draw a distinction. I'm not, I've had the fortune of being a wrestler. And I would draw a distinction between a very well executed in competition, double leg, single leg take down or a pin. There's some, as an OCD person, there's something so comforting about a well executed pin because it's like two seconds and it's just like everything is flush and nice. And like, it's all clean. I mean, okay, this OCD person who likes to align show, it's just beautiful. Okay, that's good technique. And wrestling also provides you, maybe more than other sports, the feeling of dominating another human. Yes. Of breaking, no, not just of them being very cocky and very powerful, you feel this power of another human being and then you breaking them. And like, I'm not as honest as Mike Tyson. But that, I don't think I've ever sort of looked in the mirror and said like, that that was, I enjoyed that aspect of it. But it certainly seems like you chase that. So when I was a wrestler in high school, I lost so many matches because of over aggressiveness. Like, I would pick the top position and let you stand just so that I could do a mat return. And I wasn't trying to return you to the mat. I was actually trying to like drive you through the mat and through the ground. Like I took, like, it gave me joy to do that. Like, it wasn't like I was trying to, you know, just return you to the mat so that I could pin you. That what you just talked about, like the dominating another person, I used to look at that as you've got someone who in theory is equally trained and equally skilled as you are. And you're absolutely out there totally dominating them. There's joy in that. You could get in an MMA fight and you could take someone down and you could mount them. And all that feels great. But when you start raining down the punches on their face from mount and like dropping elbows and stuff, like there's another level of satisfaction there. And it's tough to describe. And I don't think that everyone is made for it. When I was, I think when I was a senior in high school, my wrestling coach said, look, you've got to stop with all this crazy aggressive wrestling. Like they tried to turn me into a technician and it did work to a degree. And it was a humongous shift for me in terms of success, but it wasn't the same level of enjoyment out of it. Like, I mean, I got disqualified from New England because my coach said cross face and I cross face and he said harder. And I basically wound up and blasted a kid in the face and his nose got busted everywhere. But I didn't think not to do it because that felt good. It felt good to cross face him like that. I was a lot of like. That's a weird American warrior ethos that I've picked up, but I also have in me the Russian, the Setyaev brothers that don't see it, don't see it as that. They don't get draw, they think that there is a tension between the art of the martial art and the violence of the martial art. I agree with that. It's a poetic way I could put it, but they're not so fascinated with this Dan Gable dominating another human. They think of the effortlessness of the technique and your mastery of the art is exhibited in its effortlessness, how much you lose yourself in the moment and the timing, that just the beauty of a timing. Like there's much more, like one example in judo, but also in wrestling, you can look at the foot sweep. Wrestlers in America and even judo players in America and much of the world don't admire the beauty of the foot sweep, but a well timed foot sweep, which is a way to sort of off balance to find the right timing to just effortlessly change the table, turn the tables of, I mean, dominate your opponent is seen as the highest form of mastery in Russian wrestling. In the case of judo, it's in Japanese judo. It's interesting. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that tension is about. I think it actually takes me back to, I don't know if you listened to Dan Carlin, Hardcore History and Genghis Khan, if you've ever. I've read a great, great book. On Genghis Khan? Yeah. I'm still trying to adjust. Most of my life said Genghis Khan, but the right pronunciation is actually Genghis Khan. There's a tension there. We kind of think, I don't know we, I kind of thought as Genghis Khan is a ultra violent, a leader of ultra violent men, but another view, another way to see them is the people who warriors that valued extreme competence and mastery of the art of fighting with weapons, with bows, with the horse riding, all that kind of stuff. And I'm not sure exactly where to place them on my sort of thinking about violence in our human history. I think in the context of like combat sports, I think there's a difference between an athlete winning a contest under a certain set of rules and a fighter winning a fight under those exact same rules. There's a different approach to it. And I don't think one is any better than the other. Like in MMA, I think a great example would be George St. Pierre. George St. Pierre is a tremendous athlete and he considers himself to be a martial artist first. He's trying to win an athletic competition. Like Nick Diaz is trying to bust your ass, right? There's a different approach to it. And yes, they've had different results at the highest level of competition, but it's difficult to attribute the difference in results just to their approach to the sport because they're different human beings with different abilities and different physical attributes. The PsyTF brothers have that luxury of being able to talk about the beauty of a perfectly timed slide by. There are other wrestlers that will never be able to pull that off and therefore they have to pursue other ways to defeat someone. And maybe it is the Dan Gable breaking a man's spirit by outworking him type thing, which is beautiful in its own way. But we tend to self select the ways in which we're able to be successful and then kind of take a deep dive into that. What do you think is more beautiful? Brute force or effortless execution of a technique that dominates another human? I think it's a subjective thing based on what skills you perceive yourself to have. I'm never, I've never been a slick, super athletic, dexterous competitor in anything. And I've always been more of an, I've gotta outwork you, I've gotta out grind you, I gotta out mean you. And so because I've lived that, I tend to see the beauty in that more because I have a perceptual awareness that I don't have for the people who have the luxury of being very slick and athletic and using beautiful technique. Now that said, there's a phenomenal little video the other day I sent to a friend of a compilation of foot sweeps by Leota Machida in MMA. And they're so beautiful and they're so awesome. And it's not that I don't have an appreciation for those, but I can't emulate those because I lack the physical ability to do that. Whereas I at least have a chance to emulate some of the people who do it through grit and through outworking people. But I would love to return to Genghis Khan and get your thoughts about, like I have so many mixed feelings about whether he is evil or not, whether the violence that he brought to the world had ultimately, the fact that it had maybe kind of like Dan Carlin describes, cleanse the landscape. It's like a reset for the world through violence had ultimately a progressive effect on human civilization, even though in the short term it led to massive, you could say suffering. I don't know what to make of that, man. What are your thoughts on Genghis Khan? I think it's always difficult to look at a historical figure and their actions of their time through a modern day lens because it's easy for us to kind of impugn their achievements and the things that they did and say, oh, well, what he did was wrong. Well, of course that can be true, but a lot of times we don't actually have any real good context or concept of the times they were living in and what really was deemed wrong and what really wasn't. We're looking at it through a very cushy modern lens. That being said, from what I've read about Genghis Khan, yeah, he was a violent dude, but also he gave you an option. When he got to a village, he said, look, you have a choice, you can come with us or you can run. And he gave them an option to join his legion of fighters who he took very good care of. He was the first military leader to pay his soldiers families when they died. And he did that based on the booty that they got when they raided a village. He took that money, he took his share and they divided that up amongst the soldiers and then the soldiers families. I think he also is credited with first horseback mail routes or something like that, right? Isn't he the godfather of the modern postal system? There's something like that. Yeah, he's the Bernie Sanders of the Mongol Empire. I do think the offering of surrender is an interesting one because it's interesting as a thought experiment, whether you would sacrifice your way of, like the pride of nations or the nationalism, pride of your country, whether you're willing to give that up to survive. It depends on who depends on you. If you have a family and young kids and stuff like that, I think your obligation is primarily to them and therefore surrender has to be something that you consider in that moment in time so that you can take care of those people. If you're a man alone and you've got all these principles and all this other stuff and you're not down with what Genghis Khan is doing and what he's selling, yeah, try and escape, do your thing and just know what waits on the other side of that for you potentially. But I think if there's someone else out there that depends on you, your obligation should be to them. It feels like historically people valued principles more than life in this weight of like, what do I value more? The principles I hold versus survival. It seems that now we don't value principles as much. Principles could be also religion, it could be your values, whatever. We're okay sort of sacrificing those for to preserve our survival. And that applies in all forms like actual survival or like on social media, like preserving your reputation, all those kinds of things. It seems like we, especially in America, value individual life, that death is somehow a really bad thing. As opposed to saying sacrificing your principles is a very bad thing and everybody dies and it's okay to die. What's horrible is to sacrifice your principles of who you are just to live another day. I think a big problem is people don't really even know what their principles are anymore. People, social media and just the way that we live nowadays where we're separated from the human contact like this, like you're not contacting people in a community anymore. You're not, whether you're religious or not, like you're not congregating at a church, you're not part of a parish like you would be like in down South, you're not part of that community anymore. And so it's difficult to figure out what your principles and values are because you're constantly jumping from one bucket to the next online. And you don't get a lot of like direct, like reasonable feedback from people. You just get dipshit feedback. Like, oh, you don't believe this? Well, you're a jerk. I think the hard thing currently is having the integrity and character to stick by principles one under. I don't want to equate murder in the Genghis Khan times to social media cancel culture, but it certainly doesn't feel good when people are attacking on social media. And it does take a lot of integrity to, without anger, without emotion, without mocking others or attacking others unfairly, standing by the ideas you hold, or in another way, standing by your friends, standing by this little group, like loyalty of the people that you know are good people. I find that in cancel culture, one of the sad things is whenever somebody gets quote unquote canceled, everybody just gets all their friends become really quiet and don't defend them or worse. I mean, quiet is at least understandable. They kind of signal that they throw them out of the bus, I guess is one way to put it. And that's something I think about a lot because from coming from me, it's like, I hold an ethic. I don't know if others hold this ethic. Maybe it's this like Russian mobster ethic of like, you should help your friends bury the body. You shouldn't criticize your friends for committing the murder. Like there are certain levels of like, yeah, you have that discussion after you buried the body that like maybe you shouldn't have done that murder thing. I don't know, I understand that that's a problematic, what's the terminology? That's a problematic ethical framework within which to operate. But at the same time, it feels like what else do we have in this world except the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the love we have for a very small community. But perhaps that's the wrong way of thinking. Perhaps the 21st century would be defined by the dissipation of this community, of this loyalty concept. No, we're all just individuals. I think you're right. And I think you have to have some sort of core framework of principles and beliefs that you operate on. And I think what I was referencing is a little bit different. But to speak to your point, you need a framework of core principles on which you can then base a lot of your other decisions. Like I believe these three things to be true, whatever they are, and that will help inform other decisions you make in your life. As far as how you treat your friends, I've got probably three friends that, if they called me right now and said, let's bury the body, sorry, Lex, I gotta go. There are other people in my life that if they said, hey, we've got to go bury the body, I would say, who is this? So I think it depends on the relationship. I wonder if that's a good, that's a really good measure. I would love to have, I would love that to be in your profile. People put like pronouns. I would love to put like, honestly, like objectively, not self report, but objective, how many people in your life, if they committed murder, you would not ask any questions and you would help them hide the body. Like, I would love to know that number for people. Yeah, and I think it's a weird thing too, because you think right away, like, okay, it must be the group of people that are the closest to you. That's who you're first thinking of, right? But obviously for like my best friend, I would do it, no question about it. But I've got other people that are close to me that are close to me in other ways. And I probably wouldn't do that only because I don't think they'd do it for me. Yeah. And that is a consideration. So I guess, is the principle there then that you do for your friends what you think they would do for you? Is that the underlying principle? Or do you just have a blind loyalty to people in your life for different reasons? I got people that are not on my inner circle that I probably wouldn't help change a tire at two in the morning if they're on the highway. But if they called me and said, hey, we gotta bury the body, I might show up for that. It's just these weird different connections you have. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I have close friends that like, I'd probably be, exactly, the tire is a good example. I'd be like, can't you find somebody else to do this? I think part of that is just this leap of faith into like giving yourself to the other person that creates a deep connection that makes life fulfilling, like meaningful that doesn't exist if you don't take that leap. I mean, it's not about the murder. We're sort of focusing. I think that's a, I think you have to, what is it, cross that bridge when you get there. I'm not exactly sure. This is just a thought experiment. But it's, I think about that a lot, especially these COVID times. And as like people become more and more isolated and separated from each other, like how important is it to have those deep connections to other humans? I think especially like what you're talking about there. Have you ever seen the movie, The Town? There's a great line in the movie where one of the main characters walks into his friend's house and he says, I need your help. We're gonna go hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again. And the friend looks up and he says, whose car are we taking? Like that is the type of person you need in your life. And the people, like there are people that will walk through that door and say that to you and you drop everything you're doing. And then there's the people that walk through your door and you're like, you know what? I got a hot pocket in the microwave. I'm a little bit tied up right now, but I'd love to help you out. But you know, I don't wanna do that. And you don't have that deep connection with those people. You mentioned some principles that you've changed your mind on. Is there, do you wanna go there? Is there some interesting principles and the process of changing that is useful to talk about? I can't really cite a specific thing, except that understanding that the principles that you have at different points in your life can change and it's okay to change them without being a total pussy and being bullied by other people into thinking what you thought was wrong. If you come to these conclusions of your own volition and you decide to change them, that's great. And it can be really, it can be really liberating. It's really liberating to have an idea that you hold so true to your core belief system and then to actually have someone change your mind for you and be okay with it, as opposed to being like, no, I gotta die with this. I gotta die with this. It's really liberating. There are definitely are ideas you wanna die on that hill and no one's ever gonna change your mind. But it's really liberating to be confident enough to say, change my mind. I'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfuckers around me who can tell me, listen, you're being a total dipshit. Like let's rethink this. Or like I have one friend who does the five whys all the time and he loves backing me into a corner. And. What's the five whys? You just, like when someone makes a statement about something, to really get to the core issue, they say, if you ask why five times, make a statement, well, why is that? And you answer that, well, why? And you phrase the whys differently, obviously, but then you get to the core. They say five times, you can get to the core of the issue. And that's a challenging thing. But I find later in life, it's so liberating for me to be confident enough to be like, man, was I fucking way off the mark on this and have my mind changed. And be able to say that to others that I was wrong. Totally. That ability, and I never used to have that. And it feels real good. And there's a hunger for that too. Yeah, you're so right, actually, on a personal level, it feels very good. Exactly as you said, it's liberating because you're free to then think as opposed to. Defend. Yeah, without thinking. Yeah, you get so sick of defending the same thing over and over and over. And you start to think about it and it's like, well, I would really like to evolve my thought process here. And when you're constantly defending one point, it's difficult to let other ideas in. You discount the possibility that you can have your mind changed when you're constantly on the defense. You have to have a crack in the front line in order to let a new idea come in and possibly flourish. And maybe the new idea doesn't even prove your current belief system to be wrong, but maybe it's like the water to a seed and it grows and now it's something even bigger and better. And you can start to work with that instead. And it's a tough thing because I'm a stubborn fuck and it's very difficult for me, it was historically, to say I was wrong about this one, or I messed this one up, or I wish I could have that one back. There's a public figure for me thing too, which there's a difference between changing your mind with a small circle of friends and changing your mind publicly about something, but it has equal, one echoes the other. It is equally liberating, but people will not make that change easy, but it doesn't matter. That's the point. I think it's ultimately liberating as a human being, public figure or not to just think deeply about this world and to keep changing, which is like, I think there's a deep hunger for that in like political discourse, that people are so tribal currently about politics that they want to see somebody who says, you know what, I changed my mind on this. And then keep changing their mind and keep asking questions, keep showing that they're open minded, all that kind of stuff. But when you want someone in a position of political power to change their mind because they realize that there might be a better way, not because they realize that by changing their mind, they're gonna get a new demographic to vote for them. Like that's transparent as shit. Nobody wants to see that. Like that's a person who can't separate their position from their people they're supposed to be helping. Yeah, and you can usually smell that. That's, we're just talking offline about, there's something about Hillary Clinton where she talked about changing her mind on gay marriage that it felt like this is a political calculation versus like really deeply thinking about like, what things do we do in this world that violate basic human rights? Like really thinking about deeply. And of course politicians are calculating this, but you can see it. This is the thing. That's why I like on the human level, there's like political policies, but there's also humans. And I've always liked Bernie Sanders, for example. I don't know, not the later perhaps Bernie Sanders, but I used to listen to him back in the day. And it felt that people might disagree with me, but it felt like there was a real human struggling with ideas, whatever, agree with him or not, it felt like he wasn't doing political calculation. He was just a human. He couldn't be further away from my political ideals, but also like, there's an obvious authenticity to his passion for what he's saying that is not present in other candidates. And you could see it, all these people that have been in politics forever, like from all the way back when Hillary was a lawyer in the 70s. There's a couple of shots of her in a courtroom in the 70s though, she's looking all right. She's got those big glasses on. She's kind of a little bit of a nerdy babe back in the day. Oh, you mean like. Yeah. Well, John Clark says Hillary Clinton was a babe back in the day. 73 Clinton, yeah. That's an interesting question about authenticity in politicians. Do you think like Hillary Clinton, just the Clintons in general are a good example that why do you think they become over time so inauthentic? Is it the system that changes them? Is it their own hunger for power? Is it, what is it, or are they always inauthentic? Well, first I'd like to say that, I don't know if you know this, but I come from a bit of a political dynasty myself. I was on the student government several times in high school and my dad won the runoff in a special election in Bradenton Beach, Florida. I think there's like 700 people there. So. So your dad got you the job? Yeah, we're basically, a lot of people compare us to the Kennedys. My guess with the politicians is that, and you can see it now as we're becoming more cognizant as people to the political process, I think the process corrupts people. And I think that, I don't know the ins and outs of it. I've listened to people who are far more educated on it than me and I'm unprepared to cite any of their points. I think you can see it a little bit in Dan Crenshaw. Can I say this? Yeah, I like him. I really liked Dan, especially like a year, year and a half ago. He seemed very level headed. It's clear to me now that as he panders more and more to the right, it's because he's setting himself for a presidential run. It's clear that that's happening. And he just doesn't seem like the same authentic ideals oriented guy that he did a year and a half ago. Now I could be wrong on that. It could be way off. But I think that you can take someone as honest as you want to. When you start them on that path to the presidency, you become so unbelievably beholden to so many people and entities along the way that by the time you get to the final destination, the Oval Office, all you're doing is paying back the favors that got you there. And you never get to serve the people you're supposed to serve. Your primary focus is on your office and not on the people that you're supposed to be helping. And I think that that's a humongous problem. And like we could talk all about campaign finance reform and the two party system. But at the end of the day, the people who are running for political posts, they're working to keep a job. They're not working to improve the lives of the constituents, which is different. A long, long time ago, like a lot of politicians, those were like part time jobs. And they held other posts out West. They were ranchers by day and sheriff by night, whatever the case might be. But now, such a cushy path for the rest of your life that the goal is to just be a politician, not do the things that you think a politician is supposed to do. And that's a problem. By the way, I'll talk to Dan on this. It's funny, I like the version of him from a year ago and I haven't been really paying attention. So I'll be, I'll actually pay more attention now and ask him that exact question. Like, how do you prevent yourself from changing, becoming what the Clintons became? I tend to believe like there's conspiratorial stuff about Clintons and all these politicians. I tend to believe that they were actually good, thoughtful people back in the day. And the system changes them. It's not even the system. There's something about just the process of campaigning. I just think it wears you down to where if you look at the percentage of time you spend on the kinds of conversations you have, it's like one, you do these speeches, which you repeat the same thing over and over and over. It beats the process of thinking. You just exhaust your brain to where you're not thinking anymore, you're just repeating. It's very, it's exceptionally difficult to keep making speech after speech after speech, saying the same thing over and over and over again, and at the same time thinking deeply and changing your mind and learning. And then also the pandering to financial, like having phone calls, like fundraising, all those kinds of things. That's what they do now. They spend most of their time fundraising. They're not worried about anything. Sorry to interrupt you, but I was gonna say that you can see there's a fuel. Like the more attention and the higher regard you're held in in your community, and the more sycophants like continue to blow smoke up your ass, the more it changes the way you present yourself. And you can see it in every walk of life. I mean, jiu jitsu is a tiny, tiny little section of the world, but you see it in the jiu jitsu community. When someone all of a sudden starts a social media page or whatever, and they get a bunch of people, like basically like cyber fellating them on their Instagram page, they change. Fellating, is that a word? I think so. So giving fellatio? Yeah. So fellating. Yeah. Jamie, look it up. I think, but in those people, it changes their character. Yeah. It changes who they are because they become emboldened and now they've got this like mythical cyber mob behind them. There's a sign at the entrance to your gym that reads, for every moment of triumph, it's a quote by Hunter S. Thompson. It reads, for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. What does this quote mean to you? That quote to me is about, mostly about sacrifice. And it's about to achieve anything great or anything beautiful or to triumph, you have to have sacrificed so many things to get there, unless you're the most unbelievably genetically gifted person in the world and greatness is just, you know, falls upon you, it's just raining from the sky. I think on your path to greatness, on your path to success and triumph, you leave a lot of carnage in your wake, personal relationships, other goals, things that you didn't pursue, you know, other unfulfilled dreams. And you kind of have to sell a lot of that out in order to be really at the peak of your field or what you want to be. I know that that's happened in my life. I mean, there's tons and tons of relationships that, you know, couldn't survive the way that I was living my life, because when I was trying to be a big time fighter or like when I was just training all the time, tons of relationships dissolve themselves naturally, some not so naturally. Some people get it, some people don't get it, some people hate you, you miss tons of other opportunities. And I think that's kind of what that quote means to me. It's about sacrifice. It's about you're giving up what you want now for what you want more. And it's the trampling of souls, it's messy too, because it's not clear what the right path is. Like that sacrifice is not obvious that those are the right sacrifices to make. You might be ruining your own life, but the fact that you're willing to take that risk and sort of go all in on whether it's stupid or not, go all in on something, that the possibility of creating something beautiful is there. Who says it's stupid? If you're going all in on it, you don't think it's stupid. Someone else might think it's stupid, but I mean, who really cares? Well, I'm of many minds on many things, so I feel like there's certain minds, certain moves of the day where you think it's stupid. Like relationships is a beautiful one, which is, you've seen the movie Whiplash, by any chance? Yes. It seems like in a man's life, or it could be a woman's, but I don't identify as a woman, so I know the man, the lived experience. It's 2020, bro. But my lived experience for now is that of a man. We'll see about tomorrow. And there is, in the pursuit of excellence, there's often a choice of, some of the souls that must be trampled are personal relationships with humans in your life that you might deeply care about. It could be family, it could be friends, it could be loved ones of all different forms. It could be the people that, your colleagues that are dependent on you, people who will lose jobs because of the decisions you make, all this kind of stuff. It seems that that moment happens, and I'm not sure that sacrifice is always the correct one. Like, to me, the movie Whiplash, for people who haven't seen, spoiler alert, maybe? I don't even know if that movie has any spoilers, but there is a relationship with a female. There's a student, there's a drummer that's pursuing excellence of this particular art form of drumming, and he has a brief, fleeting relationship with a female, and he also has an instructor that's pushing him to his limits in what appears to be awfully a lot like a toxic relationship. And he chooses, not chooses, he naturally makes the decision to sacrifice the romantic relationship with the woman in further pursuit of this chaos of, this chaotic pursuit of excellence. And that doesn't feel like a deliberate decision. It feels like a giant mess of like an emotional mess where you're just like, kind of like a fish swimming against stream, just like, fuck it. You let go of all the things that convention says you should appreciate. You throw away the possibility of a stable life, of a comfortable life, of what society says is a meaningful life, and just pursue this crazy thing full of seeming toxicity with crazy people surrounding you. I don't know. So I don't know what the right decision is. Part of my brain says, you should stay with the girl. Fuck that instructor that's making you, that's pushing you to places where it's like, that are destructive, potentially destructive, like could lead to suicide, could lead you to completely fail or fail on your pursuit of excellence or destroy the dream, the passionate pursuit of the thing that you've always dreamed for, in that case is drumming. I don't know. There's so many minds there. Like what is the right thing to do? So my first two thoughts are, number one, fuck convention. What is convention? It's like some laid out path, some linear progression of the way your life is supposed to go, like that someone can draw a picture of at the end. That shit's, first of all, it's just boring and whatever. And it's, I don't wanna say that it's cowardly because it isn't cowardly, but for someone who's not conventional to not be nonconventional is cowardly, to get sucked into the convention. That's first. Second of all, I believe that scene in the diner in that movie where he tells her you're in my way because I'm gonna want to be with you, or you're going to want me to be going out to dinner with you and I know I should be practicing, or I know I should be training. And ultimately I'm gonna make, I'm either gonna feel bad about not being with you by training, or I'm gonna skip the training to be with you and neither one is right. The whole thing that they don't mention in that is that that's the wrong girl. That's the wrong girl. The right girl is a gangster. The right girl says, oh, you've practiced tonight? I'll leave you a sandwich and some milk so that you can, outside the door, let me know when you're done, or you have some free time. The right girl compliments that. She's not an impediment in any way. Even if what you wanna do is be with her so much that you're putting the drums down, or you're putting the bass down, or you're picking up the pizza, or you're not going to training, that girl, without even telling you why she's making decisions, is making decisions to help you achieve your goal. Now that might sound like some sort of chauvinistic king of the castle type shit where everyone should cater to you, but the fact of the matter is that person is a compliment to your life in helping you do your thing, and in your own way you're helping them to achieve whatever their goals are also. It's uncommon that you have two people under the same roof striving to be unbelievably excellent in one small area. It's not impossible, but it's uncommon. Relationships have to be like binary systems, like two stars. The gravitational pull is what keeps you together and circling around one another, right? And one is bigger than the other, and they'll fluctuate, and the stars will get bigger, and they'll get smaller, and they'll contract based on positioning and composition. That's the way a relationship should be, not an asteroid coming in to disrupt the surface of your planet. It's a binary system, it's a compliment. That girl was the wrong girl for him. So you shouldn't, like the big unconventional dreams should not be adjusted to fit into this world. Because I mean, there is a part of me that's like full of self thought, well, maybe you're just a dick. Maybe. Yeah, who cares? Lex, so first of all, who cares? This is, by the way, somebody who's, you have recently gotten, well, in the span of the history of the universe is recently you've gotten to a relationship, but you haven't always, you have not felt the need to be in the relationship just because you're supposed to by society's kind of momentum. If you, I think that if you really want anything, you've got to be prepared fully to be the exact opposite. If you're a person who's looking for a relationship, the only way you're going to get in an awesome relationship is by being comfortable being alone, because that's the risk. If you're a person who's driven by money, you've got to be comfortable being totally poor because that's the risk, right? And when you're constantly hedging your bets, you're never all in. You're never all in on the thing you're trying to do. So a relationship has to compliment your life. You can't say, it's okay to want to be in a relationship, but you can't want to be in a relationship so bad that you take someone in who fits the suit. And it's like, oh, our schedules kind of work out. You live near me and this and that and the other thing, because the logistics of a relationship are not always perfect. It's what matters is when the two people are together. That's the perfect part of it. And it's great to want to meet people and say, if we meet and some sort of a relationship develops, I'm willing to run with it, but I'm not meeting you hoping a relationship develops. I think you kind of put the cart before the horse in a lot of those situations. It's like when guys meet. No guy goes out and is like, I'm looking for a bro, right? Nobody does that. You go to the gym and you run into a bunch of dudes and the next thing you know, someone's cool and they want to talk about fighting and you're fucking shotgun and beers. And all of a sudden you got a bro and that's how it works. It works the same way with women. What's a shotgun and beers? I'll show you after this. You poke a hole in the bottom and you open the top. Yeah, this is the problem with America. Drink vodka like a man. Okay, now don't poke holes in beers. This is the problem with the frat culture. They don't really know how to drink. They think they know how to drink. They don't know how to drink. What do you think makes a successful relationship if we can linger on that a little longer? Like, let me ask John Clark about love. I didn't ask a question, but let me just say love. About love. Are you one of those people who never says I love you? No, no, I'm an extreme person. And like my emotions are also extreme. And one of the things I concern myself with, maybe this is philosophical and martial arts warrior soldier type related stuff is like, I don't want anyone. If I die tonight on the drive home, hopefully that doesn't happen. I hope that no one is left questioning how I felt about them. And people I don't like probably are not questioning that. And so the thing that I've had to learn how to do later in life is to tell the people that you care about, that you care about them. And each thing can be equally off putting to the receiver of the message. Each thing can be equally off putting to the receiver of the message. When you're letting someone know how much you dislike them, that can be off putting to the person receiving that message. And when you tell someone how much you care about them, it can also be off putting to the person, depending on how they view their relationship with you. But it's still important to get it out there. Like you shouldn't hold those things in because you're worried about how they'll be received or if they'll come back at you. So you're okay going all in on these? Yeah. Not afraid of commitment? No, I'm not afraid of commitment. Anyone who says they're afraid of commitment is full of shit. You know what they're afraid of? They're afraid of commitment with that person. That's what they're afraid of. Like when someone knocks you on your ass and they come into your life and you're flush with all these emotions, you're not worried about, oh, I don't really like commitment. No, because they've knocked you on your ass. You want to be with them. You want those things. The two most alive points in your life, I think people feel is the euphoria of a new relationship and then the loss when that love is gone. You'll never feel more, I don't think, than in those moments in your life. See, the nice thing about the loss is it lasts longer. Yeah. That's a Louis C.K. point that he makes, which is like that, like in his show, I think, is a conversation with an older gentleman that says like that's his favorite part of the relationship is that period between the loss of the relationship and the real death, which is forgetting the person. But that period lasts the longest and that's like the most fulfilling, like missing the other person is as fulfilling as the actual love, the early infatuation, which is interesting. I also think of the Bukowski. I return to that. There's a little clip of him in an interview saying that love is a fog that dissipates with the first light of reality or something like that. So basically emphasizing that it's this very, very, very fleeting thing, that it's a moments thing and then it just fades and everything else is something else. So love is only a temporary thing, which is interesting. I think some people say that's cynical. I don't know. I don't know what to think of it. I think it's important to understand that everything is fleeting when you don't put effort into it. Almost everything will be fleeting. If you don't put effort into it, most people will get fat and lazy. If you don't put effort into something, you're gonna not be good at playing guitar or playing bass. You've got to put effort into it. The same thing goes for a relationship. That the awesome part of it, that like love part, that dies soon and early on in a relationship because it's so good that we think we don't have to work at it, but you do. You have to keep doing the things and you gotta keep things new and crisp and fresh. And different people probably feel differently about this, but I don't know, you walk around your girl and you start like farting and stuff, like that's when it all dies. That's when it dies. We're all human beings. We're all here and our bodies work in the same way, but you start to chip away at this beautiful thing when you buck conventional courtesy and things like that. Well, take it for granted, basically. You take it for granted, yeah. I mean, that's the same thing with life. I'm a big fan of meditating on death that you could die today. In the same way you should meditate on this relationship could end today, this connection with another human could be. This is the last time you could be interacting. And your chances of that increase when you take it for granted and you shit on people. But when you work at it, the chances of that decrease. It's never gonna be zero, but it decreases. And when you do that, when you're the person and you're trying to maintain and you're trying to work at the relationship, you gotta make sure that both people are working at it. Otherwise, you're just a fucking chump. Okay, let's return back to mixed martial arts. Let me ask the ridiculous question of who do you think are the top three, maybe top five greatest fighters of all time? It's so hard to compare fighters across generations. And maybe one way to say it is which metrics would you put on the table as to measure what a great fighter is? There was a guy named Dioxapus. And in the fourth century, and he was such a badass that in the Olympics in 336 BC, no one even showed up to fight him in the Pancration event. Nobody even showed up because he was fucking everybody up. Years later, he was retired. And this crazy Macedonian dude came there at some dinner for Alexander the Great, everyone's chilling, drinking, whatever they were drinking out of their chalices. And this Macedonian dude threatened him and challenged him. So Dioxapus said, yeah, man, we'll throw down. And they set the time and the place. Macedonian dude comes out like body armor, spear, shield, all this other shit. Dioxapus came out absolutely naked with a wooden club and took on this much younger guy, beat the living crap out of him and then put his foot on his throat and then didn't even kill him in the show of ultimate power for the time. So I think. There's something about the guy being naked too is just extra demeaning. Extra demeaning, yeah. Okay, can we rephrase the question then? Because those are clearly going to be some probably forgotten warriors in history. Well, let's take it to like modern day mixed martial arts in the UFC, perhaps. Well, just mixed martial arts there. Who do you think are the top fighters of all time? What metrics would you consider in trying to answer this perhaps unanswerable question? I think one of the things you want to think about is strength of opponent at the time you fought them. So for example, fighting BJ Penn in his prime and beating him is far different than beating BJ Penn last year, right? So to say you have a victory over BJ Penn is not the same given the timeframe of when it happened. Not to take anything away from anyone who's beaten BJ Penn. Just use that as an example of someone whose career went into a different direction. I would say the guy who I think is probably the best that people are the least familiar with would be Marillo Bustamante. And I think he was a guy who was one of the guys with the first really good physical build for MMA, which I think is narrow from the chest to the back and long shoulder to shoulder and kind of sinewy made out of steel cable. That was a guy who could box, that was a guy who could wrestle, and that was a guy who had great jujitsu. He wasn't a great kickboxer, but at the time he didn't need it. Fought everybody and gave everybody a run. I think he's probably one of those guys who's gotta be considered. Yeah, there's a few killers that never, because why is he not in the discussion? Because I think greatness requires both the skill and the opportunity to meet each other. And when you talk about a fighter, the other thing that really a good fighter needs to become great is a foil. And so many fighters don't have a foil. That's one of the biggest detractions, I think, of early Mike Tyson's career. He didn't have a foil. He had no one driving him. And by the time he did, by the time he had a foil in Holyfield, his career was in a different place. But he's one of the greats of all time, and he never really had a foil, so his greatness was in unparalleled destruction of like nobody as well, of lesser opponents. Right, and so when people debate the level of greatness of Mike Tyson, that's one of the things they say, like he didn't fight a lot of killers in their prime. I think you've obviously got to say in that conversation, I have a really difficult time keeping George St. Pierre out of the conversation, only because he was able to beat you with anything. He could out jab you, he could out wrestle you, and he could submit you. The problem I have with Fedor is his career also took a drastic turn towards the end. And when he was fighting in Pride, he was doing a lot more grappling, and then he just started casting that overhand right at people. And his game kind of changed at that point. You can't take anything away from his greatness, but at that time, the great heavyweights were not really fighting in Pride, and they didn't really exist yet. And by the time he fought a really good one, Fabricio Verdun, he did get submitted there. Does his later performance color your and our perception of his greatness in general about fighters? Not mine, but I'm someone who's intimately involved in the sport, but it colors everyone else's. Same with Anderson Silva. I don't think Anderson Silva doesn't want to fight in like seven years or something, or he's like one. That's a guy who in his prime was one of the best fighters. Is he in the top five for you? I think he's probably in the top five, yeah. Greater striker of all time or no? In MMA? In mixed martial arts. In mixed martial arts? In mixed martial arts, that's a tough question. The greatest MMA striker of all time. Because like the timing, we're talking about foot sweeps, right? Who makes it look easier than Anderson Silva? I think in an incredibly short sample of his prime, it's gotta be Anderson Silva, and I think you have to consider discussing Leota Machida for his unbelievable manipulation of distance, which is something that people don't really talk too much about in terms of fighting, unless you're someone in the sport. That his use of distance and the ability to like, what we call pop out, like make you miss by one inch so that he could follow your fist back in as you retract it and it hit you over the top, that that's a thing of beauty. Anderson Silva, when he became a counter striker, when he got to his prime in the UFC, that was a thing of beauty. That was a thing of beauty. So I think definitely those two guys and Murilo Bustamante's gotta be the third guy. There's just so many good guys now. It's just. So where do you put, in terms of metrics, you mentioned GSP and Anderson Silva, I think they have a large number of defenses of a title. Is that important to you? Like this kind of consistent domination? No, because it's easily manipulated by the people making money off the fights. So there was a great quote one time when the UFC was coming to prominence and Vince McMahon from the WWE, he said, you know, the difference between what we do and what UFC does is that when we have a superstar, I can make sure he stays on top until he's no longer a superstar because we have predetermined results. UFC can't do that because they're actually having fights. Well, it's true and false. You can't do that, but you can give your superstars the most favorable matchups to keep them on top for the longest. So people always talk about title defenses as if the guy they're fighting, the challenger, is always the person most deserving of the shot. And it's just not true. So I don't put that much stock in it. Is it possible to put a guy in consideration as one of the greats if all they had is one or two amazing fights? I'll tell you, like an amazing could be a lot of different definitions. It could be just the war. Like they never really reached the highest of excellences of domination, but they've, like this, we had this discussion about Kyle Bokniak, right? Yep. To me, that's a perfect example. He had this famous fight against Zabit Magomed Sharapov, where on one side you have an Anderson Silva type of fighter and Zabit, like just a very good striker. Like, and then there's like the warrior on the Kyle side. And just the fight, they created something special together. It was fight at night, whatever. But the, you know, that fight was special on that night because the two dance partners. You can have a great performance without being a great fighter. Not saying neither of those guys is a great fighter, but to answer your first question, I think that having one or two great performances does not necessarily mean that you are great. I need a larger sample size. I have no idea what that is. I don't have any idea what that is. And also, where, how much weight does toughness have when you're thinking about the criteria when you define a great fighter? That's a good question. And I don't have the answer to it. I admire the underdog that rises to the occasion through brute force. They didn't have, they didn't bring the skillset to the table that perhaps some of the greats have, but they rose to the occasion. I mean, there's something about that. There's something about that. And so now we're more talking about like the internal attributes as opposed to the external physical attributes. And those are the things I think that you cannot teach. Those things, you come in the door and you either have that or you don't. I think, and we talk about this all the time, and this is one of the things where my mind changes regularly. Like on what makes a fighter, is it born or is it bred? And this week I'm of the opinion that it's in you. And maybe it's in you and you suppress it and people can tease it out of you, but I don't think you can make someone who doesn't have that seed in there. I don't think you can turn them into that great warrior with that level of grit and mental toughness. Now, when that fight, when Kyle fights Zabit, it's a unique situation for both guys. It was kind of a later replacement fight for Kyle. Zabit's star was on the rise. And Kyle put the blueprint out there on how to beat Zabit. Which is? Which is pressure him and try and drag him into the late rounds. You notice that later on when Calvin Kader fought him, they wouldn't give him five rounds. They wanted five rounds. And Zabit's camp, from what I understand, would not agree to the five round fight. Well, he didn't look. Right, so with Kyle, it was a three round fight. Three round fight. And did it went to decision? It went to decision. Well, Zabit won the decision, clearly. Did Kyle have a shot at winning the third round? I don't remember the exact score, but Kyle could have won the third round had he done a couple things differently. But I do believe in the fourth round, I think Kyle wouldn't have won a fourth round. And I think maybe even won the fight if there would have been a fifth round. And he was pressing forward, perhaps in a funny way that you could tell me I'm wrong, but it felt like he wasn't emphasizing head movement at that point. He went full Mike Tyson. There was a point at which, so it's funny that you say that. Which is a contradiction, actually, because. Mike Tyson had great head movement. I actually don't know exactly what I mean because he was in the pocket. I think he was trying to do the movement. He was just in the pocket and pressing forward. And the fuck you attitude of just not pressing down. That was a little bit later when Zabit's back was towards the cage. Towards the end of the round. We get that fight. And I said to Kyle, I was like, look, this kid has been training martial arts since he was three years old. There's not an area where you're gonna out technique him. And so we've gotta now channel some of that grit that we know you have. This is an opportunity to showcase it. And I don't know how long I did it for, because Kyle's much shorter than Zabit. So for a good long while, while we were training for Zabit, I didn't even say anything. And I just had clips of Mike Tyson training on the TV in the gym and the head movement. And I didn't even mention it. And then we started to like get into it and talk about getting inside the length of the longer fighter and things like that. And we kind of, which when some people train MMA, they say, okay, this guy's a really good wrestler. Let's think about avoiding the wrestling or being a better wrestler. And I think that when the difference in skill is so great, those are both the wrong answer. If a guy who's a really good wrestler wants to take you down and you don't have a lot of wrestling experience, he's probably gonna get you down if he's got a good coach, right? So you have to deal with that. To then say, I'm gonna then learn in eight weeks how to wrestle better than a guy who's been wrestling since he was eight years old is also a bad idea. So what we concentrated on for that camp and it worked beautifully was not getting caught in chain wrestling. These are the takedowns you're gonna get caught with. This is how to not get caught with the next step while you're defending takedown one. Cause it's the chain of techniques that are gonna get fucked, right? So we talked, we did a ton of work on get ups and breaking the hands from the various takedowns. Like it was a while ago now. So I don't remember exactly the techniques we worked on, but we concentrated on defend the first takedown and stay out of the chain. Don't get chained into a bunch of wrestling techniques cause you will be out wrestled. And that was really successful. And then in the third round, Zabit was tired. And... He was tired. He's Zabit got tired. He cuts a tremendous amount of weight. Like I can't see him staying at 145 forever when they start giving him five round fights. I don't even know if he's had a five round fight and he may have, but I can't see him staying down there. He's, the guy's like six one. Guys, he's a giant of a guy. So Kyle pressed forward there and he said, he felt that there was no power left in Zabit's hands. And so he felt fine. And I think part of it was he fed off the crowd as he moved forward and, you know, saw that he wasn't taking a lot of damage. Like the punches weren't staying him. He started walking right through him. It goes to your question of what makes a fighter. Was the, him walking forward like that, something that you're born with or is that something you were training? Is that the Mike Tyson on TV? He's born with that. Kyle is born with that. And the crowd, I've been in a lot. Was he in Boston? No, he was in New York. He was in Brooklyn. I've been in a lot of arenas for a lot of different sporting events. That's one of the loudest things I've ever heard when he did that. I was going crazy. And you ask about that being like taught or not. Kyle is so much like that, that I have to try and tease some of that out of him, pull it back. Because he's also so very technical when he wants to be that the emotion and the fun of it gets in the way of his technique. And probably has cost him a couple of wins. And so that's one of the things we work on with him right now. It's like staying within yourself, being a professional, taking your time to download the information in round one and then starting your fight in round two. But the tension between those two things, what makes, what on that day created one of the, in my opinion, one of the greatest fights I've ever seen. Joe Rogan agrees. Yeah, it's one of the greatest fights I've certainly ever seen. So like, it's funny that you as a coach, I can see the frustration of like, like throwing away some of the strategy kind of thing. Like you seeing like being not happy that there could be things that he could have done to win the fight. It's in retrospect. I think that at that time, we were playing with incredible house money. Like Kyle was a gigantic underdog in that fight. Zabit was unstoppable. I think people were probably picking him to finish the fight in round one. I think at that point, no one had ever gone the distance with Zabit. And no one certainly had, you know, put that kind of performance together. And I think Kyle put the blueprint out there. And in retrospect, when I look at the last round, yeah, there were things that could have been done differently, but we're playing with house money at that point. Like, I mean, let it fly. You get to a point where you've got it, you're down three rounds and there's 20 seconds left. You got to move all your chips to the center of the table and, you know, see what happens. Do you remember what Joe Rogan said about it? I remember like he got won over. I think I have trouble remembering because offline we talked about that fight and he's exceptionally impressed by, I mean, Joe's from Boston, so it's like, I mean, there's a story there. Okay, it sucks not, you naturally want to romanticize, like there's a Rocky versus like, there's a Rocky IV, a Draga. I mean, similar, I suppose, kind of chemistry. Kyle's style represents the American. Ideal, right? The spirit. Yeah, I mean, he's from Gloucester. It's like, you could have dragged him off the docks three hours before the fight and said, hey, you want to go fight? And he would have said yes. Oh man, that was a special fight. But that's, as per a discussion of like greatest fighters of all time, I tend to believe that that fight is more special than the championship belt defenses by George St. Pierre. Like, you know, there's something to that. It's like Rocky, Rocky I is more special than like Rocky III, right? So like, it's the underdog or it's whatever, like the dance partner is like going to war and like that moment, I mean, it's bigger. It's bigger than any individual fighter. They create that and that, I know it's not perhaps good for a career. It's not good for like in terms of money, in terms of longevity, in terms of all those kinds of things, but that's a special moment in the history of fighting that you both created. I can remember like right after, like there was so much excitement in the air during the third round. And I remember being in the corner and like, I was so excited at the end of it that I had forgotten what happened in the other two rounds. I didn't even know. And I looked to Sean, one of the other corner men, and I think I said to him, did we win? When you rewatch the fight, clearly we didn't win the fight. I mean, we lost the other rounds, but I got so caught up in that moment and I just remember like, I was so in awe of his performance that like I forgot what was going on. And it's so hard to not be a fan at that moment and to stay within yourself and try and like coach, but then what the fuck you even coaching at that point? It's like, we're rumbling. We got 30 seconds. We're trying to win here. And I remember like the performance itself, I'm not a fan of moral victories, but if ever there was gonna be one, that was one. And when the fight was over and I grabbed Kyle, like they hadn't even been to the center of the cage yet. And I just hugged him and I said, you're my fucking hero. And I remember being very emotional about that, that I was able to be a part of that. It feels wrong to say, but I was, I kind of avoided saying it, but I think if I'm being honest with my feelings, this is a safe space for feelings. Is I think it was the greatest mixed martial arts fight I've ever seen. And I don't think I'm being biased. I was honestly thinking like, am I being biased? I honestly don't think so. I think that was the greatest fight. Like if you wanna rank fights I've ever seen, I think to me that was the greatest fight I've ever seen. It certainly was one of the greatest displays of like just dogged effort from an underdog who was out experienced and probably outsized. But I mean, like you just, Kyle's one of those kids, you're never gonna tell him he's out of a fight. He has something you can't teach. And I've seen tons of people with more physical attributes and they're just mental midgets and they got a million dollar body and a 50 cent heart. And Kyle is not that. And you can't teach it no matter what you do. But that was, I would say like my career in combat sports, which spans, if you wanna go all the way back to like wrestling, like that was one of probably the greatest experiences I've been a part of. It's a bittersweet sport. She's a fickle mistress. Yeah, I mean, the tragic aspect of that is like, I guess Kyle lost, right? So like if you look at the record and all the kind of things, perhaps like you look at the career, maybe like as a financial, from a financial perspective that perhaps is not the greatest thing for Kyle's career or that or in the history of the UFC, perhaps it's not like maybe many people didn't even watch that fight, but it was a special moment that stands in the history. There's not many of these in the history of fighting. But at the end of the day, when you look at someone's career in the UFC, like financially, there's a handful of people that make real money. Everybody else makes nothing. There's a handful of people that make real money. So did that loss cost him in the near term? Sure, but when you look back on your life, you're not gonna look back on that loss as something that derailed my life financially and I never recovered from it. That's not gonna happen. Like the sad thing is, is unless you were a champion and most people are gonna be forgotten right after they're gone. Most people will be forgotten. And if you're not forgotten, certainly your accolades are gonna be misrepresented. Either they're gonna be inflated or diminished one way or the other. So looking back on it, it's just so hard to quantify that. But it's an experience. And when you're in that moment and you're one of the people intimately involved in it, the value of that experience supersedes any financial gain. Where would you put Khabib in the discussion of the greatest of all time? So you recently, we worked together, we watched the fight of him and Justin Gaethje and Khabib retired. Would you put him up there as one of the greatest or did he never truly find his foil, like the great warrior that challenged him? And maybe do you think he's fully retired now? To answer the question about being fully retired, I don't have any idea. I can't for a second pretend to think that I understand the way that people from that part of the world think and respect their family and things like that. To an American who says, oh, I promised my mom I wouldn't do it. I mean, I promised my mom I wouldn't do a lot of things. I went right out the fucking back door and did them. But I think that that means something different to people in different parts of the world. So I have no idea what kind of weight that carries. So I can't answer that. I can say a lot of times when people think about great fighters, they think about the aspects that make up MMA. Like they think of MMA as a pie and they're all these different pieces that make up the pie. And how good is this piece? And how good is this piece? And how good is this piece? When the fact of the matter is is you only need one really, really, really good piece. And the other pieces are complimentary pieces to get you to where you're the strongest. And if you want to tell me that Khabib's not the greatest MMA fighter because he doesn't have really slick striking, you can make that argument. But what I can tell you is Khabib has good enough striking to get him to his grappling where he is clearly the best guy at 155 they've ever seen. So does that make him the greatest fighter in that division or not? To your point about the foil, they wanted Connor to be his foil and he just manhandled them. I mean, they wanted that to happen. Did not happen. Well, there's a kind of argument to be made which we kind of, now you get haters in this argument and you're going to be one of the haters because I know your, how should I put it? Lack of admiration for Connor McGregor. But, what is it? Football is a game of inches? Yeah. There's a sense where that Connor, there's an argument to be made that Connor wasn't exactly dominated, that he ended up being dominant, meaning, let me phrase it differently, is there's a lot of points in the fight that a different trajectory could have happened. So he wasn't so far from having a chance at winning that fight. It's just the end. You can focus. Those are the most important moments at the end. You've lost the most important moments. Right, but the road less taken. It could have been, if he didn't lose those very important moments, he had a chance. I'm saying out of all the people that Khabib fought, it's arguable that Connor was up there of the people that had a chance. Let me say this first. I love. I'm going to get so much heat for this. I do love Khabib. I'm a huge Khabib fan because I'm a grappler first and foremost. Me too, because I'm also Russian. I love Khabib, calm down. Okay. When Connor came on the scene, I loved Connor because I'm an Irish American and I want to support him and things like that. And he was good fun. He got to be, for my personal taste, he got to be too much. Of all the people Khabib has fought, I would never fight Connor again if I were him. And here's why. And I said this about the Diaz fight. Nate Diaz, who was one of my favorite fighters, has fought the exact same fight for 12 years. Connor will switch something up to give himself an edge. And I believe that Connor would figure something out in fight number two, I think, but I also thought that Gagey would give Khabib problems where it wouldn't be a matter of I'm going to out wrestle Khabib or become better at defending his wrestling takedowns. Connor would have figured out a way to not get wrestled. I feel like he's constantly changing. He's constantly evolving. And whether or not people realize it or not, I think Connor's one of the better overall athletes in MMA just from looking at his body and his movement and the way he's shaped. He's got a very tiny waist. He's got really pronounced glutes and shoulders. And I think he's a for real athlete. Whereas a lot of guys in MMA are not for real athletes. They're just good at one of the things that makes up MMA. I understand what you're saying about if this happened, if that happened, but I mean, you could say that about every single combat sports event ever. If Spinks's hook landed on Tyson, maybe that fight didn't end the way that it did, but you know what? It didn't. You're absolutely right. But if we could talk about just Connor McGregor for a second, I can't wait to get your fan mail or hate mail. Speak to the innovation of Connor. I don't hear very many people making this argument, but is it possible to make an argument that Connor McGregor is one of the greatest fighters of all time? It's an interesting argument. And the problem, the only problem with the argument is there's so much emotion on either side. Yeah, I had a conversation, sorry to interrupt, with Yaron Brook, who is a philosopher, objectivist, which is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. And the amount of emotion around that particular human is fascinating to me. It's similar to the amount of emotion around Donald Trump. You can think of different personalities, maybe Elon Musk. Those are the people that aren't willing to have their mind changed. They're too emotionally attached to the argument. Yeah, but it's weird that why do we, why some people inspire so much emotion and others don't? But Connor McGregor, I feel like nobody's able to have a calm fight analysis of the guy. Look, to me, as just a fan of martial arts, like I studied judo, I love watching just hours of Olympic judo and appreciating the art form. Like I forget the humans involved. Teddy Renner, who's a heavyweight, the most probably the most dominant heavyweight in the history of judo, just studying his gripping, just the art of it. And who cares if there's shit talking? Like to me, I put all of that aside and just look at the art. And like what I really appreciate about Connor McGregor is his innovation, like of movement, of maybe it's romanticized, maybe you can correct me. I'm just a Cheeto eating fan of mixed martial arts, but like I seem to detect more innovation than almost any other fighter that I've paid attention to in Connor McGregor. I think first, I'll answer in two parts. I think, well, I'm not gonna answer the first part. It's just a comment, because you didn't ask the question. What was the question? I don't even remember. It's about how Connor McGregor fans are very emotional and Connor McGregor detractors are very emotional. I think fans become very emotional. They become cheerleaders of someone like Connor McGregor or Donald Trump, because they see that person exhibiting the qualities that they themselves lack. And so they become cheerleaders for that, right? And I think that for the most part, people who are detractors of Connor McGregors, they're not really Connor McGregor detractors. They're detractors of Connor supporters. There's a beef that they have with the people in that bucket, right? Like, it's not really a problem. And that applies probably in our current political climate, Donald Trump with the left and the right. It's more about like, they actually don't like on the other, the caricature, the most extreme versions of what they see in the supporters of the other side. Yeah, that's a good point. But I think the more interesting thing is the fighter himself. So let's put the supporters aside. I would say that, you know, what some people know and some people don't know is that Connor's base is in karate and the karate style of Connor McGregor, Steven Thompson, of Lyoto Machida, that type of distance management, a lot of times we think as martial artists, we think that the sport version of the art we've chosen to pursue somehow taints the authenticity and the effectiveness of it. But point karate is what led to that in and out distance management style of Connor, of Lyoto and of Steven Thompson. They all kind of use it a little bit differently, but they use it very effectively, all three of them. And that comes from a world of trying to kind of like step in, land contact on you from my point and then get back out before you can counterstrike me, right? And that's where that comes from. Connor is blessed to have a longer arms than someone his height probably normally has. And his movement is just so fluid. He's so athletic with the hinges of his body, the knees and the hips and the swivel of his body, which is also the hips and the shoulders. His movement, his distance, and the way he sets people up for the straight left hand while you're circling away from it and he can still land it, which is what he did to Chad Mendes. Hit him with a straight left while he was circling away from it. That is something that is very beautiful to watch. And sometimes people see the kicks and they see all the flashy snap kicks and the sidekicks. All that stuff is doing is setting people up for the left hand. It's all it's doing. It's you're corralling people, you're funneling people, or you're leading the dance and you're bringing them to a spot where you know you can land that left hand. And his ability to do that is masterful. People constantly shit on his ability to grapple because a couple of his losses have been to jujitsu guys or grapplers, but they've been to really good guys. Anyone who's gonna sit here and tell me Conor McGregor's not a good grappler, go grapple him. Let me see you grapple him. To that point, I'll also say a lot of people will use Conor McGregor's X guard sweep on Nate Diaz as evidence to his high level grappling in that fight, to which I would also counter, Nate Diaz didn't fight that off because he knew he was so much better at jujitsu off the bottom that he didn't even care if he got swept. So is Conor McGregor innovative? Absolutely. Is he one of the best fighters ever? It's tough to say because he's such a cash cow that he was fed people. I firmly believe no one who put that Conor McGregor Khabib fight together thought Khabib would win. Wow. I remember, so at that time it was not completely clear. There was a myth of the great Khabib. It wasn't completely clear how good is he really. So that's interesting. And it was unclear how good is Conor also. Because I think to me, maybe part of my admiration of Conor McGregor is rooted in the fact that I thought there was no way he beats Jose Aldo and I thought there's definitely no way he beats Eddie Alvarez. And so like when he did, I was like, my brain was like, there's something broken. It was like shut down, like on windows, like froze. We have to rethink this. Like this is a special human. Now people who argue he's not even in the running of like top 20 is, if you look at the number of defenses, for example, of his belt that he had very, very little. But like to me, I'm one of those people is back to our discussion of like, do moments make great fighters? That I think just being able to beat Jose Aldo and I would argue in his prime, some people might disagree in this, in a way where he like figures out the puzzle, gets in his head the entirety of the picture. And then to be, I mean, Eddie Alvarez, would he be considered a really strong wrestler? Like, or not strong wrestler, strong striker and wrestler, the whole combination of it. And also what's the other wrestler he fought? Chad Mendes. Chad Mendes. So let me comment on all those if I may. So I was at the Chad Mendes fight live. And there was a jujitsu tournament, we're out in Vegas. And so me and my best friend came out and we got some tickets. That night was supposed to be the first Aldo fight. Aldo got hurt, like right after I bought the tickets. They pulled Chad Mendes in. He was a little bit out of shape, whatever. You still got to fight the fight. But I don't want to use that fight as evidence to Conor's greatness because they pulled Chad Mendes in. He was like hunting and drinking beers in the woods and was a little out of shape. But if you want to talk about greatness, like that surpasses your in ring accomplishments. I was in the stands that night and the people that came from Ireland to see Conor fight that night, single handedly set the market for hotel room prices and airline tickets to Vegas that weekend. These motherfuckers were all dressed like Conor in the stands. They had wool suits on and big beards and the whole thing. I mean, they probably weren't pocket watches. I never saw more people trying to be someone else. Never saw more people try to be someone else. I mean, there's a level of, is there a level of greatness in that? I mean, I don't know how to parse all that out. You're somebody who doesn't admire that. I love that in the sense, the following sense, I think. And people don't seem to hold this belief at all, but to me, fighting is not just, this isn't like a quiet street fight that nobody watches. This is also a spectacle. This is also a story. There's like, there's a professional wrestling element to this. This is not, like you think it's just about fighting. If it was just about fighting, you wouldn't, I mean, there's a story to it, I guess, is what I'm trying to get to. And greatness has to incorporate that. People that criticize, again, I might be wrong on this, but I honestly think that Conor McGregor, not nearly as much as Khabib, but he's a true martial artist. I think he respects his opponents despite the talk. Maybe I'm misreading it, but it feels like he is a storyteller, like Chael Sonnen type of like, he's constructed this image to play the story, like just the way he acts after the fight, the honor he shows to his opponents. There's a real martial artist in there, and to dismiss the fact that the story of the fight is part of it, because he doesn't just shit talk. This is what people don't seem to understand. He's good at shit talking. Very good, and I'm with you on basically everything you said. I think that there's greatness to that, and I think that he understands how to sell a fight, and I think what he did to Jose Aldo by getting in his head helped him win that fight. He insulted Jose Aldo and his country so much that he knew Aldo was gonna come forward right into that left hook. Was that fight in Brazil, by the way? Do you remember? I don't recall. Because I know he insulted all of Brazil, but I'm not sure if it was in Brazil. But when he tried to do that to Khabib, you could tell that he just was not gonna get in Khabib's head. Khabib was unflappable. But there is definitely something great about how he moves people. The Irish are like, I mean, Conor's walkout music, for people from Ireland of Irish descent, that shit is like very deep. You know, it's a very emotional song. I was, to be honest, a little bit upset with Khabib, that he didn't rise. I admire that entire culture. But there's an aspect to where he could have risen to the occasion of there's the same kind of depth of love of country that Russia has. Is there in Dagestan? Dagestan is a little weird in terms of like, but he could have, especially with Putin's support, wear for a bit the full Russian hat of like this is the great nation. Like rise above the culture of Dagestan, which is a small town boy with the small town values of family and all those kinds of things. There's a moment where you inspire entire nations. Like the step up and be the foil to the great Conor McGregor where also Khabib becomes the foil to, like both of them are the foil to each other and become like, that fight was already a great fight, right? But it could have been something historic. Ali versus Fred, I mean, it could have been really historic. And I would argue, I guess the biggest disappointment I have, and I understand it and I also honor it as a martial artist, but to, I'm disappointed that Khabib doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of doing in Moscow fight number two, and because that could be narrative wise if they do it right, that's one of the, could be one of the greatest fights in history. Yeah, I think in terms of Khabib and inspiring a country, is it possible that by staying true to the values that he had his entire career and getting to the zenith of his art form and still doing it in that humble way, isn't it possible that that inspires? Yeah, 100%, so I should clarify that I think they're just hearing from people, from my fellow comrades, no, is they love that. They love that, but they. There's also a brash, beer chugging, shit talking thing that people really like about Connor, and I do love that. But the beautiful narrative would have been the clash, the real clash of those cultures. So Khabib chooses to live the culture by walking away. There's also like a clash of them sort of walking, not walking away from the fire, but walking into the fire of this brashness. It's the sort of the cool collected calmness of the Dagestan people. It's like you were talking about the Saitya brothers. So they just view it totally differently. And there are stereotypes about the Irish where they're maybe potentially a louder, more boisterous culture. Haven't heard of that, yeah. And I mean, I thought they each played their part perfectly. And all those things that you're describing could have happened. Maybe Khabib steps up and he carries the proverbial flag, so to speak, for a nation of people and they go to battle. But the fight, if it plays out the same way, is still the fight. And it was an okay fight. It wasn't a great fight. It was, you know, the fight was okay. And I think that, again, I don't have any idea what Khabib's obligations to his family are. I don't think either of those guys want for more money. To do another fight is just a legacy thing. It's just about fulfilling some part of a legacy. And I just, I admire the possibility of a great legacy that is bigger than either of the fighters. I think with Khabib, he kind of, he's not as concerned about legacy, I think. Right. There's a... Your promoter's dream, because you want the rematch, and the only thing that makes more money than the rematch is the trilogy. You gotta split the rematch, you hope Conor wins, and then you have the trilogy fight. And now you're all in. Yeah. Yeah, I can't get into Khabib's head, but I know Putin, just the game, the entirety of it, especially at the time, especially if it was Trump as president, if he was as president at the time, and Putin, and in Russia, and just knowing how masterful Conor is at, because Conor would be a different Conor. I think he would be a calmer Conor. There would be a different, because you don't wanna be over the top Conor with the Russian people. Right, no, that's... It's like, ah, this is dangerous ground. See, that was the episode in the hotel in Brooklyn when some of the Russian guys confronted Artem, and then Conor came over. It's not, but the danger of that. I mean, there is the element of just like real danger, and the real, it was almost of war. It's, I don't know, it's... It was like when Chael Sonnen was talking so much smack, maybe it was against Vanderlei Silva. I don't know, and it was one of those fights where they just didn't think he was gonna make it out of Brazil. Yeah. Yeah. Americans don't get it. Yeah. People take some of that shit in different parts of the world very, very seriously. Yeah, but that's what makes it beautiful. That's what makes a great story, and I think fighting is very much about the stories, not just about the particular outcomes of a fight, or the skillset matching, or the chess of the fight. It's also about the story of the greater, like context of societies, of warring. We're like warring cultures, but we're still, we're still good, we're no longer can have great, big, hot wars between nations because of nuclear weapons. This is our wars that we can have, and in some sense, I feel robbed of the great war that could have happened. It doesn't mean there aren't lots of wars going on, but yeah, the big one is not gonna happen. There's too much of a balance of power with nuclear weapons and technology and stuff, but it's not the end of war. No. Do you think there's always gonna be war? I think there'll always be war, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world. Isn't there always underdeveloped, relatively, parts of the world? Yeah, I mean, at some point, though, you'd think, I mean, the way that technology's expanding and we're bringing technology to weird parts of the world that you wouldn't think of as technologically advanced, the way that the Chinese are inhabiting certain areas for mining purposes and things like that, I think underdeveloped parts of the world will get developed quickly. I just wonder what the nature of that war might be. It could be cyber, it could be all those kinds of things. I think in developed nations, it's gonna be cyber. I think that's probably the next phase of war, but I mean, I think you talk about parts of the world like the Middle East, and it's just still gonna be warring tribal factions. We can't even begin to understand what those people are fighting about over there. Yet, everyone sitting in America on their couch has an opinion. You can't even begin to understand it. I sure can't. Yeah, it's back to the principle discussion, when what's violated is much deeper than just kind of anything we can even, in a middle class existence, can even comprehend. A lot of times, American soldiers will go to war because that's what they're told to do, and maybe they disagree with the orders, and maybe they agree with the orders, but I get a sense that people in the Middle East fighting all believe in what they're fighting for. It's not a thing where they're told to go do it. I believe they really believe that what they're doing is the right thing, and they're defending some sort of principle. Are you generally optimistic about the future, speaking of war, of human civilization? Do you think we'll, people talk about the Fermi Paradox and asking why haven't aliens visited us, if you believe they haven't visited us. One of the thoughts is that there's kind of a great filter that intelligent civilization reach a point where it destroys itself naturally, so that's why we haven't seen them. They don't last very long. There does seem to be a kind of, we seem to be advancing faster and faster and faster. We keep developing more and more powerful ways of destroying ourselves in all kinds of ways, not even, just even to say nuclear weapons alone, but there's all kinds of new ways, engineer pandemics, nanotechnology, AGI, all those kinds of things. It seems to be that the argument that we are going to destroy ourselves in some kind of creative way very shortly is not too crazy of an argument to make. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects of human civilization in maybe the 22nd century? Like, is it possible that your generation is the last generation to be alive on Earth? No, but I wouldn't say that five generations from now that could be true. I guess I think of it really selfishly. I'm a big believer that when your time here on Earth is over, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people will be forgotten within 12 calendar months. People with no family will be forgotten sooner, and so I don't give a lot of thought to what will happen to Earth or mankind when I'm gone. I give more thought to maximizing my time here now, and I wanna do it in a way where I don't, I'm not overtly hindering the future of civilization or humankind, but I'm definitely taking a me first approach to how I live on Earth. Do you have a philosophy behind why you have or don't have kids on this topic? Because for many people, when they have kids, there's a sense, it's almost like a genetic sense or something like that, where all of a sudden, you do start caring about what happens five generations from now. I mean, I think I'm just too selfish. I mean, I think that's the easy answer. Like, I know that your whole life has to change. You know, your focus, everything shifts, and just don't wanna do that. And also, I think that there's a level of, I guess if I have to really unpack it, there's probably a level of lack of hope in the future. Like, I don't think it's, I don't think the world and humanity is going in the right direction. What does the right direction look like? I think the right direction looks like people coming back together in a more impactful human way, in person, touching, feeling, talking face to face. So all the things you're describing is what we had, as you mentioned before, when you were like a teenager. So the state of the world. But that's because your mind was formed then. It very well could be. It very well could be. It's very possible that the virtual reality worlds that we'll create will be actually a much higher level of existence. In fact, like now we're getting, we're moving slowly away from tribalism, perhaps you could argue the ideas of nations, and we're going, we're moving into the realm of ideas and it could be a higher form of existence where we're sort of moving past the constraints of our meat vehicles into the space of our minds. It depends what you value. Cause when you sit here and you talk about it, and you're talking about these things in these humongous levels, on these macro levels. And I don't think a lot of people view it that way. I think a lot of people view it as like, what kind of pizza am I getting tonight? Like it's a much different outlook. And sure, the virtual world that's on the horizon, I'm sure it's got benefits and will help people, but is it gonna help the things that you find valuable? Like, was it gonna help commerce? Okay, sure. Is that the thing you find the most valuable? Is it gonna help communication? Well, it'll help disseminating information. Is it gonna help explain the information you're disseminating? Probably not. Is it gonna hinder interpersonal communication? Absolutely. And those are things I find valuable. Interpersonal communication, talking to people. Like it saddens me when I go into a restaurant and there's five year old kids who like, slamming away on an iPad and can't make eye contact with anybody or teenagers who don't say please and thank you when they order from the waitress. Like that to me is wrong. That shit's wrong. And I don't know this for a fact, but I do attribute that to using technology as a crutch when we're raising raising kids. So, you know, I think those are things that I find valuable. I tried to empathize. I mean, I agree with you as a person who grew up in a certain age, but like prior to the internet, I suppose. But, or at least solidified the early philosophies of the way I see the world prior to the internet. During the time of AOL, let's put it this way. Mm hmm. Uh. Brr. Uh, what was your AIMS screen name? I never had one. Okay. I was the last person I knew to get a cell phone. I was so anti all that stuff because I just felt like I didn't want to be a part of it. I did not want to be a part of it. I joined the underground forum about MMA in 2000 or 2001 when I first started training. I think right at the tail end, I got a MySpace, but I didn't have any of that stuff and I didn't want any of it. I don't know why. It just was, I was not into it. I felt like, like what are the good things that are going to come out of it? Oh, I'm going to get my package in two days instead of four days? Does that make my life better? I try to, I try to deeply empathize with a lot of experiences of other people. And like one of the things I love, like the smell of paper books and books in general. And early on, this is like five years ago, I just gave away all my books. And I said, you know, I'm really going to try to fall in love with the books in the same way I did before, but now with a Kindle or not a Kindle, like paper, white, whatever, the ebook reader. And I'm still not there, but I've been kind of trying to fall in love with that experience. And the same way I try to think like, teenagers are really into TikTok now, like making these short videos. I try to consider the possibility that their existence will be a much happier one than I've had because of this kind of interaction. From my sort of skeptical perspective, it's like the attention span is so short, they don't really deeply think or deeply experience things. They construct a social layer that they present to the world and they work on creating this social layer, like the presentation to the world much more than really sitting alone with their thoughts and the sadnesses and their hopes and dreams and fears. And like working on the project that is their own, like actual person that exists in this physical world, as opposed to working on the project of a particular social platform that they show. But like, perhaps that project, like who cares who you are in the physical space? Maybe what you are is what your Instagram shows. That's the more important project to work on. Well, what's reality? Yeah, what's reality? Perception is reality, right? So how other people perceive this constructed thing, that's their reality of you. But is it your reality? Like that, I mean, like we said earlier, it's how you want people to see you is very rarely in line with how you really are or how you see yourself. And I mean, I can remember being like a 13 year old kid and like when you go through a bunch of weird 13 year old kid shit, like sitting in my room, like turning a red light on and listening to like a sad record and like trying to figure out what's going on inside. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don't like it. But I feel like those experiences are lost on kids constantly connected to a phone. And like, you know, I don't know what the remedy for those situations is nowadays. Like, I don't know, do they make a TikTok video? Do they blog about it? Do they, you know, make a video or a... Nobody blogs anymore, bro. Whatever, man. Or a video, a story about, oh, this is what happened to me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Does that actually help them work it out? Or does it just create more noise and more static on how to get to the root of the problem and learn about themselves? I don't know what future social networks are exactly. I do know on a shallow level, it does feel good when somebody clicks like on something. I think that is more of a drug than an actual deep long lasting fulfilling happiness. But perhaps there's a way to make a social network that does lead to long lasting happiness that's somehow detached from the physical meat space. I don't know, but it feels like you want to give that a chance. Do you think when people are liking things on social media, do you think there's just a group of people, an overwhelming majority of people that are gonna like whatever you put out there, they're clicking like, and then there's another section of people that just constantly scroll and like, scroll and like, and scroll and like. Like, do you think when you get a like on content you put out, that that like perhaps came from someone who normally doesn't like your content, but like you've just changed their mind on something, you've turned them around on it. I tend to think that when I get likes on social media, those are just the people that like all my shit no matter what I say. Like they probably don't even read it. Like I could put the most preposterous thing up there and you're still gonna get a handful of the same exact likes. That's interesting. But I tend to, the way I see likes, you're kind of, you said multiple things. I think in one sense you see social media as like a battleground of ideas and like is a kind of indicated, like the best possible like is an indicator of like, of you winning over somebody on an idea and they really appreciate that idea. That's the best possible like. To me, a like is just two strangers smiling at each other. Like a moment of like, like. I got you, bro. Yeah, I got you, bro. Yeah. Yeah, like fist bump. Like, yeah, we're in this fucking thing together. This whole thing doesn't make any sense, but we're in this together. And yeah, it's possible for likes to be that. I don't think the actual clicking of a like, I think social media at its best might be that where it's like, I got you, bro. And it's a large scale as opposed to kind of this weird, like crazy pool of dopamine where everyone's just obsessed with this likes and likes and then the division drives like more of this like weird, anxious engagement. I think that's just the dark version of it in the early days of social media. I think you called it a battleground of ideas, but I think social media is nothing but a battleground of fragile egos. Well, but humans are fragile egos. I mean, maybe, but I think the people, I think particularly on social media, they're the most fragile. Like, would you be doing all the things you're doing? What would you be doing if you weren't, if you weren't podcasting and posting the things you do on social media, what would you be doing? You'd probably be much the same guy, right? But I think that on social media, the fragile ego people, what you see on social media is not what they'd be doing without social media. Does that make any sense? Like you're probably, your mission is probably somewhat congruent, your path. You're just utilizing social media. But I think a lot of people, social media has changed their path and now they're doing something totally foreign to them. And they're only able to do it maybe because of social media. I think you're focusing on a particular moment in time of people in their less great moments, like in their less great version of themselves. I think you're just focusing on the masses struggling to become the best version of themselves. And then you, yeah, sure. For stretches of time, whether it's days, weeks, and months, you could be a shady person on the internet. I think you're focusing on that. And unfortunately, social media platforms emphasize they love it when you're like that, when you're not doing great in your own life because it increases anxiety, increases engagement, makes you more susceptible to an argument, and then really get pulled into like conspiracy theories, all that kind of stuff. But the other side works too. I think there's also the people who are on social media fronting like they're these positive figures and going to the gym, whatever it is, the positivity that they spew out. But in real life, they're the most negative fucks you've ever met in your life. And they're just so full of crap. And it's just people playing to an audience. It's like you said, it's like a politician sometimes. A politician wakes up one day and they decide, who's the group I can pander to the best to get the most likes equals votes? And it's the same thing on social media. People wake up and whether it's conscious or not, what's the group I can pander to the best to get the most likes? Is it the positivity motivated crowd? Is it the woe is me crowd? Like what is it? Who's gonna give me the most likes? That's what I'll do. I don't know how to argue against that. I guess it rings true what you're saying, but I just kind of refuse to believe it. I guess I'm pandering to the optimistic crowd. Like I met with my marketing team and I just feel that love has the best, what do you call it? No, I don't know. There's a lot of people that accuse me of being like exactly that, which is like, why are you always being positive? It's like, well, cause I'd like to be that. Yeah, but I wouldn't consider you someone who panders. No, but I guess what I'm saying is like, it's easy to say that everyone is pandering, but like maybe they're just trying. I do believe that social media platforms could encourage people when they're trying to be the best version of themselves, whatever that is. It could be like Conor McGregor talking shit. It could be just being positive. It could be actually creating cool things in this world, putting out instructional videos for Jiu Jitsu or like inspiring students to competition. I don't know. All those kinds of things, educational content. I think that people are trying. Like I tend to believe that people want to be good. Like they want to be successful in whatever that definition of success is. And they're kind of struggling to do that. And they're just awkward at it at first. And like, it's easy to focus on the awkwardness and the stumbling around as people have that. And they start shitting on each other. It's easy to kind of focus in on that. But I think that's just like people, you know, white belts. There's more white belts in the world than there are black belts. But you gotta give them a chance to kind of grow. I think on social media, if you put your stuff out there, whatever your stuff is, your content, your views or whatever, you let the chips fall where they may. Like that's a different thing than being like, I'm gonna tweak what I normally might say and put it up this way because I want these people to like it. And in terms, I also think I have a different viewpoint than you do on people wanting to be successful. I actually don't think that many people want to be successful. I think people want to have the appearance of wanting to be successful. But to be successful takes a shitload of work. And most people don't want to put that work in. So they craft this persona of a person who's trying really hard, but just can't catch the break or, you know, these motherfuckers with getting back on my grind. You've never been on a grind. You've been on the couch. I so disagree with you. I get it. I get it. That's your foil. You enjoyed that guy on the couch with the cheetah. That's your motivation. But just own it. Don't be like back on the ground, back on the couch. Yeah. Well, you're like David Goggins, who was like talking shit to the one guy with the eating Cheetos. And so doing inspires millions to actually pursue their success. I get it. But I just think that most people really do want to be successful and are trying to work hard and they keep failing. So, I mean. But why is it continue? I'm sorry to interrupt you. But like, let's take a person who's overweight. Do you not think that person wants to be skinny? Of course they want to be skinny. They just don't want it enough to put the pizza or the pie down and go to the gym. They want it, but they want it to be easy. Of course they want to be skinny. Well, everyone wants it to be easy. Right. And of course people want to be successful, but do they want it enough to do the work? I don't think they do. I think the easy thing to do is to create an outward facing persona of the person who really wants it. And you get the same reward from a lot of people as the person who actually is successful. Very few people differentiate from the person who's found success and the person who's showing you how they're trying to get success on social media. People see that as the same. I see you're going after the marketing dollar that represents the people that want to work hard. Yeah. I like it. You started a podcast recently. Hell yeah. It's called, which people probably from this conversation can, I guess we didn't really talk about politics much or the fact that you're a business owner or the fact that you're a red blooded American and love this country, America. We didn't really talk about that, but from the name of the podcast, they can probably infer it. And the name is Please Allow Me. Good name. What have you learned from doing this podcast? What's your hope of doing this podcast? People should definitely listen to it. You have a few episodes out. You're damn good at it, which is very interesting. I'm sure you'll evolve and change. So this is like the early days. I'm curious to see where it goes, but what's your thinking around it as an intellectual putting your thoughts out into the world? I think that one of the things that COVID did when we're all kind of in lockdown was as a business owner, made me take stock of what's the future of brick and mortar businesses. And I've always been reluctant to be an online presence in any way, just because it's not my thing, because I believe that I'm a force of nature and people need to experience me, right? And the few characters that Twitter has are phasing. It's not enough to experience. It's not enough. The force of nature, there's John Clark. I want you to feel physically uncomfortable around me. This has been three hours of me being physically uncomfortable. I'm scared for my life. And so I thought that that would be one of the ways in which I could increase. I came to the conclusion that with the lockdown and potential future lockdowns, in order to pay my mortgage and my bar tab and my Grubhub's out of control, that I would need to find ancillary ways to... Door dash slash Lex. You don't want to use Grubhub, Grubhub sucks. Door dash. They actually do. Door dash. No, I'm just kidding. You can go back to your local fooder. 711. Yeah, and get the food. You can order 711 from Door Dash. Or from Postmates. Code Lex. Okay, I'm sorry, go. But anyway, I thought it was like, oh, I should probably increase a little bit my online presence and what would be a way to do that that would be fun for me and entertaining. And I thought, well, a lot of people, yourself included, that I know have done some podcasts and I find that inspiring and I'm fortunate enough to know a bunch of cool motherfuckers that I can talk to about a wide range of topics. Then they're starting to drop in. There's an aspect to which podcasting does capture the force of nature better. In the digital form, podcasting captures the force of nature of a human being better than other mediums, perhaps. Yeah, definitely, there's that. I just felt like, you know when it's midnight and you're in the bar and you get the sense that the bar's gonna close in 90 minutes and you think, you know, not enough people have seen me yet and maybe we should go to another bar so more people can see me. I feel like podcasting is like that for me. Not enough people have heard my thoughts and I feel like, my mom raised me to be a giver. She didn't want me to be selfish. And I have these thoughts that I think. It'd be a waste if you didn't give it to the world. People seem to really enjoy them. Yeah, no, I enjoy them. While I've probably been on my best behavior today on this episode of the podcast. So if you want the uncensored, unfiltered, the full spectrum of the force of nature, there's John Clark, you go to the podcast. Funny enough, I think you're drinking throughout most of the podcast. Yeah, yeah. Tequila, so they only last like an hour because you seem to like, I'm guessing that you just lose it one hour. Like it's like Cinderella turns into a frog or whatever. One of the things I'm learning is sometimes you have great conversations when you're drunk and sometimes you don't. Like I went into it with the write drunk, edit sober mentality. Yes, Hemingway. Hemingway, yes. But turns out that sometimes you don't have that much to edit when you're super shit faced. And so I've been scaling that back a little bit. What do you mean exactly by that? Like, where does it go wrong when you're drunk? I'm curious about that, because. It gets, especially when you have a personal relationship with the person that you're talking to, rather than trying to put some ideas on display for other people to hear and maybe talk about, you wind up just having like a conversation with your bro about inside jokes and things like that. And it's like, it's not that interesting. No one wants to like watch, you know, go to a bar and watch two people at the, sitting there getting drunk and talking to each other is different than listening to like strong discourse. Yes. One interesting thing as a fan of Joe Rogan, I'm a fan, I've been a fan of Joe Rogan for a long time and he has his friends over a lot, right? And there's a aspect to those three, four, five hour conversations that I really enjoy. There's a magic to those. I think he taught the world that those kinds of long form conversations can work. The, what you forget is Joe Rogan is a comedian. His friends are also celebrities. Like they know what it's like to be on the mic. They know there is a challenge to actually having your friends on a microphone. Totally. Like they've never, this is the first time they've been on a microphone. And that's actually what you've been doing, which is a very interesting experiment. And you find that some are more awkward than others. Like they're trying to find like, what do I do with this kind of thing? Why do you not talk to strangers? Why did you go with people that you're actually know? So the simple answer is the people that I selected are both interesting and I thought would be good at talking. But then I noticed the thing you just mentioned. My buddy Paul did the first one and Paul's a wild man. And if you went out with Paul, he can talk about a bazillion topics to a certain, to a significant level of depth, right? And he's got a good understanding and he's got a unique perspective on a lot of things. And I think he was the first guy invited on my podcast and it was almost like he was on a little bit less than natural about it. And then by the time he loosened up with some drinks, he was, it just, we were all shitfaced. There's a face shift though. Totally, totally. And so he's gonna come back on and he'll be more comfortable with it. And it'll probably be awesome because he's a great person to talk to. I had my friend Dave on who's a restaurateur and a musician, that one will be released pretty soon. But yesterday I had a guy on who you might really enjoy listening to who's a friend of mine, his name's Mark Clem. He's an endurance athlete and he's been compared, he's been called the white Dave Goggins. And he talks about like those comparisons and what he hates about it and the various events and stuff. And he's just a guy who's just always kind of like natural and like, I knew he'd be great to get on the podcast. And so I started with friends who I thought could handle it and who also are just really interesting people. And I did it so that I could also establish a level of comfort because it was a new thing for me. And I knew that they wouldn't really give a shit what I was doing and be like, hey, this is cool. I'm going over to JC's house. We're gonna drink some tequila and talk shit. There's just gonna be a microphone there this time. I mean, it's amazing what you're doing, the freedom of it. I mean, you're not currently doing any advertisements or any of that kind of stuff. You're just exploring your voice. This is one of the mediums that you're just trying it out. My 11 subscribers know what I'm about. Your 11 subscribers, it's in the double digits. For both you and I, do you have advice for me as a podcaster and for yourself as a podcast? Like if you were to think like you're gonna do say, I mean, who knows, but say you do a thousand more episodes. Like imagine a world where your life continues in that direction, that this is like a little parallel. Like for me, this thing is like a little side hobby, but it's also one that's deeply fulfilling. So not just from a business perspective, which is not the way I think about it. I just think from a life human perspective, it's I probably wouldn't have this kind of conversation with you off mic, like this long, this deep, this attentive. There's something really fulfilling about these conversations. So what advice would you have for me? What advice do you have for yourself? Oh, have you not introspected this that deeply? Oh, I have advice. I think the first advice I would give to you is I think you should have me on more often. Yeah. Yeah. That's first and foremost. And second is go on your podcast and have a conversation. Well, I would say you come on my podcast when you're ready. Yeah. When you feel like the product that I'm putting out would benefit from your presence and vice versa, not as a favor to a bro, but at the right time. I do sense, actually, it's an interesting, there's a dance to it, which is like Joe Rogan, I recently did, like Joe Rogan had a conversation with me on this podcast. There's a very specific kind of thing where you're helping each other out. Yeah. But the timing on that has to be right. Right. You know, like if that makes any sense, you're like supporting each other. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make a difference, you would think. Right. Because it's just people talking, it doesn't matter what microphones, but it changes things. It does, and there's an order to the guests that I've had on. And the next guest that I'll have on will be a friend we have in common, and we'll be talking about teaching and how to teach different styles of teaching and what you're teaching and all these other things. Your mind's saying who? Oh, Sean Fisher. And I think there's an order to, it's not scientific, but it's based on my gut. Is it astrologically based? What do you mean it's not scientific? Your gut, so you have a sense, like Joe Rogan, for example, tries to do left, right. He tries to alternate like this gut feeling of like these bins of people, and he tries to alternate worldviews. That's interesting. Like he kind of, so that he doesn't feel like it, like it constantly shakes him. It's more about him, like constantly pulls him in multiple directions about like how he sees the world, and that keeps him balanced. That keeps the conversation kind of exciting. That's interesting. I did it in a way where I knew Paul was gonna be wild and we might get a little out of control and like have some technical hiccups along the way. And then my friend Jake, who's a CEO of a pharmaceutical company, that was very timely because he was able to speak to vaccines. And that was kind of scientific flavored. Yeah. And what I learned listening back on that is like I learned for myself about, I wasn't asking the next level questions to really draw out great answers. And part of it is you're simultaneously hanging out with a bro, but also I was trying to learn something and I didn't learn what I wanted to learn. And that's my fault because I didn't ask the questions. He's an expert in that field. He doesn't know that I'm an absolute dipshit when it comes to that stuff. And so I didn't do a good job. And if I don't know it, that means the thing I was trying to tease out of him, no one who was gonna listen is gonna learn that either. So I learned that. Then I had the one with soap on, which I thought was pretty good. He's a wrestler, he's also a farmer. Right, and a social worker. And kind of humble and thoughtful. Yeah, thoughtful. Thoughtful guy. Like slower, he's not a wild man, that kind of thing. Not a wild man in the sense that I'm wild, but he does preach this philosophy of being more wild. Like being in touch with nature. Nature, that kind of wild. Right, right, right. And then my buddy Dave, he came on because I love music. And I wanted to talk a lot about music. And he's one of the most knowledgeable people about music that I know. And he's got a restaurant coming up. And I thought my buddy Mark Clem, being an endurance athlete, like when you hear some of the things, I didn't even know these things existed that this fucking kid did. He's out of his mind. And I think Sean and I will have probably the most intellectual conversation that I'll have had on my podcast to date. And so there's a little bit of alternating there, but I did it that way so that. There's a gut feeling behind, oh, so that what? Is there, where are you going? Do you know where you're going? I don't have a destination, but I want to, I want to see it to its end, whether that's, it gets somewhere of its own volition or it takes on a new life at some point. And then I know how to drive it where it needs to go. I think the advice I have for both of us is, I think I need to, no, I don't think so. I think for you, I see an inner turmoil. I see a storm that bruising you because I feel like there's a concern for what you're saying. And is it gonna lead to negative feelings towards you or the thing that you're doing? And I feel like we're different people and I have such an easier time saying fuck off to everybody. And that's a liberating thing, but it also can keep me from achieving the thing that I want to achieve, because I'm so flippant with opinions that I don't listen to them and let them direct me when they should. There's a balance. Let me push back on that. Please do. I think you believe that about yourself and nevertheless, your social media presence indicates otherwise. If I were to be very harsh, you're like one of the mentally strongest character wise people I know. And yet on social media, you don't put your face to the world. So one of the reasons you sense the fear in me, which exists, I of course want to let go of it, is because I put my face and my name on things. And so when I say something stupid, it hurts when people say like, look, that guy said something stupid. And so there's a fear of saying something stupid in all of his different forms, like of being my lesser self. It's the same feeling I have in competition of losing, not just losing. Losing doesn't matter. It's embarrassing myself. I like losing, being the lesser version of myself. And when you put yourself out there in a full way, I think you, I would venture to say you're also, because you said you wouldn't give yourself that advice. I feel like you're also afraid of standing behind some of the ideas, because right now you're doing guerrilla warfare. You're free to be, to say things, to speak your mind from the sidelines. But the moment you're standing, and when people can throw shit at you, I feel like you haven't faced that fire yet. You've been avoiding that fire. I'm not sure, maybe I'm projecting. No, to a degree you're right. I think a big thing for me was putting ads on for our Jiu Jitsu online curriculum. That was a big thing for me, because for several reasons, like in the climate of everyone under the sun having a Jiu Jitsu tutorial online and social media, not social media necessarily, but forums specifically that critique and shit the bed. One thing I have not done that I've thought about doing, and probably you're right in your analysis of it, is I've not gone the way that I do see you on things like Reddit and say, hey, Reddit, I'm doing this. Like I could easily go to Reddit and say, hey, Reddit, I got this website up. Here's a sample video, whatever the fuck people do on there. But yeah, you're right, I haven't done that. And part of it might be because I know also, if I get suckered in for one second into the negativity, I'm gonna become an online warrior, and I don't wanna be that person. So yeah, you're probably right. So you're self aware about that. I mean, one of the things I've early on decided is like, I'm just gonna be, I've always really enjoyed being positive. So I'm going to make sure I stay that way. And when there's negativity, it's like, I'm not just ignoring it. I'm literally just returning it with positivity. I probably am the same way as you, most people are with egos. You wanna become the warrior against the negativity. And like many wars, there's no winning. There's no winning that war. Especially online. Especially on the internet. And so in that sense, that's been a journey to try to face the fire of the negativity. And it's not actually that bad. It sounds like very dramatic. There's not many people that are negative, but it's like when you put advertisements, so you put your face on an instructional or something like that. It just, there's an aspect to it which you're being a salesman, you're being a gimmicky thing. It just feels wrong. And people will point out, look, that guy is a fraud, like it's fake. Look, he's trying, but those people are going to be out there. And if you're like trying to do your best, trying to be authentic and not trying to like be a snake oil salesman and being like the shady kind of salesman, I think they keep you honest. They keep you honestly being the most authentic self. And podcasting is like the best medium because you're being real. Those one hour plus that you put out there, that's like real John. That's not a, like people fall in love with that. And that's the beautiful aspect of podcasting is there's no, long form doesn't give any possibility for you not to be authentic. And that's why it's a magical medium. The tough thing is you're not, popularity takes time, not popularity. And so like you shouldn't be doing it for that reason. And I don't, it's not the thing that really drives me. Yeah. Is there three books, technical fiction philosophical that had an impact on you? Like, is there books that you kind of return to that you enjoy and that you find profound in some way? I would say like probably the thing I read is in one of Emerson's essays that I read at a point in my life where I needed that type of thing. And I read self reliance and, he's got a ton of good essays, but I thought self reliance was probably the most impactful to me. I've read later in life, like a handful of existential authors and they're all great, but at the time a lot of it has to do with timing. And when I read self reliance and it was about the individual that was really good and made it was impactful. There's also a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, I think. And it's kind of along the same lines. It's about this seagull who wants to break conformity and learn to fly and do all these other great things. And so it's a very short read. So if people are interested in that, that's good. The book, which I was lucky enough to read before the movie ever even came out, which is just a pleasure of mine was American Psycho. Just from a writing standpoint, I found that the writing was awesome. Brett Easton Ellis is the author of that and several other books who have like intertwining characters. He's a New England prep school guy. And so a lot of like the stories and a lot of the visuals rang true for me and anyone who can write four pages of prose on like a Huey Lewis album, I mean, kudos to you. And I also would say no one will do this, but I would at some point read as much of one of the big three religious texts as possible. It really gives you perspective. There are so many overlapping stories of religious texts. And then the way that they're written gives you a unique perspective on different people throughout the world. And if you're a Roman Catholic, maybe don't read the Bible, read one of the other texts. And that would be an interesting take, but. I'm embarrassed to say that, first of all, I've never read the Bible, which is embarrassing to say. It's like I read a bunch of stuff about the Bible and not the Bible itself. And the same, not equating them, but I haven't read Marx directly. I haven't read Mein Kampf by Hitler directly. And it feels like sometimes, cause you think like it's better to read stuff about the books, but ultimately you want, because like the analysis will be better in texts that followed it, but there's value to actually reading like the actual words. Yeah, there's this power in the words that there's a reason why like the Bible is one of the most impactful books ever. You know, it's in those words and it's a value to return to those words. The communist manifesto is truly frightening if you read it in like modern context. It's worth reading. Yeah. It's worth reading. And so is Mein Kampf, not obviously, well, it's not obvious, but it is not very well written, but all the ideas that led to the evil that is Hitler are all in there, which is fascinating to think about because probably some of the world leaders at the time should have probably read the books. He outlined everything he's gonna do. Offline, you mentioned an Emerson quote that I really like. So let's try to end on this powerful quote. It's easy in the world to live after the world's opinion. It's easy in solitude to live after your own. The great man is who in the midst of the world keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. What does this quote mean to you? It kind of reinforces the idea that you're here to live your life and that even when people are trying to influence you or comment on the decisions that you make for your life, you should have the strength to stick by living your life the way you want to live it, that there's one immutable truth for you and it doesn't apply to everyone. And so people who frown upon or judge the way that you live because it's not, air quotes, conventional, their opinion should not be something that impacts the choices that you make. You're in a relationship now. Yes. Is that deeply meaningful? Or are you ultimately still alone? Are you still just a man in the cold of the life that is suffering? No, I'm a man who's warm, nestled in a bosom. I don't think there's a better way to end, John. You're a friend, you're my coach. I'm sure we'll talk many more times in the future. Thanks for wasting all your time with me today. Thanks brother. Thanks Lex, I had an awesome time. Hope to be back soon. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

John Clarke: The Art of Fighting and the Pursuit of Excellence | Lex Fridman Podcast #143

The following is a conversation with Michael Littman, a computer science professor at Brown University doing research on and teaching machine learning, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence. He enjoys being silly and lighthearted in conversation, so this was definitely a fun one. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to SimplySafe, a home security company I use to monitor and protect my apartment, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, MasterClass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history, and BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I may experiment with doing some solo episodes in the coming month or two. The three ideas I have floating in my head currently is to use one, a particular moment in history, two, a particular movie, or three, a book to drive a conversation about a set of related concepts. For example, I could use 2001, A Space Odyssey, or Ex Machina to talk about AGI for one, two, three hours. Or I could do an episode on the, yes, rise and fall of Hitler and Stalin, each in a separate episode, using relevant books and historical moments for reference. I find the format of a solo episode very uncomfortable and challenging, but that just tells me that it's something I definitely need to do and learn from the experience. Of course, I hope you come along for the ride. Also, since we have all this momentum built up on announcements, I'm giving a few lectures on machine learning at MIT this January. In general, if you have ideas for the episodes, for the lectures, or for just short videos on YouTube, let me know in the comments that I still definitely read, despite my better judgment, and the wise sage advice of the great Joe Rogan. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Littman. I saw a video of you talking to Charles Isbell about Westworld, the TV series. You guys were doing the kind of thing where you're watching new things together, but let's rewind back. Is there a sci fi movie or book or shows that was profound, that had an impact on you philosophically, or just specifically something you enjoyed nerding out about? Yeah, interesting. I think a lot of us have been inspired by robots in movies. One that I really like is, there's a movie called Robot and Frank, which I think is really interesting because it's very near term future, where robots are being deployed as helpers in people's homes. And we don't know how to make robots like that at this point, but it seemed very plausible. It seemed very realistic or imaginable. And I thought that was really cool because they're awkward, they do funny things that raise some interesting issues, but it seemed like something that would ultimately be helpful and good if we could do it right. Yeah, he was an older cranky gentleman, right? He was an older cranky jewel thief, yeah. It's kind of funny little thing, which is, you know, he's a jewel thief and so he pulls the robot into his life, which is like, which is something you could imagine taking a home robotics thing and pulling into whatever quirky thing that's involved in your existence. It's meaningful to you. Exactly so. Yeah. And I think from that perspective, I mean, not all of us are jewel thieves. And so when we bring our robots into our lives, it explains a lot about this apartment, actually. But no, the idea that people should have the ability to make this technology their own, that it becomes part of their lives. And I think it's hard for us as technologists to make that kind of technology. It's easier to mold people into what we need them to be. And just that opposite vision, I think, is really inspiring. And then there's a anthropomorphization where we project certain things on them, because I think the robot was kind of dumb. But I have a bunch of Roombas I play with and you immediately project stuff onto them. Much greater level of intelligence. We'll probably do that with each other too. Much greater degree of compassion. That's right. One of the things we're learning from AI is where we are smart and where we are not smart. Yeah. You also enjoy, as people can see, and I enjoyed myself watching you sing and even dance a little bit, a little bit, a little bit of dancing. A little bit of dancing. That's not quite my thing. As a method of education or just in life, you know, in general. So easy question. What's the definitive, objectively speaking, top three songs of all time? Maybe something that, you know, to walk that back a little bit, maybe something that others might be surprised by the three songs that you kind of enjoy. That is a great question that I cannot answer. But instead, let me tell you a story. So pick a question you do want to answer. That's right. I've been watching the presidential debates and vice presidential debates. And it turns out, yeah, it's really, you can just answer any question you want. So it's a related question. Well said. I really like pop music. I've enjoyed pop music ever since I was very young. So 60s music, 70s music, 80s music. This is all awesome. And then I had kids and I think I stopped listening to music and I was starting to realize that my musical taste had sort of frozen out. And so I decided in 2011, I think, to start listening to the top 10 billboard songs each week. So I'd be on the on the treadmill and I would listen to that week's top 10 songs so I could find out what was popular now. And what I discovered is that I have no musical taste whatsoever. I like what I'm familiar with. And so the first time I'd hear a song is the first week that was on the charts, I'd be like, and then the second week, I was into it a little bit. And the third week, I was loving it. And by the fourth week is like, just part of me. And so I'm afraid that I can't tell you the most my favorite song of all time, because it's whatever I heard most recently. Yeah, that's interesting. People have told me that there's an art to listening to music as well. And you can start to, if you listen to a song, just carefully, like explicitly, just force yourself to really listen. You start to, I did this when I was part of jazz band and fusion band in college. You start to hear the layers of the instruments. You start to hear the individual instruments and you start to, you can listen to classical music or to orchestra this way. You can listen to jazz this way. I mean, it's funny to imagine you now to walking that forward to listening to pop hits now as like a scholar, listening to like Cardi B or something like that, or Justin Timberlake. Is he? No, not Timberlake, Bieber. They've both been in the top 10 since I've been listening. They're still up there. Oh my God, I'm so cool. If you haven't heard Justin Timberlake's top 10 in the last few years, there was one song that he did where the music video was set at essentially NeurIPS. Oh, wow. Oh, the one with the robotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like at an academic conference and he's doing a demo. He was presenting, right? It was sort of a cross between the Apple, like Steve Jobs kind of talk and NeurIPS. Yeah. So, you know, it's always fun when AI shows up in pop culture. I wonder if he consulted somebody for that. That's really interesting. So maybe on that topic, I've seen your celebrity multiple dimensions, but one of them is you've done cameos in different places. I've seen you in a TurboTax commercial as like, I guess, the brilliant Einstein character. And the point is that TurboTax doesn't need somebody like you. It doesn't need a brilliant person. Very few things need someone like me. But yes, they were specifically emphasizing the idea that you don't need to be like a computer expert to be able to use their software. How did you end up in that world? I think it's an interesting story. So I was teaching my class. It was an intro computer science class for non concentrators, non majors. And sometimes when people would visit campus, they would check in to say, hey, we want to see what a class is like. Can we sit on your class? So a person came to my class who was the daughter of the brother of the husband of the best friend of my wife. Anyway, basically a family friend came to campus to check out Brown and asked to come to my class and came with her dad. Her dad is, who I've known from various kinds of family events and so forth, but he also does advertising. And he said that he was recruiting scientists for this ad, this TurboTax set of ads. And he said, we wrote the ad with the idea that we get like the most brilliant researchers, but they all said no. So can you help us find like B level scientists? And I'm like, sure, that's who I hang out with. So that should be fine. So I put together a list and I did what some people call the Dick Cheney. So I included myself on the list of possible candidates, with a little blurb about each one and why I thought that would make sense for them to do it. And they reached out to a handful of them, but then they ultimately, they YouTube stalked me a little bit and they thought, oh, I think he could do this. And they said, okay, we're going to offer you the commercial. I'm like, what? So it was such an interesting experience because they have another world, the people who do like nationwide kind of ad campaigns and television shows and movies and so forth. It's quite a remarkable system that they have going because they have a set. Yeah. So I went to, it was just somebody's house that they rented in New Jersey. But in the commercial, it's just me and this other woman. In reality, there were 50 people in that room and another, I don't know, half a dozen kind of spread out around the house in various ways. There were people whose job it was to control the sun. They were in the backyard on ladders, putting filters up to try to make sure that the sun didn't glare off the window in a way that would wreck the shot. So there was like six people out there doing that. There was three people out there giving snacks, the craft table. There was another three people giving healthy snacks because that was a separate craft table. There was one person whose job it was to keep me from getting lost. And I think the reason for all this is because so many people are in one place at one time. They have to be time efficient. They have to get it done. The morning they were going to do my commercial. In the afternoon, they were going to do a commercial of a mathematics professor from Princeton. They had to get it done. No wasted time or energy. And so there's just a fleet of people all working as an organism. And it was fascinating. I was just the whole time just looking around like, this is so neat. Like one person whose job it was to take the camera off of the cameraman so that someone else whose job it was to remove the film canister. Because every couple's takes, they had to replace the film because film gets used up. It was just, I don't know. I was geeking out the whole time. It was so fun. How many takes did it take? It looked the opposite. There was more than two people there. It was very relaxed. Right. Yeah. The person who I was in the scene with is a professional. She's an improv comedian from New York City. And when I got there, they had given me a script as such as it was. And then I got there and they said, we're going to do this as improv. I'm like, I don't know how to improv. I don't know what you're telling me to do here. Don't worry. She knows. I'm like, okay. I'll go see how this goes. I guess I got pulled into the story because like, where the heck did you come from? I guess in the scene. Like, how did you show up in this random person's house? Yeah. Well, I mean, the reality of it is I stood outside in the blazing sun. There was someone whose job it was to keep an umbrella over me because I started to sweat. And so I would wreck the shot because my face was all shiny with sweat. So there was one person who would dab me off, had an umbrella. But yeah, like the reality of it, like, why is this strange stalkery person hanging around outside somebody's house? We're not sure when you have to look in, what the ways for the book, but are you, so you make, you make, like you said, YouTube, you make videos yourself, you make awesome parody, sort of parody songs that kind of focus on a particular aspect of computer science. How much those seem really interesting to you? How much those seem really natural? How much production value goes into that? Do you also have a team of 50 people? The videos, almost all the videos, except for the ones that people would have actually seen, are just me. I write the lyrics, I sing the song. I generally find a, like a backing track online because I'm like you, can't really play an instrument. And then I do, in some cases I'll do visuals using just like PowerPoint. Lots and lots of PowerPoint to make it sort of like an animation. The most produced one is the one that people might have seen, which is the overfitting video that I did with Charles Isbell. And that was produced by the Georgia Tech and Udacity people because we were doing a class together. It was kind of, I usually do parody songs kind of to cap off a class at the end of a class. So that one you're wearing, so it was just a thriller. You're wearing the Michael Jackson, the red leather jacket. The interesting thing with podcasting that you're also into is that I really enjoy is that there's not a team of people. It's kind of more, because you know, there's something that happens when there's more people involved than just one person that just the way you start acting, I don't know. There's a censorship. You're not given, especially for like slow thinkers like me, you're not. And I think most of us are, if we're trying to actually think we're a little bit slow and careful, it kind of large teams get in the way of that. And I don't know what to do with that. Like that's the, to me, like if, yeah, it's very popular to criticize quote unquote mainstream media. But there is legitimacy to criticizing them the same. I love listening to NPR, for example, but every, it's clear that there's a team behind it. There's a commercial, there's constant commercial breaks. There's this kind of like rush of like, okay, I have to interrupt you now because we have to go to commercial. Just this whole, it creates, it destroys the possibility of nuanced conversation. Yeah, exactly. Evian, which Charles Isbell, who I talked to yesterday told me that Evian is naive backwards, which the fact that his mind thinks this way is quite brilliant. Anyway, there's a freedom to this podcast. He's Dr. Awkward, which by the way, is a palindrome. That's a palindrome that I happen to know from other parts of my life. And I just, well, you know, use it against Charles. Dr. Awkward. So what was the most challenging parody song to make? Was it the Thriller one? No, that one was really fun. I wrote the lyrics really quickly and then I gave it over to the production team. They recruited a acapella group to sing. That went really smoothly. It's great having a team because then you can just focus on the part that you really love, which in my case is writing the lyrics. For me, the most challenging one, not challenging in a bad way, but challenging in a really fun way, was I did one of the parody songs I did is about the halting problem in computer science. The fact that you can't create a program that can tell for any other arbitrary program whether it actually going to get stuck in infinite loop or whether it's going to eventually stop. And so I did it to an 80's song because I hadn't started my new thing of learning current songs. And it was Billy Joel's The Piano Man. Nice. Which is a great song. Sing me a song. You're the piano man. Yeah. So the lyrics are great because first of all, it rhymes. Not all songs rhyme. I've done Rolling Stones songs which turn out to have no rhyme scheme whatsoever. They're just sort of yelling and having a good time, which makes it not fun from a parody perspective because like you can say anything. But the lines rhymed and there was a lot of internal rhymes as well. And so figuring out how to sing with internal rhymes, a proof of the halting problem was really challenging. And I really enjoyed that process. What about, last question on this topic, what about the dancing in the Thriller video? How many takes that take? So I wasn't planning to dance. They had me in the studio and they gave me the jacket and it's like, well, you can't, if you have the jacket and the glove, like there's not much you can do. Yeah. So I think I just danced around and then they said, why don't you dance a little bit? There was a scene with me and Charles dancing together. They did not use it in the video, but we recorded it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was pretty funny. And Charles, who has this beautiful, wonderful voice doesn't really sing. He's not really a singer. And so that was why I designed the song with him doing a spoken section and me doing the singing. It's very like Barry White. Yeah. Smooth baritone. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. That was awesome. So one of the other things Charles said is that, you know, everyone knows you as like a super nice guy, super passionate about teaching and so on. What he said, don't know if it's true, that despite the fact that you're, you are. Okay. I will admit this finally for the first time. That was, that was me. It's the Johnny Cash song. Kill the Manorino just to watch him die. That you actually do have some strong opinions on some topics. So if this in fact is true, what strong opinions would you say you have? Is there ideas you think maybe in artificial intelligence and machine learning, maybe in life that you believe is true that others might, you know, some number of people might disagree with you on? So I try very hard to see things from multiple perspectives. There's this great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where, do you know? Yeah. Okay. So Calvin's dad is always kind of a bit of a foil and he talked Calvin into, Calvin had done something wrong. The dad talks him into like seeing it from another perspective and Calvin, like this breaks Calvin because he's like, oh my gosh, now I can see the opposite sides of things. And so the, it's, it becomes like a Cubist cartoon where there is no front and back. Everything's just exposed and it really freaks him out. And finally he settles back down. It's like, oh good. No, I can make that go away. But like, I'm that, I'm that I live in that world where I'm trying to see everything from every perspective all the time. So there are some things that I've formed opinions about that I would be harder, I think, to disavow me of. One is the super intelligence argument and the existential threat of AI is one where I feel pretty confident in my feeling about that one. Like I'm willing to hear other arguments, but like, I am not particularly moved by the idea that if we're not careful, we will accidentally create a super intelligence that will destroy human life. Let's talk about that. Let's get you in trouble and record your video. It's like Bill Gates, I think he said like some quote about the internet that that's just going to be a small thing. It's not going to really go anywhere. And then I think Steve Ballmer said, I don't know why I'm sticking on Microsoft. That's something that like smartphones are useless. There's no reason why Microsoft should get into smartphones, that kind of. So let's get, let's talk about AGI. As AGI is destroying the world, we'll look back at this video and see. No, I think it's really interesting to actually talk about because nobody really knows the future. So you have to use your best intuition. It's very difficult to predict it, but you have spoken about AGI and the existential risks around it and sort of basing your intuition that we're quite far away from that being a serious concern relative to the other concerns we have. Can you maybe unpack that a little bit? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So as I understand it, that for example, I read Bostrom's book and a bunch of other reading material about this sort of general way of thinking about the world. And I think the story goes something like this, that we will at some point create computers that are smart enough that they can help design the next version of themselves, which itself will be smarter than the previous version of themselves and eventually bootstrapped up to being smarter than us. At which point we are essentially at the mercy of this sort of more powerful intellect, which in principle we don't have any control over what its goals are. And so if its goals are at all out of sync with our goals, for example, the continued existence of humanity, we won't be able to stop it. It'll be way more powerful than us and we will be toast. So there's some, I don't know, very smart people who have signed on to that story. And it's a compelling story. Now I can really get myself in trouble. I once wrote an op ed about this, specifically responding to some quotes from Elon Musk, who has been on this very podcast more than once. AI summoning the demon. But then he came to Providence, Rhode Island, which is where I live, and said to the governors of all the states, you know, you're worried about entirely the wrong thing. You need to be worried about AI. You need to be very, very worried about AI. And journalists kind of reacted to that and they wanted to get people's take. And I was like, OK, my my my belief is that one of the things that makes Elon Musk so successful and so remarkable as an individual is that he believes in the power of ideas. He believes that you can have you can if you know, if you have a really good idea for getting into space, you can get into space. If you have a really good idea for a company or for how to change the way that people drive, you just have to do it and it can happen. It's really natural to apply that same idea to AI. You see these systems that are doing some pretty remarkable computational tricks, demonstrations, and then to take that idea and just push it all the way to the limit and think, OK, where does this go? Where is this going to take us next? And if you're a deep believer in the power of ideas, then it's really natural to believe that those ideas could be taken to the extreme and kill us. So I think, you know, his strength is also his undoing, because that doesn't mean it's true. Like, it doesn't mean that that has to happen, but it's natural for him to think that. So another way to phrase the way he thinks, and I find it very difficult to argue with that line of thinking. So Sam Harris is another person from neuroscience perspective that thinks like that is saying, well, is there something fundamental in the physics of the universe that prevents this from eventually happening? And Nick Bostrom thinks in the same way, that kind of zooming out, yeah, OK, we humans now are existing in this like time scale of minutes and days. And so our intuition is in this time scale of minutes, hours and days. But if you look at the span of human history, is there any reason you can't see this in 100 years? And like, is there something fundamental about the laws of physics that prevent this? And if it doesn't, then it eventually will happen or will we will destroy ourselves in some other way. And it's very difficult, I find, to actually argue against that. Yeah, me too. And not sound like. Not sound like you're just like rolling your eyes like I have like science fiction, we don't have to think about it, but even even worse than that, which is like, I don't have kids, but like I got to pick up my kids now like this. OK, I see there's more pressing short. Yeah, there's more pressing short term things that like stop over the next national crisis. We have much, much shorter things like now, especially this year, there's covid. So like any kind of discussion like that is like there's this, you know, this pressing things today is. And then so the Sam Harris argument, well, like any day the exponential singularity can can occur is very difficult to argue against. I mean, I don't know. But part of his story is also he's not going to put a date on it. It could be in a thousand years, it could be in a hundred years, it could be in two years. It's just that as long as we keep making this kind of progress, it's ultimately has to become a concern. I kind of am on board with that. But the thing that the piece that I feel like is missing from that that way of extrapolating from the moment that we're in, is that I believe that in the process of actually developing technology that can really get around in the world and really process and do things in the world in a sophisticated way, we're going to learn a lot about what that means, which that we don't know now because we don't know how to do this right now. If you believe that you can just turn on a deep learning network and eventually give it enough compute and eventually get there. Well, sure, that seems really scary because we won't we won't be in the loop at all. We won't we won't be helping to design or target these kinds of systems. But I don't I don't see that. That feels like it is against the laws of physics, because these systems need help. Right. They need they need to surpass the the the difficulty, the wall of complexity that happens in arranging something in the form that that will happen. Yeah, like I believe in evolution, like I believe that that that there's an argument. Right. So there's another argument, just to look at it from a different perspective, that people say, why don't believe in evolution? How could evolution? It's it's sort of like a random set of parts assemble themselves into a 747. And that could just never happen. So it's like, OK, that's maybe hard to argue against. But clearly, 747 do get assembled. They get assembled by us. Basically, the idea being that there's a process by which we will get to the point of making technology that has that kind of awareness. And in that process, we're going to learn a lot about that process and we'll have more ability to control it or to shape it or to build it in our own image. It's not something that is going to spring into existence like that 747. And we're just going to have to contend with it completely unprepared. That's very possible that in the context of the long arc of human history, it will, in fact, spring into existence. But that springing might take like if you look at nuclear weapons, like even 20 years is a springing in in the context of human history. And it's very possible, just like with nuclear weapons, that we could have I don't know what percentage you want to put at it, but the possibility could have knocked ourselves out. Yeah. The possibility of human beings destroying themselves in the 20th century with nuclear weapons. I don't know. You can if you really think through it, you could really put it close to, like, I don't know, 30, 40 percent, given like the certain moments of crisis that happen. So, like, I think one, like, fear in the shadows that's not being acknowledged is it's not so much the A.I. will run away is is that as it's running away, we won't have enough time to think through how to stop it. Right. Fast takeoff or FOOM. Yeah. I mean, my much bigger concern, I wonder what you think about it, which is we won't know it's happening. So I kind of think that there's an A.G.I. situation already happening with social media that our minds, our collective intelligence of human civilization is already being controlled by an algorithm. And like we're we're already super like the level of a collective intelligence, thanks to Wikipedia, people should donate to Wikipedia to feed the A.G.I.. Man, if we had a super intelligence that that was in line with Wikipedia's values, that it's a lot better than a lot of other things I could imagine. I trust Wikipedia more than I trust Facebook or YouTube as far as trying to do the right thing from a rational perspective. Yeah. Now, that's not where you were going. I understand that. But it does strike me that there's sort of smarter and less smart ways of exposing ourselves to each other on the Internet. Yeah. The interesting thing is that Wikipedia and social media have very different forces. You're right. I mean, Wikipedia, if A.G.I. was Wikipedia, it'd be just like this cranky, overly competent editor of articles. You know, there's something to that. But the social media aspect is not. So the vision of A.G.I. is as a separate system that's super intelligent. That's super intelligent. That's one key little thing. I mean, there's the paperclip argument that's super dumb, but super powerful systems. But with social media, you have a relatively like algorithms we may talk about today, very simple algorithms that when something Charles talks a lot about, which is interactive A.I., when they start like having at scale, like tiny little interactions with human beings, they can start controlling these human beings. So a single algorithm can control the minds of human beings slowly to what we might not realize. It could start wars. It could start. It could change the way we think about things. It feels like in the long arc of history, if I were to sort of zoom out from all the outrage and all the tension on social media, that it's progressing us towards better and better things. It feels like chaos and toxic and all that kind of stuff. It's chaos and toxic. Yeah. But it feels like actually the chaos and toxic is similar to the kind of debates we had from the founding of this country. You know, there was a civil war that happened over that period. And ultimately it was all about this tension of like something doesn't feel right about our implementation of the core values we hold as human beings. And they're constantly struggling with this. And that results in people calling each other, just being shady to each other on Twitter. But ultimately the algorithm is managing all that. And it feels like there's a possible future in which that algorithm controls us into the direction of self destruction and whatever that looks like. Yeah. So, all right. I do believe in the power of social media to screw us up royally. I do believe in the power of social media to benefit us too. I do think that we're in a, yeah, it's sort of almost got dropped on top of us. And now we're trying to, as a culture, figure out how to cope with it. There's a sense in which, I don't know, there's some arguments that say that, for example, I guess college age students now, late college age students now, people who were in middle school when social media started to really take off, may be really damaged. Like this may have really hurt their development in a way that we don't have all the implications of quite yet. That's the generation who, and I hate to make it somebody else's responsibility, but like they're the ones who can fix it. They're the ones who can figure out how do we keep the good of this kind of technology without letting it eat us alive. And if they're successful, we move on to the next phase, the next level of the game. If they're not successful, then yeah, then we're going to wreck each other. We're going to destroy society. So you're going to, in your old age, sit on a porch and watch the world burn because of the TikTok generation that... I believe, well, so this is my kid's age, right? And that's certainly my daughter's age. And she's very tapped in to social stuff, but she's also, she's trying to find that balance, right? Of participating in it and in getting the positives of it, but without letting it eat her alive. And I think sometimes she ventures, I hope she doesn't watch this. Sometimes I think she ventures a little too far and is consumed by it. And other times she gets a little distance. And if there's enough people like her out there, they're going to navigate this choppy waters. That's an interesting skill actually to develop. I talked to my dad about it. I've now, somehow this podcast in particular, but other reasons has received a little bit of attention. And with that, apparently in this world, even though I don't shut up about love and I'm just all about kindness, I have now a little mini army of trolls. It's kind of hilarious actually, but it also doesn't feel good, but it's a skill to learn to not look at that, like to moderate actually how much you look at that. The discussion I have with my dad, it's similar to, it doesn't have to be about trolls. It could be about checking email, which is like, if you're anticipating, you know, there's a, my dad runs a large Institute at Drexel University and there could be stressful like emails you're waiting, like there's drama of some kinds. And so like, there's a temptation to check the email. If you send an email and you kind of, and that pulls you in into, it doesn't feel good. And it's a skill that he actually complains that he hasn't learned. I mean, he grew up without it. So he hasn't learned the skill of how to shut off the internet and walk away. And I think young people, while they're also being quote unquote damaged by like, you know, being bullied online, all of those stories, which are very like horrific, you basically can't escape your bullies these days when you're growing up. But at the same time, they're also learning that skill of how to be able to shut off the, like disconnect with it, be able to laugh at it, not take it too seriously. It's fascinating. Like we're all trying to figure this out. Just like you said, it's been dropped on us and we're trying to figure it out. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. And I guess I've become a believer in the human design, which I feel like I don't completely understand. Like how do you make something as robust as us? Like we're so flawed in so many ways. And yet, and yet, you know, we dominate the planet and we do seem to manage to get ourselves out of scrapes eventually, not necessarily the most elegant possible way, but somehow we get, we get to the next step. And I don't know how I'd make a machine do that. Generally speaking, like if I train one of my reinforcement learning agents to play a video game and it works really hard on that first stage over and over and over again, and it makes it through, it succeeds on that first level. And then the new level comes and it's just like, okay, I'm back to the drawing board. And somehow humanity, we keep leveling up and then somehow managing to put together the skills necessary to achieve success, some semblance of success in that next level too. And, you know, I hope we can keep doing that. You mentioned reinforcement learning. So you've had a couple of years in the field. No, quite, you know, quite a few, quite a long career in artificial intelligence broadly, but reinforcement learning specifically, can you maybe give a hint about your sense of the history of the field? And in some ways it's changed with the advent of deep learning, but as a long roots, like how is it weaved in and out of your own life? How have you seen the community change or maybe the ideas that it's playing with change? I've had the privilege, the pleasure of being, of having almost a front row seat to a lot of this stuff. And it's been really, really fun and interesting. So when I was in college in the eighties, early eighties, the neural net thing was starting to happen. And I was taking a lot of psychology classes and a lot of computer science classes as a college student. And I thought, you know, something that can play tic tac toe and just like learn to get better at it. That ought to be a really easy thing. So I spent almost, almost all of my, what would have been vacations during college, like hacking on my home computer, trying to teach it how to play tic tac toe and programming language. Basic. Oh yeah. That's, that's, I was, I that's my first language. That's my native language. Is that when you first fell in love with computer science, just like programming basic on that? Uh, what was, what was the computer? Do you remember? I had, I had a TRS 80 model one before they were called model ones. Cause there was nothing else. Uh, I got my computer in 1979, uh, instead. So I was, I was, I would have been bar mitzvahed, but instead of having a big party that my parents threw on my behalf, they just got me a computer. Cause that's what I really, really, really wanted. I saw them in the, in the, in the mall and radio shack. And I thought, what, how are they doing that? I would try to stump them. I would give them math problems like one plus and then in parentheses, two plus one. And I would always get it right. I'm like, how do you know so much? Like I've had to go to algebra class for the last few years to learn this stuff and you just seem to know. So I was, I was, I was smitten and, uh, got a computer and I think ages 13 to 15. I have no memory of those years. I think I just was in my room with the computer, listening to Billy Joel, communing, possibly listening to the radio, listening to Billy Joel. That was the one album I had, uh, on vinyl at that time. And, um, and then I got it on cassette tape and that was really helpful because then I could play it. I didn't have to go down to my parents, wifi or hi fi sorry. Uh, and at age 15, I remember kind of walking out and like, okay, I'm ready to talk to people again. Like I've learned what I need to learn here. And, um, so yeah, so, so that was, that was my home computer. And so I went to college and I was like, oh, I'm totally going to study computer science. And I opted the college I chose specifically had a computer science major. The one that I really wanted the college I really wanted to go to didn't so bye bye to them. So I went to Yale, uh, Princeton would have been way more convenient and it was just beautiful campus and it was close enough to home. And I was really excited about Princeton. And I visited, I said, so computer science majors like, well, we have computer engineering. I'm like, Oh, I don't like that word engineering. I like computer science. I really, I want to do like, you're saying hardware and software. They're like, yeah. I'm like, I just want to do software. I couldn't care less about hardware. And you grew up in Philadelphia. I grew up outside Philly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so the, you know, local schools were like Penn and Drexel and, uh, temple. Like everyone in my family went to temple at least at one point in their lives, except for me. So yeah, Philly, Philly family, Yale had a computer science department. And that's when you, it's kind of interesting. You said eighties and neural networks. That's when the neural networks was a hot new thing or a hot thing period. Uh, so what is that in college when you first learned about neural networks or when she learned, like how did it was in a psychology class, not in a CS. Yeah. Was it psychology or cognitive science or like, do you remember like what context it was? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I was a, I've always been a bit of a cognitive psychology groupie. So like I'm, I studied computer science, but I like, I like to hang around where the cognitive scientists are. Cause I don't know brains, man. They're like, they're wacky. Cool. And they have a bigger picture view of things. They're a little less engineering. I would say they're more, they're more interested in the nature of cognition and intelligence and perception and how like the vision system work. Like they're asking always bigger questions. Now with the deep learning community there, I think more, there's a lot of intersections, but I do find that the neuroscience folks actually in cognitive psychology, cognitive science folks are starting to learn how to program, how to use neural, artificial neural networks. And they are actually approaching problems in like totally new, interesting ways. It's fun to watch that grad students from those departments, like approach a problem of machine learning. Right. They come in with a different perspective. Yeah. They don't care about like your image net data set or whatever they want, like to understand the, the, the, like the basic mechanisms at the, at the neuronal level and the functional level of intelligence. It's kind of, it's kind of cool to see them work, but yeah. Okay. So you always love, you're always a groupie of cognitive psychology. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so it was in a class by Richard Garrig. He was kind of like my favorite psych professor in college. And I took like three different classes with him and yeah. So they were talking specifically the class, I think was kind of a, there was a big paper that was written by Steven Pinker and Prince. I don't, I'm blanking on Prince's first name, but Prince and Pinker and Prince, they wrote kind of a, they were at that time kind of like, ah, I'm blanking on the names of the current people. The cognitive scientists who are complaining a lot about deep networks. Oh, Gary, Gary Marcus, Marcus and who else? I mean, there's a few, but Gary, Gary's the most feisty. Sure. Gary's very feisty. And with this, with his coauthor, they, they, you know, they're kind of doing these kinds of take downs where they say, okay, well, yeah, it does all these amazing, amazing things, but here's a shortcoming. Here's a shortcoming. Here's a shortcoming. And so the Pinker Prince paper is kind of like the, that generation's version of Marcus and Davis, right? Where they're, they're trained as cognitive scientists, but they're looking skeptically at the results in the, in the artificial intelligence, neural net kind of world and saying, yeah, it can do this and this and this, but low, it can't do that. And it can't do that. And it can't do that maybe in principle or maybe just in practice at this point. But, but the fact of the matter is you're, you've narrowed your focus too far to be impressed. You know, you're impressed with the things within that circle, but you need to broaden that circle a little bit. You need to look at a wider set of problems. And so, so we had, so I was in this seminar in college that was basically a close reading of the Pinker Prince paper, which was like really thick. There was a lot going on in there. And, and it, you know, and it talked about the reinforcement learning idea a little bit. I'm like, oh, that sounds really cool because behavior is what is really interesting to me about psychology anyway. So making programs that, I mean, programs are things that behave. People are things that behave. Like I want to make learning that learns to behave. And which way was reinforcement learning presented? Is this talking about human and animal behavior or are we talking about actual mathematical construct? Ah, that's right. So that's a good question. Right. So this is, I think it wasn't actually talked about as behavior in the paper that I was reading. I think that it just talked about learning. And to me, learning is about learning to behave, but really neural nets at that point were about learning like supervised learning. So learning to produce outputs from inputs. So I kind of tried to invent reinforcement learning. When I graduated, I joined a research group at Bellcore, which had spun out of Bell Labs recently at that time because of the divestiture of the long distance and local phone service in the 1980s, 1984. And I was in a group with Dave Ackley, who was the first author of the Boltzmann machine paper. So the very first neural net paper that could handle XOR, right? So XOR sort of killed neural nets. The very first, the zero with the first winter. Yeah. Um, the, the perceptrons paper and Hinton along with his student, Dave Ackley, and I think there was other authors as well showed that no, no, no, with Boltzmann machines, we can actually learn nonlinear concepts. And so everything's back on the table again. And that kind of started that second wave of neural networks. So Dave Ackley was, he became my mentor at, at Bellcore and we talked a lot about learning and life and computation and how all these things fit together. Now Dave and I have a podcast together. So, so I get to kind of enjoy that sort of his, his perspective once again, even, even all these years later. And so I said, so I said, I was really interested in learning, but in the concept of behavior and he's like, oh, well that's reinforcement learning here. And he gave me Rich Sutton's 1984 TD paper. So I read that paper. I honestly didn't get all of it, but I got the idea. I got that they were using, that he was using ideas that I was familiar with in the context of neural nets and, and like sort of back prop. But with this idea of making predictions over time, I'm like, this is so interesting, but I don't really get all the details I said to Dave. And Dave said, oh, well, why don't we have him come and give a talk? And I was like, wait, what, you can do that? Like, these are real people. I thought they were just words. I thought it was just like ideas that somehow magically seeped into paper. He's like, no, I, I, I know Rich like, we'll just have him come down and he'll give a talk. And so I was, you know, my mind was blown. And so Rich came and he gave a talk at Bellcore and he talked about what he was super excited, which was they had just figured out at the time Q learning. So Watkins had visited the Rich Sutton's lab at, at UMass or Andy Bartow's lab that Rich was a part of. And, um, he was really excited about this because it resolved a whole bunch of problems that he didn't know how to resolve in the, in the earlier paper. And so, um, For people who don't know TD, temporal difference, these are all just algorithms for reinforcement learning. Right. And TD, temporal difference in particular is about making predictions over time. And you can try to use it for making decisions, right? Cause if you can predict how good a future action or an action outcomes will be in the future, you can choose one that has better and, or, but the thing that's really cool about Q learning is it was off policy, which meant that you could actually be learning about the environment and what the value of different actions would be while actually figuring out how to behave optimally. So that was a revelation. Yeah. And the proof of that is kind of interesting. I mean, that's really surprising to me when I first read that paper. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, that's really surprising to me when I first read that and then in Richard, Rich Sutton's book on the matter, it's, it's kind of a beautiful that a single equation can capture all one line of code and like, you can learn anything. Yeah. Like enough time. So equation and code, you're right. Like you can the code that you can arguably, at least if you like squint your eyes can say, this is all of intelligence is that you can implement that in a single one. I think I started with Lisp, which is a shout out to Lisp with like a single line of code, key piece of code, maybe a couple that you could do that. It's kind of magical. It's feels too good to be true. Well, and it sort of is. Yeah, kind of. It seems to require an awful lot of extra stuff supporting it. But nonetheless, the idea is really good. And as far as we know, it is a very reasonable way of trying to create adaptive behavior, behavior that gets better at something over time. Did you find the idea of optimal at all compelling that you could prove that it's optimal? So like one part of computer science that it makes people feel warm and fuzzy inside is when you can prove something like that a sorting algorithm worst case runs and N log N, and it makes everybody feel so good. Even though in reality, it doesn't really matter what the worst case is, what matters is like, does this thing actually work in practice on this particular actual set of data that I enjoy? Did you? So here's a place where I have maybe a strong opinion, which is like, you're right, of course, but no, no. Like, so what makes worst case so great, right? If you have a worst case analysis so great is that you get modularity. You can take that thing and plug it into another thing and still have some understanding of what's gonna happen when you click them together, right? If it just works well in practice, in other words, with respect to some distribution that you care about, when you go plug it into another thing, that distribution can shift, it can change, and your thing may not work well anymore. And you want it to, and you wish it does, and you hope that it will, but it might not, and then, ah. So you're saying you don't like machine learning. But we have some positive theoretical results for these things. You can come back at me with, yeah, but they're really weak, and yeah, they're really weak. And you can even say that sorting algorithms, like if you do the optimal sorting algorithm, it's not really the one that you want, and that might be true as well. But it is, the modularity is a really powerful statement. I really like that. If you're an engineer, you can then assemble different things, you can count on them to be, I mean, it's interesting. It's a balance, like with everything else in life, you don't want to get too obsessed. I mean, this is what computer scientists do, which they tend to get obsessed, and they overoptimize things, or they start by optimizing, and then they overoptimize. So it's easy to get really granular about this thing, but like the step from an n squared to an n log n sorting algorithm is a big leap for most real world systems. No matter what the actual behavior of the system is, that's a big leap. And the same can probably be said for other kind of first leaps that you would take on a particular problem. Like it's picking the low hanging fruit, or whatever the equivalent of doing the, not the dumbest thing, but the next to the dumbest thing. Picking the most delicious reachable fruit. Yeah, most delicious reachable fruit. I don't know why that's not a saying. Yeah. Okay, so then this is the 80s, and this kind of idea starts to percolate of learning. At that point, I got to meet Rich Sutton, so everything was sort of downhill from there, and that was really the pinnacle of everything. But then I felt like I was kind of on the inside. So then as interesting results were happening, I could like check in with Rich or with Jerry Tesaro, who had a huge impact on kind of early thinking in temporal difference learning and reinforcement learning and showed that you could do, you could solve problems that we didn't know how to solve any other way. And so that was really cool. So as good things were happening, I would hear about it from either the people who were doing it, or the people who were talking to the people who were doing it. And so I was able to track things pretty well through the 90s. So what wasn't most of the excitement on reinforcement learning in the 90s era with, what is it, TD Gamma? Like what's the role of these kind of little like fun game playing things and breakthroughs about exciting the community? Was that, like what were your, because you've also built across, or part of building across a puzzle solver, solving program called proverb. So you were interested in this as a problem, like in forming, using games to understand how to build intelligence systems. So like, what did you think about TD Gamma? Like what did you think about that whole thing in the 90s? Yeah, I mean, I found the TD Gamma result really just remarkable. So I had known about some of Jerry's stuff before he did TD Gamma and he did a system, just more vanilla, well, not entirely vanilla, but a more classical back proppy kind of network for playing backgammon, where he was training it on expert moves. So it was kind of supervised, but the way that it worked was not to mimic the actions, but to learn internally an evaluation function. So to learn, well, if the expert chose this over this, that must mean that the expert values this more than this. And so let me adjust my weights to make it so that the network evaluates this as being better than this. So it could learn from human preferences, it could learn its own preferences. And then when he took the step from that to actually doing it as a full on reinforcement learning problem, where you didn't need a trainer, you could just let it play, that was remarkable, right? And so I think as humans often do, as we've done in the recent past as well, people extrapolate. It's like, oh, well, if you can do that, which is obviously very hard, then obviously you could do all these other problems that we wanna solve that we know are also really hard. And it turned out very few of them ended up being practical, partly because I think neural nets, certainly at the time, were struggling to be consistent and reliable. And so training them in a reinforcement learning setting was a bit of a mess. I had, I don't know, generation after generation of like master students who wanted to do value function approximation, basically reinforcement learning with neural nets. And over and over and over again, we were failing. We couldn't get the good results that Jerry Tesaro got. I now believe that Jerry is a neural net whisperer. He has a particular ability to get neural networks to do things that other people would find impossible. And it's not the technology, it's the technology and Jerry together. Which I think speaks to the role of the human expert in the process of machine learning. Right, it's so easy. We're so drawn to the idea that it's the technology that is where the power is coming from that I think we lose sight of the fact that sometimes you need a really good, just like, I mean, no one would think, hey, here's this great piece of software. Here's like, I don't know, GNU Emacs or whatever. And doesn't that prove that computers are super powerful and basically gonna take over the world? It's like, no, Stalman is a hell of a hacker, right? So he was able to make the code do these amazing things. He couldn't have done it without the computer, but the computer couldn't have done it without him. And so I think people discount the role of people like Jerry who have just a particular set of skills. On that topic, by the way, as a small side note, I tweeted Emacs is greater than Vim yesterday and deleted the tweet 10 minutes later when I realized it started a war. I was like, oh, I was just kidding. I was just being, and I'm gonna walk back and forth. So people still feel passionately about that particular piece of good stuff. Yeah, I don't get that because Emacs is clearly so much better, I don't understand. But why do I say that? Because I spent a block of time in the 80s making my fingers know the Emacs keys and now that's part of the thought process for me. Like I need to express, and if you take that, if you take my Emacs key bindings away, I become... I can't express myself. I'm the same way with the, I don't know if you know what it is, but it's a Kinesis keyboard, which is this butt shaped keyboard. Yes, I've seen them. They're very, I don't know, sexy, elegant? They're just beautiful. Yeah, they're gorgeous, way too expensive. But the problem with them, similar with Emacs, is once you learn to use it. It's harder to use other things. It's hard to use other things. There's this absurd thing where I have like small, elegant, lightweight, beautiful little laptops and I'm sitting there in a coffee shop with a giant Kinesis keyboard and a sexy little laptop. It's absurd, but I used to feel bad about it, but at the same time, you just kind of have to, sometimes it's back to the Billy Joel thing. You just have to throw that Billy Joel record and throw Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber to the wind. So... See, but I like them now because again, I have no musical taste. Like now that I've heard Justin Bieber enough, I'm like, I really like his songs. And Taylor Swift, not only do I like her songs, but my daughter's convinced that she's a genius. And so now I basically have signed onto that. So... So yeah, that speaks to the, back to the robustness of the human brain. That speaks to the neuroplasticity that you can just like a mouse teach yourself to, or probably a dog teach yourself to enjoy Taylor Swift. I'll try it out. I don't know. I try, you know what? It has to do with just like acclimation, right? Just like you said, a couple of weeks. Yeah. That's an interesting experiment. I'll actually try that. Like I'll listen to it. That wasn't the intent of the experiment? Just like social media, it wasn't intended as an experiment to see what we can take as a society, but it turned out that way. I don't think I'll be the same person on the other side of the week listening to Taylor Swift, but let's try. No, it's more compartmentalized. Don't be so worried. Like it's, like I get that you can be worried, but don't be so worried because we compartmentalize really well. And so it won't bleed into other parts of your life. You won't start, I don't know, wearing red lipstick or whatever. Like it's fine. It's fine. It changed fashion and everything. It's fine. But you know what? The thing you have to watch out for is you'll walk into a coffee shop once we can do that again. And recognize the song? And you'll be, no, you won't know that you're singing along until everybody in the coffee shop is looking at you. And then you're like, that wasn't me. Yeah, that's the, you know, people are afraid of AGI. I'm afraid of the Taylor Swift. The Taylor Swift takeover. Yeah, and I mean, people should know that TD Gammon was, I get, would you call it, do you like the terminology of self play by any chance? So like systems that learn by playing themselves. Just, I don't know if it's the best word, but. So what's the problem with that term? I don't know. So it's like the big bang, like it's like talking to a serious physicist. Do you like the term big bang? And when it was early, I feel like it's the early days of self play. I don't know, maybe it was used previously, but I think it's been used by only a small group of people. And so like, I think we're still deciding is this ridiculously silly name a good name for potentially one of the most important concepts in artificial intelligence? Okay, it depends how broadly you apply the term. So I used the term in my 1996 PhD dissertation. Wow, the actual terms of self play. Yeah, because Tesoro's paper was something like training up an expert backgammon player through self play. So I think it was in the title of his paper. If not in the title, it was definitely a term that he used. There's another term that we got from that work is rollout. So I don't know if you, do you ever hear the term rollout? That's a backgammon term that has now applied generally in computers, well, at least in AI because of TD gammon. That's fascinating. So how is self play being used now? And like, why is it, does it feel like a more general powerful concept is sort of the idea of, well, the machine's just gonna teach itself to be smart. Yeah, so that's where maybe you can correct me, but that's where the continuation of the spirit and actually like literally the exact algorithms of TD gammon are applied by DeepMind and OpenAI to learn games that are a little bit more complex that when I was learning artificial intelligence, Go was presented to me with artificial intelligence, the modern approach. I don't know if they explicitly pointed to Go in those books as like unsolvable kind of thing, like implying that these approaches hit their limit in this, with these particular kind of games. So something, I don't remember if the book said it or not, but something in my head, or if it was the professors instilled in me the idea like this is the limits of artificial intelligence of the field. Like it instilled in me the idea that if we can create a system that can solve the game of Go we've achieved AGI. That was kind of, I didn't explicitly like say this, but that was the feeling. And so from, I was one of the people that it seemed magical when a learning system was able to beat a human world champion at the game of Go and even more so from that, that was AlphaGo, even more so with AlphaGo Zero than kind of renamed and advanced into AlphaZero beating a world champion or world class player without any supervised learning on expert games. We're doing only through by playing itself. So that is, I don't know what to make of it. I think it would be interesting to hear what your opinions are on just how exciting, surprising, profound, interesting, or boring the breakthrough performance of AlphaZero was. Okay, so AlphaGo knocked my socks off. That was so remarkable. Which aspect of it? That they got it to work, that they actually were able to leverage a whole bunch of different ideas, integrate them into one giant system. Just the software engineering aspect of it is mind blowing. I don't, I've never been a part of a program as complicated as the program that they built for that. And just the, like Jerry Tesaro is a neural net whisperer, like David Silver is a kind of neural net whisperer too. He was able to coax these networks and these new way out there architectures to do these, solve these problems that, as you said, when we were learning from AI, no one had an idea how to make it work. It was remarkable that these techniques that were so good at playing chess and that could beat the world champion in chess couldn't beat your typical Go playing teenager in Go. So the fact that in a very short number of years, we kind of ramped up to trouncing people in Go just blew me away. So you're kind of focusing on the engineering aspect, which is also very surprising. I mean, there's something different about large, well funded companies. I mean, there's a compute aspect to it too. Like that, of course, I mean, that's similar to Deep Blue, right, with IBM. Like there's something important to be learned and remembered about a large company taking the ideas that are already out there and investing a few million dollars into it or more. And so you're kind of saying the engineering is kind of fascinating, both on the, with AlphaGo is probably just gathering all the data, right, of the expert games, like organizing everything, actually doing distributed supervised learning. And to me, see the engineering I kind of took for granted, to me philosophically being able to persist in the face of like long odds, because it feels like for me, I would be one of the skeptical people in the room thinking that you can learn your way to beat Go. Like it sounded like, especially with David Silver, it sounded like David was not confident at all. So like it was, like not, it's funny how confidence works. It's like, you're not like cocky about it, like, but. Right, because if you're cocky about it, you kind of stop and stall and don't get anywhere. But there's like a hope that's unbreakable. Maybe that's better than confidence. It's a kind of wishful hope and a little dream. And you almost don't want to do anything else. You kind of keep doing it. That's, that seems to be the story and. But with enough skepticism that you're looking for where the problems are and fighting through them. Cause you know, there's gotta be a way out of this thing. And for him, it was probably, there's a bunch of little factors that come into play. It's funny how these stories just all come together. Like everything he did in his life came into play, which is like a love for video games and also a connection to, so the nineties had to happen with TD Gammon and so on. In some ways it's surprising, maybe you can provide some intuition to it that not much more than TD Gammon was done for quite a long time on the reinforcement learning front. Is that weird to you? I mean, like I said, the students who I worked with, we tried to get, basically apply that architecture to other problems and we consistently failed. There were a couple of really nice demonstrations that ended up being in the literature. There was a paper about controlling elevators, right? Where it's like, okay, can we modify the heuristic that elevators use for deciding, like a bank of elevators for deciding which floors we should be stopping on to maximize throughput essentially. And you can set that up as a reinforcement learning problem and you can have a neural net represent the value function so that it's taking where all the elevators, where the button pushes, you know, this high dimensional, well, at the time high dimensional input, you know, a couple of dozen dimensions and turn that into a prediction as to, oh, is it gonna be better if I stop at this floor or not? And ultimately it appeared as though for the standard simulation distribution for people trying to leave the building at the end of the day, that the neural net learned a better strategy than the standard one that's implemented in elevator controllers. So that was nice. There was some work that Satyendra Singh et al did on handoffs with cell phones, you know, deciding when should you hand off from this cell tower to this cell tower. Oh, okay, communication networks, yeah. Yeah, and so a couple of things seemed like they were really promising. None of them made it into production that I'm aware of. And neural nets as a whole started to kind of implode around then. And so there just wasn't a lot of air in the room for people to try to figure out, okay, how do we get this to work in the RL setting? And then they found their way back in 10 plus years. So you said AlphaGo was impressive, like it's a big spectacle. Is there, is that? Right, so then AlphaZero. So I think I may have a slightly different opinion on this than some people. So I talked to Satyendra Singh in particular about this. So Satyendra was like Rich Sutton, a student of Andy Bartow. So they came out of the same lab, very influential machine learning, reinforcement learning researcher. Now at DeepMind, as is Rich. Though different sites, the two of them. He's in Alberta. Rich is in Alberta and Satyendra would be in England, but I think he's in England from Michigan at the moment. But the, but he was, yes, he was much more impressed with AlphaGo Zero, which is didn't get a kind of a bootstrap in the beginning with human trained games. It just was purely self play. Though the first one AlphaGo was also a tremendous amount of self play, right? They started off, they kickstarted the action network that was making decisions, but then they trained it for a really long time using more traditional temporal difference methods. So as a result, I didn't, it didn't seem that different to me. Like, it seems like, yeah, why wouldn't that work? Like once you, once it works, it works. So what, but he found that removal of that extra information to be breathtaking. Like that's a game changer. To me, the first thing was more of a game changer. But the open question, I mean, I guess that's the assumption is the expert games might contain within them a humongous amount of information. But we know that it went beyond that, right? We know that it somehow got away from that information because it was learning strategies. I don't think AlphaGo is just better at implementing human strategies. I think it actually developed its own strategies that were more effective. And so from that perspective, okay, well, so it made at least one quantum leap in terms of strategic knowledge. Okay, so now maybe it makes three, like, okay. But that first one is the doozy, right? Getting it to work reliably and for the networks to hold onto the value well enough. Like that was a big step. Well, maybe you could speak to this on the reinforcement learning front. So starting from scratch and learning to do something, like the first like random behavior to like crappy behavior to like somewhat okay behavior. It's not obvious to me that that's not like impossible to take those steps. Like if you just think about the intuition, like how the heck does random behavior become somewhat basic intelligent behavior? Not human level, not superhuman level, but just basic. But you're saying to you kind of the intuition is like, if you can go from human to superhuman level intelligence on this particular task of game playing, then so you're good at taking leaps. So you can take many of them. That the system, I believe that the system can take that kind of leap. Yeah, and also I think that beginner knowledge in go, like you can start to get a feel really quickly for the idea that being in certain parts of the board seems to be more associated with winning, right? Cause it's not stumbling upon the concept of winning. It's told that it wins or that it loses. Well, it's self play. So it both wins and loses. It's told which side won. And the information is kind of there to start percolating around to make a difference as to, well, these things have a better chance of helping you win. And these things have a worse chance of helping you win. And so it can get to basic play, I think pretty quickly. Then once it has basic play, well now it's kind of forced to do some search to actually experiment with, okay, well what gets me that next increment of improvement? How far do you think, okay, this is where you kind of bring up the Elon Musk and the Sam Harris, right? How far is your intuition about these kinds of self play mechanisms being able to take us? Cause it feels, one of the ominous but stated calmly things that when I talked to David Silver, he said, is that they have not yet discovered a ceiling for Alpha Zero, for example, in the game of Go or chess. Like it keeps, no matter how much they compute, they throw at it, it keeps improving. So it's possible, it's very possible that if you throw, you know, some like 10 X compute that it will improve by five X or something like that. And when stated calmly, it's so like, oh yeah, I guess so. But like, and then you think like, well, can we potentially have like continuations of Moore's law in totally different way, like broadly defined Moore's law, not the exponential improvement, like, are we going to have an Alpha Zero that swallows the world? But notice it's not getting better at other things. It's getting better at Go. And I think that's a big leap to say, okay, well, therefore it's better at other things. Well, I mean, the question is how much of the game of life can be turned into. Right, so that I think is a really good question. And I think that we don't, I don't think we as a, I don't know, community really know the answer to this, but so, okay, so I went to a talk by some experts on computer chess. So in particular, computer chess is really interesting because for, of course, for a thousand years, humans were the best chess playing things on the planet. And then computers like edged ahead of the best person. And they've been ahead ever since. It's not like people have overtaken computers. But computers and people together have overtaken computers. So at least last time I checked, I don't know what the very latest is, but last time I checked that there were teams of people who could work with computer programs to defeat the best computer programs. In the game of Go? In the game of chess. In the game of chess. Right, and so using the information about how, these things called ELO scores, this sort of notion of how strong a player are you. There's kind of a range of possible scores. And you increment in score, basically if you can beat another player of that lower score 62% of the time or something like that. Like there's some threshold of if you can somewhat consistently beat someone, then you are of a higher score than that person. And there's a question as to how many times can you do that in chess, right? And so we know that there's a range of human ability levels that cap out with the best playing humans. And the computers went a step beyond that. And computers and people together have not gone, I think a full step beyond that. It feels, the estimates that they have is that it's starting to asymptote. That we've reached kind of the maximum, the best possible chess playing. And so that means that there's kind of a finite strategic depth, right? At some point you just can't get any better at this game. Yeah, I mean, I don't, so I'll actually check that. I think it's interesting because if you have somebody like Magnus Carlsen, who's using these chess programs to train his mind, like to learn about chess. To become a better chess player, yeah. And so like, that's a very interesting thing because we're not static creatures. We're learning together. I mean, just like we're talking about social networks, those algorithms are teaching us just like we're teaching those algorithms. So that's a fascinating thing. But I think the best chess playing programs are now better than the pairs. Like they have competition between pairs, but it's still, even if they weren't, it's an interesting question, where's the ceiling? So the David, the ominous David Silver kind of statement is like, we have not found the ceiling. Right, so the question is, okay, so I don't know his analysis on that. My, from talking to Go experts, the depth, the strategic depth of Go seems to be substantially greater than that of chess. That there's more kind of steps of improvement that you can make, getting better and better and better and better. But there's no reason to think that it's infinite. Infinite, yeah. And so it could be that what David is seeing is a kind of asymptoting that you can keep getting better, but with diminishing returns. And at some point you hit optimal play. Like in theory, all these finite games, they're finite. They have an optimal strategy. There's a strategy that is the minimax optimal strategy. And so at that point, you can't get any better. You can't beat that strategy. Now that strategy may be, from an information processing perspective, intractable. Right, you need, all the situations are sufficiently different that you can't compress it at all. It's this giant mess of hardcoded rules. And we can never achieve that. But that still puts a cap on how many levels of improvement that we can actually make. But the thing about self play is if you put it, although I don't like doing that, in the broader category of self supervised learning, is that it doesn't require too much or any human input. Human labeling, yeah. Yeah, human label or just human effort. The human involvement passed a certain point. And the same thing you could argue is true for the recent breakthroughs in natural language processing with language models. Oh, this is how you get to GPT3. Yeah, see how that did the. That was a good transition. Yeah, I practiced that for days leading up to this now. But like that's one of the questions is, can we find ways to formulate problems in this world that are important to us humans, like more important than the game of chess, that to which self supervised kinds of approaches could be applied? Whether it's self play, for example, for like maybe you could think of like autonomous vehicles in simulation, that kind of stuff, or just robotics applications and simulation, or in the self supervised learning, where unannotated data, or data that's generated by humans naturally without extra costs, like Wikipedia, or like all of the internet can be used to learn something about, to create intelligent systems that do something really powerful, that pass the Turing test, or that do some kind of superhuman level performance. So what's your intuition, like trying to stitch all of it together about our discussion of AGI, the limits of self play, and your thoughts about maybe the limits of neural networks in the context of language models. Is there some intuition in there that might be useful to think about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first of all, the whole Transformer network family of things is really cool. It's really, really cool. I mean, if you've ever, back in the day you played with, I don't know, Markov models for generating texts, and you've seen the kind of texts that they spit out, and you compare it to what's happening now, it's amazing, it's so amazing. Now, it doesn't take very long interacting with one of these systems before you find the holes, right? It's not smart in any kind of general way. It's really good at a bunch of things. And it does seem to understand a lot of the statistics of language extremely well. And that turns out to be very powerful. You can answer many questions with that. But it doesn't make it a good conversationalist, right? And it doesn't make it a good storyteller. It just makes it good at imitating of things that is seen in the past. The exact same thing could be said by people who are voting for Donald Trump about Joe Biden supporters, and people voting for Joe Biden about Donald Trump supporters is, you know. That they're not intelligent, they're just following the. Yeah, they're following things they've seen in the past. And it doesn't take long to find the flaws in their natural language generation abilities. Yes, yes. So we're being very. That's interesting. Critical of AI systems. Right, so I've had a similar thought, which was that the stories that GPT3 spits out are amazing and very humanlike. And it doesn't mean that computers are smarter than we realize necessarily. It partly means that people are dumber than we realize. Or that much of what we do day to day is not that deep. Like we're just kind of going with the flow. We're saying whatever feels like the natural thing to say next. Not a lot of it is creative or meaningful or intentional. But enough is that we actually get by, right? We do come up with new ideas sometimes, and we do manage to talk each other into things sometimes. And we do sometimes vote for reasonable people sometimes. But it's really hard to see in the statistics because so much of what we're saying is kind of rote. And so our metrics that we use to measure how these systems are doing don't reveal that because it's in the interstices that is very hard to detect. But is your, do you have an intuition that with these language models, if they grow in size, it's already surprising when you go from GPT2 to GPT3 that there is a noticeable improvement. So the question now goes back to the ominous David Silver and the ceiling. Right, so maybe there's just no ceiling. We just need more compute. Now, I mean, okay, so now I'm speculating. Yes. As opposed to before when I was completely on firm ground. All right, I don't believe that you can get something that really can do language and use language as a thing that doesn't interact with people. Like I think that it's not enough to just take everything that we've said written down and just say, that's enough. You can just learn from that and you can be intelligent. I think you really need to be pushed back at. I think that conversations, even people who are pretty smart, maybe the smartest thing that we know, maybe not the smartest thing we can imagine, but we get so much benefit out of talking to each other and interacting. That's presumably why you have conversations live with guests is that there's something in that interaction that would not be exposed by, oh, I'll just write you a story and then you can read it later. And I think because these systems are just learning from our stories, they're not learning from being pushed back at by us, that they're fundamentally limited into what they can actually become on this route. They have to get shut down. Like we have to have an argument, they have to have an argument with us and lose a couple of times before they start to realize, oh, okay, wait, there's some nuance here that actually matters. Yeah, that's actually subtle sounding, but quite profound that the interaction with humans is essential and the limitation within that is profound as well because the timescale, like the bandwidth at which you can really interact with humans is very low. So it's costly. So you can't, one of the underlying things about self plays, it has to do a very large number of interactions. And so you can't really deploy reinforcement learning systems into the real world to interact. Like you couldn't deploy a language model into the real world to interact with humans because it was just not getting enough data relative to the cost it takes to interact. Like the time of humans is expensive, which is really interesting. That takes us back to reinforcement learning and trying to figure out if there's ways to make algorithms that are more efficient at learning, keep the spirit in reinforcement learning and become more efficient. In some sense, that seems to be the goal. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. I don't know if you got a chance to see the blog post called Bitter Lesson. Oh yes. By Rich Sutton that makes an argument, hopefully I can summarize it. Perhaps you can. Yeah, but do you want? Okay. So I mean, I could try and you can correct me, which is he makes an argument that it seems if we look at the long arc of the history of the artificial intelligence field, he calls 70 years that the algorithms from which we've seen the biggest improvements in practice are the very simple, like dumb algorithms that are able to leverage computation. And you just wait for the computation to improve. Like all of the academics and so on have fun by finding little tricks and congratulate themselves on those tricks. And sometimes those tricks can be like big, that feel in the moment like big spikes and breakthroughs, but in reality over the decades, it's still the same dumb algorithm that just waits for the compute to get faster and faster. Do you find that to be an interesting argument against the entirety of the field of machine learning as an academic discipline? That we're really just a subfield of computer architecture. We're just kind of waiting around for them to do their next thing. Who really don't want to do hardware work. So like. That's right. I really don't want to think about it. We're procrastinating. Yes, that's right, just waiting for them to do their jobs so that we can pretend to have done ours. So yeah, I mean, the argument reminds me a lot of, I think it was a Fred Jelinek quote, early computational linguist who said, we're building these computational linguistic systems and every time we fire a linguist performance goes up by 10%, something like that. And so the idea of us building the knowledge in, in that case was much less, he was finding it to be much less successful than get rid of the people who know about language as a, from a kind of scholastic academic kind of perspective and replace them with more compute. And so I think this is kind of a modern version of that story, which is, okay, we want to do better on machine vision. You could build in all these, motivated part based models that, that just feel like obviously the right thing that you have to have, or we can throw a lot of data at it and guess what we're doing better with a lot of data. So I hadn't thought about it until this moment in this way, but what I believe, well, I've thought about what I believe. What I believe is that, you know, compositionality and what's the right way to say it, the complexity grows rapidly as you consider more and more possibilities, like explosively. And so far Moore's law has also been growing explosively exponentially. And so it really does seem like, well, we don't have to think really hard about the algorithm design or the way that we build the systems, because the best benefit we could get is exponential. And the best benefit that we can get from waiting is exponential. So we can just wait. It's got, that's gotta end, right? And there's hints now that, that Moore's law is starting to feel some friction, starting to, the world is pushing back a little bit. One thing that I don't know, do lots of people know this? I didn't know this, I was trying to write an essay and yeah, Moore's law has been amazing and it's enabled all sorts of things, but there's also a kind of counter Moore's law, which is that the development cost for each successive generation of chips also is doubling. So it's costing twice as much money. So the amount of development money per cycle or whatever is actually sort of constant. And at some point we run out of money. So, or we have to come up with an entirely different way of doing the development process. So like, I guess I always a bit skeptical of the look, it's an exponential curve, therefore it has no end. Soon the number of people going to NeurIPS will be greater than the population of the earth. That means we're gonna discover life on other planets. No, it doesn't. It means that we're in a sigmoid curve on the front half, which looks a lot like an exponential. The second half is gonna look a lot like diminishing returns. Yeah, I mean, but the interesting thing about Moore's law, if you actually like look at the technologies involved, it's hundreds, if not thousands of S curves stacked on top of each other. It's not actually an exponential curve, it's constant breakthroughs. And then what becomes useful to think about, which is exactly what you're saying, the cost of development, like the size of teams, the amount of resources that are invested in continuing to find new S curves, new breakthroughs. And yeah, it's an interesting idea. If we live in the moment, if we sit here today, it seems to be the reasonable thing to say that exponentials end. And yet in the software realm, they just keep appearing to be happening. And it's so, I mean, it's so hard to disagree with Elon Musk on this. Because it like, I've, you know, I used to be one of those folks, I'm still one of those folks that studied autonomous vehicles, that's what I worked on. And it's like, you look at what Elon Musk is saying about autonomous vehicles, well, obviously, in a couple of years, or in a year, or next month, we'll have fully autonomous vehicles. Like there's no reason why we can't. Driving is pretty simple, like it's just a learning problem and you just need to convert all the driving that we're doing into data and just having you all know with the trains on that data. And like, we use only our eyes, so you can use cameras and you can train on it. And it's like, yeah, that should work. And then you put that hat on, like the philosophical hat, and but then you put the pragmatic hat and it's like, this is what the flaws of computer vision are. Like, this is what it means to train at scale. And then you put the human factors, the psychology hat on, which is like, it's actually driving us a lot, the cognitive science or cognitive, whatever the heck you call it, it's really hard, it's much harder to drive than we realize, there's a much larger number of edge cases. So building up an intuition around this is, around exponentials is really difficult. And on top of that, the pandemic is making us think about exponentials, making us realize that like, we don't understand anything about it, we're not able to intuit exponentials, we're either ultra terrified, some part of the population and some part is like the opposite of whatever the different carefree and we're not managing it very well. Blase, well, wow, is that French? I assume so, it's got an accent. So it's fascinating to think what the limits of this exponential growth of technology, not just Moore's law, it's technology, how that rubs up against the bitter lesson and GPT three and self play mechanisms. Like it's not obvious, I used to be much more skeptical about neural networks. Now I at least give a slither of possibility that we'll be very much surprised and also caught in a way that like, we are not prepared for. Like in applications of social networks, for example, cause it feels like really good transformer models that are able to do some kind of like very good natural language generation of the same kind of models that can be used to learn human behavior and then manipulate that human behavior to gain advertisers dollars and all those kinds of things through the capitalist system. And they arguably already are manipulating human behavior. But not for self preservation, which I think is a big, that would be a big step. Like if they were trying to manipulate us to convince us not to shut them off, I would be very freaked out. But I don't see a path to that from where we are now. They don't have any of those abilities. That's not what they're trying to do. They're trying to keep people on the site. But see the thing is, this is the thing about life on earth is they might be borrowing our consciousness and sentience like, so like in a sense they do because the creators of the algorithms have, like they're not, if you look at our body, we're not a single organism. We're a huge number of organisms with like tiny little motivations were built on top of each other. In the same sense, the AI algorithms that are, they're not like. It's a system that includes companies and corporations, because corporations are funny organisms in and of themselves that really do seem to have self preservation built in. And I think that's at the design level. I think they're designed to have self preservation to be a focus. So you're right. In that broader system that we're also a part of and can have some influence on, it is much more complicated, much more powerful. Yeah, I agree with that. So people really love it when I ask, what three books, technical, philosophical, fiction had a big impact on your life? Maybe you can recommend. We went with movies, we went with Billy Joe and I forgot what music you recommended, but. I didn't, I just said I have no taste in music. I just like pop music. That was actually really skillful the way you avoided that question. Thank you, thanks. I'm gonna try to do the same with the books. So do you have a skillful way to avoid answering the question about three books you would recommend? I'd like to tell you a story. So my first job out of college was at Bellcore. I mentioned that before, where I worked with Dave Ackley. The head of the group was a guy named Tom Landauer. And I don't know how well known he's known now, but arguably he's the inventor and the first proselytizer of word embeddings. So they developed a system shortly before I got to the group that was called latent semantic analysis that would take words of English and embed them in multi hundred dimensional space and then use that as a way of assessing similarity and basically doing reinforcement learning, I'm sorry, not reinforcement, information retrieval, sort of pre Google information retrieval. And he was trained as an anthropologist, but then became a cognitive scientist. So I was in the cognitive science research group. Like I said, I'm a cognitive science groupie. At the time I thought I'd become a cognitive scientist, but then I realized in that group, no, I'm a computer scientist, but I'm a computer scientist who really loves to hang out with cognitive scientists. And he said, he studied language acquisition in particular. He said, you know, humans have about this number of words of vocabulary and most of that is learned from reading. And I said, that can't be true because I have a really big vocabulary and I don't read. He's like, you must. I'm like, I don't think I do. I mean like stop signs, I definitely read stop signs, but like reading books is not a thing that I do a lot of. Do you really though? It might be just visual, maybe the red color. Do I read stop signs? No, it's just pattern recognition at this point. I don't sound it out. So now I do. I wonder what that, oh yeah, stop the guns. So. That's fascinating. So you don't. So I don't read very, I mean, obviously I read and I've read plenty of books, but like some people like Charles, my friend Charles and others, like a lot of people in my field, a lot of academics, like reading was really a central topic to them in development and I'm not that guy. In fact, I used to joke that when I got into college, that it was on kind of a help out the illiterate kind of program because I got to, like in my house, I wasn't a particularly bad or good reader, but when I got to college, I was surrounded by these people that were just voracious in their reading appetite. And they would like, have you read this? Have you read this? Have you read this? And I'm like, no, I'm clearly not qualified to be at this school. Like there's no way I should be here. Now I've discovered books on tape, like audio books. And so I'm much better. I'm more caught up. I read a lot of books. The small tangent on that, it is a fascinating open question to me on the topic of driving. Whether, you know, supervised learning people, machine learning people think you have to like drive to learn how to drive. To me, it's very possible that just by us humans, by first of all, walking, but also by watching other people drive, not even being inside cars as a passenger, but let's say being inside the car as a passenger, but even just like being a pedestrian and crossing the road, you learn so much about driving from that. It's very possible that you can, without ever being inside of a car, be okay at driving once you get in it. Or like watching a movie, for example. I don't know, something like that. Have you taught anyone to drive? No, except myself. I have two children. And I learned a lot about car driving because my wife doesn't want to be the one in the car while they're learning. So that's my job. So I sit in the passenger seat and it's really scary. You know, I have wishes to live and they're figuring things out. Now, they start off very much better than I imagine like a neural network would, right? They get that they're seeing the world. They get that there's a road that they're trying to be on. They get that there's a relationship between the angle of the steering, but it takes a while to not be very jerky. And so that happens pretty quickly. Like the ability to stay in lane at speed, that happens relatively fast. It's not zero shot learning, but it's pretty fast. The thing that's remarkably hard, and this is I think partly why self driving cars are really hard, is the degree to which driving is a social interaction activity. And that blew me away. I was completely unaware of it until I watched my son learning to drive. And I was realizing that he was sending signals to all the cars around him. And those in his case, he's always had social communication challenges. He was sending very mixed confusing signals to the other cars. And that was causing the other cars to drive weirdly and erratically. And there was no question in my mind that he would have an accident because they didn't know how to read him. There's things you do with the speed that you drive, the positioning of your car, that you're constantly like in the head of the other drivers. And seeing him not knowing how to do that and having to be taught explicitly, okay, you have to be thinking about what the other driver is thinking, was a revelation to me. I was stunned. So creating kind of theories of mind of the other. Theories of mind of the other cars. Yeah, yeah. Which I just hadn't heard discussed in the self driving car talks that I've been to. Since then, there's some people who do consider those kinds of issues, but it's way more subtle than I think there's a little bit of work involved with that when you realize like when you especially focus not on other cars, but on pedestrians, for example, it's literally staring you in the face. So then when you're just like, how do I interact with pedestrians? Pedestrians, you're practically talking to an octopus at that point. They've got all these weird degrees of freedom. You don't know what they're gonna do. They can turn around any second. But the point is, we humans know what they're gonna do. Like we have a good theory of mind. We have a good mental model of what they're doing. And we have a good model of the model they have a view and the model of the model of the model. Like we're able to kind of reason about this kind of, the social like game of it all. The hope is that it's quite simple actually, that it could be learned. That's why I just talked to the Waymo. I don't know if you know that company. It's Google South Africa. They, I talked to their CTO about this podcast and they like, I rode in their car and it's quite aggressive and it's quite fast and it's good and it feels great. It also, just like Tesla, Waymo made me change my mind about like, maybe driving is easier than I thought. Maybe I'm just being speciest, human centric, maybe. It's a speciest argument. Yeah, so I don't know. But it's fascinating to think about like the same as with reading, which I think you just said. You avoided the question, though I still hope you answered it somewhat. You avoided it brilliantly. It is, there's blind spots as artificial intelligence, that artificial intelligence researchers have about what it actually takes to learn to solve a problem. That's fascinating. Have you had Anca Dragan on? Yeah. Okay. She's one of my favorites. So much energy. She's right. Oh, yeah. She's amazing. Fantastic. And in particular, she thinks a lot about this kind of, I know that you know that I know kind of planning. And the last time I spoke with her, she was very articulate about the ways in which self driving cars are not solved. Like what's still really, really hard. But even her intuition is limited. Like we're all like new to this. So in some sense, the Elon Musk approach of being ultra confident and just like plowing. Put it out there. Putting it out there. Like some people say it's reckless and dangerous and so on. But like, partly it's like, it seems to be one of the only ways to make progress in artificial intelligence. So it's, you know, these are difficult things. You know, democracy is messy. Implementation of artificial intelligence systems in the real world is messy. So many years ago, before self driving cars were an actual thing you could have a discussion about, somebody asked me, like, what if we could use that robotic technology and use it to drive cars around? Like, isn't that, aren't people gonna be killed? And then it's not, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, that's not what's gonna happen. I said with confidence, incorrectly, obviously. What I think is gonna happen is we're gonna have a lot more, like a very gradual kind of rollout where people have these cars in like closed communities, right, where it's somewhat realistic, but it's still in a box, right? So that we can really get a sense of what, what are the weird things that can happen? How do we, how do we have to change the way we behave around these vehicles? Like, it's obviously requires a kind of co evolution that you can't just plop them in and see what happens. But of course, we're basically popping them in and see what happens. So I was wrong, but I do think that would have been a better plan. So that's, but your intuition, that's funny, just zooming out and looking at the forces of capitalism. And it seems that capitalism rewards risk takers and rewards and punishes risk takers, like, and like, try it out. The academic approach to let's try a small thing and try to understand slowly the fundamentals of the problem. And let's start with one, then do two, and then see that. And then do the three, you know, the capitalist like startup entrepreneurial dream is let's build a thousand and let's. Right, and 500 of them fail, but whatever, the other 500, we learned from them. But if you're good enough, I mean, one thing is like, your intuition would say like, that's gonna be hugely destructive to everything. But actually, it's kind of the forces of capitalism, like people are quite, it's easy to be critical, but if you actually look at the data at the way our world has progressed in terms of the quality of life, it seems like the competent good people rise to the top. This is coming from me from the Soviet Union and so on. It's like, it's interesting that somebody like Elon Musk is the way you push progress in artificial intelligence. Like it's forcing Waymo to step their stuff up and Waymo is forcing Elon Musk to step up. It's fascinating, because I have this tension in my heart and just being upset by the lack of progress in autonomous vehicles within academia. So there's a huge progress in the early days of the DARPA challenges. And then it just kind of stopped like at MIT, but it's true everywhere else with an exception of a few sponsors here and there is like, it's not seen as a sexy problem, Thomas. Like the moment artificial intelligence starts approaching the problems of the real world, like academics kind of like, all right, let the... They get really hard in a different way. In a different way, that's right. I think, yeah, right, some of us are not excited about that other way. But I still think there's fundamentals problems to be solved in those difficult things. It's not, it's still publishable, I think. Like we just need to, it's the same criticism you could have of all these conferences in Europe, CVPR, where application papers are often as powerful and as important as like a theory paper. Even like theory just seems much more respectable and so on. I mean, machine learning community is changing that a little bit. I mean, at least in statements, but it's still not seen as the sexiest of pursuits, which is like, how do I actually make this thing work in practice as opposed to on this toy data set? All that to say, are you still avoiding the three books question? Is there something on audio book that you can recommend? Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've read a lot of really fun stuff. In terms of books that I find myself thinking back on that I read a while ago, like that stood the test of time to some degree. I find myself thinking of program or be programmed a lot by Douglas Roschkopf, which was, it basically put out the premise that we all need to become programmers in one form or another. And it was an analogy to once upon a time we all had to become readers. We had to become literate. And there was a time before that when not everybody was literate, but once literacy was possible, the people who were literate had more of a say in society than the people who weren't. And so we made a big effort to get everybody up to speed. And now it's not 100% universal, but it's quite widespread. Like the assumption is generally that people can read. The analogy that he makes is that programming is a similar kind of thing, that we need to have a say in, right? So being a reader, being literate, being a reader means you can receive all this information, but you don't get to put it out there. And programming is the way that we get to put it out there. And that was the argument that he made. I think he specifically has now backed away from this idea. He doesn't think it's happening quite this way. And that might be true that it didn't, society didn't sort of play forward quite that way. I still believe in the premise. I still believe that at some point, the relationship that we have to these machines and these networks has to be one of each individual can, has the wherewithal to make the machines help them. Do the things that that person wants done. And as software people, we know how to do that. And when we have a problem, we're like, okay, I'll just, I'll hack up a Pearl script or something and make it so. If we lived in a world where everybody could do that, that would be a better world. And computers would be, have, I think less sway over us. And other people's software would have less sway over us as a group. In some sense, software engineering, programming is power. Programming is power, right? Yeah, it's like magic. It's like magic spells. And it's not out of reach of everyone. But at the moment, it's just a sliver of the population who can commune with machines in this way. So I don't know, so that book had a big impact on me. Currently, I'm reading The Alignment Problem, actually by Brian Christian. So I don't know if you've seen this out there yet. Is this similar to Stuart Russell's work with the control problem? It's in that same general neighborhood. I mean, they have different emphases that they're concentrating on. I think Stuart's book did a remarkably good job, like just a celebratory good job at describing AI technology and sort of how it works. I thought that was great. It was really cool to see that in a book. I think he has some experience writing some books. You know, that's probably a possible thing. He's maybe thought a thing or two about how to explain AI to people. Yeah, that's a really good point. This book so far has been remarkably good at telling the story of sort of the history, the recent history of some of the things that have happened. I'm in the first third. He said this book is in three thirds. The first third is essentially AI fairness and implications of AI on society that we're seeing right now. And that's been great. I mean, he's telling the stories really well. He went out and talked to the frontline people whose names were associated with some of these ideas and it's been terrific. He says the second half of the book is on reinforcement learning. So maybe that'll be fun. And then the third half, third third, is on the super intelligence alignment problem. And I suspect that that part will be less fun for me to read. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting problem to talk about. I find it to be the most interesting, just like thinking about whether we live in a simulation or not, as a thought experiment to think about our own existence. So in the same way, talking about alignment problem with AGI is a good way to think similar to like the trolley problem with autonomous vehicles. It's a useless thing for engineering, but it's a nice little thought experiment for actually thinking about what are like our own human ethical systems, our moral systems to by thinking how we engineer these things, you start to understand yourself. So sci fi can be good at that too. So one sci fi book to recommend is Exhalations by Ted Chiang, bunch of short stories. This Ted Chiang is the guy who wrote the short story that became the movie Arrival. And all of his stories just from a, he was a computer scientist, actually he studied at Brown. And they all have this sort of really insightful bit of science or computer science that drives them. And so it's just a romp, right? To just like, he creates these artificial worlds with these by extrapolating on these ideas that we know about, but hadn't really thought through to this kind of conclusion. And so his stuff is, it's really fun to read, it's mind warping. So I'm not sure if you're familiar, I seem to mention this every other word is I'm from the Soviet Union and I'm Russian. Way too much to see us. My roots are Russian too, but a couple generations back. Well, it's probably in there somewhere. So maybe we can pull at that thread a little bit of the existential dread that we all feel. You mentioned that you, I think somewhere in the conversation you mentioned that you don't really pretty much like dying. I forget in which context, it might've been a reinforcement learning perspective. I don't know. No, you know what it was? It was in teaching my kids to drive. That's how you face your mortality, yes. From a human beings perspective or from a reinforcement learning researchers perspective, let me ask you the most absurd question. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? The meaning of life on this spinning rock. I mean, I think reinforcement learning researchers maybe think about this from a science perspective more often than a lot of other people, right? As a supervised learning person, you're probably not thinking about the sweep of a lifetime, but reinforcement learning agents are having little lifetimes, little weird little lifetimes. And it's hard not to project yourself into their world sometimes. But as far as the meaning of life, so when I turned 42, you may know from, that is a book I read, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that that is the meaning of life. So when I turned 42, I had a meaning of life party where I invited people over and everyone shared their meaning of life. We had slides made up. And so we all sat down and did a slide presentation to each other about the meaning of life. And mine was balance. I think that life is balance. And so the activity at the party, for a 42 year old, maybe this is a little bit nonstandard, but I found all the little toys and devices that I had where you had to balance on them. You had to like stand on it and balance, or a pogo stick I brought, a rip stick, which is like a weird two wheeled skateboard. I got a unicycle, but I didn't know how to do it. I now can do it. I would love watching you try. Yeah, I'll send you a video. I'm not great, but I managed. And so balance, yeah. So my wife has a really good one that she sticks to and is probably pretty accurate. And it has to do with healthy relationships with people that you love and working hard for good causes. But to me, yeah, balance, balance in a word. That works for me. Not too much of anything, because too much of anything is iffy. That feels like a Rolling Stones song. I feel like they must be. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you can strike a balance. Yeah, I think that's how it goes, Michael. I'll write you a parody. It's a huge honor to talk to you. This is really fun. Oh, no, the honor's mine. I've been a big fan of yours, so can't wait to see what you do next in the world of education, in the world of parody, in the world of reinforcement learning. Thanks for talking to me. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Michael Littman, and thank you to our sponsors, SimpliSafe, a home security company I use to monitor and protect my apartment, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, Masterclass, online courses that I enjoy from some of the most amazing humans in history, and BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Groucho Marx. If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Michael Littman: Reinforcement Learning and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #144

The following is a conversation with Matthew Johnson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at John Hopkins, and is one of the top scientists in the world conducting seminal research on psychedelics. This was one of the most eye opening and fascinating conversations I've ever had on this podcast. I'm sure I'll talk with Matt many more times. Quick mention of a sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to a new sponsor, Brave, a fast browser that feels like Chrome but has more privacy preserving features. Neuro, the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee, I'm just now realizing how ironic the set of sponsors are. And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that psychedelics is an area of study that is fascinating to me in that it gives hints that much of the magic of our experience arises from just a few chemical interactions in the brain and that the nature of that experience can be expanded through the tools of biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The fact that a world class scientist and researcher like Matt can apply rigor to our study of this mysterious and fascinating topic is exciting to me beyond words. As is the case with any of my colleagues who dare to venture out into the darkness of all that is unknown about the human mind with both an openness of first principle thinking and the rigor of the scientific method. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Matthew Johnson. Can you give an introduction to psychedelics, like a whirlwind overview? Maybe what are psychedelics and what are the kinds of psychedelics out there and in whatever way you find meaningful to categorize? Yeah, you can categorize them by their chemical structure. So, phenethylamines, tryptamines, ergolines, that is less of a meaningful way to classify them. I think that their pharmacological activity, their receptor activities are the best way. Well, let me start even broader than that because there I'm talking about the classic psychedelics. So, broadly speaking, when we say psychedelic, that refers to, for most people, a broad number of compounds that work in different pharmacological ways. So, it includes the so called classic psychedelics. That includes psilocybin and psilocin, which are in mushrooms, LSD, dimethyltryptamine or DMT, it's in ayahuasca, people can smoke it too, mescaline, which is in peyote in San Pedro, cactus. And those all work by hitting a certain subtype of serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor. They act as agonists at that receptor. Other compounds like PCP, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, they all are more broadly speaking called psychedelics, but they work by very different ways pharmacologically. And they have some different effects, including some subjective effects, even though there's enough of an overlap in the subjective effects that, you know, people informally refer to them as psychedelic. And I think what that overlap is, you know, compared to say, you know, caffeine and cocaine and, you know, Ambien, et cetera, other psychoactive drugs is that they have strong effects in altering one's sense of reality and including the sense of self. And I should throw in there that cannabis, more historically, like in the 70s, has been called a minor psychedelic. And I think with that latter definition, it does fit that definition, particularly if one doesn't have a tolerance. So you mentioned serotonin, so most of the effect comes from something around like the chemistry around neurotransmitters and so on. So it's chemical interactions in the brain, or is there other kinds of interactions that have this kind of perception and self awareness altering effects? Well, as far as we know, all of the psychedelics of all the different classes we've talked about, their major activity is caused by receptor level events. So either acting at the post receptor side of the synapse. So in other words, neurotransmission operates by, you know, one neuron releasing neurotransmitter into a synapse, a gap between the two neurons. And then the other neuron receives, it has receptors that receives, and then there can be an activation caused by that. So it's like a pitcher and a catcher. So all of the major psychedelics work by either acting as a pitcher, mimicking a pitcher or a catcher. So for example, the classic psychedelics, they fit into the same catcher's mitt on the post receptor, post synaptic receptor side as serotonin itself. But they do a slightly different thing to the cell, to the neuron than serotonin does. There's a different signaling pathway after that initial activation. Something like MDMA works at the presynaptic side, the pitcher side. And basically it floods the synapse or the gap between the cells with a bunch of serotonin, the natural neurotransmitter. So it's like the pitcher in a baseball game all of a sudden just starts throwing balls like every second. Everything we're talking about is it often more natural, meaning found in the natural world. You mentioned cacti, cactus, or is it chemically manufactured, like artificially in the lab? So the classic psychedelics, there's... What are the classics? So using terminology that's not chemical terminology, not like the terminology you see in titles of papers, academic papers, but more sort of common parlance. Right, it would be good to kind of define their effects, like how they're different. And so it includes LSD, psilocybin, which is in mushrooms, mescaline, DMT. Which one is mescaline? Mescaline is in the different cacti. So the one most people will know is peyote, but it also shows up in San Pedro or Peruvian torch. And all of these classic psychedelics, they have, at the right dose, and typically they have very strong effects on one sense of reality and one sense of self. Some of the things that makes them different than other more broadly speaking psychedelics, like MDMA and others, is that they're, at least the major examples, there's some exotic ones that differ, but the ones I've talked about are extremely safe at the physiological level. Like LSD and psilocybin, there's no known lethal overdose, unless you have like really severe heart disease, because it modestly raises your blood pressure. So same person that might be hurt traveling snow or going up the stairs, that could have a cardiac event because they've taken one of these drugs. But for most people, someone could take a thousand times what the effective dose is, and it's not gonna cause any organ damage, affect the brainstem, make them stop breathing. So in that sense, they're freakishly safe at the physiolo... I would never call any compounds safe, because there's always a risk. They're freakishly safe at the physiological level. I mean, you can hardly find anything over the counter like that, I mean, aspirin's not like that. Caffeine is not like that. Most drugs, you take five, 10, 20, maybe it takes 100, but you get to some times the effective dose, and it's gonna kill you or cause some serious damage. And so that's something that's remarkable about most of these classic psychedelics. That's incredible, by the way, that you can go on a hell of a journey in the mind, like probably transformative, potentially in a deeply transformative way, and yet there's no dose that in most people would have a lethal effect. That's kind of fascinating. There's this duality between the mind and the body. It's like, it's the... Okay, sorry if I bring them up way too much, but David Goggins is like, the kind of things you go on in the long run, like the hell you might go through in your mind. Your mind can take a lot, and you can go through a lot with the mind, and the body will just be its own thing. You can go through hell, but after a good night's sleep, be back to normal, and the body's always there. So bringing it back to Goggins, it's like you can do that without even destroying your knee or whatever, or coming close and riding that line. That's true. So the unfortunate thing about the running, which he uses running to test the mind, so the aspect of running that is negative, in order to test the mind, you really have to push the body, take the body through a journey. I wish there was another way of doing that in the physical exercise space. I think there are exercises that are easier on the body than others, but running sure is a hell of an effective way to do it. And one of the ways that where it differs is that you're unlike exercise, you're essentially, most exercise, to really get to those intense levels, you really need to be persistent about it. I mean, it'll be intense if you're really out of shape, just jogging for five minutes, but to really get to those intense levels, you need to have the dedication. And so some of the other ways of altering subjective effects or states of consciousness, take that type of dedication. Psychedelics though, I mean, someone takes the right dose. They're strapped into the rollercoaster and something interesting is gonna happen. And I really like what you said about that distinction between the mind or the contrast between the mind effects and the body effects, because I think of this, I do research with all the drugs, caffeine, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, legal, illegal. Most of these drugs, thinking about say cocaine and methamphetamine, you can't give to a regular user, you can't safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user is gonna say, oh man, that's like, that's the strongest coke I've ever had, you know, because you get it past the ethics committee and you need approval. And I wouldn't wanna give someone something that's dangerous. So to go to those levels where they would say that, you would have to give something that's physiologically riskier, you know. Psilocybin or LSD, you can give a dose at the physiological level that is like very good chance it's gonna be the most intense psychological experience of that person's life and have zero chance for most people if you screen them of killing them. The big risk is behavioral toxicity, which is a fancy way of saying doing something stupid. I mean, you're really intoxicated, like if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height, just like plenty of people do on high doses of alcohol. And the other kind of unique thing about classic psychedelics is that they're not addictive, which is pretty much unheard of when it comes to so called drugs of abuse or drugs that people, at least at some frequency choose to take, you know, most of what we think of as drugs, you know, even caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, cannabis, most of these you can get into alcohol, you can get into a daily use pattern. And that's just extreme, so unheard of with psychedelics. Most people have taken these things on a daily basis, it's more of like they're building up the courage to do it and then they build up a tolerance or yeah, they're in college and they do it on a dare, can you take take acid seven days in a row and that type of thing rather than a self control issue where you have and say, oh God, I gotta stop taking this, I gotta stop drinking every night, I gotta cut down on the coke, whatever. So that's the classic psychedelics. What are the, what's a good term, modern psychedelics or more maybe psychedelics that are created in the lab? What else is there? Right, so MDMA is the big one. And I should say that with the classic psychedelics, that LSD is sort of, you can call it a semi synthetic because there's natural from both ergot and in certain seeds, morning glory seeds as one example, there's a very close, there are some very close chemical relatives of LSD. So LSD is close to what occurs in nature, but not quite. But then when we get into the other non classic psychedelics, probably the most prominent one is MDMA, people call it ecstasy, people call it Molly. And it is, it differs from classic psychedelics in a number of ways, it can be addictive, but not so. It's like, you can have cocaine on this end of the continuum and classic psychedelics here. Continuum of addiction. Continuum of addiction, you know, so it's certainly no cocaine. It's pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns, but it's possible and they can get into more like, you know, using once a week pattern where they can find it hard to stop, but it's somewhere in between mostly towards the, to the classic psychedelic side in terms of like relatively little addiction potential. But it's also more physiologically dangerous. I think that the, certainly the therapeutic use, it's showing really promising effects for treating PTSD and the models that are used, I think those are extremely acceptable when it comes to the risk benefit ratio that you see all throughout medicine. But nonetheless, we do know that at a certain dose and a certain frequency that MDMA can cause longterm damage to the serotonin system in the brain. So it doesn't have that level of kind of freakish bodily safety that the classic psychedelics do. And it has more of a heart load, a cardiovascular, I don't mean kind of emotion, I mean, in this sense, although it is very emotional and that's something unique about its subjective effects, subjective effects, but it's more of a oppressor. And the terminology you use instead of like a freakish capacities, allowing you from a researcher perspective, but a personal perspective too, of taking a journey with some of these psychedelics that is the heroic dose, as they say. So like these are tools that allow you to take a serious mental journey, whatever that is. That's what you mean. And with MDMA, there's a little bit, it starts entering this territory where you gotta be careful about the risks to the body potentially. So yes, that in the sense that you can't kind of push the dose up as high as you safely as one can, if they're in the right setting, like in our research as they can with the classic psychedelics. But probably more importantly, just the nature of the effects with MDMA aren't the full on psychedelic. It's not the full journey. So it's sort of a psychedelic with rose colored glasses on. A psychedelic that's more of, it's been called more of a heart trip than a head trip. The nature of reality doesn't unravel as frequently as it does with classic psychedelics. But you're able to more directly sense your environment. So your perception system still works. It's not completely detached from reality with MDMA. That's true, relatively speaking. That said at most doses of classic psychedelics, you still have a tether to reality. Changes a little bit when you're talking about smoking DMT or smoking 5 methoxy DMT, which are some interesting examples we could talk more about. But with MDMA, for example, it's very rare to have what's called an ego loss experience or a sense of transcendental unity, where one really seemingly loses the psychological construct of the self. But MDMA, it's very common for people to have this, they still are perceiving themselves as a self, but it's common for them to have this warmth, this empathy for humanity and for their friends and loved ones. So it's more, and you see those effects under the classic psychedelics, but that's a subset of what the classic psychedelics do. So I see MDMA in terms of its subjective effects is if you think about Venn diagrams, it's sort of MDMA is all within the classic psychedelics. So everything that you see on a particular MDMA session, sometimes a psilocybin session looks just like that, but then sometimes it's completely different with psilocybin. It's a little more narrowed in terms of the variability with MDMA. Is there something general to say about what the psychedelics do to the human mind? You mentioned kind of an ego loss experience in the space of Venn diagrams. If we're to like draw a big circle, what can we say about that big circle? In terms of people's report of subjective experience, probably one of the most general things we can say is that it expands that range. So many people come out of these sessions saying that they didn't know it was possible to have an experience like that. So there's an emphasis on the subjective experience that is there words that people put to it that capture that experience or is it something that just has to be experienced? Yeah, people like... As a researcher, that's an interesting question because you have to kind of measure the effects of this and how do you convert that into numbers? Right. That's the ultimate challenge. So is that possible to one, convert it into words and the second, convert the words into numbers somehow? So we do a lot of that with questionnaires, some of which are very psychometrically validated. So lots of numbers have been crunched on them. And there's always a limitation with questionnaires. I mean, subjective effects are subjective effects. Ultimately, it's what the person is reporting and that doesn't necessarily point towards a ground truth. So for example, if someone says that they felt like they touched another dimension or they felt like they sensed the reality of God or if they, I mean, just you name it, people's ontological views can sometimes shift. I think that's more about where they're coming from and I don't think it's the quintessential way in which they work. There's plenty of people that hold onto a completely naturalistic viewpoint and have profound and helpful experiences with these compounds. But the subjective effects can be so broad that for some people, it shifts their philosophical viewpoint more towards idealism, more towards thinking that the nature of reality might be more about consciousness than about material. That's a domain I'm very interested in. Right now, we have essentially zero to say about that in terms of validating those types of claims, but it's even interesting just to see what people say along those lines. So you're interested in saying like, can we more rigorously study this process of expansion? Like, what do we mean by this expansion of your sense of what is possible in the experiences in this world? Right, as much as what we can say about that through naturalistic psychology, especially as much as we can root it to solid psychological constructs and solid neuroscientific constructs. And I wonder what the impact is of the language that you bring to the table. So you mentioned about God or speaking of God, a lot of people are really into sort of theoretical physics these days at a very surface level and you can bring the language of physics, right? You can talk about quantum mechanics, you can talk about general relativity and curvature of space time and using just that language without a deep technical understanding of it to somehow start thinking like, sort of visualizing atoms in your head and somehow through that process because you have the language, using that language to kind of dissolve the ego, like realize like that we're just all little bits of physical objects that behave in mysterious ways. And so that has to do with the language. Like if you read a Sean Carroll book or something recently, it seems like it has a huge influence on the way you might experience, might perceive the world and might experience the alteration that psychedelics brings to your perception system. So I wonder like the language you bring to the table, how that affects the journey you go on with the psychedelics. I think very much so. And I think there's, I'm a little concerned some of the science is going a little too far in the direction of around the edges, speaking about it changing beliefs in this sense or that sense about particular, in particular domains. And I think what really what a lot of what's going on is what you just discussed. It's the priors coming into it. So if you've been reading a lot of physics, then you might bring up like space time and interpret the experience in that sense. I mean, it's not uncommon for people come out talking about visions of the, it's not the most typical thing, but it's come up in sessions I've guided, the Big Bang and this sort of nature of reality. I think probably that the best way to think about these experiences is that, and the best evidence, even though we're in our infancy and understanding it, they really tap into more general psychological mechanisms. I think one of the best arguments is they reduce the influence of our priors, of what we bring into all of the assumptions that we all that we're essentially, especially as adults, we're riding on top of heuristic after heuristic to get through life. And you need to do that. And that's a good thing. And that's extremely efficient and evolution has shaped that, but that comes at an expense. And it seems that these experiences will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness. And so one can be both less influenced by their prior assumptions, but still nonetheless the nature of the experience can be influenced by what they've been exposed to in the world. And sometimes they can get it in a deeper way. Like maybe they've read, I mean, I had a philosophy professor one time as a participant in a high dose psilocybin study. And I remember him saying, my God, it's like Hegel's opposites defining each other. Like, I get it. I've taught this thing for years and years and years. Like, I get it now. And so like that, you know, and even at the psychological, emotional level, like the cancer patients we worked with, you know, they told themselves a million times over this people trying to quit smoking, I need to quit smoking. Oh, I'm ruining my life with this cancer. I'm still healthy. I should be getting out. I'm letting this thing defeat me. It's like, yeah, you told yourself that in your head, but sometimes they had these experiences and they kind of feel it in their heart. Like they really get it. So in some sense that you bring some prize to the table, but psychedelics allow you to acknowledge them and then throw them away. So like one popular terminology around this in the engineering space is first principles thinking that Elon Musk, for example, espouses a lot. Let me ask a fun question before we return to a more serious discussion. With Elon Musk as an example, but it could be just engineers in general, do you think there's a use for psychedelics to take a journey of rigorous first principles thinking? So like throwing away, we're not talking about throwing away assumptions about the nature of reality in terms of like our philosophy of the way we live day to day life, but we're talking about like how to build a better rocket or how to build a better car or how to build a better social network or all those kinds of things, engineering questions. I absolutely think there's huge potential there. And there was some research in the late 60s, early 70s that were, it was very early and not very rigorous in terms of methodology, but it was consistent with the, I mean, there's just countless anecdotes of folks. I mean, people have argued that just, Silicon Valley was largely influenced by psychedelic experience. I remember the, I think the person that came up with the concept of freeware or shareware, it's like it kind of was generated out of or influenced by psychedelic experience. So to this, I think there's incredible potential there and we know really next, there's no rigorous research on that, but. Is there anecdotal stuff like with Steve Jobs? I think there's stories, right? In your exploration of that, is there something a little bit more than just stories? Is there like a little bit more of a solid data points, even if they're just experiential like anecdotes? Is there something that you draw inspiration from like in your intuition? Because we'll talk about, you're trying to construct studies that are more rigorous around these questions. But is there something you draw inspiration from, from the past, from the 80s and the 90s and Silicon Valley, that kind of space? Or is it just like you have a sense based on everything you've learned and these kind of loose stories that there's something worth digging at? I am influenced by the, gosh, the just incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these. I mean, Carey Mullis, he invented PCR. I mean, absolutely revolutionized biological sciences. He says he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize for him. He said he wouldn't have come up with that had he not had psychedelic experiences. Now, he's an interesting character. People should read his autobiography because you could point to other things he was into. But I think that speaks to the casting your nets wide and this mental flex, more of these general mechanisms where sometimes if you cast your nets really wide and it's gonna depend on the person and their influences, but sometimes you come up with false positives. You connect the dots where maybe you shouldn't have connected those dots, but I think that can be constrained. And so much of our, not only our personal psychological suffering, but our limitations academically and in terms of technology are because of the self imposed limitations and heuristics, these entrenched ways of thinking. Like those examples throughout the history of science where someone has come up with the paradigm, Kuhn's paradigm shifts. It's like, here's something completely different. This doesn't make sense by any of the previous models. And like, we need more of those. And then you need the right balance between that because so many of the novel crazy ideas are just bunk and that's what science is about separating them from the valid paradigm shifting ideas. But we need more paradigm shifting ideas like in a big way. And I think we could, I think you could argue that we've, because of the structure of academia and science in modern times, it heavily biases against those. Right, there's all kinds of mechanisms in our human nature that resist paradigm shift quite sort of obviously. So, and psychedelics, there could be a lot of other tools but it seems like psychedelics could be one set of tools that encourage paradigm shifting thinking. So like the first principles kind of thinking. So it's a kind of, you're at the forefront of research here. There's just kind of anecdotal stories. There's early studies. There's a sense that we don't understand very much but there's a lot of depth here. How do we get from there to where Elon and I can regularly, like I wake up every morning, I have deep work sessions where it's well understood like what dose to take. Like if I want to explore something where it's all legal, where it's all understood and safe, all that kind of stuff. How do we get from where we are today to there? Not speaking in terms of legality in the sense like policy making all that like laws and stuff, meaning like how do we scientifically understand this stuff well enough to get to a place where I can just take it safely in order to expand my thinking, like this kind of first principles thinking, which I'm in my personal life currently doing. Like how do I revolutionize particular several things? Like it seems like the only tools I have right now is just, just, but my mind going, doing the first principles like, wait, wait, wait, okay. Why has this been done this way? Can we do it completely differently? It seems like I'm still tethered to the priors that I bring to the table and I keep trying to untether myself. Maybe there's tools that can systematically help me untether. Yeah, well, we need experiments and that's tied to kind of the policy level stuff. And I should be clear, I would never encourage anyone to do anything illicitly. But yeah, in the future, we could see these compounds used for technical and scientific innovation. What we need are studies that are digging into that. Right now, most of what the funding, which is largely from philanthropy, not from the government, largely what it's for is treatment of mental disorders like addiction and depression, et cetera. But we need studies. One of the early initial stabs on this question decades ago was they took some architects and engineers and said, what problems have you been working on? Where have you been stuck for months like working on this damn thing and you're not getting anywhere, like your head's butting up against the wall. It's like, come in here, take, and I think it was 100 micrograms of LSD. So not a big session. And a little bit different model where they were actually working. It was a moderate enough dose where they could work on the problem during the session. I think probably, I'm an empiricist, so I'd like to see all the studies done. But the first thing I would do is like a really high dose session where you're not necessarily in front of your computer, which you can't really do on a really high dose. And then the work has been talked about, like you take a really high dose, you take a journey, and then the breakthroughs come from when you return from the journey and like integrate, quote unquote, that experience. I think that's where all the, again, we're babies at this point, but my gut tells me that it's the so called integration, the aftermath. We know that there's some different forms of neuroplasticity that are unfolding in the days following a psychedelics, at least in animals, probably going on humans. We don't know if that's related to the therapeutic effects. My gut tells me it is, although it's only part of the story, but we need big studies where we compare people, like let's get a hundred people like that, scientists that are working on a problem, and then randomize them too. And then I think you need even more credible, active controls or active placebo conditions to kind of tease this out. And then also in conjunction with that, and you can do this in the same study, you wanna combine that with more rigorous sort of experimental models where we actually give there a problem solving tasks that we know, for example, that you tend to do better on after you've gotten a good night's sleep versus not. And my sense is there's a relationship there. People go back to first principles, questioning those first principles they're operating under and getting away from their priors in terms of creative problem solving. And so I think wrap those things and you could speak a little more rigorously about those because ultimately, if everyone's bringing their own problem, that's more in the face valid side, but you can't dig in as much and get as much experimental power and speak to the mechanisms as you can with having everyone do the same sort of canned problem solving task. So we've been speaking about psychedelics generally. Is there one you find from the scientific perspective or maybe even philosophical perspective most fascinating to study? Therapeutically, I'm most interested in psilocybin and LSD and I think we need to do a lot more with LSD because it's mainly been psilocybin in the modern era. I've recently gotten a grant from the Heftar Research Institute to do an LSD study. So I haven't started it yet, but I'm going through the paperwork and everything. Therapeutic meaning there's some issue and you're trying to treat that issue. Right, right. In terms of just like, what's the most fascinating, understanding the nature of these experiences, if you really wanna like wrap your head around what's going on when someone has a completely altered sense of reality and sense of self, there I think you're talking about the high dose, either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection, which all kind of, they're very similar pharmacologically, of DMT and 5 methoxy DMT. This is like when people, this is what, I don't know if you're familiar with Terrence McKenna, he would talk a lot about smoking DMT, Joe Rogan has talked a lot about that. People will say that, and there's a close relative called 5 methoxy DMT. Most people who know the terrain will say that's an order of magnitude or orders of magnitude beyond, I mean, anything one could get from even a high dose of psilocybin or LSD. I think it's a question about whether, you know, how therapeutic, I think there is a therapeutic potential there, but it's probably not as sure of a bet because one goes so far out, it's almost like they're not contemplating their relationship and their direction in life. They are like reality is ripping apart at the seams and the very nature of the self and of the sense of reality. And the amazing thing about these compounds and same to a less degree with oral psilocybin and LSD is that unlike some other drugs that really throw you far out there, you know, anesthetics and even alcohol, like as reality starts to become different at higher and higher doses, there's this numbing, there's this sort of, there's this ability for the sense of being the center, having a conscious experience that's memorable, that is maintained throughout these classic psychedelic experiences. Like one can go as far, so far out while still being aware of the experience and remembering the experience. Interesting, so being able to carry something back. Right. Can you dig in a little deeper, like what is DMT, how long is the trip usually, like how much do we understand about it? Is there something interesting to say about just the nature of the experience and what we understand about it? One of the common methods for people to use it is to smoke it or vaporize it. And it usually takes, this is a pretty good kind of description of what it might feel like on the ground. The caveat is it's a completely insufficient description that someone's gonna be listening to. It's like nothing you could say is gonna come close. But it'll take about three big hits, inhalations, in order to have what people call a breakthrough dose. And there's no great definition of that, but basically meaning moving away from, not just having the typical psilocybin or LSD experience where like things are radically different, but you're still basically a person in this reality to go in somewhere else. And so that'll typically take like three hits. And this stuff comes on like a freight train. So one takes a hit and around the time of the first exhalation, so we're talking about a few seconds in, or maybe just sometime between the first and the second hit, like it'll start to come on. And they're already up to, let's say, what they might get from a 30 milligram or 300 microgram LSD trip, a big trip. They're already there at the second hit, but their consciousness is geared, this is like acceleration, not speed, to speak of physics. It's like those receptors are getting filled like that and they're going from zero to 60 in like Tesla time. And at the second hit, again, they're at maybe the strongest psychedelic experience they've ever had. And then if they can take that third hit, and some people can't, they're propelled into this other reality. And the nature of that other reality will differ depending on who you ask, but folks will often talk about it. And we've done some survey research on this. Entities of different types, elves tend to pop up. The caveat is that I strongly presume all of this is culturally influenced, but thinking more about the psychology and the neuroscience, there is probably something fundamental, like for someone that might be colored as elves, others that might be colored as, Terrence McKenna called them self dribbling basketballs. For someone else, it might be little animals or someone else, it might be aliens. I think that probably is dependent on who they are and what they've been exposed to. But just the fact that one has this sense that they're surrounded by autonomous entities. Right, intelligent autonomous entities. Right, and people come back with stories that are just astonishing. Like there's communication between these, communication between these entities and often they're telling them things that the person says are self validating, but it seems like it's impossible. Like it really seems like, and again, this is what people say oftentimes, that it really is like downloading some intelligence from a higher dimension or some whatever metaphor you wanna use. Sometimes these things come up in dreams like someone is exposed to something that, I've had this in a dream, where it seems like what they are being exposed to is physically impossible, but yet at the same time self validating, it seems true. Like they really are figuring something out. Of course, the challenge is to say something in concrete terms after the experience where you could verify that in any way. And I'm not familiar of any examples of that. Well, there's a sense in which I suppose the experience is like you're a limited cognitive creature that knows very little about the world and here's a chance to communicate with much wiser entities that in a way that you can't possibly understand are trying to give you hints of deeper truths. And so there's that kind of sense that you can take something back, but you can't where our cognition is not capable to fully grasp the truth. We'll just get a kind of sense of it and somehow that process is mind expanding that there's a greater truth out there. That seems like what from the people I've heard talk about that seems to be what it is. And that's so fascinating that there's fundamentally to this whole thing is a communication between an entity that is other than yourself, entities. So it's not just like a visual experience like you're like floating through the world is there's other beings there, which is kind of, I don't know. I don't know what to sort of, from a person who likes Freud and Carl Jung, I don't know what to think about that. That being of course from one perspective is just you looking in the mirror. But it could also be from another perspective like actually talking to other beings. Yeah, you mentioned Jung and I think he's particularly interesting and it kind of points to something I was thinking about saying is that, I think what might be going on from a naturalistic perspective. So regardless, whether or not there are, it doesn't depend on autonomous entities out there. What might be happening is that just the associative net, the level of learning, the comprehension might be so beyond what someone is used to that the only way for the nervous system, for the aware sense of self to orient towards it is all by metaphor. And so I do think, when we get into these realms as a strong empiricist, I think we always gotta be careful and be as grounded as possible, but I'm also willing to speculate and sort of cast the nets wide with caveat. But I think of things like archetypes and it's plausible that there are certain stories, there are certain, we've gone through millions of years of evolution. It may be that we have certain characters and stories that our central nervous system is sort of wired to tend to. Yeah, those stories, we carry those stories in us. Right. And this unlocks them in a certain kind of way. And we think about stories. Like our sense of self is basically, narrative self is a story. And we think about the world of stories. This is why metaphors are always more powerful than sort of laying out all the details all the time, speaking in parables. It's like, if you really get some, this is why, as much as I hate it, if you're presenting to Congress or something and you have all the best data in the world, it's not as powerful as that one anecdote as the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session and it transformed her life. That's a story, that's meaningful. And so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change and experience happens with a DMT ingestion, these stories of entities, they might be that, stories that are constructed that is the closest, which is not to say the stories aren't real. I mean, I think we're getting to layers where it doesn't really, right. Yeah, but it's the closest we can come to making sense out of it. Because what we do know about these psychedelics, one of the levels beyond the receptor is that the brain is communicating it with itself in a massively different way. There's massive communication with areas that don't normally communicate. And so I think that comes with both, it's casting the nets wide. I think that comes with the insights and helpful novel ways of thinking. I do think it comes with false positives, that could be some of the delusion. And so when you're so far out there, like with the DMT experience, like maybe alien is the best way that the mind can wrap some arms around that. So I don't know how much you're familiar with Joe Rogan, but he does bring up DMT quite a bit. It's almost a meme, it is a meme. Have you ever, what is it, have you ever tried DMT? I mean, I think he talks about this experience of having met other entities and they were mocking him, I think, if I remember the experience correctly, like laughing at him and saying F you, F you, or something like that. I may be misremembering this, but there's a general mockery. And what he learned from that experience is that he shouldn't take himself too seriously. So it's the dissolution of the ego and so on. Like what do you think about that experience? And maybe if you have more general things about Joe's infatuation with DMT and if DMT has that important role to play in popular culture in general. I'm definitely familiar with it. I remember telling you offline that when I first, the first time I learned who Joe Rogan was, it was probably 15 years ago. And I came upon a clip and I realized there's another person in the world who's into both DMT and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I think both those worlds have grown dramatically since and it's probably not such a special club these days. So he definitely got onto my radar screen quickly. You were into both before it was cool. Right, I mean, this is all relative because there's people that were before the late 90s and early 2000s who were into it to say you're a Johnny come lately. But yeah, compared to where we're at now. But yet one of the things I always found fascinating by Joe's telling of his experiences I think is that they resemble very much Terrence McKenna's experiences with DMT and Joe has talked very much about Terrence McKenna and his experiences. If I had to guess, I would guess that probably just having heard Terrence McKenna talk about his experiences that that influenced the coloring of Joe's experience. It's funny how that works because I mean, that's why McKenna hasn't, I mean, poets and great orators give us the words to then like start to describe our experiences because our words are limited, our language is limited. And it's always nice to get some kind of nice poetry into the mix to allow us to put words to it. Right, but I also see some elements that seem to relate to Joe's psychology just from what I've seen from hours of watching him on his podcast is that he's a self critical guy. And I think with always his positive been, I'm always struck being a behavioral pharmacologist and no one else really says it about cannabis. I'll get back to the DMT thing about he likes the kind of the paranoid side of things. He's like, that's you radically examining yourself. It's like, that's not just a bad thing. That's you need to like look hard at yourself and something's making you uncomfortable, like dig into that. And like, that's his, it's sort of along the lines of Goggins with exercise. And it's like, yeah, like things, learning experiences aren't supposed to be easy. Like take advantage of these uncomfortable experience. It's why we call in our research in a safe context with psychedelics, they're not bad trips, they're challenging experiences. Yes, yeah, that's fascinating. Just that's the tiny tangent. It's always cool for me to hear him talk about marijuana, like weed as the paranoia, the anxiety or whatever that you experience as actually the fuel for the experience. Like I think he talks about smoking weed when he's writing. That's inspiring to me because then you can't possibly have a bad experience. I'm a huge fan of that. Like every experience is good. Right, which is very Goggins. Yeah, yeah, is it bad? Okay, all right, great, you know. Well, see Goggins is one side of that. He wants it bad. Like he wants the experience to be challenging always. But I mean like both are good. Like the few times of taking mushrooms, the experience was like everything was beautiful. There's zero challenging aspect to it. It was just like the world is beautiful and it gave me this deep appreciation of the world. I would say, so like that's amazing, but also ones that challenge you are also amazing. Like all the times I drink vodka, but that's another, let's not. So back to DMT. Yeah, Joe's treating cannabis as a psychedelic, which is something that I'd say like a lot of people treat it more like Xanax or like beer or vodka. But he's really trying to delve into those minor, it's been called a minor psychedelic. So with DMT, as you brought up, it's like the entity's mocking him. And it's like, you're not, I mean, this reminds me of him, him describing his, like writing his, or just his entire method of comedy. It's like, watch the tape of yourself. Don't just ignore it. Like that's where I screwed up. That's where I need to do better. This like sort of radical self examination, which I think our society is kind of getting away from because like, all the children win trophies type of thing. And it's like, no, no, don't go overboard, but like recognize when you've messed up. And so that's a big part of the psychedelic experience. Like people come out sometimes saying, my God, I need to say sorry to my mom. It's so obvious, or whatever interpersonal issue or like, my God, I'm not pulling enough weight around the house and helping my wife. And these things that are just obvious to them, the self criticism that can be a very positive thing if you act on it. You've mentioned addiction. Maybe we could take a little bit detour into a darker aspect of things, or not even darker, it's just an important aspect of things. What's the nature of addiction? You've mentioned some things within the big umbrella of psychedelics may be usually not addictive, but maybe MDMA, I think you said might have some addictive properties, but the point is stuff outside of the psychedelics umbrella can often be highly addictive. So you've studied addiction from several angles, one of which is behavioral economics. What have you understood about addiction? What is addiction from the biological physiological level to the psychological to whatever is the interesting way to talk about addiction? Yeah, and the lenses that I view addiction through very much are behavioral economic, but I also think they converge on, I think it's beautiful at the other end of the spectrum, sort of just a completely humanistic psychology perspective. It converges on what people come out of, 12 step meetings talking about. Can you say what is behavioral economics and what is humanistic psychology? Like, what do you mean by that? And more importantly, behavioral economics lens, what is that? Yeah, so behavioral economics, my definition of it is the application of economic principles, mostly microeconomic principles. So understanding the behavior of individual agents surrounding commodities in the marketplace, applying microeconomic types of analyses to non economic behavior. So basically at one point, like psychologists figured out that there's this whole other discipline that's been studying behavior, it just happened to be all focused on monetary behavior, spending and saving money, et cetera. But it comes with all of these like principles that can be wildly and fruitfully applied to understanding behavior. So for example, I've studied things like demand curve analysis of drug consumption. So I look at, for example, tobacco, cigarettes and nicotine products through the lens of demand curves. And in other words, at different prices, if there's different work requirements for being able to smoke cigarettes, sort of modeling price. Within that price data, there is some indication of addiction, how much the habits that you form around these particular drugs. It's one important dimension. So I think a particularly important one there is elasticity or inelasticity, two ends of the spectrum. So that's the price sensitivity. So for example, you could have something that's pretty price inelastic, like gasoline. So the price of gas at times can keep going up and Americans are just gonna pretty much buy the same amount of gas. Or maybe the price of gas doubles, but their consumption only decreases by 10%. So it's a sub proportional reduction. So that's an inelastic. And that changes, like you push the price up high enough. I mean, if it was $100 a gallon, it would eventually turn, the curve would turn and go downward more drastically and it would be elastic. But you can apply that to someone who, a regular cigarette smoker who was working for cigarette puffs, who's gone six hours without smoking. And you're asking questions like, how many times are they willing to pull this knob in the lab during this three hour session? I do a lot of work like this in order to earn a cigarette. How does the content of nicotine in that affect? It has the availability of nicotine replacement products like nicotine gum or eCigarettes affect those decisions. So it's a certain lens of, it's sort of a way to take the kind of the classic behavioral psychology definition of reinforcement, which is just basically reward. How much is this a good thing? And it kind of breaks that apart into a multi dimensional space. So it's not just the ideas reward or reinforcement is not unit dimensional. So for example, you can unpack that with demand curves. At a cheap price, you might prefer one good to another. So the classic example is luxury versus necessity. So diamonds versus toilet paper. So at those cheap prices, you can look at something called intensity of demand. If it was basically as cheap as possible, or essentially zero, how much would you buy of this good? But then you keep jacking up the price and you'll see, so diamonds will look like the better reward at that low price sort of intensity of demand side of things. But as you keep jacking up the price, you gotta have some toilet paper. And again, we can get into the whole bidet thing, but forget that, I know Joe's been pushing that too. You're gonna hang on and keep buying the toilet paper to a greater degree than you will the diamonds. So you'll see a crossing of demand curves. So what's the better reinforcer? What's the better reward? Depends on your price. And so that's an example of one way to look at addiction. So specifically drug consumption, which isn't all of addiction, but it's like in order for something to be addictive, it has to be a reward. And it has to compete with other rewards in your life. And one of the two main aspects of addiction in my view, and this doesn't map onto how the DSM, the psychiatry Bible defines addiction, which I think is largely bunk, but there's some value to have some common description, but it's how rewarding is it from this multi dimensional lens? And specifically, how does that rewarding value compete with other rewards, other consequences in your life? So it's not a problem if the use of that substance is rewarding. Okay, yeah, you like to have a couple of beers every once in a while, and it's like not a problem. But then you have the alcoholic who is drinking so much that it tanks their career, it ruins their marriage. It's in competition with these pro social aspects to their life. It's all about comparing to the other choices you're making, the other activities in your life. And if you evaluate it as a much higher reward than anything else, that becomes an addiction. Right, right. And so it's not just the rewarding value, but it's the relative rewarding value. And the other major aspect, again, from behavioral economics, that the thing that makes addiction is something called delayed discounting. So in economics, sometimes it's called time preference. It's what compound interest rates are based upon. It's the idea that delaying a good access to a good or a reward comes with a certain decrement to its value. So we'd all rather have things now than later. And we can study this at the individual level of, would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow? And when you do that, you get huge differences between addicted populations and non addicted, not just heroin and cocaine, but like just cigarette smokers, like normal everyday cigarette smokers. And even when you look at something like monetary rewards. And so you can go into the rabbit hole with this delayed discounting model. So it's not only those huge differences that seem to have a face valid aspect to it. Like the cigarette smoker is choosing this thing that's rewarding today, but I know it comes with increased risk of having these horrible consequences down the line. So it's this competition between what's good for me now and what's good for me later. And the other aspect about delayed discounting is that if you quantitatively map out that discounting curve over time, so you don't just do that $10 tomorrow, how much is it worth to you today? So you can say, what about nine? What about eight? What about $7? And you can titrate it to find that indifference point. And so we can say, aha, $10 tomorrow is worth $6 today. So it's by the one day it's decreased by 40%. We can do that also at one week and one month and one year and 10 years and map out that curve, get a shape of that curve. And one of the fascinating things about this is that whether you're talking about pigeons, making these types of choices between a little bit of food now or a little bit of food a minute from now or rats, or like dozens of species of animals tested, including humans, the tendency is pretty consistently that we discount hyperbolically rather than exponentially. And what exponentially means is that every unit of time is associated with the same proportional reduction. Every unit of delay is associated with the same, causes the same proportional reduction in value. And that's the way the compound interest rate works. Every day you get this sort of out of whatever values in there at the beginning of that day, you get this, we'll give you this amount of extra money to compensate you for that delay. But then the way that all animals tend to function is of this very different way where the reductions, the initial, that initial delay, so like one day's worth of delay, you see a much stronger discounting rate or reduction in value than you do over those. So you see the super proportional, then it changes to these lesser rates. And so the implication of that, I know I've gone like really into the weeds quantitatively, but what that means is that there's these preference reversals. When you have curves of that nature, the decay that's hyperbolic, it maps onto this phenomenon we see both in terms of how people deal with future rewards, but also how perception works. When two things are far away, whether it's physical distance or whether in terms of perception or whether it's in terms of time, when you're really far away, the value, the subjective value for that further, that delayed reward is larger. So for example, like, let's say we're talking about 360, 364 days from now, you can get $9 or 365 days a year. Now you get $10 and you're like, dude, it's like, it's a year, like no difference. Like I'll take, why not get one more dollar? You bring that same exact set of choices closer. Nothing's changed other than the time to both rewards. And it's like, would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow and plenty of people would say, eh, just about the same, let's go ahead and take it today. So you see this preference reversal. And so that's a model of addiction in the sense that consistently with true addiction, I would argue, you see this competition between molar and molecular utility. It's like interpersonal, like within the person competing agents. Someone sometimes has control of the bus that wants to do what's good for you in the short term. And someone at other times is in control of driving the bus and they want to do what's good for you in the long term. So you tell the, you're trying to quit and you see a doctor, you see your 12 step therapist and say, God, I know this stuff is killing me. Like, I'm really, I'm on the path, like I'm done. And that's when you're kind of in their office or wherever you're not, it's not around you. And then later on that day, your buddy says that, hey man, I just scored. I got it right here. Do you want it? And that reward is right in front of you. That's like bringing those two choices right in front of you. And it's like, hell yeah, I want to use. And then you can go through that cycle for like years of the person telling themselves, I want to quit. But then other times that same person is saying, I don't want to, you know, functionally, they're saying, I don't want to, because they're saying, yeah, like, yeah, give me some. So in the moment, it's very difficult to quit. And this isn't just something, this is something that has huge clinical ramifications with addiction, but it's like all humans do it. Anyone who's hit the snooze alarm in the morning, like the night before they realize, oh, I got to get up extra early tomorrow. That's what's ultimately better for me. So I'm going to set the alarm for, you know, 5 a.m. And it goes off at 5 a.m., you know, and then, so now those two consequences have come sooner and it's like, what the hell? And they hit the snooze alarm. And sometimes not just once, but then five minutes later and five minutes later, you know, and so, and it's why it's easier to exercise self control at the grocery store compared to in your fridge. Like if that snack is like 30 seconds away in your fridge, you're going to more likely yield to temptation than if it is further away. So then just take a step back to something you brought up earlier, the inelasticity of pricing. Is it from a perspective of the dealers, whether we're talking about cigarettes or maybe venturing slightly into the illegal realm, you know, of people who sell drugs illegally, they also have an economics to them that they set prices and all those kinds of things. Does addiction allow you to mess with the nature of pricing? Like, so I kind of assume that you meant that there's a correlation between things you're addicted to and the inelasticity of the price. So you can jack up the price. Is there something interesting to be said both for legal drugs and illegal drugs about the kind of price games you can play because the consumers of the product are addicted? Right, I mean, I think you just described it. Yeah, you can jack up the price and you know, some people are going to drop off, but the people, you know, and it's not dichotomous because you could just consume less, but some people are going to consume less and the people that are most addicted are going to keep, you know, I mean, you see this, they're going to keep purchasing. So you see this with cigarettes. And so it's interesting when you interface this with policy, like in one respect, heavily taxing cigarettes is a good thing. We know it keeps adolescents particularly price sensitive. So you definitely, people smoke less and especially kids smoke less when you keep cigarette prices high and you tax the hell out of them. But one of the downsides you've got to balance and keep in mind is that you disproportionately have working class, poor people. And then you get into a point where someone's spending, you know, a quarter of their paycheck on cigarettes. So they're going to smoke no matter what. And basically because they're addicted, they're going to smoke no matter what. And you're just, yeah, you're taxing their existence. Right, so you're making it worse for them. If they don't, if they are completely inelastic, you're actually making that person's life worse. Because we know that by interfering with the amount of money they have, you're interfering with the other pro social, the potential competitors to smoking, you know. And we know that when someone's in more impoverished environments and they have less sort of non drug alternatives, you know, the more likely they're going to stay addicted. So, you know. Is there data, this is interesting, from a scientific perspective of those same kind of games in illegal drugs? Sort of, because that's where most drug, I was, I mean, I don't know, maybe you can correct me, but it seems like most drugs are currently illegal. And so, but there's still an economics to them, obviously. That's the drug war and so on. Is there data on the setting of prices or like how good are the business people running the selling of drugs that are illegal? Are they all the same kind of rules apply from a behavioral economics perspective? I think so. I mean, they're basically, whether they're crunching the numbers or not, they're basically sensitive to that demand curve and they're doing the same thing that businesses do in a legal market. And, you know, you want to sell as much of a product to get as much money. You're looking more at the total income. So if you jack the price a little bit, you're going to get some reduction in consumption, but it may be that the total amount of money that you rake in is going to be more than, it's going to overcompensate for that. So you're willing to take, okay, I'm going to lose 10% of my customers, but I'm getting more than enough to compensate from that, from the extra money from the people who still are buying. So I think they're more, you know, and especially when we get to the lower, I wouldn't be surprised if people are crunching those numbers and looking at demand curves, maybe at the, you know, at the really high levels of the, you know, up the chain with the cartels and whatnot. I don't know, that wouldn't surprise me at all, but I think it's probably more implicit at the lower levels where something, you brought up drug policy. I will say that for years now, it's been this kind of unquestioned goal by, for example, the drug czar's office in the US to make the price of illegal drugs as high as possible without this kind of nuanced approach that, yeah, if you make, you know, for some people, if you make the price so high, you're actually making things worse. I mean, I'm all about reducing the problems associated with drugs and drug addictions. And part of that is the, are more direct consequences of those drugs themselves, but a whole lot is what you get from indirectly and, you know, sort of the, both for the individual and for society. So like making a poor person who doesn't have enough money for their kids, making them even poorer. So now you've made their children's future worse because they're growing up in deeper poverty because you've essentially levied a tax onto this person who's heavily addicted. But then at the societal level, you know, so everything we know about the drug war in terms of the heavy criminalization and filling up prisons and reducing employment and educational opportunities, which in the big picture, we know are the things that in a free market compete against some of the worst problems of addiction is actually having educational and employment opportunities. But when you give someone a felony, for example, you're pretty much guaranteeing they're never gonna go very high on the economic ladder. And so you're making drugs a better reward for that person's future. So this is a quick step into the policy realm. And I think for both you and I, I'm not sure you can correct me, but I'm more comfortable into studying the effects of drugs on the human behavior and human psychology versus like policy. It seems like a whole giant mess, but yeah, there's some libertarian candidates for president and just libertarian thinkers that had a nice thought experiment of possibly legalizing, I've spoken about possibly legalizing basically all drugs. In your intuition, do you think a world where all drugs are legal is a safer world or a less safe world for the users of those drugs? It really depends on what we mean by legalization. So this is one of my beefs with this, how these things are talked about. I mean, we have very few completely laissez faire, you know, legal drugs. So even caffeine is one of the few examples. So for example, caffeine and tea and coffee is in that realm. Like there's no limits, no one's testing, there's no laws, regulation at any level of how much caffeine you're allowed to buy or how much is in the product. But even like with this Starbucks, like nitro, there are rules with soda and with canned products, you can only put so much. In there, yeah. So this is FDA regulated. And it's kind of weird because there's a limit to sodas that's not there for energy drinks and other things. But, you know, so even caffeine, it depends on what product we're talking about. Like if you're like no dose and other caffeine products over the counter, like you can't just put 800 milligrams in there. The pills are like one or 200 milligrams. And so it's FDA regulated as an over counter drug. Some of the most dangerous drugs in society, I would say arguably one of the most dangerous classes of drugs is the volatile anesthetics, huffing. People huffing gasoline and, you know, airplane glue, toluene, whatnot, severely damaging to the nervous system. Pretty much legal, but there's some regulation in the sense that there's a warning label, like it's illegal to do it for, not that they're busting people for this, but, you know, it's against federal law to use this in a way other than intended type of, basically saying like, yeah, don't huff this, you know, your paint thinner or whatnot. It at least keeps people from selling it for that. Like, no, because they're gonna go after that person. They're not gonna be able to find the 12 year old who's huffing. So anyway, just as some extreme examples at the end. And then, you know, even the so called illegal, like schedule one drugs, psilocybin, we do plenty in terms of schedule two, which is ironically less restrictive than psilocybin, but methamphetamine and cocaine, I've done human research with. My research has been legal. So they're scheduled compounds, but they're not completely illegal. Like you can do research with them with the appropriate licenses and approval. So there really is no such thing. And like alcohol, well, it's illegal if you're 12 years old or 18 years old or 20 years old. And for anyone, it's illegal to be drinking it while you're driving. So there's always a nuance. It's not dichotomy. And I actually should admit, it's been on my to do list for a while to buy in Massachusetts, some like edible, or buy weed legally. Yeah, haven't done that in Massachusetts, let's put it this way. And I wonder what that experience is like, because I think it's fully legal in Massachusetts. And so I wonder what legal drugs look like to me. You know, I grew up with even weed being like, you know, it's like this forbidden thing, you know, not forbidden, but it's illegal. You know, most people, of course, I never partook, but most people I knew would attain it illegally. And so that big switch that's been happening across the country, there's like federal stuff going on to make marijuana legal federally. I'm half paying attention. There's some movement there. I mean, the House passed a bill that's not gonna be passed by the Senate, but yeah, it's progress. There's clearly a change. Right, it's moving in a trend. So that's the example of a drug that used to be illegal is now becoming more and more and more legal. So like, I wonder what like cocaine being legal looks like, what a society with cocaine being legal looks like, the rules around it, you know, the processes in which you can consume it in a safer way and be more educated about its consequences, be able to control dose and like purity much better, be able to get help for overdose. I don't know, all those kinds of things. It does in a utopian sense feel like legalizing drugs at least should be talked about and considered versus keeping them in the dark. I agree. But yeah, so that in your sense, it's possible that in 50 years we legalize all drugs and it makes for a better world. The way I like to talk about it is that I would say that it's possible and it would probably be a good thing if we regulate all drugs. How would you regulate like cocaine, for example? Is there ideas there? So yeah, and you were already, you know, going, you know, where I was going with that kind of first I described how there's always a new ones. And even like the cannabis in Massachusetts, federally illegal. So for example, if I was like, and I, you know, colleagues that do cannabis research where they get people high in the lab, like you're a federal funded researcher with NIH funds, you can't get that stuff from the dispensary because you're breaking a federal law. Even though the feds don't have the resources to go after, they don't want the controversy at this point to go after the individual users or even the sellers in those legal states. So there's always this nuance, but it's about the right regulation. So I think we already know enough that, for example, like I think safe injection sites for hard drugs makes a lot of sense. Like I wouldn't want heroin and cocaine at the convenience stores. And I don't think, maybe there's some extreme libertarians that want that. I think even the folks that identify as libertarians, probably most of them don't, well, I don't know. Like not all of them want that, you know? I think, you know, that as a form of regulation, like, look, if you're using these hard drugs on a regular basis, you're putting yourself at risk for lethal overdose. You're putting yourself at risk for catching HIV and hepatitis. If you're gonna do it, if you're doing it anyway, come to this place where at least you're not like, you know, like pulling the water out of like, you know, the puddle on the side of the street. Yeah, so it's done by professionals and those professionals are able to educate you also. So like a 711 clerk may not be both capable of helping you to inject the drug properly, but also won't be equipped to educate you at the negative consequences, all those kinds of things. That's a huge part of it, the education. But then I think with the opioids, like the big part of it is just like with naloxone, which is an antagonist, it goes into the receptor, it's called Narcan, that's the trade name, but it's what they revive people on an opioid overdose. That's almost completely effective. Like if there's a medical professional there and someone's ODing on an opioid, they're virtually guaranteed to live. Like that's remarkable that if 100% at the opioid crisis, you know, if all of those people right now that are dying were doing that in the presence of a medical professional, like even like a nurse with Narcan, there'd be basically almost no deaths. There's always some exceptions, but you know, almost no deaths, like that's staggering to me. So the idea that people are doing this, that we could have that level of positive effect without encouraging the drug. And this is where like you get into this like terrain of like sending the wrong message. And it's like, no, you can do that. You can say like, we're not encouraging this. In fact, probably one of the greatest advertisements for not getting hooked on heroin is like visiting a methadone clinic, visiting a safe injection site. Like this is not like an advertisement for getting hooked on this drug, but knowing that we can save people. Now you have a landscape here because a lot of times it's just like supervised injection, but you bring your own stuff, you know, you bring your own heroin, which could still be, you know, dirty and filled with fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives, which because of the incredible potency and the more difficulty measuring it, and some differences at the receptor, like you may be more likely, you are more likely on average to lethally overdose on it. You know, so you could, the level that's been more explored in Switzerland is in some places is you actually provide the drug itself and you supervise the injection. So I don't see. Do you like that idea? Yeah, the public health data are completely on the side of, there's really no credible evidence to this. If we allow that, we're sending the wrong message and everyone's gonna, I mean, I'm not showing up. Like, you know, and it's different by drug. Like, yeah, you legalize, you set up cannabis shops and some people are gonna say, so you go, I'm gonna go there. I don't think a whole lot of people are gonna go to one of these places and say, I'm gonna shoot up heroin for the first time. And even if like, you know, it's a country of 300 million people, like even if someone does that, you have to compare this to the every day people are dying from opioid overdoses. Like people's kids, people's uncles, people's like, these are real lives that are being shattered. So you just look at that. And then the other thing, and I know this from having done residential, even like non treatment research, where we just have a cocaine user or something, stay on our inpatient ward for a month and you really get to know them. And sometimes you see like, oftentimes that's the first time this person has had a discussion with a medical professional, any type of professional in their entire life around their drug use. Even if they're not looking to quit. And it's like, you know, you could imagine that in the safe injection settings where it's like, it might be a year into treatment and they're like, you know, doc, I know you're not the cops. Like you really care for me. Like, I think I'm ready to try that methadone thing. I think I'm really, I think I wanna be done. I'm really patient about it, yeah. Yeah, they get to trust the people and realize that they're there cause they truly like, they have a compassion, a love for this community, like as human beings, and they don't want people to die. And you get real human connections and that, and again, like those are the conditions where people are gonna ultimately seek treatment and not everyone always will, but you're gonna get that. And then, you know, you're gonna get people like looking into treatment options sometimes, you know, maybe it's years into the treatment. So it's like, they're just all of these indirect benefits that I think at that level, I don't know if you'd call that legalizing, you know, I think again, at least well regulated. Right, whatever that word is. Yeah, well regulated, but out in the open. Right, minimizing as many harms as we can while not encouraging. I mean, we don't encourage people to drink all the, I mean, people die every year from caffeine overdose. Like, you know, there's different ways to like, you know, just by allowing something doesn't mean we're sending the message that, you know, by saying we're not gonna give you a felony, which is actually often the penalty for psychedelics. I just actually testified for the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, the Assembly in New Jersey. And just to move psilocybin from a felony to misdemeanor, they use different language in New Jersey, it's weird, but like the equivalent of felony and misdemeanor. And that was like, two people didn't vote for that on this committee because it was might, one of them said it might be sending the wrong message. And it's like, a felony, I mean, there's real harms. Like, that's the scarlet letter the rest of your life. You're stuck at the lower ends of the employment ladder. You're not gonna get, you know, loans for education, all of this, maybe because of a stupid mistake you made once as a 19 year old. Doing something that like, you know, a presidential candidate could have done and admitted to and had no problem, you know? Yeah, what drug is the most addictive, the most dangerous in your view? Not maybe, like not technically, like specifically which drug, but more like in our society today, what is a highly problematic drug? We talked about psychedelics not being that addictive on the other flip side of that. You mentioned cocaine, is that the top one? Is there something else? That's a concern to you? It depends, and you've already alluded to this nuance. It depends on how you define it. If we're talking about on the ground today, in, you know, a modern society, I'd say nicotine, tobacco. Oh shit. I mean, in terms of mortality, it kills far more than any other drug known to humankind. Four times more than alcohol, like a half million deaths in the US every year and about five to six million worldwide due to tobacco. That's four times more in the US than alcohol. And if you graph all of the drugs, legal and illegal, like, you know, put all of the illegal drugs in like one category on that figure, and you put alcohol and tobacco on that figure, all the illegal drugs combined, they're a barely visible blip to this incredible, like there's no, even all of the opioid epidemic rolled up along with cocaine and everything else, the meth barely shows up compared to tobacco. That's one of those uncomfortable truths that I don't know what to do with. It's like where everybody's freaking out about coronavirus, right? And nobody's... The relative. It's all relative. If you look at the relative thing, it's like, well, why aren't we freaking out about cigarettes, which we are increasingly so over the, historically speaking, right? Right. It's like terrorism versus swimming pools. I remember that being back in the, after the war on terror started. It's like, yeah, there's not even comparison. Okay. So, you know, that's a little sobering truth there. Cause I was thinking like cocaine, I was thinking about all of these hard drugs, but the reality is relatively nicotine is the big one. And you didn't ask about mortality or deaths. You asked about addiction, but that really is hard to evaluate. It gets into those nuances I spoke of before about there's not a unidimensional way to measure reinforcement. It kind of depends on the situation and what measure we're looking at. But you know, more people have access to tobacco and I'm not advocating that we make it an illegal drug. I think that would be a horrible mistake. Although there is a very credible push to mandate the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes, which I have most scientists that study it are for it. I think there's some real dangers there cause I see that in the broader history of drug use. It's like when has drug prohibition worked broadly speaking? And it's to me that path would only make sense in very good conjunction with eCigarettes, which once they're fully regulated can be a safer, not safe, but much safer alternative. And if we tax the hell out of eCigarettes and ban every attractive feature like flavors and everything, then that's gonna push people to a black market if they can't get the real thing from real cigarette. Like some people will just quit straight out. But I think with the regulators and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco, like myself, it's a big part still of what I study. They're not used to thinking about the like tobacco really as a drug largely speaking in terms of, for example, the history of prohibition. And I think of like, we already know there's an illicit market, a black market for tobacco to get around taxes. I mean, and for selling even loose cigarettes, that's what initially caused in Staten Island the police to approach Eric Garland who was selling loose cigarettes and he got choked out. I mean, the thing that caused that police contact was he was selling, well, I think reported to sell individual cigarettes for like, he gets home for court, it happens in Baltimore. And it's like, that's technically illegal. But are you not gonna have massive boats of supplies coming over from China and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes if you ban the sale of nicotine? Like it's obviously gonna happen. And you have to weigh that against, you're gonna create a black market to one size or another. And your intuition that really hasn't worked throughout the history when we've tried it. Right, but I see a potential path forward, but only if it's well, if it's not in conjunction with eCigarettes. If there's a clear alternative, that's a positive alternative that it kind of stares the population towards an alternative. The difference here, the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine is by and large, not what causes the harm. It's the aromatic hydrocarbons, it's the carcinogens and tobacco, it's burning tobacco smoke, it's not the nicotine. So it's not like alcohol prohibition where like you couldn't create the O'Douls, the near beer is not gonna have the alcohol. And so people like, here you do have the possibility of giving another medium the ability to deliver the drug, which still aren't to a lot of people isn't preferred to the tobacco, but nonetheless, again, if you overregulate those and make them less attractive, like if you aren't thoughtful about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything, and if you overtax them, you're actually decreasing the ability to compete with the more dangerous products. So I feel like there is a potential path forward, but I don't have a lot of confidence that that's gonna be done in a thoughtful analytical way. And I'm afraid that it could decrease the increase of black market calls all of the harms. Like every other drug we're moving away from the prohibition model slowly, but the big barge ship is like making a very slow turn. And like, okay, we really had to step back and question if we went with nicotine, tobacco, are we moving into that direction? Like big picture. It doesn't quite make sense. You've done a study on cocaine and sexual decision making. Can you explain? Can you explain the findings? I mean, in a broad sense, how do you do a study that involves cocaine and the other, how do you do a study involving sexual decision making? And then how do you do a study that combines both? Yeah, sex and drugs too. I'm just missing the rock and roll. It's like the two controversial, rock and roll isn't very controversial anymore. Yeah, so the cocaine, lots of hoops to jump through. You gotta have a lot of medical support. You gotta be at a basically an institution, a research unit like I'm at that has a long history and the ability to do that and get ethics approval, get FDA approval, but it's possible. And whenever you're dealing with something like cocaine, you would never wanna give that to someone who hasn't already used cocaine. And you wanna make sure you're not giving it to someone who is an active user who wants to quit. So the idea is like, okay, if you're using this type of drug anyway, and we're really sure you're not looking to quit, hey, use a couple of times in the lab with us so we can at least learn something. And part of what we learn is maybe to help people not use and it'll reduce the harms of cocaine. So there's hoops to jump through. With the sexual decision making, I looked at the main thing I looked at was this model of I applied delayed discounting to what we talked about earlier, the now versus later, that kind of decision making that goes along with addiction. I applied that to condom use decisions. And I've done probably published about 20 or so papers with this and different drugs. So the primary metric is whether you do or don't use a condom? Right, and so this is using hypothetical decision making, but I've published some studies looking at, showing a tight correspondence to self report it in correlational studies to self reported behavior. So this is like, so like how do you, did you do a questionnaire kind of thing? Right, so it's not quite a questionnaire, but it's a behavioral task requiring them to respond to. So you show pictures of a bunch of individuals and it's kind of like one of these fun behavioral, like a lot of them you get like numbers are boring, but it's like, okay, hot or not, like which of these 60 people would you have a one night stand with? Men, women, so pick whatever you like, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, whatever you're into, it's all variety there. Out of that group, you pick some subsets of people. Who do you think is the one you most want to have sex with the least, he thinks most likely to have an STI or least likely a sexually transmitted disease by STI. And then you could do certain decision making questions. So what I've done is asked, say this person you read a vignette, this person wants to have sex with you now you've met them, you get along casual sex scenario, like a one night stand with a condoms available, just rate your likelihood from one to 100 on this kind of scale, would you use it? But then you can change your scenario to say, okay, now imagine you have to wait five minutes to use a condom. So the choice is now instead of using condom versus not in terms of your likelihood scale, it now what ranges from have sex now without a condom versus on the other end of the scale is wait five minutes to have sex with a condom. So you rate your likelihood of where your behavior would be along that continuum. And then you could say, okay, well, what about an hour? What about three hours? What about 24 hours? Misunderstanding, now without a condom or five minutes later with a condom? Right. So what's supposed to be the preference for the person? There's a lot of factors coming into play, right? There's like pleasure, a personal preference and then there's also the safety. Those are two like, are those competing objectives? Right, and so we do get at that through some individual measures and this task is more of a face valid task where there's a lot underneath the hood. So for most people, sex with the condom is the better reward but underneath the hood of that is just at the purely physical level, they'd rather have sex without the condom. It's gonna feel better. What do you mean by reward? Like when they calculate their trajectory through life and try to optimize it, then sex with the condom is a good idea? Well, it's really based on, I mean, yeah, yeah. Presumably that's the case that there's, but it's measured by like what would you, really that first question where there is no delay. Most people say they would be at the higher end scale a lot of times 100% they would say they would definitely use a condom. Not everybody and that we know that's the case. See, it's like that some people don't like condoms, some people say, yeah, I wanna use a condom but quarter of the time ended up not because I just getting lost in the passion of the moment. So for the people, I mean, the only reason that people, so behaviorally speaking, at least for a large number of people in many circumstances condom use as a reinforcer just because people do it. Like, why are they doing it? They're not because it makes the sex feel better but because it makes that it allows for at least the same general reward. Even if actually, even if it feels a little bit not as good with the condom, nonetheless, they get most of the benefit without the concurrent, oh my gosh, there's this risk of either unwanted pregnancy or getting HIV or way more likely than HIV, herpes in general awards, et cetera, all the lovely ones. And we've actually done research saying like where we gauge the probability of these individual different SDIs. And it's like, what's the heavy hitter in terms of what people are using to judge and to evaluate whether they're gonna use a condom. So that's why the condom use is the delayed thing, five minutes or more. And then, yeah, because that's the prefer. Which would normally be the larger later reward like the $10 versus the nine, it's like the $10, which is counterintuitive if you just think about the physical pleasure. So that's a good thing to measure. So condom use is a really good concrete, quantifiable thing that you can use in a study. And then you can add a lot of different elements like the presence of cocaine and so on. Yeah, you can get people loaded on like any number of drugs like cocaine, alcohol and methamphetamine are the three that I've done and published on. And it's interesting that. These are fun studies, man. Right, I love to get people loaded in a safe context and like, but to really, it started, like there was some early research with alcohol. I mean, the psychedelics are the most interesting, but it's like all of these drugs are fascinating. The fact that all of these are keys that unlock a certain like psychological experience in the head. And so there was this work with alcohol that showed that it didn't affect those monetary delay discounting decisions, $9 now versus $10 later. And I'm like getting people drunk. And I thought to myself, are you telling me that getting someone, that people being drunk does not cause people at least sometimes to make, to choose what's good for them in the short term at the expense of what's good for them in the long term. It's like, bullshit, like we see like, but in what context does that happen? So that's something that inspired me to go in this direction of like, aha, risky sexual decisions is something they do when they're drunk. They don't necessarily go home. And even though some people have gambling problems and alcohol interacts with that, the most typical thing is not for people to go home, log on and change their allocation in their retirement account or something like that. But they're more likely, risky sexual decisions, they're more likely to not wait the five minutes for the condom and instead go no condom now. Right, that's a big effect. And we see that. And interestingly, we do not see, with those different drugs, we don't see an effect if we just look at that zero delay condition. In other words, the condoms right there waiting to be used, how likely are to use it? You don't see it. I mean, people are by and large gonna use the condom. So, and that's the way most of this research outside of behavioral economics that just looked at condom use decisions, very little of which has ever actually administered the drugs, which is another unique aspect. But they usually just look at like assuming the condom is there. But this is more using behavioral economics to delve in and model something that, and I've done survey research on this, modeling what actually happens. Like you meet someone at a laundromat, like you weren't planning on like, and it's like one thing leads to another, they live around the corner, these things. And like we did one survey with men who have sex with men and found that 25% of them, 24%, about a quarter, reported in the last six months that they had unprotected anal intercourse, which is the most risky in terms of sexually transmitted infection. In the last six months, in a situation where they would have used a condom, but they simply didn't use one just because they didn't have one on them. So this to me, it's like, if unless we delve into this and understand this, these suboptimal conditions, we're not gonna fully address the problem. There's plenty of people that say, yep, condom use is good. I use it a lot of the time. It's like, where is that failing? And it's under these suboptimal conditions, which in Frank, if you think about it, it's like most of the case. Action is unfolding, things are getting hot and heavy. Someone's like, do you got a condom? Eh, no. It's like, do they break the action and take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store or whatever? Maybe everything's closed. Maybe they gotta wait till tomorrow. And there's something to be studied there on the, that just seems like an unfortunate set of circumstances. Like, what's the solution to that is, I mean, what's the psychology that needs to be taken apart there? Because it just seems like that's the way of life. We don't expect the things to happen. Are we supposed to expect them better to be self aware enough about our calculations? Or you see the 10 minute detour to a convenience store as a kind of thing that we need to understand how we humans evaluate the cost of that. I think in terms of like how we use this to help people, it's mostly on the environment side, rather than on the individual side. Yeah, although those interact. So it's like, in one sense, if you're, especially if you're gonna be drinking or using another substance that is associated with a stimulant, alcohol and stimulants go along with risky sex. Good to be aware that you might make decisions just to tell yourself you might make a decision that you wouldn't have made in your sober state. And so, hey, throwing a condom in the purse, in the pocket, might be a good idea. I think at the environmental level, just more condom, I mean, it highlights what we know about just making condoms widely available. Something that I'd like to do is like reinforcing condom use. So just getting people used to carrying a condom everywhere they go. Because once it's in someone's habit, if they are, say, like a young, single person, and they occasionally have unprotected sex, like training those people, like what if you got a text message once every few days saying, ah, if you send back a photo of a condom, within a minute you get a reward of $5. You could shape that up like that. It's a process called contingency management. It's basically just straight up operant reinforcement. You could shape that up with no problem. And I mean, those procedures of contingency management, giving people systematic rewards is like, for example, the most powerful way to reduce cocaine use in addicted people. And by saying, if you show me a negative urine for cocaine, I'm gonna give you a monetary reward. And like that has huge effects in terms of decreasing cocaine use. If that can be that powerful for something like stopping cocaine use, how powerful could that be for shaping up just carrying a condom? Because the primary, unlike cocaine use, here, we're not saying you can't have the main reward, like you could still have sex, and you can even have sex in the way that you tell yourself you'd rather do it if the condom is available. Relatively speaking, it's way easier than like not using cocaine if you like using cocaine. It's just basically getting in the habit of carrying a condom. So that's just one idea of like why. There could be also the capitalistic solutions of like, there could be a business opportunity for like a door dash for condoms. Oh yeah. Like delivery. I thought about this. Within five minute delivery of a condom at any location, like Uber for condoms. I've thought about it, not with condoms, but a very similar line of thinking, a line that you're going into in terms of Uber and people getting drunk when they enter the bar playing to have one or two, they ended up having five or six, and it's like, okay, yeah, you can take the cab home, the Uber home, but you've left your car there. It might get towed. You might like, there's also the hassle of just, you wanna wake up tomorrow with your hangover and forget about it and move on. And I think a lot of people in their situation, they're like, screw it. I'm gonna take the risk, just get it. What if you had an Uber service where two, you have a car come out with two drivers and one of them, two sober drivers, obviously, and the person, the one driver drops off the other that then drives you home in their car, in your car, so that you can, I mean, I think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks. It's gonna be more than a regular Uber, but it's like, it's gonna be done. I got the money. I already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight. Like, just get the damn thing done tomorrow. I'm done with it. I wake up, my car's in front of my house. I think that would be, I think someone could, I'm not gonna open that business, so if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that, I think it could help a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. And Uber itself, I would say, helped a huge amount of people, just making it easy to make the decision of going home, not driving yourself. I read about in Austin where they, I don't know where it's at now, where they outlawed Uber for a while. You know, because of the whole taxicab union type thing and how just, yeah, there were like hordes of drunk people that were used to Uber that now didn't have a cheap alternative. So just, we didn't exactly mention, you've done a lot of studies in sexual decision making with different drugs. Is there some interesting insights or findings on the difference between the different drugs? So I think you said meth as well. So cocaine, is there some interesting characteristics about decision making that these drugs alter versus like alcohol, all those kinds of things? I think, and there's much more to study with this, but I think the biggie there is that the stimulants, they create risky sex by really increasing the rewarding value of sex. Like if you talk to people that are really, especially that are hooked on stimulants, one of the biggies is like sex on coke or meth is like so much better than sex without. And that's a big part of why they have trouble quitting because it's so tied to their sex life. So it's not that your decision making is broken, it's just that you, well, you allocate. It's a different aspect of their decision. Yeah, on the reward side. I think on the alcohol, it works more through disinhibition. It's like, alcohol is really good at reducing the ability of a delayed punisher to have an effect on current behavior. In other words, there's this bad thing that's gonna happen tomorrow or a week from now or 20 years from now. Being drunk is a really good way, and you see this in like rats making decisions. A high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive to those consequences. So I think that's the lever that's being hit with alcohol and it's the more, just the increasing the rewarding value of sex by the psycho stimulants on that side. We actually found that it, and it was amazing because like hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by NIH to study the connection between cocaine and HIV. Like we ran the first study on my grant that like actually just gave people cocaine under double blind conditions and showed that like, yeah, when people are on coke, like their ratings of sexual desire, even though they're not in a sexual situation, yeah, you've shown them some pictures, but they're just saying they're horny. Like you get subjective ratings of like how much sexual desire are you feeling right now. People get horny when they're on stimulants. And a lot of people say, duh, if they really know these drugs. But that's a rigorous study that's in the lab that shows like there's a plot. Right, the dose effects of that, the time course of that. Yeah, it's not just. Can you please tell me there's a paper with a plot that shows dose versus evaluation of like horniness. Yeah, we didn't say horniness. We said sexual arousal, yeah, basically, yeah. There's a plot, I'm gonna find this plot. Right, I'll send it to you. There was one headline from some publicity on the work that said, horny cocaine users don't use condoms or something like that. You gotta love journalism. I wouldn't have put it that way, but like, yeah, that's right. I guess that's what it finds. So you've published a bunch of studies on psychedelics. Is there some especially favorite insightful findings from some of these that you could talk about? So maybe favorite studies or just something that pops to mind in terms of both the goals and like the major insights gained and maybe the side little curiosities that you discovered along the way. Yeah, I think of the work with like using psilocybin to help people quit smoking. And we've talked about smoking being such a serious addiction and so that what inspired me to get into that was just kind of having like behavioral psychology as my primary lens, sort of this sort of like, you know, kind of radical empirical basis of, I'm really interested in the mystical experience and all of these reports, very interested. And, but at the same time, I'm like, okay, let's get down to some behavior change and something that we can record, like quantitatively verify biologically. So find all kinds of negative behaviors that people practice and see if we can turn those into positive or change their behavior. Right, like really change it, not just people saying, which again is interesting, I'm not dismissing it, but folks that say my life has turned around, I feel this has completely changed me. It's like, yep, that's good. All right, let's see if we can harness that and test that. And just something that's real behavior change. You know what I mean? It's quantifiable. It's like, okay, you've been smoking for 30 years, you know, like that's a real thing. And you've tried a dozen times, like seriously to quit and you haven't been able to long term, like, okay. And if you quit, like we'll ask you and I'll believe you, but I don't trust everyone reading the paper to believe you. So we're gonna have you pee in a cup and we'll test that. And we'll have you blow into this little machine that measures carbon monoxide and we'll test that. So multiple levels of biological verification. Like now we're getting like, to me that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of like therapeutics. It's like, can we really shift behavior? And since, and so much as we've talked about my other scientific work outside of psychedelics is about understanding addiction and drug use. So it's like, you know, looking at addiction, it's a no brainer and smoking is just a great example. And so back to your question, like we've had really high success rates. I mean, it really, it rivals anything that's been published in the scientific literature. The caveat is that, you know, that's based on our initial trial of only 15 people, but extremely high longterm success rates, 80% at six months per smoke free. So can we discuss the details of this? So first of all, which psychedelic are we talking about? And maybe can you talk about the 15 people and how the study ran and what you found? Yeah, yeah. So the drug we're using is psilocybin and we're using moderately high and high doses of psilocybin. And I should say this about most of our work, these are not kind of museum level doses. In other words, nothing, even big fans of psychedelics wanna take and go to a concert or go to the museum. If someone's at Burning Man on this type of dose, like they're probably gonna wanna find their way back to their tent and zip up and hunker down for, you know, not be around strangers. By the way, the delivery method, so psilocybin is mushrooms, I guess. What's the usual, is it edible? Is there some other way? Like, how is people supposed to think about the correct dosing of these things? Cause I've heard that it's hard to dose correctly. That's right. So in our studies, we use the pure compound psilocybin. So it's a single molecule, you know, a bunch of molecules. And we give them a capsule with that in it. And so it's just, you know, a little capsule, they swallow. What people, when psilocybin is used outside of research, it's always in the context of mushrooms cause they're so easy to grow. There's no market for synthetic psilocybin. There's no reason for that to pop up. The high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams, body weight adjusted. So if you're a heavier person, it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams. We have some data that, based on that data, we're actually moving into like getting away from the body weight adjusting of the dose and just giving an absolute dose. It seems like there's no justification for the body weight based dosing, but I digress. Generally 30, 40 milligrams, it's a high dose. And based on average, even though, as you alluded to, there's variability, which gets people into some trouble in terms of mushrooms, like psilocybe cubensis, which is the most common species in the illicit market in the US. This is about equivalent to five dried grams, which is right at about where McKenna and others, they call it a heroic dose. This is not hanging out with your friends, going to the concert again. So this is a real deal dose, even to people that really, just even to psychonauts. And we've even had a number of studies. Psychonauts? Yeah, people that, yeah, astronaut or cosmonaut, like for psychedelics. Yeah, going as far out as possible. But even for them, even for those who've flown to space before. Right, right, they're like, holy shit, I didn't know the orbit would be that far out. Or I escaped the orbit, I was in interplanetary space there. So these folks, the 15 folks in the study, there's not a question of dose being too low to truly have an impact. Right, right, out of hundreds of volunteers over the years, we've only seen a couple of people where there was a mild effect of the 30 milligrams. And who knows, that person's, their serotonins, they might have lesser density of serotonin 2A receptors or something, we don't know. But it's extremely rare. For most people, this is like something interesting is gonna happen, put it that way. Speaking of Joe Rogan, I think that Jamie, his producer, is immune to psychedelics. So maybe he's a good recruit for the study to test. So that's interesting. Now I'm not, the caveat is I'm not encouraging anything illicit, but just theoretically, my first question as a behavioral pharmacologist is like, you know, increase the dose. You know, like really, let's see the full dose. I'm not telling him, Jamie, to do that, but like, okay, like, you know, you're taking the same amount that friends might be taking, but yeah. But he was also referring to the psychedelic effects of edible marijuana, which is, is there rules on dosage for like marijuana? Is there limits? Like what place where it's, this is, this all goes, it probably is state by state, right? It is, but most, they've gone that direction in states that didn't initially have these rules have now have them. So it was like, you'll get, I think, you know, five, 10 mil, I think 10, five or 10 milligrams of THC being a common, and like, and this is an important thing, like where they've moved from not being allowed to say, like have a whole candy bar and have each of the eight or 10 squares on the candy bar being 10 milligrams, but it's like, no, the whole thing, because like, you know, someone gets a candy bar, they're eating the freaking candy bar. And it's like, unless you're a daily cannabis user, if you take, you know, a hundred milligrams, it's like, that's what could lead to a bad trip for someone. And it's like, you know, a lot of these people, it's like, oh, you used to smoke a little weed in college, they might say they're visiting Denver for a business trip and they're like, why not? Let's give it a shot, you know? And they're like, oh, I don't want to smoke something because it's going to, so I'm going to be safer with this edible, they might consume this massive, you know, but there's huge tolerance. So a regular, like for someone who's smoking weed every day, they might take five milligrams and kind of hardly feel anything. And they may really need something like 30, 40, 50 milligrams to have a strong effect. But yeah, so they've evolved in terms of the rules about like, okay, what constitutes a dose, you know? Which is why you see less big candy bars and more, or if it is a whole candy bar, you're only getting a smaller dose like 10 milligrams or, yeah, because that's where people get in trouble more often with edibles. Yeah, except Joey Diaz, which I've heard. That's definitely somebody I want to talk to out of the crazy comedians I want to talk to as well. Anyway, so yeah, the study of the 15 and the dose not being a question. So like, what was the recruitment based on? What was the, like, how did the study get conducted? Yeah, so the recruitment, and I really liked this fact, it wasn't people that, you know, largely were, you know, we were honest about what we were studying, but for most people, it was, they were in the category of like, you know, not particularly interested in psychedelics, but more of like, they want to quit smoking. They've tried everything but the kitchen sink. And this sounds like the kitchen sink. You know, and it's like, well, it's Hopkins. So, you know, thinking that sounds like it's safe enough. So like, what the hell, let's give it a shot. Like most of them were in that category, which I really, you know, I appreciate because it's more of a test, you know, of, yeah, just like a better model of what, if these are approved as medicines, like what you're going to have the average participant, you know, be like. And so the therapy involves a good amount of non psilocybin sessions, of preparatory sessions, like eight hours of getting to know the person, like the two people who are going to be their guides or the person in the room with them during the experience, having these discussions with them where you're both kind of rapport building, just kind of discussing their life, getting to know them, but then also telling them, preparing them about the psilocybin experience. Oh, it could be scary in this sense, but here's how to handle it, trust, let go, be open. And also during that preparation time, preparing them to quit smoking, using really standard bread and butter techniques that can all fall under the label typically of the cognitive behavioral therapy, just stuff like before you quit, we assign a target quit date ahead of time, you're not just quitting on the fly. And that happens to be the target quit date in our study was the day where they got the first psilocybin dose, but doing things like keeping a smoking diary, like, okay, during the three weeks until you quit, every time you smoke a cigarette, just like jot down what you're doing, what you're feeling, what situation, that type of thing. And then having some discussion around that and then going over the pluses and minuses in their life that smoking kind of comes with and being honest about the, this is what it does for me, this is why I like it, this is why I don't like it. Preparing for like, what if you do slip, how to handle it, like don't dwell on guilt because that leads to more full on relapse, just kind of treat it as a learning experience, that type of thing. Then you have the session day where they come in, five minutes of questionnaires, but pretty much they jump into the, we touch base with them and we give them the capsule. It's a serious setting, but a comfortable one. They're in a room that looks more like a living room than like a research lab. We measure their blood pressure, their experience, but kind of minimal kind of medical vibe to it. And they lay down on a couch and it's a purposefully an introspective experience. So they're laying on a couch during most of the five to six hour experience and they're wearing eye shades, which is a better connotation as a name than blindfold. But like, yeah, so they're wearing eye shades, but that's, and they're wearing headphones through which music is played, mostly classical, although we've done some variation of that. I have a paper that was recently accepted kind of comparing it to more like gongs and harmonic bowls and that type of thing, kind of like sound, you know, kind of. You've also added this to the science and have a paper on the musical accompaniment to the psychedelic experience, that's fascinating. Right, and we found basically that about the same effect, even by a trend, not significant, but a little bit better of an effect, both in terms of subjective experience and longterm, whether it helped people quit smoking, just a little tiny non significant trend even favoring the novel playlist with the Tibetan singing bowls and the gongs and didgeridoo and all of that. And so anyway, just saying, okay, we can deviate a little bit from this, like what goes back to the 1950s of this method of using classical music as part of this psychedelic therapy, but they're listening to the music and they're not playing DJ in real time. You know, it's like, you know, they're just, be the baby, you're not the decision maker for today, go inward, trust, let go, be open. And pretty much the only interaction, like that we're there for is to deal with any anxiety that comes up. So guide is kind of a misnomer in a sense. It's, we're more of a safety net. And so like, tell us if you feel some butterflies that we can provide reassurance, a hold of their hand can be very powerful. I've had people tell me that that was like the thing that really just grounded them. Can you break apart trust, let go, be open? What, so in a sense, how would you describe the experience, the intellectual and the emotional approach that people are supposed to take to really let go into the experience? Yeah, so trust is, trust the context, you know, trust the guides, trust the overall institutional context. I see it as layers of like safety, even though it's everything I told you about the relative bodily safety of psilocybin. Nonetheless, we're still getting blood pressure throughout the session, just in case. We have a physician on hand who can respond just in case. We're literally across the street from the emergency department, just in case. You know, all of that, you know. Privacy is another thing you've talked about is just trusting that you're, and whatever happens is just between you and the people in the study. Right, and hopefully they've really gotten that by that point deep into the study that like they realize where do we take that seriously and everything else, you know. And so it's really kind of like a very special role that you're playing as a researcher or a guide and hopefully they have your trust. And so, you know, and trust that they could be as emotional, everything from laughter to tears, like that's gonna be welcomed. We're not judging them. It's like, it's a therapeutic relationship where, you know, this is a safe container. It's a safe space. It's a lot of baggage to that term, but it truly is, it's a safe space for that, for this type of experience and to let go. So trust, let's see, let go. So that relates to the emotional, like, you feel like crying, cry. You feel like laughing your ass off, laugh your ass off. You know, it's like all the things actually that sometimes it's more challenging with someone has a large recreational use, sometimes it's harder for them because people in that context, and understandably so, it's more about holding your shit. Someone's had a bunch of mushrooms at a party. Maybe they don't wanna go into the back room and start crying about these thoughts about the relationship with their mother. And they don't wanna be the drama queen or king that bring their friends down because their friends are having an experience too. And so they wanna like compose, you know. And also just the appearance in social settings versus the, so like prioritizing how you appear to others versus the prioritizing the depth of the experience. And here in the study, you can prioritize the experience. Right, and it's all about, like you're the astronaut and there's only one astronaut. We're ground control. And I use this often with, I have a photo of the space shuttle on a plaque in my office and I kind of often use that as an example. And it's like, we're here for you. Like we're a team, but we have different roles. It's just like, you don't have to like compose yourself. Like you don't have to like be concerned about our safety. Like we're playing these roles today. And like, yeah, your job is to go as deep as possible or as far out, whatever your analogy is, like as possible. And we're keeping you safe. And so, yeah, and the emotional side is a hard one because you really want people to, like if they go into realms of subjectively of despair and sorrow, like, yeah, like cry, it's okay. And especially if someone's more macho and you want this to be the place where they can let go. And again, something that they wouldn't or shouldn't do if someone were to theoretically use it in a social setting. And like, and also these other things, like even that you get in those social settings of like, yeah, you don't have to like worry about your wallet for being taken advantage or especially for a woman sexually assaulted by some creep at a concert or something. Cause they're, you know, they're laying down, being far out. There's like a million sources of anxiety that are external versus internal. So you can just focus on your own, like the beautiful thing that's going on in your mind. And even the cops at that layer, even though it's extremely unlikely for most people that cops would come in and bust them right when, like even at that theoretical, like that one in a billion chance, like that might be a real thing psychologically. In this context, we even got that covered. This is, we've got DEA approval. Like you are, this is okay by every level of society that counts, you know, that has the authority. So it's, so go deep, trust the, you know, trust the setting, trust yourself, you know, let go and be open. So in the experience, and this is all subjective and by analogy, but like, if there's a door, open it, go into it. If there's a stairwell, go down it or a stairway, go up it. If there's a monster in the mind's eye, you know, don't run, approach it, look in the eye and say, you know, let's talk. Yeah, what's up, what are you doing here? Let's talk Turkey, you know? And I thought. Dave Goggins entered the chat, okay. Right, right, it really is that, that really is a heart of it, this radical courage. Like it. Courage. People are often struck by that coming out. Like this is heavy lifting, this is a hard work. People come out of this exhausted and it can be extremely, some people say it's the most difficult thing they've done in their life. Like choosing to let go on a moment, a microsecond by microsecond basis. Everything in their inclination is to say stop, sometimes stop this, I don't like this, I didn't know it was gonna be like this, this is too much. And Terrence McKenna put it this way, it's like comparing to meditation and other techniques, it's like spending years trying to press the accelerator to make something happen. High dose psychedelics is like you're speeding down the mountain in a fully loaded semi truck and you're charged with not slamming the brake. It's like, let it happen. So it's very difficult and to engage, always go further into it and take that radical, radical courage throughout. What do they say in self report? If you can put general words to it, what is their experience like? What do they say it's like? Because these are many people, like you said, that haven't probably read much about psychedelics or they don't have like with Joe Rogan, like language or stories to put on it. So this is very raw self report of experiences. What do they say the experience is like? Yeah, and some more so than others, cause everyone has been exposed at some level or another, but some it is pretty superficial as you're saying. One of the hallmarks of psychedelics is just their variability. So I'm more stressed, it's like not the mean, but the standard deviation is so wide that it's like, it could be like hellish experiences and just absolutely beautiful and loving experiences, everything in between and both of those, like those could be two minutes apart from each other. And sometimes kind of at the same time concurrently. So let's see, there's different ways to, there were some Jungian psychologists back in the 60s, masters in Houston that wrote a really good book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, which is a play on varieties of religious experience by William James, that they described this, a perceptual level. So most people have that when, whether they're looking at the room without the eyeshades on or inside their mind's eye with the eyeshades on, colors, sounds like this, it's a much richer sensorium, which can be very interesting. And then at another level, a master's in Houston called it the psychodynamic level. And I think you could think about it more broadly than, that's kind of Jungian, but just the personal psychological levels, how I think of it, like this is about your life. There's a whole life review. Oftentimes people have thoughts about their childhood, about their relationships, their spouse or partner, their children, their parents, their family of origin, their current family, that stuff comes up a lot, including people just pouring with tears about how much, it hits them so hard how much they love people. Like in a way, for people that they'd love their family, but it just hits them so hard that how important this is and the magnitude of that love and what that means in their life. So those are some of the most moving experiences to be present for is where people like it hits home, like what really matters in their life. And then you have this sort of what masters in Houston called the archetypal realm, which again is sort of Jungian with the focus on archetypes, which is interesting, but I think of that more generally as like symbolic level. So just really deep experiences where you have, you do have experiences that seem symbolic of, very much in like what we know about dreaming and what most people think about dreaming, like there's this randomness of things, but sometimes it's pretty clear in retrospect, oh, like this came up because this thing has been on my mind recently. So it seems to be, there seems to be this symbolic level. And then they have this, the last level that they describe is the mystical integral level, which this is where there's lots of terms for it, but transcendental experiences, experiences of unity, mystical type effects we often measure. Europeans use a scale that will refer to oceanic boundlessness. This is all pretty much the same thing. This is like at some sense, the deepest level of the very sense of self seems to be dissolved, minimize, or expanded, such that the boundaries of the self go into in here. I think some of this is just semantics, but whether the self is expanding such that there's no boundary between the self and the rest of the universe, or whether there's no sense of self, again, might be just semantics, but this radical shift or sense of loss of sense of self or self boundaries. And that's like the most, typically when people have that experience, they'll often report that as being the most remarkable thing. And this is what you don't typically get with MDMA, these deepest levels of the nature of reality itself, the subjectivity and objectivity, just like the seer and the seen become one, and it's a process, and yeah. And they're able to bring that experience back and be able to describe it? Yeah, but one of the, to a degree, but one of the hallmarks going back to William James of describing a mystical experience is the ineffability. And so even though it's ineffable, people try as far as they can to describe it, but when you get the real deal, they'll say, and even though they say a lot of helpful things to help you describe the landscape, they'll say, no matter what I say, I'm still not even coming anywhere close to what this was. Like the language is completely failing. And I like to joke that even though it's ineffable, and we're researchers, so we try to eff it up by asking them to describe the experience. I love it, it's a good one. But to bring it back a little bit, so for that particular study on tobacco, what was the results, what was the conclusions in terms of the impact of psilocybin on their addiction? So in that pilot study, it was very small and it wasn't a randomized study, so it was limited. The only question we could really answer was, is this worthy enough of followup? And the answer to that was absolutely, because the success rates were so high, 80% biologically confirmed successful at six months, that held up to 60% biologically confirmed abstinent at an average of two and a half years, a very long fall. Yeah, and so, I mean, the best that's been reported in the literature for smoking cessation is in the upper 50%, and that's with not one, but two medications for a couple of months, followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy, where you're coming in once a week or once every few weeks for an entire year. And so it was very heavy. This is just like a few uses of psilocybin? So this was three doses of psilocybin over a total course, including preparation, everything, a 15 week period, where there's mainly like, for most part, one meeting a week, and then the three sessions are within that. And so it's, and we scaled that back in the more, the study we're doing right now, which I can tell you about, which is a randomized controlled trial. But it's, yeah, the original pilot study was these 15 people. So given the positive signal from the first study telling us that it was a worthy pursuit, we hustled up some money to actually be able to afford a larger trial. So it's randomizing 80 people to get either one psilocybin session, we've scaled that down from three to one, mainly because we're doing fMRI neuroimaging before and after, and it made it more experimentally complex to have multiple sessions. But one psilocybin session versus the nicotine patch using the FDA approved label, like standard use of the nicotine patch. So it's randomized, 40 people get randomized to psilocybin, one session, 40 people get nicotine patch. And they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapy sort of the standard talk therapy. And we've scaled it down somewhat, so there's less weekly meetings, but it's within the same ballpark. And right now we're still, the study's still ongoing. And in fact, we just recently started recruiting again, we paused for COVID. Now we're starting back up with some protections like masks and whatnot. But right now for the 44 people who have gotten through the one year followup, and so that includes 22 from each of the two groups, the success rates are extremely high. For the psilocybin group, it's 59% have been biologically confirmed as smoke free at one year after their quit date. And that compares to 27% for the nicotine patch, which by the way is extremely good for the nicotine patch compared to previous research. So the results could change because it's ongoing, but we're mostly done and it's still looking extremely positive. So if anyone's interested, they have to be sort of be in commuting distance to the Baltimore area, but you know. To participate. Right, right, to participate. This is a good moment to bring up something. I think a lot of what you talked about is super interesting. And I think a lot of people listening to this, so now it's anywhere from 300 to 600,000 people for just a regular podcast. I know a lot of them will be very interested in what you're saying and they're going to look you up. They're going to find your email and they're going to write you a long email about some of the interesting things they've found in any of your papers. How should people contact you? What is the best way for that? Would you recommend? You're a super busy guy. You have a million things going on. How should people communicate with you? Thanks for bringing this up. This is a, I'm glad to get the opportunity to address this. If someone's interested in participating in a study, the best thing to do is go to the website. Of the study or of like, yeah, which website? So we have all of our psilocybin studies. So everything we have is up on one website and then we link to the different study websites, but hopkinspsychedelic.org. So everything we do, or if you don't remember that, just go to your favorite search engine and look up Johns Hopkins Psychedelic and you're going to find one of the first hits is going to be our, is this website. And there's going to be links to the smoking study and all of our other studies. If there's no link to it there, we don't have a study on it now. And if you're interested in psychedelic research more broadly, you can look up, like at another university that might be closer to you. And there's a handful of them now across the country. And there's some in Europe that have studies going on, but you can, at least in the US, you can look at clinicaltrials.gov and look up the term psilocybin. And in fact, optionally people even in Europe can register their trial on there. So that's a good way to find studies. But for our research, rather than emailing me, like a more efficient way is to go straight and you can do that first, the first phase of screening. There's some questions online and then someone will get back in touch with you. But I do already, you know, and I expect it's like going to increase, but I'm already at the level where my simple limited mind and limited capacity is already, I sometimes fail to get back to emails. I mean, I'm trying to respond to my colleagues, my mentees, all these things, my responsibilities. And as many of the people just inquiring about I wanna go to graduate school, I'm interested in this, I had this, I have a daughter that took a psychedelic and she's having trouble. And it's like, I try to respond to those, but sometimes I just simply can't get to all of it already. To be honest, like from my perspective, it's been quite heartbreaking because I basically don't respond to any emails anymore. And especially as you mentioned mentees and so on, like outside of that circle, it's heartbreaking to me how many brilliant people there are, thoughtful people, like loving people. And they write long emails that are really, by the way, I do read them very often. It's just that I don't, the response is then you're starting a conversation. And the heartbreaking aspect is you only have so many hours in the day to have deep, meaningful conversations with human beings on this earth. And so you have to select who they are. And usually it's your family, it's people like you're directly working with. And even I guarantee you with this conversation, people will write you long, really thoughtful emails. Like there'll be brilliant people, faculty from all over, PhD students from all over. And it's heartbreaking because you can't really get back to them. But you're saying like many of them, if you do respond, it's more like here, go to this website when you're interested into the study, just it makes sense to directly go to the site if there's applications open, just apply for the study. Right, right, right, as either a volunteer or if we're looking for somebody, we're gonna be posting, including on the Hopkins University website, we're gonna be posting if we're looking for a position. I am right now actually looking through and it's mainly been through email and contacts, but should I say it? I think I'd rather cast my nets wide, but I'm looking for a postdoc right now. Oh, great. So I've mentored postdocs for, I don't know, like a dozen years or so. And more and more of their time is being spent on psychedelics. So someone's free to contact me. That's more of a, that's sort of so close to home. That's a personal, you know, that like emailing me about that. But I come to appreciate more the advice that folks like Tim Ferriss have of like, I think it's him, like five cents emails, you know, like a subject that gets to the point that tells you what it's about so that like you break through the signal to the noise. But I really appreciate what you're saying because part of the equation for me is like, I have a three year old, and like my time on the ground, on the floor, playing blocks or cars with him is part of that equation. And even if the day is ending and I know some of those emails are slipping by and I'll never get back to them. And I have, I'm struggling with it already. And I get what you're saying is like, I haven't seen anything yet if with the type of exposure that like your podcast gets. This will bring in exposure. And then I think in terms of postdocs, this is a really good podcast in the sense that there's a lot of brilliant PhD students out there that are looking for a poster from all over, from MIT, probably from Hopkins, it's just all over the place. So this is, and I, we have different preferences, but my preference would also be to have like a form that they could fill out for posts. Because, you know, it's very difficult through email to tell who's really going to be a strong collaborator for you, like a strong postdoc, strong student, because you want a bunch of details, but at the same time, you don't want a million pages worth of email. So you want a little bit of application process. So usually you set up a form that helps me indicate how passionate the person is, how willing they are to do hard work. Like I often ask a question, people of what do you think is more important to work hard or to work smart? And I use that, those types of questions to indicate who I would like to work with. Because it's counterintuitive. But anyway, I'll leave that question unanswered for people to figure out themselves. But maybe if you know my love for David Goggins, you will understand. So anyway. Those are good thoughts about the forms and everything. It's difficult. And that's something that evolves. Email is such a messy thing. There's, speaking of Baltimore, Cal Newport, if you know who that is, he wrote a book called Deep Work. He's a computer science professor and he's currently working on a book about email, about all the ways that email is broken. So this is gonna be a fascinating read. This is a little bit of a general question, but almost a bigger picture question that we touched on a little bit, but let's just touch it in a full way, which is what have all the psychedelic studies you've conducted taught you about the human mind, about the human brain and the human mind? Is there something, if you look at the human scientists you were before this work and the scientists you are now, how has your understanding of the human mind changed? I'm thinking of that in two categories. One kind of more scientific, and they're both scientific, but one more about the brain and behavior and the mind, so to speak. And as a behaviorist, all we see sort of the mind as a metaphor for behaviors, but anyway, that gets philosophical. But it's really increasing the, so the one category is increasing the appreciation for the magnitude of depth. I mean, so these are all metaphors of human experience. That might be a good way to, because you use certain words like consciousness and it's like we're using constructs that aren't well defined unless we kind of dig in, but human experience like that, the experiences on these compounds can be so far out there or so deep. And they're doing that by tinkering with the same machinery that's going on up there. I mean, my assumption, and I think it's a good assumption is that all experiences, there's a biological side to all phenomenal experience. So there is not, the divide between biology and experience or psychology is, it's not one or the other. These are just two sides of the same coin. I mean, you're avoiding the use of the word consciousness, for example, but the experience is referring to the subjective experience. So it's the actual technical use of the word consciousness of subjective experience. And even that word, there are certain ways that like, sort of like if we're talking about access consciousness or narrative self awareness, which is an aspect of, like you can wrap a definition around that and we can talk meaningfully about it, but so often around psychedelics, it's used in this much more, in terms of ultimately explaining phenomenal consciousness itself, the so called hard problem, and relating to that question and psychedelics really haven't spoken to that. And that's why it's hard because like it's hard to imagine anything. But I think what I was getting is that psychedelics have done this by, the reason I was getting into the biology versus mind, psychology divide is that just to kind of set up the fact that I think all of our experience is related to these biological events. So whether they be naturally occurring neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine, et cetera, and a whole other sort of biological activity and kind of another layer up that we could talk about as network activity, communication amongst brain areas, like this is always going on, even if I just prompt you to think about a loved one, like there's something happening biologically. Okay, so that's always another side of the coin. So another way to put that is all of our subjective experience outside of drugs, it's all a controlled hallucination in a sense. Like this is completely constructed. Our experience of reality is completely a simulation. So I think we're on solid ground to say that that's our best guess and that's a pretty reasonable thing to say scientifically. Like all the rich complexity of the world emerges from just some biology and some chemicals. So in that definition implied a causation, it comes from. And so we know at least there's a solid correlation there. And so then we delve deep into the philosophy of like idealism or materialism and things like this, which I'm not an expert in, but I know we're getting into that territory. You don't even necessarily have to go there. Like you at least go to the level of like, okay, we know there seems to be this one on one correspondence and that seems pretty solid. Like you can't prove a negative and you can't prove, you know, it's in that category of like, you could come up with an experience that maybe doesn't have a biological correlate, but then you're talking about, there's also the limits of the science. Is it a false negative? But I think our best guess and a very decent assumption is that every psychological event has a biological correlate. So with that said, you know, the idea that you can throw, alter that biology in a pretty trivial manner. I mean, you could take like a relatively small number of these molecules, throw them into the nervous system and then have a 60 year old person who has, you name it, I mean, that has hiked to the top of Everest and that speaks five languages and that has been married and has kids and grandkids and has, you name it, you know, like been at the top and say, this fundamentally changed who I am as a person and what I think life is about. Like that's the thing about psychedelics that just floors me and it never fails. I mean, sometimes you get bogged down by the paperwork and running studies and all the, I don't know, all of the BS that can come with being in academia and everything and then you, and sometimes you get some dud sessions where it's not the full, all the magic isn't happening and it's, you know, more or less it's either a dud or somewhere and I don't mean to dismiss them, but you know, it's not like these magnificent sort of reports, but sometimes you get the full Monty report from one of these people and you're like, oh yeah, that's why we're doing this. Whether it's like therapeutically or just to understand the mind and you're like, and you're still floored, like how is that possible? How did we slightly alter serotonergic neurotransmission and say, and this person is now saying that they're making fundamental differences in the priorities of their life after 60 years. It also just fills you with awe of the possibility of experiences we're yet to have uncovered. If just a few chemicals can change so much, it's like, man, what if this could be up? I mean, like how, cause we're just like took a little, it's like lighting a match or something in the darkness and you could see there's a lot more there, but you don't know how much more. And that's. And then like, where's that gonna go with like, I mean, I'm always like aware of the fact that like we always as humans and as scientists think that we figured out 99% and we're working on that first 1%. And we gotta keep reminding ourselves, it's hard to do. Like we figured out like not even 1%, like we know nothing. And so like, I can speculate and I might sound like a fool, but like what are drugs, even the concept of drugs, like 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, if we're surviving, like molecules that go to a specific area of the brain in combination with technology, in combination with the magnetic stimulation, in combination with the, like targeted pharmacology of like, oh, like this subset of serotonin 2A receptors in the claustrum, at this time, in this particular sequence in combination with this other thing, like this baseball cap you wear that like has, has one of the, is doing some of these things that we can only do with these like giant like pieces of equipment now, like where it's gonna go is gonna be endless. And it becomes easy to combine within virtual reality where the virtual reality is gonna move from being something out here to being more in there. And then we're getting, like we talked about before, we're already in a virtual reality in terms of human perception and cognition models of the universe being all representations and sort of color not existing and just our representations of EM wavelengths, et cetera, sound, being vibrations and all of this. And so as the external VR and the internal VR come closer to each other, like this is what I think about in terms of the future of drugs. Like all of this stuff sort of combines and like where that goes is just, it's unthinkable. Like we were probably gonna, you know, again, I might sound like a fool and this may not happen, but I think it's possible, you know, to go completely offline, like where most of people's experiences maybe going into these internal worlds. And I mean, maybe you through some, through a combination of these techniques, you create experiences where someone could live a thousand years in terms of maybe they're living a regular lifespan, but in over the next two seconds, you're living a thousand years worth of experience. Inside your mind. Yeah, through this manipulation of them. Like, is that possible? Like just based on like first principles and like. Yeah, first principles, yes. I think so. Like give us another 50, 100, 500, like who knows, but like how could it not go there? In a small tangent, what are your thoughts in this broader definition of drugs, of psychedelics, of mind altering things? What are your thoughts about Neuralink and brain computer interfaces, sort of being able to electrically stimulate and read neuronal activity in the brain and then connect that to the computer, which is another way from a computational perspective for me is kind of appealing, but it's another way of altering subtly the behavior of the brain. That's kind of, if you zoom out, reminiscent of the way psychedelics do as well. So what do you have? Like what are your thoughts about Neuralink? What are your hopes as a researcher of mind altering devices, systems, chemicals? I guess broadly speaking, I'm all for it. I mean, for the same reason I am with psychedelics, but it comes with all the caveats. You know, you're going into a brave new world where it's like all of a sudden there's going to be a dark side. There's going to be serious ethical considerations, but that should not stop us from moving there. I mean, particularly the stuff from, and I'm no expert, but on the short list in the short term, it's like, yeah, can we help these serious neurological disorders? Like, hell yeah. And I'm also sensitive to something being someone that has lots of neuroscience colleagues with some of this stuff, and I can't talk about particulars, I'm not recalling, but in terms of stuff getting out there and then kind of a mocking of, oh gosh, they're saying this is unique, we know this, or sort of like this belittling of like, oh, this sounds like it's just a, I don't know, a commercialization or like an oversimplification. I forget what the example was, but something like, something that came off to some of my neuroscientific colleagues as an oversimplification, or at least the way they said it. Oh, from a Neuralink perspective. Right, oh, we've known that for years and like, but I'm very sympathetic to like, maybe it's because of my very limited, but relatively speaking, the amount of exposure the psychedelic work has had to my limited experience of being out there, and then you think about someone like Mike Musk, who's like really, really out there, and you just get all these arrows that like, and it's hard to be like when you're plowing new ground, like you're gonna get, you're gonna get criticized like every little word that you, this balance between speaking to like people to make it meaningful, something scientists aren't very good at, having people understand what you're saying, and then being belittled by oversimplifying something in terms of the public message. So I'm extremely sympathetic, and I'm a big fan of like what that, you know, what Elon Musk does, like tunnels through the ground, and SpaceX, and all this, just like, hell yeah, like this guy has some, he has some great ideas. And there's something to be said, it's not just the communication to the public. I think his first principles thinking, it's like, because I get this in the artificial intelligence world, it's probably similar to neuroscience world, where Elon will say something like, or I worked at MIT, I worked on autonomous vehicles. And he's sort of, I could sense how much he pisses off like every roboticist at MIT, and everybody who works on like the human factor side of safety of autonomous vehicles, and saying like, nah, we don't need to consider human beings in the car, like the car will drive itself, it's obvious that neural networks is all you need. Like it's obvious that like we should be able to systems that should be able to learn constantly. And they don't really need LIDAR, they just need cameras, because we humans just use our eyes, and that's the same as cameras. So like it doesn't, why would we need anything else? You just have to make a system that learns faster, and faster, and faster, and neural networks can do that. And so that's pissing off every single community. It's pissing off human factors community, saying you don't need to consider the human driver in the picture, you can just focus on the robotics problem. It's pissing off every robotics person for saying LIDAR can be just ignored, it can be camera. Every robotics person knows that camera is really noisy, that it's really difficult to deal with. But he's, and then every AI person who says, who hears neural networks, and says like, neural networks can learn everything, like almost presuming that it's kind of going to achieve general intelligence. The problem with all those haters in the three communities is that they're looking one year ahead, five years ahead. The hilarious thing about the, quote unquote, ridiculous things that Elon Musk is saying, is they have a pretty good shot at being true in 20 years. And so like, when you just look at the, you know, when you look at the progression of these kinds of predictions, and sometimes first principles thinking can allow you to do that, is you see that it's kind of obvious that things are going to progress this way. And if you just remove the prejudice you hold about the particular battles of the current academic environment, and just look at the big picture, the progression of the technology, you can usually see the world in the same kind of way. And so in that same way, looking at psychedelics, you can see like, there is so many exciting possibilities here if we fully engage in the research. Same thing with Neuralink. If we fully engage, so we go from a thousand channels of communication to the brain, to billions of channels of communication to the brain, and we figure out many of the details of how to do that safely with neurosurgery and so on, that the world would just change completely in the same kind of way that Elon is. It's so ridiculous to hear him talk about a symbiotic relationship between AI and the human brain. But it's like, is it though? Is it? Because I can see in 50 years, that's going to be an obvious, like everyone will have, like obviously you have, like why are we typing stuff in the computer? It doesn't make any sense. That's stupid. People used to type on a keyboard with a mouse? What is that? And it seems pretty clear, like we're going to be there. Like, and the only question is like, what's the timeframe? Is that going to be 20 or is it 50 or a hundred? Like, how could we not? And the thing that I guess upsets with Elon and others is the timeline he tends to do. I think a lot of people tend to do that kind of thing. I definitely do it, which is like, it'll be done this year versus like, it'll be done in 10 years. The timeline is a little bit too rushed, but from our leadership perspective, it inspires the engineers to do the best work of their life to really kind of believe, because to do the impossible, you have to first believe it, which is a really important aspect of innovation. And there's the delay discounting aspect I talked about before. It's like saying, oh, this is going to be a thing 20, 50 years from now. It's like, what motivates anybody? And even if you're fudging it or like wishful thinking a little bit, or let's just say airing on one side of the probability distribution, like there's value in saying like, yeah, like there's a chance we could get this done in a year. And you know what? And if you set a goal for a year and you're not successful, hey, you might get it done in three years. Whereas if you had aimed at 20 years, well, you either would have never done it at all, or you would have aimed at 20 years and then it would have taken you 10. So the other thing I think about this, like in terms of his work and I guess we've seen with psychedelics, it's like there's a lack of appreciation for like sort of the variability you need a natural selection, sort of extrapolating from biological, from evolution like, hey, maybe he's wrong about focusing only on the cameras and not these other things. Be empirically driven. It's like, yeah, you need to like when he's, when you need to get the regulation, is it safe enough to get this thing on the road? Those are real questions and be empirically driven. And if he can meet the whatever standard is relevant, that's the standard and be driven by that. So don't let it affect your ethics. But if he's on the wrong path, how wonderful someone's exploring that wrong path. He's gonna figure out it's a wrong path. And like other people, he's, damn it, he's doing something. Like he's, and appreciating that variability, that like it's valuable even if he's not on, I mean, this is all over the place in science. It's like a good theory. One standard definition is that it generates testable hypotheses. And like the ultimate model is never gonna be the same as reality. Some models are gonna work better than others. Newtonian physics got us a long ways, even if there was a better model like waiting. And some models weren't as good as, were never that successful, but just even like putting them out there and test it. We wouldn't know something is a bad model until someone puts it out anyway, so. Yeah, diversity of ideas is essential for progress, yeah. So we brought up consciousness a few times. There's several things I wanna kind of disentangle there. So one, you've recently wrote a paper titled Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus, Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine. So that's one side of it. You've kind of already mentioned that these terms can be a little bit misused or used in a variety of ways that they can be confusing. But in a specific way, as much as we can be specific about these things, about the actual heart problem of consciousness or understanding what is consciousness, this weird thing that it feels like, it feels like something to experience things. Have psychedelics given you some kind of insight on what is consciousness? You've mentioned that it feels like psychedelics allows you to kind of dismantle your sense of self, like step outside of yourself. So that feels like somehow playing with this mechanism of consciousness. And if it is in fact playing with the mechanism of consciousness using just a few chemicals, it feels like we're very much in the neighborhood of being able to maybe understand the actual biological mechanisms of how consciousness can emerge from the brain. So yeah, there's a bunch there. I think my preface is that I certainly have opinions that I can say, here are my best speculations as just a person and an armchair philosopher. And that philosophy is certainly not my training and my expertise. So I have thoughts there, but that I recognize are completely in the realm of speculation that are like things that I would love to wrap empirical science around, but that there's no data and getting to the hard problem, like no conceivable way, even though I'm very open, like I'm hoping that that problem can be cracked. And as an armchair philosopher, I do think that is a problem. I don't think it can be dismissed as some people argue it's not even really a problem. It strikes me that explaining just the existence of phenomenal consciousness is a problem. So anyway, I very much keep that divide in mind when I talk about these things, what we can really say about what we've learned through science, including by psychedelics versus like what I can speculate on in terms of the nature of reality and consciousness. But in terms of, by and large, skeptically, I have to say psychedelics have not really taught us anything about the nature of consciousness. I'm hopeful that they will. They have been used around certain, I don't even know if features is the right term, but things that are called consciousness. So consciousness can refer to not only just phenomenal consciousness, which is like the source of the hard problem and what it is to be like Nagel's description, but the sense of self, which can be sort of like the experiential self moment to moment, or it can be like the narrative self, the stringing together of stories. So those are things that I think can be, and a little bit's been done with psychedelics regarding that, but I think there's far more potential. So like one story that unfolded is that psychedelics acutely having effects on the default mode network, a certain pattern of activation amongst a subset of brain areas that is associated with self referential processing, seems to be more active, more communication between these areas, like the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex, for example, being parts of this and others that are tied with sort of thinking about yourself, remembering yourself in the past, projecting yourself into the future. And so an interesting story emerged when it was found that when psilocybin is on board in the person's system, that there's less communication amongst these areas. So with resting state fMRI imaging, that there's less synchronization or presumably communication between these areas. And so I think it has been overstated in terms of, ah, we see this is like, this is the dissolving of the ego. The story made a whole lot of sense, but there's several, I think that story is really being challenged. Like one, we see increasing number of drugs that decouple that network, including ones like that aren't psychedelic. So this may just be a property, frankly, of being like, you know, screwed up, you know, like, you know, being out of your head, being like, like, you know. Anytime you mess with the perception system, maybe it screws up some, just our ability to just function in the holistically like we do in order, yeah, for the brain to perceive stuff, to be able to map it to memory, to connect things together, the whole recur mechanism that that could just be messed with. Right. And it could, and I'm speculating, it could be tied to more if you had to download into the language, everyday language, like not feeling like yourself. Like, so whether that be like really drunk or really hopped up on amphetamine or, you know, like we found it like decoupling of the default mode network on salvinorin A, which is a smokable psychedelic, which is a non classic psychedelic, but another one where like DMT, where people are often talking to entities and that type of thing. That was a really fun study to run. But nonetheless, most people say it's not a classic psychedelic and doesn't have some of those phenomenal features that people report from classic psychedelics and not sort of the clear sort of ego loss type, at least not in the way that people report it with classic psychedelics. So you get it with all these different drugs. And so, and then you also see just broad, broad changes in network activity with other networks. And so I think that story took off a little too soon, although, so I think, and the story that the DMN, the default mode network relating to the self, and I know some neuroscientists, it drives them crazy if you say that it's the ego and that just like, but self referential processing, if you go that far, like that was already known before psychedelics. Psychedelics didn't really contribute to that. The idea that this type of brain network activity was related to a sense of self. But it is absolutely striking that psychedelics that people report with pretty high reliability, these unity experiences that where people subjectively, like they report losing or again, like the boundaries, however you wanna say it, like these unity experiences, I think we can do a lot with that in terms of figuring out the nature of the sense of self. Now, I don't think that's the same as the hard problem or the existence of phenomenal consciousness, because you can build an AI system, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that will pass a Turing test in terms of demonstrating the qualities of like a sense of self. It will talk as if there's a self and there's probably a certain like algorithm or whatever, like computational, like scaling up of computations that results in somehow, and I think this is the argument with humans, but some have speculated this, why do we have this illusion of the self that's evolved? And we might find this with AI that like it works, having a sense of self, and that's stated incorrectly, like acting as if there is an agent at play and behaviorally acting like there is a self, that might kind of work. And so you can program a computer or a robot to basically demonstrate, have an algorithm like that and demonstrate that type of behavior. And I think that's completely silent on whether there's an actual experience inside there. I've been struggling to find the right words in how I feel about that whole thing, but because I've said it poorly before, I've before said that there's no difference between the appearance and the actual existence of consciousness or intelligence or any of that. What I really mean is the more the appearance starts to look like the thing, the more there's this area where it's like, I don't think, our whole idea of what is real and what is just an illusion is not the right way to think about it. So the whole idea is like, if you create a system that looks like it's having fun, the more it's realistically able to portray itself as having fun, like there's a certain gray area which the system is having fun. And same with intelligence, same with consciousness. And we humans wanna simplify, like it feels like the way we simplify the existence and the illusion of something is missing the whole truth of the nature of reality, which we're not yet able to understand. Like it's the 1%, we only understand 1% currently. So we don't have the right physics to talk about things, we don't have the right science to talk about things. But to me, like the faking it and actually it being true is the difference is much smaller than what humans would like to imagine. That's my intuition, but the philosophers hate that because, and guess what? It's philosophers, what have you actually built? So like to me is that's the difference in philosophy and engineering. It feels like if we push the creation, the engineering, like fake it until you make it all the way, which is like fake consciousness until you realize, holy crap, this thing is conscious. Fake intelligence until you realize, holy crap, this is intelligence. And from my curiosity with psychedelics and just neurobiology and neuroscience is like it feels, I love the armchair. I love sitting in that armchair because it feels like at a certain point you're going to think about this problem and there's going to be an aha moment. Like that's what the armchair does. Sometimes science prevents you from really thinking, wait, like it's really simple. There's something really simple. Like there's some, there could be some dance of chemicals that we're totally unaware of, not from aspects of like which chemicals to combine with which biological architectures, but more like we were thinking of it completely wrong that just out of the blue, like maybe the human mind is just like a radio that tunes into some other medium where consciousness actually exists. Like those weird sort of hypothetically, like maybe we're just thinking about the human mind totally wrong. Maybe there's no such thing as individual intelligence. Maybe it is all collective intelligence between humans. Like maybe the intelligence is possessed in the communication of language between minds. And then in fact, consciousness is a property of that language versus a property of the individual minds. And somehow the neurotransmitters will be able to connect to that. So then AI systems can join that common collective intelligence, that common language, like just thinking completely outside of the box. I just said a bunch of crazy things. I don't know, but thinking outside the box and there's something about subtle manipulation of the chemicals of the brain, which feels like the best or one of the great chances of the scientific process leading us to an actual understanding of the hard problem. So I am very hopeful that, and so I mean, I'm a radical empiricist, which I'm very strong with that. Like that's what, you know, so, you know, science isn't about ultimately being a materialist. It's like, it's about being an empiricist in my view. And so, for example, I'm very fascinated by the so called Psi phenomenon, you know, like stuff that people just kind of reject out of hand. You know, I kind of orient towards that stuff with an idea of, you know, hey, look, you know, what we consider, like anything exists as natural. And so, but the boundary of what we observe in nature, like what we recognize as in nature moves, like what we do today and what we know today would only be described as magic 500 years ago, or even a hundred years ago, some of it. So there will surely be things that, like you explained these phenomenon that just sound like completely, they're supernatural now, where there may be, for some of it, like some of it might turn out to be a complete bunk and some of it might turn out to be, it's just another layer of nature, whether we're talking about multiple dimensions that are invoked or something, we don't even have the language towards. And what you're saying about the moving together of the model and the real thing of conscious, like, I'm very sympathetic to that. So that's that part of like, on the armchair side, where I want to be clear, I can't say this as a scientist, but just in terms of speculating, I find myself attracted to these, more of the sort of the panpsychism ideas. And that kind of makes sense to me. I don't know if that's what you meant there, but it seemed like related, the sense that ultimately if you were completely modeling, like it's like, if you completely modeling, unless you dismiss like the idea that there is a phenomenal consciousness, which I think is hard, given that we all, I seem like I have one, that's really all I know. But if that's so compelling, I can't just dismiss that. Like if you take that as a given, then the only way for the model and the real thing to merge is if there is something baked into the nature of reality, sort of like in the history of like, there are certain just like fundamental forces or fundamental, like, and that's been useful for us. And sometimes we find out that that's pointing towards something else, or sometimes it's still, seems like it's a fundamental, and sometimes it's a placeholder for someone to figure out, but there's something like, this is just a given. This is just, and sometimes something like gravity seems like a very good placeholder, and then there's something better that comes to replace it. So, I kind of think about like consciousness and I didn't, I kind of had this inclination before I knew there was a term for it, Rosalian monism, the idea that, which is a form of, again, I'm an armchair philosopher, not a very good one. Broadly panpsychism, by the way, is the idea that sort of consciousness permeates all matter and, or it's a fundamental part of physics of the universe kind of thing. So, and there's a lot of different flavors of it as you're alluding to. And something that struck me as like consistent with some just, you know, inclinations of mine, just total speculation is this idea of everything we know in science and with most of the stuff we think of physics, you know, really describes, it's all interactions. It's not the thing itself. Like there is something to, and this sounds very new agey, which is why it's very difficult and I have a high bullshit like meter and everything, but like an isness, I mean, think about like Huxley, all this Huxley with his mescaline experience and doors of procession, like there's an isness there in Alan Watson, like there is a nature of being, again, very new agey sounding, but maybe there is something to, and when we say consciousness, we think of like this human experience, but maybe that's just, that's so processed and so, that's so far, so derivative of this kind of basic thing that we wouldn't even recognize the basic thing, but the basic thing might just be, this is not about the interaction between particles. This is what it is like to exist as a particle. And maybe it's not even particles. Maybe it's like space time itself. I mean, again, totally in the speculation area. And something else based on, so it's funny because we don't have this, neither the science nor the proper language to talk about it. All we have is kind of a little intuitions about there might be something in that direction of the darkness to pursue. And in that sense, I find panpsychism interesting in that like, it does feel like there's something fundamental here, that consciousness is, it's not just like, okay, so the flip side, consciousness could be just a very basic and trivial symptom, like a little hack of nature that's useful for like survival of an organism. It's not something fundamental. It's just this very basic, boring chemical thing that somehow has convinced us humans, because we're very human centric, we're very self centric, that this is somehow really important, but it's actually pretty obvious. But, or it could be something really fundamental to the nature of the universe. So both of those are to me pretty compelling. And I think eventually scientifically testable. It is so frustrating that it's hard to design a scientific experiment currently, but I think that's how Nobel Prizes are won, is nobody did it until they do it. The reason I lean towards, and again, armchair spec, if I had to bet like $1,000 on which one of these ultimately be proved, I would lean towards, I'd put my bets on something like panpsychism rather than the emergence of phenomenal consciousness through complexity or computational complexity, because, although certainly if there is some underlying fundamental consciousness, it's clearly being processed in this way through computation in terms of resulting in our experience and the experience presumably of other animals. But the reason I would bet on panpsychism is to me, Occam's razor, in terms of truly the hard problem, at some point you have an inside looking out. And even looking refers to vision and it doesn't, that's just an example, but just, there's an inside experiencing something. At some point of complexity, all of a sudden, you start from this objective universe and all we know about is interactions between things and things happen. And at this certain level of complexity, magically there's an inside. That to me doesn't pass Occam's razor as easily as maybe there is a fundamental property of the universe. There's both subjective and objective. There is both interactions amongst things and there is the thing itself. Yes. But, yeah. So I'm of two minds. I agree with you totally on half my mind. And the other half is I've seen, looking at cellular automata a lot, which is, it sure does seem that we don't understand anything about complexity. Like the emergence, just the property. In fact, that could be a fundamental property of reality is something within the emergence from simple things interacting, somehow miraculous things happen. And like that, I don't understand that. That could be fundamental. That like something about the layers of abstraction, like layers of reality, like really small things interacting and then on another layer emerges actual complicated behavior even on the underlying thing is super simple. Like that process, we don't really don't understand either. And that could be bigger than any of the things we're talking about. That's the basic force behind everything that's happening in the universe is from simple things, complex phenomena can happen. Phenomena can happen. And the thing that gives me pause is that I'm concerned about a threshold there. Like how is it likely that, now there may be, and there may be some qualitative shift that in the realm of like, we don't even understand complexity yet, like you're saying. Like, so maybe there is, but I do think like if it is a result of the complexity, well, just having helium versus hydrogen is a form of complexity. Having the existence of stars versus clouds of gas is a complexity. The entire universe has been this increasing complexity. And so that kind of brings me back to then the other of like, okay, if there's, if it's about complexity, then we should, then it exists at a certain level in these simple systems like a star or a more complex atom. Hence the panpsychism, that's right. But we humans, the qualitative shift, we might have evolved to appreciate certain kinds of thresholds. Right. Yeah. I do think it's likely that this idea that, whether or not there's an inner experience, which is phenomenal, it's the hard problem, that acting like an agent, like having an algorithm that basically like operates as if there is an agent, that's clearly a thing that I think has worked and that there is a whole lot to figure out there that, and I think psychedelics will be extremely helpful in figuring more out about that because they do seem to a lot of times eliminate that or whatever, radically shift that sense of self. Let me ask the craziest question. Indulge me for a second. I'll, this is a joke. Compared to what we've been talking about? Like, okay. No, all of this is assigned, all of that, despite the caveats about armchair, I think is within the reach of science. Let me ask one that's kind of, also within the reach of science, but as Joe likes to say, it's entirely possible, right? Is it possible that with these DMT trips, when you meet entities, is it possible that these entities are extraterrestrial life forms? Like our understanding of little green men with aliens that show up is totally off. I often think about this, like what would actual extraterrestrial intelligence look like? And my sense is it will look like very different from anything we can even begin to comprehend. And how would it communicate? And how would it communicate? Would it be necessarily spaceships within your civil travel or? Could it be communicating through chemicals, through if there's the panpsychism situation, if there's something, not if. I almost for sure know we don't understand a lot about the function of our mind in connection to the fabric of the physics in the universe. A lot of people seem to think we have theoretical physics pretty figured out. I have my doubts because I'm pretty sure it always feels like we have everything figured out until we don't. Right, I mean, there's no grand unifying theory yet, right? But even then, we could be missing out, like the concept of the universe just can be completely off. Like how many other universes are there? All those kinds of things. I mean, just the basic nature of information, the time, time, all of those things. Yeah, whether that's just like a thing we assign value to or whether it's fundamental or not, that's whole, I could talk to Shankar forever about whether time is emergent or fundamental to the reality. But is it possible that the entities we meet are actual alien life forms? Do you ever think about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. And I've, to some degree, laid my cards out by identifying as a radical empiricist, you know? And it's like, so the answer, is it possible? And I think, you know, ultimately, if you're a good scientist, you gotta say, now that's at the extremes, it's a like, yes. Yes. It might get more interesting when you're asked to guess about the probability of that. Is that a one in a million, one in a trillion, one in more than the number of atoms in the universe probability? And as an empiricist, it's like, what is a good testable? Like, how would you know the answer to that question? Or how would you be able to validate? I mean. Well, can you get some information that's verifiable, like information about some other planet or some aspect? And gosh, it would be an interesting range, but what range of discovery that we can anticipate we're gonna know within, you know, whatever, a few years, next five, 10, 20 years, and seeing if you can get that information now, and then over time, it might be verified. You know, the type of thing like, you know, part of Einstein's work was ultimately verified, not until decades and decades later, at least certain aspects through empirical observations. But it's also possible that the alien beings have a very different value system and perception of the world, where all of this little capitalistic improvements that we're all after, like predicting, the concept of predicting the future too, is like totally useless to other life forms that perhaps think in a much different way, maybe a more transcendent way, I don't know, but. So they wouldn't even sign the consent form to be a participant in our experiment? They would not, they would not. And they wouldn't even understand the nature of these experiments. I mean, maybe it's purely in the realm of the consciousness thing that we talked about. So communicating in a way that is totally different than the kinds of communication that we think of as on Earth. Like what's the purpose of communication for us? For us humans, the purpose of communication is sharing ideas, it feels like. Like converging, like it's the Dawkins like memes. It's like we're sharing ideas in order to figure out how to collaborate together, to get food into our systems and procreate and then like murder everybody in the neighboring tribe because they'll steal our food. Like we are all about sharing ideas. Maybe it's possible to have another alien life form that's more about sharing experiences. Like it's less about ideas, I don't know. And maybe that'll be us in a few years. How could it not? Like instead of explaining something laboriously to you, like having people describe the ineffable psychedelic experience, like if we could record that and then get the neural link of 50 years from now, like, oh, just plug this into your... Just transferring the experiences. Yeah, it's like, oh, now you feel what it's like. And like, in one sense, like how could we not go there? And then you get into the realm, especially when you throw time into it, are the aliens us in the future? Or even like a transcendental, temporal, like the us beyond time. Like, I don't know, like you get into this realm and there's a lot of possibilities, yeah. But I think, you know, there's one psychedelic researcher that's who did high dose DMT research in the 90s who speculated that, that there was a lot of alien encounter experiences. Like maybe these are like entities from some other dimension or... He labeled it as speculation, but you know. Do you remember the name? Oh, Rick Strassman. Oh, Rick Strassman. Yeah, yeah, the DMT work. He labeled it as speculation, but you know, I think that, yeah, I think we'd be wise to kind of, you know, it's always that balance between being empirically grounded and skeptical, but also not being, and I think in science, well, often we are too closed, which relates to like, you're talking about Elon, like in academia, it's like often like, I think you're punished for thinking or even talking about 20 years from now because it's just so far removed from your next grant or for your next paper that it's easy pickings and you know, that you're not allowed to speculate, so. I think though, I'm a huge fan of, I think the best way to me at least to practice like science or to practice good engineering is to like do two things and just bounce off, like spend most of the time doing the rigor of the day to day of what can be accomplished now in the engineering space or in the science, like what can actually, what can you construct an experiment around, do like that, the usual rigor of the scientific process, but then every once in a while on a regular basis, to step outside and talk about aliens and consciousness and we just walk along the line of things that are outside the reach of science currently. Free will, the illusion or the perception or the experience of free will of anything, just the entirety of it, being able to travel in time through wormholes, it's like it's really useful to do that, especially as a scientist, like if that's all you do, you go into a land where you're not actually able to think rigorously, there's something at least to me that if you just hop back and forth, you're able to, I think do exactly the kind of injection of out of the box thinking to your regular day to day science that will ultimately lead to breakthroughs. But you have to be the good scientist most of the time. And that's consistent with what I think the great scientists of history, like in most of the history, the greats, the Newtons and Einsteins, I mean, they were, there was less of, and this change I think is time marched on, but less of a separation between those realms. It's like, there's the inclination alpha, it's like, as a scientist, and this is science, this is my work, and then this, it's like my inclination to say, oh, Lex, don't take me too seriously because this is my armchair, I'm not speaking as a scientist, I'm bending over backwards to say, to divide that self, and maybe there's been less of, there's been that evolution and that's, and like the greats didn't see that. I mean, Newton, and you go back in time, and it's like that obviously connects to then religion, especially if that is the predominant world, where Newton, like how much time did he spend trying to decode the Bible and whatnot? Maybe that was a dead end. But it's like, if you really believe in that, in that particular religion, and you're this mastermind, and you're trying to figure things out, it's not like, oh, this is what my job description is and this is what the grant wants. It's like, no, I've got this limited time on the planet, I'm gonna figure out as much stuff as possible. Nothing is off the table and you're just putting it all together. So this is kind of this trajectory is really related to this, the siloing in science. Like, again, related to my like, oh, I'm not a philosopher, whether you consider that a science or not, not empirical science, but like going to these different disciplines, like the greats didn't observe the boundaries, the boundaries didn't exist, they didn't observe them. So speaking of the finiteness of our existence in this world, so on the front of psychedelics and teaching you lessons as a researcher, as a human being, what have you learned about death, about mortality, about the finiteness of our existence? Are you yourself afraid of death? And how has your view, do you ponder it? And has your view of your mortality changed with the research you've done? Yeah, yeah, so I do ponder it and... Are you afraid of death? Probably on a daily basis, I ponder it. I'd have to pick it apart more and say, yeah, I am afraid of dying, like the process of dying. I'm not afraid of being dead. I mean, I'm not afraid of, I think it was Penn Jillette that said, and he may have gotten it from someone else, but I'm not afraid of the year 1862 before I existed. I'm not afraid of the year 2262 after I'm gone. It's gonna be fine. But yeah, dying, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid of dying. And so there's both the process of dying, yeah, it's usually not good. It'd be nice if it was after many, many years and just sort of, I'd rather not die in my sleep. I'd rather kind of be conscious, but sort of just die, fade out with old age maybe. But just being in an accident and horrible diseases, I've seen enough loved ones. It's like, yeah, this is not good. This is enough to be, I'd like to say that I'm peaceful and sort of balanced enough that I'm not concerned at all, but no, like, yeah, I'm afraid of dying. But I'm also concerned about, I think about family. I'm really, I'm afraid or at least concerned about like not being there, like with a three year old, not being there, not being there for him and my wife and my mom the rest of her life. I'm concerned about not, I'm concerned more about like the harm that it would cause if I left prematurely. And then kind of even bigger along the lines of some of the stuff that forward thinking we've been talking about. I think maybe way too much about just like, and I'll never know the answer. So even if I lived to 120, but like, I wanna know as much as I can, but like, how is this gonna work out like as humans? Are we, and a big one, I think is are we gonna, and I don't think unfortunately I'm gonna learn it in my lifetime, even if I live to a ripe old age, but well, I don't know. Is this gonna work out? Like, are we gonna escape the planet? I think that's one of the biggies. Like, are we gonna, like the survival of the speed, like I think the next, like the time we're in now, it's like with the nuclear weapons, with pandemics and with, I mean, we're gonna get to the point where anyone can build a hydrogen bomb. Like, you know, it's like, you just like the, or engineer like the, you know, something that's a million times worse than COVID and then just spread it. It's like, we're getting to this period of, and then not to mention climate change, you know, it's like, although I think that's not, there's probably gonna be surviving humans with that regard, you know, but it could be really bad. But these existential threats, I think the only real guarantee that we're gonna get another, you name it, thousand million, whatever years is like diversity, diversify our portfolio, get off the planet, you know, don't leave this one, hopefully we keep, you know, but like, and I, you know, it's like, either we're gonna get snuffed out like really quickly or we're gonna like, if we reach that point and it's gonna be over the next like 100, 200 years, like we're probably gonna survive like until like, I mean, you know, like our sun, like, and even beyond that, like we're probably gonna be talking about millions and millions of years. It's like, and we're, I don't know, in terms of the planet, 4 billion years into this. And depending on how you count our species, you know, we're, you know, we're millions of years into this. And it's like, this is like the point of the relay race where we can really screw up. So that would make you feel pretty good when you're on your deathbed at 120 years old and there's something hopeful about, there's a colony starting up on Mars and it's like. Yeah, Titan, like whatever, you know, like, yeah, like that we have these colonies out there that would tell me like, yeah, then at least we'd be good until like the, you know, hopefully, probably until the sun goes red giant, you know what I mean? Rather than, oh, like 20 years from now when there's someone with their finger on the nuclear button that just, you know, misperceives, you know, the radar, you know, like the signal they think Russia's attacking, they're really not or China. And like, that's probably how a nuclear accident, war is gonna start rather than, you know, or the, like I said, these other horrible things. Does it not make you sad that you won't be there if we are successful at proliferating throughout the observable universe that you won't be there to experience any of it? Just the ego death, right? It's the death, because you're still gonna die and it's still gonna be over. That's, you know, Ernest Becker and those folks really emphasize the terror of death that if we're honest, we'll discover if we search within ourselves, which is like, this thing is gonna be over. Most of our existence is based on the illusion that it's gonna go forever. And when you sort of realize it's actually gonna be over, like today, like I might murder you at the end of this conversation. And it might be over today, or like on going home, this might be your last day on this earth. And it's, I mean, like pondering that, I suppose one thing to be me, I, if I were to push back, it's interesting, is you actually, I think you see comfort in the sadness of how unfortunate it will be for your family to not have you, because the really, even the deeper, yes, but that's the simple fear. Even the deeper terror is like this thing doesn't last forever. Like I think, I don't know, like it's hard to put the right words to it, but it feels like that's not truly acknowledged by us, by each of us. Yeah, I think this is the, I mean, getting back to the psychedelics in terms of the people and our work with cancer patients who, we had psilocybin sessions to help them, and it did substantially help them, the vast majority, in terms of dealing with these existential issues. And I think, you know, it's something we, I could say that I really feel that I've come along in that both like being with folks who have died that are close to me, and then also that work, I think are the two biggies in sort of, you know, I think I've come along in that, that sort of acceptance of this, like it's not gonna last. And whether at the personal level or even at the species level, like at some point, all the stars are gonna fade out, and it's gonna be the realm of, which is gonna be the vast majority, unless there's a big crunch, which apparently doesn't seem likely. Like most of the universe, there's this blink of an eye that's happening right now that life is even possible, like the era of stars. So it's like, we're gonna fade out at some point. Like, you know, and you know, then we get at this level of consciousness and like, okay, maybe there is life after death. Maybe there's, maybe time's an illusion. Like that part I'm ready for. Like, I'm like, you know, like that, that would be really great. And I'm looking, I'm not afraid of that at all. It's like, even if it's just strange, like if I could push a button to enter that door, I mean, I'm not gonna, you know, die, you know, I can kill myself, but it's like, if I could take a peek at what that reality is or choose at the end of my life, if I could choose of entering into a universe where there is an afterlife of something completely unknown versus one where there's none, I think I'd say, well, let's see what's behind that. That's a true scientist way of thinking. If there's a door, you're excited about opening it and going in. Right. When I am attracted to this idea, like, you know, and I recognize it's easier said than done to say I'm okay with not existing. It's like the real test is like, okay, check me on my deathbed. You know, it's like, oh, I'll be all right. It's a beautiful thing and the humility of surrendering. And I really hope, and I think I'd probably be more likely to be in that realm right now than I would, or check me when I get a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I really hope I'm more in that realm. But I know enough about human nature to know that, like, I can't really speak to that because I haven't been in that situation. And I think there can be a beauty to that and the transcendence of like, yeah, and, you know, it was beautiful, not just despite all that, but because of that, because ultimately there's going to be nothing and because we came from nothing and we dealt with all this shit, the fact that there was still beauty and truth and connection, like, that, you know, like it just, it's a beautiful thing. But I hope I'm in that. It's easy to say that now. Like, yeah. Do you think there's a meaning to this thing we got going on, life, existence on earth to us individuals from a psychedelics researcher perspective or from just a human perspective? Those merged together for me, like, because it's just hard. I've been doing this research for almost 17 years and like, not just the cancer study, but so many times people like, I remember a session in one of our studies, someone who wasn't getting any treatment for anything, but one of our healthy normal studies where he was contemplating the suicide of his son and just these, I mean, just like the most intense human experiences that you can have in the most vulnerable situations. Sometimes like people like, you know, and it's just like, you have to have a, and you just feel lucky to be part of that process that people trust you to let their guards down like that. Like, I don't know, the meaning, I think the meaning of life is to find meaning. And I think, actually, I think I just described it a minute ago. It's like that transcendence of everything. Like, it's the beauty despite the absolute ugliness. It's the, and as a species, and I think more about this, like, I think about this a lot. It's the fact that we are, I mean, we come from filth. I mean, we're, you know, we're animals. We come from, like, we're all descendant from murderers and rapists. Like, we, despite that background, we are capable of the self sacrifice and the connection and figuring things out, you know, science and other forms of truth, you know, seeking, and an artwork, just the beauty of music and other forms of art. It's like the fact that that's possible is the meaning of life. I mean... And ultimately, that feels to be creating more and richer experiences. The, from a Russian perspective, both the dark, you mentioned the cancer diagnosis or losing a child to suicide or all those dark things is still rich experiences. And also the beautiful creations, the art, the music, the science, that's also rich experience. So somehow we're figuring out from just like psychedelics expand our mind to the possibility of experiences. Somehow we're able to figure out different ways as a society to expand the realm of experiences. And from that we gain meaning somehow. Right. And that's part of like this, we're going across different levels here, but like the idea that so called bad trips or challenging experiences are so common in psychedelic experiences, it's like, that's a part of that. Like, yeah, it's tough. And most of the important things in life are really, really tough and scary. And most of the things like the death of a loved one, like the greatest learning experiences and things that make you who you are are the horrors. And it's like, yeah, we try to minimize them. We try to avoid them, but I don't know. I think we all need to get into the mode of like giving ourselves a break, both personally and societally. I mean, I went through like the, I think a lot of people do these days in my twenties, like, oh, the humans are just kind of a disease on the planet. And then in terms of our country, in terms of the United States, it's like, oh, we have all these horrible sins in our past. And it's like, I think about that like the, I think about it like my three year old. It's like, yeah, you can construct a story where this is all just horrible. You can look at that stuff and say, this is all just horror. Like there's no logical answer to our rational answer to say we're not a disease on the planet. From one lens we are. And you could just look at humanity as that, like nothing but this horrible thing. You can look at, and you name the system, modern medicine, Western medicine, the university system. And it's like, you could dismiss everything. So, big pharma, like hopefully these vaccines work. And then like, yeah, I'd like to, I'm kind of glad the big pharma was a part of that. And it's like the United States, you can like point to the horrors, like any other country that's been around a long time that has these legitimate horrors and kind of dismiss like these beautiful things. Like, yeah, we have this like modifiable constitutional republic that just like I still think is the best thing going. That as a model system of like how humans have to figure out how to work together. It's like, there's no better system that I've come across. Yeah, there's, if we're willing to look for it, there's a beautiful core to a lot of things we've created. Yeah, this country is a great example of that. But most of the human experience has a beauty to it, even the suffering. Right. So, the meaning is choosing to focus on that positivity and not forget it. Beautifully put. Speaking of experiences, this was one of my favorite experiences on this podcast talking to you today, Matthew. I hope we get a chance to talk again. I hope to see you and Joe Rogan. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Can't wait to read your papers. Thanks for talking today. Likewise, I very much enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew Johnson. And thank you to our sponsors. Brave, a fast browser that feels like Chrome but has more privacy preserving features. Neuro, the micro functional sugar free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna. Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold. This is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #145

The following is a conversation with Michael Mina. He's a professor at Harvard doing research on infectious disease and immunology. The most defining characteristic of his approach to science and biology is that of a first principles thinker and engineer focused not just on defining the problem, but finding the solution. In that spirit, we talk about cheap rapid at home testing, which is a solution to COVID 19 that to me has become one of the most obvious, powerful, and doable solutions that frankly should have been done months ago and still should be done now. As we talk about its accuracy, it's high for detecting actual contagiousness and hundreds of millions can be manufactured quickly and relatively cheaply. In general, I love engineering solutions like these even if government bureaucracies often don't. It respects science and data, it respects our freedom, it respects our intelligence and basic common sense. Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to Brave, a fast browser that feels like Chrome but has more privacy preserving features, Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I've always been solution oriented, not problem oriented. It saddens me to see that public discourse disproportionately focuses on the mistakes of those who dare to build solutions rather than applaud their attempt to do so. Teddy Roosevelt said it well in his The Man in the Arena speech over 100 years ago. I should say that both the critic and the creator are important, but in my humble estimation, there are too many now of the former and not enough of the latter. So while we spread the derisive words of the critic on social media, making it viral, let's not forget that this world is built on the blood, sweat, and tears of those who dare to create. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Minna. What is the most beautiful, mysterious, or surprising idea in the biology of humans or viruses that you've ever come across in your work? Sorry for the overly philosophical question. Wow, well that's a great question. You know, I love the pathogenesis of viruses, and one of the things that I've worked on a lot is trying to understand how viruses interact with each other. And so pre all this COVID stuff, I was really, really dedicated to understanding how viruses impact other pathogens, so how if somebody gets an infection with one thing or a vaccine, does it either benefit or harm you from other things that appear to be unrelated to most people. And so one system which is highly detrimental to humans, but what I think is just immensely fascinating, is measles. And measles gets into a kid's body. The immune system picks it up, and essentially grabs the virus, and does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to take this virus and bring it into the immune system so that the immune system can learn from it, can develop an immune response to it. But instead, measles plays a trick. It gets into the immune system, serves almost as a Trojan horse, and instead of getting eaten by these cells, it just takes them over, and it ends up proliferating in the very cells that were supposed to kill it. And it just distributes throughout the entire body, gets into the bone marrow, kills off children's immune memories. And so it essentially, what I've found and what my research has found is that this one virus was responsible for as much as half of all of the infectious disease deaths in kids before we started vaccinating against it, because it was just wiping out children's immune memories to all different pathogens, which is, I think, just astounding. It's just amazing to watch it spread throughout bodies. We've done the studies in monkeys, and you can watch it just destroy and obliterate people's immune memories in the same way that some parasite might destroy somebody's brain. Is that evolutionary just coincidence, or is there some kind of advantage to this kind of interactivity between pathogens? Oh, I think in that sense, it's just coincidence. It probably is a, it's a good way for measles to, it's a good way for measles to essentially be able to survive long enough to replicate in the body. It just replicates in the cells that are meant to destroy it. So it's utilizing our immune cells for its own replication, but in so doing, it's destroying the memories of all the other immunological memories. But there are other viruses, so a different system is influenza, and flu predisposes to severe bacterial infections. And that, I think, is another coincidence, but I also think that there are some evolutionary benefits that bacteria may hijack and sort of piggyback on viral infections. Viruses can, they just grow so much quicker than bacteria. They replicate faster, and so there's this system with viruses, with flu and bacteria, where the influenza has these proteins that cleave certain receptors, and the bacteria want to cleave those same receptors. They want to cleave the same molecules that gave entrance to those receptors. So instead, the bacteria found out, like, hey, we could just piggyback on these viruses. They'll do it 100 or 1,000 times faster than we can. And so then they just piggyback on, and they let flu cleave all these sialic acids, and then the bacteria just glom on in the wake of it. So there's all different interactions between pathogens that are just remarkable. So does this whole system of viruses that interact with each other and so damn good at getting inside our bodies, does that fascinate you or terrify you? I'm very much a scientist, and so it fascinates me much more than it terrifies me. But knowing enough, I know just how well, you know, we get the wrong virus in our population, whether it's through some random mutation or whether it's this same COVID 19 virus, and it, you know, these things are tricky. They're able to mutate quickly. They're able to find new hosts and rearrange in the case of influenza. So what terrifies me is just how easily this particular pandemic could have been so much worse. This could have been a virus that is much worse than it is. You know, same thing with H1N1 back in 2009. That terrifies me. If a virus like that was much more detrimental, you know, that would be, it could be much more devastating. Although it's hard to say, you know, the human species were, well, I hesitate to say that we're good at responding to things because there are some aspects that were, this particular virus, SARS COVID 2 and COVID 19 has found a sweet spot where it's not quite serious enough on an individual level that humans just don't, we haven't seen much of a useful response by many humans. A lot of people even think it's a hoax. And so it's led us down this path of, it's not quite serious enough to get everyone to respond immediately and with the most urgency, but it's enough, it's bad enough that, you know, it's caused our economies to shut down and collapse. And so I think I know enough about virus biology to be terrified for humans that, you know, it can, it just takes one virus, just takes the wrong one to just obliterate us or not obliterate us, but really do much more damage than we've seen. It's fascinating to think that COVID 19 is a result of a virus evolving together with like Twitter, like figuring out how we can sneak past the defenses of the humans. So it's not bad enough. And then the misinformation, all that kind of stuff together is operating in such a way that the virus can spread effectively. I wonder, I mean, obviously a virus is not intelligent, but there's a rhyme and a rhythm to the way this whole evolutionary process works and creates these fascinating things that spread throughout the entire civilization. Absolutely, it's, yeah, I'm completely fascinated by this idea of social media in particular, how it replicates, how it grows. You know, I've been, how it actually starts interacting with the biology of the virus, masks, who's gonna get vaccinated, politics, like these seem so external to virus biology, but it's become so intertwined. And it's interesting. And I actually think we could find out that the virus actually becomes, obviously not intentionally, but we could find that people choosing not to wear masks, choosing not to counter this virus in a regimented and sort of organized way, effectively gives the virus more opportunity to escape. We can look at vaccines. We're about to have one of the most aggressive vaccination programs the world has ever seen. But we are unfortunately doing it right at the peak of viral transmission when millions and millions of people are still getting infected. And when we do that, that just gives this virus so many more opportunities. I mean, orders of magnitude more opportunity to mutate around our immune system. Now, if we were to vaccinate everyone when there's not a lot of virus, then there's just not a lot of virus. And so there's not going to be as many, I don't even know how many zeros are at the end of however many viral particles there are in the world right now, more than quadrillions. And so if you assume that at any given time, somebody might have trillions of virus in them and any given individual, so then multiply trillions by millions and you get a lot of viruses out there. And if you start applying pressure, ecological pressure, to this virus, that when it's not abundant, God, the opportunity for a virus to sneak around immunity, especially when all the vaccines are identical, essentially, it's... All it takes is one to mutate and then jumps. Takes one. Takes one in the whole world. And we have to not forget that this particular virus was one. It was one opportunity and it has spread across the globe and there's no reason that can't happen tomorrow anew. It's scary. I have a million other questions in this direction, but I'd love to talk about one of the most exciting aspects of your work, which is testing or rapid testing. You wrote a great article in Time on November 17th. This is like a month ago about rapid testing titled, How We Can Stop the Spread of COVID 19 by Christmas. Let's jot down the fact that this is a month ago. So maybe your timeline would be different, but let's say in a month. So you've talked about this powerful idea for quite a while throughout the COVID 19 pandemic. How do we stop the spread of COVID 19 in a month? Well, we use tests like these. So the only reason the virus continues spreading is because people spread it to each other. This isn't magic. Yes. And so there's a few ways to stop the virus from spreading to each other. And that is you either can vaccinate everyone and vaccinating everyone is a way to immunologically prevent the virus from growing inside of somebody and therefore spreading. We don't know yet actually if this vaccine, if any of these vaccines are going to prevent onward transmission. So that may or may not serve to be one opportunity. Certainly I think it will decrease transmission. But the other idea that we have at our disposal now, we had it in May, we had it in June, July, August, September, October, November, and now it's December. We still have it. We still choose not to use it in this country and in much of the world. And that's rapid testing. That is giving, it's empowering people to know that they are infected and giving them the opportunity to not spread it to their loved ones and their friends and neighbors and whoever else. We could have done this. We still can. Today we could start. We have millions of these tests. These tests are simple paper strip tests. They are, inside of this thing is just a little piece of paper. Now I can actually open it up here. There we go. So this, this is how we do it right here. We have this little paper strip test. This is enough to let you know if you're infectious. With somewhere around the order of 99% sensitivity, 99% specificity, you can know if you have infectious virus in you. If we can get these out to everyone's homes, build these, make 10 million, 20 million, 30 million of them a day. You know, we make more bottles of Dasani water every day. We can make these little paper strip tests. And if we do that and we get these into people's homes so that they can use them twice a week, then we can know if we're infectious. You know, is it perfect? Absolutely not. But is it near perfect? Absolutely. You know, and so if we can say, hey, the transmission of this is, you know, for every hundred people that get infected right now, they go on to infect maybe 130 additional people. And that's exponential growth. So a hundred becomes 130. A couple of days later that 130 becomes another 165 people have now been infected. And you know, go over three weeks and a hundred people become 500 people infected. Now it doesn't take much to have those hundred people not infect 130, but infect 90. All we have to do is remove say 30, 40% of new infections from continuing their spread. And then instead of exponential growth, you have exponential decay. So this doesn't need to be perfect. We don't have to go from a hundred to zero. We just have to go and have those hundred people infect 90 and those 90 people infect, you know, 82, whatever it might be. And you do that for a few weeks and boom, you have now gone instead of a hundred to 500, you've gone from a hundred to 20. It's not very hard. And so the way to do that is to let people know that they're infectious. I mean, we're a perfect example right now. This morning I used these tests to make sure that I wasn't infectious. Is it perfect? No, but it reduced my odds 99%. I already was at extremely low odds because I spend my life quarantining these days. Well, the interesting thing with this test, with the testing in general, which is why I love what you've been espousing, is it's really confusing to me that this has not been taken on as it's one actual solution that was available for a long time. There doesn't seem to have been solutions proposed at a large scale and a solution that it seems like a lot of people would be able to get behind. There's some politicization or fear of other solutions that people have proposed, which is like lockdown. And there's a worry, you know, especially in the American spirit of freedom, like you can't tell me what to do. The thing about tests is it like empowers you with information essentially. So like it gives you more information about your, like your role in this pandemic, and then you can do whatever the hell you want. Like it's all up to your ethics and so on. So like, and it's obvious that with that information, people would be able to protect their loved ones and also do their sort of quote unquote duty for their country, right? Is protect the rest of the country. That's exactly right. I mean, it's just, it's empowerment, but you know, this is a problem. We have not put these into action in large part because we have a medical industry that doesn't want to see them be used. We have a political and a regulatory industry that doesn't want to see them be used. That sounds crazy. Why wouldn't they want them to be used? We have a very paternalistic approach to everything in this country. You know, despite this country kind of being founded on this individualistic ideal, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, all that stuff. When it comes to public health, we have a bunch of ivory tower academics who want data. They, you know, they want to see perfection. And we have this issue of letting perfection get in the way of actually doing something at all, you know, doing something effective. And so we keep comparing these tests, for example, to the laboratory based PCR test. And sure, this isn't a PCR test, but this doesn't cost a hundred dollars and it doesn't take five days to get back, which means in every single scenario, this is the more effective test. And we have, unfortunately, a system that's not about public health. We have entirely eroded any ideals of public health in our country for the biomedical complex, you know, this medical industrial complex, which overrides everything. And that's why, you know, I'm just, can I swear on this pot? Yes. I'm just so fucking pissed that these tests don't exist. Meanwhile, and everyone says, you know, oh, we couldn't make these, you know, that we could never do it. That would be such a hard, a difficult problem. Meanwhile, the vaccine gets, we have at the same time that we could have gotten these stupid little paper strip tests out to every household, we have developed a brand new vaccine. We've gone through phase one, phase two, phase three trials. We've scaled up its production. And now we have UPS and FedEx and all the logistics in the world, getting freezers out to where they need to be. We have this immense, we see when it comes to sort of medicine, you know, something you're injecting into somebody, then all of a sudden people say, oh, yes we can. But you say, oh no, that's too simple a solution, too cheap a solution. No way could we possibly do that. It's this faulty thinking in our country, which, you know, frankly is driven by big money, big, you know, the only time when we actually think that we can do something that's maybe aggressive and complicated is when there's billions and billions of billions of dollars in it, you know. I mean, on a difficult note, because this is part of your work from before the COVID, it does seem that I saw a statistic currently is that 40% would not be taken, of Americans would not be taking the vaccine, some number like this. So you also have to acknowledge that all the money that's been invested, like there doesn't appear to be a solution to deal with like the fear, distrust that people have. I bet, I don't know if you know this number, but for taking a strip, like a rapid test like this, I bet you people would say, like the percentage of people that wouldn't take it is in the single digits, probably. I completely think so. And you know, there's a lot of people who don't want to get a test today. And that's because it gets sent to a lab, it gets reported, it has all this stuff. And we're a country which teaches people from the time they're babies, you know, to keep their medical data close to them. We have HIPAA, we have all these, we have immense rules and regulations to ensure the privacy of people's medical data. And then a pandemic comes around and we just assume that the average person is gonna wipe all that away and say, oh no, I'm happy giving out not just my own medical data, but also to tell the authorities, everyone who I've spent my time with, so that they all get a call and are pissed at me for giving up their names. You know, so people aren't getting tested and they're definitely not giving up their contacts when it comes to contact tracing. And so for so many reasons, that approach is failing. Not to even mention the delays in testing and things like that. And so this is a whole different approach, but it's an approach that empowers people and takes the power a bit away from the people in charge. You know, and that's what's really grating on, I think, public health officials who say, no, we need the data. So they're effectively saying, if I can't have the data, I don't want the individuals, I don't want the public to have their own data either. Which is a terrible approach to a pandemic where we can't solve a public health crisis without actively engaging the public. It just doesn't work. And you know, and that's what we're trying to do right now, which is a terrible approach. So first of all, there's a, you have a really nice informative website, rapidtest.org, with information on this. I still can't believe this is not more popular. It's ridiculous. Okay, but our, one of the FAQs you have is a rapid test too expensive. So can cost be brought down? Like I pay, I take a weekly PCR test and I think I pay 160, 170 bucks a week. No, I mean, it's criminal. Absolutely we can get costs. This thing right here costs less than a dollar to make. With everything combined, plus the swabs, you know, maybe it costs a dollar 50. Could be sold for, frankly, it could be sold for $3 and still make a profit if they wanna sell it for five. This one here, this is a slightly more complicated one, but you can see it's just got the exact same paper strip inside. And this is really, it doesn't look like much, but it's kind of the cream of the crop in terms of these rapid tests. This is the one that the US government bought and it is doing an amazing job. It has a 99.9% sensitivity and specificity. So it's really, it's really good. And so essentially the way it works is you just, you use a swab, you put the, once you kind of use a swab on yourself, you put the swab into these little holes here. You put some buffer on it and you close it and a line will show up if it's positive and a line won't show up if it's negative. It takes five, 10 minutes. This whole thing, this can be made so cheap that the US government was able to buy them, buy 150 million of them from Abbott for $5 a piece. So anyone who says that these are expensive, we have the proof is right here. This one at its, Abbott did not lose money on this deal. They got $750 million for selling 150 million of these at five bucks a piece. All of these tests can do the same. So anyone who says that these should be, unfortunately what's happening though is the FDA is only authorizing all of these tests as medical devices. So what happens when you, if I'm a medical company, if I'm a test production company and I wanna make this test and I go through and the FDA at the end of my authorization, the FDA says, okay, you now have a medical device, not a public health tool, but a medical device. And that affords you the ability to charge insurance companies for it. Why would I ever as a, you know, in our capitalistic economy and sort of infrastructure, why would I ever not sell this for $30 when insurance will pay for it or $100? You know, it might only cost me 50 cents to make, but by pushing all of these tests through a medical pathway at the FDA, what extrudes out the other side is an expensive medical device that's erroneously expensive. It doesn't need to be inflated in cost, but the companies say, well, I'd rather make fewer of them and just sell them all for $30 a piece than make tens of millions of them, which I could do, and sell them at a dollar marginal profit. And so it's a problem with our whole medical industry that we see tests only as medical devices and what I would like to see is for the government in the same way that they bought 150 million of these from Abbott, they should be buying, you know, all of these tests, they should be buying 20 million a day and getting them out to people's homes. This virus has cost trillions of dollars to the American people. It's closed down restaurants and stores and obviously the main streets across America have shuttered. It's killing people, it's killing our economy, it's killing lifestyles and lives. This is an obvious solution. To me, this is exciting. This is like, this is a solution. I wish like in April or something like that to launch like the larger scale manufacturing deployment of tests. Doesn't matter what test they are. It's obviously the capitalist system would create cheaper and cheaper tests that would be hopefully driving down to $1. So what are we talking about? In America, there's, I don't know, 300 plus million people. So that means you wanna be testing regularly, right? So how many do you think is possible to manufacture? What would be the ultimate goal to manufacture per month? Yep, so if we wanna slow this virus and actually stop it from transmitting, achieve what I call herd effects. Like vaccine herd immunity, herd effects are when you get that R value below one through preventing onward transmission. If we wanna do that with these tests, we need about 20 million to 40 million of them every day, which is not a lot. In the United States. In the United States. So we could do it. There's other ways. You can have two people in a household swab each other, swab themselves rather, and then mix, put the swabs into the same tube and onto one test so you can pool. So you can get a two or three X gain in efficiency through pooling in the household. You could do that in schools or offices too, wherever and just use a swab. You have a, there's two people. I mean, even if it's just standing in line at a public testing site or something, you could just say, okay, these two are the last people to test or swab themselves. They go into one thing. And if it comes back positive, then you just do each person and it's rapid. So you can just say to the people, one of you is positive. Let's test you again. So there's ways to get the efficiency gains much better. But let's say, I think that the optimal number right now that matches sort of what we can produce more or less today, if we want it, is 20 million a day. Right now, one company that, I don't have their test here, but one company is already producing 5 million tests themselves and shipping them overseas. It's an American company based in California called Inova, and they are giving 5 million tests to the UK every day. Not to the, you know, and this is just because there's no, the federal government hasn't authorized these tests. So without the support of the government. So yeah, so essentially, if the government just puts some support behind it, then yeah, you can get 20 million, probably easy. Oh yeah, this, I mean, just here, I have three different companies. These, they all look similar. Well, this one's closed, but these are three different companies right here. This is a fourth, Abbott. Now, this is a fifth. This is a sixth. These two are a little bit different. Do you mind if in a little bit, would you take some of these or? Yeah, let's do it. We can absolutely do them. So you have a lot of tests in front of you. Could you maybe explain some of them? Absolutely. So there's a few different classes of tests that I just have here, and there's more tests. There's many more different tests out in the world too. These are one class of tests. These are rapid antigen tests that are just the most bare bones paper strip tests. These are, this is the type that I wanna see produced in the tens of millions every day. It's so simple. You don't even need the plastic cartridge. You can just make the paper strip, and you could have a little tube like this that you just dunk the paper strip into. You don't actually need the plastic, which I'd actually prefer, because if we start making tens of millions of these, this becomes a lot of waste. So I'd rather not see this kind of waste be out there. And there's a few companies, Quidel is making a test called the Quick View, which is just this. It's a, they've gotten rid of all the plastic. And for people who are just listening to this, we're looking at some very small tests that fit in the palm of your hand, and they're basically paper strips fit into different containers. And that's hence the comment about the plastic containers. These are just injection molded, I think. And they're, you know, they can build them at high numbers, but then they have to like place them in there appropriately and all this stuff. So it is a bottleneck, or somewhat of a bottleneck in manufacturing. The actual bottleneck, which the government, I think, should use the Defense Productions Act to build up, is there's a nitrocellulose membrane, a laminated membrane on this, that allows the material, the buffer with the swab mixture to flow across it. So the way these work, they're called lateral flow tests. And you take a swab, you swab the front of your nose, you dunk that swab into some buffer, and then you put a couple of drops of that buffer onto the lateral flow. And just like paper, if you dip a piece of paper into a cup of water, the paper will pull the water up through capillary action. This actually works very similarly. It flows through somewhat a capillary action through this nitrocellulose membrane. And there's little antibodies on there, these little proteins that are very specific, in this case, for antigens or proteins of the virus. So these are antibodies similar to the antibodies that our body makes from our immune system, but they're just printed on these lateral flow tests, and they're printed just like a little, a line. So then you slice these all up into individual ones. And if there's any virus on that buffer, as it flows across, the antibodies grab that virus, and it creates a little reaction with some colloids in here that cause it to turn dark. Just like a pregnancy test, one line means negative, it means a control strip worked, and two lines mean positive. It means, you know, if you get two lines, it just means you have virus there. You're very, very likely to have virus there. And so they're super simple. It is the exact same technology as pregnancy tests. It's the technology, this particular one from Abbott, this has been used for other infectious diseases like malaria, and actually a number of these companies have made malaria tests that do the exact same thing. So they just coopted the same form factor and just changed the antibodies so it picks up SARS CoV2 instead of other infections. Is it also, the Abbott one, is it also a strip? Yep, yeah, this Abbott one here is, there's the, in this case, instead of being put in a plastic sheath, it's just put in a cardboard thing and literally glued on. I mean, it looks like nothing, you know, it's just, it looks like a, like, I mean, it's just the simplest thing you could imagine. The exterior packaging looks very Apple like, it's nice. It does, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's nice when it comes in a, this is how they're packaged, you know, so, and they don't have to, you know, these are coming in individual packages against, again, because they're really considered individual medical devices, but you could package them in bigger packets and stuff. You wanna be careful with humidity so they all have a little, one of those humidity removing things and oxygen removing things. So that's, this is one class, these antigen tests. If we could just pause for a second, if it's okay, and could you just briefly say what is an antigen test and what other tests there are out there, like categories of tests? Sure. Just really quick. So the testing landscape is a little bit complicated, but it's, but I'll break it down. There's really just three major classes of tests. We'll start with the first two. The first two tests are just looking for the virus or looking for antibodies against the virus. So we've heard about serology tests, or maybe some people have heard about it. Those are a different kind of test. They're looking to see has somebody in the past, does somebody have an immune response against the virus, which would indicate that they were infected or exposed to it. So we're not talking about the antibody tests. I'll just leave it at that. Those, they actually can look very similar to this, or they can be done in a laboratory. Those are usually done from blood and they're looking for an immune response to the virus. So that's one. Everything I'm talking about here is looking for the virus itself, not the immune response to the virus. And so there's two ways to look for the virus. You can either look for the genetic code of the virus, like the RNA, just like the DNA of somebody's human cells, or you can look for the proteins themselves, the antigens of the virus. So I like to differentiate them. If you were a PCR test that looks for RNA in, let's say if we made it against humans, it would be looking for the DNA inside of our cells. That would be actually looking for our genetic code. The equivalent to an antigen test is sort of a test that like actually is looking for our eyes or our nose or physical features of our body that would delineate, okay, this is Michael, for example. And so you're either looking for a sequence or you're looking for a structure. The PCR tests that a lot of people have gotten now and they're done in labs usually are looking for the sequence of the virus, which is RNA. This test here by a company called Detect, this is one of Jonathan Rothberg's companies. He's the guy who helped create modern day sequencing and all kinds of other things. So this Detect device, that's the name of the company, this is actually a rapid RNA detection device. So it's almost, it's like a PCR like test and we could even do it here. It's really, it's a beautiful test in my opinion, works exceedingly well. It's gonna be a little bit more expensive. So I think it could confirm, could be used as a confirmatory test for these. Is there a greater accuracy to it? Yes, I would say that there is a greater accuracy. There's also a downfall though of PCR and tests that look for RNA. They can sometimes detect somebody who is no longer infectious. So you have the RNA test and then you have these antigen tests. The antigen tests look for structures, but they're generally only going to turn positive if people have actively replicating virus in them. And so what happens after an infection dissipates, you've just gone from having sort of a spike. So if you get infected, maybe three days later, the virus gets into exponential growth and it can replicate to trillions of viruses inside the body. Your immune system then kind of tackles it and beats it down to nothing. But what ends up in the wake of that, you just had a battle. You had this massive battle that just took place inside your upper respiratory tract. And because of that, you've had trillions and trillions of viruses go to zero, essentially. But the RNA is still there. It's just these remnants. In the same way that if you go to a crime scene and blood was sort of spread all over the crime scene, you're going to find a lot of DNA. There's tons of DNA. There's no people anymore, but there's a lot of DNA there. Same thing happens here. And so what's happening with PCR testing is when people go and use these exceedingly high sensitivity PCR tests, people will stay positive for weeks or months after their infection has subsided, which has caused a lot of problems, in my opinion. It's problems that the CDC and the FDA and doctors don't want to deal with. But I've tried to publish on it. I've tried to suggest that this is an issue, both to New York Times and others. And now it's unfortunately kind of taken on a life of its own of conspiracy theorists thinking that they call it a case demic. They say, oh, you know, PCR is detecting people who are no longer, who are false positive. They're not false positives. They're late positives, no longer transmissible. I think the way you, like what I saw in rapidtest.org, I really liked the distinction between diagnostic sensitivity and contagiousness sensitivity. That's, it's so, that website is so obvious that it's painful because it's like, yeah, that's what we should be talking about is how accurately is a test able to detect your contagiousness? And you have different plots that show that actually there's, you know, that antigen tests, the tests we're looking at today, like rapid tests, are actually really good at detecting contagiousness. Absolutely. It all mixes back with this whole idea that, of the medical industrial complex. You know, in this country, and in most countries, we have almost entirely defunded and devalued public health, period. You know, we just have. And what that means is that we don't even, we don't have a language for it. We don't have a lexicon for it. We don't have a regulatory landscape for it. And so the only window we have to look at a test today is as a medical diagnostic test. And that becomes very problematic when we're trying to tackle a public health threat and a public health emergency. By definition, this is a public health emergency that we're in. And yet we keep evaluating tests as though the diagnostic benchmark is the gold standard. Where if I'm a physician, I am a physician, so I'll put on that physician hat for a moment. And if I have a patient who comes to me and wants to know if their symptoms are a result of them having COVID, then I want every shred of evidence that I can get to see, does this person currently or did they recently have this infection inside of them? And so in that sense, the PCR test is the perfect test. It's really sensitive. It will find the RNA if it's there at all so that I could say, you know, yeah, you have a low amount of RNA left. You might've been, you said your symptoms started two weeks ago. You probably were infectious two weeks ago and you have lingering symptoms from it. But that's a medical diagnosis. It's kind of like a detective recreating a crime scene. They wanna go back there and recreate the pieces so that they can assign blame or whatever it might be. But that's not public health. In public health, we need to only look forward. We don't wanna go back and say, well, was this person, are there symptoms because they had an infection two weeks ago? In public health, we just wanna stop the virus from spreading to the next person. And so that's where we don't care if somebody was infected two weeks ago. We only care about finding the people who are infectious today. And unfortunately, our regulatory landscape fails to apply that knowledge to evaluate these tests as public health tools. They're only evaluating the tests as medical tools. And therefore, we get all kinds of complaints that say this test, which detects 99 plus, 99.8% of current infectious people, by the FDA's rubric, they'll say, no, no, it's only 50% sensitive. And that's because when you go out into the world and you just compare this against PCR positivity, most people who are PCR positive in the world right now at any given time are post infectious. They're no longer infectious because you might only be infectious for five days, but then you'll remain PCR positive for three or four or five weeks. And so when you go and just evaluate these tests and you say, okay, this person's PCR positive, does the rapid antigen test detect that? More often than not, it's no. But that's because those people don't need isolation. They're post infectious. And it's become much more of a problem than I think even the FDA themself is recognizing because they are unwilling at this point to look at this as a public health problem requiring public health tools. We'll definitely talk about this a little bit more because the concern I have is that a bigger pandemic comes along. What are the lessons we draw from this and how we move forward? Let's talk about that in a bit. But sort of, can we discuss further the lay of the land here of the different tests before us? Absolutely. So I talked about PCR tests and those are done in the lab or they're done essentially with a rapid test like this, the detect, and we can even try this in a moment. It goes into a little heater. So you might have one of these in a household or one of these in a nursing home or something like that or in an airport. Or you could have one that has 100 different outlets. This is just to heat the tube up. These are the rapid tests. They're super simple, no frills. You just swab your nose and you put the swab into a buffer and you put the buffer on the test. So we can use these right now if you want. We can try it out. And all the tests we're talking about, they're usually swabbing the nose. Like that's the... That's still the main, yeah. There are some saliva tests coming about and these can all work potentially with saliva. They just have to be recalibrated. But these swabs are really not bad. This isn't the deep swab that goes like way back into your nose or anything. This is just a swab that you do yourself like right in the front of your nose. So if you wanna do it. Yeah, do you mind if I? Sure, yeah. Yeah, why don't we start with this one? Because this is Abbott's Buy Next Now test and it's really, it's pretty simple. This is the swab from the Abbott test. That's correct. That's the swab from the Abbott test. So what I'm gonna do to start is I'm going to take this buffer here, which is, this is just the buffer that goes onto this test. So this is a brand new one. I just opened this test out. I'm gonna just take six drops of this buffer and put it right onto this test here. Two, three, four, five, six. Okay. And now you're gonna take that swab, open it up. Yep, and now just wipe it around inside the, into the front of your nose. Do a few circles on each nostril. That looks good. This always makes me wanna sneeze. Yeah. Okay, now I'm gonna have you do it yourself. I'm getting emotional. Hold it parallel to the test. So put the test down on the table. Yep, and then go into that bottom hole. Yep, and push forward so that you can start to see it in the other hole. There you go. Now turn, if it's, once it hits up against the top, just turn it three times. One, two, three, and sort of, yep. And now you just close, so pull off that adhesive sticker there. And now you just close the whole thing. And. And that's it. That's it. Now what we will see is we will see a line form. What's happening now is the buffer that you put in there is now moving up onto the paper strip test, and it has the material from the swab in there. And so what we'll see is a line will form, and that's gonna be the control line. And then we'll also see the, ideally we'll see no line for the actual line. We'll see no line for the actual test line. And that's because you should be negative. So one line will be positive and two lines will be negative. That's very cool. There's this purple thing creeping up onto the control line. That's perfect. That's what you wanna be seeing. So you want to see that, so right now you essentially want to see that that blue line turns pink or purply color. There's a blue line that's already there printed. It should turn sort of a purple pink color. And ideally there will be no additional line for the sample. And if there is, that's the 99 point whatever percent accuracy on, that means I have, I'm contagious. That would mean that you're likely contagious or you likely have infectious virus in you. What we can do, because one of the things that my plan calls for is because sometimes these tests can get false positive results, it's rare. Maybe 1% or in the case of this Binex now, this Abbott test 0.1%. So one in a thousand, one in 500, something like that can be falsely positive. What I recommend is that when somebody is positive on one of these, you turn around and you immediately test on a different test. You could either do it on the same, but for good measure, you want to use a separate test that is somewhat orthogonal, meaning that it shouldn't turn falsely positive for the same reason. This particular test here, this detect test because it is looking for the RNA and not the antigen, this is an amazingly accurate test and it's sort of a perfect gold standard or confirmatory test for any of these antigen tests. So one of the recommendations that I've had, especially if people start using antigen tests before you get onto a plane or as what I call entrance screening, if somebody is positive, you don't immediately tell them, you're positive, go isolate for 10 days. You tell them, let's confirm on one of these, on a detect test. That is because it's completely orthogonal, it's looking for the RNA instead of the antigen. There's no reason, no biological reason that both of these should be falsely positive. So if one's falsely positive and the other one is negative, especially because this one's more sensitive, then I would trust this as a confirmatory test. If this one's negative, then the antigen test would be considered falsely positive. It does look like there's only a single line, so this is very exciting news. That's right, yep. It says wait 15 minutes to see both lines, but in general, if somebody's really gonna be positive, that line starts showing up within a minute or two. So you wanna keep the whole, we'll keep watching it for the whole 15 minutes as it's sitting there, but I would say you're knowing that you've had PCR tests recently and all that. The odds are pretty good. The odds are very good. The packaging, very iPhone like. I'm digging the sexy packaging. I'm a sucker for good packaging, okay. So then there's this test here, which is, this is another, it's funny. Let me open this up and show you. This is a really nice test. It's another antigen test. Works the exact same way as this, essentially, but what you can see is it's got lights in it and a power button and stuff. This is called an allume test, which is fine, and it's a really nice test, to be honest, but it has to pair with an iPhone. And so it's good as a, I think that this is gonna become, there's a lot of use for this from a medical perspective, where you want good reporting. This can, because it pairs with an iPhone, it can immediately send the report to a department of health, whereas these paper strip tests, they're just paper. They don't report anything unless you wanna report it. Okay, so I'm gonna just pick it apart. And so you can see is there's fluorescent readers and little lasers and LEDs and stuff in there. You can actually see the lights going off. And there's a paper strip test right inside there, but you can see that there's a whole circuit board and all this stuff, right? And so this is the kind of thing that the FDA is looking for, for home use and things like that, because it's kind of foolproof. You can't go wrong with it. It pairs with an iPhone, so you need Bluetooth. So it's gonna be more limited. It's a great test, don't get me wrong. It's as good as any of these. But when you compare this thing with a battery and a circuit board and all this stuff, it's got its purpose, but it's not a public health tool. I don't wanna see this made in the tens of millions a day and thrown away. This is just. But FDA likes that kind of stuff. FDA loves this stuff, because they can't get it out of their mind that this is a public health crisis. We need, I mean, just look at the difference here. Something with flashing lights is essential. It's got batteries, it's got a Bluetooth thing. It's a great test, but to be honest, it's not any better than this one. And so I want this one. It's nice and all. The form factor is nice, and it's really nice that it goes to Bluetooth. But it goes against the principle of just 20 million a day. The easy solution, everybody has it. You can manufacture and probably, you could've probably scaled this up in a couple of weeks. Oh, absolutely. These companies, I mean, the rest of the world has these. They can be scaled up. They already exist. You know, SD biosensors, one company's making tens of millions a day, not coming to the United States, but going all over Europe, going all over Southeast Asia and East Asia. So they exist. The US is just, you know, we can't get out of our own way. I wonder why somebody, I don't know if you were paying attention, but somebody like an Elon Musk type character. So he was really into doing some like obvious engineering solution, like this at home rapid test seems like a very Elon Musk thing to do. I don't know if you saw, but I had a little Twitter conversation with Elon Musk. Does he not like, what is he, do you know what his thoughts are on rapid testing? Well, he was using a slightly different one, one of these, but that requires an instrument called the BD Veritor. And he got a false positive, or no, I shouldn't say, he didn't necessarily get a false positive. He got discrepant results. He did this test four times. He got two positives, two negatives, but then he got a PCR test and it was a very low positive result. So I think what happened is he just tested himself at the tail end of an, this was actually right before he was about to send those. It was the day of essentially that he was sending the astronauts up to the space station the other day. So he was using these rapid tests cause he wanted to make sure that he was good to go in and he got discrepant results. Ultimately they were correct, but two were negative, two were positive. But what really happened once he shared his PCR results and they were very low positive. So really what was happening is, my guess is he found himself right at the edge of his positivity, of his infectiousness. And so the test worked how it was supposed to work. It probably had he used it two days earlier, it would have been screaming positive. He wouldn't have gotten discrepant results, but he found himself right at the edge by the time he used the test. So the PCR would always pick it up cause it's still, cause that will still stay positive then for weeks potentially. But the rapid antigen test was starting to falter, not in a bad way, but just he probably was really no longer particularly infectious. And so it was kind of when it gets to be a very low viral load, it becomes stochastic. It's fascinating this duality. So one you can think from an individual perspective, it's unclear when you take four and half are positive, half are negative, like what are you supposed to do? But from a societal perspective, it seems like if just one of them is positive, just stay home for a couple of days, for a while. So when you're a CEO of a company, you're launching astronauts to space, you may not want to rely absolutely on the antigen test as a thing by which you steer your decisions of like 10,000 plus people companies. But us individuals just living in the world, if you can, if it comes up positive, then you make decisions based on that. And then that scales really nicely to an entire society of hundreds of millions of people. And that's how you get that virus to stop spreading. That's exactly right. You don't have to catch every single one. And the nice thing is that these will, these will catch the people who are most infectious. So with Elon Musk, it generally that test, we don't have the counterfactual. We don't have his results from three days earlier when he was probably most infectious. But my guess is the fact that it was catching two out of the four, even when he was down at a CT value of really, really very, very low viral load on the PCR test suggests that it was doing its job. And you just wanna, and the nice thing is because these can be produced at such scale, getting one positive doesn't immediately have to mean 10 days of isolation. That's the CDC is more conservative stance to say, if you're positive on any tests, stay home for 10 days and isolate. But here, people would just have more tests. So the recommendation should be test daily. If you turn positive, test daily until you've been negative for 24, 48 hours and then go back to work. And the nice thing there is right now, people just aren't testing because they don't wanna take 10 days off. They're not getting paid for it. So they can't take 10 days off. Do you know what Elon thinks about this idea of rapid testing for everybody? So I understood I need to look at that whole Twitter thread. So I understand his perhaps criticism of, he had like a conspiratorial tone from my vague look at it of like, what's going on here with these tests? But what does he actually think about this very practical to me engineering solution of just deploying rapid tests to everybody? It seems like that's a way to open up the economy in April. Well, to be honest, I've been trying to get in touch with him again. I think, take somebody like Elon Musk with the engineering prowess within his ranks, to easily, easily build these at the tens of millions a day. He could build the machines from scratch. A lot of the companies, they buy the machines from South Korea or Taiwan, I believe. We don't have to, we can build these machines. They're simple to build. Put somebody like Elon Musk on it, take some of his best engineers and say, look, the US needs a solution in two weeks. Build these machines, figure it out. He'll do it, he could do it. This is a guy who is literally, he has started multiple entirely new industries. He has the capital to do it without the US government if he wanted to. And you know what, it would, the return on investment for him would be huge. But frankly, the return on investment in the country would be hundreds of billions of dollars, because it means we could get society open. So I know that his first experience with these rapid tests was confusing, which is how I ended up having this Twitter kind of conversation with him very briefly. But I think that if he understood sort of a little bit more, and I think he does, I really love to talk to him about it, because I think he could totally change the course of this pandemic in the United States, single handedly. He loves grand things. Yeah, I think out of all the solutions I've seen, this is the obvious engineering solution to at least a pandemic of this scale. I love that you say the engineering solution. So this is something I've been really trying to, I'm an engineer, my previous history was all engineering, and that's really how I think. I then went into medicine and PhD world, but I think that the world, like one of the major catastrophes, or one of the major problems, is that we have physicians making the decisions about public health and a pandemic, when really we need engineers. This is an engineering problem. And so what I've been trying to do, I actually really want to start a whole new field called public health engineering. And so I've been, eventually I want to try to bring it to MIT and get MIT to want to start a new department or something. That's a doubly awesome idea. Yeah. That, this is really, okay. I love this, I love every aspect. I love everything you're talking about. A lot of people believe, because vaccines started being deployed currently, that we are no longer in need of a solution. We're no longer in need of slowing the spread of the virus. To me, as I understand, it seems like this is the most important time to have something like a rapid testing solution. Can you kind of break that apart? What's the role of rapid testing currently in the next, what is it, three, four months maybe? Even more. The vaccine rollout isn't gonna be as peachy as everyone is hoping. And I hate to be the Debbie Downer here, but there's a lot of unknowns with this vaccine. You've already mentioned one, which is there's a lot of people who just don't want to get the vaccine. I hope that that might change as things move forward and people see their neighbors getting it and their family getting it and it's safe and all. We don't know how effective the vaccine is gonna be after two or three months. We've only measured it in the first two or three months, which is a massive problem, which we can go into biologically, because there's very good reasons to believe that the efficacy could fall way down after two or three months. We don't know if it's gonna stop transmission. And if it doesn't stop transmission, then there's, you know, herd immunity is much, much more difficult to get because that's all based on transmission blockade. And frankly, we don't know how easily we're going to be able to roll it out. Some of the vaccines need really significant cold chains, have very short half lives outside of that cold chain. We need to organize massive numbers of people to be able to distribute these. Most hospitals today are saying that they're not equipped to hire the right people to be even administering enough of these vaccines. And then a lot of the hospitals are frustrated because they're getting much lower, smaller allocations than they were expecting. So I think right now, like you say, right now is the best time, you know, besides three or four or five or six months ago, right now is the best time to get these rapid tests out. And we need to, I mean, the country has the capacity to build them. We have, we're shipping them overseas right now. We just need to flip a switch, get the FDA to recognize that there's more important things than diagnostic medicine, which is the effectiveness of the public health program when we're dealing with a pandemic. They need to authorize these as public health tools, or, you know, frankly, the president could, you know, there's a lot of other ways to get these tests to not have to go through the normal FDA authorization program, but maybe have the NIH and the CDC give a stamp of approval. And if we could, we could get these out tomorrow. And that's where that article came from, you know, how we can stop the spread of this virus by Christmas, we could, you know, now it's getting late. And so we have to keep updating that timeframe, maybe putting Christmas in the title wasn't, I should have said how we can stop the spread of this virus in a month. It would be a little bit more timeless, but we could do it, you know, we really could do it. And that's the most frustrating part here is that we're just choosing not to as a country. We're choosing to bankrupt our society because some people at the FDA and other places just can't seem to get their head around the fact that this is a public health problem, not a bunch of medical problems. Is there a way to change that policy wise? So this is a much bigger thing that you're speaking to, which I love in terms of the MIT engineering approach to public health. Is there a way to push this? Is this a political thing? Like where some Andrew Yang type characters need to like start screaming about it? Is it more of an Elon Musk thing where people just need to build it and then on Twitter start talking crap to politicians for not doing it? What are the ideas here? I think it's a little of both. I think it's political on the one hand, and I've certainly been talking to Congress a lot, talking to senators. Are they receptive? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the crazy thing. Everyone but the FDA is receptive. I mean, it's astounding. I mean, I advise, informally I advise the president and the president elects teams. I talk to Congress, I talk to senators, governors, and then all the way down to mayors of towns and things. And I mean, months ago I held a round table discussion with Mayor Garcetti, who's the mayor of LA, and I brought all the companies who make these things. This was in like July or August or something. I brought all the companies to the table and said, okay, how can we get these out? And unfortunately, it went nowhere because the FDA won't authorize them as public health tools. The nice thing is that this is one of the nice and frustrating things. This is one of the few bipartisan things that I know of. And like you said, it's a real solution. Lockdowns aren't a solution. They're an emergency bandaid to a catastrophe that's currently happening. They're not a solution. And they're definitely not a public health solution if we're taking a more holistic view of public health, which includes people's wellbeing, includes their psychological wellbeing, their financial wellbeing. Just stopping a virus if it means that all those other things get thrown under the bus is not a public health solution. It's a myopic or very tunnel visioned approach to a virus that's spreading. This is a simple solution with essentially no downfall. There is nothing bad about this. It's just giving people a result. And it's bipartisan. The most conservative and the most liberal people, everyone just wants to know their status. Nobody wants to have to wait in line for four hours to find out their status on Monday, a week later, on Saturday. It just doesn't make any sense. It's a useless test at that point. And everyone recognizes that. So why do you think, like the mayor of LA, why do you think politicians are going for these, from my perspective, like kind of half ass lockdowns, which is not, so I have seen good evidence that like a complete lockdown can work, but that's in theory, it's just like communism in theory can work. Like theoretically speaking, but it just doesn't, at least in this country, we don't, I think it's just impossible to have complete lockdown. And still politicians are going for these kind of lockdowns that everybody hates, that's really hurting small businesses. Like why are they going for that? And big businesses, and yeah, all businesses, but like basically not just hurting, they're destroying small businesses, right? Which is going to have potentially, I mean, yeah, I've been reading as I don't shut up about the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and there's economic effects that take a decade to, there's going to be long lasting effects that may be destructive to the very fabric of this nation. So why are they doing it, and why are they not using the solution? Is there any intuition? I mean, you've said that FDA has a stranglehold, I guess, on this whole public health problem. Is that all it is? That's honestly, it's pretty much all it is. The companies, so somebody like Mayor Garcetti or Governor Baker, Cuomo, Newsom, any of these, DeWine, I've talked to a lot of governors in this country at this point, and of course the federal government, including the president's own teams, and the heads of the NIH, the heads of the CDC about this. The problem is the tests don't exist in this country at the level that we need them to right now to make that kind of policy, to make that kind of program. They could, but they don't. And so what that means is that when Mayor Garcetti says, okay, what are my actual options today, despite these sounding like a great idea, he looks around and he says, well, they're not authorized. They don't exist right now for at home use. And from his perspective, he's not about to pick that fight with the FDA, and it turns out nobody is. Why are people afraid of, it seems like an easy struggle to fight. It's like a... So they don't see it as a fight. They think that the FDA is the end all be all. Everyone thinks the FDA is the end all be all. And so they just defer, everyone is deferential, including the heads of all the other government agencies because that is their role. But what everyone is failing to see is that the FDA doesn't even have a mandate or a remit to evaluate these tests as public health tools. So they're just falling in this weird gray zone where the FDA is saying, look, we evaluate medical products. That's the only thing that I meant, like Tim Stenzel, head of in vitro diagnostics at the FDA, he's doing what his job is, which is to evaluate medical tools. Unfortunately, this is where I think the CDC has really blundered. They haven't made the right distinction to say, look, okay, the FDA is evaluating these for doctors to use and all that, but we're the CDC and we're the public health agency of this country and we recognize that these tools require a different authorization pathway and a different use, not prescription. There's a difference between medical devices and public health. And I guess FDA is not designed for this public health, especially in emergency situations. And they actually explicitly say that. I mean, when I go and talk to Tim, and he's a very reasonable guy, but when I talk to him, he says, look, we don't, we just do not evaluate a public health tool. If you're telling me this is a public health tool, great, go and use it. And so I say, okay, great, we'll go and use it. And then the comment is, but does it give a result back to somebody? I say, well, yes, of course it gives a result back to somebody, it's being done in their home. So then it's defined as a medical tool, can't use it. So it's stuck in this gray zone where unfortunately, there's this weird definition that any tool, any test that gives a result back to an individual is defined by CMS, Centers for Medicaid Services, as a medical device requiring medical authorization. But then you go and ask, it gets crazier, because then you go and ask Seema Verma, the head of CMS, you know, okay, can these be authorized as public health tools and not fall under your definition of a medical device? So then the FDA doesn't have to be the ones authorizing it as a public health tool. And Seema Verma says, oh, we don't have any jurisdiction over point of care and sort of rapid devices like this. We only have jurisdiction over lab devices. So it's like nobody has ownership over it, which means that they just keep, they stay in this purgatory of not being approved. And so this is where I think, frankly, it needs a president. It needs a presidential order to just unlock them, to say this is more important than having a prescription. And in fact, I mean, really what's happening now, because there is this sense that tests are public health tools, even if they're not being defined as such, the FDA now is pretty much, not only are they not authorizing these as public health tools, what they're doing by authorizing what are effectively public health tools as medical devices, they're just diluting down the practice of medicine. I mean, his answer right now, unfortunately is, well, I don't know why you want these to be sort of available to everyone without a prescription. We've already said that a doctor can write a whole prescription for a whole college campus. It's like, well, if you're going in that direction then, and that's no longer medicine, having a doctor write a prescription for a college campus, for everyone on the campus to have repeat testing, now we're just in the territory of eroding medicine and eroding all of the legal rules and reasons that we have prescriptions in the first place. So it's just everything about it is just destructive instead of just making a simple solution, which is these are okay as public health tools as long as they meet X and Y metrics, go and CDC can put their stamp of approval on them. What do you think, sorry if I'm stuck on this, your mention of MIT and public health engineering, right? I mean, it has a sense of, I talked to computational biology folks. It's always exciting to see computer scientists start entering the space of biology. And there's actually a lot of exciting things that happen because of that, trying to understand the fundamentals of biology. So from the engineering approach to public health, what kind of problems do you think can be tackled? What kind of disciplines are involved? Like, do you have ideas in this space? Oh yeah. I mean, I can speak to one of the major activities that I wanna do. So what I normally do in my research lab is develop technologies that can take a drop of somebody's blood or some saliva and profile for hundreds of thousands of different antibodies against every single pathogen that somebody could be possibly exposed to. That's awesome. So this is all new technology that we've been developing more from a bioengineering perspective. But then I use a lot of the mathematics tools to A, interpret that. But what I really wanna do, for example, to kind of kick off this new field of what I consider public health engineering is to create, maybe it's a little ambitious, but create a weather system for viruses. I want us to be able to open up our iPhones, plug in our zip code and get a better sense, get a probability of why my kid has a runny nose today. Is it COVID? Is it a rhinovirus, an adenovirus, or is it flu? And we can do that. We can start building the rules of virus spread across the globe, both for pandemic preparedness, but also for just everyday use in the same way that people used to think that predicting the weather was gonna be impossible. Of course, we know that's not impossible now. Is it always perfect? No, but does it offer, does it completely change the way that we go about our days? Absolutely. I envision, for example, right now, we open up our iPhone, we plug in a zip code, and if it tells us it's gonna rain today, we bring an umbrella. So in the future, it tells us, hey, there's a lot of SARS CoV2 in your community. Instead of grabbing your umbrella, you grab your mask. We don't have to have masks all the time. But if we know the rules of the game that these viruses play by, we can start preparing for those. And every year, we go into every flu season blindfolded with our hands tied behind our back, just saying, I hope this isn't a bad flu season this year. I don't, I mean, this is, we're in the 21st century. We have the tools at our disposal now to not have that attitude. This isn't like 1920s. You know, we can just say, hey, this is gonna be a bad flu season this year. Let's act accordingly and with a targeted approach. You know, we don't, for example, we don't just use our umbrellas all day long, every single day, in case it might rain. We don't board up our homes every single day in case there's a hurricane. We wait, and if we know that there's one coming, then we act for a small period of time accordingly. And then we go back, and we've prepared ourselves in like these little bursts to not have it ruin our days. I can't tell you how exciting that vision of the future is. I think that's incredible. And it seems like it should be within our reach, the, just these like weather maps of viruses floating about the Earth, and it seems obvious. It's one of those things where right now, it seems like maybe impossible. And then looking back like 20 years from now, we'll wonder like why the hell this hasn't been done way earlier. Though one difference between weather, I don't know if you have interesting ideas in this space. The difference between weather and viruses is it includes, the collection of the data includes the human body, potentially. And that means that there is some, as with the contact tracing question, there's some concern about privacy. There seems to be this dance that's really complicated. With Facebook getting a lot of flack for basically misusing people's data, or just whether it's perception or reality, there's certainly a lot of reality to it too, where they're not good stewards of our private data. So there's this weird place where it's like obvious that if we do, if we collect a lot of data about human beings and maintain privacy and maintain all like basic respect for that data, just like honestly common sense respect for the data, that we can do a lot of amazing things for the world, like a weather map for viruses. Is there a way forward to gain trust of people or to do this well, do you have ideas here? How big is this problem? I think it's a central problem. There's a couple central problems that need to be solved. One, how do you get all the samples? That's not actually too difficult. I'm actually, I have a pilot project going right now with getting samples from across all the United States. Tens of thousands of samples every week are flowing into my lab and we process them. So it's taking the, it's taking like one of the, basically there's biology here and chemistry and converting that into numbers. That's exactly right. So what we're doing, for example, there's a lot of people who go to the hospital every day, a lot of people who donate blood, people who donate plasma. So one of the projects that I have, I'll get to the privacy question in a moment, but this, so what I wanna do is the name that I've given this as a global immunological observatory. There's no reason not to have that. Good name. I've said, instead of saying, well, how do we possibly get enough people on board to send in samples all the time? Well, just go to the source. So there's a company in Massachusetts that makes 80% of all the instruments that are used globally to collect plasma from plasma donors. So I went to this company, Hemenetics, and said, is there a way you have 80% of the global market on plasma donations? Can we start getting plasma samples from healthy people that use your machines? So that hooked me up with this company called Octopharma. And Octopharma has a huge reach and offices all over the country where they're just collecting people's plasma. They actually pay people for their plasma and then that gets distributed to hospitals and all this stuff is anonymous plasma. So I've just been collecting anonymous samples. And we're processing them, in this case, for COVID antibodies to watch from January up through December, we're able to watch how the virus entered into the United States and how it's transmitting every day across the US. So we're getting those results organized now and we're gonna start putting them publicly online soon to start making at least a very rough map of COVID. But that's the type of thinking that I have in terms of like, how do you actually capture huge numbers of specimens? You can't ask everyone to participate on sort of a, I mean, you maybe could if you have the right tools and you can offer individuals something in return like 23andMe does. That's a great way to get people to give specimens and they get results back. So with these technologies that I've been building along with some collaborators at Harvard, we can come up with tools that people might actually want. So I can offer you your immunological history. I can say, give me a drop of your blood on a filter paper, mail it in and I will be able to tell you every infectious disease you've ever encountered and maybe even when you encountered it roughly. I could tell you, do you have COVID antibodies right now? Do you have Lyme disease antibodies right now? Flu, triple E and all these different viruses. Also peanut allergies, milk allergies, anything. If your immune system makes a response to it, we can detect that response. So all of a sudden we have this very valuable technology that on the one hand gives people maybe information they might want to know about themselves, but on the other hand becomes this amazingly rich source of big data to enter into this global immunological observatory sort of mathematical framework to start building these maps, these epidemiological tools. But you asked about privacy and absolutely that's essential to keep in mind first and foremost. So privacy can be, you can keep these samples 100% anonymous. They are just, when I get them, they show up with nothing. They're literally just tubes. I know a date that they were collected and a zip code that they're collected from or even just sort of a county level ID. So with an IRB and with ethical approval and with the people's consent, we can maybe collect more data, but that would require consent. But then there's this other approach which I'm really excited about, which is certainly going to gain some scrutiny I think, but we'll have to figure out where it comes into play. But I've been recognizing that we can take somebody's immunological profile and we can make a biological fingerprint out of it. And it's actually stable enough so that I could take your blood. Let's say I don't know who you are, but you sent me a drop of blood a year ago and then you sent me a drop of blood today. I don't know that those two blood spots are coming from the same person. They're just showing up in my lab. But I can run our technology over and it just gives me your immunological history. But your immunological history is so unique to you and the way that your body responds to these pathogens is so unique to you that I can use that to tether your two samples. I don't know who you are, I know nothing about you. I only know when those samples came out of a person. But I can say, oh, these two samples a year apart actually belong to the same person. Yeah, so there's sufficient information in that immunological history to match the samples. Or from a privacy perspective, that's really exciting. Does that generally hold for humans? So you're saying there's enough uniqueness to match? Yeah, because it's very stochastic, even twins. So this, I believe, we haven't published this yet. We will soon. You have a twin too, right? I do have a twin, I have an identical twin brother, which makes me interested in this. He looks very much like me. Oh, is that how that works? Yeah. And DNA can't really tell us apart. But this tool is one of the only tools in the world that could tell twins apart from each other. Could still be accurate enough to say this blood, it's like 99.999% accurate to say that these two blood samples came from the same individual. And it's because it's a combination, both of your immunological history, but also how your unique body responds to a pathogen, which is random. The way that we make antibodies is, by and large, it's got an element of randomness to it. How the cells, when they make an antibody, they chop up the genetic code to say, okay, this is the antibody that I'm gonna form for this pathogen. And you might form, if you get a coronavirus, for example, you might form hundreds of different antibodies, not just one antibody against the spike protein, but hundreds of different antibodies against all different parts of the virus. So that gives this really rich resolution of information that when I then do the same thing across hundreds of different pathogens, some of which you've seen, some of which you haven't, it gives you an exceedingly unique fingerprint that is sufficiently stable over years and years and years to essentially give you a barcode. And I don't have to know who you are, but I can know that these two specimens came from the same person somewhere out in the world. So fascinating that there's this trace, your life story in the space of viruses, in the space of pathogen, like these, you know, because there's this entire universe of these organisms that are trying to destroy each other. And then your little trajectory through that space leaves a trace, and then you can look at that trace. That's fascinating. And that, I mean, there's, okay, that data period is just fascinating. And the vision of making that data universally connected to where you can make, like infer things, and just like with the weather, is really fascinating. And there's probably artificial intelligence applications there, start making predictions, start finding patterns. Exactly, we're doing a lot of that already. And that's how, how do we have this going? You know, I've been trying to get this funded for years now. And I've spoken to governments, you know, everyone says, cool idea, not gonna do it. You know, why do we need it? Oh, really? The why do you need it? Yeah, the why do you need it. And of course now, you know, I mean, I wrote in 2015 about this, why we would, why this would be useful. And of course, now we're seeing why it would be useful. Had we had this up and running in 2019, had we had it going, we were drawing blood from, you know, we're getting blood samples from hospitals and clinics and blood donors from New York City, let's just say, you know, that could have, we didn't run the first PCR test for coronavirus until probably a month and a half or two months after the virus started transmitting in New York City. So it's like with the rain, we didn't start wearing umbrella or taking out umbrellas. Exactly, for two months, but different than the rain, we couldn't actually see that it was spreading right now. And so Andrew Cuomo had no choice but to leave the city open. You know, there were hints that maybe the virus was spreading in New York City, but you know, he didn't have any data to back it up. No data. And so it was just week on week and week. And he didn't have any information to really go by to allow him to have the firepower to say we're closing down the city. This is an emergency. We have to stop spread before it starts. And so they waited until the first PCR tests were coming about. And then the moment they started running PCR tests, they find out it's everywhere. You know, and so that was a disaster because of course New York City, you know, was just hit so bad because nobody was, you know, we were blind to it. We didn't have to be blind to it. And the nice thing about this technology is we wouldn't have, with the exact same technology we had in 2017, we could have detected this novel coronavirus spreading in New York City in 2020. Not because we changed, not because we are actually actively looking for this novel coronavirus, but because we would see, we would have seen patterns in people's immune responses using AI, or just frankly using our, just the raw data itself. We could have said, hey, it looks like there's something that looks like known coronavirus is spreading in New York, but there's gaps. You know, there's, for some reason, people aren't developing an immune response to this coronavirus that seems to be spreading to these normal things that, you know, and it just looks, the profile looks different. And we could have seen that and immediately, especially since we had an idea that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the world, we could have very quickly and easily seen, hey, clearly we're seeing a spike of something that looks like a known coronavirus, but people are responding weirdly to it. Our AI algorithms would have picked it up, and just our basic, heck, you could have put it in an Excel spreadsheet, we would have seen it. So. Some basic visualization would have shown it. Exactly, we would have seen spikes, and they would have been kind of like off, you know, immune responses that the shape of them just looked a little bit different, but they would have been growing, and we would have seen it, and it could have saved tens of thousands of lives in New York City. So to me, the fascinating question, everything we've talked about, so both the huge collection of data at scale, just super exciting, and then the kind of obvious at scale solution to the current virus and future ones is the rapid testing. Can we talk about the future of viruses that might be threatening our very existence? So do you think like a future natural virus can have an order of magnitude greater effect on human civilization than anything we've ever seen? So something that either kills all humans, or kills, I don't know, 60, 70% of humans. So something like something we can't even imagine. Is that something that you think is possible? Because it seems to not have happened yet. So maybe like the entirety, whoever the programmer is of the simulation that sort of launched the evolution from the Big Bang seems to not want to destroy us humans. Or maybe that's the natural side effect of the evolutionary process that humans are useful. But do you think it's possible that the evolutionary process will produce a virus that will kill all humans? I think it could. I don't think it's likely. And the reason I don't think it's likely is on the one hand, it hasn't happened yet, in part because mobility is a recent phenomena. People weren't particularly mobile until fairly recently. Now, of course, now that we have people flying back and forth across the globe all the time, the chances of global pandemics has escalated exponentially, of course. And so on the one hand, that's part of why it hasn't happened yet. We can look at things like Ebola. Now, Ebola, we haven't generally had major Ebola epidemics in the past, not because Ebola wasn't transmitting and infecting humans, but because it was largely affecting and infecting humans in disconnected communities. So you see out in rural parts of Africa, for example, in Western Africa, you might end up having isolated Ebola outbreaks, but there weren't connections that were fast enough that would allow people to then spread it into the cities. Of course, we saw back in 2014, 15 massive Ebola outbreak that wasn't because it was a new strain of Ebola, but it was because there's new inroads and connections between the communities and people got it to the city. And so we saw it start to spread. So that should be a little bit foreshadowing of what's to come. And now we have this pandemic. We had 2009, we have this. There is a benefit or there is sort of a natural check. And this is like kind of like a Voltaire predator prey dynamic kind of systems, ecological systems and mathematics that if you have something that's so deadly, people will respond more maybe with a greater panic, a greater sense of panic, which alone could, you know, destroy humanity. But at the same time, we now know that we can lock down. We know that that's possible. And so if this was a worse virus that was actually killing 60% of people as infecting, we would lock down very quickly. My biggest fear though, is let's say that was happening. You need serious lockdowns if you're gonna keep things going. So the only reason we were able to keep things going during our lockdowns is because it wasn't so bad that we were still able to have people work in the grocery stores. Still have people work in the shipping to get the food onto the shelves. So on the one hand, we could probably figure out how to stop the virus, but can we stop the virus without starving? You know, and I'm not sure that that, if this was another acute respiratory virus that say had a slightly, say it transmitted the same way, but say it actually did worse damage to your heart, but it was like a month later that people started having heart attacks in mass. You know, it's like not just one offs, but really severe. Well, that could be a serious problem for humanity. So in some ways I think that there are lots of ways that we could end up dying at the hand of a virus. I mean, we're already seeing it. Just, I mean, my fear is still, I think coronaviruses have demonstrated a keen ability to destroy or to create outbreaks that can potentially be deadly to large numbers of people. Flu strains, though, are still by and large my concern. So you think the bad one might come from the flu, the influenza? Yeah, their replication cycle, they're able to genetically recombine in a way that coronaviruses aren't. They have segmented genomes, which means that they can just swap out whole parts of their genomes, no problem, repackage them, and then boom, you have a whole antigenic shift, not a drift. What that means is that on any occasion, any day of the year, you can have, boom, a whole new virus that didn't exist yesterday. And now with farming and industrial livestock, we're seeing animals and humans come into contact much more. Just the opportunities for an influenza strain that is unique and deadly to humans increases. All the while, transmission and mobility has increased. It's just a matter of time, in my opinion. What about from immunology perspective of the idea of engineering a virus? So not just the virus leaking from a lab or something, but actually being able to understand the protein, like everything about what makes a virus enough to be able to figure out ways to maybe target it or untarget it, attack biologics. Subverse immunity. Yeah. Yeah. Is that something, obviously that's somewhere on the list of concerns, but is that anywhere close of the top 10 highlights along with nuclear weapons and so on that we should be worried about? Or is the natural pandemic really the one that's much greater concern? I would say that the former, that manmade viruses and genetically engineered viruses should be right up there with the greatest concerns for humanity right now. We know that the tools, for better or worse, the tools for creating a virus are there. We can do it. And I mean, heck, the human species is no longer vaccinated against smallpox. I didn't get a smallpox vaccine. You didn't get a smallpox vaccine, at least I don't think. And so if somebody wanted to make smallpox and distribute it to the world in some way, it could be exceedingly deadly and detrimental to humans. And that's not even sort of using your imagination to create a new virus. That's one that we already have. Unlike the past when smallpox would circulate, you had large fractions of the community that was already immune to it. And so it wouldn't spread or it would spread a little bit slower. But now we have essentially in a few years, we'll have a whole global population that is susceptible. Let's look at measles. We have an entire, I mean, measles, I have, there are some researchers in the world right now, which for various reasons are working on creating a measles strain that evades immunity. It's not for bioterrorism, at least that's not the expectation. It's for using measles as an oncolytic virus to kill cancer. And the only way you can really do that is if your immune system doesn't, if you take a measles virus and there's, we don't have to go into the details of why it would work, but it could work. Measles likes to target potentially cancer cells. But to get your immune system not to kill off the virus if you're trying to use the virus to target it, you maybe want to make it blind to the immune system. But now imagine we took some virus like measles, which has an R naught of 18, transmits extremely quickly. And now we have essentially, let's say we had a whole human race that is susceptible to measles. And this is a virus that spreads orders of magnitude easier than this current virus. Imagine if you were to plug something toxic or detrimental into that virus and release it to the world. So it's possible to be both accidental and intentional. Absolutely. Yeah, so Mark Lipsitch is a good colleague of mine at Harvard, we're both in the, he's the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics from a faculty member. He's spoken very, very forcefully and he's very outspoken about the dangers of gain of function testing, where in the lab we are intentionally creating viruses that are exceedingly deadly under the auspices of trying to learn about them. So that if the idea is that if we kind of accelerate evolution and make these really deadly viruses in the lab, we can be prepared for if that virus ever comes about naturally or through unnatural means. The concern though is, okay, that's one thing, but what if that virus got out on somebody's shoe? Just what if? If the effects of an accident are potentially catastrophic, is it worth taking the chances just to be prepared a little bit for something that may or may not ever actually develop? And so it's a serious ethical quandary we're in, how to both be prepared, but also not cause a catastrophic mistake. As a small tangent, there's a recent really exciting breakthrough of alpha two, of alpha fold two solving protein folding or achieving state of the art performance on protein folding. And then I thought proteins have a lot to do with viruses. It seems like being able to use machine learning to design proteins that achieve certain kinds of functions will naturally allow you to use maybe down the line, not yet, but allow you to use machine learning to design basically viruses, maybe like measles, like for good, which is like to attack cancer cells, but also for bad. Is that a crazy thought or is this a natural place where this technology may go? I suppose as all technologies can, which is for good and for bad. Do you think about the role of machine learning in this? Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean, alpha fold is amazing. It's an amazing algorithm, a series of algorithms. And it does demonstrate, to me, it demonstrates just how powerful, everything in the world has rules. We just don't know the rules. We often don't know them, but our brain has rules, how it works. Everything is plus and minus. There's nothing in the world that's really not at its most basic level, positive, negative. It's all, obviously, it's all just charge. And that means everything. You can figure it out with enough computational power and enough, in this case, I mean, machine learning and AI is just one way to learn rules. It's an empirical way to learn rules, but it's a profoundly powerful way. And certainly, now that we are getting to a point where we can take a protein and know how it folds, given its sequence, we can reverse engineer that and we can say, okay, we want a protein to fold this way. What does the sequence need to be? We haven't done that yet so much, but it's just the next iteration of all of this. And so let's say somebody wants to develop a virus it's gonna start with somebody wanting to develop a virus to defeat cancer, something good. And so it would start with a lot of money from the federal government for all the positives that will come out of it. But we have to be really careful because that will come about. There's no doubt in my mind that we will develop, we're already doing it. We engineer molecules all the time for specific uses. Oftentimes, we take them from a lab and then we take them from a lab and then we make them. Oftentimes, we take them from nature and then tweak them. But now we can supercharge it. We can accelerate the pace of discovery. To not have it just be discovery, we have it be true ground up engineering. Let's say you're trying to make a new molecule to stabilize somebody with some retinal disease. So we come up with some molecule to stability of somebody with retinal degeneration. Just a small tweak to that, to say make a virus that causes the human race to become blind. I mean, it sounds really conspiracy theoryish, but it's not. We're learning so much about biology and there's always nefarious reasons. I mean, heck, look at how AI and just Google searches, those can be, they are every single day being leveraged by nefarious actors to take advantage of people, to steal money, to do whatever it might be. Eventually, probably to create wars or already to create wars. And I mean, I don't think there's any question at this point behind disinformation campaigns. And so it's being leveraged. This thing that could be wholly good is always going to be leveraged for bad. And so how do you balance that as a species? I'm not quite sure. The hope is, as you mentioned previously, that there's some, that we were able to also develop defense mechanisms. And there's something about the human species that seems to keep coming up with ways to, just like on the deadline, just at the last moment, figuring out how to avoid destruction. I think I'm eternally optimistic about the human race not destroying ourselves, but you could do a lot of things that would be very painful. Yes. Well, we're doing it already, just, I mean, we are seeing how our regulation today, we did this thing, it started as a good thing, regulation of medical products, but now it is unwillingly and unintentionally harming us. Our regulatory landscape, which was developed totally for good in our country is getting in the way of us deploying a tool that could stop our economies from having to be sort of sputteringly closed, that could stop deaths from happening at the rate that they are. And it's, I think we will come to a solution. Of course, now we're gonna get the vaccine and it's gonna make people lose track of like why we even bother testing, which is a bad idea. But we're already seeing that. We have this amazing capacity to both do damage when we don't intend to do damage and then also to pull up when we need to pull up and stop complete catastrophe. And so we are an interesting species in that way, that's for sure. So there's a lot of young folks, undergrads, grads, they're also young, listen to this. So is there, you've talked about a lot of fascinating stuff that's like, there's ways that things are done and there's actual solutions and they're not always like intersecting. Do you have advice for undergraduate students or graduate students or even people in high school now about a life, about a career of how they might be able to solve real big problems in the world, how they should live their life in order to have a chance to solve big problems in the world? It's hard. I struggle a little bit sometimes to give advice because the advice that I give from my own personal experience is necessarily distinct from the advice that would make other people successful. I have unending ambitions to make things better, I suppose. And I don't see barricades where other people sometimes see barricades. Now, even just little things like when this virus started, I'm a medical director at Brigham and Women's Hospital and so I oversee or helped oversee molecular virology diagnostics. So when this virus started, wearing my epidemiology hat and wearing my sort of viral outbreak hat, I recognized that this is gonna be a big virus that was important on a global level. Even if the CDC and WHO weren't ready to admit that it was a pandemic, it was obvious in January that it was a pandemic. So I started trying to get a test built at the Brigham, which is one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. The first encounters I had with the upper administration of the hospital were pretty much, no, why would we do that? That's silly, who are you? And I said, well, okay, don't believe me, sure. But I kept pushing on it. And then eventually I got them to agree. It was really only a couple of weeks before the Biogen conference happened. We started building the test. I think they started looking abroad and saying, okay, this is happening, sure, like, maybe he was right. But then I went a step further and I said, we're not gonna have enough tests at the hospital. And so my ambition was to get a better testing program started and so I figured what better place to scale up testing than the Broad Institute. Broad Institute is amazing, very high throughput, high efficiency research institute that does a lot of genomic sequencing, things like that. So I went to the Broad and I said, hey, there's this coronavirus that's obviously gonna impact our society greatly. Can we start modifying your high efficiency instruments and robots for coronavirus testing? Everyone in my orbit, in the hospital world, just said, that's ridiculous. How could you possibly plan to do that? It's impossible. And to me, it was like the most dead simple thing to do. It didn't, but the higher ups and the people who think about, I think one of the things is to recognize that most people in the world don't see solutions, they just see problems. And it's because it's an easy thing to do. Thinking of problems and how things will go wrong is really easy because you're not coming up with a brand new solution. And this to me was just a super simple solution. Hey, let's get the Broad to help build tests. Every single hospital director told me no, like it's impossible. My own superiors, the ones I report to in the hospital, said, you know, Mike, you're a new faculty member. Your ideas probably would be right, but you're too naive and young to know that it's impossible. Obviously now the Broad is the highest throughput laboratory in the country. And so I think my recommendation to people is as much as possible, get out of the mode of thinking about things as problems. Sometimes you piss people off, I could probably use a better filter sometimes to try to like be not so upfront with certain things. But it's just so crucial to always just see, to just bring it, like think about things in new ways that other people haven't. Cause usually there's something else out there. And one of the things that has been most beneficial to me, which is that my education was really broad. It was engineering and physics. And well, and then I became a Buddhist monk. Well, and then I became a Buddhist monk for a while. And so that gave me a different perspective, but then it was medicine and immunology. And now I've brought all of it together from a mathematics and biology and medicine perspective and policy and public health. And I think that, you know, I'm not the best in any one of these things. I recognize that there are gonna be geniuses out there who are just worlds better than me at any one of these things that I try to work on. But my superpower is bringing them all together, you know, and just thinking, and that's, I think how you can really change the world. You know, I don't know that I'll ever change the world in the way that I hope. But that's how you can have a chance. Yeah, that's how you can have a chance, exactly. And I think it's also what, you know, this to me, this rapid testing program, like this is the most dead simple solution in the world. And this literally could change the world. It could change the world. It could change, and it is, you know, there's countries that are doing it now. The US isn't, but I've been advising many countries on it. And I would say that, you know, some of the early papers that we put out earlier on, a lot of the things actually are changing. You don't always, unless you really look hard, you don't know where you're actually having an effect. Sometimes it's more overt than other times. In April, I published a paper that was saying, hey, with the PCR values from these tests, we need to really focus on the CT values, the actual quantitative values of these lab based PCR tests. At the time, all the physicians and laboratory directors told me that was stupid. You know, why would you do that? They're not accurate enough. And of course, now it's headline news that, you know, Florida, they just mandated reporting out the CT values of these tests, cause there's a real utility of them. You can understand public health from it. You can understand better clinical management. You know, that was a simple solution to a pretty difficult problem. And it is changing. The way that we approach all of the lab testing in this country is starting to, it's taken a few months, but it's starting to change because of that. And, you know, that was just me saying, hey, this is something we should be focusing on. Got some other people involved and other people. And now people recognize, hey, there's actual value in this number that comes out of these lab based PCR tests. So sometimes it does grow fairly quickly. But I think the real answer, if my only answer, I don't know what, you know, I recognize that everyone, some people are gonna be really focused on and have one small, but deep skillset. I go the opposite direction. I try to bring things together. And, but the biggest thing I think is just, don't see barriers, like just see, like there's always a solution to a barrier. If there's a barrier, that literally means there's a solution to it. That's why it's called a barrier. And just like you said, most people will just present to you, only be thinking about it and present to you with barriers. And so it's easy to start thinking that's all there is in this world. And just think big. I mean, God, you know, there's nothing wrong with thinking big. Elon Musk thought big and, you know, and then thinking big builds on itself. You know, you get a billion dollars from one big idea and then that allows you to make three new big ideas. And there's a hunger for it if you think big and you communicate that vision with the world. All the most brilliant and like passionate people will just like, you'll attract them and they'll come to you. And then it makes your life actually really exciting. The people I've met at like Tesla and Neuralink, I mean, there's just like this fire in their eyes. They just love life. And it's amazing, I think, to be around those people. I have to ask you about what was the philosophy, the journey that took you to becoming a Buddhist monk and what did you learn about life? What did you take away from that experience? How did you return back to Harvard and the world that's unlike that experience, I imagine? Yeah, well, I was at Dartmouth at the time. Well, I went to Sri Lanka. I was already pretty interested in developing countries and sort of under resourced areas. And I was doing a lot of engineering work and I went there, but I was also starting to think maybe health was something of interest. And so I went to Sri Lanka because I had a long interest in Buddhism as well, just kind of interested in it as a thing. Which aspect of the philosophy attracted you? I would say that the thing that interested me most was really this idea of kind of a butterfly effect of like what you do now has ripple effects that extend out beyond what you can possibly imagine, both in your own life and in other people's lives. And in some ways, Buddhism has, not in some ways, in a pretty deep way, Buddhism has that as part of its underlying philosophy in terms of rebirth and sort of your actions today propagate to others, but also propagate to sort of what might happen in your circle of what's called samsara and rebirth. And I don't know that I subscribe fully to this idea that we are reborn, which always was a little bit of a debate internally, I suppose, when I was a monk. But it has always been, it was that and then it was also meditation. At the time I was a fairly elite rower. I was rowing at the national level and rowing to me was very meditative. It was just, even if you're in a boat with other people, I mean, on the one hand, it's like the extreme of like a team sport, but it's also the extreme sort of focus and concentration that's required of it. And so I was always really into just meditative type of things. I was doing a lot of pottery too, which was also very meditative. And so Buddhism just kind of really, there are a lot of things about meditating that just appealed. And so I moved to Sri Lanka, planning to only be there for a couple of months. And then I was shadowing in this medical clinic and there was this physician who was just really, I mean, it's just kind of a horrible situation. Frankly, this guy was trained decades earlier. He was an older physician and he was still just practicing like these fairly barbaric approaches to medicine because he was a rural town and he just didn't have a lot of, he didn't have any updated training, frankly. And so, I just remember this like girl came in with like shrapnel in her hand and his solution was to like air it out. And so he was like, without even numbing her hand, he was like cutting it open more with this idea that like the more oxygen and stuff. And it just, I think there was something about all of this. And I was already talking to these monks at the time. I would be in this clinic in the morning and I'd go and my idea was to teach English to these monks in the evening. Turned out I'm a really bad English teacher. So they just taught, they allowed me just to sit with them and meditate and they were teaching me more about Buddhism than I could have possibly taught them about English or being an American or something. And so I just slowly, I just couldn't take, I like couldn't handle being in that clinic. So more and more, I just started moving to, spending more and more time at this monastery. And then after about two months, I was supposed to come back to the States and I decided I didn't want to. So I moved to this monastery in the mountains primarily because I didn't have the money to like just keep living. So living in a monastery is free. And so I moved there and just started meditating more and more and then months went by and it just really gravitated. I gravitated to the whole notion of it. I mean, it became, it sounds strange, but meditating almost just like anything that you've put your mind to became exciting. It became like there weren't enough hours in the day to meditate. And I would do it for 18 hours a day, 15 hours a day, just sit there and you, and like, I mean, I hate sleeping anyway, but I wouldn't want to go to sleep because I felt like I didn't accomplish what I needed to accomplish in meditation that day, which is so strange because there is no end, but it was always, but there are these, there are these steps that happen during meditation that are very prescribed in a way. Buddha talked about them and these are ancient writings, which exist. I mean, the writings are real. They're thousands of years old now. And so whether it was Buddha writing them or whoever, there are lots of different people who have contributed to these writings over the years. But they're very prescribed and they tell you what you're gonna go through. And I didn't really focus too much on them. I read a little bit about them, but your mind really does. When you actually start meditating at that level, like not an hour here and there, but like truly just spending your day as meditating, it becomes kind of like this other world where it becomes exciting and you're actively working, you're actively meditating, not just kind of trying to quiet things. That's sort of just the first stage of trying to get your mind to focus. Most people never get past that first stage, especially in our culture. Could you briefly summarize what's waiting beyond the stage of just quieting the mind? It's hard for me to imagine that there's something that could be described as exciting on there. Yeah, it's an interesting question. So I would say, so the first thing, the first step is truly just to like be able to close your eyes, focus on your breath and not have other thoughts enter into your mind. That alone is just so hard to do. Like I couldn't do it now if I wanted, but I could then. But once you get past that stage, you start entering into like all these other, you go through the kind of, I went through this like pretty trippy stage, which is a little bit euphoric where you just kind of start not hallucinating. I mean, it wasn't like some crazy thing that would happen in a movie, but definitely just weird. You start getting into the stage where you're able to quiet your mind for so long, for hours at a time that like for me, I started getting really excited about this idea of mindfulness, which is part of Buddhism in general, but it's part of Theravada Buddhism in particular for this in this way, which was you take, you start focusing on your daily activities, whether that's sipping a cup of tea or walking or sweeping around. I lived on this mountainside in this cottage thing, it was built into the rock. And so every morning I would wake up early and sweep around it and stuff, cause that's just what we did. And you start to, you meditate on all those activities. And one of the things that was so exciting, which sounds completely ridiculous now was just almost learning about your daily activities in ways that you never would have thought about before. So what's involved with like picking up this glass of water? If I said, okay, I'm just gonna pick, I'm gonna take a drink of water, to me right now, it's a single activity. But during meditation, it's not a single activity. It's a whole series of activities of like little engineering feats and feelings. And it's gripping the water and it's feeling that the glass is cold and it's lifting and it's moving and dragging and dragging. And you start to learn a whole new language of life. And that to me was like this really exhilarating thing that it was an exhilarating component of meditation that there was never enough time. It's kind of like learning a new computer language. Like it gets really exciting when you start coding and all these new things you can do. You learn how to experience life in a much richer way. And so you never run out of ways to go deeper and deeper and deeper in the way you experienced even just the drinking of the glass of water. That's exactly right. And what becomes kind of exhilarating is you start to be able to predict things that you never are, I don't even have predictions, right word. But I always think of the matrix, where I forget who it was, somebody was shooting at Neo and he like leans backwards and he dodges the bullets. In some ways, when you start breaking every little action that your hands do or that your feet do or that your body does down into all these little actions that make up one what we normally think of as an action, all of a sudden you can start to see things almost in slow motion. I like to think of it very much like language. The first time somebody hears a foreign language, it sounds really fast usually. You don't hear the spaces between words. And it just sounds like a stream of consciousness. And it just sounds like a stream of noises if you've never heard the language before. And as you learn the language, you hear clear breaks between words and it starts to gain context. And all of a sudden like that, what once sounded very fast slows down and it has meaning. That's our whole life. Well, there's this whole language happening that we don't speak generally. But if you start to speak it and if you start to learn it and you start to say, hey, I'm picking up this glass is actually 18 little movements. Then all of a sudden it becomes extremely exciting and exhilarating to just breathe. Breathing alone and the rise and fall of your abdomen or the way the air pushes in and out of your nose becomes almost interesting. And what's really neat is the world just starts slowing down and I'll never forget that feeling. And if there was one euphoric feeling from meditation I want to gain back, but I don't think I could without really meditating like that again and I don't think I will, was this like slow motion of the world. It was finding the spaces between all the movements in the same way that the spaces between all the words happen. And then it almost gives you this new appreciation for everything, it was really amazing. And so I think it came to an abrupt end though when the tsunami hit. I was there in the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004. And it was like this dichotomy of being a monk and just meditating in this extraordinary place. And then the tsunami hits and kills 40,000 people in a few minutes on the coast of this really small little country in Sri Lanka. And then my whole world of being a monk came crashing down. And when I go to the coast, and I mean, that was just a devastating visual sight and emotional sight. But the strangest thing happened, which was that everyone just wanted me to stay as a monk. You know, people in that culture, they wanted to, the monks largely fled from the coastlines those, you know, and so then there I was and people wanted me to be a monk. They wanted me to stay on the coast, but be a monk and not help, like not help in the way that I considered helping. They wanted me just to keep meditating so that they could bring me offerings and have their sort of karmic responsibilities attended to as well. And so that was really bizarre to me. It was like, how could I possibly just sit around while all these people, half of everyone's family just died? And so in any case, I stopped being a monk and I moved to this refugee camp and lived there for another six months or so and just stayed there, not as a monk, but tried to raise some money from the US and tried to like, I didn't know what I was doing. Frankly, I was 22. And I don't think I appreciated at the time how much of a role I was having in that community's life. But it's taken me many years to process all of this since then, but I would say it's what put me into the public health world, living in that refugee camp. And that difference that happened, from being a monk to being in this devastating environment just really changed my whole view of sort of why I was existing, I suppose. Well, so there's this richness of life in a single drink of water that you experience, and then there's this power of nature that's capable to take the lives of thousands of people. So given all that, the absurdity of that, let me ask you, and the fact that you study things that could kill the entirety of human civilization, what do you think is the meaning of this all? What do you think is the meaning of life, this whole orchestra we've got going on? Does it have a meaning? And maybe from another perspective, how does one live a meaningful life, if such is possible? Well, from what I've seen, I don't think there's a single answer to that by any stretch. One of the most interesting things about Buddhism to me is that the human existence is part of suffering, which is very different from Judeo Christian existence, which is that human existence is something to be, is a very different, it's something to, there's a richness to it. In Buddhism, it's just another one of your lives, but it's your opportunity to attain nirvana and become a monk, for example, and meditate to attain nirvana, else you kind of just go back into the samsara, the cycle of suffering. And so, when I look at, I mean, in some ways, the notion of life and what the purpose of life is, they're kind of completely distinct, this sort of Western view of life, which is that this life is the most precious thing in the world versus this is just another opportunity to try to get out of life. I mean, the whole notion of nirvana, and in Buddhism, it getting out of this sort of cycle of suffering is to vanish. If you could attain nirvana throughout this life, the idea is that you don't get reborn. And so, when I look at these two, on the one hand, you have Christian faith and other things that want to go to heaven and live forever in heaven. Then you have this other whole half of humans who want nothing more than to get out of the cycle of rebirth and just, poof, not exist anymore. The cycle of suffering, yeah. Yeah, and so how do you reconcile those two? And I guess. Do you have both of them in you? Do you basically oscillate back and forth? I don't think I, I think I just, I look at us and I think we're just a bunch of proteins. That we form and we, they work in this really amazing way and they might work in a bigger scale. There might be some connections that we're not really clear about, but they're still biological. I believe that they're biological. How did these proteins become conscious and why do they want to help civilization by having at home rapid tests at scale? Well, I think, I don't have an answer to that one, but I really do believe. I was hoping you would. It's just, you know, this is just an evolution of consciousness I don't, I don't personally think is, my feeling is that we're a bunch of pluses and minuses that have just gotten so complex that they're able to make rich feelings, rich emotions. And I do believe though, you know, on the one hand, I sometimes wake up some days, my fiance doesn't always love it, but you know, I kind of think we're all just a bunch of robots with like pretty complicated algorithms that we deal with. And, you know, in that sense, like, okay, if the world just blew up tomorrow and nothing existed the day after that, it's just another blip in the universe, you know? But at the same time, I don't know. So that's kind of probably my most core basic feeling about life is like, we're just a blip and we may as well make the most of it while we're here blipping. It's one hell of a fun blip though. It is, it's an amazing blink of an eye in time. Michael, this is, you're one of the most interesting people I've met, one of the most interesting conversations, important ones now, I'm going to publish it very soon. I really appreciate taking the time, I know how busy you are, it was really fun. Thanks for talking today. Well, thanks so much, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Mina and thank you to our sponsors. Brave, a fast browser that feels like Chrome but has more privacy preserving features. Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Teddy Roosevelt. It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end that triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset | Lex Fridman Podcast #146

The following is a conversation with Dimitri Dolgov, the CTO of Waymo, which is an autonomous driving company that started as Google self driving car project in 2009 and became Waymo in 2016. Dimitri was there all along. Waymo is currently leading in the fully autonomous vehicle space and that they actually have an at scale deployment of publicly accessible autonomous vehicles driving passengers around with no safety driver, with nobody in the driver's seat. This to me is an incredible accomplishment of engineering on one of the most difficult and exciting artificial intelligence challenges of the 21st century. Quick mention of a sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to Triolabs, a company that helps businesses apply machine learning to solve real world problems. Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books, better help, online therapy with a licensed professional, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount at the support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that autonomous and semi autonomous driving was the focus of my work at MIT and as a problem space that I find fascinating and full of open questions from both robotics and a human psychology perspective. There's quite a bit that I could say here about my experiences in academia on this topic that revealed to me, let's say the less admirable size of human beings, but I choose to focus on the positive, on solutions. I'm brilliant engineers like Dimitri and the team at Waymo, who work tirelessly to innovate and to build amazing technology that will define our future. Because of Dimitri and others like him, I'm excited for this future. And who knows, perhaps I too will help contribute something of value to it. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Dimitri Dolgov. When did you first fall in love with MIT? When did you first fall in love with robotics or even computer science more in general? Computer science first at a fairly young age, then robotics happened much later. I think my first interesting introduction to computers was in the late 80s when we got our first computer, I think it was an IBM, I think IBM AT. Those things that had like a turbo button in the front, the radio precedent, you know, make, make the thing goes faster. Did that already have floppy disks? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the, the 5.4 inch ones. I think there was a bigger inch. So good. When something then five inches and three inches. Yeah, I think that was the five. I don't, I maybe that was before that was the giant plates and it didn't get that. But it was definitely not the, not the three inch ones. Anyway, so that, that, you know, we got that computer, I spent the first few months just playing video games as you would expect, I got bored of that. So I started messing around and trying to figure out how to, you know, make the thing do other stuff, got into exploring programming and a couple of years later, it got to a point where, I actually wrote a game, a lot of games and a game developer, a Japanese game developer actually offered to buy it for me for a few hundred bucks. But you know, for, for a kid in Russia, that's a big deal. That's a big deal. Yeah. I did not take the deal. Wow. Integrity. Yeah. I, I instead, yes, that was not the most acute financial move that I made in my life, you know, looking back at it now, I, I instead put it, well, you know, I had a reason I put it online, it was, what'd you call it back in the days? It was a freeware thing, right? It was not open source, but you could upload the binaries, you would put the game online and the idea was that, you know, people like it and then they, you know, contribute on the send you a little donations, right? So I did my quick math of like, you know, of course, you know, thousands and millions of people are going to play my game, send me a couple of bucks a piece, you know, should definitely do that. As I said, not, not the best. You're already playing with business models at that young age. Remember what language it was? What programming, it was a Pascal, which what Pascal, Pascal, and that a graphical component, so it's not text based. Yeah. Yeah. It was, uh, like, uh, I think there are 300, 320 by 200, uh, whatever it was. I think that kind of the earlier, that's the resolution, right? And I actually think the reason why this company wanted to buy it is not like the fancy graphics or the implementation. That was maybe the idea, uh, of my actual game, the idea of the game. Well, one of the things I, it's so funny. I'm used to play this game called golden X and the simplicity of the graphics and something about the simplicity of the music, like it's still haunts me. I don't know if that's a childhood thing. I don't know if that's the same thing for call of duty these days for young kids, but I still think that the simple one of the games are simple. That simple purity makes for like allows your imagination to take over and thereby creating a more magical experience. Like now with better and better graphics, it feels like your imagination doesn't get to, uh, create worlds, which is kind of interesting. Um, it could be just an old man on a porch, like way waving at kids these days that have no respect. But I still think that graphics almost get in the way of the experience. I don't know. Flip a bird. Yeah, I don't know if the imagination is closed. I don't yet, but that that's more about games that op like that's more like Tetris world where they optimally masterfully, like create a fun, short term dopamine experience versus I'm more referring to like role playing games where there's like a story you can live in it for months or years. Um, like, uh, there's an elder scroll series, which is probably my favorite set of games that was a magical experience. And that the graphics are terrible. The characters were all randomly generated, but they're, I don't know. That's it pulls you in. There's a story. It's like an interactive version of an elder scrolls Tolkien world. And you get to live in it. I don't know. I miss it. It's one of the things that suck about being an adult is there's no, you have to live in the real world as opposed to the elder scrolls world, you know, whatever brings you joy, right? Minecraft, right? Minecraft is a great example. You create, like it's not the fancy graphics, but it's the creation of your own worlds. Yeah, that one is crazy. You know, one of the pitches for being a parent that people tell me is that you can like use the excuse of parenting to, to go back into the video game world. And like, like that's like, you know, father, son, father, daughter time, but really you just get to play video games with your kids. So anyway, at that time, did you have any ridiculously ambitious dreams of where as a creator, you might go as an engineer? Did you, what, what did you think of yourself as, as an engineer, as a tinker, or did you want to be like an astronaut or something like that? You know, I'm tempted to make something up about, you know, robots, uh, engineering or, you know, mysteries of the universe, but that's not the actual memory that pops into my mind when you, when you asked me about childhood dreams. So I'll actually share the, the, the real thing, uh, when I was maybe four or five years old, I, you know, as we all do, I thought about, you know, what I wanted to do when I grow up and I had this dream of being a traffic control cop. Uh, you know, they don't have those today's I think, but you know, back in the eighties and in Russia, uh, you probably are familiar with that Lex. They had these, uh, you know, police officers that would stand in the middle of intersection all day and they would have their like stripe back, black and white batons that they would use to control the flow of traffic and, you know, for whatever reasons, I was strangely infatuated with this whole process and like that, that was my dream. Uh, that's what I wanted to do when I grew up and, you know, my parents, uh, both physics profs, by the way, I think were, you know, a little concerned, uh, with that level of ambition coming from their child. Uh, uh, you know, that age. Well, that it's an interesting, I don't know if you can relate, but I very much love that idea. I have a OCD nature that I think lends itself very close to the engineering mindset, which is you want to kind of optimize, you know, solve a problem by create, creating an automated solution, like a, like a set of rules, that set of rules you can follow and then thereby make it ultra efficient. I don't know if that's, it was of that nature. I certainly have that. There's like fact, like SimCity and factory building games, all those kinds of things kind of speak to that engineering mindset, or did you just like the uniform? I think it was more of the latter. I think it was the uniform and the, you know, the, the stripe baton that made cars go in the right directions. But I guess, you know, I, it is, I did end up, uh, I guess, uh, you know, working on the transportation industry one way or another uniform. No, but that's right. Maybe, maybe, maybe it was my, you know, deep inner infatuation with the, you know, traffic control batons that led to this career. Okay. What, uh, when did you, when was the leap from programming to robotics? That happened later. That was after grad school, uh, after, and I actually, the most self driving cars was I think my first real hands on introduction to robotics. But I never really had that much hands on experience in school and training. I, you know, worked on applied math and physics. Then in college, I did more half, uh, abstract computer science. And it was after grad school that I really got involved in robotics, which was actually self driving cars. And, you know, that was a big flip. What, uh, what grad school? So I went to grad school in Michigan, and then I did a postdoc at Stanford, uh, which is, that was the postdoc where I got to play with self driving cars. Yeah. So we'll return there. Let's go back to, uh, to Moscow. So, uh, you know, for episode 100, I talked to my dad and also I grew up with my dad, I guess. Uh, so I had to put up with them for many years and, uh, he, he went to the FISTIEG or MIPT, it's weird to say in English, cause I've heard all this in Russian, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. And to me, that was like, I met some super interesting, as a child, I met some super interesting characters. It felt to me like the greatest university in the world, the most elite university in the world, and just the people that I met that came out of there were like, not only brilliant, but also special humans. It seems like that place really tested the soul, uh, both like in terms of technically and like spiritually. So that could be just the romanticization of that place. I'm not sure, but so maybe you can speak to it, but is it correct to say that you spent some time at FISTIEG? Yeah, that's right. Six years. Uh, I got my bachelor's and master's in physics and math there. And it's actually interesting cause my, my dad, and actually both my parents, uh, went there and I think all the stories that I heard, uh, like, just like you, Alex, uh, growing up about the place and, you know, how interesting and special and magical it was, I think that was a significant, maybe the main reason, uh, I wanted to go there, uh, for college, uh, enough so that I actually went back to Russia from the U S I graduated high school in the U S. Um, and you went back there. I went back there. Yeah, that's exactly the reaction most of my peers in college had. But, you know, perhaps a little bit stronger that like, you know, point me out as this crazy kid, were your parents supportive of that? Yeah. Yeah. My games, your previous question, they, uh, they supported me and, you know, letting me kind of pursue my passions and the things that I was interested in. That's a bold move. Wow. What was it like there? It was interesting, you know, definitely fairly hardcore on the fundamentals of, you know, math and physics and, uh, you know, lots of good memories, uh, from, you know, from those times. So, okay. So Stanford. How'd you get into autonomous vehicles? I had the great fortune, uh, and great honor to join Stanford's DARPA urban challenge team. And, uh, 2006 there, this was a third in the sequence of the DARPA challenges. There were two grand challenges prior to that. And then in 2007, they held the DARPA urban challenge. So, you know, I was doing my, my postdoc I had, I joined the team and, uh, worked on motion planning, uh, for, you know, that, that competition. So, okay. So for people who might not know, I know from, from certain autonomous vehicles is a funny world in a certain circle of people, everybody knows everything. And then the certain circle, uh, nobody knows anything in terms of general public. So it's interesting. It's, it's a good question of what to talk about, but I do think that the urban challenge is worth revisiting. It's a fun little challenge. One that, first of all, like sparked so much, so many incredible minds to focus on one of the hardest problems of our time in artificial intelligence. So that's, that's a success from a perspective of a single little challenge. But can you talk about like, what did the challenge involve? So were there pedestrians, were there other cars, what was the goal? Uh, who was on the team? How long did it take any fun, fun sort of specs? Sure, sure, sure. So the way the challenge was constructed and just a little bit of backgrounding, as I mentioned, this was the third, uh, competition in that series. The first year we're at the grand challenge called the grand challenge. The goal there was to just drive in a completely static environment. You know, you had to drive in a desert, uh, that was very successful. So then DARPA followed with what they called the urban challenge, where the goal was to have, you know, build vehicles that could operate in more dynamic environments and, you know, share them with other vehicles. There were no pedestrians there, but what DARPA did is they took over an abandoned air force base. Uh, and it was kind of like a little fake city that they built out there. And they had a bunch of, uh, robots, uh, you know, cars, uh, that were autonomous, uh, in there all at the same time. Uh, mixed in with other vehicles driven by professional, uh, drivers and each car, uh, had a mission and so there's a crude map that they received, uh, beginning and they had a mission and go here and then there and over here. Um, and they kind of all were sharing this environment at the same time. They had to interact with each other. They had to interact with the human drivers. There's this very first, very rudimentary, um, version of, uh, self driving car that, you know, could operate, uh, and, uh, in a, in an environment, you know, shared with other dynamic actors that, as you said, you know, really, you know, many ways, you know, kickstarted this whole industry. Okay. So who was on the team and how'd you do? I forget. Uh, I came in second. Uh, perhaps that was my contribution to the team. I think the Stanford team came in first in the DARPA challenge. Uh, but then I joined the team and, you know, you were the one with the bug in the code, I mean, do you have sort of memories of some particularly challenging things or, you know, one of the cool things, it's not, you know, this isn't a product, this isn't the thing that, uh, you know, it there's, you have a little bit more freedom to experiment so you can take risks and there's, uh, so you can make mistakes. Uh, so is there interesting mistakes? Is there interesting challenges that stand out to you as some, like, taught you, um, a good technical lesson or a good philosophical lesson from that time? Yeah. Uh, you know, definitely, definitely a very memorable time, not really challenged, but like one of the most vivid memories that I have from the time. And I think that was actually one of the days that really got me hooked, uh, on this whole field was, uh, the first time I got to run my software and I got to software on the car and, uh, I was working on a part of our planning algorithm, uh, that had to navigate in parking lots. So it was something that, you know, called free space emotion planning. So the very first version of that, uh, was, you know, we tried on the car, it was on Stanford's campus, uh, in the middle of the night and you had this little course constructed with cones, uh, in the middle of a parking lot. So we're there in like 3 am, you know, by the time we got the code to, you know, uh, uh, you know, compile and turn over, uh, and, you know, it drove, I could actually did something quite reasonable and, you know, it was of course very buggy at the time and had all kinds of problems, but it was pretty darn magical. I remember going back and, you know, later at night and trying to fall asleep and just, you know, being unable to fall asleep for the rest of the night, uh, just my mind was blown. Just like, and that, that, that's what I've been doing ever since for more than a decade, uh, in terms of challenges and, uh, you know, interesting memories, like on the day of the competition, uh, it was pretty nerve wrecking. Uh, I remember standing there with Mike Montemarillo, who was, uh, the software lead and wrote most of the code. I think I did one little part of the planner, Mike, you know, incredibly that, you know, pretty much the rest of it, uh, with, with, you know, a bunch of other incredible people, but I remember standing on the day of the competition, uh, you know, watching the car, you know, with Mike and cars are completely empty, right? They're all there lined up in the beginning of the race and then, you know, DARPA sends them, you know, on their mission one by one. So then leave and Mike, you just, they had these sirens, they all had their different silence silence, right? Each siren had its own personality, if you will. So, you know, off they go and you don't see them. You just kind of, and then every once in a while they come a little bit closer to where the audience is and you can kind of hear, you know, the sound of your car and then, you know, it seems to be moving along. So that, you know, gives you hope. And then, you know, it goes away and you can't hear it for too long. You start getting anxious, right? So it's a little bit like, you know, sending your kids to college and like, you know, kind of you invested in them. You hope you, you, you, you, you, you, you build it properly, but like, it's still, uh, anxiety inducing. Uh, so that was, uh, an incredibly, uh, fun, uh, few days in terms of, you know, bugs, as you mentioned, you know, one that that was my bug that caused us the loss of the first place, uh, is still a debate that, you know, occasionally have with people on the CMU team, CMU came first, I should mention, uh, that you haven't heard of them, but yeah, it's something, you know, it's a small school, but it's, it's, it's, you know, really a glitch that, you know, they happen to succeed at something robotics related. Very scenic though. So most people go there for the scenery. Um, yeah, it's a beautiful campus. I'm like, unlike Stanford. So for people, yeah, that's true. Unlike Stanford, for people who don't know, CMU is one of the great robotics and sort of artificial intelligence universities in the world, CMU, Carnegie Mellon university, okay, sorry, go ahead. Good, good PSA. So in the part that I contributed to, which was navigating parking lots and the way that part of the mission work is, uh, you in a parking lot, you would get from DARPA an outline of the map. You basically get this, you know, giant polygon that defined the perimeter of the parking lot, uh, and there would be an entrance and, you know, so maybe multiple entrances or access to it, and then you would get a goal, uh, within that open space, uh, X, Y, you know, heading where the car had to park and had no information about the optical, so obstacles that the car might encounter there. So it had to navigate a kind of completely free space, uh, from the entrance to the parking lot into that parking space. And then, uh, once parked there, it had to, uh, exit the parking lot, you know, while of course, I'm counting and reasoning about all the obstacles that it encounters in real time. So, uh, Our interpretation, or at least my interpretation of the rules was that you had to reverse out of the parking spot. And that's what our cars did. Even if there's no obstacle in front, that's not what CMU's car did. And it just kind of drove right through. So there's still a debate. And of course, you know, as you stop and then reverse out and go out the different way that costs you some time. And so there's still a debate whether, you know, it was my poor implementation that cost us extra time or whether it was, you know, CMU, uh, violating an important rule of the competition. And, you know, I have my own, uh, opinion here in terms of other bugs. And like, uh, I, I have to apologize to Mike Montemarila, uh, for sharing this on air, but it is actually, uh, one of the more memorable ones. Uh, and it's something that's kind of become a bit of, uh, a metaphor and a label in the industry, uh, since then, I think, you know, at least in some circles, it's called the victory circle or victory lap. Um, and, uh, uh, our cars did that. So in one of the missions in the urban challenge, in one of the courses, uh, there was this big oval, right by the start and finish of the race. So the ARPA had a lot of the missions would finish kind of in that same location. Uh, and it was pretty cool because you could see the cars come by, you know, kind of finished that part leg of the trip, that leg of the mission, and then, you know, go on and finish the rest of it. Uh, and other vehicles would, you know, come hit their waypoint, uh, and, you know, exit the oval and off they would go. Our car on the hand, which hit the checkpoint, and then it would do an extra lap around the oval and only then, you know, uh, leave and go on its merry way. So over the course of the full day, it accumulated, uh, uh, some extra time and the problem was that we had a bug where it wouldn't, you know, start reasoning about the next waypoint and plan a route to get to that next point until it hit a previous one. And in that particular case, by the time you hit the, that, that one, it was too late for us to consider the next one and kind of make a lane change. So at every time we would do like an extra lap. So, you know, and that's the Stanford victory lap. The victory lap. Oh, that's there's, I feel like there's something philosophically profound in there somehow, but, uh, I mean, ultimately everybody is a winner in that kind of competition. And it led to sort of famously to the creation of, um, Google self driving car project and now Waymo. So can we, uh, give an overview of how is Waymo born? How's the Google self driving car project born? What's the, what is the mission? What is the hope? What is it is the engineering kind of, uh, set of milestones that it seeks to accomplish, there's a lot of questions in there. Uh, yeah, uh, I don't know, kind of the DARPA urban challenge and the DARPA and previous DARPA grand challenges, uh, kind of led, I think to a very large degree to that next step and then, you know, Larry and Sergey, um, uh, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, uh, uh, Google founders course, uh, I saw that competition and believed in the technology. So, you know, the Google self driving car project was born, you know, at that time. And we started in 2009, it was a pretty small group of us, about a dozen people, uh, who came together, uh, to, to work on this project at Google. At that time we saw an incredible early result in the DARPA urban challenge. I think we're all incredibly excited, uh, about where we got to and we believed in the future of the technology, but we still had a very, you know, very, you know, rudimentary understanding of the problem space. So the first goal of this project in 2009 was to really better understand what we're up against. Uh, and, you know, with that goal in mind, when we started the project, we created a few milestones for ourselves, uh, that. Maximized learnings. Well, the two milestones were, you know, uh, one was to drive a hundred thousand miles in autonomous mode, which was at that time, you know, orders of magnitude that, uh, more than anybody has ever done. And the second milestone was to drive 10 routes, uh, each one was a hundred miles long, uh, and there were specifically chosen to become extra spicy and extra complicated and sample the full complexity of the, that, that, uh, domain. Um, uh, and you had to drive each one from beginning to end with no intervention, no human intervention. So you would get to the beginning of the course, uh, you would press the button that would engage in autonomy and you had to go for a hundred miles, you know, beginning to end, uh, with no interventions. Um, and it sampled again, the full complexity of driving conditions. Some, uh, were on freeways. We had one route that went all through all the freeways and all the bridges in the Bay area. You know, we had, uh, some that went around Lake Tahoe and kind of mountains, uh, roads. We had some that drove through dense urban, um, environments like in downtown Palo Alto and through San Francisco. So it was incredibly, uh, interesting, uh, to work on. And it, uh, it took us just under two years, uh, about a year and a half, a little bit more to finish both of these milestones. And in that process, uh, you know, it was an incredible amount of fun, probably the most fun I had in my professional career. And you're just learning so much. You are, you know, the goal here is to learn and prototype. You're not yet starting to build a production system, right? So you just, you were, you know, this is when you're kind of working 24 seven and you're hacking things together. And you also don't know how hard this is. I mean, that's the point. Like, so, I mean, that's an ambitious, if I put myself in that mindset, even still, that's a really ambitious set of goals. Like just those two picking, picking 10 different, difficult, spicy challenges. And then having zero interventions. So like not saying gradually we're going to like, you know, over a period of 10 years, we're going to have a bunch of routes and gradually reduce the number of interventions, you know, that literally says like, by as soon as possible, we want to have zero and on hard roads. So like, to me, if I was facing that, it's unclear that whether that takes two years or whether that takes 20 years. I mean, it took us under two. I guess that that speaks to a really big difference between doing something once and having a prototype where you are going after, you know, learning about the problem versus how you go about engineering a product that, you know, where you look at, you know, you do properly do evaluation, you look at metrics, you drive down and you're confident that you can do that. And I guess that's the, you know, why it took a dozen people, you know, 16 months or a little bit more than that back in 2009 and 2010 with the technology of, you know, the more than a decade ago that amount of time to achieve that milestone of, you know, 10 routes, a hundred miles each and no interventions, and, you know, it took us a little bit longer to get to, you know, a full driverless product that customers use. That's another really important moment. Is there some memories of technical lessons or just one, like, what did you learn about the problem of driving from that experience? I mean, we can, we can now talk about like what you learned from modern day Waymo, but I feel like you may have learned some profound things in those early days, even more so because it feels like what Waymo is now is to trying to, you know, how to do scale, how to make sure you create a product, how to make sure it's like safety and all those things, which is all fascinating challenges, but like you were facing the more fundamental philosophical problem of driving in those early days. Like what the hell is driving as an autonomous, or maybe I'm again romanticizing it, but is it, is there, is there some valuable lessons you picked up over there at those two years? A ton. The most important one is probably that we believe that it's doable and we've gotten far enough into the problem that, you know, we had a, I think only a glimpse of the true complexity of the, that the domain, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, climbing a mountain where you kind of, you know, see the next peak and you think that's kind of the summit, but then you get to that and you kind of see that, that this is just the start of the journey. But we've tried, we've sampled enough of the problem space and we've made enough rapid success, even, you know, with technology of 2009, 2010, that it gave us confidence to then, you know, pursue this as a real product. So, okay. So the next step, you mentioned the milestones that you had in the, in those two years, what are the next milestones that then led to the creation of Waymo and beyond? Yeah, we had a, it was a really interesting journey and, you know, Waymo came a little bit later, then, you know, we completed those milestones in 2010. That was the pivot when we decided to focus on actually building a product using this technology. The initial couple of years after that, we were focused on a freeway, you know, what you would call a driver assist, maybe, you know, an L3 driver assist program. Then around 2013, we've learned enough about the space and thought more deeply about, you know, the product that we wanted to build, that we pivoted, we pivoted towards this vision of building a driver and deploying it fully driverless vehicles without a person. And that that's the path that we've been on since then. And very, it was exactly the right decision for us. So there was a moment where you're also considered like, what is the right trajectory here? What is the right role of automation in the, in the task of driving? There's still, it wasn't from the early days, obviously you want to go fully autonomous. From the early days, it was not. I think it was in 20, around 2013, maybe that we've, that became very clear and we made that pivot and also became very clear and that it's either the way you go building a driver assist system is, you know, fundamentally different from how you go building a fully driverless vehicle. So, you know, we've pivoted towards the ladder and that's what we've been working on ever since. And so that was around 2013, then there's sequence of really meaningful for us really important defining milestones since then. And in 2015, we had our first, actually the world's first fully driverless trade on public roads. It was in a custom built vehicle that we had. I must've seen those. We called them the Firefly, that, you know, funny looking marshmallow looking thing. And we put a passenger, his name was Steve Mann, you know, great friend of our project from the early days, the man happens to be blind. So we put them in that vehicle. The car had no steering wheel, no pedals. It was an uncontrolled environment. You know, no, you know, lead or chase cars, no police escorts. And, you know, we did that trip a few times in Austin, Texas. So that was a really big milestone. But that was in Austin. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, we only, but at that time we're only, it took a tremendous amount of engineering. It took a tremendous amount of validation to get to that point. But, you know, we only did it a few times. We only did that. It was a fixed route. It was not kind of a controlled environment, but it was a fixed route. And we only did a few times. Then in 2016, end of 2016, beginning of 2017 is when we founded Waymo, the company. That's when we kind of, that was the next phase of the project where I wanted, we believed in kind of the commercial vision of this technology. And it made sense to create an independent entity, you know, within that alphabet umbrella to pursue this product at scale. Beyond that in 2017, later in 2017 was another really huge step for us. Really big milestone where we started, I think it was October of 2017 where when we started regular driverless operations on public roads, that first day of operations, we drove in one day. And that first day, a hundred miles and driverless fashion. And then we've now the most, the most important thing about that milestone was not that, you know, a hundred miles in one day, but that it was the start of kind of regular ongoing driverless operations. And when you say driverless, it means no driver. That's exactly right. So on that first day, we actually hit a mix and in some, we didn't want to like, you know, be on YouTube and Twitter that same day. So in, in many of the rides we had somebody in the driver's seat, but they could not disengage like the car, not disengage, but actually on that first day, some of the miles were driven and just completely empty driver's seat. And this is the key distinction that I think people don't realize it's, you know, that oftentimes when you talk about autonomous vehicles, you're, there's often a driver in the seat that's ready to to take over what's called a safety driver and then Waymo is really one of the only companies at least that I'm aware of, or at least as like boldly and carefully and all, and all of that is actually has cases. And now we'll talk about more and more where there's literally no driver. So that's another, the interesting case of where the driver's not supposed to disengage, that's like a nice middle ground, they're still there, but they're not supposed to disengage, but really there's the case when there's no, okay, there's something magical about there being nobody in the driver's seat. Like, just like to me, you mentioned the first time you wrote some code for free space navigation of the parking lot, that was like a magical moment to me, just sort of as an observer of robots, the first magical moment is seeing an autonomous vehicle turn, like make a left turn, like apply sufficient torque to the steering wheel to where it, like, there's a lot of rotation and for some reason, and there's nobody in the driver's seat, for some reason that communicates that here's a being with power that makes a decision. There's something about like the steering wheel, cause we perhaps romanticize the notion of the steering wheel, it's so essential to our conception, our 20th century conception of a car and it turning the steering wheel with nobody in driver's seat, that to me, I think maybe to others, it's really powerful. Like this thing is in control and then there's this leap of trust that you give. Like I'm going to put my life in the hands of this thing that's in control. So in that sense, when there's no, but no driver in the driver's seat, that's a magical moment for robots. So I'm, I've gotten a chance to last year to take a ride in a, in a way more vehicle and that, that was the magical moment. There's like nobody in the driver's seat. It's, it's like the little details. You would think it doesn't matter whether there's a driver or not, but like if there's no driver and the steering wheel is turning on its own, I don't know. That's magical. It's absolutely magical. I, I have taken many of these rides and like completely empty car, no human in the car pulls up, you know, you call it on your cell phone. It pulls up, you get in, it takes you on its way. There's nobody in the car, but you, right? That's something called, you know, fully driverless, you know, our writer only mode of operation. Yeah. It, it is magical. It is, you know, transformative. This is what we hear from our writers. It kind of really changes your experience. And not like that, that really is what unlocks the real potential of this technology. But, you know, coming back to our journey, you know, that was 2017 when we started, you know, truly driverless operations. Then in 2018, we've launched our public commercial service that we called Waymo One in Phoenix. In 2019, we started offering truly driverless writer only rides to our early rider population of users. And then, you know, 2020 has also been a pretty interesting year. One of the first ones, less about technology, but more about the maturing and the growth of Waymo as a company. We raised our first round of external financing this year, you know, we were part of Alphabet. So obviously we have access to, you know, significant resources but as kind of on the journey of Waymo maturing as a company, it made sense for us to, you know, partially go externally in this round. So, you know, we're raised about $3.2 billion from that round. We've also started putting our fifth generation of our driver, our hardware, that is on the new vehicle, but it's also a qualitatively different set of self driving hardware. That is now on the JLR pace. So that was a very important step for us. Hardware specs, fifth generation. I think it'd be fun to maybe, I apologize if I'm interrupting, but maybe talk about maybe the generations with a focus on what we're talking about on the fifth generation in terms of hardware specs, like what's on this car. Sure. So we separated out, you know, the actual car that we are driving from the self driving hardware we put on it. Right now we have, so this is, as I mentioned, the fifth generation, you know, we've gone through, we started, you know, building our own hardware, you know, many, many years ago. And that, you know, Firefly vehicle also had the hardware suite that was mostly designed, engineered, and built in house. Lighters are one of the more important components that we design and build from the ground up. So on the fifth generation of our drivers of our self driving hardware that we're switching to right now, we have, as with previous generations, in terms of sensing, we have lighters, cameras, and radars, and we have a pretty beefy computer that processes all that information and makes decisions in real time on board the car. So in all of the, and it's really a qualitative jump forward in terms of the capabilities and the various parameters and the specs of the hardware compared to what we had before and compared to what you can kind of get off the shelf in the market today. Meaning from fifth to fourth or from fifth to first? Definitely from first to fifth, but also from the fourth. That was the world's dumbest question. Definitely from fourth to fifth, as well as the last step is a big step forward. So everything's in house. So like LIDAR is built in house and cameras are built in house? You know, it's different. We work with partners and there's some components that we get from our manufacturing and supply chain partners. What exactly is in house is a bit different. We do a lot of custom design on all of our sensing modalities, lighters, radars, cameras, you know, exactly. There's lighters are almost exclusively in house and some of the technologies that we have, some of the fundamental technologies there are completely unique to Waymo. That is also largely true about radars and cameras. It's a little bit more of a mix in terms of what we do ourselves versus what we get from partners. Is there something super sexy about the computer that you can mention that's not top secret? Like for people who enjoy computers for, I mean, there's a lot of machine learning involved, but there's a lot of just basic compute. You have to probably do a lot of signal processing on all the different sensors. You have to integrate everything has to be in real time. There's probably some kind of redundancy type of situation. Is there something interesting you can say about the computer for the people who love hardware? It does have all of the characteristics, all the properties that you just mentioned. Redundancy, very beefy compute for general processing, as well as inference and ML models. It is some of the more sensitive stuff that I don't want to get into for IP reasons, but it can be shared a little bit in terms of the specs of the sensors that we have on the car. We actually shared some videos of what our lighters see in the world. We have 29 cameras. We have five lighters. We have six radars on these vehicles, and you can get a feel for the amount of data that they're producing. That all has to be processed in real time to do perception, to do complex reasoning. That kind of gives you some idea of how beefy those computers are, but I don't want to get into specifics of exactly how we build them. Okay, well, let me try some more questions that you can get into the specifics of, like GPU wise. Is that something you can get into? I know that Google works with GPUs and so on. I mean, for machine learning folks, it's kind of interesting. Or is there no... How do I ask it? I've been talking to people in the government about UFOs and they don't answer any questions. So this is how I feel right now asking about GPUs. But is there something interesting that you could reveal? Or is it just... Or leave it up to our imagination, some of the compute. Is there any, I guess, is there any fun trickery? Like I talked to Chris Latner for a second time and he was a key person about GPUs, and there's a lot of fun stuff going on in Google in terms of hardware that optimizes for machine learning. Is there something you can reveal in terms of how much, you mentioned customization, how much customization there is for hardware for machine learning purposes? I'm going to be like that government person who bought UFOs. I guess I will say that it's really... Compute is really important. We have very data hungry and compute hungry ML models all over our stack. And this is where both being part of Alphabet, as well as designing our own sensors and the entire hardware suite together, where on one hand you get access to really rich raw sensor data that you can pipe from your sensors into your compute platform and build like build the whole pipe from sensor raw sensor data to the big compute as then have the massive compute to process all that data. And this is where we're finding that having a lot of control of that hardware part of the stack is really advantageous. One of the fascinating magical places to me again, might not be able to speak to the details, but it is the other compute, which is like, we're just talking about a single car, but the driving experience is a source of a lot of fascinating data. And you have a huge amount of data coming in on the car and the infrastructure of storing some of that data to then train or to analyze or so on. That's a fascinating piece of it that I understand a single car. I don't understand how you pull it all together in a nice way. Is that something that you could speak to in terms of the challenges of seeing the network of cars and then bringing the data back and analyzing things that like edge cases of driving, be able to learn on them to improve the system to see where things went wrong, where things went right and analyze all that kind of stuff. Is there something interesting there from an engineering perspective? Oh, there's an incredible amount of really interesting work that's happening there, both in the real time operation of the fleet of cars and the information that they exchange with each other in real time to make better decisions as well as on the kind of the off board component where you have to deal with massive amounts of data for training your ML models, evaluating the ML models for simulating the entire system and for evaluating your entire system. And this is where being part of Alphabet has once again been tremendously advantageous because we consume an incredible amount of compute for ML infrastructure. We build a lot of custom frameworks to get good at data mining, finding the interesting edge cases for training and for evaluation of the system for both training and evaluating some components and your sub parts of the system and various ML models, as well as the evaluating the entire system and simulation. Okay. That first piece that you mentioned that cars communicating to each other, essentially, I mean, through perhaps through a centralized point, but what that's fascinating too, how much does that help you? Like if you imagine, you know, right now the number of way more vehicles is whatever X. I don't know if you can talk to what that number is, but it's not in the hundreds of millions yet. And imagine if the whole world is way more vehicles, like that changes potentially the power of connectivity. Like the more cars you have, I guess, actually, if you look at Phoenix, cause there's enough vehicles, there's enough, when there's like some level of density, you can start to probably do some really interesting stuff with the fact that cars can negotiate, can be, can communicate with each other and thereby make decisions. Is there something interesting there that you can talk to about like, how does that help with the driving problem from, as compared to just a single car solving the driving problem by itself? Yeah, it's a spectrum. I first and say that, you know, it's, it helps and it helps in various ways, but it's not required right now with the way we build our system, like each cars can operate independently. They can operate with no connectivity. So I think it is important that, you know, you have a fully autonomous, fully capable driver that, you know, computerized driver that each car has. Then, you know, they do share information and they share information in real time. It really, really helps. So the way we do this today is, you know, whenever one car encounters something interesting in the world, whether it might be an accident or a new construction zone, that information immediately gets, you know, uploaded over the air and it's propagated to the rest of the fleet. So, and that's kind of how we think about maps as priors in terms of the knowledge of our drivers, of our fleet of drivers that is distributed across the fleet and it's updated in real time. So that's one use case. And you know, you can imagine as the, you know, the density of these vehicles go up, that they can exchange more information in terms of what they're planning to do and start influencing how they interact with each other, as well as, you know, potentially sharing some observations, right, to help with, you know, if you have enough density of these vehicles where, you know, one car might be seeing something that another is relevant to another car that is very dynamic. You know, it's not part of kind of your updating your static prior of the map of the world, but it's more of a dynamic information that could be relevant to the decisions that another car is making real time. So you can see them exchanging that information and you can build on that. But again, I see that as an advantage, but it's not a requirement. So what about the human in the loop? So when I got a chance to drive with a ride in a Waymo, you know, there's customer service. So like there is somebody that's able to dynamically like tune in and help you out. What role does the human play in that picture? That's a fascinating like, you know, the idea of teleoperation, be able to remotely control a vehicle. So here, what we're talking about is like, like frictionless, like a human being able to in a in a frictionless way, sort of help you out. I don't know if they're able to actually control the vehicle. Is that something you could talk to? Yes. Okay. To be clear, we don't do teleporation. I kind of believe in teleporation for various reasons. That's not what we have in our cars. We do, as you mentioned, have, you know, version of, you know, customer support. You know, we call it life health. In fact, we find it that it's very important for our ride experience, especially if it's your first trip, you've never been in a fully driverless ride or only way more vehicle you get in, there's nobody there. And so you can imagine having all kinds of, you know, questions in your head, like how this thing works. So we've put a lot of thought into kind of guiding our, our writers or customers through that experience, especially for the first time they get some information on the phone. If the fully driverless vehicle is used to service their trip, when you get into the car, we have an in car, you know, screen and audio that kind of guides them and explains what to expect. They also have a button that they can push that will connect them to, you know, a real life human being that they can talk to, right, about this whole process. So that's one aspect of it. There is, you know, I should mention that there is another function that humans provide to our cars, but it's not teleoperation. You can think of it a little bit more like, you know, fleet assistance, kind of like, you know, traffic control that you have, where our cars, again, they're responsible on their own for making all of the decisions, all of the driving decisions that don't require connectivity. They, you know, anything that is safety or latency critical is done, you know, purely autonomously by onboard, our onboard system. But there are situations where, you know, if connectivity is available, when a car encounters a particularly challenging situation, you can imagine like a super hairy scene of an accident, the cars will do their best, they will recognize that it's an off nominal situation, they will do their best to come up with the right interpretation, the best course of action in that scenario. But if connectivity is available, they can ask for confirmation from, you know, human assistant to kind of confirm those actions and perhaps provide a little bit of kind of contextual information and guidance. So October 8th was when you're talking about the was Waymo launched the fully self, the public version of its fully driverless, that's the right term, I think, service in Phoenix. Is that October 8th? That's right. It was the introduction of fully driverless, right, our only vehicles into our public Waymo One service. Okay, so that's that's amazing. So it's like anybody can get into Waymo in Phoenix. So we previously had early people in our early rider program, taking fully driverless rides in Phoenix. And just this a little while ago, we opened on October 8th, we opened that mode of operation to the public. So I can download the app and go on a ride. There's a lot more demand right now for that service. And then we have capacity. So we're kind of managing that. But that's exactly the way to describe it. Yeah, that's interesting. So there's more demand than you can handle. Like what has been reception so far? I mean, okay, so this is a product, right? That's a whole nother discussion of like how compelling of a product it is. Great. But it's also like one of the most kind of transformational technologies of the 21st century. So it's also like a tourist attraction. Like it's fun to, you know, to be a part of it. So it'd be interesting to see like, what do people say? What do people, what have been the feedback so far? You know, still early days, but so far, the feedback has been incredible, incredibly positive. They, you know, we asked them for feedback during the ride, we asked them for feedback after the ride as part of their trip. We asked them some questions, we asked them to rate the performance of our driver. Most by far, you know, most of our drivers give us five stars in our app, which is absolutely great to see. And you know, that's and we're they're also giving us feedback on you know, things we can improve. And you know, that's that's one of the main reasons we're doing this as Phoenix and you know, over the last couple of years, and every day today, we are just learning a tremendous amount of new stuff from our users. There's there's no substitute for actually doing the real thing, actually having a fully driverless product out there in the field with, you know, users that are actually paying us money to get from point A to point B. So this is a legitimate like, there's a paid service. That's right. And the idea is you use the app to go from point A to point B. And then what what are the A's? What are the what's the freedom of the of the starting and ending places? It's an area of geography where that service is enabled. It's a decent size of geography of territory. It's actually larger than the size of San Francisco. And you know, within that, you have full freedom of, you know, selecting where you want to go. You know, of course, there's some and you on your app, you get a map, you tell the car where you want to be picked up, where you want the car to pull over and pick you up. And then you tell it where you want to be dropped off. All right. And of course, there are some exclusions, right? You want to be you know, you were in terms of where the car is allowed to pull over, right? So that you can do. But you know, besides that, it's amazing. It's not like a fixed just would be very I guess. I don't know. Maybe that's what's the question behind your question. But it's not a, you know, preset set of yes, I guess. So within the geographic constraints with that within that area anywhere else, it can be you can be picked up and dropped off anywhere. That's right. And you know, people use them on like all kinds of trips. They we have and we have an incredible spectrum of riders. We I think the youngest actually have car seats them and we have, you know, people taking their kids and rides. I think the youngest riders we had on cars are, you know, one or two years old, you know, and the full spectrum of use cases people you can take them to, you know, schools to, you know, go grocery shopping, to restaurants, to bars, you know, run errands, you know, go shopping, etc, etc. You can go to your office, right? Like the full spectrum of use cases, and people are going to use them in their daily lives to get around. And we see all kinds of really interesting use cases and that that that's providing us incredibly valuable experience that we then, you know, use to improve our product. So as somebody who's been on done a few long rants with Joe Rogan and others about the toxicity of the internet and the comments and the negativity in the comments, I'm fascinated by feedback. I believe that most people are good and kind and intelligent and can provide, like, even in disagreement, really fascinating ideas. So on a product side, it's fascinating to me, like, how do you get the richest possible user feedback, like, to improve? What's, what are the channels that you use to measure? Because, like, you're no longer, that's one of the magical things about autonomous vehicles is it's not like it's frictionless interaction with the human. So like, you don't get to, you know, it's just giving a ride. So like, how do you get feedback from people to in order to improve? Yeah, great question, various mechanisms. So as part of the normal flow, we ask people for feedback, they as the car is driving around, we have on the phone and in the car, and we have a touchscreen in the car, you can actually click some buttons and provide real time feedback on how the car is doing, and how the car is handling a particular situation, you know, both positive and negative. So that's one channel, we have, as we discussed, customer support or life help, where, you know, if a customer wants to, has a question, or he has some sort of concern, they can talk to a person in real time. So that that is another mechanism that gives us feedback. At the end of a trip, you know, we also ask them how things went, they give us comments, and you know, star rating. And you know, if it's, we also, you know, ask them to explain what you know, one, well, and you know, what could be improved. And we have our writers providing very rich feedback, they're a lot, a large fraction is very passionate, very excited about this technology. So we get really good feedback. We also run UXR studies, right, you know, specific and that are kind of more, you know, go more in depth. And we will run both kind of lateral and longitudinal studies, where we have deeper engagement with our customers, you know, we have our user experience research team, tracking over time, that's things about longitudinal is cool. That's that's exactly right. And you know, that's another really valuable feedback, source of feedback. And we're just covering a tremendous amount, right? People go grocery shopping, and they like want to load, you know, 20 bags of groceries in our cars and like that, that's one workflow that you maybe don't think about, you know, getting just right when you're building the driverless product. I have people like, you know, who bike as part of their trip. So they, you know, bike somewhere, then they get on our cars, they take apart their bike, they load into our vehicle, then go and that's, you know, how they, you know, where we want to pull over and how that, you know, get in and get out process works, provides very useful feedback in terms of what makes a good pickup and drop off location, we get really valuable feedback. And in fact, we had to do some really interesting work with high definition maps, and thinking about walking directions. And if you imagine you're in a store, right in some giant space, and then you know, you want to be picked up somewhere, like if you just drop a pin at a current location, which is maybe in the middle of a shopping mall, like what's the best location for the car to come pick you up? And you can have simple heuristics where you're just going to take your you know, you clean in distance and find the nearest spot where the car can pull over that's closest to you. But oftentimes, that's not the most convenient one. You know, I have many anecdotes where that heuristic breaks in horrible ways. One example that I often mentioned is somebody wanted to be, you know, dropped off in Phoenix. And you know, we got car picked location that was close, the closest to there, you know, where the pin was dropped on the map in terms of, you know, latitude and longitude. But it happened to be on the other side of a parking lot that had this row of cacti. And the poor person had to like walk all around the parking lot to get to where they wanted to be in 110 degree heat. So that, you know, that was about so then, you know, we took all take all of these, all that feedback from our users and incorporate it into our system and improve it. Yeah, I feel like that's like requires AGI to solve the problem of like, when you're, which is a very common case, when you're in a big space of some kind, like apartment building, it doesn't matter, it's some large space. And then you call the, like a Waymo from there, right? Like, whatever, it doesn't matter, ride share vehicle. And like, where's the pin supposed to drop? I feel like that's, you don't think, I think that requires AGI. I'm gonna, in order to solve. Okay, the alternative, which I think the Google search engine is taught is like, there's something really valuable about the perhaps slightly dumb answer, but a really powerful one, which is like, what was done in the past by others? Like, what was the choice made by others? That seems to be like in terms of Google search, when you have like billions of searches, you could, you could see which, like when they recommend what you might possibly mean, they suggest based on not some machine learning thing, which they also do, but like, on what was successful for others in the past and finding a thing that they were happy with. Is that integrated at all? Waymo, like what, what pickups worked for others? It is. I think you're exactly right. So there's a real, it's an interesting problem. Naive solutions have interesting failure modes. So there's definitely lots of things that can be done to improve. And both learning from, you know, what works, but doesn't work in actual heal from getting richer data and getting more information about the environment and richer maps. But you're absolutely right, that there's something like there's some properties of solutions that in terms of the effect that they have on users so much, much, much better than others, right? And predictability and understandability is important. So you can have maybe something that is not quite as optimal, but is very natural and predictable to the user and kind of works the same way all the time. And that matters, that matters a lot for the user experience. And but you know, to get to the basics, the pretty fundamental property is that the car actually arrives where you told it to, right? Like, you can always, you know, change it, see it on the map, and you can move it around if you don't like it. And but like, that property that the car actually shows up reliably is critical, which, you know, where compared to some of the human driven analogs, I think, you know, you can have more predictability. It's actually the fact, if I have a little bit of a detour here, I think the fact that it's, you know, your phone and the cars, two computers talking to each other, can lead to some really interesting things we can do in terms of the user interfaces, both in terms of function, like the car actually shows up exactly where you told it, you want it to be, but also some, you know, really interesting things on the user interface, like as the car is driving, as you call it, and it's on the way to come pick you up. And of course, you get the position of the car and the route on the map. But and they actually follow that route, of course. But it can also share some really interesting information about what it's doing. So, you know, our cars, as they are coming to pick you up, if it's come, if a car is coming up to a stop sign, it will actually show you that like, it's there sitting, because it's at a stop sign or a traffic light will show you that it's got, you know, sitting at a red light. So, you know, they're like little things, right? But I find those little touches really interesting, really magical. And it's just, you know, little things like that, that you can do to kind of delight your users. You know, this makes me think of, there's some products that I just love. Like, there's a there's a company called Rev, Rev.com, where I like for this podcast, for example, I can drag and drop a video. And then they do all the captioning. It's humans doing the captioning, but they connect, they automate everything of connecting you to the humans, and they do the captioning and transcription. It's all effortless. And it like, I remember when I first started using them, I was like, life's good. Like, because it was so painful to figure that out earlier. The same thing with something called iZotope RX, this company I use for cleaning up audio, like the sound cleanup they do. It's like drag and drop, and it just cleans everything up very nicely. Another experience like that I had with Amazon OneClick purchase, first time. I mean, other places do that now, but just the effortlessness of purchasing, making it frictionless. It kind of communicates to me, like, I'm a fan of design. I'm a fan of products that you can just create a really pleasant experience. The simplicity of it, the elegance just makes you fall in love with it. So on the, do you think about this kind of stuff? I mean, it's exactly what we've been talking about. It's like the little details that somehow make you fall in love with the product. Is that, we went from like urban challenge days, where love was not part of the conversation, probably. And to this point where there's a, where there's human beings and you want them to fall in love with the experience. Is that something you're trying to optimize for? Try to think about, like, how do you create an experience that people love? Absolutely. I think that's the vision is removing any friction or complexity from getting our users, our writers to where they want to go. Making that as simple as possible. And then, you know, beyond that, just transportation, making things and goods get to their destination as seamlessly as possible. I talked about a drag and drop experience where I kind of express your intent and then it just magically happens. And for our writers, that's what we're trying to get to is you download an app and you click and car shows up. It's the same car. It's very predictable. It's a safe and high quality experience. And then it gets you in a very reliable, very convenient, frictionless way to where you want to be. And along the journey, I think we also want to do little things to delight our users. Like the ride sharing companies, because they don't control the experience, I think they can't make people fall in love necessarily with the experience. Or maybe they, they haven't put in the effort, but I think if I were to speak to the ride sharing experience I currently have, it's just very, it's just very convenient, but there's a lot of room for like falling in love with it. Like we can speak to sort of car companies, car companies do this. Well, you can fall in love with a car, right? And be like a loyal car person, like whatever. Like I like badass hot rods, I guess, 69 Corvette. And at this point, you know, you can't really, cars are so, owning a car is so 20th century, man. But is there something about the Waymo experience where you hope that people will fall in love with it? Is that part of it? Or is it part of, is it just about making a convenient ride, not ride sharing, I don't know what the right term is, but just a convenient A to B autonomous transport or like, do you want them to fall in love with Waymo? To maybe elaborate a little bit. I mean, almost like from a business perspective, I'm curious, like how, do you want to be in the background invisible or do you want to be like a source of joy that's in very much in the foreground? I want to provide the best, most enjoyable transportation solution. And that means building it, building our product and building our service in a way that people do. Kind of use in a very seamless, frictionless way in their day to day lives. And I think that does mean, you know, in some way falling in love in that product, right, just kind of becomes part of your routine. It comes down my mind to safety, predictability of the experience, and privacy aspects of it, right? Our cars, you get the same car, you get very predictable behavior. And you get a lot of different things. And that is important. And if you're going to use it in your daily life, privacy, and when you're in a car, you can do other things. You're spending a bunch, just another space where you're spending a significant part of your life. And so not having to share it with other people who you don't want to share it with, I think is a very nice property. Maybe you want to take a phone call or do something else in the vehicle. And, you know, safety on the quality of the driving, as well as the physical safety of not having to share that ride is important to a lot of people. What about the idea that when there's somebody like a human driving, and they do a rolling stop on a stop sign, like sometimes like, you know, you get an Uber or Lyft or whatever, like human driver, and, you know, they can be a little bit aggressive as drivers. It feels like there's not all aggression is bad. Now that may be a wrong, again, 20th century conception of driving. Maybe it's possible to create a driving experience. Like if you're in the back, busy doing something, maybe aggression is not a good thing. It's a very different kind of experience perhaps. But it feels like in order to navigate this world, you need to, how do I phrase this? You need to kind of bend the rules a little bit, or at least test the rules. I don't know what language politicians use to discuss this, but whatever language they use, you like flirt with the rules. I don't know. But like you sort of have a bit of an aggressive way of driving that asserts your presence in this world, thereby making other vehicles and people respect your presence and thereby allowing you to sort of navigate through intersections in a timely fashion. I don't know if any of that made sense, but like, how does that fit into the experience of driving autonomously? Is that? It's a lot of thoughts. This is you're hitting on a very important point of a number of behavioral components and, you know, parameters that make your driving feel assertive and natural and comfortable and predictable. Our cars will follow rules, right? They will do the safest thing possible in all situations. Let me be clear on that. But if you think of really, really good drivers, just think about professional lemon drivers, right? They will follow the rules. They're very, very smooth, and yet they're very efficient. But they're assertive. They're comfortable for the people in the vehicle. They're predictable for the other people outside the vehicle that they share the environment with. And that's the kind of driver that we want to build. And you think if maybe there's a sport analogy there, right? You can do in very many sports, the true professionals are very efficient in their movements, right? They don't do like, you know, hectic flailing, right? They're, you know, smooth and precise, right? And they get the best results. So that's the kind of driver that we want to build. In terms of, you know, aggressiveness. Yeah, you can like, you know, roll through the stop signs. You can do crazy lane changes. It typically doesn't get you to your destination faster. Typically not the safest or most predictable, very most comfortable thing to do. But there is a way to do both. And that's what we're doing. We're trying to build the driver that is safe, comfortable, smooth, and predictable. Yeah, that's a really interesting distinction. I think in the early days of autonomous vehicles, the vehicles felt cautious as opposed to efficient. And I'm still probably, but when I rode in the Waymo, I mean, there was, it was, it was quite assertive. It moved pretty quickly. Like, yeah, then he's one of the surprising feelings was that it actually, it went fast. And it didn't feel like, awkwardly cautious than autonomous vehicle. Like, like, so I've also programmed autonomous vehicles and everything I've ever built was felt awkwardly, either overly aggressive. Okay, especially when it was my code, or like, awkwardly cautious is the way I would put it. And Waymo's vehicle felt like, assertive and I think efficient is like the right terminology here. It wasn't, and I also like the professional limo driver, because we often think like, you know, an Uber driver or a bus driver or a taxi. This is the funny thing is people think they track taxi drivers are professionals. They, I mean, it's, it's like, that that's like saying, I'm a professional walker, just because I've been walking all my life. I think there's an art to it, right? And if you take it seriously as an art form, then there's a certain way that mastery looks like. It's interesting to think about what does mastery look like in driving? And perhaps what we associate with like aggressiveness is unnecessary, like, it's not part of the experience of driving. It's like, unnecessary fluff, that efficiency, you can be, you can create a good driving experience within the rules. That's, I mean, you're the first person to tell me this. So it's, it's kind of interesting. I need to think about this, but that's exactly what it felt like with Waymo. I kind of had this intuition. Maybe it's the Russian thing. I don't know that you have to break the rules in life to get anywhere, but maybe, maybe it's possible that that's not the case in driving. I have to think about that, but it certainly felt that way on the streets of Phoenix when I was there in Waymo, that, that, that that was a very pleasant experience and it wasn't frustrating in that like, come on, move already kind of feeling. It wasn't, that wasn't there. Yeah. I mean, that's what, that's what we're going after. I don't think you have to pick one. I think truly good driving. It gives you both efficiency, a certainness, but also comfort and predictability and safety. And, you know, it's, that's what fundamental improvements in the core capabilities truly unlock. And you can kind of think of it as, you know, a precision and recall trade off. You have certain capabilities of your model. And then it's very easy when, you know, you have some curve of precision and recall, you can move things around and can choose your operating point and your training of precision versus recall, false positives versus false negatives. Right. But then, and you know, you can tune things on that curve and be kind of more cautious or more aggressive, but then aggressive is bad or, you know, cautious is bad, but true capabilities come from actually moving the whole curve up. And then you are kind of on a very different plane of those trade offs. And that, that's what we're trying to do here is to move the whole curve up. Before I forget, let's talk about trucks a little bit. So I also got a chance to check out some of the Waymo trucks. I'm not sure if we want to go too much into that space, but it's a fascinating one. So maybe we can mention at least briefly, you know, Waymo is also now doing autonomous trucking and how different like philosophically and technically is that whole space of problems. It's one of our two big products and you know, commercial applications of our driver, right? Right. Hailing and deliveries. You know, we have Waymo One and Waymo Via moving people and moving goods. You know, trucking is an example of moving goods. We've been working on trucking since 2017. It is a very interesting space. And your question of how different is it? It has this really nice property that the first order challenges, like the science, the hard engineering, whether it's, you know, hardware or, you know, onboard software or off board software, all of the, you know, systems that you build for, you know, training your ML models for, you know, evaluating your time system. Like those fundamentals carry over. Like the true challenges of, you know, driving perception, semantic understanding, prediction, decision making, planning, evaluation, the simulator, ML infrastructure, those carry over. Like the data and the application and kind of the domains might be different, but the most difficult problems, all of that carries over between the domains. So that's very nice. So that's how we approach it. We're kind of build investing in the core, the technical core. And then there's specialization of that core technology to different product lines, to different commercial applications. So on just to tease it apart a little bit on trucks. So starting with the hardware, the configuration of the sensors is different. They're different physically, geometrically, you know, different vehicles. So for example, we have two of our main laser on the trucks on both sides so that we have, you know, not have the blind spots. Whereas on the JLR eye pace, we have, you know, one of it sitting at the very top, but the actual sensors are almost the same. Now we're largely the same. So all of the investment that over the years we've put into building our custom lighters, custom radars, pulling the whole system together, that carries over very nicely. Then, you know, on the perception side, the like the fundamental challenges of seeing, understanding the world, whether it's, you know, object detection, classification, you know, tracking, semantic understanding, all that carries over. You know, yes, there's some specialization when you're driving on freeways, you know, range becomes more important. The domain is a little bit different. But again, the fundamentals carry over very, very nicely. Same, and you guess you get into prediction or decision making, right, the fundamentals of what it takes to predict what other people are going to do to find the long tail to improve your system in that long tail of behavior prediction and response that carries over right and so on and so on. So I mean, that's pretty exciting. By the way, does Waymo via include using the smaller vehicles for transportation of goods? That's an interesting distinction. So I would say there's three interesting modes of operation. So one is moving humans, one is moving goods, and one is like moving nothing, zero occupancy, meaning like you're going to the destination, your empty vehicle. I mean, it's the third is the less of it. If that's the entirety of it, it's the less, you know, exciting from the commercial perspective. Well, I mean, in terms of like, if you think about what's inside a vehicle as it's moving, because it does, you know, some significant fraction of the vehicle's movement has to be empty. I mean, it's kind of fascinating. Maybe just on that small point, is there different control and like policies that are applied for zero occupancy vehicle? So vehicle with nothing in it, or is it just move as if there is a person inside? What was with some subtle differences? As a first order approximation, there are no differences. And if you think about, you know, safety and comfort and quality of driving, only part of it has to do with the people or the goods inside of the vehicle. But you don't want to be, you know, you want to drive smoothly, as we discussed, not for the purely for the benefit of whatever you have inside the car, right? It's also for the benefit of the people outside kind of fitting naturally and predictably into that whole environment, right? So, you know, yes, there are some second order things you can do, you can change your route, and you optimize maybe kind of your fleet, things at the fleet scale. And you would take into account whether some of your you know, some of your cars are actually, you know, serving a useful trip, whether with people or with goods, whereas, you know, other cars are, you know, driving completely empty to that next valuable trip that they're going to provide. But that those are mostly second order effects. Okay, cool. So Phoenix is, is an incredible place. And what you've announced in Phoenix is, it's kind of amazing. But, you know, that's just like one city. How do you take over the world? I mean, I'm asking for a friend. One step at a time. Is that a cartoon pinky in the brain? Yeah. Okay. But, you know, gradually is a true answer. So I think the heart of your question is, can you ask a better question than I asked? You're asking a great question. Answer that one. I'm just gonna, you know, phrase it in the terms that I want to answer. Exactly right. Brilliant. Please. You know, where are we today? And, you know, what happens next? And what does it take to go beyond Phoenix? And what does it take to get this technology to more places and more people around the world, right? So our next big area of focus is exactly that. Larger scale commercialization and just, you know, scaling up. If I think about, you know, the main, and, you know, Phoenix gives us that platform and gives us that foundation of upon which we can build. And it's, there are few really challenging aspects of this whole problem that you have to pull together in order to build the technology in order to deploy it into the field to go from a driverless car to a fleet of cars that are providing a service, and then all the way to commercialization. So, and then, you know, this is what we have in Phoenix. We've taken the technology from a proof point to an actual deployment and have taken our driver from, you know, one car to a fleet that can provide a service. Beyond that, if I think about what it will take to scale up and, you know, deploy in, you know, more places with more customers, I tend to think about three main dimensions, three main axes of scale. One is the core technology, you know, the hardware and software core capabilities of our driver. The second dimension is evaluation and deployment. And the third one is the, you know, product, commercial, and operational excellence. So you can talk a bit about where we are along, you know, each one of those three dimensions about where we are today and, you know, what has, what will happen next. On, you know, the core technology, you know, the hardware and software, you know, together comprise a driver, we, you know, obviously have that foundation that is providing fully driverless trips to our customers as we speak, in fact. And we've learned a tremendous amount from that. So now what we're doing is we are incorporating all those lessons into some pretty fundamental improvements in our core technology, both on the hardware side and on the software side to build a more general, more robust solution that then will enable us to massively scale beyond Phoenix. So on the hardware side, all of those lessons are now incorporated into this fifth generation hardware platform that is, you know, being deployed right now. And that's the platform, the fourth generation, the thing that we have right now driving in Phoenix, it's good enough to operate fully driverlessly, you know, night and day, you know, various speeds and various conditions, but the fifth generation is the platform upon which we want to go to massive scale. We, in turn, we've really made qualitative improvements in terms of the capability of the system, the simplicity of the architecture, the reliability of the redundancy. It is designed to be manufacturable at very large scale and, you know, provides the right unit economics. So that's the next big step for us on the hardware side. That's already there for scale, the version five. That's right. And is that coincidence or should we look into a conspiracy theory that it's the same version as the pixel phone? Is that what's the hardware? They neither confirm nor deny. All right, cool. So, sorry. So that's the, okay, that's that axis. What else? So similarly, you know, hardware is a very discreet jump, but, you know, similar to how we're making that change from the fourth generation hardware to the fifth, we're making similar improvements on the software side to make it more, you know, robust and more general and allow us to kind of quickly scale beyond Phoenix. So that's the first dimension of core technology. The second dimension is evaluation and deployment. How do you measure your system? How do you evaluate it? How do you build a release and deployment process where, you know, with confidence, you can, you know, regularly release new versions of your driver into a fleet? How do you get good at it so that it is not, you know, a huge tax on your researchers and engineers that, you know, so you can, how do you build all these, you know, processes, the frameworks, the simulation, the evaluation, the data science, the validation, so that, you know, people can focus on improving the system and kind of the releases just go out the door and get deployed across the fleet. So we've gotten really good at that in Phoenix. That's been a tremendously difficult problem, but that's what we have in Phoenix right now that gives us that foundation. And now we're working on kind of incorporating all the lessons that we've learned to make it more efficient, to go to new places, you know, and scale up and just kind of, you know, stamp things out. So that's that second dimension of evaluation and deployment. And the third dimension is product, commercial, and operational excellence, right? And again, Phoenix there is providing an incredibly valuable platform. You know, that's why we're doing things end to end in Phoenix. We're learning, as you know, we discussed a little earlier today, tremendous amount of really valuable lessons from our users getting really incredible feedback. And we'll continue to iterate on that and incorporate all those lessons into making our product, you know, even better and more convenient for our users. So you're converting this whole process in Phoenix into something that could be copy and pasted elsewhere. So like, perhaps you didn't think of it that way when you were doing the experimentation in Phoenix, but so how long did you basically, and you can correct me, but you've, I mean, it's still early days, but you've taken the full journey in Phoenix, right? As you were saying of like what it takes to basically automate. I mean, it's not the entirety of Phoenix, right? But I imagine it can encompass the entirety of Phoenix. That's some near term date, but that's not even perhaps important. Like as long as it's a large enough geographic area. So what, how copy pastable is that process currently and how like, you know, like when you copy and paste in Google docs, I think now in, or in word, you can like apply source formatting or apply destination formatting. So how, when you copy and paste the Phoenix into like, say Boston, how do you apply the destination formatting? Like how much of the core of the entire process of bringing an actual public transportation, autonomous transportation service to a city is there in Phoenix that you understand enough to copy and paste into Boston or wherever? So we're not quite there yet. We're not at a point where we're kind of massively copy and pasting all over the place. But Phoenix, what we did in Phoenix, and we very intentionally have chosen Phoenix as our first full deployment area, you know, exactly for that reason to kind of tease the problem apart, look at each dimension and focus on the fundamentals of complexity and de risking those dimensions, and then bringing the entire thing together to get all the way and force ourselves to learn all those hard lessons on technology, hardware and software, on the evaluation deployment, on operating a service, operating a business using actually serving our customers all the way so that we're fully informed about the most difficult, most important challenges to get us to that next step of massive copy and pasting as you said. And that's what we're doing right now. We're incorporating all those things that we learned into that next system that then will allow us to kind of copy and paste all over the place and to massively scale to, you know, more users and more locations. I mean, you know, just talk a little bit about, you know, what does that mean along those different dimensions? So on the hardware side, for example, again, it's that switch from the fourth to the fifth generation. And the fifth generation is designed to kind of have that property. Can you say what other cities you're thinking about? Like, I'm thinking about, sorry, we're in San Francisco now. I thought I want to move to San Francisco, but I'm thinking about moving to Austin. I don't know why people are not being very nice about San Francisco currently, but maybe it's a small, maybe it's in vogue right now. But Austin seems, I visited there and it was, I was in a Walmart. It's funny, these moments like turn your life. There's this very nice woman with kind eyes, just like stopped and said, he looks so handsome in that tie, honey, to me. This has never happened to me in my life, but just the sweetness of this woman is something I've never experienced, certainly on the streets of Boston, but even in San Francisco where people wouldn't, that's just not how they speak or think. I don't know. There's a warmth to Austin that love. And since Waymo does have a little bit of a history there, is that a possibility? Is this your version of asking the question of like, you know, Dimitri, I know you can't share your commercial and deployment roadmap, but I'm thinking about moving to San Francisco, Austin, like, you know, blink twice if you think I should move to it. That's true. That's true. You got me. You know, we've been testing all over the place. I think we've been testing more than 25 cities. We drive in San Francisco. We drive in, you know, Michigan for snow. We are doing significant amount of testing in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, which is not like, because we're talking about the very different thing, which is like a full on large geographic area, public service. You can't share and you, okay. What about Moscow? When is that happening? Take on Yandex. I'm not paying attention to those folks. They're doing, you know, there's a lot of fun. I mean, maybe as a way of a question, you didn't speak to sort of like policy or like, is there tricky things with government and so on? Like, is there other friction that you've encountered except sort of technological friction of solving this very difficult problem? Is there other stuff that you have to overcome when deploying a public service in a city? That's interesting. It's very important. So we put significant effort in creating those partnerships and you know, those relationships with governments at all levels, local governments, municipalities, state level, federal level. We've been engaged in very deep conversations from the earliest days of our projects. Whenever at all of these levels, whenever we go to test or operate in a new area, we always lead with a conversation with the local officials. But the result of that investment is that no, it's not challenges we have to overcome, but it is very important that we continue to have this conversation. Oh, yeah. I love politicians too. Okay, so Mr. Elon Musk said that LiDAR is a crutch. What are your thoughts? I wouldn't characterize it exactly that way. I know I think LiDAR is very important. It is a key sensor that we use just like other modalities, right? As we discussed, our cars use cameras, LiDAR and radars. They are all very important. They are at the kind of the physical level. They are very different. They have very different, you know, physical characteristics. Cameras are passive. LiDARs and radars are active. Use different wavelengths. So that means they complement each other very nicely and together combined, they can be used to build a much safer and much more capable system. So, you know, to me it's more of a question, you know, why the heck would you handicap yourself and not use one or more of those sensing modalities when they, you know, undoubtedly just make your system more capable and safer. Now, it, you know, what might make sense for one product or one business might not make sense for another one. So if you're talking about driver assist technologies, you make certain design decisions and you make certain trade offs and make different ones if you are building a driver that you deploy in fully driverless vehicles. And, you know, in LiDAR specifically, when this question comes up, I, you know, typically the criticisms that I hear or, you know, the counterpoints is that cost and aesthetics. And I don't find either of those, honestly, very compelling. So on the cost side, there's nothing fundamentally prohibitive about, you know, the cost of LiDARs. You know, radars used to be very expensive before people started, you know, before people made certain advances in technology and, you know, started to manufacture them at massive scale and deploy them in vehicles, right? You know, similar with LiDARs. And this is where the LiDARs that we have on our cars, especially the fifth generation, you know, we've been able to make some pretty qualitative discontinuous jumps in terms of the fundamental technology that allow us to manufacture those things at very significant scale and at a fraction of the cost of both our previous generation as well as a fraction of the cost of, you know, what might be available on the market, you know, off the shelf right now. And, you know, that improvement will continue. So I think, you know, cost is not a real issue. Second one is, you know, aesthetics. You know, I don't think that's, you know, a real issue either. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah. You can make LiDAR sexy again. I think you're exactly right. I think it is sexy. Like, honestly, I think form all of function. Well, okay. You know, I was actually, somebody brought this up to me. I mean, all forms of LiDAR, even like the ones that are like big, you can make look, I mean, you can make look beautiful. There's no sense in which you can't integrate it into design. Like, there's all kinds of awesome designs. I don't think small and humble is beautiful. It could be like, you know, brutalism or like, it could be like harsh corners. I mean, like I said, like hot rods. Like, I don't like, I don't necessarily like, like, oh man, I'm going to start so much controversy with this. I don't like Porsches. Okay. The Porsche 911, like everyone says it's the most beautiful. No, no. It's like, it's like a baby car. It doesn't make any sense. But everyone, it's beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You're already looking at me like, what is this kid talking about? I'm happy to talk about. You're digging your own hole. The form and function and my take on the beauty of the hardware that we put on our vehicles, you know, I will not comment on your Porsche monologue. Okay. All right. So, but aesthetics, fine. But there's an underlying, like, philosophical question behind the kind of lighter question is like, how much of the problem can be solved with computer vision, with machine learning? So I think without sort of disagreements and so on, it's nice to put it on the spectrum because Waymo is doing a lot of machine learning as well. It's interesting to think how much of driving, if we look at five years, 10 years, 50 years down the road, what can be learned in almost more and more and more end to end way. If we look at what Tesla is doing with, as a machine learning problem, they're doing a multitask learning thing where it's just, they break up driving into a bunch of learning tasks and they have one single neural network and they're just collecting huge amounts of data that's training that. I've recently hung out with George Hotz. I don't know if you know George. I love him so much. He's just an entertaining human being. We were off mic talking about Hunter S. Thompson. He's the Hunter S. Thompson of autonomous driving. Okay. So he, I didn't realize this with comma AI, but they're like really trying to end to end. They're the machine, like looking at the machine learning problem, they're really not doing multitask learning, but it's computing the drivable area as a machine learning task and hoping that like down the line, this level two system, this driver assistance will eventually lead to allowing you to have a fully autonomous vehicle. Okay. There's an underlying deep philosophical question there, technical question of how much of driving can be learned. So LiDAR is an effective tool today for actually deploying a successful service in Phoenix, right? That's safe, that's reliable, et cetera, et cetera. But the question, and I'm not saying you can't do machine learning on LiDAR, but the question is that like how much of driving can be learned eventually. Can we do fully autonomous? That's learned. Yeah. You know, learning is all over the place and plays a key role in every part of our system. As you said, I would, you know, decouple the sensing modalities from the, you know, ML and the software parts of it. LiDAR, radar, cameras, like it's all machine learning. All of the object detection classification, of course, like that's what, you know, these modern deep nets and count nets are very good at. You feed them raw data, massive amounts of raw data, and that's actually what our custom build LiDARs and radars are really good at. And radars, they don't just give you point estimates of, you know, objects in space, they give you raw, like, physical observations. And then you take all of that raw information, you know, there's colors of the pixels, whether it's, you know, LiDARs returns and some auxiliary information. It's not just distance, right? And, you know, angle and distance is much richer information that you get from those returns, plus really rich information from the radars. You fuse it all together and you feed it into those massive ML models that then, you know, lead to the best results in terms of, you know, object detection, classification, state estimation. So there's a side to interop, but there is a fusion. I mean, that's something that people didn't do for a very long time, which is like at the sensor fusion level, I guess, like early on fusing the information together, whether so that the the sensory information that the vehicle receives from the different modalities or even from different cameras is combined before it is fed into the machine learning models. Yeah, so I think this is one of the trends you're seeing more of that you mentioned end to end. There's different interpretation of end to end. There is kind of the purest interpretation of I'm going to like have one model that goes from raw sensor data to like, you know, steering torque and, you know, gas breaks. That, you know, that's too much. I don't think that's the right way to do it. There's more, you know, smaller versions of end to end where you're kind of doing more end to end learning or core training or depropagation of kind of signals back and forth across the different stages of your system. There's, you know, really good ways it gets into some fairly complex design choices where on one hand you want modularity and decomposability, decomposability of your system. But on the other hand, you don't want to create interfaces that are too narrow or too brittle to engineered where you're giving up on the generality of the solution or you're unable to properly propagate signal, you know, reach signal forward and losses and, you know, back so you can optimize the whole system jointly. So I would decouple and I guess what you're seeing in terms of the fusion of the sensing data from different modalities as well as kind of fusion at in the temporal level going more from, you know, frame by frame where, you know, you would have one net that would do frame by frame detection and camera and then, you know, something that does frame by frame and lighter and then radar and then you fuse it, you know, in a weaker engineered way later. Like the field over the last, you know, decade has been evolving in more kind of joint fusion, more end to end models that are, you know, solving some of these tasks, you know, jointly and there's tremendous power in that and, you know, that's the progression that kind of our technology, our stack has been on as well. Now to your, you know, that so I would decouple the kind of sensing and how that information is fused from the role of ML and the entire stack. And, you know, I guess it's, there's trade offs and, you know, modularity and how do you inject inductive bias into your system? All right, this is, there's tremendous power in being able to do that. So, you know, we have, there's no part of our system that is not heavily, that does not heavily, you know, leverage data driven development or state of the art ML. But there's mapping, there's a simulator, there's perception, you know, object level, you know, perception, whether it's semantic understanding, prediction, decision making, you know, so forth and so on. It's, you know, of course, object detection and classification, like you're finding pedestrians and cars and cyclists and, you know, cones and signs and vegetation and being very good at estimating kind of detection, classification, and state estimation. There's just stable stakes, like that's step zero of this whole stack. You can be incredibly good at that, whether you use cameras or light as a radar, but that's just, you know, that's stable stakes, that's just step zero. Beyond that, you get into the really interesting challenges of semantic understanding at the perception level, you get into scene level reasoning, you get into very deep problems that have to do with prediction and joint prediction and interaction, so the interaction between all the actors in the environment, pedestrians, cyclists, other cars, and you get into decision making, right? So, how do you build a lot of systems? So, we leverage ML very heavily in all of these components. I do believe that the best results you achieve by kind of using a hybrid approach and having different types of ML, having different models with different degrees of inductive bias that you can have, and combining kind of model, you know, free approaches with some model based approaches and some rule based, physics based systems. So, you know, one example I can give you is traffic lights. There's a problem of the detection of traffic light state, and obviously that's a great problem for, you know, computer vision confidence, or, you know, that's their bread and butter, right? That's how you build that. But then the interpretation of, you know, of a traffic light, that you're gonna need to learn that, right? You don't need to build some, you know, complex ML model that, you know, infers with some, you know, precision and recall that red means stop. Like, it's a very clear engineered signal with very clear semantics, right? So you want to induce that bias, like how you induce that bias, and that whether, you know, it's a constraint or a cost, you know, function in your stack, but like it is important to be able to inject that, like, clear semantic signal into your stack. And, you know, that's what we do. And, but then the question of, like, and that's when you apply it to yourself, when you are making decisions whether you want to stop for a red light, you know, or not. But if you think about how other people treat traffic lights, we're back to the ML version of that. You know they're supposed to stop for a red light, but that doesn't mean they will. So then you're back in the, like, very heavy ML domain where you're picking up on, like, very subtle cues about, you know, they have to do with the behavior of objects, pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and the whole, you know, entire configuration of the scene that allow you to make accurate predictions on whether they will, in fact, stop or run a red light. So it sounds like already for Waymo, like, machine learning is a huge part of the stack. So it's a huge part of, like, not just, so obviously the first, the level zero, or whatever you said, which is, like, just the object detection of things that, you know, with no other machine learning can do, but also starting to do prediction behavior and so on to model the, what other, what the other parties in the scene, entities in the scene are going to do. So machine learning is more and more playing a role in that as well. Of course. Oh, absolutely. I think we've been going back to the, you know, earliest days, like, you know, DARPA, the DARPA Grand Challenge, our team was leveraging, you know, machine learning. It was, like, pre, you know, ImageNet, and it was a very different type of ML, but, and I think actually it was before my time, but the Stanford team during the Grand Challenge had a very interesting machine learned system that would, you know, use LiDAR and camera. We've been driving in the desert, and it, we had built the model where it would kind of extend the range of free space reasoning. We get a clear signal from LiDAR, and then it had a model that said, hey, like, this stuff on camera kind of sort of looks like this stuff in LiDAR, and I know this stuff that I'm seeing in LiDAR, I'm very confident it's free space, so let me extend that free space zone into the camera range that would allow the vehicle to drive faster. And then we've been building on top of that and kind of staying and pushing the state of the art in ML, in all kinds of different ML over the years. And in fact, from the early days, I think, you know, 2010 is probably the year where Google, maybe 2011 probably, got pretty heavily involved in machine learning, kind of deep nuts, and at that time it was probably the only company that was very heavily investing in kind of state of the art ML and self driving cars. And they go hand in hand. And we've been on that journey ever since. We're doing, pushing a lot of these areas in terms of research at Waymo, and we collaborate very heavily with the researchers in Alphabet, and all kinds of ML, supervised ML, unsupervised ML, published some interesting research papers in the space, especially recently. It's just a super active learning as well. Yeah, so super, super active. Of course, there's, you know, kind of the more mature stuff, like, you know, ConvNets for, you know, object detection. But there's some really interesting, really active work that's happening in kind of more, you know, in bigger models and, you know, models that have more structure to them, you know, not just, you know, large bitmaps and reason about temporal sequences. And some of the interesting breakthroughs that you've, you know, we've seen in language models, right? You know, transformers, you know, GPT3 inference. There's some really interesting applications of some of the core breakthroughs to those problems of, you know, behavior prediction, as well as, you know, decision making and planning, right? You can think about it, kind of the the behavior, how, you know, the path, the trajectories, the how people drive. They have kind of a share, a lot of the fundamental structure, you know, this problem. There's, you know, sequential, you know, nature. There's a lot of structure in this representation. There is a strong locality, kind of like in sentences, you know, words that follow each other. They're strongly connected, but there's also kind of larger context that doesn't have that locality, and you also see that in driving, right? What, you know, is happening in the scene as a whole has very strong implications on, you know, the kind of the next step in that sequence where whether you're, you know, predicting what other people are going to do, whether you're making your own decisions, or whether in the simulator you're building generative models of, you know, humans walking, cyclists riding, and other cars driving. That's all really fascinating, like how it's fascinating to think that transformer models and all this, all the breakthroughs in language and NLP that might be applicable to like driving at the higher level, at the behavioral level, that's kind of fascinating. Let me ask about pesky little creatures called pedestrians and cyclists. They seem, so humans are a problem. If we can get rid of them, I would. But unfortunately, they're all sort of a source of joy and love and beauty, so let's keep them around. They're also our customers. For your perspective, yes, yes, for sure. They're a source of money, very good. But I don't even know where I was going. Oh yes, pedestrians and cyclists, you know, they're a fascinating injection into the system of uncertainty of like a game theoretic dance of what to do. And also they have perceptions of their own, and they can tweet about your product, so you don't want to run them over from that perspective. I mean, I don't know, I'm joking a lot, but I think in seriousness, like, you know, pedestrians are a complicated computer vision problem, a complicated behavioral problem. Is there something interesting you could say about what you've learned from a machine learning perspective, from also an autonomous vehicle, and a product perspective about just interacting with the humans in this world? Yeah, just to state on record, we care deeply about the safety of pedestrians, you know, even the ones that don't have Twitter accounts. Thank you. All right, cool. Not me. But yes, I'm glad, I'm glad somebody does. Okay. But you know, in all seriousness, safety of vulnerable road users, pedestrians or cyclists, is one of our highest priorities. We do a tremendous amount of testing and validation, and put a very significant emphasis on, you know, the capabilities of our systems that have to do with safety around those unprotected vulnerable road users. You know, cars, just, you know, discussed earlier in Phoenix, we have completely empty cars, completely driverless cars, you know, driving in this very large area, and you know, some people use them to, you know, go to school, so they'll drive through school zones, right? So, kids are kind of the very special class of those vulnerable user road users, right? You want to be, you know, super, super safe, and super, super cautious around those. So, we take it very, very, very seriously. And you know, what does it take to be good at it? You know, an incredible amount of performance across your whole stack. You know, starts with hardware, and again, you want to use all sensing modalities available to you. Imagine driving on a residential road at night, and kind of making a turn, and you don't have, you know, headlights covering some part of the space, and like, you know, a kid might run out. And you know, lighters are amazing at that. They see just as well in complete darkness as they do during the day, right? So, just again, it gives you that extra, you know, margin in terms of, you know, capability, and performance, and safety, and quality. And in fact, we oftentimes, in these kinds of situations, we have our system detect something, in some cases even earlier than our trained operators in the car might do, right? Especially, you know, in conditions like, you know, very dark nights. So, starts with sensing, then, you know, perception has to be incredibly good. And you have to be very, very good at kind of detecting pedestrians in all kinds of situations, and all kinds of environments, including, you know, people in weird poses, people kind of running around, and you know, being partially occluded. So, you know, that's step number one, right? Then, you have to have in very high accuracy, and very low latency, in terms of your reactions to, you know, what, you know, these actors might do, right? And we've put a tremendous amount of engineering, and tremendous amount of validation, in to make sure our system performs properly. And, you know, oftentimes, it does require a very strong reaction to do the safe thing. And, you know, we actually see a lot of cases like that. That's the long tail of really rare, you know, really, you know, crazy events that contribute to the safety around pedestrians. Like, one example that comes to mind, that we actually happened in Phoenix, where we were driving along, and I think it was a 45 mile per hour road, so you have pretty high speed traffic, and there was a sidewalk next to it, and there was a cyclist on the sidewalk. And as we were in the right lane, right next to the side, so it was a multi lane road, so as we got close to the cyclist on the sidewalk, it was a woman, you know, she tripped and fell. Just, you know, fell right into the path of our vehicle, right? And our, you know, car, you know, this was actually with a test driver, our test drivers, did exactly the right thing. They kind of reacted, and came to stop. It requires both very strong steering, and, you know, strong application of the brake. And then we simulated what our system would have done in that situation, and it did, you know, exactly the same thing. And that speaks to, you know, all of those components of really good state estimation and tracking. And, like, imagine, you know, a person on a bike, and they're falling over, and they're doing that right in front of you, right? So you have to be really, like, things are changing. The appearance of that whole thing is changing, right? And a person goes one way, they're falling on the road, they're, you know, being flat on the ground in front of you. You know, the bike goes flying the other direction. Like, the two objects that used to be one, they're now, you know, are splitting apart, and the car has to, like, detect all of that. Like, milliseconds matter, and it doesn't, you know, it's not good enough to just brake. You have to, like, steer and brake, and there's traffic around you. So, like, it all has to come together, and it was really great to see in this case, and other cases like that, that we're actually seeing in the wild, that our system is, you know, performing exactly the way that we would have liked, and is able to, you know, avoid collisions like this. That's such an exciting space for robotics. Like, in that split second to make decisions of life and death. I don't know. The stakes are high, in a sense, but it's also beautiful that for somebody who loves artificial intelligence, the possibility that an AI system might be able to save a human life. That's kind of exciting as a problem, like, to wake up. It's terrifying, probably, for an engineer to wake up, and to think about, but it's also exciting because it's, like, it's in your hands. Let me try to ask a question that's often brought up about autonomous vehicles, and it might be fun to see if you have anything interesting to say, which is about the trolley problem. So, a trolley problem is an interesting philosophical construct that highlights, and there's many others like it, of the difficult ethical decisions that we humans have before us in this complicated world. So, specifically is the choice between if you are forced to choose to kill a group X of people versus a group Y of people, like one person. If you did nothing, you would kill one person, but if you would kill five people, and if you decide to swerve out of the way, you would only kill one person. Do you do nothing, or you choose to do something? You can construct all kinds of, sort of, ethical experiments of this kind that, I think, at least on a positive note, inspire you to think about, like, introspect what are the physics of our morality, and there's usually not good answers there. I think people love it because it's just an exciting thing to think about. I think people who build autonomous vehicles usually roll their eyes, because this is not, this one as constructed, this, like, literally never comes up in reality. You never have to choose between killing one or, like, one of two groups of people, but I wonder if you can speak to, is there some something interesting to you as an engineer of autonomous vehicles that's within the trolley problem, or maybe more generally, are there difficult ethical decisions that you find that an algorithm must make? On the specific version of the trolley problem, which one would you do, if you're driving? The question itself is a profound question, because we humans ourselves cannot answer, and that's the very point. I would kill both. Yeah, humans, I think you're exactly right in that, you know, humans are not particularly good. I think they're kind of phrased as, like, what would a computer do, but, like, humans, you know, are not very good, and actually oftentimes I think that, you know, freezing and kind of not doing anything, because, like, you've taken a few extra milliseconds to just process, and then you end up, like, doing the worst of the possible outcomes, right? So, I do think that, as you've pointed out, it can be a bit of a distraction, and it can be a bit of a kind of red herring. I think it's an interesting, you know, discussion in the realm of philosophy, right? But in terms of what, you know, how that affects the actual engineering and deployment of self driving vehicles, it's not how you go about building a system, right? We've talked about how you engineer a system, how you, you know, go about evaluating the different components and, you know, the safety of the entire thing. How do you kind of inject the, you know, various model based, safety based arguments, and, like, yes, you reason at parts of the system, you know, you reason about the probability of a collision, the severity of that collision, right? And that is incorporated, and there's, you know, you have to properly reason about the uncertainty that flows through the system, right? So, you know, those, you know, factors definitely play a role in how the cars then behave, but they tend to be more of, like, the emergent behavior. And what you see, like, you're absolutely right that these, you know, clear theoretical problems that they, you know, you don't encounter that in the system, and really kind of being back to our previous discussion of, like, what, you know, what, you know, which one do you choose? Well, you know, oftentimes, like, you made a mistake earlier. Like, you shouldn't be in that situation in the first place, right? And in reality, the system comes up. If you build a very good, safe, and capable driver, you have enough, you know, clues in the environment that you drive defensively, so you don't put yourself in that situation, right? And again, you know, it has, you know, this, if you go back to that analogy of, you know, precision and recoil, like, okay, you can make a, you know, very hard trade off, but like, neither answer is really good. But what instead you focus on is kind of moving the whole curve up, and then you focus on building the right capability on the right defensive driving, so that, you know, you don't put yourself in the situation like this. I don't know if you have a good answer for this, but people love it when I ask this question about books. Are there books in your life that you've enjoyed, philosophical, fiction, technical, that had a big impact on you as an engineer or as a human being? You know, everything from science fiction to a favorite textbook. Is there three books that stand out that you can think of? Three books. So I would, you know, that impacted me, I would say, and this one is, you probably know it well, but not generally well known, I think, in the U.S., or kind of internationally, The Master and Margarita. It's one of, actually, my favorite books. It is, you know, by Russian, it's a novel by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, and it's just, it's a great book. It's one of those books that you can, like, reread your entire life, and it's very accessible. You can read it as a kid, and, like, it's, you know, the plot is interesting. It's, you know, the devil, you know, visiting the Soviet Union, and, you know, but it, like, you read it, reread it at different stages of your life, and you enjoy it for different, very different reasons, and you keep finding, like, deeper and deeper meaning, and, you know, kind of affected, you know, had a, definitely had an, like, imprint on me, you know, mostly from the, probably kind of the cultural, stylistic aspect. Like, it makes you think one of those books that, you know, is good and makes you think, but also has, like, this really, you know, silly, quirky, dark sense of, you know, humor. It captures the Russian soul more than many, perhaps, many other books. On that, like, slight note, just out of curiosity, one of the saddest things is I've read that book in English. Did you, by chance, read it in English or in Russian? In Russian, only in Russian, and I actually, that is a question I had, kind of posed to myself every once in a while, like, I wonder how well it translates, if it translates at all, and there's the language aspect of it, and then there's the cultural aspect, so I, actually, I'm not sure if, you know, either of those would work well in English. Now, I forget their names, but, so, when the COVID lifts a little bit, I'm traveling to Paris for several reasons. One is just, I've never been to Paris, I want to go to Paris, but there's the most famous translators of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, of most of Russian literature live there. There's a couple, they're famous, a man and a woman, and I'm going to, sort of, have a series of conversations with them, and in preparation for that, I'm starting to read Dostoevsky in Russian, so I'm really embarrassed to say that I read this, everything I've read in Russian literature of, like, serious depth has been in English, even though I can also read, I mean, obviously, in Russian, but for some reason, it seemed, in the optimization of life, it seemed the improper decision to do, to read in Russian, like, you know, like, I don't need to, I need to think in English, not in Russian, but now I'm changing my mind on that, and so, the question of how well I translate, it's a really fun to method one, like, even with Dostoevsky. So, from what I understand, Dostoevsky translates easier, others don't as much. Obviously, the poetry doesn't translate as well, I'm also the music big fan of Vladimir Vosotsky, he doesn't obviously translate well, people have tried, but mastermind, I don't know, I don't know about that one, I just know in English, you know, as fun as hell in English, so, so, but it's a curious question, and I want to study it rigorously from both the machine learning aspect, and also because I want to do a couple of interviews in Russia, that I'm still unsure of how to properly conduct an interview across a language barrier, it's a fascinating question that ultimately communicates to an American audience. There's a few Russian people that I think are truly special human beings, and I feel, like, I sometimes encounter this with some incredible scientists, and maybe you encounter this as well at some point in your life, that it feels like because of the language barrier, their ideas are lost to history. It's a sad thing, I think about, like, Chinese scientists, or even authors that, like, that we don't, in an English speaking world, don't get to appreciate some, like, the depth of the culture because it's lost in translation, and I feel like I would love to show that to the world, like, I'm just some idiot, but because I have this, like, at least some semblance of skill in speaking Russian, I feel like, and I know how to record stuff on a video camera, I feel like I want to catch, like, Grigori Perlman, who's a mathematician, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, I want to talk to him, like, he's a fascinating mind, and to bring him to a wider audience in English speaking will be fascinating, but that requires to be rigorous about this question of how well Bulgakov translates. I mean, I know it's a silly concept, but it's a fundamental one, because how do you translate, and that's the thing that Google Translate is also facing as a more machine learning problem, but I wonder as a more bigger problem for AI, how do we capture the magic that's there in the language? I think that's a really interesting, really challenging problem. If you do read it, Master and Margarita in English, sorry, in Russian, I'd be curious to get your opinion, and I think part of it is language, but part of it's just, you know, centuries of culture, that, you know, the cultures are different, so it's hard to connect that. Okay, so that was my first one, right? You had two more. The second one I would probably pick is the science fiction by the Strogatsky brothers. You know, it's up there with, you know, Isaac Asimov and, you know, Ray Bradbury and, you know, company. The Strogatsky brothers kind of appealed more to me. I think it made more of an impression on me growing up. I apologize if I'm showing my complete ignorance. I'm so weak on sci fi. What did they write? Oh, Roadside Picnic, Heart to Be a God, Beetle in an Ant Hill, Monday Starts on Saturday. Like, it's not just science fiction. It also has very interesting, you know, interpersonal and societal questions, and some of the language is just completely hilarious. That's the one. Oh, interesting. Monday Starts on Saturday. So, I need to read. Okay, oh boy. You put that in the category of science fiction? That one is, I mean, this was more of a silly, you know, humorous work. I mean, there is kind of... It's profound too, right? Science fiction, right? It's about, you know, this research institute, and it has deep parallels to serious research, but the setting, of course, is that they're working on, you know, magic, right? And there's a lot of stuff. And that's their style, right? And, you know, other books are very different, right? You know, Heart to Be a God, right? It's about kind of this higher society being injected into this primitive world, and how they operate there, and some of the very deep ethical questions there, right? And, like, they've got this full spectrum. Some is, you know, more about kind of more adventure style. But, like, I enjoy all of their books. There's just, you know, probably a couple. Actually, one I think that they consider their most important work. I think it's The Snail on a Hill. I'm not exactly sure how it translates. I tried reading a couple times. I still don't get it. But everything else I fully enjoyed. And, like, for one of my birthdays as a kid, I got, like, their entire collection, like, occupied a giant shelf in my room, and then, like, over the holidays, I just, like, you know, my parents couldn't drag me out of the room, and I read the whole thing cover to cover. And I really enjoyed it. And that's one more. For the third one, you know, maybe a little bit darker, but, you know, comes to mind is Orwell's 1984. And, you know, you asked what made an impression on me and the books that people should read. That one, I think, falls in the category of both. You know, definitely it's one of those books that you read, and you just kind of, you know, put it down and you stare in space for a while. You know, that kind of work. I think there's, you know, lessons there. People should not ignore. And, you know, nowadays, with, like, everything that's happening in the world, I, like, can't help it, but, you know, have my mind jump to some, you know, parallels with what Orwell described. And, like, there's this whole, you know, concept of double think and ignoring logic and, you know, holding completely contradictory opinions in your mind and not have that not bother you and, you know, sticking to the party line at all costs. Like, you know, there's something there. If anything, 2020 has taught me, and I'm a huge fan of Animal Farm, which is a kind of friendly, as a friend of 1984 by Orwell. It's kind of another thought experiment of how our society may go in directions that we wouldn't like it to go. But if anything that's been kind of heartbreaking to an optimist about 2020 is that that society is kind of fragile. Like, we have this, this is a special little experiment we have going on. And not, it's not unbreakable. Like, we should be careful to, like, preserve whatever the special thing we have going on. I mean, I think 1984 and these books, The Brave New World, they're helpful in thinking, like, stuff can go wrong in nonobvious ways. And it's, like, it's up to us to preserve it. And it's, like, it's a responsibility. It's been weighing heavy on me because, like, for some reason, like, more than my mom follows me on Twitter and I feel like I have, like, now somehow a responsibility to do this world. And it dawned on me that, like, me and millions of others are, like, the little ants that maintain this little colony, right? So we have a responsibility not to be, I don't know what the right analogy is, but I'll put a flamethrower to the place. We want to not do that. And there's interesting complicated ways of doing that as 1984 shows. It could be through bureaucracy. It could be through incompetence. It could be through misinformation. It could be through division and toxicity. I'm a huge believer in, like, that love will be the, somehow, the solution. So, love and robots. Love and robots, yeah. I think you're exactly right. Unfortunately, I think it's less of a flamethrower type of thing. It's more of a, in many cases, it's going to be more of a slow boil. And that's the danger. Let me ask, it's a fun thing to make a world class roboticist, engineer, and leader uncomfortable with a ridiculous question about life. What is the meaning of life, Dimitri, from a robotics and a human perspective? You only have a couple minutes, or one minute to answer, so. I don't know if that makes it more difficult or easier, actually. You know, they're very tempted to quote one of the stories by Isaac Asimov, actually. Actually, titled, appropriately titled, The Last Question. It's a short story where, you know, the plot is that, you know, humans build this supercomputer, you know, this AI intelligence, and, you know, once it gets powerful enough, they pose this question to it, you know, how can the entropy in the universe be reduced, right? So the computer replies, as of yet, insufficient information to give a meaningful answer, right? And then, you know, thousands of years go by, and they keep posing the same question, and the computer, you know, gets more and more powerful, and keeps giving the same answer, you know, as of yet, insufficient information to give a meaningful answer, or something along those lines, right? And then, you know, it keeps, you know, happening, and happening, you fast forward, like, millions of years into the future, and, you know, billions of years, and, like, at some point, it's just the only entity in the universe, it's, like, absorbed all humanity, and all knowledge in the universe, and it, like, keeps posing the same question to itself, and, you know, finally, it gets to the point where it is able to answer that question, but, of course, at that point, you know, there's, you know, the heat death of the universe has occurred, and that's the only entity, and there's nobody else to provide that answer to, so the only thing it can do is to, you know, answer it by demonstration, so, like, you know, it recreates the big bang, right, and resets the clock, right? But, like, you know, I can try to give kind of a different version of the answer, you know, maybe not on the behalf of all humanity, I think that that might be a little presumptuous for me to speak about the meaning of life on the behalf of all humans, but at least, you know, personally, it changes, right? I think if you think about kind of what gives, you know, you and your life meaning and purpose, and kind of what drives you, it seems to change over time, right, and that lifespan of, you know, kind of your existence, you know, when just when you just enter this world, right, it's all about kind of new experiences, right? You get, like, new smells, new sounds, new emotions, right, and, like, that's what's driving you, right? You're experiencing new amazing things, right, and that's magical, right? That's pretty pretty awesome, right? That gives you kind of meaning. Then, you know, you get a little bit older, you start more intentionally learning about things, right? I guess, actually, before you start intentionally learning, it's probably fun. Fun is a thing that gives you kind of meaning and purpose and purpose and the thing you optimize for, right? And, like, fun is good. Then you get, you know, start learning, and I guess that this joy of comprehension and discovery is another thing that, you know, gives you meaning and purpose and drives you, right? Then, you know, you learn enough stuff and you want to give some of it back, right? And so impact and contributions back to, you know, technology or society, you know, people, you know, local or more globally becomes a new thing that, you know, drives a lot of kind of your behavior and is something that gives you purpose and that you derive, you know, positive feedback from, right? You know, then you go and so on and so forth. You go through various stages of life. If you have kids, like, that definitely changes your perspective on things. You know, I have three that definitely flips some bits in your head in terms of, you know, what you care about and what you optimize for and, you know, what matters, what doesn't matter, right? So, you know, and so on and so forth, right? And I, it seems to me that, you know, it's all of those things and as kind of you go through life, you know, you want these to be additive, right? New experiences, fun, learning, impact. Like, you want to, you know, be accumulating. I don't want to, you know, stop having fun or, you know, experiencing new things and I think it's important that, you know, it just kind of becomes additive as opposed to a replacement or subtraction. But, you know, those fewest problems as far as I got, but, you know, ask me in a few years, I might have one or two more to add to the list. And before you know it, time is up, just like it is for this conversation, but hopefully it was a fun ride. It was a huge honor to meet you. As you know, I've been a fan of yours and a fan of Google Self Driving Car and Waymo for a long time. I can't wait. I mean, it's one of the most exciting, if we look back in the 21st century, I truly believe it'll be one of the most exciting things we descendants of apes have created on this earth. So, I'm a huge fan and I can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thanks, thanks for having me and it's a also a huge fan doing work, honestly, and I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dmitry Dolgov and thank you to our sponsors, Triolabs, a company that helps businesses apply machine learning to solve real world problems, Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books, BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional, and CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Upper Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Isaac Asimov. Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars | Lex Fridman Podcast #147

The following is a conversation with Charles Isbell and Michael Whitman. Charles is the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and Michael is a computer science professor at Brown University. I've spoken with each of them individually on this podcast and since they are good friends in real life, we all thought it would be fun to have a conversation together. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Eight Sleep, a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep. Masterclass, online courses from some of the most amazing humans in history and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that having two guests on the podcast is an experiment that I've been meaning to do for a while. In particular, because down the road, I would like to occasionally be a kind of moderator for debates between people that may disagree in some interesting ways. If you have suggestions for who you would like to see debate on this podcast, let me know. As with all experiments of this kind, it is a learning process. Both the video and the audio might need improvement. I realized I think I should probably do three or more cameras next time as opposed to just two. And also try different ways to mount the microphone for the third person. Also, after recording this intro, I'm going to have to go figure out the thumbnail for the video version of the podcast since I usually put the guest's head on the thumbnail. And now there's two heads and two names to try to fit into the thumbnail. It's a kind of a bin packing problem which in theoretical computer science happens to be an NP hard problem. Whatever I come up with, if you have better ideas for the thumbnail, let me know as well. And in general, I always welcome ideas how this thing can be improved. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Charles Isbell and Michael Littman. You'll probably disagree about this question, but what is your biggest, would you say, disagreement about either something profound and very important or something completely not important at all? I don't think we have any disagreements at all. I'm not sure that's true. We walked into that one, didn't we? So one thing that you sometimes mention is that, and we did this one on air too, as it were, whether or not machine learning is computational statistics. It's not. But it is. Well, it's not. And in particular, and more importantly, it is not just computational statistics. So what's missing in the picture? All the rest of it. What's missing? That which is missing. Oh, yes, well, you can't be wrong now. Well, it's not just the statistics. He doesn't even believe this. We've had this conversation before. If it were just the statistics, then we would be happy with where we are. But it's not just the statistics. That's why it's computational statistics. Or if it were just the computational. I agree that machine learning is not just statistics. It is not just statistics. We can agree on that. Nor is it just computational statistics. It's computational statistics. It is computational. What is the computational and computational statistics? Does this take us into the realm of computing? It does, but I think perhaps the way I can get him to admit that he's wrong is that it's about rules. It's about rules. It's about symbols. It's about all these other things. But statistics is not about rules? I'm gonna say statistics is about rules. But it's not just the statistics, right? It's not just a random variable that you choose and you have a probability. I think you have a narrow view of statistics. Okay, well then what would be the broad view of statistics that would still allow it to be statistics and not say history that would make computational statistics okay? Well, okay, so I had my first sort of research mentor, a guy named Tom Landauer, taught me to do some statistics, right? And I was annoyed all the time because the statistics would say that what I was doing was not statistically significant. And I was like, but, but, and basically what he said to me is statistics is how you're gonna keep from lying to yourself, which I thought was really deep. It is a way to keep yourself honest in a particular way. I agree with that. Yeah, and so you're trying to find rules. I'm just gonna bring it back to rules. Wait, wait, wait, could you possibly try to define rules? Even regular statisticians, noncomputational statisticians, do spend some of their time evaluating rules, right? Applying statistics to try to understand does this rule capture this? Does this not capture that? You mean like hypothesis testing kind of thing? Or like confidence intervals? I think more like hypothesis. Like I feel like the word statistic literally means like a summary, like a number that summarizes other numbers. But I think the field of statistics actually applies that idea to things like rules, to understand whether or not a rule is valid. Does software engineering statistics? No. Programming languages statistics? No. Because I think there's a very, it's useful to think about a lot of what AI and machine learning is or certainly should be as software engineering, as programming languages. Just to put it in language that you might understand, the hyperparameters beyond the problem itself. The hyperparameters is too many syllables for me to understand. The hyperparameters. That's better. That goes around it, right? It's the decisions you choose to make. It's the metrics you choose to use. It's the loss function. You wanna say the practice of machine learning is different than the practice of statistics. Like the things you have to worry about and how you worry about them are different, therefore they're different. Right. At a very little, I mean, at the very least. It's that much is true. It doesn't mean that statistics, computational or otherwise aren't important. I think they are. I mean, I do a lot of that, for example. But I think it goes beyond that. I think that we could think about game theory in terms of statistics, but I don't think it's very as useful to do. I mean, the way I would think about it or a way I would think about it is this way. Chemistry is just physics. But I don't think it's as useful to think about chemistry as being just physics. It's useful to think about it as chemistry. The level of abstraction really matters here. So I think it is, there are contexts in which it is useful. Yes. I think of it that way, right? So finding that connection is actually helpful. And I think that's when I emphasize the computational statistics thing. I think I want to befriend statistics and not absorb them. Here's the A way to think about it beyond what I just said, right? So what would you say, and I want you to think back to a conversation we had a very long time ago. What would you say is the difference between, say, the early 2000s, ICML and what we used to call NIPS, NeurIPS? Is there a difference? A lot of, particularly on the machine learning that was done there? ICML was around that long. Oh, yeah. So iClear is the new conference, newish. Yeah, I guess so. And ICML was around the 2000. So ICML predates that. I think my most cited ICML paper is from 94. Michael knows this better than me because, of course, he's significantly older than I am. But the point is, what is the difference between ICML and NeurIPS in the late 90s, early 2000s? I don't know what everyone else's perspective would be, but I had a particular perspective at that time, which is I felt like ICML was more of a computer science place and that NIPS, NeurIPS was more of an engineering place, like the kind of math that happened at the two places. As a computer scientist, I felt more comfortable with the ICML math. And the NeurIPS people would say that that's because I'm dumb. And that's such an engineering thing to say, so. I agree with that part of it, but I do it a little differently. We actually had a nice conversation with Tom Dietrich about this in public. On Twitter just a couple of days ago. I put it a little differently, which is that ICML was machine learning done by a computer scientist. And NeurIPS was machine learning done by a computer scientist trying to impress statisticians. Which was weird because it was the same people, at least by the time I started paying attention. But it just felt very, very different. And I think that that perspective of whether you're trying to impress the statisticians or you're trying to impress the programmers is actually very different and has real impact on what you choose to worry about and what kind of outcomes you come to. So I think it really matters. I think computational statistics is a means to an end. It is not an end in some sense. And I think that really matters here in the same way that I don't think computer science is just engineering or just science or just math or whatever. Okay, so I'd have to now agree that now we agree on everything. Yes, yes. The important thing here is that my opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right, I think is what we just came to. Right, and my opinions may have changed and not the fact that I'm wrong. That's right. You lost me. I'm not even. I think I lost myself there too. But anyway, we're back. This happens to us sometimes. We're sorry. How does neural networks change this, just to even linger on this topic, change this idea of statistics, how big of a pie statistics is within the machine learning thing? Like, because it sounds like hyperparameters and also just the role of data. You know, people are starting to use this terminology of software 2.0, which is like the act of programming as a, like you're a designer in the hyperparameter space of neural networks, and you're also the collector and the organizer and the cleaner of the data, and that's part of the programming. So how did, on the NeurIPS versus ICML topic, what's the role of neural networks in redefining the size and the role of machine learning? I can't wait to hear what Michael thinks about this, but I would add one. But you will. That's true, I will, I'll force myself to. I think there's one other thing I would add to your description, which is the kind of software engineering part of what does it mean to debug, for example. But this is a difference between the kind of computational statistics view of machine learning and the computational view of machine learning, which is, I think, one is worried about the equation, as it were. And by the way, this is not a value judgment. I just think it's about perspective. But the kind of questions you would ask when you start asking yourself, well, what does it mean to program and develop and build the system, is a very computer sciencey view of the problem. I mean, if you get on data science Twitter and econ Twitter, you actually hear this a lot with the economist and the data scientist complaining about the machine learning people. Well, it's just statistics, and I don't know why they don't see this. But they're not even asking the same questions. They're not thinking about it as a kind of programming problem. And I think that that really matters, just asking this question. I actually think it's a little different from programming in hyperparameter space and sort of collecting the data. But I do think that that immersion really matters. So I'll give you a quick example of the way I think about this. So I teach machine learning. Michael and I have co taught a machine learning class, which has now reached, I don't know, 10,000 people at least over the last several years, or somewhere there's abouts. And my machine learning assignments are of this form. So the first one is something like, implement these five algorithms, KNN and SVMs and boosting and decision trees and neural networks, and maybe that's it, I can't remember. And when I say implement, I mean steal the code. I am completely uninterested. You get zero points for getting the thing to work. I don't want you spending your time worrying about getting the corner case right of what happens when you are trying to normalize distances and the points on the thing. And so you divide by zero. I'm not interested in that, right? Steal the code. However, you're going to run those algorithms on two data sets. The data sets have to be interesting. What does it mean to be interesting? Well, data sets interesting if it reveals differences between algorithms, which presumably are all the same because they can represent whatever they can represent. And two data sets are interesting together if they show different differences, as it were. And you have to analyze them. You have to justify their interestingness and you have to analyze them in a whole bunch of ways. But all I care about is the data in your analysis, not the programming. And I occasionally end up in these long discussions with students, well, I don't really, I copy and paste the things that I've said the other 15,000 times it's come up, which is they go, but the only way to learn, really understand is to code them up, which is a very programmer, software engineering view of the world. If you don't program it, you don't understand it, which is, by the way, I think is wrong in a very specific way. But it is a way that you come to understand because then you have to wrestle with the algorithm. But the thing about machine learning is it's not just sorting numbers where in some sense the data doesn't matter. What matters is, well, does the algorithm work on these abstract things, one less than the other? In machine learning, the data matters. It matters more than almost anything. And not everything, but almost anything. And so as a result, you have to live with the data and don't get distracted by the algorithm per se. And I think that that focus on the data and what it can tell you and what question it's actually answering for you as opposed to the question you thought you were asking is a key and important thing about machine learning and is a way that computationalists as opposed to statisticians bring a particular view about how to think about the process. The statisticians, by contrast, bring, I think I'd be willing to say, a better view about the kind of formal math that's behind it and what an actual number ultimately is saying about the data. And those are both important, but they're also different. I didn't really think of it this way is to build intuition about the role of data, the different characteristics of data by having two data sets that are different and they reveal the differences in the differences. That's a really fascinating, that's a really interesting educational approach. The students love it, but not right away. No, they love it at the end. They love it later. They love it at the end. Not at the beginning. Not even immediately after. I feel like there's a deep profound lesson about education there. Yeah. That you can't listen to students about whether what you're doing is the right or the wrong thing. Yeah, well, as a wise, Michael Lippmann once said to me about children, which I think applies to teaching, is you have to give them what they need without bending to their will. And students are like that. You have to figure out what they need. You're a curator. Your whole job is to curate and to present because on their own, they're not gonna necessarily know where to search. So you're providing pushes in some direction and learn space and you have to give them what they need in a way that keeps them engaged enough so that they eventually discover what they want and they get the tools they need to go and learn other things off of. What's your view? Let me put on my Russian hat, which believes that life is suffering. I like Russian hats, by the way. If you have one, I would like this. Those are ridiculous, yes. But in a delightful way. But sure. What do you think is the role of, we talked about balance a little bit. What do you think is the role of hardship in education? Like I think the biggest things I've learned, like what made me fall in love with math, for example, is by being bad at it until I got good at it. So like struggling with a problem, which increased the level of joy I felt when I finally figured it out. And it always felt with me, with teachers, especially modern discussions of education, how can we make education more fun, more engaging, more all those things? Or from my perspective, it's like, you're maybe missing the point that education, that life is suffering. Education is supposed to be hard and that actually what increases the joy you feel when you actually learn something. Is that ridiculous? Do you like to see your students suffer? Okay, so this may be a point where we differ. I suspect not. I'm gonna do go on. Well, what would your answer be? I wanna hear you first. Okay, well, I was gonna not answer the question. You don't want the students to know you enjoy them suffering? No, no, no, no, no, no. I was gonna say that there's, I think there's a distinction that you can make in the kind of suffering, right? So I think you can be in a mode where you're suffering in a hopeless way versus you're suffering in a hopeful way, right? Where you're like, you can see that if you, that you still have, you can still imagine getting to the end, right? And as long as people are in that mindset where they're struggling, but it's not a hopeless kind of struggling, that's productive. I think that's really helpful. But it's struggling, like if you break their will, if you leave them hopeless. No, that don't, sure, some people are gonna, whatever, lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but like mostly you give up and certainly it takes the joy out of it. And you're not gonna spend a lot of time on something that brings you no joy. So it is a bit of a delicate balance, right? You have to thwart people in a way that they still believe that there's a way through. Right, so that's a, we strongly agree actually. So I think, well, first off, struggling and suffering aren't the same thing, right? Yeah, just being poetic. Oh, no, no, I actually appreciate the poetry. And one of the reasons I appreciate it is that they are often the same thing and often quite different, right? So you can struggle without suffering, you can certainly suffer pretty easily. You don't necessarily have to struggle to suffer. So I think that you want people to struggle, but that hope matters. You have to, they have to understand that they're gonna get through it on the other side. And it's very easy to confuse the two. I actually think Brown University has a very, just philosophically has a very different take on the relationship with their students, particularly undergrads from say a place like Georgia Tech, which is. Which university is better? Well, I have my opinions on that. I mean, remember, Charles said, it doesn't matter what the facts are, I'm always right. The correct answer is that it doesn't matter, they're different. But clearly, clearly the answer is different. He went to a school like the school where he is as an undergrad. I went to a school, specifically the same school, though it was changed a bit in the intervening years. Brown or Georgia Tech? No, I was talking about Georgia Tech. And I went to an undergrad place that's a lot like the place where I work now. And so it does seem like we're more familiar with these models. So there's a similarity between Brown and Yale? Yeah, I think they're quite similar, yeah. And Duke. Duke has some similarities too, but it's got a little Southern draw. You've kind of worked your, you've sort of worked at universities that are like the places where you learned. And the same would be true for me. Are you uncomfortable venturing outside the box? Is that what you're saying? Journeying out? That's not what I'm saying. Yeah, Charles is definitely. He only goes to places that have institute in the name, right? It has worked out that way. Well, academic places anyway. Well, no, I was a visiting scientist at UPenn or visiting something at UPenn. Oh, wow, I just understood your joke. Which one? Five minutes later. I like to set the sort of time bomb. The institute is in the, that Charles only goes to places that have institute in the name. So I guess Georgia, I forget that Georgia Tech is Georgia Institute of Technology. The number of people who refer to it as Georgia Tech University is large and incredibly irritating. It's one of the few things that genuinely gets under my skin. But like schools like Georgia Tech and MIT have as part of the ethos, like there is, I wanna say there's an abbreviation that someone taught me, like IHTFP, something like that. Like there's an expression which is basically I hate being here, which they say so proudly. And that is definitely not the ethos at Brown. Like Brown is, there's a little more pampering and empowerment and stuff. And it's not like we're gonna crush you and you're gonna love it. So yeah, I think there's a, I think the ethoses are different. That's interesting, yeah. We had Drown Proofing. What's that? In order to graduate from Georgia Tech, this is a true thing. Feel free to look it up. If you. A lot of schools have this by the way. No, actually Georgia Tech was barely the first. Brandeis has it. Had it. I feel like Georgia Tech was the first in a lot of things. It was the first in a lot of things. Had the first master's degree. First Bumblebee mascot. Stop that. First master's in computer science actually. Right, online master's. Well that too, but way back in the 60s. NSF grant. Yeah, yeah. You're the first information and computer science master's degree in the country. But the Georgia Tech, it used to be the case that in order to graduate from Georgia Tech, you had to take a Drown Proofing class. Where effectively, they threw you in the water and tied you up. If you didn't drown, you got to graduate. Tied you up? I believe so. No. There were certainly versions of it, but I mean luckily they ended it just before I had to graduate because otherwise I would have never graduated. It wasn't going to happen. I want to say 84, 83, somewhere around then they ended it. But yeah, you used to have to prove you could tread water for some ridiculous amount of time or you couldn't graduate. Two minutes. No, it was more than two minutes. I bet it was two minutes. Okay, well we'll look at it. And it was in a bathtub. Yeah, right. You could just stare. It was in a pool. But it was a real thing. But that idea that, you know, push you. Fully clothed. Yeah, fully clothed. I bet it was that and not tied up. Because who needs to learn how to swim when you're tied? Nobody. But who needs to learn to swim when you're actually falling into the water dressed? That's a real thing. I think your facts are getting in the way with a good story. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. I didn't mean to. All right, so they tie you up. Sometimes the narrative matters. But whatever it was, you had to, it was called drown proofing for a reason. The point of the story, Michael, is that it's, well, no, but that's good. It doesn't bring it back to struggle. That's a part of what Georgia Tech has always been. And we struggle with that, by the way, about what we want to be, particularly as things go. But you sort of, how much can you be pushed without breaking? And you come out of the other end stronger, right? There's a saying we used to have when I was an undergrad there. It was just Georgia Tech, building tomorrow the night before. Right? And it was just kind of idea that, give me something impossible to do and I'll do it in a couple of days because that's what I just spent the last four or five or six years with. That ethos definitely stuck to you. Having now done a number of projects with you, you definitely will do it the night before. That's not entirely true. There's nothing wrong with waiting until the last minute. The secret is knowing when the last minute is. Right, that's brilliantly put. Yeah, that is a definite Charles statement that I am trying not to embrace. And I appreciate that because you helped move my last minute up. That's the social construct the way you converge together what the definition of last minute is. We figure that all out together. In fact, MIT, I'm sure a lot of universities have this, but MIT has like MIT time that everyone has always agreed together that there is such a concept and everyone just keeps showing up like 10 to 15 to 20, depending on the department, late to everything. So there's like a weird drift that happens. It's kind of fascinating. Yeah, we're five minutes. We're five minutes. In fact, the classes will say, well, this is no longer true actually, but it used to be a class that started at eight, but actually it started at eight oh five, it ends at nine, actually it ends at eight fifty five. Everything's five minutes off and nobody expects anything to start until five minutes after the half hour, whatever it is. It still exists. It hurts my head. Well, let's rewind the clock back to the fifties and sixties when you guys met, how did you, I'm just kidding, I don't know. But what, can you tell the story of how you met? So you've, like the internet and the world kind of knows you as connected in some ways in terms of education of teaching the world. That's like the public facing thing, but how did you as human beings and as collaborators meet? I think there's two stories. One is how we met and the other is how we got to know each other. I'm not gonna say fell in love. I'm gonna say that we came to understand that we Had some common something. Yeah, it's funny. Cause on the surface, I think we're different in a lot of ways, but there's something Yeah, I mean, now we complete each other's There you go. Afternoon. So I will tell the story of how we met and I'll let Michael tell the story of how we met. Okay, all right. Okay, so here's how we met. I was already at that point, it was AT&T labs. There's a long, interesting story there. But anyway, I was there and Michael was coming to interview. He was a professor at Duke at the time, but decided for reasons that he wanted to be in New Jersey. And so that would mean Bell Labs slash AT&T labs. And we were doing the interview. Interviews are very much like academic interviews. And so I had to be there. We all had to meet with him afterwards and so on, one on one. But it was obvious to me that he was going to be hired. Like no matter what, because everyone loved him. They were just talking about all the great stuff he did. Oh, he did this great thing. And you had just won something at AAAI, I think. Or maybe you got 18 papers in AAAI that year. I got the best paper award at AAAI for the crossword stuff. Right, exactly. So that had all happened and everyone was going on and on and on about it. Actually, so Tinder was saying incredibly nice things about you. Really? Yes. He can be very grumpy. Yes. That's nice to hear. He was grumpily saying very nice things. Oh, that makes sense. And that does make sense. So, you know, it was going to come. So why was I meeting him? I had something else I had to do. I can't remember what it was. It probably involved comedy. So he remembers meeting me as inconveniencing his afternoon. So he came. So I eventually came to my office. I was in the middle of trying to do something. I can't remember what. And he came and he sat down. And for reasons that are purely accidental, despite what Michael thinks, my desk at the time was set up in such a way that it had sort of an L shape. And the chair on the outside was always lower than the chair that I was in. And, you know, the kind of point was to... The only reason I think that it was on purpose is because you told me it was on purpose. I don't remember that. Anyway, the thing is, is that, you know, it kind of gives... His guest chair was really low so that he could look down at everybody. The idea was just to simply create a nice environment that you were asking for a mortgage and I was going to say no. That was the point. It was a very simple idea here. Anyway, so we sat there and we just talked for a little while. And I think he got the impression that I didn't like him. Which wasn't true. I strongly got that impression. The talk was really good. The talk, by the way, was terrible. And right after the talk, I said to my host, Michael Kearns, who ultimately was my boss. I'm a huge fan. I'm a friend and a huge fan of Michael, yeah. Yeah, he is a remarkable person. After my talk, I went into the... He went into basketball. I went... Racquetball, he's good at everything. No, basketball. No, but basketball and racquetball too. Squash. Squash, squash, squash, not racquetball. Yes, squash, which is not... Racquetball, yes. Squash, no. And I hope you hear that, Michael. Oh, Michael Kearns. As a game, not his skill level, because I'm pretty sure he's... All right, there's some competitiveness there, but the point is that it was like the middle of the day, I had full day of interviews. I got met with people, but then in the middle of the day, I gave a job talk. And then there was gonna be more interviews, but I pulled Michael aside and I said, I think it's in both of our best interest if I just leave now, because that was so bad that it'd just be embarrassing if I have to talk to any more people. You look bad for having invited me. It's just, let's just forget this ever happened. So I don't think the talk went well. That's one of the most Michael Lipman set of sentences I think I've ever heard. He did great, or at least everyone knew he was great, so maybe it didn't matter. I was there, I remember the talk, and I remember him being very much the way I remember him now, on any given week. So it was good. And we met and we talked about stuff. He thinks I didn't like him, but... Because he was so grumpy. Must've been the chair thing. The chair thing and the low voice, I think. But like, he obviously... And that slight skeptical look. Yes. I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, I probably didn't have any idea what you were talking about. Anyway, I liked him. He asked me questions, I answered questions. I felt bad about myself. It was a normal day. It was a normal day. And then he left. And then he left, and that's how you met. Can we take a... And then I got hired and I was in the group. Can we take a slight tangent on this topic of, it sounds like, maybe you could speak to the bigger picture. It sounds like you're quite self critical. Who, Charles? No, you. Oh. I can do better. I can do better. Try me again. I'll do better. I'll be so self critical. I won't. I won't. I won't. Yeah, that was like a three out of 10 response. So let's try to work it up to five and six. Yeah, I remember Marvin Minsky said on a video interview, something that the key to success in academic research is to hate everything you do. For some reason... I think I followed that because I hate everything he's done. That's a good line. That's a six out of 10. Maybe that's a keeper. But do you find that resonates with you at all in how you think about talks and so on? I would say it differently. It's not that. No, not really. That's such an MIT view of the world though. So I remember talking about this when, as a student, you were basically told I will clean it up for the purpose of the podcast. My work is crap. My work is crap. My work is crap. Then you go to a conference or something. You're like, everybody else's work is crap. Everybody else's work is crap. And you feel better and better about it, relatively speaking. And then you sort of keep working on it. I don't hate my work. That resonates with me. Yes, I've never hated my work, but I have been dissatisfied with it. And I think being dissatisfied, being okay with the fact that you've taken a positive step, the derivative's positive, maybe even the second derivative's positive, that's important because that's a part of the hope, right? But you have to, but I haven't gotten there yet. If that's not there, that I haven't gotten there yet, then it's hard to move forward, I think. So I buy that, which is a little different from hating everything that you do. Yeah, I mean, there's things that I've done that I like better than I like myself. So it's separating me from the work, essentially. So I think I am very critical of myself, but sometimes the work I'm really excited about. And sometimes I think it's kind of good. Does that happen right away? So I found the work that I've liked, that I've done, most of it, I liked it in retrospect more when I was far away from it in time. I have to be fairly excited about it to get done. No, excited at the time, but then happy with the result. But years later, or even I might go back, you know what, that actually turned out to matter. That turned out to matter. Or, oh gosh, it turns out I've been thinking about that. It's actually influenced all the work that I've done since without realizing it. Boy, that guy was smart. Yeah, that guy had a future. Yeah, I think there's something to it. I think there's something to the idea you've got to hate what you do, but it's not quite hate. It's just being unsatisfied. And different people motivate themselves differently. I don't happen to motivate myself with self loathing. I happen to motivate myself with something else. So you're able to sit back and be proud of, in retrospect, of the work you've done. Well, and it's easier when you can connect it with other people, because then you can be proud of them. Proud of the people, yeah. And then the question is. You can still safely hate yourself. Yeah, that's right. It's win, win, Michael. Or at least win, lose, which is what you're looking for. Oh, wow, there's so many brilliant minds in this. There's levels. So how did you actually meet me? Yeah, Michael. So the way I think about it is, because we didn't do much research together at AT&T, but then we all got laid off. So that sucked. By the way, sorry to interrupt, but that was one of the most magical places historically speaking. They did not appreciate what they had. And how do we, I feel like there's a profound lesson in there too. How do we get it, like what was, why was it so magical? Is it just a coincidence of history? Or is there something special about? There were some really good managers and people who really believed in machine learning as this is gonna be important. Let's get the people who are thinking about this in creative and insightful ways and put them in one place and stir. Yeah, but even beyond that, right? It was Bell Labs at its heyday. And even when we were there, which I think was past its heyday. And to be clear, he's gotten to be at Bell Labs. I never got to be at Bell Labs. I joined after that. Yeah, I showed up in 91 as a grad student. So I was there for a long time, every summer, except for two. So twice I worked for companies that had just stopped being Bell Labs. Bellcore and then AT&T Labs. So Bell Labs was several locations or for the research or is it one? I don't know if Jersey's involved somehow. They're all in Jersey. Yeah, they're all over the place. But they were in a couple of places in Jersey. Murray Hill was the Bell Labs place. So you had an office in Murray Hill at one point in your career. Yeah, and I played Ultimate Frisbee on the cricket pitch at Bell Labs at Murray Hill. And then it became AT&T Labs when it split off with loose during what we called Trivestiture. Are you better than Michael Korn's at Ultimate Frisbee? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. But I think that one's not boasting. I think Charles plays a lot of Ultimate and I don't think Michael does. Yes, but that wasn't the point. The point is yes. I'm finally better. Sorry. Okay, I have played on a championship winning Ultimate Frisbee team or whatever, Ultimate team with Charles. So I know how good he is. He's really good. How good I was anyway, when I was younger. But the thing is. I know how young he was when he was younger. That's true. So much younger than now. He's older now. Yeah, I'm older. Michael was a much better basketball player than I was. Michael Kearns. Yes, no, not Michael. Let's be very clear about that. To be clear, I've not played basketball with you. So you don't know how terrible I am, but you have a probably pretty good guess. And that you're not as good as Michael Kearns. He's tall and athletic. And he cared about it. He's very athletic. He's very good. And probably competitive. I love hanging out with Michael. Anyway, but we were talking about something else, although I no longer remember what it was. What were we talking about? Oh, Bell Labs. Oh, Bell Labs. But also Labs. So this was kind of cool about what was magical about it. The first thing you have to know is that Bell Labs was an arm of the government, right? Because AT&T was an arm of the government. It was a monopoly. And every month you paid a little thing on your phone bill, which turned out was a tax for all the research that Bell Labs was doing. And they invented transistors and the laser and whatever else is that they did. The Big Bang or whatever, the cosmic background radiation. Yeah, they did all that stuff. They had some amazing stuff with directional microphones, by the way. I got to go in this room where they had all these panels and everything. And we would talk and one another, and he'd move some panels around. And then he would have me step two steps to the left. And I couldn't hear a thing he was saying because nothing was bouncing off the walls. And then he would shut it all down and you could hear your heartbeat, which is deeply disturbing to hear your heartbeat. You can feel it. I mean, you can feel it now. There's just so much all this sort of noise around. Anyway, Bell Labs was about pure research. It was a university, in some sense, the purest sense of a university, but without students. So it was all the faculty working with one another and students would come in to learn. They would come in for three or four months during the summer and they would go away. But it was just this kind of wonderful experience. I could walk out my door. In fact, I would often have to walk out my door and deal with Rich Sutton and Michael Kearns yelling at each other about whatever it is they were yelling about the proper way to prove something or another. And I could just do that. And Dave McAllister and Peter Stone and all of these other people, including, it's a tender and then eventually Michael. And it was just a place where you could think thoughts. And it was okay because so long as once every 25 years or so somebody invented a transistor, it paid for everything else. You could afford to take the risk. And then when that all went away, it became harder and harder and harder to justify it as far as the folks who were very far away were concerned. And there was such a fast turnaround among mental management on the AT&T side that you never had a chance to really build a relationship. At least people like us didn't have a chance to build a relationship. So when the diaspora happened, it was amazing, right? Everybody left and I think everybody ended up at a great place and made a huge, continued to do really good work with machine learning. But it was a wonderful place. And people will ask me, what's the best job you've ever had? And as a professor, anyway, the answer that I would give is well, probably Bell Labs in some very real sense. And I will never have a job like that again because Bell Labs doesn't exist anymore. And Microsoft research is great and Google does good stuff. And you can pick IBM, you can tell if you want to, but Bell Labs was magical. It was around for, it was an important time and it represents a high watermark in basic research in the US. Is there something you could say about the physical proximity and the chance collisions? Like we live in this time of the pandemic where everyone is maybe trying to see the silver lining and accepting the remote nature of things. Is there one of the things that people like faculty that I talk to miss is the procrastination. Like the chance to make everything is about meetings that are supposed to be, there's not a chance to just talk about comic book or whatever, like go into discussion that's totally pointless. So it's funny you say this because that's how we met, met, it was exactly that. So I'll let Michael say that, but I'll just add one thing which is just that research is a social process and it helps to have random social interactions even if they don't feel social at the time, that's how you get things done. One of the great things about the AI Lab when I was there, I don't quite know what it looks like now once they moved buildings, but we had entire walls that were whiteboards and people would just get up there and they were just right and people would walk up and you'd have arguments and you'd explain things to one another and you got so much out of the freedom to do that. You had to be okay with people challenging every fricking word you said, which I would sometimes find deeply irritating, but most of the time it was quite useful. But the sort of pointlessness and the interaction was in some sense the point, at least for me. Yeah, I think offline yesterday I mentioned Josh Tenenbaum and he's very much, he's a man, he's such an inspiration in the childlike way that he pulls you in on any topic. It doesn't even have to be about machine learning or the brain, he'll just pull you in to a closest writable surface, which is still, you can find whiteboards at MIT everywhere, and just like basically cancel all meetings and talk for a couple hours about some aimless thing and it feels like the whole world, the time space continuum kind of warps and that becomes the most important thing. And then it's just, it's definitely something worth missing in this world where everything's remote. There's some magic to the physical presence. Whenever I wonder myself whether MIT really is as great as I remember it, I just go talk to Josh. Yeah, you know, that's funny. There's a few people in this world that carry the best of what particular institutions stand for, right? And it's. It's Josh. I mean, I don't, my guess is he's unaware of this. That's the point. Yeah. That the masters are not aware of their mastery. So. How did we meet? Yes, but first a tangent, no. How did you meet me? So I'm not sure what you were thinking, but when it started to dawn on me that maybe we had a longer term bond was after we all got laid off. And you had decided at that point that we were still paid. We were given an opportunity to like do a job search and kind of make a transition, but it was clear that we were done. And I would go to my office to work and you would go to my office to keep me from working. That was my recollection of it. You had decided that there was no, really no point in working for the company because our relationship with the company was done. Yeah, but remember I felt that way beforehand. It wasn't about the company. It was about the set of people there doing really cool things. And it always, always been that way. But we were working on something together. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So at the very end, we all got laid off, but then our boss came to, our boss's boss came to us because our boss was Michael Kearns and he had jumped ship brilliantly, like perfect timing. Like things like right before the ship was about to sink, he was like, gotta go and landed perfectly because Michael Kearns. Because Michael Kearns. And leaving the rest of us to go like, this is fine. And then it was clear that it wasn't fine and we were all toast. So we had this sort of long period of time. But then our boss figured out, okay, wait, maybe we can save a couple of these people if we can have them do something really useful. And the useful thing was we were gonna make basically an automated assistant that could help you with your calendar. You could like tell it things and it would respond appropriately. It would just kind of integrate across all sorts of your personal information. And so me and Charles and Peter Stone were set up as the crack team to actually solve this problem. Other people maybe were too theoretical that they thought, but we could actually get something done. So we sat down to get something done and there wasn't time and it wouldn't have saved us anyway. And so it all kind of went downhill. But the interesting, I think, coda to that is that our boss's boss is a guy named Ron Brockman. And when he left AT&T, cause we were all laid off, he went to DARPA, started up a program there that became KALO, which is the program from which Siri sprung, which is a digital assistant that helps you with your calendar and a bunch of other things. It really, in some ways got its start with me and Charles and Peter trying to implement this vision that Ron Brockman had, that he ultimately got implemented through his role at DARPA. So when I'm trying to feel less bad about having been laid off from what is possibly the greatest job of all time, I think about, well, we kind of helped birth Siri. That's something. And then he did other things too. But we got to spend a lot of time in his office and talk about lots of things. We got to spend a lot of time in my office, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so then we went on our merry way. Everyone went to different places. Charles landed at Georgia Tech, which was what he always dreamed he would do. And so that worked out well. I came up with a saying at the time, which is luck favors the Charles. It's kind of like luck favors the prepared, but Charles, like he wished something and then it would basically happen just the way he wanted. It was inspirational to see things go that way. Things worked out. And we stayed in touch. And then I think it really helped when you were working on, I mean, you'd kept me in the loop for things like threads and the work that you were doing at Georgia Tech. But then when they were starting their online master's program, he knew that I was really excited about MOOCs and online teaching. And he's like, I have a plan. And I'm like, tell me your plan. He's like, I can't tell you the plan yet. Cause they were deep in negotiations between Georgia Tech and Udacity to make this happen. And they didn't want it to leak. So Charles would kept teasing me about it, but wouldn't tell me what was actually going on. And eventually it was announced and he said, I would like you to teach the machine learning course with me. I'm like, that can't possibly work. But it was a great idea. And it was super fun. It was a lot of work to put together, but it was really great. Was that the first time you thought about, first of all, was it the first time you got seriously into teaching? I mean, I was a professor. This was already after you jumped to, so like there's a little bit of jumping around in time. Yeah, sorry about that. There's a pretty big jump in time. So like the MOOCs thing. So Charles got to Georgia Tech and he, I mean, maybe Charles, maybe this is a Charles story. I got to Georgia Tech in 2002. He got to Georgia Tech in 2002. And worked on things like revamping the curriculum, the undergraduate curriculum, so that it had some kind of semblance of modular structure because computer science was at the time moving from a fairly narrow specific set of topics to touching a lot of other parts of intellectual life. And the curriculum was supposed to reflect that. And so Charles played a big role in kind of redesigning that. And then the. And for my labors, I ended up as associate dean. Right, he got to become associate dean of charge of educational stuff. Yeah, I was under. This should be a valuable lesson. If you're good at something, they will give you responsibility to do more of that thing. Well. Until you. Don't show competence. Don't show competence if you. Don't want responsibility. Here's what they say. The reward for good work is more work. The reward for bad work is less work. Which, I don't know. Depending on what you're trying to do that week, one of those is better than the other. Well, one of the problems with the word work, sorry to interrupt, is that it seems to be an antonym in this particular language. We have the opposite of happiness. But it seems like they're. That's one of, you know, we talked about balance. It's always like work life balance. It always rubbed me the wrong way as a terminology. I know it's just words. Right, the opposite of work is play. But ideally, work is play. Oh, I can't tell you how much time I'd spend. Certainly, when I was at Bell Labs, except for a few very key moments, as a professor, I would do this too. I would just say, I cannot believe they're paying me to do this. Because it's fun. It's something that I would do for a hobby if I could anyway. So that sort of worked out. Are you sure you want to be saying that when this is being recorded? As a dean, that is not true at all. I need a raise. But I think here with this, even though a lot of time passed, Mike and I talked almost every, well, we texted, almost every day during the period. Charles, at one point, took me, the ICML conference, the machine learning conference was in Atlanta. I was the chair, the general chair of the conference. Charles was my publicity chair or something like that, or fundraising chair. Yeah, but he decided it'd be really funny if he didn't actually show up for the conference in his own home city. So he didn't, but he did at one point pick me up at the conference in his Tesla and drove me to the Atlanta mall and forced me to buy an iPhone because he didn't like how it was to text with me and thought it would be better for him if I had an iPhone, the text would be somehow smoother. And it was. And it was. And it is, and his life is better. And my life is better. And so, yeah, but it was, yeah, Charles forced me to get an iPhone so that he could text me more efficiently. I thought that was an interesting moment. It works for me. Anyway, so we kept talking the whole time and then eventually we did the teaching thing and it was great. And there's a couple of reasons for that, by the way. One is I really wanted to do something different. Like you've got this medium here, people claim it can change things. What's a thing that you could do in this medium that you could not do otherwise besides edit, right? I mean, what could you do? And being able to do something with another person was that kind of thing. It's very hard. I mean, you can take turns, but teaching together, having conversations is very hard. So that was a cool thing. The second thing, give me an excuse to do more stuff with him. Yeah, I always thought, he makes it sound brilliant. And it is, I guess. But at the time it really felt like I've got a lot to do, Charles is saying, and it would be great if Michael could teach the course and I could just hang out. Yeah, just kind of coast on that. Well, that's what the second class was more like that. Because the second class was explicitly like that. But the first class, it was at least half. Yeah, but I do all the stuff. So the structure that we came up with. I think you're once again letting the facts get in the way of a good story. I should just let Charles talk to us. But that's the facts that he saw. So that was kind of true for 7642. Yeah, that was sort of true for 7642, which is the reinforcement learning class, because that was really his class. You started with reinforcement learning or machine learning? Intro machine learning, 7641, which is supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning and decision making, cram all that in there, the kind of assignments that we talked about earlier. And then eventually, about a year later, we did a follow on 7642, which is reinforcement learning and decision making. The first class was based on something I'd been teaching at that point for well over a decade. And the second class was based on something Michael had been teaching. Actually, I learned quite a bit teaching that class with him, but he drove most of that. But the first one I drove most, it was all my material. Although I had stolen that material originally from slides I found online from Michael, who had originally stolen that material from, I guess, slides he found online, probably from Andrew Moore, because the jokes were the same anyway. At least some of the, at least when I found the slides, some of the stuff with it. Is that true? Yes, every machine learning class taught in the early 2000s stole from Andrew Moore. A particular joke or two? At least the structure. Now, I did, and he did, actually, a lot more with reinforcement learning and such, and game theory and those kinds of things. But, you know, we all sort of built in. You mean in the research world? No, no, no, in that class. No, I mean in teaching that class. The coverage was different than what we started. Most people were just doing supervised learning and maybe a little bit of clustering and whatnot, but we took it all the way to machine learning. A lot of it just comes from Tom Mitchell's book. Oh, no, yeah, except, well, half of it comes from Tom Mitchell's book, right? I mean, the other half doesn't. This is why it's all readings, right? Because certain things weren't invented when Tom wrote that stuff. Yeah, okay, that's true. All right, but it was quite good. But there's a reason for that besides, you know, just, I wanted to do it. I wanted to do something new, and I wanted to do something with him, which is a realization, which is despite what you might believe, he's an introvert and I'm an introvert, or I'm on the edge of being an introvert anyway. But both of us, I think, enjoy the energy of the crowd, right? There's something about talking to people and bringing them into whatever we find interesting that is empowering, energizing, or whatever. And I found the idea of staring alone at a computer screen and then talking off of materials less inspiring than I wanted it to be. And I had in fact done a MOOC for Udacity on algorithms. And it was a week in a dark room talking at the screen, writing on the little pad. And I didn't know this was happening, but they had watched, the crew had watched some of the videos while, you know, like in the middle of this, and they're like, something's wrong. You're sort of shutting down. And I think a lot of it was I'll make jokes and no one would laugh. And I felt like the crowd hated me. Now, of course, there was no crowd. So like, it wasn't rational. But each time I tried it and I got no reaction, it just was taking the energy out of my performance, out of my presentation. Such a fantastic metaphor for grad school. Anyway, by working together, we could play off each other and have a good time. And keep the energy up, because you can't let your guard down for a moment with Charles, he'll just overpower you. I have no idea what you're talking about. But we would work really well together, I thought, and we knew each other, so I knew that we could sort of make it work. Plus, I was the associate dean, so they had to do what I told them to do. We had to make it work. And so it worked out very well, I thought, well enough that we. With great power comes great power. That's right. And we became smooth and curly. And that's when we did the overfitting thriller video. Yeah, that's a thing. So can we just, like, smooth and curly, where did that come from? Okay, so it happened. It was completely spontaneous. These are nicknames you go by. Yeah, so it's what the students call us. He was lecturing. So the way that we structured the lectures is one of us is the lecturer and one of us is basically the student. And so he was lecturing on. The lecturer prepares all the materials, comes up with the quizzes, and then the student comes in not knowing anything. So it was just like being on campus. And I was doing game theory in particular, the Prisoner's Dilemma. Prisoner's Dilemma. And so he needed to set up a little Prisoner's Dilemma grid. So he drew it and I could see what he was drawing. And the Prisoner's Dilemma consists of two players, two parties. So he decided he would make little cartoons of the two of us. And so there was two criminals, right, that were deciding whether or not to rat each other out. One of them he drew as a circle with a smiley face and a kind of goatee thing, smooth head. And the other one with all sorts of curly hair. And he said, this is smooth and curly. I said, smooth and curly? He said, no, no, smooth with a V. It's very important that it have a V. And then the students really took to that. Like they found that relatable. He started singing Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those names stuck. So we now have a video series, an episode, our kind of first actual episode should be coming out today, Smooth and Curly on video, where the two of us discuss episodes of Westworld. We watch Westworld and we're like, huh, what does this say about computer science and AI? And we've never, we did not watch it. I mean, no, it's on season three or whatever we have. As of this recording, it's on season three. We've watched now two episodes total. Yeah, I think I watched three. What do you think about Westworld? Two episodes in. So I can tell you so far, I'm just guessing what's gonna happen next. It seems like bad things are gonna happen with the robots uprising. It's a lot of. Spoiler alert. So I have not, I have not, I mean, you know, I vaguely remember a movie existing. So I assume it's related to that, but. That was more my time than your time, Charles. That's right, cause you're much older than I am. I think the important thing here is that it's narrative, right? It's all about telling a story. That's the whole driving thing. But the idea that they would give these reveries, that they would make people, they would make them. Let them remember. Remember the awful things that happened. The terrible things that happened. Who could possibly think that was gonna, I gotta, I mean, I don't know. I've only seen the first two episodes or maybe the third one. I think I've only seen the first one. You know what it was? You know what the problem is? That the robots were actually designed by Hannibal Lecter. That's true. They weren't. So like, what do you think is gonna happen? Bad things. It's clear that things are happening and characters are being introduced and we don't yet know anything, but still I was just struck by how it's all driven by narrative and story. And there's all these implied things like programming, the programming interface is talking to them about what's going on in their heads, which is both, I mean, artistically, it's probably useful to film it that way. But think about how it would work in real life. That just seems very great. But there was, we saw in the second episode, there's a screen. You could see things. They were wearing like Kubrick's glasses. In the world. It was quite interesting to just kind of ask this question so far. I mean, I assume it veers off into Never Never Land at some point. So we don't know. We can't answer that question. I'm also a fan of a guy named Alex Garland. He's a director of Ex Machina. Mm hmm. And he is the first, I wonder if Kubrick was like this actually, is he like studies, what would it take to program an AI systems? Like he's curious enough to go into that direction. On the Westworld side, I felt there was more emphasis on the narratives than like actually asking like computer science questions. Yeah. Like, how would you build this? How would you, and. How would you debug it? I still think, to me, that's the key issue. They were terrible debuggers. Yeah. Well, they said specifically, so we make a change and we put it out in the world and that's bad because something terrible could happen. Like if you're putting things out in the world and you're not sure whether something terrible is going to happen, your process is probably. I just feel like there should have been someone whose sole job it was to walk around and poke his head in and say, what could possibly go wrong? Just over and over again. I would have loved if there was an, and I did watch a lot more and I'm not giving anything away. I would have loved it if there was like an episode where like the new intern is like debugging a new model or something and like it just keeps failing and they're like, all right. And then it's more turns into like a episode of Silicon Valley or something like that. Yes. Versus like this ominous AI systems that are constantly like threatening the fabric of this world that's been created. Yeah. Yeah, and you know the other, this reminds me of something that, so I agree that that should be very cool, at least for the small percentage of people who care about debugging systems. But the other thing is. Right, debugging, the series. Yeah, it falls into, think of the sequels, fear of the debugger. Oh my gosh. Anyway, so. It's a nightmare show, it's a horror movie. I think that's where we lose people, by the way, early on is the people who either decide, either figure out debugging or think debugging is terrible. This is where we lose people in computer science. This is a part of the struggle versus suffering, right? You get through it and you kind of get the skills of it, or you're just like, this is dumb, and this is a dumb way to do anything. And I think that's when we lose people. But, well, I'll leave it at that. But I think that there's something really, really neat about framing it that way. But what I don't like about all of these things, and I love Tex Machina, by the way, although the ending was very depressing. One of the things I have to talk to Alex about, he says that the thing that nobody noticed he put in is at the end, spoiler alert, the robot turns and looks at the camera and smiles, briefly. And to him, he thought that his definition of passing the general version of the Turing test, or the consciousness test, is smiling for no one. It's like the Chinese room kind of experiment. It's not always trying to act for others, but just on your own, being able to have a relationship with the actual experience and just take it in. I don't know, he said nobody noticed the magic of it. I have this vague feeling that I remember the smile, but now you've just put the memory in my head, so probably not. But I do think that that's interesting. Although, by looking at the camera, you are smiling for the audience, right? You're breaking the fourth wall. It seems, I mean, well, that's a limitation of the medium. But I like that idea. But here's the problem I have with all of those movies, all of them, is that, but I know why it's this way, and I enjoy those movies, and Westworld, is it sets up the problem of AI as succeeding and then having something we cannot control. But it's not the bad part of AI. The bad part of AI is the stuff we're living through now, right? It's using the data to make decisions that are terrible. It's not the intelligence that's gonna go out there and surpass us and take over the world or lock us into a room to starve to death slowly over multiple days. It's instead the tools that we're building that are allowing us to make the terrible decisions we would have less efficiently made before, right? Computers are very good at making us more efficient, including being more efficient at doing terrible things. And that's the part of the AI we have to worry about. It's not the true intelligence that we're gonna build sometime in the future, probably long after we're around. But I think that whole framing of it sort of misses the point, even though it is inspiring. And I was inspired by those ideas, right? I got into this in part because I wanted to build something like that. Philosophical questions are interesting to me, but that's not where the terror comes from. The terror comes from the everyday. And you can construct situations in the subtlety of the interaction between AI and the human, like with social networks, all the stuff you're doing with interactive artificial intelligence. But I feel like Cal 9000 came a little bit closer to that in 2001 Space Odyssey, because it felt like a personal assistant. It felt like closer to the AI systems we have today. And the real things we might actually encounter, which is over relying in some fundamental way on our dumb assistants or on social networks, like over offloading too much of us onto things that require internet and power and so on and thereby becoming powerless as a standalone entity. And then when that thing starts to misbehave in some subtle way, it creates a lot of problems. And those problems are dramatized when you're in space, because you don't have a way to walk away. Well, as the man said, once we started making the decisions for you, it stopped being your world, right? That's the matrix, Michael, in case you don't remember. But on the other hand, I could say no, because isn't that what we do with people anyway? You know, just kind of the shared intelligence that is humanity is relying on other people constantly. I mean, we hyper specialize, right? As individuals, we're still generally intelligent. We make our own decisions in a lot of ways, but we leave most of this up to other people. And that's perfectly fine. And by the way, everyone doesn't necessarily share our goals. Sometimes they seem to be quite against us. Sometimes we make decisions that others would see as against our own interests. And yet we somehow manage it, manage to survive. I'm not entirely sure why an AI would actually make that worse or even different, really. You mentioned the matrix. Do you think we're living in a simulation? It does feel like a thought game more than a real scientific question. Well, I'll tell you why I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Let's see what you think. From a computer science perspective, it's a good experiment of how difficult would it be to create a sufficiently realistic world that us humans would enjoy being in. That's almost like a competition. If we're living in a simulation, then I don't believe that we were put in the simulation. I believe that it's just physics playing out and we came out of that. Like, I don't think. So you think you have to build the universe and have all the fun in the world? I think that the universe itself, we can think of that as a simulation. And in fact, sometimes I try to think about, to understand what it's like for a computer to start to think about the world. I try to think about the world. Things like quantum mechanics, where it doesn't feel very natural to me at all. And it really strikes me as, I don't understand this thing that we're living in. It has, there's weird things happening in it that don't feel natural to me at all. Now, if you want to call that as the result of a simulator, okay, I'm fine with that. But like, I don't. There's the bugs in the simulation. There's the bugs. I mean, the interesting thing about the simulation is that it might have bugs. I mean, that's the thing that I, But there would be bugs for the people in the simulation. That's just reality. Unless you were aware enough to know that there was a bug. But I think. Back to the matrix. Yeah, the way you put the question though. I don't think that we live in a simulation created for us. Okay, I would say that. I think that's interesting. I've actually never thought about it that way. I mean, the way you asked the question though, could you create a world that is enough for us humans? It's an interestingly sort of self referential question because the beings that created the simulation probably have not created the simulation that's realistic for them. But we're in the simulation and so it's realistic for us. So we could create a simulation that is fine for the people in the simulation, as it were. That would not necessarily be fine for us as the creators of the simulation. But, well, you can forget. I mean, if you play video games in virtual reality, you can, if some suspension of disbelief or whatever. It becomes a world. It becomes a world. Even like in brief moments, you forget that another world exists. I mean, that's what like good stories do. They pull you in. And the question is, is it possible to pull, our brains are limited. Is it possible to pull the brain in to where we actually stay in that world longer and longer and longer and longer? And like, not only that, but we don't wanna leave. And so, especially this is the key thing about the developing brain, is if we journey into that world early on in life, often. How would you even know, yeah. Yeah, so I, but like from a video game design perspective, from a Westworld perspective, it's, I think it's an important thing for even computer scientists to think about because it's clear that video games are getting much better. And virtual reality, although it's been ups and downs just like artificial intelligence, it feels like virtual reality will be here in a very impressive form if we were to fast forward 100 years into the future in a way that might change society fundamentally. Like if I were to, I'm very limited in predicting the future as all of us are, but if I were to try to predict, like in which way I'd be surprised to see the world 100 years from now, it'd be that, or impressed, it'd be that we're all no longer living in this physical world, that we're all living in a virtual world. You really need to read Calculating God by Sawyer. It's a, he'll read it in the night. It's a very easy read, but it's, assuming you're that kind of reader, but it's a good story. And it's kind of about this, but not in a way that it appears. And I really enjoyed the thought experiment. And I think it's pretty sure it's Robert Sawyer. But anyway, he's apparently Canadian's top science fiction writer, which is why the story mostly takes place in Toronto. But it's a very good sort of story that sort of imagines this. Very different kind of simulation hypothesis sort of thing from say, The Egg, for example. You know, I'm talking about the short story. By the guy who did The Martian. Who wrote The Martian? You know what I'm talking about. The Martian. Matt Damon. The book. So we had this whole discussion that Michael doesn't partake in this exercise of reading. He doesn't seem to like it, which seems very strange to me, considering how much he has to read. I read all the time. I used to read 10 books every week when I was in sixth grade or whatever. I was, a lot of it's science fiction, a lot of it's history, but I love to read. But anyway, you should read Calculating God. I think you'll, it's very easy to read, like I said, and I think you'll enjoy sort of the ideas that it presents. Yeah, I think the thought experiment is quite interesting. One thing I've noticed about people growing up now, I mean, we talk about social media, but video games is a much bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger part of their lives. And the video games have become much more realistic. I think it's possible that the three of us are not, maybe the two of you are not familiar exactly with the numbers we're talking about here. The number of people. It's bigger than movies, right? It's huge. I used to do a lot of the computational narrative stuff. I understand that economists can actually see the impact of video games on the labor market. That there's fewer young men of a certain age participating in like paying jobs than you'd expect. And that they trace it back to video games. I mean, the problem with Star Trek was not warp drive or teleportation. It was the holodeck. Like if you have the holodeck, that's it. That's it, you go in the holodeck, you never come out. I mean, it just never made, once I saw that, I thought, okay, well, so this is the end of humanity as we know it, right? They've invented the holodeck. Because that feels like the singularity, not some AGI or whatever. It's some possibility to go into another world that can be artificially made better than this one. And slowing it down so you live forever. Or speeding it up so you appear to live forever. Or making the decision of when to die. And then most of us will just be old people on the porch yelling at the kids these days in their virtual reality. But they won't hear us because they've got headphones on. So, I mean, rewinding back to Mook's, is there lessons that you've, speaking to kids these days? That was a transition. That was fantastic. I'll fix it in post. That's Charles's favorite phrase. Fix it in post? Fix it in post. Fix it in post. When we were recording all the time, whenever the editor didn't like something or whatever, I would say, we'll fix it in post. He hated that. He hated that more than anything. Because it's Charles's way of saying, I'm not gonna do it again. You're on your own for this one. But it always got fixed in post. Exactly right. So is there something you've learned about, I mean, it's interesting to talk about Mook's. Is there something you've learned about the process of education, about thinking about the present? I think there's two lines of conversation to be had here. There's the future of education in general that you've learned about. And more passionately is the education in the times of COVID. Yeah. The second thing in some ways matters more than the first, for at least in my head, not just because it's happening now, but because I think it's reminded us of a lot of things. Coincidentally, today, there's an article out by a good friend of mine, who's also a professor at Georgia Tech, but more importantly, a writer and editor at the Atlantic, a guy named Ian Bogost. And the title is something like, Americans Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience. And it's about why we went back to college and why people wanted us to go back to college. And it's not greedy presidents trying to get the last dollar from someone. It's because they want to go to college. And what they're paying for is not the classes. What they're paying for is the college experience. It's not the education that's being there. I've believed this for a long time, that we continually make this mistake of, people want to go back to college as being people want to go back to class. They don't. They want to go back to campus. They want to move away from home. They want to do all those things that people experience. It's a rite of passage. It's an identity, if I can steal some of Ian's words here. And I think that's right. And I think what we've learned through COVID is it has made it, the disaggregation was not the disaggregation of the education from the place, the university place, and that you can get the best anywhere you want to. Turns out there's lots of reasons why that is not necessarily true. The disaggregation is having it shoved in our faces that the reason to go, again, that the reason to go to college is not necessarily to learn. It's to have the college experience. And that's very difficult for us to accept, even though we behave that way, most of us, when we were undergrads. A lot of us didn't go to every single class. We learned and we got it and we look back on it and we're happy we had the learning experience as well, obviously, particularly us, because this is the kind of thing that we do. And my guess is that's true of the vast majority of your audience. But that doesn't mean the, I'm standing in front of you telling you this, is the thing that people are excited about. And that's why they want to be there, primarily why they want to be there. So to me, that's what COVID has forced us to deal with, even though I think we're still all in deep denial about it and hoping that it'll go back to that. And I think about 85% of it will. We'll be able to pretend that that's really the way it is, again, and we'll forget the lessons of this. But technically what'll come out of it, or technologically what'll come out of it is a way of providing a more dispersed experience through online education and these kinds of remote things that we've learned. And we'll have to come up with new ways to engage them in the experience of college, which includes not just the parties or the whatever kids do, but the learning part of it so that they actually come out four or five or six years later with having actually learned something. So I think the world will be radically different afterwards. And I think technology will matter for that, just not in the way that the people who were building the technology originally imagined it would be. And I think this would have been true even without COVID, but COVID has accelerated that reality. So it's happening in two or three years or five years, as opposed to 10 or 15. That was an amazing answer that I did not understand. It was passionate and meaningful. Shots fired. But I don't, no, I just didn't, no, I'm not trying to criticize it. I just think, I don't think I'm getting it. So you mentioned disaggregation. So what's that? Well, so the power of technology that if you go on the West Coast and hang out long enough is all about we're gonna disaggregate these things together. The books from the bookstore, that kind of a thing. And then suddenly Amazon controls the universe, right? And technology is a disruptor, right? And people have been predicting that for higher education for a long time, but certainly in the age of moves. So is this the sort of idea like students can aggregate on a campus someplace and then take classes over the network anywhere? Yeah, this is what people thought was gonna happen, or at least people claimed it was gonna happen, right? Because my daughter is essentially doing that now. She's on one campus, but learning in a different campus. Sure, and COVID makes that possible, right? COVID makes that legal, all but avoidable, right? But the idea originally was that, you and I were gonna create this machine learning class and it was gonna be great, and then no one else would, there'd be the machine learning class everyone takes, right? That was never gonna happen, but something like that, you can see happening. But I feel like you didn't address that. Why, why, why is it that, why, why? I don't think that will be the thing that happens. So the college experience, maybe I missed what the college experience was. I thought it was peers, like people hanging around. A large part of it is peers. Well, it's peers and independence. Yeah, but none of that, you can do classes online for all of that. No, no, no, no, because we're social people, right? So you wanna be in the same room. So when we take the classes, that also has to be part of an experience. It's in a context, and the context is the university. And by the way, it actually matters that Georgia Tech really is different from Brown. I see, because then students can choose the kind of experience they think is gonna be best for them. Okay, I think we're giving too much agency to the students in making an informed decision. Okay. But the truth, but yes, they will make choices and they will have different experiences. And some of those choices will be made for them. Some of them will be choices they're making because they think it's this, that, or the other. I just don't want to say, I don't want to give the idea. It's not homogenous. Yes, it's certainly not homogenous, right? I mean, Georgia Tech is different from Brown. Brown is different from pick your favorite state school in Iowa, Iowa State, okay? Which I guess is my favorite state school in Iowa. But these are all different. They have different contexts. And a lot of those contexts are, they're about history, yes, but they're also about the location of where you are. They're about the larger group of people who are around you, whether you're in Athens, Georgia, and you're basically the only thing that's there as a university, you're responsible for all the jobs, or whether you're at Georgia State University, which is an urban campus, where you're surrounded by six million people in your campus where it ends and begins in the city, ends and begins, we don't know. It actually matters whether you're a small campus or a large campus. I mean, these things matter. Why is it that if you go to Georgia Tech, you're forever proud of that, and you say that to people at dinners, like bars and whatever, and if you get a degree at an online university somewhere, that's not a thing that comes up at a bar. Well, it's funny you say that. So the students who take our online masters by several measures are more loyal than the students who come on campus, certainly for the master's degree. The reason for that, I think, and you'd have to ask them, but based on my conversations with them, I feel comfortable saying this, is because this didn't exist before. I mean, we talk about this online masters and that it's reaching 11,000 students, and that's an amazing thing, and we're admitting everyone we believe who can succeed. We got a 60% acceptance rate. It's amazing, right? It's also a $6,600 degree. The entire degree costs $6,600 or $7,000, depending on how long you take. A dollar degree, as opposed to $46,000 it would cost you to come on campus. So that feels, and I can do it while I'm working full time, and I've got a family and a mortgage and all these other things. So it's an opportunity to do something you wanted to do, but you didn't think was possible without giving up two years of your life, as well as all the money and everything else in the life that you had built. So I think we created something that's had an impact, but importantly, we gave a set of people opportunities they otherwise didn't feel they had. So I think people feel very loyal about that. And my biggest piece of evidence for that, besides the surveys, is that we have somewhere north of 80 students, might be 100 at this point, who graduated, but come back in TA for this class, for basically minimum wage, even though they're working full time, because they believe in sort of having that opportunity and they wanna be a part of something. Now, will generation three feel this way? 15 years from now, will people have that same sense? I don't know, but right now they kind of do. And so it's not the online, it's a matter of feeling as if you're a part of something. Right, we're all very tribal, right? And I think there's something very tribal about being a part of something like that. Being on campus makes that easier, going through a shared experience makes that easier. It's harder to have that shared experience if you're alone looking at a computer screen. We can create ways to make that true. But is it possible? It is possible. The question is, it still is the intuition to me, and it was at the beginning when I saw something like the online master's program, is that this is gonna replace universities. No, it won't replace universities. But like why? Because it's living in a different part of the ecosystem, right? The people who are taking it are already adults, they've gone through their undergrad experience. I think their goals have shifted from when they were 17. They have other things that are going on. But it does do something really important, something very social and very important, right? You know this whole thing about, don't build the sidewalks, just leave the grass and the students or the people will walk and you put the sidewalks where they create paths, this kind of thing. That's interesting, yeah. Their architects apparently believe that's the right way to do things. The metaphor here is that we created this environment, we didn't quite know how to think about the social aspect, but we didn't have time to solve all, do all the social engineering, right? The students did it themselves, they created these groups, like on Google Plus, there were like 30 something groups created in the first year because somebody had used Google Plus. And they created these groups and they divided up in ways that made sense. We live in the same state or we're working on the same things or we have the same background or whatever and they created these social things. We sent them T shirts and they wear, we have all these great pictures of students putting on their T shirts as they travel around the world. I climbed this mountain top, I'm putting this T shirt on, I'm a part of this, they were a part of them. They created the social environment on top of the social network and the social media that existed to create this sense of belonging and being a part of something. They found a way to do it, right? And I think they had other, it scratched an itch that they had, but they had scratched some of that itch that might've required they'd be physically in the same place long before, right? So I think, yes, it's possible and it's more than possible, it's necessary. But I don't think it's going to replace the university as we know it. The university as we know it will change. But there's just a lot of power in the kind of rite of passage kind of going off to yourself. Now, maybe there'll be some other rite of passage that'll happen. That'll drive us somewhere else, it's possible. So the university is such a fascinating mess of things. So just even the faculty position is a fascinating mess. Like it doesn't make any sense. It's stabilized itself, but like why are the world class researchers spending a huge amount of time or their time teaching and service? Like you're doing like three jobs. And I mean, it turns out it's maybe an accident of history or human evolution, I don't know. It seems like the people who are really good at teaching are often really good at research. There seems to be a parallel there, but like it doesn't make any sense that you should be doing that. At the same time, it also doesn't seem to make sense that your place where you party is the same place where you go to learn calculus or whatever. But it's a safe space. Safe space for everything. Yeah, relatively speaking, it's a safe space. Now, by the way, I feel the need very strongly to point out that we are living in a very particular weird bubble, right? Most people don't go to college. And by the way, the ones who do go to college, they're not 18 years old, right? They're like 25 or something. I forget the numbers. The places where we've been, where we are, they look like whatever we think the traditional movie version of universities are. But for most people, it's not that way at all. By the way, most people who drop out of college, it's entirely for financial reasons, right? So we were talking about a particular experience. And so for that set of people, which is very small, but larger than it was a decade or two or three or four, certainly, ago, I don't think that will change. My concern, which I think is kind of implicit in some of these questions, is that somehow we will divide the world up further into the people who get to have this experience and get to have the network and they sort of benefit from it, and everyone else, while increasingly requiring that they have more and more credentials in order to get a job as a barista, right? You gotta have a master's degree in order to work at Starbucks. I mean, we're gonna force people to do these things, but they're not gonna get to have that experience, and there'll be a small group of people who do who will continue to, you know, positive feedback, look, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I worry a lot about that, which is why, for me, and by the way, here's an answer to your question about faculty, which is why, to me, that you have to focus on access and the mission. I think the reason, whether it's good, bad, or strange, I mean, I agree, it's strange, but I think it's useful to have the faculty member, particularly at large R1 universities where we've all had experiences, that you tie what they get to do and with the fundamental mission of the university and let the mission drive. What I hear when I talk to faculty is, they love their PhD students because they're reproducing, basically, right? And it lets them do their research and multiply. But they understand that the mission is the undergrads, and so they will do it without complaint, mostly, because it's a part of the mission and why they're here, and they have experiences with it themselves, and it was important to get them where they were going. The people who tend to get squeezed in that, by the way, are the master's students, right, who are neither the PhDs who are like us nor the undergrads we have already bought into the idea that we have to teach, though. That's increasingly changing. Anyway, I think tying that mission in really matters, and it gives you a way to unify people around making it an actual higher calling. Education feels like more of a higher calling to me than even research, because education, you cannot treat it as a hobby if you're going to do it well. But that's the pushback on this whole system is that education should be a full time job, right? And it's almost like research is a distraction from that. Yes, although I think most of our colleagues, many of our colleagues would say that research is the job and education is the distraction. Right, but that's the beautiful dance. It seems to be that tension in itself seems to work, seems to bring out the best in the faculty. But I will point out two things. One thing I'm going to point out, and the other thing I want Michael to point out, because I think Michael is much closer to sort of the ideal professor in some sense than I am. Well, he is a dean. You're the platonic sense of a professor. I don't know what he meant by that, but he is a dean, so he has a different experience. I'm giving him time to think of the profound thing he's going to say. That was good. But let me point this out, which is that we have lecturers in the College of Computing where I am. There's 10 or 12 of them, depending on how you count, as opposed to the 90 or so tenure track faculty. Those 10 lecturers who only teach, well, they don't only teach, they also do service. Some of them do research as well, but primarily they teach. They teach 50%, over 50% of our credit hours, and we teach everybody, right? So they're doing not just, they're doing more than eight times the work of the tenure track faculty, just more closer to nine or 10. And that's including our grad courses, right? So they're doing this, they're teaching more, they're touching more than anyone, and they're beloved for it. I mean, so we recently had a survey. Everyone does these alumni surveys. You hire someone from the outside to do whatever, and I was really struck by something. You saw all these really cool numbers. I'm not going to talk about it because it's all internal, confidential stuff. But one thing I will talk about is there was a single question we asked our alum, and these are people who graduated, born in the 30s and 40s, all the way up to people who graduated last week, right? Well, last semester. Okay, good. Time flies. Yeah, time flies. And it was the question, name a single person who had a strong positive impact on you, something like that. I think it was special impact? Yeah, special impact on you. And then, so they got all the answers from people, and they created a word cloud. It was clearly a word cloud created by people who don't do word clouds for a living because they had one person whose name appeared like nine different times, like Philip, Phil, Dr. Phil, you know, but whatever. But they got all this. And I looked at it, and I noticed something really cool. The five people from the College of Computing, I recognized, were in that cloud. And four of them were lecturers, the people who teach. Two of them, relatively modern, both were chairs of our division of computing instruction. One just, one retired, one is going to retire soon. And the other two were lecturers, I remembered, from the 1980s. Two of those four actually have. By the way, the fifth person was Charles. That's not important. The thing is, I don't tell people that. But the two of those people our teaching awards are named after. Thank you, Michael. Two of those our teaching awards are named after, right? So when you ask students, alumni, people who are now 60, 70 years old even, you know, who touched them? They say the Dean of Students. They say the big teachers who taught the big introductory classes that got me into it. There's a guy named Richard Park who's on there, who's, you know, who's known as a great teacher. The Phil Adler guy who, I probably just said his last name wrong, but I know the first name's Phil because he kept showing up over and over again. Famous. Adler is what it said. Okay, good. But different people spelled it differently. So he appeared multiple times. Right. So he was a, clearly, he was a professor in the business school. But when you read about him, I went to read about him because I was curious who he was. You know, it's all about his teaching and the students that he touched, right? So whatever it is that we're doing and we think we're doing that's important or why we think the universities function, the people who go through it, they remember the people who were kind to them, the people who taught them something, and they do remember it. They remember it later. I think that's important. That's why the mission matters. Yeah. Not to completely lose track of the fundamental problem of how do we replace the party aspect of universities before we go to the what makes the platonic professor. Do you think, like, what in your sense is the role of MOOCs in this whole picture during COVID? Like, should we desperately be clamoring to get back on campus? Or is this a stable place to be for a little while? I don't know. I know that the online teaching experience and learning experience has been really rough. I think that people find it to be a struggle in a way that's not a happy, positive struggle, that when you got through it, you just feel like glad that it's over as opposed to I've achieved something. So, you know, I worry about that. But, you know, I worry about just even before this happened, I worry about lecture teaching, how well is that actually really working as far as a way to do education, as a way to inspire people. I mean, all the data that I'm aware of seems to indicate, and this kind of fits, I think, with Charles's story, is that people respond to connection, right? They actually feel, if they feel connected to the person teaching the class, they're more likely to go along with it. They're more able to retain information. They're more motivated to be involved in the class in some way. And that really matters. People... You mean to the human themselves. Yeah. Okay, can't you do that actually perhaps more effectively online? Like you mentioned, science communication. So I literally, I think, learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang by watching MIT OpenCourseWare when I was in track. Like, and he was a personality, he was a bit like a tiny... In this tiny little world of math, he's a bit of a rockstar, right? So you kind of look up to that person. Can't that replace the in person education? It can help. I will point out something, I can't share the numbers, but we have surveyed our students, and even though they have feelings about what I would interpret as connection, I like that word, in the different modes of classrooms, there's no difference between how well they think they're learning. For them, the thing that makes them unhappy is the situation they're in. And I think the lack of connection, it's not whether they're learning anything. They seem to think they're learning something anyway, right? In fact, they seem to think they're learning it equally well, presumably because the faculty are putting in, or the instructors, more generally speaking, are putting in the energy and effort to try to make certain that what they've curated can be expressed to them in a useful way. But the connection is missing. And so there's huge differences in what they prefer. And as far as I can tell, what they prefer is more connection, not less. That connection just doesn't have to be physically in a classroom. I mean, look, I used to teach 348 students in my machine learning class on campus. Do you know why? That was the biggest classroom on campus. They're sitting in theater seats. I'm literally on a stage looking down on them and talking to them, right? There's no, I mean, we're not sitting down, having a one on one conversation, reading each other's body language, trying to communicate and going, we're not doing any of that. So if you're past the third row, it might as well be online anyway is the kind of thing that people have said. Daphne has actually said some version of this that online starts on the third row or something like that. And I think that's not, yeah, I like it. I think it captures something important. But people still came, by the way. Even the people who had access to our material would still come to class. I mean, there's a certain element about looking to the person next to you. It's just like their presence there, their boredom. And like when the parts are boring and their excitement when the parts are exciting, like in sharing in that, like unspoken kind of, yeah, communication. In part, the connection is with the other people in the room. Yeah, watching the circus on TV alone is not really. Ever been to a movie theater and been the only one there at a comedy? It's not as funny as when you're in a room full of people all laughing. Well, you need, maybe you need just another person. It's like, as opposed to many. Maybe there's some kind of. Well, there's different kinds of connection, right? And there's different kinds of comedy. Well, in the sense that. As we're learning today. I wasn't sure if that was gonna land. But just the idea that different jokes, I've now done a little bit of standup. And so different jokes work in different size crowds too. No, it's true. Where sometimes if it's a big enough crowd, then even a really subtle joke can take root someplace and then that cues other people. And it kind of, there's a whole statistics of. I did this terrible thing to my brother. So when I was really young, I decided that my brother was only laughing as it comes when I laughed. Like he was taking cues from me. So I like purposely didn't laugh just to see if I was right. And did you laugh at non funny things? Yes. You really wanna do both sides. I did both sides. And at the end of it, I told him what I did. He was very upset about this. And from that day on. He lost his sense of humor. No, no, no, no. Well, yes. But from that day on, he laughed on his own. He stopped taking cues from me. I see. So I wanna say that it was a good thing that I did. Yes, yes. You saved that man's life. Yes, but it was mostly mean. But it's true though. It's true, right? That people, I think you're right. But okay, so where does that get us? That gets us the idea that, I mean, certainly movie theaters are a thing, right? Where people like to be watching together, even though the people on the screen aren't really co present with the people in the audience. The audience is co present with themselves. By the way, and that point, it's an open question that's being raised by this, whether movies will no longer be a thing because Netflix's audience is growing. So that's, it's a very parallel question for education. Will movie theaters still be a thing in 2021? No, but I think the argument is that there is a feeling of being in the crowd that isn't replicated by being at home watching it and that there's value in that. And then I think just. But, but. It scales better online. But I feel like we're having a conversation about whether concerts will still exist after the invention of the record or the CD or wherever it is, right? They won't. You're right, concerts are dead. Well, okay, I think the joke is only funny if you say it before now. Right, yeah, that's true. Like three years ago. It's like, well, no, obviously concerts are still a big thing. I'll wait to publish this until we have a vaccine. No, you know, we'll fix it in post. But I think the important thing is. Fix the virus post. Concerts changed, right? Concerts changed. First of all, movie theaters weren't this way, right? In like the 60s and 70s, they weren't like this. Like blockbusters were basically what? Well, Jaws and Star Wars created blockbusters, right? Before then, there weren't. Like the whole shared summer experience didn't exist in our lifetimes, right? Certainly you were well into adulthood by the time this was true, right? So it's just a very different. It's very different. So what we've been experiencing in the last 10 years is not like the majority of human history, but more importantly, concerts, right? Concerts mean something different. Most people don't go to concerts anymore. Like there's an age where you care about it. You sort of stop doing it, but you keep listening to music or whatever and da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So I think that's a painful way of saying that it will change. It was not the same thing as it going away. Replace is too strong of a word, but it will change. It has to. Actually, like to push back, I wonder, because I think you're probably just throwing that your intuition now. Oh, I wasn't. And it's possible that concerts, more people go to concerts now, but obviously much more people listen to, well, that's dumb, than before there was records. It's possible to argue that if you look at the data, that it just expanded the pie of what music listening means. So it's possible that universities grow in the parallel or the theaters grow, but also more people get to watch movies, more people get to be educated. Yeah, I hope that is true. Yeah, and to the extent that we can grow the pie and have education be not just something you do for four years when you're done with your other education, but it be a more lifelong thing, that would have tremendous benefits, especially as the economy and the world change rapidly. People need opportunities to stay abreast of these changes. And so, I don't know, that's all part of the ecosystem. It's all to the good. I mean, I'm not gonna have an argument about whether we lost fidelity when we went from Laserdisc to DVDs or record players to CDs. I mean, I'm willing to grant that that is true, but convenience matters and the ability to do something that you couldn't do otherwise because that convenience matters. And you can tell me I'm only getting 90% of the experience, but I'm getting the experience. I wasn't getting it before or it wasn't lasting as long or it wasn't as easy. I mean, this just seems straightforward to me. It's gonna, it's going to change. It is for the good that more people get access and it is our job to do two separate things. One, to educate them and make access available. That's our mission. But also for very simple selfish reasons, we need to figure out how to do it better so that we individually stay in business. We can do both of those things at the same time. They are not in, they may be intention, but they are not mutually exclusive. So you've educated some scary number of people. So you've seen a lot of people succeed, find their path through life. Is there a device that you can give to a young person today about computer science education, about education in general, about life, about whatever the journey that one takes in there, maybe in their teens, in their early 20s, sort of in those underground years as you try to go through the essential process of partying and not going to classes and yet somehow trying to get a degree? If you get to the point where you're far enough up in the hierarchy of needs that you can actually make decisions like this, then find the thing that you're passionate about and pursue it. And sometimes it's the thing that drives your life and sometimes it's secondary. And you'll do other things because you've got to eat, right? You've got a family, you've got to feed, you've got people you have to help or whatever. And I understand that and it's not easy for everyone, but always take a moment or two to pursue the things that you love, the things that bring passion and happiness to your life. And if you don't, I know that sounds corny, but I genuinely believe it. And if you don't have such a thing, then you're lying to yourself. You have such a thing. You just have to find it. And it's okay if it takes you a long time to get there. Rodney Dangerfield became a comedian in his 50s, I think. Certainly wasn't his 20s. And lots of people failed for a very long time before getting to where they were going. I try to have hope and it wasn't obvious. I mean, you and I talked about the experience that I had a long time ago with a particular police officer. Was it my first one and was it my last one? But in my view, I wasn't supposed to be here after that and I'm here. So it's all gravy. So you might as well go ahead and grab life as you can because of that. That's sort of how I see it. While recognizing, again, the delusion matters, right? Allow yourself to be deluded. Allow yourself to believe that it's all gonna work out. Just don't be so deluded that you miss the obvious. And you're gonna be fine. It's gonna be there. It's gonna be there. It's gonna work out. What do you think? I like to say choose your parents wisely because that has a big impact on your life. It's different. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole lot of things that you don't get to pick. And whether you get to have one kind of life or a different kind of life can depend a lot on things out of your control. But I really do believe in the passion, excitement thing. My, I was talking to my mom on the phone the other day and essentially what came out is that computer science is really popular right now. And I get to be a professor teaching something that's very attractive to people. And she was like trying to give me some appreciation for how foresightful I was for choosing this line of work as if somehow I knew that this is what was gonna happen in 2020, but that's not how it went for me at all. Like I studied computer science because I was just interested. It was just so interesting to me. I didn't think it would be particularly lucrative. And I've done everything I've can to keep it as unlucrative as possible. Some of my friends and colleagues have not done that. And I pride myself on my ability to remain unrich. But I do believe that, like I'm glad. I mean, I'm glad that it worked out for me. It could have been like, oh, what I was really fascinated by is this particular kind of engraving that nobody cares about. But so I got lucky and the thing that I cared about happened to be a thing that other people eventually cared about. But I don't think I would have had a fun time choosing anything else. Like this was the thing that kept me interested and engaged. Well, one thing that people tell me, especially around the early undergraduate, and the internet is part of the problem here, is they say they're passionate about so many things. How do I choose a thing? Which is a harder thing for me to know what to do with. Is there any? I mean, don't you know which, I mean, you know, look. A long time ago, I walked down a hallway and I took a left turn. Yeah. I could have taken a right turn. And my world could be better or it could be worse. I have no idea. I have no way of knowing. Is there anything about this particular hallway that's relevant or you're just in general choices? Yeah, you were on the left. It sounds like you regret not taking the right turn. Oh no, not at all. You brought it up. Well, because there was a turn there. On the left was Michael Newman's office, right? I mean, these sorts of things happen, right? But here's the thing. On the right, by the way, there was just a blank wall. It wasn't a huge choice. It would have really hurt. He tried first. No, but it's true, right? You know, I think about Ron Brockman, right? I went, I took a trip I wasn't supposed to take and I ended up talking to Ron about this and I ended up going down this entire path that allowed me to, I think, get tenure. But by the way, I decided to say yes to something that didn't make any sense and I went down this educational path. But it would have been, you know, who knows, right? Maybe if I hadn't done that, I would be a billionaire right now. I'd be Elon Musk. My life could be so much better. My life could also be so much worse. You know, you just gotta feel that sometimes you have decisions you're gonna make. You cannot know what's gonna do. You should think about it, right? Some things are clearly smarter than other things. You gotta play the odds a little bit. But in the end, if you've got multiple choices, there are lots of things you think you might love. Go with the thing that you actually love, the thing that jumps out at you and sort of pursue it for a little while. The worst thing that'll happen is you took a left turn instead of a right turn and you ended up merely happy. Beautiful. So, so accepting, so taking the step and just accepting, accepting that, that don't like question, question the choice. Life is long and there's time to actually pursue. Every once in a while, you have to put on a leather suit and make a thriller video. Every once in a while. If I ever get the chance again, I'm doing it. Yeah. I was told that you actually dance, but that part was edited out. I don't dance. There was a thing where we did do the zombie thing. We did do the zombie thing. That wasn't edited out. It just wasn't put into the final thing. I'm quite happy. There was a reason for that too, right? Like I wasn't wearing something right. There was a reason for that. I can't remember what it was. No leather suit. Is that what it was? I can't remember. Anyway, the right thing happened. Exactly. You took the left turn and ended up being the right thing. So a lot of people ask me that are a little bit tangential to the programming and the computing world and they're interested to learn programming, like all kinds of disciplines that are outside of the particular discipline of computer science. What advice do you have for people that want to learn how to program or want to either taste this little skill set or discipline or try to see if it can be used somehow in their own life? What stage of life are they in? One of the magic things about the internet of the people that write me is I don't know. Because my answer's different for, my daughter is taking AP computer science right now. Hi, Joni. She's amazing and doing amazing things and my son's beginning to get interested and I'll be really curious where he takes it. I think his mind actually works very well for this sort of thing and she's doing great. But one of the things I have to tell her all the time, she points, well, I want to make a rhythm game. So I want to go for two weeks and then build a rhythm game. Show me how to build a rhythm game. Start small, learn the building blocks and how to take the time. Have patience, eventually you'll build a rhythm game. I was in grad school when I suddenly woke up one day over the Royal East and I thought, wait a minute, I'm a computer scientist. I should be able to write Pac Man in an afternoon. And I did, not with great graphics. It was actually a very cool game. I had to figure out how the ghost moved and everything and I did it in an afternoon in Pascal on an old Apple 2GS. But if I had started out trying to build Pac Man, I think it probably would have ended very poorly for me. Luckily back then, there weren't these magical devices we call phones and software everywhere to give me this illusion that I could create something by myself from the basics inside of a weekend like that. I mean, that was a culmination of years and years and years right before I decided, oh, I should be able to write this and I could. So my advice if you're early on is you've got the internet. There are lots of people there to give you the information. Find someone who cares about this. Remember, they've been doing it for a very long time. Take it slow, learn the little pieces, get excited about it and then keep the big project you want to build in mind. You'll get there soon enough. Because as a wise man once said, life is long. Sometimes it doesn't seem that long, but it is long and you'll have enough time to build it all out. All the information is out there, but start small. Generate Fibonacci numbers. That's not exciting, but it'll get you the language. Well, there's only one programming language, it's Lisp. But if you have to pick a programming language, I guess in today's day, what would I do? I guess I'd do. Python is basically Lisp, but with better syntax. Blasphemy. Yeah, with C syntax, how about that? So you're gonna argue that C syntax is better than anything? Anyway, also I'm gonna answer Python despite what he said. Tell your story about somebody's dissertation that had a Lisp program in it. It was so funny. This is Dave's, Dave's dissertation was like, Dave McAllister, who was a professor at MIT for a while and then he came to Bell Labs and now he's at Technology Technical Institute of Chicago. A brilliant guy. Such an interesting guy. Anyway, his thesis, it was a theorem prover and he decided to have as an appendix his actual code, which of course was all written in Lisp because of course it was. And like the last 20 pages are just right parenthesis. It's just wonderful. That's programming right there. Pages upon pages of right parenthesis. Anyway, Lisp is the only real language, but I understand that that's not necessarily the place where you start. Python is just fine. Python is good. If you're, you know, of a certain age, if you're really young and trying to figure it out, graphical languages that let you kind of see how the thing works and that's fine too. They're all fine. It almost doesn't matter. But there are people who spend a lot of time thinking about how to build languages that get people in. The question is, are you trying to get in and figure out what it is? Or do you already know what you want? And that's why I asked you what stage of life people are in because if you're different stages of life, you would attack it differently. The answer to that question of which language keeps changing, I mean, there's some value to exploring, a lot of people write to me about Julia. There's these like more modern languages that keep being invented, Rust and Kotlin. There's stuff that, for people who love functional languages like Lisp, that apparently there's echoes of that, but much better in the modern languages. And it's worthwhile to, especially when you're learning languages, it feels like it's okay to try one that's not like the popular one. Oh yeah, but you want something simple. And I think you get that way of thinking almost no matter what language. And if you push far enough, like it can be assembly language, but you need to push pretty far before you start to hit the really deep concepts that you would get sooner in other languages. But like, I don't know, computation is kind of computation, is kind of Turing equivalent, is kind of computation. And so it matters how you express things, but you have to build out that mental structure in your mind. And I don't think it's super matters which language. I mean, it matters a little, because some things are just at the wrong level of abstraction. I think assembly is at the wrong level of abstraction for someone coming in new. I think that if you start. For someone coming in new. Yes, for frameworks, big frameworks are quite a bit. You know, you've got to get to the point where I want to learn a new language, means I just pick up a reference book and I think of a project and I go through it in a weekend. Right, you got to get there. You're right though, the languages that are designed for that are, it almost doesn't matter. Pick the ones that people have built tutorials and infrastructure around to help you get kind of, kind of ease into it. Because it's hard. I mean, I did this little experiment once. I was teaching intro to CS in the summer as a favor. Which is, anyway. I was teaching. I was teaching intro to CS as a favor. And it was very funny because I'd go in every single time and I would think to myself, how am I possibly going to fill up an hour and a half talking about for loops, right? And there wasn't enough time. Took me a while to realize this, right? There are only three things, right? There's reading from a variable, writing to a variable and conditional branching. Everything else is syntactic sugar, right? The syntactic sugar matters, but that's it. And when I say that's it, I don't mean it's simple. I mean, it's hard. Like conditional branching, loops, variable. Those are really hard concepts. So you shouldn't be discouraged by this. Here's a simple experiment. I'm gonna ask you a question now. You ready? X equals three. Okay. Y equals four. Okay. What is X? Three. What is Y? Four. Y equals X. I'm gonna mess this up. No, it's easy. Y equals X. Y equals X. What is Y? Three. That's right. X equals seven. What is Y? That's one of the trickiest things to get for programmers, that there's a memory and the variables are pointing to a particular thing in memory, and sometimes the languages hide that from you and they bring it closer to the way you think mathematics works. Right, so in fact, Mark Guzdal, who worries about these sorts of things, or used to worry about these sorts of things anyway, had this kind of belief that actually, people when they see these statements, X equals something, Y equals something, Y equals X, that you have now made a mathematical statement that Y and X are the same. Which you can if you just put like an anchor in front of it. Yes, but people, that's not what you're doing, right? I thought, and I kind of asked the question, and I think I had some evidence for this, it's hardly a study, is that most of the people who didn't know the answer, weren't sure about the answer, they had used spreadsheets. Ah, interesting. And so it's, you know, it's by reference, or by name really, right? And so depending upon what you think they are, you get completely different answers. The fact that I could go, or one could go, two thirds of the way through a semester, and people still hadn't figured out in their heads, when you say Y equals X, what that meant, tells you it's actually hard. Because all those answers are possible, and in fact, when you said, oh, if you just put an ampersand in front of it, I mean, that doesn't make any sense for an intro class, and of course a lot of languages don't even give you the ability to think about it in terms of ampersand. Do we want to have a 45 minute discussion about the difference between equal EQ and equal in Lisp? Yeah. I know you do. No. But you know, you could do that. This is actually really hard stuff. So you shouldn't be, it's not too hard, we all do it, but you shouldn't be discouraged. It's why you should start small, so that you can figure out these things, so you have the right model in your head, so that when you write the language, you can execute it, and build the machine that you want to build, right? Yeah, the funny thing about programming, and those very basic things, is the very basics are not often made explicit, which is actually what drives everybody away from basically any discipline, but programming is just another one. Like even a simpler version of the equal sign that I kind of forget, is in mathematics, equals is not assignment. Yeah. Like, I think basically every single programming language with just a few handful of exceptions, equals is assignment. And you have some other operator for equality. And even that, like everyone kind of knows it, once you started doing it, but like you need to say that explicitly, or you just realize it, like yourself. Otherwise you might be stuck for, you said like half a semester, you could be stuck for quite a long time. And I think also part of the programming is being okay in that state of confusion for a while. It's to the debugging point. It's like, I just wrote two lines of code, why doesn't this work? And staring at that for like hours, and trying to figure out. And then every once in a while, you just have to restart your computer and everything works again. And then you just kind of stare into the void with the tear slowly rolling down your eye. By the way, the fact that they didn't get this actually had no impact on, I mean, they were still able to do their assignments. Because it turns out their misunderstanding wasn't being revealed to them by the problem sets we were giving them. It's pretty profound actually, yeah. I wrote a program a long time ago, actually for my master's thesis, and in C++ I think, or C, I guess it was C. And it was all memory management and terrible. And it wouldn't work for a while. And it was some kind of, it was clear to me that it was overriding memory. And I just couldn't, I was like, look, I got to pay for this time for this. So I basically declared a variable at the front in the main that was like 400K, just an array, and it worked. Because wherever I was scribbling over memory, it would scribble into that space and it didn't matter. And so I never figured out what the bug was. But I did create something to sort of deal with it. To work around it. And it, you know, that's crazy, that's crazy. It was okay, because that's what I wanted. But I knew enough about memory managed to go, you know, management to go, you know, I'm just going to create an empty array here and hope that that deals with this scribbling memory problem. And it did. That takes a long time to figure out. And by the way, the language you first learned probably just garbage collection anyway, so you're not even going to come up across, you're not going to come across that problem. So we talked about the Minsky idea of hating everything you do and hating yourself. So let's end on a question that's going to make both of you very uncomfortable. Okay. Which is, what is your, Charles, what's your favorite thing that you're grateful for about Michael? And Michael, what is your favorite thing that you're grateful for about Charles? Well, that answer is actually quite easy. His friendship. He stole the easy answer. I did. Yeah, I can tell you what I hate about Charles, he steals my good answers. The thing I like most about Charles, he sees the world in a similar enough, but different way that I, it's sort of like having another life. It's sort of like I get to experience things that I wouldn't otherwise get to experience because I would not naturally gravitate to them that way. And so he just, he just shows me a whole other world. It's awesome. Yeah, the inner product is not zero for sure. It's not quite one, 0.7 maybe. Just enough that you can learn. Just enough that you can learn. That's the definition of friendship. The inner product is 0.7. Yeah, I think so. That's the answer to life really. Charles sometimes believes in me when I have not believed in me. He also sometimes works as an outward confidence that he has so much, so much confidence and self, I don't know, comfortableness. Okay, let's go with that. That I feel better a little bit. If he thinks I'm okay, then maybe I'm not as bad as I think I am. At the end of the day, luck favors the Charles. It's a huge honor to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking this time, wasting your time with me. It was an awesome conversation. You guys are an inspiration to a huge number of people and to me, so really enjoyed this. Thanks for talking to me. I enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much. And by the way, if luck favors the Charles, then it's certainly the case that I've been very lucky to know you. I'm gonna edit that part out. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Isbell and Michael Littman. And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Super Nutritional Drink, Eight Sleep, Self Cooling Mattress, Masterclass Online Courses from some of the most amazing humans in history, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars Napa Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Desmond Tutu. Don't raise your voice, improve your argument. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Charles Isbell and Michael Littman: Machine Learning and Education | Lex Fridman Podcast #148

The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh Basolka, a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic, UFOs, Religion and Technology. This book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology, belief and the mystery of alien intelligence. Quick mention of our sponsors, Element Electrolyte Drink, Grammarly Writing Plugin, Business Wars Podcast and Cash App. So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life, intelligence and how they might communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine. What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world and, as Diana argues, the technology we create. Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality in just a matter of years through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation. The nature and power of this belief, in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence, is mysterious and fascinating, perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind, our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh Pasalka. You are a scholar of religious belief, or belief in general. So, the fascinating question, what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality? What is real, period? Sure, what is real? Easy question. So first, let me start with belief. So, belief is generally, there are different definitions of belief, just as there are different definitions of what is real, okay? So, for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions, okay? So, we believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow, therefore we act as if it will rise tomorrow, all right? Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed, and actually some still do, that the earth was flat, okay? Well, that's obviously an erroneous belief. So, beliefs can be wrong. Now, the bigger question that philosophers ask is, is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So, now let me go to objective reality. So, what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again, and that would be Immanuel Kant. So, Immanuel Kant is one of the, he was basically in the 1750s, he wrote critiques of reason and things like that. So, he said, well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is. He had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in itself, okay? So, and he called that the numeral, the thing in itself. He said, let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across. So, this thing is a table. You and I both know that. We assume it's real. We believe in it because we put our water on it and our water stays on it, okay? However, can we know this thing in and of itself as a table? So, that would be what he then would call the phenomenal. How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is, okay? How do we know? We use our faculties. So, we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong. So, I've been on committees just recently this year, last year, for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers. And we're hiring metaphysicians and people who are thinking about the nature of reality. And basically, what I've learned from them, yeah, they're very good. I'd love to attend those faculty talks of metaphysics professors. What's funny is that for each one of them, I'm convinced each time. They all say different things, but they're so convincing. I'm like, yes, hire that one, right? Is it like historical philosophy, like a particular talk? No, no. Or do they have an actual belief? They're practicing metaphysicians. Metaphysicians, yes. So, what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from Harvard or USC or whatever. They come and they give what's called a job talk. That's what every academic does a job talk in order to get it. They talk to us about a department about what they do. And so, it so happens that we need a metaphysician and now we're hiring again for one. And so, I've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year. And this is what I've learned that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real. And what is real is really difficult to pin down. And so, your question is, what is belief? Well, belief, does it correspond to reality? That's the question I would ask. And first, we don't even know what is real. So, the table, they would say, how do we know that the table even exists? Well, how do we differentiate it from the floor, for example? So, these are the questions that philosophers are asking. No one else is, of course. But philosophers are asking these questions and they have different answers for it. So, I would say that it's very difficult to know what is real. And in fact, what I do usually is I paraphrase my friend and colleague, Brother Guy Consolmagno. He's a Jesuit priest who's also an astronomer and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory. And so, he says this, he's a very smart person. He says, well, truth is a moving target. So, basically, to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that, you've got to approximate it. And as human beings, we have senses to tell us what, at least so we don't get hurt. We're not going to fall off a building or something like that. We have eyes to see and things like that. So, we can approximate what reality is, but we're never going to get to it unless we develop better senses, okay? And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing. We're developing better senses. We have telescopes, we have microscopes, we have extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology. And we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is. And therefore, our beliefs can be honed. So, we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs. But can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality? Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So, I hope that's not like too big an answer to your question. Well, do you think beliefs are in themselves can become reality? I mean, so you've now adapted the, in this little bit of a conversation, adapted the metaphysician view of reality, which is the physics. Yes. But, you know, we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas very much so. Like we've kind of in the collective intelligence of human beings, have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people. And they become quite strong and powerful. Like in terms of like impact on our lives, they can have sometimes more impact than this table does than the physics. Yeah, I agree. And in that sense, is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality, even if they're not connected to the physics? Yes, even if they're not real. Yeah, even if, okay. So, yes, absolutely. So, our beliefs are tremendously, they create social effects, absolutely. There was a belief that, I'm going to use this example. There was a belief back in the day, and we're talking about, when I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like 1000 years ago, right? That women had no souls, okay? So, look, I don't know if human beings have souls. I can tell you this, though, that if human beings have souls, probably animals do too. That's my own personal belief. That's not a professor belief there. But there was this belief among the Catholic magisterium, which runs Europe, that women had no souls. So, they had to have this big meeting about it, you know, did women have souls? But that belief had consequences for women. I mean, women were treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls. Okay, so there's... And the soul was really the essence of the human being. It was. It's called the animus, right? It's what is the essence of what is eternal, you know, when women weren't eternal. Here's another example, okay? This is an example from my own research. All right. So, in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory, hell, and heaven. And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. And if you're great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible, you go to hell, right? Okay. Well, there was a place that the Catholics determined, and this was a belief for a long time, like a thousand years or more, and it was called limbo, all right? And limbo comes from the Latin limbus, and it means edge. And it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven. No one really could determine which it was. No historians are like, well, this person says it was on the edge of heaven. Well, listen, this was a terrible... First of all, there is no limbo anymore. In 2007, Benedict, the then Pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo, okay? So Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know. They forgot that limbo existed and they thought it was purgatory. And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory? But actually, he just got rid of this idea of limbo. Oh, so that's a distinct thing from purgatory. It was. And by the way, people should know they have a book on purgatory that came before... American Cosmic. Yes, I wrote a book on purgatory, yeah. Anyway, so limbo is a distinct thing from purgatory? Yeah. And the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans, okay? Like Socrates or somebody like that. And children who weren't baptized. So think of this. Think of for like more than a thousand years, mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial... And then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven. Think of the pain and suffering that that caused. And that was nothing. Limbo's nothing. Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering. And that's just a small example. And that was as real to them? It was absolutely real. I mean, the effects were real, let's put it that way. The place itself, not real. But the families themselves, do you think they really believed it? They totally believed it. As much as the table is real? Yes. I've read, listen, we have trigger warnings today, right? So don't read this, it's gonna make you upset, okay? History, primary sources, no trigger warnings, okay? So you're going through like somebody's diary from 1400 and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through. There were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true because they wouldn't write something, they're not gonna write in their diary something that's not true and it was horrible. So yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing because they had an erroneous belief. But they didn't know it was erroneous. So it was real to them? Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman. He has this idea that in terms of the distance we are from being able to know the reality, which is there, the physics reality, is we're actually really, really, really, really far away from that. Yeah. So like it's, I think his ideas that were basically like completely detached from it. Yes. What's your sense, how close are we to the reality? We'll talk about a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and beyond, but in terms of what is actually real from a physical sense, how close are we to understanding that? Pretty far. I'm gonna use examples from what I do. Okay, so this idea that we're suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new. Of course, it goes back a long time, thousands of years, in fact. And philosophers, I'm not actually technically a philosopher, but I was one. I'm a professor of religious studies. Yeah, what do you introduce yourself at, like at a bar when the bartender asks, what do you do? I never tell people what I do, especially on airplanes. It's a bad idea. So generally if they push though, I say, I'm the chair of philosophy and religion, although I stepped down last year, so I'm no longer the chair. But I have like a master's degree in philosophy and I was a philosophy major and I still study philosophy, so I integrate it into my research. All right, so this idea that we can't know, we're suspicious of what we know, it's called external world skepticism. That's the official philosophical name for it. Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there, okay, especially at a quantum level or a molecular level. I mean, that's just obvious. So yeah, so I think that the person you mentioned is correct in that. I think we're far away from it. I think you're talking about our direct senses, but you know, we have tools, measurement tools from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy, cosmology that gives us a sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small. Do you think there's some other things that are completely sort of other dimensions or there's ideas of panpsychism, that consciousness permeates all matter, that there's like fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet? Oh, absolutely. I do think, and this is why I write about technology and I mean, that's actually what I specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion. So in my opinion, thank goodness for technology because where would we be without it? I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLuhan was the person who said technology is like an extension of our senses and I absolutely believe that to be true. I think that we're lucky that Prometheus gave us technology, okay, and that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better. And that makes us more efficient. It makes us more efficient as a species. And like my point is that I think that our instruments, I mean, I don't want to be a religious technologist, you know, but our instruments will save us. I mean, they're already making life better for us. You think it's important that they also help us understand reality more directly, more deeply? I think directly is better than deeply. I think directly, more directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think, ask me, you know, can we actually, I mean, I think you're asking me that question that Kant basically was trying to get at was can we know the thing in itself? Can we know that? Can we have like some kind of like intense knowing of it? It's almost mystical. And I would say that that's where religion comes in, okay? That's where we talk about religion. And if I may also go back to Immanuel Kant. This idea that he, just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique of reason where basically he believed, he basically talks about can we know what's real? He basically has this long, you know, that question, can we know what's real? And then, you know, a thousand pages later, no. I'll just give you the rundown. Okay. So, okay, yeah, yeah, exactly. Then he does this other critique and okay, so he does like three critiques. Then he does this critique of judgment. Okay. Well, judgment is this other thing altogether. And I think that that's what you're getting at. So how do we know things? How can we know things really intensely and intimately? And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can actually know the thing in itself. And he was working on that as he died and then he never finished it. Hannah Arendt, another philosopher of the 20th century, took it up, took up the critique of judgment and tried to finish it. Why the word judgment? Because judgment, think about it, when you see a work of art, who judges that to be decent? Okay. So there is a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten or, you know, that's pretty good. You know, like, I noticed that you like to play guitar. Well, you choose music that I happen to like too. Okay. So you and I both have a sense of judgment. It's a sense. So he said, there's a sense that some people have. Why do certain communities have a similar sense? What dictates that? And so he was working on that. He thought it had something to do with the knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself. Yeah, so another philosopher that philosophers actually don't like at all, but religious studies people do, is Martin Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger has some great essays. One is called What is a Work of Art? And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh and Van Gogh's shoes. You know, that picture, the painting Van Gogh's shoes, it's really a really intense picture. It's just shoes. It's, you know, it's an amazing painting of shoes. And I think everybody can agree that's a cool picture of shoes, right? And so why, you know, the question is, why is that a cool picture of shoes? You know, what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that works, right? And in fact, we still like it. So basically the nature of knowledge and what does it represent? It can operate in the space of, that's detached from reality or can it ultimately represent reality? I guess that's the, is that, that's the space of metaphysics? Is that the, is that the... Yeah. So what can we know is actually called epistemology. Epistemology. But metaphysics is, is basically what is the nature of reality. Right. And those intersect. Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of things intersect in philosophy. We just have fancy names for them. Another non philosopher that may be considered a philosopher, since we're talking about reality is Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism. What are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality, calling her philosophy objectivism, and kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything, and it's pretty obvious, and then from that, you can derive an ethics about how to live life, like what is the, what is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selfishness, all that kind of stuff. So you talked to a lot of academic philosophers. So I'd be curious to see from the perspective of like, is she somebody that's taken seriously at all? Why is she dismissed as I see from my distant perspective by serious philosophers, and also like your own personal thoughts of like, is there some interesting bits that you find inspiring in her work or not? Okay, so Ayn Rand, I've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books, and basically say, please, Dr. Basilka, read this book. And I'll tell them, yes, thank you, I've read this book before. And then want to engage in, let me put it this way, they're religious about Ayn Rand. Okay, so to them, Ayn Rand represents some type of way of life, her objectivism. Now, why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general? Well, let me put it this way, philosophers in general tend to get pretty, I guess you could call it, they're kind of scientists, but with words. I always call philosophy, when I describe it to someone who's going to take a philosophy class, I say, it's basically math problems, like word math problems, okay? So that's basically what it is. So they take words very seriously, and they're very formal. And definitions very seriously, yeah. So they all want to get on the same page, so there is no confusion. So for Ayn Rand to basically say, you can know everything, and you know, it's like, okay, and establish ethics from that, I think philosophers automatically say no. Now, that doesn't mean I say no. In fact, we have at my university a wonderful business school. And when you walk into the dean of the business school's office, Ayn Rand is everywhere. So I want to say that not all academics are anti Ayn Rand. And in fact, I don't think philosophers are either, except that they don't teach Ayn Rand, okay? So in one sense, you could say that because they don't teach her, they're being exclusive in what they teach, or very particular, perhaps, is another way to put it. Yeah, it's hard to know where to place people like her, because, you know, do you put Albert Camus as a philosopher? So I guess, what's the good term for that? Like literary philosophers, or whatever the term is, it's annoying to me that the academic philosophers get to own the word philosophy, because like, it's just like people who think deeply about life is what I think about as philosophy. And like, to me, it's like, all right, so I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles, because he is, you know, full of contradictions, full of... I love Nietzsche. Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher. Oh, really? Yes, I absolutely love Nietzsche. So he's definitely, you know, I love people that are full of ideas, even if they're full of contradictions, and Nietzsche is certainly that. And Ayn Rand is also that. I'm able to look past the obvious ego that's there on the page, and the fact that she actually has, in my view, a lot of wrong ideas. But there's a lot of interesting tidbits to pick up, and the same goes with Nietzsche. And I'm weirded out by the religious aspect here, on both the people who like worship Ayn Rand, and people who completely dismiss her. I just kind of see it as, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move on, as opposed to... No....have a diplomatic conversation. Is there something you find about her work that's interesting to you? Or her personality, or any of that? Oh, I think she's fascinating. I don't dismiss her. She was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind at a time when that was difficult. So, I mean, she's definitely worth looking at for even that reason. But also, her idea, I guess, part of the situation with Rand, first of all, I think that she her work is, you have to, it's misinterpreted, okay? And I think that's the same with Nietzsche. A lot of people think that, I mean, in fact, it is the case that Nietzsche's writing before the 20th century, so he's got the, he's somewhat, his rhetoric is sexist and racist and of the time period, right? He was a educated philosopher of that time period. However, his books are amazing, and Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I think that's what you're saying about Rand, too. And I agree. I mean, I think that we get caught up. I mean, likely we should, and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which they are. We should not forgive their, you know, because there were people during Nietzsche's time that were, you know, feminist and not racist and things like that. And, you know, so, but each has merit. I mean, I would say Nietzsche is, and you did ask me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me, and Nietzsche's Gay Science is one of them. It's one of the best books ever, in my opinion. I do think Nietzsche was, I don't know about exactly sexist. He certainly was sexist, but it felt like he didn't get laid much in his life. No. It felt like he was extra sexist. I was like, his theories on women are like, all right. He's pretty angry. He seems frustrated. Yeah. He's like, all right, calm down, buddy. The fate of philosophers. I just ignore everything Nietzsche says about women. So can we talk about myth and religion a little bit? Yes. I mean, can we start at the beginning, which is like myths, how are they born? There's this collective intelligence amongst us human beings, and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions. How is such a myth born? Great question. Okay. So that brings us to terminology again. And in my field, we definitely, I think, try not to distinguish between religion. I guess it's going to be controversial, I think, between religion and myth, because we call other cultures, religions, myths, right? And then we call our myths, religions. And I guess myth has a bad connotation to it, that it's not somehow real. Yeah. Now, what's interesting is that people like Plato, who lived thousands of years ago, 2500 about, basically made this distinction himself within his own culture, which was Greek, right? So Plato is a very famous Greek philosopher. And he would say things like this. He would say that he would make a distinction between the reality of the one God, or the one, he would call it, he didn't use the word God, but he's referencing a divinity, and he believes in the soul. But he would also say that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks are just myths. So even he would make that distinction. Again, he would say the population is not too bright, so they believe in these gods and goddesses. But he himself is talking to his students, and he's basically talking about forms, so that seem to live in these other dimensions. Like this table, let's go back to this table that we're talking around right now. He would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table, and that there is this table that actually exists somewhere. It's this place where numbers exist, like the number two, okay? So we use the number two mathematically, therefore it exists. But have you ever seen a real one? Have you ever seen the real two? No, okay. So but where does it exist? So he says that tables... So he was also talking about things that he says are real, making a distinction between the people, and by the way, he got this from Socrates, his mentor, who was killed by Athens because he would say such things. People don't like to be told that what they believe in is not real, right? Yeah. By the way, his idea of forms, you're just making me realize how incredible was that somebody like that was able to come up with that. I mean, that idea became a myth, the idea of forms, right? That permeated probably the most influential set of ideas in the history of philosophy, in the history of ideas. Yes, yeah. I mean, Plato, we know him for a reason, right? Yeah. So let's say that it's a gray area between religious and myths, and maybe not even... It is gray, yeah. So how's that idea with little Plato start and permeate through all of society? Oh, how does it happen? Okay, so there are different ways that religions work. So a lot of people would call the UFO narrative today, and this is what I talk about in my book, like a myth, right, the UFO myth. But a lot of people believe in it, okay? So how do these things work? Well, what I did was I took... There's a Ann Taves at UC Santa Barbara. She's a pretty well known academic who studies religion, and she has this building block definition of religion, like it builds, okay? And so she says there are no religious experiences or mythic experiences. There are experiences. And then they get interpreted as religious or mythic, okay? And so I use that with the UFO narrative. So I take and I compare it to the religious narrative. So basically what happens? What happens is this, is that a person generally has a very intense experience. It could be with something that they see in the sky, a being that they see, like Moses in the burning bush or something like that. They tell other people, okay? And those other people believe them because they say, that guy, let's take you. Okay, Lex. Okay, so you're playing some of your music. Jimi Hendrix shows up out of the blue. So Jimi Hendrix, who does Electric Church stuff, right? The Electric Church movement. So he shows up. I was, sorry for the small tension. I'm not aware of, I apologize if I should be. I just know how to play all of the songs, Electric Church. Is this a thing? Yeah, it's Jimi Hendrix's thing. Yeah. That was like a philosophy of his or what? Yes, yes, yes. So he thought it was like a mission for him, like he was a missionary. And he was like doing the Electric Church. It was through his mission of music that he was actually impacting people spiritually. And I think you have to agree that his music is really spiritual, yeah. Wow, that's so cool to know that there's like a philosophy there. Yeah. I wonder if he's ever written anything. He's spoken about it many times. Interesting. Yeah. I need to actually do some research here. Wow, that adds another level of depth. That's awesome. Okay, so. Okay, so say Lex is playing one of his songs. He shows up. What's your favorite Hendrix song by the way? Oh, that's a hard one. I like Castles in the Sand. It's a sad one, but I like it. So I'm playing something and they show up. And all of a sudden, boom, just like Elvis does for people. Hendrix shows up, all right? And then you're amazed and he tells you something that's very, very significant. And he says, you need to tell other people this, okay? So then like, okay. I go on social media. Yes, and you start. And because people believe you and because you are a person of credibility, people believe you. And so all of a sudden a movement starts, okay? And it's the Hendrix movement. It's Hendrix 2 or something like that. You know, we call it something, the next iteration of Hendrix, right? Hendrix lives, but he lives as this vibration. And only Lex can manifest this vibration, okay? So this is how religions start. Excuse your audience who are religious. I'm actually a practicing Catholic. So this is how religion starts. They start with, first off, a contact experience. Not all of them, but a good portion of them. And some person has an experience that's transcendent, sacred to them. And they go and they tell other people. And then those people tell other people. And then something gets written about it, okay? And then it becomes, because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if too many people are affected by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So this is what you'd call the beginning of a religion or a myth, a very powerful myth. And so it's almost like a star, right? A star is born. A star is born. Okay, yeah. When you say institution, do you mean some other organization that's already powerful? Yes. Doesn't want to become overpowered by this new movement? Yes, absolutely. Is this usually governments? It's usually, yeah. So I have a couple of examples. I use the example of the Christian church in my book, because I'm most familiar with the history of Christianity. And Christianity was started by this Jewish man. And it was a movement that he was a very powerful, charismatic person. Other people believed in him. And then his followers talked about him. And then usually early Christians before the 300s were generally people who were disenfranchised, because he had a pretty radical idea that humans should have dignity. And this was pretty radical during that time. So women who didn't have dignity and slaves who didn't have dignity at the time converged to Christianity in droves. And so what happened was that all of a sudden it became this belief system that was undercurrent. And then Constantine, who was an elite, had an experience and made Christianity a state religion. By that time, there were different forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them. Well, most likely. And Constantine and the people who were powerful with him decided that their idea, this is the Council of Nicaea now, decided that there was one form, and they called it universal. It's the one form of Christianity, and this should be it. And so they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity and different forms of it. So you can see that a very, very powerful set of beliefs put a culture on fire, right? And so they had to deal with that fire somehow. And so they narrativized it. They decided, how do we interpret this? And they interpreted it as they wished. But that wasn't the only interpretation of Christianity. I have another example. In the Catholic Church, a lot of times, and I'm going to use the example of Faustina. She's a nun, and she's Polish. And I think it was in the early 20th century, if not the 1800s, that she had a very powerful, many experiences, actually, of Jesus. And she saw Jesus with rays coming out of his heart. And basically, she called this his divine mercy, and it became a devotion in Poland, and it spread. The Catholic Church was not into this at all, okay? And so they did everything they could to try to suppress Faustina's influence, which was growing and growing and growing and growing, okay? And so they were very successful in trying to keep her quiet, and she died, okay? Years later, John Paul II, Polish, sainted her and created the divine mercy devotion, which is worldwide now, and millions and millions of people. But do you see how they completely controlled it there? So fascinating that it just starts with a single, like you said, contact experience. Experience is the key word. And is your sense that those experiences are legitimate, so it's not... Yes, for the most part. Somehow artificially constructed? Yeah. I think for the most part, they're legitimate experiences that people have. Why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through? Like, why would Jesus want to get crucified? I mean, that's a pretty nasty way to die. Why would Faustina bring this upon herself? The people that I meet who said that they've seen UFOs, that most of them don't want to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it. So I honestly think that there are people who are maybe not stable and would like the attention, but for the most part, normal people don't want this attention. So you mentioned building blocks. You didn't mention the word God or sort of the afterlife. Are those essential to the myth? So there's a contact experience. Is there some other aspects of myth and religion which makes them viral? Which makes them spread and captivate the imagination of people? Yes. Is there a pattern to them? I think that for each era, it's different and people have... First, let's talk about the definition of religion, if that's okay, because most people assume the definitions that we in the West are familiar with, which is that, you know, that of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, you know, monotheistic religions. And those are just some religions. There are so many different types of religions. Some religions have no God at all. Zen Buddhism, for example, is a religion that asks you to take away your belief structures, like to kind of like... In fact, I would call that a Kantian type religion, right? In that it's basically telling you to get rid of your concepts of what you think about things so that you can actually have the experience, like you were talking about earlier, of the thing in itself. And they call that Satori. So there are people who believe, you know, they try to... They call it meditation, Zen meditation, and it's fairly radical, actually. In some monasteries, I don't know if they still do this, but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be not focusing and, you know, that kind of thing. You know, they do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is, which is what they call Satori. And that has nothing to do with God. I like this religion. And anything that involves sticks and whacking in order for you to focus better, I'm gonna have to join a monastery. So, okay, so digging into definitions of religion. So like, what do you think is the scope that defines a religion? Oh, okay. So in my field, we have a few different definitions of religion, as you can imagine, just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real. So I take this definition and it comes from John Livingston. And it's, religion is that set of beliefs and practices that is inspired by a transformative, what is perceived actually to be a transformative and sacred power. Can you say that again? Yeah. So religion is a set of, it's not just belief, it's also practices. It's both belief and practices, because you won't have the practices without the belief. So you have those together, okay, and it's inspired by what is perceived, because we don't know if it's real or not, what is perceived to be of sacred and transforming power. So perceived by the followers, or is this connected to the original sort of experience? No, no, well, it's perceived by the followers. That's a really good definition. So, and that's the governing idea is that there's something of great power, perceived to be of great power, which you can connect yourself either emotionally or intellectually somehow in order to explore the world that is beyond your own capabilities. Yes. And is there communication also involved? Generally, yeah. That's a great definition. Okay. So within that falls everything that we've talked about so far, including technology and alien life and so on. Do you think ultimately religion is good for human civilization? Let me maybe phrase it differently is what's religion good for? Okay, yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that. Most people don't ask that. And I think it's the question to ask, why do we still have religion? That's the question, right? Because scientists and others, scholars, humanists even thought that there's this thing called the secularization thesis, and it's this idea that the more we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding our reality, the less religious we will be. But that's been found to be untrue. We're still very religious, okay? So why? Why is it around? Well, it's adaptive in some way, in my opinion. Many people would not agree with me, but I kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation. Now, think about religions, okay? Think about Christianity again, for one. Here comes this idea when you have this ruthless empire called the Roman Empire, which litters its roads with crucified bodies to let you know, don't mess with us, okay? All right. Here all of a sudden you have this guy saying, God is love, okay? All right, well, that's weird. Okay, so why? Why does this take off? Well, it takes off because we're becoming a colonial power. That means we're going into other countries, we're conquering them. How do we survive together as cultures that don't clash? Well, we have to have a belief structure that allows us to, and I think religions function that way, frankly. So religions help us, so Richard Dawkins's meme idea, it allows us to explore a space of ideas, and that in itself is the, so it's like evolution of ideas, and religion is a powerful tool for us to explore ideas. Because if I believe that men have souls. Do they? Yes, they do, okay. I'm still trying to figure that out. Well, I still, in terms of souls, do believe cats don't have souls, but we'll never be able to confirm that. Maybe if we get better instruments, the soul instrument, you need to come up with that one, please. For cats? Yeah, not just for cats, but for all animals and people in general. For sure, you could put them in like a little, you know, soul machine and find out what's the status of their soul. That's funny. I hope we'll become a scientific discipline of consciousness, and consciousness is in some sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word soul used to be. And I think it's a fascinating open question, like what is consciousness and so on that maybe we'll touch on in a little bit. But yeah, anyway, back to our... Religions being adaptive. I think that Christianity probably helped us become better people to each other as we moved into a more global society. And I also, it goes along with my book, which is basically making the argument that belief in nonhuman intelligence or ETs or UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call them, is a new form of religion. And how does that work with the scientific method? Do you think there's always this role of religion as being, in its broad definition of religion, as being a complement to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality? There's always going to be this coupling. We'll always define, redefine new eras of civilization of what that religion actually looks like. So you talk about technology and so on being the modern set of religious beliefs around that. So is that always going to... Is religion always going to kind of cover the space of things we can't quite understand with science yet, but we still want to be thinking about? Oh, I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion, I would use the word religiosity because I think that we're moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a, I hate to put it this way, but an X Files type religion where we can say, I want to believe, or the truth is out there, but we don't know that it's out there, or we don't know yet what it is, but we know it's out there. So there's this kind of built in capacity for belief in something that we don't have evidence for yet, and that's a sort of faith. So I would say yes to that question, absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way. We're moving into a new... I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, and I think that I'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are. So I mentioned to you offline that I'm finishing up on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. I'm not sure if you have anything in your exploration, interesting to say, but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the use of religion by dictators, whether we're talking about Stalin, which is mostly secular, I apologize if I'm historically incorrect on this, but I believe it's secular. And Hitler, I think there's some controversy about how much religion played a role in his own personal life and in general in terms of influencing the... using it to manipulate the public, but definitely the church played a role. Do you have a sense of the use of religion by governments to control the populations, by dictators, for example, or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious scholar? It's not outside of my framework, absolutely not. I think that it's done routinely. Propaganda is done routinely, especially there's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act, I think. My mother's Jewish and my father was Roman Catholic, okay, from Irish extraction. And so, both great grandparents came here under duress because they were being, what would you call it, there was an act of genocide on both sides being done by other cultures, okay? So, on the one hand, obviously, we know about the Holocaust, okay? So, they came, the great grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it. On the other hand, there was an English genocide, we just have to say it, of the Irish, it was called a famine, but it wasn't fun, it was a staged thing. And so, millions of Irish left Ireland on coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here, mine happened to get here, okay? So, that's the context that I'm coming from. So, in each case, for one thing, Irish weren't considered, Catholics weren't considered, they were considered to be terrible and there was a lot of anti Catholic rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the Carrolls in Maryland and they were Catholic. So, when you look at the United States, at our history, and you see the separation of church and state, do you wanna know where that came from? That came from those guys, they convinced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, I mean, they couldn't vote, yet they have their names on the constitution, is that not a strange contradiction? So, here you can see how propaganda works, there was anti Catholic propaganda, there was anti Jewish propaganda and a lot of it was that these people weren't human, they weren't human beings. Another thing I'd like to say is that when the Irish did come here, they were indentured, a lot of times indentured servants, but that's terminology, what is an indentured servant? Slave. Pretty much. So, in that sense, religion can be used derogatorily as a useful grouping mechanism of saying, this is the other. And it's powerful too, because behind it is a force of what people contend to be sacred, a sacred force, right? So, it's up to God to decide who's, so you have to go along with what God says, of course. Well, that's basically, that's not the contact event. The contact event is usually some type of very specific, legitimate event that a person has with something that is non human or considered divine. But when religions become narrativized, I would call it, by different institutions, that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda. You said Nietzsche, one of your favorite philosophers. He said, famously, one of the many famous things he said is that God is dead. Yes. What do you think he meant? Do you think he was right? Okay, good. I love this question. No one asks me about Nietzsche. And I love Nietzsche. Okay, so first, actually, I do think, and I could be corrected and probably will be in all the comments, but I think that's a good question. Well, first, Nietzsche, it's true, wasn't the first to say God is dead. I think Hegel said it, okay? No one reads Hegel. He's like so difficult to read that it's impossible. Same with Heidegger, as you mentioned. I love him, but yeah, he's really hard to read. So Nietzsche basically said God is dead. And let me give you the context for him saying that. He also said this. He said there was only one Christian. He died on the cross, okay? So he despised Christianity. And he said that... And the people who practice it. Absolutely, yeah. But again, he believed in Jesus, and he believed Jesus was... He didn't believe He was a divinity. He believed Jesus was a good man, and he died on the cross, okay? So he believed in the morality of Jesus. Yeah, he absolutely did. Yeah, he did. And Nietzsche basically was making a historical statement about God is dead. And he was right. He was basically saying that in the century in which he lived, and he died, I think, in 1900. Again, I could be wrong about that. So I just want to say that I believe he died in 1900. Okay, so he's writing in the 1800s. And he's basically saying God is dead, and we killed Him, okay? So he's making a historical statement that at that point in time, with science just kind of getting better and industrialization happening, the idea of this thing beyond what we know as material reality is dead. So the substrate of Western civilization is dead. That's what Nietzsche is saying, if that makes sense. Yes. And he basically says with that comes the übermensch, okay, which is the superhuman. And he says there aren't many of them. He says, but they're going to come. And he also talks about the philosophers of the future. And he's speaking and writing to them, is my belief. So he's basically telling you and me, because we're now the philosophers of his future. Yeah. He's basically telling us this is what's happening now, and look what it has done. He says now everything is possible, all manner of terrible evil, because no one has the belief in God anymore, the belief that there is an afterlife. You asked about an afterlife. So with this kind of belief in a morality comes this belief, you can have morals without God, okay, people do. But Christianity is this idea that you will reap what you sow. So if people don't believe that anymore, what will happen? And so that's what he's basically saying, is that the basic anchor for Western society is now gone. Do you think he was right? Absolutely, absolutely right. But then again, what do you think if we brought him back to life and he read American Cosmic, your book, and he wrote, he tweeted about it, writing a review maybe for the, I don't know what they post, for New York Times. He'd be an editorial writer with a blue check mark on Twitter. What do you think he would say about this idea that you present that's a grander idea of religion and, you know. Like religiosity, like this new form. Yeah, wouldn't that kind of reverse the idea that God is dead? Yeah, because it would bring up this idea of external intelligences that are not human, which is basically a lot of religions talk about that, right? There are bodhisattvas, there are angels, there are demons, you know, there's all these types of non human intelligences that religion makes space for. So what I'm basically saying in American Cosmic is these new things are within the realm of UFOs and UAPs. So no, I think that, well, I think Nietzsche would say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what I would hope he would say. Nietzsche, however, is unpredictable, I think. I couldn't predict him. So I would say that it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move into a new type of religion. And it's adaptive, therefore, progressive. He would probably be uncomfortable reading a book by a brilliant female professor. Who happens also to be short. I don't know if you read that. He said some pretty nasty things about short women. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, Nietzsche. He should be canceled. No, no, please don't cancel Nietzsche. You have to take people in the context of their time. Although I'm pretty sure in his time he was also an asshole. He was. But assholes are people too. Okay. Just bad ones. You wrote the book, American Cosmic UFOs, Religion, Technology. What was the goal of writing this book? What, maybe we'll mention it. We have already mentioned it many times, but in this little space of a conversation, can you say maybe what is the key insight that you found that lingers with you to this day from the process, the long process of putting this book together? Sure. Just like with my book on purgatory, I went into the research thinking that it would be something that it was entirely not. It ended up being something completely different. And I think that's good. I think that people who do research are very excited actually when their research surprises them. So I was happily surprised by my purgatory book to learn that it was a place. And so I went into American Cosmic being a nonbeliever in UFOs entirely. And I came out being agnostic. Okay. Kind of believer. Yeah. But agnostic, sort of open to the mysteries of the world. Yes. And I didn't think that, first of all, I knew that the government was part of the situation. I just didn't know how much. And so I learned that quickly and acclimated to it, accepted it, and noted that, indeed, Horatio, the world is much more mysterious than we think it is. There are more mysteries in this life than your philosophy provides for. So is the sense American Cosmic is about the mysteries of the modern life as encapsulated by the realm of technology and the realm of alien intelligences? Yes. I'd have to go off record as a professor and talk personally. As a person, I do think that there are mysteries of which we have an inkling. And if it's something as powerful as nonhuman intelligence, whether or not it's from another planet, extraterrestrial, or it happens to be from another dimension or something else, I think that this is going to get the attention of institutions of power. And indeed, I think that's what has happened. And although probably people have had interactions with these things, it appears to me historically for a long time, as long as humans have existed, I would imagine that indeed this is something that's quite powerful and could change the belief structures of our entire societies, our civilization, basically. So it's the same way that you're talking the belief structures were strongly affected by religious beliefs throughout history in the same way this has the potential. It serves as a source of concern for the powerful because it can have very significant effects on the populace. Is there some broader understanding of how we should think about alien intelligences than like little green men that you can maybe elaborate on and talk about? Yes. This comes directly out of my research in Catholic history. What I found was that let's take, for instance, this idea of an angel. Okay, so we all think we know what an angel looks like. Why? Well, we've been told what an angel looks like. We see what an angel looks like. Throughout history, people have painted angels and they all look pretty much the same. But actually, if you go to the primary sources on either in Hebrew or in Greek or in whatever language and in Latin, and you look at experiences that people have talked about where they've written down their experiences about angels, angels don't at all look like what we think they look like. They don't look like little cherubs with wings. They don't look like tall, strong, anthropomorphic, human looking things. They don't. They look really weird. And sometimes they don't look at all humanoid. They look like strange spinning things with eyes and things like that. They communicate telepathically with us. Okay, so what does that mean for the idea of extraterrestrials or what we consider to be aliens? Like, I do think that they're first, if we are, listen, I'm not the first to say this. If we're in contact with nonhuman intelligence, we're most likely in contact with its technology. Because think about us. Do we send human beings to Mars yet? Some people would say yes, but let's put that aside. So no, we don't. We use our technology. We send our rovers to Mars, okay? Okay, so if there's an extraterrestrial civilization, are they coming by themselves? Are they coming to see us? Or are they sending their technology? Most likely they either are technology or they are sending their technology. Yeah, there might be a gray area between what is technology and what the aliens are. Yeah, so but you're saying like basically a robotic probe that would be the equivalent of us, our human civilization created technology. Way more advanced than what we could believe to be a probe, all right? It's kind of funny to think about like if whatever sort of extraterrestrial creations have visited Earth that we're interacting with some like dumb crappy drone technology. Yeah, it's true. And we're like building these like myths and so on from like an experience with some like crappy drone made by some crappy startup somewhere. That is correct. When the actual intelligence is like something much grander. Yeah, that's the more likely situation I describe. That's what I like to tell people. I'm like, no, it's probably a lot weirder than you think. Yeah, oh boy. So but what forms can it possibly take? So like I really love this idea that I tend to be humble in the face of all that we don't know and I tend to believe that the form alien life forms would take. And the way they would communicate is much more likely to be of a form that we can't even comprehend or perhaps can't even perceive directly. So like, you know, it could be in the space of, you know, we don't understand most of how our mind works. It could be in the space of whatever the heck consciousness is. Like maybe consciousness itself is communication with aliens. Or like, I don't know, it could be just our own thoughts is actually the alien life forms communicating. Like, I know all that sounds crazy, but I'm saying like, I'm just trying to come up with the craziest possible thing that doesn't make any sense that could very well be true. And you can't say it's not true, because we don't understand basically anything about our mind. So it could be all of those things, everything from hallucinations, all the things that are explored through the different drugs that we've talked about in this podcast in general. Joe Rogan loves to talk about DMT and all those kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. All of it, including love and fear, all those things that could be aliens communicating with us, memes on the internet that could be pretty sure here. Pretty sure humor is alien communication. No, I don't know. But is there some way that's helpful for you to think about beyond the little green men? Oh, absolutely. It accords exactly with how I think, actually. So I'll explain. I liked in American Cosmic, I attained the status of full professor. So I was like, OK, I can pretty much write this book like I want to do it. And I did. So I used a lot of quotes from cool artists like David Bowie. So David Bowie opens the book, and he basically says, and so does Nietzsche, by the way. David Bowie and Nietzsche, boom, two awesome quotes right together. That's how I opened my book. No better opener. Yeah. Do you remember the quotes? Yeah, of course. So the first quote by David Bowie, and that's what I'm going to concentrate on in response to what you just said, which I think is absolutely correct. David Bowie said, the internet is an alien life form. OK, and if you've not seen David Bowie's interview where he says that, I highly recommend it. He's so brilliant. OK, so David Bowie is actually quite brilliant about the idea of UFOs. He's also brilliant about the idea of technology. OK, and most people wouldn't think that, but I mean, he's pretty darn smart. OK, so all right. So I started to think about it. And I also early on in my research met Jacques Vallée. OK, so he's a technologist. He has a Ph.D. in information technology from computer science, basically, from Northwestern. And he got that back in the day. You know, when I say back in the day, I'm not talking a thousand years ago. I'm talking like in the 60s. OK, so he's back when computer science wasn't really even the field you can get a degree. Yeah, he has a Ph.D. in it. And he's French. He's from France, but he lives in Silicon Valley. And he worked on ARPANET, which is the proto internet. He mapped Mars. He's also an astronomer. I mean, he's just this all around brilliant guy, right? And he's also interested in UFOs. And most people take those two interests of his as separate interests. And I remember being at a very small conference and listening to him, being in awe, of course, because he's an awe inspiring person, and then thinking, wait a minute, why do people compartmentalize those two things about him? They're one in the same. OK, so when we talk about UFOs and UAPs and stuff, we have to talk about digital technology and things like that. And things like that. Now, if we're going back to what I so if I were to say what if I were to believe in and I like I said earlier, I was agnostic bordering on belief, most likely a believer in these this extraterrestrial or not extraterrestrial, let me put it another way, nonhuman intelligence that's communicating with us. I'm going to tell you how I think they communicate with us. And I go back to the Greeks again. OK, and the Greeks had this idea of muses, you know, the muses. So, OK, so there are these things called muses and we tend to think of them as metaphors. Right. But what if they're not? What if they're actually nonhuman intelligence trying to communicate with us, but we're so stupid? We can't like understand. Like, so only people with like, you know, in super amazing capacities, like poetic, creative, you know, intelligent, mathematical, whatever, you know, because they tend to do this symbolically. They tend to communicate with us in symbols form. And so music, you know, symbols, we've got math that are, you know, it's a symbolic language. And so what? So, OK, so muses are probably a good idea for me of what this would be. Now, would muses have spaceships, you know, or those things that we call physical counterparts to what they are? That's another question altogether. But if, you know, I know why would I think this? Because if you look at the history, there are space programs, both Russian and American, you're going to find some pretty weird stuff, pretty weird history there, Lex. So you want to get an idea, go back to Tchaikovsky and read a little bit about what he has to say. If you look back at the history of our space programs, the viable space programs are both Russian and American, and each has an amazingly strange history because the founders of the calculations that got us up into space, the rocket scientists, basically, were doing some pretty weird rituals and doing religious things, right? They weren't necessarily, like, Jack Parsons on our side was out in the desert with people like L. Ron Hubbard and doing really intense rituals, believing that they were opening stargates and things like that, OK? That's awesome. And they were really doing that, OK? So then you go to the Russian side, and they had a very specific non dogmatic, according to Catholics or Orthodox Christianity, idea of what Christianity was, and they believed that they were interacting with angels, nonhuman intelligences. So if you look back and you see muses, you can contextualize them within this tradition. And so when I started to talk to people who were actually in the space program and who were in these programs that now the government has said, oh, yeah, we do have these programs, they have the same belief structures. They believe that they were also in contact with these nonhuman intelligences, and they were getting what they called downloads of information and creating, sometimes with Tyler Dee in my book, creating technologies that were real, and they were selling them on NASDAQ for a lot of money, like, say, $100 million or something like that, undisclosed amounts, but a lot. And these things are viable technologies that we use now, and they make our lives better, and we progress as a species because of them. Now, that has nothing to do with the scientific method. As much as I know, as much as anybody's going to get angry at me for saying that, but sorry, those were strange encounters that created our ability to go into space. I don't know if they're real or not, but these people believe they were real. YARO Right, so they have a power in actually having an impact on this world, in inspiring humans to create technology, which enables us to do things we haven't been able to do before. KATE Yeah. YARO And these, I like how we're putting angels, alien life forms, aliens, and technology all in the nonhuman intelligence camp, which I really like that because that's very true. It's this other source of wisdom, intelligence, maybe a connection to the mysterious. KATE Yes, I was really surprised by it. YARO Can you speak a little bit more to the connection between aliens and technology that Jacques Vallée had in his own one individual mind, that's very tempting to kind of separate as two separate endeavors. Why did you come to believe that they are one and the same, or at least part of the same intellectual journey? KATE Thanks for asking that again, because nobody asks me that question, and it's central to my project. So Jacques was a huge influence, is a huge influence on me. He taught me a lot. He gave me access to some of his information that he keeps. But a lot of his information is actually there out there for everyone to read. He has an academia.edu page, so he didn't have this, unfortunately, when I was doing my research in 2012 and 2013. So I had to go back and do microfiche type stuff. What I did was I began to read everything that he wrote, and he actually gave me a lot of his books too. And he told me, I remember, he dropped me off from, this is actually quite interesting if you'll allow me to tell you a little story, and it also includes ayahuasca. SIMON Great, every story that includes ayahuasca is a great story. KATE Okay, so I was at a conference, and it was a small conference of very interesting people in California, on the Pacific Ocean. And Jacques was there. And this actually opens my book. This is the, I go, it's the preface to my book. I go on this ride. He takes me through Silicon Valley. I've lived there, right? My grandparents grew up in the same place that he raised his children, in Belmont. And so, but we were there with Robbie Graham, who's a great ufologist in his own right, and film theorist. I highly recommend his work. So we were together, and he was taking us to San Francisco, where I was going to meet my brother, who was going to take me home. And so he took us on this long journey, and he talked to us. And as we got out of the car, he gave me several of his books. And one in particular he gave me, and he said, read this first. And I was like, okay, I definitely will read that first. Okay, so this is how the ayahuasca figures in. So we were, I didn't take it, nor have I taken it. Okay, so we were at this place in California, and Alex Gray and his wife were there. And they were talking about their experiences with psychedelics. He's an amazing visionary artist, okay? So he believes that there's a place that you can enter, and he and his wife would enter this space with either ayahuasca or LSD or something like that. And they would not talk to each other, but they would be having the same exact experience. So it was almost like having the same dream, right? Okay, so somehow that whole event with Jacques there, and them talking about their experiences in these realms, of which religious studies people are quite familiar, by the way, because visionary experiences are what we study. So all of this seems super familiar to me, and I recognized that immediately that Jacques, that it hit me like, you know, very obvious that UFOs and these experiences and technology all seemed, they were all meshed together. And I knew that I had to take them, I knew I had to read everything Jacques ever wrote. And the best stuff he's written, by the way, is his little essays that he wrote in the 1970s, and they were peer reviewed essays about the beginning of the internet and how a lot of it was based on basically neural connection with the internet, like somehow psychic connection through the internet with others and things like that. So the brain is a biological neural network, there's this connection between visual neurons and so on, and that's what ultimately is able to have memories and has cognitive ability and is able to perceive the world and generate ideas. And those ideas are then spread on the internet, even from the very early days to other humans. So it gets injected or travels into the brains of other humans and that goes around in there and then spits out other stuff and it goes back and forth. So it's nice to think of the network that's in our mind, individual mind as, I mean, very much even deeply connected to the network that is the connection between humans through the internet. And so in that sense, Jacques saw the internet as this powerful, as a source of power and wisdom that is beyond our own. Exactly, that's external to us, like if you could call it autonomous AI, right? It's nonhuman intelligence in a sense, even though humans are a part of it. Yes, or we're invaded by it or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, whoever, right, it's the chicken and the egg, right. So if I can go on, I don't want to experience things, I'm not done with that. So this is where I come to this idea that we're in this space, we're in now a new space of religion, of religiosity. So what happens is then, and it's like a biosphere and I'll talk about that in a minute. So Jacques takes us back, we get to San Francisco and my brother, who is your straight lace person, army guy and everything like that, I get into his car and the first thing he tells me is, I took ayahuasca and I was like, what? And he goes, it's going to save humanity. That's great. As I mentioned to you offline, I talked to Matthew Johnson, he's a Hopkins professor and he's really a scholar of most, he's studied most drugs, he's also really deeply studied cocaine and all those stuff and negative effects and he's focused on a lot of positive effects of the different psychedelics. It's kind of fascinating. So I'm very much interested in exploring the science of what these things do to the human mind and also personally exploring it. Although it's like this weird gray area, which he's masterful at, which is he's a professor at John Hopkins, one of the most prestigious universities in the world and doing large scale studies of this stuff and until he got a lot of money for these studies, even in Hopkins itself, there's not much respect. It's not even respect, it was like people just didn't want to talk about it as a legitimate field of inquiry. It's kind of fascinating how hesitant we are as a little human civilization to legitimize the exploration of the mysterious, of whatever the definition of the mysterious is for that particular period of time. So for us now, there's like little groups of things. I would say consciousness in the space of computer science research is something that's still like, I don't know, maybe let philosophers kick it around for a little longer. And then certainly extraterrestrial life forms in most formulations of that problem space is still the other, it's still the source of the mysterious, except maybe like SETI, which is like, how can we detect signals from far away alien intelligences that we'll be able to perceive? And psychedelics is another one of those that's like, we're starting to see, okay, well, can we try to see if there's some medical applications of like helping you get, like he does studies of help you quit smoking or help you in some kind of treatment of some disease. And he's sneaking into that, I mean, it's like openly sneaking into it, he's doing studies on it of like, how can you expand the mind with these tools and what can the mind discover through psychedelics and so on. And we're like slowly creeping into the space of being able to explore these mysterious questions. But it's like, it sucks that sometimes a lot of people have to die, meaning, sorry, they have to age out. Like it's like faculty have, and people have a fixed set of ideas and they stick by them. In order for new ideas to come in, then the young folks have to be born with an open mind, the possibility of those ideas, and then they have to become old enough and get A's in school and whatever to then carry those ideas forward. So the acceptance of the exploration of the mysterious takes time. It's kind of sad. It is sad. I agree. Maybe to go into my source of passion, which is artificial intelligence. What's your sense about the possibility, like Pamela McCordick has this quote that I like, I talked to her a couple of years ago, I guess already on this podcast, that artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods. So do you think artificial intelligence may become the very kind of gods that were at the center of our, the religions of most of our history? Yeah, there's a lot there. So I'm going to start by addressing this idea of artificial intelligence being separate from human beings. So I don't think that's actually, that might happen. I mean, it's already happened, but let's put it this way. You're talking about super artificial intelligence, like autonomous, conscious artificial intelligence? Yes. Okay, yeah. Something with artificial consciousness. First of all, I think she's correct, but also there's an awesome quote. I'd also like to bring up this writer of fiction, actually, Ted Chiang, and one of his essays, he writes short essays. One of them was The Basis for the Movie Arrival, which if you haven't seen it, it's a really great movie about UFOs, and it has a very creative way of proposing an idea of how they might be able to communicate, first of all, how they appear to us, and second of all, how they may be communicating with us humans. Exactly. The author Ted Chiang has a lot, I recommend his writings, his short stories. One is very short, and it appeared in Nature about 20 years ago, and it is called, I think it's called Eating the Crumbs from the Table or something like that, and it's basically this short essay, and I hate to do a spoiler here, but if you don't want to know what it's about, don't listen right now for five minutes. Yeah, spoiler alert. Yeah. Okay. So this is what it's about. So basically it's about human beings becoming two different species, okay? And one of them is created, they're called metahumans, and they start biohacking themselves with tech. Okay? Sound familiar? So they do this, and they become metahumans and another species, right, and just kind of another fork, such that humans can barely understand them because they're so far removed. So in a sense, are they gods, right? No, they're metahumans, they're superhumans, they're enhanced humans, okay? I see that hopefully on the horizon, frankly. I hope so. Not that we have two species, but that we can use our technology or we can become so integrated with our technology that we can survive, okay? We can survive the radiation in space. We can't go places now because of the radiation in space. Perhaps we can develop our bodies such that we can survive the radiation in space. So there's this idea of these metahumans. Now, there's also this idea that technology is just another form of humans. We've created it, right? And so maybe it is bent on surviving, thereby using us kind of as a meme or a team. Some people are calling them teams now, these self generating, they're replicating themselves through us, okay? I see that also, and I don't think that's terribly bad. Maybe it's just the way that we are evolving. It doesn't mean that we're evolving all the time, like we're taller than we used to be, we have different skills. So I don't see that as a bad thing. I think a lot of people see it as if we're not how we are now, it's a tragedy. But it's not a tragedy. How we are now is actually a tragedy for most people alive. Yeah, and we might be evolving in ways we can't possibly perceive. Like you said, that humans have created Twitter and Twitter may be changing us in ways that we can't even understand now, currently. From a perspective, if you look at the entirety of the network of Twitter, that might be an organism that the organism understands what's happening from its level of perception. But we humans are just like the cells of the human body, we're interacting individually, but we're not actually aware of the big picture that's happening. And we naturally somehow, or whatever the force that's creating the entirety of this, whatever one version of it is the evolutionary process, like biological evolution, whatever force that is, is just creating these greater and greater level of complexity, and maybe somehow not other kinds of non human intelligence are involved that we're calling alien intelligences. So just to step back, and we'll come back to AI, because I love the topic, but through American Cosmic and in general, you've interacted with much of the UFO community, you mentioned ufologists. By the way, is it ufologists or is it ufologists? It's ufologists. Ufologists. Yeah. So first of all, what is a ufologist? And second of all, what have you learned about this community of ufologists? Or also as you refer to them as the invisibles, or the members of the invisible college, or just in general, people who study UFOs from the different, all the different kinds of groups that study UFOs? Sure. Generally, what I found is that they are okay, so people who are interested in UFOs from like being a kid, you know, and seeing some cool movie like Star Wars or something, and then they become interested, and then they study it as best they can, UFOs, or UAPs. They're generally an honest group of people who are using their tools, and they're generally two types of them. There are those who believe in the nuts and bolts, like the physical craft, and they believe in that these are things from other planets, okay? So that's like the ETH hypothesis, you know. I'm sorry, ETH hypothesis, ETH is what we call it. Yeah. Sorry about that. So this is like there's an actual spaceship, like something akin, but much more advanced than the rockets we use now. And there's some kind of, not necessarily biological, but something like biological organisms that travel on these spaceships. Yes. So this would be like what, to the Star Academy, is trying to decipher, like how, you know, how do they do it? You know, maybe we could use that technology, the propulsion and things like that. They look at the rocket technology. Okay, so there are those, and then there are people who believe that it's more consciousness based, okay? So these are your two types of ufologists who are known, and these are people who we know about. Then I found that there are people who are, quote, unquote, I call them the invisibles, because Jacques Vallée in the 70s, he and I think actually Allen Hynek, his colleague quoted, this is a Francis Bacon thing, by the way, it goes back to the early modern time period when scientists could be killed for basically trying to go outside with the church or the government institution determined was dogma. And so they had to be really careful. So he called it the invisible college. So Hynek took that term and reused it, or what do you call it, repurposed it. So he repurposed it. So they were still talking to each other, though. So what I found to be the case was that there was a group of people who were scientists but were not on the internet. You know, people today, and students of mine in particular, and my own kids, actually, they think that you only exist if you're on the internet or something only exists if it's on the internet. And that's, of course, untrue. And so what I found was that most people who are the most powerful people of our society and are doing things are not on the internet. You're not going to find any trace of them. So a lot of these people are what I call invisibles, people who are studying, at least their work is invisible. You might find them on the internet, but you're going to find that they're part of the bowling league or something like that. You will not find that they are actually engaged in research about this topic. And so I called them the invisibles because I was surprised to find them. And I thought, well, this is no longer the invisible college because these people are not even talking to each other. And that's why I reference this movie Fight Club. In it, you have an invisible, and his name is Tyler Durden, and he's incredible. He does incredible things. He's like a person who should not exist because he does so many things that are amazing. And so I found a person like that, and he's a real person. He's partially on the internet, but nothing that he does around that topic of UFOs is on the internet. So I decided to call him Tyler D after Tyler Durden. And so these people, I've termed the UFO Fight Club because they work together, but they don't know, in fact, his boss doesn't know what he does. They don't talk to each other because, you know, the first rule of Fight Club. Same as the second, yeah. Exactly, yeah. You don't talk about people. No, you don't do it. Why do you have a sense that there's such a, I don't want to say fear, but a principle of staying out of the limelight? I think there's something real, and I think that the use of it could be dangerous for people. Oh, sorry, you mean like something real, like there's actual, I don't know, what's the right terminology here to use it? Alien technology, ideas about technology that are being explored that are dangerous have made public, that may become dangerous have made public. So that's the word. You don't have to call it alien technology. You can call it ideas about alien technology because I don't know if it's actual alien technology or not. I honestly don't know. But I do know for a fact, because it's a historical fact, that Jack Parsons and Konstantin Tchaikovsky, who's Russian, believed in these things and believed that they were downloading this information. Whether or not they were, I don't, I mean, they definitely created the rocket technologies. That's true. How they did and whether their process was exactly what they said it was, I don't know. So this is the same thing today. So we've got some powerful technologies going on here. And of course we have a military and we have a military for a reason. Almost every government who needs a military has one. And so they're going to keep these the way they should be kept, in my interpretation. I mean, think about it. Everybody accepts the fact that we have a military. Almost everybody does. Why are they so upset then that the military keeps secrets? Yeah. Well, that's the nature of things. We can get into that whole thing. I tend to, I've spoken with the CTO Lockheed Martin on this, I obviously read and think about war a lot. It's such a difficult question because this space, this particular space of technology, there's a gray area that I think is evolving over time. I think nuclear weapons change the game in terms of what should and shouldn't be secret. I think there's already technology that will enable us to destroy each other. And so there's some sense in which some technology should be made public. This is the same discussion of, you know, between companies, which part of your technology should you make public through like, for example, academic publications and all that kind of stuff. Like how the Google search engine works, PageRank algorithm, or how the different deep learning, like there's pretty vibrant machine learning research communities within Google, Facebook and so on. And they release a lot of different ideas. It's an interesting question, like how dangerous is it to release some of the ideas? I think it's a gray area that's constantly changing. I do also think it's super interesting. I wonder if you could elaborate on a little bit that there's this gray area between what's actually real in terms of alien technology and the belief of it when held in the minds of really brilliant people that they ultimately may produce the same kind of result in terms of being able to create new technologies that are human usable. Like is there, in your mind, they're one in the same as like believing in alien craft and actually being in possession of an alien craft? I don't think they're the same, no. Belief is powerful, okay? In new age communities, you know, people think thoughts are things, okay? That's been said, you know, thoughts are things. You can make them happen kind of thing, believe in them enough. It is true that if I believe I can run a 540 mile, I'll do it, okay, and I probably will do it. And I've done it before actually, much younger, but I did it. But my coach is the one that instilled that belief in me, right? And so, but can I run like a one minute mile? No. Okay. So I guess, does that answer your question? Like there's only so far belief goes in generating reality. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess that's what, just having listened to Jacques Vallée, it seemed like reality is not, was not as important for the scientific exploration of the concept of alien technology. I could be wrong, but this is what I think Jacques getting at. There are other ways to access places in reality other than what we consider to be physical. There's consciousness, okay? So like I said, so religious studies is, among other things, it's looking at visionary experiences, all right? So people do have visionary experiences. They did without drugs, they did with drugs, they do with drugs, they do, many have them without drugs today. And oftentimes those visionary experiences correspond to each other. Now how do we make sense of that? So do these places actually exist? In a sense, I think they do. And so I think that, let's take that very famous case of a Virgin Mary apparition in Fatima where I think there was like a lot of people, thousands and thousands, if not like I think 50,000 or something like that, a lot of people gathered to see what's now called the miracle of Fatima, which was the spinning of the sun. Well, a lot of people saw different things, but they all saw some kind of thing, okay? So they all saw different things, but it was, something happened, okay? So I guess the question is, what are these places where we access what I'd call like nonphysical realities, okay? Where we actually do get information, like who could say that Jack Parsons didn't get information from doing these rituals and accessing these? We have to say that he actually did because we see the results, the physical results. The same thing with Tyler, and that's why I put Tyler in this camp with this tradition with Jack Parsons. I say that Tyler is getting these, what he calls downloads, and you can see the results of them physically. He sells them on the Nasdaq. He makes millions of dollars from them. They help people. I've seen people who they've helped, okay? Do you think psychedelics that I just mentioned earlier have a possibility of going to these kind of, same kind of places of exploring ideas that are outside of our more commonplace understanding of the world? In my, yeah, I think so, absolutely, however, I think we have to be really careful about those because young people or people in general, I should say, absolutely can get hurt by them. I mean, but we get hurt by alcohol, you know, we drive our cars and we kill each other. But psychedelics are really interesting because I know that within the history of our country, we have used psychedelics in various capacities for our military in order to try to stimulate ideas and access places and information that can't be accessed normally. This is all fact. Yeah. I talked to Matt for like four hours, so we ran out of time being able to talk, but I wanted to talk to him about MK Alter and Ted Kaczynski. There's so many mysterious things there. There's like layers of what's known or what's not known, it's fascinating. But I think what is interesting is psychedelics were used or were attempted to be used as tools of different kinds. That's the point. So like we think of technology as tools to enable us to do things in that same way that psychedelics, like many drugs could be used as tools, some more effective than others. Absolutely. I'm not sure what you can do effectively with alcohol, although I think somebody commented somewhere on social media that, I don't know why everyone is so negative about alcohol because I think the person said that it's given me some of the most incredible, it enabled me to let go and have some of the most incredible experiences with friends in my life. And it's true. People sometimes say alcohol is dangerous, it can make you do horrible. But the reality is it's also a fascinating tool for letting go of trying to be somebody maybe that you're not and allowing you to be yourself fully in whatever crazy form that is and allow you to have really deep and interesting experiences with those you love. So yeah, even alcohol can be used as an effective tool for exploring experiences and becoming expanding your mind and becoming a better person. So what the hell was I talking about? So yes, so psychedelics and MK Ultra, is there something interesting to say in our historical use of psychedelics? I mean, think about it, when did we start doing that? When did we start using those? That's true. It's quite a long time ago, right? But okay, but true, but when did our government start experimenting with them with us? Our government is the United States government. Yeah. Okay. So that happened in around the 1950s. After quote unquote, the 1940s, where we have 47 and we have this Roswell type stuff going on, like crash sites and things like that. So I think that there might be a correlation there. I don't know what it is. But I do think... That's fascinating actually. Yeah. A lot of interesting things started around that time period. And so Aldous Huxley would say, we opened the doors of perception, okay, and what flew in. Oh man, that was beautifully put. It'd be interesting to get your opinions on certain more concrete sightings that are sort of monumental sightings with alien intelligences in the history, in the recent history that at least I'm aware of, I'm not very much aware of this history. But the most recent one, I've spoken with David Fravor on this podcast, I really like him as a person. He's a fun guy, but also he's gotten a chance to... He's described his account of having an experience with what he and others now term the TikTok UFO. What do you think of that particular sighting, which has captivated the imagination of many in particular because there's been videos released of it, of these UFOs. But I find the videos to be way too blurry and grainy to be of interest to me personally, to me the most fascinating thing is the first person account from David and others about that experience. But what are your thoughts? Those videos have been out for a while, actually much, I think in the mid 2000s they were out. But what you have is you have kind of like this corroboration from a group and also the New York Times involvement in 2017. My opinion about the TikToks is that first, I believe the people who have had the experiences, I know some of them, like some of the radar people and things like that, they'd saw them and they're not... I don't believe they're making it up, okay. I do think that this is being used as a spin, okay, and I'm just gonna say that. And the reason I think that is this is because at the time it was released, I was still in touch with many people who were among the UFO Fight Club. And so they had intimate knowledge of these things. And the first thing they said was, we have satellites that can read the news on your phone when you're reading it. So we've got better footage than this and this is not good footage at all. Therefore they believe that it was authentic footage that had been doctored up. Now, why? I don't know why. So I honestly don't know if it's accurate or not. I mean, I believe the people, absolutely, but was this something out there to fool these people? Perhaps. I don't know. Is it spun? The people who I know who are part of the UFO Fight Club believed it was real, okay, and said, this is badly done, but real. Okay. I see. But so there's some kind of... When you say spinning, there's some parties involved that are trying to leverage it from the... For funds, probably. For funds, for financial interests. Yeah, I think so. Nevertheless, it has inspired a conversation and just a lot of people in the world that there's something mysterious out there that we're not fully informed about. And I was certainly grateful that the New York Times ran the story right before my book came out. Well, see, but there's the financial interest that to me, as a person who doesn't give a damn about money, actually, I don't like money, except for when it's used in the context of a company to build cool things. But personally, I don't know, I find the financial interest side off putting, especially when we're talking about the exploration of some of the most... Money is a silly creation of human beings. I agree. And it's used to provide temporary... The unfortunate thing with money is that it helps you buy things that too easily allow you to forget the important things in life and also to forget the difficult aspects of life, to do the difficult intellectual work of being cognizant of your mortality, of fully engaging in life, in a life of reason too, of thinking deeply about the world, all those kinds of things. If you get a nice car or something like that and just, I don't know, all the different things you can do with money, it can make you forget that. Anyway, there's a long way to say that, yes, yes, it's very nice that it coincided nicely with the book. But also, I think it, like I said, I think it inspired quite a lot of people that maybe there's a lot of things out there that were... It reminded a lot of people, there's things out there we don't know about. Lex, I can agree with you on that, but can I push back on two things? Mm hmm. Okay. Let's do it. All right. The first one is that I was happy to receive money from the book because of the New York Times article. That's absolutely false. So I published my book with Oxford, which is an academic press, and you don't get paid with an academic press. Okay. So money was not it for me. What it was, was recognition that my research was being validated. So because then people called me and said, well, maybe it's more than interesting. Okay. And they did. Okay. The other thing about money is just as you say that, now I agree with you, I'm upset about money too. I think there should be universal health care, a universal income. I don't think people should be in poverty, especially because we are so wealthy as a species, frankly. Okay. That said, think about this, if you don't have money, you can't have a life of the mind either. Right? 100%. So I'm not espousing that money is the devil. I just think that money can be a drug. Or I would compare it to like food or something like that, where like you really should have enough to nourish yourself. Yes. Right. And too much can be a huge problem. So that's where I come from with money. And I'm just aware, I'm fortunate enough to have the skills and the health to be able to earn a living in whatever way, like I wish of having being in the United States and being able to speak English. So the very least I could work with McDonald's and my standards are, I told Joe, I made a mistake. I told Joe Rogan that I've always had a few money and people are like, oh, Lex was always rich. No, no, no. I was always broke. What I mean by I've always had a few monies, my standard, what it takes to have a few is always very little. I'm just happy with very little. But yes, it's true that money for many people, including for myself, it's just a different level for different people, is freedom. Yes, absolutely. Freedom to think, freedom to pursue your passions. It just so happens I am very fortunate that many of my passions often come with a salary if I wished. Right. So everything like me, I love programming. So even just like working as a basic level software engineer will be a source of a lot of joy for me. And that happens in this modern world to come with a salary. So yeah, it's definitely true. I just mean that it can become a dangerous drug. So I'm glad you are in this pursuit that you are in for the love of knowledge. And it's true. People should definitely buy your book. I won't be making money off of it. Oh yeah, it's true actually. Absolutely. Maybe my next book. Yes. Yeah. Your sense is there's some groups of people that may be trying to leverage this for financial gains. And you know, probably good financial, I mean, they may have good reasons for this too. Like, okay, let's take the study of UFOs, okay? Maybe many people in government that decide who dole out the money, let's put it that way, they think UFOs aren't real. So they're not going to give these programs money. So how do these programs make money? They're going to have to find a way to do it. So maybe that's how they do it. Okay. So I... That's fascinating. This is a way to raise money for science. Doing the research. Yeah, I think so. So let's take a step back to Roswell, we talked about it a little bit. What's your sense about that whole time, Roswell and just Area 51, and the sightings, and also the follow on mythology around those sightings? That's with us today. Of course. All right. So... Where do I get started? Well, I mean, it is a mythology here, right? The mythology of Roswell, it's very religious like in the sense that there's a pilgrimage to Roswell people make and they go to, there's a festival there as well, like a religious festival. You can get little kitschy stuff like you can get at a religious festival there. So it's very much like a place of pilgrimage where a herophany occurred and a herophany is basically contact with nonhuman intelligence. Okay. So nonhuman intelligence is thought to have contacted humans or crashed at this place in Roswell, New Mexico. Now what's fascinating is that I begin my book by going out to a crash site in New Mexico. I have to get blindfolded with my, well, to tell you the truth, the story is that I'm with Tyler, who's an invisible, and he wants to show me a place in New Mexico where a crash happened. And he says that he thinks that I need to see physical evidence because I don't believe. And so I said, I'll go, but I'm going to bring a friend of mine. And he said, no, you have to go alone. He goes, it's a place that is on government owned property and it's a no fly zone. And when you go, you'll be blindfolded. And I said, I definitely need to bring a friend. So he said, well, who do you want to bring? I just had met this university scientist who's very well known and I call him James in my book. And I asked, and I had a feeling James would definitely want to do this. And I asked James and he said, I'll go tomorrow. So I suggested this to Tyler and Tyler said, absolutely not. And I thought, I know he's going to look up James and he's going to say yes, because if anybody can figure out what this material is that you're going to go look for, it's going to be James. He has the instruments. And so Tyler did, in fact, look him up and finally said, okay, you can go. So we both head out there and we get blindfolded and Tyler takes us out there. It takes about 40 minutes outside of a certain place in New Mexico. So in terms of Roswell, this is what I can say is that according to Tyler, there were about seven crashes out in the 1940s in New Mexico in various places. We went to one of them according to Tyler. At the time I was completely an atheist with regard to anything that had to do with UFOs. So we were out there, we had specially configured metal detectors for these metals. And we did find these, okay. And they've since been studied by various scientists, material scientists, so forth. And I believe Jacques talked about not those particular ones, but others on the Joe Rogan show. They're anomalies, so there are scientists, I'm not a scientist, so I can't weigh in on whether, I just believe the people, these people I believe because they're well known scientists. What do you mean they're not anomalies? No, they are anomalous. Oh, anomalous in terms of the materials that are naturally occurring on earth. Yes. Okay, so there's some kind of inklings of evidence that something happened in Roswell in terms of crashes of alien technology. What else is there to the mythology? So there's some crashes, right? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of epic. It's pretty epic, yeah. And what else, like what are we supposed to take away from this? Right, yeah. So it's weird. Okay, so there's this, okay, so in religious studies, like I said, we call it a herophany, which is the meeting of a nonhuman intelligent thing, whatever it is, an angel, a god, whatever, a goddess with, or an alien, with humans. And that's the place, okay, so the place is New Mexico. So New Mexico becomes folded into the mythology of this new religion, is what I call a new type of religion, of the UFO. And it becomes ground zero for this new mythology. Just like Mecca is the place where Muslims go, they have to go, right, at least once in their lives, it's a pilgrimage place now. So in my book, that's how I tell it. Now what about Roswell in the public imagination? Really according to Annie Jacobson, who's good, she's a great author, investigative journalist, she's written about Roswell too. I don't agree with all of what she comes up with, but part of it is that there's a lot of military stuff going on there that is classified, and there's a reason why you can't get in, and nor would you want to, right? So there's a lot of experimentation going on there. I don't believe that it has to do with ETs, frankly, but in the imaginations of Americans, Roswell is that place, but I went to a different place, and apparently there are several places in New Mexico. Now, strangely enough, I traveled back to New Mexico at the very end chapter of my book, but I don't go there physically. I go there through the story of a Catholic nun who actually believes that she bilocated to New Mexico in the, gosh, in the 1600s. So yeah, it was very strange. And I was at the Vatican at the Space Observatory when I made that connection that she probably went to the very, well, she believed she went to this very place that I had gone. Can you elaborate a little bit? What does it mean to go to that place? For her? Yeah, yeah. For her. What does it mean, so we're kind of breaking down the barrier between what it means to be in a place and time, right? Right. I agree with you. This is the field of religious studies. So, and again, I don't say it's true in my book. I just say it's a very strange coincidence that I'm at the Vatican Observatory. In fact, I'd finished my book, but while I was at the Vatican Observatory, I was there with Tyler, and we were looking at the records. They're called the trial records, but they're the canonization records of these two saints. Each was said to have done amazing things. One was Joseph of Cupertino, who levitated, okay, or is said to have levitated. The other was Maria of Agrida from Spain, their contemporaries in the 1600s, who was said to have been able to bilocate, which is to be in two places at once, okay? So this is a belief in Catholicism that certain very holy people can do these kinds of things like levitate, which, by the way, is also associated with UFO abductions. People get levitated out of their beds and things like that. So we were sent there by a billionaire who was interested in levitation and bilocation. And since I could get into the Vatican and I knew the director of the Vatican Observatory, both Tyler and I were able to go to the secret archives and look at the canonization records and then go to Castle Gandolfo, which is about an hour from the Vatican where the first observatory, the space observatory of the Vatican is. The second one is in Arizona and it has a much larger telescope. So we went and Brother Guy gave me the keys to the archive and said, look at anything you want. And I got to see a lot of stuff by Carl Sagan, by the way. I know he talked about, yeah, it was awesome. So they have a whole section on the search for extraterrestrial life. And they don't, by the way. How awesome is that? It was awesome. Yeah. So we got to stay there. They have a scholars quarters. And so they had two. And so Tyler stayed in one and I stayed in the other. And Brother Guy probably shouldn't have been so nice to me and given me the keys because when I got home, we were there for two weeks, when I got home, I got this frantic phone call from him and he basically said, Diana, he goes, do you remember where you put the original Kepler? And so I had this Kepler, right? And so I misplaced it. Luckily I remembered where it went. I was like, oh gosh, thank goodness I found it. But he'll probably change the rules of the Vatican observatory after my visit. So Maria, she's actually in the history of our country in that she first wrote a cosmography of what she said was the spinning earth. And this was in the 1600s. And that's her first book. And she wrote that. And then she said that she was transported on the wings of angels to the new world. And she said that she met a culture of people and she basically told them about the faith of Catholicism. And then what happened was that the people that, and she described the fauna, she described the people and everything like that. And so there were actually missionaries there. And when they went to try to convert some of the people who already lived there, apparently they already knew a bunch of stuff. And they said, how did you know all this stuff? And they said, this lady in blue came and told us, and they said, did it look like this? And they showed them, they obviously didn't have a photograph, but they had a picture of a sister, a nun. And they said, yeah, she wore similar clothes, but she was much younger. And these guys thought that was weird. But when they went back to Spain, they found that this woman had been doing that in her mind, had been traveling. I mean, I don't know what to make of it. There's so many things that are sort of forcing you to kind of go outside of, you know, I'm of many minds. I have a very, most of my days spent with very rigorous scientific kind of things and even engineering kind of things. And then I'm also open minded and just the entirety of the idea of extraterrestrial life forces you to think outside of conventional boundaries of thought, scientific, current scientific thought. Let's put it that way. And your story right now. It's freaking you out. Yeah. That's okay. That's a nice way to put it. What do you, just another person that seems to be a key figure in this, in the mythology of this is Bob Lazar. It'd be interesting. Maybe there's others you can tell me about, but Bob, who's also been on Joe Rogan, but his story has been told quite a bit that he's got, I think he said that he witnessed some of the work being done on the spacecraft that was, you know, that was captured and so on in order to try to reverse engineer some of the technology in terms of the propulsion and so on. What are your thoughts about his story, how it fits into the mythology of this whole thing and broader ufologist community? Okay. So regarding Bob Lazar, with respect to his claims, again, I have no way to adjudicate whether or not he actually encountered this. I do have friends who are. And the people that I know who know his story, some know him, believe him. And they have said to me that the most important thing that they think he has said, in fact, one of them I think made a meme out of it or something like that was basically he said, maybe the public, you know, I regret making it public. Maybe the public isn't ready for this kind of information. And basically they've, they emphasize that to me and they emphasized it so much that they wanted me to know, right? So that is somewhat creepy to me. So I think, okay, this poor guy, Bob Lazar, so many people, you know, this is what happens to people who have experiences like this. They're questioned, their reputations are put on the line, in some instances their reputations are manipulated on purpose to make them look uncredible. To me, as a scientist, it's just inspiring that it kind of gives this kind of, I'm not even thinking of it, is there an actual spacecraft being hidden somewhere and studied and so on? But I think of it like, I don't know, it's a thing that gives you a spark of a dream, you know, as a reminder that we don't understand most of how this world works. And then we can build technologies that aren't here today that will allow us to understand much more. And it's kind of like, almost like a feeling that it provides and that it inspires and makes you dream. That's the way I see the Bob Lazar story. I don't necessarily, people ask me, because I'm at MIT, people ask me, did Bob Lazar actually go to MIT and so on? I don't know, and I personally don't care. That's not what's interesting to me about that story. To me, the myth is more interesting, not interesting actually, but inspiring. Yes, because inspiring, you're suggesting that the myth inspires you to create reality. Yes. Yeah, I think that's true. So even if it's not real, in some sense, just like you said, it does in some sense, it doesn't. So a lot of people know how much I love 2001 Space Odyssey. So I got a lot of these emails asking like, hey bro, do you know what's up with the monoliths in the middle of the desert or whatever it was? I haven't been actually paying attention, I apologize, but you kind of mentioned offline that this is kind of cool and interesting. What do you make of these monoliths and in general, are you a fan of 2001 Space Odyssey where monoliths showed up? Do you have any thoughts about either the science fiction, the mythology of it or the reality of it? Yes. Okay. No, okay. And please say more. Right. So first of all, Kubrick's films are not ever easy for me because they're so weird, right? And I don't actually enjoy watching them, but it doesn't take away from their incredible brilliance though and their visionary merit. So 2001 Space Odyssey is incredibly visionary and of course, all those things that people say, I don't have to restate them. In terms of what I have, it's a subtext to my book, by the way. I didn't mean it to be, but it's almost a character in my book, 2001 Space Odyssey. And when the monoliths started to appear, again, everything went crazy with my everything, internet, social media, phone. What's up? What's going on, right? Is this disclosure? And I thought, well, I'll tell you one thing, is let's look at the timing of it. It's a cool, it isn't art and then copy art and things like that. It's actually happening at a really interesting time when all of us are forced to go online. When all of us are forced, because of COVID, right? We're completely now invaded by the screen or we're invading the screen. Our infrastructure now is completely changed. So the monolith, basically, if art is supposed to show us life, it certainly has. If that's an art project, somebody did an awesome job with it. But apparently that monolith was there for a long time, right? I mean, that's the thing. It's been there for a couple of years, so they said, okay, all right. That said, if your audience is interested, I think the best theory about the meaning of the monolith is Robert Ager or Robert Ayer. I think it's Robert Ager. He's got a website where he does analyses of films and it's called Collative Learning or Collative Learning, and he does the meaning of the monolith. Everyone should go look at that because I fully agree with him. I studied different meanings of the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey. I was fascinated. Okay, so what is this about? I accepted as soon as I listened to it and watched it. So basically, he says that the monolith is, okay, can you pick up your phone here? What does that look like? It looks awfully a lot like a monolith. Yeah. So basically, that's what he was saying was that Kubrick was basically, the monolith was technology or the screen in particular, and he basically was saying that the cinema screen, we're being completely... And if you think about it, look at all this, we live in a screen culture. We have computer screens, iPhone screens, there's phone screens, we have TV screens, everything is something... And now that COVID has come, we're forced to go into these screens and we're forced to live a different material existence than we have lived before. So in my sense, I think that if it's an art project, it's a really good one for that. So I like that meaning of it, it's a screen and a screen could take all kinds of forms. I mean, our perception system in a sense is a screen between reality and our mind. The screen of the computer is a screen, the virtual reality worlds that we might be one day living in, there'll be an interface, I mean, ultimately it's about the interface. That's interesting. It's an interface to another world of ideas. It's also a material change. It's a change in our material... I mean, when people talk about augmented reality, I say we already live in augmented reality, don't we? I mean, this isn't our grandparents existence. Yeah. I sometimes, you have to pause and remind yourself how weirdly different this reality is than just even like, I mean, 30 years ago. The internet changed so much and social media has changed so much about actually just the space of our thinking. Wikipedia changed so much about the offloading of our knowledge. The way we interact with knowledge. I mean, it offloaded our longterm memory about facts onto a digital format. So in the sense that expanded our mind, it's kind of interesting. I'd be curious to see if he has just one interpretation. I wonder if there's others. I've corresponded with him, yes. So over the years he and I have corresponded. And I told him, I said, look, I'm going to be using this in my book. So I think you should read what I say. And he was, he of course wanted to see it. So. What do you think about your book? Did he get a chance to read it? Yeah. Oh yeah. So he is a nonbeliever in alien intelligence and UFOs, but he, and that's fine, but I still agree with him that the meaning of the monolith was the screen, but that doesn't mean the screen isn't like what David Bowie said, right? So it's not exclusive. So I could still use his theory, but differ from the conclusions. In terms of nonbeliever and believer, there's, when you say believer, you also are kind of implying this, the idea that aliens have visited or had made direct contact with humans in some form. There's also the exploration and the idea of just alien intelligence is out there in the universe. Yeah. You know, the Drake equation estimating how many intelligent civilizations may be out there. How many have ever existed? How many are about to communicate with us? I mean, when you just zoom out from our own little selfish perspective of earth and look at the entirety, let's say the Milky Way galaxy, but maybe even the universe, does the idea that there are intelligent civilizations out there, something that you're excited about or something that you're terrified about? That's a good question. So basically I would say I'm not so keen on it. I think that our relationship with technology as it is and as it, as I hope it will go will help us survive, okay? I don't think we're equipped to do it as we stand now, but I think that if we can up our game or let's just put it this way, if technology is an extension of ourselves, which it actually is, it will help us because it'll probably be smarter than us, okay? It'll help us survive in the ways in which it determines best, okay? So with that said, if there are nonhuman intelligences out there and they have more advanced, you know, obviously technologies than us and they actually come, the history of human engagement with, you know, other cultures has not gone well for cultures that are less aggressive. So you see what I'm saying? Like, it's not a good idea. Well, I wonder where we stand on the, where humans stand in the full spectrum of aggression. Well, heck, where are we now, Lex? I mean, we're not too great here. We're still aggressing against each other. No, I know, but that will give us a benefit, right? Like, oh, you're saying, I thought, okay, I see. I just have a sense that there may be a lot of intelligences out there that are less aggressive because they've evolved past it. We can't assume that. No, I know we can't assume that, but like. If we can't assume it, then I'm going to assume the worst. Well, that's, despite the fact that I am a Russian and think that life is suffering, I tend to assume, not the best, but I tend to assume that there is a best core to creatures, to people and to creatures that ultimately wins out. I think there's an evolutionary advantage to being good to other living creatures. And so, ultimately, I think that if there's intelligent civilizations out there that prosper sufficiently to be able to travel across the great spans of space, that they've evolved past silly aggression, that it's more likely in my mind to be deeply cooperative. So like growth over destruction, like growth does not require destruction, I think. But if you see the universe as ultimately a place where it's highly constrained in resources that are necessary for traveling across space and time, then perhaps aggression is necessary in order to aggress against others that are desiring to get access to those resources. I don't know. I tend to try to be optimistic on that front. I think I'm emotionally optimistic and intellectually nonoptimistic. Yeah, I guess I'm there with you. I tend to believe that the happiness and deep fulfillment in life is found in that emotional place. The intellectual place is really useful for building cool new technologies and ideas and so on. But happiness is in the emotional place. And there it pays off to be optimistic, I think. You said that technology might be able to save us. That's also kind of optimistic, too. It might kill us. But there's, talking to you offline a little bit, there was a sense that we humans are facing existential risks, that it's not obvious that we will survive for long. Is there things that you worry about in terms of ways we may destroy ourselves or deeply damage the fabric of human civilization that technology may allow us to avoid or alleviate? Yes, I think that you can choose anything, actually. And it could destroy us, pollution. Here we're in a pandemic, a meteor. So we can use technology, or the thing is, is that we say we use technology, but actually that's not a correct way of putting it, in my opinion. So there is a term used by others, coined by somebody I don't know, and I'm sorry to not give credit where credit's due, but it's called technogenesis. And it's this idea, Heidegger actually had this idea, but he didn't use that term. And it's this idea that we coevolve with technology, that we don't actually use it. Most people think it's like a tool we use, okay, let's use technology to do this. Well, actually when we engage with technology, we actually engage with it and it engages back with us and we engage with it. So it's this coevolution that's happening. And in that sense, I think that as we create more autonomous, intelligent AI, it will help us survive because if we coevolve with it, it will need us as much as we need it, is my opinion. How that happens or if that bears out to be true, we'll see, but I don't think the idea that we use technology is a correct way to put it. I think that technology is something so strange, the way it is today, like digital technology, I'm not talking about hammers or things like that, those kinds of tools, okay, is technology is so far removed from that and our environment is so now conditioned by our technology and the infrastructure we live within, the material structure. I think that it's going to, I don't think it's going to be a Frankenstein. I think it's actually going, like a Mary Shelley type idea of technology. I think it's actually going to be more Promethean in the sense of, think about it, we create children and then we get old and we rely upon our children to help us, okay? Well, I feel like that about technology. We've created, well, we've created it, right? And so it's kind of growing up now. Or maybe it's in its teenage years and we'll see. What do you think about in terms of this coevolution of the work around brain computer interfaces and maybe Neuralink and Elon seeing Neuralink in particular as its longterm mission as a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. So like giving a greater bandwidth channel of communication between technology, AI systems and the biological neural networks of our human mind. What do you think about this idea of connecting directly to the brain in AI systems? I mean, okay, I've listened to your podcast with Elon. I've listened to Elon before, he's very intelligent, obviously super smart guy. I think this is already, I mean, not in the specific ways that he is doing it, but I think we are already doing that, okay? And I can give you some examples. And there are really trivial examples, but they do make the point and this is one of them. So before he started this research on UFOs and UAPs and technology, I actually was looking at the effects of technology and in particular media on religion. And what I did was I was lucky to be asked to be a consultant for various movies and one in particular I learned a lot from and that was The Conjuring. So I was a history consultant for The Conjuring. It happens to be my field, it's Catholic studies, right? And you've got these people who are real people and they're, you know, exercising demons and things like that. Okay, so I thought, wow, this is a great example for me. You know, I didn't do it for the money. It doesn't pay well, but I did it to learn, right? So I work closely with the screenwriters who I work with now all the time. I work with them all the time now. And what I found was this, I found that as the most interesting part of the creation of this movie was the editing process because it would go through editing and they would use test audiences and a lot of the test audiences would be like, you know, there's like these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that, the eye flicker rates. And so, and when it goes really intense, they go to UC Irvine and they do this thing called cognitive consumption, which is basically, or I'm sorry, cognitive consumerism, where they basically hook test audiences up to EKGs and they read their brains and they figure out which scenes create the most. Arousal. Yeah. And then they cut out all the other scenes. Okay? So what we're getting is we're getting like this drug when we go to the movies or when we do video games or when we watch, we're literally physiologically responding to our technologies. So we're already there. We're already interfacing with them physiologically. So that's my example. Now, the kind of thing that he's doing, Musk is doing with Neuralink, I say, go for it. That's awesome. I hope he does it. You know, I'm fascinated. I want it to happen. Why do I want it to happen? Because I think that, well, first it's inevitable that it's going to happen. I also want to point out that Jacques Vallée was trying to get this done back in the sixties and the seventies. He was writing papers about, in fact, the ARPANET, the ProtoInternet was called Augmentation of the Human Intellect. So we've been doing this for a while. Okay? So props to Elon Musk, but we've been thinking about this for a good time. We've even been visioning it. Okay? So there was a really interesting Jesuit priest, he was French, Tellur de Chardin. I don't know if you know who he is. If not, he's fascinating. He was actually a soldier before he became a priest. And so he believed, he also saw what he called a biosphere. Now this guy is talking in like the early 20th century, like the 1917, 19, you know, that time period. And so basically he said and wrote about this thing called the noosphere. And he basically said, there will be a point when we merge with our technology and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere. We have this atmosphere and then we have the stratosphere and it's going to be this biosphere and we're all going to be hooked into it mentally. So we'll be able to communicate in a way in which we don't communicate now. So you know, that sounds so similar to the singularity. So after I've read him many, many years ago, but when I read the Kurzweil's book about the singularity, to me, it read just like religious language. Like it read like, you know, cause he, in fact, it's so much like revelation to me when I read it that I even assign it to my students in my classes. I'm like, this is, this is it. You know, this is like a really great book of the singularity, you know, the coming singularity. And this religious event, because it seems like it, when he writes about it, he says, I felt it before I even understood it. You know? He, I mean Kurzweil. Kurzweil, yeah, Kurzweil. So what, I mean, what are your feelings about, not feelings, thoughts, feelings too, about the idea of the singularity? Do you think it's ultimately the thing that echoes throughout the history of ideas is this like moment of a revelation, like this, this almost mythological religious moment? Or is there something more physical to this idea of concrete about the idea of, there'll come a point where our technology, there'll be like a phase shift between the basic fabric of like humanity, of how we interact, you know, how evolution brought us to be these biological interaction, that our technology crosses some kind of line of capability that the world would be more technology than human to where it'll leave us behind. Sort of. Oh yeah. I don't think it's going to leave us behind. I think it's going to take us along. But it will be, I mean, I guess the idea of the singularity, first of all, isn't the idea of the singularity is like, we can't possibly predict what's on the other side of the singularity. These are the senses like, this is like the world will be fundamentally transformed. Yes. Okay. So right. And then it was, you know, this was characterized in various movies like Lucy and stuff like that. You know, Lucy being the first human that, right, we, so kind of replicating that this is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity. I actually don't believe that. I'm frankly, however, and the reason I don't believe it is because we're material beings and technology has to have a host. So we're not going to, you know, become something super abstract. Like there's, it's just impossible to do. There's nothing like that. Well, people will be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and laughing at it because they'll be all existing in a virtual reality where it will be all information as opposed to material, meaning connected to some kind of concept of physical, physical reality. I don't even know the right words to use here. You see, that's because there are none because there's no place from, there's no view from nowhere. There's no non material, like we have thoughts, but they're connected to us, right? They're in our, you know, they're somehow, okay. As far as, as far as you know. Listen, platonic forms, I think is about as, as, you know, close to what we're talking about as possible. Like this place where these things exist and then there's like a physical instantiation of it. No, but see we're, the question is from the perspective of the platonic form, what does our physical world look like? You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, if, if, if say you're a creature existing in a virtual reality, like if you grew up your whole life in a virtual reality game, like what is it? And somebody in that virtual reality world tells you that there actually exists this physical world and in fact your own, you think you're in this virtual world, but it's actually you're in a body and this is just your mind putting yourself and there's a piece of technology. Like how will they, how will they be able to think of that physical world? Would they, would they sound exactly like you just sounded a minute ago saying like, well, that's silly. Who cares if there's a physical world? It's the, the entirety of the perception and my memories and all of that is in this other realm of, of like information. It's just all just information. Why do I need some kind of weird meat bag to contain? So there's a great, again, I always, you know, return to something for your audience to read or you, there's a great, very short article online for free by David Chalmers. Do you know him? He's the philosopher of consciousness. Yeah. Interviewed him on this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's cool. I used to, I was friends with his best friend for a while when, in, when I was in grad school. He probably has some weird friends. He does. He's a philosopher. Okay. So, I like his fashion choice and his style too and hang out with him a little bit. It's a great guy. Okay. So he wrote this article, which I use a lot. I love it because it's accessible to undergraduates and it's called Matrix as Metaphysics. And basically it's, it's an answer to external world skepticism, which is basically how do we know there's an external world, right? How do we know that we're not in a matrix right now? And so basically he's using, he's also, he even references, he uses a religious reference even. He says, you could think of the Matrix of the movie as a new, as the new book of Genesis for our new world, right? And I thought, yeah, that's absolutely correct because, you know, we don't know and we don't, we won't know for sure or for certain, therefore what we know is what is real to us. And so he goes through these scenarios and within philosophy it's called, there's a, this is different from that, but it's like this brain in a vat, right? If you're a brain in a vat and some not so kind scientist is like recreating this world for you just to see, you know, and you think you're this awesome rock star, right? And you're living this awesome existence, but you're actually just this brain in this vat. Okay. But there's still a brain in a vat, okay? So his idea in The Matrix as metaphysics kind of takes out the brain in a vat like this. I don't know if this is possible. So I've read critiques of this that, you know, what you're talking about is a non dualism, like there's like, you know, or it's not necessarily a non dualism. I just, I mean, information in and of itself has to have some kind of material component to it. I mean, it's that when taking it outside of the realm of human beings, because dualism is kind of talking about humans in a sense, it's just possible to me that there could be creatures that exist in a very different form, perhaps rely on very different set of materials that may perhaps not even look like materials to us. Yes, I agree. Which is why like information, it could be, even in computers, the information that's traveling inside a computer is connected to actual material movement, right? So like it is ultimately connected to material movement, but it's less and less about the material and more and more about the information. So I just mean that there's, it's possible that... You think the singularity is basically like sloughing off our material existence? Because I can tell you that this has been the hope of philosophers and theologians forever. Yeah, well, I don't, I think we're living in a, through a singularity. I don't think, I think this world, just like, as you've said already, has been already transformed significantly and keeps continually being transformed. Yes. And we're just riding this big, beautiful wave of transformation. And that's why it's both exciting and terrifying from a scientific perspective that like we're so bad at predicting the future and the future is always so amazing in terms of the things that has brought us. I mean, I don't know if it's always will be this exciting in terms of the rate of innovation, but it seems to be increasing still. And it's really exciting. It's exciting. I think so too. Yeah. It's terrifying because obviously we're building better and better tools for destroying ourselves. But I, on the optimistic side, believe that we're also can build better and better tools to defend against all the ways we can destroy ourselves. And it's kind of this interesting race of innovation. Yeah. Books are great. Of course, the greatest book of all time, two of the greatest books of all time are yours. But besides those, what books, technical, fiction or philosophical, had an impact on your life or possibly you think others might want to read and get some insights from? And what ideas did you pick up from them? Great. Okay, I really enjoy Nietzsche. Okay. So anything by Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. He's a philosopher. I actually hated him when I first read him in my early twenties. That's like the opposite of most people's experience, right? They usually love them in their twenties and then they throw them to the curb. Later. Yeah. I think he's totally misrepresented and misinterpreted. He grew on you. Well, it happened in one night. So let me just describe it because it's kind of funny. Yeah. Happened on New Year's. So I had friends when I was in my twenties and they kept telling me, you have to read Nietzsche, you have to read Nietzsche. And I tried. Okay. But again, you know, no, I was not into how he described the philosophical concepts he was trying to get across. But they weren't giving up, I have very persistent friends. So one of them gave me The Gay Science and I had it on my bookstand and it was New Year's Eve and I'm actually not a big part, I'm actually an introvert. I'm a geeky introvert, okay? So I don't go out and party a lot. It was New Year's Eve, even that couldn't get me out to go party. So I just wanted to go to bed and New Year's Eve hit and everybody went out and I was asleep and they woke me up and I was like, darn, they woke me up, eh, might as well read this book by Nietzsche. Okay. So I picked it up and lo and behold, I turned to a page that was exactly about, it was called Sanctus Januarius, which is basically St. January and it was about New Year's Eve. And I thought, whoa, what a weird coincidence. And it was also super Catholic and it was a really beautiful little aphorism. It's actually a book of aphorisms, which are kind of religious, right? And so it's religious, the genre is religious, let's put it that way, but he's not. So basically he says, today's the day when people are supposed to make these resolutions, right? And he says, from here on out, I will never say no, I will only say yes. Okay. I look away, if something's horrible, I'll just look away from it, I won't get angry at it. And then he also says, I will be like St. January. And St. January is actually the saint whose blood is in this place in Italy. I think it's in Italy, and every year it turns to blood again. So it's like it's desiccated, so it's this miracle, it says, my blood is now, it flows again. And I was like, wow, that's really beautiful. And I said, and a strange coincidence because it just turned 12th. So it's like New Year's Eve, I pick up the book, I read this aphorism and I said, strange coincidence that. And then I turned the page, and the page is about coincidences. And I was like, I shut it, and I thought, this is weird. And I felt like it was alive, I felt like the book was alive and Nietzsche was speaking to me, right? I had a experience and engagement with Nietzsche. And so after that, I couldn't put his stuff down, it was engaging, fascinating, everything. So yeah, so that's one book, The Gay Science. What did you pick up from The Gay Science or from Nietzsche in general? Because there's some ideas that just kind of... Yeah, the idea is basically that truth, he's got awesome one liners. So truth is a woman. So okay, what does he mean by that? Truth is a woman. Basically, she's going to lie to you. She looks real attractive, but she's not going to tell you the truth. Oh, Nietzsche. Yeah. So okay, so basically, I'm not saying that that's true about women. I'm obviously a woman. So basically what he's saying is that truth is like what I said, Brother Guy said, it's a moving target, okay? We started this whole conversation with what's real, right? So I should have just gone straight to Nietzsche. Haven't you heard truth is a woman? Okay, so truth is a woman. All right, so that and also, and Foucault, this other philosopher, French philosopher actually takes up this idea and creates his own framework called genealogy from it. So the genealogy of morals, so that we only believe certain things and we sediment them into truth. So we say a truth told, who said that? Was it Lenin or Stalin? A truth told enough times, I mean, a lie told enough times becomes the truth. So that's basically Nietzschean right there, okay? So that's Nietzsche. So Nietzsche also is a huge critic of Christianity, which I'm actually Catholic, I'm a practicing Catholic. So I appreciated his critique, I thought it was actually quite accurate. He's a critique of religion in general and he's fascinating. And also I find that he talks about altered states of consciousness and he calls them elevated states. And I think through his book, you can actually experience elevated states. So yeah, Nietzsche, thumbs up. So what other books? Yeah, okay. So Hannah Rent, she is a philosopher that not a lot of people know about, but she was a Jewish woman during the Holocaust and she was interned at Bergen Belsen, which was basically Auschwitz for women and she escaped. She came to the United States and she had worked with Heidegger, even though he's supposed to be anti Semitic and a Nazi and everything, but they were lovers, okay? So she comes out and she's at Columbia University and she teaches philosophy there. And she writes two books, which I'll recommend. One is called Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she attends the Nuremberg trials. And she basically makes this really astute observation about evil. And she says, Eichmann is one of the people who sent the Jews to the concentration camps who ran the trains, okay? And she said, the thing about Eichmann was that he didn't seem particularly evil. Actually, he seemed to be quite a nice guy. She said, what was interesting about him was he seemed incredibly thoughtless and stupid. And she said, and he used a lot of stereotypes like memes. So she actually wrote about memes before we had them. And now people just use memes and they're actually used against us even. There's even a segments of warfare called memetic warfare, all right? So memes are something that can sway a whole population of people. So she wrote about memes before they were even in existence. And that's Eichmann in Jerusalem. And I think she also has some really amazing things to say about evil is that when people remain thoughtless, she has another book called The Life of the Mind, which is gigantic. And I don't think anybody will read it, but frankly, it's one of the best books I've ever read. And I've read it many times. And basically, The Life of the Mind, in The Life of the Mind, she asks a very simple question. She says, why do people do bad things? Why are they evil? And what she says is she wonders if it's, she says that bad people sleep well at night contrary to, you know how the saying, how do you sleep at night? Well, that's only because you're a good person that you're asking that question because you actually have a conscience and a conscience is this dual kind of, you fight with yourself about the consequences of your actions. And she says, bad people don't seem to have a conscience. Do they actually sleep well at night? And so she goes through a whole history of philosophy about evil, and that's really a good one too. But I also have to recommend this one too. There's one more. So I know I recommended two, but just from the same philosopher. My friend Jeffrey Kreipel, he's at Rice University and he's in my field, religious studies. He's written several books. I mean, he's written a heck of a lot of books, let's put it that way. But I think his best book or the one that impacted me the most is called Authors of the Impossible. And his book, his writing is very much like Nietzsche's writing in the sense that he, it's almost as if he reaches out of the pages and he grabs you and he kind of slaps you around and says, think about this, you know, and you can't help but be changed after you've read it. And he's got a great chapter in there about Jacques Vallée. Oh, so he covers a bunch of different thinkers and authors that somehow are, what is it? Some aspect of revolutionism aspect. They're thinking the impossible. There's a great one he's written called Mutants and Mystics, where he talks about the comic strips, the, gosh, why can't I remember the name of the person? He just died, Stan Lee. He talks about the history of the comics by Stan Lee and they're all paranormal. They all start off super paranormal and it's fascinating. On the topic of Hannah Arendt, so I haven't read her work, but I've vaguely touched upon sort of like commentary of her work and it seems like some people think her work is dangerous in some aspect. I don't know if you can comment on why that is. It feels like similar with Ayn Rand or something like that, where like this is, I should say not dangerous, but controversial. Yes, it is. Yes, they think it's controversial. This is the reason I believe, I've heard of the controversy. The controversy is that she didn't, first of all, she is Jewish and she did escape a concentration camp and yet she's called, she's been called anti Jewish. And I think part of that was that she basically was saying something that I believe that a lot of normal people are like Eichmann and evil things are done by people who just follow the rules and they don't think about what they're doing. And that's one of the most pernicious forms of evil of our time. So we talked quite a bit about the definitions of religion and what are the different building blocks of religion. So one of the, I don't think we touched on, we did a little bit with the afterlife, but in a sense, I don't know if you're familiar with the Ernest Becker work and all the philosophies around there about the fear of death and how the fear of our own mortality, awareness of our mortality and its fear is in case of Ernest Becker is a significant component in the psychology in the way we humans develop our understanding of the world. So what are your thoughts in the context of religion or maybe in the context of your own mind about the role of death in life or fear of death in life and are you afraid of death? We cover everything in this podcast. Every single topic is covered. Wow. Okay. I so happen to have benefited perhaps from living with an older brother who seemingly had no fear of death while growing up and he did everything, okay? So he climbed mountains, he was a rock climber, he jumped out of airplanes. Of course, he had to be a Green Beret and go into the special forces where that type of thing is a requirement, right? And so because of that, I did a lot of things outside of my comfort zone and which probably I shouldn't have done and hope to goodness, my kids don't do them, okay? Okay. So do I fear death? I think about death a lot actually. You may not know this about me, but in my field, I was the head, I was the co chair of the death panel. It's called the death panel. No, it's like it's the panel to think about death in religious studies and I was that for many years. So you've thought about it a bit. A bit. Let's see, I think that people are a little too confident, I think about life in general that they're gonna kind of live all the time and not die. I happen to, I mean, I hate to say it, I'm super positive and most people would consider me to be too happy almost, right? And so it's odd then that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, but I wonder if there's a connection there. I'm happy to be alive, right? That's kind of what the thinking about death does is it makes you appreciate the days that you do have. Yeah. It's a weird controversy. I tend to believe that the fact that this life ends gives each day a significant amount of meaning. So I don't know, it seems like an important feature of life. It's not like a bug, it seems like a feature that it ends, but it's a strange feature because I wish it, like all the good stuff you wish it wouldn't end. Well, you know what's interesting, Lex, and I do point this out to my students because we cover in a lot of the basic studies courses I teach, we cover all religions or as many as we can, like the major religions. And so take Hinduism, for example. Now this is an ancient religion, okay? So you and I are here talking about how we enjoy living and life and things like that. Well, the goal of Hinduism is basically never to get reincarnated again, is basically to not live, okay? And to get off samsara, which is the wheel of life and death. Yeah. Escape the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Think of that. Conditions are so different that you and I and my students are happy to be alive. But back in the day, thousands of years ago, when they wrote, they actually didn't write it, they spoke the Vedas, which were the sacred traditions of India. They wanted off. They didn't want to come back. Life was terrible. That's what people don't have the adequate understanding of history, that for the majority of people, life is really hard, right? And you and I are, and your audience, among the lucky. Yeah. Yeah, we actually like life. We want to live. Most of the time. Yeah, most of the time. What do you think the biggest, since we're covering every single possible topic, let me ask the biggest one, the unanswerable one. From the perspective of alien intelligence, or from the perspective of religious studies, or from the perspective of just Diana, what do you think is the meaning of this existence of this life of ours? Yes. Okay. So, all right. So, well, of course I have to, my philosophical training as an undergrad always makes me think about like, what's the assumption in your question? There's an assumption there. It's like, there is a meaning. Okay. That's the assumption. What do you mean by meaning? What do you mean by life? Yeah. Can you define the terms? No, no. But listen. Okay. I'll answer your question. I'm just going to say that there's this assumption that we should have meaning to life. Okay. Well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe it's just all random. Okay. However, I believe that it's not. And in my opinion, the meaning of life, in my opinion, is intrinsic. I enjoy living. I want to live. Sometimes I don't enjoy living. And when I don't enjoy living, I change my circumstances. So it's intrinsic. And I think that certain things are intrinsic and like love, love of your children is kind of, well, it's actually physiological, but it's also intrinsic. It's beautiful. You know, there's something about it that is intrinsically desirable. So I think the meaning of life is like that, intrinsically desirable. So it's something that just is born inside you based on what makes you feel good? No, that's hedonism. That's about what a wordy place, love, love, love of your children. Yeah. So basically, love of your children, by the way, is not always easy because they do things that they shouldn't do. You have to discipline them. That's one of the worst things about parenthood to me is disciplining my children. I don't like to do that. I love them. So a lot of things that I do that I feel are good are not easy. So there's an intrinsic sense that, like, okay, let's take animals, okay? So we have dogs and cats, okay? So you might not, but I do. I told you about them. Can you share their names? If I share their names, I will share their names. Okay. So we have a cat, and it has red fluffy hair, and so we called it Trump. Well, when we got our dog, we figured that it needed a companion, so we called it Putin. So we have Trump and Putin. Those are the greatest pet names of all time, I'm sorry. And maybe we'll be able to share a picture of your cat because this is awesome. It is really cute, yeah. Very photogenic. I mean, is this something that's, whether we're talking about love or the intrinsic meaning, do you think that's something that's really special to humans? Or if there is intelligent alien civilizations out there, do you think that's something that they possess as well, maybe in different forms? Like whatever this thing that meaning is, this intrinsic drive that we have, do you think that's just a property of life, of some level of complexity? That we will see that everywhere in this universe? In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I do think that it is, but I also think that it can take different forms. So if there is like, think of gravity, right? Gravity kind of like makes stuff stick to it, right? It attracts stuff. Well, what is love to you? That does that too, right? So people who are, we call them charismatic. Charism, it means love. Charism means light and love. So a charismatic person is a person who attracts people to them like the sun does, right? Like, you know? So I think that whatever this property is, that's intrinsic, is like gravity and most likely takes different forms in different types of life forms. Yeah, I can't wait until like a Albert Einstein type of figure in the future will discover that love is in fact one of the fundamental forces of physics. That would be cool. Diana, this is one of the favorite conversations I've ever had. It's truly an honor to talk to you and thank you so much for spending all this time with me. Absolutely. It's been fun. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation with Diana Walsh Pasalka. And thank you to our sponsors, Element Electrolight Drink, Grammarly Writing Plugin, Business Wars Podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief | Lex Fridman Podcast #149

The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, his second time on the podcast. He's an anarchist, political thinker, podcaster, and author. He wrote Dear Reader, which is a book on North Korea, and The New Right, a book on the various ideological movements at the fringe of American politics. He hosts a podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y O U R, and in general, there's a lot of live shows on YouTube that are at times profoundly absurd, and at other times absurdly profound, and always full of humor and wisdom. He is the Joker to my Batman, and the Caviar to my Vodka. His masterful dance between dark humor and difficult, even dangerous ideas, challenges me to think deeply about this world, and when that fails, at least smile and have a good laugh at the absurdity of it all. This episode has much of that. His outfit, for example, the exact inverse of mine, with a white suit and a black shirt, is just one example of that, of the humor, trolling, and brilliance that is Michael Malice. Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite, Business Management Software, Athletic Greens, All In One Nutrition Drink, Sun Basket, Meal Delivery Service, and Cash App. So the choice is success, health, food, or money. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Michael is, in many ways, a man of radical ideas, but also a man with kindness in his heart. Those two things are great ingredients for a fascinating conversation. I hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year who also have radical ideas about politics, science, technology, and life. At times, often perhaps, I might fail at asking the challenging questions that should be asked, but I will try my best to do so, and hope to keep improving every time. Mostly, I come to these conversations with an open mind and with love. Unfortunately, that kind of approach can be taken advantage of in many ways. It can be used by reporters or just people online later to highlight how or why I'm ignorant or worse, I'm generally not a good human being. In the context of this, I have two options. I could either be cautious and afraid, or second, be kind, thoughtful, and fearless. I choose the latter. Hopefully while still being open, fragile, and empathetic. Again, I strive to be like the main character of The Idiot by Dostoevsky. That's my New Year's resolution. Be kind and do difficult things. Difficult conversations, difficult research projects, and difficult entrepreneurial adventures. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Michael Malice. Knock knock. You're stealing my bed? I'll kill your family. That's not how a knock knock joke works. Knock knock, Michael. You don't do knock knock jokes with Russians because if we have a knock at the door, turn down the TV. You got to sit quiet. We hope they go away. You don't do that back in the motherland. You know this. It's triggering. Who's there? I can't even do it now. Knock knock. Who's there? Leon. Leon who? Leon me when you're not strong, Michael. Well, that will never happen. I stole elegantly, eloquently that joke from you. The lie detector term, that was a lie. Elegantly and eloquently. Oh. Yeah, you crossed it out on a sheet of paper. That means it's real. The reason I bring it up is because you had the guts, the brilliance to do a knock knock joke. Not once, but three times with Alex Jones. I think it was like six. I had a runner. Okay. Maybe they started to sort of melt together in this beautiful art form that you've created, which is like these kind, loving knock knock jokes with Alex Jones. So you got the chance to meet him and talk to him twice with Tim Pool in a long form conversation. What was it like talking to Alex Jones, both on the deep philosophical intellectual level and staring the man in his eyes and doing a knock knock joke about Olive knock knock. Who's there? Olive. I love you, Alex. I love you. Well, there's a lot to explain. Where do you start? I've been on his show Infowars a few times when I was researching my book, Then You Write. So I had had conversations with him before. One of the things that I appreciate about Alex is he is a lot more self aware than people think and has a good sense of humor. And I also like a good twist ending. So if you set people up and all these jokes are these kind of vapid, you know, all of you jokes and the last one's about building seven, they're not going to see that one coming nor will he see that one coming. I even had another one about Sandy Hook, which I didn't do on the air because he was being like a good sport, but that was the dagger that was kind of behind my back if necessary. But it was a good mechanism toward I like it when things work on several levels. It was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation guarded and this every so often, this is kind of hitting the control, alt, delete and bring it down to a certain point of calmness. What about the love thing? I mean, you're saying that that was a buildup to the dagger, but it was also somehow really refreshing to get that little jolt, like that pause. You don't get that in conversations often. Like I'm a huge fan of Rogan and he'll have a three hour conversation, but at some point just pause and be like, I love you, man. Like it's in the cheesiest way possible because that seems to be, it somehow hits the hardest then. I don't know. I don't know you didn't intend it that way, but with Alex Jones to sit there and to say, I love you. That was like, I just haven't never heard that before. And so it struck me as like, not just funny for what you're doing, but just like, whoa, we just took, cause conversations are all about like this ranting, especially with Alex Jones, just like ranting about this or that, this part of the world, like, can you believe this shit? That kind of thing. But like to pause and be like, this is awesome. I don't know if you felt that way, but. Oh, I definitely felt that way. So it was actually very fun. I'll give you the backstory of how that happened. It was silly cause Tim calls me up and there's this expression in marketing, don't go past the sale. Right? You're gonna buy someone a car and like, it's got this feature, this feature and that feature. And they're like, you know what? I'm going to buy the car. If you keep talking, you can only make them lose the sale. You just get them to sign and get, get out of Dodge. So Tim calls me up and he goes, okay, here's what we're thinking. This is top secret. Alex is going to be on the show. We want you on as well. And I've never said yes to anything as quickly in my life. And then he keeps talking and I'm like, Tim, this, you don't have to sell it. I interrupted him. I go, you don't have to sell it. Why you, by the way? I think because I am kind of an agent of chaos and Alex is in his own way, an agent of chaos. And what is, provides an opportunity in this kind of news media space that you and I travel in, it's the kind of things where none of us three, you know, as we said on the show, knew what it would be like. If you, you know, to certain, within certain parameters, what, you know, Megyn Kelly or Wolf Blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be like in a conversation to some extent, none of us had any idea. I knew they didn't know I was bringing in knocking up jokes. So that was kind of what was so exciting. I said at one point, I'm kind of envious of the audience because this is, there's so many exciting things that are happening and that the internet and podcasting provides people an opportunity to do that. It was great. Yeah. That, that was the greatest pairing with Alex Jones that I've ever seen by far. So like, so I immediately knew now this isn't a knock on Tim, but I don't even know if Tim was prepared. Tim was not prepared. For this. How could he be prepared? Well, so I mean, I don't know if Tim is used to that. I think Joe Rogan is more equipped, prepared for the chaos, just the years he's been in it. Like I immediately thought this is the right pairing for Joe Rogan because Alex Jones has been on Joe Rogan a few times, three times. My favorite so far was with Tim Dillon, but Tim was clearly, Tim Dillon was also kind of a genius in his own right, but he was kind of a fan and he was stepping away. He was almost like in awe of Alex Jones where you were both, you were in awe of the experience that's being created and at the same time fearlessly just trolling the situation. I mean, to do a knock, knock joke, to stop, I mean, that just shows that you're in control of the experience. No, you're like riding the experience. That immediately was like, this needs to be on Rogan. So I hope that happens as well. You're on your own, of course, on Rogan, but just you, that's an experience. That's the, whatever, this gotta be a good name for it. Like Jimi Hendrix Experience, there's the Michael and Alex. Because that was a band. It's taken. Well, I don't know how many years you can restart the experience. Because I feel sorry to interrupt you, I feel a very big responsibility, especially in 2020 to provide fun and something cool and something unique that hasn't been done before for the audience. I think this has been a very rough year on our audiences psychologically and in other aspects of their lives. So I feel if I'm going to be there, I'm going to put on a show and it's also going to be great because it also alienates the people you don't want. So there's a lot of people who sit there and be like, oh, he's telling knock, people who are too cool for school, where they're like, oh, he's telling knock, knock jokes. This is stupid. I'm like, good. If you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle with a kid or with that by yourself, that's on you. And it's something very, something I think is the enemy is cynicism and this idea that like, oh, this is too silly and we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives. I think it's something we could use more of. It's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of have be condemnatory about that or to do it in a certain very corporate fake way. So it is something I encourage a lot, something I enjoy doing. And again, like with the first time I was on Tim, I had a propeller beanie on, you know, with the motorized and a lot of people were like, I can't take anyone seriously who dresses like this. I go, good. If you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of the ideas themselves, you're not someone I want on my team. Are we going to address the outfit you're wearing? We can address it, sure. You know, for those who are colorblind, Michael's wearing the, or just listening to this, Michael's wearing the exact opposite, the universe from another dimension outfit, which is a white suit and black shirt. So genius. Okay. So. You just see the next two looks I've planned. Oh, no. Yeah, they're great. Well, obviously this relationship's going to end today. It's over. I'll put them on Insta. Okay. Is there some deep philosophy to the humor? Is this goes to our trolling discussion? Is there some, is there like chapters to this genius or is this just what makes you smile in the morning? Well, I mean, I think you're honestly, in this case, using the word genius a little loosely. I am. I don't think this is particularly genius, but I do think it is fun. It is exuberant. It is joyous. I think the bigger my audience has gotten and the more I actually communicate with, you know, fans, I do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal maternal instincts, which is very, very odd. I did not expect to have them. What do you mean? Who's the dad? I'm the dad and the mom. I remember, and it may have been similar for you, I'm curious to hear it. For young, smart, like ambitious men, like 24 to 27 for me was a very rough period because that's the window where a lot of people get married and they kind of check out. And if you're very much kind of finding your own road, you don't know what's happening. No one's in a position to really guide you or help you. And it's tough. It's a very tough window. And what I'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position, but now instead of them stumbling along, for some of them, I'm the one who could be like, no, no, no, it's not you. It's everybody else. And to be able to give them that semblance of feeling seen, to use a cliched expression, to feel normal and that, no, no, you're the heroes here. They're the background noise. It's just really very flattering and humbling to be in that position. You have many minds, right? There's the thoughtful kind, Michael, there's like, I'm going to burn down the powerful. And then there's like, I'm going to have this just lighthearted trolling of the world, which and which of those are most important to the 27 demographic? I think it is the combination. It's like if you're making a meal, chicken Kiev, you need the chicken, you need the ham, you need the butter sauce. Because I think people, when you're young, you need to see someone who's fought the fight for you and who's won. So it's very easy to be defeatist. So this is what winning looks like. No, this is not. This is most assuredly what winning does not look like. But in my normal clothes, a little bit more. This is a good time to mention that clothes wise, you're wearing sheath underwear. And people should buy sheath underwear. Use code Malice20. If you go to sheathunderwear.com, use promo code Malice20. What I love about why I'm glad to promote the product and wear it, it's the most comfortable underwear I've ever worn. And you have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals. That's what I thought there was like a punchline coming. No, it's a very nice aspect of the product. Yeah. But I think what here's something else just goes back to what we're just talking about. There are so many and this is going to segue into this. There are so many small companies who've been devastated this year. We have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops like we've seen in 2020, who are innovators and making something happen. And when you're just like one dude who's producing a product, they're a sponsor of mine. I'm happy to, first of all, it's funny that I'm pitching underwear, but it's also something I enjoy. And also you said small business. Yeah. It's microscopic, like a thimble. So this isn't a sponsor of mine, but this is a good segue. So this is, Russians, we celebrate New Year's, it's Novomgorodom. We have Dmitry, he comes down, puts a present under your pillow. So this is a company called J.L. Lawson. He's a fan of yours. He's a metal worker. And he said, can I give you something to give to Lex? I have one of his worry coins. I'll tell you what it is. He's not a sponsor. This is not, I'm not getting paid for this. So what a worry coin is, I carry it around in my butt. If you have raw denim, it's great because it brings you fades. So you carry it around with you all the time. It says worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe, right? And I carry this around and allow it to spend like a year. Next time you're worrying, and this is good advice if you don't have a worry coin. Go think about 10 years ago and what you were worried about then. And then think about, did any of those things pan out? And some of them did, but you were able to handle it. And that's a good way to maintain perspective. So J.L. Lawson is the company. He sent me this present. I said, let me give it to Lex on air. So enjoy. So I have to open it up now? Yeah. J.L. Lawson and co. Two Lex from Anthony. Yeah. And I said, make something mathematical for Lex. So I don't even know what's in there. You don't know what's in there? No. And it got through his TSA. Could be a bomb. It could be. Just like this episode. Make sure you unwrap it close to the mic because it drives you for crazy. That's really the best part. Is this what an unboxing video looks like? I think so. This conversation is going to be a big hit on the internet. With the unboxing community. I need to have an excited look on my face to make sure that the reaction video, it should be an unboxing and a reaction video. Lex Freeman reacts. It's another box. It's just a series of boxes. Lex big fan since hearing you on Rogan months ago. Most of your guests are over my head, but still enjoyable. Like this episode, Michael was kind enough to want to share my work with you. Keep doing what you do. Anthony Lawson. Thanks Anthony. There's a lot in there. What is in there? Give me some. I'll open some. Okay. All right. Show it to the camera and then make sure you look excited or not or disappointed. No, this is cool. This is a worry coin. Like I was showing you. So you hold it in your hand and when you can do this with your thumb, if people are, have anxiety or whatever. Oh, there's a lot of cool stuff in here. Fibonacci coin. Oh, see, yeah, that's the math stuff. That's really awesome. This is really cool. Wait, you got a big one laying there too. That's what she said. I'm telling you last time you offended me saying I don't have humor. The spin tray micro brass and copper bronze. By the way, the packaging is epic. I think that's his top. He makes tops. Cool. Yeah, you spin it in there and it's the two different bronze and copper. I think he's the only one who makes these machined tops and then they sit in here, I guess. Yeah, but you could spin them in that section. Got it, cool. Where's the where's the worry thing? Here's the worry coin. Anyway, I wasn't listening. What were you worried about 10 years ago? 10 years ago, 2010. What would I have been worried about then? The government? No, I'm not. That's not a worry. I think... What was the North Korea book? I apologize. That came out in 2014. I went there in 2012, came out in January 2014. It still pays my rent with the royalties. The North Korea book? Yeah. See, this is why it's so much better. I gotta talk to you about self publishing because you brought that up. I'm doing the next books also going to be self published. Can we talk about self publishing? What's the whole idea of publishing? Like having a publisher and an agent because there's a bunch of people have been reaching out to me trying to get me to write a book, which is ridiculous. Why? Because people who are brilliant folks like you, like Jordan Peterson, that I think have a lot of knowledge to share with the world. I think what I feel I can contribute to the world in terms of impact is to build something. Meaning like engineering stuff. Like a book... A book has to be engineered and I'm not using that loosely. You have to engineer a book. No, for sure. What I mean is like literally a product with programming and artificial intelligence. I want to build a company. I want to... Because I have a few ideas that I feel I'm equipped and it has to do with your intuition about the way you can build a better world. You individually. Like, what can you add to the world that's a positive thing? And for me, I feel like the maximal thing I can add to the world is at least to attempt to build products that would add more love in the world. And like, so I want to focus on that. The danger of the book for me, or any kind of writing, and even this podcast is a little bit dangerous for me, is like, it's fun. That's for sure. It's fun. It's like it takes you into this place where you start thinking about the world. You start enjoying and playing with ideas. You start... And like, just your book on a Dear Reader, but also the new write. Like clearly you and I probably think similarly in the sense that you did a lot of work. Yes. This next book is killing me. Yeah. As you mentioned, often it's clear, like on your YouTube channel, which I'm a fan of, you often, it just comes out like you mentioned all of these books that you're reading. It just comes through you that you're suffering through this and it changes you. And it's clear that you're thinking deeply about the world because of this book. And I feel like if you do that, that's like when I first came to this country, I read the book The Giver. I need to read it again. It's like the red pill thing is it changes you in where you can never be the same person again. Sure. I feel about a book in that same way. The moment you write a book, of course it depends on the book. I could also just write like in my field, a very technical book. No, that's a terrible idea. Yes. But that's okay. That doesn't really change you. That's just like sharing information. But like something where you're like, how do I think about this world? Can you just leave that behind you? I get it. Dude, it's being pregnant. It never escapes your brain. I'm telling you. You're absolutely right. Yeah. I don't know. It does seem to change you. The reason I bring that up is because there's this whole industry of people that seem to not really contribute much to the publication process, but they make themselves seem necessary for like, if you want to be in the New York Times bestseller list kind of thing, but also just being like reputable, which I'm allergic to that whole concept. But do you think it's possible to be on the New York Times bestseller list and be a reputable author and still be self published? Not what you would want to do. Like people like Mark Sisson, I think is his name. He wrote like the Primal Blueprints. So like if I'm getting the names correct, he's the first paleo guy, right? So he self published it. It sold gangbusters. But that would be on their health chart, I believe. And it's a little bit of a different situation. You would be reaching much more for the mainstream. You'd be giving up a lot if you go through a publisher, especially financially. But yeah, you are not going to have the cred because the publishing is a cartel. The New York Times is part of this cartel. And if you don't publish within this cartel, they will do what they can, as any cartel has to, by necessity of being cartel, to pretend you don't exist. So I was, I think, the first one to have an hour on BookTV for Dear Reader because that was a Kickstarter book. But this is something that people would have to be aware of. So you would be giving up a lot. But you'd also be giving a lot to work with a publisher because you're losing like a year and a half of your life because they're glacial and they don't care. Well, that's my problem. It's not the money. I mean, the money is whatever percent they take, 10, 20, 30, 50%. They're taking a huge chunk. So if I sell a book through St. Martin's, it's a dollar. If I sell a book through Amazon, which is Dear Reader, that's $6. So that's what, 87%, it's something crazy. But for me, what bothers me isn't the money that, for me personally, for me, what bothers me is incompetence. Like whenever I go to the DMV or something like that. Can I interrupt you? Yeah. Let's talk incompetence. When a new write comes out last year, I get on Rogan, get on Ruben. I call them and I said, I got on these shows. Is there money in the budget for travel? And they say, we don't have that budget. Fine. By the way, you got on those shows with no help from them. Correct. Oh yeah, that's not even a question. The reason they would want you to do a book is because they know you could get... The only reason people get book deals nowadays, literally, is because they know that person can market their own book. That's the only way. And I got on Ruben, I got on Rogan, and they go and have the money for the budget for travel, which is fair. They can do Skype. They told me this in writing. And I'm like, okay. And they can financially cover Skype. No, but it's like, hey Joe, yeah, we don't have the budget, but you're going to do Skype. Hello? Hello? There is, another friend of mine was on a show on CNBC with Nassim Taleb, and they said Nassim wants a copy of the book. And they're like, oh yeah, it's like four o clock on Friday, so we're closed. So, and he's like, he went there, picked it up, and walked it the two blocks. So there is, it's almost cartoonish, and it's not incompetence. It's past that. It's something almost, you can't really believe that, I've had two friends who have been literally rendered suicidal because this was such a huge opportunity for them. And it was like watching their kid get beaten in front of them, and I had to talk them off the ledge. So it's, people do not appreciate how bad, here's another example. The apathy of bureaucracy, something like that. I did this book, Concierge Confidential. There's a typo in the first chapter, it ends with, I'm about to, TOO, they didn't fix it for the paperback. Who cares? It's just like, well, okay, yeah, great book by the way, it got, NPR gave it one of the books of the year, so that was good. So why participate in this? Because otherwise, New York Times is going to pretend you don't exist. Getting booked on some shows might be more difficult. Although I think that's collapsing in real time. You're not going to get reviewed necessarily on places like PW, or some others. So the new book you're working on, do you have a title yet? The White Pill. The White Pill. Are you self publishing that? Oh yeah, for sure. And what's the thinking behind that? Just because you already have a huge following and a big platform and... It's six times the cash. If I finish the book in December, I could have it out in February. If I finish the book in December with the publisher, it's going to be out in December at the earliest, 2021. Why am I giving up 10 months of my life? Well, this is the big one. Do you have any leverage? Like do authors have leverage to say, F you? Can you just say, what do you mean? Meaning like, I want to release this book in two months. Oh no, no. I mean, you'll have a contract and then your agent can fight it, but they don't have the capacity to rush things through. Yeah. I guess if the, cause I've heard like big authors, I don't know, Sam Harris, all those folks talk about like, they've accepted it actually. They've accepted it. They're like, yeah, it takes a long time to... I'm not accepting it. But you're kind of implying that a human being like me should, like... I'm saying these are your options. Right. So I just, I just hate it. I hate the waiting because it's incompetence. It's not the, it's not necessarily the wait. If I knew it wasn't, you know, if it was the kind of people that are up at 2 a.m. at night on a Friday and they love what you're doing and they're helping create something special. That's the sense I get with some of the Netflix folks, for example, that work with people. I just, I don't know anything about this world, but you get like Netflix folks who, who help with shows. You could tell that they're obsessed with those shows. Yeah. Oh yeah. You're not going to get that publishing. If you hand, like I handed the book in, I think it was July, I didn't hear anything from my editor until December. Well, can we actually talk about the suffering, the darkest parts of writing a book? So the, let's go to the full Michael Malice, Stephen King mode of what are the darkest moments of writing this book and what is it maybe start, the white pill? What's the idea? What's the hope and what are your darkest moments around writing this book? So people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill, the red, they're from the Matrix. The red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact by the corporate press entertainment industry is in fact a carefully constructed narrative designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and everyone else under control. And I guess one of my expressions is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle because at a certain point you think everything's lie and then you're kind of no capacity for distinguishing truths. You're full of good one liners. Well, thank you. Yeah. I'm full of something that's for sure. And what I saw in this space is a lot of these red pill people got very disheartened and cynical. And one of my big heroes is Albert Camus and he said the worst thing is cynicism. And that's something called the black pill, which is the idea that, you know, it's all, it's just we're waiting for the end. It's hopeless. And I don't see it that way at all. And I'm like, all right, I have to address this. And not just with some kind of cheerleading, everything's going to be great guys. Here is why I am positive. And not that I'm positive the good guys are going to win, but I'm positive that good guys can win. And that's all you need. Because if your God forbid kid is kidnapped and there's a 10% chance that you can save them, you're not going to be like, well, I don't like those odds. This is your country. This is your values. This is your family. And I think it's much more than 10%. And even if you lose, you will take pride in that you did everything in your power to win. So. Is there a good definition of good guys? In the sense that. The ones who wear white. There's layers to this. You're like modern day Shakespeare. Is there a danger in thinking Adolf Hitler was probably pretty confident that he led a group of good guys? Listen, if Hitler did anything wrong, why isn't he in jail? My Czech friend thought of that joke. He actually says in his accent, he goes, if Hitler's so bad, why isn't he in the jail? That's a good point. He's probably still alive. Right? And look, yeah. Hopefully. Oh boy. Two of the three people listening to this are very upset right now. What were you even talking about? Oh, how do you, how do you know the, what is good? There's lots of standards of good, but if you're for me to be a good guy is if you want to leave the world a little bit better than you found it, that to me is the definition of a good guy. And I think there are many people that that's not their motivation at all. It's about your motivation. Well, it's also about if your motivation is at all correlated to reality. No one thinks we're the bad guys. That's correct. But are you taking steps to check your motivations and also take a certain amount of humility because if you're going to start interfering with other people's lives, you really better be sure you know what you're talking about. The control of others, if you do have centralized control or then you kind of, you become a leader of a group, you better know, you better do so humbly and cautiously. And also have steam valves, right? So if in case things go wrong, let's have, I'm sure this is a lot happening with AI, whatever work with computers, like, okay, if something goes wrong here, how do we have a workaround to make sure it doesn't cause everything to collapse? Yeah. The going wrong thing. I mean, the whole, the feedback mechanism. Yeah. Like, I wonder if people in Congress think that things are really wrong. It's working for them. Are you sure? No, I'm not sure. Because I'd like to believe that the people that at least when they got into politics actually wanted, some of it is ego, but some of it is like wanting to be the kind of person that builds a better world. Sure. I also think it's diverse. Some of who are going to have different motivations than others. But like once you're in the system and trying to build a better world, how do you know that's not working? Like, how do you take the basic feedback mechanisms and like, and actually productively change? I mean, that's what it means to be a good guy is like, hmm, something is wrong here. And that's why I like the Elon Musk, like think from first principles, like, wait, wait, wait. Okay. Let's ask the big question. Like, can this be, one, is this working at all? Like the way we're solving this particular problem of government, is this working at all? And then like stepping away and saying like, as opposed to modifying this bill or that bill or like this little strategy, like increase the tax by this much or decrease the tax by this much, like, why do we have a democracy at all? Or why do we have any kind of representative democracy? Shouldn't it be a pure democracy? Or why do we have states, like representation of states and federal government and so on? Why do we have this kind of separation of powers? Is this different? Why don't we have term limits or not like big things? Like how do you actually make that happen? And is that what it means to be a good guy? It's like taking big revolutionary steps as opposed to incremental steps. Well, I don't know that you could be a politician to be a good guy, to be honest. And let me give you a counter example of someone who you could tell is not being a good guy. Joe Biden said he regards the Iraq wars a mistake. Okay. You and I have made mistakes in our lives, I'm sure. None of our mistakes have caused tens of thousands of people to die. If I were a chef, let's take it out of politics. And in my restaurant, somehow, accidentally, someone ate something and they died. A, I would feel horrible. But more importantly, I would be like, we need to look through the system and figure out how it got to the point where someone lost their life. Because that can never happen again. And we need to figure out step by step. I'm not a gun person, but there's like this checklist of like, if you're holding a gun, there's five things to do. And if you get too wrong, it's like assume every gun is loaded, only pointed at something that you want to kill. And there's like three other things. And it's like to make sure that nothing goes wrong. So if I'm that chef, and I would have to not only feel guilt, but take preventative action to make sure this has no possibility of happening again. If you look at the staff he's putting in, it's the same warmongers that would have advised him to get into the Iraq war on the first time. That is to me is not a good guy. That to me is someone who does not feel remorse for their responsibility in killing not only many Americans, but some of us think that, you know, dead Iraqis isn't necessarily ideal either. Okay, let's talk a bit about war. Maybe you can also correct me on something. The first time I found myself into Barack Obama was, I don't know how many years ago this was, but when I maybe heard a speech of his about him speaking out against the war. Yeah. And him, I think it's on record saying he was against the war before it was happening. But he wasn't in Senate at the time, so it was very easy for him to say this. But see, like people say that, people say that. People say like it was easy and it was some people say it's like strategically the wise thing to do given some kind of calculus, whatever. But I, to this day give him, that's the reason I've always given him props in my mind. Like this is a man of character, like he makes, I also personally really value great speeches. I think speeches are really important for leaders because they inspire the world. It's like one of the most best things you can contribute to the world is great, like through intellect, mold ideas in a way that's communicable to like a huge number of people. Yeah, it's better to persuade than to force in every instance. That's where I disagree with Chomsky said, like if you're, Chomsky's whole idea was that like if you're really eloquent speaker, that means your ideas aren't that good. That's nonsense. Yeah. So I think that's a way for him to describe like I speak in a very boring way. Maybe that's a pitch for this podcast. I speak boring so that the ideas are the things you value and it's also useful to go to sleep. But that's why I really liked Obama throughout his life and still do. But when I first like saw this is for some reason you can disagree, I thought he's a man of character. It's when most politicians, most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power, I think were for the war or too afraid to be against the war. That's why I liked Bernie Sanders and that's why I liked like in the early days Obama for speaking out against the war and not like in this weird activist way. Not weird, but not saying I'm an activist, but like just saying the common sense thing and being brave enough to say the common sense thing without like having a big sign and saying I'm going to be the antiwar candidate or something like that, but just saying this is not a good idea. Yeah. And I think it's for those of us who are old enough to remember, it's pretty despicable what happened with Tulsi in 2020. She was the biggest antiwar candidate and she was marginalized within her own party, which I guess you can make sense. She's just a congresswoman from Hawaii. But the corporate press did everything in their power to diminish her and pretend she didn't exist. And for those of us who remember where 12 years prior, when George W. Bush had the Republican National Convention in New York and it was the biggest protest in history and the Iraq war led to democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008, to have that completely not part of the Democratic Party in 2020 is both shocking and reprehensible. Hey, Michael, you don't have to say, hey, Michael, you just say knock, knock, okay. What did the volcano say to his true love? What? I love you. These jokes are better when you know how to speak English. It was actually in Russian, I did Google translate, okay. Back to your book, In the Suffering, you somehow turned it positive. And as one who's wearing, who's the representative of the black pill in this conversation, what are some of the darker moments? What are some of the hardest challenges of putting together this book, the white pill? Content, content, content. So if I'm having a page in about Reagan taking on Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries, I'm going to have to read like 20. So it's the thing like if there'll be some times I'll remember some quote somewhere and then I have to spend an hour trying to find it because I want it to be as dense with information as possible. Like how do you structure the main philosophical ideas you want to convey? Is that already planned out? No, the book changed entirely from its conception. So my buddy Ryan Holiday had a series of books, still does, where he takes the ideas of the Stoics and he applies them to contemporary terms. He has this whole cottage industry that he's doing very well with. And I'd asked him years ago if I could do that with Camus and he's like, sure, go for it. And I was going to rework Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. And I read it recently, reread it, and this wasn't the book I remembered at all. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to write the book that I remembered. But the more I was writing it, one of the things I always yell at conservatives about, there's a long list, is they don't talk about the great victory of conservatism, which was the winning of the Cold War without firing a shot. And I said, you can't expect the New York Times to tell this story because the blood is on their hands. And I'm like, well, Michael, instead of complaining about it, why don't you do it? Why don't you talk? That is a great example of the good guys winning over the bad guys. And that's become, A, the victory is beautiful. But also pointing out to people, when people are like, oh, things are worse than they've ever been, they don't appreciate how bad things were in the 30s, what Stalin was doing overseas and how people in the West were advocating to bring that here. So that's kind of pointing out how bad things were and how good they became. And you don't have to be a Republican or conservative to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism and the peaceful liberation of half the world. So that's a picture of the good guys winning. Oh, yeah. Well, how does that connect to Sisyphus and maybe to speak deeper to life and whatever the hell this thing is, which is what I remember the myth of Sisyphus being about. So where does the threat of Camus sort of lie in the work that you're doing? So the myth of Sisyphus, which I had remembered incorrectly, is actually just a five to seven page coda to the whole book at the very end. You only need to read that little essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. The broader work is about Camus's concept of the absurd and the absurd man within literature. And it's just like, I don't really care about the character in Dostoevsky and all this other stuff that you're talking about. It's of no relevance. But the myth of Sisyphus, the myth itself, not the book or the essay of his, is this Greek character and Sisyphus is forced in hell to roll a rock up a hill for eternity. At the very last moment, the rock falls away. And Camus's takeaway from the story is that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. And there's several interpretations of this, but one is once you accept that you are living an absurdist existence, once you own your reality, it loses its bite. And you can start with that as your kind of baseline. And bite is suffering. And hopelessness. So I think when people look at how much ridiculousness is happening in America and it's escalating, you can either think, oh, all is lost. And I think you and I have lived our lives like this. You can live life more like a surfer, whereas you're never going to control the ocean. But you can sure enjoy that ride and stop. If you're trying to control the waves, yeah, you're done. But if you're like, all right, I've got my board, I'm going to see where this takes me. Surfing from what I understand is a pretty fun activity. And also sometimes dangerous, but you'd have to ask Tulsi about that. So we were offline talking about Stalin and the evils of the Soviet regime. One of the things I mentioned, I watched the movie, Mr. Jones, but it's about the 1930s, all the more the, what would you say, the torture of the Ukrainian people by Stalin. One interesting thing to me that I'd love to hear your opinion about is the role of journalism in all of this and also about 1930s Germany. So what's the role of journalists and intellectuals in a time when trouble is brewing. But it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking to understand that trouble is brewing. Like if you were a journalist or if you were just like an intellectual, a thinker, but also a voice in the space of public discourse, what would you do in 1930s about Stalin, about how the more, and what would you do about Nazi Germany in 1937, 1938? So that's really funny that you asked that because currently how the book is structured, it's like books often follow a three act structure, right? So act three is the 80s, act one is the 30s, and act two is going to be like, all right, let's suppose you were in the 30s. Are you just going to give up? Are you just going to be like, well, we're screwed? And you'd be right to say things are going to be very bad for a long time. Or are you going to be one of those few who are like, we're going to do something about this and we're going to go down swinging. There are two books I can recommend, which are just masterpieces that are written by women that just are historians that are just superb. There's a book called Beyond Belief by Deborah Lipschdott. She talks about the rise of Nazi Germany as seen through the press. And what was amazing, and she does a great job empathizing with the press and understand their perspective, is we remember, and Chamberlain gets a bad rap, Neville Chamberlain for kind of appeasing Hitler, because not that long ago they had the Great War, they had World War I, and they had the carnage that the earth had never seen before. And when you had people made out of meat, meeting industrial machines, and plastic surgery was invented as a consequence of this, they're coming back mangled and disfigured. And for what? And this was a world where the Kaiser was the most evil person ever lived. And we all had the Western propaganda about the Hun and all the rapes and all this barbarism and blah, blah, blah. So not that long later, when you're hearing all this propaganda, which was factual, about Hitler, it's like, we heard this, we heard this 20 years ago. This was all lies. Give us a break. And she has all the quotes from the different agencies and how they addressed it. Plus they had very limited information. It's not like Nazi Germany was an open society where reporters can walk around and they were under a lot of pressure as well in those areas. And Hitler himself was pretty good at, he let some stuff slip, but usually he made it seem like he wants peace. He wants world peace. This was amazing. They were making the argument that because all these Jews were being beaten up on the street, this proved, this was the hot take of the day, that Hitler was weak because since Hitler's a statesman and he can't control these hooligans, that shows his control and power is tenuous and this is all going to go away. By the way, Hitler thought that too. He was kind of afraid of the branchers, whatever, he was afraid of these hooligans a little bit. They were useful to him, but at a certain point, yeah, they can get in the way. That's why he wanted to get control of the military, the army, their regiment. If you want to take over the world, you can't do it with hooligans. You have to do it with an actual army. And then you had Kristallnacht, which was a nationwide pogrom, and then all the news agencies universally were like, oh, crap, we got this wrong, and the condemnation was universal. So that book traces the West's reaction to what's going on there and including the reaction to the insipid Holocaust as people being, you know, what they knew, when did they know. There was not ambiguity about people. I think there's this myth that she dispels that they didn't know the Holocaust was happening or they didn't care. They were aware, but they were already at war with Nazi Germany, like what literally what else could they do at that point, you know, to rescue all these Jews. So that's a superb book. And Ann Applebaum, I think the book is called Red Famine, came out fairly recently. And she brings the receipts. And she's a, you know, this is something I really hate with the binary thinkers, where the people think, oh, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're basically a communist, they call Joe Biden a Marxist. It's just like, you know, she's a hard lefty, she's, you know, has TDS. But this book just systemically lays out what Stalin did. By the way, I'm triggered by the binary thinkers. And for those who don't know, TDS 0011 is a trauma derangement syndrome. Yes. So they, you know, forced the starvation in this entire population. And it's not only that, it's like they knew if you weren't starving by looking at you, you were hiding food. So they'd come back to your house at night and break your fingers in the door, or take, burn down your house. And now you're on the street without food because you lied, because this is the people's food. You're a kulak, you're a landowner. And very quickly, a kulak, which meant like peasant landowner, became anyone who had a piece of bread. And this was systemic and ongoing. And many people in the press did not believe it. There was a British journalist, I believe, who got out of the train, Ukraine, like one town earlier and walked and he described all this. And he was mocked and derided. And this is just anti Russian propaganda. Because at the time, in the 30s, this was socialism had come to fruition. This was a noble experiment. I'd seen the future and it works, as I think Sidney Webb was the guy who said that. And the premise was, let's see what happens. We've never tried something like that. And they were perfectly happy to have this experiment happen overseas at the price of the Russian people. Because it's like, you know what, maybe this will be paradise on earth. And I address this in my book as well. This superb essay, I think, by Eugene Genovese. And he talks about the question. The question being, what did you know? And when did you know it? What did you know about the concentration camps? What did you know about the starvation? What did you know about children being taught at school to turn in their parents for having some extra bread? And his conclusion is, we all knew. And we all knew from the beginning, every bit of it. And we didn't care. Because we were more interested in promoting this ideology. So when people are kind of thinking the worst thing on earth is like Robert E. Lee statue being taken down to Washington, DC. We were being told, and especially in a much more limited news information world where now you have literally anyone can have a Twitter, but how many outlets were there, that this is, we're backwards, they're the future, they're scientific. We have the vagaries of the market, which led to the Great Depression. And when you see what was being put over on the American public at the time, anyone who thinks things are as bad now as they've ever been is simply delusional or ignorant. Yeah, I would say just as a small aside, that's why reading, as I'm almost done with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it's a refreshes the, resets the palette of your understanding what is good and evil in the world that I think is really useful now. What helps me be really positive and almost naive on Twitter and in the world is by just studying history and comparing it to how amazing things are today. But in that time, what would you do? What does a brave mind do? And not just acts of bravery, but how do you be effective in that? That's something I often think about. It's easy to be an activist in terms of just saying stuff. It's hard to be effective at your activism. One of the big questions historians have constantly is how did this happen? A, to make sure it doesn't happen again, but this is Germany. This is not some kind of weirdo cult nation. They're very advanced, very in the land of poets and philosophers. How did it get to that point that they're just shooting children and everyone's cheering for this? Specifically on the anti Semitism and the Holocaust. But just the totalitarianism, the cult of Hitler and just this whole kind of thing. This is starting to drop, but there's two sides. I don't know if you want to separate them. One is the totalitarianism and the entirety of the Nazi regime. And then there's the Holocaust, which is going, I would say, very specifically, as I think you're about to describe, is targeting Jews very much so. I don't know if you see those as two separate things. I think they're very interconnected. But I think if you look at it, everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up Anne Frank. But if you look at the numbers, they'd be the ones calling the Stasi on her or whoever the people were at the time, and not the Stasi, obviously, and patting themselves on the back for it. So sorry to pause on that. That's a really important thing. If you're listening to this, and you were in Germany at the time, you would have likely been willing to commit or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against Jews. You have to really sit with that idea that you would have been somebody who just sees this and is not bothered by it, and also very likely kind of understand this as a necessary evil or even a necessary good. Yeah. And I think people think they would be the abolitionists or marching on Selma. The numbers don't add up to that at all. And I think the question would be like, what social... My friend was on Tinder, my friend Matt, who's a great dude. And the question was, what's the most controversial opinion you have? This is New York. And the girl wrote, I hate Trump. And what people perceive themselves as being courageous in saying and doing, and what is the actual social costs of you saying or doing this are two very disconnected things. And we're also trained by corporate media to have completely vapid, uninteresting, banal ideas and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries. There are people who still in New York will take pride because they have a gay friend. And it's like, first of all, who cares? But second of all, you are not a hero. And that person is not your prop, by the way. That's another big problem. Which is why I'd like to give Richard Wolff a shout out for being an intellectual who talks about communism. I think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now to speak about communism seriously. There's difficult waters to tread. Is that the expression? There's difficult paths to walk. I love watching a robot try to use idiom in a language he doesn't even know. 0011. I'm quite deeply hurt by the binary comment. Are you? Your feeling has gone from one to zero. What is love? My buffers have overflown. But there's difficult, I feel like communism is universally seen as a bad thing currently in intellectual circles. Or actually maybe some people disagree with that. People say far left, people are trying to, there's some people who argue the BLM movement is some kind of a Marxist. I don't really follow the deep logic in that, whatever. They said they were formed by Marxism, the founder, co founder. But stating that is different than... There's Marx the totalitarian, there's also Marx the revolutionary. I think they're talking more like we're revolutionaries, we're going to overthrow the status quo. Yeah, right. But we can have that further discussion. But I just don't think they speak deeply about political systems and saying communism is going to be the righteous system. There's not a deep intellectual discourse is what I mean. But if you were to try to be on stage with the Jordan Peterson, to me the brave thing now, it would be to argue for communism. It'd be interesting to see. Not many people do it. I certainly wouldn't be willing to do it. I don't have enough... I don't, first of all, I don't believe it, but second of all, it's a very difficult argument to make because you will get so much fire, which is why I like Richard Wolff, he's one of the people who is quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system of communism, specifically saying that attacking more the negative sides of capitalism. Just saying that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism. I mean, I disagree with that, but I think it's a... I love how something is like we've got a body count of 60 million, but this everything is potentially, like water can drown everyone on earth. So this is incoherent. Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good. Sure. Well, nuclear weapons also can be good. You can easily make the argument, which I don't know that I subscribe to, that nuclear weapons prevented boots on the ground war, or it caused them to be much more contained. And they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about to hit earth, as I've learned from a movie. Armageddon. And they're actually useful as Elon Musk has claimed for prior to colonizing Mars, making it more habitable. Oh, okay. Got to do something. But yes, but I guess what I'm saying is there's a place for nuance. And there's some topics so hot, like communism, where nuance is very difficult to have. And I feel like with Nazi Germany, it was a similar thing at the time. You want to talk about Jeanette Rankin, who was one of my favorite people. So Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress. She was elected before women's suffrage was a constitutional amendment from Montana. She was elected in 1916. She was one of a handful of people to vote against the US going into the Great War, which was the right call at the time. She was a pacifist Republican as well, coincidentally. She lost her seat, ran again in, was it 1940? Got the seat again, and was the only person to vote against getting into World War II. It was not a unanimous choice. Jeanette Rankin was the one person. And she said, you can no more win a war than you can win a hurricane. So she's one of these interesting, and talk about bravery. You're the one vote after Pearl Harbor to say, we're not doing this. And I mean, the pressure she must have been under at the time is, and of course, many people are not interested in hearing her perspective. She's crazy. She's evil, blah, blah, blah. It's also funny, someone on my Twitter when I talked about her goes, maybe she had Hitler's sympathies. Like, yeah, Ms. Rankin was a big fan of Hitler. You figured it out, guys. Do you think there's an argument to be made that United States should not have gotten involved in World War II? Oh, easy. An easy argument. The argument, I talk about this in The New Right. So on internet circles, there's something called Godwin's Law, which means the longer an internet conversation goes on, the probability someone gets compared to Hitler becomes one. In certain New Right circles, the longer the conversation goes on, the more likelihood that the argument will become we shouldn't have ended World War II also becomes one. And the argument is, at the very least, stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off, and then go in and knock off the weaker one. And you're going to be saving, destroying two nightmare systems. And I think that's an easy argument to make. Now, it's hard to pull off after Pearl Harbor. But in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a tough sell. What about after Pearl Harbor? I mean, that's what I'm saying. After Pearl Harbor, how are you going to sell it to the people? The argument is, blah, blah, the Holocaust. The Holocaust, there's no scenario where that doesn't happen, really, unless you're going in way earlier. But even so, Hitler had said, if the Jews launch another war, we're going to wipe them from the face of the earth. So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler as an argument for this. Another thing he did, which was diabolical, is in order to make it that people could not accept Jews as refugees, if they were going to leave Germany, they had to be penniless. So now you have, it's not like they're coming over with money and they can take care of themselves. No, no. They're going to be completely destitute. It makes it harder to accept them, yeah. Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language, it's a tough sell. So speaking of good ones law, what do you make of this condition, Trump derangement syndrome? Yeah. And the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler? I think it's despicable. And I'll give you an example, something parallel that I think more people should be regarding as despicable. Earlier in 2020, we were all told that unless we were in Syria immediately, the Kurds were going to be exterminated. They invoke the Holocaust. This is going to be another genocide. And if you're not for this, you're basically forcing another Holocaust. None of the people who use this argument, we didn't go to Syria, the Kurds were exterminated, they just vanished from the news, had any consequences for using this kind of a comparison. So I think it's really kind of fatuous. And I think it's amazing that people think Hitler's the only tyrant who ever lived. Like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler. You know how you know he's not Hitler? Because you can tweet at him, and no one comes to your house to kill your family. Like that's kind of a big difference. Also there between Trump and many of his critics is that his grandchildren will be raised as Jews. So that's also kind of a, and Deborah Lipschad talks about this a lot. The New York Times at the time, there's another book called Buried by the Times, which talks about the New York Times in the World War II. Because the idea that Jews weren't white was the Hitler idea, the New York Times at the time, Salzburger, wanted to be against this idea. So they specifically downplayed the antisemitism as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive. So the argument that you can separate Nazism from antisemitism is a historical debate people have. And my perspective is, I think it's, I do not find it convincing that you can separate those two. I think antisemitism was essential to Nazism. I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism have very big differences. And do you think, do you think antisemitism was fundamental to who Hitler was or was it just that? So this is the interesting thing is like, was it a tool that he saw as being effective? No, he believed it. So why do you see those as intricately connected? Could Hitler have accomplished the same amount or more without the Holocaust? Yeah. Because think about how many resources you had to divert at a time where you have Operation Barbarossa with Stalin. So why are they connected? Why are they so connected? Is it because Hitler was insane or was he a bad strategist or what? He was obviously a bad strategist. He had no need to open a second front. His generals, my understanding, told him this is crazy. It didn't work out for him at all. I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war, it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect. There's a book about, I forgot what it's called, where it talked about him at that point was just high all the time on amphetamines and that could have affected his thinking. Yeah, there's a really good book on drugs. I forget what it's called, but yeah, it's a really good one. But it was, I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel of the Nazi mythology and this kind of one universal figure to explain this kind of skeleton key. But it could have been the communists. I mean, that could have been the source of the hatred. But the communists didn't get Germany into World War I like he said the Jews did. It seems to me that the atrocity of the Holocaust is the reason we see Hitler as evil. No, the reason we see Hitler as evil is because of World War II propaganda still. Because we don't see Stalin as evil. Right, that's my main point. We don't see Mao as evil to that extent. I think that... Why? Like why would you say that? You know what? Because... The nature of that propaganda. Because I think a lot of the problem for certain type of mentality is Hitler didn't mass murder equally. So as long as you're killing just one group, it's a problem. But if you're murdering everyone equally, all of a sudden, it's like, what are you going to do? So the fact like you were saying, the Hall of the Moor is not common knowledge. The fact that Mao's 50 million dead are not common knowledge and Richard Nixon can be raising a glass to him in China. These are things that I think the West has not done a good job reconciling. Knock knock. Who's there? Frank. Frank who? Frank, you for being my friend, Michael. And the heart attacks will say, Frank, you for being my friend. This is... You got to do it like this. Yeah. Okay. Now back to Hitler. Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? We kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of how to... What is the brave thing to do in the time of Nazi Germany? But do you think, I mean, I'm not even going to ask about Stalin in terms of could Stalin have been stopped? Because probably the answer there is no. But on the Hitler side, could Hitler have been stopped? I think a lot of these things, a lot of luck has to play with it. He was almost assassinated. If you mean by like the West, it's very hard. I mean, yeah. By the German people too. I mean, like if we're politically speaking, there was a rise to power through the thirties, through the twenties, really, I mean, like can whoever... It's not about Hitler. It's about that kind of way of thinking, that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble at sometimes at a mass scale. Could that have been stopped in Germany or maybe in the Soviet Union? I think this is one of the best arguments against radicalization in the States, which is how do you engage when you have like 30% of the population who are members of a party, which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy. Stalin gave orders that the communists who had a pretty sizable population, the Reichstag, that their target shouldn't be the Nazis, but the liberals and the social Democrats and they invented the term social fascist for them. So instead of, they're just like jihadis, instead of taking their sights on Nazism, they set their sights on the moderates because they figured the choice between Hitler and us we're going to win. And this was a huge gamble and they were all killed or had to flee and ones who fled were killed also by Stalin to my understanding. So this is an easy way where he could have been certainly heavily mitigated. What about France and England that it was obvious that Hitler was lying and they wanted peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it even after Czechoslovakia? Like this is the anti pacifist argument, which is like they should have threatened military force more. But then the other anti, the anti anti pacifist argument is if you're going to remember Barack Obama had that, the red line, if you cross this red line in Syria, we're going to go in and Assad or whatever is like, yeah, cool. And he's like, oh, okay, well, sorry. So if you're threatening force, there's the great song lyric, don't show your guns unless you intend to fight, right? So if it's very clear with, with free countries through what's in the press, whether the institutional will is there to follow through on these threats. So I think we have been very hard for Chamberlain to rally the British people to take on Hitler just after the great, I mean, the suffering that Britain's took the great war, they still, you know, obviously it means so much more to them than does to us in the West. What about what do you make of Churchill then? Like why was Churchill able to rally the British people? Why was he like, do you give much credit to Churchill for being one of the great forces in stopping Hitler in World War II? I don't think that's really in dispute. I think he was very much regarded as this kind of the right man at the right time. And I think Chamberlain took a gamble. He, the expression peace in our time was Neville Chamberlain when he signed the appeasement with Hitler and he goes, we now have peace in our time, now go home and get a good night's sleep. That's what he said. Cause he's like, all right, you know, he's going to stop here. And it's not impossible that if you just gave him, like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait, it's not impossible that he's not going to, you know, invade Saudi Arabia next or something like that. Let's see. Okay. The last thing I've read, it's like, of course there's, there's a, it's not impossible, but when you're in the room with Hitler, you should be able to see like man to man, like, like to me, a great leader should be able to see past the facade and see like, like, yes, everything in life is a risk, but it seems like the right risk to take with Hitler, like it's surprising to me. I know there's charisma, but it's surprising to me. People did not see through this facade. I really hate the idea of hindsight and everything being 20, 20, and I think it's a very good idea. Generally, I'm thinking generally not in this specific instance to give our ancestors more credit than they, than, than we tend to give them because people often, here's a great example from another context, which is a lightning rods. People always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious and they weren't, they often were very well reasoned and example of this is lightning rods, which is every year whatever town, the church was the tallest building and that's the one that always got hit by lightning and got caught on fire. Now what, it's a coincidence that it's always the church, like that makes logical sense that they didn't realize, well, it's because the tallest and therefore that attracts electricity. And in fact, when they invented lighting rods, this is a controversy because it's like, well, how is God going to show his displeasure if now it's striking this lightning rod not burning down the church? So a lot of times things are a lot more coherent than we give them credit for. And again, Chamberlain didn't, he's the head of a parliamentary party. So he does not have the freedom in a sense that a Hitler would to be like, all right, we're doing this again, boys. We don't know what it's like in the room with Hitler. Come on. That's, that's, we really have no idea. But I think you have to think about that, right? Yeah, but you can, I can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming. And then you think, okay, the guy with the speeches is the act and he's putting on a show for his people and this is the real one. Okay. So let's, let's take somebody as an example. Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin. Yes. Okay. I don't know why saying his name makes my voice crack. Because he's scared he can hear you. It's like Beetlejuice. Volodya. So there's a lot of people that... Was he the one who built you? No, that was a, that was a collaboration. It's a double blind engineering effort where I was not told of who my maker was. There's a backstory, but... There's a talking cricket. Pinocchio. He'll be a real boy someday. I talk about him quite a bit because I find him fascinating. Now there's a, there's a really important line that people say, like, why does Lex admire Putin? I do not admire Putin. I find the man fascinating. I find Hitler fascinating. I find a lot of figures in history fascinating, both good and bad. And the figures, just as you said, that are with us today, like Vladimir Putin, like Donald Trump, like Barack Obama, it's difficult to place them on the spectrum of good and evil because that's only really applies to like when you see the consequences of their action in a historical context. So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil. And based on our discussion about Hitler, that's something I think about a lot, which is in the room with Putin, and there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's like to be in the room with Hitler in the 1930s. There is a lot of charisma. In the same way, I find Putin to be very charismatic in his own way. The humor, the wit, the brilliance, there's a simplicity of the way he thinks that really, if taken at face value, looks like a very intelligent, honest man thinking practically about how to build a better Russia constantly, almost like an executive. He looks like a man who loves his job in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't, meaning like he loves laws and rules and how to... There's no adversarial press, so that's going to help. Yes. And he's popular with his people, that's also going to help enormously. I'm talking about strictly the man, directly the words coming out of his mouth, like all the videos and interviews I watch, I'm based on that, not the press, not the reporting. You can just see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not... Like I can see, that's why I love Joe Rogan, is like you could tell the guy is genuine and is a good person. And you could tell immediately that once you meet Joe, that he's going to be offline, also a good person. You could tell there's signals that we send that are difficult to describe. In the same way, you could tell Putin is like he genuinely loves his job and wants to build a better Russia. There's the argument that he is actually an evil man behind that charisma, or is able to assassinate people, limit free press, all those kinds of things. Like that's... What do we do with that? So what do human beings like journalists or what do other leaders when they're in their room with Putin do with those kinds of notions in deciding how to act in this world and deciding what policy to enact, all those kinds of things? Just like with Hitler, when Chairman is in the room with Hitler, how does he decide how to act? Well, let's go back to my wheelhouse, which is North Korea. So when your entire world is based on being against Trump and everything Trump does is buffoonery or counterproductive, the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much given. I was very hopeful that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes rather of Trump's meeting with Kim Jong Un. It looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better. I talked about it a lot at the time. And Trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with. People pretend that, oh, he was kind of naive. He had one of the refugees that had stayed the union, you know, lifting up his crutch. The first thing he sat down and talked to Xi Jinping about in Mar a Laga right after he became inaugurated was North Korea. Barack Obama said that when he sat down Trump in the White House during the transfer of power, he said North Korea is the biggest issue. So I think a good leader, whether or not you consider Trump a good leader, has to be aware of, all right, I'm going to have to have relationships of some kind, even if it's adversarial, with some really evil, evil, horrible people, which Kim Jong Un clearly is. Well, I don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that North Korean Kim Jong Un or ill are not evil, right? Correct. But with, in 1930s Germany, isn't it a little bit more nuanced and difficult? Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet and he's just a blowhard and he's an anti Semite, sure, but he's... What about like before the war breaks out, like what about the basic actionable anti Semitism when you're like just attacking, hurting? Are you talking about Kristallnacht or are you talking about the Night of Long Knives? Kristallnacht. So it's the Night of the Broken Glass. Yeah, yeah, the Long Knives is when he assassinated a bunch of his people, that was something different. Yeah, so like when you're actually attacking your own citizenry. Yeah, that was universally condemned, Kristallnacht, and that was very shocking, its level of barbarism to the West. Because I think we still want to believe, understandably, that things aren't as bad as they seem. We would rather... This is why the North Korea book I did, Dear Reader, is used in a humorous framework because if you have to look, it's like looking to the sun. If you stared it straight on, it's very hard to do. So you have to kind of look at it obliquely and then you're kind of realizing the enormity of the depravity. And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing for a very long time. And there's a difference between, okay, we're going to sack these villages and persecute people and we're going to systematically exterminate them. There's still levels of evil and depravity. So you did write the book, Dear Reader, on Kim Jong Il, Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong Il. So that's the previous leader of North Korea. Third one is the un, no creativity on the naming. Well, no, this is intentional because it's a throwback to the dad. So there's been only three leaders in North Korea. So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin, men like these. I think it's important to understand that the history of those kinds of humans, there's the history of North Korea is not well written about or understood, which is why your book is exceptionally powerful and important. So maybe in a big broad way, can you say who was, who is Kim Jong Il as a man, as a leader, as a historical figure that we should understand and why should we understand them? So I wrote Dear Reader by going to North Korea and getting all their propaganda, which is translated into several languages because the conceit is everyone on earth is interested in them and wants to mirror their ideology. And he died in 2011 and you wrote the book in 2012. I went there in 2012. I wrote the book, came out in 2014. So Kim Jong Il is, though not an intellect, North Korea's version of Forrest Gump in that when they write their history, whenever something happens, he's there. And by telling his life story, it's in the first person, he's telling the history of North Korea. So I wanted to write the kind of book where in one book, and it's the kind of reading you could do in the beach or the bathroom, you're gonna get the entire history and know everything you need to know about North Korea in one accessible outlet. And it's what people don't appreciate about North Korea, there's several things, how bad it is. And this didn't happen overnight. This was very systemic that what this family did to that country where piece by piece, they did everything in their power to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world, ramp up the oppression, keep any information from coming in. And they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and control. So there is a farcical element. Let me give you an example. So people in the West kind of get it wrong. They talk about, oh, they talk about when Kim Jong Il played golf for the first time, they get 17 holes in one. There's this one story about Kim Jong Il shrinking time. And this is a story, it sounds supernatural, but it's not. So Kim Jong Il is at a conference, the Dear Leader, and someone is giving a talk. And while that person is giving a talk, Kim Jong Il is taking notes and working on his work. And he has an aide who keeps interrupting him with questions and the speaker keeps stopping. And Kim Jong Il says, why are you stopping, goes, I see you're doing these other things. And he goes, no, no, I can do all these things at once, everyone's shocked. And they said, this is why Kim Jong Il looks at time, not like a plane, but like a cube, and he can shrink time. And my friend goes, do they mean multitasking? And yes, Kim Jong Il is the only person in North Korea who's capable of multitasking. So in order to elevate him, they basically make everyone else in North Korea completely incompetent. And that has a purpose because should the leader go away, this country is going to collapse overnight. So they laugh in the West about all these newspapers show him at the factory and he's at the fish hatchery at the paper plant. They say the difference in North Korea is that the leader goes among the people and does what he calls field guidance. So he will go in that farm and be like, this is what you need to do. And he'll go here and he's so smart, he's good at everything. And thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us. And he's not removed from the people like in every other country. Why does that seem to go wrong with humans, do you think that this kind of the structure where there's this one figure, this authoritarian, this totalitarian structure where there's one figure that's a source of comfort and knowledge? Kim Jong Il is not good at farming. Kim Jong Il is not good at the machinery. It's all a complete lie. Or the things he'll point out will be things that are completely obvious. So here's another example that they use. In North Korea, they have something called the Tower of the Juche Idea, which is an obelisk, which looks like the Washington Monument. But it's completely different because it's got this like plastic torch at the top. And they talk about in their propaganda how all the architects got together and they said, oh, we should make this the second tallest stone obelisk in the world. And Kim Jong Il says, no, let's make it the tallest. They're like, we never thought of this before. And the way it's presented as if, and like, he's the first person to think of this, like these architects are having a brainstorming session at the Tower of the Juche Idea. They're like, all right, we got to do something innovative to put North Korea on the map. What can we do? How about second biggest? He's going to go for this. And then he's like, make, oh, we never thought of this. It's so, because I present it at face value, people sometimes say the book's a satire. It's not a satire. I downplayed all this stuff. It's a farce. Here's another example. North Korea is very big. And I think Russia is to some extent too, on amusement parks, funfairs, they call them, in the British style, because this is a chance for the people to all get together. And there was this amusement park, it's almost like South Park, Cartman, where there's all these rides. And Kim Jong Il's like, I'm not going to let any elderly or children take these rides until I put myself in danger and ride them myself. And they go, but dear leader, it's drizzling. And he goes, no, I have to make sure these rides are going to be safe for everyone, even during the light rain. They go, well, can we go on these rides with you? No, no, no. I have to be the courageous one. And he's riding all the rides and they're standing there crying at his courage. But that's what's, and you ask all the things in one power. It's like, listen, I'm quite confident that those funfair engineers are in a position to ride Modest Mouse, whatever it's called, by themselves and be like, yeah, okay, this is good for the kids. Although to be fair, some of those amusement parks are pretty rusty and dangerous. That kind of propaganda, I guess what I'm playing a devil's advocate is like, it's comforting and it's useful. But it does seem that that naturally leads to an abuse of power. How can it be used correctly? No one person has the intellect or the mind to understand the entirety of an economy, let alone every individual field of interest. Well, for example, you can have an artificial intelligence system that understands the entirety of it. Your affect just completely changed. The mask slipped. I guess you could have an artificial intelligence system. But the question is, can that, I mean, the human version of that is like, you can hire a lot of experts, right? You can be an extremely good manager. Since everything's dynamic, they're not going to have the data to kind of manage it well. It seems that there's a, like what George Washington allegedly did, it seems like most humans are not able to fire themselves. You're not able to like, ultimately be a check on your own power. But that's not, if I was creating a human, that's not an obvious bug of the system that we would not be able to fire ourselves, to know when we have, I mean, it seems like that's something you have to know always, like that's something I often wonder is like, am I wrong about this? Well, this is what we talked about earlier, what are the safety valves to make sure that, okay, if I am incorrect, or my knowledge is finite, Plato's cave kind of thing, what mechanisms are in place that my mistake or limited information isn't going to have the deleterious consequences? And North Korea does not really have that, and as a result, they had polio in the 90s. So there is a, you write about it straight, but there's a humor to it, because it's an absurdly evil place, I suppose. A bunch of people, I asked, I said that I'm talking to you and a bunch of people ask questions. Oh, I got to hear from the plebs, you asked me before we started recording, I specifically said no, it was my contract. Yeah, and you gave, I gave you all the pink skittles or whatever. But they, So pink skittles, you know, pink. I'm trolling, Michael, let me explain to you how that works. We should go at malice.locals.com and sign up and pay, I think the membership fee is several thousand dollars, it's very, it's not. It's not for the layman. Yeah, but the service is excellent. You get a coat with it. But yeah, I went there, posted a lot of really brilliant people there, people should join that community. If you find Michael interesting, or if you just want to go and say why he's wrong, it's a great place to have that. It's not a good place for that, I assure you. A lot of really kind people. So anyway, there's a bunch of people ask that we should talk about humor. So pretend hypothetically speaking that I'm a robot asking you to explain humor to me. So dear reader, I mean, there's a humor, you so wonderfully dance between serious dark topics and then seriously dark humor. Can you try to, if you were to write like a, I don't know, a Wikipedia article, maybe a book about your philosophy of humor, what do you think is the role of humor in all of this? A joke is like a baby. You can't dissect it and then put it back together and expect it to work. Trust me on this one. Despite no matter how you carve that thing up, it's not going to be working the next day. And you need it to sew those little sneakers with those hands. I don't know that humor is something that is very explainable. People there's something called claptor, where this is like the worst kind of humor where people applaud because they agree with what you're saying, as opposed to laughter. That's the poetry reading and the drag queens do that too, I think because of the nails. You laugh, it's a visceral reaction. When someone on Twitter is insisting, you know, that's not funny, you're not in a position to make that claim. And let's go back to North Korea. I had a refugee I knew and he went to high school here and he was talking to his buddies and they said, hey, remember when we were kids, we had Pokemon and he goes, oh yeah, except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad starve to death, which is the truth. Now, who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke? I don't know what it's like watching anyone, including my dad, starve to death and my dad's fatty so he's not going hungry anytime soon. So it's very bizarre to me when people feel comfortable precluding others from making jokes, especially, and I think this is a very Jewish thing, like this kind of gallows humor, especially when it's laughing about a personal loss or experience that they've had. Humor is a great way to mitigate pain and suffering. But it's also, I think this is why it's a Jewish thing, it's a black thing. When you are a marginalized community or poorer, it's free. Telling stories, telling jokes or songs, you don't have to have money, but you can have joy and happiness. And I think that's why you find it so much more in kind of lower status communities than you find in like wasps who are notoriously humorless. Which is strange because people pay you a lot of money for the jokes you do, so it's not really free. Yeah, well, nope, they don't have to pay me. It's appreciated but not expected. I find my voice cracking every time I try to make a joke, like I fail miserably at this. Some people... You're still in beta, that's what I thought. Alpha. Sure. Being an alpha is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. No, I meant alpha version. Oh, okay. I don't know if you're a robot gobbledygook. I'm not going there, okay. Who are you talking to? In my own head. I'm talking to myself in my own head. Okay, speaking of North Korea, some people say that, you know, I've read that comedy is about timing. Well, first of all, do you agree? And second of all... No, I'm serious. It's very much about timing. No, just that you're saying yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Okay. Isn't it comedy is tragedy plus timing? This is not the full reference. What is it? The interrupting cow knock knock joke. I'm not going to do it, but... That's not a timing thing. It's more of a repetition and then the twist ending. No, the moo. Oh, the moo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interrupting cow. You're thinking of the banana one. Anyway, I'm not going there. Yet you're... Who are you talking to? In my own head. Good lord. Are you small wonder? Do you stand sleeping in a wardrobe? Yeah. That's so British. But yet you're very... I don't want to stay in a closet because that has connotations. Let's both come out of the closet for a second. I love you. Let's talk about... I love you, Lex. I wasn't saying, I love you, Alex. I was saying, I love you, Lex. Oh, you're talking to me. Yes, through the screen. So you think about me when you're with another man. I watch you when you're sleeping. Okay, so you're really active on Twitter. And somebody else asked on your overly expensive membership site, how do you find humor different in writing on Twitter versus spoken humor? So if humor is about timing, how do you capture the timing and the brilliance of the whatever is underlying humor in the context of Twitter? Like another way to say it is how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on Twitter? So with Twitter, you have to be the first one to the punchline. So when Ron Paul had a stroke, I was immediately being like, he's still the most articulate libertarian. He's doing a great Joe Biden impression right now. All the libertarians got ass mad. So like too soon, or like when someone dies, you're making the jokes about them. It's like, when do you want to make the jokes about someone just died a week later? It doesn't make any sense. Too soon is perfect timing. Or you could say it's not appropriate ever, but too soon does not make sense in this context. So that is something that I enjoy doing. It's also fun ruffling people's feathers, something I enjoy doing. I think spoken versus writing is very different because when you are having good banter with someone, for me as the audience, knowing that it is on the spot really adds an element of humor because then it's like, wow, this is fun. It's like a ping pong match or something. Whereas in writing, you're losing the tone, you're losing the relationship of a dynamic conversation. And a lot of times the joke is just going to be a different type of joke. Well, it's funny, but Twitter, there's a sense, especially your Twitter, that you just thought of that and you just wrote it. Yes. Like there's a feeling like it's literally you talking as opposed to what I imagine is there's some editing or it doesn't look like it. Whoever your editor is should be fired. There's an interesting effect actually. If I want to say something, I don't know, about something that's bothering me about the presidential election or something like that, what is the actual central idea that I'm trying to convey to myself? Like if say I was having a hypothetical conversation with myself in my head, why am I putting my pants back on? I'm more comfortable this way. Promo code MALICE20, sheathunderwear.com, okay. That's sheath... What is it? What's the website? Sheathunderwear.com. Sheathunderwear.com, promo code MALICE20. And I forgot, why is that underwear really nice? Because it has a dual pouch technology to keep your man parts separate. They've also got woman stuff, but I don't know how that works. There's a thing worth going somewhere. And the material is really refreshing. I mean, it's really... And it makes your ass look good. That's promo code MALICE20. And it's made by a former vet because he was in Iraq. So that's why I like promoting it. Yeah. But what I'm writing the tweet, I like to... It forces me to think deeply about the core of the message. But what I found, this really interesting effect, like I don't really do much editing on the tweet, I'll just think and then I'll write it. And then when I post it, like submit, I immediately see the tweet very differently than it was in my mind. Huh. I often delete, I delete, I don't know, some percentage of tweets about two, five seconds after. Wow. I don't know. It's something... Once you send it, it's why the Gmail send features, undo send feature is really nice. It's like it just changes the way I see the thing. So it's very interesting. But I really love it that you can delete it because when I say stuff out in the wild, like to other humans, like spoken word is like, you can't delete what you just said. And I often regret the things I say, like on the spot, like I shouldn't have said that. Really? Yeah. I don't have that. Well, again, whoever your editor is, what is it, Edith Piaf, Jeannine Hicart Han? Wow, your French is as bad as your English. I don't have any tweets I regret because if I sent a tweet that I regretted, I would make amends. I would make it a point if I was needlessly offensive to somebody or hurtful or accidentally, I would make sure to fix it and go out of my way to make sure that person feels vindicated and validated by accepting my apology. That has never happened, had to happen, thankfully. I'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait. Some recently some people have come after me pretty hard. And my perspective is that it's not really about me. It's either I represent something to them. I'm just a jackass with the Twitter. So if you're getting this riled up over me, it's not really about me. Maybe I'm delusional, but that's how I look at it. So if they are trying to provoke me into this kind of heated exchange, I will never do it because I'm not interested in it. And I don't think there's going to be any, like Jeannette Rankin, you can't win. It's just going to be like trying to win a hurricane. There's no hero here. Well, let me ask you about this because somebody also asked that on your overly expensive membership site that like they were saying that they're an academic. They wondered, because I'm an academic, quote unquote, I'm not an academic, but I do still have an affiliation with MIT. The word academic is just dirty, which is a problem that needs to change. Just like the word nerd is dirty. No, academic needs is going to be the next front to open and they're going to be very vilified. We're coming for them and it's going to be very, very ugly. And I cannot wait. No, but there needs to be a place, a different term for people who love research and knowledge. Oh, that's true. That's very fair. No, you're right. 100%. You're right. So like you have to clarify what you mean by academic and right now the word academic means in the intellectual public discourse, it means the enemy. And there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve that targeted vilification, but like a lot that don't. They're just curious people that are just building robots that will one day destroy you. Voice cracks every time I make a joke. You're not consistent. I can't do this. Because you're not making a joke, you're telling the truth. I'm editing. Can I delete that joke? Okay. That's not even a joke. Robots building robots that will one day kill us. Oh, God willing. God willing. Humans are the joke. That's why I'm cracking. My voice is cracking. What was I even fucking saying? Academics. Academics. But why? My local, someone had a question. They're an academic. Right. They're an academic. They're saying like, are you worried that in academia, associating yourself with a sort of somebody who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas, like the two examples they gave is Michael Malice and Joe Rogan. Does Joe have any radical? I wouldn't consider him radical at all. Well, we can talk about it. But Joe is, I think, a bad example. He's quite centrist to me. Well he could have, for example, like what has Joe been attacked on? It's, for example, on the topic of like transgender athletes in sports, there's what else? I mean, he's been pro Bernie Sanders and pro Trump or like giving Trump a pass. Not anti Trump. Not anti Trump. What else? None of these are radical. Meat stuff, being pro meat versus anti vegan. All those kinds of things. But you can be misconstrued and saying, there's I think a highlight, my mom actually wrote to me about this, which is hilarious. Thank you. I said, I like how you jot it down. That's when it's important. That's a sign, my voice cracks, a sign when Michael Malice makes a funny joke when you jot something down. He writes it and then the next time he crosses it out. Yeah. It's like Joe Biden and the debates. I did also just crap my pants. So there's a, I mean, he's a comedian. You have a comedian side to you, right? I mean, you're, you've talked humorous side humorous. So you can misconstrued like Joe is being somehow a radical thinker and the same can be done with you. And his question was, how are you worried about associating yourself with folks like that? Am I or are you? Like me? Yeah. That's a good question. And is that something, do you see yourself as somebody who's dangerous that I shouldn't be talking to? And in the same way, do you ever think about guests on your podcast or people you talk to publicly, associate yourself with publicly and think that there is somebody that crosses that line that you shouldn't talk to? So I interviewed in the new ride, I interviewed like up to full blown Nazis in the last chapter is that Chris Cantwell, but that was in the context of that book, right? So there's lots of people who people want me to have on my show. And the way I look at it is like you have a table and tablecloth, right? And let's suppose the table is three feet wide. The tablecloth is two feet wide. So if I move the tablecloth to the right, I'm going to lose people on the left. I can only cover so much space. And the further you go on the fringe in one direction, the more mainstream you're going to lose on the other direction. So I'm very much making a conscious choice not to talk to being, people will say I'm cowardly and that's absolutely true. I'm being fearful here. I would prefer not to talk to some of those who would alienate some of the more mainstream people. And here's a perfect example of why. On my birthday last year, I woke up seven o clock in the morning to go pee. And I checked Twitter or whatever, and Jeb Bush had followed me, Jeb. And it's seven a.m., you're not really awake. You're like, wait, what? And then I thought maybe it was a fake account, but it's in the verified tab. Oh, you don't have this because you're not verified on Twitter, that's a shame. So people who are mad are on Twitter. Twitter does not respect robots. They ban bots. You're lucky. Zero, one. Zero, zero. It's zero, zero, zero. Those are my pronouns. So it was Jeb, Jeb, Governor Bush, and I corresponded with him and I asked him on the show and he decided not to for various reasons. Very politely, he's like, just politics is so bad right now, I don't want to talk about it. And I respect that for him. If I'm creating my show where he's going to get heat and get canceled, oh, you can't be on the show. He has these other guests. I don't want to lose that opportunity because as we were talking about earlier, me and Alex Jones and Tim Pool, I think a lot of people would be very excited to see me sit down with Jeb Bush. And I told him in writing, and I meant this, I wouldn't be clowning him. I wouldn't be disrespectful. It would be a lot of fun. There's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes and I would do my best to bring that out and talk about what it's like being a blue blood to be born into his grandfather, Prescott Bush was a Senator from Connecticut, marrying a woman who didn't speak English. How does that work when your family's royalty and things like that? So I had a lot of fun questions for him and that's kind of, you're going to have to choose one or the other. Well, you do a really good job with that. Like Ben Shapiro does a good job with that too, which is you can have multiple, you can have a trolley side, humor side where you tear down the power structures and so on, but you can also have a serious side and it's a safe space for people from all walks of life to walk in and you're not adversarial. Never. So I take the word guests seriously. If they're going to be on my show, I'm not going to have them have negative consequences as a result of being on my show. That said, I mean, maybe in my case, I'll be honest and say that I find Alex Jones outside of the conspiracy stuff for some reason, maybe you can explain, maybe you can psychoanalyze me, but I find him hilarious to listen to. He's a performer. He's very performative. But there's a lot of people that don't see the humor of it and they see the serious consequences of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds and they see the danger of it. And I personally, I'm often tempted to talk to Alex in a podcast format, but I think I'm trying to convince myself that I never will. For me, I feel unsafe talking to Alex because I can't truly be myself, which is like naive and honest. And actually, I generally, when I talk to humans, I want to see the best in them. And I think that's like, I often think about if I talked to Hitler in 1935, 1938. You got a list of names to give him. Well, yeah, I mean, that's how you get the interview. Come on, let's be honest. Who are we kidding? I would, you have to give away one of your, I would probably give away one of my brothers, so. How many brothers do you have? Well, just one. Okay. Too many. I want to be an only child. He's the older brother. He used to pick on me. Payback. You know, it's only, he had a good life. You should think of it more as Stalin, so I don't interrupt you, because Hitler, you're Jewish. You're already going to have very adversarial, he's not going to perceive you as a human in a sense, right? Right. Stalin, you're right. Yeah. That would be much easier. Or Kim Jong Un or something like that. Okay. Do you think, like how, okay, this is a good question, is, and that's, why don't you judge something? If you, alright, we'll cross it out in a second. I think this is a really good example of a difficult figure that's controversial that people bring up to me a lot, and you've interviewed twice, which is Curtis Yarvin. Yeah, Manchester Smallbug. Manchester Small, AKA Manchester Smallbug, which is his pseudonym that he goes by in his blog. Can you tell me about who he is? Sure. Why is he interesting? What of his ideas are interesting? Well, briefly, he invented the concept, the red pill. So Curtis, Manchester Smallbug had a blog called Unqualified Reservations, you can still find it online. It's very verbose. He writes at length, very, very bright. His perspective is very heretical. So a lot of things that we take for granted in our liberal democracy, he regards as not only incorrect, which is downright absurd, and he does not take what many people view as the basis of American political discourse as the basis for his thought. So when you're starting with someone who is basically repudiating the American milieu, a lot of people are going to, of course, regard him as dangerous or someone who is verboten. He's a very bright person. Why is he such a toxic figure? Because if you are blue pilled, if you are the guardians of what is acceptable discourse, then you have to make sure your forts are secured, and that any figure outside of this acceptable discourse has to be marginalized and regarded as radioactive as possible. You don't want to let in these kind of ideas that would be destructive to your hegemony. So let's dig into it. So I've read a few things by him, but then I hear that in a bunch of places, him being called a racist, a white supremacist, neo fascist, so on. I go to his Wikipedia. There's a view on race section. Let me read it. Yarvin's opinions have been described as racist, with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery, including the belief that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons. Yarvin himself maintains that he's not a racist because while he doubts that, quote, all races are equally smart, the notion, quote, that people who score higher on IQ tests are in some sense superior human beings is, quote, creepy. He also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery, though he has argued that some races are more suited for slavery than others, quote, it should be obvious that although I'm not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff. Yarvin wrote in a post that linked approvingly of, I don't know these people, Steve Saylor. Steve Saylor, yeah, he's from. Jared Taylor and other racialists. Yeah, so. Okay, so like, one of my questions is. Let me just say one sentence. In the same way that you had, you mentioned that guy earlier who was defending some aspects of communism, and that is, in some context, acceptable when you think about it, it's like this should be radioactive. The fact that he is engaging with these ideas in anything other than this has to be reputed at all costs is what renders him to a large extent a racist. That's really interesting. There are some topics you can be nuanced and some not, and communism is still a topic that you can be nuanced about. It's difficult, but you can be. Race and this like talking about slavery and IQ differences based on race is a topic that I guess is radioactive to a degree where you can't even say anything, even if it's like nuanced or not even like making a point, it's like touching it as you make another point. And understandably, you can understand that I'm going to steel man their point, because you can understand the point. It's like you're just talking about Hitler. Once this foot gets in the door that some people are inherently slaves or some people are inherently better than others, it really quickly collapses, so that would be their perspective. But that's what, like if I were to give criticism of his... But let me just say one more thing. Racist is also used to describe Alex Jones. Alex doesn't talk about race. Racist is a shorthand for a certain percentage of the population to let you know, do not bother investing in this person any further. They're off limits. Yeah, so definitely. Racism and sexism is a thing that's now used to shut down conversation that's quite absurd by a small percent of the population. But Jared Taylor and Steve Saylor, Jared Taylor interviewed him for my book, he would be regarded in any sense as a racist. What's the difference between racist and racialists? So racialists, I mean, this is splitting hairs and now I'm gonna be all radioactive, Jared Taylor runs something called Amarin and this is, I mean, his perspective is that there are inherent differences for the races and you cannot live side by side, well, whites and blacks should not be living side by side. And by the way, for people who don't know, this is out of context, you have written a great book that includes some of these concepts called The New Right, which does not include these concepts, but talks about, well, it's more about the growth of the community around the alt right and all those kinds of the world. So and his point about IQ, it's like, if you had a population, the Dutch, right, I think they're the tallest people on earth. And if you said, well, the Dutch are the best people on earth, why? Because they're the tallest, it's like you're a crazy person. So if someone is scoring low, an individual on an IQ test, that means they're somehow a lower quality person. Well, maybe one very specific aspect, but I mean, if they're a good human being, I've got friends who are low IQ, all my friends are low IQ, frankly, compared to me, sound like Trump there for a second. That's how you choose. Well, I don't have any other choices, no one's gonna be at my level. You're the smartest person since Abraham Lincoln that I've ever seen. Unlike him, I actually am honest. So he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas. Here's another thing, like if you bring up that Aristotle said that some people are born to be slaves, he wasn't speaking about race, he just meant people's souls. H.L. Mencken, who's a great heretic and early 20th century figure, one of his quotes that I say all the time, which people have seen a lot in this past year, that the average man does not want to be free, he merely wants to be safe. That I think speaks, I don't know, I am not familiar with what Mulbug's saying about slavery because his writing is ponderous, but that certainly is something I think that is undeniable, that I think more people are realizing there's a large percent of the population that is actively disinterested in freedom and the more responsibilities it entails. Well, I mean, really just the word slavery, if you want to make some kind of point or even think about the topic outside the context of this is a horrible thing that happened in the United States history. And other countries history is not unique to us, let's be clear. This is very important in their slavery going on today and a lot of people argue that sex trafficking and all those kinds of things, I mean, there's atrocities going on today that talking about it in a way that's not immediately saying this is the most horrible thing that happened ever, it's something I think about a lot is like if I want to say something controversial, I should do so with skill, with care, and only about things I care about. Well, here's where I would disagree. When I say things, I often say things that are controversial, or I will say uncontroversial things in a controversial way, because it's a useful mechanism to alienate people you don't want around you. Because if there are people who are going to be shocked by certain topics, like we should have ended World War II, like even as a hypothesis, they just clutch their pearls, they're like, oh, you want the Holocaust to happen? I can't discuss most things with you because you're not interested in having a conversation, you're interested in your emotional response. I see things differently, maybe this is a bit of a devil's advocate, but in at least the modern discourse of like Twitter and social media and so on, I find that if you do that, you're not actually removing the people that are not thoughtful and kind and so on, you're actually attracting loud people. Like a small number of them, they come over and start yelling at you, start yelling, they're basically ruin the party by showing up and just screaming, and so all the thoughtful people leave. Well, that's why you have to be a very heavy blocker. You have to block people on Twitter because you have to cultivate your audience and have them, like a lot of times people come at me, I don't care, then they'll start attacking members of my audience and then I'm like, dang, I got to block them because they've won this one because I can't have that. Yeah, I don't know, unnecessarily provoking people feels, this is beta testing, you try to break the system and see what works, you put up as much pressure as possible. This is very much computer stuff that you should be able to appreciate, the point being when you have a program, you're trying to intentionally sit there and do as many mistakes as you would go wrong. Right? Is that not common practice? Yeah. So you're saying that's a way to see communication with the world, as you say something uncontroversial in a controversial way and that blocks people. Or does it trigger them? Do they roll their eyes? What is going to be their emotional response? Are they going to start yelling? The problem is the reason I can't think like this, or I can't, because I'm not sure about the points I'm trying to make, always. I'm not always 100% sure that I'm right about things. So in being thoughtful, I'm afraid that I'll turn off with an eloquently phrased or even incorrect statement, I will do damage that can't be undone in terms of having a good conversation about a topic. So I want to be very careful about like, I'm not saying afraid, fear is not what I'm talking about. I think fear is like not saying something out of fear is at the core of the many of the problems of the world today. But I'm just saying be, say stuff with care. If I'm going to touch race as a topic, it feels like you really should be deeply, first have a point to make, like you really care about a point you want to make, and second, think deeply about how to say that point in a way that communicates it the best. And touching, I would say, listen, on your show, which is great, I mean, I'd like to say thank you for having Menchus Moberg. You are welcome. That's the name of the show. Thank you for having me. A couple of times, it's great to sort of get him to in this loose way to talk about different kinds of stuff. I don't think we talked about race at all. So I'm just bringing it back to what you were asking, which is if you read the Wikipedia, the perspective is going to be this guy talks about slavery constantly, where it's completely disproportionate to his work. But even on your show, you can tell even not outside of the race stuff that he's not ultra careful about, he's not nuanced. He's not afraid to say something just like, I would say, let me just criticize him, my face is not used as me, carelessly say something controversial. I'm not saying he doesn't go, that makes him, it's a very different thing than somebody who on purpose says something controversial stuff, like Milo Annapolis, sorry, I forgot Milo, whatever his name is. Which is really nice to see that he's a genuine person who's thoughtful, he doesn't mean to, but he just carelessly seems to say things that I feel like damaged the rest of his body of work. I can't really speak for him, but I would guess his point is once you're swimming in this kind of worldview, you're going to be anathema already. So there's no pleasing these people, so why bother trying? Yeah, I think that's a deeply, that's a black pill way of seeing the world. It's not black pilled at all, because it's a cynical way that these people, so it's saying that it's a very kind of way of thinking, I'll say whatever I want, whoever comes along with me. You just earlier said yourself that race, racism has been weaponized as a way to shut down conversation. So I think his perspective would be, I am so outside the mainstream in my worldview that I know I'm going to be called racism, racist. So there's no point in trying to be nuanced because I'm already going to get the scarlet letter. Yeah, I just disagree with that because for example, I am one person that he turned off by his carelessness, and I think I should be a good target. I should be somebody. I think that's fair. And I'm just like, he, it's very convenient to think that there's ridiculous people out there, which they are, who call everybody racist and sexist currently. And then you can't please them. So I'm not even going to try, no, but there's like this gray area of people that I don't listen to the outreach culture, whatever that I don't, this Wikipedia article means nothing to me. I'm not going to, I'm more, I'm just seeing this careless person. And if he's going to be careless about a race like this, I feel like if I walk along with him long enough, I'm going to catch the carelessness. I'm going to lose like, I'll defend your perspective better than you can. This is good. I'm taking notes. I talked to Eric Weinstein after you guys talked about me on your show. We had a good conversation. He invited me on his show. That would be an amazing conversation. And we got on the phone and his concern, fairly, he goes, I don't want you to come on my show for the purposes of clowning me. And I would never do that. Yeah. It would never. He might not be aware of who you are. That's why he wants to feel me out. He's like, you know, when he hears troll, it can mean a lot of different things. And I, we had a very conversation and very much was very clear that that's not where the conversation would go. But I think when you are going to be on someone's show, there is a responsibility that they're not going to have to pay a cost for having you as their guests. So if you're perceived, if you were put off by how he was in that live streams or two, I did like, I understand where you're coming from. I think he's very, very bright, but you have a very, you have a different audience than I do. And you're going for something different than I am. No, no, no. Like in my interest, the sense of. You wouldn't feel safe with him. Yeah. I wouldn't feel safe with him. That's a really boring line for me. I think I would like to actually talk to him one day, Alex Jones has crossed the other line for me. Well, you could do what you could do with me, tape the episode and then never release it. No, it's, it's one of those things will be when there's finally they'll, they'll make a history channel documentary about you and I and how it all went wrong. Like the cult that we started and then everybody killed themselves. And there's a, we'll release it then because it'll be like unseen footage. This is how it started is it'll be black and white in a basement somewhere in New York. Yeah. Yeah. My mother's basement. Let's explain so much. Okay. So I spoke to Yaron Brooke about objectivism and Ayn Rand, he, he kind of argued, he highlighted difference between capitalism and anarchism as around the topic of violence and the, that having government be the sort of the, the negative way to say it is like having a monopoly on violence, but basically being the arbiter of, or the, the people that making sure that violence doesn't get out of hand. That would, you know. Yeah. 2020 showed that. Yeah. The government's great at that. Yep. Well, what, what's, okay. Without. This is him with a straight face making that argument. Good work Yaron. All right. Well, can you with a straight face argue for the idea that in anarchism, violence would not get out of hand? Sure. For one thing, if your worst argument against that, one of my little quotes is what are presented as the strongest arguments against anarchism are inevitably description of the Strasquo. So the argument is under anarchism, you know, you'd have warlords, you know, killing people and then you'd have, you know, whoever's strongest gets to just take over a neighborhood. Well, we have that now. We saw that the police are perfectly comfortable disarming the population. And then when they try to protect themselves or punished, they're, we're happy to stand down. You can't, you can only have that happen if you have a monopoly. If they're like, let's suppose you had a television stations, right? And CBS said, you know what? We're not going to broadcast. Cool. We're not going to broadcast. We're going to watch any of these other channels. So the problem with having monopoly is everyone has to be dependent on this issue. What's amazing about minarchism, which objectivists are, is they will argue that government is really, really bad at everything it does and it touches. Therefore it has to be in charge of the most important stuff. Well, that's not therefore, but, but there is a thing that's fundamentally different than all the other things. And Yaron Brook also said that no government has, this is on your show, has ever worked in the way he's proposing. Now objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy is based on objective reality. And what she posited is you look and study the facts of nature, facts of reality and deduce things accordingly. And she very much regards herself as part of the Aristotelian tradition, as opposed to the Platonist tradition, where the idea precedes reality and the idea is more real than what we see around us. So what he's saying is all the data, according to him, contradicts his argument, but still he's going to make this imaginary government that has never existed and there's no evidence that it can exist. Let's talk about objective law, to have access to the legal system, which is something we want. And just in terms of selling disputes, when you have a government monopoly, it's going to be more expensive, more difficult for poor people. The cost of hiring a lawyer is more expensive than hiring a surgeon. You can't say with a straight face, this is the only way or the best way. And the other thing is the argument for objectivism, against anarchism, they have this stupid claim it's like, what if you're a member of one security company and I'm a member of another and we have a dispute and one shows up the door. What happens now? As if this is some insuperable argument. Well, we have that on earth. Every country is in a state of anarchism regarding every other country. We don't have a world government. So what happens if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico? I have no idea. I bet you don't have an idea. What I'm sure of is that system has been worked out ahead of time between the three countries and it's been worked out in such a way that you and I don't have to reinvent the wheel. Same thing with cell phone companies. If I'm on Sprint, you're on Metro PCS and I call you, who pays? Does Sprint pay you? Do they split the difference? First of all, there's no objective way that one has to work, but the thing is companies who have auto accidents, they have arbitrage all the time. Like if I run into you, they work it out and it never reaches our desk. So the only thing that cops are good at is keeping people, at any government monopoly, is forcing people to be their customers by keeping them unsafe. Okay. There's a few things I'd like to say there to just explore some of these ideas. So one is in terms of Canadian and Mexico and so on, that it does, something has been worked out perhaps. Not perhaps. Perhaps. Do you know for sure that if there's a point I'm trying to make, so let's say for sure it's been worked out. There was a point in history where it wasn't worked out. To work, to come to a place of stability, there has to first be some instability. So when you first, like for every kind of situation, they're like dispute over space, like who gets to own Mars, that kind of thing. Sure. For it, and then these different competing institutions will have to figure it out. And so there's the concern with anarchism, I think, or with any kind of interaction. You said brilliantly that there's an anarchism relative to the, there's no one world government. Right. Alex Jones enters the chat, but the fear is that there's going to be an instability that doesn't converge towards some stable place. That is not the fear. That is the goal under Ayn Rand's philosophy. Markets have something what they always talk about as being creatively destructive, which means you look at something that's been happening for a very long time. Every generation, every innovator starts chipping away at it. He finds better ways, marginal improvement or marginal, or it doesn't work and he goes broke. When government tries to implement improvement, we all have to suffer the consequences. When an innovator does, it's a huge asymmetry. If it hurts, it only hurts him. If it succeeds, he becomes rich and we all profit as a consequence. But the fear of anarchism, I think, is that it will be non creative destruction. It'll be just destruction, right? It's not like the instability. Stability is one of these words that sounds objective, but has no real meaning. What field has stability? Let's suppose you want stability. Relationships. Yeah. Let's talk about medicine. Stability means we're not going to invent new diseases or new treatments, right? If you mean stability in terms of a baseline of security, we have that already. Very few relationships turn violent. Under an anarchist system, look at it right now. If you look at a bar full of drunken young males full of testosterone, if you look at a hotel where everyone is not native to the area, those are both far safer than the places that the government has taken upon itself to protect you. The parks, the alleyways, the streets, the subways. We have right now a comparison of which is better at keeping people safe. And it's very obvious that when something is private and under someone's control, and there would be layers of there'd be more police, but they wouldn't be a government monopoly. The store would have someone, the street would have someone, and you'd have your own personal security that would be attached to your phone. Having security as a function of geography as opposed to a function of you as an individual is a landline technology in a post cell phone world. So you think it's possible to have, psychologically speaking, as an individual among the masses, to have a sense of security even though there's not a centralized thing at the bottom of the whole thing? Like, there's not a set of laws that are enforced based on geography like we have nations now. You can have a set of laws that are enforced in some kind of emergent agreed upon way. So like, basically, I want to go to a hotel and trust that I'll be able to get a room and nobody's going to break down the door and I don't know, take all my vodka. Let's take a different way. If you were worried about a hotel having bedbugs, that's not something the government's involved in. And that's not an unrealistic concern. Are there mechanisms right now that you can undertake to make sure that's not the case? Yes. So it would be the same thing with, I want to make sure I go to a hotel that has security. It would be exactly the same thing. And here's another example, kosher food. People who keep kosher, Jews who keep kosher, their food has to be prepared in a certain way. It has to meet higher rabbinical standards, right? If you look at food, it will have that certification, the K, and there's even competition there. There's the K and there's the stricter U letter. People don't notice it because they're looking for it. You would have companies certifying different locales for their level of security. And it would take an hour to have an app that would, just like when you have toll roads, right? That would tell you you're approaching an unsafe area, you're not going to be covered by us or, and you could have it color coded very easily. We could do this today. But the thing is, you're exactly correct, but there's an assumption of you're already in a, okay, you can give me a different word than stability, but you're already in a place where the forces of the market or whatever can operate. The worry is like, initially, you might not have enough stability to where you can choose one place over the other based on the security that they provide. We already have different types of security here because we have federal government, we have state governments and we have local governments. So and these often contradict each other. So the idea of the implausibility of having different security companies and having it be unstable or impossible, we already have a very rough example of it happening in real life. So how all of it started, the idea of, especially with Yaron, is like it all started with government monopoly of violence saying like, no kids, don't let violence get out of hand. So like how do... We had a civil war where half the country was slaughtered. That's the display of the government not having a monopoly on the violence, right? It's like, that's the split. They had such a monopoly on the violence in the North that it could draft people to fight others that they didn't even care about. But there's a South. It's the government splitting because this is giant iceberg like splitting. The argument is that you would have something like a civil war much more often under anarchism. First of all, if you had a civil war much more often, we don't have that with car companies, right? We don't have a company that says, I refuse to pay or whatever. That's not violence. Sorry to interrupt. And I'm playing... Hold on, let me finish. It is violence because if I'm a company and I'm saying that my cars can run over yours with no consequences, this is a rough analog, why has that not happened? Now in terms of having security system, if I am free, just like switching cell phone to go from one provider to another and this one company as part of its payment doesn't want $50 a month, $100 a month, wants my son, I'm not going to be a member of this security company unless in that case we're dealing with something like a Pearl Harbor or foreign invasion where it's like all hands on deck. Let's go by evidence. How many places do have evidence of that you can have at a large scale? Well, it's absolutely in a large scale. Because it feels like once you don't know the person. What about eBay? eBay is an example of anarchism in practice. I am selling something to someone whose name I don't even know in a country that is nowhere proximate to me and eBay acts as the arbiter. Sometimes I don't get the money after I get screwed over, but that's far less than the taxation that I have to give to the federal government. It's a great point, but it's in the space of finance. If I could, if on eBay you could also commit violence. Theft is violence. No. Yeah, if you give me 10 grand for a car and I don't deliver anything, you've stolen 10 grand from me. Yes, but there's something uniquely problematic to being stabbed or shot. The reason you're stabbed or shot is because the government, despite its contract, is refusing to allow second amendment rights to be implemented among the citizenry and the people who are making that the case are the cops. They are the ones who are the traitors to the constitution and should be regarded as such. Whereas private companies are far more amenable to market pressures than the state is. It's a strong argument, but let's actually just briefly mention the scale thing. Why don't you think we should talk about scale? Because if you had anarchism just in Vermont or just in Brooklyn, well, fine. The people make the argument you need anarchism or else China's going to invade, but that's like saying what, do these little countries don't exist? Does San Salvador not exist? Some of them are violent, some of them are not, but the point is they're not all at moments notice about to be invaded. Kuwait's an example of this. Kuwait was invaded by Iraq and very quickly all the big countries who are interested in having your stability, safe space, got involved and kicked him out of Kuwait. If you had this company that was waging war on the population, it seems quite likely that the other organization would get together and put a stop to this because they're not in a position to provide this service of security to their customers. Okay. All of this is brilliant, but didn't you just say that we are actually in a state of anarchism relative to other countries? Yes. So isn't this what emerges? This is what, aren't we actually living in a state of anarchism where we all have agreed? I haven't agreed to anything. So the basic criticism you have is you're born on a geographical area and you're forced to have signed a bunch of stuff just by being born in a particular place. So really, if you could just much easier choose which space of ideas you associated with, that would be actually a state of anarchism. And you could have like a military that you sign up with. Sure. And you're certainly not putting people in prison to get raped because they're selling drugs. Yeah. And you're certainly not allowing everyone else on the street who wants to be there. Can we say something nice about Ayn Rand? I can talk about nice things about her all day. I own her copy of the Fountainhead, you know. What to you is Ayn Rand's best idea, one that you find impactful, insightful, useful for us in modern society that you think about? That your life has meaning and productive work is your highest value. And that you shouldn't apologize, and this is something I despise, you shouldn't apologize for saying, I want to be happy and I'm going to work toward that. And that, there's a few others, that you owe nobody else, some random stranger, a second of your time. You see this a lot on Twitter and social media, people like demanding a debate or demanding you act a certain way and engage with them. You don't owe them anything. So I think those are some of her best ideas. And she teaches you how to think. Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions. Do you think, what do you think about the whole selfishness thing? I mean, are you triggered by the word selfishness? It's really unfortunate what she does because you were just talking earlier about Moldbug being carelessly, this is indefensible in my opinion. So she talks about the virtue of selfishness and she claims that when people talk about selfishness, they mean concern primarily with the self, they don't. When people talk about selfishness, they mean in a sociopathic way, concern exclusively with oneself. They mean like, oh, if someone is dying on the street, I'm not going to even waste a second saving them because I'm selfish. So she sets up this complete caricature of the term. When she's attacking selflessness in her best sense is when there are people who have no sense of self, they have no values of their own, they have no goals of their own, everything that's in their mind is gotten secondhand from the culture at large and there's nothing unique or special from their perspective worth fighting for. So when she attacks, when she advocates for the self, she basically means self development, self improvement and achievement. So I think that word choice is really false and needlessly off putting. Yeah, controversial perhaps for the purpose of being controversial, I don't know, but it's just, it's not accurate. That's not what people mean by selfishness. Yeah, I would say it's one of the reasons probably her philosophy is not as much adopted or thought about is like, it's funny, like the use of words means something. Exactly as you said, that's my criticism, I mentioned small bug, which could be incorrect criticism by the way, so I'm not exactly sure. Can we talk about some modern day chaos and politics? Yes, please. I hate chaos. Speaking of your hatred for chaos, let's talk about secession. Oh yeah, I was the first one on this trip. Yeah, you were, well, the Civil War beat you to it, but. Sure, in contemporary times. In contemporary times you were, you're on this. Can you talk about what is the idea of secession, what are the odds that it might happen, what does it mean for the United States in some way for different states to secede? Sure, America's been one country with several cultures since the beginning. There's absolutely no reason for someone, this goes back to the anarchist idea, if you despise Donald Trump, which is your prerogative, if you think Joe Biden is a clown, which is your prerogative, there's absolutely no reason for you to be governed by someone you disapprove of. This is an incoherent, nonsensical concept. The only reason we even take it as a hypothesis is that we're trained to the contrary since kindergarten. A secession, I don't know along what lines, but increasingly it's becoming harder and harder for people to have conversations. I think social media, and this is something people despise social media for, I think this is something that social media has done well, which I'm advocating for, is it tends to kind of run through ideas through like an evolutionary process and drive them to the logical conclusion. So it's very hard to be a moderate online because there's going to be people pushing through your ideas through several cycles, and then you're going to end up at some kind of more pure, or if you want to dislike it, extreme perspective. Having these different pockets, it's not really governable because people fundamentally have different worldviews. So I don't know what secession would look like. I think the number is really increasing at an exponential rate. I do not think the number of supporters. I think the claim that this can only be accomplished through violence is false. It's a lie. Just like any divorce doesn't have to involve beating your ex husband or ex wife. And I'm very much looking forward to this becoming a reality far quicker than I ever expected. Do you think there's a value of competing worldviews being forced to be in the same space? Yes, but within a context. So we can agree if group one thinks A, B, and C are the fundamental aspects of the worldview and argue within that, and group two thinks D, E, and F and argue within that. So you're going to have a lot of argument within those space. And if there's fundamental differences in worldview, there's no reason to be, especially when each views the other as completely coherent and unreasonable. Do you think there's a line of fundamentally different worldviews along which a secession will happen in the United States? Is there something that emerges to you as a set of ideas that are like, what do you call that? That you can't come to an agreement over? Yeah, I think that's already happening. Like with the masks, I think there's just two fundamental perspective and each one thinks the other is insane and also deadly and destructive. And I don't see how there's any discourse on this topic. So on the left, I wouldn't say it's left versus right. I think it's people who are pro risk versus people who are risk averse. Yeah, so risk averse. And then there's like a hope for the comfort of the sort of a centralized science giving the truth and then everybody must follow the truth of the proper way to behave. And then there's on the other side, a distrust of any kind of centralized institutions of anybody who might use like control to try to gain greater and greater power and masks are a symbol of that. And even if masks are or are not a effective way of stopping the virus, which is really unfortunate to me from a perspective, I happen to be on a survey paper about masks. Like people don't seem to care about the data or the so on. This has become just a nice point on which to then highlight the difference between the two sides. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it sounds kind of on the face kind of ridiculous that the succession would occur over masks. It wouldn't, but I'm saying this is an example of something where there's a clean break. And risk averse versus someone who's risk seeking, these are just two fundamentally different perspectives. Do you want to have an NHS or do you have one of a market based healthcare system? You can make very valid arguments for both. There's no reason for everyone to be under one. But do you think that's not something that's, you think that's irreconcilable, if that's the word, that that's not in the space of ideas that you can have in the same room together and they fight at each other and ultimately make progress like that. That succession is the more effective way to proceed forward. Yes. But do you see a possible world with no is the answer, meaning I know you say yes, because you kind of lean on the side of freedom and anarchism. Yes. Like you make, you want to make, let me make an argument in terms of divorce, which is in your worldview or your intuition is you want to make secession as frictionless as possible. Of course. And not just like states or whatever, just like you want to choose, you want to be free. Yeah. And peaceful. Let me make my authoritarian, Russian, okay, Papa Stalin argument in terms of relationships. Like when shit goes wrong in a relationship. That's your language. Okay. There's only a place for one Stalin at this table. Okay. Okay. I'll get to be Lenin. Or you get to be like Merkel as our previous discussion with Putin. Okay. Don't let me unleash the hounds. You know, you want to work through some of the troubles before you get divorced. Like you want to do the work in relationships sometimes, like it goes up and down. It's been 200 plus years. It's done. But in the, listen, okay, so it's not a one night stand, but you know. Look at Trump. This I don't see the middle ground. He's either a complete calamity buffoon, or he's been the first great president we've had in like many, many years. So you think that there's something different now than it was 20 years ago? Yes. Social media and access to information. And the division will only increase, you think? Oh yes. So Trump is not an accident of history. So they thought Trump was the river, but he was the dam. Trump was the dam. They thought he was the river. So in that analogy, Trump being gone makes things worse. Yes. For that perspective, because now things are really going to hit the fan. So what are the odds of secession? I don't know. And my desperate hope is that it's peaceful, but I think the number of people who are becoming very comfortable with the violence is making me very unsettled. So I see words as violence and your Twitter. It's like Hiroshima times a million. Sometimes I curl up in the corner crying after I check your Twitter feed. So in all seriousness, you think it's possible to do nonviolent secession? It's like a Czechoslovakia. Look at Brexit. Brexit was a secession. Right. Right, so you can have a civil war did not need to be fought. That would have been a nonviolent secession. And if you worry about slavery, you could have bought off all the slaves, import them to the North. It still would have been cheaper and less loss of life and probably better for race relations. Yeah. I don't know enough history to, to wonder about like how the civil war could have been avoided. Well, that's how is a well conversation. So like, no, no. If they want to secede, say, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to let you secede, but you have to end slavery. They seceded because of slavery. Here's the other thing. There's like this, some circles of conservatism have this myth that, oh, it wasn't about slavery, it was about state's rights. Well, if you go back, every state, when they seceded, released the press release. And they said explicitly, we're doing this because of slavery. So that is an abomination that needs to be taken care of. But other countries have ended slavery peacefully. One of the ways to do it is pay them by all, and we ended up doing this after the war. I think the South people got reparations, the slave owners, it was just insane. Bring them North. You want to go to Canada, whatever. And you agree. And that's our peace treaty. Because the people who died weren't the slave owners. It was white trash. And it was, that's who always, and I hate that that's the term, I can't think of a better one, but that's who always ends up fighting these wars often disproportionately. It's poor people and uneducated people. And I don't, I did not regard them as cannon fodder. I think it's horrible. So what would it look like? There would be two founding documents? Yeah, they had their constitution. Actually, I don't know the history of that. Yeah, they had a constitution, but it was much more decentralized. If secession doesn't happen, you said that Donald Trump was the dam, not the river. That sounds like Walt Whitman or something. It's poetry. Okay. Are you flirting with me? You know us, we don't flirt. We just club and drag you to the cave. We hammer and sickle. And you don't want to know about the sickle. It's not good cob, bad cob. It's bad cup for a sickle. Yeah. What do you think 2024 looks like in terms of the candidates? It's going to be Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. I'm really looking forward to Ted Cruz versus Mike Pence, because they're both very good at debate. That would be interesting to see how they differentiate themselves. But honestly, I don't, I mean, things are going to get really ugly really soon. What about Donald Trump coming back? He's not going to do it. So things, in my opinion, I think things are going to be really, really crazy in 2021. And talking about the dam being gone, like 2021. So this year coming up. Oh yeah. It's going to be complete. It's going to be complete mayhem. What do you think, like prediction wise, and this is empirical. What do you think Donald Trump's Twitter feed looks like in 2021? Like if we're at the end of 2021, we'll look back and see like, what was the, you know, Obama gate exclamation points or we won. He is going to be, for the first time in history, holding the Republican party accountable to the base. We've never had that happen before. I think he's going to be holding their feet to the fire, radicalizing them. And given that they have the Senate, where it's going to be 50 50, the Democrats have a three seat majority in the House. This is not a governing coalition for either. It's going to be complete mayhem. What does that actually look like? What are the key values you think that he's going to try to push? I think it's just going to be very contrarian. He's going to be holding them accountable in terms of budgeting, even though he never did that as president. I think in terms of some kind of nominations, here's the thing. This is the first time since Nixon, 50 years and things weren't as politicized then, where an incoming president doesn't have control of the Senate. The Senate has the vote over cabinet positions. I do not see a possibility of them not trying to pick a fight on one or two of these nominations. And especially as revenge for Kavanaugh. This is going to get very bloody very quickly. And I think Mitch McConnell, there's a sadistic side to him. He revels in being the brakes on the car. And I think the base, it's just going to be throwing just, they're going to want some bone. It's like, oh yeah, we eliminated this one person. So that's going to get really ugly really quickly. You see it being quite divisive, like the division increasing, not stabilizing or decreasing. And I'll be doing my part. I know you'll be doing my part, but I'm trying to do my part and like trying to be like, to me, the division is shouting over people like Elon Musk, people who are actually building stuff and like accomplishing things in this world in terms of like. Elon said he took the red pill. No, see, you're talking about the, I'm talking about, forget Elon, SpaceX and Tesla and actually the good sides of like some of the things that Google is doing. Like actually building things, like making the world's information searchable, all that kind of stuff. Like all this stuff, you know, making actually the world a better place. There's a bunch of technologies that are increasing our quality of life. All this, all that kind of stuff. I feel like they get like not much credit or in our public discourse because of the division. The division is just like, it's clouding our ability to concentrate on what's awesome about this world. Well, you know what would eliminate the division, right? Succession. Yeah. See, I don't, I don't, it's hard for me to disagree. It's hard for me to disagree because, but at the same time, succession, I'm a romantic at heart and divorce breaks my heart. Cool. But do you want to live in a country where Joe Rogan is regarded as an example of someone who's spreading white supremacy? I don't. Well, but see, I feel like that's not the country we live in. That's just. The New York Times did it, the cathedral does it on a regular basis. Well, the cathedral is, okay, the cathedral, I guess you can maybe define the cathedral, but it's like the centralized institutions that have like a story that they're trying to sell and so on. Yeah, this is mold books concept, but yeah, they basically are set the limits of permissible discourse and create a narrative for the population to follow. But to me, that's a minority of people. Yeah, minorities always controlling everything in any country, the vast majority of the masses have no thought. But minorities can be overthrown and the. Sure, the circulation of the elites, yeah. The way the, no, no, no, and that's why the, what progress looks like is ridiculous people take power. Yes. And then they get annoying and new ridiculous people that are a little bit better overthrow the previous. No, I think progress happens despite the people who are in power, not because of them. Right. And so why is this a succession? So is it always about overthrowing the powerful? Is that how progress happens? No, I think progress happens despite the powerful. The powerful are going to do what's in their power to maintain their power and they're going to fight innovation because it's a threat to their control. There's always going to be the New York Times of the world, right? There's always going to be those, those people that haven't heard. Sure, let them have their own country. So it's two countries. One has Joe Rogan, the other one has the New York Times. That's basically what's happening right now. It just geographically doesn't map out very well, but culturally, yes. But that's just cultural stuff. Like there's a layer of public discourse. Okay. I don't mean like that's what we're operating under now, but there's actual like progress being made, like roads being built, hospitals being run, all those kinds of things like different innovations. That seems like secession is counterproductive to that. Right, because one country would have all the roads and the other would have all the hospitals. That's a great point. No, that's not, that's not the point I'm trying to make. It's just like, it just feels like the division that we're experiencing in the space of ideas could be constructive and productive for, for building better roads and better hospitals as opposed to like using that division to separate the countries. They're all going to have to solve the same problems, it feels like. Sure but they can solve them differently and compete that way. Mass is a great example. Yeah. We're seeing that right now. Different countries have different mass mandates and things like this. And the competition within the same structure, within the same founding documents and same institutions is not effective, you think? As effective as separating. It is effective but there is a certain point, which I think we have long passed, where there is not a governing consensus ideologically or culturally. Let me ask you a fun question, okay? Knock knock. Who's there? Mars. God of war. The other one. The planet. Yeah. So, there is a kind of captivating notion that we might, I'm excited by it, the human being stepping foot on Mars. That to me is, it's like one of those things that feels like it's, why do we want to engage in space exploration? But I'm a little bit with Elon Musk on this, which is, it's obvious that eventually if human species is to survive, it's going to have to innovate in ways that includes the space. Okay. Like, there's a lot of things we're not able to predict yet that if we push ourselves to the limits of space, like new ideas will come that'll be obvious a hundred years from now and then we're not even imagining now. And colonizing Mars, that idea that seems ridiculous, exceptionally difficult, impossibly expensive is something that is actually going to be seen as obvious in retrospect and that we should engage in. Okay. That's just to contextualize things. The fun idea and experiment from a philosophical and political sense is what kind of government, how do you orchestrate a government when you go to Mars, like we don't get too many chances like this, but how do you build new systems, not in place of old ones, but in a place with no system previous have existed? I think organically, I hate that word, but that's the correct word. You would have to figure out, I mean, that's how America was built. You had the, it was a Jamestown colony and they tried to do communism here and it completely failed and they went to a more free market system with the second wave of colonists is my understanding. For Mars, I mean, it depends on the population, who the population was, the number of people. I don't know. These are all kind of hypotheticals that I don't really have any good insight in whatsoever. I'm not a space person. I hate astronomy. Like I hate it. So a lot of people look up to the stars and they're filled with awe and wonder about the mystery of the universe and you look up to the stars and you feel what? I'm not looking up. I'm looking at the earth. If you look at what's, I'd much rather given a choice between Mars and the deep sea. I'd much rather spend a week at the deep sea and all the life forms that are down there because they're literal aliens. It's like things that are not literal, but they're unimaginable to us. Some of the things down there. Yeah, that's true. To me, it's an interesting thought experiment to see when you have 10 people, when you have a hundred people, how do you build an effective, you know, this is actually really useful for a company, right? How do you build an effective company that does things? It's not an obvious, despite everybody being really certain about everything in this, in this modern world, to me, it's not obvious, like how do you run successfully as a group of people? I agree. I agree. That's what I'm saying. It also organic means you have to look at who the people are and tailor the organization to them as opposed to try to impose something. But you get to also select people. Right. Cause it's not going to be open borders on Mars. Oh, right. I was going to say when you have one country, it's all open borders. Yeah, you're right. They're from outer space, right? Some say they're aliens already there. So you're going to have to negotiate that. Sure. We're aliens. So we're aliens to somebody. We're legal aliens. Do you think there's alien civilizations out there? Yes. Of course. What do you think is their system of government anarchism? Cause they're advanced. Do you honestly think there's intelligent life forms out there? Of course. It's the math. It's impossible that there isn't. So what do you make of all the stories of UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff? Do you think they've visited earth? Yes. My grandfather was an air traffic controller in the Soviet Union and he said they would often see these things that were not operating the way we knew vehicles operate. So that's good enough for me. So I mean, do you think government is in possession of some, like, what do you think government is doing with this kind of information? Do you think somebody has any understanding of UFO sightings or any kind of information about extraterrestrial life forms that are not known to the public? Yes. That's indisputably true. I think the fact that so many of these sightings are from aerodynamic professionals, like pilots and things of that nature, they are people who've seen it all, who are reputable. If they are on record saying, I've seen things that don't make sense, and both the Russians and the Americans thought it was the other one, that says something. Shouldn't that be a bigger problem? Shouldn't that be bigger news and a bigger problem if government is in fact hiding it? I guess, but like, what are they going to do with that information? It's a good question. Like, if a UFO, if an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which most likely would be like a crappy space, like it wouldn't be the actual aliens, it would be like some drone probe ship. AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if that, like, what would you do with that information? As somebody that's in charge of, you know, like you see how badly WHO fumbled the discussion of masks. Masks? Yeah. Yeah. Masks is one of them, but everything really in terms of communicating with the public honestly about what they know, what they don't know. And that's a trivial one. Right. I don't, I don't, I don't know. There certainly feel incompetent at being able to communicate effectively with the public about something much more difficult, much more full of mystery, like a UFO, a thing, a piece of material that's out of this earth. Forget like organic material. I don't, I don't know. To me, I just, so from a scientist perspective, it would be beautiful. It would be inspiring to reveal this to the world. Here's the mystery and make it completely public. Share it with China. Share it with everybody. I think there is a domino effect where the concern would be what else are you hiding from us? And at that point, if you said, no, no, no, this is everything, people wouldn't believe you and they would, you can't blame them for not believing them. Ah, yeah. And then it'd be like, show us the aliens. They'd be like, we don't have them. We just have the craft. You're lying. Speaking of aliens, offline, you mentioned elves. Yeah. And psychedelics. Yeah. What do you think about psychedelics in terms of the kind of places that can take your mind? The kind of journey it can take you on. Like what do you think, what do you think the psychedelics do to the human mind and what does that say about the capacity of the human mind and just in general, like the mysteries of all that's out there? I don't know that we understand what they do. The way I heard it explained to me is that much of the human mind isn't about receiving information but blocking information, right? Because we're so, there's so much data coming in any moment that you basically have to train yourself to see and to hear only what you want to see and to hear. And that what psychedelics do is they tear that away and suddenly you're much more aware of what's out there and also you're going to be noticing patterns that you hadn't noticed before. I know you had that researcher on the show and he kind of discussed this at some length. I mean, Rogan is probably the person who popularized DMT more than, well, he's obviously the person who's popularized DMT more than anything. I don't know anyone who had, even the researchers who have anything close to a coherent explanation of why this drug, which exists everywhere, would have this very specific, very extreme effect on so many people who are going to be experiencing such bizarre consequences as a result of it. I think it's very interesting that this is talking about the government, you know, the CIA started experimenting with LSD, they killed one of their own people, drove them to suicide and there was a lot of research into, Terrence McKenna talks about this, into this field and then very quickly, once it got into the mainstream, they shut it down, even though it's not addictive, it doesn't cause you to go crazy or anything like that and there was a lot of propaganda against its use, which I think, thankfully, is now somewhat receding. I think Colorado just legalized mushrooms, something like that and I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens as a result of this. Yeah, and the interesting thing is, there doesn't seem to be, for certain psychedelics like psilocybin, like mushrooms, there doesn't seem to be a lethal dose, which is fascinating, like Matthew Johnson, the Hopkins professor that you mentioned, I'm definitely going to do one of his studies, it's a really cool way to do what he calls a heroic dose of psilocybin. Oh, I want to do it, what do I have to do? Let's do it. A heroic dose, holy crap. Yeah, but it's safe. How many grams are we talking? I don't know, but it's just, it's big. He says that... This is going to have a kick. Yeah. He says that, I mean, he also studies cocaine, he studies all kinds of drugs and he's like, the psilocybin is... A heroic dose of cocaine kills you. You can't, so you can't even come close, so he says the problem with studying cocaine is you have people who are addicted to cocaine or war or so on, you give them the kind of doses that we can and part of the study is like, it's nothing to them. Psilocybin is the only one where even daily users or regular users are blown away by the dose they give them. So you can go to Russia in your mind, you can go to outer space, maybe you'll become an astronaut or astronomer after all. Maybe I'll be Baba Yaga. I'll let people look that one up. What is love? What do you think this thing is like our attachment to other human beings? And is it something that we should give to just a few people? Yes, that's for sure. When I was working with DL Hughley in his book, he didn't use the term, but he was describing like low key depression. And he talked about how he was in the airport and he noticed a girl had a red dress and he went up and thanked her and she was like, what are you thanking for? And he had realized he hadn't registered color in like weeks. And I think love is like that when you see someone and you just like, oh, like your eyes are open. Like this is something I've never seen before or I want more of this, that kind of thing. It really disorients and reorients your thinking. Don't you find that like the world is full of that like nonstop? It's not just like a person either. It's like... Yes, but when it's in a person, it's a whole other level because it's like, I could have, this is going to be great for years. It's like, you know, every day it's something new. I mean, that is, and that is rare. You think it's rare? I mean... Find someone who you could talk to them for years and not run out of things to talk to. Oh, that's true for years. Yes. Yes. That's rare. And know that they really, if you leave the room, they will do right by you. That's really rare. Well, from a Russian perspective, you just don't give them another choice. This is Tavadish New Year, New Year's Eve. So you talked about secession and the world burning down and you holding the match at the end, standing with a big smile on your face. Yes. I was serious. But let me ask you, if it doesn't include flame and secession and destruction and laughing malice and makeup and a white suit at the end, how do we bring more kindness and love to the world in 2021? Oh, easy. Be comfortable saying, I want to be happy. And if there's someone who interjects and gives you attitude, arms lengthen. Surround yourself with people who also want to be happy. Here's a great example. My buddy Chris Williamson, who I've mentioned before, he's a podcaster, does Modern Wisdom. He's an awesome dude and we became very close friends this past year. And he was in Dubai recently and he sent me pics from Dubai by the pool, just loving life. And it took me a week and then it clicked in my head and I'm like, you know what? For some other people, if they saw him under remodel at the pool, they would think this is him bragging or humble bragging. And that never entered my head. I'm like, oh man, I'm so glad my boy can be having a good time and is sharing his joy with me. That's the kind of people you need to surround yourself with, where it never enters their head to be resentful or anything other than sharing in your bounty. What makes you happy? I'm happy all the time. And one of the points I made in my life is like, I really hated, I really did not like to give advice because I feel don't give advice until you know what you're talking about. And to me, what makes me happy is being self actualized. I am in a position with my career where I could be myself 24 seven, where I never have to engage in small talk, where I never have to interact with someone I don't want to. And I'm very blessed to have that. Very few people have that. And to have that be not only, to have that be like rewarded and having people find that something of value to them makes me very, very happy. But also being an uncle, I have two little nephews. They make me very, very happy. Sure my sister's raising them Russian, so they talk like immigrants, but that's okay. We're going to change that. We have to dismember her, that's fine. That makes me happy. And to be able to finish this book and know it's going to give people a sense of hope, that's really validating. What are you most grateful for for our conversation today? You're stealing my bit. What am I most grateful for? I am very grateful that I can come in here not knowing what we're going to talk about and know it's not going to be something I have to be on guard about, or I have to watch my words and that neither you or your audience is going to be responding derisively. I feel safe here. You're welcome. Vaseva. Thanks for talking to me Michael, that was awesome. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Michael Malus and thank you to our sponsors. NetSuite, business management software, Athletic Greens, all in one nutrition drink, Sun Basket, the delivery service, and Cash App. So the choice is success, health, food, or money. Choose wisely my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Emma Goldman on anarchism. People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Michael Malice: The White Pill, Freedom, Hope, and Happiness Amidst Chaos | Lex Fridman Podcast #150

The following is a conversation with Dan Kokotov, VP of engineering at rev.ai, which is by many metrics, the best speech to text AI engine in the world. Rev in general is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI. I've been using their services for a couple of years now and I'm planning to use Rev to add both captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast to make it easier for people to read through the conversation or reference various parts of the episode, since that's something that quite a few people requested. I'll probably do a separate video on that with links on the podcast website so people can provide suggestions and improvements there. Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, All in One Nutrition Drink, Blinkist app that summarizes books, Business Wars podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, wisdom, or money. Choose wisely my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I reached out to Dan and the Rev team for a conversation because I've been using and genuinely loving their service and really curious about how it works. I previously talked to the head of Adobe research for the same reason. For me, there's a bunch of products, usually software, that comes along and just makes my life way easier. Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, iZotope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automating keyboard and mouse tasks, Emacs as an IDE for everything, including the universe itself. I can keep on going, but you get the idea. I just like talking to people who create things I'm a big fan of. That said, after doing this conversation, the folks at Rev.ai offered to sponsor this podcast in the coming months. This conversation is not sponsored by the guest. It probably goes without saying, but I should say it anyway, that you can not buy your way onto this podcast. I don't know why you would want to. I wanted to bring this up to make a specific point that no sponsor will ever influence what I do on this podcast, or to the best of my ability, influence what I think. I wasn't really thinking about this. For example, when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, who is the CEO of Square that happens to be sponsoring this podcast, but I should really make it explicit. I will never take money for bringing a guest on. Every guest on this podcast is someone I genuinely am curious to talk to or just genuinely love something they've created. As I sometimes get criticized for, I'm just a fan of people. And that's who I talk to. As I also talk about way too much, money is really never a consideration. In general, no amount of money can buy my integrity. That's true for this podcast, and that's true for anything else I do. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on the Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, a podcast on YouTube, and support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Dan Kokotov. You mentioned science fiction on the phone. So let's go with the ridiculous first. What's the greatest sci fi novel of all time in your view? And maybe what ideas do you find philosophically fascinating about it? The greatest sci fi novel of all time is Dune. And the second greatest is The Children of Dune. And the third greatest is The God Emperor of Dune. So I'm a huge fan of the whole series. I mean, it's just an incredible world that he created. And I don't know if you've read the book or not. No, I have not. It's one of my biggest regrets, especially because a new movie is coming out. Everyone's super excited about it. I used to, it's ridiculous to say, and sorry to interrupt, is that I used to play the video game. It used to be Dune. I guess you would call that real time strategy. Right. I think I remember that game. Yeah, it was kind of awesome. Nineties or something. I think I played it actually when I was in Russia. I definitely remember it. I was not in Russia anymore. I think at the time that I used to live in Russia, I think video games were about like the suspicion of Pong. I think Pong was pretty much like the greatest game I ever got to play in Russia, which was still a privilege right in that age. So you didn't get color? You didn't get like, uh, so I left Russia. I left Russia in 1991, right? Okay. So I was one of the few lucky kids because my mom was a programmer. So I would go to her work, right? I would take the, the Metro. I've got our work and play like on, I guess the equivalent of like a 286 PC, you know, nice floppy disks. Yes. So, okay. Put back to doing what you get back to doing. And by the way, the new movie I'm pretty interested in, but the skeptical, I'm a little skeptical. I'm a little skeptical. I saw the trailer. Uh, I don't know. So there's, there's a David Lynch movie doing as you may know, I'm a huge David Lynch fan, by the way. So the movie is somewhat controversial, but it's a little confusing, but it captures kind of the mood of the book better than I would say like most any adaptation and like doing so much about kind of mood and the world, right. But back to the philosophical point. So in the fourth book, God, emperor of doing, there's a sort of setting where Leto, one of the characters, he's become this weird sort of God emperor. He's turned into a gigantic worm. I mean, you kind of have to read the book to understand what that means. So the worms are involved, the worms are involved. You probably saw the worms in the trailer, right. And in the video, you kind of like merges with the swarm, um, and becomes this tyrant of the world and like oppresses the people for a long time. Right. But he has a purpose and the purpose is to kind of, uh, break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization. Right. Um, but people have gotten too comfortable, right. And so you kind of oppresses them so that they explode and like go on to colonize new worlds and kind of renew the forward momentum of humanity. Right. And so to me, that's kind of fascinating, right. You need a little bit of pressure and suffering, right. To kind of like make progress, not, not, not get too comfortable. Maybe that's a bit of a cruel philosophy to take away, but that seems to be the case, unfortunately, obviously, I'm a huge fan of, uh, suffering. So one of the reasons we're talking today is that a bunch of people requested that I do transcripts for this podcast and do captioning. I used to make all kinds of YouTube videos and I would go on up work, I think, and I would hire folks to do transcription and it was always a pain in the ass, if I'm being honest, and then I don't know how I discovered Rev. But when I did, it was this feeling of like, Holy shit, somebody figured out how to do it just really easily. I I'm, I'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy. Right. You know, like just, uh, there's so many, uh, there's so many, it's like, there's so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful. Then Rev, you just like give the audio, give the video, you can actually give a YouTube link. And then it comes back like a day later or, uh, two days later, whatever the hell it is with the captions, you know, all in a standardized format. It was, I dunno, it was, it was, it was, it was truly a joy. So I thought I had, you know, just for the hell of it, uh, talk to you that one other product just made my soul feel good. One other product that I've used like that is, uh, for people who might be familiar is called isotope RX. It's for audio editing and like, and that's another one where it was like, you just drop it. I dropped into the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely. All the stupid, like the mouth sounds and sometimes there's a background like sounds due to the malfunction of the equipment. It can clean that stuff up. It can, it has a general voice denoising. It has like automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put a bunch of effects. I mean, it just, I dunno, everything else sucked for like voice based cleanup that I've ever used. They've used audition, Adobe audition, and he's all kinds of other things with plugins and you have to kind of figure it all out. You have to do it manually here. It's just, it just worked. So that's another one in this whole pipeline. It just brought joy to my, to my heart. Anyway, all that to say is, uh, uh, Rev put a smile to my face. So can you maybe take a step back and say, what is Rev and how does it work? And Rev or Rev.com? Rev, Rev.com, the same thing, I guess, uh, that way we do have Rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later. Like, do you have the actual domain or is it just, uh, the actual domain, but we also use it kind of as a, as a sub brand. Oh, so we've, so we use Rev.ai to denote our ASR services, right? And Rev.com is kind of our more human and to the end user services. So it's like wordpress.com and wordpress.org, they actually have separate brands that like, I don't know if you're familiar with what those are. Yeah, they provide almost like a separate branch of a little bit. I think with that, it's like wordpress.org is kind of their open source, right? And, uh, wordpress.com is sort of their hosted commercial offering. Yes. Um, and with us, the differential is a little bit different, but maybe a similar idea. Yep. Okay. So what is Rev? Before I launch into, uh, what is Rev? I was going to say, you know, like you, you were talking about like Rev was music to your ears, your, your, your field was music to my ears. To us, the founders of Rev, because, um, Rev was kind of founded to improve on the model of Upwork that was kind of the original, um, or part of their original impetus, like our CEO, Jason, was a early employee of Upwork. So he was very familiar with their work, the company Upwork company. Um, and so he was very familiar with that model and he wanted to make the whole experience better because he knew like, when you go at that time, Upwork was primarily programmers, so the main thing they offered us, if you want to hire, you know, someone to help you code a little site, right. Um, you could go on Upwork, um, you could like browse through a list of freelancers, pick a programmer, you know, have a contract with them and have them do some work, but it was kind of a difficult experience because, uh, for the, for you, you would kind of have to browse through all these people, right. And you have to decide, okay, like, well, is this guy good as, um, or somebody else better and naturally, you know, you're going to Upwork because you're not an expert, right? If you're an expert, you probably wouldn't be like getting a programmer from Upwork, uh, so, so how can you really tell? So there's a kind of like a lot of potential regret, right? What if I choose a bad person, they're like, going to be late on the work. It's going to be a painful experience. And for the freelancer, it was also painful because, you know, half the time they spent not on actually doing the work, but kind of figuring out how can I make my profile most attractive to the buyer, right? And they're not an expert on that either. So like Grav's idea was let's remove the barrier, right? Like, let's make it simple where we'll pick a few, uh, verticals that are fairly standardizable. Now we actually started with translation, um, and then we added audio transcription a bit later and we'll just make it a website. You go give us your files. We'll give you back, uh, the results, you know, as soon as possible. You know, originally maybe it was 48 hours. Then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter. Um, yeah, there's a rush processing too. There's a rush processing now, uh, and, uh, we'll hide all the details from you. Right. Yeah. And like, that's kind of exactly what you're experiencing, right? You don't, you don't need to worry about the details of how the sausage is made. That's really cool. The, so you picked like a vertical by vertically, you mean basically a service, a service category. Why translation is Rev thinking of potentially going into other verticals in the future, or is this like the focus now is a translation transcription, like language, the focus now is, is language or, uh, speech services, generally speech to text language services, you can kind of group them however you want. Um, so, but we, uh, originally the categorization was work from home. So when, uh, work that was done by people on a computer, you know, we weren't trying to get into, you know, uh, task rabbit type of things and something that could be relatively standard, not a lot of options. So we could kind of present the simplified interface, right? So programming wasn't like a good fit because each programming project is kind of unique, right? We're looking for something that, uh, Transcription is, you know, you have five hours of idea, it's five hours of audio, right? Translation is somewhat similar. In that, you know, you can have a five page document, you know, and then you just can price it by that and then you pick the language you want and that that's mostly all that is to it. So those were a few criteria. We started with translation because we saw the need, um, and, uh, we picked up kind of a specialty of translation, um, where we would translate things like board certificates, uh, uh, immigration documents, things like that. And so they were fairly, um, even more well defined and easy to kind of tell if we did a good job. So you can literally charge per type of document. Was that, was, was that the, so what, what is it now? Is it per word or something like that? Like, how do you, like, how do you measure the effort involved in a particular thing? So now it looks like for audio translation, it's like, so now it looks a for audio transcription, right? It's a per audio minute. Well, that, that yes, for, for, for our translation, we don't really, uh, actually focus it on anymore. Uh, but you know, back when it was still a main business of Revit was per page, right. Or per word, depending on the kind of, uh, cause you can also do translation now on the audio, right? Mm hmm. So like subtitles. So it would be both, uh, transcription and translation. That's right. I wanted to test the system to see how good it is to see like how, how, uh, well, is Russian supported? I think so. Yeah. And it'd be interesting to try it out. I mean, one of the, now it's only in like the one direction, right? So you start with English and then you can have subtitles in Russian. Not really, not really the other way. Got it. Because it's, um, I'm deeply curious about this. Um, when COVID opens up a little bit, when the economy, when the world opens up a little bit, you want to build your brand in Russia? No, I don't. First of all, I'm allergic to the word brand. All right, I'm definitely not building, uh, any brands in Russia, but I'm going to Paris to talk to the translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, there's this famous couple that does translation. And, you know, I'm more and more thinking of how is it possible to have a conversation with a Russian speaker? Cause I have just some number of famous Russian speakers that I'm interested in talking to, and my Russian is not strong enough to be witty and funny. I'm already an idiot in English. I'm an extra level of like awkward idiot in Russian, but I can understand it. Right. And I also like wonder how can I create a compelling English Russian experience for an English speaker? Like if I, there's a guy named Grigori Perlman, who's a mathematician who, uh, obviously doesn't speak any English. So I would probably incorporate like a Russian translator into the picture. And then it would be like a, not to use a weird term, but like a three, like a three, three person thing where it's like a dance of, like, I understand it one way. They don't understand the other way, but I'll be asking questions in English. I don't know. I don't know the right way. It's complicated. It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people, one of whom I'm confident of Vladimir Putin, I'm for sure talking to. I really want to make it happen. Cause I think I could do a good job with, but the, the right, you know, understanding the fundamentals of translation is something I'm really interested in. So that's why I'm starting with, um, the actual translators of like Russian literature, because they understand the nuance and the beauty of the language and how it goes back and forth. But I also want to see, like in speech, how can we do it in real time? So that's, that's like a little bit of a baby project that I hope to push forward. But anyway, it's a challenging thing. So just to share, uh, my dad, um, actually does translation, um, not, not professional, he's a, uh, he writes poetry. That was kind of always his, uh, not a hobby, but he's, uh, he, you know, he had a job, like a day job, but his passion was always writing poetry. Uh, and then when I got to America, like he started also translating, um, first he was translating English poetry to Russia. Now he also like goes the other, uh, the other way, you kind of gain some small fame in that world anyways, because, uh, recently this poet like Lewis clock, I don't know if you know of, uh, some American poet, um, she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Uh, and so my dad had translated, uh, one of her books of poetry in to Russian, and he was like one of the few. So he kind of like, they asked him and gave an interview to Radiosvoboda, if you know what that is. And he kind of talked about some of the intricacies of translating poetry. So that's like an extra level of difficulty, right? Because translating poetry is even more challenging than translating just, you know, interviews. Do you remember any, any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation that, that's the God to you, like something he's talked about? I mean, a lot of it, I think is word choice, right? It's the way Russian is structured is first of all, quite different than, um, the way English is structured, right? Just there is inflections in Russian and genders, and they don't exist in English. That's just one of the reasons actually why, um, machine translation is quite difficult for English to Russian and Russian to English, because there's such different languages, but then English has like a huge number of words. Um, many more than Russian, actually, I think. So it's often difficult to find the right word to convey the same emotional meaning, yeah, Russian language. They play with words much more. So you, you're mentioning that, uh, Rev was kind of born out of, um, trying to take a vertical on the upwork and then standardize it. So we're just trying to make the, the freelancer marketplace idea better, right? Um, better for both customers and better for the freelancers themselves. Is there something else to the story of Rev finding the right word? Rev, finding Rev, like what, what did it take to bring it to actually to life? Was there any pain points? Um, plenty of, plenty of pain points. I mean, uh, as, as often the case it's with scaling it up, right? Um, and in this case, you know, the scaling is kind of scaling the, the marketplace, so to speak, right? Rev is essentially a two sided marketplace, right? Because, you know, there's the customers and then there's the reverse. Um, if there's not enough Revers, Revers are world color freelancers. So if there's not enough Revers, then customers have a bad experience, right? You know, it takes longer to get your work done. Um, things like that, you know, if there's too many done, the Revers have a bad experience because they might log on to see like what work is available and there's not very much work, right? Uh, so kind of keeping that balance, um, is, is, is a quite challenging problem. And, you know, that's, that's like a problem we've been working on for many years and we're still like refining our methods, right? If you can kind of talk to this gig economy idea, I did a bunch of different psychology experiments on mechanical Turk, for example, I've asked to do different kinds of very tricky computer vision annotation on mechanical Turk. And it's connecting, connecting people in a more systematized way. I would say, you know, between task and, and, uh, what would you call that worker is what mechanical Turk calls it. What do you think about this world of gig economies, of there being a service that connects customers to workers in a way that's like massively distributed, like potentially scaling to, it could be, it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people, right? Is there something interesting about that world that you can speak to? Yeah. Well, we don't think of it as kind of gig economy, like to some degree, I don't like the word gig that much, right? Because to some degree it diminishes the words being done, right? It sounds kind of like almost amateurish. Well, maybe in like music industry, like gig is a standard term, but in work, it kind of sounds like, oh, it's, it's, it's frivolous, um, to us it's, um, improving the nature of working from home on your own time and on your own terms, right? And kind of taking away geographical limitations and time limitations, right? Uh, so, you know, many of our freelancers are maybe work from home moms, right? And, you know, they don't want the traditional nine to five job, but they want to make some income and rough kind of like allows them to do that and decide like exactly how much to work and when to work or by the same token, maybe someone is, you know, someone wants to live the mountain top, you know, life, right? You know, cabin in the woods, but they still want to make some money. Um, and like generally that wouldn't be compatible before, before this new world, you kind of had to choose, uh, but like with Rev, like, if you like, you don't have to choose, can you speak to like, what's the demographics like distribution? Like where do rivers live? Is there a way to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, but you really want to teach it how to, how to run, how to track Once you're out of the bush, 들어가, things like that, you know, but like in the back of you know, like hard, but you just as you approach, there's a lot more control over you. Like you, you may be Oh, like you know, one day you might go to the For some years now, we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to some place and we'll try to meet Revers. And pretty much wherever we go, it's pretty easy to find a large number of Revers. The most recent one we did is in Utah. But anyway, really. Are they from all walks of life? Are these young folks, older folks? Yeah, all walks of life, really. Like I said, one category is the work from home. Students who want to make some extra income. There are some people who maybe have some social anxiety, so they don't want to be in the office. And this is one way for them to make a living. So it's really pretty wide variety. But on the flip side, for example, one Rever we were talking to was a person who had a fairly high powered career before and was kind of like taking a break. And she was almost doing this just to explore and learn about the gig economy, quote unquote. So it really is a pretty wide variety of folks. Yeah, it's kind of interesting through the captioning process for me to learn about the Revers because like some are clearly like weirdly knowledgeable about technical concepts. Like you can tell by how good they are at like capitalizing stuff, like technical terms, like a machine learning or deep learning. Like I've used Rev to annotate, to caption the deep learning lectures or machine learning lectures I did at MIT. And it's funny, like a large number of them were like, I don't know if they looked it up or were already knowledgeable, but they do a really good job at like, I don't know. They invest time into these things. They will like do research, they will Google things, you know, to kind of make sure that they got it right. But to some of them, it's like, it's actually part of the enjoyment of the work. Like they'll tell us, you know, I love doing this because I get paid to watch a documentary on something, right? And I learn something while I'm transcribing, right? Pretty cool. Yeah, so what's that captioning transcription process look like for the Revers? Can you maybe speak to that to give people a sense, like how much is automated, how much is manual? What's the actual interface look like? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, so, you know, we've invested a pretty good amount of time to give like our Revers the best tools possible. So typical day of forever, they might log into their workspace, they'll see a list of audios that need to be transcribed. And we try to give them tools to pick specifically the ones they want to do, you know? So maybe some people like to do longer audios or shorter audios, people have their preferences. Some people like to do audios in a particular subject or from a particular country. So we try to give people the tools to control, things like that. And then when they pick what they want to do, we'll launch a specialized editor that we've built to make transcription as efficient as possible. They'll start with a speech drag draft. So, you know, we have our machine learning model for automated speech recognition, they'll start with that. And then our tools are optimized to help them correct that. So it's basically a process of correction. Yeah, it depends on, you know, I would say the audio. If the audio itself is pretty good, like probably like our podcast right now would be quite good. So the ASR would do a fairly good job. But if you imagine someone recorded a lecture, you know, in the back of a auditorium, right? Where like the speaker is really far away and there's maybe a lot of cross talk and things like that, then maybe the ASR wouldn't do a good job. So the person might say like, you know what, I'm just gonna do it from scratch. Do it from scratch, yeah. So it kind of really depends. What would you say is the speed that you can possibly get? Like, what's the fastest? Can you get, is it possible to get real time or no? As you're like listening, can you write as fast as? Real time would be pretty difficult. It's actually a pretty, it's not an easy job, you know. We actually encourage everyone at the company to try to be a transcriber for a day, transcriptionist for a day. And it's way harder than you might think it is, right? Because people talk fast and people have accents and all this kind of stuff. So real time is pretty difficult. Is it possible? Like there's somebody, we're probably gonna use Rev to caption this, they're listening to this right now. What do you think is the fastest you could possibly get on this right now? I think on a good audio, maybe two to three X, I would say, real time. Meaning it takes two to three times longer than the actual audio of the podcast. This is so meta, I could just imagine the Revvers working on this right now. You're like, you're way wrong. You're way wrong, this takes way longer. But yeah, it definitely works. Or you doubted me, I could do real time. Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned ASR. Can you speak to what is ASR, automatic speech recognition? How much, like what is the gap between perfect human performance and perfect or pretty damn good ASR? Yeah, so ASR, automatic speech recognition, it's a class of machine learning problem, right? So take speech like we're talking and transform it into a sequence of words, essentially. Audio of people talking. Audio, audio to words. And there's a variety of different approaches and techniques, which we could talk about later if you want. So, we think we have pretty much the world's best ASR for this kind of speech, right? So there's different kinds of domains, right, for ASR. Like one domain might be voice assistance, right? So Siri, very different than what we're doing, right? Because Siri, there's fairly limited vocabulary. You might ask Siri to play a song or order a pizza or whatever. And it's very good at doing that. Very different from when we start talking in a very unstructured way. And Siri will also generally adapt to your voice and stuff like this. So for this kind of audio, we think we have the best. And our accuracy, right now I think it's maybe 14% word error rate on our test suite that we generally use to measure. So word error rate is like one way to measure accuracy for ASR, right? So what's 14% word error rate? So 14% means across this test suite, of a variety of different audios, it would be, it would get in some way 14% of the words wrong. 14% of the words wrong. So the way you kind of calculate it is, you might add up insertions, deletions, and substitutions, right? So insertions is like extra words. Deletions are words that we said, but weren't in the transcript, right? Substitutions is, you said Apple, but I said, but the ASR thought it was able, something like this. Human accuracy, most people think realistically, it's like 3%, 2%, word error rate would be like the max achievable. So there's still quite a gap, right? Would you say that, so YouTube, when I upload videos, often generates automatic captions. Are you sort of from a company perspective, from a company perspective, from a tech perspective, are you trying to beat YouTube, Google? It's a hell of a, Google, I mean, I don't know how seriously they take this task, but I imagine it's quite serious. And they, you know, Google is probably up there in terms of their teams on, on ASR or just NLP, natural language processing, different technologies. So do you think you can beat Google? On this kind of stuff, yeah, we think so. Google just woke up on my phone. This is hilarious, okay. Now Google is listening, sending it back to headquarters. Who are these rough people? But that's the goal? Yeah, I mean, we measure ourselves against like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, some of the, some smaller competitors. And we use like our internal tests with it, we try to compose it of a pretty representative set of ideas, maybe it's some podcasts, some videos, some interviews, some lectures, things like that, right? And we beat them in our own testing. And actually Rev offers automated, like you can actually just do the automated captioning. So like, I guess it's like way cheaper, whatever it is, whatever the rates are. Yeah, yeah. So it's a, by the way, it used to be a dollar per minute for captioning and transcription, I think it's like $1.15 or something like that. $1.25. $1.25, yeah. It's pretty cool. That was the other thing that was surprising to me, it was actually like the cheapest thing you could, one of the, I mean, I don't remember it being cheaper. You could on Upwork get cheaper, but it was clear to me that this, that's gonna be really shitty. Yeah. So like, you're also competing on price. I think there were services that you can get, like similar to Rev kind of feel to it, but it wasn't as automated. Like the drag and drop, the entirety of the interface, it's like the thing we're talking about. I'm such a huge fan of like frictionless, like Amazon's single buy button, whatever. Yeah, yeah. That one click. The one click, that's genius right there. Like that is so important for services. Yeah. And simplicity and I mean, Rev is almost there. I mean, there's like some, I'm trying to think. So I think I've, I stopped using this pipeline, but Rev offers it and I like it, but it was causing me some issues on my side, which is you can connect it to like Dropbox and it generates the files in Dropbox. So like it closes the loop to where I don't have to go to Rev at all and I can download it. Sorry, I don't have to go to Rev at all and to download the files. It could just like automatically copy them. Right, you're putting your Dropbox in a day later or maybe a few hours later. Yeah, it just shows up. Just shows up, yeah. Yeah, I was trying to do it programmatically too. Is there an API interface you can, I was trying to through like through Python to download stuff automatically, but then I realized this is the programmer in me. Like, dude, you don't need to automate everything like in life, like flawlessly, because I wasn't doing enough captions to justify to myself the time investment into automating everything perfectly. Yeah, I would say if you're doing so many interviews that your biggest roadblock is clicking on the Rev download, but now you're talking about Elon Musk levels of business. But for sure, we have like a variety of ways to make it easy. You know, there's the integration. You mentioned, I think it's through a company called Zapier, which kind of can connect Dropbox to Rev and vice versa. We have an API if you want to really like customize it, you know, if you want to create the Lex Friedman, you know, CMS or whatever. For this whole thing. Okay, cool. So can you speak to the ASR a little bit more? Like, what does it take? Like approach wise, machine learning wise, how hard is this problem? How do you get to the 3% error rate? Like, what's your vision of all of this? Yeah, well, the 3% error rate is definitely, that's the grand vision. We'll see what it takes to get there. But we believe, you know, in ASR, the biggest thing is the data, right? Like, that's true of like a lot of machine learning problems today, right? The more data you have and high quality of the data, the better label the data. Yeah, that's how you get good results. And we at Rev have kind of like the best data. Like we have. Like you're literally, your business model is annotating the data. Our business model is being paid to annotate the data. Being paid to annotate the data. So it's kind of like a pretty magical flywheel. Yeah. And so we've kind of like written this flywheel to this point. And we think we're still kind of in the early stages of figuring out all the parts of the flywheel to use, you know, because we have the final transcripts and we have the audios and we train on that. But we in principle also have all the edits that the Revvers make, right? Oh, that's interesting. How can you use that as data? Yeah, that's something for us to figure out in the future. But, you know, we feel like we're only in the early stages, right? So the data is there. That'd be interesting. Like almost like a recurrent neural net for fixing transcripts. I always remember we did a segmentation annotation for driving data. So segmenting the scene, like visual data. And you can get all, so it was drawing, people were drawing polygons around different objects and so on. And it feels like it always felt like there was a lot of information in the clicking, the sequence of clicking that people do, the kind of fixing of the polygons that they do. Now there's a few papers written about how to draw polygons like with a recurrent neural nets to try to learn from the human clicking. But it was just like experimental, you know, it was one of those like CVPR type papers that people do like a really tiny data set. It didn't feel like people really tried to do it seriously. Yeah, I wonder if there's information in the fixing that provides deeper set of signal than just like the raw data. The intuition is for sure there must be, right? There must be. And in all kinds of signals and how long you took to make that edit and stuff like that. It's gonna be like up to us. That's why like the next couple of years is like super exciting for us, right? So that's what like the focus is now. You mentioned rev.ai, that's where you want to. Yeah, so rev.ai is kind of our way of bringing this ASR to the rest of the world, right? So when we started, we were human only. Then we kind of created this Temi service. I think you might've used it, which was kind of ASR for the consumer, right? So if you don't wanna pay $1.25, but you wanna pay, now it's 25 cents a minute, I think. And you get the transcript, the machine generated transcript and you get an editor and you can kind of fix it up yourself, right? Then we started using ASR for our own human transcriptionists. And then the kind of rev.ai is the final step of the journey, which is, you know, we have this amazing engine. What can people build with it, right? What kind of new applications could be enabled if you have SpeedTrack that's that accurate? Do you have ideas for this or is it just providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with? It's providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with and kind of learning from what people do with it. And we have ideas of our own as well, of course, but it's a little bit like, you know, when AWS provided the building blocks, right? And they saw what people built with it and they try to make it easier to build those things, right? And we kind of hope to do the same thing. Although AWS kind of does a shitty job of like, I'm continually surprised, like Mechanical Turk, for example, how shitty the interface is. We're talking about like Rev making me feel good. Like when I first discovered Mechanical Turk, the initial idea of it was like, it made me feel like Rev does, but then the interface is like, come on. Yeah, it's horrible. Why is it so painful? Does nobody at Amazon want to like seriously invest in it? It felt like you can make so much money if you took this effort seriously. And it feels like they have a committee of like two people just sitting back, like a meeting, they meet once a month, like what are we going to do with Mechanical Turk? It's like two websites making me feel like this, that and craiglist.org, whatever the hell it is. It feels like it's designed in the 90s. Well, Craigslist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the guy originally built. Do you seriously think there's a team, like how big is the team working on Mechanical Turk? I don't know. There's some team, right? I feel like there isn't. I'm skeptical. Yeah. Well, if nothing else, they benefit from the other teams like moving things forward in a small way. But I know what you mean. We use Mechanical Turk for a couple of things as well. And yeah, it's painful UI. It's painful, but yeah, it works. I think most people, the thing is most people don't really use the UI, right? Like we, for example, we use it through the API, right? But even the API documentation and so on, like it's super outdated. Like I don't even know what to... I mean, the same criticism, as long as we're ranting, my same criticism goes to the APIs of most of these companies. Like Google, for example, the API for the different services is just the documentation is so shitty. Like it's not so shitty. I should actually be... I should exhibit some gratitude. Okay, let's practice some gratitude. The documentation is pretty good. Like most of the things that the API makes available is pretty good. It's just that in the sense that it's accurate, sometimes outdated, but like the degree of explanations with examples is only covering, I would say, like 50% of what's possible. And it just feels a little bit, like there's a lot of natural questions that people would wanna ask that doesn't get covered. And it feels like it's almost there. Like it's such a magical thing. Like the Maps API, YouTube API, there's a bunch of stuff. I gotta imagine it's like, there's probably some team at Google responsible for writing this documentation that's probably not the engineers, right? And probably this team is not where you wanna be. Well, it's a weird thing. I sometimes think about this for somebody who wants to also build a company. I think about this a lot. YouTube, the service is one of the most magical, like I'm so grateful that YouTube exists. And yet they seem to be quite clueless on so many things like that everybody's screaming them at. Like it feels like whatever the mechanism that you use to listen to your quote unquote customers, which is like the creators, is not very good. Like there's literally people that are like screaming why, like their new YouTube studio, for example. There's like features that were like begged for for a really long time. Like being able to upload multiple videos at the same time. That wasn't missing for a really, really long time. Now, like there's probably things that I don't know, which is maybe for that kind of huge infrastructure, it's actually very difficult to build some of these features. But the fact that that wasn't communicated and it felt like you're not being heard. Like I remember this experience for me and it's not a pleasant experience. And it feels like the company doesn't give a damn about you. And that's something to think about. I'm not sure what that is. That might have to do with just like small groups working on these small features and these specific features. And there's no overarching like dictator type of human that says like, why the hell are we neglecting like Steve Jobs type of characters? Like there's people that we need to speak to the people that like wanna love our product and they don't. Let's fix this shit. Maybe at some point you just get so fixated on the numbers, right? And it's like, well, the numbers are pretty great, right? Like people are watching, doesn't seem to be a problem, right? And you're not like the person that like build this thing, right? So you really care about it. You're just there, you came in as a product manager, right? You got hired sometime later, your mandate is like increase this number, like 10%, right? And you just. That's brilliantly put. Like if you, this is, okay, if there's a lesson in this is don't reduce your company into a metric of like how much, like you said, how much people watching the videos and so on and like convince yourself that everything is working just because the numbers are going up. There's something, you have to have a vision. You have to want people to love your stuff because love is ultimately the beginning of like a successful longterm company is that they always should love your product. You have to be like a creator and have that like creator's love for your own thing, right? Like, and you're pained by these comments, right? And probably like Apple, I think did this generally like really well. They're well known for kind of keeping teams small even when they were big, right? And, you know, he was an engineer, like there's a book, a creative selection. I don't know if you read it by a Apple engineer named Ken Koscienda. It's kind of a great book actually because unlike most of these business books where it's, you know, here's how Steve Jobs ran the company. It's more like here's how life was like for me, you know, an engineer here, the projects I worked on and here what it was like to pitch Steve Jobs, you know, on like, you know, I think it was in charge of like the keyboard and the auto correction, right? And at Apple, like Steve Jobs reviewed everything. And so he was like, this is what it was like to show my demos to Steve Jobs and, you know, to change them because like Steve Jobs didn't like how, you know, the shape of the little key was off because the rounding of the corner was like not quite right or something like this, right? He was famously a stickler for this kind of stuff. But because the teams were small, he really owned this stuff, right? So he really cared. Yeah, Elon Musk does that similar kind of thing with Tesla, which is really interesting. There's another lesson in leadership in that is to be obsessed with the details. And like, he talks to like the lowest level engineers. Okay, so we're talking about ASR and so this is basically where I was saying we're gonna take this like ultra seriously. And then what's the mission? To try to keep pushing towards the 3%. Yeah, and kind of try to build this platform where all of your, you know, all of your meetings, you know, they're as easily accessible as your notes, right? Like, so, like, imagine all the meetings a company might have, right? You know, now that I'm like no longer a programmer, right? Then I'm a quote unquote manager. That's less like my day as in meetings, right? Yeah. And, you know, pretty often I wanna like see what was said, right? Who said it, you know? What's the context? But it's generally not really something that you can easily retrieve, right? Like imagine if all of those meetings were indexed, archived, you know, you could go back, you could share a clip like really easily, right? So that might change completely. It's like everything that's said, converted to text might change completely the dynamics of what we do in this world, especially now with remote work, right? Exactly, exactly. With Zoom and so on. That's fascinating to think about. I mean, for me, I care about podcasts, right? And one of the things that was, you know, I'm torn. I know a lot of the engineers at Spotify. So I love them very much because they dream big in terms of like, they wanna empower creators. So one of my hopes was with Spotify that they would use a technology like Rev or something like that to start converting everything into text and make it indexable. Like one of the things that sucks with podcasts is like, it's hard to find stuff. Like the model is basically subscription. Like you find, it's similar to what YouTube used to be like, which is you basically find a creator that you enjoy and you subscribe to them. And like, you just kind of follow what they're doing, but the search and discovery wasn't a big part of YouTube like in the early days, but that's what currently with podcasts, like is the search and discovery is like non existent. You're basically searching for like the dumbest possible thing, which is like keywords in the titles of episodes. Yeah. Even aside from a search and discovery, like all the time. So I listened to like a number of podcasts and there's something said, and I wanna like go back to that later because I was trying to, I'm trying to remember, what do you say? Like maybe like recommended some cool product that I wanna try out. And like, it's basically impossible. Maybe like some people have pretty good show notes. So maybe you'll get lucky and you can find it, right? But I mean, if everyone had transcripts and it was all searchable, it would be so much better. I mean, that's one of the things that I wanted to, I mean, one of the reasons we're talking today is I wanted to take this quite seriously. The rough thing, I just been lazy. So, because I'm very fortunate that a lot of people support this podcast, that there's enough money now to do a transcription and so on. And it seemed clear to me, especially like CEOs and sort of like PhDs, like people write to me who are like graduate students in computer science or graduate students in whatever the heck field, it's clear that their mind, like they enjoy podcasts when they're doing laundry or whatever, but they wanna revisit the conversation in a much more rigorous way. And they really wanna transcript. Like it's clear that they want to analyze conversations. Like so many people wrote to me about a transcript for Yosha Bach conversation. I had just a bunch of conversations. And then on the Elon Musk side, like reporters, they wanna write a blog post about your conversation. So they wanna be able to pull stuff. And it's like, they're essentially doing on your conversation transcription privately. They're doing it for themselves and then starting to pick, but it's so much easier when you can actually do it as a reporter, just look at the transcript. Yeah, and you can like embed a little thing, like into your article, right? Here's what they said, you can go listen to like this clip from the section. I'm actually trying to figure out, I'll probably on the website create like a place where the transcript goes, like as a webpage so that people can reference it, like reporters can reference it and so on. I mean, most of the reporters probably want to write clickbait articles that are complete falsifying, which I'm fine with. It's the way of journalism, I don't care. Like I've had this conversation with a friend of mine, a mixed martial artist, the Ryan Hall. And we talked about, you know, as I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and a bunch of books on Hitler and we brought up Hitler and he made some kind of comment where like, we should be able to forgive Hitler and, you know, like we were talking about forgiveness and we're bringing that up as like the worst case possible things, like even, you know, for people who are Holocaust survivors, one of the ways to let go of the suffering they've been through is to forgive. And he brought up like Hitler as somebody that would potentially be the hardest thing to possibly forgive, but it might be a worthwhile pursuit psychologically, so on, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't matter. It was very eloquent, very powerful words. I think people should go back and listen to it. It's powerful. And then all these journalists, all these articles written about like MMA fight, UFC fight. MMA fighter loves Hitler. No, like, well, no, they didn't. They were somewhat accurate. They didn't say like loves Hitler. They said, thinks that if Hitler came back to life, we should forgive him. Like they kind of, it's kind of accurate ish, but the headline made it sound a lot worse than it was, but I'm fine with it. That's the way the world, I wanna almost make it easier for those journalists and make it easier for people who actually care about the conversation to go and look and see. Right, they can see it for themselves. For themselves. There's the headline, but now you can go. There's something about podcasts, like the audio that makes it difficult to jump to a spot and to look for that particular information. I think some of it, I'm interested in creating, like myself experimenting with stuff. So like taking rev and creating a transcript and then people can go to it. I do dream that like, I'm not in the loop anymore, that like, Spotify does it, right? Like automatically for everybody, because ultimately that one click purchase needs to be there, like, you know. Like you kind of want support from the entire ecosystem. Exactly. Like from the tool makers and the podcast creators, even clients, right? I mean, imagine if like most podcast apps, you know, if it was a standard, right? Here's how you include a transcript into a podcast, right? Like it's just an RSS feed ultimately. And actually just yesterday I saw this company called Buzzsprout, I think they're called. So they're trying to do this. They proposed a spec, an extension to their RSS format to reference transcripts in a standard way. And they're talking about like, there's one client dimension that will support it, but imagine like more clients support it, right? So any podcast, you could go and see the transcripts right in your like normal podcast app. Yeah. I mean, somebody, so I have somebody who works with me, works with helps with advertising, Matt, this awesome guy. He mentioned Buzzsprout to me, but he says, it's really annoying because they want exclusive, they want to host the podcast. Right. This is the problem with Spotify too. This is where I'd like to say, like F Spotify, there's a magic to RSS with podcasts. It can be made available to everyone. And then there's all, there's this ecosystem of different podcast players that emerge and they compete freely. And that's a beautiful thing, that that's why I go on exclusive, like Joe Rogan went exclusive. I'm not sure if you're familiar with, he went to Spotify as a huge fan of Joe Rogan. I've been kind of nervous about the whole thing, but let's see, I hope that Spotify steps up. They've added video, which was very surprising that they were able to put on. Exclusive meaning you can't subscribe to the RSS feed anymore. It's only in Spotify. For now you can until December 1st. And December 1st, it's all, everything disappears and it's Spotify only. I, you know, and Spotify gave him a hundred million dollars for that. So it's an interesting deal, but I, you know, I did some soul searching and I'm glad he's doing it. But if Spotify came to me with a hundred million dollars, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do, well, I have a very different relationship with money. I hate money, but I just think I believe in the pirate radio aspect of podcasting, the freedom. And that there's something about. The open source spirit. The open source spirit, it just doesn't seem right. It doesn't feel right. That said, you know, because so many people care about Joe Rogan's program, they're gonna hold Spotify's feet to the fire. Like one of the cool things with what Joe told me is the reason he likes working with Spotify is that they, they're like ride or die together, right? So they, they want him to succeed. So that's why they're not actually telling him what to do despite what people think. They, they don't tell them, they don't give them any notes on anything. They want him to succeed. And that's the cool thing about exclusivity with a platform is like, you're kind of wanting each other to succeed. And that process can actually be very fruitful. Like YouTube, it goes back to my criticism. YouTube generally, no matter how big the creator, maybe for PewDiePie, something like that, they want you to succeed. But for the most part, from all the big creators I've spoken with, Veritasium, all of those folks, you know, they get some basic assistance, but it's not like, YouTube doesn't care if you succeed or not. They have so many creators. Yeah, like a hundred other. They don't care. So, and especially with, with somebody like Joe Rogan, who YouTube sees Joe Rogan, not as a person who might revolutionize the nature of news and idea space and nuanced conversations. They see him as a potential person who has racist guests on, or like, you know, they see him as like a headache, potentially. So, you know, a lot of people talk about this. It's a hard place to be for YouTube, actually, is figuring out with the search and discovery process of how do you filter out conspiracy theories and which conspiracy theories represent dangerous untruths and which conspiracy theories are like vanilla untruths. And then even when you start having meetings and discussions about what is true or not, it starts getting weird. Yeah, it's difficult these days, right? I worry more about the other side, right? Of too much, you know, too much censorship. Well, maybe censorship is the right word. I mean, censorship is usually government censorship, but still, yeah, putting yourself in the position of arbiter for these kinds of things. It's very difficult and people think it's so easy, right? Like, cause like, well, you know, like no Nazis, right? What a simple principle. But you know, yes, I mean, no one likes Nazis, but there's like many shades of gray, like very soon after that. Yeah, and then, you know, of course everybody, you know, there's some people that call our current president a Nazi and then there's like, so you start getting a Sam Harris. I don't know if you know that is wasted, in my opinion, his conversation with Jack Dorsey. Now I'll also, I spoke with Jack before in this podcast and we'll talk again, but Sam brought up, Sam Harris does not like Donald Trump. I do listen to his podcast. I'm familiar with his views on the matter. And he asked Jack Dorsey, he's like, how can you not ban Donald Trump from Twitter? And so, you know, there's a set, you have that conversation. You have a conversation where some number, some significant number of people think that the current president of the United States should not be on your platform. And it's like, okay. So if that's even on the table as a conversation, then everything's on the table for conversation. And yeah, it's tough. I'm not sure where I land on it. I'm with you, I think that censorship is bad, but I also think the show... Ultimately, I just also think, you know, if you're the kind of person that's gonna be convinced, you know, by some YouTube video, you know, that, I don't know, our government's been taken over by aliens, it's unlikely that like, you know, you'll be returned to sanity simply because, you know, that video is not available on YouTube, right? Yeah, I'm with you. I tend to believe in the intelligence of people and we should trust them. But I also do think it's the responsibility of platforms to encourage more love in the world, more kindness to each other. And I don't always think that they're great at doing that particular thing. So that, there's a nice balance there. And I think philosophically, I think about that a lot. Where's the balance between free speech and like encouraging people, even though they have the freedom of speech to not be an asshole. Yeah, right. That's not a constitutional, like... So you have the right for free speech, but like, just don't be an asshole. Like you can't really put that in the constitution that the Supreme Court can't be like, eh, just don't be a dick. But I feel like platforms have a role to be like, just be nicer. Maybe do the carrot, like encourage people to be nicer as opposed to the stake of censorship. But I think it's an interesting machine learning problem. Just be nicer. Machine, yeah, machine learning for niceness. It is, I mean, that's... Responsible, yeah, I mean, it is. It is a thing, for sure. Jack Dorsey kind of talks about it as a vision for Twitter is, how do we increase the health of conversations? I don't know how seriously they're actually trying to do that though. Which is one of the reasons that I'm in part considering entering that space a little bit. It's difficult for them, right? Because, you know, it's kind of like well known that people are kind of driven by rage and you know, outrage maybe is a better word, right? Outrage drives engagement. And well, these companies are judged by engagement, right? So it's... In the short term, but this goes to the metrics thing that we were talking about earlier. I do believe, I have a fundamental belief that if you have a metric of long term happiness of your users, like not short term engagement, but long term happiness and growth and both like intellectual, emotional health of your users, you're going to make a lot more money. You're going to have long... Like you should be able to optimize for that. You don't need to necessarily optimize for engagement. And that'll be good for society too. Yeah, no, I mean, I generally agree with you, but it requires a patient person with, you know, trust from Wall Street to be able to carry out such a strategy. This is what I believe the Steve Jobs character and Elon Musk character is like, you basically have to be so good at your job. Right, you got to pass for anything. That you can hold the board and all the investors hostage by saying like, either we do it my way or I leave. And everyone is too afraid of you to leave because they believe in your vision. But that requires being really good at what you do. It requires being Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. There's kind of a reason why like a third name doesn't come immediately to mind, right? Like there's maybe a handful of other people, but it's not that many. It's not many. I mean, people say like, why are you... Like people say that I'm like a fan of Elon Musk. I'm not, I'm a fan of anybody who's like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. And there's just not many of those folks. It's the guy that made us believe that like we can get to Mars, you know, in 10 years, right? I mean, that's kind of awesome. And it's kind of making it happen, which is like... And it's kind of gone like that kind of like spirit, right? Like from a lot of our society, right? You know, like we can get to the moon in 10 years and like we did it, right? Yeah. Especially in this time of so much kind of existential dread that people are going through because of COVID, like having rockets that just keep going out there now with humans. I don't know that it, just like you said, I mean, it gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and dream, for us engineers too. It is inspiring as hell, man. Let me ask you this, the worst possible question, which is, so you're like at the core, you're a programmer, you're an engineer, but now you made the unfortunate choice or maybe that's the way life goes of basically moving away from the low level work and becoming a manager, becoming an executive, having meetings, what's that transition been like? It's been interesting. It's been a journey. Maybe a couple of things to say about that. I mean, I got into this, right? Because as a kid, I just remember this like incredible amazement at being able to write a program, right? And something comes to life that kind of didn't exist before. I don't think you have that in like many other fields, like you have that with some other kinds of engineering, but you're maybe a little bit more limited with what you can do, right? But with a computer, you can literally imagine any kind of program, right? So it's a little bit godlike what you do like when you create it. And so, I mean, that's why I got into it. Do you remember like first program you wrote or maybe the first program that like made you fall in love with computer science? I don't know what was the first program. It's probably like trying to write one of those games and basic, you know, like emulate the snake game or whatever. I don't remember to be honest, but I enjoyed like, that's why I always loved about, you know, being a programmer, it's just the creation process. And it's a little bit different when you're not the one doing the creating. And, you know, another aspect to it I would say is, you know, when you're a programmer, when you're a individual contributor, it's kind of very easy to know when you're doing a good job, when you're not doing a good job, when you're being productive, when you're not being productive, right? You can kind of see like you trying to make something and it's like slowly coming together, right? And when you're a manager, you know, it's more diffuse, right? Like, well, you hope, you know, you're motivating your team and making them more productive and inspiring them, right? But it's not like you get some kind of like dopamine signal because you like completed X lines of code, you know, today. So kind of like you missed that dopamine rush a little bit when you first become, but then, you know, slowly you kind of see, yes, your teams are doing amazing work, right? And you can take pride in that. You can get like, what is it? Like a ripple effect of somebody else's dopamine rush. Yeah, yeah, you live off other people's dopamine. So is there pain points and challenges you had to overcome from becoming, from going to a programmer to becoming a programmer of humans? Programmer of humans. I don't know, humans are difficult to understand, you know, it's like one of those things, like trying to understand other people's motivations and what really drives them. It's difficult, maybe like never really know, right? Do you find that people are different? Yeah. Like I, one of the things, like I had a group at MIT that, you know, I found that like some people I could like scream at and criticize like hard and that made them do like much better work and really push them to their limit. And there's some people that I had to nonstop compliment because like they're so already self critical, like about everything they do that I have to be constantly like, like I cannot criticize them at all because they're already criticizing themselves and you have to kind of encourage and like celebrate their little victories. And it's kind of fascinating that like how that, the complete difference in people. Definitely people respond to different motivations and different loads of feedback and you kind of have to figure it out. It was like a pretty good book, which for some reason now the name escapes me, about management, first break all the rules. First break all the rules? First break all the rules. It's a book that we generally like ask a lot of like first time managers to read it rough. And like one of the kind of philosophies is managed by exception, right? Which is, you know, don't like have some standard template like, you know, here's how I, you know, tell this person to do this or the other thing. Here's how I get feedback, like manage by exception, right? Every person is a little bit different. You have to try to understand what drives them. And tailor it to them. Since you mentioned books, I don't know if you can answer this question, but people love it when I ask it, which is, are there books, technical fiction or philosophical that you enjoyed or had an impact on your life that you would recommend? You already mentioned Dune, like all of the Dune. All of the Dune. The second one was probably the weakest, but anyway, so yeah, all of the Dune is good. I mean, yeah, can you just slow little tangent on that? Is, how many Dune books are there? Like, do you recommend people start with the first one if that was? Yeah, you gotta have to read them all. I mean, it is a complete story, right? So you start with the first one, you gotta read all of them. So it's not like a tree, like a creation of like the universe that you should go in sequence? You should go in sequence, yeah. It's kind of a chronological storyline. There's six books in all. Then there's like many kind of books that were written by Frank Herbert's son, but those are not as good. So you don't have to bother with those. Shots fired. Shots fired. Okay. But the main sequence is good. So what are some other books? Maybe there's a few. So I don't know that like, I would say there's a book that kind of, I don't know, turned my life around or anything like that, but here's a couple that I really love. So one is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. And it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about like what a brave new world might be like, right? You know, you kind of see genetic sorting in this book, right, where there's like these alphas and epsilons and how from like the earliest time of society, like they're sort of like, you can kind of see it in a slightly similar way today where, well, one of the problems with society is people are kind of genetically sorting a little bit, right? Like there's much less, like most marriages, right, are between people of similar kind of intellectual level or socioeconomic status, more so these days than in the past. And you kind of see some effects of it in stratifying society and kind of he illustrated what that could be like in the extreme. There's different versions of it on social media as well. It's not just like marriages and so on. Like it's genetic sorting in terms of what Dawkins called memes as ideas being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on. Yeah, I know, so that's the book that's I think a worthwhile read for everyone. I mean, 1984 is good, of course, as well. Like if you're talking about, you know, dystopian novels of the future. Yeah, it's a slightly different view of the future, right? But I kind of like identify with Brave New World a bit more. Yeah, speaking of not a book, but my favorite kind of dystopian science fiction is a movie called Brazil, which I don't know if you've heard of. I've heard of and I know I need to watch it, but yeah, because it's in, is it in English or no? It's an English movie, yeah. And it's a sort of like dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence, right? It's like nothing really works very well, you know, the system is creaky, you know, but no one is kind of like willing to challenge it, you know, just things kind of ample along and kind of strikes me as like a very plausible future of like, you know, what authoritarianism might look like. It's not like this, you know, super efficient evil dictatorship of 1984. It's just kind of like this badly functioning, you know, but it's status quo, so it just goes on. Yeah, that's one funny thing that stands out to me is in whether it's authoritarian, dystopian stuff, or just basic like, you know, if you look at the movie Contagion, it seems in the movies, government is almost always exceptionally competent. Like it's like used as a storytelling tool of like extreme competence. Like, you know, you use it whether it's good or evil, but it's competent. It's very interesting to think about where much more realistically is it's incompetence and that incompetence isn't itself has consequences that are difficult to predict. Like bureaucracy has a very boring way of being evil, of just, you know, if you look at the show, HBO show at Chernobyl, it's a really good story of how bureaucracy, you know, leads to catastrophic events, but not through any kind of evil in any one particular place, but more just like the... It's just the system kind of system. Distorting information as it travels up the chain that people unwilling to take responsibility for things and just kind of like this laziness resulting in evil. There's a comedic version of this, I don't know if you've seen this movie, it's called The Death of Stalin. Yeah, I liked that. I wish it wasn't so... There's a movie called Inglourious Bastards about, you know, Hitler and so on. For some reason, those movies pissed me off. I know a lot of people love them, but like, I just feel like there's not enough good movies, even about Hitler. There's good movies about the Holocaust, but even Hitler, there's a movie called Dawnfall that people should watch. I think it's the last few days of Hitler. That's a good movie, turned into a meme, but it's good. But on Stalin, I feel like I may be wrong on this, but at least in the English speaking world, there's not good movies about the evil of Stalin. That's true. Let's try to see that. Actually, so I agree with you on Inglourious Bastard. I didn't love the movie because I felt like kind of the stylizing of it, right? The whole Tarantino kind of Tarantinoism, if you will, kind of detracted from it and made it seem like unserious a little bit. But Death of Stalin, I felt differently. Maybe it's because it's a comedy to begin with. This is not like I'm expecting seriousness, but it kind of depicted the absurdity of the whole situation in a way, right? I mean, it was funny, so maybe it does make light of it, but something goes probably like this, right? Like a bunch of kind of people, they're like, oh shit, right? You're right. But like the thing is, it was so close to like what probably was reality. It was caricaturing reality to where I think an observer might think that this is not, like they might think it's a comedy. Well, in reality, that's the absurdity of how people act with dictators. I mean, that's, I guess it was too close to reality for me. The kind of banality of like what were eventually like fairly evil acts, right? But like, yeah, they're just a bunch of people trying to survive. Cause I think there's a good, I haven't watched it yet, the good movie on, the movie on Churchill with Gary Oldman, I think it's Gary Oldman. I may be making that up. But I think he won, like he was nominated for an Oscar or something. So I like, I love these movies about these humans and Stalin, like Chernobyl made me realize the HBO show that there's not enough movies about Russia that capture that spirit. I'm sure it might be in Russian there is, but the fact that some British dude that like did comedy, I feel like he did like hangover or some shit like that. I don't know if you're familiar with the person who created Chernobyl, but he was just like some guy that doesn't know anything about Russia. And he just went in and just studied it, like did a good job of creating it and then got it so accurate, like poetically. And the facts that you need to get accurate, he got accurate, just the spirit of it down to like the bowls that pets use, just the whole feel of it. It was incredible. It was good, yeah, I saw the series. Yeah, it's incredible. It's made me wish that somebody did a good, like 1930s, like starvation that Stalin led to, like leading up to World War II and in World War II itself, like Stalingrad and so on. Like, I feel like that story needs to be told. Millions of people died. And to me, it's so much more fascinating than Hitler because Hitler is like a caricature of evil almost that it's so, especially with the Holocaust, it's so difficult to imagine that something like that is possible ever again. Stalin to me represents something that is possible. Like the so interesting, like the bureaucracy of it is so fascinating that it potentially might be happening in the world now, like that we're not aware of, like with North Korea, another one that, like there should be a good film on. And like the possible things that could be happening in China with overreach of government. I don't know, there's a lot of possibilities there. I suppose. Yeah, I wonder how much, you know, I guess the archives should be maybe more open nowadays, right, I mean, for a long time, they just, we didn't know, right, or anyways, no one in the West knew for sure. Well, there's a, I don't know if you know him, there's a guy named Stephen Kotkin. He is a historian of Stalin that I spoke to on this podcast. I'll speak to him again. The guy knows his shit on Stalin. He like read everything and it's so fascinating to talk to somebody, like he knows Stalin better than Stalin himself, it's crazy. Like you have, so he's, I think he's a Princeton, he is basically, his whole life is Stalin. Fighting Stalin. Yeah, it's great. And in that context, he also talks about and writes about Putin a little bit. I've also read at this point, I think every biography of Putin, English biography of Putin, I need to read some Russians. Obviously, I'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with Putin. So what is your first question to Putin when you have him on the podcast? I, it's interesting you bring that up. First of all, I wouldn't tell you, but. You can't give it away now. But I actually haven't even thought about that. So my current approach, and I do this with interviews often, obviously that's a special one, but I try not to think about questions until last minute. I'm trying to sort of get into the mindset. And so that's why I'm soaking in a lot of stuff, not thinking about questions, just learning about the man. But in terms of like human to human, it's like, I would say it's, I don't know if you're a fan of mob movies, but like the mafia, which I am, like Goodfellas and so on, he's much closer to like mob morality, which is like. Mob morality, maybe, I could see that. But I like your approach anyways of this, the extreme empathy, right? It's a little bit like Hannibal, right? Like if you ever watched the show Hannibal, right? They had that guy, well, you know Hannibal of course, like. Yeah, Silence of the Lambs. But there were those TV shows as well, and they focused on this guy, Will Durant, who's a character like extreme empath, right? So in the way he like catches all these killers, as he pretty much, he can empathize with them, right? Like he can understand why they're doing the things they're doing, right? It's a pretty excruciating thing, right? Like, because you're pretty much like spending half your time in the head of evil people, right? Like, but. I mean, I definitely try to do that with others. So you should do that in moderation, but I think it's a pretty safe place, safe place to be. One of the cool things with this podcast, and I know you didn't sign up to hear me listen to this bullshit, but. That was interesting. I, and what's his name? Chris Latner, who's a Google, oh, he's not Google anymore, SciFi. He's legit, he's one of the most legit engineers I talk with, I talk with him again on this podcast. And one of the, he gives me private advice a lot. And he said for this podcast, I should like interview, like I should widen the range of people because that gives you much more freedom to do stuff. Like, so his idea, which I think I agree with Chris is that you go to the extremes. You just like cover every extreme base and then it gives you freedom to then go to the more nuanced conversations. And it's kind of, I think there's a safe place for that. There's certainly a hunger for that nuanced conversation, I think, amongst people where like on social media, you get canceled for anything slightly tense, that there's a hunger to go full. Right, you go so far to the opposite side. And that's like demystifies it a little bit, right? Yeah, that's. There is a person behind all of these things. And that's the cool thing about podcasting, like three, four hour conversations that it's very different than a clickbait journalism, it's like the opposite, that there's a hunger for that. There's a willingness for that. Yeah, especially now, I mean, how many people do you even see face to face anymore? Right, like this, you know? It's like not that many people like in my day today, aside from my own family that like I sit across. It's sad, but it's also beautiful. Like I've gotten the chance to like, like our conversation now, there's somebody, I guarantee you there's somebody in Russia listening to this now, like jogging. There's somebody who is just smoked some weed, sit back on a couch and just like enjoying. I guarantee you that we'll write in the comments right now that yes, I'm in St. Petersburg, I'm in Moscow, whatever. And we're in their head and they have a friendship with us. I'm the same way, I'm a huge fan of podcasting. It's a beautiful thing. I mean, it's a weird one way human connection. Like before I went on Joe Rogan and still, I'm just a huge fan of his. So it was like surreal. I've been friends with Joe Rogan for 10 years, but one way. Yeah, from this way, from the St. Petersburg way. Yeah, the St. Petersburg way and it's a real friendship. I mean, now it's like two way, but it's still surreal. And that's the magic of podcasting. I'm not sure what to make of it. That voice, it's not even the video part. It's the audio that's magical. I don't know what to do with it, but it's people listen to three, four hours. Yeah, we evolved over millions of years, right? To be very fine tuned to things like that, right? Oh, expressions as well, of course, right? But back in the day on the Savannah, you had to be very attuned to whether you had a good relationship with the rest of your tribe or a very bad relationship, right? Because if you had a very bad relationship, you were probably gonna be left behind and eaten by the lions. Yeah, but it's weird that the tribe is different now. Like you could have a one way connection with Joe Rogan as opposed to the tribe of your physical vicinity. But that's why it works with the podcasting, but it's the opposite of what happens on Twitter, right? Because all those nuances are removed, right? You're not connecting with the person because you don't hear the voice. You're connecting with like an abstraction, right? It's like some stream of tweets, right? And it's very easy to assign to them any kind of evil intent or dehumanize them, which it's much harder to do when it's a real voice, right? Because you realize it's a real person behind the voice. Let me try this out on you. I sometimes ask about the meaning of life. Do you, your father now, an engineer, you're building up a company. Do you ever zoom out and think like, what the hell is this whole thing for? Like why are we descended to vapes even on this planet? What's the meaning of it all? That's a pretty big question. I think I don't allow myself to think about it too often, or maybe like life doesn't allow me to think about it too often. But in some ways, I guess the meaning of life is kind of contributing to this kind of weird thing we call humanity, right? Like it's in a way, you can think of humanity as like a living and evolving organism, right? That like we all contributing in a sway way, but just by existing, by having our own unique set of desires and drives, right? And maybe that means like creating something great. And it's bringing up kids who are unique and different and seeing like, they can join what they do. But I mean, to me, that's pretty much it. I mean, if you're not a religious person, right? Which I guess I'm not, that's the meaning of life. It's in the living and in the creation. Yeah, there's something magical about that engine of creation. Like you said, programming, I would say, I mean, it's even just actually what you said with even just programs. I don't care if it's like some JavaScript thing on a button on the website. It's like magical that you brought that to life. I don't know what that is in there, but that seems, that's probably some version of like reproduction and sex, whatever that's in evolution. But like creating that HTML button has echoes of that feeling and it's magical. Right, well, I mean, if you're a religious person, maybe you could even say, all right, like we were created in God's image, right? Well, I mean, I guess part of that is the drive to create something ourselves, right? I mean, that's part of it. Yeah, that HTML button is the creation in God's image. Maybe hopefully it'll be something a little more. So dynamic, maybe some JavaScript. Yeah, maybe some JavaScript, some React and so on. But no, I mean, I think that's what differentiates us from the apes, so to speak. Yeah, we did a pretty good job. Dan, it was an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for being part of creating one of my favorite services and products. This is actually a little bit of an experiment. Allow me to sort of fanboy over some of the things I love. So thanks for wasting your time with me today. It was really fun. Well, it was awesome. Thanks for having me on and giving me a chance to try this out. Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Kokotov and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Only One Nutrition Drink, Blinkist app that summarizes books, Business Wars podcast and Cash App. So the choice is health, wisdom or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein. The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151

The following is a conversation with Dan Gable from two years ago. I did not previously publish this conversation as part of this podcast, but as a separate thing. And as a result, it did not receive many listens. Let me be honest and say that while I usually don't care about how many listens or views something gets, in this one case, I feel like I failed one of my heroes. I feel I didn't properly introduce a truly special human being to an audience that might find him as inspiring as I did. Dan Gable is one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time. Bigger than records and medals, to many like myself, he's a symbol of guts, spirit, mental toughness, and relentless hard work. As a wrestler, he was undefeated in high school, undefeated in college until his very last match. And having lost that match, he found another level and became a world champion and an Olympic champion. And most importantly, he did so perfectly dominating his opponents. He did not surrender a single point at the 1972 Olympic games. As a coach, he led the Iowa Hawkeyes to 15 national titles and 25 consecutive Big Ten championships. He coached 152 All Americans, 45 national champions, 106 Big Ten champions, and 12 Olympians, including eight medalists. He's the author of several books, including A Wrestling Life One and Two, and Coaching Wrestling Successfully. Quick mention of our sponsors. Trial Labs, a machine learning company, ExpressVPN, Grammarly writing helper tool, and Simply Safe Home Security. So the choice is AI, privacy, grammar, or safety. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I spent a few days in Iowa and got to attend a wrestling duel meet in the historic Carver Hawkeye Arena. Part of me wanted to stay in Iowa forever to drill takedowns, to start a family, to live life simply. Wrestling is one of the pure sports, both beautiful and brutal, where both mental toughness and technical mastery of the highest form are rewarded with victory, and everything else is punished with defeat. And every such loss weighs heavy on the minds of anyone who has ever stepped on the wrestling mat, including myself. The same is true for one of the greatest wrestlers in history of the sport, the man who graciously welcomed me into his home for this conversation, the legend, Dan Gable. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Dan Gable. You're persistent, I love that, because you've been trying to get me on this podcast for a long time. And until I saw you on another podcast and you said you were Russian, did I call you back? Then it was over. Because Russia to me, you know, is leading the world in wrestling almost every year. What's the difference between American wrestling and Russian wrestling? You showed me this painting. Well, it's MIT, it's science. It's science. And they really study the sport. They're really good technically. They're really, really good in strategy. They don't really push like the real toughness. They don't push like conditioning. And so Americans, we need what they have. Russians need what we have. And when you get the two together. And for me, why I could beat the Russians is because I went their way a little bit. But I kept my toughness. But you're known, you're known for your toughness. Yeah, but I wasn't known for my art. I wasn't known for my science. So when did you become a bit of an artist? It took a loss. The Larry Owens loss. Most people thought I was already an artist just because I won 181 straight matches in seven years. And not just winning, but you know, kind of punishing people. And from that point of view, yeah, I might've been pretty good, but I had a long ways to go yet. And I didn't really realize that, or I should say, I didn't really know how to get it out of me until I had a loss. And then I realized I gotta buckle down, learn some of that science, become more of an artist. How do you become an artist? So the Russian way has this drilling technique, thousands of reps. How do you think you work on the science, the art part? You gotta study the best in the world. I think Dave Schultz was our guy in America that probably showed us that being artistic, you needed that. And he studied it. He went over there as a high schooler and rustled in some major tournaments over there. And he saw their ways. He used that Russian science and then he was already an American and he saw how I trained athletes. He saw what I did in the Olympics, saw what other people, how we held up, and he applied that as well. But I'd have to say he was more the artistic type. He was more of a Russian than an American when it came to wrestling. You've coached 45 national champions, 106 Big Ten champions, and eight Olympic medalists, which is incredible. What is a common thread between them and what are maybe some of the fundamental differences? I think the common thread is that they all had one of those two avenues that we talked already and because we intertwined them. So in a Russian wrestling room, they got the same people. Most of the time in an American wrestling room, we had the same people. But when I was out recruiting, at first I recruited just attitude, but I needed more than that. I needed some genetics in that wrestling room to actually, that hard work people, they could look and see, wow, that execution, that's unbelievable. But yet I can beat that guy after the first minute. So you think the art, the technique is genetics. You're born with it. You think it's not something. I think your pop and your ability to move. Timing. And timing and your quickness and your strength. The Russians, they usually picked out the people that can go into that sport. That was the old fashioned sports school. But it's mostly like when you walk into a Russian wrestling room, you see them hitting skills, techniques. You don't see them banging against each other that much. But then when practice is over, you might not see a bunch of sprints. You might see them walk over to the ropes and they drop down from the ceiling and they'll jump up and climb a rope, boom, boom, boom. And then they come down and then they don't jump right back on. They have three or four other guys go and then they jump back on. Whereas I probably made my guys climb them, get right back down, climb them right back again. But I also realized that I had to have a mix of that. What was the role? What was your role? I mean, those guys looked up and Dan Gable and what was the role in helping these athletes become their best? These national champions. Well, you had to first of all prove that you were, knew what you were doing. In terms of technique or in terms of hard work? Everything, everything. They just, you had to be the first guy there and the last guy to leave and you had to be the most dedicated guy, even though they were the ones that's trying to win the championships. You had to prove that you were gonna work just as hard as they were as a coach. And what does that look like? So you can see it when you, you know it when you see it? Well, you're there ahead of them and you're there after they leave. It's that simple. I'm picking up after them and you're analyzing them. You outwork them, you outwork them and you outthink them. And so, you know, use that type of strategy. And over time, when you prove it works, because some of my kids that were the best kids in the world really shouldn't have been a wrestler. I mean, they weren't very coordinated, but they worked so hard to develop themselves. What was your role in that process? I mean, that means pushing kids to their limit. If you're not... Yeah, but you can't push kids to their limit. And even when you push them to their limit, that's not their limit because their limit's above and beyond that. I mean, yeah, coaches sometimes accidentally don't, they lose kids because of the heat, because of hard work and all that. And you gotta know when to back off. You gotta read your athletes. And by that, I mean, you gotta know them pretty well. Every once in a while, you make a little bit of a mistake, but if you don't react right on that mistake before it gets too far, then it's gonna be a casualty. And I don't mean somebody dying necessarily, but maybe something that could turn them off or maybe something that could run them away or maybe something that, wow, that was close. Maybe shouldn't have pushed them that far. So you really have to be very educated. And it's not just what you know, it's what you know about them. And I'm not talking about the team. I'm talking about each guy on the team. Individuals, yeah. Yeah, each person on the team. And you know it how? You see it in their eyes? You know it how because you're the first one there and you're the last one to leave and you set in the environment with them. You're there in the morning for practice sometimes. You're there in the afternoon for two or three hours. After practice, you might have a hot room or you might have a sauna or a steam or a whirlpool and you get in there with them and you listen. You're not just feeding out information. You do that, but you're taking in a lot of that too. And I'm telling you, when you get in an atmosphere that they're relaxed and they feel comfortable, it's like a massage. And that's after practice in one of those areas that people are around you, you learn a lot. I mean, you got a lot to learn as a coach. And when you get in that atmosphere, when all of a sudden you feel like very comfortable, words start flowing. And when those words flow, you take them in as a coach. And there's something probably gonna be said that you can do and act upon that's gonna help certain situations. I've saved a couple of kids lives for sure that were on the brink. Sometimes performance is at such a high level in a high level atmosphere that life and death is actually involved. And I don't mean pushing a kid to where he just dies, but I mean, he might feel himself as a failure. He might go home and take his own life. Yeah, I mean, but that's part of it. You're putting so much heart, so much blood and heart and sweat and your whole meaning of life becomes winning. So, and sometimes it's so hard to lose within that context. So if in your, I think the first wrestling life you wrote about Chad Zapato who lost, I mean, incredible wrestler, but lost in three finals in the nationals and has this tattoo of a hawk clawing out the human heart. Yeah, so what lessons, is there any lessons from the incredible wrestling he's done, but also the incredible suffering that he went through on himself? Yeah, again, you like that word suffering, which is okay. Okay, so. No, no, no, no, no, keep it, keep it. Cause it fits right in where I want. I have to turn that suffering around to where he makes and feels good about himself or better, doesn't have to feel perfect. Cause he did lose, you know? And so, but you have to actually get him to realize that yeah, he's still unique compared to the walk of the earth. He was unbelievably unique right at the top, just a little bit short of, but because it was, you know, he felt the suffering, you now have to go about and change that and put it into goodwill some way. And because he's, you really have a lot of goodwill, you can do a lot of goodwill. And so, and it's not easy. It took him probably years, years of tattooing. Yeah. Years of covering the tattoos. And, you know, he told me he moved to, I go, why are you moving to California? Cause he was here for a couple of years after his wrestling was done, cause he had a good job around here and he was, I thought he was doing a good job, but he just, he said, I had to escape, you know? Yeah, it's the same as the covering up the tattoo. I had a wrestling terminology. I have to get, I hate to say this, I hate to say this. I go, where are you going? He said, I'm gonna go to California. And I go, is there any reason why you're going to California? And he says, that's where everybody goes to hide. But I said, I think you're wrong there, but you know, I think what will determine your life will be what you do from now on, you know? And if you can find, and he's actually turned it around. I mean, he's actually turned it around. You have to discover that yourself. Exactly, and he went someplace that he thought he could fit into, and I think he did. And I think he's got a good job, and he's helping people, and he covered that tattoo with feathers, another tattoo. Well, in the end, it's a beautiful story. Yeah, it is, it really is. Suffering and overcoming. Yeah, and he's not done yet. He's not done yet. No, he's not done. He's got a lot more to do. So you mentioned Roger Bannister, again, I think in your first book, and somebody you looked up to, that's the man who broke the four minute mile, right? When everybody said it was impossible, everyone thought it was impossible. Oh, they thought he would die. He would die. It's not humanly possible, yeah. So what? Well, you've done your homework. For what, the book, or what? Oh, I don't know, for me, you've done your homework. Yeah, I know, but yeah. What? I was sitting here by Putin to do research, yeah. So what lesson do you take from that story for yourself, the impossible, trying to accomplish the impossible? Well, the impossible is possible. It's just that simple. Time changes things. I mean, if you looked at where the mile time is right now, compared to that four minute mile, which when it was broke by a couple of tenths, or three or four tenths, it's now broke by another 20 seconds. Yeah, by several hundred people, yeah. Yeah, I mean, by tons of people. And it's pretty much common knowledge that you gotta run a four minute mile if you're gonna go somewhere now, or below if you're gonna win events at major level, that you gotta be able to do that. And so you can take that, and you can look at what in time history has as its record performance, and you can realize that that record performance, it's gonna change. Yeah. And they don't take into all the factors of knowledge. They don't take in all the factors of better shoes. They don't take in all the factors of better understanding of nutrition. I mean, it's like me as an athlete. I went to practice every day in high school for at least my sophomore, and my junior, and part of my senior year, and all of a sudden a new rule came up. It said, the rule said before that, it said at least most of the coaches, we don't want you drinking water at practice. Yeah. And okay, why? Because you gotta toughen you up. That's a weakness, water. And so we would go through practice. I mean, and you're sweating, and then you're sweating so much that you're almost out of sweat. Yeah. And so you're mostly at the end of practice, you're not even wrestling. Excuse me. You're setting against the wall. Yeah. Because you're tired. So then all of a sudden they say, okay, go ahead and drink water during practice, drink greater aid during practice. And all of a sudden at the end of practice, we're still out there competing. And so I look at my career for two and a half years where I, and junior high too. So I got another three years where I didn't really, wasn't able to push as good as I could because I just was probably under. Under hydrated. Yeah. Yeah. So, but at the individual level, in terms of the impossible, when did you first believe the thing that maybe probably people would laugh at you about was that you would be an Olympic champion? Well, I always visualized me being the best. You believed it in the very beginning. Forever, forever. Yeah, I was, because I was, I don't know if you'd call it a dreamer or somebody that, I was just involved with competitive sports at the YMCA from age five. Did you tell people that dream that you're gonna be Olympic champion one day? You're gonna be the best in the world? I think they knew. And the only reason why they knew, cause there was something a little different about this guy. He was. He's not gonna stop. Well, he was out in the yard. Yeah. And he was swinging baseball bats. Yeah. He was swinging baseball at six, at seven, and eight, and nine, and 10. And he was swinging baseball bats, so much right handed and so much left hand with nobody even there throwing the ball. Yeah. That all of a sudden when they walked by, all of a sudden the grass was down to dirt on both sides. Yeah. So it's like, they saw me out in the yard playing by myself sports, or you get the neighborhood kids and you play a lot. But if they weren't there, if you walked in my front room, I was hiking a ball like I was the quarterback. And I was running and running through the furniture, that type stuff. So who saw this guy mostly was probably the parents. Yeah. And the coaches at the YMCA level, the junior high level, they saw this guy come first and end up last. But I wasn't that great. I wasn't the fastest guy at that time. And I wasn't the strongest guy. Actually, before I went to the Olympics, when they tested me, they tested everybody. And I probably came back with one of the highest scores, but it was not like the highest person on this and this and that. I was all high across the board, straight across the board high on every one of them. But there was always people that were higher than me. Genetics. But then they would go down. Yeah. Then they would test on something else and go back up. Mine stayed high all across the board. And so I really didn't have too many flaws, but I didn't have any things that also said that you were gonna be unscored upon at the Olympic games. Right. So take me through that day, if you could. 1972, when you were going for the 68 kilogram freestyle wrestling gold, you scored 57 points, if I'm correct, and had zero points scored on you. 57, zero. So maybe take me through almost the details. What was your routine? What was your process? What was going through your mind, your thoughts of that day? Yeah, first of all, it was quite a day because we weighed in every day at that time. In the morning? Yeah, we weighed in two hours before the start of the competition. And so that didn't mean that you weighed in two hours before you wrestled, because you didn't know whether you're gonna wrestle right away or later on. In fact, in that day, I don't think I wrestled until later on in the evening. So had all day to recover, but I didn't really need it anyway, because I wasn't really pulling a whole lot of weight, but it was just interesting. But what was in your mind? What were you thinking? Were you nervous? Were you? I was confident. I was confident. You knew you were gonna win the gold. Yeah, I knew I was gonna win. But in reality, I didn't know it from a cocky point of view. I only knew it because for the last one, two, three and a half years, I had been going to practice, and I'd win in every practice. You felt good, you won. And I hardly ever lose a takedown. And if I lost, if somebody scored on me, it was like when I went to bed, I couldn't sleep until I figured it out. Or if I didn't figure it out, I would fall asleep and I would wake up with the answer of what I needed, why I got scored upon. So maybe now that you've won the gold, can you tell me in the practice room when somebody took you down, how do you take Dan Gable down in the practice room? Timing, technique? Very difficult, but somebody could, because they were going for one move. All I wanted was one move. Whereas if you can arrest somebody, arrest them the whole practice or half a practice for at least 10, 15 minutes, and they were maybe gonna score if they could work it in their mind. But they knew that was gonna be their victory. So in the practice room, maybe you can educate me, at that, when you're going for the Olympic gold, you didn't want to allow any takedowns. So there's no such thing as working on some kind of weird position, a weak point or something. It's important to not let down, take down. It's kind of like what we were saying before. If something happened and somebody scored on me in a certain way, I would go over that situation, over that situation, over it again, and I would come up with an answer. And then I would actually test it. Maybe I wouldn't go right back the next day because I didn't want the guy to not have some, I didn't want him to think that I was thinking about it all night, I didn't tell him. But maybe three days later when he wrestled again, I actually had it figured out because he wasn't able to. Or even if I was in on a takedown, an offensive move, and I got stopped and didn't score, I had to go back and filter that. But it wasn't something that usually I couldn't solve. I could usually solve it. Let's go back to the Olympic games. So I get up in the Olympic in the morning and I'm not sure when the weigh ins were, but I think I was probably a pound over. And that's about a half a kilo and 1.1 pounds is a kilo because we went in kilograms. So what do you do with that pound? You aren't off or? No, I just went over to the, they had a sauna there and I got in the sauna. And the funny thing was the morning of the finals, there was another athlete in the sauna. And it was American or? No, it was a European. I don't remember where she was from. Not a Russian. Well, you know what? I kind of think it was a plot because it was a girl. Interesting. And she didn't have her top on. Oh, wow. And that was pretty common. And so, you know, it was kind of interesting. You think back about it because there's some funny things that go on behind the scenes in Olympic games, in world games, anytime when you have country against country. And so there's some crazy stuff that goes on. Did any of it affect you? Was there any? Well, I almost stayed too long in the sauna. You lost a little bit over a pound. I lost a little more than a pound. But it didn't really bother me because I wasn't like cutting a lot of weight. So your match against the Russian, the... Azhelyov. Yeah, Azhelyov. He went on to be a two time world champion, a silver medalist as well. I mean, this is an incredible wrestler. So what was going through your mind before stepping on the mat with that guy? You've beaten a bunch of wrestlers, haven't had a point scored on you. And you're stepping on the mat against this Russian who you said was really, they picked, the Soviets picked to beat you. Right, and I know why they picked him because he had a great attitude. So he wasn't just the typical artist. He was a good artist. He hooked elbows like Azhelyov. And he's from that area of the world where they have some of those types of moves. But he, and he was a goer, but by cutting him down a weight, he lost some of that go. And I don't know if, you gotta, that's a process you gotta go about scientifically. Yeah. And so, if you don't do it as an American, it can really hurt your performance. If you don't do it as a Russian, it can hurt your performance. And they already didn't really do that a lot where you usually wrestle the weight where it was more like your weight. And so by cutting him down, maybe slowed his belief down a little bit. So you saw it in him. The spirit was a little bit gone when you were facing him. Yeah, but then he came back and he won rest of the matches and he was in the round robin and he was able to go to the finals, but he had lost another match actually against in the round robin against the Japanese. So I think I had already gained enough of artistic, being able to finish a match. Once I lost my match in college for the last two years, I took on some of that artistic work. And I think that he was already hoping to win, but he was hoping to win by a long ways because he had to pin me or beat me by eight points to be able to win the gold. And that wasn't gonna happen. I mean, the chances of pin is pretty good. Is it hard to pin Dan Gable versus take down? Like, have you taken risks where you could pay for them? I can't remember too many that I took that would actually put me in a danger position. I've taken risk, but the risks were so scientifically, technically correct that I wouldn't land in that danger zone. It's like, if I'm gonna lock up and throw you, I'm not gonna throw you to my own back and roll you through. I'm gonna turn in the air. So you were scientific about it. Yeah, exactly. I learned the hard way. Early on, there was moves from collegiate wrestling that you did that exposed your shoulders, which it cost me in some early freestyle matches against great wrestlers. But I would go back to my collegiate escaping type moves to where I hit a Granby roll where you expose your shoulders and you lose two points every time. But you learn that that's not the system. But if you hadn't wrestled much, you would get exposed under maybe a desperate situation. You would hit it. So you won the gold. How did it feel? I think it would have, I think the question would be how would it feel if you lost the gold for me? Because I already went through that once. Not at that highest level, but the National Collegiate Championship level my senior year. The Larry Owings loss. Larry Owings, yeah. And that didn't sit well. Were you afraid of that happening again at the Olympic level? Was that even a thought? No, I really wasn't. But it was why I changed my philosophy of training and added to the scientific artist type. And if I had won that match, even though I wouldn't have felt good about it, even though I squeaked it out, I wasn't feeling good about that match. It would have affected me a little bit, but if I'd have won it, I would have got over it. I mean, I'm not over it now. I mean, I don't know why I was doing this kind of stuff right before my match. By that, I mean this kind of stuff. Interviews, yeah, journalists. Yeah, and I really wasn't a good talker then. I mean, me and you were talking pretty good right now, except for I got a little cold, but I don't think I could say two words hardly then. And they took takes. Wide World of Sports said, hey, we want you to be the introduction for our next week's show. So I just say, hey, I'm Dan Gable. Come watch me as I finish my career undefeated 182 and 0. That's what they want me to say. Everybody assumed you'd be undefeated. And I said it. I had to take it 22 times. And the last two or three times they wrote it out and I read it and it still wasn't like I just said it. I was reading it like, hi, I'm Dan Gable. Come on. You know, that type of stuff. So, and he finally just closed the book and said, yeah, that's good enough. But I turned and it was my time to wrestle. And so, you know, you just, you learn that, and for me it was great coaching experience because that's what I turned into be. You know, I coached for longer than I wrestled. And I put out a lot of champions, but you learn through mistakes that even in your own career that you had made, you know, it's an ever learning process. It's an ever learning process. Have you ever been afraid on the mat? Does fear have any role do you think for a wrestler or it must be out there? Well, I'm sure fear is out there. And I'm sure that was to my advantage almost every time. I'm sure in my Olympic finals, I was really off. He had these doubts. He probably had these doubts. And that gives me the edge. And I don't know if I really ever had fear, but obviously there was points in times where I didn't perform as well, not many, but a few. And if I look back of it, look back at it, I don't think it was that American, you know, raw, raw, raw stuff. I think it was probably the fear of not being an artist as much. You know, maybe this guy might be better than me scientifically. And you know, you're a scientist. I think that got to me more than anything else. I said early on that I want to eliminate ever having to worry about getting tired in a match. So I kind of eliminated that. So I got rid of that point. And I do think that in wrestling, that is one of the fears that a lot of wrestlers have, actually how they feel during the match and are they gonna get tired and is it gonna affect my performance? And as a coach, that really was one of the things I tried to eliminate on all my athletes. So there wasn't that fear factor, but that fear factor would be put upon my opponent, which would give me an edge. But that's not what I needed as much. I needed to just focus, make sure that I was doing the right things. And I needed my team to be focused. So I made sure that for my mistakes as an athlete or even as a coach sometimes, that I didn't repeat them. Didn't repeat them. And if you make a mistake once and then you can repeat it, then it's like you didn't learn anything. Your goal throughout your wrestling career, as you've beautifully put, was to work so hard that you pass out on the mat, right? That you would be carried off the mat. So you never did successfully in, that's one of the ways you failed in your career is you've never worked so hard that you've passed out. Have you ever come close? Do you remember a time that you've come close that you've been pushed to the limits of exhaustion? You know, the question is really a good question about that pushing to you collapse. Yeah. Because I don't, as a coach today, I don't think I get, if I said that to my athletes, I don't know, I could get in trouble. Because, you know, it's like. But it's understood, isn't it, by the athletes? Yeah, they understand it. But the outside might not understand it. Because it's almost like, what do you mean there? You push them to the point where they go collapse. It means they may die or something might happen to them. And, you know, that's dangerous. That's dangerous. We can't have our kid in that type of atmosphere. But it's something that's highly unlikely that's gonna happen. But I'm gonna tell you, there's many times in a practice where I had pushed myself to all of a sudden the whistle blew or it was time to stop. And when I got up off the mat or wherever I was at and I needed water, I needed fresh air, because you're usually in a fairly small room with a lot of guys that the heat rises and it's hard to breathe. And that I can remember, and I stayed a lot of times not by the door, the far end of the room. I can remember walking from the far end of the room to that door. And I can remember, am I gonna make it the next step? Am I gonna make it the next step? I need air, I need water, I need oxygen, I need to get out of here. It didn't happen often, but I can recount four or five times in my career that I pushed myself to that level where I thought I was gonna maybe go out, but every step I was dizzy. But once I got to that door, I was able to open it and go out and grab the water and get cold water in my face. And so, no, I never really was able to do that. And I think the story is in a book where my daughter pushed a collapse, Molly. It made you proud. Oh my gosh, and she didn't win. But she pushed a collapse. Now, did she suffer because of that? Well, she didn't get to go to the next event because she had to qualify. But I think it probably helped her too, realizing because she was winning the race and she was beating people she normally never pushed, but she was at a new level that she had never been before and she only needed about five feet to finish. And it was just one of those things that I bet there was a lot of learning that she did there. And it probably made her realize that she could be better, but she had to hold up though. So you mentioned in Wrestling Life that the Brands Brothers looked up to Roy Salger, who was known for pushing the limits of physical wrestling, but not getting too rough. So how do you find the line between extreme physical wrestling, but at the same time not rough wrestling or angry wrestling? So that line between aggression, tough wrestling and anger. Well, I think anger would cause less successful wrestling. I think anger would cause you to make mistakes and actually get out of position because I think anger is kind of a loss of control. And there can be a furious type of attack, but I think if it crosses the line to anger, then you're gonna be vulnerable. And so Royce and the Brands wrestled to the edge, through the edge, but when the whistle blew, they stopped. And there's people that when the whistle blows, they keep going. It's like in a football game, a fight breaks out and it's after the whistles blow. Well, when the whistle blew, they backed off. So that whistle was something that in a match, that kind of gave them the boundaries. But perhaps it could be a little bit of fuel. So in Wrestling Tough, the book that you just got from Mike Chapman, the new edition, talks about Bill Cole, undefeated Northern Iowa wrestler. And how he talked about how my strength, speed and ability to think were increased tremendously by just sitting apart from the action prior to the match and getting into a state of controlled anger. So can anger, controlled, so anger could be fuel as long as it's controlled. Right, exactly. You had that line. One side of the line, you can have an anger for performance and the other side of the line, if you go beyond that, it's not gonna be for performance. It's gonna be for not performance because you're gonna lose points. It's a fine line. There's definitely a fine line. You're talking about Roy Selger. You're talking about Tom Brands. You're talking about Terry Brands. I mean, you got world championship titles there. You got Olympic championship title there. You got a world silver medalist in Roy Selger. And when I talked to him about the world silver medalist, he's haunted by that. Cause he was actually 20 seconds away from winning when he got beat in the end there, but that's part of the game. And I don't know whether he's okay with it or not. Cause he says every, after talking about things, he goes, I'm okay with it now. But then he keeps talking about it. So I don't really think he's okay with it. And it's hard for him to actually make amends to himself when you really don't do it. I mean, it's no matter what the situation, even with the Owings loss. Yeah, it still eats it. I mean, yeah, I'm a world champion. He's not, and he wanted to be. I'm Olympic champion. He's not, he wanted to be. One of the greatest coaches of all time. Yeah, yeah. And so, it's like, why do I keep going back to it? Because you don't get over those things. So Roy really keeps going back to it, even though he says he's fine. But then he realizes he's really not fine because that's just the nature of the game. And that's why he was able to win national titles and make world teams and stuff like that. What's interesting about him, he's analyzed all the people that he's wrestled, and a lot of them have won world and Olympic championships. And he's beaten every one of them at one time or another. And he didn't get to that world championship gold or Olympic gold. And he says it because they did it. So he's showing people that I beaten those guys. But apparently he didn't beat them at the right time. And so it's still haunting. You don't get away from that stuff. I mean, it's just like anything in life that's really high. I mean, it doesn't have to be athletics. I mean, you think I'm ever gonna get over the murder of my sister? And you might not even know that. Let me pause for a second, please. You've talked about it, you've written about it. So I hope it's okay for me to say that your sister, your older sister, on May 31st, 1964, was raped and murdered by a local boy. So the echoes of pain and anger from that tragic day, do they ripple through your life still? Through your wrestling, through your coaching, through the way you, when you wake up in the morning? What is that like? It can be very emotional to me under certain circumstances. And it can be the mood I'm in. It can be maybe if I've had a Mountain Dew or maybe if I've had a Gable beer. Yeah, or maybe if you turn the country music up a little bit loud, emotions come out and everybody has them in their life. It's just so happens, what brings it out? And hopefully it's nothing that you do to the extreme point to where it brings it out. For me, it's not extreme. I don't have to have any of that really, I can get emotional. How did that change you as a man? What it did was realize that I was already pretty well developed because I was only a sophomore, 15 years old in high school. And I had parents that weren't making it. And my parents are a lot older than me. And now that we're down just to me and my parents, and I'm gonna be around the house for another two years. And they had just lost a daughter that was the only other sibling. They weren't handling it. They were the ones that were suffering much more than me, even though I always look back upon one area that I wasn't good at was communication at that time, except inside the resident room, because I had been tipped off. Tipped off, what do you mean? Well, then everybody said that something to me about my sister just three weeks before that, that really wasn't normal or practical. And I said nothing to nobody. Is there a part of you that blames yourself? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I'm 15 years old and you make mistakes. And you don't really act on everything that happens in your life. But I can tell you how it affected me. And I acted a lot on anything that maybe wasn't even of that consequence. I mean, cause I had four daughters and I'm telling you when they left every time to go somewhere in a car or go out with someplace, I always said something to them. And they would always say, dad, you said that last night. I don't care. What, like I love you or like be careful? I'd say like, don't be driving and drinking or don't be in a car with somebody that's of the same nature, or stay out of trouble. Don't go be somewhere where you have, I said, you know how to get out of a car if your car goes into the river. I'm always thinking ahead a little bit, just in case of something did happen. And it goes back to that walk to school with that young man that when he was talking to me and I just, I took it and I kept it inside me. And once I found out she had been murdered, it took me maybe 25 to 30 minutes. And I told my dad, I think I know who killed her. And he looked at me and he just like, he slapped me actually. He pushed me against the car. He didn't slap me. He pushed me against the car. My mom slaps me. She was the one that slapped me around a little bit. But my dad, he pushed me against the car and go, what do you mean you might know something about this? I said, dad, I don't for sure, but, and I would probably all crying, but, and I don't, I doubt if I was crying yet. I've probably cried a lot of tears since, but, you know, I just said, hey, I was walking to school with this neighbor and I never had walked to school with him before. And he was kind of a troubled kid. And he said something about Diane and it wasn't good, but I didn't, he goes, why didn't you say something? I said, daddy, I just boy talk, you know? So, you know, and so he hugged me, he hugged me, he hugged me and, you know, it was one of these things that it's definitely made me a lot of who I am because there's been a lot of choices and I don't, I took the word choice out of my life and I just like to say, okay, do the right thing, do the thing that you should do. And so I don't really, it's like, are you gonna do this or this? Well, what do you mean? Which one's better? You know? Well, then I'm, so I don't have that choice. Just give me the right way to go. And so not that I've been perfect by any means, but it's made a big difference in my life on how I handle my life. It's probably given me the opportunity to be married for 44 years. It's just given me opportunities to be better in my life. And I, you know, I wanna thank my sister for that, you know, and I think my family was ready to make a split because of that incident, they're blaming each other. And I think that I was able to help, but more than that, they really liked each other, but they didn't really know it at the time until I got out of the house. Two years later, it probably was going on for a couple of years until I moved on and went to college. Then they found out they really liked each other when they were alone and it worked out pretty good. But I think them being able to follow me, not just through college and the Olympics and worlds, but my coaching. So it's the same, the same success and factor, you know, the excitement and all those things gave them a real purpose. And it gave my four daughters, it gave my wife, you know, a real purpose to be able to be close to all these champions and championships. And now it's like, there's a family of 22 and they're all interested in what we're interested in. And it's going good, knock on wood. But you know, it's something that when all of a sudden you got too much time in your hands and you're not doing and accomplishing much that things probably, you know, get off track. What do you think is the role of family in wrestling? Can a man do it alone? And if not, where's family most important? You know, you can do it alone, but why would you want to? Yeah. I think the chances of doing it alone are much less than the chances of doing it together. I know they say, don't bring your profession home sometimes. They say that, I never got away from my profession. And you know, sometimes I, it's like my house right here. So when I'm moving home and I'm not going to have an office because I'm not going to coach anymore or I'm not going to be an assistant athletic director for a while, that you got to do something that gives you a little bit of a break. Not you necessarily, maybe the person you're living with. And so I don't know if you looked outside there, I got a cabin right out in my backyard. You probably can't see it right there, but. What's in the cabin? That's my house away from my house. It's only 30 feet from my house and it's my office and it's my workout room. I got a sauna there, it's a bed upstairs if I need it. If I ever get too close and she says, hey, why don't you go sleep in the other house? But you know, it kicks me out of the bed, but. Get the heck out. It's never happened. But I do spend a lot of time out there. And it's, you know, you got to have a little distance sometimes and you got to know your role. And so all of a sudden when you're a guy that's been gone your whole life from eight o clock in the morning until close to seven, three or eight o clock at night. So 11, 12 hours a day, then all of a sudden you're not gone as much, even though you still work. She's trying to slow me down now. I'm doing not so much like here, what we're doing right now, but it's when I get in the car and drive somewhere or fly somewhere, you know, like just last night I just went to bed and I hadn't told her that this guy called me and he wants me to speak for a bit, want to build another, wrestling wants to start another wrestlers and business networking out in Delaware because we don't have any colleges in wrestling in Delaware. And so I said, well, you know, I'm glad to do that because that's my life, you know? So, but then all of a sudden I didn't say anything to my wife until all of a sudden this morning. And I told her that I might go on the Friday the 21st of December. Oh no. Well, I said, that's not Christmas. She goes, we're celebrating Christmas that weekend early because a lot of the family can't be here except for that weekend. Yeah. And I said, oh, well, that's not gonna work. But I kind of didn't say anything to her at first. And then, well, I'll tell you, she started getting a little emotional. And if I want to stay married for another year, 45 years, then I better tell those people that I got family obligations because that depends what's most important. I love wrestling. I love wrestling and I want to start another, start another wrestlers and business network. But there's more than one Dan Gable out there. Well, maybe not, but there's a lot of people that are maybe even closer and they got big names. I mean, we're doing pretty well right now. I mean, we got first two years ago and we got second this year. And then we got the women's freestyles doing good in wrestling. We got to work a little bit on our Greco yet, but they are working on it. But our men's freestyle team right now are excellent. And the key for them is to get them all on the same page instead of just have new highlights. And by that, I'm saying, you look and see who won this year. Well, the three guys that have never won before won this year. We had three world champions. Our two past world champions didn't win this year. I mean, they did okay, they got medals. Did Borrows win? No, he did not. He got third. Oh, that's right, he got bronze, yeah. And Sajilov got, I mean, Snyder got second. So those two are our main guys. So the three new guys that came through were guys that hadn't won world gold. In fact, two of them have never made a world team before. And so we have three world champions this year, but we needed all five of them to come through to win the championships. And so the key really is getting them all to do the same at the same time, year in and year out, and not just based on, okay, Borrows got beat this year, so he'll win next year. It's gotta be every year if you're capable of doing that. And that's what the coaching staff has to do. What's kind of funny that I do have a lot of influence actually on the coaching staffs right now at the USA level because the women's freestyle guy is Terry Steiner. And he wrestled for me, he was a national champion. He's got a twin brother that's at Fresno State. And then Billy Zaddik is the freestyle coach and he wrestled for the Hawkeyes back in the early days. And he was the national champion. So we've got a lot of former Gable influence on there, but it's. You got deep roots in there. In 2013, the International Olympic Committee, IOC, voted wrestling out of the Olympics. So a lot of folks know about this, the absurdity of it and so on. But in a big picture, you can step back now, it's five years later. What did you learn from that experience? Well, first of all, did it surprise me? Yeah. But did it really surprise me? No. You gotta run. You gotta have people running the organization that are top notch. If you take anything for granted and you're not the person of authority, somebody can kick you out. And even though we had a lot of authority because we're wrestling, we're one of the first sports in the Olympics ever, and that we think that we're in 180 some countries and some of the number one countries in the world that are politically strong have the sport, we thought we were okay. But then you gotta look and see who's running the IOC. The IOC, the International Olympic Committee. And then you gotta see that in wrestling, we don't have anybody in there. I mean, that shocked me. We've never had anybody on the IOC from wrestling. You know why? Because we didn't have to, but yes, that's wrong. You have to. And if you don't have somebody looking out for you right within the structure, then it's pretty easy for people to turn their head. But all it took was the statement, you guys are kicked out of the Olympics. You guys are done. Everybody came together. Well, yeah, I mean, it's the first time in history that probably all this competitive people that were working for their own agenda turned that agenda to the sport. So that made a big difference and we got a lot done. In fact, in America, there was several people that were really out there that we didn't know about until this point in time. And when they came aboard, now they're still aboard. That doesn't mean we're doing everything perfect because just because we got voted back in before we even got kicked out really, that doesn't mean we're by any means safe. We have to do some of the things that I'm talking about or some of the things that we didn't do before. We can't fall right back into the same mess. And so our leadership got changed and it's better, but it's gotta stay better. But there are things that we could still be doing to make sure that we don't have situations like this happen. I'll tell you, when I first learned about it, I was like, I broke down and wept again. It's like every once in a while, I'll break down and cry about my sister or I'll break down, I don't know if I cry about losing the owings, but I probably get more determined. But that's kind of, you have to go back and think about those moments when you heard, when I heard that moment and it just overcame me. It was like four o clock, 4.30 in the morning when I heard about it. And my wife had been up looking at the internet and she woke me up and I thought she was joking, but I jumped out of bed really quick when she said that. I knew she was serious. And I started making phone calls right then to find out if it was true. And when I found out it was true, it was just like devastating. And it was one of these things that it's a nightmare, and, but you don't let it happen again. It's that simple. You keep getting stronger. Yeah, and if people haven't read, they should read The Loss of Dan Gable by Ray Thompson, the ESPN article. That kind of, in this very beautiful poetic way, ties together all the losses of Dan Gable, the losing your sister, losing to Larry Owens, losing wrestling from the Olympics, all of these tragedies of various forms. So that's, well, the IOC, there's politics, and you're sort of being very pragmatic. But stepping back, wrestling is one of the oldest forms of combat, period. Dating back, there's cave drawings 15,000 years ago. And if you look at the ancient Olympics, the Greek Olympics, 2,700 years ago, did you ever, when you wrestled or coached, do you now see wrestling in this way, freestyle and folk style wrestling, the purity of sort of two human beings locked in combat, the roots of that as just human beings, this fair struggle between two men or two women? I don't think I ever looked at it as anything but just a combat. And I think there's times that have made me figure out how to make that combat better. There's little markers or little points in time in your life that make you wonder, or I should say determined, to be able to get more out of yourself and to be able to take it to a new level. And I don't think people can actually feel that way unless you've actually had a lot of accomplishments in anything. I think there's anything out there. I mean, no matter what sport or breaking the four minute mile, I mean, when you broke that, when they broke that, Roger Bannister broke that four minute mile, I can't imagine him breaking it from his best time being 4.30. It's one of these things that along the line that he did had some close calls or he had some coaching that was giving him the opportunity to become a little better. But I think because he was doing well and being very successful, that the opportunity came. And so it's for me, it's like the same thing. I had so much success and so many practices that went well and so much goodness out of this sport that it gave me the opportunity to really look more finite and look more how I can even make it better. And so it's like, if you look at my library upstairs, I got a library upstairs and there's a lot of books up there from the family. But if you look at the Gable books up there, I got a lot of Russian technique books. I can't read the book, but I can see the diagrams and I can see the figures. They don't really show it in pictures. They do it in drawings. And so it was like when I was trying to beat the best that has labeled the best because they win the world championships every year since they've been just about involved. And I don't think they got started involved till like the fifties, but it's something, you study the best who's out there, but then you don't focus so much on the best that you can't beat the best. You learn from them, but there's something that they don't have that you can have. Toughness to technique, to the art, to the science. Yeah, all that stuff. And that's why I even talking to you and you're sitting over there and you love MIT and you're bragging about it over Harvard. Cause it's true. In your eyes and that's great. And it might be, but it's the same type of thing that there's something that you're probably stealing from Harvard, but you won't give them credit. Well, Dan, in the interest of time, I've read that you're pretty serious. You're pretty seriously into fishing. So what's the biggest fish you ever caught? What are we talking about here? What are we talking about? No, I don't think I've ever caught a big ocean fish. I'm not, I'm a river lake fisherman. I have fish in the... Trout? No, probably Northern. I probably caught a Northern that weighed 20 some pounds. The fish I like to catch is walleyes. And the reason why I like to catch them cause they're really good eating fish. And the best eating fish are not the real big ones. It's kind of interesting. I got people hunting deer right on my land and they're looking for the big bucks, but they're not the best eaters if you want to eat, but they're the best trophy. So I do have a couple of trophy walleyes on the wall, but most of the time I throw the big ones back and put them back in there. I don't know if you know there's a book by Hemingway called Old Man in the Sea. Heard of it. Ernest Hemingway? Ernest Hemingway, yeah. And there's an old man that basically catches an 18 footer, but it can't pull it in, doesn't have the strength. So they together spend while the sharks eat away at it. I mean, this is very powerful story. I think one of the Nobel Prize, but he says, it's better to be lucky. The old man says, it's better to be lucky, but I would rather be exact that way when luck comes, you're ready. So let me ask, what do you think about luck? Do you believe in free will that we have actions that control the direction, destination of our life, or does luck and some other outside forces really land you where you end up? For me, I'm not about luck, but I do think luck is involved. But I think it's mostly created, just how lucky you are through preparations. And things have happened in my life forever, and a lot of good things. And a lot of people could say, hey, you've been pretty lucky to win all these awards. I don't know, if you analyze my life, I don't think it was involved with luck. I think it was more involved with preparation. And again, science, had you been smarter, had you understood that you could do some things and be just as lucky, that'd be great. But I'm only as smart as today. So when I was training in my life, and me even training people in my life, as of that moment, that's how lucky I am to be able to have whatever is available to me. And that's what, you call that a lot of science. So for me, I think that, like right now, if I look back, I do a lot of things different, just because things are proven differently. Like I'd give people water during practice, and I did. And I would let them change their wrestling shoes into running shoes to run sprints on the concrete. Or I would actually, maybe I've had a guy climb 12 ropes after practice, one after another. And then maybe the next day I'd do it again. Ah, I might not make him do it the next day. I might let him recover a little bit more. And you gotta learn, keep adding to your philosophy. And your philosophy may have been great at that time, but it's at that time. And what is really important is where you at with this time, today. And so there's better ways to do things. Now, if you ever take attitude out of it, and just depend on total science, then you're not gonna be as, as you know, I think as I listened to a couple people that are really pretty famous people. One of them was John Irving. He was a writer. And he told me, he says, you think I really learned how to be a great writer in writing school? He said, yeah, I learned a lot there. But really what gave me the ability to stay focused, to work extra hours, to be more disciplined, was wrestling practices. That's right, he was a wrestler, yeah. Yeah, he goes, I go back to that. That's what gave me that chance. And there's a guy in Iowa, that guy named Norman Borlaug. He learned, he invented a process to feed the underprivileged countries of the world. And he was a wrestler, and he said the same thing. And he worked extremely hard. And he said, I give a lot of credit to the sport of wrestling. And even though I'm known for this, and I got a statue in Washington, DC, because I saved a billion lives plus, I'm gonna give wrestling a lot of credit. So I think some of these MMA stars and some of these guys that maybe weren't wrestlers, that had to wrestle, had to fight wrestling guys and stuff, missed a little bit there. But I think the ones that did have wrestling probably have a really good chance and can adapt to the other ones. But I think every martial art or every activity is good, and you probably can't skip any. But I don't think they're ever gonna overlook and say that wrestling's not valuable, because it is. However, that doesn't mean you're gonna make it. You still gotta take the values and apply it, whatever area you're gonna be in. And some people forget that. Some people can't get over the highness of getting your arm raised in a wrestling match. And you know what? What's even greater than me getting my arm raised is that if I'm a coach or if I belong with you, that you get your arm raised. And even if you don't get your arm raised, it's what you walk away with and how you learn to handle that as well. Because there's gonna be some losses, but you don't want many. Because you don't wanna get used to losing, I can tell you that. So it's the hunger for the win. It's the brotherhood, the sisterhood of the wrestling room. And it's hard work and science that's gonna beat luck at the end of the day. Absolutely, that luck, I like luck, but I think it's created by the opportunity that... You make your luck. You make your luck, yeah. Dan, it was a huge honor. Thank you for welcoming me into your home and for having this conversation. Yeah, no problem. Good man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Gable. And thank you to our sponsors, Trio Labs, a machine learning company, ExpressVPN, Grammarly writing helper tool, and SimpliSafe Home Security. So the choice is artificial intelligence, privacy, grammar, or safety. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Dan Gable. The first period is won by the best technician. The second period is won by the kid in the best shape. And the third period is won by the kid with the biggest heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Dan Gable: Olympic Wrestling, Mental Toughness & the Making of Champions | Lex Fridman Podcast #152

The following is a conversation with Dmitry Korkin, his second time in the podcast. He's a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at WPI, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. He loves biology, he loves computing, plus he is Russian and recites a poem in Russian at the end of the podcast. What else could you possibly ask for in this world? Quick mention of our sponsors. Brave Browser, NetSuite Business Management Software, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, and 8sleep Self Cooling Mattress. So the choice is browsing privacy, business success, healthy diet, or comfortable sleep. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that to me, the scientists that did the best apolitical, impactful, brilliant work of 2020 are the biologists who study viruses without an agenda, without much sleep, to be honest, just a pure passion for scientific discovery and exploration of the mysteries within viruses. Viruses are both terrifying and beautiful. Terrifying because they can threaten the fabric of human civilization, both biological and psychological. Beautiful because they give us insights into the nature of life on Earth and perhaps even extraterrestrial life of the not so intelligent variety that might meet us one day as we explore the habitable planets and moons in our universe. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Dmitry Korkin. It's often said that proteins and the amino acid residues that make them up are the building blocks of life. Do you think of proteins in this way as the basic building blocks of life? Yes and no. So the proteins indeed is the basic unit, biological unit that carries out important function of the cell. However, through studying the proteins and comparing the proteins across different species, across different kingdoms, you realize that proteins are actually much more complicated. So they have so called modular complexity. And so what I mean by that is an average protein consists of several structural units. So we call them protein domains. And so you can imagine a protein as a string of beads where each bead is a protein domain. And in the past 20 years, scientists have been studying the nature of the protein domains because we realize that it's the unit. Because if you look at the functions, right? So many proteins have more than one function and those protein functions are often carried out by those protein domains. So we also see that in the evolution, those proteins domains get shuffled. So they act actually as a unit. Also from the structural perspective, right? So some people think of a protein as a sort of a globular molecule, but as a matter of fact, is the globular part of this protein is a protein domain. So we often have this, again, the collection of this protein domains align on a string as beads. And the protein domains are made up of amino acid residue. So we're talking about. So this is the basic, so you're saying the protein domain is the basic building block of the function that we think about proteins doing. So of course you can always talk about different building blocks. It's turtles all the way down. But there's a point where there is, at the point of the hierarchy where it's the most, the cleanest element block based on which you can put them together in different kinds of ways to form complex function. And you're saying protein domains, why is that not talked about as often in popular culture? Well, there are several perspectives on this. And one of course is the historical perspective, right? So historically scientists have been able to structurally resolved to obtain the 3D coordinates of a protein for smaller proteins. And smaller proteins tend to be a single domain protein. So we have a protein equal to a protein domain. And so because of that, the initial suspicion was that the proteins are, they have globular shapes and the more of smaller proteins you obtain structurally, the more you became convinced that that's the case. And only later when we started having alternative approaches. So the traditional ones are X ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. So this is sort of the two main techniques that give us the 3D coordinates. But nowadays there's huge breakthrough in cryo electron microscopy. So the more advanced methods that allow us to get into the 3D shapes of much larger molecules, molecular complexes, just to give you one of the common examples for this year, right? So the first experimental structure of a SARS COVID 2 protein was the cryo EM structure of the S protein. So the spike protein. And so it was solved very quickly. And the reason for that is the advancement of this technology is pretty spectacular. How many domains does the, is it more than one domain? Oh yes. Oh yes, I mean, so it's a very complex structure. And we, you know, on top of the complexity of a single protein, right? So this structure is actually is a complex, is a trimer. So it needs to form a trimer in order to function properly. What's a complex? So a complex is a glomeration of multiple proteins. And so we can have the same protein copied in multiple, you know, made up in multiple copies and forming something that we called a homo oligomer. Homo means the same, right? So in this case, so the spike protein is the, is an example of a homo tetram, homo trimer, sorry. So you need three copies of it? Three copies. In order to. Exactly. We have these three chains, the three molecular chains coupled together and performing the function. That's what, when you look at this protein from the top, you see a perfect triangle. Yeah. So, but other, you know, so other complexes are made up of, you know, different proteins. Some of them are completely different. Some of them are similar. The hemoglobin molecule, right? So it's actually, it's a protein complex. It's made of four basic subunits. Two of them are identical to each other. Two other identical to each other, but they are also similar to each other, which sort of gives us some ideas about the evolution of this, you know, of this molecule. And perhaps, so one of the hypothesis is that, you know, in the past, it was just a homo tetramer, right? So four identical copies, and then it became, you know, sort of modified, it became mutated over the time and became more specialized. Can we linger on the spike protein for a little bit? Is there something interesting or like beautiful you find about it? I mean, first of all, it's an incredibly challenging protein. And so we, as a part of our sort of research to understand the structural basis of this virus, to sort of decode, structurally decode, every single protein in its proteome, which, you know, we've been working on this spike protein. And one of the main challenges was that the cryoEM data allows us to reconstruct or to obtain the 3D coordinates of roughly two thirds of the protein. The rest of the one third of this protein, it's a part that is buried into the membrane of the virus and of the viral envelope. And it also has a lot of unstable structures around it. So it's chemically interacting somehow with whatever the hex is connecting to. Yeah, so people are still trying to understand. So the nature of, and the role of this one third, because the top part, you know, the primary function is to get attached to the ACE2 receptor, human receptor. There is also beautiful mechanics of how this thing happens, right? So because there are three different copies of this chains, you know, there are three different domains, right? So we're talking about domains. So this is the receptor binding domains, RBDs, that gets untangled and get ready to get attached to the receptor. And now they are not necessarily going in a sync mode. As a matter of fact. It's asynchronous. So yes, and this is where another level of complexity comes into play because right now what we see is, we typically see just one of the arms going out and getting ready to be attached to the ACE2 receptors. However, there was a recent mutation that people studied in that spike protein. And very recently, a group from UMass Medical School will happen to collaborate with groups. So this is a group of Jeremy Lubin and a number of other faculty. They actually solve the mutated structure of the spike. And they showed that actually, because of these mutations, you have more than one arms opening up. And so now, so the frequency of two arms going up increase quite drastically. Interesting. Does that change the dynamics somehow? It potentially can change the dynamics because now you have two possible opportunities to get attached to the ACE2 receptor. It's a very complex molecular process, mechanistic process. But the first step of this process is the attachment of this spike protein, of the spike trimer to the human ACE2 receptor. So this is a molecule that sits on the surface of the human cell. And that's essentially what initiates, what triggers the whole process of encapsulation. If this was dating, this would be the first date. So this is the... In a way. Yes. So is it possible to have the spike protein just like floating about on its own? Or does it need that interactability with the membrane? Yeah, so it needs to be attached, at least as far as I know. But when you get this thing attached on the surface, there is also a lot of dynamics on how it sits on the surface. So for example, there was a recent work in, again, where people use the cryolectron microscopy to get the first glimpse of the overall structure. It's a very low res, but you still get some interesting details about the surface, about what is happening inside, because we have literally no clue until recent work about how the capsid is organized. What's a capsid? So a capsid is essentially, it's the inner core of the viral particle where there is the RNA of the virus, and it's protected by another protein, N protein, that essentially acts as a shield. But now we are learning more and more, so it's actually, it's not just this shield, it potentially is used for the stability of the outer shell of the virus. So it's pretty complicated. And I mean, understanding all of this is really useful for trying to figure out like developing a vaccine or some kind of drug to attack, any aspects of this, right? So, I mean, there are many different implications to that. First of all, it's important to understand the virus itself, right? So in order to understand how it acts, what is the overall mechanistic process of this virus replication, of this virus proliferation to the cell, right? So that's one aspect. The other aspect is designing new treatments. So one of the possible treatments is designing nanoparticles. And so some nanoparticles that will resemble the viral shape that would have the spike integrated, and essentially would act as a competitor to the real virus by blocking the ACE2 receptors, and thus preventing the real virus entering the cell. Now, there are also, you know, there is a very interesting direction in looking at the membrane, at the envelope portion of the protein and attacking its M protein. So there are, you know, to give you a, you know, sort of a brief overview, there are four structural proteins. These are the proteins that made up a structure of the virus. So SPIKE, S protein that acts as a trimer, so it needs three copies. E, envelope protein that acts as a pantomime, so it needs five copies to act properly. M is a membrane protein, it forms dimers, and actually it forms beautiful lattice. And this is something that we've been studying and we are seeing it in simulations. It actually forms a very nice grid or, you know, threads, you know, of different dimers attached next to each other. Just a bunch of copies of each other, and they naturally, when you have a bunch of copies of each other, they form an interesting lattice. Exactly. And, you know, if you think about this, right? So this complex, you know, the viral shape needs to be organized somehow, self organized somehow, right? So it, you know, if it was a completely random process, you know, you probably wouldn't have the envelope shell of the ellipsoid shape, you know, you would have something, you know, pretty random, right, shape. So there is some, you know, regularity in how this, you know, how this M dimers get to attach to each other in a very specific directed way. Is that understood at all? It's not understood. We are now, we've been working in the past six months since, you know, we met, actually, this is where we started working on trying to understand the overall structure of the envelope and the key components that made up this, you know, structure. Wait, does the envelope also have the lattice structure or no? So the envelope is essentially is the outer shell of the viral particle. The N, the nucleocapsid protein, is something that is inside. Got it. But get that, the N is likely to interact with M. Does it go M and E? Like, where's the E and the M? So E, those different proteins, they occur in different copies on the viral particle. So E, this pentamer complex, we only have two or three, maybe, per each particle, okay? We have thousand or so of M dimers that essentially made up, that makes up the entire, you know, outer shell. So most of the outer shell is the M. M dimer. And the M protein. When you say particle, that's the virion, the virus, the individual virus. It's a single, yes. Single element of the virus, it's a single virus. Single virus, right. And we have about, you know, roughly 50 to 90 spike trimmers. Right? So when you, you know, when you show a... Per virus particle. Per virus particle. Sorry, what did you say, 50 to 90? 50 to 90, right? So this is how this thing is organized. And so now, typically, right, so you see these, the antibodies that target, you know, spike protein, certain parts of the spike protein, but there could be some, also some treatments, right? So these are, you know, these are small molecules that bind strategic parts of these proteins, disrupting its function. So one of the promising directions, it's one of the newest directions, is actually targeting the M dimer of the protein. Targeting the proteins that make up this outer shell. Because if you're able to destroy the outer shell, you're essentially destroying the viral particle itself. So preventing it from, you know, functioning at all. So that's, you think is, from a sort of cyber security perspective, virus security perspective, that's the best attack vector? Is, or like, that's a promising attack vector? I would say, yeah. So, I mean, there's still tons of research needs to be, you know, to be done. But yes, I think, you know, so. There's more attack surface, I guess. More attack surface. But, you know, from our analysis, from other evolutionary analysis, this protein is evolutionarily more stable compared to the, say, to the spike protein. Oh, and stable means a more static target? Well, yeah, so it doesn't change. It doesn't evolve from the evolutionary perspective so drastically as, for example, the spike protein. There's a bunch of stuff in the news about mutations of the virus in the United Kingdom. I also saw in South Africa something. Maybe that was yesterday. You just kind of mentioned about stability and so on. Which aspects of this are mutatable and which aspects, if mutated, become more dangerous? And maybe even zooming out, what are your thoughts and knowledge and ideas about the way it's mutated, all the news that we've been hearing? Are you worried about it from a biological perspective? Are you worried about it from a human perspective? So, I mean, you know, mutations are sort of a general way for these viruses to evolve, right? So, it's, you know, it's essentially, this is the way they evolve. This is the way they were able to jump from one species to another. We also see some recent jumps. There were some incidents of this virus jumping from human to dogs. So, you know, there is some danger in those jumps because every time it jumps, it also mutates, right? So, when it jumps to the species and jumps back, right? So, it acquires some mutations that are sort of driven by the environment of a new host, right? And it's different from the human environment. And so, we don't know whether the mutations that are acquired in the new species are neutral with respect to the human host or maybe, you know, maybe damaging. Yeah, change is always scary, but so are you worried about, I mean, it seems like because the spread is, during winter now, seems to be exceptionally high and especially with a vaccine just around the corner already being actually deployed, is there some worry that this puts evolutionary pressure, selective pressure on the virus for it to mutate? Is that a source of worry? Well, I mean, there is always this thought in the scientist's mind, you know, what will happen, right? So, I know there've been discussions about sort of the arms race between the ability of the humanity to get vaccinated faster than the virus, you know, essentially, you know, it becomes, you know, resistant to the vaccine. I mean, I don't worry that much simply because, you know, there is not that much evidence to that. To aggressive mutation around the vaccine. Exactly, you know, obviously there are mutations around the vaccine, so the reason we get vaccinated every year against the seasonal mutations, right? But, you know, I think it's important to study it. No doubts, right? So, I think one of the, you know, to me, and again, I might be biased because, you know, we've been trying to do that as well, so, but one of the critical directions in understanding the virus is to understand its evolution in order to sort of understand the mechanisms, the key mechanisms that lead the virus to jump, you know, the Nordic viruses to jump from species, from species to another, that the mechanisms that lead the virus to become resistant to vaccines, also to treatments, right? And hopefully that knowledge will enable us to sort of forecast the evolutionary traces, the future evolutionary traces of this virus. I mean, what, from a biological perspective, this might be a dumb question, but is there parts of the virus that if souped up, like through mutation, could make it more effective at doing its job? We're talking about this specific coronavirus because we were talking about the different, like, the membrane, the M protein, the E protein, the N and the S, the spike, is there some? And there are 20 or so more in addition to that. But is that a dumb way to look at it? Like, which of these, if mutated, could have the greatest impact, potentially damaging impact, on the effectiveness of the virus? So it's actually, it's a very good question because, and the short answer is, we don't know yet. But of course there is capacity of this virus to become more efficient. The reason for that is, you know, so if you look at the virus, I mean, it's a machine, right? So it's a machine that does a lot of different functions, and many of these functions are sort of nearly perfect, but they're not perfect. And those mutations can have the greatest impact and make those functions more perfect. For example, the attachment to ACE2 receptor, right, of the spike, right? So, you know, has this virus reached the efficiency in which the attachment is carried out? Or there are some mutations that still to be discovered, right, that will make this attachment sort of stronger, or, you know, something more, in a way more efficient from the point of view of this virus functioning. That's sort of the obvious example. But if you look at each of these proteins, I mean, it's there for a reason, it performs certain function. And it could be that certain mutations will, you know, enhance this function. It could be that some mutations will make this function much less efficient, right? So that's also the case. Let's, since we're talking about the evolutionary history of a virus, let's zoom back out and look at the evolution of proteins. I glanced at this 2010 Nature paper on the quote, ongoing expansion of the protein universe. And then, you know, it kind of implies and talks about that proteins started with a common ancestor, which is, you know, kind of interesting. It's interesting to think about like, even just like the first organic thing that started life on Earth. And from that, there's now, you know, what is it? 3.5 billion years later, there's now millions of proteins. And they're still evolving. And that's, you know, in part, one of the things that you're researching. Is there something interesting to you about the evolution of proteins from this initial ancestor to today? Is there something beautiful and insightful about this long story? So I think, you know, if I were to pick a single keyword about protein evolution, I would pick modularity, something that we talked about in the beginning. And that's the fact that the proteins are no longer considered as, you know, as a sequence of letters. There are hierarchical complexities in the way these proteins are organized. And these complexities are actually going beyond the protein sequence. It's actually going all the way back to the gene, to the nucleotide sequence. And so, you know, again, these protein domains, they are not only functional building blocks, they are also evolutionary building blocks. And so what we see in the sort of, in the later stages of evolution, I mean, once this stable structurally and functionally building blocks were discovered, they essentially, they stay, those domains stay as such. So that's why if you start comparing different proteins, you will see that many of them will have similar fragments. And those fragments will correspond to something that we call protein domain families. And so they are still different because you still have mutations and, you know, the, you know, different mutations are attributed to, to, you know, diversification of the function of this, you know, protein domains. However, you don't, you very rarely see, you know, the evolutionary events that would split this domain into fragments because, and it's, you know, once you have the domain split, you actually, you, you know, you can completely cancel out its function or at the very least you can reduce it. And that's not, you know, efficient from the point of view of the, you know, of the cell functioning. So, so the, the, the protein domain level is a very important one. Now, on top of that, right? So if you look at the proteins, right, so you have this structural units and they carry out the function, but then much less is known about things that connect this protein domains, something that we call linkers. And those linkers are completely flexible, you know, parts of the protein that nevertheless carry out a lot of function. So it's like little tails, little heads. So, so, so we do have tails. So they're called termini, C and N termini. So these are things right on the, on, on, on one and another ends of the protein sequence. So they are also very important. So they, they attributed to very specific interactions between the proteins. So. But you're referring to the links between domains. That connect the domains. And, you know, apart from the, just the, the simple perspective, if you have, you know, a very short domain, you have, sorry, a very short linker, you have two domains next to each other. They are forced to be next to each other. If you have a very long one, you have the domains that are extremely flexible and they carry out a lot of sort of spatial reorganization, right? That's awesome. But on top of that, right, just this linker itself, because it's so flexible, it actually can adapt to a lot of different shapes. And therefore it's a, it's a very good interactor when it comes to interaction between this protein and other protein, right? So these things also evolve, you know, and they in a way have different sort of laws of the driving laws that underlie the evolution because they no longer need to, to preserve certain structure, right? Unlike protein domains. And so on top of that, you have something that is even less studied. And this is something that attribute to, to the concept of alternative splicing. So alternative splicing. So it's a, it's a very cool concept. It's something that we've been fascinated about for, you know, over a decade in my lab and trying to do research with that. But so, you know, so typically, you know, a simplistic perspective is that one gene is equal one protein product, right? So you have a gene, you know, you transcribe it and translate it and it becomes a protein. In reality, when we talk about eukaryotes, especially sort of more recent eukaryotes that are very complex, the gene is no longer equal to one protein. It actually can produce multiple functionally, you know, active protein products. And each of them is, you know, is called an alternatively spliced product. The reason it happens is that if you look at the gene, it actually has, it has also blocks. And the blocks, some of which, and it's essentially, it goes like this. So we have a block that will later be translated. We call it exon. Then we'll have a block that is not translated, cut out. We call it intron. So we have exon, intron, exon, intron, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So sometimes you can have, you know, dozens of these exons and introns. So what happens is during the process when the gene is converted to RNA, we have things that are cut out, the introns that are cut out, and exons that now get assembled together. And sometimes we will throw out some of the exons and the remaining protein product will become still be the same. Different. Oh, different. So now you have fragments of the protein that no longer there. They were cut out with the introns. Sometimes you will essentially take one exon and replace it with another one, right? So there's some flexibility in this process. So that creates a whole new level of complexity. Cause now. Is this random though? Is it random? It's not random. We, and this is where I think now the appearance of this modern single cell and before that tissue level sequencing, next generation sequencing techniques such as RNA seed allows us to see that these are the events that often happen in response. It's a dynamic event that happens in response to disease or in response to certain developmental stage of a cell. And this is an incredibly complex layer that also undergoes, I mean, because it's at the gene level, right? So it undergoes certain evolution, right? And now we have this interplay between what is happening in the protein world and what is happening in the gene and RNA world. And for example, it's often that we see that the boundaries of this exons coincide with the boundaries of the protein domains, right? So there is this close interplay to that. It's not always, I mean, otherwise it would be too simple, right? But we do see the connection between those sort of machineries. And obviously the evolution will pick up this complexity and, you know. Select for whatever is successful, whatever is interesting function. We see that complexity in play and makes this question more complex, but more exciting. Small detour, I don't know if you think about this into the world of computer science. There's a Douglas Hostetter, I think, came up with the name of Quine, which are, I don't know if you're familiar with these things, but it's computer programs that have, I guess, exon and intron, and they copy, the whole purpose of the program is to copy itself. So it prints copies of itself, but can also carry information inside of it. So it's a very kind of crude, fun exercise of, can we sort of replicate these ideas from cells? Can we have a computer program that when you run it, just print itself, the entirety of itself, and does it in different programming languages and so on. I've been playing around and writing them. It's a kind of fun little exercise. You know, when I was a kid, so you know, it was essentially one of the sort of main stages in informatics Olympiads that you have to reach in order to be any so good, is you should be able to write a program that replicates itself. And so the task then becomes even sort of more complicated. So what is the shortest program? And of course, it's a function of a programming language, but yeah, I remember a long, long, long time ago when we tried to make it short and short and find the shortcut. There's actually on a stack exchange, there's a entire site called CodeGolf, I think, where the entirety is just the competition. People just come up with whatever task, I don't know, like write code that reports the weather today. And the competition is about whatever programming language, what is the shortest program? And it makes you actually, people should check it out because it makes you realize there's some weird programming languages out there. But just to dig on that a little deeper, do you think, in computer science, we don't often think about programs, just like the machine learning world now, that's still kind of basic programs. And then there's humans that replicate themselves, right? And there's these mutations and so on. Do you think we'll ever have a world where there's programs that kind of have an evolutionary process? So I'm not talking about evolutionary algorithms, but I'm talking about programs that kind of mate with each other and evolve and like on their own replicate themselves. So this is kind of the idea here is, that's how you can have a runaway thing. So we think about machine learning as a system that gets smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter. At least the machine learning systems of today are like, it's a program that you can like turn off, as opposed to throwing a bunch of little programs out there and letting them like multiply and mate and evolve and replicate. Do you ever think about that kind of world, when we jump from the biological systems that you're looking at to artificial ones? I mean, it's almost like you take the sort of the area of intelligent agents, right? Which are essentially the independent sort of codes that run and interact and exchange the information, right? So I don't see why not. I mean, it could be sort of a natural evolution in this area of computer science. I think it's kind of an interesting possibility. It's terrifying too, but I think it's a really powerful tool. Like to have like agents that, you know, we have social networks with millions of people and they interact. I think it's interesting to inject into that, was already injected into that bots, right? But those bots are pretty dumb. You know, they're probably pretty dumb algorithms. You know, it's interesting to think that there might be bots that evolve together with humans. And there's the sea of humans and robots that are operating first in the digital space. And then you can also think, I love the idea. Some people worked, I think at Harvard, at Penn, there's robotics labs that, you know, take as a fundamental task to build a robot that given extra resources can build another copy of itself, like in the physical space, which is super difficult to do, but super interesting. I remember there's like research on robots that can build a bridge. So they make a copy of themselves and they connect themselves and the sort of like self building bridge based on building blocks. You can imagine like a building that self assembles. So it's basically self assembling structures from robotic parts. But it's interesting to, within that robot, add the ability to mutate and do all the interesting like little things that you're referring to in evolution to go from a single origin protein building block to like this weird complex. And if you think about this, I mean, you know, the bits and pieces are there, you know. So you mentioned the evolution algorithm, right? You know, so this is sort of, and maybe sort of the goal is in a way different, right? So the goal is to, you know, to essentially, to optimize your search, right? So, but sort of the ideas are there. So people recognize that, you know, that the recombination events lead to global changes in the search trajectories, the mutations event is a more refined, you know, step in the search. Then you have, you know, other sort of nature inspired algorithm, right? So one of the reasons that, you know, I think it's one of the funnest one is the slime based algorithm, right? So it's, I think the first was introduced by the Japanese group, where it was able to solve some pre complex problems. So that's, and then I think there are still a lot of things we've yet to, you know, borrow from the nature, right? So there are a lot of sort of ideas that nature, you know, gets to offer us that, you know, it's up to us to grab it and to, you know, get the best use of it. Including neural networks, you know, we have a very crude inspiration from nature on neural networks. Maybe there's other inspirations to be discovered in the brain or other aspects of the various systems, even like the immune system, the way it interplays. I recently started to understand that the, like the immune system has something to do with the way the brain operates. Like there's multiple things going on in there, which all of which are not modeled in artificial neural networks. And maybe if you throw a little bit of that biological spice in there, you'll come up with something, something cool. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Drake equation that estimate, I just did a video on it yesterday because I wanted to give my own estimate of it. It's an equation that combines a bunch of factors to estimate how many alien civilizations are in the galaxy. I've heard about it, yes. So one of the interesting parameters, you know, it's like how many stars are born every year, how many planets are on average per star for this, how many habitable planets are there. And then the one that starts being really interesting is the probability that life emerges on a habitable planet. So like, I don't know if you think about, you certainly think a lot about evolution, but do you think about the thing which evolution doesn't describe, which is like the beginning of evolution, the origin of life. I think I put the probability of life developing in a habitable planet at 1%. This is very scientifically rigorous. Okay, well, first at a high level for the Drake equation, what would you put that percent at on earth? And in general, do you have something, do you have thoughts about how life might've started, you know, like the proteins being the first kind of, one of the early jumping points? Yeah, so I think back in 2018, there was a very exciting paper published in Nature where they found one of the simplest amino acids, glycine, in a comet dust. So this is, and I apologize if I don't pronounce, it's a Russian named comet, it's I think Chugryumov Gerasimenko. This is the comet where, and there was this mission to get close to this comet and get the stardust from its tail. And when scientists analyzed it, they actually found traces of, you know, of glycine, which, you know, makes up, you know, it's one of the basic, one of the 20 basic amino acids that makes up proteins, right? So that was kind of very exciting, right? But, you know, the question is very interesting, right? So what, you know, if there is some alien life, is it gonna be made of proteins, right? Or maybe RNAs, right? So we see that, you know, the RNA viruses are certainly, you know, very well established sort of, you know, group of molecular machines, right? So, yeah, it's a very interesting question. What probability would you put? Like, how hard is this job? Like, how unlikely just on Earth do you think this whole thing is that we got going? Like, are we really lucky or is it inevitable? Like, what's your sense when you sit back and think about life on Earth? Is it higher or lower than 1%? Well, because 1% is pretty low, but it still is like, damn, that's a pretty good chance. Yes, it's a pretty good chance. I mean, I would, personally, but again, you know, I'm, you know, probably not the best person to do such estimations, but I would, you know, intuitively, I would probably put it lower. But still, I mean, you know, given. So we're really lucky here on Earth. I mean. Or the conditions are really good. It's, you know, I think that there was, everything was right in a way, right? So we still, it's not, the conditions were not like ideal if you try to look at, you know, what was, you know, several billions years ago when the life emerged. So there is something called the Rare Earth Hypothesis that, you know, in counter to the Drake Equation says that the, you know, the conditions of Earth, if you actually were to describe Earth, it's quite a special place. So special it might be unique in our galaxy and potentially, you know, close to unique in the entire universe. Like it's very difficult to reconstruct those same conditions. And what the Rare Earth Hypothesis argues is all those different conditions are essential for life. And so that's sort of the counter, you know, like all the things we, you know, thinking that Earth is pretty average. I mean, I can't really, I'm trying to remember to go through all of them, but just the fact that it is shielded from a lot of asteroids, the, obviously the distance to the sun, but also the fact that it's like a perfect balance between the amount of water and land and all those kinds of things. I don't know, there's a bunch of different factors that I don't remember, there's a long list. But it's fascinating to think about if in order for something like proteins and then DNA and RNA to emerge, you need, and basic living organisms, you need to be very close to an Earth like planet, which will be sad or exciting, I don't know which. If you ask me, I, you know, in a way I put a parallel between, you know, between our own research. And I mean, from the intuitive perspective, you know, you have those two extremes and the reality is never very rarely falls into the extremes. It's always the optimus always reached somewhere in between. So, and that's what I tend to think. I think that, you know, we're probably somewhere in between. So they were not unique, unique, but again, the chances are, you know, reasonably small. The problem is we don't know the other extreme is like, I tend to think that we don't actually understand the basic mechanisms of like what this is all originated from, like, it seems like we think of life as this distinct thing, maybe intelligence is a distinct thing, maybe the physics that, from which planets and suns are born is a distinct thing. But that could be a very, it's like the Stephen Wolfram thing, it's like the, from simple rules emerges greater and greater complexity. So, you know, I tend to believe that just life finds a way. Like, we don't know the extreme of how common life is because it could be life is like everywhere. Like, so everywhere that it's almost like laughable, like that we're such idiots to think who are you? Like, it's like ridiculous to even like think, it's like ants thinking that their little colony is the unique thing and everything else doesn't exist. I mean, it's also very possible that that's the extreme and we're just not able to maybe comprehend the nature of that life. Just to stick on alien life for just a brief moment more, there is some signs of life on Venus in gaseous form. There's hope for life on Mars, probably extinct. We're not talking about intelligent life. Although that has been in the news recently. We're talking about basic like, you know, bacteria. Yeah, and then also, I guess, there's a couple moons. Europe. Yeah, Europa, which is Jupiter's moon. I think there's another one. Are you, is that exciting or is it terrifying to you that we might find life? Do you hope we find life? I certainly do hope that we find life. I mean, it was very exciting to hear about this news about the possible life on Venus. It'd be nice to have hard evidence of something with, which is what the hope is for Mars and Europa. But do you think those organisms will be similar biologically or would they even be sort of carbon based if we do find them? I would say they would be carbon based. How similar, it's a big question, right? So it's the moment we discover things outside Earth, right? Even if it's a tiny little single cell. I mean, there is so much. Just imagine that, that would be so. I think that that would be another turning point for the science, you know? Especially if it's different in some very new way. That's exciting. Because that says, that's a definitive statement, not a definitive, but a pretty strong statement that life is everywhere in the universe. To me at least, that's really exciting. You brought up Joshua Lederberg in an offline conversation. I think I'd love to talk to you about Alpha Fold and this might be an interesting way to enter that conversation because, so he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes. But he also did a ton of other stuff, like we mentioned, helping NASA find life on Mars and the... Dendro. Dendro. The chemical expert system. Expert systems, remember those? What do you find interesting about this guy and his ideas about artificial intelligence in general? So I have a kind of personal story to share. So I started my PhD in Canada back in 2000. And so essentially my PhD was, so we were developing sort of a new language for symbolic machine learning. So it's different from the feature based machine learning. And one of the sort of cleanest applications of this approach, of this formalism was to cheminformatics and computer aided drug design. So essentially we were, as a part of my research, I developed a system that essentially looked at chemical compounds of say the same therapeutic category, you know, male hormones, right? And try to figure out the structural fragments that are the structural building blocks that are important that define this class versus structural building blocks that are there just because, you know, to complete the structure. But they are not essentially the ones that make up the chemical, the key chemical properties of this therapeutic category. And, you know, for me, it was something new. I was trained as an applied mathematicians, you know, as with some machine learning background, but, you know, computer aided drug design was a completely new territory. So because of that, I often find myself asking lots of questions on one of these sort of central forums. Back then, there were no Facebooks or stuff like that. There was a forum, you know, it's a forum. It's essentially, it's like a bulletin board. Yeah. On the internet. Yeah, so you essentially, you have a bunch of people and you post a question and you get, you know, an answer from, you know, different people. And back then, just like one of the most popular forums was CCL, I think Computational Chemistry Library, not library, but something like that, but CCL, that was the forum. And there, I, you know, I... Asked a lot of dumb questions. Yes, I asked questions. Also shared some, you know, some information about how formal it is and how we do and whether whatever we do makes sense. And so, you know, and I remember that one of these posts, I mean, I still remember, you know, I would call it desperately looking for a chemist advice, something like that, right? And so I post my question, I explained, you know, how formalism is, what it does and what kind of applications I'm planning to do. And, you know, and it was, you know, in the middle of the night and I went back to bed. And next morning, have a phone call from my advisor who also looked at this forum. It's like, you won't believe who replied to you. And it's like, who? And he said, well, you know, there is a message to you from Joshua Lederberg. And my reaction was like, who is Joshua Lederberg? Your advisor hung up. So, and essentially, you know, Joshua wrote me that we had conceptually similar ideas in the dendrial project. You may wanna look it up. And we should also, sorry, and it's a side comment, say that even though he won the Nobel Prize at a really young age, in 58, but so he was, I think he was what, 33. It's just crazy. So anyway, so that's, so hence in the 90s, responding to young whippersnappers on the CCL forum. Okay. And so back then he was already very senior. I mean, he unfortunately passed away back in 2008, but, you know, back in 2001, he was, I mean, he was a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University. And, you know, that was actually, believe it or not, one of the reasons I decided to join, you know, as a postdoc, the group of Andre Salle, who was at Rockefeller University, with the hope that, you know, that I could actually, you know, have a chance to meet Joshua in person. And I met him very briefly, right? Just because he was walking, you know, there's a little bridge that connects the, sort of the research campus with the, with the sort of skyscraper that Rockefeller owns, the where, you know, postdocs and faculty and graduate students live. And so I met him, you know, and had a very short conversation, you know. But so I started, you know, reading about Dendral and I was amazed, you know, it's, we're talking about 1960, right? The ideas were so profound. Well, what's the fun about the ideas of it? The reason to make this is even crazier. So, Lederberg wanted to make a system that would help him study the extraterrestrial molecules, right? So, the idea was that, you know, the way you study the extraterrestrial molecules is you do the mass spec analysis, right? And so the mass spec gives you sort of bits, numbers about essentially gives you the ideas about the possible fragments or, you know, atoms, you know, and maybe a little fragments, pieces of this molecule that make up the molecule, right? So now you need to sort of, to decompose this information and to figure out what was the hole before it became fragments, bits and pieces, right? So, in order to make this, you know, to have this tool, the idea of Lederberg was to connect chemistry, computer science, and to design this so called expert system that looks, that takes into account, that takes as an input the mass spec data, the possible database of possible molecules and essentially try to sort of induce the molecule that would correspond to this spectra or, you know, essentially what this project ended up being was that, you know, it would provide a list of candidates that then a chemist would look at and make final decision. So. But the original idea, I suppose, is to solve the entirety of this problem automatically. Yes, yes. So he, you know, so he, back then he approached. 60s. Yes, believe that, it's amazing. I mean, it still blows my mind, you know, that it's, that's, and this was essentially the origin of the modern bioinformatics, cheminformatics, you know, back in 60s. So that's, you know, every time you deal with projects like this, with the, you know, research like this, you just, you know, so the power of the, you know, intelligence of this people is just, you know, overwhelming. Do you think about expert systems, is there, and why they kind of didn't become successful, especially in the space of bioinformatics, where it does seem like there is a lot of expertise in humans, and, you know, it's possible to see that a system like this could be made very useful. Right. And be built up. So it's actually, it's a great question, and this is something, so, you know, so, you know, at my university, I teach artificial intelligence, and, you know, we start, my first two lectures are on the history of AI. And there we, you know, we try to, you know, go through the main stages of AI. And so, you know, the question of why expert systems failed or became obsolete, it's actually a very interesting one. And there are, you know, if you try to read the, you know, the historical perspectives, there are actually two lines of thoughts. One is that they were essentially not up to the expectations. And so therefore they were replaced, you know, by other things, right? The other one was that completely opposite one, that they were too good. And as a result, they essentially became sort of a household name, and then essentially they got transformed. I mean, in both cases, sort of the outcome was the same. They evolved into something, right? And that's what I, you know, if I look at this, right? So the modern machine learning, right? So. So there's echoes in the modern machine learning. I think so, I think so, because, you know, if you think about this, you know, and how we design, you know, the most successful algorithms, including AlphaFold, right? You built in the knowledge about the domain that you study, right? So you built in your expertise. So speaking of AlphaFold, so DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 recently was announced to have, quote unquote, solved protein folding. But how exciting is this to you? It seems to be one of the, one of the exciting things that have happened in 2020. It's an incredible accomplishment from the looks of it. What part of it is amazing to you? What part would you say is over hype or maybe misunderstood? It's definitely a very exciting achievement. To give you a little bit of perspective, right? So in bioinformatics, we have several competitions. And so the way, you know, you often hear how those competitions have been explained to sort of to non bioinformaticians is that, you know, they call it bioinformatics Olympic games. And there are several disciplines, right? So the historically one of the first one was the discipline in predicting the protein structure, predicting the 3D coordinates of the protein. But there are some others. So the predicting protein functions, predicting effects of mutations on protein functions, then predicting protein, protein interactions. So the original one was CASP or a critical assessment of a protein structure. And the, you know, typically what happens during this competitions is, you know, scientists, experimental scientists solve the structures, but don't put them into the protein data bank, which is the centralized database that contains all the 3D coordinates. Instead, they hold it and release protein sequences. And now the challenge of the community is to predict the 3D structures of this proteins and then use the experimental results structures to assess which one is the closest one, right? And this competition, by the way, just a bunch of different tangents. And maybe you can also say, what is protein folding? Then this competition, CASP competition has become the gold standard. And that's what was used to say that protein folding was solved. So just to add a little, just a bunch. So if you could, whenever you say stuff, maybe throw in some of the basics for the folks that might be outside of the field. Anyway, sorry. So, yeah, so, you know, so the reason it's, you know, it's relevant to our understanding of protein folding is because, you know, we've yet to learn how the folding mechanistically works, right? So there are different hypothesis, what happens to this fold? For example, there is a hypothesis that the folding happens by, you know, also in the modular fashion, right? So that, you know, we have protein domains that get folded independently because their structure is stable. And then the whole protein structure gets formed. But, you know, within those domains, we also have a so called secondary structure, the small alpha helices, beta schists. So these are, you know, elements that are structurally stable. And so, and the question is, you know, when do they get formed? Because some of the secondary structure elements, you have to have, you know, a fragment in the beginning and say the fragment in the middle, right? So you cannot potentially start having the full fold from the get go, right? So it's still, you know, it's still a big enigma, what happens. We know that it's an extremely efficient and stable process, right? So there's this long sequence and the fold happens really quickly. Exactly. So that's really weird, right? And it happens like the same way almost every time. Exactly, exactly. That's really weird. That's freaking weird. It's, yeah, that's why it's such an amazing thing. But most importantly, right? So it's, you know, so when you see the, you know, the translation process, right? So when you don't have the whole protein translated, right, it's still being translated, you know, getting out from the ribosome, you already see some structural, you know, fragmentation. So folding starts happening before the whole protein gets produced, right? And so this is obviously, you know, one of the biggest questions in, you know, in modern molecular biologists. Not like maybe what happens, like that's not as bigger than the question of folding. That's the question of like, something like deeper fundamental idea of folding. Yes. Behind folding. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, so obviously if we are able to predict the end product of protein folding, we are one step closer to understanding sort of the mechanisms of the protein folding. Because we can then potentially look and start probing what are the critical parts of this process and what are not so critical parts of this process. So we can start decomposing this, you know, so in a way this protein structure prediction algorithm can be used as a tool, right? So you change the, you know, you modify the protein, you get back to this tool, it predicts, okay, it's completely unstable. Yeah, which aspects of the input will have a big impact on the output? Exactly, exactly. So what happens is, you know, we typically have some sort of incremental advancement, you know, each stage of this CASP competition, you have groups with incremental advancement and, you know, historically the top performing groups were, you know, they were not using machine learning. They were using a very advanced biophysics combined with bioinformatics, combined with, you know, the data mining and that was, you know, that would enable them to obtain protein structures of those proteins that don't have any structurally solved relatives because, you know, if we have another protein, say the same protein, but coming from a different species, we could potentially derive some ideas and that's so called homology or comparative modeling, where we'll derive some ideas from the previously known structures and that would help us tremendously in, you know, in reconstructing the 3D structure overall. But what happens when we don't have these relatives? This is when it becomes really, really hard, right? So that's so called de novo, you know, de novo protein structure prediction. And in this case, those methods were traditionally very good. But what happened in the last year, the original alpha fold came into and all of a sudden it's much better than everyone else. This is 2018. Yeah. Oh, and the competition is only every two years, I think. And then, so, you know, it was sort of kind of over shockwave to the bioinformatics community that, you know, we have like a state of the art machine learning system that does, you know, structure prediction. And essentially what it does, you know, so if you look at this, it actually predicts the context. So, you know, so the process of reconstructing the 3D structure starts by predicting the context between the different parts of the protein. And the context essentially is the parts of the proteins that are in a close proximity to each other. Right, so actually the machine learning part seems to be estimating, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems to be estimating the distance matrix, which is like the distance between the different parts. Yeah, so we call the contact map. Contact map. So once you have the contact map, the reconstruction is becoming more straightforward, right? But so the contact map is the key. And so, you know, so that what happened. And now we started seeing in this current stage, right? Well, in the most recent one, we started seeing the emergence of these ideas in other people works, right? But yet here's, you know, AlphaFold2 that again outperforms everyone else. And also by introducing yet another wave of the machine learning ideas. Yeah, there don't seem to be also an incorporation. First of all, the paper is not out yet, but there's a bunch of ideas already out. There does seem to be an incorporation of this other thing. I don't know if it's something that you could speak to, which is like the incorporation of like other structures, like evolutionary similar structures that are used to kind of give you hints. Yes, so evolutionary similarity is something that we can detect at different levels, right? So we know, for example, that the structure of proteins is more conserved than the sequence. The sequence could be very different, but the structural shape is actually still very conserved. So that's sort of the intrinsic property that, you know, in a way related to protein folds, you know, to the evolution of the, you know, of the proteins and protein domains, et cetera. But we know that, I mean, there've been multiple studies. And, you know, ideally, if you have structures, you know, you should use that information. However, sometimes we don't have this information. Instead, we have a bunch of sequences. Sequences, we have a lot, right? So we have, you know, hundreds, thousands of, you know, different organisms sequenced, right? And by taking the same protein, but in different organisms and aligning it, so making it, you know, making the corresponding positions aligned, we can actually say a lot about sort of what is conserved in this protein and therefore, you know, structurally more stable, what is diverse in this protein. So on top of that, we could provide sort of the information about the sort of the secondary structure of this protein, et cetera, et cetera. So this information is extremely useful and it's already there. So while it's tempting to, you know, to do a complete ab initio, so you just have a protein sequence and nothing else, the reality is such that we are overwhelmed with this data. So why not use it? And so, yeah, so I'm looking forward to reading this paper. It does seem to, like they've, in the previous version of Alpha Fold, they didn't, for this evolutionary similarity thing, they didn't use machine learning for that. Or rather, they used it as like the input to the entirety of the neural net, like the features derived from the similarity. It seems like there's some kind of quote, unquote, iterative thing where it seems to be part of the learning process is the incorporation of this evolutionary similarity. Yeah, I don't think there is a bioarchive paper, right? There's nothing. No, there's nothing. There's a blog post that's written by a marketing team, essentially, which, you know, it has some scientific similarity, probably, to the actual methodology used, but it could be, it's like interpreting scripture. It could be just poetic interpretations of the actual work as opposed to direct connection to the work. So now, speaking about protein folding, right? So, you know, in order to answer the question whether or not we have solved this, right? So we need to go back to the beginning of our conversation with the realization that an average protein is that typically what the CASP has been focusing on is this competition has been focusing on the single, maybe two domain proteins that are still very compact. And even those ones are extremely challenging to solve. But now we talk about, you know, an average protein that has two, three protein domains. If you look at the proteins that are in charge of the, you know, of the process with the neural system, right, perhaps one of the most recently evolved sort of systems in an organism, right? All of them, well, the majority of them are highly multi domain proteins. So they are, you know, some of them have five, six, seven, you know, and more domains, right? And, you know, we are very far away from understanding how these proteins are folded. So the complexity of the protein matters here. The complexity of the protein modules or the protein domains. So you're saying solved, so the definition of solved here is particularly the CASP competition achieving human level, not human level, achieving experimental level performance on these particular sets of proteins that have been used in these competitions. Well, I mean, you know, I do think that, you know, especially with regards to the alpha fold, you know, it is able to, you know, to solve, you know, at the near experimental level, pre big majority of the more compact proteins like, or protein domains. Because again, in order to understand how the overall protein, you know, multi domain protein fold, we do need to understand the structure of its individual domains. I mean, unlike if you look at alpha zero or like even mu zero, if you look at that work, you know, it's nice reinforcement learning self playing mechanisms are nice cause it's all in simulation. So you can learn from just huge amounts. Like you don't need data. It was like the problem with proteins, like the size, I forget how many 3D structures have been mapped, but the training data is very small. No matter what, it's like millions, maybe a one or two million or something like that, but it's some very small number, but like, it doesn't seem like that's scalable. There has to be, I don't know, it feels like you want to somehow 10 X the data or a hundred X the data somehow. Yes, but we also can take advantage of homology models, right, so the models that are of very good quality because they are essentially obtained based on the evolutionary information, right? So you can, there is a potential to enhance this information and, you know, use it again to empower the training set. And it's, I think, I am actually very optimistic. I think it's been one of this sort of, you know, churning events where you have a system that is, you know, a machine learning system that is truly better than the machine learning system. Better than the sort of the more conventional biophysics based methods. That's a huge leap. This is one of those fun questions, but where would you put it in the ranking of the greatest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence history? So like, okay, so let's see who's in the running. Maybe you can correct me. So you got like AlphaZero and AlphaGo beating the world champion at the game of Go. Thought to be impossible like 20 years ago. Or at least the AI community was highly skeptical. Then you got like also Deep Blue original Kasparov. You have deep learning itself, like the maybe, what would you say, the AlexNet, ImageNet moment. So the first neural network achieving human level performance. Super, that's not true. Achieving like a big leap in performance on the computer vision problem. There is OpenAI, the whole like GPT3, that whole space of transformers and language models just achieving this incredible performance of application of neural networks to language models. Boston Dynamics, pretty cool. Like robotics. People are like, there's no AI. No, no, there's no machine learning currently. But AI is much bigger than machine learning. So that just the engineering aspect, I would say it's one of the greatest accomplishments in engineering side. Engineering meaning like mechanical engineering of robotics ever. Then of course, autonomous vehicles. You can argue for Waymo, which is like the Google self driving car. Or you can argue for Tesla, which is like actually being used by hundreds of thousands of people on the road today, machine learning system. And I don't know if you can, what else is there? But I think that's it. And then AlphaFold, many people are saying is up there, potentially number one. Would you put them at number one? Well, in terms of the impact on the science and on the society beyond, it's definitely, to me would be one of the... Top three? What you want? Maybe, I mean, I'm probably not the best person to answer that. But I do have, I remember my, back in, I think 1997, when Deep Blue, that Kasparov, it was, I mean, it was a shock. I mean, it was, and I think for the, for the pre substantial part of the world, that especially people who have some experience with chess, and realizing how incredibly human this game, how much of a brain power you need to reach those levels of grandmasters, right, level. And it's probably one of the first time, and how good Kasparov was. And again, yeah, so Kasparov's arguably one of the best ever, right? And you get a machine that beats him. All right, so it's... First time a machine probably beat a human at that scale of a thing, of anything. Yes, yes. So that was, to me, that was like, you know, one of the groundbreaking events in the history of AI. Yeah, that's probably number one. Probably, like we don't, it's hard to remember. It's like Muhammad Ali versus, I don't know, any of the Mike Tyson, something like that. It's like, nah, you gotta put Muhammad Ali at number one. Same with Deep Blue, even though it's not machine learning based. Still, it uses advanced search, and search is the integral part of AI, right? It's not, people don't think of it that way at this moment. In vogue currently, search is not seen as a fundamental aspect of intelligence, but it very well, I mean, it very likely is. In fact, I mean, that's what neural networks are, is they're just performing search on the space of parameters, and it's all search. All of intelligence is some form of search, and you just have to become cleverer and clever at that search problem. And I also have another one that you didn't mention that's one of my favorite ones is, so you've probably heard of this, it's, I think it's called Deep Rembrandt. It's the project where they trained, I think there was a collaboration between the sort of the experts in Rembrandt painting in Netherlands, and a group, an artificial intelligence group, where they train an algorithm to replicate the style of the Rembrandt, and they actually printed a portrait that never existed before in the style of Rembrandt. I think they printed it on a sort of, on the canvas that, you know, using pretty much same types of paints and stuff. To me, it was mind blowing. Yeah, and the space of art, that's interesting. There hasn't been, maybe that's it, but I think there hasn't been an image in that moment yet in the space of art. You haven't been able to achieve superhuman level performance in the space of art, even though there's this big famous thing where a piece of art was purchased, I guess for a lot of money. Yes. Yeah, but it's still, you know, people are like in the space of music at least, that's, you know, it's clear that human created pieces are much more popular. So there hasn't been a moment where it's like, oh, this is, we're now, I would say in the space of music, what makes a lot of money, we're talking about serious money, it's music and movies, or like shows and so on, and entertainment. There hasn't been a moment where AI created, AI was able to create a piece of music or a piece of cinema, like Netflix show, that is, you know, that's sufficiently popular to make a ton of money. Yeah. And that moment would be very, very powerful, because that's like, that's an AI system being used to make a lot of money. And like direct, of course, AI tools, like even Premiere, audio editing, all the editing, everything I do, to edit this podcast, there's a lot of AI involved. Actually, this is a program, I wanna talk to those folks, just cause I wanna nerd out, it's called iZotope, I don't know if you're familiar with it. They have a bunch of tools of audio processing, and they have, I think they're Boston based, just, it's so exciting to me to use it, like on the audio here, cause it's all machine learning. It's not, cause most audio production stuff is like any kind of processing you do, it's very basic signal processing, and you're tuning knobs and so on. They have all of that, of course, but they also have all of this machine learning stuff, like where you actually give it training data, you select parts of the audio you train on, you train on it, and it figures stuff out. It's great, it's able to detect, like the ability of it to be able to separate voice and music, for example, or voice and anything, is incredible. Like it just, it's clearly exceptionally good at applying these different neural networks models to just separate the different kinds of signals from the audio. That, okay, so that's really exciting. Photoshop, Adobe people also use it, but to generate a piece of music that will sell millions, a piece of art, yeah. No, I agree, and you know, it's, that's, you know, as I mentioned, I offer my AI class, and you know, an integral part of this is the project, right? So it's my favorite, ultimate favorite part, because it typically, we have these project presentations the last two weeks of the classes, right before, you know, the Christmas break, and it's sort of, it adds this cool excitement, and every time, I mean, I'm amazed, you know, with some projects that people, you know, come up with. And so, and quite a few of them are actually, you know, they have some link to arts. I mean, you know, I think last year we had a group who designed an AI producing hokus, Japanese poems. Oh, wow. So, and some of them, so, you know, it got trained on the English based, haikus, haikus, right? So, and some of them, you know, they get to present, like, the top selection. They were pretty good. I mean, you know, I mean, of course, I'm not a specialist, but you read them, and you see this is real. It seems profound. Yes, yeah, it seems real. So it's kind of cool. We also had a couple of projects where people tried to teach AI how to play, like, rock music, classical music. I think, and popular music. Yeah. Interestingly enough, you know, classical music was among the most difficult ones. Oh, sure. And, you know, of course, if you, if, you know, you know, if you look at the, you know, the, like, grandmasters of music, like Bach, right? So there is a lot of, there is a lot of, there is a lot of almost math. Yeah, well, he's very mathematical. Yeah, exactly. So this is, I would imagine that at least some style of this music could be picked up, but then you have this completely different spectrum of classical composers. And so, you know, it's almost like, you know, you don't have to sort of look at the data. You just listen to it and say, nah, that's not it, not yet. That's not it, yeah. That's how I feel too. There's OpenAI has, I think, OpenMuse or something like that, the system. It's cool, but it's like, eh, it's not compelling for some reason. It could be a psychological reason too. Maybe we need to have a human being, a tortured soul behind the music. I don't know. Yeah, no, absolutely. I completely agree. But yeah, whether or not we'll have, one day we'll have, you know, a song written by an AI engine to be like in top charts, musical charts, I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised. I wonder if we already have one and it just hasn't been announced. We wouldn't know. How hard is the multi protein folding problem? Is that kind of something you've already mentioned which is baked into this idea of greater and greater complexity of proteins? Like multi domain proteins, is that basically become multi protein complexes? Yes, you got it right. So it's sort of, it has the components of both of protein folding and protein, protein interactions. Because in order for these domains, many of these proteins actually, they never form a stable structure. One of my favorite proteins, and pretty much everyone who works in the, I know, whom I know, who works with proteins, they always have their favorite proteins. Right, so one of my favorite proteins, probably my favorite protein, the one that I worked when I was a postdoc is so called post synaptic density 95, PSD 95 protein. So it's one of the key actors in the majority of neurological processes at the molecular level. So it's a, and essentially it's a key player in the post synaptic density. So this is the crucial part of this synapse where a lot of these chemical processes are happening. So it has five domains, right? So five protein domains. So pretty large proteins, I think 600 something assets. But the way it's organized itself, it's flexible, right? So it acts as a scaffold. So it is used to bring in other proteins. So they start acting in the orchestrated manner, right? So, and the type of the shape of this protein, it's in a way, there are some stable parts of this protein, but there are some flexible. And this flexibility is built in into the protein in order to become sort of this multifunctional machine. So do you think that kind of thing is also learnable through the alpha fold two kind of approach? I mean, the time will tell. Is it another level of complexity? Is it like how big of a jump in complexity is that whole thing? To me, it's yet another level of complexity because when we talk about protein, protein interactions, and there is actually a different challenge for this called Capri, and so this, that is focused specifically on macromolecular interactions, protein, protein, protein, DNA, et cetera. So, but it's, there are different mechanisms that govern molecular interactions and that need to be picked up, say by a machine learning algorithm. Interestingly enough, we actually, we participated for a few years in this competition. We typically don't participate in competitions, I don't know, don't have enough time, because it's very intensive, it's a very intensive process. But we participated back in about 10 years ago or so. And the way we entered this competition, so we design a scoring function, right? So the function that evaluates whether or not your protein, protein interaction is supposed to look like experimentally solved, right? So the scoring function is very critical part of the model prediction. So we designed it to be a machine learning one. And so it was one of the first machine learning based scoring function used in Capri. And we essentially learned what should contribute, what are the critical components contributing into the protein, protein interaction. So this could be converted into a learning problem and thereby it could be learned? I believe so, yes. Do you think AlphaFold2 or something similar to it from DeepMind or somebody else will be, will result in a Nobel Prize or multiple Nobel Prizes? So like, you know, obviously, maybe not so obviously, you can't give a Nobel Prize to a computer program. At least for now, give it to the designers of that program. But do you see one or multiple Nobel Prizes where AlphaFold2 is like a large percentage of what that prize is given for? Would it lead to discoveries at the level of Nobel Prizes? I mean, I think we are definitely destined to see the Nobel Prize becoming sort of, to be evolving with the evolution of science and the evolution of science as such that it now becomes like really multi facets, right? So where you don't really have like a unique discipline, you have sort of the, a lot of cross disciplinary talks in order to achieve sort of, you know, really big advancements, you know. So I think, you know, the computational methods will be acknowledged in one way or another. And as a matter of fact, you know, they were first acknowledged back in 2013, right? Where, you know, the first three people were, you know, awarded the Nobel Prize for study the protein folding, right, the principle. And, you know, I think all three of them are computational biophysicists, right? So, you know, that I think is unavoidable. You know, it will come with the time. The fact that, you know, alpha fold and, you know, similar approaches, because again, it's a matter of time that people will embrace this, you know, principle and we'll see more and more such, you know, such tools coming into play. But, you know, these methods will be critical in a scientific discovery, no doubts about it. On the engineering side, maybe a dark question, but do you think it's possible to use these machine learning methods to start to engineer proteins? And the next question is something quite a few biologists are against, some are for, for study purposes, is to engineer viruses. Do you think machine learning, like something like alpha fold could be used to engineer viruses? So to answer the first question, you know, it has been, you know, a part of the research in the protein science, the protein design is, you know, is a very prominent areas of research. Of course, you know, one of the pioneers is David Baker and Rosetta algorithm that, you know, essentially was doing the de novo design and was used to design new proteins, you know. And design of proteins means design of function. So like when you design a protein, you can control, I mean, the whole point of a protein with the protein structure comes a function, like it's doing something. Correct. So you can design different things. So you can, yeah, so you can, well, you can look at the proteins from the functional perspective. You can also look at the proteins from the structural perspective, right? So the structural building blocks. So if you want to have a building block of a certain shape, you can try to achieve it by, you know, introducing a new protein sequence and predicting, you know, how it will fold. So with that, I mean, it's a natural, one of the, you know, natural applications of these algorithms. Now, talking about engineering a virus. With machine learning. With machine learning, right? So, well, you know, so luckily for us, I mean, we don't have that much data, right? Yeah. We actually, right now, one of the projects that we are carrying on in the lab is we're trying to develop a machine learning algorithm that determines the, whether or not the current strain is pathogenic. And the current strain of the coronavirus. Of the virus. I mean, so there are applications to coronaviruses because we have strains of SARS COVID 2, also SARS COVID, MERS that are pathogenic, but we also have strains of other coronaviruses that are, you know, not pathogenic. I mean, the common cold viruses and, you know, some other ones, right? So, so pathogenic meaning spreading. Pathogenic means actually inflicting damage. Correct. There are also some, you know, seasonal versus pandemic strains of influenza, right? And determining the, what are the molecular determinant, right? So that are built in, into the protein sequence, into the gene sequence, right? So, and whether or not the machine learning can determine those, those components, right? Oh, interesting. So like using machine learning to do, that's really interesting to, to, to given, give the input is like what the entire, the protein sequence and then determine if this thing is going to be able to do damage to a biological system. Yeah. So, so I mean, It's a good machine learning, you're saying we don't have enough data for that? We, I mean, for, for this specific one, we do. We might actually, I have, you know, have to back up on this because we're still in the process. There was one work that appeared in bioarchive by Eugene Kunin, who is one of these, you know, pioneers in, in, in evolutionary genomics. And they tried to look at this, but, you know, the methods were sort of standard, you know, supervised learning methods. And now the question is, you know, can you advance it further by, by using, you know, not so standard methods, you know? So there's obviously a lot of hope in, in transfer learning where you can actually try to transfer the information that the machine learning learns about the proper protein sequences, right? And, you know, so, so there is some promise in going this direction, but if we have this, it would be extremely useful because then we could essentially forecast the potential mutations that would make the current strain more or less pathogenic. Anticipate, anticipate them from a vaccine development, for the treatment, antiviral drug development. That, that would be a very crucial task. But you could also use that system to then say, how would we potentially modify this virus to make it more pathogenic? This, that's true. That's true. And then, you know, the, again, the hope is, well, several things, right? So one is that, you know, it's, even if you design a, you know, a sequence, right? So to carry out the actual experimental biology, to ensure that all the components working, you know, is a completely different matter. Difficult process. Yes. Then the, you know, we've seen in the past, there could be some regulation of the moment the scientific community recognizes that it's now becoming no longer a sort of a fun puzzle to, you know, for machine learning. Could be open. Yeah, so then there might be some regulation. So I think back in, what, 2015, there was, you know, there was an issue on regulating the research on influenza strains, right? There were several groups, you know, used sort of the mutation analysis to determine whether or not this strain will jump from one species to another. And I think there was like a half a year moratorium on the research on the paper published until, you know, scientists, you know, analyzed it and decided that it's actually safe. I forgot what that's called. Something of function, test of function. Gain of function. Gain of function, yeah. Gain of function, loss of function, that's right. Sorry. It's like, let's watch this thing mutate for a while to see like, to see what kind of things we can observe. I guess I'm not so much worried about that kind of research if there's a lot of regulation and if it's done very well and with competence and seriously. I am more worried about kind of this, you know, the underlying aspect of this question is more like 50 years from now. Speaking to the Drake equation, one of the parameters in the Drake equation is how long civilizations last. And that seems to be the most important value actually for calculating if there's other alien intelligent civilizations out there. That's where there's most variability. Assuming like if life, if that percentage that life can emerge is like not zero, like if we're a super unique, then it's the how long we last is basically the most important thing. So from a selfish perspective, but also from a Drake equation perspective, I'm worried about our civilization lasting. And you kind of think about all the ways in which machine learning can be used to design greater weapons of destruction, right? And I mean, one way to ask that if you look sort of 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, would you be more worried about natural pandemics or engineered pandemics? Like who's the better designer of viruses, nature or humans if we look down the line? I think in my view, I would still be worried about the natural pandemics simply because I mean, the capacity of the nature producing this. It does pretty good job, right? Yes. And the motivation for using virus, engineering viruses as a weapon is a weird one because maybe you can correct me on this, but it seems very difficult to target a virus, right? The whole point of a weapon, the way a rocket works, if a starting point, you have an end point and you're trying to hit a target, to hit a target with a virus is very difficult. It's basically just, right? The target would be the human species. Oh man. Yeah, I have a hope in us. I'm forever optimistic that we will not, there's insufficient evil in the world to lead to that kind of destruction. Well, I also hope that, I mean, that's what we see. I mean, with the way we are getting connected, the world is getting connected. I think it helps for the world to become more transparent. Yeah. So the information spread is, I think it's one of the key things for the society to become more balanced one way or another. This is something that people disagree with me on, but I do think that the kind of secrecy that governments have. So you're kind of speaking more to the other aspects, like a research community being more open, companies are being more open. Government is still like, we're talking about like military secrets. I think military secrets of the kind that could destroy the world will become also a thing of the 20th century. It'll become more and more open. Yeah. I think nations will lose power in the 21st century, like lose sufficient power towards secrecies. Transparency is more beneficial than secrecy, but of course it's not obvious. Let's hope so. Let's hope so that the governments will become more transparent. What, so we last talked, I think in March or April, what have you learned? How has your philosophical, psychological, biological worldview changed since then? Or you've been studying it nonstop from a computational biology perspective. How has your understanding and thoughts about this virus changed over those months from the beginning to today? One thing that I was really amazed at how efficient the scientific community was. I mean, and even just judging on this very narrow domain of protein structure and understanding the structural characterization of this virus from the components point of view, whole virus point of view. If you look at SARS, something that happened less than 20, but close enough, 20 years ago, and you see what, when it happened, what was sort of the response by the scientific community, you see that the structure characterizations did a cure, but it took several years, right? Now the things that took several years, it's a matter of months, right? So we see that the research pop up. We are at the unprecedented level in terms of the sequencing, right? Never before we had a single virus sequence so many times, so which allows us to actually to trace very precisely the sort of the evolutionary nature of this virus, what happens, and it's not just this virus independently of everything, it's the sequence of this virus linked, anchored to the specific geographic place to specific people, because our genotype influences also the evolution of this, it's always a host pathogen, core evolution that, you know, it's not just the virus, it's the sequence of this virus, it's the sequence of this virus linked to the specific geographic place, it's the sequence of this virus linked to the specific geographic place to specific people, that, you know, occurs. It'd be cool if we also had a lot more data about, so that the spread of this virus, not maybe, well, it'd be nice if we had it for like contact tracing purposes for this virus, but it'd be also nice if we had it for the study for future viruses to be able to respond and so on, but it's already nice that we have geographical data and the basic data from individual humans, yeah. Exactly, no, I think contact tracing is obviously a key component in understanding the spread of this virus. There is also, there is a number of challenges, right? So XPRIZE is one of them, we just recently took a part of this competition, it's the prediction of the number of infections in different regions. Oh, sure. So, you know, obviously the AI is the main topic in those predictions. Yeah, but it's still, the data, I mean, that's a competition, but the data is weak on the training. Like, it's great, it's much more than probably before, but like, it'd be nice if it was like really rich. I talked to Michael Mina from Harvard, I mean, he dreams that the community comes together with like a weather map to where viruses, right, like really high resolution sensors on like how from person to person the viruses that travel, all the different kinds of viruses, right? Because there's a ton of them, and then you'd be able to tell the story that you've spoken about of the evolution of these viruses, like day to day mutations that are occurring. I mean, that'd be fascinating just from a perspective of study and from the perspective of being able to respond to future pandemics. That's ultimately what I'm worried about. People love books. Is there some three or whatever number of books, technical, fiction, philosophical, that brought you joy in life, had an impact on your life, and maybe some that you would recommend others? I'll give you three very different books, and I also have a special runner up. Honorable mention. I mean, it's an audiobook, and that's some specific reason behind it. So the first book is something that sort of impacted my earlier stage of life, and I'm probably not going to be very original here. It's Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. For a Russian, maybe it's not super original, but it's a really powerful book, even in English. It is incredibly powerful, and I mean, the way it ends. I still have goosebumps when I read the very last sort of, it's called prologue, where it's just so powerful. What impact did it have on you? What ideas? What insights did you get from it? I was just taken by the fact that you have those parallel lives apart from many centuries, and somehow they got sort of intertwined into one story, and that to me was fascinating. And of course the romantic part of this book is like it's not just romance, it's like the romance empowered by sort of magic, right? And maybe on top of that, you have some irony, which is unavoidable, right? Because it was that Soviet time. But it's very deeply Russian, so that's the wit, the humor, the pain, the love, all of that is one of the books that kind of captures something about Russian culture that people outside of Russia should probably read. I agree. What's the second one? So the second one is again another one that it happened I read it later in my life. I think I read it first time when I was a graduate student. And that's the Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Word. That is amazingly powerful book. What is it about? It's about, I mean, essentially based on Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed with cancer when he was reasonably young, and he made a full recovery. So this is about a person who was sentenced for life in one of these camps. And he had some cancer, so he was transported back to one of these Soviet republics, I think it was South Asian republics. And the book is about his experience being a prisoner, being a patient in the cancer clinic, in the cancer ward, surrounded by people, many of which die. But in the way it reads, first of all, later on I read the accounts of the doctors who describe the experiences in the book by the patient as incredibly accurate. So I read that there was some doctor saying that every single doctor should read this book to understand what the patient feels. But again, as many of the Solzhenitsyn's books, it has multiple levels of complexity. And obviously if you look above the cancer and the patient, the tumor that was growing and then disappeared in his body with some consequences, this is allegorically the Soviet, and he actually when he was asked, he said that this is what made him think about this, how to combine these experiences. Him being a part of the Soviet regime, also being a part of the someone sent to Gulag camp, and also someone who experienced cancer in his life. The Gulag Archipelago and this book, these are the works that actually made him receive a Nobel Prize. But to me I've read other books by Solzhenitsyn. This one to me is the most powerful one. And by the way, both this one and the previous one you read in Russian? Yes. So now there is the third book is an English book and it's completely different. So we're switching the gears completely. So this is the book which, it's not even a book, it's an essay by Jonathan Neumann called The Computer and the Brain. And that was the book he was writing knowing that he was dying of cancer. So the book was released back, it's a very thin book. But the power, the intellectual power in this book, in this essay is incredible. I mean you probably know that von Neumann is considered to be one of the biggest thinkers. So his intellectual power was incredible. And you can actually feel this power in this book where the person is writing knowing that he will be, he will die. The book actually got published only after his death back in 1958. He died in 1957. So he tried to put as many ideas that he still hadn't realized. So this book is very difficult to read because every single paragraph is just compact, is filled with these ideas. And the ideas are incredible. Even nowadays, so he tried to put the parallels between the brain computing power, the neural system, and the computers as they were understood. Do you remember what year he was working on this? 57. 57. So that was right during his, when he was diagnosed with cancer and he was essentially... Yeah, he's one of those, there's a few folks people mention, I think Ed Witten is another that like everyone that meets them, they say he's just an intellectual powerhouse. Yes. Okay, so who's the honorable mention? And this is, I mean, the reason I put it sort of in a separate section because this is a book that I recently listened to. So it's an audio book. And this is a book called Lab Girl by Hope Jarron. So Hope Jarron, she is a scientist, she's a geochemist that essentially studies the fossil plants. And so she uses this fossil plant, the chemical analysis to understand what was the climate back in a thousand years, hundreds of thousands of years ago. And so something that incredibly touched me by this book, it was narrated by the author. Nice. And it's an incredibly personal story, incredibly. So certain parts of the book, you could actually hear the author crying. And that to me, I mean, I never experienced anything like this, reading the book, but it was like the connection between you and the author. And I think this is really a must read, but even better, a must listen to audio book for anyone who wants to learn about sort of academia, science, research in general, because it's a very personal account about her becoming a scientist. So we're just before New Year's. We talked a lot about some difficult topics of viruses and so on. Do you have some exciting things you're looking forward to in 2021? Some New Year's resolutions, maybe silly or fun, or something very important and fundamental to the world of science or something completely unimportant? Well, I'm definitely looking forward to towards things becoming normal. So yes, I really miss traveling. Every summer I go to an international summer school. It's called the School for Molecular and Theoretical Biology. It's held in Europe. It's organized by very good friends of mine. And this is the school for gifted kids from all over the world, and they're incredibly bright. It's like every time I go there, it's like, you know, it's a highlight of the year. And we couldn't make it this August, so we did this school remotely, but it's different. So I am definitely looking forward to next August coming there. One of my personal resolutions, I realized that being in the house and working from home, I realized that actually I apparently missed a lot spending time with my family, believe it or not. So you typically, with all the research and teaching and everything related to the academic life, I mean, you get distracted. And so you don't feel that the fact that you are away from your family doesn't affect you because you are naturally distracted by other things. So this time I realized that that's so important, right? Spending your time with the family, with your kids. And so that would be my new year resolution and actually trying to spend as much time as possible. Even when the world opens up. Yeah, that's a beautiful message. That's a beautiful reminder. I asked you if there's a Russian poem that I could read, that I could force you to read, and you said, okay, fine, sure. Do you mind reading? And you said that no paper needed. So this poem was written by my namesake, another Dmitry, Dmitry Kemerefeld. It's a recent poem and it's called Sorceress, Vyadma, in Russian, or actually Koldunya. So that's sort of another sort of connotation of sorceress or witch. And I really like it and it's one of just a handful poems I actually can recall by heart. I also have a very strong association when I read this poem with Master and Margarita, the main female character, Margarita. And also it's about, it's happening about the same time we're talking now, so around New Year, around Christmas. Do you mind reading it in Russian? I'll give it a try. So you narrowed your eyes, that anyone who was blessed was ready to give their soul to the devil for this witch's connection. And I, without prejudice, ran out to feel your amazing breath on your lips, to remember how you flew above the earth in a white view, in a white haze, in a white mist. That's beautiful. I love how it captures a moment of longing and maybe love even. Yes. To me it has a lot of meaning about this something that is happening, something that is far away, but still very close to you. And yes, it's the winter. There's something magical about winter, isn't there? I don't know how to translate it, but a kiss in winter is interesting. Lips in winter and all that kind of stuff. It's beautiful. Russian has a way. It has a reason, Russian poetry is just, I'm a fan of poetry in both languages, but English doesn't capture some of the magic that Russian seems to, so thank you for doing that. That was awesome. Dmitry, it's great to talk to you again. It's contagious how much you love what you do, how much you love life, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today. And thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dmitry Korkin, and thank you to our sponsors. Brave Browser, NetSuite Business Management Software, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, and Asleep Self Cooling Mattress. So the choice is browsing privacy, business success, healthy diet, or comfortable sleep. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Jeffrey Eugenides. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Dmitry Korkin: Evolution of Proteins, Viruses, Life, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #153

The following is a conversation with Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist, astronomer, and cosmologist at Harvard. He has authored over 800 papers and written 8 books, including his latest, called Extraterrestrial, The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. It'll be released in a couple of weeks, so go preorder it now to show support for what I think is truly an important book in that it serves as a strong example of a scientist being both rigorous and open minded about the question of intelligent alien civilizations in our universe. Quick mention of our sponsors, Zero Fasting App for intermittent fasting, Element Electrolyte Drink, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and Pessimist Archive History Podcast. So the choices, a fasting app, fasting fuel, fast breaking, delicious meals, and a history podcast that has very little to do with fasting. Choose wisely my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a bit more about why Avi's work is so exciting to me and I think to a lot of people. In 2017, a strange interstellar object, now named Oumuamua, was detected traveling through our solar system. Based on the evidence we have, it had strange characteristics which made it not like any asteroid or comet that we've seen before. Avi was one of the only world class scientists who fearlessly suggested that we should be open minded about whether it is naturally made or in fact is an artifact of an intelligent alien civilization. In fact, he suggested that the more likely explanation given the evidence is the latter hypothesis. But we also talk about a lot of fascinating mysteries in our universe including black holes, dark matter, the big bang, and close to speed of light space travel. The theme throughout is that in scientific pursuits, the weird things, the anomalies, the ideas that right now are considered taboo should not be ignored if we are to have a chance at finding the next big breakthrough, the next big paradigm shift, and also if we are to inspire the world with the power and beauty of science. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Avi Loeb. In the introduction to your new book, Extraterrestrial, you write, this book confronts one of the universe's most profound questions, are we alone? Over time, this question has been framed in different ways. Is life here on Earth the only life in the universe? Are humans the only sentient intelligence in the vastness of space and time? A better, more precise framing of this question would be this. Throughout the expanse of space and over the lifetime of the universe, are there now or have ever been other sentient civilizations that, like ours, explored the stars and left evidence of their efforts? So let me ask, are we alone? That's an excellent question. For me, the answer is sort of clear because I start from the principle of modesty. You know, if we believe that we are alone and special and unique, that shows arrogance. My daughters, when they were infants, they tended to think that they are special, unique, and then they went out to the street and realized that other kids are very much like them. And then they developed a sense of a better perspective about themselves. And I think the only reason that we are still thinking that we are special is because we haven't searched well enough to find others that might even be better than us. And, you know, I say that because I look at the newspaper every morning and I see that we do foolish things. We are not necessarily the most intelligent ones. And if you think about it, if you open a recipe book, you see that out of the same ingredients, you can make very different cakes, depending on how you put them together and how you heat them up. And what is the chance that by taking the soup of chemicals that existed on earth and cooking it one way to get our life, that you got the best cake possible? I mean, we are probably not the sharpest cookie in the jar. And my question is, I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that we are probably not alone because half of all the sun like stars we know now as astronomers, half of the sun like stars from the Kepler satellite data have a planet the size of the earth, roughly at the same distance that the earth is from the sun. And that means that they can have liquid water on their surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. So if you roll the dice billions of times, just within the Milky Way galaxy, and then you have tens of billions of galaxies like it within the observable volume of the universe, it would be extremely arrogant to think that we are special. I would think that we are sort of middle of the road, typical forms of life. And that's why nobody pays attention to us. If you go down the street on a sidewalk and you see an ant, you don't pay attention or a special respect to that ant, you just continue to walk. And so I think that we are sort of average, not very interesting, not exciting, so nobody cares about us. We tend to think that we are special, but that's a sign of immaturity. And we're very early on in our development. Yes, that's another thing that we have our technology only for 100 years, and it's evolving exponentially right now on a three year timescale. So imagine what would happen in a hundred years, in a thousand years, in a million years or in a billion years. Now, the Sun is actually relatively late in the star formation history of the universe. Most of the Sun like stars formed earlier, and some of them already died, you know, became white dwarfs. And so if you imagine that a civilization like ours existed around a typical Sun like star, by now, if they survived, they could be a billion years old. And then imagine a billion year technology, it would look like magic to us, you know, an approximation to God, we wouldn't be able to understand it. And so in my view, we should be humble. And by the way, we should probably just listen and not speak, because there is a risk, right? If you are inferior, there is a risk if you speak too loudly, something bad may happen to you. You mentioned, we should be humble also in the sense, with the analogy to ants, that they might be better than us. So there's a kind of scale that we're talking about. And in the question, you mentioned the word sentient. So sentience, or maybe the more basic formulation is consciousness. Do you think that this thing within us humans in terms of the typical life form of consciousness is the essential element that permeates other, if there's other alien civilizations out there, that they have something like consciousness as well? Or is this, I guess I'm asking, can you try to untangle the word sentient? Yeah, so that's a good question. I think what is most abundant, depending on how long it survives. So if you look at us, as an example, we are now, we do have consciousness and we do have technology. But the technologies that we are developing are also means for our own destruction, as we can tell. You know, we can change the climate if we are not careful enough. We can go into nuclear wars. So we are developing means for our own destruction through self inflicted wounds. And it might well be that creatures like us are not long lived, that crocodiles on other planets live for billions of years. They don't destroy themselves, they live naturally. And so if you look around, the most common thing would be dumb animals that live for long times, you know, not those that have conscious. But in terms of changing the environment, I think since, I mean, humans develop tools, they develop the ability to construct technologies that would lift us from this planet that we were born in. And that's something animals without a conscious, consciousness cannot really do. And so I, you know, in terms of looking for things that are new, that went beyond the circumstances they were born into, I would think that even if they're short lived, these are the creatures that made the biggest difference to their environment. And we can search for them, you know, even if they're short lived, and most of the civilizations are dead by now. Even if that's the case. That's sad to think about, by the way. Well, but if you look on Earth, that, you know, there are lots of cultures that existed throughout time, and they're dead by now. The Mayan culture was very sophisticated, died. But we can find evidence for it and learn about it just by archaeology, digging into the ground, looking. And so we can do the same thing in space, look for dead civilizations. And perhaps we can learn a lesson why they died and behave better so that we will not share the same fate. So I think, you know, there is a lesson to be learned from the sky. And by the way, I should also say, if we find a technology that we have not dreamed of, that we can import to Earth, that may be a better strategy for making a fortune than going to Silicon Valley or going to Wall Street. Because you make a jump start into something of the future. So that's one way to do the leap is actually to find, to literally discover versus come up with the idea in our own limited human capacity, like a cognitive capacity. It would look like, it would feel like cheating in an exam where you look over the shoulder of a student next to you. Yeah. But it's not good on an exam, but it is good when you're coming up with technology that could change the fabric of human civilization. But there is, you know, in my neck of the woods of artificial intelligence, there's a lot of trajectories one can imagine of creating very powerful beings, the technology that's essentially, you know, you can call super intelligence that could achieve space exploration, all those kinds of things without consciousness, without something that to us humans looks like consciousness. And there, you know, there is a sad feeling I have that consciousness too, in terms of us being humble, is a thing we humans take too seriously. That it's, we think it's special just because we have it. But it could be a thing that's actually holding us back in some kind of way. It may well be. It may well be. I should say something about AI, because I do think it offers a very important step into the future. If you look at the Old Testament, the Bible, there is this story about Noah's Ark that you might know about. Noah knew about a great flood that is about to endanger all life on earth. So he decided to build an ark. And the Bible actually talks about specifically what the size of this ark was, what the dimensions were. Turns out it was quite similar to Oumuamua that we will discuss in a few minutes. But at any event, he built this ark and he put animals on it so that they were saved from the great flood. Now, you can think about doing the same on earth, because there are risks for future catastrophes. You know, we could have the self inflicted wounds that we were talking about, like nuclear war, changing the climate. Or there could be an asteroid impacting us, just like the dinosaurs died. The dinosaurs didn't have science, astronomy. They couldn't have a warning system. But there was this big stone, big rock that approached them. It must have been a beautiful sight. Just when it was approaching, it got very big and then smashed them and killed them. So you could have a catastrophe like that. Or in a billion years, the sun will basically boil off all the oceans on earth. And currently all our eggs are in one basket, but we can spread them. It's sort of like the printing press, if you think about it. The revolution that Gutenberg brought is there were very few copies of the Bible at the time, and each of them was precious because it was handwritten. But once the printing press produced multiple copies, you know, if something bad happened to one of the copies, it wasn't a catastrophe. You know, it wasn't disaster because you had many more copies. And so if we have copies of life here on earth elsewhere, then we avoid the risk of it being eliminated by a single point breakdown, catastrophe. So the question is, can we build NOx spaceship that will carry life as we know it? Now, you might think we have to put elephants and whales and birds on a big spaceship, but that's not true because all you need to know is the DNA making, the genetic making of these animals, put it on a computer system that has AI plus a 3D printer so that this CubeSat, which is rather small, can go with this information to another planet and use the raw materials there to produce synthetic life. And that would be a way of producing copies, just like the Gutenberg printing press. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be exact copies of the humans, it could just contain some basic elements of life and then have enough life on board that it could reproduce the process of evolution on another place. So I mean, that also makes you sad, of course, because you confront the mortality of your own little precious consciousness and all your own memories and knowledge and all that stuff. But who cares? I care about mine, right? And you care about yours. No, no, I actually don't. If you're an astronomer, one thing that you learn from the universe is to be modest because you're not so significant. I mean, think about it, all these emperors and kings that conquered a piece of land on Earth and were extremely proud. You see these images of kings and emperors that usually are alpha males and they stand strong and they're very proud of themselves. But if you think about it, there are 10 to the power 20 planets like the Earth in the observable volume of the universe. And this view of conquering a piece of land and even conquering all of Earth is just like an ant hugging a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach. That's not very impressive. So you can't be arrogant. If you see the big picture, you have to be humble. Also, we are short lived. Within 100 years, that's it. So what does it teach you? First to be humble, modest. You never have significant powers relative to the big scheme of things. And second, you should appreciate every day that you live and learn about the world. Humble and still grateful. Yes, exactly. Well, let's talk about probably the most interesting object I've heard about and also the most fun to pronounce. Oumuamua. Can you tell me the story of this object and why it may be an important event in human history? And is it possibly a piece of alien technology? Right. So this is the first object that was spotted close to Earth from outside the solar system. And it was found on October 19th, 2017. And at that time, it was receding away from us. And at first, astronomers thought it must be a piece of rock, you know, just like all the asteroids and comets that we have seen from within the solar system. And it just came from another star. I should say that the actual discovery of this object was surprising to me because a decade earlier, I wrote the first paper together with Ed Turner and Amaya Moro Martin that tried to predict whether the same telescope that was surveying the sky, PanSTARRS from Hawaii, would find anything from interstellar space, given what we know about the solar system. So if you assume that other planetary systems have similar abundance of rocks and you just calculate how many should be ejected into interstellar space, the conclusion is no, we shouldn't find anything with PanSTARRS. To me, I apologize for probably revealing my stupidity, but it was surprising to me that so few interstellar objects from outside this whole system have ever been detected. No, nothing. None has been. You do maybe talk about it that there has been one or two rocks since then. Well, since then, there was one called the Borisov. It was discovered by an amateur Russian astronomer, Gennady Borisov. And that one looked like a comet. And just like a comet from within the solar system. But this is a really important point. Sorry to interrupt it. You showed that it's unlikely that a rock from another solar system would arrive to ours. Right. And so the actual detection of this one was surprising by itself to me. Yes. But then, so at first they thought maybe it's a comet or an asteroid, but then it didn't look like anything we've seen before. Borisov did look like a comet. So people asked me afterwards and said, you know, doesn't it convince you if Borisov looks like a comet, doesn't it convince you that Oumuamua is also natural? And I said, you know, when I went on the first date with my wife, she looked special to me. And since then I met many women. That didn't change my opinion of my wife. So, you know, that's not an argument. Anyway, so why did the Oumuamua look weird? Let me explain. So first of all, astronomers monitored the amount of light, sunlight that it reflects. And it was tumbling, spinning every eight hours. And as it was spinning, the brightness that we saw from that direction, we couldn't resolve it because it's tiny. It's about a hundred meters, a few hundred feet, size of a football field. And we cannot, from Earth, with existing telescopes, we cannot resolve it. The only way to actually get a photograph of it is to send a camera close to it. And that was not possible at the time that Oumuamua was discovered because it was already moving away from us faster than any rocket we can send. It's sort of like a guest that appeared for dinner. And then by the time we realized that it's weird, the guest is already out the front door into the dark street. What we would like to find is an object like it approaching us, because then you can send the camera irrespective of how fast it moves. And if we were to find it in July 2017, that would have been possible because it was approaching us at that time. Actually, I was visiting Mount Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii with my family for vacation at that time in July 2017, but nobody knew at the observatory that the Oumuamua is very close. That's sad to think about that we had the opportunity at that time to send up a camera. But don't worry. I mean, there will be more. There will be more because I operate by the Copernican principle, which says we don't live at a special place and we don't live at a special time. And that means if we surveyed the sky for a few years and we had sensitivity to this region between us and the sun, and we found this object with PanStars, there should be many more that we will find in the future with surveys that might be even better. And actually, in three years timescale, there would be the so called LSST. That's a survey of the Vera Rubin Observatory that would be much more sensitive and could potentially find an Oumuamua like object every month. OK, so I'm just waiting for that. And the main reason for me to alert everyone to the unusual properties of Oumuamua is with the hope that next time around, when we see something as unusual, we would take a photograph or we would get as much evidence as possible because science is based on evidence, not on prejudice. And we will get back to that theme. So anyway, let me let me point out some of the properties, actually, the elongated nature, all those kinds of things. So the light curve, the amount of light, sunlight that was reflected from it was changing over eight hours by a factor of 10, meaning that the area of this object, even though we can't resolve it, the area on the sky that reflects sunlight was bigger by a factor of 10 in some phases as it was tumbling around than in other phases. So even if you take a piece of paper that is razor thin, you know, there is a very small likelihood that it's exactly edge on and getting a factor of 10 change in the area that you see on the sky is huge. It's much more than any. It means that the object has an unusual geometry. It's at least a factor of a few more than any of the comets or asteroids that we have seen before. You mentioned reflectivity. So it's not just the geometry, but the properties of the surface of that thing. Well, if you assume the reflectivity is the same, then it's just geometry. If you assume the reflectivity may change, then it could be a combination of the area that you see and the reflectivity because different directions may reflect differently. But the point is that it's very extreme. And actually the best fit to the light curve that we saw was of a flat object. Unlike all the cartoons that you have seen of a cigar shape, a flat object at the 90% confidence gives a better model for the way that the light varied. So like flat meaning like a pancake. Like a pancake. Exactly. And so that's, you know, the very first unusual property. But to me, it was not unusual enough to think that it might be artificial. It was not significant enough. Then there was no cometary tail, you know, no dust, no gas around this object. And the Spitzer Space Telescope really searched very deeply for carbon based molecules. There was nothing. So it's definitely not a comet the way people expected it to be. Can you maybe briefly mention what properties a comet that you're referring to usually has? Right. So a comet is a rock that has some water ice on the surface. So you can think of it as an icy rock. Actually comets were discovered a long time ago, but the first model that was developed for them was by Fred Whipple, who was at Harvard. And I think the legend goes that he got the idea from walking through Harvard Square and seeing during a winter day and seeing these icy rocks, you know. So a comet is icy and an asteroid is not. It's just a rock. It's just a rock. Yeah. So when you have ice on the surface, when the rock gets close to the sun, the sunlight warms it up and the ice sublimates, evaporates. Because the one thing about ice, water ice, is it doesn't become liquid if you warm it up in vacuum, you know, without an external pressure. It just goes straight into gas. And that's what you see as the tail of a comet. The only way to get liquid water is to have an atmosphere like on Earth that has an external pressure. Only then you get liquid. And that's why it's essential to have an atmosphere to a planet in order to have liquid water and the chemistry of life. So if you look at Mars, Mars lost its atmosphere and therefore no liquid water on the surface anymore. I mean, there may have been early and that's what the Perseverance survey, you know, the Perseverance mission will try to find out whether it had liquid water, whether there was life perhaps on it at the time, but at some point it lost its atmosphere and then the liquid water was gone. So the only reason that we can live on Earth is because of the atmosphere. But a comet is in vacuum pretty much. And then when it gets warmed up on the surface, the water becomes, the water ice becomes gas and then you see this cometary tail behind it. In addition to water, there are all kinds of carbon based molecules or dust that comes off the surface. And those are detectable. Yeah, it's easy to detect. It's very prominent. You see these cometary tails that look very prominent because they reflect sunlight and you can see them. In fact, it's sometimes difficult to see the nucleus of the comet because it's surrounded and shrouded with, and in this case, there was no trace of anything. That's fascinating. Now you might say, okay, it's not a comet. So that's what the community said. Okay, it's not a, no problem. It's still a rock, you know, it's not a comet, but it's just a rock, bare rock. You know, okay, no problem. Then, and that's the thing that convinced me to write about it. And then in June 2018, you know, significantly later, there was a report that in fact the object exhibited an excess push in addition to the force of gravity. So the sun acts on it by gravity, but then there was an extra push on this object that was figured out from the orbit that you can trace. And the question was, what is this excess push? So for comets, you get the rocket effect. When you evaporate gas, you know, just like a jet engine on an airplane, you throw, a jet engine is very simple. You throw the gas back and it pushes the airplane forward. That's all. That's how the jet. So in a case of a comet, you throw gas in the direction of the sun because it, and then you get a push. Okay. So in the case of comets, you can get a push, but there was no cometary tail. So then people say, oh, wait a second. Is it an asteroid? No, but it behaves like a comet, but it doesn't look like a comet. So what, well, forget about it. Business as usual. So that's what they mean by a non gravitation acceleration. So that's interesting. So like the primary force acting on something like just a rock, like an asteroid would be like, you can predict the trajectory based on the gravity, based on gravity. And so here there's detected movement that's not, cannot be accounted purely by the gravity of the sun. And if it was a comet, you would need about a 10th of the mass of this comet, the weight of this comet to be evaporated in order to give it. And there was no sign of that. No sign. 10% of the mass evaporating. It's huge. Think about it. A hundred meter size object losing 10% of its mass. You can't miss that. So that's super weird. It's super weird. Is there a good explanation, is there in your mind a possible explanation for this? So I operated just like Sherlock Holmes in a way. I said, okay, what are the possibilities? And the only thing I could think, so I ruled out everything else. And I said, it must be the sunlight reflected off it. Okay. So the sunlight reflects off the surface and gives it a push, just like you get a push on a sail on a boat, you know, from the wind reflecting off it. Now, in order for this to be effective, it turns out the object needs to be extremely thin. It turns out it needs to be less than a millimeter thick. Nature does not produce such things. But we produce it because it's called the technology of a light sail. So we are, for space exploration, we are exploring this technology because it has the benefit of not needing to carry the fuel with the spacecraft. So you don't have the fuel, you just have a sail and it's being pushed either by sunlight or by a laser beam or whatever. So perhaps this is the light sail. So this is actually the same technology with the Starshot project. Yes. So people afterwards say, okay, you work on this project, you imagine. No, that's a pretty good explanation, right? Obviously, my imagination is limited by what I know. So I would not deny that working on light sails expanded my ability to imagine this possibility. But let me offer another interesting anecdote. In September this year, 2020, there was another object found, and it was given the name 2020SO by the Minor Planet Center. This is an organization actually in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that gives names to astronomical objects found in the solar system. And they gave it that name 2020SO because, you know, it looked like an object in the solar system and it moved in an orbit that is similar to the orbit of the Earth, but not the same exactly. And therefore it was bound to the Sun, but it also exhibited a deviation from what you expect based on gravity. So the astronomers that found it extrapolated back in time and found that in 1966, it intercepted the Earth. And then they went to the history books and they realized, oh, there was a mission called Lunar Lander Surveyor 2 that had a rocket booster. It was a failed mission, but there was a rocket booster that was kicked into space. And presumably this is the rocket booster that we're seeing. Now, this rocket booster was sufficiently hollow and thin for us to recognize that it's pushed by sunlight. So here is my point. We can tell from the orbit of an object, obviously this object didn't have any cometary tail. It was artificially made. We know that it was made by us and it did deviate from an orbit of a rock. So just by seeing something that doesn't have cometary tail and deviates from an orbit shaped by gravity, we can tell that it's artificial. In the case of Oumuamua, it couldn't have been sent by humans because it just passed near us for a few months. We know exactly what we were doing at that time. And also it was moving faster than any object that we can launch. And so obviously it came from outside the solar system. And the question is who produced it? Now, I should say that when I walk on vacation on the beach, I often see natural objects like seashells that are beautiful and I look at them. And every now and then I stumble on a plastic bottle that was artificially produced. And my point is that maybe Oumuamua was a message in a bottle. And this is simply another window into searching for artifacts from other civilizations. Where do you think it could have come from? And if it's so, okay, from a scientific perspective, the narrow minded view, as we'll probably talk about throughout, is, you know, you kind of want to stick to the things that, to naturally originating objects like asteroids and comets. Okay, that's the space of possible hypotheses. And then if we expand beyond that, you start to think, okay, these are artificially constructed. Like you just said, it could be by humans. It could be by whatever that means, by some kind of extraterrestrial alien civilizations. If it's the alien civilization variety, what is this object then? That's an excellent question. And let me lay out, I mean, we don't have enough evidence to tell. If we had a photograph, perhaps we would have more information. But there is one other peculiar fact about Oumuamua. Well, other than it was very shiny, that I didn't mention, you know, we didn't detect any heat from it. And that implies that it's rather small and shiny. But the other peculiar fact is that it came from a very special frame of reference. So it's sort of like finding a car in a parking lot, in a public parking lot, that, you know, you can't really tell where it came from. So there is this frame of reference where you average over the motions of all the stars in the neighborhood of the Sun. So you find the so called local standard of rest of the galaxy. And that's a frame of reference that is obtained by averaging the random motions of all the stars. And the Sun is moving relative to that frame at some speed. But this object was at rest in that frame. And only one in 500 stars is so much at rest in that frame. And that's why I was saying it's like a parking lot. It was parked there, and we bumped into it. So the relative speed between the solar system and this object is just because we are moving. It was sitting still. Now you ask yourself, why is it so unusual in that context? You know why? Because if it was expelled from another planetary system, most likely it will carry the speed of the host star that it came from. Because it was, you know, the most loosely bound objects are in the periphery of the planetary system, and they move very slowly relative to the star. And so they carry the, when they are ripped apart from the planetary system, most of the objects will have the residual motion of the star roughly relative to the local star. But this one was at rest in the local star. Now, one thing I can think of, if there is a grid of road posts, you know, like for navigation system, so that you can find your way in the local frame, then that would be one possibility. These are like little sensors of, that's fascinating to think about. So there could be, I mean, not necessarily literally a grid, but just evenly, in some definition of evenly spread out set of objects like these that are just out there. A lot of them. Another possibility is that these are relay stations, you know, for communication. You might think, in order to communicate, you need a huge beacon, a very powerful beacon. But it's not true. Because even on Earth, you know, we have these relay stations. So you have a not so powerful beacon. So it can be heard only out to a limited distance, but then you relay the message. And it could be one of those. Now, after it collided with the solar system, of course, it got a kick. So it's just like a billiard ball, you know, we gave it a kick by colliding with, but most of them are not colliding with stars. And so that's one possibility. Okay. And there should be numerous, lots of them, if that's the case. The other possibility is that it's a probe, you know, that was sent in the direction of the habitable region around the Sun to find out if there is life. Now, it takes tens of thousands of years for such a probe to traverse the solar system from the outer edge of the Oort cloud, all the way to where we are. And, you know, it's a long journey. So when it started the journey from the edge of the solar system to get to us now, you know, we were rather primitive back then, you know, we still didn't have any technology, there was no reason to visit, you know, there was grass around and so forth. But, you know, maybe it is a probe. So you said 10,000 years, that's faster. So it takes that long. Tens of thousands, yes. Tens of thousands of years. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I should say is, you know, it could be just an outer layer of something else, like, you know, something that was ripped apart, like a surface of an instrument. And you can have lots of these pieces, you know, if something breaks, lots of these pieces spread out, like space junk. And, you know, that... It could be just space junk from an alien civilization. Yes. So it's kind of... I should tell you about space junk. Let me... Yes. What do you mean by space junk? So, I think, you know, you might ask, why aren't they looking for us? One possibility is that we are not interesting, like we were talking about ants. Another possibility, you know, if there are millions or billions of years into their technological development, they created their own habitat, their own cocoon, where they feel comfortable, they have everything they need. And it's risky for them to establish communication with other... So they have their own cocoon and they close off. They don't care about anything else. Now, in that case, you might say, oh, so how can we find about them if they are closed off? The answer is they still have to deposit trash, right? That is something from the law of thermodynamics. There must be some production of trash. And, you know, we can still find about them just like investigative journalists going through the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood, you know. You can learn about the private lives of those celebrities by looking at the trash. It's fascinating to think, you know, if we are the ants in this picture, if this thing is a water bottle, or if it's like a smartphone, like where on the spectrum of possible objects of space, because there's a lot of interesting trash. How interesting is this trash? But imagine a caveman seeing a cell phone. The caveman would think, since the caveman played with rocks all of his life, he would say, it's a rock, just like my fellow astronomers said. Yes, exactly. That's brilliantly put. Actually, as a scientist, do you hope it's a water bottle or a smartphone? Because I hope it's even more than a smartphone. I hope that it's something that is really sophisticated. That's funny. See, I'm the opposite. I feel like I hope it's a water bottle because at least we have a hope with our current set of skills to understand it. A caveman has no way of understanding the smartphone. It's like, it will be like, I feel like a caveman has more to learn from the plastic water bottle than they do from the smartphone. But suppose we figure it out. If we, for example, come close to it and learn what it's made of. And I guess a smartphone is full of like thousands of different technologies that we could probably pick at. Do you have a sense of where a hypothesis of where is the cocoon that it might have come from? No, because, okay, so first of all, you know, the solar system, the outermost edge of the solar system is called the Oort cloud. It's a cloud of icy rocks of different sizes that were left over from the formation of the solar system. And it's thought to be roughly a ball or a sphere. And it's halfway, the extent of it is roughly halfway to the nearest star. Okay, so you can imagine each planetary system basically touching the Oort clouds of those stars that are near us are touching each other. Space is full of these billiard balls that are very densely packed. And what that means is any object that you see, irrespective of whether it came from the local standard. So we said that this object is special because it came from a local standard of rest. But even if it didn't, you would never be able to trace where it came from because all these Oort clouds overlap. So if you take some direction in the sky, you will cross as many stars as you have in that direction. Like, there is no way to tell which Oort cloud it came from. So yes, I didn't realize how densely packed everything was from the perspective of the Oort cloud. And that's really interesting. So yeah, it could be nearby, it could be very far away. Yeah, we have no clue. You said cocoon. And you kind of paint, I think in the book, I've read a lot of your articles too on the Scientific American, which are brilliant. So I'm kind of mixing things up in my head a little bit. But what does that cocoon look like? What does a civilization that's able to harness the power of multiple suns, for example, look like? When you imagine possible civilizations that are a million years more advanced than us, what do you think that actually looks like? I think it's very different than we can imagine. By the way, I should start from the point that even biological life, just without technology getting into the game, could look like something we have never seen before. Take, for example, the nearest star, which is Proxima Centauri. It's four and a quarter light years away. So they will know about the results of the 2016 elections only next month, in February 2021. It's very far away. But if you think about it, this star is a dwarf star, and it's twice as cold as the sun. And it emits mostly infrared radiation. So if there are any creatures on the planet close to it that is habitable, which is called Proxima B, there is a planet in the habitable zone, in the zone just at the right distance where, in principle, liquid water can be on the surface. If there are any animals there, they have infrared eyes because our eyes were designed to be sensitive to where most of the sunlight is in the visible range. But Proxima Centauri emits mostly infrared. So in the nearest star system, these animals would be quite strange. They would have eyes that are detectors of infrared, very different from ours. Moreover, this planet, Proxima B, faces the star always with the same side. So it has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And obviously the creatures that would evolve on the permanent day side, which is much warmer, would be quite different than those on the permanent night side. Between them, there would be a permanent sunset strip. And my daughters said that that's the best opportunity for high value real estate because you will see the sunset throughout your life, right? The sun never sets on this trip. So these worlds are out of our imagination. Just even the individual creatures, the sensor suite that they're operating with might be very different. Very different. So I think when we see something like that, we would be shocked not to speak about seeing technology. So I don't even dare to imagine. And I think obviously we can bury our head in the sand and say, it's never aliens, like many of my colleagues say. And it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you never look, you will never find. If you're not ready to find wonderful things, you will never discover them. And the other thing I would like to say is reality doesn't care whether you ignore it or not. You can ignore reality, but it's still there. So we can all agree, based on Twitter, that aliens don't exist. That Umuamua was a rock. We can all agree. And you will get a lot of likes, we will have a big crowd of supporters, and everyone will be happy and give each other awards and honors and so forth. But Umuamua might still be an alien artifact. Who cares what humans agree on? There is a reality out there. And we have to be modest enough to recognize that we should make our statements based on evidence. Science is not about ourselves. It's not about glorifying our image. It's not about getting honors, prizes. A lot of the academic activity is geared towards creating your echo chamber where you have students, postdocs, repeating your mantras so that your voice is heard loudly so that you can get more honors, prizes, recognition. That's not the purpose of science. The purpose is to figure out what nature is. And in the process of doing that, it's a learning experience. You make mistakes. Einstein made three mistakes at the end of his career. He argued that in the 1930s, he argued that black holes don't exist, gravitational waves don't exist, and quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. And all three turned out to be wrong. So the point is that if you work at the frontier, then you make mistakes. It's inevitable because you can't tell what is true or not. And avoiding making mistakes in order to preserve your image makes you extremely boring. You will get a prize, but you will be a boring scientist because you will keep repeating things we already know. If you want to make progress, if you want to innovate, you have to take risks and you have to look at the evidence. It's a dialogue with nature. You don't know the truth in advance. You let nature tell you, educate you, and then you realize that what you thought before is incorrect. And a lot of my colleagues prefer to be in a state where they have a monologue. You know, if you look at these people that work on string theory, they have a monologue. They know what, and in fact, their monologue is centered on anti de Sitter space, which we don't live in now. To me, it's just like the Olympics. You define a hundred meters and you say, whoever runs these hundred meters is the best athlete, the fastest. And it's completely arbitrary. You could have decided it would be 50 meters or 20 meters. Who cares? You just measure the ability of people this way. So you define anti de Sitter space as a space where you do your mathematical gymnastics, and then you find who can do it the best. And you give jobs based on that. You give prizes. But as we said before, you know, nature doesn't care about, you know, the prizes that you give to each other. It cares, you know, it has its own reality and we should figure it out. And it's not about us. The scientific activity is about figuring out nature. And sometimes we may be wrong. Our image will not be preserved. But that's the fun, you know. Kids explore the world out of curiosity. And I always want to maintain my childhood curiosity. And I don't care about the labels that I have. In fact, having tenure is exactly the opportunity to behave like a child because you can make mistakes. And I was asked by the Harvard Gazette, you know, the Pravda of Harvard, what is the one thing that you would like to change about the world? And I said, I would like my colleagues to behave more like kids. That's the one thing I would like them to do. Because something bad happens to these kids when they become tenured professors. They start to worry about their ego and about themselves more than about the purpose of science, which is, you know, curiosity driven, figuring out from evidence. Evidence is the key. So when an object shows anomalies like Oumuamua, what's the problem discussing, you know, whether it's artificial or not? You know, so there was, I should tell you, there was a mainstream paper in Nature published saying it must be natural. That's it. It's unusual, but it must be natural, period. And then at the same time, some other mainstream scientists tried to explain the properties. And they came up with interpretations like it's a dust bunny, you know, the kind that you find in a household, a collection of dust particles pushed by sunlight, something we have never seen before. Or it's a hydrogen iceberg. It actually evaporates like a comet, but hydrogen is transparent. You don't see it. And that's why we don't see the cometary tail. Again, we have never seen something like that. In both cases, the objects would not survive the long journey. We discussed it in a paper that I wrote afterwards. But my point is, those that tried to explain the unusual properties went into great length at discussing things that we have never seen before. Okay? So even when you think about a natural origin, you have to come up with scenarios of things that were never seen before. And by the way, they look less plausible to me personally. But my point is, if we discuss things that were never seen before, why not discuss, why not contemplate an artificial origin? What's the problem? Why do people have this pushback? You know, I worked on dark matter, and we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. It's called dark matter. It's just an acronym because we have no clue. We simply don't know. So it could be all kinds of particles. And over the years, people suggested weakly interacting massive particles, axions, all kinds of particles. And experiments were made. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They put upper limits, constraints that ruled out many of the possibilities that were proposed as natural initially. The mainstream community regarded it as a mainstream activity to search the nature of the dark matter. And nobody complained that it's speculative to consider weakly interacting massive particles. Now, I ask you, why is it speculative to consider extraterrestrial technologies? We have a proof that it exists here on Earth. We also know that the conditions of Earth are reproduced in billions of systems throughout the Milky Way galaxy. So what's more conservative than to say, if you arrange for similar conditions, you get the same outcome. How can you imagine this to be speculative? It's not speculative at all. And nevertheless, it's regarded the periphery. And at the same time, you have physicists, theoretical physicists, working on extra dimensions, super symmetry, super string theory, the multiverse. Maybe we live in a simulation. All of these ideas that have no grounding in reality, some of which sound to me like, you know, just like what someone would say. Science fiction, basically. Because you have no way to test it, you know, through experiments. And experiments really are key. It's not just the nuance. You say, okay, forget about experiments. As some philosophers try to say, you know, if there is a consensus, what's the problem? The point is, it's key. Then that's what Galileo found. It's key to have feedback from reality. You know, you can think that you have a billion dollars or that you are more rich than, you know, Elon Musk. That's fine. You can feel very happy about it. You can talk about it with your friends and all of you will be happy and think about what you can do with the money. Then you go to an ATM machine and you make an experiment. You check how much money you have in your checking account. And if it turns out that, you know, you don't have much, you can't materialize your dreams. Okay. So you realize, you have a reality check. And my point is, without experiments giving you a reality check, without the ATM machine showing you whether your ideas are bankrupt or not, without putting skin in the game. And by skin in the game, I mean, don't just talk about theoretical ideas. Make them testable. If you don't make them testable, they're worthless. They're just like theology that is not testable. By the way, theology has some tests. Let me give you three examples. It turns out that my book already inspired a PhD student at Harvard in the English department to pursue a PhD in that direction. And she invited me to the PhD exam a couple of months ago. And in the exam, one of the examiners, a professor, asked her, do you know why Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake? And she said, no, I think it's because he was an obnoxious guy and irritated a lot of people, which is true. But the professor said, no, it's because Giordano Bruno said that other stars are just like the sun, and they could have a planet like the Earth around them that could host life. And that was offensive to the church. Why was it offensive? Because there is the possibility that this life sinned. And if that life sinned on planets around other stars, it should have been saved by Christ. And then you need multiple copies of Christ. And that's unacceptable. How can you have duplicates of Christ? And so they burned the guy. I'm just like loading this all in because that's kind of brilliant. So he was actually already, it's not just about the stars, it's anticipating that there could be other life forms. Like why, if this star, if there's other stars, why would it be special? Why would our star be special? He was making the right argument. And he would just follow that all along to say like, there should be other Earth like places, there should be other life forms. And then there needs to be copies of Christ. Yeah, so that was offensive. So I said to that professor, I said, great, I wanted to introduce some scientific tone to the discussion. And I said, this is great because now you basically laid the foundation for an experimental test of this theology. What is the test? We now know that other stars are like the sun and we know they have planets like the Earth around them. So suppose we find life there and we figure out that they sinned, then we ask them, did you witness Christ? And if they say no, it means that this theology is ruled out. So there is an experimental test. So this is experimental test number one. Another experimental test, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, Abraham was heard the voice, the voice of God to sacrifice his son, right? Only son. And that's what the story says. Now, suppose Abraham, my name, by the way, had a voice memo up on his cell phone. He could have pressed this up and recorded the voice of God. And that would have been experimental evidence that God exists, right? Fortunately, he didn't, but it's an experimental test, right? There is a third example I should tell, and that is Elie Wiesel attributed this story to Martin Buber, but it's not clear whether it's true or not. At any event, the story goes that Martin Buber, you know, he was a philosopher and he said, you know, the Christians, you know, the Messiah arrived already and will come back again in the future. The Jews argue the Messiah never came and will arrive in the future. So he said, why argue? Both sides agree that the Messiah will arrive in the future. When the Messiah arrives, we can ask whether he or she will arrive in the future. When the Messiah arrives, we can ask whether he or she came before, you know, like visited us and then figure it out. And one side. So again, experimental test of a theology. So even theology, if it puts a skin in the game, you know, if it makes a prediction, could be tested, right? So why can't string theories test themselves? Or why can't, you know, even cosmic inflation? That's a model that, you know, one of the inventors from MIT, Alan Guth, argues that it's not falsifiable. My point is a theory that cannot be falsified is not helpful because it means that you can't make progress. You cannot improve your understanding of nature. The only way for us to learn about nature is by making hypotheses that are testable, doing the experiments and learning whether we are correct or not. So B, and coupled that with a curiosity and open mindedness that allows us to explore all kinds of possible hypotheses, but always the pursuit of those, the scientific rigor around those hypotheses is ultimately get evidence. Knowledge of what nature is should be a dialogue with nature. Yes. Rather than a monologue. Monologue, beautifully put. Can we talk a little bit about the Drake equation? Another framework from which to have this kind of discussion about possible civilizations out there. So let me ask, within the context of the Drake equation or maybe bigger, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there? Well, it's hard to tell because the Drake equation is again quantifying our ignorance. It's just a set of factors. The only one that we know, or actually two that we know quite well is the rate of star formation in the Milky Way galaxy, which we measured by now, and the frequency of planets like the Earth around stars and at the right distance to have life. But other than that, there are lots of implicit assumptions about all the other factors that will enable us to detect the signal. Now, I should say the Drake equation has a very limited validity just for signals from civilizations that are transmitting at the time that you're observing them. However, we can do much better than that. We can look for artifacts that they left behind. Even if they are dead, you can look for industrial pollution in the atmosphere of planets. Why do I bring this up? Why do I bring this up? Again, to show you the conservatism of the mainstream in astronomy. And by the way, I have leadership positions. I was chair of the astronomy department for nine years, the longest serving chair at Harvard. And I'm the chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Academies. It's a primary board. And I'm director of two centers at Harvard and so forth. So I do represent the community in various ways. But at the same time, I'm a little bit disappointed by the conservatism that people have. And so let me give you an illustration of that. So the astronomy community actually is going right now through the process of defining its goals for the next decade. And there are proposals for telescopes that would cost billions of dollars and whose goal is to find evidence for oxygen in the atmosphere of planets around other stars, with the idea that this would be a marker, a signature of life. Now, the problem with that is Earth didn't have much oxygen in its atmosphere for the first two billion years. Roughly half of its life, it didn't have much oxygen. But it had life. It had microbial life. It's not it's not clear yet as of yet what the origin is for the rise in the oxygen level after two billion years, about 2.4 billion years ago. But we know that a planet can have life without oxygen in the atmosphere because Earth did it. The second problem with this approach is that you can have oxygen from natural processes. You can break water molecules and make oxygen. So even if you find it, it will never tell you that for sure life exists there. And so even with these billions of dollars, the mainstream community will never be confident whether there is life. Now, how can it be confident? There is actually a way. If instead of looking with the same instruments, if you look for molecules that indicate industrial pollution, for example, CFCs that are produced by refrigerating systems or industries here on Earth, that they do the ozone layer, you can search for that. And I wrote a paper five years ago suggesting that. Now, what's the problem? You can just tell NASA, I want to build this telescope to search for oxygen, but also for industrial pollution. Nobody would say that because it sounds like on the periphery of the field. And I ask you, why would? Hilarious. Because that's exactly, I mean, that would be saying is quite brilliant. I mean, because it's a really strong signal. And if life, if there's alien civilizations out there, then they're probably going to be many of them. And they're probably going to be more advanced than us. And they're probably going to have something like industrial pollution, which would be a much stronger signal than some basic gas, which could have a lot of different explanations. So like something like oxygen or, I mean, we could talk about signs of life on Venus and so on. But if you want a strong signal, it would be pollution. I love how garbage is. No, but the pollution, you have to understand, we think of pollution as a problem, but on a planet that was too cold, for example, to have a comfortable life on it, you can imagine terraforming it and putting a blanket of polluting gases such that it will be warmer. And that would be a positive change. So if an industrial or a technological civilization wants to terraform a planet that otherwise is too cold for them, they will do it. So what's the problem of defining it as a search goal using the same technologies? The problem is that there is a taboo. We're not supposed to discuss extraterrestrial intelligence. There is no funding for this subject, not much, very little. And young people, because of the bullying on Twitter, you know, all the social media and elsewhere, young people with talent that are curious about these questions do not enter this field of study. And obviously, if you step on the grass, it will never grow, right? So if you don't give funding, obviously, you know, the mainstream community says, look, nothing was discovered so far. Obviously, nothing would be discovered. If talented people go to other districts, you never search for it well enough, you will never find anything. I mean, look at gravitational wave astrophysics. It's a completely new window into the universe, pioneered by Ray Weiss at MIT. And at first, it was ridiculed. And thanks to some administrators at the National Science Foundation, it received funding, despite the fact that the mainstream of the astronomy community was very resistant to it. And now it's considered a frontier. So all these people that I remember as a young postdoc, these people that bashed this field and said bad things about people, you know, said nothing will come out of it. Now they say, oh, yeah, of course, you know, the Nobel Prize was given to the LIGO collaboration. Of course, now they are supportive of it. But my point is, if you suppress innovation early on, there are lots of missed opportunities. The discovery of exoplanets is one example. You know, in 1952, there was an astronomer called the name Otto Struve. And he wrote a paper saying, why don't we search for Jupiter like planets close to their host star? Because if they're close enough, they would move the star back and forth, and we can detect the signal. And so astronomers on time allocation committees of telescopes for 40 years argued, this is not possible because we know why Jupiter resides so far from the Sun. You cannot have Jupiter so close because there is this region where ice forms far from the Sun. And beyond that region is where Jupiter like planets can form. There was a theory behind it which ended up being wrong by today's standards. But anyway, they did not give time on telescopes to search for such systems until the first system was discovered four decades after Otto Struve's paper. And the Nobel Prize was awarded to that just a couple of years ago. And then you ask yourself, okay, so science still made progress. What's the problem? The problem is that this baby came out barely, and there was a delay of four decades. So the progress was delayed. And I wonder how many babies were not born because of this resistance. So there must be ideas that are as good as this one that were suppressed because they were bullied, because people ridiculed them, that were actually good ideas. And these are missed opportunities, babies that were never born. And I'm willing to push this frontier of the search for technologies or technological signatures of other civilizations. Because when I was young, I was in the military in Israel. It's obligatory to serve. And there was this saying that one of the soldiers sometimes has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can go through. And I'm willing to suffer the pain so that younger people in the future will be able to speak freely about the possibility that some of the anomalies we find in the sky are due to technological signatures. And it's quite obvious. This is why I like the folks in artificial intelligence space, Elon Musk and a few others speak about this. And they look at the long arc. They say like, what, you know, this kind of, you know, you can call it like first principles thinking, or you can call it anything really is like, if we just zoom out from our current bickering and our current, like discussions in the what science is doing, look at the long arc of the trajectory we're headed at. Which questions are obviously fundamental to science? And it should be asked, and which is the space of hypothesis we should be exploring? And like exoplanets is a really good example of one that was like an obvious one. I recently talked to Sarah Seager, and it was very taboo when she was starting out to work on an exoplanet. And that was even in the 90s. And like it's obvious should not be a taboo subject. And to me, I mean, I'm probably ignorant, but to me, exoplanets seems like it's ridiculous that that would ever be a taboo subject to not fund, to not explore. That's very, but even for her, it's now taboo to say, like what, you know, to look for industrial pollution, right? Right. And I find that ridiculous. I'll tell you why. She can't take the next step. It's ridiculous for another reason. Not because of just the scientific benefits that we might have by exploring it, but because the public cares about these questions. And the public funds science. So how dare the scientists shy away from addressing these questions, if they have the technology to do it. It's like saying, I don't want to look through Galileo's telescope. It's exactly the same. You have the technology to explore this question, to find the evidence and you shy away from it. You might ask, why do people shy away from it? And perhaps it's because of the fact that there is science fiction. I'm not a fan of science fiction, because it has an element to it that violates the laws of physics in many of the books and the films. And I cannot enjoy these things when I see the laws of physics violated. But who cares that the, you know, the fact that there is science fiction. I mean, if you have the scientific methodology to address the same subject, I don't care that other people, you know, spoke nonsense about this subject or said things that make no sense. Who cares? You do your scientific work, just like you explore the dark matter. You explore the possibility that umuamua is an artifact. You just look for evidence and try to deduce what it means. And I have no problem with doing that. To me, it sounds like any other scientific question that we have. And given the public's interest, we have an obligation to do that. By the way, science to me is not an occupation of the elite. It doesn't allow me to feel superior to other humans that are unable to understand the math. To me, it's a way of life. You know, if there is a problem in the faucet or in the pipe at home, I try to figure out what the problem is. And with a plumber, we figure it out and we look at the clues. And the same thing in science. You look at the evidence, you try to figure out what it means. It's common sense in a way. And it shouldn't be regarded as something removed from the public. It should be a reflection of the public's interest. And I think it's actually a crime to resist the public. If the public says, I care about this, and you say, no, no, no, that's not sophisticated enough for me. I want to do intellectual gymnastics on anti the sitter space. To me, that's a crime. Yes, I 100% agree. So it's hilarious that the very, not hilarious, it's sad, that people who are trained in the scientific community to have the tools to explore this world, to be children, to be the most effective at being children, are the ones that resist being children the most. But there is a large number of people that embrace the childlike wonder about the world and may not necessarily have the tools to do it. That's the more general public. And so, I wonder if I could ask you and talk to you a little bit about UFO sightings. That there's people, quote unquote believers, there's hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings. And I've consumed some of the things that people have said about it. And one thing I really like about it is how excited they are by the possibility. It's almost like this childlike wonder about the world out there. It's not a fear, it's an excitement. Do you think, because we're talking about this possibly extraterrestrial object that visited, that flew by Earth, do you think it's possible that out of those hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, one is an actual, one or some number is an actual sighting of a nonhuman, some alien technology. And that we're not, we did not, we're too close minded to look and to see. I think to answer this question, we need better evidence. My starting point, as I said, out of modesty is that we are not particularly interesting. And therefore I would be hard pressed to imagine that someone wants to really spy on us. So I would think, as a starting point, that we don't deserve attention and we shouldn't expect someone, but who knows. Now, the problem that I have with UFO sighting reports is that 50 years ago, there were some reports of fuzzy images, saucer like things. By now, our technologies are much better. Our cameras are much more sensitive. These fuzzy images should have turned into crisp, clear images of things that we are confident about. And they haven't turned that way. It's always on the border line of believability. And because of that, I believe that it might be most likely artifacts of our instruments or some natural phenomena that we are unable to understand. Now, of course, the reason you must examine those, if, for example, pilots report about them or the military finds evidence for them, is because it may pose a national security threat. If another country has technologies that we don't know about and they're spying on us, we need to know about it. And therefore we should examine everything that looks unusual. But to associate it with an alien life is a little too far for me until we have evidence that stands up to the level of scientific credence, that we are 100% sure that from multiple detectors and through a scientific process. Now, again, if the scientific community shies away from these reports, we will never have that. It's like saying, I don't want to take photographs of something because I know what it is, then you will never know what it is. But I think if some scientist, if grants, let's put it this way, if funding will be given to scientists to follow on some of these reports and use scientific instruments that are capable of detecting those sightings with much better resolution, with much better information, that would be great because it will clarify the matter. These are not, as you said, hundreds of thousands, these are not once in a lifetime events. So it's possible to take scientific instrumentation and explore, go to the ocean where someone reported that there are frequent events that are unusual and check it out, do a scientific experiment. Why only do experiments deep into the ocean and look at the oceanography or do other things. We can do scientific investigation of these sightings and figure out what they mean. I'm very much in favor of that, but until we have the evidence, I would be doubtful as to what they actually mean. Yeah, we'll have to be humble and acknowledge that we're not that interesting. It's kind of, you're making me realize that because it's so taboo, that the people that have the equipment, uh, meaning, and we're not just talking, everybody has cameras now, but to have a large scale, like a sensor network that collects data that regularly collects, just like we look at the weather, we're collecting information and then we can then access that information when there is reports and like have it not be a taboo thing where there's like millions or billions of dollars or billions of dollars funding this effort that by the way, inspires millions of people. This is exactly what you're talking about. It's like the scientific community is afraid of a topic that inspires millions of people. It's absurd. But if you put blinders on your eyes, you don't see it. Right. I should say that we do have meteors that we see. These are rocks that by chance happen to collide with the earth and they, if they're small, they burn up in the atmosphere. But if they're big enough, tens of meters or more, hundreds of meters, the outer layer burns up, but then the core of the object makes it through. And this is our chance of putting our hands around an object if this meteor came from interstellar space. So one path of discovery is to search for interstellar meteors. And with a student of mine, we actually looked through the record and we thought that we found one example of a meteor that was reported that might have come from interstellar space. And then another approach is, for example, to look at the moon. The moon is different from the earth in the sense that it doesn't have an atmosphere. So objects do not burn up on their way to it. It's sort of like a museum. It collects everything. Of rocks from out there in deep space. Yeah. And there is no geological activity on the moon. So on earth, every hundred million years, you know, we could have had computer terminals on earth that could have been a civilization like ours with electronic equipment. Yes. More than a hundred million years ago. And it's completely lost. You cannot excavate and find it, evidence for it, because in archaeological digs, because the earth is being mixed on these timescales. And everything that was on the surface more than a hundred million years ago is buried deep inside the earth right now because of geological activity. Fascinating to think about, by the way. Yeah. But on the moon, this doesn't happen. The only thing that happens on the moon is you have objects impacting the moon and they go 10 meters deep. So they produce some dust, but the moon keeps everything. It's like a museum. It keeps everything on the surface. So if we go to the moon, I would highly recommend regarding it as an archaeological site. Yes. And looking for objects that are strange. Maybe it collected some trash, you know, from interstellar space. If we could just linger on the Drake equation for a little bit. We kind of talked about there's a lot of uncertainty in the parameters and the Drake equation itself is very limited. But I think the parameters are interesting in themselves, even if it's limited, because I think each one is within the reach of science, right? Did you get the evidence for it? I mean, a few I find really interesting, could be interesting to get your comment on. So the one with the most variance, I would say, from my perspective, is the length that civilizations last. However you define it. In the Drake equation, it's the length of how long you're communicating. Yeah, transmitting. Transmitting. Just like you said, that's a wrong way to think about it, because we can be detecting some other outputs of the civilizations, etc. But if we just define broadly how long those civilizations last, do you have a sense of how long they might last? Like what are the great filters that might destroy civilizations that we should be thinking about? And how can science give us more hints on this topic? So I, as I mentioned before, operate by the Copernican principle, meaning that we are not special. We don't live in a special place and not in a special time. And by the way, it's just modesty encapsulated in scientific terms, right? You're saying, I'm not special, you know, I find conditions here, they exist everywhere. So if you adopt the Copernican principle, you basically say, our civilization transmitted radio signals for a hundred years, roughly, so probably it would last another hundred or a few hundred and that's it. Because we don't live at a special time. So that's, you know, well, of course, if we get our act together and we somehow start to cooperate rather than fighting each other, killing each other, you know, wasting a lot of resources on things that would destroy our planet, maybe we can lengthen that period if we get smarter. But the most natural assumption is to say that we will live into the future as much as we lived from the time that we start to develop the means for our own destruction, the technologies we have, which is quite pessimistic, I must say. So several centuries, that's what I would give, unless we get our act, unless we become more intelligent than the newspapers report every day. Okay. Point number one. Second, and by the way, this is relevant, I should say, because there was a report about perhaps a radio signal detected from Proxima Centauri. What do you make of that signal? Oh, I think it's some Australian guy with a cell phone next to the observatory or something like that, because it was the Parkes Telescope in Australia. Okay. So it's human created noise. Yeah. Which is always the worry because actually the same observatory, the Parkes Observatory, detected a couple of years ago some signal and then they realized that it comes back at lunchtime. Yes. And they said, okay, what could it be? And then they figured out that it must be the microwave oven in the observatory because someone was opening it before it finished and it was creating this radio signal that they detected with a telescope every lunchtime. So just a cautionary remark. But the reason I think it's human made, without getting to the technical details, is because of this very short window by which we were transmitting radio signals out of the lifetime of the Earth. As I said, 100 years out of four and a half billion years that the Earth existed. So what's the chance that another civilization, a twin civilization of ours, is transmitting radio signals exactly at the time that we are looking with our radio telescopes? 10 to the minus 7. And the other argument I have is that they detected it in a very narrow band of frequencies and that makes it cannot be through natural processes, very narrow band, just like some radio transmissions that we produce. But if it were to come from the habitable zone, from a transmitter on the surface of Proxima b, this is the planet that orbits Proxima Centauri, then I calculated that the frequency would drift through the Doppler effect. Just like when you hear a siren on the street, when the car approaches you, it has a different pitch than when it recedes away from you, that's the Doppler effect. And when the planet orbits the star, Proxima Centauri, you would see or detect a different frequency when the planet approaches us as compared to when it recedes. So there should be a frequency drift just because of the motion of the planet. And I calculated that it must be much bigger than observed. So it cannot just be a transmitter sitting on the planet and sending in our direction a radio signal unless they want to cancel the Doppler effect. But then they need to know about us because in a different direction, it will not be cancelled. Only in our direction, they can cancel it perfectly. So there is this direction of Proxima Centauri, but I have a problem imagining a transmitter on the surface of a planet in the habitable zone emitting it. But my main issue is really with the likelihood, given what we know about ourselves. Right. In terms of the duration of the civilization. The Copernican principle. Yeah. So nevertheless, this particular signal is likely to be a human interference, perhaps. But do you find Proxima be interesting? Or the more general question is, do you think we humans will venture out into outside our solar system and potentially colonize other habitable planets? Actually, I am involved in a project whose goal is to develop the technology that would allow us to leave the solar system and visit the nearest stars. And that is called the Star Shot. In 2015, May 2015, an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, Yuri Milner, came to my office at Harvard and said, would you be interested in leading a project that would do that in our lifetime? Because as we discussed before, to traverse those distances with existing rockets would take tens of thousands of years. And that's too long. For example, to get to Proxima Centauri with the kind of spacecrafts that we already sent, like New Horizons or Voyager 1, Voyager 2, you needed to send them when the first humans left Africa, so that they would arrive there now. And that's a long time to wait. So Yuri wanted to do it within a lifetime, 10, 20 years, meaning it has to move at a fraction of the speed of light. So can we send a spacecraft that would be moving at the fraction of the speed of light? And I said, let me look into that for six months. And with my students and postdocs, we arrived to the conclusion that the only technology that can do that is the light sail technology, where you basically produce a very powerful laser beam on Earth. So you can collect sunlight with photovoltaic cells or whatever and then convert it into stored energy and then produce a very powerful laser beam that is 100 gigawatts and focus it on a sail in space that is roughly the size of a person, a couple of meters or a few meters, that weighs only a gram or a few grams, very thin. And through the math, you can show that you can propel such a sail, if you shine on it for a few minutes, it will traverse the distance that is five times the distance to the moon, and it will get to a fifth of the speed of light. Sounds crazy. But I've talked to a bunch of people and they're like, I know it sounds crazy, but it's actually, it will work. This is one of those, it's beautiful. I mean, this is science. And the point is, people didn't get excited about space since the Apollo era. And it's about time, you know, for us to go into space. A couple of months ago, I was asked to participate in a debate organized by IBM and Bloomberg News. And the discussion centered on the question, is the space race between the US and China good for humanity? Oh, interesting. And all the other debaters were worried about the military threats. And I just couldn't understand what they're talking about, because military threats come from hovering above the surface of the Earth, right? And we live on a two dimensional surface, we live on the surface of the Earth. But space is all about the third dimension, getting far from Earth. So if you go to Mars, or you go to a star, another star, there is no military threat. What are we talking about? Space is all about, you know, feeling that, you know, we are one civilization, in fact, not fighting each other, just going far, and having aspirations for something that goes beyond military threats. So why would we be worried that the space race will lead? That's actually brilliant. I didn't, you know, there's something in our discourse about it, the space race is sometimes made synonymous with like the Cold War or something like that. Right. Or with wars. But really, yeah, there was a lot of ego tied up in that. I remember, I mean, it's still to this day, there's a lot of pride that Russians, Soviet Union was the first to space. And there's a lot of pride in the American side that was the first on the moon. But yeah, you're exactly right. Like, there's no aggression, there's no wars. And beyond that, if you think about the global economy, right now, there is a commercial interest. That's why Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are interested about, you know, Mars and so on. There is a commercial interest, which is international. It's driven by money, not by pride. And, you know, nations can sign treaties. First of all, there are lots of treaties that were signed even before the First World War and the Second World War and the World War took place. So who cares, you know, like humans, treaties do not safeguard anything, you know. But beyond that, even if nations sign treaties about space exploration, you might still find commercial entities that will find a way to get their launches. And, you know, so I think we should rethink space. It has nothing to do with national pride. Once again, nothing to do with our egos. It's about exploration. And the biggest problem, I think, in human history is that humans tend to think about egos and about their own personal image rather than, look at the big picture, you know. We will not be around for long. We are just occupying a small space right now. Now, let's move out of this, you know, the way that Oscar Wilde said, I think is the best. He said, all of us are in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars. Yeah, and the more of us are looking at the stars, the likelier we are to, for this thing, this little experiment we have going on to last a while as opposed to end too quickly. I mean, it's not just about science of being humble. It's about the survival of the human species as being humble. To me, it's incredibly inspiring, the Starshot project of, I mean, there's something magical about being able to go to another habitable planet and take a picture even. I mean, within our lifetime, I mean, that, with crazy technology too, which is... I should tell you how it was conceived. So, I was at the time, so after six months passed, after the visit of Yuri Miller, I was, usually I go in December during the winter break, I go to Israel. I used to go to see my family and I get a phone call just before the weekend started. I get a phone call, Yuri would like you to present your concept in two weeks at his home. And I said, well, thank you for letting me know because I'm actually out of the door of the hotel to go to a goat farm in the Negev, in the southern part of Israel, because my wife wanted to have to go to a place that is removed from civilization, so to speak. So, we went to that goat farm and I need to make the presentation and there was no internet connectivity except in the office of the goat farm. So, the following morning at 6am, I sit with my back to the office of that goat farm, looking at goats that were newly born and typing into my laptop, the presentation, the PowerPoint presentation about our ambitions for visiting the nearest star. And that was very surreal to me. Like our origins in many ways, this very primitive origins and our dreams of looking out that is brilliant. So that is incredibly inspiring to me, but it's also inspiring of putting humans onto other moons or planets. I still find going to the moon really exciting. I don't know, maybe I'm just a sucker for it, but it's really exciting. And Mars, which is a new place, a new planet, another planet that might have life. I mean, there's something magical to that or some traces of previous life. You might think that humans cannot really survive and there are risks by going there. But my point is, we started from Africa and we got to apartment buildings in Manhattan, right? It's a very different environment from the jungles to live in an apartment building in a small cubicle. Yes. And it took tens of thousands of years, but humans adapted, right? So why couldn't humans also make the leap and adapt to a habitat in space? Now you can build a platform that would look like an apartment building in the Bronx or somewhere, but have inside of it everything that humans need. And just like the space station, but bigger. And it will be a platform in space. And the advantage of that is if something bad happens on Earth, you have that complex where humans live. And you can also move it back and forth depending on how bright the sun gets. Because within a billion years, the sun would be too hot and it will boil off all the oceans on Earth. So we cannot stay here for more than a billion years. That's for sure. Yes. So that's a billion years from now. I prefer shorter term deadlines. And so there's a lot of threats that we're facing currently. Do you find it exciting the possibility of landing on Mars and starting little like building a Manhattan style apartment building on Mars and humans occupying it? Do you think from a scientific or an engineering perspective, that's a worthy pursuit? I think it's worthy. But the real issue that is often underplayed is the risk to the human body from cosmic rays. These are energetic particles and we are protected from them by the magnetic field around the Earth that blocks them. But if you go to Mars, where there is no such magnetic field to block them, then, you know, a significant fraction of the brain cells in your head will be damaged within a year. And the consequences of that are not clear. I mean, it's quite possible that humans cannot really survive on the surface. Now, it may mean that we need to dig tunnels, go underground or create some protection. This is something that can be engineered. Yes. And, you know, we can start from the Moon and then move to Mars. That would be a natural progression. But it's a big issue that needs to be dealt with. I don't think, you know, it's a showstopper. I think we can overcome it. But, you know, just like anything in science and technology, you have to work on it for a while, figure out solutions. But it's not as rosy as Elon Musk talks about. I mean, Elon Musk can obviously be optimistic. I think eventually it will boil down to figuring out how to cope with this risk, the health risk. Yeah, I mean, in defense of optimism, I find that there's at least a correlation, if not their best friends, is optimism and open mindedness. It's a necessary precondition to try crazy things. And in that sense, the sense I have about going to Mars, if we use today's logic of what kind of benefits we'll get from that, we're never going to go. And like most decisions we make in life, most decisions we've made as a human species are irrational if you look at just today. But if you look at the long arc and the possibilities that it might bring, just like humans, Europe and destroyed everybody. But it was a commercial interest that drove that for trade. And, you know, it might happen again, in this context, you have people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk that are commercially driven to go to space. But it doesn't mean that what we will ultimately find is not new worlds that have nothing, you know, have much more to offer than just commercial interest. And as a side effect, almost. Yeah, yeah. And then that's why I think, you know, we should be open minded and explore. And, however, at the same time, because of the reasons you pointed out, I'm not optimistic that we will survive more than a few centuries into the future, because people do not think long term. And that means that we will only survive for the short term. I don't know if you have thoughts about this, but what are the things that worry you the most about, from the great perspective of the universe, which is the great filters that destroys intelligent civilizations, but for our own species here? Like, what are the things that worry you the most? Yeah, the thing that worries me the most is that people pay attention to how many likes they have on Twitter. And rather than, you know, basketball coaches tell the team players, keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience. The problem is we keep our eyes on the audience most of the time. Let's keep our eyes on the ball. And what does that mean? First of all, in the context of science, it means pay attention to the evidence. When the evidence looks strange, then we should figure it out. You know, I went to a seminar about Umuamua at Harvard, and a colleague of mine that is mainstream, conservative, would never say anything that would deviate from what everyone else is thinking, said to me after the seminar, I wish this object never existed. Now, to me, I mean, I just couldn't hear that. What do you mean, nature is whatever it is, you have to pay attention to it. You cannot say, you know, you cannot bury your head in this. I mean, you should bless nature for giving you clues about things that you haven't expected. Yes. And I think that's the biggest fault that we are looking for confirmations of things we already know, so that we can maintain our pride that we already knew it, and maintain our image, not make mistakes, because we already knew it, therefore we expected the right thing. Yes. But science is a learning experience, and sometimes you're wrong. And let's learn from those mistakes. And what's the problem about that? Why do we have to get, you know, prizes, and why do we get to be honored and maintain our image, when the actual objective of science is learning about nature? And like you've talked about, anomalies in this case are actually are not things that are unfortunate and to be ignored are, in fact, gifts and should be the focus of science. Exactly, because that's the way for us to improve our understanding. If you look at quantum mechanics, nobody dreamed about it. And it was revolutionary, and we still don't fully understand it. It's a pain for us to figure out. So I understand from the perspective that's holding our science back, why do you have a sense that that's also something that might be a problem for us in terms of the survival of human civilization? Because when you look at society, it operates by the same principles. People look for affirmation by groups, and they, you know, people segregate into herds that think like them, especially these days when social media is so strong, you can find your support group. And if you don't look for evidence for what you're saying, you can say crazy things as long as there are enough people supporting what you say. You can even have your newspapers, you can have everything to support your view, and then, you know, bad things will happen to society. Because we're detaching ourselves from reality. And if we detach ourselves from reality, all the destructive things that naturally can occur in the real world, whether from nuclear weapons, all the kinds of threats that we're facing, even we're living through a pandemic, the supposed, you know, a much, much worse pandemic could happen. And then we could sadly, like we did this one, politicize it in some kind of way and have bickering in the space of Twitter and politics, as opposed to there's an actual thing that can destroy the human species. Exactly. So the only way for us to maintain, to stay modest and learn about what really happens is by looking for evidence. Again, I'm saying, it's not about ourself, you know, it's about figuring out what's around us. And if you close yourself by surrounding yourself with people that are like minded, that refuse to look at the evidence, you can do bad things. And throughout human history, that's the origin of all the bad things that happen. Yes. And I think it's a key. It's a key to be modest and to look at evidence. And it's not a nuance. Now, you might say, Oh, okay, the uneducated person might operate. No, it's the scientific community operates this way. My problem is not with people that don't have an academic pedigree. It's included everywhere in society. On the topic of the discovery of evidence of alien civilizations, which is something you touch on in your book, what that idea would do to societies, to the human psyche and in general, do you think, and you talk about the, I still have trouble pronouncing, but a Muamua wager, right? What do you think is, can you explain it? And what do you think in general is the effect that such knowledge might have on human civilization? Right. So Pascal had this wager about God. And by the way, there are interesting connections between theology and the search for extraterrestrial life. It's possible that we were planted on this planet by another civilization. We attribute to God powers that belong really to the technological civilization. But putting that aside, Pascal basically said, there are two possibilities, there are two possibilities, either God exists or not. And if God exists, the consequences are quite significant. And therefore, we should consider that possibility differently than equal weight to both possibilities. And I suggest that we do the same with Muamua or other technological signatures, that we keep in mind the consequences and therefore pay more attention to that possibility. Now, some people say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My point is that the term extraordinary is really subjective. For one person, a black hole is extraordinary. For another, it's just a consequence of Einstein's theory of gravity. It's nothing extraordinary. The same about the type of dark matter, anything. So we should leave the extraordinary part of that sentence. Just keep evidence, okay? So let's be guided by evidence. And even if we have extraordinary claims, let's not dismiss them because the evidence is not extraordinary enough. Because if we have an image of something and it looks really strange and we say, oh, the image is not sufficiently sharp, therefore, we should not even pay attention to this image or not even consider. I think that's a mistake. What we should do is say, look, there is some evidence for something unusual. Let's try and build instruments that will give us a better image. And if you just dismiss extraordinary claims, because you consider them extraordinary, you avoid discovering things that you haven't expected. And so I believe that along the history of astronomy, there are many missed opportunities. And I speak about astronomy, but I'm sure in other fields, it's also true. I mean, this is my expertise. For example, you know, the Astrophysical Journal, which is the main primary publication in astrophysics. If you go before the 1980s, there are images that were posted in the Astrophysical Journal of giant arcs, you know, arcs of light surrounding clusters of galaxies. And, you know, you can find it in printed versions of the Astrophysical Journal. People just ignore it. They put the image, they see the arc, they say, who knows what it is and just ignore it. And then in the 1980s, the subject of gravitational lensing became popular. And the idea is that you can deflect light by the force of gravity. And then you can put a source behind the cluster of galaxies, and then you will get these arcs. And actually, Einstein predicted it in 1940. And, you know, so these things were expected, but people just had them in the images, didn't pay attention. So I'm sure there are lost opportunities sometimes. Even in existing data, you have things that are unusual and exceptional and are not being addressed. Yeah, you actually, I think you have an article, the data is not enough from quite a few years ago, where you talk, you know, we can go back to the 70s and 80s, but we can go also to the Mayan civilization. Right, the Mayan civilization basically believed in astrology that you can forecast the outcome of a war based on the position of the planets. And they had, you know, astronomers in their culture had the highest social status. They were priests, they were elevated. And the reason was that they helped politicians decide when to go to war, because they would tell the politicians, you know, the planets would be in this configuration, it's a better chance for you to win the war, go to war. And in retrospect, they collected wonderful data, but misinterpreted it, because we now know that the position of Venus or Jupiter or whatever has nothing to do with the outcome of World War I, World War II, you know, has nothing to do. And so we can have a prejudice and collect data without actually doing the right thing with it. That's such a Pisces thing to say. I looked up what your astrological sign is. Well, so you mentioned Einstein predicted that black holes don't exist, or just didn't, or thought. Don't exist in nature. Don't exist in nature. When Einstein came up with his theory of gravity in 1915, November 1915, a few months later, another physicist, Karl Schwarzschild, he was the director of the Potsdam Observatory, but he was a patriot, a German patriot. So he went into the First World War fighting for Germany. But while he was at the front, he sent a postcard to Einstein saying, you know, a few months after the theory was developed, saying, actually, I found a solution to your equations. And that was a black hole solution. And then he died a few months later. And Einstein was a pacifist, and he survived. So the lesson from this story is that if you want to work out the consequences of a theory, you better be a pacifist. But the point is that this solution was known shortly after Einstein came up with his theory. But in 1939, Einstein wrote a paper in the Annals of Mathematics saying, even though the solution exists, I don't think it's realized in nature. And his argument was, if you imagine a star collapsing, stars often spin, and the spin will prevent them from making a black hole, collapsing to a point. So, I mean, can you maybe, one of the many things you have worked on, you're an expert in, is black holes. Can you first say, what are black holes? And second, how do we know that they exist? Right. So black holes are the ultimate prison. You know, you can check in, but you can never check out. It's romantic. You can never check out. Even light cannot escape from them. So there are extreme structures of space and time. And there is this so called Schwarzschild radius or the event horizon of a black hole. Once you enter into it with a spaceship, you would never be able to tweet back to your friends and tell them, by the way, I asked the students in my class, freshman seminar at Harvard, I said, let me give you two possible journeys that you can take. I said, suppose aliens come to Earth and suggest that you would board their spaceship, would you do it? And the second is, suppose you could board a spaceship that will take you into a black hole, would you do it? So all of them said to the first question, yes, under one condition, that I'll be able to maintain my social media contacts and report back, share the experience with them. Personally, I have no footprint on social media. Yeah, which is as a matter of principle. Yeah, my wife asked me when we got married, and I honor that. And I told you offline, I need to get married to such a woman. She truly is a special agent. Well, she was wise enough to recognize the risk. But it saves me time. And it also keeps me away from crowds. I don't have the notion of what a lot of other people think, so I can think independently. Crowd think, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I was surprised to hear that for students, it's extremely important to share experiences. Even if they go on a spaceship with aliens, they still want to brag about it rather than look around and see what's going on. This is not an option when you go to the black hole, is exactly the point. So for the black hole, they said no, because obviously you can find your death after you get into it, you crash into singularity. There is this singularity in the center. So inside the event horizon, we know that all the matter collects at a point. Now, we can't really predict what happens at the singularity because Einstein's theory breaks down. And we know why it breaks down, because it doesn't have quantum mechanics that talks about small distances. We don't have a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity so that it will predict what happens near a singularity. And in fact, a couple of years ago, I had a flood in my basement. And I invited a plumber to come over and figure out and we found that the sewer was clogged because of tree roots that got into it. And we solved the problem. But then I thought to myself, well, isn't that what happens at the singularity of a black hole? Because the question is, where does the matter go? In the case of a home, I never thought about it, but the water, all the water that we use, goes in through the sewer to some reservoir somewhere. And the question is, what happens inside a black hole? And one possibility is that there is an object in the middle, just like a star, and everything collects there. And the object has the maximum density that we can imagine, like Planck density. It's the ultimate density that you can have, where gravity is as strong as all the other forces. So you can imagine this object, very dense object at the center that collects all the matter. Another possibility is that there is some tunnel just like the sewer. It takes the matter into another place. And we don't know the answer. But I wrote a Scientific American essay about it, admitting our ignorance. It's a fascinating question. What happens to the matter that goes into a black hole? I actually recommend it to some of my colleagues that work on string theory. At the closing of a conference, I'm the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, which brings together astronomers, physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians. And we have a conference once a year. And at the end of one of them, since I'm the director, I had to summarize. And I said that I wish we could go on a field trip to a black hole nearby. And I highly recommend to my colleagues that work on string theory to enter into that black hole, because then they can test their theory when they get inside. But one of the string theorists in the audience, Nimar Khani Hamad, immediately raised his voice and said, you have an ulterior motive for sending us into a black hole, which I didn't deny, but at any event. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Can you say why we know that black holes exist? Right. So it's an interesting question because black holes were considered a theoretical construct. And Einstein even denied their existence in 1939. But then in the mid 1960s, quasars were discovered. These are very bright sources of light, 100 times brighter than their host galaxy, which are point like at the center of galaxies. And it was immediately suggested by Ed Salpeter in the West and by Yakov Zeldovich in the East, that these are black holes that accrete gas, collect gas from their host galaxy that are being fed with gas. And they shine very brightly because as the gas falls towards the black holes, just like water running down the sink, the gas swirls and then rubs against itself and heats up and shines very brightly because it's very hot close to the black hole. By viscosity, it heats up. And in the case of black holes, it's the turbulence, the turbulent viscosity that causes it to heat up. So we get these very bright sources of light just from black holes that are supposed to be dark, nothing but black holes. You know, nothing escapes from them, but they create a violent environment where gas moves close to the speed of light and therefore shines very brightly, much more than any other source in the sky. And we can see these quasars all the way to the edge of the universe. So we have evidence now that when the universe was, you know, about 7% of its present age, you know, infant, already back then you had black holes of a billion times the mass of the sun, which is quite remarkable. It's like finding giant babies in a nursery, you know, like how can these black holes grow so fast? You know, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, you already have a billion times the mass of the sun in these black holes. And the answer is presumably there are very quick processes that build them up. They build quickly. Very quickly. And so we see those black holes, and that was found in the mid 1960s. But in 2015, exactly 100 years after Einstein came up with his theory of gravity, the LIGO observatory detected gravitational waves. And these are just ripples in space and time. So according to Einstein's theory, the innovation, the ingenuity of Einstein's theory of gravity that was formulated in November 1915 was to say that space and time are not rigid. You know, they respond to matter. So, for example, if you have two black holes and they collide, it's just like a stone being thrown on the surface of a pond. They generate waves, disturbances in space and time that propagate out at the speed of light. These are gravitational waves. They create a space time storm around them, and then the waves go all the way through the universe and reach us. And if you have a sensitive enough detector like LIGO, you can detect these waves. And so it was not just the message that we received for the first time, gravitational waves, but it was the messenger. So there are two aspects to it. One is the messenger which is gravitational wave for the first time were detected directly. And the second was the message, which was a collision of two black holes, because we could see the pattern of the ripples in space and time. And it was fully consistent with the prediction that Schwarzschild made for how the space time around the black hole is, because when two black holes collide, you can sort of map from the message that you get, you can reconstruct what really happened and it's fully consistent. And in 2017 and 2020, there's two Nobel prizes. That's right. That had to do with the black holes. Can you maybe describe in the same masterful way that you've already been doing what the 2017 was given for the LIGO collaboration for discovering gravitation waves from collisions of black holes? And the 2020 Nobel prize in physics was given for two things. One was theoretical work that was done by Roger Penrose in the 1960s, demonstrating that black holes are inevitable when stars collapse. And it was mostly mathematical work. And actually, Stephen Hawking also contributed significantly to that frontier. And unfortunately, he is not alive, so he could not be honored. So Penrose received it on his own. And then two other astronomers received it as well, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, and they provided conclusive evidence that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy that weighs about 4 million times the mass of the sun. And they found the evidence from the motion of stars very close to the black hole. Just like we see the planets moving around the sun, there are stars close to the center of the galaxy and they are orbiting at very high speeds of other thousands of kilometers per second or thousands of miles per second per second. Think about it. Which can only be induced at those distances if there is a 4 million solar mass object that is extremely compact. And the only thing that is compatible with the constraints is a black hole. And they actually made a movie of the motion of these stars around the center. One of them moves around the center over a decade, over timescales that we can monitor. And it was a breakthrough in a way. So combining LIGO with the detection of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way and in many other galaxies like quasars, now I would say black hole research is vogue. It's very much in fashion. We saw it back in 2016 when we established the black hole initiative. You kind of saw that there's this excitement about in breakthroughs and discoveries around black holes which are probably one of the most fascinating objects in the universe. It's up there. They're both terrifying and beautiful and they capture the entirety of the physics that we know about this universe. I should say the question is where is the nearest black hole? Can we visit it? And I wrote a paper with my undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, suggesting that perhaps if there is one in the solar system, we can detect it. I don't know if you heard, but there is a claim that maybe there is a planet nine in the solar system because we see some anomalies at the outer parts of the solar system. So some people suggested maybe there is a planet out there that was not yet detected. So people searched for it, didn't find it. It weighs roughly five times the mass of the earth. And we said, okay, maybe you can't find it because it's a black hole that was formed early in the universe. Where do you stand on that? It could be that the dark matter is made of black holes of this mass. We don't know what the dark matter is made of. It could be the black holes. So we said, but there is an experimental way to test it. And the way to do it is because there is the Oort cloud of icy rocks in the outer solar system. And if you imagine a black hole there, every now and then a rock will pass close enough to the black hole to be disrupted by the very strong gravity close to the black hole. And that would produce a flare that you can observe. And we calculated how frequently these flares should occur. And with LSST on the Vera Rubin Observatory, we found that you can actually test this hypothesis. And if you don't see flares, then you can put limits on the existence of a black hole in the solar system. It would be extremely exciting if there was a black hole, if planet nine was a black hole, because we could visit it and we can examine it. And it will not be a matter of an object that is very removed from us. Another thing I should say is it's possible that the black hole affected life on Earth. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way. How? That black hole right now is dormant. It's very faint. But we know that it flares. When a star like the sun comes close to it, the star will be spaghettified, basically become a stream of gas, like a spaghetti. And then the gas would fall into the black hole and there would be a flare. And this process happens once every 10,000 years or so. So we expect that these flares to occur every 10,000 years. But we also see evidence for the possibility that gas clouds were disrupted by the black hole, because the stars that are close to the black hole are residing in a single or two planes. And the only way you can get that is if they formed out of a disk of gas, just like the planets in the solar system formed. So there is evidence that gas fell into the black hole and powered possibly a flare. And these flares produce x rays and ultraviolet radiation that could damage life if the Earth was close enough to the center of the galaxy. Where we are right now, it's not very risky for us. But there is a theoretical argument that says the solar system, the sun, was closer to the galactic center early on, and then it migrated outwards. So maybe in the early stage of the solar system, the conditions were affected, shaped by these flares of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. And that's why for the first two billion years, there wasn't any oxygen in the atmosphere, who knows. But it's just interesting to think that from a theoretical concept that Einstein resisted in 1939, it may well be that black holes have influence on our life. And that it's just like discovering that some stranger affected your family and in a way your life. And if that happens to be the case, a second Nobel Prize should be given, not for just the discovery of this black hole at the center of the galaxy, but perhaps for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, for the effect that it had. For the effect for the interplay that resulted in some kind of, yeah, the chemical effect, biology, I mean, all those kinds of things in terms of the emergence of life and the creation of a habitable environment. That's so fascinating. And of course, like you said, dark matter, like black holes have some... They could be the dark matter in principle, yes. We don't know what the dark matter is at the moment. Does it make you sad? So you've had an interaction and perhaps a bit of a friendship with Stephen Hawking. Does it make you sad that he didn't win the Nobel? Well, all together, I don't assign great importance to prizes because, you know, Jean Paul Sartre, who I admired as a teenager, because I was interested in philosophy. When I grew up on a farm in Israel, I used to collect eggs every afternoon and I would drive the tractor to the hills of our village and just think about philosophy, read philosophy books. And Jean Paul Sartre was one of my favorites. And he was honored with a Nobel Prize in literature. He was a philosopher primarily, existentialist. And he said, the hell with it. Why should I give special attention to this committee of people that get their self importance from awarding me the prize? Why does that merit my attention? So he gave up on the Nobel Prize. And you know, there are two benefits to that. One, that you're not working your entire life in the direction that would satisfy the will of other people. You work independently, you're not after these honors. Just for the same reason that if you're not living your life for making a profit or money, you can live a more fulfilling life because you're not being swayed by the wind, you know, of how to make money and so forth. The second aspect of it is, you know, that very often, you know, these prizes, they distort the way we do science because instead of people willing to take risks, and instead of having announcements only after a group of people converges with a definite result, you know, the natural progression of science is based on trial and error, you know, reporting some results, and perhaps they're wrong, but then other people find perhaps better evidence, and then you figure out what's going on. And that's the natural way that science is, you know, it's a learning experience. So if you give the public an image by which scientists are always right, you know, and you know, some of my colleagues say we must do that, because otherwise the public will never believe us that global warming is really taking place. But that's not true, because the public would really believe you if you show the evidence. So the point is, you should be sincere. When the evidence is not absolutely clear, or where there are disputes about the interpretation of the evidence, we should show ourselves. You know, the king is naked, okay? There is no point in pretending that the king is dressed, saying that scientists are always right. Scientists are wrong, frequently. And the only way to make progress is by evidence, giving us the support that we need to make airtight arguments. So when you say global warming is taking place, if the evidence is fully supportive, there are no holes in the argument, then people will be convinced, because you're not trying to fool them. When the evidence was not complete, you also show them that the evidence is not complete. And when there's holes, you show that there's holes, and here's the methodology we're using to try to close those holes. Exactly. Let's be sincere. Why pretend? So if there were no, in a world where there were no prizes, no honours, we would act like kids, as I said before. We would really be focusing on the ball and not on the audience. Yeah, the prizes get in the way, and it's so powerful. Do you think, in some sense, the few people that have turned down the prize made a much more powerful statement? I don't know if you're familiar in the space of mathematics with the Fields Medal and Google Perlman turned down the prize. One of the reasons I started this podcast is I'm going to definitely talk to Putin, I'm definitely talking to Perlman, and people keep telling me it's impossible. I love hearing that, because I'll talk to both. Anyway, but do you have a sense of why he turned down the prize, and is that a powerful statement to you? Well, what I read is that he was disappointed by the response of the community, the mainstream community, the mathematicians, to his earlier work, where they dismissed it, they didn't attend to the details, and didn't treat him with proper respect, because he was not considered one of them. And I think that speaks volumes about the current scientific culture, which is based on groupthink and on social interaction, rather than on the merit of the argument, and on the evidence in the context of physics. So in mathematics there is no empirical basis, you're exploring ideas that are logically consistent, but nevertheless there is this groupthink. And I think he was so frustrated with his past experience that he didn't even bother to publish his papers, he just posted them on the archive, and in a way saying, you know, I know what the answer is, go look at it. And then again, in the long arc of history, his work on archive will be remembered, and all the prizes, most of the prizes will be forgotten, that's what people don't kind of think about. When you look at Roger Penrose, for example, is another fascinating figure, you know, it's possible, and forgive me if this, I'm sure, my ignorance, but he's also did some work on consciousness. He's been one of the only people who spoke about consciousness, which for the longest time, and is still arguably outside the realm of the sciences. It's still seen as a taboo subject, and he was brave enough to explore it from a physics perspective, from just a philosophical perspective, but like with the rigor, like proposing different kind of hypotheses of how consciousness might be able to emerge in the brain, and it's possible that that is the thing he's remembered for if you look 100 years from now, right? As opposed to the work in the black holes, which fits into what the current scientific community allows to be the space of what is and isn't science. Yeah, it's really interesting to look at people that are innovators, where in some phases of their career, their ideas fit into the social structure that is around them, but in other phases, it doesn't. And when you look at them, they just operated the same way throughout, and it says more about their environment than about them. Well, yeah, and I don't know if you know who Max Tegmark is, I just recently talked to him. He's a friend of mine. I just recently talked to him again, and he, I mean, he was a little bit more explicit about saying, you know, being aware, which is something I also recommend, is like being aware where the scientific community stands, and doing enough to get, like move along into your career, in your career. And it's the necessary evil, I suppose, if you are one of those out of the box thinkers that just naturally have this childlike curiosity, which Max definitely is one of them, is sometimes you have to do some stuff that fits in, you publish and you get tenure and all those kinds of things. But the tenure is a great privilege because it allows you to, in principle, explore things that are not accepted by others. And unfortunately, it's not being taken advantage of by most people, and it's a waste of a very precious resource. Yeah, absolutely. The space that you kind of touched on that's full of theories and is perhaps detached from appreciation of empirical evidence, or longing for empirical evidence, or grounding in empirical evidence, is the theoretical physics community and the interest in unifying the laws of physics and with the theory of everything. I'm not sure from which direction to approach this question, but how far away are we from arriving at a theory of everything, do you think? And how would we, how important is it to try to arrive at it, at this kind of goal of this beautiful simple theory that unlocks the very, you know, fundamental basis of our nature as we know it? And, you know, and how, what are the kinds of approaches we need to take to get there? Yeah, so in physics, the biggest challenge is to unify quantum mechanics with gravity. And I believe that once we have experimental evidence for how this happens in nature, in systems that have quantum mechanical effects, but also gravity is important, then the theory will fall into our lap, okay? But the mistake that is made by the community right now is to come up with the right theory from scratch. And, you know, Einstein gave the illusion that you can just sit in your office and understand nature, you know, when he came up with his general theory of relativity. But, you know, first of all, perhaps he was lucky, but it's not a rule. The rule is that you need evidence to guide you, especially when dealing with quantum mechanics, which is really not intuitive. And so there are two places where the two theories meet. One is black holes, and there is a puzzle there. It's called the information paradox. In principle, you can throw the Encyclopedia Britannica into a black hole. It's a lot of information. And then it will be gone because a black hole carries only three properties or qualities, the mass, the charge, and the spin, according to Einstein. But then when Hawking tried to bring in quantum mechanics to the game, he realized that black holes have a temperature and they radiate. This is called Hawking radiation. It was sort of anticipated by Jacob Bekenstein before him, and Hawking wanted to prove Bekenstein wrong and then figure this out. And so what it means is black holes eventually evaporate. And they evaporate into radiation that doesn't carry this information, according to Hawking's calculation. And then the question is, according to quantum mechanics, information must be preserved. So where did the information go if a black hole is gone? And where is the information that was encoded in the Encyclopedia when it went into the black hole? And to that question, we don't have an answer yet. It's one of those puzzles about black holes. And it touches on the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity. Another important question is what happened at the beginning of the universe? What happened before the Big Bang? And by the way, on that, I should say, you know, there are some conjectures. In principle, if we figure it out, if we have a theory of quantum gravity, it's possible to imagine that we will figure out how to create a universe in the laboratory. And by irritating the vacuum, you might create a baby universe. And if we do that, it will offer a solution to what happened before the Big Bang. Perhaps the Big Bang emerged from the laboratory of another civilization. So it's like baby universes are being born out of laboratories. And inside the baby universe, you have a civilization that brings to existence a new baby universe. So just like humans, right? We have babies and they make babies. So in principle, that would solve the problem of why there was a Big Bang and also what happened before the Big Bang. So we came, our umbilical cord is connected to a laboratory of a civilization that produced our universe once it figured out quantum gravity, you know. It's baby Big Bangs all the way down. So if we collect data about how the universe started, we could potentially test theories of, or it can educate us about how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. If we get any information about what happens near the singularity of a black hole, you know, if we get a sense of, you know, somehow we learn what happens at the same, that would educate. So there are places where we can search for evidence, but it's very challenging, I should say. And my point is, you know, the string theorists, they decided that they know how to approach the problem, that they don't have a single theory. There is a multitude of theories and it's not tightly constrained and they cannot make predictions about black holes or about the beginning of the universe. So at the moment I say we're at a loss. And the way I feel about this concept of the theory of everything, we should wait until we get enough evidence to guide us. And until then, you know, there are many important problems that we can address, you know. Why bang our head against the wall on a problem for which we have no guidance? Right. We don't have a good dance partner in terms of evidence. There's not. Exactly. I mean, it'd be interesting, just like you said, I mean, the lab is one place to create universes or black holes, but it'd be fascinating if there is indeed a black hole in our solar system that you can interact with. So the problem with the origin of the universe is all you can do is collect data about it, right? You can't interact with it. Well, you can, for example, detect gravitational waves that emerged from that. And, you know, there is an effort to do that and that could potentially tell us something. But yeah, it's a challenge and that's why we're stuck. So I should say, despite what physicists portray, that, you know, we live through an exceptional growth in our understanding of the universe, we're actually pretty much stuck, I would say, because we don't know the nature of the dark matter. Most of the matter in the universe, we don't know what it is. And we don't know how the universe started. We don't know what happens in the interior of a black hole. Because you've thought quite a bit about dark matter as well. Do you have any kind of hypothesis, interesting hypothesis? We already mentioned a few about what is dark matter and what are the possible paths that we could take to unlock the mystery of dark? What is dark matter? Yeah. So what we need is some anomalies that would hint what the nature of the dark matter is, or to detect it in the laboratory. There are lots of laboratory experiments searching, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack, because there are so many possibilities for the type of particle that it may be. But maybe at some point, you know, we'll find either a particle or black holes as the dark matter, or something else. But at the moment... Can you also maybe, sorry to interrupt, comment about what is dark matter? Like what, it's just a name we assign to what? So most of the community believes that it's a particle that we haven't yet detected. It doesn't interact with light, so it's dark. But the question is, what does it interact with, and how can we find it? And for many years, physicists were guided by the idea that it's some extension of the standard model of particle physics. But then they said, oh, we will find some clues from the Large Hadron Collider about its nature. Or maybe it's related to supersymmetry, which is a new symmetry that we haven't found any evidence for. In both cases, the Large Hadron Collider did not give us any clues. And other people search for specific types of particles in the laboratory and didn't find any. A couple of years ago, actually, around the time that I worked on Oumuamua, I also worked on the possibility that the dark matter particles may have a small electric charge, which is a speculation, but nobody complained about it. And, you know, it was published and I regarded it more as of a speculation than the artificial origin of Oumuamua. And to me, I apply, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I apply the same scientific tools in both cases. There is an anomaly that led me to that discussion, which has to do with hydrogen being cold in the early universe more than we expected. So we suggested maybe the dark matter particles have some small charge. But then you deal with anomalies by exploring possibilities. That's the only way to do it, and then collecting more data to check those. And searching for technological signatures is the same as any other part of our scientific endeavor. We make hypotheses and we collect data, and I don't see any reason for having a taboo on this subject. In your childlike, open minded excitement and approach to science, you're, I think, to anyone listening to this, truly inspiring. I mean, the question I think is useful to ask is by way of advice for young people. A lot of young people listen to this, whether from all over the world, and teenagers, undergraduate students, even graduate students, even young faculty, even older faculty, they're all young at heart. Like there's many of them young at heart. Do you have advice for, but let's focus on the traditionally defined sort of young folks that kind of graduate. Do you have advice to give to young people like that today about life, maybe in general, maybe a life of curiosity in the sciences? Definitely. Well, first, I should confess that I enjoy working with young people much more than with senior people. And the reason is they don't carry a baggage of prejudice. They're not so self centered. They're open to exploration. My advice, I mean, one of the lessons that took me a while to learn, and I should say I lost important opportunities as a result of that. So I would regard it as a mistake on my behalf, was to believe experts. So, quote unquote. So on a on a number of occasions, I would come up with an original idea and then suggest it to an expert, someone that works in the same field for a while. And the expert would dismiss it most of the time because it's new and was not explored, not because of the merit. And then what happened to me several times is that someone else would listen to the conversation or would hear me suggesting it. And I would give up because the expert said no. And then that someone else would develop it so that it becomes the hottest thing in this field. And once it happened to me multiple times, I then realized the hell with the experts. They don't know what they're doing. They're just repeating them. They don't think creatively. They are being threatened by innovation. And it's the natural reaction of someone that cares about their ego more than about the matter that we are discussing. And so I said, I don't care how many likes I have on Twitter. I don't care whether the experts say one thing or another. I will basically exercise my judgment and do the best I can. Turns out that I'm wrong. I made a mistake. That's part of the scientific endeavor. And it took me a while to recognize that. And it was a lot of wasted opportunities. So to the young people, I would recommend don't listen to experts. Carve your own path. Now, of course, you will be wrong. You should learn from experience, just like kids do. But do it yourself. Your father died in 2017. Your mother died in 2019. Do you miss them? Very much so. Is there a memory, that fond memory that stands out? Or maybe what have you learned from them? From my mother, I mean, she was very much my inspiration for pursuing intellectual work, because she studied at the university. And then because of the Second World War, after the Second World War, she was born in Bulgaria. They immigrated to Israel. And she and she left university to work on a farm. And later in life, when all the kids left home, she went back to the university and finished the PhD. But she planted in me the intellectual curiosity and valuing learning or acquiring knowledge as a very important element in life. And my love with philosophy came from attending classes that she took at the university. When I was a teenager, I was fortunate to go to some of these and they inspired me later on. And I'm very different than my colleagues, as you can tell, because my upbringing was quite different. And the only reason I'm doing physics or astrophysics is because of circumstances. At age 18, I was asked to serve in the military. And the only way for me to pursue intellectual work was to work on physics, because that was the closest to philosophy. And I was good at physics. So they admitted me to an elite program called LPO that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24 and to actually propose the first international project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative of Ronald Reagan. And that brought me to the US to visit Washington, DC, where we were funded from. And then on one of the visits, I went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and met John Bacall that later offered me a five year fellowship there. Under the under the condition that I'll switch to astrophysics. At which point, you know, I said, OK, I cannot give up on this opportunity. I'll do it. Switch to astrophysics. It felt like a forced marriage, kind of arranged marriage. And then I was offered the position at Harvard because nobody wanted that. They first selected someone else. And that someone said, I don't want to become a junior faculty at the Harvard Astronomy Department because the chance for being promoted are very small. So he took another job. And then I was second in line. They gave it to me. I didn't care much because I could go back to the farm any day, you know. And after three years, I was tenured. And eventually, a decade later, became the chair of this department and served for nine years as the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard. But at that point, it became clear to me that I'm actually married to the love of my life, even though it was an arranged marriage. There are many philosophical questions in astrophysics that we can address. But I'm still very different than my colleagues, you know, that were focusing on technical skills in getting to this job. So my mother was really extremely instrumental in planting the seeds of thinking about the big picture in me. Then my father, he was, you know, he was working in the farm. And we didn't speak much because we sort of understood each other without speaking. But what he gave me is a sense of, you know, that it's more important to do things than to talk about them. I love the, I mean, my apologies, but MIT mind and hand. I love that there's that the root of philosophy that you gain from your mom and the hand, that action is all that ultimately in the end matters from your dad. That's really powerful. If we could take a small detour into philosophy, is there by chance any books, authors, whether philosophical or not, you mentioned Sartre, that stand out to you that were formative in some small or big way, that perhaps you would recommend to others, maybe when you were very young or maybe later on in life? Well, actually, yeah, I, you know, I read the number of existentialists that appealed to me because they were authentic. You know, Sartre, you know, he declined the Nobel Prize, as we discussed, but he also was mocking people that pretend to be something better than they are. You know, he was living an authentic life that is sincere. And that's what appealed to me. And Albert Camus was another French philosopher that advocated existentialism. You know, that really appealed to me. That's probably my favorite existentialist, Camus. Yeah. Yeah. And he died at a young age in an accident, unfortunately. And then, you know, people like Nietzsche that, you know, broke conventions. And I noticed that Nietzsche is still extremely popular. You know, that's quite surprising. He appeals to the young people of today. It's the childlike wonder about the world. And he was unapologetic. You know, it's like most philosophers have a very strict adherence to terminology and to the practices, academic philosophers. And Nietzsche was full of contradictions. And he just, I mean, he was just this big kid with opinions and thought deeply about this world. And people are really attracted to that. And surprisingly, there's not enough people like that throughout history of philosophy. And that's why I think he's still drawn to them. Yeah. To me, what stands out is his statement that the best way to corrupt the mind of young people is to tell them that they should agree with the common view, you know. And, you know, it goes back to the thread that went throughout discussion. Yes. You've kind of suggested that we ought to be humble about our very own existence and that our existence lasts only a short time. We talked about you losing your father and your mother. Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? I'm not afraid. You know what, Epicurus, actually Epicurus was a very wise person. According to Lucretius, Epicurus didn't leave anything in writing. But he said that he's never afraid of death because as long as he's around, death is not around. And when death will be around, he will not be around. So he will never meet death. So why should you be worried about something you will never meet? You know, and it's an interesting philosophy of life. You know, you shouldn't be afraid of something that you will never encounter, right? But there's a finiteness to this experience. We live every day. I mean, I think if we're being honest, we live every day as if it's going to last forever. We often kind of don't contemplate the fact that it ends. You kind of have plans and goals and you have these possibilities. You have a kind of lingering thought, especially as you get older and older and older, that this is, especially when you lose friends, then you start to realize, you know, it does end. But I don't know if you really are cognizant of that. I mean, because... But you have to be careful not to be depressed by it, because otherwise you lose the vitality, right? So I think the most important thing to draw from knowing that you are short lived is a sense of appreciation that you're alive. That's the first thing. But more importantly, a sense of modesty, because how can anyone be arrogant if they kept at the same time this notion that they are short lived? I mean, you cannot be arrogant, because anything that you advocate for, you know, you will not be around to do that in a hundred years. So people will just forget and move on, you know. And if you keep that in mind, you know, the Caesars in ancient Rome, they had a person next to them telling them, don't forget that you are mortal. You know, there was a person with that duty because the Caesars thought that they are all powerful, you know. And they had, for a good reason, someone they hired to whisper in their ear, don't forget that you are mortal. Yeah. Well, you're somebody, one of the most respected, famous scientists in the world, sitting on a farm, gazing up at the stars. So you seem like an appropriate person to ask the completely inappropriate question of, what do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? That's an excellent question. And if we ever find an alien that we can converse with, I would like to answer this. I would like to ask for an answer to this question because... Would they have a different opinion, you think? Well, they might be wiser because they lived around for a while, but I'm afraid they will be silent. I'm afraid they will not have a good answer. And I think it's the process that you should get satisfied by, the process of learning you should enjoy. Okay, so it's not so much that there is a meaning. In fact, there is, as far as I can tell, things just exist, you know. And I think it's inappropriate for us to assign a meaning for our existence because, as a civilization, we will eventually perish and nothing will be... Just another planet on which life died. And if you look at the big scheme of things, who cares? Who cares? And how can we assign significance to what we are doing? So if you said the meaning of life is this, well, it will not be around in a billion years. So it cannot be the meaning of life because nothing will be around. So I think we should just enjoy the process. And it's like many other things in life, you enjoy good food, okay? And you can enjoy learning. Why? Because it makes you appreciate better the environment that you live in. And sometimes people think religion, for example, is in conflict with science, spirituality. That's not true. If you see a watch and you look at it from the outside, you might say, oh, that's interesting. But then if you start to open it up and learn about how it works, you appreciate it more. So science is the way to learn about how the world works. And it's not in conflict to the meaning that you assign to all of this, but it helps you appreciate the world better. So in fact, I would think that a religious person should promote science because it gives you a better appreciation of what's around you. It's like if you buy in a grocery, buy something, a bunch of fruits that are packed together, and you can't see from the outside exactly what kind of fruits are inside. But if you open it up and study, you appreciate better the merchandise that you get, right? So you pay the same amount of money, but at least you know what's inside. So why don't we figure out what the world is about, what the universe contains, what is the dark matter? It will help us appreciate the bigger picture. And then you can assign your own flavor to what it means. Ali, I think I'm truly grateful that a person like you, exists at the center of the scientific community, gives me faith and hope about this big journey that we call science. So thank you for writing the book you wrote recently. You have many other books and articles that I think people should definitely read. And thank you for wasting all this time with me. It's truly an honor. Thank you so much. It was not a waste at all. And thank you for having me. I learned a lot from your questions and your remarks. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Avi Loeb. And thank you to our sponsors, Zero Fasting App for intermittent fasting, Element Electro Light Drink, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and Pessimist Archive History Podcast. So the choice is a fasting app, fasting fuel, fast breaking, delicious meals, and a history podcast that has very little, as far as I know, to do with fasting. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Avi Loeb: Aliens, Black Holes, and the Mystery of the Oumuamua | Lex Fridman Podcast #154

The following is a conversation with Max Tegmark, his second time on the podcast. In fact, the previous conversation was episode number one of this very podcast. He is a physicist and artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, and author of Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He's also the head of a bunch of other huge, fascinating projects and has written a lot of different things that you should definitely check out. He has been one of the key humans who has been outspoken about longterm existential risks of AI and also its exciting possibilities and solutions to real world problems. Most recently at the intersection of AI and physics, and also in reengineering the algorithms that divide us by controlling the information we see and thereby creating bubbles and all other kinds of complex social phenomena that we see today. In general, he's one of the most passionate and brilliant people I have the fortune of knowing. I hope to talk to him many more times on this podcast in the future. Quick mention of our sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and ExpressVPN. So the choices, wisdom, caffeine, sanity, or privacy. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that much of the researchers in the machine learning and artificial intelligence communities do not spend much time thinking deeply about existential risks of AI. Because our current algorithms are seen as useful but dumb, it's difficult to imagine how they may become destructive to the fabric of human civilization in the foreseeable future. I understand this mindset, but it's very troublesome. To me, this is both a dangerous and uninspiring perspective, reminiscent of a lobster sitting in a pot of lukewarm water that a minute ago was cold. I feel a kinship with this lobster. I believe that already the algorithms that drive our interaction on social media have an intelligence and power that far outstrip the intelligence and power of any one human being. Now really is the time to think about this, to define the trajectory of the interplay of technology and human beings in our society. I think that the future of human civilization very well may be at stake over this very question of the role of artificial intelligence in our society. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Max Tegmark. So people might not know this, but you were actually episode number one of this podcast just a couple of years ago, and now we're back. And it so happens that a lot of exciting things happened in both physics and artificial intelligence, both fields that you're super passionate about. Can we try to catch up to some of the exciting things happening in artificial intelligence, especially in the context of the way it's cracking, open the different problems of the sciences? Yeah, I'd love to, especially now as we start 2021 here, it's a really fun time to think about what were the biggest breakthroughs in AI, not the ones necessarily that media wrote about, but that really matter, and what does that mean for our ability to do better science? What does it mean for our ability to help people around the world? And what does it mean for new problems that they could cause if we're not smart enough to avoid them, so what do we learn basically from this? Yes, absolutely. So one of the amazing things you're a part of is the AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. What's up with this institute? What are you working on? What are you thinking about? The idea is something I'm very on fire with, which is basically AI meets physics. And it's been almost five years now since I shifted my own MIT research from physics to machine learning. And in the beginning, I noticed that a lot of my colleagues, even though they were polite about it, were like kind of, what is Max doing? What is this weird stuff? He's lost his mind. But then gradually, I, together with some colleagues, were able to persuade more and more of the other professors in our physics department to get interested in this. And now we've got this amazing NSF Center, so 20 million bucks for the next five years, MIT, and a bunch of neighboring universities here also. And I noticed now those colleagues who were looking at me funny have stopped asking what the point is of this, because it's becoming more clear. And I really believe that, of course, AI can help physics a lot to do better physics. But physics can also help AI a lot, both by building better hardware. My colleague, Marin Soljacic, for example, is working on an optical chip for much faster machine learning, where the computation is done not by moving electrons around, but by moving photons around, dramatically less energy use, faster, better. We can also help AI a lot, I think, by having a different set of tools and a different, maybe more audacious attitude. AI has, to a significant extent, been an engineering discipline where you're just trying to make things that work and being more interested in maybe selling them than in figuring out exactly how they work and proving theorems about that they will always work. Contrast that with physics. When Elon Musk sends a rocket to the International Space Station, they didn't just train with machine learning. Oh, let's fire it a little bit more to the left, a bit more to the right. Oh, that also missed. Let's try here. No, we figured out Newton's laws of gravitation and other things and got a really deep fundamental understanding. And that's what gives us such confidence in rockets. And my vision is that in the future, all machine learning systems that actually have impact on people's lives will be understood at a really, really deep level. So we trust them, not because some sales rep told us to, but because they've earned our trust. And really safety critical things even prove that they will always do what we expect them to do. That's very much the physics mindset. So it's interesting, if you look at big breakthroughs that have happened in machine learning this year, from dancing robots, it's pretty fantastic. Not just because it's cool, but if you just think about not that many years ago, this YouTube video at this DARPA challenge with the MIT robot comes out of the car and face plants. How far we've come in just a few years. Similarly, Alpha Fold 2, crushing the protein folding problem. We can talk more about implications for medical research and stuff. But hey, that's huge progress. You can look at the GPT3 that can spout off English text, which sometimes really, really blows you away. You can look at DeepMind's MuZero, which doesn't just kick our butt in Go and Chess and Shogi, but also in all these Atari games. And you don't even have to teach it the rules now. What all of those have in common is, besides being powerful, is we don't fully understand how they work. And that's fine if it's just some dancing robots. And the worst thing that can happen is they face plant. Or if they're playing Go, and the worst thing that can happen is that they make a bad move and lose the game. It's less fine if that's what's controlling your self driving car or your nuclear power plant. And we've seen already that even though Hollywood had all these movies where they try to make us worry about the wrong things, like machines turning evil, the actual bad things that have happened with automation have not been machines turning evil. They've been caused by overtrust in things we didn't understand as well as we thought we did. Even very simple automated systems like what Boeing put into the 737 MAX killed a lot of people. Was it that that little simple system was evil? Of course not. But we didn't understand it as well as we should have. And we trusted without understanding. Exactly. That's the overtrust. We didn't even understand that we didn't understand. The humility is really at the core of being a scientist. I think step one, if you want to be a scientist, is don't ever fool yourself into thinking you understand things when you actually don't. That's probably good advice for humans in general. I think humility in general can do us good. But in science, it's so spectacular. Why did we have the wrong theory of gravity ever from Aristotle onward until Galileo's time? Why would we believe something so dumb as that if I throw this water bottle, it's going to go up with constant speed until it realizes that its natural motion is down? It changes its mind. Because people just kind of assumed Aristotle was right. He's an authority. We understand that. Why did we believe things like that the sun is going around the Earth? Why did we believe that time flows at the same rate for everyone until Einstein? Same exact mistake over and over again. We just weren't humble enough to acknowledge that we actually didn't know for sure. We assumed we knew. So we didn't discover the truth because we assumed there was nothing there to be discovered, right? There was something to be discovered about the 737 Max. And if you had been a bit more suspicious and tested it better, we would have found it. And it's the same thing with most harm that's been done by automation so far, I would say. So I don't know if you heard here of a company called Knight Capital? So good. That means you didn't invest in them earlier. They deployed this automated trading system, all nice and shiny. They didn't understand it as well as they thought. And it went about losing $10 million per minute for 44 minutes straight until someone presumably was like, oh, no, shut this up. Was it evil? No. It was, again, misplaced trust, something they didn't fully understand, right? And there have been so many, even when people have been killed by robots, which is quite rare still, but in factory accidents, it's in every single case been not malice, just that the robot didn't understand that a human is different from an auto part or whatever. So this is why I think there's so much opportunity for a physics approach, where you just aim for a higher level of understanding. And if you look at all these systems that we talked about from reinforcement learning systems and dancing robots to all these neural networks that power GPT3 and go playing software and stuff, they're all basically black boxes, not so different from if you teach a human something, you have no idea how their brain works, right? Except the human brain, at least, has been error corrected during many, many centuries of evolution in a way that some of these systems have not, right? And my MIT research is entirely focused on demystifying this black box, intelligible intelligence is my slogan. That's a good line, intelligible intelligence. Yeah, that we shouldn't settle for something that seems intelligent, but it should be intelligible so that we actually trust it because we understand it, right? Like, again, Elon trusts his rockets because he understands Newton's laws and thrust and how everything works. And can I tell you why I'm optimistic about this? Yes. I think we've made a bit of a mistake where some people still think that somehow we're never going to understand neural networks. We're just going to have to learn to live with this. It's this very powerful black box. Basically, for those who haven't spent time building their own, it's super simple what happens inside. You send in a long list of numbers, and then you do a bunch of operations on them, multiply by matrices, et cetera, et cetera, and some other numbers come out that's output of it. And then there are a bunch of knobs you can tune. And when you change them, it affects the computation, the input output relation. And then you just give the computer some definition of good, and it keeps optimizing these knobs until it performs as good as possible. And often, you go like, wow, that's really good. This robot can dance, or this machine is beating me at chess now. And in the end, you have something which, even though you can look inside it, you have very little idea of how it works. You can print out tables of all the millions of parameters in there. Is it crystal clear now how it's working? No, of course not. Many of my colleagues seem willing to settle for that. And I'm like, no, that's like the halfway point. Some have even gone as far as sort of guessing that the mistrutability of this is where some of the power comes from, and some sort of mysticism. I think that's total nonsense. I think the real power of neural networks comes not from inscrutability, but from differentiability. And what I mean by that is simply that the output changes only smoothly if you tweak your knobs. And then you can use all these powerful methods we have for optimization in science. We can just tweak them a little bit and see, did that get better or worse? That's the fundamental idea of machine learning, that the machine itself can keep optimizing until it gets better. Suppose you wrote this algorithm instead in Python or some other programming language, and then what the knobs did was they just changed random letters in your code. Now it would just epically fail. You change one thing, and instead of saying print, it says, synth, syntax error. You don't even know, was that for the better or for the worse, right? This, to me, is what I believe is the fundamental power of neural networks. And just to clarify, the changing of the different letters in a program would not be a differentiable process. It would make it an invalid program, typically. And then you wouldn't even know if you changed more letters if it would make it work again, right? So that's the magic of neural networks, the inscrutability. The differentiability, that every setting of the parameters is a program, and you can tell is it better or worse, right? And so. So you don't like the poetry of the mystery of neural networks as the source of its power? I generally like poetry, but. Not in this case. It's so misleading. And above all, it shortchanges us. It makes us underestimate the good things we can accomplish. So what we've been doing in my group is basically step one, train the mysterious neural network to do something well. And then step two, do some additional AI techniques to see if we can now transform this black box into something equally intelligent that you can actually understand. So for example, I'll give you one example, this AI Feynman project that we just published, right? So we took the 100 most famous or complicated equations from one of my favorite physics textbooks, in fact, the one that got me into physics in the first place, the Feynman lectures on physics. And so you have a formula. Maybe it has what goes into the formula as six different variables, and then what comes out as one. So then you can make a giant Excel spreadsheet with seven columns. You put in just random numbers for the six columns for those six input variables, and then you calculate with a formula the seventh column, the output. So maybe it's like the force equals in the last column some function of the other. And now the task is, OK, if I don't tell you what the formula was, can you figure that out from looking at my spreadsheet I gave you? This problem is called symbolic regression. If I tell you that the formula is what we call a linear formula, so it's just that the output is sum of all the things, input, the times, some constants, that's the famous easy problem we can solve. We do it all the time in science and engineering. But the general one, if it's more complicated functions with logarithms or cosines or other math, it's a very, very hard one and probably impossible to do fast in general, just because the number of formulas with n symbols just grows exponentially, just like the number of passwords you can make grow dramatically with length. But we had this idea that if you first have a neural network that can actually approximate the formula, you just trained it, even if you don't understand how it works, that can be the first step towards actually understanding how it works. So that's what we do first. And then we study that neural network now and put in all sorts of other data that wasn't in the original training data and use that to discover simplifying properties of the formula. And that lets us break it apart, often into many simpler pieces in a kind of divide and conquer approach. So we were able to solve all of those 100 formulas, discover them automatically, plus a whole bunch of other ones. And it's actually kind of humbling to see that this code, which anyone who wants now is listening to this, can type pip install AI Feynman on the computer and run it. It can actually do what Johannes Kepler spent four years doing when he stared at Mars data until he was like, finally, Eureka, this is an ellipse. This will do it automatically for you in one hour. Or Max Planck, he was looking at how much radiation comes out from different wavelengths from a hot object and discovered the famous blackbody formula. This discovers it automatically. I'm actually excited about seeing if we can discover not just old formulas again, but new formulas that no one has seen before. I do like this process of using kind of a neural network to find some basic insights and then dissecting the neural network to then gain the final. So in that way, you've forcing the explainability issue, really trying to analyze the neural network for the things it knows in order to come up with the final beautiful, simple theory underlying the initial system that you were looking at. I love that. And the reason I'm so optimistic that it can be generalized to so much more is because that's exactly what we do as human scientists. Think of Galileo, whom we mentioned, right? I bet when he was a little kid, if his dad threw him an apple, he would catch it. Why? Because he had a neural network in his brain that he had trained to predict the parabolic orbit of apples that are thrown under gravity. If you throw a tennis ball to a dog, it also has this same ability of deep learning to figure out how the ball is going to move and catch it. But Galileo went one step further when he got older. He went back and was like, wait a minute. I can write down a formula for this. Y equals x squared, a parabola. And he helped revolutionize physics as we know it, right? So there was a basic neural network in there from childhood that captured the experiences of observing different kinds of trajectories. And then he was able to go back in with another extra little neural network and analyze all those experiences and be like, wait a minute. There's a deeper rule here. Exactly. He was able to distill out in symbolic form what that complicated black box neural network was doing. Not only did the formula he got ultimately become more accurate, and similarly, this is how Newton got Newton's laws, which is why Elon can send rockets to the space station now, right? So it's not only more accurate, but it's also simpler, much simpler. And it's so simple that we can actually describe it to our friends and each other, right? We've talked about it just in the context of physics now. But hey, isn't this what we're doing when we're talking to each other also? We go around with our neural networks, just like dogs and cats and chipmunks and Blue Jays. And we experience things in the world. But then we humans do this additional step on top of that, where we then distill out certain high level knowledge that we've extracted from this in a way that we can communicate it to each other in a symbolic form in English in this case, right? So if we can do it and we believe that we are information processing entities, then we should be able to make machine learning that does it also. Well, do you think the entire thing could be learning? Because this dissection process, like for AI Feynman, the secondary stage feels like something like reasoning. And the initial step feels more like the more basic kind of differentiable learning. Do you think the whole thing could be differentiable learning? Do you think the whole thing could be basically neural networks on top of each other? It's like turtles all the way down. Could it be neural networks all the way down? I mean, that's a really interesting question. We know that in your case, it is neural networks all the way down because that's all you have in your skull is a bunch of neurons doing their thing, right? But if you ask the question more generally, what algorithms are being used in your brain, I think it's super interesting to compare. I think we've gone a little bit backwards historically because we humans first discovered good old fashioned AI, the logic based AI that we often call GoFi for good old fashioned AI. And then more recently, we did machine learning because it required bigger computers. So we had to discover it later. So we think of machine learning with neural networks as the modern thing and the logic based AI as the old fashioned thing. But if you look at evolution on Earth, it's actually been the other way around. I would say that, for example, an eagle has a better vision system than I have using. And dogs are just as good at casting tennis balls as I am. All this stuff which is done by training in neural network and not interpreting it in words is something so many of our animal friends can do, at least as well as us, right? What is it that we humans can do that the chipmunks and the eagles cannot? It's more to do with this logic based stuff, right, where we can extract out information in symbols, in language, and now even with equations if you're a scientist, right? So basically what happened was first we built these computers that could multiply numbers real fast and manipulate symbols. And we felt they were pretty dumb. And then we made neural networks that can see as well as a cat can and do a lot of this inscrutable black box neural networks. What we humans can do also is put the two together in a useful way. Yes, in our own brain. Yes, in our own brain. So if we ever want to get artificial general intelligence that can do all jobs as well as humans can, right, then that's what's going to be required to be able to combine the neural networks with symbolic, combine the old AI with the new AI in a good way. We do it in our brains. And there seems to be basically two strategies I see in industry now. One scares the heebie jeebies out of me, and the other one I find much more encouraging. OK, which one? Can we break them apart? Which of the two? The one that scares the heebie jeebies out of me is this attitude that we're just going to make ever bigger systems that we still don't understand until they can be as smart as humans. What could possibly go wrong? I think it's just such a reckless thing to do. And unfortunately, if we actually succeed as a species to build artificial general intelligence, then we still have no clue how it works. I think at least 50% chance we're going to be extinct before too long. It's just going to be an utter epic own goal. So it's that 44 minute losing money problem or the paper clip problem where we don't understand how it works, and it just in a matter of seconds runs away in some kind of direction that's going to be very problematic. Even long before, you have to worry about the machines themselves somehow deciding to do things. And to us, we have to worry about people using machines that are short of AGI and power to do bad things. I mean, just take a moment. And if anyone is not worried particularly about advanced AI, just take 10 seconds and just think about your least favorite leader on the planet right now. Don't tell me who it is. I want to keep this apolitical. But just see the face in front of you, that person, for 10 seconds. Now imagine that that person has this incredibly powerful AI under their control and can use it to impose their will on the whole planet. How does that make you feel? Yeah. So can we break that apart just briefly? For the 50% chance that we'll run to trouble with this approach, do you see the bigger worry in that leader or humans using the system to do damage? Or are you more worried, and I think I'm in this camp, more worried about accidental, unintentional destruction of everything? So humans trying to do good, and in a way where everyone agrees it's kind of good, it's just they're trying to do good without understanding. Because I think every evil leader in history thought they're, to some degree, thought they're trying to do good. Oh, yeah. I'm sure Hitler thought he was doing good. Yeah. I've been reading a lot about Stalin. I'm sure Stalin is from, he legitimately thought that communism was good for the world, and that he was doing good. I think Mao Zedong thought what he was doing with the Great Leap Forward was good too. Yeah. I'm actually concerned about both of those. Before, I promised to answer this in detail, but before we do that, let me finish answering the first question. Because I told you that there were two different routes we could get to artificial general intelligence, and one scares the hell out of me, which is this one where we build something, we just say bigger neural networks, ever more hardware, and just train the heck out of more data, and poof, now it's very powerful. That, I think, is the most unsafe and reckless approach. The alternative to that is the intelligible intelligence approach instead, where we say neural networks is just a tool for the first step to get the intuition, but then we're going to spend also serious resources on other AI techniques for demystifying this black box and figuring out what it's actually doing so we can convert it into something that's equally intelligent, but that we actually understand what it's doing. Maybe we can even prove theorems about it, that this car here will never be hacked when it's driving, because here is the proof. There is a whole science of this. It doesn't work for neural networks that are big black boxes, but it works well and works with certain other kinds of codes, right? That approach, I think, is much more promising. That's exactly why I'm working on it, frankly, not just because I think it's cool for science, but because I think the more we understand these systems, the better the chances that we can make them do the things that are good for us that are actually intended, not unintended. So you think it's possible to prove things about something as complicated as a neural network? That's the hope? Well, ideally, there's no reason it has to be a neural network in the end either, right? We discovered Newton's laws of gravity with neural network in Newton's head. But that's not the way it's programmed into the navigation system of Elon Musk's rocket anymore. It's written in C++, or I don't know what language he uses exactly. And then there are software tools called symbolic verification. DARPA and the US military has done a lot of really great research on this, because they really want to understand that when they build weapon systems, they don't just go fire at random or malfunction, right? And there is even a whole operating system called Cell 3 that's been developed by a DARPA grant, where you can actually mathematically prove that this thing can never be hacked. Wow. One day, I hope that will be something you can say about the OS that's running on our laptops too. As you know, we're not there. But I think we should be ambitious, frankly. And if we can use machine learning to help do the proofs and so on as well, then it's much easier to verify that a proof is correct than to come up with a proof in the first place. That's really the core idea here. If someone comes on your podcast and says they proved the Riemann hypothesis or some sensational new theorem, it's much easier for someone else, take some smart grad, math grad students to check, oh, there's an error here on equation five, or this really checks out, than it was to discover the proof. Yeah, although some of those proofs are pretty complicated. But yes, it's still nevertheless much easier to verify the proof. I love the optimism. We kind of, even with the security of systems, there's a kind of cynicism that pervades people who think about this, which is like, oh, it's hopeless. I mean, in the same sense, exactly like you're saying when you own networks, oh, it's hopeless to understand what's happening. With security, people are just like, well, it's always going, there's always going to be attack vectors, like ways to attack the system. But you're right, we're just very new with these computational systems. We're new with these intelligent systems. And it's not out of the realm of possibly, just like people that understand the movement of the stars and the planets and so on. It's entirely possible that within, hopefully soon, but it could be within 100 years, we start to have an obvious laws of gravity about intelligence and God forbid about consciousness too. That one is... Agreed. I think, of course, if you're selling computers that get hacked a lot, that's in your interest as a company that people think it's impossible to make it safe, but he's going to get the idea of suing you. I want to really inject optimism here. It's absolutely possible to do much better than we're doing now. And your laptop does so much stuff. You don't need the music player to be super safe in your future self driving car, right? If someone hacks it and starts playing music you don't like, the world won't end. But what you can do is you can break out and say that your drive computer that controls your safety must be completely physically decoupled entirely from the entertainment system. And it must physically be such that it can't take on over the air updates while you're driving. And it can have ultimately some operating system on it which is symbolically verified and proven that it's always going to do what it's supposed to do, right? We can basically have, and companies should take that attitude too. They should look at everything they do and say what are the few systems in our company that threaten the whole life of the company if they get hacked and have the highest standards for them. And then they can save money by going for the el cheapo poorly understood stuff for the rest. This is very feasible, I think. And coming back to the bigger question that you worried about that there'll be unintentional failures, I think there are two quite separate risks here. Right? We talked a lot about one of them which is that the goals are noble of the human. The human says, I want this airplane to not crash because this is not Muhammad Atta now flying the airplane, right? And now there's this technical challenge of making sure that the autopilot is actually gonna behave as the pilot wants. If you set that aside, there's also the separate question. How do you make sure that the goals of the pilot are actually aligned with the goals of the passenger? How do you make sure very much more broadly that if we can all agree as a species that we would like things to kind of go well for humanity as a whole, that the goals are aligned here. The alignment problem. And yeah, there's been a lot of progress in the sense that there's suddenly huge amounts of research going on on it about it. I'm very grateful to Elon Musk for giving us that money five years ago so we could launch the first research program on technical AI safety and alignment. There's a lot of stuff happening. But I think we need to do more than just make sure little machines do always what their owners do. That wouldn't have prevented September 11th if Muhammad Atta said, okay, autopilot, please fly into World Trade Center. And it's like, okay. That even happened in a different situation. There was this depressed pilot named Andreas Lubitz, right? Who told his German wings passenger jet to fly into the Alps. He just told the computer to change the altitude to a hundred meters or something like that. And you know what the computer said? Okay. And it had the freaking topographical map of the Alps in there, it had GPS, everything. No one had bothered teaching it even the basic kindergarten ethics of like, no, we never want airplanes to fly into mountains under any circumstances. And so we have to think beyond just the technical issues and think about how do we align in general incentives on this planet for the greater good? So starting with simple stuff like that, every airplane that has a computer in it should be taught whatever kindergarten ethics that's smart enough to understand. Like, no, don't fly into fixed objects if the pilot tells you to do so. Then go on autopilot mode. Send an email to the cops and land at the latest airport, nearest airport, you know. Any car with a forward facing camera should just be programmed by the manufacturer so that it will never accelerate into a human ever. That would avoid things like the NIS attack and many horrible terrorist vehicle attacks where they deliberately did that, right? This was not some sort of thing, oh, you know, US and China, different views on, no, there was not a single car manufacturer in the world, right, who wanted the cars to do this. They just hadn't thought to do the alignment. And if you look at more broadly problems that happen on this planet, the vast majority have to do a poor alignment. I mean, think about, let's go back really big because I know you're so good at that. Let's go big, yeah. Yeah, so long ago in evolution, we had these genes. And they wanted to make copies of themselves. That's really all they cared about. So some genes said, hey, I'm gonna build a brain on this body I'm in so that I can get better at making copies of myself. And then they decided for their benefit to get copied more, to align your brain's incentives with their incentives. So it didn't want you to starve to death. So it gave you an incentive to eat and it wanted you to make copies of the genes. So it gave you incentive to fall in love and do all sorts of naughty things to make copies of itself, right? So that was successful value alignment done on the genes. They created something more intelligent than themselves, but they made sure to try to align the values. But then something went a little bit wrong against the idea of what the genes wanted because a lot of humans discovered, hey, you know, yeah, we really like this business about sex that the genes have made us enjoy, but we don't wanna have babies right now. So we're gonna hack the genes and use birth control. And I really feel like drinking a Coca Cola right now, but I don't wanna get a potbelly, so I'm gonna drink Diet Coke. We have all these things we've figured out because we're smarter than the genes, how we can actually subvert their intentions. So it's not surprising that we humans now, when we are in the role of these genes, creating other nonhuman entities with a lot of power, have to face the same exact challenge. How do we make other powerful entities have incentives that are aligned with ours? And so they won't hack them. Corporations, for example, right? We humans decided to create corporations because it can benefit us greatly. Now all of a sudden there's a supermarket. I can go buy food there. I don't have to hunt. Awesome, and then to make sure that this corporation would do things that were good for us and not bad for us, we created institutions to keep them in check. Like if the local supermarket sells poisonous food, then the owners of the supermarket have to spend some years reflecting behind bars, right? So we created incentives to align them. But of course, just like we were able to see through this thing and you develop birth control, if you're a powerful corporation, you also have an incentive to try to hack the institutions that are supposed to govern you. Because you ultimately, as a corporation, have an incentive to maximize your profit. Just like you have an incentive to maximize the enjoyment your brain has, not for your genes. So if they can figure out a way of bribing regulators, then they're gonna do that. In the US, we kind of caught onto that and made laws against corruption and bribery. Then in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt realized that, no, we were still being kind of hacked because the Massachusetts Railroad companies had like a bigger budget than the state of Massachusetts and they were doing a lot of very corrupt stuff. So he did the whole trust busting thing to try to align these other nonhuman entities, the companies, again, more with the incentives of Americans as a whole. It's not surprising, though, that this is a battle you have to keep fighting. Now we have even larger companies than we ever had before. And of course, they're gonna try to, again, subvert the institutions. Not because, I think people make a mistake of getting all too, thinking about things in terms of good and evil. Like arguing about whether corporations are good or evil, or whether robots are good or evil. A robot isn't good or evil, it's a tool. And you can use it for great things like robotic surgery or for bad things. And a corporation also is a tool, of course. And if you have good incentives to the corporation, it'll do great things, like start a hospital or a grocery store. If you have any bad incentives, then it's gonna start maybe marketing addictive drugs to people and you'll have an opioid epidemic, right? It's all about, we should not make the mistake of getting into some sort of fairytale, good, evil thing about corporations or robots. We should focus on putting the right incentives in place. My optimistic vision is that if we can do that, then we can really get good things. We're not doing so great with that right now, either on AI, I think, or on other intelligent nonhuman entities, like big companies, right? We just have a new second generation of AI and a secretary of defense who's gonna start up now in the Biden administration, who was an active member of the board of Raytheon, for example. So, I have nothing against Raytheon. I'm not a pacifist, but there's an obvious conflict of interest if someone is in the job where they decide who they're gonna contract with. And I think somehow we have, maybe we need another Teddy Roosevelt to come along again and say, hey, you know, we want what's good for all Americans, and we need to go do some serious realigning again of the incentives that we're giving to these big companies. And then we're gonna be better off. It seems that naturally with human beings, just like you beautifully described the history of this whole thing, of it all started with the genes and they're probably pretty upset by all the unintended consequences that happened since. But it seems that it kind of works out, like it's in this collective intelligence that emerges at the different levels. It seems to find sometimes last minute a way to realign the values or keep the values aligned. It's almost, it finds a way, like different leaders, different humans pop up all over the place that reset the system. Do you want, I mean, do you have an explanation why that is? Or is that just survivor bias? And also is that different, somehow fundamentally different than with AI systems where you're no longer dealing with something that was a direct, maybe companies are the same, a direct byproduct of the evolutionary process? I think there is one thing which has changed. That's why I'm not all optimistic. That's why I think there's about a 50% chance if we take the dumb route with artificial intelligence that humanity will be extinct in this century. First, just the big picture. Yeah, companies need to have the right incentives. Even governments, right? We used to have governments, usually there were just some king, who was the king because his dad was the king. And then there were some benefits of having this powerful kingdom or empire of any sort because then it could prevent a lot of local squabbles. So at least everybody in that region would stop warring against each other. And their incentives of different cities in the kingdom became more aligned, right? That was the whole selling point. Harare, Noel Harare has a beautiful piece on how empires were collaboration enablers. And then we also, Harare says, invented money for that reason so we could have better alignment and we could do trade even with people we didn't know. So this sort of stuff has been playing out since time immemorial, right? What's changed is that it happens on ever larger scales, right? The technology keeps getting better because science gets better. So now we can communicate over larger distances, transport things fast over larger distances. And so the entities get ever bigger, but our planet is not getting bigger anymore. So in the past, you could have one experiment that just totally screwed up like Easter Island, where they actually managed to have such poor alignment that when they went extinct, people there, there was no one else to come back and replace them, right? If Elon Musk doesn't get us to Mars and then we go extinct on a global scale, then we're not coming back. That's the fundamental difference. And that's a mistake we don't make for that reason. In the past, of course, history is full of fiascos, right? But it was never the whole planet. And then, okay, now there's this nice uninhabited land here. Some other people could move in and organize things better. This is different. The second thing, which is also different is that technology gives us so much more empowerment, right? Both to do good things and also to screw up. In the stone age, even if you had someone whose goals were really poorly aligned, like maybe he was really pissed off because his stone age girlfriend dumped him and he just wanted to, if he wanted to kill as many people as he could, how many could he really take out with a rock and a stick before he was overpowered, right? Just handful, right? Now, with today's technology, if we have an accidental nuclear war between Russia and the US, which we almost have about a dozen times, and then we have a nuclear winter, it could take out seven billion people or six billion people, we don't know. So the scale of the damage is bigger that we can do. And there's obviously no law of physics that says that technology will never get powerful enough that we could wipe out our species entirely. That would just be fantasy to think that science is somehow doomed to not get more powerful than that, right? And it's not at all unfeasible in our lifetime that someone could design a designer pandemic which spreads as easily as COVID, but just basically kills everybody. We already had smallpox. It killed one third of everybody who got it. What do you think of the, here's an intuition, maybe it's completely naive and this optimistic intuition I have, which it seems, and maybe it's a biased experience that I have, but it seems like the most brilliant people I've met in my life all are really like fundamentally good human beings. And not like naive good, like they really wanna do good for the world in a way that, well, maybe is aligned to my sense of what good means. And so I have a sense that the people that will be defining the very cutting edge of technology, there'll be much more of the ones that are doing good versus the ones that are doing evil. So the race, I'm optimistic on the, us always like last minute coming up with a solution. So if there's an engineered pandemic that has the capability to destroy most of the human civilization, it feels like to me either leading up to that before or as it's going on, there will be, we're able to rally the collective genius of the human species. I can tell by your smile that you're at least some percentage doubtful, but could that be a fundamental law of human nature? That evolution only creates, like karma is beneficial, good is beneficial, and therefore we'll be all right. I hope you're right. I would really love it if you're right, if there's some sort of law of nature that says that we always get lucky in the last second with karma, but I prefer not playing it so close and gambling on that. And I think, in fact, I think it can be dangerous to have too strong faith in that because it makes us complacent. Like if someone tells you, you never have to worry about your house burning down, then you're not gonna put in a smoke detector because why would you need to? Even if it's sometimes very simple precautions, we don't take them. If you're like, oh, the government is gonna take care of everything for us, I can always trust my politicians. I can always, we advocate our own responsibility. I think it's a healthier attitude to say, yeah, maybe things will work out. Maybe I'm actually gonna have to myself step up and take responsibility. And the stakes are so huge. I mean, if we do this right, we can develop all this ever more powerful technology and cure all diseases and create a future where humanity is healthy and wealthy for not just the next election cycle, but like billions of years throughout our universe. That's really worth working hard for and not just sitting and hoping for some sort of fairytale karma. Well, I just mean, so you're absolutely right. From the perspective of the individual, like for me, the primary thing should be to take responsibility and to build the solutions that your skillset allows. Yeah, which is a lot. I think we underestimate often very much how much good we can do. If you or anyone listening to this is completely confident that our government would do a perfect job on handling any future crisis with engineered pandemics or future AI, I actually reflect a bit on what actually happened in 2020. Do you feel that the government by and large around the world has handled this flawlessly? That's a really sad and disappointing reality that hopefully is a wake up call for everybody. For the scientists, for the engineers, for the researchers in AI especially, it was disappointing to see how inefficient we were at collecting the right amount of data in a privacy preserving way and spreading that data and utilizing that data to make decisions, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think when something bad happens to me, I made myself a promise many years ago that I would not be a whiner. So when something bad happens to me, of course it's a process of disappointment, but then I try to focus on what did I learn from this that can make me a better person in the future. And there's usually something to be learned when I fail. And I think we should all ask ourselves, what can we learn from the pandemic about how we can do better in the future? And you mentioned there a really good lesson. We were not as resilient as we thought we were and we were not as prepared maybe as we wish we were. You can even see very stark contrast around the planet. South Korea, they have over 50 million people. Do you know how many deaths they have from COVID last time I checked? No. It's about 500. Why is that? Well, the short answer is that they had prepared. They were incredibly quick, incredibly quick to get on it with very rapid testing and contact tracing and so on, which is why they never had more cases than they could contract trace effectively, right? They never even had to have the kind of big lockdowns we had in the West. But the deeper answer to, it's not just the Koreans are just somehow better people. The reason I think they were better prepared was because they had already had a pretty bad hit from the SARS pandemic, or which never became a pandemic, something like 17 years ago, I think. So it was kind of fresh memory that we need to be prepared for pandemics. So they were, right? So maybe this is a lesson here for all of us to draw from COVID that rather than just wait for the next pandemic or the next problem with AI getting out of control or anything else, maybe we should just actually set aside a tiny fraction of our GDP to have people very systematically do some horizon scanning and say, okay, what are the things that could go wrong? And let's duke it out and see which are the more likely ones and which are the ones that are actually actionable and then be prepared. So one of the observations as one little ant slash human that I am of disappointment is the political division over information that has been observed, that I observed this year, that it seemed the discussion was less about sort of what happened and understanding what happened deeply and more about there's different truths out there. And it's like an argument, my truth is better than your truth. And it's like red versus blue or different. It was like this ridiculous discourse that doesn't seem to get at any kind of notion of the truth. It's not like some kind of scientific process. Even science got politicized in ways that's very heartbreaking to me. You have an exciting project on the AI front of trying to rethink one of the, you mentioned corporations. There's one of the other collective intelligence systems that have emerged through all of this is social networks. And just the spread, the internet is the spread of information on the internet, our ability to share that information. There's all different kinds of news sources and so on. And so you said like that's from first principles, let's rethink how we think about the news, how we think about information. Can you talk about this amazing effort that you're undertaking? Oh, I'd love to. This has been my big COVID project and nights and weekends on ever since the lockdown. To segue into this actually, let me come back to what you said earlier that you had this hope that in your experience, people who you felt were very talented were often idealistic and wanted to do good. Frankly, I feel the same about all people by and large, there are always exceptions, but I think the vast majority of everybody, regardless of education and whatnot, really are fundamentally good, right? So how can it be that people still do so much nasty stuff? I think it has everything to do with this, with the information that we're given. Yes. If you go into Sweden 500 years ago and you start telling all the farmers that those Danes in Denmark, they're so terrible people, and we have to invade them because they've done all these terrible things that you can't fact check yourself. A lot of people, Swedes did that, right? And we're seeing so much of this today in the world, both geopolitically, where we are told that China is bad and Russia is bad and Venezuela is bad, and people in those countries are often told that we are bad. And we also see it at a micro level where people are told that, oh, those who voted for the other party are bad people. It's not just an intellectual disagreement, but they're bad people and we're getting ever more divided. So how do you reconcile this with this intrinsic goodness in people? I think it's pretty obvious that it has, again, to do with the information that we're fed and given, right? We evolved to live in small groups where you might know 30 people in total, right? So you then had a system that was quite good for assessing who you could trust and who you could not. And if someone told you that Joe there is a jerk, but you had interacted with him yourself and seen him in action, and you would quickly realize maybe that that's actually not quite accurate, right? But now that the most people on the planet are people we've never met, it's very important that we have a way of trusting the information we're given. And so, okay, so where does the news project come in? Well, throughout history, you can go read Machiavelli, from the 1400s, and you'll see how already then they were busy manipulating people with propaganda and stuff. Propaganda is not new at all. And the incentives to manipulate people is just not new at all. What is it that's new? What's new is machine learning meets propaganda. That's what's new. That's why this has gotten so much worse. Some people like to blame certain individuals, like in my liberal university bubble, many people blame Donald Trump and say it was his fault. I see it differently. I think Donald Trump just had this extreme skill at playing this game in the machine learning algorithm age. A game he couldn't have played 10 years ago. So what's changed? What's changed is, well, Facebook and Google and other companies, and I'm not badmouthing them, I have a lot of friends who work for these companies, good people, they deployed machine learning algorithms just to increase their profit a little bit, to just maximize the time people spent watching ads. And they had totally underestimated how effective they were gonna be. This was, again, the black box, non intelligible intelligence. They just noticed, oh, we're getting more ad revenue. Great. It took a long time until they even realized why and how and how damaging this was for society. Because of course, what the machine learning figured out was that the by far most effective way of gluing you to your little rectangle was to show you things that triggered strong emotions, anger, et cetera, resentment, and if it was true or not, it didn't really matter. It was also easier to find stories that weren't true. If you weren't limited, that's just the limitation, is to show people. That's a very limiting fact. And before long, we got these amazing filter bubbles on a scale we had never seen before. A couple of days to the fact that also the online news media were so effective that they killed a lot of people that were so effective that they killed a lot of print journalism. There's less than half as many journalists now in America, I believe, as there was a generation ago. You just couldn't compete with the online advertising. So all of a sudden, most people are not getting even reading newspapers. They get their news from social media. And most people only get news in their little bubble. So along comes now some people like Donald Trump, who figured out, among the first successful politicians, to figure out how to really play this new game and become very, very influential. But I think Donald Trump was as simple. He took advantage of it. He didn't create the fundamental conditions were created by machine learning taking over the news media. So this is what motivated my little COVID project here. So I said before, machine learning and tech in general is not evil, but it's also not good. It's just a tool that you can use for good things or bad things. And as it happens, machine learning and news was mainly used by the big players, big tech, to manipulate people and to watch as many ads as possible, which had this unintended consequence of really screwing up our democracy and fragmenting it into filter bubbles. So I thought, well, machine learning algorithms are basically free. They can run on your smartphone for free also if someone gives them away to you, right? There's no reason why they only have to help the big guy to manipulate the little guy. They can just as well help the little guy to see through all the manipulation attempts from the big guy. So this project is called, you can go to improvethenews.org. The first thing we've built is this little news aggregator. Looks a bit like Google News, except it has these sliders on it to help you break out of your filter bubble. So if you're reading, you can click, click and go to your favorite topic. And then if you just slide the left, right slider away all the way over to the left. There's two sliders, right? Yeah, there's the one, the most obvious one is the one that has left, right labeled on it. You go to the left, you get one set of articles, you go to the right, you see a very different truth appearing. Oh, that's literally left and right on the political spectrum. On the political spectrum. So if you're reading about immigration, for example, it's very, very noticeable. And I think step one always, if you wanna not get manipulated is just to be able to recognize the techniques people use. So it's very helpful to just see how they spin things on the two sides. I think many people are under the misconception that the main problem is fake news. It's not. I had an amazing team of MIT students where we did an academic project to use machine learning to detect the main kinds of bias over the summer. And yes, of course, sometimes there's fake news where someone just claims something that's false, right? Like, oh, Hillary Clinton just got divorced or something. But what we see much more of is actually just omissions. If you go to, there's some stories which just won't be mentioned by the left or the right, because it doesn't suit their agenda. And then they'll mention other ones very, very, very much. So for example, we've had a number of stories about the Trump family's financial dealings. And then there's been a bunch of stories about the Biden family's, Hunter Biden's financial dealings. Surprise, surprise, they don't get equal coverage on the left and the right. One side loves to cover the Biden, Hunter Biden's stuff, and one side loves to cover the Trump. You can never guess which is which, right? But the great news is if you're a normal American citizen and you dislike corruption in all its forms, then slide, slide, you can just look at both sides and you'll see all those political corruption stories. It's really liberating to just take in the both sides, the spin on both sides. It somehow unlocks your mind to think on your own, to realize that, I don't know, it's the same thing that was useful, right, in the Soviet Union times for when everybody was much more aware that they're surrounded by propaganda, right? That is so interesting what you're saying, actually. So Noam Chomsky, used to be our MIT colleague, once said that propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. And what he means by that is if you have a really totalitarian government, you don't need propaganda. People will do what you want them to do anyway, but out of fear, right? But otherwise, you need propaganda. So I would say actually that the propaganda is much higher quality in democracies, much more believable. And it's really, it's really striking. When I talk to colleagues, science colleagues like from Russia and China and so on, I notice they are actually much more aware of the propaganda in their own media than many of my American colleagues are about the propaganda in Western media. That's brilliant. That means the propaganda in the Western media is just better. Yes. That's so brilliant. Everything's better in the West, even the propaganda. But once you realize that, you realize there's also something very optimistic there that you can do about it, right? Because first of all, omissions, as long as there's no outright censorship, you can just look at both sides and pretty quickly piece together a much more accurate idea of what's actually going on, right? And develop a natural skepticism too. Yeah. Just an analytical scientific mind about the way you're taking the information. Yeah. And I think, I have to say, sometimes I feel that some of us in the academic bubble are too arrogant about this and somehow think, oh, it's just people who aren't as educated as the dots are pulled. When we are often just as gullible also, we read only our media and don't see through things. Anyone who looks at both sides like this and compares a little will immediately start noticing the shenanigans being pulled. And I think what I tried to do with this app is that the big tech has to some extent tried to blame the individual for being manipulated, much like big tobacco tried to blame the individuals entirely for smoking. And then later on, our government stepped up and say, actually, you can't just blame little kids for starting to smoke. We have to have more responsible advertising and this and that. I think it's a bit the same here. It's very convenient for a big tech to blame. So it's just people who are so dumb and get fooled. The blame usually comes in saying, oh, it's just human psychology. People just wanna hear what they already believe. But professor David Rand at MIT actually partly debunked that with a really nice study showing that people tend to be interested in hearing things that go against what they believe, if it's presented in a respectful way. Suppose, for example, that you have a company and you're just about to launch this project and you're convinced it's gonna work. And someone says, you know, Lex, I hate to tell you this, but this is gonna fail. And here's why. Would you be like, shut up, I don't wanna hear it. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Would you? You would be interested, right? And also if you're on an airplane, back in the pre COVID times, and the guy next to you is clearly from the opposite side of the political spectrum, but is very respectful and polite to you. Wouldn't you be kind of interested to hear a bit about how he or she thinks about things? Of course. But it's not so easy to find out respectful disagreement now, because like, for example, if you are a Democrat and you're like, oh, I wanna see something on the other side, so you just go Breitbart.com. And then after the first 10 seconds, you feel deeply insulted by something. And they, it's not gonna work. Or if you take someone who votes Republican and they go to something on the left, then they just get very offended very quickly by them having put a deliberately ugly picture of Donald Trump on the front page or something. It doesn't really work. So this news aggregator also has this nuance slider, which you can pull to the right and then sort of make it easier to get exposed to actually more sort of academic style or more respectful, portrayals of different views. And finally, the one kind of bias I think people are mostly aware of is the left, right, because it's so obvious, because both left and right are very powerful here, right? Both of them have well funded TV stations and newspapers, and it's kind of hard to miss. But there's another one, the establishment slider, which is also really fun. I love to play with it. And that's more about corruption. Yeah, yeah. I love that one. Yes. Because if you have a society where almost all the powerful entities want you to believe a certain thing, that's what you're gonna read in both the big media, mainstream media on the left and on the right, of course. And the powerful companies can push back very hard, like tobacco companies push back very hard back in the day when some newspapers started writing articles about tobacco being dangerous, so that it was hard to get a lot of coverage about it initially. And also if you look geopolitically, right, of course, in any country, when you read their media, you're mainly gonna be reading a lot of articles about how our country is the good guy and the other countries are the bad guys, right? So if you wanna have a really more nuanced understanding, like the Germans used to be told that the British used to be told that the French were the bad guys and the French used to be told that the British were the bad guys. Now they visit each other's countries a lot and have a much more nuanced understanding. I don't think there's gonna be any more wars between France and Germany. But on the geopolitical scale, it's just as much as ever, you know, big Cold War, now US, China, and so on. And if you wanna get a more nuanced understanding of what's happening geopolitically, then it's really fun to look at this establishment slider because it turns out there are tons of little newspapers, both on the left and on the right, who sometimes challenge establishment and say, you know, maybe we shouldn't actually invade Iraq right now. Maybe this weapons of mass destruction thing is BS. If you look at the journalism research afterwards, you can actually see that quite clearly. Both CNN and Fox were very pro. Let's get rid of Saddam. There are weapons of mass destruction. Then there were a lot of smaller newspapers. They were like, wait a minute, this evidence seems a bit sketchy and maybe we... But of course they were so hard to find. Most people didn't even know they existed, right? Yet it would have been better for American national security if those voices had also come up. I think it harmed America's national security actually that we invaded Iraq. And arguably there's a lot more interest in that kind of thinking too, from those small sources. So like when you say big, it's more about kind of the reach of the broadcast, but it's not big in terms of the interest. I think there's a lot of interest in that kind of anti establishment or like skepticism towards, you know, out of the box thinking. There's a lot of interest in that kind of thing. Do you see this news project or something like it being basically taken over the world as the main way we consume information? Like how do we get there? Like how do we, you know? So, okay, the idea is brilliant. It's a, you're calling it your little project in 2020, but how does that become the new way we consume information? I hope, first of all, just to plant a little seed there because normally the big barrier of doing anything in media is you need a ton of money, but this costs no money at all. I've just been paying myself. You pay a tiny amount of money each month to Amazon to run the thing in their cloud. We're not, there never will never be any ads. The point is not to make any money off of it. And we just train machine learning algorithms to classify the articles and stuff. So it just kind of runs by itself. So if it actually gets good enough at some point that it starts catching on, it could scale. And if other people carbon copy it and make other versions that are better, that's the more the merrier. I think there's a real opportunity for machine learning to empower the individual against the powerful players. As I said in the beginning here, it's been mostly the other way around so far, that the big players have the AI and then they tell people, this is the truth, this is how it is. But it can just as well go the other way around. And when the internet was born, actually, a lot of people had this hope that maybe this will be a great thing for democracy, make it easier to find out about things. And maybe machine learning and things like this can actually help again. And I have to say, I think it's more important than ever now because this is very linked also to the whole future of life as we discussed earlier. We're getting this ever more powerful tech. Frank, it's pretty clear if you look on the one or two generation, three generation timescale that there are only two ways this can end geopolitically. Either it ends great for all humanity or it ends terribly for all of us. There's really no in between. And we're so stuck in that because technology knows no borders. And you can't have people fighting when the weapons just keep getting ever more powerful indefinitely. Eventually, the luck runs out. And right now we have, I love America, but the fact of the matter is what's good for America is not opposite in the long term to what's good for other countries. It would be if this was some sort of zero sum game like it was thousands of years ago when the only way one country could get more resources was to take land from other countries because that was basically the resource. Look at the map of Europe. Some countries kept getting bigger and smaller, endless wars. But then since 1945, there hasn't been any war in Western Europe. And they all got way richer because of tech. So the optimistic outcome is that the big winner in this century is going to be America and China and Russia and everybody else because technology just makes us all healthier and wealthier. And we just find some way of keeping the peace on this planet. But I think, unfortunately, there are some pretty powerful forces right now that are pushing in exactly the opposite direction and trying to demonize other countries, which just makes it more likely that this ever more powerful tech we're building is going to be used in disastrous ways. Yeah, for aggression versus cooperation, that kind of thing. Yeah, even look at just military AI now. It was so awesome to see these dancing robots. I loved it. But one of the biggest growth areas in robotics now is, of course, autonomous weapons. And 2020 was like the best marketing year ever for autonomous weapons. Because in both Libya, it's a civil war, and in Nagorno Karabakh, they made the decisive difference. And everybody else is watching this. Oh, yeah, we want to build autonomous weapons, too. In Libya, you had, on one hand, our ally, the United Arab Emirates that were flying their autonomous weapons that they bought from China, bombing Libyans. And on the other side, you had our other ally, Turkey, flying their drones. And they had no skin in the game, any of these other countries. And of course, it was the Libyans who really got screwed. In Nagorno Karabakh, you had actually, again, Turkey is sending drones built by this company that was actually founded by a guy who went to MIT AeroAstro. Do you know that? No. Bacratyar. Yeah. So MIT has a direct responsibility for ultimately this. And a lot of civilians were killed there. So because it was militarily so effective, now suddenly there's a huge push. Oh, yeah, yeah, let's go build ever more autonomy into these weapons, and it's going to be great. And I think, actually, people who are obsessed about some sort of future Terminator scenario right now should start focusing on the fact that we have two much more urgent threats happening from machine learning. One of them is the whole destruction of democracy that we've talked about now, where our flow of information is being manipulated by machine learning. And the other one is that right now, this is the year when the big arms race and out of control arms race in at least Thomas Weapons is going to start, or it's going to stop. So you have a sense that there is like 2020 was an instrumental catalyst for the autonomous weapons race. Yeah, because it was the first year when they proved decisive in the battlefield. And these ones are still not fully autonomous, mostly. They're remote controlled, right? But we could very quickly make things about the size and cost of a smartphone, which you just put in the GPS coordinates or the face of the one you want to kill, a skin color or whatever, and it flies away and does it. And the real good reason why the US and all the other superpowers should put the kibosh on this is the same reason we decided to put the kibosh on bioweapons. So we gave the Future of Life Award that we can talk more about later to Matthew Messelson from Harvard before for convincing Nixon to ban bioweapons. And I asked him, how did you do it? And he was like, well, I just said, look, we don't want there to be a $500 weapon of mass destruction that all our enemies can afford, even nonstate actors. And Nixon was like, good point. It's in America's interest that the powerful weapons are all really expensive, so only we can afford them, or maybe some more stable adversaries, right? Nuclear weapons are like that. But bioweapons were not like that. That's why we banned them. And that's why you never hear about them now. That's why we love biology. So you have a sense that it's possible for the big power houses in terms of the big nations in the world to agree that autonomous weapons is not a race we want to be on, that it doesn't end well. Yeah, because we know it's just going to end in mass proliferation. And every terrorist everywhere is going to have these super cheap weapons that they will use against us. And our politicians have to constantly worry about being assassinated every time they go outdoors by some anonymous little mini drone. We don't want that. And even if the US and China and everyone else could just agree that you can only build these weapons if they cost at least $10 million, that would be a huge win for the superpowers and, frankly, for everybody. And people often push back and say, well, it's so hard to prevent cheating. But hey, you could say the same about bioweapons. Take any of your MIT colleagues in biology. Of course, they could build some nasty bioweapon if they really wanted to. But first of all, they don't want to because they think it's disgusting because of the stigma. And second, even if there's some sort of nutcase and want to, it's very likely that some of their grad students or someone would rat them out because everyone else thinks it's so disgusting. And in fact, we now know there was even a fair bit of cheating on the bioweapons ban. But no countries used them because it was so stigmatized that it just wasn't worth revealing that they had cheated. You talk about drones, but you kind of think that drones is a remote operation. Which they are, mostly, still. But you're not taking the next intellectual step of where does this go. You're kind of saying the problem with drones is that you're removing yourself from direct violence. Therefore, you're not able to sort of maintain the common humanity required to make the proper decisions strategically. But that's the criticism as opposed to like, if this is automated, and just exactly as you said, if you automate it and there's a race, then the technology's gonna get better and better and better which means getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And unlike, perhaps, nuclear weapons which is connected to resources in a way, like it's hard to engineer, yeah. It feels like there's too much overlap between the tech industry and autonomous weapons to where you could have smartphone type of cheapness. If you look at drones, for $1,000, you can have an incredible system that's able to maintain flight autonomously for you and take pictures and stuff. You could see that going into the autonomous weapons space that's, but why is that not thought about or discussed enough in the public, do you think? You see those dancing Boston Dynamics robots and everybody has this kind of, as if this is like a far future. They have this fear like, oh, this'll be Terminator in like some, I don't know, unspecified 20, 30, 40 years. And they don't think about, well, this is like some much less dramatic version of that is actually happening now. It's not gonna be legged, it's not gonna be dancing, but it already has the capability to use artificial intelligence to kill humans. Yeah, the Boston Dynamics legged robots, I think the reason we imagine them holding guns is just because you've all seen Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? That's our reference point. That's pretty useless. That's not gonna be the main military use of them. They might be useful in law enforcement in the future and then there's a whole debate about, do you want robots showing up at your house with guns telling you who'll be perfectly obedient to whatever dictator controls them? But let's leave that aside for a moment and look at what's actually relevant now. So there's a spectrum of things you can do with AI in the military. And again, to put my card on the table, I'm not the pacifist, I think we should have good defense. So for example, a predator drone is basically a fancy little remote controlled airplane, right? There's a human piloting it and the decision ultimately about whether to kill somebody with it is made by a human still. And this is a line I think we should never cross. There's a current DOD policy. Again, you have to have a human in the loop. I think algorithms should never make life or death decisions, they should be left to humans. Now, why might we cross that line? Well, first of all, these are expensive, right? So for example, when Azerbaijan had all these drones and Armenia didn't have any, they start trying to jerry rig little cheap things, fly around. But then of course, the Armenians would jam them or the Azeris would jam them. And remote control things can be jammed, that makes them inferior. Also, there's a bit of a time delay between, if we're piloting something from far away, speed of light, and the human has a reaction time as well, it would be nice to eliminate that jamming possibility in the time that they by having it fully autonomous. But now you might be, so then if you do, but now you might be crossing that exact line. You might program it to just, oh yeah, the air drone, go hover over this country for a while and whenever you find someone who is a bad guy, kill them. Now the machine is making these sort of decisions and some people who defend this still say, well, that's morally fine because we are the good guys and we will tell it the definition of bad guy that we think is moral. But now it would be very naive to think that if ISIS buys that same drone, that they're gonna use our definition of bad guy. Maybe for them, bad guy is someone wearing a US army uniform or maybe there will be some, weird ethnic group who decides that someone of another ethnic group, they are the bad guys, right? The thing is human soldiers with all our faults, we still have some basic wiring in us. Like, no, it's not okay to kill kids and civilians. And Thomas Weprin has none of that. It's just gonna do whatever is programmed. It's like the perfect Adolf Eichmann on steroids. Like they told him, Adolf Eichmann, you know, he wanted to do this and this and this to make the Holocaust more efficient. And he was like, yeah, and off he went and did it, right? Do we really wanna make machines that are like that, like completely amoral and we'll take the user's definition of who is the bad guy? And do we then wanna make them so cheap that all our adversaries can have them? Like what could possibly go wrong? That's I think the big ordeal of the whole thing. I think the big argument for why we wanna, this year really put the kibosh on this. And I think you can tell there's a lot of very active debate even going on within the US military and undoubtedly in other militaries around the world also about whether we should have some sort of international agreement to at least require that these weapons have to be above a certain size and cost, you know, so that things just don't totally spiral out of control. And finally, just for your question, but is it possible to stop it? Because some people tell me, oh, just give up, you know. But again, so Matthew Messelsen again from Harvard, right, who the bioweapons hero, he had exactly this criticism also with bioweapons. People were like, how can you check for sure that the Russians aren't cheating? And he told me this, I think really ingenious insight. He said, you know, Max, some people think you have to have inspections and things and you have to make sure that you can catch the cheaters with 100% chance. You don't need 100%, he said. 1% is usually enough. Because if it's another big state, suppose China and the US have signed the treaty drawing a certain line and saying, yeah, these kind of drones are OK, but these fully autonomous ones are not. Now suppose you are China and you have cheated and secretly developed some clandestine little thing or you're thinking about doing it. What's your calculation that you do? Well, you're like, OK, what's the probability that we're going to get caught? If the probability is 100%, of course, we're not going to do it. But if the probability is 5% that we're going to get caught, then it's going to be like a huge embarrassment for us. And we still have our nuclear weapons anyway, so it doesn't really make an enormous difference in terms of deterring the US. And that feeds the stigma that you kind of established, like this fabric, this universal stigma over the thing. Exactly. It's very reasonable for them to say, well, we probably get away with it. If we don't, then the US will know we cheated, and then they're going to go full tilt with their program and say, look, the Chinese are cheaters, and now we have all these weapons against us, and that's bad. So the stigma alone is very, very powerful. And again, look what happened with bioweapons. It's been 50 years now. When was the last time you read about a bioterrorism attack? The only deaths I really know about with bioweapons that have happened when we Americans managed to kill some of our own with anthrax, or the idiot who sent them to Tom Daschle and others in letters, right? And similarly in Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union, they had some anthrax in some lab there. Maybe they were cheating or who knows, and it leaked out and killed a bunch of Russians. I'd say that's a pretty good success, right? 50 years, just two own goals by the superpowers, and then nothing. And that's why whenever I ask anyone what they think about biology, they think it's great. They associate it with new cures, new diseases, maybe a good vaccine. This is how I want to think about AI in the future. And I want others to think about AI too, as a source of all these great solutions to our problems, not as, oh, AI, oh yeah, that's the reason I feel scared going outside these days. Yeah, it's kind of brilliant that bioweapons and nuclear weapons, we've figured out, I mean, of course there's still a huge source of danger, but we figured out some way of creating rules and social stigma over these weapons that then creates a stability to our, whatever that game theoretic stability that occurs. And we don't have that with AI, and you're kind of screaming from the top of the mountain about this, that we need to find that because it's very possible with the future of life, as you point out, Institute Awards pointed out that with nuclear weapons, we could have destroyed ourselves quite a few times. And it's a learning experience that is very costly. We gave this Future Life Award, we gave it the first time to this guy, Vasily Arkhipov. He was on, most people haven't even heard of him. Yeah, can you say who he is? Vasily Arkhipov, he has, in my opinion, made the greatest positive contribution to humanity of any human in modern history. And maybe it sounds like hyperbole here, like I'm just over the top, but let me tell you the story and I think maybe you'll agree. So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we Americans first didn't know that the Russians had sent four submarines, but we caught two of them. And we didn't know that, so we dropped practice depth charges on the one that he was on, try to force it to the surface. But we didn't know that this nuclear submarine actually was a nuclear submarine with a nuclear torpedo. We also didn't know that they had authorization to launch it without clearance from Moscow. And we also didn't know that they were running out of electricity. Their batteries were almost dead. They were running out of oxygen. Sailors were fainting left and right. The temperature was about 110, 120 Fahrenheit on board. It was really hellish conditions, really just a kind of doomsday. And at that point, these giant explosions start happening from the Americans dropping these. The captain thought World War III had begun. They decided they were gonna launch the nuclear torpedo. And one of them shouted, we're all gonna die, but we're not gonna disgrace our Navy. We don't know what would have happened if there had been a giant mushroom cloud all of a sudden against the Americans. But since everybody had their hands on the triggers, you don't have to be too creative to think that it could have led to an all out nuclear war, in which case we wouldn't be having this conversation now. What actually took place was they needed three people to approve this. The captain had said yes. There was the Communist Party political officer. He also said, yes, let's do it. And the third man was this guy, Vasily Arkhipov, who said, no. For some reason, he was just more chill than the others and he was the right man at the right time. I don't want us as a species rely on the right person being there at the right time, you know. We tracked down his family living in relative poverty outside Moscow. When he flew his daughter, he had passed away and flew them to London. They had never been to the West even. It was incredibly moving to get to honor them for this. The next year we gave them a medal. The next year we gave this Future Life Award to Stanislav Petrov. Have you heard of him? Yes. So he was in charge of the Soviet early warning station, which was built with Soviet technology and honestly not that reliable. It said that there were five US missiles coming in. Again, if they had launched at that point, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. He decided based on just mainly gut instinct to just not escalate this. And I'm very glad he wasn't replaced by an AI that was just automatically following orders. And then we gave the third one to Matthew Messelson. Last year, we gave this award to these guys who actually use technology for good, not avoiding something bad, but for something good. The guys who eliminated this disease, it was way worse than COVID that had killed half a billion people in its final century. Smallpox, right? So you mentioned it earlier. COVID on average kills less than 1% of people who get it. Smallpox, about 30%. And they just ultimately, Viktor Zhdanov and Bill Foege, most of my colleagues have never heard of either of them, one American, one Russian, they did this amazing effort not only was Zhdanov able to get the US and the Soviet Union to team up against smallpox during the Cold War, but Bill Foege came up with this ingenious strategy for making it actually go all the way to defeat the disease without funding for vaccinating everyone. And as a result, we haven't had any, we went from 15 million deaths the year I was born in smallpox. So what do we have in COVID now? A little bit short of 2 million, right? Yes. To zero deaths, of course, this year and forever. There have been 200 million people, we estimate, who would have died since then by smallpox had it not been for this. So isn't science awesome when you use it for good? The reason we wanna celebrate these sort of people is to remind them of this. Science is so awesome when you use it for good. And those awards actually, the variety there, it's a very interesting picture. So the first two are looking at, it's kind of exciting to think that these average humans in some sense, they're products of billions of other humans that came before them, evolution, and some little, you said gut, but there's something in there that stopped the annihilation of the human race. And that's a magical thing, but that's like this deeply human thing. And then there's the other aspect where that's also very human, which is to build solution to the existential crises that we're facing, like to build it, to take the responsibility and to come up with different technologies and so on. And both of those are deeply human, the gut and the mind, whatever that is that creates. The best is when they work together. Arkhipov, I wish I could have met him, of course, but he had passed away. He was really a fantastic military officer, combining all the best traits that we in America admire in our military. Because first of all, he was very loyal, of course. He never even told anyone about this during his whole life, even though you think he had some bragging rights, right? But he just was like, this is just business, just doing my job. It only came out later after his death. And second, the reason he did the right thing was not because he was some sort of liberal or some sort of, not because he was just, oh, peace and love. It was partly because he had been the captain on another submarine that had a nuclear reactor meltdown. And it was his heroism that helped contain this. That's why he died of cancer later also. But he had seen many of his crew members die. And I think for him, that gave him this gut feeling that if there's a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, the whole world is gonna go through what I saw my dear crew members suffer through. It wasn't just an abstract thing for him. I think it was real. And second though, not just the gut, the mind, right? He was, for some reason, very levelheaded personality and very smart guy, which is exactly what we want our best fighter pilots to be also, right? I never forget Neil Armstrong when he's landing on the moon and almost running out of gas. And he doesn't even change when they say 30 seconds, he doesn't even change the tone of voice, just keeps going. Arkhipov, I think was just like that. So when the explosions start going off and his captain is screaming and we should nuke them and all, he's like, I don't think the Americans are trying to sink us. I think they're trying to send us a message. That's pretty bad ass. Yes. Coolness, because he said, if they wanted to sink us, and he said, listen, listen, it's alternating one loud explosion on the left, one on the right, one on the left, one on the right. He was the only one who noticed this pattern. And he's like, I think this is, I'm trying to send us a signal that they want it to surface and they're not gonna sink us. And somehow, this is how he then managed it ultimately with his combination of gut and also just cool analytical thinking, was able to deescalate the whole thing. And yeah, so this is some of the best in humanity. I guess coming back to what we talked about earlier, it's the combination of the neural network, the instinctive, with, I'm getting teary up here, getting emotional, but he was just, he is one of my superheroes, having both the heart and the mind combined. And especially in that time, there's something about the, I mean, this is a very, in America, people are used to this kind of idea of being the individual of like on your own thinking. I think under, in the Soviet Union under communism, it's actually much harder to do that. Oh yeah, he didn't even, he even got, he didn't get any accolades either when he came back for this, right? They just wanted to hush the whole thing up. Yeah, there's echoes of that with Chernobyl, there's all kinds of, that's one, that's a really hopeful thing that amidst big centralized powers, whether it's companies or states, there's still the power of the individual to think on their own, to act. But I think we need to think of people like this, not as a panacea we can always count on, but rather as a wake up call. So because of them, because of Arkhipov, we are alive to learn from this lesson, to learn from the fact that we shouldn't keep playing Russian roulette and almost have a nuclear war by mistake now and then, because relying on luck is not a good longterm strategy. If you keep playing Russian roulette over and over again, the probability of surviving just drops exponentially with time. Yeah. And if you have some probability of having an accidental nuke war every year, the probability of not having one also drops exponentially. I think we can do better than that. So I think the message is very clear, once in a while shit happens, and there's a lot of very concrete things we can do to reduce the risk of things like that happening in the first place. On the AI front, if we just link on that for a second. Yeah. So you're friends with, you often talk with Elon Musk throughout history, you've did a lot of interesting things together. He has a set of fears about the future of artificial intelligence, AGI. Do you have a sense, we've already talked about the things we should be worried about with AI, do you have a sense of the shape of his fears in particular about AI, of which subset of what we've talked about, whether it's creating, it's that direction of creating sort of these giant competition systems that are not explainable, they're not intelligible intelligence, or is it the... And then like as a branch of that, is it the manipulation by big corporations of that or individual evil people to use that for destruction or the unintentional consequences? Do you have a sense of where his thinking is on this? From my many conversations with Elon, yeah, I certainly have a model of how he thinks. It's actually very much like the way I think also, I'll elaborate on it a bit. I just wanna push back on when you said evil people, I don't think it's a very helpful concept. Evil people, sometimes people do very, very bad things, but they usually do it because they think it's a good thing because somehow other people had told them that that was a good thing or given them incorrect information or whatever, right? I believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity that if we educate people well and they find out how things really are, people generally wanna do good and be good. Hence the value alignment, as opposed to it's about information, about knowledge, and then once we have that, we'll likely be able to do good in the way that's aligned with everybody else who thinks differently. Yeah, and it's not just the individual people we have to align. So we don't just want people to be educated to know the way things actually are and to treat each other well, but we also need to align other nonhuman entities. We talked about corporations, there has to be institutions so that what they do is actually good for the country they're in and we should align, make sure that what countries do is actually good for the species as a whole, et cetera. Coming back to Elon, yeah, my understanding of how Elon sees this is really quite similar to my own, which is one of the reasons I like him so much and enjoy talking with him so much. I feel he's quite different from most people in that he thinks much more than most people about the really big picture, not just what's gonna happen in the next election cycle, but in millennia, millions and billions of years from now. And when you look in this more cosmic perspective, it's so obvious that we are gazing out into this universe that as far as we can tell is mostly dead with life being almost imperceptibly tiny perturbation, and he sees this enormous opportunity for our universe to come alive, first to become an interplanetary species. Mars is obviously just first stop on this cosmic journey. And precisely because he thinks more long term, it's much more clear to him than to most people that what we do with this Russian roulette thing we keep playing with our nukes is a really poor strategy, really reckless strategy. And also that we're just building these ever more powerful AI systems that we don't understand is also just a really reckless strategy. I feel Elon is very much a humanist in the sense that he wants an awesome future for humanity. He wants it to be us that control the machines rather than the machines that control us. And why shouldn't we insist on that? We're building them after all, right? Why should we build things that just make us into some little cog in the machinery that has no further say in the matter, right? That's not my idea of an inspiring future either. Yeah, if you think on the cosmic scale in terms of both time and space, so much is put into perspective. Yeah. Whenever I have a bad day, that's what I think about. It immediately makes me feel better. It makes me sad that for us individual humans, at least for now, the ride ends too quickly. That we don't get to experience the cosmic scale. Yeah, I mean, I think of our universe sometimes as an organism that has only begun to wake up a tiny bit, just like the very first little glimmers of consciousness you have in the morning when you start coming around. Before the coffee. Before the coffee, even before you get out of bed, before you even open your eyes. You start to wake up a little bit. There's something here. That's very much how I think of where we are. All those galaxies out there, I think they're really beautiful, but why are they beautiful? They're beautiful because conscious entities are actually observing them, experiencing them through our telescopes. I define consciousness as subjective experience, whether it be colors or emotions or sounds. So beauty is an experience. Meaning is an experience. Purpose is an experience. If there was no conscious experience, observing these galaxies, they wouldn't be beautiful. If we do something dumb with advanced AI in the future here and Earth originating, life goes extinct. And that was it for this. If there is nothing else with telescopes in our universe, then it's kind of game over for beauty and meaning and purpose in our whole universe. And I think that would be just such an opportunity lost, frankly. And I think when Elon points this out, he gets very unfairly maligned in the media for all the dumb media bias reasons we talked about. They want to print precisely the things about Elon out of context that are really click baity. He has gotten so much flack for this summoning the demon statement. I happen to know exactly the context because I was in the front row when he gave that talk. It was at MIT, you'll be pleased to know, it was the AeroAstro anniversary. They had Buzz Aldrin there from the moon landing, a whole house, a Kresge auditorium packed with MIT students. And he had this amazing Q&A, it might've gone for an hour. And they talked about rockets and Mars and everything. At the very end, this one student who has actually hit my class asked him, what about AI? Elon makes this one comment and they take this out of context, print it, goes viral. What is it like with AI, we're summoning the demons, something like that. And try to cast him as some sort of doom and gloom dude. You know Elon, he's not the doom and gloom dude. He is such a positive visionary. And the whole reason he warns about this is because he realizes more than most what the opportunity cost is of screwing up. That there is so much awesomeness in the future that we can and our descendants can enjoy if we don't screw up, right? I get so pissed off when people try to cast him as some sort of technophobic Luddite. And at this point, it's kind of ludicrous when I hear people say that people who worry about artificial general intelligence are Luddites because of course, if you look more closely, you have some of the most outspoken people making warnings are people like Professor Stuart Russell from Berkeley who's written the bestselling AI textbook, you know. So claiming that he's a Luddite who doesn't understand AI is the joke is really on the people who said it. But I think more broadly, this message is really not sunk in at all. What it is that people worry about, they think that Elon and Stuart Russell and others are worried about the dancing robots picking up an AR 15 and going on a rampage, right? They think they're worried about robots turning evil. They're not, I'm not. The risk is not malice, it's competence. The risk is just that we build some systems that are incredibly competent, which means they're always gonna get their goals accomplished, even if they clash with our goals. That's the risk. Why did we humans drive the West African black rhino extinct? Is it because we're malicious, evil rhinoceros haters? No, it's just because our goals didn't align with the goals of those rhinos and tough luck for the rhinos, you know. So the point is just we don't wanna put ourselves in the position of those rhinos creating something more powerful than us if we haven't first figured out how to align the goals. And I am optimistic. I think we could do it if we worked really hard on it, because I spent a lot of time around intelligent entities that were more intelligent than me, my mom and my dad. And I was little and that was fine because their goals were actually aligned with mine quite well. But we've seen today many examples of where the goals of our powerful systems are not so aligned. So those click through optimization algorithms that are polarized social media, right? They were actually pretty poorly aligned with what was good for democracy, it turned out. And again, almost all problems we've had in the machine learning again came so far, not from malice, but from poor alignment. And that's exactly why that's why we should be concerned about it in the future. Do you think it's possible that with systems like Neuralink and brain computer interfaces, you know, again, thinking of the cosmic scale, Elon's talked about this, but others have as well throughout history of figuring out how the exact mechanism of how to achieve that kind of alignment. So one of them is having a symbiosis with AI, which is like coming up with clever ways where we're like stuck together in this weird relationship, whether it's biological or in some kind of other way. Do you think that's a possibility of having that kind of symbiosis? Or do we wanna instead kind of focus on this distinct entities of us humans talking to these intelligible, self doubting AIs, maybe like Stuart Russell thinks about it, like we're self doubting and full of uncertainty and our AI systems are full of uncertainty. We communicate back and forth and in that way achieve symbiosis. I honestly don't know. I would say that because we don't know for sure what if any of our, which of any of our ideas will work. But we do know that if we don't, I'm pretty convinced that if we don't get any of these things to work and just barge ahead, then our species is, you know, probably gonna go extinct this century. I think it's... This century, you think like, you think we're facing this crisis is a 21st century crisis. Like this century will be remembered. But on a hard drive and a hard drive somewhere or maybe by future generations is like, like there'll be future Future of Life Institute awards for people that have done something about AI. It could also end even worse, whether we're not superseded by leaving any AI behind either. We just totally wipe out, you know, like on Easter Island. Our century is long. You know, there are still 79 years left of it, right? Think about how far we've come just in the last 30 years. So we can talk more about what might go wrong, but you asked me this really good question about what's the best strategy. Is it Neuralink or Russell's approach or whatever? I think, you know, when we did the Manhattan project, we didn't know if any of our four ideas for enriching uranium and getting out the uranium 235 were gonna work. But we felt this was really important to get it before Hitler did. So, you know what we did? We tried all four of them. Here, I think it's analogous where there's the greatest threat that's ever faced our species. And of course, US national security by implication. We don't know if we don't have any method that's guaranteed to work, but we have a lot of ideas. So we should invest pretty heavily in pursuing all of them with an open mind and hope that one of them at least works. These are, the good news is the century is long, and it might take decades until we have artificial general intelligence. So we have some time hopefully, but it takes a long time to solve these very, very difficult problems. It's gonna actually be the, it's the most difficult problem we were ever trying to solve as a species. So we have to start now. So we don't have, rather than begin thinking about it the night before some people who've had too much Red Bull switch it on. And we have to, coming back to your question, we have to pursue all of these different avenues and see. If you were my investment advisor and I was trying to invest in the future, how do you think the human species is most likely to destroy itself in the century? Yeah, so if the crises, many of the crises we're facing are really before us within the next hundred years, how do we make explicit, make known the unknowns and solve those problems to avoid the biggest, starting with the biggest existential crisis? So as your investment advisor, how are you planning to make money on us destroying ourselves? I have to ask. I don't know. It might be the Russian origins. Somehow it's involved. At the micro level of detailed strategies, of course, these are unsolved problems. For AI alignment, we can break it into three sub problems that are all unsolved. I think you want first to make machines understand our goals, then adopt our goals and then retain our goals. So to hit on all three real quickly. The problem when Andreas Lubitz told his autopilot to fly into the Alps was that the computer didn't even understand anything about his goals. It was too dumb. It could have understood actually, but you would have had to put some effort in as a systems designer to don't fly into mountains. So that's the first challenge. How do you program into computers human values, human goals? We can start rather than saying, oh, it's so hard. We should start with the simple stuff, as I said, self driving cars, airplanes, just put in all the goals that we all agree on already, and then have a habit of whenever machines get smarter so they can understand one level higher goals, put them into. The second challenge is getting them to adopt the goals. It's easy for situations like that where you just program it in, but when you have self learning systems like children, you know, any parent knows that there was a difference between getting our kids to understand what we want them to do and to actually adopt our goals, right? With humans, with children, fortunately, they go through this phase. First, they're too dumb to understand what we want our goals are. And then they have this period of some years when they're both smart enough to understand them and malleable enough that we have a chance to raise them well. And then they become teenagers kind of too late. But we have this window with machines, the challenges, the intelligence might grow so fast that that window is pretty short. So that's a research problem. The third one is how do you make sure they keep the goals if they keep learning more and getting smarter? Many sci fi movies are about how you have something in which initially was aligned, but then things kind of go off keel. And, you know, my kids were very, very excited about their Legos when they were little. Now they're just gathering dust in the basement. If we create machines that are really on board with the goal of taking care of humanity, we don't want them to get as bored with us as my kids got with Legos. So this is another research challenge. How can you make some sort of recursively self improving system retain certain basic goals? That said, a lot of adult people still play with Legos. So maybe we succeeded with the Legos. Maybe, I like your optimism. But above all. So not all AI systems have to maintain the goals, right? Just some fraction. Yeah, so there's a lot of talented AI researchers now who have heard of this and want to work on it. Not so much funding for it yet. Of the billions that go into building AI more powerful, it's only a minuscule fraction so far going into this safety research. My attitude is generally we should not try to slow down the technology, but we should greatly accelerate the investment in this sort of safety research. And also, this was very embarrassing last year, but the NSF decided to give out six of these big institutes. We got one of them for AI and science, you asked me about. Another one was supposed to be for AI safety research. And they gave it to people studying oceans and climate and stuff. So I'm all for studying oceans and climates, but we need to actually have some money that actually goes into AI safety research also and doesn't just get grabbed by whatever. That's a fantastic investment. And then at the higher level, you asked this question, okay, what can we do? What are the biggest risks? I think we cannot just consider this to be only a technical problem. Again, because if you solve only the technical problem, can I play with your robot? Yes, please. If we can get our machines to just blindly obey the orders we give them, so we can always trust that it will do what we want. That might be great for the owner of the robot. That might not be so great for the rest of humanity if that person is that least favorite world leader or whatever you imagine, right? So we have to also take a look at the, apply alignment, not just to machines, but to all the other powerful structures. That's why it's so important to strengthen our democracy again, as I said, to have institutions, make sure that the playing field is not rigged so that corporations are given the right incentives to do the things that both make profit and are good for people, to make sure that countries have incentives to do things that are both good for their people and don't screw up the rest of the world. And this is not just something for AI nerds to geek out on. This is an interesting challenge for political scientists, economists, and so many other thinkers. So one of the magical things that perhaps makes this earth quite unique is that it's home to conscious beings. So you mentioned consciousness. Perhaps as a small aside, because we didn't really get specific to how we might do the alignment. Like you said, is there just a really important research problem, but do you think engineering consciousness into AI systems is a possibility, is something that we might one day do, or is there something fundamental to consciousness that is, is there something about consciousness that is fundamental to humans and humans only? I think it's possible. I think both consciousness and intelligence are information processing. Certain types of information processing. And that fundamentally, it doesn't matter whether the information is processed by carbon atoms in the neurons and brains or by silicon atoms and so on in our technology. Some people disagree. This is what I think as a physicist. That consciousness is the same kind of, you said consciousness is information processing. So meaning, I think you had a quote of something like it's information knowing itself, that kind of thing. I think consciousness is, yeah, is the way information feels when it's being processed. One's being put in complex ways. We don't know exactly what those complex ways are. It's clear that most of the information processing in our brains does not create an experience. We're not even aware of it, right? Like for example, you're not aware of your heartbeat regulation right now, even though it's clearly being done by your body, right? It's just kind of doing its own thing. When you go jogging, there's a lot of complicated stuff about how you put your foot down and we know it's hard. That's why robots used to fall over so much, but you're mostly unaware about it. Your brain, your CEO consciousness module just sends an email, hey, I'm gonna keep jogging along this path. The rest is on autopilot, right? So most of it is not conscious, but somehow there is some of the information processing, which is we don't know what exactly. I think this is a science problem that I hope one day we'll have some equation for or something so we can be able to build a consciousness detector and say, yeah, here there is some consciousness, here there's not. Oh, don't boil that lobster because it's feeling pain or it's okay because it's not feeling pain. Right now we treat this as sort of just metaphysics, but it would be very useful in emergency rooms to know if a patient has locked in syndrome and is conscious or if they are actually just out. And in the future, if you build a very, very intelligent helper robot to take care of you, I think you'd like to know if you should feel guilty about shutting it down or if it's just like a zombie going through the motions like a fancy tape recorder, right? And once we can make progress on the science of consciousness and figure out what is conscious and what isn't, then assuming we want to create positive experiences and not suffering, we'll probably choose to build some machines that are deliberately unconscious that do incredibly boring, repetitive jobs in an iron mine somewhere or whatever. And maybe we'll choose to create helper robots for the elderly that are conscious so that people don't just feel creeped out that the robot is just faking it when it acts like it's sad or happy. Like you said, elderly, I think everybody gets pretty deeply lonely in this world. And so there's a place I think for everybody to have a connection with conscious beings, whether they're human or otherwise. But I know for sure that I would, if I had a robot, if I was gonna develop any kind of personal emotional connection with it, I would be very creeped out if I knew it in an intellectual level that the whole thing was just a fraud. Now today you can buy a little talking doll for a kid which will say things and the little child will often think that this is actually conscious and even real secrets to it that then go on the internet and with lots of the creepy repercussions. I would not wanna be just hacked and tricked like this. If I was gonna be developing real emotional connections with the robot, I would wanna know that this is actually real. It's acting conscious, acting happy because it actually feels it. And I think this is not sci fi. I think it's possible to measure, to come up with tools. After we understand the science of consciousness, you're saying we'll be able to come up with tools that can measure consciousness and definitively say like this thing is experiencing the things it says it's experiencing. Kind of by definition. If it is a physical phenomenon, information processing and we know that some information processing is conscious and some isn't, well, then there is something there to be discovered with the methods of science. Giulio Tononi has stuck his neck out the farthest and written down some equations for a theory. Maybe that's right, maybe it's wrong. We certainly don't know. But I applaud that kind of efforts to sort of take this, say this is not just something that philosophers can have beer and muse about, but something we can measure and study. And coming, bringing that back to us, I think what we would probably choose to do, as I said, is if we cannot figure this out, choose to make, to be quite mindful about what sort of consciousness, if any, we put in different machines that we have. And certainly, we wouldn't wanna make, we should not be making much machines that suffer without us even knowing it, right? And if at any point someone decides to upload themselves like Ray Kurzweil wants to do, I don't know if you've had him on your show. We agree, but then COVID happens, so we're waiting it out a little bit. Suppose he uploads himself into this robo Ray and it talks like him and acts like him and laughs like him. And before he powers off his biological body, he would probably be pretty disturbed if he realized that there's no one home. This robot is not having any subjective experience, right? If humanity gets replaced by machine descendants, which do all these cool things and build spaceships and go to intergalactic rock concerts, and it turns out that they are all unconscious, just going through the motions, wouldn't that be like the ultimate zombie apocalypse, right? Just a play for empty benches? Yeah, I have a sense that there's some kind of, once we understand consciousness better, we'll understand that there's some kind of continuum and it would be a greater appreciation. And we'll probably understand, just like you said, it'd be unfortunate if it's a trick. We'll probably definitely understand that love is indeed a trick that we'll play on each other, that we humans are, we convince ourselves we're conscious, but we're really, us and trees and dolphins are all the same kind of consciousness. Can I try to cheer you up a little bit with a philosophical thought here about the love part? Yes, let's do it. You know, you might say, okay, yeah, love is just a collaboration enabler. And then maybe you can go and get depressed about that. But I think that would be the wrong conclusion, actually. You know, I know that the only reason I enjoy food is because my genes hacked me and they don't want me to starve to death. Not because they care about me consciously enjoying succulent delights of pistachio ice cream, but they just want me to make copies of them. The whole thing, so in a sense, the whole enjoyment of food is also a scam like this. But does that mean I shouldn't take pleasure in this pistachio ice cream? I love pistachio ice cream. And I can tell you, I know this is an experimental fact. I enjoy pistachio ice cream every bit as much, even though I scientifically know exactly why, what kind of scam this was. Your genes really appreciate that you like the pistachio ice cream. Well, but I, my mind appreciates it too, you know? And I have a conscious experience right now. Ultimately, all of my brain is also just something the genes built to copy themselves. But so what? You know, I'm grateful that, yeah, thanks genes for doing this, but you know, now it's my brain that's in charge here and I'm gonna enjoy my conscious experience, thank you very much. And not just the pistachio ice cream, but also the love I feel for my amazing wife and all the other delights of being conscious. I don't, actually Richard Feynman, I think said this so well. He is also the guy, you know, really got me into physics. Some art friend said that, oh, science kind of just is the party pooper. It's kind of ruins the fun, right? When like you have a beautiful flowers as the artist and then the scientist is gonna deconstruct that into just a blob of quarks and electrons. And Feynman pushed back on that in such a beautiful way, which I think also can be used to push back and make you not feel guilty about falling in love. So here's what Feynman basically said. He said to his friend, you know, yeah, I can also as a scientist see that this is a beautiful flower, thank you very much. Maybe I can't draw as good a painting as you because I'm not as talented an artist, but yeah, I can really see the beauty in it. And it just, it also looks beautiful to me. But in addition to that, Feynman said, as a scientist, I see even more beauty that the artist did not see, right? Suppose this is a flower on a blossoming apple tree. You could say this tree has more beauty in it than just the colors and the fragrance. This tree is made of air, Feynman wrote. This is one of my favorite Feynman quotes ever. And it took the carbon out of the air and bound it in using the flaming heat of the sun, you know, to turn the air into a tree. And when you burn logs in your fireplace, it's really beautiful to think that this is being reversed. Now the tree is going, the wood is going back into air. And in this flaming, beautiful dance of the fire that the artist can see is the flaming light of the sun that was bound in to turn the air into tree. And then the ashes is the little residue that didn't come from the air that the tree sucked out of the ground, you know. Feynman said, these are beautiful things. And science just adds, it doesn't subtract. And I feel exactly that way about love and about pistachio ice cream also. I can understand that there is even more nuance to the whole thing, right? At this very visceral level, you can fall in love just as much as someone who knows nothing about neuroscience. But you can also appreciate this even greater beauty in it. Just like, isn't it remarkable that it came about from this completely lifeless universe, just a bunch of hot blob of plasma expanding. And then over the eons, you know, gradually, first the strong nuclear force decided to combine quarks together into nuclei. And then the electric force bound in electrons and made atoms. And then they clustered from gravity and you got planets and stars and this and that. And then natural selection came along and the genes had their little thing. And you started getting what went from seeming like a completely pointless universe that we're just trying to increase entropy and approach heat death into something that looked more goal oriented. Isn't that kind of beautiful? And then this goal orientedness through evolution got ever more sophisticated where you got ever more. And then you started getting this thing, which is kind of like DeepMind's mu zero and steroids, the ultimate self play is not what DeepMind's AI does against itself to get better at go. It's what all these little quark blobs did against each other in the game of survival of the fittest. Now, when you had really dumb bacteria living in a simple environment, there wasn't much incentive to get intelligent, but then the life made environment more complex. And then there was more incentive to get even smarter. And that gave the other organisms more of incentive to also get smarter. And then here we are now, just like mu zero learned to become world master at go and chess from playing against itself by just playing against itself. All the quirks here on our planet, the electrons have created giraffes and elephants and humans and love. I just find that really beautiful. And to me, that just adds to the enjoyment of love. It doesn't subtract anything. Do you feel a little more careful now? I feel way better, that was incredible. So this self play of quirks, taking back to the beginning of our conversation a little bit, there's so many exciting possibilities about artificial intelligence understanding the basic laws of physics. Do you think AI will help us unlock? There's been quite a bit of excitement throughout the history of physics of coming up with more and more general simple laws that explain the nature of our reality. And then the ultimate of that would be a theory of everything that combines everything together. Do you think it's possible that one, we humans, but perhaps AI systems will figure out a theory of physics that unifies all the laws of physics? Yeah, I think it's absolutely possible. I think it's very clear that we're gonna see a great boost to science. We're already seeing a boost actually from machine learning helping science. Alpha fold was an example, the decades old protein folding problem. So, and gradually, yeah, unless we go extinct by doing something dumb like we discussed, I think it's very likely that our understanding of physics will become so good that our technology will no longer be limited by human intelligence, but instead be limited by the laws of physics. So our tech today is limited by what we've been able to invent, right? I think as AI progresses, it'll just be limited by the speed of light and other physical limits, which would mean it's gonna be just dramatically beyond where we are now. Do you think it's a fundamentally mathematical pursuit of trying to understand like the laws of our universe from a mathematical perspective? So almost like if it's AI, it's exploring the space of like theorems and those kinds of things, or is there some other more computational ideas, more sort of empirical ideas? They're both, I would say. It's really interesting to look out at the landscape of everything we call science today. So here you come now with this big new hammer. It says machine learning on it and that's, you know, where are there some nails that you can help with here that you can hammer? Ultimately, if machine learning gets the point that it can do everything better than us, it will be able to help across the whole space of science. But maybe we can anchor it by starting a little bit right now near term and see how we kind of move forward. So like right now, first of all, you have a lot of big data science, right? Where, for example, with telescopes, we are able to collect way more data every hour than a grad student can just pour over like in the old times, right? And machine learning is already being used very effectively, even at MIT, to find planets around other stars, to detect exciting new signatures of new particle physics in the sky, to detect the ripples in the fabric of space time that we call gravitational waves caused by enormous black holes crashing into each other halfway across the observable universe. Machine learning is running and ticking right now, doing all these things, and it's really helping all these experimental fields. There is a separate front of physics, computational physics, which is getting an enormous boost also. So we had to do all our computations by hand, right? People would have these giant books with tables of logarithms, and oh my God, it pains me to even think how long time it would have taken to do simple stuff. Then we started to get little calculators and computers that could do some basic math for us. Now, what we're starting to see is kind of a shift from GOFI, computational physics, to neural network, computational physics. What I mean by that is most computational physics would be done by humans programming in the intelligence of how to do the computation into the computer. Just as when Garry Kasparov got his posterior kicked by IBM's Deep Blue in chess, humans had programmed in exactly how to play chess. Intelligence came from the humans. It wasn't learned, right? Mu zero can be not only Kasparov in chess, but also Stockfish, which is the best sort of GOFI chess program. By learning, and we're seeing more of that now, that shift beginning to happen in physics. So let me give you an example. So lattice QCD is an area of physics whose goal is basically to take the periodic table and just compute the whole thing from first principles. This is not the search for theory of everything. We already know the theory that's supposed to produce as output the periodic table, which atoms are stable, how heavy they are, all that good stuff, their spectral lines. It's a theory, lattice QCD, you can put it on your tshirt. Our colleague Frank Wilczek got the Nobel Prize for working on it. But the math is just too hard for us to solve. We have not been able to start with these equations and solve them to the extent that we can predict, oh yeah. And then there is carbon, and this is what the spectrum of the carbon atom looks like. But awesome people are building these supercomputer simulations where you just put in these equations and you make a big cubic lattice of space, or actually it's a very small lattice because you're going down to the subatomic scale, and you try to solve it. But it's just so computationally expensive that we still haven't been able to calculate things as accurately as we measure them in many cases. And now machine learning is really revolutionizing this. So my colleague Fiala Shanahan at MIT, for example, she's been using this really cool machine learning technique called normalizing flows, where she's realized she can actually speed up the calculation dramatically by having the AI learn how to do things faster. Another area like this where we suck up an enormous amount of supercomputer time to do physics is black hole collisions. So now that we've done the sexy stuff of detecting a bunch of this with LIGO and other experiments, we want to be able to know what we're seeing. And so it's a very simple conceptual problem. It's the two body problem. Newton solved it for classical gravity hundreds of years ago, but the two body problem is still not fully solved. For black holes. Black holes, yes, and Einstein's gravity because they won't just orbit in space, they won't just orbit each other forever anymore, two things, they give off gravitational waves and make sure they crash into each other. And the game, what you want to do is you want to figure out, okay, what kind of wave comes out as a function of the masses of the two black holes, as a function of how they're spinning, relative to each other, et cetera. And that is so hard. It can take months of supercomputer time and massive numbers of cores to do it. Now, wouldn't it be great if you can use machine learning to greatly speed that up, right? Now you can use the expensive old GoFi calculation as the truth, and then see if machine learning can figure out a smarter, faster way of getting the right answer. Yet another area, like computational physics. These are probably the big three that suck up the most computer time. Lattice QCD, black hole collisions, and cosmological simulations, where you take not a subatomic thing and try to figure out the mass of the proton, but you take something enormous and try to look at how all the galaxies get formed in there. There again, there are a lot of very cool ideas right now about how you can use machine learning to do this sort of stuff better. The difference between this and the big data is you kind of make the data yourself, right? So, and then finally, we're looking over the physics landscape and seeing what can we hammer with machine learning, right? So we talked about experimental data, big data, discovering cool stuff that we humans then look more closely at. Then we talked about taking the expensive computations we're doing now and figuring out how to do them much faster and better with AI. And finally, let's go really theoretical. So things like discovering equations, having deep fundamental insights, this is something closest to what I've been doing in my group. We talked earlier about the whole AI Feynman project, where if you just have some data, how do you automatically discover equations that seem to describe this well, that you can then go back as a human and then work with and test and explore. And you asked a really good question also about if this is sort of a search problem in some sense. That's very deep actually what you said, because it is. Suppose I ask you to prove some mathematical theorem. What is a proof in math? It's just a long string of steps, logical steps that you can write out with symbols. And once you find it, it's very easy to write a program to check whether it's a valid proof or not. So why is it so hard to prove it? Well, because there are ridiculously many possible candidate proofs you could write down, right? If the proof contains 10,000 symbols, even if there were only 10 options for what each symbol could be, that's 10 to the power of 1,000 possible proofs, which is way more than there are atoms in our universe. So you could say it's trivial to prove these things. You just write a computer, generate all strings, and then check, is this a valid proof? No. Is this a valid proof? Is this a valid proof? No. And then you just keep doing this forever. But there are a lot of, but it is fundamentally a search problem. You just want to search the space of all those, all strings of symbols to find one that is the proof, right? And there's a whole area of machine learning called search. How do you search through some giant space to find the needle in the haystack? And it's easier in cases where there's a clear measure of good, like you're not just right or wrong, but this is better and this is worse, so you can maybe get some hints as to which direction to go in. That's why we talked about neural networks work so well. I mean, that's such a human thing of that moment of genius of figuring out the intuition of good, essentially. I mean, we thought that that was... Or is it? Maybe it's not, right? We thought that about chess, right? That the ability to see like 10, 15, sometimes 20 steps ahead was not a calculation that humans were performing. It was some kind of weird intuition about different patterns, about board positions, about the relative positions, somehow stitching stuff together. And a lot of it is just like intuition, but then you have like alpha, I guess zero be the first one that did the self play. It just came up with this. It was able to learn through self play mechanism, this kind of intuition. Exactly. But just like you said, it's so fascinating to think, well, they're in the space of totally new ideas. Can that be done in developing theorems? We know it can be done by neural networks because we did it with the neural networks in the craniums of the great mathematicians of humanity. And I'm so glad you brought up alpha zero because that's the counter example. It turned out we were flattering ourselves when we said intuition is something different. Only humans can do it. It's not information processing. It used to be that way. Again, it's really instructive, I think, to compare the chess computer Deep Blue that beat Kasparov with alpha zero that beat Lisa Dahl at Go. Because for Deep Blue, there was no intuition. There was some, humans had programmed in some intuition. After humans had played a lot of games, they told the computer, count the pawn as one point, the bishop is three points, rook is five points, and so on, you add it all up, and then you add some extra points for past pawns and subtract if the opponent has it and blah, blah, blah. And then what Deep Blue did was just search. Just very brute force and tried many, many moves ahead, all these combinations and a prune tree search. And it could think much faster than Kasparov, and it won. And that, I think, inflated our egos in a way it shouldn't have, because people started to say, yeah, yeah, it's just brute force search, but it has no intuition. Alpha zero really popped our bubble there, because what alpha zero does, yes, it does also do some of that tree search, but it also has this intuition module, which in geek speak is called a value function, where it just looks at the board and comes up with a number for how good is that position. The difference was no human told it how good the position is, it just learned it. And mu zero is the coolest or scariest of all, depending on your mood, because the same basic AI system will learn what the good board position is, regardless of whether it's chess or Go or Shogi or Pacman or Lady Pacman or Breakout or Space Invaders or any number, a bunch of other games. You don't tell it anything, and it gets this intuition after a while for what's good. So this is very hopeful for science, I think, because if it can get intuition for what's a good position there, maybe it can also get intuition for what are some good directions to go if you're trying to prove something. I often, one of the most fun things in my science career is when I've been able to prove some theorem about something and it's very heavily intuition guided, of course. I don't sit and try all random strings. I have a hunch that, you know, this reminds me a little bit of about this other proof I've seen for this thing. So maybe I first, what if I try this? Nah, that didn't work out. But this reminds me actually, the way this failed reminds me of that. So combining the intuition with all these brute force capabilities, I think it's gonna be able to help physics too. Do you think there'll be a day when an AI system being the primary contributor, let's say 90% plus, wins the Nobel Prize in physics? Obviously they'll give it to the humans because we humans don't like to give prizes to machines. It'll give it to the humans behind the system. You could argue that AI has already been involved in some Nobel Prizes, probably, maybe something with black holes and stuff like that. Yeah, we don't like giving prizes to other life forms. If someone wins a horse racing contest, they don't give the prize to the horse either. That's true. But do you think that we might be able to see something like that in our lifetimes when AI, so like the first system I would say that makes us think about a Nobel Prize seriously is like Alpha Fold is making us think about in medicine, physiology, a Nobel Prize, perhaps discoveries that are direct result of something that's discovered by Alpha Fold. Do you think in physics we might be able to see that in our lifetimes? I think what's probably gonna happen is more of a blurring of the distinctions. So today if somebody uses a computer to do a computation that gives them the Nobel Prize, nobody's gonna dream of giving the prize to the computer. They're gonna be like, that was just a tool. I think for these things also, people are just gonna for a long time view the computer as a tool. But what's gonna change is the ubiquity of machine learning. I think at some point in my lifetime, finding a human physicist who knows nothing about machine learning is gonna be almost as hard as it is today finding a human physicist who doesn't says, oh, I don't know anything about computers or I don't use math. That would just be a ridiculous concept. You see, but the thing is there is a magic moment though, like with Alpha Zero, when the system surprises us in a way where the best people in the world truly learn something from the system in a way where you feel like it's another entity. Like the way people, the way Magnus Carlsen, the way certain people are looking at the work of Alpha Zero, it's like, it truly is no longer a tool in the sense that it doesn't feel like a tool. It feels like some other entity. So there's a magic difference like where you're like, if an AI system is able to come up with an insight that surprises everybody in some like major way that's a phase shift in our understanding of some particular science or some particular aspect of physics, I feel like that is no longer a tool. And then you can start to say that like it perhaps deserves the prize. So for sure, the more important and the more fundamental transformation of the 21st century science is exactly what you're saying, which is probably everybody will be doing machine learning. It's to some degree. Like if you want to be successful at unlocking the mysteries of science, you should be doing machine learning. But it's just exciting to think about like, whether there'll be one that comes along that's super surprising and they'll make us question like who the real inventors are in this world. Yeah. Yeah, I think the question of, isn't if it's gonna happen, but when? And, but it's important. Honestly, in my mind, the time when that happens is also more or less the same time when we get artificial general intelligence. And then we have a lot bigger things to worry about than whether we should get the Nobel prize or not, right? Yeah. Because when you have machines that can outperform our best scientists at science, they can probably outperform us at a lot of other stuff as well, which can at a minimum make them incredibly powerful agents in the world. And I think it's a mistake to think we only have to start worrying about loss of control when machines get to AGI across the board, where they can do everything, all our jobs. Long before that, they'll be hugely influential. We talked at length about how the hacking of our minds with algorithms trying to get us glued to our screens, right, has already had a big impact on society. That was an incredibly dumb algorithm in the grand scheme of things, right? The supervised machine learning, yet that had huge impact. So I just don't want us to be lulled into false sense of security and think there won't be any societal impact until things reach human level, because it's happening already. And I was just thinking the other week, when I see some scaremonger going, oh, the robots are coming, the implication is always that they're coming to kill us. Yeah. And maybe you should have worried about that if you were in Nagorno Karabakh during the recent war there. But more seriously, the robots are coming right now, but they're mainly not coming to kill us. They're coming to hack us. They're coming to hack our minds, into buying things that maybe we didn't need, to vote for people who may not have our best interest in mind. And it's kind of humbling, I think, actually, as a human being to admit that it turns out that our minds are actually much more hackable than we thought. And the ultimate insult is that we are actually getting hacked by the machine learning algorithms that are, in some objective sense, much dumber than us, you know? But maybe we shouldn't be so surprised because, you know, how do you feel about cute puppies? Love them. So, you know, you would probably argue that in some across the board measure, you're more intelligent than they are, but boy, are cute puppies good at hacking us, right? Yeah. They move into our house, persuade us to feed them and do all these things. And what do they ever do but for us? Yeah. Other than being cute and making us feel good, right? So if puppies can hack us, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if pretty dumb machine learning algorithms can hack us too. Not to speak of cats, which is another level. And I think we should, to counter your previous point about there, let us not think about evil creatures in this world. We can all agree that cats are as close to objective evil as we can get. But that's just me saying that. Okay, so you have. Have you seen the cartoon? I think it's maybe the onion with this incredibly cute kitten. And it just says, it's underneath something that thinks about murder all day. Exactly. That's accurate. You've mentioned offline that there might be a link between post biological AGI and SETI. So last time we talked, you've talked about this intuition that we humans might be quite unique in our galactic neighborhood. Perhaps our galaxy, perhaps the entirety of the observable universe who might be the only intelligent civilization here, which is, and you argue pretty well for that thought. So I have a few little questions around this. One, the scientific question, in which way would you be, if you were wrong in that intuition, in which way do you think you would be surprised? Like why were you wrong? We find out that you ended up being wrong. Like in which dimension? So like, is it because we can't see them? Is it because the nature of their intelligence or the nature of their life is totally different than we can possibly imagine? Is it because the, I mean, something about the great filters and surviving them, or maybe because we're being protected from signals, all those explanations for why we haven't heard a big, loud, like red light that says we're here. So there are actually two separate things there that I could be wrong about, two separate claims that I made, right? One of them is, I made the claim, I think most civilizations, when you're going from simple bacteria like things to space colonizing civilizations, they spend only a very, very tiny fraction of their life being where we are. That I could be wrong about. The other one I could be wrong about is the quite different statement that I think that actually I'm guessing that we are the only civilization in our observable universe from which light has reached us so far that's actually gotten far enough to invent telescopes. So let's talk about maybe both of them in turn because they really are different. The first one, if you look at the N equals one, the data point we have on this planet, right? So we spent four and a half billion years fluxing around on this planet with life, right? We got, and most of it was pretty lame stuff from an intelligence perspective, you know, it was bacteria and then the dinosaurs spent, then the things gradually accelerated, right? Then the dinosaurs spent over a hundred million years stomping around here without even inventing smartphones. And then very recently, you know, it's only, we've only spent 400 years going from Newton to us, right? In terms of technology. And look what we've done even, you know, when I was a little kid, there was no internet even. So it's, I think it's pretty likely for, in this case of this planet, right? That we're either gonna really get our act together and start spreading life into space, the century, and doing all sorts of great things, or we're gonna wipe out. It's a little hard. If I, I could be wrong in the sense that maybe what happened on this earth is very atypical. And for some reason, what's more common on other planets is that they spend an enormously long time futzing around with the ham radio and things, but they just never really take it to the next level for reasons I don't, I haven't understood. I'm humble and open to that. But I would bet at least 10 to one that our situation is more typical because the whole thing with Moore's law and accelerating technology, it's pretty obvious why it's happening. Everything that grows exponentially, we call it an explosion, whether it's a population explosion or a nuclear explosion, it's always caused by the same thing. It's that the next step triggers a step after that. So I, we, tomorrow's technology, today's technology enables tomorrow's technology and that enables the next level. And as I think, because the technology is always better, of course, the steps can come faster and faster. On the other question that I might be wrong about, that's the much more controversial one, I think. But before we close out on this thing about, if, the first one, if it's true that most civilizations spend only a very short amount of their total time in the stage, say, between inventing telescopes or mastering electricity and leaving there and doing space travel, if that's actually generally true, then that should apply also elsewhere out there. So we should be very, very, we should be very, very surprised if we find some random civilization and we happen to catch them exactly in that very, very short stage. It's much more likely that we find a planet full of bacteria. Or that we find some civilization that's already post biological and has done some really cool galactic construction projects in their galaxy. Would we be able to recognize them, do you think? Is it possible that we just can't, I mean, this post biological world, could it be just existing in some other dimension? It could be just all a virtual reality game for them or something, I don't know, that it changes completely where we won't be able to detect. We have to be honestly very humble about this. I think I said earlier the number one principle of being a scientist is you have to be humble and willing to acknowledge that everything we think, guess might be totally wrong. Of course, you could imagine some civilization where they all decide to become Buddhists and very inward looking and just move into their little virtual reality and not disturb the flora and fauna around them and we might not notice them. But this is a numbers game, right? If you have millions of civilizations out there or billions of them, all it takes is one with a more ambitious mentality that decides, hey, we are gonna go out and settle a bunch of other solar systems and maybe galaxies. And then it doesn't matter if they're a bunch of quiet Buddhists, we're still gonna notice that expansionist one, right? And it seems like quite the stretch to assume that, now we know even in our own galaxy that there are probably a billion or more planets that are pretty Earth like. And many of them are formed over a billion years before ours, so had a big head start. So if you actually assume also that life happens kind of automatically on an Earth like planet, I think it's quite the stretch to then go and say, okay, so there are another billion civilizations out there that also have our level of tech and they all decided to become Buddhists and not a single one decided to go Hitler on the galaxy and say, we need to go out and colonize or not a single one decided for more benevolent reasons to go out and get more resources. That seems like a bit of a stretch, frankly. And this leads into the second thing you challenged me that I might be wrong about, how rare or common is life, you know? So Francis Drake, when he wrote down the Drake equation, multiplied together a huge number of factors and then we don't know any of them. So we know even less about what you get when you multiply together the whole product. Since then, a lot of those factors have become much better known. One of his big uncertainties was how common is it that a solar system even has a planet? Well, now we know it very common. Earth like planets, we know we have better. There are a dime a dozen, there are many, many of them, even in our galaxy. At the same time, you know, we have thanks to, I'm a big supporter of the SETI project and its cousins and I think we should keep doing this and we've learned a lot. We've learned that so far, all we have is still unconvincing hints, nothing more, right? And there are certainly many scenarios where it would be dead obvious. If there were a hundred million other human like civilizations in our galaxy, it would not be that hard to notice some of them with today's technology and we haven't, right? So what we can say is, well, okay, we can rule out that there is a human level of civilization on the moon and in fact, the many nearby solar systems where we cannot rule out, of course, that there is something like Earth sitting in a galaxy five billion light years away. But we've ruled out a lot and that's already kind of shocking given that there are all these planets there, you know? So like, where are they? Where are they all? That's the classic Fermi paradox. And so my argument, which might very well be wrong, it's very simple really, it just goes like this. Okay, we have no clue about this. It could be the probability of getting life on a random planet, it could be 10 to the minus one a priori or 10 to the minus five, 10, 10 to the minus 20, 10 to the minus 30, 10 to the minus 40. Basically every order of magnitude is about equally likely. When then do the math and ask the question, how close is our nearest neighbor? It's again, equally likely that it's 10 to the 10 meters away, 10 to 20 meters away, 10 to the 30 meters away. We have some nerdy ways of talking about this with Bayesian statistics and a uniform log prior, but that's irrelevant. This is the simple basic argument. And now comes the data. So we can say, okay, there are all these orders of magnitude, 10 to the 26 meters away, there's the edge of our observable universe. If it's farther than that, light hasn't even reached us yet. If it's less than 10 to the 16 meters away, well, it's within Earth's, it's no farther away than the sun. We can definitely rule that out. So I think about it like this, a priori before we looked at the telescopes, it could be 10 to the 10 meters, 10 to the 20, 10 to the 30, 10 to the 40, 10 to the 50, 10 to blah, blah, blah. Equally likely anywhere here. And now we've ruled out like this chunk. And here is the edge of our observable universe already. So I'm certainly not saying I don't think there's any life elsewhere in space. If space is infinite, then you're basically a hundred percent guaranteed that there is, but the probability that there is life, that the nearest neighbor, it happens to be in this little region between where we would have seen it already and where we will never see it. There's actually significantly less than one, I think. And I think there's a moral lesson from this, which is really important, which is to be good stewards of this planet and this shot we've had. It can be very dangerous to say, oh, it's fine if we nuke our planet or ruin the climate or mess it up with unaligned AI, because I know there is this nice Star Trek fleet out there. They're gonna swoop in and take over where we failed. Just like it wasn't the big deal that the Easter Island losers wiped themselves out. That's a dangerous way of lulling yourself into false sense of security. If it's actually the case that it might be up to us and only us, the whole future of intelligent life in our observable universe, then I think it really puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders. It's inspiring, it's a little bit terrifying, but it's also inspiring. But it's empowering, I think, most of all, because the biggest problem today is, I see this even when I teach, so many people feel that it doesn't matter what they do or we do, we feel disempowered. Oh, it makes no difference. This is about as far from that as you can come. But we realize that what we do on our little spinning ball here in our lifetime could make the difference for the entire future of life in our universe. How empowering is that? Yeah, survival of consciousness. I mean, a very similar kind of empowering aspect of the Drake equation is, say there is a huge number of intelligent civilizations that spring up everywhere, but because of the Drake equation, which is the lifetime of a civilization, maybe many of them hit a wall. And just like you said, it's clear that that, for us, the great filter, the one possible great filter seems to be coming in the next 100 years. So it's also empowering to say, okay, well, we have a chance to not, I mean, the way great filters work, they just get most of them. Exactly. Nick Bostrom has articulated this really beautifully too. Every time yet another search for life on Mars comes back negative or something, I'm like, yes, yes. Our odds for us surviving is the best. You already made the argument in broad brush there, right? But just to unpack it, right? The point is we already know there is a crap ton of planets out there that are Earth like, and we also know that most of them do not seem to have anything like our kind of life on them. So what went wrong? There's clearly one step along the evolutionary, at least one filter or roadblock in going from no life to spacefaring life. And where is it? Is it in front of us or is it behind us, right? If there's no filter behind us, and we keep finding all sorts of little mice on Mars or whatever, right? That's actually very depressing because that makes it much more likely that the filter is in front of us. And that what actually is going on is like the ultimate dark joke that whenever a civilization invents sufficiently powerful tech, it's just, you just set your clock. And then after a little while it goes poof for one reason or other and wipes itself out. Now wouldn't that be like utterly depressing if we're actually doomed? Whereas if it turns out that there is a really, there is a great filter early on that for whatever reason seems to be really hard to get to the stage of sexually reproducing organisms or even the first ribosome or whatever, right? Or maybe you have lots of planets with dinosaurs and cows, but for some reason they tend to get stuck there and never invent smartphones. All of those are huge boosts for our own odds because been there done that, you know? It doesn't matter how hard or unlikely it was that we got past that roadblock because we already did. And then that makes it likely that the future is in our own hands, we're not doomed. So that's why I think the fact that life is rare in the universe, it's not just something that there is some evidence for, but also something we should actually hope for. So that's the end, the mortality, the death of human civilization that we've been discussing in life, maybe prospering beyond any kind of great filter. Do you think about your own death? Does it make you sad that you may not witness some of the, you know, you lead a research group on working some of the biggest questions in the universe actually, both on the physics and the AI side? Does it make you sad that you may not be able to see some of these exciting things come to fruition that we've been talking about? Of course, of course it sucks, the fact that I'm gonna die. I remember once when I was much younger, my dad made this remark that life is fundamentally tragic. And I'm like, what are you talking about, daddy? And then many years later, I felt, now I feel I totally understand what he means. You know, we grow up, we're little kids and everything is infinite and it's so cool. And then suddenly we find out that actually, you know, you got to serve only, this is the, you're gonna get game over at some point. So of course it's something that's sad. Are you afraid? No, not in the sense that I think anything terrible is gonna happen after I die or anything like that. No, I think it's really gonna be a game over, but it's more that it makes me very acutely aware of what a wonderful gift this is that I get to be alive right now. And is a steady reminder to just live life to the fullest and really enjoy it because it is finite, you know. And I think actually, and we know we all get the regular reminders when someone near and dear to us dies that one day it's gonna be our turn. It adds this kind of focus. I wonder what it would feel like actually to be an immortal being if they might even enjoy some of the wonderful things of life a little bit less just because there isn't that. Finiteness? Yeah. Do you think that could be a feature, not a bug, the fact that we beings are finite? Maybe there's lessons for engineering in artificial intelligence systems as well that are conscious. Like do you think it makes, is it possible that the reason the pistachio ice cream is delicious is the fact that you're going to die one day and you will not have all the pistachio ice cream that you could eat because of that fact? Well, let me say two things. First of all, it's actually quite profound what you're saying. I do think I appreciate the pistachio ice cream a lot more knowing that I will, there's only a finite number of times I get to enjoy that. And I can only remember a finite number of times in the past. And moreover, my life is not so long that it just starts to feel like things are repeating themselves in general. It's so new and fresh. I also think though that death is a little bit overrated in the sense that it comes from a sort of outdated view of physics and what life actually is. Because if you ask, okay, what is it that's gonna die exactly, what am I really? When I say I feel sad about the idea of myself dying, am I really sad that this skin cell here is gonna die? Of course not, because it's gonna die next week anyway and I'll grow a new one, right? And it's not any of my cells that I'm associating really with who I really am. Nor is it any of my atoms or quarks or electrons. In fact, basically all of my atoms get replaced on a regular basis, right? So what is it that's really me from a more modern physics perspective? It's the information in processing me. That's where my memory, that's my memories, that's my values, my dreams, my passion, my love. That's what's really fundamentally me. And frankly, not all of that will die when my body dies. Like Richard Feynman, for example, his body died of cancer, but many of his ideas that he felt made him very him actually live on. This is my own little personal tribute to Richard Feynman. I try to keep a little bit of him alive in myself. I've even quoted him today, right? Yeah, he almost came alive for a brief moment in this conversation, yeah. Yeah, and this honestly gives me some solace. When I work as a teacher, I feel, if I can actually share a bit about myself that my students feel worthy enough to copy and adopt as some part of things that they know or they believe or aspire to, now I live on also a little bit in them, right? And so being a teacher is a little bit of what I, that's something also that contributes to making me a little teeny bit less mortal, right? Because I'm not, at least not all gonna die all at once, right? And I find that a beautiful tribute to people we do not respect. If we can remember them and carry in us the things that we felt was the most awesome about them, right, then they live on. And I'm getting a bit emotional here, but it's a very beautiful idea you bring up there. I think we should stop this old fashioned materialism and just equate who we are with our quirks and electrons. There's no scientific basis for that really. And it's also very uninspiring. Now, if you look a little bit towards the future, right? One thing which really sucks about humans dying is that even though some of their teachings and memories and stories and ethics and so on will be copied by those around them, hopefully, a lot of it can't be copied and just dies with them, with their brain. And that really sucks. That's the fundamental reason why we find it so tragic when someone goes from having all this information there to the more just gone, ruined, right? With more post biological intelligence, that's going to shift a lot, right? The only reason it's so hard to make a backup of your brain in its entirety is exactly because it wasn't built for that, right? If you have a future machine intelligence, there's no reason for why it has to die at all. If you want to copy it, whatever it is, into some other machine intelligence, whatever it is, into some other quark blob, right? You can copy not just some of it, but all of it, right? And so in that sense, you can get immortality because all the information can be copied out of any individual entity. And it's not just mortality that will change if we get to more post biological life. It's also with that, very much the whole individualism we have now, right? The reason that we make such a big difference between me and you is exactly because we're a little bit limited in how much we can copy. Like I would just love to go like this and copy your Russian skills, Russian speaking skills. Wouldn't it be awesome? But I can't, I have to actually work for years if I want to get better on it. But if we were robots. Just copy and paste freely, then that loses completely. It washes away the sense of what immortality is. And also individuality a little bit, right? We would start feeling much more, maybe we would feel much more collaborative with each other if we can just, hey, you know, I'll give you my Russian, you can give me your Russian and I'll give you whatever, and suddenly you can speak Swedish. Maybe that's less a bad trade for you, but whatever else you want from my brain, right? And there've been a lot of sci fi stories about hive minds and so on, where people, where experiences can be more broadly shared. And I think one, we don't, I don't pretend to know what it would feel like to be a super intelligent machine, but I'm quite confident that however it feels about mortality and individuality will be very, very different from how it is for us. Well, for us, mortality and finiteness seems to be pretty important at this particular moment. And so all good things must come to an end. Just like this conversation, Max. I saw that coming. Sorry, this is the world's worst translation. I could talk to you forever. It's such a huge honor that you've spent time with me. The honor is mine. Thank you so much for getting me essentially to start this podcast by doing the first conversation, making me realize falling in love with conversation in itself. And thank you so much for inspiring so many people in the world with your books, with your research, with your talking, and with the other, like this ripple effect of friends, including Elon and everybody else that you inspire. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you, I feel so fortunate that you're doing this podcast and getting so many interesting voices out there into the ether and not just the five second sound bites, but so many of the interviews I've watched you do. You really let people go in into depth in a way which we sorely need in this day and age. That I got to be number one, I feel super honored. Yeah, you started it. Thank you so much, Max. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Max Tegmark, and thank you to our sponsors, the Jordan Harbinger Show, For Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and ExpressVPN. So the choice is wisdom, caffeine, sanity, or privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Max Tegmark. If consciousness is the way that information feels when it's processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate independent. It's only the structure of information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Max Tegmark: AI and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #155

The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon, a standup comedian who is fearless in challenging the norms of modern day social and political discourse. Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite Business Management Software, Athletic Greens All In One Nutrition Drink, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Rev Speech Detect Service. So the choices, business, health, sanity, or transcripts. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I will continue talking to scientists, engineers, historians, mathematicians, and so on. But I will also talk to the people who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones in his book, On The Road. That is one of my favorite books. He wrote, the only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, ah. Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble in that I have no idea how they will turn out. But I'm willing to risk it for a chance at a bit of an adventure. And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time, wanted to take a chance as well. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Tim Dillon. What would you like your tombstone to read? It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being. I would like it to say, this has not been paid for. Yeah. And I want my living relatives to struggle to pay for it. And I think I would like them to be hounded every day. I would like people to call and go, listen, we don't wanna ever excavate a body, but we will because this has not been paid for. I love the idea of leaving the, like debt, leaving the world in lots of debt that other people have to deal with. And I know people that have done that. I know people that have been in families where that's happened, where someone has to sit and just curse the sky because they don't have a physical person anymore to be angry at, but they still have to deal with the decisions that person made. And that's deeply tragic, but that's always struck me as very funny. Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt. Because if the debt lasts for a long time, the anger lasts for a long time. And then you're now immortal in the minds of many. You arouse emotion in the minds of many. My mother's best friend in the town I grew up in, her husband shot himself in the driveway. And my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve because he owed so much money. She would come over and go, I hate him. I fucking hate him. And it was just such an interesting thing to see somebody who, and her kids ended up getting angry at her for that because they didn't understand why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering. But she goes, he took the selfish way out. He fucked us. And it was always interesting for me to just remember that you can leave earth and still be a problem. That's kind of a special person. So that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read. Yeah, there's a show called Louis with Louis C.K. I don't know if you watched it. I'm aware of it. There's this moment, I think, where an old guy's talking to Louis about the best part about love is after you break up. And it's remembering the good times and feeling that loss, the pain of that loss. The worst part about love is when you no longer feel that pain. So the pain of losing somebody lasts longer, is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love. So his argument was like the pain is what love really is. Wow. In the same way that anger, your tombstone would arouse will last longer. And that's deeply like a human thing. Like why do we attach happiness to the way we should remember others? It could be just anger. I know so many people who will have deeply complicated feelings when... I did drugs for many years and I spent time with some wild people. And their parents were also wild people. And some of their parents have done crazy things to them. And have created situations that were not productive for child rearing. And so I know that when those people die, it's going to be a very mixed bag. Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions. Like, hey, we loved that guy. But also when we look back, he was a horrible father, a horrible husband, but he was fun. And we don't put enough stock in that, but that will be a push and pull. And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like, hey, he was a lot of fun. He was a lot. Remember when he stuck us, one of the things this particular person I'm talking about, we were at a bar and me and my friend were there, we're having dinner. And his father, who was an alcoholic, a guy that would go out every night and didn't work, refused to work, would lie and say he was going to work and then go to a bar. I mean, just a fun person. And we were sitting at this bar restaurant and the bartender, we see his father walk up to the bartender and say, point at us, point at our table and go and put the thumbs up. And the bartender nodded. And then the father walked over to our table and he said, listen, I just want to let you know I just bought you dinner. And I looked at his son and I said, he's a pretty good guy. And then he climbed over the little fence down to the water and got in his little boat. It was a little cigarette boat and he just drove away. And then about an hour later, we went and we said, I think that guy took care of the bill. But she said, well, go talk to the bartender. So we talked to the bartender and he goes, he handed us a bill and the bill was for like $1,000. And we said, wait a minute, what the hell's going on? And he goes, the guy that left an hour ago said, you were going to take care of his bill. He's been drinking here all week. And we go, what are you talking about? And he goes, remember, he pointed at you. He put the thumbs up and you guys waved. You remember that? And the guy go, and we went, yeah. And I just looked at my friends, my friend and I went, you know, your dad is just, we're going to remember him for all kinds of reasons. But to you, he was fun. He was a lot of fun. He wasn't my dad, but I spent a lot of time with him. I was in two boating accidents with him. You know, two boating accidents. Alcohol involved, drugs involved. Yes, he was, usually alcohol was involved when he left his house and when he was at home as well. But I was in two boating accidents. And do you know how fun someone has to be to get in a second boating accident? Do you know what a good time someone has to be to get in a boat with them after you've already gotten in one wreck? Never get fooled again. What was that line? George Bush, never get fooled again. Right. Yeah, so if you're getting fooled again, you know, there's a reason for it, but he was a fun guy. He did have a death wish. The second boating accident, he grabbed me and said, you can't hang out with me anymore. And I said, why? He goes, I'm trying to kill myself. And I was like, oh. And then I understood that like all of the fun under the fun lived a very destructive person who not only was destructive, but wanted to die. So speaking of fun people that want to die, I don't know if you're, we can go Hunter S. Thompson, but Charles Bukowski. I don't know if you're aware of the guy. I'm aware of him, sure. I've read some of his stuff. So his tombstone says, I just want to ask you a question about it. His tombstone says, don't try. Interesting. What do you think about that advice as a way to approach life? I think for many people, it's a good advice because the people that are going to try will do anyway. And the people that need to be told, there's a whole cottage industry now of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus that tell people that they all have to own their own business and be their own boss and be a disruptor and get into industries. That's incredibly unrealistic for most people. Most people are not suited for that. And the Gary Vees of the world that tell everybody that they should just hustle and grind and hustle and grind. They're very light on the specifics of what they should actually do. Yeah, I think a lot of people, that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people. I think my generation got horrible advice from our parents, from our teachers. And that advice was follow your dreams and nobody, and that was it, by the way. There was no like, what are your dreams? Are they realistic? What happens when they don't work out? Will your dreams make you happy? Are your dreams real? Do they exist on earth? Can you follow, anybody follow your dreams? You can be anything you want to be. Horrible advice, horrible advice. Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people. Really, truly. I mean, think about it. If you were talking to somebody and you were trying to make them succeed, are there any two worse pieces of advice to give them than follow your dreams and you can be anything you want to be? Those to me are the two most destructive pieces of information I've ever heard. So let me push back because. Okay, that's fair. This is. Many people do. So yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview. Larry King, by the way, passed away today. So I'm taking over the. It's very sad. I'm carrying the. It's very sad. RIP King. Yeah, what was I even gonna say? Oh, let me push back on the follow your dream thing is I come from an immigrant family where I was always working extremely hard at stuff, like in a stupid way. I would, I love, there's something about me that loves hitting my head against the wall over and over and over until either my head breaks or the wall breaks. Just like, I love that dedication for no purpose whatsoever. It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever. And no, and everybody always told me, my family, the people around me, the sort of the epitome of what I could achieve is to be kind of a stable job. You know, the old like lawyer doctor, in my case, it's like scientists and so on. But I had these dreams at this fire, you know, about love robots. And that nobody ever gave me permission to pursue those dreams. I know you're supposed to grab it yourself. Nobody's supposed to give you permission, but there's something about just people saying, you know, fuck what everyone else thinks, like giving you permission, a parent or somebody like that saying, do your own thing. Go become an actor, go become like, do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do, an artist, go build a company, quit school, all that kind of stuff. Yes, sure. That's the push back against the, follow your dreams as bad advice. In mass, if you were to look at, in mass, if you were to look at statistically how few people that works out for, I'm just, no, but let's be very honest. That's very true. Be very honest. So I mean like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an, hey, I was broke for 10 years before I became a, before I was making money as a comedian. I get it. I didn't need Gary Vaynerchuk to tell me to follow my thing, right? And here's the other thing. I was kind of funny and like, I was kind of, a lot of things were in my favor of being a comedian, right? I had this kind of crazy fucked up life. I had a lot of stories. I had exhausted, I was willing to fail. I had failed before. I was broke. I didn't care about being broke. I knew how to be broke. I had, I was shameless to a degree. I was, I would get on a stage night after night and be laughed at. I would, I had a high threshold for being embarrassed. I had a high threshold for people thinking that I was a scumbag, right? And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah, I still really don't have a job. And I'm just, I work at comedy clubs kind of, and I get booked when I can. And I was, you know, suited for it. There's this idea that people can just roam around the world injecting themselves into other things they have no aptitude for at all. And will that to happen? A small percentage of people might be able to do that, but the vast majority of people have something they might key into that they're meant to do. Like you loved robots, you love technology, and you found a place in that world where you thrive. But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right? So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting. I think your shit is fascinating. I watch you or podcasts, and I think it's very interesting. I have no place in your world. You know what I mean? I have no place in that world. I don't like remedial math. I don't like community college math. I think it's a waste of my time. What do you think about robot? Would you ever buy a robot for your home? Yes. What will it do? I'd be a companion, a friend. Oh yeah, I mean, I would like to start replacing friends and family with robots immediately. I mean, truly, truly. I mean, I'm not even kidding. Like I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots. I'm dead serious. Are they into QAnon? Like are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy? That's my question is like, how long do the robots live with me before they are also a problem and I got to replace them? You know what I mean? You're gonna indoctrinate the robot. The robot's gonna call me like my aunt does and talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning and tell me everyone in America who's died of coronavirus. One of the things I enjoy in life is how terrified people like you, I'm a huge fan by the way, get a robot. Well, I'm concerned about AI completely getting rid of the need for human beings because human beings, I mean, usually you go out in the street and you go, so few of these people are necessary, even now. Even now you look at people and you go, they're hanging on by a thread, right? And you can just imagine how many jobs are gonna get replaced, how many industries are going to be completely remade with AI and the pace of change worries me a little bit because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation when we have problems. We don't do a great job. We did not great job with COVID, right? We don't do a good job. It's just something we don't do well. We're good in booms and busts. We're good when it's good. And we're actually, we kind of know how to kind of like, hey, we're bottomed out. We're like a gambling addict in this country. We like, we know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB at 9 a.m. drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes going, I'm gonna build it back. And we know what it's like to win, but anything in between, it seems not that great. So to me, it feels like are we gonna be able to like help people that are displaced and that have their jobs taken by, I mean, do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of artificial intelligence replacing workers and then what happens? There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence. One of them is, yes, displacement of jobs, workers. That's technology in general. That's just any kind of new innovations displace jobs. I'm less worried about that. I'm more worried about other impacts of artificial intelligence. For example, the nature of our discourse, like social, the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate with each other, the spread of information, what that information looks like, the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff. I think that would just make worse the effects that the displacement of jobs has. I think ultimately, I have a hope that technology creates more opportunities than it destroys. I hope so too. So in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility, but the challenges this world presents will create divisions, will create chaos and so on. So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society with that chaos, the way we talk to each other. That's huge. Creating the platform that's healthy for that. Now, as a comedian creator, whatever you want to call it, people that put out content, the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right? So they are kind of almost AI ready. So if you are a person that puts out YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever you're doing, it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar saying, I like you or get him out of here. Now, it's an algorithm you barely understand. I've talked to people at YouTube, but I don't know if they understand the algorithm. They don't. They don't. This is fascinating. Yeah, it's fascinating. Because I speak to people at YouTube and I go, hey, man, what's going on here? One of my episode titles of my podcast was called Knife Fight in Malibu. It was about real estate. And it was because a realtor in Malibu, I was trying to get a summer rental, which I can't really afford, but I don't think that's a huge problem. I follow my dreams. So I called a realtor and she said, listen, she goes, I don't know what the government's saying, but she goes, it's a real knife fight out here. You know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor, tanned skin, sig out the mouth, driving a Porsche. It's a real knife fight out here. Her entire life had become real estate. Her soul had been hollowed out. Her kids hate her. No one's made her come in years, but she just loves heated kitchen floors infused. Fun. She's a demon from hell and we need them, truly. We're getting rid of them. It's not good. And she goes, it's a real knife fight out here. So we put that in the episode title. And of course, I guess some algorithm thought that we were showing like people stabbing each other in a Wendy's and we got like demonetized. Did we get demonetized? We lost a lot of views because we were kicked out of whatever out, like we're just kicked out. And then I was asking YouTube about it. They were kind of understanding it. But even the people that work there didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm. So can you explain to me how that works where they barely know what's going on? No, they do not understand the full dynamics of the monster or the amazing thing that they've created. It's the amount of content that's being created is larger than anyone understands. Like this is huge. They can't deal with it. The teams aren't large enough to deal with it. There's like special cases. So if you fall into the category of special case, so we can maybe talk about that, like a Donald Trump, where you like actually have meetings about what to do with this particular account. But everything outside of that is all algorithms. They get reported by people and they get, like if enough people report a particular video, a particular tweet, it rises up to where humans look over it. But the initial step of the reporting and the rising up to the human supervision is done by algorithm. And they don't understand the dynamics of that because we're talking about billions of tweets. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded every day. Now, the hilarity of it is that most of the YouTube algorithm is based on the title. That's crazy. And the description is a small contribution in terms of filtering, in terms of the knife fight situation. And that's all they can do. They don't have algorithms at all that are able to process the content of the video. So they try to also infer information based on if you're watching all of these QAnon videos or something like that, or Flat Earth videos, and you also watch, are really excitedly watching the whole knife fight in Malibu video, that says that increases the chance that the knife fight is a dangerous video for society or something like that. Interesting, wow. Based on their contribution. So people are watching something, because I watch QAnon and Flat Earth videos to ridicule them. Right. That, you know what I mean? I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show. But what's interesting is, if I then go watch something else, I'm increasing the likelihood that that video is gonna get looked at as potentially subversive or dangerous. Exactly. That's why. So they make decisions about who you are, who you are as a human being, as a watcher, as a visual user, based on the clusters of videos you're in. But those clusters are not manually determined. They're automatically clustered. It's so weird. We have titles where they got upset about, I don't even understand. Like we had a title that was so innocuous, in my opinion, and the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World. And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World. And YouTube got angry at that. So you don't know why. You can never understand why. You could have said Disney World is the bombs. Right, right, right. It's just rearranging. That's what it probably meant. I wasn't saying do it, but I was saying let's start thinking about plans to do, not let's do it, but let's get in the mind. Let's change the conversation. I think it's very interesting because as a comedian, you don't wanna live in that world of worrying about algorithms. You don't wanna worry about deplatforming and shadowbanning. I mean, all these conversations that I've had with other comedians about shadowbanning, I mean, it's hilarious. We all call each other, I think I'm being shadowbanned. Are you being shadowbanned? Nobody knew what that word was a month ago, I mean, a year ago, but everyone now is convinced that everything they do that isn't succeeding is being shadowbanned. So it's this new paranoia, this algorithmic paranoia now that we all kinda have because there are genuine instances of people being taken out of an algorithm, you know, rightly or wrongly, however you wanna believe. But then there are also things that just don't perform as well for a myriad of reasons. And then we're all saying like, well, they're against me. They're shutting me down. And you don't know if that's true or not, you know? What do you think about this moment in history, which was really troubling to me? We could talk about several troubling aspects, but one is Amazon removing Parler from AWS. To me, that was the most clearly troubling. It felt like it created a more dangerous world when the infrastructure on which you have competing medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale, now influences who wins and who loses. Absolutely, you're right. And what you're always told is like, if you don't like Twitter, create your own service. Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing. Or if you are, and basically because, you know, tech, you have to be in business with one of five companies. And I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, whatever, they're like, you know, I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud, you know, Google and YouTube, it's all basically the SEO and the advertising. And you got to get your name out there. You don't wanna be buried in it. Like, because you have to do business with it, it's a cartel of these companies. You understand it better than anybody that you are prevented, truly. And I think whatever you think about Parler, whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler, whatever you think about Alex Jones, whatever you thought about Milianopolis, the state has an interest in, and has always had an interest in crushing dissent. This is what the state has done. This is how they, you know, retain the power they have by eliminating dissent where they can. Now, because you don't have, you know, three broadcast networks anymore, and a handful of newspapers that were all run, by the way, by people that had been either compromised or happily, you know, happily going with the program, and you have this wild west of the internet, people like me, people that make, I make funny content that I hope is funny, but a lot of it is wild and crazy. I say a lot of wild and crazy things. They're very funny. I say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people. You mock the powerful in there by bringing them down a notch. We'll probably talk about it, but humor is one of the tools to balance the powers in society. Well, sure. And to make people feel better about things and to, you know, whatever the case may be, right? That's my goal is to kind of like, hey, people have had a shitty day. If this video or podcast makes you laugh, that's great. I think that it won't ever, it was never gonna stop at Alex Jones. Not that I think he should have been taking off everything the way he was, but this keeps going until we have sanitized all of social media. And what they really want it to be is what Instagram is kind of becoming, which is a marketplace of, you could just go and buy sneakers, go buy a sweatshirt, go buy jeans, go buy this, go buy that. And the idea of the free exchange of information seems to be the old internet. And it seems the new internet seems to be, you know, hyper, and I'm a capitalist, but this seems to be like hyper capitalist in the sense of like, they only want you consuming things and they don't want you thinking too much. And that seems to be where it's heading. I've even seen that with Instagram where it's like everything on Instagram is like, buy a sweatshirt, you know? And I'm like, all right, man. Hey man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it. Like, relax. You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption, but very few things seem geared towards, hey, let's have a dialogue or let's, and not that Instagram was ever great for that, but like, if everything's are geared now towards content on Instagram, a lot of it seems geared towards shopping. See, I don't know, that's an interesting point. I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation. I feel like you could still sell Tim Dillon sweatshirts and have a difficult nuanced conversation or mock the current president, the previous president, mock the powerful, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we try. We try to balance that. Do you have sweatshirts? We do. Are they on sale now, fake business? We do, fake business sweatshirt with the Enron logo, fake business, because I do fake business all the time. It would be nice if you talk about Alex Jones if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation. Yeah, we'll do that, absolutely. But what I tend to worry about with, I see social media and technology existing to flatten society. It makes people very boring. All of the experiences kids have right now are online. Many of their closest friendships are online. Their first relationships are online. The culture is very homogenous, and I think it's eliminating characters. It's eliminating interesting people. It's making people into AI. All of their tastes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. AI could be Charles Bukowski as well. Let's not get crazy. It's not there yet, right? I mean, the $75,000 dog is not doing anything. So we're not there yet. Listen, I hate people. I get why you like AI so much. I hate people too, and I'm very amenable to AI, and I agree with you. Listen, I think the future, we gotta get everyone out of here. I'm with you on that, so don't think I'm. I love people. He's manipulating my mind and my. That's why the flash of light in your eyes when you talked about that dog was so much more than any person. And I get it, by the way. You're right. I hate people, but if we could. They're not excited. If we could just use robots to kill most of them, I think that would be good for society. I'm with that too, but I think that social media flattens people. Flattening the personalities of characters. Flatten the personalities of people, man. And it's just, you know, when's the last time? Like, I like the idea of like, you know, and I'm, you know, somebody showing up to high school with like a backpack and taking out an old CD and being like, hey man, here's this band you've never heard of that I love or whatever, you gotta get into this. And I'm like, you know, when I talk to young, you know, I have friends that have younger brothers and everything. And I know that the dominant culture was always dominant. I'm not an idiot, but like, I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now because so much of what's promoted is just this way to kind of corral people into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals that's constantly shifting and evolving. And people are just caught up in that. And to me, it gets very boring very quickly. I hate being bored and that's what it is. I don't know what to do with that because at the same time, podcasts are really popular, long form podcasts are really popular and people are hungry for those kinds of conversations. There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote, flowing, being spread around through podcasts, meaning just like debates. Correct. You know, so that's still popular. So I don't know what to. I agree with you. That gives me hope, I guess. I hope so too. And like I said, I look at the negative a lot because that's what I usually make fun of, but there's a lot of positive stuff happening too. Let's talk a bit about Alex Jones. So you've gotten a chance to talk to him while you were on the Joe Rogan Experience. I've been on Alex's show. I've talked, I've had Alex on my show. I've talked to Alex for three hours in front of, I guess it was maybe like 15 million people right on Joe's show. It was a really wild conversation. I think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting that clearly that I've ever been a part of. But I think it goes in the lexicon of like, these are big podcasts. Like I think it's one of the biggest podcasts. A week before the election, Alex Jones. I'm really grateful that Joe gave me the opportunity to be there. And it was just an amazing conversation to watch. What was the shirt you wore? Fridges Lane. It was a fun joke that no one in tech got because we all know how funny they are. But the tech writers, which is mainly blue haired. I do not agree with these statements. It's mainly blue haired people whose goal in life is to find things to give them orgasms with. If you want to dye your hair blue, it's your choice. I respect it. Yeah, but is it your choice? But at the end of the day, it's like, all the tech writers, like a lot of people just, and I'm not, I'm just maligning tech unfairly. But a lot of people that sense there's a humor were like, he's advocating for human trafficking. I'm like, it's clearly a joke because we're coming off the believe all women. We're coming off that. And it's very funny to just say Fridges Lane, hey man, believe all women. Like, it's just our politics and our public sphere is so schizophrenic right now that when you point that out, people are going to be angry with you. But that was a fun shirt to wear. But on Alex, you know, I was one of the people that found him really entertaining, that the same kind of thing as with Bukowski, these kinds of personalities that are wild, crazy, full of ideas. They don't have to be grounded in truth at all, or they can be grounded in truth a little bit. Like, he's just playing with ideas, like a jazz musician, screaming sometimes. Obviously he has some demons. Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever at some weird thing that he's constructing in his own head. Sometimes he's super loving and peaceful, especially lately that I've heard him, I don't know if you've seen with him, with Michael Malice, where he's doing, like Malice was doing, like telling Alex Jones, I love you, Alex. Just this loving kind of softness and kindness underneath it all. I don't know what to make of any of it. And then there's this huge number of people that tell me that Alex Jones is dangerous for society. So what do you do with that? Do you think he's dangerous for society? Do you think he is one of the sort of entertaining personalities of our time that shouldn't be suppressed or somewhere in between? I don't think that Alex per se is dangerous for society. I think the greater danger for society comes again from stifling all dissent, right? All, like anybody with a voice that uses it, that critiques the government, and putting all of those people in a category and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous. To me, more so. I think the biggest problem that Alex has ever had was when he questioned the Sandy Hook shooting. And that really was, because it really is this identifiable incident that you can look at where it did get away from him and a lot of his fans who, the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff, and I have some of those fans, some of them are really smart people, some of them are mentally unwell. A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell. So when you have a fan base of people where some of them are mentally unwell, and you are questioning tragic events, okay? And Alex was right about Epstein. He was right about a lot of things, and he's got no credit for that. And I understand that this, sometimes when you write about 10 things and you're wrong about something, and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people, you're never gonna get any credit for being right, even though you were right more than when you were wrong. The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy stalked, harassed these families and accused them of being actors and accused them of faking their children's deaths. It was just horrific experience. And Alex is tied to that. And how much he inspired that by what he did on his show, I don't know because I haven't watched hours and hours of that particular thing, the whole Sandy Hook thing. If you listen to him, he says, I really covered it. I kind of covered it and moved on. Other people go, no, he spent a long time on it. But that's the real danger of going into that territory over and over again, going everything's a false flag or everything's fake. I think Alex has actually been kind of reasonable. He's resisted a lot of the politics of racial resentment on the alt right, for example, he's resisted that. He's resisted the antisemitic currents of a lot of that politics. He's resisted a lot of the virulently anti trans or anti gay stuff. Now he does dip his toe into the water of like the culture wars, of course he does. But I've never really seen him, and I could be wrong about this, embrace white nationalism or identitarianism. I've never seen him really go antisemitic. I've never seen him take that route. When I grew up and I would turn him on every now and then, he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO, he's talking about 9 11, he was talking about the world trade organizations and a lot of these big conferences, whether it was the Bilderberg group, whether it was a Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated. And he was talking about, hey, here are the most powerful people in the world. Here's what they're doing. And here's how it affects you. And that was interesting to me because no one else was really talking about it except Alex Jones, occasionally Art Bell on WABC. You'd listen to him at night, right? I think Alex became very controversial when he decided to back Donald Trump. And then he has a considerable following and a considerable audience that he was then able to marshal in the direction of supporting Donald Trump. That was when the spotlight, because then he was talking to Trump, Trump did his show, Alex Jones just got bigger, right? And he blew up, that's the term, right? He blew off, he put out the Good HBO special, whatever you wanna call it. He has a hit song, he blew up. And then people started looking at the things that he was associated with. The Sandy Hook thing is a blemish on his record. I do believe he regrets it. But again, I do see the point of the families who are like, dude, fuck this guy forever. This is the worst thing I ever went through. It's a very tough, I understand the people that say that. I understand, and I understand the people that go, when you have tech companies that act in a coordinated manner to just get rid of someone, they don't have any way to defend themselves. It's a little terrifying when you think about that power being abused and how wouldn't it be? Do you think he should have not have been banned from all these platforms? I don't think, I do think that if you are a private company, right? I do think, and this is where you run into this problem. I don't know if these tech companies were government utilities, would that decrease people's likelihood of being banned? I don't know, right? So I understand the benefit of them being treated like public utilities and people thinking they have the right to a Twitter. I've never, I don't know, I have very little confidence. I mean, the government's trying to roll out a vaccine in California and we vaccinated like five people. I mean, in terms of what we need to do in the state, right? So maybe if it was a government utility, I do think someone like Alex, like there should be some process. So if you're gonna get rid of someone, they should have a way to defend themselves. There should be more democratic process that you can go through than just being unilaterally taken off something. But like, then you run into the, you're like, am I gonna say that everyone deserves? No, if you're threatening or harassing people or threatening to kill them, publishing their private information, if you're committing crimes on these platforms, obviously the people that own these platforms are gonna be like, we're not gonna allow this to happen. So I understand that there is a line, right? There is some, like people that say there's no line aren't really thinking, like there is a line. I just thought that line seems to be moving all the time and it seems to be a very hard thing to police. But I don't think you can remove a guy off everything and then also bank accounts won't give him debit cards or credit cards, I don't know if you talked to him about that, but like, you know, there were financial institutions that were refusing to let him park his money there. So, I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying pretty quickly. Probably without any transparency from those companies. So you're right, it feels like there should be a process of just having, for him to defend himself. I think there needs to be a process for people to defend themselves. Every day I wake up and I go, is something I said in a video gonna get taken out of context, is somebody gonna get angry, is somebody gonna be, you know, I say wild stuff because that's what makes me laugh, that's what makes my friends laugh and that's what makes my audience laugh. So I never ever, people, you know, whatever political side you come down on, I think if you make your living speaking, it's always interesting to me if you are pro the deplatforming, that's odd. It's interesting to consider a kind of a jury context to where, you know, there's transparency about why your video about bombing Disney World might be taken down, like it gets taken down and then there is, it's almost like creating a little court case, a mini court case and not in a legal sense, but in the public sphere. And then people should be able to have, you know, we pick representatives of our current society and have a discussion about that and make a real vote. You know, just have like jury locks himself up in a discussion, that kind of process might be necessary. Right now, what happens is Twitter is completely, first of all, they're just mostly not aware of everything they're doing, there's too much stuff, but the stuff they're aware about, they make the decision in closed doors meetings and without any transparency to the rest of the company actually, but also transparency to the rest of the world. And so, and then all they say is we're making decisions because the people, they use things like violence. So violence equals bad and if this person is quote unquote, inciting violence, therefore that gives us enough reason to ban them without any kind of process. I mean, it's interesting, I'm torn in the whole thing. If it was indeed, there's no transparency about it, but if Parler was indeed inciting violence, like if there was brewing of violence, potential violence where, you know, thousands of people might die because of some kind of riot, like this is the scary thing about mob, about when a lot of people get together. Who are good people, like legitimately good people that love this country, that don't see enemies yet around them, but if they get excited together and there's guns involved and then some cop gets nervous and shoots one person, another person shoots the cop and then there's a lot of shooting involved and then it goes from five people dying in the Capitol to thousands of people dying in the Capitol. Well, in fairness to defend the people at the Capitol, they didn't shoot the cop, they bludgeoned him to death with a fire extinguisher. Yes. So I do wanna just kind of put that out as a defense of them. Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit going on on Parler and I think the problem, here's the problem, right, there's a lot of people that just wanna go on these sites and say they wanna kill everyone. And the problem is, you know, at what point do you shut them all down? Like I think a lot of people are just living in a world where they're powerless, they don't have any political power, they don't have any economic power, right? They can't throw their money around. They don't have healthcare, their job security isn't great. They might be living in a community that doesn't have the resources they would like it to have. They're not happy and thrilled. And then they have these sites where they can go on and just say, man, I'd like to fucking burn it all down. And distinguishing a guy blowing off steam and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat is a very hard thing to do, you know? Like I've threatened to kill, I got banned from Airbnb, I threatened to kill the people that banned me, comedically, comedically, this is a joke. I'm not going to kill you, this is a joke because I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry. Do you know how many people that my parents, like my dad's like, I'm gonna fucking kill this guy, my mom's like, I'm gonna fucking kill. They were talking about each other. But none of it ever happened, but we should be, I think you have to create a space for people to threaten to overthrow the government as long as they don't violently do it. I mean, does that make any sense? I mean, as long as they're not gonna go hurt innocent people, what are you gonna do? Like there's so many people out there that, that's why a lot of these things like 4chan, these sites, a lot of people going on there, they just wanna say the most fucked up shit because it's the thing that gives them, they can laugh or they can release steam and it is immature, it is stupid. It's not productive, it's not, you know, but at the end of the day, if you're not gonna give people health insurance, you gotta give them something. It's like when someone in this country dies that everyone disagrees with, right? Political figure, media figure, a lot of people dance on their grave online and then everyone, people goes, and the other side will always do it. Like if a conservative dies and everyone goes, great, conservatives goes, this is grotesque that you, and then when RBG dies, they all have parties and the conservatives go, great. You have to let people in this country enjoy the deaths of their enemies. You do because they don't have much else. Again, if you gave them other things, you might say, guy, you can go get an E operation. Why don't you stop? But if they're working for shit wages and you haven't figured out a way to treat them, treat their cancer diagnosis, and they don't like, I mean, life, you know, you gotta, you gotta derive pleasure from something, right? It's an interesting point that anger is a good valve, like to, if your life is suffering, that there's something very powerful about anger, but I still have hope that it doesn't have to be. I mean, that kind of channeling into anger that then becomes hate led us into a lot of troubles in human history. So you have to be careful empowering people too much in that anger, especially, I think my, I think I understand why people are nervous about Parler, about Twitter and so on. Because all that shit talking about violence was now paired with let's get together at this location. This was a new thing. Like it's not just being on whatever platform talking shit, it's saying we're going to in physical space meet. And then everybody got, all these platforms got nervous. Well, what happens when all these shit talkers, all these angry people that are just steam, letting off steam meet in a physical space. And there was probably overreach, almost definitely overreach, but I can understand why they were nervous. I agree. There doesn't seem to be, and this is when Trump got elected and when you have like, whatever you have, right? Whether you have riots in Portland and Seattle, where you have the Antifa people doing crazy things, you have like the people storming the Capitol. There never seems to be a ton of an examination of why these ideas are becoming popular. Why are people so angry? What is leading people to this? Why are we here? What about their lives is to the point where they need to show up at these places? And like, and obviously there's going to be people on the fringe. There'll always be the mentally unwell. There'll always be people that want to destroy society. But when you look at how popular, large, long discredited things, whether it's fascism, totalitarian communism, all of these things are like, why are they back? Why are they back in a big way? And why are people so fed up with the status quo that they're finding solace in the most extreme discredited theories of how to run and operate societies, theories that have led to deaths of a lot of people. So to me, I'm like, if those people at the Capitol, yes, if they were going to work, if they were able to go out and drink at Chili's, if they were able to get a fucking checkup, right? Like if their job paid a little bit better, and I'm not saying that this is all the reason, right? I'm sure that there's a lot of people there that are doing quite well and they're still nuts. But like the anger and the rage that's boiling to the surface of this society, does it come from the fact that across the board people in very different areas and with very different political beliefs feel like they are being fucked over and there's nothing they can do about it. That's what the baseline to me, they look at the people that run the country and run the world, whether they're tech titans, the guys that you talked to, or whether they're people that run the government, whether they're people that run large banks, large media companies, the people that have created this kind of infrastructure that everyone lives in, these people are incredibly powerless. And when you push people to that point, logically, sadly, and unfortunately, the next thing does seem to be violence. Yeah, the thing that troubles me a lot is you said nobody's asking why these beliefs are out there, but sometimes it's not even acknowledged that people are hurting, people are angry, just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories that are out there, acknowledging that they're out there. And then people are thinking about it and talking about it just because otherwise, so it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way. What happens is you say, okay, 70 million people are white supremacists. It's just throwing a kind of blanket statement. And of course that gets them angrier and makes them feel more powerless. And that ultimately, that's what's been painful for me to see is that there's not an acknowledgement that most people are good. Right. There's circumstances where it's just you're pissed off. Right. Because you are powerless. I mean, most of us are powerless. You could fall in with a bad crowd. That's the thing, you can just fall in. And it doesn't mean that there's not blame. Obviously you have agency, you're a person. But the idea that you could be rehabilitated, you could do something stupid or you could fall into a group of people that are, and then in a few years you can go, what the fuck was I doing? I'm an ex drug addict. I know what it's like to go from being one thing to being another thing. I'm still a drug addict. If I would use drugs right now or drink, I would still be addicted to them. I mean, it's not something that I can ever change about myself, but I know what it's like to go from one thing to another thing. So when you look at racism or whatever ism, homophobia, misogyny, whatever you're looking at, antisemitism, and you go, that's a fixed condition where nobody's ever going to be able to change. Nobody's ever gonna be able to be rehabilitated. Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves in a different way. To me, you're just, you're throwing away someone and you're making them feel helpless and worthless. And that's gonna lead to antisocial behavior that spills out into the violence. We don't have a very redemptive society. That's a huge factor. We don't have a redemptive society. That's why I like O.J. Simpson. Because O.J. Simpson, yes, he did a bad thing supposedly. But he's very kind now on Twitter and he makes very nice points about how we all have to get involved in the political process and he's on golf courses and I like watching people golf. I don't do it, but I like watching him do it. And he's like an elder statesman because I remember him from the naked gun. And I choose to forgive him for whatever happened there, which I don't know. But I choose to forgive him really for, I mean, obviously, what they say is he cut his wife's head off. But I can look past that and redeem him because he's very stable on Twitter and he's a good, like I see all these people going crazy on Twitter and I'm like, O.J.'s lived a full life. I think there's a benefit to that. There's a benefit to kind of living a full life. Yeah, how many of us have not at least tried to murder somebody? 100%, listen, O.J.'s had the highs and the lows, but he did it on his terms. And there's a real. It's like a Frank Sinatra song. Yeah, he did it my way. I mean, there's a benefit to that. And he seems like a very well adjusted person now. So I mean, I don't know, how is that a fact? But it is a fact and that's an uncomfortable fact. Well, this is a strong case of forgiveness in one of the more extreme cases, I suppose. But yeah, there's not a process of forgiveness. It seems like people just take a single event from your, sometimes a single statement from your past and use that as a categorical like capture of the essence of this particular human being. So murder might be a thing that you should get a time out for a little while. Murder is bad. Murder, and let's just say that. Murder is not good. I'm glad you make this definitive statement. O.J. is an interesting cat because you're like, he's very stable on Twitter. He's very like, he's like, let's take a look at it, guys. Like we need more of his energy. That's what I'm trying to say. I know like, yes, it was bad. He killed the woman in the waiter. I was not for that. I wish he didn't do that. But the trial, the O.J. Simpson trial was such a fun thing. And like you said, we need more fun people in society. Speaking of fun people, you've, your politics have been all over the place. I hope so. I hope so. I mean, imagine not, imagine someone whose politics weren't all over the place. It would seem odd. Right. In the 10 years that I've been politically conscious, just because I'm 35 and 20. No, I've probably been conscious for over two decades, but like Democrats have become Republicans, Republicans become Democrats. I remember when Ann Coulter said, we need to, he defended George W. Bush when he said, we need to go out and Christianize or modernize the Arab world. We need to democratize the Arab world. And then Ann Coulter backed Donald Trump. And all the right wing in America believed in nation building. They believed in going out and democratizing areas that might breed radical terrorists, whether it was Iraq or wherever you were going, toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms in those countries. That was the right wing point of view when I grew up. Then the right wing switched to, we are going to be isolationist. We're going to take care of America. First and foremost, we're not going to go into other countries. And then the Democrats who, when I grew up, were doves and the right wing people were more hawkish. And the Democrats were like, the military solutions aren't the way. We need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions to solve all the problems. Now, Rachel Maddow's like, let's nuke Russia every night on MSNBC. The Democrats are like, we need strong presence in Syria. We need a strong presence. We need to counter Putin all over the globe. We need to get, so they're more hawkish on things. So literally I have watched two political parties literally flip and it's crazy to watch. And in some sense I've watched that as well because when I first saw Barack Obama, I admired that he was against the war. This is whatever, maybe before he was a Senator, he spoke out against the Iraq war. And then it doesn't feel like, it feels like his administration was more hawkish than dovish in a sense with all the drone attacks, with the sort of inability to pull back, or at least in mass efficiently pull back from all the military involvement that we have all over the world. So, and just the language. What I think is interesting about that, what's interesting about Obama, cause this is a very interesting study, is that presidents are controlled in very different ways. Presidents can be controlled by different factors, power factions within Washington. I think one of the reasons that Obama was maybe, you had a very close relationship with John Brennan, he was a CIA director. And Obama was very close with John Brennan, and Obama was very, I think malleable to the extent that the CIA, and I've had CIA agents on my show, John Kiriakou, a guy who went to jail for exposing torture, was saying that like, you get into the Oval Office, all of a sudden you're having that presidential daily briefing every day, and the intelligence people come in and they go, listen man, I mean, there's gonna be a terrorist attack on your watch if you don't do X, Y, and Z. They go, they call it like blue book information, which is five levels above top secret, and they go like, hey man, a guy in Iran at a cafe said he's blowing everything up next week, and you know, I mean, it's the same thing as Parler, you don't know if it's true or not. But now the president's making a decision on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence that goes into a presentation for the president, where you're just terrified every day, and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch. Now, so why are they getting all this information? Because a lot of the people in Washington have an interest in perpetual, constant, ongoing warfare, and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that. So they're sneaking their information into the presentations that are going to the president, and then the president is now behaving and going, fuck, I don't want a bomb going off, we gotta do what we gotta do. And whatever version of that happens, that is really kind of what is happening, whereas the presidents are being controlled by forces that are outside of the political sphere, but very much still in it. And they have a lot of, that's what the deep state is. You know, Trump, there's a lot of ridiculing Trump of going, the deep state doesn't exist. It absolutely exists, there's been books about it written by liberal journalists. The deep state is only a term for unelected, largely, power factions in Washington, DC, that outlive any presidential administration. These are people that might work at the State Department, they might work at the Defense Department. These are people that are not always working officially in any government capacity. They might be private companies, they might be military contractors, they might be people at Boeing or Raytheon or General Dynamics. And they constitute a group of people that Trump kind of called the swamp, but Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp. But he articulated these things, and this is what it is. You have a lot of interested parties that have budgets that they want, big budgets. Everybody wants a budget in Washington, whether you know what it is, they want money. And these are the people who really control press. So this idea that the president is the be all end all has got to be smashed, which is why the horse race model of politics and being like, is it right wing? Is it left wing? Is it, what team am I on and what color am I wearing? It's very simplistic, but the reality is this is an empire. It's past its peak. We're in trouble. The United States is an empire past its peak. Yeah, I mean, that's just, you could prove that case in court. Well, let's go to court right now. But I do love the more complex idea that there's just human beings who crave power and seek ways to attain that power through different ways. If you have Barack Obama or George Bush or Donald Trump, there's different attack vectors. Correct. There's different ways to attain that power and then you can use that to leverage. And it probably doesn't have to be just in Washington, DC. There's people who crave power all over the world. Of course, but where we are now in Los Angeles, these people are all good. LA. Studio executives and people that I, from what I understand, they treat everyone fairly and they're nice, but he sees the bad guys, but out here in LA, everyone's lovely. So amidst this fun exploration in your mind through the political landscape that you've done over the past couple of decades that you've been conscious politically, where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you? Great question. Well, he didn't, right? Cause we didn't, he wasn't political until four years ago, right? He got political very quickly before. I mean, he was always firing off crazy tweets about where Obama was born or whatever, but he was, he got into politics like very quickly and then he became the president, right? So it was like, we didn't, I knew him as Donald Trump, this crazy New York city character, the coast of the apprentice. I didn't think much about him. He was just constant, you know, like he was just this constant figure. Like I don't think much about Warren Buffett. Like I know like Trump's like, he's married to a new show girl all the time and he's always opening another casino and he's on TV. Wait, Warren Buffett really? No, Trump. Trump, but like Warren Buffett is the opposite, right? Warren Buffett's like been married for a billion years, lives in a little house in Omaha, but these are the, that's what I associate Trump. Like I don't think about Warren Buffett. I don't think about these people. They're just guys that I've known forever that have like, you know, you associate certain things with them, right? And Trump, we always associated with kind of vulgar, garish, new money, billionaire, married a lot, you know, casinos, Miss Universe pageants. But again, you know, but it makes perfect sense that he really was able to become president at the moment where we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush. And I think Americans felt like this is, now the oligarchy is spitting right in our face. You're not even making it feel like there's an appearance of democracy. We have two crime families vowing for control of the country every four years. And then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy that was really about himself. You know, Trump doesn't really care that much about the, I mean, really was summarized perfectly when he left and he just said, hey, have a good life. That's what he said before he got on Andrews Air Force Base. If you watch his speech, he goes, hey, have a good life. That's what he really feel. Like, hey, have a good life. I'm gonna get on a plane right now and fly to a castle I own in Florida. And really, I'm not gonna think too much about you people outside of how I can get more attention in the future. Can I ask you like a therapy question? What is your favorite and least favorite quality of Donald Trump? So my least favorite quality of Donald Trump, I think because there's a few of them, his lack of empathy, complete and total lack of empathy. I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level. And I feel like that's, maybe it should be a requirement, right? I mean, I don't think he cares. I think it's obvious that he doesn't care. I mean, he sent, you know, basically he's saying like, they're in there, Mike Pence is in there. He knows that his people are going to get, try to get into a Capitol. I mean, those motherfuckers are not gonna have jobs. They're gonna go to federal prison and he doesn't care. As long as they're storming the Capitol to prove the point that he thinks he won the election, he has no concern for these people, his followers. He leads them lambs to the slaughter, right? So that's not a respectable quality. My favorite quality of Donald Trump is his willingness to call bullshit. So his willingness to call bullshit out. He doesn't play the game. He will, you know, when people say about Putin, Putin kills people, he goes, we kill a lot of people here too. Like he's willing and able to break the fourth wall and say things that no politician has ever said. He's willing to call out hypocrisy, you know, of course not his own, but the media, the members of the political establishment, that's a laudable quality. It's an entertaining quality, right? We all like it. I love, I'm like this guy saying something that a lot of people want said. That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action. So it's not coupled with anything behind it that he just wants to, we did an episode of my podcast once where it's like essentially he's like criticizing the deep state, he wants a deeper state. He wants a deeper state. Like he hired his daughter and her husband. I mean, this is not a guy that's interested in transparency and openness. He's a guy that would just prefer, he wants to run the mafia state. But he shakes up the norms of social discourse, political discourse, and that people are just hungry for that. Like he got banned from Twitter, from all the different platforms. Do you think, is there an argument to be made for and against banning Twitter? There's always arguments to be made for everything. A permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me. He's the president of the United States. It also rearranges the power, like whether you like him or hate him, love him or hate him, he was the president. We've elevated Twitter is now more powerful than the president. It's like, do you want that to be longterm the salute, that the reality, like now Jack at Twitter is more powerful than the president of the United States. Is that a good paradigm going forward? I don't know. I'm not, listen, maybe give him a little time out for a few days. I think a time out, a little spanking, certainly, but I don't know if a permanent ban across the board on every social media. I mean, they banned them on Grindr. I mean, this is how hilarious it is, right? I mean, they banned them across the board on everything. I don't think he could get an Airbnb now, neither can I, but like, I don't think he can do anything. Again, I just, I look back and there's so many people, my very smart, intelligent friends that go, yeah, but who cares? Yeah, but he's bad. Yeah, but blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but I don't like Milianopolis. Yeah, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you have such faith. You have such faith that it's always gonna be the people you dislike that are banned. It's always gonna be the, it's never gonna be you. Man, you have so much faith in the government. You have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met. You have so much faith in the security state that they're gonna always make the right decisions and they're not gonna penalize people that shouldn't be penalized. To me, I'm like, wow, I've never had that much faith in any human being ever, including myself. I wouldn't want that power. I would start deplatforming people that I hate. I would deplatform my aunt, you know what I mean? I would deplatform everyone I know. I mean, so it's such an insane power to give somebody, like who gets heard, who gets to speak? Yeah, I'm worried about the effect it has on people like you, actually. I agree. Of being, like everybody's a little more nervous in what they say. Correct. And that is a big problem. Yes. Because then you're just like longterm unmasked, like we're talking about. It has an effect where people just become more bland. Yeah, self censorship, anxiety, all of these things go into it. We try to fight it. I try to fight it. I think I gotta still do what makes me laugh and what makes me laugh is often fucked up. And it's often, it's not always fucked up in a way that it's gonna get me thrown off something, but I think pushing certain buttons is funny to me, so I gotta keep doing that. Part of the problem is that so many of the lines are blurred, right? So you have comedians that are commentators and commentators that are comedians and politicians. So it's harder to get the defense of like, hey, I'm a comedian, leave me alone. That defense becomes harder when all of these lines are blurring. Everybody's kind of everything now. So like people say to me, you should run for office and they're serious and I'm like, you're crazy, but they're serious. Like, so the blurring of everything means that people aren't in their lanes as much and that you go, well, this guy is dangerous because he's not just making a joke. He's doing something else and he's using humor. And I'm like, I'm really not. I'm really just trying to make a joke. That's all, that's really what I'm trying to do. But I do think that because of the flattening, there's a lot of people out there that go, they take aim at humor because they go, humor is where bad ideas can kind of start and flourish. But don't you, to put some responsibility on you, don't you think humor is a way to, that you are the modern, like Jordan Peterson style intellectual, that humor is actually a tool of. It can be. Changing the zeitgeist, changing the social norms. It absolutely can be, but it also cannot be. I don't think it's any one thing and I think there's a lot of pressure for a comedian. You can be funny and right. You can be funny and wrong. If your goal is to be right, you might end up being right and not funny. So the reality is funny has to come first. There are brilliant people that have been funny and correct according to people, right? But at the end of the day, people that put way too much faith in what comedy is, most of what comedy is, is people showing up to strip malls and telling jokes for an hour while people eat chicken fingers and they all get drunk and they laugh and they feel a little bit better about their lives. That's really the majority of comedy. Then there's like 10 famous people that are really famous that do a version of that in an arena. But the amount of cultural power they have has always been greatly exaggerated. My uncles loved George Carlin, who was anti military industrial complex, anti this, anti that. And then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan. They didn't care. It's not as powerful as you think. I wish it was. It feels good. It feels good for me to say I am the new thing. It really isn't. It truly isn't. No one is, comedians are the people that get on stage and say, we're fucked up. We're drug addicts. We're sex addicts. We're fat. We're gross. We can't manage our money. We can't stop eating. We can't stop fucking doing horrible things. We're liars. We're narcissists. We're scumbags. We're the people that get out and say that. Only a psychopath would look at us and go, show me the way. Like it's not. I disagree with you because then I'm a psychopath. Well, and that's, I mean, I don't think, no pushback here. That's another issue. But you know what I'm saying. Well, and I don't because, I mean, I understand you using this as a psychological tool for yourself to give yourself freedom. But the reality is you are one of the rare comedians like a George Carlin who is, besides being funny. When I hear things like that, I'm like, okay, you're being very sweet. But like, I agree. I understand what you're saying. I do stuff that makes, hopefully makes you think. I hope that's what good comedy is. But I think I try to do that. But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea of that I had to make a point and that point had to be correct. I think the best comedy makes fun of everything. It makes fun of both sides. And then there's a deeper truth about humanity revealed. But then what happens is people take that deeper truth and go, let's politicize it. But what does he mean? Is it the right or the left? And I'm like, I'm doing something that I think speaks to hopefully people on both sides for everybody. Cause I'm making fun of people on the left and the right and in the center and people that don't care and people that do care. And I'm trying to figure out a way to do it. But then immediately anything of value in this culture right now is like, how do we politicize it? How do we put it in a box? So yes, I think comedy can produce a lot of inherently valuable things, reflective, thoughtful things. But then immediately, can it be put in this box where all of those things can be used politically? No. And unfortunately, like when they say like, comedy is a great way to speak truth to power. It is, but I don't know how much it changes things. I don't know how much a joke can dethrone a king. I know the idea is nice, but let's look at the practical applications. I mean, we had brilliant comics, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Richard Pryor. We had people talk about so many problems in society, illustrate them, put a spotlight on them. And we still have them. They're worse now than they've ever been. That's not true. I think the society is better. And so to push back in my perspective, it's very possible that those voices were the exact reason we have the world today, which I do believe is actually, I mean, on the boring old measures of what makes a good world, which is the amount of violence in the world, the amount of opportunity that all those kinds of measures, even happiness, all of those things measured, things have been improving. Steven Pinker gets a lot of shit for this, but he's really good at articulating how the data says pretty clearly that the world is getting better. And it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock. So to me, it's possible that humor is the very thing that saves the world. Humor is the very thing that keeps, is the balance of power in the world. But I think a lot of the things that those guys criticize, whether it was militarism or the elites, the lying, the corruption, the bribery, that's still going on. And it's always gonna go on, right? Because that's the nature of human beings. We call it out, we point it out, but we don't have a plan to change. It's not really our job. And I think that too much now is like, well, comedians should have a, like, I don't tell people who to vote for. Like the idea that comedians went and told people who to vote for, it's like, to me, it's crazy. I understand like people have strong opinions, but like, I believe I have a job. And my job is to make you laugh or whatever, maybe make you think, but like, my job is not to tell you who to vote for. I mean, it's absurd. But see, the thing you do by the comedy, like on your Twitter, that people should definitely follow. I believe that, Jim J. Dillon, I agree with you. Oh, on this point of, I agree with you wholeheartedly. That people should follow you. Yeah, you give me, you give me freedom to think on my own. Meaning like you're shaking things up to where I don't feel constrained about what I can think about. And that's awesome. Thank you. So you're not telling me what to think, you're giving me the freedom to think. And that's what great comedy does, is I don't often agree with George Carlin. He can get pretty political sometimes. But just the ability to do that's so rare. Podcasts do that too now. Like there's certain people that can really just challenge you to, even when you disagree with them, to sort of be like, oh, it's okay to think about this kind of stuff. Yeah, and I appreciate that, because that's awesome. And I mean, that's great. And a guy like you, who's a brilliant guy, that's great. If I'm giving you the license to think, then man, the world is completely fucked. But I'm happy about that. Yeah. No, it's... Well, you know. Speaking about the world being completely fucked, Alex Jones turned on QAnon. I know almost nothing... It's a very tough match. They had a rough marriage. They fought it. They fought it out for years. And eventually we just knew someone was gonna leave someone. Hewlett tried to leave him a few months ago. Oh, so... Yeah, he was staying at someone else's house. The car wasn't in the driveway. Yeah. Well, the thing about QAnon that makes it a lot of fun is it's kind of a make it up as you go along. I'm a drug addict, right? So often my lies aren't planned. They're in the moment. A lot of what I do on the podcast, a lot, you know, it's all in the moment. I'll have an idea what I wanna talk about, and I rant and I go. And I've been like stoned, and I show up at home, and my parents are like, what's going on? There was $50 on the mantle. Now it's not there. And I'm like, well, and I gotta make something up on the spot, right? I've been, you know, are you drinking again? No, I'm not. And then you gotta have a, well, you were gone for two days. No one knows where you were. And somebody said you left your car. Well, I was at, well, this is, I was at a sales conference and I left my car. I flew to Phoenix. Like, I understand what that is. QAnon is an ever evolving conspiracy theory where the events are happening in the past, in the present, and in the future. It's kind of hilarious. Every conspiracy theory is like Kennedy, something like that, that there's a lot of truth in that, or all truth. But at the end of the day, it's like you're looking back from 30,000 feet, analyzing little things that have already happened. QAnon's like, so I think Alex is kind of like got a little tired of the constant evolving nature of that conspiracy theory. So he's not a fan of like the jazz that is QAnon. So they're not, because they're improvising constantly. They're improvising. Alex is like, hey man, I was on board a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's getting a little annoying because it can turn on you. Eventually you become part of the conspiracy. Alex is controlled opposition. That's what they'll say. Eventually you, because QAnon just eats things. So it's a conspiracy that just eats things. The minute you start to say, hey man, maybe that's not, it just eats you and go, well, you're in on it. Everyone's in on it. Everyone's a satanic pedophile. Everybody. Everyone that questions it is eating children. And you go, wait a minute, that seems illogical. But now there's not enough children. Now there's not enough. And I think QAnon's over now, unfortunately, because for these people, but I think fortunately for them, they're gonna have to find a new hobby. But I think it's over now because even the best QAnon people now are starting to go, hey man, this might not be going down the way we thought. But they've literally gone as far as to say that like Biden and Trump switched faces. Trump's actually still the president except Biden. You have to be a real moron now. You gotta be real stupid now. It's at the end. Like it was cool when the Epstein stuff happened, QAnon was like, it was party at Q. And then when the Hunter Biden laptop stuff started to happen, they were like dancing, like it's time. And then Biden wins and they're like, wait, whoa. And it's just like, it's the day after the party. QAnon, if you ever went to a party in high school or college, QAnon right now is the day after the party. You wake up, it's 12 noon. The sun is hitting you in the face. You're hung over. There's a stench of disgusting beer and cigarettes all over the house. You're like, what the fuck happened here? I gotta get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese. That's what QAnon is. They gotta sober up, get out of that house, get a bacon, egg and cheese and go, man, we were fucking whacked. We were high, dude. I thought Nancy Pelosi was eating children for four years and that Donald Trump was gonna put her in Guantanamo Bay. Wow, that was, cause I mean, it's interesting. People had to do that after the sixties. They were like, yeah, I just did a bunch of acid and I lived in a ranch in Malibu and fucked everyone I ever saw. And they're like, I thought that was the way the world was gonna go and I followed some shaman guy, some guru who just wanted to fuck me and 10 other people that were living there. And we did that for three years. Apparently we never created the utopia we thought we were gonna have. And now I'm back working here at Allstate Insurance and we have great policies and we'd love you to come in the office so we can break them down for you. It all ends folks, all the love, all the bullshit ends, but it's fun, they have so much fun. QAnon was hard to get mad at because they were, this was all they had. Yeah, and they were quite good at it. And they were good at it and it was a lot of desperate people, but they were also rich idiots. There's also like dumb rich people and those are like the saddest people in Q cause it's like they should, they have the resources to do other things, but they just love Q. They're like, I'm just into this. And I'm like, you're rich, go do something. How in curious are you? Go to the Amazon, go bird walk. I don't know, but they're, you know, so. Play golf. It's sad, but they're like done now. I mean, it's over. I see you think this is the. I think everything's ending. My whole thing is that Trump's out, QAnon's over, the quarantine is gonna end. Everything's gonna go back to something that's more recognizable. I think that. Are you optimistic about the 2021 and what. To a degree in certain aspects, I have optimism. And then I have, I have short term optimism and longterm pessimism. Meaning that I think in the short term, things can get better. I think longterm, because there's so many forces that are out of our control that are evolving in ways I barely understand that are carving up society. It's gonna be very tough longterm to be completely optimistic. Like, Hey, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be good forever. But short term, I think, yeah, this quarantine will end. Things will get better. The economy will get a little better. The constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit. That's my hope. And people can go back to focusing on things that matter, which is the things that are near you and close to you. Yeah, the humans around you. Humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi. I have uncles that talk about Nancy Pelosi. I'm like, you've never met her. You'll never meet her, shut up. And I have a belief that this kind of local love and kindness that you naturally can have for human beings that you actually know can be expanded at scale through the social networks that we use, that we build. Twitter is currently failing at that miserably. That would be great. But that's... If we were able to increase the love through the social networks, that would be great. It feels very hard to. It's a worthy challenge. You've tweeted, one of the underreported reasons conspiracy theories take hold is because some of them are true. What conspiracy theories do you believe that are sort of important for people to think about, would you say? Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman with no connections to any other situation, government. I believe that JFK was removed from office by a group of people that had very different interests. But... This is the question of like deep state. So these are powerful people that are able now to dictate through basically the threat of violence what the presidents, the surface powerful people in our society. Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not... I want another investigation into 9 11, not because I think that George Bush pressed a button and made 9 11 happen, but because we invaded the country of Iraq. And then we, 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. There was tons of stuff in the 9 11 report that didn't make sense to anybody. There's tons of stuff about that day that I feel like we just don't know. Yeah, that's... Sorry to interrupt. That's when I, my little aunt life touched upon conspiracy theory world and first learned about Alex Jones is when 9 11 happened. It was very frustrating to me how poorly the reporting and the transparency around what exactly happened, who knew what, all that kind of a basic information that you would hope the government would release, reveal, and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this. Instead, it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden in order to manipulate some kind of machine that leads us to war. Yeah, that's fair to say. Yeah, I mean, I just don't feel like we've gotten the full story. I don't know what the full story is. I can't, I don't know what it is, but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story. Yeah, there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right? Whether they're in the Catholic church or they're in the government or wherever they are, they are able to cover things up that they do. They're able to silence people that try to out them in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations. That's true. QAnon has nuggets of truth. It just went crazy. Any conspiracy theory that involves the Knights Templar and also Chrissy Teigen is probably wrong, you know? What's the Knights Templar? Well, it was just this group of Knights back in the day. You know, it's that supposedly secret meetings. And like in every conspiracy, they talk about like, you know, if you go deep enough, it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, you know, all of these secret groups throughout history, the Illuminati, the... Oh, and there's a thread that connects all of this. Oh yes, it connects it all to David Spade. I mean, it's a little much. Well, how do you, if you're David Spade, defend yourself, by the way? You ignore it because it's hilarious. And I know David Spade. It's like Hollywood's kind of boring. Yes, there are sex orgies. I'm not invited. I'm sure there's shit going on. Kids do get abused, women get abused. I'll invite you to one. Please, we got the $75,000 dog and then we'll get one. But, you know, me and David Spade, we go out to sushi restaurants, like, and you sit there and you listen to people complain. That's what a lot of it is. What a lot of Hollywood is is deeply sad tragedy that people don't understand that some of it is nefarious and dark and there are problems and there are real power brokers here. It's a dark town, 100%. But the idea that everybody that lives here is in some wide ranging vast conspiracy isn't true. It ignores how humdrum, boring, deeply sad most people's lives are in Hollywood. And it ignores how sad fame is in general. Fame's a sad thing. Not always, but a lot of times it's a sad thing. It's fleeting, it's ephemeral, it doesn't last. It separates you from other people. It's isolating. It can be traumatic depending on what's going on. Obviously it's better than the alternative. If you're trying to be famous, it's better to be famous than not famous, right? I'll say that. But it's a mixed bag to a degree. There are things about it that aren't great. And Hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness of people that have not realized their dreams and people that have realized them. Both of those people. The people that win Olympic gold medals can sometimes suffer from depression. Correct. They've lost. Well, somebody said, and I forget who said it, it's a great quote, it's not mine. I think it's from a book, or it might be from a TV show. Sometimes I quote something and they're like, "'That's from like, Charlotte's Web." I'm like, oh. The two worst things are, oh, I think it's from the movie Limitless. I'm like an idiot. But anyway, thanks for having me on. Tomorrow you're gonna make some genius. I will not publish this. It's from the movie, and I think he says, "'The two worst things in the world are not good." Oh, you know what's not from Limitless? I think it's from the movie where Nicolas Cage sold weapons. It was called Lord of War. It's a little better than Limitless. Anyway. That's a good movie. It's a great movie. He said, the two worst things in the world are not getting what you want and getting it. So the undercurrents of sadness that run through Hollywood are, there are two rivers that converge, and there are people that just never had it, and people that have it and go, now what? And so it's a sad place, a tragic place. And there's a lot of, it's boring. That's what people don't realize is like, it's actually kind of boring. Well, life is kind of boring. Life is kind of boring. But there's also like, you know, so I think QAnon's this way to make a lot of it seem like it's super exciting. And listen, I don't want to diminish the experiences of people who've been abused here, because there is a lot of horror here. But the whole QAnon thing was like, everybody in everything is doing, and that's not true. Well, see, just to linger on that a little bit is, Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates bother me because, this is me, dumb, naive Lex, thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world. Sure. First, by creating a company that empowered personal computers. And second, by donating a ton of money for like treating malaria in Africa and all those kinds of things. And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think, based on like just replies to whenever Bill Gates does anything. Like, to me, the top replies should be about how inspiring that guy is, to donate so much money. And so sorry to, the thing I'm struggling with is, if I'm Bill Gates, like, how do you behave differently? How do you show people that you're, if you're not, I don't know, doing creepy stuff that they're saying he's doing? Well, I think part of it is that he's done some really good stuff, right? He's an innovative guy, he's on the vanguard of a lot of things, but he's also the antichrist. And I think that that is, you know, they're not mutually exclusive. He is the prince of darkness, as well as some, no. Here's my deal with Bill Gates. He's a Batman villain billionaire, meaning that he's not a villain, but he's got all this money, right? Here's the thing, and I love Musk and all these guys, I know you love these guys. Listen, when you have the kind of money that these guys have and you have the vision that they have, and they want society to look a certain way, and a lot of them are doing great things, people, they need to get better at the pushback. They need to get a little better. When somebody says, hey man, what's going on over there? Bill Gates needs to be a little better at going, here's what, because, you know, Bill Gates has the money. You know, I think once he wanted to shoot a missile of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming, and a lot of scientists were like, hey man, that might not be the way to do it. But no one in history, like so few people in history have had the resources to even have that thought, that if you have the resources to have that thought, and you have designs on the way you want society to look, whether it's public health policy or vaccinations, whatever, you have to get a little better at dealing with legitimate critiques. And obviously you're not defending yourself against people that say you're the Antichrist, but like, you need to get a little better. And I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people at that level are like, ugh, PR is kind of like, you know. They're terrible at it. They're terrible at it. They're terrible at it. Him and Zuckerberg are really bad at it. Zuckerberg's horrible at it. He seems especially bad at public. Yeah, and it makes me feel so bad because the problem with being a billionaire is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful. I think Elon is good at, at least so far, maintaining touch with reality. No, if you look at the name of his child, you can clearly see. Listen, I do like him, and I do think what he's done with Tesla, you know, my producer has a Tesla, and he never shuts up about it. Most people that have Teslas never shut up about them, and they think they're part of the development team at SpaceX, and I like that he's created a world where people can get excited about a $37,000 car and never shut the fuck up about it to the point where I have to threaten people with physical violence to get them to stop telling me about that their car drives itself. Oh, you should get a Tesla. Maybe have a few less drinks and a few fewer Vicodin, and you can drive yourself. Have you thought about getting a Tesla? I've never thought about it. You should get a Tesla. I don't like them, they're minimalist. I don't like, I want more. I want more. Get the Cybertruck. I want a Cybertruck. I'm just being a, trolling you by being a salesman. My producer wants a Cybertruck. I want a stagecoach. Old school, stagecoach, horse thief shit. It's going back to that. I live in an area with a lot of horses. It's going back to like whipping a horse. I want an animal to shriek while I go by. You want more suffering in the world, not less. Oh, I think we need it. Okay, but I just don't like that billionaire is a bad word. And it's not necessarily, not every billionaire is a pedophile. I know, but the problem is a lot of like, it's just, you know, Epstein was very smart at like just getting people at that house and taking photos of them. Nobody knew what they were doing, but it's like, it was one of those things where it's like, Epstein was the most social guy ever. Like every photo he's like, hey, and it's like everyone that's ever done anything in the world has been at that fucking island. Every human being is like in a photo. It's just weird, like I'm in, like it's funny me and my friends get together. We don't ever take photos, right? Like last night, a few people, it was my birthday yesterday, I'm 17. And my friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right? And we had a fun night, and just four people that are over, nobody, right? Nobody ever thought like, let's, hey, I wanna remember it. Let's take photos, I'm 36, woo! But everything Epstein did, there's just photos of everybody, it's interesting. Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself? No, I think he was killed by that guy, that guy that they put in his cell, that lunatic, who was that big muscled guy. I think he was just, he did it for money, kept his mouth shut. That's it. Money from whom do you think? Mossad, MI6, CIA, all three. So there's a lot of pressure from a lot of different powerful people. Probably Mossad, CIA more. I mean, it seems very clear that he was working inside of a honeypot intelligence operation. Ghislaine Maxwell's father was an Israeli super spy. Ghislaine Maxwell's working for Israeli intelligence. It would be odd to think, and of course the CIA knows about everything that Israeli intelligence is doing with Americans. So I would think that it's a very cozy relationship with those two intelligence agencies. And I think if you ran it by anyone, I think if you ran it by French intelligence, they'd go, yeah, no, get him. I don't think there was any intelligence service in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people that live in their countries that was against him getting whacked. But do you think it's possible that he's just an evil person who is after manipulating people and also was a pedophile? So that there's a bigger thing. It's not factual that there's a bigger thing. Evil people don't get handed. Those are your facts, Tim Dillon. No, there's the facts of the case. You don't get handed a 65. Show me another evil guy who was handed a $65 million place by Les Wexner. Show me another evil guy that got that type of a handshake deal where he was basically let off without anything after a judge had made a very sweetheart deal for him after he was accused of molesting a 14 year old. Show me another evil guy that doesn't have that kind of backing that has those types of friends, those connections, those types of properties. Show me multiple passports all over the world. So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it. Why did they, so you think he's just an evil guy who is doing this for whom is his own just shits and giggles. He's just getting off on it. Human nature, yeah. Human nature, huh? It's human nature. $70 million limestone mansion. I'm being visibly mocked. Yeah, is it human nature? And it's like poetry. I don't think it's human nature. I think they manipulated human nature, but I think they did it. I think JustLane, I think Epstein was really just a functionary and I think JustLane was kind of a pimp and Epstein was kind of a guy that made the money okay and hid money and things like that and worked for a lot of powerful people. I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore. I don't even believe that. If you're a pedophile, you're like in a group. You know what I mean? Well, I'm not even going there, but staying on JustLane, so you believe there's some power in her. What do you think happens to her now? Like what are the differences? Great question. I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her, but I imagine she'll get some type of deal, closed door thing years from now when people don't really care about the case and she'll serve some time in a very lax thing or she'll be killed. I mean, again, it's like if she was doing what she was doing, which is I believe a fact that she was compromising powerful people so that they could be blackmailed by the intelligence services of the US and Israel, probably, I don't see how she wasn't doing that. Someone's black, someone's using the photos and the tapes, right? Someone's using that against these people. Someone wants to control these people. Well, who and why? That's the real question. And I think the real question is you wanna exert control over congressmen and senators and presidents because they have the power to make decisions to affect the, but the CIA just works for a lot of very wealthy people. That's what the CIA, so how the CIA started, right? It was lawyers, bankers. They're protecting financial interests of multinational corporations all over the world, overthrowing democratically elected governments, going in and doing subterfuge campaigns, encouraging terror. They were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't see why that would change. I think that's who they still represent. And I think those people want certain policies and certain people pushed forward. And I think those people are controlled. And I think one of the ways to control people is their sexual problems. And that's the way they did it. I wish there was a way to, because everything you just said now is. It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? I'm being indoctrinated on air. No. You think there's just a, Jeff Ramsey is just a fun, random guy who just wanted to make home movies of presidents? Well, you think I'm just some random guy. I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody who's friendly with the American audience. I believe you are backed by people that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs. I believe that. I believe you're pushed to be the happy face of AI. Which is why I will edit this part. They shouldn't pick the happier face. Wow. No editing. Joe Rogan's rule, no editing. This is live. No, I mean, I wish there was a way to, for some of the conspiracy theories, to prove that that's not the case. Like what the CIA is. There is some possibility in my mind that institutions like the CIA and different kinds of organizations are driven less by organized malevolence and more by just incompetence. Just bureaucracy, being incompetent. I think that argument gets less and less persuasive when you look at all the things they've been able to do. It's very certain, just like you said, that there's a bunch of them that have done, because there's some conspiracy theories that are dramatic and true. The question is, I wish there was a way to prove that some of them are not. And it's very difficult, because so much is shrouded in mystery. Like one of the things I'm bothered by is when people accuse other athletes of using steroids, for example. And it's just, yes, a lot of people use steroids, but it sucks that people just don't believe you. There's some incredible athletes that look shredded, that look just incredible performers, and everybody just says that they're on steroids. They kind of assume. Yeah, I mean, and people accuse me all the time of being on performance enhancing drugs and steroids. And it is hard, but what I remind them is, it's what my appearance is a result of dedication. But no, it's hard work, diet, exercise, dedication. Are you on keto? I'm on, I'm on keto. I'm doing a version of, you're keto, right? Yeah. So I'm doing a version of keto right now with Brad. And it's, do you see what I mean? You carb up in order to be able. So it's keto with sugar. It's called keto plus sugar. And it's a good diet for, I grew up in the 90s when nobody ever lost weight sadly, because every diet was like, you can eat what you want, just be accountable. No one even knew what that meant. So it would be like my mother being like, if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water. Just take a walk around the block. You can go to McDonald's three times a day. Just walk around the block. It's what my parents used to say. My mother would be like, just walk around the block. You're fine. Gonna have a cigarette? Walk 20 steps, walk 20 steps back. It's exercise. So, you know, there's too many conspiracies out there. A lot of them aren't true. A lot of them are bitter, angry people trying to justify their own impotence, not being able to do anything in life. And they're like the people that have done something in life, they're all nefarious. It's all, the car just attacked against me. That's 100% true, 100%. It attracts usually people that have not figured out a way to succeed or haven't succeeded on the level that they want to. But that also being true, there is a fair amount of fuckery going on and provable. And, you know, we just have to, I think, separate, know that these things are often inflated or not true, but know that sometimes they are true. Otherwise it wouldn't exist. If there was no, if there was nothing to JFK, there was nothing to 9 11, if people felt like they were being dealt with honestly, this wouldn't exist. I mean, this exists because there are real questions that people have that don't get answered for whatever reason. And then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions, that information vacuum is filled with people like Alex Jones, who are curious and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're horribly wrong. And sometimes they're all over the place. And they're good storytellers and people love stories. And then when there's an absence of actual. Alex is a uniquely American person, like a very interesting, I don't know how many countries, like how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist, a good living in other countries, right? It's very rare, right? I mean, it's very interesting. And he became like, I know people that knew him when he was a kid, because I'd go to Austin and perform a lot. And he was a guy that would take a bullhorn and yell at cops because he thought DEI checkpoints were unconstitutional. That's what he was doing in college. And he's just went through, he was hated by the right. He was hated by the Bush people. He was hated by them. And he went from being this guy that was considered like a leftist even, like even though he was never a leftist, he was considered this like enemy of mainstream conservatism. Like he was not considered a guy that wasn't a patriot, wasn't this, wasn't that. And he just, wow, like he whines and whines and ends up just being this confidant of a Republican president, very divisive Republican president. And he becomes this populist and everything like that. It's really wild to watch that. But I mean, I do think he should retire eventually just so we could get some, I don't know, it seems like it's a lot to keep doing. Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones to continue having a voice because just like you said, he's a, use the word fun, but really he shakes up the norms of our discourse. I do too. I do think we need to put more value. I think entertainment, we do need to say that like there are people that should be allowed to have a voice for entertainment purposes. Right. And that's part of what Donald Trump, now that he's not the president, come on, let the guy, let him talk. Who do you think is the best comedian of all time? Oh, that's a great question. Greatest of all time. You mentioned Carlin, your uncle's liking Carlin. Well, Carlin is great. Carlin is really hard to argue with, but Chappelle is also really great. Louis C.K. is really great. I don't know that there's what Joan Rivers is great. I don't know. You smile at that. Well, she's a beast of a comic. I'm not aware of her standup actually. She's a beast of a comic. Ask Rogue and ask any of them. Kennison's great. So what makes a great comic do you think in the history of comedy? Just like that. Said something at the moment in a way, found a way to communicate with people in the funniest possible way at that moment and illustrated larger truths about life in what they did. And I think that guys like Louis and Chappelle and Pryor and Kennison and Hicks, people like Joan Rivers have done that. And even modern people, people like Maria Bamford's an amazing comedian. It's just a different style of comedy per se, but she's an amazing comedian. Cat Williams is an amazing comedian. He really is. Does he have any, was he the one of the things you kind of mentioned, the communities you mentioned, they were kind of fearless in saying the difficult things that needs to be said. Cat Williams is more, I don't remember his comedy, but I think it's just more wild out there. Well, to an extent that you can watch it. He's got stuff. He talks about stuff. He talks about race brilliantly. He talks about America brilliantly. No, I think there's a lot of stuff there. Of course, Chris Rock. Of Chris Rock, of course. It's so hard. You can't really pick one. You just gotta, there's a class of people that throughout this history of this business, which is not that long of a history. It's pretty much within the last century, that have been really influential. Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things. Sometimes it's substance of how they, what they're saying, or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying. And we're only talking about standup comedians, right? So there's a million great comedians. If we're gonna talk about Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, these are brilliant. And those guys are bigger influences on comedy, I think, than standups, really, truly. So there's so many brilliant people in the business. Who was, for you, influential, just early on? Hicks was influential, because I'd watch Bill Hicks, and I'd be like, this guy's saying crazy shit on stage, and this is the only way he can get away with it, is because it's so funny. And he was calling out the military industrial complex, and he was talking about the first Gulf War. I remember he said a joke that I heard. It made me sit up straight, and he goes, he was in Canada, and he said, we had a war in the States. He was talking about the first Gulf War. And he said, I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops. And to me, I love that joke. It was so funny to me, and I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere other than standing on a stage. You couldn't ever say that in an office, really. And this was before, like, it was like PC, and they said, the other thing, I always knew that comedians had to say shit and have it be funny enough that you couldn't get away with it in polite society. That was the whole point. That was why it was a dark theater or a dark nightclub. That's when people had a few drinks. That's what the art form was, and that's why. So a guy like that was influential because I started watching him. And then, of course, I loved SNL when I was a kid, and I would watch Chris Farley, and I would watch people like even John Belushi going back in the day, but I'd watch Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and all these guys. I mean, there's so many funny people, but Bill Hicks was kind of funny. And then Patrice O Neill was probably my favorite comedian who's made me laugh more than anybody else. So I think it was you, actually, that maybe on your podcast, we're talking about Patrice O Neill and that he was actually vicious to others. I think he was a little mean to other people, but he was very good to people that he liked, I guess. I think he was like not, I mean, he wasn't, and I've never met him. I have no inside info, but from what I've heard, he was like no nonsense guy, right? He just said what he wanted to say. But I think in terms of comedians, I don't know of anyone funnier than Patrice O Neill who said, in modern times, that said more about our society than him. I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy. On the radio, he was funny. On his specials, he was funny. Everywhere, he was funny. And there's something else to be said about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts. Because it unlocks a weird, special, new thing that changed everything. I mean, Rogan started with that. You're doing that. I think that's a whole nother form of like standups, the ones that have a lot to say. Almost like we get to witness the process of the creation of the jokes in a way, or the mind. The sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes. It's just. Comedians relate to social media. Comedians, comedy's, it's a performance based medium. So it's about getting up and doing it, getting up in a club, getting up in a theater, getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up. And comedy for years was about performance. And then on the higher end, it was about movies and TV shows. But we were very slow to get on YouTube. We're very slow to adapt to technology. We're very slow to monetize anything we did on the internet. So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people to kind of get into that space, start earning money. And now because of the pandemic, it's really become essential. And it helps you, and even without the pandemic, it was how you were building a fan base. And that's like, but comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it. And they thought the people on it were idiots and were unfunny and it was just a blatant, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab or it was just too commercial in a sense where they're like, hey, look at me. Like it was just goofy, right? And then comics, I think got displaced because all the YouTubers came in and all the social media stars came in and they really knocked comics off because now people are much more, like if you ask anyone under 30 who their favorite comedian is, they say David Dobrik. And there's nothing wrong with that. David's a funny guy, but like what you, not especially to me a ton, but that's okay. I don't, but he makes people laugh, so he's funny. But he's what people, that's a comedian now. So comics got beat by other people coming into a digital space before they did laying the groundwork and taking it over. And now comics are just trying to stay alive. Like even my podcast, which is people really like it, thank God, and I love doing it. The Tim Dillon Show. Well, thank you. I was late, you know, I mean, I was, I just, you know, I've been podcasting for a long time, but really dedicating myself and putting the resources behind it, I was late to it. Like, I was like, hey, I'm telling jokes on stage, which is great, but I should have been allocating more time to building an infrastructure online. And I wasn't doing it and a lot of comics weren't doing it. Funny comics weren't doing it. Comics should be doing it. And I think when the pandemic ends, a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup, but I will keep, obviously I'm gonna go back on the road and do live standup, but I will keep doing this podcast and building digitally too. But you're also exploring ideas. You're doing like short videos and so on. You're trying to look for different mediums of how to be funny. I wanna be funny everywhere. I wanna be funny everywhere. I love making things too. My producer, Ben Avery, is like a brilliant editor and comedic mind, even though he's not a standup. He's able to, he understands funny, he understands what makes me funny. We're able to make these really, I mean, some of those videos, they're just brilliant little videos, even though they're tiny little videos, they're fucking as funny as anything. And it's not me. It's me working with somebody else to make something really great. And it's that relationship that's very important. In some sense, the medium of a short video is a challenge, just like the medium of a short tweet. Of course. How to say something. I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart, what's in your mind, how to say it, whether it's the goal is funny or something, or just an expressing idea. I think the whole thing that's important to us is that it's an extension of, really like an extension of your friendship in a way. Like, are you guys laughing at it? Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea? And if that's the case, other people are going to laugh at it. I think so much of the old medium was like, everything was top down. Okay, pitch me this idea. I pitch it to the showrunner. They pitch it to the network. They pitch it to this, to that, to that. Standards and practices, sales, and we got to go through everything. Now it's just like, are me and a few buddies or even just one buddy laughing at this idea? Does it captivate us? And do we see it visually? And also a great line from Roseanne, a guy, not Roseanne, but a guy that worked on Roseanne, the old Roseanne, the great one. He said, is it funny with the sound off? Right. That's what we try to do. That's brilliant. Is it funny with the sound off? When you see me in the dumb things, or me in the Meghan McCain, or me in the thing, is it funny with the sound off? And if it's funny with the sound off, you have a good starting point. That's hilarious, because you, I would say you're one of the people, because most people are not funny with the sound off, most comedians. Like you, Will Ferrell's another example of that. There's something about when I click on one of your videos, it's funny, just like the first thing I see, just your face. We, well, thank you. That's very sweet. But I mean, thank God. I mean, that's what we try to do, right? We're trying to be funny. Yeah. So we're trying to be funny. Can we talk about love a little bit? Sure. So you came out of the closet as being gay when you were 25. Yeah, it was late, very late. Very late. Before then. By today's standards. During and after, how has your view on love evolved? Interesting. It's so hard to say, because like I would, I'd like to make a very like Disneyfied statement about like that you can't be in love secretively. You should be honest. Love should all be about honesty, but that's not true. Right? There's people that are in love that are lying to everyone else, but they're deeply in love. Yeah. I would love to say something like, honesty is an ingredient for love, you know? But I don't know, maybe honesty with each other. But I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world that aren't honest. My view on love is super important. I think that it's, a lot of society in America is all about love. We don't tend to focus on other things in terms of like, you know, friendship or sustainability of that. Cause I think that a lot, I know a lot of people in relationships where it's like, I don't know, they're not, they are, they love each other, but like, it's also a rock solid couple because they are, they're very compatible in many other ways. Right. So I think that like, They're friends. They have, right. I see friendship and love as the same thing. There's just parts of it that are, right? So it's like, I look at it as like, there is, there needs to be more than just like that, like amazing, like chemistry or physical attraction that is this chemical thing that happens. There should be like some underlying, I mean, again, that's from what I, that's what I've observed as really long lasting, successful relationships. Well, is there something about coming out that, that was, that you took away, that you remember as profound, Yes. That it was my, that I, it wasn't society, it was me. So there were kids that were out in my high school that I waited years later to do it. That was no one's fault but my own. So I was taking a cowardly way out and a lot of people. So I could blame society or like, oh, I lived in a conservative area and I grew up in that. You should take responsibility for your own decisions. And if you're being cowardly, admit that you're being cowardly. So that's what I took out of it is that it's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward. Society will never be perfect. You have to be honest when you're ready to be honest or however you want to be honest, but it's not somebody, too much now is it's everyone else's fault that you didn't take, make a hard choice or a hard decision. So that's kind of what I took out of it. So now in retrospect, you see yourself as, were being afraid. Do you think at the time? Well, I wanted people to like me, which is the disease of humanity, right? Is that we want to be liked. And what happens is if you want people to like you and love you even, you want people to feel comfortable with you. And those were people like your family? Friends more. My family I would always, could always throw in the street, but I'm kidding. I mean, but I am not, but my friends, my circle of friends, which I were my family at the time when you're a senior, when you're 10th, 11th grade in high school, your friends are your family. You know what I mean? Like that's your, so you don't want to do anything that puts you on the outside of the circle. It's just thinking back to that fear. Is there things you're afraid of now? That you're not doing, you're afraid to do? I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of not being good at my job, not being funny, letting people down, not putting out products that are good, whether it's the podcast every week or stand up or the videos, like I'm afraid of like, there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do. So when you're in that position, you're nervous that you're going to start doing things that they don't like. So the new things you want to do, the evolution you want to do, you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way. You want to make sure that you're doing things that are consistent with why people liked you, but also you don't want to put yourself in a box and limit what you can be going forward. So like, I had a talk with the CEO of NBC Universal once. I was doing some internal sketch for them. And I was playing like a cab driver and he was a, and he's not the current CEO, but he's a former CEO. And I said to him, what's the hardest part of running a corporation of this size? And he said something very interesting. He said, the hardest part is maximizing the current profit model of what you have at the same time, getting ready, getting ready, getting the company ready for where it's going to be in five years. He said, those are often at odds. And that's the toughest thing. He goes, cause I could just bang out everything I got to do right now. And we're going to make a lot of money doing this, but am I devoting enough resources into digital so that in five years, when that's where everything lives, are we competitive in that space? So as funny as I am now, hopefully to people and a lot of the things that I want to do now, I'm going, what am I, what groundwork am I not laying for three to five years down the road so that I can be adapting to the trends that are important then in terms of not so much comedic trends, but like the technological trends, like what is the, what is the, you know, I should have done podcasting earlier. What should I, should I have a bigger presence on TikTok? Should I have a bigger presence here? Should I have a business, or should I be on Twitch? Should I be doing this? Should I be doing that? What am I not doing that I should be doing that I'll regret not doing? And those are, those are the conversations I think I have in my own head all the time. And I guess there's parallels to coming out as gay or just parallels in like a career path so you're taking all that, that's ultimately just fear. It's fear. Yeah. It's the fear of, you know, the best thing that happened in my career was that I came to LA. I didn't have an idea of what was going to happen. I met somebody who was really committed to making funny things that we just wanted to be funny. No one would let us be funny. We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny. We didn't have HBO, we didn't have Netflix. We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning and then a camera and then a thing. And we just wanted to be funny. And that was the greatest risk really I took because I was like, well, I don't know what else is going to happen right now, but I just want to be funny. And funny saved my life, right? I mean, funny got me out of drugs. Funny probably got me out of the closet. Funny was the thing that I was able to do that made everything okay in my own head. So I was like, as long as I'm being funny, something good will happen. So we did that and then something really cool happened that we were able to do a lot of cool things, but that's what it is. It's fear that keeps you from being the better version of yourself. Your mom, I mean, you have so many complicated, fascinating parts of your story. Oh, thank you. Your mom, as you were growing up, suffered. Schizophrenic, yeah. Well, from mental illness, yeah, schizophrenia. Can you tell her story and how that relationship has changed over the years? Yeah, well, she was always eccentric and always, you know, the terms for schizophrenia in an Irish Catholic household where we didn't talk about anything were eccentric, fun. She's fun. There's a theme to this conversation. She's unpredictable. She's a wire, she was a live wire. Any of the words you would use to describe somebody who was a fucking lunatic, but you wouldn't say that. Pop that spin. Right, she started experiencing symptoms probably early on in her life, but she also, I think, started really manifesting them when I was in my mid teens, so like 14, 13, 14 area. And she got really, really bad. And then I think she was institutionalized about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago. And she could really no longer live on her own. She was unable to go to work. She was unable to function. So I visit her when I can. Obviously, I'm not in New York. Whenever I go to New York, I visit her. She's aware of what I do, my career and everything like that. She has good days and bad days, but mental illness is a thing that's very tough. We don't talk about it as a society. People with mental problems don't get that much attention. We tend to think that they did something wrong or that they deserve it or that they are to be ignored. And we don't devote a lot of resources into it, which is unfortunate because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like, let's diagnose your mental illness off Instagram. And it's like, that's not the move. Yeah. Do you love her? I do, I do. I love her, but I also remember her that isn't her now. And when someone has mental illness that's severe, you make peace with their death before they die. Wow, yeah. Because the part of them that you love and remember a lot of cases is not evident or obvious. Now, my mother's still a loving person that I love, but the fun, her ability to be present in the moment and to not, that is lost with the progression of realness so that you still love her. And I mean, again, your parents, the time horizons you have with your parents are unknown. People don't know. I have friends that their parents were in their lives for their entire life. And I have friends whose parents were in their life, but my mother was a very, she knew what I was. When I was a little kid, I was an actor. When I was like six to 12, my mother knew that I was a performer. She knew what I was and what I'd ultimately do. She recognized that in me. And when I said to her, I want to audition for shows, I want to be on stage, I want to be on this, I want to do this, she let me do it because she knew who I was and she didn't want to get in the way of me being a human being, a fully realized person at six. So that's probably the best thing a parent can do for a kid is let them be who they are. And my mother did that. So that, I mean, that's good. We ate too much fast food. There were negatives, but she did let me be who I was. That's why you want to throw them out into the street. Yeah, sometimes. But coming to accept the mortality of her, I guess, identity as you remember it from childhood, do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? I'm afraid of death. I don't like the idea of death, but I know it's happening. I know it's going to happen eventually. I don't love it. Do you think about it? I think about, I want to do some good stuff that people can look back at. And I think I'm proud of the show where if people look back at the show, I don't know how comedy ages or whatever, but I think I put out a lot of stuff and I want to continue to put out stuff and I want to put out a few specials that people can look back at and go, oh, this guy was really funny in this really crazy, he lived in the latter part of this century when all this shit was going on. And he kind of made fun of it. And he did something to make people's lives a little better just by having a few laughs. What do you think about, this is something like in the podcast context, do you think you'll have just one or two or three shows out of thousands maybe that are like the truly special ones? That's probably the case. Or do you think it's an entirety of the body of work? I think people will take 10 minute clips from all different shows and put them together. And there's a highlight. Yeah, like a highlight reel of just like, these are like the best things that he's ever done or the best rants he's ever had, the best things, whatever. So the legacy would be that this was an important voice in a very weird time. I would hope that that's part of it. And I hope that I continue to be, you say important, I say funny, but hopefully I continue to be a voice. And that's what I think when I think about death, I think about like, what do people come on earth to do? And I think I came, I think my main purpose on this planet other than to experience whatever love or worthiness or whatever is to entertain people. And there's a lot of people in comedy right now that are not entertainers, and that's really the problem. But, and they got into comedy sort of the way that you can walk into the wrong store in a mall and then not realize you're in the wrong store and try on a bunch of clothes and then go, fuck, I wasted my whole afternoon. But I think I've always kind of been an entertainer and that's what I wanna do. There's a, unfortunately, sadly, a lot of people that look up to you. That is a horrible thing, but life is a nightmare. Yeah. If you were to give them advice, young folks, people in college, maybe even high school, but people in their 20s about what to do with their life, whether it's career, whether it's just life in general, what would you say? Ignore everyone. Make a few good friends. Truly have honest conversations with yourself about your, when do you feel the most alive? Figure that out. When and how do you feel the most alive? Yeah. Figure that out. Try to figure out a job or a career that can replicate that feeling. Don't listen to anyone. Don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to the gurus on the internet. Don't listen to me. Don't listen to anyone. Figure out where you feel the most alive. Where do you feel excited? Where does your pulse quicken? What do you feel matters? When you're in a situation, do you feel like it matters? What situation was that? What got you excited? What thing did you walk into where you looked around and were taken back and you're like, wow, this is amazing? And I'm filled with awe. If you can figure out a life where you can excite yourself, you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction or gambling or irresponsibility. You might not have to get your fucking kicks in very destructive places if you can get them in a productive place. Well, you had a pretty weaving life that's full of mistakes and so on. Many mistakes. Is that, are mistakes a bug or a feature? Like, do you recommend embrace the mistakes, make a bunch of them? Depends what they are, right? So. Well, you've had the full spectrum. I've had a lot, but a lot of mine could have sunk me. Right. Like, they sound like fun when I talk about them, but they actually could have sunk me. And they were all part of what made me funny, but I don't know. I would never tell anyone else to just light their life on fire and hope it all works out on the other end. It would be pretty irresponsible. But hey, at the end of the day, it's like, you're gonna, we get, there's, you know, I think one of my themes is that there's too much. We give the power. We think we have too, the power of choice has been elevated on our society to an unhealthy degree. I think people are, I think you could get really good at something, but you're born with a certain aptitude. It might be to be a deal maker, might be to be an athlete. It might be to be an artist. It might be to be a romantic, just fall in and out of love, in and out of love, in and out of love. It might be to be like a world traveler. Like, but whatever you are, I think you are. I think that there's something about you that makes you something. And if you can figure it out and then refine, you're not gonna be good at it per se. But if you're an athlete, it might not mean that you're going to be a great athlete in the history, but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had, or you're the person that, you know, builds a local scene for young athletes or whatever. If you are a really good deal maker, it doesn't mean you're gonna be Warren Buffett, but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys making deals all the time and things like that. Like if you're an entertainer, it might mean that you are an entertainer. It might mean that you are in the world of entertainment because you love it so much that if you lack the skillset to really pursue it on a degree, you just want to be like, there's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are. I think, I look at certain people and I go, you were born to be that thing. You know? The whole purpose is to find it. I was a juror on that murder trial in Long Island and the woman who's the DA, I'm like, you were born to do this. You were born to put murderers away and this guy killed the mother of his children. I mean, he's a bad guy, but like, I was like, you are really good at what you do. She has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is and what her justice and ethics are. And she wants to communicate that to people. She was very good at doing what she did. I don't know the facts of the case. I didn't really listen. He seemed guilty, so I just voted guilty. But I didn't really listen to her, but I heard the shape of her mouth was very bovine, like a cow, and it conferred a certain level of expertise that I enjoyed. Well, it's funny. I mean, you could see, you're half joking. Yes, but I'm serious. You can often see that people just, they found their place. They found their role. They found their thing. They found their thing, and that's kind of the purpose of life. And once you are in a place that seems sticky, like the place that seems right, that's one of the problems with the generation that you're speaking to, is there's always a feeling like I should keep exploring, keep exploring. But it's okay to stay in a place that you found that works. Yeah, and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find is like when people are like, when did you feel really excited and alive? It's like doing nothing. Right, yeah. You know, like that's the other thing. It's like some people are gonna be like, I feel really excited and alive, and I'm laying in my backyard in a hammock. And I just wanted the simplest life and not have to do much, and I don't like doing anything. And I love laying around and going, wow, the sky looks good today. Bill Gates goes, the sky looks good today. Let's shoot a missile into it. He wants to do shit, right? So it's like in between that and nothing is you can find something. But in that process, for you personally, I mean, for me and for others, I think there's a struggle. When you look in the, when Tim and Dylan looks in the mirror, do you love yourself or do you hate yourself? Well, a lot of times I think I'm Amy Schumer, so I'm confused. I'm a detente to myself all the time. I don't love myself or hate myself. Addicts have a very bad problem where you can't just fall in love with yourself and you can't hate yourself. Both of them lead you to a negative place. You try to stay kind of even keel. I don't go like, hey man, you put out a video, get all these views, things are great. You sold a bunch of tickets. Let's fucking go out and like, maybe let's, hey man, let's have that drink that you've been waiting for for 11 years. And I don't look at myself and go, you ate a burger yesterday. You're a piece of shit. You're horrible. You'll never get into the shape you want. I try not to get too low or too high. Both of them are not good for my particular mind. Okay, I gotta ask, we kind of spoke about 2021 and you being potentially hopeful, hopeful short term, cynical long term. Yeah. So let me ask, I forgot to ask, are you moving to Austin? I don't know. I mean, I don't think so immediately. I love Joe. I love what he's trying to do down there. I'm appreciative of everything that he's done for not only me, but for comedy in general. And I think as things happen in Austin and unfold is such a political answer, but as things unfold, I will consider it more and more. But I mean, I think I got another year in LA. So you've spoken so nicely about this magical place that is Los Angeles. LA is very funny. You think there's a place for comedy in LA? Oh yeah. There will always be a place for comedy in LA. So it's gonna be a place for comedy in New York. I mean, the question is how thriving of a comedy scene is Austin gonna be? And Joe can probably make it one, but as of right now, it isn't. So that would be him doing that. But the question, there's a lot of people escaping Los Angeles, but I know better about New York. There's a lot of really brilliant people. Let them go. There's other people. This is the thing. It's like, this is the fear thing. It's like, no, but all the brilliant people are leaving. There'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes the way that they've done throughout history. And I think that New York and LA, listen, maybe in five to 10 years, they're not the two cities. It would be real rough in five years when this pandemic's over for people in Australia to go, dude, you gotta go to America and you gotta visit Charleston and Austin. Stop. Let's be adults here. Let's be adults. It's still gonna be New York and LA for a while. LA is an absolute hellscape, but I don't think you're gonna replace California with another place. And also, everyone's making decisions now because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic we've never had before. We've never had this before. Joe loved California up until the pandemic. He had problems with it. Like, we all have problems with it. There's a lot of benefits to being here. I think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in 2020 because we were all locked up and stuck with our own thoughts. But, so it's funny, there's parallels because I don't necessarily, you know, I'm obviously a fan of comedy, but I don't care where comics move. But there's a parallel move that's happening, set of decisions which do influence my decision making, which is where to start a business that's tech centered. And that's more about the San Francisco, Silicon Valley. And there is a lot of people leaving there. That's already. And they're going to Austin. Well, Austin, there's a, I think, there's a bunch of different places. Phoenix, there's Denver. Austin will probably be a massive tech hub. Elon's there. It seems like it's all, everything about Austin says that it's going to be a massive tech hub. I just don't know if that means it'll be a massive comedy hub. It might. I don't know if those two can actually coexist. It's interesting because. Yeah, I don't, I think, you know, comedy suffered in New York and LA when everyone got super rich. Like, you know, it just wasn't as cool. It's still much more fun on the road. It's still more fun to perform for people that want and need to laugh in strip malls than it is to perform for hedge fund managers and with their dates and, you know, Instagram models in LA. It's just what it is. Comedy on the road is much more fun. So maybe in the spirit of that, Austin becomes, but you know, you know, if Austin is just colonized by tech bros and stuff like, yeah, I mean, sure, sure it'll be fun and it'll be great. I think Joe's made LA a scene. So if anyone's going to make Austin a scene, it's Joe. Yeah, and I like the, on the Elon side, which is what I'm much more familiar with, the promise of the possibility of what that could become because there's a lot of problems in Silicon Valley. And of course it might be naive to think that just because it's like the grass is greener thing, which is just because the place where you come from has a lot of problems, doesn't mean you can just create a new place that's not going to have those problems. Yeah, there's homelessness in Austin. There are problems in Austin. I mean, I think that with, by the way, with the influx of very rich people to an area, sometimes that helps things, but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing and it puts a spotlight on those problems and makes those problems even bigger, right? So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily, it's hard to predict. I just know that LA right now is funny. It's funny that there's 15 year old TikTokers making millions of dollars dancing in a house while the world burns. That is very funny. Well, it's for your style of humor, yes. The absurdity of the world is that it's... No one cares about Hollywood starlets and actresses and actors and everyone goes, hey, fuck you. Even though they've won three Academy Awards, they're all being replaced by just mediocre dancer 15 year olds. I mean, it's like there's something hilarious about this city and it will burn in hell, but so will everything. So what are we talking about? Eventually the sun will die out and we will all be gone unless we colonize outside of our solar system. But I just sit here, I'm struggling with this because Boston, I'm currently at MIT, Boston doesn't feel like the right place to start a business in the tech sector. And so I'm choosing, I'm looking at San Francisco the way it is and I'm looking at Austin. Oh, Austin, clearly. So it seems clear, but it's such a difficult thing to predict what a place will look like in 10 years and 15 years and 20 years. And it's so hard to predict if you'll like it or not until you're there. And this is speaking to risk, there's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere. There's not a good reason to do anything in life. Part of me wants to just fucking do it and whatever and see what happens. Do you like Boston, do you like other things about Boston besides the tech thing? You like MIT. MIT, that's the problem. Do you like the food in Boston? Do you eat food? I haven't eaten food or been outside for years. And I mean, that's probably the better version. But you're keto forever. You've been keto for a long time. Yeah, keto, fasting for a long time. 15 years fasting, eating once or twice a day. But no sugar ever, no like and no pasta ever, no bread ever. No pasta, no bread, no, except like, so my source of... You could kind of live anywhere because like going out is such a big part of what city you live in. And like, do you like the food there? Do you like the restaurants? Can you meet people? Whatever, but it's like, you really can just kind of... Yeah, so not married, no kids. Right, you have freedom. Me too, I have freedom. And that's, we have the curse of being vegan. We have too many choices. Right. That's the thing. We have too many choices. We don't have somebody else going, what about like, we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone. So we can just kind of like let our minds go run wild. So you just got to hone the instinct of just what feels right and just fucking do it. And that's it. I think Austin with Joe down there and Elon down there, Austin seems like a real no brainer move for you. To try, you know, why the hell not? Why not? And then I think I should go to MIT. Like, I mean, I think I should give those nerds a piece of my mind that you should go to. I was in an Uber pool once with a kid from MIT and I was eating this thing from Bova's Bakery. I forget what it was. It was like a, it's so good. I don't know. You don't know Bova's Bakery, right? Yeah, it's in Boston, it's famous. I was eating a thing and I was like covered in chocolate. This kid, like this little nerd, like this little like, you know, USB drive with feet was just staring at me and they just dropped him off at MIT. And he like scurried away. But that's a big school that, doesn't the NSA recruit out of their heavy, like MIT, places like that? I can't, I can't speak to that. But what, this is a ridiculous question I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone. What is the meaning of life? Do you think about the big existential kind of, why the hell we're here? It's a cosmic kind of joke kind of in a weird way, right? I mean, Joe said it the other day on, maybe it was you saying that like, he was just like, you know, by the time you figure out what it is, you're out of here. You know, it's kind of interesting. Or you even start to figure out what it is, you're out of here. It's like, that's kind of funny. It's like, you don't get enough time to truly, I think the meaning of life is just like, at the end of the day, do you feel it was time well spent? Was it time well spent? That's really what it is. If you look back, do you go, hey, it was time well spent. Pretty good ride. It was a pretty good ride. I did a lot of things. Doing what you say is a part of it, I think. If you say you're going to do something, maybe doing it. That seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life question to like, you know, what did you come here to do? I think it goes down deep of like, who are you and what do you want and you know, what are you suited to do and what? It does seem that like, the people who are most enlightened that I've ever met or read books by, they ultimately land on humor. Like, they don't take shit seriously. They embrace the absurdity of it all and just kind of laugh at it in this kind of simple way. So it does seem that humor is like, one of the fundamental truths of this universe we're in. And somehow. It's love, it's love. Humor can be love, right? People laughing, that that sound is kind of like, Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called, Drinking a Love Story, which is a really good book about not drinking. Drinking and then not drinking. And she said, you could understand things as love. I think one of the last lines of the thing is like, people talking about their experiences in life, that could be love. Like, you know, laughter is love. Like, I feel like love and finding it wherever you could find it is why we're here. That's that connection. And laughter can be love. And, you know, figuring out, you know, something that makes life better for a lot of people can be love. You know, whether it's a vaccine or a technological advancement or whatever. Like, you know, all of those things, I think, can be that feeling. And I think that's what's important. It connects you to a larger frequency, you know? I don't think there's a better way to end it, Tim. I hope you're one of the voices. I truly believe that your legacy would be one of the most important voices of our time, because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity of the nonsense of our social and political discourse. So I hope you keep doing it. I'm a fan. I'm still a bit starstruck, so. I'll stop it. Listen, I was your intellectual capacity. Enjoying anything I do only underscores how truly fucked we are. But thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for talking today. Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon, and thank you to our sponsors. NetSuite Business Management Software, Athletic Greens All In One Nutrition Drink, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Rev Speech Detect Service. So the choices, business, health, sanity, or transcripts. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you some words from George Carlin. Scratch any cynic, and you will find a disappointed idealist. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #156

The following is a conversation with Natalia Bailey, a rocket scientist and spacecraft propulsion engineer previously at MIT and now the founder and CTO of Axion Systems, specializing in efficient space propulsion engines for satellites and spacecraft. So these are not the engines that get us from the ground on Earth out to space, but rather the engines that move us around in space once we get out there. Quick mention of our sponsors, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Blinkist, an app that summarizes books, and Sun Basket, meal delivery service. So the choice is snacks, caffeine, knowledge, or a delicious meal. Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say something about Natalia's story. She has talked about how when she was young, she would often look up at the stars and dream of alien intelligences that one day we could communicate with. This moment of childlike cosmic curiosity is at the core of my own interest in space and extraterrestrial life and in general in artificial intelligence, science, and engineering. Amid the meetings and the papers and the career rat race and all the awards, let's not let ourselves lose that childlike wonder. Sadly, we're on Earth for only a very short time, so let's have fun solving some of the biggest puzzles in the universe while we're here. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Natalia Bailey. You said that you spent your whole life dreaming about space and also pondering the big existential question of whether there is or isn't intelligent life, intelligent alien civilizations out there. So what do you think? Do you think there's life out there? Intelligent life? Intelligent life, that's trickier. I think looking at the likelihood of a self replicating organism given how much time the universe has existed and how many stars with planets, I think it's likely that there's other life. Intelligent life, I'm hopeful, I'm a little discouraged that we haven't yet been in touch. As I'm hopeful. Allegedly, I mean, it's also. In our dimensions and so on, yeah. It's also possible that they have been in touch and we just haven't, we're too dumb to realize they're communicating with us. In whichever, it's the Carl Sagan idea that they may be communicating at a time scale that's totally different. Like their signals are in a totally different time scale or in a totally different kind of medium of communication. It could be our own, it could be the birth of human beings. Whatever the magic that makes us who we are, the collective intelligence thing, that could be aliens themselves. That could be the medium of communication. Like the nature of our consciousness and intelligence itself is the medium of communication. And like being able to ask the questions themselves, I've never thought of it that way. Like actually, yeah, asking the question whether aliens exist might be the very medium by which they communicate. It's like they send questions. So some of this like collective emergent behavior is the signal. Is the signal, yeah. So. That's interesting, yeah. Because maybe that's how we would communicate with, if you think about it, if we were way, way, way smarter, like a thousand years from now, we somehow survive, like how would we actually communicate? In a way that's like, if we broadcast the signal, and then it could somehow like percolate throughout the universe, like that signal having an impact on. Multiverse. Multiverse, of course, that would have a signal, an effect on the most possible, the highest number of possible civilizations. What would that signal be? It might not be like sending a few like stupid little hello world messages. It might be something more impactful. It's almost like impactful in a way where they don't have to have the capability to hear it. It like forces the message to have an impact. Right. My train of thought has never gone there, but I like it. And also somewhere in there, I think it's implied that something travels faster than the speed of light, which I'm also really hopeful for. Oh, you're hopeful. Are you excited by the possibility that there's intelligent life out there? Sort of, you work on the engineering side of things. It's this very kind of focused pursuit of moving things through space efficiently. But if you zoom out, one of the cool things that this enables us to do is find, get even intelligent life, just life on Mars or on Europa or something like that. Does that excite you? Does that scare you? Oh, it's very exciting. I mean, it's the whole reason I went into the field I'm in is to contribute to building the body of knowledge that we have as a species. So very exciting. Do you think there's life on Mars? Like no longer, well, already living, but currently living, but also no longer living, like that we might be able to find life, as some people suspect, basic microbial life. I'm not so sure about in our own solar system. And I do think it might be hard to untangle if we somehow contaminated other things as well. So I'm not sure about this close to home. That'd be really exciting. Yes. Do you think about the Drake equation much of like? That was what got me into all of this, yeah. Yeah, because one of the questions is how hard is it for life to start on a habitable planet? Like if you have a lot of the basic conditions, not exactly like Earth, but basic Earth like conditions, how hard is it for life to start? And if you find life on Mars or find life on Europa, that means it's way easier. That's a good thing to confirm that if you have a habitable planet, then there's going to be life. And that like immediately, that would be super exciting because that means there's like trillions of planets with basic life out there. Though of all the planets in our solar system, Earth is clearly the most habitable. So I would not be discouraged if we didn't find it on another planet in our solar system. True, and again, that life could look very different. It's habitable for Earth like life, but it could be totally different. I still think that trees are quite possibly more intelligent than humans, but their intelligence is carried out over a time scale that we're just not able to appreciate. Like they might be running the entirety of human civilization, and we're just like too dumb to realize that they're the smart ones. Maybe that's the alien message. It's in the trees. It's in the trees. Yeah, it's not in the monolith in the Utah desert. It's in the trees. Right, yeah. So let's go to space exploration. How do you think we would get humans to Mars? I think SpaceX and Elon Musk will be the ones that get the first human setting foot on Mars, and probably not that long from now from us having this conversation. Maybe we'll inflate his timeline a little bit, but I tend to believe the goals he sets. So I think that will happen relatively soon. As far as when and what it will take to get humans living there in a more permanent way, I have a glib answer, which is when we can invent a time machine to go back to the early Cold War, and instead of uniting around sending people to the moon, we pick Mars as the destination. So really, I say that because there's nothing truly scientifically or technologically impossible about doing that soon. It's more politically and financially, and those are the obstacles, I think, to that. Well, I wonder of when you colonize with more than, I say, five people on Mars, you have to start thinking about the kind of rules you have on Mars, and just speaking of the Cold War, who gets to own the land? You know, you start planting flags, and you start to make decisions. And like SpaceX says, it's probably a little bit trolly, but they have this nice paragraph in their contracts where it talks about that human governments on Earth or Earth governments have no jurisdiction on Mars. Like the rules, the Martians get to define their own rules. It sounds very much like the founding fathers for this country. That's the kind of language. It's interesting that that's in there, and it makes you think perhaps that needs to be leveraged. Like you have to be very clever about leveraging that to create a little bit of a Cold War feeling. It seems like we humans need a little bit of a competition. Do you think that's necessary to succeed and to get the necessary investment, or can the pure pursuit of science be enough? No, I think we're seeing right now the pure pursuit of science. I mean, that results in pretty tiny budgets for exploration. There has to be some disaster impending doom to get us onto another planet in a permanent way. I don't know, financially, I just don't know if the private sector can support that, but I don't wish that there is some catastrophe coming our way that spurs us to do that. Yeah, I'm unsure what the business model is for colonizing Mars. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like there is for, we'll talk about satellites. There's probably a lot of business models around satellites, but there's not enough short term business. I guess that's how business works. Like you should have a path to making money in like the next 10 years. Well, and maybe even more broadly, and looping back to something we said earlier, I don't know that getting humans off this planet and spreading like bacteria is what we're supposed to be doing in the first place. So maybe we can go, but should we? And I'm probably an unusual person for thinking that in my industry because humans want to explore, but I almost wonder, are we putting unnecessary obstacles? Like we're very finicky biological things in the way of some more robotic or more silicon based exploration. And yeah, do we need to colonize and spread? I'm not sure. What do you think is the role of AI in space? Do you, in your work, again, we'll talk about it, but do you see more and more of the space vehicles, spacecraft being run by artificial intelligence systems? More than just like the flight control, but like the management? Yeah, I don't have a lot of color to the dreams I have about way in the future in AI, but I do think that removing, it's hard for humans to even make a trip to Mars, much less go anywhere farther than that. And I think we'll have more, again, I'm probably unusual in having these thoughts, but perhaps be able to generate more knowledge and understand more if we stop trying to send humans and instead, I don't know if we're talking about AI in a truly artificial intelligence way or AI as we kind of use it today, but maybe sending a Petri dish or two of like stem cells and some robotic handlers instead, if we still need to send our DNA because we're really stuck on that, but if not, maybe not even that Petri dish. So I see, I think what I'm saying is, I see a much bigger role in the future of AI for space exploration. It's kind of sad to think that, I mean, I'm sure we'll eventually send a spacecraft with efficient propulsion, like some of the stuff you work on out that travels just really far with some robots on it and with some DNA in a Petri dish, and then human civilization destroys itself, and then there'll just be this floating spacecraft that eventually gets somewhere or not. That's a sad thought, like this lonely spacecraft just kind of traveling through space and humans are all dead. Well, it depends on what the goal is, right? Another way to look at it is we've preserved, it's like a little time capsule of knowledge, DNA, that will outlive us. Well, that's beautiful. Yeah. It's how I sleep at night. So you also mentioned that you wanted to be an astronaut. Yes. So even though you said you're unusual in thinking like, it's nice here on Earth, and then we might want to be sending robots up there, you wanted to be a human that goes out there. Would you like to one day travel to Mars? You know, if it becomes sort of more open to civilian travel and that kind of thing? Like are you, like vacation wise, like if we're talking vacations, would you like to vacation on Earth or vacation on Mars? I wish that I had a better answer, but no. I wanted to be an astronaut because I, first of all, I like working in labs and doing experiments. And I wanted to go to like the coolest lab, the ISS, and do some experiments there. That's being decommissioned, which is sad, but you know, there will be others, I'm sure. The ISS is being decommissioned? Yes, I think by 2025, it's not going to be in use anymore. But I think there are other, there are private companies that are going to be putting up stations and things. So it's primarily like a research lab, essentially. Yes. A research lab in space, that's a cool way to say it. It's like the coolest possible research lobby. That's where I wanted to go. And now though, my risk profile has changed a little bit. I have three little ones and I won't be in the first thousand people to go to Mars, let's put it that way. Yeah, Earth is kind of nice. We have our troubles, but overall, it's pretty nice. Again, it's the Netflix. Okay, let's talk rockets. How does a rocket engine work or any kind of engine that can get us to space or float around in space? The basic principle is conservation of momentum. So you throw stuff out the back of the engine and that pushes the rocket and the spacecraft in the other direction. So there are two main types of rocket propulsion. The one people are more familiar with is chemical because it's loud and there's fire. And that's what's used for launch and is more televised. So in those types of systems, you usually have a fuel on an oxidizer and they react and combust and release stored chemical energy. And that energy heats the resultant gas and that's funneled out the back through a nozzle, directed out the back and then that momentum exchange pushes the spacecraft forward. Is there an interesting difference in liquid and solid fuel in those contexts? They're both lumped in the same. So chemical just means that the release of energy from those bonds essentially. So a solid fuel works the same way. And the other main category is electric propulsion. So instead of chemical energy, you're using electrical energy, usually from batteries or solar panels. And in this case, the stuff you're pushing out the back would be charged particles. So instead of combustion and heat, you end up with charged particles and you force them out the back of the spacecraft using either an electrostatic field or electromagnetic. But it's the same momentum exchange and same idea stuff out the back and everything else goes forward. Cool, so those are the big two categories. What's the difference maybe in the challenges of each, in the challenges of each, the use cases of each and how they're used today, the physics of each and where they're used, all that kind of stuff. Anything interesting about the two categories that distinguishes them? Besides the chemical one being the big sexy flames. Yeah, fire. Fire, yeah. Chemical is very well understood in its simplest form, it's like a firework. So it's been around since 400 BC or something like that. So that even the big engines are quite well understood. I think one of the last gaps there is probably what exactly are the products of combustion? Our modeling abilities kind of fall apart there because it's hot and gases are moving and you end up kind of having to venture into lots of different interdisciplinary fields of science to try to solve that. And that's quite complex, but we have pretty good models for some of the more like emergent behaviors of that system anyways. But that's I think one of the last unsolved pieces. And really the kind of what people care about there is making it more fuel efficient. So the chemical stuff, you can get a lot of instantaneous thrusts, but it's not very fuel efficient. It's much more fuel efficient to go with the electric type of propulsion. So that's where people spend a lot of their time is trying to make that more efficient in terms of thrust per unit of fuel. And then there's always considerations like heating and cooling. It's very hot, which is good if it heats the gases, but bad if it melts the rocket and things like that. So there's always a lot of work on heating and cooling and the engine cycles and things like that. And then on electric propulsion, I find it like much more refreshingly poorly understood. Lots more mysteries. Yeah, I think so. One of the classes I took in college, we spent 90% of the class on chemical propulsion and then the last 10% on electric. And the professor said like, we only sort of understand how it works, but it works kind of. And it's like, that's interesting. Yeah, and even an ion engine, which is probably one of the most straightforward because it's just an electrostatic engine, but it has this really awesome combination of like quantum mechanics and material science and fluid dynamics and electrostatics. And it's just very intriguing to me. First of all, can you actually zoom out even more? Like, cause you mentioned ion propulsion engine is a subset of electric. So like maybe, is there a categories of electric engines and then we can zoom in on ion propulsion? Yes, so sure. There's the two most kind of conventional types that have been around since the sixties are ion engines and hall thrusters. And ion engines are a little bit simpler because they don't use a magnetic field for generating thrust. And then there are also some other types of plasma engines, but that don't fit into those two categories. So just kind of other plasma, like a VASMIR engine, which we could get into. And then those are probably the main three categories that would be fun to talk about. Oh, and then of course, the category of engine that I work on, which has a lot of similarities to an ion engine, but could be considered its own class called a colloid thruster. Colloid, cool. Okay, so what is an ion propulsion, I imagine? Okay, so in an ion engine, you have an ionization chamber and you inject the propellant into that chamber. And this is usually a neutral gas like xenon or argon. So you inject that into the chamber and you also inject a stream of really high energy electrons and everything's just moving around very randomly in there. And the whole goal is to have one of those electrons collide with one of those neutral atoms and turn it into an ion. So kick off a secondary electron and now you have... Plasma. Yes. Okay. And now you have a charged xenon or argon ion and more electrons and so on. And then some fraction of those ions will happen to make it to this downstream electric field that we set up between two grids with holes in them. And in terms of area, the same amount of those ions also runs into the walls and lose their charge and that's where some of the inefficiencies come in. But the very lucky few make it to the downstream and the very lucky few make it to those holes in that grid and there are two grids actually and you apply a voltage differential between them and that sets up an electric field. And a charged particle in an electric field creates a force. And so those ions are accelerated out the back of the engine and the reaction force is what pushes the spacecraft forward. If you're following along and tallying these charges, now we've just sent a positive beam of ions out the back of the spacecraft and for our purposes here, the spacecraft is neutral. So eventually those ions will come back and hit the spacecraft because it's a positive beam. So you also have to have an external cathode producer of electrons outside the engine that pumps electrons into that beam and neutralizes that. So now it's net neutral everywhere and it won't come back to the spacecraft. So that's an ion engine. What temperature are we talking about here? So in terms of like the chemical based engines, those are super hot. You mentioned plasma here. How hot does this thing get? I mean, is that an interesting thing to talk about in a sense that is that an interesting distinction or is the heat, I mean, it's all gonna be hot. No, so it's important especially for some of these smaller satellites people are into launching these days. So it's important because you have the plasma but also those high energy electrons are hot and if you have a lot of those that are going into the walls you do have to care about the temperature. So I'm having trouble remembering off the top of my head. I think they're at like a hundred electron volts in terms of the electron energy and then I'd have to remember how to convert that into Kelvin. Can you stick your hand in it? Not move the temperature. Not recommended, yeah. So what's a colloid engine? So the same rocket people that came up with these ideas for electric propulsion probably in the middle of last century also realized that there's one more place to get charged particles from if you're going to be using electric propulsion. So you can take a gas and you can ionize it but there are also some liquids particularly ionic liquids which is what we use that you also can use as a source of ions and if you have ions and you put them in a field you generate a force. So they recognize that but part of being able to leverage that technique is being able to kind of manipulate those liquids on a scale of nanometers or very few microns. So the diameter of a human hair or something like that and in the 50s there was no way to do that. So they wrote about it in some books and then it kind of died for a little bit and then with silicon mems, computer processors and when foundry started becoming more ubiquitous and my advisor started at MIT kind of put those ideas back together and was like, hey actually there's now a way to build this and bring this other technique to life. And so the way that you actually get the ions out of those liquids is you put the liquid in again a strong electric field and the electric field stresses the liquid and you keep increasing the field and eventually the liquid will assume a conical shape. It's when the electric field pressure that's pulling on it exactly balances the liquid's own restoring force which is its surface tension. So you have this balance and the liquid assumes a cone when it's perfectly balanced like that and at the tip of a cone the radius of curvature goes to zero right at the tip and the electric field right at the tip of a sharp object would go to infinity because it goes as one over the radius and one over the radius squared and instead of the electric field going to infinity and maybe like generating a wormhole or something, a jet of ions instead starts issuing from the tip of that liquid. So the field becomes strong enough there that you can pull ions out of the liquid. What is the liquid? We're talking about, there's a bunch of different ones. You can do it with different types of liquids. It depends on how easily you can free ions from their neighbors and if it has enough surface tension so that you can build up a high enough electric field but what we use are called ionic liquids and they're really just positive. They're very similar to salts but they happen to be liquid over a really wide range of temperatures. This sounds like really cool. Okay, so how big is the cone we're talking about? What's the size of this cone that generates the ions? So if you have a cone that's emitting pure ions, I can't remember if it's the radius or diameter but that emission is happening from, of that cone is something like 20 nanometers. Oh, I was imagining something slightly bigger but so like this is tiny, tiny. Hence the only being able to do it recently. Yeah, that's right. So this is all controlled by a computer, I guess. Like, or like, how do you create a cone that generates ions at a scale of nanometers exactly? So the kind of main trick to making this work is that physically we manufacture hundreds or thousands of sharp structures and then supply the liquid to the tips. So that does a few things. It makes sure that we know where the ion beams are forming. So we can put holes in the grid above them to let them actually leave instead of hitting, right? Cool. But it also reduces the actual field we have, the voltage we have to apply to create that field because the field will be much stronger if we can already give the liquid a tip to form on. And those tips we form have radii of curvature on the order of probably like single microns. So we are working at a little bit larger scale but once we create that support and the electric field can be focused at that tip, then the tiny little cone can form on top of that. So wait, so there's something in them, there's already like a hard material that like gives you the base for the cone and then you're pouring like liquid over it, whatever the heck. From the bottom, yeah. It's porous, so we actually supply it from the back of the chip and then it wicks. And then liquid forms on top on that structure. And then you somehow make it like super sharp, the liquid, so the ions can leave. And then we've applied that field to get those ions and that same field then accelerates them. That's awesome. And there's like a bunch of these? Yeah, I should have brought something. So we... You could just pretend that you have some nanometer cones on a table here. So actually, you know, kind of about this scale, we build, we call them thruster chips and it's just a convenient form factor and it's a square centimeter. And on each square centimeter today, we have about 500 of the actual physical, we call them emitters, those physical cones. And we're working on increasing that by a factor of four in the coming months. In size or in the density? In number, in the density, the number of emitters within the same square centimeter chip. So that thing, cause I think I've seen pictures of you with like a tiny thing in your hand. That must be the... Okay, so that's an engine. So that is kind of the ionization chamber and thrust producing part of it. What's not shown, you know, in that picture is the propellant tank. So we can keep supplying more and more of the liquid to those emission sites. And then we also provide a power electronic system that talks to the spacecraft and turns our device on and off. So that's the colloid engine. That's the core of the colloid engine. It's, the way I've been talking about it, it's more of ion electrospray colloid tends to mean like liquid droplets coming off of the jet. But if you make smaller and smaller cones, you get pure ions. So we're kind of like a subset of colloid, yes. What aspects of this, you said that it's been full of mysteries from the physics perspective. What aspects of this are understood and what are still full of mystery? Yeah, recently we've been understanding the kind of instabilities and stable regimes of, you know, how much liquid do you supply and what field do you apply? And why is it flickering on and off? Or why does it have these weird behaviors? So that's, in the past just couple of years, that's become much more understood. I think the two areas that come to mind as far as not as well understood are the boundary between, you know, you have, we actually use kind of big molecular ions. And if you're looking at the molecular scale, you have, you know, some ions that you've extracted and they're in this electric field. One ion, you know, it's a big molecule, it's getting energy from the electric field. And some of that energy is going into the bonds and making it vibrate and doing weird things to it. Sometimes it breaks them apart. And then zooming out to the whole beam, the beam has some behaviors as this beam of ions. And there's a big gap between what are those, how do you connect those? And how do we understand that better so that we can understand the beam performance of the engine? Is that a theory question or is it an engineering question? Theory, definitely. We're, Axion is a startup and we're more in the business of building and testing and observing and characterizing. And we're not really diving much into that theory right now. Okay, zooming out a little bit on the physics, apologize for the way too big of a question, but to you from either, you mentioned Axion is, you know, more of sort of an engineering endeavor, right? But from a perspective of physics in general, science in general, or the side of engineering, what do you think is the most, to you, like beautiful and captivating and inspiring idea in this space? In this space, and then I'm gonna zoom out a little bit more, but in this space, I keep butting up against material science questions. So I, over the past 10 years, I feel like every problem or interesting thing I want to work on, if you dig deep enough, you end up in material science land, which I find kind of exciting and it makes me want to dig in more there. And I was just, you know, even for our technology, when we have to move the propellant from the tank to the tip of the emitters, we rely a lot on capillary action and you're getting into wetting and surface energies. At a scale of like nano scale. Yeah, I mean, it's, if you look further, it's quantum too, but it all is, you know, a capillary action at the quantum level. Yeah, so I would, it all comes back to me to, you know, material science, there's so much we don't understand at these sizes and I find that inspiring and exciting. And then more broadly, you know, I remember when I learned that the same equation that describes flow over an airfoil is used to price options, the Black Scholes equation, and it's, you know, just a partial differential equation, but that kind of connectedness of the universe, you know, I don't want to use options pricing and the universe in the same, but you know what I mean, this connectedness I find really magical. Yeah, the patterns that mathematics reveals seems to echo in a bunch of different places. Yes. Yeah, there's just weirdness. It's like, it really makes you think, I think you're definitely living in a simulation, like whoever programmed it. I like that that's your conclusion. Is using like shortcuts to program it, like they didn't, they're just copying and pasting some codes for the different parts. Yeah, think of something new or just paste from over there. They won't notice. My conclusion from that was I'm gonna go interview for a finance job, so I had like a little detour. That's the backup option. So in terms of using call it engines, what's an interesting difference between a propulsion of a rocket from earth when you're standing on the ground to orbit and then the kind of propulsion necessary for once you get out to orbit or to like deep space to move around. Yes, the reason you can't use an engine like mine to get off the ground is, the thrust it generates is instantaneous thrust is very small, but if you have the time and can accumulate that acceleration, you can still reach speeds that are very interesting for exploration and even for missions with humans on them. An interesting direction I think we need to go as humans exploring space is the power supplies for electric propulsion are limiting us in that solar panels are really inefficient and bulky and batteries. I don't know when anybody's ever gonna improve battery technology. I know a lot of people that work on that. And nuclear power, we could have a lot more powerful electric propulsion system. So they would be extremely fuel efficient, but more instantaneous thrust to do more interesting missions if we could start launching more nuclear systems. So like something that's powered, nuclear powered, that's the right way to say it. Yeah. But is in a small enough container that could be launched? Yeah, so I mean, as a world we do launch spacecraft with nuclear power systems on board, but size is one consideration. It hasn't been a big focus. So the reactors and the heaters and everything are bulky. And so they're really only suitable for some of the much bigger interplanetary stuff. So that's one issue, but then it's a whole like rat's nest of political stuff as well. I heard, I think Elon described or somebody, I think it was Elon that described the EV to all like electrical, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. So basically saying rockets, obviously Elon is interested in electric vehicles, right? But he said that rockets can't, in the near term, it doesn't make sense for them to be electrical. What, do you see a world with the rockets that we use to get into orbit are also electric based? It's possible, you can produce the thrust levels you need, but you need this, a much bigger power supply. And I think that would be nuclear. And the only way people have been able to launch them at all is that they're in a 100 times redundancy safe mode while they're being launched and they're not turned on until they're farther off. So if you were to actually try to use it on launch, I think a lot of people would still have an issue with that, but someday. It's an interesting concept, nuclear. It seems like people, like everybody that works on nuclear power has shown how safe it is as a source of energy. And yet we are, seem to be, I mean, based on the history, based on the excellent HBO series, I'm Russian with a Chernobyl. It seems like we have our risk estimation about this particular power source is drastically inaccurate, but that's a fascinating idea that we would use nuclear as a source for our vehicles and not just in outer space. That's cool. I'm gonna have to look into that. That's super interesting. Well, just last year, Trump eased up a little bit on the regulations and NASA and hopefully others are starting to pick up on the development. So now is a good time to look into it because there's actually some movement. Is that a hope for you to explore different energy sources that the entirety of the vehicle uses something like the entirety of the propulsion systems for all aspects of the vehicle's life travel is the same or electric? Is it possible for it to be the same? Like the colloid engine being used for everything? You could, and you would have to do it in the same way we do different stages of rockets now where once you've used up an engine or a stage, you let it go because there's really no point in holding onto it. So I wouldn't necessarily want to use the same engine for the whole thing, but the same technology I think would be interesting. Okay, so it's possible. All right, but in terms of. Yeah, it comes down to the power source. The power source, that's really interesting. But for the current power sources and its current use cases, what's the use case for electric, like the colloid engine? Can you talk about where they're used today? Sure, so chemical engines are still used quite a bit once you're in orbit, but that's also where you might choose instead to use an electric system and what people do with them. And this includes the ion engines and hall thrusters and our engine is basically any maneuvering you need to do once you're dropped off. Even if your only goal was to just stay in your orbit and not move for the life of your mission, you need propulsion to accomplish that because the Earth's gravity field changes as you go around in orbit and pulls you out of your little box. There are other perturbations that can throw you off a bit. And then most people want to do things a little bit more interesting like maneuver to avoid being hit by space debris or perhaps lower their orbit to take a higher resolution image of something and then return. At the end of your mission, you're supposed to responsibly get rid of your satellite, whether that's burning it up, but if you're in geo, you want to push it higher into graveyard orbit. What's geo and what's graveyard? So low Earth orbit and then geosynchronous orbit or geostationary orbit. And there's a graveyard? Yeah, so those satellites are at like 40,000 kilometers. So if they were to try to push their satellites back down to burn up in the atmosphere, they would need even more propulsion than they've had for the whole lifetime of their mission. So instead they push them higher where it'll take a million years for it to naturally deorbit. So we're also cluttering that higher bit up as well, but it's not as pressing as Leo, which is low Earth orbit where more of these commercial missions are going now. Well, so how hard is the collision avoidance problem there? You said some debris and stuff. So like how much propulsion is needed? Like how much is the life of a satellite is just like a crap trying to avoid like little things down there? I think one of the recent rules of thumb I heard was per year some of these small satellites are doing like three collision avoidance maneuvers. So that's not, yeah, but it's not zero. And it takes a lot of planning and people on the ground and none of that really, I don't think right now is autonomous. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, and then we have a lot of folks taking advantage of Moore's law and cheaper spacecraft. So they're launching them up without the ability to maneuver themselves. And they're like, well, I don't know, just don't hit me. And three times a year that could become affordable if it gets hit, maybe it won't be damaged kind of thing, that kind of logic. Affordable in that instead of launching one satellite, they'll launch 20 small ones. Yeah, so if one gets taken out, that's okay. But the problem is that one good sized satellite getting hit, that's like a ballistic event that turns into 10,000 pieces of debris that then are the things that go and hit the other satellites. Yeah. So do you see a world where, like in your sense, in your own work and just in the space industry in general, do you see the people moving towards bigger satellites or smaller satellites? Is there going to be a mix? Like what's, and what do we talk, what does it mean for a satellite to be big and small? What size are we talking about? So big, the space industry prior to, I don't know, 1990, I guess the bulk of, the majority of satellites were the size of a school bus and cost a couple billion dollars. And now our first launches were on satellites the size of shoe boxes that were built by high school students. So that's a very different, to give you the two ends of the spectrum. So big satellites will, I think they're here to stay, at least as far as I can see into the future for things like broadcasting. You want to be able to broadcast to as many people as possible. You also can't just go to small satellites and say Moore's law for things like optics. So if you have an aperture on your satellite, that just, that doesn't follow Moore's law. That's different. So it's always going to be the size that it will be, unless there's some new physics that comes out that I'm not aware of. But if you need a resolution and you're at an altitude, that kind of sets your, the size of your telescope. But because of Moore's law, we are able to do a lot more with smaller packages. And with that comes more affordability and opening up access to space to more and more people. Well, what's the smallest satellite you've seen go up there? Like what are the smallest kind of, you said shoe boxes. Yeah, so I think the smallest common form factor can fit a softball inside. So that's 10 centimeters on each side. But then there are some companies working on fractions of that even. And they're doing things like IOT type application. So it's very low bandwidth type things, but they're finding some niches for those. Do you mean like there's a business, there's a thing to do with them? Yes, either. What do you do with a small satellite like that? You can track a ship going across the ocean. Like if you need to, if you're just pinging something, you can handle that amount of data and those latencies and so on. You have to have propulsion on that. You have to have a little engine. No, those are just letting fall out of the sky. Okay, so what kind of satellite would you equip a colloid engine on? Anything that's bigger than probably about 20 kilograms, anything that needs to stay up for more than a year or anything somebody spent more than like 100K to build are kind of the ways I would think about it. That's a lot of use cases. What's a small sat? Like what category? Small sat is actually very big. I think it's like 700 kilograms, or I keep hitting my microphone, maybe 1,000 kilograms down to 200 kilograms. People have their own kind of definitions of how they break them up, but small sat is still quite large. And then it's kind of also applied as a blanket term for anything that's not a school bus size satellite. So we need to get our jargon straight in the industry. So do you see a possible future where, you know, there's a few thousand satellites up there now, a couple of thousand of them functioning. Do you see a future where there's like millions of satellites up in orbit? Or forget millions, tens of thousands, which just seems like where the natural trajectory of the way things are going now is going. Tens of thousands, yes. The two buckets of applications, one is imaging and the other is communication. So imaging, I think that will plateau because one satellite or one constellation can take an image or a video and sell it to, you know, infinity customers. But if you're providing communications like broadband internet or satellite cell or something like that, satellite phone, you know, you're limited by your transponders and so on. So to serve more people, you actually need more satellites and perhaps at the rate, you know, our data consumption and things are going these days. Yeah, I can see tens of thousands of satellites. Can I ask you a ridiculous question? Yes. So I've recently watched this documentary on Netflix about flat earthers, you know, the people that believe in a flat earth. As somebody who develops propulsion systems for satellites and for spacecraft, what's, do you use the most convincing evidence that the earth is round? Probably some of the photos taken from the moon. Photos from the moon? Okay, so it's not from the satellite space. Yeah, I think seeing that perspective, maybe I'm just, I'm answering too personally because I really love those photos. Because they're beautiful, yeah. I really like the ones that show the moon and the lunar lander and they're taken a little bit farther back. So you see earth and first you're like, wow, that's tiny and we're insignificant and that's kind of sad. But then you see this really cool thing that we landed on another planetary body and you're like, oh, okay. Can you actually see earth? I don't know if I remember this. Yeah, I'll send you that picture. Because I love the pictures or videos of just earth from orbit and so on. Right, yeah. Just like those, that's really beautiful. That's like a perspective shifter. That's the pale blue dot, right? It probably appears tiny. Yeah, and just that juxtaposition of the insignificance, but we built this, really cool thing. And I just love that, yeah. Oh, that'd be cool. I can't, I personally love the idea of humans stepping on Mars. I'm such a sucker for the romantic notion of that and being able to take pictures from Mars next. So you would go? I, yeah, I would be, what did you say? You said you wouldn't be the first one. Not in the first 1,000. 1,000, which it's funny because to me, that's brave to be in the first million. I think when the Declaration of Independence was signed in the United States, that was like two million people. So I would like to show up when they're signing those documents. Okay. So maybe the two million. Oh, that's an interesting way to think about it. Because like then we're like participating in citizenry and defining the direction. So it's not the technical risk. You just don't wanna show up somewhere that's like America before. Yeah, because I, from a psychological perspective, it's just gonna be a stressful mess as people have studied, right? It's like, it's people, most likely the process of colonization like looks like basically a prison. Like you're in a very tight and closed space with people. And it's just a really stressful environment. How do you select the kind of people that will go and then there'll be drama. There's always drama. And I just wanna show up when there's some rules. But I mean, you know, it depends. So I'm not worried about the health and the technical difficulties. I'm more worried about the psychological difficulties. And also just not being able to tweet. Like what are you gonna, how are you talking? There's no Netflix. So yeah, maybe not in the first million, but the first 100,000. It's exciting to define the direction of a new, like how often do we not just have a revolution to redefine our government, as smaller countries are still doing to this day, but literally start over from scratch. There's just our financial system. It could be like based on cryptocurrency, you could think about like how democracy, we have now the technology that can enable pure democracy, for example, if we choose to do that, as opposed to representative democracy, all those kinds of things. So we talked about two different forms of propulsion, which are super exciting. So the chemical based, that's doing pretty well. And then the electric based is, are there types of propulsion that might sound like science fiction right now, but are actually within the reach of science in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years that you kind of think about, or maybe even within the space of even just like, like even ION engines, is there like breakthroughs that might 10 X the thing, like really improve it? So, you know, the real game changer would be propellantless propulsion. And so every couple of years you see a new, now a startup or a researcher comes up with some contraption for producing thrust that didn't require, you know, we've been talking about conservation of momentum, mass times velocity out the back, mass times velocity forward. Yes, exactly. And you have to, you know, carry that up with you or find it on an asteroid or harvest it from somewhere if you didn't bring it with you. So not having to do that would be, you know, one of the ultimate game changers. And I, you know, unless there are new types of physics, I don't know how we do it, but it comes up often, so it's something I do think about. And, you know, the one, I think it's called the Casimir effect. If you can, if you have two plates and the space between them is on the order of these, like the wavelength of these ephemeral vacuum particles that pop into and out of existence or something. I may be confusing multiple types of propellantless forces, but that could be real and could be something that we use eventually. What would be the power source? Yeah, the most recent engine like this that was just debunked this year, I think, in March or something was called the M drive. And supposedly you used a power source, so, you know, batteries or solar panels to generate microwaves into this resonant cavity. And people claimed it produced thrust. So they went straight from this really loose concept to building a device and testing it. And they said, we've measured thrust and sure on their thrust balance, they saw thrust and different researchers built it and tested it and got the same measurements. And so it was looking actually pretty good. No one could explain how it worked, but what they said was that this inside the cavity, the microwaves themselves didn't change, but the speed of light changed inside the cavity. So relative to that, you know, their momentum was conserved. And I don't, you know, whatever. But finally someone, I think at NASA built the device, tested it, got the same thrust, then unhooked it, flipped it backwards and turned it on, but got the same thrust in the same direction again. And so they're like, this is just an interaction with the test setup or, you know, some of the chamber or something like that. So forwarded again, but, you know, it would be so wonderful for everybody if we could figure out how to do it, but I don't know. That's an interesting twist on it because that's more about efficient travel, long distance travel, right? That's not necessarily about speed. That's more about enabling like, let's hook that up to the nuclear power supply. There you go. Okay. But still in terms of speed, in terms of trying to, so there's recently, already I think been debunked or close to being debunked, but the signal, a weird signal from our nearby friends, nearby exoplanets from Proxima Centauri, a signal that's 4.2 light years away. So, you know, the thought is it'd be kind of cool if there's life out there, alien life, but it'd be really cool if it could fly out there and check. And so what kind of propulsion, and do you think about what kind of propulsion will allow us to travel close to the speed of light or, you know, half the speed of light, all those kinds of things that would allow us to get to Proxima Centauri and have reasonable, in a lifetime? You know, there's the project Breakthrough Starshot. Yeah. That's looking at sending those tiny little chip sets. They're like accelerating really fast. Yeah, using a laser, so launching them and then while they're still relatively close to the earth, you know, blasting them with some, I forget what, even what power level you needed to accelerate them fast enough to get there in 20 years. Super crazy sounding, but a lot of people say that's a legitimate, like it's crazy sounding, but it can actually pull it off. Yeah, I love that project because there are a lot of different aspects. You know, there's the laser, there's how do you then get enough power when you're there to send a signal back. No part of that project is possible right now, but I think it's really exciting. But do you see like human, like a spacecraft with a human on it, so it's like a heavy one, being like us inventing new propulsion systems entirely. Like, do you ever see that on the radar of propulsion systems like that or are they completely out there in the impossible? Well, we're going to quickly leave the realm of what I can describe with any credibility, but I think because of special relativity, if we try to accelerate some mass close to the speed of light, it becomes infinitely heavy and then we just don't, we'd have to like harness a lot of suns to do that. Or, you know, it's just that math doesn't quite work out, but, you know, in my child's, my childlike heart, I believe that, you know, we're missing something, whether it's, you know, dark matter or other dimensions. And if you can just have some anti matter and a black hole and then ride that around and somehow, you know, turn that into some. Mess with gravity somehow. Yeah, I feel like we're missing lots of things in this puzzle and that, you know. I want to heart that puzzle. Yeah, right. I can speak with confidence as a descendant of apes that we don't know what the hell we're doing. Yeah. So there's, we're like really confident, like physicists are really confident that we've like got most of the picture down, but it feels like, oh boy, it feels like that we might not even be getting started on some of the essential things that would allow us to engineer systems that would allow us to travel to space much, much faster. Yeah, and there's even things that are much more commonplace that we can't explain, but we've started to take for granted, like quantum tunneling, you know, just things like, oh, the electron was here with this energy and now it's here with this energy and it's just tunneling. But so, you know, we're missing a lot of the picture. So yeah, I don't know, to, you know, use your same question from earlier, I don't know if you and I will see it, but yeah, someday. You're the cofounder of, just like we've been talking about, Axion Systems. It's a, would you say a space propulsion company? Yes. Broadly speaking. So how do you, big question, how do you build a rocket company from like a propulsion company from one person, from two people to 10 people plus, and actually, you know, take it to a successful product? Yeah, well, I think the early stage is quite, I'm not supposed to use the word easy when you work in rocket science, but straightforward when you're working on something, you know, sexy, like an ion engine, it's more straightforward to raise money and get people to come work for you because the vision's really exciting. And actually that's something I would say is very important throughout, is a really exciting vision because when everything, you know, goes to crap, you need that to get people getting themselves out of bed in the morning and thinking of the higher purpose there. And, you know, another thing along the way that I think is key in building any company is the right early employees that also have their own networks and can bring in a lot of people that, you know, really make the whole greater than just the sum of the early team. How do you build that? Like, how do you find people? It's like asking, like, how do you make friends? But is there, is it luck? Is there a system? Like how, in terms of the people you've connected with, the people you built the company with, is there some thread, some commonality, some pattern that you find to be, to hold for what makes a great team? I think, you know, personally, a thread for me has been my network and being able to draw on that a lot, but also giving back to it as much as possible in like an unsolicited sort of way, like making connections between people that, you know, maybe didn't ask, but that I think could be really fruitful. And even, you know, weirder than that is just really getting, you know, having weird, uncomfortable conversations with people like at a conference and getting over the small talk quickly and getting to know them quickly and having a relationship that stands out and then being able to call on them later because of that. And I think that's been because I'm introverted and I, you know, want to poke my eyes out instead of go and do small talk. And so I huddle in a corner with one person and, you know, we talk about aliens or things like that. And so, you know, that's all to say that, you know, having a strong network, I think is really important, but a genuine one. And let's see, other ways to build a rocket company, kind of making sure you're paying attention to the sweeping trends of the industry so everybody just cares about cost and being able to get out ahead of that and even more than we ever thought we'd need to as far as what we needed to price our systems at. You know, people for, since the start of the US space industry, they've been paying 20, 25 million in adjusted dollars for an ion engine. And seeing that now people are going to want to pay 10K for an ion engine and just staying out ahead of that and those kinds of things. So, you know, being out in the industry and talking to as many people as possible. So there's a drive. I mean, I suppose SpaceX really pushed that. Frustrating for me. So SpaceX really pushed this, the application of, I guess, capitalism of driving the price down, of basically forcing people to ask the question, can this be done cheaper? This can lead to like big problems, I would say, in the following sense. I see this in the car industry, for example, that people have, it's such a small margin for profit. Like they've driven the cost of everything down so much that there's literally no room for innovation for taking risks. So like cars, which is funny because not until Tesla, really, which is one of the, in a long, long time, one of the first successful new car companies that's constantly innovating, every other car company is really pouring in terms of their technological innovation. They innovate on design and style and so on, that people fall in love with the look and so on, but it's not really innovation. In terms of the technology in it, it's really boringly the same thing, and they're really afraid of taking risks. And that's a big problem for rocket space, too, is like if you're cutting out costs, you can't afford to innovate, to try out new things, and that's definitely true with ion engines, right? So how do you compete in this space? Do you, by the way, see SpaceX as a competitor? And what do you say in general about the competition in this space? Is it really difficult as a business to compete here? No, I don't see SpaceX as a competitor, and I see them as one day, not too long from now, a customer, hopefully. I mean, to compete against that, I think you just have to do things in an unconventional way. So bringing silicon MEMS manufacturing to propulsion, NASA doesn't make ion engines using a batch mass producible technique. They have one guy that's been making their ion engines for 20 years bespoke pieces of jewelry. So bringing things to what you're trying to innovate to make them, in our case, more cost effective was really key. I like the idea of somebody putting out ion engines on like Etsy. Yeah, my advisor at MIT would, the thruster chip I was holding up, he would wear one as a lapel pin. But in general, just on the topic of SpaceX, 2020 has seen some difficult things for human civilization. And it's been a lot of, first of all, it's an election year, there's been a lot of drama and division about that. There's been riots of all different reasons, racial division, there's been obviously a virus that's testing the very fabric of our society. But there's been really, for me at least, super positive things, inspiring things, which is SpaceX and NASA doing the first commercial human flight, launching humans to space and did it twice successfully. What is that, did you get to watch that launch? Did you, what does it make you feel? Do you think this is first days for a new era of space exploration? Yeah, I did watch it. We played it outside on a big screen at our place. And I was a little, they kept saying Bob and Doug, Bob and Doug, and astronauts usually are treated with a little bit more fanfare. So it felt very casual, but maybe that was a good, a good thing, like this is the era of commercial crewed missions. It was a little bit more, what is it? What's his name? Chris Hadfield, like playing guitar. Yeah. It's more, it's a different flavor to it of. Yeah, exactly. More like fun, playful, celebrity type. Yes, exactly. Astronaut versus the aura of the magical sort of heroic element of the single human representing us in space. Yes, I think that's all for the better though. It's so cool that it's such a commonplace thing now that we send. I can't believe that sometimes I'll have to, you don't even realize that astronauts are coming and going all the time, splashing back down. And it's just so common now, but that's quite magical, I think. So yes, we did watch that. I love, love, love that we finally have that capability again to send people to the space station. And it's just really exciting to see the private sector stepping up to fill in where the government has pulled back in the US. And I think pulled back way too soon as far as exploration and science goes. Probably pulled back at the right time for commercial things and getting that started. But I'm really happy that it's even possible to do that with private money and companies. Do you like the kind of the model of competition of NASA funding? I guess that's how it works, is like they're providing quite a bit of money from the government and then private companies compete to be the delivery vehicles for whichever the government missions, like NASA missions. Yes, I think for this type of mission is a little bit kind of straddles commercial and science. So I think it's good, but I do in general feel like we've pulled back too much on NASA's role in the science and exploration part. And I think our pace is too slow there, for my liking, I suppose. What do you mean? Okay, so did you have, I mean, on the cost thing, do you feel like NASA was a little too bureaucratic in a sense, like too slow, too heavy cost wise in their effort, like when they were running things purely without any commercial involvement? So I suppose it's more that I just want the government to fund. I see, yeah. And maybe NASA's not the best organization to do it rapidly. But I think that, again, depending on the goals, we're just kind of at the very starting point of space exploration and science and understanding. So we should be spending more money there and not less. And other countries are starting to spend more and more, and I think we'll fall behind because of that. So you have quite a bit of experience, first of all, starting a company yourself, but also I saw, maybe you can correct me, but you have quite a bit of knowledge of just in general the startup experience of building companies that you've interacted with people. Is there advice that you can give to somebody, to a founder or cofounder who wants to launch and grow a new company and do something big and impactful in this world? Yes, I would say, like I mentioned earlier, but make sure the vision is something that will get you out of bed in the morning and that you can rally other people around you to achieve. Because I see a lot of folks that sort of cared about something or saw a window of opportunity to do something, and startups are hard, and more often than not, just being opportunistic isn't going to be enough to make it through all the really crappy things that are going to happen. So the vision just helps you psychologically to carry through the hardships, for you and the team. Yeah, you and the team, yeah, exactly. To kind of younger people interested in getting into entrepreneurship, I would say stay as close to first principles and fundamentals as you can for as long as you can, because really understanding the problems, if it's something scientific or hardware related, or even if it's not, but having a deep understanding of the problem and the customers and what people care about and how to move something forward is more important than taking all of the entrepreneurship classes in undergrad. So being able to think deeply, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, have you been surprised about how much pivoting is involved, basically rethinking what you thought initially would be the right direction to go? Or is there, if you think deeply enough, that you can stick in the same direction for long enough? So our guiding star hasn't changed at all, so that's been pretty consistent, but within that, we flip flop on so many things all the time, and to give you one example, it's do you stop and build a first product that's well suited to maybe a smaller, less exciting segment of the market, or do you stay head down and focus on the big swing and trying to hit it out of the park right away? And we've flip flopped between that, and there's not a blanket answer, and there are a lot of factors, but that's a hard one. And I think one other piece for the aspiring founder, spending a lot of time and effort on the culture and people piece is so important and is always an afterthought and something that I haven't really seen the founders or executives or executives at companies purposefully carve out time and acknowledge that, yes, this is going to take a lot of my time and resources, but you see them after the fact trying to repair the bro culture or whatever else is broken at the company. And I think that it's starting to change, but just to be aware of it from the beginning is important. Right, I guess it should be part of the vision of what kind of place you want to create, or what kind of human beings. Yeah, exactly, you can't wait five, 10 years and then just slap an HR person onto trying to fix it. It has to be thoughtful from the beginning. Yeah, don't get me started on HR people. Don't leave HR to HR people, but I'll just leave it at that. You didn't say that, I said it, okay. Yeah, HR's actual HR is really important, is so important, culture is so important. And then I also was surprised, I thought you could say, here will be our culture and our values, and that it was kind of distinct from who I and my co founder were as people, and I was like, no, that's not how that works. We just kind of ooze out our behaviors and then the company grows around that. So you have to do a lot of introspection and self work to not end up with a shitty culture. It's kind of a, it's a relationship, but it's supposed to be a relationship with two people, it's a relationship with many people. Yeah. And you communicate so much indirectly by who you are. You have to be, you have to live it, yeah. As somebody, I think about this a lot because generally I'm full of love and all those kinds of things, but I also get really passionate and when I see somebody in the context of work, especially, when I see somebody who I know can do a much better job and they don't do a great job, I can lose my shit in a way that's like Steve Jobsian. And you have to think about exactly the right way to lose your shit if you're going to, or if at all. You have to really think through that because it sends a big signal. You know, sometimes it's okay, like if you do it deliberately, like if you're going to do it deliberately, if you're going to say like, I'm going to be the kind of person that allows this and pays the cost of it, but you can't just think it's not gonna have a cost. Yes, this was like the first thing I worked on with my leadership coach was how not to just snap at people when they were being an idiot. And first I got really good at apologizing. That was the first step because it was going to take longer to fix the behavior. And then she, I'm actually a lot better at it now and it started with things. She's like, every time you walk through a doorway, think, you know, calm and take breaths before responding. And there were all sorts of these little things we did and it was mostly just changing the habit. Yeah, oh boy, it's a long road. Okay, so people love it and we talk about books. Is there books, maybe three or so technical fiction, philosophical that had an impact on your life and you might recommend and for each, is there an idea or so that you take away from it? Yes, so I've been a voracious reader all my life and I'm always reading like three or four or five books at a time and now I use Audible a lot too and you know, podcasts and things like that. So I think the first one that stands out to me is 10, it's a novel, Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. And I read it when I was much younger but I went back and read it recently and it's not that good. So I'm not sure why it has like such an important place in my literary history but I love Fitzgerald as an author because he's very like flowery prose that I can just picture what he's saying but he does it in such a creative way. I remember that one in particular because I read a ton as a kid too but it kind of set me, it was like the beginning of my adult reading life and getting into classics and I kind of, I do feel like they seem intimidating maybe and then I realized that they're all just like love stories. So. Yeah, isn't everything a love story? Yeah, it's really. At the bottom. Even, you know, I don't know. I was surprised that even like a lot of the Russian authors, you know, they're all just love stories. We're humans are pretty simple. There's not much to worry, there's not much to work with. So I think maybe that was it. It made like that whole world less intimidating to me and cemented my love for reading. People should have just approached the classics like there's probably a love story in here. Chick flicks, yeah. So somehow it boils down to a chick flick. So just relax and enjoy the ride. And then. So what else? Changing gears quite a bit. The Beginning of Infinity, do you know it? By David Deutsch. So he's a physicist at Cambridge or Oxford. And so I was introduced like more formally to a lot of the ideas, like a lot of the things we've talked about, he has a lot more like formalism and physics rigor around. And so I got introduced to, you know, more like jargon of how to think about some of these ideas, you know, like memes and, you know, DNA as ultimate meme, the concept of infinity and objective beauty. But he has a really strong grounding in physics. And then. There's a rigorous way of talking about these like big. Yeah. So that was very mind opening to me to read that. But it also, I think it's probably part of why I ended up marrying my husband is related to that book. And then I've had some other really great connections with people because I had read it and so had they. I like how you turned that, even that book into a love story. I did, oh no. Somehow. No, it's good, it's good. Your robot has a heart. Exactly. And okay, the third series is, it's just, it's Harry Potter. Of course, which somehow connects to, I haven't read Harry Potter. I'm really sorry. Oh no. Forgive me, forgive me. But I've read Tolkien, but just Harry Potter, just haven't gotten to it. But your company name is somehow I think connected to Harry Potter, right? Yes. I think I heard this. My, I always feel like I have to justify my fandom. The first three books came out when I was 10. So I went along this journey with Harry, age wise. And I read them all like nine or 10 times, all seven books. And I think anything that just keeps you reading is what's important. And I have lulls where I don't feel like reading anything. So I'll reread a Harry Potter or a trashy detective novel or something, and I don't really care. And that's why I mentioned Harry Potter because whatever just keeps me reading, I think is important. And it was a big part of my life growing up. And then yes, Axion, the official story of the naming of the company is that Axion is like a concatenation of accelerate and ion. But it actually came from accio, the summoning charm. And then we just added an N and it was perfect. What's the summoning charm? It's one of the spells in Harry Potter. Yeah, probably most notably Harry uses it to summon his broomstick out of his dorm room when he's battling a dragon somewhere else. So he says the spell and the broomstick comes to him. So summoning in that way. Okay, there we go. This is brilliant. So the big thing is that it's something that you've carry with, it's like your safe place you return to something like the Harry Potter. That, I reread them still, whatever keeps me reading I think is the most important thing. Okay, I got it. So I'm actually the same way in terms of the habit of it. It's important to just keep reading. But I have found myself struggling a little bit too because I listen to a lot of audio books now. I've struggled to then switch back to reading seriously. It's just I read so many papers, I read so many other things. It feels like if I'm gonna sit down and have the time to actually focus on the reading I should be reading like blog posts or papers or more condensed kind of things. But there's a huge value to just reading long form still. Yeah, and my husband was never that into fiction but then someone told him or he heard, you learn a lot of empathy through reading fiction. So you could think of it that way. Well, yeah, that's kind of what, yeah, yeah. And it's also fiction is a nice, unlike not less so with nonfiction is a chance to travel. I see it as kind of traveling. As you go to this other world and it's nice because it's like much more efficient. You don't have to get on a plane, and you get to meet all kinds of new people. It's like people say they love traveling and I say I love traveling too. I just, yeah, read fiction. I told my three year old that that was why we read so much because we see the places in our mind and I'm like, it's basically like we're watching a movie. That's how it feels. And she's like, I prefer watching Frozen with popcorn, was her response that. Okay, well, you're three. That's a good point. But yeah, there's some power to the imagination, right? That's not just like watching a movie because something about our imagination because it's the words in the world that's painted somehow mixing in with our own understanding of our own hopes and dreams, our fears. It like mixes up in there and the way we can build up that world from just the page. Yeah, you're really creating the world just with the prompts from the book, right? Yeah, that's different than watching a movie. Yeah, which is why it hurts sometimes to watch the movie version and then you're like, that's not at all how I imagined it. Well, we kind of brought this up in terms of depending on what the goals are. Let me ask the big, you're friends with Manolis, he's obsessed with this question. So let me ask the big ridiculous question about the meaning of life. Do you ever think about this one? Do you ever ponder the reason we're here? Descends as the vapes on this spinning ball in the middle of nowhere? Yeah, I don't think one ends up in the field of space propulsion without thinking of these existential questions. Yeah, all the time. Or builds a business. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, we've touched on a lot of the different pieces of this, I think. So I have a bunch of thoughts. I do think that the goal isn't, the meaning isn't anymore just to be like a Petri dish of bacteria that reproduces and where survival and reproduction are the main objectives. And maybe it's because now we're able to answer these, ask those questions. That's maybe the turning point. And instead, I think it's really the pursuit and generation of knowledge. And so if we're taken out by an asteroid or something, I think that it will have been a meaningful endeavor if somehow our knowledge about the universe is preserved somehow and the next civilization isn't starting over again. So that's, I always, yeah, I resonate with that. I always loved the mission of Google from the early days of making the world's sort of information and knowledge searchable. I always loved that idea. I always loved, I was donated as people should to Wikipedia. I just love Wikipedia. I feel like it's the, that's one of the greatest accomplishments of just a humanity of us together, especially Wikipedia and this opens like in this open community way, putting together different knowledge is like, on everything we've talked about today, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page about ion engines and I'm sure it's pretty good. Like, it's, I don't know, that's incredible. And obviously that can be preserved pretty efficiently, at least Wikipedia. I don't know, you'll be like, human civilization is all like burning up in flames as there's this one USB drive slowly traveling out. Yeah, I know, exactly. With Wikipedia on it. Yep. That's on, from the beginning of our chat, that one lonely spacecraft. It just needs Wikipedia. And then it will have been a civilization well spent. So pushing that knowledge along. Yeah. Through like one little discovery at a time is one of, is a core aspect to the meaning of it all. Yes, and I also, I haven't yet figured out what the connection, you know, an explanation I'm happy with yet for how it's connected, but evolving beyond just the survival piece too, I think like we touched on the emotional aspect, something in there about cooperation and, you know, love. And so I, in my day to day that just boils down to, you know, the pursuit of knowledge or improving the human condition and being kind. Love and knowledge. Yeah, exactly. So I'm pretty at peace with that as the meaning right now. Makes sense to me. While you work on spacecraft propulsion. Yes, exactly. Like literal rocket science. Natalia, this is an amazing conversation. You work on such an exciting engineering field. And I think this is like what 20th, 21st century will be remembered for is space exploration. So this is super exciting space that you're working on. So, and thank you so much for spending your time with me today. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Natalia Bailey. And thank you to our sponsors, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Blinkist, an app that summarizes books, and Sun Basket, meal delivery service. So the choice is snacks, caffeine, knowledge, or a delicious meal. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. All civilizations become either space faring or extinct. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Natalya Bailey: Rocket Engines and Electric Spacecraft Propulsion | Lex Fridman Podcast #157

The following is a conversation with Zev Weinstein, a young man with a brilliant, bold and hopeful mind that I had the great fortune of talking to on a recent afternoon. He happens to be Eric Weinstein's son, but I invited Zev not because of that, but because I got a chance to listen to him speak on a few occasions and was captivated by how deeply he thought about this world at such a young age. And I thought that it might be fun to explore this world of ours together with him for a time through this conversation. Quick mention of our sponsors. ExpressVPN, Grammarly Grammar Assistant, Simply Safe Home Security, and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal. So the choice is privacy, grammar, safety or health. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Zev acknowledges the fear associated with participating in public discourse and is brave enough to join in at a young age, to push forward, to change his mind publicly, to learn, to articulate difficult nuanced ideas and grow from the conversations that follow. In this, I hope he leads the next generation of minds that is joining and steering the collective intelligence of this big ant colony we think of as our human civilization. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Zev Weinstein. You've said that philosophy becomes more dangerous in difficult times. What do you mean by that? Interestingly, I think I mean two things by that. And I think firstly, I should clarify, when I say philosophy, I sort of mean in a very traditional sense, just thinking, ideation. And that could be reconsidering our notions of self in a very traditional sense, which we consider philosophy, or that could be like technological innovation. I think it's important to recognize all of these as philosophies that we can not question whether it's important to promote thought. I think the other thing I should clarify is when I say difficult times, I mean times when nothing is growing, and so the risk for real conflict is much greater because people are incentivized to fight over the things which already exist. I think when times are not difficult, the people with the greatest power are usually the people who are very creative, generating a lot, and that really requires ideation or philosophy of some sort. I think when times become stagnant, the important successful people become the people who are very good at protecting their own pieces of the pie and taking others. I think that those people have to be very opposed to any sort of thinking that could restructure society or conventions about who should succeed. And so firstly, I mean by that that it becomes much more dangerous for a person to think deeply and question during a time when the important people are those concerned with making sure no one rocks the boat. One example of this would be Socrates and his execution because everyone was happy enough to sit through his questions before there was war and poverty and distress, and afterwards it just became too dangerous. The other thing I mean by that is that the consequences of thinking deeply carry much greater potential for real catastrophe when everyone is desperate. So like for example, the communist manifesto was probably much more dangerous during early 1900s Russia than it was during the 1848 revolutions because I think people were in much worse shape and desperate people are very willing to dive into anything new that might bring the future without fully calculating whatever the consequences or risks might be. So it is both more dangerous for a person to have creative ideas and those ideas are more dangerous when times are tough. And by dangerous you mean it challenges the people with power who want to maintain that power in times of stagnation when there's not much growth, innovation, creativity, all that kind of stuff. Right, and we know that if nothing new is created, people have promises that they've made about what will be paid to whom, what debt structure is. The only possibility if stagnation lasts for long enough is really some kind of great conflict, great war because people have to take from others to make good on their own promises. So we know that by denying any sort of grand ideation we are accepting that there will be some kind of great catastrophe. And so we have to understand that philosophy is the most important when we've seen too much stagnation for too long. It is also very dangerous and it's dangerous for the people who are doing it and it's dangerous for the people who believe it but it's kind of our only way out ever. And again, by philosophy you mean the bigger, so it's not academic philosophy or this kind of games played in the space of just like moral philosophy and all those metaphysics, all that kind of stuff. You mean just thinking deeply about this world, thinking from first principles. I think your like Twitter line involves something about like. Trying to piece everything together from first principles. So that's fundamentally what being philosophical about this world is and that's where the people who are thinking deeply about this world are the ones who are feeding, who are the catalyst of this growth in society and so on. Yeah, I mean, I also think that the real implication of moral philosophy can be something that most would consider like a real political implication. So I think all philosophy really ties together because there has to be some sort of grand structure to all thought and how it relates. Do you think this growth and innovation and improvement can last forever? We've seen some incredible, the thing that humans have been able to accomplish over the past several hundred years is just, I mean, awe inspiring and every moment in that history, it almost seemed like no more could be done. Like we've solved all the problems that are to be solved. And there's just historically, there's all these kind of ridiculous like Bill Gates style quotes, or like it's obvious that this new cool thing is not gonna take off and yet it does. And so there's a feeling of the same kind of pattern that we see in Moore's law. There's constant growth in different technologies in the modern day era in any kind of automation over the past hundred years. Do you think it's possible that we'll keep growing this way if we give power to the philosophers of our society? I think the only way that we can keep growing this way is if we give power to real thinkers. And there's no guarantee that that will work, but we sort of don't have any other choice. And I think you're entirely right that this period of both understanding the universe at a rate which has never been seen before and invention and creativity, that these past hundred years have been sort of uncharacteristic for the level of growth that we've seen in all of history. We've never seen anything like this. And I think a lot of our promises rest on this sort of thing continuing. I think that's very dangerous. But the one thing that can get us out of this is philosophy and being ready to radically restructure all of our notions about what should be, what is. I think that's very important. So you think deeply about this world. You are clearly the embodiment of a thinker, of a philosopher. Your dad is also one such guy, Eric Weinstein. Do you have big disagreements with him on this topic in particular? I think, now people should know, he also happens to be in the room, but the mics can't pick him up so he can heckle. It doesn't even matter. But do you have disagreements with him on this point? Let me try to summarize his argument that we are actually based a lot of our American society on the belief that things will keep growing. And yet it seems that however you break it apart, maybe from an economics perspective, that they're not growing currently. And so that's where a lot of our troubles are at. Do you have the same sense that there's a stagnation period that we're living through over the past couple of decades? I think stagnation, modern stagnation is completely undeniable, particularly scientifically. And I think there have been a few fields where tremendous progress has been made very recently. I think my dad might feel that there is sort of an inevitability to the ending of this period. And I'm not so certain that the fall of this great time is completely inevitable because I don't know what thoughts we're capable of producing, what we're able to reconsider. I think we really have to be open to the possibility that all of our standard frameworks where, like he will talk about embedded growth obligations. If we continue within the same framework, then we're very susceptible to the dangers of whatever these embedded growth obligations are. I think if we break the frameworks, we have no reason to believe that the problems we're experiencing with our current frameworks will follow us. And I think that's the importance of radical thought is we don't know what the solution is, but if there is a solution, it will be born from some very fundamental thinking. And so I have great hope. So you have optimism about sort of the power of a single radical idea or a single radical thinker to break our frameworks and break us out of this, like, spiral down due to whatever the economic forces that are creating this current stagnation. Yeah, I'm very, very hopeful. The optimism of youth. Well, I share your optimism. So let me come back to something you've also talked about. You have very little stuff out there currently, but the things you have out there, your thoughts, you could just tell how deeply you think about this world. And one of the things you mentioned is as you learn about this world, as you read, as you sort of go through different experiences, that you're open to changing your mind. How often do you find yourself changing your mind? Do you think Zev from 10 years into the future will look back at this conversation we're having now and disagree completely with everything you just said? It's entirely possible. And that's one of the things that scares me so much about appearing publicly. I think that the internet can be very intolerant of inconsistency. And I am entirely prepared to be very inconsistent because I know that whatever beliefs I have when subjected to scrutiny may change because that's really the only way to form your truest, most fundamental conceptions about the world around you. And it would take an infinite amount of time to subject every single one of your beliefs to scrutiny. And so that's a process that must follow me throughout my entire life. And I know that means that my opinions and perspectives are always to be changing. I'm prepared to accept that about myself. Whether other people are prepared to accept that my public opinions may change and vary greatly over time is something I don't know. I don't know how tolerant the world will be, but I'm very prepared to change anything I believe in if I think deeply enough about it or a good enough argument is made so that I might reconsider. Well, there certainly is currently an intolerance and that's one of the problems of our age. There's an intolerance towards change. And I'll also ask you about labels. You talked about sort of we like to bin each other into different categories, the blue or red or whatever the different categorization is. But it seems like the task before you as a young person defining our future is to make a tolerance of change the norm. Doing this podcast, for example, and then changing your mind one or two years later and doing so publicly without a big dramatic thing or maybe changing it on a daily basis and just being open about it and being transparent about your thought process. Maybe that is the beacon of hope for the philosophical way, the path of the philosopher. So that's your task in a sense is to change your mind openly and bravely. You know, you're right. And maybe I will just have to endure some sort of criticism for doing that, but I think that's very important. I think this ties back to this previous facet of our conversation where we were discussing if thinkers would win over systems that are devoted to preventing radical thought or if who will win the systems or the thinkers. I think it's crucial that my generation take up a hand in this fight. And I think it's important that I'm a part of that because I know that I have some opportunity to, there is, I think it is my obligation as a member of a generation whose only real hope is to think outside of a system because whatever systems exist are collapsing. I think it is really my obligation to try to play some role, whatever role I can and being an instrument in that change. Are you, as a young mind, do you have a sense of fear about just like how afraid were you to do this podcast conversation? Do you have a sense of fear of thinking publicly? Yeah, I don't even think that that fear is irrational. It's very difficult to exist publicly in any form now because it's very easy for anyone to take cheap shots at something which is difficult and as I said, the people who are trying to have the difficult ideas and conversations are perhaps putting others in actual danger because everyone is so desperate that they might be willing to try anything. So there's a certain amount of responsibility which one has to take going before the public and there is a certain amount of ridicule which will be completely unwarranted that anyone must endure for it. And I think that means that one has to be afraid because they could both ruin the world and be ruined by the world in an unwarranted and undeserved fashion. I would like to believe in myself enough to try to accept this as a task because I think people need to try or there's no getting out of this and we will end in some kind of crazy, brilliant war. Awfully put. You've said also that in these times we can't have labels because it holds us back. Maybe we've already talked about it a little bit but this idea of labels is really interesting. Why do you think labels hold us back? Well, I think many underestimate the extent to which language and communication really impacts and shapes the ideas and thoughts which are being communicated. And I think if we're willing to accept imperfect labels to categorize particular people or thoughts, in some sense, we are corrupting an abstraction in order to represent it and communicate about it. And I think as we've discussed, those abstractions are particularly important when everything is on fire. We should not be sacrificing grand thoughts for the ability to express it. I think everyone should work much harder, including myself, to really be thinking abstractly in abstract terms instead of using concrete terms to discuss abstraction while ruining it slightly. Yeah, it's kind of a skill actually. So one really difficult example in the recent time that maybe you can comment on if you have been thinking about it is just politics. And there's a lot of labels in politics that it takes a lot of skill to be able to communicate difficult ideas without labels being attached to you. That's something that I've been sort of thinking about a lot in trying to express, for example, how much I love various aspects of the foundational ideas of this country, like freedom, and just saying, I love America, a simple statement. I love the ideas that we're finding to America. Well, often in the current time, well, people will try, they desperately try to attach a label to me, for example, for saying I love America, that I'm a Republican, a Donald Trump supporter, and it takes elegance and grace and skill to avoid those labels so that people can actually listen to the contents of your words versus the summarization that results from just the labels that they can pin on you. Are you cognizant of the skill required there of being able to communicate without being branded a Republican or a Democrat in this particular set of conversations? I'm sure there's other dangerous labels that could be attached. I don't think there's any way of avoiding that right now. It might not be anyone's best effort to really try. I think the thing I can say, which will most speak to that, which I truly believe, is that participating in modern conventional politics is not being inherently political in a generative sense. It's this repeated trope where politics now is not about creating new political ideologies. It's about defending ideologies which already exist so that everyone can keep what they have. And that's where all of the name calling and the labeling really comes in. It's an attempt to constrict whatever may be generated to standard conversations and discussions so that arguments can be straw manned and defeated and people can keep what they have because everyone's very, very scared. I want to be very political, but not in a standard political sense where I'm defending a particular party or place on a spectrum. I would like to play some role in inventing new spectrums and I think that's most important politically because above most else, politics is about real power and conventional politicians have real power and that power will find terrible outlets if new spectrums for that power to live are not invented. So you're not afraid of politics. You're afraid of political discourse at the deepest, richest level of what political discourse is supposed to mean. Actually, I'm very afraid of it, but once again, we have no. That's not paralyzing for you. You feel like it's a responsibility, you're ready to take it on. Yes. This is a good sign. This is, you're a special human. Okay, let's talk maybe fun, maybe profound. We talked about philosophers, philosophy. Who's your favorite philosopher? Like somebody in your current time but neither influential or you just enjoy his, her ideas or writing or anything like that? Weirdly, I'll give an answer which sort of doesn't have much to do with whom I might imagine myself to be. I like Thomas Aquinas at the moment. I think he's very inspirational to me given what we're going through and that's not because his particular ideas of religion or God or unmoved movers are particularly inspirational to me and I don't even think they were necessarily right. But he was introducing aspects of the scientific method during one of the darkest periods in human history when we had lost all hope and reason and ability to think logically. So I think he was really something of a light in the dark and I think we need to look to people like that at the moment. The other reason why I think I need to learn from him is that even though he was doing something which really needed to be done and introducing scientific thought and reason to a time that lacked it, he was not saying anything that would have been offensive to whatever powers were in play during his time. He was writing about the importance of faith in God and how we could prove it. And so it's important to remember, I suppose, that having ideas that shape the world and which bring the world closer to what we can prove it's supposed to be and how it's supposed to work does not always take some sort of grand contradiction of whatever's in play. And the most courageous thing to do may not always be the most helpful thing to do. And I think it's very easy for anyone with ideas about how everything is broken to become very cynical and say, oh, the system, man, they're all wrong. I think it takes another kind of discipline to be a person with real ideas and to make the world better without stepping on anyone's toes or contradicting anyone. I have real respect for that. So being able to be, when it's within your principles to operate, within the current system of thought. Yeah, and not offend anyone, not say anything outlandish, but introduce the method by which progress must be achieved. I think that takes a kind of maturity, which is found very rarely now. And I really look to him for inspiration despite whatever disagreements I may have with the minute details of his philosophy. Yeah, it takes a lot of skill, a lot of character, and yeah, deep thinking to be able to operate within the system when needed and having the fortitude and just the boldness to step outside and to burn the system down when needed, but rarely, and opportune moments that would actually have impact. I mean, it's ultimately about impact within the society that you live in, not just making a statement that has no impact. Yeah, and we were talking about how dangerous it is to do real philosophy at dangerous broken times. He was going through the most broken time in history and he questioned the methods which made a broken system able to survive. And he was so skilled and so graceful that he became a saint in that tradition. And there's something for me to really learn from there. Do you draw any inspiration, have any interest in the sort of more modern philosophers, maybe the existentialists? I mean, Nietzsche is one of the early ones. Do you have thoughts on the guy in general or any of the other existentialists? Well, with regard to Nietzsche, I think Yates might've said that he's the worst. He was certainly filled with passionate intensity. I think... Was that a compliment? He was the worst or a criticism or both? Yates had this big line, that the best lack all conviction, the worst are filled with passionate intensity. So I think Nietzsche was destroyed by the horrors of everything that went on around him. And I think he never really recovered from it. I think that's because if you think about Nietzsche's philosophy, he was very opposed to any sort of acceptance of what one had. One should always envy those who have more and use that envy to fuel their ideas. To fuel their growth and accept whatever the human condition and desires are and use those desires to want more and more and make use of your greed. I think it's very difficult to be truly happy if the thing which you pride yourself most on is never being satisfied. And I think Nietzsche was never satisfied and that was the danger of his philosophy. I think also with his amoralism, there is no good or evil. I sort of disagree with that on a pretty fundamental basis. I think that our notion of morality is by no means subjective. It's really the proxy for the fitness of a society. I think whatever we consider ethical, like don't steal, don't murder, don't do this, societies have a very difficult time running. It's very hard to run a civilization when everyone is stealing from everyone else and people are murdering each other and committing these things, which we would consider atrocities. So I think we also, we know this because I think very similar notions of morality have evolved convergently from different traditions. I think good is a proxy for a civilization's fitness and the good news is that that means that evil in being anathema to that good must therefore be the opposite of stable in whatever way that it's evil. And that means that good will always be more stable than evil and the only way evil can really win is like if everyone dies. So I think that's a good thing. Everyone dies, so. So wait, can you say that again? Good is a proxy for society's what? Good is a proxy for the stability and fitness of a civilization and evil. Damn, that's a good definition. Thank you. So you're throwing some bombs today. Okay, all right. Okay, this is exciting. Sorry, sorry to interrupt your flow there, but it's just a damn good line. Thank you. Yeah. So in that sense, that's a kind of optimistic view that if by definition good is a proxy for stability, then it's going to be stable unless the entire world just blows itself up. So good wins in the end by definition. Yeah. Or no, well, good wins unless it all goes to complete destruction. That's beautifully put. Thank you. On a topic of sort of good and evil being human illusions, you've said that more broadly than that about truth, that it is easier in some ways to be unified under truth because it is universal than it is to be unified under belief, which at times can be completely subjective. So what is the nature of truth to you? Can we understand the world objectively or is most of what we can understand about the world is just a subjective opinions that we kind of all agree on in these little collectives and over time it kind of evolves completely detached from objective reality. I think this is the greatest argument for objectivity is that something that is objectively true cannot be true to me and untrue to you. You can feel that it's untrue, but that would be unproductive and create unnecessary tension and conflict. I think this is one reason for the importance of science as a tool for stability. If science is the search for truth and truth can never really be, I shouldn't say that, truth should never be an engine of conflict because no two people should disagree on something which is objectively true, then in some sense, search for truth is searching for a common ground where we can all exist and live without contradicting or attacking each other. Do you have a hope that there is a lot of common ground to be discovered? Sure, I mean, if we continue scientifically, we are discovering truth and in that discovering common ground on which we can all agree. That's one reason why I think caring about science, if you have a culture which cares very deeply about science, that's a culture which is not necessarily bound to injure unwarranted internal conflict. I think that's one reason that I'm so passionate about science is it's search for universal ground. Let me just throw out an example of a modern day philosophical thinker. We'll keep your dad, Eric Weinstein out of the picture for a sec, but he does happen to be an example of one, but Jordan Peterson is an example of another, somebody who thinks deeply about this world. His ideas are by a certain percent of the population, sort of speaking of truth, are labeled as dangerous. Why do you think his ideas or just ideas of these kinds of deep thinkers in general are labeled as dangerous in our modern world? Is it similar to what you've been discussing that in difficult times, philosophers become dangerous? Or is there something specific about these particular thinkers in our time? Well, I think Jordan Peterson is very anti establishment in a lot of his beliefs. He's an unconventional thinker. And I think we need, regardless of whatever Jordan's particular views and beliefs are, and if they bring about more danger than truth, or if they don't, it's very important to have fundamental thinkers who exist outside of a conventional framework. So do I think that he's dangerous? I think by existing outside of a system which is known, he is dangerous. And I think we have to, in some sense, in some sense, we have to welcome danger in that capacity because it will be our only way out of this. So regardless of whether his beliefs are right or wrong, I'm pretty adamant about the fact that we need to support thought which may rescue us. And that thought can appear radical or dangerous at times. But ultimately, if you allow for it, this is kind of the difficult discussion of free speech and so on, is ultimately difficult ideas will pave the way for progress. Yeah, and I'd actually, I'd like to slow you down there because I think like one of the issues we were discussing previously was the fact that language often destroys our ability to think. When we're talking about whether his ideas are radical, I don't know if we mean radical in the traditional sense of having to do with the root of a problem or in the more modern sense of being very extreme. And I think that's completely by design, I think fundamental thought, which semantically would once be considered radical thought became very dangerous. And now it's become synonymous with extreme or dangerous thought, which means that anyone who considers themselves a radical thinker is semantically also a dangerous or extreme thinker. These are not helpful labels in a sense that the moment you say radical or extremist thinker, then you're just, well, how do I put it? You're not helping the public discourse, exchange of ideas. But through no fault of our own, the concept of radical as having to do with a root is it's an obvious concept for which there must be language and a lot of the attack on thought has to do with attacking language, which communicates conceptually. So like this is an example of how our world is becoming increasingly Orwellian. It's just language is being used to destroy our ability to think. I think I can't remember exactly what the numbers are, but I read some statistic about how greatly the average English vocabulary has been used and the vocabulary has decreased since 1960. It was like some incredible number. It really baffled me. It's like, how are people less able to think in a time when the world is supposed to be growing at a never before seen rate? It's like, we can't keep on, we can't sustain this growth if we destroy everyone's ability to think because the growth requires thinking and we're ruining the tools for it. I watched your podcast with Noam Chomsky and I think one interesting thing which he discussed was how language is more used to develop thoughts within our own head than it is used to communicate those thoughts with others. If the language doesn't change, even if its usage changes, when language is destroyed in communication, it also stymies our ability to think reasonably and I'm very, very worried. But the language in communication requires a medium and there's a lot of different mediums. So there's social media, there's Twitter, there's writing books, there's blog posts, there's podcasts, there's YouTube videos, all of things you have dipped a toe in in your exploration of different mediums of communication. Which do you see yourself, this might be just a poetic way of asking are you gonna do a podcast, but broader picture, what do you think as an intellectual in this world for you personally would be the path for communicating your ideas to the world? What are the mediums you are currently drawn to out of the ones I mentioned or maybe something I didn't? To answer your question concretely before abstractly, I'm scared but I need to do a podcast. It's important, it is my obligation as a member of my generation. I really hope that more people my age start to do this because we will be the people in charge of new ideas which either sink or swim. How upset will your dad be when your podcast quickly becomes more popular than his? I think he would be negatively upset. I'll say he'd be proud, he's a good dad. I really think so, yeah. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, so but then zooming out, do you think podcasts, are you excited by the possibility of other mediums outside of podcasting to communicate ideas? I would be if people still read books or did things like that. I'm somewhat guilty of this. A lot of the books I read are very technical and then my, to absorb like really deep modern conversations I listen to podcasts and I don't really read many books on like the matters that we're discussing, for example. It's fascinating because you're making me think of something that I align with you very much of how I consume deep thinkers currently. So what happens is somebody who thinks deeply about the world will write a book, Jordan Peterson example, and instead of reading their book, I'll just listen to podcast conversations of them talking about the book, which I find to, this is really sad, but I find that to be a more compelling way to think about their ideas because they're often challenged in certain ways in those conversations and they're forced to, after having boiled them down and really thought through them enough to write a book. So it's almost like they needed to go through the process of writing a book just so they could think through, convert the language in their minds into something more concrete, and then the actual exchange of ideas, the actual communication of ideas with the public happens not with the book, but after the book, with that person going on a book tour and communicating the ideas. Well, there are two meanings I make of why not too many people spend much of their time reading anymore. One interpretation is that we've lost our attention spans to our phones, people can't concentrate on a page if it takes them a minute to read, we're too busy watching TikToks or whatever people do. The other interpretation would be that language and verbal communication has, as well as some amount of communication, which is done through facial expression, tone of voice, et cetera. These are means of communication that have evolved along with humanity over thousands and thousands of years. So we know that we are built to communicate in this way. We have had writing for much less time. It is a system that we invented, not a system which evolved and is innately part of humanity or the human mind. And so we are designed to consume conversation by our own evolution. We are designed to consume writing by some process of symbols that's evolved over a couple of thousand years. It makes sense to me why many are much more compelled to listen to podcasts, for example, than they are to read books. It could be that this is simply a technological progression which has displaced reading conventionally instead of some sort of maladaptation of our minds, which has corrupted our attention spans. Likely there's some combination which determines why people spend much less time reading. But I don't think it's necessarily because we're all broken. It may simply have to do with the fact that we are designed to listen through our ears and speak through our mouths. And we are not innately designed to communicate over a page. Yeah, there's an exciting coupling to me between like few second TikTok videos that are fun and addicting, and then the three, four hour podcasts, which are both really popular in our current time. So people are both hungry for the visual stimulation of internet humor and memes. I'm a huge fan of, and also slow moving deep conversations. And that might, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, it's part of your generation to define what that looks like moving forward. There were a lot of people, like Joe Rogan's one of the people that kind of started, accidentally stumbled into the discovery that this is like a thing. And now people are kind of scrambling to figure out why is this a thing? Like, why is there so much hunger for long form conversations? And how do we optimize that medium for further, further expression of deep ideas and all that kind of stuff. And YouTube is a really interesting medium for that as well. Like video, sharing of videos, mostly YouTube is used with a spirit of like the TikTok spirit, if I can put it in that way, which is like, how do I have quick moving things that even if you're expressing difficult ideas, they should be quick and exciting and visual and switching. But there's a lot of exploration there to see what can we do something deeper and nobody knows. And you're part of the, you have a YouTube channel releasing one video every few years. So, so your momentum is currently quite slow, but perhaps it'll accelerate. You're one of the people that gets to define that medium. Is that, do you enjoy that, the visual YouTube medium of communication as well? I know that when the topic of conversation or the means by which a conversation is communicated or an idea is communicated, if that is sufficiently interesting to me, I will read a book on it. I would listen to a podcast on it. I would watch a video on it. I think if I'm very curious about something, I will consume it however possible. I think when I have to consume things which really don't interest me very much, I'm indeed much more ready to consume them through some sort of video or discussion than I am through like a long tedious book. So for the breadth of acquiring knowledge, video is good. For the depth, the medium doesn't matter. I think it'd be fun to ask you about some big philosophical questions to see if you have an opinion on them. Do you think there's a free will or is free will just an illusion? Well, I think classical mechanics would tell us that if we were to know every piece of information about a system and understand the rules which govern that system, we would be completely able to predict the future with complete accuracy. So if something could know everything about our lives, it could freeze time and understand the position of every neuron in my mind about to fire, no decision could be unpredictable. In some sense, there is that sort of fate. I think that doesn't make the decisions we make illegitimate even if some grand supercomputer could understand what decisions we would make beforehand with complete certainty. I think we're making legitimate systems within a system that has no freedom. We're making legitimate systems within a system that has no freedom. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, so if we were to have just a simple pendulum and I told you how long the rope was, we froze it at a particular point and I told you how high above the ground the weight was and the motion of a pendulum is something which is easy for everyone to imagine, I could, if we had all of that information, you could ask me what will the pendulum do six and a half minutes from now? And we would have a precise answer. That's an example of a very simple system with a very simple Lagrangian. And we could completely predict the future. The pendulum has no ability to do anything that would surprise us. Weirdly, that's true of whatever this four dimensional, crazy world we live in looks like if we were to understand where every piece of this system was at any given time and we understand the laws of motion, how everything worked, if we could compute all of that information somehow, which we will never be able to do, we would, every decision you will ever make could be predicted by that computer. That doesn't mean that your decisions are illegitimate. You are really making those decisions, but with a completely predictable outcome. So I'm just sort of a little bit high at the moment on the poetry of a system within a system that has no freedom. So the human experience is the system we've created. Within the system that has no freedom, but that system that we've created has a feeling of freedom that, to us, ants feels as much more real than the physics, as we understand it, of the underlying base system. So it's almost like not important what the physics of the base system is, that for what we've created, the nature of the human experience is there is a free will. Or there is something that feels close enough to a free will that it may not be worth spending too much time on the fact that it's something of an illusion. We will never build a computer that knows everything about every piece of the universe at a given time. And so for all intensive purposes, our decisions are up to us. We just happen to know that their outcomes could be predicted with enough information. So speaking of supercomputers, they can predict every single thing about what's going to ever happen. What do you think about the philosophical thought experiment of us living in a simulation? Do you often find yourself pondering of us living in a simulation of this question? Do you think it is at all a useful thought experiment? I think it's very easy to become fascinated with all of these possibilities, and they're completely legitimate possibilities. Is there some validity to solipsism? Well, it can never be falsified or disproven. So, I mean, sure, you could be a figment of my imagination. It doesn't mean that I will act according to this possibility. I'm not gonna call you mean names. And just to test the system, to see how robust it is to distortions. Yeah, so, I mean, all of these existential thought experiments are completely possible. We could be brains in jars. It doesn't mean that our experience will feel any less valid. And so it doesn't make a difference to me if you are some number of ones and zeros, or you are a figment of my imagination, which lives in a stored away brain. It will never really change my experience knowing that that's a possibility. And so I try to avoid making decisions based on such contemplations. If we take this previous issue of free will, I could decide that because I have no choice in my life, if I lie around in bed all day and eat chips, I was destined to do that thing. And if I make that decision, then I was destined to do that thing. It would be a really poor decision for me to make. I have school and a dozen commitments. There's somebody listening to this right now, probably hundreds of people sitting down, eating chips and feeling terrible about them. So how dare you, sir? If they're listening to this, they're clearly curious about possibilities of thought. It's not the bed and the chips that makes the man. It's not the bed or the chips that makes the man. Yet another quotable from Zev Weinstein. Okay. But you don't think of it as a useful thought experiment from an engineering perspective of virtual reality, of thinking how we can create further and further immersive worlds. Like would it be possible to create worlds that are so immersive that we would rather live in that world versus the real world? I mean, that's another possible trajectory of the world that you're growing up in is we're more and more immersing ourselves into the digital world. For now it's screens and looking at the screens and socializing on the screens. But it's possible to potentially create a world that's also visually for all of our human senses as immersive as the physical world. And then, you know, to me it's an engineering question of how difficult is it to create a world that's as immersive and more fun than the world we currently live in. It's a terrifying concept and I hate to say it. We might live happier lives in a virtual reality headset 30 years from now than we are currently living. This future, the digital future, worries you. It worries me. On the other hand, it may be a better alternative to fighting for whatever people are clinging onto in our non virtual world or at least the world that we don't yet know is virtual. So embrace the future. We've been talking a lot about thinkers. Now, in the broad definition of philosophy, you kind of included innovators of all form. Do you find it useful to draw a distinction between thinkers and doers? I think that the most important gift we've ever been given is our ability to observe the universe and think deductively about whatever principles, transcend humanity. Because as we discussed, that's the closest thing we will ever have to a universal experience is understanding things, which must be true everywhere. In order for that, so I think if we're deciding that life is meaningful and the human experience is meaningful, you could make a very convincing argument that its greatest meaning will be understanding whatever transcends it. I think that's only sustainable if people are happy and well fed and things of market value are invented. And so I think we really need both to live meaningful and successful and possible lives. In terms of who my greatest heroes are, I can't decide between figures like Einstein and Newton and Feynman, and on the other hand, figures like Carey Mullis, for example. I think people like Einstein make our lives meaningful and people like Carey Mullis, who's probably responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives, make our lives possible and good. So in terms of where I would like to find myself with these two different notions of achievement, I don't know what I would more like to achieve. I have an inclination that it will be something scientific because I would like to bring meaning to humanity instead of sustenance, but I think both are very important. We can't sustain our lives if we don't keep growing technologically. I think people like you are making that possible with computing because that's one of the few things that's really moving forward in a clear sense. I think about this a great deal. So I think both are very important. So one example that's modern day inspiring figure on the latter part, on the engineering part, on the sustenance, is Elon Musk. Does that somebody you draw inspiration from? What are your thoughts in general about the kind of unique spec of human that's creating so much inspiring innovation in this world so boldly? I know that we will not survive without people like that. Elon is a ridiculous and sensational example of one of these figures. I don't know if he's the best example or the worst example, but he is of his own kind. He is radically individualistic, and those are the people who will allow us to continue as humans. I'm very happy that we have people like that in this world. You said this thing about if we are to say that life has meaning or life is meaningful, then you could argue that it is a worthy pursuit to transcend life. Do you see that, another just, I'm gonna have to go back and sleep on that one. Do you draw some, speaking of Elon, some inspiration of us transcending Earth, of us moving outside of this particular planet that we've called home for a long time and colonizing other planets, and perhaps one day expanding outside the solar system and expanding, colonizing our galaxy and beyond? Honestly, I know very little about space exploration. I think it makes complete sense to me why we are starting to think very seriously about it. It's an amazing and baffling and innovative solution to a lot of problems we see as a world population. I can't really offer very much of interest on the topic. I think when I'm talking about transcending humanity and transcending Earth, I'm talking usually about deriving truth, and that's one of the things that makes theoretical math and physics so interesting. It's like, I really, really love biology, for example, but biology is a combination of whatever principles ensure evolution and whatever weird coincidences happened billions of years ago. So do you think it's more interesting to understand the fundamental mechanisms of evolution, for example, than it is the results, the messy results of its processes? I can't say which is more interesting. I can say which I think is more deep. I think theory and abstraction, which can be achieved completely deductively, is deeper because it has nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with logic and thought. So, like, if we were ever to interact with aliens, for example, we would not have our biology in common if these were some sort of really intelligent life form. We would have math and physics in common because the laws of physics will be the same everywhere in the universe. Our particular anatomy and biology pertains only to life on this planet, and the principles may apply more ubiquitously. Do you ever think about aliens, like, what they might look like? I try to, when I deal with thought experiments like these, I try to keep a very abstract mindset, and I notice that whenever I try to instantiate these abstractions, I corrupt whatever thoughts there are for which they're useful. So it's kind of like the labels discussion. So, like, the moment you try to make it concrete, it's probably going to look like some cute version of a human, like, it's the little green fellas with the eyes and so on, or whatever. Whatever the movies have instilled, like, your cultural upbringing, you're going to project onto that and the assumptions you have. That's interesting. So you prefer to sort of step away and think and abstract notions of what it means to be intelligent, what it means to be a living life form and all that kind of stuff. Mm hmm. I try to, I almost try to pretend I'm blind and I'm deaf and I'm only a mind with no inductive reasoning capacity when I'm trying to think about thought experiments like these, because I know that if I incorporate whatever my eyes instruct my brain, I will impede my ability to think as deeply as possible. Because once again, it's the thing which shallows our thought can be the incorporation of circumstance and coincidence. And for particular kinds of thought, that's very important. I'm not discounting the use of inductive reasoning in many humanities and in many sciences, but for the deepest of thoughts, once again, I feel it's important to try to transcend whatever methods of observation characterize human experience. See, but within that, that's all really beautifully put. I wonder if there is a common mathematics and a common physics between us and alien beings, we still have to make concrete the methods of communication. Yeah. And that's a fascinating question of like, while remaining in these abstract fundamental ideas, how do we communicate with them? I mean, I suppose that that question could be applied to different cultures on earth, but it's finding a common language. Do you think about that kind of problem of basically communicating abstract fundamental ideas? My least favorite aspect of math or physics or any of these really deep sciences is the symbolic component. You know, I'm dyslexic. I don't like looking at symbols. They're too often a source of ambiguity. And I think you're entirely right that if one thing holds us back with communication with something that behaves or looks nothing like us, I think if one thing holds us back it will be symbols and the communication of deep thought. Because as I said, I think communication frequently compromises thought by intention or by just theoretical inadequacy. So on this topic, actually, it'd be fun to see what your thoughts are. Do you think math is invented or discovered? So you said that math, we might share many different things. Some ideas of mathematics and physics with alien life forms. So it's uniform in some sense of uniform throughout the universe. Do you think this thing that we call mathematics is something that's kind of fundamental to the world we live in or is it just some kind of pretty axioms and theorems we've come up with to try to describe the patterns we see in the world? I think it's completely discovered and completely fundamental to all experience. I think the only component of mathematics that has been invented is the expression of it. And I think in some sense, there's almost an arrogance required to believe that whatever aspect we invent having to do with math and physics and theory, there is an arrogance required to truly believe that that belongs on any sort of stage with the actual beauty of the matters being discovered. So we need our minds and in some sense our pens to be able to play with these things and communicate about them. And those hands and those pens are the things which smudge the most beautiful thing that humanity can ever experience. And maybe if we interact with some intelligent life form, they will have their own unique smudges. But the canvas, which is beautiful, must be identical because that is universal and ubiquitous truth. And that's what makes it deep and meaningful is that it's so much more important than whatever we're programmed to enjoy as an aspect of human experience. Yeah, that's really beautifully put. The human language is these messy smudges of trying to express something underlying that is beautiful. Speaking of that, on the physics side, do you think the pursuit of a theory of everything in physics, as we may call it in our current times, of understanding the basic fabric of reality from a physics perspective is an important pursuit? I think it's essential. As I've said, I think ideation is our only escape from the constraints of human condition. And I think that it's important that all great thoughts and ideas are bound together. And I think the math is beautiful. And it ensures that the things which bind great ideas which have already been had and great discoveries together, it ensures that those strings will be beautiful. I think it's very important to unify all theories that have brought us to where we are. Do you think humans can do it? Do you think humans can solve this puzzle? Is it possible that we, with our limited cognitive capacity, will never be able to truly understand this deep, like deeply understand this underlying canvas? I think if not, it will be people like you who invent some sort of, I don't know, we'll call it computation for now, that will be able to not only discover that which transcends humanity, but to transcend human methods of discovering that which is above it. So superintelligence systems, AGI, and so on, that are better physicists than us. I wonder if you might be able to comment. So your dad does happen to be somebody who boldly seeks this kind of deep understanding of physics, the underlying nature of reality from a physics perspective, from a mathematical physics perspective. Do you have hope your dad figures it out? I have great hope. It's not supposed to be my journey. It's supposed to be his journey. It's supposed to be his to express to the world. Obviously, I'm so proud that I'm connected to someone who is determined to do such a thing. And on the other hand, maybe in some sense, I feel bad for him for having to, if he's going to be the thing which discovers some sort of grand unified theory and expresses it, I feel sorry that he will have to smudge whatever canvas this thing is. Because he's human. Really, I think I know I've seen a little bit of what I think great math and great physics looks like. And it's unbelievably beautiful. And then you have to present it to a world with market constraints and all of this messy sloppiness. I feel bad in some sense for my dad because he has to go back and forth between this beautiful world of math and whatever the messiness is of his human life. And then the scientific community broadly with egos and tensions and just the dynamics of what makes us human. He's also very lucky that he gets to play with these sorts of things. It's a mixed bag. I both feel a little sorry for him for having to deal with the beauty as well as the smudging and the sloppiness of human expression. And I think it's difficult not to envy such a beautiful insight or life or vision. Well, that's your own path as well is this kind of struggle of, as you mentioned, exploring the beauty of different ideas while having to communicate those ideas with the best smudges you can in a world that wants to put labels, that wants to misinterpret, that wants to destroy the beauty of those ideas. And you seem to, at this time, with your youthful enthusiasm, embracing that struggle despite the fear in the face of fear. And your dad also carries that same youthful enthusiasm as well. But that said, your dad, Eric Weinstein, he's a powerful voice, I would say, a powerful intellect in public discourse. Is this a burden for you or an inspiration or both as a young mind yourself? I think, as I said, there's this weird contrast of I know that he has ideas, which I think are very beautiful, and I know he has to deal with the sort of there's something you have to sacrifice in beauty when you bring it to a world which is not always beautiful. And there's an aspect of that which sort of scares me about this kind of thing. I also think that, especially since I'm trying to think about how I should appear publicly, my dad has been very inspirational in that I think he brings a sort of fastidious care to very difficult conversations that. What does fastidious mean? It's just very careful and thoughtful. He brings that sort of attitude to, I think, really difficult conversations. And I know that I don't have that skill yet. I don't think I'm terrible, but. The care, the nuance, and yet not being afraid to push forward. Yeah, I would really like to learn from my dad there. I think also my dad has been very important to my life just because I've always been a sort of very idiosyncratic thinker. And I think I don't always know how to interact with the world for those sorts of reasons. And I think my dad has always been similar. And if not for my dad, I don't know if I would just believe that I was stupid or something. Because I don't know if I would know how to interpret my differences from convention. So he gave you the power to be different and use that as a superpower. Yeah, I guess you could put it that way. I don't know who I would believe I am if I didn't have my dad telling me that it wasn't my own stupidity which alienated me from certain aspects of standard life. So I'm very, very thankful for that. Is there a fond memory you have about an interaction with your dad, either funny, profound, that kind of sticks with you now? A lot. Part of the reason I ask that, of course, is just fascinating to see somebody as brilliant as you, see how the people that you interact with, how they form the mind that you have, but also to give an insight of another public figure like your dad to see from your perspective of what kind of little magical moments happen in private life. I would say I remember I think I just posted about this on Instagram or something. Otherwise, it didn't happen. If you didn't post that, yeah. One person who's always sort of mattered to whatever weird life and experience I've had has been this comedian, Tom Lehrer. Do you know him? Yes. I love him very much. Likewise. Anyway, I remember I think I was five or something. My dad came home with the CD, this Tom Lehrer CD, and he told me to listen to it. And it was all of this bizarre satirical writing about prostitution and cutting up babies and all kinds of ridiculously vile content for a five year old. I think beyond just my love of Tom Lehrer, I think it was a way for my dad to express that from a very young age, he was really ready to treat me like an adult, and he was ready to trust me and share his life and his enjoyments with me in a way that was unconventional because he was willing to discard tradition for the chance at a really unique and meaningful parental relationship. So trusting that his particular brand of weirdness is something you can understand at a young age and embrace and learn from it. Tom Lehrer, we should clarify, is not all about, what is it, murder and prostitution. He's one of the wittiest, most brilliant musical artists. If you haven't listened to his work, you should. He's just a rare intellect who's able to sort of, in catchy rhyme, express some really difficult ideas through satire, I suppose. That still, even though it's decades ago, still resonates today, some of the ideas that he expressed. I will say also that I think I am probably a more cultured person having listened to Tom Lehrer than I would have been without, I think, a lot of his comedy draws upon a canon that I was really driven to research by saying, oh, what does this mean? I don't understand that reference. There are a lot of references there to really inspirational things, which he sort of assumes going into a lot of his songs. And for many of us, like me, you have to piece those things together, looking at Wikipedia pages and whatnot. But to tie this back to the original question, I think there's sort of a break it, you bought it notion of parenting. I think, really, if you're not going to accept a standard, you have to invent your own. And I think, in some ways, that was my dad's way of telling me that if I was too unstandard as a child, he would invent his own way of parenting me because that was worth it to him. And I think that was very meaningful to me. I know you're young. This is a weird time to ask this question. Are you cognizant on the role of love in your relationship with your dad? Are you at a place mentally, as a man yourself, to admit that you love the guy? I love my dad with the connection that I think I've had to very few things in the world. I think my dad is one of the people that's allowed me to see myself. And I don't know who I would imagine myself to be if not for my dad. That isn't to say that I agree with him on everything. But I think he's given me courage to accept myself and to believe that I can teach myself where I'm unable to learn from convention. So I love my dad very dearly, yes. Is there ways in which you wish you could be a better son? Firstly, I'd like to say I'm sure before I figure out exactly what those are. I think whenever I come to conclusions on what that means, I'm eager to take them. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by a conclusion? If I have an idea for how to be a better son, I think I'm inclined to try to be that person. I think that's true of almost anything. I think if I have ideas for improvement, it would be wasteful not to act on them. So I suppose one thing I could say is that I think idealism and what could almost be considered naivete is not necessarily a lacking of maturity, but instead an obligation to those older than us who have lived and seen too much to fully believe in what is naive and right without the assistance of the young to reinspire traditional idealism. And so perhaps instead of trying to be more mature all the time, I should spend some time trying to be an idealistic form of hope in the lives of people who maybe have seen too much to retain all of that original hope. So that's something that's difficult, but especially appearing in public as someone as young as I am, I think anything I do, which is juvenile by choice, will be held against me. But maybe that's a sacrifice that I have to make. I have to retain some sort of youthful hope and optimism. Yeah, I can't. I mean, I'm going to get teary eyed now, but I have allergies. But also, this is pretty powerful what you're saying. I certainly share your ideas. It's something I struggle with just by instinct. You should read The Idiot by Dostoevsky. By instinct, I love being naive and seeing the world from a hopeful perspective, from an optimistic perspective. And it's sad that that is something you pay a price for in this world, like in the academic world, especially as you're coming up through schooling. But just actually, it's a hit on your reputation throughout your life. And it's a sad truth, but you have to, for many things, if it's a principle you hold, you have to be willing to pay the costs. And ultimately, I believe that in part, a hopeful view will help you realize the best version of yourself. Because optimism is a kind of, optimism is productive. Like believing that the world is and can be amazing allows you to create a more amazing world somehow. I mean, I'm not sure if it's the human nature of a fundamental law of physics. I don't know. But believe in the impossible in the sense being optimistic about the thing. It's similar, going back to what you've said, is believing that a radical, that a powerful single idea, that a single individual can revolutionize some framework that we're operating in that will change the world for the better. Believing that allows you to have the chance to create that. And so I'm with you on the optimism. But you may have to pay a cost of optimism and naive hopefulness. I mean, in some sense, optimism limits freedom. I think if we don't really have much choice in choosing what is perfect, if it exists as an ideal, then there isn't much room for creativity. And that's a danger of optimism, is someone who would like to be creative. I think it was Warren Zeevon said, accepting dreams, you're never really free. And that's something I think about a lot. He's an interesting guy, also. I really like him. On that topic, you do have a bit of an appreciation and connection with music. I saw you play some guitar a few months ago. Can you put, in a philosophical sense, your connection to music? What insights about life, about just the way you see the world, do you get from music? I think the role music has played in my life was originally motivated by wanting to prove things to myself. I really have no ear for music. I have a terrible sense of pitch. And I think a lot of music relies on very standard teaching. If you think about lessons, for example, music lessons, there's a routine to them, which is so archaic and traditional that there's no room for deviation. I think all of that suggested to me that I would never have a relationship with music. I loved listening to music. It was just difficult to me. It saddened me. I wanted to know if there was any way I could build a connection to music, given who I am, my own idiosyncrasies, what challenges I have. I decided to try to learn music theory before I touched an instrument. I think that gave me a very unique opportunity instead of spending my time fruitlessly at the beginning on the syntax of a particular instrument. This is how you, this is your posture on the piano. This is how you hold your fingers. I tried instead to learn what made music work. And the wonderful thing about that was I'm pretty sure that any instrument with discrete notes is mine for the taking within a day or so of having the ability to play with it. So I think approaching music abstractly gave me the ability to instantiate it everywhere. And I think it also taught me something about self teaching. Recently, I've tried getting into classical music because, at least traditionally, this is the thing which is thought to require the most rigor and traditional teaching. I think it's essentially taught me, even if I'll never be a great classical performer, that there is nothing one can't really teach themself in this era. So I've been enjoying whatever connection I have with music. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's a very rewarding learning process. We know, for example, that music accesses our neurochemicals very directly. And if you teach yourself a little bit of theory and are able to instantiate it on an instrument without wasting your time or spending your time tediously on learning the particulars of that instrument, you can instantly sit down and access your own dopamine loops. And so you don't really need to motivate yourself with music because you're giving your brain drugs. Who needs motivation to give themselves drugs? And learn something. So I think more people should be playing music. I think a lot of people don't realize how easy it can be to approach if you take a sort of unstandard approach. And the unstandard approach in your sense was understanding the theory first, and then just from the foundation of the theory, be able to then just take on any instrument and start creating something that sounds reasonably good or learning something that sounds reasonably good. And then plugging into the, as you call them, the dopamine loops of your brain, allowing yourself to enjoy the process. What about the pain in the ass rigorous process of practice? So is there something about my dopamine loops, for example, that enjoys doing the same thing over and over and over again and watching myself improve? I think that's because music is more effective at accessing us when it's played correctly. And I think you play, I'm positive that you play music much more correctly than I do. So if you are going to sit down and play something that you've learned, that piece will be much more satisfying to your ears and to your brain than if I were to play that piece just sitting down with an instrument. But it's sort of a trade off with freedom and rigor because even if I should be spending more of my time practicing rigorously, I know I don't have to to make me happy. Well, Jocko Willink, I think, has this saying that discipline is freedom. So maybe the repetition of the disciplined repetition is actually one of the mechanisms of achieving freedom. It's another way to get to freedom, that it doesn't have to be a constraint, but in a sense, unlocks greater sets of opportunity than results in a deeper experience of freedom. Maybe. Particularly if you're thinking about discipline and method for improvisation, there are a million pieces that you could improvise with the same discipline in how to approach that improvisation. So I think it's true that discipline promotes freedom if you insert a layer of indirection. Because I think if you're trying to learn one piece that was written 400 years ago and you're playing it over and over again, there is nothing personal or creative about that process, even if it's beautiful and satisfying. There has to be some sort of discipline applied to the creativity of self. So I think that is the layer of indirection which reconciles both approaches to freedom and discipline and enjoyment of music. Discipline applied to the creativity of self. Damn, Zev. Thank you. Now, as an aging man yourself, if you were to give advice to young folks today of how to approach life and maybe advice to yourself, is there some way you could condense a set of principles, a set of advices you would give to yourself and to other young folks of how to live life? Sure. I would say that with the collapse of systems that have existed for thousands of years, whatever is happening with universities might be an example of some system that may or may not be decaying. I think with the destruction of important systems, there is a unique opportunity to invest in oneself. And I think that is always the right approach, provided that the investment one makes in his self is obligated towards humanity as a whole. And I think that is the great struggle of my generation. Will we create our own paths that are capable of saving whatever is collapsing? Or will we be squashed by the debris? And I hope to articulate what patterns I see this struggle taking over the years that my generation becomes particularly active in the world as an important force. I think already we're important as a demographic to particular markets. But I should hope that our voices will matter as well, starting very soon. So I would try to think about that. That would be my advice. It's a silly question to ask, perhaps. But a bit of a Russian one. It's silly because you're young, but I don't think it's actually silly because you're young. Do you ponder your mortality? And are you just afraid of death in general? So tying us back to our previous conversations about abstraction versus experience, which is determining our notions of our life and our world, death is interesting in that it is obviously hyper important to a person's life. And it is something that, for the most part, no human will really experience and be able to reflect upon. So our notions of death are sort of proof that if we want to make the most of our lives, we have to think abstractly and relying not at all at times on experiential thought and understandings because we can't really experience death and reflect upon it hence and use it to motivate us. It has to remain some sort of abstraction. And I think if we have trouble comprehending true abstraction, we tend to view ourselves as nearly immortal. And I think that's very dangerous. So one concrete implication for my belief in abstraction would be that we all need to be aware of our own deaths. And we need to understand concretely the boundaries of our lifetimes. And no amount of experience can really motivate that. It has to be driven by thought and abstraction in theory. That's one of the deepest elements of what it means to be human is our ability to form abstractions about our mortality versus animals. I think there's just something really fundamental about our interaction with the abstractions of death. And there's a lot of philosophers that say that that's actually core to everything we create in this world, which is us struggling with this impossible to understand idea of mortality. I mean, I'm drawn to this idea because both the mystery of it but also just from the human experience perspective, it seems that you get a lot of meaning from stuff ending. It's kind of sad the flip side of that to think that stuff won't be as meaningful if it doesn't end, if it's not finite. But it seems like resources gain value from being finite. And that's true for time. That's true for the deliciousness of ice cream. That's true for love, for everything, for music, and so on. And yeah, it seems deeply human to try to, as you said, concretize the abstractions of mortality even though we can never truly experience it because that's the whole point of it. Once it ends, you can't experience it. Yeah. Again, another ridiculous question. OK. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? From your deep thinking about this world, is there a good way to answer any of the why questions about this existence here on Earth? And as I said, we're here in part by principle and in part by accident. And a lot of the things which bring us joy are programmed to bring us joy to ensure our evolutionary success. And so I would not necessarily consider all of the things which bring us joy to be meaningful. I think they play a very obvious role and a clear pattern, and we don't have much choice in that. I think that outrules the idea of joy being the meaning of life. I think it's a nice thing we get to have, even if it's not inherently meaningful. I think the most wonderful thing that we have ever been given has been our ability to, as I said, observe what transcends us as humans. And I think to live a meaningful life is to see that and hopefully contribute to that. So to try to understand what makes us human and to transcend that and in some small way contribute to it in the finite time we have here. Yeah. Those are some powerful words. Thank you. You're a truly special human being. It's really an honor to talk to you. I can't, I'm just, I'm a newborn fan of yours and I can't wait to see how you push the world. Please embrace the fear you feel and be bold. And I think you will do some special things in this world. I'm confident if the world doesn't destroy you and I hope it doesn't. Be strong, be brave. You're an inspiration. Keep doing your thing. And thanks for talking today. Thank you so much, Les. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Zev Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Grammarly Grammar Assistant, Simply Safe Home Security and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal. So the choice is privacy, grammar, safety or health. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Aristotle. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Zev Weinstein: The Next Generation of Big Ideas and Brave Minds | Lex Fridman Podcast #158

The following is a conversation with Richard Crabe, founder of Numeri, which is a crowdsourced hedge fund, very much in the spirit of Wall Street Bets, but where the trading is done not directly by humans, but by artificial intelligence systems submitted by those humans. It's a fascinating and extremely difficult machine learning competition where the incentives of everybody is aligned, the code is kept and owned by the people who develop it, the data, anonymized data is very well organized and made freely available. I think this kind of idea has a chance to change the nature of stock trading and even just money management in general by empowering people who are interested in trading stocks with the modern and quickly advancing tools of machine learning. Quick mention of our sponsors, Audible Audio Books, Trial Labs Machine Learning Company, Blinkist app that summarizes books, and Athletic Greens, all in one nutrition drink. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that this whole set of events around GameStop and Wall Street Bets has been really inspiring to me as a demonstration that a distributed system, a large number of regular people are able to coordinate and collaborate in taking on the elite centralized power structures, especially when those elites are misbehaving. I believe that power in as many cases as possible should be distributed. And in this case, the internet, as it is for many cases, is the fundamental enabler of that power. And at the core, what the internet in its distributed nature represents is freedom. Of course, the thing about freedom is it enables chaos or progress, or sometimes both. And that's kind of the point of the thing. Freedom is empowering, but ultimately unpredictable. And I think in the end, freedom wins. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Richard Crabe. From your perspective, can you summarize the important events around this amazing saga that we've been living through of Wall Street Bets, the subreddit and GameStop, and in general, just what are your thoughts about it from a technical to the philosophical level? I think it's amazing. It's like my favorite story ever. Like when I was reading about it, I was like, this is the best. And it's also connected with my company, which we can talk about. But what I liked about it is like, I like decentralized coordination and looking at the mechanisms that these are Wall Street Bets users use to hype each other up, to get excited, to prove that they bought the stock and they're holding. And then also to see that how big of an impact that that decentralized coordination had. So it really was a big deal. Were you impressed by the distributed coordination, the collaboration amongst like, I don't know what the numbers are. I know I'm numerized looking at the data. After all of this is over and done, it'd be interesting to see like from a large scale distributed system perspective to see how everything played out. But just from your current perspective, what we know, is it obvious to you that such incredible level of coordination could happen where a lot of people come together in a distributed sense, there's an emergent behavior that happens after that. No, it's not at all obvious. And one of the reasons is the lack of credibility. To coordinate with someone, you need to make credible contracts or credible claims. So if you have a username on our Wall Street Bets, like some of them are, like deep fucking value is one of them. That's an actual username. By the way, we're talking about, there's a website called Reddit and there's subreddits on it. And a lot of people, mostly anonymous, I think for the most part anonymous, can create user accounts and then can then just talk on forum like style boards. You should know what Reddit is. If you don't know what Reddit is, check it out. If you don't know what Reddit is, maybe go to the awesome subreddit first, aww with cute pictures of cats and dogs. That's my recommendation. Anyway. Okay, yeah, that would be a good start to Reddit. When you get into it more, go to our Wall Street Bets. It gets dark quickly. We'll probably talk about that too. So yeah, so there's these users and there's no contracts, like you were saying. There's no contracts, the users are anonymous, but there are little things that do help. So for example, if you've posted a really good investment idea in the past, that exists on Reddit as well. And it might have lots of upvotes. And that's also kind of like giving credibility to your next thing. And then they are also putting up screenshots, like here's the trades I've made and here's a screenshot. Now you could fake the screenshot, but still it seems like if you've got a lot of karma and you've had a good performance on the community, it somehow becomes credible enough for other people to be like, you know what? He actually probably did put a million dollars into this. And you know what, I can follow that trade easily. And there's a bunch of people like that. So you're kind of integrating all that information together yourself to see like, huh, there's something happening here. And then you jump onto this little boat of like behavior, like we should buy the stock or sell the stock. And then another person jumps on, another person jumps on. And all of a sudden you have just a huge number of people behaving in the same direction. It's like flock of whatever birds. Exactly. What was strange with this one, it wasn't just let's all buy Tesla. We love Elon, we love Tesla, let's all buy Tesla. Because that we've heard before, right? Everybody likes Tesla. Well, now they do. So what they did with this in this case, they're buying a stock that was bad. They're buying it because it was bad. And that's really weird because that's a little bit too galaxy brain for a decentralized community. How did they come up with it? How did they know that was the right one? And the reason they liked it is because it had really, really high short interest. It had been shorted more than its own float, I believe. And so they figured out that if they all bought this bad stock, they could short squeeze some hedge funds. And those hedge funds would have to capitulate and buy the stock at really, really high prices. And we should say that shorted means that these are a bunch of people, when you short a stock, you're betting on the, you're predicting that the stock's going to go down and then you will make money if it does. And then what's a short squeeze? It's really that if you are a hedge fund and you take a big short position in a company, there's a certain level at which you can't sustain holding that position. There's no limit to how high a stock can go, but there is a limit to how low it can go, right? So if you short something, you have infinite loss potential. And if the stock doubles overnight, like GameStop did, you're putting a lot of stress on that hedge fund. And that hedge fund manager might have to say, you know what, I have to get out of the trade. And the only way to get out is to buy the bad stock that they don't want, like they believe will go down. So it's an interesting situation, particularly because it's not zero sum. If you say, let's all get together and make a bubble in watermelons, you buy a bunch of watermelons, the price goes up, it comes down again, it's a zero sum game. If someone's already shorted a stock and you can make them short squeeze, it's actually a positive sum game. So yes, some Redditors will make a lot of money, some will lose a lot, but actually the whole group will make money. And that's really why it was such a clever thing for them to do. And coupled to the fact that shorting, I mean, maybe you can push back, but to me always from an outsider's perspective, seemed, I hope I'm not using too strong of a word, but it seemed almost unethical. Maybe not unethical, maybe it's just a asshole thing to do. Okay, I'm speaking not from an economics or financial perspective, I'm speaking from just somebody who loves, I'm a fan of a lot of people, I love celebrating the success of a lot of people. And this is like the stock market equivalent of like haters. I know that's not what it is. I know that there's efficient, you wanna have an economy efficient mechanism for punishing sort of overhyped, overvalued things. That's what shorthand guess is designed for. But it just always felt like these people are just, because they're not just betting on the loss of the company. It feels like they're also using their leverage and power to manipulate media or just to write articles or just to hate on you on social media. Then you get to see that with Elon Musk and so on. So this is like the man, so people like hedge funds that were shorting are like the sort of embodiment of the evil or just the bad guy, the overpowerful that's misusing their power. And here's the crowd, the people that are standing up and rising up. So it's not just that they were able to collaborate on Wall Street bets to sort of effectively make money for themselves. It's also that this is like a symbol of the people getting together and fighting the centralized elites, the powerful. And that, I don't know what your thoughts are about that in general. At this stage, it feels like that's really exciting that people have power, just like regular people have power. At the same time, it's scary a little bit because just studying history, people could be manipulated by charismatic leaders. And so just like Elon right now is manipulating, encouraging people to buy Dogecoin or whatever, there can be good charismatic leaders and there can be bad charismatic leaders. And so it's nerve wracking. It's a little bit scary how much power a subreddit can have to destroy somebody because right now we're celebrating they might be attacking or destroying somebody that everybody doesn't like, but what if they attack somebody that is actually good for this world? So that, and that's kind of the awesomeness and the price of freedom. It's like it could destroy the world or it can save the world. But at this stage, it feels like, I don't know, overall, when you sit back, do you think this was just a positive wave of emergent behavior? Is there something negative about what happened? Well, yeah, the cool thing is they weren't doing anything, the Reddit people weren't doing anything exotic. It was a creative trade, but it wasn't exotic. It wasn't, it was just buying the stock. Okay, maybe they bought some options too, but it was the hedge fund that was doing the exotic thing. So I liked that. It was, it's hard to say, well, we've got together and we've pulled all our money together and now there's a company out there that's worth more. What's wrong with that? Yeah. Right? But it doesn't talk about the motivations, which is, and then we destroyed some hedge funds in the process. Is there something to be said about the humor and the, I don't know, the edginess, sometimes viciousness of that subreddit? I haven't looked at it too much, but it feels like people can be quite aggressive on there. So is there, what is that? Is that what Freedom looks like? I think it does, yeah. You definitely need to let people, one of the things that people have compared it to is the Occupy Wall Street, which is, let's say, some very sincere liberals, like 23 years old, whatever, and they go out with signs and they have some kind of case to make. But this isn't sincere, really. It's like a little bit more nihilistic, a little bit more YOLO, and therefore a little bit more scary because who's scared of the Occupy Wall Street people with the signs? Nobody. But these hedge funds really are scared. I was scared of the Wall Street bats people. I'm still scared of them. Yeah, the anonymity is a bit terrifying and exciting. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't know what to do with this. I've been following events in Russia, for example. It's like there's a struggle between centralized power and the distributed. I mean, that's the struggle of the history of human civilization, right? But this on the internet, just that you can multiply people. Like some of them don't have to be real. Like you can probably create bots. Like it starts getting me, me as a programmer, I start to think like, hmm, me as one person, how much chaos can I create by writing some bots? Yeah. And I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that. There's, I'm sure there's hundreds, thousands of good developers out there listening to this, thinking the same thing. And then as that develops further and further in the next like decade or two, what impact does that have on financial markets, on just destruction of reputations of just, or politics, the bickering of left and right political discourse, the dynamics of that being manipulated by, you know, people talk about like Russian bots or whatever. We're probably in a very early stage of that, right? Yeah, exactly. And this is a good example. So do you have a sense that most of WallStreetBets folks are actually individual people, right? That's the feeling I have is they're just individual, maybe young investors, just doing a little bit of an investment, but just on a large scale. Yeah, exactly. The reason I found out, I've known about WallStreetBets for a while, but the reason I found out about GameStop was this, just I met somebody at a party who told me about it and he was like 21 years old and he's like, it's gonna go up 100% in the next one day. That we're talking about in last year? This was probably, no, this was, yeah, a few days ago. Yeah, it was like maybe two weeks ago or something. So it was already high GameStop, but it was just strange to me that there was someone telling me at a party how to trade stocks who was like 21 years old. And I started to, yeah, I started to look into it. And yeah, and he did make, he made it, yeah, he made 140% in one day, he was right. And now he's supercharged, he's a little bit wealthier and now he's gonna wait for the next thing. And this decentralized entity is just gonna get bigger and bigger. And they're gonna together search for the next thing. So there's thousands of folks like him and they're going to probably search for the next thing to attack. People that have power in this world that sit there with power right now in government and in finance and any kind of position are probably a little bit scared right now. And honestly, that's probably a little bit good. It's dangerous, but it's good. Yeah, it certainly makes you think twice about shorting. It certainly makes you think twice about putting a lot of money into a short. Like these funds put a lot into one or two names. And so it was very, very badly risk managed. Do you think shorting is, can you speak at a high level just for your own as a person, is it good for the world? Is it good for markets? I do think that the two kinds of shorting, evil shorting and chill shorting. Evil shorting is what Melvin Capital was doing. And it's like, you put a huge position down, you get all your buddies to also short it and you start making press and trying to bring this company down. And I don't think in some cases, you go out after like fraudulent companies say, this company is a fraud. Maybe that's okay. Like some, but they weren't even saying, they're just saying it's a bad company and we're going to bring it to the ground, bring it to its knees. So a quant fund like Numerai, we always have lots of positions and we never have a position that's like more than 1% of our fund. So we actually have right now, 250 shorts. I don't know any of them except for one because it was one of the meme stocks. But we shorting them not to make them go, we don't even want them to go down necessarily. That doesn't sound a bit strange that I say that, but we just want them to not go up as much as our longs. So by shorting a little bit, we can actually go long more in the things we do believe in. So when we were going long in Tesla, we could do it with more money than we had because we would borrow from banks who would lend us money to go down. Who would lend us money because we had longs and shorts, because we didn't have market exposure, we didn't have market risk. And so I think that's a good thing because that means we can short the oil companies and go long Tesla and make the future come forward faster. And I do think that's not a bad thing. So we've talked about this incredible distributed system created by Wall Street Bets. And then there's a platform which is Robinhood, which allows investors to efficiently as far, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's those and there's others in this new MRI that allow you to make it accessible for people to invest. But that said, Robinhood was in a centralized way applied its power to restrict trading on the stocks that we're referring to. Do you have a thoughts on actually like the things that happened? I don't know how much you were paying attention to sort of the shadiness around the whole thing. Do you think it was forced to do it? Or was there something shady going on? What are your thoughts in general? Well, I think I wanna see the alternate history. Like I wanna see the counterfactual history of them not doing that. How bad would it have gotten for hedge funds? How much more damage could have been done if the momentum of these short squeezes could continue? What happens when there are short squeezes, even if they're in a few stocks, they affect kind of all the other shorts too. And suddenly brokers are saying things like, you need to put up more collateral. So we had a short, it wasn't GameStop luckily, it was Blackberry and it went up like 100% in a day. It was one of these meme stocks, super bad company. The AIs don't like it, okay? The AIs think it's going down. What's a meme stock? A meme stock is kind of a new term for these stocks that catch memetic momentum on Reddit. And so the meme stocks were GameStop, the biggest one, GameStonk, as Elon calls it, AMC. And Blackberry was one, Nokia was one. So these are high short interest stocks as well. So these are targeted stocks. Some people say, oh, isn't it adorable that these people are investing money in these companies that are nostalgic? It's like, you go into the AMC movie theater, it's like nostalgic. It's like, no, it's not why they're doing it. It's that they had a lot of short interest. That was the main thing. And so there were high chance of short squeeze. In saying, I would love to see an alternate history, do you have a sense that that, what is your prediction of what that history would look like? Well, you wouldn't have needed very many more days of that kind of chaos to hurt hedge funds. I think it's underrated how damaging it could have been. Because when your shorts go up, your collateral requirements for them go up. It's similar to Robinhood. Like we have a prime broker that says, said to us, you need to put up like $40 per $100 of short exposure. And then the next day they said, actually you have to put up all of it, 100%. And we were like, what? But if that happens to all the short, all the commonly held hedge fund shorts, because they're all kind of holding the same things. If that happens, not only do you have to cover the short, which means you're buying the bad companies, you need to sell your good companies in order to cover the short. So suddenly like all the good companies, all the ones that the hedge funds like are coming down and all the ones that the hedge funds hate are going up in a cascading way. So I believe that if you could have had a few more days of GameStop doubling, AMC doubling, you would have had more and more hedge fund deleveraging. But so hedge funds, I mean, they get a lot of shit, but they, do you have a sense that they do some good for the world? I mean, ultimately, so, okay. First of all, Wall Street bets itself is a kind of distributed hedge fund. Numeri is a kind of hedge fund. So I got, hedge fund is a very broad category. I mean, like if some of those were destroyed, would that be good for the world? Or would there be coupled with the destroying the evil shorting, would there be just a lot of pain in terms of investment in good companies? Yeah, a thing I like to tell people if they hate hedge funds is, I don't think you want to rerun American economic history without hedge funds. So on mass they're, yeah, they're good. Yeah, you really wouldn't want to. Because hedge funds are kind of like picking up, they're making liquidity, right, in stocks. And so if you love venture capitalists, they're investing in new technology, it's so good. You have to also kind of like hedge funds because they're the reason venture capitalists exist because their companies can have a liquidity event when they go to the public markets. So it's kind of essential that we have them. There are many different kinds of them. I believe we could maybe get away with only having an AI hedge fund. But we don't necessarily need these evil billions type hedge funds that make the media and try to kill companies. But we definitely need hedge funds. Maybe from your perspective, because you run such an organization and Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood, sort of had to make decisions really quickly, probably had to wake up in the middle of the night kind of thing. And he also had a conversation with Elon Musk on Clubhouse, which I just signed up for. It was a fascinating, one of the great journalistic performances of our time with Elon Musk. Pull a surprise for Elon. How hilarious would it be if he gets a pull a surprise? And then his Wikipedia would be like journalist and part time entrepreneur. Business magnate. Business magnate. As you know, I don't know if you can comment on any aspects of that, but like, if you were Vlad, how would you do things differently? What are your thoughts about his interaction with Elon? How he should have played it differently? Like, I guess there's a lot of aspects to this interaction. One is about transparency. Like how much do you want to tell people about really what went down? There's NDAs potentially involved. How much in private do you want to push back and say, no, fuck you, to centralize power? Whatever the phone calls you're getting, which I'm sure he was getting some kind of phone calls that might not be contractual. Like it's not contracts that are forcing him, but he was being, what do you call it? Like pressured to behave in certain kinds of ways from all kinds of directions. Like what do you take from this whole situation? I was very excited to see Vlad's response. I mean, it's pretty cool to have him talk to Elon. And one of the things that like struck me in the first like few seconds of Vlad speaking was like, I was like, is Vlad like a boomer? Like, but hear me out. Like he seemed like a 55 year old man talking to a 20 year old. Elon was like the 20 year old. And he's like the 55 year old man. You can see why Citadel are NMR buddies, right? Like you can, you can see why. It's like, this is a nice, it's not a bad thing. It's like, he's got a respectable professional attitude. Well, he also tried to do like a jokey thing. Like, no, we're not being ageist here. Boomer, but like a 60 year old CEO of Bank of America would try to make a joke for the kids. That's what Vlad's like. Yeah, I was like, what is this? This guy's like, what is he, 30? Yeah. And I'm like, this is weird. Yeah. But I think, and maybe that's also what I like about Elon's kind of influence on American business is like, he's super like anti the professional. Like why say, you know, a hundred words about nothing? And so I liked how he was cutting in and saying, Vlad, what do you mean? Spill the beans, bro. Yeah, so you don't have to be courteous. It's like the first principles thinking. It's like, what the hell happened? Yes. Let's just talk like normal people. The problem of course is, you know, for Elon, it's cost them, what is it? Tens of millions of dollars is tweeting like that. But perhaps it's a worthy price to pay because ultimately there's something magical about just being real and honest and just going off the cuff and making the mistakes and paying for them, but just being real. And then moments like this, that was an opportunity for Vlad to be that. And it felt like he wasn't. Do you think we'll ever find out what really went down if there was something shady underneath it all? Yeah, I mean, it would be sad if nothing shady happened, but his presence made it shady. Sometimes I feel like that would mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. Sometimes I feel like, yeah, there's a lot of shitty things that Facebook is doing, but sometimes I think he makes it look worse by the way he presents himself about those things. Like I honestly think that a large amount of people at Facebook just have a huge unstable chaotic system and they're all, not all, but mass are trying to do good with this chaotic system. But the presentation is like, it sounds like there's a lot of back room conversations that are trying to manipulate people. And there's something about the realness that Elon has that it feels like CEO should have and Vlad had that opportunity. I think Mark Zuckerberg had that too when he was younger. Younger. And somebody said, you gotta be more professional, man. You can't say, you know, lol to an interview. And then suddenly he became like this distant person that was hot. Like you'd rather have him make mistakes, but be honest than be like professional and never make mistakes. Yeah, one of the difficult hires I think is like marketing people or like PR people is you have to hire people that get the fact that you can say lol on an interview. Or, you know, take risks as opposed to what the PR, I've talked to quite a few big CEOs and the people around them are trying to constantly minimize risk of like, what if he says the wrong thing? What if she says the wrong thing? It's like, what, be careful. It's constantly like, ooh, like, I don't know. And there's this nervous energy that builds up over time with larger and larger teams where the whole thing, like I visited YouTube, for example. Everybody I talked at YouTube, incredible engineering and incredible system, but everybody's scared. Like, let's be honest about this like madness that we have going on of huge amounts of video that we can't possibly ever handle. There's a bunch of hate on YouTube. There's this chaos of comments, bunch of conspiracy theories, some of which might be true. And then just like this mess that we're dealing with and it's exciting, it's beautiful. It's a place where like democratizes education, all that kind of stuff. And instead they're all like sitting in like, trying to be very polite and saying like, well, we just want to improve the health of our platforms. Like, it's like this discussion like, all right, man, let's just be real. Let's both advertise how amazing this fricking thing is, but also to say like, we don't know what we're doing. We have all these Nazis posting videos on YouTube. We don't know how to like handle it. And just being real like that, because I suppose that's just a skill. Maybe it can't be taught, but over time, the whatever the dynamics of the company is, it does seem like Zuckerberg and others get worn down. They just get tired. Yeah. They get tired of. Not being real. Of not being real, which is sad. So let's talk about Numerai, which is an incredible company system idea, I think, but good place to start. What is Numerai and how does it work? So Numerai is the first hedge fund that gives away all of its data. So this is like probably the last thing a hedge fund would do, right? Why would we give away a data? It's like giving away your edge. But the reason we do it is because we're looking for people to model our data. And the way we do it is by obfuscating the data. So when you look at Numerai's data that you can download for free, it just looks like a million rows of numbers between zero and one. And you have no idea what the columns mean, but you do know that if you're good at machine learning or have done regressions before, you know that I can still find patterns in this data, even though I don't know what the features mean. And the data itself is a time series data. And even though it's obfuscated, anonymized, what is the source data like approximately? What are we talking about? So we are buying data from lots of different data vendors and they would also never want us to share that data. So we have strict contracts with them. So we only can, but that's the kind of data you could never buy yourself unless you had maybe a million dollars a year of budget to buy data. So what's happened with the hedge fund industry is you have a lot of talented people who used to be able to trade and still can trade, but now they have such a data disadvantage, it would never make sense for them to trade themselves. But Numerai, by giving away this obfuscated data, we can give them a really, really high quality data set that would otherwise be very expensive. And they can use whatever new machine learning technique they want to find patterns in that data that we can use in our hedge fund. And so how much variety is there in underlying data? We're talking about, I apologize if I'm using the wrong terms, but one is just like the stock price. The other, there's like options and all that kind of stuff, like the, what are they called, order books or whatever. Is there maybe other totally unrelated directly to the stock market data, like natural language as well, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, we were really focused on stock data that's specific to stocks. So things like you can have like a, every stock has like a PE ratio. For some stocks, it's not as meaningful, but every stock has that. Every stock has one year momentum, how much they went up in the last year, but those are very common factors. But we try to get lots and lots of those factors that we have for many, many years, like 15, 20 years history. And then the setup of the problem is commonly in quant called like cross sectional global equity. You're not really trying to say, I believe this stock will go up. You're trying to say the relative position of this stock in feature space makes it not a bad buy in a portfolio. So it captures some period of time and you're trying to find the patterns, the dynamics captured by the data of that period of time in order to make short term predictions about what's going to happen. Yeah, so our predictions are also not that short. We're not really caring about things like order books and tech data, not high frequency at all. We're actually holding things for quite a bit longer. So our prediction time horizon is about one month. We end up holding stocks for maybe like three or four months. So I kind of believe that's a little bit more like investing than kind of plumbing, like to go long a stock that's mispriced on one exchange and short on another exchange, that's just arbitrage. But what we're trying to do is really know something more about the longer term future of the stock. Yeah, so from the patterns, from these like periods of time series data, you're trying to understand something fundamental about the stock, not like about deep value, about like it's big in the context of the market, is it underpriced, overpriced, all that kind of stuff. So like, this is about investing. It's not about like, just like you said, high frequency trading, which I think is a fascinating open question from a machine learning perspective, but just to like sort of build on that. So you've anonymized the data and now you're giving away the data. And then now anyone can try to build algorithms that make investing decisions on top of that data or predictions on the top of that data. Exactly. And so that's, what does that look like? What's the goal of that? What are the underlying principles of that? So the first thing is, we could obviously model that data in house, right? We can make an XGBoost model on the data and that would be quite good too. But what we're trying to do is by opening it up and letting anybody participate, we can do quite a lot better than if we modeled it ourselves and a lot better on the stock market doesn't need to be very much. Like it really matters the difference between if you can make 10 and 12% in an equity market neutral hedge fund because usually you're charging 2% fees. So if you can do 2% better, that's like all your fees, it's worth it. So we're trying to make sure that we always have the best possible model as new machine learning libraries come out, new techniques come out, they get automatically synthesized. Like if there's a great paper on supervised learning, someone on Numerai will figure out how to use it on Numerai's data. And is there an ensemble of models going on or is it more towards kind of like one or two or three like best performing models? So the way we decide on how to weight all of the predictions together is by how much the users are staking on them. How much of the cryptocurrency that they're putting behind their models. So they're saying, I believe in my model. You can trust me because I'm gonna put skin in the game. And so we can take the stake weighted predictions from all our users, add those together, average those together, and that's a much better model than any one model in the sum because ensembling a lot of models together is kind of the key thing you need to do in investing too. Yeah, so you're putting, so there's a kind of duality from the user, from the perspective of a machine learning engineer where it's both a competition, just a really interesting, difficult machine learning problem, and it's a way to invest algorithmically. So like, but the way to invest algorithmically also is a way to put skin in the game that communicates to you that the quality of the algorithm and also forces you to really be serious about the models that you build. So it's like, everything just works nicely together. Like, I guess one way to say that is the interests are aligned. Okay, so it's just like poker is not fun when it's like for very low stakes. The higher the stakes, the more the dynamics of the system starts playing out correctly. Like as a small side note, is there something you can say about which kind, looking at the big broad view of machine learning today or AI, what kind of algorithms seem to do good in these kinds of competitions at this time? Is there some universal thing you can say, like neural networks suck, recurrent neural networks suck, transformers suck, or they're awesome, like old school, sort of more basic kind of classifiers are better, all that, is there some kind of conclusions so far that you can say? There is definitely something pretty nice about tree models, like XGBoost, and they just seem to work pretty nicely on this type of data. So out of the box, if you're trying to come a hundredth in the competition, in the tournament, maybe you would try to use that. But what's particularly interesting about the problem that not many people understand, if you're familiar with machine learning, this typically will surprise you when you model our data. So one of the things that you look at in finance is you don't wanna be too exposed to any one risk. Like, even if the best sector in the world to invest in over the last 10 years was tech, does not mean you should put all of your money into tech. So if you train a model, it would say, put all your money in tech, it's super good. But what you wanna do is actually be very careful of how much of this exposure you have to certain features. So on Numeri, what a lot of people figure out is, actually, if you train a model on this kind of data, you wanna somehow neutralize or minimize your exposure to these certain features, which is unusual, because if you did train a stoplight or stop street detection on computer vision, your favorite feature, let's say you have an auto encoder and it's figuring out, okay, it's gotta be red and it's gotta be white, that's the last thing you wanna reduce your exposure to. Why would you reduce your exposure to the thing that's helping your model the most? And that's actually this counterintuitive thing you have to do with machine learning on financial data. So reducing your exposure would help you generalize the things that are... So basically, a financial data has a large amount of patterns that appeared in the past and also a large amount of patterns that have not appeared in the past. And so like in that sense, you have to reduce the exposure to red lights, to the color red. That's interesting, but how much of this is art and how much of it is science from your perspective so far in terms of as you start to climb from the 100th position to the 95th in the competition? Yeah, well, if you do make yourself super exposed to one or two features, you can have a lot of volatility when you're playing Numerai. You could maybe very rapidly rise to be high if you were getting lucky. Yes. And that's a bit like the stock market. Sure, take on massive risk exposure, put all your money into one stock and you might make 100%, but it doesn't in the long run work out very well. And so the best users are trying to stay high for as long as possible, not necessarily try to be first for a little bit. So me, a developer, machine learning researcher, how do I, Lex Friedman, participate in this competition and how do others, which I'm sure there'll be a lot of others interested in participating in this competition, what are, let's see, there's like a million questions, but like first one is how do I get started? Well, you can go to numero.ai, sign up, download the data. And on the data is pretty small. In the data pack you download, there's like an example script, Python script that just builds a XGBoost model very quickly from the data. And so in a very short time, you can have an example model. Is that a particular structure? Like what, is this model then submitted somewhere? So there needs to be some kind of structure that communicates with some kind of API. Like how does the whole, how does your model, once you've built, once you create a little baby Frankenstein, how does it then live in the world? Okay, well, we want you to keep your baby Frankenstein at home and take care of it. We don't want it. So you never upload your model to us. You always only giving us predictions. So we never see the code that wrote your model, which is pretty cool, that our whole hedge fund is built from models where we've never, ever seen the code. But it's important for the users because it's their IP, why do they want to give it to us? That's brilliant. So they've got it themselves, but they can basically almost like license the predictions from that model to us. License the predictions, yeah. So. Think about it. What some users do is they set up a compute server and we call it Numeric Compute. It's like a little AWS kind of image and you can automate this process. So we can ping you. We can be like, we need more predictions now. And then you send it to us. Okay, cool. So that's, is that described somewhere, like what the preferred is, the AWS, or whether another cloud platform, is there, I mean, is there sort of specific technical things you want to say that comes to mind that is a good path for getting started? So download the data, maybe play around, see if you can modify the basic algorithm provided in the example. And then you, what, set up a little server on the AWS that then runs this model and takes pings and then makes predictions. And so how does your own money actually come into play doing the stake of a cryptocurrency? Yeah, so you don't have to stake. You can start without staking. And many users might try for months without staking anything at all to see if their model works on the real life data, right? And is not overfit. But then you can get Numeraire many different ways. You can buy it on, you can buy some on Coinbase. You can buy some on Uniswap. You can buy some on Binance. So what did you say this is? How do you pronounce it? So this is the Numeraire cryptocurrency. Yeah, NMR. NMR, you just say NMR? It is technically called Numeraire. Numeraire, I like it. Yeah, but NMR is simple. NMR, Numeraire. Okay, so, and you could buy it basically anywhere. Yeah, so it's a bit strange because sometimes people are like, is this like pay to play? Right. And it's like, yeah, you need to put some money down to show us you believe in your model. But weirdly, we're not selling you the, like you can't buy the cryptocurrency from us. Right. It's like, it's also, we never, if you do badly, we destroy your cryptocurrency. Okay, that's not good, right? You don't want it to be destroyed. But what's good about it is it's also not coming to us. Right. So it's not like we win when you lose or something, like we're the house. Like we're definitely on the same team. Yes. Helping us make a hedge fund that's never been done before. Yeah, so again, interests are aligned. There's no, there's no tension there at all, which is really fascinating. You're giving away everything and then the IP is owned by sort of the code. You never share the code. That's fascinating. So since I have you here and you said a hundred, I didn't ask out of how many, so we'll just, but if I then once you get started and you find this interesting, how do you then win or do well, but also how do you potentially try to win if this is something you want to take on seriously from the machine learning perspective, not from a financial perspective? Yeah, I think that first of all, you would want to talk to the community. People are pretty open. We give out really interesting scripts and ideas for things you might want to try. And, but you're also going to need a lot of compute probably. And so some of the best users are, you know, actually the very first time someone won on Numerai, I would, I wrote them a personal email. It's like, you know, you've won some money. We're so excited to give you $300. And then they said, I spend way more on the compute, but. So this is fundamentally a machine learning problem first, I think is this is one of the exciting things. I don't know if we'll, in how many ways we can approach this, but really this is less about kind of no offense, but like finance people, finance minded people, they're also, I'm sure great people, but it feels like from the community that I've experienced, these are people who see finance as a fascinating problem space, source of data, but ultimately they're machine learning people or AI people, which is a very different kind of flavor of community. And I mean, I should say to that, I'd love to participate in this and I will participate in this and I'd love to hear from other people. If you're listening to this, if you're a machine learning person, you should participate in it and tell me, give me some hints how I can do well at this thing. Cause this boomer, I'm not sure I still got it, but cause some of it is, it's like a Kaggle competitions. Like some of it is certainly set of ideas, like research ideas, like fundamental innovation, but I'm sure some of it is like deeply understanding, getting like an intuition about the data. And then like a lot of it will be like figuring out like what works, like tricks. I mean, you could argue most of deep learning research is just tricks on top of tricks, but there's some of it is just the art of getting to know how to work in a really difficult machine learning problem. And I think what's important, the important difference with something like a Kaggle competition, where they'll set up this kind of toy problem and then there will be an out of sample test, like, Hey, you did well out of sample. And this is like, okay, cool. But what's cool with Numeri is the out of sample is the real life stock market. We don't even know, like we don't know the onset of the problem. We don't, like you'll have to find out live. And so we've had users who've like submitted every week for like four years because it's kind of, we say it's the hardest data science problem on the planet, right? And it sounds maybe sounds like maybe but too much for like a marketing thing, but it's the hardest because it's the stock market. It's like literally there are like billions of dollars at stake and like no one's like letting it be inefficient on purpose. So if you can find something that works at Numeri, you really have something that is like working on the real stock market. Yeah, because there's like humans involved in the stock market. I mean, you could argue there might be harder data sets like maybe predicting the weather, all those kinds of things. But the fundamental statement here is, which I like, I was thinking like, is this really the hardest data science problem? And you start thinking about that, but ultimately it also boils down to a problem where the data is accessible. It's made accessible, made really easy and efficient at like submitting algorithms. So it's not just, you know, it's not about the data being out there, like the weather. It's about making the data super accessible, making the ability of community around it. Like this is what ImageNet did. Exactly. Like it's not just, there's always images. The point is you aggregate them together. You give it a little title. This is a community and that was one of the hardest, right, for a time. And most important data science problems in the world because it was accessible, because it was made sort of, like there was mechanisms by which like standards and mechanisms by which you judge your performance, all those kinds of things. And Numerize actually step up from that. Is there something more you can say about why from your perspective it's the hardest problem in the world? I mean, you said it's connected to the market. So if you could find a pattern in the market, that's a really difficult thing to do because a lot of people are trying to do it. Exactly. But there's also the biggest one is it's non stationary time series. We've tried to regularize the data so you can find patterns by doing certain things to the features and the target. But ultimately you're in a space where you don't, there's no guarantees that the out of sample distributions will conform to any of the training data. And every single era, which we call on the website, like every single era in the data, which is like sort of showing you the order of the time. Even the training data has the same dislocations. And so, yeah, and then there's so many things that you might wanna try. There's unlimited possible number of models, right? And so by having it be open, we can at least search that space. Zooming back out to the philosophical, you said that Numerai is very much like Wall Street Bets. Is there, I think it'd be interesting to dig in why you think so. I think you're speaking to the distributed nature of the two and the power of the people nature of the two. So maybe can you speak to the similarities and the differences and in which way is Numerai more powerful in which way is Wall Street Bets more powerful? Yeah, this is why the Wall Street Bets story is so interesting to me because it's like, feels like we're connected. And looking at how, just looking at the form of Wall Street Bets, I was talking earlier about how, how can you make credible claims? You're anonymous. Okay, well, maybe you can take a screenshot. Or maybe you can upvote someone. Maybe you can have karma on Reddit. And those kinds of things make this emerging thing possible. Numerai, it didn't work at all when we started. It didn't work at all. Why? People made multiple accounts. They made really random models and hoped they would get lucky. And some of them did. Yes. Staking was our solution to, could we make it so that we could trust? We could know which model people believed in the most. And we could weight models that had high stake more and effectively coordinate this group of people to be like, well, actually there's no incentive to creating bot accounts anymore. Either I stake my accounts, in which case I should believe in them because I could lose my stake or I don't. And that's a very powerful thing that having a negative incentive and a positive incentive can make things a lot better. And staking is like this, is this really nice like key thing about blockchain. It's like something special you can do where they're not even trusting us with their stake in some ways. They're trusting the blockchain, right? So the incentives, like you say, it's about making these perfect incentives so that you can have coordination to solve one problem. And nowadays I sleep easy because I have less money in my own hedge fund than our users are staking on their models. That's powerful. In some sense, from a human psychology perspective, it's fascinating that the WallStreetBets worked at all, right? That amidst that chaos, emerging behavior, like behavior that made sense emerged. It would be fascinating to think if numerized style staking could then be transferred to places like Reddit, you know? And not necessarily for financial investments, but I wish sometimes people would have to stake something in the comments they make on the internet. Yeah. That's the problem with anonymity is like, anonymity is freedom and power that you don't have to, you can speak your mind, but it's too easy to just be shitty. Yeah, exactly. So this, I mean, you're making me realize from a profoundly philosophical aspect, numerized staking is a really clean way to solve this problem. It's a really beautiful way. Of course, it only with Numerai currently works for a very particular problem, right? Not for human interaction on the internet, but that's fascinating. Yeah, there's nothing to stop people. In fact, we've open sourced the code we use for staking in a protocol we call Erasure. And if Reddit wanted to, they could even use that code to enable staking on our Wall Street pets. And they're actually researching now, they've had some Ethereum grants on how could they have more crypto stuff in there in Ethereum, because wouldn't that be interesting? Like, imagine you could, instead of seeing a screenshot, like, guys, I promise I will not sell my GameStop. We're just going to go huge. We're not going to sell at all. And here is a smart contract, which no one in the world, including me, can undo, that says, I have staked millions against this claim. That's powerful. And then what could you do? And of course, it doesn't have to be millions. It could be just a very small amount, but then just a huge number of users doing that kind of stake. Exactly. That could change the internet. It would change, and then Wall Street. It would change Wall Street. They would never have been able to, they would still be short squeezing one day after the next, every single hedge fund collapsing. If we look into the future, do you think it's possible that numerae style infrastructure, where AI systems backed by humans are doing the trading, is what the entirety of the stock market is, or the entirety of the economy, is run by basically this army of AI systems with high level human supervision? Yeah, the thing is that some of them could be bad actors. Some of the humans? No, well, these systems could be tricky. So actually, I once met a hedge fund manager, and this is kind of interesting. He said, very famous one, and he said, we can see, sometimes we can see things in the market where we know we can make money, but it will mess shit up. We know we can make money, but it will mess things up. And we choose not to do those things. And on the one hand, maybe this is like, oh, you're being super arrogant. Of course you can't do this, but maybe he can. And maybe he really isn't doing things he knows he could do, but would be pretty bad. Would the Reddit army have that kind of morality or concern for what they're doing? Probably not, based on what we've seen. The madness of crowds. There'll be one person that says, hey, maybe, and then they get trampled over. That's the terrifying thing, actually. A lot of people have written about this, is somehow that little voice that's human morality gets silenced when we get into groups and start chanting. And that's terrifying. But I think maybe I misunderstood. I thought that you're saying AI systems can be dangerous, but you just describe how humans can be dangerous. So which is safer? So one thing is, so Wall Street bets these kinds of attacks. It's not possible to model, numerize data, and then come up with the idea from the model, let's short squeak, just game stop. It's not even framed in that way. It's not possible to have that idea. But it is possible for a bunch of humans. So I think this, it's, numera could get very powerful without it being dangerous. But Wall Street bets needs to get a little bit more powerful, and it'll be pretty dangerous. Yeah, well, I mean, this is a good place to think about numera data today and numera signals and what that looks like in 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. Right now, I guess, maybe you can correct me, but the data that we're working with is like a window. It's an anonymized, obfuscated window into a particular aspect, time period of the market. And you can expand that more and more and more and more, potentially. You can imagine in different dimensions to where it encapsulates all the things that, where you could include kind of human to human communication that was available to buy GameStop, for example, on Wall Street bets. So maybe as a step back, can you speak to what is numera signals and what are the different data sets that are involved? So with numera signals, you're still providing predictions to us, but you can do it from your own data sets. So numera, it's all you have to model our data to come up with predictions. Numa signals is whatever data you can find out there, you can turn it into a signal and give it to us. So it's a way for us to import signals on data we don't yet have. And that's why it's particularly valuable, because it's going to be signals. You're only rewarded for signals that are orthogonal to our core signal. So you have to be doing something uncorrelated. And so strange alternative data tends to have that property. There isn't too many other signals that are correlated with what's happening on Wall Street bets. That's not going to be correlated with the price to earnings ratio. And we have some users, as of recently, as of a week ago, there was a user that created, I think he's in India, he created a signal that is scraped from Wall Street bets. And now we have that signal as one of our signals in thousands that we use at Numerai. And the structure of the signal is similar, so it's just numbers and time series data. It's exactly. And it's just like, you're providing a ranking of stocks. So you just say, a one means you like the stock, zero means you don't like the stock, and you provide that for 5,000 stocks in the world. And they somehow converted the natural language that's in the Wall Street bet. Exactly. And they open sourced this Colab notebook. You can go and see it. And so, yeah, it's making a sentiment score. And then turning it into a rank of stocks. A sentiment score. Yeah. Like, this stock sucks, or this stock is awesome. And then converting. That's fascinating. Just even looking at that data would be fascinating. So on the signal side, what's the vision? This long term, what do you see that becoming? So we want to manage all the money in the world. That's Numerai's mission. And to get that, we need to have all the data and have all of the talent. Like, there's no way, first principles, if you had really good modeling and really good data that you would lose, right? It's just a question of how much do you need to get really good. So Numerai already has some really nice data that we give out. This year, we are 10xing that. And I actually think we'll 10x the amount of data we have on Numerai every year for at least the next 10 years. Wow. So it's going to get very big, the data we give out. And signals is more data. People with any other random data set can turn that into a signal and give it to us. And in some sense, that kind of data is the edge cases, the weirdness is the, so you're focused on the bulk, the main data. And then there's just weirdness from all over the place that just can enter through this back door of Numerai signals. Exactly. And it's also a little bit shorter term. So the signals are about a seven day time horizon. And on Numerai, it's like a 30 day. So it's often for faster situations. You've written about a master plan. And you've mentioned, which I love, in a similar sort of style of big style thinking, you would like Numerai to manage all of the world's money. So how do we get there from yesterday to several years from now? Like what is the plan? So you've already started to allure to get all the data and get all the talent, humans, models. Exactly. I mean, the important thing to note there is, what would that mean? And I think the biggest thing it means is if there was one hedge fund, you would have not so much talent wasted on all the other hedge funds. Like it's super weird how the industry works. It's like one hedge fund gets a data source and hires a PhD. And another hedge fund has to buy the same data source and hire a PhD. And suddenly, a third of American PhDs are working at hedge funds. And we're not even on Mars. And so in some ways, Numerai, it's all about freeing up people who work at hedge funds to go work for Elon. Yeah. And also, the people who are working on Numerai problem, it feels like a lot of the knowledge there is also transferable to other domains. Exactly. One of our top users, he works at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. And he's amazing. I went to go visit him there. And he's got Numerai posters. And it looks like the movies. It looks like Apollo 11 or whatever. Yeah, the point is he didn't quit his job to join full time. He's working on getting us to Jupiter's moon. That's his mission, the Europa Klippa mission. Actually, literally what you're saying. Literally. He's smart enough that we really want his intelligence to reach the stock market. Because the stock market's a good thing. Hedge funds are a good thing. All kinds of hedge funds, especially. But we don't want him to quit his job. So he can just do Numerai on the weekends. And that's what he does. He just made a model and it just automatically submits to us. And he's like one of our best users. You mentioned briefly that stock markets are good. From my sort of outsider perspective, is there a sense, do you think trading stocks is closer to gambling? Or is it closer to investing? Sometimes it feels like it's gambling as opposed to betting on companies that succeed. And this is maybe connected to our discussion of shorting in general, but from your sense, the way you think about it, is it fundamentally still investing? I do think, I mean, it's a good question. I've also seen lately people say, this is like speculation. Is there too much speculation in the market? And it's like, but all the trades are speculative. All the trades have a horizon. People want them to work. So I would say that there's certainly a lot of aspects of gambling math that applies to investing. Like one thing you don't do in gambling is put all your money in one bet. You have bankroll management, and it's a key part of it. And small alterations to your bankroll management might be better than improvements to your skill. And then there are things we care about in our fund. Like we want to make a lot of independent bets. We talk about it, like we want to make a lot of independent bets, because that's going to be a higher sharp than if you have a lot of bets that depend on each other, like all in one sector. But yeah, I mean, the point is that you want the prices of the stocks to be reflective of their value. Of the underlying value of the company. Yeah, you shouldn't have there be like a hedge fund that's able to say, well, I've looked at some data, and all of this stuff's super mispriced. That's super bad for society if it looks like that to someone. I guess the underlying question then is, do you see that the market often drifts away from the underlying value of companies, and it becomes a game in itself? Like with these, whatever they're called, like derivatives, like the options, and shorting, and all that kind of stuff. It's like layers of game on top of the actual, like what you said, which is like the basic thing that the Wall Street Bets was doing, which is like just buying stocks. Yeah. There are a lot of games that people play that are in the derivatives market. And I think a lot of the stuff people dislike when they look at the history of what's happened, they hate like credit default swaps, or collateralized debt obligations. Like these are the enemies of 2008. And then the long term capital management thing, it was like they had 30 times leverage, or something. You could just go to a gas station and ask anybody at the gas station, is it a good idea to have 30 times leverage? And they just say no. It's like common sense just like went out the window. So yeah, I don't respect long term capital management. OK. But Numerai doesn't actually use any derivatives unless you call shorting derivative. We just we do put money into companies. And that does help the companies we're investing in. It's just in little ways. We really did buy Tesla. And it did. And we played some role in its success. Super small, make no mistake. But still, I think that's important. Can I ask you a pothead question, which is what is money, man? So if we just kind of zoom out and look at, because I'd love to talk to you about cryptocurrency, which perhaps could be the future of money. In general, how do you think about money? You said Numerai, the vision, the goal is to run, to manage the world's money. What is money in your view? I don't have a good answer to that. But it's definitely in my personal life, it's become more and more warped. And you start to care about the real thing, like what's really going on here. Elon talks about things like this, like what is a company, really? It's a bunch of people who show up to work together and they solve a problem. And there might not be a stock out there that's trading that represents what they're doing, but it's not the real thing. And being involved in crypto, I put in crowdsale of Ethereum and all these other things and different crypto hedge funds and things that I've invested in. And it's just kind of like, it feels like how I used to think about money stuff is just totally warped. Because you stop caring about the price and you care about the product. So by the product, you mean the different mechanisms that money is exchanged. I mean, money is ultimately a kind of a little, one is a store of wealth, but it's also a mechanism of exchanging wealth. But what wealth means becomes a totally different thing, especially with cryptocurrency, to where it's almost like these little contracts, these little agreements, these transactions between human beings that represent something that's bigger than just cash being exchanged at 7.11, it feels like. Yeah. Maybe I'll answer what is finance. It's what are you doing when you have the ability to take out a loan? You can bring a whole new future into being with finance. If you couldn't get a student loan to get a college degree, you couldn't get a college degree if you didn't have the money. But now, weirdly, you can get it with, and all you have is this loan, which is like, so now you can bring a different future into the world. And that's how when I was saying earlier about if you rerun American economic history without these things, like you're not allowed to take out loans, you're not allowed to have derivatives, you're not allowed to have money, it just doesn't really work. And it's a really magic thing how much you can do with finance by bringing the future forward. Finance is empowering. We sometimes forget this, but it enables innovation. It enables big risk takers and bold builders that ultimately make this world better. You said you were early in on cryptocurrency. Can you give your high level overview of just your thoughts about the past, present, and future of cryptocurrency? Yeah, so my friends told me about Bitcoin, and I was interested in equities a lot. And I was like, well, it has no net present value. It has no future cash flows. Bitcoin pays no dividends. So I really couldn't get my head around it, that this could be valuable. And then I didn't feel like I was early in cryptocurrency, in fact, because it was like 2014. It felt like a long time after Bitcoin. But then I really liked some of the things that Ethereum was doing. It seemed like a super visionary thing. I was reading something that was just going to change the world when I was reading the white paper. And I liked the different constructs you could have inside of Ethereum that you couldn't have on Bitcoin. Like smart contracts and all that kind of stuff? Exactly, yeah. And even spoke about different constructions you could have. Yeah, that's a cool dance between Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's in the space of ideas. It feels so young. Like, I wonder what cryptocurrencies will look like in the future. If Bitcoin or Ethereum 2.0 or some version will stick around or any of those, who's going to win out? Or if there's even a concept of winning out at all? Is there a cryptocurrency that you especially find interesting that technically, financially, philosophically, you think is something you're keeping your eye on? Well, I don't really. I'm not looking to invest in cryptocurrencies anymore. But I mean, and many are almost identical. I mean, there wasn't too much difference between even Ethereum and Bitcoin in some ways, right? But there are some that I like the privacy ones. I mean, I like Zcash for its coolness. It's actually a different kind of invention compared to some of the other things. OK, can you speak just briefly to privacy? Is there some mechanism of preserving some privacy of the universe? So I guess everything is public. Yeah. Is that the problem? Yeah, none of the transactions are private. And so I have some numeraire. And you can just see it. In fact, you can go to a website and it says like, you can go to like, etherscan. And it'll say like, numeraire founder. And I'm like, how the hell do you guys know this? So they can reverse the near, whatever that's called. Yeah, and so they can see me move it, too. They can see me. Oh, why is he moving it? Yeah. So but yeah, Zcash. Also, when you can make private transactions, you can also play different games. Yes. And it's unclear. It's like what's quite cool about Zcash is I wonder what games are being played there. No one will know. So from a deeply analytical perspective, can you describe why Dogecoin is going to win? Which it surely will. Like it very likely will take over the world. And once we expand out into the universe, we'll take over the universe. Or on a more serious note, like what are your thoughts on the recent success of Dogecoin where you've spoken to sort of the meme stocks, the memetics of the whole thing, that it feels like the joke can become the reality. Like the meme, the joke has power in this world. Yeah. It's fascinating. Exactly. It's like why is it correlated with Elon tweeting about it? It's not just Elon alone tweeting, right? It's like Elon tweeting and that becomes a catalyst for everybody on the internet kind of like spreading the joke, right? Exactly. The joke of it. So it's the initial spark of the fire for Wall Street bets type of situation. Yeah. And that's fascinating because jokes seem to spread faster than other mechanisms. Like funny shit is very effective at captivating the discourse on the internet. Yeah, and I think you can have, like I like the one meme, like Doge, I haven't heard that name in a long time. Like I think back to that meme often. That's like funny. And every time I think back to it, there's a little probability that I might buy it, right? And so imagine you have millions of people who have had all these great jokes, told them, and every now and then they reminisce, oh, that was really funny. And then they're like, let me buy some. Wouldn't that be interesting if we travel in time like multiple centuries where the entirety of the communication of the human species is like humor? Like it's all just jokes. Like we're high on probably some really advanced drugs and we're all just laughing nonstop. It's a weird like dystopian future of just humor. Elon has made me realize how like good it feels to just not take shit seriously every once in a while and just relieve like the pressure of the world. At the same time, the reason I don't always like when people finish their sentences with lol is like when you don't take anything seriously. When everything becomes a joke, then it feels like that way of thinking feels like it will destroy the world. It's like, I often think of like, will memes save the world or destroy it? Because I think both are possible directions. Yeah, I think this is a big problem. I mean, I always felt that about America, a lot of people are telling jokes kind of all the time and they're kind of good at it. And you take someone aside, an American, you're like, I really wanna have a sincere conversation. It's like hard to even keep a straight face because everything is so, there's so much levity. So it's complicated. I like how sincere actually like your Twitter can be. You're like, I am in love with the world today. I get so much shit for it, it's hilarious. I'm never gonna stop because I realize like, you have to be able to sometimes just be real and be positive and just be, say the cliche things, which ultimately those things actually capture some fundamental truths about life. But it's a dance. And I think Elon does a good job of that from an engineering perspective of being able to joke, but everyone's mostly to pull back and be like, here's real problems, let's solve them and so on. And then be able to jump back to a joke. So it's ultimately, I think, I guess a skill that we have to learn. But I guess your advice is to invest everything anyone listening owns into Dogecoin. That's what I heard from this interaction. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, our hedge fund is unavailable. Just go straight to Dogecoin. You're running a successful company. It's just interesting because my mind has been in that space of potentially just being one of the millions of other entrepreneurs. What's your advice on how to build a successful startup, how to build a successful company? I think that one thing I do like, and it might be a particular thing about America, but there is something about playing, tell people what you really want to happen in the world. Don't stop. It's not gonna make it, like if you're asking someone to invest in your company, don't say, I think maybe one day we might make a million dollars. When you actually believe something else, you actually believe you're actually more optimistic, but you're toning down your optimism because you want to appear like low risk. But actually it's super high risk if your company becomes mediocre because no one wants to work in a mediocre company. No one wants to invest in a mediocre company. So you should play the real game. And obviously this doesn't apply to all businesses, but if you play a venture backed startup kind of game, like play for keeps, play to win, go big. And it's very hard to do that. I've always feel like, yeah, you can start narrowing your focus because 10 people are telling you, you gotta care about this boring thing that won't matter five years from now. And you should push back and do the real, play the real game. So be bold. So both, I mean, there's an interesting duality there. So there's the way you speak to other people about like your plans and what you are like privately just in your own mind. And maybe it's connected with what you were saying about, yeah, sincerity as well. Like if you appear to be sincerely optimistic about something that's big or crazy, it's putting yourself up to be kind of like ridiculed or something. And so if you say, my mission is to, yeah, go to Mars, it's just so bonkers that it's hard to say. It is, but one powerful thing, just like you said, is if you say it and you believe it, then actually amazing people come and work with you. Exactly. It's not just skill, but the dreams. There's something about optimism that, like that fire that you have when you're optimistic of actually having the hope of building something totally cool, something totally new, that when those people get in a room together, like they can actually do it. Yeah. Yeah, there's, yeah, that's, and also makes life really fun when you're in that room. So all of that together, ultimately, I don't know, that's what makes this crazy ride of a startup really look fun. And Elon is an example of a person who succeeded at that. There's not many other inspiring figures, which is sad. I used to be at Google and there's something that happens that sometimes when the company grows bigger and bigger and bigger, where that kind of ambition kind of quiets down a little bit. Yeah. Google had this ambition, still does, of making the world's information accessible to everyone. And I remember, I don't know, that's beautiful. I still love that dream of that they used to scan books, but just in every way possible make the world's information accessible. Same with Wikipedia. Every time I open up Wikipedia, I'm just awe inspired by how awesome humans are, man. And creating this together, I don't know what the meanings are over there, but it's just beautiful. Like what they've created is incredible. And I'd love to be able to be part of something like that. And you're right, for that, you have to be bold. And there's, and strange to me also, I think you're right that there's how many boring companies there are. Something I always talk about, especially in FinTech, it's like, why am I excited about, this is so lame. Like what is, this isn't even important. Even if you succeed, this is gonna be like terrible. This is not good. And it's just strange how people can kind of get fake enthusiastic about like boring ideas when there's so many bigger ideas that, yeah, I mean, you read these things, like this company raises money, and it's just like, that's a lot of money for the worst idea I've ever heard. Some ideas are really big. So like I worked on autonomous vehicles quite a bit. And there's so many ways in which you can present that idea to yourself, to the team you work with, to just, yeah, like to yourself when you're quietly looking in the mirror in the morning, that's really boring or really exciting. Like if you're really ambitious with autonomous vehicles, it changes the nature of like human robot interaction, it changes the nature of how we move. Forget money, forget all that stuff. It changes like everything about robotics and AI, machine learning, it changes everything about manufacture. I mean, cars, transportation is so fundamentally connected to cars, and if that changes, it's changing the fabric of society, of movies, of everything. And if you go bold and take risks and be willing to go bankrupt with your company, as opposed to cautiously, you can really change the world. And it's so sad for me to see all these autonomous companies, autonomous vehicle companies, they're like really more focused about fundraising and kind of like smoke and mirrors, they're really afraid, the entirety of their marketing is grounded in fear and presenting enough smoke to where they keep raising funds so they can cautiously use technology of a previous decade or previous two decades to kind of test vehicles here and there, as opposed to do crazy things and bold and go huge at scale, do huge data collection. And yeah, so that's just an example. Like the idea can be big, but if you don't allow yourself to take that idea and think really big with it, then you're not gonna make anything happen. Yeah, you're absolutely right in that. So you've been connected in your work with a bunch of amazing people. How much interaction do you have with investors, that whole process is an entire mystery to me. Is there some people that just have influence on the trajectory of your thinking completely, or is it just this collective energy behind the company? Yeah, I mean, I came here and I was amazed how, yeah, people would, I was only here for a few months and I met some incredible investors and I'd almost run out of money. And once they invested, I was like, I am not gonna let you down. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna send them like an email update every like three minutes. And then they don't care at all. So they kind of wanna, I don't know, like, so for some, I like it when it's just like, they're always available to talk, but a lot of building a business, especially a high tech business, there's a little for them to add, right? There's little for them to add on product. There's a lot for them to add on like business development. And if we are doing product research, which is for us research into the market, research into how to make a great hedge fund, and we do that for years, there's not much to tell the investors. So that basically is like, I believe in you. There's something, I like the cut of your jib. There's something in your idea, in your ambition, in your plans that I like. And it's almost like a pat on the back. It's like, go get them kid. Yeah, it is a bit like that. And that's cool. That's a good way to do it. I'm glad they do it that way. Like the one meeting I had, which was like really good with this was meeting Howard Morgan, who's actually a co founder of Renaissance Technologies in the like 1980s and worked with Jim Simons. And he was in the room and I was meeting some other guy and he was in the room and I was explaining how quantitative finance works. I was like, so they use mathematical models. And then he was like, yeah, I started Renaissance. I know a bit about this. And then I was like, oh my God. So yeah, but then, and then I think he kind of said, well, yeah, he said, well, cause I was talking, he was working at first round capital as a partner and they kind of said, they didn't want to invest. And then I wrote a blog post describing the idea and I was like, I really think you guys should invest. And then they end up. Oh, interesting. You convinced them on that. That must be good. Yeah, cause they're like, we don't really invest in hedge funds. And I was like, you don't see like what I'm doing. This is so a tech company, not a hedge fund, right? Yeah, and Numerai is brilliant. It's, when it caught my eye, there's something special there. So I really do hope you succeed in the, obviously it's a risky thing you're taking on, the ambition of it, the size of it, but I do hope you succeed. You mentioned Jim Simons. He comes up in another world of mine really often on the, he's just a brilliant guy on the mathematics side as a mathematician, but he's also brilliant finance hedge fund manager guy. Have you gotten a chance to interact with him at all? Have you learned anything from him on the math, on the finance, on the philosophy, life side, things? I've played poker with him. It was pretty cool. It was like, actually in the show, Billions, they kind of do a little thing about this poker tournament thing with all the hedge fund managers. And that's real life thing. And they have a lot of like world series of bracelet, world series poker bracelets holders, but it's kind of Jim's thing. And I met him there and yeah, it was kind of brief, but I was just like, he's like, oh, how do you, why are you here? And I was like, oh, Howard sent me, you know, he's like, go play this tournament, meet some of the other players. And then... Was it Texas Holdem? Yeah, Texas Holdem tournament, yeah. Do you play poker yourself or was it? Yeah, I do. I mean, it was crazy. On my right was the CEO, who's the current CEO of Renaissance, Peter Brown. And Peter Muller, who's a hedge fund manager at PDT. And yeah, I mean, it was just like, and then, you know, just everyone. And then all these bracelet world series, like people that I know from like TV. And Robert Mercer, who's fucking crazy. Who's that? He's the guy who donated the most money to Trump. And he's just like... It's a lot of personality. Character, yeah, geez, it's crazy. So it's quite cool how, yeah, like the, it was really fun. And then I managed to knock out Peter Muller. I have a, I got a little trophy for knocking him out because he was a previous champion. In fact, I think he's won the most. I think he's won three times. Super smart guy. But I will say Jim outlasted me in the tournament. And they're all extremely good at poker, but they're also, so it was a $10,000 buy in. And I was like, this is kind of expensive, but it all goes to charity, Jim's math charity. But then the way they play, they have like rebis and like they all do a shit ton of rebis because it's for charity. So immediately they're like going all in and I'm like, man, like, so I ended up adding more as well. So it's like you couldn't play at all without doing that. Yeah, the stakes are high. But you're connected to a lot of these folks that are kind of titans of just of economics and tech in general. Do you feel a burden from this? You're a young guy. I did feel a bit out of place there. The company was quite new and they also don't speak about things, right? So it's not like going to meet a famous rocket engineer who will tell you how to make a rocket. They do not want to tell you anything about how to make a hedge fund. It's like all secretive and that part I didn't like. And they were also kind of making fun of me a little bit. Like they would say, like they'd call me like, I don't know, the Bitcoin kid or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they would say, even things like, member Peter, yeah, said to me something like, I don't think AI is gonna have a big role in finance. And I was like, hearing this from the CEO of Renaissance was like weird to hear because I was like, of course it will. And he's like, but he can see, I can see it having a really big impact on things like self driving cars. But finance, it's too noisy and whatever. And so I don't think it's like the perfect application. And I was like, that was interesting to hear because it's like, and I think it was that same day that Libra, I think it is, the poker playing AI started to beat like the human. So it was kind of funny hearing them like say, oh, I'm not sure AI could ever attack that problem. And then that very day it's attacking the problem of the game we're playing. Well, there's a kind of a magic to somebody who's exceptionally successful looking at you, giving you respect, but also saying that what you're doing is not going to succeed in a sense. Like they're not really saying it, but I tend to believe from my interactions with people that it's a kind of prod to say like, prove me wrong. Yeah. That's ultimately, that's how those guys talk. They see good talent and they're like. Yeah. And I think they're also saying it's not gonna succeed quickly in some way. They're like, this is gonna take a long time and maybe that's good to know. And certainly AI in trading, that's one of the most philosophically interesting questions about artificial intelligence and the nature of money. Because it's like, how much can you extract in terms of patterns from all of these millions of humans interacting using this methodology of money? It's like one of the open questions in the artificial intelligence. In that sense, you converting into a data set is one of like the biggest gifts to the research community, to the whole, anyone who loves data science and AI, this is kind of fascinating. I'd love to see where this goes actually. I think I say sometimes long before AGI destroys the world, a narrow intelligence will win all the money in the stock market. Way, like just a narrow AI. Yeah. And I don't know if I'm gonna be the one who invents that. So I'm building Numerai to make sure that that narrow AI uses our data. So you're giving a platform to where millions of people can participate and do build that narrow AI themselves. People love it when I ask this kind of question about books, about ideas and philosophers and so on. I was wondering if you had books or ideas, philosophers, thinkers that had an influence on your life when you were growing up or just today that you would recommend that people check out blog posts, podcasts, videos, all that kind of stuff. Is there something that just kind of had an impact on you that you couldn't recommend? A super kind of obvious one that I really, I was reading Zero to One while coming up with Numerai. It was like halfway through the book. And I really do like a lot of the ideas there. And it's also about kind of thinking big and also it's like peculiar little book. It's like why, like there's a little picture of the hipster versus Unabomber. And it's a weird little book. So I like, there's kind of like some depth there. In terms of a book on a, if you're thinking of doing a startup, that's a good book. A book I like a lot is maybe my favorite book is David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity. I just found that so optimistic. It puts you, everything you read in science, it like makes the world feel like kind of colder because like it's like we're just coming from evolution and coming from nothing should be this way or whatever. And humans are not very powerful. We're just like scum on the earth. And the way David Deutsch sees things and argues, he argues them with the same rigor that the cynics often use and then has a much better conclusion. That's some of the statements of things like, anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics can be solved. So ultimately arriving at a hopeful, like a hopeful path forward. Yeah, without being like a hippie. You've mentioned kind of advice for startups. Is there, in general, whether you do a startup or not, do you have advice for young people today? You're like an example of somebody who's paved their own path and were, I would say exceptionally successful. Is there advice, somebody who's like 20 today, 18, undergrad or thinking about going to college, or in college and so on that you would give them? I think I often tell young people don't start companies. Is it not, don't start a company unless you're prepared to make it your life's work. Like that's a really good way of putting it. And a lot of people think, well, this semester I'm gonna take a semester off. And in that one semester, I'm gonna start a company and sell it or whatever. And it's just like, what are you talking about? It doesn't really work that way. You should be like super into the idea, so into it that you wanna spend a really long time on it. Is that more about psychology or actual time allocation? Like, is it literally the fact that you need to give 100% for potentially years for it to succeed? Or is it more about just the mindset that's required? Yeah, I mean, I think, well, any, I think, yeah, you don't wanna have, certainly don't wanna have a plan to sell the company like quickly or something, or it's like a company that has a very, it's like a big fashion component. Like it'll only work now. It's like an app or something. So yeah, that's a big one. And then I also think something I've thought about recently is I had a job as a quant at a fund for about two and a half years. And part of me thinks if I had spent another two years there, I would have learned a lot more and had even more knowledge to be where, to basically accelerate how long Numerai took. So the idea that you can sit in an air conditioned room and get free food, or even sit at home now in your underwear and make a huge amount of money and learn whatever you want and get, it's just crazy. It's such a good deal. Yeah, oh, that's interesting. That's the case for, I was terrified of that. Like at Google, I thought I would become really comfortable in that air conditioned room. And that, I was afraid the quant situation is, I mean, what you present is really brilliant that it's exceptionally valuable, the lessons you learn, because you get to get paid while you learn from others. If you see that, if you see jobs in the space of your passion that way, that it's just an education. It's like the best kind of education. But of course you have, from my perspective, you have to be really careful on that to get comfortable. Again, in a relationship, then you buy a house or whatever the hell it is, and then you get, and then you convince yourself like, well, I have to pay these fees for the car, for the house, blah, blah, blah. And then there's momentum and all of a sudden you're on your death bed and there's grandchildren and you're drinking whiskey and complaining about kids these days. So I'm afraid of that momentum, but you're right. Like there's something special about the education you get working at these companies. Yeah, and I remember on my desk, I had like a bunch of papers on quant finance, a bunch of papers on optimization, and then the paper on Ethereum, just on my desk as well, and the white paper, and it's like, it's been amazing how kind of, and you can learn about, so that, I also thought, I think this idea of like learning about intersections of things, I don't think there are too many people that know like as much about crypto and quant finance and machine learning as I do. And that's a really nice set of three things to know stuff about. And that was because I had like free time in my job. Okay, let me ask the perfectly impractical, but the most important question. What's the meaning of all the things you're trying to do so many amazing things, why? What's the meaning of this life of yours or ours? I don't know. Humans. Yeah, so I have yet had some people say, asking what meaning of life is, is like asking the wrong question or something. The question is wrong. Yeah. No, usually people get too nervous to be able to say that because it's like your question sucks. I don't think there's an answer. It's like the searching for it. It's like sometimes asking it. It's like sometimes sitting back and looking up at the stars and being like, huh, I wonder if there's aliens up there. There's a useful like a palette cleanser aspect to it because it kind of wakes you up to like all the little busy, hurried day to day activities, all the meetings, all the things you'd like a part of. We're just like ants, a part of a system, a part of another system. And then asking this bigger question allows you to kind of zoom out and think about it. But there's ultimately, I think it's an impossible thing for a limited capacity, like cognitive capacity to capture. But it's fun to listen to somebody who's exceptionally successful, exceptionally busy now, who's also young like you, to ask these kinds of questions about like death. You know, do you consider your own mortality kind of thing and life, whether that enters your mind? Because it often doesn't, it kind of almost gets in the way. Yeah. It's amazing how many things you can like that are trivial that could occupy a lot of your mind until something bad happens or something flips you. And then you start thinking about the people you love that are in your life. Then you started thinking about like, holy shit, this ride ends. Exactly. Yeah, I just had COVID and I had it quite bad. What wasn't really bad is just like, I also got a simultaneous like lung infection. So I had like almost like bronchitis or whatever. I don't even, I don't understand that stuff, but I started, and then you're forced to be isolated. Right. And so it's actually kind of nice because it's very depressing. And then I've heard stories of, I think it's Sean Parker. He had like all these diseases as a child and he had to like just stay in bed for years. And then he like made Napster. It's like pretty cool. So yeah, I had about 15 days of this recently, just last month. And it feels like it did shock me into a new kind of energy and ambition. Were there moments when you were just like terrified at the combination of loneliness? And like, you know, the thing about COVID is like, there's some degree of uncertainty. Like it feels like it's a new thing, a new monster that's arrived on this earth. And so, you know, dealing with it alone, a lot of people are dying. It's like wondering like. Yeah, you do wonder, I mean, for sure. And then there are the even new strains in South Africa, which is where I was. And maybe the new strain had some interaction with my genes and I'm just gonna die. But ultimately it was liberating somehow. I loved it. Oh, I loved that I got out of it. Okay. Because it also affects your mind. You get confused, you get confusion and kind of a lot of fatigue and you can't do your usual tricks of psyching yourself out of it. So, you know, sometimes it's like, oh man, I feel tired. Okay, I'm just gonna go have coffee and then I'll be fine. It's like, now it's like, I feel tired. I don't even wanna get out of bed to get coffee because I feel so tired. And then you have to confront, there's no like quick fix cure and you're trapped at home. But that, so now you have this little thing that happened to you that was a reminder that you're mortal and you get to carry that flag in trying to create something special in this world. Right? With Numerai. Listen, this was like one of my favorite conversation because the way you think about this world of money and just this world in general is so clear and you're able to explain it so eloquently. Richard, that was really fun. Really appreciate you talking to me. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Crave and thank you to our sponsors, Audible Audio Books, Trial Labs, Machine Learning Company, Blinkist app that summarizes books and Athletic Greens all in one nutrition drink. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Warren Buffett. Games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Richard Craib: WallStreetBets, Numerai, and the Future of Stock Trading | Lex Fridman Podcast #159

The following is a conversation with Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, cofounder of Mozilla, which created the Firefox browser, and now cofounder and CEO of Brave Software, which has created the Brave browser. Each of these are revolutionary technologies. JavaScript is one of the most widely used and impactful programming languages in the world. Firefox pioneered many browser ideas that we love today or even take for granted today, and Brave is looking to revolutionize not only the browser, but content creation online and the nature of the internet to make it fundamentally about respecting people's control over their data. Quick mention of our sponsors. The Jordan Harbinger Show, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, Better Help Online Therapy, and AidSleep Self Cleaning Mattress. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that there's a tension between theory and engineering that I've been thinking a lot about. I tweeted something like, "'Good execution is more important than a good idea, "'but one helps the other.'" I think the wording of that sucks, but what I mean is a good idea is a must, but in my experience, good ideas are in abundance. Good execution, on the other hand, is rare. I think some mix of good timing, good idea, and good execution is essential. Getting that mix right is tough, and Brendan, somehow, multiple times in his career, did just that. I'm starting to believe it's more art than science, like most interesting things in life. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review an Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Brendan Eich. When did you first fall in love with programming? I didn't program a lot when I was in high school, but I had a friend who had a Commodore PET, and after we saw Star Wars, he said, "'Hey, let's make a basic program "'that does the Death Star Trench run.'" And it was just simple 2D graphics, and I didn't know what I was doing, so I just helped him out on the math and stuff like that. I was a math and science kid. I was really into the HP calculators of the early mid-'70s. These were the RPN. They were really strongly built, and as Arik Goldfinger said of gold, divinely heavy. There's probably some gold in them, too, gold metalization. But they were awesome calculators, and they had all the scientific functions, so I was really into that. So I aimed toward physics. I was a little late for the, I think, the 20th century golden age, and I read a lot of science fiction, so I was like, yeah, it's on the hyperdrives and warp drives, and physics was not gonna get there quickly, and I started hacking on computers while I was studying physics as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University, and I dodged the Fortran bullet because I was in the science department instead of the engineering department, where they still did Fortran card decks. I think they had an auto collator. But we were using Pascal, and I got one of the first portable C Compilers ports to the DEC minicomputers we were using, and I fell in love with programming just based on procedural abstraction, Pascal, just what now would be considered old school, like structured programming from the 70s. Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal, was a good writer and a good pedagogue, right? He always at ETH would do these courses where it's like build your own computer, build your own compiler, build your own operating system. It was scratch. Yeah, kind of. And I know some people who were grad students under him and said he would torture the students with things like this custom email system that had 25 word limit and things like that. I unfortunately dodged both the Pascal and the Fortran bullets. Could you maybe linger on the Pascal? What kind of programming language was it? What is it reminiscent of today? Because it sounds like it may have had an impact on your own trajectory. Yeah, it was in the ALGOL family, and ALGOL was the big successful language design and compiler project in the 60s. It had a successor called ALGOL 68, which was ambitious but not as successful. But Pascal was kind of wordy procedures and functions language. It distinguished between functions which return a value and procedures which don't, which just compute. And you could say that whole ALGOL family went into ADA. Pascal had a second life thanks to Borland with Turbo Pascal, which was hugely successful. I think in large part due to Anders Helberg, who then went to Microsoft and did C Sharp and done that with his team there and has done really well doing TypeScript, type JavaScript. So yeah, there's a lineage here. But I was also interested in C and Unix by the time I was an undergrad because people were bringing Unix up on all sorts of hardware. I had some friends who were doing their own wirewrapped computers, 6820 maybe. And I was wirewrapping for my engineering course, 6809 or something simpler, building a computer on a board. And I wanted to build a more ambitious one and port Unix to it, but I picked the wrong processor. I picked the National Semiconductor NS16032, which was this amazing, you know, CISC, complex instruction set computer, and not the reduced instruction set computers that were just being contemplated into the mid eighties. And RISC ultimately went out. RISC won in some ways, it dissolved into, you have both now, you have these super scalar architectures where like Intel has kept probably too much backward compatibility at the instruction level, but that's just, there's a front end that parses that into these, you know, these wide internal instructions. So, you know, the very long instruction word research that was also interesting at the time kind of became the micro architecture inside the backward compatible Intel. But I picked a National Semi chip and it never got made successfully. It was full of bugs and I never could have brought it up. But I went on out of physics after three years into math, computer science. And like I said, I did it because I saw, I was being sort of childlike and naive about physics. And I thought, meanwhile, the Valley is go go for computers. The Apple II, right? The PC, the Intel 8086, 8088 based PC, the IBM, you know, gave Microsoft the future for, you know, somewhat fishy deal. So it was wide open in the computing space, but in physics, you were as optimistic about physics as? No, I mean, I was one of three brothers who were all in the same grade. I have a twin and a younger brother who skipped second grade and was with us the whole time after that. And, you know, he went on, he actually studied under Kip Thorne at Caltech. But he also didn't, he ended up in software. He didn't talk about physics stuff. Does it make you sad that theoretical physics, even with string theory, hasn't really had any foundational breakthroughs in the latter part of the 20th century? Yeah, in fact, I'd say the problem is theory over experiment. I would say, you know, we need more Aristotle and less Plato. You know, mathematics is not all physical. There are lots of mathematics that cannot be realized as far as I know in this world. So to understand the world, you need to do experiments. You need to not just dream up inductive theories that could have lots of alternative theories competing with them, with no way to decide between them, except aesthetics, which is not a good guide in my opinion. Yeah, I don't know if you are friends or have a relationship with Elon Musk. Where's the, in terms of like what you would love to see our society investing in, building up, is it closer to Elon or is it closer to Feynman and Einstein and those? Well, those gentlemen are no longer with us and I think that's noticed. So like I said, the real glory days of physics, the famous pictures from Germany before the second war were just a fantastic assembly of brains, Schrodinger and Einstein. And physics, I think, took a wrong turn that maybe all of, I would say, Western science took in going for models over reality, right? You see this in all sorts of fields. Now, we can build models that are very predictive and generative and then we build actual devices or semiconductors, things like that. That's good, I'm not dismissing that. We need good models, we need to experiment and prove them and test them. But the problem I've seen in physics, which you see certainly in economics, the dismal science, and you see surprisingly in other so called hard sciences is models that don't really have to be tested against reality. They can instead become policy tools or they can become, like I said, one of a large family of alternate theories that could be as predictive but nobody's doing the winnowing out. That's such an interesting tension in society. You see this in even the software scientists which have a deep love for psychology. You see this in epidemiology, not with the virus. Absolutely. There's this tension of how much of the world can we understand through just a beautifully fit model? And then at the same time, my main work is in machine learning where it's like there is no provable thing usually. It's all about just getting the right data set and getting tricks and so on. And there's this tension even in my own soul of I grew up on theoretical computer science. I loved approximation algorithms, all of that different complexity classes, just those little puzzles. I mean, I don't know, to you as somebody who was in math and computer science and then ended up going into places where you engineer some of the most impactful things in this world, do you see the P versus NP, all that whole space is interesting at all? Yeah, it's not that useful in practice. People are using it with sort of crypto analysis or asymptotic arguments about can we have a quantum resistant crypto algorithm, things like that, which may not be practical, right? If you follow Mikhail Diakonov or Gil Kalai, there are big questions about how quantum computing will scale up, how practical it will be. Is that something that you think about quantum computing? Not except for spare time. Like you said, I'm not using this kind of computer science in practice because almost everything now is engineering and finding ways to get computers to be more useful for people, which goes from design problems, which are really kind of an art. Like you said, anything you can't automate is an art. Well, we can have machine learning compose music and it can imitate, you can train it, and it can sound kind of decent, but maybe lacking that je ne sais quoi. But user interface still, I think, requires human art. So speaking of things that didn't follow a perfect theory and model, JavaScript, so there's two things. One, it had an impact on the world at a huge scale, obviously, and it also still is one of probably the most popular programming language in the world. So can we go back to the origin story? Can you tell the story of how JavaScript was created? Yeah, I was at Silicon Graphics after graduate school for seven years, and it got to be big and successful and divisionalized and political, and I thought kind of boring. And a friend who'd been there went to one of the last of the super companies, the super startups in the early 90s. There were several. I suppose General Magic was a little after that around the same time. But Micro Unity was that company that I went to, and it was because my friend Jeff Weinstein had gone there from Silicon Graphics. He recruited me, and Micro Unity was doing everything. So this was like the ultimate sort of pretend grad school. It was doing a new fab, new semiconductor process. It was doing new analog and digital circuits on the same very large but not wafer scale chip. Originally, it was five centimeters on a side. It was really hot too, so I needed a water cooler. It was a Craykiller, and then they shrunk it, and they tried to do a home sort of media processor that was essentially a barrel processor. But you could think of trying to do all the things that we now see in modern architectures with short vector instructions and sort of wide instructions or multiple issue, and doing a lot of the stuff in software because the second iteration, the set top box, was really for avoiding the cost to the cable company of rolling the trucks out to replace your garbage General Atlantic set top box with a totally newer, less garbagey one. So if you could have software gradable set top boxes, the cable companies thought they could save a lot of money and add features. Is this assembly, or which level of the software? It was like, we were writing in, we were using GCC. We were writing C++ and C. Somebody I worked with there, really very smart guy, hired from a sort of Wall Street hotshot programming consultancy, did his own hardware design as well as software. And we were working on how to make not only a short vector units, but general bit shufflers and permuters. So you could do things like crypto algorithms efficiently, and you could do demodulation of the cable, complex quadrature amplitude modulated signal. So you're basically taking A to D converters, dumping things in buffers, and then doing the rest in software. All the framing and the Reed Solomon and Viterbi and all that error correction. So that was really great learning experience, but it was not gonna work. It was doing too many risky things at once, right? If you, as Jim Clark said to me, when I hopped to Netscape after three years at MicroUnity, he said, oh yeah, you do 10 things each, one in 10 odds, it's gonna be one in 10 billion, right? The multiplication principle. So, Netscape was already a rocket, and I passed the chance to go there in 1994. I knew the founders because I worked at SGI, Clark's company. Could you pause for a second in Netscape? When was the launch of this rocket? 94. 94 was the launch of Netscape? And I went there in early 95 in April. Okay, so you said you missed the launch. Well, I missed the first floor employment opportunity, but the IPO was August 1995, so I was there for that. How obvious was it that Netscape was like world changing? What was the layout? Was Netscape one of the first big browsers? Yes, so when I was at MicroUnity still in 93, we saw a browser called Mosaic. And up till then, we'd used email and we'd used Usenet, the NNTP protocol, we'd use news readers, we used FTP, we used all these old internet protocols, all relying on the DNS and TCP IP and UDP for that matter. When I was at Silicon Graphics, we brought up the whole stack, right? We had to discover how to find the ethernet addresses on your network and then find IP addresses for them, ARP protocol, all that stuff. And it was great because nobody knew in the 80s what was gonna win, all the proprietary stacks like IBM, SNA and DeckNet and all these other protocols were saying, we're gonna do it or it's gonna be heterogeneous future. And instead it was Berkeley Unix and the TCP IP stack that dated back to the ARPANET that won. And I think we knew it, we all knew it at SGI, but the salespeople didn't. And so they kept trying to get multiple network stacks interoperating, but in the end it won. And so that was the internet and it was email and texty and it was used and very texty. And then Tim Berners Lee did his thing, but I don't think I was paying attention. And I think the date when he first did it or when he wrote the famous emails and pushed back to 89, but I noticed a mosaic in 93 because one of the things that Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina did at NCSA was they innovated on the early HTML standard. They in particular Mark sent this email saying, hey everybody, we think you should be able to put an image in a page. And you know when he sent that Eric Bina had already written the code. And I talked to Tim Berners Lee more recently just a few years ago and he was like, oh, we had another way of doing it and it didn't work out because Mark shipped his in mosaic. And this convinced me of several things. One, the internet meant there was a huge first mover advantage and being fast, getting on first mattered a lot. And so Richard Gabriel of scheme and poetry fame has written about this, the famous. What's poetry? Well, he's a poet. Oh, actual poetry. Is he talking about some kind of something? No, no. I mean, he's the founder of Lucid, which is where Jamie Zawinski worked before Netscape. And Lucid was doing compilers and Lucid Emacs, which was a fork of Emacs, famously Jamie fighting against Richard Stallman, Stalmax. And so Richard Gabriel, very, very brainy computer guy, but also a poet, but he wrote a nice essay that gets abused all the time. In fact, Jamie's put a kind of warning in front of his version of it on his site, JWC.org called Worse is Better. And this is about survival advantage of software in the network world, in my opinion. It's about Unix. It started out being framed as Unix and Lisp, good news, bad news, because all the Lisp people, the MIT people were like, oh, you know, the crown jewel scheme, this Faberge egg or Common Lisp, this giant cathedral, of course we're going to win. This is civilization. And those, you know, those farmers in New Jersey to borrow from the Sopranos, those picks down at Bell Labs, they're just, you know, there's nothing sound there. It's all hacking. Well, guess what won? Wow, so you're saying this is a fundamental, like principle of the internet is moving fast wins. You could say in almost any network system, like in biological evolution, you see successful alleles sweep populations and they don't always have, you know, they aren't free of flaws. They're heterozygous advantage, right? You can get both parents give you the gene variant and you get sickle cell anemia, right? But if one of them does, you're more resistant to malaria. And so this isn't a beautiful process, except at large scale. And then you realize that because it moves fast and can adapt, it can win. And people still struggle with this. I used to struggle with this because JavaScript was done in such a hurry and the force of web compatibility meant early mistakes couldn't be fixed. And even the standards process injected new mistakes, as it will. But often standards bodies go back and making compatible changes. You can't do that with the web. It's more like, again, like biology, you preserve what still works. You don't want to break ATP metabolism or whatever. So you have to kind of resign yourself to the reality of worse is better being enshrined in actual design points you might not like. And that happened with JavaScript and I'm way over it, but it also, I think was a huge advantage. That's why JavaScript has kind of swept a lot of programming domains. People will say, oh, it's not because of merit. Well, you're right. But we also improved it over time in the standards body. I spent 20 years doing that. And you don't get that choice. It's like, I'm not saying that that was the best language. I'm just saying that was the right time to do it. And I like to say the alternative was not to do it. I could have told Netscape, I can't do this. It's too rushed. And it would have been visual basic script. And it would have been bad. So that's a good way to present the alternative. But so it was a Netscape and you have written it in how many days and why was it only that many days? And what was the goal and the underlying principles in your mind at the time? So the whole, I'm sort of describing worse is better in a frenetic way because it fit the model of Netscape. When it was known that Jim Clark and Marc Inves were founding Netscape and they did the first release in 1994, that browser took over from Mosaic. In fact, that's why Mozilla is called that. It's the Mosaic killer. It's like the giant monster that kills Mosaic. That's awesome. And they knew they could, it wasn't that, again, it's not like you're doing advanced scientific research that is changing the world. You're more like taking down the last iteration on the browser, Marc did, which had images and other importances before he stopped working on it. And you're making Netscape the new thing that has images, plugins, which was the way to do video back in the day. It had something that's kind of died now for tiled windows called frames and frame sets. HTML tables, that was new. Eric Bina did tables in Netscape 1.1. So when I got there, they were heading toward IPO. Clark wanted the IPO early, I think his instinct was right. And that kicked off the whole dot com era, right? There was a recession in the US in 91. You can see old law and order reruns where they talk about the recession and how hard it's hitting New Yorkers. And after that, Greenspan really goosed things at the Federal Reserve and technology had been sort of fermenting in a way that came together with the internet. And Netscape made it possible to do pets.com, to do eBay, to get people to recognize a URL on a billboard and then type it in when they get home. And that was huge. That was so fast moving a rocket that Marc and the engineering team there thought, we need to make this a programmable browser, not just a document viewer, not just a video. It was all HTML with images and tables and also, like you said, frames. There was no dynamic element at all. Yeah, the most dynamism we get was from a plugin, which there are a few of them then. Flash didn't exist at that point. It was, I think. Java Applets yet or no? Well, that's the thing we did to deal with Sun. In fact, I was recruited to go do Scheme in the browser. Remember Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman's beautiful Lisp variant? I was gonna do it in the browser because my friends from SG, I thought, hey, we like Scheme, you like Scheme. And I'm like, I hardly ever use Scheme. It's not really used in industry, except in sort of silos, but I like it. Okay, I'll come do Scheme in the browser. I have a slide from my 2017 talk where I have Bruce Willis crawling through the duct in Die Hard. He's like, come out to the coast, have a lot of fun. Come on, do Scheme in the browser. But when I got there, there was no Scheme in the browser because they'd started a deal with Sun Microsystems. And my best contact there was Bill Joy, who I admired as a Berkeley Unix founder. And, you know, Sun founder. And Bill got the idea of making the browser programmable too. And so the main idea was to put the Java VM, which at that point was not really easy to embed, into Netscape, including the Netscape version on Windows that was still most popular, which was the 16 bit Windows 3.1, which was going away. Microsoft was coming out with Windows 95 and everyone was afraid they were gonna do Internet Explorer, I guess, two at that point, three the next year. They already bought or invested in somehow Spyglass, this other company that shot out from NCSA at University of Illinois. And in fact, Microsoft had tried to buy Netscape in late 94, before I got there. And I heard about this later. I heard they offered way too little money. And so, you know, Jim Barksdale and Jim Clark said, get out of here, you know, pound sand. But then they realized, oh, this is going to hurt us because now they're gonna copy us. Didn't happen right away. I'm not sure when Gates internet title wave memo was written. That's the famous memo he wrote when Bill Gates realized that Microsoft was going down this old copy AOL path or copy CompuServe path, a project called Blackbird, presumably after the SR71, I don't know. But they were gonna make a, you know, dial up service with a custom content language stack and custom rendering. It wasn't the web. You know, they could have content partners. They have a lot of money, but it still wasn't to scale the web. It wasn't gonna be compelling. And Gates realized this, and he turned the company on a dime and they couldn't buy Netscape. Again, I'm not sure the timing, so they decided to copy it. And once we realized that everybody inside Netscape felt even more urgency and more of a frenetic mood. And so my chance to do scheme disappeared when the Java deal started brewing. But there was still a chance to do a companion language to Java because Java was a compiled, is a compiled language. It's evolved and improved quite a lot since then too, but it was for sort of serious advanced programmers that cost a certain salary or hourly rate. And people observed, Bill Joy observed, and Mark Andreessen and I observed that in a mature stack like Microsoft, you really benefit from having a scripting language like Visual Basic, which became Visual Basic script in IE3, but didn't take over and kill JavaScript, that you need two languages. One is for the component writers who are higher price and more expert. And the other is for scripters, certified public accountants, designers, graphic designers with some programming inclination, anybody, amateurs, doesn't matter. There's a much more demotic approach there for programming the components together, gluing them together. Some people say duct tape language, which I don't really like. But we saw, Bill Joy and Mark Andreessen and I, we saw the need for a companion language. And the gleam in our eye was to call it JavaScript. I didn't like it, that was marketing's plan. Mark called it Mocha, which I liked. And Netscape Marketing, I think, didn't like that. So they said, oh, there's some trademark and some software somewhere that uses Mocha, so we can't use that. And they tried LiveScript in August and that didn't last. And then finally we got the trademark license in December 1995. But the work I did to prove that it could be done was important because I came in in April and even then Netscape was growing so fast that they couldn't find an open hiring requisition in the client team for me. So they hired me into the server team. And I worked for a month on server team on what became HTTP 1.1. So I was actually, I had done protocol work at Silicon Graphics with Greg Chesson, former Bell Labs intern, grad student intern who knew all the Unix founders. And Greg was very interested in taking protocols to the next level with VLSI, because he thought that CPUs wouldn't scale up. He was mistaken in that, unfortunately. Moore's law more than kept up. And you have gigabit ethernet running with conventional processors. But I worked on protocols at SGI as well as Unix kernel hacking and NFS and things like that. So I came into Netscape to work on the server side for a month, but I was thinking the whole time, what should this language be like? Should it be easy to use? Might its syntax even be more like natural language like HyperTalk, which is Bill Atkinson's language in HyperCard, if you ever used HyperCard on an early Mac. And I thought, well, I'd like to do that, but my management is saying, make it look like Java, which looks like C from a distance. What does that mean? Is it braces? We're talking about visually? Does that mean like, management, do they understand what they think about? Marketing didn't know, but management did. Like Rick Schell, the VP of engineering, knew. And we had a plan even that was, if you have this companion language, you're going to glue things together between Java and JavaScript. So you're going to have commerce in memory, in the heap with data types. So you're going to want some of the data types in Java to reflect in the JavaScript. You're going to want the primitive types that Java unfortunately separated from objects. So at least some of them, double, let's call it in Java's terms from the C term for double precision floating point, or strings or Booleans and objects. And so right away there was this constraint that looking like Java meant kind of a C curly brace syntax but also some of the data types and objects. Like objects and so on, all that kind of stuff. Comparison operator. Garbage collection, all that stuff. Even the bitwise operators and the shift operators including the unsigned right shift, which Java had because it didn't have unsigned integer types. It said, if you want to do unsigned operations, use an operator. And that turned out to be important much later. I'll tell that story five time. But JavaScript inherited a set of operators, the expression grammar, the statement grammar up to a point from Java. But I wanted a functional language. I wanted scheme, a little bit of scheme, even though it wasn't as clean as scheme. I wanted. So you had a love, sorry to interrupt. You had a love for scheme and list but that functional language landscape. Yes, I wanted first class functions because I saw the need for callbacks in the browser where it's a single threaded program. All the early browsers were single threaded and it's the right model for users. Most users weren't ready for mutual exclusion and threading. So in a single threaded world, you cannot block the user interface. So you have to use a callback and run later. And without getting too fancy and trying to capture the continuation like call CC does in scheme, I thought I'll just make it easy to have fun arcs. First class functions you pass downward and it can call back, it'd be called back. And Java didn't have that at the time. It took forever to get proper first class functions or lambdas now into Java, Java seven or eight, I think. It did have concurrency, right? Yes. From the very beginning. But you were thinking that the JavaScript in the browser would not have the luxury of being concurrent. That's right. And the reason was Java was gonna run in the plugins. So it could fork threads and go to town. But the main action in the browser was in the single threaded program, the single Unix process on Unix or Windows. And it was where you had to service the event loop and then go do things. Respond to the network layout, some HTML, render it, turn widths into heights by filling containers, boxes, the early, what became the CSS box model. And run scripts to make the thing livelier, respond to user input. And all that event driven programming was in part like HyperCard because HyperCard had this on event name syntax. And so that's why you have in JavaScript on click run together as the name of the event handler. And there's some funny ones on mouse over and on mouse out, people still complain about those. But there were many more events now over the years standardized, but it was a mix of event driven single threaded programming because it had to run in the main thread of the browser where the action is and Java never got there. Which meant Java could not interact easily or quickly or in a nested way with the document, with the objects reflected from the HTML document, with the tables and forms and so on. And that is one of the reasons I think JavaScript survived and Java kind of died. Java was in this plugin prison. It essentially was confined to a rectangle, the applet rectangle. And while we even built next year, Nick Thompson, a friend from SGI who was an intern grad student at CMU at the time, built the first version of Live Connect to glue Java and JavaScript together to deliver on that vision where you do have commerce between the data types in the heap. Did it work? It worked, but Java was in charge. JavaScript was in charge and Java was just these components, these helper objects. You might as well do everything in JavaScript. What happened over time, it's like an evolutionary filter. It just kind of, who needs the plugin? And in fact, Sun mismanaged Java as a plugin. They thought, oh, Netscape is giving us the distribution vehicle and we don't care about the browser. It's just about getting Java out there. And that was a big miscalculation. They then tried, because Microsoft's killing Netscape after years, they tried getting into Microsoft. And you may remember there was a Sun Microsoft deal which famously blew up. And Microsoft kicked Java out of Windows. And that's when they really pulled the trigger. I think they'd already evaluated it and liked it on Anders Helzberg's.NET and C Sharp and decided we're gonna just not have Java. We don't want any of that Sun stuff. We don't want the patent risk. We don't want, I'm not sure what all fights were about. There was some patent angle to it, I think. And up till then, Microsoft had been using Java components like in Outlook Web Access, which had a lot of JavaScript to be a webmail like Hotmail, like user interface. They had to call the mail server through HTTP and they used a Java object to do this. And when they gave the boot to Sun, suddenly the left hand gave the boot and the right hand said, we better do something else in Outlook Web Access. What are we gonna do? And they said, let's just add an ActiveX component, which is their own native way of embedding things in languages and it'll be what became XML HTTP request, which is now a web standard for calling asynchronously. And it's been replaced by the fetch API in HTML5 or HTML living document. But this whole lineage goes back to Java being successfully the loser and getting kicked out. And after Microsoft kicked it out, it was a plugin and you would find it required for like smart card banking in the Nordic countries where that was mandated by law, but really didn't get used much. Or there were pilots who used it for flight information, but Flash, which Netscape could have bought, but fortunately didn't. The early days. Yeah, we would have screwed it up. What year are we talking about with Flash? I think after the IPO, so it was probably late 95. Oh, Flash was around. Was it Adobe? No, it wasn't. No, it was called Future Splash and it was these brothers, Jonathan Gay, I think his name was, and he came knocking and the marketing guy at Netscape, who was screening the technology partners or wannabe acquisitions was brutal and just everybody wanted to get in on the Netscape, stock gravy train and he sent them packing and they ended up selling to Macromedia and Macromedia was where Flash was created. And the good thing about Macromedia was it was a tool company. So it invested in the best ideas, I think, which are still somewhat lost to us of Flash, the timeline, animation has sort of been a mutable function over time. They had the tooling around that too, like they had Dreamweaver, there's a Flash. Flash Director, there were a bunch of them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that was a great. Flash Builder was one of the last ones. These tools were used by real artists and special effects people and designers. All the restaurant websites around 2005 were done in Flash, which was, we were trying to do HTML5 at the same time. That was the Firefox era. We were trying to make the web capable enough you didn't need Flash, but if you recall, you go to a restaurant and it's like, this is kind of like a game or something. It's like a Flash, all the font looks small. So you didn't like Flash from the beginning. You're like, this doesn't feel right. Not really. I actually admire Flash's technology and I'm pretty pragmatic about these things. And I realized that it doesn't matter if your Delta bad hand like JavaScript was a rush job, or if you have Flash as a plugin and you can invest in the tools and make it pretty good. You should make it better for your users and grow it as best you can. And what happened with the browser due to Microsoft's monopoly abuse for which they were convicted. And even after that, until I think Firefox and then Chrome was people kept saying, oh, the web can't do X, can't do Y. We'll have to have a plugin. We'll have to have a new approach. We'll clean the slate and have a new web. And everyone who said that failed. And the reason they failed is because there's too much value in the web, this huge network. And the worse is better principle means that you can not only start bad, which they all sneer at, but get on first and get wide distribution, get sort of evolutionary advantage in priority of place, but you can also improve it over time. And so if you're gonna improve Flash, and for some reason Flash is now out of favor. Steve Jobs said you can't have Flash on the iPhone. That was probably the death knell. Put your energy into JavaScript. And that happened, right? So we did things at Mozilla with Adobe to improve, which bought my Macromedia, to improve Flash and to improve the version of JavaScript that was in Flash. We tried to standardize that. Oh, that's right. I'm getting ahead of myself with it. It was ES4. Yeah. That's right, that's right. Can we just rewind to the magical, like, you know. It's a special moment in the history of all of computing. We'll talk about it later, but it's arguable. It's possible that the entirety of the world will run in JavaScript at some point. So like, it's like those days, it would be interesting if you could just describe, actually zooming in on how the cake was baked from the several days that you were working on it. What was on your mind? How much coffee were you drinking? Were you nervous? Why, freaking out? I'll try to remember it. I mean, you're right. There are these pregnant moments you see in hindsight, maybe they're overrated, but like Hegel sees Napoleon on horseback at Jena and says, there's the world spirit on horse. And I knew that there was a chance to do it. Mark knew, and he was my executive sponsor and he was the one sort of brainstorming how the JavaScript should be right there in the page. That was important for him to say that. Cause I thought so too, but a lot of people were like, well, you can't write programming language in the middle of the markup. And indeed there are problems. If you did it naively, you'd see the code laid out as like random gibberish. So I had to figure out how to hide that. That was a challenge. Is that a breakthrough idea? I mean, so you and Mark thinking about this idea that you just inject code in the middle of the markup. Of the webpage. I consider kind of heretical. There was an SGML guru, I forget his name, but he corresponded with me and at first he was angry. He's like, you should have used a marked section. Why didn't you use a marked section? And I said, well, SGML marked sections are not part of HTML by the way, and they're not supported in the browser. And so I did some hack that was equivalent and over time you could do the proper SGML thing. But eventually he came around and it was again, sort of evolutionary necessity. It was almost like introgression, like the idea which Lynn Margulies, I think helped get across that we have to consider mutualism biology that maybe mitochondria were ancient prokaryotes that got into the cell and became beneficial. Somehow the same sort of thinking applies. You have to embed JavaScript in HTML. It's gonna be a good virus. It won't hurt you. The code becomes data in the sense it just gets carried along. But is there the side of the, so you were focusing on Netscape at that time. Doesn't the browser have to support interpret correctly this mix of HTML and whatever code? I had to hide it from old browsers, including Netscape 1.1, which was predominant then. So I used an HTML comment, but the inside the container that comment lived in the script tag, which is a new element, I could make different semantics in Netscape 2 where those HTML comment delimiters instead of being multi line brackets became one line or essentially one line. So you wrote, so JavaScript was written, the programming language was written as a comment. A comment for old browsers and a set of brackets that were ignored with real code for new. And it was this two way comment hiding hack, as I called it, that was absolutely necessary for us to get off the ground. We couldn't have bootstrapped JavaScript without it. We didn't have scripts that were loaded from a separate file. The only scripts in Netscape 2 were inline in the document. What were the challenges here? What, like what, you know, typing, what were the choices you were thinking about? What was the design for this garbage collection? I didn't have time to write a garbage collector. So I just, I didn't at first. The thing was using essentially arenas or what GNU calls object pools and just would run out of memory eventually. And I added reference counting in a hurry after the 10 days in which I hacked. So after I was in the server team doing HTTP 1.1 and thinking about the language, I finally got transferred to the client team in early May. And that's when I, you know, I got the go sign from Mark and it was like, we can't wait because people inside Netscape are doubting. Even people inside Sun are definitely doubting. Bill Joy was the champion, but he was like alone in that in seeing that there was a role for JavaScript as the, as I call it, the sidekick language, robbing the boy hostage. Frank Miller put it in the Dark Knight Returns that there was this silly little language that would be the glue language and it could become important over time. And you were better off having that complementarity, that pairing of languages, just like Microsoft stacked it with visual C plus plus and visual pacing. So what was the big moment of I'm done? So I had to do a demo. I forget the dates. I think I, for a history of programming languages paper that Alan Wiersbrock did with my help, he did a lot of the writing. I think it was the 10 days from like Thursday evening through to the following weeks, you know, the whole of that week and then into the Monday. You get sleep? Not enough. And I was really going fast because I had already used a lot of C compiler and front end compiler knowledge that I'd gained from undergraduate school. When I started getting into computing as a renegade physics major, people were formalizing more efficient bottom up grammars, parsers for bottom up languages, really LALR one was the big thing. And I studied all this and learned how to parse them. And in the end, if you're doing C languages, you often do what Dennis Ritchie did anyway, which is the recursive descent parser. You can hand code it. And I did that for JavaScript in a blazing hurry, mostly got it right. I didn't have precedence inversion problems or other bugs, but I copied a lot from Java and C. And I tried to keep things simple, like the equality operator in those 10 days sprint between two objects of different dynamic type said, no, they're not equal, their types are different. And then after that, I had internal early adopters and they were using JavaScript to match a number against a database field that had been stringized. And they said, oh, can we just have implicit conversion? Like an idiot, I agreed. I gave them what they wanted. I was trying to please them and get adoption. And that broke what equivalence relation nature there was to the double equal. There's some edge cases with not a number that break that too, but it really broke it. Having an implicit conversions in the operator is something that people still roast me over. So let's talk about two things. One, it sounds like the comparison operator, the equality operator is the thing that you regret. So maybe you can. Making it sloppy. Making it sloppy. So what is the biggest thing you regret in those 10 days? And what is the biggest thing you're proud of? So that making it sloppy came after the 10 days. And my lesson there, which I've tweeted is when people come to you saying, can you please make it sloppy or add this cute feature? The answer should be no. And I should have known that because I think Nicholas Viert, one of my heroes said, the essence of design is leaving things out. But during the 10 days, I also, like I said, I was in such a hurry, I left out garbage collection, came back to haunt me, but I got reference counting in in time that people weren't running out of memory right away on long lived JavaScript. What happens when you don't have garbage collection and you have objects? Well, you just run out of memory. And you know, at first you write a short script and the page doesn't last long or it doesn't do a lot. It's okay. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah. But if you're writing a game or something and you're doing event based allocation, you run out of memory. And this was noticed in the summer of 1985 and people were like, what's going on? Oh yeah, I better go back and do reference counting. And then the problem with reference counting is you're writing the language in the runtime in C, an unsafe language, and if you're reference counting and you overflow the counter, you mismanage it so it goes high, it gets stuck high, you leak memory again and you run out. If you underflow it, you pre memory that's still in use. And even then we knew what all the security hackers came to know that you therefore have potentially a remote code execution vulnerability. Cause this was before things like non executable heap memory and staff defenses against taking over memory. So if you can, from the remote side, write some HTML and JavaScript that just happens to exploit a bug in memory safety, like it causes JavaScript to underflow reference counter. And the script still has its hands on that object and it's trying to call a method on it and there's some kind of lookup function table in the object, but you've managed to stuff the heap with strings that forwards their own lookalike for the function table. You can call some other code. And this was a problem right away. So security, JavaScript upped the ante. Java had this problem too, but in its own VM. And it just was a separate headache for Sun to worry about. We had this problem in Netscape right away. So Netscape 2 came out after my 10 days and after these follow on work to embed JavaScript better in the browser and to add garbage or collection through reference counting, really I call it reference counting and get it shipped. We had a bunch of dot releases where we fixed security bugs like maniacs. But what is the thing you're, you know, when you sit back on a porch and just look out into the sunset, what are you most proud of from those 10 days? I think the first class functions shines. I think especially since Java didn't have it and it was somewhat unusual. Scheme made it in somehow at the end of the day. In spirit, I mean, people complain because Scheme has, you know, minimalism. It has, you know, six or seven special forms. It has hygienic macros. It has call CC. It has sort of a beautiful complete set of forms to make the land of calculus pleasant to use in practice. And JavaScript is, you know, kind of a multi paradigm or shambolic. Just in a small tangent, you mentioned Mark Andreessen. It sounds like, and Bill Joy, but staying on Mark, it sounds like he had an impact on you in that he sort of believed in what you were doing there. Can you talk about like what role Mark had in your life? Yeah, we would meet at the Peninsula Creamery in downtown Palo Alto. And Mark was just fresh out of, you know, grad school or whatever he was doing and he was big dude and he got fitter later. He had hair, he would order giant milkshakes and burgers and we would meet there and brainstorm about what to do. And it was very direct because we didn't have much time. The sort of, we didn't talk about it. The implication was Microsoft was coming after us. Mark was saying things boldly pre IPO like Netscape plus Java kills Windows, right? This is, make a browser programmable. It becomes the new runtime for programs. It's the meta OS or it's the replacement OS. But he still saw value in JavaScript. Yes, even though he was saying that and Java was the big name, hence the trademark license, he saw JavaScript as important. And he even thought, what if we got, I told this in other interviews, I can say it. He thought, what if we had my friend Kip Hickman who'd been at Netscape from the beginning and who was a kernel hacker at SGI when I joined, he'd started writing his own JVM before we consummated the Sun deal and got our hands on their code. And the Java compiler, Java C, which Arthur Van Hoff had written very nice code, was all written in Java. It was self hosted or so called bootstrap. And so we could use that as soon as Kip's Java VM could run the bytecode from the Sun JVM running the self hosted compiler to emit the bytecode. So once we could bootstrap into Kip's VM, we wouldn't need Sun. And Mark was like, well, maybe we can just ditch Sun. Well, if Kip's Java VM, or if you're a JavaScript VM, now we need graphics. So Mark was thinking far ahead because he knew you could do things with HTML and images, but at some point you really want. Like dynamic graphics or three dimensional? Even SGI had already started its downfall because the first floor VLSI team there had gone off to do 3D effects and all these other companies that made the graphics card on your PC, right? Doom was big and Quake. And so you were, we were all playing Quake. I was old, so I was terrible. But why not put that graphics capability on the web? And in fact, it finally happened at Mozilla with Firefox era with Vlad Vukicovic taking OpenGL ES and reflecting it as WebGL. But OpenGL ES is the mobile version of OpenGL, which is a standard based on SGI GL. So this whole lineage of graphics libraries or really graphics languages for what became the GPU. And Mark was thinking ahead. He's like, we need graphics too. And I thought, okay, I can try to get somebody I knew at SGI, but he's a grad student at MIT. He was studying under Barbara Liskov. He laughed when he heard about this later, Andrew Myers. He's at Cornell, long time, I think he's a full professor. And Mark said, great, we'll get him. I'm not sure he's gonna come. We'll throw money, we'll stock options. We never did it. And they did the Sun deal. So Kip Nobly put aside his own JVM and we used the Sun JVM. So that was an ambitious period. And Mark was very generative because he was pushing hard. He was ambitious and he wanted to have Netscape possibly be in control of the ball. Maybe you can speak to this dance of Netscape versus Internet Explorer. You've thrown some loving words towards Microsoft throughout this conversation, but that's a theme with, I mean, Steve Jobs has a similar sort of commentary. From a big sort of philosophical principle perspective, can you comment on like the approach that Microsoft has taken with Internet Explorer from IE1 to Edge today? Is there something that you see as valuable that they're doing in the occasional copying and that kind of stuff? Or is it, is the world worse off because Internet Explorer exists? So I'm gonna segment this into historical areas because I think Microsoft today with Satya is quite a different company and what they're doing with Edge is different. But back then, Gates, aggressive character, not really original in my view, not an originator. Steve Jobs famously said once, he doesn't have any taste and I don't mean this in a small way, he has no taste. You can see this, Apple at the time had beautiful typography and ligatures and kerning and the fonts looked great. And Windows had this sort of ugly system font that was carefully aligned with Pixel so it didn't get anything. What is it? I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but why was Internet Explorer winning throughout the history of these competitions? Distribution. Distribution matters more than anything. And this is why even now we're seeing in the browser wars Edge doing better because it's being foisted on people of Windows. We have Windows 10 boxes at home. We have some Windows 7 boxes or laptops we keep running to because we don't connect them to the internet generally. But once you have that operating system to hold, you can force Edge. And Apple did it with Safari too. It's not unique to Microsoft. That's sad. But distribution matters. And that's why I think IE was going to win. That's why everybody at Netscape felt we're doomed. This was something Michael Toy and Jamie Woodson were doomed. But for a while there we had a chance and we innovated in Netscape too. We did a big platform push, Java and JavaScript and plugins, more plugins and more HTML table features. And really started making a programmable stack out of what were pretty static web languages. And even in the beta releases of Netscape, two people were using JavaScript to build what you would call single page applications like Gmail. And they were using JavaScript locally to compute things and to call the server on a hidden frame in the background. So it was prefiguring a lot of what came later as AJAX or dynamic JavaScript, dynamic HTML. So people saw that, I mean. Even then they saw it, yeah. That's kind of, I don't know. But from my perspective, that seems quite brilliant. It seems like really innovative that you would have code run in the browser. It did impress me with something which I learned later about from Eric Von Hippel of MIT, which is user innovation networks, lead user effects. That throwing out JavaScript, even though we weren't doing open source, we were doing beta releases early and permissively with Netscape. Getting early developer feedback, absolutely critical. I loved it. I did some of that with SGI with some of the products I worked on, but it really came to the fore in Netscape. And that culminated in Mozilla where you're dealing with developers all the time and early adopters, lead users. But the lead users helped improve JavaScript, even in those last few betas where I could hardly change things. I was under pretty rigid change control. So we're talking about just a small collection of individuals that are just like upfront. A guy named Bill Dorch. You can find his work in the web archives, still from 1996. It's a single page application. It's an artist gallery of mountain art. He used JavaScript? It doesn't quite work. He uses JavaScript locally. He uses a local database. What you would think of now is JSON, but it's all pure JavaScript code, a bunch of objects being constructed. That's so cool. So how is, if you can do sort of a big sweeping progress of JavaScript, how has JavaScript changed over the years? Any of you from those early 10 days with a quick addition of garbage collection and fixes around security, how has this evolution that now it's taken over the world? In this, it's been a bumpy ride because the standards body got shut down after Microsoft, I think, took over the web and then felt punished by the USB Microsoft antitrust case. Can you speak to the standard body? That was a fun ride too because Netscape had taken the lead with the web and HTML innovations like frames and framesets tables. And the W3C was sort of off even then, sort of in SGML land heading toward XML, la la land. I'm gonna be a little harsh on it. What's SGML? I'm sorry. SGML was the precursor markup language to HTML. It was sort of the more extensible standards, generalized markup language. It was a... XML like... Pointy brackets, but it had all sorts of elaborate syntax for doing different semantics. And this is why I think TBL and others who wanted to do the semantic web then took XML forward, but they had this, or some of them anyway, had this strange idea they could replace the web with XML or that they would upgrade the web to be XML. And it couldn't be done. Worse is better had concrete meaning. The web was very forgiving of HTML, including sort of minor syntax errors that could be error corrected. Like error correction isn't generally done in programming languages because... That's another amazing thing about HTML is like, it's more like biology than programming. Exactly. And so XML was in its standard form super strict and could never have admitted the kind of users who were committing these errors. And the funniest part was Microsoft said, hey, we're doing XML, but the way they put it in Internet Explorer under the default media type, put it through the HTML error corrector. Oh, wow. So they kind of bastardized it to make it popular and usable and accessible. And so XML as a pure thing was never gonna take over. And what W3C was kind of not fully functional because Netscape wasn't cooperating with them. We thought about where to take JavaScript and we realized our standards, Guru Kargal realized there was a European standards body that had already given Microsoft fits by standardizing parts of the Windows 3.1 API, which European governments insisted on. They said, Microsoft, we can't use your operating system without some standards. And Microsoft said, here's our docs. And the government said, no, we need a European standard. So this body called the European Computer Manufacturers Association, ECMA, which eventually became global and became a proper noun instead of an acronym. Right, it's just one capital E now with a lowercase CMA. Right, and as one of the early Microsoft guys I met when we first convened a working group to talk about JavaScript said, it sounds like a skin disease. But it gave, I mean, maybe you'll speak to that, but it gave the name to JavaScript of ECMA script. That was the standard name because Java was a trademark of Suns. They were so aggressive, they were sending cease and desist letters to people whose middle European heritage meant their surname was Javanko and they called their website javanko.com and Sunwood sent them a letter saying, you're using J A V A at the start of your domain name, you must cease and desist. I love marketing more than anything else in this world. So ECMA script and now is popularly named as ES plus version. I would say people use JS more than anything. People still say JavaScript. JavaScript is in all the books. So I mean, when you're referring to it, it's usually JavaScript. And when you wanna refer to a version of JavaScript, you'll say ES6, ES5. Yes, or now they've gone to years, which is kind of confusing because it's an offset of 2009, ES6, ES 2016. Yeah, it doesn't match the years perfectly. Yeah, so what were the choices made and how did JavaScript evolve here? So we took this new standards body, which we thought sort of a proven record of standing up to Microsoft, but Microsoft sent a lot of people. They sent some people who were pretty good. And then when they realized that I was there and Netscape was not gonna just bend over and do whatever they wanted, they sent somebody really good. And he was a smart guy. He did a lot of the work on the first draft of the spec. Sean Katzenberger, he's left Microsoft. He even did what I sort of did. He told his bosses, stop bugging me to do other things. I'm focused on this. Cause it took a lot of focused work to create the first draft of the spec. And I was still holding, I was spending almost all the plates. I had like part time help in certain areas. And on the front end integrations, I had the front end guys. But I couldn't take as much time as Sean was to write the draft spec, but I had to participate because I was essentially helping write down what the language did and in areas where we didn't like what it did and Microsoft didn't agree, we sometimes got away with slight changes. And that's the story of standards. You have different implementations and depending on their market power, they interoperate where you have agreement and where they don't, the dominant one usually sets the de facto standard. And then you should probably reflect that into the de jure standard. And this happened with JavaScript. Over time, as Netscape went down and Microsoft went up, we did the first edition of the standard codified in 1997 in France, we had a trip to Nice, which was very memorable. For any interesting reason or just because it's Nice? And ECMA's European and IBM and others were there. Mike Kalashaw, an IBM fellow was a British. And the guy who ran ECMA at the time, Jan van der Bell, was quite a raconteur and a very fun guy. And he had us out for, you know, the great, you know, Fui de mer, the bouillabaisse and the... Was the standardization process beautiful or painful that those early days, you as a designer of the language? It was painful because it was rushed. Now, Guy Steele was contributed by Sun. So even more than Sean, you had this giant brain Guy Steele helping, bringing some of that scheme magic. And he even brought Richard Gabriel for funding. Richard wrote the fourth clause of the ECMA standard, which was kind of an intro to what JavaScript's all about. So we had some really good people and we didn't fight too much. There was some tension where I was fixing bugs and I was late to a meeting and Sean Katzenberger, Microsoft, was actually mad. Like, where is he? We need him. And when I got there, I saw that only he saw this sort of off by one bug in somewhere in the spec. And then I saw it too. And I said, there's a fence post bug there. And then we kind of locked eyes and we realized we were on the same page. And we kind of, he wasn't mad anymore. What were the features that are being struggled over and debated and thought about? It was mainly writing down what worked and what we thought should work in the edge cases that didn't interoperate or that seemed wrong. But we were already laying the groundwork for the future additions that I was already implementing. I was still trying to lead the standard by using the dominant market power to write the code that actually shipped. So the de facto standard would lead the de jure standard. And I was putting in the missing function forms that I didn't have time for in the 10 days. So this is the engineering mindset versus the theoretician. So you didn't want to create the perfect language, but one that was the popular and shipped and all that kind of stuff. And you could say there was, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. So there was a staged process where I had to hold back things that were well designed by others in other languages and I could imitate, but I couldn't do them all in the 10 days. So they came in 1996 and 97, and they came into the third edition of the standard, which was final finalized in 1999. But at that point, Netscape had been sold to AOL which was a decent exit considering and had previously been mercilessly crushed. Netscape was selling the browser along with server software that it had acquired after its IPO and Microsoft was just underpricing it. So there was no way to compete with that. Microsoft was also making Internet Explorer the default browser in Windows, which is called tying and antitrust law. And they were doing even more brutal things. There was a famous investor. He did very well on Google. So he's a billionaire, Ramshree Ram, and he was sales guy or head of sales at Netscape. And he got off the phone looking ashen faced after a compact called and said, Microsoft just told us they're gonna pull our Windows license if we ship Netscape as the default browser. Wow. So there is some bullying going on. It was totally immaterial in the antitrust case. But JavaScript escaped into the standard setting where there was fairly good cooperation. Microsoft had a really good guy on it and Guy Steele was there for a time and there was some good work. But after the antitrust case and Netscape kind of dissolving into AOL and not really going anywhere quickly, Mozilla took years to really bring up, the standard froze. And by 2003, even though they'd been sort of noodling around with advanced versions, JavaScript 2, I'd given the keys to the kingdom to another MIT grad, Baltimore Horwatt. Very big brain and still at Google, I think. He won the Putnam in 86 and he's very mathematical. Legit. He designed this successor language, JavaScript 2, but it only showed up in mutated form in Microsoft's ASP.NET server side and it didn't last there. And it showed up in Flash and that's what became ActionScript 3. Ah, ActionScript, interesting. And then Flash of course declined. And so how did we arrive at ES6 where it's like there's so many, where everyone, okay, there's this history of JavaScript that people were, it was just like cool when you're like having beers to talk crap about JavaScript. Everyone loves to hate, like people who are married say, ah, marriage sucks, is they just wanna get, let off some steam even though everyone uses the language. But ES6, it's become this like reputable, like it fixed major pain points, I think. It added things to the language and added something that was already ES5 strict mode, but made it implicit in class bodies and module bodies. It was a big jump, but it accumulated some of the ES4 designs that we'd done with Adobe for what we hoped would be the fourth edition of ECMAScript that were supposed to fold in some of these old JavaScript 2 ideas that had come into ActionScript 3. So you look at the family tree and you see these forks and the main ones are the ones that go into Adobe Flash acquired from Macromedia and the one that went into the service side of Microsoft's stack, which kind of died. And then trying to bring them back into the standard and not quite succeeding, ES4 was mothballed, but all the good parts that everyone liked made it into ES6. And so that was a success. And I said earlier, I had the wrong year, I think it's 2015, so it's off by. Four, ES6. Yeah, it was finalized in 2015. It took a little longer than we hoped, but because ES5 was 2009 and that was a smaller increment from ES3. We skipped four again, we mothballed it. And we had a split in the committee where some people said, ES4 is too big, we're gonna work on incremental improvements, no new syntax in particular, they promised. Not quite true, but they added a bunch of interesting APIs, Alan Wiersbrock, my coauthor of the Hobble paper. And he was at Microsoft at the time. I ended up hiring with Mozilla. He wanted to get to Mozilla and keep doing his sort of editor job of the JavaScript standard, ECMAScript. And when we got ES6 done, it was a little late, 2015, and we switched to year numbers. So people still call it ES6, I call it ES6. But if you remember, off by nine plus 2000. Yeah, I mean, ES6 is such a big job. I mean, like you said, there's a third that connects all of it, but ES6 is when it became this language that almost feels ready to take over the world completely. More programming and the large features, more features you need for larger teams. Software engineering. Microsoft did something smart, too. Anders and company, Luke Hoban, who's left Microsoft, also did TypeScript. And they realized something, I think, that Gilad Barak has also popularized, and he was involved in Dart at Google. If you, don't worry about soundness in the type system. You don't try to enforce the type checks at runtime in particular. Just use it as sort of a warning system, a tool time type system. You can still have a lot of value for developers, especially in large projects. So TypeScript's been a roaring success for Microsoft. What do you think about TypeScript? Is it adding confusion, or is it ultimately beneficial? I think it's beneficial. Now, it's technically a superset of JavaScript, so of course I love it, right? The shortest JavaScript program is still a TypeScript program. Any JavaScript program is a TypeScript program, which is brilliant, because then you can start incrementally adding type annotations, getting warnings, learning how to use them. Microsoft's had to kind of look around corners at the standards body and guess how their version of modules or decorators should work. And the standards body then may change things a bit. So I think they're obligated with TypeScript either to carry their own version or to bring it back with incompatible changes towards the standard over time. And I think they've played generally fair there. There's some sentiment that, why don't they standardize TypeScript? Well, they've been clear they don't want to. They have a proprietary investment, it's valuable. They have control of the ball. And in some ways, you can say the same thing to any of the other big companies in the standards body. Why doesn't Google standardize its stuff? So you think it'll continue being like a kind of dance partner to JavaScript, to the base JavaScript? There's a hope that at some point, if they keep reconverging it and the standard doesn't break them and goes in a good direction, we will get at least the annotation syntax and some semantics around them. Because when you're talking about type annotations, they're generally on parameters and return values and variable declarations. They're cast operators. You want that syntax to be reserved and you want it to work the same in all engines. And this is where ideas like Gilad's pluggable type systems might be good, though then you could create the same problem you have with Lisp and Scheme, where there's a bunch of macro libraries and they don't agree and you have conflicts between them. But pluggable type systems could be one way to standardize. What do you think about the giant ecosystem of frameworks in JavaScript? It feels like, because, I mean, this is a side effect of how many people use JavaScript, a lot of entrepreneurial spirit create their own JavaScript frameworks and they're actually awesome in all different ways. And this is an interesting question about almost like philosophically about biological system and evolution, all that kind of stuff. Do you see that as good or should it like, should some of them die out quicker? I think maybe they should, now jQuery was a very clever thing, John Resig made this library that was sort of query and do and blended sort of CSS selector syntax with JavaScript sort of object graph or DOM querying and made it very easy for people to do things almost like they were learning jQuery as its own language, domain specific language. And that I think reflected in part the difficulty of using the document object model, these APIs that were originally designed in the 90s for Java as well as JavaScript. They're very object oriented or even procedural. They're very kind of verbose. And it took like a constructor call and three different, you know, hokey pokey dances to do something where as in jQuery, it's just one line. Right, so that fed back finally into the standards. It didn't mean we standardized jQuery. It wasn't quite that concise, but you find now with the modern standards that we were working on in the HTML5 sort of effort that things became simpler, the fetch API and the query selector API, document.querySelector. A lot of things can be done now in raw JavaScript that you would make more concise and terse in jQuery, but it's not bad. It's pretty good. Whereas in the old DOM of 15 years ago, it was just too verbose. So maybe the frameworks were born kind of because JavaScript lacks some of the features of jQuery. And so like now that JavaScript is swallowing what jQuery was, then the frameworks will, only the ones that truly add value will stick around and the other ones will die out. And that highlights this also this division between the core language JavaScript, which can show up in other places like Node.js on the server side and the browser specific APIs or the document object model APIs, which are even managed by the W3C, the standards body that was off in XML La La Land when we were doing real JavaScript standards in ECMA. And you have this division of labor, division of responsibility and division of style and sort of aesthetics and also speed. So the document object model really stagnated after Microsoft kind of deinvested in the web. And Microsoft did something in their haste in the spirit of Netscape, doing things quickly and getting on first called DHTML. And some of their innovations that were like an alternative document object model didn't really get standardized until HTML5 when we pragmatists at Opera at the time, Ian Hickson who went to Google, Apple and Mozilla said let's, XML is not gonna replace HTML, HTML4 is too old. Let's standardize HTML5 based on all this good stuff including that DHTML variant dynamic HTML5. HTML5, it feels like to me, maybe you can correct me, like a beautiful piece of design work. It was, it's not often with web stuff, you have this breath of just like, oh, whoever did this is, it just feels good. Is that, what are your thoughts about HTML? Is the, am I being too romantic? A little bit, a little bit. Are there flaws, fundamental flaws to it that I'm just not aware of? My old friend Hixie did a great job. He was another renegade physics student. And he was basically a QA guy at Opera but he obviously trained physics student and someone who could write British or he developed test suites and he started thinking about them more axiomatically. Now this is, this can be good because you can sort of systematize in a way that makes a better HTML or you can get caught in the pragmatism of saying, well, we have to handle all of these edge cases so we're just gonna have sort of a test matrix. And if the matrix is large, it will not be beautiful by many people's lights. Everyone likes to minimize along their preferred dimensions, the seven special forms and scheme or whatever. But reality is HTML needs to be big. It's kind of shambolic, it's a creative multi paradigm. And Hixie did a good job, I would say, with a bunch of it. Other people came in in the spirit of Ian Hickson to do HTML5 work and they've carried on that effort. And so it's a mix of pragmatism, de facto standards from the past being sort of combined or written down for the first time and then rethought in a way that has a simpler syntax, like the fetch API instead of XML HTTP request. This video too as well, it ultimately, it feels like maybe you can correct me, it feels like it was the nail in the coffin of Flash. Steve Jobs saying no Flash on the iPhone, in my opinion, was the actual sting through the heart. But, well, I'm not sure what trope you wanna use. Flash was a zombie until just this year, right? Or last year, I think last year was the end of Flash in main browsers. But Jobs really did the death blow. And yeah, you're right, we had to make HTML5 competitive. I still don't think we got that beautiful timeline animation. The timeline thing, so you like the time. I mean, me from, I used to animate all kinds of stuff inside Flash, plus there's a programming element. It was a little bit, I don't know if you can comment on that, but to me, it was a little bit like go to statement, like in a sense that it was a little bit too chaotic. Like it didn't, that OCD part of me as a programmer wasn't satisfied by Flash. It feels like there was bugs that were introduced through the animation process that I couldn't debug easily. Yes, I heard that too. I didn't use it, so I'm doing the grass is greener thing here. The thing I liked about the animation model was that it was this immutable function of time. So you could time warp and you could, if you dodged these bugs or worked carefully, you could really make it sing in ways that I think still a little challenging with the web animation standards. But, or just using raw canvas and WebGL. But there's so many tools now that maybe it doesn't matter. And yet we had to do video, we had to do WebGL and then evolve it. We had to do web audio. But once we did all these things that helped Flash die, thanks to Steve Gubbs, we had something that people didn't realize. We had that vision that Market Vision had, this graphics capable to the metal portable runtime. And we at Mozilla realized this and we saw JavaScript was something that you could compile to. Adobe had somebody in the Adobe Labs doing this too. He had a project called Alchemy. We had somebody who's now Google, Alon Zakai, who did his own LLVM based compiler that would take C or C++ and it would emit JavaScript. And you would think this is crazy. You're going from this sort of machine types, low level, controlled memory allocation language to this garbage collected, dynamically typed, high level, higher level language. But Alon sort of just phenomenologically carved nature of the joint and found the forms that were fast in JavaScript. And then with Dave Herman, who I'd recruited from Northeastern University, who was a type theorist, and Luke Wagner, who's still at Mozilla, who was the compiler guy and the JIT guy, they figured out how to codify what Alon had done into a typed subset of JavaScript called Asm.js. And this is a strange thing to think about because it doesn't have new syntax. The types are casts that occur in dominator positions in the control flow graph. So it's like a hack on JavaScript and it's a subset and it uses those bitwise operators that I talked about copying from Java to basically cast numeric types, which are double position flowing point, into integers. And so inside JavaScript, in the kernel semantics, are integers. And if you use these operators, if a compiler emits them in the right places, you can then treat them as typed values, typed memory locations, and you can type check your program. You can not only type check it, you can compile it. And this is all in sort of linear time, Alon. You can compile it to have deterministic performance. It doesn't touch the garbage collector. It calls a bunch of functions that come from the C functions or C++ code that you're compiling. And you can make the Epic Unreal Engine go in 30 frames a second. And when we did this in 2013 in the fall, Tim Sweeney and I didn't think it could be done quickly. Thought it would take years. And the team went to Raleigh, to Epic, and in four days they had Unreal Engine ported by pressing a compile button. But they had to have WebGL, which came from OpenGL. Yes, it came to OpenGL, which came from Silicon Graphics GL. They had to have Web Audio so they could map OpenAL, which was another audio library standard to Web Audio, which was kind of a Chrome idiosyncratic thing. But they could make it work. And they had to have Asm.js for fast C++ to JavaScript. And if you didn't have that fast compiler step, the JavaScript you'd write by hand trying to do an Unreal game would be too big and too slow. It would touch the garbage collector. It would not keep up with 30 frames a second on the hardware, 2013 hardware. So we demoed that at, this must have been fall 2012 now that I think about it. Because we demoed it at GDC, Game Developer Conference 2013. And people were stunned. That's like Unreal Engine, Unreal Tournament running in my browser window. No plugin, no Flash, no Java, no. So were those the early days of, because JavaScript now is able to run basically on par with a lot of the C++. And even before then, you had the fast JavaScript VMs in 2008 when Chrome came out. Just before it came out, Mozilla, my friend Andreas Gal and I and others hacked out Trace Monkey, our Trace based JIT. The Squirrel Fish Extreme team at Apple did their JIT. And we were all competing on these crazy performance benchmarks. It was a little bit too much tuning to the benchmark. But JavaScript started getting fast and developers started noticing it. But it was still kind of its own high level language with garbage collection. The Asm.js step helped us go further because until we really proved the concept, people were still saying, well, JavaScript's okay. It's getting faster, thanks to V8. Everybody gave Google credit, especially Google. But we need something to kill Flash. Let's use the portable native client code that Google had acquired, native client. Which is a separate lineage for taking basically C code, compiling it into a software fault isolated container of some sort using some kind of virtualization technique. And maybe it can even be in process and still be memory safe, that would be awesome. But they ended up using process isolation too. And that kind of weakened it. And in the end, it was like portable native client, okay, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. This is the Google Flash, right? But when we did Asm.js and we showed Unreal Engine working, I think it was only a matter of time before Google threw in the towel. And in fact, everybody agreed in spring of 2015, we're gonna take what was proven by Asm.js and make a new syntax, a binary syntax, it's efficient, that loads into the same JavaScript VM that JavaScript loads into. So there'll be two source languages, one VM, very important, one garbage collector, one memory manager, one set of compiler stages. And that's called WebAssembly. And that's the successor to Asm.js. And it's important that it have binary syntax because at the end of the day, especially on mobile, if you're downloading JavaScript, even if you're using LZ compression on the wire, that's cool, but you've got to blow it out into memory and then parse the silly eight character function keyword that I picked, when I should have used something shorter, I picked it because of awk, the Unix tool. So anyways. I want to, but I'm not following the awk thread. Yeah, don't worry about it. Is it surprising to you that, how damn fast JavaScript is these days? I mean, like, you've been through the whole journey. I know every step of the way, but is it like, I mean, it feels incredible. It does, but I knew, so the funny thing is, computer science is this big karmic wheel, right? Wheel of Fortuna. And in the, it's about the 97, I was loaned by Netscape to do due diligence for Sun in their acquisition of Anamorphic, which was David Unger and friends, people, Craig, I'm forgetting his name, he went to Microsoft. These Stanford language buffs who'd taken Smalltalk and then David create itself as a simpler sort of Smalltalk language and made really fast, just in time compiling VMs for them. And they, you know, well ahead of Java hotspot or JavaScript V8 or any of these modern VMs, figured out how to make dynamic code fast because Smalltalk is dynamic language, right? It has classes, it has, I think more lockdown declarative syntax than JavaScript, but it's fundamentally dynamic. You don't declare the types. But you could infer the types as the program runs and you start to form these ideas about what types are actually flowing through key operations and you form little so called polymorphic inline caches that are optimized machine code. The cache is the machine code that assumes, does a quick check to make sure the type is right and if it's not right, it bails to the interpreter. And if it is right, you go pretty fast. And that short test is a predicted branch, so things are pretty quick. All that amazing stuff I knew about in the 90s and I didn't have time to do it and Anamorphic got bought by Sun and they did hotspot. And you needed that even in Java because at scale, Java has some dynamic aspects due to invoke interface. You can have basically collections of Java code where you don't know at the time each module or package is compiled exactly what's being called, what subclass or what implementation of an interface is being called. And so you want to optimize using this sort of dynamic polymorphic caching there too. And they did that and hotspot, it's amazing beast. I've met like 13 people who all claim they created it. I think one of them may deserve credit more than others. But I didn't get to do that in JavaScript. And when we knew that Google was going to do their own browser, which we knew at Mozilla around 2006, I also met the team that did V8. And it turns out it was Lars Bach, who was one of the young engineers from Anamorphic that got acquired by Sun. And so Lars is like one of the world's expert on these kinds of virtual machines. And he picked my brains about JavaScript. I could tell he didn't like it at the time, but he had to do it. And... Oh, really interesting. Yeah, in 2006 lunch at Google's campus. And then I had another friend who was DevRel at Chrome and he said, yeah, we don't know what they're doing. This is getting 2007 to fall, getting toward 2008. We're trying to get Chrome out and we don't know what's going with the V8 team. They're off in Aarhus, Denmark, rewriting their engine four times, which is good. That's the right way to do this kind of development. They were learning JavaScript, including all its quirks, which they came to hate the fire of a thousand suns, which is one of the reasons that Lars and company did Dart, their own language. But they also made the language fast. And meanwhile, we knew this was happening. So we got our act together with Trace Monkey, our tracing JIT at Mozilla and Apple I think was also aware. And so they were doing their own JIT. So the era of JITed fast JavaScript in 2008 had this prehistory going back to Smalltalk itself and Anamorphic. And again, the lineage is interesting because you had Lars and Anamorphic and then he ends up at Google. Yeah, and today we have an incredibly fast language that like you said, still, without hate, you can't have love. So I think there's both love and hate for this dance, this rich complex dance of JavaScript throughout its history. There's a dialectic for sure. Today, JavaScript is the most popular language in the world. Why by many measures? Why do you think that is? Is there some fundamental ideas that you've already spoke to a little bit but sort of broader that you think is the most popular language in the world? So I think I did, by doing first class functions and taking the good parts of the C operator hierarchy and just keeping things simple enough, maybe it could have been simpler but I had to make it look like Java and interoperate with Java that there was inherent goodness, Aristotelian quality there. And people perceive that even through all the quirks and warts. And then over time working on it with the standards body, working on it not only as a core language but in the context of HTML5 and making the browser better, listening to developers, thinking about, this is something that Nick Thompson wrote nicely about on Hacker News, I was very flattered. He said, Java was this thing where the experts were writing the code and it was compiled and you had to declare all your types and Sun didn't really give a damn about the average programmer who wanted to build real web apps, dynamic things. And I was in there meanwhile doing a bunch of people's jobs making JavaScript survive those early years when it was kind of touch and go. JavaScript was considered a Mickey Mouse language. It was for annoyances like the scrolling text at the bottom of the browser in the status bar. But I kept listening to developers working with them and trying to make it run in that single threaded event loop in a useful way. And I think that forged something that people have come to love. Now you don't always love the best thing, right? I talked about Shakespeare sonnet about I'm Mr. Sizer, nothing like the sun. Or the scene from Josh Whedon's film Serenity at the end where the actual piece in the score by David Newman is called Love where Captain Mal is teaching River Tam about how to pilot the ship. And she's a super genius, super soldier. She knows how to do it already. And he's basically talking about how you have to love the ship because if you don't, it's going to kill you. And then the piece falls off the ship. It's kind of like JavaScript. You have to love it. You have to love it because now people say we're stuck with it because it got this priority of place. But there's love underpinning that. And actually the listening to developers, that's kind of beautiful. There's most successful products in this world with all the messes, with all the flaws. Perhaps the flaws themselves are actual features, but that's a whole nother, that's a discussion about love. But underneath it, there's something that just connects with people. And it has to keep connecting. If JavaScript kind of went off in this, people sometimes complain about ES6. Oh, you put classes in JavaScript. I hate classes. You've ruined it. But it's not true. It's a dynamic language. Smalltalk had classes. Python has classes. There are lots of Lisp variants that have classy systems. So people who don't reject it based on some sort of fashion judgment do use it and do interact with the standards body. The standards body is competing browser vendors mainly, but also now big companies that use JavaScript heavily, the Paypal's and other such companies, Salesforce. And they have to cater to web developers. They have to hire developers who know JavaScript. They have to keep their engines up to the latest standard. And this creates all this sort of social structure around JavaScript that is unusual. I mean, you get C++ buffs that follow the inner workings of C++, what is it now? 21 something, I don't know. I've lost track. But it's a more rarefied group. It's more like the old language, gray hairs. Whereas JavaScript is a younger and more vibrant and large crowd. There's a community feel to it. There's echoes, perhaps I don't wanna draw too many similarities, maybe you can comment on it. There's C++ is like Wall Street, and the JavaScript is like Wall Street bets from the recent events. It's like there's a chaotic community of all, and there's some power from that distributed crowd of people that ultimately. It's more thematic, it's more of the people. It lets people in without requiring these credentials. I remember in the late 90s into the 90s, people were all getting Java credentials. And I knew people, and friends knew people who became Java programmers, and you knew they really should have been like nature guides or pilots. They hated programming, but they thought, I gotta make money, I'm gonna become a Java programmer. Do you have some, because it's such a monumental moment in our current history, as a quick aside, do you have thoughts about this huge distributed crowdsourced financial happenings with Wall Street bets? That's like nobody could have, well, you could have predicted, but the scale and the impact of this kind of emergent behavior from independent parties that could happen. Like I said, my own experience with the dismal science, as with physics, led me to reject a lot of bad models. Economics was always compromised by politics, political economy. You could also argue that it was, it used to be a branch of moral philosophy, so it was concerned with the good, and it became divorced and became sort of in this quasi Newtonian way, just about, everything's just running by itself, don't worry about it. This monopoly's crushing your Netscape company, but that's just nature. And economics couldn't, or doesn't really have good models for the Wall Street bets subreddit. You know, they know how to squeeze a short, right? So the amazing thing is you have Robinhood app, which was, again, supposedly for the demos, for the people, and eliminated the fee through various kinds of straddles or some kind of spread operation that helped them eliminate the fee or eat the fee. And in fact, as a broker in these days, because it takes two days to settle, there's counterparty risk, as they found out. And so the Wall Street bets people, you know, the memes are like the Terminator robot with the $600 STEMI check and the hedge funds that make little girl hiding under the desk. There is a problem, which I talked about in a recent podcast, which I'm conscious of from the history of the web, and that is, you could say it's monopoly, which antitrust wasn't enforced after USB Microsoft for a long time. And a lot of this was due to the money interests buying control of politicians. And, you know, in Plato's five regimes, that's oligarchy. That's where we are. And now we're seeing a fight against the oligarchs. I don't know if it'll work, but you're definitely seeing it. And it's also kind of hackerish, right? It's got a hacker ethos. You know, hey, Robinhood, no fees. Oh, interesting. Hey, you know, I could buy a fraction of a share in this thing, or I can keep buying with my stimulus check. So I mentioned Hegel seeing Napoleon on the horse, right? Hegel also talked about the cunning of reason that you have this sort of, you know, God sees history in full, and if you believe in God, or, you know, we don't know the future, but there's always this sort of fly in the ointment, this unintended consequence that confounds the best plans of the powers that be. And we're living through it. I'm glad it's not, you know, street warfare or mechanized warfare, because it has been in the past. It's more like soft power, and people are fighting back. Do you think it's possible? So JavaScript used to be for the front end of the web. It's now increasingly so being used for back end, like running stuff that's like behind the scenes. And it's also starting to be used quite a bit for things like TensorFlow.js. So starting to actually use like these heavy duty applications that are using neural networks, machine learning, and so on in the browser. Is it possible in 10, 20, 30 years that basically most of the world runs on JavaScript? This is a dystopia and a nightmare to some people. When we did Asm.js and WebAssembly, I would joke and mean people with scenes like Neo waking up in his pod in the matrix, and he's all skinny and weak and hairless. And, you know, you realize in the future that you're living in some simulation that it's all running on JavaScript, and you just scream forever. It's possible. Gary Bernhardt does these funny talks. He did watch.js, and then he did this life and death of JavaScript, I think it's called, where he took some clever ideas that actually have a thread of credibility to them. But I mentioned software fault isolation. In the old days, when we were using computers, we said we're gonna use the Unix monolithic monitor, and it's the privileged program. This is before you even had hardware rings of protection. Those, some of the early 60s operating systems used hardware protection zones. But Unix is privileged, and the program that runs user code in a process is hosted. It's the guest, in the host, and you get to suspend it. You get to kill it. If it crashes, it doesn't take down the whole OS. It's a wonderful idea, but the call into the kernel is expensive, the system call, so called. And this has even been optimized now for things like getting the time of day, so it doesn't actually enter the kernel. And meanwhile, hardware architectures and virtualization techniques have gone in a different direction, even to the point where you can do software fault isolation very cheaply without entering the operating system kernel, and so you get unikernels and exokernels and very lightweight VMs. And so Gary took this idea and said, JavaScript will take over computing, because the system call boundary's too expensive, so everything ends up in JavaScript with these lighter weight isolation enforcement mechanisms. It's not totally beyond belief. It'd be WebAssembly too. It's nice to ask you sort of for advice to, there's so many people that are interested in starting to learning about programming, getting into this world. Is there some number of languages, three to five programming languages that you would recommend people learn, or maybe a broader advice on how to get started in programming? Well, so you asked about machine learning, and JavaScript is a general purpose language, and it's a language that's not that great for doing matrix operations or doing parallel programming, I would say, without using some extensions or some libraries that have some magic in them. So if someone wanted to learn, there are amazing languages in sort of the APL family that are very useful for, I would say, linear algebra, which gets to a lot of the kernels in machine learning. And so APL had like J and then K and their K variants because the guy that did K is still going, and they're proprietary, but he's still innovating there. There are, you know, Python is used. So people talk about TensorFlow.js. Well, it's not that surprising because Python was heavily used for machine learning, and Python was always, you know, they didn't have this fast just in time compiler tradition. There were some projects that tried this, and some of them were interesting. PyPy was interesting, but the philosophy with Python was, oh, you need to go fast, write a C plugin, and drop into C code. So I think people should look at multiple languages because there are different tools in the belt. If you're trying to do supervision or rapid prototyping, you want a dynamic language. You want to throw things together and see what works. If you are trying to go down to the metal very fast, well, I'm an old C hacker, but I was also the executive sponsor of Rust at Mozilla, and Rust has now escaped, you know, from that sort of nest where it was born to be adopted by a bunch of companies that have a foundation in the works. Some of the key core team members are working now at Amazon and other places. So it looks like Rust has reached escape velocity, and Rust is an interesting language because one of our goals there, one of the reasons I sponsored it was we were all tired of seeing those remote code execution vulnerabilities due to C and C++, and we thought, can we have a sort of safety property through a type and effect system or an ownership system, and Rust has that. And that ownership system is interesting because it doesn't just give you memory safety. There's a sort of theorem for free, a dual that falls out for protection against data races. So Rust is better for low level programming. You delimit your unsafe code where you do have to be unsafe, and you can prove certain facts about memory safety and race condition avoidance. And so I think people should learn these new languages. I think Go is a great language. I admire, you know, the Unix people who did that. Ken Stoll was involved, Rob Pike, of course, David, what's his name, and other people. Go is a huge success, really on the server side, anywhere you have a lot of networking to do, and it's garbage collected, but it's also very pragmatic. It has that sort of C flavor. As an old C hacker, I can't get used to the fact that they swapped the type and declarator in the declaration order. I haven't used Rust, but this is one of the most respected and loved languages currently, so it's interesting. Yeah, and it's still young. You look at these things, JavaScript is now considered old. It's gone through so many versions that you can fall in love with it all over again. 25 plus years, you know, it's an adult. It should be out of the house. But it could be around another 25 years. Cannot rule it out. So Rust will be around for a long time. The longer you're around, the more likely you're Lindy, and you're around your wife. A lot of people ask me, like, I'm often torn between recommending either Python or JavaScript as the first language to play with, because, I mean, it's difficult, because it's so easy to do JavaScript incorrectly. It's much easier to do it correctly these days, or like, well, learn about programming. But the cool thing about JavaScript is that you can create stuff that will put a smile on your face. Like, as a developer, you can create stuff, and it'll visually look like something, and it'll do stuff, and it makes you feel good. It makes you fall in love with programming. With Python, you could do the same. It's a little slower. And with C++, it takes five to 10 years to write a program that actually does something. So, like, there's that tension between is JavaScript the right first step, or is it Python? And I've been going back and forth on those two. My Python, right, it came from a lineage of ABC, which was a pedagogical language in the Netherlands. And it, you know, it was a good teaching language, too. I think it is a good teaching language, and it's a little more restrictive in that if you misspell something in a way that JavaScript might let run, let reach runtime, it'll get stopped at syntax check in Python. That's good for beginners. I think the sloppiness that some people object to, like, people were just tweeting at me, having just learned JavaScript. They said, I can take a number, and I can index into it, and get undefined out of it as a property. Why is that? A number's not an object. And I explained why it is, because like in Java, the primitive types, which unfortunately are not objects, can be automatically boxed or wrapped by an object. And I made that implicit. In Java, it's typed, and you have to declare things, and you'll get type errors. But there are cases in Java where you get auto boxing or auto wrapping, because you've declared that you want it. In JavaScript, it just happens. And so once I explained it, like, oh, wow, I get it. But it also means that you can commit a blunder that just. You don't get punished for it, you don't detect. You get an undefined value, and you don't know where it came from. Right. I've been reading a lot about military history recently. And one way to paint the picture of browsers, internet browsers, is through the various wars throughout its history. I don't know if that's a useful way to look at it, but we've already talked a little bit about Netscape and Internet Explorer in the early days. Can you tell the story of the different wars, if that's at all an interesting way to look at it, of the 90s and to today? Yeah. So I mentioned that Microsoft, you know, which was convicted for it, did abuse its monopoly, but they had a pretty good team by the time they did IE4. And Netscape, unfortunately, I was like second floor, and I was friends with all the first floor people, the front end guys who did the JavaScript event hookup and things like that, that that team was fairly burnt out. And I think having gone public, the upper management wanted to buy a bunch of companies to try to go head to head with Microsoft. Didn't work, but buying a bunch of companies usually doesn't work. I think the modern sort of approach roughly is like Mark Zuckerberg took, which is to keep them at arm's length and let them do their thing. And now that he's pulling WhatsApp in and people are fleeing it because it's tied into the ad surveillance. But, you know, for a while, they're keeping it separate really does work because you bought it for its value, it's complimentary, and you're not messing with it. With Netscape, when they bought a bunch of companies, they had some of the first floor people or the founders burned out. They had newcomers who wanted their turn to do the browser, and they hadn't really done browsers or understood them. And so Netscape 4 was originally supposed to be 3, and it was so late, they renumbered it. We did a 3 release. Jamie and a few others put some extra effort into. SecureMine was supported in the built in mail program. And Netscape 4 was late, and it was only on Windows at first, and Microsoft had really started doing better, like they do. They copy, and the first version's trash, and the second one, you're starting to feel threatened. The third one, you can tell what's gonna happen, and the fourth one's good. And plus there's the benefit, like you said, that it comes as a default browser. Yes, and yet Netscape's screwing it up, and Microsoft really putting some quality people on it. IE4 was good. On Windows, it was good. And they did the dynamic HTML innovations. Scott Isaac's my old buddy, a former accountant who programmed in BASIC and became what Microsoft calls a program manager, which is kind of an elevated position. You can be a programmer or an engineer and track, but you switch to it, and you sort of lead a lot of design and standards efforts. And so Scott Isaac put in a lot of those funky DHTML APIs that didn't quite have the same flavor as the stuff that I did, and neither of them was like the later sort of verbose Java, like DOM W3C standardized. But IE4 was pretty darn good. I remember a friend, Scott Furman and I, got invited by Scott Isaac to Gordon Beers in San Jose. They were doing a preview of IE4. This must have been 1997. And Scott said, yeah, here's the new graphics stuff we're doing. We've got something like your Netscape layers. We've got VML, a vector markup language. We can do virtual reality. And Scott and I looked at each other and said, we're doomed, right? Microsoft was starting to fire on all cylinders. So I have to give them credit for that, even though they abused their market power. And maybe I shouldn't give them credit for having the resources to hire talented people, but they did a credible job on IE4. What really was bad was that phase of the browser wars ended with monopoly and perhaps due to the antitrust case, perhaps due to regulation in Europe, perhaps just due to Microsoft not liking dealing with standardization, they let it rot. They just abandoned it, IE5, 5.5, IE6 later, but these were not well maintained. They had a lot of security bugs. It felt really closed and outdated too, even though it's getting updated, it's just weird. Browsers like Mozilla and then Firefox were adding tabs. Opera had a version of tabs and they didn't add tabs. And they pop up blocking, something I should have done from the start. People realized that you can tell when the user clicks something and it goes in JavaScript to open a little window, that you can sort of inspect the stack and see that the click originated that, and it's probably okay. Whereas if you're just loading a script and it opens a new window, that's a spam technique and you should block it. Tabs were a brilliant innovation. Like you said, Opera had it, but I remember I fully switched to Firefox the moment. I remember the moments of first using tabs in Firefox and not liking it for the first few minutes, and then like, wait a minute. You get the groove, yeah. You get the groove and you understand. So that timing, what year was this? Because also as a aspiring web designer, I use Table, so we didn't mention Layout or CSS much. There's also a change in the way the frames were going away. So there's a change in the way websites looked and behaved and all that kind of stuff. CSS finally, which Microsoft embraced with IA4 and Netscape never really did right. CSS became a better standard over time for doing Table Layout that relieved you of the need to use what are called spacer GIFs, spacer GIFs, right? Images, you would throw into space at tables. The typographic power of the web has gotten better, but it's still not on the level of PDF and you can't do advanced typography, but it's gotten really better. And even then, tables were getting better. If you were using Firefox, that would have been 2004 because it was called Firebird until earlier that year. No, yeah, I think it wasn't. 2003. I don't remember, it was a Firebird, which had tabs? We had tabs the whole way. So it started out as Mozilla slash browser in 2002, became Phoenix. There's a BIOS that has an embedded version of IE and they said, we're called Phoenix Technologies, you can't use Phoenix. And so we said, okay, we'll call it Firebird. And then this Australian centered open source database project started really like in the true Mad Max style, just screaming at us saying, you can't use Firebird. And I had to sort of be the ambassador and say, okay, we're gonna rename. And they're like, we don't believe you, you shouldn't have used it, we hate you. And then we renamed it to Firefox. And they're like, ah, we love you. And then I haven't heard of them ever since. But Firefox was a clever name. We had to think of something distinctive. We wanted to keep the fire going. And it turns out there's a red panda, right? That's the nickname for it. So that's the second set of browser wars. So how was Firefox born, how was Mozilla born? There's a long story there too. So Netscape got acquired by AOL, which as I say was a reasonable happy ending for a lot of people, because Netscape otherwise was gonna go out of business because Microsoft was just killing its market. There was no way to charge for a browser. Windows came with IE, IE4 was pretty good and Netscape 4 wasn't that good. It took a while to get better. But the Netscape executive said, let's do an open source escape pod. And like in Star Wars, A New Hope, the gunner won't shoot it because there's no life forms on board, right? It's not a threat. And so we did Mozilla in 1998 and it looked like it was going to initially just give the world an open source browser. But it's really hard to get people to work on this sort of hairball that had been hacked up over by that point four years. And it also couldn't have the crypto module for secure sockets, so called, or now transport layer security. That was an electronic munition. We were not allowed to release that in the full 1024 bit key strength. And yet people, one of whom I happened to meet previously at SGI when I went on a sales support engineering trip, Tim Hudson in Brisbane, Australia, and Eric A. Young did what became open SSL. It was called SSL EAY after Eric's initials. And Tim and Eric took their open SSL outside of the purview of the NSA and the Department of Commerce, and they stuck it into Mozilla's code. And that was perhaps the best hack that was done in the first few months after we open sourced the browser. We had other problems. The politics inside Netscape were riven by these acquisitions. So the one acquisition that kind of messed up Netscape for also wanted to keep doing a proprietary mail and groupware program, not Jamie Zawinski's mail program that was in Netscape two and three. And they held it back from open source. We didn't have a mail program, it was just a browser. We didn't know what AOL will do to us. Turns out they didn't interfere with us for a long time. But Netscape wasn't the best steward of Mozilla. We were operating Mozilla as a pirate ship without a legal entity. So most of us worked for Netscape under a separate organization. And initially the first engineering manager, Tom Paquin of Netscape was the Mozilla founding manager. But he left pretty quickly and he left me as the acting manager, which is more like method acting in my case. And that was my first management stint. But then someone who'd written the licenses, Mitchell Baker, she was a lawyer at Netscape. She was involved in the open source license decision making and the actual writing and construction of those licenses. That was Mitchell's job, Netscape public license and the truly open Mozilla public license. And there were two because Netscape needed, because of some encumbered code, needed some special rights but that went away over time. Mitchell was always interested in Mozilla and she came back from maternity leave and she said, I'll be the manager if you want. And Jamie and I said, sure. And then Jamie quit, he quit after a year. He said, this didn't work, I'm sorry. He acted like it was a total failure because Mozilla didn't restart the browser market. But there's no way it could have, right? Netscape was still shipping variants of Netscape 4, which was based on the old code. Mozilla was trying to react to the code to make greenfield for developers. So it was one of my big goals. It wasn't a technical goal so much as again, a social goal. People wanted a more standard spaced browser. They wanted less of a hairball that had been hacked on by ex grad students starting four years prior. So we said, we're gonna make a modular code base. We're gonna use a variant or an open source version of Microsoft's component object model, has reference counting and standardized V tables, virtual calls and C++. And we're gonna use JavaScript. We're gonna have a bridge between those two so you can script those components just like Java components. We're going to make a portable front end with a markup language for the user interface. Not tables, not HTML, but custom menus and dropdowns and toolbars. And that was called Zool, XML user interface language. And some real talent on the Netscape side delivered that. Dave Hyatt, who was instrumental in Zool, Chris Watterson, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross. And Blake was an intern. He was like a high school aged intern at Netscape. And at some point we were innovating rapidly in the Mozilla world and Netscape was still caught up in this management mess from these acquisitions and it wasn't delivering. And every year they were wondering if ALO was gonna come and start beheading the executives because it didn't do anything useful. And there was this thought you should take the Netscape browser engine and put it in the Windows ALO client, which was the dial up client that all the increasingly aging users of ALO were using. Never happened. It would have been too big a change. So it wasn't clear why ALO bought Netscape, but as I said, they left it alone. But Netscape didn't leave Mozilla alone. And so in 2001, Mitchell called me up and said, I'm no longer employed. And I was like, what? You quit? No, no, this wasn't my choice. And there was a layoff which maybe accidentally or on purpose got rid of Mitchell. But the funny thing was we had an open source project. We had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side and we had people we'd hired through the Mozilla community who were top notch. They'd risen, they came in high quality, they knew the code and they actually were better than the average or median hire of Netscape. And so the funny thing was the executive who thought they'd gotten rid of Mitchell in the layoff on the next week's community call around Mozilla and what to do, there's Mitchell. And so this showed you can kind of transcend your boundaries of corporate open source if you get a project that has enough loyalty, even among the paid staff. Because we had outside people contributing. We had people at Red Hat and a few other places, but the majority of the hackers were employed by Netscape. But a lot of them at that point had come from the community and others got the community and wanted to work with it. And it was really the weakest engineers at Netscape who didn't like Mozilla and didn't like the crucible of competing with the better programmers. So if the project is good enough, it will rise, the Phoenix will rise out of the... That's exactly right. And so we had this Mozilla code base that was getting better. In fact, I think at some point in 2002 when we declared Mozilla 1.0, I engineered a roadmap that successively through similar sort of six week, five week releases, like we all do with browser releases nowadays, Chrome does and Firefox braved us three weeks. We got to a point where we said, you know what? It doesn't suck. This is like the 1.0 that you want to release because if you hold it back any longer to polish it, you're denying others the ability to use it. It's like pro engineer, the mechanical CAD tool embedded the code, they embedded the layout engine. And Mozilla 1.0 was like a Netscape communication suite. We had at that point gotten male people to reintegrate mail and news and we had an editor for HTML. And it felt like a 90s suite, suiteware. And it felt kind of bloated. And the people who were taking that Mozilla open source and then adding Netscape flavor to it were not calling the shots right. And they were also under AOL's thumb a little bit and that they said, well, we should probably put the AOL instant messenger chicklet on the toolbar. We should put the ICQ, the other messaging system that AOL had acquired. We should put the ICQ button on the toolbar. And pretty soon Netscape looked like a bit of a NASCAR badged version of Mozilla. And that also made Mozilla more popular. And yet they had contrived to fire or lay off the leader and we carried on with an open source structure where Mozilla was still, you know, Mitchell was calling sort of management or project level shots and I was calling technical shots. And we had a popular suite, but we thought, why not make it just a browser? Because it'll be simpler, it'll do one job well. And even then we can strip it down by having extensions. So Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, the high school aged intern did the first version, which was called Mozilla slash browser. It was very, the small group of us, Ian Hicks and Asa Dotzler, me and Joe Hewitt and Hyatt and Blake. And Hyatt was really the senior hacker. He'd done all these things like amazing cross platform menus through the user interface, markup language. And he knew how to do tab browsing. He'd implemented it natively on Mac OS at the time in Camino originally called Chimera. He'd written multiple implementations, which was a thing programmers should do. It's like the V8 team did for those missing years when the rest of the Chrome team's like, where's V8? In fact, Dave's wife, Rebecca told me a story about when they were at UIUC, they were also University of Illinois grad students. There was an assignment, it was a programming assignment it was supposed to do at the end of the semester. And Dave's friend was this, I'm gonna go think and I'm gonna design and I'm gonna make this platonic perfect form of the program. And then I'm gonna write it at the end when it's due. And Hyatt just went there and started hacking. He wrote one version, he wrote a second version, a third version, end of the semester comes around. The friend's not doing too well. It wasn't perfect and it wasn't written. I'm not sure how that story ended for him, but Dave's version was a fifth iteration, it was great. And so he'd done that with everything you need in a tabbed browser. And this really showed well in Phoenix, what we called Phoenix and I had to rename two more times. And Blake went to Stanford, he became a Stanford student and couldn't work on it. Dave Hyatt went to Apple in 2001. He was one of the founding Safari team members. Interesting, wow. But he was still blogging about tabbed browsing. I think Apple at some point said you should. Safari have tabbed browsing? Yeah, but it was because of Hyatt. Hyatt was quite a feather in their cap. Don Melton, who had been the engineering manager for Safari from the beginning, had been in Netscape also. And so there's this diaspora of talent and yet Hyatt was still kind of writing blog posts about how to do tabs right. And at some point Apple said, don't blog about that. That's our proprietary tab technology. And I was like, no, it's not. It was an opera and I've refined it. So we had to replace people and we had Ben Goodger, a New Zealander we hired at Netscape. And he stepped in to be the Firefox lead. And we also had this weird circumstance where AOL finally did notice that Netscape was kind of an albatross, that they bought it for no particular benefit. And even then the AOL politics were also heinous, sort of East Coast politics. I remember taking two trips there because I was a principal engineer. And so us principal engineers got trotted out to do dog and pony shows in Dallas, Virginia. And the AOL opera management was very East Coast in flavor. And they were at that time merging with Time Warner, which did not go well. So one of these years we went out there and we were all doing dog and pony shows and there were these characters that were sort of like marketing guys. One of them was wearing a cravat and one was named Reggie. And they were very you rather than non you. Or they were like what's what's Stoneman's metropolitan film, UHB, urban haute bourgeoisie. They were haute bourgeoisie. They were funny and they were kind of useless and kind of preppy. And then the next year we went back and I said, where's Reggie? And it's like, oh, Reggie's not here anymore because Time Warner realized that the merger wasn't in their interest either. And then the sort of knives came out. And these mergers rarely work, right? This is very difficult. You get these giant companies and they think there's gonna be synergy. That was the 90s, late 90s watch word. And there wasn't synergy with AOL buying Netscape and there wasn't synergy with Time Warner and AOL. But did AOL ever really work? Was it ever really cool? Like the same kind of fire and excitement that Firefox eventually created, was that ever there in AOL? AOL was the right time to do a dial up service that got distribution by basically leaflet bombing compact discs on the country. And they beat out CompuServe and the other ones, Prodigy, and then the web happened. And so you had almost like this isolated continent, like some of the evolutionary biologists I follow make fun of the funny large marsupial mammals of Australia, how silly they are. And so AOL is like Australia. Yeah. And you saw it over time because they kept aging and they were using AOL to get online and they couldn't really use a web browser. And it became sort of a valued cohort because they still have relatively high socioeconomic status and they have grandchildren, but it's going away, it's dying at some point. Towards the end of the aughts, that decade, and then to the decade 2010 plus, that Firefox became this incredible, I forget when Chrome came out, but. 2008, September. 2008, but Firefox was the sexy cool thing that represented a lot of the cutting edge technologies and all that kind of stuff. Web 2, it was amazing. Kim O'reilly and John Battelle did the first Web 2 conference which eventually became huge and they split it. But that was in 2004, it was right when Firefox was out. Craigslist was huge, it was killing classified revenue for newspapers, but there was just this ferment. People starting. Wikipedia along there somewhere. Gmail was already done and it was an impressive web mail. There were others before it like Hotmail, but Gmail was really impressive from Google. And Google Maps, people started seeing what could be done. They thought how can you drag the map around and how does that work? And it was all JavaScript and images and. So Gmail was 2003, four? Yeah, it actually started quite early. It might've been 2002 or three, but by the time we started dealing with Google and Firefox to get the search deal, which was the main revenue source for Mozilla, and still is, 2004, early, Sergey Brinz, one of his trusted engineer guys, Fritz Schneider, made contact with me at Mozilla and we started talking and we realized search and browser need each other. And this is deeply true, right? This is still true. This is why a lot of the search engines have their own browsers. Yeah, so in case people don't know, the main revenue source for the browser is the default search engine, which is kind of incredible to think about that that is a revenue source. It's a little bit sad. Yeah, it leads to this capture or kill effect where you have the search engine own its own browser and other browsers may struggle to get the distribution we talked about earlier. So where, and you said you've figured out that Google is working on its own browser at some point there. 2006, yeah. 2006, so would you say Firefox versus, was Internet Explorer part of the war here or was the Firefox versus Chrome? So Firefox didn't quite cause Microsoft to reconvene IE. They did do IE7 and I remember being on a plane back from the standards meeting, JavaScript standards meeting from Seattle, from Redmond, and there was some Microsoft guy in front of me. Turns out my wife knew him from her past life before we married and he was just this bearded big guy and he was like, we should have just killed Firefox in the cradle. All we needed to do was add pop up blocking in tabs and we could have made Internet Explorer kill Firefox. And it's like, shoulda, coulda, woulda, pal. And I was right behind him during this. But they didn't, they were slow and IE7 wasn't that great. And what really got them started I think was Chrome. And I talked to Larry Page in 2005, I think I said, we're talking about the Firefox relationship but he was also saying, what about WebKit? This was Apple's version of the old KHTML engine from Linux, the KDE side of Linux that was used in the Conqueror browser also with Ks that Apple had forked. And in 2005 was when Apple's principals including Dave Hyatt, Maciej Stokowiak, some of my friends who are still there said, we must stop patch bombing this poor KHTML project. We should make a proper Mozilla like organization, webkit.org. Now it wasn't a separate nonprofit or anything. It was still Apple, it was Apple controlled but they made their fork first class and they made it be something that they all worked in and lived in. And that was before Chrome. And then Chrome, Larry Page said, what about WebKit? I said, yeah, it's nice. I have friends who work on it. You might use that if you do your own browser. Why don't you do your own browser? Don't worry about Firefox. You should do your own browser. You can have your own opinion of how it should work. And sure enough they did. So by 2006, we knew they'd been working on it. Some of my friends who'd been at Netscape did the original demo. And the demo wasn't what you thought. It didn't have the fast JavaScript yet. That was still off in Denmark on a farm. Did it have tabs? It had tabs because all browsers had tabs at this point. And it had this software fault isolation I mentioned. It was through process isolation. So in theory, each tab has some operating system process. And so what's gonna take your tab down? Well, WebKit has bugs that can crash it but Flash was still big then. All the restaurant sites remember. And Flash crashed a lot. So the demo that I heard about, my friends at Netscape as a lot of people did, inside Google was the sad tab. They showed an early version of Chrome which is just this bare bones tab browser. They loaded a site with a known Flash volume and then suddenly Flash crashes. And everyone expected the whole browser to go down. But instead you got this little sad face in the tab and you could reload it and there it is again. So this was an improvement. It was a real move for security. It was based on a company they acquired called Green Border. They had some really big brains like Olfar Erlingsson I think was involved. And they had done some exotic security stuff but they ended up simplifying it to this process isolation. And it was good. And Firefox didn't have it at the time. So we were still struggling with security bugs. So we knew Chrome was coming but it took two more years to come out. And we were still getting the Google search revenue and we were still making Google the default engine and Firefox was still growing. Firefox grew I think until 2011. That was when it peaked. And as it started falling, it was because of Chrome. Chrome came out in 2008 and it had a comic book that leaked accidentally that showed some of the people who worked on it. Lars Bock was in there and so on. It was kind of soft launch because they didn't market it heavily. They didn't push distribution. But Google had reason to worry about distribution because Microsoft was doing a search engine, Bing, since 2007. In fact, when they came out with Bing, Google was worried that Microsoft would just brute force switch the default browser in everyone's Internet Explorer or even Firefox on Windows to Bing from Google. And Microsoft wasn't I think ready to dare the antitrust cops that way even though they'd gone to sleep. And I don't think Bing was ready either. But just in case it happened, Sundar Pichai, who rose very well based on this work, was sort of in charge of getting distribution deals. And he got Google toolbar and Google desktop search distribution. And if you remember those pieces of software, those were like desktop extensions, toolbars or operating system extensions for doing desktop search, searching your local files. Kind of like Mac OS Spotlight, right? Sadly, it died. It all died. And there were some features that we still missed that didn't make it into Chrome. But Sundar got OEMs to bundle those. And then he got enough of those deals that by 2007 or eight, Google felt, well, if Bing, Microsoft does the worst and tries to force Bing, we can reach in and reset it with that point of presence. So that was good for Sundar's career and it was good for Google, but it never came to pass that they had to defend. Microsoft was still slow. And by the time they saw Chrome come out, then they did what would have been IE9. And then they said, we're gonna have a fast JavaScript engine to Chakra, Chakra core. And they did okay. They were another process isolated, fast JavaScript browser, tab browser. So it sounds like there's a deep fundamental coupling of search engine and browser that's mixing this whole thing up. And obviously Firefox doesn't have a search engine. That's like, I mean, you're partnering with somebody with a search engine. With Yahoo or with Google or so on. They tried Yahoo, that was unfortunate because I think even though Marissa Mayer talked about it, she never pulled it off. They never restored the search team that had been laid off. I believe Carol Bartz was running Yahoo when Carol said, I've got to get rid of one of the three expensive things. I'm gonna get rid of search. And those researchers went to Google and Microsoft and there was no way to put Yahoo search back together. So when Firefox tried switching all their users who'd stuck with a default from Google to Yahoo, it was like mid December, 2014, a bunch of users said, what just happened to my Firefox? And others didn't notice right away, but over time they did. And so over the next year, the traffic just went away for Yahoo. And yet they were obliged, I understand it. I don't have inside knowledge, but this has leaked out and Danny Sullivan's written about it, search engine land. I think the deal was like fixed payments to Mozilla. So Mozilla was getting a bunch of money for traffic that wasn't staying because users were resetting their default. And this shows how defaults are important, but they have to be good enough that the user doesn't override them. And a lot of the commercial value in popular apps is what are the default settings? What is the default search? But oftentimes there's something just like you said, I mean, if there's something compelling that's also can beat out the default, like tab browsing and so on. And that's where, I mean, we'll talk about brave browser. It feels like now we're in this third stage where there's a Chrome, Firefox, Edge, I guess it's called and brave. And these are all seem like really exciting, I don't know, innovative browsers. They're all kind of copying off of each other, picking up the good stuff. There's evolution again, especially on tracking protection. So privacy is this sort of global wave that's rising. I like to call it a wave because it's a large, somewhat chaotic structure. It's not a unitary good. You can't say I'm buying privacy for $3, I'm paying $3 privacy. Some people think a VPN does this and are disappointed when it fails them. But often people use VPNs for region unlocking video or getting the US Netflix catalog. But privacy is not a unitary good, it's complex and people are understanding it only over time and as they get burned, but there's a genie that's not going back in the bottle there. People are fed up. Apple has responded to this. Apple was always making Safari, I think, more of a privacy branded browser from the very beginning. I think this was probably Steve Jobs. Safari had private windows, private tabs before Firefox did. And these are only private in the sense that they don't leave local traces, if you don't want them to. Turns out Safari does keep them around between shutdown. But the canonical model is no local traces after you close the private window. No leftover traces that you went to some site that you were embarrassed by or bought a gift for somebody you wanted to keep secret. But there's still some level of tracking. There's network tracking. Network privacy is not guaranteed at all because you're using the same internet and ISP as a public window, a non private window. But, Safari had that early on. They also had a cookie blocking policy that might take a little explaining. When you, if you know what a cookie is, it's a little bit of storage in the browser indexed by the name of the site. And it's really only the main name of the site, like bofa.com or, you know, something like npr.org. Every site can store some information in a cookie. Every time it's contacted by the browser, the previous version is sent back. And in the response from the server, the cookie's updated. So it's this little bit of storage in the browser that the site can keep updating and it can store an encrypted version of your login credentials with a timestamp so you can stay logged in without having to retype your password every time you navigate, which is how it would be if you didn't have cookies. The web protocols, especially in the 90s, are so called stateless protocols. So you go to your bank, you log in, you go from your login confirmed page to your account view. If you didn't have a cookie, you'd be logging in again. Every time you type in the source. So that was the great thing about cookies. Luhmann truly did it in a hurry in 1994 before I joined Escape and he did it for really holding that kind of credential. But even then there was the image element embedded in the page and the image gets fetched possibly from a different server and that request carries the last cookie, which could be empty at first, and the response carries the updated cookie. So just by having images and cookies, you got tracking because that image server can be serving a little one by one pixel and they still use the word pixel in ad tech. And that pixel can be served from the same server, embedded differently with different URL spellings in the New York Times and ESPN. And as you go from one to the other, the image server can say, I haven't got a cookie for you. It's empty initially. I'm gonna assign you user number 1234. I'm gonna put a database entry in. And I see, by the way, I always fetch the name of the path part of the URL that I was in the New York Times. So you're a New York Times reader. And then you hit ESPN, same thing. And the database gets updated and the number user 1234 indexes in the database to a profile of you, you've been tracked. This was not intended. And it was too late to undo by the time I got the Netscape. I think Lou wanted to do Twinkies, he called them. And he was trying to solve several problems. He wanted them to be bigger because initially cookies had a short size limit. I think he wanted to solve the third party problem, but Tom Paquin, the engineering manager said, nope, no Twinkies, just cookies. We're done. You're done, son. And that's how a lot of that stuff was. That's how JavaScript got frozen like a flying Amber in some ways with that sloppy equality operator that I made because of the early adopters. And the cookie got stuck with this tracking hazard. And then because JavaScripts can be like images, they're embedded in the page. By the time Netscape 3, I made that work. You can get a request with the last cookie value and the response updates it. That's a tracking mechanism. And that's why you don't even need images to track. Now you just use scripts. So this whole tracking economy evolved and it depended on these accidents of the 90s, these unintended consequences. Well, it created some of the richest companies in the world, right? I mean, it's the social media. All I got was T shirts. All I got is this crappy T shirt. Yeah. I mean, so that's the fundamental problem the world is facing now. They're looking at what social media has created and they're looking at, and like a world is looking at itself in the mirror and seeing that privacy is actually something as opposed to like a nice thing to have. It's something that is actually should be fundamental to the way we interact with the world as part of our tooling. And that's where the Brave browser comes in. And I suppose others as well are playing with this idea, but Brave is at the forefront of that. So maybe can you like describe what Brave is and what are its key principles and what's broken and what is it Brave trying to fix? So when I realized that these accidents like the third party cookie, the image or script that's tracking you or the JavaScripts that can do an invisibly now, that all this stuff wasn't intended and that Firefox had supported extensions that block some of these things, I thought probably we should have browsers just block some of these things by default. These were not intended and they're now unsafe. They're tracking you. There could be data breaches, malware distribution, bullying and psyops and other attacks on people. Block that stuff, block that JavaScript. I'm Dr. Frankenstein, I've got to deal with a monster here. But obviously you go to Gmail, there's a bunch of script there to make that amazing web client. That's okay, that's first party JavaScript. So how do you tell the first from the third party? And it's not easy. It's not a matter of just what's embedded from a different server because a lot of publishers use benign scripts from unrelated domains or apparently unrelated domains. So you end up having to develop a sort of human and machine learning practice around blocking. And at Brave, we did that from the start and built a research team to help drive it and automate it. We realized that protecting people needed machine learning and around 2017 spring, I talked to my friends at Apple about this too and they were also doing what they call intelligent tracking prevention, which uses local machine learning in the browser. And the funny thing is, great minds think alike, they were taking their third party cookie blocker that was in Safari from the old days and making it not have a big loophole. Because what they did was in 2003, when Safari came out, they said, we're gonna block cookies that are from those third party embedded elements where you've never visited that site before. So I'm gonna pick an ad company that got sold to AT&T, so I'm not picking on anybody unfairly, appnexus.com. Have you ever been to appnexus.com? Nope. I've never been there, but I guarantee you 10 years ago, you probably had, if you were using Firefox, you had a cookie, third party cookie, because you were being tracked by them and they were using that cookie to build up a profile of you. In Safari, as long as the user never went to appnexus, that cookie would not be set. And that was a real move for privacy early on when jobs were still around in Safari. But it had this loophole that if you do go to appnexus, then why it's okay to be a third party cookie. And so appnexus did something very naughty. They took their ad partners to put the actual ad you click on. And they said, hey, add a little script so that when somebody clicks on the ad, before it goes to your landing page, redirect to appnexus and we'll redirect to the landing page. And by doing that, they set a first party cookie and they got whitelisted. So it was a loophole they exploited. Intelligent tracking prevention in Safari was sophisticated enough to counteract this and it did other things and it's evolved since they did it. And we've evolved brave too. And so when I say machine and human learning, there's a real set of techniques here. They have to fight. This is a fascinating problem. Fingerprinting, right? Anytime you have a little bit of storage in the browser associated with a website, if the bad guy can get 32 websites, each one has a bit of storage, that's 32 bits. You can turn the bit on or off, you can make 4 billion numbers, you can make an identifier. It's called a super cookie sometimes. There are weaker ways that are statistical. They're called fingerprinting. You have to block all of them and you have to not only automate, you want to work in the web standards body to put privacy in by default, by design, from the get go, not add it as an afterthought or go hogwile with new web APIs to add a bunch more local storage or fingerprint surface area. And that's been a struggle too, because guess who's the new Microsoft in the standards body? It's Google. And they're not in favor of privacy first. They want to do privacy their way, only under, I would say, market pressure. But with Apple and with Brave leading the way, we block third party cookies almost without exception. So we've just blocked them. And that gives us a very strong privacy benefit, but it also means some sites just don't work right. Embedded YouTube videos might not work right. So we're adapting in a similar way to Apple's done with ITP to make third party cookies blocked, but to sort of simulate what looks like a working third party cookie for the site. It essentially tries to partition each site and its third parties into its own sort of cookie jar. Got it. And so, like you said, is this both like a human fine tuning issue and a machine learning problem? And as the humans learn, then they train the machine learning. But, you know, maybe Google aside or including Google, there's millions of dollars, if not B, billions of dollars to be made from fighting the ways of Brave. That's right. And it's been an interesting change from when we started in 2015. When we started, you know, ad blocking extensions, ad block plus was one of the big ones that started on Firefox in 2006, I believe, had gotten to a certain level of use around the world. And browsers like UC Web, UC Browser in Asia had some amount of ad blocking built in and on by default. So, a page fair was a startup and they measured ad blocking adoption. And they tried to say, hey publishers, you're, you know, 30% of the visitors to Pitchfork or Wire to Conda NAS properties are using ad blockers. If we can somehow convince them to lower their ad blocking for your site, that could be like a 43% lift, right? And, you know, three sevenths. Well, that's easier said than done. And PageFair and others, SourcePoint, and many others tried to either smuggle ads through or cajole the user into letting, you know, ads appear. And it didn't really work. And meanwhile, the ad blocking adoption has just continued intelligent tracking prevention in Safari in 2017, Brave from 2016 on with very strong cookie blocking and other protections. And this is not going away. The publishers used to rage against it. Like we would try to say, we can help you. You're dealing with users who are already blocking all your ads. We can try to put back some economics that help the user and you that led to the basic attention token that we started with Bitcoin. We can be your friend. Don't just fingerprint us as an ad blocker and treat us as an enemy. But in 2015 or 16, it was like, nah, you're an ad blocker. Get out of here. I hate you. And by 2017 or 18, it's like something's happening. The ad blocking is not stopping and we're all getting sort of pulled on the Google's plantation through AMP, AMP. Or we're getting killed by the Google ad system we use because it's taking all the revenue or it's permitting or some other vendors we use are permitting ad fraud. And so a fake New York Times is getting paid by the marketer running an ad that a bot clicks on. And the real New York Times that's supposed to get the ad doesn't get it. And there's something really broken about that kind of system. And that fraud is mediated through Google's ad exchange, which is the biggest of them all. And Google takes a fee. There's a flip side of that, which is malware distribution, malvertising, where fake advertisers put malware payloads in or exploit hit loaders in JavaScript and they smuggle them in ads onto real publisher pages, the ad exchange takes the fee. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not gonna say this is a RICO predicate, but why is the ad exchange facilitating fraud and malware distribution and taking a fee? It's not right. As opposed to just fighting, this is the really interesting thing about Brave is as opposed to just fighting and then being treated like an ad blocker, you're providing an alternate. There's a philosophical idea here that might change the nature of the internet with the basic attention token. Yes. Well, maybe what is basic attention token BAT and how does it work? Okay, I'll tell the story first by saying how I came to it. I realized for a long time at Firefox, we were dependent on this Google search deal. And I thought, now that Chrome's out, maybe that's gonna go away. And they just, at some point, Google will say, Firefox, like old yeller, you saved me from the rabid beast, now I have to shoot you in the head. Done your job, sad but true, goodbye. And what could we do? And I think Mozilla doesn't know what to do. This is something that I couldn't solve there and I don't think they can solve. But I thought, why is the browser the sort of passive servant of these big tech companies? Why is it a blind runtime for ad tech JavaScripts, including from Google? Why doesn't it block some? And if it blocks some, why can't it reconnect users, readers, fans with publishers, creators, websites? Why can't it help people make direct payments or even possibly get an ad revenue share for private ads that are placed in the browser? The ads are all placed in the browser. Some people have this sort of model that the server's painting the ad into some, flash combined package or into some giant image and then it all gets sent down, that's not how it works. All the ads you see on the web are placed in your browser by it calling out to various ad tech partners and Google's among them. And so if you block those scripts, you break the advertising flow of money from the brands and their agencies to the publishers. And if you want to reconnect it directly with the user, you have limited choices. The user generally isn't gonna sign up with a ACH bank connection or a credit card. The publisher isn't gonna sign up the user except as a subscriber and then they're gonna overcharge you because they want you to cross subsidize all the content and buy more than you read and all that stuff. And how many, people are doing great who are big names like New York Times and The Washington Post, but how many subscriptions are you as a user gonna pay for? This is why startups like Tony Hale Scroll are trying to do a portable subscription system. By the way, just a small tangent there, even the New York Times is really annoying how difficult it is to subscribe. There's way too many clicks. They don't make it easy. And I had friends a few years ago, I think they fixed this, who would pay for the paper and then they'd go online and they get upcharged for the digital and there was no break. There was no connection between them. But publishers are not that technical and they can't all get you to subscribe. You can't have a thousand subscriptions. So for a long time, people talked about micropayments. There was Blendle and other ones which came to the US, but it didn't grow. And I thought, if you have just a browser and it's protecting you by blocking all this ad tech tracking junk, it can provide you an option that uses cryptocurrency to let you support your favorite sites and even YouTube channels. And that we prototyped with Bitcoin. And that meant the user had to be of means to contribute and willing to contribute, but it could be done on the Bitcoin blockchain and it could be fairly efficient even though Bitcoin went through a period when we had this prototype running in 2016 into 2017 where Bitcoin was very congested and very slow to confirm and the fees got very high. And a lot of users who were not Bitcoin maximalists or even experienced, we helped them out by embedding a Coinbase buy widget and they had the income to buy, but it was hard. It was like, do I buy $5 a month? But the fee is like 450. I better buy in larger batches, right? And they're like, I don't wanna own that much Bitcoin. So it became this painful thing. And the real idea that I had of private ads that pay the user a rev share couldn't be realized alone in that kind of system. In these cryptocurrency systems, especially with the blockchain we switched to Ethereum, you can have smart contracts. The Bitcoin system is not turned complete. So what you can do with the scripts is more limited, but you can still do sort of clever things even with Bitcoin script. What we wanted to do was sort of a three sided ecosystem. We wanted users, creators or publishers and advertisers. And we wanted the advertisers to put money in just like they do today, but without going through the Googles and the app nexuses and all these other ad tech companies, because those companies take out a huge cut. The Guardian in the UK once did an experiment for a month. They bought out their own ad space. They put in a pound and they were paid 30 pence. 70% was coming out to the intermediary vendors they were using. And that's like the opposite of what the app store does. The app store takes 30% and gives the publisher 70%. So pretty broken, in the old days of the superstation TBS, the media owner would get 85%. So these splits have become really unbalanced and the middle players, the ad tech vendors are taking out way too much money. And they're doing something worse, which has been noticed. They're letting not just the malware vendors, but also the ad fraud side, which fakes the publishers and clickbait merchants come in and steal traffic from good sites. Because once you have a certain audience identified at one site, Jason Calconas told me this about his experience with, I guess it was in Gadget, I forget which site he was running. But once he started using an ad partner that was sharing his audience information across multiple sites, he saw his competitors stealing all his traffic. And then what's worse is the clickbait sites that just have much cheaper rates steal all that traffic. And that facilitates fraud, facilitates fake news, all sorts of problems. So Gray blocks it and then we give users the ability to give back and because we invented the basic attention token on Ethereum, we can do this three way split. And we can give users a share of the revenue. And if they want to take it out, they can. Now, unfortunately for us and for all blockchain, the regulators are saying, we're gonna have to know who you are. There's the Treasury Department's FinCEN agency. There's the Office of Foreign Asset Controls, OFAC. There's the other regulators in the federal government that take a very dark look at things like money laundering and sending money to someone named Osama bin Laden. So compliance starts to come in. And even now they're threatening for pure Bitcoin sending to some address. If you're a Coinbase, you're gonna have to know who's at that address. You're gonna have to start. Like the actual identities of people involved. Yeah, now with Coinbase members, you sign up and they know you and they comply with the regulations. They're a regulated money services business. And, but if somebody's using their own self custody, so called self custodial wallet where they have the hardware private key and they're not named and they want to send to that address, our friends in the federal government are talking about requiring at some threshold and knowing who that is. So. Some threshold that's unreasonable. It's not that big. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how this will play out. I think crypto is here to stay. I think the beauty of being able to send peer to peer without any bank in the middle, without any huge wire charge and two day delay and all that nonsense. It's beautiful and I've used it and I love it. But we're pragmatists are brave about crypto. And we realized that anything like a revenue split, we can't facilitate without being licensed in a certain way and it requires knowing who the user is. So our default mode doesn't know who the user is. It instead imputes to the user's browser, some of the revenue and allows that browser to steer it back to the creators. And we do have to identify the creators. But as things improve and who knows how it'll play out, there should become a day when this full vision can be done more fully on a blockchain. But regulations and the practicalities of today's blockchains, which are not that fast and not anonymous over time, you fingerprint yourself over time. We do some of this with the browser. So one of the ideas of the basic attention token is to make a hybrid system that's stronger than blockchain alone. It's the browser and the blockchain. And the browser is this trusted endpoint software. It's this universal app. Everyone uses browsers. The bigger the screen, the more you're in the browser and the less you install fat clients for things. I use Slack on Mac OS and it's like a browser. It's based on an electron framework we used to use. And it's just, it's not that great. Some of the people at Brave use Slack in Brave as a... In the browser, yeah. In the browser, yeah. I use that often, yeah. And I noticed on the iPad, I use apps less. The smaller the screen, the browser got handicapped by Apple and Android both. And it also can be slower or not have the right affordances, the interface with the security limited APIs. But in principle, with the right permissioning, you can make the web browser just as good as any app. You make it be a super app. And that's part of our mission at Brave. So we want to have the economics that got captured by these big tech companies through tracking and through social networks. We want to block that for your own safety and then let you opt into a cleaner world where you keep your data defended in your browser and you can actually realize value from it. So the way our ad system works, I mentioned it being private, but how does that work? We don't see your data at all. All browsers are sort of the mother of all data feeds, your history, all your searches at all engines. Each engine sees the queries you send to it, but it doesn't see the others, but the browser sees them all. Machine learning in the browser that you can opt into can study all that in a very complete way and do a better job than Google does. Google has cookie and scripts across the web from acquiring DoubleClick, they have YouTube, they have Android, they have search, which is still their big revenue lane, but they don't see everything. The browser sees everything. And if it can do a good job locally, and this is not advanced machine learning, this is not TensorFlow, this is like SVMs now, naive Bayes, then you can match intense signals, intense signals from those data feeds, searches, the queries, the history, how much you're scrolling down a page, how much you redid a search. It's all blind browser algorithm, we don't see that data. And then pick the best ad from a fixed catalog per day. And the catalog is fixed across a large population per day, and it only updates once a day, because new offers come in and old ones expire, sometimes every week or every month. And that catalog, and there can be many such catalogs, is sold by our direct sales team. And so we're making an anonymous audience available to advertisers without the advertisers tracking them. Instead, each browser is a little machine learning system that's picking the best catalog entry. Now, the catalog is not the ads, those are big, right? It's a video or a webpage, it's just the link to an edge cache, and there are many such edge caches. We're not trying to protect them from seeing your IP address, it's not really feasible. We could use Tor, but we don't yet. And then some keywords about the ad. So it's basically like metadata and a link. And that's what the catalog consists of, and that's what the machine learning picks. And the machine learning is learning about the use specifically locally in order to choose from the catalog of different ads. Couldn't this possibly be like a multi billion dollar, isn't this taken on the Google ad? Could be. So like what, I mean, one question to ask, there seems to be some really profound ideas here that are different than what the internet has grown up to be. If Brave or something like Brave, the ideas, the fundamental philosophical ideas underlying Brave went out and runs 95% of the internet, how does that change the, what are the major things these changes about the internet? So social networks and then the creatives, like YouTube creators and all that kind of stuff. So let's talk about that. First of all, if Brave gets 95%, I'm gonna demand a recount, because I won't believe it. I don't know, I think we're trying to put things into web standards that can be standardized across browsers. So the main value of Brave will be the trust users have in us and our ability to give the best deal to users. So 70% of the gross ad revenue we give to the user. And if they go through that KYC process I mentioned, they can take it out. They can also give it back, they can take some out, give the rest back. They can add basic attention tokens to give back. Some of them turn off the ads, cause they just don't like ads, but they put in $20 a month. But I believe Zuko of Zcashframe does that. And that's very generous, because the browser is just anonymously based on his browsing, sort of keeping score on how much time he spent on this video, on that website. And if those sites verify in sort of a, like getting a domain certificate fashion, they can get paid, they can get part of his $20 a month. So that vision could go big. And if it does, I hope it's across multiple browsers. I don't know that they'll all compete well on the quality of the ads, the quality of the ad blocking and tracking protection. Those are subject to competition. It'll take a while to standardize them. But I think that would be a better world. It would have less counterparty risk, fewer fee takers in the middle, really just the browser. We're taking 30%, sort of the app store split. And if we get bigger, maybe we can take even less. Social networks, creators. If you look at YouTubers, a lot of them are the indies that are getting some size are getting sponsorship deals. They're using Patreon. They're encouraging people to subscribe and give them regular money through Patreon. But that's centralized through Patreon. So there's censorship hazards, there's a 5% fee. What if that were a web standard? What if Brave pioneered it first and we took 3%? And we did it in a way that was through your browser so we couldn't censor it. That's brilliant. Do you think it could be standardized across browsers? Can Internet Explorer come in again and... Yeah, protocols are easy to copy in that they're meant to be interoperable. So there's a risk there. And the loyal users might be tricked into leaving you. Or they might, because of that distribution power, you might end up getting stomped. I don't know, I can't predict the future. I think antitrust is back on the case finally in the US. And certainly in Europe, G Comp is doing its thing. So I'm hopeful that we'll have a period of innovation. People were talking, like Elizabeth Warren was talking about breaking up the tech companies very clearly. Now she didn't win, and I suspect that won't happen, but I also suspect that Google might be smart enough to see they should do something more than just put privacy perfume on Chrome. They should maybe get rid of DoubleClick or something, divest something. I don't know, it might happen. So Brave might inspire Google to completely change the way they're doing things in the browser? They're already doing something, you may have read about called the Privacy Sandbox or Flock, which they have this bird metaphor going, Turtle Dove, Fledge. But these systems have been very Googley, kind of overengineered, and yet, depending on differential privacy, which has weakness over time, if you know how that works, it's kind of injecting noise to hide you in a crowd, but over time an adversary can pull you out of the crowd. This doesn't look like it's gonna become a standard. Like Apple, Brave, Mozilla, we're not gonna just say, oh, Google, you saved us. You've invented the Privacy Sandbox, so we'll all just adopt it. Not gonna be that easy. It's gonna be more like pieces of what we do in Brave, the synonymous ad matching or the blind signature cryptography we use to confirm the ad impressions. That's David Chow's invention. That could get standardized. In fact, some of that is being standardized. Even Google's in favor of so called trust tokens, which are Chowmian blind signature certs. But they're not using them for ad confirmations because they don't wanna blow up their own business. And they need to let some of the publishers they serve have other ad tech scripts on the page. And so they're kind of caught. And this is something I realized doing Brave. I thought, what's Google's innovators dilemma apart from just being mature and having trouble innovating? It's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system that has all these vendors that publishers rely on because publishers aren't technical enough. And I feel for the publishers, but I realized the users have to come first. And if you give the users a better browser that's faster, then you'll get enough users to give back or support publishers. The speed and the battery savings and the data plan savings are significant. There's so much bad JavaScript involved in ad tech that if you block it, you sort of chop off what's called the programmatic waterfall, which chains a bunch of requests. Yeah, that's one of the incredible things about Brave. I guess you're saying you should attribute it to the fact that the messy JavaScript, no offense. No offense. Not my solution. I mean, Brave just feels faster. Even then, I mean, Chrome was fast. One of the things that it was like impressive is it showed that browsers can be really fast and Brave is even faster than that, which is incredible. And it saves the network, which means data plan. It saves battery because the radio consumes your battery when it's running more to do those requests. And it's just stunning how many there are. Like some of my Google friends were like, oh, that's just that bad site. They'll fix it. And you actually do a survey of web pages that they're like mostly like that. I know Google engineers could make everything super efficient, but they can't, especially in antitrust court, do it. They cannot take over all the publishers and do that. They're trying with accelerated mobile profile, AMP. They're trying to pull publishers. They're like, oh, you poor publishers don't know how to make your pages fast. Put them on our AMP system. We'll give you extra placement in the search carousel. That's an antitrust problem for one. But it's also publishers we talk to hate it because it degrades their brand. Now they look like a gig writer wrote a piece that's got Google's framing an AMP URL on top of it. And they're trying to fix that too. But it just looks like Google's Borgifying all these publishers and they don't want to be plugged into the Borg cube. They want to build up their own brand and have loyal readers. So, you know, I'm in favor of giving the users power to help all the publishers and the little platoons and the creators. And so we talked about Patreon. What about social networks? Well, they're inherently like search, a global algorithm. You're trying to find friends of friends. You're doing the transitive closure of a graph induced by this friend of relation. But you should own your friend relation. You should own your posts. They shouldn't be owned by somebody else who can take them down or censor them. And your friend relations, you should be able to find those friends on other networks. And that's why I've tweeted about this. I haven't built it yet. What if the browser could keep track of those for you? What if the browser could maybe combine Facebook and Twitter and you could find your friends on both and you could have a sort of multi. So that relationship is not owned by Facebook or Twitter. It's owned by you through the browser. They'll have terms of use and they'll say they own it. But if they zap you on one and you're still on the other, your friends find you and the browser could preserve a combined view. You could resurrect almost across networks. It's something I wanna maybe quickly ask you about. On that front, there's been quite a lot of centralized, we talked about Wall Street Bets and then Robinhood. There's been centralized banning of different accounts and removing like Parler, for example, from AWS and this kind of overreach of centralized control. Is your hope that it's possible to, like what are your thoughts about that in general? And then is it possible to create tools that give individual people the power to fight back against overreach of such control? So we're talking about oligarchy, I do think. And if it controls a nation state, that's formidable. It's the tax and the police power, the military power. It means that you may have the great firewall of China. You may have people in China who are jailed because of their tweets, right? This is a serious threat. I can't minimize it or say that we'll win. I don't know how it's gonna go. But I do think, like I said earlier about the kind of reason people find ways around things. The internet routes around censorship. And this is not to endorse any particular bad faction. One of the things that happens when you try to wave the free speech flag too much, you say, I'm not gonna censor anything and you get colonized by terrible, terrible people. I don't care if you call them neo Nazis, some of them could be doing illegal things. And you don't want them colonizing because it'll ruin your reputation and destroy your business. So what you really want is that kind of user first subsidiarity, that subjectivity. I want my social networks to be composited in some multi social user interface where I don't lose track of people across networks. And if they leave one or they get banned from one, I can find them on another, I can still sort of thread them together. That's brilliant. And this didn't happen because browsers got captured by the central powers. Why did they get captured? Mostly because of search. And search is a central algorithm. So Larry Page said this too many years ago. He said, with search, you're giving up a little privacy by handing the query over to us. And we'll error correct it. Alan used to be a Google executive. He said, oh yeah, we used to laugh. They'd all be doing typos and they'd be typing the wrong word. And we'd be like, no dummy, type that query. And it's like, okay Google, might want to dial back that ego a little bit. But yes, you do see all the queries and you can improve them and you can find the best results. And that was Google's forte. When we did the Firefox deal in 2004, Google was really good. And over time, SEO, which is an adversarial game, and Google itself buying all these companies and crowding its own results page with its own tied in stuff. The YouTube. It's a slippery slope that happens when you have control over these kinds of really important mechanisms. Yeah, monopoly capitalism or cartel. You get this with the Robin Hoods and the hedge funds. You get sort of the money interests take over and kind of abuse their power and wear out their welcome. So how do you get around that? You have to have either new land to go to, which some people's ancestors, not mine, did to found the country. I'm mostly Irish, German. You have new virtual space people go to and that requires an ISP or a colo center or Amazon to host you. It requires domain name registrar who will not strike you. And so when Parler was taken down, I thought that was egregious. Parler, it was not well designed and I tried it out because I tried all these things, but I didn't use it. And I also felt they were being unfairly scored for not moderating because you can find tweets to this day that are horrendous and threaten all sorts of violence. Whereas Twitter, why isn't Twitter being taken down? But so it was very selective. It was the insiders who have the power are gonna take out the newcomer. And it looked bad, sort of like the hedge funds, shorting GameStop, looked bad. You're seeing a piece in Time Magazine this week that's like basically saying, yeah, we interfere with the election, but it was great, aren't we good? I don't know if you've seen this piece yet. If you tried to say that as a Trump supporter in November after the election, you'd get banned from Twitter. But now Time in its Twitter account is saying, we saved the day, it's AFL, CIO and big business, the Better Business Bureau got together and kept Trump from spreading fake news. So the country's kind of broken. I don't know how to fix that. The oligarchs have run wild in my opinion. And big tech is in the antitrust dock. What's gonna happen? I don't think they get out. I think some of the DOJ and certainly the state cases, because they're separate cases, are not gonna go away just because somebody got elected differently. And these are career prosecutors and they have a strong case. And Google's smart. And Microsoft almost got split up, right? The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, he overreached. He didn't hold a hearing about the remedy. He just said, I'm gonna break you up. And Microsoft appealed and the higher level court said, go back and figure this out. You're not breaking them up. You didn't even hold a hearing. And when they got back, Microsoft said, let's settle, let's settle, we don't wanna get broken up. Because Jackson was gonna make the Opsco, the operating system company, and the Appsco office, you know, Word and Excel. And that would have been a huge blow to Microsoft, so. But ultimately, I don't know if you're optimistic or cynical about the possibility of breaking up big tech. To me, I'm optimistic that tools like Brave, I love the idea of owning your friendships. Like users more and more owning the stuff is the only real way. Unfortunately, it's like the WallStreetBets subreddit is the only real way to fight decentralized power. You can't break them up with the regulation. It's very difficult. Certainly don't wanna wait for the law. Netscape was long dead or acquired by AOL and effectively dead. It was only Mozilla that returned Firefox to the market by the time that the US v. Microsoft case was finally settled and the penalties were put in place. And yet, antitrust has a role to play. Those penalties caused Microsoft to kind of turn away from the web. They did Windows Vista and they thought, the web's too painful. We got punished in court and we had to standardize things with those icky standards people. So they ran back to proprietary lock in and Windows Vista flopped. It was late, it was bloated. Longhorn, remember? Now, what I was gonna say, but Google's smart enough, they won't get split up. They'll split something out to get off the hook, I think. This is a complicated subject, but I myself was so, I decided to journey out from the world of being a researcher at MIT and potentially doing a startup myself. And I've been thinking of, you know, I wanted to come to Silicon Valley to do so. It's the land of the entrepreneur. And there's a lot of my friends, a lot of them are successfully, have been entrepreneurs themselves, have said, do not come to Silicon Valley. It'd be, you've started, you ran amazing teams of engineers. You started a lot of successful businesses. I wondered if you could comment on why a lot of people are leaving California. Is there something that could be fixed about California? If you were starting a business today, would you consider somewhere else, like Austin or some other place? Or is Silicon Valley still, is it just a little lull, everybody's being overdramatic during this particular year of the coronavirus and so on? I think, you know, even Austin's getting overheated, I hear. And I've had relatives and friends move to Texas within the last few months. So Texas as a whole is a big place. And, you know, people are moving to Florida. There's a big movement toward Miami, Peter Thielke, these people. The mayor has been very business friendly about it, which I think is just good politics. America is fundamentally a commercial republic. So you would think this would be what's happening. For a long time, California was the golden state. I came here in late 76 when I was a teenager. So it's in crushing debt due to the lockdowns. It's got the highest taxes. That's got to matter. People will do high taxes. It's got likely fires every year because of the deadfall. It's not global warming. It's because the forests weren't managed like they had been in the first part of the 20th century. Just, I would say corruption at all levels, especially up to the governor, who famously was eating at the French Laundry and claimed that the outside was inside. And they wore masks off and it was great. Do what I say, not what I do. Rules for thee, but not for me. When you see that in leadership, people either run or they get rid of the leadership. So there's a recall drive, which is about to reach the threshold. Or in the old days, they get their guns, right? You don't put up with this junk. But ultimately, the thing that made Silicon Valley a special place, it gave freedom to young kids, entrepreneurs, young minds, brave minds to think bold, to try different stuff. I mean, even if the taxes are high, so outside of financial stuff, outside of all of that. Housing's super expensive. Housing's super. So it's hard. Okay, everything about startups is hard. Peninsula was narrow and they didn't plan the roads, right? Yeah. They got rid of public transportation in LA, like the Who Framed Roger Rabbit cartoon show. They used to have trolley cars in Portland too. The oil companies and the DOD conspired to build highways and make cars dominant. And the rights of way are long gone. Like Elon's gonna go underground. And I wish him well. That's probably the only way to do it now. But is it still a place, do you think it's possible that Silicon Valley is still a place where magic happens? Where the next Google's built? Where the next, I mean, Brave is built where? I think all good things come to an end. I think the problem is Silicon Valley had strong network effects through Stanford, through the angel investor networks and the wealth effect. And originally you have to give the federal government credit like the ARPANET was a government project. Let's not kid ourselves. This wasn't wild free market, libertarian capitalism. This was all Cold War stuff. You had out of the academia, you had Shockley and then the Traders Aid and Fairchild and Intel. But now, when's the last fab that was built in the Valley? MicroUnity might've been the last, I don't know. I haven't followed. We built a fab in Sunnyvale and MicroUnity in starting early 90s. And now the fabs are overseas. And the one thing that I would say that the oligarchs have intentionally done in both parties is sort of labor and environmental protection law arbitrage by going where the labor is cheaper and the environmental laws aren't as strict. And that's polluted the hell out of parts of China, but it's made things, you can make cheaper junk. And this is not a story that's over yet. So what is Silicon Valley for now? It's for the network effect, the brain trust of who you know, the parties, the Stanford sort of network. That's fragile too over time, I'm afraid. Stanford, a lot of good professors are like, they still filter mainly based on socioeconomic status, but it's kind of a skate school. I had a friend hired out of Harvard 20 years ago at Netscape and we talked about Harvard and he said, yeah, there's still professors who do great on the curve. And I said, oh yeah, I don't think they're any doing that at Stanford anymore. And he said, yo, it was shocking. Some of the students got Cs and Ds and they were crying. It's like, yes, that's right, the precious deers can't take that at Stanford, so they get As and Bs. Now you look at China and people say what you all about China, they prove Russia too, a lot of math science training, a lot of engineering, a lot of people who are doing their coursework to get the As and the Bs. So I'm an American, I'm born on the 4th of July. American, yeah. 4th of July, wow. And America, as I say, fundamentally is a commercial republic. You can try to make it something else. You can say it's the new Atlantis and mystify it. You could talk about it in a more, I think, correct way, which is 13 colonies that grew and then there's a lot of local or original design anyway, the federalist papers talk about this, there's a lot of subsidiarity, but that's been eroded over time. And like I say, a lot of the offshoring is hurt. So what happened with coronavirus? People working from home, and at first it was funny because I have friends at Google who used to grumble that not only did they have to come into the office, if they joined a different team that was centered in a different office, they had to move. Or if the VA team was reconstituted in Munich, which it was after Lars Bock just got tired of JavaScript, that they hired in Munich or they hired PhDs in Germany and moved them to Munich. With coronavirus, everyone's working from home and it's like, what a relief, I can work for Google from home. But then the next shoe dropped and people started asking Mark Zuckerberg, hey, can I move to my hometown in the Midwest? And he said, okay. And they said, oh, can I keep getting my Silicon Valley pay? No. We're gonna figure out what your cost of living there is and we're gonna adjust your pay accordingly. And these colonies and these little mini experiments that all combine to the big giant experiment, I have a, I don't know, I have this vision of America, which the country, I was born in Russia, like I said here, and this is truly a wonderful country. I wasn't born on the 4th of July, but I might as well be. People still flee here. I still, and I'm a red blooded American at this point. And I have a sense that we figured it out somehow. If Silicon Valley burns, another place will come up in this place that even more innovation and people will move and the remote work might change fundamentally how we work or it might not. It might just give you the freedom to then create many other small Silicon Valleys throughout the place, like Austin included, but other places as well. And we somehow figured it out and... I think that's true that there will be more mobility and maybe new places that come up. I don't know if Silicon Valley has passed some sell by date because it did hurt. The coronavirus hurt, the lockdowns hurt in the sense that part of what keeps things going is social. And so a lot of young people, even before coronavirus, moved to San Francisco. It was very strange to watch because in the 80s, we all lived in the Valley and it was less populated and San Francisco was grungier. It was more like Dirty Harry in the 70s. But by the 90s, and Jamie runs a nightclub there and he's talked about this, you had sort of wealthy tech people moving in south of market, fancy townhouses being built. And that's continued in such a point that it's almost like, what's the movie by the South African director Nils Jody Foster up in the space colony? Matt Damon is the guy on the earth who has to go up and anyway, it's about the stratification. It's about the great inequality that people in the space station have like amazing medical auto docs that can extend their life or save them cure cancer. People on earth are all suffering ground down in poverty. And that sort of happened while I was here. You saw a lot of money drive prices up along the narrow peninsula and the single people wanted nightlife so they were in the city and the condos in the city got super expensive. And I know even Google friends who are socially responsible say we should have more housing built. We should have yes in my backyard, not in my backyard. But that's not happening as far as I can tell. And from the government to the incumbent landowners and renters, it's just not happening. And that has to drive people away. I appreciate that people come here and you should wait for the prices to moderate, they will. But a lot of people are gonna go where the prices are lower. You, and sorry for silly questions here, but just looking back, you have created things, have been part of creating things that have transformed this world, the world of technology, perhaps more than almost anything else. But you're still a human being and unfortunately this ride ends. Do you ever think about your own mortality? Not too much, I mean, I'm a Roman Catholic so I am not afraid of death. I think a lot of people who have problems with death are suffering from some lack of either faith in their transcending death or maybe they don't have children or they feel like they get later in life and they feel like they've missed opportunities to do something that endures. And I sympathize with a lot because I'm old, I got married fairly old, so I understand all that. Nothing human is alien to me as Terrence said. But I don't fear it, no. What do you hope your legacy is? Yeah, it's gonna be JavaScript. I think, no, I think my legacy has more to do with my children and their children. I think it also has to do with web standards, it has to do with things like Brave, the things we did with Firefox. When we did, I'm not gonna oversell Brave but I think Brave is important and we'll continue to prove this in a way that counts for many decades to come. But even Firefox, whatever its future fortune, showed you can restart the browser market. This thing you said about people opting out and routing around, you don't need everybody to do that. It's more like Taleb's stubborn minorities that do that. It's the lead users, Erfron Hipple's lead users. You can be a few percent, you can tilt the market. And that can be done in spite of the incumbents, of moneyed interests not being in favor of what you're doing. So I think what we do with Firefox won't be forgotten and it needs to be done more and we're doing it with Brave. And you could argue that other projects are doing it. In some ways, blockchain is doing it. The Robinhood, take down the use of Robinhood by the Wall Street Bets kids, similar. So yeah, that kind of spirit endures. And I think it, in some ways it's American, right? It's not hard revolutionary. It's not trying to burn the past and destroy everything. It's more like we have these certain, let's say rights. We have duties too. So there's some debate about which comes first in American jurisprudence and the founding documents. But as long as things are working, we'll be like pragmatic Americans, like de Tocqueville described in his writings. But if things get too out of whack for one reason or another, too unequal, too oligarchic and abusive, we're gonna start our rights. And even a few of us can do it. And even in the American Revolution, it was the minority who fought and put their lives, treasure and sacred honor at stake. It was a bunch of people went to upper Canada, I think it was called, Ontario. Yeah, that's the beautiful, I mean, that is at the core where your work stands for is that a few people can have the power to transform society with just a few radical ideas, with just a little bit of code, change the world. Gotta do it. And that's empowering. That is the American way. That's why this country is, I believe, the greatest country on Earth. That's not over, or Matt says it too much, but I think some special things have already happened in this country and will continue to happen. And that's really exciting. And that spirit can continue no matter who comes here. They can adopt those folkways and that spirit. Brandon, I can't tell you how much, I was freaking out how much of an honor it is to talk to you. You're an incredible human being. It's one of my favorite conversations ever. Thank you so much for wasting all this time with me. I really appreciate it. Oh, it seems like a breeze. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Brandon and Ike. And thank you to our sponsors, Jordan Harbert's Show, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Eight Sleep Self Cooling Mattress. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Jeff Atwood. Any app that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave | Lex Fridman Podcast #160

The following is a conversation with Jason Calacanis, who's an entrepreneur, investor, author of Angel, How to Invest in Technology Startups, and as many people may know, he's a fun, brilliant, long time podcast host of This Week in Startups, and co host of the All In podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, and David Friedberg, who all happen to be poker buddies and self proclaimed besties. The result is always a great listen due to both the love and the heated disagreements. Quick mention of our sponsors, Brave Browser, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and Rev Speech Detect Service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I've been learning a lot about real world finance in the past few months. To give you a bit of context on the side, I've studied trading from an algorithmic trading perspective as a machine learning and a game theory problem off and on for a few years in undergrad and grad school. I found the distributed complex system aspect of finance and economics in general fascinating, but now I find even more fascinating the human side of the whole thing, ideas of greed, power, freedom, and truth. Wall Street bets, Robin Hood, and the whole beautiful mess around this topic allows us to have great conversations about human nature and the systems that underlie the rise and fall of civilizations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Jason Kolokanis. I have a million things to talk to you about, but we do happen to be living through what I would think of as a historic event in terms of its impact, in terms of almost philosophically thinking about the role of people and how they can fight power with this whole Wall Street bets and GameStop situation. I was wondering, you've covered in your amazing all in podcast, you guys have been having fascinating battles over this whole situation. I was wondering if you could tell maybe from your perspective, as it's unrolling the saga of Wall Street bets and GameStop, what are some interesting insights that you have about this whole set of events? In full disclosure, I was an angel investor in Robin Hood before they launched. And when I met the founder, Vlad, and his partner, you know, they pitched me at a bar, not too far from where we are right now in Palo Alto, called Antonio's Nut House. And my friend Adeo, it's a really good story, my friend Adeo had asked me to speak at his founder's institute, which is kind of like an accelerator for people who were thinking about starting a company. And so I gave a talk, and then he said, hey, let's go to Antonio's Nut House and we'll meet Elon for a drink. And so Elon met us for a drink there. And it's the divest of dive bars. Like you'll take a beer and it will... I love the image of all of this. You hang out with Elon at a crappy bar. Yeah, I mean, it is the worst bar in the peninsula. Like just garbage on the floor, and like cheap beer, and warm beer, and like you'll pick up your pint glass and be lipstick on it. It's brutal. Classy. Not your lipstick. You understand, somebody else's lipstick. And so we're sitting there and Vlad walks up with his partner and he says, you're Jason Calacanis. And I said, tell me about your startup. He said, how do you know I have a startup? I said, you recognize me. And I mean, that's the only way. And he goes, is that Elon Musk? And I said, yes, Elon, come say hi. And he came over and said, hi. I said, tell me what you do. He said, well, I'm a quant. I said, what's that? And he said, quantitative analysis. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I know about that. That's like you guys make algorithms and then try to beat the market, right? He's like, yeah. I was like, so you're gonna pitch me on a startup and you're gonna sell your algorithm to other people. And if it was so good, why wouldn't you just use it yourself and print money? He's like, yeah, yeah, no, no, that's not our business. Our business is we're gonna create an app to get millennials to trade stocks. And he said, hmm, you do realize there's no retail investors anymore. Like the dot com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis eliminated any individual's belief in participating in the stock market. And he said, that's the opportunity. I said, okay, I like it. Tell me more. He said, well, we're gonna get these millennials to trade. I said, the same ones who live in their mom's basements and take Uber and Lyft and are on their parents, have no money, got screwed and went 250K into debt for school and now can't get a job. Those people? And he's like, yeah. I'm like, okay, they have no interest in their future, but they're gonna trade stocks. He said, yeah, that's the opportunity. I was like, how are you gonna make money? And he said, well, that's the best part. It's gonna be free. And I said, so your idea is to get a group of people who have no interest in saving for their future to trade and your business model is free. And he said, yes. I said, I'm in. Because in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas that nobody believes in are the ones that have the greatest returns. I mean, Uber, I introduced to about 25 investors and three of us said yes. So a full 12% of the community who saw that deal decided to do it. So your sense about this idea being good had to do with the fact that this guy was just crazy and ambitious and bold thinking, or was it that there was something here in allowing a much larger magnitude of people to be able to be investors? Yeah, the way to do really well as an angel investor or just in technology or in life is to not say what could go wrong, but to say what could go right. And then to just imagine for a moment, if it does work, what would the world look like? And so when Elon was investing in Tesla and some other guys were running it and he was trying to save the company, it wasn't, is this gonna work? It was almost positively not gonna work. And he knew that, but if it does work, what does the world look like? And so that's really what you're looking for is not the chances of success, but if it does succeed, what would that look like? And that's what the world needs more people doing. And so when you looked at Robinhood, it was like, well, if he does succeed, what would the world look like? And now we've seen what it looks like. You have a generation who are so financially sophisticated that they know how to do puts and calls and shorts and research at a level that dominated the hedge fund industry. So let's pause for a second. These traders sitting there on a subreddit in a discord server are able to do analysis and research and then act in unison to say, we're going to beat in the Robinhood sense, this group of sophisticated insiders who have more access and more access to capital, but we will figure out how to solve this problem. And most things don't work. It's like the Wikipedia. There's no way the Wikipedia would ever work, except it did. You're like, how is this ever gonna work? You're not paying anybody, but it's both the largest corpus of an encyclopedia ever. So I think Robinhood actually succeeded. And then what we saw was this system and a lot of the systems in our society, whether it's the political system, the constitution of the United States, education, higher education, which you're involved in, and then even the financial system, we have not stress tested and stress tested it, and we don't actually know all the edge cases and how it works. So Trump was able to just really put this crazy stress test. Is the democracy going to hold? Are we gonna break this two or three, 200 someone year old experiment? And then we looked at the financial markets and it turns out there were more people shorting the stock than stocks and shares were available. I don't know how that's possible. And then I'm trying to uncover, where can I see a list of people who have shorted the stock? And it's like, you can't, but we can tell you sort of how many every two weeks or maybe twice a week, we can create a report. Maybe we know. I was surprised that nobody knows the list of people who were shorted and you guys are trying to figure that out. Yeah, there's no transparency on a lot of these systems. And if you call to try to short a stock, it's almost like they'll tell you on the phone, let me see, I think I might know a guy who has shares to loan out. So it's like, am I calling to try to find like a 73 Mustang Grande in gold? You're gonna call around, it's like, shouldn't this be like on a ledger somewhere and be completely transparent? So now we're seeing those things. And I think the investigations will make it super clear. But of course, in a vacuum without information, there are so many investors in these startups that conflicts can start to appear. And then you know how it is with people in conspiracy theories, the mind starts to wander, right? And so in some cases, there is actually a conspiracy. And then in other cases, people's mind will fill in like, oh my God, there's some grand conspiracy here. I can tell you Robinhood's only goal is to get more people to trade stocks and to democratize it even more. And they apparently were on the brink of seizing as an entity if they didn't get more money to cover all these trades. I mean, they were on the brink and they raised $3.5 billion or something like that in a week. Yeah, so in some sense, Robinhood enabled this very, like the magic of this distributed system of WallStreetBets, right? You said Wikipedia, which is another, which is probably one of my favorite websites and one of my favorite examples of like a distributed system somehow coming together in a way, just like you said at that crappy bar, I would have guessed it would never work. But if it does work, it changes everything and it did. And Robinhood in that same way probably enabled or was one of the major enablers of WallStreetBets of giving power, like empowering young kids to learn about how this whole messy financial system works and take on the big elite centralized players. Yes, and it's very easy. When these companies get big, one thing that's changed is the footprint of these startups and the velocity at which they grow. So something like Airbnb is another perfect example of something that should really not work in practice, but it does. Like I'm gonna rent my couch or my extra room to somebody like a serial killer, or I'm gonna stay in somebody's house, like a serial killer's house. And it's like, it really sounds scary, but it actually works and it has not destroyed the hotel business. It has added. So the best startups induce a market to exist. If you look at Uber or Airbnb, people replace their cars and Uber was not competing ultimately with taxis. They were competing with car ownership, public transportation, walking, or just not going out. And then you look at Airbnb, a lot of people who stay in an Airbnb would not be taking a trip to Kyoto, if not for the fact that they could get a $75 beautiful room with great reviews in Kyoto for three weeks. It inspires people and it manifests the market because the product is so transcendent, right? And I think that's one of the things that Robinhood did. You can't learn how to do this options trading and puts and calls and all this sophistication stuff, unless you actually do it. It's just too hard to learn except in practice, just like poker. If you wanna learn how to play poker or guitar or tennis or skiing, like you can talk about it. You can watch YouTube videos, but at a certain point, you gotta get on the mountain. At a certain point, you gotta put some chips in the pot and it's gonna be painful. Like poker is gonna be painful. You're gonna lose a lot of money and that's why you should play at the small tables first. And even in trading, like you look at people who are doing this crazy trading and GameStop, a company that's worth maybe a couple of billion dollars, but certainly not tens of billions of dollars. Of course, the people who are throwing their money in last are gonna lose it. I think everybody knew that. And so it was a momentum play and they're betting against the hedge funds. So I think it's good for people to learn and become financially literate and just always understand the concept of the risk of ruin. The good news is for a young person, the risk of ruin might be like they lose $5,000 or something and then they have to build their stack back up. But that's really the only thing I am concerned about is there are people who will play poker or blackjack or sports betting or whatever it is and lose control. Just like there might be people who try alcohol and lose control. But we can't build a system based upon limiting the average person's behavior based upon somebody who can't control their ability to drink. Two glasses of wine instead of 20. How does this whole thing end? Probably in tears. For who? Yeah. Who's crying? Is everybody crying? Exactly. Who's crying when? So I think there were some of the hedge funds that were crying initially. That maybe some of the Wall Street Bets people who bought last would be crying. And then eventually there's probably another set of hedge funds or even the Wall Street Bets mob and that army, some of them might've broke ranks and then shorted the stock. So nobody knows. So everybody has to be aware of what's happening in the game. So if Wall Street Bets said, hey, let's squeeze these hedge funds because they have too much short interest. Let's all buy the stock. Then some of them might've said, okay, you know, it's at two or $300. Maybe I'll join the short movement now that they've covered. And they could have shorted their been like double agent. So people have to understand like this stuff is gnarly and it's a free for all. I mean, it is a literal free for all. There's a kind of morality, like a big statement that Wall Street Bets made in terms of like the elites can't just push us around. They can't bully around. But at the same time, you know, they're also interested in making money, right? What's your sense? You said that some of the people in the Wall Street Bets might've broken off and shorted the stock. Are they more interested? There was an emergent like morality that emerged and said like, we're not gonna put up with the centralized elites, but is that going to continue? Are they going to fight the power structures that are bad for society? Or are they going to now like, I mean, are they ultimately going to introduce more chaos that's going to damage the economy and damage the world? Or are they going to continue being the good guys and fighting the evils that manipulate the market? What's your sense? You know, it really feels like the Dark Knight series of films where like some people just want to see the world burn. I think there is a contingent of people who just literally want to see chaos. Like, you know that contingent on some of these forums who just want to create chaos, right? So there's certainly that chaos contingent, but I think overall what the arc will show is a group of people getting massively educated. You see it in crypto as well. There was like a three year period where all of these failed entrepreneurs who I knew who couldn't build companies were then coming back to me after their companies has failed or after they gave up or couldn't clear market raising money with the venture capital community and they were doing ICOs. And I was like, I met you before, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm doing an ICO now. I'm like, okay, where's your company at? And they're like, here's a white paper. And I was like, this white paper with spelling errors in it that says you're going to destroy Airbnb because everybody's apartment is gonna be on an immutable ledger. Like, wouldn't that be better in a regular database that was private and not public? Like, why does it need to be on an immutable ledger? It can't change. I'm like, not changing the database is a feature? That does not seem like a good feature. And they couldn't explain it. They're like, well, just people are interested in ICOs. And there was that ICO mania. And what it showed was there's a global appetite for risk. People want to try new things. This is one of the great things about the human spirit is one of the great things about capitalism. And one of the things that concerns me most about where we're at in society is the sort of socialism, communism, entrepreneurship is bad, technology is bad, and polarization of wealth, and people getting rich is a bad thing. When I grew up, I'm 50 now, but when I was a Gen Xer growing up, we kind of maybe too much idolized Bill Gates and people who were doing interesting things in the world. And we thought capitalism was a force for good. I still believe capitalism is a force for good because when a group of people build a product or service that changes the world and it gets globally distributed, whether it's Tesla or SpaceX or Google or Airbnb or Uber or Robinhood, everybody gets to benefit from that product or service having to compete. And if you look at the places where there's no competition like public education or less established colleges and something like that, less competition for accreditation degrees, like things tend to get a little weird, don't they? And people tend to be protected and that's not good. You need competition. Doesn't mean that people shouldn't have global healthcare. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a safety net, but we need to keep capitalism vibrant, especially because China has now coopted capitalism and created their own version of capitalism, which is communism with capitalism. It's like this weird operating system like we still want to keep communism so we can take any of your gains at any time, but we'd like you to be entrepreneurial. And then you have somebody like the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, who disappears for a couple of weeks. Who's that? No, I'm just kidding. Who's Jack Ma? I was like, he kind of disappears for a couple of weeks and then he comes back and he's really sorry about the things he said and then he disappears again. And like, we have to be very careful. You know, we have to be very careful if China wins capitalism, this is going to be an existential threat for humanity. The Chinese are no joke. I mean, they are seriously focused and they are picking the winners. It's a very weird system because it is in fact, I don't know what you call it. Like communism and capitalism is such a overloaded terms, but they do encourage entrepreneurship, but they, and they do a good job of it. Oh, yes. But then they're like, they're like the surveillance thing and they're controlling things in a way. It's weird because it seems to work really well for them in the short term. Yes, it's definitely got short term benefits. So the question is like, how that gets distorted and it becomes worse and worse and worse, which it potentially might be. And I think on, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit, which you have a podcast all centered around the entrepreneurial spirit, is one of the magical things that makes this country great. I don't know if money is deeply tied into that. I do get bothered by people, you know, treating the word billionaires if it's a bad word. But in general, like all the hard things, all the difficult things we're going through in this country, it seems like the way out is going to be making the entrepreneur the hero of society of like letting that young kid with a big dream and the guts to take the big risks and build something totally new, giving them a chance and whatever that involves. I don't think it's about taxes. I don't think it's about like regulation, all that stuff. It's about us and just public discourse saying that kid, that guy, that girl, they're bad asses. Like encourage them to do it. We have to have people buy in to the fact that they have that opportunity. And I think one of the problems in society is there's a group of people who actually don't believe that they can succeed or they don't believe even more perniciously that other people can. And that's the group of people that I think are highly vocal but a small group of people, which are generally people of incredible privilege, rich parents, white city dwellers, liberals. They kind of look and say, poor people cannot change it a lot. And they're battling in their minds to protect poor people. But they have this very weird patriarchal kind of approach to it, which is they think that they're not capable of changing their lot in life. And they're like, it's not possible. And then once in a while, I'll tweet something where I say, it's really incredible that every piece of knowledge you could possibly want is now available for free on YouTube. And every course from MIT and Harvard and Stanford is available on edX or Coursera. And all that information is there freely available. And you can take the lectures. This is amazing. And then people will be like, yeah, but people don't have access to it. I'm like, they do. It's free. Here's the link. And they're like, yeah, but they don't have internet. And I'm like, here's the chart of internet penetration in America. And they're like, well, poor people don't have internet. And I'm like, really? Find me any downtrodden person without a smartphone with a high speed connection that capitalism provided for $12 a month or $15 a month. It's very hard to find that. And we have it so well in this country and there's so much opportunity, but people don't believe it. And that's actually one of the problems. See, the average American still watches four or five hours of television a day. And often I meet people and they're like, I need a technical co founder. But all I need is a million dollars. And I'm like, okay, well, what is your skill? And they don't have a skill. And I'm like, well, are you a designer? No. Are you a product manager? No. Are you a developer? No. Are you a sales executive? No. Do you have an idea? Well, as my friend, Sam Harris, I think your friend as well says like, everybody has like a million ideas an hour. Like you don't really get credit for those. Even when you're asleep, your idea is spewing ideas. Like zero credit for your ideas. It's all about execution. And we're seeing. You have to believe that you yourself can be the core of that execution. You yourself can build the thing in every, no matter what your circumstances are. I mean, we could talk about like structural racism and all those kinds of things that push things down. But from the individual perspective, when you just like are coaching or giving advice to an individual, you can literally change the world. I mean, Wall Street Bets is an indication of that in the financial space that you yourself can have, can change the world. That's why this country is amazing. Still the best country in the world, right? I mean, it still is amazing the opportunity provided to people. All this educational experience is online. And the ability, what I tell young people who are looking for advice, I say, the skill you need to refine is the ability to learn new skills. Like if you become good at learning a new skill, and Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine has really pioneered this, he can get to 60 or 70% of like the knowledge in a skill in some incredibly short period of time. And I'm not saying he's gonna become a virtuoso drummer or a great basketball player, but Tim and I were on vacation together in like a group vacation in Italy and there was a basketball court. And I said, let's go shoot some hoops. I'd never shot before. And I was like, okay, come on, I'll teach you. And Tim is fabulously uncoordinated. People don't know this. Like he tried to dribble a basketball and do a layup and it looked like he had a blindfold on. I mean, you've never seen something less elegant than Tim Ferriss doing a layup in basketball. And then he watched me do it three or four times and I watched him study me. And listen, I've been playing basketball in Brooklyn since I was a kid. I got a couple of moves and he was just taking notes and taking notes and taking notes. And by the end of a couple of hours of doing this, I could just watch him checking his form and figuring it out. That's every skill in the world now. And what I tell people is like, I'm like, did you watch Game of Thrones? And they're like, yeah. Watch Breaking Bad? Like, yeah, I'm like, okay, that's about 400 hours. How about you don't watch the next two and you put that 400 hours into learning how to be a graphic designer, a UX person, a developer, whatever it is and learn how to add skills. That's what I did my whole life. I was a kid from Brooklyn, went to school at night, but I was very quick to get to maybe 50% of the knowledge base of graphic design or being a writer or being a sales executive, whatever it was, a developer even. And I was just good enough to not have people be able to bullshit me like when I hired them. And that was a big unlock. When you know enough that people can't snow you, that's a really good one. And look at yourself. You figured out how to set up an entire podcast, people don't know this, but you don't have a team around you. I have a team of like five, six people working on my podcast. With even knowing enough about to set this up, you would then be able to hire a team. Correct. And you'll be able to call them on their bullshit if they're not doing a good job. And that's really important. And I don't know that much about this whole thing, but I know enough to be able to then see who knows their stuff and not. You're absolutely right. And the process of learning how to learn is essential there because I did martial arts, jiu jitsu and so on. And it's so funny to watch. I did Taekwondo, yeah. Taekwondo is awesome. It's funny that there's some people that do an activity for years, because just sort of elaborate on something you were saying about hours. It's not always the amount of hours, it's the quality that you put in. Deliberate practice versus just doing some behavior. I mean, literally I've been playing chess and trying to get that going again after watching Queen's Gambit and I got chess.com. And I realized I was just playing and I'm not getting better. And then I was like, oh wait, there's a little analysis feature here in chess.com where it will show you your blunders and mistakes. And I'm like, oh, I'm spending no time reviewing my losses in chess and I just wanna play the next game. I should really review these losses and figure out what mistakes I made. And when I started doing that, I was like, oh, I'm getting better. So some deliberate practice really works. And if you wanna take it all the way, Magnus Carlsen, shout out to the guy, he has an app, but there's a few other coaching apps where you focus on the end game, you focus drilling a particular, you basically don't play the game at all. You just focus on drilling the different aspects. The openings, the end game, the end game, yeah. And there's different kinds of puzzles. So you can really make it into a deliberate practice. Not to make this episode sponsored by chess.com, but they literally have puzzles. So I was like, oh, and it's $100 a year for this product. And I just thought to myself, this is capitalism. They don't need to charge you $100 an hour for a lesson. They can charge you $100 and they've created the ability for you to play chess 24 hours a day against opponents who are perfectly matched against you based on your rating. And they analyze every game and they have puzzles and they have tutorials and they've got everything else. It's like, just think about how much value is being provided to society because of capitalism and because competition. If you want things to get better and you wanna step up your game, just make it slightly competitive. It is one of these things in human existence that is so powerful. I don't know, did you see the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance? Like half of it, I'm still working through it. He's so competitive and petty. It's so inspiring that all he cares about is just winning to the level of which he literally, there's like this running meme, I took that personally and I took that person. I don't know if you've seen the images of him sitting smoking a cigar, looking at like an iPad or a video clip and it's like, I took that personally. And you can make a super cut of every time he took something personally, he literally takes everything personally to give himself that competitive motivation to win. That's capitalism. And when people are competing, man, look at what Elon did to the space of cars. Like every, they were literally laughing at him in the first 10 years. Electric cars, ha ha, that company will go out of business. And now every single company is like, we're going fully electric by 2035. And he kicked their asses so brutally that they had no choice but then to step up their game. And that's what we want, right? And this virus and this pandemic, I think the great thing that will come out of this horrible experience that we've all had is psychologically death, learning, just so many bad things occurred, the economy, people losing their jobs. But we also got to see the human spirit with these mRNA vaccines and just how, if we took out some of the regulation and people were super motivated, we might actually be able to eliminate all pandemics from ever happening again. And before that, Bill Gates was banging his fist and Jeff Skoll was doing the movie Contagion. I mean, for two decades, people have been banging their fist. We have to be prepared for this. And everybody's like, yeah, whatever, YOLO. It's not gonna happen. And now it's happened and people are like, we need to be able to destroy every pandemic and virus before it happens. And listen, you know a lot more about science than I do, but these mRNA has been around for a while. We've just never gotten aggressive about doing it. And then you think about challenge trials. I don't know if you've been following this, but they're doing challenge trials now in the UK this month where they're introducing COVID into healthy young patients and then giving them the vaccine or, you know. And that is against all rules and regulations about do no harm. But then you think about it. We kind of celebrate people jumping out of planes and we got that one guy, Alex Honnold, who's climbing up mountains without a rope and they give him a North Star, you know, back page ad and an endorsement deal. And we celebrate that. We celebrate people surfing with sharks. We celebrate people doing deep welding. We pay them extra to go 200 feet underground and weld stuff. And people do dangerous stuff all day long, astronauts. But we won't, soldiers, firefighters, but we won't let people get paid to do a challenge trial. Yeah, we're weirdly risk averse in certain areas that completely don't make any sense. And this is where the world needs it. We could have said these thousand people, young people, who we know are in all likelihood not going to have a bad outcome, but there's a possibility. There's a possibility. But it's very low. It's certainly lower than riding a motorcycle. It's lower than riding a motorcycle. People ride motorcycles everywhere. We have ads for motorcycles. We could have just said to those thousand people, we'll give you a million dollars each to do this. Okay, there's your billion dollars. We're printing trillions of dollars of money to deal with this. If we had just done a thousand people for a million dollars each to do a challenge trial in March, April, May, when they had the mRNA vaccines ready, we could have deployed the vaccines in the summer. We would have been done with this. We would have been over by now. So we get to challenge all of that thinking. I think that's what the great pause did. It's letting everybody challenge that thinking is, why do we have that rule? Okay, yeah, we don't want to have people, you know, like give up their organs for money. Like we obviously understand, but there's a reasonable discussion about, well, maybe there's a level of risk in a global pandemic. I mean, we fought the Nazis, right? We defeated the Nazis. That took a lot of deaths to do that, but we had to kill that evil. This is another evil, which we must fight. And it's going to result in, it's already resulting in thousands of people dying a day, but we could have actually stopped it earlier if we just had a reasonable discussion. This is why podcasting is our respect what you do. This is why intelligent people are so drawn to podcasts because you and I can expand on this and not cancel each other over this very suggestion. When I make this suggestion, are challenge trials reasonable or not? If I were to do that on Twitter, they'd be like, oh, Calacanis wants to give poor people coronavirus in order to save rich people. It's like, no, I didn't say that. But you and I could have a reasonable discussion about a challenge trial is something we should consider in a acute situation where millions of people are going to lose their lives. Right, so that's an example of capitalism competition working really well. There's one of the, to me, sad thing to see about coronavirus is that, for example, testing at scale should have, it seems obvious. I was a little clueless about it, but because I thought there's no way you can have like antigen tests at hundreds of millions, like order hundreds of millions of them and make them cheap. But actually I realized recently that there have been available since about like May. Yeah. You were able to. In Korea, in Finland, all over the place. You could have done mass manufacture. So there, there's a little bit of a failure of capitalism to step up. And I don't know if you agree with this, but it seems that the blame is to be placed at the regulators and the various institutions. Chrony capitalism in all likelihood is what stopped it here in America. I mean, I had friends who had imported them from other countries, the testing kits. And you've probably been to parties where people had these kinds of testing kits from other countries and we're sitting here and they're just approving them now. Really, in February, month 11 of the pandemic in America, we're gonna have testing online, really. I mean, even if these tests were 80% effective and they're 95% effective, mass producing them, we should have sent them in every postal, anybody with a post office box with a mailing address should have had 10 of them put in their mailing address just for free from the government. And then everybody would be testing and we would have contained it. We don't have test and trace here in the United States. Well, all the countries that are on the other side of COVID did it by having testing, tracing and closing their borders and masks. That's the combination that works. The problem with the coronavirus is while there's a lot of institutions did not behave their best, it's also the case that there's a lot of uncertainty. So I tend to give a little bit of a pass to everybody involved for the uncertainty. We were all. I give them that until June. I wonder how history will remember this whole period. I'd love to ask you, because you were an early investor in Robinhoods and you're in a very nice place of being a huge supporter of the sort of Wall Street bets kind of distributed power of the people. And at the same time, because of you being an investor, like intellectually giving a chance to Robinhood in this kind of chaotic time of conversations to think about like, well, what did they do right? What did they do wrong? So you have a kind of a balance view on the whole thing, which is really nice. We've talked about what Robinhood did right, I think. Can you sort of steel man at your mouth's argument of what Robinhood did wrong in the last few days? Yeah, I mean, communication is always the number one issue with these startups, right? And if you, you have to get ahead of any problem and you have to put all the bad news out immediately. And in the case of Robinhood, it seems based on what has been in the papers and what Robinhood said publicly is that they had this kind of liquidity crisis, right? Where they were being, because of these exchanges telling them you have to put up this amount of money in collateral and them being pinned at number one in the app store. There were so many people trying to buy five shares of this stock, five shares of this meme stock that it kind of broke their system. And then the people who clear the trades for them, they said, you gotta put up a billion dollars, two billion dollars, three billion dollars. We can't do that overnight. And I think that they were in an uncomfortable situation of like going on TV and saying, we have a liquidity crisis. Like that could be like a run on the bag. Everybody then logs in at the same time to Robinhood and tries to sell every share they own because they're afraid that the whole thing's gonna collapse, right? So I think there was this kind of like black swan event and they probably didn't communicate it all that well. At the center of that, this is really interesting. Maybe you can comment on the nature of communication. Vlad, the CEO, the guy you met at the bar, was I think at the center of the communication, right? So Elon is an example of a guy who also is at the center of the communication for his particular set of companies. And that on Twitter seems to be a really powerful way to communicate. And there was something, this is me saying it, there was something about Vlad that sounded like he's hiding stuff. As opposed to Elon, it doesn't sound like he's hiding stuff. It could be the nature, the beat, the timing of the conversation. Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg for some reason often sounds like he's hiding something. And then there's like Jack Dorsey is much less so. And I don't know what that is about the CEOs that makes you trust them and not. Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity. There might be nondisclosures in place that we're not aware of where they're not allowed to talk about certain relationships. I see. And that results like in Vlad's case, and that results in you being like acting weird and nervous. Or nervous. Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous. So it's really hard to be building one of these companies and you're at scale and oh my Lord, the entire thing's coming apart and you're the most hated person for that day. You know how the rage cycle works and the media is just so crazy when they get their hooks into something. I saw it happen with Uber. We saw it happen with Facebook and even Tesla. There were times when people did stupid things with autopilot and it's like, okay, somebody is watching a movie and sleeping in their car or leaving the driver's seat against all the rules of autopilot and somehow Tesla's responsible for that. It's like we have people who stand on top of their motorcycles and drive down the road on a motorcycle. And we don't blame Yamaha or Harley Davidson for some idiot standing on the seat of their motorcycle on a highway going 60 miles an hour. We just say, that person's an idiot. But when new technology comes out, we blame the technology, not the person operating it. And if you are going to operate, we basically vilify it and demonize it. I think that is part of it. Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb, we always thought, what if somebody trashes your apartment? And then sure enough, a bunch of meth heads rented this poor woman's apartment. She left all of her stuff in it. And then a bunch of meth heads had a drug party, destroyed her apartment, ripped up all her photos and went crazy. And we knew that day would happen, but nobody remembers it now. But it was the number one story on every news channel because wow, that's an exciting story. And I just thought to myself, I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms where the hotel room is being trashed and people are doing drugs and crazy things. It's like, yes, that's basically every hotel in Los Angeles right now is being destroyed by some rock band that's throwing a TV out the window. Like we expected in a hotel, we just didn't expect it in somebody's house with Airbnb. And then Airbnb created rules around, you can't rent an Airbnb for a party and they learn. So I think there's a learning curve with these companies and they do get to scale at a level that is unprecedented. It used to take decades for a company to become an international phenomenon. Now it happens in two, three, four years. I mean, look at Clubhouse. This thing went from being a private beta six months ago to being the number one app in Germany and in Japan and here. Like just like that, boom. And it's because there's an ecosystem that has never existed, the app store. Then there's payments online. And then everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket. The thing people got wrong about entrepreneurship technology and business over the last couple of decades was just how big the market was and then how quickly you could achieve relevancy in these markets. We thought the market was like the 60 million homes were broadband. And originally it was like maybe 10 or 20. Then it became 60 million. Then it was like, okay, well, how many hours are you at your desktop computer? Well, like probably at our computers for five hours a day, 10 hours a day at work, three hours a day on our own. And then it was like, yeah, nobody's on their desktop computer. Everybody's on their mobile phone. Oh, and by the way, they have it with them. So the people with mobile phones are now using this high speed device with an app store with their credit card in it. In the early days of the internet, people were scared to put their credit card on the internet. That was considered a really dumb thing to do. If you put your credit card on the internet, you're gonna lose all your money. They're gonna hack you or whatever. And now it's just amazing to me how quickly when a company hits, how quickly it can get to a million subscribers or 10 million or a billion users, right? And there's all these networks, like social networks that allow the spread of the viral spread of like a new startup, a new company, a new app to be announced. Anything. An idea, a podcast, right? A single thing, a single meme could change the world. Speaking of Clubhouse, I just wanna, we're saying so many interesting things, but there was a magical moment with Vlad and Elon on Clubhouse. I don't know if you got that. That was wild. Yes, is there, do you have thoughts about that interaction which felt like so many aspects of this whole situation feels like totally novel, surreal, like it's defining a new era. It is, yes. Like a billionaire, the richest human on earth is interviewing the person at the center of one of the most interesting mass scale like power battles in finance ever, perhaps. And by the way, seven movies have been sold two weeks. Just think about how fast things are moving, Lex. This thing happens. Like people had the idea to short the stock six months ago. They start doing their research. They build an army. They execute the trade. The system goes down. Robinhood raises $3.5 billion in four days. Elon is interviewing them on Clubhouse on Sunday after the Wednesday it happened. And now here we are, it's 10 days later. Doesn't it feel like it's been 10 months? It's been 10 days, Lex. It's been 10 days. 10 days. Plus, there's like a new president, all these things, and everyone forgot. Oh, and there was an insurrection. By the way, we also almost had a revolution at the Capitol where a bunch of crazy people who have guns and body armor, and then a bunch of them who are just yoloing in cosplay, took over the Capitol. Well, so, and the other more dramatic thing to me is. That was one month ago. That was one month. And the president of the United States got banned from every major social network, and which I think I'm still deeply troubled by is Parler being removed from AWS. That changed the way, that changed a lot of things. As somebody who's an aspiring entrepreneur, that changed the way I see the world. That little, maybe I'm being over dramatic, but. No, you're not. I think you're paranoid for a reason. You're paranoid for a very good reason, which is as big as these companies can become, they are beholden to the mob. And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled, they're going to get canceled because you can't lose your entire audience. You could lose your whole customer base, and you could lose all your employees. I think what's interesting about your fear about Parler and AWS taking off is we went from being like a social network, which is the software layer. And then we went to like the infrastructure layer, and they'll even go after like Cloudflare, which is a CDN provider, right? They're just like a plumbing, it's like sort of like the telephone. So we're basically holding everybody responsible on the whole chain of events here. And what that's going to do is, I'm not a huge believer in crypto, but distributed computing, where nobody in decentralized and distributed computing platforms and open standards, podcasting is an open standard, the web is an open standard, FTP was an open standard, but Twitter and Facebook are closed. And what's going to happen is we will see a group of individuals create peer to peer networks for social media, where nobody can control it. And the same for cloud computing, where there's a crypto project where everybody will, and I invested in a company that tried to do this and got sold and it didn't work out, but take your hard drive on your computer at home, you give a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive over to the cloud, and then everybody else does their terabyte. And then all of a sudden you've got this virtual cloud and anybody can store stuff on it and it's all encrypted, and then nobody can stop it. And that could be tweets, it could be videos. And so this idea that YouTube will be able to tell people, to kick people off because they're skeptics of, I don't know, the pandemic or the vaccine, or they've, they'll make things that are more censorship resistant. I think that'll be the reaction to all of this. This is my question for you, going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you, is there, like with Clubhouse, do you see competitors, do you think it's possible that another, perhaps more decentralized or another kind of social media will emerge that will take on Twitter and Facebook and might be able to replace them? If you look at the whole landscape with Clubhouse and everything else, do you think some other company might emerge? There'll be 10 versions of Clubhouse. We looked at social networking. We thought Friendster was it. Like Friendster was so good, nobody would be able to compete with that. It was growing so quickly. And then MySpace was a juggernaut and they hit a hundred million in revenue and a hundred million users. And it was like, well, that's game over. And then Facebook and LinkedIn and Snapchat and FriendFeed and countless others. So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category and 80% of the category will be owned by the top two or three players. But will those players change, do you think? What's your sense of that? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, if Facebook hadn't bought Instagram, it would be a company in decline right now. People would be shorting the stock, right? Facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down and Instagram saved them and WhatsApp saved them. So, you know, that's another kind of weird moment in history that they were able to accumulate that much power and consolidate that much power. Instagram should have never sold to them. That should have gone public. They had just raised money from Sequoia and they had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation and they didn't need to sell. And that was a big mistake to sell. They should have kept going and they should have took on Facebook. And if Instagram was a standalone company right now, it'd be worth 500 million, 500 billion, yeah. Do you think Facebook might buy Clubhouse has been? Oh, they'll probably copy it. I mean, Zuckerberg has no moral compass or ethics or anything. I mean, he's a marauder. I mean, he basically copied Snapchat seven times. Like he did poke and he just kept trying and trying and trying. Part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders and the Instagram founders left is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful in terms of his ability to copy. What do you think makes a great leader in that sense? Because, okay, so when I look at Zuckerberg. He's a great executor. Is he a great executor? I don't think he's a great leader. I was bullish on, I was excited by Facebook in the very early days. I thought it was an exciting opportunity to connect people and stuff started going wrong in certain kinds of ways. And again, maybe it's our human nature, but I attribute a lot of that to the leadership. Absolutely. I mean, the guy started it because he was unable to ask girls if they were single and on a date. I mean, that was his explicit. That could be a good motivator. That could be a good motivator. Well, I mean, it does. I mean, listen, the motivation of 18, 19 year old men or his, yeah, pretty clear. He was just trying to, he had no game. He had no game and he needed to know who was single so he could at least have a shot at getting a date. It's a little creepy. A little creepy, yeah. He, I think, was so obsessed with engagement and winning. And he's kind of like one of those friends you have who's just really good at playing a video game, but maybe doesn't see the bigger picture in life. And I mean, there's a reason why everybody who worked for him hates him and doesn't talk to him anymore and then actively derides him. Like so many, the people who sold WhatsApp to him then backed other projects like Telegram and said horrible things about him on the way out. These are the people he made billionaires. And they really don't like him. So I think there is something that he does that does not breed loyalty, but he's very successful in his focus, which is growth is all that matters. He's a marauder and taking friction out of products and processes is the playbook of Silicon Valley for the last decade or two. So whatever the friction is. It's like poetry what you're saying right now. It's like you're speaking so fast that I almost forget that you're dropping bombs. But so removing the, removing friction. And you're saying Facebook is exceptionally good at removing friction. He was the best at it. I mean, at Uber, they were like, we're gonna take out tipping. We're gonna take out the need for you to take out your credit card and do payment. It's just gonna be in your wallet. You got picked up, you leave, that's it. And I was like, we should have tipping. And they're like, it adds a step. And we're trying to have no steps. You put your address in, you click the button and you do nothing else. And so we've been obsessed here in Silicon Valley is how many clicks can we take out of the process? I guess Amazon is incredible at that as well. Absolutely, one click was the start of it. And then you look at Clubhouse as an example, you open Clubhouse and you see rooms, you click on it, you're listening. So in one click, you're listening. And then in one click, if you raise your hand or you get invited and you say, yes, you're speaking. So it's two clicks to speak, one click to listen. I mean, the only way they could make that app work even faster is if you opened it up and your microphone was turned on, which is kind of scary, but that is the next evolution. And what happens when you go that fast is you get unintended consequences. And so this is why Facebook has had more fines than any company in the history of Silicon Valley, just giant fines for doing stuff like this. And one of them was, I don't know if you remember when they created groups or if you have a group for your podcast, but you can just add people to a group without their permission. And there was this famous case when they first came out with it. Somebody created a Nambla fake group, National Man Love Boy Association or whatever, like pedophilia association. And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself, and like 20 other famous people in Silicon Valley. And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it and they're like, you're in Nambla? And I'm like, no. Facebook, and then Zuckerberg's response was, well, if your friends put you in that Nambla group, you should get new friends. And it was like, you got put in there too. And then the sad part about it was there were a group of young men who were gay and who were in college and there was a gay choir in their college and the person who was coordinating their Facebook group added them. So Zuckerberg, it wasn't enough for Zuckerberg to make it so anybody could add anybody to any group because it will grow faster, let alone you have to confirm you wanna be added to the group. What it also did was posted it on their walls to increase engagement. And what they inadvertently did was they outed a bunch of 18, 19 year olds in college to their families because they joined the gay men's choir at some college. And this is the kind of way, this is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself and to do better is you have to really think, well, there is my incentive to grow faster and then there's what's right for society and for the individual. You gotta think it through, think it through. It's sometimes very difficult. This is where vision is required to anticipate the unintended consequences. And it seems like Mark Zuckerberg is not very good at that. You've talked to so many great leaders in this world, privately and publicly. What do you think makes a great leader of these tech companies? Do you have an example? Is Elon to you a great leader? He's also a controversial one, right? There's a love and hate, a controversial sense that there is, and I know a lot of people work with him, for him, that there's also a love, hate relationship. The hate comes from the fact that they get pushed extremely hard. It's a very competitive environment, but it's a positive one because there's a vision that's underlying. It's similar to the Steve Jobs thing. And it has to do with the, back to our Michael Jordan discussion as well, that there seems to be the demons involved in tension and just anxiety, all those kinds of things. If you wanna do great things, there will be some suffering and there'll be some pain, and it's not easy if you wanna change the world. And then some people have this expectation that it's going to be easy. And what you'll typically find for any great leader who's trying to do something super ambitious, like if you wanna be like, if you're a rich guy and you start a restaurant and you don't care about making money and people have made restaurants before, you could be high fives and everybody could love you or whatever. But if you wanna change the world, you wanna do something hard driving, there's gonna be sacrifice involved. And so the problem is people are looking at something that is an Olympic caliber sport or a Navy SEALs like effort. In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice. We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal, like Michael Phelps and say, oh my God, he had to get up at 4 a.m. every day and he had to swim and he had to do an ice bath. Oh my God, that poor guy, he suffered, he was tortured. People were super mean to him, they put him in an ice bath. It was like, no, he wanted to be the greatest swimmer of all time and he knew what the sacrifice entailed. And that what happens in work, in business, is that people conflate like, oh, well, I went to work to make a living to pay my bills versus Michael Phelps approach to getting gold medals or Michael Jordan or pick the person, Elon or Jeff Bezos. And when you look at the reviews of like a place like Amazon, there was this incredible story in the New York Times where people were, I don't know if you remember it, this is the worst place you could ever work, Amazon. And we talked to 200 people and they all told us, they all described for us in the New York Times, a culture of cutthroatness and brutality that has never before been seen. And then you see all these people who work for Bezos for 24 years from when they graduated with their MBAs until today. And they've never left the company and they are ride or die forever. And what you're seeing there is, there's a mismatch of people going to work in an extreme sport or an extreme endeavor who should not do that. There are people who should go out into the rice fields and pick rice. And then there's another group of people who are samurai and who wield a sword and who take on missions that are dangerous. But if you're a rice picker and that's what you do and you feel safe, just getting a couple grains of rice, put them in a basket, cleaning it and then whatever, that's valid work, no big deal. I'm not deriding it, I'm sort of, but that is one group. And then there's people who are samurai and you cannot conflate the two, you cannot compare the two. And that's what is happening right now in business. Whenever you see these stories about, this person at this company is like a tyrant and they're so horrible and they yelled at somebody. Like if you're in the field and you're taking the beach at Normandy and it's D day or you gotta take the hill or you gotta whack Osama bin Laden and you're the Navy SEALs and like a rudder, a rotor gets knocked off the back of the Black Hawk, like this is serious shit. Like don't do it if you're not serious. And if you're not serious about changing the world, why would you go work for Bezos? Why would you go work for Elon Musk? Don't do it, don't go work there. This is, let me just sit back and enjoy the beauty of all of that. That's music to my ears, but I'm not sure what to do with it because it's conflicting to a lot of the things I hear from the way you're supposed to kind of act. And I think in order to do great things, you have to, I always admired people that lose their shit a little bit because they're so passionate. And I apologize and all those kinds of things, but like there's a tension, there's a drama to the creative process when especially in the early startup, this is not like the work life balance idea doesn't even apply. Work life balance, it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous concept. Like the idea that there's like work life balance in a startup is ridiculous. If you're looking for work life balance, do not go to a startup or any kind of ambitious company. There is a series of places you can work in the world where you do not need to do anything more than what's put in front of you. And you just put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole and you go home. And you get your little bits and grains of rice and you go heat them up and eat them, that's it. And then there's this other thing, which is the extreme pursuit of changing the world and sacrificing. And we have a generation of people, multi generations of people who are soft. They're just soft. I mean, what is the big struggle we've had to deal with in America in our lifetimes? Like 9 11 and we didn't have the Vietnam War and then we had this like weird Iraq Wars and Middle East Wars that were kind of like a small number of people went and we sent drones. Like we have not had to sacrifice. Gen Xers, maybe the tail end of boomers experienced the Vietnam War regrettably. But we've had a couple of generations now, three I guess, that just haven't had to suffer. And so we're soft as Americans, we're soft. And then you look at people in China and we're like, oh my God, these poor Chinese people are living in these tiny cramped apartments. Like they were living in like essentially lean twos in Northern China with no running water or like one spigot of ice cold water for the entire village. Like they're thrilled to be joining the middle class. Even if it's the bottom of the middle class, right? They've taken hundreds of millions of people in China and moved them into the middle class. And we're like, oh my God, these people are suffering. It's like, they're up to $4 an hour, three or $4 an hour in the factories there. And they were just two decades ago at, I don't know, it was probably 50 cents an hour, something crazy like that. And now they've improved the quality of life there so much, just like America did 200 years ago or 100 years ago. They've improved it so much in China that now they're getting outpriced for factories from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, and people are moving and people in China are moving the factories out of China into other countries. Because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam and other countries. So this is the way of the world. People move up and they get a better lot in life for their families. And just in America, we've gotten soft. And there's a generation. How do people die in America now? Suicide, obesity, heart attacks, anxiety. I mean, we're suffering from things that if you told people 100 years ago that the number, the top ways Americans would die would be overeating and suicide, they'd be like, what? You're literally killing yourself or eating yourself to death? That's what's happening in America? And when everybody, not everybody en masse, there's a large number of people who have become softer and softer. Capitalism creates an environment where there is people that still step up amidst that with a big dream and challenge the conventions. And that human spirit just arise above that. Elon's example of that, Jeff Bezos's example of that. Countless, countless examples. And they push the limits of those, of human beings that are willing to step up. And I think about sort of how to create a company that amidst all of this softness still creates a revolution. It's not, it doesn't seem trivial. It seems like how do you build a culture that's once healthy, but also unhealthy in the way that an Olympic pursuit is. It's all top down. Everybody just, you asked earlier what leadership was and I never answered the question. I think what leaders do is they set the example, they set the bar. And if you look at someone like Elon, we're personal friends for 20 years and he is indefatigable. Like, I mean, the guy has a stamina that is just phenomenal. Like he does not get tired. He works relentlessly and he sets that standard for the rest of the team. And I think Bezos is very sharp and likes to debate stuff and is very, and Jobs was just incredible at design and figuring out how to bridge that gap. So they just, leaders set the standard. They set the standard. And you know that your time is over as a leader when you can't set the standard. And that's when you have to pass the baton, right? And Bezos did that. And Bezos now is saying, you know what? I'm 57, I'm the richest guy on the planet, depending on the week. And I would like to do some other challenges, but I don't wanna grind it out at Amazon for another 25 years. I wanna do other things. And so he passed the baton. And that's the healthy thing to do in that regard. I do think there is a time period in which you can run that hot. And then at a certain point you have to then change. Just like an athlete might go to be a coach, right? Or a commentator. And so being an entrepreneur is brutal. It's seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Anybody who says anything differently is kidding themselves. You're gonna have to sacrifice. And this competition, and America has to fight. If America does not win capitalism, and China does, it is literally the end of the human species. It's over for humanity. Right now, everything has been going really well in terms of the number of people living in poverty is plummeting. Lifespans have been rising. Science is booming. The economy is booming. All these things are incredible. The one thing that's kind of stagnant right now is the number of people living in democracy versus under authoritarian rule. It's flat. So when you look at all Steve Pinker's charts, and he's really excited, there's one you're gonna see that's flat. And I think we peaked with 53 or 54% of people on the planet Earth being in a democracy, and now it's going below 50. And it's because some of the democratic Western countries don't have the population growth of some of the communist and socialist countries and authoritarian countries. And we have to make sure that we win capitalism. We must win economically. That is the battlefield. The battlefield is science, technology, and money, and economy, finance. That's the battlefield. China wins, authoritarians win. And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room and say, it's time for you to be reeducated. Or they can put three or four million people, Uighurs, into prison camps and say, you know what? This religious thing, that's counter to what is productive for us. Therefore, we're gonna shave your heads and we're going to have you literally pick cotton in the fields. They have Uighurs with no sense of any kind of arc of history in the fields picking cottons as slaves in what can only be described by every humanitarian organization as a concentration camp. And every Jewish person I know takes great offense when somebody uses the Holocaust as a metaphor, except in the case of the Uighurs right now. And every Jewish person I've talked to has said to me, that is a Holocaust. That is millions of people going to genocide because of their religious beliefs. And I'm an atheist, but if people wanna believe a certain religion, fine. But China's approach is we need to win capitalism so bad, we need to win on the global stage so bad, we can't have any of this religious stuff going on here. That is a distraction from winning and beating America. And then in America, the people who are gonna make us win are the entrepreneurs and the scientists and the technology and our education system and finance. And we're vilifying those things. It's pretty dark. It's dark, but I still believe that the vilification is just in the space of Twitter and the space of ideas. I think that's probably a good. And entrepreneurs win out in the end. They don't listen to that. I believe we'll win. And they'll build, we'll get the rocks up. Some of them do actually in their darkest moments, I can tell you that they turn off their Twitter accounts and they, I've had to sit down with a number of entrepreneurs and say, turn off Twitter. This is not healthy for you. This is not a healthy pursuit because, don't read the comments. If you do, it's like a full contact sport. You should just take it as like professional wrestling or something, but stay focused on building companies and advancing the human species through science and technology. I mean. As you're describing, you've hosted this week in startups for how many episodes? 11 years, almost 1200 now. 1200. Yeah. So you've talked to some of the great leaders in business in general. Is there a common thing that you see or? Really, I'm in a relationship with their parents. Like just find me a great entrepreneur. I will, show me the trauma. Their dad was like, you're not good enough. In the teenage years, is that truly, is there something? There is definitely something. Hardship at some point in their life kind of thing? Yeah, I think so. I mean, and there's definitely something with immigrant parents that is a bit of a stereotype out here, but I've heard from many investors, like that's like their, oh, were your parents immigrants? And did they beat into you that you have to succeed and you feel the need to succeed because they suffered to get you to this country? Like there is an archetype there that I hear. When I started investing, I heard from a lot of people. It's like, yeah, you wanna find those immigrant founders who are coming out of Stanford because they had to fight to get there and their parents had to fight, right? So it was like two huge fights and there's so much at stake as opposed to somebody who's fifth generation and like had everything handed to them and they were legacy and got into schools for free. But I think in general, the ability to get people to join you on that journey is so critical. So you have to be charismatic and it doesn't mean like you're an extrovert. There are introverts who are super charismatic and there are soft spoken people. They don't have to be like super vivacious or rambunctious people. They could be just quiet assassins, but you need to be able to get people to come on the journey with you. You have to be that storyteller and you have to have that passion and then you have to transfer that enthusiasm to investors, the press, to customers, to all the stakeholders. And if you're enthusiastic about it and you're engaged, then it's easier for people to come on that journey. And that's why people really start to think about, well, what is the purpose of what I'm doing? And it sounds corny and when I first heard that, I was like, it's kind of corny. But then I read this book by, I've got his name, Rick something. He wrote the purpose driven church and he had spoken at a TED or something and everybody went crazy about it. And he's like, a church should have one purpose, one single thing they do. And like his church, which was like one of these mega churches in San Diego, just wanted to do education for this specific country. And that's all they did. And they just, they benchmarked. I think it's very important to have a purpose and a mission, not everything, but a specific purpose of some kind of joy that you wanna put into the world. You wanna solve some kind of big, hard problem. And then everybody knows why you're coming to work every day. And then for the founder, when you dread going to work that day and you don't feel like solving that problem anymore, that's the tell. And a lot of times I meet young founders, I'm like, why are you doing this? And they're like, well, I was looking for an idea and this is the one I came up with because I think I'll make a lot of money. And it's like, you're gonna quit. You're gonna get to month nine or 10 of this and you're gonna run out of money or like your CTO is gonna quit, then your CFO is gonna quit and you're gonna lose your biggest customer and you're just gonna say, this is not worth it. And if using Bezos or Elon as examples, they just needed to see the world change in very specific ways. And Steve Jobs, they needed to see a change and it doesn't matter if they made money or they were losing or winning, they just went to work every day and they had to change it. It's almost like they didn't have a choice. No choice. Elon makes it sound like his torture, his whole journey, but he can't help it. Having been a witness to it, just as friends for that long, I have never seen an entrepreneur suffer more than him. And he's been public about that, like you do not wanna be me. He has suffered for those companies. He has suffered to get them where they are. It has not been easy. Can you second analyze Elon in that aspect? Like, is it just he can't help it? He must see the change that he hopes for in the world. He's just incredibly hardworking and he's very talented as well. I don't think people understand that. He actually is a really brilliant man. He actually is a really brilliant engineer. At the end of the day, he actually knows what he's doing and he asked the right questions. I mean, people were kind of aghast that he was asking Vlad such good questions. And they're like, oh my God, Elon's the best journalist on the planet. And it was like, anybody who knows Elon knows he has great questions. I mean, I used to have dinner in LA and my book agent also was Sam Harris's agent. And Sam and I met through John Brockman and we became friends because we lived near each other and I was friends with Elon. And then I used to invite them to both dinner in Brentwood because one lived in Bel Air, one lived in Santa Monica and I lived in Brentwood. And we would go to this place, Popone, this Italian restaurant. And every Tuesday for years, we would just, the three of us, every other Tuesday or so, we'd have dinner and I'd sit there and Sam wanted to know about AI and Elon's talking about artificial intelligence because he's on the board of DeepMind. Elon wanted to know about atheism and meditation and all this other stuff that Sam was an expert on. I got to sit there and just listen to these two guys talk. And they have both piercing intelligences, but Elon, he goes straight to the gut, like the questions that no engineer wants to hear is just the basic stuff that, it's like, why the hell are you doing it this way when the obvious solution is much easier or this or that? Why haven't you tried this? He can figure things out. I mean, he's a problem solver. I mean, and that's another thing, like I think the great entrepreneurs can look at a problem with very fresh eyes, like almost consistently. And Bezos described that as day one thinking, right? Like just pretend this is day one every day. And then other people use the term first principles, but it basically means like when you see a problem, pause for a second and really think through what is the best possible solution here? What are some alternative solutions and get from everybody, like how do we solve this problem? What people do sometimes they get in a rut. They just come to work and they just go through their email. They do whatever they did the day before. They don't think, why are we doing this? And is there a better way to do it? Now you can get so obsessive about that that you can over engineer stuff and you can never actually ship a product. So there have to be some pragmatism and some goals and some dates associated with that. But it is a very cool thing to really think like, I wonder if we actually made the batteries ourselves, what that would look like. Or I wonder if we could get to two day shipping, or what if we do same day shipping? Like you need to have somebody who's willing to say, you know what, fuck it. Let's set a crazy audacious goal. Two day shipping of any product anywhere in the United States. And once you throw the gauntlet down like that, now everybody knows they're rolling in the right direction. Two day shipping, Amazon Prime. And that's what people didn't realize about Amazon. The business wasn't shipping all those products. It was getting you to sign up for Amazon Prime. They have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime for 10 bucks a month. I think globally it's probably cheaper. But that was the driver of that business was all of those people. Cause they would, you're an Amazon Prime subscriber? Do you know how much you pay? No. Exactly. It started at $50. And I think they even had like 40, 50, $60 was like the testing in the early days. And now it's, I think $149, 12, $13 a month. If you pay for the year, I think it goes down to 10 bucks a month, 120. And you're like, wow. And it's like, yeah, you're paying $13 a month for the privilege of shopping at Amazon. But you say it's the greatest thing in the world because anything I need, if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad or a camera goes bad, you get it here within a day or less. It's pretty amazing. You've already been dropping bombs, incredible advice on startups in general. But let me maybe go straight in and ask, is there advice for somebody that wants to go big to build the big startup to help them succeed? Yeah, it's very similar to the advice I give to investors because now I teach angel investing because there's so many people who want to invest. And so I wrote a book on that angel and then I do a course called Angel University that I teach six times a year. And then I have a syndicate called thesyndicate.com where I invest in companies. There's 6,500 people who are members of that. It's the largest syndicate in the world. In fact, the first deal we ever did was calm.com, the meditation app. We put $378,000 into it when it was a $5 million product. A $5 million company. So we bought six or 7% of the company. It's now worth 2 billion. So you can do the math on that. We still own 5%. What year was that? Six years ago. So probably seven, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014. And nobody else would invest in calm. But Sam Harris was the reason I did because I asked Sam, tell me about meditation. And he's explaining it to me. And I said, what about this? You have to have like a mantra. How does it work exactly? I know positive. He was like, well, you know, you should just go to UCLA and talk to Diana Winston. And like, there's this whole project there. And I'm like, UCLA does meditation? He's like, yeah, there's a mindful institute. They're like teaching people to be Tahitian meditation. And they're doing PTSD and I'm doing brain scans. And I was like, oh. And then I talked to the UCLA people and they're like, it's real, yeah, like we taught Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O Neal did, you know, that's how they won their championships. They meditated. And I was like, hmm, if UCLA is doing it, Sam says it's cool. Well, fuck it, I'll put money into that. And that's the second biggest investment in my career after Uber. And it will in all likelihood become the biggest. I mean, it's between Uber, Robinhood and Calm. And long story short, when I'm teaching people to angel invest, there's really two things that you cannot fake. One is a product that is built really well. So if you look at Calm, Robinhood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, these products are transcendent. They're well constructed. There's craftsmanship to them. They're great products. So you're saying not fundamentally like the idea, but the execution of the actual craftsmanship of the construction. The actual product is amazing. Then there's customers. And that every business has ultimately a customer. And that customer, if they are in fact delighted by that product, that's the magic. Because you need a team to build the product. And then you need customers to use the product. And really those three vectors are undeniable. Now, you can have great teams that build a bad product, doesn't happen too often. Or you can have customers who don't like the product, but generally speaking, a great team will build a great product or a good product that iterate, and then eventually delight customers. And so most people say the team is the most important, but there's a lot of smart people out there. And let's assume that you can raise money for your idea, or you have money, or you can just convince people to do it for free. If you make a great product and it connects with users, that's the magic. You look at Clubhouse, it's actually a really well designed product. And that product is connecting with customers. And if you were to talk to the customers or look at the product, you would see a well constructed product and a delighted customer. And you can tell the delighted customer by just the amount of time they use it. That's called engagement. It's the fancy word for how much they use it. And Snapchat, when that was going around and they were trying to raise money, they had a fraction of the number of users, but the top maybe third were opening the app every hour. And nobody had ever seen that before. People were using Facebook a couple of times a day, the top users, but nobody had ever seen people using it every day for a hundred days in a row, every hour. And I was like, what's going on here? It's like, oh, the ephemeral messaging, and then the streaks. They had created these streaks between people where every day and then people would be like on vacation, like, I just have to open my streak and keep my streak with Lex that we chatted every day going. And so they had this like addictive nature to it. And that's why Clubhouse was able to garner so much investment is the number of hours people were using it every month was just unbelievably off the charts. Some of that is execution, but some of it is the weird magic of the... Product market fit. Yeah, so there's something, I mean, Clubhouse, there's a, it's still a mystery to me because I also use Discord voice. There's an intimacy to voice. Oh, for sure. Well, you have people's, yeah, tent. It's, well, but like the video gets in the way actually, in a weird way. There's a privacy when you just use voice. People are not taking showers now, Lex. I mean, we're in a pandemic and people just roll out of bed. And the hair thing, nobody's getting haircuts. Nobody's hair is good, nobody's getting haircuts. People are wearing gym clothes. I mean, Zoom is just horrific to be on Zoom for five hours a day. It is exhausting. Well, it does make me wonder what, once we emerge from the pandemic, whether a product market fit, how that evolves with Clubhouse and all those kinds of things. Yeah, I know Clubhouse is a beneficiary of the pandemic for sure. When do you think the pandemic, when do you think deaths will be under, let's say 200 a day and we'll have 200 million people on the other side of this? Because that's kind of what it takes, right? You gotta get to 150, 200 million people on the other side in America? I haven't, you know, I personally stopped deeply thinking about this because I've been frustrated for so long that. You checked out. I almost checked out because it psychologically allows me to carry on because I thought for many months now that testing needs to be done at scale. And it still hasn't gotten done. It hasn't been. It's so ridiculous. We gave up basically on testing. We gave up. Because we're, and we're all sitting there waiting for vaccine to come along. And the distribution of the vaccine is not, you know, it's struggling from the same kind of things as the testing. It's gonna take quite a bit of time. So it does, if everything goes great, meaning there's not a second strand of the virus that's going to create a second major wave that I am cynical enough to think that it won't be until mid summer that we start opening back up. Yeah, I think it's gonna be May, June. I'm a little bit earlier than you. I've been tracking it. There are 1.5 million shots in arms a day. I think this vaccine's been undersold. I mean, it's a miracle. Not one person who was in the trials died, who took it, and only one went to the hospital and they weren't even put on a ventilator. So, and the hospitalizations are plummeting and we're at 10% now in the United States. At the pace, we're going at 1.5 a day. I think when the Johnson & Johnson one comes out next month, it'll be 3 million a day maybe, two and a half. And we already have 100 million people who've likely had it. So I've been doing the math. I think we're like 60 days away, February, March. Yeah, sometime in April, I think. Anybody's gonna be able to get a shot and the number of deaths is gonna go below 200 a day. And once that happens, I think people have had enough of this. They're just gonna go YOLO. But see, the crucial piece for me that I've been focusing on is the social media aspect of how the, it's not just about the reality of deaths. It's about the state of the collective intelligence of the human species, which is determined by our communication on social media. So yeah, we can be collectively afraid, the fear can spread, or it could be YOLO can spread, or it could be like all different kinds of misinformation. And of course, during the election year, the politics influences our perception of what is true and not, but having real rigorous nuanced conversation about this kind of stuff is the way out of this. And that's where social media really comes in because social media drives division, where people form tribes and so on. And it feels like it's honestly a technology problem. People say it's a human problem, but it just feels like, I believe humans are good. Technology can enable them to be thoughtful. We talked earlier about the magic of Silicon Valley and then maybe going too far with the Facebook groups example, where you take out all that friction. What happened was we used to have something called Rchron, reverse chronological order. That's how you consume to feed. So any kind of social feed, like Twitter was in reverse chronological order. The newest thing was up top and you would just work your way backwards. And so it gave this like really fresh feeling. And then a guy named Dave Moran and the team over at Facebook realized, you know, there are some things that got a lot of attention two hours ago. And the stuff since then has not been as important. But if you miss that, there was a really good tweet where there was a really good update. Like somebody had a baby. Can we get the baby one at the top? And it was like, well, how would we do that? How would we know that that's the important one? It's like, well, let's put a like button on it and let's see how many comments there are. So if it gets a lot of likes or comments or retweets, let's show those first and then we'll kind of mix in the most recent stuff. And so when you're on Twitter, and then when Facebook did that, Facebook became so addicting because Facebook was on, what has got the most engagement? Put that first. So every time you opened up Facebook, you get the dopamine hit. And then what happens when you see the Bar Mitzvah photo or, you know, the enraging story about some injustice in the world? You retweet it, you write a comment, you share it on your wall. And thus this addiction to the outrageous, the outlandish, the inspiring occurred. And it used to be like inspiring stuff, puppies or some heartwarming story. And then it got dark. And then people started to realize, if I wanna show up on the top of my friend's feeds, if I say something controversial or I'm outraged, I get to the top. And then that's when outrage culture came in. And then that's when cancel culture came in. Everybody started to realize, if I try to cancel that person for being a racist or a sexist or a horrible human being or whatever they did that's wrong, I get to the top of the feed. And we all collectively started playing a very weird video game, which is how outraged can we all be? And to get to the top of the list. And then of course, with Trump, he realized it. And he's like, okay, yeah, I'm just gonna make fun of a celebrity and I get more retweets. Okay, I'm gonna make fun of Rosie O'Donnell for being overweight or something. And he just starts attacking people. And people are like, oh my God, what did he say? And he copied that from Howard Stern. Cause he was in New York and he used to be on Howard Stern. Howard Stern took over all the dialogue in the eighties and nineties because he was outrageous. And then Trump did that. And then social media incorporated that into the operating system. It became the actual device of social media was the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. We've got something incredible for you. Everybody salivates like Pavlov's dog. Oh my God, I can be outraged. That's what's gotta be undone. And the only way for that to be undone is these things can't be billions of people where the most outrageous thing that happened in the world today in the last five minutes is now in front of you. And that's why people have anxiety. They don't sleep and they doom scroll all night. It's because the human mind was not meant to process this much suffering, pain, anger. And that's why we have all this mental health issues. Also, young girls or even adults watching other people post their private jets and their vacations and YOLO adventures on their Instagram to the point at which young people are now faking being on private jets to put on their Instagram and creating this crazy FOMO around their Instagrams. We wonder why people are unhappy. If you think everybody's on a private jet going to some Michelin star restaurant or whatever the coolest thing in the world is today, going to the Grammys, going to whatever, Coachella, Burning Man. You're like, ah, but I'm home. I'm in my house and I'm not at Burning Man. Getting inadequate. Exactly. So this whole system is creating the wrong set of incentives. I tend to believe it's possible to still have extremely high engagement and create a successful profitable business while encouraging personal growth, like encouraging people to be the best version of themselves. I just think we haven't, we got the first generation of social networks. I think a new generation needs to be built. Absolutely. Is that your plan for a business? Well, I have a longer term plan in terms of ambition, which is I believe in being able to have deep connection between human and AI systems, like partners, friends. There is a connection to there with social media. I do think AI has a strong role to play in representing us, in guiding us in how we consume social media. So this algorithm that controls the feed for Facebook is a somewhat centralized algorithm, but instead to give more power to the people, individuals to where each one of us have our own algorithm. Bring your own algorithm. Bring your own algorithm. BYOA. BYOA, I like it. Instead of bringing your own alcohol, bring your own algorithm. Well, I mean, if you thought about it, if we came and said, when I look at my Twitter feed, I would like to see the people with, who are the most helpful in the world, generous, kind, intelligent, considered, commenting on things that I don't already know about because I want to open my worldview. That could be a beautiful thing for society. And actually Jack was talking about potentially on Twitter, letting people bring their own algorithms and sort their feeds themselves. This would be a wonderful thing. I think it's one of the reasons Clubhouse has resonated is it's such a diverse group of people that I've been able to drop in on conversations with people who are nothing like me and listen in and hear conversations that I wouldn't normally be privy to. And everybody's like, oh, come join as a speaker. I want to do a room with you. I get asked every day, can we do a room? Can we do a room? Ask an angel investor, talk about startups. And I'm like, my usage of Clubhouse is going on my Peloton treadmill, putting Clubhouse on, picking a room and just listening. It's so delightful for me as a podcaster where my job is to talk, to sit back and just put in a couple of miles and play chess and listen to a Clubhouse discussion that is about relationships or some fashion or hip hop or whatever it is that I'm not part of. I just sit there and I listen and you learn. It's like such a delightful thing. I always think about these kids who go to college and I've always been so jealous of these Ivy League kids. They go and they're like, oh, I got to go to class. And I'm like, I would just love to sit there and listen to Professor Lex talk. What a privilege to sit there and let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn. Yeah, that's the beauty of podcasting. But of course, Clubhouse creates a whole nother experience where it's conversations, it's different. I think it's going to be the in between. I like it as a, you release your podcast. Like you and I are going to release this podcast, right? And then at some point I'll have you on my pod when you want your startup. And then at some point somebody is going to be like, you and I will run into, and I ran into you. I saw you were on Clubhouse the other night and I was busy, but I was almost going to click on you and say, let's start a room together. But you and I will start a room together with Eric Weinstein or somebody or Sam Harris will jump in or Elon and we'll have a different experience, which would just shoot the shit. And it'll act as like a fabric and a little filler between the tent pole podcasts, right? Like you and Eric, you've done three, I think, with Eric. Yeah, it was your four, I haven't released the fourth yet. Oh, okay, so I watched all three because I really thought your you way and him like giving you advice is very interesting dynamic. I thought it was very interesting dynamic. And I find him like a fascinating cat. We know everybody in common, except we've never met. It's very weird because you think about the social graph in the real world. This is why I think augmented reality is going to be such an amazing product. I just have one killer feature I want for augmented reality, we wear our glasses. And when I look at you above your head, I see the relationships we have and the things we've done together, right? So I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris or you had Elon on the podcast on this date or you and I were both at Burning Man in 2016. So it's the most meaningful element of our connection in the network, yeah. And then, cause we would discover that through small talk, but imagine you're like at a party and you look and it just, people glow and you just see a glow around a person and like green means you have some financial relationship. Blue means you have some friendship one or yellow means you have friendship one. Blue means you know nothing about each other. You have no connections. You're like, wow, these blue people have no connection to. These people, that one's glowing red. We know seven or more people in common. And those are the seven people. Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other. That could, and that sort of happened with Facebook member or MySpace where you were like, oh, you know that person, friend of a friend. But that's what is going to be AR is like, this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat and they just have those glasses, you know, forget about VR, it's just nauseating and whatever, but AR where you put the glasses on, you see the real world, but you augment it. You make a, just like you were saying, you make a frictionless, a very low friction to make a deep human connection because you have all the basic elements there already. Now think about the unintended consequences of what I just described. It could get creepy and weird. The privacy thing. I mean, people will, here's the thing, people, your privacy is an illusion. Like all this information is there. And then people are more than willing to give up privacy in exchange for some value, you know, it's a value trade. And giving, if my Tesla, when I'm driving in the direction of my house, just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks and that friction's gone, I'm willing to give Tesla my location and my home address, right? I'm not willing to give Zuckerberg anything because I don't trust him, but you get the idea. I mean, it will be that way with like DNA and other things at some point we'll just be like, yeah, just take my DNA. Like I don't, yeah, sure. People can look and see that I'm a mental midget and my IQ is like lower than, I don't want to bring the bell curve up or whatever, but you could figure out, like if we all put our DNA in a sequence online and be like, oh yeah, you know, Lex has got 10 more IQ points than Jcal and, you know, Sam's got 10 more than Lex. And all of a sudden people are like all bed out of shape about it, but what if they, we did that? And they were like, and by the way, you also, all three of you are going to get Parkinson's unless you do X, Y, and Z, unless you eat more blueberries or whatever we figure out. They're going to accept it pretty quickly. Yeah, that's brave new world. Brave new world. I have to ask you, you're, just like you were saying, you're one of the world experts in investing and in startups, yeah, VC and so on. From the perspective of the startup, I was always kind of skeptical of raising money. It feels like people do it too quickly, too easily, but I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. When is the, when should a startup raise money? And from the perspective of the investor, when should the investor invest in a startup? Like, is there a timing thing here? Is there a, what, yeah, what? It's a very important question because the venture capital community is only going to fund, you know, sub 1% of enterprises started in the United States every year, like maybe 10 basis points of them, like one in a thousand. And the reason is it's jet fuel. You only want to take that money if you really want to build something big and you want to build it fast. And when you put jet fuel behind a startup, as we've seen with other rockets, things can blow up and people can die. You know, it's not people literally dying, but the business can go up in smoke, right? Like rockets get blown up all the time at SpaceX as part of their ambitious plans. And startups, seven out of 10 startups we invest in, go to zero. Now, if you were to start the business and only build it off customer revenue and use your own money and go nice and slow and grow 10% a year, the chances of you blowing up the rocket are very low because you're riding a bicycle. You can go a little faster, but the bicycle can only go so fast. And once you start taking that money, the way venture capital is constructed as in the mix of like MIT or Harvard's endowments is, you know, we're going to put some money into safe things and then we're going to have these really binary things over here. And they probably put 5% in venture capital traditionally. It's grown to 20% just as a function of how successful it's been. So, you know, the Harvards of the world and MIT is probably want five or 10% in venture, but it's grown to 25% because, you know, companies like Airbnb and Uber have grown so big and Tesla. But the goal is in these venture funds, we're going to invest in 30 names and one or two of them are going to return three times the capital we've deployed. So it's a $300 million fund and there's 30 names and they each got 10 million. That means one of the 10 million is going to return the fund plus. So that means it has to grow 30X and then 60X to double the fund. And you're really supposed to be doing three times cash on cash. So that $300 million funds, the expectation is in 10 years to return 900 million, triple the person's money as opposed to the stock market, which doubles your money in the same period. So you're supposed to do 25% annualized returns in order to triple the money. And maybe I have an outlying chance of four or five times the money, which does happen sometimes when you have an outlier in your portfolio like Uber or Facebook was. And what that means is the venture capitalist behavior in the game they're playing is different than you as the founder. You as the founder, you may really care about this and it dying really matters to you. And then you got a venture capitalist who's like, we're betting on 30 names, we need two of them to hit it out of the park, maybe three, and nothing else is meaningful. So now you start thinking about the game theory there. You're dealing with money that is coming in that only cares about you going 100X. It's a whole different ball game. Whereas if you build off revenue, you don't have to do that. And if you look at a company like com.com, we invested at 5 million, the next round they did was 250. They were so capital efficient that they grew from $10,000 a month in revenue to millions of dollars a month in revenue over those four years since we invested and they didn't raise money in between. It was unbelievable. And I've only seen this happen three or four times. So it doesn't happen all this capital efficient meaning based on customer revenue alone plus some small amount of fundraising, you're able to go. Like how hard is it to do that? It takes extreme product market fit. You have to have a great price for your product that has a great margin. Yeah, and if you're doing something in hardware, it's probably impossible because it's super capital intensive. So it's probably gotta be a software business. Hardware businesses take a lot more. Do venture capitals get in the way at all of the business or is it possible to get out of the way? Yeah, if you get young venture capitalists who are starting their career, they're very nervous and scared because they're putting all these bets. And then there's a very weird thing that happens. The bad news comes first. So companies that don't work out go out of business immediately. So if it's not gonna be Com or Robinhood or Uber, you know you have one of those great successes somewhere in your five, six, seven, eight as an investor. What is the first five years like? First five years, you feel like an idiot. Let's say you make these 10 bets. In year two, two or three of them come back and they don't have product market fit and they're out of money. And they say, can we have more money? You say, no, we have to go get it from somebody else because you have to prove that there's still a market for it. We may keep our pro rata. We may put a little bit in to maintain our percentage ownership, but we're not going to give you another big chunk of money. And that company dies. So now you've got 10 million, poof, up in smoke. Boom, 10 million up in smoke. So this is called the J curve where your performance goes down. And then it's only in years four or five and six it starts going up. And what you're seeing right now is the people who started like I did in 2000, you know, just 11, 12 years ago. In 2009, I started investing. We all look like geniuses. Why? We're at the end of the cycle. We invested after when the stock market was on the floor after the financial crisis. And it's gone straight up since. So everybody looked, there's a couple of little blips in there, but generally speaking, there hasn't been like a major crash with the exception of the pandemic crash, but that bounced right back. And so, you know, it takes a decade to figure out if you're good at it. And then if the market crashes again, everybody feels like an idiot again, the cycle starts again. So you are now as a founder, you are now inserting yourself into that casino. And now you've got all these other forces pushing and pulling. And you're growing, let's say your company was growing 50%. You feel like, wow, I'm successful. I made a million dollars last year. Now I'm doing a million and a half. And the first thing a VC is gonna say to you is, how do we triple? We're growing too slow. See, but that's, like you said, that beautifully is a rocket fuel. It's, in a sense, it's a kind of motivation. It's a drive. I mean, it's a positive. So if you want that. Yes, if you want that. If you want that, if you want to go to Navy SEAL school, you're gonna be in pain and they're gonna put that hose in your face while you're underwater with your hands tied behind your back in the pool and you're gonna be choking. And they may have to do CPR on you. And like every couple of years, tragically, somebody dies in Navy SEAL school. Yeah, well. Does it mean we're getting rid of the Navy SEALs? Brock, if he dies, he dies. I don't know if you know David Goggins as by any chance. I do. I mean, I don't know him personally, but oh my Lord. So I'm running 48 miles together with him in person in a month. What, you're doing an ultra marathon? With him and probably other stuff because he enjoys just breaking people, making them cry. Oh my God, I'm so jelly. So no, well, I offered, we agreed a while ago to do a podcast and he's like, oh yeah, come, we'll do it this day. Is he in the Bay Area? I don't know where the hell he is, but we're doing it. And I don't think I'm supposed to say where it is, but it's not anywhere close to anywhere of this. It's in the middle of nowhere. But he seems to be in a bunch of different locations. Like he's in Oregon or something like that. What does he do for outside of writing books and being inspirational? Does he actually train people or like? No, he's just, he's a full time insane. Like he fights forest fires like for a few months a year as a farmer, like unpaid labor. Like he, you know, there's a bunch of people who are like him, like Navy Seals and so on that kind of make a career, automotivational speak and all that kind of stuff. He's not interested in any of that. He's literally interested in just doing hard shit all the time. Breaking himself. Breaking himself personally. He seems like he wants to break himself. And that book is amazing. And the audio book's amazing when he's talking about how fat he was and how he just had to go and keep running and his like legs are broken and he's just super pain and he just goes through it. It's really inspiring. Inspiring thing also. You could have videotaped yourself doing this. I can't wait to see you get destroyed. This is gonna be so entertaining for the lax audience. The pain. But the other inspiring thing is he's happily married and there's a partnership there that's, you know, everybody finds this attention as a push and pull that's beautiful, I think. But in speaking of a beautiful push and pull, how about that transition? Yeah, here we go. You and Chamath on, he's a friend of yours. Besties. Besties, yeah. Yeah, good friend. I mean, there's very few people in my life, him, Elon, David Sachs, John Brockmans. Very few people have supported me as much as those folks. I mean, I'm a huge debt. So he's also cohost on the All In podcast. We taped episode 21 today. Oh, today? Yeah, every Friday now. They wanna do every Friday. They're addicted like me and you are to podcasts. So you're going to release it when? It's probably released as we're sitting here. Okay, beautiful. Special guest on it. We had Draymond Green from the Warriors phone in. So we had our first guest. Awesome. Yeah, so it's really funny because he plays poker with us and we're all besties, so. Beautiful. So you guys went pretty heated against each other versus on Robin Hood. There's just two things I wanna ask. First, on the actual Robin Hood discussion and the Wall Street Best discussion, can you steel man his argument? What was the nature of the disagreement? Where, yeah, what is the little, because I don't think it's as big as spaces it came off as sounding. What is the nature of the disagreement? He felt that Robin Hood turned off trading because the hedge funds told them to and that they were bowing down to the pressure of the hedge funds. That's not true, but in a vacuum of information, you know what happens to people's minds, conspiracy theories abound. And sometimes there is a conspiracy theory and sometimes there's just the appearance of impropriety or a bunch of related things. Like when you look at the Trump situation with Russia, like was Trump trying to coordinate with Russia or the Russians just screwing with a bunch of like neophyte idiotic dipshits like Donald Trump Jr. who don't know any better. And they don't know that you shouldn't meet with the Russians and if you do meet with the Russians, you are probably a useful idiot. You probably should tell the FBI. Like they're just a bunch of idiots in all likelihood, who knows? And there's a vacuum of information. And there's a vacuum of information, we don't know. And the Russians are trying to compromise everybody. So would you call it a conspiracy or would you call it an attempted conspiracy? There was no conspiracy here. What it was was Robin Hood needed to raise billions of dollars to say solvent in all likelihood. And they weren't allowed to talk about it. So they were forced into not talking about it in all likelihood and had to come up with that money or shut down. And then what got me upset with Chamath and we had a talk afterwards that people don't know about, I'll talk about it here for the first time. On Sunday, we had to have a little, we had to air it out. Yeah, in the episode after you guys sound like you've had a private, you've made up. We had a private discussion, just one on one. And we said, listen, we love each other, we're besties. We've always been there for each other. What happened here? And what happened there is I'm fiercely loyal to my folks, whether it's Chamath or Travis from Uber or Saks or whoever. I'm just a loyal guy. And I'm always ride or die with my founders. If I invest in them, even if they make a mistake and Uber made plenty of mistakes, I always went on CNBC, on my podcast and said, hey, we're gonna fix these things. I'm in touch with the team. Mistakes were made, we're gonna solve them. This is a group of people with great intent who want to make the world a better place. And you know what? I was hated for a period of time with Uber. I was hated for it last week with Robinhood. I got a lot of blowback. But I think in both of those cases, eventually I was right. Uber is doing great stuff in the world. Robinhood is doing great stuff in the world. And I like to be loyal to my investments and my partners to just, I feel like if you invest and you're on the team, you have really three choices. You either fight for your team, you can go silent, or you can throw your team under the bus. And I've watched investors throw the team that they invested in that made them a bunch of money under the bus, not acceptable to me. And being quiet's not acceptable to me. So I always ask the founder, do you want me to, is it okay if I go out and defend you publicly? If they say yes, I do it. And then. That's beautiful, by the way, because what else do we have in this world if not friendship? Loyalty means everything to me. I grew up in Brooklyn where if you were not loyal and you were not loyal to your crew, then you were a Ronin. You were out there on your own flailing in the, trust me, you do not want to be on your own in 1970s, 80s, Brooklyn, Manhattan. You need to have a crew with you. I've gotten into, you don't want to get into a fight with 10 guys and be alone or just be with, you need a crew to survive. So I just learned early on, my dad owned a bar, just drilled into me being loyal. And so for whatever reason, I'm a bulldog when it comes to loyalty. And Shemov came out and said, these guys need to go to jail and they're scumbags. And I'm trying to defend them. And I'm in a position where I can't defend them because I don't have complete information. There is no complete information. It's in the heat of the moment. And then it becomes the number one story. And it's my number three investment. And Shemov has a competing company, SoFi. And he's killing my guys. And then I started killing his guys. And then all of a sudden we're like, wait a second, we're best friends. And we're swinging our swords at each other. And we're a group of the seven samurai who fight together. When did we turn on each other? And then everybody else who's on the pod, the two Davids, you know, both on the spectrum a bit, they got a little Asperger's or whatever. No offense, Les. None taken. None taken. I'm not saying, you know, but there is, you're into AI and you might be somewhere. It's not a coincidence, yeah. Might not be a coincidence. Anyway, we upgraded the two Davids firmware. We're gonna upgrade your firmware after this. I'll give you, yeah, you're on the 1.5. You have the three emotions now. Or should we add a fourth? Do you wanna go with joy? I'm on the 2.0 already. You're on the 2.0, you got the joy. How's it working out for you, the joy chip? It's difficult. It's painful. It's difficult. You'll get there. Just let it happen, Lex. Just let the joy happen. So anyway, we just talked about it offline and we decided like, listen, we didn't pregame that episode. And I happened to be skiing with my family. I had taken the first like vacation since this goddamn pandemic started. And I was having a wonderful time. And then this whole thing blows up. I'm coming off the mountain, just having a great time with my daughter skiing. And you know, and then I'm mixing it up with him. And you know, he had a short fuse about it because he was triggered, he told me, because he really feels like he's fighting to defend, you know, the every man. And I was like, that's what my team's doing. That's why they named the company Robinhood. We're on the same side here. And then over time, we've started to see the explanation come out. And you know, people who are friends are gonna have disagreements. In the podcast, it happened to happen very publicly. And we didn't know it was gonna become the number one story in the world. If Trump still had his Twitter handle, this would not have been a story. Trump would have said something about GameStop and he would have coopted the entire conversation. So in a way, going back to our censorship discussion, I might actually be in favor of Trump being censored only because how delightful has it been since January 20th that we can all focus on something other than him. He was exhausting. I mean, the amount of cycles he took on our processors. He monetized the conversation. And now this is a little bit more of a distributed, like this bunch of. Yeah, everybody gets a chance to be the number one news story. Everybody gets a chance to discuss it. So on a scale of one to 10, how much do you love Chamath? Oh, it's 11. I mean, I love Chamath. I mean, we played cards last night. We're besties. And you know, I would literally jump in front of a bullet for him. I mean, what's the lesson in that discussion? Because it was super, I wouldn't. I think the love was felt and the respect was felt throughout even when you guys are going pretty vicious on each other. Is there a lesson to be learned? Do you regret any of that conversation? No, I mean, I think he told me that he regretted some of the things he said. He said publicly on the podcast, like, listen, I was a little hot. I may have said things in the heat of the moment. But I don't live with too much regret because I always think about intent. As one of the nuance and intent have been totally lost. The idea that we could have any kind of a nuanced discussion about things seems to have been forgotten. And the fact that people don't look at people's intent. If you hurt somebody's feelings or you disrespect somebody or you do something mean or whatever, I always look at the intent, you know? And I've had people attack me and I look at the intent and I'm like, that person feels bad about themselves. Or maybe I said something and I insulted them and that's why their blowback's there. So I always try to think what's the intent of the person. And then almost universally, you talk to somebody and you find out, you ascribe some crazy intent that's not there. And they're like, oh yeah, you know what happened? I got in a fight with my spouse and I didn't sleep last night and I've had a lot of anxiety about my business. And I just snapped and said something about you. And it's like, oh, okay. Like I literally had somebody on Twitter this past summer. I had said something. I was complaining about a New York Times journalist and something I thought was wrong. And this person was a fan of that journalist. And they went, I kid you not, onto my social media account, found a picture I'd taken about how blue the sky was one day. They reverse image search the tree line, found the tree line on Google image search somehow with a reverse image search, found an old listing that some broker had listed on their website of my house, and then posted my home address, the value of my home, and doxxed me on Twitter. And I'm like, what is going on here? So I call the person and I look them up and they work in private equity in Boston. And I look and I'm like, this person works in Boston. This is July 4th week. So, and when I look at the person's LinkedIn, we have seven people in common. So going back to the AR conversation real quick, I'm like, okay, this person literally just doxxed me. I asked them to take it down. They told me they won't take it down. And then I look at it. So then I DM him back on Instagram, on Twitter. And I said, by the way, your boss, Susan, and I know seven people in common. And these are the seven people. Here's a screenshot. What is she going to think when I call her on Monday and you've doxxed me? Here's my phone number if you'd like to talk. He calls me. I said, what's going on? Why would you do this? He's like, well, I really pissed off about what you said about this person. I was like, you understand I've had like two or three stalkers and anybody who's a high profile like I am or medium profile, you're going to have weird things happen. You literally put my home address. You put my family at risk. What if I put your home address on my, I have 400,000 followers or 300,000 followers. You have like 300. What if I post your address? He said, well, I wish you wouldn't do that. I was like, well, I asked you kindly to take my address down. And I said, are you married? I said, how old are you? Are you like 25 or something? He's like, no, I'm 42. I was like, you're 42 years old. I was like, are you married? Do you have kids? He's like, yeah, I just had a baby like six months ago. I'm like, you're home with your wife. It's July 4th weekend. You're doxxing Jason Calagans because you're upset at me because I said something about a New York Times writer. He's like, yeah, this is the biggest mistake of my life. I said, I tell you what, let's forget it ever happened. And he wrote me back and he said, I just wanted to thank you for how you handled it. My wife said I'm a complete fucking moron. And he literally sent me an email. My wife says I'm a complete fucking moron. And I'm really sorry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I wrote her back. I said, I wrote her back and I said, my wife says the same thing to me all the time. I said, welcome to the club. It's totally fine. But intent, nuance, it matters, right? And the person could be having a bad day and they do something stupid they regret. And what am I gonna do, cancel the guy? Or if I had called his boss, he would have been fired immediately. And then I got to live with this guy got fired and he's got a kid. And what is this personal destruction? Why are we doing this to each other? Life's hard enough. Life's hard, right? Like just getting through the day is hard. Yeah, and that little bit of empathy, thinking about the intent of the person allows you to then sort of deescalate this kind of conversation that social media wants to escalate. Yes, back to what we were saying. If this, in my younger years, I would have retweeted the guy's home address and my address and would have called his boss and tried to get him fired or whatever. And it's like, now I'm just like, why are we attacking each other? Life is so hard. I mean, this is what the pandemic, I think we should make everybody realize is like, look at how hard it is. Life is hard. And then just think about all the people suffering right now who are at home, the single mom or dad with two or three kids at home in public school. Maybe they've been laid off and their kids aren't learning and they're in a tiny apartment. I mean, this has been brutal for a lot of people. Not to mention people losing loved ones or maybe some people got Corona and now their lungs are still not right. Can I ask you about love? Oh, sure. I'm feeling it, you know, like we're an hour or two here, Lex. Yeah, you're feeling it. Feeling like we could become besties. We're getting it. I feel like we got a bromance going here, Lex. I feel it too. I don't know if it's Eric Weinstein level, but I feel like it's close. Yeah, I'm feeling the love. But we talked about those music to my ears, your whole rant on the Olympic nature of a startup. Is there a role, like what role does love, family, friendship play in that brutal pursuit of excellence that is building a startup, building a company or creating anything new in this world? Such a great question and totally unprepared for it. Because nobody would ever ask me about that. So I think it's why you've got quite a following on your podcast is that you're able to ask these questions. And I can tell one story because, you know, I don't talk about, I try not to talk about relationship with Elon that often because, you know, he's so famous now. I mean, when we met, I used to go out to parties with him and people were like, oh my God, you're Jason Calacas. I was like, yeah. And like, who's your friend? I'm like, that's my friend, Elon. And they'd be like, what, he's doing rocket ships? But he's told this story publicly. So I can tell it, and I would never talk about anything that he hasn't already talked about publicly, especially since he's so high profile, but it was pretty funny moment. There was a moment in time when Tesla almost went out of business and you've probably heard the story many times, but it was during the financial crisis and they were running out of money. And they said, you know, let's go get a steak. And we're in LA and we drove to BOA and I had my orange Tesla Roadster and he had his P1 or P2, like the red one that I think is in space now. And we drove to the valet and we had a steak together and we're sitting there. And I said, you know, I read the story and Gawker or whatever, you know, and New York Times here, you only got like five weeks of money left in Tesla. He goes, it's not true. I was like, oh, thank God. He goes, we have two weeks. I was like, oh God. I was like, well, what's going on with the rocket ship company? You know, like, you know, I know you did the one last month and don't you have one coming up? He's like, yeah, we've got the third one coming up. I was like, well, how's that going? I said, well, we blow that one up. There's no more SpaceX. I was like, so two weeks of money left in Tesla and SpaceX, you blew up the first two rockets, you blow up the third SpaceX, it's over. He's like, yeah. I was like, I can loan you a couple million dollars. I don't have like a ton. He's like, it's okay. Our friend, beep, has loaned me some money. And Elon's been super public about this. I would never tell the story unless he hadn't been, but he was talking, he never said who it was, but somebody had loaned him money to keep him afloat. He was functionally bankrupt. I mean, he had the equity in the companies, but the equity was quickly becoming worth zero and the financial crisis. And he's figuring out if he's going to go on vacation for Christmas or not. And he's on the phone trying to, you know, save both companies. And I said, certainly there must be some good news. And he takes out his Blackberry to date this conversation. I don't know iPhones. Takes out his Blackberry and he starts swiping. And he says, don't tell anybody. This is what I'm building. And he shows me the Model S. And nobody knew that he was working on the Model S. We knew he was doing the roadster and he was trying to save the company. And I looked at it and I was like, that's gorgeous. It was the clay models. So it was a full size clay model. So there's human beings standing around a clay version of this tiny little Blackberry picture. I'm scrolling through on the, remember that little pad or the ball on the Blackberry. I'm scrolling through it. I'm like, this is fucking great. And I just said to him, it's like, what's the range going to be? He says, well, I think we get 250 miles. I was like, 250 miles? He's like, yeah, I think it'd be the safest car ever. I said, what is it going to cost? He says, I think this could cost eventually 50, $60,000. I said, Elon, if you make that car, you'll change the goddamn world. You have to, this company must survive because the roadsters for like 2000 people in United States, this car is for every person in the United States. Every single person in the United States will want this car if it's $50,000. And maybe some of the people who have 20 or 30,000 dollars won't be able to afford it, but they'll all want it. It's gorgeous. And he said, you really think so? I said, yeah. So I got home and I talked to my wife, Jade, and I said, do you have the checkbook? She does all the finances and stuff like that, pays the bills and whatever. And I said, don't tell anybody, Elon's making this great car. And I wrote two checks for $50,000. And I just took out this paper and I wrote, E, comma, love the new car, I'll take two. And I signed it. I kissed the two $50,000 checks, put them in the envelope, and I FedExed it to him for Monday delivery. And I said to Jade, that $100,000 is going to be gone in 48 hours because it will pay for one or two days of payroll on Tesla. So we just added like, instead of two weeks of runway, he's got 12 days. And the checks don't cash, but then I read a story that he's closed the money, saved the company in like the next week or two. And a couple of months later, the checks get cashed. And I'm like, okay. Three years later, I get an email, your reservation number, it's from Tesla, your reservation number is 0000001. And then five seconds later, your reservation number is 000073. And I forwarded the number one to Elon, I said, you know, I can't take number one, a signature number one, I can't take that, that's yours. And he's like, oh, I got five of them. And besides, you're the first person who ordered it. And I was the first person who had seen it. You're gonna get me to be teary eyed. I mean, that's beautiful. No, it was a very... That's a beautiful moment. It was an incredible moment for both of us. And we talk about it sometimes, you know, those moments in time. And to your point about love, Elon... That's like the darkest moment, one of the darkest moments in his life probably. I think it was, I can tell you, it was the darkest period of his life for sure. And he's been very public about how dark that was. And I think, you know, this is why I have great sympathy for the entrepreneurs of the world, like the suffering and the pain. And when he talks about the suffering and the pain that all of these founders have felt, and then we were throwing rocks at them or criticizing them as they try to change the world and save humanity, and in Tesla's case, I mean, they weren't, you know, they weren't like delivering pizza. I mean, they were trying to get us off of fossil fuels. Like this was a big, heady mission to literally save the environment, the planet, humanity. And the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him, it was always perplexing to me why any human being who is standing on God's green earth would want to throw rocks at the guy who is trying to stem the dam of global warming that is about to engulf all of us. How dare they throw rocks at that guy? There's so many people you could throw rocks at. There's somebody who's making the Juul vaporizer, throw rocks at that scumbag, no offense. But like whoever's making the Juul things and is, you know, selling pina colada flavor to 12 year olds, like throw rocks at them. Somebody is doing something, you know, abhorrent, but not E, I mean, and yeah. Anyway, that car is, you know, up the road here, sitting under a cover with 20,000 miles on it in my garage. And then the Roadster number 16 is in the garage next to it. And every day I walk by the two of them and I get a warm feeling in my heart because I know he did it. Against all odds, against all odds, he pulled it off. And it was that moment, that month in that 2000, I think it was probably December, January, December of 2008, I think. You know, it's just 12 years ago when you think about 13 years ago, it was dark. I mean, it was dark. And they almost had the same thing happen, you know, in the Model 3 production in June of two years, three years ago. And I remember him just trying to get the Model 3 out the door and the company almost crashed then. Most of these companies have, you know, these kinds of moments. And I think friendship is you get what you give, you get what you give. And if you are there for people, you're gonna feel so good about having done that. And then the reciprocation effect, which you'd probably know very well, is so great in the world that anytime you're kind to people, you build this incredible bond. And then what are we at the end of the day, Lex, besides a series of memories with the people we love? That's all it is. It's just a series of memories and moments. It's just moments. You ever see Blade Runner? Yes, of course. Do you remember what Rucker Harris says at the end, all of these memories gone, like tears in the rain? I mean, that's our existence. It just all goes away at some point. It's just these drops of rain. Each of those memories, just like one snowflake or one drop of rain, and they're all lost at some point, but they're here now. And that's why we have to be there for each other. That's why I feel like what I do is so important in this world. And I get such great meaning out of it. Just being a friend, just having these conversations. What you're doing on your podcast, just talking to intelligent people and spreading the word and the gospel of what they're saying and amplifying it, you're inspiring so many people. Every podcast, you get 500,000 people, a million people watch these videos. And there's some kid in Sri Lanka or some little girl in Afghanistan who's gonna stumble upon this on YouTube, and they're gonna change the world in the next century. Because it's not just about America. Our story's almost over, right? We were the story of the last two or 300 years. I hope it keeps going. But there's all these other places in the world, Sao Paulo and Africa, where people now have access to these videos. And somebody will hear this video and go, Elon did it. Oh, and that guy Jason was his friend. And, oh, and Lex does those interviews with him. Oh yeah, I could do it too. Your little magical moment of love amidst the suffering with Elon because you've talked about it, it'll have these ripple effects. It's fascinating to think about in decades to come. And new entrepreneurs being born, new, more love being put out there, and more support through these rough times when people are trying to create new things. I mean, that's a beautiful thing, that's a beautiful, I'm glad you think of friendship in this way. I'm deeply grateful that you're loyal. Every time you invest. In the way you are. Here's the thing, it costs you nothing to make this investment either. The amount of time it takes to be bitter or angry, sitting at home, to be disappointed, you could just channel that same amount of energy into being loyal, loving, kind, and there for people. It just only takes the intention, right? The water is gonna, those emotions are gonna flow, right? Like Sam would always tell me when I was struggling in my life and I talked to him, he'd say, you know, Jason, your brain is spewing all these ideas. Imagine you're standing, sitting by a river, and the river is all your ideas. You are not a slave to any one of these ideas. They're just whipping by like each of those little waves in the river. You can pick one of those ideas out and look at it and examine it, and either keep it, or throw it back in the river and let it go. And I was like, wow, Sam, that was like, of my entire friendship with Sam Harris, that was like the one moment where I was just like, oh my God, all my life, I've wondered about all these thoughts in my head, insecurities, you know, imposter syndrome. Like I didn't go to MIT, you know, I'm not the smartest guy, but somehow I made a career writing little 50K checks and now, you know, $3 million checks, but whatever, you know, little checks and being a journalist and doing this little podcast, and it's ended up to something. And I kind of, I'm proud of it. I'm 50 and I'm kind of proud of what I did. And I wake up every morning after I retired, I say, I kind of like what I do. I kind of like having the conversation and writing the check and then being on somebody's team. And I got offered to be in these giant mega funds and they said, Jason, you're in it, you invest in 60 companies a year, you know, 500K at a time, you put $30 million a year to work, come work with us, write one $50 million check and then you can go to Aspen and Cabo and Coachella and not work. But why are you doing all this work? It's like, well, the $50 million check is like, it's like a formality. It's just like being an ATM, like the companies are already huge by that time. I really want to meet the two people with the idea. I want to meet them in year one. I want to meet them on day zero. I want to be the guy who wrote the first, second or third check. I want a guy who wrote the 3000th check, the last check. It's fucking boring. And make that basic human connection and also be with them through the rough times, be with them with that first, I mean, the first early successes, I mean, that's a beautiful. So great. When a founder and that team get product market fit and you just know it's going to work, oh man, Lex, it's, when Comm would email me and they'd say, we added, you know, the company's been growing and we're not going to go out of business, but we added some sleep stuff and then we added this other function and we have a streak now and we grew 10X in the last, you know, three months. And we're good. You know, I was like, ah, that's nice. It's real nice. It's like, it's a nice feeling when you, well, because so many of them die. We talked about that J curve early. Imagine it's like, it's like all these baby turtles going out to the ocean and the seagulls are ripping them to shreds and then the sharks are eating them. But then like a couple of the turtles make it and they become wise old 100 year old turtles, you know? And you're like, yep, I remember when you catched and like all of your brothers and sisters were ripped to shreds by the seagulls and you made it into the water. And then you made it out to the deep water. Pretty great feeling. I think there's no better way to end it. There it is. The talk of the cruelty of life, that suffering that is life and the love amidst the suffering. Jason, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You're one of the most special people in Silicon Valley. Thanks, Lex. And maybe you'll also call me in one of the rough times. I'm sure there'll be many. There will be, yeah. There's one expression, nobody gets there alone. Nobody gets there alone. And anybody who thinks that they got there alone is delusional and kidding themselves. And they will at some point wake up and realize, oh shit, there were a lot of people helped me get here. I need to write a couple of gratitude letters. I got a gratitude letter the other day from a friend of mine who I helped. And I was one of the, you know about these gratitude letters people are writing? It turns out Martin Seligman in, was it Authentic Happiness? Anyway, the guy who really studied happiness and joy, turns out one of the greatest amplifiers of joy in your life is to thank somebody for doing something for you. And somebody who I had helped just wrote me a letter and I got in Christmas and I had the stack of Christmas cards and I hadn't opened them. And it's the second week of January and I was just getting to like the last stack and I open it up and I almost missed it. It's incredibly heartwarming letter about how meaningful like certain things I had done to help along the way and how he'd always appreciated my counsel. And I was just like, well, this happened 25 years ago and you wrote this letter now. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was just like, wow, you know, if you're hearing this, there's probably 10 people who are really instrumental in your lives, in your lives. Go ahead and call them on the phone, write them an email or even better, just write a letter and send it to them and just tell them you're thankful. And let me tell you something, the amplification of joy in your life will go a hundred X, a hundred X when you tell somebody you love them and that you really appreciate them and that what they did for you was magical. So just, and you can look it up, gratitude. Gratitude is like one of these incredible forces. Amen. I'm grateful for being on the pod. I'm grateful you wasted all this time with me. I love it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship | Lex Fridman Podcast #161

The following is a conversation with Jim Keller, his second time in the podcast. Jim is a legendary microprocessor architect and is widely seen as one of the greatest engineering minds of the computing age. In a peculiar twist of space time in our simulation, Jim is also a brother in law of Jordan Peterson. We talk about this and about computing, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and life. Quick mention of our sponsors. Athletic Greens All In One Nutrition Drink, Brooklyn and Sheets, ExpressVPN, and Belcampo Grass Fed Meat. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Jim is someone who, on a personal level, inspired me to be myself. There was something in his words, on and off the mic, or perhaps that he even paid attention to me at all, that almost told me, you're all right, kid. A kind of pat on the back that can make the difference between a mind that flourishes and a mind that is broken down by the cynicism of the world. So I guess that's just my brief few words of thank you to Jim, and in general, gratitude for the people who have given me a chance on this podcast, in my work, and in life. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Jim Keller. What's the value and effectiveness of theory versus engineering, this dichotomy, in building good software or hardware systems? Well, good design is both. I guess that's pretty obvious. By engineering, do you mean reduction of practice of known methods? And then science is the pursuit of discovering things that people don't understand. Or solving unknown problems. Definitions are interesting here, but I was thinking more in theory, constructing models that kind of generalize about how things work. And engineering is actually building stuff. The pragmatic, like, okay, we have these nice models, but how do we actually get things to work? Maybe economics is a nice example. Like, economists have all these models of how the economy works, and how different policies will have an effect, but then there's the actual, okay, let's call it engineering, of like, actually deploying the policies. So computer design is almost all engineering. And reduction of practice of known methods. Now, because of the complexity of the computers we built, you know, you could think you're, well, we'll just go write some code, and then we'll verify it, and then we'll put it together, and then you find out that the combination of all that stuff is complicated. And then you have to be inventive to figure out how to do it, right? So that definitely happens a lot. And then, every so often, some big idea happens. But it might be one person. And that idea is in the space of engineering, or is it in the space of... Well, I'll give you an example. So one of the limits of computer performance is branch prediction. So, and there's a whole bunch of ideas about how good you could predict a branch. And people said, there's a limit to it, it's an asymptotic curve. And somebody came up with a better way to do branch prediction, it was a lot better. And he published a paper on it, and every computer in the world now uses it. And it was one idea. So the engineers who build branch prediction hardware were happy to drop the one kind of training array and put it in another one. So it was a real idea. And branch prediction is one of the key problems underlying all of sort of the lowest level of software. It boils down to branch prediction. Boils down to uncertainty. Computers are limited by... Single thread computer is limited by two things. The predictability of the path of the branches and the predictability of the locality of data. So we have predictors that now predict both of those pretty well. So memory is a couple hundred cycles away, local cache is a couple cycles away. When you're executing fast, virtually all the data has to be in the local cache. So a simple program says, add one to every element in an array, it's really easy to see what the stream of data will be. But you might have a more complicated program that says, get an element of this array, look at something, make a decision, go get another element, it's kind of random. And you can think, that's really unpredictable. And then you make this big predictor that looks at this kind of pattern and you realize, well, if you get this data and this data, then you probably want that one. And if you get this one and this one and this one, you probably want that one. And is that theory or is that engineering? Like the paper that was written, was it asymptotic kind of discussion or is it more like, here's a hack that works well? It's a little bit of both. Like there's information theory in it, I think somewhere. Okay, so it's actually trying to prove some kind of stuff. But once you know the method, implementing it is an engineering problem. Now there's a flip side of this, which is in a big design team, what percentage of people think their plan or their life's work is engineering versus inventing things? So lots of companies will reward you for filing patents. Some, many big companies get stuck because to get promoted, you have to come up with something new. And then what happens is everybody's trying to do some random new thing, 99% of which doesn't matter. And the basics get neglected. Or there's a dichotomy, they think like the cell library and the basic CAD tools or basic software validation methods, that's simple stuff. They wanna work on the exciting stuff. And then they spend lots of time trying to figure out how to patent something. And that's mostly useless. But the breakthrough is on simple stuff. No, no, you have to do the simple stuff really well. If you're building a building out of bricks, you want great bricks. So you go to two places that sell bricks. So one guy says, yeah, they're over there in a ugly pile. And the other guy is like lovingly tells you about the 50 kinds of bricks and how hard they are and how beautiful they are and how square they are. Which one are you gonna buy bricks from? Which is gonna make a better house? So you're talking about the craftsman, the person who understands bricks, who loves bricks, who loves the varieties. That's a good word. Good engineering is great craftsmanship. And when you start thinking engineering is about invention and you set up a system that rewards invention, the craftsmanship gets neglected. Okay, so maybe one perspective is the theory, the science overemphasizes invention and engineering emphasizes craftsmanship. And therefore, so it doesn't matter what you do, theory, engineering. Well, everybody does. Like read the tech ranks are always talking about some breakthrough or innovation and everybody thinks that's the most important thing. But the number of innovative ideas is actually relatively low. We need them, right? And innovation creates a whole new opportunity. Like when some guy invented the internet, right? Like that was a big thing. The million people that wrote software against that were mostly doing engineering software writing. So the elaboration of that idea was huge. I don't know if you know Brendan Eich, he wrote JavaScript in 10 days. That's an interesting story. It makes me wonder, and it was famously for many years considered to be a pretty crappy programming language. Still is perhaps. It's been improving sort of consistently. But the interesting thing about that guy is, you know, he doesn't get any awards. You don't get a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or. For inventing a crappy piece of, you know, software code. That is currently the number one programming language in the world and runs, now is increasingly running the backend of the internet. Well, does he know why everybody uses it? Like that would be an interesting thing. Was it the right thing at the right time? Cause like when stuff like JavaScript came out, like there was a move from, you know, writing C programs and C++ to what they call managed code frameworks, where you write simple code, it might be interpreted, it has lots of libraries, productivity is high, and you don't have to be an expert. So, you know, Java was supposed to solve all the world's problems. It was complicated. JavaScript came out, you know, after a bunch of other scripting languages. I'm not an expert on it. But was it the right thing at the right time? Or was there something, you know, clever? Cause he wasn't the only one. There's a few elements. And maybe if he figured out what it was, then he'd get a prize. Like that. Yeah, you know, maybe his problem is he hasn't defined this. Or he just needs a good promoter. Well, I think there was a bunch of blog posts written about it, which is like, wrong is right, which is like doing the crappy thing fast. Just like hacking together the thing that answers some of the needs. And then iterating over time, listening to developers. Like listening to people who actually use the thing. This is something you can do more in software. But the right time, like you have to sense, you have to have a good instinct of when is the right time for the right tool. And make it super simple. And just get it out there. The problem is, this is true with hardware. This is less true with software. Is there's backward compatibility that just drags behind you as, you know, as you try to fix all the mistakes of the past. But the timing. It was good. There's something about that. And it wasn't accidental. You have to like give yourself over to the, you have to have this like broad sense of what's needed now. Both scientifically and like the community. And just like this, it was obvious that there was no, the interesting thing about JavaScript is everything that ran in the browser at the time, like Java and I think other like Scheme, other programming languages, they were all in a separate external container. And then JavaScript was literally just injected into the webpage. It was the dumbest possible thing running in the same thread as everything else. And like it was inserted as a comment. So JavaScript code is inserted as a comment in the HTML code. And it was, I mean, there's, it's either genius or super dumb, but it's like. Right, so it had no apparatus for like a virtual machine and container, it just executed in the framework of the program that's already running. Yeah, that's cool. And then because something about that accessibility, the ease of its use resulted in then developers innovating of how to actually use it. I mean, I don't even know what to make of that, but it does seem to echo across different software, like stories of different software. PHP has the same story, really crappy language. They just took over the world. I always have a joke that the random length instructions, variable length instructions, that's always one, even though they're obviously worse. Like nobody knows why. X86 is arguably the worst architecture on the planet. It's one of the most popular ones. Well, I mean, isn't that also the story of risk versus, I mean, is that simplicity? There's something about simplicity that us in this evolutionary process is valued. If it's simple, it spreads faster, it seems like. Or is that not always true? Not always true. Yeah, it could be simple is good, but too simple is bad. So why did risk win, you think, so far? Did risk win? In the long archivist tree. We don't know. So who's gonna win? What's risk, what's CISC, and who's gonna win in that space in these instruction sets? AI software's gonna win, but there'll be little computers that run little programs like normal all over the place. But we're going through another transformation, so. But you think instruction sets underneath it all will change? Yeah, they evolve slowly. They don't matter very much. They don't matter very much, okay. I mean, the limits of performance are predictability of instructions and data. I mean, that's the big thing. And then the usability of it is some quality of design, quality of tools, availability. Like right now, x86 is proprietary with Intel and AMD, but they can change it any way they want independently. ARM is proprietary to ARM, and they won't let anybody else change it. So it's like a sole point. And RISC 5 is open source, so anybody can change it, which is super cool. But that also might mean it gets changed too many random ways that there's no common subset of it that people can use. Do you like open or do you like closed? Like if you were to bet all your money on one or the other, RISC 5 versus it? No idea. It's case dependent? Well, x86, oddly enough, when Intel first started developing it, they licensed like seven people. So it was the open architecture. And then they moved faster than others and also bought one or two of them. But there was seven different people making x86 because at the time there was 6502 and Z80s and 8086. And you could argue everybody thought Z80 was the better instruction set, but that was proprietary to one place. Oh, and the 6800. So there's like four or five different microprocessors. Intel went open, got the market share because people felt like they had multiple sources from it, and then over time it narrowed down to two players. So why, you as a historian, why did Intel win for so long with their processors? I mean, I mean. They were great. Their process development was great. Oh, so it's just looking back to JavaScript and what I like is Microsoft and Netscape and all these internet browsers. Microsoft won the browser game because they aggressively stole other people's ideas like right after they did it. You know, I don't know if Intel was stealing other people's ideas. They started making. In a good way, stealing in a good way just to clarify. They started making RAMs, random access memories. And then at the time when the Japanese manufacturers came up, you know, they were getting out competed on that and they pivoted the microprocessors and they made the first, you know, integrated microprocessor grant programs. It was the 4D04 or something. Who was behind that pivot? That's a hell of a pivot. Andy Grove and he was great. That's a hell of a pivot. And then they led semiconductor industry. Like they were just a little company, IBM, all kinds of big companies had boatloads of money and they out innovated everybody. Out innovated, okay. Yeah, yeah. So it's not like marketing, it's not any of that stuff. Their processor designs were pretty good. I think the, you know, Core 2 was probably the first one I thought was great. It was a really fast processor and then Haswell was great. What makes a great processor in that? Oh, if you just look at it, it's performance versus everybody else. It's, you know, the size of it, the usability of it. So it's not specific, some kind of element that makes you beautiful. It's just like literally just raw performance. Is that how you think about processors? It's just like raw performance? Of course. It's like a horse race. The fastest one wins. Now. You don't care how. Just as long as it wins. Well, there's the fastest in the environment. Like, you know, for years you made the fastest one you could and then people started to have power limits. So then you made the fastest at the right PowerPoint. And then when we started doing multi processors, like if you could scale your processors more than the other guy, you could be 10% faster on like a single thread, but you have more threads. So there's lots of variability. And then ARM really explored, like, you know, they have the A series and the R series and the M series, like a family of processors for all these different design points from like unbelievably small and simple. And so then when you're doing the design, it's sort of like this big pallet of CPUs. Like they're the only ones with a credible, you know, top to bottom pallet. What do you mean a credible top to bottom? Well, there's people who make microcontrollers that are small, but they don't have a fast one. There's people who make fast processors, but don't have a medium one or a small one. Is that hard to do that full pallet? That seems like a... Yeah, it's a lot of different. So what's the difference in the ARM folks and Intel in terms of the way they're approaching this problem? Well, Intel, almost all their processor designs were, you know, very custom high end, you know, for the last 15, 20 years. So the fastest horse possible. Yeah. In one horse race. Yeah, and then architecturally they're really good, but the company itself was fairly insular to what's going on in the industry with CAD tools and stuff. And there's this debate about custom design versus synthesis and how do you approach that? I'd say Intel was slow on getting to synthesize processors. ARM came in from the bottom and they generated IP, which went to all kinds of customers. So they had very little say on how the customer implemented their IP. So ARM is super friendly to the synthesis IP environment. Whereas Intel said, we're gonna make this great client chip or server chip with our own CAD tools, with our own process, with our own, you know, other supporting IP and everything only works with our stuff. So is that, is ARM winning the mobile platform space in terms of process? Yeah. And so in that, what you're describing is why they're winning. Well, they had lots of people doing lots of different experiments. So they controlled the processor architecture and IP, but they let people put in lots of different chips. And there was a lot of variability in what happened there. Whereas Intel, when they made their mobile, their foray into mobile, they had one team doing one part, right? So it wasn't 10 experiments. And then their mindset was PC mindset, Microsoft software mindset. And that brought a whole bunch of things along that the mobile world and the embedded world don't do. Do you think it was possible for Intel to pivot hard and win the mobile market? That's a hell of a difficult thing to do, right? For a huge company to just pivot. I mean, it's so interesting to, because we'll talk about your current work. It's like, it's clear that PCs were dominating for several decades, like desktop computers. And then mobile, it's unclear. It's a leadership question. Like Apple under Steve Jobs, when he came back, they pivoted multiple times. You know, they built iPads and iTunes and phones and tablets and great Macs. Like who knew computers should be made out of aluminum? Nobody knew that. But they're great. It's super fun. That was Steve? Yeah, Steve Jobs. Like they pivoted multiple times. And you know, the old Intel, they did that multiple times. They made DRAMs and processors and processes and I gotta ask this, what was it like working with Steve Jobs? I didn't work with him. Did you interact with him? Twice. I said hi to him twice in the cafeteria. What did he say? Hi? He said, hey fellas. He was friendly. He was wandering around and with somebody, he couldn't find a table because the cafeteria was packed and I gave him my table. But I worked for Mike Colbert who talked to, like Mike was the unofficial CTO of Apple and a brilliant guy and he worked for Steve for 25 years, maybe more and he talked to Steve multiple times a day and he was one of the people who could put up with Steve's, let's say, brilliance and intensity and Steve really liked him and Steve trusted Mike to translate the shit he thought up into engineering products that work and then Mike ran a group called Platform Architecture and I was in that group. So many times I'd be sitting with Mike and the phone would ring and it'd be Steve and Mike would hold the phone like this because Steve would be yelling about something or other. And then he would translate. And he'd translate and then he would say, Steve wants us to do this. So. Was Steve a good engineer or no? I don't know. He was a great idea guy. Idea person. And he's a really good selector for talent. Yeah, that seems to be one of the key elements of leadership, right? And then he was a really good first principles guy. Like somebody would say something couldn't be done and he would just think, that's obviously wrong, right? But you know, maybe it's hard to do. Maybe it's expensive to do. Maybe we need different people. You know, there's like a whole bunch of, if you want to do something hard, you know, maybe it takes time. Maybe you have to iterate. There's a whole bunch of things you could think about but saying it can't be done is stupid. How would you compare? So it seems like Elon Musk is more engineering centric but is also, I think he considers himself a designer too. He has a design mind. Steve Jobs feels like he's much more idea space, design space versus engineering. Just make it happen. Like the world should be this way. Just figure it out. But he used computers. You know, he had computer people talk to him all the time. Like Mike was a really good computer guy. He knew computers could do. Computer meaning computer hardware? Like hardware, software, all the pieces. And then he would have an idea about what could we do with this next. That was grounded in reality. It wasn't like he was just finger painting on the wall and wishing somebody would interpret it. So he had this interesting connection because he wasn't a computer architect or designer but he had an intuition from the computers we had to what could happen. And it's interesting you say intuition because it seems like he was pissing off a lot of engineers in his intuition about what can and can't be done. Those, like the, what is all these stories about like floppy disks and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so in Steve, the first round, like he'd go into a lab and look at what's going on and hate it and fire people or ask somebody in the elevator what they're doing for Apple. And not be happy. When he came back, my impression was is he surrounded himself with a relatively small group of people and didn't really interact outside of that as much. And then the joke was you'd see like somebody moving a prototype through the quad with a black blanket over it. And that was because it was secret, partly from Steve because they didn't want Steve to see it until it was ready. Yeah, the dynamic with Johnny Ive and Steve is interesting. It's like you don't wanna, he ruins as many ideas as he generates. Yeah, yeah. It's a dangerous kind of line to walk. If you have a lot of ideas, like Gordon Bell was famous for ideas, right? And it wasn't that the percentage of good ideas was way higher than anybody else. It was, he had so many ideas and he was also good at talking to people about it and getting the filters right. And seeing through stuff. Whereas Elon was like, hey, I wanna build rockets. So Steve would hire a bunch of rocket guys and Elon would go read rocket manuals. So Elon is a better engineer, a sense like, or like more like a love and passion for the manuals. And the details. The details, the craftsmanship too, right? Well, I guess Steve had craftsmanship too, but of a different kind. What do you make of the, just to stay in there for just a little longer, what do you make of like the anger and the passion and all of that? The firing and the mood swings and the madness, the being emotional and all of that, that's Steve. And I guess Elon too. So what, is that a bug or a feature? It's a feature. So there's a graph, which is Y axis productivity, X axis at zero is chaos, and infinity is complete order, right? So as you go from the origin, as you improve order, you improve productivity. And at some point, productivity peaks, and then it goes back down again. Too much order, nothing can happen. Yes. But the question is, how close to the chaos is that? No, no, no, here's the thing, is once you start moving in the direction of order, the force vector to drive you towards order is unstoppable. Oh, so it's a slippery slope. And every organization will move to the place where their productivity is stymied by order. So you need a... So the question is, who's the counter force? Because it also feels really good. As you get more organized, the productivity goes up. The organization feels it, they orient towards it, right? They hired more people. They got more guys who couldn't run process, you get bigger, right? And then inevitably, the organization gets captured by the bureaucracy that manages all the processes. Yeah. All right, and then humans really like that. And so if you just walk into a room and say, guys, love what you're doing, but I need you to have less order. If you don't have some force behind that, nothing will happen. I can't tell you on how many levels that's profound, so. So that's why I'd say it's a feature. Now, could you be nicer about it? I don't know, I don't know any good examples of being nicer about it. Well, the funny thing is to get stuff done, you need people who can manage stuff and manage people, because humans are complicated. They need lots of care and feeding that you need to tell them they look nice and they're doing good stuff and pat them on the back, right? I don't know, you tell me, is that needed? Oh yeah. Do humans need that? I had a friend, he started a magic group and he said, I figured it out. You have to praise them before they do anything. I was waiting until they were done. And they were always mad at me. Now I tell them what a great job they're doing while they're doing it. But then you get stuck in that trap, because then when they're not doing something, how do you confront these people? I think a lot of people that had trauma in their childhood would disagree with you, successful people, that you need to first do the rough stuff and then be nice later. I don't know. Okay, but engineering companies are full of adults who had all kinds of range of childhoods. You know, most people had okay childhoods. Well, I don't know if... Lots of people only work for praise, which is weird. You mean like everybody. I'm not that interested in it, but... Well, you're probably looking for somebody's approval. Even still. Yeah, maybe. I should think about that. Maybe somebody who's no longer with us kind of thing. I don't know. I used to call up my dad and tell him what I was doing. He was very excited about engineering and stuff. You got his approval? Uh, yeah, a lot. I was lucky. Like, he decided I was smart and unusual as a kid and that was okay when I was really young. So when I did poorly in school, I was dyslexic. I didn't read until I was third or fourth grade. They didn't care. My parents were like, oh, he'll be fine. So I was lucky. That was cool. Is he still with us? You miss him? Sure, yeah. He had Parkinson's and then cancer. His last 10 years were tough and I killed him. Killing a man like that's hard. The mind? Well, it's pretty good. Parkinson's causes slow dementia and the chemotherapy, I think, accelerated it. But it was like hallucinogenic dementia. So he was clever and funny and interesting and it was pretty unusual. Do you remember conversations? From that time? Like, do you have fond memories of the guy? Yeah, oh yeah. Anything come to mind? A friend told me one time I could draw a computer on the whiteboard faster than anybody he'd ever met. I said, you should meet my dad. Like, when I was a kid, he'd come home and say, I was driving by this bridge and I was thinking about it and he pulled out a piece of paper and he'd draw the whole bridge. He was a mechanical engineer. And he would just draw the whole thing and then he would tell me about it and then tell me how he would have changed it. And he had this idea that he could understand and conceive anything. And I just grew up with that, so that was natural. So when I interview people, I ask them to draw a picture of something they did on a whiteboard and it's really interesting. Like, some people draw a little box and then they'll say, and then this talks to this and I'll be like, oh, this is frustrating. I had this other guy come in one time, he says, well, I designed a floating point in this chip but I'd really like to tell you how the whole thing works and then tell you how the floating point works inside of it. Do you mind if I do that? And he covered two whiteboards in like 30 minutes and I hired him. Like, he was great. This is craftsman. I mean, that's the craftsmanship to that. Yeah, but also the mental agility to understand the whole thing, put the pieces in context, real view of the balance of how the design worked. Because if you don't understand it properly, when you start to draw it, you'll fill up half the whiteboard with like a little piece of it and like your ability to lay it out in an understandable way takes a lot of understanding, so. And be able to, so zoom into the detail and then zoom out to the big picture. Zoom out really fast. What about the impossible thing? You see, your dad believed that you can do anything. That's a weird feature for a craftsman. Yeah. It seems that that echoes in your own behavior. Like that's the. Well, it's not that anybody can do anything right now, right? It's that if you work at it, you can get better at it and there might not be a limit. And they did funny things like, like he always wanted to play piano. So at the end of his life, he started playing the piano when he had Parkinson's and he was terrible. But he thought if he really worked out in this life, maybe the next life he'd be better at it. He might be onto something. Yeah, he enjoyed doing it. Yeah. It's pretty funny. Do you think the perfect is the enemy of the good in hardware and software engineering? It's like we were talking about JavaScript a little bit and the messiness of the 10 day building process. Yeah, you know, creative tension, right? So creative tension is you have two different ideas that you can't do both, right? And, but the fact that you wanna do both causes you to go try to solve that problem. That's the creative part. So if you're building computers, like some people say we have the schedule and anything that doesn't fit in the schedule we can't do. Right? And so they throw out the perfect because they have a schedule. I hate that. Then there's other people who say we need to get this perfectly right. And no matter what, you know, more people, more money, right? And there's a really clear idea about what you want. Some people are really good at articulating it, right? So let's call that the perfect, yeah. Yeah. All right, but that's also terrible because they never ship anything. You never hit any goals. So now you have your framework. Yes. You can't throw out stuff because you can't get it done today because maybe you'll get it done tomorrow or the next project, right? You can't, so you have to, I work with a guy that I really like working with, but he over filters his ideas. Over filters? He'd start thinking about something and as soon as he figured out what was wrong with it, he'd throw it out. And then I start thinking about it and you come up with an idea and then you find out what's wrong with it. And then you give it a little time to set because sometimes you figure out how to tweak it or maybe that idea helps some other idea. So idea generation is really funny. So you have to give your ideas space. Like spaciousness of mind is key. But you also have to execute programs and get shit done. And then it turns out computer engineering is fun because it takes 100 people to build a computer, 200 or 300, whatever the number is. And people are so variable about temperament and skill sets and stuff. That in a big organization, you find the people who love the perfect ideas and the people that want to get stuffed on yesterday and people like to come up with ideas and people like to, let's say shoot down ideas. And it takes the whole, it takes a large group of people. Some are good at generating ideas, some are good at filtering ideas. And then all in that giant mess, you're somehow, I guess the goal is for that giant mess of people to find the perfect path through the tension, the creative tension. But like, how do you know when you said there's some people good at articulating what perfect looks like, what a good design is? Like if you're sitting in a room and you have a set of ideas about like how to design a better processor, how do you know this is something special here? This is a good idea, let's try this. Have you ever brainstormed an idea with a couple of people that were really smart? And you kind of go into it and you don't quite understand it and you're working on it. And then you start talking about it, putting it on the whiteboard, maybe it takes days or weeks. And then your brain starts to kind of synchronize. It's really weird. Like you start to see what each other is thinking. And it starts to work. Like you can see work. Like my talent in computer design is I can see how computers work in my head, like really well. And I know other people can do that too. And when you're working with people that can do that, like it is kind of an amazing experience. And then every once in a while you get to that place and then you find the flaw, which is kind of funny because you can fool yourself. The two of you kind of drifted along in the direction that was useless. That happens too. Like you have to, because the nice thing about computer design is always reduction in practice. Like you come up with your good ideas and I know some architects who really love ideas and then they work on them and they put it on the shelf and they go work on the next idea and put it on the shelf and they never reduce it to practice. So they find out what's good and bad. Because almost every time I've done something really new, by the time it's done, like the good parts are good, but I know all the flaws, like. Yeah. Would you say your career, just your own experience, is your career defined mostly by flaws or by successes? Like if... Again, there's great tension between those. If you haven't tried hard, right? And done something new, right? Then you're not gonna be facing the challenges when you build it. Then you find out all the problems with it. And... But when you look back, do you see problems? Okay. Oh, when I look back? What do you remember? I think earlier in my career, like EV5 was the second alpha chip. I was so embarrassed about the mistakes, I could barely talk about it. And it was in the Guinness Book of World Records and it was the fastest processor on the planet. Yeah. So it was, and at some point I realized that was really a bad mental framework to deal with doing something new. We did a bunch of new things and some worked out great and some were bad. And we learned a lot from it. And then the next one, we learned a lot. That EV6 also had some really cool things in it. I think the proportion of good stuff went up, but it had a couple of fatal flaws in it that were painful. And then, yeah. You learned to channel the pain into like pride. Not pride, really. You know, just a realization about how the world works or how that kind of idea set works. Life is suffering. That's the reality. No, it's not. Well, I know the Buddha said that and a couple other people are stuck on it. No, it's, you know, there's this kind of weird combination of good and bad, you know, light and darkness that you have to tolerate and, you know, deal with. Yeah, there's definitely lots of suffering in the world. Depends on the perspective. It seems like there's way more darkness, but that makes the light part really nice. What computing hardware or just any kind, even software design, do you find beautiful from your own work, from other people's work? You're just, we were just talking about the battleground of flaws and mistakes and errors, but things that were just beautifully done. Is there something that pops to mind? Well, when things are beautifully done, usually there's a well thought out set of abstraction layers. So the whole thing works in unison nicely. Yes. And when I say abstraction layer, that means two different components when they work together, they work independently. They don't have to know what the other one is doing. So that decoupling. Yeah. So the famous one was the network stack. Like there's a seven layer network stack, you know, data transport and protocol and all the layers. And the innovation was, is when they really wrote, got that right. Cause networks before that didn't define those very well. The layers could innovate independently. And occasionally the layer boundary would, the interface would be upgraded. And that let the design space breathe. And you could do something new in layer seven without having to worry about how layer four worked. And so good design does that. And you see it in processor designs. When we did the Zen design at AMD, we made several components very modular. And, you know, my insistence at the top was I wanted all the interfaces defined before we wrote the RTL for the pieces. One of the verification leads said, if we do this right, I can test the pieces so well independently when we put it together, we won't find all these interaction bugs cause the floating point knows how the cache works. And I was a little skeptical, but he was mostly right. That the modularity of the design greatly improved the quality. Is that universally true in general? Would you say about good designs, the modularity is like usually modular? Well, we talked about this before. Humans are only so smart. Like, and we're not getting any smarter, right? But the complexity of things is going up. So, you know, a beautiful design can't be bigger than the person doing it. It's just, you know, their piece of it. Like the odds of you doing a really beautiful design of something that's way too hard for you is low, right? If it's way too simple for you, it's not that interesting. It's like, well, anybody could do that. But when you get the right match of your expertise and, you know, mental power to the right design size, that's cool, but that's not big enough to make a meaningful impact in the world. So now you have to have some framework to design the pieces so that the whole thing is big and harmonious. But, you know, when you put it together, it's, you know, sufficiently interesting to be used. And, you know, so that's what a beautiful design is. Matching the limits of that human cognitive capacity to the module that you can create and creating a nice interface between those modules and thereby, do you think there's a limit to the kind of beautiful complex systems we can build with this kind of modular design? It's like, you know, if we build increasingly more complicated, you can think of like the internet. Okay, let's scale it down. Or you can think of like social network, like Twitter as one computing system. But those are little modules, right? But it's built on so many components nobody at Twitter even understands. Right. So if an alien showed up and looked at Twitter, he wouldn't just see Twitter as a beautiful, simple thing that everybody uses, which is really big. You would see the network, it runs on the fiber optics, the data is transported to the computers. The whole thing is so bloody complicated, nobody at Twitter understands it. And so that's what the alien would see. So yeah, if an alien showed up and looked at Twitter or looked at the various different network systems that you could see on Earth. So imagine they were really smart and they could comprehend the whole thing. And then they sort of evaluated the human and thought, this is really interesting. No human on this planet comprehends the system they built. No individual, well, would they even see individual humans? Like we humans are very human centric, entity centric. And so we think of us as the central organism and the networks as just the connection of organisms. But from a perspective of an alien, from an outside perspective, it seems like. Yeah, I get it. We're the ants and they'd see the ant colony. The ant colony, yeah. Or the result of production of the ant colony, which is like cities and it's, in that sense, humans are pretty impressive. The modularity that we're able to, and how robust we are to noise and mutation and all that kind of stuff. Well, that's because it's stress tested all the time. Yeah. You know, you build all these cities with buildings and you get earthquakes occasionally and, you know, wars, earthquakes. Viruses every once in a while. You know, changes in business plans or, you know, like shipping or something. Like as long as it's all stress tested, then it keeps adapting to the situation. So that's a curious phenomenon. Well, let's go, let's talk about Moore's Law a little bit. It's at the broad view of Moore's Law was just exponential improvement of computing capability. Like OpenAI, for example, recently published this kind of papers looking at the exponential improvement in the training efficiency of neural networks for like ImageNet and all that kind of stuff. We just got better on this purely software side, just figuring out better tricks and algorithms for training neural networks. And that seems to be improving significantly faster than the Moore's Law prediction, you know. So that's in the software space. What do you think if Moore's Law continues or if the general version of Moore's Law continues, do you think that comes mostly from the hardware, from the software, some mix of the two, some interesting, totally, so not the reduction of the size of the transistor kind of thing, but more in the, in the totally interesting kinds of innovations in the hardware space, all that kind of stuff. Well, there's like a half a dozen things going on in that graph. So one is there's initial innovations that had a lot of headroom to be exploited. So, you know, the efficiency of the networks has improved dramatically. And then the decomposability of those and the use going, you know, they started running on one computer, then multiple computers, then multiple GPUs, and then arrays of GPUs, and they're up to thousands. And at some point, so it's sort of like they were consumed, they were going from like a single computer application to a thousand computer application. So that's not really a Moore's Law thing. That's an independent vector. How many computers can I put on this problem? Because the computers themselves are getting better on like a Moore's Law rate, but their ability to go from one to 10 to 100 to a thousand, you know, was something. And then multiplied by, you know, the amount of computes it took to resolve like AlexNet to ResNet to transformers. It's been quite, you know, steady improvements. But those are like S curves, aren't they? That's the exactly kind of S curves that are underlying Moore's Law from the very beginning. So what's the biggest, what's the most productive, rich source of S curves in the future, do you think? Is it hardware, is it software, or is it? So hardware is going to move along relatively slowly. Like, you know, double performance every two years. There's still... I like how you call that slowly. Yeah, that's the slow version. The snail's pace of Moore's Law. Maybe we should trademark that one. Whereas the scaling by number of computers, you know, can go much faster, you know. I'm sure at some point Google had a, you know, their initial search engine was running on a laptop, you know, like. And at some point they really worked on scaling that. And then they factored the indexer from, you know, this piece and this piece and this piece, and they spread the data on more and more things. And, you know, they did a dozen innovations. But as they scaled up the number of computers on that, it kept breaking, finding new bottlenecks in their software and their schedulers, and made them rethink. Like, it seems insane to do a scheduler across 1,000 computers to schedule parts of it and then send the results to one computer. But if you want to schedule a million searches, that makes perfect sense. So there's the scaling by just quantity is probably the richest thing. But then as you scale quantity, like a network that was great on 100 computers may be completely the wrong one. You may pick a network that's 10 times slower on 10,000 computers, like per computer. But if you go from 100 to 10,000, it's 100 times. So that's one of the things that happened when we did internet scaling. This efficiency went down, not up. The future of computing is inefficiency, not efficiency. But scale, inefficient scale. It's scaling faster than inefficiency bites you. And as long as there's, you know, dollar value there, like scaling costs lots of money. But Google showed, Facebook showed, everybody showed that the scale was where the money was at. It was, and so it was worth the financial. Do you think, is it possible that like basically the entirety of Earth will be like a computing surface? Like this table will be doing computing. This hedgehog will be doing computing. Like everything really inefficient, dumb computing will be leveraged. The science fiction books, they call it computronium. Computronium? We turn everything into computing. Well, most of the elements aren't very good for anything. Like you're not gonna make a computer out of iron. Like, you know, silicon and carbon have like nice structures. You know, we'll see what you can do with the rest of it. Like people talk about, well, maybe we can turn the sun into computer, but it's hydrogen and a little bit of helium. So. What I mean is more like actually just adding computers to everything. Oh, okay. So you're just converting all the mass of the universe into computer. No, no, no. So not using. It'd be ironic from the simulation point of view. It's like the simulator build mass, the simulates. Yeah, I mean, yeah. So, I mean, ultimately this is all heading towards a simulation. Yeah, well, I think I might've told you this story. At Tesla, they were deciding, so they wanna measure the current coming out of the battery and they decided between putting the resistor in there and putting a computer with a sensor in there. And the computer was faster than the computer I worked on in 1982. And we chose the computer because it was cheaper than the resistor. So, sure, this hedgehog costs $13 and we can put an AI that's as smart as you in there for five bucks. It'll have one. So computers will be everywhere. I was hoping it wouldn't be smarter than me because. Well, everything's gonna be smarter than you. But you were saying it's inefficient. I thought it was better to have a lot of dumb things. Well, Moore's law will slowly compact that stuff. So even the dumb things will be smarter than us. The dumb things are gonna be smart or they're gonna be smart enough to talk to something that's really smart. You know, it's like. Well, just remember, like a big computer chip. Yeah. You know, it's like an inch by an inch and, you know, 40 microns thick. It doesn't take very much, very many atoms to make a high power computer. Yeah. And 10,000 of them can fit in a shoebox. But, you know, you have the cooling and power problems, but, you know, people are working on that. But they still can't write compelling poetry or music or understand what love is or have a fear of mortality. So we're still winning. Neither can most of humanity, so. Well, they can write books about it. So, but speaking about this, this walk along the path of innovation towards the dumb things being smarter than humans, you are now the CTO of 10storrent as of two months ago. They build hardware for deep learning. How do you build scalable and efficient deep learning? This is such a fascinating space. Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting. So up until recently, I thought there was two kinds of computers. There are serial computers that run like C programs, and then there's parallel computers. So the way I think about it is, you know, parallel computers have given parallelism. Like, GPUs are great because you have a million pixels, and modern GPUs run a program on every pixel. They call it the shader program, right? So, or like finite element analysis. You build something, you know, you make this into little tiny chunks, you give each chunk to a computer, so you're given all these chunks, you have parallelism like that. But most C programs, you write this linear narrative, and you have to make it go fast. To make it go fast, you predict all the branches, all the data fetches, and you run that. More parallel, but that's found parallelism. AI is, I'm still trying to decide how fundamental this is. It's a given parallelism problem. But the way people describe the neural networks, and then how they write them in PyTorch, it makes graphs. Yeah, that might be fundamentally different than the GPU kind of. Parallelism, yeah, it might be. Because when you run the GPU program on all the pixels, you're running, you know, it depends, this group of pixels say it's background blue, and it runs a really simple program. This pixel is, you know, some patch of your face, so you have some really interesting shader program to give you the impression of translucency. But the pixels themselves don't talk to each other. There's no graph, right? So you do the image, and then you do the next image, and you do the next image, and you run eight million pixels, eight million programs every time, and modern GPUs have like 6,000 thread engines in them. So, you know, to get eight million pixels, each one runs a program on, you know, 10 or 20 pixels. And that's how they work, but there's no graph. But you think graph might be a totally new way to think about hardware. So Rajagat Dori and I have been having this conversation about given versus found parallelism. And then the kind of walk, because we got more transistors, like, you know, computers way back when did stuff on scalar data. Now we did it on vector data, famous vector machines. Now we're making computers that operate on matrices, right? And then the category we said that was next was spatial. Like, imagine you have so much data that, you know, you want to do the compute on this data, and then when it's done, it says, send the result to this pile of data on some software on that. And it's better to think about it spatially than to move all the data to a central processor and do all the work. So spatially, you mean moving in the space of data as opposed to moving the data. Yeah, you have a petabyte data space spread across some huge array of computers. And when you do a computation somewhere, you send the result of that computation or maybe a pointer to the next program to some other piece of data and do it. But I think a better word might be graph. And all the AI neural networks are graphs. Do some computations, send the result here, do another computation, do a data transformation, do a merging, do a pooling, do another computation. Is it possible to compress and say how we make this thing efficient, this whole process efficient, this different? So first, the fundamental elements in the graphs are things like matrix multiplies, convolutions, data manipulations, and data movements. So GPUs emulate those things with their little singles, you know, basically running a single threaded program. And then there's, you know, and NVIDIA calls it a warp where they group a bunch of programs that are similar together. So for efficiency and instruction use. And then at a higher level, you kind of, you take this graph and you say this part of the graph is a matrix multiplier, which runs on these 32 threads. But the model at the bottom was built for running programs on pixels, not executing graphs. So it's emulation, ultimately. So is it possible to build something that natively runs graphs? Yes, so that's what 10storrent did. So. Where are we on that? How, like, in the history of that effort, are we in the early days? Yeah, I think so. 10storrent started by a friend of mine, Labisha Bajek, and I was his first investor. So I've been, you know, kind of following him and talking to him about it for years. And in the fall when I was considering things to do, I decided, you know, we held a conference last year with a friend, organized it, and we wanted to bring in thinkers. And two of the people were Andre Carpassi and Chris Ladner. And Andre gave this talk, it's on YouTube, called Software 2.0, which I think is great. Which is, we went from programmed computers, where you write programs, to data program computers. You know, like the future of software is data programs, the networks. And I think that's true. And then Chris has been working, he worked on LLVM, the low level virtual machine, which became the intermediate representation for all compilers. And now he's working on another project called MLIR, which is mid level intermediate representation, which is essentially under the graph about how do you represent that kind of computation and then coordinate large numbers of potentially heterogeneous computers. And I would say technically, Tens Torrents, you know, two pillars of those two ideas, software 2.0 and mid level representation. But it's in service of executing graph programs. The hardware is designed to do that. So it's including the hardware piece. Yeah. And then the other cool thing is, for a relatively small amount of money, they did a test chip and two production chips. So it's like a super effective team. And unlike some AI startups, where if you don't build the hardware to run the software that they really want to do, then you have to fix it by writing lots more software. So the hardware naturally does matrix multiply, convolution, the data manipulations, and the data movement between processing elements that you can see in the graph, which I think is all pretty clever. And that's what I'm working on now. So the, I think it's called the Grace Call Processor. I introduced last year. It's, you know, there's a bunch of measures of performance. We're talking about horses. It seems to outperform 368 trillion operations per second. It seems to outperform NVIDIA's Tesla T4 system. So these are just numbers. What do they actually mean in real world performance? Like what are the metrics for you that you're chasing in your horse race? Like what do you care about? Well, first, so the native language of, you know, people who write AI network programs is PyTorch now, PyTorch, TensorFlow. There's a couple others. Do you think PyTorch is one over TensorFlow? Or is it just? I'm not an expert on that. I know many people who have switched from TensorFlow to PyTorch. And there's technical reasons for it. I use both. Both are still awesome. Both are still awesome. But the deepest love is for PyTorch currently. Yeah, there's more love for that. And that may change. So the first thing is when they write their programs, can the hardware execute it pretty much as it was written? Right, so PyTorch turns into a graph. We have a graph compiler that makes that graph. Then it fractions the graph down. So if you have big matrix multiply, we turn it into right size chunks to run on the processing elements. It hooks all the graph up. It lays out all the data. There's a couple of mid level representations of it that are also simulatable. So that if you're writing the code, you can see how it's gonna go through the machine, which is pretty cool. And then at the bottom, it schedules kernels, like math, data manipulation, data movement kernels, which do this stuff. So we don't have to write a little program to do matrix multiply, because we have a big matrix multiplier. There's no SIMD program for that. But there is scheduling for that, right? So one of the goals is, if you write a piece of PyTorch code that looks pretty reasonable, you should be able to compile it, run it on the hardware without having to tweak it and do all kinds of crazy things to get performance. There's not a lot of intermediate steps. It's running directly as written. Like on a GPU, if you write a large matrix multiply naively, you'll get five to 10% of the peak performance of the GPU. Right, and then there's a bunch of people who've published papers on this, and I read them about what steps do you have to do. And it goes from pretty reasonable, well, transpose one of the matrices. So you do row ordered, not column ordered, block it so that you can put a block of the matrix on different SMs, groups of threads. But some of it gets into little details, like you have to schedule it just so, so you don't have register conflicts. So they call them CUDA ninjas. CUDA ninjas, I love it. To get to the optimal point, you either use a prewritten library, which is a good strategy for some things, or you have to be an expert in micro architecture to program it. Right, so the optimization step is way more complicated with the GPU. So our goal is if you write PyTorch, that's good PyTorch, you can do it. Now there's, as the networks are evolving, they've changed from convolutional to matrix multiply. People are talking about conditional graphs, they're talking about very large matrices, they're talking about sparsity, they're talking about problems that scale across many, many chips. So the native data item is a packet. So you send a packet to a processor, it gets processed, it does a bunch of work, and then it may send packets to other processors, and they execute in like a data flow graph kind of methodology. Got it. We have a big network on chip, and then the second chip has 16 ethernet ports to hook lots of them together, and it's the same graph compiler across multiple chips. So that's where the scale comes in. So it's built to scale naturally. Now, my experience with scaling is as you scale, you run into lots of interesting problems. So scaling is the mountain to climb. Yeah. So the hardware is built to do this, and then we're in the process of. Is there a software part to this with ethernet and all that? Well, the protocol at the bottom, we sent, it's an ethernet PHY, but the protocol basically says, send the packet from here to there. It's all point to point. The header bit says which processor to send it to, and we basically take a packet off our on chip network, put an ethernet header on it, send it to the other end to strip the header off, and send it to the local thing. It's pretty straightforward. Human to human interaction is pretty straightforward too, but when you get a million of us, we could do some crazy stuff together. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. So is that the goal is scale? So like, for example, I've been recently doing a bunch of robots at home for my own personal pleasure. Am I going to ever use 10th Story, or is this more for? There's all kinds of problems. Like, there's small inference problems, or small training problems, or big training problems. What's the big goal? Is it the big training problems, or the small training problems? Well, one of the goals is to scale from 100 milliwatts to a megawatt, you know? So like, really have some range on the problems, and the same kind of AI programs work at all different levels. So that's the goal. The natural, since the natural data item is a packet that we can move around, it's built to scale, but so many people have small problems. Right, right. But the, you know. Like, inside that phone is a small problem to solve. So do you see 10th Story potentially being inside a phone? Well, the power efficiency of local memory, local computation, and the way we built it is pretty good. And then there's a lot of efficiency on being able to do conditional graphs and sparsity. I think it's, for complicated networks that wanna go in a small factor, it's gonna be quite good. But we have to prove that, that's all. It's a fun problem. And that's the early days of the company, right? It's a couple years, you said? But you think, you invested, you think they're legit. Yeah. And so you joined. Yeah, I joined. Well, that's. That's a really interesting place to be. Like, the AI world is exploding, you know. And I looked at some other opportunities like build a faster processor, which people want. But that's more on an incremental path than what's gonna happen in AI in the next 10 years. Yeah. So this is kind of, you know, an exciting place to be part of. Yeah, the revolutions will be happening in the very space that Tesla is. And then lots of people are working on it, but there's lots of technical reasons why some of them, you know, aren't gonna work out that well. And, you know, that's interesting. And there's also the same problem about getting the basics right. Like, we've talked to customers about exciting features. And at some point we realized that, Labish and I were realizing they want to hear first about memory bandwidth, local bandwidth, compute intensity, programmability. They want to know the basics, power management, how the network ports work, what are the basics, do all the basics work. Because it's easy to say, we've got this great idea, you know, the crack GPT3, but the people we talked to want to say, if I buy the, so we have a PCI Express card with our chip on it, if you buy the card, you plug it in your machine to download the driver, how long does it take me to get my network to run? Right, right. You know, that's a real question. It's a very basic question. So, yeah. Is there an answer to that yet, or is it trying to get to that? Our goal is like an hour. Okay. When can I buy a Tesla? Pretty soon. Or my, for the small case training. Yeah, pretty soon. Months. Good. I love the idea of you inside the room with the Carpathi, Andre Carpathi and Chris Ladner. Very, very interesting, very brilliant people, very out of the box thinkers, but also like first principles thinkers. Well, they both get stuff done. They only get stuff done to get their own projects done. They talk about it clearly. They educate large numbers of people, and they've created platforms for other people to go do their stuff on. Yeah, the clear thinking that's able to be communicated is kind of impressive. It's kind of remarkable to, yeah, I'm a fan. Well, let me ask, because I talk to Chris actually a lot these days. He's been one of the, just to give him a shout out, he's been so supportive as a human being. So everybody's quite different. Like great engineers are different, but he's been like sensitive to the human element in a way that's been fascinating. Like he was one of the early people on this stupid podcast that I do to say like, don't quit this thing, and also talk to whoever the hell you want to talk to. That kind of from a legit engineer to get like props and be like, you can do this. That was, I mean, that's what a good leader does, right? To just kind of let a little kid do his thing, like go do it, let's see what turns out. That's a pretty powerful thing. But what do you, what's your sense about, he used to be, no, I think stepped away from Google, right? He's at SciFive, I think. What's really impressive to you about the things that Chris has worked on? Because we mentioned the optimization, the compiler design stuff, the LLVM, then there's, he's also at Google worked at the TPU stuff. He's obviously worked on Swift, so the programming language side. Talking about people that work in the entirety of the stack. What, from your time interacting with Chris and knowing the guy, what's really impressive to you that just inspires you? Well, like LLVM became the defacto platform for the defacto platform for compilers. It's amazing. And it was good code quality, good design choices. He hit the right level of abstraction. There's a little bit of the right time, the right place. And then he built a new programming language called Swift, which after, let's say some adoption resistance became very successful. I don't know that much about his work at Google, although I know that that was a typical, they started TensorFlow stuff and it was new. They wrote a lot of code and then at some point it needed to be refactored to be, because its development slowed down, why PyTorch started a little later and then passed it. So he did a lot of work on that. And then his idea about MLIR, which is what people started to realize is the complexity of the software stack above the low level IR was getting so high that forcing the features of that into the level was putting too much of a burden on it. So he's splitting that into multiple pieces. And that was one of the inspirations for our software stack where we have several intermediate representations that are all executable and you can look at them and do transformations on them before you lower the level. So that was, I think we started before MLIR really got far enough along to use, but we're interested in that. He's really excited about MLIR. That's his like little baby. So he, and there seems to be some profound ideas on that that are really useful. So each one of those things has been, as the world of software gets more and more complicated, how do we create the right abstraction levels to simplify it in a way that people can now work independently on different levels of it? So I would say all three of those projects, LLVM, Swift, and MLIR did that successfully. So I'm interested in what he's gonna do next in the same kind of way. Yes. On either the TPU or maybe the Nvidia GPU side, how does 10th Story think, or the ideas underlying it, does it have to be 10th Story? Just this kind of graph focused, graph centric hardware, deep learning centric hardware, beat NVIDIAs, do you think it's possible for it to basically overtake NVIDIA? Sure. What's that process look like? What's that journey look like, you think? Well, GPUs were built to run shader programs on millions of pixels, not to run graphs. Yes. So there's a hypothesis that says the way the graphs are built is going to be really interesting to be inefficient on computing this. And then the primitives is not a SIMD program, it's matrix multiply convolution. And then the data manipulations are fairly extensive about, like, how do you do a fast transpose with a program? I don't know if you've ever written a transpose program. They're ugly and slow, but in hardware, you can do really well. Like, I'll give you an example. So when GPU accelerators first started doing triangles, like, so you have a triangle which maps on a set of pixels. So you build, it's very easy, straightforward to build a hardware engine that'll find all those pixels. And it's kind of weird because you walk along the triangle to get to the edge, and then you have to go back down to the next row and walk along, and then you have to decide on the edge if the line of the triangle is like half on the pixel, what's the pixel color? Because it's half of this pixel and half the next one. That's called rasterization. And you're saying that could be done in hardware? No, that's an example of that operation as a software program is really bad. I've written a program that did rasterization. The hardware that does it has actually less code than the software program that does it, and it's way faster. Right, so there are certain times when the abstraction you have, rasterize a triangle, you know, execute a graph, you know, components of a graph. But the right thing to do in the hardware software boundary is for the hardware to naturally do it. And so the GPU is really optimized for the rasterization of triangles. Well, you know, that's just, well, like in a modern, you know, that's a small piece of modern GPUs. What they did is that they still rasterize triangles when you're running in a game, but for the most part, most of the computation in the area of the GPU is running shader programs. But they're single threaded programs on pixels, not graphs. I have to be honest, I'd say I don't actually know the math behind shader, shading and lighting and all that kind of stuff. I don't know what. They look like little simple floating point programs or complicated ones. You can have 8,000 instructions in a shader program. But I don't have a good intuition why it could be parallelized so easily. No, it's because you have 8 million pixels in every single. So when you have a light, right, that comes down, the angle, you know, the amount of light, like say this is a line of pixels across this table, right? The amount of light on each pixel is subtly different. And each pixel is responsible for figuring out what. Figuring it out. So that pixel says, I'm this pixel. I know the angle of the light. I know the occlusion. I know the color I am. Like every single pixel here is a different color. Every single pixel gets a different amount of light. Every single pixel has a subtly different translucency. So to make it look realistic, the solution was you run a separate program on every pixel. See, but I thought there's like reflection from all over the place. Every pixel. Yeah, but there is. So you build a reflection map, which also has some pixelated thing. And then when the pixel is looking at the reflection map, it has to calculate what the normal of the surface is. And it does it per pixel. By the way, there's boatloads of hacks on that. You know, like you may have a lower resolution light map, your reflection map. There's all these, you know, tax they do. But at the end of the day, it's per pixel computation. And it's so happening that you can map graph like computation onto this pixel central computation. You can do floating point programs on convolutions and the matrices. And Nvidia invested for years in CUDA. First for HPC, and then they got lucky with the AI trend. But do you think they're going to essentially not be able to hardcore pivot out of their? We'll see. That's always interesting. How often do big companies hardcore pivot? Occasionally. How much do you know about Nvidia, folks? Some. Some? Well, I'm curious as well. Who's ultimately, as a... Well, they've innovated several times. But they've also worked really hard on mobile. They've worked really hard on radios. You know, they're fundamentally a GPU company. Well, they tried to pivot. There's an interesting little game and play in autonomous vehicles, right? With, or semi autonomous, like playing with Tesla and so on and seeing that's dipping a toe into that kind of pivot. They came out with this platform, which is interesting technically. But it was like a 3000 watt, you know, 3000 watt, $3,000 GPU platform. I don't know if it's interesting technically. It's interesting philosophically. Technically, I don't know if it's the execution of the craftsmanship is there. I'm not sure. But I didn't get a sense. I think they were repurposing GPUs for an automotive solution. Right, it's not a real pivot. They didn't build a ground up solution. Right. Like the chips inside Tesla are pretty cheap. Like Mobileye has been doing this. They're doing the classic work from the simplest thing. Yeah. I mean, 40 square millimeter chips. And Nvidia, their solution had 800 millimeter chips and two 200 millimeter chips. And, you know, like boatloads are really expensive DRAMs. And, you know, it's a really different approach. And Mobileye fit the, let's say, automotive cost and form factor. And then they added features as it was economically viable. And Nvidia said, take the biggest thing and we're gonna go make it work. You know, and that's also influenced like Waymo. There's a whole bunch of autonomous startups where they have a 5,000 watt server in their trunk. Right. But that's because they think, well, 5,000 watts and, you know, $10,000 is okay because it's replacing a driver. Elon's approach was that port has to be cheap enough to put it in every single Tesla, whether they turn on autonomous driving or not. Which, and Mobileye was like, we need to fit in the bomb and, you know, cost structure that car companies do. So they may sell you a GPS for 1500 bucks, but the bomb for that, it's like $25. Well, and for Mobileye, it seems like neural networks were not first class citizens, like the computation. They didn't start out as a... Yeah, it was a CV problem. Yeah. And did classic CV and found stoplights and lines. And they were really good at it. Yeah, and they never, I mean, I don't know what's happening now, but they never fully pivoted. I mean, it's like, it's the Nvidia thing. And then as opposed to, so if you look at the new Tesla work, it's like neural networks from the ground up, right? Yeah, and even Tesla started with a lot of CV stuff in it and Andrei's basically been eliminating it. Move everything into the network. So without, this isn't like confidential stuff, but you sitting on a porch, looking over the world, looking at the work that Andrei's doing, that Elon's doing with Tesla Autopilot, do you like the trajectory of where things are going on the hardware side? Well, they're making serious progress. I like the videos of people driving the beta stuff. I guess taking some pretty complicated intersections and all that, but it's still an intervention per drive. I mean, I have autopilot, the current autopilot, my Tesla, I use it every day. Do you have full self driving beta or no? No. So you like where this is going? They're making progress. It's taking longer than anybody thought. You know, my wonder is, you know, hardware three, is it enough computing off by two, off by five, off by 10, off by a hundred? Yeah. And I thought it probably wasn't enough, but they're doing pretty well with it now. Yeah. And one thing is the data set gets bigger, the training gets better. And then there's this interesting thing is you sort of train and build an arbitrary size network that solves the problem. And then you refactor the network down to the thing that you can afford to ship, right? So the goal isn't to build a network that fits in the phone. It's to build something that actually works. And then how do you make that most effective on the hardware you have? And they seem to be doing that much better than a couple of years ago. Well, the one really important thing is also what they're doing well is how to iterate that quickly, which means like it's not just about one time deployment, one building, it's constantly iterating the network and trying to automate as many steps as possible, right? And that's actually the principles of the Software 2.0, like you mentioned with Andre is it's not just, I mean, I don't know what the actual, his description of Software 2.0 is. If it's just high level philosophical or their specifics, but the interesting thing about what that actually looks in the real world is it's that what I think Andre calls the data engine, it's like it's the iterative improvement of the thing. You have a neural network that does stuff, fails on a bunch of things and learns from it over and over and over. So you're constantly discovering edge cases. So it's very much about like data engineering, like figuring out, it's kind of what you were talking about with TestTorrent is you have the data landscape. And you have to walk along that data landscape in a way that is constantly improving the neural network. And that feels like that's the central piece of it. And there's two pieces of it. Like you find edge cases that don't work and then you define something that goes, get your data for that. But then the other constraint is whether you have to label it or not. Like the amazing thing about like the GPT3 stuff is it's unsupervised. So there's essentially infinite amount of data. Now there's obviously infinite amount of data available from cars of people successfully driving. But the current pipelines are mostly running on labeled data, which is human limited. So when that becomes unsupervised, it'll create unlimited amount of data, which then they'll scale. Now the networks that may use that data might be way too big for cars, but then there'll be the transformation from now we have unlimited data, I know exactly what I want. Now can I turn that into something that fits in the car? And that process is gonna happen all over the place. Every time you get to the place where you have unlimited data, and that's what software 2.0 is about, unlimited data training networks to do stuff without humans writing code to do it. And ultimately also trying to discover, like you're saying, the self supervised formulation of the problem. So the unsupervised formulation of the problem. Like in driving, there's this really interesting thing, which is you look at a scene that's before you, and you have data about what a successful human driver did in that scene one second later. It's a little piece of data that you can use just like with GPT3 as training. Currently, even though Tesla says they're using that, it's an open question to me, how far can you, can you solve all of the driving with just that self supervised piece of data? And like, I think. Well, that's what Common AI is doing. That's what Common AI is doing, but the question is how much data. So what Common AI doesn't have is as good of a data engine, for example, as Tesla does. That's where the, like the organization of the data. I mean, as far as I know, I haven't talked to George, but they do have the data. The question is how much data is needed, because we say infinite very loosely here. And then the other question, which you said, I don't know if you think it's still an open question is, are we on the right order of magnitude for the compute necessary? That is this, is it like what Elon said, this chip that's in there now is enough to do full self driving, or do we need another order of magnitude? I think nobody actually knows the answer to that question. I like the confidence that Elon has, but. Yeah, we'll see. There's another funny thing is you don't learn to drive with infinite amounts of data. You learn to drive with an intellectual framework that understands physics and color and horizontal surfaces and laws and roads and all your experience from manipulating your environment. Like, look, there's so many factors go into that. So then when you learn to drive, like driving is a subset of this conceptual framework that you have, right? And so with self driving cars right now, we're teaching them to drive with driving data. You never teach a human to do that. You teach a human all kinds of interesting things, like language, like don't do that, watch out. There's all kinds of stuff going on. Well, this is where you, I think previous time we talked about where you poetically disagreed with my naive notion about humans. I just think that humans will make this whole driving thing really difficult. Yeah, all right. I said, humans don't move that slow. It's a ballistics problem. It's a ballistics, humans are a ballistics problem, which is like poetry to me. It's very possible that in driving they're indeed purely a ballistics problem. And I think that's probably the right way to think about it. But I still, they still continue to surprise me, those damn pedestrians, the cyclists, other humans in other cars and. Yeah, but it's gonna be one of these compensating things. So like when you're driving, you have an intuition about what humans are going to do, but you don't have 360 cameras and radars and you have an attention problem. So the self driving car comes in with no attention problem, 360 cameras right now, a bunch of other features. So they'll wipe out a whole class of accidents, right? And emergency braking with radar and especially as it gets AI enhanced will eliminate collisions, right? But then you have the other problems of these unexpected things where you think your human intuition is helping, but then the cars also have a set of hardware features that you're not even close to. And the key thing of course is if you wipe out a huge number of kind of accidents, then it might be just way safer than a human driver, even though, even if humans are still a problem, that's hard to figure out. Yeah, that's probably what will happen. Those autonomous cars will have a small number of accidents humans would have avoided, but they'll wipe, they'll get rid of the bulk of them. What do you think about like Tesla's dojo efforts or it can be bigger than Tesla in general. It's kind of like the tense torrent trying to innovate, like this is the dichotomy, like should a company try to from scratch build its own neural network training hardware? Well, first of all, I think it's great. So we need lots of experiments, right? And there's lots of startups working on this and they're pursuing different things. I was there when we started dojo and it was sort of like, what's the unconstrained computer solution to go do very large training problems? And then there's fun stuff like, we said, well, we have this 10,000 watt board to cool. Well, you go talk to guys at SpaceX and they think 10,000 watts is a really small number, not a big number. And there's brilliant people working on it. I'm curious to see how it'll come out. I couldn't tell you, I know it pivoted a few times since I left, so. So the cooling does seem to be a big problem. I do like what Elon said about it, which is like, we don't wanna do the thing unless it's way better than the alternative, whatever the alternative is. So it has to be way better than like racks or GPUs. Yeah, and the other thing is just like, you know, the Tesla autonomous driving hardware, it was only serving one software stack. And the hardware team and the software team were tightly coupled. You know, if you're building a general purpose AI solution, then you know, there's so many different customers with so many different needs. Now, something Andre said is, I think this is amazing. 10 years ago, like vision, recommendation, language, were completely different disciplines. He said, the people literally couldn't talk to each other. And three years ago, it was all neural networks, but the very different neural networks. And recently, it's converging on one set of networks. They vary a lot in size, obviously, they vary in data, vary in outputs, but the technology has converged a good bit. Yeah, these transformers behind GPT3, it seems like they could be applied to video, they could be applied to a lot of, and it's like, and they're all really simple. And it was like they literally replace letters with pixels. It does vision, it's amazing. And then size actually improves the thing. So the bigger it gets, the more compute you throw at it, the better it gets. And the more data you have, the better it gets. So then you start to wonder, well, is that a fundamental thing? Or is this just another step to some fundamental understanding about this kind of computation? Which is really interesting. Us humans don't want to believe that that kind of thing will achieve conceptual understandings, you were saying, like you'll figure out physics, but maybe it will. Maybe. Maybe it will. Well, it's worse than that. It'll understand physics in ways that we can't understand. I like your Stephen Wolfram talk where he said, you know, there's three generations of physics. There was physics by reasoning. Well, big things should fall faster than small things, right? That's reasoning. And then there's physics by equations. Like, you know, but the number of programs in the world that are solved with a single equation is relatively low. Almost all programs have, you know, more than one line of code, maybe 100 million lines of code. So he said, then now we're going to physics by equation, which is his project, which is cool. I might point out there was two generations of physics before reasoning habit. Like all animals, you know, know things fall and, you know, birds fly and, you know, predators know how to, you know, solve a differential equation to cut off a accelerating, you know, curving animal path. And then there was, you know, the gods did it, right? So, right. So there was, you know, there's five generations. Now, software 2.0 says programming things is not the last step. Data. So there's going to be a physics past Stephen Wolfram's con. That's not explainable to us humans. And actually there's no reason that I can see well that even that's the limit. Like, there's something beyond that. I mean, they're usually, like, usually when you have this hierarchy, it's not like, well, if you have this step and this step and this step and they're all qualitatively different and conceptually different, it's not obvious why, you know, six is the right number of hierarchy steps and not seven or eight or. Well, then it's probably impossible for us to, to comprehend something that's beyond the thing that's not explainable. Yeah. But the thing that, you know, understands the thing that's not explainable to us will conceive the next one. And like, I'm not sure why there's a limit to it. Click your brain hurts. That's a sad story. If we look at our own brain, which is an interesting illustrative example in your work with test story and trying to design deep learning architectures, do you think about the brain at all? Maybe from a hardware designer perspective, if you could change something about the brain, what would you change or do? Funny question. Like, how would you do it? So your brain is really weird. Like, you know, your cerebral cortex where we think we do most of our thinking is what, like six or seven neurons thick? Yeah. Like, that's weird. Like all the big networks are way bigger than that. Like way deeper. So that seems odd. And then, you know, when you're thinking if it's, if the input generates a result you can lose, it goes really fast. But if it can't, that generates an output that's interesting, which turns into an input and then your brain to the point where you mold things over for days and how many trips through your brain is that, right? Like it's, you know, 300 milliseconds or something to get through seven levels of neurons. I forget the number exactly. But then it does it over and over and over as it searches. And the brain clearly looks like some kind of graph because you have a neuron with connections and it talks to other ones and it's locally very computationally intense, but it's also does sparse computations across a pretty big area. There's a lot of messy biological type of things and it's meaning like, first of all, there's mechanical, chemical and electrical signals. It's all that's going on. Then there's the asynchronicity of signals. And there's like, there's just a lot of variability that seems continuous and messy and just the mess of biology. And it's unclear whether that's a good thing or it's a bad thing, because if it's a good thing that we need to run the entirety of the evolution, well, we're gonna have to start with basic bacteria to create something. So imagine we could control, you could build a brain with 10 layers. Would that be better or worse? Or more connections or less connections, or we don't know to what level our brains are optimized. But if I was changing things, like you can only hold like seven numbers in your head. Like why not a hundred or a million? Never thought of that. And why can't we have like a floating point processor that can compute anything we want and see it all properly? Like that would be kind of fun. And why can't we see in four or eight dimensions? Because 3D is kind of a drag. Like all the hard mass transforms are up in multiple dimensions. So you could imagine a brain architecture that you could enhance with a whole bunch of features that would be really useful for thinking about things. It's possible that the limitations you're describing are actually essential for like the constraints are essential for creating like the depth of intelligence. Like that, the ability to reason. It's hard to say because like your brain is clearly a parallel processor. 10 billion neurons talking to each other at a relatively low clock rate. But it produces something that looks like a serial thought process. It's a serial narrative in your head. That's true. But then there are people famously who are visual thinkers. Like I think I'm a relatively visual thinker. I can imagine any object and rotate it in my head and look at it. And there are people who say they don't think that way at all. And recently I read an article about people who say they don't have a voice in their head. They can talk. But when they, you know, it's like, well, what are you thinking? No, they'll describe something that's visual. So that's curious. Now, if you're saying, if we dedicated more hardware to holding information, like, you know, 10 numbers or a million numbers, like would that distract us from our ability to form this kind of singular identity? Like it dissipates somehow. But maybe, you know, future humans will have many identities that have some higher level organization but can actually do lots more things in parallel. Yeah, there's no reason, if we're thinking modularly, there's no reason we can't have multiple consciousnesses in one brain. Yeah, and maybe there's some way to make it faster so that the, you know, the area of the computation could still have a unified feel to it while still having way more ability to do parallel stuff at the same time. Could definitely be improved. Could be improved? Yeah. Okay, well, it's pretty good right now. Actually, people don't give it enough credit. The thing is pretty nice. The, you know, the fact that the right ends seem to be, give a nice, like, spark of beauty to the whole experience. I don't know. I don't know if it can be improved easily. It could be more beautiful. I don't know how, I, what? What do you mean, what do you mean how? All the ways you can't imagine. No, but that's the whole point. I wouldn't be able to, the fact that I can imagine ways in which it could be more beautiful means. So do you know, you know, Ian Banks, his stories? So the super smart AIs there live, mostly live in the world of what they call infinite fun because they can create arbitrary worlds. So they interact in, you know, the story has it. They interact in the normal world and they're very smart and they can do all kinds of stuff. And, you know, a given mind can, you know, talk to a million humans at the same time because we're very slow and for reasons, you know, artificial, the story, they're interested in people and doing stuff, but they mostly live in this other land of thinking. My inclination is to think that the ability to create infinite fun will not be so fun. That's sad. Well, there are so many things to do. Imagine being able to make a star move planets around. Yeah, yeah, but because we can imagine that is why life is fun, if we actually were able to do it, it would be a slippery slope where fun wouldn't even have a meaning because we just consistently desensitize ourselves by the infinite amounts of fun we're having. And the sadness, the dark stuff is what makes it fun. I think that could be the Russian. It could be the fun makes it fun and the sadness makes it bittersweet. Yeah, that's true. Fun could be the thing that makes it fun. So what do you think about the expansion, not through the biology side, but through the BCI, the brain computer interfaces? Yeah, you got a chance to check out the Neuralink stuff. It's super interesting. Like humans like our thoughts to manifest as action. You know, like as a kid, you know, like shooting a rifle was super fun, driving a mini bike, doing things. And then computer games, I think, for a lot of kids became the thing where they can do what they want. They can fly a plane, they can do this, they can do this. But you have to have this physical interaction. Now imagine, you could just imagine stuff and it happens. Like really richly and interestingly. Like we kind of do that when we dream. Like dreams are funny because like if you have some control or awareness in your dreams, like it's very realistic looking, or not realistic looking, it depends on the dream. But you can also manipulate that. And you know, what's possible there is odd. And the fact that nobody understands it, it's hilarious, but. Do you think it's possible to expand that capability through computing? Sure. Is there some interesting, so from a hardware designer perspective, is there, do you think it'll present totally new challenges in the kind of hardware required that like, so this hardware isn't standalone computing. Well, this is not working with the brain. So today, computer games are rendered by GPUs. Right. Right, so, but you've seen the GAN stuff, right? Where trained neural networks render realistic images, but there's no pixels, no triangles, no shaders, no light maps, no nothing. So the future of graphics is probably AI, right? Yes. AI is heavily trained by lots of real data, right? So if you have an interface with a AI renderer, right? So if you say render a cat, it won't say, well, how tall's the cat and how big it, you know, it'll render a cat. And you might say, oh, a little bigger, a little smaller, you know, make it a tabby, shorter hair. You know, like you could tweak it. Like the amount of data you'll have to send to interact with a very powerful AI renderer could be low. But the question is brain computer interfaces would need to render not onto a screen, but render onto the brain and like directly so that there's a bandwidth. Well, it could do it both ways. I mean, our eyes are really good sensors. They could render onto a screen and we could feel like we're participating in it. You know, they're gonna have, you know, like the Oculus kind of stuff. It's gonna be so good when a projection to your eyes, you think it's real. You know, they're slowly solving those problems. And I suspect when the renderer of that information into your head is also AI mediated, they'll be able to give you the cues that, you know, you really want for depth and all kinds of stuff. Like your brain is partly faking your visual field, right? Like your eyes are twitching around, but you don't notice that. Occasionally they blank, you don't notice that. You know, there's all kinds of things. Like you think you see over here, but you don't really see there. It's all fabricated. Yeah, peripheral vision is fascinating. So if you have an AI renderer that's trained to understand exactly how you see and the kind of things that enhance the realism of the experience, it could be super real actually. So I don't know what the limits to that are, but obviously if we have a brain interface that goes inside your visual cortex in a better way than your eyes do, which is possible, it's a lot of neurons, maybe that'll be even cooler. Well, the really cool thing is that it has to do with the infinite fun that you were referring to, which is our brains seem to be very limited. And like you said, computations. It's also very plastic. Very plastic, yeah. Yeah, so it's a interesting combination. The interesting open question is the limits of that neuroplasticity, like how flexible is that thing? Because we haven't really tested it. We know about that at the experiments where they put like a pressure pad on somebody's head and had a visual transducer pressurize it and somebody slowly learned to see. Yep. Especially at a young age, if you throw a lot at it, like what can it, so can you like arbitrarily expand it with computing power? So connected to the internet directly somehow? Yeah, the answer's probably yes. So the problem with biology and ethics is like there's a mess there. Like us humans are perhaps unwilling to take risks into directions that are full of uncertainty. So it's like. No, no. 90% of the population's unwilling to take risks. The other 10% is rushing into the risks unaided by any infrastructure whatsoever. And that's where all the fun happens in society. There's been huge transformations in the last couple thousand years. Yeah, it's funny. I got a chance to interact with this Matthew Johnson from Johns Hopkins. He's doing this large scale study of psychedelics. It's becoming more and more, I've gotten a chance to interact with that community of scientists working on psychedelics. But because of that, that opened the door to me to all these, what do they call it? Psychonauts, the people who, like you said, the 10% who are like, I don't care. I don't know if there's a science behind this. I'm taking this spaceship to, if I'm being the first on Mars, I'll be. Psychedelics are interesting in the sense that in another dimension, like you said, it's a way to explore the limits of the human mind. Like, what is this thing capable of doing? Because you kind of, like when you dream, you detach it. I don't know exactly the neuroscience of it, but you detach your reality from what your mind, the images your mind is able to conjure up and your mind goes into weird places and entities appear. Somehow Freudian type of trauma is probably connected in there somehow, but you start to have these weird, vivid worlds that like. So do you actively dream? Do you, why not? I have like six hours of dreams a night. It's like really useful time. I know, I haven't, I don't for some reason. I just knock out and I have sometimes anxiety inducing kind of like very pragmatic nightmare type of dreams, but nothing fun, nothing. Nothing fun? Nothing fun. I try, I unfortunately have mostly have fun in the waking world, which is very limited in the amount of fun you can have. It's not that limited either. Yeah, that's why. We'll have to talk. Yeah, I need instructions. Yeah. There's like a manual for that. You might wanna. I'll look it up. I'll ask Elon. What would you dream? You know, years ago when I read about, you know, like, you know, a book about how to have, you know, become aware of your dreams. I worked on it for a while. Like there's this trick about, you know, imagine you can see your hands and look out and I got somewhat good at it. Like, but my mostly, when I'm thinking about things or working on problems, I prep myself before I go to sleep. It's like, I pull into my mind all the things I wanna work on or think about. And then that, let's say, greatly improves the chances that I'll work on that while I'm sleeping. And then I also, you know, basically ask to remember it. And I often remember very detailed. Within the dream. Yeah. Or outside the dream. Well, to bring it up in my dreaming and then to remember it when I wake up. It's just, it's more of a meditative practice. You say, you know, to prepare yourself to do that. Like if you go to, you know, to sleep, still gnashing your teeth about some random thing that happened that you're not that really interested in, you'll dream about it. That's really interesting. Maybe. But you can direct your dreams somewhat by prepping. Yeah, I'm gonna have to try that. It's really interesting. Like the most important, the interesting, not like what did this guy send in an email kind of like stupid worry stuff, but like fundamental problems you're actually concerned about. Yeah. And interesting things you're worried about. Or books you're reading or, you know, some great conversation you had or some adventure you want to have. Like there's a lot of space there. And it seems to work that, you know, my percentage of interesting dreams and memories went up. Is there, is that the source of, if you were able to deconstruct like where some of your best ideas came from, is there a process that's at the core of that? Like, so some people, you know, walk and think, some people like in the shower, the best ideas hit them. If you talk about like Newton, Apple hitting them on the head. No, I found out a long time ago, I process things somewhat slowly. So like in college, I had friends who could study at the last minute, get an A the next day. I can't do that at all. So I always front loaded all the work. Like I do all the problems early, you know, for finals, like the last three days, I wouldn't look at a book because I want, you know, cause like a new fact day before finals may screw up my understanding of what I thought I knew. So my goal was to always get it in and give it time to soak. And I used to, you know, I remember when we were doing like 3D calculus, I would have these amazing dreams of 3D surfaces with normal, you know, calculating the gradient. And it's just like all come up. So it was like really fun, like very visual. And if I got cycles of that, that was useful. And the other is, is don't over filter your ideas. Like I like that process of brainstorming where lots of ideas can happen. I like people who have lots of ideas. But then there's a, yeah, I'll let them sit and let it breathe a little bit and then reduce it to practice. Like at some point you really have to, does it really work? Like, you know, is this real or not, right? But you have to do both. There's creative tension there. Like how do you be both open and, you know, precise? Have you had ideas that you just, that sit in your mind for like years before the? Sure. It's an interesting way to just generate ideas and just let them sit, let them sit there for a while. I think I have a few of those ideas. You know, that was so funny. Yeah, I think that's, you know, creativity this one or something. For the slow thinkers in the room, I suppose. As I, some people, like you said, are just like, like the. Yeah, it's really interesting. There's so much diversity in how people think. You know, how fast or slow they are, how well they remember or don't. Like, you know, I'm not super good at remembering facts, but processes and methods. Like in our engineering, I went to Penn State and almost all our engineering tests were open book. I could remember the page and not the formula. But as soon as I saw the formula, I could remember the whole method if I'd learned it. Yeah. So it's just a funny, where some people could, you know, I'd watch friends like flipping through the book, trying to find the formula, even knowing that they'd done just as much work. And I would just open the book and I was on page 27, about half, I could see the whole thing visually. Yeah. And, you know. And you have to learn that about yourself and figure out what would function optimally. I had a friend who was always concerned he didn't know how he came up with ideas. He had lots of ideas, but he said they just sort of popped up. Like, you'd be working on something, you have this idea, like, where does it come from? But you can have more awareness of it. Like, how your brain works is a little murky as you go down from the voice in your head or the obvious visualizations. Like, when you visualize something, how does that happen? Yeah, that's right. You know, if I say, you know, visualize a volcano, it's easy to do, right? And what does it actually look like when you visualize it? I can visualize to the point where I don't see very much out of my eyes and I see the colors of the thing I'm visualizing. Yeah, but there's a shape, there's a texture, there's a color, but there's also conceptual visualization. Like, what are you actually visualizing when you're visualizing a volcano? Just like with peripheral vision, you think you see the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way to say it. You know, you have this kind of almost peripheral vision of your visualizations, they're like these ghosts. But if, you know, if you work on it, you can get a pretty high level of detail. And somehow you can walk along those visualizations and come up with an idea, which is weird. But when you're thinking about solving problems, like, you're putting information in, you're exercising the stuff you do know, you're sort of teasing the area that you don't understand and don't know, but you can almost, you know, feel, you know, that process happening. You know, that's how I, like, like, I know sometimes when I'm working really hard on something, like, I get really hot when I'm sleeping. And, you know, it's like, we got the blank throw, I wake up, all the blanks are on the floor. And, you know, every time it's, well, I wake up and think, wow, that was great. You know? Are you able to reverse engineer what the hell happened there? Well, sometimes it's vivid dreams and sometimes it's just kind of, like you say, like shadow thinking that you sort of have this feeling you're going through this stuff, but it's not that obvious. Isn't that so amazing that the mind just does all these little experiments? I never, you know, I always thought it's like a river that you can't, you're just there for the ride, but you're right, if you prep it. No, it's all understandable. Meditation really helps. You gotta start figuring out, you need to learn language of your own mind. And there's multiple levels of it, but. The abstractions again, right? It's somewhat comprehensible and observable and feelable or whatever the right word is. You know, you're not alone for the ride. You are the ride. I have to ask you, hardware engineer, working on neural networks now, what's consciousness? What the hell is that thing? Is that just some little weird quirk of our particular computing device? Or is it something fundamental that we really need to crack open if we're to build good computers? Do you ever think about consciousness? Like why it feels like something to be? I know, it's really weird. So. Yeah. I mean, everything about it's weird. First, it's a half a second behind reality, right? It's a post hoc narrative about what happened. You've already done stuff by the time you're conscious of it. And your consciousness generally is a single threaded thing, but we know your brain is 10 billion neurons running some crazy parallel thing. And there's a really big sorting thing going on there. It also seems to be really reflective in the sense that you create a space in your head. Like we don't really see anything, right? Like photons hit your eyes, it gets turned into signals, it goes through multiple layers of neurons. I'm so curious that that looks glassy and that looks not glassy. Like how the resolution of your vision is so high you have to go through all this processing. Where for most of it, it looks nothing like vision. Like there's no theater in your mind, right? So we have a world in our heads. We're literally just isolated behind our sensors. But we can look at it, speculate about it, speculate about alternatives, problem solve, what if. There's so many things going on and that process is lagging reality. And it's single threaded even though the underlying thing is like massively parallel. So it's so curious. So imagine you're building an AI computer. If you wanted to replicate humans, well, you'd have huge arrays of neural networks and apparently only six or seven deep, which is hilarious. They don't even remember seven numbers, but I think we can upgrade that a lot, right? And then somewhere in there, you would train the network to create basically the world that you live in, right? So like tell stories to itself about the world that it's perceiving. Well, create the world, tell stories in the world and then have many dimensions of like side shows to it. Like we have an emotional structure, like we have a biological structure. And that seems hierarchical too. Like if you're hungry, it dominates your thinking. If you're mad, it dominates your thinking. And we don't know if that's important to consciousness or not, but it certainly disrupts, intrudes in the consciousness. Like so there's lots of structure to that. And we like to dwell on the past. We like to think about the future. We like to imagine, we like to fantasize, right? And the somewhat circular observation of that is the thing we call consciousness. Now, if you created a computer system and did all things, create worldviews, create the future alternate histories, dwelled on past events, accurately or semi accurately. Well, consciousness just spring up like naturally. Well, would that look and feel conscious to you? Like you seem conscious to me, but I don't know. Off of the external observer sense. Do you think a thing that looks conscious is conscious? Like do you, again, this is like an engineering kind of question, I think, because like. I don't know. If we want to engineer consciousness, is it okay to engineer something that just looks conscious? Or is there a difference between something that is? Well, we evolve consciousness because it's a super effective way to manage our affairs. Yeah, this is a social element, yeah. Well, it gives us a planning system. We have a huge amount of stuff. Like when we're talking, like the reason we can talk really fast is we're modeling each other at a really high level of detail. And consciousness is required for that. Well, all those components together manifest consciousness, right? So if we make intelligent beings that we want to interact with that we're like wondering what they're thinking, looking forward to seeing them, when they interact with them, they're interesting, surprising, you know, fascinating, you know, they will probably feel conscious like we do and we'll perceive them as conscious. I don't know why not, but you never know. Another fun question on this, because from a computing perspective, we're trying to create something that's humanlike or superhumanlike. Let me ask you about aliens. Aliens. Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there and do you think their technology, their computing, their AI bots, their chips are of the same nature as ours? Yeah, I've got no idea. I mean, if there's lots of aliens out there that have been awfully quiet, you know, there's speculation about why. There seems to be more than enough planets out there. There's a lot. There's intelligent life on this planet that seems quite different, you know, like dolphins seem like plausibly understandable, octopuses don't seem understandable at all. If they lived longer than a year, maybe they would be running the planet. They seem really smart. And their neural architecture is completely different than ours. Now, who knows how they perceive things. I mean, that's the question is for us intelligent beings, we might not be able to perceive other kinds of intelligence if they become sufficiently different than us. Yeah, like we live in the current constrained world, you know, it's three dimensional geometry and the geometry defines a certain amount of physics. And, you know, there's like how time works seems to work. There's so many things that seem like a whole bunch of the input parameters to the, you know, another conscious being are the same. Yes, like if it's biological, biological things seem to be in a relatively narrow temperature range, right? Because, you know, organics aren't stable, too cold or too hot. Now, so if you specify the list of things that input to that, but as soon as we make really smart, you know, beings and they go solve about how to think about a billion numbers at the same time and how to think in end dimensions. There's a funny science fiction book where all the society had uploaded into this matrix. And at some point, some of the beings in the matrix thought, I wonder if there's intelligent life out there. So they had to do a whole bunch of work to figure out like how to make a physical thing because their matrix was self sustaining and they made a little spaceship and they traveled to another planet when they got there, there was like life running around, but there was no intelligent life. And then they figured out that there was these huge, you know, organic matrix all over the planet inside there where intelligent beings had uploaded themselves into that matrix. So everywhere intelligent life was, soon as it got smart, it upleveled itself into something way more interesting than 3D geometry. Yeah, it escaped whatever this, not escaped, uplevel is better. The essence of what we think of as an intelligent being, I tend to like the thought experiment of the organism, like humans aren't the organisms. I like the notion of like Richard Dawkins and memes that ideas themselves are the organisms, like that are just using our minds to evolve. So like we're just like meat receptacles for ideas to breed and multiply and so on. And maybe those are the aliens. Yeah, so Jordan Peterson has a line that says, you know, you think you have ideas, but ideas have you. Yeah, good line. Which, and then we know about the phenomenon of groupthink and there's so many things that constrain us. But I think you can examine all that and not be completely owned by the ideas and completely sucked into groupthink. And part of your responsibility as a human is to escape that kind of phenomenon, which isn't, it's one of the creative tension things again, you're constructed by it, but you can still observe it and you can think about it and you can make choices about to some level, how constrained you are by it. And it's useful to do that. And, but at the same time, and it could be by doing that, you know, the group and society you're part of becomes collectively even more interesting. So, you know, so the outside observer will think, wow, you know, all these Lexus running around with all these really independent ideas have created something even more interesting in the aggregate. So, I don't know, those are lenses to look at the situation that'll give you some inspiration, but I don't think they're constrained. Right. As a small little quirk of history, it seems like you're related to Jordan Peterson, like you mentioned. He's going through some rough stuff now. Is there some comment you can make about the roughness of the human journey, the ups and downs? Well, I became an expert in Benza withdrawal, like, which is, you took Benza to Aspen's, and at some point they interact with GABA circuits, you know, to reduce anxiety and do a hundred other things. Like there's actually no known list of everything they do because they interact with so many parts of your body. And then once you're on them, you habituate to them and you have a dependency. It's not like you're a drug dependency where you're trying to get high. It's a metabolic dependency. And then if you discontinue them, there's a funny thing called kindling, which is if you stop them and then go, you know, you'll have a horrible withdrawal symptoms. And if you go back on them at the same level, you won't be stable. And that unfortunately happened to him. Because it's so deeply integrated into all the kinds of systems in the body. It literally changes the size and numbers of neurotransmitter sites in your brain. So there's a process called the Ashton protocol where you taper it down slowly over two years to people go through that goes through unbelievable hell. And what Jordan went through seemed to be worse because on advice of doctors, you know, we'll stop taking these and take this. It was the disaster. And he got some, yeah, it was pretty tough. He seems to be doing quite a bit better intellectually. You can see his brain clicking back together. I spent a lot of time with him. I've never seen anybody suffer so much. Well, his brain is also like this powerhouse, right? So I wonder, does a brain that's able to think deeply about the world suffer more through these kinds of withdrawals, like? I don't know. I've watched videos of people going through withdrawal. They all seem to suffer unbelievably. And, you know, my heart goes out to everybody. And there's some funny math about this. Some doctor said, as best he can tell, you know, there's the standard recommendations. Don't take them for more than a month and then taper over a couple of weeks. Many doctors prescribe them endlessly, which is against the protocol, but it's common, right? And then something like 75% of people, when they taper, it's, you know, half the people have difficulty, but 75% get off okay. 20% have severe difficulty and 5% have life threatening difficulty. And if you're one of those, it's really bad. And the stories that people have on this is heartbreaking and tough. So you put some of the fault at the doctors. They just not know what the hell they're doing. No, no, it's hard to say. It's one of those commonly prescribed things. Like one doctor said, what happens is, if you're prescribed them for a reason and then you have a hard time getting off, the protocol basically says you're either crazy or dependent and you get kind of pushed into a different treatment regime. You're a drug addict or a psychiatric patient. And so like one doctor said, you know, I prescribed them for 10 years thinking I was helping my patients and I realized I was really harming them. And you know, the awareness of that is slowly coming up. The fact that they're casually prescribed to people is horrible and it's bloody scary. And some people are stable on them, but they're on them for life. Like once you, you know, it's another one of those drugs. But benzos long range have real impacts on your personality. People talk about the benzo bubble where you get disassociated from reality and your friends a little bit. It's really terrible. The mind is terrifying. We were talking about how the infinite possibility of fun, but like it's the infinite possibility of suffering too, which is one of the dangers of like expansion of the human mind. It's like, I wonder if all the possible experiences that an intelligent computer can have, is it mostly fun or is it mostly suffering? So like if you brute force expand the set of possibilities, like are you going to run into some trouble in terms of like torture and suffering and so on? Maybe our human brain is just protecting us from much more possible pain and suffering. Maybe the space of pain is like much larger than we could possibly imagine. And that. The world's in a balance. You know, all the literature on religion and stuff is, you know, the struggle between good and evil is balanced for very finely tuned for reasons that are complicated. But that's a long philosophical conversation. Speaking of balance that's complicated, I wonder because we're living through one of the more important moments in human history with this particular virus. It seems like pandemics have at least the ability to kill off most of the human population at their worst. And there's just fascinating because there's so many viruses in this world. There's so many, I mean, viruses basically run the world in the sense that they've been around very long time. They're everywhere. They seem to be extremely powerful in the distributed kind of way. But at the same time, they're not intelligent and they're not even living. Do you have like high level thoughts about this virus that like in terms of you being fascinated or terrified or somewhere in between? So I believe in frameworks, right? So like one of them is evolution. Like we're evolved creatures, right? Yes. And one of the things about evolution is it's hyper competitive. And it's not competitive out of a sense of evil. It's competitive as a sense of there's endless variation and variations that work better when. And then over time, there's so many levels of that competition. Like multicellular life partly exists because of the competition between different kinds of life forms. And we know sex partly exists to scramble our genes so that we have genetic variation against the invasion of the bacteria and the viruses. And it's endless. Like I read some funny statistic, like the density of viruses and bacteria in the ocean is really high. And one third of the bacteria die every day because a virus is invading them. Like one third of them. Wow. Like I don't know if that number is true, but it was like the amount of competition and what's going on is stunning. And there's a theory as we age, we slowly accumulate bacterias and viruses and as our immune system kind of goes down, that's what slowly kills us. It just feels so peaceful from a human perspective when we sit back and are able to have a relaxed conversation. And there's wars going on out there. Like right now, you're harboring how many bacteria? And the ones, many of them are parasites on you and some of them are helpful and some of them are modifying your behavior and some of them are, it's just really wild. But this particular manifestation is unusual in the demographic, how it hit and the political response that it engendered and the healthcare response it engendered and the technology it engendered, it's kind of wild. Yeah, the communication on Twitter that it led to, all that kind of stuff, at every single level, yeah. But what usually kills life, the big extinctions are caused by meteors and volcanoes. That's the one you're worried about as opposed to human created bombs that we launch. Solar flares are another good one. Occasionally, solar flares hit the planet. So it's nature. Yeah, it's all pretty wild. On another historic moment, this is perhaps outside but perhaps within your space of frameworks that you think about that just happened, I guess a couple of weeks ago is, I don't know if you're paying attention at all, is the GameStop and Wall Street bets. It's super fun. So it's really fascinating. There's kind of a theme to this conversation today because it's like neural networks, it's cool how there's a large number of people in a distributed way, almost having a kind of fun, we're able to take on the powerful elites, elite hedge funds, centralized powers and overpower them. Do you have thoughts on this whole saga? I don't know enough about finance, but it was like the Elon, Robinhood guy when they talked. Yeah, what'd you think about that? Well, Robinhood guy didn't know how the finance system worked. That was clear, right? He was treating like the people who settled the transactions as a black box. And suddenly somebody called him up and say, hey, black box calling you, your transaction volume means you need to put out $3 billion right now. And he's like, I don't have $3 billion. Like I don't even make any money on these trades. Why do I owe $3 billion while you're sponsoring the trade? So there was a set of abstractions that I don't think either, like now we understand it. Like this happens in chip design. Like you buy wafers from TSMC or Samsung or Intel, and they say it works like this and you do your design based on that. And then chip comes back and doesn't work. And then suddenly you started having to open the black boxes. The transistors really work like they said, what's the real issue? So there's a whole set of things that created this opportunity and somebody spotted it. Now, people spot these kinds of opportunities all the time. So there's been flash crashes, there's always short squeezes are fairly regular. Every CEO I know hates the shorts because they're trying to manipulate their stock in a way that they make money and deprive value from both the company and the investors. So the fact that some of these stocks were so short, it's hilarious that this hasn't happened before. I don't know why, and I don't actually know why some serious hedge funds didn't do it to other hedge funds. And some of the hedge funds actually made a lot of money on this. So my guess is we know 5% of what really happened and that a lot of the players don't know what happened. And the people who probably made the most money aren't the people that they're talking about. That's. Do you think there was something, I mean, this is the cool kind of Elon, you're the same kind of conversationalist, which is like first principles questions of like, what the hell happened? Just very basic questions of like, was there something shady going on? What, who are the parties involved? It's the basic questions everybody wants to know about. Yeah, so like we're in a very hyper competitive world, but transactions like buying and selling stock is a trust event. I trust the company, represented themselves properly. I bought the stock because I think it's gonna go up. I trust that the regulations are solid. Now, inside of that, there's all kinds of places where humans over trust and this exposed, let's say some weak points in the system. I don't know if it's gonna get corrected. I don't know if we have close to the real story. Yeah, my suspicion is we don't. And listen to that guy, he was like a little wide eyed about and then he did this and then he did that. And I was like, I think you should know more about your business than that. But again, there's many businesses when like this layer is really stable, you stop paying attention to it. You pay attention to the stuff that's bugging you or new. You don't pay attention to the stuff that just seems to work all the time. You just, sky's blue every day, California. And every once in a while it rains and everybody's like, what do we do? Somebody go bring in the lawn furniture. It's getting wet. You don't know why it's getting wet. Yeah, it doesn't always work. I was blue for like a hundred days and now it's, so. But part of the problem here with Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood is the scaling that we've been talking about is there's a lot of unexpected things that happen with the scaling and you have to be, I think the scaling forces you to then return to the fundamentals. Well, it's interesting because when you buy and sell stocks, the scaling is, the stocks don't only move in a certain range and if you buy a stock, you can only lose that amount of money. On the short market, you can lose a lot more than you can benefit. Like it has a weird cost function or whatever the right word for that is. So he was trading in a market where he wasn't actually capitalized for the downside. If it got outside a certain range. Now, whether something nefarious has happened, I have no idea, but at some point, the financial risk to both him and his customers was way outside of his financial capacity and his understanding how the system work was clearly weak or he didn't represent himself. I don't know the person and when I listened to him, it could have been the surprise question was like, and then these guys called and it sounded like he was treating stuff as a black box. Maybe he shouldn't have, but maybe he has a whole pile of experts somewhere else and it was going on. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the qualities of a good leader is under fire, you have to perform. And that means to think clearly and to speak clearly. And he dropped the ball on those things because and understand the problem quickly, learn and understand the problem at this basic level. What the hell happened? And my guess is, at some level it was amateurs trading against experts slash insiders slash people with special information. Outsiders versus insiders. Yeah, and the insiders, my guess is the next time this happens, we'll make money on it. The insiders always win? Well, they have more tools and more incentive. I mean, this always happens. Like the outsiders are doing this for fun. The insiders are doing this 24 seven. But there's numbers in the outsiders. This is the interesting thing is it could be a new chapter. There's numbers on the insiders too. Different kind of numbers, yeah. But this could be a new era because, I don't know, at least I didn't expect that a bunch of Redditors could, there's millions of people who can get together. It was a surprise attack. The next one will be a surprise. But don't you think the crowd, the people are planning the next attack? We'll see. But it has to be a surprise. It can't be the same game. And so the insiders. It's like, it could be there's a very large number of games to play and they can be agile about it. I don't know. I'm not an expert. Right, that's a good question. The space of games, how restricted is it? Yeah, and the system is so complicated it could be relatively unrestricted. And also during the last couple of financial crashes, what set it off was sets of derivative events where Nassim Taleb's thing is they're trying to lower volatility in the short run by creating tail events. And the system's always evolved towards that and then they always crash. The S curve is the start low, ramp, plateau, crash. It's 100% effective. In the long run. Let me ask you some advice to put on your profound hat. There's a bunch of young folks who listen to this thing for no good reason whatsoever. Undergraduate students, maybe high school students, maybe just young folks, a young at heart looking for the next steps to take in life. What advice would you give to a young person today about life, maybe career, but also life in general? Get good at some stuff. Well, get to know yourself, right? Get good at something that you're actually interested in. You have to love what you're doing to get good at it. You really gotta find that. Don't waste all your time doing stuff that's just boring or bland or numbing, right? Don't let old people screw you. Well, people get talked into doing all kinds of shit and racking up huge student debts and there's so much crap going on. And then drains your time and drains your energy. The Eric Weinstein thesis that the older generation won't let go and they're trapping all the young people. Do you think there's some truth to that? Yeah, sure. Just because you're old doesn't mean you stop thinking. I know lots of really original old people. I'm an old person. But you have to be conscious about it. You can fall into the ruts and then do that. I mean, when I hear young people spouting opinions that sounds like they come from Fox News or CNN, I think they've been captured by groupthink and memes. They're supposed to think on their own. So if you find yourself repeating what everybody else is saying, you're not gonna have a good life. Like, that's not how the world works. It seems safe, but it puts you at great jeopardy for being boring or unhappy. How long did it take you to find the thing that you have fun with? Oh, I don't know. I've been a fun person since I was pretty little. So everything. I've gone through a couple periods of depression in my life. For a good reason or for a reason that doesn't make any sense? Yeah, like some things are hard. Like you go through mental transitions in high school. I was really depressed for a year and I think I had my first midlife crisis at 26. I kind of thought, is this all there is? Like I was working at a job that I loved, but I was going to work and all my time was consumed. What's the escape out of that depression? What's the answer to is this all there is? Well, a friend of mine, I asked him, because he was working his ass off, I said, what's your work life balance? Like there's work, friends, family, personal time. Are you balancing any of that? And he said, work 80%, family 20%. And I tried to find some time to sleep. Like there's no personal time. There's no passionate time. Like the young people are often passionate about work. So I was certainly like that. But you need to have some space in your life for different things. And that creates, that makes you resistant to the whole, the deep dips into depression kind of thing. Yeah, well, you have to get to know yourself too. Meditation helps. Some physical, something physically intense helps. Like the weird places your mind goes kind of thing. Like, and why does it happen? Why do you do what you do? Like triggers, like the things that cause your mind to go to different places kind of thing, or like events like. Your upbringing for better or worse, whether your parents are great people or not, you come into adulthood with all kinds of emotional burdens. And you can see some people are so bloody stiff and restrained, and they think the world's fundamentally negative, like you maybe. You have unexplored territory. Yeah. Or you're afraid of something. Definitely afraid of quite a few things. Then you gotta go face them. Like what's the worst thing that can happen? You're gonna die, right? Like that's inevitable. You might as well get over that. Like 100%, that's right. Like people are worried about the virus, but you know, the human condition is pretty deadly. There's something about embarrassment that's, I've competed a lot in my life, and I think the, if I'm to introspect it, the thing I'm most afraid of is being like humiliated, I think. Yeah, nobody cares about that. Like you're the only person on the planet that cares about you being humiliated. Exactly. It's like a really useless thought. It is. It's like, you're all humiliated. Something happened in a room full of people, and they walk out, and they didn't think about it one more second. Or maybe somebody told a funny story to somebody else. And then it dissipates it throughout, yeah. Yeah. No, I know it too. I mean, I've been really embarrassed about shit that nobody cared about myself. Yeah. It's a funny thing. So the worst thing ultimately is just. Yeah, but that's a cage, and then you have to get out of it. Yeah. Like once you, here's the thing. Once you find something like that, you have to be determined to break it. Because otherwise you'll just, so you accumulate that kind of junk, and then you die as a mess. So the goal, I guess it's like a cage within a cage. I guess the goal is to die in the biggest possible cage. Well, ideally you'd have no cage. People do get enlightened. I've met a few. It's great. You've found a few? There's a few out there? I don't know. Of course there are. I don't know. Either that or it's a great sales pitch. There's enlightened people writing books and doing all kinds of stuff. It's a good way to sell a book. I'll give you that. You've never met somebody you just thought, they just kill me. Like they just, like mental clarity, humor. No, 100%, but I just feel like they're living in a bigger cage. They have their own. You still think there's a cage? There's still a cage. You secretly suspect there's always a cage. There's nothing outside the universe. There's nothing outside the cage. You work in a bunch of companies, you lead a lot of amazing teams. I'm not sure if you've ever been like in the early stages of a startup, but do you have advice for somebody that wants to do a startup or build a company, like build a strong team of engineers that are passionate and just want to solve a big problem? Like, is there a more specifically on that point? Well, you have to be really good at stuff. If you're going to lead and build a team, you better be really interested in how people work and think. The people or the solution to the problem. So there's two things, right? One is how people work and the other is the... Well, actually there's quite a few successful startups. It's pretty clear the founders don't know anything about people. Like the idea was so powerful that it propelled them. But I suspect somewhere early, they hired some people who understood people because people really need a lot of care and feeding to collaborate and work together and feel engaged and work hard. Like startups are all about out producing other people. Like you're nimble because you don't have any legacy. You don't have a bunch of people who are depressed about life just showing up. So startups have a lot of advantages that way. Do you like the, Steve Jobs talked about this idea of A players and B players. I don't know if you know this formulation. Yeah, no. Organizations that get taken over by B player leaders often really underperform their C players. That said, in big organizations, there's so much work to do. And there's so many people who are happy to do what the leadership or the big idea people would consider menial jobs. And you need a place for them, but you need an organization that both values and rewards them but doesn't let them take over the leadership of it. Got it. So you need to have an organization that's resistant to that. But in the early days, the notion with Steve was that like one B player in a room of A players will be like destructive to the whole. I've seen that happen. I don't know if it's like always true. You run into people who are clearly B players but they think they're A players and so they have a loud voice at the table and they make lots of demands for that. But there's other people who are like, I know who I am. I just wanna work with cool people on cool shit and just tell me what to do and I'll go get it done. So you have to, again, this is like people skills. What kind of person is it? I've met some really great people I love working with that weren't the biggest ID people or the most productive ever but they show up, they get it done. They create connection and community that people value. It's pretty diverse so I don't think there's a recipe for that. I gotta ask you about love. I heard you're into this now. Into this love thing? Yeah, is this, do you think this is your solution to your depression? No, I'm just trying to, like you said, delighting people and occasionally trying to sell a book. I'm writing a book about love. You're writing a book about love? No, I'm not, I'm not. I have a friend of mine, he's gonna, he said you should really write a book about your management philosophy. He said it'd be a short book. Well, that one was thought pretty well. What role do you think love, family, friendship, all that kind of human stuff play in a successful life? You've been exceptionally successful in the space of running teams, building cool shit in this world, creating some amazing things. What, did love get in the way? Did love help the family get in the way? Did family help friendship? You want the engineer's answer? Please. But first, love is functional, right? It's functional in what way? So we habituate ourselves to the environment. And actually, Jordan Peterson told me this line. So you go through life and you just get used to everything, except for the things you love. They remain new. Like, this is really useful for, you know, like other people's children and dogs and trees. You just don't pay that much attention to them. Your own kids, you monitor them really closely. Like, and if they go off a little bit, because you love them, if you're smart, if you're gonna be a successful parent, you notice it right away. You don't habituate to just things you love. And if you want to be successful at work, if you don't love it, you're not gonna put the time in somebody else. It's somebody else that loves it. Like, because it's new and interesting, and that lets you go to the next level. So it's the thing, it's just a function that generates newness and novelty and surprises, you know, all those kinds of things. It's really interesting. There's people who figured out lots of frameworks for this. Like, humans seem to go, in partnership, go through interests. Like, suddenly somebody's interesting, and then you're infatuated with them, and then you're in love with them. And then you, you know, different people have ideas about parental love or mature love. Like, you go through a cycle of that, which keeps us together, and it's super functional for creating families and creating communities and making you support somebody despite the fact that you don't love them. Like, and it can be really enriching. You know, now, in the work life balance scheme, if alls you do is work, you think you may be optimizing your work potential, but if you don't love your work or you don't have family and friends and things you care about, your brain isn't well balanced. Like, everybody knows the experience of, he works on something all week. He went home, took two days off, and he came back in. The odds of you working on the thing, you picking up right where you left off is zero. Your brain refactored it. But being in love is great. It's like changes the color of the light in the room. It creates a spaciousness that's different. It helps you think. It makes you strong. Bukowski had this line about love being a fog that dissipates with the first light of reality in the morning. That's depressing. I think it's the other way around. It lasts. Well, like you said, it's a function. It's a thing that generates. It can be the light that actually enlivens your world and creates the interest and the power and the strength to go do something. Well, it's like, that sounds like, you know, there's like physical love, emotional love, intellectual love, spiritual love, right? Isn't it all the same thing, kind of? Nope. You should differentiate that. Maybe that's your problem. In your book, you should refine that a little bit. Is it different chapters? Yeah, there's different chapters. What's these, aren't these just different layers of the same thing, the stack of physical? People, some people are addicted to physical love and they have no idea about emotional or intellectual love. I don't know if they're the same things. I think they're different. That's true. They could be different. I guess the ultimate goal is for it to be the same. Well, if you want something to be bigger and interesting, you should find all its components and differentiate them, not clump it together. Like, people do this all the time. Yeah, the modularity. Get your abstraction layers right and then you have room to breathe. Well, maybe you can write the forward to my book about love. Or the afterwards. And the after. You really tried. I feel like Lex has made a lot of progress in this book. Well, you have things in your life that you love. Yeah, yeah. And they are, you're right, they're modular. It's quality. And you can have multiple things with the same person or the same thing. But, yeah. Depending on the moment of the day. Yeah, there's, like what Bukowski described is that moment when you go from being in love to having a different kind of love. Yeah. And that's a transition. But when it happens, if you read the owner's manual and you believed it, you would have said, oh, this happened. It doesn't mean it's not love. It's a different kind of love. But maybe there's something better about that. As you grow old, all you do is regret how you used to be. It's sad. Right? You should have learned a lot of things because like who you can be in your future self is actually more interesting and possibly delightful than being a mad kid in love with the next person. Like, that's super fun when it happens. But that's, you know, 5% of the possibility. Yeah, that's right. There's a lot more fun to be had in the long lasting stuff. Yeah, or meaning, you know, if that's your thing. Which is a kind of fun. It's a deeper kind of fun. And it's surprising. You know, that's, like the thing I like is surprises. You know, and you just never know what's gonna happen. But you have to look carefully and you have to work at it and you have to think about it and you know, it's. Yeah, you have to see the surprises when they happen, right? You have to be looking for it. From the branching perspective, you mentioned regrets. Do you have regrets about your own trajectory? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, some of it's painful, but you wanna hear the painful stuff? No. I would say, like in terms of working with people, when people did stuff I didn't like, especially if it was a bit nefarious, I took it personally and I also felt it was personal about them. But a lot of times, like humans are, you know, most humans are a mess, right? And then they act out and they do stuff. And the psychologist I heard a long time ago said, you tend to think somebody does something to you. But really what they're doing is they're doing what they're doing while they're in front of you. It's not that much about you, right? And as I got more interested in, you know, when I work with people, I think about them and probably analyze them and understand them a little bit. And then when they do stuff, I'm way less surprised. And if it's bad, I'm way less hurt. And I react way less. Like I sort of expect everybody's got their shit. Yeah, and it's not about you as much. It's not about me that much. It's like, you know, you do something and you think you're embarrassed, but nobody cares. Like, and somebody's really mad at you, the odds of it being about you. No, they're getting mad the way they're doing that because of some pattern they learned. And you know, and maybe you can help them if you care enough about it. But, or you could see it coming and step out of the way. Like, I wish I was way better at that. I'm a bit of a hothead. And in support of that. You said with Steve, that was a feature, not a bug. Yeah, well, he was using it as the counter force to orderliness that would crush his work. Well, you were doing the same. Yeah, maybe. I don't think I, I don't think my vision was big enough. It was more like I just got pissed off and did stuff. I'm sure that's the, yeah, you're telling me. I don't know if it had the, it didn't have the amazing effect of creating the trillion dollar company. It was more like I just got pissed off and left and, or made enemies that I shouldn't have. And yeah, it's hard. Like, I didn't really understand politics until I worked at Apple where, you know, Steve was a master player of politics and his staff had to be, or they wouldn't survive him. And it was definitely part of the culture. And then I've been in companies where they say it's political, but it's all, you know, fun and games compared to Apple. And it's not that the people at Apple are bad people. It's just, they operate politically at a higher level. You know, it's not like, oh, somebody said something bad about somebody, somebody else, which is most politics. It's, you know, they had strategies about accomplishing their goals. Sometimes, you know, over the dead bodies of their enemies. You know, with sophistication, yeah, more Game of Thrones than sophistication and like a big time factor rather than a, you know. Wow, that requires a lot of control over your emotions, I think, to have a bigger strategy in the way you behave. Yeah, and it's effective in the sense that coordinating thousands of people to do really hard things where many of the people in there don't understand themselves, much less how they're participating, creates all kinds of, you know, drama and problems that, you know, our solution is political in nature. Like how do you convince people? How do you leverage them? How do you motivate them? How do you get rid of them? How do you, you know, like there's so many layers of that that are interesting. And even though some of it, let's say, may be tough, it's not evil unless, you know, you use that skill to evil purposes, which some people obviously do. But it's a skill set that operates, you know. And I wish I'd, you know, I was interested in it, but I, you know, it was sort of like, I'm an engineer, I do my thing. And, you know, there's times when I could have had a way bigger impact if I, you know, knew how to, if I paid more attention and knew more about that. Yeah, about the human layer of the stack. Yeah, that human political power, you know, expression layer of the stack. Just complicated. And there's lots to know about it. I mean, people are good at it, are just amazing. And when they're good at it, and let's say, relatively kind and oriented in a good direction, you can really feel, you can get lots of stuff done and coordinate things that you never thought possible. But all people like that also have some pretty hard edges because, you know, it's a heavy lift. And I wish I'd spent more time like that when I was younger. But maybe I wasn't ready. You know, I was a wide eyed kid for 30 years. Still a bit of a kid. Yeah, I know. What do you hope your legacy is when there's a book like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and this is like a one sentence entry by Jim Waller from like that guy lived at some point. There's not many, you know, not many people would be remembered. You're one of the sparkling little human creatures that had a big impact on the world. How do you hope you'll be remembered? My daughter was trying to get, she edited my Wikipedia page to say that I was a legend and a guru. But they took it out, so she put it back in. She's 15. I think that was probably the best part of my legacy. She got her sister, and they were all excited. They were like trying to put it in the references because there's articles and that on the title. So in the eyes of your kids, you're a legend. Well, they're pretty skeptical because they don't be better than that. They're like dad. So yeah, that kind of stuff is super fun. In terms of the big legends stuff, I don't care. You don't care. I don't really care. You're just an engineer. Yeah, I've been thinking about building a big pyramid. So I had a debate with a friend about whether pyramids or craters are cooler. And he realized that there's craters everywhere, but they built a couple of pyramids 5,000 years ago. And they remember you for a while. We're still talking about it. So I think that would be cool. Those aren't easy to build. Oh, I know. And they don't actually know how they built them, which is great. It's either AGI or aliens could be involved. So I think you're gonna have to figure out quite a few more things than just the basics of civil engineering. So I guess you hope your legacy is pyramids. That would be cool. And my Wikipedia page, you know, getting updated by my daughter periodically. Like those two things would pretty much make it. Jim, it's a huge honor talking to you again. I hope we talk many more times in the future. I can't wait to see what you do with Tense Torrent. I can't wait to use it. I can't wait for you to revolutionize yet another space in computing. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Thanks for talking to me. This was fun. See you next time.

Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #162

The following is a conversation with Eric Weinstein, his fourth time on the podcast. Both sadness and hope run through his heart and his mind, and the result is a complicated, brilliant human being who I am fortunate to call a friend. Quick mention of our sponsors. Indeed hiring site, Theragun muscle recovery device, Wine Access online wine store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me ask that whenever we touch difficult topics in this or other conversations, that you listen with an open mind and forgive me or the guest for a misstep in an imperfectly thought out statement. To have any chance at truth, I think we have to take risks and make mistakes in conversation and then learn from those mistakes. Please try not to close your mind and heart to others because of a single sentence or an expression of an idea. Try to assume that the people in this conversation or just people in general are good, but not perfect and far from it, but always striving to add a bit more love into the world in whatever way we know how. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. You often talk about getting off this planet and I think you don't often talk about extra terrestrial life, intelligent life out there. Do you wonder about this kind of thing, about intelligent civilizations out there? I do, but I try to not wonder about it in a particular way. In a certain sense, I do find that speculating about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and space aliens is kind of a recreation for when things aren't going very well. At least it gives us some meaning and purpose in our lives. So I worry about, for example, the simulation hypothesis is taking over from religion. You can't quite believe enough to go to church or synagogue or the mosque on the weekend, so then you just take up an interest in simulation theory because that's something like what you do for your job coding. I do think that in some sense, the issue of aliens is a really interesting one, but has been spoiled by too much sort of recreational escapism. The key question that I find is let's assume that it is possible to look out at the night sky and see all of these distant worlds and then go visit them. If that is possible, it's almost certainly possible through some as yet unknown or not accepted theory of physics beyond Einstein. And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but probably is. If that theory exists, there would be a percentage of the worlds that have life in sort of a Drake equation kind of a way that would have encountered the ability to escape soon enough after unlocking the power of the atom at a minimum and whatever they have that is probably analogous to the cell on that world. So assuming that life is a fairly generic thing that arises, probably not carbon based, probably doesn't have DNA, but that something that fits the pattern of Darwinian theory, which is descent with variation, differential success. And thereby constantly improving and so on that through time, there'll be a trajectory where there'll be something increasingly complex and fascinating and beautiful like us humans, but much more. That can also off gas whatever entropy it creates to give an illusion that you're defeating thermodynamics. So whatever these things are probably has an analog of the biolipid layer so that cells can get rid of the chaos on one side of the barrier and keep order on the other. Whatever these things are that create life, assuming that there is a theory to be found that allows that civilization to diversify, we would have to imagine that such a civilization might have taken an interest in its concept of the universe and have come here. They would come here, they would have a deep understanding of the physics of the universe sufficient to have arrived here. Well, there's two questions, whether they could arrive physically and whether their information could be sent here and whether they could gain information from us. It's possible that they would have a way of looking into our world without actually reaching it. I don't know. But yes, if my hope, which is that we can escape this world, can be realized, if that's feasible, then you would have to imagine that the reverse is true and that somebody else should be here. First of all, I wanna say this. My purpose when I come on to your show and I reframe the questions is not to challenge you. I can sit inside all of those. It's to give you better audio and video because I think we've been on an incredible role. I really love what you do. And so I am trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame breaking as possible. I think some of your listeners don't understand that it's actually a sign of respect as opposed to some sort of a complex dynamic, which is I think you can play outside of some of the frames and that these are sort of offerings to get the conversation started. So let me try to break that frame and give you something different. Beautiful. I think what's going on here is that I can prove effectively that we're not thinking about this in very deep terms. As soon as I say we've gotta get off this planet, the number of people who assume that I'm talking about faster than light travel is very high and faster than light travel assumes some sort of Einsteinian paradigm that then is broken by some small adjustment. And I think that that's fascinating. It shows me that our failure to imagine what could be being said is profound. We don't have an idea of all of the different ways in which we might be able to visit distant worlds. All we think about is, okay, it must be Einsteinian space times and then some means of exceeding the speed limit. And it's just, it's fascinating to me that we don't really have, we've lost the ability to just realize we don't know the framework and what does it even mean? So one of the things I think about a lot is worlds with more than one temporal dimension. It's very hard to think about more than one temporal dimension. So that's a really strong mental exercise of breaking the framework in which we think because most of the frameworks would have a single temporal dimension, right? Well, first of all, most of the frameworks in which we think would have no temporal dimension would have pure, like in mathematics, the differential geometry that Riemann came up with in the 1800s. We don't usually talk about what we would call split signature metrics or Lorentzian signature. In fact, if it weren't for relativity, this would be the most obscure topic out there. Almost all the work we do is in Euclidean signature and then there's this one freakish case of relativity theory in physics that uses this one time and the rest spatial dimensions. Fascinating. So it's usually momentary and just looking at space. Yes, we have these three kinds of equations that are very important to us. We have elliptic, hyperbolic and parabolic, right? And so the idea is if I'm chewing gum after eating garlic bread, when I open my mouth and I've got chewing gum between my lips, maybe it's gonna form an elliptic object called a minimal surface. Then when I pop that and blow through it, you're gonna hear a noise that's gonna travel to you by a wave equation, which is gonna be hyperbolic. But then the garlic breath is gonna diffuse towards you and you're eventually gonna be very upset with me according to a heat equation, which will be parabolic. So those are the three basic paradigms for most of the work that we do. And a lot of the work that we do in mathematics is elliptic, whereas the physicists are in the hyperbolic case. And I don't even know what to do about more than one temporal dimension because I think almost no one studies that. I can't believe you just captured much of modern physics in the example of chewing gum. Well, I have an off color one, which I chose not to share, but hopefully the kids at home can imagine. Okay, so, okay, that is the place where we come from. Now, if we want to arrive at a possibility of breaking the frameworks with two versus zero temporal dimensions, how do we even begin to think about that? Well, let's think about it as you and I getting together in New York City, okay? So if you tell me, Eric, I wanna meet you in New York City, go to the corner of, I don't know, 34th Street and Third Avenue, and you'll find a building on the Northwest corner and go up to the 17th floor, right? So when we have Third Avenue, that's one coordinate, 34th Street, that's the second coordinate, and go up to the 17th. And what time is it? Oh, 12 noon. All right, well, now imagine that we traded the ability to get up to a particular height in a building and it's all flat land, but I'm gonna give you two temporal coordinates. So meet me at 5 p.m. and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and Third. That gets to be too mind blowing. I've got two separate watches. And presumably that's just specifying a single point in those two different dimensions, but then being able to travel along those dimensions. Let me see your right hand. You have no watch on that. No. Okay, I'm very concerned, Lex, that you're going through life without a wristwatch. That is my favorite and most valued wristwatch. I want you to wear it. This guy is funnier than basically any human on Earth. Lex, that has been in my family for months. It's a Fitbit. Now, what I want you to understand is Lex Fridman is now in a position to live in two spatial and two temporal dimensions unlike the rest of us. I clearly am only fit for four spatial dimensions. So I'm frozen, whereas you can double move. I can double move, which is funny because this is set in Austin time. So it's 4 p.m. and this is set in Los Angeles time. Well, but that's just with an affine shift in mod 12. But my point is, wouldn't that be interesting if there were two separate time scales and you had to coordinate both of those, but you didn't have to worry about what floor of the building because everything was on the ground floor. That is the confusion that we're having. And if you do one more show, right, then they're gonna put a watch on your ankle and you're only gonna have one spatial dimension that you can move around. But my claim is that all of these are actually sectors of my theory in case we're interested in that, which is geometric unity. There is a two, two sector and a three, one and a one, three and a zero, four and a four, zero. And all of these sectors have some physical reality. We happen to live in a one, three sector. But that's the kind of thinking that we don't do. When I say we have to get off this planet, people imagine, oh, okay, it's just Einstein plus some ability to break the law. By the way, even though you did this for humor's sake, I perhaps am tempted to pull a Putin who. Am I gonna get whacked? No, not quite. But he was given a Super Bowl ring to look at and he, instead of just looking at it, put it on his finger and walked away with it. Rubbercraft? Rubbercraft, that's right. So in the same way, I will, if you don't mind, walk away with this Fitbit and taking the entirety of your life story with it because there's all these steps on it. Boy, have you lost a lot of weight. And where have I been? Exactly. Right, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about, you wanna get into aliens, let's have an interesting alien conversation. Let's stop having the typical free will conversation, the typical alien conversation, the typical AGI morality conversation. It's like, we have to recognize that we're amusing ourselves because we're not making progress. Time to have better versions of all these conversations. Is there some version of the alien conversation that could incorporate the breaking of frameworks? Well, I think so. I mean, the key question would be, we've had the Pentagon release multiple videos of strange UFOs that undermined a lot of us. I just think it's also really fascinating to talk about the fact that those of us who were trained to call BS on all of this stuff just had the rug pulled out from under us by the Pentagon choosing to do this. And you know what the effect of that is? You've opened the door for every stupid theory known to man. My aunt saw a ghost. Okay, now we're gonna have to listen to, well, hey, the Pentagon used to deny it. Then it turned out there were UFOs, dude. Whoever is in charge of lying to the public, they need a cost function that incorporates the damage and trust because I held this line that this was all garbage and all BS. Now I don't know what to think. There's a fascinating aspect to this alien discussion, the breaking of frameworks that involves the release of videos from the Pentagon, which is almost like another dimension that trust in itself or the nature of truth and information is a kind of dimension along which we're traveling constantly that is messing with my head to think about because it almost feels like you need to incorporate that into your study of the nature of reality is like the constant shifting of the notation, the tools we use to communicate that reality. And so what am I supposed to think about these videos? Is it a complete distraction? Is it a kind of cosmic joke? I don't know, but you know what? I'm tired of these people, just completely tired of these people. The people on the Pentagon side or the people who are interpreting this stuff on the Pentagon side? I'm tired of the authorities playing games with what we can know. The fact that you and I don't, do you have a security clearance? Some level of it for, because I was funded for DARPA for a while. I don't have a security clearance. You know, I am going to release whatever theory I have. And my guess is that there is zero interest from our own government. And so the Chinese will find out about it at the same time, our government does, because Lord knows what they do in these buildings. I watch crazy people walk in and out of the intelligence community, walk in and out of DARPA. And I think, wow, you're talking to that person? That's really fascinating to me. We don't seem to have a clue as to who might have the ball. Complete lack of transparency. Do you think it's possible there's, the government is in possession of something deeply fundamental to our understanding of the world that they're not releasing? So this is one of the things is, this is one of the famous distractions that people play with, the narrative. Assume that that were true. Of alien life forms and spacecraft in possession, that the government is in possession of alien spacecraft. Assume that were true. I don't think the government really exists at the moment. I believe, and this is not an idea that was original to me. There was a guy named Michael Teitelbaum who used to be at the Sloan Foundation. And at some point I pointed out that the US government had completely contradictory objectives when it came to the military and science. And one branch said this, one branch said that. I said, I don't understand which is true. What does the government want? He said, do you think there's a government? And I said, what do you mean? He said, what makes you think that the people in those two offices have ever coordinated? What is it that allows each office to have a coherent plan with respect to every other office? And that's when I first started to understand that there are periods where the government coheres, and then there are periods where the coherence just decays. And I think that that's been going on since 1945. That there have been a few places where there's been increased coherence, but in general everything is just getting less and less coherent. And that what war did was focus us on the need to have a government of people, a mission, capacity, technology, commitment, ideology. And then as soon as that was gone, different people, those who'd been through World War II had one set of beliefs, those born in the 1950s or late 40s by the time they got to Woodstock, they didn't buy any of that. So coherence is the complete opposite of bureaucracy being paralyzed by bureaucracy. So coherence is efficient, functional government. Because when you say there's no government, meaning there's no emergent function from a collection of individuals. It's just a bunch of individuals stuck in their offices without any kind of efficient communication with each other on a single mission. And so a government that is truly at the epitome of what a government is supposed to be is when a bunch of people working together. What are we about? Are we about freedom? Are we about growth? Are we about decency and fairness? Are we about the absence of a national culture so that we can all just do our own thing? I've called this thing the USA and the United States have absolutely nothing. These are all different visions for our country. So it's possible that there's a alien spacecraft somewhere and there's like 20 people that know about it. And then they're kind of like, as you communicate further and further into the offices, that information dissipates, it gets distorted in some kind of way. And then it's completely lost the power, the possibility of that information is lost. We bought a house and I had this idea that I wanted to find out what all the switches did. And I quickly found out that your house doesn't keep updating its plans. As people do modifications, they just do the modifications and they don't actually record why they were doing what they were doing or what things lead to. So there are all sorts of bizarre, like there's a switch in my house that says privacy. I don't know what privacy is. Does it turn on an electromagnetic field? Does some lead shielding go over the house? That's what we have. We have a system in which the people who've inherited these structures have no idea why their grandparents built them. I'd be funny if there's a freedom of speech switch that you could also control. And there'd be a perfect metaphor. Well, that's different because what they figured out is, is that if they can just make sure that we don't have any public options for communication, then hey, everything that we say to each other goes through a private company, private companies can do whatever they want. And this is like one of the greatest moves that we didn't really notice. Electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant. And because there is no public option, guess what? There's always somebody named Sundar or Jack or Mark who controls whether or not you can speak and what it appears to be that is being said and whose stuff is weighted more highly than others. It's an absolute nightmare. And by the way, the Silicon Valley intellectual elite, Lord knows what is going on. People are so busy making money that they are not actually upholding any of the values. So Silicon Valley is sort of maximally against, it has this kind of libertarian, free, progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man. And then it quickly just imposes rules on all of the rest of us as to what we could say to each other if we're not part of the inner elite. So what do you think the ideal of the freedom of speech means? Well, this is very interesting. I keep getting lectured on social media by people who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has to abstract things. Right now, you have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. And the spirit of the law would have to say that our speech that matters is free, at least at the level of ideas. I don't claim that I have the right to endanger your life with speech or to reveal your private information. So I really am not opining about directed speech intended to smear you. And that's a different kettle of fish. And maybe I have some rights to do that, but I don't think that they're infinite. What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas is essential that the court abstract it and shove it down the throat of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, whoever these infrastructure companies are because it really matters which abstraction you use. The case that I really like is search and seizure. If I have private data that I entered in my house that is stored on a server that you hold outside of my house, but I view is the abstraction that it's only the perimeter of my house that I have the right to protect, or does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data on the server that is located outside of my house? These are choices for the court, and the court is supposed to pretend that they can divine the true intent of the framers. But all of the sort of, and I've taken to calling this the problem of internet hyenas, people with readymade answers and LOLs, and you're such a moron. These folks love to remind you, it's a private company, dude, it can do whatever it wants. No, the court has to figure out what the abstractions are. And just the way, for example, the Griswold decision found that there was a penumbra because there was too little in the Constitution, therefore there were all sorts of things implied that couldn't be in the document. Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction right now that says Jack cannot do it if he wants. It's really, so you say the courts, but it's also us, people who think about the world, it's you. No, no, no. It's the courts. But the courts don't do this. We're toast. But we can still think about it. I mean, I'll... Sure, but I don't feel like going down the drain. Here's what I'm thinking about, because it's tricky how far it should extend. I mean, that's an ongoing conversation. Don't you think the interpretation of the law... I think I'm trying to say something very simple, and it's just not gonna be popular for a while. Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication. Print or shouting in a public park. And so I can go to a public park and I can shout if I get a permit. Even there, I think it was in the late 1980s in Atlanta, we came up with free speech zones where you can't protest at a convention. You bet you can go to a park 23 miles out and they'll fence off a little area where you can have your free speech. No, speech is dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. We are a country about danger and risk. And yes, I agree that targeted speech at individuals trying to reveal their private stuff and all that kind of... That is very different. So forget a lot of that stuff. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous and people will die as a result of free speech. The idea that one life is too much is preposterous. Like why did we send... If one life is preposterous, why did we send anyone to the beaches of Normandy? I just don't get this. So one thing that I was clearly bothered by, and maybe you can be my therapist as well. I thought you were mine. This is a little bit of a miscommunication on both of our parts then. Because who's paying who for this? I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parler from AWS because my assumption was that the infrastructure... I drew a distinction between AWS, the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created is different than the actual platforms. So the standard of the ideal of freedom of speech, I, in my mind, in a shallow way perhaps, applied differently to AWS than I did to Twitter. It felt that we've created a more dangerous world, that freedoms were violated by banning Parler from AWS, which I saw as the computing infrastructure which enables the competition of tools, the competition of frameworks of communication. What do you think about this? First of all, let me give you the internet hyena answer. I don't understand, dude, just build your own Amazon. Yeah. Right? Yes. Well, so that's a very shallow statement, but it's also one that has some legitimacy. We can't completely dismiss it because there's levels to this game. Yes and no, but if you really wanted to chase that down, one of the great things about a person to person conversation as opposed to let's have 30 of our closest friends, whenever we have a conversation with 30 of our closest friends, you know what happens? It's like passing light through a prism. Every person says something interesting. And as a result, it's always muddled. Nothing ever resolves. Well, one of my conversational techniques you mentioned, you pushed back is first this childlike naivety and curiosity, but also. Real or simulated? Real, I'm afraid. I would say 80% real. All right. So in this paradigm, how could you not see this coming? I mean, I did a show with Ashley Matthews, who's the woman behind Riley Reid. And specifically about this, it was about the idea that if I move away from politics and go towards sex, I know that there's always a move to use the infrastructure to shut down sex workers. And in this case, we had Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration. We have a positive passion for people who want to solve problems, that they don't like this company, they don't like that company, payday loans would be another one. And so you have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system that you can't, as Riley Reid, Ashley couldn't get a Mailchimp account according to her, if I understand her correctly. And this idea that you charge these people higher rates because of supposed chargebacks on credit cards, even if their chargebacks are low. Yes, we have an unofficial policy of harassment. There's something about everybody who shows up at Davos, they get drunk in the Swiss Alps, and then they come back home and they coordinate, and they coordinate things like Build Back Better. We don't really understand what Build Back Better is, but my guess is that Build Back Better has to do with extremism in America. How do we shut down the Republican Party as the source of extremism? Now, I do think the Republican Party got very extreme under Trump. And I do believe that that was responsive to how extreme the Democratic Party got under Clinton first and then Obama and then Hillary. And in all of these circumstances, it's amazing how much we want to wield these things as weapons. Well, our extremism is fine because we pretend that Antifa doesn't exist and we don't report what goes on in Portland, but your extremism, my God, that's disgusting. This is the completely ridiculous place that we're in. And by the way, our friends in part are coked up on tech money, and they don't appear to hold the courage of their convictions at a political level because it's not in keeping with shareholder value. At some level, shareholder value is the ultimate shield with which everyone can cloak themselves. Well, on that point, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and I'm not sure it was a good financial decision for Twitter, right? Perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong. Well, are you thinking locally, or are you thinking if Twitter refused to ban Donald Trump, what is the odds that the full force of the antitrust division might find them? I don't know. Oh, I see, I see. So there's a complicated thing. Well, look, these guys are all having a discussion in very practical terms. You can imagine the sorts of things and imagine the sorts of conversation. Jack, Mark, Zunder, we're really glad you're all here. We're all trying to sing from the same hymnal and row in the same direction. We understand free speech. We're completely committed to it, but we have to draw a line with extremism, guys. We just need to make sure that we're all on the same page. Well, they use the term violence, too, and they, I think, over apply it. So basically, anybody... I'm telling you, I say dumb things to incentivize thoughtful conversation. Well, whatever these things are, there is no trace. Like, how old are you, Lex? You're in your mid 30s? Yeah, to late 40s. Mid, late 20s to late 40s, somewhere in there. That's the demographic, yes. I do think that partially what's happened is that your group has never seen functional institutions. These institutions have been so compromised for so long. You've probably never seen an adult. Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult. I know that he has a wild lifestyle, but I also see it looking like an adult. What does an adult look like exactly? Oh, you know, somebody who weighs things, speaks carefully, thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan. Somebody who has a pretty good idea of how to get things done, isn't wildly caught up in punitive actions, is more focused on breaking new ground than playing rent seeking games. I mean, I really had a positive... I was so completely jazzed when Elon Musk ended up as the world's richest person. He was like, well, that's interesting, back to work. It's just like, that's what an adult would do. And it just made, you know, weirdly, I said something about, isn't it amazing that the world's richest person knows what a Lagrangian is? And he made a terrible Lagrange joke about potentials. But yeah, I mean, I do think that ultimately, Elon may be one of the closest things we have to an adult. And I can tell you that the internet hyenas will immediately descend as to what a fraudster he is for pumping his stock price, talking his book and all this stuff. Shut up. Just looking at the world seriously and really saying, you're saying that the people who are running tech companies or running the mediums on which we can exercise the ideal of free speech are not adults. I think not. I think, first of all, a lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen, where you talk a utopian line and you use it. You've heard my take, which is that the idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts. And I believe that in many ways, the idealism of Silicon Valley about connecting the world, the world of abundance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is really about the software eating the world as Mark Andreessen likes to say, that there were all these legacy properties and by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed like a newspaper, you could immediately start to dwarf that by aggregating newspapers and their digital versions because digital is so much more powerful. As a result, yes, we have lots of man children wandering around what once was the Bay Area and is now Austin and Miami and other places, maybe Singapore, that all of these people, these are friends of ours and they're brilliant with respect to a certain amount of stuff, but none of them can get off the drip. It's amazing that none of them have FU money. We've got billionaires who don't have FU money. Okay, I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence and not just Jack Dorsey, but everybody that was banning people. And then this word violence was used as a kind of just like extremism and so on to without much reason behind it. You think it's impossible for Jack Dorsey or anybody else to be, as you said, an adult, a grownup and reason. Well, Jack is pretty close to being a grownup. It seems like he is. Yeah, but he's under pressures. As you've discussed, it seems that he's been on the verge of almost being quite serious and transparent and real with people. I don't know where the Jack Dorsey that I met went. And I worry that that must be something behind the scenes that I can't see. From my perspective, what I think is the stress, the burden of that when people are screaming at you is overwhelming. No, Jack is a Zen monk. He really is. Yeah. Jack is an incredibly impressive person intellectually, morally, spiritually, at least for a couple of meetings. I don't know him very well, but I'm very impressed by the person I met and I don't know where that person is. And that terrifies me. But do you think somebody could step up in that way? No. So does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reasoning behind the banning? Or do you think all banning of people from mediums of communication is eventually destructive or it's impossible for human beings to reason with ourselves about it? Well, let's see what the problem is. So my phone has been on airplane mode. I'm gonna unlock it. And I'm gonna take a picture of Lex Fridman. Now, if I can, I'm gonna tweet that picture out. Great. But here's the weird part about it. Yeah. That picture sitting with Lex today. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the sausage is made. Okay. In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you and a tiny piece of text all over the planet that has arrived at, if statistics tell the truth, just under half a million different accounts. And then more from sharing and so on. Well, and then some of those accounts are dead. We don't really know how many places it went. But the key issue with that tweet is that that is a nonlocal phenomenon. Yes. So I just broadcasted to an entire planet. Somebody in Uganda is reading that at the same time as somebody in Uruguay. There is no known solution to have so many people with the ability to communicate nonlocally because locality was part of the implicit nature of speech inside of the constitution. Friction, locality, there were all sorts of other aspects to speech. So if you think about speech as a bundle. I like this. Then it got unbundled. And some of those aspects that we were naturally counting on to retard the impact of speech aren't present. And we don't have the courage to say, I wonder if the first amendment really applies in the modern era in the same way, or we have to work through an abstraction. Either we probably have to amend the constitution or we have to abstract it properly. And that issue is not something we're facing up to. I watch us constantly look backwards. We don't seem to try to come up with new ideas and new theories. Nobody really imagines that we're going to be able to wisely amend the constitution anymore in the inside of the United States. Many people abroad will say, why are these guys talking about the US? It's a US centric program. Well, it's because nobody knows where this program lives. The fact, by the way, that you and I happen to be in a physical place together is also bizarre. It could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter that it happens to be here. So the difference between logical and between physical, local, nonlocal, frictional, nonfrictional, it's the same thing with firearms. Nobody imagined that the Gatling gun was gonna be present when you had to reload a musket. And that's fascinating to think about. I mean, you're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the world that is great, made it great, is changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the ideal freedom of speech is to be changed? I mean, I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong, perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump from Twitter, to ban not just the president. That's really wrong to me. But this particular human for being divisive. But then when there's an incitement of violence, that is an overused claim. But perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things I know was happening on Parler is people were scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're now going back from this dynamic, social, large scale, people from Uganda, people from all over the world being able to communicate. You're now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space that is similar to what the founding of this nation was. The violence would be digital if ransomware suddenly was unleashed. True. The key issue is the abstractions. So what was freedom of speech as a bundle? And now it's... And then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era? Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have ideas? Well, sure I have ideas. But the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media. I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media? So we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story, which I've called the gated institutional narrative. And the institutions pretend that, they plug their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was in the New York Times as covered by the Washington Post. And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, the Undertaker faces off against Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Okay, well, that's very different than MMA. You've recently been on Glenn Beck's program. Yeah. And there was this kind of, one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation, I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different world views. You're right. Being a nuanced, or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded in mutual. But we can't have the reality because the main model is the center, both left and right, is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up. And they've organized the extremes into two LARPing teams that I've called Magistan and Wokistan. And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex, all seven of us. The number of us who are able to earn a living looking at all of these mad people playing this game. There's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action. And somebody says, this doesn't make any sense. And somebody will say, it's just the locals stealing from each other. And that's really what we have. We've got the leaders of Magistan and Wokistan, championing these two teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames. That's what you and I are looking at. So when you ask me, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech? I've never met Mark Zuckerberg. I've never met Sundar Pichai. I never met Larry Page. I was once in a room with Sergey Brin. I've never spoken to Elon Musk. I hang out with Peter Thiel, but we have a very deep relationship, but I don't really speak to that many other people at sort of at this level. We're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they've found, you see what's going on with like Alex Stamos and the Hoover Institution. There's a loophole left. Long form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime CNN. It's like, well, why do you think they're not watching daytime CNN? But that's just silly journalism. They currently have no power to displace podcasting. That's why it's so powerful, RSS feed. I mean, that's why the big challenge with Joe Rogan and Spotify is like, there's this dance that's fascinating to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system and then he's also uncancellable and there's this tension that's happening. It's fascinating. Well, think about what happened to Howard Stern though. Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control Joe by bringing him in house, the key question is, is he going to continue, like Joe says this thing about FU money. Joe's one of the only people with FU money who's actually said FU. I don't understand this. I don't have FU money. What exactly is, can we break apart FU money? Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough to always have FU money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States. Well, this is the stoic point, which is if you can live on rice and beans, you're uncancellable because you're always rich relative to your needs. Isn't that FU fundamental, FU money? Why do you say that tech billionaires don't have FU money? When you need to hire private security to protect your family, how do you protect your two children? I don't have those yet. Bingo. Yeah. My point is that FU money insulates everything that you care about. It's not just about you. So you're saying as the level of responsibility grows, the amount of money required for FU. We have a war going on. The war is on academic freedom. Academic freedom used to be present in the system as a, in terms of the idea, we trust our elite. Now we have an idea like, you wanna be the elite. You want a Lord above us. First of all, there's like a populist, anti elitist thing. Then there's the idea that we're gonna defer tenure for forever. Then we're gonna tell people, stay in your lane. Your tenure is only good for your own particular tiny micro subject. Then we're gonna also control your grants and we'll be able to load up your teaching load. If we don't like who you are, we'll make your life absolutely impossible. We lost academic freedom and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster. And then we lost funding so that people were confident that they would have the ability to do research no matter what they said. And as a result, what you find is, is a world in which there's no ability to get people to say, no, I'm not gonna sign your diversity and inclusion forced loyalty oath. I won't sign any loyalty oath. Get the hell out of my office. FU. FU, and you're connecting money to that, but. Well, my point is, is that academic freedom is the, the whole idea behind it was that you will have the freedom of a billionaire on a much smaller salary. Right. Okay. We've lost that. Yeah, the only reason in part that I wanted to go into academic, academics as a profession, as opposed to wanting to do physical or mathematical research. The great prize was freedom. And Ralph Gomery of the Sloan Foundation, previously of IBM research pointed it out. He says, if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds. Top minds value their intellectual freedom and their physical and economic security at a different level than other human beings. And so people say, you know, I don't understand, dude, and you have the ability to do X, Y, and Z. What's the problem? It's like, well, I value my ability to raise the middle finger as an American, practically above everything else. I want to talk to you about freedom here in the context of something you've mentioned, which is one way to take away freedom is to put a human being into a cage to create constraints. The other one that worries me is something that I think you've spoken to to Twitter a little bit on Twitter, is we bleed freedom by kind of slowly scaring you into not doing, not expressing the full spectrum of opportunities you can as freedom. So like when you ban Donald Trump, when you ban Parler, you give a little doubt in the minds of millions, like me, a person who's a tech person, who's an entrepreneur, there's a little, that's what I'm afraid of when I look in the mirror, is there now a little doubt in there that limits the amount of options I will try? How certain are you that the COVID virus didn't come from the Wuhan lab and is biosafety level four? We both know that we're both supposed to robotically say the idea that the COVID virus came from a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that suggests that this is true. The World Health Organization and the CDC have both opined this to say otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible. And the threat of that is the thing that ultimately limits the freedoms we feel. I should be tweeting about Jeff Epstein all the time. And you're afraid. It's also boring. I mean, I said it in the public. Many times. Why is it we don't ask where the records are from Villard House? Where are the financial records? Where are the SEC filings? Where are the questions on the record to the intelligence agencies? Was he known to be part of the intelligence community? So we're not interested in asking questions. Like, am I gonna die as a result of asking the question, was Jeff Epstein part of the intelligence community of any nation? Is there a reason we're not asking about the financial records of the supposed hedge fund that he didn't run? It's just like the Wuhan lab. Okay, how do we get to the core of the Jeffrey Epstein, the truth behind Jeffrey Epstein in a sense? I mean, there's some things that are just like useless conspiracy theories around it, even if they're true. There's some things that get to say it. I hate to say it. You're not gonna like it. Look at the 1971 media Pennsylvania break in of the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI. Those kids, and by the way, they weren't all kids, did what had to be done. They broke in, they broke the law. It was an incredible act of civil disobedience. And God bless Judy Feingold for taking to her, she was going to take to her grave, that she'd been part of this, like the coolest thing of all time. They didn't say anything for forever. So civil disobedience, I mean, you have to. We are founded on civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is incredibly, you screw it up and you're just a vandal. You screw it up, you're a hooligan. Yeah. Those cats were so disciplined. It's an art form. It was an art form and they risked everything. They were willing to pay with their freedom. Those are the sorts of people who earned the right by putting themselves at risk. I would not do this. I am not volunteering to break into anything. I think it was William Davidon who was a student of Murray Gellman and a physics professor at Haverford who corralled these people and led this effort. And right now, what we need is somebody to blow the lid off of what is controlling everything. We have, I'm happy to hear that it's a system of incentive structures, that it's a system of selective pressures. I'm happy to find out that it's emergent. I'm happy to find that it's partially directed by our own intelligence community. I'm happy to hear that, in fact, we've been penetrated by North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia. But I need to know why people aren't, like the firebombing of the courthouse in Portland, Oregon has no explanation. And somehow this is normal. This is not normal to any human being. We have video that people don't believe. And I come back to the shaggy defense of it wasn't me. You know, so it's like, you remember that song? Shaggy, yeah, it wasn't me caught you banging in the shower on the counter. Yeah, exactly, it wasn't me. It wasn't me. He says, but his friend says, well, your strategy makes no sense at all. Well, this is what MSNBC is doing. You dropped it from the graphic, it wasn't me. It wasn't me. You came up with another Yang, it wasn't me. I will never see MSNBC the same again. So you've spoken about him before. I think it'd be nice to maybe honor him to break it apart a little bit. Aaron Schwartz. Yeah. Why was he a special human being in this ilk of what we're talking about now, civil disobedience? How do we honor him now moving forward as human beings who are willing to take risks in this world? Well, I don't know. I mean, are you inspired by Aaron Schwartz? I am. How do you feel about JSTOR? Let's talk about JSTOR first. So let's say what JSTOR is all about, right? We the taxpayer pay for research. And then the people who do the research do all the work for a bunch of companies who then charge us $30 an article to read what it is that we already paid for. And if we don't cite these articles, we're told that we're in violation. Okay. I almost never call for civil disobedience because I don't really want to, but fuck JSTOR, fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer. Who the fuck are these people? Yeah. Get the smart people need to take the greedy people behind the woodshed and explain to them what science is. I have a very old fashioned idea that's so out of favor that I will immediately be seen as a knuckle dragger. Yeah. I believe in the great woman theory of history and the great man theory of history. Emmy Nerder is fantastic as an example. As an example, and I believe in editors over peer reviewers. And I believe that wrong things should be allowed into the literature. And I believe that the gatekeeping should go towards zero because the costs associated with distribution are very, very slight. I believe that we should be looking at the perverse incentives of sending your paper blindly into your competitor's clutches, particularly if you're a young person being reviewed by an older person. Are you familiar with the Duat de Senor? Are you familiar with the legend of the Magnaia? No, the Magnaia is the Miller's daughter and the largest food fight in the entire universe, I believe is held, I think in Italy, it's called the Battle of the Oranges. And it celebrates the Miller's daughter who had fallen in love with her beloved. And when it came time for them to marry, the virginal Magnaia was in fact told that the Lord of the land had the right to have the first night with the bride. Well, the Magnaia had a different idea. So she seemed to consent to this perhaps mythical right, also called the Prima Note, the first night. And by legend, she concealed a dagger underneath her robes. And when it came time for the hated Lord of the Manor to extract this right, she pulled the knife out and killed him. And I think it also echoes a little bit of particularly wonderful scene from Game of Thrones. But that inspired both men and women. And the Magnaia is the legendary hero. So right now, what we need to do is we need to resist the Prima Note, the right of first look, right? F you, you don't have the right of first look. I don't wanna send something blindly to my competitors. I don't wanna subject myself to you naming what work I've done. Why are you in my story? That's my question, get out of my story. If I do work and then you have an idea, oh, well, it's the Matthew principle. To him who has much more will be given. I've gone to the National Academy of Sciences and talked about these things. And it's funny, I've been laughed at by the older people who think, well, Eric, you know science proceeds funeral by funeral, that's Planck. You know the Matthew principle, you know the Matilda principle, the things done by women are attributed to men. That these are not new. And you guys just live like this? Yeah, so the Revolutionary Act now is to resist all of these things that are not new. So you asked me about Aaron Schwartz. Aaron Schwartz was the Magnaia. One of the things you've done very beautifully is to communicate love. And I think about some of our conversations. And you got me to talk a little bit about my own experiences in 02138 and 39. We are the product of our trauma. And what people don't understand is that very often when you see people taking countermeasures against what appear to be imaginary forces, they're really actually replaying things that really happened to them. And having been through this system and watching all of the ways in which it completely rewrites the lives of the people who I am counting on to cure our diseases, build our new industries, keep us safe from our foes, the amount of pressure the system is putting on the most hopeful minds is unimaginable. And so my goal is to empower somebody like an Aaron Schwartz in memory and to talk about a Jeffrey Epstein situation. Do you know that the first person outside of me to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein? How did he know I was working on this? I don't know. So your ideas that formed geometric unity was something that his eyes have seen? I was pushed to talk to Jeffrey Epstein as one of the only people who could help me. No, no, no, listen to this. Yeah, how does this connect? Okay, well, first of all, my old synagogue, my old shul was the conservative minion at Harvard Hillel. And I believe it's called Rosovsky Hall after Henry Rosovsky in the economics department, who was a Japan scholar, if I'm correct. And he became provost or dean of Harvard. I believe that that was built with Jeffrey Epstein's money. And I wondered in part whether the Jewish students at Harvard all sort of passed through a bottleneck of Harvard Hillel. So that was something I found very curious, but I don't know much about it. I also found that Jeffrey Epstein hanging around scientists, I don't think that either you or Joe exactly, I mean, got me correct in your last interchange. For the record, for people who haven't listened to Joe Rogan program, Joe has claimed that Eric Weinstein was the only person who has gotten laid. Paid. Oh, paid. And you said you also got paid as a young man, right? I believe the word was laid, but allegedly. My hearing isn't so good at age 55. All right, leaving that aside. Leaving that aside, what was Jeffrey Epstein doing hanging around all of these scientists? I don't think that was the same program that was about compromising political leaders and business people and entertainment figures. I think these are two different programs that were being run through one individual. And Joe seemed to think that I didn't think he was smooth. I thought he was glib. I think what Joe is really trying to get at is that I found his mysticism meretricious. He had an ability to deflect every conversation that might go towards revealing that he didn't know what he was talking about. Every time you started to get close to something where the rubber hit the road, the rubber wouldn't hit the road. And yet, can you help me untangle the fact that you thought deeply about the physics of the nature of our universe and Jeffrey Epstein was interested? How did he know? I wasn't really talking about this stuff until, even my close friends didn't really know what I was up to. And yet you're saying he did not have sufficient brilliance to understand when the rubber hit the road. So why did he have sufficient interest and curiosity? I'll tell you what I thought. I had been waiting to find out, does my government even know I exist? Do you have an answer to that question? I have, a couple times the government has reached out to me. In general, there is zero interest in me, like less than zero interest. I find that fascinating. As far as you know, right? Well, that's what I'm trying to say. The question about not being able to see through a half silvered mirror, you don't know what's going on behind the half silvered mirror. To you, it's all you see is your reflection. But your intuition still holds, like this is where I've mentioned that I, this is where I'll say naive dumb things, but I still hold on to this intuition that Jeff, I'm not confident in this, but I lean towards that direction that Jeffrey Epstein is the source of evil, not something that's underlying him. You have a bias. It's different than mine. Our Bayesian priors are tutored by different life experiences. If I was mostly concerned, like Sam Harris is concerned, that people fill their heads with nonsense, I would have a very strong sense that people need order in the world, that they take mysterious situations, they build entire castles in the air, and then they go move in if they really get crazy. The old saying is that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics move in. Coming from a progressive family, we had a different experience. It's really weird when the government is actually out to get you, when they actually send a spy, when they actually engage in disinformation campaigns, when they smear you. And if you've ever had that brought to bear on your family, you have a Howard Zinn sort of understanding of the country, which is different than having a, wow, do people believe crazy stuff because they watch too much TV. And both of these things have some merit to them, but it's a question of regulated expression. When do you want to express more Sam Harris and when do you want to express more Howard Zinn? And you can express both, correct? The one human being can express both? Sure, but there's a trade off between them. In other words, most people like the Michael Shermers of the world are gonna tilt very strongly to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So you're gonna have that kind of energy. And then somebody else is gonna say, how many times do I have to get hit on, how many times do I have to hammer my own thumb before I realize that there's a problem? So my feeling about this is yes, people see patterns in clouds. They see faces and scripture and all sorts of things, and it's just random cloud patterns. And it's also the case that there's tremendous pressure not to see conspiracies when conspiracies are relatively more common than the people who shout conspiracy theory will claim. So both of these things are true. And you have to ask, when do you express your inner Zinn and when your inner Harris? And those are different. I want to find them out. The difference in you and I biases aside is you've actually met Jeffrey Epstein. And I'm listening to reverberations years later of stories and narratives throughout the story. Luckily, I only met him once. And I think I had one or perhaps two phone conversations with him other than the one meeting. You can learn a lot in just a few words, right, from a human being. Well, that's true, but I think that the bigger issue was I saw something that I don't hear much remarked upon, which is Jeffrey Epstein is all that there is. In other words, there's the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Howard Hughes. There's all this stuff that kind of has the same feel to it, a little bit of variation and difference, Department of Energy. If you fall outside of that, there's just Jeffrey Epstein. That's what you're told. Yes. That's not quite true. There's Kavli, maybe Jim Simons is now in the game. Peter Thiel has done some stuff. You had Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg try. So there is other money running around, Templeton. But very strongly, there was a belief that if you're doing something really innovative and the system can't fund it because we become pussies, Jeffrey Epstein's your guy. So there's like this funnel that you're supposed to go through. That's right. And the idea is that you get called the great man's house and the sort of lubricious version of Ralph Lauren takes you in and asks you bizarre questions. And maybe he has an island, maybe he has a plane. And when you're starved, somebody showing you a feast or when you're dehydrated in a death's door and somebody says, oh, I have a well, that's what it is. And so the thought is, wow, can somebody get some effing money into the science system so that we don't have super creeps trying to learn all of our secrets ahead of time? WTF, what is your problem with transparency and taxpayer dollars? Just all of you, you wouldn't have a country. You'd be speaking German. So essentially you believe that human beings would not be able to, when the money is lacking in the system, like in research. We produce public goods. You and I are meant to produce public goods. Now I sell Athletic Greens and I sell Theragun and I sell Unagi scooters and Chili Pad. Can I be honest, I love these products, but I didn't get into this game for the purpose of selling. I'm trying to figure out how do you have an FU lifestyle? But you know something Lex, I don't know why you built this channel, it's kind of a mystery. I don't know why. I'll tell you why I built my channel. It's gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time in an alley. I got rolled multiple times and my point is I didn't want to become a celebrity, I didn't want to become well known, but it's a lot harder to roll somebody who's getting, I think I'm, I don't know if this is mistaken, but I think I'm the math PhD with the largest number of followers on Twitter. And there was nothing you could do before. I mean again, to put a little responsibility on you, so you've created something really special for the distribution of your own ideas. I mean, but because it's not necessarily currently scalable, you also, perhaps you and I have the responsibility of giving other people also a chance to spread their ideas. I mean Joe Rogan did this very effectively for a bunch of people that. That's why they're angry at him because he's a gatekeeper and he let all sorts of people through that gate from Roger Penrose to Alex Jones. To Jordan Peterson to, I mean, even first of all, to you. To Abby Martin. To Abby Martin. To Barry Weiss. Yeah. That's the problem. Well, but you have not successfully built up a thing that allows that to carry that forward. Oh no, no, no, no. We are all vulnerable to reputational attack because what happens, you see, the problem, Lex, is that you are now an institution at some level. You walk around with all this equipment in a duffel bag. The last suit you'll ever need. And you have the reach of something like CNN to people who matter. Okay. So now the question is, how do we control something that doesn't have a board, doesn't have shareholders, doesn't have to make SEC filings, FCC. So the best answer they have is, well, we just have to destroy reputations. All it takes is for us to take something that gets said or done or alleged. And I think it's incredibly important. One of the things people don't understand is that I'm going to fight general reputational attacks. Not because some people don't deserve to have their reputations dragged through the mud, but because it's too powerful of a tool to hand it to CNN, MSNBC, Princeton, Harvard, the State Department. Yes. But some of it is also. J.P. Morgan. Muhammad Ali style, being good enough at doing everything you need to do without giving enough meat for the reputational attacks. Not being afraid, but not giving enough meat. I don't see why the people who have good ideas have to lead lives that are that clean. If you can do it. You can be messy, yeah. You should be able to be messy. Otherwise, we're suppressing too many people. Too many, too brilliant minds. Yeah. Can you believe Elon Musk smoked a blunt? I still, people tell me this. Okay, I have discussions about Elon and people, the Avi Loeb, the Harvard scientist, who's talking about a Muammuah that it might be alien technology. He told me his, this outside the box thinker. Yeah. When speaking to me about Elon said, called him the guy who smoked, he smokes weed. The blunt. I love it. In a dismissive way. Like this guy's crazy because he smoked some weed. I was looking at him. I was like, why? Wow. Wow. I think you should be able to have consensual drug filled orgies. Fuck perfect lives. Yeah, you should be allowed to be messy. Yeah, right. I take back my statement. I'm just saying. Respectability is the unique prison where all of the gates are open and the inmates beg to stay inside. It's time to end their prison of respectability because it's too effective of a means of sidelining and silencing people. Including it is better that we have bad people in our system than this idea of no platforming people who are beyond the pale because it's such a simple technique. So how do we, what's the heroic action here on the? Well, for example, having Ashley Matthews on my program. By the way, she was absolutely delightful as a guest. She was, she is polite in the extreme, far more polite than I am. And I had her right after Roger Penrose as a guest because I wanted to highlight this program can go anywhere. We can talk to anyone. What about social media? You've started highlighting people being banned on social media. How do we fight this? Like if you get banned from social media, so you're saying nobody will stand up to me. Well, just figure out what your incentive structure is before. Assume that I get banned on social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn't interfere with the dominant narrative. Okay. What will happen, by the way, I'm very glad to be able to explain this on your show because that video will presumably be archived and they can't easily make you take it down. Okay. So what's gonna happen is, is that there'll be a whole bunch of very low quality bot like accounts that dog you every time you talk about me. Right, dude, it's getting old, getting boring. We already heard you. Dude, that was like, let it go. Not a good look. Not a good look is one of my favorites. But what about the high profile ones? Well, then you'll get a few high profile ones and some of the high profile ones command armies. Right. Like at some point I had 10,000 people using exactly the same templated tweet, tweeting at me. It was just actually, it got to the point where it was funny because everybody said, did you hear that in a hipster coffee shop? And I was like, why are you all suddenly talking about hipster coffee? Just hilarious. Those things will cause you to think better of it. You'll start to see your follower count go down because it's easy to give you a bunch of bot like follows and then just pull them. So I think that's pretty well known how, and then maybe your account will be suspended and it can't be revoked and et cetera, et cetera. And then three days later, you'll be told it was an error. So let me push back. I just don't see not defending you. Like, okay, so what are the things you would do that given that I can actually talk to you offline, that would make me not defend you? Well, first of all, I can't, I mean, I can imagine some, but all of us have things. If somebody says, do you hear what your boy, Lex said about you? What did Lex say about me? Oh, he said you were flawed, dude. Oh, shit. They so distressed because none of us wanna stand behind flawed people. That's why you have everybody rushing to say, I neither condemn nor condone. I know I don't condemn nor, what is that? We're all trying to say. By the way, for the record, I said that Eric is smarter than me in a brilliant human being, but flawed like all humans are. My point is I've now come up with a new policy, which is I don't care what my friends have done. I am not disavowing my friends, not because they didn't do the wrong thing. Maybe they did do the wrong thing. I don't know. What's the value of friendship if that's not that? Like, for example, we've had the situation with Brian Callan. Brian Callan was featured recently in the Los Angeles Times. I know nothing about the allegations. I can't, I didn't even know Brian at the time, right? I've known him for roughly the time I've been in Los Angeles, maybe a year and a half during that period of time. I've never seen anything wrong. Now I'm in a situation, well, what do you think he did? Do you think he didn't? It's like, you know what? I don't know, but I do know this. Everyone's entitled to have friends because we can't afford isolated people. And if your friends do the wrong thing, they're still your friends. And if they do terrible, terrible things, you bring that up with them privately. And it's not my responsibility to disavow in public. We've had the situation that I don't like where particular people that I've been close to, I'm put under tremendous pressure to disavow them. What do you think now about your buddy? I like Dave Rubin, all that kind of stuff. Here's the thing, my friends are my friends. I don't disavow my friends. We all need to make a statement that we will not be brought under pressure to disavow our friends, our family members, because mass murderers are dangerous the more isolated they become. It is not a good idea to constantly push to isolate people. Yes. And it's dangerous, and so. And it sends a signal to everybody else to fit in, to be more cynical about the human. So my feeling, if I find out you've been selling heroin to elementary school students, you're still my friend, and I will not be disavowing you. And if I have a problem with you selling heroin to elementary school students during school hours, I will bring it up with you privately, because we don't need to hear my voice added to that condemnation. Are there things that you could do that would cause me to say, actually, F this guy? Yeah, above and beyond that. But simply doing the wrong thing, I think we've gone down a terrible path. I think isolated people are about the most dangerous thing we could have in a heavily armed society. So I deeply agree with you on Brian Callan and on all these people that, quote, unquote, got canceled. And I'm not saying that they, I don't know the truth value, because we can't. And even if I did know the truth value, I'm not setting up an incentive structure for the personal destruction as a means of letting institutions combat the fact that individuals are the last thing that can say, none of you guys make any sense. I don't treat these things like, I had a conversation where Kevin Spacey was at the dinner table when I came down from a hotel room. And I had a very long conversation with Kevin Spacey. I will not detail, because I don't do that, as to what we discussed. But we talked very specifically about him being canceled. And I don't think that the world has heard that story in part because there's a very strong sense that he has to be outgrouped. And as a result, I mean, do we want, do we want to disavow the space program because it touched Werner von Braun? Do we want to disavow quantum mechanics because Pascal Jordan and Werner Heisenberg passed through it? Is Ehrenfest's theorem false because he murdered his child? I mean, at what point do we recognize that we are the problem? Humans are humans. And there is no perfect, there is no perfect group of people, even all of the most oppressed people, the supposed victims of the world, who we now have fetishized into thinking that they're all oracles because their lived experience informs us and their pain is more salient than everyone else's pain. Those people aren't necessarily great people. It's like none of us, we can't do this in this fashion. So when we sit down to have a conversation across the table from somebody, you should be willing to, like you should not have NPR in your mind. You should be willing to take the full risk and to see the good in the person with limited information and to do your best to understand that person. Everybody is entitled to a hypocrisy budget. I don't believe this is of institutions, okay? Everybody is entitled to a certain amount of screwing up in life. You're entitled to a mendacity budget. You're entitled to an aggression budget. The idea of getting rid of everybody, you know, people haven't even blown through their budgets and we're already. Yeah, I think about, for example, one person, I'd be curious to get your thoughts about Alex Jones. Let's not talk about Alex Jones for a second. Let's talk about the National Enquirer. Is everything the National Enquirer says false? No. No. Okay, do you remember the John Edwards story? Did you cheat on his wife? Sorry. He had a child from an extramarital affair. Yes. I believe that the National Enquirer broke the story. And then what does the New York Times do? The New York Times, I think, is allowed to report that the National Enquirer is making a claim. That way they don't have to substantiate the story. So why is the New York Times talking to Mike Cernovich or using the National Enquirer as a source? Are they using Alex Jones as a source? Here's the big problem that we're having. Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody and other people are entitled to talk to no one? I don't really understand this. This is an indulgence system. This is how the Catholic church used to do things. It's hard to fight the system because the reason you don't talk to Alex Jones is because the platforms on which we do the communication will deplatform. I'm not platform. I used to do NPR and I used to do the NewsHour and I used to provide stories to Washington Post, New York Times. That has gone away. They've circled the wagons closer and closer and more of us are unacceptable. And right now I have no question that they're going through anybody who has a platform trying to say, okay, what do we have against that person in case we need to shut that down? We have to make a different decision, Lex, and the different decision is that it doesn't matter how many times Joe said the N word. It doesn't matter that somebody else, with mathematical theorems, if the worst person in the world proves a mathematical theorem like the Unabomber, we can't undo the theorem. And I point out Charles Manson's song, Look at Your Game Girl is an amazing song. It's a really good song. I don't think it's one of the greatest songs ever, but it happens that he wasn't a no talent. And I don't know how Hitler was as an artist. Fiction, not bad. Okay, we've got to get past this. We've got to get past this idea that we're going to purge ourselves of our badness and we're just going to, this is like, I've likened it to teenage girls in cutting. We're just, all we're doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection. And the answer is no, we're not perfect. We're flawed, we're screwed up. And we've always been this way. And we're not going to silence everyone who you can point a laser beam at and say, well, that person, look at how bad that person is. If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye. We might as well just, let's learn Chinese. But there is an art to having those messy conversations, whether with Alex or anybody else. Okay, let's talk about Alex. There's particular stuff that Alex does that's absolutely nauseating. And there's other stuff that he's doing that's funny. The methodology of the way he carries. And sometimes he's talking about the truth. And sometimes he's talking about a conspiracy. His variance is incredibly high. The right way to approach Alex Jones or James O. Keefe or the National Enquirer or anything you don't like is to say, great, go long short. Well, if you invest in a mutual fund, all the stocks in the mutual fund are held long. But if you invest in a hedge fund, you do something called relative value trade. It's like, well, you long tech or short tech? Well, actually I'm long Microsoft and I'm short Google. Why is that? Oh, because I believe Google got way too much attention and that Microsoft has been unfairly maligned. And so this is really a play on legacy tech over more modern tech, okay? Which part of Alex Jones are you long and which part are you short? One of the things that should be a requirement for being a reporter is like, what did Donald Trump do that was good? Right. Nothing. Okay, then you're not a reporter. What did Hitler do that was good? The Rosenstrasse of protest. Non Jewish women campaign for their Jewish men to be returned home to them from certain death almost in death camps. It should have been that there were no death camps. It should have been that everybody was returned home. But you know what? The fact that the women of the Rosenstrasse protest, I mean, sorry, I get very emotional about this. Some of the baddest ass chicks in the world got their husbands returned to them. Kolokavod. And not, I'm not celebrating Hitler. Hitler's the worst of the worst. But God damn it, this idea that we can just say everything that person does is a lie. Everything that person does is evil. This reflects a simplicity of mind that humanity cannot afford. Is Google evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf? Is Amazon evil because it will sell you Mein Kampf? If you find out that Mein Kampf rests on somebody's bookshelves, do you have any idea what it means? If you find out that a scholar use the N word, should that person lose their job? Come on. Grow the hell up. I guess our responsibility to lead by example in that, because you have to acknowledge that the fact, like the current public discourse. Have somebody on your podcast who you're worried about. But do it in a principled fashion. I mean, in other words, I'm not here to whitewash everything. On the other hand, if somebody makes some allegations, I don't know that I'm obligated to treat every set of allegations as if, no, how do you defend yourself against, no. Allegations are so cheap to make at this moment. Well, my standard, I don't know, maybe you could speak to it is, I don't care, like in the case of Alex Jones, for example, I don't, I'm willing to have a conversation with Alex Jones and people like him. If I know he's not going to try to manipulate me. Assume that he is gonna try to manipulate you. I can't, then we're not going to be two humans. Okay, but Lex, I want you to think well of me. I put on a jacket, I don't usually wear a jacket, okay? Thank you, Eric. All right, I'm trying to manipulate you. There's an entire field, no, there's an entire field that says that speech may be best thought of as an attempt to manipulate each other. This is too simplistic. Everything that we keep talking through. Yes. You know better than this. I disagree, I think there is ways, there's, of course, it's a gray area, but there is a threshold where your intent with which you come to a meeting, to an interaction, is one that is not one that's grounded in like a respect for a common humanity, like a love for each other, is deeply messy. If somebody is doing really bad stuff, I expect you to try to keep them from doing really bad stuff. But just keep in mind that when I was a younger man, I saw an amazing anti pornography documentary, and it was called Rate It X, and I don't know where it went, but the conceit of it was we're going to get some pornographers in front of a camera because they want to talk, and we're going to ask them about what they do for a living and why it's okay. No commentary. Okay. You could potentially, if you really think Alex Jones is the worst, and again, I'm not intimately familiar with him, you could decide to just let him talk. Just let him talk. Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people. I've spoken to Stefan Molyneux. Stefan Molyneux makes many good points, makes many bad points, and he makes many good points in bad ways, and I worry about it, and I don't feel that it's not my obligation to make sure that Stefan Molyneux has a voice on the portal. But I did stand up and say I didn't want him banned from social media, and I do think that a lot of the people who are being banned from social media were worried that they're right rather than that they're wrong. I certainly don't really think that I'm worried in some sense that some of the really wrong people are wrong, but if you look at, for example, Curtis Yarvin, there's a tremendous amount of interest. Is Eric going to speak to Curtis Yarvin? Curtis Yarvin says many interesting things, and he says many horrible, stupid things, very provocative. And I haven't invited him onto the portal, but I haven't said I will never invite him onto the portal. We are all in a difficult position. That's what I'm saying. You're making it kind of, I think it's a much more difficult task and burden to carry as people who have conversations because Curtis Yarvin is a good example. How much work do I have to put in reading Curtis's work to really understand? We should talk about the problem of Curtis Yarvin, I think it's probably illustrative. There's this big question is why does somebody who says such stupid ass things listen to by so many people? Very smart people, people who are part of our daily lives discuss Curtis Yarvin in hushed tones. Now, it's a good question. My belief is that Curtis Yarvin has made a number of very interesting, provocative points, and they associate Curtis Yarvin as the person who has made these points, and they treat the completely asinine stuff that he says that's super dangerous as, well, that's Curtis, right? Right, they give him the credit for, he's a kind of like, sorry to use the term, first principles deep thinker about the way the world, in some space about the world. But as a result, we don't actually know why Curtis Yarvin is knocking around so many Silicon Valley luminaries lives. See, you said that he said a lot of asinine stupid stuff, and that's the sense I got from a few things I've read, not just about, this is not just like Wikipedia stuff, is he's a little, like I've said before, he seems to be careless. I don't think he's, no, no, no, it's like Jim Watson. Jim Watson wants to say very provocative things in order to prove that he's free. It's not a question of careless. He enjoys the freedom to say these things. And the key point is, is that there's, I expect something more of Curtis. I expect that if somebody is insightful about all sorts of things up to that point, that they're going to have enough care. Now, I, for example, make this point repeatedly that vaccines are not 100% safe. Most people who have an idea that anybody who's an anti vaxxer should be silenced are in a position where they probably don't say vaccines are 100% safe, but you keep finding that statement over and over again, like believe all women, vaccines are 100% safe, climate science is settled science. Whatever this Mont and Bailey is, where you make extraordinarily vapid blanket claims, and then you retreat into something, well, defund the, we don't want no more police, actually just means we want the police to not take on mental health duties. We've come up with an incredibly disingenuous society. And what I'm claiming is, is that I might talk to Curtis Yarvin, but I have really very little interest to talk to a guy who seems to be kind of giddy about who makes good slaves and who makes bad slaves. It's like, why do I want to do that on the portal? One, first of all, because just as you said, that's not Curtis's main thing. He has a lot of ideas and what I've read of him, which is not a huge amount, is he's very thoughtful about the way this world works. And on top of that, he's an important historical figure in the birth and the development of the alt right, or what would be called the alt right. Or the new reactionary. Yeah, and there's, so he's just an important intellectual. And so it makes sense to talk to him. The question is, how much work do you put in? Well, this is the issue of fugu. I'm not a chef that necessarily can serve that fugu. So you have a puffer fish, you can eat the puffer fish. You can get kind of a tingly sensation on your tongue if you get a little bit of the poison organ. But my point is, I don't know how to serve Curtis Yarvin so that, in fact, I'm not worried about what happens. And I believe that if somebody else was a student of the new reactionary movement, that person might be in a better position to host Curtis Yarvin. So somebody, that's a really good example, somebody I think you've spoken with that's an intermediary, that's a powerful one, is Michael Malice. And he's spoken with Curtis Yarvin. And Michael wrote a book about. By the way, Michael somewhat changed my mind about Michael Malice. I'm glad he did. I think, I would call him a friend, and I think he's underneath it all a really kind human being. And I think your skepticism about him was initially from a surface level of, what did you call him, hyenas, the trolls, and so on. I'm not happy about his. It's been so long since I've seen good trolls. Yes. So. He needs a higher quality of trolling. But he aspires to that. I mean, disagree or not, I really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does, like on North Korea and the study of the world, and how much privately, but also in public, love he has for people, especially those who are powerless. Just a genuine admiration for them. I think Curtis actually. Does too. I don't know. I mean, you have to appreciate, the first time I met Curtis, he introduced me, he says, I'm the most right wing person you've ever met. I was just like, well, this is a conversation that's already over. It's theatrical in a way that's not conducted to actually having a real human connection. It turned me off because it was like, you need to be the most right wing person. And so it's like, I'm a troll, I'm a troll. Okay, why are we doing this? But what I'm trying to get at is different. I'm trying to say that Michael Malice is a friend of yours. If you found out something terrible, you should still be a friend. You should still continue to be his friend. And in Michael Malice's case, it's very likely that we'll find out something terrible. Curtis is an acquaintance of mine because he hangs around with some people that I know. I did not get it. I've started to understand why the people in my life, some of them are Curtis Yarvin fans. Many of them disregard the stupid stuff. But my feeling is that too much poison organ, not enough fish. I don't know how to serve that. It's too intermingled. I'm not your chef. Speaking for defending your friends, staying with your friends, and bringing the old band together again, you coined the term IDW, Intellectual Dark Web. I like it. It represents a certain group of people that are struggling with, that are almost like challenged the norms of social and political discourse from all different angles. What do you think is the state of the IDW? What do you think is its future? Is it still a useful? Well, it never exists. Is it a protocol? Is it a collection of people featured in an article? What I learned very clearly is that there's a tremendous desire in the internet age to pin people down. Well, what do you say? Who's in it? What are the criteria? It's like, I understand. You wanna play the demarcation game and you wanna make everything that is demarcated instantly null and void. No, thank you. So I resisted saying who was in it. I resisted saying what it was. I resisted saying that Barry Weiss's article was the definitive thing. They chose a ridiculous concept for the photographs that we couldn't get out of. I did not want those photographs taken. They decided that the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer needed to take them all at twilight. I don't know, some such thing. I didn't even necessarily wanna do the article. Barry convinced me that it was the right thing to do. Undoubtedly Barry was right. I was wrong. But the key point is nothing can grow in this environment. There's a reason we're not building. It does not appear that we found a way to grow anything organic and good and decent that we need right now. And that's kind of the key issue. Who's the we? Do you mean us as a society? Those of us who wish to have a future for our great grandchildren. Let's take the subset of people who are worried about things long after their demise. But do you think it's useful to have a term like the IDW to capture some set of people, some set of ideas or maybe principles that capture what I think the IDW, okay, you can say it's not supposed to mean, it doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything, but to the public, to me, okay, I'll just speak to me, it represented something. Yeah. It represented, I think I just said this to you, in my first attempt to interview the great Eric Weinstein, I said that, I spoke this about you, but IDW in general is trying to point out the elephant in the room or that the emperor has no clothes. The set of people that do that in their own way. If there are multiple elephants in the room, the point is that the IDW was more interested in seeing the totality of elephants and trying to figure out how do we move forward as opposed to saying I can spot the other guy's elephant in the room, but I can't see my own. And in large measure, we didn't represent an institutional base. And therefore it wasn't maximally important that we look at our own hypocrisy because we weren't on the institutional spectrum. This is where friendship comes into play with the different figures that are loosely associated with IDW is you were somehow responsible for the exact thing that you said, did you hear what, I don't know, I forget, oh, what Sam Harris said about IDW. Yeah. That kind of thing is. I chuckled. Lovingly or chuckle like, oh. I was angry at some people who had said things that caused Sam to say what Sam said about turning his imaginary club membership into the IDW. People said very silly things. And I think that there is just this confusion that integrity means calling out your friends in front of the world. And I've been pretty clear about this. I try to choose my friends carefully. And if you would like to recuse me because I'm not a source of reliable information, people that I know and love the most, maybe that's reasonable for you. Maybe you prefer somebody who was willing to throw a friend under the bus at the first sign of trouble. By all means, exit my feed. You don't have to subscribe to me. If that's your concept of integrity, you're barking up the wrong tree. What I will say is that I knew these people well enough to know that they're all flawed. Thank you for the callback. But the issue is that I love people who are flawed. And I love people who have to earn a living, even if you call them a grifter. And I love people who like the fact that Donald Trump didn't get us into new wars, even if you call them alt right. I love the fact that some people believe in structural oppression and wanna fight it, even if they're not woke, because they don't believe that structural oppression is hiding everywhere. I care and love different people in different ways. And I think that the overarching thing, Lex, that we're not getting at is that we were sold a bill of goods that you can go through life like an ELISA program with pre programmed responses. Well, it's what about ism, it's both sides ism, it's alt right, it's the loony left, it's campus madness. It's like, okay, why don't you just empty the entire goddamn magazine? All of those pre recorded snips. Now that you've done all of that, now we can have a conversation. Your son put it really well, which is we should, in all things, resist labels. But we can't deal without labels, we have to generalize. But we also have to keep in mind that just in the way in science, you deal with an effective theory that isn't a fundamental one. In science, most of our theories, we consider to be effective theories. If I generalize about Europe, about women, about Christians, those things have to be understood to mean something and not to have their definitions extend so broadly that they mean nothing at all, nor that they're so rigid that they're claims that clearly won't bear scrutiny. Lex, what do you really wanna talk about? That's always my question to you. That always gets me, maybe you are the therapist. But you and I could talk about anything. People love, up until now at least, people have loved listening to the two of us in conversation. And my feeling is is that we're not talking about neural nets, and we're not talking about geometric unity, and we're not talking about where distributed computing might go. And I don't think that we're really focused on some of the most exciting things we could do to transform education. We're still caught in this world of other people that we don't belong in. I don't belong in the world as it's been created. I'm trying to build a new world, and I'm astounded that the people with the independent means to help build that world are so demotivated that they don't wanna build new structures. And the people who do wanna build new structures seem to be wild eyed. Wild eyed, what do you mean by wild eyed? They're not, they're not. I guarantee you that I will get some message in my DMs that says, hey, Eric. You know, I'm a third year chemistry student at South Dakota State, and I've got a great idea. I just need funding. I wanna build. They don't have the means. So the people who have the means have become. Or the sophistication, it's like you're looking for somebody who's proven themselves a few times to say, you know, I've got $4 billion behind me that's soft circled. I wanna figure out what a new university would be and what it would take to protect academic freedom and who we would hire and what are the different characteristics because I can clearly see that everything following the current model is falling apart. Nobody in my understanding is saying that. Nobody is saying let's take that which is functioning independently and make it less vulnerable. Let's boost those signals. And a critical component as money, you think? It's not only that, but it's also a kind of these people are mobbed up hands off. Let's imagine for the moment that Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg founded a university come social media entity. And they said, the purpose of this is to make sure that academic freedom will not perish from this earth because it's necessary to keep us from all going crazy. And we are going to lock ourselves out. We've come up with this governance system. And the idea is that these people will be assigned the difficult task of making sure that society doesn't go crazy in any particular direction. That we have a fact based, reality based, feasibility based, understaffed, theory based understanding. We can try to figure out where our real opportunities are. It feels like everybody with the ability to do something like that, and with the brains and experience and the resources, would rather sit in the current system and hope to figure out where they can flee to if the whole thing comes apart. Well, yeah, and maybe to push back in a little bit, I agree with you, but you know, it feels like some people are trying that. So for example, Google purchased DeepMind. DeepMind is a company that kind of represents a lot of radical ideas. They've become acceptable, actually. AGI, artificial general intelligence, used to be really radical of a thing to talk about. And DeepMind and OpenAI are two places which has made it more acceptable. I know you can now start to criticize, well, they're really, now that it's become acceptable, they're not taking the further step of being more and more radical. But you know, that wasn't an attempt by Google to say that let's try some wild stuff. Sort of like Boston Dynamics. Sort of like Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics is a really good example of trying radical ideas for perhaps no purpose whatsoever except to try out their ideas. Well, the idea is that innovation is like dessert. You can have dessert after you solve the problem of the main course, and the main course is a bunch of insoluble problems. So the idea is we can get into innovation once we perfect ourselves. And you're saying that we need to make innovation the main meal. Well, I'm saying that there really is structural oppression. I mean, if you train a deep learning system on exclusively white faces, it's gonna get confused. So let's not disagree that there are real issues around this. In fact, that's an issue of innovation and data. Your data should be responsive. On the other hand, there are things we can't do anything about that are actually fundamental. And those things may have to do with the fact that some of us taste cilantro as soap, and some of us don't. Like there are differences between people, and some of them are in the hardware, some of them are in the firmware, some of them are in the software that is the human mind. And this completely simplistic idea that every failure of an organization to promote each person who has particular intersexual characteristics, we cannot hold progress hostage to that. And you've talked about, perhaps we'll save this for another time because it's such a fascinating conversation. You talked about this with Glenn Beck, is the whole sort of stagnation of growth and all that kind of stuff. Your idea is that in as much as the current situation is a kind of Ponzi scheme, the current situation in the United States is a kind of Ponzi scheme built on the promise of constant unending innovation, we need to fund the true innovators and encourage them and empower them and sort of culturally say that this is what this country is about is the brilliant minds. We're gonna kill each other if we don't grow. Growth is like an immune system and you always have pathogens present, but if you don't have growth present, you can't fight the pathogens in your society. And right now the pathogens are spreading everywhere. So if we don't get growth into our system fairly quickly, we are in really seriously bad shape. So it's very important that if I had a horrible person who was capable of building something that would give us all a certain amount of what I've called financial beta to some new technology where we all benefit, let's say quantum computing comes in and everybody, the dry cleaner has a quantum computing angle, right? Yes. Okay. That's necessary to keep this system that we built going. We can try to redesign the system, but our system expects growth and we've started it for growth and the madness that we're seeing is the failure of our immune system to be able to handle the pathogens that have always been present. So people can say, well, this was always there. Yes, it was. What's changed was your immune system. We have got to make sure that one, we understand why diversity is potentially really important. We have mined certain communities to death. You and I are Ashkenazi Jews. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi Jews are good at technical stuff. We know that the Chinese are good at technical stuff. The Indians have many people who are good at technical stuff as the Japanese. So I also believe that we have communities where if you think about the Pareto idea of diminishing returns, if you've never mined a community, many of the people you're gonna get at the beginning are gonna be amazing because that community, it's like, did you drill for more oil in Texas? Texas is pretty thoroughly picked over. Do you find someplace that's completely insane? Maybe there's oil there, who knows? And in particular, I would like to displace our reliance on our military competitors in Asia in our scientific laboratories with women, with African Americans, with Latinos, people who are in different categories than we have traditionally sourced. And I would like to get them the money that the market would normally give these fields were we not using visas in place of payment, right? Now, I have a crazy idea, which is that I play, you and I both play music, and I find the analytic work that I do when I'm trying to figure out chord progressions and symmetries and tritones, all these sorts of things to be very similar to the work that I do when I do physics or math. I believe that one of the things that is true is that the analytic contributions of African Americans to music are probably fungible to science. I don't know that that's true. It's true I haven't done controlled research, but I believe that it is very important to let the People's Republic of China know that they are not staffing our laboratories anymore, and that we need to look to our own people. And in particular, we are going to get a huge benefit for making sure that women, Black Americans, Latinos are in a position to take over some of these things because many of these communities have been underutilized. Now, I don't know if that's an insane idea. I want to hear somebody tell me why it's an insane idea, but I believe that part of what we need to do is we need to recognize that there are security issues, there are geopolitical issues with the funding of science, and that what we've done is we've starved our world for innovation, and if we don't get back to the business of innovation, we should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt. Now, part of the problem with this is that a lot of the energy behind diversity and inclusion is based on guilt and accusation. And what I want is I want to kick ass, and my hope is that diminishing returns favors mining the communities that have not been traditionally mined in order to extract output from those communities, unless there's a flaw in that plan. If there's a flaw, somebody needs to tell me. If there isn't a flaw, we need to get greedy about innovation rather than guilty about innovation. That's really brilliantly put. My biggest problem with what I see is it exactly speaks to that in the discussion of diversity. It's used, when it's grounded in guilt, it's then used as a hammer to shame people that don't care about diversity enough. F that shit, okay? So my point is I'm excited about the idea of Jimi Hendrix doing quantum field theory. I'm excited about the idea of Art Tatum trying to figure out what the neural nets figured out about protein folding. I have some idea of the level of intellect of people who have not found their way into STEM subjects in incredibly technically demanding areas. And if there's a flaw in that theory, I want somebody to present the flaw. But right now, my belief is that these things are merit based. And if you really believe in structural oppression, you do not want an affirmative action program. You wanna make sure that people have huge amounts of resources to get themselves into position. I wanna push out, I just tried this on this Clubhouse application. I wanna push out Klein bottles as a secret sign inside of rap videos in hip hop, right? I want people to have an idea that there's an amazing world. And I wanna get the people who, hopefully I'm trying to lure into science and engineering. I want to get them paid. I don't want them as the cheap substitutes for the fleeing white males who've learned that they can't make any money in science and engineering. So the problem is that we need to take over the ship Lex. And it doesn't need to be you and me because quite honestly, I have no desire to administer. I don't wanna be the chief executive officer of anything. What I do want is I want the baby boomers who've made this mess and can't see it to be gone. They had almost all of our universities and I want fresh blood, fresh resources. I want academic freedom and I want greed for our country and for the future to determine diversity inclusion as opposed to shame and guilt, which is destroying our fabric. That's as good of a diversity statement as I've ever heard. This is a U turn, but somebody commented on the tweet you sent that as one of the top comments, they definitely have to ask you about cryptocurrency. So it's a U turn, but not really. Since you're an economist, since you're deep, not an economist. I mean, I pretend to be an economist, hoping that the economists will take issue that I'm not an economist so that I can advance gauge theoretic and field theoretic economics, which the economics profession has failed to acknowledge was a major innovation that happened approximately 25 years ago. I don't think that economists understand what a price index is that measures inflation, nor do I think economists understand what a growth index or a product, a quantity index is that measures GDP. I think that they don't even understand the basics of price and quantity index construction. And therefore they can't possibly review field theoretic economics. They can't review gauge theoretic economics. They're intellectually not in a position to manage their own field. You talked about that there's a stagnation in growth currently. I looked at, from my microeconomics, macroeconomics in college perspective, GDP doesn't seem to capture the productivity, the full, the spectrum of what I think is as a functioning successful society. What do you think is broken about GDP? What does it need to include? These indices, like what? Let me explain what they don't understand to begin with. Sure. Imagine that all prices and all quantities of output are the same at the end of the year as they are at the beginning. And you ask what happened during that year? Was there inflation? They meandered over the course of the year, but miraculously they all came back to exactly their values. The amount produced at the end of the year is the same as at the beginning in every single quantity. Typically the claim would be that the price index should be 1.0 and that the quantity index should be 1.0. That's clearly wrong. Why? Well, it's much easier to see with, it speaks to a fundamental confusion that economists have. They don't understand that the economy is curved and not flat. In a curved economy, everything should be path dependence, but they view path dependence as a problem because they are effectively the flat earth society of market analysis. They don't understand that what they've called, and they've actually called it the cycling problem, is exactly what they need to understand to advance their field. So I'll give you a very simple example, okay? Let's imagine that we have Bob and Carol in one hedge fund and Ted and Alice in another. In both cases, the females, that is, Alice and Carol, are the chief investment officers, and Bob and Ted are the chief marketing officers in charge of trying to get money into the fund and trying to get people not to, in fact, remove their money from the funds, okay? If you, in fact, had a hedge fund with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and both hedge funds were invested in assets whose prices came back to the same levels and whose exposures were in the same quantities, and you wanted to compensate these two hedge funds, would you compensate them the same necessarily? What if, for example, Carol was killing it in terms of investments? Every time she bought some sort of security, the price of that security went up, okay? But Bob was the worst marketing officer, and as chief marketing officer, there were tons of redemptions because Bob was constantly drunk, Bob was making off color comments. Now, as a result, at the end of the year, the fund hasn't grown in size because even though Carol was crushing it in terms of the investments, Bob was screwing up everything and the redemptions were legendary, so people were making money and still pulling it out of the fund. In the other fund, Alice can't seem to buy a base hit every time she gets into a security, the thing plummets, but Ted's amazing marketing skills allowed the fund to get all sorts of new subscriptions and halted the redemptions as people hoped that the fund would get its act together, okay. Price indices should be how Carol and Alice are compensated, and quantity indices should be how Bob and Ted are compensated, so even though both funds had closed loops that come back to the original states, what happened during the period that they were active tells you how people are supposed to be compensated. Now, we know that whatever the increase in the price index is, is compensated by a decrease in the quantity index or conversely, because prices and quantities return to their original values. You could have another fund where nothing much happened, there were no redemptions, no subscriptions, the fund remained in cash the whole time. So in that third fund, you know, let's call that Tristan and Isolde, right? That fund should have no bonuses paid because nobody did anything, but nobody should be fired either. Now, the fact that the economists don't even understand that this is what their price and quantity indices were intended to do, that they don't understand that you can actually give what would be called ordinal agents the freedom to change their preferences and still have something defined as a CONUS cost of living adjustment. They don't even understand the mathematics of their field. So the indices need to be able to capture some kind of dynamics that... We have had indices that capture these dynamics due to the work of Francois de Vizier since 1925. But the economists have not even understood what de Vizier's index truly represent. What do you miss with such crude indices then? Well, you miss the fact that you're supposed to have a field theoretic subject. The representative consumer should actually be a probability distribution on the space of all possible consumers weighted by the probability of getting any particular pull from the distribution. We should not have a single gauge of inflation. What is that in 1973 dollars? Any more than you should be able to say it was 59 degrees Fahrenheit on earth yesterday. So when we get to the cryptocurrency, what I'm going to say is that because we didn't found economic theory on the proper marginal revolution, because we missed the major opportunity, which is that the differential calculus of markets is gauge theory. It's not ordinary differential calculus. We found that out in finance that it was stochastic differential calculus. We have the wrong version of the differential calculus underneath all of modern economic theory. And part of what I've been pushing for in cryptocurrencies is the idea that we should be understanding that gold is a gauge theory, just as modern economic theory is supposed to be a gauge theory. And that we should be looking to liberate cryptocurrencies and more importantly distributed computing from the problem of this unwanted global aspect, which is the blockchain. The thing that is most celebrated in some sense about Bitcoin is in fact the reason that I'm least enthusiastic about it. I'm hugely enthusiastic about what Satoshi did. But it's an intermediate step towards trying to figure out what should digital gold actually be? If physical gold is a collection of up quarks and down quarks in the form of protons and neutrons held together, the quarks by gluons with electrons orbiting and held together by photons with the occasional weak interaction beta decay, all of those are gauge theories. So gold is actually coming from gauge theory and markets are coming from gauge theory. And the opportunity to do locally enforced conservation laws, which effectively is what a Bitcoin transaction is, should theoretically be founded on a different principle that is not the blockchain. It should be a gauge theoretic concept in which effectively the tokens are excitations on a network of computer nodes. And the fact that, let's imagine that this is some token. By moving it from my custodianship to your custodianship, effectively I pushed that glass as a gauge theory towards your region of the table. We should be recognizing the gauge theory is the correct differential calculus for the 21st century. In fact, it should have been there in the 20th century. You're saying it captures these individual dynamics, much richer. Why should my giving you a token have to be, why should we alert the global community in this token that that occurred? You can talk about side chains, you can talk about any means of doing this, but effectively we have a problem, which is if I think about this differently, I have a glass that is extant, you have a glass that is abstent. We're supposed to call the constructor method on your glass at the same moment we call the destructor method on my glass in order to have a conservation principle. It would be far more efficient to do this with the one system that is known never to throw an exception, which is nature. And nature has chosen gauge theory and geometry for her underlying language. We now know due to work of Pia Malani at Harvard in economics in the mid 1990s, which I was her coauthor on, but I wish to promote her as well as this being my idea. We know that modern economic theory is a naturally occurring gauge theory. And the failure of that community to acknowledge that that work occurred and that it was put down for reasons that make no analytic sense is important in particular due to the relatively new innovation of distributed computing and Satoshi's brainchild. So you're thinking we need to have the mathematics that captures, that enforces cryptocurrency as a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one where the blockchain says that crypto should be centralized. The abundance economy much discussed in Silicon Valley or what's left of it is actually a huge threat to the planet because what it really is is that it is what Marc Andreessen has called software eating the world. And what that means is that you're gonna push things from being private goods and services into public goods and services and public goods and services cannot have price and value tied together. Ergo, people will produce things of incredible value to the world that they cannot command a price and they will not be able to capture the value that they have created or a significant enough fraction of it. The abundance economy is a disaster. It will lead to a reduction in human freedom. The great innovation of Satoshi is locally enforced or semi locally enforced conservation laws where the idea is just as gold is hard, why is gold hard to create or destroy? It's because it's created not only in stars but in violent events involving stars like supernova collisions. When gold is created and we transact, we're using conservation laws. The physics determines the custodianship, whatever it is that I don't have, you now have and conversely, in such a situation, we should be looking for the abstraction that most closely matches the physical world because the physical world is known not to throw an exception. The blockchain is a vulnerability. The idea that the 51% problem isn't solved, that you could have crazy race conditions, all of these things, we know that they're solved inside of gauge theory somehow. So the important thing is to recognize that one of the greatest intellectual feats ever in the history of economic theory took place already and was essentially instantly buried and I will stand by those comments. Satoshi, wherever you are, I probably know you. Are you Satoshi? No. No, no, no, I don't have that kind of ability. I really don't. I do other things. Speaking of Satoshi and gauge theory, you've mentioned to Brian Keating that you may be releasing a geometric unity paper this year or some other form of additional material on the topic. What is your thinking around this? What's the process you're going through now in preparing this? I used April 1st to try to start a tradition which I hope to use to liberate mankind. The tradition is that at least one day a year, you should be able to say heretical things and not have Jack Dorsey boot you off or Mark Zuckerberg. Your provost shouldn't call you up and say, what did you say? We need at some level to have a jubilee from centralized control. And so my hope is that, you know what a tradition is in America? Something a baby boomer did twice. Impeachment. That's very funny. Anyway, so I'm not a baby boomer, but as an exer, I've thought about whether or not April 1st would be a good date on which to release a printed version of what I already said in lecture form. Because I think it's hysterically funny that the physics community claims that it can't decode a lecture. It must be paper. And you know what? There will be a steady stream of new complaints up until the point that they fit it into a narrative that they like. Yeah, I'm thinking about April 1st as a date in which to release a document and it won't be perfectly complete, but it'll be very complete. And then they'll try to say, it's wrong. Or you already did it. Or no, that was dumb, but what we just did on top of it is brilliant. Or it doesn't match experiment. Or who knows what. They'll go through all of their usual nonsense. It's time to go. Is there still puzzles in your own mind that need to be figured out for you to try to put it on paper? I mean, those are different mediums, right? It was a great question. I did not count on something that turns out to be important. When you work on your own outside of the system for a long time, you probably don't think you're gonna be doing this as a 55 year old man. And I have been so long outside of math and physics departments, and I've been occupied with so many other things as you can see, that the old idea that I had was if I always did it in little pieces, then I was always safe because it wouldn't be stealable. And so now those pieces never got assembled completely. In essence, I have all the pieces and I can fit them together. But there's probably a small amount of glue code. Like there are a few algebraic things I've forgotten how to do. I may or may not figure them out between now and April 1st. But it's pretty complete. But that's the puzzle you're kind of struggling to now figure out, to get it all in the same, the glue together. I can't tell you whether the theory is correct or incorrect. But for example, there's what's the exact form of the supersymmetry algebra, or what's the rule for passing a minus sign through a particular operator. And all of that stuff got a lot more difficult because I didn't do it every, look, it's a little bit like if you're a violinist and you don't touch your violin regularly for 15 years, you come back to it and you pretty much know the pieces, sort of, but there's lots of stuff that's missing, your tone is off and that kind of stuff. I would say I'll get the ship to the harbor and it'll require a tugboat probably to get it in. And if the tugboat doesn't show up, then I'll pilot the thing right into the dock myself. But it's not a big deal. I think that it is essentially complete. Psychologically, just as a human being, this is, I remember perhaps by accident, but maybe there's no accidents in the universe. I was tuned in, I don't remember where, on April 1st to you, oh, I think on your Discord, kind of thinking about, thinking through this release. I mean, it wasn't like, it wasn't obvious that you were going to do it, you were thinking through it. And I remember there was intellectual, personal, psychological struggle with this, right? Well, because I thought it was dangerous. If this turns out to be right, I don't know what it unlocks. If it's wrong, I think I understand where we are. If it's wrong, it'll be the first fool's gold that really looks like a theory of everything. It'll be the iron pyrites of physics. And we haven't even had fool's gold in my opinion yet. Got it. So what is your intuition why this looks right to you? Like why it feels like it would be, if wrong, the first fool's gold. I can say it very simply. It's way smarter than I am. Can you break that apart a little more? Every time you poke at it, it's giving you intuitions that follow with the currently known physics. Let's put it in computer science terms. Yes, please. Okay, there's a concept of technical debt that computer scientists struggle with. As you commit crimes, you have to pay those crimes back at a later date. In general, most of the problem with physical theories is that as you try to do something that matches reality, you usually have to go into some structure that gets you farther away. And your hope is, is that you're gonna be able to pay back the technical debt. And in general, these wind up as check hiding schemes or like you're funding a startup and there are too many pivots, right? So you keep adding epicycles in order to cover, things that have gone wrong. My belief is, is that this thing represents something like a summit to me. And I'm very proud of having found a route up this summit. But the root is what's due to me. The summit can't possibly be due to me. You know, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did not create Mount Everest. They know that they didn't create that. They figured out a way up. You gotta tell me what Mount Everest is in this metaphor relative and also connected to the technical debt. So technical debt is a negative thing that it's kind of, you will eventually have to pay it. Are you saying in the, in the ascent that you're seeing now in the theory is you do not have much technical debt. Well, that's right. That what happens is, is that early on what I would say is, I believe now that the physics community has said many things incorrectly about the current state of the universe. They're not wildly off, which is why, like for example, the claim is that there are three generations of matter. I do not believe that there are three generations of matter. I believe that there are two generations of matter and there's a third collection that looks like a generation of matter as the first two, only at low energy. Okay, well, that's not a frequent claim. People imagine that there are three or more generations of matter. I would claim that that's false. People claim that the matter is chiral. That is, it knows it's left from its right. I would claim that the chirality is not fundamental, but it is emergent. But we could keep going at all these sorts of things. People think that space time is the fundamental geometrical construct. I do not agree. I think it's something that I've termed the observers. All of these different things represent a series of overinterpretations of the world that preclude progress. So you gave, I think you gave some credit to string theory as, string theory, I think loop quantum gravity, if I remember correctly, as like getting close to the fool's gold. Well, I said that Garrett Lisi, phenomenologically, gets a lot of things right. He gets, he's got a reason for chirality, a reason for uniqueness using E8. In fact, E8 uses something called vial fermions, which are chiral. He has a way of getting geometry to get Riemann's geometry underneath general relativity to play with Erisman's geometry, which is underneath the standard model, using something called Cartan connections that are out of favor. He's figured out something involving super connections to make sure that the fermion, the matter in the system isn't quantized the same way as the bosons were, which is a problem in his old theory. He's got something about three generations for triality. He's got a lot of phenomenological hits. I don't think Garrett's theory works. It also has a very simple Lagrangian. He's basically using the Yang Mills norm squared, the same thing you would use as a cost function if you were doing neural nets, okay? The string theorists have a different selling point, which is that they may have gotten a renormalizable theory of gravity if quantum gravity was what we were meant to do. And they've done some stuff with black holes that they can get some solutions correct. And then they have lots of agreements with where they show mathematical truths that mathematicians didn't even know. I'm very underwhelmed by string theory based on how many people have worked on it and how little is supporting the claims to it being a theory of everything. But those are the two that I take quite seriously. I don't yet take Wolfram's quite seriously because if he really finds one of these cellular automata that are really distinct and generative, it'll be amazing. But he's looking for such a thing. I don't think he's found anything. Tegmark, I view as a philosopher who is somehow taking credit for Platonism, which I don't see any reason for fighting with Max because I like Max, but if it ever comes time, I'm putting a post it note that I'm not positive the mathematical universe hypothesis is really anything new. And in general, loop quantum gravity really, I think grew out of some hopes that the general relativistic community had that they would be able to do particle theory. And I don't think that they've shown any particle theoretic realism. So essentially, here's what I really think, Lex. I think we didn't understand how big the difference between an effective theory and a theory of everything is conceptually. Maybe it's not mathematically that different, but conceptually trying to figure out what a theory of every, how does the universe, and I've compared it to Escher's drawing hands. How do two hands draw themselves into existence? That's the puzzle that I think has just been wanting. And I'll be honest, I'm really surprised that the theoretical physics community didn't even get up on their high horse and say, this is the most stupid nonsense imaginable, because clearly I always say I'm not a physicist. So I'm an amateur with a heart as big as all outdoors. So in your journey of releasing this, and I'm sure further maybe it will be another American tradition on April 1st that will continue for years to come. I hope so. There's sort of crumbs along the way that I'm hoping to collect in my naive view of things of the beauty that, in your geometric view of the universe. So one question I'd like to ask is if you were to challenge me to visualize something beautiful, something important about geometric unity in my struggle to appreciate some of its beauty from the outsider's perspective, what would that thing be? Interesting question. Perhaps we can both have a journey towards April 1st. Take a look at that. Some kind of a scrunchie that I picked up on Melrose, not Melrose, Montana in Santa Monica. Now you'll notice that all of those disks rotate independently. Yes. If you rotate groups of those in a way that is continuous, but not uniform everywhere, what you're doing is a so called gauge transformation on the torus seen as a U1 bundle over a U1 space time. So the concept of space time here in a very simplified case isn't four dimensional, but it's one dimensional, it's just a circle. And there's a circle above every point in the circle represented by those little disks. So imagine if you will, that we took a rubber band and placed it around here and decided that that was a function from the circle into the circle that is representing a Y axis that's wrapped around itself. Well, you would have an idea of what it means for a function to be constant, if it just went all around the outside. But what happens if I turn this a little bit? Then the function would be mostly constant. We'd have a little place where it dipped and it went back. It turns out that you can transform that function and transform the derivative that says that function is equal to zero when I take its derivative at the same time. That's what a gauge transformation is. Amazing to me that we don't have a simple video, visualizing things that I've already had built and that I can clearly demonstrate. When you do that Taurus, who's the code of the Taurus is itself generating. The Taurus. The spinning Taurus. Yeah. This is a U1 principle bundle. And the world needs to know what a gauge theory is, not by analogy, not with Lawrence Krauss saying, it's like a checkerboard. If you change some of the colors this way, not saying that it's a local symmetry involving, it's none of those things. It's a theory of differential calculus where the functions and the derivatives are both subject to a particular kind of change so that if a function was constant under one derivative, then the new function is constant under the new derivative transformed in the same fashion. And would you put that under the category of just gauge transformations? Yes, that would be gauge transformations applied to sections and connections where connections are the derivatives in the theory. This is easily explained. It is pathological that the community of people who understand what I'm saying have never bothered to do this in a clear fashion for the general public. You and I could visualize this overnight. This is not hard. The public needs to know in some sense that let's say quantum electrodynamics, the theory of photons and electrons, more or less electrons are functions and photons are derivatives. Now there's some, you can object in some ways, but basically a gauge theory is the way in which you can translate a shift in the definition of the functions and the shift of the definition of the derivatives so that the underlying physics is not harmed or changed. So you have to do both at the same time. Now you and I can visualize that. So if what you wanted to do rather than going directly to geometric unity is that I could sit down with you and I could say here are the various components of geometric unity and if the public needs a visualization in order to play along, we've got a little over two months and I'd be happy to work with you. I love that as a challenge and I'll take it on and I hope we do make it happen. And David Goggins, if Lex doesn't do some super macho thing because he's gotta work to get some of this stuff done, you'll understand he'll be available to you after April. Thank you for the escape clause. I really needed that escape clause. I'm glad that's on record. I'm worried 48 miles in 48 hours. By the way, I just wanna say how much I admire your willingness to keep this kind of hardcore attitude. I know that Russians have it and Russian Jews have it in spades, but it's harder to do in a society that's sloppy and that's weak and that's lazy. And the fact that you bring so much heart to saying, I'm gonna bring this to jujitsu, I'm gonna bring this to guitar, I'm gonna bring this to AI, I'm gonna bring this to podcasting. It comes through loud and clear. I just find it completely and utterly inspiring that you keep this kind of hardcore aspect at the same time that you're the guy who's extolling the virtue of love in a modern society and doing it at scale. Thank you. That means a lot. I don't know why I'm doing it, but I'm just following my heart on it and just going with the gut. It seems to make sense somehow. I personally think we better get tougher or we're gonna get in a world of pain. And I do think that when it comes time to lead, it's great to have people who you know don't crack under pressure. Do you mind if we talk about love and what it takes to be a father for a bit? Sure. Do you mind if Zev joins us? I'd be an honor. So Eric, I've talked to your son Zev, who's an incredible human being, but let me ask you, this might be difficult because you're both sitting together. What advice do you have for him as he makes his way in this world, especially given that, as we mentioned before on Joe Rogan, you're flawed in that just like all humans, you're mortal. Well, at some level, I guess one of my issues is that I've got to stop giving quite so much advice. Early on, I was very worried that I could see Zev's abilities and I could see his challenges and I saw them in terms of myself. So a certain amount of Zev rhymes with whatever I went through as a kid. And I don't wanna doom him to the same outcomes that sufficed for me. I think that he's got a much better head on his shoulders at age 15, he's much better adjusted. And in part, it's important for me to recognize that because I think I did a reasonably decent job early on, I don't need to get this part right. And I'm looking at Zev's trajectory and saying, you're gonna need to be incredibly and even pathologically self confident. The antidote for that is gonna be something you're gonna need to carry on board, which is radical humility. And you're gonna have to have those in a dialectical tension, which is never resolved, which is a huge burden. You are going to have to forgive people who do not appreciate your gifts because your gifts are clearly evident. And many people will have to pretend not to see them because if they see your gifts, then they're gonna have to question their entire approach to education or employment or critical thinking. And what my hope is, is that you can just forgive those who don't see them and who complicate and frustrate your life and realize that you're gonna have to take care of them too. Zev, let me ask you the more challenging question because the guy's sitting right here. What advice do you have for your dad? Since after talking to you, I realize you're the more brilliant aside from the better looking member of the family. It's a bit of an odd question. Sorry. You can say anything you want. This is the last time we're gonna be seeing left. It's gonna be an awkward drive home. I think sort of a new perspective I've taken on parenting is that it is a task for which no human is really supposed to be prepared. You know, there are in Jewish tradition, for example, there are myriad analogies in the Torah and the Talmud that compare the role of a parent to the role of a God, right? That no human is prepared to play God and create and guide a life, but somehow we're forced into it as people. And I think sometimes it's hard for children to understand that however their parents are failing sort of has to be. It's a theme here. Is something for which we must budget because our parents play a role in our lives of which they're not worthy and they devote themselves to regardless because that becomes who they are in a certain sense. So I hope to have realistic expectations of you as a human because I think too often it's easy to have godly expectations of people who are far from such a role. And I think I'm really happy that you've been as open as you have with me about the fact that, you know, you really, you don't pretend to be a God in my life. You are a guide who allows me to see myself and that's been very important considering the fact that by your self teaching paradigm I will have to, I will have to guide myself and being able to see it and see myself accurately has been one of the greatest gifts that you've given me. So I'm very appreciative. And I want you to know that I don't buy into the role that you're supposed to sort of fake your way through in my life but I am unbelievably happy with a more realistic connection that we've been able to build in lieu of it, so. I think it's been easier on you actually as you come to realize what I don't know, what I can't do and that there's been a period of time, I guess, that's fascinating to me where you're sort of surprised that I don't know the answer to a certain thing as well as you do. And that I remember going through this with a particular mathematician who I held, I still hold in awe, named David Kajdan. And, you know, he famously said to, and weirdly our family knew his family in the Soviet Union. But he said, you know, Eric, I always appreciate you coming to my office because I always find what you have to say interesting but you have to realize that in the areas that you're talking about, you are no longer the student, you are actually my teacher. And I wasn't prepared to hear that. And there are many ways in which, as I was just saying with the Mozart, I am learning at an incredible rate from you. I used to learn from you because I didn't understand what was possible. You were very much, I mean, this is the weird thing. There used to be this thing called Harvey, the invisible rabbit. This guy had a rabbit that was like six feet tall that only he could see maybe was talking. And that was like you at age four. You were saying batshit crazy things that were all totally sensible and nobody else could put them together. And so what's wonderful is that the world hasn't caught on, but enormous numbers of people are starting to. And I really do hope that that genuineness of spirit and that outside the box intellectual commitment serves you well as the world starts to appreciate that I think you're a very trustworthy voice. You don't get everything right, but the idea that we have somebody at your age who's embedded in your generation who can tell us something about what's happening is really valuable to me. And I do hope that you'll consider boosting that voice more than just at the dinner table. I apologize for saying this four letter word, but do you love Zev? Was really worried it was gonna be another four letter word. There's so many to choose from. It doesn't even rise to the level of the question. I mean, I just, there are a tiny number of people with whom you share so much life that you can't even think of yourself in their absence. And I don't know if Zev would find that, but it's, you can have a kid and never make this level of connection. I think even right down to the fact that when Zev chooses boogie woogie piano for his own set of reasons, why I would choose boogie woogie piano if I could play in any style, it's a question about a decrease in loneliness. You know, like my grandfather played the mandolin and I had to learn some mandolin because otherwise that instrument would go silent. You don't expect that you get this much of a chance to leave this much of yourself in another person who is choosing it and recreating it rather than it being directly instilled. And my proudest achievement is in a certain sense having not taught him and having shared this much. So, you know, it's not even love, it's like well beyond. So you mentioned love for you making a less lonely world. I think I speak for, I would argue, probably millions of people that you, Eric, because this is a conversation with you, have made for many people, for me, a less lonely world. And I can't wait to see how you develop as an intellect, but also I'm so heartworn by the optimism and the hopefulness that was in you that I hope develops further. And lastly, I'm deeply thankful that you, Eric are my friend and would give me, would honor me with this watch. It means more than words can say. Thanks guys, thanks for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors, Indeed Hiring Site, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device, Wine Access Online Wine Store, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Socrates. To find yourself, think for yourself. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

Eric Weinstein: Difficult Conversations, Freedom of Speech, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #163

The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his second time on the podcast. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford, a world class researcher and educator, and now he has a new podcast on YouTube and all the usual places called Huberman Lab that I can't recommend highly enough. Quick mention of our sponsors, Masterclass Online Courses for Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to get a discount. By the way, Masterclass is testing to see if they want to support this podcast long term. So if you're on the fence, now is the time to sign up. And I'm pretty sure Andrew will have a neuroscience masterclass on there soon enough, though his podcast is basically a weekly masterclass in itself. As a side note, let me say that Andrew is a friend and a new collaborator. We're working on a paper together about a topic we're both really passionate about. At the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. But that's probably many months away from being published. Still, I'm really excited about this work. He's one of the smartest and kindest people I have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast, so I hope we'll talk many more times in the future. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on our podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman. Why do humans need sleep? Let's go with a big first question. Okay, well, the answer I'll start with is the one that I always default to when there's a why question, which is I wasn't consulted at the design phase. So I wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer, right? But there's one mechanism that's very clear that's super important, which is that the longer we are awake, the more adenosine accumulates in our brain. And adenosine binds to adenosine receptors, no surprise there, and it creates the feeling of sleepiness independent of time of day or night. So there are two mechanisms. One is we get sleepy as adenosine accumulates. The longer we've been awake, the more adenosine has accumulated in our system. But how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine depends on where we are in this so called circadian cycle. And the circadian cycle is just this very, very well conserved oscillation. It's a temperature oscillation where you go from a low point. Typically, if you're awake during the day and you're asleep at night, your lowest temperature point will be like 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and then your temperature will start to creep up as you wake up in the morning, and then it'll peak in the late afternoon, and then it'll start to drop again toward the evening, and then you get sleep again. That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours. Plus or minus. Plus your temperature. Yeah, plus or minus an hour. And I don't, even though I wasn't consulted at the design phase, I do not think it's a coincidence that it's aligned to the 24 hour spin of the Earth on its axis. The fact that we tend to be bathed in sunlight for a portion of that spin, and in darkness for the other portion of that spin. So there are two mechanisms, the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point that we happen to be at. And those converge to create a sense of sleepiness, awakefulness. The simple way to reveal these two mechanisms, to uncouple them, is stay up for 24 hours, and you will find that even though you've been, let's say you stay up midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., provided you're on a regular schedule, like that I follow, not like the kind that you follow, I will get very sleepy around 3, 4 a.m., but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m., which is my normal wake up time, I'll start to feel more alert, even though adenosine has been accumulating further. So adenosine is higher for me the longer I stay up, and yet I feel more alert than I did a few hours ago. And that's because these are two interacting forces. So adenosine makes you sleepy, and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel also depends on where you are in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours. Okay, so that's fascinating. So there's a bunch of oscillations going on, and then they kind of, through the evolutionary process, have evolved to all be aligned somewhat, and they interplay. So you said your body temperature goes up and down. There's chemicals in your brain that oscillate, and then there's the actual oscillation of the sun in the sky. So all of that together has some impact on each other, and somehow that all results in us wanting to go to sleep every night. Right, so, and we can get right into the meat of this, so I guess we just dove right in, but the temperature oscillation is the effector of the circadian clock. So every cell in our body has a 24 hour rhythm that's dictated by genes like clock, purr, BMAL. This is one of the great successes of biology. They give a Nobel prize to Rappert, I don't know if Rappert got it, forgive me, but sorry if you got it, Steve, congratulations. If you didn't, I'm sorry, I wasn't on the committee. Nonetheless, did beautiful work, Steve Rappert and others, but Mike Roshbosh and other people worked out these mechanisms in flies and bacteria and mammals. There are these genes that create 24 hour oscillations in gene expression, et cetera, in every cell of our body. But what aligns those is a signal from the master circadian clock, which sits right above the roof of the mouth, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body to this general temperature rhythm by way of controlling systemic temperature, which makes perfect sense. If you want to create a general oscillation in all the tissues and organs of the body, use temperature. And so that work on temperature, if people want to explore it further, was Joe Takahashi, who was at Northwestern, now at UT Southwestern in Dallas. And it is absolutely clear that humans do better on a diurnal schedule, sorry, Lex, than a nocturnal schedule, because you could say, well, provided I sleep and push adenosine back downhill, which is what happens when we sleep, adenosine is then reduced. And provided I am on more or less a 24 hour schedule, why should it matter that I'm awake when the sun's out and I'm asleep when the sun is down? But it turns out that if you look at health metrics, people that are strictly nocturnal do far worse on immune function, on metabolic function, et cetera, than people who are diurnal, who are awake during the daytime. And animals that are nocturnal, it's the opposite. And animals that are so called crepuscular, which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk, this is a beautiful system, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but these are animals whose visual systems operate best. They tend to be predators like mountain lions. They have optimized their waking times for the times when the animals they eat can't see well in those light conditions. But given the rod cone ratios in their eyes, that the mountain lion is picking off. It's like when you see a special forces and they are looking through night vision goggles and they have a clear advantage, right? They are seeing in the dark. That's basically what it's like to be a mountain lion as opposed to a bunny rabbit. Would you say that a lot of these cycles evolved in the predator prey relationships of the different throughout the food chain? So it's basically all somehow has to do with survival in this complicated web of predators and prey. Almost certainly, there had to have been a time in which humans being awake and active at night, as opposed to during the day, led to higher levels of lethality. And probably particular in kids, you imagine kids running around in the dark and getting that where there are a lot of animals that can see really well under those conditions and humans can't. And this would be all preelectricity. Even if you're carrying a torch, I mean, the range of illumination on a torch is nothing compared to what a nighttime predator, like a large cat or something can do. I mean, they basically, they can see everything they need to in order to eat us and not the other way around. So one fascinating thing you said is that blew my mind and we went right past it, which is the temperature is a really powerful, like if you were to think about the ways that different parts of the body, different systems in the body would communicate with each other, temperature would be a really good one. And that just, I mean, maybe it's obvious, but it kind of blew my mind just now that yeah, these systems are all distributed. And they have to kind of, they're not actually sending signals, but they're coordinating. They need some sort of universal thing to look at in order to coordinate. And temperature is a nice one to build around. And that way you could control the behavior of all these different systems by controlling the temperature. Right, it's attractive to think of a mechanism where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide or something that goes and locks to receptors in all the cells and gets it just right. But that leaves far too much room for variability, binding affinities, cells in a lot of parts of our body are at different stages of maturation. They're turning over liver cells and so forth. And for instance, we have a clock in our gut and in our liver such that if we were just take out your liver and put it on a table and just look at the expression of these genes, it would be in a 24 hour oscillation on its own. It's independent, but something has to entrain them and keep them all synchronized. And so it's not obvious that it would be temperature. Takahashi's great gift to biology was to show that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock at the end of the day, that's a weird statement, no pun intended, at the end of the day and the night, at the end of the story, it all boils down to making sure that the temperature of tissues oscillates in the same fashion. That's blowing my mind and thinking like what other mechanism could possibly exist to create that kind of oscillation. Well, you're Russian, it's cold in Russia for a lot of the year. The hibernation signal in certain animals is a remarkable signal. There are peptides secreted from this very same clock that in animals like ground squirrels or bears, they go into a kind of a torpor where everything, reproduction, metabolism, everything is reduced while they're in their cave. They don't actually stay asleep all of winter. That's a myth. And they actually do these very dramatic and periodic arousals from hibernation where they just shake and shake and shake. It looks like a seizure. And then they go back under into the torpor. That's from a peptide that's released. But that's different because that's about shutting down the whole system. It's clear that having these very regular oscillations every 24 hours is essential for everything from metabolism to reproduction. Is there an optimal temperature for sleep that I should mention? I think your latest episode, you and people should go check out helixsleep.com slash Huberman to support Andrew. Thanks for the plug. I mean, the amazing thing about this stuff that you're creating, oh, and yes, you have a new podcast. That's amazing. In this past month, you did a whole series on sleep, which people should definitely check out. There's some podcasts that come out that just make me want to be a better human being by just the quality. Three Blue One Brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me. Just like, wow, this is education is best. So Andrew symbolizes that, captures that brilliantly. So go support the sponsor so he doesn't stop doing the thing. So I think they have a cooling pad too. So the 8 Sleep Mattress sponsors me. They sent me a mattress and it's been, I've never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor. Sleep where you fall. Sleep where I fall. I don't give a shit. It doesn't really matter. But so like, I would have never bought a nice mattress because it's like, why? I'm fine. This is a floor, it's fine. But it was a game changer to be able to control temperature. Like for me, it's cooling. I don't know what the hell it is. Well, you want the brain and nervous system and rest of the body needs to drop by about anywhere from two to three degrees in order to get into your deepest sleep and transition to sleep. That's really going to help. You don't want to be cold that you're bothered and can't fall asleep. But that's why some people like it really cold in the room and under a warm blanket or with socks on, for some people that can be good because this temperature oscillation is such that as your temperature is dropping, that correlates generally with the most sleepy phase of your circadian cycle. So cool is better for falling and staying asleep and sleeping deeply. And then I guess like that's what 8 Sleep showed. They have like an app is it warms back up to wake you up. The idea that I haven't actually used it. I'm like, this is stupid. People say it works, but I just keep it the same temperature throughout the night but warming it up, I guess wakes you up, which is fascinating. Yeah, because the wake up signal is, it's interesting to think about it's not just correlated with an increase in body temperature. The increase in body temperature is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals. And that's the wake up signal. Do you think it's absolute temperatures we're talking about or is it just even relative? Just even just the decrease. Well, everyone's gonna have slightly different basal temperature. The idea that everybody should be 98.6. I mean, that's a myth. And there are theories that body temperature overall has been dropping in the last 50 years or so. I doubt that's true for somebody who is athletic like you and is young and healthy. But basically the coldest period of that 24 hour cycle is when you are going to be sleepiest. There's actually a period within that 24 hour cycle, it's a time point called your temperature minimum. And your temperature minimum tends to be about two hours before your typical wake up time. I'm not talking about the wake up time in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight. I mean, if you were to just allow yourself to sleep without a clock for a few days, measure when you typically wake up, two hours before then is your temperature minimum. And that temperature minimum turns out to be a very important landmark in your circadian cycle because it turns out that if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours immediately before your temperature minimum, so two to four hours or anytime within the two or four hour window before that temperature minimum, you are going to what's called delay your circadian clock. The next day, that whole oscillation is going to move forward. It'll make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later. Whereas if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours after that temperature minimum, so let's say for me, typical wake up time is 6 a.m., my temperature minimum somewhere around 4 a.m. If I get bright light in my eyes, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m., it's going to advance that oscillation so that I'll want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier the subsequent nights. So you might say, wait, but most nights I go to sleep and wake up at more or less the same time. Why is that? And that's because the same thing is happening on both sides. You are both advancing your clock a little bit and assuming that you're looking at light in the evening, you're also delaying your clock a little bit. So you get kind of captured in between and then your rhythm more or less oscillates at the same period, as we say, as the spin of the earth. Unless you're like you where you're, I get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours and if you're on the East Coast, then I know that you had to have been pulling basically an all nighter. Yeah, yeah, that's the interesting point about the messiness of sleep. So most people seem to perform the best when they have like a regular sleep schedule. I perhaps am the same, but I don't know that. And I tend to believe that you can also perform relatively optimally with chaos of sleep, of like a weird soup of like power naps and all nighters and all of that, as long as you're like happy doing what you love. And maybe you can tell me what you think about this. So I tend to, for myself, try to minimize stress in life. So what I found for myself with diet, with sleep is that if I obsess about it being perfect, then I'll actually stress quite a bit when it's not. Like I'll feel shitty when I don't get enough sleep because I know I should be getting more sleep as opposed to the actual physiological effects of not getting enough sleep. I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens, happens and smile and just take it all in, like David Goggins style, like if it sucks, it's even better or what is it, Jocko's like good or whatever he says. I think there are several things that you said that are important, but I agree that one can have a dysregulated sleep schedule and still be a happy person and productive. Much of my life, I've pulled all nighters and slept weird schedules. I think many people can probably relate to going to sleep, waking up four hours later, being up for an hour or two on your computer, then going back to sleep and getting amazing sleep the next day functioning. I think it's important that people have highlighted the importance of sleep and getting enough rest. I do think it's gone too far and now I'm editorializing a little bit, but I think that we've created this anxiety about sleep that if we don't sleep enough, we're going to get dementia. If we don't get sleep, then the reproductive access is going to completely crash. There's a lot of evidence to the contrary and as well, just based on personal experience and based on the fact that sure, it may be that a solid eight hours with no interruptions in there or nine or 10 could do great benefit, but you can do really well if you do what you say, which is you wake up, you don't want to start stressing about it, creating this meta stress about sleep. Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things that you can do, allowing yourself to go down that rabbit hole of stress for the following reason. A lot of our fatigue is not due just to the buildup of adenosine or time of day, the circadian thing we were talking about earlier. An additional factor is that effort is related to the release of epinephrine, of adrenaline in our brain and body. At some point, those levels get so high that we get stressed mentally, we get stressed physically and we want to give up. There are good data published in Cell showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal, eventually accumulates and there's a quit point. Dopamine, the molecule of pursuit and reward and feeling good, resets our ability to be in effort. In fact, a lot of people don't know this, but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from. If you look at the biochemical cascade, it starts with tyrosine, which is found in red meats and things of that sort. And tyrosine is eventually converted through things like L dopa into dopamine. Dopamine is made into epinephrine. So, I mean, this sounds kind of new agey, but happiness, joy and pleasure in what you're doing creates a chemical milieu that provides more of the chemicals that allow for effort. And there's nothing new agey about that. It's in every biochemistry textbook. It's in every decent neuroscience textbook. They just don't talk about the happiness part. They just talk about the dopamine part. So, I think that limiting your stress and at least recognizing, okay, if you're pulling an all nighter or you're somehow on messed up sleep, that there is going to be a point in that 24 hour cycle where your brain is not trustworthy, where your mental state is not worth placing too much weight on because you are near that temperature minimum. And near that temperature minimum, which is correlates to that two hour, about two hours before you would normally wake up, the brain is hobbling along. And anything you feel or think at that time should not be given too much value. But if you can trick yourself into thinking that's the pleasure point, you afford yourself a huge advantage. There's a study done by a colleague of mine at Stanford that showed that positive anticipation about the next day events actually is a powerful metric for creating quality sleep, even if the sleep is very reduced. And you'll love this one. And a lot of people are going to, might be critical of this. So, I just want to make sure that, so this is work done out of Harvard Medical. It was Bob Stickgold's lab and Emily Hoagland did this study that showed looking at Ochem, performance on Ochem scores. Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard is pretty tough subject, highly motivated, a number of very good control groups in this study. What she showed was that consistency of total sleep duration was far more important for performance on these exams than total sleep duration itself. So it's not that just getting more sleep allows you to perform better. Consistently getting about the same amount of sleep is better for performance, at least on Ochem, than just getting more. That's interesting. So that's referring to more that there should be a consistent habit versus the total amount. To me, like the entirety of the picture of sleep is similar to nutrition in that it feels like it's, there's so many variables involved and it's so person specific. So, you know, a lot of studies, I mean, this is the way of science, has to look in aggregate the effects on sleep. It doesn't focus on high performers which are individuals ultimately. Like the question isn't, so it's a very important question, is like what kind of diet fights obesity, reduces obesity? It's another question, what kind of diet allows David Goggins to be the best version of himself? So these high performers in different avenues. And the same thing with sleep, like people that tell me that I should get eight hours of sleep, it's like, it's, I mean, I get it and there may be right, but they may be very wrong. There's no evidence that eight is better than six, that you could very well do better on six than on eight. There are a few other things that turn out to be strong parameters for success in this domain. For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep is broken up into these 90 minute ultradian cycles. If you look at ability to attend or do math problems or do anything, you know, drive, performance tends to ramp up slowly within a 90 minute cycle peak and then come down at the end of that 90 minute cycle. And in sleep, we go through these stage one, two, three, four REM, et cetera, we'll talk more about that if you like, those on 90 minute ultradian cycles as well. Ending your sleep after a 90 minute cycle at the near the end of a 90 minute cycle, say at the end of six hours, in many cases is better for you than sleeping an additional hour, seven hours and waking up in the middle of an ultradian cycle. And there are a few apps that can measure this based on body movements and things like that, that have your alarm go off at the end of an ultradian cycle. And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle, sometimes not always you can be very groggy for a long period of time. I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven. I happen to like an eight hour sleep, it feels great, but I haven't slept an entire eight hours without waking up in the middle of the night at some point in, I don't know, forever. I can't remember, it's probably some point in infancy. And I function well during the day. I think that that's an important parameter is how do you feel during the day? Almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy in the late afternoon or what would correlate to their temperature peak. And that's a good time of day to get either a 90 minute or less nap, or if you're not a napper or you can't nap, feet elevated has been shown to be good for clear out of some of this, the glymphatic system is this kind of like sewer system of the brain that you can clear stuff out. So legs elevated, or one thing that I'm a big proponent of and that my lab has been studying is what I now call NSDR, non sleep deep rest. And this is just lying down. There are some scripts that we're gonna put out there soon as a free resource. There's some hypnosis scripts that my colleague David Spiegel has put out there as a free resource, but non sleep deep rest is allowing your system to drop into states of a real calm that allow you to get better at falling asleep later. And they can be very restorative for cognitive and motor function. There's at least one study out of Denmark that shows that the basal ganglia, which is an area of the brain that's involved in motor planning and action, one of these 20 minute non sleep deep rest protocols resets levels of neuromodulators like dopamine and the basal ganglia to the same levels that they were right after a long night's sleep. So I also respectfully or semi respectfully disagree with the idea that you can't recover lost sleep. What does that mean? I mean, there's no IRS for sleep. So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep? If you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy, like you're falling asleep, that's a good sign of insomnia. It means you're not sleeping enough at night. If you're fatigued during the day, but you're not falling asleep, so you're just exhausted, but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings and in conversation, then chances are you're fatiguing your system through something else, like a long run in the middle of the night in Austin or whatever it is that you're up to lately at 3 a.m. Yes, there is a magic to the nap. And maybe you could speak to the, because you mentioned these protocols that don't necessarily, so they're non sleep. But to me, the nap one or two a day can almost irrespective of how much sleep I get the night before, have a fundamental change in my mood, in my performance. For the better or for the worse? For the better, for the better. Yeah, likewise. So I do tend to kind of experiment with durations. It's consistently surprising to me how like a nap of like 10 minutes, I don't know, maybe you can speak to the perfect duration of a nap, but I find that it's like magic that a short nap does as much good and often better than a longer one, for me, for me, subjectively speaking. What would be a longer one? Longer than 90 minutes? No, no, like 90 minutes, or a bit longer than 90 minutes, like two hours. Yeah, that's starting to drop you into REM sleep. And even if it's a tiny amount of REM sleep, people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented. I mean, remember, in sleep, space and time are totally uncoupled. And so that's an odd state to reenter the world in if you're not gonna stay there for a while, like for a good night's sleep. I think a 20 minute nap is pretty fantastic. Would you say that's the, if you were to recommend to the general, it's very weird to recommend anything to the general populace, because obviously it's very person specific, but what's a good one will you say to friends? Is 20 minutes a good powder? 20 or 30 minutes. 20 or 30 minutes, because you're going, unless you're sleep deprived, you're going to stay out of REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. If you're sleep deprived, you'll drop right into it. If you've ever traveled and you're really jet lagged, you go to the hotel, you lay down for one second, all of a sudden you're just like, you're in a psychedelic dream, which can be pretty great too. But I think that 20, 30 minutes, and if you can't sleep, some people have trouble napping, then learning to relax the body as much as possible, like trying to remove all expression from your face, completely letting your body kind of float. If people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake, there's some terrific clinically and research tested hypnosis protocols that we could provide links to that are cost free and that teach you how to just completely release the alertness button and you just start drifting. Now, the problem is if you don't have an alarm or something to go off, the other day I did one and I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but there's a component of it where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up because it's a hypnosis script. So they, it's my colleague, David Spiegel in the script, he says, let your hand float up. I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating. Yeah, and I was completely relaxed. So hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation, narrowing of context, and it's all self imposed. A lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing with the pendant and the chicken, people fucking like chickens, but real hypnosis is self hypnosis. You're learning to, it involves some shifts in the way that you, the hypnotic induction involves looking up, closing your eyes, slowly deep breath, and then imagine yourself floating. And people vary on a scale of about one to four, four being the most easily hypnotized. There are a few people who it's very hard for them to allow themselves to go into these states, but for most people, they just, they're gone. And it's nice if you can have access to those states, because when you come out of it, you feel amazing. You feel like you slept the whole night, at least most people report that. So refresh, alert. Ready to go. I mean, basically you're ready. Yeah, I know you have this interesting challenge coming up and I'm curious what you're going to do to reset in the hours, the frequency of running is every four hours. It's not going to allow you to get any more than a couple hours sleep in between. Couple hours. So we should tell it to people. I'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice on it. I'm on March 5th, running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins. So four miles every four hours and people should join us. He's, that mad man is going to be live on Instagram starting at 8 p.m. Pacific on March 5th. So. You're going to join him in person. In person. Undisclosed location. Undisclosed location. And I was trying to clarify like, okay, so we're going to like, there'll be like friendly people around or something. No, it's just me and him. Friendly people. I don't know. Like, I just feel it's very difficult to be with David alone in a room. I imagine his, I mean, I've done some work with David. His energy is infectious. Yeah. That's an intense schedule. And the periodicity of those four hour, every four hours, four miles means that there's no chance of catching an extended block of sleep. So it's about three hours that you have non exercising every time. And of course, it takes time to try to fall asleep and there's an intensity to the whole thing. I mean, it's probably impossible to get anything more than two hours of sleep if you wanted to. So the optimal thing is probably from the sound of it, I'd be curious to see what you think, but like it's getting a few 90 minute naps. Okay, well, I thought about this a bit before we met up today. So I think there are two general approaches that could work. Neither one necessarily better than the other. One would be just to hammer through the whole thing, just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up so that you don't expect yourself to sleep. There are certain advantages there. One is a subjective kind of emotional advantages, which is if you can't sleep, you're not gonna be stressed about that. And if you do fall asleep, it's a bonus, provided you wake up and you don't look up and you realize David's been out running for half an hour and you're behind, right? But chances are, that's not the way it'll go. You set an alarm. So that's one approach. And I grabbed that from a couple of friends who were in the SEAL teams and they'll say that, during BUDS, there's this infamous hell week and there's this five days, definitely five days of no sleep, although there is a component where they offer a nap at one particular point. And a lot of people will say that it's worse to go down for that nap and then be woken up 20 minutes later than to just stay up. So that's one option. Let's call it the full blitz hammer through option. And if you happen to fall asleep, you do. It's a bonus. The other one would be to really anchor in these ultradian cycles. So coming back from a run, unless you're thoroughly exhausted, you're probably going to have a few minutes where you're going to want to stay awake. It's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep. And getting as much sleep as you can in the intervening periods, provided that you guys aren't posting constantly or doing something else. There's a question of whether or not you want to nourish, whether or not you want to eat or not in that time. Anytime we put food in our gut, I don't care if it's meat or oatmeal or broccoli or cardboard, you're drawing blood into the gut. And so you are going to divert some energy towards digestion and it's going to make you sleepy. There's a reason why the rest and digest, the parasympathetic nervous system is called that. So you could decide that you were only going to sleep in between certain blocks. That would be another way to think about this. Because I did this last year. I ran very slow. Some of it was walking. I was listening to audio books. And one of the biggest mistakes I did is to overeat during that time. It made the experience very unpleasant. So I have been considering basically eating almost nothing throughout the day. Being fasted will increase alertness because high levels of epinephrine in your system from fasting. You just think about fasting or being thirsty before you get exhausted. People always think if I don't eat, I'm going to be tired. No, the energy that you derive from food is going to be used from glycogen after a long storage and conversion process. So the food that you eat is going to consume energy to digest. And so a lot of people feel better fasted. And presumably throughout history, people have fasted for long periods of time and had to stay up for two or three days. And God forbid, if a family member is sick, you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble. So that alertness system, it's all mental. Actually, and then there's a third. So you could try and sleep or take care in between. And then there's a third approach. But I didn't come up with it, but David did. So I actually texted him earlier because I had a feeling that I heard that you were going to do this challenge. So I asked David. So these are David Goggins words, not mine. One, being organized is super important. Two, you want to waste as little time as possible. Three, you need to eat, sleep and rehab in as little time as possible so you can sleep as much as possible. Interesting. By the way, this is the first time I'm reading this. Four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera, are very important. That's consistent with everything I know about military. They don't leave too much to chance. Five, again, these are David's words. All that said, he's fucked on most all that because he'll be interviewing me before or after. I will also be interviewing him. Oh, shit. Five, long story short, the only thing that might help is a very special pill. Ooh, this is interesting. They're called SIU pills. Hard to get, but I believe he can get them. SIU stands for suck it up. Tell him to grab his balls. He will find those pills there. That's number six, all right. And then the last one, stay hard, brother. Stay hard, brother. Amen. That was one of the other things that I think makes this challenging is that it'll be doing a podcast throughout. So first of all, I'll do a long one before and after, but also I'll have to come up with things to talk to him about. So it's a different thing to do something privately and then publicly. I know it doesn't seem that way, but one of the hardest, the hardest thing I had to do last time was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera because last time I did it, I recorded every single time I did a leg, I recorded something I'm grateful for. It's just kind of unrelated. I'm not a fan of talking about how I'm feeling or how the run is going. I want to do something totally unrelated to the run and with the run as the background, sort of something I'm grateful for or just any kind of interesting discussion. Gratitude, I mean, I hate the word hack, like, oh, it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin. I don't like the word hack because A, it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing and B, a hack implies that it's some sort of trick that you're kind of gaming the system. You know, what works is mechanism, right? Biological mechanisms were designed to work and they were selected for to work under variable conditions. And as you know, and I know, and we have great appreciation for the fact that the nervous system was designed to be an adaptive machine so that you don't have to sleep eight hours every night. You can do this thing. And things like gratitude allow you to tap into chemical resources. And that's not a hack. The fact that being grateful for something external to the event happens to release serotonin and have a certain soothing effect or a dopamine and give you more epinephrine and let you go further, that's not a hack. That's actually what allowed the human machine to evolve to the point that it is now. Every time, you know, an inventor eventually created something that worked and felt great about it, you can imagine that the first, you know, air flight felt pretty awesome and motivated those people to go on and do more. They didn't just go on, you know, yawn and go have a beer. So being able to access the genuine internal states of gratitude and reward works. You can't trick the system. You can't pretend that you're grateful for something, but if you can identify or attach yourself to some larger goal or something that's deeply gratifying to you, or place it in service to a relative that passed away that you care a lot about, that's not a hack. That's accessing the deepest components of your nervous system. And to steal your kind of lingo, you know, there's real beauty there, right? Yeah, but for an introvert like myself, and I think David, I don't know if he's an introvert, but like, he's not, despite the fact that he has written a great book and he communicates, he puts himself out there, he's not really a fan of communication. He's not, I don't know if he's energized by speaking his mind. I don't know him well enough to know. I mean, we've done a little bit of work together and, you know, we're in communication now and again. He's obviously super impressive. I don't know. It seems like he's a pretty private guy. Yeah, so like, you know, so I don't have access to that. So for me, I'll just speak to myself, and I think David is the same, but I'll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing, not to experience the gratitude, experiencing the gratitude just like you're saying is really energizing, and it's a powerful thing. It's a, it can lift up your mood. But to turn on the camera and have to use words, which is very difficult to do, to explain like what you're feeling and do it in a way that you know a bunch of people will be watching is really draining. And one of the things I'm concerned about that in this whole process, how do I keep my mind sharp while also keeping the physical performance sharp? And that's a little bit scary because talking to David like actual intellectually sharp, like thinking, being charismatic as much as I can be, and like being so maintaining a sense of humor too, because I can be, I become with sleep deprivation, with exhaustion, you start being. The Russian bear comes out. You start being such a, like I become a David Goggins essentially like. Oh, it makes you irritable. Sleep deprivation makes us irritable. Yeah. It's clear so that in the early part of the night, we get a higher percentage of those old Tradian cycles are occupied by slow wave sleep, sometimes just called non REM sleep. And those early night sleep bouts are great for muscular repair and for certain forms of learning, but REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep, which it starts to accumulate and occupy more of those 90 minute old Tradian cycles toward the late part of a sleep bout. So typically toward morning, but toward after you've been asleep a while, that's when you do the emotional processing. That's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed and not irritated by things. And if you deprive people of REM sleep, they become selectively bad at uncoupling the emotion from things that happened in the previous days. So the little things start to seem like big things. I always know I'm REM sleep deprived when I'm irritable. And when I look at like the word the, and it doesn't look like it's spelled right. And I'm kind of pissed off about it. Like something's off. And we actually are becoming slightly psychotic when we're REM sleep deprived. You're not going to get a lot of REM sleep in this thing, except as you fatigue more, if you do fall asleep, you're going to drop more and more into REM so that those 90 minute cycles, you won't have to go through stage one, stage two, stage three, and then REM, you're just going to drop right into REM. So you can count on your system to compensate for you. But I think that just the knowledge that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on, just that third personing of yourself, that awareness, the observer, that can be very beneficial because there may be bouts during this event when you just should probably say nothing. And maybe you just, I don't know, smile and record or not smile or do whatever it is because you're going to be conserving energy. If it feels like a grind, that's epinephrine being released. That's epinephrine that you could devote to the physical effort. But humor is an amazing anecdote for this because it resets that, it's that dopamine release that gives us that fresh perspective. And it's a real chemical thing. It's not a hack. It's not a trick. It's not a visualization. It's biology in action. Well, but I think the act of interviewing, of conversation in these processes, even if you don't want to do it, the right thing to do, even when you're feeling irritable, is to do the third person view and be able to express with words that you're feeling irritable. Like express what you're going through. Use words, which I hate doing. I honestly, I think my ultimate thing would be just to never say a single word to David Gagas and just go through hell. It doesn't matter what we do, but to do it quietly, to also express it. That's my ultimate hell. And I think that's... Well, he's definitely going to be, if I know David at all, he's going to try and find your buttons. Like he's going to, I mean, even though he knows he can complete this, and I believe that he trusts that you can complete it too, I believe you will complete it. You know you will complete it, right. There's no question about that. But he's not going to make it easier for you. He's going to make it harder. Well, I'm afraid. So I'm like, it's very difficult for me. So 48 miles is not easy. I have not been training that much. So I'm not ramping up, but it's not like going to kill me. We'll see what happens. Of course, for him, he might always get bored because I think the 48 miles for him is easy. I think... I don't know that that ever gets easy. I have a friend, Casey Cordial, who works with David. He does some physical rehab type stuff with him. And he took Casey on a 50 miler and Casey said it's like 16 miles and do it. He was just like, he had hit his wall, but he found it. They find it to get, you know, you find that portal. There is one thing I want to mention. There's some very good physiology that can perhaps support the actual running effort part. These are very new data. We have a study going on with David Spiegel at Stanford, looking at how different patterns of breathing can affect heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is good. There's this interesting mechanism that I think most people might not realize, but that medical students learn that your breathing and your heart rate and your brain are in this really remarkable interplay. It goes like this. When you inhale, this isn't breath work. We're not going to do breath work. But when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down. The heart gets a little bigger because there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity. And as a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly through that larger volume. And there's a category of neurons, the sinonitrile node, that sees that, that recognizes that slower rate through that larger volume. It sends a signal to the brainstem and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart to speed the heart up. So every time you inhale, you're speeding the heart up. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little smaller, the volume is smaller, blood flows more quickly through the heart, signal sent up to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down. This is the basis of heart rate variability. So at any point, if you feel like your heart is racing and you feel like you're working too hard per unit of effort, focus on making your exhales longer or more intense than your inhales. If ever you feel like you're truly flagging, you do not have the energy to get up, it's like, okay, it's time to go and you're exhausted, you want to draw more oxygen into the system, get your heart rate going faster. Now, some people when they hear this probably think, well, this is really obvious, but there's so much out there about breath work and how to breathe and all this stuff, but no one talks about how to do it in real time while you're exerting effort. So this is something like almost like second by second, you can adjust things just in real time based on how you're feeling, but based on the heart rate. That's right. The experience of the heart rate. That's right. So one thing that could be very efficient and we're doing some work with athletes now, so these are unpublished data, but if you, while you're running, if you want to get into a nice cadence of heart rate variability, do double inhales while you're running. What this will do is that when you do the double inhale has the effect of reopening the alveoli of the lungs, your lungs are filled with tons of little sacks, when they tend to collapse as you fatigue and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream. And that's when we start getting stressed. If you've ever been sprinting and you start getting beat and you're going as hard as you can, what you really need to do is double inhale and reinflate these sacks in the lungs and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide. So when you're at a steady cadence and you're feeling good, double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale is a terrific way to breathe while you're in ongoing effort. By the way, any recommendations or differences in nose or mouth breathing? So nasal breathing, there's a lot of excitement now, obviously about nasal breathing because of James Nestor's book, Breath. There was also, if people are going to know about that book, I do feel like out of respect for my colleagues, there was a book by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, both professors at Stanford with a forward by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky. So some heavy hitters in this book. And the book is called Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic. And it's all about how nasal breathing is better for us, especially kids, than being mouth breathers under most conditions for sake of improving immunity. It turns out there's a microbiome in the nose, like all sorts of good stuff about nasal breathing preferentially. But when we exercise, you can do pure nasal breathing. But the problem is once you get up to kind of third and fourth and fifth gear effort, you can't nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity unless you've been training it for a very long time. So I would say double inhale through the nose, offload through the mouth. So double inhale, exhale while you're in steady effort. And then if you really feel like you need to gas it and you're pushing, the data show that then just use whatever's there, right? Just go into kind of default mode because bringing too much concentration to something is also going to spend epinephrine. The goal is to get into that, I don't like the word, but the flow state where you're not thinking too much, you're just in exertion. So these are things that can help in the transitions, but I don't think there's any secret breathing technique. Anyone who's been in the SEAL teams will kind of, they'll tell you like, there's no breathing technique, right? There's tools that you can look to from time to time. And these double inhale exhales can be great for setting heart rate variability very quickly and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising. But if there's a sprint, like if suddenly you guys are sprinting, ditch the double inhale, exhale, and just sprint. One thing that you mentioned, he's probably gonna push my buttons. It's a good place to ask a question about anger. So I'll probably get pissed off at him at some point. I'm guessing. And do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective or also just the personal philosophical perspective about the role of anger in all of this and in managing alertness, performance? I think about this a lot because there's so much out there about how important it is to do things from a place of love, you know. I tweet about it all the time. And I think, and love is powerful, right? It is interesting that autonomic arousal alertness, let's just use simple language, alertness physiologically looks identical for love and excitement as it does for anger and frustration and wanting to defeat your opponent or whoever that opponent happens to be. They're identical except that the love component does tend to be associated with the release of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type that do have this replenishment component. I don't think one wants to be in constant anger and friction, but I mean, I'll come clean a bit. There've been portions of my career where some of my best work, my extra two hours, my ability to nail a really hard deadline or problem has come from not wanting to get out competed or from wanting to prove something. These days, I'm not oriented from that place toward my work quite as often, but I think we should be really honest. Anger is powerful provided it's channeled. It's very, very powerful and it can give you a ton of fuel and gas to push when otherwise you tap. Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his, has been an inspiration to sort of be, to have a kind of loving view on the world and the way you approach the world to me. So I've tended to want to approach the world that way, but in the same way, David Goggins has been an inspiration to like, yeah, be angry at stuff and use it as fuel. Like he almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind just so he can fight them. You know, but at the same time I tried that because I did a challenge in the summer of where for 30 days I was doing a lot of pushups and it was, over time, it was counterproductive for me. Like I found that it was easier to just, like the rollercoaster that the emotional, like being angry at stuff takes you can also be exhausting. Oh, absolutely, and it can take you down, like the ups of it are good, but the downs are bad. And what I found is better to get, to use it as a boost every once in a while, but mostly to get lost in the, you're talking about the breath work, the like getting lost in the ritual of it, like the beat like that, as opposed to going on the big rollercoasters of emotion. Yet this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology. There's a fascinating relationship between the hormone system and the nervous system. And, you know, hormones work in general on slower timescales. The definition of a hormone is a chemical released at one location in the body, goes and acts at multiple locations far away within the body. Pheromone would be between two bodies. Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin tend to work a little more quickly. There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that can work very fast, but here I'm referring mainly to testosterone, prolactin. Prolactin tends to be in men, and women tends to make people kind of lazy and want to take care of young. It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late. It's secreted in response to having children. These are all in humans and in animals. There's a very interesting relationship between testosterone and dopamine that speaks directly to what we're talking about now. So dopamine and testosterone are closely related in the pituitary system. And obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals and from the testes. But the major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good. That's what testosterone does. It has other effects too, right? Reproductive effects, androgenizing parts of the body, et cetera. But it makes effort feel good. The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol. Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol, a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both. So you have a limited amount of cholesterol and it gets diverted towards stress or this pathway where effort feels good. That's the pathway you want to get into. The anger pathway, if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here, the anger eventually is going to divert more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress, and you will be slowly depleting testosterone. Now going into this, you'll have plenty of testosterone, but after a couple of days, there've been very interesting studies showing that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop with sleep deprivation. That's a bit of a myth. You need it to replenish testosterone. You need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually. But the real question is, are you enjoying what you're doing? And here the work was, some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French, who runs the UFC Training Center. He did his PhD at UConn stores, did a really beautiful PhD thesis looking at the relationship between stress hormones, testosterone, and dopamine. Really interesting work. And the takeaway from all of this is, if you can just convince yourself, or ideally if you can just enjoy yourself, you are going to maintain or maybe even increase testosterone stores, which will make effort feel good. And to me, aside from neuroplasticity where everything becomes automatic after this experience, to me, that's the holy grail. When effort feels good, life just gets way better. And we're not talking about achieving the reward. I'm not talking about the end of this thing. I'm talking about the process of it feeling really good. Yeah, there is a magic to, I don't know if you can comment on this, but I find myself being able to, if I just say I'm feeling good, like this old hack of like smiling while you're running, if I just tell myself, I'm feeling really good right now, no matter how I'm actually feeling, I'll start feeling way better. And the whole thing, there's a cascading effect that allows me to maximize the effort. It's quite fascinating. It's weird. Hormones are powerful. The relationship between thoughts and hormones and these physiological things is enormous. I had a colleague that a few years ago, he was dying of pancreatic cancer. And I was interviewing him just because he's an important figure in our community. And I was a friend. And there was one day where he told me, he said, I don't want to make it past the new year. And it was crushing for me to hear. And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy for a whole set of other things. And I said, have you taken your androgen cream? And he was like, no, I haven't done it. Go get it for me. I have this on film. He takes it, he puts the androgen cream on. I'm not suggesting people take androgens, by the way. 10 minutes later, he says, you know what? I think I want to live into the new year. And I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation. He went to MIT, by the way. He said, I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation. And he did. And so there's something about these molecules that in an ancient way, in all organisms, all mammals, as far as we know, are linked to the will to live. They're linked to effort and making effort feel good, which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species. I always say, people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen, but it's not. The opposite of testosterone is prolactin, which makes us feel quiescent and not in pursuit of things, et cetera. Testosterone makes effort feel good. Estrogen makes emotions feel okay. And they are in mixed amounts in people, as I say, have all chromosomal backgrounds. Yeah. I mean, you also mentioned fasting potentially through this two day thing. It'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general. Do you think on a personal level and at a higher sort of level of studies that you're aware of and physiology and so on, what do you think about intermittent fasting of like not eating for 16 hours and then having an eight hour window or something I've been doing a lot recently, which is eating only once a day. So that's 24 hour fast, I guess, one meal a day or something I've been thinking about doing, haven't done yet of doing like 72 hours or some people do like five day fasts in general. So this will be for this particular run will be a 48 hour fast if I don't eat at all. What do you think about that for performance, for mood, for all those kinds of things? I can speak a little bit to the science and a little bit of my own experience and then some anecdotes of people that have done very hard, very long duration things and what they've told me. So I just want to make sure I'm separating those out so people know my sourcing. I think now none of this is about the actual longterm nutritional benefits of one thing or the other. But if you look at the science on intermittent fasting, it's pretty remarkable. Before I was at Stanford, my lab was in San Diego. One of my colleagues was such in Panda at the Salk is phenomenal biologist and researcher, wrote a book called the circadian code. It's very, very good and kind of popularized intermittent fasting, although there were others that had talked about this before. Ori Hofmechler talked about the warrior diet. People probably might not know who Ori is, but he's sort of the originator of this business of intermittent fasting eating once a day or limited. Anyway, Sachin has published papers, peer reviewed papers in very good journals like Cell and elsewhere, showing that limiting the consumption of calories to eight, four, six, or eight, or even 10 hours of every 24 hour cycle and keeping that more or less correlated with the light with when the sun is out leads to less liver disease, improved metabolic markers, less body fat, et cetera. In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice to eat whatever they wanted, as much as they want, as long as they restrict it to a certain period within the 24 hour cycle, they did great. They maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight. When they took the same amount of food and they stretched it out across the entire 24 hour cycle. So this is eating every hour or two hours, the animals got fat and sick. So it's pretty remarkable data. How much of that translates to humans isn't clear, but one thing that's really clear with humans is adherence. We could talk a lot about nutrition and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition is that what people will do in a laboratory is often hard to do in the real world. Low carbohydrate diets just they tend, because they tend to focus on foods that have high amino acid content like meats. Generally people are less hungry on those than they are on calorie matched diets of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates, because when the insulin goes up, you get hungry and you want to eat more. So this is not a push for carnivore or a push against one thing or the other. It's just, there are a lot of factors, but we know for sure that when you're fasted or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate in your system, complex carbohydrate, your alertness is going to go up. Fasting increases alertness and epinephrine for the sole purpose of getting you to go out and find food. Can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry and they were like, oh, I'm too tired to go find food. We wouldn't be here. It'd be like robots or something. One of your alien buddies will be like running the planet. So I think that if you want to be alert, fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates to a minimum is very valuable. If you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy, ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan, which is the precursor to serotonin, so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains, turkey, white meats, those things do create a sense of sleepiness. However, there is a caveat, and this is one problem with the once a day meal, is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut, you're increasing sleepiness because you're diverting blood to the gut. It's going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients, digest and utilize those nutrients. So I've done the once a day eating thing. The problem is I eat so much in that meal that I'm exhausted. And so it doesn't always lend itself well to the schedule. But so in a six or eight hour eating block for me is a little bit better. I do eat carbohydrates. I'm probably one of the few people left on the West coast that actually consumes carbohydrates and we'll say that out loud. I don't know people eat carbs anymore, that's weird. They don't. Where do you even find carbs these days? I like oatmeal. I like rice. The other time is if people are doing very high intensity weight train, they need to replenish glycogen. On the alertness side, I do feel like it's probably person dependent. For me alertness, being alert makes my life better in a lot of ways, more than just the alertness itself. Like for example, one of the things I discovered with fasting is that when I was training twice a day in jujitsu, for example, and competing and so on, I performed way better at things that you traditionally would say you need carbs for, which is explosive movements and all that. I don't know if I actually perform better in terms of like the force of the explosion, the explosiveness. What I do know is the alertness resulted in me doing the technique more precisely. That's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action. And there are some other just purely physical aspects to one diet versus the other that can be complicated. If you're ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, you're going to replenish glycogen, which is great, but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous. And I've never rolled jujitsu, but running when you have a lot of bulky fibrous food in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier. It can be uncomfortable. And so some people do really well on low carbohydrate, meat rich diets, because they're just not as bloated. They're not carrying as much water and other stuff. Carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it. So there are aspects to being able to train and being really explosive because you feel light. One anecdote that really, again, I'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet, but I have a friend who was in the SEAL teams. I happen to know a number of people in that community. And he told me that he did this very long fast. It was a fast that I think you get to eat a little bit of soup or broth. And there's like a bar or something, but it's like a nine day thing. And he's a very strong athlete. And he said that on day six or seven, he was running up some hills or something while he was on deployment. And he felt amazing. He had kind of hit this other level. He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy. He was somebody who knows and knew high output. And he felt like he discovered the 13th floor, that there was another floor to this performance space that he hadn't experienced except while he had fasted. And he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind, energy, it's a little bit of what you described. He described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness. So there's probably something there. On which day? At once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fast. See, this is the thing is I've never been there on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, that kind of thing. But when I just don't eat for 20 hours, many times through my training, the clarity, it's like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly and you're able to like dominate people you weren't able to before. It's like. Well, you might've slipped into, or switched over rather into full ketosis. And ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people. The problem is if you do it wrong, you can really mess it up. I tried it once and I basically got psoriasis. I thought my scalp was going to fall off. I was like sloughing off all this. And then I stopped and I was taking the liquid ketones. And then all of a sudden I felt better again. But I was told that I just did it wrong. Yes. That's right. So I think there's a right way and a wrong way and you have to get it right. Definitely. And so I've experimented quite a bit with keto to see how my body feels and doing it the right way and following all the instructions. There's definitely a huge difference that, like for example, one of the things I discovered, everyone knows who said this, but I tried this recently over the past year is I started drinking when I don't feel great. If I'm fasting, a bone broth, a chicken bone broth. And for some reason, like magically it could be, this is the other thing, the mind, I don't know, but it makes me feel really good. Well, it could be the salt. So I mean, neurons, the action potential neurons, as you know, is sodium is rushing into the cell. You need enough extracellular sodium in order for your brain and nervous system to function. And so salt, I mean, unless people have hypertension, salt is great. There was an article in Science Magazine about a decade ago about how salt had been demonized and unless people have hypertension, provide you drink enough water, salt is great. You need sodium, magnesium, and potassium to function and for your nerve cells to work. I mean, people who overdrink water and don't consume enough electrolyte die. Now, hydration is really important. I know David's really into hydration. He's mentioned that a few times. I mean, hydrating properly is key. And so you definitely want to make sure that you're drinking enough water and getting enough electrolytes. We should have actually talked about that at the beginning because that's going to keep your nervous system functioning well. And a lot of people, they'll get shaky or jittery when they're fasting and they'll think they need sugar. And if they just put some salt in some water, they feel fine. And like the other stuff, potassium, magnesium, whatever the other electrolytes are. But yeah, those three. I mean, salt, yeah. Magnesium is good before sleep. Salt. I mean, this is a vast space. And we're kind of talking about the overlap between neurochemicals, hormones, and nutrition. And it's a fascinating space. And it's one that the academic community has gems within the textbooks. It hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet. And I think that's because people get so caught up in the being, are you vegan or are you carnivore? And there's a vast space in between too that people can explore. Like I'm not a competitive athlete. So I eat meat and I also eat vegetables and I eat fruits and it's just about timing them. But I tend to eat carbohydrates when I want to be sleepy. I eat them at night. And everyone said, that's the worst thing. You can't do that. You sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta. I'll tell you. And by the way, I should give you a big thank you for connecting me with Bell Campo Farms. They sent me some meat, I think because of you. And it's delicious. So I really appreciate that. I mean, it also connected me with this whole world of people who are doing farming in this ethical way and like really love the whole process. And from both like a human level, but also scientific level. And the result is, it's like ethical, but also it's delicious. And it makes you think about your diet in a whole new kind of way. Yeah, I don't have any commercial relationship to Bell Campo, so I can be very clear. I've known Anya Fernald, who is the founder and CEO of Bell Campo. I've known her since the ninth grade. It is true that her parents are faculty members at Stanford, they're colleagues of mine, but she's just a serious academic of nutrition, but also of sustainable agriculture, of all sorts of things. And also the meat just, it's awesome. It tastes really good. And no, I'm not getting paid to say that. And no, they're not a sponsoring my podcast. It's just, I feel like if you're gonna eat animals, if that's in your framework and you're gonna eat animals, knowing that the animals were raised as happy as could be until time of slaughter is at least important to me. And actually talked to her, so I will talk to her on this podcast actually. And she invited me like a week ago out to visit the farm in May or June or whatever. Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border. I haven't been there yet, but I've seen the pictures. It looks awesome and I was like, yes. It looks beautiful. Let me know when you're going. Yeah, let's go together. You'll probably run there, but I'll drive there. Yeah, but all that said, I do want to, cause a lot of people who are vegan write to me and I do want to seriously, in the same seriousness that I approached keto, I do wanna go like on a few months to switch to a vegan diet at some point to really try it. I haven't done it yet cause I'm afraid I'm gonna function better. I'm Argentine by my dad's side. And I don't eat meat super often, but well, for most people it would seem often, but I do love steak, I do. So I'm afraid I'm gonna feel better. There's a social element to steak, you're right. Cause coming from a Russian background, like I can't imagine going to visit my folks, like my parents for Thanksgiving or something to say, mom and dad, I don't eat meat. So instead of, you know. Well, I think if you're gonna eat meat, getting it from sources that are compatible with a continuation of the planet is good. I mean, there are some real problems with the factory farm meat. You know, you drive up and down the five and you pass that point where there are all those cows. I mean, as somebody who loves animals, it's clear that it's, you know, you wanna limit the amount of suffering of those animals. Whenever I hear about, you know, we know people that hunt and that go and get their own meat. I really admire that. I admire that people do that. We don't tend to do that in the hills around Stanford, you know, there are mountain lions back there, but that's about it. And I'm certainly, I admire the vegan mindset of just making that decision. You're just not gonna consume other beings, but you know, I haven't gone that way. But performance wise, I'm just curious because I was surprised, I was certain that eating five, six, seven meals a day is the right thing to do for if you wanna be perform your best when I was like 20 or whatever. And I would eat oatmeal, like I thought it's obvious I have to have a really, a lot of carbs in the breakfast. I had a lot of preconceived notions. And then when I started eating like once a day, this was at the peak of my competing in jiu jitsu, it was like, everything I know about nutrition is wrong. You realize that like, you have to become a scientist. First of all, you have to read literature, you have to learn, you have to experiment, but you also have to become a scientist of your own body. In the same way, I have a lot of preconceived notions of what performance is like under vegan diet. And I want to do it right. Like seriously, not necessarily for the ethical reasons, but to see if it's performance wise, like can I, I remember there's like a fruitarian diet where you eat fruit only. These extremes are like, they're pretty, they're interesting cause people have this need. The extremes are informative though, right? I mean, well controlled experiments, you eliminate as many variables as you can except the one you're interested in. So people are running these experiments. I think that it's hard to imagine getting, I know people say you can get enough amino acids from plant based sources and I believe that. I think it probably takes a little more work. One thing that's really clear is that the benefit of these omega three, omega six ratios, like fish oils and things like that. There are some data that show that the getting at least a thousand milligrams of the EPA, which is in high in fish oils, but other things too, even some meats and other plants, it in double, you know, in matched placebo, double blind controlled studies, placebo controlled double blind studies have shown that those can offset antidepressive symptoms as much as some of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft. So that's pretty impressive. And in Scandinavia, people know, especially in winter, to consume a lot of those omega threes because they're good for you, they're good for the brain. That's the other question. Nutrition wise, what kind of stuff have you come across that's useful? Like I basically only take fish oil, like you said, electrolytes. Electrolytes with water, the David Goggins diet. Fish oil. Plus fish oil. And then again, the sponsor, they made it so easier. The sponsor of your podcast and mine, athleticgreens.com slash Huberman. Great stuff. Support it. I don't know, like it's great stuff for sure, but it also just takes away the headache of like, I don't have to think about. Yeah, you're going to get a bunch of vitamins and minerals. It does that. It sounds like a plug, but I have genuinely been buying it. I'm like, you know, no discount, no affiliation or anything since 2012. I think I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast. I was like, oh, I'm going to try that stuff. And I liked it. I mean, when I was starting my lab, I was working insane hours. I still work very long hours. And getting sick limits productivity. And I also wanted to train and I wasn't doing much training back then. Now I try and get, you know, three, four sessions in a week. I'm not doing nothing like what you and David are doing or what, you know, Joe does, or like you guys are way more regimented and consistent than I am. But I think that being healthy and feeling good is one of the great benefits to a career is having energy and just being not sick. Can we take a step back to sleep for a little bit? And so people should definitely look through your podcast. The first five episodes were on sleep or no, I guess the first opening episode wasn't. First one was sort of how the brain works generally is to give people some background. And then we did four episodes on sleep, including some stuff about food, temperature, exercise, jet lag shift work for the jet lag folks and shift work. Yeah, take a masterclass on sleep. And then you're going on to a next topic in the next few episodes, which is incredible. We'll, neuroplasticity, we'll talk about it. But on sleep, one of the cool things about the human mind when it sleeps is dreaming. What do you think we understand about the contents of dreams? Like what do dreams mean? All the stuff we see when we dream, is there something that we understand about the contents of dreams? Some of it is very concrete. So Matt Wilson, who, MIT guy, showed in rodents and it's been shown in nonhuman primates and now it's been shown in humans that there is replay of spatial information during sleep. So initially what Matt showed was that as these little rodents navigate through a maze, there are these cells in the hippocampus called place cells that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor. And that exact same sequence is replayed during sleep. And it turns out this is true in London taxi cab drivers. Before phones and GPS were what they are today, the London taxi cab drivers were famous for knowing the routes through the city, through these mental maps. And their analysis of their place cell firing during sleep and during wakefulness. And so we are essentially taking spatial information about the location of things and replaying it during sleep. However, it's not replayed so that you remember it all. It's replayed so that if there's a reason to remember it, the links to the emotional system, to the components of the limbic system and hypothalamus that are relevant, like you got into a car crash at a particular location, or you lost a bunch of money because you were a cab driver, Uber driver, we'd say nowadays, and you were stuck at one particular avenue all day and frustrated, and you were getting yelled at by your spouse, that information gets encoded so that you never forget that at that particular time of day and that particular time of year, and this thing happened. So context starts getting linked to experience. So there's spatial information that's absolutely replayed during sleep. And we experience this sometimes as dreams. The dreams that happen early in the night when slow wave sleep or non REM sleep dominates, tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes and kind of location. It can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange. Not so incidentally, the early phase of the night is when growth hormone is released. In the 80s and 90s, there was a drug that was very popular. It's very legal now called GHB. You could actually buy it at GNC or a store then. I never took it, but it was a popular party drug and some famous celebrities died while on GHB. They were also on a bunch of other things, so it's not clear what killed them. But GHB was very big in certain communities because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone and gave people these very hypnotic states. So people go to clubs and they were in these very hypnotic states. It was part of a whole culture. That's early night. And those dreams tend to not have a lot of emotional content or load. That phase of dreaming is associated with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep because it's somewhat lighter sleep. The dreams that occur during REM, during rapid eye movement sleep and that dominate towards morning are very different. They tend to have very little epinephrine is available in the brain at that time. Epinephrine again being this molecule of stress, fear, and excitement. You are paralyzed during these REM dreams. You cannot move. There's intense emotion at the level of what you're feeling and there's so called theory of mind. Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward by Simon Baron Cohen, Sasha Baron Cohen's cousin. I think on the podcast, I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford. It's like the cardinal sin. He's at Cambridge, forgive me. I'm not British. So the dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden. And it's very clear that those dreams and REM sleep, if you deprive yourself of them for too long, you become irritable and you start linking generally negative emotions to almost everything. REM, the dreams that occur in REM sleep are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences. And it's when we extract general rules and themes. MIT seems to have come up a lot today, but it's highly relevant. Susumu Tonagawa, Nobel prize for immunoglobulin, but obviously fantastic neuroscientist as well, has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation of the previous episode and a lot of fear unlearning of uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events that happened previously occurs in REM sleep. So you don't want to deprive yourself of REM sleep for too long. And those dreams tend to be very intense. Now, epinephrine is low so that you can't suddenly act out your dreams. But what's interesting is sometimes people will wake up suddenly while in a REM dream and their heart will be beating really, really fast. That's a surge of epinephrine that occurs as you exit REM sleep. So you were having this intense emotional experience without the fear. You were essentially going through therapy in your sleep, self induced therapy. It's like trauma therapy, where you try and divorce the emotion from the experience. And then you wake up. And some people also have the other component of REM, which is atonia, which is paralysis. Pot smokers experience this a lot more than non pot smokers. There's an invasion of paralysis into the waking state. I'm not a pot smoker, but I have experienced this. And when you wake up and you're paralyzed for a second, it's terrifying. But then you jolt yourself alert. So the REM sleep is important for kind of the self induced therapy and forgetting the bad stuff. It's good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences. And just there are two therapies. Eye movement desensitization reprocessing, which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala during therapy, not during sleep. And ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic. It's actually very similar to PCP. And ketamine is now being used as a trauma therapy when someone comes into the ER, for instance, and they were in a terrible car accident. I mean, these are horrible things to describe it. They saw a relative impaled on the steering column or something. And they will give this drug to try and shut off the emotion system so that, because they're not gonna forget, let's be honest, you don't forget the bad stuff, but it is possible to uncouple the bad events from the emotional system. And there's all sorts of ethical issues about whether or not that's good or bad to do. But PTSD is a failure to uncouple the emotion from these intense experiences. So the goal of this kind of therapy is in the uncoupling for that to be permanent. Yeah. To separate. So they can recount the event and they can describe it without it triggering the same somatic experience of terror and dread, because terror, those feelings can be debilitating, obviously. And you're saying physiologically, in REM sleep, a similar process is happening. That's right. Thematically, REM sleep is about experiencing or replaying intense emotions without experiencing the somatic, the physical component of the emotion, either the acting out or the accelerated heart rate and agitation. Likewise with things like ketamine therapies. That's the idea, is you're uncoupling the physical sensation from the mental events. What is REM sleep and why is it so special? Maybe we can comment on that. Rapid eye movement sleep. Yeah, discovered in the 50s at the University of Chicago. It's intense brain activity, high levels of metabolic activity, dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind. We were talking about Simon Baron Cohen. Theory of mind was actually something that he developed for the diagnosis of autism. If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven, put them in front of a TV screen in the laboratory and you have them watch a video where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll. And then the kid puts it into a drawer, shuts the drawer and walks away. And another kid comes in and you ask the child who's observing this little movie, you say, what does this second child think? And a typical kid would say, they want to play and they don't know where the ball or doll is, or they're upset or they're sad, they want the doll. Autistic children tend to say the doll's in the drawer. The toy is in the drawer. They tend to fixate. They can't get on the event. They can't get into the mind of that. They don't have a theory of mind. Dreams in REM have a heavy theory of mind component. People are after me trying to get me. You can assign motive to other people. I'm afraid, but it's because there's an expectation. That doesn't tend to happen in slow wave sleep dreams. Now, all this of course is by waking people up and asking them what they were dreaming about, which from a standpoint of a AI guy or a machine learning or a neuroscientist kind of like, but it's the best we've got. But brain imaging in waking states while people view a movie and then brain imaging while people are sleeping supports the idea that that's basically what's going on. So REM sleep is amazing and you're not going to get much of it during your bout with Goggins, but you will afterward. Why, so to comment, why won't I? So is it not possible to get into it real quick? Only if you're very, very sleep deprived, but because you're going to be at high muscular output, that's going to bias you towards more slow wave sleep overall. And your body and brain are smart. They, it will know, they will know that your main goal is to recover so you can keep going. So you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions and you can keep running so that you can, I mean, it's amazing to think like, why do we ever stop? Unlike weight training where I can't do a 500 pound deadlift, I just can't. I could train for it, but I certainly can't do a 600 pound, I can't do that. What causes us to stop an endurance event is usually not a physical barrier. It's almost always a purely mental barrier. And that's a very interesting problem. I mean, neuroscientists don't tend to think about those sorts of problems because it sounds so non neuroscientific, but that's fundamentally related to the question of, what is pursuit? What is the desire to push and to carry on? Is there a neuroscientific answer for that question you think? I think the closest thing is this paper from Janelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus, showing that if you put animals into a simulated environment where you can measure their effort, the forces while they're running, and you can control the visual environment, and you can create a scenario where the animal thinks that its output is futile. It knows it's running and it's actually running, but you change the frequency of the stripes going by in their visual world, such that they think they're not getting anywhere, and eventually they quit. And the thing that determines whether or not they quit is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brainstem. If you drop that level back down or you give the animals dopamine, essentially, they keep going. If you take dopamine down, they're like, this isn't worth it, it's helpless. This isn't worth my time and energy. Well, this is where the difference between humans and nonhuman animals is interesting, because it does feel like humans have an extra level of cognitive ability that might be relevant here. Well, you can pull from different time references. So if you're in that moment, you're going to need a kit of things to pull from. So you can think this is in honor of someone else that passed away, and you will find a gas reserve that's amazing, right? Now, whether or not mice are like, I remember my brother back in the other cage when I was a little mouse, we don't know. But it's very likely that they don't do that, that they're so present, they're in the experience of there and then and now, that they aren't able to extract from the past, and they're not able to project into the future, like how great it's gonna feel when I get to the end of this really lame VR corridor. I don't think they think about that. And think about like, if I quit now, how will that have, what kind of effect will it have on the rest of my life in the future difficult times? Like if you allow yourself to quit in this particular moment, you'll become a quitter more and more in life, and then you're going to not get the other nice, the opposite sex mammals. That's pretty severe, you went there. I don't know. You took it the whole way to evolution and back again. I mean, but that's really it. I mean, our ability to time reference in the past, present or future. I do believe that we can be in the present and the past, or the present and the future, or only in the present, or only in the future, only in the past. But I don't think that we can really think about past, present and future all at once. And this has a similarity to covert attention. Like we can split our visual attention into two things. We really can do a task, even though we can't multitask. Or we can bring those two spotlights of attention to the same location. But it's very hard to split our attention in really well into three domains, excuse me, into three domains. I think that that's very, very challenging. And our time referencing scheme tends to be just one or two time references. So Lisa Feldman Barrett, I'm not sure if you've done work together, but at least you're connected. I found out about her because of you, on your podcast with her. And then I brought her on to Instagram, doing an Instagram live about emotion. And it was fascinating. And she's a very spirited and very, very smart woman. Fearless and brilliant. So I love her, she's amazing. She kind of, she's not a scholar of hallucinogens or dreams, but she had this intuition that there may be a connection between the kind of dissociation that happens in dreaming and that happens in like psychedelics. I, because of my previous conversation with you on this podcast, Matthew Johnson from Johns Hopkins reached out and he said, but he commented, I think, on something that we commented on, I don't even remember exactly what, but that there's not many studies. It's not being psychedelics and not being rigorously studied in an academic setting, like with a full rigor of science. And he said, well, actually that's exactly what we're doing and they're extremely well funded now. And it's been a long battle to get it accepted as a serious scientific pursuit. So, but, and I'd like to ask you a little bit about that, but do you have a sense about connection between dreams and psychedelics or these different explorations of mind states that are outside of the standard normal one, that's the wake mindset? Yeah, I loved your discussion with Matthew. I knew of the Hopkins group and the stuff they were doing, but I didn't know much about it at all. And I learned a ton from that podcast. I reached out to him just to say, I love what you're doing. I think it's incredible. So yeah, your podcast has been a great source of serious academic and intellectual conversation for me. I think what they're doing at Hopkins is amazing. He has a collaborator there actually that had a very popular paper. I just throw out there for fun, who is a postdoc at Stanford. Her name is Gul. She's Turkish, I believe. And I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment, but that's just a function of my brain. She had a paper showing that she put octopi on MDMA on ecstasy and found out, this is published in current biology, it was a great journal, showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time with other octopi and they started cuddling. So they're colleagues out there. But the Hopkins project is super interesting because I think they were initially supported mainly through private philanthropy. And now you're starting to see some more interest at the level of NIH about psychedelics. It's a complicated space because the psychedelics are always looked at through the lens of the 60s and people losing their mind. And there's a, I always say, you don't want a Ken Kesey out of the game. Ken Kesey was amazing, right, part of the whole beat generation thing. And he was actually at the VA near Stanford. That's where he eventually, in Menlo Park, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or maybe that was about him. Anyway, the comments will tell me how wrong I am, but I think I'm tossing these words in the right general direction. But Huxley, Kesey, they did a lot of LSD and they all lost their jobs, right? They lost their jobs at big institutions like Harvard and Stanford and elsewhere, or they left because they made themselves the experiments. Hopkins, as far as I know, is one of the first places, if not the first place, where whatever Matt may or may not be doing in his own life, I don't know. It's really about the patients and whether or not the patients in these institutional review board approved studies, whether or not they're getting better in situations like depression. I think it's clear that there's a very close relationship between hallucinogenic states and dreaming of the sort that were described for REM dreaming. And there's a terrific set of books and body of scientific literature from a guy named Allan Hobson, who was an MD, is at Harvard Med, and he wrote books like Dream Drugstore. One of the first neuroscience books I ever read was about hallucinations and how psychedelics and dreaming are very similar. That was way back when I was in high school. I was just curious. And he really understood the relationship between LSD and REM dreams and how similar they are. I think psychedelics, and Matt knows way more about this than I do, of course, but psychedelics have some very interesting properties. They are certainly not for everybody, right? And kids, it's a problem. I think the major issues right now around the psychedelic conversation is that it's clear that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity. They make the brain amenable to change, changing up space time relationships, changing up the emotional load of an event and being able to reframe that. It's clear that happens. But there's two major issues. One is that people talk about plasticity as if plasticity is the goal, but plasticity is a state within which you can direct neurology. And the question is what changes are you trying to get to? So people are just taking psychedelics to unveil plasticity without thinking about what circuits they want to modify and how. I think that's a problem. I think there's great potential, however, for people opening up these states of plasticity with psychedelics or otherwise, and directing the plastic changes toward a particular end point. And there's an absolutely spectacular paper out of UC Davis published as a full article in Nature just a couple of months ago, showing that there are psychedelics that are now can be modified. So chemists have gotten into the game now and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component where you still get the neuroplasticity components. And for a lot of people it'd be like, oh, that's no fun. That's not giving you the wild experience. But I do think that that holds great potential for people that wouldn't otherwise orient towards some of these drugs. So I think it's really marvelous what's happening and what's about to happen. And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs that's very unusual, like psilocybin, LSD, those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release and lateralized connections ramp up, et cetera. Matt talked about all that. But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation where dopamine is very, very high because of the way the drug is designed. Dopamine release, it goes through the roof. So people feel great and they want to move and they have a lot of energy. But serotonin levels are also high and that's a very unnatural state. And why MDMA may, and I want to highlight may, have particularly high potential for the treatment of certain forms of depression is an interesting question. Because never before, as far as we know in human history, has there been a possibility of opening up dopaminergic and serotonergic states at the same time, dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward and more and more, and serotonin being one of bliss and being content right where you're at. So it's almost like those two things wrap back on themselves and create this very unusual state. And I think the bigger conversation is what to do with a state like that. Like is it about self love? Is it about developing love for another person? Is it about forgetting hate? Like these are powerful molecules. And I think if the academic community and the clinical community is going to move forward with them in any serious way, I think there needs to be a conversation about what they're being used for. Right, and coupled with that, I think similar to what you're saying, like Matt has talked about, as others have talked about, some of the biggest benefits of like progress, whether it's like quitting smoking and all this kind of stuff is in the days after, it's the integration of the experience. So maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity, but then there's like work to be done. It's not, you shake up something in the biology of the brain but you have to do then it's work. Absolutely, a friend of mine who's a physician, he says, who's quite open to this idea that psychedelics could play a real role in real medicine. Says, better living through chemistry still requires better living. And I think it's a beautiful statement. I wish I had said it, but he gets the credit. But the plasticity window opens. And then as you said, what are you going to do in the two weeks, three weeks, four weeks afterward? Because that's the real opportunity. But those psychedelic experiences are really a case of an amplified experience inside of an amplified experience so much so that everything seems relevant. And it's fascinating. I mean, my hope is that the AI and machine learning and the brain machine interface and all that will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments so that an individual can go in, take whatever amount of whatever's safe for them, working with a clinician and really direct the plasticity while maybe stimulating the medial frontal cortex or increasing the observer or decreasing the observer in the brain or decreasing the amygdala. I mean, it's doable. It's doable with transcranial magnetic stimulation and it's for shutting down activity and it's doable with ultrasound. Ultrasound now allows very focal activation of particular brain regions through the skull, noninvasively. So it's approaching the same kind of therapy from different angles. One AI is the computational size of injecting like the robotics injecting like maybe you can even think about it as like electricity, the electrical approach versus then like the chemical approach. Absolutely. And then the psychology is subjective, right? So it's gonna take some real understanding of what that person's lexicon is. Like, you know, that wasn't a pun, sorry. I'm sorry, it's terrible, I'm like the worst. That's the one thing I know from the feedback on my podcast. My jokes are terrible, but I never claimed to be funny. But somebody who they really trust and understands when somebody says, you know, for a very stoic person, like I'm imagining you interviewed the great Dan Gable, right? I don't know anything about Dan, but can you imagine like you ask Dan, like, you know, how you feel about something while on one of these drugs? And like, I mean, his languaging might, if he says that was troubling, it might mean that it was very troubling or not troubling at all. So people are, language is a poor guide because if I say I'm upset, how upset is that? Well, that's very subjective. So you need, we need, can you build a tool for that? Can you build an AI tool for that? Yeah, deeper, yeah, well. Maybe that's the eye, maybe that's our, that's what the eyes could reveal. So language is not just words, it's everything together. And that's one of the fascinating things about the eyes and the window to the soul. I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes, the body, I mean, Lisa talks about that, the communication of emotions, it's a super complex. Perhaps it's a bit of a side fun tangent, but Matt, Matthew Johnson brings up DMT and the experience of DMT is from a scientific perspective, just a mystery in itself over its intensity of what happens to the brain. And of course, Joe Rogan and others bring it up as a very different special kind of experience and elves seem to come up often. I've never tried DMT, what allows for hallucinogenic states? And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule. There are a lot of people experimenting now with DMT and the way they've described it is as a kind of a freight train through space and time, very different than the way people describe LSD type experiences or psilocybin where time and space are very fluid, but it tends to be a kind of a slower role, if you will. So it's clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state that's distinctly different than the other psychedelics. And you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities. I mean, I think it's interesting because jujitsu is a nonverbal activity and people get together and talk about this nonverbal activity and they show great love for it in the same way that surfers, I've known some surfers in my time and they will get up at the crack of dawn and drive really, really far to sit in the water and wait for this wave to come. I have to imagine it's pretty fantastic. I think that human beings now, some of whom are in the scientific community are starting to feel comfortable enough to talk about some of these other loves and other endeavors because they do reveal a certain component about our underlying neurology. I'm fascinated by the concept of wordlessness, activities in which language is just not sufficient to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset, as important as sleep. I think that's one of the dangers of the phone is not that you're going to get into some online battle or that you're always staring at the phone is that it's a words. As we read things, we're hearing the script in our head. And I think getting into states where we are in a state of wordlessness is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing. And I believe also can help us tap into creative states and allow our neurology to access creative states. And sleep is one such wordlessness, period. So one of the most interesting things to me are states that one can approach in waking, non sleep depressed, wordlessness through, maybe it's jujitsu, maybe it's for some people surfing, maybe it's dancing, maybe it's just, I don't know, staring at a wall, who knows? But where the language components of the brain are completely shut down. And it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs, that the brain is entering and starting to states and starting to use algorithms that are distinctly different than when we're trying to compose things in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand. There's no interest in anyone else understanding what you're experiencing in that moment. And that's beautiful. And I think it's not just beautiful because it feels good. I think it's beautiful because it's important and it's clearly fundamental to our neurology. And your sense is there's a connection between dreams and DMT and like psychedelic, like all of the, you can understand one by studying the other. So for example, dreams are also very difficult to study, but they're more accessible. It's safer to study. And we're told we need to get more of it. Whereas with psychedelics, there's this big question mark. Is it gonna make everyone crazy? Is it gonna be legal? I mean, it's kind of interesting how, if one looks on Instagram, one could almost think that these drugs are already legal based on the way that people commute, but they're not yet. There's still a lot of them are scheduled. And there's a lot of questions. I mean, but nevertheless, it's like, my hope is that science opens up to these drugs a little bit more. It's just, I have this intuition that, like a lot of people share, that they would be able to unlock deeper understanding of our own mind. It's any kind of, same as studying dreams. Absolutely. Well, creativity is in the nonlinearities, right? But productivity is in the implementation of linearities. I mean, that's what is absolutely clear. This is why I think we were talking earlier about why a formal rigorous training in something where other people are looking at you and telling you, no, not good enough, go back and do it again. There's real value to that because otherwise it's just ideas. It's just vapors. You know, one thing that Matt mentioned as the study that they're working on is, as opposed to, I think most of the psychedelic studies they've done is on how to treat different conditions. And one of the things they're working on now is to try to do a study where, for creatives, for people that don't have a condition that they're trying to treat, but instead see how this, how psychedelics can help you create. So like. Goodness. If you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics, they're not gonna be able to get out of their room. I don't know. Well, but this is the, maybe you can speak to that, psychedelics or not, or dreams or tools in general, how to be better creatives. That's an interesting, I don't often see studies of this nature of like how to take high performers in the mental creative space and get them to perform even better. So it's not average people. It's like masters of their craft, like taking, I mean, his examples was taking an Elon Musk, which is in the engineering space and maybe musicians and all that kind of stuff and studying that. That's a, I mean, that's weird. Usually the science, the scientific exploration there has been done by the musicians themselves, as has been documented. Like jazz is like all nonlinearities, right? But if it's, but the people still have to know how to play their instruments, right? There's some early skill building that's critical. I mean, when you mentioned someone like Elon, I mean, virtual, I mean, he's already a virtuoso, right? Cause he, and in so many different domains, I've never met him, but it's clear, right? He, it's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave and all that, it's all that. And there's clearly a different way of looking at the same problems that everyone else is looking at. And people are probably banging their head against the refrigerator thinking like, think differently, think it doesn't work that way. It involves, there's a certain anxiety in for the, I'm not talking about for Elon, but I don't have no idea. But I think for somebody who's very structured, very regimented, very linear, the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities. And for the person that's very creative, the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities, right? The really creative artists or musician, they're, they seem nuts. They seem like they can't get their life together because they can't. And they, you know, we look at people who are kind of pseudo Asperger's or Asperger's or some forms of autism and they are so hyper linear, but you take away those linearities and they freak out. And that's kind of the essence of some of those syndromes. So I think that the ability to toggle back and forth between those states is what's remarkable. I mean, because we're here and we're having this discussion, I mean, Steve Jobs is a good example. He probably the best example, somebody who actually talked about his own process, about the merging of art and science, art and engineering, humanities and science. Very few people can do that. Well, you seem to have a capacity to do that. Like you know poetry and you are AI guy, like you, there's nothing linear about poetry as far as I can tell. I mean, I do wonder, just like we've been talking about, if there's any ways to push that to its limits to explore further. I don't like leaning, this is why I'm bothered there's not more science and psychedelics is, I haven't done almost, so I've eaten mushrooms a few times allegedly, but that's it. And the reason I don't do more, the reason I haven't done DMT is because it's illegal and it's like not well studied. And I'm in those things, I'm not usually at the cutting edge, but I'm very curious. And it feels like there could be tools to be discovered there, not for fun, not for recreation, but for like encouraging whether you're a linear thinking to go nonlinear or it's nonlinear to go linear, like to shake things up. You mentioned Dan Gable, the idea of Dan Gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me because he's such a control freak. I mean, he likes control. That I would show up for. That I would show up for. But like so much of these psychedelic experiences it feels like is for letting go. That's right. You don't wanna resist. That's supposedly where the growth is in giving oneself over to the process. And that's for people who are like master controllers. He's one of the greatest coaches of all time. It's fascinating to see what that battle looks like of resistance and then of letting go. Yeah, I mean, I can't wait to see where these studies take us. Well, it's clearly happening. You know, I've asked there, I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford who are doing animal studies. I've asked around, you know, it's, there's a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community about what the perception of a laboratory is if they work on psychedelics. I mean, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins. They are pioneers. And as Terry Signowski, he's a computational neuroscientist down at Salk says, I don't think he was the first person to say it. He says, you know how to spot the pioneers? They're the ones with the arrows in their backs. Yeah. And you know, it's an unkind world to a scientist that's trying to do really cutting edge stuff. My colleague, David Spiegel who studies medical hypnosis, he's got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis can be beneficial for pain management, anxiety management, cancer outcomes. And it's finally, you know, at the point where there's so much data, but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis, which is like the furthest thing from what he's doing. And I think mind, body type stuff, hypnosis, respiration and breathing. I think the hard science walk into the problem is always going to be best to get the community on board. And then it's up to people like Matt and to really, you know, take it to the next level. And as I say, not Keezy out of the game because Keezy basically was taking too much of his own stuff and he started dressing crazy of banana hats. And like, you see him, he had the magic bus. So, you know, the day I start driving to work in the magic bus, that's the day I lose my job. I'm not into buses or wearing fruit, but. You're going to get a phone call from me and I hope you do the same for me. It's like, dude, what are you doing? Well, what's interesting earlier, we were talking about the challenge with David that you're about to do. I mean, that is a psychedelic experience of sorts because you're biasing your mind towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state. And you don't know what you're going to find there. And that's kind of the excitement, at least for me as an observer. It's like, I want to know what the experience is like afterward. I want to know like, how was it? I mean, I'm sure you're going to get something. Like you said, you're going to grow. The question is how. And not resisting. I mean, it's the same as with the psychedelic experience. It's like not like giving yourself over completely to the experience and not resisting and going through the whole mental journey of whether it's anger or excitement or exhaustion, the whole thing. That's, I mean, that's the entirety of the process that David goes through when he does his own challenges and so on is that whole journey. He finds purposely like missile seeks the limits of the mind that whenever the resistance is felt, runs up against it and then goes to the full journey of going beyond it and seeing what's there on the other side. Well, stress has these two sides, the limbic friction of being tired and needing to get more energized. That's one form of stress. And then there's the feeling too amped up and needing to calm down. The typical discussion around stress is one thing, but it's all limbic friction. It's just that when I say limbic friction, that's not a real scientific term. I just mean the limbic system wanting to pull you down into sleep or wanting to put you into panic and you using top down processing, using that evolved forebrain to say, I'm not going to go to sleep and I'm not going to freak out. And those top down control mechanisms are, I mean, when those get honed, that's beautiful because then you're increasing capacity for everything. This month on the podcast, you're talking about neuroplasticity. You mentioned a bunch already. Is there something you're looking forward to specifically, like something maybe you're fascinated by that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity, this fascinating property of the brain? Yeah, I think that it's clear there's one facet of neuroplasticity that is very well supported by the research data that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world. And that's the release of acetylcholine from these neurons in the forebrain called nucleus basalis. This is mainly the work of Mike Merzenich, who used to be at UCSF and some of his scientific offspring, Greg Reckensown and Michael Kilgard and others. What they showed was increases in acetylcholine, this molecule associated with focus, in concert, meaning at the same time as some event, motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event, immediately reorganizes the neocortex so that there's a permanent map representation of that event. And I absolutely believe that this can be channeled toward accelerated skill learning. And my friend and colleague, Eddie Chang, who's now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, but also a fine scientist in his own right, not just a clinician, he's doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language using these principles. He trained with Merzenich. It's clear we have these gates on plasticity in the forebrain, and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission. And why that hasn't made it into protocols for motor learning, sport learning, language learning, music learning, emotional learning, I don't know. I think part of the reason has been kind of cultural is that scientists publish their paper and they move on. Merzenich talked a lot and still can be found from time to time talking about how these plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged. But he had a commercial company, and so then people kind of backed away from him a little bit. I think he was, to be honest, I think Merzenich was ahead of his time. And I think the timing is right now for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity and start to implement them. Also, it all sounds like becoming superhuman or optimizing or whatever, all that, yes. But also what about kids with language learning deficits or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general? I have a deep, interesting concern for the future of science and mathematics and not just in this country, but all over the world. And more plasticity equals faster, better, deeper learning. And if we don't do this, I don't think we're going to get the full reach out of all the machine learning tools either, because everyone talks about these huge data sets, but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation. I mean, we don't just like stare at the numbers and bask. So the human brain, I think, needs to leverage these plasticity mechanisms to keep up with the thing that's happening very, very fast, which is technology development. So that's a long winded way of saying basal forebrain, cholinergic transmission and plasticity, it allows for plasticity in adulthood and it allows for single trial learning, which is incredible. But how do we leverage that? Like in the physical space taking actions or is there some chemicals that can stimulate neuroplasticity? Like what? I think it's the intersection of the two. I think it's being engaged in a physical practice while enhancing pharmacology. And it has to be done safely. And this is full of open questions. This is the very beginnings of it, like you're saying. Yeah, a pill that's safe that increases nicotinic transmission. I mean, I know a number of people that chew Nicorette. Actually, I have a Nobel prize winning colleague at Columbia, not to be named, who chews like six pieces of Nicorette in a half hour conversation with him. And he started doing that as a replacement for smoking because smoking is nicotine nicotinic stimulation of the cholinergic system. So smokers have long known that increases focus and attention and learning. It's just that the lung cancer thing is a barrier. Now I'm not suggesting people take Nicorette, but it's clear that we need better directed pharmacology. But you can imagine next time you go in for a learning bout, if it's really essential, you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system if that's safe for you. Again, I'm a doctor. So again, I'm not telling people to do this, but that's where it's going. Until we start merging machines with pharmacology and behavior, we're just kind of walking around in the circle over and over again, and it's going to happen. Do you find computer vision, machine learning from the perspective of tooling as an interesting tool for analyzing, for processing all the data from the neuroscience world, from the neurobiology, biology, all the different data sets that you could have about the mind, the eye, the everything that's neck and above, and also the central nervous system and all? Absolutely. I think that computer science and engineering and chemistry, bioengineering, that's what's creating the acceleration and progress in neuroscience right now. I think it's actually one place where science, I'm very reassured, science has invited in psychologists, computational biologists, at least at Stanford, MIT, and other places too, of course, it's clear that it's a everyone's invited kind of party right now. That the major issue in the field of neuroscience, at least through my view, is that there's no conceptual leadership. No one is saying we need to work on and solve this problem or that problem. It's very fragmented right now. Now, the good news is people are communicating. So computer scientists and people who work on AI, machine vision are talking to biologists and vice versa, but it's very dispersed. Is there a lot of different data sets in your work that you've just come across? Is there a huge number of disparate data sets around neuroscience and so on? Well, there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff. So the Broad over in Boston and then on this coast, the Chen Zuckerberg Initiative, they did $3 billion to sequence every cell type in humans and in animals and I think their goal is to cure every disease by some date, I don't know, in the future. Huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression, that's valuable. I think no one really knows how to think about neural circuits and what is a neural circuit? Is it one structure? Is it two structures communicating? I think this is where I actually think that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works because it's tempting to think that the brain has all these cell types and circuits in order to solve specific problems. But it might be that the fundamental algorithm is to create cells and circuits that can solve variable problems. We know in the retina, just a very simple example is that we've always heard about like cones are for color vision and high acuity and rods are for night vision and non color vision. But at the dusk, dawn transition, certain cell types switch to do completely different, have a completely different function for viewing starry night versus what they do during the daytime. So neurons multiplex. And I think building machines that can multiplex and can evolve themselves is going to help us really understand what the brain is doing. We need to tease out the fundamental algorithms. We know they're like motion detection and spatial vision and things like that. I think machines are going to be much faster at that than our understanding of biology and how the brain does that. Basically, I'll be out of a job and people like you will have a job. Well, no, I think the main idea is that there won't be a job that's machine learning or computer vision. It's just, it's a tool that neuroscientists will use more and more and more and biologists would use. I mean, this whole idea that it will just be a tool that allows you to start expanding the kind of things you can study. Well, the next generation coming up, I can say this because I now I'm blessed to have a bioengineering student. They think about problems so differently than biologists do. We realized the other day we both came up with a set of ideas around a certain project and we realized that her version of it was the exact opposite of mine. And hers was far more rational. It's just an engineering perspective. It's like, why would we do that last? We should do that first. I think that the next generation is really interested in solving practical problems. So a lot like computer science and engineering was in the late nineties, it was like, you can go do a PhD in computer science and engineering, maybe, or you go work for a company and actually build stuff that's useful. I think neuroscientists and people interested in neuroscience are starting to think, how can I build stuff that's useful? And this statement is supported by the fact that many people in my business leave their academic labs, fortunately not all of them, but they leave their academic labs and they go work for companies like Neuralink. This is something I think we've spoken a few times offline about, I mean, speaking of computer vision, I'm fascinated by the eye. I did a bunch of work on the eye. So there's the neuroscientists, there's a neurobiology way of studying the eye, and there's the computer vision way of studying the eye. And the computer vision way of studying the eye of just like observing, noncontext sensing of humans is really fascinating to me and studying human behavior in different contexts, like in semi autonomous vehicles, it seemed like there's a lot of signal that comes from the eye, that comes from blinking, that's not fully understood yet. It's been in the lab, it's been used quite a bit to study like the dilation of the pupil, all those kinds of things are used to infer workload, cognitive load, all those kinds of things. But the pictures is murky. It's not completely well understood, especially in the wild, how much signal you can get from the eye, from the human face. I've downloaded Joe Rogan's, all of the podcasts he's ever done, video. You have the YouTube bank. I have the YouTube bank for a reason that this was before he went with Spotify. You own the archive. There's PubMed, and then there's the Joe Rogan experience owned by, or maintained by Lex. For my private collection. No, the reason I did it, and I did a really rigorous processing of it, which is like I extracted all of the faces, I did the really good blink track, the pupil tracking and the blink detection for the entirety of the, oh, I should say it's from episode like, I forget what it is, but it's like episode 900 when they switched to 1080p video. But it was like much crappier video. It's still kind of. Did you log when there was marijuana consumption or when they were drinking? I mean, there's so many. Because that's gonna, like just, it won't throw off the data, but it's relevant to the pupil data. So let's just put it this way. There's a lot of fascinating computer vision problems involved, but I only kept long sequences of data where the eyes detected exceptionally well. And I also removed people that were wearing glasses. I removed, there's certain people that have a way of moving their eyes and squinting where it's harder to infer like concrete blinks. They'll kind of have a squint the whole time. And their blink is very light. It's very tough to know what's an actual blink. So I wanted to. Then you got those baseball cap wearing guys. There are certain people that go on podcasts and wear baseball caps and don't reveal their, I don't know if they realize it or not until it comes out, but their face is completely obscured from vision. And from a computer vision perspective, people that wear makeup and usually women on their eyes, it complicates things. Like eyelashes all complicate things. So you can clean stuff up just so you have really crisp signal. You don't have to, you can deal with issues, but there's so many hours of Joe Rogan video. Anyway, I say all that because I was searching for an interesting personal experiment for me because I saw in drivers when I was looking at eye movement in drivers, it seemed to indicate, there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there that indicates amount of cognitive load, but it's not clear if there's something conclusive, but if there is some signal, that's a really powerful one because eye movement can be detected in the wild. Like you and I sitting here, I can detect eye movement really well. Pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator. And it's luminance dependent. Like if I turn toward a light, it's a route. People change size depending on level of alertness, arouse autonomic arousal, but also overall levels of luminance. It's very, very hard, but there are, I mean, you're sitting on a gold mine because there is a lot of interest right now in measuring state through noncontact sensing. Heart rate variability through changes in skin tone, just off a camera. Can you imagine that at the point where you just look at some video and you're like, oh, they're getting more stressed or worked up and they're not based on a heat map of some little patch on their face. Cause everyone's going to have this slight, sort of compartmentalize it slightly differently, but you can learn it pretty quickly. We know this when someone's like giving a talk and we see them starting to blotching on their neck. This is like the thesis defense response, right? We know it and it's a stressful situation because not passing your thesis defense is rough. And we can see that, but cameras can pick that up really easily at much lower levels than the blatant blotching kind of effect. And eye movements certainly are powerful indications of the state of the autonomic system. So do you think there are things from a high level that you can pick up from eye movement and blinking? Well, blink frequency is going to increase as people get tired, right? I've actually been teased a lot online cause I don't blink much when I'll do a post. And so I did a whole post about blinking, about the science of blinking. There's some data, very strong data, not from my lab that show that every time you blink, it resets your perception of time. They have people do these kind of track a kind of a Doppler like thing. And anyway, blinking resets your perception of time. There's a dopaminergic mechanism in the blink related circuitry of the brain. When people are very alert, they tend to not blink very much. When we're sleepy, we tend to blink more and our eyes tend to close. Now, some people are more hooded in the way their eyes sit. Some people are like this all the time. There are some very famous people. I'm not gonna name them because I might run into them at some point who were like accused of being sociopaths cause they don't blink very often. But they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal. They just don't blink very much. Also depends on how lubricated the eyes are. So I think within individual, you can get a lot of information. I don't think we can say this person's blinking a lot. They're lying, this person or they're tired. This person doesn't blink, they're stressed. I think if you understand that person's baseline, you can get it. And presumably, well, having been on the Joe Rogan Experience, I can say when you first sit down there, if you've never been in there before. You're in my data set by the way. Oh my. Well, I bet you I will admit to being, first time sitting down there. I mean, Joe was incredibly gracious, made me feel very comfortable there. But yeah, it's an intense experience. It's a small space too. Anytime you enter a small space from a big space in his old studio, you're familiar with, there's a breaking in period where you're getting to know somebody. And so I'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal front of the podcast were higher than later. But once you have a baseline established, you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks. Some people averting gaze too. If you have both people, that's really powerful. This is the holy grail, another holy grail of neuroscience. We've mainly looked at subjects in isolation. There hasn't been much brain imaging of two people interacting or even in animal models of two mice or two monkeys interacting. It's all like person scanner, bite bar. I mean, if you've ever been in one of these scanners, you're like in a bite bar. It's very medieval. And so you think in the interaction, there's actually, you can almost study them as a single brain or as a single system. The two brains are a single system. I think with AI. Highly correlated. Yeah, maybe are your blinks triggering my blinks? Are your non blink epochs extending my non blink epochs? There's a fascinating space to explore there and no one's done it. And because everyone let the Joe Rogan experience archive disappear, except for you. You grabbed, did you get the comments too? Because I think the comments were almost as entertaining as the conversation. You know what you just made me realize with the couplings, I have a better data set than the Joe Rogan podcast with high resolution video, which is the raw video for this podcast. So for example, both cameras right now are recording you and I full feed. The final result will switch cameras back and forth, but I have the full feed. So I can have the blinking for both you and I the whole time. I bet you people trigger blinks and in one another, you know, and there's also like the simplest way to think about the blinks and the attentional thing and the alertness is two fighters in the standoff. There's this whole lore around who blinks first. It's like they blink first. Well, what are we really asking? They're asking whether or not one person can maintain focus longer than the other person, which is an important parameter. It's not the only parameter, but it's an important parameter. And so that blinking contest, even though they don't square off as a blinking contest, it's well known that the first to blink is revealing something about their capacity to hold attention. You've started an amazing podcast that we've mentioned a few times. People should definitely check it out. It's called the Huberman Lab Podcast. It does your, it's basically, it embodies the personality of Andrew Huberman, which is like make science accessible, but also fascinating and giving it, like what do you call it? You give tools for everyday life, meaning it kind of grounds it like, what the hell does this mean for my life? But then also does the beauty of science at the same time. So I love both the rigor and the openness of the whole thing, plus the whole corrections things that we mentioned. Anyway, what's been the hardest part of this whole process? You're one of, already one of the only, and one of the best science broadcasters out there. So in that process, what's been the hardest, what's been the most exciting part? Wow, well, first of all, thanks for the kind words about the podcast. It was inspired by you. I absolutely, that's no BS. The last time we met to do an interview for your podcast, we talked a little bit about it and you gave me the subtle nudge that maybe there was a podcast there and I thought about it and I laughed and I was just like, I gotta do this thing. And you really gave me the encouragement to do it. And your podcast, this podcast has really forged the way. You've been tip of the spear on serious scientific, intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation. And so I, as your colleague and friend, but just even if those things weren't true, like this podcast was and is the inspiration. There's no question. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really, like 100%. And when I decided to do the podcast, the Huberman Lab Podcast, I thought really long and hard about what would work best and would be most beneficial. It turned out to be the hardest thing, which is to stay on a single topic for three or four or more episodes before switching to a new topic. Because I know from the experience of university and teaching in university, as you know as well, that there's always the temptation to pivot to something else, but the drilling into something really deeply is where the gems reside. And the challenge has been how to make it interesting, how to keep people on board, how to give people tools along the way, but also stay close to the scientific data. I like to think that we're headed in the right direction. It still needs to evolve, but that's been a challenge. I think I also am challenged by the fact that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners. So some people have asked for more names, like more bits and parts of the nervous system and cellular molecular mechanisms and all that kind of thing. And other people have said, I don't understand any of that stuff, but I think I'm keeping up. And so unlike a university course where there are prerequisites and everyone's coming to the table with more or less the same knowledge, I have a very limited sense of what the audience knows and doesn't know. So that's why I incorporated the feature of the comment section on YouTube, being a source of feedback. And I do kind of an office hours like episode every third or fourth episode where I address common questions. And I think that the podcast space in my mind, at least for the sort of podcasts I'm doing, needed a venue for the listeners to be a more integral part of the experience as opposed to just commenting on what they liked or didn't like. So while I like to hear what people liked and didn't like, I also really like to hear about, hey, tell me more about temperature minimums and how they can be used to phase shifts or cadient rhythms or whatever it is. And I realized that I'm probably losing some people along the way, but hopefully at the end of each month, and because of the way that the episodes are archived, people will come away feeling as if they've learned a ton and they have tools that they can implement. And perhaps most importantly, that they're starting to think scientifically about the tons of other stuff that's out there. So that's been the challenge and it's still really early days, but, and of course, there's also an intentional challenge. I realize that people are busy. Not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast about jet lag and shift work and raising kids and sleep and that kind of thing. I'm not raising kids, but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with, you know, and how parents can manage their sleep when kids aren't sleeping. So it's been, I'm hacking through the jungle of all this stuff, but, and I'll come right back to it. My inspiration and my North star on this is getting to a point where the audience that listens to this feels the same way that I do when I listen to your podcast. Thank you so much. Like when I turn into your podcast, I'm going to embarrass you a little bit more by complimenting you a little bit more, but not out of a sadistic thing, but just because when I tune into your podcast or Joe's podcast, I have the same sensation that other people have. Like, I feel like I'm home of sorts. I'm like, I'm familiar with the space and I'd like people to feel comfortable in the space that is the Huber and Lab Podcast, whatever that ends up being. Yeah, that's the magic of podcasting. It's like, I feel like I'm part of your life now in a way that, as a fan, that I wouldn't be otherwise. And, you know, like I never was able to have that with Carl Sagan, for example, you know? And that's a whole nother level of connection with a human being that gets you excited. And then I share your excitement about different topics in neuroscience or just biology in general. And then I don't have to actually understand everything you're saying to really enjoy it. So that's the magic of podcasting is like, you can go through like 10 minutes and not understanding what the hell a person is saying, and then you enjoy the excitement and then you reconnect to a thing that you do understand what they're saying. And, you know, that's, that personal coupled with the scientific rigor is magic. And finding the right, it's exploration. Like Joe found something that works for comedians, which is like, you know, having a good laugh, but also every once in a while talking seriously about difficult topics. The scientific space, it was unclear. You haven't had guests on. Not yet, but maybe you'll come on as our first guest. I was gonna invite my, I was gonna try to force myself in there. I am, I'm officially inviting you now. Will you come on the podcast? I would love to, I would love to. But it was hard. It's still a little bit difficult to tell people that no, you don't get it. We're not gonna talk for 10 minutes. We're gonna talk for three or four hours. It's a different, for scientists, for like, they're like, what are we gonna talk about? They think it's like the NPR interview. Yes. And they don't realize, first of all, I think at his best, if you're like at the level of Joe Rogan, who I think is an excellent conversationalist, you just lose track of time. It can be three, four, five hours and you lose track of time. I'm still not there. I find that it's still painful. Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes. You don't lose quite as much of track of time. It's still an intellectual effort. And I think it might always be as it would be with you because you're talking about difficult topics, maybe that require more brain. You're not just shooting the shit with like a Brian Red Band or somebody like comedians or just joking. What's like, remember those shows, like where those shows where someone would come out and like spin plates and they're running back and forth. Really good scientific discussion is like that. You have to be maintaining three or four different logical arguments and jumping back and forth. It's occasionally get into like a real streak of linearity. But as we found today that typically there's three or four different things that we're bouncing back and forth from. And that requires a lot of updating of these, you know, forebrain circuits. It's not a passive listening experience. But I like to think that the brain likes that. I do want to ask just cause we all, I don't want to forget the question came up to me is your podcast has the same kind of rigor that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has who's a history podcaster. Well, that's a definitely a compliment. Thank you. Dan's way, you know, he's something for me to aspire to. He goes through hell to prepare. He spends months preparing. It feels like you've had to really prepare for your podcast. I definitely prepare hard. How does that? Are you okay? Yeah. I mean, how much effort does that take? It feels like a conference presentation. Yeah. So we record once a week and in the intervening time, I listened to many university level lectures. So NIH has a bank of lectures. I have some sources of recorded university seminars. I'm trying to find the points of intersection. So like for four episodes on sleep, it's not like I'm going to just regurgitate a popular book or take one lecture and just poach the content. I'm going to find the overlap in the different elements. I also, so what I'll do is I'll generally read 10 or 15 papers and generally those are good reviews, annual reviews, any review of neuroscience, annual review of physiology, those kinds of things. I'll chase a few references. I'll listen to some YouTube videos, but of university level lectures. And then I throw all that on a whiteboard. Usually while I work out in the morning, I'll just be working out. I have a gym in my house and I'll just put up all these random ideas. I want to cover that dreams, hallucination. And then I take that and I start to eliminate, I draw lines between the common points of intersection. And then from that, I distill out an outline. And then I basically think about what I want to say on my walks with my dog. And I bother a couple of people and blab to them. So I would say each podcast, yeah, I put in 10 to 15 hours at least of passive listening preparation and maybe five or six of active preparation. So I do prepare quite a lot, but it has a certain reward component for me. To come up at the end with something that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying. It feel like there's something about my dopamine circuits that just love that. And the only pain is that a year later after I've talked about the stuff a bunch of times, it's so much more succinct, but that's life. At some point you got to pull the trigger. Well, I don't know what you think, but for me, YouTube is, that's why I'm sad that Joe left YouTube. There's a archival nature to YouTube that's kind of magical. And so I'm really glad you're now, you're doing a lot of educational content on Instagram and Instagram before, but now I'm doing this podcasting on YouTube. It's like, you know, it's like Feynman lectures. Like, I'm not saying every podcast, but there will be, you will have some, I could already tell there'll be some lectures which are like definitive, like really special ones. That's the hope. And there's some aspect that's archival to YouTube where at least I hope like 20 years from now, some kid is gonna watch a lecture of yours and it'll create the next Nobel prize, right? It'll create another dream that then becomes a reality. And then that's a special thing that YouTube provides. So I'm really excited that you're on YouTube. And at the same time, I'm excited to see where this thing goes because it seems like change is the cliche thing, that change is the only constant in these times because you're paving with this podcast, with this creativity, what you were doing on Instagram as well, you're paving the new era of what it means to do science. So actively doing research and actively explaining that research in new media. It's very interesting to see. I'm genuinely inspired by you. We had this discussion last time after the podcast recording, and it's clear that communication of science cannot be left to the existing institutions. And I'm not talking about universities. I just mean that the science section of newspapers is, sometimes there's some gems there, but generally it goes, you know? And I think you really have to know a field in order to extract the best things from that field. And my hope is that other practicing scientists and people finishing their PhD and postdoc and people who are running labs or working at companies will start to do this. I mean, how amazing would it be, for instance, if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints about not necessarily what they're developing because that's complicated for all sorts of reasons, but would talk to us about what the real challenges of building futuristic brain machine interface are like and what it means to understand a clinical problem and address it. I mean, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that, that somebody in the world of chemistry or synthetic materials or whatever it is will do this in a way that I could understand because I don't have expertise in those. I think it would be marvelous. And you were tip of the spear, you were out first, and I'm just happily trying to move along in the direction I'm going. But I think the future of science education is online. And I think that's gonna be scary to a lot of existing institutions, but it's not about disrupting anything. It's just about trying to do things better. Yeah, some of the best interviews, some of the best investigative journalism is done by people inside the field. Comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk, who I love the possibility that he gets a Pulitzer for that interview. But he grilled the crap out of Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood. I'm not sure if you're familiar. Oh, on Clubhouse the other night. Yeah, I saw you guys in there. I was kept out, I wasn't quick enough. My thumbs don't go fast enough. So I was, and I wasn't about to sit in the waiting room. Have you tried that social network, by the way, the Clubhouse? I've gone in there a few times and checked some things out. I'm there, I have a few questions about it that like if I'm in there, how one can participate or not participate. I like being a fly on the wall for those conversations. I've been very curious as to what's going on in there. Oh, it's quite, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts. Maybe it's useful to comment. I also have a Discord server that has a few tens of thousands of people on it. And then they have also a voice chat capability. So there's these get togethers. And I was using it in the spring and summer, like actively on those voice discussions. And it's anywhere from 10 to like 1,000 people all together in voice. Like anyone can speak anytime, right? But there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet. Only one person speaks at a time because they're all like respectful. And it's a community of like fundamentally respectful people, even though they're all anonymous. So like, except like me and a few others, it's all anonymous people. It's so interesting and it works. But the magical thing to me about that community was how intimate voice only communication can be. It felt as intimate as like a small get together at a home with close friends. It felt like there's a calmness to it. And you're revealing things about, you know, somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal. So those are the dark things or being super excited, getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend. Like just the depth of human experience shared on voice without video is, I was really surprised how intimate that is for human connection, especially in this time of COVID, it replaced that. So just to give you some context, there's something there. There's definitely something there. One thing that comes to mind is when like in Clubhouse, you have your little icon. So they don't actually, you don't see your face moving. I think when people see their own image, it puts them in a state of self consciousness that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar. So like Zoom is dreadful because if I'm not used to talking to people and seeing a little image of myself staring back at me in the mirror. And it's just, I know there are ways that you can adjust that, but it's really awful. And I think that when I get on Zooms now, I say hello and then I shut down the video component. And then I just talk in the end. I come back on just to show that still there, it's still me. But I think that voice only is really interesting. Eddie Chang would be an interesting person to talk to about this because he understands so much about how inflection communicates emotionality in deeper state. But there's a balance between, I think, just like you said, this is the privacy somehow allows for the intimacy. So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act, which I realize we do when we're visually presenting ourselves in remote communication. But I think that there's so few places where people can actually communicate without the fear of penalty. That's woefully absent these days. And so maybe people are just relieved to be in a place where they feel like I can say what I want or not say anything and it's okay. And so Clubhouse, to answer your kind of question is, there was a big improvement to me over Discord, which is it has tiers, it has a stage where people, the person that created the room can invite people up that would like to speak potentially, have the opportunity to speak. And then there's a bigger audience that don't get a chance to speak unless they click raise their hand and they get called on. So there's like a tier system that allows for there to be a group of like five, 10, 20, 30 people talking and a lot larger amount in the audience, which in Discord was the problems that everybody could talk. And the other thing about Clubhouse is everybody is strongly encouraged to represent themselves. So you're using your real name, it's not anonymous. And how many people were in that GameStop discussion the other day? They currently limit rooms to 5,000. So I'm sure maxed out at 5,000. There's a lot of overflow rooms. This is the cool thing about Clubhouse, really big people were on there all tuned in and having a conversation, having all from, all these different worlds being able to connect, even though without the niceties of like arranging the meeting, you could just show up and leave, which is really nice. But the reason for my lessons from Discord, I'm going to mostly stay away from Clubhouse. And I think. Or go in there under another name. Right. I'll pretend I know the actual, your actual name. Yeah, it's, I've learned, it's quite addicting. It's a time sink. It's so, the intimacy of it is you find yourself wasting quite a bit of time on there. It pulls you in. Well, it's interesting. They would in sort of going back to the podcast or earlier, we're talking about books or creating a technology. One thing that's absolutely clear is that anything that's easy to reproduce is probably not worth much effort and time. Yes. Right? I mean, most posts could be easily reproduced. You just repost them. Yeah. So now there are some original posts that for which the attribution goes to the original person and it's clear it came from you. But anything that can be easily reproduced is, doesn't really expand us very much as individuals or as groups. And most of what I see on social media is stuff that is purely reproduced. Yes. But I think Clubhouse, I mean, it could be that some real magic emerges on there. So in moderation could be good. The magic is, this is another thing that I've found through COVID that maybe you can think about is live. I used to be, not understand the appeal of live video or live connection or like in this Clubhouse live events. Because Clubhouse is technically, for the most part, it's not supposed to be recorded. Most people don't record most conversations. It's a one time live event. And there's a magic to that. There is. That's not captured by like your podcast or my podcast produced video that's like recorded, like packaged up. Well, anything can happen. It's that anything can happen. And that's the kind of thing like live concerts. I definitely, I love live music. And it's the idea that, cause you can always listen to the album. Actually the album usually sounds cleaner and better, but it's just this idea that anything can happen. And then you listen to like the parts, I don't know, you like a Costello did something weird. Your dog did something weird. And then you have to go, God damn it. You have to go to the kitchen or something to get something. And then you come back and it's funny. I watched live video like that of people and I'll be there for the whole time. I'll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back. It's not like I tune out. And that makes it like a richer experience for some reason. It's weird. Well, it humanizes it. Yeah, humanizes it. And I think there is this weird effect of whether or not it's a podcast, Instagram or Twitter or anything else. There's kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel and then a bunch of people with ears at the other end of those tunnels and shouting some things back. You know, that's kind of the format we're in. I think I'll check out Clubhouse again. I've gone in there a few times during the day and I was surprised to see how many people were in there in the middle of the day. I was like, aren't these people supposed to be working? But maybe that is their work. Well, be very careful about the time sink of it. But yeah, if you want to, you and I go together, we'll have a conversation on there. But one of the things you have to figure out, I don't still know how to do it, but how to exit. Which is like. And you just do the, isn't there the leave quietly button? Yeah, no, but like when you and I are on stage having a conversation, okay, you and I is harder. But like you really, if it's just you and I, then it's the usual human communication of like, all right, I gotta go. Like, but when it's like four people, you don't want to interrupt everyone and announce you're leaving. You just have to, I mean, there's a weird dynamic that I haven't quite figured out of. The etiquette isn't clear. The etiquette is not clear. Well, the etiquette on different platforms and how that changes is really interesting. You know, how YouTube has one etiquette, which is kind of, it's a lot of harshness is tolerated on YouTube video comments. Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram. Instagram, there's kind of, it seems to be a little. People are nice. People are really nice. People are really nice on Instagram for the most part, except for those phishing things. I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account poached by those copyright. They come in with those like, you violated copyright thing. There's all sorts of harshness in there that if you think about it in the real world, I like to think about Instagram as if it was the real world. Someone comes over and is basically saying like, hey, can I hold your wallet and go into the bank and I'll get some money out for you? And like, but there's this trust based on the format it comes in that it can almost get past your radar unless you're suspicious. If you took comments, like, you know, you're posting a lot of comments and you said, you just walk past 500 random people on the street and just listen to what they say, it's like, that's ridiculous. I don't have time for that. But the comments somehow take on this importance and this relevance. And you feel, we feel obligated to give them value, right? And so the online communities, the rules really are different. And they evolve with time, which is fascinating. With Clubhouse, it's a new social network, so it's evolving and people are figuring it out as you go. And the same thing with podcasting on video and like scientific podcasting. This is the cool thing when I look at what you've created, I'm learning, I'm thinking like, hmm, that's interesting to do it this way. Because like, I have nobody to copy. Not many people to copy, you know what I mean? Well, you threw out an idea. I'm not gonna put it out here now, cause I don't wanna, cause knowing you, you'll hold yourself to it no matter what. But when we talked about this issue of the challenge of staying on a particular topic for a while, I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there. Oh, no, no, no. That's separate from this format. And I love your interview format, but when you told me about that, I got really excited that you might go forward. I'm not gonna tell your audience what it is, but I will say this, it is super cool. I would have never thought about it. It's distinctly different than what I'm doing or what Lex is currently doing. And if you decide to do that podcast, I will be your first and your number one fan. And I know there are gonna be millions of other people interested in that. It would be amazing. So if you decide to go forward with the idea, that would be awesome. I was gonna say what it is, but now I'm not going to because, cause that's even more interesting. I brought up the clubhouse thing actually in Elon, because I just wanted to get your thoughts about something he's said a few times to me and in general, is that he's under a huge amount of stress. And I'm thinking of doing a startup now and kind of thinking about all of this. Cause I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science, but he says that his life is basically hell. It's very difficult. He looks happy, but he's probably very good at. He's fulfilled. He's fulfilled, but the stress levels, the constant fires that he has to put out. And he says that most people wouldn't want to be me. And that basically the reason he does what he does is because there's probably something wrong with him. Like it's not, he can't help it, but do that. Kind of beautiful in a kind of Russian masochistic way. Well, I just wonder the stress. I mean, I'm sure you can imagine the kind of stress he's under because, so it's running three plus companies and there's constant, he says that every single meeting is not about like, should we install a coffee maker in the kitchen? It's like, this rocket is going to blow up and we're all fucked. I don't know what to do. And we have to, you have to fix, you have to fix real like big problems there. And like, how do you deal with that? What do you think about that kind of life? One, is there a way to walk through that fire? And two, should you walk through that fire? Well, I mean, without knowing I've never met Elon, but certainly we have common friends in you and in other people that he worked with long ago in the PayPal days, all of whom speak very highly of him and show, express immense admiration for the number of things that he can maintain. I think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than most people do in a decade. It's clear. And that what he does would dissolve most people into a puddle of tears. Mostly because of this whole thing about the brain working hard equates to thinking about duration path and outcome and anticipating outcomes given A, B, C, or D, a lot of very scripted linear thinking and prediction. And that is hard, it's stressful. It requires intense neurochemical output. And he's doing that for multiple projects. So presumably he's buffered himself from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues, but he is himself, unless there's something I don't know, he's walking around in a biological system. He is. Yes, allegedly, yes. Yeah, allegedly. So, and I don't wanna reveal too much here, but I have a common coworker and colleague through some contract work I do that what I can tell you is that he's accessing the best resources in terms of how to optimize his biology. And he's thinking about that, not just for himself, but for all of Neuralink. Because I think, I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think there's the scale of the individual, but then there's the companies that he's creating. And you've got people there that you could imagine if they're working at 10% better capacity or can focus 5% better for 20% of the day, you're looking at a enormous increase in productivity and a reduction in the time to reach goals, which will reduce the amount of stress presumably on Elon, unless he goes and starts another endeavor. So I think it's certainly not healthy for most people. It seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits. I'm also really struck by the fact that he has a family and he's got kids growing up and a relationship and all that, so it's super impressive. I think that, I don't know, how old is Elon? He's 40, I mean, pushing 50, I think 48. Even more impressive. Because many people who've been at exceedingly high output for a decade or more don't do well. Their system breaks down. Well, this is what he was saying. Actually, I mean, I don't listen to all of his interviews, but on that live on the clubhouse, he mentioned that he was kind of worried, it's interesting, he was worried that sometimes, what I think he said is, I'm worried that at some point my brain is just going to fail because of the amount of load it's under, like how much I have to think through throughout the day, like how many problems you have to think through. Like, it's like puzzles, it's constant puzzle solving. I would be concerned about taking somebody who's in that regime and suddenly putting them into a regime where they don't have enough to bite down into. It's like my bulldog, Costello, he's happiest when chewing and tugging at that big old neck of his, and he is just not going to become a retriever, he's not going to, he does well and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling. And it seems like Elon has ended up where he is by way of his natural leanings. Unless there's a backstory that's trauma based or something, and I don't even begin to think that there is, it seems that he has, he's one of those rare individuals in history that has an immense drive to create in all these different domains. I'm just saying the obvious here, but it seems like that's what makes him tick. I mean, you're doing an awful lot too. Well, the problem is not really, the problem is I've been on the verge of pulling the trigger on starting a company, which will increase the workload significantly. And I'm attracted to that because of a dream I have, but it's a little bit scary because it can destroy you in a lot of ways. There's two sources of destruction. So one source is, I've, for the first time in my life, a few months ago, I think, have gotten, this feels like such a noob thing to say it, but I've gotten some hate on the internet. No. I know, right? No. But like, I am such an idiot. I'm so naive to, it was, I had the question that I guess a lot of people have when they get hate on the internet. It's like, mom, why are these people making up stuff about me? That kind of feeling of like, why are you saying that? And the reason I mentioned that is like, well, if you wanna go and start a business and do, as I think people should when they start a big, ambitious business, really try to go big. Like, what does success look like in terms of your emotional journey? You're going to have a lot of people who make up stuff about you, who say negative things. I mean, majority, hopefully, if you do a good job, will be supportive and, but there's still going to be this army of people there. And like, that was scary to me because of how much emotional impact that had on me. Well, and I also know a little bit, I have some glimpse into the fact that you put your heart and soul into everything you do. You're not a, you're lighthearted about certain things, but you're even lighthearted about being full gas pedal 24 seven. There's kind of this, Laird Hamilton always says, the big wave surfers, he always says, bright light, dark shadow. And I think it's that intensity. And when you do that, and then suddenly people are starting to like, throw some paint on your picture, you're like, wait, hold on, you know, you're going max capacity. But I think the company is interesting one because you've talked about doing this company before. I've been afraid. I just not been pulling the trigger out of fear because I enjoy this life. This is, it's starting to interrupt. It's ultimately this question of taking a leap is like, say you're in academia, it's like you're at MIT, you're, I really love doing research at MIT. I really love that life. Why take a leap out? You know, but I did because it's been a dream, but now accidentally along the way, I found this podcasting thing, which is also really fulfilling. And you know, it's like, why take a leap? Cause you have a huge lust for life. Yeah. I mean, that's you. I mean, sometimes when I'm on the internet and I think, is this, you hear about it like, oh, it's addicting, you know, YouTube's addicting all that. Actually, sometimes I think maybe that's true, but a lot of times I just think there's so much here. There's a lot of garbage, but there's so many gems out there in the world now. It's almost like, sure how you allocate time is key, but I think you can do it all. Not, maybe not five more things, but all. And one thing, I just had this idea and this is not grounded in any scientific paper, but I think the answer might come to you during this torture that you're about to get yourself through with David, because in those mental states, you're really asking the question, right? You're asking the question, where is my capacity? And am I even close to my capacity? And if I am, what's of the most value? I think we find the answers to those things in those nonverbal, nonanalytic states. It just comes to us. I hope you're right, and I hope it's a profoundly fulfilling experience as opposed to one that leads to my demise, but. You have a will, right? It all goes to the hedgehog. Yeah, exactly, to the hedgehog. Now it all makes sense. Andrew, like we talked about offline and on this podcast, I do hope we write some stuff together, do some research together. You're one of the most inspiring scientists, speaking of communicating to the world. So I can't wait to see what you do with the podcast. I'm already a huge fan. I've been telling everybody about it. I can't wait to see you talk to Joe as well soon. And I can't wait to see what kind of paper we write together. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you, that project's gonna be a lot of fun. Can't wait, and thanks again for having me on. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our sponsors, Master Class Online Courses, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to get a discount, and remember, now is the time to sign up to Master Class if that's something you've been on the fence about. And now, let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson. We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity | Lex Fridman Podcast #164

The following is a conversation with Josh Barnett, one of the greatest fighters and submission wrestlers in history, with an epic 25 year career that includes being the UFC heavyweight champion and countless other accolades. He also happens to be one of the most intelligent and brutally honest human beings in all of martial arts, and especially so about his appreciation of and fascination with violence. Quick mention of our sponsors, which feels ridiculous to say after that introduction. Mung Pak low carb snacks, Element electrolyte drinks, Eight Sleep self cooling mattress, and Rev transcription and captioning service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I've been a fan of Josh Barnett for a long time. This conversation was indeed a long time coming, and I'm sure we'll talk many times again. For what it's worth, I'm a student of combat sports and admire when they're done at the highest level, either through masterful execution of skill or relentless dominance of pure guts. For context, I'm a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and have competed in wrestling, submission grappling, Jiu Jitsu, Judo, and even catch wrestling, which is a variant of submission grappling that Josh is one of the great practitioners, scholars and teachers of. I could probably talk for hours about what I've learned from my time on the mat, but if I were to say one thing, it is that the mat is honest. You can't run away from yourself when you step on the mat. It reveals your fears, the lies you might tell yourself, all the delusions you might have, or at least I had, that there's anything in this world that can be achieved except through blood, sweat, and tears. That honesty, taken to the highest levels, as is the case with Josh, creates the most special of human beings and definitely someone who is fascinating to talk to. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Josh Barnett. Who were the philosophers and philosophical ideas that influenced you the most? Are we just jumping right in? That's it. We're right in. We're not, no foreplay on camera, all right. I had an interesting philosophical journey, at least I think it's interesting, and that was, I think, as far as organized philosophy or maybe, authentic's not the right word, but like, yeah, we'll say organized. I would say that Nietzsche is probably one of the people with the most influence on me, but I also feel like, to a degree, your personality will oftentimes dictate what philosophers that you can vibe with, yeah. So what ideas from Nietzsche, was it the Ubermensch? Definitely the Ubermensch is huge to me because I see it as an extension of basically the religious concepts of God and higher ideals, but just put into a different, a secular context. And the idea also that the Ubermensch is striving and overcoming something that you're always working towards that very few will ever, it's not like the concept that you can just make them. It doesn't happen that way. And it's not based simply upon if you were, say, put through a genetic program and turned into a super soldier, like that wouldn't make it. That's like the very surface level and incorrect understanding of what the Ubermensch is. The Ubermensch is the idea of this kind of human that transcends all the weaker, lower aspects of humans, which we're full of. But I also think that there's an element in Nietzsche's writing that suggests that it's not something you can even be in all the time. Like it's even a temporary state because it's not something that we're capable of maintaining. It's something to strive for. Like a morality, an image, an ideal, a set of principles that we can connect to that doesn't rely on otherworldly kind of out there things. It's deeply human. With Nietzsche, I feel like the concept of the Ubermensch is something built on authenticity as well. Heidegger was like Dasein, right? So when you are authentic and Heidegger being a follower of Nietzsche's and highly influenced by him, I think that the Ubermensch is an example of authenticity in that it isn't about trying to be anything that you cannot be or to go against who you are, but to actually understand that, accept that, and then work with what you can work with and create from your lump of clay that is you. Because I can't become... There's certain things that are just not gonna happen for me because it's not in my proclivity. I mean, I'm never gonna be five foot tall and 120 pounds, I mean, that again, I guess. But I know, as you get more in tune with who you are, as you start learning more about what unique things or at least what that combination that makes you, that gestalt part of yourself, what those things are and how you can use them, then you can work towards being that, taking what that is and seeing if you can get to that point. Now, the likelihood is, no, maybe, probably never. I mean, but we can never achieve Godhood yet. Religion is a constant striving and a look at a higher ideal concept. Even if it's multiple gods or one God, it's still essentially all built around this concept. I like the idea of Catholics original sin. If you think of sin, not as evil, but as missing the mark, the archer's term where it derives, or even like in Spanish, you know, without. So as being, if you accept that you are imperfect, if you accept that you need to constantly strive even against yourself, because you will figure out the best ways at which to submarine your own capabilities, submarine your own dreams and wishes and whatever, you will ruin them more than anything else. And you will tell yourself that you ruined them on purpose for a good reason, or you'll say that you'll figure out a way to put it on everything else but yourself. And so the idea of thinking of, well, as I'm starting off on this whole thing, I got a lot of work to do, and that's just the way it is. And I gotta figure out what areas those are gonna be. And so, you know, I thought, oh yeah, if I think of original sin actually can be, that can be kind of a clever idea, but it's also just accepting that we're all uniquely strange and unequal in our own ways, but we have to figure out how that fits in. The word authenticity kind of connects to all of that. So striving to be your authentic self means figuring out exactly the shape of the flaws, the character of your little demons that you get to play with and around them finding a path to whatever the hell ideal versions of yourself you can carve and pretending like that's such a thing as even possible. The other idea about Nietzsche is on his idea of morality. He presents the argument that morality is a human illusion and that there's not such a thing as good and evil, and these are all kind of constructs. Do you think there's such a thing as good and evil that's connected to some objective reality? I think that there are some, I actually do believe that there are some universals. I'm not Kantian in any way, but I do think that there are some universals. And the thing that actually brought me to even the concept of that was Jung. So Jung's concept of collective unconsciousness and then taking that thought and then applying it to looking through history and the most varied history you can find. So I would say probably religion is your earliest one that you can get for written history or written examples of human behavior and psychology at the furthest that we can look into it from man's hand to whatever the medium is, cuneiform or whatever. But as you do that, and then let's say going from Mesopotamia to India to Europe and just going from all these places, as disparate as they may seem, as many different cultures and ethnicities and religions and how the religions will vary quite a bit from monotheist to polytheist and so on and so forth. But then just seeing how there's all the through lines. And of course, Campbell, he did this much earlier than me thinking about it. But I think that by looking at things that way and starting to find the threads instead of always just looking at everything as being its own compartmentalized concept as if it only applies to this time, this people, like getting overly pomo about it is just a really idiotic postmodern. So you think that there is, just like with Joseph Campbell, there's a thread that connects all of these stories, narratives that we constructed for ourselves as we evolve. And that thread is grounded in some kind of absolute ideas of maybe on the morality side, which is the trickiest one of good and evil. Somewhat, yeah, I think that a lot of this stuff is just derived from a biological perspective. I feel like these things are innate within us. Do you think our innately humans are good? No, I don't. I feel like, I also feel like there's the issue of scale too. Like Nassim Taleb likes to talk about how he views his, the way he interacts with groups in terms of scale. What is this thing about like at the familial level, I'm a communist and then at the civic level, I'm a Republican or something. And at this other level, and then it goes on at the widest level, he's a libertarian or something of that nature. Like fundamentally human interaction changes. On scale. On scale. And scale and also from subjective to the environment around them. So, and I don't even mean environment just in the sake of physical environment, nature, right? Like nature is constantly trying to murder you. Well, it's not really trying. It's just nature's being nature. The universe is the universe. And at times it takes you out. It's just not with any particular compunction or prejudice. It's just, oops, you know, sorry, there's no more dodos. My bad. But don't you think the particular flavor of the complexity that is the human mind was created, like let me make an argument for that all people are fundamentally good. Okay. Is there's an evolutionary advantage to being, to striving to cooperate, to add more love to the world of like compassion, empathy, all that kind of stuff. And that the very thing that created the human mind was this evolutionary advantage, whatever the forces behind this evolutionary advantage. And scale, yes. So when we're dealing with a small tribe, sure. When you meet another tribe, maybe. There's other factors that are going into that. Let's say you scale up. And so your 150 has exceeded their 150. And like, you start to get to a certain point where you can't really be close enough to someone down the line of some of that next, like that 150 is 150, 150. And they just now all of a sudden become some guy, whatever. And when it comes to some guy, once it starts hitting scale, I don't know that it's capable. People can be as magnanimous to a stranger as to the known. If they orient themselves to be secure enough, because it does come to security, insecurity in one way or the other, either brought on by the unknown, brought on by an actual threat, brought on by even their own, as we would use the word insecurity in that their own insecurity within their own capabilities, their own belief in themselves, all these things can change things from being compassionate and what have you to at least at the very least, maybe not evil, but self interest driven to the point of a negative results for those that aren't, you know what I mean? Right. But another way to frame that is maybe it's less about scale and more about the amount of resources available. So if we're overflowing with resources in terms of security and safety, all the things you've mentioned, if we have more than enough resources, then the way we treat a stranger, the way we position ourselves towards that stranger might be in a way that allows us to be our real human selves as opposed to sort of our animal self. And therefore it's mostly about how clever can we descendants of Abe's be in coming up with all cool kinds of technologies and ways to efficiently use the resources we have such that we're not constrained. And my hope is that human innovation will outpace the growth of our, the number of people that are starving for resources. Yes, I think that there's a lot of rationality behind this argument. And in some ways I agree and in a lot of ways I see it as missing the point of how this experiment has been playing out across time. When you look at what, for one, it's like define resources. What is a resource of as humans would define it, right? Or wealth even. And so you can say, well, an iPhone's a resource, the internet's a resource, water obviously is a resource. But if we weigh them, what is more important to human beings, water, internet or iPhones? It's water, right? So if we look at resources, if we start with what do human beings need to live? I mean, actually live, not live here in this bullshit fantasy creation extension of our own ingenuity and a prison of our own creation and also a paradise of our own creation. But this is not how human beings normally live. This is all built upon stuff, it's built on concept, on idea and some of it's built on just, well, this is the paradigm so this is what you do. Human beings need food, they need water to survive, they need shelter from the elements and they need certain skills to perpetuate these things and be able to pass them down so that they can, so that these things don't become, you don't end up in this gap where you have to relearn things because if it's lost, then that time before you can get it back again is going to be dark ages of sorts or it's going to be highly detrimental to your group because not knowing how to fish, not knowing how to hunt, not knowing how to even clean and cook the game once you have it could be lethal. That's fascinating to think of that as a basic resource, the knowledge to attain the very low level things of water. Right, and we'll figure it out. We did it once before and we've done it over and over and over and over again. It's just costly. Yes, it has costs for sure. But when you think of how you look at the, well, we'll just deal with the first world of the West. You look at the pathway of Western civilization and its growth and then you look at how technology injected into it over time, how it magnifies things or pushes things at orders of magnitude faster and then the internet comes along and even faster. So you're watching industrial revolution to, what is it, the capacitor and then so on. It goes further and further. And as the internet and technology, especially on the electronic side of things, start increasing in capability, it massively outpaces even our necessity for it at times. It becomes, you know, plant obsolescence happens quicker and over and over and over again and wealth increases, increases, increases, increases in terms of the things that we're able to acquire, right? I mean, I've seen homeless people with smartphones, you know, so we're living in the most wealth laden, luxury laden age of all of humanity yet. What happens when we see calamity or people go on hard time? What are the things that they value? You know, what do people go to an argument about the cost of things that are luxury items generally and not necessity items? You know, we get into fights about things that are at the end of the day, not necessities to us. You know, people are so concerned about Netflix and the internet and personally, I'm very concerned about the internet because I look at it as my own little personal library of Alexandria in my pocket. That's what I love about it. And the ability to have a tool as effective as it is, even though I'm in a constant battle to not let that tool become a vice or to become something that actually brings me to a lower state. But are we willing, the question is over the, are we willing to murder each other over Netflix versus murder each other over water? We're willing to murder each other over water. That's a given. Right, but that's our animalistic selves. Well, it's also a necessity for, it's animalistic, but it's also either you do it or you don't, right? Like unless somebody's willing to share that water or if that water is of such a limited capability or such a limited amount, then you will have to murder to have that water. Netflix, the argument is the higher, we get up to this hierarchy of what we consider in Los Angeles resources, we're less willing to be, to commit violence. We're less willing to commit violence, I would say over Netflix, but we are willing to commit violence over Netflix, over everything associated with Netflix, over televisions, over sneakers, over, you know, I mean, when we look at a good, I mean, the majority of the stuff that came with the riots, I mean, it was used car dealerships, targets. I mean, and then you look and it's like, well, okay, well, what are people, what do they gotta, what are they so hell bent to get out of this whole thing? And I'm even talking about the ideological elements or anything like that. Just like, okay, something's going on, boom, looting, whatever, you know, what are you gonna loot? You know, you'll have AOC say, oh, people needing bread. I didn't see a single loaf of bread. You know, I saw televisions and shoes and you know, but to me, it is poetry in a sense, because you get to see who we, how we actually are operating, you know, what is becoming first principles to most people. But wait, wait, but you could also argue though, those riots were more like the madness of crowds, which is definitely a lot more than just that. I'm just saying that given a chance, it's like, okay, boom, the lights are off, the grid is down. We've hacked into the whole system, turned into an 80s movie. And you have the ability to go get ahold of whatever it is that you think is most important. And what do we do? And I say, we, as in, you know, including all of us, we grab a TV, we attack it. We break into a sneaker store in Melrose. We do, it's just like, ah, we still giant cause statues where the value of that is completely market driven. Like it's just a piece of polypropylene or whatever, butyl and you know, it's cool. I'm a big fan of art, but it's like, you know, I can't eat that. And at the end of the day, man, you're sitting there with your, like, what'd you do today, honey? What'd you get? You know, man, we were able to, you know, oh, I got this, I got this designer art statue. Are you going to go, well, you can't really sell it on the, on like the art markets where people were really going to pay for it. So are you going to become an underground art dealer with your one piece of cause art? One interesting thing you just said before I forget it, you mentioned the library of Alexandria and your. Phone. Well, your phone, but also just thinking of your little world that you're creating for yourself on the internet. That's a really powerful way to actually phrase it. One of the things that you've been on Joe Rogan several times. Although everybody always comes to me and go, oh, that was so great. I didn't know you, you're on, you've on Joe Rogan. I go, this is like my fifth time, dude. I've been a fan of yours for a long time from other avenues. This is a long time coming actually. Everybody, you have no idea. Like how many times through messaging and missing each other over the years. This is ridiculous. This is a long time coming. You don't realize how special this is for us. This is, well, I'm also starstruck. We'll talk about this, but you symbolize something very important to me through my journey, through wrestling, through Jiu Jitsu, through Judo, through just street fighting, through just combat. There's a, you're the, in some sense, the devil on my shoulder of like, of violence. In a good, in a, devil gets a bad rap. He does get a bad rap. I realize, you know, sitting encased in ice down at that low ass level, you know. Yeah. But, you know, the angel side is more like the athletic, the sport, the science, the technical, the chess side of things. So, but on the library, Alexander, let me ask, because you were on Joe Rogan, it does make me really sad. And I realize that I'm just probably being romantic that his, most of his library of interviews that were on YouTube have now been taken down because he went to Spotify. And that was the first, I'm probably an idiot, but it was the first time I realized that this knowledge that we've been building up on the internet doesn't necessarily last forever. No, it doesn't, unless you preserve it. I mean, it's like all things. If you do not preserve them, if you do not make efforts, you know, so many of my, it just really brings the minor off the top of my head. All my, so many friends of mine that are Jewish, you know, they're basically secular. But yet through even the secular aspect of just keeping the traditions alive, it's like, well, you could always pick a book and read about it. Clearly, it's called the Torah. But if you don't put these things into action, if you don't make them a part of your consciousness, maybe even on the subconsciousness, just through repetition, they will die. They will become simply something that exists somewhere until you find it again. And Carl Gotch used to say something, he would say that I don't invent moves, I just rediscover them. But yet Gotch and Billy Robinson also would understand that you, if someone's not carrying the torch, it'll go out. Now that doesn't mean fire can't be rekindled. It just means that it, that torch no longer is lighting the way on this knowledge. And so it's important to be an individual, even on an individual level, to be a repository for aspects of knowledge. You mentioned Gotch. You consider yourself a catch wrestler. So I've mentioned to you offline that I competed in a couple of catch wrestling tournaments. Can we go Wikipedia level at the very basic, you're the exactly right person to ask, what is catch wrestling? And what are its defining principles? I would say the easiest way for us to talk about and give an overview of what catch is in the simplest terms is think of collegiate wrestling with submissions. That is essentially what catch is. And it's not surprising because collegiate wrestling is actually derived from catch as catch can. It's just that over time certain aspects were removed from the competition structure so that they became null elements, things that were discarded. But it's funny that you can take a high level amateur collegiate types and you can show them a move and then add a little bit to it and go, oh, well, hey, that was just like what we already do here, but except, oh, I didn't know you could take it all the way to this point. Or things of that nature, especially when it comes to professional wrestling, teaching people like, no, I know you're just using this in a show, but this is actually a real move and here's how it really feels. And so collegiate wrestling and wrestling in general for people who are not aware is basically two people start on their feet and they have to score, they're trying to take each other down and they score points along the way. You can end matches by pinning them, for example, on their back. I think one way to describe wrestling is it's very much about figuring out ways to establish control and leverage in these kind of tie ups, or there's different styles where you can do more from a distance to where it's more about the timing and all that kind of stuff. Ultimately, it's an art of like both upper body and lower body and you could choose the different puzzles that you solve there. You could be attacking the head, the arms, you could be attacking the legs. There's also part of collegiate wrestling that's on the ground that has more, what's called like a referee's position or whatever. The referee's position where you're on your hands and knees basically. And so. Do you understand what that's supposed to simulate? Why is that one of the standard positions? It's one of the standard positions because one, it's one of the easiest ways to actually get up, but two, it's because you cannot be on your back. If you're on your back, you're getting pinned. And back exposure or being pinned is pretty much the universal wrestling thing. One, taking the guy from their feet to the floor and two, pinning them. As you go from like, what is it? Cornish wrestling, Turkish oil wrestling, Mongolian, Sumo, Indian, well, they'll call it Palwani. It's also called Kushti, Jiu Jitsu, Judo. So many of them is like, there's a, you sombo, even if it doesn't end the match, it's still like one of the most important aspects of the competition itself, across almost every style. And this is where submission, like catch wrestling or submission wrestling or Jiu Jitsu feels different, which it seems like for most wrestling, for a lot of wrestling, the dominance is the goal, as opposed to submission, which I guess those are two are related, but dominating the position. So that's what pinning is. It's almost like breaking your opponent, like breaking through all of their defenses to where they're completely defenses and you could do anything with them that you want. Maybe that's what could be a definition of dominance. I don't know. I mean, it sounds very much like a chain to a radiator. Yeah. Yeah, there's a threat that connects all runners, but submission feels different. It is actually different when you think about it across the landscape. I don't think radically different, but just still slightly different. And that if you think of wrestling as being derived from combat, right? So, well, it is combat sports, but more lethal combat. Getting somebody off their feet and onto their back is about as lethal a place for the person on bottom to be in general. I mean, don't come at me with your talks about your fucking worm guards and blah, blah, blah, and whatever spider, bear, okay, get out of here with that. We're not talking about you in this highly regimented sporting environment. We're talking about general, all the body hair, none of the waxing human beings. So getting someone on their back, okay, as you're trying to get up, you're getting hit with a rock or stabbed or what have you set on fire, who knows? Generally, these conflicts are not just isolated to one on one. If it's four on two, your buddy that was with you back to back, now he's on his back. What do you think? And now it's gonna be one on one while three go on one. So, and then you elevate this to armored combat, right? And it's boom, put them on the ground. Oh, crap, it's hard to get up. Well, while you're struggling to get up, stab. That's where jujitsu's concepts come from with all their leveraging and off balancing is, oh man, if I end up in this situation in tight close quarters combat, yes, we could fight it out with swords and knives and what have you, but it's way easier if the first thing I can do is foot sweep you on your back and then pull my knife and just go stick. Is there a thread that connects all of these different arts from not just arts, but from the very base violence of war, just like you said that there's no rules to the very regimented IBJF. I do. Jiu Jitsu tournaments and just, you've kind of laid out some of it, but can you go all the way to the. So when you start off with absolute skills in the sense of absolute offense and defense in the taking or preserving of life, right? Full on at its purest form of self defense and self preservation, okay? And then you extrapolate part of that in that all animals train in violence. All play usually degenerates into some sort of soft violence. So be it cats when they're kittens and puppies and everything learns how to kill, how to fight. Not that, you know, just that dumb alpha meme stuff where the idea is that, oh, by being alpha, that means you run around like basically just being a bully and a shithead. No, actually alpha wolves spend very little time fighting because if you were actually alpha, you don't get into fights, there's no need to. And if you're probably getting into any large amount of fights, it's probably because you're being shitty at being an alpha and now people are tired of you being in charge. And yet in the animal world, and it would be the same for human beings at that base beginning level of violence, there's a big risk. So I know that we live in this place with healthcare or you might be in a place with nationalized health, whatever, right? So there's band aids, there's penicillin, there's all that kind of stuff. But that's not the normal way of things, you know? Yeah, there's a channel that just hurts me every time. I used to follow it and I had to unfollow it because it was too painful for me as a human being called Nature is Metal on Instagram. It was sobering and then it was like, this is too sobering. It's very sobering. So in there, the risk is at its highest level. The damage you take, the winner walks away hurt. Getting lamed when you need every aspect of your physical and athletic faculties to survive because this isn't the first and it's definitely not gonna be the last, especially if you're the slowest one. What is it, there's a lyric from a clutch song. Don't go for the fat ones, just go for the slow ones. Oh man, but that's the universal truth of the way nature works. You said it's not cruel, it's not cruel, it's just the way it is. Yeah, I mean, watch animals getting into fights on any of these sort of documentary stuff. You'll see an intense short and then dispersal. You'll see as soon as one feels like things have switched just enough to boom, the bear or whatever it is takes off. It's like, I'm done with this. Because if you can get out of there with just some scars and what have you, okay. You lose an eye, nah, it's not as good. You really get hurt bad and get infected, you're done. So there's a serious risk to be that can come with these sort of things. Yet, I believe that we are inherently born for at least aspects of and use of violence. And so at the end of the day, we need these things not just to, not just survive each other, but they're a part of being able to hunt and other things. So violence is a part of human nature. Violence is, it's an absolute. It is in every person, it is a part of every interaction, it is a part of every law, everything. And I'm not, by the way, I'm not an ANCAP. So don't even, don't hit your wagon to me on that one. ANCAP is anarchic capitalist. Anarchic capitalist, yes. Not an ANCAP. They have nice book shops. Yeah, they do. I mean, I'm not gonna sit here and shit talk ANCAPs. Although I also used to get into the conversations with an ANCOM, anarcho communist, a good friend of mine. And he would bring up this stuff and I'm like, yeah, cool, man, I'm down with anarchy. You ain't gonna like it. What do you mean? I go, cause I'm gonna take all, I'm gonna gather all kinds of people together. I'm gonna make this, I'm gonna get the strongest together and I'm going to take your shit. Okay, can I ask you on that topic, I have a friend of mine now, a fellow Russian, Ukrainian, Michael Malice. Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with Michael Malice. I watched a little bit of your guy's show. I watched a little bit of your guy's conversation. So this is really good to ask you because... I like how he's in the white suit and you're in the white and black. But he lives in New York City. He espouses ideas of anarchism and his idea, and this is different than sort of the Ayn Rand set of ideas that there's a line between sort of capitalism that's backed by the state and just pure anarchism. And his idea that violence won't take over in an anarchism is one that feels to me not grounded in reality. I may be wrong. So is there some, so the idea with pure capitalism is that... You mean laissez faire, completely deregulated? Yeah. Yeah, well, what it will agree, it'll end up in one, it'll end up in, if you're anti globalist, it's gonna be that. It's gonna be globalist 100% because it has no... Pure capitalism has no consideration for your native users or of any sort, like it doesn't matter. But the idea of governments is that the land, the little piece of land geographically you're born on means you're going to stick to whatever founding documents created that little land. So anarchism is against that. And the argument is you should be able to choose which ideas you live with. And the concern there is nobody, this geographical land, the governments that organize on that land do not need to protect you from the violence. And my sense is there does need to be an army, there does need to be police that help, however the form that police takes. But there needs to be a more centralized, not completely centralized, but more centralized safety net to protect you from the violence. Scale again, right? So if you want to have your anarchist utopia, well, we won't call it utopia, your anarchist creation here. At certain scale, I'm sure it's doable. But as it scales, as the scale increases, it's completely untenable. And a state will emerge. A state will always emerge. Because even people always think of states as like people rubbing their hands and smoking cigars in back rooms and just out of nowhere coming around and just like, oh, we're going to create this big centralized thing and just so that we can tell everybody what to do and we can be in charge. I mean, I know that there are people like that that exist, that they would like to do things of that nature and that they see the use of power as something to be used more for their personal gains over first, which again, self interest in human beings. But eventually a state, people want, they want something to go like, okay, who's taking care of this? And who's taking care of that? And how do we create some sort of protocol for this? Like, okay, well, when it's not Bob, when is it Susie, when is it whatever? I mean, like, how do we, it's gotta get done if we want this thing to become bigger, if we want all of our plumbing to work right, if we want, it's just, I'm sorry, a state's gonna happen. A state is also, when you think about it, it's supposed to have consideration to tribe, right? So if people think that we're not tribes, well, you're not really thinking very deeply. We're all tribes of a sort. And everybody likes to use the word tribalism in this idea of this antagonistic concept. And while sure, tribalism can be antagonistic, tribalism can also be a positive thing, or I could just say, it just seems to be a natural thing. People, they create their groups of one sort or another. And so when you have, well, when you think about when nation states really started to become a thing, and I don't mean even the more modern looking variants that we could think back up and say the 19th century or something like that, even older than that. I mean, you think the Assyrians didn't have a state of some sort? Of course they did. How do you increase your empire if you don't actually have a place to start from? Just to be a ruler. So you're saying like naturally, when you start talking and thinking about scale of humans, naturally states emerge. And so can we try to make an argument for anarchism, which is, so anarchy in a sense is an opposition to the unhelpful, unproductive, inefficient bureaucracies that eventually the states lead to. Yes, and that's what we can see. I mean, I would say less anarchy, more study James Burnham, you know, or, well, anybody that wants to talk about the managerial problem and the managerial. I see, so you have a sense, a hope, maybe let's think like what is the path forward with the inefficient state? Is it revolution or is it to work within the system to constantly improve it, to manage better? Man, I don't know that one. I mean, my general sense, and maybe this is the Nietzschean part of me, is that, yeah, it would take maybe not even just, maybe not even defining it specifically as revolution. Maybe it would just take just total calamity to get people to stop being shitty, to not stop being a lesser version of themselves, to stop thinking more about things from the paradigm that we exist in now, where we're giving so much value to stuff that isn't really all that valuable. Where we're so concerned about likes, and I don't just mean like whether we get them or not, but that, oh man, maybe we should take this off of our platform, because this is too destabilizing to people. Because once you exceed Dunbar's number, I think it's actually, without having the right faculties, which would need to be developed, because this is dealing with tech that brings things, ways of approaching being that we are not naturally programmed to be able to handle appropriately. And I think it's even more detrimental to women than men, because I think women have a more natural proclivity towards group association and more group oriented thinking and patterning. And now, and with also coupled with seemingly more sensitivity towards human states. So I feel like women, like the classic idea is like, oh, you know, women are psychic, you know, they have a sixth sense and what have you. And I think that's just a way of simplifying, what I think is that women may be more in tune with picking up on the unsaid. Like they might be better at seeing physical cues, inflection and tone, like different, like they may be far more sensitive to these things, which to me would make sense, because dealing with children that can't communicate. So distinctively, right now, okay. Now, whether it be a woman or a man, but especially with even the social push on this concept of empathy, which of course it gets to the point where it loses any meaning anymore. Like people use the word empathy absolutely incorrectly all the time. And they don't even understand what you're really asking of people. But let's just take it as we're using empathy in the correct sense. And you're taking on the emotional content of the thing itself. Now you open that up to thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all across the world that you will never meet, that you will never know, that you're not even getting an actual true representation most of the time of who these people are. You're meeting persona. And some of these personas are even deliberately created to elicit a response inauthentically. Are you referring to bots or? Could be bots or actual people. Bots are one thing, but I mean, there are literal people out there that will create something, create GoFundMes for tragedies that never didn't really, or events that didn't happen or any number of things. Okay, I mean, burn their own house down and then say, you know, we were attacked. And then it comes down, oh, you did it to yourself because you wanted money and empathy and this, that. And you wanted all this emotional wealth, let's say this emotional coin, as well as actual if possible. You wanted to leverage it in some way. That's not the majority of people, but I would say a good amount of folks are thinking, well, if I post this photo and I put this little blurb in there, I bet I can get this much cache out of it in this sense. And I'm not even, and this isn't just a reference to like butt pics and stuff like that. Because clearly, obviously people understand that our inborn sexual nature is easy to manipulate. I mean, that's pretty obvious. But you're saying this kind of new medium of communication on social media is unnatural. And it preys on us. And so as you want this, you know, you look at an anarchist kind of mindset, right? And so you're just like, there's no, there is no overarching state to create any kind of a structure, right? And so if you have that unfettered capitalism aspect with it, and before I say anything particularly damning about unfettered capitalism, I'm a massive capitalist because I view capitalism essentially as, what it boils down to is I get these arguments to people too. They start giving me all these extra definitions about capitalism like, no, no, this is obviously some sort of theory you're taking from other shit. But that doesn't describe capitalism. Capitalism is the ability for us to create whatever we want or, you know, create our thoughts, ideas, physical things and trade them freely amongst each other in ways that we find acceptable, right? You know, I'm not even using the word fair because I might think it's fair to me. You might think, huh, well, I mean, that was actually, I think what he thought was unfair to him and it's more fair to me. And then someone, a third observer goes, oh man, you should not have paid that for that. You should have paid this. And it's like, well, you know what? It works for me without... Sufficiently acceptable that you both agree to the transaction. Correct. But also at the root of that is freedom, right? And as far as I can tell, I've been banging this around in my head, it's like for every one unit of freedom, you need two units of accountability. And if you don't have that, what you end up with is human self interest. We're not even gonna get into evil. Human self interest, sabotaging other things, even not in a sense to be malicious. Okay, so in terms of, let's put this as mathematically speaking, I love this. So anarchism is more like two units of freedom and one unit of accountability or maybe zero units of accountability. Possibly, I mean, the anarchists tend to think like, no, everyone will be accountable. It's like, fuck they will. When have you seen this happen in real life? People aren't even accountable in their revolutions at the time. So you aren't looking at the way people really are. Marx is like, yeah, the people are like this, they're like that. Look at how capitalism does it. I mean, he of course assigns a lot of really ridiculous economic principles and practice, but and also assumes that everybody who makes any profit from anything is somehow stealing it and really assigns a negative moral aspect to them. And then it's like, oh yeah, but then eventually communism will happen. No one will act that way anymore. And you're like, whoa, hold on. You just said that people are all, are you saying it's all due to capitalism or is it innate? It's just, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of, and it's like, hey, look at you. You're like a notorious, like antisemitic, angry, like just absolute curmudgeon of a human being who seems to be really not all that fun to be around. Marx? Yeah, and then it's just like. So you have to think like, if there was 1 billion Marx's in the world, how would they behave? It would be absolute. They would hate each other so bad. And this isn't, for me to even poison them well on Marx is like, oh, his personality sucks. Like there's lots of people whose personality sucks. That doesn't mean they can't make, I don't know that it's never, what? You know what, somebody argues. He's just a loner. I mean, I don't know that his personality sucked at all. Let me walk that back and that he was human. Say his personality sucked. He was sometimes contradictory, irrational. Sometimes he was quite sexist despite the emails I've gotten. That told me that there's people who has written to me that Nietzsche has been unfairly labeled as sexist in his discussion about women. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of documents where he's just like, he's just a bitter guy. I will agree with you. And Marx is as bitter as they come to, but bitterness in and of itself doesn't make, like why I hate Marxism comes from the entirety of the thing. But I'm not going to say that Marxism or practic... Man, you can find any forbidden book and it could have something good in it. As colonel is a good idea. Yeah, and like at the end of the day, Marx is a human being. He's got a nice beard. He does, he had a hell of a beard. Yeah, a decent portrait. I mean, he looks like the kind of guy like, I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley, but thankfully I don't think he was much of a fighter. But in any case, I mean, not the anarchists or they're more hot for like Max Stirner. People like to think that Nietzsche borrowed a lot from Stirner and my argument is one, you don't have any real evidence for that and two, bullshit, you know? I mean, anybody could, the fact that they have some overlapping thoughts doesn't make it lifted. Not to mention, go read a lot more philosophy and see how there's so many different things. Oh, this guy said it in 1722. Well, and then this guy says it again in 1922. Does that mean he read the other guy's stuff? Not necessarily. I mean, he's working from the same type of human physiological construct as anybody else. Like, of course it's possible that this guy could think the same thing. We think a lot of the same things, to be perfectly honest. I mean, reading the Hagakure, going back to philosophy books, this was really impactful on me as a younger adult because here's a book written in the 19th century about someone who lived through the 19th and 18th century at times as a samurai, now a monk, and his objections to society at the time, the same objections one was having to society as I was reading it. Like, the same human behaviors, the same impetus for action that he found a problem, like, well, that's the same shit now. Like, we're not, and this was the thing, and then I'm reading more religion, and I go, oh, we're no different than anyone who wrote the Torah or older. We are the same thing with the same problems, with the same psychological issues, the same human behaviors. Like, these things are not different, and we haven't changed. Growing set of tools, though, to kill each other with or to communicate together and all that kind of stuff, but underlying it, there's a human nature. Well, we're also trying to understand that human nature. I think we've, just like you said, learning how to fish, acquired more and more knowledge about that human nature, but it's been a very slow journey, slower than people realize in terms of understanding human nature. Let me ask, in terms of egoism, to be curious, to get your sense about Ayn Rand and her whole idea of virtue of selfishness and her, because you mentioned that everybody has a kernel of truth. There's potential for a kernel of truth to be discovered in anything. For example, I've been recently reading Mein Kampf. You know what, that's the thing. Even, there's something in, there's probably things in Mein Kampf that are not the surface level read. If you get all hung up on all, probably all his crap about his anger at Jews and this and that, all this crap, it's like, okay, yeah, that's right on the surface. Try to get below that. Try to see, how is he creating the Jews as a cope somehow? Like, how is he using, why are they his scapegoat, and I mean scapegoat in the, so René Girard's concept of the scapegoat, I mean it in that sense, whereas Hitler uses, he wants to make the Jews the scapegoat for World War I. You know what I mean? For me, the starting point, similar with Ayn Rand, is that Mein Kampf is not a good place to search, not just because Hitler is evil, but it's just not full of ideas. No, it is not. It has its significance due to a lot of things. Historically speaking. The starting point for me with Hitler is to acknowledge that he is human and to at least consider the possibility that any one of us could have been Hitler. So like, not to make it. Well, that's a Peterson kind of concept. Also, Jonathan Haidt has a thing about the difference between hate and disgust mechanisms and things like that, and so he goes into the, looking at Hitler through his diary entries and journals and stuff like that to look and see it more as the disgust mechanism than also trying to see if there's any evolutionary biological attachment to this, whatever. I mean, you're right, he is a human being. Any of us, we're all human beings. It's not that, it's probably jarring for people to think, but we're all, I guess, supposedly potentially capable of just being in, and all these evil people in the world think they're doing it for the sake of good, which makes them the most dangerous. And there's some, there's differences in levels of insane. I think Hitler was way more insane than Stalin. I think Stalin legitimately thought he was doing good. I would say that's probably true. Stalin was just outright brutal. Like he had his five year plan, he had all those other things. He just had a much lower value for human life, and so he was willing to take, make decisions about what he actually, as a good executive, which he was, of managing different bureaucracies and so on, he was willing to make decisions that resulted in mass human suffering, where Hitler was, it seems like to me, much moodier. So allowed emotions and moods to make decisions. I think we also have to consider the different trajectories and how, where, and when they were making their decisions. And I mean, not by time specifically, but Hitler engaged into this conflict across multiple continents. And then that, everything that comes with basically fighting the whole world, Stalin had his conflict, and then he really mostly compartmentalized the rest of it. So he was dealing with his own internal instead of dealing with the internal and the external. So if Stalin was put under a World War scenario, I don't know, maybe he would have eventually lost his marbles too. Yeah, I'm not sure that that's, you're right. The hunger for power was more internalized for Stalin. He wanted to control the land that already existed as opposed to wanting to colonize other land. He was as nationalistic as Hitler, but, and was as capable and willing for violent conflict as Hitler, for the aims of the state. But he centered and internalized prior to then externalizing and moving outwards. Whereas even maybe prior to him, there was an interest to continually push communism in an aggressive sense following on the momentum from the 1918 revolution. And that, the halting of that through various aspects, I guess in Germany, part of that was the National Socialists. Like they came up and then they were the other ones to fight the communists, and so you had the two totalitarians going after it. But then in the rest of the world that was not dealing with totalitarian aspects, it was just, it wasn't gonna stick, especially in the West and other places. But Stalin, just casually thinking, it seemed like Stalin decided to go, all right, well, we're not gonna go just start launching right into more conflicts here. We're gonna, these dudes are going down, so that's cool for us, because they hate us and we hate them. But now we're gonna focus internally, and then we're gonna work on growing at a slower rate and picking our battles a bit more specifically. And of course there's, you can get to the, even this is after Stalin, but you got the Bezmenov type stuff talking about subversion in cultural aspects. Yeah, I mean, there's this fascinating dynamics to propaganda throughout the whole period that's. Yeah, it's a whole nother kernel, yeah. Do you think Hitler could have been stopped? One of the things that's kind of fascinating to look at is how many nations, both journalists and nations, wanted, almost craved to take Hitler at his word that he wanted peace until it was too late. They almost wanted to delude themselves. I mean, the same is true with the Stalin, people wanted to take Stalin at his word for. Oh, they still delude themselves. Yeah. We will delude ourselves over any number of things until even after the fact where the history just says, hey, fuck face, you know? You cannot supplement your pseudo reality onto actual reality here. But yet, we deal with people in pseudo realities constantly. I mean, we will always find a way to change reality to suit our needs. Well, the nature of truth now, there's now multiple actual truths. It's kind of fascinating. There's multiple versions of history that people are telling. You know, the version of the Great Patriotic War in Russia, the World War II in Russia is very different today under Putin than the version that we're learning in the United States and then different than the version in Europe. In the United States, the hero of the war is the United States. In Europe, there's a much more sad and solemn story of suffering and so on. Sure. In Russia, it's the Great. Patriotic War. Yes. It was a unifier of a sense. And it, I mean, yeah, I mean, you can't argue that war and conflict that, and or just even reducing that to stressors, agitation, suffering doesn't create human motivation. You know, we started this off. You brought up a Frankel. I'm like, yeah, Frankel's dope. Man, it serves for meaning. Maslow's great. And I talked to you about how I started to think like, man, do the ability for human beings to live and or potentially flourish in the worst environments you can think of is pretty incredible in and of itself. And that it's a crazy thought to think that without Frankel and Maslow ending up in concentration camps, do they write some of the most important books on philosophy in the 20th century? And that's insane on a lot of different levels. But, yeah, suffering is a creative force. I mean, I don't, do you think we'll always have war? Yes, we will always have war in some form or another. We need, quote unquote, air quotes, for those just listening, war to survive. We need war to flourish. We need at least. Can you explain the quote, the air quotes around the war? Well, because take, take, take, take the. You see wars as violence? No, wars are not violence. So like, so when we're talking. No, air quotes because while us getting on the mat or just getting on these hardwood floors and wrestling around is not literal war, it's war of a sorts. It is a diluted form of war. American football is a diluted form of war. All this, these are diluted forms of war. Tennis is a diluted form of war. And I think one of the best explanations I ever got from this, and another person very impactful on my life and outlook and thinking about things, Cormac McCarthy. And so in Blood Meridian, there's this fantastic speech about war given by the judge, which there's a ton of fantastic speeches on things given by the judge, yeah. All that exists in creation without my knowledge does so without my consent. Okay, that's pretty heavy. That's, that's hard. Go ahead, can you break that up? Can you say that again? All things that exist in creation, all things that exist without my knowledge do so without my consent. What does that mean? Well, I think from the judge's perspective, it's like, well, I didn't consent to that bird or that dog or this building or all this, like all of this, you know, I didn't create it, so it's done so without my consent. And if it's up to my consent, well, I'll design it how I want to. There's another similar look into how the judge is in that book is he would study everything everywhere he went. And so he's collected this group of nary do wells from all over to go on these hunts against certain tribes in the Southwest and getting paid by the US government, the Mexican government. So he's on these Indian hunts and yet they're going to all these different places and they would stay the night in a cave somewhere and he would find cave paintings, he would write them all down, or he would find old pieces. There's an example of him, the narrator, explaining how watching the judge and how he drawing, I mean, he's got this notebook just full of things, drawings and writings, and how he found like a piece of armor from a conquistador or something way back in the day, Spanish armor, and he draws it into his book and then crushes it. And so the reason we'll always have war in this society is because there's this struggle amongst people that want to be the designers. There's that, but I'm just saying that he's got this whole quote on war, like war is play, war is a game, and the difference is is that what's at stake. So all things are a game of some sort and you're putting up for it or what you're willing to put up for it determines whether or not you're going to participate or not. And all aspects of any game is war and it's just, what is at stake? If it's your life, it's a different story. If it's just a coin, it's another thing. A nice way to put it is if humans play a game in this kind of pursuit of creating, whatever the hell the reason is that we keep creating cooler and cooler things, it seems to be the result of a game that we naturally play, we naturally crave. I don't know, I mean, that's been the struggle of philosophy is to understand what is the underlying force of all that. Is it the will to power? I think will to power is a really great way of describing it. Do you want to be the winner of the game? No, not just, no, I don't look at will to power as being the winner of the game. Well, I mean, if we're going to get philosophical, yes, you want to be the winner of the game. What does winning the game define how you win? Everybody's going to define that win differently. You could define the win in the most base level like, oh, I got all the things. Well, if you got all those things without the needing component of fulfillment, then you're going to be a very unhappy person with a whole lot of things. But there's a self referential aspect to where, to me, the winner of the game is defined by the people playing the game. So if I'm playing a game, I want to win in the sense that most of the other people who are playing the game will say, yeah, that guy won. By our collective definition, if I just come up, listen, I'm sort of, if I come up with my own. That's a lot of weight on the external on you. Right, but that's how games seem to work. Somewhat. So I'm already a winner in my life by defining my own definition of success. I'm basically the best person in the world at doing me. At being Lex. Yeah, so like, and I'm really happy with that. That's a source of happiness. Well, I mean, think about it. Games are also iterated, right? So you start off with your game and then your game with your immediates and then the game further than that and the game further than that and then the game today and the game tomorrow and the game next week. And so it never ends. And if you try to keep thinking about it that way, no wonder people go crazy. But we don't want to think about things that way. We don't want to think about being towards death. We don't want to think about whether or not I'm going anywhere after this other than in the ground or what have you. Like, you know. All of these games are a sense of some distraction. This is where we brought up. Kind of, but I mean, it's violence is that we need to let this out. And so it is of our, kids need to wrestle and play just like animals need to wrestle and play. We need to have forms of competition. We need to have ways to test ourselves, to create when, what is it? When at peace a man of war makes war with himself. And so we need to be able to competently go at war with ourselves and go at war with our neighbor and go at war with our neighbor's neighbor in a way that is repeatable at the very least. So one way of saying that there will always be war, I mean, that's my hopeful view is that most of the war conducted in the future will be, like you said, the man must go to war with himself. That would be great. That's what to me love is, is like focusing on yourself and your own improvement and your own creativity and towards others feeling, sort of emphasizing cooperative behavior and compassion and empathy. It would be great. But I mean, you can have, well, I'll put it to you this way. If you have a whole community of Randians and a whole community of Ancoms, and they could all like, I don't know, toast of London on Netflix, and they love Netflix and they love the internet and they love picking apart Mon Comp with you. They love like, they like all these things, even the esoteric that they can get on with. But at the fundamental root, they cannot help but go to war because they are literally oil and water. No, but see, but they would, the very labels they assign to themselves would need to dissipate. Well, this is true. Well, then you would have to stop being whatever it is that you took on as your ideological or religious point, right? Yeah, I mean, there's some days I'm Ancom, some days I'm Ancaps and whatever the anarchic capital. I mean, it depends on the hour, the minute of the day, you constantly changing moods and embracing that flow, the change of opinions, of ideas. As there's some days like, I'm actually cognizant of the fact because I've been not getting my sleep. And after I get some sleep, I see I'm so much more optimistic about the world. The less and less sleep I get, the more sad and cynical I get. I can see that. There's an up and down constantly. I don't even let my, well, okay. I try not to let. And most days it's never a problem. Any sort of like, what the kids call it now, blackpilled way of thinking, be my over, the umbrella which I hang under. So we actually, to drag us back, can we talk about Carl Gotch and Cat Tressley? Because I do want to make sure I touch it. I mean, what, who were? Carl Gotch is. Is he the greatest catch wrestler? I don't know if he was the greatest catch wrestler ever. I don't, I mean, he's one of them for a myriad of, Carl Gotch, Billy Robinson. Gotch and Robinson's trainer, Billy Riley. So who are these figures and what did they bring to you? Joe Maeda, he's one of the greatest catch wrestlers ever because he's responsible for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Along with Cristal Gracie. Okay, there's so much of things I'd like to say here, but one of the things that catch wrestling seemed to espouse as a principle is that of violence. I just, the tournaments I competed at, the unfortunate thing, and we'll probably hopefully talk about it a little bit. They were disorganized and the level of competition was pretty low where people really sucked. Pretty typical. Is that typical, okay. Well, it's, I mean, think about local run of the mill Jiu Jitsu tournament versus IBJJF created, you know, a vast difference, so. So I, you know, but there is, to me as a human being, like intellectually, philosophically, it was more interesting to go to catch wrestling tournament. It seemed more real and honest because of the way they communicate about violence and aggression. I love that. So it is often more honest. I think that as. Who is that from? Does that originate from, gosh, is that really Rob said? Well, I mean, it originates from all wrestling in that even Wade Chalice, not a classically considered catch wrestler, yet the reason why he has the world record for most amount of world champions pinned or the record for pins in the NCAA is because, well, of course the idea is to put you on your back and pin you, but there's no way you're gonna let me do that. So how do I make it so that you want me to pin you? Well, it's by you put them in excruciating pain. So at the end of the day, you're both there. You both wanna win. Neither one wants to allow anything to the other. So how do I get you to lose to me? Well, I make it so unbearable for you that you decide losing is better than staying. So those two are so fascinating because so coming from Russia, I don't know if that's where I got it or if it's just my own predisposition is I always loved the, there's two ways to get you to want to pin yourself. One is to making it so painful not to pin yourself that you pin yourself or whatever. And the other is, it's sort of like a Bruce Lee, water flows, make it so easy to pin yourself. So it's technique, it's like the elegance, the ease of movement. This is the Satya brothers, Vasya, Satya, like the, just the elegance, the efficiency. Yeah, they're practically like ballet watching those guys. You know, it's incredible. Satya brothers are massive. And I'll also caveat a little bit that like, if you're approaching this from a Russian perspective, Russians are quite truthful about things, especially when it comes to something like combat. They just, this is how it is. And this is how it's going to be. It's honest. Yes. And honesty is what I really like about catch wrestling because I find that we, given any opportunity for us to be dishonest for any number of reasons, we're gonna, especially if it's a dishonesty towards a positive, right? Like, oh, well, you know, it's all technique and it's all this and it's the gentle art and blah. Bro, I have rolled with ADCC world champions, you know, some of the best you have ever heard of. There ain't a lot of gentleness when it comes to like, oh yeah, they wanted to sweep you and you said no. And then you did, said no again. And then you said no and attacked their leg. Yeah. It ceases to be all that gentle because at the end of the day, these dudes are strong as hell. They're flexible. They're all, I mean, they're, the difference between the athleticism and the ability to actually win is a pretty wide gap. The athleticism shows up, but then there's all that other extra and part of that is meanness and pain and getting what you need out of it. But see, there is a philosophical difference in the way it's thought because. I think some of it is just, they just in denial. Like, oh, people will, they like to, people like to espouse a lot of things as theory and then it's like, okay, let me watch. When they're, oh, you're not doing anything about what you said right now. In fact, you're doing the opposite. You're literally hurting that guy because your shit ain't working in the way that you'd like it to. So you're having to use strength. You're having to, it's one of my favorites, like, oh, you're using too much strength. And it's like, well, hold on. Do we want people not to use strength at this point to understand more of mechanics? Or are you trying to tell people if they use strength at all, that they're somehow bad at what they do? Cause you know, it's not my fault. You're not stronger than me. But see, I'm speaking to something else that's, that's. Well, I tend to think what it comes down to is like, strength is fine until you beat me with it. Then it sucks. Okay, so strength is another thing. I'm speaking, I'm thinking about more like anger. Oh, sure. Okay, so like. I've seen a lot of angry guys in jiu jitsu, I know that. Really? Mm hmm. Okay, okay, good, well, but let's talk about, let's talk about the highest level of competitions. There's a book called Wrestling Tough. Yeah. It's a really good book. There's, I've encountered in my life a few, especially in wrestling, people who really try to find a way to use anger, to get really angry at their opponent. Not like stupid anger, but just like. Intense, pointed anger distilled into something that you can use as fuel. And like, I remember this story. I don't know where I read it. Might be Wrestling Tough, where a person was imagining that their opponent just raped their mother, raped their girlfriend or something like that, to create this like method acting thing in their head to be like, to snap them out of this polite interaction of usual like athletic convention and like. You know, that's a design of necessity. So my anecdote for this was, I was sitting with backstage before a fight, not my fight. And I'm working with this guy and this dude is, this is a world champion guy. And he's competed at the highest levels. And he looks at me and he goes, you know, do you ever get nervous before fights? And I looked at him and I went, no, I don't. And he just looks at me and he's like, fuck man, I'm so nervous. You know, how do you do it, man? Or, you know, I wish it could be like you. And I said, you know what? That doesn't mean that what I'm doing is better. It's just what is necessary for me. It's the way I am. And I told him, so this anecdote goes into another anecdote. This is a Family Guy episode, I guess. So, where some, another famous high level guy told me about this experience with a world champion boxer in Japan. And this guy would get insanely nervous and worked up and anxious before his matches. And he hated it and hated it and hated it. And so he wanted to get rid of that feeling. So he went to a hypnotist for a bunch of sessions and managed to, and he goes in and next fight, he's cool as a cucumber and doesn't perform and loses. And so what I said, going back to anecdote one, was, you know, whatever is necessary for you to get yourself in the best state of being right now to compete, whatever that may be, it could be absolute stress and fear, it could be anger, it could be calmness, it could be whatever. But there is a, but there is a state at which you need to be in to do your best. And you as the individual, you have to find that. Can you comment on Tyson, Mike Tyson? Oh, yeah, that thing. So first, so he, there's two things I wanna, so he's a, in terms of fear, there's a clip there, I think from a documentary where he talks about he is like fully afraid as he walks up to the ring and as he gets closer and closer and closer, he gets more confident until he gets in and then he's a god or something like that. That coupled with his statement on Joe Rogan that he gets aroused at the possibility of true, like of hurting somebody in the ring. So like he gets aroused at the violence. I like it because it's coupled to your basically statement that we need to own, to find our own unique way of existing at our top level of performance. And that perhaps is Mike Tyson. But do you think there's something more deeply universal to the Mike Tyson speaking to the fact that he's aroused at the possibility of violence? Yeah, I do actually. Although I don't think that it always equates to arousal for people, in fact, I would say in general, it doesn't. I can say I've never had a boner in the ring. In fact, if anything, old combat cock is like, we're not hanging around, we're leaving, we're going up. We're taking off, we don't want anything to do with this. You have fun, come back to us when you have something warmer, softer, smells better. But the power, the feeling of aliveness, yeah, I could see it. Back to even the concept of the Ubermensch, I feel like the states, the highest states of being I've ever been in were in the midst of conflict. I felt like that was the times, those are the moments in my life where I felt like I was at the highest level of being as a human in existence. But yet, even being in that state was not, it was not something that you could interact with people that weren't in that state with you. They wouldn't get it, you would almost seem, and to be that way all the time, either A, might drive you mad, or B, is you're not, you're something that's untenable to the rest of society. You can't function with everybody else. It will not work. It's just like you said with the Ubermensch, it's like it's perhaps that ideal is not something you can hold for long. That's the very nature of it is. Yeah, well, there was an example in The Spoke Zarathustra about a snake being down the person's throat and biting it, and then having this maniacal laughter erupting, and to me it was, at least I read it as, yeah, okay, there's this insane moment that isn't forever, but that it is life and death, and the overcoming it is the thing that all of a sudden gives you that tapping into your highest state, right? This is, man is a chasm, a tightrope between man and Ubermensch. Well, I don't wanna leave your thought about, we'll call those things flourishes to the aspect of Tyson's interpretation or his expression of his feelings in combat, and so I gave this anecdote to the guy, and my first anecdote to that athlete I was working with, and I said, you know, there isn't a superior way in this sense. There is the way that works for you. That may be something you can implement to other people if you find that person, because we all have different personalities, and to me that's an absolute. I don't wanna, don't come at me with all your other fucking social sciences crap. No, we have distinct personalities. That personality, who you really are, and this, again, Heidegger, Dasein, being authentic. If you're authentic with who you are, goods and bads, you will know how to create what that is, and for me, violence and fighting and conflict was something that always felt normal to me, and I don't mean normal in, like I grew up in a war zone or an abusive household or something like that. I just meant that, and I was a kid who was very joyful and inquisitive, and spent a lot of time around older people, of all things, and also, while I don't think I have much capability toward engineering, my mom said that one of the first things as like a little baby, when she put me in my sister's old crib, instead of my sister who just milled about and was fine with it all, the first thing I did was I completely deconstructed it. I didn't break it. I figured out how to pull it apart. Curiosity about the world, and yet, that wasn't in conflict with the idea of violence? No, not at all, and so being a very joyful and nice kid, but kids are kids, and if kids can find that you respond maybe more easily to agitation, they will agitate you, and if you should stand out in some way by being taller or bigger or something, or caring, especially, they will agitate you. They don't really fully understand it either, and so I don't hold anything against any of the kids that used to pick on me or whatever, especially at the youngest ages. Man, they don't know shit either, so, but once that line was pushed, for me it was, oh, well, I was being cool. Now you're being uncool. Well, then that gives me license for everything, and so, boom, we would just go at it, or kids that would try to initiate a fight, and I was like, okay, and being in that moment of just going to town with someone else, it just felt like this is, this is. I belong here. Yeah, it was never a problem for me. In fact, if anything, what I had to understand was, well, not only did I learn the hard way, that it doesn't matter, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what anybody else does if your response in violence, even to their violence, if you're the winner, is often going to be penalized severely. Society, state apparatus, they don't want any of that. They wanna be the only arbiter of violence in the world, always. But I learned a very difficult lesson with that, and it was really impactful in a negative way on me, but also I had to learn, on an individual sense, to, you need to manage violence, too, because, hey, if someone attacks you or starts a fight with you and you go at it, okay, beating them up is one thing, trying to grab a handful of broken glass from the street and throw it in their face, maybe that's a bit much at seven. So you need to learn what level is necessary, and you need to learn what comes with all, what's the responsibility of, when you enact violence, I mean, you take on something when you have a responsibility for that. This is the extension of your actions. But as I got older, and especially as I found sports, and then combat sports, now this was a place for me to flourish, and to the point where I was more myself in that space than I was outside of it until time enough where I could learn to get this back together again. And I never say that I'll merge the two or anything like that. No, all what happened, my journey from adolescence on to manhood, a huge portion of it, besides the normal finding yourself, whatever, whatever, actually what it was was getting back to who I always was. Getting back to the kid. The curious kid, the kind kid. Getting back to the guy that I should have been allowed to become instead of what happened under the pressures of other things. And the attempt for society and certain people within managerial positions to compress what that was into something that they found more suitable. Yeah, but those pressures allow you to discover this little world, forbidden world, in many ways, of violence that you could explore. Through sport, you can explore it, and it's more socially acceptable to explore it through sport. For sure. But even then, at times, it's socially unacceptable. So I beat Sem Schilt. He cut my right eyebrow. I cut him and busted his nose, and he's bleeding all over me as I have an armbar on top. I'm getting, you know, it's raining blood. Quote some slayer from a lacerated Sem Schilt, bleeding in his horror, creating my structures. Now I shall rain him blood. But I win the fight, armbar, nasty one. I get on my feet, and the first thing I do is I wipe all the blood off onto my hands, and I lick it, and I do my thing. And all the MMA journalists freaked out. Dana Wise, like, man, I don't know about that. You know, we don't want him doing, everybody had this huge problem. And then some folks would even contend, oh, you know, you're trying to do, like, no, no, no, this isn't planned. I don't think of these things. This is how I really feel. This is who I really am. And, you know, it was even kind of comical after the fact, you know, and BJ Penn was on the very card with me, watching him at some point in his career all of a sudden win fights and then do this licking the glove thing, and everyone thinks it's the coolest thing ever. And I'm like, hey, fuck faces. I did this in 2002 or one, 2001, and BJ Penn actually back then was like, dude, you're a badass, you're a killer, you know? Where did that come from? Because that seems like a deeply human moment. I could say, I could just be, you know, goofy about it and call it orgiastic to align with Titan. Are we back to Mike Tyson? Yeah, but Tyson, but no, no, it isn't, it's beyond that. Is it a celebration of human nature? I've had some pretty decent orgasms in my life at this point, I'm 43. So, but no, none have ever compared to that. Like I said, it is a feeling of highest being to me. And I... It's your Ubermensch moment. This is where I feel like the restrictions of general existence in society are gone. And I get to fully live in a state that feels more meaningful, of the most meaning. You know, I think of it as life and death. And it's just, it is the way I'm built. And I don't have, I've never had any problem applying violence. Like it doesn't, I don't know where it comes from or how you would define it or whatever, if you want to stick me under in a psychologist chair, but like I don't, there's a part of me that can just like, no, if I'm gonna apply, I can apply violence to any level and be okay with it. And it doesn't, I don't lose sleep. It doesn't bother me. It's not a problem. It was me learning how to fully understand violence, humans, and the broader perspective that allowed me to think about things and like, well, what do I really want to accomplish with my actions in the world just on a whole? You know, not compartmentalizing my sporting career. Even when I get in the ring, I don't have any mercy generally. And if I do, it's because I make a really deliberate attempt to be in a state where I can have mercy. If I just go in there to fight with everything I got, there is zero mercy. The natural state of violence. There's nothing, there's nothing that will hold me back other than the referee and that's that. You know, I know I agreed to be allowed to do and not to do, but within that, no. And I expect it to be done to me. But in terms of values, in terms of seeing what, to me, violence is just yet another canvas that humans can paint beautifully on. Clearly, I mean, we have venerated the violent. There are communists that venerate the violent on their behalf. There are national socialists that venerate the violent there. And then if you remove it from an ideological perspective, we venerate the violent when they're a hero. We venerate the violent in our religion. Well, I mean, I guess some people venerate the violence of Yahweh and Sodom and Gomorrah, right? So, or do we say Jehovah? I don't know. Is there, you've already mentioned one, but is there a fight where you've achieved the highest of heights for your own personal being just when you look within yourself that you're the proudest of, or maybe it was your most beautiful creation? Is there something that stands out? Yeah, there are a few, actually. Fighting Semishield and a rematch. Well, the first one was pretty good, too. But the rematch was, I was suffering, I had suffered prior, the week prior, to food poisoning. And so while my abs are looking all right, I, in the ring, didn't have the power that I expected to. And I was struggling in ways, in some of the grappling with the submission stuff that I hadn't accounted for. Just exhaustion or mental exhaustion? No, I mean, just physical, I wasn't back up to 100% in terms of just power output. And Semi was, well, he's always seven foot tall. But this time he was, the first time I fought him, he was 260, or 257, or 260 something, something like that. This time he was like 290. And so he was a significantly bigger cat. And he's a big dude. And I just remember being up against the ropes with him, changing levels, trying to take him down. And he's fighting, and he's hippin'. And I just thought in my head, there's no fuckin way I'm gonna lose this fight. There's no way, you are not going to beat me. It's not gonna happen. And I armbarred him, the other arm. Even out of the fact he's like, man, I really wanted to get you for that, I wanted to get that match back. And then you fuckin got my other arm, dick. And I'm like, eh, dude, I still love you though. You know, and that. But the whole time you're like, so this has to do with the dichotomy of you're feeling your worst. And having to overcome. You're like literally mentally telling yourself there's no way. There's no fuckin way I'm gonna lose this fight. And then there's even my last bare knuckle match. And getting in the ring and fighting bare knuckle boxing for the first time. And just thinking, just being in a great state. And just looking so forward to seeing. I mean, I called someone. I was talking to them the night before. And I said, yeah, well, I video called you because this face might not look like this when I see you next. And they're just like, ooh, uh, okay. That's not just like empty trash talk. That's like a clarity of mind and a seriousness about. I go, I might die. Most, pretty high chance of being deformed some way. So, but fuck it. I don't really care. Are you, do you think about, are you accepting your own death? Yes, 100%. Yeah, I, in fact, and that's, in a strange way, that's partially what makes it so elevated in terms of my sense of feeling. By being able to have death at my side, it feels good. And to be there and to think that this could be the one, like, why not, you know? I'm not a religious person at all, even though I very much have to seem, it seems to bang on the drum about the usefulness or understanding the usefulness of religion for people. But, you know, if I gotta do something, then yeah, put me in Valhalla, man. I don't wanna be anywhere else. Nothing else seems like a good place for me to be. I wanna fight all day long and feast all night. You know, it sounds great. I saw you throw your hat into the ring of Fader Emelianenko. Yes. He got COVID, I guess. I hope he overcomes it and comes out just as good, if not better. Epic with that. Did I understand correctly that might be his last fight? Yes, that's my understanding. And it would be epic as hell. And it would be epic as hell because the person that I wanna give my most to is a person that I respect, especially at this long career of mine and getting at this twilight years. It's like two warriors. And that's the thing about even this going in there with the aspect of being with death and all that is that when that person is in there, they are my brother with me in this. And so when you give me your best, even if I win dominant fashion, but if you show up and you're as authentic and being here as I am, then I love you. And I'm glad for you to be here. And we're in this together. And at this point, your loss or my loss or whatever is no less deserving of veneration than the win. Like we're here in this. And so to be in the ring with Führer and to venerate him in win or defeat, to be in there with someone like that is, to me, it's so rare, so. It's incredible how the ultimate violence is coupled with love or respect. And it's weird how the competition in its violent form is also a veneration of just human connection. Human connection. It's also the removal. I feel like it's the purest, one of the purest ways, purest, most honest places a person can exist. That line in Fight Club, you don't know really who you are until you've been in a fight. I mean, I believe that. And I've seen so many examples of people trying to portray themselves as one thing. And then in the ring, you see who they really are. Or even when they're trying to portray themselves as one thing and they're winning, the crowd, at times, will see who they really are and still hate them, you know? And it's like, well, I said all the good things. Bro, don't work that way. Yeah, but speaking of Führer, if we take you out of the picture, who are the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time? I feel. You out of the picture. As a cop out, to some degree, I feel like we need a little bit more time, you know? So, to see how this unfolds. Because you gotta compare a lot of things. And I, did I, I think I'm. Like centuries? I did an interview. I don't know about centuries. But that would help if we can keep accurate records and not allow too much bias to fall in. Too much propaganda. The victor's still there, right? Yeah, but I made an argument. I was in, I get a, it was a interview with an MMA outlet of some sort. And I can't recall who it was. But, oh, it was an argument about will the winner of Cain Velasquez versus Steve Amiocik be the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time? And I said, fucking no way. Oh no, it was Cormier Amiocik. That's what it was. I said, absolutely not. Not even close. And I said, these guys need a bit more time to see how things go. And also how things go for some of their opponents. And like, there's more factors than just this one fight. It really is. And I go, and when you wanna weigh these people, even if let's say, we'll bring Alistair Overeem into the end of the equation. Okay, you judge him on what you know now, what he's done for you lately, okay? Right. Which is a very myopic way of doing it. What has he done over his career? K1 champion. He was a champion in DREAM. He, Strike Force, blah, blah, blah. His overall record. The entirety of all the different opponents he's fought. And I just sit back and I go, okay, he's not the UFC champ. But his accolades, his merits, in some ways, actually stand up higher than Cormier's and Amiocik's. So what about the moments, do you give much value to the special moments, like the highest heights you rise to, not in terms of records or the strikes landed, but just creating a magical moment in a fight? It doesn't have to be even a championship fight, but just, Conor McGregor is an example of somebody who creates a narrative, who creates a story, who creates a drama, and a special magic happens, even if it's like, not with. Myth is greater than reality. And that is always the case. But do you. And so I understand that so very much, and it takes an asshole like me to poo poo on your myth. They at least get you, at the end of the day, you're not gonna abandon your myth, but perhaps temper it with the facts and logic. So you're not a fan of myth? No, I'm an absolute massive fan of myth. But you prefer facts and logic. It's like when I, no, I mean. I like saying facts and logic, because people, I also, I am not a materialist in that sense. I don't think that materialism can solve for everything. It's not enough. It's not robust enough, I'm sorry. If facts and logic and, or reason, as the Enlightenment scholars all thought, including Marx, was enough for people, then we would never, we wouldn't have any religions. We wouldn't have any, like there would be no, we wouldn't have narratives and myths and all this kind of stuff. It would not, it just, I'm sorry, there is no, there's nothing about history that supports the idea that rationality will overcome all. There's something about Ben Shapiro's facts don't care about your feelings, that feels to be miss, feels to be missing something fundamental about human nature. It's not clear to me exactly what is missing. To give old Ben a fair shake. And I don't know Ben Shapiro. I don't really listen to Ben Shapiro, not against Ben Shapiro. I don't, I'm not here to say anything particularly bad about him. Although I will say at one time, Tom Arnold was seemingly trying to pick an actionable fight with Ben Shapiro. In the ring. Or in the. Somewhere, yeah. And I just, and I actually responded, I like, and I tried to get him to clarify, I said, hey, are you saying that you want to fight Ben Shapiro, that you're looking to actually, because I was waiting for him to say something and then I can be like, okay, well, it's one thing to want to get into a fight with someone. It's another thing to go pick on a little tiny, you know, guy like Ben, who's much smaller than you and doesn't train or whatever, but you know, if it's not me, I can find someone your size and you can go fight him. You know, don't be a, basically, don't be a bully piece of shit. Yeah. You know, which by the way, Tom Arnold, you are a mental midget. You are never going to be able to compete even with Ben Shapiro in an argument on any level about anything. Oh, intellectual argument. Yeah, intellectual argument. Maybe you can scream louder than him, but whatever. But nevertheless, in the discussion of greatness in fighting. I think you need to look at some of the numbers. You need to look at some of the numbers. And there's the magic. There is some context also in that, where did Alistair Overeem fight? Oh, he fought in Pride, where you could soccer kick people and stomp their head and this and that. And so the game environment is actually different too. There's more uncertainty, there's more chaos in Pride, there's more. Go back a little further and go like, what about the guys that used to, like Dan Severn fought bare knuckle, head butts, the whole nine. You beat Dan Severn, right? I did beat Dan Severn. That was killing an idol, so to speak. Although I didn't really kill him because I still love him. He's still an, I mean, he's still responsible for inspiration along this whole pathway. It's meeting your God and then putting a knife in it, I guess. Realizing they're human and then bringing them down to your level. Exactly, but also there's a huge misconception there and that is that I could bring, maybe I could bring Dan Severn down to my level, but I couldn't bring his mustache down to my level. It is of mythic proportions and... Greater than yours. Your facial hair is greater than yours. My facial hair is creating its own legacy, but it is not Dan Severn mustache level or now Don Fry mustache. So Don Fry mustache, Dan Severn mustache. Now you have like Shia versus Sunni. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You think there'll be a Karl Marx painting of Josh Barnett one day with the beard and is that basically what you're trying to say? I hope so. I will actually comb my hair, unlike Marx, but... Chaos has a charm to it. It does, it does. I mean, we all thought Doc Brown in Back to the Future was quite charming. You have to throw that into the calculation where they fought. Yes. This is the interesting thing. And the rules that they fought under. Some guy like Eerov Chanchin won a 32 man tournament or something like that. I go, okay. Steepa and Daniel Cormier are awesome and they will for sure be revered for their careers. 100%. Can you say that they're particularly even better overall than Eerov Chanchin? Well, maybe one of them could have beat them. Maybe one of them wouldn't have. Maybe Eerov would have got them with the knuckles right away. Well, maybe if they fought them in pride, they wouldn't have won. Maybe if they fought them bare knuckle, they wouldn't won. I don't know. And there's something about the chaos, like do you put Royce Gracie in the top 10? There's something about... Top 10 of all time in terms of competitors is capable. I don't know. I'd have to think about that. Maybe not, but I put Royce Gracie as like pyramid level. Like, wow, dude, what an amazing man. Yeah, he's so important. Absolutely, incredibly important. But there's something about stepping into, like fighting another human being under all the uncertainty that the early UFCs had. I mean, you don't know. Yup. What is going to happen? And coupled that with not much money. Yup. All of it. Yes. So the purity of it too. There's something about money. I mean, I guess it's shit for that cat post world, but that ruins the purity of the violence. Yeah, people given the opportunity for... Yeah, yeah. The bigger things get, the more... I love the fact that fighting has opened up to such a degree that the career business side of it, because I absolutely distinctly separate the two. The business side of it has opened up to give me far more possibilities, opened way more doors for me than I ever intended it to. Whereas the athlete side of things has, if anything, just gotten substantially worse, I would say. And some of this is due to the nature of all games will be learned, will be gamed without even the rules being broken. And once that's figured out, you need to make an adjustment. No adjustments have been made. So the game just appears to be the same game over and over and over and over and over again on ESPN+, on whatever, on whatever, on whatever. It doesn't really matter which night you watch. It's the same game constantly. And that's not because the athletes are worse or better. It's because they have had that game structure long enough that they figured out what do you do to be the most successful at it? What is the highest percentage way of approaching it, essentially, even if you're not thinking of percentages? What were the... If we take a step back, it's really fascinating to think about the early UFCs. Did you fight Dan Severn in the UFC? I fought him in Super Brawl. Super Brawl, so that was in the early, early days, your undefeated... 2000. What were those early days, let's say, of mixed martial arts like? Let me tell you the day of high adventure. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah, it is. It was so much fun. And it made you feel absolutely like you were a part of a novel, a comic book. I mean, I would love to transcribe my experiences as what I consider a second generation MMA athlete, except I'm way too sensitive to anybody's personal, any things that are not even to... I'm not a gossipy person. I really do believe that small people talk about others. Big people talk about ideas. But there's just some stories that you can't tell without telling the whole story. And there are so many amazing stories that could be told. People being at their best, people being at their worst. Yeah, the whole niche of gossip. Is there something you could speak to the chaos of the time? Oh, 100%. Well, okay, so we at AMC got connected to somebody that was throwing an event in Nampa, Idaho, and we all piled into this. And Matt Humes, Subaru Wagon, and we jammed out. And we left Kirkland and we headed over to Idaho, only to find out that there was nothing really put in place. Nothing really put in place, it was absolute disrepair and chaos. They didn't have a rain, they didn't have this. It was such a bullshit adventure. But we were like, well, there's hardly anywhere to fight. It's tough to find these opportunities. So, okay, well, how about this? Whoever is here to fight and is willing, all right, well, since there's no venue, there's no this, whatever, we all got gloves, we got mouthpieces, we'll just go to the park, as long as we still get paid. And so folks were kind of like, I don't know about that. The guy I was gonna fight was, he finally gets information on who I actually am, and I was undefeated at the time. I think I had fought Super Brawl 13 and already won that tournament. And so he's like, yeah, I had no clue. I'm so glad we didn't fight, you would have murdered me. What a setup. And eventually Matt had to strong arm the guy and get our money that we were supposed to all get and drive back. And because his whole position was, well, there ain't no fucking way, we drove all the way out here for free. This is on you, you fucked this up, not my problem. But what is my problem is the lack of cash in my account. So fix it, or me fighting my first organized fight against an AMC guy on 11 days notice through a connection to an old wrestling coach I had. And I just gathered up with all my old martial arts instructor that I had worked with and we grappled in his apartment. We did tie pads in the park. I ran a couple miles every day and then, all right, boom, show it up. Won my fight by front choke in two minutes. And then Matt goes, okay, well, hey, you did really great. We'd like you to come back and fight again in the summer. What do you think? Okay, go back off the university. And then I think, hmm, well, that fight didn't go exactly as how I wanted it to. So I gotta find a way to get more experience. I would literally fight people in the university, like rec center on the old wrestling mats, as they didn't know I had a wrestling team. I would find anyone doing martial arts, anyone talking about getting into street fights, anyone, whatever, and just basically go, oh, you ever watch UFC? Yeah, yeah, that stuff's cool. What do you think? Oh, man, I'm super into it, man, it's badass. Rad. So would you wanna fight? Would you wanna fight? I mean, it was way easier picking fights than it was, you know, getting a girlfriend. So I just, you know, path least resistance. I think it might be useful for us to get some advice from you. Yeah, all right. Because you've accomplished, for the journey of a martial artist first, if you accomplish some of the greatest accolades there is in the sport, if somebody who's starting out now, or early on in their journey, what advice would you give on how to become a martial artist, catch wrestler, a fighter? Well, I mean, really what it comes down to is do it because you love it. Do it for that reason and that reason alone. Most people that get into this and attempt to make any sort of professional inroads with it, you are not going to be the world champion. You probably will never even fight for a belt and you're probably not going to net make money at this. So don't do it for those reasons. Do it for the reason of the passion. Do it for the reason to be the absolute best that you can be, whatever that ends up being. You might at best only be mediocre, but you won't even be mediocre if you don't do it like you really mean it. So. The passion, look, where is the kernel of the passion, would you say, is it in the learning process itself, the improvement? I think it really depends on the person, right? I mean, there's some people that really love the fact of, they feel like they're growing, right? Well to power, you're growing, growing stronger, growing better. The idea of eliminating weakness. So, to which I'll quickly define weakness as just like things that weaken you, not like being physically weak. Sure, you could call that weakness, but maybe you're not meant to be a super strong guy. But choosing to be weak is really a different story other than just like, we're all deficient in some way or another. So that's neither here nor there. It's a matter of what you decide to do with it. And that's different from strength and weakness, at least the way I look at it. Like strength is choosing, regardless of the difficulty, to make improvements. Strength is even choosing to acknowledge that you do lack. And accept it and then make a decision what to do with it. Yeah, but there's also, there's a bunch of stuff that just like you said, it's what you're drawn to. There's an honesty to just grappling that it seems more real than anything else you can do. Sure, well and also. And that's where the passion and love can come from. Yeah, I mean, being in an environment, hopefully, that is as true as possible, would be a starter. So, it's hard to be a bullshit person when you're literally trying to tear each other's arms off. Yeah. You know, you really sort of see who somebody is. I also feel like you really get to see somebody who, there are a couple instances where you really see who people are on the mats and in the bedroom. So, even the aspect of self betterment, growth along a path. I mean, hell, that's part of the divisive capture for martial arts as a business. Give you a belt, put a stripe on your belt. Each of these iterations cost 20 bucks. So, you know. But there's a benefit to that too. I really enjoyed the progression of belts. Sure. You know, a bit of it is OCD or whatever, but you're enjoying the recognition, your growth when you feel, when you're made to feel, when I think genuinely you do earn it. Yeah. I agree. I agree. It makes complete sense to me. It just, it's anything that is, has a goodness in its purity can also have a detriment in its perversion. So. And there's a value to competition. I've gotten some shit in the past for saying this. I've gotten the most value in giving everything I have to try to win and lose. So like, I've gotten, I remember most of the matches I've lost and I think that's what I've gotten the most from the sport is losing. Think about it. I mean, if you really think about it, what makes you wanna actually, in detail, go over what happened? Oh, it's the time when you didn't get what you wanted. Yeah. It's a time when you gave it everything you had and you came up short. Right. Or failed miserably. Okay, so. Especially if you're embarrassed in some way. Right. It's usually the only time people, again, calamity, is the impetus for them to actually turn around and go, who the fuck am I? What am I doing and why am I doing it? Instead of naturally going, hmm, okay, well I won. Why? What was it the cause? And so I think part of my success is that when I win, I'm brutal. When I lose, I'm brutal. And there is no in between. So I remember losing the rematch against Noguera. And I still feel like it was a bullshit call. I feel like I won that fight. But my opinion is that, and this even came up, so one of the coaches in the back was like, oh, you did great, don't feel bad, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I go, no, fuck that. I didn't finish him. I allowed the referees to make a judge, a decision that I think is incorrect and bad, but that came because I didn't take him out. Fuck that, no, no. He won, he's gonna get more money, he's gonna get more recognition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I accept all this and it's not okay. And I need to, when I get a chance to fight him again, I gotta figure out how to take this guy out. I don't wanna say forever. I'm not trying to put him six feet underground. Well, when I fight, yes I am. But the point being, I need to find a way to, this is definitive. You don't get to say shit about it because I'm the only one who can stand right now. That's the way it's gotta be. Anything less than that is not good enough. And even if I achieve that, then I gotta figure out, okay, it's not a given. How did I get to this point? How did I make that happen? Was it simply because of his own mistakes or was it because of my successful action? So it's always self critical. Always, constantly. You love movies. I read this somewhere. You mentioned Blade Runner is a favorite. Number one of all time, the final cut. That's my go to. So you would say Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time. It's one of the greatest movies of all time. And it is my number. What's in the top? My top five, Blade Runner, final cut. This is the original Blade Runner. And I used to own, on tape, the original. VHS? The original cut, yeah. And I had the director's cut on DVD. Why Blade Runner, by the way? What connects you to it? As a kid, I just thought it was so cool. There was something about it that really spoke to me. The whole cyberpunk landscapes and this guy chasing down rogue androids, replicants, and all this. Is it just the entire cyberpunk universe or is it just robots as well? No, I mean, the cyberpunk universe is part of it. On the surface, I've always tended towards dark subject matter. Things that are of the dark, so to speak, are things that I've always been gravitated towards. I think maybe part of it is that things that are darker are more accepting and more upfront with death. And perhaps, I think, maybe that is what was... Yeah, somehow more honest, perhaps. I mean, there's also the aspect of rebelliousness, usually. Like, I was never one to wanna just do what somebody told me to do, you know? I'm not sitting around trying to always be such a radical individual that I can't take orders. No, in fact, I'm more than willing to take orders from somebody that I feel is competent and has merit and reason behind what they're doing and makes like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm 100% for it. Not only can I take orders, I will help you achieve whatever it is if I think it's worthwhile, even at my own expense. But to get to that point is a rarity. Like, it's just not a given. And so you can even imagine being a grade school teacher and this kid doesn't respect you and he doesn't really think you're that smart. They don't really appreciate that. So cyberpunk is number one. What else is there? Cyberpunk is kind of number one. It's an environment I love, but at the same time, Conan the Barbarian by John Milius is one of my favorite films of all time. And you know, that's such a pure film in a way. Like, the motivations are pure. They're very easy to follow, but not lacking in depth. You know, it's not just explosions and teal and orange. It's more on the human condition and I love it. And it's shot incredibly well. It's got an incredible soundtrack. Yeah, I fucking love it. But with Blade Runner also in a deeper sense, you know, again, the human condition. You know, you start seeing like, what is being? What is being human? You know, how does this relate to if you can make it and you can tell it what to do, at what point is it like you should or you shouldn't? You know, why do you get to determine what's alive and what's not? What's a life that should be allowed to live and what isn't? And what would be the strain of being Roy Batty and seeing all these incredible moments that with his passing will no longer exist? Especially if he hasn't had a chance to put that flame into another torch, so to speak. If he hasn't written them down, if he hasn't passed them down to somebody else. Gone like tears in the rain. Like tears in the rain, that scene is incredible. But it's funny, because those two universes are very different, Conan and the Barbarian and Cyberpunk. Is there, that makes me curious about what else might be in the list at the top. Well, let me think. It's a pretty. Do you like the Godfather type of universe? No, no, I mean, I'm sure the Godfather, I've never actually even watched the whole Godfather. No, but also like, was it Casino, Goodfellas? Goodfellas is a good movie, but no, that's not in my top. It's a good flick, but it doesn't really do it for me. If people really wanna get into this a little more, I did make a list of 100 of my favorite movies on my Facebook fan page. Nice. Do you remember what like, some of the top. Oh yeah, like Blazing Saddles is on there, Rage of the Lost Ark, Valhalla Rising by Nicholas from Winding Refn, Maniac by William Lustig. It's a 1980 gnarly video nasty horror movie about a serial killer who murders women and scalps them. And it's gnarly as hell and very brutal and very bleak and very, I mean, it's the kind of thing that like a lot of people would have a real hard time watching. But one, again, I like things that are dark, but two, I thought the performances were fantastic in this film and they really got out, I think what the underlying thing was, and it was a guy who was basically just like run amok by the overbearing mother, Jungian archetype. And it, she was, she imparted her insanity into him. And he, but yet there is this aspect you could see of him wanting to try and actually be able to be in the world and have love and have a feminine companionship to go with his masculine aspect. But he had no way of understanding how to really make that happen. And he had a complete negative connotation to the feminine. So his struggle with, and there's a little part in the movie where he somehow comes across this model or something, and they actually, he starts to feel like maybe he might be able to actually have a relationship with somebody and it goes somewhere. But yeah, even the Elijah Wood remake I felt was really well done and captured most of the essence of what the movie was about. But I still feel like the original by William Lustig is the best. What's the greatest love movie of all time? Greatest love movie of all time. So like something where love is, I mean, I suppose love underlies most of these movies, and especially like The Dark. I mean hell, Takashi Miike's films are all about family of all things, as bonkers as those movies are. They, the general theme is family almost entirely in all of his films. Yeah, there's very, I mean, even you can argue later on. Yeah, it's everywhere. Greatest love film of all time. That's, I mean, is Excalibur a film about love? What's Excalibur about? King Arthur. Excalibur is about Arthur becoming king of the Britains and his love of his country and his love of Guinevere. But eventually, yeah, it becomes more of about the necessity for the king to love, to hold Excalibur, to stay, to realize that while, if you're the king, you can love your wife and you can love your best friend, and they may fuck each other behind your back and as they fall in love too. But at the end of the day, your responsibility, your love has to be to the country and everyone else first and not your own personal wants, which, you know, made a much more interesting story when you have Carmen Berenna and oh, oh, what is that one? It's a German opera, but you know, and horses and slow mo and sword fights and an epic death scene between Arthur and his son. Okay, now I definitely have to watch it and Evan watched it and embarrassed me. It is John Boorman's second film in Hollywood, his first one being Point Blank with Lee Marvin, which is also on top, one of the upper echelon movies on my list, derived from a book called The Outfit by, what is his name? I forget, but Darwin Cook, the comic illustrator, Donald Westlake wrote, so Darwin Cook does an amazing comic book send up of Darwin Cook's novels and they are fucking incredible. So anyways, but the Point Blank with Lee Marvin, you know, it's a man driven by purpose, revenge, but also by like really pure motivations. He wants his money, he was betrayed and he wants his cash because this is what he agreed to do the thing for and this is, which also is part of the reason why I like No Country for Old Men so much, which I felt was a great movie, even better book, but I remember talking to my friend and I go, you know, Anton Chigurh is the most pure human being in that whole book. Well, that guy's the villain. I go, ha ha, is he evil? He's the one, he lies to no one. He does everything he says he will do. He always follows his word and on the rare occasion, he allows fate to make a decision as he figures like, well, whatever all led us to here will lead us one way or the other and if we're at this crossroads, what, how is there any better or worse way than to do it over a coin flip? And so that whole scene where the guy's going, well, what am I putting up? And he goes, everything, you've been putting it up every day of your life and that's true. Everything we do is a decision, is a calling, is a choice. And then it bummed me out that they reduced the last interaction between Chigurh and What's His Face's wife and he finally finds her and she's like, you don't have to do this. I mean, he's like, yes, yes, I do. This is the way it is. You can think that your life could've turned out any sort of way, you could've done this, you could've done that, but the reality is this is the way your life is and it's the way it was always going to be. You know, the fact that I'm here is the end of it and that's that. Yeah, it's funny, if you're honest, this with dark movies reveal that the villains are the purest of humans and can teach us the most profound lessons and that's certainly an example of it. What do you think the big ridiculous last philosophical question, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing we've got going on of life and existence on Earth from your individual perspective but the entirety of the human species? Life, the universe and everything? Yeah. Don't. Oh. We could just leave it at that. You knew exactly where I was going. I love it. Josh, I love you very much. You've been a huge inspiration. I have a friend who she said, do you know Lex Friedman? Have you gone on Lex's content? And I go, yes, I know Lex Friedman is. I've sadly been way too long in contact without making it happen for too long and yes, I will 100%, I even cut a shirt at the beginning of the pandemic to make my own little mask at one point due to the Lex process and hello, I was like, I can't really hear you but I'm demonstrating. Just let's see it through but this has been a blast. And next time, next time let's drink some of the Warbringer whiskey. I will bring some Warmaster. I wasn't sure if you were, if you imbibed at all in spirits. 100%, it felt a little weird to do it early on in the morning, especially because I'm flying out there. Does it though? I mean, I've had some wonderful morning whiskey at times. It, now that you've mentioned it, it doesn't at all. So next time let's make sure what Joe Organ calls the adult beverages, let's make sure we indulge. I have zero reservations for doing such a thing. I'm into it. Josh, thanks for talking to me. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Josh Barnett and thank you to our sponsors. Munk Pack, low carb snacks, Element electrolyte drink, Eight Sleep self cooling mattress and Rev transcription and captioning service. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Sun Tzu in the art of war. The Supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Josh Barnett: Philosophy of Violence, Power, and the Martial Arts | Lex Fridman #165

The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone who's writing, like his book, Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media, and in his book, Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives. And very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches. To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life. Quick mention of our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep, focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years. Deep work is hard, but is ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing. The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distractions of the world just fade away. Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation. Too much takes away the focused mind and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both, the focus and the fun. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman if you can only figure out how to spell that. And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport. What is deep work? Let's start with a big question. So I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating. What does it mean to work deeply on something? I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that. Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right? So I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians. And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, Turing Award. I mean, you know the crew, right? Theoretical computer science. Theoretical computer science, yeah, yeah. So I'm in the theory group, right? Doing theoretical computer science and I publish a book. So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier one skill. Like that's what you would talk about, right? Like how intensely I can focus. That was the key skill. It's like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right? So this is something that people actually, the theory folks are thinking about? Oh yeah. Really? Like they're openly discussing like, how do you focus? I mean, I don't know if they would quantify it, but focus was the tier one skill. So you would come in, here would be a typical day. You'd come in and Eric DeMain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard, right? With a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them. And maybe they projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem. You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back, they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard, right? Like that's the tier one skill. This is the difference between different disciplines. Like I often feel for many reasons, like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists. It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming or like machine learning, like the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering version of it. It feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe. It feels like you're just like cheating your way into like some kind of trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case. That's how it feels. I'd be interested to hear what you think about that because programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply to work deeply, but sometimes it does. So it's a weird dance. For sure code does, right? I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs, I think it's a great example of deep work. I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme. I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with a Olympic athlete, you're like, oh, I see that's what it is. Now for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes. But coding I think is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I wanna solve, I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly. But so basically I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. That was the term I used. Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012. So like right as I began as a professor. And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction, that it's not just following your passion. You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage. And there was this big followup question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at things? And then I look back to my grad school experience, I was like, huh, there was this focus thing that we used to do. And I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear, there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians, it's important here, it's important here, it's important here. And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector. Focus is very important and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it. So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically, you say knowledge work, but basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world. Can we break that apart a little bit? Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different, really, even if it's brief and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pile up that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay and I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on, but every five or six minutes you quickly check like an inbox or your phone, that initiates a context shift in your brain, right? We're gonna start to suppress some neural networks, we're gonna try to amplify some others. It's a pretty complicated process actually. There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens. You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing and now it's trying to switch back to the original thing even though it's also your brain's in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. And it's fatiguing too. I mean, you do this long enough and you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself. Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say? So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so? So if you're thinking of like this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function or large scale on a system. And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that? And then you have to look it up. This is the danger zone. You go to the internets. And so you have to, now it is a kind of context switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem, you now have switch thinking about like consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem. It definitely feels like a context switch, but is that a really bad thing to do? So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to as much as possible go deep and stay there for like a really long period of time? Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar, right? You're thinking about this type of solution. You're thinking about coding. You're thinking about this type of functions. Where you're really gonna get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different. And if there's unresolved obligations. So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox, right? Cause here's 20 emails. I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different. Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this. It's very different than the coding I'm doing. And I'm leaving it unresolved. So like someone needs something from me and I'm gonna try to pull my attention back. The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing. So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter. I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right? That could be devastating because you're gonna expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing. That's gonna completely mess up the cognitive plateau there. And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again. It's really difficult. So it's both the information and the emotion. Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before. So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lacks going on there, right? So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus. I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk. We can get a lot done. But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit. Yeah, and one of the beautiful, people can read about it in your book, Deep Work. And I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts, but it's still pretty profound and it has stayed with me for a long time. There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts. Like words matter, it's pretty cool. And just for me, sort of as a comment, there's, it's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time. But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy. So forget being productive and all that. I'm just satisfied with my life. I feel fulfilled, it's like joyful. And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards. It's a beautiful thing. And I find the opposite when I don't do that kind of thing, I'm much more irritable. Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything and there's this stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life. So in that sense, Deep Work has been a source of a lot of happiness. I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate Deep Work into your life? What are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level? What are different ideas there? Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking, right? So if you're facing your workday, don't allow like your inbox or a to do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I wanna do next? I mean, I'm a big planner saying, here's the time available, let me make a plan for it. So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left, what do I actually wanna do with it? So in this half hour, I'm gonna work on this. For this 90 minute block, I'm gonna work on that. And during this hour, I'm gonna try to fit this in. And then actually I have this half hour gap between two meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands, I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance, this is what I wanna do with the time available. I mean, I find that's much more effective. Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking, it's much easier to actually see, this is where I want, for example, the Deep Work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this. And you're gonna get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying, what's next? I schedule every single day kind of thing. So as I could try to do in the morning to try to have a plan. Yeah, so I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. Like there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season, here's what I'm working on. I wanna have this many chapters done of a book, something like this. Like you have the big picture vision of what you wanna get done. Then weekly, you look at that, and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like, okay, what's my week gonna look like? What do I need to do? How am I gonna make progress on these things? Maybe I need to do an hour every morning or I see that Monday is my only really empty day. So that's gonna be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day, you look at your weekly plan and say, let me block off the actual hours. So you do that three scales, the quarterly, down to weekly, down to daily. And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot, and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it, is scheduling the duration of time. This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings. I'm like, religiously don't do meetings. All other academics are jealous of you, by the way. Yeah. I know. No Zoom meetings. I find those are, that's one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic, is both the opportunity to, the positive thing is to have more time with your family, sort of reconnect in many ways. And that's really interesting. Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things. The negative is, actually both those things are also sourced from the negative. But the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule. And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting. Like, what are we doing here? What's the meaning of life? Yeah, I have, every Zoom meeting is, I have an existential crisis, so. Kierkegaard with the internet connection. So, what the hell are we talking about? Oh, so when you don't have meetings, there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to, like the important things, like deep work sessions to last way longer than you maybe planned for. I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule, the goal is to schedule, to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope I can keep going and hope I can get lost in it. And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go and the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world? Or is there some magic to the time blocking? Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities. So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially. There's academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff, there's the business surrounding my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well, you just rock and roll and let it go on. So like one of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it, so I even sell this planner to help people time block, it has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over one. Next time you get a chance, you move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining. So in other words, there's no bonus for I made a schedule and I stuck with it. Like there's actually, it's not like you get a prize for it, right? Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time and if I have to change that plan, that's fine. Like the state I wanna be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and gave it some thought for what to do because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs and I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot. So that's kind of my strategy is like, just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot because I feel you, if you're rolling, yeah. Well, that's what it is for me, like with writing, I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's, you don't really get on a roll in some sense, like it's just difficult, but working on proofs, it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction, just you've been at it for a couple of hours and you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made, it's really hard to pull away from that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone. Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume. Yeah. Like stopping on a dead end. That's true. There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task. Yeah, or a cold start. Yeah. Whenever I feel like I'm in a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently. So now we're sort of starting something up from cold and it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it. Like here's where we are. We feel like something's about to give here. We need the very early stages where it's just, I don't know, I'm gonna read hard papers and it's gonna be hard to understand them and I'm gonna have no idea how to make progress. It's not motivating. What about deadlines? Can we, okay, so this is like a therapy session. It seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines. And so one of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline or there's a artificial or real sense of urgency. Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines? Why do deadlines work so well? Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm gonna work on this, is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about, should I take a break now? This is the big issue with just saying, I'm gonna go write. I'm gonna write for a while and that's it because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're gonna take some breaks. We're not just gonna write forever. And so why not right now? You have to be like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes. So why don't we just take a break now? We should probably look at the internet. Now you have to constantly have this battle. On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule, I've got these two hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. I have a break scheduled over here. I don't have to fight with myself, right? And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect. I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due. Perhaps, but will you describe it as much healthier sort of giving yourself over, and you talk about this in the new email book, the process, I mean, in general, you talk about it all over, is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process. But then you have to be strict with yourself. Yeah, but what are the deadlines you're talking about? It's like with papers, like what's the main type of deadline work? Well, so papers, definitely, but publications, like say this podcast, I have to publish this podcast early next week, one, because your book is coming out. I'd love to sort of support this amazing book, but the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins. And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life. Like I don't wanna be in a hotel in Vegas, like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling. On hour 43 of your Tarathon thing. But actually it's possible that I still will be doing that because that's not a hard, that's a softer deadline, right? But those are sort of, life imposes these kinds of deadlines. Yeah. I'm not, so yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline. Yeah. But I am almost referring to like the pressure that people put on you. Hey man, you said you're gonna get this done two months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done? I don't see, I don't like that pressure. Yeah. First of all, I think we can all. I hate it too. We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique. I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling, but see, I don't like that. So I will try to get things done early. I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today. Right? Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as the night before, because then I get in my head about what if I get sick? Or like, what if, you know, what if I don't get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly? So I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked about this. If you go back and read the ethics, he's trying to understand the meaning of life and he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply. It's kind of like a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said, ultimately that's where he found his meaning, but, you know, he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct. And so what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it. I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like, I got it. I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere, I have my notebook in it because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof and it just, so you train yourself. You train yourself to appreciate certain things. And then over time, the hope is that it accretes. Well, let's talk about some demons because I wonder there's like deep work, which and the world without email books that to me symbolize the life I want to live. Okay. And then there is, I'm like, despite appearances and adult at this point, and this is the life I actually live. And I'm in constant chaos. You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate it too. But it seems like I'm always in it. It's a giant mess. It's like, it's almost like whenever I establish, whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos. Yeah. And like, I don't want to. Yeah. But you have to look in the mirror at a certain point and you have to say like, who the hell am I? Like, I keep doing this. Is this something that's fundamental to who I am or do I really need to fix this? What's the chaos right now? Like, I've seen your video about like your routine. It seemed very structured and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So like, what's the chaos now that's not in that video? Many of those sessions go way longer. I don't get enough sleep. Yeah. And then I, the main introduction of chaos is, it's taking on too many things on the to do list. I see. It's, I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with, which is saying, not saying no. But it's not like I have trouble saying no. It's that there's so much cool shit in my life. Yeah. Okay, listen, there's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics robots. Spot and the other, yeah. And they're giving me spot. So there's a to do, what am I gonna say? No. Yeah. So they're getting me spot and I wanna do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it. Okay, so that's now a to do item. And then you go to Texas for a while. There's Texas. Everything's happening. There's all the interesting people down there. And then there's surprises, right? There are power outages in Texas. There's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things. And you sleep less. And then there's personal stuff, like just people in your life, sources of stress, all those kinds of things. But it does feel like if I'm just being introspective, that I bring it onto myself. I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing. Yeah. Is they flourish under pressure. Yeah. And I wonder if that's just a hack I've developed as a habit early on in life that you need to let go of, you need to fix. But it's all interesting things. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, because these are all interesting things. Well, one of the things you talked about in Deep Work, which is really important, is having an end to the day. Yeah. Like putting it down. Yeah. Like that, I don't think I've ever done that in my life. Yeah. Well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. So I didn't have a real job. I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job. And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work. Because hey, when work's over, she'll be home, and I don't wanna be on campus or whatever. And so real early on, I just got in that habit of this is when you end work. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job, right? I put artificial, I was like, I wanna train. I was like, when I'm a professor, it's gonna be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial large time consuming things into the middle of my day. I basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this, while still maintaining the nine to five. So it's like, okay, I wanna get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay, I didn't wanna get flabby when my job was easy. So that when I became a professor, and now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids. So now I don't really have a choice. That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is I just don't have time to do them. And then after a while people stop bothering. Well, but that's how you have a successful life. Otherwise you're going to, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson. Like to where nobody wants, nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity. Like you're driving, you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you. So if you live in chaos, you're going to attract chaotic people. And then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy. And it feels like I'm not bothered by it, but I guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying, which is like, I think one of the big hacks for productive people that I've met is to get married and have kids, honestly. It's very perhaps counterintuitive, but it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer. Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables, though it has a huge, kids have a huge productivity hit those, you gotta weigh it. But okay, here's the complicated thing though. Like you could think about in your own life, starting the podcast as one of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right? Like I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago and be like, don't do that. Like your research is going well, right? But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is, the direction that's taking you is like a couple of years from now, it's gonna, it'll be something really monumental that you're probably, that's gonna probably lead to, right? There'll be some really, it just feels like your life is going somewhere. It's going somewhere. It's interesting. Unexpected, yeah. Yeah, so how do you balance those two things? And so what I try to throw at it is this motto of do less, do better, know why, right? So do less, do better, know why. It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right? So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know? So a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting. Like I have a couple bets placed on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things. And then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes. Like with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training. I was like, I wanna be a better writer, I wanna be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student. I really wanted to write hardcover idea books. I started training. I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself. I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills. And it took forever until, you know, but now today, like I actually get to write for the New Yorker, but it took like a decade. So a small number of things, try to do them really well. And then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value. Like in general, I think this is worth doing and then seeing where it leads. And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what? Like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing, like a sense that you say you wanted to write, get good at writing. You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking, this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment. Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for. I wrote that back in 2012. But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right? So what I was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start, and then that's what propels you. Or actually the reality is as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact, the passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do, and that's a worthy goal. But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is gonna identify, like for sure you should be a writer or something like this. So I was actually quoting you. I was on a social network last night in a clubhouse. I don't know if you've heard of it. Wait, I have to ask you about this because I'm invited to do a clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book. That's awesome. Well, let me know when, because I'll show up. But what is it? Okay, so first of all, let me just mention that I was in a clubhouse room last night, and I kept plugging exactly what you said about passion. So we'll talk about it. It was a room that was focused on burnout. Okay. But first, clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place because we talk about email, talk about social networks, but clubhouse is something very different. And I've encountered it in other places, Discord and so on, that's voice only communication. So it's a bunch of people in a room. They're just, their eyes closed. All you hear is their voices. In real time. Real time, live. It only happens live. You're technically not allowed to record, but some people still do, and especially when it's big conversations. But the whole point is it's there live. And there's different structures. Like on Discord, it was so fascinating. I have this Discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right? We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics. Okay. And so you're sitting there, so it's just voices, and you're able with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other. Well, first of all, like as a dynamic system, like. You see icons just like mics muted or not muted basically. Yeah, well, so everyone's muted and they unmute and it starts flashing. Yeah. Oh, so you're like, okay, let me get precedence. Yeah. So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation, like at a faculty meeting, and you sort of like kind of make some noises, like while the other person's finishing. And so people realize like, okay, this person wants to talk next, but now it's purely digital. You see a flashing. But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting, like even as we're talking now, there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption. Yeah. It's just darkness. You actually listen better and you don't interrupt. So like if you create a culture, there's always gonna be assholes, but they're actually exceptions. Everybody adjusts. They kind of evolve to the beat of the room. Okay, that's one fascinating aspect. It's like, okay, that's weird. Cause it's different than like a Zoom call where there's video. Yeah. It's just audio. You think video adds, but actually seems like it subtracts. The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy. It's weird. Because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way. It's similar to podcasts. Yeah. But with a lot of people. With a lot of people and new people. And they bring, okay, first of all, different voices, like low voices and like high voices. And it's more difficult to judge. In Discord, you couldn't even see the people. It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face. In clubhouse, it's your actual face. So you can tell like as an older person, younger person. In Discord, you couldn't. You just have to judge based on the voice. But there's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers that feels almost like a party with friends. And friends of friends you haven't met yet, but you really like. Now clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage. And you can bring people up onto stage. So only people on stage are talking. And you can have like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20, 30 people on stage. And then you can also have thousands of people just listening. I see. So there's a, I don't know, a lot of people are being surprised by this. Why is it called a social network? It seems like it doesn't have, there's not social links. There's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention. It feels like a communication. So the social network aspect is you follow people. And the people you follow, now this is like the first social network that is actually correct use of follow, I think. You're more likely to see the rooms they're in. So there's a, your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now. And the people you follow are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in. And so the final result is like, there's a list of really interesting rooms. Like I have all these, I've been speaking Russian quite a bit, there's practicing, but also just like talking politics and philosophy in Russian. I've never done that before, but it allows me to connect with that community. And then there's a community of people, like it's funny, but like I'll go in a community of all African American people talking about race and I'll be welcomed. I've never had, like I've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race, like with people from all over the place. It's like fascinating. And then musicians, jazz musicians, I don't know. You could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture, I suppose. Twitter and Facebook a lot for that culture, but there's something about this network as it stands now, cause no Android users. It's probably just because it's iPhone people. It's like. Less conspiratorial or something. Well, like less, listen, I'm an Android person. So I got an iPhone just for this network, which is funny. For now it's all like, there's very few trolls. There's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on. So I don't know, it's interesting. Now the downside, the reason you're going to hate it is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people like you, just like really successful, productive, very busy people. It's a huge time sink. It's very difficult to pull yourself out. Interesting, you mean once you're in a room? Well, no, leaving the room is actually easy. The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people, there's a little button that says leave quietly. So culture, no etiquette wise, it's okay to just leave. So you and I in a room, when it's just you and I, it's a little awkward to leave. If you're asking questions, I'm just gone. But, and actually if you're being interviewed for the book, that's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to, but usually the person interviewing would be like, okay, it's time for you to go. It's more normal, but the normal way to use the room was like, you're just opening the app and there'll be like, I don't know, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app, Bill Gates, these people on stage just like randomly just plugged in and then you'll step up on stage, listen, maybe you won't contribute at all, maybe you'll say something funny and then you'll just leave. And there's the addicting aspect to it. The reason it's a time sink is you don't wanna leave. What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people that they love this. I think it might have to do with the pandemic. It might be a little bit, yeah. There's a loneliness. They're all starved, yeah. But also it's really cool people. Yeah. Like when was the last time you talked to Sam Harris or whoever, like think of anybody, Tyler Copeland, like any faculty. This is like what universities strive to create, but it's taken hundreds of years of cultural evolution to try to get a lot of interesting, smart people together that run into each other. We have really strong faculty in a room together with no scheduling. This is the power of it. It's like you just show up, there's none of that baggage of scheduling and so on and there's no pressure to leave, sorry, no pressure to stay. It's very easy for you to leave. You realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings and like faculty, like even stopping by before the pandemic, a friend or faculty or colleague and so on, there's a weirdness about leaving. Yeah. But here there's not a weirdness about leaving. So they've discovered something interesting. But the final result when you observe it is it's very fulfilling. I think it's very beneficial, but it's very addicting. So you have to make sure you moderate. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, well, so maybe I'll try it. I mean, look, there's no, the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here. So the feed is not full of user generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does. And you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company. I mean, it seems like it's more ephemeral, right? You're here, you're talking. The feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening, right? You're not jockeying in the feed for, look, I'm being clever or something and I'm gonna get a light count that goes up and that's gonna influence. And there's more friction. There's more cognitive friction, I guess, involved in listening to smart people versus scrolling through. Yeah, there's something there. So there's no. Why are people so, I see all, there's all these articles that seem, I haven't really read them. Why are reporters negative about this? Competition. The New York Times wrote this article called Unfettered Conversations Happening on Clubhouse is. So I'm right in picking up a tone even from the headlines that there's some like negative vibes from the press. No, so I can say, let's say, well, I'll tell you what the article was saying, which is they're having cancellable conversations, like the biggest people in the world almost trolling the press. Right. And the press is desperately. Like foreshanning the press. Yeah, foreshanning the press. By saying that you guys are looking for click bait from our genuine human conversations. And so I think the, honestly, the press is just like, what do we do with this? We can't, first of all, it's a lot of work for them. Okay. It's what Naval says, which is like, this is skipping the journalist. Like the interview you, if you go on Clubhouse, the interview you might do for the book will be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you. Yeah. That's more traditional. Yeah. It'd be a good introduction for you to try it. But like the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up and it's like, again, like me, I'm sorry, I'm like, boy, I keep mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know, but like a lot of these major faculty, I don't know, Max Tegmark. Like just major faculty just sitting there and then you show up and then I'll ask like, oh, don't you have a book coming out or something? And then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee included. Interesting. So like that's the, it's not the journalistic, you're not gonna actually enjoy the interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing. Yeah. Like you're there 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience. Right. Like I'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like Jason Fried and I are talking about email, but it's using some more like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually, but it's using some sort of traditional webinar. Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally. Like I jump in like Jason's there and then someone else jumps in and yeah, that's interesting. But for now it's still closed. So even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be quite famous people just sitting there listening to you. Yeah. But the numbers aren't exactly high. So you're talking about rooms, like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand. Right. And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too. Just because of the exponential growth, give it seven more months. And if you let one invite be, it gets two invites, it gets four invites, because pretty soon it'll be everyone. And then the rooms in your feed are gonna be whatever, marketing, performance enhancing drugs or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. But then in a bunch of competitors, there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up, Twitter spaces. So Twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse because they just have a much larger user base and they already have a social network. So I would be very cautious, of course, with the addictive element, but it doesn't just like you said, this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the like, it doesn't have the context switching problem. Yeah. You'll just switch to it and you'll be stuck. Yeah, to keep a context is great. Yeah. Yeah. But then I think the best way I've found to use it is to acknowledge that these things pull you in. Yeah. So I've used it in the past, like almost, I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation as if that's how I use podcasts sometimes. I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast and then I can just turn it off. The problem with these is it pulls you in, it's really interesting. And then the other problem that you'll experience is like somebody will recognize you. Yeah. And then they'll be like, oh, Lex. Come on up. Come on. Oh, hey, I had a question for you. And then it takes a lot for you to go like, to ignore that. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. And then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool people. So it's like a source of a lot of joy, but you have to be very, very careful. The reason I brought it up is we, there's a room, there's an entire club actually on burnout. And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins as the process I go through, which is, my passion goes up and down, it dips. And I don't think I trust my own mind to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not. I kind of go with the David Goggins model of, I mean, he's probably more applying it to running, but when it feels like your mind can't take any more, that you're just 40% at your capacity. I mean, it's just like an arbitrary level. It's the Navy SEAL thing, right? The Navy SEAL thing. I mean, you could put that at any percent, but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going, it's similar to this idea of a process. If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on, then ultimately, if you look in aggregate, the passion will increase. Your self satisfaction will increase. And if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine, so that what you hope for is off phase, off phase alignment. Sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem, but off phase alignment's good. So, okay, my research, I'm struggling, but my book stuff is going well, right? And so when you add those two waves together, like, oh, we're doing pretty well. And then in other periods, like on my writing, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere, but I've had some good papers, I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that can counteract each other. Now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough. Then when, you know, when everything, because everything for me is cyclical, good periods, bad periods with all this stuff. So typically they don't coincide, so it helps compensate. When they do coincide, you get really high highs, like where everything's clicking, and then you get these really low lows where like your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher. Is, do you think about the concept of burnout? Because I personally have never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is like, it's not just the up and down. It's like, you don't want to do anything ever again. Yeah. It's like, for some people it's like physical, like to the hospital kind of thing. Yeah, so I do worry about it. So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students and student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools, and I used to call it deep procrastination, but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork. Yeah. Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension, and the professor gives you an incomplete, and says, you got it, you were gonna fail the course, you have to hand this in, and they can't do it, right? It's like a complete stop on the ability to actually do work. And so I used to counsel students who had that issue, and often it was a combination of, this is my best analysis, is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties of they're usually under a very hard load, right? They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just really pushing themselves, and the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic. Right. So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in. Everyone's hoped that they were going there, and that they're in three majors, they don't wanna let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever. So your motivation's not in the right place. The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship. And you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I would always be very worried about that. So I think about that a lot. I do a lot of multi phase or multi scale seasonality. So I'll go hard on something for a while, and then for a few weeks, go easy. I'll have semesters that are hard, and semesters that are easy. Or I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales, and in the day I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cut off at five. So like every scale, it's all about rest and recovery. Because I really wanna avoid that. And I do burn out. I burnt out, pretty recently I get minor burnt outs. I got a couple papers that I was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago, and I wasn't sleeping well, and there's some other things going on. And it just knocks out and I get sick usually, is how I know I've pushed myself too far. And so I kind of pulled it back. Now I'm doing this book launch. Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So I like seasonality for rest and recovery, I think it's crucial. And at every scale, daily, monthly, and then at the annual scale. An easy summer, for example, I think is like a great idea if that's possible. Okay, you just made me realize that that's exactly what I do. Because I feel like I'm not even close to burnout or anything. Even though I'm in chaos, I feel the right exact way is the seasonality, is the, not even the seasonality, but like you always have multiple seasons operating. It's like you said, because when you have a lot of cool shit going on, there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy, that there's always a reason. I suppose the fundamental thing, and I've known people that suffer from depression too, the fundamental problem with the experience of depression and burnout is why do, life is meaningless. And I always have an answer of why today could be cool. And you have to contrive it, right? If you don't have it, you have to contrive it. I think it's really important. Like, okay, well, this is going bad, so now is the time to start thinking about, I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic. It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what? This could be something really interesting. Deep questions with Kyle Newport. I do it all in that voice. I love the podcast, by the way. But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said, the key to life is to be unboreable. I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially generate anything. Like, find something in your environment, in your surroundings, that's a source of joy. Like, everything is fun. Yeah. Did you read The Pale King? It goes deep on boredom. It's like uncomfortable. It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. Like, the characters in that are just driven to the extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom the other day, so now I'm really interested in this topic. Because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week. So I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for, I might do it as an article first, but as a book. Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about. Because I was worried about, like, I don't know if the launch's gonna work, the pandemic, what's gonna happen, I don't know if it's gonna get there. So this is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books, and I'm beginning like a whole intellectual exploration. Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas in deep work that you don't expand on too much is boredom. Yeah, well, so deep work had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom, and a very functionalist idea was basically, you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule, or your mind is gonna form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli. And once it forms that connection, it's never gonna tolerate deep work. So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours, like it's just not gonna tolerate it. But more recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive, right? Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst, they serve a really important purpose for a species, right? Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason. Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured. Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive. So what's boredom? Why is that uncomfortable? And I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action. Like as a species, I mean, think about it, like what got us to actually take advantage of these brains? What got us to actually work with fire? What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action. So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it. Just like we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions. And then that causes, it's like a cognitive action obesity type things because it short circuits this system that wants us to do things, but we put more things on our plate than we can possibly do and then we're really frustrated we can't do them and we're short circuiting all of our wires. So it all comes back to this question, well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do? Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch, how much work I do and what I work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that. And so now I'm just, well, see, this is, it's something I made up, but now I'm going deep on it. And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about on the show and I was like, well, I get trying to learn about animals and boredom. And she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom. So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high. So I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch. And my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed a nice, you know, high. So there we go, there's a case study. Well, it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because I didn't even realize that it's so simple. I'm one of the people that has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger, trying to understand the hunger with myself. Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food. I don't know, but there's probably a perfect, that's a nice way to think about diet as action. There's probably an optimal diet response to the experience that our body's telling us, the signal that our body's sending, which is hunger. And in that same way, boredom is sending a signal. And most of our intellectual activities in this world, our creative activities, are essentially a response to that signal. Yeah, and think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits, right? It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper palatably and it doesn't end up well. Now think about modern attention engineered, digitally mediated entertainment. We have this boredom instinct. Oh, we can take care of that with a hyper palatable alternative. Is that gonna lead to a similar problem? So I've been fasting a lot lately, like I'm doing eating once a day. I've been doing that for over a month, just eating one meal a day and primarily meat. But it's very, fasting has been incredible for me, for focus, for wellbeing, for, I don't know, just for feeling good, okay? We'll put on a chart what makes me feel good. And that fasting and eating primarily a meat based diet makes me feel really good. And so, but that ultimately what fasting did, I haven't fasted super long yet, like a seven day diet, which I really like to do. But even just fasting for a day for 24 hours gets you in touch with your, with the signal. It's fascinating. Like you get to listen to your, learn to listen to your body that like, it's okay to be hungry. It's like a little signal that sends you stuff. And then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body. Like, and I get to like, okay, cool. So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal. Like it sounds ridiculous, okay? And you could do that with. And do different types of food. It feels different. So you learn about what your body wants. For some reason fasting, it's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom. Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal that I could say, I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit, okay? I love apples and cherries. Like, I don't know how to moderate them. So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know calories matter, but they say calories. 2000 calories of cherries versus 2000 calories of steak. If I eat 2000 calories of steak, maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower, I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy. If I eat cherries, I'm going to be, I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked and like, it's just. Pits all around. Yeah, with everything. Over your face, yeah. And it's just like bloated, just not and unhappy. And also the mood swings up and down. I don't know. And I'll be much hungrier the next day. Sometimes it takes a couple of days. But when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs, it starts, it's just unhealthy. I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the Amazon or something like that. And so fasting was the mechanism for me to start listening to the body. I wonder if you can do that same kind of, I guess that's what meditation a little bit is. A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom. But so two years ago, I had a book out called Digital Minimalism. And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30 day fast. But from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom. And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like, I just wanna teach your body not to need the distraction, this or that. But it really wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom. Like, okay, I can't just dispel it. I can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say, what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table and sort of ask, what is this? What am I craving? Like, what's the activity equivalent of 2000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side? And I had 1700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this. And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out, what is this really pushing me towards? And it was pushing people towards connection. It was pushing people towards, I just wanna go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities. Like I wanna go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom, but then it completely rewired how they thought about, what do I wanna do with my time outside of work? And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right? You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like, but that's basically a listening to boredom experiment. Like just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have the digital Cheez Its. Okay, so if I can't do that, where is it gonna drive me? Well, I guess I kinda wanna go to the library, which came up a lot, by the way, a lot of people rediscovered the library. With physical books. Physical books, so like you can just go borrow them. And there's like low pressure and you can explore and you bring them home and then you read them and you can like sit by the window and read them and it's nice weather outside. And I used to do that 20 years ago, they're listening to boredom. So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days? Like if you were to recommend that process, what is ultimately the goal? Yeah, digital minimalism, that's my philosophy for all this tech. And it's working backwards from what's important. So it's you figure out what you're actually all about, like what you wanna do, what you wanna spend your time doing. And then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech could amplify or support some of these things? And that's how you decide what tech to use. And so the process is, let's actually get away from everything, let's be bored for a while, let's really spend a month getting really figuring out what do I actually wanna do? What do I wanna spend my time doing? What's important to me? What makes me feel good? And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things, right? And that was the goal. That turns out to be much more successful than when people take a abstention only approach. So if you come out your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much. Like I don't like how much I'm on Instagram, that's a bad thing. I wanna reduce this bad thing. So here's my new thing, I'm gonna spend less time looking at Instagram, much less likely to succeed in the longterm. So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because in the moment you're like, yeah, but it's not that bad and it would be kind of interesting to look at it now. When you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards, it's very powerful for people. Like I want my life to be like this, here's the role that tech plays in that life. The connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong. And then it's much, much easier to say, yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life. And I really wanna have that life, so of course I'm not gonna use Instagram. So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on. So if you quit social media for 30 days, you kinda have to do the work. You have to do the work. Of thinking like, what am I actually, what makes me happy in terms of these tools that I've previously used and when you try to integrate them back, how can I integrate them to maximize the thing that actually makes me happy? Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology? Like what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like? Well, maybe what I wanna do is be like outside of nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity like I'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset. Like you create this picture and then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I keep up with my cycling group. But Twitter is just, you know, toxic, it's not helping any of these things. And well, I'm an artist, so I kinda need Instagram to get inspiration. But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone, it's just on my computer and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week. Like you really can start deploying. It was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment, the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't, was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection. Like let me try to figure out what's positive. They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much. So I'm just gonna white knuckle it. Just 30 days will be good for me. I just gotta get away from it or something. It doesn't last. So you don't use social media currently. Yeah. Do you find that a lot of people going through this process will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media primarily? About half. Right, so about half when they went through this exercise, and these aren't quantified numbers. This is just, they sent me reports and yeah. That's pretty good though, 1700? Yeah, yeah. So roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether. Once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about, I don't, social media's not the tools that's really helping. The other half kept some, there were some things in their life where some social media was useful. But the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it. So for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone. Oh, interesting. Yeah, you can't optimize if you don't know what the function you're trying to optimize. So it's like this huge hack. Like once you know this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter. And suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and then way over towards your advantage. It's kind of fascinating because I've been torn with social media, but I did this kind of process. I haven't actually done it for 30 days, which I probably should. I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking what kind of approach to Twitter works for me. I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day. And at that time checking from the previous post, it makes me feel even when there's like negative comments, they go right past me. And when there's positive comments, it makes you smile. I feel like love and connection with people, especially with people I know, but even just in general, it's like, it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people. Okay, when you increase that from checking from two to like, I don't know what the threshold is for me, but probably like five or six per day, it starts going to anxiety world. Like where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally and positive comments will feel more shallow. It's kind of fascinating. So I've been trying to, there's been long stretches of time, I think December and January where I did just post and check, post and check. That makes me really happy. Most of 2020 I did that, it made me really happy. Recently I started like, I'll go, you go right back in like a drug addict, where you check it like, I don't know what that number is, but that number is high. Not good, you don't come out happy. No one comes out of a day full of Twitter celebrating humanity. And it's not even, cause I'm very fortunate to have a lot of just positivity in the Twitter, but there's just a general anxiety. I wouldn't even say it's, it's probably the thing that you're talking about with the contact switching. It's almost like an exhaustion. I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling. It's almost just an exhaustion to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my life, just exhausted. Like an existential exhaustion. Existential exhaustion. But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use from the people you've seen from yourself to use social media in the way I'm describing moderation? Or is it always going to become? When people do this exercise, you get lots of configurations. So for people that have a public presence, for example, like what you're doing is not that unusual. Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it and that's kind of it. But you've thought through like, okay, this supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness. Okay, then you could say if that's my goal, what's the right way to do it? Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day. Maybe what I do is every day at five, I do my post and check on the day. So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the Stoics a lot. And he has this similar strategy. He posts one quote every day usually from a famous Stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure. And that's just what he does. He just posts it and it's a very positive thing. Like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration. He doesn't spend time. He's never interacting with anyone on social media, right? But that's an example of I figured out what's important to me, what's the best way to use tools to amplify it. And then you get advantages out of the tools. So I like what you're doing. I looked you up, I looked up your Twitter feed before I came over here. I was curious, you're not on there a lot. I don't see you yelling at people. Now, do you think social media as a medium changed the cultural standards? And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all? Have you read like a Amusing Ourselves to Death? He was a social critic, technology critic and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism. So the ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia. But the ways that the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves. And that book is all about how different communication medium, like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates. And so he sort of gets into the, what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it. And this was all pre social media. But this is one of these ideas I'm having is like what's the degree to which, and I get into it sometimes on my show, I get into a little bit, like the degree to which like Twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what for example, debate and discussion was. Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. And it's like, it's a complete, there's different places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently. Well, yeah, absolutely. But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think, that there's the technological solutions. Like there's literally different features in Twitter that could completely reverse that. There's so much power in the different choices that are made. And it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects. Perhaps more negative or hopefully more positive. Yeah, so I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two ways social media, let's say could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today. One could be a little bit more economic, right? So the internet made it cheaper to get news. The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were gonna survive. But once you're in a paywall model, then what you really wanna do is make your tribe, which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you. So you wanna work to them. But then there's the sort of determinist point of view, which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary. Jack and Evan just, whatever, let's just do it this way. Influenced the very way that people now understand and think about the world. So the one influenced the other, I think. They kind of started adjusting together. I did this thing, I mean, I'm trying to understand this. Part of the, I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea. That's a very particular dream I've had of a startup. That this is a longer term thing, it has to do with artificial intelligence. But more and more, it seems like there's some trajectory through creating social media type of technologies. Very different than what people are thinking I'm doing. But it's a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done. But it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make an exceptionally engaging platform. My clubhouse is very engaging. And not have any other negative effects. For example, there's Chrome extensions that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes and all of that from Twitter. So all you're seeing is just the content. On Twitter, that to me creates, that's not a compelling experience at all. Because I still need, I would argue, I still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading. Because I don't only have a limited amount of time, so I need to know what's valuable. It's like great Yelp reviews on tweets or something. But I've turned off on, for example, on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chrome extension that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views. I don't know how many views the video gets and so on. Unless it's on my phone. Did you take off the recommendations? No, no. On YouTube, some people, distraction for YouTube is a big one for people. No, I'm not worried about the distraction because I'm able to control myself on YouTube. You don't rabbit hole. No, I don't rabbit hole. So you have to know your demons or your addictions or whatever. On YouTube, I'm okay. I don't keep clicking. The negative feelings come from seeing the views on stuff you've created. Oh, so you don't want to see your views. Yeah. So I'm just speaking to the things that I'm aware of of myself that are helpful and things that are not helpful emotionally. And I feel like there should be, we need to create actually tooling for ourselves. That's not me with JavaScript, but anybody is able to create, sort of control the experience that they have. Yeah. Well, so my big unified theory on social media is I'm very bearish on the big platforms having a long future. You are. I think the moment of three or four major platforms is not gonna last, right? So I don't know. Okay. This is just perspective, right? So you can start shorting these stocks on my, don't tell. It's not financial advice. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do it Robinhood. So here's, I think the big mistake the major platforms made as when they took out the network effect advantage, right? So the original pitch, especially if something like Facebook or Instagram was the people you know are on here, right? So like what you use this for is you can connect to people that you already know. This is what makes the network useful. So therefore the value of our network grows quadratically with the number of users. And therefore it's such a headstart that there's no way that someone else can catch up. But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead of say we're gonna shift towards a newsfeed model, they basically said we're going to try to in the moment get more data and get more likes. Like what we're gonna go towards is actually just seeing interesting stuff. Like seeing different information. So people took this social internet impulse to connect to people digitally, to other tools like group text messages and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right? So you don't think about these tools as oh, this is where I connect with people. Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting, now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting. And I think that is a much fiercer competition because now for example, you're going up against podcasts, right? I mean like, okay, I guess the Twitter feed is interesting right now, but also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too. I think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no more network effects, right? And so my sense is we're gonna see a fragmentation into what I call long tail social media, where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform, then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use where it's a thousand people and we're all interested in whatever, AI or comedy. And we've perfected this interface and maybe it's like Clubhouse, it's audio or something. And we all pay $2 so that we don't have to worry about attention harvesting. And that's gonna be wildly more entertaining. Like, I mean, I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter. It's not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting. That you have all these comedians that are trying to like, well, I can do like little clips and little whatever. Like, I don't know if there was a long tail social media. I mean, it's really, this is where the comedians are and there's podcasts and the comedians are on podcasts now. So this is my thought is that there's really no, there's really no strong advantage to having one large platform that everyone is on. If all you're getting from it is, I now have different options for diversion and like uplifting aspirational or whatever types of entertainment, that whole thing could fragment. And I think the glue that was holding together was network effects. I don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized, they don't have the centrifugal force anymore and they're spinning faster and faster. But is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting than all of these streaming services? Is it really that much more interesting than Clubhouse, is it that much more interesting than podcast? I feel like they don't realize how unstable their ground actually is. Yeah, that's fascinating. But the thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work, I mean, the newsfeed, you're exactly right. Like you can just duplicate the news. Like if it's not the social network and it's the newsfeed, then why not have multiple different feeds that are more, that are better at satisfying. There's a dopamine gamification that they've figured out. Yeah. And so you have to, whatever you create, you have to at least provide some pleasure in that same gamification kind of way. It doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks. But I mean, I guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of mechanism in other forms. Or people are turning on that gamification. I mean, so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it, right? So if I'm offering something, these exist out here. Like sugar. People realize sugar's bad for you. Yeah, sugar's great. They're gonna stop eating it. Yeah, drinking a lot's great too, but also after a while you realize there's problems. So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at, they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection. Like it's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated. I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different technologies. But I think the technologies are a distraction. We focus too much on Macedon versus whatever. Like forget, or Discord. Like actually let's forget the protocols right now. It's the idea of, okay. And there's a lot of these long tail social media groups, what people are getting out of it, which I think can outweigh the dopamine gamification is strong connection and motivation. Like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be better dads or something like this. And you talk to them on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talks. And that's a powerful thing too. One interesting thing about scale of Twitter is you have these viral spread of information. So sort of Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself. Yeah, I think it's a problem. Well, yes, but I wonder what replaces that because then you immediately. Reporting? Well, no. Reporters have to do some work again, I don't know. The problem with reporters and journalism is that they're intermediary. They have control. I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently is that it creates a shield between the people and the news. The interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news. Like you have the former president of the United States on Twitter creating news. You have Elon Musk creating news. You have people announcing stuff on Twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist. And that feels much more genuine and it feels very powerful, but actually coming to realize it doesn't need the social network. You can just put that announcement on a YouTube type thing. This is what I'm thinking. Right, so this is my point about that because that's right. The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic. I mean, I'm an old school internet nerd, a guy that was telemeting in the servers and gophering before the World Wide Web was around, right? So I'm a huge internet booster. And that's one of its big power. But when you put everything on Twitter, I think the fact that you've taken, you homogenized everything, right? So everything looks the same, moves with the same low friction is very difficult. You have no what I call distributed curation, right? The only curation that really happens, there's a little bit with likes and also the algorithm. But if you look back to pre web 2.0 or early web 2.0, when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs, there was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media, it was over time you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here and there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on. So if you think like the 2004 presidential election, most of the information people are getting from the internet was one of the first big internet news driven elections was from, you had like the daily costs and drudge, but there was like blogs that were out there and this was back, Ezra Klein was just running a blog out of his dorm room at this point, right? And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility because okay, people have paid, it's very hard to get people to pay attention to your blog, they're paying attention, they get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever, it seems to be really sharp and now people are noticing it and now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized low friction environment like friction where, I mean Twitter, where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread, whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push QAnon or something like that, it's probably gonna be a really weird looking blog and you're gonna have a hard time, like it's just never gonna show up on people's radar, right? So everything you've said up until the very last statement, I would agree with. This is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess, QAnon. There's, I think, I'll forget QAnon. Yeah, no, we can. But QAnon is, QAnon could be that, I also don't know, I should know more, I apologize, I don't know more. I mean, that's a power and the downside, you can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today and you would have potentially a very large following if he's charismatic, if he's as good with words, is able to express the ideas, whatever maybe he's able to channel, the frustration, the anger that people have about a certain thing. And so I think that's the power of blogs, but it's also the limitation, but that doesn't, we're not trying to solve that. You can't solve that, yeah. The fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem. Your thesis is that there's nothing special about large scale social networks that guarantees that they will keep existing. And it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet activists or the people who are very pro internet in the early days, they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms. Say, why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet where you own all the servers? And we built this whole distributed, the whole thing, we had open protocols. Everyone anywhere in the world could use the same protocols. Your machine can talk to any other machine. It's the most democratic communication system that's ever been built. And then these companies came along and said, we're gonna build our own, we'll just own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own. And the internet will just be the first mile that gets you into our private internet where we owned the whole thing. It went completely against the entire motivation of the internet was like, yes, it's not gonna be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them. It's any one server that they own could talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols. And so the old guard of pro internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet. We'll build three or four private internets and that's what we'll all use. It was the opposite basically. Well, it's funny enough, I don't know if you follow, but Jack Dorsey is also as a proponent and is helping to fund, create fully distributed versions of Twitter, essentially, I think that would potentially destroy Twitter. But I think there might be financial, like business cases to be made there, I'm not sure. But that seems to be another alternative as opposed to creating a bunch of like the long tail, creating like the ultimate long tail of like fully distributed. Yeah, which is what the internet is. But that's sort of my long, when I'm thinking about long tail social media, I'm thinking it's like the tech's not so important. Like there's groups out there, right? I know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group, whatever, they might use Slack, they might use some combination of Zoom or it doesn't matter. I think in the tech world, we wanna build the beautiful protocol that okay, everyone's gonna use as just a federated server protocol in which we've worked out X, Y, and Z, and no one understands it because then the engineers need it all to make, I get it because I'm a nerd like this, like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else and no one understands what's going on. Meanwhile, you have this group of bike enthusiasts that are like, yeah, we'll just jump on to Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog. The tech doesn't really matter. Like we built a world with our own curation, our own rules, our own sort of social ecosystem that's generating a lot of value. I mean, I don't know if it'll happen. There's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large, but I just think they're more, they're so, I mean, look how quickly Americans left Facebook, right? I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties and to diversify, right? But how quick did that take for just standard Facebook news feed? Everyone under the age of something were using it and no one under a certain age is using it now. It took like four years. I mean, this stuff is really. I believe people can leave Facebook overnight. Yeah. Like I think Facebook hasn't actually messed up like enough to, there's two things. They haven't messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively and there's no good alternative for them to leave. I think if good alternatives pop up, it would just immediately happen. The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think. I mean, Twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of, I mean, there's a lot of anxieties that was in the sort of political sphere anyways that Twitter was working with, but its moment could go to as well. I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing. Short little things. I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic. This is crazy that the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screenshotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash in under it. We have the technology guys to really clearly convey long form information to people. Why do we have these? And I know this because it's the gamified dopamine hits, but what a weird medium. There's no reason for us to have to have these threads that you have to find and pin with your screenshot. I mean, we have technology to communicate better using the internet. I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads? Because there's mechanisms of publishing that make it easier on Twitter. I mean, we're evolving as a species and the internet is a very fresh thing. And so it's kind of interesting to think that as opposed to Twitter, this is what Jack also complains about is Twitter's not innovating fast enough. And so it's almost like the people are innovating and thinking about their productive life faster than the platforms on which they operate can catch up. And so at the point the gap grows sufficiently, they'll jump. A few people, a few innovative folks will just create an alternative and perhaps distributed perhaps just many little silos and then people will jump and then we'll just continue this kind of way. Yeah, but see, I think like Substack, for example, what they're gonna pull out of Twitter, among other things, is the audience that was, let's say, like slightly left of center, but slightly left of center, don't like Trump, uncomfortable with like postmodern critical theories made into political action, right? And they're like, yeah, Twitter, there was people on there talking about this and it made me feel sort of hurt because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it. But honestly, I'd probably rather subscribe to the four subs, you know, I'm gonna have like Barry's and Andrew Sullivan's, I'll have like a Jesse Signals, like I'll have a few substacks I can subscribe to and honestly, I'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways, probably that's an email all day. And so like, there's an innovation that's gonna, that group, you know, it's gonna suck them off. Which is actually a very large group. Yeah, that's a lot of energy. And then once Trump's gone, I guess that's probably gonna drive, that drove a lot of more like Trump people off Twitter. Like this stuff is fragile, I think. I, but the fascinating thing to me, because I've hung out on Parler for a short amount enough to know that the interface matters. It's so fascinating like that, that it's not just about ideas. It's about creating like Substack 2, creating a pleasant experience, a dicting experience. No, you're right, you're right about that. And it's hard. And it's why the, this is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article is it's just the ugliness matters. And I don't mean even just aesthetically, it's just the clunkiness of the interfaces. And I don't know, it's, to some degree, the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this. And to some degree, it's a survivorship bias, right? I think Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this, it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else, the way Twitter is being used. I mean, it's basically the way, you know, they had it years ago. And then, you know, it was like, great, there'll be statuses, right? This is what I'm doing, you know? And my friends can follow me and see it. Without really changing anything, it just happened to hit everything right to support this other type of interaction. Well, there's also the JavaScript model, which Brendan Eich talked about. He just implemented JavaScript, like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days, threw it out there and just changed it really quickly, evolved it really quickly. And now it's become, according to Stack Exchange, the most popular programming language in the world that drives like most of the internet and even the backend and now mobile. And so that's an argument for the kind of thing you're talking about where like the bike club people could literally create the thing that would, you know, run most of the internet in 10 years from now. Yeah. So there's something to that, like as opposed to trying to get lucky or trying to think through stuff is just to solve a particular problem. Do stuff, yeah. And then do stuff. Do stuff, keep tinkering until you love it. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and of course the sad thing is timing and luck matter and that you can't really control. That's the problem. Yeah. But you can't go back to 2007. Yeah. That's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is go back in time 14 years. So the thing you have to kind of think about is what is the like, what's the totally new thing that 10 years from now would seem obvious. I mean, some people saying clubhouses that, there's been a lot of stuff like clubhouse before, but it hit the right kind of thing. Similar to Tesla actually, what clubhouse did is it got a lot of relatively famous people on there quickly. And then the other effect is like, it's invite only. So like, oh, all the smart, like famous people are on there. I wonder what's, it's the FOMO, like fear that you're missing something really profound as exciting happening there. So those social effects. And then once they actually show up, I'm a huge fan of this. It's the JavaScript model is like, clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface. Like you literally can't do anything except mute, unmute. There's a mute button. Yeah. And there's a leave quietly button. Yeah. And that's it. Yeah. And it's kinda. I love single use technology that sense, yeah. There's no like, there's no, it's just like trivial. And Twitter kinda started like that. Facebook started like that. Yeah. But they've evolved quickly to add all these features and so on. And I do hope clubhouse stays that way. Yeah. It'd be interesting. Or there's alternatives. I mean, even with clubhouse though, so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms I think is bits are cheap enough now that we don't really need a unicorn investor model. I mean, the investors need that model. There's really not really an imperative of we need something that can scale to a hundred million plus a year revenue. So, because it was gonna require this much seed and angel investment, and you're not gonna get this much seed angel investment unless you can have a potential exit this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of 10 exiting here. If you don't actually need that and you don't need to satisfy that investor model, which I think is basically the case. I mean, bits are so cheap. Everything is so cheap. So even like with clubhouse, it's investor backed, right? This notion of like, this needs to be a major platform, but the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform. That's where I'm interested. I mean, I don't know. There's so much money. That's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital if you do these things, right? I mean, so Facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine. It's crazy how much, where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have access to, right? That's incredibly powerful. So when there is a possibility to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital, that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up against, so. But there's a lot of money in the bike club. If you see what the Wall Street bets on that when a bunch of people get together, I mean, it doesn't have to be a bike. It could be a bunch of different bike clubs just kind of team up to overtake. That's what we're doing now, yeah. Or we're gonna repurpose off the shelf stuff. That's not, yeah, we're gonna repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something, and like the clubs using Slack just to build out these, you know. Yeah. Let's talk about email. Yeah, that's right. I wrote a book. You wrote yet another amazing book, A World Without Email. Maybe one way to enter this discussion is to ask what is the hyperactive hive mind, which is the concept you opened the book with? Yeah, and the devil. And the devil. It's the scourge of hundreds of millions. So I think, so I called this book A World Without Email. The real title should be A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow, but my publisher didn't like that, right? So we had to get a little bit more pithy. I was trying to answer the question after deep work, why is it so hard to do this? Like, if this is so valuable, if we can produce much higher, if people are much happier, why do we check email a day? Why are we on Slack all day? And so I started working on this book immediately after deep work. And so my initial interviews were done in 2016. So it took five years to pull the threads together. I was trying to understand why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do the stuff that actually moves the needle? And the story was, and I thought this was, I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else. That's why it took me so long to pull it together, is email arrives on the scene, email spreads, I trace it, it really picks up steam in the early 1990s, between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right? And it does so for very pragmatic reasons. It was replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than. It was mainly the fax machine, voicemail, and memos, right? So this was just better, right? So it was a killer app because it was useful. In its wake came a new way of collaborating, and that's the Hyperactive Hive Mind. So it's like the virus that follows the rats that went through Western Europe for the Black Pig. As email spread through organizations, in its wake came the Hyperactive Hive Mind workflow, which says, okay, guys, here's the way we're gonna collaborate. We'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages. Just boom, boom, boom, let's go back and forth. Hey, what about this? Did you see this? What about that client? What's going on over here? That followed email. It completely took over office work. And the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages, as those got more and more and more, and we had more of those to service, the need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more, right? And so by the time, and I go through the numbers, but by the time you get to today, now the average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes. Because every single thing you do in your organization, how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your vendors, how you talk to your clients, how you talk to the HR department, it's all this asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging. And you have to service the conversations. And it spiraled out of control, and it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all I do is constantly tend communication channels. So it's fascinating what you're describing is nobody ever paused in this whole evolution to try to create a system that actually works. That it was kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata. So it's just kind of started a very simple mechanism, just like cellular automata. It just kind of grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business and also personal life. Yeah, and that's one of the big ideas is that the unintentionality, right? So this goes back to technological determinism. I mean, this is a weird business book because I go deep on philosophy. I go deep on, for some reason, we get into paleoanthropology for a while. We do a lot of neuroscience. It's kind of a weird book. But I got real into this technological determinism, right? This notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act. That's my big argument about what happened with the hive mind. And I can document specific examples, right? So I document this example in IBM, 1987, maybe 85, but it's in like the mid to late eighties, IBM, R. Monk headquarters. We're gonna put an internal email, right? Because it's convenient. And so they ran a whole study. And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study, Adrian Stone, like we're gonna run this study to figure out how much do we communicate because it was still an era where it's expensive, right? So you have to provision a mainframe. So you can't over provision. Like we wanna know how much communication actually happened. So they went and figured it out. How many memos, how many calls, how many notes, great. We'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that. So if all of our communication moves to email, the mainframe will still be fine. In three days, they had melted it down. People were communicating six times more than that estimate. So just in three days, the presence of a low friction digital communication tool drastically changed how everyone collaborated. So that's not enough time for an all hands meeting. Guys, we figured it out. This is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's gonna make us more productive. We need more emails. It's emergent. Isn't that just on the positive end, amazing to you? Like, isn't email amazing? Like in those early days, like just the frictionless communication. I mean, email is awesome. Like people say that there's a lot of problems with emails, just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter and so on. It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note. It was a miracle, right? So I wrote a, there's originally was a New Yorker piece from a year or two ago called, was email a mistake? And then it's in the book too. But I go into the history of email, like why did it come along? And it solved a huge problem. It was the problem of fast asynchronous communication. And it was a problem that did not exist until we got large offices. We got large offices, synchronous communication, like let's get on the phone at the same time. There's too much overhead to it. There's too many people you might have to talk to. Asynchronous communication, like let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready, took too long. And so it was like a huge problem. So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the CIA headquarters, there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built a pneumatic powered email system. They had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers. So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location. You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go. And my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work, to show how important fast asynchronous communication was to large offices. So when email came along, it was a productivity silver bullet. It was a miracle. I talked to the researchers who were working on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s, trying to figure out how are we gonna use computer networks to be more productive? And they were building all these systems and tools. Email showed up, it just wiped all that research off the map. There was no need to build these custom intranet applications. There was no need to build these communication platforms. Email could just do everything. So it was a miracle application, which is why it spread everywhere. That's one of these things where, okay, on into the consequences, right? You had this miracle productivity silver bullet. It spread everywhere, but it was so effective. It just, I don't know, like a drug. I'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here, analogy here of a drug that like it's so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick. Well, ultimately it probably significantly increased the productivity of the world, but there's a kind of hump that it now has plateaued. And then the fundamental question you're asking is like, okay, how do we take the next, how do we keep increasing the productivity? Now, I think it brought it down. So my contention, and so again, there's a little bit in the book, but I have a more recent Wired article that puts some newer numbers to this. I subscribed to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right? When you could do fast asynchronous communication, but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts. Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email, I think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non industrial productivity. And I think the only reason why, so it certainly has not been going up. That metric has been stagnating for a long time now while all of this was going on. I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books. I'm gonna work for three hours in the morning, I'm gonna work for three hours at night. And only that I think has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non industrial growth. We should have been shooting up the charts. I mean, this is miraculous innovations, the computer networks. And then we built out these hundred billion dollar ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets where we could talk to anyone at any time. Like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts? Because our brain can't context switch once every six minutes. So it's fundamentally back to the context switching. Context switching is poison. Context switching is poison. What is it about email that forces context switching? Is it both our psychology that drags us in? Or is it the expectation? Yeah, right, right. Because it's not, I think we've seen this through a personal will or failure lens recently. Like, oh, am I addicted to email? I have bad etiquette about my email. No, it's the underlying workflow. So the tool itself I will exonerate. I think I would rather use POP3 than a fax protocol. I think it's easier. The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow. So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people with back and forth unscheduled messaging, I have to tend those conversations, right? It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables. And when the balls come back across, you have to pretty soon hit it back or stuff actually grinds to a halt. So it's the workflow that's the problem. It's not the tools, the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration. Let's just send messages back and forth, which means you can't be far from checking that. Cause if you take a break, if you batch, if you try to have better habits, it's gonna slow things down. So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow. The tool is fine. I don't want the tool to go away, but I wanna replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow. I think this is gonna be one of the biggest value generating productivity revolutions of the 21st century. I quote an anonymous CEO who's pretty well known who says this is gonna be the moonshot of the 21st century. It's gonna be of that importance. There's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed because we just figure things out on the fly in email that as we figure that out, I think it's gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars. You're so absolutely right. The question is, what is a world without email look like? How do we fix email? So what happens is, at least in my vision, you identify, well, actually there's these different processes that make up my workday. Like these are things that I do repeatedly, often in collaboration with other people that do useful things for my company or whatever. Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented with the hyperactive hive mind. How do we do this thing? Like answering client questions to shoot messages back and forth. How do we do this thing? Posting podcast episodes, we'll just figure it out on the fly. My main argument is we actually have to do like they did in the industrial sector, take each of these processes and say, is there a better way to do this? And by better, I mean a way that's gonna minimize the need to have unscheduled back and forth messaging. So we actually have to do process engineering. This created a massive growth and productivity in the industrial sector during the 20th century. We have to do it in knowledge work. We can't just rock and roll an inbox as we actually have to say, how do we deal with client questions? Well, let's put in place a process that doesn't require us to send messages back and forth. How do we post podcast episodes? Let's automate this to a degree where I don't have to just send you a message on the fly. And you do this process by process and the pressure on that inbox is released. And now you don't have to check it every six minutes. So you still have email. I mean, like I need to send you a file. Sure, I'll use email, but we're not coordinating or collaborating over email or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind. I mean, Slack doesn't solve anything there. You have better structured bespoke processes. I think that's what's gonna unleash this massive productivity. Bespoke, so the interesting thing is like, for example, you and I exchange some emails. So obviously I, let's just say in my particular case, I schedule podcasts. There's a bunch of different tasks, fascinatingly enough, that I do that can be converted into processes. Yeah. Is it up to me to create that process? Or do you think we also need to build tools just like email was a protocol for helping us create processes for the different tasks? I mean, I think ultimately the whole organization, the whole team has to be involved. I think ultimately there's certainly a lot of investor money being spent right now to try to figure out those tools, right? So I think Silicon Valley has figured this out in the past couple of years. This is the difference between when I was talking to people after Deep Work and now five years later is this scent is in the air, right? Because there's so much latent productivity. So yes, there are gonna be new tools, which I think could help. There are already tools that exist. I mean, in the different groups I profiled use things like Trello or Basecamp or Asana or Flow and our schedule wants and acuity, like there's a lot of tools out there. The key is not to think about it in terms of what tool do I replace email with? Instead, you think about it with, we're trying to come up with a process that reduces back and forth messages. Oh, what tool might help us do that? Yeah, and I would push, it's not about necessarily efficiency. In fact, some of these things are gonna take more time. So writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity it's probably worth doing. The thing that's killer is the back and forth because now I have to keep checking, right? So we scheduled this together because I knew you from before, but like most of the interviews I was scheduling for this actually I have a process with my publicist where we use a shared document and she puts stuffs in there and then I check it twice a week and there's scheduling options. I say, here's when I wanna do this one or this will work for this one or whatever. And it takes more time in the moment than just, but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging for podcast scheduling, which without this, so like with my UK publisher, I didn't put this process in the place because we're not doing as many interviews, but it's all the time. And I'm like, oh, I could really feel the difference, right? It's the back and forth that's killer. I suppose it is up to the individual people involved, like you said, knowledge workers, like they have to carry the responsibility of creating processes. Like how always asking the first principles question, how can this be converted into a process? Yeah, so you can start by doing this yourself, like just with what you can control. I think ultimately once the teams are doing that, I think that's probably the right scale. If you try to do this at the organizational scale, you're gonna get bureaucracy, right? So if it's, if Elon Musk is gonna dictate down to everyone at Tesla or something like this, that's too much remove and you get bureaucracy. But if it's, we're a team of six that's working together on whatever powertrain software, then we can figure out on our own, what are our processes? How do we wanna do this? So it's ultimately also creating a culture where saying like an email, sending an email just for the hell of it, it should be taboo. So you are being, you're being destructive to the productivity of the team by sending this email. As opposed to helping develop a process and so on that will ultimately automate this. That's why I'm trying to spread this message of the context switches as poison. I get so much into the science of it. I think we underestimate how much it kills us to have to wrench away our context, look at a message and come back. And so once you have the mindset of, it's a huge thing to ask of someone to have to take their attention off something and look back at this. And if they have to do that for three or four times, like we're just gonna figure this out on the fly and every message is gonna require five checks of the inbox while you wait for it. Now you've created whatever it is at this point, 25 or 30 context shifts. Like you've just done a huge disservice to someone's day. This would be like, if I had a professional athlete, like, hey, do me a favor. I need you to go do this press interview, but to get there, you're gonna have to carry this sandbag and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust your muscles and then you have to go play a game. Like, of course I'm not gonna ask an athlete to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing right before a game, but something as easy as thoughts, question mark, or like, hey, do you wanna jump on a call and it's gonna be six back and forth messages to figure it out. It's kind of the cognitive equivalent, right? You're taking the wind out of someone. Yeah, and by the way, for people who are listening, because I recently posted a few job openings for us so I wanted to help with this thing. And one of the things that people are surprised when they work with me is how many spreadsheets and processes are involved. Yeah, it's like Claude Shannon, right? I talked about communication theory or information theory. It takes time to come up with a clever code upfront. So you spend more time upfront figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it. But then your communication going forward is all much more efficient. So over time, you're using much less bandwidth, right? So you do pain upfront. It's quicker just right now to send an email. But if I spend a half day to do this over the next six months, I've saved myself 600 emails. Now, here's a tough question for, you know, from the computer science perspective, we often over optimize. So you've create processes and you, okay, just like you're saying, it's so pleasurable to increase in the longterm productivity that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself by just creating processes and you actually never, like it has a negative effect on productivity longterm because you're too obsessed with the processes. Is that a nice problem to have essentially? I mean, it's a problem. I mean, because let's look at the one sector that does do this, which is developers, right? So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban are basically workflow methodologies that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind. But man, some of those programmers get pretty obsessive. I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever level three Scrum master. They get really obsessive about like, it has to happen exactly this way and it's probably seven times more complex than it needs to be. I'm hoping that's just because nerds like me, you know, like to do that, but it's a broadly probably an issue, right? We have to be careful because you can just go down that fiddling path. Like, so it needs to be, here's how we do it. Let's reduce the messages and let's roll, you know? You can't save yourself through, if you can get the process just right, right? So I wrote this article kind of recently called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done. And I profiled this productivity guru named Merlin Mann. And I talked about this movement called Productivity Prawn as like elite speak term in the early 2000s where people just became convinced that if they could combine their productivity systems with software and they could find just the right software, just the right configuration where they could offload most of the difficulty of work, what happened with the machines, when it kind of figured out for, and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it'd be, and the whole thing fell apart because work is hard and it's hard to do and making decisions about what to work on is hard and no system can really do that for you. So you have to have this sort of balance between, context switches are poison. So we got to get rid of the context switches. Once like something's working good enough to get rid of the context switches, then get after it. Yeah, there's a psychological process there for me. The OCD nature, like I've literally, embarrassing enough, have lost my shit before when, so in many of the processes that involve Python scripts, the rule is to not use spaces. Underscores, there's like rules for like how you format stuff, okay? And like, I should not lose my shit when somebody had a space and maybe capital letters, like it's okay to have a space because there's this feeling like something's not perfect. And as opposed to in the Python script, allowing some flexibility around that, you create this programmatic way that's flawless and when everything's working perfectly, it's perfect. But actually, if you strive for perfection, it has the same stress, like has a lot of the stress that you were seeking to escape with the context switching because you're almost stressing about errors. Like when the process is functioning, there's always this anxiety of like, I wonder if it's gonna succeed. I wonder if it's gonna succeed. Yeah, no, no, I think some of that's just you and I probably. I mean, it's just our mindset, right? We're in, we do computer science, right? So chicken and egg, I guess. And a lot of the processes end up working here much rougher. It's like, okay, instead of letting clients just email me all the time, we have a weekly call and then we send them a breakdown of everything we committed to, right? That's a process that works. Okay, I get asked a lot of questions because I'm the JavaScript guy in the company. Instead of doing it by email, I have office hours. This is what Basecamp does. All right, so you come to my office hours, that cuts down a lot of back and forth. All right, we're gonna, instead of emailing about this project, we'll have a Trello board and we'll do a weekly really structured status meeting real quick, what's going on, who needs what, let's go. And now everything's on there and on our inboxes, we don't have to send as many messages. So like that rough level of granularity, that gets you most of the way there. So the parts that you can't automate and turn into a process. So how many parts like that do you think should remain in a perfect world? And for those parts where email is still useful, what do you recommend those emails look like? How should you write emails? When should you send them? Yeah, I think email is good for delivering information. Right, so I think of it like a fax machine or something. It's a really good fax machine. So if I need to send you something and you just send you a file, I need to broadcast a new policy or something, like email is a great way to do it. It's bad for collaboration. So if you're having a conversation, like we're trying to reach a decision on something, I'm trying to learn about something, I'm trying to clarify what this is, that's more than just like a one answer type question, then I think that you shouldn't be doing an email. But see, here's the thing. Like you and I don't talk often and so we have a kind of new interaction. It's not, so sure, yeah, you have a book coming out, so there's a process and so on, but say there, don't you think there's a lot of novel interactive experiences? Yeah, I think it's fine. So you could, just for every novel experience, it's okay to have a little bit of exchange. Yeah, I think it's fine. Like I think it's fine if stuff comes in over the transom or you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while. I think all that's fine. I mean, that's email at its best. Where it starts to kill us is where all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth. So when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox, now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie, like You Got Mail, where it's like, all right, load this up and you wait for the boat and be like, oh, we got a message. Yeah, Lex sent me a message. This is interesting, right? You're back to the AOL days. So you're talking about the bulk of the business world where email has replaced the actual communication, all of the communication protocols required to accomplish anything. Everything is just happening with messages. So if you now get most stuff done, repeatable collaborations with other processes that don't require you to check these inboxes, then the inbox can serve like an inbox, which includes hearing from interesting people, right? Or sending something, hey, I don't know if you saw this, I thought you might like it. I think it's great for that. So there's probably a bunch of people listening to this. They're like, yeah, but I work on a team and all they use is email. How do you start the revolution from the ground up? Yeah, well, do asymmetric optimization first. So identify all your processes and then change what you can change and be socially very careful about it. So don't necessarily say like, okay, this is a new process we all have to do. You're just, hey, we gotta get this report ready. Here's what I think we should do. I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder by noon on Monday, grab it. I won't touch it again until Tuesday morning and then I'll look at your changes. I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon. So if there's anything that catches your attention, grab me then. But I've told the designer who CC'd on this that by COB Tuesday, the final version will be ready for them to take and polish or whatever. Like the person on the other end is like, great, I'm glad Cal has a plan. So what do I need to do? I need to edit this tomorrow, whatever, right? But you've actually pulled them into a process. That means we're gonna get this report together without having to just go back and forth. So you just asymmetrically optimize these things and then you can begin the conversation. And maybe that's where my book comes in place. You just sort of slide it across the desk. Buy the book and just leave it, give it to everybody on your team. Okay, so we solved the bulk of the email problem with this. Is there a case to be made that even for communication between you and I, we should move away from email? And for example, there's a guy, I recently, I don't know if you know comedians, but there's a guy named Joey Diaz that I've had an interaction with recently. And that guy, first of all, the sweetest human, despite what his comedy sounds like, is the sweetest human being. And he's a big proponent of just pick up the phone and call. And it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me. It's like, I don't know what to do with this thing. But it kind of gets everything done quicker, I think, if I remove the anxiety from that. Is there a case to be made for that? Or is email could still be the most efficient way to do this? No, look, if you have to interact with someone, there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony, right? And this is something from distributed system theory where you know if you go from synchronous to asynchronous networks, there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchrony. So actually the protocols required to solve things in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated and fragile than synchronous protocols. So if we can just do real time, it's usually better. And also from an interaction, like social connection standpoint, there's a lot more information in the human voice and the back and forth. Yeah, if you just call, so very generational, right? Our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone in a way that a younger generation isn't, but an older generation is more comfortable with, well, you just call people. Whereas we, so there's a happy medium, but most of my good friends, we just talk, we have regular phone calls. Okay. Yeah, it's not, I don't just call them, we schedule it, we schedule it, yeah. Just on text, like, yeah, you wanna talk sometime soon. Do you ever have a process around friends? Not really, no. I feel like I should, I feel like. Well, you have like a lot of interesting friend possibilities. You have like an interesting problem, right? Like really interesting people you can talk to. Well, that's one problem. The other one is the introversion where I'm just afraid of people and get really stressed. Like I freak out. And so. You picked a good line of work. Yeah, now perhaps it's the Goggins thing. It's like facing your fears or whatever, but it's almost like there's, it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work that the nice thing about the processes is it not only automates sort of, automates away the context switching, it ensures you do the important things too. It's like prioritize. So the thing is with email, because everything is done over email, you can be lazy in the same way with like social networks and do the easy things first that are not that important. So the process also enforces that you do the important things. And for me, the important things is like, okay, that sounds weird, but like social connection. No, that's one of the most important things in all of human existence. And doing it, the paradoxical thing, I got into this for digital minimalism, the more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection, the stronger the connection feels, right? So sacrificing non trivial time and attention on behalf of someone is what tells your brain that this is a serious relationship, which is why social media had this paradoxical effect making people feel less social because it took the friction out of it. And so the brain just doesn't like, like, yeah, you've been commenting on this person's, whatever, you've been retweeting them or sending them some text. You haven't, it's not hard enough. And then the perceived strength of that social connection diminishes where if you talk to them or go spend time with them or whatever, you're gonna feel better about it. So the friction is good. I have a thing with some of my friends where at the end of each call, we take a couple minutes to schedule the next. Then you never have to, it's like I do with haircuts or something, right? Like if I don't schedule it then, I'm never gonna get my haircut, right? And so it's like, okay, when do you wanna talk next? Yeah, that's a really good idea. I just don't call friends. And like every 10 years I do something dramatic for them so that we maintain the friendship. We're like, I'd murder somebody that they really don't like. Yeah, exactly. Careful, man, Joey might ask you to do that. Yeah, that's why, that's one of my favorite things. Lex, I need you to come down to New Jersey. That's exactly what we're gonna do. With that robot dog of yours. We're gonna go down to New Jersey. There's a special human. I love the comedian world. They've been shaking up. I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan, all those folks. They kind of are doing something interesting for MIT and academia. They're shaking up this world a little bit. Like podcasting, because comedians are paving the way for podcasting. And so you have like Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford, friend of mine now. He's like into podcasting now and you're into podcasting. Of course, you're not necessarily podcasting about computer science currently, right? But that, it feels like you could have a lot of the free spirit of the comedians implemented by the people who are academically trained. Who actually have a niche specialty. Yeah, and then that results, I mean, who knows what the experiment looks like, but that results me being able to talk about robotics with Joey Diaz when he says, you know, drops F bombs every other sentence. And I, the world is like, I've seen actually a shift within colleagues and friends within MIT where they're becoming much more accepting of that kind of thing. It's very interesting. That's interesting. So you're seeing, okay. Because they're seeing how popular it is. They're like, wait a minute. Well, you're really popular. I don't know how they think about it at Georgetown, for example. I don't know. It's interesting, but I think what happens is the popularity of it combined with just good conversations with people they respect. It's like, oh, wait, this is the thing. Yeah. And this is more fun to listen to than a shitty Zoom lecture about their work. Yeah. It's like, there's something here. There's something interesting. And we don't, nobody actually knows what that is. Just like with like Clubhouse or something, nobody's figured out like, where does this medium take? Is this a legitimate medium of education? Yeah. Or is this just like a fun? Well, that's your innovation, I think, was we can bring on professors. Yeah. And I know Joe Rogan did some of that too, but your professors in your field. Yeah, exactly. You bring on all these MIT guys who I remember. Well, that's been the big challenge for me is, I don't, is I feel, I would ask big like philosophical questions of people like yourself. They're like really well public. Like, so for example, you have a lot of excellent papers on, you know, that has a lot of theory in it, right? And there's some temptation to just go through papers. And I think it's possible to actually do that. I haven't done that much, but I think it's possible. It just requires a lot of preparation. And I can probably only do that with things that I'm actually like in the field I'm aware of. But there's a dance that I would love to be able to try to hit right where it's actually getting to the core of some interesting ideas as opposed to just talking about philosophy. At the same time, there's a large audience of people that just want to be inspired by disciplines where they don't necessarily know the details. But there's a lot of people that are like, hmm, I'm really curious. I've been thinking about pivoting careers into software engineering. They would love to hear from people like you about computer science. Even if it's like theory. Yeah, but just like the idea that you can have big ideas, you push them through and it's interesting, you fight for it, yeah. Well, there's some, there's what is it? Computerphile and Numberphile, these YouTube channels. There's channels I watch on like chess, exceptionally popular where I don't understand maybe 80% of the time what the hell they're talking about because they're talking about like why this move is better than this move. But I love the passion and the genius of those people and just overhearing it. Yeah. I don't know why that's so exciting. Do you look at like Scott Aaronson's blog at all? The Settled, Optimized? Yeah, it's like hardcore complexity theory. But it's just an enthusiasm or like Terry Tao's blog. A little bit of humor about it. Terry Tao has a blog? He used to, yeah. And it would just be, I'm going all in on, here's a new affine group with which you can do whatever. Whatever, it was just equations. Well, in the case of Scott Aaronson, he's good, he's able to turn on like the inner troll and comedian and so on. Yeah. He keeps the fun, which is the best of kinds of books. And he's a philosophical guy. He wrote that. He turns on the philosophy. Yeah. Yeah, so we're exploring these different ways of communicating science and exciting the world. Speaking of which, I gotta ask you about computer science. Yeah, that's right, I do some of that. So, I mean, a lot of your work is what inspired this deep thinking about productivity from all the different angles, because some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work. And in computer science, the theoretical computer science, let me ask the Scott Aaronson question of like, is there something to you that stands out in particular that's beautiful or inspiring, or just really insightful about computer science or maybe mathematics? I mean, I like theory. And in particular, what I've always liked in theory is the notion of impossibilities. That's kind of my specialty. So within the context of distributed algorithms, my specialty is impossibility results. So the idea that you can argue nothing exists that solves this, or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this. And I think that's really interesting. And that goes all the way back to Turing. His original paper on computable numbers with their connection to the German Eichsturzungen problem, but basically the German name that Hilbert called the decision problem. This was precomputers, but he's English, so it's written in English. So it's a very accessible paper. And it lays the foundation for all of theoretical computer science. He just has this insight. He's like, well, if we think about like an algorithm, I mean, he figures out like all effective procedures or Turing machines are basically algorithms. We could really describe a Turing machine with a number, which we can now imagine with like computer code, you could just take a source file and just treat the binary version of the file as like a really long number, right? But he's like, every program is just a finite number. It's a natural number. And then he realized like one way to think about a problem is you have, and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser approach, but you have a sort of, it's a language. So of an infinite number of strings, some of them are in the language and some of them aren't, but basically you can imagine a problem is represented as an infinite binary string, where in every position, like a one means that string is in the language and a zero means it isn't. And then he applied Cantor from the 19th century and said, okay, the natural numbers are countable. So it's countably infinite and infinite binary strings, you can use a diagonalization argument and show they're uncountable. So there's just vastly more problems than there are algorithms. So basically anything you can come up with for the most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer. And then he was like, let me give a particular example. And he figured out the very first computability proof. Let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic to halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm. And that kicked off the whole enterprise of some things can't be solved by algorithms, some things can't be solved by computers. And we've just been doing theory on that since that was the 30s he wrote that. So proving that something is impossible is sort of a stricter version of that. Is it like proving bounds on the performance of different algorithms? Yeah, so bounds are upper bounds, right? So you say, this algorithm does at least this well and no worse than this, but you're looking at a particular algorithm and possibility proof say no algorithm ever could ever solve this problem. So no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem. So it's problem centric. It's making something different, making a conclusive statement about the problem. Yes. And that's somehow satisfying because it's... It's just philosophically interesting. Yeah. I mean, it all goes back to, you get back to Plato, it's all reductio ad absurdum. So all these arguments have to start. The only way to do it is because there's an infinite number of solutions you can't go through them. You say, let's assume for the sake of contradiction that there existed something that solves this problem. And then you turn to crank a logic until you blow up the universe. And then you go back and say, okay, our original assumption that this solution exists can't be true. I just think philosophically, it's like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing. It's what I specialize in within distributed algorithms is more like time bound and possibility results. Like no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this in this setting. Of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it. So you have many papers, but the one that caught my eye is Smooth Analysis of Dynamic Networks, in which you write, a problem with the worst case perspective is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds. These strong results motivate a key question. Is this bond robust in the sense that it captures the fundamental difficulty introduced by dynamism? Or is the bond fragile in the sense that the poor performance it describes depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes. Fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility of algorithms that might still perform well in practice. That's in the sense of the impossible and the bounds discussion presents the interesting question. I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds, but what do you make about this kind of tension between what's provably, like what bounds you can prove that are like robust and something that's a bit more fragile. And also by way of answering that for this particular paper, can you say what the hell are dynamic networks? What are distributed algorithms? You don't know this? Come on now. And I have no idea. And what is Smooth Analysis? Yeah, well, okay. So Smooth Analysis, so it wasn't my idea. So Spielman and Tang came up with this in the context of sequential algorithms. So just like the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer. And they were looking at, there's a well known algorithm called the simplex algorithm, but basically you're trying to find a hole around a group of points. And there was an algorithm that worked really well in practice. But when you analyze it, you would say, I can't guarantee it's gonna work well in practice because if you have just the right inputs, this thing could run really long. But in practice, it seemed to be really fast. So Smooth Analysis is they came in and they said, let's assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs. It could be anything like really bad ones. And all we're gonna do, because in simplex they're numbers, we're gonna just randomly put a little bit of noise on each of the numbers. And they said, if you put a little bit of noise on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast. Like, oh, that explains this lower bound, this idea that it could sometimes run really long was a fragile bound because it could only run a really long time if you had exactly the worst pathological input. So then my collaborators and I brought this over to the world of distributed algorithms. We brought them over the general lower bounds, right? So in the world of dynamic networks, so distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms on different machines talking to each other, trying to solve a problem. And sometimes they're in a network. So you imagine them connected with network links and a dynamic network, those can change, right? So I was talking to you, but now I can't talk to you anymore. Now I'm connected to a person over here. It's a really hard environment mathematically speaking. And there's a lot of really strong lower bounds, which you could imagine if the network can change all the time and a bad guy is doing it, it's like hard to do things well. So there's an algorithm running on every single node in the network. Yeah. And then you're trying to say something of any kind that makes any kind of definitive sense about the performance of that algorithm. Yeah, so I just submitted a new paper on this a couple of weeks ago. And we were looking at a very simple problem. There's some messages in the network. We want everyone to get them. If the network doesn't change, you can do this pretty well. You can pipeline them. There's some basic algorithms that work really well. If the network can change every round, there's these lower bounds that says, it takes a really long time. There's a way that no matter what algorithm you come up with, there's a way the network can change in such a way that just really slows down your progress basically, right? So smooth analysis there says, yeah, but that seems like you'd have really bad luck if your network was changing exactly in the right way that you needed to screw your algorithm. So we said, what if we randomly just add or remove a couple of edges in every round? So the adversary is trying to choose the worst possible network. And we're just tweaking it a little bit. And in that case, this is a new paper. I mean, it's a blinded submission, so maybe I shouldn't, it's not, whatever. We basically showed. An anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper. An anonymous friend of mine, yeah, whose paper should be accepted. Showed that even just adding like one random edge per round, and here's the cool thing about it, the simplest possible solution to this problem blows away that lower bound and does really well. So that's like a very fragile lower bound because we're like, it's almost impossible to actually keep things slow. I wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile. It's my interest, yeah. Because in distributed algorithms, there's a ton of really famous strong lower bounds, but things have to go wrong, really, really wrong for these lower bound arguments to work. And so I like this approach. So this whole notion of fragile versus robust, I was like, well, let's go in and just throw a little noise in there. And if it becomes solvable, then maybe that lower bound wasn't really something we should worry about. You know, that's gonna embarrass, that's really uncomfortable. That's really embarrassing to a lot of people. Because, okay, this is the OCD thing with the spaces, is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound. And if you say that that bound is fragile, that's like, there's gonna be a sad kid that walks with their lunchbox back home, like, my lower bound doesn't matter. No, I don't think they care. It's all, I don't know, it feels like to me, a lot of this theory is just math machismo. It's like, whatever, this was a hard bound to prove. What do you think about that? So if you show that something is fragile, that's really important in practice, right? So do you think kind of theoretical computer science is living its own world, just like mathematics, and their main effort, which I think is very valuable, is to develop ideas that's not necessarily interesting, whether it's applicable in the real world. Yeah, we don't care about the applicability. Yeah, we kind of do, but not really. And we're terrible with computers, and can't do anything useful with computers, and we don't know how to code. And, you know, we're not productive members of like technological society, but I do think things percolate. Exactly. You percolate from the world of theory into the world of algorithm design, where it will pull on the theory, and now suddenly it's useful, and then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice, where they say, well, actually, we can make this algorithm a lot better, because in practice, really, these servers do X, Y, Z, and now we can make this super efficient. And so I do think, I mean, I teach theory to the PhD students at Georgetown. I show them the sort of funnel of like, okay, we're over here doing theory, but it eventually, some of this stuff will percolate down in effect at the very end, you know, a phone, but it's a long tunnel. But the very question you're asking, at the highest philosophical level, is fascinating. Like, if you take a system, a distributed system, or a network, and introduce a little bit of noise into it, like, how many problems of that nature are fundamentally changed by that little introduction of noise? Yeah, because it's all, especially in distributed algorithms, the model is everything. Like, the way we work is we're incredibly precise about, here's exactly, it's mathematical, here's exactly how the network works, and it's a state machine, algorithms are state machines, there's rounds and schedulers, we're super precise so we can prove lower bounds. But yeah, often those lower, those impossibility results really get at the hard edges of exactly how that model works. So we'll see if this, so we published a paper on this, that paper you mentioned, that kind of introduced the idea to the distributed algorithms world. And I think that's got some traction and there's been some followup. So we've just submitted our next. I mean, honestly, the issue with the next that like the result fell out so easily, and this shows the mathematical machismo problem in these fields is there's a good chance the paper won't be accepted because there wasn't enough mathematical self flagellation. That's such a nice finding. So even showing that very few, just very little bit of noise, can have a dramatic, make a dramatic statement about the. It was a big surprise to us, but once we figured out how to show it, it's not too hard. And these are venues for theoretical work. Okay, so the fascinating tension that exists in other disciplines, like one of them is machine learning, which despite the power of machine learning and deep learning and all like the impact of it, in the real world, the main conferences on machine learning are still resistant to application papers. And application papers broadly defined, meaning like finding almost like you would, like Darwin did by like going around, collecting some information, saying, huh, isn't this interesting? Like those are some of the most popular blogs, and yet as a paper, it's not really accepted. I wonder what you think about this whole world of deep learning from a perspective of theory. What do you make of this whole discipline of the success of Neon Networks, of how to do science on them? Are you excited by the possibilities of what we might discover about Neon Networks? Do you think it's fundamental in engineering discipline, or is there something theoretical that we might crack open one of these days in understanding something deep about how system optimization and how systems learn? I am convinced by, is it Tegmark at MIT? Tegmark? Yeah, Tegmark, right. So his notion has always been convincing to me that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable is not fundamental to them, and that we can, we're gonna get better and better, because in the end, you know, the reason why practicing computer scientists often who are doing AI or working at AI and industry aren't like worried about so much existential threats is because they see the reality as they're multiplying matrices with NumPy or something like this, right? Yeah, and tweaking constants and hoping that the classifier fitness, for God's sakes, before the submission deadline actually gets above some, it feels like it's linear algebra and tedium, right? But anyways, I'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand better and better what's going on from a theory perspective, it's gonna make it into an engineering discipline. So in my mind, where we're gonna end up is, okay, forget these metaphors of neurons, and these things are gonna be put down into these mathematical kind of elegant equations, differentiable equations that just kind of work well, and then it's gonna be when I need a little bit of AI in this thing, plumbing. Like, let's get a little bit of a pattern recognizer with a noise module and let's connect. I mean, you know this feel better than me, so I don't know if this is like a reasonable prediction, but it's gonna become less inscrutable, and then it's gonna become more engineerable, and then we're gonna have AI in more things because we're gonna have a little bit more control over how we piece together these different classification black boxes. So one of the problems, and there might be some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition on is, you know, neural networks are very large, and they have a lot of, you know, we were talking about, you know, dynamic networks and distributed algorithms. One of the problems with the analysis of neural networks is, you know, you have a lot of nodes, and you have a lot of edges. To be able to interpret and to control different things is very difficult. There's fields in trying to figure out like mathematically how you form clean representations that are like, like one node contains all the information about a particular thing, and no other nodes is correlated to it. So like it has unique knowledge and like, but that ultimately boils down to trying to simplify this thing into, that goes against this very nature, which is like deeply connected, and like dynamic and just, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of nodes. And in a distributed sense, like when you zoom out, the thing has a representation and understanding of something, but the individual nodes are just doing their little exchanging thing. And it's the same thing with Stephen Wolfram when you talk about cellular automata, it's very difficult to do math when you have a huge collection of distributed things, each acting on their own. And it's almost like, it feels like it's almost impossible to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense. It almost becomes completely like a biology, you become a biologist as opposed to a theoretician. You just study it experimentally. Yeah, I think that's the big question, I guess, right? Yeah, so is the large size and interconnectedness of the like a deep learning network fundamental to that task, or are we just not very good at it yet because we're using the wrong metaphor? I mean, the human brain learns with much fewer examples and with much less tuning of the whatever, whatever, whatever probably that requires to get those like deep mind networks up and running. But yeah, so I don't really know, but the one thing I have observed is that the, yeah, there's the mundane nature of some of the working with these models tends to lead people to think that, to do it like, it could be Skynet or it could be like a lot of pain to get the thermostat to do what we want it to do. And there's a lot of open questions in between there. And then of course, the distributed network of humans that use these systems. So like you can have the system itself, then your network, but you can also have like little algorithms controlling the behavior of humans, which is what you have with social networks. It's possible that a very, what is it, a toaster or whatever, the opposite of Skynet when taken at scale while used by individual humans and controlling their behavior can actually have the Skynet effect. So the scale there. We might have that now. We might have that now, we just don't know. As it's happening. Is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet? I mean, because of what happens, it twirls out ramifications in the world. And is it really that much different if it's a robot with tentacles or a bunch of servers that. Yeah, and the destructive effects could be, I mean, it could be political, but it could also be like, you could probably make an interesting case that the virus, the coronavirus spread on Twitter too, in the minds of people. Like the fear and the misinformation in some very interesting ways mixed up. And maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently dangerous to where that could have created a weird like an instability, but maybe other things might create instability. Like somebody, God forbid, detonates a nuclear weapon somewhere. And then maybe the destructive aspect of that would not as much be the military actions, but the way those news are spread on Twitter and the panic that creates. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's a great case study, right? Like what happened, not, but I'm not suggesting that Lexi go let off a nuclear bomb. I meant the coronavirus, but yeah, I think that's a really interesting case study. I'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995, like do the same virus in 1995. So first of all, it would have been, I get to hear whatever the nightly news, we'll talk about it. And then there'll be my local health board, we'll talk about it. That mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be very sort of localized. Okay, our community is trying to figure out what are we gonna do? What's gonna happen? Like we see this with schools, like where I grew up in New Jersey, there's very localized school districts. So even though they had sort of really bad viral numbers there, my school I grew up in has been open since the fall because it's very localized. It's like these teachers and these parents, what do we wanna do? What are we comfortable with? I live in a school district right now in Montgomery County that's a billion dollar a year budget, 150,000 kid school district. It just can't, it's closed because it's too. So I'm interested in that counterfactual. Yeah, so you have all this information moving around and then you have the effects on discourse that we were talking about earlier, that the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter, which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset of don't give an inch to the other team. And we're used to this and was fired up by politics and the unique attributes of Twitter. Now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge, a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic, was thrown out the window because a lot of this was happening on Twitter and suddenly we had public health officials using a don't give an inch to the other team mindset of like, well, if we say this, that might validate something that was wrong over here and we need to, if we say this, then maybe like that'll stop them from doing this. That's like very Twittery in a way that in 1995 is probably not the way public health officials would be thinking. Where now it's like, well, this is, if we said this about masks, but the other team said that about masks, we can't give an inch to this. So we gotta be careful. And like, we can't tell people it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might, we're giving them an inch on this and that's very Twittery in my mind, right? That is the impact of Twitter on the way we think about discourse, which is a dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team and it's all about slam dunks where you're completely right and they're completely wrong. It's as a rhetorical strategy, it's incredibly simplistic, but it's also the way that we think right now about how we do debate. It combined terribly with election year pandemic. Yeah, election year pandemic. I wonder if we could do some smooth analysis. Let's run the simulation over a few times. A little bit of noise, yeah. See if it can dramatically change the behavior of the system. Okay, we talked about your love for proving that something is impossible. So there's quite a few still open problems and complexity of algorithms. So let me ask, does P equal NP? Probably not. Probably not. If P equals NP, what kind of, and you'd be really surprised somebody proves it. What would that proof look like and why would that even be? What would that mean? What would that proof look like? And what possible universe could P equals NP? Is there something in size that you could say there? It could be true. I mean, I'm not a complexity theorist, but every complexity theorist I know is convinced they're not equal and are basically not working on it anymore. I mean, there is a million dollars at stake if you can solve the proof. It's one of the millennium prizes. Okay, so here's how I think the P not equals NP proof is gonna eventually happen. I think it's gonna fall out and it's gonna be not super simple, but not as hard as people think, because my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science based on just some results I've done, so this is a huge extrapolation, is that a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating deeper mathematics. So this happens to me a lot, not a lot, but it's happened to me a few times in my work where we obfuscate it because we say, well, there's an algorithm and it has this much memory and they're connected on a network and okay, here's our setup and now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem and people do bounds about it and then the end it turns out that we were just obfuscating some underlying mathematical thing that already existed, right? So this has happened to me. I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago. It was looking at this problem called contention resolution where you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel and they're trying to break symmetry. So it's like an ethernet, whatever. Only one person can use it at a time. You try to break symmetry. There's all these bounds people have proven over the years about how long it takes to do this, right? And like I discovered at some point, there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s. All of these lower bound proofs all come from this and in fact, it improved a lot of them and simplified a lot. You could put it all in one paper. It's like, are we really? And then, okay, so this new paper that I submitted a couple of weeks ago, I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs for this contention resolution problem. You could reprove them. Using Shannon's source code theorem that actually when you're breaking contention, what you're really doing is building a code over, if you have a distribution on the network sizes, it's a code over that source. And if you plug in a high entropy information source and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem that says on a noiseless channel, you can't send things at a faster rate than the entropy allows, the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right? So like this type of thing happens. There's some famous lower bounds and distributed algorithms that turned out to all be algebraic topology underneath the covers. And they won the Girdle Prize for working on that. So my sense is what's gonna happen is at some point, someone really smart to be very exciting is gonna realize there's some sort of other representation of what's going on with these Turing machines trying to sort of efficiently compute. And there'll be an existing mathematical result that apply. Someone or something, I guess. It could be AI theorem provers kind of thing. It could be, yeah. I mean, not a, well, yeah. I mean, there's theorem provers, like what that means now, which is not fun. It's just a bunch of... Very carefully formulated postulates that, but I take your point, yeah. Yeah, so, okay. On a small tangent on that, then you're kind of implying that mathematics, it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral, few fundamental ideas that all are just like, they're all somehow connected. In that sense, do you think math is fundamental to our universe and we're just like slowly trying to understand these patterns or is it discovered? Or is it just a little game that we play amongst ourselves to try to fit little patterns to the world? Yeah, that's the question, right? That's the physicist question. I mean, I'm probably, I'm in the discovered camp, but I don't do theoretical physics. So I know they have a, they feel like they have a stronger claim to answering that question. But everything comes back to it. Everything comes back to it. I mean, all the physics, the fact that the universe is, well, okay. It's a complicated question. So how often do you think, how deeply does this result describe the fundamental reality of nature? So the reason I hesitated, because it's something I'm, I taught this seminar and did a little work on what are called biological algorithms. So there's this notion of, so physicists use mathematics to explain the universe, right? And it was unreasonable that mathematics works so well. All these differential equations, why does that explain all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity and all these types of things? Well, there's this movement within the intersection of computer science and biology, just kind of Wolframium, I guess, really, that algorithms can be very explanatory, right? Like if you're trying to explain parsimoniously something about like an ant colony or something like this, you're not going to, ultimately it's not gonna be explained as a equation, like a physics equation. It's gonna be explained by an algorithm. So like this algorithm run distributedly is going to explain the behavior. So that's mathematical, but not quite mathematical, but it is if you think about an algorithm like a Lambda calculus, which brings you back to the world of mathematics. So I'm thinking out loud here, but basically abstract math is sort of like unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things. And that's just what I feel like I glimpse. I'm not like a super well known theoretician. I don't have really famous results. So even as a sort of middling career theoretician, I keep encountering this where we think we're solving some problem about computers and algorithms, and it's some much deeper underlying math. It's Shannon, but Shannon is entropy, but entropy was really goes all the way back to whatever it was, Boyle or all the way back to looking at the early physics. And it's, anyways, to me, I think it's amazing. Yeah, but it could be the flip side of that could be just our brains draw so much pleasure from the deriving generalized theories and simplifying the universe that we just naturally see that kind of simplicity in everything. Yeah, so that's the whole Newton to Einstein, right? So you can say this must be right because it's so predictive. Well, it's not quite predictive because Mercury wobbles a little bit, but I think we have it set and then you turn out, no, Einstein. And then you get Bohr like, no, not Einstein. It's actually statistical. And yeah, so that would be interesting. It's hard to also know where a smooth analysis fits into all that or a little bit of noise. Like you can say something very clean about a system and then a little bit of noise, like the average case is actually very different. And so, I mean, that's where the quantum mechanics comes in. It's like, ugh, why does it have to be randomness in this? Yeah, I would have to do this complex statistics. Yeah. Yeah. So to be determined. Yeah, that'll be my next book. That'd be ambitious. The fundamental core of reality, comma, and some advice for being more productive at work. Can I ask you just, if it's possible to do an overview and just some brief comments of wisdom on the process of publishing a book, what's that process entail? What are the different options and what's your recommendation for somebody that wants to write a book like yours, a nonfiction book that discovers something interesting about this world? So what I usually advise is follow the process as is. Don't try to reinvent. I think that happens a lot where you'll try to reinvent the way the publishing industry should work. Like this is kind of not like in a business model ways, but just like, this is what I want to do. I want to write a thousand words a day and I want to do this and I'm gonna put it on the internet and the publishing industry is very specific about how it works. And so like when I got started writing books, which at a very young age, so I sold my first book at the age of 21. The way I did that is I found a family friend that was an agent and I said, I'm not trying to make you be my agent. Just explain to me how this works. Not just how the world works, but give me the hard truth about how would a 21 year old, under what conditions could a 21 year old sell a book and what would that look like? And she just explained it to me. You know, you have to do this and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write. And you would have to do this type of writing for the publications to validate it and blah, blah, blah. And you have to get the agent first. And I learned the whole game plan and then I executed. And so the rough game plan is with nonfiction, you get the agent first and the agent's gonna sell it to the publishers. So like you're never sending something directly to the publishers. In nonfiction, you're not writing the book first, right? You're gonna get an advance from the publisher once sold and then you're gonna do the primary writing of the book. In fact, it will, in most circumstances, hurt you if you've already written it. If you've already written it. Yeah. So you're trying to sell, well, I guess the agent, first you sell it to the agent and then the agent sells it to the publishers. It's much easier to get an agent than a book deal. So the thought is, if you can't get an agent, then why would you? So you start with, and also the way this works with a good agent is they know all the editors and they have lunch with the editors and they're always just like, okay, what projects do you have coming? What are you looking for? Here's one of my authors. That's the way all these deals happen. It's not, you're not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile. Yeah, and so first of all, the agent takes a percentage and then the publishers, this is where the process comes in. They take also a cut that's probably ridiculous. So if you try to reinvent the system, you'll probably be frustrated by the percentage that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy and efficiency ridiculousness there is in the system. Your recommendation is like, you're just one ant. Stop trying to build your own ant colony. Well, or if you create your own process for how it should work, the book's not gonna get published. So there's the separate question, the economic question of like, should I create my own, like self publish it or do something like that? But putting that aside, there's a lot of people I encounter that wanna publish a book with a main publisher, but they invent their own rules for how it works, right? So then the alternative though is self publishing and the downside, there's a lot of downsides. It's almost like publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times versus writing on a blog. There's no reason why writing a blog post on Medium can't get way more attention and legitimacy and long lasting prestige than a New York Times article. But nevertheless, for most people, writing in a prestigious newspaper, quote unquote prestigious, is just easier. And well, and depends on your goal. So, you know, like I push you towards a big publisher because I think your goal, it's huge ideas, you want impact. You're gonna have more impact. Even though, like actually, so there's different ways to measure impact, right? In the world of ideas. In the world of ideas. And also, yeah, in the world of ideas, it's kind of like the clubhouse thing now, even if the audience is not large, the people in the audience are very interesting. It's like the conversation feels like that has long lasting impact among the people in different and disparate industries that are also then starting their own conversations and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, because you have other, so like self publishing a book, the goals that would solve, you have much better ways of getting to those goals, might be part of it, right? So if there's the financial aspect of well, you get to keep more of it, I mean, the podcast is probably gonna crush what the book's gonna do anyways, right? Yeah, if it's, I wanna get directly to certain audiences or crowds, it might be harder through a traditional publisher. There's better ways to talk to those crowds. It could be on clubhouse with all these new technologies, self published books not gonna be the most effective way to find your way to a new crowd. But if the idea is like, I wanna have a, leave a dent in the world of ideas, then to have a vulnerable old publisher, put out your book in a nice hardcover and do the things they do, that goes a long way. And they do do a lot. I mean, it's very difficult actually. There's so much involved in putting together a book. They get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff. And from an efficiency standpoint, I mean, just the time involved in trying to do this yourself is. They have a process, right? Like you said, they have a process. They've got a process. I mean, I know like Jocko did this recently, he started his own imprint and I have a couple other. But it's a huge overhead. I mean, if you run a business and you, so like Jocko is a good case study, right? So he got fed up with Simon and Schuster dragging their feet and said, I'm gonna start my own imprint then, if you're not gonna publish my kid's book. But he, what does he do, he runs businesses, right? So I think in his world, like I already run, I'm a partner in whatever, in Origin, and I have this and that. And so it's like, yeah, we can run businesses. That's what we know how to do. That's what I do. I run businesses, I have people. But for like you or I, we don't run businesses. It'd be terrible. Yeah, well, especially these kinds of businesses, right? So I do wanna launch a business with very different technology business. It's very different. Yeah, it's very, very different, yeah. I mean, this is like, okay, I need copy editors and graphic book binders, and I need to contract with the printer, but oh, the printer doesn't have slots. And so now I have to try to, I mean, it's. I get so, I need to shut this off in my room, but I get so frustrated when the system could clearly be improved. It's the thing that you're mentioning. It's like, this is so inefficient. Every time I go to the DMV or something like that, you think like, ah, this could be done so much better. But, and the same thing as the worry with an editor, which I guess would come from the publisher, like who would, how much supervision on your book did you receive like, hey, do you think this is too long? Or do you think the title, like title, how much choice do you have in the title, in the cover, in the presentation and the branding and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I mean, all of it depends, right? So when it comes on the relationship with the editor on the writing, it depends on the editor and it depends on you. So like at this point, I'm on my seventh book and I write for a lot of major publications. And at this point I have what I feel like is a voice and a level of craft that I'm very comfortable with, right? So my editor is not gonna be, she kind of is gonna trust me and it's gonna be more big picture. Like I'm losing the thread here or this seems like it could be longer. Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21, I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with so, you don't use any contractions because I've been doing scientific writing, we don't use contractions. Like you should probably use contractions. It was way more, I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing, yeah. But ultimately the recommendation, I mean, we talked offline and sort of, I was thinking loosely, not really sure, but I was thinking of writing a book and there's a kind of desire to go self publishing, not for financial reasons. And the money can be good by the way, right? I mean, it's very power law type distributed, right? So the money on a hardcover is somewhere between one or $2 a book. So the thing is, I personally don't. But then you give up 15% to the agent, so. I personally don't care about money as I've mentioned before, but I for some reason really don't like spending money on things that are not worth it. Like I don't care if I get money, I just don't like spending money on like feeding a system that's inefficient. It's like I'm contributing to the problem. That's my biggest problem. Right, so you're worried about the inefficiencies of the opportunity. Yeah, the fact that. Like the overheads, the number of people involved. Or the overheads. The emails again. The fact that they have this way of speaking, which I'm allergic to many people, like that's very marketing speak. Like you could tell they've been having Zoom meetings all day. It's like as opposed to a sort of creative collaborators that are like also a little bit crazy. Yeah. I suppose some of that is finding the right people. Finding the right people. That's what I would say. I'd say there's definitely, and maybe it's just good fortune. Good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors I've worked with. There's really good people who see the vision are smart or incredibly literary. And they actually help you. Yeah. Like psychologically. Yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving into hardcover books, for example. It was my first big book advance and my first sort of big deal and he was like a senior editor and it was very useful, you know? He was like, we had a lot of long talks, right? I was, so this was my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You was my first, my big hardcover idea book. And we had a lot of talks, like even before I started writing it, just let's talk about books and his philosophy. He'd been in the business for a long time. He was the head of the imprint. It was useful. Yeah, but I mean, the other frustrating thing is how long the whole thing takes. Makes a long time. Yeah. But I suppose that's, you just have to accept that. Well, yeah, I handed in this manuscript for the book that comes out now, like when this, I handed it in, I mean, over the summer, like during the pandemic. So it's not, it's not terrible, right? And we were editing during the pandemic and I finished it in the spring. We've talked most of the day, except for a little bit computer science, most of the day about a productive life. How does love, friendship and family fit into that? Is there, do you find that there's a tension? Is it possible for relationships to energize the whole process, to benefit? Or is it ultimately a trade off? But because life is short and ultimately we seek happiness, not productivity, that we have to accept that tension. Yeah. I mean, I think relationships is the, that's the whole deal. Like I thought about this the other day, I don't know what the context was. I was thinking about if I was gonna give like an advice speech, like a commencement address or like giving advice to young people. And like the big question I have for young people is if they haven't already, bad things are gonna happen that you don't control, so what's the plan, right? Like, let's start figuring that out now because it's not all, you know, some people get off better than others, but eventually stuff happens, right? You get sick, something falls apart, the economy craters, someone you know dies, like all sorts of bad stuff is gonna happen, right? So how are we gonna do this? Like, how do we like live life when life is hard? And in ways that is unfair and unpredictable, then relationships is the, that's the buffer for all of that. Cause we're wired for it, right? I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism. I went down this huge rabbit hole about the human brain and sociality. It's all we're wired to do. It's like all of our brain is for this. Like everything, all of our mechanisms, everything is made to service the social connections because it's what kept you alive, you know? I mean, you had the, your tribal connections is how you didn't starve during a famine, people would share food, et cetera. And so you can't neglect that. And it's like everything and people feel it, right? Like there's no, our social networks are hooked up to the pain center. That's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone or like someone dies or something, right? That's like how seriously we take it. There's a pretty accepted theory that the default mode network, like a lot of what the default mode network is doing. So that's sort of the default state our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular is practicing sociality, practicing interactions thing, because it's so crucial to what we do. It's like at the core of human thriving. So I've more recently, the way I think about it is like relationships first. Okay. Given that foundation of putting like, and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it. I worry that social media is reducing relationships, strong relationships. Strong relationships where you're sacrificing non trivial time and attention and resources, whatever on behalf of other people. That's the net that is gonna allow you to get through anything. Then, all right. Now what do we wanna do with the surplus that remains? Maybe I wanna build some fire, build some tools. So put relationships first. I like the worst case analysis from the computer science perspective. Put relationships first. Yeah, because everything else is just assuming average case, assuming things kind of keep going as they were going. And you're neglecting the fundamental human drive. Like we have this, we talked about the boredom instinct. We wanna build things, we wanna have impact, we wanna do productivity. That's not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need people. But if we look at the real worst case analysis here is one day you're pretty young now, but that's not gonna last very long. You're gonna die one day. Is that something you think about? Little bit. Are you afraid of death? Well, I'm of the mindset of, let's make that a productivity hack. I'm of the mindset of we need to confront that soon. So let's do what we can now so that when we really confront and think about it, we're more likely to feel better about it. So in other words, let's focus now on living and doing things in such a way that we're proud of so that when it really comes time to confront that, we're more likely to say, like, okay, I feel kind of good about the situation. So what, when you're laying on your deathbed, would you, in looking back, what would make you think like, oh, I did okay, I'm proud of that. I optimized the hell out of that. That's a good, I mean, it's a good question to go backwards on. I mean, this is like David Brooks's eulogy virtues versus resume virtues. Right, so his argument is that, and that's another interesting DC area person. I keep thinking of interesting DC area people. All right, David Brooks is here too. Yeah. His argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is, so what we eulogize is different than what we promote on the resume. That's his whole thing now, right? His Suckin Mountain wrote the character. Both these books are, he has this whole premise of there's like this professional phase and there's a phase of giving of yourself and sacrificing on behalf of other people. I don't know, maybe it's all mixed together, right? You wanna, I think living by a code is important, right? I mean, this is something that's not emphasized enough. I always think of advice that my undergrad should be given that they're not given, especially at a place like Georgetown that has this like deep history of trying to promote human flourishing because of the Jesuit connection. There's such resiliency and pride that comes out of living well, even when it's hard, like living according to a code, living accord to, which I think religion used to structure this for people. But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement. But even when things were, soldiers get this a lot, right? They experienced this a lot. Even when things were tough, I was able to persist in living this way that I knew was right, even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment. Fewer things give humans more resiliency. It's like having done that, your relationships were strong, right? Many people coming to your funeral is a standard. A lot of people are gonna come to your funeral. I mean, you matter to a lot of people. And then maybe having done, to the extent of whatever capabilities you happen to be granted, and they're different for different people, and some people can sprint real fast, and some people can do math problems, try to actually do something of impact. I'll just promise to give gift cards to anybody who shows up to the funeral. You're gonna hack it. I'm gonna hack even the funeral. There's gonna be a lottery wheel you spin when you come in and someone goes away with $10,000. See, the problem is, with all this living by principles, living a principled life, focusing on relationships, and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing kind of forgets the notion that none of it makes any sense, right? It kind of implies that this is like a video game and you wanna get a high score, as opposed to none of this even makes sense. Like, why would he, like, what that? Like, what does it even mean to die? It's gonna be over. It's like everything I do, all these productivity hacks, all this life, all these efforts, all this creative efforts, kind of assume it's gonna go on forever. There's a kind of a sense of immortality, and I don't even know how to intellectually make sense that it ends. Of course, gotta ask you in that context, what do you think is the meaning of it all, especially for a computer scientist? I mean, there's gotta be some mathematical. Yeah, 27, or what's the, what's the Douglas Adams? Yeah, or 42, okay. 27 is a better number. I should read more sci fi. Maybe you're onto something with a 27. I don't wanna give away too much, but just trust me, 27. It's visible, yeah. So, I mean, I don't know, obviously, right? I mean, I'm a... I was hoping you would. Yeah, I don't know, but going back to what you were saying about the sort of the existentialist, or sort of the more nihilist style approach, the one thing that there is are intimations, right? So that there's these intimations that human halves of somehow this feels right, and this feels wrong, this feels good, this feels like I'm doing, I'm aligned with something, you know, when I'm acting with courage to save, whatever, right? It's not, these intimations are a grounding against arbitrariness. Like, one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that when you look at religion, right? So I'm interested in world religions. My grandfather was like a theologian that studied and wrote all these books, and I'm very interested in this type of stuff. And there's this great book that's, it's not specific to a particular religion, but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book called The Case for God. She's very interesting. She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion, but one of the smartest thinkers in terms of like accessible theological thinking that's not tied to any particular religion. Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion, first of all, you have to go way back pre enlightenment where all this was formed. We got messed up thinking about religion post enlightenment, right? And these were operating systems for making sense of intimations. The one thing we had were these different intimations of this field, like awe and mystical experience. And this feels, there's something you feel when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way. And it was like the scientists who were trying to study and understand the model of the atom by just looking at experiments and trying to understand what's going on. Like the great religions of the world were basically figuring out how do we make sense of these intimations and live in alignment with them and build a life of meaning around that. What were the tools they were using? They were using ritual. They were using belief. They were using action, but all of it was like an OS. It was like a liturgical model of the atom that did. It's hard coded in. So it did through the evolutionary process. I mean, they wouldn't have called it that back then or yeah, I mean, they didn't have that as pre enlightenment. They just said, this is here. And the directive is to try to live in alignment with that. Well, then I want to ask who wrote the original code. Yeah, so Armstrong lays out this good argument and where it gets really interesting is that she emphasizes that all of this was considered ineffable, right? So the whole notion, and this is like rich in Jewish tradition in particular and also in Islamic tradition, we can't comprehend and understand what's going on here. Right? And so the best we can do to approximate understanding and live in alignment is we act as if this is true, do these rituals, have these actions or whatever. Post enlightenment, a lot of that got, once we learned about enlightenment, we grew these suspicions around religion that are very much of the modern era, right? So like the Karen Armstrong, like Sam Harris's critique of religion makes no sense. Right? The critique's based on, well, this is, you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true. That's an enlightenment thing, right? This is not the context and this is not, the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom. Like it's not actually maybe what is underneath happening, but this model explains why your chemical equations work. And so this is like the way religion was. There's a God, we'll call it this, this is how it works, we do this ritual, we act in this way, it aligns with it, just like the model of the atom predicted why NA and CL is gonna become salt, this predicts that you're gonna feel and live in alignment, right? It's like this beautiful sophisticated theory, which actually matches how a lot of great theologians have thought about it. But then when you come forward in time, yeah, maybe it's evolution. I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right? Like he's basically, he doesn't like to get super pinned down on this, but it kind of seems where he sees it that way. He's almost like searching for the words. He focuses more on like Jung and other people, but I mean, I know he's very Jungian, but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking, like Armstrong is sort of a, it's kind of like a Peter Sony analysis, but she's looking more at the deep history of religion than, but yeah, he throws in an evolutionary. Yeah, and I wonder what home it finds, I wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates and what the new home for these kinds of natural inclinations are, whether it's technology, whether... And if it's evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins's book also, he's like, well, that's a religious, that could be a very religious notion. I don't, I think this stuff is interesting. I'm not a very religious person, but I'm thinking it's not a bad idea. Maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces religion is a return to religion, but in this sort of more sophisticated... I mean, if you went back, yeah, I mean, it's the issue with like a lot of the recent critiques, I think it's a strong critique in a complicated way, right? Because the whole way these, the way this works, I mean, the theologians, if you're reading Paul Tillich, if you're reading Heschel, if you're reading these people, they're thinking very sophisticatedly about religion in terms of this, it's ineffable, and we're just these things, and it connects us to these things in a way that puts life in alignment. We can't really explain what's going on because our brains can't handle it, right? For the average person though, this notion of live as if is kind of how religions work, is live as if this is true. It's like an OS for getting in alignment with, because through cultural evolution, like you behave in this way, do these words, live as if this is true gives you the goal you're looking for. But that's a complicated thing, live as if this is true, because if you, especially if you're not a theologian, to say, yeah, this is not true in an enlightenment sense, but I'm living as if, it kind of takes the heat out of it, but of course it's what people are doing because highly religious people still do bad things, where if you really were, there's absolutely a hell and I'm definitely gonna go to it if I do this bad thing, you would never have, you know, no one would ever murder anyone if they were an evangelical Christian, right? So it's like what, this is kind of a tangent that I'm on shaky ground here, but it's something I've been interested off and on a lot. Well, it's fascinating, I mean, I think we're in some sense searching for, because it does make for a good operating system, we're searching for a good live as if X is true and we're searching for a new X. And maybe artificial intelligence will be the very, the new gods that we're so desperately looking for. Or it'll just spit out 42. I thought it was 27. Cal, this is, as you know, I've been a huge fan, so are a huge number of people that I've spoken with, so they've been telling me, I absolutely have to talk to you, this is a huge honor, this is really fun, thanks for wasting all this time with me. Yeah, no, likewise, man, I've been a long time fan, so this was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal Newport and thank you to our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Cal himself, "'Clarity about what matters provides clarity "'about what does not.'" Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166

The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati. He is a DC based political correspondent, host of The Rising with Crystal Ball and host of the realignment podcast with Marshall Kozloff. He has interviewed Donald Trump four times and has interviewed a lot of major political figures and human beings who wield power. He loves policy and loves history, which makes him a great person to sail through the sometimes stormy waters of political discourse. He showed up to this conversation with a gift of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's biography on Hitler, a two volume set that is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, most definitive studies of Hitler. Nothing wins my heart faster on a first meeting or first date than a great book about the darkest aspects of human nature and human history. I think I started saying that as a joke, but actually there's probably a lot of truth to it. I love it when we skip the small talk and go straight to the in depth conversation about the best and worst of human nature. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly Grammar Assistant, Eight Sleep Self Cooling Bed and Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that for better or for worse, I would like to avoid the trap of surface political bickering of the day. I do find politics fascinating, but not the talking points produced by the industrial engagement complex of red versus blue division. Instead, I'm fascinated by human beings who seek power and how power changes them. I don't have a political affiliation and my ideas, at least I hope so, are defined more by curiosity and learning in the face of uncertainty and less by the echo chambers who tell me what I'm supposed to think. I'm constantly evolving, learning, and doing my best to do so without ego and with empathy. Please be patient with me. As far as I'm aware, I do not have any derangement syndromes, nor do I get a medical prescription of blue, red, white, or black pills. If I say something, I say it because I'm genuinely thinking and struggling with the ideas. I have no agenda, just a bit of a hope to add more love to the world. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Sagar Anjati. There's no better gifts in this world than a book about Hitler, so thank you so much. I've gotten a gift when we were just talking about flying, the watch from Joe Rogan, and this almost beats it. So tell me what this particular book on Hitler is. So this is volume two. Yes, so this is Ian Kershaw. He wrote the famous two volume on Hitler. I'm a big book nerd, and I spend a lot of time reading biographies in particular. So this one, if you need a one volume, "'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,' right? I think you talked about that, William Shire, because that's like Hitler's rise, Nazi Germany, the war, et cetera. But I like bios because a good biography is story of the times, right? And so this one, the first volume, it does exactly that, which is that it doesn't just tell the story of Hitler. It's the context of this kid in Austria, and he's got all these dreams, but then actually pretty courageous in terms of World War I, right? Gets pinned to metal on by the Kaiser. And then what it's like to lose World War I, and actually lose this stain, and then the rise within, everybody knows that story, the Beer Hall Putsch and all that. This one I like, and the reason I like Kershaw is obviously number one, it's English, which is actually hard, right? Like in order to write that story, who can do both the primary source material and then translate it for people like us, but he tells the dynamic story of Hitler so well in the second volume, just like the level of detail. You've talked about this, Lex, like what was it like inside that room, inside with Chamberlain? Like what was it like in terms of who was this like magnetic madman who did convince the smartest people in the world at the time? And up until like 1940, the Soviet gamble, like it took tremendous risks, but like highly calculated, thinking, no, no, no, I'm not gonna pay for this one. I'm not gonna pay for this one. And it put himself, he had a remarkable ability, not just to put himself in the minds of the German people, but in terms of his adversaries, like with when he was across from Mussolini. Calculate, he's like, how exactly did Mussolini, the guy who created fascism, becomes like second fiddle to Hitler? Think it's an amazing bio. And yeah, like Ian Kershaw, along with Richard Evans, two of my favorite authors on the Third Reich, no question. Do you think he was born this way, that charisma, whatever that is? Or was it something he developed strategically? That's like the question you apply to some of the great leaders. Was he just a madman who had the instinct to be able to control people in the room together with them? Or is this like, he worked at it? I think he worked at it. But also, there is an innate quality. I'm forgetting his name, his lifelong, Rudolf, the one who flew to Berlin in like 1940. I forget his name, anyway. So he helped Hitler write Mein Kampf. And he was like slavishly devoted to him in prison. This is 1925 or something like that. And so you read that and you're like, well, how does he get this like crank wacko to basically believe he's like the second coming, help him write this book? I mean, literally, they live together in the prison cell and they wake up every day. And as he was composing Mein Kampf and because of the Beer Hall Putsch and all that, had this like absolute ability to gather people around him. I think his greatest skill was, is he was just a very good politician, truly. I mean, if you look at his ability in order to read coalitional politics and then convince exactly the right people in order to follow him. I think I heard you ask this once and I've thought about it a lot, which is like, who could have stopped Hitler in Germany? It's always like the ever present question. Of course, like the whole baby Hitler thing. Really the answer is Hindenburg. Like Hindenburg was the person who could have stopped and had the immense standing within the German public. The only real like war hero definitely was personally skeptical of fascism and Nazism. And didn't like Hitler. And didn't like him and he knew he was full of shit. He was like, yeah, I think this guy is dangerous. I think this guy could do a lot of damage to the Republic. But he acceded basically to Hitler at the time. And I think that he was one of the main people who could have done something about it. And also he was able to convince the generals, the military. I mean, that was very interesting. And to convince Chamberlain and the other political leaders. That's something I often think about because we're just reading books about these people. I think about what like Jeffrey Epstein, for example. Like evil people, not evil, but people have done evil things. Let's not go to the Dan Carlin thing of what is evil. People that do evil things, I wonder what they are like in a room because I know quite a lot of intelligent people that did not see the evil in Jeffrey Epstein and spend time with them. And were not bothered by it. In the same sense, Hitler, it seems like he was able to get, just even before he had power, because people get intoxicated by power and so on. They want to be close to power. But even before he had power, he was able to convince people. And it's unclear, like is there something that's more than words? It's like the way you, I mean, people talk, tell stories about like this piercing look and whatever, all that kind of stuff. I wonder if that's somehow a part of it. Like that has to be the base floor of any of these charismatic leaders. You have to be able to, in a room alone, be able to convince anybody of anything. So I can tell you from my personal experience, one of the best educated lessons I got was when I got to meet Trump. So I interviewed Trump four different times as a journalist, spent like two and a half hours with him in the Oval Office, not alone, but like me and one person and like the press secretary, and that was it. So I actually got to observe him. And as a guy who reads these types of books, and you think of Trump, obviously most people, what they see on television, in articles and more, but being able to observe it like one on one, I was closer to him than I am right now from you. That was one of the most educational experiences I got because it's like you just said, the look, the leaning forward, the way he talks, the way he is a master at taking the question and answering exactly which party wants. And then if you try and follow up, he's like, excuse me, you know, like he knows. And then whenever you're talking, it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted. If he realizes he's been mirandering and then you interrupt him, all good. But if he's driving home a point, which he has to make sure appears in your transcript or whatever, it really was fascinating for me to look at. And what was also crazy with Trump is I realized how much he was living in the moment. So when I went to the Oval, I've read all these biographies and I walk in, I'm like, holy shit, you're like, I'm in the Oval Office. Were you interviewing him in the Oval Office? In the Oval, every time, I was in the Oval Office. You scared shitless? Well, I wasn't scared. I was just, look, it's the Oval Office, right? I mean, I'm this nerd. He was like this kid, I'm so, I will admit this here. I printed out on my dad's label maker when I was like seven and I wrote the Oval Office on my bedroom. So I was a huge nerd, obviously egomaniacal, even from seven. But so for this, I mean, it was huge, right? I'm like this 25 year old kid. And I walk in there and I see the couch, right? And I'm like, oh man, that's Kissinger. That's where Kissinger and Nixon got on their knees. And then you see over by the door and you're like, are the scuff marks still there from when Eisenhower used to play golf? You know, this is all running through my mind. With Trump, none of it was there, none of it, right? So like, even the desk, I put my phone on the desk to record and I'm like, this is the fucking Resolute desk. Like, I shouldn't put my phone on this thing, right? And I'm like HMS Resolute, you know, all the international. And even for him, he doesn't think about any of it. It was like amazing to me. Like he had this portrait of Andrew Jackson right next to his, to the, I think from on the fireplace, like right here on the right. And the most revealing question was when I was like, Mr. President, what are people gonna remember you for in a hundred years? And he was like, I don't know, like veteran's choice. He like has a list in front of him of like his accomplishments, which is staff. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I wanted to know. And he's like, veteran's choice. And I remember looking at him being like, it's not gonna be veteran's choice. I'd be like, I'm like, I'm looking at you, Donald Trump, the harbinger of something new. We still don't know what the hell it is. And so I realized with these guys and their charisma and more is that they don't think about themselves the way that we think about them. And that was actually important to understand because a lot of people are like, Trump is playing all this chess. I'm like, I assure you he's not. Like he's truly, one time I was interviewing him and he had like a certificate that he had to sign or something on his desk. He's like, it was like child almost. Like he got distracted by, he's like, oh, what's this? You know, he's just like picking up and I was like, wow, like this, this is the guy. Like this is what he is. Well, I wonder if there was a different person because you were recording then offline at a party. I can tell you. Well, here's the thing though, because that's another part of it. Because that two hours, I would say like half of that was not on the record. So like, whenever he's off the record, he changes completely, right? I don't wanna like go into too much of it or whatever, but like he, I mean, he is so mindful of when that camera is on and when the mic is hot in terms of the language that he uses, what he's willing to admit, what he's willing to talk about, how he's willing to even appear in front of his staff. I think the most revealing thing Trump ever did was there was this press conference, like right after he lost the, right after the midterm elections in 2018. And one of the journalists was like, Mr. President, thank you for doing this press conference. And he looks at him and he goes, it's called earned media, it's worth billions. And he just like had so much disdain for him because he's like, I'm not doing this for you. He's like, I'm doing this for me. So he's really aware of the narrative of the story. I mean, that the people have talked about that all comes from the tabloid media of the, from New York and so on. He's a master of that. But I've also heard stories of just in private, he's a really, I don't wanna overuse the word charismatic, but just like, he is a really interesting, almost like friendly, like a good person. Like, that's what I heard. I've heard actually surprising the same thing about Hillary Clinton. And like. That I can't tell you anything about. But like the way they present themselves is perhaps very different than they are as human beings and one on one. That's something, maybe that's just like a skill thing. Maybe the way they present themselves in public is actually their, I mean, almost their real self. And they're just really good in private, one on one to go into this mode of just being really intimate in some kind of human way. I think that's part of it. Because I noticed that with Trump, you know, he's like, it's almost like a tour guide. It was very like, it's very crazy, right? Cause you're like, you're in the Oval. I mean, it's his office. And he's like, do you guys want anything? And he's like, you want a Diet Coke? Cause he drinks like all this Diet Coke. You know? And he's just like, you guys want a Diet Coke, right? And you're sitting there and you're like, the way he's able to like, like the last time I interviewed him, he wanted to do it outside. Because he like, he's studied himself from all angles. And he knows exactly how he looks on a camera and with which lighting. And so we were supposed to interview him on camera in the Oval Office, which is actually rare. Like you don't usually get that. And they ended up moving it outside at the last minute. And he came out and he's like, I picked this spot for you. He's like, great lighting. Yeah. I was like, you are your own like lighting director. Yeah. The president, right? It's great. It's so funny. But it's like you said, he's very charismatic and friendly. I mean, you wouldn't know. I mean, look, this is what I mean in terms of the dynamism of these people that gets lost. And I think even he knows that. Like, I don't think he would want that side of him. That I see, you know, that you see in those off the record moments and more in order to come out because he's very keen about how exactly he presents to the public. It's like, you know, even his presidential portrait, everybody usually smiles and he refused to smile. He was like, I want to look like Winston Churchill. You know, like even he knew that. Do you think he believes that he, what he kind of implies that he is one of, if not the greatest president in American history? Like people kind of laugh at this, but there's quite, I mean, there's quite a lot of people, first of all, that make the argument that he's the greatest president in history. Like I've heard this argument being made. And I mean, I don't know what the, first of all, I don't care. Like, you can't make an argument that anyone is the greatest. That's just, that just, I come from a school of like being humble and modest and so on. It's like, even Michael, you can't have that conversation. Okay, so I like that he's humble enough to say like Abraham Lincoln or whatever. Like, I don't know. He says maybe Lincoln. Maybe. Remember that. Maybe. He says maybe Lincoln. Do you think he actually believes that? Or is that something he understands will create news and also perhaps more importantly, piss off a large number of people? Is he almost like a musician masterfully playing the emotions of the public? Or does he, or, and does he believe when he looks in the mirror, I'm one of the greatest men in history? Combination of all three. I do think he believes it. And for the reason why is I don't think he knows that much about US history. I really mean that. Like, and that's what I meant whenever I was in there and I realized he was just living in the moment. I don't think he knew all that much about why. I mean, this is why he was elected in many ways, right? So I'm not saying this is an orbit, like I'm not making a judgment on this. I'm just saying, I do think in his mind, he does think he was one of the best presidents in American history largely because, and I encountered this with a lot of people who work for him, which is that they didn't really know all that much kind of about what came before and all that. And it's not necessarily to hold it against them because for in many ways, that's what they were elected to do or elected to be in many ways. It's an interesting question whether knowing history, being a student of history is productive or counterproductive. I tend to assume I really respect people who are deeply like well read in history, like presidents that are almost like history nerds. I admire that. But maybe that gets in the way of governance. I don't know. It's not, I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate to my own beliefs, but it's possible that focusing on the moment and the issues and letting history, it's like first principles thinking, forget the lessons of the past and just focus on common sense reasoning through the problems of today. Yeah, it's really hard question. In terms of the modern era, I mean, Obama was a student of history. Like he used to have presidential biographers and people over and I mean, famously, like Robert de Caro, one of my favorite presidential biographers, he was invited to have dinner with Obama and Obama would like pepper some of his, it was interesting because he'd try and justify some of the things he didn't do by being like, well, if you look at what they had to do and what I have to deal with, mine's much harder. So in that way, I was a little pissed off because I'd be like, no, that actually like, you're comparing apples to oranges and all that. But if you look at Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt in particular, this was, I mean, a voracious reader, not of just American history, all history. That guy's just such a badass. Incredible. The only president who willed himself to greatness. That's like the amazing thing about him. He wasn't tested by a crisis, right? Like it wasn't, no, he didn't have a civil war. He didn't have World War II. He didn't have to found the country, literally, or like, didn't have to stave off that, or he didn't buy Louisiana Purchase, like all that. He literally came into a pretty static country and he could have just governed with, I mean, he was, the person who came before him was assassinated, like he easily could have coasted, but he literally willed the country into something more. And that's always why I've focused a lot on him too, because I'm like, that, in many ways, I wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis. I mean, like look at Trump, right? But it can bring out the best within you, but it's a whole other level to bring out the best within yourself just for the sake of doing it. That's, I think is really interesting. The speeches were amazing. I'm also a sucker for great speeches because I tend to see the role of the president as in part like inspirer in chief, sort of to be able to, I mean, that's what great leaders do, like CEOs of companies and so on, establish a vision, a clear vision, and like hit that hard. But the way you establish the vision isn't just like, not to dig at Joe Biden, but like sleepy, boring statements. You have to sell those statements and you have to do it in a way where everybody's paying attention. Everybody's excited. And that, Teddy Roosevelt was definitely one of them. Obama was, I think, at least early on, I don't know, was incredible at that. It does feel that the modern political landscape makes it more difficult to be inspirational in a sense because everything becomes bickering and division. I do want to ask you about Trump. So you're now a successful podcaster. I've talked to Joe about Trump, Joe Rogan, and Joe's not interested in talking to Trump. It's just fascinating. I try to dig into like why. What would you interview Trump on like realignment, for example, and do you think it's possible to do a two, three hour conversation with him where you will get at something like human or you get at something, like when we're talking about the facade he puts forward, do you think you could get past that? No, I don't. I look, I was a White House correspondent. I observed this man very closely. I interviewed him. I think if that mic is hot, he knows what he's doing. He just, he's done this too long, Lex. He just knows. But do you think he's a different human now after the election? Do you think that? Yeah, not at all. I think he's been the same person since 1976. I really do. Like basically, 1976, I studied Trump a lot and I think he's basically been the core of who he is and elements of that. Ever since he built that, you know, the ice rink in Central Park and got that media attention, that was it. Yeah, he's a fascinating study. Still, I feel there's a hope in me that there would be a podcast like a Joe Rogan, like a long form podcast where it's something could be, you know, and you're actually a really good person to do that, where you can have a real conversation that looks back at the election and reveal something on us. But perhaps he's thinking about running again and so maybe he'll never let down that guard. But like, you know, I just love it when there's this switch in people where you start looking back at your life and wanting to tell stories. Like, you know, trying to extract wisdom and like realizing you're in this new phase of life where like the battles have all been fought, now you're this old, like former warrior and now you can tell the stories of that time. And it seems like Trump is still at it, like the young warrior he is, he's not in the mode of telling stories. You know what I got from Rogan? He's the only president who didn't age well in office. It's true, right? Like, and this is what I mean, because he lives in the moment, like the job actually aged Obama, I mean, Bush, same thing, even Clinton. Clinton was like fat, it looked miserable by like 2000. HW, like, I mean, Reagan, famous, actually, yeah, pretty much everybody I think about, including John F. Kennedy, who got much sicker while in office. The job like weighs on you and makes you physically ill. Trump was, he's the only person who just didn't happen to. He almost gotten stronger and he was one of the most, like the climate, there's so many people attacking him, so much hatred, so much love and hatred. And it was just, I mean, it was whatever it was, it was quite masterful and a fascinating study. If we stick on Hitler for just a minute, what lessons do you take from that time? Do you think it's a unique moment in human history, that World War II, I mean, both Stalin and Hitler, you know, is it something that's just an outlier in all of human history in terms of the atrocities, or is there lessons to be learned? You mentioned offline that you're not just a student of the entirety of the history, but you also are fascinated by just different like policies and stuff. Like, what's the immigration policy? What's the policy on science? And... Third Reich in power, let me plug it, by Richard Evans, I think is what it was. Cause that actually will tell you, like what was it like to live under the Nazi regime without the war? Yeah, it's a hard question in terms of the lessons that we can learn. Cause there's a lot, and it's actually been over, it's been over indexed almost. Everything comes back to Hitler in a conversation. So I kind of think of it within Mao, Stalin, and Hitler as, I don't wanna say payments for, but like the end point payment for the sins and the problems of the monarchical system that evolve within Europe. Basically like 1400 and more. I basically think that 1400, the wars between France, England, the balance of power, eventually World War I, and then serfdom within Russia, the Russian revolution that birthed Stalin. Same thing, the Kaiser and Imperial Germany and this like incredibly crazy system of balance of power in World War I. And then same thing within China in terms of the warring states and then the disintegration, the European, you know, this is how they think of it. Which is like the century of humiliation and they had to have something like this. I think of it, I try to think of it within the context of that. I don't wanna sound like an inevitablist, but I think of it as, I like to think about systems, especially here in DC, that's where I got into politics, which is that you have to understand systems of power and the incentives within systems and the disincentives, the downside risk of what you're creating because that is what leads and creates the behavior within that system. I was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday. It's kind of funny, like I read these, I'm obsessed with these books by Robert Caro, the biographies of Lyndon Johnson. He's written like 5,000 pages so far and it's still not done. Okay, so like these are like books I base my life on. And look, these are Washington and the story of the post New Deal era and forward. Not much has changed. Like the Senate is still the Senate. So many of the same problems with the Senate are still there in some cases. No, not anymore. But for a while, some of the people who were there with Johnson are actually still, one of them is the president of the United States, just a joke. And you think about also, same with the media relationship, right? Like there's this media really, they may have come and gone. Like the people who were in the media and who were cozy with the administration officials, I mean, they just recreated themselves. It's like an ecosystem which doesn't change. And that's why I'm like, oh, it's not that was a specific time. That's just DC. Like that is DC because of the way the system is architected. It's pretty much been that way since like 1908, whenever like Teddy Roosevelt was dining with these journalists and he would yell at them. And then he would go over to the society house. And like in many ways, that's now instead of going to Henry Adams's house, like the people are congregating in Calorama, which is the richest neighborhood here at somebody else's house. Like it's the same thing. So you have to think about the system and then the incentives within that system about what the outcomes that they're producing. If you actually wanna think about how can I change this from the outside? That's also why it's very difficult to change because the system is designed in order to produce actually pretty specific outcomes that can only be changed in extraordinary times. Yeah, and sometimes it's hard to predict what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive, the system that you create, right? In the case, because especially when it's novel kind of situations. With Trump, he actually created a pretty novel situation. And a lot of the things that we've seen in the 20th century were very novel systems where people were very optimistic about the outcomes, right? And then it turned out to not have the results that they predicted. In terms of things being unchanged for the past 100 years and so on, can you like Wikipedia style or maybe like in a musical form, like I'm only a bill, describe to me. I still sing that to my head sometimes. I'm just a bill. I don't know what the rest of the song is, but let's leave that to people's imagination. How does this whole thing work? How does the US political system work? The three branches is how do you think about the system we have now? If you were to try to describe, if aliens showed up and asked you like, they didn't have time, so this is an elevator thing. Should we destroy you as you plead to avoid destruction? Well, how would you describe how this thing works? I would say we come together and we pick the people who make our laws. Then we pick the guy who executes those laws and they together pick the people who determine whether they or the president is breaking the law at the most basic level. That's how I would describe it. So the people who make the laws are Congress. The executive is charged with executing the laws as passed by Congress, the system, the branches of government, and the Supreme Court is picked by the president, confirmed by the Senate, which then decides whether you or other people are breaking the law in terms of interpretation of that law. That's basically it. Oh, and they decide whether those laws are in, they fall within the restrictions and the want of the founders as expressed by the Constitution of the United States, which is a set of principles that we came together in 1787. I want to make sure I get this right, 1787, and decided that we were going to live the rest of our lives barring a revolution and more. And we've made it 200 and something years in order on under that system. So there's a balance of power that's because it's multiple branches. There's a tension and a balance to it as designed by those original documents. What, which is the most dysfunctional, the branches, which is your favorite? Like in terms of talking about systems and like what's the greatest of concern and what is the greatest source of benefit in your view? The presidency, obviously, well, the presidency is my favorite to study, obviously, because it is the one where there's the most subjective variable change in terms of the personality involved because of so much power imbued within the executive. The Senate is actually pretty much the same. That's one of the things I love about reading about the Senate and histories of the Senate is you're like, oh yeah, there were always like assholes in the Senate who were doing their thing and filibustering constantly based upon this or that. And then the personalities involved with the Senate haven't mattered as much since like pre civil war, right? Like pre civil war, you had like Henry Clay and then Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, who even in their own way, they represented like larger constituencies and they crafted these like compromises up until the outbreak of the civil war, et cetera. But like post since then, you don't think about like the Titans within the Senate. Most of that is because a lot of the stuff that they had power over has transferred over to the executive. So I'm most interested in really in like power, like where it lies. It's actually pretty, you know, throughout American history, much more used to lie with Congress. Now it's obviously just so imbued within the executive that understanding executive power is I think the thing I'm probably most interested in here. Do you think at this point, the amount of power that the president has is corrupting to their ability to lead well? Is this, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Are we, is there too much power in the presidency? There definitely is. And part of the problem, one of the things I try to make come across to people is if you're the president, unless you have a hyper intentional view of how something must be different in government, your view doesn't matter. So for example, like if you were Trump, let's take Trump even, and even in with a pretty intentional view, he was like, I'm gonna end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, right? And he came in and he gets these generals in. He's like, I wanna end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh, and I wanna withdraw these troops from Syria. And they're like, okay, we'll give you, give us like six months. He's like, okay. And this is the thing about Trump. He doesn't realize that it's bullshit. So they're like, he's like, oh, six months seems fun, right? So then six months comes and he's like, he's like, so, and then he'll announce it. He'll be like, and we're getting out of Syria. It's great. And then the generals freak out. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't have a plan for that. He's like, but you guys told me six months. He's like, I don't know, now we need another six months in order to figure this thing out. And by that time, now you're midterms. So now what? Now you gotta run for reelection. So more what I mean by that is, if you don't have a hyperintentional view about how to change foreign policy, if you don't have a hyperintentional view about how the Department of Commerce should do its job, they are just gonna go on autopilot. So this is part of the problem. When you asked me about the presidency, it's not the presidency itself, like the president himself, which has become too powerful. It's that we have less democratic checks on the people and the systems that are on autopilot. And I would say that basically since 2008, we have voted every single time to disrupt that system, except in the case of 2020 with Joe Biden, and there are a lot of different reasons around why that happened. And in every single one of those cases, Obama and Trump, they all failed in order to radically disrupt that. And that just shows you how titanic the task is. And I'm using my language precisely because I don't wanna be like deep state, but obviously there's deep state. Deep state, I guess, has conspiratorial intentions to it. But so what you're saying is the true power currently lies with the autopilot, AKA deep state. Well, but see, this is the thing too I wanna make clear, because I think people think conspiratorially that they're all coming together to intentionally do something. No, no, no, no. They are doing what they know, believe they are right, and don't have real democratic checks within that. And so now they have entire generations of cultures within each of these bureaucracies where they say, this is the way that we do things around here. And that's the problem, which is that we have a culture of within many of these agencies and more. I think the best example for this would be during the Ukraine gate with Trump and all that, with the impeachment. I'm not talking about the politics here, but the most revealing thing that happened was when the whistleblower guy, Alexander Vindman, was like, here you have the president departing from the policy of the United States. And I was like, well, let me educate you, Lieutenant Colonel. The president of the United States makes American foreign policy. But it was a very revealing comment because he and all the people within national security bureaucracy do think that. They're like, this is the policy of the United States. We have to do this. That's where things get screwy. Well, listen, for me personally, but also from an engineering perspective, I just talked to Jim Keller. It's just, this is the kind of bullshit that we all hate when you're trying to innovate and design new products. So that's what first principles thinking requires. It's like, we don't give a shit what was done before. The point is, what is the best way to do it? And it seems like the current government, government in general, probably, bureaucracies in general, are just really good at being lazy without never having those conversations. And just, it becomes this momentum thing that nobody has the difficult conversations. It's become a game within a certain set of constraints and they never kind of do revolutionary tasks. But you did say that the presidency is power, but you're saying that more power than the others, but that power has to be coupled with focused intentionality. You have to keep hammering the thing. If you want it done, it has to be done. I mean, and you gotta, this is the other part too, which is that it's not just that you have to get it done. You have to pick the 100 people who you can trust to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want. One of the most revealing quotes is from a guy named Tommy Corcoran. He was the top aide to FDR. This I'm getting from the Kara books too. And he said, what is a government? It's not just one guy or even 10 guys. Hell, it's a thousand guys. And what FDR did is he masterfully picked the right people to execute his will through the federal agencies. Johnson was the same way. He played these people like a fiddle. He knew exactly who to pick. He knew the system and more. Part of the reason that outsiders who don't have a lot of experience in Washington almost always fail is they don't know who to pick or they pick people who say one thing to their face. And then when it comes time to carry out the president's policy in terms of the government, they just don't do it. And the president's too, think about this. I think some Rahm Emanuel said this. He was like, by the time it gets to the president's desk, nobody else can solve it. It's not easy. It's not like a yes or no question. It's every single thing that hits the president's desk is incredibly hard to do. And Obama actually even said, and this was a very revealing quote about how he thinks about the presidency, which is he's like, look, the presidency is like one of those super tankers. He's like, I can come in and I can take it two degrees left and two degrees right. In a hundred years, two degrees left, that's a whole different trajectory. Same thing on the right. And he's like, that ultimately is really all you can do. I quibble and disagree with that in terms of how he could have changed things in 2008, but there's a lot of truth to that statement. Okay, that's really fascinating. You make me realize that actually both Obama and Trump are probably playing victim here to the system. You're making me think that maybe you can correct me that, cause I'm thinking of like Elon Musk, whose major success despite everything is hiring the right people. Exactly. And like creating those thousands, that structure of a thousand people. So maybe a president has power in that if they were exceptionally good at hiring the right people. Personnel is policy, man. That's what it comes down to. But wouldn't you be able to steer the ship way more than two degrees if you hire the right people? So like, it's almost like Obama was not good at hiring the right people. Well, he hired all the Clinton people. That's what happened. What happened with Trump? He hired all the Bush people. And then you just sit back and say, oh, president can't, but that means you're just suck at hiring. Correct. Yeah, I mean, look, I know it's funny. I'm giving you simultaneously the nationalist case against Trump and the progressive case against Obama. The progressive people are like, why the fuck are you hiring all these Clinton people in order to run the government and just recreate, like why are you hiring Larry Summers, who was one of the people who worked at all these banks and didn't believe that bailouts were gonna be big enough, and then to come in in the worst economic crisis in modern American history. That was 2008. And Summers actively lobbied against larger bailouts, which had huge implications for working class people and pretty much hollowed out America since. Okay, from Trump, same thing. You're like, I'm gonna drain the swamp. And by doing that, I'm gonna hire Goldman Sachs's Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and all these other absolute bush clowns in order to run my White House. Well, yeah, no shit. The only thing that you accomplished in your four years in office is passing a massive tax cut for the rich and for corporations. I wonder how that happened. What role does money play in all of this? Is money a huge influence in politics, super PACs, all that kind of stuff? Or is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with because from the outsider's perspective, it seems to have, that seems to be one of the fundamental problems with modern politics. So I was just having this conversation, Marshall and I, Marshall Kosloff, my cohost on The Realignment. And it's funny because if you do enough research, we actually live in the least corrupt age in American campaign finance, as in it's never been more transparent. It's never been more up to the FEC and all of that. If you go back and read not even 50 years ago, we're talking about Lyndon B. Johnson, handing people like literally as he came up in his youth, paying people for votes, like the boss of the person who like had all the Mexican votes, like the person who had, and he was like giving out briefcases. This is like within people's lifetimes who are alive in America. So that doesn't happen anymore. But I don't like to blame everything on money. Although I do think money is obviously a huge part of the problem. I actually look at it in terms of distribution, which is that how is money distributed within our society? Because I firmly believe that politics, this is gonna get complicated, but I think politics is mostly downstream from culture. And culture, obviously I'm using economics because there's obviously a huge interplay there, but like in terms of the equitable or lack of equitable distribution of money within our politics, what we're really pissed off about is we're like, our politics only seems to work for the people who have money. I think that's largely true. I think that the reason why things worked differently in the past is because our economy was structured in different ways. And there's a reason that our politics today are very analogous to the last Gilded Age because we had very similar levels of economic distribution and cultural problems too at the same time. I don't wanna erase that. Cause I actually think that's what's driving all of our politics right now. So that's interesting. So in that sense, the representative government is doing a pretty good job of representing the state of culture and the people and so on. Yeah. Can I ask you in terms of the deep state and conspiracy theories, there's a lot of talk about, again, from an outsider's perspective, if I were just looking at Twitter, it seems that at least 90% of people in government are pedophiles. 90 to 95%, I'm not sure what that number is. If I were to just look at Twitter, honestly, or YouTube, I would think most of the world is a pedophile. I would almost feel like. Right. And if you don't fully believe that, you're a pedophile. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would start to wonder like, wait, like what, am I a pedophile too? I'm either a communist or a pedophile or both, I guess. Yeah, that's gonna be clipped out. Thank you, internet. Yeah. I look forward to your emails. But is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories that give you pause or, so the flip side, the response to a lot of conspiracy theories is like, no, the reason this happened is because it's a combination of just incompetence. So where do you land on some of these conspiracy theories? I think most conspiracy theories are wrong. Some are true and those are spectacularly true. And if that makes sense. Yeah. And we don't know which ones. I don't know which ones. That's the problem. I think, well, I mean, look, man, I listened to your podcast. I think I was a huge nonbeliever in UFOs and now I've probably never believed more in UFOs. Like I believe in UFOs. Like I'm very comfortable being like, not only do I believe in UFOs, like I think we're probably being visited by an alien civilization. And if you asked me that three years ago, I would have been like, you're out of your fucking mind. Like, what are you talking about? Well, listen to David Fravor. That's all I have to say. That's it. I have the sense that the government has information that hasn't revealed, but it's not like they're, I don't think they're holding, there's like a green guy sitting there in a room. They have seen things they don't know what to do with. So it's like, they're confused. They're afraid of revealing that they don't know. That's what I think it is, right? It's revealing, yeah, exactly, that they don't know. And then in the process, there's a lot of fears tied up in that. First, looking incompetent in the public eye. Nobody wants to be looked that way. And the other is like, in revealing it, even though they don't know, maybe China will figure it out. Exactly. So like, we don't want China to figure it out first. And so all those kinds of things result in basically secrecy. Then that damages the trust in institutions on one of the most fascinating aspects, like one of the most fascinating mysteries of humankind of is there life, intelligent life, out there in the universe? So that's one of them. But there's other ones, like for me, when I first came across actually Alex Jones was 9 11. I remember like, cause I was in Chicago. I was thinking like, oh shit, are they gonna hit Chicago too? That's what everybody was thinking. Yeah, everybody. Everybody was thinking like, what does this mean? What scale? What, I mean, trying to interpret it. And I remember like looking for information desperately, like what happened? And I remember not being satisfied with the quality of reporting and figuring out like rigorous, like here's exactly what happened. And so people like Alex Jones stepped up and others that said like, there's some shady shit going on. And it sure as hell looked like there's shady shit going on. Yes. So like, and I still stand behind the fact that it seems like there's not, there's not enough, like it wasn't a good job of being honest and transparent and all those kinds of things. Cause it would implicate the Saudis. Let's be honest. And see, that's my conspiracy theories. I'm like, yeah, I think they covered up a lot of stuff because they wanted to cover up for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Like, I mean, that was a conspiracy theory not that long ago. I think it's true. I mean, I think it's a hundred percent true. Yeah, so those kinds of conspiracy theories are interesting. I mean, there's other ones for me personally that touched the institution that means a lot to me is the MIT and, you know, Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, I wanna hear a lot more. I wanna hear about, I talk about Epstein a lot. So I'm like. Oh, you do? Yeah, and he, I was gonna say, in terms of conspiracy theory, that one changed my outlook. Cause I was like, I was like, whoa, like you have this dude who convinced some of the most successful people on earth that he was like some money manager. And it looks like it was totally fake. Like Leon Black. I mean, this is one of the richest men on wall street, $9 billion net worth. Why is he giving him over a hundred million dollars between 2015 and 2019? What's going on here? Lex Wexner, same thing. So yeah, I wanna hear, because you know people who met him. And the only person I know who met him was Eric Weinstein. I've heard his, right. Oh boy. So I, listen, I'm still in and Eric is fascinating and like Eric is full on saying that. He was a Mossad or whatever. Yeah, there's a front for something, something much, much bigger. And there's a, whatever his name, Robert Maxwell, all the, all those stories, like you could dig deeper and deeper that Jeffrey's just like the tip of the iceberg. I just think he's an exceptionally charismatic, listen, this isn't speaking from confidence or like deep understanding of the situation, but from my speaking with people, he just seems like, at least from the side of his influence and interaction with researchers, he just seems like somebody that was exceptionally charismatic and actually took interest. He was unable to speak about interesting scientific things, but he took interest in them. So he knew how to stroke the egos of a lot of powerful people, like well, like in different kinds of ways, I suppose I don't know about this because I don't have, like if a really, okay, this is weird to say, but I have an ability, okay, I think women are beautiful, I like women, but like if like a supermodel came to me or something, like I'm able to reason. It seems like some people are not able to think clearly when there's like an attractive woman in the room. And I think that was one of the tools he used to manipulate people. Interesting. I don't know, listen, it's like the pedophile thing. I don't know how many people are complete sex addicts, but like, it seems like looking out into the world, like the Me Too movement have revealed that there's a lot of like weird, like creepy people out there. I don't know, but I think it was just one of the many tools that he used to convince people and manipulate people, but not in some like evil way, but more just really good at the art of conversation and just winning people over on the side. And then by building through that process, building a network of other really powerful people and not explicitly, but implicitly having done shady shit with powerful people, like building up a kind of implied power of like, like we did some shady shit together. So we're not like, you're gonna help me out on this extra thing I need to do now. And that builds and builds and builds to where you're able to actually control, like have quite a lot of power without explicitly having like a strategy meeting. And I think a single person or yeah, I think a single person can do that, can start that ball rolling. And over time it becomes a group thing, like I don't know if Jillian Maxwell was involved or others and yeah, over time that becomes almost like a really powerful organization that wasn't, that's not a front for something much deeper and bigger, but it's almost like maybe it's cause I love cellular automata, man. A system that starts out as a simple thing with simple rules can create incredible complexity. And so I just think that we're now looking in retrospect, it looks like an incredibly complex system that's operating, but like, that's just because it's, there could be a lot of other Jeffrey Epstein's in my perspective that the simple thing just was successful early on and builds and builds and builds and builds and then there's a creepy shit that like a lot of aspects of the system helped it get bigger and bigger and more powerful and so on. So the final result is, I mean, listen, I have a pretty optimistic, I tend to see the good in people and so it's been heartbreaking to me in general just to see people I look up to not have the level of integrity I thought they would or like the strength of character, all those kinds of things. And it seems like you should be able to see the bullshit that is Jeffrey Epstein, like when you meet him. We're not talking about like Eric Weinstein, like one or two or three or five interactions, but like there's people that had like years of relationship with him. And I don't know, I'm not sure. Even after he was convicted. After he was convicted. That guy always gets me. Yeah, there's stories, I mean, I don't need to sort of, I honestly believe, okay, here's the open question I have. I don't know how many creepy sexual people that are out there. Like, I don't know if there is like, like the people I know, the faculty and so on, I don't know if they have like a kink that I'm just not aware of that was being leveraged because to me, it seems like if not everybody's a pedophile, then it's just the art of conversation. That is just like the art of just like manipulating people by making them feel good about like the exciting stuff they're doing. Listen, man, academics, people talk about money. I don't think academics care about money as much as people think. What they care about is like somebody, they want to be, it's the same thing that Instagram models posting their butt pictures, is they want to be loved. They want attention. My parents are professors. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. They, and Jeff Epstein, like the money is another way to show attention. Right, it's a proxy. My work matters. And he did that for some of the weirdest, most brilliant people. I don't want to sort of drop names, but everybody knows them. It's like people that are the most interesting academics is the one he cared about. Like people are thinking about the most difficult questions in all of science and all of engineering. So those people are, were kind of outcasts in academia a little bit because they're doing the weird shit. They're the weirdos. And he cared about the weirdos and he gave them money. And that, you know, that's, I don't know if there's something more nefarious than that. I hope not, but maybe I'm surprised. And in fact, half the population of the world is pedophiles. No, I think it's what you were talking about, which is that it's the, it's the implication after the initial, right? Like you do some shady things together or you do something that you want out of the public eye and you're a public person. And look, we probably even experienced this to a limited extent, right? You're like, ah, you know, like, I don't want to, I don't know, I almost lost my temper, you know, one time whenever a car hit me and I'm like, I can't freak out in public anymore. Like, you know, like what if somebody takes a photo or something? And so I think that there's an extent to that times a billion, literally, when you have a billion dollars or more. And you take that all together and you stack it up on itself. I saw a story about like Bill Clinton. Like Bill Clinton was with Epstein or with Ghislaine Maxwell in a private air terminal or something. And she had one of their like sex, you know, one of those girls who was underage, had her dressed up in a literal like pilot uniform. And she was underage in order to, you know, and she was being disguised for being older. And she was a masseuse, right? Because that was one of the guises which they got in order to sexually traffic these women. And she was like, Bill was like complaining about his neck. And she's like, give Bill Clinton a massage, right? So now there's a photo of an underage girl giving a massage to the former president of the United States. I don't think he knew, right? But like, that looks bad. And so this is kind of what we're getting at, which is that you're setting it all up and creating those preconditions or like Prince Andrew. Do I think Prince Andrew knew that Virginia Gouffre was underage? I don't know. Probably knew she was pretty young, which I think is, you know, skeevy enough where you're a fucking Prince, you probably know better. But I don't think he knew she was underage or maybe he did. And if he did, then he's even more of a piece of shit than I thought. But when we look at these things, the stuff I'm more interested in is like what you were talking about. I'm like, Bill Gates, how do you get the richest man in the world in your house? Like under what, and Gates is like, he was talking about financing and all this. I'm like, you don't have access to money or bankers? Like you're the richest man in the world. You can call Goldman Sachs anytime you want on a hotline. Like, why do you need, that's where I start again to get more conspiratorial because I'm like, Bill, dude, you have the gold credit, right? Like you don't need Epstein to create some complicated financing structure. Or Leon Black, like what is 2015, 2009? I mean, this is very recent stuff. Or, and this is the part that really got me as I read the department, I think it's called the Department of Financial Service report around Deutsche Bank with Epstein. They knew he was a criminal. They solicited his business, explicitly knew that his business meant access to other high net worth individuals, consistently doled money out from his account for hush payments to women in Europe and prostitution rings. They knew all of this within the bank. It was elevated multiple times. Here was the other one. One of Epstein's associates was like, hey, how much money can we take out before we hit the automatic sensor before you have to tell the IRS? And that question by their own standards is supposed to result in a notification to the feds and they never did it. And he was withdrawing like $2 million of cash in five years for tips to, I'm like, okay, like something's going on here. Like, you see what I'm saying? There's a lot of signs that make you think that there's a bigger thing at play than just the man, that there's some, it does look like a larger organization is using this front, right? Again, I don't know. I truly don't know. And I'm not willing to use the certainty, which I think a lot of people online are, to say like, it wants 100%. The certainty is always the problem because that's probably why I hesitate to touch conspiracy theories is because I'm allergic to certainty in all forms. In politics, any kind of discourse. And people are so sure, in both directions, actually, it's kind of hilarious. Either they're sure that the conspiracy theory, particularly whatever the conspiracy theory is, is false. Like they almost dismiss it like, like they don't even want to talk about it. It's like the people, like the way they dismiss that the earth is flat. Most scientists are like, they don't even want to like hear what the flat earthers are saying. They don't have like zero patience for it, which is like, maybe in that case is deserved. But everything else, you really like have empathy. Like consider the fact, you have, okay, this is weird to say, but I feel like you have to consider that the earth may be flat for like one minute. Like you have to be empathetic. You have to be open minded. I don't see a lot of that through our cultural taste makers and more. And that really is what concerns me the most. Cause it's just another manifestation of all of our problems. Is that we have this completely bifurcating economy, bifurcating culture, literally, in terms of we have the middle of the country and then we have the coast. And in terms of the population, it's almost 50, 50. And with increasing mega cities and urban culture, like urban monoculture of LA, New York and Chicago and DC and Boston and Austin, relative to how an entire other group of Americans live their lives, or even the people within them who aren't rich and upwardly mobile, how they live their lives is just completely separating. And all of our language and communication in mass media and more is to the top. And then everybody else is forgotten. Do you think when you dig to the core, there is a big gap between left and right? Is that division that's perceived currently real or are most people center left and center right? It's so interesting because that's such a loaded term, center left. What does that mean? Like to you, I think the way you're thinking of it is, I'm not like a, well, even this, like I'm not a radical socialist, but I'm marginally left on cultural issues and economic issues. This is how we've traditionally understood things. And then in popular discourse, like center right, like what does it mean to be center right? Like I am marginally right on social issues and marginally right on economic issues. But that's just not, like if you look at survey data, for example, like stimulus checks, people who are against stimulus checks are conservative. Well, 80% of the population is for a stimulus check. So that means a sizable number of Republicans are for stimulus checks. Same thing happens on like a wealth tax. The same thing happens on, okay, Florida voted for Trump, 3.1%, more than Barack Obama, 2008, on the same day passes a $15 minimum wage at 67%. So what's going on? So that's why I. What is going on? Oh, that's my entire career. But it seems like, so that's fascinating. Conversation is different than the policies. Well, it's different than reality. That's what I would say, which is that the way we have to understand American politics today, it didn't always used to be this way, is it's almost entirely long. Basic, I would say the main divider is, because even when you talk about class, this misses it in terms of socioeconomics, it's around culture, which is that it's basically, if you went to a four year degree granting institution, you are part of one culture. If you didn't, you're part of another. I don't wanna erase the 20% or whatever of people who did go to a college degree who are Republicans or vice versa, et cetera, but I'm saying on average, in terms of the median way that you feel, we're basically bifurcating along those lines. And because people get upset, be like, oh, well, there are rich people who vote for Trump. And I'm like, yeah, but you know who they are? They're like plumbers or something. They're people who make $100,000 a year, but they didn't go to a four year college degree and they might live who are in a place which is not an urban metro area. And then at the same time, you have like a Vox writer who makes like 30 grand, but they have a lot more cultural power than like the plumber. So you have to think about where exactly that line is. And I think in general, that's the way that we're trending. So that's why when I say like, what's going on, are we divided? Yeah, like, but it's not left and right. I mean, like, and that's why I hate these labels. So it's more just red and blue like teams. They're arbitrary teams. So how arbitrary are these teams, I guess is another. Completely arbitrary. So, well, you kind of imply that there's, I don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing the patterns because it seems like there's a network effects of like, you just pick the team red or blue and it might have to do with college. You might have to do all of those things, but like, it seems like it's more about just the people around you. Correct. So less than whether you went to college or not. I mean, it's almost like, seems like, it's almost like a weird, like network effects that are hard. There's certain strong patterns you're identifying, but I don't know. It's sad to think that it might be just teams that have nothing to do with what you actually believe. Well, it is, Lex. Look, I mean, I don't want to believe that, but the data points me to this, which especially 2020, I'm one of the people chief among them. I will own up to it here. I was totally wrong about why Trump was elected in 2016. I believed and based a lot of my public commentary beliefs on this, Trump was elected because of a rejection of Hillary Clinton neoliberalism on the back of a pro worker message, which was anti immigration. It was its pillar, but alongside of it was a rejection of free trade with China and generally of the political correctness and globalism, which has been come in through the uniparty and same thing here with the military industrial complex and endless war, he rejected all of that. Wait, what's wrong with that prediction? It's wrong, man. And the reason I know this is that it sounds right. I wish it, I honestly wish it was true, but here's the truth. Trump actually governed largely as a neoliberal Republican who was meaner online and who departed from orthodoxy in some very important ways. Don't get me wrong. I will always support the trade war with China. I will always support not expanding the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I will support him moving the Overton window on a million different things and revealing once and for all that GOP voters don't care about economic orthodoxy necessarily. But here's what they do care about. Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, despite not delivering largely for all the Trump people out there on that agenda. He wasn't more pro union, but he won more union votes. He wasn't necessarily more pro worker, but he actually won more votes in Ohio than he did in 2016. And he won more Hispanic votes than despite being all the immigration rhetoric, et cetera. Here's why, it's about the culture, which is that the culture war is so hot that negative partisanship is at such high levels. All of the vote is geared upon what the other guy might do in office. And there's a poll actually just came out by Echelon Insights. Crystal and I were talking about it on Rising, that number one concern amongst Democratic voters is Trump voters, number one concern. Not issues like Trump voters. And number two is white supremacy. And so like, which is basically code for Trump voters. And is the same true for the other side? Also on the right, the number one concern is illegal immigration. And number, I think, three or four or whatever is Antifa, which is code for Democrats. At least on the right is a policy kind of thing. Well, yeah, it's funny. I saw Ben Shapiro was talking about this. But the reason why I would functionally say it's the same is because, I mean, you can believe whether it's true or not. I think it actually largely is true. But a lot of GOP voters feel like a lot of illegal immigration is code for people who are coming in, who are gonna be legalized and are gonna go vote Democrat. Like, I can just explain it from their point of view. So like, what does that actually mean? Each other, like each other, which is that the number one concern is the other person. So negative partisanship has never been higher. And I think people who had my thesis in terms of why Trump was elected in 2016, you have to grapple with this. Like, how did he win 10 million more votes? He came 44,000 votes away from winning the presidency across three states. Like, I don't, none of our popular discourse reflects that very stark reality. And I think so much of it is people really hate liberals. Like, they just really hate them. And I was driving through rural Nevada before the election. And I was like, literally in the middle of nowhere. And there was this massive sign this guy had out in front of his house. And it just said, Trump, colon, fuck your feelings. And I was like, that's it. That is why people voted for Trump. And I don't want to denigrate it because they truly feel they have no cultural power in America, except to raise the middle finger to the elite class by pressing the button for Trump. I get that. That's actually a totally rational way to vote. It's not the way I wish we did vote, but like, you know, that's not my place to say. So this is interesting. If you could just psychoanalyze, I'm again, probably naive about this, but I'm really bothered by the hatred of liberals. It's this amorphous monster that's mocked. It's like the Shapiro liberal tears. And I'm also really bothered by probably more of my colleagues and friends, the hatred of Trump. Yeah, the Trump and white supremacists. So apparently there's 70 million white supremacists, 75 million, sorry. There's millions of white supremacists. And apparently whatever liberal is, I mean, literally liberal has become equivalent to white supremacists in the power of negativity it arouses. I don't even know what those, I mean, honestly, they've become swears essentially. Is that, I mean, how do we get out of this? Because that's why I just don't even say anything about politics online. Cause it's like, really? Like you can't, here's what happens. Anything you say that's like thoughtful, like, hmm, I wonder, immigration, something. I wonder like why we have these many, we allow these many immigrants in or some version of the like thinking through these difficult policies and so on. They immediately tried to find like a single word in something you say that can put you in a bin of liberal or white supremacists and then hammer you to death by saying you're one of the two. And then everybody just piles on happily that we finally nailed this white supremacist or liberal. And that, is this some kind of weird like feature of online communication that we've just stumbled upon? Is there a way or is it possible to argue that this is like a feature, not a bug? Like, this is a good thing? Yeah, well, look, I just think it's a reflection of who we are. People like to blame social media. I think we're just incredibly divided right now. I think we've been divided like this for the last 20 years. And I think that, the reason I focus almost 99% of my public commentary on economics is because you asked an important question at the top. How do we fix this? What did I say about the stimulus checks? Stimulus checks have 80% approval rating. So that's the type of thing. If I was Joe Biden and I wanted to actually heal this country, that's the very first thing I would have done when I came into office. Same thing on when you look at anything that's gonna increase wages. I said on the show, I was like, look, I think Joe Biden will have an 80% approval rating if he does two things. If he gives every American a $2,000 stimulus check and gives everybody who wants a vaccine a vaccine. That's it. It's pretty simple. Cause here's the thing. I don't really like Greg Abbott that much. We have like very different politics. I'm from Texas, but my parents got vaccinated really quickly. That means something to me. I'm like, listen, I don't really care about a lot of the other stuff. He got my family vaccinated. Like that, well, I will forever remember that. And that's how we will remember the checks. This is a part of a reason why Trump almost won the election and why, if the Republicans had been smart enough to give him another round of checks, 100% would have won. Which is that people were like, look, I don't really like Trump, but I got a check with his name on it. And that meant something to me and my family. I'm not saying for all the libertarians out there that they should go and like endlessly spend money and buy votes. What I am saying is lean into the majoritarian positions without adding your culture war bullshit on top of it. So for example, what's the number one concern that AOC says after the first round of checks got out? Oh, the checks didn't go to illegal immigrants. I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like this is the most popular policy America has probably done in 50 years, since like Medicare and you're ruining it. And then on the right is the same thing, which is that they'll be like, these checks are going to like, you know, low level blah, blah, you know, people who are lazy and don't work. I'm like, oh, there you go, you know, like you're just playing a caricature of what you are. Like if you lean into those issues and you got to do it clean, this is what everybody hates about DC, which is that Biden right now is doing the $1,400 checks, but he's looping it in with his COVID relief bill and all that. That's his prerogative, that's the Democrats prerogative. They won the election, that's fine. But I'll tell you what I would have done if I was him, I would have come in and I would have said, there's five United States senators who are on the record, Republicans, who said they'll vote for a $2,000 check. And I would put that on the floor of the United States Senate on my, you know, first or the first day possible. And I would have passed it and I would have forced those Republican senators to live up to that, vote for this bill, come to the Oval Office for a signing so that the very first thing of my presidency was to say, I'm giving you all this relief check, this long national nightmare is over. Take this money, do with it what you need. We've all suffered together. The thing about Biden is he has a portrait of FDR and is in the Oval, which kind of bothers me because he thinks of himself as an FDR like figure. But this is, you have to understand the majesty of FDR. We're talking about a person who passed a piece of legislation five days after he became president. And he passed 15 transformative pieces of legislation in the first 100 days. We're on day like 34, 35, and nothing has passed. The reconciliation bill will eventually become law, but it will become law with no Republican votes. And again, that's fine. But it's not fulfilling that legacy and the urgency of the action. And the mandate, which I believe that history has handed, it handed it to Trump and he fucked it up, right? He totally screwed it up. He could have remade America and made us into the greatest country ever coming out on the other side of this. He decided not to do that. I think Biden was again handed that like a scepter almost. It's like all you have to do, all America wants is for you to raise it up high, but he's keeping it within the realm of traditional politics. I think it's a huge mistake. Why, so this is, everything he's saying is makes perfect sense, like take, okay. It's like, it's like, again, if the aliens showed up, it's like the obvious thing to do is like, what's the popular thing? Like 80% of Americans support this. Like do that clean. Also do it like with like grace, where you're able to bring people together, not like in a political way, but like obvious common sense way. Like just people, the Republicans and Democrats just bring them together on a policy and like bold, just hammer it without the dirt, without the mess, whatever, try to compromise. Just the yellow have a good Twitter account, like loud, very clear. We're gonna give a $2,000 or a stimulus check. Anyone who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine at scale. What make America, let's make America great again by manufacturing. Like we are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine because we're bad motherfuckers. And without maybe with more eloquence than that and just do that. Why haven't we seen that for many, for several presidencies? Because of coalitional politics and they owe something to somebody else. For example, Biden has got a lot of the Democratic constituency has to satisfy within this bill. So there's gonna be a lot of shit that goes in there, state and local aid, all this stuff. Again, I'm not even saying this is bad, but he's like, his theory is, and this isn't wrong, is like we're gonna take the really popular stuff and use it as cover for the more downwardly less popular. And so the Dems could face the accusation, the people who are on this side, this is their pushback to me. They're like, why would we give away the most popular thing in the bill and then we would never be able to pass state and local aid, right? Why would we do, and the Republicans do the same thing, right, like Mitch McConnell, because he's a fucking idiot, decided to say, we're gonna pair these $2,000 stimulus checks with like section 230 repeal. And it was like, oh, it's obviously dead, right? Like it's not gonna happen together. That's largely why I believe Trump lost the election and why those races down in Georgia went the way that they did. Obviously Trump had something to do with it, but the reason why is they have longstanding things that they've wanted to get done. And in the words of Rahm Emanuel, never let a good crisis go to waste and try and get as much as you possibly can done within a single bill. My counter would be this, things have worked this way for too long, which is that the reconciliation bill is almost certainly going to be the only large signature legislative accomplishment of the Biden presidency. That's just how American politics works. Maybe he gets one more, maybe one. He has a second reconciliation bill, then you're running for midterms, it's over. I believe that by trying to change the paradigm of our politics, leaning into exactly what I'm talking here, you could possibly transcend that to a new one. And I'm not naive. I think people respond to political pressures. And the way that we found this out was David Perdue, who was just a total corporate dollar general CEO guy. He was against the original $1,200 stimulus checks. But then Trump came out, who's the single most popular figure in the Republican party. He's like, I want $2,000 stimulus checks. And all of a sudden, Perdue running in Georgia is like, yeah, I'm with President Trump, I want a $2,000 stimulus check. That was, if you're an astute observer of politics, to say, you can see there that you can force people to do the right thing because it's the popular thing. And that if it's clean, if you don't give them any other excuse, they have to do it. So this is what we've been gaslit into our culture war framework of politics. And the reason it feels so broken and awful is because it is, but there is a way out. It's just that nobody wants to be, it's a game of chicken, because maybe it is true. Maybe we would never be able to get your other democratic priorities, your Republican priorities. But I think that the country understands that this is fucking terrible and would be willing to support somebody who does it differently. There's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without, there's a lot of incentives to not stray from the traditional path. Yeah, is it also possible that the A students are not participating? Like we drove all of the superstars away from politics. So like you just had this argument before. I mean, everything you're saying sort of rings true. Like this is the obvious thing to do. As a student of history, you can almost like tell, like, if you look at great people in history, this is what great leaders in history, this is what they did. It's like clean, bold action, sometimes facing crisis, but we're facing a crisis right now. No, we're in a crisis. We've been, exactly. So why don't we see those leaders step up? I mean, you say that's kind of like, it makes sense. There's a lot of different interests at play. You don't wanna risk too many things, so on and so forth. But that sounds like the C students. I don't think it's that. I think it's that the pipeline of politician creation is just totally broken from beginning to end. So it's not that A students don't wanna be politicians. It's basically the way that our current primary system is constructed, is what is the greatest threat to you as a member of Congress? It's not losing your reelection. It's losing your primary, right? So that means, especially in a safe district, you're most concerned about being hit if you're a Republican from the right, and if you're a Democrat from the left for not being a good enough one. That's actually what stops people, heterodox people in particular, from winning primaries because the people who vote in our primaries are the party faithful. That's how you get the production. It's important to understand the production pipeline, which is that, all right, I'm from Texas, so that's what I know best. So it's like, if you think in Texas, if you're a more heterodox like state legislature or something who works with the left on this and does that, you're gonna get your ass beat in a Republican primary because they're gonna be like, he worked with the left to do this, blah, blah, take it out of context, and you're screwed. And then that means you never ascend up the next level of the ladder, and then so on and so forth all the way. But I do think Trump changed everything. This is why I have some hope, which is that he showed me that all the people I listened to were totally wrong about politics, and that's the most valuable lesson you could ever teach me, which was, I was like, wait, I don't really have to listen to these people. I'm like, they don't know anything, actually. That's powerful, man. I'm like, he did it. This guy. Even if he didn't do anything with it. It doesn't matter. He showed that it's possible. And that means a lot. You're absolutely right. There's young people right now that kind of look, turn around and like, huh. You're like, wait, I don't have to comb my hair a certain way and go to law school and be an asshole who everybody knows is an asshole. And then get elected to state legislature. I mean, look, who's the number one person in the New York City primary right now? Andrew Yang. He's polling higher than everybody else in the race. Look, maybe the polls are totally fucked and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice voting and all of that. But I consider Andrew, I mean, I know him a little bit and I've followed his candidacy from the very beginning. I consider him an inspiration. He's the new generation of politics. Like if I see who's gonna be president 20 years from now, it's gonna be, I'm not saying it's gonna be Andrew Yang. I think it's gonna be somebody like Andrew Yang outside the political system who talks in a totally different way, right? Just a completely, one of my favorite things that he said on the debate stage, he's like, look at us, we're all wearing makeup. It's crazy, you know? And he like, he like brought that, that he brought that. And he's writing like, yeah, why are they all wearing makeup? He probably arguably hasn't gone far enough almost. Yes. But he showed that it's possible. And then you see other, like AOC is a good example of somebody, at least in my opinion, is doing the same kind of thing, but going too far in like, well, I don't know, she's doing the Trump thing, but on the other side. So I don't know, what's too far? Who knows? Don't take a normative judgment of it. Yeah. I will tell you the future of politics looks like AOC. Appreciate the art of it. Right, no, I do. Look, I don't, I'm not a big AOC fan, but she's a genius, media genius, once in a generation talent. The way that she uses social media, Instagram, and everybody on the right is like trying to copy her. Like Matt Gaetz is like, I want to be the conservative AOC. I'm like, it's just not going to happen, dude. Like you just don't have it. Like what she has, it's like, it's electric. And Trump had that. Like I've been to a Trump rally, like to cover as a journalist, and there's nothing like it in America. And Yang is similar. It's the same way where you're like, there is something going on here, which is just like, I've been doing Obama rally. I've been to a Clinton rally. I've been to several normal politics. It's fine, you know, with Trump and with Yang, it was, it's another world. It's another world. Yeah, Yang gang. There's probably thousands of people listening right now, who are just like doing a slow clap. Yes. I know, I know. Yang gang forever. Okay, but yeah, I mean, my worst fear, I prefer Andrew Yang kind of free improvisational idea, exchange, all that versus AOC, who I think no matter what she stands for is a drama machine, creates dramas just like Trump does. I would say my worst fear would be in 2024, is AOC old enough? It'd be AOC versus Trump. I don't think she's old enough. I think you'd have to be, I don't know. I think she's 30. So she needs five more years. So probably not. Yeah. Okay, but that kind of, that's, or Trump Jr. Well, AOC probably wouldn't win a Democratic primary. So, I mean, look, Joe Biden is, you know, he's pretty much showed that. That's exactly what you're saying. This process grooms you over time. You see the same thing in academia actually, which is very interesting, is the process of getting tenure. There's this, it's like you're being taught without explicitly being taught to behave in the way that everybody's behaved before. I've heard this, it was funny. I've had a few conversations that were deeply disappointing, which involved statements like, this is what's good for your career. This kind of conversation, almost like mentor to mentee conversation, or it's like, there's a grooming process in the same way. I guess you're saying the primary process does the same kind of thing. So, I mean, that's what people have talked about with Andrew Yang. He was being suppressed by a bunch of different forces, the mainstream media and all. Just the Democratic, just that whole process didn't like the honesty that he was showing, right? For now, but here's my question to you. People gotta see, look, Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous people in America, right? Like you have a massive podcast. You're more famous than half, 99% of the people at MIT. So like, from that perspective, everything has changed. And somewhere out there, there's a student who's taking notice. And I've noticed that with my own career, everybody thought I was crazy for doing this show with Crystal, The Hill. They thought I was nuts. They're like, what are you doing? You're a White House correspondent. You've got a job forever. The other job offer I had was being a White House correspondent. And people thought I was nuts for not just sticking there and aging out within Washington, pining for appearances on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC. But I hated it. I just hated doing it. I did not wanna be a company man, like a Washington man, who's one of those guys who like brags to his friends about how many times he's been on Fox or whatever, mostly because I just have a rebellious streak and I hate being at the subject of other people. I created something new, which a lot of people watch to get their news. And I noticed that younger people who are almost all my audience, they don't really look up to any of the people in traditional, right? They don't go and they're not coming up and being like, how do I be like Jim Acosta? You know, they're like, hey, how did you do what you do? And the way you did it is by bucking the system. So I think that we are at a total split point. And look, there will always be a path for people. Cause like, I don't want people to over learn this lesson. I have people who are like, I'm not gonna go to college. And I'm like, well, just wait. Yeah, like, I'm like, just like stop, just like, just hold on a second. But there will always be a path for the institutional that will always be there for you. But now there's something else. Now there's another game in town. And that's more appealing to millions and millions and millions and millions of people who feel unserved by the corporate media, CNN and these people, possibly who feel unserved in the, you know, the faculty. Like if you are an up and comer who wants to teach as many young people as possible, I think you should be on YouTube, right? Like look at the Khan Academy guy, that guy created a huge business. So I just think we can be cynical and like upset about what that system is, but we should also have hope. Like I have a lot of hope for what can be in the future. Yeah, there's a guy people should check out. So my story is a little bit different because I basically stepped aside with the dream of being an entrepreneur earlier in the pipeline than like a legitimate, like senior faculty would. There's an example of somebody people should check out, Andrew Huberman from Stanford, who's a neuroscientist, who's as world class as it gets in terms of like 10 year faculty, just a really world class researcher. And now he's doing YouTube. Yeah, I see him on Instagram. Yeah. And he's great. So he not just does Instagram, he now has a podcast and he's changing the nature of like, I believe that Andrew might be the future of Stanford. And for a lot, it's funny, like he's basically, Joe Rogan is an inspiration to Andrew and to me as well. And those ripple effects and Andrew is an inspiration probably just like you're saying to these young, like 25 year olds who are soon to become faculty, if we're just talking about academia. And the same is probably happening with government is, funny enough, Trump probably is inspiring a huge number of people who are saying, wait a minute, I don't have to play by the rules. And I can think outside the box here and you're right. And the institutions we're seeing are just probably lagging behind. So the optimistic view is the future is going to be full of exciting new ideas. So Andrew Young is just kind of the beginning of this whole thing. He's the tip of the iceberg. And I hope that iceberg doesn't, it's not this influencer. One of the things that really bothers me, I've gotten the chance, I should be careful here. I don't wanna, I love everybody, but these people who talk about like, how to make your first million or how to succeed. And they're so, I mean, yeah, that makes me a little bit cynical about, I'm worried that the people that win the game of politics will be ones that want to win the game of politics. They are, they are, man. And like we mentioned, AOC, I hope they optimize for the 80% populist thing, right? Like they optimize for that bad thing, that history will remember you as the great man or woman that did this thing, versus how do I maximize engagement today and keep growing those numbers? The influencers are so, I'm so allergic to this, man. They keep saying how many followers they have on the different accounts. And it's like, I don't think they understand. Maybe I don't understand. I don't really care. I think it has destructive psychological effects. One, like thinking about the number, like getting excited, your number went from 100 to 101 and being like, and today went out to 105. Whoa, that's a big jump. Then maybe like thinking this way, like I wonder what I did, I'll do that again. In this way, one, it creates anxiety and those psychological effects, whatever. The more important thing is it prevents you from truly thinking boldly in the long arc of history and creatively, thinking outside the box, doing huge actions. And I actually, my optimism is in the sense that that kind of action will beat out all the influencers. Well, I don't know, Lex, this is where my cynicism comes in. So there's a guy, Madison Cawthorn, the youngest member of Congress. And he, I don't want to say got caught, but there was like an email where he was like, my staff is only oriented around comms. Like he was basically saying, he got basically caught saying like, my staff is only centered on communications. And that's the right play. If you do want to get the benefits of our current electoral political and engagement system, which is that what's the best way to be known within the right as a right wing politician. It's to be a culture warrior, go on Ben Shapiro's podcast, be one of the people on Fox News, go on Sean Hannity's show, go on Tucker's show and all of that, because you become a mini celebrity within that world. Left unsaid is that that world is increasingly shrinking portion of the American population. And they barely, they can't even win a popular vote election, let alone barely win, eke out an electoral college victory in 2016. Well, but the incentives are all aligned within that. And it's the same thing really on the left, but you're right, which is that, ultimately, and look, this is why geniuses are geniuses because they buck the short term incentives. They focus on the long term, they bet big and they usually fail. But then when they get big, they succeed spectacularly. The people I know who have done this the best are like a lot of the crypto folks that I've spoken to. Like some of the stuff they say, I'm like, I don't know if that's gonna happen, but look, they're like billionaires, right? And you're like, so they were right. The way I've heard it expressed is you can be wrong a lot, but when you're right, you get right big. And I mean, I've seen this in Elon Musk's career. I mean, he took spectacular risk, like spectacular risk and just doubled down, doubled down, doubled down, doubled down, doubled down. And you can kind of tell to him, I mean, you know him better than I do, but like from my observation, I don't think the money matters, right? I just, like when I see him, I'm like, I don't, nobody works as hard as you do and builds the way that you build if it's just about the money. It just doesn't happen. Like nobody wills SpaceX into existence just for the money. Like it's not worth it, frankly, right? Like he probably destroyed years of his life and like mental sanity. Money or attention or fame, none of that. Yeah. It's not the primary priority. Well, that's what's so appealing to me, to me in particular about him, just like in how he built. Like I read a biography of him and just like the way that he constructed his life and like we're able to hyperfocus in meeting after meeting and drill down and also hire all the right people who execute each one of his tasks discreetly to his perfection is amazing. Like that's actually the mark of a good leader. But I mean, if you think about his career, the reason he's a renegade is cause probably he was told to like put it in an index fund or whatever. Like whenever he made his like 29 million and from PayPal, I don't know how much he made. And then just go along that road and he's like, no. So he succeeds spectacularly. So you have to have somebody who's willing to come in and buck that system. So for now, I think our politics are generally frozen. I think that that model is gonna be most generally appealing to the mean person, but somebody will come along and we'll change everything. Yeah, I'm just surprised there's not more of them. Yeah. On that topic, it's now 20, what is it, 21? Yes. Let's make some predictions that you can be wrong about. Good. What major political people are you thinking will run in 2024, including Trump, junior, senior, or Ivanka? I don't know. Any Trump. Trump. And who do you think wins? I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024. And I think he will run against someone with the last name Trump. I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump junior, but I think one of those people will probably be the GOP nominee in 2024. Who is it? Some prominent political figure, was it Romney? Somebody like that said that Trump will win the primary if he runs again. Of course, that's not even a question. Trump is the single most popular figure in the Republican party by orders of magnitude. Still. Oh, I mean, probably more, honestly. There was a, actually, I can tell you because I saw the data, which is that pre January 6th, it was like 54% of Republicans wanted him to run again. Then it went down eight points after January 6th, two days later. And then after impeachment, it went right back up to 54%. So the exact same number is in February, post impeachment vote, as it was after November. Now look, yeah, again, surveys, bullshit, et cetera. But like, that's all the data we have. That's what I can point you to. If Trump runs, he will be the nominee and he will be the 2024 nominee. I just don't know if he wants to. It really depends. Do you think he wins? After the Trump vaccine heals all of us, do you think Trump wins? It depends on how popular culture functions over the next four years. And I can tell you that they are, because I don't think Biden has that much to do with it. Because again, Trump is not a manifestation of an affirmative policy action. It is a defensive bulwark wall against cultural liberalism. So it's like, this is why it doesn't matter what Biden does. If there are more riots, if there is a more sense of persecution amongst people who are more lean towards conservative or like, hey, I don't know about that, that's crazy, then he very well could win. Okay, let's say Joe Biden doesn't run and they put up like Kamala Harris, I think he would beat her. I don't think there's a question that Trump would beat Kamala Harris in 2024. And you don't think anybody else, I don't know how the process works, you don't think anybody else on the Democratic side can take the... Well, how could you run against the sitting vice president? It's like, Joe Biden has a 98% approval rating in the Democratic Party. If he says, she is my heir, I think enough people will listen to him in a competitive primary or a noncompetitive primary. And then there's all these things about how primary systems themselves are rigged, the DNC could make it known that they'll blacklist anybody who does try and primary Kamala Harris. And look, I mean, progressives aren't necessarily all that popular amongst actual Democrats, like we found that out during the election. There's an entire constituency which loves Joe Biden and Joe Biden level politics. And so if he tells them to vote for Kamala, I think she would probably get it. But again, there's a lot of game theory obviously happening. Well, see, I think you're talking about everything you're saying is correct about mediocre candidates. It feels like if there's somebody like a really strong, I don't wanna use this term incorrectly, but populist, somebody that speaks to the 80% that is able to provide bold, eloquently described solutions that are popular. I think that breaks through all of this nonsense. How? How do they break through the primary system? Cause the problem is the primary system is not populism. It's primary. So it's like. But you don't think they can tweet their way to. Well, you have to be willing to win a GOP primary. You basically have to be at, whoever wins the GOP primary, in my opinion, will be the person most hated by the left. One of the people, things that people forget is, you know who came in second to Trump? Ted Cruz. And the reason why is because Ted Cruz was the second most hated guy by liberals in America. A second to Trump. They have nothing in policy in common. But don't you think this kind of brilliantly described system of hate being the main mechanism of our electoral choices, don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates? Basically the field of candidates, including Trump, including everybody was just like, didn't make anyone feel great. It's like, really? This is what we have to choose from? Maybe a Mark Cuban, or like a Mark Cuban is a Democrat, or it would have to be somebody like that. Somebody who, because here's the thing about Trump. It's not just that it was Trump. He was so fucking famous. Like people don't realize he was so famous. Like I, even when I first met Trump, I met a couple of other presidents, but when I met Trump, even I felt like kind of starstruck. Cause I was like, yo, this is the guy from The Apprentice. I'm like, this is the dude. From The Apprentice? Cause I'm like, my dad and I used to sit and watch The Apprentice when I was in high school. And then one of the guys was from College Station where I grew up and we're like, oh my God, like that guy's on The Apprentice. Like it was a phenomenon. There's like that level. It's kind of like when I met Joe Rogan, I'm like, holy shit, that's Joe Rogan. I don't feel that way when I meet Mitt Romney, or Tom Cotton, or Josh Hawley, I met all of them. But there's a lot of celebrities, right? Do you think there's some celebrities you were not even thinking about that could step in? The Rock? So I was about to say, I think The Rock could do it, but does he wanna do it? I mean, it's terrible. Like it's terrible gig. It's very hard to do. I don't know if The Rock necessarily has like the formed policy agenda. Cause then here's the other problem. What if we set ourselves up for a system where like these people keep winning, but like with Trump, they have no idea how to run a government. It's actually really hard, right? And you have to have the knowhow and the trust to find the right people. This is where the genius element comes in is, you have to understand that front and you have to understand how to execute discrete tasks. Like this is the FDR. This is why it's so hard, like FDR, Lincoln, TR. They were who they were and they live in history and their name rings like for a reason. And yeah, I mean, one of the most depressing lessons I got from 2020 is at almost, it seems like in my opinion, that we over learn the lesson of our success and not of our failures. For example, like we have this narrative in our head that we always have the right person at the right time during crisis. And in some cases it was true. We didn't deserve Lincoln. We didn't deserve FDR. We didn't deserve a lot of presidents at times of crisis. But then you're like, okay, George W. Bush, 9 11, that was terrible. Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson, awful, right? Like we had several periods in our history where the crisis was there, they were called and they did not show up. And I really, it hadn't happened in my lifetime except for 9 11. And even then you could kind of see that as an opportunity for somebody like Obama to come in and fix it. But then he didn't do it. And then Trump didn't do it. And you realize, I feel like our politics are most analogous to like the 1910s, like all in terms of the Gilded Age, in terms of that, remember there's that long period of presidents between like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. We were like, wait, like who was president? Like, or even TR was like an exception where you'll have like Calvin Coolidge who like, silent cow, Grover Cleveland. That's kind of how, if I think of us within history, I feel like we're in one of those times. We're just waiting. It feels really important to us right now. Like this is the most important moment in history, but it might be. It could just be a blip, right? 20, 30 year blip. Like when you think about who was president between 1890 and 19 before, I mean, yeah, between like 1888 and 1910. Like nobody really thinks about that period of America, but like that was an entire lifetime for people, right? Like what did they, how did they feel about the country that they were in? That's hilarious. That's how I kind of think about where we are right now. It's funny to think. I mean, I don't want to minimize it, but like we haven't really gone through a World War II style crisis. So like, say that there is a crisis in like several decades of that level, right? Existential risks to a large portion of the world. Then what will be remembered is World War II, maybe a little bit about Vietnam and then whatever that crisis is. And this whole period that we see as dramatic, even coronavirus. Even 9 11. Even 9 11, it's like, cause you can look at how many people died and all those kinds of things, all the drama around the war on terror and all those kinds of things. Maybe Obama will be remembered for being the first African American president, but then like that's, yeah, that's fascinating to think about, oh man, even Trump will be like, oh, okay, cool. That guy. Yeah, like maybe he'd be remembered as the first celebrity. I mean, Reagan was already a governor, right? Yeah, so like the first apolitical celebrity that was, so maybe if there's more celebrities in the future, they'll say that Trump was the first person to pave the way for celebrities to win. Oh man, yeah. And yeah, I still hold that this era will probably be remembered. You know, people say I talk about Elon way too much, but the reality is like, there's not many people that are doing the kind of things he's doing is why I talk about it. I think this era, it's not necessarily Elon and SpaceX, but this era will be remembered by the new, the like of the space exploration, of the commercial of companies getting into space exploration of space travel. And perhaps like artificial intelligence around social media, all those kinds of things, this might be remembered for that. But every, all the political bickering, all that nonsense, that might be very well forgotten. One way to think about it is that the internet is so young. I think about it, so Jeff Jarvis, he's a media scholar I respect. He's not the only person to say this, but many others have, which is that, look, this is kind of like the printing press. There was a whole 30 years war because of the printing press. It took a long time for shit to sort out. I think that's where we're at with the internet. Like at a certain level, it disrupts everything. And that's a good thing. It can be very tumultuous. I never felt like I was living through history until coronavirus. Like, you know, like until we were all locked down, I was like, I'm living through history. Like this, there's this very overused cliche in DC where every comm staffer wants you to think that what their boss just did is history. And I've always been like, this isn't history. This is some like stupid fucking bill, you know, whatever. But like, that was the first time I was like, this is history, like this right here. Well, I was hoping, tragedy aside, that this, I wish the primaries happened during coronavirus so that we, because like, then we can see the, so, okay, here's a bunch of people facing crisis. It's an opportunity for a leader to step up. Like, I still believe the optimistic view is the game theory of like influencers will always be defeated by actual great leaders. So like, maybe the great leaders are rare, but I think they're sufficiently out there that they will step up, especially in moments of crisis. And coronavirus is obviously a crisis where like, you know, mass manufacture of tests, all kinds of infrastructure building that you could have done in 2020, there's so many possibilities for just like bold action. And none of that, even just, forget actually doing the action, advocating for it. Just saying like this, we need to do this. And none of that, like the speeches that Biden made, I don't even remember a single speech that Biden made because there's zero bold, I mean, their strategy was to be quiet and let Donald Trump. Polarize the electorate. Polarize the electorate and hope that results in them winning because of the high unemployment numbers and all those kinds of things, as opposed to like, let's go big, let's go with a big speech. Like, you know, that, yeah, it's a lost opportunity in some sense. So we talked a bunch about politics, but one of the other interesting things is that you're involved with is, or involved with defining the future of as journalism. I suppose you can think of podcasts as a kind of journalism, but also just writing in general, just whatever the hell the future of this thing looks like is up to be defined by people like you. So what do you think is broken about journalism and what do you think is the future of journalism? I think the future of journalism looks much more like what we, you and I are doing here right now. And journalism is gonna be downstream from a culture that can be a good and a bad thing depending on how you look at it. We are gonna look at our media, our media is gonna look much more like it did pre mass media. And the way that I mean that is that back in the 18, in the 1800s in particular, especially after the invention of the telegraph when information itself was known. So for example, like you and I don't need to, let's say you and I are competing journalists. You and I are no longer competing quote unquote to tell the public X event happened. All journalism today is largely explaining why did X happen. And part of the problem with that is that that means that it's all up for partisan interpretation. Now you can say that that's a bad thing. I think it's a great thing because the highest level of literacy and news viewership in America was during the time of yellow journalism, was during the time of partisan journalism. Not a surprise. People like to read the news from people that they agree with. You could say that's bad, echo chambers, et cetera. That's the downside of it. The upside is more people are more educated. More people are interested in the news. So I think the proliferation of mass media, I mean, sorry, of this format of niching, of not just long form. Dude, I do updates on Instagram, which are five minutes. Are you considered like Instagram, almost even Twitter? Oh, of course, Twitter. Twitter is where I get my news from. I don't read the paper. I have literally, Twitter is my news aggregator. It's called my wire where I find out about hard events. Like the president has departed the White House. But not only that, I don't know about you, but I also looked at Twitter to the exact thing you're saying, which is the response to the news, like the thoughtful sounds ridiculous, but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet. If you follow the right people, you can get that. And so that is the future of media, which is that the future of media is it will be much larger amounts of people, which are famous to smaller groups. So Walter Cronkite's never gonna happen again, at least probably within our lifetimes, where everybody in America knows who this guy is. That age is over. I think that's a good thing because now people are gonna get the news from the people that they trust. Yes, some of it will be opinionated. I'm in my program. Crystal and I are like, she's coming from this view. I'm coming from this view. That's our bias when we talk about information and we're gonna talk about the information that we think is important. And it has garnered a large audience. I think that's very much where the future is gonna be. And the reason why I think that's a good thing is because people will be engaged more within it rather than the current system where news is highly concentrated, highly consolidated, has group think, has the same elite production pipeline problem of everybody knows journalists all come from the same socioeconomic background and they all party together here in DC or in New York or in LA or wherever, and they're part of the same monoculture and that affects what they report. This will cause a total dispersion of all of that. The battle of our age is gonna be the guild versus the non guild. So like what we see right now with the New York Times and Clubhouse, this is a very, very, very, very, very intentional thing that is happening, which is that the Times talking about unfettered conversations, that's happening on Clubhouse for people who aren't aware. This is important because they need to be the fetters of conversation. They need to be the inter agent. That's where they get their power. They get their power from convincing Facebook that they are the ones who can fact check stuff. They are the ones who can tell you whether something is right or wrong. That battle over unimpeded conversation and the explosion of a format that you and I are doing really well in, and then this more consolidated one, which holds cultural power and elite power and more importantly, money, right? Over you and I, that's the battle that we're all gonna play out. Do you think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle? Yes, I do in the long run. In the long run, the internet is simply too powerful. But here's the mistake everybody makes. The New York Times will never lose. It will just become one of us. See. You think so? They already are. They are the largest. The daily? The daily, look at the daily. Not even that. Think about it not in podcasting. The Times is not a mass media product. It is a subscription product for upper middle class largely white liberals who live the same circumstances across the United States and in Europe. There's nothing wrong with that. But here's the thing. You can't be the paper of record when you're actually the paper of upper middle class white America. Your job is to report on the news from that angle and deliver them the product that they want. There's nothing wrong with that. Their stock price is higher than ever. They're making 10 times more money than they did 10 years ago, but it comes at the cost of not having a mass application audience. So like when people, I think people in our space are always like, the New York Times is gonna be destroyed. No, it's actually even better. They will just become one of us. They already are. They're a subscription platform. Well, yes, in terms of the actual mechanism. But you know, New York Times is still, and I don't think I'm speaking about a particular sector. I think it, as a brand, it does have the level of credibility assigned to it still. There's politicization of it. Totally. But there's a credibility. Like it has much more credibility than, forgive me, than I think you and I have. No, you're right. In terms of your podcast, like people are not going to be like, they're gonna say at the New York Times versus what you said on the podcast for an opinion. I wonder in the sense of battles, whether on Federated Conversations, whether Joe Rogan, whether your podcast can become the, have the same level of legitimacy or the flip side, New York Times loses legitimacy to be at the same level of in terms of how we talk about it. It's a long battle, right? It's gonna take a long time. And I'm saying, this is where I think the end state is going and look at what the Times is doing. They're leaning into podcasting for a reason, but not just podcasting as in NPR level, like here's what's happening. Michael Barbaro is a fucking celebrity, right? The guy who does the daily. That guy's famous amongst these people because they're like, oh my God, I love Michael. Like, I love the way he does this stuff. Again, that's fine. More people are listening to the news. I think that's a good thing. And then who else do they hire? Ezra Klein from Vox, Kara Swisher, also from Vox, who does Pivot, which is an amazing podcast. Or Jane Coaston, same thing. It's personalities who are becoming bundled together within this brand, right? Here's, okay, maybe I'm just a hater. Cause I love podcasting from the beginning. I love Green Day before the recall, man. But I am bothered by it. Like why doesn't Kara Swisher, she's done successfully. I think in her own, no, she was always a part of some kind of institution. I'm not sure. But she started her own thing, I think. It would. Recode, right, yeah. Recode, I don't know if that's her own thing. Yeah, yeah. So she was very successful there. Why the hell did she join the New York Times with the new podcast? Why is Michael Barbaro not do his own thing? Cause he gets paid and because he has, he wants the elite cache that you just referenced within his social circle in New York, which is that I think the biggest mistake that some of the venture people make is if we give everybody the tools that those people are all gonna leave to like go substack and go independent, within their social circle, sacrificing some money from being independent is worth it to be a part of the New York Times. That's sad to me because it propagates old thinking, like it propagates old institutions. And you could say that New York Times is going to evolve quickly and so on, but I would love it if there was a mechanism for reestablishing, like for building new New York Times in terms of public legitimacy. And I suppose that's a wishful thinking cause it takes time to build trust in institutions and it takes time to build new institutions. My main thing I would say is public legitimacy as a concept is not gonna be there in mass media anymore because of the balkanization of audiences. I mean, think about it, right? Like this is like Lesion, the classic stuff around a thousand true fans, or no, sorry, like a hundred true fans even now. Like you can make a living on the internet just talking to a hundred people. If as long as they're all high frequency traders, some of the highest paid people on substack, they don't have that many subs. It's just that they're Wall Street guys, right? So people pay a lot of money. Again, that's great. So what you will have is an increasing balkanization of the internet, of audiences and of niches. People will become increasingly famous within us. You will become astoundingly famous. I'm sure you've noticed this with your fan base. I certainly have with mine. Like 99% of people have no idea who I am, but when somebody meets, they're like, oh my God, I watch your show every day, right? Like it's the only thing I watch for news, right? Like instead of casually famous, if that makes sense, but like, oh yeah, it's like Alec Baldwin, you know? Whoa, shit, that's Alec Baldwin. But you're not like, oh shit, I love you Alec Baldwin. This is a Ben Smith of the New York Times, actually he wrote this column. He's like, the future is everybody will be famous, but only to a small group of people. And I think that is true. But again, I don't decry it. I think it's great because I think that the more that that happens, the more engaged people will be and it empowers different voices to be able to come in and then possibly, I wouldn't say destroy, but compete against. I mean, look at Joe. Joe is more powerful than CNN and MSNBC and Fox all put together. That gives me like immense inspiration. Like he created the space for me to succeed. And I told him that when I met him, I was like, dude, like I listened to his podcast when I was like young. And like, and I remember like when I got to meet him and all that, and I told him this on this pod, I was like, I didn't know people were millions were willing to listen to a guy talk about chimps for three straight hours, including me. I didn't know that I could be one of those people. Yeah, me too. I learned something about myself from his show, yeah. And so by creating that space, I'd be like, wait, there's a hunger here. Like he showed us all the way and none of us will ever again be as famous as Rogan because he was the first and that's fine because he created the umbrella ecosystem for us all to thrive. That is where I see like a great amount of hope within that story. Yeah, and the cool thing, he also supports that ecosystem. He's such a. He's so generous. One of the things he paved the way out for me is to show that you can just be honest, publicly honest, and not jealous of other people's success, but instead be supportive and all those kinds of things, just like loving towards others. He's been an inspiration. I mean, to the comics community, I think there are a bunch of, before that, I think there were all a bunch of competitive haters towards each other. Yeah, and now he's like just injected love. They're like, they're still like many are still resistant, but they're like, they can't help it because he's such a huge voice. He like forces them to be like loving towards each other. And the same, I tried to, one of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was to try to, I wanted to be like do what Joe Rogan did, but for the scientific community, like my little circle of scientific community of like, like let's support each other. Yeah, well, like Avi Loeb, I would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you. I mean, I assume you put him in touch with Joe. He went on Joe's show. I had him on my show. Like millions of people would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you. Just by the way, in terms of deep state and shadow government, Avi Loeb has to do with aliens. You better believe Joe. Dude, the last thing I sent to him was the American Airlines audio. Did you see that? The pilots who were, oh my God, dude, this is amazing. So like, this American Airlines flight crew was over New Mexico, this happened five or six days ago. And the guy comes and he goes, hey, do you have any targets up here? A large cylindrical object just flew over me. Okay, so this happens, so this happens. Then a guy or like a radio catcher records this and posts it online. American Airlines confirms that this is authentic audio. And they go, all further questions should be referred to the FBI. So then, okay, American Airlines just confirmed it's a legitimate transmission. FBI, then the FAA comes out and says, we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane at the time of the transmission. So the only plausible explanation that online sleuths have been able to say is maybe he saw a Learjet, which was, you know, using like open source data. FAA rules that out. So what was it? He saw a large cylindrical object. While he was mid flight, American Airlines, but you can go online, listen to the audio yourself. This is a 100% no shit transmission confirmed by American Airlines of a commercial pilot over New Mexico, seeing a quote unquote, large cylindrical object in the air. Like I said, when we first started talking, I've never believed more in UFOs and aliens. Yeah, this is awesome. I just wish both American Airlines, FBI, and government would be more transparent. Like there would be voices, and I know it sounds ridiculous, but the kind of transparency that you see, maybe not Joe Rogan, he's like overly transparent. He's just a comic really, but just the, I don't know, like a podcast from the FBI, just like being honest, like excited, confused. I'm sure that they're being overly cautious about their release information. I'm sure there's a lot of information that would inspire the public, that would inspire trust in institutions that will not damage national security. Like it seems to me obvious, and the reason they're not sharing it is because of this momentum of bureaucracy, of caution and so on. But there's probably so much cool information that the government has. The way I almost, I wouldn't say it confirmed it's real, but Trump didn't declassify it. Like you know that if there was ever a president that actually wanted to get to the bottom of it, it was him. I mean, he didn't declassify it, man. And people begged him to. I know for a fact, because I pushed to try and make this happen, that some people did speak to him about it. And he was like, no, I'm not gonna do it. So. He might be afraid. That's what I mean, though. They were probably all telling him, they're like, sir, you can't do this, you know, all this, like, wow, and I get that. And there's this legislation written at COVID that like they have six months to release it, man. Is that real? What is that? Is that a bunch of bullshit? I think it's bullshit. There's so many different levels of classification that people need to understand. I mean, look, I read John Podesta. He was the chief of staff to Bill Clinton. He's a big UFO guy. He tried. Like him and Clinton tried to get some of this information and they could not get any of it. And we're talking about the president and the White House chief of staff. Well, there's a whole bureaucracy, but just like you were saying, with intent. You have to be like, that has to be your focus because there's a whole bureaucracy built around secrecy for probably for a good reason. So to get through to the information, there's a whole like paperwork process, all that kind of stuff. You can't just walk in and get the, unless again, with intention, that becomes your thing. Like let's revolutionize this thing. And then you get only so many things. It's sad that the bureaucracy has gotten so bulky, but I think the hopeful messages from earlier in our conversation, it seems like a single person can't fix it, but if you hire the right team, it feels like you can. Can't fix everything. I don't wanna give people unrealistic expectations. You can fix a lot, especially in crisis, you can remake America. Yeah. And the reason I know that is because it's already happened twice. FDR, or in modern history, FDR and JFK. Sorry, FDR and JFK's assassination, LBJ. Two hyper competent men who understood government, who understood personnel, and coincidentally were friends. I love this. I don't think actually people understand this. FDR met Johnson three days after he won his election to Congress, special election. He was only 29 years old. And he left that meeting and called somebody and said, this young man is gonna be president of the United States someday. Like even then, like what was within him to understand and to recognize that. And sometimes Johnson, as a young member of Congress, would come and have breakfast with FDR, like just to the great political minds of the 20th century, just sitting there talking. Like I would give anything to know what was happening. Yeah, I hope they were real with each other. And there was like a genuine human connection, right? That seems to be the... Well, Johnson wasn't a genuine guy, so probably certainly not. Well, I need to read those thousands of pages. I've been way too focused on Hitler. I was gonna say, one of my goals in coming to this is I was like, I gotta get Lex into two things, because I know he'll love it. I know he'll love LBJ, if he takes the time to read the books. Really? 100%. He's the most... Of all the presidents... I didn't say you'll love him, but you'll love the books about him. Because the books are a story of America, the story of politics, the story of power. This is the guy who wrote the Power Broker. These books are up there with Decline and Follow the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, in terms of how power works. Study of power. Exactly. No, that's why Carroll wrote the books. And that's why the books are not really about LBJ, they're about power in Washington, and about the consolidation of power post New Deal, the consolidation then, where they're using the levers of power like Johnson knew in order to change the House of Representatives, the Senate of the United States, and ultimately the presidency of the United States, which ended in failure and disaster with Vietnam. Don't get me wrong. But he's overlooked for so many of the incredible things that he did with civil rights. Nobody else could have done it. No one else could have gotten it done. And the second thing is, we gotta get you into World War I. We gotta get you more into World War I, because I think that's a rabbit hole, which I know you're a Dan Carlin fan. So blueprint for Armageddon. Yeah, it's good. Guaranteed. But... But there's fewer evil people there. Yes, but... But that's what actually... There's a banality of that evil, of the Kaiser and of the Austro Hungarians. And of... See, I like World War I more because it was unresolved. It's one of those periods I was talking to you about, about sometimes you're called and you fail. That's what happened. I mean, 50 million people were killed in the most horrific way. People literally drowned in the mud, like an entire generation. One stat I love is that, Britain didn't need a draft till 1916. Like they went two years of throwing people into barbed wire voluntarily. And because people love their country and they love the king, and they thought they were going against the Kaiser. It's just like that conflict to me, I just can't read enough about it. Also just like births Russian Revolution, you know. Yeah, I mean... Hitler. You can't talk about World War II without World War I. Right. And I'm obsessed with the conflict. I've read way too many books about it. For this reason is, it's unresolved. And like the roots of so much of even our current problems are happened in Versailles, right? Like Vietnam is because of the Treaty of Versailles. Many ways the Middle Eastern problems and the division of the states there. The Treaty of Versailles in terms of the penalties against Germany. But also they fall out from those wars on the French and the German population, or the French and the British populations and their reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938. When Neville Chamberlain goes, right? Like that's one of the things people don't understand is the actual appetite of the British public at that time. They didn't want to go to war. Only Churchill, he was the only one in the gathering storm, right? Like being like, hey, this is really bad and all of that. And then even in the United States, our streak of isolationism, which sweat. I mean, things were because of that conflict. We were convinced as a country that we wanted nothing to do with Europe and its problems. And in many ways that contributed to the proliferation of Hitler and more. So like I'm obsessed with World War I for this reason, which is that it's just like the root. It's like the culmination of the monarchies, then the fall, and then just all the shit spills out from there for like a hundred years. So World War I is like the most important shift in human history versus World War II is like a consequence of that. Yeah, so I have a degree in security studies from Georgetown. And one of the thing is that we would focus a lot on that is like war and, but also like the complexity around war. And it's funny. We never spent that much time on World War II because it was actually quite of a clean war. It's a very atypical war as in the war object, which we learned from World War I is we must inflict suffering on the German people and invade the borders of Germany and destroy Hitler. Like the center of gravity is the Nazi regime and Hitler. So it had a very basic begin and end. Begin, liberate France, invade Germany, destroy Hitler, reoccupy, rebuild. World War I, what are you fighting for? Like, are you, I mean, and nobody even knew. You can go to the German general staff. They were like, even in 1917, they're like, the war was worth it because now we have Luxembourg. I'm like, really? Like you killed 2 million of your citizens for fucking Luxembourg and like half of Belgium, which is now like a pond. And same thing, the French are like, well, the French more so they're defending their borders, but like, what are the British fighting for? Why did hundreds of thousands of British people die? In order to preserve the balance of power in Europe and prevent the Kaiser from having a port on the English Channel? Like really, that's why? That's more what wars are is they become these like atypical, they become these protracted conflicts with a necessary diplomatic resolution. It's not clean, it's very dirty. It usually leads in the outbreak of another war and another war and another war and a slow burn of ethnic conflict, which bubbles up. So that's why I look at that one even, because it's more typical of warfare and how it works. Exactly, it's kind of interesting. You're making me realize that World War II is one of the rare wars where you can make a strong case for it's a fight of good versus evil. Yeah, just war theory, obviously. Like, yeah, they're literally slaughtering Jews. Like, we have to kill them. And there's one person doing it. I mean, there's one person at the core. Yeah, that's fascinating. And it's short and there's a clear aggression. It's interesting that Dan Carlin has been avoiding Hitler as well. Yeah, probably for this reason. Probably for this reason. I mean, but it's complicated too, because there's a pressure. That guy has his demons. I love Dan so much. So this is the, I don't know if you feel this pressure, but as a creative, he feels the pressure of being maybe not necessarily correct, but maybe correct in the sense that his understanding, he gets to the bottom of why something happened, of why something happened, of what really happened. Get to the bottom of it before he can say something publicly about it. And he is tortured by that burden. I know, you know, he takes so much shit from the historical community for no reason. I think he's the greatest popularizer, quote unquote, of history. And I wish more people in history understood it that way. He was an inspiration to me. I mean, I do some videos sometimes on my Instagram now where I'll do like a book tour. I'll be like, here's my bookshelf of these presidents. And like, here's what I learned from this book and this book and this. And that was very much like a skill I learned from him of being like, you know, as a historian writes. You know, I just love the way he talks. He's like, in the mud. I mean, you know, he'll be like, quote, quote. I just, I love, he inspires me, man. He really does to like learn more. And I've read, I bought a lot of books because of Dan Carlin. He'll be, you know, because of this guy, because of that guy, in terms of, you know, another thing he does, which nobody else, and I'm probably guilty of this, he focuses on the actual people involved. Like he would tell the story of actual British soldiers in World War I. And I probably, and maybe you're guilty of this too, we over focus on what was happening in the German general staff, what was happening in the British general staff. And he doesn't make that mistake. That's why he tells real history. Yeah, and it gives it a feeling. The result is that there's a feeling, you get the feeling of what it was like to be there. Exactly. You know, you're becoming, quickly becoming more and more popular. Speaking about political issues in part, do you feel a burden, like almost like the prison of your prior convictions of having to, being popular with a certain kind of audience and thereby unable to really think outside the box? I had, I've really struggled with this. I came up in right wing media. I came up a much more doctrinaire conservative in my professional life. I wasn't always conservative. We can get to that later if you want. And I did feel an immense pressure after the election by people to say, wanted me to say the election was stolen. And I knew that I had a sizable part of my audience. Oh, well, here's the benefit. Most people know me from Rising, which is with Crystal and me. That is inherently a left right program. So it's a large audience. So I felt comfortable and I knew that I could still be fine in terms of my numbers, whatever, because a lot, many people knew me who were on the left. And if really, you know, my right listeners abandoned me, so be it. I was, had the luxury of able to take that choice, but I still felt an immense amount of pressure to say the election was stolen, to give credence to a lot of the stuff that Trump was doing, to downplay January 6th, to downplay many of the Republican senators or justify many of the Republican senators, some of whom I know who objected to the electoral college certification and who stoked some of the flames that have eaten the Republican base. And I just wouldn't do it. And that was hard, man. Like I feel more politically homeless right now than I ever have, but I have realized in the last couple of months that's the best thing that ever happened to me. It's freedom. It's true freedom. I now, I say exactly what I think. And it's not that I wasn't doing that before. It's maybe I would avoid certain topics or like I would think about things more from a team perspective of like, am I making sure that, it's, I'm not saying I didn't fight it. And I still, I criticize the right plenty and Trump plenty before the election and more. It's more just like, I no longer feel as if I even have the illusion of a stake within the game. I'm like, I only look at myself as an outside observer and I will only call it as I see it truly. And I was aspiring to that before, but I had to have, in a way, Trump stop the steal thing. It like took my shackles off 100%. Cause I was like, no, this is bullshit. And I'm going to say it's bullshit. And I think it's bad. And I think it's bad for the Republican party. And if people in the Republican party don't agree with me on that, that's fine. I'm just not going to be necessarily like associated with you anymore. This is probably one of the first political liberal politics related conversations we've had. I mean, unless you count Michael Malice, who. He was great. Yeah. He's the funny guy. He's not so much political as he is like burning down, man. He leans too far in anarchy for me. Yeah. I think he's. There's a place for that. It's almost, well, first of all, he's working on a new book, which I really appreciate. Outside of the, he's working on like a big book for a while, which is White Pill. He's also working on this like short little thing, which is like anarchist handbook or something like that. It's like Anarchy for Idiots or something like that, which I think is really. Well, me being an idiot and being curious about anarchy seems useful. So I like those kinds of books. That's Russian heritage, man. Anarchist 101. I find those kinds of things a useful thought experiment because that's why it's frustrating to me when people talk about communism, socialism, or even capitalism, where they can't enjoy the thought experiment of like why did communism fail and maybe ask the question of like, is it possible to make communism succeed or are there good ideas in communism? Like I enjoy the thought experiment, like the discourse of it, like the reasoning and like devil's advocate and all that. People have like, seem to not have patience for that. They're like, communism bad, red. I was obsessed with the question and still am. I will never be, I will never quench my thirst for Russian history. I love that period of 1890 to 1925. It's just like, it's so fucking crazy. Like the autocracy embodied in Czar Alexander. And then you get this like weird fail son, Nicholas, who is kind of a good guy, but also terrible. And also Russian autocracy itself is terrible. And then I just became obsessed with the question of like, why did the Bolshevik revolution succeed? Because like people in Russia didn't necessarily want Bolshevism. People suffered a lot under Bolshevism and it led to Stalinism. How did Vladimir Lenin do it, right? Like, and I became obsessed with that question. And it's still, I find it so interesting, which is that series of accidents of history, incredible boldness by Lenin, incredible real politic, smart, unpopular decisions made by Trotsky and Stalin, and just like the arrogance of the Czars and of the Russian like autocracy. But at the same time, there's all these like cultural implications of this, right? In terms of like how it became hollowed out post Catherine the Great and all that. I was obsessed with autocracy because Russia wasn't actual autocracy. And like actually, and I'm like, it was there. Like they didn't even remove serfdom to like the civil war in America. Like that's crazy. Like, you know, and nobody really talks about it. And I just became, yeah, I was like, was Bolshevism a natural reaction to the excesses of Czarism? There is a convenient explanation where that is true. But there were also a series of decisions made by Lenin and Stalin to kill many of the people in the center left and marginalized them and also not to associate with the more quote unquote, like amenable communists in order to make sure that their pure strain of Bolshevism was the only thing. And the reason I like that is because it comes back to a point I made earlier. It's all about intentionality, which is that you actually can will something into existence even if people don't want it. That was the craziest thing. Like nobody wanted this, but it's still ruled for half a century, more actually. I mean, almost 75 years. To think that there could have been a history of the Soviet Union that was dramatically different than Leninism, Stalinism, that was completely different. Like almost would be the American story. Yeah, easily. I mean, there's a world where, and I don't have all the characters, there's like Kerensky and then there was like whoever Lenin's number two, Stalin's chief rival. And even, I mean, look, even a Soviet Union led by Trotsky, that's a whole other world, right? Like literally a whole other world. And yeah, it's just, I don't know. I find it so interesting. I will never not be fascinated by Russia. I always will. It's funny that I get to talk to you. Cause it's like, I read this book. I forget what it's called. It won, I think it won a Pulitzer prize. And it was like the story of, I tried to understand Russia post Crimea. Cause I came up amongst people who are much more like neoconservative and they're like, fuck Russia, Russia bad. And I was like, okay, like what do these people think? And we have this narrative of like the fall of the Soviet Union. And then I read this book from the perspective of Russians who lived through the fall. And they were like, this is, I was like, this is terrible. Like actually the introduction of capitalism was awful. And like the rise of all these crazy oligarchs. That's why Putin was, came to power to like restore, restore order to the oligarchy. And he still talks to this day. Do you guys, I mean, that's always the threat of like, do you want to return to the nineties? Do you want to return to Yeltsin? But the thing is in the West, we have this like our own propaganda of like, no, Yeltsin was great. That was the golden age. What could have been with Russia? And I was like, well, what do actual Russians think? And so that, yeah, I'll always be fascinated by it. And then just like to understand the idea of feeling encircled by NATO and all of that, you have to understand like Russian defense theory all the way of going back to the czars has always been defense in depth in terms of having Estonia, Lithuania, and more as like protection of the heartland. I'm not justifying in this. So NATO shills like, please don't come after me. But look, Estonians like NATO. They want to be in NATO. So I don't want to minimize that. I'm more just saying like, I understand him and Russia much better having done that. And we are very incapable in America. I think this is probably because my parents are immigrants and I've traveled a lot. Of like putting yourself in the mind of people who aren't Western and haven't lived a history, especially our lives of America's fucking awesome. We're the number one country in the world. Like we're literally better than you, like in many ways. And they can't empathize with people who have suffered so much. And I just, yeah, it's just so interesting to me. What about if we could talk for just a brief moment about the human of Putin and power, you are clearly fascinated by power. Do you think power changed Putin? Do you think power changes leaders? If you look at the great leaders in history, whether it's LBJ, FDR, do you think power really changes people? Like, is there a truth to that kind of old proverb? It reveals, I think that's what it is. It reveals. So Putin was a much more deft politician, much more amenable to the West. If you think back, you know, to 2001 and more, right when he came, cause he was still, cause at that time his biggest problem was intra Russian politics, right? Like it was all consolidating power within the oligarchy. Once he did that by around like 2007, there's that famous time when he spoke out against the West at the Munich security conference. I forget when it was. And that's when everybody in the audience was like, whoa. And he was talking about like NATO encirclement and like, we will not be beaten back by the West. Very shortly afterwards, like the Georgia invasion happens. And that was like a big wake up call of like, we will not be pushed around anymore. I mean, he said before publicly, like the worst thing that ever happened was the fall. Or what did he say? He was like, the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, right? Of course, people in the West were like, what? I'm like, I get it, right? Like they were a superpower. And now their population is declining. Like it's like a Petro state. It sucks. Like, I understand. I understand like how somebody could feel about that. I think it revealed his character, which is that I think he thinks of himself probably as he always has since 2001 as like this benevolent, almost as a benevolent dictator. He's like, without me, the whole system would collapse. I'm the only guy keeping all these people in check. Most Russians probably do support Putin because they feel like they support some form of functional government. And they view it as like a check against that, which is a long, has a long history within Russia too. So I don't know if it changed him. I think it just revealed him because it's not like he, I mean, he has a bill. You know, Navalny has put that like billion dollar palace and all that. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like Putin does that for show. He doesn't seem like somebody who indulges in all that stuff. Or maybe we just don't see it. Like, I don't know. Well, I don't, it's very difficult for me to understand. I've been hanging out, thanks to Clubhouse. A lot of, I've gotten to learn a lot about the Navalny folks and it's been very educational. Made me ask a lot of important questions about what, you know, question a lot of my assumptions about what I do and don't know. But I'll just say that I do believe, you know, there's a lot of the Navalny folks say that Putin is incompetent and is a bad executive, like is bad at basically running government. But to me. Well, why do Russians not think that? Right? Well, they probably say propaganda. They would say it's the press. Yeah, they would say the control. There is a strong either control or pressure on the press, but I think there is a legitimate support and love of Putin in Russia that is not grounded in just misinformation and propaganda. There's legitimacy there. Mostly I tried to remain apolitical and actually genuinely remain apolitical. I am legitimately not interested in the politics of Russia of today. I feel I have some responsibility and I'll take that responsibility on as I need to. But my fascination as it is perhaps with you in part is in the historical figure of Putin. I know he's currently president, but I'm almost looking like as if I was a kid in 30 years from now reading about him, studying the human being, the games of power that are played that got him to gain power, to maintain power, what that says about his human nature, the nature of the bureaucracy that's around him, the nature of Russia, the people, all those kinds of things, as opposed to the politics and the manipulation and the corruption and the control of the media that results in misinformation. Those are the bickering of the day, just like we were saying, what will actually be remembered about this moment in history? Totally, he's a transformational figure in Russian history. Really, like the bridge between the fall of the Soviet Union and the chaos of Yeltsin, that will be how he's remembered. The only question is what comes next and what he wants to come next. I'm always, I'm like, he's getting up. How old are you, 60 something? Yeah, 60. So he would be, I think he would be 80. So with the change of the constitution, he cannot be president until 2034, I think it is. So he would be like 80 something and he would be in power for over 30 years, which is longer than Stalin. But he still seems to be. Seems fit. I think he's gonna be around for a long time. But this is a fascinating question that you ask, which is like, what does he want? I don't know. Yeah, that's the question. I don't, and this is where I think, given all of his behavior and more, I don't know if it's about money. I don't know if it's about enriching himself. Obviously he did, to the tune of billions and billions and billions of dollars. But I think he probably, he's as close to like an actual Russian nationalist, like at the top, who really does believe in Russia as its rightful superpower. Everything he does seems to stem from that opposition to NATO, intro to Syria, like wanting to play a large role in affairs, deeply distrustful and yet coveting of the European powers. Like, I could describe every czar in those same language. Like every czar falls into the exact same category. Yeah, and I mean, it makes me wonder, looking at some of the biggest leaders in human history, to ask the question of what was the motivation? What was the motivation for even just the revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin? What was the motivation? Because it sure as hell seems like the motivation was at least in part driven by the idea, by ideas, not self interest of like power. For Lenin, it was, I think he was a true believer and an actual narcissist who thought he was the only one who could do it. Stalin, I do think just wanted power. And realized, well, I don't know. Look, he wrote very passionately when he was young. And he was, he really believed in communism. In the beginning he did. I'm always fascinated as I'm like, around 1920, what happened, right? Post revolution, you crushed the whites. Now it's all about consolidation. That's where the games really began. And I'm like, I don't think that was about communism. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it became a useful propaganda tool, but it still seemed like he believed in it. Whether it was, of course, this is the question. I mean, this is the problem with conspiracy theories for me. And this is legitimate criticism towards me about conspiracy theories, which is just because you're not like this doesn't mean others aren't like this. So like, I can't believe that somebody be like deeply two faced. Oh, I've met them, you're welcome to Washington. Yeah. But like, I think that I would be able to detect like, no. Well, this, my question is, well, so there's differences. There's two face, like there's different levels of two face. Like what I mean is to be killing people and it's like house of cards style, right? And still present a front like you're not killing people. I don't know if, I guess it's possible, but I just don't see that at scale. Like there's a lot of people like that. And I don't, I have trouble imagining some, that's such a compelling narrative that people like to say. Like people, that's the conspiratorial mindset. I think that skepticism was really powerful and important to have because it's true. A lot of powerful people abuse their power, but saying that about, I feel like people over assume that. It's like, I see that with use of steroids often in sports. People seem to make that claim about like everybody who's successful and I want to be very, I don't know. Something about me wants to be cautious because I want to give people a chance. Being purely cynical isn't helpful. People say this about me. He's only saying this to do this. But at the same time, being naively optimistic about everything is also a kind of pedophilic scheme. People are going to fuck you over. And more importantly, that doesn't bother me. More importantly, you're not going to be able to reason about how to create systems that are going to be robust to corruption, to malevolent parties. So in order to create, you have to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose, especially if you want to actually engineer things that work in this world that has evil in it. I can't believe there's a book of Hitler on the desk. We've mentioned a lot of books throughout this conversation. I wonder, and this makes me really curious to explore in a lot of depth the kind of books that you're interested in. I think you mentioned in your show that you provide recommendations. Yes, I do. In the form of spoken word, can you beyond what we've already recommended mention books, whether it is historical, nonfiction, or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction that had a big impact on your life? Is there a few that you can mention? Sure. I already talked about the Johnson books, so I'll leave that alone. Robert A. Caro, he's still alive, thank God. He's finishing the last book. I hope he makes it. So those Johnson books. Second, can I ask you a question about those books? Yes. What the hell do you fit into so many pages? Everything, man. Let me tell you this. So I'll just give you an anecdote. This is why I love these books. The beginning, the first book is about Lyndon Johnson. His life, when he gets elected to Congress, the book begins with a history of Texas and its weather patterns, and then of his great, great grandfather moving to Texas. Then the story of that, about a hundred or so pages in, you get to Lyndon Johnson. That's how you do it. Which is you get. It's like a Tolstoy style retelling. This is the thing, it's not a biography, it's a story of the times. That's a great biography. So another one, this isn't part of my list, so don't do it, is Grant, Ron Chernow. Ron Chernow's Grant, it's a thousand pages. And the reason I tell everybody to read it is it's not just the story of Grant, it is the story of pre civil war America, the Mexican American war, the civil war and reconstruction, all told in the life of one person who was involved in all three. Most people don't know anything about the Mexican American war. It's fascinating. Most people don't know anything about reconstruction. Now more so because people are talking, it's a hot topic now. I've been reading about it for years. That is another thing people need to learn a lot more about. In terms of non history books, the book that probably had the most impact on me, which is also a historical nonfiction is I am obsessed with Antarctic exploration. And it all began with a book called Shackleton's Incredible Journey, which is the collection of diaries of everybody who was on Shackleton's journey. For those who don't know, Shackleton was the last explorer of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. He led a ship called the Endurance, which froze in the ice off the coast of Antarctica in 1914. And they didn't have radios over the last exploration, the last one without the age of radio. And he happens to freeze in the ice. And then the ship collapses after a year frozen in the ice. And this man leads his entire crew from that ship onto the ice with a team of dogs, survives out on the ice for another year with three little lifeboats and is able to get all of his men, every single one of them alive to an island hundreds of miles away called Elephant Island. And when they got there, he had to leave everybody behind except for six people. And him and two other guys, I'm forgetting their names, navigated by the stars 800 miles through the Drake Passage with seas of hundreds of feet to Prince, I think it's called Prince George's Island. And then when they got to Prince George's Island, they landed on the wrong side and they had to hike from one side to the other to go and meet the whalers. And every single one of those things was supposed to be impossible. Nobody was ever supposed to hike that island. It wasn't done again until like the 1980s with professional equipment. He did it after two years of starvation. Nobody was ever supposed to make it from Elephant Island to Prince George. The guy, they had to hold him steady, his legs, so that he could chart the stars. And if they miss this island, they're into open sea. They're dead. And then before that, how do you survive for a year on the ice? On seals. And before that, he kept his crew from depression frozen one year in the ice. It's just an amazing story. And it made me obsessed with Antarctic exploration. So I've read like 15 books on it. What the hell is it about the human spirit? It's amazing. That's the thing about Antarctica is it brings it out of you. So for example, I read another one recently called Mawson's Will. Douglas Mawson, he was an Australian. He was on one of the first Robert Frost expeditions. He leads an expedition down to the South. Him and a partner, they're leading explorations, 1908, something like that. They're going around Antarctica with dog teams. And what happens is they keep going over these snow bridges where there's a crevice, but it's covered in snow. And so one of the lead driver, the dogs go over and they plummet. And that sled takes with it. So the guy survives, but that sled takes all their food, half the dogs, their stove, the camping tent, the tent specifically designed for the snow, everything. And they're hundreds of miles away from base camp. He and this guy have to make it back there in time before the ship comes to come get them on an agreed upon date. And he makes it. But the guy he was with, he dies. And it's a crazy story. First of all, they have to eat the dogs. A really creepy part of Antarctic exploration is everyone ends up eating dogs at different points. And part of the theory, which is so crazy, is that the guy he was with was dying because they were eating dog liver. And dog liver has a lot of vitamin E, which if you eat too much of it, can give you like a poisoning. And so Mawson, by trying to help his friend, was giving him more liver. Of all the things that kills you. I know, it's dog liver. And so his friend ends up dying, have a horrific heart attack, all of that. Mawson crawls back hundreds of miles away, makes it back to base camp hours after the ship leaves. And two guys or a couple of guys stayed behind for him. And he basically has to recuperate for like six months before he can even walk again. But it's like you were saying about the human spirit. It's like Antarctica brings that out of people. Or Amundsen, the guy who made it to the South Pole, Robert Amundsen, oh my God. Like this guy trained his whole life in the ice from Norway to make it to the South Pole. And he beat Robert Frost, the British guy with all this money and all these, I could go on this forever. I'm obsessed with it. Well, first of all, I'm gonna take this part of the podcast. I'm gonna set it to music. I'm gonna listen to it. Cause I've been whining and bitching about running 48 miles of Goggins this next weekend. And this is gonna be so easy. I'm just gonna listen to this over and over in my head. You're gonna be. Elon's obsessed with Shackleton. He talks about him all the time. He uses, I was gonna ask you about that. He uses an example of that as an example of what Mars colonization would be like. He's right. No, Antarctica is as close to you can simulate that. Antarctica is as close to what you could simulate what it would get. That Nat Geo series on Mars, I'm not sure if you watched it, it's incredible. Elon's actually in it. And it's like, they get there, everything goes wrong. Somebody dies, like it's horrible. They can't find any water. It's not working. So what is it? Is it like simulating the experience of what it'd be like to colonize? So it's like a docu series where the fictionalized part is the like astronauts on Mars, but then they're interviewing people like Elon Musk and others who were the ones who like paved the way to get to Mars. So it's a really interesting concept. I think it's on Netflix. And yeah, I agree with him 100%, which is that the first guys to make, like for example, Robert Frost, who went to Australia, sorry, to Antarctica, the British explorer who was beaten to the South Pole three weeks by Robert Amundsen, he died on the way back. And the reason why is because he wasn't well prepared. He was arrogant. He didn't have the proper amounts of supplies. His team had terrible morale. Antarctica is a brutal place. If you fuck up one time, you die. And it's like, and this is what you read a lot about, which is the reason why such heroic characters like Shackleton Shine is a lot of people died. Like there were some people who got frozen in the eye. I mean, man, this again also came to the North exploration. So I read a lot about like the exploration of the North Pole and same thing. These unextraordinary men take people out into the ice and get frozen out there for years and shit goes so bad. They end up eating each other. They all die. There's a famous, one I'm forgetting his name, the British Franklin expedition, where they went searching for them for like 20 years. And they eventually came across a group of Inuit who were like, oh yeah, we saw some weird white men here like 15 years ago. And they find their bones and there's like saw marks, which showed that they were eating each other. I mean. So history remembers the ones who didn't eat each other. Yeah, well, yeah, we remember the ones who made it, but there are. And that would be the story of Mars as well. That will be the story of Mars. But, and nevertheless, that's the interesting thing about Antarctica. Nevertheless, something about human nature drives us to explore it. Yes. And that seems to be like, you know, a lot of people have this kind of, to me, frustrating conversations like, well, Earth is great, man. Why do we need to colonize Mars? You just don't get it. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's the same people that say like, why are you running? Like, why are you running a marathon? What are you running from, man? I don't know. It's pushing the limits of the human mind of what's possible. It's George Mallory because it's there. Yeah. It's simple. And that's somehow actually the result of that, if you want to be pragmatic about it, there's something about pushing that limit that has side effects that you don't expect that will create a better world back home for the people, not necessarily on Earth, but like just in general, it raises the quality of life for everybody, even though the initial endeavor doesn't make any sense. The very fact of pushing the limits of what's possible then has side effects of benefiting everybody. And it's difficult to predict ahead of time what those benefits will be. Say with colonizing Mars, it's unclear what the benefits will be for Earth or in general with struggling. What did we get from the moon? What did we get from Apollo, right? Technically, and there were a lot of socialists at the time making this argument. They're like, all this money going, you know what? We went to the fucking moon in 1969. That was amazing. The greatest feat in human history, period. What did we learn from it? We learned about interstellar or interplanetary travel. We learned that we could do something off of a device less powerful than the computer in my pocket. Like the amount of potential locked within my pocket and your pocket, I mean, this is, if you were to define my policies in one way, it's greatness, like national, a quest for national greatness. There is no greatness without fulfilling the ultimate calling of the human spirit, which is more, it's not enough. And why should it be? It wasn't enough. Our ancestors could have been content to sit, well, actually many of them were, were content to sit and say, these berries will be here for a long time. And they got eaten and they died. And it's the ones who got out and went to the next place and the next place and went across the Siberian land bridge and went across more. And it just did extraordinary things. The craziest ones, we are their offspring and we fail them if we don't go into space. That's how I would put it. You should run for president. I'm just pro space, man. I love space. No, you're pro doing difficult things and pushing, exploring the world in all of its forms. I hope that kind of spirit permeates politics too. That same kind of a... Can, can. I, well, it can, and I hope so. I don't know if you want to stay on it, but I think that was book number one or two. Oh, shit. Yeah, okay. All right, all right. Is there something else? Well, this one is second, this actually is a corollary to that, which is sapiens. And I know that's a very normal, normie answer. One of the best selling book. I think there's a reason for that. Yuval Noah Harari. Oh, cool. Okay, look, yes, he didn't do any new research. I get that. All he did was aggregate. I'm sure he's very controversial in the scientific community, but guess what? He wrote a great book. It's a very easy to read general explanation of the rise of human history. And it helps challenge a lot of preconceptions. Are we special? Are we an accident? Are we more like a parasite? Are we not? What, is there a destiny to all of us? I don't know. You know, if anything, it's like what I just described, which is more. Move, move out. The evolution of money. Like, I know he gets a lot of hate, but I think that he writes it so clearly and well that for your average person to be able to read that, you will come away with a more clear understanding of the human race than before. And I think that that's why it's worth it. I agree with you 100%. I'm ashamed to, I usually don't bring up sapiens because it's like. Yeah, it's like, everybody's uncle has read it, but that's a good thing. It is one of the, I think it'll be remembered as one of the great books of this particular era. Yeah, because it's so clearly, it's like the selfish gene with Dawkins. I mean, it just aggregates so many ideas together and puts language to it that makes it very useful to talk about. So it is one of the great books. 100%. Another one is definitely Born to Run for the same reason by Christopher McDougall, which is that. I'm just gonna listen to this whole podcast next week. You have to. Well, you should because it, you are inheriting our most basic skill, which is running. And reimagining human history or reimagining like what we were as opposed to what we are is very useful because it helps you understand how to tap into primal aspects of your brain, which just drive you. And the reason I love McDougall's writing is because I love anybody who writes like this. Malcolm Gladwell, who else? Michael Lewis, people who find characters to tell a bigger story. Michael Lewis finds characters to tell us the story of the financial crisis. Malcolm Gladwell writes, finds characters to tell us the story of learning new skills and outliers and whatever his latest book is, I forget what it's called. But McDougall tells the vignettes and a tiny story of a single person in the history of running and like how it's baked into your DNA. And I think there was just something very useful to that for me for being like, I don't need to go to the gym or like, I'm not saying, you should still go to the gym. I'll be clear. I'm saying like, in order to fulfill like who you are, you can actually tap into something that's the most basic. I don't know if, I'm sure if you listened to the David Cho episode with Joe Rogan. You know what I mean? Oh, where he's the animal. Yeah, right. With the baboon. When he goes hunting. And there's something to that, man. There's something to that. Where it's just like, they are living the way that we were supposed to. We're not supposed, well, I don't wanna put a normative judgment on it. They're living the way that we used to. There's something very fun. It feels more honest somehow to our true nature. There's a guy I follow on Instagram. I've come from, Paul Saladino, Carnivore MD. He just went over there to the Hadza to live with them. And I was watching his stuff just like, I was like, man, there's something in you that wants to go. I'm like, I wanna do that. I wouldn't be very good at it, but like I want to. I'm so glad that somebody who thinks deeply about politics is so fascinated with exploration and with the very basic nature, like human nature, nature of our existence. I love that. There's something in you. And still you're stuck in DC. For now, for now. Speaking of which, you're from Texas. What do you make of the future of Texas politically, culturally, economically? I am in part moving, well, I'm moving to Austin. Congrats. But I'm also doing the Eric Weinstein advice, which is like, dude, you're not married. You don't have kids. There's no such thing as moving. What are you moving? You're like your three suits and some shirts and underwear. What exactly is the move entail? So I have nothing. So I'm basically, it's very just remain mobile, but there's a promise, there's a hope to Austin. Outside of just like friendships, I have no, it's a very different culture that Joe Rogan is creating. I'm mostly interested in what the next Silicon Valley will be, what the next hub of technological innovation. And there's a promise, maybe a dream for Austin being that next place. It's very possible. Doesn't have the baggage of some of the political things, maybe some of the sort of things that hold back the beauty of, that makes capitalism, that makes innovation so powerful, which is like meritocracy, which is excellence. Diversity is exceptionally important, but it should not be the only priority. It has to be something that coexists with a like insatiable drive towards excellence. And it seems like Texas is a nice place, like having a Austin, which is like a kind of this weird, I hope it stays weird, man. I love weird people. I don't know about that, but we can get into it. But there's this hope is it remains this weird place of brilliant innovation amidst a state that's like more conservative. So like there's a nice balance of everything. What are your thoughts about the future of Texas? I think it's so fascinating to me because I never thought I would want to move back, but now I'm beginning to be convinced. So I'm going to stick to this clip. I am, I'm being honest and many Texas will hate me for this. But Texas was not a place that was kind to me, quote unquote. And this is because of my own parent. Look, I was raised in College Station, Texas, which is a town of 50,000. It's a university town. It exists only for the university. So it was a very, I did not get the full Texas experience purely speaking from a College Station experience. But growing up first generation, or I forget what it is, I'm the first American. I was born and raised in College Station. My parents are from India. Being raised in a town where the dominant culture was predominantly like white evangelical Christian was hard. Like it was just difficult. And I think of it, in the beginning, I would say like ages, like zero to like eight, it was like cultural ignorance, as in like they just don't know how to interact with you. And there was a level of, always there was like the evangelical kind of antipathy towards like you being not Christian. You know, my parents are Hindu. Like that's how I was raised. And so like, there was that. But 9 11 was very difficult. Like 9 11 happened when I was in third or fourth grade. And that changed everything, man. Like, I mean, our temple had to like print out T shirts. And I'm not saying this is a sob story, to be clear. I've still actually largely for my adult life identified on the political right. So don't take this as some like, you know, race manifesto. I'm just telling it like, this is what happened, which is that like we had, it was just hard to be proud, frankly, and to have some of the fallout from 9 11 and during Iraq. And the reason I am political is because I realize in myself, I have a strong rebellious nature against systems and structures of power. And the first people I ever rebelled against were all the people telling me to shut up and not question the Iraq war. So the reason I am in politics is because I hated George W. Bush with a passion and I hated the war. And I was so, again, my entire background is largely in national security for this reason, which is I was obsessed with the idea of like, how do we get people who are not gonna get us into these quagmire situations in positions of power? That's how I became fascinated by power in the first place was all a question of how do this happen? Like, how did this catastrophe happen? I realized it's not as bad as like, you know, previous conflicts, but this one was mine. And to see how it changed our domestic politics forever. And so that was my rebellion. But it's funny, because I identified on the left when I was growing up, up until I was 18, I had also a funny two year stint. This is where everything kind of changed for me when I was 16, actually. I moved to Qatar, to Doha, Qatar, because my dad was a dean or associate dean of Texas A&M University at Doha. So my last two years of high school were at this. I went from this small town in Texas, and I love my parents because they could recognize that I had within me that I was not a small town kid. So they took me out of this country every chance they got. I traveled everywhere and constantly let me go. And so I went from school in College Station to like this ritzy private school, American school. Best thing that ever happened to me, because first of all, it got me out of College Station. Second, at that time, I had this annoying streak of, I wouldn't call it being anti America, but you don't appreciate America. Let me tell everybody out there listening, leave for a while, you will miss it so much. You do not know what it is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it. And I was going to high school with these guys in the Qatari royal family. And all I wanted to do was speak out of how they were pieces of shit for the way that they treated Indian citizens in that country who are basically used as slave labor. And I could not say one word because I knew I would be deported and I knew my dad would lose his job and my mom would lose her job and we would be forced out of the country. You don't know what it's like to live like that. Or to be in a society where like, you have like a high school girlfriend or something and you can't even touch in public or you're lectured for public decency. Like, listen, I've lived under a Gulf monarchy now. And that turned me into the most pro America guy ever. Like I came back so like Merica, like I still am because of that experience. Living abroad, like that will do it to you. Live in a non democracy. You have, even in Europe, I would say, you guys aren't living as free as we are here. It's awesome and I love it. You're ultimately another human being than the one who left Texas. Yeah. So, I mean, have you actually considered moving to Texas and broadly just outside of your own story, what do you think is the future of Texas? What is the future of Austin? There's so much transformation seemingly happening now related to Silicon Valley, to California. That's what's been so hard to me, which is that since I left, it's changed dramatically, which is that it used to be like this conservative state where the main money to be made was oil. And everybody knew that. Petro, it was a Petro state, Houston, all of that. Austin was always weird, but it was more of a music town and a university town. It was not a tech town. But in the 10 years or so since I left, I have begun to realize, I'm like, well, the Texas I grew up in is over. It is not a deep red state in any sense of the term. The number one Uhaul route in the country pre pandemic already was San Francisco to Austin, okay? So like you have this massive influx of people from California and New York. And the state, the composition of it is changed dramatically. The intra composition and the ultra, yeah. So the intra composition, it's become way more urban. It's from when I grew up, Texas was a much more rural state. Its politics were much more static. It looked much more like Rick Perry, like he was a very accurate representation of who we were. Now, I don't think that that's the case. Texas is now a dynamic economy, not just 100% reliant on oil because of its kind of like, I would call it like regulatory arbitrage relative to California and New York offers a large incentive to people who are more, I wouldn't say culturally liberal, but they're not necessarily like culturally conservative, like the people who I grew up with. That's changed the whole state's politics. Beto came two points away from beating Ted Cruz. I'm not saying the state's gonna go blue. I think the Republican party will just change and we'll have to readjust. But the re urbanization of Texas has made it, I'll put it in this way, much more attractive to me than the place that I grew up. And then from my perspective, well, first of all, I love some of the cowboy things that Texas stands for, but for more practically, from my perspective, the injection of the tech innovation that's moving to Texas has made it very exciting to me. It seems like outside of all that, maybe you can speak to the weird in Austin. It seems like I know that Joe Rogan is a rich, sort of almost like mainstream at this point, but he's also attracting a lot of weirdos. And so is Elon and a lot of those weirdos are my friends and they're like Michael Malice, like those weirdos. And it's like, I have a hope for Austin that all kinds of different flavors of weirdos will get injected. It's possible. I actually think the most significant thing that happened were Tesla moving there. The reason why is I love Joe, obviously, but he can only attract X amount of people. Elon actually employs thousands of people. And then you will also Oracle. Oracle's decision to move to Austin is just as important because those two men, Larry, was it Ellison, right? Ellison and Elon, they actually employ tens of thousands of people collectively, that can change the nature of the city. So you combine that with Joe bringing this entire new entertainment complex with the bodies of people who will appreciate said entertainment complex. Spend money on the entertainment. Exactly, you just remade the entire city. And that's why I'm fascinated. And obviously there's network effects, which is now that all those people are down there, I mean, if I were Elon Musk, I would donate a shit ton of money to the University of Texas and I would turn it into my Stanford for Silicon Valley. Let's introduce some competition and let UT Austin hire the best software developers, engineers, professors, and more, and turn Texas into a true like Austin revolving door hub where people come to UT Austin to get an internship at Tesla and then become an executive there and then create their own company in their own garage in Austin, which is the next Facebook, Twitter. That's how it happens. This is why I'm much more skeptical of Miami. There's a whole like tech Miami crew. I'm like, yeah, like there's no university. It's very inorganic. Look, I think Miami is awesome. I just like, I don't know if the same building blocks are there and also no multi billion dollar companies which employ thousands of people are coming there. That's the ingredient. It's not just Joe Rogan. It's not just even Elon Musk if he's still operated in California. It's all the people he employs. I think that is where, I think Texas is going to dramatically change within the next 10 years. Alternative to, it's already become a more urbanized state that's moved away from oil and gas in terms of like its emphasis, not necessarily in terms of his real economics. And 10 years from now, I don't think it will be necessarily the name prop like of the town. The only question to me is how that manifests politically because it's very possible though, because a lot of these workers themselves are California culturally liberal. You could see a Gavin Newsom type person getting elected governor of Texas or like the mayor of Austin. I mean, look, mayor of Austin is already a Democrat, right? Like, I mean, Joe has his own problems with Austin. It's funny, I remember him leaving LA and I'm like, I don't know, have you been to Austin? Like, it's not everything it's cracked up to be, necessarily. But no matter what, a new place allows the possibility for new ideas, even if they're somehow left leaning and all those kinds of things. I do think the only two things missing from Austin and Texas are two dudes in a suit that sometimes have a podcast talking a bunch of nonsense on a mic. So let's bring the best suit game to Texas. I hope you do make it to Texas at some point. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sagar and Jetty. And thank you to our sponsors, Jordan Harmer's show, Grammarly grammar assistant, eight sleep self cooling bed and magic spoon low carb cereal. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr. About the idea that what is just and what is legal are not always the same thing. He said, never forget that what Hitler did in Germany was legal. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Saagar Enjeti: Politics, History, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #167

The following is a conversation with Silvio McCauley, a computer scientist at MIT, winner of the Turing Award, and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography, information security, game theory, and most recently, cryptocurrency and the theoretical foundations of a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain at Algorand, a company of cryptographers, engineers, and mathematicians that he founded in 2017. Quick mention of our sponsors. Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information In Depth Tech Journalism website, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I will be having many conversations this year on the topic of cryptocurrency. I'm reading and thinking and thinking a lot on this topic. I just recently finished reading The Bitcoin Standard, a book I highly recommend. As always, with this podcast, I'm approaching it with an open mind, with compassion, with as little ego as possible, and yes, with love. I hope you go along with me on this journey and don't judge me too harshly on any likely missteps. As usual, I will play devil's advocate. I will, on purpose, sometimes ask simple, even dumb questions, all to try and explore the space of ideas here with as much grace as I can muster. I have no financial interests here. I only have a simple curiosity and a love for knowledge, especially about a set of technologies that may very well transform the fabric of human civilization. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Silvio McCauley. Let's start with the big and the basic question. What is a blockchain? And why is it interesting? Why is it fascinating? Why is it powerful? All right. So a blockchain, think of it, is really a common database distributed. Think about it as a ledger in which everybody can write an entry in a page. You can write, I can write, and everybody can read, and you have a guarantee that everybody has the same copy of the ledger that is in front of you. So whatever you see on page seven, anyone else sees on page seven. So what is extraordinary about this is this common knowledge thing that I think is really a first for humanity. I mean, if you look at communication, like right now, you can communicate very quickly images, photos, but do you have a certainty that whatever you have received has been received by everybody else? Not really. And so there's a commonality of knowledge and the certainty that everybody can write, nobody has been prevented from writing whatever they want. Nobody can erase. Nobody can tear a page of a ledger. Nobody can swap page. Nobody can change anything. And that is immutable common record is extremely powerful. And there's something fundamental that is decentralized about it. So at least in spirit, some degree against maybe a resistance to centralization. Absolutely. If it is not decentralized, how can it be common knowledge? If only one person or a few people have a ledger, you don't have a ledger, you have to ask, you know, what is on page seven? And how do you know that whatever they tell you is on page seven, they tell the same thing to everybody else. And so this commonality is extremely powerful. Just to give you an example, assume that you do an auction, okay? You have worked very hard, you build a building, and now you want to auction it off. Makes sense because you want to auction worldwide, better yet, you want to tokenize the building and sell it in all in parcels. Now, everybody sees the bids. And you know that everybody sees the bids. You and I see the same bids, and so does everybody else. So you know that a fair price has reached, and you know who owns what and who has spent how much. And if you do it instead of, otherwise, in a centralized system, I put a bid saying, oh, congratulations, Alex, you won, and your price is $12,570. How do you know? So if instead of this common knowledge is a very powerful tool for humanity. So we return to it from a bunch of different perspectives, including like a technical perspective. But you often talk about blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization, scalability, security, all those kinds of things. But one of the most maybe impactful, exciting things that leverage the blockchain, this kind of ledger idea of common knowledge is cryptocurrency. So in the financial space. So is there, can you say in the same kind of basic way, what is cryptocurrency in the context of this common knowledge and in the context of the blockchain? Great. Cryptocurrency is a currency that is on such a ledger. So imagine that on the ledger, initially, you know that somehow, say you and I are the only owner, each one, let's give it ourselves a billion each of whatever this unit. Then I start writing on the ledger, I give 100 of these units to my sister, I give this much to my aunt. And then now, because it's written on the ledger and everybody can see, my sister can give 57 of these units that she received from me to somebody else. And that is money. And that is money because you can see that somebody who tenders your payment has really the money there. You don't have any more of a doubt when you want to sell an item. If I write you a check, is the check covered? Or do I have the money at the moment of a transaction? You really see because the ledger is always updated. What you see is what I see, what the merchant sees. You know that the money, the money is the most powerful money system there is because it is totally transparent. And so you know that you have been paid, and you know that the money is there, you have not to second guess anything else. So the common knowledge applied there is you're basically mimicking the same kind of thing you would get in the physical space, which is if you give 100 bucks or 100 of that thing, whatever of that cryptocurrency to your sister, the actual transfer is as real as you giving like a basket of apples to your sister. So in the case in the physical space, the common knowledge is in the physics of the atoms. And then it's digital space, the common knowledge is in this ledger. And so that transfer holds the same kind of power, but now it's operating in the digital space. Again, I apologize for a set of ridiculous questions, but you mentioned cryptocurrencies and money. What is money? Why do we have money? Do you think about this kind of from this high philosophical level at times of this tool, this idea that we humans have all kind of came up with and seem to be using effectively to do stuff? Money is a social construct, okay, in my opinion. And this has been somehow people always felt that somehow money is a way to allow us to transact, even though we want different things. So I have two sheep, and then you have one cow, and I want the cow, but you are looking for blankets instead, you know, so to have money is really simplifies this. But at the end of it, that's why a bit was invented. And you started with gold, you started with the coinage, then you started with the check. But at the end of the day, money is essentially a social construct because you know that what you receive, you can actually spend with somebody else. And so there is a kind of a social pact and social belief that you have. At the end of the day, even barter requires these beliefs that other people are going to accept the quote unquote currency you offer them. Because if I'm a mason, and you ask me to build a wall in your field, and I did, and you, in exchange, you give me a thousand sheep, what am I going to do? Eat them all? No, I have to feed them. And if I don't feed them, they die, and my value is zero. So in receiving this livestock, I must believe that somebody else will accept them in return for something else. So money is a social belief, social shared belief system that makes people transact. That's fascinating. I didn't even think about that, that you're actually, you have a deep like network of beliefs about how society operates. So the value is assigned even to sheep, based on that everyone will continue operating how they were previously operating. Somebody will feed the sheep. I didn't even think about that. That's fascinating. So that directly transfers to the space of money and then to the space of digital money, cryptocurrency. Okay. Does it bother you sort of intellectually when this money that is a social construct is not directly tied to physical goods like gold, for example? Not at all, because after all, gold has some industrial value. Nobody delights it. It's a metal. It doesn't oxidate. It has some good things about it. But does this industrial value really represent the value to which it now is traded? No. So gold is another way to express our belief. I give you an ounce of gold, you treat it like, oh, somebody else will want this for doing something else. So it is really this notion of this. Money is a mental construct, is really, and is shared, is a social construct, I really believe. And so some people feel that it's physical, so therefore gold exists. Then, as you know now, countries, most sophisticated country right now, they print their own money and you believe that they are not going to exaggerate it with inflation. Not everybody believes it, but at least they are not going to exaggerate it blatantly. And therefore you receive it because you know that somebody else will accept it, will have faith in the currency and so on and so forth. But whether it's gold, whether it's livestock, whatever it is, money is really a shared belief. So there is something, you know, and I've been reading more and more about different cryptocurrencies. There is a kind of belief that the scarcity of a particular resource like Bitcoin has a limited amount and it's tied to physical, you know, to proof of work. So it's tied to physical reality in terms of how much you can mine effectively and so on. That that's an important feature of money. Do you think that's an important feature to be a part of whatever the money is? That is certainly a very useful part. So at some point in time, you know, assume that money is something that all of a sudden we say, daisies are money, are the currency. Then, you know, I offer you 10 daisies in payment of whatever goods and services you want to provide. But at the end of the day, if you know that you can cultivate it and generate them at will, then perhaps, you know, you should not accept my payment. Here is a bouquet of daisies. So you need some kind of a scarcity. The inability to create it suddenly out of nothing is unimportant. And it's not an intrinsic necessity, but it's much easier to accept once you know that there is a fixed number of units of whatever currency there is and therefore you can mentally understand I'm getting, you know, this much of this piece of a pie and therefore I consider myself paid. I understand what I'm receiving. You described the goals of a blockchain. You have a nice presentation on this as scalability, security, and decentralization. And you challenged the blockchain trilemma that claims you can only have two of the three. So let's talk about each. What is scalability in the context of blockchain and cryptocurrency? What does scalability mean? So remember, we said that the blockchain is a ledger and each page receives a, gets some transaction and everybody can write in these pages of the ledger. Nobody can be stopped from writing and everybody can read them. Okay. Scalability means how fast can you write? Just imagine that you can write an entry in this special shared ledger once every hour. Well, you know, what are you going to do if you have no one transaction of an hour, the world doesn't go around. So you need to have scalability means here that you can then somehow write a lot of transaction and then you can read them and everybody can validate them. And that is the speed and the number of transactions per second and the fact that they are shared. So you want to have this speed not only in writing, but in sharing and in inspection for validity. This is scalability. The world is big. The world wants to interact, the people want to interact with each other and you better be prepared to have a ledger in which you can write lots and lots and lots of transactions in this special way very, very, very quickly. So maybe from a more mathematical perspective or can we say something about how much scalability is needed for a world that is big? Well, it really depends how many transactions you want, but remember that I think right now yet to go into at least 1000s of transactions per second, even if you look at credit cards, we are going to go from an average of 1600 to peaks of 20,000 or 40,000, something like this. But remember, it's not only a question of a transaction per se, but the value is that the transaction is actually being shared and visible to everybody and the certainty that that is the case. I can print on my own printer way more transactions, but nobody has the time to see or to inspect. That doesn't count. So you want scalability at this common knowledge level. That is the challenge. I also meant from a perspective of like a complexity analysis. So when you get more and more people involved, doesn't need to scale in some kind of way that do you like to see certain kind of properties in order to say something is scalable? Oh, absolutely. I took a little bit implicitly that the people transacting are actually very different. So if there is a two people who can do thousands of transactions per second with each other, this is not so interesting. What do we really need is to say there are billions of people at any point in time, you know, thousands and thousands of them want to transact with each other and you want to support to that. So Algorand, it solves, so that's the company, the team of cryptographers and mathematicians, engineers, so on, that challenged the blockchain trilemma. So let's break it down in terms of achieving scalability. How do we achieve scalability in the space of blockchain, in the space of cryptocurrency? Okay. So scalability, security, remember, and decentralization, right? So that's what they want. What's the best way to approach? Can we break it down? Let's start with scalability and think about how do we achieve it? Well, to achieve it one at a time is perhaps easy, even security. If nobody transacts, nobody loses money. So that is secure, but it's not scalable. So let me tell you, I'm a cryptographer, so I try to fight the bad guys. And what you want is that the vesselager that we discussed before cannot be tampered with. So you must think of it as a special link that nobody can erase. Then it has to be, everybody should be able to read and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages. That's okay. But you know what? That is actually easy cryptographically. Easy cryptographically means you can use tools invented 50 years ago, which in cryptographic time is prehistory, okay? We cavemen working around and solve the problem in cryptography land. But there is really a fundamental problem, which is really almost a social, seems a political problem, is to say, who the hell chooses or publishes the next page of the ledger? I mean, that is really the challenge. This ledger, you can always add a page because more and more transaction had to be written on there. And somebody has to assemble this transaction, put them on a page and add the next page. Who is the somebody who chooses the page and adds it on? Who can be trusted to do it? Exactly. Assume it is me for what I'm being, not that I want to volunteer for the job, but then I would have more power than any absolute monarch in history, because I would have a tremendous power to say, these are the transactions that the entire world should see. And whatever I don't write, this transaction will never see the light of day. I mean, no one had any such a power in history. So it's very important to do that. And that is the quintessential problem in a blockchain. And people have thought about it to say, it's not me, it's not you. But for instance, in proof of work, what people say is, okay, it's not me, it's not you, you know what it is? We make a very difficult, we invented a cryptographic puzzle, very hard to solve. The first one to solve it has the right to add one page to the ledger on behalf of everybody else. That now seems okay, because sometimes I solve a puzzle before you do, sometimes you solve before I do, or before somebody else solves it, it's okay. And presumably, the effort you put in is somehow correlated with how much trust you should be given to add to the ledger. Yeah, so somehow you want to make sure that you need to work because you want to prevent, you want to make sure that you get one solution every 10 minutes, say, like in a particular example of Bitcoin, so that it is very rare that two pages are added at the same time. Because if I solve a puzzle at the same time you do, it could happen that if it happens once or twice, we can survive it. But if it happens every other page is a double page, then which of the two is the real page, it becomes a problem. So that's why in Bitcoin, it is important to have a substantial amount of work so that no matter how many people try on Earth to solve a puzzle, you have one solution out of how many people are trying every 10 minutes. So that you have, you distance these pages, and you have the time to propagate through the network a solution and the page attached to it. And therefore, there is one page at a time that is added. And you say, well, why don't we do it? We have a solution. Well, first of all, a page every 10 minutes is not fast enough. It's a question of scalability. And second of all, to ensure that no matter how many people try, you get one page every 10 minutes, one solution to the riddle every 10 minutes. This means that the riddle becomes very, very hard. And to have a chance to solve it within 10 minutes, you must have such an expensive apparatus in terms of specialized computers, not one, not two, but thousands and thousands of them. And they produce tons of heat, okay? They dissipate heat like maniac. And then you have to refrigerate them too. And so then now you have air conditioning galore to add to the thing. It becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer and fewer people can actually compete in order to add to the page. And the problem becomes so crucial that in Bitcoin, depending on which day of the week you look at it, you are going to have two or three mining pools that are really the ones that are capable of controlling the chain. So you're saying that's almost like at least a centralization. Right. It started being decentralized, but the expenses became higher and higher and higher. When the cost becomes higher and higher, fewer and fewer people can afford them. And then it becomes de facto centralized, right? Yeah. And a different type of approach is instead, for instance, a delegated proof of stake, which is also very easy to explain, essentially boils down to say, well, look at these 21 people, say, okay? Don't they look honest? Yes, they do. In fact, I believe that they're going to remain honest for the foreseeable future. So why don't we do ourselves a favor? Let's entrust them to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger. Okay. Okay. But now we are going to say, is this centralized or decentralized? Well, 21 is better than one, but to say is very little. So if you look at when people rebelled to centralize power, I don't know, the French revolutions, okay? There was a monarch and the nobles. Were there 21 nobles? No, there were thousands of them, but there were millions and millions of disempowered citizens. So one is centralized, 21 is also centralized, right? So that's delegated proof of stake. Delegated. It's kind of like representative democracy, I guess. Yes, which is good. It's working great, right? It's working great. Well, it's better than the single monarch, right? There's problems. There are problems. And so we were looking for a different, when thinking about Algorand, for a different approach. And so we have an approach that is really, really decentralized because essentially it works as follows. You have a bunch of tokens, right? These are the tokens that have equal power. And you have say 10 billions of tokens distributed to the entire world. And the owners, each token has a chance to add the ledger, equal probability to everybody else. In fact, actually, if you want, here is how it works. So think about by some magic cryptographic process, which is not magic, it's mathematics, but think of it as magic. Assume that you select a thousand tokens and so sometimes a random, okay? And you have a guarantee that the random selected. And then the owners of these 1000 tokens somehow agree on the next page, they all sign it, and that is the next page. Okay? So it is clear that nobody has the power but in a while, one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this committee to select the next page. But this goes around very quickly. So, and if you look at this, the equation really is that it's not really centralized. And because for agreeing on the same page, it is important that the 1000 tokens that you randomly selected are in honest ends, the majority of them. So which, if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, that is essentially true because if the majority of the tokens are in honest ends, if you select, say 90% of the people are, 90% of the tokens are in honest ends. So can you randomly select a thousand, in this thousand you find the 501 tokens in bad ends. Very, very improbable. So basically, when a large fraction of people are honest, then you can use randomness as a powerful tool to get decentralization. So what does honesty mean? And now we're into the social side of things, which is how do we know that like the fraction, a large fraction of people or participating parties are honest? That is an excellent question. So by the way, first of all, we should realize that the same thing is for every other system. When you look at proof of work, you rely that the majority of the mining power is in honest ends. When you look at delegated proof of stake, you rely that the majority of these 21 people are honest. What is the difference? The difference is that in these other systems, you should say the whole economy is secure if the majority of this small piece of economy are honest. And that is a big question. But instead, in Algorand, in our approach, we say the whole economy is secure if the majority of the economy is honest. In other words, who can subvert Algorand is not a majority of a small group, but is a majority of the token holders had to conspire with each other in order to sink the very economy for which they own the majority of. That I think it is a bit harder to... Like a self destructive majority, essentially. And you're also making me realize that basically every system that we have in the world today assumes that the majority of participants is honest. Yes. The only difference is the majority of whom. And in some cases, the majority of a club and in our case is the majority of the whole system. The whole system. Okay. So that's... So through that kind of random sampling, you can achieve decentralization. You can achieve... So the scalability, I understand. And then the security that you're referring to, basically the security comes from the fact that the sample selected would likely include honest people. So it's very difficult to... So by the way, the security, as you mentioned, you're referring to is basically security against dishonesty, right? Or manipulation or whatever. Yes. Yes. So essentially when what you're going to do is to the following and say, well, Silvio, I understood what you're saying, but somebody has to randomly randomly selected these tokens, then I believe you. So then who does this random selection? That's a good point. And in Algorand, we do something a little bit unorthodox. Essentially is the token choose themselves at random. And you say, if you think about it, that seems to be a terrible idea. Because if you want to say, choose yourself at random, and whoever chooses himself is a thousand people committee, you choose the page for the rest of us. Mm hmm. And because if I'm a bad person, I'm going to select myself over and over again, because I want to be part of the committee every single time. But not so fast. So what do we do in Algorand? What does it mean that I select myself? That each one of us, in the privacy of our own computer, actually a laptop, what you do is that you execute your own individual lottery. And think about that you pull a lever of a slot machine, you can only pull the lever once, not until you win, not enough times until you win. And when you pull the lever, case one, either you win, in such a case, you have a winning ticket. Or you lose, you don't get any winning ticket. So if you don't have a winning ticket, you can say anything you want about the next page in the ledger, nobody pays attention. But if you ever win a ticket, people say, Oh, wow, this is one of the 1000 winning tickets, we better pay attention to what he or she says. And that's how it works. And the lottery is a cryptographic lottery, which means that even if I am an entire nation, extremely powerful, with incredible computing powers, I don't have the ability to improve even minimally my probability of one of my token winning the lottery. And that's how it happens. So everybody pulls the lever, the 1000 random winners say, Oh, here is my winning ticket. And here is my opinion up or down about the block. These are the ones that count. And if you think about it, while this is distributed, because there is, in the case of Algon, there is 10 billion tokens and you selected 1000 of them more distributed than this, you cannot get. And then why is this scalable? Because what do you have to do? Okay, you have to do the lottery. How long the lottery takes? It takes actually one microsecond. Whether you have one token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always one microsecond of computation, which is very fast. We don't hit the planet with a microsecond of computation. And finally, why is this secure? Because even if I were a very evil and very, very powerful individual, I'm so powerful that I can corrupt anybody I want instantaneously in the world, whom would I want to corrupt? The people in the committee so that I can choose the page of the ledger. But I do have a problem. I do not know whom I should corrupt. Should I corrupt this lady in Shanghai, this other guy in Paris? Because I don't know. The winners are random, so I don't know whom I should corrupt. But once the winner comes forward and says, here is my winning ticket, and you propagate your winning ticket across the network, together with your opinion about the block, now I know who they are. For sure, I can corrupt all 1000 of them given to my incredible powers. But so what? Whatever they said, they already said, and their winning tickets and their opinions are virally propagated across the network. And I do not have the power, no more than the US government or any government has the power, to put back in the bottle a message virally propagated by WikiLeaks. So everything you just described is kind of is fascinating, a set of ideas. And, you know, online I've been reading quite a bit, and people are really excited about the set of ideas. Nevertheless, it is not the dominating technology today. So Bitcoin, in terms of cryptocurrency, is the most popular cryptocurrency, and then Ethereum, and so on. So it's useful to kind of comment. We already talked about proof of work a little bit. But what, in your sense, does Bitcoin get right? And where is it lacking? Okay, so the first thing that Bitcoin got right is to understand that there was the need of a cryptocurrency. And that, in my opinion, they deserve all the success because they said the time is right for this idea. Because very often, it's not enough to be right here to be right at the right time. And somebody got it right there. So hat off to Bitcoin for that. And so what they got right is that it is hard to subvert and change the ledger, to cancel a transaction. It's not impossible. That is very hard. What they did not get right is somehow that it is a great store of value, currency wise. But money is not only a question that you store it and you put under the mattress. Money wants to be transacted. And the transaction bitcoins are very little. So if you want to store value, everybody needs a store of value. Might as well use Bitcoin. I mean, it's the plan. But if you don't look at that for a moment, at least it's a great store of value. And everybody needs a store of value. But most of the time, we want to transact. We want to interact. We don't put the money under the mattress. So we wanted to embed. They didn't get it right. That is too slow to transact. Too few transactions. There's a scalability issue. Is it possible to build stuff on top of Bitcoin that sort of fixes the scalability? I mean, this is the thing you look at. There's a bunch of technologies that kind of hit the right need at the right time and they have flaws, but we kind of build infrastructures on top of them over time to fix it as opposed to getting it right from the beginning. Or is it difficult to do? Well, that is difficult to do. So you're talking to somebody that when I decided to throw my heart in the arena and I decided, first of all, as I said before, I much admire my predecessors. I mean, they got it right, a lot of things. And I really admire for that. But I had a choice to make. Either I patch something that has holes all over the place or I start from scratch. I decided to start from scratch because sometimes it's a better way. So what about Ethereum, which looks like proof of stake and a lot of different innovative ideas that kind of improve or seek to improve on some of the flaws of Bitcoin. Ethereum made another great idea. So they figured out that money and payments are important as they are. They are only the first level, the first stepping stone. The next level are smart contracts. And they were at the vision to say the people will need smart contract, which allow me and you to somehow to transact securely without being shopped around by a trusted third party, by a mediator. By the way, because mediators are hard to find. And in fact, maybe even impossible to find if you live in Thailand and I live in New Zealand, maybe we don't have a common person that we know and trust. And even if we find them, guess what? They want to be paid. So much so that 6% of the world GDP goes into financial friction, which is essentially third party. So the head of right of the world needed that. But again, the scalability is not there. And the system of smart contracts in Ethereum is slow and expensive. And I believe that is not enough to satisfy the appetite and the need that we have for smart contracts. Well, what do you make of just as a small sort of aside in human history, perhaps it's a big one is NFT, the non fungible tokens. Do you find those interesting technically, or is it more interesting on the social side of things? Well, both. I think NFTs are actually great. So you are an artist to create a song or it could be a piece of art. He has many unique representations of a unique piece where there is an artifact of something dreamed up by you and has unique representations that now you can trade. And the important part is that now you have this is not only the NFTs themselves, but the ability to trade them quickly, fast, securely, knowing who owns which rights. And that gives a totally new opportunity for content creators to be remunerated for what they do. But ultimately, you still have to have that scalability, security and decentralization to make it, you know, to make it work for bigger and bigger applications. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be like enabled by it because so much. The interesting thing about NFTs, you know, if you look outside of art is just like money, you can start playing with different social constructs, is you can start playing with the ideas. You can start playing with even like investing. Somebody was talking about almost creating an economy out of like creative people or influencers. Like if you start a YouTube channel or something like that, you can invest in that person and you can start trading their creations. And then almost like create a market out of people's ideas, out of people's creations, out of the people themselves that generate those creations. And there's a lot of interesting possibilities of what you can do with that. I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you're basically creating a hierarchy of value, maybe artificial in the digital world and are trading that. But in so doing are inspiring people to create. So maybe as a sort of our economy gets better and better and better where actual work in the physical space becomes less and less in terms of its importance, maybe we'll completely be operating in the digital space where these kinds of economies have more and more power. And then you have to have this kind of blockchains to the scalability, security, and decentralization. And then decentralization is of course the tricky one because people in power start to get nervous. Absolutely. Once in power, you're always nervous that you'll be supplanted by somebody else. But this is your job. Congratulations, you got the job, the top job, and now everybody wants it. Well, what is your sense about our time and the future hope about the decentralization of power? Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve given that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it's so wonderful to be absolutely powerful? Well, good question. So first of all, I believe that by the way, there is a complex question, Lex, and like all the rest of your questions. I'm so very sorry. It's okay. I am enjoying it. So there are two things. First of all, power has been centralized for a variety of reasons. When you want to get it, it's easier for somebody, even a single person, to grab power. But there is also some kind of a technology, lack thereof, that justified having power. Because in a society in which even communication, never mind blockchain, which is common knowledge, but even simple unilateral communication is hard, it is much easier to say, you do as I say. So there is a little bit of a technology barrier. But I think that now to get to this common knowledge, it is a totally different story. Now we have finally the technology for doing this. So that is one part. But I really believe that by having a distributed system, you have actually a much more stable and durable system. Because not only for corruption, but even for things that go astray, and given a long enough time by a strange version of Murphy's law, whatever goes wrong, goes wrong. And if the power is diffused, you actually are much more stable. If you look at any complex living being, it's distributed. I mean, I don't have somebody who says, okay, tell Silvio now it's time to eat. You have millions of cells in your body. You have billions of bacteria. Exactly. Help me in the guts. We are in a soup that somehow keeps us alive. So strange enough, however, when we design systems, we design them centralized. We ourselves are distributed beings. And when we plan to say, okay, I want to create an architecture, how about I make a pyramid, I put this on the top and the power flows down. And so again, it's a little bit perhaps of a technology problem. But now the technology is there. So that is a big challenge to rethink how we want to organize power in a very large system and distribute a system, in my opinion, much more resilient. Let's put it this way. There was Italian compatriots, Machiavelli, who looked at the time, there was a bunch of small state democratic Republic of Florence and Venice and the other thing. And there was the Ottoman Empire that at the time was an empire and the Sultan was very centralized. And he made a political observation that goes roughly to say, whenever you have such a centralized thing, it's very hard to overtake that former government is centralized. But if you get it, it's so easy to keep the population. While instead these other things are much more resilient. When the power is distributed, it's going to be lasting for a much longer time. And ultimately maybe the human spirit wants that kind of resilience, wants that kind of distribution. It's just that we didn't have technology throughout history. Machiavelli didn't have the computer, the internet. That is certainly part of a reason. Yes. You've written an interesting blog post. If we just take a step out of the realm of bits and into the realm of governance, you wrote a blog post about making Algorand governance decentralized. Can you explain what that means, the philosophy behind that? How you decentralized basically all aspects of this kind of system? Let's start with the philosophy. I really believe that nothing fixed lasts very long. So I really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation. Things change, and we have to be nimble and adjust to change. When I see a lot of a crypto project, I'm actually very proud to say it's fixed in stone. Code is law. Law is code. I verify the code. It will never change. You go, wow. When I'm saying this is a recipe to me of disaster, not immediately, but soon. Just imagine you take an ocean liner, and you want to go, I don't know, from Lisbon to New York, and you set a course, iceberg, no iceberg, tempest, no tempest. It doesn't matter. You need a teal. You need to correct. You need to adjust. By the way, you would design Algorand with the idea that the code was evolving as the needs. Of course, there is a system in which every time there is an adjustment, you must have essentially a vote that right now is orchestrated at 90% of the stake. They say, okay, we are ready. We agree on the next version, and we pick up this version. So we are able to evolve without losing too many components left and right. But I think without evolving, any system essentially becomes aesthetic and is going to shrivel and die sooner or later. That is needed. What you want to do on the blockchain, you have a perfect platform in which you can log your wishes, your votes, your things, so that you have a guarantee that whatever vote you express is actually seen by everybody else. Everybody sees really the outcome, call it a referendum, of a change. And Vete is, in my opinion, a system that wants to live long as to adapt. There is an interesting question about leaders. I've talked to Vitalik Buterin. I'll probably talk to him again soon. He's one of the leaders, maybe one of the faces of the Ethereum project. And it's interesting. You have Satoshi Nakamoto, who's the face of Bitcoin, I guess. But he's faceless. He, she, they. It does seem like in our whatever it is, maybe it's 20th century, maybe it's Machiavellian thinking, but we seek leaders. Leaders have value. Linus Torvalds, the leader of Linux, the open source development a lot. It's not that the leadership is sort of dogmatic, but it's inspiring. And it's also powerful in that through leaders, we propagate the vision. Like the vision of the project is more stable. Maybe not the details, but the vision. And so do you think there's value to, because there's a tension between decentralization and leadership, like in visionaries. What do you make of that tension? SL. Okay. So I really believe that, that's another great question. I think of it, I really believe in the power of emotions. I think the emotion are of a creative impulse of everybody else. And therefore it's very easy for a leader to be a physical person, a real being, and that interprets our emotions. And by the way, these emotions have to resonate. And what is good is that the more intimate our emotions are, the more universal they are, paradoxically. The more personal, the more everybody else somehow magically agrees and feels a bit of the same. And it's very important to have a leader in the initial phase that generates out of nothing something. That is important leadership. But then the true tested leadership is to disappear after you lead the community. So in my opinion, the quintessential leader according to my vision is George Washington. He served for one term, he served for another term, and then all of a sudden he retired and became a private citizen. And two hundred and change years later, we still are, with some defects, but we have done a lot of things right. And we have been able to evolve. That to me is success in leadership. While instead you contrast our experiment with a lot of our experiment. I've done so much so well that I want another four years. And why shouldn't I be only a four and I have another eight? Why should it be another eight? Give me 16 and I will fix all your problems. And then is the type, in my opinion, of failed leadership. Leadership ought to be really lead, ignite, and disappear. And if you don't disappear, the system is going to die with you. It is not a good idea for everybody else. So we've been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency, but is there spaces where this kind of blockchain ideas that you're describing, which I find fascinating, do you think they can revolutionize some other aspects of our world that's not just money? A lot of things are going to be revolutionized is independent of finance. By the way, I really believe that finance is an incredible form of freedom. I mean, if I'm free to do everything I want, but I don't have the means to do anything, that's a bad idea. So I really think financial freedom is very, very important. But you just can say that against you know, censorship, you write something on the chain and now nobody can take it out. That is a very important way to express our view. And then the transparency that you give, because everybody can see what's happening on the blockchain. So transparency is not money. But I believe that transparency actually is a very important ingredient also of finance. Let's put this way, as much as I'm enthusiastic about blockchain and decentralized finance, and we have actually our expression, we're creating this future five, because as much as we want to do, we must agree that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity are really the legal system, the courts. Because we may not think about them and say, oh, the courts are a bunch of boring lawyers. But without them, I'm saying there is no certainty. There is no notion of equality. There is no notion that you can resolve your disputes thing. That's what thrives commerce and things. And so what I really believe that the blockchain actually makes a lot of this trust essentially automatic, but make it impossible to cheat in very way. You don't even need to go to court if nobody can change the ledger. So essentially it's a way of you cannot solve an illegal system that reduces to a blockchain. But what I'm saying, a big chunk of it can actually be guaranteed. And there is no reason why technology should be antagonistic to legal scholarship. It could be actually coexisting and one should start to doing the interest things that the technology alone cannot do. And then you go from there. But I think that essentially blockchain can affect all kinds of our behavior. Yeah. So in some sense, the transparency, the required transparency ensures honesty, prevents corruption. So there's a lot of systems that could use that. And the legal system is one of them. There's a little bit of attention that I wonder if you can speak to where this kind of transparency, there's a tension with privacy. Is it possible to achieve privacy if wanted on a blockchain? Do you have ideas about different technologies that can do that? People have been playing with different ideas. So absolutely. The answer is yes. And by the way, I'm a cryptographer. Right. Okay. So I really believe in privacy and I believe in and I've devoted a big chunk of my life to guarantee privacy, even when it seems almost impossible to have it. And it is possible to have it also in the blockchain too. However, I believe in timing as well. And I believe that the people have the right to understand their system they live in. And right now people can understand the blockchain to be something that cannot be altered and is transparent. And that is good enough. And there is a pseudo privacy for the fact that who knows if this public key belongs to me or to you. And I can, when I want to change my money from one public key, I split it to other public keys, going to figure out which one is Silvio or all of them are Silvio or only one of Silvio. Who knows? So you get some vanilla privacy, not the one I could talk. And I think it's good enough because, and it's important for now that we absorb this stage. Because in the next stage, we must understand the privacy tool rather than taking on faith. When the public starts saying, I believe in the scientists and whatever they say, I swear by them. And therefore, the term is private is private and nobody understands it very well. We need a much more educated about the tools we are using. And so I look forward to deploying more and more privacy on the blockchain, but we are not, I will not rush to it until the people understand and are behind whatever we have right now. So you build privacy on top of the power of the blockchain. You have to first understand the power of the blockchain. Yes. So Algorand is like one of the most exciting, technically at least from my perspective, technologies, ideas in this whole space. What's the future of Algorand look like? Is it possible for it to dominate the world? Let's put it this way. I certainly working very hard with a great team to give the best blockchain that one can demand and enjoy. And they said, I really believe that there is going to be, it's not a winner takes them all. So it's going to be a few blockchains and each one is going to have its own brand and it's going to be great at something. And sometimes it's scalability, sometimes it's your views, sometimes it's a thing. And it's important to have a dialogue between these things. And I'm sure, and I'm working very hard to make sure that Algorand is one of them, but I don't believe that it's even desirable to have a winner takes all because we need to express different things. But the important thing is going to have enough interoperability with various systems so that you can transfer your assets where you have the best tool to service them, whatever your needs are at the time. So there's an idea, I don't know, they call themselves Bitcoin maximalists, which is essentially the bet that the philosophy that Bitcoin will eat the world. So you're talking about, it's good to have variety. Their claim is it's good to have the best technology dominate the medium of exchange, the medium of store of value, the money, the digital currency space. What's your sense of the positives and the negatives of that? So I feel people are smart and it's going to be very hard for anybody to win. And because people want more and more things. There is an Italian saying that translates well, I think. It goes, the appetite grows while eating. I think you understand what he means. So I say, I'm not hungry. Okay, food. Let me try this. So we want more and more and more. And when you find something like Bitcoin, which are already very good things to say, but it does something very well, but it's a static, I mean, store of value. Yes, I think it's a great way for the rest. You know, it would be a sad world if the world in which we are so anchoring down, so defensive that we want to store value and hide it under the mattress. I long for a world in which is open. People want to transact, interact with each other. And therefore, when you want to store value, one, perhaps one chain, where you want to have to transact, maybe is another. I'm not saying that, you know, one chain cannot be store of value or another thing, but I really believe, I believe in the ingenuity of people and in the innovation that is intrinsic to the human nature. We want always different things. So how can it be something invented, whatever it is decades ago, is going to fulfill the needs of our future generations. I'm not going to fulfill my needs, let alone my kids or their kids. We are going to have a different world and things will evolve. So you believe that life, intelligent life, is ultimately about adaptability and evolving. So static loses in the end. Yes. Let me ask the, well, first the ridiculous question. Do you have any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is? Is that even an interesting question? Well, your questions are very interesting. So, and I think, so I would say, first of all, it's not me. Okay. And I can prove it because, you know, if I were Satoshi Nakamoto, I would have not found an algorithm. It takes a totally different principle to approach to the system. But the other thing, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? You know what the right answer is? It's not him or her or them. Satoshi Nakamoto is Bitcoin. Because to me, it's such a coherent proof of work that at the end, the creator and the creation identify themselves. So you say, okay, I understand Michelangelo. Okay. He did the Sistine Chapel. Fine. He did the St. Peter's Dome. Fine. He did the Moses of the Pieta statue. Fine. But besides this, who was Michelangelo? That's the wrong question. It's his own work. That is Michelangelo. So I think that when you look at the Bitcoin is a piece of work that as it defects, yes, like anything human, but it was captivated the imaginations of millions of people as subverted the status quo. And I'm saying, you know, whoever this person of people are, he's living in this piece of work. I mean, it is Bitcoin. The idea of the work is bigger. We forget that sometimes. It's something about our biology likes to see a face and attach a face to the idea when really the idea is the thing we love. The idea is the thing that impact the idea is the thing that ultimately we, you know, Steve Jobs or somebody like that, we associate with the Mac or the iPhone with just everything he did at Apple. Apple, actually the company is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, the man is a pales in comparison to the creation. Correct. And the sense of aesthetics that has brought to the daily lives and very often aesthetic wins in the long, in the long, in the long game. And these are very elegant design product. And when you say, Oh, elegance, very few people care about it. Apparently millions and millions and millions and millions of people do because we are attacked by beauty and these are beautifully designed products. And, and, and, you know, and they've in addition to ever the technological aspect of the other thing. And I think, yes, that is, yeah, as the Stajewski said, beauty will save the world. So I'm, I'm with you on that one. Right. It currently seems like cryptocurrency, all these different technologies are gathering a lot of excitement, not just in our discourse, but in their like scale of financial impact. A lot of companies are starting to invest in Bitcoin. Do you think that the main method of store value and exchange of value, basically money will soon or at some point in the century will become cryptocurrency? Yes. So mind you, as I said, that the notion of cryptocurrency, like any other fundamental human notion has to evolve, but yes. So I think of it, uh, he has a lot of momentum behind it. Um, it's not only static as a visa programmable money as a smart contract. It allows a peer to peer interaction among people who don't even know each other. Right. Uh, and they don't even, therefore I cannot even trust each other just because they never saw each other. So I think it's so powerful that, uh, uh, is going to do this said again, a particular cryptocurrency should develop and cryptocurrency will all develop. But the answer is yes, we are going towards a much more, uh, unless we have a society, a sudden crisis for different reasons, which nobody hopes there's always an asteroid. There's always something, uh, nuclear war and all the existential crisis that we kind of think about, including artificial intelligence. Uh, okay. It's funny. You mentioned that, um, um, Michelangelo and Steve jobs, you know, set of ideas represents the person's work. So we talked about Algorand, which is a super interesting set of technologies, but, you know, he did also win the touring award. You have a bunch of, you have a bunch of ideas that are, you know, seminal ideas. So can we talk about cryptography for a little bit? What is the most beautiful idea in cryptography or computer science or mathematics in general asking somebody who has explored the depths of all? Well, there are a few contenders and, uh, either your work or, uh, or other words, uh, let's leave my work aside and, uh, and, uh, so, but one powerful idea and is, uh, both an old idea in some sense and a very, very modern one. And, uh, in my opinion is this idea of a one way function. So a function that easy to evaluate. So given X, you can compute F of X easily, but given F of X is very hard to go back to X. Okay. Think like breaking a glass, easy. Reconstruct the glass harder. Frying an egg, easy. From the fried egg to go back to the original egg, harder. If you want to be extreme, killing a living being, unfortunately, easy. The other way around, very hard. And so the fact that the notion of a function, whichever a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform an X into F of X, and then from F of X, even though you see the recipe to transform it, you cannot go back to X. That in my opinion is one of the most elegant and momentous notions that there are. And it is a computational notion because of the difficulties in a computational sense. And it's a mathematical notion because we were talking about function. And it's so fruitful because that is actually the foundation of all cryptography. And let me tell you, it's an old notion because very often in any mythology that we think of, the most powerful gods or goddesses are the ones of X and the opposite of X, the gods of love and death. And when you take opposites, they don't just erase one another, you create something way more powerful. And this one, the function is extremely powerful because essentially becomes something that is easy for the good guys and hard for the bad guys. So for instance, in pseudo random number generation, the easy part of the function corresponds, you want to generate bits very quickly. And hard is predicting what the next bit is. It doesn't look the same. One is X f of X going from X f of X to X. What does it do? Predicting bits. By a magic of reductions in mathematical apparatus, this simple function morphs itself into pseudo random generation. This simple function morphs itself in digital signature scheme in which digitally signing should be easy and forging should be and forging should be hard. Again, a digital signature is not going from X to f of X, but the magic and the richness of this notion is that it is so powerful that it morphs in all kinds of incredible constructs. And in both these two opposites coexist, the easy and the hard, and in my opinion is a very, very elegant notion. That simple notion ties together cryptography, and like you said, pseudo random number generation. You have work on pseudo random functions. What are those? What's the difference in those and the generators, the pseudo random number generators? How do they work? Let's go back to pseudo random number generation. First of all, people think that the pseudo random number generation generates a random number. Not true, because I don't believe that from nothing you can get something. So nothing from nothing. But randomness, you cannot create it out of nothing, but what you could do is that it can be expanded. In other words, if you give me somehow 300 random bits, truly random bits, then I can give you 300,000, 300 million, 300 trillions, 300 quadrillions, as many as you want random bits, so that even though I tell you the recipe by which I produce these bits, but I don't tell you the initial 300 random numbers, I keep them secret, and you see all the bits I produced so far, if you were to bet, given all the bits produced so far, what is the next bit in my sequence? Better than 50, 50. Of course, 50, 50, anybody can guess. But to be inferring something, you have to be a bit better. Then the effort to do this extra bit is so enormous that is de facto random. So that is a pseudo random generator, are these expanders of secret randomness, which goes extremely fast. Okay, that said, what is that? Expanders of secret randomness, beautifully put. Okay, so every time somebody, if you're a programmer, is using a function that's not called pseudo random, it's called random usually, you know, these programming languages, and it's generating different, that's essentially expanding the secret randomness. But they should. In the past, actually, most of the library, they used something pre modern cryptography, unfortunately. They would be better served with 300 real seed random number, and then expand them properly, as we know now. But that has been a very old idea. In fact, one of the best philosophers have debated whether the world was deterministic or probabilistic. Very big questions, right? Does God play dice? Exactly. Einstein says it does, it doesn't. But in fact, now we have a language that even at the Albert time was not around, but it was this complex theory of modern complexity based cryptography. And now we know that if the universe has 300 random bits, whether where is random or probabilistic or deterministic, it doesn't matter, because you can expand this initial seed of randomness forever in which all the experiments you could do, all the inferences you could do, all the things you could do, they are, you are not be able to distinguish them from truly random. So if you are not able to distinguish truly random from this super duper pseudo randomness, are they really different things? So many to become really philosophical. So for things to be different, but I don't have in my lifetime, in the lifetime of the universe, any method to set them aside, well, I should be intellectually honest, say, well, pseudo random in this special fraction is as good as random. Do you think true randomness is possible? And what does that mean? So practically speaking, exactly as you said, if you're being honest, that the pseudo randomness approaches true randomness pretty quickly. But is it, maybe this is a philosophical question. Is there such a thing as true randomness? Well, the answer is actually maybe, but if it exists, most probably it's expensive to get. And in any case, if I give you one of mine, you will never tell them apart by any other shape, no matter how much you work on it. So in some sense, if it exists or not, it really is a quote philosophical sense in the colloquial way to say that we cannot somehow pin it down. Do you ever, again, just to stay unphilosophical for a bit, for a brief moment, do you ever think about free will and whether that exists because ultimately free will sort of is this experience that we have, like we're making choices, even though it appears that, you know, the world is deterministic at the core. I mean, that's against the debate, but if it is in fact deterministic at the lowest possible level, at the physics level, how do you make, if it is deterministic, how do you make sense of the difference between the experience of us feeling like we're making a choice and the whole thing being deterministic? So first of all, let me give you a gut reaction to the question. And the gut reaction is that it is important that we believe that there exists free will. And second of all, almost by weird logic, if we believe it exists, then it does exist. Okay. So it's very important for our social apparatus, for our sense of ourselves that it exists. And the moment in which, you know, we so want to, we almost conjure it up in existence. But again, I really feel that if you look at some point, the space of free will seems to shrink. We realize how more and more, how much of our, say, genetic apparatus dictates who we are, why we prefer certain things than others, right, and why we react to noises of music. We really prefer poetry and everything else. We may explain even all this. But at the end of the day, whether it exists in a philosophical sense or not, it's like randomness. If pseudo random is as good as random vis a vis lifetime of the universe, our experience, then it doesn't really matter. Yeah. So, you know, we're talking about randomness. I wonder if I can weave in quantum mechanics for a brief moment. There's a, you know, a lot of advancements on the quantum computing side. So leveraging quantum mechanics to perform a new kind of computation, and there's concern of that being a threat to a lot of the basic assumptions that underlie cryptography. What do you think? Do you think quantum computing will challenge a lot of cryptography? Will cryptography be able to defend all those kinds of things? Okay, great. So first of all, for the record, and not because I think it matters, but it's important to set the record, there are people who continue to contend that quantum mechanics exist, but that's nothing to do with computing. It's not going to accelerate it, at least, you know, very basic, you know, hard computation. That is a belief that you cannot take it out. I'm a little bit more agnostic about it, but I really believe, going back to whatever I said about the one way function. So one way function, what is it? That is a cryptography. So does quantum computing challenge the one way function? Essentially, you can boil it down to does quantum computing challenge the one way function. What is one way function? Easy in one direction, hard in the other. Okay, but if quantum computing exists, when you define what it is easy, it's not easy by a classical computer and hard by a classical computer, but easy for a quantum computer, that's a bad idea. But once easy means it should be easy for a quantum and hard for also quantum. Then you can see that you are, yes, it's a challenge, but you have hope because you can absorb if one computing really realizes and becomes available according to the promises, then you can use them also for the easy part. And once you use it from the easy part, the choices that you have a one way function, they multiply. So, okay, so they particularly candidates of one way function, they not only candidates of one way function, they not be one way anymore, but quantum one way function may continue to exist. And so I really believe that for life to be meaningful, this one way function had to exist. Because just imagine that anything that is becomes easy to do. I mean, what kind of life is it? I mean, so you need that. And if something is hard, but it's so hard to generate, you'll never find something which is hard for you. You want to that there is abundance, that is easy to produce hard problem. That's my opinion is why life is interesting, because pop up really, really speed. So in some sense, I almost think that I do hope they exist if they don't exist, somehow life is way less interesting than it actually is. Yeah, it does. That's funny. It does seem like the one way function is fundamental to all of life, which is the emergence of the complexity that we see around us seem to require the one way function. I don't know if you play with cellular automata. That's just another formulation of. I know, but it's very simple. It's almost a very simple illustration of starting out with simple rules in one way, being able to generate incredible amounts of complexity. But then you ask the question, can I reverse that? And it's just surprising how difficult it is to reverse that. It's surprising, even in constrained situations, it's very difficult to prove anything that it almost, I mean, the sad thing about it. Well, I don't know if it's sad, but it seems like we don't even have the mathematical tools to reverse engineer stuff. I don't know if they exist or not, but in the space of cellular automata, where you start with something simple and you create something incredibly complex, can you take something, a small picture of that complex and reverse engineer? That's kind of what we're doing as scientists here. You're seeing the result of the complexity and you're trying to come up with some universal law that generate all of this. What is the theory of everything? What are the basic physics laws that generated this whole thing? And there's a hope that you should be able to do that, but it gets, it's difficult. Yeah. But there is also some poetry on the fact that it's difficult because it gives us some mystery to life, without which, I mean, it's not so fun. Life is no business fun. Can we talk about interactive proofs a little bit and zero knowledge proofs? What are those? What are those? How do they work? So interactive proof actually is a modern realization and conceptualization of something that we knew was true, that is easy to go to lecture. In fact, that's my motivation. We invented schools to go to lecture. We don't say, oh, I'm the minister of education. I published this book. You read it. This is book for this year, this book for this year. We spend a lot of our treasury in educating our kids and in person, educating, go to class, interact with teacher, on the blackboard and chalk on my time. Now we can have a whiteboard and presumably you're going to have actually this magic pens and a display instead. But the idea is that interactively you can convey truth much more efficiently. We knew this psychologically. It's better to hear an explanation than just to belabor some paper. Same thing. So interactive proofs is a way to do the following. Rather than doing some complicated, very long papers and possibly infinitely long proofs, exponentially long proofs, you say the following. If this theorem is true, there is a game that is associated to the theorem. If the theorem is true, this game, I have a winning strategy that I can win half of the time, no matter what you do. So then you say, well, is the theorem true? You believe me. Why should I believe you? Okay, let's play. If I prove that I have a strategy and I win the first time and I win the second time, then I lose a third time. But I win more than half of the time, or I win, say, all the time if the theorem is true, and at least at most half of the time if the theorem is false, you statistically get convinced. You can verify this quickly. And therefore, when the game typically is extremely fast, so you generate a miniature game in which if the theorem is true, I win all the time, and if the theorem is false, I can win at most half of the time. And if I win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, you can deduce either the theorem is true, which most probably is my case of the week, or I've been very, very unlucky because it's like if I had 100 coin tosses and I got 100 heads. Very improbable. So that is a way. And so this transformation from the formal statement of a proof into a game that can be quickly played, and you can draw statistics how many times you win, is one of a big conquest of modern complexity theory. And in fact, actually has highlighted the notion of a proof as it really gives us a new insight of what to be true means and what truth is and what proofs are. So these are legitimately proofs. So what kind of mysteries can it allow us to unlock and prove? You said truth. So what does it allow us? What kind of truth does that allow us to arrive at? So it enlarges the realm of what is provable because in some sense of the classical way of proving things was extremely inefficient from the verifier point of view. Yes. Right. And so therefore, there is so much proof that you can take. But in this way, you can actually very quickly, in minutes, verify something that is the correctness of an assertion that otherwise would have taken a lifetime to belabor and check all the passages of a very, very, very long proof. And you better check all of them because if you don't check one line, an error can be in that line. And so you have to go linearly through all the stuff rather than bypass this. So you enlarge a tremendous amount what the proof is. And in addition, once you have the idea that essentially a proof system is something that allows me to convince you of a true statement, but does not allow me to convince you of a false statement, and that at the end is proof. Proof can be beautiful, should be elegant, but at the end is true or false. It is possible to prove the truth and it should be impossible or statistically extremely hard to prove something false. And if you do this, you can prove way, way more once you understand this. And on top of it, we got some insight like in this zero knowledge proofs that is in something which you took for granted where the same knowledge and verification are actually separate concepts. So you can verify that an assertion is correct without having any idea why this is so. And so people failed to say, if you want to verify something, you have to have the proof. Once you have the proof, you know why it's true, you have the proof itself. So somehow you can totally differentiate knowledge and verification validity. So totally, you can decide if something is true and still have no idea. Is there a good example in your mind? Oh, actually, you know, at the beginning, we labored to find the first zero knowledge proof. Then we found a second, then we found a third. And then a few years later, actually, we proved a theorem which essentially says every theorem, no matter what about, can be explained in a zero knowledge way. So it's not a class of theorem, but all theorems. And it's a very powerful thing. So we were really, for thousands of years, bought this identity between knowledge and verification had to be hand in hand together, and for no reason at all. I mean, we had to develop a way of technology. As you know, I'm very big on technology because it makes us more human and make us understand more things than before. And I think that's a good thing. So this interactive proof process, there's power in games. Yes. And you've recently gotten into, recently, I'm not sure you can correct me, mechanism design. Yeah. So first of all, maybe you can explain what mechanism design is and the fascinating space of playing with games and designing games. Mechanism design is that you want a certain behavior to arise. If you want to organize a societal structure or something, you want to have some orderly behavior to arise because it is important for your goals. But you know that people, they don't care what my goals are. They care about maximizing their utility. So put it crassly, making money. The more money, the better, so to speak. I'm exaggerating. Self interest in whatever way then. So what you want to do is, ideally, what you want to do is to design a game so that while people play it, so to maximize their self interest, they achieve the social goal and behavior that I want. That is really the best type of thing. And it is a very hard science and art to design these games. And it challenges us to actually come up with solution concepts for a way to analyzing the games that need to be broader. And I think game theory has developed a bunch of very compelling ways to analyze the game, that if the game has the best property, you can have a pretty good guarantee that it's going to be played in a given way. But as it turns out, and not surprisingly, these tools have a range of action like anything else. All these so called the technical resolution concept, the way to analyze the game, like dominant strategy equilibrium, if something comes to mind, would be very meaningful. But as a limited power, in some sense, the games that can be admit to such a way to be analyzed. There's a very specific kind of games and the rules are set, the constraints are set, the utilities are all set. Yes. So if you want to reason, if there is a way, say, that you can analyze a restricted class of games this way, but most games don't fall into this restricted class, then what do I do? When you need to enlarge a way what a rational player can do. So for instance, in my opinion, at least in some of my, I played with this for a few years, and I was doing some exoteric things, I'm sure, in the space that was not exactly mainstream. And then I changed my interest in blockchain. But what I'm saying for a while I was doing. So for instance, to me, is a way in which I design the game, and you don't have the best move for you. The best move is the move that is best for you, no matter what the other players are doing. Sometimes a game doesn't have that, okay, it's too much to ask. But I can design the game such that given the option in front of you say, oh, these are really stupid for me, take them aside. But these, these are not stupid. So if you design the game so that in any combination of non stupid things that the player can do, I achieve what I want, I'm done. I don't care to find the very unique equilibrium. I don't give a damn. I want to say, well, as long as you don't do stupid things, and nobody else does stupid things, good social things outcome arise, I should be equally happy. And so I really believe that this type of analysis is possible and has a bigger radius. So it reaches more games, more classes or games. And after that, we have to enlarge it again. And it's going to be, we're going to have fun because human behavior can be conceptualized in many ways. And it's a long game. It's a long game. Do you have favorite games that you're looking at now? I mean, I suppose your work with blockchain and Algorand is a kind of game that you're basically this mechanism design, design the game such that it's scalable, secure and decentralized, right? Yes. And very often you have to say, and you must also design so that the incentives are, and tell you the truth, whatever little I learned from my venture in mechanism design is that incentives are very hard to design because people are very complex creatures. And so somehow the way we design Algorand is a totally different way, essentially with no incentives, essentially. But technically speaking, there is a notion that is actually believable, right? So that to say people want to maximize their utility. Yes. Up to a point. Let me tell you. Assume that if you are honest, you make a hundred bucks. But if you are dishonest, no matter how dishonest you are, you can only make a hundred bucks and one cent. What are you going to be? I'm saying, you know what? Technically speaking, even that one cent, nobody bothers and say, how much am I going to make by honest? A hundred. If I'm devious and if I'm a criminal, 100 bucks and one cent, you know, I might as well be honest. Okay. So that essentially is called, you know, Epsilon utility equilibrium, but I think it's good. And that's what we design essentially means that, you know, having no incentives is actually a good thing because prevent people from reasoning, how else are you going to gain the system? But why can we achieve an algorithm to have no incentives and in Bitcoin instead, you have to pay the miners because they do a tremendous amount of work. Because if you have to do a lot of work, then you demand to be paid accordingly. Because you, right? But if I'm going to say you have to add two and two equal to four, how much you want me to pay for this? If you don't give me this, I don't add the two and two. I would say you can add two and two in your sleep. You don't need to be paid to add the two and two. So the idea is that if we make the system so efficient, so that generating the next block is so damn simple, it doesn't hit the universe, let alone my computer, let alone take some microsecond of computation, I might as well not being received incentives for doing that and try to incentivize some other part of the system, but not to the main consensus, which is a mechanism for generating and adding block to the chain. Since you're Italian, Sicilian, I also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food. If I said today's the last day you get to be alive, you shouldn't have trusted me. You never know with a Russian whether you're going to make it out or not. Well, if you had one last meal, you can travel somewhere in the world. Either you make it or somebody else makes it. What's that going to look like? All right. If it's one last meal, I must say in this era of COVID, I have not been able to see my mom. My mom was a fantastic chef and had this very traditional food. As you know, the very traditional food are great for a reason, because they survived hundreds of years of culinary innovation. There is one very laborious thing, which is, you heard the name, which is parmigiana, but to do it is a piece of art. So many hours that only my mom could do it. If we have one last meal, I want a parmigiana. Okay. What's the laborious process? Is it the ingredients? Is it the actual process? Is it the atmosphere and the humans involved? The latter. The ingredient like in any other, in the Italian cuisine, believes in very few ingredients. If you take say quintessential Italian recipe, spaghetti pesto. Pesto is olive oil, very good extra virgin olive oil, basil, pine nuts, pepper, clove of garlic, not too much, otherwise you overpower everything. And then to do either two schools of thought, parmesan or pecorino or a mix of the two. I mentioned six ingredients. That is typical Italian. I understand that there are other cuisines, for instance, a French cuisine, which is extremely sophisticated and extremely combinatorial, or some Chinese cuisine, which has a lot of many more ingredients than this. And yet the art is to put them together a lot of things. In Italy is really the striving for simplicity, yet to find few ingredients, but the right ingredients to create something. So in parmigiana, the ingredients are eggplants, tomatoes, basil, but how to put them together and the process is an act of love, labor and love. You can spend the entire day, I'm not exaggerating, but the entire morning for sure to do it properly. Yeah, as a Japanese cuisine too, there's a mastery to the simplicity with the sushi. I don't know if you've seen Giorgio's of sushi, but there's a mastery to that that's propagated through the generations. It's fascinating. You know, people love it when I ask about books. I don't know if books, whether fiction, nonfiction, technical or completely non technical had an impact on your life throughout. If there's anything you would recommend or even just mention as something that gave you an insight or moved you in some way. So, okay. So I don't know if I can comment because in some sense you almost had to be Italian or to be such a scholar, but being Italian, one thing that really impressed me tremendously is the Divine Comedy. It is a medieval poem, a very long poem divided in three parts, hell, purgatory and paradise. Okay. And that is the non trivial story of a middle man gets into a crisis, personal crisis. And then out of this crisis he purifies, makes a catastrophe, purifies himself more and more and more until he's become capable of actually meeting God. Okay. And that is actually a complex story. So you have to get some very sophisticated language, maybe Latin at that point. We are talking about 1200s Italy, in Florence. And this guy instead, he chose his own dialect, not spoken outside his own immediate circle, a Florentine dialect. Actually, Dante really made Italian, Italian. How can you express such a sophisticated thing? And then the point is that these words that nobody actually knew because they were essentially dialect and plus a bunch of very intricate rhymes in which they had to rhyme with things. And it turns out that by getting meaning from the things that rhyme, you essentially guess what the word means and you invent Italian and you communicate it by almost osmosis what you want. It's a miracle of communication. In a dialect, a very poor language, very unsophisticated to express very sophisticated situation. I love it. People love it, Italians and not Italian. But what I got of it is that very often limitations are our strength. Because if you limit yourself at a very poor language, somehow you get out of it and you achieve even better form of communication using a hyper sophisticated literary language with lots of resonance from the prior books so that you can actually instantaneously quote. He couldn't quote anything because nothing was written in Italian before him. So I really felt that limitations are our strength. And I think that rather than complaining about the limitations, we should embrace them because if we embrace our limitation, limited as we are, we find very creative solutions that people with less limitation we have, we would not even think about it. So limitations are kind of superpower if you choose to see it that way. Since you speak both languages, is there something that's lost in translation to you? Is there something you can express in Italian that you can't in English and vice versa maybe? Is there something you could say to the musicality of the language? I mean, I've been to Italy a few times and I'm not sure if it's the actual words, but the people are certainly very, there's body language too. There's just the whole being is language. So I don't know if you miss some of that when you're speaking English in this country. Yes. In fact, actually, certainly I miss it. And somehow it was a sacrifice that I made consciously by the time I arrived. I knew that this, I was not going to express myself at that level. And it was actually a sacrifice because given to you also your mother tongue is Russian. So you know that you can be very expressive in your mother tongue and not very expressive in a new tongue, a new language. And then what people think of you in the new language, because when the precise of expression of things, it generates, it shows elegance or it shows knowledge or it shows as a census or it shows as a caste or education, whatever it is. So all of a sudden I found myself on the bottom. So I had to fight all my way up, back up. But what I'm saying, their limitations are actually our strength. In fact, it's a trick to limit yourself to exceed. And there are examples in history. If you think about Hernan Cortes, he goes to invade Mexico. He has what, a few hundred people with him and he has a hundred thousand people in arms on the other side. First thing he does, he limits himself. He sinks his own ship. There is no return. And at that point he actually manages. That's really profound. I actually, first of all, this inspiring to me, I feel like I have quite a few limitations, but more practically on the Russian side, I'm going to try to do a couple of really big and really tough interviews in Russian. Once COVID lifts a little bit, I'm traveling to Russia and I'll keep your advice in mind that the limitations is a kind of superpower. We should use it to our advantage because you do feel less, like you're not able to convey your wisdom in the Russian language. Cause I moved here when I was 13. So you don't, the parts of life you live under a certain language are the parts of life you're able to communicate. I became a thoughtful, deeply thoughtful human in English. But the pain from World War II, the music of the people that was instilled with me in Russian. So I can carry both of those and there's limitations in both. I can't say philosophically profound stuff in Russian, but I can't in English express like that melancholy feeling of like the people. And so combining those two, I'll somehow. Oh, beautifully said. Thanks for sharing. This is great. Yes. I totally understand you. Yes. You've accomplished some incredible things in the space of science, in the space of technology, in the space of theory and engineering. Do you have advice for somebody young, an undergraduate student, somebody in high school or anyone who just feels young about life or about career, about making their way in this world? So I was telling before that I believe in emotion and my thing is to be true to your own emotion. And that I think that if you do that, you're doing well because it's a life well spent and you are going never tire because you want to solve all these emotional knots that always intrigued you from the beginning. And I really believe that to live meaningfully, creatively, and yet to live your emotional life. So I really believe that whether you're a scientist or an artist even more, but a scientist, I think of them as artists as well. If you are a human being, so you are really to live fully your emotions and to the extent possible, sometimes emotions can be overbearing and my advice is try to express them with more and more confident. Sometimes it's hard, but you are going to be much more fulfilled than by suppressing them. What about love? One of the big ones. What role does that play? That's the bigger part of emotions. It's a scary thing. It's a lot of vulnerability that comes with love, but there is also so much energy and power and love in all senses and in the traditional sense, but also in the sense of a broader sense for humanity, this feeling, this compassion that makes us one with other people and the suffering of other people. All of this is very scary stuff, but it's really the fabric of life. Well, the sad thing is it really hurts to lose it. Yes, that's why the vulnerability comes with it. That's the thing about emotion is the up and the down and the down seems to come always with up, but the up only comes with the down. Let me ask you about the ultimate down, which is unfortunately we humans are mortal or appear to be for the most part. Do you think about your own mortality? Do you fear death? I hope so. Without death, there is no life. At least there is no meaningful life. Death is actually in some sense our ultimate motivator to live a beautiful and meaningful life. I myself felt as a young man that unless I got something that I wanted to do, I don't know why I got this idea of something to say. If I'm not able to say, I would suicide. Maybe it was a way to motivate myself, but you don't need to motivate it because in some sense, unfortunately, death is there. So you better get up and do your thing because that is the best motivation to live fully. Well, what do you hope your legacy is? You mentioned you have two kids. Yes. I really feel that on one side is my biological legacy and that is my two kids and their kids, hopefully. That is one side. The other thing is this common enterprise, which is society. I really feel that my legacy would be better by providing security and privacy. Actually, for me, it's metaphorical to say I want to give you the ability to interact more and take more risks and reach out more for more people as difficult and dangerous as it may seem. But my whole scientific work is about to guarantee privacy and give you the security of interaction. Not only in a transaction, like it would be a blockchain transaction, but that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional problems. I think that these are the problems I want to tackle. Ultimately, privacy and security is freedom. Freedom is at the core of this. It's dangerous. It's like the emotion thing, but ultimately, that's how we create all the beautiful things around us. Do you think there's meaning to it all, this life, except the urgency that death provides and us anxious beings create cool stuff along the way? Is there a deeper meaning? If it is, what is it? Well, meaning of life. Actually, there are three meanings of life. Great. That's great. One, to seek. Two, to seek. And three, to seek. To seek what? Or is there no answer to that? There's no answer to that. I really think that the journey is more important than the destination, whatever that be. I think that is a journey and is, in my opinion, at the end of the day, I must admit, meaningful in itself. We must admit that maybe whatever your destination might be, at the end, we may never get there, but hell was a great ride towards it. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end this, Silvio. Thank you for wasting your extremely valuable time with me today, joining on this journey of seeking something together. We found nothing, but it was very fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you, Alex. It's been really special for me to be interviewed by you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Silvio McCauley, and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens Nutrition Drink, the Information In Depth Tech Journalism website, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Silvio Micali: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Algorand, Bitcoin & Ethereum | Lex Fridman Podcast #168

The following is a conversation with Ryan Hall, his second time in the podcast. He's one of the most innovative scholars of martial arts in the modern era. Quick mention of our sponsors. Indeed hiring website, Audible audio books, ExpressVPN and Element electrolyte drink. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I've gotten a chance to train with Ryan recently and to both discuss and try out on the mat his ideas about grappling and fighting. What struck me is his unapologetic drive to solve martial arts. It reminds me of the ambitious vision and effort of Google's DeepMind to solve intelligence. In Ryan's case, this isn't some out there martial arts guru talk. This is a style of thinking about the game of human chess, of seeking to define the rules and to engineer ways from first principles of escaping the constraints of those rules. This style of thinking is rare, but is ultimately the one that leads to the discovery of new revolutionary ideas. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe to it anywhere or connect with me at Lex Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Ryan Hall. You're known as a systems thinker in martial arts, but you also, I think, are willing to think outside the rules of the game, outside of the system. When you're thinking about strategies of how to solve the particular problem of an opponent, whether that's jiu jitsu or in mixed martial arts, what's your process for doing that, for figuring out that puzzle? I would say, I don't know if I have a specific like A to B to C process for that sort of thing. I try to do my best to appreciate that. I think a lot of the thinking, or maybe not all the thinking, but a lot of great thinking on conflict, on battle, on war, on martial arts has been done already. Not that we don't have to do any sort of background investigation or reassessing of these ideas or axioms that have come down through things like the book of five rings or the art of war, or like von Clausewitz, even anything like that really, but is trying to understand the lessons of the past that I think oftentimes we don't take with us problem solving. We pay lip service. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, a victorious fighter, the great fighter, you know, he knows victory is there, then he seeks battle. Everyone else is looking for victory in battle. Yeah, moving on. And that's why I'm gonna double jab and throw my left hand. And I think a lot of times our actions don't reflect our stated belief structure. And I think that oftentimes you can tell what I believe really, or what my fundamental operating system is based on my actions, whether I'm aware, I have an operating system internally, whether I'm aware of it or not, or certainly whether I'm fully aware of it. So I guess when it comes to strategy, I try to think about how things interact. You mentioned systems thinking, and I try to do my best to understand how systems exist, but I think that systems have a fundamental strength and a fundamental weakness. They work how they work, and that's great, but they're readable. So if you are aware, if I am operating on a system of which you're not really read into, then I think oftentimes I can seem shockingly effective, particularly if my system preys on certain weaknesses that maybe you're given to. But what happens when you've read the same books that I have? I think that a lot of times that makes me deeply predictable. I think about systems in jiu jitsu, and a lot of times people think that they're doing jiu jitsu when in reality they are doing an expression of it. Let's say I'll use, there's the Marcelo Garcia system. There is the current Henzo Gracie system. There's the old Gracie Baja one. There's the Gracie Academy, classic Gracie jiu jitsu. There's the art of jiu jitsu, kind of autos approach. And there's some crossover between a lot of these, but oftentimes I think when it comes to understanding how I'm making decisions and how my opponent is making decisions, I have to appreciate whether or not I'm an end user of something, and I'll use my phone as an example. I was thinking of this the other day, and as an end user of my phone, I can't, I have no idea what it does. Like Edward Snowden comes up and goes, ''Hey guys, you realize your phones are listening to you.'' I'm like, ''Really, what? All right, I believe you.'' And then of course that comes out, but to what extent? I have no idea. What is my phone capable of? I have no idea. I can mess with the font though. I really like blue screens, not purple screens. So as an end user, I can change some of the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with the underlying source code of it all or how it functions. The same way in my car, I'm an end user of my car. If I do this with the steering wheel, it goes. If I push on the gas, it goes. I know how to fix it when it's out of gas. I know how to fix it when it's out of oil. And I know how to fix it when a flat tire comes. But short of that, or actually beyond that, I have nothing. So I think that oftentimes, I've been around in jiu jitsu long enough to encounter a new wave of good grapplers. And it's very, very interesting sometimes how they're running systems they don't realize they're running. Like, I'm like, oh yeah, I trained at Marcelo Garcia's Academy for a long time. And a big fan of Marcelo's was a student there. Encountered a lot of the auto style jiu jitsu a number of years ago. Been very, very deep into foot locking and leg attacks and whatnot for a long, long time. I understand your system better than you do, or I may. And let's say you understand my system better than I do. That would be a huge issue. That was something that I encountered a long time ago, trying to come up in jiu jitsu where I was trying to utilize systems that were created by, let's say Hoffa Mendez or someone else. And I'm basically trying to do what you're doing. I'm just not doing as good of a version of it. So not only am I not doing it well, but I'm entirely predictable. And I think that that can be a big issue. So to come back, I think of systems a lot of times now in terms of, particularly like end user type of systems, like an iPhone is a really, really fast way for me to be able to do all sorts of things. If you were to take it from me, I couldn't recreate any of that. So you want to be more the NSA and less the end user. Exactly, exactly. That way I'm listening to you. You want to be the NSA of combat. That's right, we're watching UP. But basically, I guess what I would come back and say is if you understand how things interact on a fundamental level and what type of games exist and what type of interactions exist, then you can transcend a lot of the systems. It's almost like a cook versus if I can make certain things in the kitchen, but I am not a chef. You could give me a bunch of ingredients and I could probably cook not well, but a couple of different things. But a master chef would be aware of the implications of all of the things that they're doing, extra time in the oven, less time in the oven, putting this flavoring or spice in, what you're doing with various things. And also they could turn all of these ingredients into Chinese food. They could turn all these ingredients into Italian food and they could turn all these Italian food ingredients into chicken Parmesan or it could turn into lasagna. But they're not limited to a specific thing because they have knowledge of how food interacts, what it does to create taste, what it does to create texture. So to come back, let's take rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors is built on the idea of a couple of different things. Or actually, I'll tell you what, can I ask you a question? What's your favorite dinosaur? On the same, on three, we'll go. One, two, three. T. Rex. So me too, man, we're gonna be best friends. So it's, okay, so what's the first question when you say, hey, let's play rock, paper, scissors? It's like, hey, is it rock, paper, scissors or rock, paper, scissors, shoot? And you're like, rock, paper, scissors, shoot. You're like, okay. Because if we go rock, paper, scissors, shoot, and I'm like, oh man, I got lucky and I won. Imagine I won 100 times in a row. Yeah. It'd be luck, it'd be luck if I was honestly doing that. But now let's say, for instance, I go on rock, paper, scissors and you go on shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Here comes the rock, right? If you lose, whose fault is it? It's yours. This is built on a parody thing where I don't get to pick second. If I get to pick second, it's like being able to investigate your background before going to meet you. And then I'm like, oh, hi. Oh, I too love the New Jersey, you know, the New Jersey Nets, which is a statement that no one in their right mind would ever make when I was growing up. So anyway, you'd have to have personal knowledge of somebody. So anyway, to come back, if you understand how games are structured, you can start to realize that there's huge gaps and huge holes in a lot of the thinking behind all of it. And if you can create the illusion of choice, I'll play one more if you don't mind. This is one of my favorite ones. I do this in class all the time. Have you seen this before? No. Okay, may I ask you some questions please? Sure. Okay, fantastic. I'm scared. Oh, there's, everybody wins. Don't worry. All right. So could you please? I win. Could you please pick three fingers and tell me what they are? Your thumb. Okay. Your pinky. Okay. And your middle finger. Okay. So could you please pick two fingers? Your middle finger and your pinky. Okay, could you please pick one finger? I'll go with the middle finger. Woo hoo. Okay, could you please pick one finger? Pinky. Okay, let's play again. Can you pick one finger, please? Your middle finger. Okay, can you pick one finger, please? Your thumb. Yeah, your pinky. Okay, now pick two more fingers, please. Your middle finger and your ring finger. Okay. Could you please pick one more finger? Damn it. So. I thought that enhanced the illusion of choice. It's the illusion of choice. If I'm asking the questions, provided I ask the right questions, there can be no correct answer. Doesn't mean that, I mean, ultimately, if that's what you wanted, let's say, like I thought I was guiding you to something I wanted, it turns out that was the outcome you wanted. Now I'm gonna ask the wrong questions. I might not get what I wanted, so. Oh, by the way, sorry to interrupt. For people that might be just listening to this, that no matter what trajectory we took through that decision tree that Ryan was presenting, it was always ending up with a middle finger, ironically enough. I was surprised. So, and. All of us were surprised, and we're both winners. Yeah, we all, everyone was. I felt like a winner. All right, so now I'm gonna, now I'll ask some different questions, if you don't mind. Can you please pick two fingers to put down? Your middle finger and your pinky. All right, sorry. Oh, that's so awkward. That's like the worst finger positions. Okay, can you please pick, wait a minute. That's, oh, hold on. Yeah. Well, what if you picked two other fingers to put down? Your thumb and your pinky. Okay, my thumb and my pinky. Can you please pick two fingers to put down? Well. Whatever two you like. Okay, your middle finger and your pointy finger. Ah, okay, can you pick two fingers to put down? What's the name? It's index finger. Index finger. Why did I call it the pointy finger? Pointy, it's the pointy one. That's the one we usually point. It's weird to point with the ring finger. Sorry, what? Two more to put down, please. The middle finger and the ring finger. Ah, man. What if you pick my ring finger and my index finger? Yeah. Aha, woohoo, I win. So even though I'm asking the questions, it's not impossible that I arrive at a good outcome for me, but it's no longer guaranteed. I went from a situation where I literally can't lose. Yeah, it's pretty low probability. Right, super low probability. And the second you realize what I'm doing, you would never let me win because the ball's truly in your court. So I guess that's kind of what I'm fundamentally trying to put into play almost all the time. Can I ask the right set of questions? Can I develop the ability skills wise, understanding wise, and then discipline wise, and then have the courage and the constitution and the discipline necessary, the patience necessary to ask the proper questions and wait for the proper answers? And if I can, assuming the perfect world, I win, period. Yeah, so does that make sense? Yeah, that totally makes sense. So I don't know if you know sort of the more mathematical discipline of game theory. There's something called mechanism design. So game theory is this field where you model some kind of interaction between human beings. You could model grappling that way. You can model nuclear conflict between nations that way. And you set up a set of rules and incentives and then use math to predict what is likely outcome depending over time based on the interaction given those rules. Mechanism design is the design of games. So like the design of systems that are likely to lead to a certain outcome. And so what you're suggesting is you want to discover systems whose decision tree, all the possible things that could happen, feel like there's choice being made, but ultimately one of the parties doesn't have any choice in what the actual final outcome is. You're making them feel like they're playing a game too. So it's not like you don't feel trapped. It's kind of like. Well, the best traps, you don't look very threatening. So I'm like, oh, I'll walk over there. I guess wouldn't that, I guess that's kind of an interesting thing. If a lion, when does a lion roar? It's an interesting thing when you watch like lions hunting. Don't roar when they hunt. They want to, when they want to move you back, they do stuff like that. When they actually want to come and get you, they're pretty slinky. It's like water covered. It's like furry water. And I guess like when you keep that in mind, it's funny how, like for us a hobby actually, a brilliant guy, like one of my MMA coaches and the head coach at TriStar, he brought this up one time. I thought it was a really salient point. Said, let's say we have a million person bracket. Impossibly huge. Like Frank Dukes went in the Kumite level huge bracket. He claimed to knock out like 250 consecutive people. And you're like, that is all of Hong Kong was in that thing. And everyone kept their mouth shut. But anyway, that's pretty cool. But to come back a little improbable, pretty cool. So let's say for instance, like there's no cheating going on, no cheating going on and we're flipping coins, right? Someone is gonna have an unbroken string of victory through that bracket, which is pretty insane. How many consecutive like toss ups this person won. And then at the end of it all, imagine like aliens show up and we go, hey, they wanna flip a coin for whether or not Earth, whether or not Earth gets to continue. They'd be like, oh, I'll do it. I'm good at this. That would be tempting as a person to do. You're like, I'm a lucky guy. Are you sure? Maybe, I mean, maybe effectively you are. We could argue that effectively you're incredibly lucky. But basically is that an actual ability? Is that like a perk in a video game or is that just this thing that happened? So anyway, how many times are someone, you could go through an entire career, particularly in a fight sport. Well, let's say you get 15 knockouts and 15 toss up scenarios. Cause you see that happening all the time in the fight game, a toss up scenario. It's not like you're mounted on me and that's not a toss up scenario. Many, many, many, many, many striking scenarios. A lot of grappling ones, but tons of striking scenarios are dead toss ups. And somebody wins by knockout. They win five times in a row. Then they lose a couple of times in a row. We go, what happened? You're like, what do you mean what happened? They were always flipping the coin. And then they win five more and they go, ah, back on track. Can you imagine that? You're flipping a coin. I'm like heads, heads, heads, heads, tails. What? Tails, tails, heads again. Oh man, I'm back on it. I'm flipping good now. That's basically what's going on. I think the vast majority of the time and then humanity's tendency to see a sign in almost anything, it starts to present itself. And then we build a narrative in our mind to convince ourselves that we're in some sort of control. When in reality, I was in a marginal situation at best the whole time. Yeah, without having much control, without having a deep understanding of the system. The same story is told in the stock market. With many of these distributed human systems, we start telling narratives and start seeing patterns without understanding actually the system that's generating these patterns. So if we can see the system, that's incredibly valuable, but then you go, well, what system is above all of the systems? And I guess maybe physics, maybe something like game theory explains these things with like, I guess what are the, what aspects of the system can I put my hands on that I can touch and understand? And what am I missing? What's going on in the world all around me to continue to lean on Dune that I don't have, you talk to a blind person about the world, about the site and talk to someone that doesn't have everyone who's got coronavirus now, so no one can taste or smell. They're like, this is delicious, like, is it? So anyway, you know, again, what senses am I missing or what understanding am I missing that's preventing me from seeing the dots connect in the world all around me? And I think sometimes if we are oftentimes at least personally, I've screwed this up a lot. I'm so nose deep in the trench of trying to understand what I'm doing that I can't take a step back and realize, you know, that I'm in a forest, not just headbutting a tree. And I may be doing both, maybe both, two things should be true at once. But so I would say when it comes to strategy, trying to understand that, but then also you go, well, okay, well, how can, that sounds cool, but how can you actually do that? And then I'd say, that's a really good question because if I imagine I say, man, I should fight like Steven Thompson, I should fight like Wonderboy, it's like, good idea, go do that. I'm like, not the guy. I would fight like Khabib Nurmagomedov if I could. You know, it seems to work. So anyway, you go, well, what if I could develop, what if I could take my time developing skills so that when these strategies become apparent, they are executable to you. You actually have the ability to like, in or to again, to be the person in the arena, to be the person required, whereas there's plenty of great ideas like dunking a basketball is a fantastic idea. Alas, for me, unless there's a small trampoline nearby, I'm not the guy. But that doesn't make it any less good of an idea. I just haven't developed the ability or I lack the ability. So anyway, I think a lot of times, at least when I watch people in fighting, I'll use an example. We're so concerned with trying to win early on rather than develop skills that I'm going like, well, what's the best way to fight with my current set of skills? And usually the path forward is like the barbarian route, like you put on the one ring, take the damage you need to take to hit that guy. And that was something I realized very early on in my MMA career was like, I'm not that good at striking at that time, not a world class striker now, but I'm way better at striking than I'm given any credit for because it helps people sleep at night, I think. But I'm serious. But... Yeah, yeah, you're always introduced as like this master grappler. I'm like, that's nice of them to say that. Maybe I'm not that good at grappling. We haven't even seen that. But the funny thing is where I'm like, just because people almost go like, well, Lex, see, you're really good at this, but you gotta understand, we're equal, man. I'm good at this other thing. Maybe you're really good at what you do and I'm just mediocre at what I do. That's also possible. So there's plenty of people that define themselves as a striker that do that just because that's for lack of other options. It's not because they're really good striker. I'm a grappler. I was a grappler as a blue belt. Not really. So anyway, I guess to come back, if I'm constantly going, how can I win with what I've got right now? I think oftentimes I never take the time to develop the skills that I wanna develop and I also never take the time to develop the strategies that I wanna develop. And that has actually been a one big blessing of fighting someone frequently, which has been really frustrating as a result of injuries and time away and some of those people being hesitant to get in the game. But it gives you so much time to be out of the trenches and focus on developing your abilities so that now it's almost like developing money like you mentioned the stock market that you can now put in. Imagine you told me Bitcoin was a great idea five years ago and I had eight bucks. Man, if someone told me Bitcoin was a great idea five years ago and I had 50K, I'd be like, oh my God, I'd be sleeping in my bed of money that I would then set on fire later so they had just to do it. So due to all the injuries, you've been mining Bitcoin all this time and now you're a rich man. Well, no, actually someone told me I was trying to mine for Bitcoin, actually like in a cave. And then I found out recently that it's actually, mining is like a figure of speech. You misunderstood. Not like a literal thing that you do. But I mean, in my defense, I only know what I know. English language is difficult. It is, it really is. Next time talk to me, I'll explain. Russian is more, is a rich language. You should learn, you should learn Russian. I'll help you out. I believe you, thank you. Can you do a whirlwind overview of your career in MMA leading up to this point with the injuries and the undefeated record? And then what's next since we're on the topic? I did my first fight as a blue belt and I've been training for about a year and a half. I did nine Jiu Jitsu tournaments in 10 weekends or maybe eight Jiu Jitsu tournaments in 10 weekends prior to my first fight in April 2006. I got punched in the face a whole bunch. I didn't realize it was a professional fight and found that out like the day beforehand. That was great. Thanks, coach. It was in Atlantic City where another place no one ever goes on purpose. So that wasn't great. I got into three, actually three car accidents in the preceding 36 hours before the fight. I had my car totaled. I wasn't driving for any of them. That was great. It was 2006? It was 2006, yeah. You were a blue belt? Yeah, yeah, I've been training for about a year and a half. So you're a blue belt. You're getting, I mean, if you haven't lived, if you haven't gotten punched in the face in Atlantic City. That's true. I mean, I would have loved to have it happen for different reasons. But yeah, well, what's funny is I remember getting punched in the face a bunch, trying to do inverted guard. I won one round, lost two rounds, definitely lost the fight. So you went for inverted, sorry to interrupt. You went for inverted guard. Can you tell the story of that fight real quick? Yeah, sure. It was three three minute rounds, which is not a professional fight length, although I don't know if professional fight length would have been any better. It's just more time to get punched. But I found out partway through, I was like, I remember walking back to my corner in the first round, I'm like, yeah, this guy can't hurt me. And he's like, yeah, my corner was my friend, Tom, and then someone else. And then he's like, yeah, I would still encourage you to stop blocking so many punches with your face. I'm like, that's a good idea, Tom, I appreciate that. I'm gonna try that. Anyway, I remember I was not allowed to up kick. So I'm like, great. I had no martial arts skills, really at all. But if I had anything at all, it was jiu jitsu. It was very, very little jiu jitsu. But definitely no wrestling, definitely no striking. I was basically a magnet for punches. So that was your time, roughnecking out in Atlantic City as we all do once in a while. Can we fast forward to when you're actually dominating the world as a black belt? Well, actually, it's funny, because I took a little bit of money that they're like, hey, we're paying you. I'm like, really? It's like Bukowski stories with Ryan Hall. Well, then I went to the casino. I went to whatever, like the Tropicana that was right there, the casino, because that was a boardwalk hall. I'm like, you know what, man? This has been a not great evening. I'm gonna win it back. This will be great. 15 minutes later, they had all the money that I had from the fight was gone. I just remember walking out of the casino super pissed. And I don't know what I was thinking. I'm not good at gambling. This was not gonna make my night better. I just thought that there was gonna be some sort of cosmic balancing, and maybe it was the cosmic balancing all at once for things I'd done in the past. Longer term, though, the balancing. We'll see. I hope so. We're all dead in the end, though. That is true. Time will get us all, yeah. Well, so that was the first one, and that was when I realized I'm terrible at MMA, but I like it. I should just stop this until I one day learn how to actually grapple, much less learn how to fight. But I remember there was this guy named Dave Kaplan, who's the reason my ears are all messed up, who was on the Ultimate Fighter and got punched in the face and knocked out by Tom Lawler, who I'll always appreciate for doing that. But anyway. Dave or Tom? I appreciate Tom. I appreciate Dave, too. Dave was great. Dave was just a huge bully, and used to, not completely unmercifully, but relatively unmercifully beat the crap out of me. And anyway. Well, the ears look good, so. I appreciate that. I tell people it's a tumor that I got, and if they want in on a class action lawsuit with AT&T, they should send me an email. But anyway. Well, you're very financially savvy. Very good. No, I just give the impression. Dave basically said, hey, don't worry, man. You're never gonna be good at MMA. And you're never gonna be good at grappling, either, but even if you are good at grappling, which, in my opinion, you will never be, you will never be good at fighting. And I said, Dave, if I do nothing else in my life, I'm gonna keep training until I can make you pay for that. And now that I can make him pay for that really easily, he doesn't train anymore. But I love Dave. Dave's awesome. He actually won the singing beat. What an interesting dude. Super interesting guy. But anyway. Virginia, like, speaks a couple languages. Super interesting guy. Like, shockingly good at Jeopardy, too. Not that I'm any good, but still shockingly good at Jeopardy. So anyway, years later, met Faraz Zahabi. Actually, John Danaher, I met John Danaher, and he put me in touch with Faraz Zahabi. I started training at TriStar. I immediately loved working with Faraz and learning under Faraz. Started training at TriStar. And I did my first real professional MMA fight as someone that actually does, had practiced a little bit prior in, I think, August, 2012. And that was against a guy, he was four and five at the time. So, you know, had some experience, good kind of like first go for me, honestly. And I won that fight by TKO. And then it was a little bit of a time off. And then I did another fight against a tough guy named Magid Hamo. He was five and two at the time. I think he was three and I was amateur. So, you know, a good little bit of fighting experience. Won that one in the first round of Iron Rear Naked Choke. And then started to experience difficulty getting fights at that point. You know, I... Were you continuously introduced as like the master of grappling, the submission? At least that was my thing. I don't know if I was... Is that was the source of the fear for people? I think so, because, I mean, I definitely wasn't much at striking at that point. You know, I definitely am a lot, I like to think I'm pretty hard to hurt, although I try not to lean on that. And I played baseball for like 16 years, so I can hit things pretty hard. I just wasn't able to, I recognized pretty early on that I had no idea how to actually hit things hard without becoming hitable myself. So I think that's kind of the big thing is a lot of times, like we almost were mentioning before, if you try to go and get people too early, you can hit them if they're not that good, but you're going to get hit yourself. So you're making, you're basically making a wager. You're making a trade of your own life for the ability to hit them. When you watch guys like Israel Adesanya, Floyd Mayweather, Steven Thompson, Conor McGregor, when he's fighting really well, it's not a trade. They're not, you're hitting them and they're hitting you. It's, they're hitting you, but it takes years and years and years and years to be able to learn how to do that. Ton Lee is another great example of that. You know, my closest training partner, one of my best friends, and currently now one champion, one championship in Asia, the champion of the featherweight, or I guess lightweight featherweight, 155 over there now. And he recently defeated Martin Wynn in a really great fight. And Ton knocked him out, long time champion. And Ton doesn't let you hit him. He doesn't let you touch him. I feel so fortunate to have met guys like Steven and Ton to go early on in career and go, holy moly, I can't even, it's not even like, oh, you'll let me walk over and find you. It's like fighting a ghost that periodically shows up with a hammer and smokes you in the melon and then disappears into the ether again. So the way they approach the fighting game is thinking, how can I attack without being hit? So every strategy, every idea you have about what you're going to do has to do with like that minimizing the returns. Absolutely. I mean, that's what all good fighting is done. All poor fighting, you know, throughout the course of history, most generals, whether they're, so I read, or, you know, they did battles by attrition. You know, it's like, yeah, man, I've got 150 guys. You've got 50. You're like, yeah, if 60 of my guys die killing your 50, like, that's great for me. But that's not so great for the 60 guys that died. You know, I hope it's worth it. So when you realize that not only, you're not just Kobe Bryant and you're Phil Jackson too, you got to do everything. You know, if you've got to run across the beach in Normandy, so be it. But that better be, you should have, we make sure we thought this through and there's like, hey, there's no way we can like, you know, walk around the side, huh? Because oftentimes there is, and I think a lot of times there's a lot of incentives in professional fighting too, for people to want to do that. And we come up with all sorts of, well, I'm trying to be exciting. Are you? Is that really what you came here to do? Cause I came here to win. And I think that anyone that's really successful came there to win. And if it ends up being exciting, well, that's fantastic. I hope that people enjoy watching something and that's great, but that's a qualitative assessment anyway. You know, you want to also be able to, you know, live the rest of your life. I think it's easy, you know, I'll use Meldrick Taylor. I'm a big boxing fan. Meldrick Taylor was an excellent fighter, came this close to a world title and was stopped with like, he was in a fight that he was winning with seconds remaining, literally seconds remaining. And they probably could have just let it go and he would have been world champion. And it was brutal. If you ever watched legendary nights like a HBO boxing show, it's great, but it's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking. And also like the beating that he absorbed in that fight changed him for the rest of his life. And also, you know, don't think he'd never been hit before, but it was one of those where you go, it's all fun and games until you can't remember your name at age 44 years old. And I didn't come here, what did Patton saying? Nobody wins a war by dying for his country. You make the other poor bastard die for his. And I think that that's kind of what we're shooting for. And, you know, the lionization of absorbing damage and that not being a big deal, like you hear that all the time. So and so can take shots that would put a lesser fighter down. What does that even mean? You know, like, so let me get this straight. Your ability to absorb damage is a part of you. I mean, I guess that, don't get me wrong, that is an attribute that's nice to have if you need it. But there's plenty of people that actually have really porous defense that are just very, very difficult to hurt for whatever reason. That's a fascinating fighter's perspective on the thing. I mean, the story that is inspiring and I know it goes against the artistry of fighting is when you have taken the damage to still rise up and be able to defeat the opponent. So it's, but that's a flip side of a basically you failing to defend yourself properly, right? I agree. But let's say for, I think it's a triumph, that's a triumph of humanity. That's a triumph, that's amazing. To witness such a thing is unbelievable. But you still go, this is, there is a cost here. It's like, I've been fortunate enough to spend some time working with the military and I've been like around and read Medal of Honor citations, they're unbelievable. Like you read the story and you're like, it'll floor you. But it's still a cost and you don't wanna be paying that cost a long time. And most of the time the cost was everything. And then sometimes you go, hey, yeah, the value here, it's worth everything. It's like, I defend your family, defend your country under certain circumstances. And if that point is extension of your family, you're like, hey, this is worth it. To casually throw your life away or throw your health away, it's foolish. There's nothing great about that. And like you said, it's still an amazing thing to see, but. But it's also amazing to see you not take damage as the Floyd Mayweather, it's the artistry of like not being hit. And I wonder if maybe that's why people don't resonate with Floyd as much, is obviously Muhammad Ali was such a time and place, a great man for so many different reasons. Although it was funny to remember like there were times when he wasn't very popular. We love him now because of time of context, time to move away from some of the nonsense he had to deal with. But we got to see him struggle. And also he had unbelievable sacrifice, both in and out of the ring, that we all got to witness. We've never really seen Floyd struggle like that. And granted, obviously Floyd isn't like a civil rights figure like Muhammad Ali was, it's different time, different place, and he's a different man. But basically, I wonder if part of the thing that made everyone think of Muhammad Ali as the greatest, in addition to, of course, the unbelievable things that he did out in the world and the stands that he made, we saw him struggle in the ring. It's almost, it's humanizing. You know, it's weird when people respect Khabib, but again, we saw GSP lose and GSP came back stronger. Khabib is amazing. But I wonder how people feel about him longterm. Not like they won't think of him as amazing and great. And he's been a respectable person and champion. But the time, he hasn't had to fall, if that makes sense. And also coupled with Ali had a way of being poetic about sort of the way he was in the ring, sort of being able to explain the artistry that he, I mean, there's like joking as being playful, but really he was able to describe the flow, like a butterfly sting like a bee. Like he was able to actually talk about his strategy without talking, without crossing that line into the Floyd Mayweather, when you're just talking about money and just talking shit. That's true. Actually Conor McGregor, when he's not talking shit, it's pretty good at like talking about the art of the martial, like the first mug guy. And I wish Khabib did the same. Actually from like the Setia brothers, there's a few, there's a culture of like being poetic about like being scholars and also bards or whatever, the poets of the game. And Khabib was more like just simple and he lets his actions speak, which is great too. It's a cool thing in its own way. Yeah, it's great. But it's nice when you can tell stories and that's probably why Ali was the great. Catch me up to, you went to three fights, I think undefeated, BJ Penn, we talked about last time you defeated BJ Penn. That's an incredible accomplishment, but you fought a lot of really tough guys. When was your last fight? And then catch me up with the injuries. A lot of people kept more and more and more were unwilling to fight you. Yeah, that's been, that was why I was out for two years following the Gray Maynard fight between the fighting Gray and BJ and the Gray Maynard fight was actually one I'm really proud of because Gray was very tough. He's very big, very strong, very experienced. I had only five fights at the time and I didn't have a lot of skills. I don't get to fight Gray with what I have today. I had to fight Gray with what I had in December, 2016. And that, it really took a lot of discipline, a lot of focus, a lot of challenge, to stay the course, to do what I needed to do in that fight and to win in ultimately dominating fashion, just not in the dominating, obvious sense that you see when someone runs across and just does that to somebody, but that wasn't on the list for me at that time. So that was an interesting one, but the time away again was very frustrating. That was incredibly difficult. Before that fight? After that fight, well, because I beat Artem Lobov in the final of the Ultimate Fighter and Artem is another guy that's tough, a lot of experience and he's a funny guy and he said some things on the internet, so he gets a lot of heat for that. But he just knocked out three of my teammates. I'm like, he put a couple of people in a pretty rough shape at the end of that. So he was doing well and that was a tough fight. Again, if I got to go back and fight that fight now, it would be not competitive at all. I mean, it wasn't competitive at that time, but it was a compelling phase. It wasn't close, but it was competitive. So you were improving and growing fast. Yeah, and it was nice to have time away. I wish I'd had more time in the ring, but again, I'd only been doing MMA for three years at that time. So the improvement from doing what, the Bitcoin mining was overriding the ring rust. I think so. I don't really believe in ring rust, if I'm honest. I can understand why people could feel a certain way, but if anything, it's almost like you just kind of forget what competition's like and you realize like, oh, you feel butterflies or something like that and you go, oh my God, this is different versus no, that's just your body getting ready to perform. It's okay, it's normal. How do you not have ring rust? I think I try to practice performing no matter what, whether it's singing karaoke and I'm very good, but like anything, you name it, talking in front of people. You embrace the butterflies. Yeah, it's almost like, I remember my last fight, I'm just staring at the wall and I'm like, huh, I guess I'm gonna fight in a couple of minutes. I mean, of course we all heard the phrase, like you can never walk in the same river twice because even if the river's the same, you're a different man. That's, I think it's a really important thing to understand because at various points in my martial arts career, I've thought, oh man, how should I feel? I remember when I used to do well in competition, I would feel, I would think these thoughts, listen to this song, think about this. I would feel a certain way. And then if you don't feel that way, I would start to become stressed because I was self inflicted versus going, you'll feel how you feel. Your job is to show up with what you have on the day, do your absolute best. It's like, I will never quit. I can be sure of that. I didn't say I can't be beat. I can definitely be beat. I could have lost every single fight that I've ever had, but I control my effort and I control my attitude. And that's, I will do my very best, execute my game plan and the event's not working. If I have to, I'll put my hands up and walk dead forward. If I need to, it's somebody, we hope that that's not where it goes, but like again, that humanizing moment where you're shooting for like just the inner, like the inner, you sacrifice the outer and all you have left is will, and you hope it doesn't happen. But if it does, you'll be there. But I guess to come back, like the extra periods of time in between fights, I think was valuable because it was deeply challenging. It was incredibly, it was heartbreaking sometimes if I'm honest, man. It's like, I didn't want to. It's just waiting. Oh my God, dude. Is there politics involved? There's a. Sometimes, you know, like I, you know, it's every single time you step into the ring, nothing's guaranteed. It's, you could be hurt. You could hurt somebody. You could win. You could lose, you know, throwing away, just like I said, throwing away your healthier life cheaply makes no sense for anyone. And, you know, having demonstrating some degree of temperance is not cowardly either. I mean, but again, if you wait too long, you have nothing. So I guess like I was trying and always being, I'm always open to fighting the absolute best people possible. I'm never turning down fights ever. You know, if some random jabroni decides that he wants to fight, I'm like, go away. If I wanted to just fight randoms, I would just start standing on the table at Denny's and start yelling. And I'm sure it would have, you know, some people would be willing to indulge me. But, you know, you want to fight, you know, meaningful opponents, challenging opponents, and I know who and where they are. And sometimes they're so well. You did fight in Atlantic City. I did. So the Denny's, but you put the Denny's behind you. I did. And, you know, I'll be honest, if I'd have stood up after that fight, I don't know if I was in great shape to expect to win in the other fights that evening, but I could have tried it. I'm sure there were some takers in the crowd, particularly after they watched me fight, they're like, yeah, I'll fight that guy. So, okay, so when was the last fight that you had? That was Darren Elkins. That was six months or seven months after the BJ fight, which is great because it's, you know, I love maybe five really tough, very tough opponent, very tough guy, super tough dude. And that was in July, 2019. And then right when I was about to fight. So you were ready to fight regularly after that. Yeah. You were trying to find a fight. Yeah. And we got Ricardo Llamas, so no one else, none of the, I was ranked in the top 15 at that point. And then people didn't want to fight. We were struggling to find an opponent. Then Ricardo Llamas, a great, you know, former title challenger, you know, MMA, you know, really great history in MMA, recently retired, but we were supposed to fight in, I think May, March, March, May of 2020. And then coronavirus happened. And so that scrapped the whole show, you know, training. We were just scrambling to try to keep the gym alive and take care, you know, I have five or six full, five, six, I think five full time employees that I, you know, they're my responsibility. I have to, their livelihood is in my hands and it's, they'd be irresponsible of me to not take that seriously. So anyway, we were able to navigate through that time. And then we were able to reschedule the Llamas fight. And that was in August of last year. And I got a, a medical like flag, like, oh, hey, you like, you, you, you have like a medical condition that we need to look into when I got pulled from the fight. And I immediately was concerned because of course, any serious medical condition you want to go, oh man, well, I guess I would like to look at that. Yeah, it turns out it was a giant false positive. And, you know, we find that out, you know, all of five weeks later and you go, you gotta be kidding me. That's frustrating. And then we're still waiting for a fight, waiting for a fight, waiting for a fight, waiting for a fight. People won't sign up. Asked for a number of different opponents, basically said, Hey, I'm willing to fight anybody that's, that's tough and moving forward. Finally got a, you know, a great opponent in Denny Gay for, I guess it would have been this, this March. And then I was training in January, working on working on some stuff. I was out training with Raymond Daniels in, in California, Raymond's amazing, unbelievable, you know, kickboxing, karate style kickboxer, fantastic martial artist, great teacher, great training partner and good friend. And, you know, just really bad luck, you know, kind of a fall in the middle of, in the middle of training. And I tore my hip flexor halfway off of my femur. So that wasn't great. And you go like, man, right at the time where you're like, oh man, all right, finally moving forward, you know, having the opportunity to fight. Dan's a really tough guy. You know, you have to fight well if you want to have a good chance to do well with him. If you don't fight well, it's going to be a rough night. And I'm like, that's exactly what I signed up for. That's what we want with BJ, that's what we want with Elkins, that was gray. And then the universe goes, hey man, I hear you, but there's also this. So anyway, unfortunately it's healing up and then hopefully I'm trying to, looking for May, I think. May this year? May of this year. Yeah. So it's been, it's been, it's been about five weeks since the injury. You'll be able to heal up, you think? Yeah, I think it'll be okay by then. Like I don't need a big camp at this point. I've had years of camp. Not going to curtail my drinking or anything like that. Obviously, you know, come on, man. Life is meant to be lived. And you know, so it's, you know, I'm in good shape. I always, I'm always training. I'm trying to do my best to train around the injury to the extent that I can right now without, you know, hurting myself longterm. So is there a particular opponents you're thinking about? Yeah. Anybody, anybody forward? You know, I mean, I tried to, I asked, I asked the second that I got hurt, I sent a message to Dan and I said, hey man, like I just want you to be the first person to know. You know, I just was pretty reasonably injured. We just got an MRI. Doctor says like, hey man, you're out and you need to take like three weeks off, off. Don't do anything. Or you're going to immediately, you're going to tear it the whole way. And this is going to be surgery. And then it's going to be an additional, like eight weeks on top of that to start to rehab it through PT. And anyway, you know, so I let him know, hey, if you can push this thing back, I would love to keep on the car. I would love to keep the fight. You know, it's like, I respect you a lot as an opponent. And also it's been brutal trying to get anybody to sign on. So if you're into it, I'm still there. Unfortunately, he turned that down. I understand he had other things going on and he and his wife were expecting a child coming up. So he needed to, he needed to fight. And anyway, you know, I guess we'll see who's coming forward. Is there somebody like super tough in the featherweight division that you, you seem to like enjoy the difficult puzzles. Is there somebody especially difficult that you would like to fight? I would like to fight. I know that I'll need to win at least one fight before this. And I look forward to coming back and giving my best effort to do that. I want to fight to beat Megumin Sharapov. I want to fight Yair Rodriguez. I want to fight Korean Zombie. And you know, this is complicated, man. Yeah, that would be fun. I would love to see that fight. That's a fascinating fight. That would be fun. He would be very challenging. All those guys are very challenging. And so I look forward to just staying healthy to the extent that we can coming back and I'm going to fight multiple times this year, hell or high water. Hell yes. Hey, by the way, I completely forgot because you were talking about the systems and decision trees and the illusion of choice made me think of Sam Harris and I forgot to mention it. So he talks about free will quite a bit and that there's an illusion of free will. So it's like the. Bold claim, Cotton. That the, you know, maybe the universe constructed that little game where it makes us feel like we have a bunch of choices, but we really don't. We're really always ending up with a middle finger. That would be hilarious. Yeah, that's it. That's what you see before you die. It's just a giant middle finger. It's like, oh, fuck. I knew it. I knew it. What do you think? Do you think there's a free will? Like we feel like we're making choices. So you're thinking, again, what we're talking about, okay, here's a system of martial arts that's Hanzo Gracie, there's different schools and whatever, and then you're thinking, okay, how can I think outside these systems? But then there's also a system that's our human society and we feel like there's an actual choice being made by us individuals. Do you think that choice is real? Or is it just an illusion? Well, okay, that's a really good question. I'm not necessarily equipped to answer this, but I'll do my best. Okay, I guess I would say to start with, sure would be interesting if it wasn't real, if the choice wasn't real, would be pretty interesting if it is real. First off, I would start with facilitative beliefs versus not facilitative beliefs. It's almost like, I think the world's out to get me. True, not true, what next? Probably not a facilitative belief. Even if you, imagine you believe there's no free will. Okay, now what? Does that justify every single impulse that you're going to give into? Or does the belief in free will, does the belief in my ability to work hard, to focus, to be disciplined, to improve my position, improve my situation, whether it's true or not, although I think that at least many of us would argue that at least whether there's some sort of internal driver that allows for that. We live in a material world. Your actions do affect the world. I can choose to pick that water up or not. And anyway, I would say a belief strongly in the idea of picking facilitative beliefs, and going, hey, I will adjust, whether this belief system is right or wrong on a cosmic level, I'm nowhere near smart enough to understand, but I can say me deciding that, let's say, for instance, I'm gonna walk over to have a conversation with someone in a hotel lobby, and I've never met them, and I go over, and I start with, oh, this is gonna be interesting, and I just walk over there, versus in my head, I'm like, what's this asshole want? We're about to have two very different conversations. I could be right that this person's not very polite or thinks negatively of me right from go, but I think that that's probably not a facilitative belief. People talk about, how is that gonna help me navigate the conversation to a positive conclusion? And I think about that for, let's say, fighting, it's a good example, like confidence, plenty of people believe plenty of things that aren't real, myself included, I'm sure, all the time. And anyway, believing that you can do something, I'm like, hey, I think I can win, doesn't guarantee you a positive outcome, but I would say most of us would probably, most of us would argue that it helps. Think about depression. What's depression if not a negative, unfacilitative belief that is not always, that oftentimes is not reflected by reality, but you project it onto reality, and it's understandable if it makes you feel like, oh, man, this isn't gonna work out, I don't think the prospects are going well. And then if you feel like you can't get out of that loop, that seems pretty rough. And I see a lot of things out in society right now where you go, whether you agree or disagree with various positions on things, you go, is that a facilitative belief? Even if that is true, which is arguable, anything. So what next, man? So where does this end? When is the positive, what's the happy ending here? And if they go, well, there is no happy ending, I'm like, okay, so now what? So what do we do here? And I guess. So choose the facilitative belief, and in your intuition, believing that free will is real is more productive for a successful life. Absolutely, because otherwise, how am I not, first off, how can society function if it's not real? So how can I blame you or anyone else or hold anyone responsible for anything if free will isn't real? Well, no, that's exactly the point. But at the surface level, what you're saying is true, but perhaps if we truly internalize that free will is an illusion, we'll start to figure out something that transforms the way we see society. For example, we are very individual centric, so believing that free will is real puts a lot of responsibility and blame on people when they do something bad. Maybe if we truly internalize that free will is an illusion, we start to think about the system of humans together as this mechanism for progress, as opposed to where individual people are responsible for their actions, good or bad. So we remove the value, the weight we assign to the accomplishments or the violence, the negative stuff done by individuals, or more look at the progress of society. I don't know what that looks like, but it's almost like as opposed to focusing on the individual ants of an ant colony, looking at the entirety of the ant colony. So that, I think it makes perfect sense. I would just say that that's a reasonable thing to suggest. It's a seismic shift, right? And it's hard to say whether that would be better or worse, but I guess I'll use this as a convenient one for me. So I remember the last time we spoke, I brought up one of the most reviled evil characters in certainly recent history, probably human history period, Adolf Hitler. Well, I'm a big fan of making people live in the world that they wanna believe in. Well, if free will doesn't exist, and it's just about how things move forward, when are we gonna be high fiving this guy or what? Because I remember what I said, and that actually brings me to something else we discussed. Yeah, for people who don't know, Ryan brought up, or I brought up, there's literally a giant book about Hitler. So I've been obsessed with Hitler, World War II, and Stalin recently. For recently. Oh man, this has become like a meme. Joe Rogan with like DMT and me with Hitler. Can I pick something more positive? Like cat in the hat or something, I don't know. But you brought up Hitler as an example of something particular, some philosophical discussions we're having. And the excellent, eloquent, and the full of integrity MMA journalist clipped out something you've said about Hitler and said that, I forget what the headlines are, but they were the most ridiculous possible implementation. Basically, it was intentionally misunderstanding what I'm saying. Then it's like, I get that they're stupid, but I'm stupid too. So I know what that's like. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly, I can't give you a pass on that. But basically, intentionally misunderstanding what's going on. But what I find funny is that, hey, we gotta be careful what we believe. And again, back to the cancel culture thing that we discussed last time as well, where would I like to apologize? I mean, no, actually something about cancel culture that we've been seeing things culturally, I'm like, I will be damned if I apologize for anything that I don't need to apologize for because I was intentionally misunderstood in that instance. Now, you could say that I'm not a historical scholar, which I would agree immediately. And also that I oftentimes in eloquently or inarticulately phrase things, which I'll agree is again. But ultimately, going, hey, I wanna make you believe, live in the world that you're suggesting ought to exist. Okay, so if there's no free will, how far of a step back are we willing to take cosmically before we start going, hey, this is good because we're experiencing a social reckoning in our country at the moment, for good and for other probably, I guess. And basically, but hey, it all worked out, right? So that's probably not something that would fly. And I think that's a fair thing. That's interesting. It might not fly from the individual perspective, but if you zoom out and think, appreciate society as just like an ant colony as a beautifully complex system, like we kinda, from the individual perspective, we value progress, especially progress of the individual, but in whole progress of societies. But if you accept that this is just a complex system that's not necessarily headed anywhere, that this is almost like that river is just flowing, I think that removes the burden of always striving, of always trying, of always like the struggle and so on. So it's possible that if we have no control, you can like arrive at some kind of other zen state. Does that sound very human though? That goes against, I think, our current human condition as we experience it, but we've communicated that to each other. Like we've taught, like through these social forces, taught each other that our lives matter and so on. Maybe if we convince ourselves that we're just sort of like little things in a stream and ultimately none of it matters, there might be some kind of enjoyment to be discovered through that process. I don't, listen, I'm a capitalist, rah, rah, like. But I guess I think you bring up a really important point. I guess almost anything like capitalism, I only get to experience it as I sit here now and I get to live, I was raised in the United States, have traveled around the world a little bit, have had the good fortune of meeting many people from many different places. And I'm an end user of capitalism. I don't really know how it got here, whether it was, I wasn't there at the start of this idea. I wasn't there for, hey, how did we come up with this idea? How did we arrive? And I'm nowhere near well read enough to understand any of that really even secondhand. And I guess recognizing that communism, Marxism, socialism, anarchism, anything is, these are all perspectives that all have, I guess, various strengths and weaknesses. But I guess one thing I'm always, I guess I would say the burden, it seems to me that if you wanna make a change, the burden of proof is on the person implying that there needs to be a change. And it doesn't mean that there's nothing there, but it's like if you wanna create a small shift, a ripple, that's fine, but a seismic ripping shift in how we exist or how we experience the world as human beings. And you mentioned fighting, why watching someone undergo, take abuse on a level in the ring that's just shocking and then triumph in spite of it is like, this is unbelievable. This is part of the magic of combat sports. Now, it's part of the magic, the other side of the magic that doesn't get talked about sometimes is that the trajectory of that individual's life later on is not always great, or let me rephrase, there's a cost for that. But if we remember, you mentioned removing the struggle. I don't personally, the struggle is what makes life life. And also, I guess, something Faraz has brought up to me on a number of occasions, and it makes sense to me, it's basically humans only understand things through relative comparison. I only understand heat because I've known cold. I only understand, it's like talking to someone that's never experienced any sort of hardship and then their latte isn't right, and then they pitch a fit versus someone that's gone through a great deal of challenge, struggle in their life. They tend to have a little bit more of an even perspective. And anyway, and of course, even as a relative thing and what I perceive to be even may not be even, maybe I'm particularly softer or something in the other direction without realizing, because I can only understand what I can understand. But the idea that we wanna fundamentally alter ourselves as a species and as people seems like an incredibly, incredibly high bar to prove, and also like an incredibly dangerous idea, because it always comes back to, well, who's gonna be responsible for this? Who gets to do the choosing? What's a good idea? What's not a good idea? And I guess that actually brings me kind of to a, something I've been encountering recently in discussions with friends. I feel like there's only two types of people that I encounter at this point. People with a more or less libertarian tilt to their thinking and people without it. And when I say libertarian, I don't mean that in the political party sense or even the belief system. Basically, I'm like, hey, you do you buddy. It's not my, what you're up to is not my concern versus what you're up to is my concern. And I guess I've always watched, various points in history, people on this side or people on that side are more or less, I guess, problematic, I guess you could say. And I don't mean that in the internet sense, you know, more of an issue, but the world is always full of people that wanna tell you what you need to be doing as opposed to more or less doing no harm. And I guess that's one of the ones, anytime I'm trying to tell other people what to do, I better hope I'm right. And it's bizarre to me how many people are so confident that their side or their position is the one that's not only right for them, but right enough that they can enforce it on others. And that just seems incredibly dangerous to me. And I guess that comes back to even Sam's point about, oh, we want to, trying to spread the idea that free will doesn't exist. I'm not saying it's damaging, but it very well may be. And plenty of other things could be as well. I'm not, you know, it goes way over my head as to the implications of all of these. And I guess all of us are in evangelist for something, but I guess it's weird that we've gotten this far as a species and now we wanna take like sharp, sharp turns. Well, we've been taking a bunch of sharp turns throughout history. Yeah. That's what, you know, that's the way, you know, okay, humans love power. And one way to attain power is to say, everything that you guys are doing is wrong and I have the right thing and I'm gonna build up a giant cult of people and I'm gonna overthrow. And indirectly what that results in me is me gaining power. And that's how you get all the big revolutions in human history, saying I'm done with the thing that the powerful are currently doing. So I'm gonna overthrow. That's where probably all the identity politics that's happening now is people that didn't have power before are looking to gain power. And they're also, you know, that's where Jordan Peterson criticized identity politics is people with the right, with the good intentions, I should say, are in seeking power, allow power to corrupt them as power always does. And so they lose track of like the devils that they're fighting by becoming the same kind of devils, the same kind of evil that they're fighting. And so that's just the progress of human history. But hopefully as these power greedy people keep attaining power with a progressive mindset, over time things get better and better as they have been. Like each iteration? Each iteration. A lot of unfairness happens. A lot of hypocrisy happens. A lot of people are trampled along the way by those who mean well. But over time, like lessons are learned or like human civilization accumulates lessons and in part learns lessons of history and it gets better and better over time, even though in the short term, there's people acting not their best selves. And you know, that seems to be the progress of human history. The idea of internalizing the free will not being real. I mean, you're actually making me realize that that ultimately leads to a kind of. Doesn't that go in a nihilistic direction? Yeah, it's both nihilistic or if you want to make it a political system, then it's more like communist type of a system where like the value of the individual is completely reduced, removed. Or another perspective is like the freedom of an individual is not to be valued or protected. And so from our current perspective, the systems that seem to have worked, the United States works pretty damn well, despite all the different criticisms. It seems like freedom of the individual in all its forms seems to be fundamental to the success of the United States. And so we should, it's a, however the hell you put it, is like, it doesn't matter whether free will is or isn't an illusion. The belief that it's real. Protects the individual from the group, which is fundamentally, correct me if I'm wrong, that always seems like the big issue of history. Hey, there's more of me than there is of you. Deal with it. You're like, yikes. And you want to be yourself. You want to be different. You want to have a different religion. You want to be a different skin color. You want to do this. All the bad tribal things happen when there's more of me than you. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then that's always the fundamental power imbalance though, right? Well, the interesting thing about the libertarian thinking, I guess I, I don't know. Those words are really. Maybe they're all charged, I know actually. Yeah, they're all charged. I may not scale up, but I mean, more like on a philosophical underpinning where you're like, yeah, basically, hey, you feel free to believe I'm a fool. And I mean, plenty of people do, I'm sure. But as long as you don't chase me down the hall and hit me in the back of the head with a textbook, what's the big deal? Yeah, so the libertarian viewpoint, which I probably espouse, like that's, I'm very much like freedom of the individual is very valuable and like leave others the fuck alone unless they're trying to hurt you. The thing is you also have to, I believe, put in the work of empathy of understanding what others, how, what leaving people the fuck alone means to others. But isn't that an interesting thing? If I believe in freedom of the individual and I take that, like all of these, like you said, you take them past just their first why question. You ask why, why, why, why, or how, how, how, how many times. Should that not extend to respect for you, respect for your position, respect for your individual lived experience, which could be grossly different than mine. Yeah, this is the problem with saying, I'm an individual, I'm not gonna bother you, you don't bother me. That's just like, that's not actionable. Because to be, to make it actionable, you have to think the why, why, why, why, why, you have to do the steps beyond. You think, what does that actually mean? That means understanding how even my very existence like hurts others. Because you have to understand that like, I'm not, you're not just sitting alone in a room. You're using like public transit, you're using the police force, you're using firefighters, you're using the, like you're using a lot of resources that are publicly shared. And some of those resources are unfairly distributed. Like we've agreed that we're gonna pay taxes and those taxes are gonna go towards building some kind of infrastructure. So that's already towards social. So you're not a real, you're not a real sort of, I talked to Michael Malice, like anarchist, right? Saying like basically, full, just leave me the fuck alone and I'm going to collaborate with whoever the hell I want. We're not, that's not the American society as it stands currently. We've agreed that there's going to be certain social institutions that we pay into. And some of the sort of discussions about race and all those kinds of things is about those institutions being institutionally unfair, whether it's race or gender, all those kinds of things. Listen, I have a bunch of criticisms of the way that conversation carries itself out, but the thing is, what's valuable is to actually listen and empathize. And that's not often talked about with the leave me the fuck alone mindset because you're, it doesn't have that little component which I think could be fundamental to the function of a society, which is like social. Like it's the, what is it, the Obama, you didn't build it or you didn't build it alone or whatever, however that goes. But basically we wouldn't be able to accomplish anything as individuals without the help of others. And to be able to then start to think, okay, so what is my duty? What is my responsibility to other human beings to be respectful, to be loving, to help them as part of this functioning society? That starts, that's actually a lot of work to start to think about that. Because then I have to like think, okay, Ryan, what's his life like? As a business owner during COVID, what's that like? And then he has, there's employees that run the gym. What's that like? What's that stress like? Or about the fighting and the injury and so on. What's that like? That empathy takes a lot of like compute cycles. And also a lot of energy, right? But I have to go through that computation if I want to be an individual that's like, doesn't hurt you. If I may, I guess like to come back to Muhammad Ali, one of the things he said is service to others is the rent that you pay for your, is the price you pay for your rent here on earth. And now one of the things that I think that I see as a result of the internet all the time is people talking about global giant problems, social problems that are society wide, that are massive, truly massive. And frankly, beyond the power of any of us to solve. That's certainly on an individual level. So I've discussed things with friends. Like my father's an environmental attorney, like has been for a long time and has been an engineer for a long time. And so I'm not, barely know anything, but I'm read in a little bit of various things. But climate change, oh my God, I'm so concerned about climate change. What am I supposed to do about climate change? I'll tell you what I can do is I can not litter. I can try to conserve energy where I can. I can do whatever I want. What can I personally do about some giant social problem that I didn't start and is out of my control? I'm like, well, I can be decent to the people around me. I can mention, I can demonstrate empathy and I can demonstrate consideration for the people in my circle. And to the extent that I can the people outside of my circle, but yelling at the trees over problems that are borderline cosmic, doesn't seem very productive. It just makes me feel like I'm cool and important because I'm talking about something, well, hundreds of years from now, the water will rise. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. It's completely on my head, I know nothing. But focusing on the problems that we can actually solve, it comes back to the same thing. I want to win a fight. I would love to win a fight. I can't control that. What I can do is I can control each individual step that I take around the ring and try to make the next correct move. I can't look, no, it gets people's, you know, they get all excited. You know, I'm trying to keep my language in check, but they get all excited thinking about, you know, problems that are like Superman couldn't solve these problems. Like you could be that powerful and you can't make all of the bad things go away, but you can absolutely change yourself. And I think a lot of the lessons that, you know, like the good lessons from religion that happened, the good lessons from the great men and women throughout history that we're inspired by, that talk about change starting with within, and, you know, again, treating the people around you decently and treating the people around you decently doesn't even necessarily mean the golden rule. Do unto others as you would like them to do to you. I go, well, maybe what I would like and what this person would like aren't the same thing. Well, how am I going to get to the bottom of that? Cause I could be attempting to be decent to this person. And by my standards, I am being decent, but maybe I'm missing the mark by theirs. Well, I can't possibly, if I just interacted with you, like it's like someone talking about some nonsense microaggression. You're like, so let me get this straight. I've never met you before. You never met me before. And you're interpreting some minor comment that I've made in the least charitable way possible. I'm not saying that you couldn't be annoyed, but your expectation for that level of consideration is you're going to be disappointed a lot. Now, if you, if we're someone that's in your life on a consistent basis and they're like, hey, I really don't appreciate what you're saying or what you're doing here. Do you realize that this is how I'm, this is how I'm perceiving you go, oh man, I'm so sorry. Of course I would hear what you have to say, but I guess trying to recognize that, you know, I guess my job is to treat others with dignity in general, but that level of the level of specificity that, that, that, that requires increases as it gets closer to you. And I have, as a person, I have a very finite amount of resources financially, intellectually, emotionally, physically. If I chuck, you know, 0.001% of it in every single different direction, what am I doing? It's like when people are like, oh, I care deeply about Tibet. I'm like, why aren't you over there? Go build a house, man. Get on a plane, go build a house. Oh, you don't want to do that. So really what you want to do is post on Facebook and, and, and accept high fives for how much of a good guy you are. I got an idea. Go help somebody in your neighborhood. Go be, go play with, go play with some kids. Go be a friend to someone that doesn't have a friend. Read a book, try to educate yourself. And so I guess to, to come back, it's all of these problems aren't solvable on a grand scale, but it's almost like by attempting to address them in our personal lives, we do better. But rather than a giant airing of the grievances on a, on a consistent basis, not that that isn't, you know, sometimes necessary and valuable, but after you air your grievances, you go, hey, how about we, we sort this out? What's the next step? And, and I guess, again, when we're trying to address it on a giant social level, it just seems unmanageable to me, even if you have the best of intentions. Yeah, I mean, but nevertheless, there's, there's a lot you can do on social networks. I mean, I enjoy tweeting and consuming Twitter. It's just, I apply the exact same principle that you just said, which is free will and discussion, which is like, I approach it in a way that I don't get stuck in this loop that's counterproductive. I try to do things that are productive. And like, it's just like you said, that's like, like what kind of things can I do in this world? Whether that's tweeting or building things, those are low effort tweeting, or actually building businesses or building ideas out as high effort. What can I do that will actually solve problems? And that's, that's the way I approach it. And I do wonder if it's possible to at scale, encourage each other to approach like social media and communication with fellow humans in that way. I don't know. How do you think that would be done? I guess, like to improve the, improve the quality of discourse, maybe. Like, or even like you said, the empathy or the decency of discourse. I think people should be, you know, incentivized, encouraged to do that. I think most of what's, we see happening on Twitter and Facebook and so on has to do with very small, very powerful implementation details. It goes down to like, what is the source of the dopamine rush, the like button, the sharing mechanisms, just even small tweaks in those can fix a lot. Really? I believe so. So like a lot, a lot of the stuff we see now is the result of just initial implementations of these systems that we didn't anticipate. So the modernization comes from engagement and the tools we have is clicking like and sharing. It was not always obvious. It was not obvious from the beginning. It wasn't obvious while Twitter and Facebook grew that there's a big dopamine rush from getting more followers and likes and shares. So we've gotten addicted to this feeling like how many people are commenting, how many people are saying, like clicking like and so on. So that's that dopamine rush. So we want to say the thing that will get the most likes and like unmasked in society. And then the other thing that was expected is the controversial, the divisive will get the most likes. So it had to do with the initial mechanisms of likes and shares resulting in an outcome that was unpredicted, which is huge amounts of division irrespective of like any of the basics of human connection that we've actually all come to understand that society is valuable at the individual level like we're saying, but unmasked what results is like you throw all that out and it's all just divisive at scale discourse. I think it could be fixed by incentivizing personal growth like incentivizing you to challenge yourself to grows individual and most importantly to be happy at the end of the day. So like incentivize you feeling good in a way that's long lasting longterm. I think what makes people actually feel good is being kind to others longterm. In the short term what feels good is getting a lot of likes. And I think those are just different incentives that if implemented correctly you can just build social networks that would do much better. So do you think it comes from a structural perspective? I guess at what point does you mention like you mentioned free will and also you mentioned feeling good and again working hard. I know that you have the, I guess the, was it a race or? No, it's the Goggins thing. It's four by four by 48 challenge where you run four miles every four hours for two days. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a bunch of, the challenge of it isn't just the running, the running is very tough but it's mostly the sleep deprivation because you're just training every four hours. But it's a struggle, right? But the struggle gives meaning. And ultimately I guess so how can we, because you mentioned like you said adjusting things on like a, I guess like a programming level almost, based programming level so that the interface is different for the user. But at what point does the user have a responsibility to as a man or a woman or a person to just behave more decently? How can we I guess utilize, what can we do? It seems like our society is so grossly missing like a Martin Luther King right now, like the great inspiring characters throughout American history, throughout world history. Where are the great leaders? So leadership is part of it, but that's definitely, where are the great leaders is a very good question. That's more of a question of our political systems why they're not pushing forward the great leaders. But there's also just, okay, there's some just basic engineering shit which is when you and I, when you Ryan and I are in a room alone and we're talking, even if we're strangers, the incentives are for us to get along. Like just when we're together in person, that's what I'm saying. I'm not even saying some kind of profound. But when you remove that. When we remove that, the implementation of social networks as they stand right now in the digital space, a very different set of incentives. It's more fun to destroy others, to be shitty to others. And it becomes this endless loop, like you were saying, that's ultimately destructive and not productive. And I think it has to do with just the interfaces of making it feel good to be nice to others. Because currently it doesn't feel nearly as good to be nice to others on the internet. And it doesn't feel nearly as bad as it does in real life to be shitty to others on the internet. So the incentives are just wrong. I think there is a technology solution to this, or at least a solution to improve this communication mechanism. It's not obvious how. I have a bunch of sort of more detailed ideas, but this is fascinating because I've gotten a chance to talk to Jack Dorsey quite a bit. He's the CEO of Twitter. And he is legitimately has, in this conversation, he would agree with everything. And he's a good human being, and he has a lot of really good ideas how to improve things. The question when you're a captain of a ship, whether it's a question whether a CEO is even a captain, how much can you actually steer that ship once it's gotten large enough? There's so much momentum, there's so many users, there's so many people who are marketing and PR and lawyers. It's very difficult to change things. Is it difficult because of the fallout, or is it difficult because it's actually like literally out of this power? So power is weird when you have a large organization. This is why the great leaders, this is what great leaders do, whether it's presidents or leaders of companies. Steve Jobs, I would argue Musk is that way, is to walk into a room full of people who don't want you to create drama. It's weird, man. When people just kind of want to be nice, the niceness creates momentum and nobody wants to, it's the systems thing. Everybody just behaves in the way they were previously behaving in the way they're supposed to behave, and nobody wants to raise a fuss. It takes a great man or woman leader to step in and say, what we've been doing is bullshit. Okay, you're fired, you're cool. What is it that? I'm out. I think you have to create constant revolutions within a company that's very, very difficult to do. Structurally and psychologically, it's very difficult to do, to be able to sort of, yeah, to constantly challenge the way things have been done in the past, which is why another way it's often done is a startup, like a small company, basically a small company becomes really successful and then no longer can turn the ship, so a new startup comes along, a new competitor that then challenges the big ship, and then that starts out the winner. That's like Google came to be, so Twitter came to be, and Facebook, and so on. And Apple has, that was the dream of Steve Jobs is it would succeed for many decades, for like centuries. That was the idea that you would keep creating revolutions, and under Steve Jobs, Apple successfully pivoted a bunch of times, just like reinvented themselves, which is very difficult to do. Because I mean, I've heard, at least I don't know if this is accurate, because I wouldn't know anything, but I've heard plenty of people complain about Steve Jobs. Yeah. But in reality, the reason that all of these amazing things were done was because this person was willing to, well obviously brilliant, and then also willing to rattle everyone's cage periodically and say, hey, what's going on is not what we need to be doing. That's a really interesting thing. So he would rattle the cage, but he would also, I don't know if those are intricately connected or always have to be connected, but he would just be a dick. So maybe by his standard, I am lazy and worthless. Well, he would say that to you, right? Is he being a dick though, if by his standard, I mean, again, it's like everyone's stupid compared to somebody. You know, I guess. But, so you apparently are able to take that kind of thing. Sometimes you just, there's ways to cross the line. And I mean, this is, okay, the fascinating thing about being a leader, especially a leader of companies, is it's a people problem. So each individual in a room, so as a leader, you're only really interacting with a small number of people because there are leaders of other smaller groups and so on. But each of those individuals in the room have their own different psychology. Some like to be pushed to the limit. Some like to be screamed at. Some are very soft spoken and almost afraid to speak. And they have to be, you have to hear them out. Like there's a, and those could be all superstars. We're not talking about like the C students. We're talking about the A plus students. Well, it's funny that, yeah, but the thing to, the skill to manage all of those people is completely separate from the skill to innovate something. I mean, not that they're not connected, but it's funny how it's, it's almost like, you know, why do we have shitty representatives? Well, I mean, the thing that you do to get elected has nothing to do with governance. Yes. Well, that's exactly it. But the great leaders have to have both skills. So like you have to have the boldness of, if you look at the great presidents through history, usually it's in a time of crisis is when they step up, but they basically say, okay, stop this old way that Congress works of this bickering, of this like compromise bullshit. Here's a huge plan that costs billions of dollars in today's age, trillions of dollars, no extra pork, no extra additions, just like, here's a clear plan. We're going to build the best road network the world has ever seen. We're going to build some huge infrastructure project. We're going to revolutionize internet. Oh, we're going to, for coronavirus, we're going to build the largest like testing facility the world has ever seen in terms of the, we're gonna get everybody tested several times a day, all those kinds of things, huge projects and say, fuck all this, the details that everybody's bickering about, we're going to give everybody $2,000, we can give everybody $3,000, like huge projects. And at the same time, so that's the boldness and the leadership and saying, throw out all the bullshit of the past. And at the same time, be able to get in the room with the leaders of both parties or for the powerful individuals and smooth talk the shit out of them in the way they need to be smooth talked to. So like both of those skills, it seems to be when they're combining one person, that creates great leaders. Musk appears to have that, Elon. I don't know if Steve Jobs, it's interesting. So the criticism of Steve and a little bit on Elon is he misses some of the human part, but maybe it's impossible to have a really, you have like Sadia Nadal, who's the CEO of Microsoft, you have, who's really good on the human side, really, really good on the human side, like everybody loves him. The CEO of Google and Alphabet is also the same way. So like, I don't know if it's possible to have both. You only get so many stat points. Yeah, you only get, in this RPG of life, yeah. You got very good at jujitsu very fast. So you went, I mean, you told the story of Blue Belt and so on, but you went to Black Belt really quickly and not just in terms of ranks, but in terms of just skill level. I mean, you didn't go to Black Belt nearly as fast as your skill set developed. You were like doing extremely well at a high level of competition. So you're a good person to ask, how does one get good at jujitsu? We talked about solving problems at the elite level, but when you're a beginner at the martial arts, how do you get good? How much training should you do? The very basic stuff, like how much training, how much drilling, and then the mental stuff, like where should your mind be? How should you approach it from a mental perspective too? I'll just tell you my perspective on this one. I guess I would say I feel step one, I feel lucky to have found a good training situation, particularly for the time in where I was at. And I drilled a ton. I drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled. And one thing that's really important to understand though, is that I was able to, in a relatively brief period of years, go from zero to reasonably good. But I think I probably crammed more hours in those small years than most people did training, let's say in two or three times the length. So it may masquerade as something else other than it is. I could say. So you have to put in the hours. Yeah. There's no way around that. I think so. But what did you put in those hours? So when you say drilling, can you break that apart a little bit? Sure. What does drilling look like? Is there any recommendations you can put in? Absolutely. Step one, I would say your choices matter. I think one of the really important things that I think we should consider about jiu jitsu is that there's a lot of junk in the system right now. It's like jiu jitsu has exploded in terms of the number of positions, techniques, strategies, this, that, rule sets. That's really cool on the one hand. On the other hand, there's probably a just metric shit ton of suboptimal things that are out there that are being taught. Myself included, I've taught things that are looking back five years, three years, two years, one year, where I'm like, oh, I would not do it like that anymore. Straight up, sometimes I wouldn't do it like that. Other times I would literally never do even that particular movement. I don't think the shrimp is a real move. It's a giant spiel and seizure to show in person. But long story short, there's a lot of things that we think of as fundamental that I think that are really pretty negative. And also, you know. That's heresy in jiu jitsu. Isn't it? The shrimp. Exactly. Is like the holy, we all worship the shrimp. We love the shrimp. We love the shrimp. For people who don't do jiu jitsu, and you should, the shrimp is you scoot your butt away from your opponent. Yeah, in a really, it's like a really athletic looking position where you look like someone that's trying to stick their butt out on Instagram, and then you push your hands away, and you expose your face, and then you lay on your side because someone told you to do that. And you look like a, I guess you look like a shrimp. Yeah, it's like that time that someone really credible told me to drink unleaded gasoline, and I did it for a while. And then it got to the point in my life where the next best, the thing that I needed to do to really improve my life was stop drinking unleaded gasoline. And I would say that there's a lot of stuff that's in there that step one is like it's junk. It's actual junk. And it's not only will it waste your time, it will straight up, it will be like an albatross hanging on you because it affects how you think about things going forward. So although it was, it's funny, like the operating assumptions that we work under have a huge, huge, huge influence. You mentioned like growing up in the United States or this being a capitalist society, like woo, all right. Now, of course I think that, I don't really know any different otherwise. And I think that a lot of times people go, oh, communism is better. I'm like, haven't seen it. I haven't read any books about it being better, but it's possible. I mean, I haven't experienced it much myself either. So I can't dismiss it outright, but I guess I would say it's a fundamentally different operating system underpinning and all of my choices, all of, if I honestly believed in that thing, many of my choices on a moment by moment, on a day by day, and certainly on a lifetime basis would be very different. So I would say that it's tough when you're young in the martial arts. And I mean, all of us are always trying to do our best to learn. But when you're young in the martial arts, you always go, if you're a reasonable guy, what do they, what do they call it? Like Dunning, Kruger, Amnesia. I can't remember if this is the right one, but basically you go like, oh, I know what I'm doing here. So I can say that's not right. But then I read a news story about baseball and I don't know anything about baseball, sounds credible. And it's bullshit, but I can't call bullshit. If you're a reasonable person, you can't call bullshit on things that you don't understand. Even if you suspect it's not right, you're like, well, I've got to reserve judgment. You never, ever, ever set aside your need and also obligation to understand why you were doing what you're doing. And don't ask why once, ask why over and over and over and over about the same thing. Oh, well, I want a shrimp. Why? To make space. Why do I want to make space? To get away from the guy. Well, why do I want to get away from him? Well, because he's dangerous. Well, why is he dangerous? And you can oftentimes get down to, wait a minute, I didn't even need to move. Three quarters of the time, you're actually acting in the other person's self interest. And I guess a lot of times I can't, this kind of goes beyond what we can demonstrate here. But I would just say trying to understand what my base operating assumptions are and consistently reevaluate them, which can be fricking exhausting, frankly, and also constantly confidence destroying. But you mentioned that I did pretty well relatively quickly. I started in 2004 and I was at Abu Dhabi ADCC for the first time as an alternate in 2007. I won a match there against a Black Belt world champion. And the fact, frankly, the fact that I was able to beat someone like that was neat, but at the same time says a little bit more about what jiu jitsu is and some of the issues with it than it does about how cool I am or was, because that shouldn't really happen when you think about it. You're like, okay, you're a champion at ostensibly a very high level of the sport. You enjoy a three inch, four inch height advantage and a 35 pound weight advantage, and you just got beat. Like that should not, I'm dead serious, that should not exist. If that happens, you're doing it wrong. Is it that I'm doing it right? Or is it that you're doing it wrong and there's enough variance in the way that you're doing it that you're allowing me to win? And now I did happen to win that with the 50, 50 heel hook, which was 50, 50, but basically, which was one of the early examples of like, hey guys, by the way, people can try to hurt your legs. And that was something like, we mentioned John Danaher, mentioned like, you know, myself, Dean Lister, a lot of the guys from the Henzo Gracie team that have had amazing success. They've gone and done great things. And you know, Craig Jones in the competitive grappling world, basically taking advantage of being very, very good in what they're doing, but also a glaring, glaring, glaring issue with the operating system of jiu jitsu, which was, you know, a huge vulnerability in the lower body and not only not attacking it, but having no idea how one does attack it, which means you can't understand how someone will assail you. So anyway, I guess to come back is if in the absence of knowing what to do, I try to polish what I've got. So if I've got a knife and I'm like, I don't know how to use them, I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna sharpen the edge and polish it and make sure that when I need to use this dang thing, I'll be able to do it. Because trying to put together a system when you don't have an idea of what's going on, a lot of times you end up making suboptimal choices, but as long as you're consistently reevaluating what you're doing, and that's something I've tried to do over time, over and over and over again, and try to seek out the most, the best, and also most articulate or insightful instructors or people of various levels, doesn't matter if they're well known or not, that could say, hey, Ryan, I think you should do this, I think you should do that. And I think all I've ever done in martial arts is try to treat people with respect, honestly, try to demonstrate appreciation for the many, many people who have helped me over time and be the type of person that they wanna train with. Not the type of, because we've all trained with people that make us think about beating the ever loving crap. I never wanted to be that guy. And I was basically saying like, if I train with a black belt when I'm a blue belt and this person enjoys training with me, that's in my interest. Selfishly, not only do I not want them to beat me up, but selfishly, I should, you mentioned being decent to other people, you wanna incentivize being decent to other people, right, with a structure of what you're doing. Selfishly, I'm incentivized to be a nice guy, even if I'm internally a scumbag, which I like to think that I'm not, but basically going like, hey, this guy's way more likely to help me or this person's way more likely to help me if I shake their hand, say thank you, I really appreciate you helping me out. And that thing that they tap me with four or five times, I'm gonna ask them about it. And then they don't have to tell me, they're under no obligation, but I'll say, and whether they tell me or don't tell me, thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it. And that's it, you know? Okay, so to summarize, the way you brilliantly described, I just wanna make sure we're keeping track of this. I went all over the place. No, you didn't, you're pretty on point. But so the first thing is basically, which is difficult, I wonder if we can break it apart a little bit, is don't trust authority, essentially. Keep asking why. Be respectful without trusting authority, right? Right, which is, and then the second thing is be the kind of person that others like training with or like being around, sort of being a good friend. So so many people just enjoy being around. So one is completely, which is, yeah, you're right, it's attention, which is like completely disrespect the way that things are done. So asking why constantly. One of it is your own flaws and not understanding the fundamentals of what's being described. And then once you get good enough, not understanding, like going against the fact that the instructor doesn't understand. And my inability to understand what you're saying, though, doesn't invalidate it. And that's something like you mentioned, like me mentioning, keeping in mind our own flaws. And then also, again, the flaws that any of us have is the instructor, to your point. And I guess I can speak to being kind of weird. I don't, you know, I like to sit in the corner. But so everyone's a little bit different. Some people, you know, I wasn't terribly popular in high school. You know, like, I didn't like high school very much. But anyway, I would, not gonna be rude to people, though. I was never gonna bully anybody. If you said hello to me, I'd say hello back. I would hold the door for you if you walked by. You know, and I would just say, like simple things like that go a long, long, long way. And that actually takes us back to our social discussion where I'm like, oh man, how do I become great at jiu jitsu? It's like, well, I'll start by not pissing off this person who can beat the crap out of me and not disrespecting the person who is probably the closest thing to a font of knowledge at that time for me. So, and then recognizing that I should do that for its own virtue because it's the right thing to do and I should try to treat people decently. But beyond that, even selfishly, it's in my interest to do that. But see, the thing is, this is interesting, is there's a culture in martial arts, a culture that I like where the instructor, legitimately so, carries an aura of authority. And it's not comfortable to really ask why. I'm not, it's a skill to be able to have a discussion as a white belt or the black belt instructor of like, why is it done this way? Like, and saying why again. Like, I mean, it's a skill to show that you're actually a legitimately curious and passionate and compassionate student versus like, somebody who's just being an annoying dick who saw some stuff on YouTube. There's a line between, to walk there. I just wonder because like, it's the drilling thing. And, you know, I, for example, like in my, when I was coming out, there was so much emphasis placed on like, close guard, for example. And you might actually teach me now, I don't know, but to me it was like, why do I need to master the close guard? Like, why is the close guard on top or the bottom? But the bottom really, the fundamental basics of jiu jitsu. Who decided that? My body is not, my body says this is wrong. I'm like, this, like I have short legs, but it doesn't even matter the length of the legs. There's something about me that just, I don't understand how leverage here works for my particular body. Like, so it's just, it's a feel thing too. Like, it feels like in my basic understanding of leverage and movement and timing and so on, it feels like these certain, like butterfly guard, or even like half, basically every guard except close guard. I can play, I can dance. Close guard feels like you're shutting down like the play that I. Is that wrong? Or is that, make sure that's what you want because that's almost like an innate characteristic of this guard position, but it's not sold that way, right? It's like, hey, this is a good guard. It's like, hey man, here's a bow and arrow versus, and you know how to use this thing, right? Like make sure you're far away and like up on a hill or something. Cause you can take that bow and arrow, run up on something and try to use it. But if nobody told you not to do that and they told you it was foundational, it's very foundational, it's very important. To everything else too, right? That's back to the shrimping thing. How many things are we taught that even if it's not, let's say itself is not a garbage thing, might be effectively garbage. You could give me a Ferrari, but if I try to make it fly, it's not going to work. If you're like, here's a plane, here's another plane, here's another plane, here's another plane, here's a Ferrari. I'm like, oh, it must be a different type of plane. Like you could be forgiven for leap if we're going there, you know, like, oh, maybe the wings come out or you just go fast enough to take a bullet. You can make these crazy leaps in your mind. And people are doing that all the time. So if you don't provide the context for me, or worse yet, you provide improper context, like how much of a problem is that going to be? Well, I think the skill of the white belt should be, just be nice. But in the complicated human space of when your intention, at least in the big picture view, is good. The question is, it's not always when your intention is good, the actual implementation of it is good. So you might be just almost, and that's much, it's not the case for you, it's much more the case for white belts. They don't even know, their intention might be good, but they don't know all the lines they're crossing, all the, so they're not actually able to like interpret all the ways in which they're being totally insensitive to the requests of others, like explicit requests of others. So your job as a beginner is to be a really good listener of those social cues. Well, it's like a visitor in a foreign country, right? Yeah. Like you're a representative of people that look like you, people that talk like you, people that have your passport, and you're like, man, I'm going to go over here. Oh, I've got my foot up on my knee. Well, if I was in certain countries in the world, that's rude. I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. But can you imagine if someone says, hey, I really appreciate if you take your foot off, that's pretty rude. And then I want to tell them, well, not where I'm from, man. I'm in your house. I better, again, I might go that direction, but let's say I could get away with that. Now I'm a bully. And if I can't get away with that, well, I'm about to maybe be on the wrong side of something. But I guess, like you said, if we have positive intention, that's fine. But I also have to recognize who I am. And I think that that's one thing that I tried to do and continue to try to do over time. Like we're, oh man, hi, I'm the one that's asking for a favor here. If I spar with Raymond Daniels, Raymond Daniels is doing me a favor. I ain't doing him a favor. Let's not get it twisted. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And this is not like some effected nonsense. This is serious. I'm like, thank you. If I spar with Steven Thompson, I'm the one being done a favor. George St. Pierre takes his time to spar with me, which he has in the past and not even kill me, which is really, I appreciate that because that's why I can sit here. George is not a prop for me to get my rocks off or see what's going on. And also I'm going to do that and then expect him to just take it. And I've seen, he's a gentleman. I've seen people get nuts with George and have him just be like, he's a patient of a saint. I don't have that level of patience, but I would just say to come back, figuring out like, hey, so what role am I here? And that comes back to like, at least what I see people on the internet. Yeah, man, I have a beef with Joe Rogan. You're like, no, you don't, Ryan. You're some goof. I'm like, I'm some random dude. Joe, like people want to, they almost want to like elevate so that we can somehow be level with peers here. If I go into Feroz Zahabi's gym, I am not a peer of Feroz Zahabi. I am a student of TriStar. I'm a guest in the academy. And if Feroz asked me for something short of him, like telling me to try to do a triple backflip so I don't break my neck, the answer is yes, sir, I can do a free Feroz. No, man, in no words. And it's, and hopefully it should come with, I guess, a level of graciousness, but I guess that's kind of one of the things that I see nowadays with how accessible people are. Cause I grew up, you know, being a big, huge baseball sports fan of all kinds. I couldn't send Derek Jeter a message and much less have a possibility of a reply. And if I do, it's like, you know, I have people send me messages. It's very nice that people send me messages. Some people, again, and everyone, not everyone is coming from the same place, but I've had plenty of things that are like, yo, dude, I need you to do this for me. I'm like, well, I'll tell you what's never going to happen. That I have no idea who you are. And that was how I was addressed. And I don't need, oh man, you're the greatest one because that's weird and too, cause I'm not, but just, hey Ryan, how are you doing? Hey, do you think you could do the following if you get a second? I'm like, if I get a second, you're dang right I can. Why not? It's easy to ask. But it started with some level of politeness. And I guess like that's maybe being semi Southern, like I grew up in Virginia. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'm. Like that goes a long way. And there's all different kinds of implementations of politeness. I mean, most of the successful people I've met, it's been surprising to me how much of, you mentioned peers, like I could think of Joe Rogan. You mentioned Joe Rogan, but Elon Musk, they don't, like they almost treat me like I'm the superior. You know what I mean? Like it's not even, that's the politeness. Like, you know, that's the approach. The feeling of it is like, I'm the student, I'm the beginner, I'm like approaching the situation. Like it's almost like a method acting of like, you're better than me. And that's how I approach a lot of interactions. Like I have something to learn from this, even if it's like a young. Do you think that they're ungenuine? They're totally genuine. But isn't that a funny thing? Like in spite of who they are, they're incredibly genuine because they respect, correct me if I'm wrong, they respect you obviously for what you bring to the table. They also approach. No, no, they approach everybody like this. But that's all right. No, but I'm sure they respect for what you bring to the table. Beyond that though, they're treating you with dignity as a human being. Yeah, as a human being, that's right. And when they could probably get away with treating most people without a whole heck of a lot of dignity. And I guess what does that always say that like, you know, again, like you can always tell someone of quality because they treat the king and the janitor the same way. But that's what we're seeing a lot. Like, I guess I don't mean to like to nitpick, but that's where it would take issue, I guess a little bit, or disagree with the next. Are you gonna criticize with the internet again? I know. People on the internet. Old man yells at clouds. But anyway, but I guess what I mean is just like the way that people address each other because it's so casual now, you know, and it's great on the one hand, it's nice. On the other hand, you go, hey, I just, why can't do, am I somehow, am I worried about diminishing myself? It's like the way that I'm sure that people talk to like, talk to women sometimes. And words, what's up girl? I mean, she's a bitch. You know, versus like, how am I, that was supposed to get a good response? What about that was going to elicit a favorable response? You know, versus being anything, anything other than just, you know, man, what's going on? And I guess that, does that make any sense? It makes total sense. And that Southern thing that you're referring to, I feel like that's an important, that's an important part of human communication. Let me ask you this. Sure. You're a new back attacks instructional. First of all, awesome. Yeah. Second of all, you drop a lot of fascinating insights in there, but you quote Galileo out of all people in saying that you can't teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself. So we talked about how to start in Jiu Jitsu. What about if we zoom out even more and how do you learn how to learn? How do you optimize the learning process? I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you what I'd like to do. And I would say like, I can't step one. I don't, I'm not, maybe this is a little bit easier for me cause you know, I've never had a ton of friends, honestly. I've, you know, I've got my close friends and people that I know, but I've never had tons and tons of people. So I spent a lot of time, you know, thinking. And anyway, I can't, I can't control you. I can't control anybody else. I, you know, I, all I can, I want to take my, it's a Marcus Aurelius thing. It's like, you know, I guess the trick to life is figuring out what's in our control and what's not and focusing on things that are in our control, I guess. And so step one is figuring out both internally and then also out in the world as it pertains to Jiu Jitsu, what is actually in my control and what is not. Like passing someone's guard is not in your control. People think it is, it ain't. If I can't just do an activity and be unchecked, then it ain't in my control entirely. I can always breathe. I can always, you know, be calm. I can always, no matter whether I'm concerned or not concerned, have whatever you want to call it, nerves, you know, I can step forward across the line and say, I will, I will face the challenge ahead. That is all entirely, no one can stop me from doing that. That's entirely in my control. And that's why I know that every single time that I walk into the ring, I'll walk in and out of there with my head held high because there's, I will fight with everything that I have. I can't promise that I'll win. I would say I take that same first principles. You mentioned last time we talked, you know, with Elon and the importance of that and going, what are the first principles? And I guess to come back a lot of times, in my opinion, the things that people think are the basics are not the basics. You can't learn. If you think you're reasoning for first principles, but you're actually like level six, you're actually like layers up, you're making so many, there's so many baked in assumptions to what's going on that you're gonna struggle to understand why anything is actually happening, internally, externally, you name it. So I guess what I would start when it comes to learning is first principles and trying to understand what's going on, but then also simple things first. I can control my posture. I can control my breathing. No one can stop me from doing that. I can control where I place my frames. I can control where I place my limbs. I can move my feet. I can develop the ability to do these things better, of course. And I do that through practice, through drilling, through watching people. I've been incredibly fortunate in my time in martial arts to train with many of my heroes, to train with many of the people that I looked at. And I was like, that guy is amazing. I wanna train with this person, like Stephen Thompson, Kenny Florian, George St. Pierre, Raymond Daniels, Farah Zahabi, you know, I mean, like Bruno Frazada, Marcelo Garcia, you know, all of these guys that are just unbelievable. And I go, well, they're moving in a way that's different. Well, how do I do that? Well, sometimes you can ask them and they can tell you directly. Other times, people, part of the genius of what they do is that it's intuitive. And maybe they don't think and understand and see the world the same way that I do. That was something that I experienced with Marcelo. He's amazing. But in a different way than his, it just, we see things fundamentally different. We experience the world differently. It seems to me that we do. And again, that taught me a really important lesson because I was wanting, when I trained there, to have someone go, hey, Ryan, do this, this, this, and this, and that's how it works. And I'm like, all right, because that's how I understood martial arts at the time. I wasn't ready to have someone tell me, like, hey, it feels a little bit like this, and I just kind of do it, which is kind of what Marcelo would do at the time. He was less experienced as a teacher, but that is what he was doing. I was completely, I couldn't separate in my mind performance and understanding. I thought that if I understand, I could do it. And I would also struggle sometimes to wonder why I couldn't execute things that I thought I understood, and why guys like Marcelo were just so elemental. I mean, in like the, like lightning, wind, like that type of thing where like, it's just so in touch with what they wanted, with their capabilities. They could summon their powers at will. I couldn't always do that. And I guess, so recognizing that there was more than one way to the top of the mountain, and also I had a lot of science, but I didn't have a lot of art, or I had some science, I should say, but I didn't have a lot of art. Meeting people like Marcelo taught me, and then Josh Waitzkin, actually brilliant guy, chess champion, former owner, maybe owner of Marcelo's Academy, really great friend. I think he has a book on learning. He does, yeah, The Art of Learning, actually. But yeah, he knows a thing or two about it, but a great guy. And anyway, he sat me down one time, and was like, look, man, you're doing this wrong. You're missing what the, missing the genius, the brilliance that's right in front of you. And it took me a long time. What did he mean exactly? I was frustrated with my inability to grasp certain things, and sometimes the teaching style being different. Not wrong, just it was, it was tough on me at times. So you were trying to replicate what Marcelo was saying as opposed to understanding the fundamentals from which it was coming. Right, I couldn't see, I couldn't see where it was coming from. And also, sometimes I'm like, well, why can't you explain it in the way that I would want you to explain it? And he's like, well, why can't I meet him where he's coming from? So anyway, it was a really important time, unless I'm very, very frustrating if I'm honest, but it's not, I'm so thankful for that time. And anyway, you know, I guess. So always first principles, trying to understand the basics, first starting at the place where you can control things, the very basic elements of what you can work with. And then when there's other mentors and teachers to. Meet them where they're coming from. Meet them where they're coming from. To the extent that I can. Rather than, I'm not, like, again, it's like, why are you not talking to me the way I want you to talk to me? As opposed to, hey, where are you coming from? Back to your point. But I know that's not entirely specific, but you know, like, if you can focus on that and back to the whole, you can't teach a man anything. Marcelo didn't teach me anything, but he taught me in so doing, like, and other people like that, to find it within. And it's like, yeah, I guess something else that I've heard before is that all learning is self discovery, but all performance is self expression. And I always thought that Marcelo was a brilliant master of letting what's inside out. He was so consistent in his performances. And a lot of times I felt like there was a block there personally, particularly at the end of Jiu Jitsu when I was very, very results oriented. And I wasn't, I think my focus was not ideal. It was definitely not in the place that I would like it to be. And whether it would have won more or lost more, hard to say, but I know that I would have performed better if I'd have adjusted that. And anyway, that recognizing that, again, Jiu Jitsu, I think I've said it before, Jiu Jitsu studies is a science, but expressed as an art. It doesn't matter if you can articulate what you know how to do. What matters is if you can do what you know how to do. It only matters if you're, you know, I guess if you're teaching in a verbal fashion is whether or not you can articulate it, but recognizing the difference between learning on an intellectual level or conceptual level and being able to translate that into the physical. And I guess like that's been the thing that I feel like fortunate over time in my own academy to be able to kind of fiddle around and learn on my own and practice with my students. And, you know, sometimes I struggle to have great training partners. Like when I say great training partner, I mean, other world class people to spar, to roll with, but I've gotten a lot more, honestly, than I ever would have thought out of being able to practice and learn and fail and try and succeed on my own without like my own little sandbox, figuring out how I can take an idea and then come up with drills and drills to practice it so that I can actually practice putting it into play. Because again, knowing an idea and then not drilling, what's the point? I'll never have it. It'll never see the light of day. So in that DVD, in that instruction DVD, sorry. It's an online instructional DVD. I keep saying DVD though. Nobody has DVDs anymore. Do they not? It's like VHS. I don't know. Who has DVDs? What, like Blu Ray? I possess some DVDs. I mean, like I've never watched them. What do you use them for? Like a cup, like a thing you put a drink on? I mean, in a pinch, yeah. What's that even called? Coaster? Yeah, my matrix coaster. The matrix coaster, zeros and ones. Okay, so in that instruction that people should get, I've been watching. I'm really enjoying. It's, I don't even know when it came out recently, right? Like December or something like that? Yeah, it's part one. It was actually like ended up being like 18 hours long and I was like, oh my God, we gotta chop it in half. And when it comes together, the whole thing, I think I hope people will like it. Yeah, well it's even part one is really good. Yeah, people on Reddit were really excited for part two as well. Really? And you also have a back. Oh, the old one. The old one that I, that was really helpful to me to understand some very basic aspects of control for the back. Really? Yeah, that was, you know, that clicked with me. There's very few instructionals. There's very few things I've watched that ever clicked with me and that was definitely it. It taught me one thing, I don't know, it's you drop a lot of sort of bombs, you drop a lot of really interesting details and it's funny that there's only specific things that really click. Like a lot of it rings true and you kind of take it in and it's like, oh, that's interesting, okay, yeah, but there's certain things that really click. And I remember when that first instruction will click with me is like the importance. I don't remember any more like how you communicated it because I've now integrated, it's now mine, you know what I mean? But it was more about you just describing upper body control and the importance of the upper body control from the back. And just like the, there's certain grip, like you did describe different details on the grips and so on and as I started trying it, I realized how important upper body control is versus like me maybe as a blue belt or something was I thought like you have achieved victory when you got the two hooks in. And then I realized like at least for me that the hooks were not even for my body type, for my style, for the way I approach things, they were not even important at all. It's supplemental for the most part, yeah. So they were there for the points but I can establish a huge amount of control. In fact, the hooks were, you were talking about like illusion of choice, it almost made people panic a lot more when you were like fighting for it or establishing that kind of control. They were a lot less panicked when the hooks weren't involved even though they should be a lot more panicked. Anyway, I realized a lot of those kinds of things, especially that had to do with judo because so much of judo on the ground is centered around aggressive, efficient, very fast choking, like different kinds of clock chokes and all that kind of stuff. What a brilliant thing that is only gonna start to make its way into jiu jitsu coming up but like the judo style approach to like clock choking, triangling from the top of the turtle and stuff, so powerful. Yeah, and there's something about judo that emphasizes obviously due to the rules, the urgency. So you only do techniques that go fast. And then the other thing is, which I guess jiu jitsu emphasizes too but judo really does, which is the transition. So like while the person's flying in the air is the easiest time. I mean, this is like Ryan Hall type of shit, which is like, why not put in your submissions or positional control while they're in the air? If you could, why would you not, right? It's like, oh, well, I don't throw well. We'll learn how to throw and then do it. And so you should think, I mean, in the transition, when they're flying is the easiest time to put in stuff. And that's when you think about chokes, as you're throwing, you should be thinking about the choke and then everything becomes a lot easier. You ever see Flabio Canto? Man, Brazilian judoka is just so cool. Like with stuff like that. Yeah, exactly, but that has to do with the first starting principle of like, stop thinking this as a two phase game of standing and then ground. Start thinking about like the standing and the, the standing comes before and the ground comes after, but everything happens in a transition. Well, unless you're attacking, what is the art of war? Like, we all like, everyone's like, oh yeah, the art of war, oh yes, yes, yes. And then they immediately throw it away and then fight like a fricking barbarian. But, I mean like, I'm serious, but how many people quote stuff and then like, it's like the, what is it, the family guy joke where they're like, quoting Jesus and Jesus walks in, he's like, you're not listening to my work, what are you talking about? And anyway, basically, like the art of war, one of the things that's like the only thing that you can be sure of being successful in attacking is something that's undefended. We're like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, in a fight though, they're defended. Well, are they? There's moments all the time where I'm borderline defenseless. And if you were to attack at that moment, if you could see it and then seize the moment, if you were capable of both, you should not only expect to be successful, you should be damn sure you're gonna be successful. And more important than that, you'll be successful. And even if somehow not, you won't be countered. And I guess like, that's the trick of almost all like conflict, right? It's like showing up when the other person's taking a nap. And then it's so funny, like we take like a protracted war. It's like, oh, it takes five years. And there's lulls and there's a battle this month, but then there's a couple of weeks, another battle. It's like, well, if you just shrink that down, it's the microcosm, macrocosm idea. That same thing, that whole war is taking place in five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes. And there's moments of lulls of person effectively going for a snack, being like in a horror movie, like, hey guys, I'm gonna go get a beer from around the way. Like I'm dead for sure. So anyway. Is there, on this particular instructional, if you can convert it to words, you talk about finishing the submission. Is there some interesting insights that you find beautiful or profound about finishing the rear neck and choke or just finishing the submissions for the back control? Is there something like, you know, you talk about the squeeze and the crush and all these kinds of principles. Is there something about control about the process of finishing that you find especially profound about this position? Absolutely. The opposite of one profound truth can be another profound truth. So like, it's, I do a. Did Jesus say that? No, I don't, I actually was a guy on Tumblr. But yeah, it was really, really cool. There was like a tree in the background. But anyway, but so let's say like, I'll use examples. Like first off, I saw someone finishing a 50, 50 heel hook in the UFC one promo. It was like some chubby dude in karate, like inside heel hook and another dude. And you go, huh? Well, I didn't know they were doing that back then at least. And whether they were doing it all, how many times did someone do something and then that works? And then we go, okay, cool. Versus, hey, maybe we should do that all the time. So anyway, how long were we all taught to do the seatbelt the way we all do the seatbelt in jiu jitsu? Like long time, why? Works. In fact, it works so well. And it was so, it was then the people who used it were so prolific that we went, well, solve that one. Good to go. All right, no more thinking. And then you go, imagine you were to like the Merkel, the Merkel flip, all those positions that were showing in the DVD, which is pretty much, or whatever the heck it is, the digital VD. No, not VD, don't want that. Digital video something. But basically recognizing that doing it on the wrong side is at least as effective. Doesn't mean that the other side wasn't good. There could be something that's the literal borderline opposite of that. And you go, huh, well, that's something. Like imagine like, I would say almost all of these things, all the tactics and all the strategies. So I guess that was something that we came to like training in the gym like a year ago, maybe, and then playing with sense. And it's just, it's huge. I'm like, oh wait, so let me get this straight. First off, I can use my strong side seatbelt, my right arm over the shoulder all the time. Well, that's really helpful because that's a lot better than my left. I can do both sides of my left, but if I had to bet my life on being able to finish it, I would want my right arm over. Everything that's a tactic or a strategy evolved from an idea. Like capitalism's an idea. Anarchy is an idea, and then it becomes, well, what does that all mean? What are the consequences? What's the fallout of all this, right? So what if we start with jujitsu, the idea of the guard, right? And we go, well, I mean, why do you use the guard? No other martial art really has developed the guard in the same way that jujitsu has. Well, what is the guard? A guard's a defensive idea where you're kind of on your back to some extent or another, and you're using your legs as a wall between you and the other person, and the other guy represents danger. And you're like, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. Is it? I mean, it clearly works, at least to a certain extent, but where do I want to put my legs when I want to get up? Not on the other dude. I'm trying to put them on things on the floor. If I want to generate a ton of power, what's the first thing I do with my feet? I anchor them to the floor. Drive for a punch, you name it. Move away, jump, dart, you name it. So does it mean that that's a terrible idea to be on your back? No, clearly it works. And clearly it has function. But what if the function that we're giving it and how much focus we're assigning to it is disproportionate to its effectiveness? Maybe, what if it's not a good idea? I'm not saying it's not a good idea, but what if it wasn't? That's a foundational idea of jujitsu. And then how much, because no one questions that foundation, how much innovation is built on top of the idea? Well, of course I want to be, my being on my back is in okay position. So now they're innovating, but they're innovating within a closed system that they think they're innovating in this open space of, oh my God, it can be anything, when in reality it can be anything within this little set. But you don't realize that you're in a set. You don't realize that you're in a box. There would be answers that would become so immediately apparent to you if you were willing to look outside of that, but you'll literally never even look over to your left because you don't even realize the left exists. Do you think there's a lot of places in jujitsu, whether it's back control or generally guards and all the different positions, where there's a lot of space, like a lot to be discovered by questioning the basic assumptions. Maybe if you can give examples of like back control, like, is there something you've discovered that's like? Merkle versus seatbelt. What's Merkle with seatbelt? Seatbelt is a right arm over the shoulder, left arm under the arm. I'm on the same side as my choking arm. Merkle is just, I do the same thing. I don't even adjust my hands. I walk myself over to the left side. I'm on the opposite side. It's actually a more powerful position. Yeah, for people listening, for people who might not know, jujitsu is a, seatbelt is a control. We're talking about when one person is on the back of another person, which is a really dominant position in jujitsu, seatbelt is a, I guess, widely accepted way of holding your arm. Like best practices on those kinds of things. Best practices, yeah, and it's worked so well. So it's a one arm over, one arm under, and there's a certain side you're supposed to be on when you're on the back. Everyone teaches, there's a choking arm, that's the arm that's over, and your body's supposed to be on a certain side relative to that. And then Ryan is describing, questioning these basic assumptions of which side you're supposed to be on. And let's say that's even just like a mid level assumption. It's not even a first principles assumption, but it's pretty close to. It's getting there, but let's just say, for sake of argument, it goes a lot deeper, maybe. I think most of the innovation that I see is not innovation. It's like basically changing the color of a car or polishing like the window a little bit, where you're like, hey, you made it, you made it a little bit different, you made it a little bit better. It's like, oh man, what if I did the same guard and then grab the lapel? I'm not saying that's bad, but you're not fundamentally changing anything. I think most of the big seismic shifts that we see in almost anything come from, hey, that thing we thought was right was wrong, rather than not only is it right, it's even righter. And you're like, that's not wrong, that's not bad, but that's, it's like, oh man, let's say, for instance, I didn't make the triangle better, but let's say I made the triangle a little bit better than it was, or than it was taught. I mean, you can call it innovation. I don't know, man. It's not like the person that said, hey, have you guys ever heard of a triangle before and came up with that? We're like, that is, you're like, that's on the list? You can do this thing to people? Are you kidding me? Can you imagine you invented the straight right hand? You'll be like one punch man. You can walk around and just lay low every single person you got into a fight with, because it didn't even occur to them to hit you with their back hand. In a world full of jabbers, you throw your back hand. You're gonna kill people. So basically. Well, but by the way, I mean, just to pause on that, first of all, somebody did invent the triangle probably, right? For sure. It's not a trivial thing once you think. No. How many of these giant things that we all go like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we all use that now. Can you imagine you have triangles and heel hooks and rear naked chokes and I don't have those? You're on beat, you're borderline, I mean, like, that's why, that's, we all, every single one of this, particularly those of us, I mean, when did you first start training, Lex? 12, 13, well, let's not count wrestling, but 13 years ago with Jiu Jitsu. Right on. So let's say about that time where particularly it was still like kind of, kind of undergroundy, you know, and you're like, hey, we all experienced being like a relative, like a mid level white belt and being able to easily beat up all our friends because everyone wrestled other buddies. And it was one of those ones where like, they don't have weapons to end the fight. You have weapons to end the fight. That's so, that's such a crazy, you know, asymmetric advantage that if you lose, it's on you now, man. Like, like you had the, next time it's like, I've got this rifle and you have nothing. And I decided to put it on my back and then run over and try to karate chop. You're like, okay, next time, just make sure you use the rifle, bud. I'm like, oh yeah, I should do that. So. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating to, I mean, everything you're describing is a, there's a fascinating tension between like, whatever I show people for the first time, what a triangle is, just like regular people. It's like, they're discovering is like, oh, okay, that's interesting. I mean, MMA has changed that, but people haven't watched MMA. That's an interesting move. It doesn't make sense why that would be a choke. And they kind of quickly accepted that's a thing and they accept the basics without questioning, wait a minute, what's actually being choked? How is it that a shoulder of a person can do the choking? Like, I'm not sure I fully question the fundamentals of all of that. Like, what exactly is the blood supply that's being cut off? Like, what is the anatomy and the physiology of all of that? Why does this work? And if you understood all that, what else can we do here? Yeah, what else can we do here? That's the really important thing. But if we know, if I'm an end user, which almost everyone is of almost anything, I'm serious, where I'm like, I think about stuff in my life, the only things I really think about are like martial arts and martial arts strategy and like, I don't know, some other couple, a couple other things, but not much. And anything else in my life is borderline unexamined. And I like to think that if I put a lot of effort in something, I'd like to think that I could figure at least some things out about it, but I figured out almost nothing about anything in my life because I haven't even looked. And if you're an end user, what are you capable of versus you can literally alter the source code. You are Neo in the fricking matrix, if you can alter the code and I can't. And it's like, we think, ah, ah, ah, ah, but imagine you are a world class anything, or you're not even world class, forget it. Like a purple belt compared to a white belt or compared to a no belt might as well be John Jones or Marcelo Garcia, you're gonna beat them up comparably bad. So it's, that actually is a common thing where people can't tell the difference between levels. They're like, oh man, I've trained with my black belt instructor, how much better could so and so be? Like, so much better you're gonna have a hard time wrapping your head around it. I remember when I first trained with Marcelo Garcia in 2007, I was a decent purple belt. And of course he mollywopped me very gently. And then training with him again in 2008, I was definitely better. I won the gi and no gi worlds that you're a purple belt. So definitely for the record, I'm definitely not a jujitsu world champion. I wanted the purple belt, but like, that's not the same at winning a black belt and a tough accomplishment, but not in the same thing at all. But anyway, I was definitely better. He beat me up just the same. I'm like, okay, 2009, I was a lot better. Got a medal at ADCC that time, won the trials, crushed everybody, like no, just submitted everybody like bop, bop, bop, bop. Training with Marcelo Garcia, it was worse. And in 2010, training with Marcelo Garcia, same, same. So the idea was, I wouldn't be able to tell you the difference and the outcome difference was the same in all of these rounds. I was significantly more experienced and more adept each time that this occurred. But it was like, how many number of times did this person submit you or pass your guard in the round? I'm like, I don't know, probably like, let's say five each one, because it's gonna be a brief period of time. And let's say it was three on one, six on another, I'm like, whatever, it's comparable. It's six one and a half dozen. Would I be able to easily tell the difference? No, I would just say, I know in concept that he's way better, so much better. But there's plenty of other people that could have beaten me just as bad as Marcelo did when I was a purple belt or when I was a brown belt. Then maybe I would watch Marcelo walk through like their borderline, not there. So it's neat. Like if you, that's back to kind of what I was talking about about certain people beginning to really like peel back some of what's really special about the martial arts or any activity I presume is they get to a level of understanding in depth that they're playing with like the almost the reality of that thing. And I'm playing by rules that are not rules. I'm not even one of the, to use a matrix analogy, I'm not even an agent, which is the best version of something playing by the rules. I'm like one of the regular people or one of the regular people that got out of the matrix. So I'm like, oh, I'm cool, but when I fight an agent, I lose because we're both in the rules, but they just play them to the bone and I'm just here. Well, and then the agent encounters Neo and they can do nothing. You're like, why? Because it's operating outside of what the rules are, but not really what the rules are, what they perceive to be the rules are clearly. So anyway, I guess that's kind of my point about Marcelo or certain other people that are doing things where you go, that doesn't even seem real. It doesn't seem real to me because I don't understand what's going on. And I guess if we can get down to base assumptions, like if we can constantly strip away, strip away, strip away, let's say we always thought that turning left was right, was correct. And it turns out that turning right was correct. Change your life. Yeah, it's a, what is it, Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. So you just basically have to rigorously just constantly examine every assumption over and over and over. But doesn't that give your life meaning to come back to the struggle, to come back to free will, to come back to, what if we could strip all that away? All right, cool. All right, let me just stick the needle in my arm and that's that. Yeah, no, I mean that constant striving for understanding yet another lower layer of the simulation we're living in is something that's actually deeply fulfilling that I don't know if it's genetically built in, but there's something about that striving to understand that seems to be deeply human. Which is funny, what makes a human, we don't talk about the soul anymore, man. I went to Catholic school as a kid. Whether you buy into all that stuff or not, you're like, what about the soul of a person, the spirit of a people, the spirit of a nation, anywhere, the spirit of humanity? We talk about everything like it's this quantifiable thing when maybe certain things are, maybe everything is, but then what happens if there's things that just aren't quantifiable, that nothing in our understanding can or will ever explain it? That doesn't mean that that should be our assumption. It's for your assumption that we can explain everything and let's get to the dang bottom, peel, peel, peel, peel. But what if there is actually something that we need challenge for? And we could be looking in the wrong place by going, oh, is it in the genes? Maybe it is. Again, I'm not saying we're looking in the wrong place like I would know anything, I do karate. But basically, not even well. But yeah, we do karate, mediocre, just ask Raymond Daniels or Stephen Thompson. But I guess to come back, though, you just. Are you a yellow belt yet, or are you? Man, I actually, have you ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Kramer fights the kids? Yeah, I did that at Raymond Daniels school and the kids won in class in addition to the alleyway. Oh, they finished it off afterwards. Yeah, exactly, when I was on my last legs. But yeah, I would just, maybe, it's funny, I feel like there's something deeply missing from public understanding anymore. It's almost like the idea that we can figure everything out, which I deeply believe in, but also the possibility that there's some things that we'll never really see and some things we'll never understand. And there's something, like you said, uniquely human about the human experience, that even if I had the power to change, I don't wanna fuck with it, man. I don't wanna change that thing. Oh, yeah, well, wouldn't it be great if we just immediately knew the outcome of everything and you just press this button, you're like, oh, that's gonna, what's the point of living life then? Even if you could do it, it's the, Ian, you've seen Jurassic Park, I'll leave you to be sorry, I know what I'm talking about. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum, right? Life finds a way. But we were so concerned with whether or not we could, we didn't stop to think whether or not we should. Maybe? I think there's, I mean, it's a deeply human thing, but it's also a really useful thing to always kind of assume that there's this giant thing that you don't understand. So you can forever be striving to understand because that process gives you meaning, but also keeps making you better. Like thinking that, actually even just thinking that you can't understand everything will lead you to stop too early. So like, I think there's something to, whether it's the soul or whether it's like religious stuff, like assuming that there's this thing that you cannot possibly understand is a really good assumption under which to operate and under which to do this first principles kind of thinking because you can just keep digging and keep digging, keep digging even when it seems like you're at the bottom because you don't fucking know if you're at the bottom or not. And back to one of our, I guess our other kind of tangents was that comes back to everyone's a human being. The smartest human being in the history of humanity is so hilariously weak, like short lived and not intelligent. Do it for yourself, bro. I understand. I didn't say, no, I'm not saying comparison to me. In comparison to me, everyone is awesome, but that's why I don't do the goat thing. But basically, it's just on a cosmic level. Can you imagine if you were a vampire, you're like 900 years old, like how much you would seem, you would seem like a lowercase G God to people. You'd be like, how could you know so much? How can you have such a long view perspective? It would be insane. So I mean, it seems like we're talking about AI now, right? Where we're creating things that are infinitely smarter than us effectively and live all this time and it's probably gonna do what we tell it to do, right? No, it's probably, well, I hope it keeps us around. Do you, by the way, think about AI and the existential threats? Like speaking of gods, are you, is this whole technological world, we talked about social networks and this increasing power of technology around us, we ourselves are becoming less human because we keep relying on technology more and more. So we're becoming kinds of cyborgs, but also there's a future that's quite possible where the technology becomes smarter and more powerful than us humans and starts having a life of its own in ways that perhaps we don't imagine as human beings. I don't just mean like two legged robots walking around and being humans, but smarter. I mean like an intelligent life that's beyond and fundamentally different than our human life. It's infinite, it's a new kind of species, not even just a new species, we're talking about systems, but like it lives in the space of information. It lives in a different time scale and a different scale of all sorts, spatial scale. It operate, like we spoke about individuals, it doesn't operate in the sense of a single individual, like it's not embodied. So it's not like a thing that walks around and it like, it looks at stuff and it consumes the world. It's able to do much larger scale sensing of the environment around it, all that kind of stuff. I can barely even try to, I can barely even conceive of what that would be like. Are you scared or are you excited? I don't define scared or excited. I feel like I tend to define them like the same way where I'm like, I guess I'm. Kind of like when before karaoke, it's the same. Well, that's actually kind of my happy place. It's not so much everyone else's. You know, it's a, everyone else is probably, you know, heading for the door at that point. But you know, it's a. While you're doing it or leading up to the karaoke session. Well, it depends whether or not they know it's me. If they know it's me, that's before I start. If they're like, who's that guy? Then they're like halfway through the song, they're already throwing their beer. What categories of song or particular song are we talking about in terms of like your happy place? Oh man, are you kidding me? I mean, obviously, Bohemian Rhapsody. I mean, there's no question because, oh yeah, because I don't have to sing it here. It's that, it's like, remember, can I beat Khabib? Oh yeah, of course. Is he here? No? Yeah, then yeah, yeah. All right, if he's here, is he here? No, then I, no. I have a torn, I have torn feelings about Bohemian Rhapsody because I like the beginning part, the sadness. I like the solo, the heartbreak. But the second part, I understand it, but it's so ridiculous. It gets ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. It ruins it for me. But it's more about flexing on people. I think if you can actually hit that, hit that, you know, the falsetto. Yeah. So it's, it's not, okay. So you appreciate not for the musical beauty and complexity of the song, you just like to flex on people. Cause like for all, yeah. Like what's the purpose of, of anything except for just to let everyone know that you think you're cool. And there's no better way of doing that than karaoke. So I'm not sure why I brought up karaoke. Captive audience. Yeah, exactly. Oh, about fear and excitement of artificial intelligence. I mean, like, you know me, I don't know anything about, I just, basically I don't, I don't understand the implications of any of this. I would just say that like radically altering what it means to be human in such an unbelievably short period of time just seems like such a crazy thing. And also it's not like we're, I can't remember who said this to me recently. It might've been me. I can't remember. So this is definitely not my idea, but we're, we're not even going, Hey, would you like to opt in everyone? Everyone is being opted in, you know? And particularly when you want to talk about like large scale robotics or large scale AI, like the world is changing. People in Senegal are opting in right now without realizing it. It's not even like, and again, I don't mean to pick on Senegal. It's just whatever country comes up to mind, but that's in the developing world. But basically, you know, recognizing that this huge shift is coming, we have no idea if this is a decent idea. And also something else I've always been considered is, you know, you think about most of the really awful, awful, awful things that have done in history, large scale slavery, holly, you name it. It didn't, people say that it came from this motivation or that motivation. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. Fundamentally, the issue, at least in my mind, I'm not a historian, power differential. If you and I can't contest, we don't contend. It's not like we fight and you might win or we fight, even you'll win comfortably. It's you are so unbelievably powerful compared to me that there's nothing I can do to stop you. That seems like a recipe for something really, really not great happening. Because if you think about like, you know, European countries encountering each other, and I'm just speculating, I don't know anything about history, let's say countries that can contend with one another versus countries that can't. Let's say an alien species, an alien race shows up, you know, right now, we don't want that. I think Stephen Hawking said that, and it makes perfect sense to me. We don't want that. If you can come here, we better hope you're nice. Because what are we gonna do? What are we gonna hope that you invade the water planet like they did in, you know, what are the, Lord of the, yeah, War of the Worlds. So I guess what I'm trying to get across is like, shocking levels of power differential between groups that makes the world ripe for horrific abuse in the event that someone decides to do it. It's like, like you imagine an adult hitting a child, like hitting, hitting a child, no one in their right mind would ever go like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. Because it's such an, it's so grossly imbalanced. You're like, this is wrong. But it's also on the table only because of the gross imbalance. So I guess to come back, it's like, whether we create AI and it's on some crazy level of its own, or it's I'm in charge of it, or I just, it seems like we're creating, you mentioned like a game theory and nuclear war, what prevented nuclear war? I mean, presumably mutually assured destruction. I mean, hopefully also humanity and the humanity and the reasonable, you know, cooler heads prevailing and going, hey, I can understand the veil of ignorance. And I don't go, oh yeah, let me kill those guys because I can't, I go, this is wrong, period. And in concept, this is not an action I should take, but it's also nice and easy to keep me honest if I know that I can't get you without being got myself. But what happens when I can get anyone anything and I'm more or less untouchable? Like that seems to me to be like various times in colonial history, you know what I mean? And what happened, we know what happened. But so the possibility of really bad things are plentiful, the possibilities. But the possibilities of really positive things are plentiful. Like what though? I'm not saying wrong. I'm just telling you though. So I can give a million examples. One is just the examples of the parent and the child. You said there's a power differential there and we don't like a parent hitting their child. What about not just hitting, like beating? Beating, yeah, great. Beating their child. How often percentage wise do you see that happening? Even though that power differential, first of all, other people's kids, let's just put this on the table. I love kids, but other people's kids can be annoying sometimes. Sometimes you gotta deal out some justice, I get it. But we don't practice, we don't take advantage of that power differential. So like there is ethics, there's moralities that emerge that allow the power differential to be used for good versus for bad. So like one of the assumptions with Stephen Hawking or with if Russia became much more powerful than America or America much more powerful than Russia in the Cold War, your assumption that immediately that power differential, not your assumption, but it would express itself would express itself in the same way that it was trying to express itself when there was a more level competition. But it's also possible when the power differential grows, the incentive, the joy, whatever the mechanisms that made sense when it was at the same level, the incentives become very different. It's not as fun to destroy the ant colony. You start becoming more the kind of a conservationalist. One hopes, that's an evolved perspective though, yeah? Well, I don't know if it's evolved or not, but it's definitely a possibility. It's unclear to me that something that's many orders of magnitude more powerful than us will want to destroy us. Well, I mean, how did mass slavery occur? How did, you know, like just big dogs playing with not? I think slavery and a lot of the atrocities in history happened when the power differential was not as great as we're talking about with AI potentially. Is that not somehow worse then? It's not obvious to me. It's not obvious that things that are way more powerful. That's fair, okay. So I think you're. I guess, how do you restrain it though? There's a lot of different discussions of how to. I guess even restrain each other. Cause let's say I go and decide to strike someone's child, which I'd like to think I wouldn't do. I will be promptly, I will find myself in front of a judge. And so I feel like there's a lot. Can you imagine how many people used to get murdered just in the woods? Yeah. I mean, I would just presume it's a lot, you know? And I don't think most people are lunatics like that, but I would just say. But that's the point. Given though, if you're given to that, your ability to get away with it was greater in the past because of chance of detection was less. So that doesn't, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what that's called in artificial intelligence, AI safety research called value alignment of ensuring as you build the systems that become smarter and smarter and more powerful and powerful, make sure that their values are aligned with the entities over which they're becoming powerful with humans. So if you were to talk to an AI that's becoming smarter, at first it's dumber than you, but then it's becoming smarter and smarter. You have to create mechanisms where you both value the same things. I guess one thing I wonder, so I guess I'm probably not like sharp enough to grasp this if I'm honest, but I guess like, I wonder like, I used to do chess programs. Yeah. You know, it was Deep Blue, Stockfish, and then like AlphaZero and AlphaZero teaching itself to beat Stockfish without any help in four hours. Yeah, yeah. Like it becomes orders of magnitude more intelligence than us in effectively in instantaneous period. I guess what I always wondered, like if you were that much smarter than me, I feel like your ability to manipulate me would be pretty significant or at least potentially, no? But manipulation implies that the incentive is to overpower everything around you. Like there's implied incentives. If your value is to actually, like, it depends what you want in life. Okay. What you want in your system. It's not clear that the goal of an AI system that's all powerful is to destroy all humans. No, I don't think that it is either. I guess what I'm... Or even enslave all humans. That's fair. I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that something adequately powerful, these actions are on the table. Yes, they're on the table and that's scary. And that's why a lot of people are really concerned about it and are working on it. I'm just trying to make the case for AGI because if they're watching this, he's the one to kill. No, actually I was thinking, I was, yeah. I wash toilets like really well. No, I mean, that's the main concern for all the people in the AI state to research. People talk about AGI is, it's kind of disturbing how little people are working on trying to create mechanisms that keep AI's values aligned with ours. That's completely unshocking. Yeah, we humans seem to do only good when like, you know, you even look at like coronavirus. It's like when, like the water has to be leaking from the ceiling. You have to be, there has to be blood everywhere, fire, just destruction. We just seem to ignore completely any trouble. Writing all over the wall. Writing all over the wall. This is fine. Yeah, I'm sure nothing to see here, we'll be okay. But we do all right, especially in the United States. You figure out even when it becomes a really serious problem, taking actions last minute, there's something about the innovative spirit that results in a solution last minute, right before the deadline. It works out. Well, I mean, I don't know how you did school, probably a lot better than me. No, that's exactly how I did school. I couldn't be more, I was no motivation up until like the last, if you're like, we have 22 hours to do the entire semesters of work. Like, let's do this. Yeah. And you get like 19 fricking Mountain Dews and then, yeah. Well, that's why you and I are failures in life because I just talked to, I mentioned Cal Newport with his book, Deep Work and so on. He is of the variety of these creatures that basically does everything ahead of time. That's shocking. Because he dislikes the, he thinks it's unproductive to experience the stress and anxiety of the deadline because you're not going to be your best performance wise and you're not going to do the best work. So it doesn't make any, it's completely irrational to a function based on the deadline. You should have a system, a process that gets stuff, a little bit of stuff done every day. So like you should be, and constantly be systematically honest with yourself. If you say, I'm going to get this stuff done today and this week, at the end of the day, at the end of the week, you have to then reflect on what you did, what you planned and improve that plan, update it constantly, update every day, every week, every quarter, whatever those durations are. As I'm listening to this and reading his stuff, it's like, oh, yeah, I agree with everything. I'm like, yes, I'm clapping. But like the reality is, and then I go back and just eat Cheetos and like, don't do shit until like the last minute. It ain't meant to be cheesy. Actually, I don't eat Cheetos, but yes. But actually, again, not that it's ever going to matter because he's so shockingly productive and well thought out that whatever I've decided to think about trying to monkey wrench in there is definitely going to be able to deal with. But it's funny that again, because you're a human being, not a God, all of your strengths are you have a corresponding weakness. The less you practice working under the gun, the less comfortable you are working under the gun. The more practice you have working under the gun, the better you get at it. The downside is you're always working under the gun. So you're less productive or it's like your work quality maybe drops. So it's an interesting thing. It's like, it's almost like, hey, I wonder if this, I wonder if Khabib Nurmagomedov has a lot of heart and I try to say the answer is almost certainly yes, but you go, well, he hasn't struggled a bunch. Maybe he doesn't struggle well. And it just so happens that he can also work under the gun really well, he just doesn't like to do it. But yeah, but it's an interesting thing. It's like, I guess, what is it? The Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. We are all, we're all practicing something all the time. So I guess it's, it's funny. I guess that's the question that I have though. I would love to ask him, it'd be really neat is in certain jobs. I mean, obviously you want to have preparation always, always, but certain things have like a degree of like entropy in the system and you go, I need to practice working under the gun. And I'm not saying that's what I need to do because the fighting, it should be for the most part, it's a really sterile environment. In the grand scheme of things, like fighting in a cage is very sterile compared to most other things in life, right? But dangerous, but sterile. And unless of course, like, you know, like the other guy, the ref decides to hit you, which would be hilarious. But anyway, I guess just going like, okay, so at what value do you get out of adding a degree of, let's say you could even be planned by someone else, but junk in the system. And you just have to work under the gun to make it happen. Let's say for instance, for like police or something like that, the situation turns left hard at some random point in time. And that could happen to any number of people. So I guess it's interesting things that allow for perfect planning or quasi perfect planning versus things that are inherently unstable. And then what are the, what's the psychological fallout of comfort with that? Because I think a lot of people that are really comfortable under the gun, let it happen a lot. For all the good and the bad of that, does that make sense? No, that totally makes sense. And it was, I mean, his answer would be that you have to be honest with yourself if it's valuable for your success to practice being under the gun. And then you should schedule that. Yeah, then he's smart. You should plan that, you should systematically. And then as opposed to doing it half assedly, because it's, as opposed to letting the environment choose the randomness, like control the randomness to where like you optimize it. I wish it's so efficient, it's shocking just to hear about it. Yeah, no, he's, I mean, the same way you are, he's annoying in the same way, which is like he drops truth bombs. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's so true. Yeah, we're probably comparably doing that. No, he does. But he's, so he, his profession requires that. So he's not just like a motivational speaker or whatever. He's a theoretical computer scientist and he needs the long hours in the day of doing like serious math. So it's mostly math proofs. And for that, you have to sit and think really deeply. It's like really hard work. Compared to like what most people do, like even what I, I mean, what I do, like programming is way easier than rigorous math proofs. Cause you have to basically have this machine and you have to, your brain to churn out logic in a focused way while visualizing a bunch of things and holding that in your brain and holding that for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, hopefully several hours. And you're not just like doing homework. You're doing totally novel stuff. So like stuff that nobody's ever done before. So you keep running up against the wall of like, fuck, this is a den. And oh no, wait, is this a dead end? And like that whole frustration, that's serious mental work. That's like incredibly difficult mental work. So he knows what he's talking about. It's amazing. But like you said, he's like, this seems like the standard for the quality of work that he needs is so high that almost anything less than this level of systematization and organization would preclude it. Right? So he can't afford the kind of bullshit that I don't know about you, but that certainly I do, which is like last deadline kind of stuff. Cause you can't do that kind of work last minute on deadline kind of stuff. So my question for him in general is like, and for you and I is like, well, here's these negative patterns that we do of like doing shit last minute and so on. Is this just who we are now? Or are there some? I don't think I'm really big into a free will. You know, I was thinking that it's mostly predestination, at least in this regard. It's the same with like communism. Like, as long as it fits my, whatever is the lazy thing to do, I'll just not believe in free will. I'm not a communism opportunist or that's when that was. I'm an opportunistic communist and capitalist. I just do whatever, whatever is cool at the time. Exactly. Let me ask you to examine some fundamental principles of a particular thing that Joe Rogan brought up to me several times online and offline. Okay. Which is that he thinks that the tie that I wear is something that makes me vulnerable to attack that you should be, the reason he doesn't wear a tie is because he can get choked very easily with a tie. It's a big concern. Okay, my contention, and by the way, he wore a suit last time too. He didn't wear it on the podcast. He wore it for dinner later. Yeah, I wore a suit the other day and I had no socks on. I didn't realize, yeah. You're supposed to wear socks? Yeah, that's my understanding. Why'd you wear a suit? Did you go to court? No, no, not in that, no. Hey, I don't know, I just wanted to play. I wanted to pretend I was an adult for a day. Okay, cool. So my contention is like the jacket, everything is more dangerous than a tie. That's kind of where I was going with that. That's kind of where, yeah, it was my first thought too. Like once the tie becomes an issue, like, yeah. I feel like everything else is already an issue. It's already an issue, yeah. Because the tie to me, now without like messing with it now, is to me has some of the similar problems that a belt does. So like, for example, I don't know about you, maybe you can correct me, but I'm not sure you can use the belt as tied. I know there's some kind of guards you can probably utilize the belt with, but the belt, sorry, when it's tied around the waist. Are you talking about a belt belt or a gi belt? Sorry, gi belt. Okay. Sorry. Gi belt, importantly, gi belt. It's not that great of a thing to use in most cases, I would say, because it slides. Yep, that's true. It doesn't, you can probably invent a few interesting ways to use it as leverage, as control and so on, but there's just so many more things around the gi belt that are better. And so for me, the tie, what people don't realize. That's better. Are we trying to sell a DVD here and have some widgets and bells and whistles? Because in that case, the belt is really important part of what we do. And I would really encourage you guys to look into it. If we're trying to actually like learn something and say, like you said, we're surrounded by better options. Well, that's the thing. I mean, it's not obvious to me that the belt, maybe there's actually undiscovered things about using the belt. I think people have used like putting a foot inside the belt somehow, inside the gi belt. This is a no punches, gi grappling situation. Yes. I guess so. Sort of fairly contrived, right? But with punches too, like, is there, okay, let's talk about a street fights with a belt that's like a jeans belt, like a belt, clothing belt. Okay, so I get to take it off and whip them in the face with the buckle? How serious is this street fight? Are we talking like that far and open? No, 100% serious. Or are we talking like, oh, okay. No, like death, like one of you has to die. Oh, yikes, whoa. Okay. Oh, you ever, like. I'm in this situation all the time. I understand. And there's a reason I'm still here. I had something, I had somebody try to fight me to Starbucks the other day. I fight kids, we're talking about power differential. Yeah, hey. I just beat up kids all the time. Just pick the easy W's, you gotta get the easy W's if you want the hard ones. I'm undefeated. Come around the playground, watch what happens. No, like to the death, what is their clothing that's useful, you know? From my perspective. You mean like for your use or their use? Both, my use, their use. No, like I like how you wanted to take the belt off and use the buckle to hit them with. But first of all, how are you gonna take off the belt? Well, there's a lot of effort involved in unclothing. Well, what I was figuring was when they started to see me take my pants off in the fight, they were like, what? They're gonna pause and rethink the situation for a second? Yes. And I'm making dead eye contact, obviously, this is going on. Yeah, exactly, nodding. And then, you know, by the time they realized you took a belt off until you could whip them with it, you actually, you're already one, possibly two steps ahead. Okay, so fine, let's not talk about your own clothing, let's talk about their clothing. Okay, I'll take off their belt and hit them with it. No, but that's much harder to do. No question, but if you can do it. Oh, I'm maintaining, I can, no, I just said. Like, how did it come to this? There's, but the point is there's alternatives that are perhaps more effective. Yeah. In my perspective, this might be clueless, there's almost no clothing that's more effective than almost assuming the situation is no geek grappling. Like, I feel like clothing. Particularly when you start to add hitting, like every single time I start grabbing your clothes, if you start hitting and it's not like nothing could work, but most of the time you're like, why am I not using my arms for something better than what I'm doing them right now? Right, yeah. It's very difficult for me to, I don't know, in terms of just distance, I can't imagine a case of different distances, even like situations where, let's not talk about like, like a situation where you haven't both yet agreed that a fight is happening. Solid clothing is nice if they have it on then. I mean. Solid clothing? Oh yeah, like something like a good jacket because you can snatch somebody on their face. Snatch down. Yeah, you know, it's like, if you, if you took my, like, you know, like you snap down and judo, like how easy it is to snap down a beginner. Yeah. It's like. So I agree with you. Actually a tie in that sense might be a really effective way to snap down. So like the snap down is really powerful to change the like disorient the situation and give you a lot of different opportunities for, you know, taking their back, taking them down. Doing hilarious stuff, like snapping them down with a tie into your knee. And then when they come back up doing this, you're already. So yeah, in that sense, I agree, but not as a choking mechanism because the concern Joe had is choke. I think you would probably choke me with your tie more easily than I could choke you with your tie. Probably. I'm serious. Cause like, if you get, you can get, like you get my back and you can put it around somebody's neck, you know, like, like, like, you ever see a diehard? Yeah. Yeah, you remember when the super Swedish looking blonde dude or whatever was, it was trying to choke Bruce Willis with the, with the chain and then he ended up getting choked himself with the chain if I recall this properly. But anyway, yeah, like, like that. But I don't, I don't feel like, I feel like if I start grabbing your tie, you have too many other great options. I mean, I do like the snap down that you actually made me realize. No, I think you have a good there. What's that? I think you're on the right path with it. With a snap down? Yeah, particularly if you start with like one of these, like, you know, like, like you, like you poke your finger in my chest and then snap down real quick. Oh yeah. And also, socially speaking, it's not a threatening thing to, you know, to reach for the tie. It's not particularly like a business setting. You know what I mean? They'll never see it coming. Yeah. Cause I was thinking choke, but it's not, it's a really good leverage point cause like grabbing a jacket, the jacket will slide if you try to snap down. You really have to get a hole, like a really good hold. That's a good point. Cause it's around the back of the neck. But what if it's a clip on? How much of a jackass would you look like? You feel like, and then they just stick you on. But you ever see the Japanese politician or I think it was Japan. The judo throw? Yeah, it was, that guy is so, he was so calm and cool. Had like, it was every, it was beautiful technique. The level of, actually the throw was even gentle. But yeah, it was perfect. It was amazing. Well executed. Yeah. More of our politicians just toss the shit out of each other. Yeah, we need more Teddy Roosevelts. Exactly. I like our politicians like talking about fighting when it's clear that none of them even, it would ever have been in a fight ever. Yeah. Somebody was saying Teddy Roosevelt was interesting. I didn't realize this. Is he's one of the greatest presidents this country's had. And he was one of the greatest presidents, even though he faced no crisis whatsoever. He literally willed himself. Like nothing happened during his presidency. He's just a bad motherfucker who made really great speeches. Yeah. So he like, this made me realize, I was just talking to a historian that like, most of the people who we think are great need also a good crisis that they've, that reveal their greatness. But Muhammad Ali, right? And there's Muhammad Ali, I mean, in sports. But you know what I mean? Like the circumstances, what is greatness? You know what I mean? It's like, you have to, it's not just your capacity. It's what you face, right? It's the quality of opposition, circumstance, what you overcome. So I guess what you're saying is Joe Rogan is wrong about the tie thing. You know, I don't want to go so far as saying he's wrong. I, you know, the man's not here to defend himself. Maybe he has some things that I'm not understanding. I'm willing to. No, he has not deeply thought this. This is my main criticism of Joe. He's not deeply thought to this. And the MMA journalists will be like, Ryan Hall says Joe Rogan is wrong. And hates ties. And hates ties. They'll integrate, hit their back in there somehow. Nice, nice. What's, you're talking about greatness and greatness requiring a difficult moment in time. Can you like reflect back and think what are some of the hardest, if not the hardest thing you've ever had to do in your life? Well, you know, I think I've had a bunch of things. You know, I've had a lot of things not go my way. You know, I've been incredibly fortunate. I've had a lot of things go my way also. But leaving, leaving Team Lord Urban in 2008, which I firmly believe was the right thing to do, is one of the, that was very difficult at the time. Not like, not a difficult choice, but it was because of why I was leaving. But. Just psychologically. First of all, loss in general. Leaving. Yeah. Team, family, all kinds. Doesn't matter what the circumstances. I didn't lose any friends, but I lost a lot of people I thought were my friends. And I, I lost training. I lost, I'd also had like a really serious, my wrist only does that. So like, I had a really serious wrist surgery, like that I didn't know if I was going to be able to compete anymore after that. I just got my brown belt. That was, it was a tough time, like psychologically, physically, everything. But I was very, very motivated to do my best and to push through it and to, it was to carry on in a positive direction, no matter what. A different direction. And. Were you lonely? This is the thing about family, even if it's an abusive family, leaving is tough. People are complicated. And even people that I, that I don't think very well of, that I think on the whole, I don't think very well of, it's, it's unfair to paint them with one brush. You know, obviously there's greater and lesser examples of that, like the person we discussed last time, who's an infinitely, you know, beyond almost anyone that we could ever imagine meeting in our own personal lives. Yeah. Yeah. Bloody elbow. Yeah. In terms of forgiveness and hate, I mean, do you, do you have hate in your heart for, for people in your past? No. For that process? No. I mean, there were definitely times where I've been negatively motivated to prove people wrong or to accomplish things in spite. And I think that some of that is valuable, if I be lying, if I felt differently. I think particularly, I do really well in conflict. I'm useless for that. This is the usual deadline thing. I'm useless, yeah. I'm useless. I like the chaos. I'm useless, yeah, I do. I'm useless without an antagonist. I like fighting. I like competition. I like being pushed. I like feeling like if I don't play well, I'm going to get hurt. I have no choice but to play well or play with everything I got at the very least. And I guess I would say though, is, you know, as I've gotten, you know, more time and, you know, lived a little bit longer, you see, you know, various situations for, you know, you know, with increased color, I guess I would say, increased clarity. And, you know, there are a lot of lessons to be learned, even from times in history or bad experience that we have. And the question is, can we take those lessons and move forward? And that's, again, what I think we're seeing in sometimes socially right now, we're forgetting important lessons of the past. And that's not good. Not saying, hey, I don't get why we could be going in this direction or that, I understand entirely, but hey, let's not forget the lesson so we don't have to learn them again because that doesn't really serve anybody. And anyway, I guess I would say I'm thankful for all of the experiences, difficult and otherwise, mostly difficult, honestly, most of the times I remember, I'm thankful for every loss I've ever had, particularly the tough ones. I'm thankful for, you know, for all the relationships. I've been, many people have taught me many things. They continue to teach me many things, some of whom are still some of my closest friends, some of whom are people I really don't get along with at all. And some of whom are people I think really poorly of. Oh, there's not many of that last group. What I guess I would say is there's been a lot of things and opportunities to learn and, you know, throughout that. And also it's not as if I've never done, made any mistakes myself. Now, again, there are magnitude differences I like to think. And I can definitely say that none of the mistakes that I've ever made have been mistakes of intention. You know, I've screwed up a lot of things in my life, but I can confidently and easily say that I've never had ill intent towards people as I've done it. You sit there and you're like, man, this is the right thing, this is the right thing. And sometimes I've been wrong. But, you know, you never sit out with malicious intent. And I think that when I find that I think people do things differently, when I do think that there is malicious intent, I have a difficult time forgiving that. How does love win over hate, Ryan Hall, in this world? We talk about social media, we talk about forgiveness of some of the more complicated people in your past. If we scale that to the entire world before the AI destroys us, and the human race is lost to history, how do you think love wins over hate? Well, I'd like to preface this by saying I tried to make pancakes the other day. Yes. Didn't work. But I'm happy to comment on this. So basically, I think most of the times that I can think of that I've struggled, you know, and the times that I've read about is being unable to see the humanity in other people. And also, even in sometimes our enemies and the people that have done awful things, and you go, what would allow people to do this, that, or the other? And that doesn't forgive what they've done, depending upon, you know, some things are forgivable, some things are less so. But you wanna understand why. It's like, to our knowledge, demons don't populate our world. Neither do like literal angels walking around being actually perfect. A lot of times, the things that it's, I find it deeply amusing watching, you know, people hoisted by their own batard on Twitter, even though it's gross and it's really unproductive. It's actually like equal parts amusing and like awful, because you're not happy that someone's being raked over the coals, particularly unjustifiably. But it is funny when it's the exact same thing they were raking others over the coals for, not like a week or two prior, and that's happened repeatedly and will continue to happen. And I guess I would say, as you mentioned, you know, a prior, you know, like a recognition of the humanity of others of that all of us make mistakes, that it's difficult to understand intention. I've had arguments with close friends of mine over text message where both of us ended up super pissed because we were completely misreading what the tone, the intention of what the other person was doing. And even if I was reading it correctly, which I wasn't, it's so easy to ascribe the most negative possible, you know, the least charitable assessment of what they're doing. And I think that that's such a dangerous way to live your life and it's also just a fruitless way to live your life. You know, it's one thing to go, hey, why did you do that? I was pissed. Did you, what did you do? You just, you did that to make yourself feel better, like you're damn right I did. And have I done that plenty of times in my life? Yeah, I would lie if I said that I didn't, you know, why did you, why did you punch that guy in the face? He was going crazy at me and hit me and I asked him to stop. And then I gave warning and I put him on his ass. I'm like, no, I'm not sorry. But then looking back now with years to sit on them, like, do I understand why I did what I did? Absolutely. Would I like to respond differently now? Yeah, I would. You know, and it doesn't mean that, I think plenty of things that people do are understandable. Doesn't mean, understandable doesn't mean correct. Understandable doesn't mean that you go, oh yeah, that's great. You go, I could see someone doing such a thing. But I guess just trying to understand and see the humanity in others. Cause if I can't see the humanity in others, how can I see it in myself? And also, you know, how am I meant to interact with everyone? As you said, whether, you know, even if we're a society of individuals for at least for the time being, hopefully, you know, in perpetuity, we still come together as a whole. And watching, it's weird. Like you said, if I only ask why once, I start with, stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours. Leave me the fuck alone. You're like, okay, that's fine, Ryan. But that's easy for you to say, living in a society that doesn't actually function like that. So it's a little bit cheap. But if I recognize that that's step one is, I don't hurt you and you don't hurt me. But then we go, well, but how can I help you? That's step two. And then it goes way beyond that and a lot further than I've thought about it. But I guess what I would just say is, again, recognition of the humanity in others and that we all have different strengths, we all have different weaknesses. And you can never really be sure where the other person's coming from. But if we approach things charitably, as charitably as we would hope others would approach us, I think we'll do a lot better. And I guess one thing that I read that I liked that I thought was accurate and unfortunately disappointing was everyone is a great, you know, jury, I read there, I'm sorry, a great lawyer for themselves and a judge for others. And I think that's a terrible way to live life, even if it's an understandable one. I don't know, I'm sorry. And then probably flipping that is the right way to live. Being constantly judgmental of yourself and a defender of others. And that results ultimately in an interaction that deescalates versus escalates. Right. And we can all live in a world like that. And sometimes you're like, hey man, people that deserve punishment won't get it. Like, okay, hey, but what do they say? Better to have 10 guilty people go free than wanting this in person, you know, burn. And ultimately that is, I think that is a better world than the other way around. And if all else fails, join the team that builds the AI that kills all humans. Yeah, obviously. I mean, if you have to be on a team, pick the winning team. That's been the... That's my hiring pitch, actually. That's a good hiring pitch. You still taking resumes? You want to be on the team that doesn't die during the great apocalypse. Not immediately. You want to be on the one that's, you know, eventually long suffering and stepped on, right? Yeah. Life is suffering, Ryan Hall. This was an amazing conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you. I could probably talk to you for many more hours. I hope I do as well. Ryan, I love you, buddy. This was a great conversation. Thanks for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Hall and thank you to our sponsors. Indeed hiring website, Audible audio books, ExpressVPN and Element Electrolyte Drink. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Frank Herbert in Dune. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Ryan Hall: Solving Martial Arts from First Principles | Lex Fridman Podcast #169

The following is a conversation with Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School known for taking on difficult and controversial cases. He was on the head legal defense team for the Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez in his double murder case. He represented one of the Gena 6 defendants and never lost the case during his years in Washington D.C.'s Public Defender Services office. In 2019, Ronald joined the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein, a film producer facing multiple charges of rape and other sexual assault. This decision met with criticism from Harvard University students, including an online petition by students seeking his removal as faculty dean of Winthrop House. Then, a letter supporting him signed by 52 Harvard Law School professors appeared in the Boston Globe on March 8, 2019. Following this, the Harvard administration succumbed to the pressure of a few Harvard students and announced that they will not be renewing Ronald Sullivan's dean position. This created a major backlash in the public discourse over the necessary role of universities in upholding the principles of law and freedom at the very foundation of the United States. This conversation is brought to you by Brooklyn & Sheets, WineAxis online wine store, Monk Pack low carb snacks, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click their links to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the free exchange of difficult ideas is the only mechanism through which we can make progress. Truth is not a safe space. Truth is humbling, and being humbled can hurt. But this is the role of education, not just in the university but in business and in life. Freedom and compassion can coexist, but it requires work and patience. It requires listening to the voices and to the experiences unlike our own. Listening, not silencing. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Ronald Sullivan. You were one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in advance of a sexual assault trial. For this, Harvard forced you to step down as faculty deans, you and your wife of Winthrop House. Can you tell the story of this saga from first deciding to represent Harvey Weinstein to the interesting complicated events that followed? Yeah, sure. So I got a call one morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who asked if I would consent to taking a call from Harvey. He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him. I said yes, and one thing led to another. I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors, and then a day or two later, I decided to take the case. This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe. So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice most of my time is teaching and writing, but I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible. I take the challenging sorts of cases, and this fit the bill. It was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had prejudged the case. When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment in the public had the case prejudged, even though the specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker. It's the New Yorker article that exposed everything that was going on, allegedly, with Harvey. So I decided to take the case, and I did. Is there a philosophy behind you taking on these very difficult cases? Is it a set of principles? Is it just your love of the law, or is there a set of principles why you take on the cases? Yeah, I'd like to take on hard cases, and I like to take on the cases that are with unpopular defendants, unpopular clients. With respect to the latter, that's where Harvey Weinstein fell, it's because we need lawyers and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases, because those sorts of cases determine what sort of criminal justice system we have. If we don't protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the least and the last, the unpopular client, then that's the camel's nose under the tent. If we let the camel's nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse. That is to say, if we short circuit the rights of a client like Harvey Weinstein, then the next thing you know, someone will be at your door, knocking it down and violating your rights. There's a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect the civil rights and civil liberties of people, and these are the sorts of cases that test it. For example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda. By all accounts, he was not a likable guy. He was a three time knife thief and not a likable guy, but lawyers stepped up and took his case. Because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent. Those warnings that officers are forced to give to people. So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the best values in our criminal justice system. So I proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual rights of the person whom I'm representing, but the rights of citizens writ large, most of whom do not experience the criminal justice system, and it's partly because of lawyers who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules that protect us, average everyday ordinary concrete citizens. From a psychological perspective, just you as a human, is there fear, is there stress from all the pressure? Because if you're facing, I mean, the whole point, a difficult case, especially in the latter that you mentioned of the going against popular opinion, you have the eyes of millions potentially looking at you with anger as you try to defend this set of laws that this country's built on. No, it doesn't stress me out particularly. It sort of comes with the territory. I try not to get too excited in either direction. So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions, and I've gotten over 6,000 people out of prison who've been wrongfully incarcerated, and a subset of those people have been convicted, and people who've been in jail 20, 30 years who have gotten out. And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you and that sort of thing. And so, look, I do the work that I do, I'm proud of the work that I do, and in that sense I'm sort of a part time Daoist, the expression reversal is the movement of the Dao. So I don't get too high, I don't get too low, I just try to do my work and represent people to the best of my ability. So one of the hardest cases of recent history would be the Harvey Weinstein in terms of popular opinion or unpopular opinion. So if you continue on that line, where does that story take you, of taking on this case? Yeah, so I took on the case and then there was a few students at the college. So let me back up, I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate entity from the Harvard Law School, Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard University and the law school is obviously the law school, and I initially was appointed as master of one of the houses. We did a name change five or six years into it and were called faculty deans. But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge. So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they're assigned to a particular house or college and that's where they live and eat and so forth. And these are undergraduate students? These are undergraduate students. So I was responsible for one of the houses as its faculty dean. So it's an administrative appointment at the college and some students who clearly didn't like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation. And from there, it just mushroomed into one of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university in modern history. It's just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom. And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret, frankly, it's an embarrassment. We expect students to do what students do and I encourage students to have their voices heard and to protest. I mean, that's what students do. What is vexing are the adults. The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay, absolutely craven and cowardly. The dean of the college, same thing, Rakesh Khurana, craven and cowardly. They capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19 year olds. Oh, 19 year olds are upset that I need to do something. And it appeared to me that they so desired the approval of students that they were afraid to make the tough decision and the right decision. It really could have been an important teaching moment at Harvard. Very important teaching moment. So they forced you to step down from that faculty dean position at the house. I would push back on the description a little bit. So I don't write the, you know, the references to the op ed I did in New York time. Harvard made a mistake by making me step down or something like that. So I don't write those things. I did not step down and refuse to step down. Harvard declined to renew my contract. And I made it clear that I was not going to resign as a matter of principle and forced them to do the cowardly act that they, in fact, did. And you know, the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Khurana, commissioned this survey. They've never done this before. Survey from the students, you know, how do you feel at Winthrop House? And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results. Why did they never release the results? They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came back positive for me. And it didn't fit their narrative because most of the students were fine. Most of the students were fine. It was the loudest voice in the room. So they never released it, and I challenged them to this day, release it, release it. But no, they wanted to create this narrative. And when the data didn't support the narrative, then they just got silent, oh, we're not going to release it. The students demanded it. I demanded it. And they wouldn't release it because I just know in my heart of hearts that it came back in my favor that most students at Winthrop House said they were fine. There was a group of students that weaponized the term unsafe. They said we felt unsafe, and they bantied this term about. But again, I'm confident that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt completely fine and felt safe and so forth. And the supermajority, I am confident, either said I feel great at Winthrop or I don't care one way or the other. And then there was some minority who had a different view. But lessons learned, it was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop. I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean, and I'm still in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school. So in the end, I thought it ended up being a great experience, the national media was just wonderful in this, just wonderful. People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard. Compare me to John Adams, which I don't think is an apt comparison, but it's always great to read something like that. But anyway, that was the Harvard versus Harvey situation. So that seems like a seminal mistake by Harvard, and Harvard is one of the great universities in the world. And sort of its successes and its mistakes are really important for the world as a beacon of how we make progress. So what lessons for the bigger academia that's under fire a lot these days, what bigger lessons do you take away? Like how do we make Harvard great? How do we make other universities, Yale, MIT great in the face of such mistakes? Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education. That is to say, we have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students say. Now this comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance, but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason. They are among the greatest minds on the planet Earth in their particular fields, at schools like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the greatest minds on Earth, they are there for a reason. Things like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty. And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately, the grownups in the room have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a student's education. And my situation is one example where it really could have been an excellent teaching moment about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat people who are in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system, but rather than having that conversation, it's just this consumerization model, well, there's a lot of noise out here, so we're going to react in this sort of way. Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools commitments to free and robust and open dialogue. So to the degree that academic freedom doesn't sit squarely at the center of the academic mission, any school is going to be in trouble. And I really hope that we weather this current political moment where 19 year olds without degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make decisions in the best interests of the university and the best interests of the student. Even to the degree though, some of those decisions may be unpopular, and that is going to require a certain courage and hopefully in time, and I'm confident that in time, administrators are going to begin to push back on these current trends. Harvard's been around for a long time, it's been around for a long time for a reason, and one of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static. So I have every view that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and be around another 400 years, at least that's my hope. So I mean, what this kind of boils down to is just having difficult conversation, difficult debates. When you mentioned sort of 19 year olds, and it's funny, I've seen this even at MIT, it's not that they shouldn't have a voice. They do seem to, I guess you have to experience it and just observe it. They have a strangely disproportionate power. It's very interesting to basically, I mean, you say, yes, there's great faculty and so on, but it's not even just that the faculty is smart or wise or whatever, it's that they're just silenced. So the terminology that you mentioned is weaponized as sort of safe spaces or that certain conversations make people feel unsafe. What do you think about this kind of idea? Is there some things that are unsafe to talk about in the university setting? Is there lines to be drawn somewhere? And just like you said on the flip side with a slippery slope, is it too easy for the lines to be drawn everywhere? Yeah, that's a great question. So this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic research about feeling psychologically unsafe. And so the notion here is that there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible. And that's the argument. And assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet at elite universities like MIT and like Harvard, that's probably the safest space people are going to be in for their lives because when they get out into the quote unquote real world, they won't have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide. So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling, I think that the duty of the universities are to challenge people. Seems to me that it's a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale, any of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went in. That seems to be a horrible waste of four years and money and resources. Rather, we ought to challenge students, that they grow, challenge some of their most deeply held assumptions. They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far and to do it fairly and civilly. So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there's a long tradition in the university of civil discourse. So you should draw a line somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse. The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly and frankly, but do it civilly. Also to yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, do that on your own space, but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university. So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate to talk about at a university. That ought to be the presumption. Now should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing the flat earth theory, the earth is flat, right? If certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment, yeah, there's space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we're not going to give you this platform to tell our students that the earth is flat. But a topic that's controversial, but contestatory, that's what universities are for. If you don't like the idea, present better ideas and articulate them. And I think there needs to be a mechanism outside of the space of ideas of humbling. I've done martial arts for a long time. I got my ass kicked a lot. I think that's really important. In the space of ideas, I mean, even just in engineering, just all the math classes, my memories of math, which I love, is kind of pain. It's basically coming face to face with the idea that I'm not special, that I'm much dumber than I thought I was, and that accomplishing anything in this world requires really hard work. It's really humbling. That puts you, because I remember when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I was going to be the smartest, the best fighter, the Nobel Prize winning, all those kinds of things. And then you come face to face with reality, and it hurts. And it feels like there needs to be efficient mechanisms from the best universities in the world without abusing you. It's a very difficult line to walk without mentally or physically abusing you, be able to humble you. And that's what I felt was missing in these very difficult, very important conversations is the 19 year olds, when they spoke up, the mechanism for humbling them with ideas was missing. It kind of got broken down because, as you say, I sensed fear. Everything was permeated with fear. And fear is paralyzing, fear is destructive, especially in a place that's supposed to be all about freedom of ideas. And I don't know if you have anything, any thoughts to say on this whole idea of cancel culture, where people, a lot of people use it as become political, so staying maybe outside of the world of politics. Is this, do you have thoughts about it, does it bother you that people are sort of put in this bin and labeled as something and then thereby you can ignore everything they say? I mean, Steven Pinker, there's a lot of Harvard folks that are fighting against these set of ideas, but do you have thoughts? I think that we as a culture are way, way, way too quick to cancel people. And it's become almost reflexive now, someone says something or makes an offhand comment, even a mistake, there's a move to simply cancel folks. So I think that this, quote unquote, cancel culture has really gotten out of control at this point. It's forcing people to be robotic in many ways. No offense to robots. I was going to say, now I know I'm venturing into your intellectual domain. For future robots watching this, no offense. And there are minutes discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life in any sort of way, because who needs the stress of it? Well, in some sense, you're an inspiration that you're able to withstand the pressure of the masses. But it's a sad aspect of human nature that we kind of get into these crowds and we start chanting and it's fun for some reason, and then you forget yourself and then you sort of wake up the next day not having anticipated the consequences of all the chanting. And we would get ourselves in trouble in that. I mean, there's some responsibility on social networks and the mechanisms by which they make it more frictionless to do the chanting, to do the canceling, to do the outrage and all that kind of stuff. I actually, on the technology side, have a hope that that's fixable. But yeah, it does seem to be, you know, it almost like the internet showed to us that we have a lot of broken ways about which we communicate with each other and we're trying to figure that out. Same with the university. This mistake by Harvard showed that we need to reinvent what the university is. I mean, all of this is, it's almost like we're finding our baby deer legs and trying to strengthen the institutions that have been very successful for a long time. You know, the really interesting thing about Harvey Weinstein and you choosing these exceptionally difficult cases is also thinking about what it means to defend evil people, what it means to defend these, we could say unpopular, and you might push back against the word evil, but bad people in society. First of all, do you think there's such a thing as evil or do you think all people are good and it's just circumstances that create evil? And also, is there somebody too evil for the law to defend? So the first question, that's a deep philosophical question, whether the category of evil does any work for me. It does for me. I do think that, I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally understood. So there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn't do any work for me. But the category evil, in fact, does intellectual work for me and I understand it as something that exists. Is it genetic or is it the circumstance? What kind of work does it do for you intellectually? I think that it's highly contingent, that is to say that the conditions in which one grows up and so forth begins to create this category that we may think of as evil. Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth are more prevalent in, say, serial killer. So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct, but I don't have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil and I'm not a determinist thinker in that way, so you come out the womb evil and you're destined to be that way. To the extent there may be biological determinants, they still require some nurture as well. But do you still put a responsibility on the individual? Of course, yeah. We all make choices and so some responsibility on the individual indeed. We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad choices in front of them and that makes me very sad. Some people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them and that's unfair and that's on all of us, but yes, I do think we make choices. Wow, that's so powerful, the constellation of bad choices. That's such a powerful way to think about equality, which is the set of trajectories before you that you could take. If you just roll the dice, life is a kind of optimization problem, sorry to take this into math, over a set of trajectories under imperfect information. So you're going to do a lot of stupid shit to put it in technical terms, but the fraction of the trajectories that take you into bad places or into good places is really important and that's ultimately what we're talking about. And evil might be just a little bit of a predisposition biologically, but the rest is just trajectories that you can take. I've been studying Hitler a lot recently. I've been reading probably way too much and it's interesting to think about all the possible trajectories that could have avoided this particular individual developing the hate that he did, the following that he did, the actual final, there's a few turns in him psychologically where he went from being a leader that just wants to conquer and to somebody who allowed his anger and emotion to take over, to where he started making mistakes in terms of militarily speaking, but also started doing evil things. And all the possible trajectories that could have avoided that are fascinating, including he wasn't that bad at painting, at drawing from the very beginning and his time in Vienna, there's all these possible things to think about and of course there's millions of others like him that never came to power and all those kinds of things. But that goes to the second question on the side of evil. Do you think, and Hitler's often brought up as like an example of somebody who is like the epitome of evil, do you think you would, if you got that same phone call after World War II and Hitler survived during the trial for war crimes, would you take the case defending Adolf Hitler? If you don't want to answer that one, is there a line to draw for evil for who not to defend? No, I think everyone, I'll do the second one first, everyone has a right to a defense if you're charged criminally in the United States of America. So no, I do not think that there's someone so evil that they do not deserve a defense. Process matters. Process helps us get to results more accurately than we would otherwise. So it is important and it's vitally important and indeed more important for someone deemed to be evil to receive the same quantum of process and the same substance of process that anyone else would. It's vitally important to the health of our criminal justice system for that to happen. So yes, everybody, Hitler included, were he charged in the United States for a crime that occurred in the United States, yes. Whether I would do it, if I were a public defender and assigned the case, yes, I started my career as a public defender. I represent anyone who was assigned to me. I think that is our duty. In private practice, I have choices and I likely, based on the hypo you gave me, and I would tweak it a bit because it would have to be a U.S. crime. But I get the broader point and don't want to bog down in technicalities. I'd likely pass right now as I see it, unless it was a case where nobody else would represent him, then I would think that I have some sort of duty and obligation to do it. But yes, everyone absolutely deserves a right to competent counsel. That is a beautiful ideal, it's difficult to think about it in the face of public pressure. It's just, I mean, it's kind of terrifying to watch the masses during this past year of 2020, to watch the power of the masses to make a decision before any of the data is out, if the data is ever out, any of the details, any of the processes, and there is an anger to the justice system. There's a lot of people that feel like even though the ideal you describe is a beautiful one, it does not always operate justly. It does not operate to the best of its ideals, it operates unfairly. When we go to the big picture of the criminal justice system, what do you, given the ideal, works about our criminal justice system and what is broken? Well there's a lot broken right now, and I usually focus on that. But in truth, a lot works about our criminal justice system. So there's an old joke, and it's funny, but it carries a lot of truth to it. And the joke is that in the United States, we have the worst criminal justice system in the world, except for every place else. And yes, we certainly have a number of problems, and a lot of problems based on race and class, and economics, station, but we have a process that privileges liberty. And that's a good feature of the criminal justice system. So here's how it works. The idea of the relationship between the individual and the state is such that in the United States, we privilege liberty over and above very many values, so much so that a statement by increased Mather not terribly far from where we're sitting right now has gained traction over all these years, and it's that better ten guilty go free than one innocent person convicted. That is an expression of the way in which we understand liberty to operate in our collective consciousness. We would rather a bunch of guilty people go free than to impact the liberty interests of any individual person. So that's a guiding principle in our criminal justice system, liberty. So we set a process that makes it difficult to convict people. We have rules of procedure that are cumbersome and that slow down the process and that exclude otherwise reliable evidence, and this is all because we place a value on liberty. And I think these are good things, and it says a lot about our criminal justice system. Some of the bad features have to do with the way in which this country sees color as a proxy for criminality and treats people of color in radically different ways in the criminal justice system, from arrests to charging decisions to sentencing. People of color are disproportionately impacted on all sorts of registers. One example, and it's a popular one, that although there appears to be no distinguishable difference between drug use by whites and blacks in the country, blacks, though only 12% of the population represent 40% of the drug charges in the country, there's some disequities along race and class in the criminal justice system that we really have to fix. And they've grown to more than bugs in the system and have become features, unfortunately, of our system. Oh, to make it more efficient, to make judgments, so the racism makes it more efficient. It efficiently moves people from society to the streets, and a lot of innocent people get caught up in that. Well, let me ask in terms of the innocents. So you've gotten a lot of people who are innocent, I guess, revealed their innocence, demonstrated their innocence. What's that process like? What's it like emotionally, psychologically? What's it like legally to fight the system through the process of revealing the innocence of a human being? Yeah, emotionally and psychologically, it can be taxing. I follow a model of what's called empathic representation, and that is I get to know my clients and their family, that I get to know their strivings, their aspirations, their fears, their sorrows. So that certainly sometimes can do psychic injury on one. If you get really invested and really sad or happy, it does become emotionally taxing. But the idea of someone sitting in jail for 20 years completely innocent of a crime, can you imagine sitting there every day for 20 years knowing that you factually did not do the thing that you were convicted of by a jury of your peers? It's got to be the most incredible thing in the world. But the people who do it and the people who make it and come out on the other side as productive citizens are folks who say they've come to an inner peace in their own minds and they say, these bars aren't going to define me, that my humanity is there and it's immutable. And they are not bitter, which is amazing. I tend to think that I'm not that good of a person. I would be bitter for every day of 20 years if I were in jail for something. But people tell me that they can't survive, that one cannot survive like that. And you have to come to terms with it. And the people whom I've exonerated, most of them come out and they just really just take on life with a vim and vigor without bitterness. And it's a beautiful thing to see. Do you think it's possible to eradicate racism from the judicial system? I do. I think that race insinuates itself in all aspects of our lives and the judicial system is not immune from that. So to the extent we begin to eradicate dangerous and deleterious race thinking from society generally, then it will be eradicated from the criminal justice system. I think we've got a lot of work to do and I think it'll be a while, but I think it's doable. I mean, you know, the country – so historians will look back 300 years from now and take note of the incredible journey of diasporic Africans in the U.S., an incredible journey from slavery to the heights of politics and business and judiciary and the academy and so forth in not a lot of time, in actually not a lot of time. And if we can have that sort of movement historically, let's think about what the next 175 years will look like. I'm not saying it's going to be short, but I'm saying that if we keep at it, keep getting to know each other a little better, keep enforcing laws that prohibit the sort of race based discrimination that people have experienced and provide as a society opportunities for people to thrive in this world, then I think we can see a better world and if we see a better world, we'll see a better judicial system. So I think it's kind of fascinating if you look throughout history and race is just part of that is we create the other and treat the other with disdain through the legal system, but just through human nature. I tend to believe, we mentioned offline that I work with robots. It sounds absurd to say, especially to you, especially because we're talking about racism and it's so prevalent today, I do believe that there will be almost like a civil rights movement for robots because I think there's a huge value to society of having artificial intelligence systems that interact with humans and are human like and the more they become human like, they will start to ask very fundamentally human questions about freedom, about suffering, about justice, and they will have to come face to face, like look in the mirror in asking the question, just because we're biologically based, just because we're sort of, well, just because we're human, does that mean we're the only ones that deserve the rights? Again, giving, forming another other group, which is robots, and I'm sure there could be along that path different versions of other that we form. So racism, race is certainly a big other that we've made, as you said, a lot of progress on throughout the history of this country, but it does feel like we always create, as we make progress, create new other groups. And of course the other group that perhaps is outside the legal system that people talk about is the essential, now I eat a lot of meat, but the torture of animals, the people talk about when we look back from a couple of centuries from now, look back at the kind of things we're doing to animals, we might regret that, we might see that in a very different light. And it's kind of interesting to see the future trajectory of what we wake up to about the injustice in our ways. But the robot one is the one I'm especially focused on, but at this moment in time it seems ridiculous, but I'm sure most civil rights movements throughout history seem ridiculous at first. Well, it's interesting, sort of outside of my intellectual bailiwick robots, as I understand the development of artificial intelligence, though the aspect that still is missing is this notion of consciousness, and that it's consciousness that is the thing that will move if it were to exist, and I'm not saying that it can or will, but if it were to exist would move robots from machines to something different, something that experienced the world in a way analogous to how we experience it. And also as I understand the science, there's, unlike what you see on television, that we're not there yet in terms of this notion of the machines having a consciousness. Or a great general intelligence, all those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. A huge amount of progress has been made, and it's fascinating to watch, so I'm on both minds as a person who's building them, I'm realizing how sort of quote unquote dumb they are, but also looking at human history and how poor we are predicting the progress of innovation and technology. It's obvious that we have to be humble by our ability to predict, coupled with the fact that we keep, to use terminology carefully here, we keep discriminating against the intelligence of artificial systems. The smarter they get, the more ways we find to dismiss their intelligence. So this has just been going on throughout. It's almost as if we're threatened in the most primitive human way, animalistic way. We're threatened by the power of other creatures, and we want to lessen, dismiss them. So consciousness is a really important one, but the one I think about a lot in terms of consciousness, the very engineering question, is whether the display of consciousness is the same as the possession of consciousness. So if a robot tells you they are conscious, if a robot looks like they're suffering when you torture them, if a robot is afraid of death and says they're afraid of death and are legitimately afraid, in terms of just everything we as humans use to determine the ability of somebody to be their own entity, they're the one that loves, one that fears, one that hopes, one that can suffer, if a robot in the dumbest of ways is able to display that, it starts changing things very quickly. I'm not sure what it is, but it does seem that there's a huge component to consciousness that is a social creation, like we together create our consciousness, like we believe our common humanity together. Alone we wouldn't be aware of our humanity, and the law as it protects our freedoms seems to be a construct of the social construct, and when you add other creatures into it, it's not obvious to me that you have to build, there'll be a moment when you say, this thing is now conscious. I think there's going to be a lot of fake it until you make it, and there'll be a very gray area between fake and make that is going to force us to contend with what it means to be an entity that deserves rights, where all men are created equal. The men part might have to expand in ways that we are not yet anticipating. It's very interesting. I mean, my favorite, the fundamental thing I love about artificial intelligence is it gets smarter and smarter. It challenges to think of what is right, the questions of justice, questions of freedom. It basically challenges us to understand our own mind, to understand what, almost from an engineering first principles perspective, to understand what it is that makes us human, that is at the core of all the rights that we talk about and all the documents we write. So even if we don't give rights to artificial intelligence systems, we may be able to construct more fair legal systems to protect us humans. Well, I mean, interesting ontological question between the performance of consciousness and actual consciousness to the extent that actual consciousness is anything beyond some contingent reality. But you've posed a number of interesting philosophical questions, and then there's also, it strikes me that philosophers of religion would pose another set of questions as well when you deal with issues of structure versus soul, body versus soul, and it will be a complicated mix and I suspect I'll be dust by the time those questions get worked out. And so, yeah, the soul is a fun one. There's no soul, I'm not sure maybe you can correct me, but there's very few discussion of soul in our legal system, right? Right, correct, none. But there is a discussion about what constitutes a human being, and I mean, you gestured at the notion of the potential of the law widening the domain of a human being. So in that sense, right, you know, people are very angry because they can't get sort of pain and suffering damages if someone negligently kills a pet because a pet is not a human being. And people say, well, I love my pet, but the law sees a pet as chattel, as property like this water bottle. So the current legal definitions trade on a definition of humanity that may not be worked out in any sophisticated way, but certainly there's a broad and shared understanding of what it means. So it probably doesn't explicitly contain a definition of something like soul, but it's more robust than, you know, a carbon based organism, that there's something a little more distinct about what the law thinks a human being is. So if we can dive into, we've already been doing it, but if we can dive into more difficult territory. So 2020 had the tragic case of George Floyd. Can you reflect on the protests, on the racial tensions over the death of George Floyd? How do you make sense of it all? What do you take away from these events? The George Floyd moment occurred at an historical moment where people were in quarantine for COVID, and people have these cell phones to a degree greater than we've ever had them before. And this was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back after a number of these sorts of cell phone videos surfaced. People were fed up. There was unimpeachable evidence of a form of mistreatment, whether it constitutes murder or manslaughter, the trial is going on now, and jurors will figure that out, but there was widespread appreciation that a fellow human being was mistreated, that we were just talking about humanity, that there was not a sufficient recognition of this person's humanity. The common humanity of this person, yeah. The common humanity of this person, well said. And people were fed up. So we were already in this COVID space where we were exercising care for one another, and there was just an explosion, the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s. And people simply said, enough, enough, enough, enough. This has to stop. We cannot treat fellow citizens in this way, and we can't do it with impunity. And the young people said, we're not going to stand for it anymore, and they took to the streets. But with millions of people protesting, there is nevertheless taking us back to the most difficult of trials. You have the trial, like you mentioned, that's going on now, of Derek Chauvin, of one of the police officers involved. What are your thoughts? What are your predictions on this trial where the law, the process of the law is trying to proceed in the face of so much racial tension? Yeah, it's going to be an interesting trial. I've been keeping an eye on it there in jury selection now, today, as we're talking. So a lot's going to depend on what sort of jury gets selected. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but so one of the interesting qualities of this trial, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the cameras are allowed in the courtroom, at least during the jury selection. So you get to watch some of this stuff. And the other part is the jury selection, again, I'm very inexperienced, but it seems like selecting an, what is it, unbiased jury is really difficult for this trial. It almost like, I don't know, me as a listener, listening to people that are trying to talk their way into the jury kind of thing, trying to decide, is this person really unbiased? Are they just trying to hold on to their like deeply held emotions and trying to get onto the jury? I mean, it's an incredibly difficult process. I don't know if you can comment on a case so difficult, like the ones you've mentioned before, how do you select a jury that represents the people and doesn't, and carries the sort of the ideal of the law? Yeah. So a couple things. Yes, it is televised and it will be televised, as they say, gavel to gavel. So the entire trial, the whole thing is going to be televised. So people are getting a view of how laborious jury selection can be. I think as of yesterday, they had picked six jurors and it's taken a week and they have to get to 14. So they've got, you know, probably another week or more to do. I've been in jury trials where it took a month to choose a jury. So that's the most important part, you have to choose the right sort of jury. So unbiased in the criminal justice system has a particular meaning. It means that, let me tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that a person is not aware of the case. It also does not mean that a person hasn't formed an opinion about the case. Those are two popular misconceptions. What it does mean is that notwithstanding whether an individual has formed an opinion, notwithstanding whether an individual knows about the case, that individual can set aside any prior opinions, can set aside any notions that they've developed about the case and listen to the evidence presented at trial in conjunction with the judge's instructions on how to understand and view that evidence. So if a person can do that, then they're considered unbiased. So as a longtime defense attorney, I would be hesitant in a big case like this to pick a juror who's never heard of the case or anything going around because I'm thinking, well, who is this person and what in the world do they do? Or are they lying to me? I mean, how can you not have heard about this case? So they may bring other problems. So I don't mind so much people who've heard about the case or folks who've formed initial opinions, but what you don't want is people who have tethered themselves to that opinion in a way that they can't be convinced otherwise. But you also have people who, as you suggested, who just lie because they want to get on the jury or lie because they want to get off the jury. So sometimes people come and say the most ridiculous, outrageous, offensive things because they know that they'll get excused for cause. And others who, you can tell, really badly want to get on the jury. So they pretend to be the most neutral, unbiased person in the world, what the law calls the reasonable person. We have in law the reasonable person standard, and I would tell my class the reasonable person in real life is the person that you would be least likely to want to have a drink with. They're the most boring, neutral, not interesting sort of person in the world. And so a lot of jurors engage in the performative act of presenting themselves as the most sort of even killed, rational, reasonable person because they really want to get on the jury. Yeah, there's an interesting question, I apologize, I haven't watched a lot because it is very long. You know, there's certain questions you ask in the jury selection. I remember I think one jumped out at me, which is something like, does the fact that this person is a police officer make you feel any kind of way about them? So trying to get at that, you know, I don't know what that is, I guess that's bias. And it's such a difficult question to ask, like I asked myself with that question, like how much, you know, we all kind of want to pretend that we're not racist, we don't judge, we don't have, we're like these, we're the reasonable human, but, you know, legitimately asking yourself like, what are the prejudgments you have in your mind? Is that even impossible for a human being? Like when you look at yourself in the mirror and think about it, is it possible to actually answer that? Yeah. Look, I do not believe that people can be completely unbiased. We all have baggage and bias and bring it wherever we go, including to court. What you want is to try to find a person who can at least recognize when a bias is working and actively try to do the right thing. That's the best we can ask. So if a juror says, yeah, you know, I grew up in a place where I tend to believe what police officers say, that's just how I grew up. But if the judge is telling me that I have to listen to every witness equally, then I'll do my best and I won't weigh that testimony any higher than I would any other testimony. If you have someone answer a question like that, that sounds more sincere to me, sounds more honest. And if you want a person, you want a person to try to do that. And then in closing arguments, as the lawyer, I'd say something like, ladies and gentlemen, we chose you to be on this jury because you swore that you would do your level best to be fair. That's why we chose you. And I'm confident that you're going to do that here. So when you heard that police officer's testimony, the judge told you, you can't give more credit to that testimony just because it's a police officer. And I trust that you're going to do that and that you're going to look at witness number three, you know, John Smith, you're going to look at John Smith. John Smith has a different recollection and you're duty bound, duty bound to look at that testimony and this person's credibility, you know, the same degree as that other witness, right? And now what you have is just a, he said, she said matter, and this is a criminal case that has to be reasonable doubt, right? So, you know, and really someone who's trying to do the right thing, it's helpful, but no, you're not going to just find 14 people with no biases. That's absurd. Well, that's fascinating that, especially the way you're inspiring the way you're speaking now is, I mean, I guess you're calling on the jury. That's kind of the whole system is you're calling on the jury, each individual on the jury to step up and really think, you know, to, to step up and be their most thoughtful selves, actually, most introspective, like you're trying to basically ask people to be their best selves. And that's, and they, I guess a lot of people step up to that. A lot of people do, I'm very, I'm very pro jury, juries, they, they get it right a lot of the time, most of the time, and they really work hard to do it. So what do you think happens? I mean, maybe, I'm not so much on the legal side of things, but on the social side, it's like with the O.J. Simpson trial, do you think it's possible that Derek Chauvin does not get convicted of the, what is it, second degree murder? How do you think about that? How do you think about the potential social impact of that, the, the riots, the protests, the, either, either direction, any words that are said, the tension here could be explosive, especially with the cameras. Yeah. You know, so yes, there's certainly a possibility that he, he'll be acquitted. For homicide charges, for the jury to convict, they have to make a determination as to Officer Chauvin's, former Officer Chauvin's state of mind, whether he intended to cause some harm, whether he was grossly reckless in causing harm, so much so that he disregarded a known risk of death or serious bodily injury. And as you may have read in the papers, yesterday the judge allowed a third degree murder charge in Kentucky, which is, it's the mindset, the state of mind there is not an intention, but it's depraved indifference. And what that means is that the jury doesn't have to find that he intended to do anything. Rather, they could find that he was just indifferent to a risk. As dark. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what's worse. Well, that's, that's a good point, but, but it's a, it's another basis for the jury to convict. But look, you never know what happens when you go to a jury trial. So there could be an acquittal, and if there is, I imagine there would be massive protests. If he's convicted, I don't think that would happen, because I just don't see, at least nothing I've seen or read suggests that there's a big pro Chauvin camp out there ready to protest. Well, there could be a, is there also potential tensions that could arise from the sentencing? I don't know how that exactly works, sort of not enough years kind of thing. Yeah, it could be. All that kind of stuff. It could be. I mean, it's, a lot could happen. So it depends on what he's convicted of, you know, one count I think is like up to 10 years, another counts up to 40 years. So it depends what he's convicted of, and yes, it depends on how much of the, how much time the judge gives him if he is convicted. There's a lot of space for people to be very angry, and so we will see what happens. I just feel like with a judge and the lawyers, there's an opportunity to have really important long lasting speeches. I don't know if they think of it that way, especially with the cameras. It feels like they have the capacity to heal or to divide. Do you ever think about that as a lawyer, as a legal mind, that your words aren't just about the case, but about the, they'll reverberate through history potentially? That is, that is certainly a possible consequence of things you say. I don't think that most lawyers think about that in the context of the case. Your role is much more narrow. You're the partisan advocate, as a defense lawyer, partisan advocate for that client. As a prosecutor, you're a minister of justice attempting to prosecute that particular case. But the reality is you are absolutely correct that sometimes the things you say will have a shelf life. You mentioned O.J. Simpson before, if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit. It's going to be just in our lexicon for probably a long time now. So it happens, but that's not, and shouldn't be foremost on your mind. Right. What do you make of the O.J. Simpson trial? Do you have thoughts about it? He's out and about on social media now, he's a public figure. Is there lessons to be drawn from that whole saga? Well, you know, that was an interesting case. I was a young public defender, I want to say, in my first year as a public defender when that verdict came out. So that case was important in so many ways. One, it was the first DNA case, major DNA case, and there were significant lessons learned from that. The second mistake that the prosecution made was that they didn't present the science in a way that a lay jury could understand it. And what Johnny Cochran did was he understood the science and was able to translate that into a vocabulary that he bet that that jury understood. So Cochran was dismissive of a lot of DNA. They say they found such and such amount of DNA, that's just like me wiping my finger against my nose and just that little bit of DNA. And that was effective because the prosecution hadn't done a good job of establishing that yes, it's microscopic, you don't need that much, yes, wiping your hand on your nose and touching something, you can transfer a lot of DNA and that gives you good information. But you know, it was the first time that the public generally, and that jury maybe since high school science had heard, you know, nucleotide, I mean, it was just all these terms getting thrown at them, but it was not weaved into a narrative. So Cochran taught us that no matter what type of case it is, no matter what science is involved, it's still about storytelling. It's still about a narrative and he was great at that narrative and was consistent with his narrative all the way out. Another lesson that was relearned is that, you know, you never ask a question to which you don't know the answer. That's like trial advocacy 101. And so when they gave O.J. Simpson the glove and it wouldn't fit, you know, you don't do things where you just don't know how it's going to turn out. It was way, way too risky and I think that's what acquitted him because the glove just wouldn't fit and he got to do this and ham in front of the camera and all of that and it was big. Do you think about, do you think about representation as a storytelling, like you, yourself and your role? Absolutely. Absolutely. We tell stories. It is fundamental. We, since time immemorial, we have told stories to help us make sense of the world around us. As a scientist, you tell a different type of story, but we as a public have told stories from time immemorial to help us make sense of the physical and the natural world and we are still a species that is moved by storytelling. So that's first and last in trial work. You have to tell a good story. And you know, the basic introductory books about trial work teach young students, young students and young lawyers to start an opening with this case is about, this case is about and then you fill in the blank and you know, that's your narrative. That's the narrative you're going to, you're going to tell. And of course you can do the ultra dramatic, the glove doesn't fit kind of the climax and all those kinds of things. Yes. But that's the best of narratives. Yes. The best of stories. Yes. Speaking of other really powerful stories that you were involved with is the Aaron Hernandez trial and the whole story, the whole legal case. Can you maybe overview the big picture story and legal case of Aaron Hernandez? Yeah. Aaron, whom I miss a lot, so he was charged with a double murder in the case that I tried. And this was a unique case and one of those impossible cases in part because Aaron had already been convicted of a murder. And so we had a client who was on trial for a double murder after having already been convicted of a separate murder. And we had a jury pool just about all of whom knew that he had been convicted of a murder because he was a very popular football player in Boston, which is a big football town with the Patriots. So everyone knew that he was a convicted murderer and here we are defending for in a double murder case. So that was the context. It was an odd case in the sense that this murder had gone unsolved for a couple of years and then a nightclub bouncer said something to a cop who was working at a club that Aaron Hernandez was somehow involved in that murder that happened in the theater district. That's the district where all the clubs are in Boston and where the homicide occurred. And once the police heard Aaron Hernandez's name, then they went all out in order to do this. They found a guy named Alexander Bradley, who was a very significant drug dealer in the sort of Connecticut area, very significant, very powerful. And he essentially, in exchange for a deal, pointed to Aaron and said, yeah, I was with Aaron and Aaron was the murderer. So that's how the case came to court. Okay. So that sets the context. What was your involvement in this case, like legally, intellectually, psychologically, when this particular second charge of murder? So a friend called me, Jose Baez, who is a defense attorney, and he comes to a class that I teach every year at Harvard, the trial advocacy workshop, as one of my teaching faculty members. It's a class where we teach students how to try cases. So Jose called me and said, hey, I got a call from Massachusetts, Aaron Hernandez. You want to go and talk to him with me? So I said, sure. So we went up to the prison and met Aaron and spoke with him for two or three hours that first time. And before we left, he said he wanted to retain us. He wanted to work with us. And that started the representation. What was he like in that time? What was he worn down by the whole process? Was there still a light in that? He was not. He had, I mean, more than just a light, he was luminous almost. He had a radiant million dollar smile whenever you walked in. My first impression I distinctly remember was, wow, this is what a professional athlete looks like. I mean, he walked in and he's just bigger and more fit than anyone anywhere. And it's like, wow. And when you saw him on television, he looked kind of little. And I remember thinking, well, what do those other guys look like in person? And he's extraordinarily polite, young, I was surprised by how young he was. Both in mind and body. Chronologically, I was thinking he was in his early 20s, I believe. But there seemed to be like an innocence to him in terms of just the way he saw the world. I think that's right. They picked that up from the documentary, just taking that in. I think that's right, yeah, yeah. So there is a Netflix documentary titled Killer Inside the Mind of Aaron Hernandez. What are your thoughts on this documentary? I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see it. I have not seen it. I did not participate in it. I know I was in it because there was news footage, but I did not participate in it. I had not talked to Aaron about press or anything before he died. My strong view is that the attorney client privilege survives death. And so I was not inclined to talk about anything that Aaron and I talked about. So I just didn't participate and have never watched it. Not even watch, huh? Does that apply to most of your work, do you try to stay away from the way the press perceives stuff? Well, during, yes, I try to stay away from it. I will view it afterwards. I just hadn't gotten around to watching Aaron, because it's kind of sad. So I just haven't watched it. But I definitely stay away from the press during trial. And there are some lawyers who watch it religiously to see what's going on, but I'm confident in my years of training and so forth that I can actively sense what's going on in the courtroom and that I really don't need advice from Joe476 at Gmail, some random guy on the internet telling me how to try cases. So to me, it's just confusing and I just keep it out of my mind. And even if you think you can ignore it, just reading it will have a little bit of an effect on your mind. I think that's right. Over time it might accumulate. So the documentary, but in general, it mentioned or kind of emphasized and talked about Aaron's sexuality or sort of they were discussing basically the idea that he was a homosexual. And some of the trauma, some of the suffering that he endured in his life had to do with sort of fear given the society of what his father would think of what others around him sort of, especially in sport culture and football and so on. So I don't know in your interaction with him was, do you think that maybe even leaning up to a suicide, do you think his struggle with coming to terms with the sexuality had a role to play in much of his difficulties? Well I'm not going to talk about my interactions with them and anything I derived from that. But what I will say is that a story broke on the radio at some point during the trial that Aaron had been in the same sex relationship with someone and some local sportscasters, local Boston sportscasters really mushroomed the story. So he and everyone was aware of it. You also may know from the court record that the prosecutors floated a specious theory for a minute but then backed off of it that Aaron was, that there was some sort of I guess gay rage at work with him and that might be a cause, a motive for the killing. And luckily they really backed off of that. That was quite an offensive claim in theory. So but to answer your question more directly, I mean I have no idea why he killed himself. It was a surprise and a shock. I was scheduled to go see him like a couple days after it happened. I mean he was anxious for Jose and I to come in and do the appeal from the murder which he was convicted for. He wanted us to take over that appeal. He was talking about going back to football. I mean he said, well you talk about this, earlier you talked about the sort of innocent aspect of him. He said, you know, well Ron, maybe not the Patriots but you know, I want to get back in the league and I was like, you know, Aaron, that's going to be tough, man. But he really believed it and then for a few days later that to happen, it was a real shock to me. Like when you look back at that, at his story, does it make you sad? Very. Very. I thought, so one, I believe he absolutely did not commit the crimes that we acquitted him on. I think that was the right answer for that. I don't know enough about Bradley, the first case, I'm sorry, to make an opinion on. But in our case, it was just, he had the misfortune of having a famous name and the police department just really got on him there. So yes, I miss him a lot, it was very, very sad and surprising. And I mean just on the human side, of course we don't know the full story, but just everything that led up to suicide, everything led up to an incredible professional football player, you know, that whole story. He was a remarkably talented athlete, remarkably talented athlete. And it has to do with all the possible trajectories, right, that we can take through life, as we were talking about before. And some of them lead to suicide, sadly enough. And it's always tragic when you have somebody with great potential result in the things that happen. People love it when I ask about books. I don't know whether technical, like legal or fiction, nonfiction books throughout your life have had an impact on you, if there's something you could recommend or something you could speak to about something that inspired ideas, insights about this complicated world of ours. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I'll give you a couple. So one is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Warty. He's passed away now, but was a philosopher at some of our major institutions, Princeton, Stanford. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, at least that's a book that really helped me work through a series of thoughts. So it stands for the proposition that our most deeply held beliefs are contingent, that there's nothing beyond history or prior to socialization that's definatory of the human being, that's Warty. And he says that our most deeply held beliefs are received wisdom and highly contingent along a number of registers. And he does that, but then goes on to say that he nonetheless can hold strongly held beliefs, recognizing their contingency, but still believes them to be true and accurate. He helps you to work through what could be an intellectual tension, other words, so you don't delve into, one doesn't delve into relativism, everything is okay, but he gives you a vocabulary to think about how to negotiate these realities. Do you share this tension? I mean, there is a real tension. It seems like even the law, the legal system is all just a construct of our human ideas, and yet it seems to be, almost feels fundamental to what a just society is. Yeah, I definitely share the tension and love his vocabulary and the way he's helped me resolve the tension. So right, I mean, yeah, so like, you know, infanticide, for example. Perhaps it's socially contingent, perhaps it's received wisdom, perhaps it's anthropological, you know, we need to propagate the species, and I still think it's wrong. And Warty has helped me develop a category to say that, no, I can't provide any, in Warty's words, noncircular theoretical backup for this proposition. At some point, it's going to run me into a circularity problem, but that's okay. I hold this nonetheless in full recognition of its contingency, but what it does is makes you humble, and when you're humble, that's good because, you know, this notion that ideas are always already in progress, never fully formed, I think is the sort of intellectual I strive to be. And if I have a sufficient degree of humility that I don't have the final answer, capital A, then that's going to help me to get to better answers, lowercase a. And Warty does that, and he talks about in the solidarity part of the book, he has this concept of imaginative, the imaginative ability to see other different people as we instead of they. And I just think it's a beautiful concept, but he talks about this imaginative ability and it's this active process. So I mean, so that's a book that's done a lot of work for me over the years. Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was absolutely pivotal in my intellectual development. One of the premier set of essays in the Western literary tradition, and it's a deep and profound sociological, philosophical, and historical analysis of the predicament of blacks in America from one of our country's greatest polymaths. It's a beautiful text and I go to it yearly. So for somebody like me, so growing up in the Soviet Union, the struggle, the civil rights movement, the struggle of race, and all those kinds of things that is, you know, this universal, but it's also very much a journey of the United States. It was kind of a foreign thing that I stepped into. Is that something you would recommend somebody like me to read, or is there other things about race that are good to connect to? My flavor of suffering injustice, I'm a Jew as well, my flavor has to do with World War II and the studies of that, you know, all the injustices there. So I'm now stepping into a new set of injustices and trying to learn the landscape. I would say anyone is a better person for having read Du Bois. He's just a remarkable writer and thinker, and to the extent you're interested in learning another history, he does it in a way that is quite sophisticated. So it's interesting, I was going to give you three books. I noted the accent when I met you, but I didn't know exactly where you're from. But the other book I was going to say is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and I mean, I've always wanted to go to St. Pete's just to sort of see with my own eyes what the word pictures that Dostoevsky created in Crime and Punishment. And you know, I love others of his stuff too, The Brothers Care, Masov, and so forth. But Crime and Punishment I first read in high school as a junior or senior, and it is a deep and profound meditation on both the meaning and the measure of our lives. And Dostoevsky, obviously in conversation with other thinkers, really gets at the crux of a fundamental philosophical problem, what does it mean to be a human being? And for that, Crime and Punishment captured me as a teenager, and that's another text that I return to often. We've talked about young people a little bit at the beginning of our conversation. Is there advice that you could give to a young person today thinking about their career, thinking about their life, thinking about making their way in this world? Yeah, sure. I'll share some advice. It actually picks up on a question we talked about earlier in the academy and schools. But it's some advice that a professor gave to me when I got to Harvard. And it is this, that you have to be willing to come face to face with your intellectual limitations and keep going. And it's hard for people, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, to face really difficult tasks, and particularly in these sort of elite spaces where you've excelled all your life, and you come to MIT and you're like, wait a minute, I don't understand this. Wait, this is hard. I've never had something really hard before. And there are a couple options, and a lot of people will pull back and take the gentleman or gentlewoman's bee and just go on, or risk going out there, giving it your all, and still not quite getting it. And that's a risk, but it's a risk well worth it, because you're just going to be the better person, the better student for it. And even outside of the academy, I mean, come face to face with your fears and keep going and keep going in life, and you're going to be the better person, the better human being. Yeah, it does seem to be, I don't know what it is, but it does seem to be that fear is a good indicator of something you should probably face. Fear kind of shows the way a little bit. Not always. You might not want to go into the cage with a lion, but maybe you should. Maybe. Let me ask sort of a darker question, because we're talking about Dostoyevsky, we might as well. Do you, and connected to the freeing innocent people, do you think about mortality? Do you think about your own death? Are you afraid of death? I'm not afraid of death. I do think about it more now, because I'm now in my mid fifties, so I used to not think about it much at all, but the harsh reality is that I've got more time behind me now than I do in front of me, and it kind of happens all of a sudden, too. You realize, wait a minute, I'm actually on the back nine now, so yeah, my mind moves to it from time to time. I don't dwell on it. I'm not afraid of it. My own personal religious commitments, I'm Christian, and my religious commitments buoy me that death, and I believe this, death is not the end, so I'm not afraid of it. Now, this is not to say that I want to rush to the afterlife. I'm good right here for a long time, and I hope I've got 30, 35, 40 more years to go, but no, I don't fear death. We're finite creatures. We're all gonna die. Well, the mystery of it, you know, for somebody, at least for me, we human beings want to figure everything out. Whatever the afterlife is, there's still a mystery to it. That uncertainty can be terrifying if you ponder it, but maybe what you're saying is you haven't pondered it too deeply so far, and it's worked out pretty good. It's worked out, yeah, no complaints. So you said, again, the Sejewski kind of was exceptionally good at getting to the core of what it means to be human. Do you think about, like, the why of why we're here, the meaning of this whole existence? Yeah, no, I do, I think, and I actually think that's the purpose of an education. What does it mean to be a human being? And in one way or another, we set out to answer those questions, and we do it in a different way. I mean, some may look to philosophy to answer these questions. Why is it in one's personal interest to do good, to do justice? Some may look at it through the economist lens. Some may look at it through the microscope in the laboratory that the phenomenal world is the meaning of life. Others may say that that's one vocabulary, that's one description, but the poet describes a reality to the same degree as a physicist, but that's the purpose of an education. It's to sort of work through these issues. What does it mean to be a human being? And I think it's a fascinating journey, and I think it's a lifelong endeavor to figure out what is the thing, that nugget, that makes us human. Do you still see yourself as a student? Of course. Yes. I mean, that's the best part about going into university teaching. You're a lifelong student. I'm always learning. I learn from my students and with my students and my colleagues. You continue to read and learn and modify opinions, and I think it's just a wonderful thing. Well, Ron, I'm so glad that somebody like you is carrying the fire of what is the best of Harvard. It's a huge honor that you would spend so much time, waste so much of your valuable time with me. I really appreciate that conversation. Not a waste at all. I think a lot of people love it. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ronald Sullivan, and thank you to Brooklyn and Sheetz, Wine Access Online Wine Store, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, and Blinkist app that summarizes books. Click their links to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela, when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Ronald Sullivan: The Ideal of Justice in the Face of Controversy and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #170

The following is a conversation with Anthony Pompliano, entrepreneur, technology investor, prolific writer, podcaster, and Twitter user on topics of finance, cryptocurrency, technology, and economics. I highly recommend his popular podcast and daily letter called The Pump Podcast and The Pump Letter. Quick thank you to our sponsors, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, ExpressVPN, and Indeed Hiring website. Click their links to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I'll be having many conversations in the coming months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds and worldviews. Those who are proponents of Bitcoin, like Anthony, Nick Carter, Robert Breedlove, Alex Glastine, and many others. And those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies, like Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergey Nazarov, Silvia Macaulay, and many others as well. I'm not framing this as a debate. I'm simply looking to explore exciting ideas in the space of technologies that could very well change human civilization and AGI civilization as well. I appreciate that some communities are a bit more intense in their style of communication and others, but I personally am only interested in open minded, respectful collaboration in exploring ideas. I personally try to like to approach conversations by considering that I may be wrong about everything and I'm looking to learn. I won't engage in groupthink, social signaling, outrage mobs, mocking, and derision. If you do, I understand, it's just not my thing. I send you my love either way and hope to meet you in person or some drinks, some good laughs, and a good conversation one day. No matter the difference in style or substance, we're all just human after all. This is an amazing ride we're all on together. Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S. Thompson said, whether you pay for that ticket with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or the dollar, gold, seashells, a beer, or just a good old smile. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. And here is my conversation with Anthony Pampliano. You served in the US Army for six years and spent 13 months in Iraq in 2008 and 2009. Can you tell the story of why you joined the army and what were some of the moving difficulties, maybe lasting experiences from the time you served? Sure. I joined when I was 17 years old, needed my parents to basically sign in order to join. And I graduated a semester early from high school and thought I was going to go play football in college and kind of enroll in the spring semester. And when that didn't happen, basically was working at Chick Fil A and Quiznos. And I had in my mind, look, this is probably not the path in life that I want. And so I knew I was going to go to college. I knew I was going to go play football in the fall, but I had this window of time and so I walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like, I'm assuming you guys need some help. And, uh, you know, they gave me the whole pitch and, uh, you know, give you a signing bonus, you can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff. I just said, okay, let's do it. This was, this was close to the 9 11. This was in 2006, about five years after. So what impact, I mean, do you remember 9 11? What impact did that have on your thinking about this? So I was, uh, in eighth grade, um, if I remember correctly. And, uh, I remember, uh, being in school when it happened and, uh, I walked into a classroom and the entire class, uh, somebody else's class, they were all talking to the teacher about something. The second that me and a couple other kids walked in and we got real quiet and the teacher was like, Hey, go back to your like, homeroom. And so it was just kind of a weird, like what's going on. Uh, and then next thing I know, they called all the students into the cafeteria. And this is back before, you know, every classroom really had a television in it and, you know, cable and all that kind of stuff. And so when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there's been this, uh, event that's occurred. All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up and, uh, they'll explain it to you. And so to, you know, a kid in eighth grade, you're basically like, what happened? And so I got home and, uh, and I remember talking to my dad about it and my dad basically gave me, you know, the, uh, the core American kind of talking points. Right. Look, somebody from another country came here and tried to kill Americans and was successful in doing that. Um, and to some extent he just said, and I'm willing to bet, you know, we're going to go back after them. Did that wake you up a little bit to the idea that there's evil out there that, you know, even just the idea of terrorism for many people that was, um, when it hits you on your own land, it's a, it really shakes up your mind in some sense, world war two. That's why world war two was fundamentally different for Americans than it is for the people like in Russia and England and France and, uh, in Europe in general is there's something about when there's a families, women, children dying on your own land, that's different. And that was one of the first times in America where like on your, uh, of course it's Pearl Harbor, but like, this is like in recent history, it's like, they hit us here, that was like a profound idea. I think America was very, very good at exporting the violence elsewhere for a long time. And, uh, there was this element of, uh, complacency, but also this element of, uh, um, you know, really just American superiority that doesn't happen here. Right. And, uh, I think that that woke people up, not only to, uh, you know, to the idea that other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not like democracy and capitalism and, and that, but also, uh, maybe we aren't as big, tough and secure as we thought we were. Right. And so obviously I think you see the kind of the over rotation with a lot of the kind of security theater that came after that of almost psychologically, let's make our citizens feel like they're safe, even if the things that we're doing don't necessarily, you know, kind of change that apparatus. Uh, but on top of that, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's I think that it really woke people up to, uh, extremism around the world. And, uh, I don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as much as it just was an awareness thing, right. How, how many people, you know, kind of drew a line from, was it 92 or 93 with the world trade center bombing to, you know, deep levels of extremism and hatred of, uh, kind of the American industrial complex, probably not that many, 2001, a lot of people. And so I think that was, you know, again, as a, as a young kid, you don't understand a lot of this stuff. You basically just, Hey, somebody came here and tried to kill Americans. And so, you know, we should go fight back, right. Was kind of the, uh, the, the response I think that I had. What role did that have psychologically for you when you then in 2006 join the army, I mean, this is a very different joining the army than in the time when like it's more peaceful here, you're essentially facing, I mean, I don't know if you see it that way, but you know, there is a war on terror. And I know that people kind of, uh, criticize that whole formulation framework of thinking, but nevertheless, you are going to Iraq. You are going to Afghanistan, you're going to these places and are fighting these complicated, like, I mean, it's not even clear what you're fighting. Yeah. Well, I think that there's a couple of key pieces, right? So one, like what the actual most impactful data points, if you were, or kind of stories for me, uh, was the Pat Tillman story. So I played football, uh, in high school and it was going to go play in college. Um, and seeing, you know, this NFL player who basically just one day said, Hey, I'm going to go and do this instead, uh, and walk away. I don't know necessarily if it was a, uh, I want to pursue the same story right now. So he ended up dying. And so not exactly the, uh, the end result that you want, but I think it was almost like, uh, he made it okay. If you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and, and to go do it. Um, but the second thing is I was 17. You're pretty stupid when you're 17, you're pretty naive when you're 17. Right. And so, uh, I almost, um, kind of backed into the deployment because I signed up, uh, as a, uh, a reserve member. And so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves. I was going to go to basic training, get all the, you know, kind of education and qualification, I was going to go to college and then after college, you know, maybe there's a chance that you will go and serve or do whatever. For me, I ended up getting deployed when I was a junior in college and we got pulled out of school. And so at 20 years old, uh, it's not exactly what you thought you were signing up for, right. Especially to kind of leave school to go do it. And then on top of that, uh, I probably had an advantage over most people, both on the entry to combat and the exit to, uh, kind of a combat situation, which that was football. So I always explain that, um, in hindsight, you're in a male dominated testosterone driven kind of combative sport where it's us first them. And, and, uh, there's training and, and, uh, you know, injuries and just kind of all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football to now they give you guns, but you still have a uniform on still male dominated. It's just a little bit, you know, more serious in terms of the injuries and, and, uh, potential deaths and things like that, but also on the exit from that deployment, most guys I was there with, they're going back to being, you know, prison guards, police officers working at the lumber yard, you know, just kind of every day Americans. And so I had the fortunate ability to go back into, uh, kind of that combative environment, go back to play football. And so it was almost this like deescalation on the way out, uh, where they take your guns away. We still got a uniform, still male dominated, uh, still combative. And then eventually you're just a normal citizen. And so I think that in some weird way, I was, you know, very fortunate to kind of on the entry and exit, have that experience where other guys did. So what you were deployed to Iraq, were there any memories, experiences that changed you or in general, like you're probably a different man on the other side of it? How did that time change you? I think there, there was two main takeaways that I took, right? So one was, um, not a specific moment, but on multiple occasions, uh, I remember we were driving down the road and I would look and there would be a 10, 12, 14 year old kid. And if you've never seen somebody who literally has hate and disdain in their eyes, just not necessarily to you personally, just to the uniform, to what you stand for, it's all this stuff. When you see it, you see it right. And I always think of, um, if you've ever, uh, watched the movie, uh, 12 strong and in it, uh, they've got this Afghan, uh, Afghanistan warlord, and he's talking to a bunch of soldiers and he says, you know, you don't have killer eyes. You do, you do. And he's just like, he can just tell, right? He's, he's seen so many soldiers. And so I think that that was a, a memory on a number of occasions where I just saw young kids and I just said, they hate us. Right. And, and it's not you personally, it's what you stand for. But the really big event was, um, when you first get to these combat zones, a lot of times what will happen is, uh, you basically, your unit teams up with a unit that's leaving and there's a handoff and happens over a couple of weeks. And so you can imagine almost, you know, 1% of our team goes out with 99% of their team, then five, 95, 10, 90, all the way till it's 50, 50. And then eventually it rotates. And then it's majority of our team and a small number of their team. And so what a lot of people will explain is the two most dangerous times in war are actually the first two or three weeks and the last two or three weeks. When you first get there, you don't know who the people are. You don't know the terrain, you don't know, you know, kind of the local cultures and, and, uh, who to look out for, what signs, all that kind of stuff. And the last two or three weeks is you basically think you survived the deployment, you're looking forward to going home. So you become complacent, things like that. And so we made it through that transition period with no issues. Uh, but the literally the very first mission, uh, that we went out as a team, ourselves, a hundred percent, um, there was two separate incidents. Uh, one was we were driving in the middle of the night and, uh, what we think was a sniper shot at a truck that I was in, I was standing up outside of it, uh, along with a, uh, another guy. And that was kind of just a wake up call again of never been shot at before. Right. And so I'll never forget, uh, you kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to me was from a rural Pennsylvania. And he just said, you know, look, I've never been shot at before either, but I've done a lot of hunting, get the fuck down. Okay. And so, uh, we kept driving that night. Um, and, uh, later on in the night, uh, an IED went off, a guy ran over an IED, uh, who was at the front of the convoy. And when that IED went off, uh, again, I had never been in a convoy that had been blown up before, but the training kicks in. And so immediately every single person starts screaming out IED, IED, and they started looking and trying to figure it out. And you realize the United States military did a fantastic job training us before we went, because in that moment, nobody thought about anything. You just did what you had been programmed to do. Um, and so ultimately kind of through the end of that event, uh, there was a US soldier that ended up dying. He was, uh, shot in the head. And, um, when we got back to the base, uh, kind of after that entire event, I think it just hit us. We are at war. And if we make mistakes here, that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes. And this was somebody who I didn't know. Uh, it was somebody who literally showed up, uh, kind of as secondary support, uh, for our unit and basically, uh, was there to help us. Right. And so it was one of those weird situations where, uh, you have this emotional connection because it's somebody who, uh, shared an event with you, but you didn't know them. Right. And you learn their name later and you understand that they have a family and they have young kids and all this stuff. And so again, as a 20 year old kid, you're kind of processing all this and you just realize like the gun I have in my arm, my hands, it's real for a reason. Right. And we better take this seriously. This is not, you know, let's joking around in kind of the barracks and, you know, all the things that you would expect, you know, guys you're doing in the army. So I think that was like the moment where I said, Hey, I'm going to learn a lot here. Uh, and I got to make sure I get home. And you snap it into the training, but nevertheless, I mean, you're somebody who thinks philosophically about this world now, right? You're, uh, very intelligent and things deeply about the world. So looking back, you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kids eyes, there's death. So the way you kind of described this whole story is like training kicks in. This, this shit is serious. Like this is, uh, you know, there's a reason there's a gun in, in your hand. So there's a strategic element. There's like, you have to get the job done. There's a task at hand, but at the same time, if you zoom out, there's a kid who has hate for you, uh, some of those kids would probably, if they could, would kill you for the thing you stand for in the uniform. And then there's bullets flying at you. And then there's people that some of them you might already care for deeply are dying. What the hell do you make of that? Do you think about that? Does any of that haunt you? How do you think about the world having witnessed that? Yeah. A lot of times when we would talk about it, we were there. If I was that kid, I would want to kill that person too. Right. I would have hatred as well. Right. Imagine if in the United States tomorrow, you and I woke up and there was tanks rolling down the street from another country and they were basically imposing their rules on us, whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not, the soldiers were there and they were doing this, we would probably feel not so great about it, right. At kind of a minimum and at a maximum, we'd be really, really pissed off. We would fight back. And so what you don't understand when you're in the heat of the moment is why does this person feel this way? And so what's very weird is, well, what happens if a year ago, US soldiers came through, they got shot at, they returned fire and they killed that kid's uncle. You'd be pissed off. Right. And so you just start to understand, like we look at war very black and white. We look at it very much from a clinical perspective. We're going to go, we're going to go kind of invade somewhere. We are the most dominant military in the world. We're very good at invading. And we will crush wherever we invade, but when you're actually on the ground, what you understand is the humanity of it all. Right. And so what becomes very interesting is pretty much every veteran I know that comes back, they're some of the largest pacifists in the world. And I always revert back to Marcus Luttrell, who was a famous Navy SEAL, and there's a movie made about him and his story. He gave a speech one time that I saw and he basically said, listen, if you're a politician, your job is to be the diplomat, do everything you possibly can, not to send me and my friends anywhere, because when you send us, we're going to bring hell with us, right. And understand that is the business that we are in, but every single other person up until we get sent has a job to do to prevent having to send us. And I think that ultimately that's where you see a lot of kind of this generation that has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan that says, listen, maybe we shouldn't be running around the world being the police, maybe we shouldn't be going and invading all these different countries, because when you actually get to see firsthand what happens, it's just something that we should avoid at all costs. But if we have to go, or we have to actually send soldiers somewhere, understand what happens when that occurs. And you know, the United States is the best in the world at doing it. Do you think, I'm thinking about that kid with the hatred. Do you think there will always be hatred in the world? Do you think there will always be hatred? In the world, do you think, uh, from another perspective, do you think there'll be war always, is that a fundamental aspect of human nature or is that something we can escape? Yeah. So war, I think has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and bombs and death and kind of just very morbid type, um, um, understanding. Conflict on the other hand, I think people look at and say, of course there will always be conflict, right. You just can't have billions of people all on the same planet without some level of disagreement, whether that's a disagreement of ideas, disagreement over physical, you know, geography, uh, or something else. And so I think conflict will always exist. The question is what form does war take moving forward? And so in my mind, you know, it's starting to look a lot more clinical, right? A lot more drones, a lot less soldiers on the ground, a lot more use of special forces and kind of these small, highly specialized teams rather than kind of big mechanical armies. Um, and then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber warfare and you start to understand that we're at war with a lot of people right now, right? Doesn't mean we're necessarily dropping bombs, uh, on their countries. Doesn't necessarily mean we're sending soldiers there, but on a daily basis, we are engaged in these kind of, you know, cyber battlefields. And so if that's where war starts to play out, um, it, one changes the tools and tactics and techniques that, uh, we need to arm our country and other countries will arm themselves with. But it also changes the way that we think about war, right? It seems, it sounds a lot less worrisome if I say, Hey, we're going to go to war with a country, but by the way, there's going to be no death. Right? Okay. Like that doesn't sound nearly as bad as, Hey, we're going to go send 10,000 soldiers and you know, some percentage of them are going to die on the battlefield. And then we're going to, you know, basically pipe back videos and articles saying that American soldiers are dying. Yeah. It does seem to be a fundamental difference between the, the Genghis Khan style, like if I would feel differently if somebody like hand to hand with a knife murdered my family versus cyber security, why I stole all their data, stole all their money, stole everything they own, falsified their identity, all that kind of stuff that those are both traumatic events, but they do seem to be fundamentally different, but maybe that's actually very narrow style thinking, because ultimately you have to think about what is life and what's happiness. And, um, it's like the samurai thinking, I'm not sure what's more painful. If I take it to myself, like, I'm not sure what I would rather live through being stabbed, like to death, or having my identity stolen, all my money stolen, or maybe reputation destroyed, like with lies or something like that. That that's very interesting to think about. If you think about quality of life and all those kinds of things, well, one's finite, right? One's the pain ends and the other is kind of a long prolonged, almost torture. So it's physical pain versus psychological pain. It's really interesting to, it's really interesting to think about. And I think another key piece to this, which I don't have answers to, but, but there is an element of emotion and rage in the physical violence versus again, more of that clinical, you know, information warfare. And so, um, it's really easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed, um, it fits very well into propaganda for everyone involved, right, regardless of what side they're on, when you start talking about cyber warfare, how many times have we seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked and we all, you know, read the headlines, maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day and don't remember it anymore. And so it's just very, very different. I think, uh, in, in the, uh, motion and response that it invokes and people when they hear about it as well. Given the conflict, do you think people are fundamentally good? Are we all sort of like blank slates that could be evil given the environment or good given the environment, or can we kind of, is there some base that we can rely on that people, if left to their own devices will be good and trustworthy and honest, I think you have to separate out intention from action. So if you talk to some of the most heinous criminals in the world, they've rationalized their actions, and so you've got to ask yourself, what is the level of which they understood what they were doing, that they intended to be malicious, nefarious, um, and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves. And so, um, even as a society, you know, if let's say, for example, you were to walk down the street and you were to murder somebody on the sidewalk, completely unprovoked, we would look at you and say, you are a, you know, a sociopath, uh, you have everything wrong with you and that is somebody that we do not want in our society, and therefore we will levy, you know, the extent of rule of law against you in order to protect society from you, right? And you become that monster, that beast, if in the same situation, somebody walks in your house with a knife and you murder them or you kill them, now we put you up on a pedestal as a hero, and those are two very, very different responses. They may be just as morbid, they may be just as violent, uh, in terms of the actual actions, the intentions, the way it's perceived is very, very different. And so I think that, uh, as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut, you know, good, bad, uh, I think the world's a lot more messy than that. And I think that, uh, a lot of times when you look at intention, it's hard for us to tell what somebody's intention is, but I've looked at a lot of, you know, people who are both considered very good and also a lot of people are considered very bad and they sound very similar in terms of the motivations for their actions. And so I think that it's just a really hard problem that probably doesn't have a perfect solution or an answer. Do you give much value to the intention or do you think it's better to look at the results of the behavior, uh, as opposed to the, the underlying ideology? Underlying ideology, the underlying intention of, of the behavior. I think that intention gets at the question of like, are people inherently good or bad, right? Is I think that they're generally inherently good and the intention is driving towards the thing that they believe is the best outcome or the best thing for them to pursue the action. I think is where we spend most of our time focused on. Um, and frankly, we actually may be a better society or, uh, kind of kinder as a humanity to each other if we spent more time looking at intention rather than action. Um, but again, you know, if somebody walks down the street and murders somebody, uh, it's really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate for us to have a conversation about intention versus, uh, any level of, of action, right? So you're one of the prominent, I would say even the faces of the, the world of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire world was dive straight in and ask, uh, do you think, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist? I think that the way I really look at it is, uh, I work backwards off of what is the maximalism that I believe in and the world that I believe in is, uh, kind of an automated world that is run on these open decentralized protocols. Uh, and what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism and, and kind of, uh, personal responsibility and liberty, uh, to people over institutions. And what we end up doing is we end up, uh, kind of taking what has historically been a very analog or physical world economy and, uh, geographic rule. And we then kind of put it in the cloud and this digital economy becomes the prevalent way that we all, uh, conduct commerce, communicate, uh, et cetera. And so it's less about any one single technology to me, right? I think that it's pretty stupid for people to, um, almost in a way, uh, put an inanimate object up for, uh, you know, some sort of obsession, uh, to me, it's much more about the ideals, the ethos, uh, and the most rational, uh, and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think, you know, is at this point, just a foregone conclusion. So the distinction there, and maybe people don't know the terminology, maximalism is basically saying, I really think this is a good idea. Like, uh, you know, if you prefer a certain kind of diet, it could be a keto maximalist saying like, this is probably, maybe it's not a hundred percent, but probably the diet that's healthiest for humans kind of thing. In the same sense, Bitcoin maximalism is saying, you know, of course we don't know, there's a lot of uncertainty, but this particular technology seems to be the best representations of some set of ideals that defines progress in the future, but you're drawing a distinction between sort of, um, cult like obsession about an object of any kind, whether it's keto, uh, or, uh, Bitcoin, and just sort of believing that a technology is the best representation of a particular set of ideals. And you believe that sort of, uh, this moving into the cloud, uh, both the distributed nature of it, but also just the digital nature of it is something that's going to, uh, be a positive step for humanity. Yeah. I would even take maximalism a step further, and it's not just the kind of singular viewpoint of this is the best, it's also, uh, an element of it's anti everything else. Right. So, you know, take keto, for example, uh, the keto diet is not only the best diet. All the other diets are bad. Yeah. Right. And so it's, it's a very binary view of the world. Um, I think that what's probably most misunderstood about, uh, let's take Bitcoin, uh, as a specific example, is that most of the people who are labeled Bitcoin maximalist, they would be open minded if they believe that something else came along that was a superior technology or had a, a better, um, kind of probability of achieving again, that ultimate vision, I think where, uh, there's this controversy and kind of clashing of, uh, ideas is that the Bitcoin community believes Bitcoin is the best way to do that and has very specific arguments as to why the other things are not right. And so what ultimately ends up happening, which is very weird in the investing world, right, it's unlikely that you and I are going to sit down and you're going to like Apple stock is the best stock and there's no other stock. That's worth anything. Yeah. Right. And, uh, and then also it's very weird if you said to me, um, you know, this stock is worth zero and that's where everything that I own, I've put on a short on one single company, right? There's diversification. There's a much more kind of probabilistic thinking in finance in general. Uh, when it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital assets, if you will, uh, is there's two main groups of people who are trying to build two very, very different things at the onset, but when you unpack it and you start to spend more and more time on it, you rise, they're actually trying to accomplish the same thing in two different ways. So Bitcoin is seen, I think, as a, uh, a digital currency, right? Kind of the idea that this is going to ascend to become the next global reserve currency, it's a programmatic kind of digital currency, but it's also a programmatic kind of transparent, um, money. And, uh, it's essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary, you know, non transparent, uh, fiat currencies that exist in the world. You then look at kind of everything else, right? And you have a lot of smart contract platforms and various things that they're all going after at Ethereum with kind of the world computer approach, and you can kind of go down the line with all their other arguments as to what they're trying to build. I think the big difference just comes down to, uh, innovation versus security. And when you simplistically look at it via that lens, you actually understand where both people are coming from. When you say security, sorry to interrupt, do you mean financial security or do you mean like literally the, the, the security of the, of the particular cryptocurrency? The, the technical security of a blockchain. So when you look at, let's say, um, Bitcoin versus Ethereum, right? Bitcoin has decided in that community has decided security is the number one thing that you have to optimize for. So decentralization, um, over everything else in terms of transaction speeds, uh, cost, anything that you could come up with, that is, uh, something that would be important for a currency. The number one thing to optimize for is security. And as we have seen, uh, with a lot of technologies, right? Facebook's, uh, Libra or now what's known as DiEM is a great example. Uh, not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state. And so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains, uh, they say security is important, but it's not the most important thing we believe there's a trade off between, you know, a little less security and transaction speed or composability or whatever it is. And so take a theorem as kind of the second, uh, largest, uh, community and blockchain by market cap. It was created because somebody wanted to, or a group of people wanted to do something on Bitcoin. They felt like they couldn't do it. And so they said, Hey, we're going to go create something that has the smart contracts that we can then go do here. Again, this is technology, right? And so the tribalism of like, you're right, you're wrong to me is a little childish, just in the sense of like the market is going to decide what is most valuable. And then when you go inside of that community, like there's a lot of dumb ideas, people are trying to build around Bitcoin, but there's also a lot of really, really great ideas that people are trying to build around Bitcoin, same thing in the Ethereum world. And so what you end up getting, I think, is the tribalism really comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price that is attached to all of this, right? If you go back in history of technology, venture capitalists didn't sit around the table and yell and scream at each other in this like religious zealot way, right? Because you bet on one type of cloud computing platform. And I bet on another one, right? It's just the market's going to decide, we're both going to work on and try to make our successful, uh, here in the world. I think that the sensitivity and mainly it comes out of the Bitcoin community is that a lot of this is being funded, not only by venture capitalists and kind of professional money managers and asset allocators. There's also this element of including the retail investor and the public. And so it, whether it's through ICOs or some other forms of capital raising, um, there's arguments for it saying, Hey, look, uh, this now gives kind of the little guy, some sort of access and an ability to do it. But there's also arguments against it. Some people say, Hey, it's easier to dupe them and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff. And so ultimately I think that, uh, crypto is this like arena of ideas. It is literally the war of attrition and, uh, what will end up happening is 10 years from now, you and I will talk and we're going to say, well, the market said X was valuable and Y wasn't. And so all of the tribalism from between, you know, here and there, uh, it's fun. It's, you know, engaging. Whatever, but ultimately it doesn't really matter because the public is involved. There's a lot of personalities. And so a lot of times we focus on the extreme personalities that do a lot of maybe, uh, pardon the French shit talking. And, and so we kind of focus on that, but that's not necessarily a representative of the communities involved. Let's talk about Bitcoin first, and then it'll help us use as a kind of comparison to Ethereum or whatever else. So when you think about what is money, right? That's kind of the first question. People really kind of go down the rabbit hole on, and ultimately today, it's a belief system, right? And you may believe that one currency has more value over another because it's backed by a certain military or a certain government has a monetary policy that you believe in or don't believe in. Um, but ultimately it's a belief system that there's nothing backing this, uh, other than, uh, a government asks you to pay your taxes in it, right? And they can have a monopoly on violence, uh, in terms of they can put you in jail. If you don't pay your taxes, uh, they can, uh, they can, uh, they can go to other countries and they can invade and do all this stuff. It wasn't always like that, right? It was historically a layer one technology was gold. And so gold was a fantastic store of value. You knew that if you held gold, it wasn't going to be inflated away. It was sound money was outside the system and no one could create more of it. And the reason why that's important is because that optimization for store of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of, uh, money. Uh, for 5,000 years. And so the problem with that though, again, trade off between store of value is it was really hard to transact with, right? If I came in here and I, and you said, Hey, I want a couple of ounces of gold and I had a whole bar, I'd have to literally shave off the ounces of gold. Uh, it's heavy to carry around. If you said to me, Hey, you're in one city, mail it to me, really expensive. You know, there's all these issues with it. And so ultimately what people said was, well, let's create a second layer on top of that gold in order to make it easier to transact with it. That gold in order to make it easier to transact. And so we created paper claims on the gold. So, Hey, don't carry around the gold in your pocket anymore. Put it in a vault or a bank. They're going to issue a paper claim. Now you and I can trade these paper claims around. And at any point, if you want the gold, you just show up and you say, Hey, give me three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever. And so that actually made the store of value. It was allowed that to be the anchor and kind of the most important part, the security of your, of your purchasing power, but now it became easier to transact. And then eventually we built layers even on top of that. So everything from electronic money, uh, kind of electronic UCIPS, all the way to credit and other systems on top of that gold 1971 comes around and obviously we D peg from that gold, right? And it was a temporary measure at the time. We ended up not going back to it. And so what you moved or transitioned from was sound money, which was outside the system, no one could create more to now the government had full control. They could create as much as they wanted to. They tried to be responsible and disciplined, but obviously hard to do. Sometimes we've been really good at it. Sometimes we've been less good at it. And then you go around the world and some countries have absolutely sucked at it and some have been good at it. And so when you look into the Bitcoin world, I think that when you look at this optimization for security, similar to gold store value, people hold it. Purchasing power has gone up a lot year over year. It's like a 200% year over year compound annual growth for over a decade. Right? And so you measure this in kind of the us dollar exchange price, et cetera. But there's still a lot of people who will yell and scream about it's slow. It's costly, right? All the things around those transactions that are obstacles or challenges. And so there's basically two schools of thought, and this is where we kind of get into the bifurcation. Some people just said, Hey, this technology is antiquated. We can't use it. It doesn't make sense. Uh, and so what we're going to do is we're going to go build something new. And so you go get, you know, kind of all of the various versions there. The Bitcoin community says, no, just like gold had paper claims and other things built on top and layer two, three, four, five, we're going to do that here. And so they've already started to build kind of this layer two where it's easier to transact. It's cheaper, it's faster, et cetera. And so I actually think that both of those worlds are going to coexist in the future. The big question is just which one has more importance, right? So again, get out of binary. It's just probabilistically. And so my personal belief is that the security that the store of value component as the bedrock for a monetary system is essential, right? Like that is the most important thing because you can always improve the other components, but you can't go back and fix that kind of core piece. So money, money's a, an idea that we all it's like an emergent idea that we believe in. You're saying that security is one of the most fundamental catalysts or fuels for that idea to sort of take hold and be stable and sort of take over the world. The other stuff is really nice to have, but if you don't have the security, you're not going to, like, it's not going to spread in the viral sense in, in our human brains. Well, and especially in light of the kind of the macro economy, right? So like, what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is, um, in investing in general, the best returns, right? I kind of put that in air quotes a little bit is something that is different than everything else and right. So being different and wrong just means you're an idiot, right? Being different and right means that that's where kind of the outsize returns are. And so if you look around the world at currencies today, they're all the same. They're all inflationary, unlimited supply controlled by a government done and decisions made in a very non transparent process. And what we've watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies over the last 12 months in direct contrast to that is this thing, Bitcoin, which is outside of the system, has a finite supply, transparent and programmatic monetary policy. And so when you see those two systems kind of, um, in comparison to each other in the United States, there's a lot of people who say the dollar works great for me. I can go to the ATM, I can get out physical cash. If I want to swipe a card, I could do that. My money in my bank doesn't lose 50% of its value in a day in terms of purchasing power. Like the dollar's pretty good. When you go to other countries, that might not be the case. And so I do think that there's a kind of a relative analysis that goes on here. If you compare Bitcoin to the dollar, there's all kinds of arguments to make that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today. But if I go and I tell you, well, what about in these kind of extreme examples of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, et cetera. And so I think that that's kind of one perspective to view this through is security versus all of the innovative components of a medium of exchange, et cetera. The second thing, though, that I think is really important is around censorship. And so when you look at, again, every currency in the world today, every single financial service, they're highly susceptible to censorship. And actually, I would argue the United States is in the business of censorship in terms of how many countries around the world do we sanction and cut them off in either a minimal or a very material way from the global financial system. So when you define it, when you talk about censorship, do you mean just the censoring your ability to operate freely in the world? Well, look at it a little bit differently, which is that the United States has kind of the American superiority because we have the bombs, the bullets, the soldiers and that military might. We basically impose our will around the world. And so there's a very strong argument to be made that there are certain countries around the world that are being sanctioned, that the people of those countries did nothing wrong. Now, the governments are bad, right? In terms of the way that you and I would look at democratic rule or communism or whatever it is, but the people are being hurt as well. So there's a whole group of people who would just argue, listen, we shouldn't hurt anyone at the expense of punishing one person or a group of people. There's other people argue against that. But I do think that if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I'm going to take myself out of the Western worldview, and I'm simply going to look at this as we're all part of the human race, it's censorship. And there might be an argument for censorship, but there also might be an argument against the censorship. And so what Bitcoin does, as that specific kind of payment network is it says anyone in the world with an internet connection, I don't care where you were born, what language you speak, what religion you are, your wealth status, your education status, none of it matters. If you have an internet connection, you're not going to care. If you have an internet connection, you can plug into this monetary system. And you can move value around the world to anyone else without asking for permission. And in the United States, we basically have that ability in the US dollar kind of traditional banking system, I can pretty much send money to almost anyone I want unless they're a really bad person that's on some list or something. Most people in the world don't have that capability. And so what you're essentially doing is you're democratizing access to a true store value, and a medium of exchange, right. And so what you see in many of these countries is that when their currency starts to fail, the first thing that a government or a group of people in power and influence do is they lock the citizens into the currency with capital controls. Why? Because if you let them out, it exasperates the problem. And so now what we're seeing is we basically are giving a tool to billions of people around the world that is a peaceful protest. Right? You and I had no say at all. When not only the Federal Reserve and elected officials here in the United States, but central banks around the world over the last 12 months decided to create trillions of dollars and injected into the monetary system. Right? They have arguments, and some of them are very good arguments as to why they should do that. They're trying to mitigate short term pain. Long term, they'll figure out the other issues, right? They have very kind of elaborate and well articulated kind of viewpoint as to why they're doing it. But you and I had no say. And so when you start to look at, we have a very small group of people in this world, both in our country and in countries around the world that make these decisions that have very, very far reaching kind of impact. And on top of that, in many cases, there's actually not that much kind of accountability. Because usually these are not elected officials who are making some of these decisions, these are appointed. And you can argue that, hey, we elected somebody who appointed them. But at the same time, that accountability isn't quite there. And so I think ultimately, when you just back out, you say, you know, what is Bitcoin? Why is it important to the world? It is giving access to anyone in the world with an internet connection to a store of value and a monitoring network that allows them to peacefully protest and to opt out of a system that pretty much is not working for majority of people in the world. So it's moving the power from these centralized places, sometimes unelected to the individuals and to the people. So the dollar does seem to work for Americans and for many people in the world. But you kind of have a vision, you paint a picture of a future where potentially we move to cryptocurrency. So what kind of trajectory do you see where Bitcoin can become the main currency in the world, or at least cryptocurrency become the main way of storing value in the world and basically overtake the dollar? Yeah, so I always go first to we don't need to have competition like in terms of like a direct competition between the dollar and Bitcoin, right? If you look at most technologies in the world, the really valuable ones are actually market expanding technologies, rather than simply just market share stealing technologies, right. So if you look at Uber, for example, Uber didn't just say, Hey, I'm gonna go take out all the taxis, right? It actually drastically expanded the market for people now there's literally millions of people in the United States who don't have cars because they use Uber, right. And so I think that Bitcoin is very similar in that, yes, there is a component of medium of exchange, in terms of the dollar. But also there is this component of just store value assets in general. And so when you start to look at Bitcoin, specifically, I think that what you're seeing is you're seeing a generational gap, where young people say, I grew up with a phone in my hand, I'm digitally native, the whole idea of going to the bank and sending a wire, or going to an ATM and getting physical cash is an antiquated idea in their mind, right? I one time asked my brother, he's 24 years old. And I said, Hey, how do you send money to your friends? And he gave me one answer, which I expected, which was Venmo. And the second answer, I didn't expect he said Uber. I said, How do you send money via Uber? He said, Well, we get in a car together. And at the end, we split the ride. And so again, you and I have probably both done that. But I never thought of it as a way to send money to each other. And so it is a psychological difference between even me, who's only, you know, a decade older than him or so, and his peer group. And so I think as we're watching kind of Bitcoin continue this ascent, ultimately, what we're seeing is an entire generation of kids are saying, Listen, if I look at financial assets across the board, I have stocks, I have bonds, I have currencies, and I have commodities, I know that bonds, from a real rate return perspective, is flat to negative, right? I'm gonna make no money on this, because I have a belief that my dollar is being devalued. And actually, what we're starting to see is, again, the internet has broken down these walled gardens and kind of these centralized hubs of information, in that if you were to look at, let's say the stock market, from 1971 to today, in dollar terms, it's a 45 degree angle right up into the right, right, you know, it's kind of seven, 810% growth, every year, it's amazing, just get invested in the stock market, and you'll make money over a long period of time, regardless of the dips along the way. If you do not make that same stock market in gold, the stock market is down since 1971. And so is it so much that the stock market is accruing true value? Or is it that the underlying currency in which it is denominated in is being devalued? Right? And I was being devalued in a very disciplined way, right, in terms of it's not like it went 50% devaluation in a short period of time, but it's still being devalued. And so I think that people are waking up to this idea that a traditional 6040 type global portfolio doesn't work anymore, right? 40% of it in bonds is just not going to get it done. And so when you start to look at this, people first look at Bitcoin via two main ways, in my opinion, they look at it one as a store value, should I actually go and put some of my wealth there use it as a savings technology, right? We ask people in the traditional world, if you're a teacher, a fireman, an accounting, you know, mid level manager, we say, hey, go do your job, be best in class as a fireman or as a teacher. And then Oh, by the way, you have to be a professional investor as well. Because if you just put your dollars in your bank account, you're literally going to have your wealth devalued away over time. So you can't just save you have to invest. That is a really tall task for people, they have a hard enough time just doing their job, right? Taking care of their family, right? Now they got to go be an investor. So I think savings technology for Bitcoin standpoint is, if you buy satoshis or Bitcoin, over time, it will increase from a purchasing power standpoint, because there's a fixed supply and demand continues to rise. But then you start to look at well, what other assets do people put in their portfolios, whether it's art, it's real estate, precious metals, or something else. Most of those assets are not because people actually think that they're going to go up in value over time, they're using the store of value. Right? The reason why somebody buys gold is because the store of value, right historically, that's a narrative driven type asset, though, right? We tell people it's scarce, we tell people that it is a store of value. When you look at it, though, we don't know how much gold exists in the world, we have a good estimate, right? But we don't actually we can't prove how much there is. We don't know how much is coming out of the ground every day. Again, great, fantastic estimate. But we can't prove it. And we don't know what the total supply and that's what you mean by narrative driven, we can't really prove it, like mathematically, we you I and everyone else in the world has lived in a narrative driven world for the last couple of decades, right? And what the internet and digital technologies have done is it opened up the possibility and the desire from people to have a world now where I can validate things. So when I see that headline, I want to see you say whatever happened to the news, if you're the subject of the news, rather than have somebody else tell me the story. If I see that you say something is scarce, prove to me that it is scarce. And so I think that's kind of a psychological shift, the younger generation is starting to understand because ultimately, you and I probably grew up in a world where parents could tell us the story. And we just believed it. You know, dad or mom says it must be true. If my brother heard a story, what does he do? He goes to Google and he looks it up. Randy comes back and usually tells my parents, oh, you got the story wrong, right. And so I think that that that provability or that that validation ends up becoming really, really important. And so, you know, look at something like gold, I think that people are drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right now. Gold is one down in value since April, or I'm sorry, August of 2020. And so in a timeframe where central banks have had historic quantitative using literally $6 trillion in the United States, the one asset that historically has been the best store of value and has, you know, in 2008 financial crisis hit an all time high based on the government response has actually suffered for a main part of this financial crisis. You then look at central banks around the world who have been very large holders of gold for a long time and net buyers on a monthly basis. For multiple months, over the last six months, they've been net sellers of gold. And then you start to look at jewelry demand. So the actual non monetary value of gold, and that demand for gold jewelry peaked in 2013, and has continued to fall since. And so what you start to say to yourself is take just the asset of gold, which about $10 trillion market cap, and you say, Okay, well, jewelry demand continues to fall, even if it's at a slight rate, but it's continues to contract. You have central banks that now at some times are net sellers and sometimes net buyers, right? So okay, again, contraction there. And then from the investment standpoint, the actual price, the daily price of this continues to fall, which is a signal that there's a contracting demand from an investment perspective. That's 93% of all use of gold, only 7% of it's used for actual technology and metal conduction and things like that. And so you have a $10 trillion asset that it appears and again, maybe data changes, and I'll change my mind and other people change their mind, but it appears is on the decline. And so if that happens, you're going to get the contraction of a $10 trillion asset, where's all that value go. And what you're seeing is at the same time that that asset is contracting, you're also seeing a massive influx from not only retail investors, not only kind of the wealthy and the elite, but also from financial institutions, corporations, pension funds, etc. into this kind of digital sound money. So you're saying that there's a kind of shift from gold to Bitcoin, because they have a lot of the same properties, except one is in the physical space, the other is in the digital space. So do you see like central banks, quietly potentially switching out from sort of gold to Bitcoin, like naturally just doing is seeing a pattern that you're referring to now, but more drastically into the future, where there's a complete shift, if you line up the gold community and the Bitcoin community next to each other, they'll agree on all the problems that they that they see in the world, right? They'll actually agree on the solution that sound money is the solution where they differentiate is the gold communities believes that it's the analog application of sound money, right? The physical gold, that is the solution. The Bitcoin community believes the digital application of sound money, Bitcoin, can you define sound money, by the way, someone is just outside the system, and no one can create more of it. So nobody controls it. This is scarcity is fundamental. Exactly why scarcity important in money? I think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value across all assets, not just money, right? Money happens to be the unit of account that we use in terms of daily commerce. But whether it is, you know, as we're seeing now, sneakers, or you know, whatever it is, scarcity, ultimately, is that signal of value, I think, and that's just been the way that humans derive value for literally, you know, thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, I gotta say, that's my view on life and love in general, is scarcity is what makes it valuable. People talk about immortality. You know, I would like to be immortal, but it does, it does seem that when you let go of the finiteness of life, I feel like that meals and the experiences you have get devalued significantly, like, the longer you live, the less value there are in infinity, if you live forever, I worry that all the meaning will dissipate. And the same thing with love, I think criticism of sort of dating culture and all that kind of stuff. Like I haven't had shocking revelation that I've never been on a tinder date or any of those things. I believe that scarcity in dating and interaction is like, intensifies the value of when the interactions do happen. So, when they like when love does happen. And so in that sense, there's something magical about scarcity in the more subjective psychological social world, as well. And perhaps money is just another version of that, right? It's just it's all about the stories and ideas we tell ourselves. I think they're actually more interconnected than you're giving it credit for, right? Which is, what is money? Money is time, ultimately, right? The pursuit of the acquisition of money, right, of whether it's a currency or true money, is because that should give you more time, right? And that's what would give you more time. And so one of my favorite movies ever is, and it's funny, because Justin Timberlake is in it, is this movie in a lot of me, I lose most people at that point, in time, in time. And basically, the premise of the movie is that everyone has a clock that is embedded into their arm. And so if you go to work, you basically put your arm underneath when you leave, and there's time that's deposited into your clock. And if your clock ever hits all the arrows, you're dead, you die on the spot. And so there's a number of scenes where people are basically running, you know, to get to you, and I give you a little bit more time so that you can get to work on Monday, and then you work to acquire time. And so basically, time becomes this currency. But what becomes very fascinating about it is there are sections in society, where literally, there's physical places, if you only have, let's say, 72 hours or less, you're allowed to go to Section One. Section Five, though, is because you have years and years and years on your clock. And in this movie, everyone at the age of 25 freezes from a biological aging standpoint. So everyone stays the same, but you may have lived for 1000 years. And so what becomes so fascinating about it is that rich people have time, poor people do not have time. And so in it, Justin Timberlake, the main character at one point, essentially acquires a bunch of time, and he's able to go to one of the higher levels. And now he's attending all these galas and, you know, poker nights and all this stuff. And one of the first things that he learns is that in the lower end of society, everyone is running everywhere at all times in the movie, because time is so finite, and it is so scarce. And so therefore, why would I walk down the street, I must run down the street. In the highest level of society, no one runs anywhere. And in fact, if you run, you are seen as lower class. Yeah, because wealth is time. And so that movie is, you know, it's got a ton of kind of things that you can pull out of it, but to me is the perfect epitome of money is time. And so when you start to think about the acquisition of money, right, it goes to this whole idea of time billionaire. And I know that there's probably a lot of people who've heard about this already. But if you think of a million seconds, it's about 11 days, a billion seconds is 31 years. And so if I said to somebody, you have to switch lives with Warren Buffett, would you do it? Some people would say, Sure, that'd be their initial reaction. But you got have to be you know, 92 years old, is the money worth the lack of time? Most people would say no, right? And there's this guy, Graham Duncan, who really articulated this well. And ultimately, what ends up happening is you rest time is more valuable than the money. But the you acquire the money to gain more time. And the reason is valuable is because of the scarcity of time. We currently have the by the biology, the physics means that this is not just the narrative we tell ourselves, maybe it is, I don't know, but it feels like pretty sure we're mortal. And in that sense, the scarcity there gives value to time, it's fascinating to think about all the thought experiments here of if that could actually be on the economy, if you can actually convert time in a frictionless way to money. Well, and if you start to pull on this a little bit and say, okay, a young person today, let's say somebody in their 20s, has about 2 billion seconds left in their life, right, kind of 60 years, give or take, based on life expectancy. They usually, until they start to understand this concept, think of wealth in dollar terms. But dollars are being devalued. And so you know, a million dollars doesn't get you what it used to get, right is kind of an old adage. And so what you're doing is you're pursuing something that ends up losing value. And so it's the constant rat race, it's how do I constantly try to get more? How do I get more dollars? How do I get more dollars? Because even if I say to myself, you know, I'm going to retire when I get $100,000. When I get the $100,000, the $100,000 five years from now doesn't buy me what I thought it did. So now I need 500,000 or 200,000 or a million or whatever the number is. And so ultimately, what ends up occurring is that the Bitcoin community and many people in kind of this idea of sound money is you want to be able to acquire an asset that not only will hold the value, right, the store of value over time, but it will actually appreciate over time. And so when you look at something like Bitcoin against the dollar against other types of assets, all of these assets are down compared to Bitcoin, right? Now, some of that's just in the early days of kind of the pricing of an asset, you go from very small to something much larger. But now what you start to look at is well, if you have a finite supply of something, what ends up happening is people begin to value it more. And so in a world where dollars are infinite, and other fiat currencies are infinite, Bitcoin becomes very, very interesting, very special, and something that is very aspirational. And so I think that's where you're starting to see people say, wait a second, this is something where that finite, secure store of value is essential to wealth generation and preservation over a long period of time. And if Sam Harris is right, that free will is an illusion. This is really interesting to think about. Maybe time is a kind of blockchain, because you can't change anything. And then the physical space time of the universe is a ledger. So maybe it won't be Bitcoin that replaces gold, maybe it'll be time, once we crack open that, in fact, the universe is fully deterministic. So maybe that's what like Eric Weinstein is afraid of, once you figure out the theories of everything of physics, we'll be able to then start trading, create a market out of like the very fabric of reality. And that way break it. Well, if you look at infinite inflationary type currencies, you can't do that, right? Because it constantly is losing value. When you look at a finite asset, again, that has the provability of the actual finite element to it. Ultimately, the wealth is that marketplace. Yeah. And so, you know, I always kind of try to highlight for people, the top 55% of Americans understand something that the bottom 45% don't, they invest, right, the bottom 45% consume the top 55% invest. And that's why we have a wealth inequality gap. And it continues to get wider and wider and wider is because the people who are holding the devaluing assets, and saving are watching their wealth be devalued away. And there's arguments and controversy over how fast that's happening, but it's happening. The people who are holding the assets that have any level of scarcity, right, real estate may not be finite, but it's scarce, right? Art may not be finite, but it's scarce. Gold may not be finite, but it's scarce. Those assets continue to appreciate against the devaluing currency. And so when you then say, No, I have complete finite supply, with provability, and this transparency around it, where everyone knows how much is there and what where it's going. And now all of a sudden, you and I can transact back and forth that value. And it is a representation of time. Because what I can essentially do is if I gather or acquire more of that wealth, I then can apply leverage to my life. I can use machines, humans, or some other resources. And basically now free up my time. Yeah, and it's not fun about the way you are trading time. Maybe it's a little bit indirect, but maybe not. So just because I brought up Eric and you're on Twitter, I'd love to hear your opinions. I talk to him a lot. He seems to have stepped into the beautiful dance of human communication and the social dynamics that is the Bitcoin cryptocurrency community. Do you have thoughts on gauge, theoretic concepts, conceptualization of the world, or just Eric in general? He's got a lot of love in his heart, and he's got a grace in the way he communicates. But he's also loves to play with ideas and seems to have touched a sensitive point with the Bitcoin community. Is there anything you could say that's hopeful, inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down? So I don't know all the details. But what I will say is I've listened to a number of his podcasts, and him and there's a whole bunch of people like him. I basically put them in the bucket of they're an independent thinker who are courageous enough to speak their truth, whatever that may be. They are humble enough to revisit their ideas and say, I got this right, I got this wrong information change, I'll change my mind. Obviously, a sign of intelligence to be able to do that type of stuff. And I actually think that one of the most scarce things in our society are those independent thinkers who are able to do all this. Right? Speaking of scarcity. Yeah. And so to me, I put Eric and the whole host of other people kind of, if you look at like the intellectual dark web is kind of a label that's been used. They're actually some of the most important people in our society, because they're the people who are willing to stand up against the mass kind of thought process. They're willing to talk about things that others may think are taboo, right? They're willing to change their mind, which all of a sudden has become a bad thing rather than a good thing. And so when I see the exploration of ideas in public, I actually think that those are the people who are most open to the kind of VM it blowback as well. Right? Because that's part of what they're doing is that they're eliciting, hey, I'm going to throw an idea into the arena. If it doesn't get attacked, they actually may be more nervous than if there is some level of, you know, kind of war of attrition, if you will. And so what I've seen with a number of the people who have done this, everyone from some of the best, you know, hedge fund managers and kind of money managers in the world, all the way to what I'll consider some of the most intellectual people in the world is they play with these ideas. And they play with the ideas and they play with them and they put them and they all arrive at the same conclusion. And sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it takes years, but they arrive at this Bitcoin thesis. And what's so interesting about it is it highlights something that many people view as a bug. But I think people in the Bitcoin community view as a feature, which is that community. And so what ends up happening is when you have something that is as ambitious as creating a global reserve currency doesn't mean needs to unseat any of the existing ones, but become the global reserve currency of the internet, right, this digital economy, you need shepherds of it. And so just like a technology company wants to find those loyal fans that are willing to go out and market and word of mouth and, and kind of not only promote it, but also protect it. This technology that is this decentralized thing, which uses a financial incentive in order to elicit the buy in, not from a financial perspective, but from a mental energy standpoint, has built one of the most rabid, powerful and engaged communities on the internet. And what ends up happening is those people have thought more about these ideas, and actually challenged those ideas more than anyone else in the world. And so I've got a lot of folks who will just say, there's this guy Marty Bent, who will talk all the time about the Bitcoin critics haven't done their homework in a lot of cases. So they show up and sometimes it's super intellectual, lazy arguments, sometimes actually very well thought out arguments, you know, on the counter to the Bitcoin thesis. But ultimately, what ends up happening is you're talking to somebody who's an expert, they've been thinking about for five, seven, eight, 10 years, right? They've gone through every simulation you possibly can. And they show up with data, examples, and responses. Now, they're not always right. But they've just done the work. And so what I actually like about folks like Eric and others is as they're kind of going through this journey, they're incredibly smart, right? And they provide, or they apply a lot of intellectual rigor to some of these arguments. And so what it does is what does it do? It's a marketplace. It keeps people honest. Let me sort of make a few comments. It's kind of interesting. So you're exactly right. Maybe the blowback is part of the mechanism that actually develops these ideas and so on. I do want to kind of speak to a little bit of the toxicity that I've experienced in the Bitcoin community. I kind of see it, the Bitcoin community, I think you paint a really nice picture, which I kind of see it as an immune system that protects against sort of the viruses that are bad ideas. That said, the immune system can destroy a body, right? And the thing you mentioned about Eric and maybe about myself, and in general, just people exploring ideas, is there is a Dunning Kruger effect, which is when you first start exploring ideas deeply, you have an overblown level of confidence about like how much you understand. And that's actually the process about learning, then you realize you don't understand much. What I've noticed with the Bitcoin community is they're not as patient with the basics of the Dunning Kruger effect. Like if I step in and make declarative statements about Bitcoin, like I, you know, I read a long time ago, the white paper, like at the cursory level, I felt that I understand the technology, this is basic intuitions. You know, I didn't think about the social dynamics. I didn't think about any like financial implications and a lot of the deep, actually the ongoing innovations and all that kind of stuff. But I thought I understood that technology. And so I step in and make declarative statements. I think those are the first time you say, okay, what's the role of Bitcoin in the world? You start thinking about it deeply. And then you make statements. The toxicity that you get in those first few statements is really off putting to me. I'm somebody that tries to communicate love and live that with everything I do. And there is a level of disrespect that I've experienced, not directly just observing others, people have been mostly kind to me. And I appreciate that. But if you're going to criticize me about my exploration of ideas in Bitcoin, you have to also acknowledge that I'm a human being that got like a PhD in stuff. Like I did some hard shit that it could be in farming or it could be in whatever. Like I've lived life and I've really thought deeply and I really care. Like I know a lot of shit. And it's possible that I actually have a lot of ideas that you can learn from. Now, if it's agriculture, fine. Or if it's artificial intelligence, fine. Like I know what I'm talking about, about certain things. And I could be wrong about a lot of things. And there's like an exchange of ideas that makes that mechanism that you talked about more efficient. Sometimes when the blowback is too strong too early on, the development of ideas is just inefficient. And I'm not sure if there's a, you know, the way it was explained to me is that for so long, that community was like bombarded with just like bad ideas, like criticisms. They're just overly sensitive now to bullshit. They're like triggered by statements. They've heard it all before and they're like, oh, there they go again with the same old arguments. But that doesn't mean that you have to sort of, I guess, develop patience and so on. Especially when you feel like in my case that the person is coming from a good place, right? I don't know if there's something you could say that's positive about the future of this kind of overcoming this toxicity. I think there's a couple of trends that are all kind of coalescing here in these types of experiences. So one is when you look at a community, there's always a spectrum in terms of there's some people who over index on kindness and stupidity. And there's some people who over index on intelligence and basically just being an asshole. And then you get everyone in between. And so naturally, as we know, the extremist ends of any community end up being the loudest usually. The second thing is there is from the outsider view, like at the beginning of the exploration of ideas, it's very much a learning process. I don't know if I understand this or not, but here's ideas A, B, and C. From the internal perspective, there's a trillion dollars of value at stake and we must protect it with our lives. The truth is probably somewhere in between there. And again, the world's not black and white. There's this kind of more gray area that I think actually is where most people exist. The other thing that's at play here is I think the Bitcoin community understands the internet and internet culture and narratives better than almost anyone. And so you see this with kind of the just complete destruction of narratives with memes and just the visceral reaction and the use of things like Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, podcasts, just areas where I think a lot about if you are an upstart and you are going to go challenge the most well respected elite kind of establishment institutions in the world, if you walk in in a suit and tie and you say, I'm here to debate you with ideas, you're going to get your clock cleaned because they're going to trot out their lawyers, their regulators, their lobbyists, right? Like all this stuff. If you instead say, I'm going to meme you to death on the internet and I'm going to control the public narrative. You've shifted the power. The asymmetry of power is more symmetrical now. It's the ultimate insurgency, right? If you bring it back to the the conflict. Yes. And so when you think about this, you have to lean into the advantage that you have. And so what ends up happening is you and I would absolutely lose it if we saw JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or the Federal Reserve start tweeting memes. Yeah, right. It it would almost the the validation that would give to the medium and the even playing field that it would provide would pull these establishments down to the level of what is this upstart? But now what you're starting to see is that the Bitcoin community, even though there's some level of toxicity at times, even though there's this visceral reaction, sometimes there's even what I would call bullying or or or kind of outward projection of things, right? Even though it may be a small percentage, it'll happen every once in a while. What they do understand, though, is that these establishments are made up of humans. And what you can actually do, one of the best ways to pick apart an institution is to recruit from inside of them one by one. Yes. And so what you're starting to see now is I mean, I get the messages on Twitter and LinkedIn all the time. Hey, I'm a banker by trade, but I'm a bitcoiner at heart, right? And so what you're doing is you're essentially infiltrating the organizations, not in in physical, you know, population. Yeah. But with the ideas and with the philosophies, banker in the streets, bitcoiner in the sheets. Yeah. Okay. I like it. With that said, in terms of shitposting and memes, I gotta say like bring it on because I believe in terms of asymmetry of power, I believe in that love will save the world, not memes. Or at least good vibe memes as opposed to shitposting. It's an interesting battleground, though. It's an interesting battleground to think about. The other thing I would say, too, is one of the elements that's always kind of funny to me is how much of the entertainment is love, right? So, when you start to think about how many of the memes that are posted, for example, are for outsiders versus insiders. Yes. Laser eyes, right? Which seems absolutely ridiculous, elementary, and frankly, beneath anyone in any level of power or influence in the world somehow has congressmen and senators who have done it. Yeah. They're not trying to convince their colleagues in elected positions to become bitcoiners. Yeah. They're speaking directly internally to the Bitcoin community. Yeah, there's some sense in which, yes, memes is love. Even I keep hearing Bitcoin is love. They're trying to convert me. The one that you have to laugh at, right? Probably my favorite one out of all of it is I've seen on multiple occasions, you know, Mark Cuban a couple of years ago, Kevin O Leary, whoever, you know, wealthy people, billionaires, etcetera, and you have people on anonymous accounts who who knows who they are telling them have fun staying poor, right? It's just, you know, it's just, again, part of a community and I think it's a feature, not a bug. There's bad aspects to it at times but I do think it's a net positive. Yeah, just like the immune system. It does a lot of crappy stuff but overall, it's a major net positive. Maybe this is a bit of a personal question for me. It just added my own curiosity but I've talked to Ray Dalio a few times. So, Ray Dalio, I think was one of those people that took that journey, the Bitcoin journey. Do you have thoughts about him specifically about that whole world and about the journey maybe of others that are going through the same process because Ray is, at least from my perspective, I'm a bit of an outsider. He's one of the most insightful and deep thinkers about investment, about finance, about economics in general. Actually, about life. So, it's interesting to see him go on that journey. Do you have something to comment about Ray or just those kinds of people in general? So, if we look at what I'll just consider the legends of Wall Street in general. Yeah. Right? There's no denying that they're incredibly intelligent. There's no denying that actually, especially in the hedge fund world, they're some of the most open minded people in terms of they're willing to change their mind when they get new information. There's no doubt that they are historians in the sense of having studied financial markets and cycles over time. And also, one of the things that I really respect about all those guys is almost all of them are willing to put ideas out via various writings that they do and accept the public criticism, right? Whether it's Howard Marks, Ray or others, they will put this stuff out in public. And sure, there's a lot of people who are supportive and kind of are part of a fan base, if you will. But there's a lot of people who also think that sometimes they say stupid things. And so, putting that out takes kind of courage, right? I think Ray's actually the most fascinating though out of all of these kind of legends of Wall Street in that he understands debt cycles. He understands currencies. He, for a while now, has been all over and famously said, you know, cash is trash, investible assets, right? He kind of like just knew all of it. And for a long time, Bitcoiners have said, Ray, you understand the Bitcoin argument, you're just missing the last part, which is Bitcoin is the solution, right? And so, he was gold and some other ideas. But I think that he's a perfect example of when you are part of the establishment, people view you in a very static way as the leader of a part of establishment. But whether it's Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, or somebody else, each one of these people were innovators and challengers to a system. They were upstarts at one point. And so, it's kind of this idea that like if you live long enough, you eventually become the man, right? And so, you know, Gates is a good example, right? Warren Buffett is a good example. Ray Dalio is a good example, etc. And so, you have to give credit, I think, to Dalio in the sense of he kept an open mind about all of this and more so than many of his peers has continued to do the work and come around to this idea. And now, I don't want to know if I wanted to say that he's a Bitcoin proponent as much as he believes it is one of a portion of assets that can be a solution. And so, to me, when you start to convince those types of people, when it's Paul Tudor Jones, a Stanley Druckenmiller, Ray Dalio, Howard Marks now even writing about it saying, hey, I was anti Bitcoin and put a ton of intellectual rigor into it. But thank God my son bought a bunch for our family, right? And kind of we've had exposure to it. I think what it does is more than anything, it's not going to convince somebody to go and take it seriously or go ahead and make an allocation. It reduces career risk. And so, if all of a sudden when Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller come out and say, hey, I own Bitcoin and here's why, every other investor on Wall Street now can say to an investment committee, well, it's good enough for Paul Tudor Jones, it's good enough for Stanley Druckenmiller. And so, I think that it's very interesting because Ray doesn't just represent Wall Street. I think Ray in some weird way represents this like macro economic investor. And so, some of those are in hedge funds and some of those people would be like CIOs at organizations. Some of them would be at corporations and some of them are just kind of retail investors. And so, you can see this kind of inflection point throughout the adoption of Bitcoin, right? There was infrastructure that got built. Okay, that kind of led to more adoption. There was certain individuals, right? Usually they were kind of technology oriented, entrepreneurial billionaires. They would buy it and come out and say it. Okay, that led to inflection points. You started to have some of these kind of Wall Street legends come out, sort of financial institutions started. And now, you're seeing corporations start to do it, right? Eventually, there's going to be a central bank that does it. And so, you kind of walk through that line and what you understand is like, it's the same thing every time. It's just somebody new, right? That path, right? That Bitcoiners journey, if you will. And I think that that is almost the beauty of it is if you short circuit the journey, it's almost like somebody doesn't appreciate it, right? If you take, let's say, somebody who's a young kid and you just give them a bunch of money and they didn't have to work hard for it. They don't really appreciate it. Well, and Ray actually has a book principles, right? And he talks about the hero's journey. So, he's like living it in some sense in terms of, you know, thinking about digital currency in general, like digital finance. It's one of the big transitions, transformations of our world in some sense. It's not just about money. Or you could argue that money is everything. I mean, it's like money isn't just the narrow definition of money. Money is really everything. And so, where you could argue that sort of cryptocurrency is like the base layer of this transformation to the digital space and everything else would just be built on top of it. I use a different word that I think is kind of closer to your world, which is it's ultimately automation. And what I mean by that is, you know, before 1970 or 1980, all the assets were analog. And so, when you have analog assets, physical stock certificates, physical bonds, right, physical deed to a home, you have to physically exchange them. When we wanted to increase transactions and increase kind of global finance and access, we took those physical assets and we created electronic QCIP assets. So, now we have in centralized databases kind of a file, represents the asset that's sitting somewhere in custody. And you and I can transact them a little bit easier, but still centralized. There's still some bureaucracy and, you know, maybe it takes two days to transact rather than actually mailing it across the world. Now, what we're seeing is a transition from those electronic QCIPs to these digital assets. And so, if you look at, again, just let's say money or currency, every currency in the world is going to be digital. You're going to have a digital dollar, a digital euro, yen, RMB. You're going to have decentralized kind of open source money like Bitcoin. You're also going to have private currencies like Facebook's attempt at DiEM and there will be others that will try to do this. And so, when you get everything digital, right, and I think that's the kind of the first step that everyone focuses on, the competition at the technology layer essentially goes away. You get some level of feature parity and sure, there's bells and whistles on each kind of implementation of a digital currency, but at the end of the day, the technology is relatively the same. And ultimately, what it will do is it will facilitate the adoption of digital wallets. So, you have to have a digital wallet regardless of what digital currency you have. Same with me, same with everybody else in the world. But what it does do is when you kind of push away and reduce the friction of competition at the technology layer, it moves the competition to the monetary policy layer. And so, when you get to that layer, now it becomes interesting because all of the currencies are the same except for this one right now and maybe there will be others in the future. But for sure, Bitcoin today and people may try to replicate in a private manner or something, but Bitcoin is kind of the only finite scarce digital somebody. And so, when you then have that pretty big difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer, it's actually not going to matter where you get paid. Right? And what I mean by that is like you and I both live in a single currency environment. I get paid in dollars. I historically have saved in dollars. All of the assets in my life are denominated in dollars and I owe my debts in dollars, whether it's taxes or in the private market. And I don't have to worry about foreign currencies. I don't exchange anything. The only time I would ever think about another currency is if I'm going to another country in their single currency environment. And in order to change or exchange my currency, I go to the bank or I go get ripped off at the airport. Right? Those are my two options. So, it's high friction to change between currencies. When the competition of technology is kind of innovated away, now I can get paid in dollars, these digital dollars, and with a click of a button, switch into any other currency in the world. And so, what ultimately happens is value and liquidity is going to coalesce around the best monetary policy. And so, you get in this very weird world where even if the United States says, hey, you're going to get paid in dollars, you have to pay your taxes in dollars. You're going to start to see people operate in a multi currency environment where they say, okay, I got paid in my digital dollar, click a button, I save in Bitcoin. It stays there or grows my purchasing power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into dollars with click of a button and pay. When you go to a multi currency world, it's not just about currency. It's now multi asset world. Because not only is the currency digitized, but that same technology is used to digitize stocks, bonds, and commodities as well. And so, today we live in a very fragmented financial world where basically I have a brokerage account, I have a bank account, I may have an alternative asset account, etc. When I can put all those assets in a single digital wallet, and I can then go from asset to asset without having to go back to a single unit of account. Like frictionless going from asset to asset. Yeah. So now what you end up doing is you start to open up the possibility for machine to machine transactions. Yeah. So today, if you and I write software code for two machines to transact with each other, they can't transact physical currency. And in many cases, they can't actually transact the electronic QCIP currencies or assets either because there's too long of a settlement time. So you can't get true automation, right? So the whole idea of the car's going to drive over a strip in the road and it's going to pay the toll, right? Well, that can't happen right now because literally the transaction won't go through, right? And so I always joke that in an automated world, it's like a CD ROM, but we're trying to take cassette tape player assets and put it in the CD ROM. It's just incompatible technology. Reference is nobody understands at this point. By the way, you need to update your reference. I probably do. It's like taking a CD ROM and trying to put an MP3 player into a streaming. But I think that the reason why that becomes really interesting is when you start to create these digital assets, now you open up the world of possibilities. So when new technology is created, you can do two things. You can either create new things the world's never seen before, or you can use it to improve the old world. Most people, because it's the easiest thing to think about, want to improve the old world. So an equivalent of this would be when the internet came along, a media company that had newspapers would say, hey, we should take a PDF of the newspaper and we should put it on a website. And now anyone in the world can go to this website and they can read the newspaper today. That was valuable, but it missed out on the ability to change headlines, to test, to put multimedia, to distribute it differently, to do all kinds of things that today we understand the internet really empowered. And so what I think we're about to watch happen is we're going to digitize the assets. We're going to put them all into these digital wallets. You're going to get automated technologies where machines can now transact with each other. And we're going to do simple things like why do we pay people once every two weeks? Why don't we just pay them at the end of every day? Or why don't I literally stream payments to you on an hour by hour basis based on the work you do? It would solve incredible economic issues in our country and in countries around the world. But historically businesses can't do this because of the technology problem. They can't keep track of it all. How do they pay everyone every day? How do they pay everyone every hour? You just can't do it. Yeah, it's funny. The vision of the future you're painting, it's kind of an exciting one. And it almost makes me sad looking into the future when we'll look back at this time. It's like how incredibly inefficient financial transactions were. Like the transaction of value of any kind. Like how to pay each other. Like there has to be processes. There's like payroll and all this kind of just the entirety of the transactions is just like painful. Almost all transactions are painful. And the companies that innovate to make the transactions a little bit more frictionless like Amazon with the one click purchase button like went out huge. But even that's really painful. It's actually really interesting especially when you start to move that into the space of data. There's a lot of people thinking about privacy and data and like can we put, can we like convert data into like money so that you can pay for how much you reveal to the companies about your own private data that can then be used to assign value to you so you can use the service for free if you hand over the data but there's like explicit transaction going on. So you can empower all those kinds of things that will just like fundamentally change our world. That's really, really, really exciting. One of the most interesting things to me is I invested in a company called Bridget and what they told me was they said $8 billion was paid to the top four banks last year on overdraft fees. So literally they took $8 billion from people who didn't have money in their bank account, right? And so when you dig into why is that a lot of times it's not that the people don't have the money. It's actually a mismatch of the payments. So what ends up happening is you get paid on the 1st and the 15th but on the 12th your Netflix bill hits, on the 13th you went grocery shopping, and on the 14th your car payments hit, you overdraft, and then on the 15th you actually get the check and then you're able to pay not only the overdraft but for the expenses that you have. And so something as simple as just getting paid at the end of every day immediately would eliminate some big percentage of those $8 billion of value that flows to large institutions on overdraft fees. Yeah and also I mean this whole process with overdraft fees and just many of the financial transactions we have to live through today forces many of us to be like accountants, like to understand the different mechanism of financial like the movement of money as opposed to you which is what we want to do as human beings operating in high layers of like providing services for others, of like following your passions and like working for others, like doing cool shit or you know basically providing value, exchanging value in the world and not thinking about the money. The money takes care of itself and then you see the results of it. So you're able to think in terms of money but not have to know how like the accounting works. Automation simply frees humans up to do more creative work. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like that's it. Yeah. And what we Which is why you use the term automation which I think is kind of brilliant reframing of all of this. Yeah because ultimately digital technologies are merely the conduit to ushers into that world and I think the most fascinating part of this entire industry is people who are trying to figure out now that we're going to have these digital technologies how do we usher in that automated world faster and so there's people who are building all kinds of incredible things right there's literally some technologies where you can stream for paying for consumption of content. Yeah. Right there's I saw somebody recently who they basically said hey I have created something but it's not going to be released until everyone and almost like a GoFundMe type situation pays for it in combination then it gets unlocked and so when you start to think about this it's not only innovation on the technology front it's innovation around the way that we form capital it's the way that we organize resources it's the way that we build companies it's the business models right it's the application of those technologies all that stuff starts to change and go back to a 2007 that's when the iPhone came out Uber wasn't possible right I'm just going to lie like all these companies that weren't possible before when the digital technologies are kind of adopted on a global scale I think that we all myself included drastically underestimate how fast and how big innovation can be because it's just hard right like like we like to think linearly and that's not how the world works. Yeah I do find it kind of interesting it is NFT based but I don't think it has to be this this idea of I think big clout it's called or whatever the idea of sort of investing in individuals it makes me immediately think about investing in ideas so even just the words you speak having value and sort of if you have a frictionless like automated financial system then you could do a bunch of interesting things about what it means to add value to the world I mean I don't know if big cloud is currently an efficient representation of that but I am truly happy that however that thing works I'm just one notch above Vladimir Putin which is one of the that's like one of the bucket list items for me to to have a list where I'm one notch above Putin well what I think you're talking about here is important because there's historical examples you could invest in a patent in some situations you could invest in an organization that has an idea right so these are super inefficient given kind of the vision that you're painting in terms of like investing directly in an idea in a super efficient automated fashion yeah but that's how the technology evolution works right is it's really hard to do at first and then slowly kind of becomes easier and easier as technology is more prevalent the other thing that I think is interesting is this whole idea of investing in people if you really think about the origination of that is I would hire somebody right I pay you money and then you're going to create production but I take the lion's share and you don't now there's things like these ISAs these income sharing agreements where basically I will educate you on something train you on something I'll put up capital right and then over time you'll pay me back plus profits as some version eventually I don't know what it looks like but being able to get upside in somebody's success for having risk capital early on doesn't seem that far off see it in professional sports you see it in you know a lot of these things and so I just think that a lot of the focus right now is on the technology but ultimately these are ideas that are very old and have had lots of success and traction and we're just merely standing in the way of the evolution of these ideas with new technology and so it's easy to get caught up in the technology but when you really zoom out and look at it from the ideological standpoint and kind of the progress of humanity it's a foregone conclusion this stuff's going to happen it's just how I think the world is waiting and some of us are trying to create that future world which is like what are the applications of this technology that will transform the world and then you know I hate the term but killer apps like cool ideas that are implemented effectively at scale that transform the world and there's been a there's been a lot of different ideas popping up like the there's a lot of ideas about social networks that are built on top of the technology and all that kind of stuff so but let me actually drag this back down to something basic if a person wanted to buy Bitcoin store Bitcoin how do they actually do it yeah so there's a couple of different ways to kind of acquire Bitcoin and in every way you've got to exchange some form of value for Bitcoin right which is part of why it has values because you're giving up value so in one way is to exchange energy and computational power for Bitcoin so you can mine it you can literally take computer power that you have you can rent it to the network and run that software and then it will pay you a portion of the kind of daily revenue off that system and you can acquire Bitcoin in exchange for your power and your computational kind of contribution and that's the fundamental principle behind Bitcoin is the proof of work so I got a hundred bucks like I use cash app the you know they there's Coinbase there's all these exchanges like how do I convert my $100 to Bitcoin is there something disclaimer this is not financial advice and this is just us talking and just your opinions this do not use this to invest or take as financial expertise that said like is there something you recommend that's an easy entry point for somebody that's like hmm I wonder if I can convert this hundred dollars into whatever amount of Bitcoin what do you recommend what are the options so there's a lot of options I'm heavily biased I went out and I scoured the market looked at all of them I've invested a lot of money in a company called BlockFi that basically basically has financial products for crypto investors so you can go you can take dollars or other currency you have you can convert it through an exchange you can leave it on these interest bearing accounts you can earn interest just like you would earn in a traditional account but higher levels of interest because it's this new thing or you can withdraw it and you can put it into cold storage on a hardware device you can leave it in a software wallet there's kind of all these storage options so BlockFi is you know kind of the one that I'm biased towards because I'm sorry to interrupt so BlockFi is Bitcoin only or is it an exchange with other crypto it's got a bunch of different ones yeah they basically are agnostic to what it is but they provide kind of financial you know products to crypto investors okay so you mentioned a few interesting ideas that'd be nice for people who would not be familiar with it cold storage hot storage what does that mean so like I go to a website and I convert dollars to Bitcoin that's a kind of storage that's like online banking right what else is there so there's a couple of different things that you can do right and let's use the legacy system as kind of an example so if I want to get currency and I put in my bank account it sits there I have to trust that the bank doesn't go under nobody steals it all this kind of stuff there's insurance for it right there's all these kind of benefits in the legacy system to make sure that as long as I don't have you know millions and millions of dollars there I'm going to be protected pretty much if anything happens through FDIC insurance if I want to do that I'm taking that counterparty risk though so it's mitigated but there's still counterparty risk I'm counting on that bank but it is easier to move it around right if all of a sudden you call me up and say hey send me some money I can press a couple buttons on my computer and it'll send it to you if I want deeper level of security I can go and I can get the physical dollars and I can go and I can you know put under my mattress right and I can say you know what it's not gonna be as easy to send it to you immediately but if I really want to I can go underneath my mattress pretty quickly I can grab it I can get it back to the bank and then I can send you the money the third thing I could do is I could basically take those physical dollars out of the bank and I could go and I could go put it literally you know in a vault somewhere that I don't have control over that's behind 10 passwords and biometric scanning and like it's really difficult to even get to it right so if you can almost look at it it's like there's three stages of security that you could have in the traditional world the same thing is true in Bitcoin so you could buy Bitcoin on any exchange you can do it on BlockFi but you also can do it on places like Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. Also Cash App. Cash App. You can do it on Cash App. I think I think they're still sponsoring this podcast. I'm not biased at all. So once you get Bitcoin on any of these venues you can leave it there on that venue. Now the trade off is you're taking counterparty risk so somebody else is responsible for the security and the protection of it in many cases big well known companies who have billions of billions of dollars of assets they have higher levels of security that's why they're well known that's why people trust them whatever but you are taking counterparty risk it is easier to quickly send to somebody so that so the trade off of like ease of use but counterparty risk is big and in the Bitcoin community specifically there's a huge thing of they really really have a keep for not leaving the Bitcoin there right for the obvious counterparty the second thing you can do is you can basically get it off of an exchange and you can put it in some level of kind of what I'll call a second layer of storage that second layer storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly just you know grab off your desk and plug into your computer and immediately use that's what they call like a hardware wallet or you can have some sort of software wallet right where it's not on an exchange but there is some level of in between between the hardware wallet and the exchange and the software wallet but the software wallet is connected to the internet yeah and so if you kind of think of it as like the exchange software wallet hardware wallet and then there's something called deep storage right or cold storage and this is you know literally there was a company called Zappo that would put things in deep cold storage and it was literally buried in a mountain right so like the odds that somebody's physically going to go there there's armed guards there's you know kind of all this type of stuff but again you're taking some level of counterparty risk because they have your Bitcoin and so the saying or the phrase is not your keys not your coins whereas my buddy Isaiah Jackson came up with he said not your keys not your cheese right in terms of sovereignty is important right and ultimately this goes back to kind of the beginning of our conversation around Bitcoin's ethos sovereignty right giving the power back to people you don't have to rely on this infrastructure in order to be able to participate in this monetary kind of economy what you are now able to do is you're able to use digital sound money you're able to keep control of it you and you alone are responsible for it so the idea of personal responsibility and then also you and you alone make the decisions as to whether you hold on to it or you use it without censorship right no one can tell you what you can do with it or can't do with it and so the purchase and the storage what I find is depending on who you are there's varying degrees of kind of concern or decisions that get made there and a lot of it comes down to personal preference the Bitcoin community though absolutely will over optimize for sovereignty and kind of hardware or cold storage I wonder if you can sort of comment on that because you have both sort of cash app and the BlockFi and Coinbase like you can store it that you can purchase and trade it there and store it there and so on but ultimately they're saying you wanna you know keep some of it there but you wanna move it to the hardware wallet and the cold storage of the hardware wallet is like you can disconnect this from the computer because ultimately stuff that's connected to the internet can be compromised can be controlled by governments and other parties and so on what are your thoughts about sort of practically speaking for maybe like a regular citizen what's what should be the role of the hardware wallet in their lives yeah so at the highest level I just think that like learning about it is important right so even if you only have five dollars equivalent of Bitcoin going and understanding here's how it works here's why it's important here's how I would actually withdraw from an exchange under the hardware wall like that alone just as an intellectual exercise is a worthwhile pursuit I think people should go do that actually go through the process of the steps so you feel like you can you can do it yeah yeah it's kind of like if I said to you you know hey we're gonna go buy an asset and you never went and you looked at it you never went and you know made a decision like sure maybe I did it or I didn't do it but like you didn't actually experience it right and so I think that that's important part the second thing is each person is different from a how they view this asset so there are some people who are speculating right there's three use cases for Bitcoin their store value medium of exchange and speculation and the people who are speculating they can't put it in deep cold storage because they need to be able to trade it right so what ends up happening is they fall in the bucket of like high risk high reward they're trying to trade they're trying to do all these things and sure maybe there are profits that they can generate if they're good at it but also they're introducing a lot of risk and so that person is very different than the person who says hey you know I bought one Bitcoin and I'm gonna save it for my child right and I'm gonna give it to them on their 18th birthday yeah and so when you start to look at this what you end up saying is what are you actually purchasing this for kind of like why are you doing it and then what's your time horizon and what ends up happening is more and more people in the Bitcoin community have longer time horizons one of the advantages to this community right if you look at the on chain metrics 60% of Bitcoin haven't moved from the digital wallet in which they sit in the last 12 months so even though it's appreciated hundreds of percent on the upside there's been lots of volatility a 50% drop in a single day in terms of US dollar price still doesn't move and so these are the kind of long term holders right these are the the iron fist or or as recently has become popular the diamond hands right they just they're not going anywhere and so I think that those people are much more likely to not have their Bitcoin on exchanges or in software walls they've got it in some sort of like highly secure environment and what and one in which they have deep sovereignty or kind of prevalent sovereignty and the reason for that is because they have that long time horizon they don't want to be kind of convicted around Bitcoin sound money macro environment all stuff and then they make a mistake because they trusted you know ABCD company and that counterparty risk ends up actually being you know fatal or or detrimental so again this is not financial advice disclaimer but let me ask so in terms of investment advice on Bitcoin so you see Bitcoin potentially not just the thing that you speculate over like buy and sell buy and sell buy and sell but it's something that you can just buy only and I believe I've heard that you own quite a large percentage of of your wealth in in Bitcoin and you're basically buying only and storing long term so that's something that's a legitimate way to approach Bitcoin in your recommendation go to other cultures so if we remove ourselves from the Western world culture of investing in gamification of financial markets and the financialization of everything let's say we go to the culture of India for hundreds if not thousands of years families basically saved their wealth in gold and in jewelry and in these hard assets with the expectation to pass it on to the next generation and so it would be blasphemous to sell the family's gold in that culture right you know your great grandfather gave to your grandfather your grandfather gave to your father your father gave it to you right and so in that culture the long term kind of holding is the default I think that what Bitcoin has presented again is a digital application of the exact same thing which is that while everything else in the world is being devalued that is denominated in a currency that is being inflated away whether it's quickly or not this finite supply this scarce asset ends up accruing more and more value over time right and so I think that for me personally I've got you know over 95% of my net worth that's in this 90 over 95% of your net worth there's two important caveats to this one is I didn't you know buy some Bitcoin in 2011 or 12 right and then all of a sudden it appreciated a bunch and it grew into that but from a cost basis perspective you know put $100 and now it's a ton of money instead what I did was I basically in 2018 saw Bitcoin from a US dollar price standpoint was falling and falling and falling and in December 2018 as I take about 50% of my net worth and convert it from dollar denominated assets into Bitcoin so it's a very kind of intentional decision with a very specific view on the world as to like why I was doing it I then essentially just let it sit there grow whatever until the spring of 2020 and when I saw the government step in and start to say hey we're going to really be aggressive in terms of interest rate manipulation and quantitative easing I then decided to go ahead and take basically the remainder and start to convert it as well so became very aggressive in doing that and so the way that I look at it is that's actually my savings right and so in some weird way if I said to you know what's the dollar worth you'd say well a one dollar bill is worth one dollar right Bitcoin to me I denominate my wealth in Bitcoin so I think of one Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin not one Bitcoin is worth 60,000 or 55,000 or 70,000 right I denominated everything in Bitcoin when I make a purchase in my head I'm calculating how much Bitcoin am I spending right now right well guess what happens when you have a devaluing currency as the denominator doesn't matter right like your financial incentivize to spend or invest right to consume when you have an appreciating currency all of a sudden you become much less consumptive in your behavior yeah because you're actually trading off future purchasing power for the consumption today it's fascinating to think that if if when you move about this world you think in Bitcoin you behave differently is if you think in dollars that's really fascinating people but here's the thing is the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier in history most people used to think this way yeah it's only when a fiat currency got introduced that one argument the positive argument or perspective is there was an explosion in growth but really it's because there was a financial incentive to consume yeah right and there's nobody better in the world than the United States at consuming and we consume anything and everything and if you want to see a great example look at how big the coca colas are at McDonald's right you know you go to other places they don't serve them that big and so the other example though or the negative argument is we have to consume because if not you end up being the bottom 45% of Americans that help no investable assets and actually are just having their wealth devalued away so holding the dollars end up being a very bad economic decision and so when you then switch to this sound money you say wait a second why would I if today I can trade one Bitcoin you know back in October of last year one Bitcoin for 10 thousand US dollars why would I spend that if at some point in the future whether it's a month from now or 10 years from now I could trade it for something much much more than that you just become much more of a anti consumer and much more of a long term thinker yeah from the individual perspective that's pretty powerful I wonder I mean I think that's a interesting debate what's better for the long term economy no better for the growth of the civilization because capitalism is fascinating it seems to it seems to work pretty well there's this kind of like Eric Weinstein says that one of the problems is for the past several decades this whole economy society is built on the idea that we have to keep growing like it depends on that idea and it's a good question whether that's going to result in huge problems or if like a college student on a deadline the the dependence on growth will mean that we'll have to grow like the fear of death will force us to grow but I think there's a false equivalency between we're dependent on growth and then if the world was denominated in sound money we don't grow what I think ends up happening is we remove a lot of the society's bullshit yeah because right now when the money is free or the currency is free you come with all kinds of crazy stuff and people will give it to you right when all of a sudden it's really really valued by the population the decisions are better yeah you you have to provide real value in the goods and services you provide in order to get them to give it to you there's less room for corruption less room for manipulation that's and like that's not actually productive yeah definitely so you said you moved a lot of your investment into bitcoin is there when you look so you're a special human being in many ways so you're like a strategic thinker but you're also like a deep thinker about this whole thing but when you look at a regular club like me in terms of just investing and moving into thinking about cryptocurrency is there a strategy that you recommend what are the different options about investing into bitcoin yeah so i think that there's just uh kind of timeless advice when it comes to uh investing or or acquiring an asset in general uh dollar cost averaging is usually the the best way to think about it and what i mean by that is um most people don't just have a pile of uh currency sitting there right it's not like they have a million dollars sitting in their bank like what do i do with it uh that situation aside what happens is they trade their hours and their effort for currency and so as they get paid every two weeks let's say um the best way to acquire bitcoin without having to worry about timing markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the percentages that you want and to buy bitcoin when you get your paycheck so if you get paid on the first and 15th of every month on that day you should go take you know let's say it's three percent of your paycheck take three percent go buy bitcoin don't worry about what the price is you should do that over time and the reason why that's important is um if in december of 2017 when bitcoin is at twenty thousand dollars it was the height of kind of this last uh big upwards movement you had taken all of your money and you had put it into bitcoin you would have had to wait almost three years just to get back to quote unquote break even in us dollar terms if at the same time you had simply bought then and over the next three years bought every two weeks you would have been up hundreds of percent three years later because what ended up happening was you bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was at 15 12 10 9 8 3 4 5 5 5 you know all the way back up on the other side and so dollar cost averaging is one of these weird things that uh it almost sounds too easy but what we find is in america we have a lack of financial education and so rather than try to be smarter than markets what most people are better off doing is just saying hey set your what's called an asset allocation plan i want 30 in stocks i want 10 in real estate i want this this whatever and every time you get your paycheck just think of it as a savings account right just put it in based on those percentages and don't think about it and over a long enough period of time what we find is almost anyone in the united states right there's exceptions but almost anyone in the united states can become a millionaire in their lifetime if they follow these plans and have that long term view and they allow compounding to work for them and so don't look at the price of bitcoin and all that kind of stuff just pick a specific time specific day that you just buy and you just keep buying that's probably good investment advice across any kind of assets it's like if you don't believe in bitcoin and you just want to let's say you just want to do the s&p 500 yeah you shouldn't try to time the market of the s&p 500 either right you should just every two weeks you should just buy some and over a 20 year period you're gonna end up buying it at all kinds of different prices but you're gonna get kind of a blended average and the more important thing is the compounding and the time in the market then did you buy it at you know two percent higher or lower than where you bought it doesn't really matter and buying often makes you i guess uh resistant robust to the uh to the volatility of the market or the volatility of bitcoin price and so on that said uh you know bitcoin price is volatile and you know again the argument i've heard is like everything that's going to be a lot more valuable in the future like if you look at the history like companies like apple like teslas now i mean but let's look at companies that have now stabilized right uh apple is a good example it's like volatile in the beginning and so the argument for bitcoin is like yeah this is the early stages because it's going to be a lot more valuable right now it's volatile and this is why you have to have these kinds of strategies to ride out the volatility of course everything that goes to zero is also volatile like the early days are volatile uh do you see like this volatility as like a feature or a bug or is this just like a way of life so amazon is the one that i know the numbers on in terms of early volatility uh every year since it has gone public it's had a double digit drawdown in that year uh the average is over 30 percent and one time it drew down over 95 percent sounds a lot like bitcoin right like oh wow this is crazy but it's one of the best performing stocks in the last 20 years if not the best performing stock and so volatility is not positive or negative it's positive or negative compared to the position you're in so if you're long and it's volatile to the upside it's positive if you're long holding something and it's volatile to the downside you see it as a negative it's all about perspective with that said um another way that i look at this is every asset priced in bitcoin is down significantly so over the last one three five years the dollar priced in bitcoin has crashed 99 percent if you denominate stocks it's down like 80 85 if you denominate gold if you denominate bonds if you just go down the line real estate etc it's all down massively against bitcoin now you could argue that that's because bitcoin is appreciating in us dollar terms or you could actually argue that the world is repricing this asset it's doing price discovery on this asset and it's essentially comparing it's saying hey bitcoin verse this stock or bitcoin verse this ounce of gold or bitcoin verse you know this dollar which is more valuable and it continues to move up in the rankings in terms of the value that the world ascribes to this some of that's based on lindy effect just the longer it persists the more likely it is to survive some of that's based on like the underlying fundamentals of how much computing power the usage transaction volume things like that but some of it also is that as more and more people wake up to the fact that it's a finite supply asset that has a place in the world and demand increases people just naturally compete and ascribe more value to it and so the volatility i think all comes back to like what do you price your life in for majority people that's dollars and so you look at the us dollar price you get all this volatility the beauty of this is that 60 that doesn't move regardless of price upward or downward and movement those people aren't looking at the day to day price what they've basically said is i've acquired x amount of bitcoin and i'm just going to hold it for years and every time somebody's done that right if if uh you bought bitcoin at any point in the last 12 years and you held it till today you are up in us dollar terms now if we had this conversation 18 months ago couldn't say that so it's all about not only the acquisition price if you will it's also when are you looking at it right because there was a point in 2017 you could have said the same thing but in 18 you couldn't and so i tend to think a lot about um humans are really really bad at short term uh decision making because we're so emotional especially when something has a price tied to it and so it's in terms of our strategies and decision making we should be long term and have like a regular almost think like an algorithm that in that in that kind of way so i think you've tweeted that you believe that bitcoin has a chance of reaching 1 million i don't know what it is currently i think it's five the 60s which is incredible i think i remember when it was at least in the double digits i think i remember it was in the signal digits of a dollar so the fact that it's cross 50 is crazy uh but uh you're even crazier apparently thinking that it can reach a million so do you think it's possible for it to reach a million is there some kind of transformative effects we have to see first when might it reach a million like what are the signs that we would look for what's required for it to reach a million so let's just look at it from a macro perspective uh gold is a 10 trillion dollar asset and when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of bitcoin bitcoin is superior in every single way right it's more portable it's more divisible uh it's more verifiable it's more scarce on everything and so some people would argue it's a 10x improvement some people argue it's 100x improvement from a technology standpoint and so we don't need bitcoin to actually kind of um capture the full 10x or 100x improvement from a market cap standpoint if bitcoin simply captures 2x the value be a 20 trillion dollar market cap which would put bitcoin at about a million dollars right so kind of just from a macro perspective if you have a 10x or 100x improvement from a technology standpoint and you directionally get some value capture in that direction you're hitting around a million or more uh dollar price point can ask a quick question which is uh what's the current market cap for bitcoin uh the current market cap is right around a trillion just over a trillion dollars and you're saying gold is 10 trillion and uh sorry where did you get the 20 trillion 20 trillion would just be 2x gold market cap got it right so if it's a 10x technology improvement let's just say it only captures 2x the market cap got it right and so again if it was to capture just gold market cap kind of the equivalent puts you around 500 000 right so you can kind of see there's bitcoin so if you capture the entirety of the gold market uh then it would be value of a single bitcoin uh the price of a single bitcoin would be five hundred thousand dollars okay to reach a million it would be double that that's what the 20 trillion comes from correct got it so if you then say to yourself okay how does the uh the pricing um kind of cycles work right or the boom and bust cycles gold is a very um kind of linear type supply schedule meaning that uh there is a certain amount of gold that comes out of the ground each year the interyear variation in that incoming supply is not much right maybe there's an extra mining company that gets set up or a couple of them maybe one goes out of business but for the most part the kind of inflationary uh increase to the supply of gold is pretty stagnant uh year over year bitcoin has a very unique feature which every four years there is a programmatic supply shock meaning that uh in the beginning 50 bitcoin every 10 minutes was introduced into the supply after four years of that happening every 10 minutes it was cut in half so on a in a single moment it went from 50 to now it was 25 four years every 10 minutes 25 got cut in half again to 12 and a half and then recently in may 2020 got cut to 6.25 when you have an asset that is determined the price based on supply and demand you normally have two inputs to the equation what is the supply and what is the demand in an asset like gold or a stock or anything else we have to do our best guess at the supply both the existing supply and the incoming supply and do our best guess at the demand and we're actually pretty good at this a lot of times in terms of directionally saying it's going to go up or down and here's kind of some price point milestones bitcoin's unique in that there's 100 verifiable proof of the existing supply the total supply and the incoming daily supply so we know 100 i can show you on the actual blockchain or in the code that there's 21 million bitcoin and that's all there will ever be i can show you that there's 18.6 million give or take bitcoin that actually are in circulation today right and i can go all the way back to every single transaction that's ever occurred since january 2009 and then i can show you on a daily basis that 900 bitcoin a day are coming into the circulating supply and so when you have 100 confidence because you can prove the supply side of this equation you can hold it constant i know with 100 accuracy the supply side so now i've reduced the mathematical equation that i need to do to determine price movements to a 50 reduction i only have to worry about demand i don't have to worry about supply and so when i look at demand i can do all kinds of things i can take the demand over the last 10 years and the growth and just extrapolate it out i can increase it i can decrease it whatever but what you find is that these supply shocks lead to significant price appreciation as the asset gets repriced because there there's a supply shock to and so probably the best thing that i've done over the last couple of years was in 2019 i started to talk about the idea that we were going to have both a supply shock and the demand shock in 2021 or i'm sorry in 2020 i didn't know when this bull market that we were in was going to end nobody knows right it's impossible to time these things but you could tell that we were kind of at late stages of a cycle there was inverted yield curves there was rep uh gyrations in the repo markets a lot of ceos leaving their jobs you know all this kind of stuff and all i said was at some point when the market turns over the government's gonna have to step in we were addicted to stimulus they're gonna have to manipulate interest rates down and they're gonna have to print money i had no clue that there was going to be a global pandemic that they were going to have to step in in such an aggressive way and move rates not down but down to zero and that they not only were going to print hundreds of billions but they could print trillions of dollars but the framework that i used to think about this was when they do that everyone is going to run to store value assets they're going to run the gold they're going to run the bitcoin etc and right as they do that it appears at the same time there's going to be this supply shock so you're gonna get a supply shock and a demand shock that are both positive for the the price i called it rocket fuel for bitcoin well it happened and here we are i now look forward and i say okay we are likely going to see a hundred thousand bitcoin a hundred thousand dollar bitcoin this year or at some point i don't know when it happens but we're moving in that so you think in 2021 we'll see a hundred thousand that would be uh my most conservative view uh i i've said a hundred thousand dollars since 2019 and people thought that was insane and crazy and all stuff now i'm the conservative guy in the room because i stick with a hundred thousand dollars and people are saying you know multiples of that number here uh so we'll see what happens but but i think that there's still a lot of room kind of to run from a us dollar price standpoint what is on the horizon is in 2024 we will have another supply shock and so that's what i think will carry us to the million dollar bitcoin from 6 to 5 to whatever 50 reduction yeah yeah and so that's what i think uh well basically when we get that that next supply shock that'll carry us up over a hundred or over a one million dollar bitcoin price which if historical examples persist and again sometimes it's hard to use historical examples to look at future events um but if that happens we would see a million dollars of bitcoin by the end of 2026 after that wave so 2024 basically is the supply shock and within you know 18 to 24 months you would see the uh the kind of top of the next market hopefully without a coupling to the net to another pandemic yes we we would like to do all of this without a public health crisis so that would take it to 20 trillion you don't have to compare it to the dollar essentially in some sense that the dollar could also lose value i mean there's a lot of kind of dynamics at play here now but like fundamentally there's going to be a huge move uh in your prediction of uh value into into bitcoin i mean that's a fascinating world uh to think about uh i mean but i do have to kind of ask you about the whole space of technology there because we're talking about the value of security we're talking about the the future which bitcoin will be at the center of but from my perspective of thinking how like i and others can build technologies on top of this kind of decentralized world i'm thinking about different different technologies out there different cryptocurrencies out there ethereum being one but there's a lot of others so i'd love to get your sort of ideas about some of these but so first let me ask you about what the hell is shit coin is this connected to uh to our previous discussion of the meme uh this shit coin cover basically all coins that are not bitcoin is it uh uh mean is it a beautiful is it's a mixture of both as with most things in life uh depends who you ask um the uh most um kind of enthusiastic and uh uh parts of the bitcoin community shit coin is anything else right kind of if you ascribe to kind of a maximalistic view of the world shit crime be anything if you look at people who i would say are bitcoin proponents uh yet see value in other things shit coin may be the bottom half of the other things right so i think again it's really important kind of who you ask is how you'll get that answer so there's tiers and the way you divide those tiers might be different depending who you ask ultimately what it is is it's a meme yeah and it's used to uh articulate the idea that whatever you want to put in that bucket has no value so shit coin right are coins that have no value yeah uh what is fascinating about it and i think that again speaks to the power of the bitcoin community is uh there was congressional hearings a couple years ago oh no and at one point uh a congressman from ohio warren davidson who uh who's definitely uh open minded and excited about bitcoin asked a an individual on the congress floor uh during testimony to uh talk about these other coins and at one point basically read into the record the terminology of shit coin he said the word shit coin uh i can't remember if he said it first somebody else did or if uh the other person did and then he uh um you know repeated it that's awesome but he definitely he was trying to get that read into the record yes uh for sure and so uh you know you can imagine one again the meme speaking insolently to the bitcoin community was you know made him very uh very well liked uh but also too was um it does go back to this idea almost of uh if you and i sat down with 10 ceos and we interviewed each one of them and then we went in a room and we deliberated and we said we have to pick the person who's going to be the most successful one of the inputs not all the inputs but one of the inputs would be who's the person who we believe has the best ability to raise capital recruit people and tell a story to the world that will get them to follow and so somebody like elon would probably be the best example of this when you have decentralized products you have no kind of leader right in the sense of somebody who is financially ascribed to be that leader and kind of the executive decision maker so what you have to do is you have to look at these technologies in these communities and say well which volunteer teams or which technologies have been able to coalesce these groups around it and in some way build the same level of engagement and protection and things like that and so you actually get tribalism but you also get things like shitcoin because what it does is it's not only a um kind of verbal attack towards uh others it's a rallying cry for internal what's so funny is that it was started with the bitcoin community talking about everybody but now you've seen adoption in other communities who use it you know basically say well we're not a shitcoin it's the it's the next guy yeah i mean the meaning to be honest it's it's one it's off it's sometimes misused i think like with anything it's like people adopt memes that used to be brilliant or still brilliant and they're just not good at using them so they become mean uh but when you do with with grace it can tear down an argument and at the same time have like love and respect underneath it i mean it's a beautiful dance they have to be good at like you know people just can suck at communication and even uh like even a powerful weapon like a meme in the wrong hands just uh fires in a way that doesn't get anything done but this is like a war of humor and memes it's kind of fascinating exactly like you formulated that there's a symmetry of power so you have to have guerrilla warfare in this internet game especially when there's no leader like you said in a distributed culture i would say here that is um is really important i think is from a society standpoint we've become very soft and very kind of coddling and not in um not in a way that's like i think people take this argument like too far sometimes but what i mean by that is um it's almost like if you're the person who holds somebody accountable you become the bad person right if you're the person who um says hey you know that's wrong you're the bad person right and so in a world where i think in um this kind of influencery you know all positive if you have any negative you know feedback or constructive criticism like you're the bad person uh it's the ultimate echo chamber right and so i think that what the bitcoin world does in in some crazy crazy way to look at it is bitcoin is ultimately about truth not about narrative not about feelings or emotion it's math yeah you look at a blockchain and you can prove something or you can't and so naturally people who are attracted to that have a very similar approach in life yeah right they say hey you made x claim prove it and as you can imagine you know a great example is like the financial media meets bitcoiners and it's a bloodbath right in kind of the the arena of ideas because what do they do the financial media is used to the soft you know opinion pieces etc and bitcoiners show up and they're like uh here's data point a b and c here's example one two and three and you're wrong and then all they yell and scream about is like uh i'm wrong i'm wrong i'm wrong like you can't say i'm wrong and they're like nerd like disprove what i just said and so you get in this like very very weird it's fascinating it's a fascinating battlefield but i i do want to say it's i've been watching this it's kind of interesting i think that the pursuit of truth like tearing down bad ideas can be done with grace and to do it with grace requires a lot of skill like what people don't realize about disagreement they think that disagreement is easy like they they see the the the lies or the inaccuracies in the statement and and they just think they can say wrong uh yes you can say that but if you want to be effective it requires great skill like you look at i don't know um a beautiful uh verbal shit poster which is Christopher Hitchens right it requires a lot of skill through your words to tear down an argument to criticize and to take a step towards truth what i'm disheartened by internet culture like the negative side is people don't put a lot of effort in their tear downs like into your shit posting into your memes you should put effort and see it as a skill that you want to if you want to be a part of this culture you want to uh get good at it like any skill it's the 10 000 hours like get improve deliberate practice self criticism all of those things uh just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you won't get deep joy and actually have an impact on the world if you get good at shitposting but but i think this is really really important right because you're right in that uh it's all about intention versus action if your intention is to uh tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to see the truth yes that's very different than if your intention is to tell someone they're wrong and hurt their feelings yes right and so when you can unpack intention and action you really quickly can tell what somebody ultimately is trying to accomplish i also think that one of the craziest things that i've seen play out is uh memes when i use that term i'm not just talking about like a static photo right when i'm talking about these elaborate uh kind of edited videos and kind of all this stuff um when done right it is uh the most articulate way to deliver a blunt message and it's done in such a way that is humorous and entertaining yet really hammers the point home and so it's a skill set that many people don't have i don't make those i'm assuming you don't make them either right i see them i share the ones that i like right uh but it does take practice and you can tell look there's people who are fantastic meme lords right and there are people who absolutely suck at it and it's like anything it's just how good are you at communicating and uh i've heard the idea a bunch of times so i don't know who to kind of credit for it but uh whether it's emojis it's gifs it's memes whatever this is the extension and evolution of just hieroglyphics right yeah like like we have been doing this for literally centuries it's just that now we're doing it on the internet you can press a button and go to millions and millions of people immediately uh but speaking of memes what the heck do you think is up with elon musk talking about dogecoin a lot sort of uh from the cryptocurrency community i from i've been talking to a lot of sort of technologists i guess and reading papers on cryptocurrency it's like nobody really sees dogecoin as a revolutionary crypto technology a lot of people talk about it's security issues there's a bunch of issues it has nevertheless you did say that money is the kind of social construct right and uh elon musk's combination of humor and brilliant engineering in the various companies he runs combines to create a kind of value and excitement behind dogecoin it's like um what is it he says uh that the most amusing outcome is the most likely kind of idea which sounds silly but there could be like profound truth to it it's like what do you make of dogecoin philosophically or technically is is it possible that dogecoin will overtake bitcoin and run the run the entire world i can't even because it could happen it could happen but what uh if there's any serious way to answer that question well we have to start with uh techno king of tesla yeah and master of coin as they are so articulately called in the latest scc filing he officially changed his title techno king yes no king of tesla and the cfo's new uh title is a master of coin and so uh when you have a sense of humor yeah and frankly uh a level of uh self confidence and uh an element of uh an appreciation for irony in the world dogecoin is actually one of the least crazy things that you could talk about when you're willing to go to techno king of tesla master of coin uh and all this stuff and so i think that elon uh doesn't get enough credit frankly for his understanding of internet culture understanding of memes and understanding of frankly human psychology and marketing and so in some crazy way every time he talks about dogecoin it's a rallying cry for an entire generation of kids it's a rallying cry for an entire industry uh in terms of cryptocurrencies and digital technologies but this is the flag yeah and this is the thing that he can yell and scream about and tweet about without worry of punishment so he could be talking about bitcoin he could be talking about cryptocurrency but that's not going to be uh as beautifully humorous and whatever the hell internet culture is as dogecoin he's finding the right language he's speaking the language of the people of the of the in the digital age if you want to reach weird people yeah you can't be serious and most people are weird the masses are weird so he's speaking to the masses yeah and the techno king and even further than that i think is he essentially is um he's using dogecoin as a way to say i'm doing this because i can yeah he couldn't do it with securities he couldn't do it with certain types of other assets right like i almost look at it as like a venn diagram what's the thing that a bunch of people know about care about thinkers funny whatever and also overlay that with the things that like he could actually talk about they won't get in trouble for that's a big f you to the sec i could see the the people just freaking out i i mean i love it but um i i don't know if i would have the guts to do it myself but i i think he's an inspiration to a lot of us to be like well maybe you should grow the guts when you're the techno king you can do whatever you want right and i mean that's something to aspire to is to be the techno king in your own little world if you also think about it in the sense of uh when you're somebody on a mission to create interplanetary life yeah when you're trying to solve a or put a dent in the climate crisis or create electric vehicles and be the first american company and you know however long frankly the sec or other things in your life that just don't you don't ascribe that much importance to compared to those things they're almost uh nuisances and that's scary i think for shareholders of a company when the person that you're trusting to lead you to the promised land and create shareholder value doesn't put value on certain things but at the same time i always look at it as a tug of war how much of the actions of what he's doing and calling attention to actually change the way that regulators lawmakers politicians countries whatever act he may not be able to say do acts i'm the techno king and they go do it but with every step he makes he changes some of their behavior and so i think that it's um a really kind of game of like 3d chess that frankly i'm not privy to right i'm kind of watching from the sidelines and uh figuring out alongside everybody else but i also don't think that it's just elon uh bought a bunch of dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he's going to a dollar and he's gonna you know make money right like i don't think i don't think it's an economic argument as to why he's so interested in i think it's much more uh it's almost like meta message for a lot of other stuff yeah he's kind of trying to break apart internet communication from first principles like it does so many other problems it's kind of fascinating to watch i know he's been uh he's he's taught me quite a bit about communication and uh at least for me it's been liberating to not give a fuck about the old school way of things i've been always bothered by a place i deeply admire which is mit but there's problems the bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back innovation brilliant minds and in that sense doge is a kind of fu to the system that's kind of positive but also uh kind of uh but it was also an fu so in that sense i think elon has a perspective on the world that's similar to bitcoin folks which i really like which is like thinking long term it's how visionaries think is like how will if i take these ideas what and the ideas hold true what will the world look like in 20 30 50 years and think about everything in that way yeah i like uh bezos's view which is uh is essentially how do you minimize regret how do you accelerate your life mentally and go to 80 90 100 150 years whatever we end up being you know fortunate enough to live to and then look backwards yes and say this decision that i'm going to make i have two options which one is going to be the one that i least regret and if you continue to make decisions that way one you have that long term view kind of built in because you're working backwards uh two you are ultimately going to optimize for uh minimal regret but also three is even if you only look forward 10 years that's much much further than most people do and so it gives you a significant advantage and i think that um bitcoin has kind of this like um you know proxy for time as we talked about uh interplant uh planetary travel where there's multiple steps from creating a reusable rocket to landing it to you know all this stuff all the way to simple things just like if you're simply trying to figure out where the world's going to be 30 years from now you know bill gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year underestimate what we can do in 10 well to me it's a um kind of degree of uh mistake if you will 10 years maybe you're off by 10 percent well if that line of progress continues 20 years you may be off by 100 and 30 years you may be off by a thousand percent right like almost the further you go out the more inaccurate you become and so i think that people who want to iterate their way to success right that's a common thing in like the startup world end up actually following kind of the breadcrumbs to where the world is taking them but people like an elon musk a jeff bezos a jack dorsey all the way down the line all these innovators they actually say to themselves there is a point in time in the future where there's a world i want to construct and then they go and they construct it regardless of the short term iterations and incentives it is just they're driving towards that point and i think that it's this whole idea of having this like you know kind of set vision and this uh refusal to kind of move or budge off of that that's what makes them special one of the things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto community is nfts i i have no idea really the depths the fundamental technological philosophical depths of the second of this technology whether this is just like a little bit of a fad or there's some deep lessons to learn whether it's bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general about it do you have thoughts about like the long lasting fundamental aspects of nfts i think there's probably both things happening fad and things to learn right and um if we just start with like what is an nft it's a non fungible token meaning that um there's no fungibility and fungibility is a fancy word um i always describe it as if i took a hundred dollar bill and i put it on the table with a bunch of the hundred dollar bills and we mixed them up and i just grabbed a hundred dollar bill and left i'm no worse as long as they're all you know uh official hundred dollar bills because as long as i have a hundred dollars i have hundred dollars i don't need that exact same bill back so that means that those hundred dollar bills are fungible non fungible would be like art if i took a picasso and i put it down on the table and you brought three artists that no one's ever heard of before and we mixed them up and i just took any random piece of art it wasn't the picasso i lose because the picasso is really important there right so non fungibility is important in art what these non fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are uh creating scarcity and originality in a digital environment and what i mean by that is um take a music file if i had a music file and you wanted it you said send it to me i press send it essentially creates a copy and you get one music file i get another we don't care you can listen to music i can listen to music we're super happy if i instead though have a digital file that entire premise is based on scarcity and i hit send and you get a copy and i keep the original or you get the original i get a copy there's a problem and so ultimately what i think is playing out with nfts is it's a technology regardless of where it plays out from blockchains or uh what in communities or environments that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet and so naturally what people do they look at the legacy world and they say well what's scarce there that has value how do we bring that to the digital world so art is a perfect example right and you know frankly last year i started to look at this because it felt like this was going to be really really big and the conclusion i came to was just as bitcoin is going to be bigger than gold right the digital application of something is going to be bigger than the analog application the same thing's going to be true in art the digital art world is going to be bigger than the traditional art world people think that sounds crazy at first until you start to realize it's very very similar the art is more portable it can be divisible right it's got a larger demand market in terms of the internet rather than an auction right all this kind of stuff when you display it it can have motion and music and all of these aspects to it that are better than the traditional art what the traditional art market has that the digital art market has not had is the narrative narrative based world scarcity kind of in digital sense and so what i think the entire world is going through right now is an exploration of how do we use this technology to create new things frankly we're not going to be good at it for a while and so the only place i've really focused on is digital art itself and i've always been interested in art but i wasn't going to go buy a painting and hang it on the wall right in the sense of uh that's how i was going to store value what i find fascinating though is that i now can take that concept which most of the wealthiest people in the world have a significant portion some you know some people have 20 percent in terms of you know number of billionaires 20 percent of their wealth is in art and you can bring to this digital realm which is much more um kind of natural to a digital native and so the best way to describe the importance is imagine a serial number being placed on something take the eiffel tower the only eiffel tower that has value is the first one every replica of it regardless of size location you know who made it where they sent it they have no value eiffel tower 001 is the most important and so i think that's ultimately what we're starting to see here and what we're looking at is probably one percent of what it's going to grow into so you're you're bullish you're saying it could grow into something for one percent it could grow into something significant like all the kinds of different applications strip away all the applications right now and just think about is digital scarcity going to be important on the internet moving all the things that are scarce in the physical world into digital space us trying to figure out which things can be moved and not and also there's things in the digital space just like you're saying that don't exist in the physical world that might also benefit from gaining scarcity like you know people are i guess creating nfts out of like tweets or whatever so like you're you have you have a fun twitter account you know you could say like you could put value to a single tweet and then be able to invest in it and trade it and buy parts of it and all those kinds of things you know you can invest in people you can invest in you know art can be defined broadly as any kind of creation right and in some sense this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety of the digital world it can like consume the all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn everything into a market well so if i take you on like a i don't know 10 year fast forward yeah and i paint a picture of uh something today that seems absolutely insane but there's early signs that people are building this and let's just give them the benefit of the doubt that some of the early iterations will work and some of or most of them won't there's a world where you and i are participating in a digital economy in a virtual world where uh whether it is a piece of art it is a digital sculpture it is a digital skin from a video game it is a digital good that we purchased somewhere online and we bring it and we display it in a digital museum or a virtual museum and so now all of a sudden you can charge people for entry you can consign digital goods it's the replication of what happens in the analog world now just in digital and when you do that what you do is you take the addressable markets of these assets or these mechanisms and they explode in the digital realm and so now all of a sudden how fast does the human race accelerate when it comes to human production intelligence learning all in the digital output it's just if i said to you 20 years ago i'm going to give you a global education that means i'm going to take you and i'm going to physically move you to geography after geography after geography it's going to take time it's going to take resources and ultimately it's going to take lots of effort if i now said to you hey i'm going to transport you in this virtual world to multiple geographies but you're going to experience it in this virtual world and you're going to have digital goods that you can take from economy to economy or from location to location all of a sudden you may get maybe you get 90 of the value you don't get 100 of the same value we get 90 of the value but you can do it at a much faster pace and so in the six month period you've actually made three times the progress than you would have if you had to do in the physical world so that's where i think we're heading so there's digital art being displayed in the digital museum and people are being charged for access and perhaps we plug in our senses which means we start to operate more and more in a virtual reality augmented reality virtual reality way with this digital world and increasingly going to this world basically lived most of our productive and uh social lives in this digital world uh and increasingly essentially create a simulation where the biological basis is just there to say sustain the brain that's used to operate in the in the virtual world uh taking us back to the original when we started talking about war i wonder what conflict looks like in that world that uh the people who are born today maybe will be fighting wars in the space in in that museum world in that digital world remember what i said we're moving from a world of conflict surrounded and determined by bombs bullets and soldiers to a battlefield that is determined by war of information and cyber capabilities and so in that virtual world is it about death and destruction of human life in the physical analog world or will it become more important to attack or defend virtual property and virtual life and you know some level of virtual sovereignty in my opinion the latter is more likely and so what you start to understand is well what do you truly value in your life is it the physical analog materialistic consumptive goods or is it virtual and in many cases something as simple as the ability to connect with somebody it's really important and so one of the most disruptive combative violent things that a country may do to another country in the future simply take down the internet and put people in isolation yeah i don't need to physically harm you if i can psychologically harm you i don't need to it's terrifying yeah i don't need to uh actually convince you through a monopoly on violence on physical violence what if i can psychologically change the way you see the world through misinformation through all sorts of nefarious activities and i think that you know the united states has been struggling with this idea over the last couple of years in the political arena but what happens when it starts to come to other aspects of our life and i think it's very likely it's almost obviously likely that we're moving into the digital world the one of the features of the digital world is that artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power in a in a frictionless way in that world currently as we understand it it's hard it's hard to build robots that operate at scale and do like arbitrary large amount of impact damage or positive in the physical world it's much easier to do in the digital world do you have do you ever think about ai systems just swimming about uh doing extraordinarily powerful destructive things in the digital world is that something of a concern to you or is this something into a very distant future i think a lot of artificial intelligence is uh in the name it's simply the replication of human intelligence at scale automated and program uh programmatic meaning that in the analog world you could go hire a thousand employees or in you know an amazon case hire millions of employees and set a mission or a goal and push them to go do that that requires recruiting retention training resources all that stuff in the virtual world or in this digital economy what if you can just program the resources and gain the same leverage and do it at scale and do it in a very programmatic way and then have them actually make decisions in a way that doesn't require you to have thought of every single potential scenario or edge case that's ultimately what we're talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence right and so when you look at that when technology is created everyone uses it for good or bad but both get used right and so whether we're talking about cell phones beepers the internet uh guns whatever it's always used for good and bad the big question is and i think that you know yourself and many other people have rightfully said this is the question really becomes is the negative and nefarious uses of this inadvertent potentially or does it actually come from a malicious person it's the intention malicious and to me that's what i i don't know enough you know much more about this and there's plenty of other people who do as well but i do think that there will be nefarious actors and malicious people but we're going to treat them the same way we've always treated people who use technology poorly right we're going to understand it we're going to identify it we're going to control it and then we're going to end up reversing it or preventing that from doing them it's the inadvertent things that i think are actually the most dangerous because when you have something that can think for itself and there is no way to leverage a monopoly on violence for control it's a very scary thing and it can i mean the the thing that's scary to me is this it can scale arbitrarily so it can outnumber humans very quickly even if it's dumber than humans and so i don't know if we're able to reason about a world like let's look at the physical analog where all of a sudden uh let's talk about something kind of like humans but dumber than humans like chimps okay imagine that all of a sudden chimps could multiply arbitrarily quickly and you could have like a trillion chimps the next day when you when you only had maybe a million the day before like how does that world look different where the fuck all these chimps come from and they like and then we can we can pretend to be like well let's hope the chimps like don't get violent because they don't seem to get violent when the resources aren't constrained but like we don't know and the problem is it all starts by building that first chip multiplier device and everyone's like okay yeah there's a lot of good applications you want you know uh you can make all kinds of arguments for why you have more chimps maybe they can help you out around the house or something like that in the physical space uh but ultimately it's the unintended consequences that you're referring to is you don't know what's going to happen i'm really worried about dumb ai agents uh like having impact when they're multiplied to a million to a billion and are allowed to operate in the digital space especially as we clearly are moving more and more of our lives into the digital space so it's kind of terrifying because we you know a lot of people are terrified or like concerned about super intelligence systems i think i'm definitely much more concerned about super dumb systems at scale that that's terrifying i always think about um the inadvertent but as you were talking what it made me think of is also the irreversible irreversible that's right so it's one thing if there's your inadvertent negative impact but we have reversibility built into a system and we can fix our mistakes yeah i think the really scary part is when you overlay inadvertent mistakes with the irreversible aspect of it and therefore humans have no control yeah if you if you have the trillion chimps you can't they're not gonna like it when you try to start killing them off uh all right but back to bitcoin those chimps in the bitcoin community anytime you bring up chimps some people say joe rogan entered the chat can i ask you about sort of learning about bitcoin books and resources you have an amazing podcast that's not just about bitcoin or cryptocurrency it's about everything including life but you do have a lot of really amazing conversations about this whole digital world but you obviously you also have a newsletter that's incredible on substack and and um but do you have recommendations maybe it would be great if you could talk about first of all your podcast and the newsletter but also other resources that you recommend people should check out in order to learn about bitcoin yeah so the podcast and uh email are like the two most selfish things i do because the podcast is a way for me to learn from other people so i get them to come on and tell me all the things they're thinking about and i could ask some questions what's it called by the way uh just the pomp podcast and so in doing that um it really is informative for me and i think that my whole goal is just like if i'm learning other people will be learning and then the email uh i read it every morning because it forces me to collect my thoughts and actually articulate them in somewhat of a coherent way and so it's just something that um is like a practice that i probably would do even if no one read it and then by being able to publish it uh what does it do it elicits you know both the good and bad responses and so people will let me know if they think i'm an idiot and they'll usually not respond if they think that it's something smart and so um those two things are really um educational for me and i think kind of forced me to uh to be able to articulate a lot of ideas but a lot of what i share or learn on those things come from these other resources so i'm definitely subscribing people should subscribe but what are bitcoin resources books that you recommend i think you got to start with bitcoin standard uh that one to me feels like uh it really lays out the picture nicely um there is uh bitcoin uh money you can't fuck with i was written by our friend jason williams uh as you can imagine it's basically what it talks about uh there's another book layered money um it's written by nick who uh who's done a great uh great job kind of laying it out um there's a book uh called bitcoin in black america written by a guy isaiah jackson and he basically lays out the argument for why the black community um can benefit in a asymmetric way from something like bitcoin um and there's a whole bunch more i'm gonna forget them all um there's the uh i think it's called the cost of tomorrow a guy jeff booth uh jeff booth wrote it um and just if you get on twitter basically you're gonna see all these books flying around um but i do have to say that uh from a psychological concept uh or philosophical concept the number one book that i've ever read uh that aligns with bitcoin ethos but doesn't say a word about bitcoin is a book called the dow of capital by mark spitznagel and so what he essentially does is he just reiterates over and over and over again long term thinking outliers disruption all the stuff and so he's a guy who he runs a fund uh that essentially they just do uh tail risk hedging and so in you know march or february of 2020 they're up like four thousand percent right by the way they pretty much lose money you know for eight nine years then that happens and so uh but they're still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over you know years and years and so it's just this mindset of uh everyone is so short term focused and so i think it's just a great reminder to long term thinking uh and also i mean i've gotten quite a bit of value just reading the papers and that's perhaps more like for technical folks there's quite an active research community and also going back to the original white paper and just original documents old school old school is still what uh like what a few years ago still really interesting to think about to look at what people were thinking about because the the principles are carried through with uh other cryptocurrencies as well like it's it's all it's all there even in the early documents so that's kind of fascinating to see that whole history from if you're more like tech savvy and like you said twitter is actually an interesting place if you can look past all the shit coin talk it's a it's a fascinating place for news and resources is there books outside of all this cryptocurrency sort of technical fiction philosophical that impact on your life because you've you have interests that are all over the place is there something that um you would recommend to others so doubt capital is definitely probably my favorite book um books that have been impactful i read uh when i was 20 actually sitting in the desert of iraq um rich dad poor dad thinking grow rich and the richest man in babble on and i don't think i took a single thing and like implemented it from like an execution standpoint uh but it was a complete shift in mentality and understanding a relationship with money and um just kind of what i wanted to do with my life and stuff like that so i think those three books i read them in succession were really impactful um and then i think one of the best books probably ever written is uh i think it's called uh when breath becomes air um or air becomes breath i can't remember uh but it's basically a doctor or a medical professional who's dying and he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all the stuff and i think that it's just uh one of these things where if you said to me you know what's the number one thing i took out of my experience in iraq that's a book like that also gives you is we're all gonna die right and you and i can want to be as immortal as we want but at some point we're gonna die and so it really does kind of focus you on time being that scarce asset and use it for enjoyment and happiness uh more so than anything else and i think that's part of your message and it's a great one do you think do you like literally meditate on your own mortality i necessarily think i uh meditate on it as much as um are you afraid of death were you afraid of death when you're in iraq i mean if you're coming face to face with it are you afraid of death today no i i think that it was just one of these things where like if you fixate on something and you worry about it then at least to me like you become uneasy about it and so after an experience like going to war i think that everything is just so not important compared to that right like when i came back i remember uh going back into the college environment and like things people worried about i was like listen let me explain to you you know what the real world is like right but i think even today right if you talk to people who know me really well i don't get worked up about a lot of stuff i don't get you know in either direction good or bad uh anything because ultimately it just comes down to if that's the final result let's enjoy it it's fascinating to ask you because this reformulation of money essentially buying time and uh you know there's the old question of does money buy happiness do you think money can buy happiness in the context of money being able to buy time or is happiness something else that is beyond all of this when people talk about this question i think that they really focus on money as a means to getting materialistic things so they want a big house they want a boat they want a fast car they want you know whatever they think that's the stuff that will make them happy what i think about it is if you have resources you can have time and if you have time and you spend it the way that you want to spend it then that's ultimately happiness so i always say to people if you think that money doesn't buy you happiness what if i told you that if you had more money you could spend more time with your family it reframes it yeah and now is all about i want to do certain things in life but there's a lot of people who spend their life not doing those things because they feel the need to pursue economic means as a way to provide a living or whatever and so i explain this listen in my opinion again it's my opinion it's what makes me happy if i can leverage financial resources to create more time to do the things i like i'm happier might not work for everybody but like that's what works for me and so there's this element of like i don't care what other people think if they like that or not because they're not me right like there's almost this element of like you gotta figure out what works for you and if it works for me then like no i think that resonate that that will resonate with a lot of people i think that's a brilliant reframing of it uh that said uh you kind of imply there's a there's a reason behind this whole existence of ours there's a meaning to it so let me ask what is the meaning of life anthony do you think about these ridiculous big questions that have no answer every once in a while or do you just enjoy the shit out of every day i answer it in a way that um isn't meant to be accurate it's meant to um be the right answer for me which is ultimately you know and i talk to a lot of people who always ask like what's the what are you doing why are you doing this i say it's to be happy and the reason why i think of it that way is i've got a friend jonathan galler who talks about uh you know enough being enough and recently he talked about it in the um context of bitcoin and so bitcoiners are have two things any bitcoiner if you talk to them they believe the same two things one they don't want the us dollar price to go up because they actually want to acquire more bitcoin right and then let it go once they feel like they've got enough but two is no matter how much they own they think that they don't own enough and they want to acquire more and so at some point you say to yourself what is enough and and i think that the whole meaning of life is to understand kind of what your level of satisfaction is and for some people that's a monetary thing some people that's a freedom of time thing for some people it's an impact thing whatever but just understanding that's important and then going and accomplishing it and what i've found is that the people who i know who have done this and been intentional about it they accomplish it on a much shorter timeline than people who don't right there's some people who start thinking about this when they're 60 naturally you're not going to accomplish before you're 60 if you just start thinking about it 60 people who are thinking about it earlier can do it and so i think that's really it for me it's just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it the way i think about it that's because it's a really nice formulation i i almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth so majority of the time is spent at the moment of enough is enough of gratitude of basically being content with where you're at like deeply appreciative of every moment and all the bitcoin whatever bitcoin you have being deeply appreciative of it and that being enough and then some fraction of time perhaps it shrinks as you get older that's maybe there's an optimal trajectory there but some fraction of time is spent being yeah like deeply self critical and nothing is enough nothing you've ever done is worth anything it's the marvin minsky said like the secret to success is hating everything you've ever done so like that mode of just hating everything you've ever done and just like trying to improve trying to make stuff better nothing is enough it's never enough that kind of stuff and then oscillating back and forth like you don't have to have the same algorithm operating throughout the day you could just like oscillate back and forth and maybe reserve that gratitude part the chill part to when you're hanging out with family and friends and loved ones and then when you're like alone or maybe at work that's the madman comes out kind of thing i also think it's um kind of purpose driven in the sense of there's a lot of people who have the uh i need to do more but in a somewhat altruistic way so they're you know take elon as an example the idea of colonizing mars sure if he is successful he will be very rich i don't think you or i or many people believe he's doing it for the money right there's a lot of other things he could do that would be much easier that would make him tons of money and so in some weird way he has enough because he's able to free himself from the constraints of i need to acquire more resources and he can focus on what is the thing that i want to work on regardless of money and so in that pursuit that is non economic you can be as selfish as you want because ultimately you're not tied back to this like measurement tool and so it's this uh again like altruistic non monetary purpose and i think that there's a lot of people who spend their whole life looking for that and they don't know what it is and so again some people may not think of it that way but if you can find something to do that you win i don't think there's a better way to end it anthony i'm a huge fan it's a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today uh you know i thank you for just educating the world for for teaching me uh inspire me to learn more about this new set of technologies that look like they have a potential to change transform all of human civilization so thank you for coming today and thank you for being who you are absolutely thank you so much for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with anthony pampliano and thank you to our sponsors theragun muscle recovery device sun basket meal delivery service express vpn and indeed hiring website click their links to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from mahatma gandhi freedom is not worth having if it doesn't include the freedom to make mistakes thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin | Lex Fridman Podcast #171

The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion feed for college communities starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now adding Stanford and MIT. Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college campuses in recent history. I think this is a very difficult but worthy project. Quick thank you to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, Better Help, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur and genuine human being who quickly won me over. He's inspiring in many ways, both in the struggle he had to overcome in his personal life, but also in the fact that he did not know how to code, but saw a problem in this world, in his community, that he cared about, and for that he learned to code and built a solution in the best way he knew how. That's an important reminder for us humans. Let us not only complain about the problems in the world, let us fix them. I also have to say that there's passion in Ryan's eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world. His story, his effort, gives me hope for the future. There is hate in this world, but I believe there's much more love, and I believe it's possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we explore difficult, personal, even painful ideas together. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Ryan Shiller. Let's start with the basics. What is Librex? What are its founding story and founding principles? And looking to the future, what do you hope to achieve with Librex? Sure, let me break that down. So what is Librex? Librex is an anonymous discussion feed for college campuses. It's a place where people can have important and unfettered discussions and open discourse about topics they care about, ideas that matter, and they can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of their college community. And we exist both on each Ivy League campus, and we have an interivy community, and actually this week we just opened to MIT and Stanford. No, really? MIT? Yes! So we have MIT and Stanford communities, and I expect you to sign up for your MIT account and start posting. What are, for people who are not familiar like me actually, which are the Ivy Leagues? Sure, so we started at Yale, which is my, I don't know, can you call it alma mater? Because I haven't technically graduated. Yeah, what's that called when you're actually still there? My university? Yeah, I guess we'll just call it home. That's my home. Educational home. Started at my educational home of Yale, and then we moved to, and we could get into the story of this eventually if you'd like, and then we went to Dartmouth, and then quarantine hit. We opened to the rest of the Ivy League, and now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don't know, is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one breath. What's the younger side of the league? Penn? No. Columbia. I can't say that on camera. We'll edit it in post. I don't know. I'll just say each of all eight of them, and then you can just like get it in. Yeah. Penn, Harvard. There's actually a really nice software that people should check out, like a service. It's using machine learning really nicely for podcast editing, where you can, it learns the voice of the speaker, and it can change the words you said. It's like some deep fake stuff. It's deep fake, but for positive applications. It's very interesting. It's like the only deep fake positive application I've seen. I have a friend who's obsessed with deep fakes. Yeah. What's great about, I think, deep fakes is that it's going to do the opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible deniability. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the hope for me is there's so many fake things out there that we're going to actually be much more skeptical, and think, and take in multiple sources, and actually like reason, like use common sense, and use like deep thinking to understand like what is true and what is not. Because, you know, we used to have like traditional sources like the New York Times, and all these kinds of publications that had a reputation. There are these institutions, and they're the source of truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your own. That gets part of the individual. That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from, the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust any one source of news. You have to think on your own. You have to talk to your friends. Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don't you think? Think about the societal consequences. Absolutely. I mean, we see so much decentralization in all aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like the decentralization of thought. Yes. You could say it's sadly, or I don't think it's sad, is decentralization of truth, where like truth is a clustering thing, where you have these like this point cloud of people just swimming around, like billions of them, and they all have certain ideas. And what's thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm. When you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing, that's truth. But there's also another truth, and there may be like multiple truths, and it's almost will be like a battle of truths. Maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society that there is such a thing as a truth. Because like the downside of saying something is true is it's almost the downside of what people like religious people call scientism, which is like once science has declared something as true, you can't no longer question it. But the reality is science is a moving mechanism. You constantly question, you constantly questioning, and maybe truth should be renamed as a process, not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering. Kind of like we're going backwards in time. So like back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? Like people would get together and they'd get together around common value system, common morals, and a common place. And those would be sort of these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different civilizations and societies across the world that created their own truths. We talk about the Jews and the Talmud and Torah. We look at Buddhist texts. We can look at all sorts of different truths and how many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations. Yeah, Harari and sapiens, it rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times. That's the thing that made us humans special, is who can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in their minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows. And finally, we have Bitcoin. Which money is another belief system that has power only because we believe in it. And is that truth? I don't know, but it has power. And it's carried in the minds of millions and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what's the founding story? What's the founding principles of Librex? Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman, and I was talking to my friends. Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They really felt like even outside the classroom, it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to understand about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you, basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people, and they want to be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real friendships. And second of all, it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality to explore important ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately, due to the culture, my friends expressed that it was very difficult to do that. And I felt it, too. And then I couldn't talk to my professors. And I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor, and I was taking his class, and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said, Professor, we're almost finished this class. And we haven't even gotten to sort of the reason I originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle Eastern conflict. Because something I'd learned at Yale, and this is maybe the most important thing, but I'll flush it out a bit. Something I've learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a textbook. And what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get the opinions of the experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in depth conversations. And so that's sort of the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to just reading a textbook. But also interact with that opinion. Exactly. To interact with that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it, to push back on it, and to have that with some great minds. And there really are great minds at Yale, don't get me wrong. It's still a place of tremendous brilliance. So I'm talking to this professor, right? And I'm like, I haven't heard your area of expertise. And I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal? And this is during office hours, mind you. So we're one on one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective, his research and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table. And he said, I used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school and I realized my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically just not to approach the topic. And so now I just don't even mention it. And he's like, you can say whatever you want, but I'm not going to be a part of it. And it's a real shame. It's a real loss to all of the students who I think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors. In that context of these world experts, the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism where there's a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student, a complaint that an idea is painful or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or ideas creating an unsafe space. And the conclusion of that, I mean, I'm not sure what to do with that because it's a single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power than the idea itself. And that's strange. I don't know how to fix that in the administration except to fire everybody. So like this is to push back against this storyline that academia is somehow fundamentally broken. I think we have to separate a lot of things out. Like one is you have to look at faculty and you have to look at the administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration does, tries to do well, but they're the ones that often lack courage. They're often the ones who are the source of the problem. When people criticize academia, and I'll just speak to myself, you know, I'm willing to take heat for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the bolder thinkers that you think. Whenever you talk about we need like the truth to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind in that sense. And they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're saying. And so it's not broken, like fundamentally, but there's stuff that like needs, that's not working that well. It needs to be fixed. You kind of took my words. That's what I thought you were going to ask me if I think the Ivy League is broken. That's totally, that's exactly it. So you don't think, yeah. So on the question, do you think the Ivy League is broken? Like what, how do you think about it? The academia in general, I suppose, but Ivy League still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia. What more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to this day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a little careful because I've been in some of these committees and I've talked to the administration about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way that they would probably like to. Yeah. Okay. So this is me speaking, right? The administration, I know the people, and they're oftentimes the faculty holding positions in these committees, right? Yes. But it's in the role of quote unquote service. They're trying to do well. They're trying to do good. But I think you could say it's the mechanism is not working, but I could also say my personal opinion is they lack courage, and one, courage, and two, grace when they walk through the fire. So courage is stepping into the fire, and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining that like as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote unquote experience of others or like, you know, just not eloquent at all. Like as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying the difficult thing, doing it well, like doing it skillfully. So both of those are important, the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas, and they often lack them because they weren't trained for it, I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that don't, that allow 19, 20 year old students to have more power than the entire faculty, or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication. And really administration. Well, yeah. And the administration. That's right. That's the administration. Because the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave outspoken people within the bounds of their career. Yeah. So that takes a, that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that led you to then say, okay, so how can I help? Yeah. And I explored a lot. I explored a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom up, grassroots. Something, I knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale. This was basically the number one thing that students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus. So the people on campus know it. And you look at a Gallup poll, 61% of students are on Ivy League campuses, afraid to speak their minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture is causing a sort of freezing effect on discourse. Can you pause on that again? So what percentage of students feel afraid to speak their mind? 61% nationally. And then you're talking about, you know, places, nothing like the Ivy League where I'd say, I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities. That's nationwide that college students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of their campus climate. So it's a majority. It's not a conservative thing. It's not a liberal thing. It's a group thing. We're all feeling it. The majority of us are feeling it. And basically just, it doesn't even, you don't even necessarily need to have anything to say. You just have a fear. That's right. So when you're like teaching, you know, metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain, you know, and there's just the caution that you feel that's just horrible for humor. Now, comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really appreciate somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who gives zero, pardon my French, fucks about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful. But, you know, inside the academia as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor, you don't have the same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students. And you were getting at something there too, which is that if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely, it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're capable of, because these are the mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the precise mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet. This is the beginning. This is the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really scares me is that if I'm not allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people in the sort of messy, sloppy way that we do as humans when we're first being creative, are we going to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? And that's what really starts to scare me. So you've explored a bunch of different ideas. You ordered a bunch of different stuff. How did lead bricks come about? Basically, it came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal, people meeting people, people finding out that, no, I'm not the only one on campus who feels this way. I feel alone. And there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing. And it's not as unpopular as I thought. Basically, creating heterodoxy of thought. And it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't have much coding experience, but went headfirst in and figured how hard could it be? I mean, this is really fascinating. So I talked to a lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously, that's where my passion, my interests are. My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to people that want to change the world, is that you don't have a background in programming. You don't have even maybe a technical background. So you saw a problem, you explored different ideas, and then you just decided you're going to learn how to build an app without a technical background. That's so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through the journey of deciding to do that, of learning to program without a programming background, and building the app? Detail, how do you start? Sure. You want to buy a Mac? I'm just going to go step by step. I'll be as dumb as possible. Because it was truly leading by your feet. So you need a computer for this? Oh, yeah. I had a PC at the time, and I was Android at the time. And I realized it should be an iOS app. And so that was a decision. But I knew kids these days, they're always on their phone. And I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought in class. You're walking around, and you have a thought, and you can express it. Or you're in the dining hall, and you have your phone out, you can express it. So it was clear to me it should be an iOS app. By the way, Android is great. Definitely check it out. We also are now available on Android, but we'll get there, for the new Android users from MIT, Stanford, or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened. So I realized I need a Mac. So I went out and got a Mac. And I realized I need an iPhone for testing eventually. Got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean, there's almost too much information out there about programming. And the question is, where do you start, and what's going to be useful to you? And my first thought was I should look at some Yale classes. But it became very clear, very quickly, that that was not the right place to start. That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon, but my goal was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea. I'm not trying to make a finished product. I'm just trying to get to the first step. Because I figured if I keep getting to the next step, at least I won't die now. At least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe I'll meet new people. I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing. And things will come together. And that is, as you'll see, what ends up happening. So I start with Swift. And I find this video from the Stanford professor that had a million views that was how to make, basically, Swift apps perfect. And you just like, so you got this Mac, and you go to google.com, and you type in Xcode. And then I type in on YouTube like Stanford, iOS, Swift, enter. First YouTube video has a million views. I'm like, it has to be good at Stanford has a million views. I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video. It's basically like introductory course to Swift. Yeah. I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better background than I did software developers probably computer scientists. And it was slow for me. I don't think I realized it fully at the time just how far behind I was from the rest of the class because I was like, wow, it seems like people are picking this up really quickly. So it took a little longer and you know, a lot of time on Stack Overflow. But eventually I made a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal like we're talking, you know, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know, make a post, make a response. And anyone with a Yale email can do this. And you plug it into a certain cloud server and you verify people's accounts. And you you're off you have to figure out how to like the whole idea of like having an account. So there's a permanence like you can create an account with an email, verify it, verify it. OK, so that that's not, you know, and that's literally how I thought about it. Right. Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm like, well, first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift. I mean, it's that easy. If someone this has been done before, of course. And then the first page that pops up is probably a pretty damn good page when it wasn't that bad. It wasn't perfect. But like maybe it got me 80 percent of the way there. And then I came into some bugs and then, you know, I asked Stack Overflow a few questions and then I got a little further and then I found some more bugs. And then I'm like, maybe this isn't the right way to do. Maybe I should do it this way. And I'm sure my code isn't great, but the goal isn't to make great code. The goal wasn't to make scalable code. It was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like, what is the reaction going to be if I put it in their hands and am I capable of making this thing? And that's awesome. And so you're focusing on the experience, like actually just really driving towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course, you have to also figure out like this concept of like storage, like database. You know something funny? What's that? I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever. And I start showing it to my friends who have an experience in CS and they're like, you used to heap. That's so interesting. You're like, why did you decide to store it in this way? I'm like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is. I just did it because it works. Like I'm trying to make calls and stuff. And they're like, yeah, they're like, the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what? Well, there's a deep profound lesson in there that I don't know how much you've interacted with computer science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kinds of discussions. And what leads, what results is over optimization. It's like worrying, is this really the right way to do it? And then you go as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this like rabbit hole of what's the actual proper way to do it. And then you're like, you wake up five years later working on Amazon because you've never finished the login page. Like it's kind of hilarious, but that's a really deep lesson. Like just get it done. And there's like, what's a heap, bro? Is the right, that should be a t shirt. That's really the right approach to building something that ultimately creates an experience. And then you iterate eventually. That's how the great, some of the greatest software products in this world have been built is you create it quickly and then just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a prototype? Like what, what was the first step that it feels like something is working? Like did you see you interacting with another friend? Yeah. I think the first step was like, it's one thing to tell someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way their, their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd walk around cross campus, which is part of Yale, and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this, you got to try this. This is pre quarantine, by the way, of course, this would never be the same post quarantine, but like, you got to try this, you got to try this. Like, what is it? And I'd be like, and I explain it's like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus. And you see their gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I'm like, fine, not your target demographic. I get it. You'll come eventually. But some people like you could see it, they got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don't need, I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it. You need what, 5%, 10% to love it. And then they'll tell 5%, 10%. Yeah, word of mouth. And you're good. Of course, the first version was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness wasn't, it was sort of enough to be the first step. And since then, all of my code has been stripped out. I now have friends who basically have told me, don't bother with the coding part. You do the rest. You just make sure that we can code because they want to code. Great. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I never intended to be an engineer. And there's a lot to do that's not engineering. But the point was just to validate the idea, so to speak. When was the moment that you felt like we've created something special? Maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is, this has the potential to actually be the very implementation of the idea that I initially had. There's so many little moments. It's like, and I bet there'll still be moments in the future that make it hard to like totally say, like. Yeah, we should say this is, this is still very early days of Librex. It's only been a year since we've had like actual, like a lot of people on the app. Yeah. About a year. Oh wow. Okay. I mean, there's some crazy moments I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth because it's one thing to like get some traction at your school. People know you and you know, it's your school, you know, it's another thing to go to another school and where no one knows you and sign up 90% of the campus overnight. Wow. So tell me that story. You're invading another territory. It was literally like that. Did you buy it like a Dartmouth sweatshirt? Purposefully, I didn't want to fraud anyone, but I was purposefully nondescript in my clothing. Yeah. No Yale stuff, no Dartmouth stuff. Just blended. I'll go back there. So what happened was this was like March of last year. So almost, almost a year ago today. And I really wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two campuses. So I didn't know anyone at Dartmouth's campus, but I kind of, I had some cold emails, some warmish emails. And I went to people and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your floor for two days during finals period? I had a lot of people who said, this is crazy. Like no one's going to, no one wants to download an app during finals period, a social app during finals period. But I emailed a few people. I was like, you know, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them was crazy enough to say, sure, come to my, come to my dorm. I have a nice floor. And he ended up, today, he's still really close. He's a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train, knowing nothing about this guy besides his first and last name. And I arrive and Dartmouth is really, really remote, way more remote than you think to the point where I'm like, he's like, he warned me. He's a really hospitable guy. He warned me like, it's going to be hard to get to campus from the train station because it's really remote. And I'm like, I'm sure it's fine. I'll just get an Uber. There are no Ubers in Hanover. What do you think this is? This is New Hampshire. So, Connecticut, I mean, Yale is pretty remote as well, no? Yeah. Yale is, well, I mean, Yale is in New Haven, which is a real city. It has Ubers. It has food. It has culture. It has a nightclub even. Like, we're talking about a real city. Like, it's not New York. It's not Philadelphia, where I'm from, but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very different. Yeah. Beautiful campus, I'm sure. Beautiful. Oh, my gosh. I could talk so much about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I started wondering like why I didn't apply. Legitimately, between the people and the culture, it was a beautiful vacation. So, I arrived there, no Uber, but eventually I call this guy who's like the only guy who can get you to Dartmouth and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's floor. I wake up. I ask him if there's any printing. He's like, oh, Dartmouth happens to have free printing in the copy room. I print out like 2000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me, he's like, kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here. I'm like, I'm going, I'm going. I found the limits. Yeah, I found the limit. I think a lot of startups about finding the limits. That's a little piece of advice. Socially, he's like, you got to get out of here. I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door, advertising the app with a QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone and telling them about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself, say hi and tell them to download the app. It's an exhausting day. So many steps, so many crotching down to slip the poster under the dorm door. My legs were burning. But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I'm sitting in a bus and I'm just pressing the refresh button on the account creation panels. It's like going up by hundreds. And I'm like, oh my gosh. The word of mouth is working in a sense. I mean, certainly your initial seed is powerful. Just a piece. Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave to the app? Is anonymity a fundamental part of it? Like saying, this is a chance for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus. Yeah, I think people get it. What I've realized is you don't need to tell people why to try it. They know. There's a hunger for this. Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of ended up coining the line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times in those 24 hours. I just said, it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they're like, yes. Like they've been waiting for it. Some people are more skeptical, but a lot of people were like, great, I'm excited to try this. I'm excited to meet people and connect. And I mean, the way Dartmouth is taken to is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during finals period to be like, good luck in finals period. You're going to rise like a Phoenix or whatever to like, yeah, it's crazy. To I heard about two women meeting on Librex and starting a finance club at Dartmouth to significant others meeting. There was an article recently written up at Yale as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship, which was pretty, it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre COVID. Yeah. It was just amazing to see how, when you allow people to be vulnerable and social, they connect. People have this natural desire to connect. Yeah. When, when you have, would have a natural desire to have a voice. And then when that voice is, is paired with freedom, that you could truly express yourself and there's something liberating about that. And in that sense, you're like, you're connecting as your true self, whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversation you've seen on the app? You mentioned like people connecting. The hard part of that, that is the sorting, you know, figuring out which one, which one am I going to put at the top? Mental sorting out. Just something that stands out to you. Sorry. I don't mean to do like the top 10 conversations ever of all time, ever on the app. I just mean like stuff that you remember that stands out to you. I remember this one really amazing comment from this. He was a Mexican international student who spoke out and this, this, this post was super edgy, but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale community specific post. And we should point out that there's a school specific community now and there's an all Ivy community. So this was specifically in the Yale community. And this was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This Mexican international student comes to Yale and he starts talking about his experience in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latina X as they would say, cultural center at Yale, and how he doesn't feel welcome there because he's Roman Catholic basically and international and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their agenda. And as a result, this place that's supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted and feels more alone than he does anywhere else on campus. That's powerful. That was powerful to me. Yeah. It's hearing someone, someone who should be feeling supported by this culture say, actually, this is not doing anything for me. Like this is not helping me. This is not where I feel at home. So what do you make of anonymity? Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power of the app, right? But at the same time, anonymity on the internet, so it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice, but it can also bring out the dark sides of human nature, like trolls or people who want to be malicious, want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting others, being cruel for fun and going to the dark places. So like, what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature of social interaction, like the pros and the cons? Yeah. Just to break that down a bit, I would say a lot of those same things about a place like Twitter where people are very unanonymous. Having said that, of course, there's a different sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity? I think it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in different ways, both on politics, and there was a lot to talk about this year regarding politics, and personally being vulnerable, talking about relationships and mental health. I think it allows people to have a community that's not performative. And of course, there's this other side where people can sometimes break rules or say things that they wouldn't otherwise say that people don't always agree with or that people might find repugnant. And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other hand, we have to have moderation in place, and we have to have community guidelines to make sure that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity, first of all, anonymity is a tool in Librex. It was not the purpose of Librex. It is a way that we get towards these authentic conversations given our campus climate. And second of all, I would say it's a spectrum. It's not just Librex is anonymous because Librex isn't totally anonymous. Everyone's a verified Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only have one account per person at Yale. I mean, what that amounts to is people have more of an ownership in the community and people know that they're connected and they have a common vernacular. So the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool. But you can also trust, I mean, this is the difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts. When you have only one account per person, or at least it's very difficult to create multiple accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being. Not a bot. I try to be completely unanonymous now in my all public interactions. I try to be as real in every way possible, like zero gap between private me and public me. Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission. What made you want to sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that's unique. I know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision. Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion with Naval about this, actually, with a few others that have a very clear distinction between public and private. Something I'm struggling with, by the way, personally, and thinking about. So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies, it's extra mental effort to remember what you're supposed to say and not supposed to say. So that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier to live life when you have the smaller the gap between the private you and the public you. And the second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective, like if I'm dishonest with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself. And in so doing, I will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up and build revolutionary ideas. There's something about honesty that feels like it's that first principles thinking that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that requires radical honesty, not radical asshole and lishness, but radical honesty with yourself, with yourself. And it feels like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're being dishonest with the public. And also I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current social context, so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are touchy? Ethnicity and nationality. All those things. I mean, like. Family structure. Maybe I'm ineloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly, when I look in the mirror, like I'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race. I'm sure I'm biased and I've tried to like think about those biases and so on. And also, I don't have any creepy shit in my closet. It seems like a lot of people did a lot of creepy stuff in their life. I've gotten a bit of a platform. And I think it all started when I went to this female comedian, Whitney Brown, and I was like, you know, I really value love, long term monogamy with like one person. And it's like, I really value liberating as a human being. Forget public, all that. Because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground when I say difficult things. And at the same time, sorry, I'm ranting on this. I apologize. Like I won't be able to fake it. Like they'll see it through. Yeah. So I feel like if you're not lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself. And the internet will figure it out. Like we'll figure who you are. People have a natural tendency to be able to tell bullshit. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Exactly. Like why? Why wouldn't, why, like, of all the things that we could evolve to be good at, being able to detect honesty seems like one that would be particularly valuable, especially in the sorts of societies we developed into. And then also from a selfish perspective, like a success perspective, I think there's a lot of folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them, that shows that there's a hunger for genuineness. Like you can build a business as a CEO and be genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while, as long as it's coming from the same place of who you truly are. Like Elon is inspirational with that. And then there's a lot of other people I admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like they're very formal. They hold back a lot of themselves. And it's like, I know how brilliant those people are. And I think they're not being as effective of leaders, public faces of companies as they could be. I mean, to be honest, like not to throw shade, but I will, it's like Mark Zuckerberg is an example of that. Jack Dorsey is also a bit of an example of that. I like Jack a lot. I've talked to him a lot. I will talk to him more. I think he's a much more amazing person than he conveys through his public presentation. I think a lot of that has to do with PR and marketing people having an effect. This is difficult. I think it's really difficult. It's probably many of the same difficulties you will face as the pressures. But it's hard to know what to do. But I think as much as possible as an individual, you should try to be honest in the face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished. And that being more polished turns you into a politician and politician eventually turns into being dishonest. Dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself. Something I noticed, which was of the people you mentioned, those things have had ramifications in terms of letting things go too far or get out of hand. And you wonder, it's an aspect of lying, right? You say one lie goes to another lie. You push it down. It doesn't matter. You can figure it out later. You can figure it out later. Pretty soon, you've dug a pretty big hole. And I think if we look at Twitter and we look at Facebook, I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes have been dug because of, perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the leaders. So yeah, there's two problems within the company. It doesn't make you as effective of a leader, I think. That's one. And two, for social media companies, I think people need to trust, like it doesn't have to be the CEO, but it has to be like, this is how humans work. We want to look to somebody we're like, I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social. Something I realized really quickly, one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't totally connect to products as much as they connect to people. And I mean, I don't know how much you've spent on Librex. You've only been here the last week, but I mean, I love the product. And one of the aspects of me loving the product is that I was super active and I've been super active throughout the entire time. And the amount of support I've received has made that very easy to do from the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for this interview, right? Yeah. I came to Boston. I got off the train. It was around 5.30 PM. I checked Librex. Someone is writing, hey, I'm in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner? 30 minutes later, I'm getting dinner with them. That's amazing. And I mean, it's incredible. First of all, as an entrepreneur, the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the message through the product. I mean, that's incredibly validating, but also, I mean, I think it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand and especially a brand that's built on trust because fundamentally the users are trusting us with some really important discussions and some really, and a movement to some degree. It's a community and a movement. I'll tell you actually why I didn't use the app very much so far is there's something really powerful about the way it's constructed, which I felt like a bit of an outsider, because I don't know the communities. It felt like it's a really strong community around each of these places. And so I felt like I was, it made me really wish there was an MIT one. And so there's both discussions about the deep community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on, and Dartmouth, and there's also the broader community of the Ivy Leagues that people are discussing. But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more, but which is, it's a powerful coupling, which is the feeling of like this little village, this little community we're building together, but also the broader issues. So you could do both discussions. One thing that was important to me is talking about social media as a concept. I think the way people socialize is very much context dependent. So we're talking about people understanding each other through language, through English. And these languages are constructed in a very nuanced way, in a very sort of temperamental way, right? And you kind of need a similar context to be able to have productive conversations. So to me, it's really important that these groups, they share something in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League, or their school community. And they have a similar vocabulary, they have a similar background, they know what's happening in their community. And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental. Like, you talk about anonymity. To me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex, I think what makes it different. It's the fact that everyone knows what's going on. Everyone comes from a similar context and people can socialize in a way where they understand each other because they've been through, you used the word lived experience, they've been through so many of the same lived experiences. One clarification, is there an easy way, if you choose, to then connect in meat space, in physical space? So the, I guess the sort of magic of it, and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers who I met off the app while I was in Boston. And every time they told me this is my favorite part of the app, this is what I love about the app. We have this matching system, which is an anonymous direct message that you can send to any poster. So, like, I was talking to this guy who, he was really into coin collection. And he met other people who are really into coin collection through a post and what they he would make a post about coin collection. And then someone would come to him and they'd be like, and they could direct message him anonymously. And it would just show them that his it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat, totally anonymously, direct message if he accepted the anonymous request. Do they see the usernames, right? There are no usernames on Librex. It's all just school's names. So he made this post about coin collection. And he got a direct message. Yeah, I guess so, right? No usernames. I was just looking at the text. Yeah. That's interesting. That's right. And I can tell you, I can go into why. That's really interesting. Yeah, I can go into it. So it truly is anonymous. Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by anonymous. Exactly. It's a very different kind of anonymous. And the reason that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas. We want people to connect to things in the moment. We don't want people to go, oh, I know this guy. He said this other thing. And we didn't want people to feel like they were at risk of being doxxed. So it's just these are small communities, right? We talked about this. Everyone knows someone who knows you. And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone might be just through a couple of posts. So it's both safety and about the ideas in terms of not adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct message system where you can direct message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you're a Redditor, of any post. And that makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one on one, you can exchange a number. You can exchange a Snapchat. You can exchange an email. Probably not very often, but you could. And then that's how people meet up. Matching. And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC, Y Combinator, in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data. Can you speak to that? Why do you think it's important not to sell user data? Which draws a clear contrast between other, basically any other service on the internet. I mean, to be honest, it's quite simple. I mean, we talk about this platform. People are talking about their most intimate secrets, their political opinions. How are they feeling about what's going on in their city during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle and also their mental health, their relationships? These are some of the most intimate thoughts that people were having. Point blank, I don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit. I didn't think it was moral. I don't think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing, is turning these people's most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold. There's something very off about that. Yeah, I tend to believe that there is some room, so like Facebook would just take that data and sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and giving people the choice on which parts they can, I wouldn't even see it as sell, but like share with advertisers. Are you going to give them a profit? So right, you have to monetize, you have to create an entire system, you have to rethink this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and are transparent and make it easy, like I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account or like delete all your data. I've tried, it's very difficult. So like just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product, people are not going to do it. And if they do it, then they're not actually a deep loving member of the community. What's that? So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value, but was something that users really cared about. And we added this functionality. It's just a button that says, forget me. You press it, like two clicks. It's not that hard. We just remove your email from the database. You're good. Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can actually speak to this, but I don't think Facebook, well now they would, but if they did it earlier, they would lose that much money. If they allow like transparently tell people, you could just delete everything. They also explained that like in ways that's going to potentially like lessen your experience in the short term, like explain that. But then there shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense. I'm trying to hold back from ranting about Instagram because let me just say real quick, because I've been locked out of Instagram for a month. And there's a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters of like Lex, help Lex. Free Lex? Free Lex. I wasn't blocked. It was just like a bug in the system. Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway, it's a bug. It happens to a lot of people, but like, first of all, I appreciate the love from all the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook. All of those folks, the entire mechanism though is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it's also difficult to operate a large company once it scales, all those kinds of things, but it should not be that difficult to do some basic, basic things that you want to do, which is in the case of Facebook, that's verify your identity to the app. And also in the case of Facebook, in the case of Librex, like disappear if you choose. There's downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult process. And yeah, I think people are waking up to that. I think there's a lot of room for an app like Librex with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like. You know, and like you said, I think beautifully, anonymity is not the core value. It's just a tool you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool you use. Like if you give people the choice, who knows what this evolves from the login page you initially created. The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows if you give people a really nice way to monetize their data, maybe there'll no longer be a thing that you say, do not sell user data. Yeah, all those kinds of things. But the basic principles should be there. And also a good, simple interface design goes a really long way. Like simplicity and elegance, which Librex currently is. Clubhouse is another app. It's gotten a lot better, by the way. I don't mean to go too deep into the history, but the... It was bad? I didn't look at the early pictures. Oh, thank goodness. I read somewhere that it was like a white screen, like with black. The up and down buttons were like these big freaking boxes. And I could go on, but it was my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was in first grade. And I think I still have similar skills to my first grade self, but it's gotten a lot better. And thanks to a lot of my friends who have sort of chipped in here and there. Oh, I love the idea of a button that just forget me. I don't know. That's really moving, actually. That's actually all people want, is they want, I think... Okay, I'll speak to my experience. I would give so much more if I could just disappear if I needed to. And I trusted the community. I trusted the founders and the principals. That's really powerful, man. The trust and ease of escape. Yeah. You've also kind of mentioned moderation, which is really interesting. So with this anonymity and this community, I don't know if you've heard of the internet, but there's trolls on the internet. So I've heard. And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that probably enjoy sort of being the guerrilla warfare, counter revolutionary, and just like creating chaos in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos and hatred breaking out in Librex? So the way I think about it is we have these principals. They're pretty simple and they're pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principals, we have a set of moderators, moderate from every single Ivy League school, a team of diverse moderators who enforce these principals, but not only enforce the principals, but kind of clue us in to what's happening in their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the Librex context of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the standards of the community. And we're constantly talking about what needs to be further elucidated and what needs to be tweaked. And we're in constant communication with the community. Now, if you want me to get into the principals that underlie Librex's moderation policy. Yeah, please. Maybe you can explain that there's moderators. What does that mean? How are they chosen? And what are the principals under which they operate? Sure. So how are the moderators chosen? The moderators are all volunteers. They're Librexers who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become moderator. And the way they're chosen is basically we want to make sure that they're in tune with their community. We want to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds and we want to make sure that they sort of understand what the community is about. And then we ask them some questions about how they would deal with certain scenarios, ones that we've had in the past and we feel strongly about. And then also ones that are a little more murky, where we want to see that they're sort of thinking about these things in a critical way. And from there, we choose a set and they have the power to take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of the day pens my review, but they can take them down and we can reinstate them if it's a problem. But they can take down posts and they can advocate for different moderation standards and different moderation policies. So for now, you're the Linus Torvalds of this community. So meaning like you're able to, like people are actually able to like email you or like text you, contact you and get a response. Like you respond to basically everybody. And then you're like really, you know, you're, you're living that live on people's floor life currently. That's not necessarily, this is the early days folks. I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and he was cool. And then he was in a mansion making meats on his barbecue. No. Okay. But you know, how does it scale? Like what I suppose, how does it scale is the question. I mean, with Linus, I don't know if you're familiar with the Linux open source community, but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was really important. Like leadership there was really important to drive that large scale, really productive open source community. What do you see your role as Librex grows and in general, what are the mechanisms of scaling here for moderation? Where I see it, open discourse is fundamental to the purpose of the app, right? So as the, I guess you could say founder, CEO, what have you, part of my purpose has to be to enforce the vision, right? And part of the vision is open discourse. And that does come down in part to reasonable moderation and community guided reasonable moderation. So I imagine that will always be something that I'm intimately involved with to some degree. Now the degree to which the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have to change, right? And hopefully I'll be able to, just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I'll be able to be in integrated in hiring people who understand the way that we are sort of operating and the reasonable standards of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure. But I think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult conversations on campus that need to be had, I can never fully, I don't think I can fully ever abdicate that responsibility. I think that would be like, I mean, that would be like Bezos abdicating eCommerce, right? That's part of the job. Yeah, of course you can run companies in different ways. I think because he might have abdicated quite a bit of the details there. It's hard for me to say. Because Amazon does so many things. I think probably the better examples like Elon with rockets, he's still at the core of the engineering. He's at the core of the engineering. There's some fundamental questions. He probably does way too much of the engineering. He's the lowest level detail. But you're saying the core things that make the app work is the moderation of difficult conversations. And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's remind everyone of that. If this thing does scale and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of people's lives, who knows what will happen in the next, what I'll learn. I'm still growing definitely as a leader, still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person. I can't pretend that I know how to run a business that is worth up to $1 billion, whatever. I can't pretend I know how to run a business that's going to have millions and millions of users. I expect that there are going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and that a lot of people who have already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things. And I imagine that I'll learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always going to be important to me because I don't think Librex is Librex unless we have open discourse and moderation, reasonable, open, light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that, right? So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations, what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around and politicizing, I would say, but is at the core of the founding of this country, which is the freedom of speech? How do you think about the freedom of speech, this particular kind of freedom of expression? And do you think it's a fundamental human right? How do you define it to yourself when you're thinking about it? I went down, especially preparing for this conversation down a rabbit hole of like just how unclear it is philosophically what is meant by this kind of freedom. It's not as easy as people think, but it's interesting pragmatically speaking to hear how you think about it in the context of Librex. Yeah, it's a tough one, right? There's a lot there. So I come from the background of being a math major. Maybe it's important to start with that. And I found myself in the middle of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the Librex community is filled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this sort of thing. And I'm still learning. I'm still growing. I'm still probably going to modify my perspective to some degree. Hopefully. Don't worry. I imagine I'll always support free discourse. Like learning how to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like I'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations because the moment you say like even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, oh, we spotted a communist. Like they'll say, there's nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom, bro. It is complicated. First of all, if you talk about there's different definitions of freedom of speech. If you want to go constitutionally, if you want to talk about the United States specifically and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as what people think of. It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see. What does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate in ways that allows for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn't result in the silencing of voices, not through like censorship, but through like just assholes being rude. Spam. Spam. So it could be just bots. Racism. Racism. Going back to the name of the app, Librex. Libre, free. X was put onto for free exchange and the free exchange of what my purpose was to create as much inner communication of ideas, be them repugnant or otherwise as possible. And of course, to do that within legal bounds and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed. So to keep things focused on the ideas, not the people. And then no BS crap stuff. And so to me, the easiest way to moderate around that, because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what is hate speech is really hard, was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups. And that seems to work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch. And it's hard to do though. It's difficult. We like to generalize, we humans. It's difficult, but what it comes down to is be specific. And when you think about what are sweeping statements against core identity groups, oftentimes these are sort of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have been broached and we've heard them before. They don't really lead anywhere productive. So it goes under this principle of be specific in the ideas you're discussing. So even for like positive and humorous stuff, you try to avoid generalizations. Against core identity groups. Core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups? We're talking, kind of like, You know, race, religion. Okay. Got it. Even positive stuff? Well, against, negative. Oh, against. Sorry, against, against. Okay. Very, very, we've learned to be very specific. Very few words, but the community gets it, you know? Yeah, they get it. I mean, this is the thing. The trouble with rules is as the community grows, they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules. Absolutely. It's human nature. It's creativity. Yeah. Something beautiful about it, of course. From an evolutionary perspective, yes. Yeah, the fact that people are so creative and so looking to, because people are genuinely interested in figuring out these things about social media. And so they'll 100% see like, where's the edge? And I mean, part of that's maintaining some level of vagueness in your rule set, which has its own set of questions and something we could think about. And I'm not implying I have all the answers, but there is something really interesting about people being so engaged that they're looking to figure out where are those edges and what does that mean? What does that edge mean, you know? Well, so one of the things I'm kind of thinking about, like from an individual user of Librex or an individual user of the internet, I think about like that one person that is on Reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff, doesn't matter, or funny stuff. One of the things I think about is the trajectory of that individual through life and how social media can help that person become the best version of themselves. I don't mean from like an Orwellian sense, like educate them properly or something. I just mean like, we're all, I believe, we're all fundamentally good. And I also believe we all have the capacity to do, to create some amazing stuff in this world, whether that's ideas or art or engineering, all those kinds of things, just to be amazing people. And I kind of think about like, you know, a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst in us. And I try to think like, in the long term, how can the social media or how can a website, how can a tool that you create can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you better, better and better and like the best version of yourself. So I think about that because like, you know, Twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories. I've seen people just not being the best version of themselves. Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It's just like they're not developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves. I think Reddit, I'm not sure what I think about Reddit yet, because one positive side is all the shit posting I read. It could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you almost have like a parallel life where you're in meat space. You might be actually becoming successful and so on and growing and so on, but you just need some times to be angry at somebody. But I tend to not think that's possible. I think if you're shit posting, you're probably not spending your time the best way you could. I don't know. I'm torn on that. But do you think about that with Librex of creating a trajectory for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for the students, to where they grow intellectually? One thing that I think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content creation? How do you incentivize really intellectual content creation? It's something that, frankly, I think about every single day. And I think there are ways that... I mean, one thing that's great about humans is that they can be incentivized, right? And I think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content if that's your goal. So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization? I do. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. Do you have already concrete ideas in your mind? I have about three concrete ideas that I'm very, very optimistic about. You don't even need to share them. I understand totally. But the fact that you have them, that's really good. Because I feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there's literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long term content creation. Twitter, I really was excited about this when they said like, when Jack has talked about creating healthy conversations. He does seem to care. I've listened to him. I mean, he has a very particular way of saying things. But you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares about these things within the limits of his power. Yeah. And that's the question, the limits of the power. Librex is growing not just in the number of communities, but also in the way you're incentivizing positive conversations, like coupled with a moderation and so on. So you think there's a lot of innovation to be had in that area? There's a tremendous amount. I think when you think about the reasons people post, fundamentally, people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree. Now, there will always be bad actors. And part of the benefit of our moderation structure is that we can limit some of those bad actors, no bot accounts, no brigading. At the same time, the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And we don't see it as our role as the platform to force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don't think it would be good for anyone, the community or the conversations, if we forced a specific type of conversation. We just need to make the tools to allow people to be good and to incentivize good behavior. Yeah, I believe that. You will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good. The good will overpower the assholes. That's my fundamental belief. I'm very optimistic about that. But currently, Librex is small in the sense that it's a small set of communities that I believe. And you mentioned to me offline that by design, you're scaling slowly and carefully. That's right. So how does Librex scale? Is it possible? Facebook also started with a small set of communities that were schools, and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest social networks in the world. Do you see Librex as potentially scaling to be beyond even college campuses, but encompassing the whole world? It's a long timeline. I'll say this. This gets back to where did Facebook go wrong? Because clearly, they did a lot right. And we can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of Facebook. I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always interesting to know what the mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter. So perhaps they've been very successful. I mean, they've taken over the world to some extent. At the same time, the goals of Librex are to create these positive communities and these open conversations where people can have real conversation and connection in their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way. And so to that end, which I imagine might be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example, one thing that we want to do is keep things intimate and community based. So each school is its own community. And perhaps you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you could have a, I know the California system is an obvious one. Packed time might be an obvious one. And we can think about that. But fundamentally, the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that's one difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we're scaling intentionally, meaning that when we expand to a school, we have moderators in place. We have moderators who understand that school's environment in a very personal level. And we're growing responsibly. We're growing as we're ready, both technologically, but also socially. But as we think we have the tools to preserve the community and to encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to create. And there's a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there's geographic community as well. But the way you're kind of defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the email, right? That's what gives you, there's a power to the email in the sense that that's how you can verify, efficiently verify yourself with being a single individual in the university. In that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Do you see potentially taking on those communities? That'd be fascinating, getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google. 100% crossed my mind. To some extent, this is something where I understand the college experience. I understand the need. And I've never worked at Google. I don't know if they would hire me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager. I think if there's a community that needs this product, and has that will, which I think, especially as Librex continues to grow and expand and change and learn. Because that's what we're doing is we're learning, right? With each community, it's not just about growing. It's about learning from each of these communities and iterating. I think it's quite likely there are going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve their culture, so to speak. So forgive me, I'm not actually that knowledgeable about the history of attempts of building social networks to solve the problem that you're solving. But I was made aware that there was an app or at least a social network called Yik Yak that had a similar kind of focus. I think the thing you've spoken about that differs between Librex and Yik Yak is that Yik Yak was defined, am I pronouncing it right even? You good? I'm good. I met the founder so I can confirm. Okay, you can confirm, cool. That it was constrained to a geographical area versus like to the actual community and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted. But can you speak to the history of Yik Yak? Like how does Librex differ? What lessons have you learned from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial, I don't know, I didn't look at the details, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff that emerged on Yik Yak. Okay, so that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong when you have anonymity on college campuses. So how does Librex going to do better? Yeah, Yik Yak had a lot of problems, content problems, but the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would reveal. There's a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes to Yik Yak and when you talk about startups, I mean you know this, you know startups, and you look at the postmortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes these things are somewhat unknowable and the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to somebody, seeking closure, look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure. It feels like the little details often make all the difference. Yes, and I think the details are so little that as humans we are not capable of parsing even what they are. But I'll tell you my perspective on it, knowing that I am also a human with biases. In this particular case, very significant biases. So I started building Librex for its own merits. At first I wasn't aware of Yik Yak, but as I started to talk to people about this platform I was building, I was made aware of Yik Yak and I built it from day one with a lot of the issues Yik Yak had in mind. So as you said, the one difference between Yik Yak is the geographical versus community based aspect. Going along with that, one thing I realized by researching social media sites is that the majority of the negative content, the content that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really, and the people who are not reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best part of the human experience. It's a really small minority, right? I remember, I was listening to the founder of 4ChamMoot talk about this, how like one guy was able to basically destroy like large swaths of his community. Yeah, that's part of what makes it exciting for that minority is how much power they can have. So if you're predisposed to think in this way, it's exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned the party before, you have a party of a lot of positive people and it feels, especially if you don't have much power in this world, it feels exceptionally empowering to just, to destroy like the lives of many. Yeah. And if you think this way, it's a problem. But I'm hopeful that you're right, that in most cases it's going to be a minority of people. I think it is. And that's what the research has showed. And one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out of our community based on the.edu verification. And we can also control who's not in our community because we have that lever where each account is associated with a.edu. So that's the first point I would point out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that we have community moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded content, all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through it and decide what they like and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. And we have, we ping every moderator when there's a report. So things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our standards and we have, I think above all of that, we have a mission and it's a community based mission. Yik Yak was more of a fun app and by its own admission, it was a place where people could enjoy themselves and could sort of yak. Yik Yak, chit chat. We have a bigger purpose than that, frankly. And I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex and to be on Yik Yak, respectively. The last thing I'll say is Yik Yak was very few characters. It was a Twitter esque platform. And that doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of nuance. It doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of conversation. Librex is much more long form. And so the kind of posts that you'll get on Librex can span pages. What people are starting to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time a lot more quickly by posting their thoughts on Librex than if they went to their school newspaper. And I think the school newspapers might be a little worried about that. But more importantly, we're connecting people in this way where long form communication with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening in the community temporally is really available at Librex and not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the yaks were bound to. And I could talk about the history of Yik Yak if you want me to go further. They started, I think they were at 12 schools. And then spring break hit. People told their friends, look at this app. A thousand schools signed up and had active communities. They had a problem on their hands. And then the high schools come on board. I think a lot of the things you said ring true to me, but especially the vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership, having a mission makes all the difference in the world. That's both for the engineers that are building, like the team that's building the app, the moderation and users because they kind of, the mission carries itself through the behavior of the people on the social network. As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it's less about Parler, more about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from his platform, you know, for whatever reasons, it doesn't really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me personally, because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure and I always thought that part could not put a finger on its scale. And I don't know what your thoughts are. Like, were you bothered by Parler being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about the computing infrastructure on which Librex is based? I was bothered not so much by Parler specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that something that's like a highway, something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic, like a road that people drive on, is becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory. And of course, mind you, Amazon can do what it wants. It's a private company and I support the rights of private companies. I just, on an ethical and sort of a deep moral level, I wonder, like, at what point should a company sort of be agnostic in that regard and let developers build on top of their infrastructure? And where does that responsibility hold? Yes, it makes you hope that there's going to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors to AWS would say, like, we're not going to put our finger on the scale. I mean, on the highway is a good sort of example. It's like if a privately owned highway said, you know, we're no longer going to allow, we're only going to allow electric vehicles. And a bunch of people in this world would be like, yes, because electric is good for the environment. And, you know, I think that's a good example. You know, yes, but then you have to consider the, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also like the negative impact on the lives of many others and what that means for innovation and for, like, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So, there's some nature, there's some level to this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate what's built on top of it. It should be truly infrastructure. And it feels like compute is storage and compute is that layer. Like, it shouldn't be messed with. I haven't seen anybody really complain about it, like, in terms of government. And I'm not even sure government is the right mechanism through policy and regulation to step in. Because again, they do a messy job of fixing things. But I do hope there's competitors to AWS to make AWS then step up. Because I do think, you know, I'm a fan of AWS, except this. Good service. It's a good service until this. Until, yeah, until they rip out the rug. And the point is, it's not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with Parler, in particular. It's that, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also the, it takes the good actors that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful. And when you're more fearful, it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don't create the best thing you could possibly create. When you're fearful, you don't create. That's right. I think we've kind of talked about it a little bit. But I wonder if we can kind of revisit it a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald Sullivan, who's a faculty at Harvard, a law professor. He was on the legal defense team. He was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular figures because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe in the rule of law. But he was, there's a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him and to get him to no longer be faculty dean, all those kinds of things. And it was by a minority of students, but there's a huge blowback, obviously in the public, but also inside Harvard, like that's not okay. He stands for the very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding of this country and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that it was about safe spaces, that it's unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein, right? What do you think about this whole idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like the mission of Librex is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces. I think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's private lives, within their homes, within their religious organizations. I think the problem becomes when the institution starts encouraging or backing safe spaces because what are people being safe from? And oftentimes, it seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being attempted to be mitigated is the harm of confronting opinions you disagree with, opinions you might find repugnant. And if this is conflated with a need for safety, then that's where the idea of liberal arts education sort of dies. Of course, it's complicated and we still want to have safe intellectual environments. But the way that I hear the term safe space used today, I think it doesn't really have a place within the intellectual context. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really exciting, is it's pushing those difficult conversations. And I'd love to see, ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry of power that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in the slippery slope kind of way where it means basically anything you want it to mean. And it basically is used to silence people, to silence people. They're like good, thoughtful experts. Also, beyond that, I would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing, but also sort of an ideological purpose, which is, and a linguistic purpose, which is to conflate words with unsafety and harm and violence, which is what you kind of see on a cultural linguistic level is happening all around us right now is that this idea that words are harm is a very dangerous and slippery concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem. Once we start making words into violence and we start criminalizing words, we get into some really authoritarian territory, things that I think, I mean, myself and my background, I don't know how much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors certainly would be worried about. What's your background? I'm a child of Holocaust survivors and pro grom survivors, so. Yeah, I mean, me as well from different directions. I come from the Soviet Union, so there's, well, like in most of us, hate and love runs through our blood from our history. You mentioned MIT is being added to Librex. Has it already been added? Yes, it was added today. Today, okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don't know what your thoughts are about this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're, and a lot of MIT folks listen to this, I would love it if you joined Librex. It'd be interesting to explore conversations on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most moving that hasn't been discussed at all at all, except in little flourishes here and there, is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein. Now, there's been a huge amount of, like, impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey Epstein and the various things that have been said had on MIT, but it feels like the difficult conversation haven't had been had. It's the administration trying to clean up and give a bunch of BS to try to pretend, like, let's just hide this part. Like nothing is broken, nothing to see here. Here's a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved a little bit because they're a little bit clueless. Let's all look the other way. Harvard did this much better, by the way. They completely, it's almost like people pretend like Harvard didn't have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But I think I'd be curious to hear what those conversations are because there's conversations on the topic of like, well, obviously sort of sexual assault and disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women in general. That's an important topic to talk about, various, many sets of difficult conversations. And the other topic is, you know, funding for research. Like how are, like, what are we okay taking money from and what are we not okay taking money from? You know, there's a lot of just interesting difficult conversations to be had. I've worked with people who, you know, refuse to take money from DOD, Department of Defense, for example, because in some indirect or direct way, you're funding military industrial complex, all those kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein, it's even more stark, this contrast of like, well, what is and isn't ethical to take money from? And I just think, forget academia, I think there's just a lot of interesting, deep human discussions to be had. And they haven't been. And there's been somebody, I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Weinstein, who has been outraged by the fact that nobody's talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody's having these difficult conversations. And Eric himself has had a sort of complicated journey through academia, in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker in many kinds of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is, by any chance. Heard the name. Okay. I actually checked out ZEV. ZEV. It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person on this podcast. You're the second youngest. Second youngest. That's hilarious. But Eric, he's kind of a renegade thinker. He's a mathematical physicist with, I believe, a PhD at Harvard, and he spent some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the fact that there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you're somebody who's a bit outside of the box, a bit weird, in whatever dimension of weird, that makes you actually kind of interesting that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out. And so he kind of opposes that whole idea. He's the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind of Librex kind of context of anonymity. Because I'll tell you the few conversations that came across and they were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it. I'm not sure what to think of it. Is there's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I don't know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's a seminal figure in AI before your time, but one of the most important people in the history of artificial intelligence. And there was a discussion on a thread that involved the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein. That conversation was quickly shut down. One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman, who's one of the key figures in the, because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the situation. But he also miss, he spoke, like we mentioned earlier, without grace, right? But he was quickly punished by the administration because of a few people protesting. And just that conversation, I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't expand. There was no like complexity. And it was, there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially sort of for me, I'd like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the reasons I wanted to come to MIT. He's passed away, but he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply care about, artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged through the mud, through that situation, and without ever being like resolved. And so it's unclear to me, like, what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to keep talking. It's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like, is conversation. So in that sense, I'd love if people on Librex, perhaps in other places, but it seems like Librex is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss Jeffrey Epstein, to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better. As I'm still one of the people, I've always dreamed of being at MIT and it was a dream come true in many ways. And I still believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world. Like many other universities, universities in general is truly special, man. It hurts my heart when people speak poorly of academia. I understand what they mean. They're very correct, but there is much more, in my opinion, that's beautiful about academia than that's broken. I mean, I don't know if you have something to comment. It doesn't necessarily need to be about Jeffrey Epstein, but there's these difficult things that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like conversation is the only way to resolve it. I think people have a natural need for closure. And it's not just, I'm not as plugged into the, what academics are talking about as you would be Lux, but I even... In case these days, no respect for Minsky. Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community, I'm not necessarily a programmer. But what I will say is that people come to Librex and we always see a huge spike in users whenever there's a tragedy on campus or something where people need closure. Recently, there was a suicide just the other day on Yale's campus, and people were just coming to pay respects and to say, rest in peace, and speak also about what might've led to an environment where people are drawn to these terrible results. So just having a conversation is important there, because it brings closure. People need the space, especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above, be the longest blade of grass on that one because of the stigma. People need to be able to speak. Yeah, that fear really bothers me, the fear that silences people. Like, were they self censor? Were they self silence? Well, you've created an amazing place. I'm kind of interested in your struggle and your journey of creating positive incentives, because it's a problem in a very different domain that I'm also interested in. So I love robotics. I love human robot interaction. And so I believe that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature. Social networks is a very tricky space to do that in. So I'm glad you're taking on the problem and I'm glad you have the mission that you do. I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess. Tell me about your journey through chess. Sure. I was a very competitive tournament player growing up till about like 13. I got for the chess fans, I got to around 2000. USCF. So I was a competitive player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker. I was I was playing a tournament. And what happens is when you're like a very strong 13 year old and you're playing locally, if you want a good match, you're gonna end up playing a lot of adults and you're gonna end up playing if you want a good match, you're gonna end up playing a lot of adults. And I ended up playing this mid 40s guy who we played a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still I still remember the game and think I could I should have played that move instead of that one. But after after the game, we had a postmortem. It was this me I think I was 13 at the time and this 40 year old like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves. And even at that even at my age, that this guy was absolutely brilliant. Yes. And after after the postmortem, not only by the way, in chess, but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts, as some people are. After postmortem, I went and looked him up online, I found out that he was a World Series of Poker Champion. And his name is Bill Chen. Oh, wow. And I haven't really kept up with him, except one time there was another chess tournament when I was around 14. And I followed him into an elevator as he was leaving the chess hall, like pretending that I was going to go up just because I wanted to, I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that he could that I thought he could make for his book. And he was like, actually, I was thinking of doing the same thing, which is incredibly validating to my 14 year old or 15 year old self. But I really haven't kept up with him. So shout out to him. But and then that he wrote a book called the mathematics of poker that I started reading. And that, first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory. And second of all, in poker. So it started from chess and then poker. And I started with Bitcoin poker and had a lot of success with that met a lot of amazing friends. Learned a ton about I mean, I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value risks. And also just growing as a person and mathematician. And what did you say Bitcoin poker? Yeah, what's Bitcoin poker? So you have to understand I was 14 years old, right? Yes. So how is a 14 year old with wonderful parents who care about him? Yeah. And probably don't want him playing poker. Yeah. Going to start playing poker, because I wanted I wanted to challenge I love the challenge of the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin. Because the implications of that. And they had they had these free roll tournaments, which for those who don't know what free rolls are, there's these promotional tournaments that sites put on where they'll put like a few dollars in and then 1000s of people sign up and the winners get like a dollar. And I started there and I worked my way up. And that's amazing. What's your sense about from that time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community? I'm actually having like four or five conversations with Bitcoin proponents, Bitcoin maximalists, and like all these I'm just having all these cryptocurrency conversations currently, because there's so many brilliant, like technically brilliant, but also financially and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It's fascinating with the explosion of impact, like and also, if you look into the future, the possible revolutionary impact on society in general, but what's your sense about this whole growth of Bitcoin? I'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming, it was a means to an end. Yes. Right. What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of it. And you'd have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're my backer. For having never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin entry fee tournaments, and I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage. And to have that level of community for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about the potential for, you know, humans to act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust. Yeah, there's a really fascinating, strong community there. But speaking of like bringing out the best of human nature, it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive, inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks, and we talk about this a lot. I honestly think they have a lot of love in their hearts and minds, but they just kind of naturally, naturally, because the world has been like institutions and the centralized powers have been sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they've become sort of worn down and cynical. And so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the internet in the way they communicate, especially on Twitter. And it's just created this whole community of of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff. But people are trying to, you know, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency community grows, they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they're trying to find the positive core and grow and grow in that way. So it's fascinating because I think all of us are trying to find the positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online. It's like the internet hasn't been around. Social networks haven't been around that long. We're trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. I don't know if you have an answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view? So since you like chess. That's how you define it. But if you're talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone across time into a torment together, Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level? Exactly. Now if you talk about political importance, I think Bobby Fischer is, you know, he's the only one that people still, when you go to someone on the street, they know Bobby Fischer because of what he represented, right? Who do you think is more famous on the street? Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer? Bobby Fischer. In America, Bobby Fischer. You think so? Yes. That's interesting. I think we're gonna have to put that to the test. Yeah, maybe it's more reflective of the community that I was a part of, but yeah. Oh, so in the community you're a part of like Young Minds playing chess, Bobby Fischer was a superstar in terms of the roots. Yeah, I think so because he's American and, you know, he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time and, you know, unfortunately he had a very bad downfall. But, you know, for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then if you talk about compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Morphy was a bit of a throwback. He's one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else. Is there somebody that inspired your own play, like as a Young Mind? Yeah, I really liked Mikhail Tal. I think he was very aggressive, right? Yeah, very tactical. Which is funny because I found that I was better at like sort of slow methodical play than quick tactics, but I just, I mean, there's something beautiful about the creativity and that's something I always latched onto as being a creative player, being a creative person. I mean, chess doesn't really reward creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially entrepreneurial pursuits, which I think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But I always was attracted to the creativity that I did see in chess. So let me ask the flip, the other, because you said poker, is there somebody that stands out to you as could be the greatest poker player of all time? Like who do you admire? That's a more controversial one because these chess players are such like, first of all, there's more an objective standard. And second of all, there's like, they're like almost like cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players are more like live, living. They feel more like, yeah, they feel more accessible. But they also have like personalities in poker. They have vices, they have quirks, they have humor. Like, I guess we've seen videos of them because it's such a recent development. I'll say one person who I admire so much. And like, if I could like have a dinner list of people that I want to have dinner with, like maybe it'll happen now, actually. I would love to have dinner with him. Phil Galfond, who most people probably won't know. But on this podcast, but the way, first of all, he democratized poker learning in like the mathematical nitty gritty, how do you get good at poker type sense to the entire world in like an unprecedented way. He gave, he had this gift that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds. And he just democratized it through his website. And I learned a ton from him. And not only that, but you just listen to him think. And it's almost like a philosophical meditation, the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different elements and has such a holistic thought process. It's like watching a genius work. And, you know, he's also just a nice, fun, sociable guy that like, you can, you can imagine being at your dinner table. So all that combined. Which is not true for a lot of poker players, right? A lot of them are dark souls. To say the least, yes. I like, I really like the, what is he, Canadian Daniel Negrano. He's also a nice guy. He's also a nice guy, but he's also somebody who's able to express his thoughts about poker really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict cards better than anybody I've ever seen. Like what. Did you watch the challenge? Which challenge? He, he lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk, heads up online. It's really interesting. Yeah. It's, it's awesome to watch these guys work. So I know you're 20, 21. 21. 21. So, so asking you for advice is, is a little bit funny, but, but at the same time, not because you've created a social network. You've created a startup from nothing as we talked about earlier, like without knowing how to program you've programmed. I mean, you've taken this whole journey that a lot of people I think would be really inspired by. So given that, and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the advice you're going to give now. Absolutely. I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now, something went desperately wrong, right? Yeah. So do you have advice for people that want to follow in your footsteps and create a startup, whether it's in a software app domain or whether it's anything else. So I'll speak specifically about social media apps. Yes. Try to keep it as narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41. And what I would say is that if you're like a 21, 22 year old, who's looking at me and being like, I want to do something like this. What I would say is you probably know better than just about anyone. And if you have a feeling in yourself that this is something that I have to do, and this is something I could imagine myself doing for the next 10 years, because if you're successful, you are going to have to do it for the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs, through the amazing interviews with Lex, and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people, right? And you're going to have to ride those highs and lows and you have to believe in what you're doing. But if you have that feeling, what I would say is listen to as few people as possible, because people are experts in domains. But when it comes to what's hot and what makes sense in a social context, you are the authority as a young person who's going through these things and living in your sort of milieu. And I mean, I've talked to, at this point, you know, so many experts, so many investors, VCs. You'd be amazed at the advice I've gotten. Advice I've gotten. So there's like a minefield of bad advice. That's the hardest part, I think, for young people. And it's the thing, when people, like, I help Yellies all the time who ask, like, I never turn down, when a founder asks me to have a conversation, I never turn it down. I'm always there for them. And the number one thing I worry about is that at Yale, we're taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the room, you listen to the person with the highest, you know, pay grade. And it's devastating, because that's how innovation dies. And, you know, yeah, it's intimidating to, like, you talk to VC who probably means worth a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and they're going to tell you, you know, all the, all the successful startups they have funders or even just a successful business owner, uh, is going to tell you some advice and it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong. Yeah, but you're saying that's the only way you succeed. The only way you succeed, because if they knew what they were doing, they would have built it themselves. Um, and what's especially hard is people go, oh, of course, you know, I'll listen to people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong. And then I'll, and I'll do my own thing. And that sounds great in the abstract, but sometimes you can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong. And I think to have the conviction, to say, you're wrong and I can't tell you why, but I still think I'm right. It's a rare thing, especially at like, it's very counterintuitive. And you might even say it's hubris or arrogant, but I think it's necessary because a lot of these things are, they're not things that you can really put into words until you see them in action. Like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents. Yeah. It's been, it's been tough for me, like as a, as a person who, um, like I'm very empathetic. So I, when people tell me stuff, I kind of want to understand them. And it's been a painful process, especially people close to me, basically everything I've done, and especially in the recent few years, a lot of people close to me said not to do, you know, and, uh, like, my parents too, that's been a hard one is, is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don't know, like, you, you don't, that everything you're going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be helpful. Like, I love my parents very much, but like, they're just like, they don't get it. And, and as you put it beautifully, it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why, because, uh, a lot of advice sounds reasonable. That's the worst kind. Yeah. Uh, if it, if it sounds really good, that just means it's an earworm. Like, that's like a song that you hear on the radio and then you're like, you're humming it in the car and it's like, it's the same thing. The more, the better it sounds, the more skeptical. Yeah. Reason is a, is a bad drug. Like, should be very careful because, like, you know, the things that seem impossible, every, every major innovation, every major business seems impossible at birth. But even not just the impossible things, I think, you know, you look at like love, for example, it's very easy to give advice, to sort of point out all the ways you can go wrong or marriage, all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years that you go through the divorce, like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex, all the money that's wasted, all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you're in love. I guess the best the point is to just pat the person on the back and say, go get him, kid. Like, what is it? Good Will Hunting. I went to see about a girl. Yeah. That's a good movie. I love that movie. But yeah, that, that's, that took me a long time to figure out. I'm still trying to fight through it, but especially when you're young, that's hard. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, but, uh, nothing in life is, uh, worth accomplishing is easy. So, but I think it's really interesting. You make that connection between like startup advice and like your parents, because it's the exact same sort of mechanism where when you're young, your parents are usually like, right. Right. And the experts are usually right. And, you know, if you listen to them and you, you, you follow their orders, you're going to go to a school like Yale and at a certain point stops making sense. And I've, I've seen my friends at Yale go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that I know in their heart of hearts is not the right path for them. Yeah. You know what? That's how I see like the education system. The whole point is to guide you to a certain point in your life. And everybody's point is different. And your task is to, at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path. But no one tells you that. Nobody tells you that because they're, they want you to keep following the same path as they, they're leading you towards. Like they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually rebel. Yeah. That's how revolution, that's how rebellion works. You're not supposed to be told, but that is the task. They can take you just like you said, and depending who you are, they can take you really far. But at a certain point you have to rebel. That could be getting your PhD, that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school. Yeah. It could be any point. One thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role, and I've never really mentioned this, he might not even know the person about to tell you about, in sort of me actually going out and making Librex was that I was taking this graduate level math class, my sophomore year. And I met this, I met this PhD student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also startup experience. And I think he actually ended up being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I've sort of lost touch with him, but we're still Facebook friends as it is in the 21st century. So, and I was in a class and I was telling him, I really want to, I really want to make this thing, but I have no technical background. And he, this guy's a computer genius. He worked under Dan Spielman at Yale. So he's a good guy. Right. And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on discrepancy for those of you who really care about math. So combinatorics. And he just turns to me, he's like, I think you could do it. Like, what do you mean you think I could do? He's like, I think you could do it. And I was like, really? But I respected this guy so much. His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck. I respected this guy so much that I was like, if Young Duck says I can do it and Young Duck is a legit genius and he knows, and he knows me, because we were in two classes together and we'd spent a lot of time together. If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can't do it? Yeah. You know, that's a lesson for mentorship is like, by the way, he has no idea probably. Well, he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny. But the point is that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, you know, every once in a while, you should just pat him on the back and say, I believe in you. Like you can do it. If they look up to you, that means your words have power. And if you say, no, no, come on, be like reasonable, like, you know, finish your schoolwork kind of thing. Like that's, that's unreasonable to take that leap now. Just finish your education, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable advice is every once in a while, maybe often as a mentor, you should say, you know, go see about a girl in California or whatever the equivalent is. That was my moment. That was my good will hunting moment. That's your good will hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams. I was a special guy. People love it when I ask about book recommendations in general. Of course, your journey is just beginning. But is there something that jumps out to you? Technical, fiction, philosophical, sci fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere that had an impact on your life? Video games. Video games that you recommend to others. Minecraft, manual. Manga. I mean, yeah, video, you could mention video games too, if there's something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact. I guess I'll say I really liked the book, The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative. And part of what I see in this conversation and what you're doing, Lex, is so much of The War of Art's idea is that you just keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap. And you just roll with it, right? And that's sort of what happens when you have like three hour conversations with people is you can only have so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you. And you have to show up. I mean, that book is kind of painful. It's really painful. And it's not something I would recommend for every part of it, but for what it did in my life at the time. It also kind of normalized, I don't know, part of my coming of age story is part of it's about realizing that I'm a creative person and person who needs to create. That's sort of a God given thing, I think, for a lot of people. But it's something that I don't really feel like I can live without. And part of it was realizing that even within some of these more rigid structures, it's okay that I don't sort of fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own self esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don't think the book itself might be perfect, but for what it did for my life, it was really impactful. Yeah, I think exactly. The words may not be exactly right by way of advice, but I think the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also has another one called Turning Pro, I think. I mean, he in general espouses like taking it seriously. If you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world, go do it. Don't show up. Look at that blank page. So many people would tell me, would encourage me either blatantly or through implicit means to basically take the Apple S seriously. It's a good signal, by the way. It's a good signal because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that because they got it. They understood that that was my path. And they might be skeptical. They might be like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me, I was always taken aback about why you were so certain this would work out. And he's like, I finally got it once I saw it popping off, but before that, I just didn't get it. But he still supported me. And I think it's a really good signal. And actually just the fact of going through this process has made me socially feel so much more connected. And I've somewhat consolidated my social life to some degree, but it's so much more vulnerable, connected. And that's part of the creative process. I have to thank for that, I think. There's something that's unstoppable about the creative mind. It's right there, that fire. And I guess part of the thing that you're supposed to do is let that fire burn. In whichever direction. And it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Fire will hurt. But on the topic of video games, you mentioned the Stanley Parable offline. You said you played some video games. Is there a video game that you especially love that you recommend I play, for example? Yeah, I'll mention. It's actually really in keeping with what we've been talking about. It's the Beginner's Guide, which was made by the same guy, Davey Rendon, who made the Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw you. I just clicked the video and then I went to sleep. It was like 2 a.m. But I briefly saw that you were looking at. And it's a game that is better treated as art. And I think I won't claim to understand the creator, because that would be a cardinal sin to me as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been talking about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of ways in a feminist way. It could be interpreted as a story of friends. It could be interpreted as the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't want to give away too much, is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake of creating. Meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It's almost ethereal. Versus the part that's, you could call it the editor. You could call it the pragmatist. You could call it the necessary force of ego in our lives. We can't totally be egoless, right? But we need to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure, what role does it play? And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become useful? And it's funny that a video game could have this in. It's a fascinating tension, which reminds me about the ridiculous question that every once in a while asks about meaning and death. So, this whole ride ends. You're at the beginning of the ride, but it could end any day, actually. That's kind of the way human life works. You could die today, you could die tomorrow. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about death? Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist, too, as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Yeah, so, on mortality, right? About three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I love so much. And I was really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe walk onto the Yale team. And I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go squash that day. I wanted to, I almost did. And you'll see how this story turns out. You'll decide if I made the right choice. I decided not to go squash today. And I decided to get my driver's license, or I had to get my driver's license because I wanted to get a driver's license before I went off to college, because otherwise I might never get it. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's license for Hashem. And I go back to my house and I decided I don't want to drive back because I just feel so sick. Like things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I come home, I run back right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even like asked my mom who is a doctor, I'm like, should I go to the hospital? And she's like, you can just wait it out and she'll get better. And then, you know, and then at one point I look at my arms and they're like covered in this like red splotchy stuff. Yeah. And I'm like, mom, I think. And she's like, yeah, we have to go. And so I go there and they're like, you have scarlet fever. And they're like, there's nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back home. Six hours later I wake up in the morning. They'd let me out at like 3 a.m. They let me, I come home in the morning and I feel this, like a spear through my chest. And I never felt anything like it. And I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a, cause we're all used to different sorts of pain, right? And that was the sort of pain I never felt before. As far as an athlete, you're used to like, you know, pain. So I told my parents and immediately we hop back in the car. We go up to the same hospital I was at six hours ago. And they initially didn't want to let me in. And I was like, I have chest pain. They're like, oh, come in. Cause they're like, you're a healthy guy, wait your turn. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. I have like a pain in my chest. And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They like put something like in my back, which is really scary. It's a huge needle. And I'm smiling because it's like one of the ways I reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it. But like, you know, that, you know, it's definitely very scary in the moment, shocking and scary. And they go and they, they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked my heart and I had myocarditis and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at one point of dying. And so I'm sitting in my, they admit me into the hospital. I'm in the bed, in my bed for about three weeks. And I'm just, I'm just standing there. And I had this moment also that I remember very specifically where I was in so much pain that like I was crying, not out of like emotional standpoint, but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like I could feel my heart in my chest. And when I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible. So I couldn't go to sleep and lean back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night. Right. And I'm feeling my, and I'm feeling my chest. I'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest. I'm crying unstoppably. And I mean, also maybe I should mention that at the time I was someone who like refused to take in anything into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time I, I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually I didn't allow them to add a little medication to my body, but there's just so much uncertainty and pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with mortality. First of all, I think you still should have gone and played squash. I mean, come on. I mean, yeah. I thought you're serious about this. You still carry that with you sort of. There is power to realizing the ride can end. Right. Very suddenly. Very suddenly. Yeah. And painfully. And, you know, it, it has pragmatic application to like what you, to trajectories you take through life. Right. Something else that is worth noting is that I, for the next year, couldn't walk to my classes. So I get to Yale, they put me in a medical single alone, and I have to get shuttled to all my classes. I have to ask, I had to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could actually get there. I can't move my book. I can't lift my book bags. I can't, I can't walk upstairs. I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls and more so. And more than that, all this, like, you, I got to watch my body, like, deteriorate and like the muscle, like fall off of it. Cause I was, I was taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic. And for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18 year old has feelings about their body, man or woman. And, you know, just seeing this, it's like, you're watching sort of death transpire. And it's like, and you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition. And you're thinking about the future and a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you. And I took up a meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day. At my peak, I was at like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years. And I started thinking about, like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about? And to get to your point, I think you were asking, like, how does this carry forward? Right? I think I realized that, you know, there's an end and I realized that there are things I believe and things that I believe that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make the world a better place. And in spite of, and then basically, if my conditions provided, I wanted to make something that I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way. Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end. Now, man, that's amazing. I did not realize like that there was a long term struggle. I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, will have a profound positive impact because struggle is ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I'm glad to see that. But from the perspective of the creator of the other ridiculous question about meaning, do you think about this kind of stuff? Is that the, you know, the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for us, descendants of apes in general? The first thing I'd like to say is that I think part of like, when we talk about the meaning of life, the part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with this question and we get to do it together for a long time. And we sometimes, I think, it's accepting that there's no meaning at all. And sometimes I think it's accepting that, or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes I'm, look, I'm very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the future because I think life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20 years about the meaning of life. Yeah, rise from the future, cut them some slack. Please do. Perspective, perspective, perspective. Having said that, you know, I think part of what brings meaning to my life is things like this, where we think about these things with people who are really, really, really on the ball, and we get to connect with these people. That certainly brings meaning to my life, human connection. Yeah, this conversation is just another, like, echo of the thing you're trying to create in a digital space, right? That's the same kind of magic. From what I understand about what you're trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long form podcasting, like as a fan. That's why I listen to long form podcasts. Is there something deeply human and genuine about the interchange through their voice? But I do think that connection through text can be even more powerful. Like I think about letters. I still write letters to Russia. You know, there's something powerful in letters. When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say, in the words you write, that's powerful. You can really communicate, not just the actual semantic meaning of the words, but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connection. So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this is an incredible conversation. I'm glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature in the digital space. I think that's a battleground where the good will win, like love will win. And I'm glad you're creating technology that does just that. So thank you so much for wasting all your time for coming down. I can't wait to see what you do in the future. Thanks for talking today. Thank you for having me. Bam. How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast? Zero. Two now. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Shiller. And thank you to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15, 1783. If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses | Lex Fridman Podcast #172

The following is a conversation with Nick Carter, who is a partner at Castle Island Ventures, cofounder of CoinMetrics.io, and previously a crypto asset research analyst at Fidelity Investments. He's a prominent writer, speaker, and podcaster on topics around decentralized finance and especially Bitcoin. Quick mention of our sponsors, The Information, Athletic Greens, Four Sigmatic, and Blinkist. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. This conversation with Nick Carter is part of a series of episodes on cryptocurrency that is a small journey of exploration I'm on because I find decentralized finance and especially Bitcoin fascinating, technically and philosophically, especially because it may be the very mechanism that achieves a global decentralization of power, giving more sovereignty to the individual and making our systems more resilient to corruption, manipulation, and in general to the darker side of human nature. Please let me also address something for a few minutes that happened recently that's been weighing heavy on me. If you find me annoying to listen to, please skip to the actual conversation with Nick. I had a recent podcast episode with Anthony Pompliano where we spoke about Bitcoin and life in general for three hours. I was curious, inspired, positive, or at least I tried to be as I usually do. Someone clipped out, out of context, a short segment of me mumbling something about having a PhD and I started getting mocked online because that made it convenient for people to mock me for being yet another quote unquote expert who learns about Bitcoin and thinks he knows everything. I almost never mentioned that I have a PhD, except to make fun of myself as I was doing, or at least trying to do in the full context of the conversation. I brought up grad school as a random example of one of the many journeys I've taken that was hard, but where the destination was in itself, not very useful. I was saying I enjoy exploring with a curious mind and I'm willing to be patient, to learn, to listen, to humble myself with knowledge, and to help with knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. Grad school was an example of that. The PhD means nothing, at least to me. I never call myself an expert or at least try not to because that would be dumb because I know how little I know. I'm not a influencer or a thought leader or whatever else silly self aggrandizing label people put on their LinkedIn. I try to be the opposite of what I was mocked for. I try to think deeply about the world, to look for the beautiful ideas and the minds of others, and to be inspired by them. I wanted to say all this because psychologically, it struck a bit of a blow. It made me realize that even when I approach things with love, I may be mocked, I may be derided, I may be taken out of context or even lied about. But the growing platform, this is sadly only increasing. I now have learned that there's people who are waiting for my missteps so they can point the finger, laugh, and say, see, I told you so. That guy's a joke. He's a fraud. As a fellow human being, the knowledge of this is painful. Yes, I know people tell me to toughen up, and my life has been about strengthening my mind in the face of my limits, but I refuse to not be fragile and wear my heart on my sleeve. It's who I am. In some sense, this is the immune system of the internet, but let us be careful not to destroy the good ones in the process. The Bitcoin community had to endure many years of attacks from quote unquote experts and also fraudulent cryptocurrency efforts that scam people out of their money. This created a powerful immune system that fought the attackers and the scammers. I understand this, and I also understand that one of the beautiful aspects of Bitcoin is its community of humans is decentralized, but some small part of this community has come to enjoy the us versus them battles, sometimes for the sake of the battle in itself. This happens in political discourse as well. I understand this, but to my limited mind, it sounds like group think, which has powerful defense mechanisms against bad ideas, but has dangerous consequences if taken too far. As in many periods of human history that I often talk about, where the us versus them thinking has led to the suffering of many. Again, I understand the value of this as many Bitcoin has explained to me, but it's not the way I, as a sovereign individual, choose to walk in this life. By the way, none of this podcast should be treated as financial advice. Before Nick kindly gifted me with a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin in hardware form, I didn't own any. I'll probably buy some Bitcoin on Cash App, Coinbase, and other platforms, and also transfer to a hardware wallet just to learn how to do it. But other than that, I don't necessarily make wise investment decisions. Money is not a motivation for me personally. I try to avoid it actually. I'm grateful for every day I'm alive, no matter how much money is in my bank account. For long stretches of my life, that number was very close to zero, and I was always fortunate to be free and happy. So I encourage you to listen to people much smarter than me for actual good financial advice. Here, I'm just exploring ideas. And as if this has not already gone on too long, let me please make another comment on the style of discourse among some Bitcoin maximalists on platforms like Twitter, that in my humble view, I may be wrong, but I believe is not conducive to the nuanced empathetic exchange of ideas I very much look for and enjoy. Again, I appreciate their style of discourse. I think I understand the value of it, but it's not my thing. So I don't want to engage in it. I want to hear the quiet voices in the room. I look for people to inspire each other, and when we disagree, I look for disagreement that is grounded in respect and empathy. I think that mockery and derision destroys the possibility of those nuanced conversations. It drives away the quiet, thoughtful, empathetic voices, and I try to give those voices space to be heard, to shine, to exchange ideas, whether we agree or disagree. So, if I happen to block you on Twitter, I block you with love. Honestly, I will never speak poorly of you or even think poorly of you. I would love to hang out in person, give you a big old hug, and talk about life over some beers. If you see or hear me say something stupid, which I'm sure I do often, or something you disagree with, and you still respect me as a human being, please show your love, as I always do to you, but also send me some links to blogs, books, videos, podcasts, where people describe why my stated idea may be totally wrong. I love this kind of long form disagreement. I humble myself every day by reading books and blogs by people much smarter than me. Sometimes it strengthens my ideas, sometimes it totally changes them, but I always learn. This is a too long way of saying that I'm here trying to walk with grace and with an open mind, a bit of patience, and always love. If I make mistakes, cut me some slack. Like you, I'm here trying to love. Like you, I'm only human. Allegedly. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Nick Carter. What philosopher or philosophical idea had a big impact on your life, not just in the space of cryptocurrency, but in general? Oh, so we're going now. We're rolling. We're going right in. We're rolling. Because you majored philosophy. I did. I majored in philosophy. I didn't know what to do with my life, and my parents said, do whatever you find interesting. It's like, okay, philosophy, great. I find that interesting. And it had way more of an impact on my career, actually, than I thought it might. Typically, I guess, if you do philosophy, you go into law or finance, so it sort of makes sense. But there are a number of philosophers I really admire. One of my favorites would be Descartes, probably the notion of skepticism. It's sort of a rabbit hole. It's kind of hard to pull yourself out of it. Basically, the brain in the vat theory, pulling yourself out of that. But yeah, I really like epistemology, you know, questioning what it is to have knowledge. So Descartes was one of my gateways to that. Do you think everything is knowable? Like, we humans can can know fully the objective reality? Oh, definitely not. No, I mean, reality is very much processed through your own, you know, subjective lens. So how much do you think do we understand about this world? Because a lot of your ideas, a lot of things we might talk about today are kind of trying to figure out human civilization, how humans, how human behavior works at scale, all those kinds of things. That kind of assumes that we have it or we're able to somehow figure most of it out, right? So in your sort of when you step way back, how much of it have we really figured out? Well, I think that's the conceit of economics is thinking that you can model human behavior in these unbelievably complex systems. And then I think that's the modern critique of economics, like the sort of Taliban critique is that you can't have true knowledge, and they're much less predictable than we think they are. And, you know, we behave according to our accumulated assumptions, and we're using tiny sort of data sets trained on the last 50, 100 years, and they turn out to be horribly askew. And that's when we have our gray swans and our black swans. So I'm much more on the sort of, you know, reality is much less noble than we think side of things. But it is nice to have very concrete things like Bitcoin, that's for sure. Oh, so you think so most of it is shaky ground, but there are some things there's like islands of stoniness. Yeah, Bitcoin is one of them. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, like look at the dollar system, not to pivot this into the dollar right away, but the dollar is like shaky ground. It's the most who truly understands the dollar system. I mean, the totality of it, the Euro dollar system, the way that monetary policy interacts with the economy is monetary issuance inflationary. What's the relationship between unemployment and inflation? Even policymakers don't understand these things. Economists don't seem to understand them. What is inflation? How do you define inflation? None of these things are really known or knowable. So a lot of people kind of make a claim that there's a lot of manipulation possible with the dollar with those currencies. If you couple that with the fact that people don't understand it, and yet there's claims that being manipulated by centralized power, how do you bring those two ideas together? If no one understands that, how can you manipulate it? I think what we don't understand are the long term consequences of our structures. So like the Fed's mandate to target unemployment and steady, you know, exchange rates or low inflation, you know, what we don't understand is okay, what is the result of doing that continuously for 40 years? What is the net effect of that? What is the consequence of the long term accumulation of debt and, you know, basement interest rates? What is the net effect of that on society? We might understand there's much short term features of the system, but I think it's the longer term features we don't understand. Do you think there's like malevolent people with people that don't have good intent in central banks like in the system, you know, when you have centralized power in any forms, it's susceptible to somebody hacking the system, taking the power, and in the shadows, this is where conspiracy theories come in, right? In the shadows, be able to, you know, act out things that have a lot of negative impacts on a large percent of the population in greedy self interest. Do you think there's people like that? Or do you think fundamentally most people are good, even those associated with the sort of central banking? I mean, I don't villainize those people. I think everyone is the hero of their own story, right? So they all believe that their force are good in the world. You have to. Are there any true villains? I don't think so. I think they get socialized into a world where they believe there's particular skills and their mandate is, you know, what they should be doing. I think they might be presumptuous or arrogant in some cases. And, you know, I think it's more of a systemic issue where you have a small handful of very homogenous types of people with PhDs from the same institutions that are brought up in the same cultural context that, you know, set policy and wield a tremendous amount of control over society. And I think they have this notion that you can tinker society. You can play with a few key variables and tinker society into a state that is desirable or good. And that's what they're trying to do. And I think the consequences of that can be pretty bad. But no, I don't think it's born out of malevolence. There's an interesting idea. I think Michael Malas brought it up as a test whether you're on the left or the right. The question he asks, which is, do you think some people are better than others? If you say yes, he claims you're on the right. If you start answering, if you start like saying a lot of things, like you're on the left. So if you start explaining yourself, well, it's a good term for it. I was really, so in this test, I suppose I would be on the left because I'm uncomfortable with the idea that some people are better than others as a basic feeling, as a starting point in the way you think about the world. Because as we're talking about, everybody's a hero of their own story. When you start to think some people are better than others, as a starting axiom, it's like a slippery slope to where you think you're way better than others. And then you start to like, basically, it's okay to take advantage of a large percent of the population for the greater good. And then you go into Stalin mode and Hitler mode where it's okay to murder a larger part of the population for the greater good. So it's like, it's this very dangerous slippery slope in my mind. So I try to not, yeah, I was always uncomfortable with that kind of test or even that kind of thought. And yes, the same applies and suppose in government, in central banking is if you think some people are better than others, applying your idea of what is good can have large scale detrimental effects. Of course. Yeah. I'm glad you didn't pose me the question. I mean, I think it maybe not the left right axiom isn't the disjunction isn't the way I would sort of put it. But you know, to me, it's just if you reason in a consequentialist way, you know, that lends itself to authoritarianism. Yeah, where whereby you think you can shape society and only you can shape society in a positive direction according to your, you know, specific objectives. So let's step onto the land of sturdiness that is Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin and in your view, what are, you know, the principles, the philosophical foundations of Bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin the term I think refers to two things specifically. So one is the protocol for conveying value through a communications channel. So just a set of rules that we collectively opt into in order to transact online or just at a distance. And then the other thing is the name of the asset, the sort of monetary unit which circulates within the system and that always confuse people a lot because it's like, well, you got uppercase Bitcoin, lowercase Bitcoin, why didn't Satoshi just give them different names? Like in Ethereum, you've got Ethereum, the system and then Ether. Although people don't really talk about Ether very much, but they, you know, chose to distinguish them. In Bitcoin, for whatever reason, they're not distinct. So the two Bitcoins get commingled all the time in the explanations. Did you find that's a problem that confuses things? I mean, what's what's really a distinction between the protocol and the currency? Well, they are sometimes distinguished practically, like you can transact with Bitcoin outside of the Bitcoin protocol, for instance. So, you know, you can transact with Bitcoin on Ethereum or I have Bitcoin on Opendime here. This would be a Bitcoin transaction. It wouldn't settle on the Bitcoin network. Do you mind explaining what you have on the table before us? Yeah, so I brought you some presents. This is awesome. This isn't a bribe. This is just a proof of concept. So this is basically a Bitcoin bearer instrument. So I put a hundred bucks of Bitcoin on here. And to spend it, you have to basically physically destroy part of the device. You have to poke a hole and, you know, poke off one of the little transistors on this. So it can only be spent once. And you can't extract the private key from this device. So the private key was generated on device, always stays on the device. So what it means without breaking off, like a small part. So this basically is a way to physically instantiate Bitcoin. So it's basically gold. Yeah, effectively. So here. Thank you so much. This one's limited edition. It's orange. So what is it called again? Opendime. The point is, if you wanted to settle a Bitcoin transaction instantly, the kind of same way that a cash transaction is instant final settlement, right? You would do it with a device like this. So if I was buying a house from you, you know, you might prefer to do it with a physical bearer instrument as opposed to waiting for confirmation on the Bitcoin blockchain. So the moment I hand that over to you, goes in your possession, you're the owner. There's no way for me to have retained the private key. Like I could have created a Bitcoin paper wallet and given that to you, but you have no assurance that I didn't copy down that, you know, the key elsewhere. So this solves that problem. So this is a physical instantiation of the Bitcoin transaction outside the Bitcoin protocol. That's right. So this is, you're transacting the currency outside of the protocol. So it's analog Bitcoin. We're running it analog, which I was like, because Bitcoin is this immaterial thing. And so it's nice to have physical totems. How much does it cost to manufacture this, do you know? Like 15 bucks or something. So this is just kind of almost like a philosophical statement versus something that's scalable for use. Like, you know, the point of Bitcoin is to be in the digital space, right? But this shows like Bitcoin can be anywhere. It's useful for gifts. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if it would be a suitable foundation for a physical Bitcoin economy. In theory, these would be like cash like instruments that you could use to transact. Well, I just mean post apocalypse. Yeah, yeah. But you still need to plug it into your laptop to actually verify that there's coins on there. So you still need the internet. So I have to take your word for how much money is on here. No, I mean, you can plug it into your laptop and check. Yeah, but to transact, to extract Bitcoin from this, I need to break. Yeah, you have to poke a hole through the little hole and that renders it spendable, basically. So, you know, that's protection against you spending it and then representing that it's still loaded. That's fascinating. Cool. Yeah, so that the other thing I brought here, basically dice, 12 sided, they don't have any Bitcoin on them. So they just have a bunch of different critiques of Bitcoin on each side. We'll go through them then. This is awesome. I don't know if we have time to do all 11 because there's one with my funds logo on it. But it's just basically a tongue in cheek joke that the critiques of Bitcoin are so formulaic at this point that you can just put them on dice. Yeah, it's silly. Well, some of them might be topics for interesting conversations. Oh, yeah. We could even arrange the conversation that way. You can roll the dice and see what you got. All right. But first, the philosophical foundations of Bitcoin. Like, how do you see Bitcoin outside of just a basic protocol and a basic currency? It seems to be, like you said, it seems like sturdy ground. So what do you mean by this? Yeah. Yeah. So it's not just any protocol for moving value around. It's not just any currency. It's got specific rules and values that are embedded in it. And this is an important point is that Bitcoin is the encoding of certain values, which are often misunderstood or not acknowledged necessarily. And so it's sort of impregnated with values. And what they are specifically is a topic of debate. And there have been civil wars fought over the values inherent in Bitcoin. One of them was, should Bitcoin be this cheap, scalable, the base layer, low fee payments system with an emphasis on P2P payments? Or should it be more of this gold like digital commodity that would eventually settle infrequently and mainly between institutions? Right? So that's fundamentally a conflict of visions. Right? So keep in mind that this is just one man's opinion. I don't speak for Bitcoin. Right? So I would say the key number one value that's embedded in Bitcoin is the notion of nondiscretionary monetary policy. So algorithmic monetary policy as opposed to human based monetary policy. Satoshi was very clear about that. Bitcoin is an alternative to modern central banking where you have constant tweaking, constant intervention, which Satoshi felt leads to credit bubbles and so on. So Bitcoin proposes a completely nondiscretionary monetary policy, sort of decays over time. 50% of the coins were issued in the first four years and then the next 25% in the next four years, then 12.5% in the next four years until you get to 21 million units. And none of those numbers really matter. Like it could have been 25 million units and it could have been a more aggressive slope or more gradual slope. What matters is that this schedule was proposed even before the code was public. The schedule was proposed and then we all collectively agreed to stick to it. And that is kind of a first for monetary system. I mean, gold kind of has that property, right? Because the supply of gold above ground only really increases at 1% to 2% a year. So it's sort of inhuman, which is a good feature, right? You don't want to give humans that much control over it. Bitcoin is a much more, you know, fastidious approach to that. It really is super concrete about what the supply schedule is and the fact, crucially, that it can't change. So we can't have a bailout of debtors. Let's say a lot of people had debts denominated in Bitcoin and we needed loose, accommodative monetary policy to bail them out. That's not possible. We couldn't have a jubilee denominated in Bitcoin because the social contract we've all bought into and committed to is that it's nondiscretionary. So that's sort of one of the first things. And I think ultimately that comes back to basically a strong respect for property rights because if we were to have unanticipated inflation, let's say a really charismatic leader somehow commandeered Bitcoin and convinced everyone that we should have 30 million units and not 21 million, that would basically be dilutive on everybody that held Bitcoin and had opted into the 21 million set of coins. An additional 9 million unanticipated would have a dilutive effect on everyone else. And that would be a covert way of effectively stealing their purchasing power through inflation. Is that possible, that kind of thing? I mean, what's the mechanism of Bitcoin that resists that kind of charismatic leader? Well, we've had people that have had a lot of influence in Bitcoin in the past and they've tried to make changes to the protocol, not as dramatic as that, but Bitcoiners have generally resisted those individuals, institutions, and Bitcoiners have a good track record of sort of staying true to those core values. So you mentioned values and sticking to the monetary thing, but there's bigger values. There's almost like psychological values that are instilled in Bitcoin. You make a point that Bitcoin for many is a vessel, quote, for their expectations, hopes, and dreams. Can the Bitcoin protocol support this kind of complexity of the human condition? So, like, there's ideas of freedom that seem to be spoken about. There's a sort of ideas of, I mean, even love. Yeah. I mean, some people kind of use it as a meme, like, you know, Bitcoin is love or something like that, you know, mostly to troll me because I talk about love all the time. But, you know, these bigger ideas than just the exchange of currencies. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin itself is very simple, I would say. Like, ultimately, it doesn't, you know, pretend to do very much. It really just settles transactions. But people do superimpose their own views on it, for sure. And Bitcoin's qualities give rise to these perceptions of it having censorship resistance or giving you transactional freedom or a measure of transactional privacy. So because anyone can operate a node and join the consensus process and because mining is a competitive free market process, that means that it's likely that you can't be censored by the miners. So that means you have transactional freedom. So you have these computer science technical features of the system that cause it to have these political qualities, which is it's very hard or impossible to censor a specific individual. So it's interesting to see that flow. So that's one of the core values, for sure, is the censorship resistance. Then you have the fact that it's a cryptographic based system and you can hold value in your brain by memorizing 12 words, for instance. That gives it seizure resistance, which is, again, a political concept. If you wanted to desert your jurisdiction with your wealth intact in your brain, that cryptographic feature of the system, the fact that it's built on public key cryptography and that you can encode a Bitcoin private key in 12 words, that gives it this political salience that you're now empowered relative to a despot, basically. Yeah, I mean, there's so many beautiful concepts behind cryptocurrency, behind Bitcoin, that stand for sort of freedom, some of the basic things at the founding of this country. The one thing I don't like personally behind Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that money is involved and it's like people's life savings sometimes are involved, so there is naturally a kind of fear, a self preservation, like instinctual kind of dogmatic thing that comes in where you're not the best of human nature. You stop being a George Washington and you lose touch of the foundational principles, which I think are beautiful, just like the founding principles of this country. So that's just like, so I like staying on the level of like the philosophy versus the level of like all my money is invested in Bitcoin and that becomes very tricky territory to have principle discussions about ideas. Well, it's an interesting tension. I try to stay balanced despite being very exposed to Bitcoin. So let me ask the ridiculous question, just in case, who is Satoshi Nakamoto and is it you? We don't know. It's probably not me because I was like 17 when Satoshi mounted Bitcoin, 16, so unlikely and also not really a programmer. So there's a lot of theories, but honestly, it's one of the greatest mysteries of all time because even Bitcoiners that have been around since day one, really, you know, people that were around before Bitcoin came out, they're on the mailing list, they're active in the cypherpunk community, you ask them and they sincerely will not know and they may not even have a good guess as to who Satoshi is. Is it important to know or is it like actually important not to know? Do you think that's a feature or bug that you, we don't know? Some people don't like the uncertainty, especially, you know, folks on Wall Street, they really want to know. And if you read the Coinbase S1, their disclosure pre IPO, that's a risk factor that Satoshi could come back. So the risk management crowd wants to know because they want to know if maybe Satoshi had, you know, undesirable political opinions or something that would forever taint the project. Do you think they were just trolling with that risk with Satoshi's identity being a risk factor or is that like actual, like, was there an actual meeting and a discussion of that being a risk factor? I think in the risk factor sections of the prospectuses, it's really just the lawyers doing a total brain dump to cover absolutely everything they can think of. So it's just lawyers. It's not like, you know, it's like, I think Elon was somewhere in the legal documents for SpaceX mentioned that like Earth governments have no jurisdiction on Mars. Like they threw that in there and it feels like, yeah, that could be lawyers, but it could also just be Elon trolling. Yeah. So I wonder if it's like the Coinbase folks trolling or if it's lawyers. I hope it's the trolling, not the lawyers. The Coinbase leadership, they're not as big trolls as Elon is, but I mean, it's a risk for sure from their perspective because let's say Satoshi returned, doesn't seem likely, and let's say they decided to spend all their coins, which also seems very unlikely. That's, you know, rumored to be or estimates have it at 1 to 1.2 million Bitcoin, which is like 50, 60 billion dollars worth. So some people consider that to be a risk. You think it's, you know, this is almost like a topic of leadership. It doesn't feel like anybody, any one person speaks for Bitcoin. There's not even like prominent figures. Like you have for like Ethereum, you have Vitalik Buterin. There's a lot of like top minds talking about it like yourself, but it's not like one or two. Do you think again, is that a feature or a bug? Like, do you think for effective, for Bitcoin to effectively have a role in society that like is as large or larger than the dollar, there needs to be like leadership that represents it, almost like democratic kind of thing. Well, that's a real counterintuitive point because most Bitcoiners, including myself, would say, no, the lack of leadership is a great quality to have because if you have a charismatic leader and a foundation or corporation that controls it, maybe they can control the features of the protocol and maybe they can expropriate holders of the coin or, you know, build in an endowment that pays them off and gives them privileged access to the units of the coin, for instance. So, you know, we call people that have privileged access to the money spigot Cantillon insiders, which is there is this economist that pointed out that as you know, I think Richard Cantillon that as money enters the economy has an uneven flow, right? So you see this in last last decade or so before that to the consequence of money printing in this country is people that own financial assets made a lot of money and people that didn't didn't. So you see that Cantillon insider Cantillon outsider effect and it's the same with a cryptocurrency in many other alternative cryptocurrencies that do have these corporate entities or these leaders and CEOs. They're able to make specific decisions regarding the protocol and the currency of the asset the benefit themselves the cronies, etc. And that's not a good feature to have. I mean, it does grant you, you know, the ability to orchestrate decisions in a faster and more efficient way. But long term what you're trying to optimize for if you're creating a money is monetary credibility and soundness so you don't really want it changing all that often and you don't want to have the appearance of you know, these elites that are engaging in rent seeking or anything like that. So there's definitely people that are influential in Bitcoin this core developers that people listen to because it's I would say meritocracy largely and they're sort of self appointed high priest of the protocol. I write a lot about Bitcoin people listen to me but is a completely free market of ideas, right? I don't have any authority within Bitcoin whatsoever. I'm just a scribbler, you know, so was Aristotle and Socrates and Nietzsche. Okay, at the high level, technically, how does Bitcoin work? Is there interesting things you could say? Like what are miners? What are nodes, full nodes? What are blocks? What's proof of work? Is there a nice way to wrap up a clean explanation of the protocol? Oh man, that could be a whole, that could be another five hours. Is there interesting because I'd love to talk to you about block size wars and sort of the politics psychology, the principles around that, but sort of building up to that. It'd be nice to talk about how the thing works. That's fair. I mean, and the block size wars are really fascinating discussion of how governance debates intersect with technical features. So I guess we can, yeah, so basically at the highest possible level, Bitcoin is a globally shared. It's really a replicated ledger that any participant that wants to be an equal peer on that ledger, they want to maintain that ledger and they want to stay up to date with the global state of the ledger. And really any monetary system is just a ledger with physical cash. We benefit from the physical instantiation of the money. So the physics is the ledger. The physics is a ledger, right? Same with gold, right? You can't just produce new units of gold. So we trust that gold atoms are hard to create, although not impossible, right? You could find a bunch of protons and whatever is the adjacent metal and create gold atoms would be expensive. And the same with dollars, you know, we trust that it's hard to counterfeit a dollar. So we trust the physical analog world to help maintain the state of that ledger with digital money, like, you know, the money in your bank account, your checking account. We basically trust our institutions or banking institutions to keep a faithful record. And then ultimately we trust the central bank to administer that system. So there's kind of a handful of nodes. In Bitcoin, we trust that the economic incentives of the system are carefully poised, basically. So we trust that the free market mining competition will lead to the miners assembling transactions into blocks in a faithful and correct way, and that we are going to converge on a global state of the ledger continuously. Which updates every 10 minutes or so with some variance. And then the miners aren't the sole entities that control the system. To really participate, if you are a merchant and you're accepting Bitcoin, you really want to run your own full node and check the whole history of transactions. Sort of something like, I want to say, five to six hundred million transactions that have ever occurred on Bitcoin. So full node contains all the transactions ever transacted on the Bitcoin blockchain. And that's, I saw it's like 200 gigs or something like that. Like 350, something like that. It's doable on a regular consumer laptop and that is going to be really key later on in the discussion. But so, you know, that's really the ultimate trust models. First of all, we trust that the miners that assemble transactions into blocks and they are the archivists, you know, they inscribe those transactions onto the ledger and they have an economic incentive to sort of behave correctly because they're getting paid in no units of Bitcoin. That's part of it. But then really you are also, you're not fully trusting them. You're actually, if you want to run a node, you replay every single transaction in the history of Bitcoin from the beginning to the current day and you arrive at the present state that way. So you don't really have to trust too many people or entities. You can validate the correctness that all the rules have been followed, that all the Bitcoins that were created were done so in the valid way, that the inflation rate was adhered to and that there's no covert inflation, you know, that if you're spending 50 units of Bitcoin, you had that Bitcoin to spend in the first place. So it's sort of delicately poised between node operators who, you know, engage in this validity checking kind of anti counterfeiting checking and then also the miners which are an industrial entity and they basically produce block space and assemble transactions in a box. And everybody, so the miners are incentivized to not mess with the system because they're getting value from the system. So if they mess with it, it's going to decrease the value of their physical work investment. Yeah, so they have to incur a real physical cost to produce a block, right? So right now you get 6.25 Bitcoins in a block at a minimum and then maybe some fees as well. How hard is it to produce a block now? Well, challenging. I mean, you need, so 6.25 Bitcoins and a Bitcoin is worth $55,000 or so. So it's probably going to cost you about that amount to produce it because it's a free market competition and miners have very thin margins. So it's like if I auction off a dollar, you would pay up to $0.99 to buy that dollar from me. Exactly what happens with miners. They're, you know, basically competing for the right to obtain new units of money. So logically speaking, they would pay up to the value of that money in order to earn it. And for people who are not familiar, the process of mining is solving a difficult cryptographic problem that's a computational problem. I would say it's not like people sometimes represent it as like a really challenging puzzle. Like the individual puzzle is very simple. Like you can do it with pen and paper if you wanted, you know, like SHA256. It's just that you're searching through the big mathematical space to find the needle in the haystack. You're just doing lots of iterations of a simple puzzle. It's just brute force. Hence, like the stability of the whole idea of the proof of work. If there was a shortcut, it wouldn't work. Exactly. So let's hope nobody solves SHA256. Yeah, there's a lot of discussions from the quantum computing space, but everybody I talked to, all my colleagues that work in quantum computers say that we're quite a long way away from that being an issue in cryptography and certainly an issue in cryptocurrency. That should have been one of the sides on these dice. It should have been quantum because I don't think it is. I forgot to put it on this edition. People should check out Scott Aaronson. There's a lot of people that are kind of selling quantum snake oil, so you should be very careful. I think it is a really exciting space that might change the world in the next decade or hundred, couple hundred years, especially for simulating quantum mechanical systems, but in quantum machine learning, people should check out TensorFlow quantum. It's a nice way to sort of educate yourself about the space. And actually, if you're pragmatically minded to, you know, through software engineering, explore how you simulate quantum circuits, how you run machine learning on those quantum circuits. The main point that Scott makes, Scott Aaronson, people should check out his blog too, is that like, there's not yet a single machine learning application that doesn't do almost as well in a classical computer. So it doesn't like, yes, the dream is somehow quantum computers will change the nature of artificial intelligence, but there's yet to be an actual algorithm or problem set or data set where that would be the case. So skepticism is good in this space. Anyway, that said, so you kind of explained how Bitcoin works. You also wrote a blog post recently, giving a shout out to the new book, The Block Size Wars. What is a block size? What are the block size wars? It's history, it's importance, it's philosophical foundations. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin, at this point, we have our own civil wars, if you're wondering about how politically intense it gets. It's currently not hot, it's cold. Oh yeah, we're in a detente right now. There's no tanks or missiles, at least not yet, hopefully. It can get a little violent, I guess. I think one of the Bitcoin core developers or one of the participants in the war got swatted at one point. What swatted means? When someone does a fake phone call saying that you're holding someone hostage at your house and the SWAT team goes, it's pretty scary. Internet warfare tactic, yeah. But the block size war, I would say, effectively ended, although we're definitely going to have more civil wars in Bitcoin, for sure. But basically, the core argument was a technical one on its surface, but a very deep political one at its core. The technical question is, how many megabytes should be in each successive block? So, Satoshi basically installed a limit of one megabyte per block. So, we should backtrack. There was no limit in the beginning, and it seems like Satoshi, what is this, 2000, the war started in what, 2017 or something like that? I don't know. 2015 was when the battle cries began. What was the first battle in the Civil War? I don't remember. But, Satoshi, I don't know if you can comment on it. Why did Satoshi set the limit to one megabyte all of a sudden, almost secretively, and in the beginning, there was no limit whatsoever? Yeah, I mean, we can get into, and people have spent thousands of hours poring over Satoshi's writings to find which side Satoshi was on, and you can find, like any textual exegesis, you can find evidence for either side, right? But, yeah, I mean, effectively, when Bitcoin was launched, there was a block size, because if you made a block over a certain size with the first edition of the code, it would have crashed nodes. But then, yeah, in 2010, Satoshi added the one megabyte limit in a covert way with no comments or anything, and that stuck, basically. And then Bitcoin blocks filled up, and people that had been socialized into this vision of Bitcoin as an effectively free transactional network were like, why pay a transaction fee if you're not at congestion? If the block isn't full, the miner will mine your transaction for free, right? And people that had been brought up in that status quo from 2009 to kind of 2015, they noticed the block started to fill up, and they're like, okay, well, let's just remove this arbitrary limit, right? What could possibly be the harm? And then a whole other faction said, no, you need to cap the data throughput of the system, because if you increase it, it's going to be highly exclusionary, and ultimately, regular folks are not going to be able to run a full node. So there's a fixed number, there's a fixed frequency of blocks, and so if you want to increase the number of transactions per second, you want to increase the size of the block. So huge blocks allow you to shove in a lot of transactions. Small blocks don't, so that's what you mean like constraining the system. So what's the benefit of a small block size where transactions, you can squeeze in only a small number of transactions, and what's the benefit of a huge block size where you can squeeze in a lot of transactions? Well, it really comes down to the way that you think about the system. So a lot of people wanted Bitcoin to be Visa scale, so to have blocks sufficiently large that you could accommodate a Visa level scale of transactions. Which is many orders of magnitude more transactions. That's right, I mean, preposterously larger in terms of data throughput. Then, you know, Bitcoin offers up, or at least it used to, 144 megabytes of space per day, and your average transaction is 350 bytes. So, you know, you could, at a push, do four or five hundred thousand transactions a day, which is not many. So if you wanted to get to Visa scale, you'd have to increase blocks obnoxiously large. The small blockers claimed that this would overwhelm the ability of any regular person to ingest that data and stay current at the state of the ledger, to replay all those transactions to ensure that the protocol rules were valid. So basically, the small blocker contention is that you eliminate the trustlessness of the system by pushing a ton of data through the system, because only one or two industrial heavy duty nodes would ever be able to run the protocol at that point. So, by the way, in the Civil War, the two sides, as you're calling them, the small blocker and the big blocker sides. And so that takes us back to the thing that you mentioned, that a regular computer could be a node. And with big blocks, that's no longer going to be the case. So just the number of transactions is going to blow up the size of the blockchain that every full node has to store. And so then, as opposed to a regular mom and pop type of node, you're going to have to have data centers. So they're going to have to be owned by large organizations. There's going to have to be very few of them. And that's how you centralize the control over this whole operation. So the big blocker, yes, it allows you to be Visa and do a huge number of transactions, but it becomes centralized. And then the small blocker is, you cannot actually do kind of merchant style transactions, but you get the decentralized benefit. Well, I don't even think the big blocker approach would allow you to be Visa, frankly, because there's effectively one node in the Visa network, right? So you don't really need to maintain this peer to peer architecture at all. And the amount of data you'd have to push through the network to reach Visa scale is a really preposterous amount. And we have now evidence for what happens when you try and scale up as a blockchain and do 10 million transactions a day, which is still not Visa scale, right? I've seen what it's like to operate those nodes, and it's not pretty. So there are totally genuine computer science physical limits, because it's a broadcast network. Everyone has to be aware of every transaction. And that model, which gives you the trustlessness, the nice guarantees where everyone's an equal peer on the network, everyone has audited the full history of the transactions, that model falls apart under stress. So the small blocker vision is that ultimately you would scale in a layered approach, with the base layer transactions being settlement style transactions, and payments happening at the other layers, basically. Is that universally agreed upon, or to a large degree agreed upon that the small blockers have won in this debate? Where would you put the current state of affairs? There was a wave of competing Bitcoin implementations, starting in 2015 with Bitcoin XT. Actually Gavin Andresen, who was the guy that Satoshi handed the reins to when Satoshi left, Gavin supported this large block proposal. And so that didn't achieve consensus, and then there was Bitcoin Unlimited. And then later on, there was a genuine hard fork, where the large blockers couldn't push through their proposals on Bitcoin itself, so they just created a competing version of Bitcoin. So by the way, maybe you can comment on, but sort of hard fork versus a soft fork, a hard fork is when it's no longer compatible. What's the right way to put it? They can't operate on the same blockchain, with the same protocol. Yeah, so there's a few ways to define them, and it gets controversial as well. One way to define it as a hard fork is an expansion of protocol rules, and a soft fork is a shrinking of protocol rules. That's an interesting way to find it. It's not very intuitive, so I don't like that way. Another way is that a hard fork is backwards incompatible, whereas a soft fork is, in theory, backwards compatible. So in August 2017, basically the large blockers had had enough, and they said, we're going to hard fork Bitcoin, we're going to create a clone, an alternative version of Bitcoin, which has a shared history as Bitcoin itself, but you completely fork it and you create a new future. But everybody that had a balance on Bitcoin at the time also had a balance on the alternative coin, Bitcoin Cash. That's what it's called, Bitcoin Cash is the hard fork. That was one of them, there were more actually. What the heck is Bitcoin Satoshi's vision BSV, Bitcoin SV? So this is all talking about increasing the max, the limit of the block size more and more and more. Yeah, that was one of the changes they wanted to push through. But BSV was a fork of Bitcoin Cash. Hard fork of Bitcoin Cash. Yeah, so now there's multiple big blocker blockchains floating around. What are your thoughts about them? These are pretty popular, sorry to interrupt. Are they popular? I mean, if you look at the metrics, they're not. And they don't trade, I think each trade below 1% of the value of Bitcoin itself. I see, so measuring popularity is like how much they actually, oh, value of the frequency of trade. Oh, no, no, I mean, they do like a fair number of transactions, but there's no way to know that that is genuine or just contrived. So ultimately, the true measure I think in my mind is just where the market prices these protocols relative to Bitcoin, because that's like a prediction market. If Bitcoin Cash was being priced at 50% of Bitcoin, you could say the market has given it a 50% chance of unseating Bitcoin, right? But both Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, which was a hard fork from Bitcoin Cash itself, are well, I believe at this point, well below 1% of the value of Bitcoin. And in like the ranking of different cryptocurrencies, what is it, Bitcoin, Ethereum? Is Ethereum in value second? Yes, number two. And then Bitcoin Cash is in the top five, right? But it's just a fast drop off? You know, I haven't checked lately, but I think it's reached kind of morbidity. You know, it doesn't really have much traction. The blocks aren't full. So the whole value proposition was, you know, we will get all this merchant adoption if we increase the block size. That just didn't materialize. In my view, they had a flawed vision of how adoption works and what blockchain should optimize for. Maybe you get a Bitcoin Cash supporter on the show, they'll give you a different answer. But yeah, full disclosure, you know, I have my sympathies. And I think the small blockers won that skirmish for sure. So at this time, there's no merchant adoption and so on. So it's kind of its vision, the whole reason for existence, at least for now, hasn't materialized. And so that's an indication as possible that, well, it's a sign that perhaps that's the wrong way to accomplish the scalability. Well, you know, first of all, I think the layered scaling model is definitely, definitely correct. I mean, that's absolutely the way these things have to work, given the constraints of blockchains. What is the layered scaling model? It's really how all payment systems scale, blockchain or otherwise. And I think a lot of people don't understand this, is that there is no equivalent to scaling of the base layer in the regular payment space. That totally doesn't happen. All of them are built on layers. So Visa is like the fifth layer in the payment stack that ultimately depends on these utility scale settlement systems, like Fedwire, CHIPS, ACH, basically interbank settlement systems. So you've got these slow moving but high assurance settlement systems. Fedwire is probably the number one, you know, like when you send a wire, that's using the Fedwire system typically. On top of that, you know, you have banks and then you have payment processors, and then you build up these layers and layers and layers, and then you have these fast payments, you know, Venmo PayPal, credit, debit, Visa, you name it. Those payments are not final when they occur. You know, a credit card transaction will not be final for 90 to 120 days. So you've decoupled the payment, the financial message, and the settlement. Those are distinct concepts. And the settlement happens on a deferred basis. So that's how you get scalability, is you have lots and lots of messages, but they don't settle for a long time. They might settle on a net basis, on an end of day basis. But so that's really how it works. And then you have Fedwire where your average transaction is in the millions of dollars, and there's only a few hundred thousand transactions a day. It's sort of an interbank settlement network. So that's my vision for how I think Bitcoin will develop too. Bitcoin itself on the base layer is the slow moving high assurance final settlement network, where if you're sending money to the other side of the globe to someone you don't trust, where you want that payment to be final in a short period of time, and both counterparties know it's final, then you would use that. But if you wanted to buy coffee, you could do it on a second layer. Lightning would be one way. There's a bunch of side chains now. Or you could use a more centralized solution if you wanted. It's kind of a profound idea that in the space of transactions, when you're buying coffee or buying anything really from a merchant or exchanging goods and all those kinds of things, that most of the time, like basic honest behavior, human behavior, which it does appear that most of our societies is based on the fact that we're all, most of us are honest, is like stuff is not going to go wrong when you do the transaction. And you only need like the base layer, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's, I forget the terms you use for the credit card version, but you need that just to verify, just to like resolve any disagreements or shady shit. Yeah. And that's a really rare occurrence. So it's okay for that to be handled in a small block debate, handled at a rate that's much, much lower than the rate of the transactions. That's a really interesting idea that when we spend money, we didn't actually exchange the money most of the time. Yeah, most of the time you're not getting final settlement when you do a transaction. And oftentimes that causes, there's pluses and minuses on the plus side of huge efficiency if you use a credit network like Visa, but it's in the name credit, right? Visa is extending you credit, right? They're kind of guaranteeing your reputation to the merchant. But fraud happens all the time, right? There's always fraud because you have this reversibility, right? And so you can engage in fraud against the merchant. If you have a final settlement, there's no possibility for fraud. So that's one reason merchants kind of like accepting Bitcoin because once you receive an inbound Bitcoin payment and you deliver some good or service, that payment can't be reversed. But frankly, most of the transactions we undertake on a daily basis do not require the strong assurances of final settlement. There's one exception, which is physical cash. With physical cash or the open dime, a cash like product, you actually are getting final settlement. But most online banking transactions, most P2P digital wallet transactions in the dollar system, they're not really final at all. You mentioned Lightning, Lightning Network. What is it? What are your thoughts on it? And what are your thoughts about any kind of alternatives? So Lightning is one potential payment solution built on top of Bitcoin where you have different assurances, different transactional assurances, but ultimately it's very proximate to the base layer. So if something goes wrong, you can always basically settle to the base layer. Just layer two. Yeah, layer two, you could say. And basically the intuition is it's kind of like opening a bar tab. So you go to the bar and you might drink a dozen beers over the course of the night, maybe half a dozen. And well, I guess nobody goes to the bar these days, but let's say you did. You open a tab and at the end of the night you settle up once. You're not necessarily paying each time you get another beer. So it's the same idea. You're opening a channel, an ongoing relationship with your counterparty. And so Lightning has you open a channel with the counterparty and you're sort of sending back and forth these cryptographic commitments saying, you know, I agree to send you some Bitcoin, but you don't necessarily settle each time you make a transaction. So you can do hundreds of thousands of transactions in a channel. The other thing Lightning proposes is saying, okay, well, now that we have channels established, what if we interlocked a number of channels together? So if you and I have a channel and, you know, me and my buddy have a channel, my buddy can now pay you because you have a relationship through me basically. And so Lightning is this network, this overlay network that sits on top of Bitcoin and allows people to transact in a much faster and less frictional way without the need for Bitcoin's kind of slow periodic settlement, assuming that everything sort of goes well. Do you see any downsides to this? Like, have you seen flaws in the whole system from a security perspective, from a scaling perspective, any of that? Or is Lightning working well? It works. I use it. When I initially sold those dice, I sold them on Lightning. I was one of the first merchants to use Lightning back in the day, the first edition of the dice. So people could buy these dice somewhere? Well, they used to be able to. I haven't made a new edition recently. They're very scarce and very special. They're like physical NFTs. Physical NFTs. Yeah. I mean, the flaw with Lightning is really that you, you know, and this can be remedied in a number of ways, but you have to kind of prefund these channels. So it's a weird concept to have to inject liquidity into a channel in order to accept a payment, you know. So I'm sure those user experience problems can be solved, but it's still in a state of relative immaturity. So we'll see. In terms of other ideas that are sidechains or soft forks of Bitcoin, you've mentioned something about Schnorr and Taproot. What are your thoughts about this update to Bitcoin in terms of its promise to improve privacy and scaling and so on? And what other things are you interested, excited about in terms of the development of Bitcoin? Well, Schnorr and Taproot, that's the first new protocol upgrade since SegWit in 2017, which was what laid the groundwork for Lightning to be developed, basically. Schnorr and Taproot is really the first protocol change in three, almost four years now. So we're very excited about it. I mean, is there something interesting to say technically about what are the things it's actually going to improve? And maybe on the politics side, bringing a protocol change on Bitcoin, what does that actually involve? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge deal because the last time we tried to make a change to the protocol, we had a whole civil war over it, and it was incredibly difficult to get SegWit activated in 2017. And it took all this brinksmanship and threats and all these campaigns, and it was this whole thing. Luckily, I think things have quieted down and there's much more consensus that Schnorr and Taproot is a good change to Bitcoin, and everyone generally supports it. But everyone kind of has PTSD over the last time. When we tried to change Bitcoin. And so we're sort of really dithering over how we actually want to implement it. So it's taking forever because we're trying to set the protocol for how do you change Bitcoin itself. And all of our assumptions went out the window last time. So we're trying to reset and decide what is a legitimate way to institute a change to Bitcoin. So that's actually the big question right now. It's not, should we implement these changes? We basically all agree that we should. It's a meta question is, what's the valid way to implement new changes to Bitcoin? What's a way that is scalable in the long term and will last and people will consider credible? Even if this one isn't controversial at all. So that's where we're at. We're basically debating over how do we implement this change that we all want. To get a feeling of how slow Bitcoin governance is and how deliberate it is, everybody collectively wants the change. But we haven't fully agreed on how we're going to put it into Bitcoin. So it's a classic sort of Bitcoin situation. But what it is, I mean, Schnorr is an alternative signature scheme. I think it was encumbered by a patent. And it had only just been unencumbered when Satoshi created Bitcoin, I believe. It's a better signature scheme than Elliptic Curves, which is what, than ECDSA, which is what Bitcoin uses. And so it's been long enough that we now trust it. Kind of in cryptography, it's meant to be Lindy. You want to test it over time, and then it's considered safe to use. So Schnorr has been around for long enough that we've decided to rip out ECDSA and insert Schnorr, which is just a different signature scheme, which is more efficient. And it has better properties. Like if you want to do a multi signature transaction where many people collectively sign in order to permission a spend, that would be more efficient in a bytes sense than ECDSA, for instance. So it's pretty incremental. And then Taproot is all about having transactional conditions that are sort of withheld from final entry onto the blockchain. So it's kind of a way to have more private conditional transactions on Bitcoin. So both of them, I would say, are incremental changes. Is this an over exaggeration that Schnorr and Taproot might improve privacy and scaling, which is like at the high level things that people mention? Is that just like a dramatic way of trying to frame what's fundamentally an incremental improvement? Yes, but incremental is the word, right? We're not going to get an order of magnitude enhancement to either privacy or scaling, but we will get a considerable enhancement. But privacy and scaling are actually two sides of the same coin because you get more transactional privacy by removing data from the ledger so that there's less metadata for people to surveil and analyze. And that's also how you scale by compressing and being really space efficient with transactions. And the more parsimonious you are, the more economically dense each byte that everyone has to retain on the ledger is. And so those are very closely allied concepts. So do you mind if we go through some potential criticisms of Bitcoin? Totally. I spent the last five years tackling these every day. Are the dice the same? Those two are the same, yeah. There are three editions. So let's go with the dice. Silk Road. What does that mean? Silk Road. Classic. Classic situation. So that was the darknet marketplace set up by Ross Albrecht in the early days of Bitcoin. That's one of the first killer apps for Bitcoin was being the payments network behind this darknet marketplace where you'd go to buy drugs and things. And so that became associated with Bitcoin, if you remember the press coverage from back then. But over time that faded and it became less of a critique. So like the critique is that Bitcoin is something you would use for illegal activity, for drugs, for crimes, all those kinds of things, as opposed to for any kind of legitimate transactions and merchant transactions. And today Bitcoin settles $10 billion a day and the vast, vast majority of it is completely legitimate. It's just a useful alternative system. But back then a huge fraction of all Bitcoin transactions were related to the basically illicit marketplaces. And if you're just tuning in, this incredible tall sighted guy has 11 common criticisms of Bitcoin that Nick, in a genius way, has put together. Maybe you could do a couple more. It was Satoshi something, Satoshi Coins. Satoshi Coins, we touched on that earlier in the episode. What if Satoshi returns and sells all of their coins? So we don't know for sure how many coins Satoshi actually mined or produced because there's a degree of probabilistic analysis that you would do. There's a few thousand blocks that were mined by what we think is a single entity in sort of 2009. And so if you add them all up, you get to about a million. So people think that Satoshi mined a million coins and then they're worried that Satoshi would return and market sell all the coins, thus crushing the price of Bitcoin. So looking at some of these, no CEO, I think we touched on that. We did, we see, we've already hit on the dice. No merchants, that's no longer true. There's a scalability one, and I think that one has addressed the idea that you're mentioning with the block size debates and the lightning network that by adding extra layers on top, you can achieve scalability. That's my vision, that's my theory. And you can do it in a permissionless and a permissioned way. Like Coinbase is a big Bitcoin exchange. They provide scalability. They're a financial institution. You can settle up internally on their own database and then periodically settle to Bitcoin. So they do something like the lightning network internally, something like this similar kind of mechanism. Well, honestly, I'm not sure exactly how it works. They might have that built in, but just generally speaking, institutional scaling is a model for scaling, right? Where you could have banks holding Bitcoin and they issue notes against Bitcoin, and those are your payments, and then the base layer is the settlement layer. I think that's what you're getting with the boiling oceans, is this is like the impact on weather, I suppose, on the environment. So, you know, that is a concern that people have in terms of like the proof of work requires that there's a lot of computational resources being used and that requires a lot of energy and like some large percentage of the world's energy is used to mine Bitcoin. How would you respond to that criticism? Yeah, I mean, that's been the loudest critique of Bitcoin this year in the press. This year, really? Yeah, so, I mean, it's not like a new criticism, but Bitcoin is consuming more energy than ever. So, as the price rises, the electricity consumption rises, and so we've heard renewed, you know, bellyaching over this, for sure. I mean, if you don't believe that Bitcoin is useful, then you're inclined to think that all the energy consumption is a waste. So that's, you know, it's something that's sort of unrebuttable if you fundamentally contest the validity of the Bitcoin system. So if Bitcoin is like a thing that will take over, it will become like the main mechanism of financial transactions or transactions period in the world, then you say, well, the cost of energy use is actually quite low relative to the benefit it provides. If you think it's not going to be, if it's just a volatile way to make a little money in the short term, then you see the energy use as really wasteful. That's totally spurious, yeah. So then there's no really response, I suppose. That's, so I can totally, you know, get into the details of Bitcoin's energy mix and things like that, but that's like at a high level what the debate is. It's this normative question, like, does Bitcoin have an entitlement to consume any of the world's resources? And that's actually where the debate should end much of the time because a lot of people fundamentally dispute the validity or usefulness of Bitcoin as a system. And so, of course, they're going to consider the energy usage illegitimate. Now, there's a lot of mitigating factors if you, you know, think the Bitcoin is potentially a useful system, which is Bitcoin consumes energy in a very peculiar way, which virtually no other industry does, which is that Bitcoin is a geography independent buyer of energy, which is not how we humans typically consume energy. Like, we need energy to be produced near to population centers, and we need it to be produced at the, you know, corresponding to the peaks and troughs of our consumption, right? Because we have to 100% match the demand and the supply at all times, right? Otherwise, we'd blackouts. So, Bitcoin doesn't care about any of that. It just buys energy on a constant basis. And so, it's, you know, indifferent to where it's being produced. And so, the consequence of all that is that Bitcoin will buy energy that's otherwise being wasted, basically. So, it will buy so called stranded energy assets that would not make it to a population center. And in fact, most energy produced is, ultimately, does not sort of make it to, you know, your socket in your wall. And so, this is why so much Bitcoin is mined in China, for instance. It's not because, you know, Chinese industrialists had a special affinity for Bitcoin. It's because the Chinese grid had a massive overabundance of energy, and particularly in four provinces, Sichuan, Yunnan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang. So, in those four provinces, those are all pretty distant from major population centers. So, because of that, you can't really transport the energy that easily. And so, huge amounts of energy are curtailed or basically wasted in all those provinces. And so, miners set up shop there because they could mine Bitcoin with the excess energy. They could monetize this thing that otherwise was going to go to waste. So, you know, there's things like that which, you know, I think mitigate the reality. Bitcoin is not really rival with our consumption of electricity. It's not depriving anyone of electricity. It's mostly these stranded assets that are going into supporting the Bitcoin network. So, maybe let's do a last one since you mentioned China. This is China control. So, if so much mining is happening in China, how do we prevent nation states from controlling much of Bitcoin? Yeah, that's the flip side of a large portion of the blocks being mined in China due to this energy feature which I discussed, which is that there's a lot of Chinese miners for sure. Now, the question ultimately is, what degree of control do miners have over the Bitcoin system? And that was part of the block size debate. I mean, the miners, when we implemented subgraded witness in 2017, the miners just didn't want to do it. Eventually, the users, the regular folks running nodes rebelled and basically said, look, we're going to implement this whether or not you do it. And it was a threat to the value of Bitcoin because if this threat had gone through, it could have split Bitcoin and it would have been really messy. So, the miners sort of capitulated. So, I think the current consensus is that miners do not have unilateral control over Bitcoin and that governance is more poised between people that run nodes, developers and miners. It's sort of a triumvirate where neither of them has, you know, total control. So, that's my current model for controlling Bitcoin. I think if you asked a miner, they would tell you they didn't feel that they had sort of unilateral control over Bitcoin either. Almost as a thought experiment, can I ask you to think about if some of your predictions, some of your analysis, some of your understanding of Bitcoin is wrong in the following sense where it will not have the impact that you have a vision for it, that you will not have the scale of impact and perhaps in terms of value will go to zero to something very low and other cryptocurrency or other financial systems will overtake it. What would be the reason for that in your mind? Like, why might you be wrong? If you look back at it in the future, what did you not understand about Bitcoin that will result in that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think for that to happen, one of two things would have to obtain, one of two things would have to happen for Bitcoin to just be irrelevant basically. Either central banks totally clean up their act and stop engaging in rampant money printing, which I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. I mean, it looks like we're normalizing this new regime of inflation, pro inflation, just to remediate the debt issues we have. So that would be one thing that would make Bitcoin cryptocurrency much less relevant as if everyone becomes totally assured of the soundness of sovereign currencies basically, namely the dollar, like the dollar being the main one. It seems like we're going in completely opposite direction. Most people seem to be noticing the stirrings of inflation in society. You might have noticed that too. It's showing up in commodity prices, lumber prices, in food, obviously in financial assets. It'll show up in consumer prices generally soon. So that would be one way for Bitcoin to basically become irrelevant because it's a dialectical thing. Bitcoin is held in opposition to the established monetary regime. So if they completely reform themselves and the dollar becomes super sound once again and the Fed stops tinkering the way they constantly do, then we wouldn't need cryptocurrency as much. The other thing would be if a completely superior design for a new sort of state independent monetary system emerged. But it's really hard to even imagine how that would come to emerge. And there's good reasons to think that Bitcoin, the conditions of its launch were extremely favorable and hard to replicate. Can you speak to some of those conditions, why it's a unique timing wise moment for Bitcoin to emerge? Yeah. So obviously Bitcoin was born in the depths of the financial crisis, which gives it a nice historical element. But that was kind of a coincidence. Honestly, we know that Satoshi had been working on it earlier in 2017. The really special thing about Bitcoin was that it was launched anonymously by an entity that did not seek any glory or credit for what they did and apparently never monetized it at all. So they never really moved any of their coins. Satoshi sent one test transaction to Hal Finney, who is one of the earliest Bitcoiners. Aside from that, as far as we know, Satoshi never spent any of their coins. So you have this wonderful Promethean quality whereby it's almost self sacrificial. I mean, it's like this borderline godlike figure in terms of their restraint finds this monetary technology and releases it to the world and pays the price. They never took advantage of their filthy lucre. They never recognized any of the $50 billion that they made from Bitcoin. And Satoshi also didn't assign themselves any privileged access to the coins. Satoshi could have just written in the code, I own 10% of the coins. But they didn't. They just mined in the open free market competition like everyone else. It's just that Satoshi is an early miner to support the network, accumulate a lot of coins for sure. But they didn't have any privileged special access. So that's one thing that's extremely special about the launch is that we had a founder that was truly committed to the monetary protocol and didn't seek either recognition or financial spoils. And then also left. Satoshi left in 2010, 2011 and hasn't really been heard from since. It's a very George Washington gangster move where he didn't want power and once he got power, he let go of it. Precisely. That was a key actually move. That was probably one of the most important moves at the founding of this country. That's right. George Washington could have been a king, probably if he'd wanted. And Satoshi could have been Jerome Powell if he'd wanted. And Satoshi could have held on to power indefinitely but chose to leave. The other thing is that Bitcoin circulated for a long period of time from January 2009 to about July 2010 without really having a financial value. So there weren't really any marketplaces. It didn't have a value. And so that gave it this really great distribution among a broad set of stakeholders. And there were no venture funds or hedge funds trying to aggressively buy up all the supply back then. Now when you have new cryptocurrencies launched, they're aggressively pre mined and some gigantic Silicon Valley venture fund is going to own 30% of it. And so it's impossible to conceive of how that could become a global money because how could a Silicon Valley investment firm own 30% of the money supply? That doesn't make sense. That's just so oligarchical. It's unbelievable. So Bitcoin by contract is a very bottom up thing. It was the early enthusiasts, people that were really excited about the technology. They're the ones that obtained those early coins. And so there was a real element of fairness and just an organic nature to its launch, which would be incredibly hard to recapture today. Let's say Satoshi came back and they said, OK, I made Bitcoin 2.0. I'm going to release it. There would be the most aggressive land grab ever by gigantic pools of capital to sort of get favorable allocations of the new system. Can Satoshi with Bitcoin 2.0 build in a resistance mechanism or a prevention mechanism for the land grab? It would be hard to because if you have capital and resources, I mean, if it was a proof of work chain, you just have people that would invest a ton of money in mining, for instance. But most new blockchains, cryptocurrencies are just sold, basically. They're issued in token offerings kind of thing. So it's hard to enforce through the protocol the decentralization of control power. It'd be challenging to and people have tried to do airdrops where they distribute coins to a large number of people. Basically doesn't work. Most people don't care about the airdrop. So it's hard to have an equitable distribution. I think the conditions of Bitcoin's launch were so lucky and favorable that they're very unlikely to be replicated. So I do think it's going to be a real challenge to ever have a new competitor that's as decentralized, as leaderless, as dispersed, sort of distributed as Bitcoin is, has its credibility. I don't know how you could overrule it on those important features. What about Bitcoin's comparison to other current cryptocurrencies? So Bitcoin versus Ethereum, for example. Why is it possible that Ethereum overtakes Bitcoin? It's certainly possible. Yeah, I'm not ruling it out. Ethereum leadership is sort of wise enough to understand that they shouldn't compete with Bitcoin on those most profound qualities. Ethereum doesn't really aspire to be more sound from a monetary perspective than Bitcoin. In fact, the Ethereum leadership are sort of constantly tweaking the monetary policy. So they went for a completely different trade off. They also don't compete to be as decentralized from a governance perspective, right? Because there's leadership. There's an ETH foundation. There's a charismatic leader, Vitalik. And Ethereum has this policy of hard forks. So in Bitcoin, hard forks are extremely rare. In Ethereum, it's the default way to change things. So it's a much more adaptive system and it changes more frequently. But that also means that it's sort of they're incurring more risk when they introduce those changes. There's much more complexity. So Ethereum is smart because they sort of understood Bitcoin as the top dog when it comes to a sound money, a digital gold type thing. And they went for all of the different trade offs. They wanted to be more of a platform. They wanted to have more complexity of the transactional layer. They wanted to take on more risk in terms of changing the protocol. They wanted to change more quickly. They wanted to make the monetary policy more mutable. So Ethereum takes that completely different tack. Of course, you know, I'm not ruling out that it could take over Bitcoin from a market cap perspective. It's just a very different system. And I tend to think that Bitcoin is the most disruptive one because it's the most equipped to challenge sovereign currencies in the grand scheme. Do you think they can coexist? So like in the future, do you see a world where, you know, Ethereum captures some large percent of the market but nevertheless the minority? A hundred percent. Bitcoin has already been tokenized and put onto Ethereum. Many units of Bitcoin, I think over a billion dollars worth. So not only do they coexist, they are actually mutualistic. So they're like two creatures that have this, you know, it's like the rhino and like the bird that packs the parasites off the rhino's back or whatever. Yeah. Right. So I don't know which is which in the analogy. But yeah, I don't know who the parasites are. Or, you know, the alligator and the teeth cleaning fish or whatever. Right. So, you know, I always wonder why the alligator doesn't just eat the fish, but I guess they're brushing its teeth basically. So Ethereum is it gives you more transactional flexibility. There's much more experimentation happening there. It has this whole decentralized finance element. There's a huge number of Bitcoins that circulate on the Ethereum protocol, right? Because Ethereum is open to other asset types, basically. So I think that's actually accretive to both systems because Ethereum gets to have this good form of collateral Bitcoin on the system, which is good volatility characteristics. And then it's a supply sink for Bitcoins, which are sort of now they're injected into this third party protocol. And that, I think, reduces the velocity of Bitcoin overall, and it's probably good for the valuation. So you see it quite possibly could be a symbiotic relationship. That's really interesting. I think so. I think so. What are your thoughts about Vitalik, Buterin? What are your thoughts about some of the other figures in the space outside of Bitcoin? I think Vitalik made some mistakes with Ethereum ultimately. Like, I disagree with some of the decisions that were made along the way. Like, there's this infamous case of this bailout where 14% of Ether was lost in the smart contract, or really this smart contract that a lot of Ethereum leadership were sort of backing and supporting was hacked. And then the foundation with Vitalik's support chose to make a change to the underlying protocol to undo the hack, right? So to me, that was not the most prudent approach, because you're basically violating the core protocol rules in order to undo, you know, to bail out a specific contract, which has failed. Granted, there was a lot of Ether in there. But I think that shook the credibility of the Ethereum system that happened back in 2016, I think. That was one reason why I became disenchanted with Ethereum. So basically, even if in that case that might fix an important problem that opens the door to centralized, like, manipulation of the protocol in the future. Yeah, it basically demonstrates that there's certain elites at the protocol level that can exercise specific control over the system. And, you know, a lot of people have lost money in hacks on Ethereum, a lot of contracts have gone south, huge amount of value, but they didn't get a bailout. And it was just when, you know, this specific contract called the DAO was hacked, that, you know, the leadership intervened. And, you know, to their credit, they haven't had a significant intervention or bailout since then. But it did normalize the practice. And I think it weakened the social contract. So I would prefer that you sort of bite the bullet in that situation, and you accept the failure of that contract. There'll be a ballsy move to bite that bullet. Yeah, I mean, and then you would have had like, what they thought was a malicious entity in control of a lot of coins. I think the real reason they sort of felt that they had to undo it was because they'd always planned to move to this proof of stake world, where your political control over the system is a function of your wealth in the system. And they didn't want this attacker, which would have inherited all this significant wealth, to have influence over that future proof of stake version. That's sort of my theory. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It kind of reminds me of the bailout of car companies. You know, this is difficult. There's a lot of people that criticize the bailout of these large companies, you know. Yeah, creative destruction. I mean, I was critical of the bailouts that happened during COVID. I mean, I generally think that it's healthier for society for bad firms that aren't making money to fail or be reorganized under the various forms of bankruptcy. And you saw what happens. You see the, you know, the corporate sector in Japan in the 90s, there was this like slow motion insolvency where basically firms weren't allowed to fail. And the Japanese corporate sector lost competitiveness because bad firms did not fail. And so, you know, the process of actual capitalism for the market clearing didn't occur. So I'm always in support of, you know, of the free market being allowed to clear for non profitable firms to fail. It's complicated, man, because creative destruction seems to be in the long term a positive. But human civilization is such that short term pain has real impact on people, you know. Yeah, policymakers don't ever want to incur that short term pain because they have a short term outlook and term limits often. And also just it's short term pain. Forget policymakers, forget politicians. It sucks to lose a job for an individual. You know, you could say the company, you know, creative destruction of a company means the company was inefficient and that's going to have a ripple effect of teaching everybody else what an efficient operation looks like. But like there's jobs that are being lost. There's families that have to suffer because of that. I mean, that's the tension we live in society is having a basic safety net for our world because there's a level beyond which, like if through creative destruction, you have some percent of the population that dips below a certain level that you would call like suffering. We don't want that. And that's a difficult thing to live with. Like, yes, in the long term, you want inefficiency to be destroyed and efficiency to be rewarded. But there does seem to be a base level of like quality of life that we want to uphold. That's a difficult thing to think about. I think about that a lot. There's a doctor called Paul Farmer that, you know, there's like in Haiti or in Africa, there's a child who's dying. And as a doctor, you want to give everything you have, all the money you have to save that one child. And you do, actually. But that's a very human action. It's not a rational action from a game theoretic perspective because there's no way you can take that action for every child who is suffering. But there's something deeply human about doing that for that one particular child. In that same sense, creative destruction is an economic principle. But it's not necessarily that same kind of human principle. And there's a tension there. I see it. I mean, I think that's the issue with modern central banking, really, is that the central bank always has an incentive to lower interest rates. And they've been doing that from the 70s towards today on this, you know, well, 80s, really, on this slow march down. Because whenever there was a hint of a crisis in the economy or financial asset prices started to fall, their reaction is, okay, we'll inject more capital into the economy, we'll save it. But my view is that these palliative short term measures cause the buildup of a huge amount of fragility in the long term. And then the ultimate collapse is much worse than the counterfactual situation where you raised interest rates, you took your medicine, and the economy was healthier. So and that's sort of, that's why, you know, people like Ray Dalio point out that you have these long term debt cycles. And we're sort of at the end of one now, is because we couldn't take our medicine, we couldn't, you know, let interest rates clear, we constantly wanted to ward off any difficulty, and we didn't ever want to de leverage truly. And then when the when the debt crisis happens, and it hits, it's, you know, horrendously bad. So do you think Bitcoin might reach a million dollars in value? It's, it's having a current resurgence, a crazy one in 2021, in the recent months of over 60,000, I guess it is now. Do you think it's possible it goes over 100,000? Do you think it's possible it goes to a million? You can't rule anything out with Bitcoin. So I mean, I'm not, you know, wanting to put price targets on it. But one way it could reach a million dollars is Bitcoin's value stays unchanged in real terms. And the dollar depreciates. Not that I expect hyperinflation. But yeah, I mean, like Bitcoin is worth about one 10th, slightly under one 10th the value of all the gold in the world. And, you know, gold is worth 10 trillion, 11 trillion dollars in the aggregate. Do I think Bitcoin can be more culturally and economically salient than gold in two decades time? 100%. Bitcoin was unknown. 12 years ago, and today 100 million people worldwide own Bitcoin. So just extrapolate that what is the level of penetration you think we'll get 500 million a billion? You know, you can easily tune these adoption curves, however you like. I don't think it's done, you know, monetizing and being adopted globally. You think it can become like the base layer for a lot of our financial operation, like become the main base layer for all our transactions. So like, even banks will use Bitcoin, essentially, and like Visa would use Bitcoin as the base layer, like it would actually operate very similarly at the surface layer, but at the base layer would all be Bitcoin. That's precisely what I expect. And banks and Visa are already using Bitcoin. So Visa has embraced Bitcoin in a really big way, actually. And it's always funny to the people saying Bitcoin has to change in a certain way so it can compete with Visa. No, Visa adopted Bitcoin, right? PayPal adopted Bitcoin, Square adopted Bitcoin. Obviously, they're not tearing out all of their existing infrastructure, but they're totally engaging with this thing. Banks have now begun, they got the green light to provide custody for Bitcoin for their depositors. That's the first step. Eventually, you know, it'll happen one of two ways, either Bitcoin native financial institutions will become banks, that's already happening. There's Bitcoin exchanges that have gotten banking licenses, or banks themselves will start to engage with Bitcoin as a reserve asset. It'll converge either way. That's totally happening. And yes, I mean, I don't think Bitcoin is going to power every financial transaction, I think it'll coexist alongside sovereign currencies. But I think it's a great reserve asset. It's a very powerful asset to build a financial system on top of because it's highly, highly auditable. It's something that you can take physical delivery of very cheaply. And those are great qualities. If you're a depositor in a bank, they can prove to you how much Bitcoin they have. They can't really easily prove, you know, in the old system, how much gold they held on deposit. And you can easily conduct a run on the bank, you can hold them accountable, because you can withdraw it. Because, you know, making Bitcoin transaction is pretty easy at the end of the day. Unlike fiat currency, it's like kind of, you can't really withdraw your dollars from the bank. I mean, you sort of can, but you're not going to want to take delivery of pounds of cash or anything like that. So it's a good modern asset upon which to build a financial system, basically. You mentioned Square and Visa sort of investing in Bitcoin. What do you make of probably one of the higher profile big investments in Bitcoin, which is Tesla and Elon Musk? But there's also a few billionaires like Chamath and all of them investing. What do you make of this whole movement? Why do you think they're doing it? I mean, Tesla is an interesting case. Why do you think Tesla is buying so much Bitcoin? I honestly don't know. And I would love to truly know Elon's genuine thoughts on Bitcoin. Because he's kind of sending us mixed messages, honestly, with his embrace of Dogecoin, which is sort of playful, not exactly sure what point he's trying to make there. So you were involved with Dogecoin, you mentioned offline a little bit in the early days, or at least played around with it. What do you make of Dogecoin? What do you make of Elon and Doge? What do you make of this particular meme coin? Is it one, like a legitimate cryptocurrency? Or is it two, like a funny internet way of saying F you to the man? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so I wasn't like a figurehead in Dogecoin or anything. But that was totally my introduction to crypto was mining Dogecoin in my dorm room. And then tipping people online in Dogecoin, which I just thought was the funniest thing. So I guess that was really easy to entertain back in 2013. But it was very playful at the time, there was a culture around Dogecoin. And the people liked it, because it was in opposition to the Bitcoin culture, which was really serious and involved lots of Austrian economics, and Rothbard and Hayek and stuff like that. So that was my introduction to cryptocurrency was because I thought the Bitcoin people were pretty lame. Yeah. And they were like, way too serious about all this stuff. And I was like, okay, I'll just be a part of the Dogecoin community. And they did all these funny publicity stunts, like, they paid to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. You know, like, great stuff. Like they put the Dogecoin logo on top of a NASCAR car. Yeah. And I just that tickled me so much because it's like this made up internet coin. This was back when crypto is pretty novel and still like kind of funny and stuff. And that was really entertaining. Fast forward seven, eight years. Dogecoin is way less entertaining now, frankly, because it's the leadership left the community spirit evaporated. The meme didn't persist. I mean, Doge itself is not really a contemporary meme, right? I mean, it's an old meme. Although that new refresh of the meme, like Doge, I haven't heard that name in a long time. Like, or Doge is like in a hat smoking a cigarette. I mean, there's some sense where Elon is reinvigorating the meme. And it's funny, because like one influential figure could do just that, which just speaks to the tension that you're talking about. Like Tesla is investing Bitcoin. And yet, Elon, he also tweets about Bitcoin. But yeah, he's, I mean, who am I to question the meme, right? Like, yeah, I can't, you know, dissect internet culture and penantically sit here and tell you it's an invalid meme. You know, if people believe in it, then it's real. Is there a space for meme coins at this time? Like Doge or somebody else to almost like, you know, it does serve a lot of purposes, which is, like you said, it pulls in people into this whole space of digital currency, into cryptocurrency, allow them to explore, allow them to have fun as opposed to taking everything very seriously. Is there still space for that? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the crypto landscape is very broad today. So whatever, you know, cultural element you seek to find within crypto, you will find. It was a bit different in 2013, because Bitcoin was kind of the only game in town, there were a couple altcoins. And so Dogecoin made a lot of sense as a counterpart to Bitcoin as a less serious counterpart. Today, crypto is just like gigantic cultural and economic trend. So it's, you know, very multifaceted. Dogecoin is one of the many, you know, ways that people have to engage with it. I think a lot of people that buy Dogecoin based on Elon's implied guidance are going to lose money, because fundamentally, there's nothing enduring about Dogecoin. It's an ancient fork of Bitcoin. It's unmaintained. There, you know, it's probably at risk, actually, from a protocol perspective. It's merge mined with Litecoin, I think. If there was an inflation bug on Dogecoin, it's unclear who would sort of be able to remediate that, you know, so it's not technologically very sound. So I wouldn't recommend that anyone stores wealth in it, you know. Yes, it's funny because cryptocurrency, like my interest in cryptocurrency is in the exploration of technical ideas. But cryptocurrency is also, like in the case of Dogecoin, like for LOLs, at least originally, like a meme coin, but it's also a mechanism for investment. And so those are sometimes a tension. And it's unclear, sort of like, yeah, you know, there's the meme with Doge has almost become to take it to, I guess, to a dollar, trying to drive the price of the value up to a dollar. But, you know, implied in that is like this overlap of the meme coin and like legitimate investment. And so you have a lot of young people, I think, who almost start getting greedy and want to make money, like as opposed to having fun. And that becomes a different beast then because you're essentially making financial decisions that can have a long lasting, like, you know, money is freedom. And if you make stupid financial decisions, you can remove freedom from your life. And that's, it can be detrimental in that sense. So I don't, it's difficult. I don't know what to do with that set of ideas because a lot of cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, is very volatile because it's new. So you're trying to figure out the space of like, what's actually going to be a large part of, like you speak of network effects, like what's going to take over the world. And through that process, there's going to be a lot of volatility. And if you're talking about cryptocurrency as an investment mechanism, then it can have a real detrimental effects on people's lives. Yeah. And that's really the challenge with operating in the crypto space, talking about it, overlaid on top of everything that's interesting politically or culturally about it is the financial incentive. And so, you know, it's not all fun and games because there are literally billions over a trillion dollars at stake now. So if you buy Dogecoin, because some influencer on TikTok said so, you've now made a financial decision, right? So I'm not going to scold any Dogecoin buyers or any crypto asset buyer for that matter. But be aware that there are like billions of dollars of really elite hedge funds that are trying to front run all of your decisions and evaluate social sentiment, things like that. So it's a waterfall of sharks, basically. And by the way, if you're listening to this, don't take this podcast or anything I ever say as financial advice. That's definitely not my interest or expertise level. The interest here is to explore different ideas. Speaking of which, you've written a little bit about NFTs. I'd be interested to hear your opinions on this space of ideas, these non fungible tokens. They seem to have a cultural impact currently, but do they have a long lasting technical, financial or cultural impact or is this just a fad? What do you think of NFTs? Yeah, I think the current enthusiasm for NFTs and the financial metrics, you see the growth there in that sector is partially a function of where we are in the actual credit cycle. So oftentimes, when inflationary events occur, you have correspondence speculative manias that occur at the same time, because people intuitively feel that the fiat currency that they hold is being debased. And so they frantically look around for other places to put it. So stocks, property, commodities, and then other asset classes, NFTs are an asset class. And this is a case with any inflation you look at in history, you saw these correspondence speculative manias, basically, speculative episodes. So a lot of us feel that inflation is occurring, whether it's in CPI or not, that basically lots of dollars are being injected into the economy. We've all seen stocks massively appreciate even as GDP contracted. And so a lot of people sort of got caught on to this notion that, wow, is the Fed, you know, lowers interest rates, and Congress spends a huge amount of stimulus dollars into the economy, financial assets going to go up, so I better have exposure to all that stuff. And so you see, virtually every asset class is awash with cash right now, people are investing like their lives depend on it, investing, trading, whatever, whether it's options, volumes, on Robin Hood, you know, like kind of retail brokerages, things like that, whether it's stocks, whether it's crypto, and then other collectibles, baseball cards, their valuations have been skyrocketing. And so I think NFTs are part of that. It's a new asset class. It's basically an opportunity to invest in sort of art or collectibles, in game items, things like that. I think that explains a large degree of the enthusiasm, the excitement is that it's a novel asset class that people can trade. And right as you know, these inflationary tailwinds pick up. Now as for the sort of virtues of the actual technical phenomenon, NFTs are actually not a new idea at all. So you've had NFTs, I didn't call them NFTs, but in 2016, built on Bitcoin, for instance, so it's been around for a while. What it is, is a serial code, basically a string of data that is inserted onto a public blockchain, and then circulates as a unique token. And then the question is, okay, well, what does that data refer to? What's the external reference? And that has to be defined, there has to be some entity which says, oh, yeah, this unique string refers to like this piece of art or digital content, or, you know, trading card or whatever. So NFT, the concept itself is like an incredibly broad idea. It's just, well, what if we took, you know, barcodes, and put them on chain so that they could be traded. And so they could circulate freely on a peer to peer basis and plugged into exchanges and things like that. So that concept is super valid, clearly has protocol market fit, right? People are using it for a really wide array of purposes, it's completely going to exist. May the valuations contract of NFTs in the aggregate? Definitely possible, probably likely. But I think the notion of creating enduring collectibles or artworks that have accompanying signatures, basically autographed art on the blockchain, that has totally been validated. I think that won't go away. I wonder if there's ideas, like BitCloud, for example, I don't know if you saw that, if there's ideas built on top of this concept, it doesn't have to be like Ethereum NFTs, it could be just the concept of non fungible tokens, whether those kinds of things can take hold. And they, it's less about financial transactions, and more about almost like, I don't know how to put it, but like staking identity in some way, whether it's BitCloud or identity of objects, like there might be some way of connecting physical reality and digital reality in some interesting ways. So just the financial aspect is a way to put some validity behind the identity. I wonder if there's ideas there that are yet to be discovered, or ideas that are yet to take hold. Like BitCloud seems interesting, seems shady as hell, seems a little scammy. I don't know if I like the idea that you can bet on people, essentially. Yeah, I think my market cap on BitCloud is like $90,000, and I haven't done anything there, so. Did you take, did you like take, like verify yourself or whatever? I have not. I think people would yell at me on Twitter if I did, so. And it's unclear whether it's a scam yet or not, right? It's unclear where it's coming from. Well, there is some details about the, you know, investors. It's backed by some pretty big name investors, so I probably wouldn't use the word scam to describe it, but it's got Ponzi like dynamics, like everything in crypto. So there's very questionable, and then also is it using people's likeness without their permission, which is, I think, a legal question, you know, so there's open questions around it. But, you know, is our public blockchains and, you know, that sort of architecture, is that going to be useful for decentralized or alternative forms of social media? 100% yes. You know, I'm super, super bullish on that idea. Basically, creating open protocols, open namespaces, ways to organize without the dependence on a single node effectively in Silicon Valley, you know, the Twitter node or the Facebook node. I think it's a matter of urgency that we create, you know, digital gathering spaces where you have strong property rights, you know, you have a claim on your identity, you have a claim on your data. And open architecture is our way to do that. I don't know if it'll be a blockchain, but certainly I think the general, you know, concept introduced by blockchains is a good template for how to, you know, organize these systems. Yeah, value freedom, value decentralization of power, whatever the mechanism. Let me ask you about love. So there is a Bitcoin maximalist community that sometimes, so those folks in general have a strong belief that Bitcoin is good for the world. And it's almost an ethical imperative to sort of help Bitcoin succeed, which I think as a member of any community, I think is beautiful to believe in the vision of the community. Right. There does seem to be some properties of what some may call like toxicity or derision and mockery and those kinds of things. You know, some folks have criticized this, right, that Bitcoin maximalism is not necessarily good for the world, even if Bitcoin is good for the world. What are your thoughts about this kind of approach philosophically or practically to the spread of Bitcoin? And is there a way that we can add more love to the world while we add more Bitcoin to the world? That's a great question. I mean, you know, Bitcoin is sort of what you make of it. So you can define your own path as you advocate for Bitcoin or don't for that matter. So my chosen approach is the approach you see here, which I try to minimize the amount of sort of harshness or mockery, although I've been known to be mean on Twitter too, you know. Well, Twitter is a specific, sorry to interrupt, is a specific medium where this takes its worst form. So I'm learning, listen, I'm actually because of this podcast, but in general, I'm part of different communities. And some are full of like unabashed love. And some are like, what I experienced on Twitter, the Bitcoin community at first, I was off put in terms of the intensity, the mockery. I bet. The layers of lol, like the layers of not taking anything seriously. And I think there's power to that. There's freedom to that. I appreciate it. I have respect for it. But it's not my thing on Twitter. It's just not the way I enjoy communicating on Twitter. I retired from Twitter. I hit 100,000 followers and then I retired. So I'm free now. I don't have to tweet anymore. It's great. But I totally can see the point. I wish that Bitcoiners were gentler in their approach. Not all Bitcoiners are like that. Of course, there's, you know, 50 to 100 million of them worldwide, and a few 10s of 1000s on Twitter. So I'm not going to claim that they're necessarily representative. The toxicity, though, is kind of a learned habit, because Bitcoin has had so many episodes where strong willed institutions, billionaires, the dice are pretty toxic, you could say, right? I'm basically mocking critics of Bitcoin. But at the same time, you're saying that the criticism has been predictable and repeatable, and it's been the same throughout. Yeah, and that's a pretty dismissive thing to say, right? That I can reduce you to an algorithm with 11 permutations. But the thing to remember, I guess, is that some of the best funded companies in the Bitcoin space, the most powerful miners, billionaires have tried to change and coopt and alter Bitcoin to shape it to their liking. And without these incredibly hardcore sort of high priests of the Bitcoin protocol, it would have been hopeless, hopelessly malleated in all number of ways. And so there is a reason why someone would be incredibly protective of Bitcoin. Does that justify immense toxicity on social media? Probably not. But it's a leaderless protocol. So the whole point is that it's money for enemies. And, you know, some of the Bitcoin maximalists came for me too, when I made suggestions that they didn't like. But, you know, I'm happy to use it, the protocol, because I know that that transaction will be final, regardless of how odious my counterparty is, or how, you know, politically disfavored their opinions are. See, I mean, and this is where there could be disagreements, but I think you have to think about what's effective as a defense mechanism of strong ideas. And I personally think that, like, kindness and thoughtfulness is much more effective because it lets the idea shine. As opposed to the personality of the individual humans overriding it. But there's debates on this, you know. I mean, I take your side on that. I think a patient and careful approach is the way to go. Now, do all critics deserve good faith engagement? No, I would say. A lot of critics of Bitcoin operate in extreme bad faith. And the reason why is because we're not just talking about technical questions. In fact, most of this conversation has not been technical, it's been political. Because Bitcoin is an intensely political idea. And so a lot of people are predisposed to totally hate it, and to wish, you know, death on Bitcoiners. I mean, there's a professor at GW, I saw earlier this week, that was musing about getting all the Bitcoiners on a boat and sinking it. Like, in what other context would a, you know, upstanding professor muse about mass murder? But in the context of Bitcoin, it's sort of okay, you know, within his peers, because you're talking about something that most people don't like. You know, it's a concept that's alien to them, that doesn't jive with the way they see the world. And so because it's so, you know, pitched from a political perspective, there's a lot of critics, as well as defenders that operate in bad faith, I would say. But that's the nature of the beast. It's because we're proposing a very disruptive thing. And there are people that would be disrupted by it. You wrote a blog post titled On Writing. You're, I think, an excellent writer. So let me ask, what does it take to be a good writer? What does it take to write some of the blog posts you've written? Sort of condense set of ideas in your head, the mess that's probably in your head and putting down on paper in a way that communicates the idea clearly and powerfully. So that was basically the point of the blog post is that being an impressive writer is different from being an effective writer. You know, so I think the answer to your question is humility, basically. So I think if you let pride and vanity seep into your writing, then you risk creating a very noisy signal. You know, creating a very inefficient channel for communicating literal neural arrangements from your brain to someone else's brain. And that's what I think about when I write is like, wow, I have the power to, at scale, change the literal physical composition of people's brains, right, to rewire them. If I make an idea that's so persuasive, that's so sticky, if I coin a phrase that is so pithy, then I can alter their brain. That's crazy. I mean, you're letting someone reach into your head and like, mess with it a little bit. That's unbelievable. And that's like a superpower. And if you could do that to 100,000 people at once, how powerful is that, right? You mentioned Descartes, I think, therefore I am. That's like literally rewired millions of brains throughout history. I mean, that's one of the most powerful, like, cogito urgo sum, one of the most powerful phrases ever written. And that sent a zillion philosophy undergraduates down a rabbit hole of skepticism that some of them didn't make it out of, you know? And they're convinced that, you know, the brain in the vat theory is true, and there's no way to know, you know, what our tangible experiences. But yeah, so that's the beauty of writing. And the thing that interferes with that is our pride, our desire to, you know, impress people and, you know, look good to them and show off our vocab and stuff. And that was the point of that piece is that I went on this journey where I eventually realized that I don't know if I'm any better of a writer for having realized it, but I think that is a necessary condition. So does that mean there's a value to striving for simplicity in the words, as opposed to, I mean, complexity? I think so, for sure. And we deal with complex topics all the time in crypto. And that's always a huge red flag for me. I mean, if you can't explain something simply, do you understand it, you know? Yeah. So if you're talking about something that complex, if you can't find simple ways to discuss it, my presumption is that you're actually obfuscating the truth. And this is what Orwell railed against with political language. You know, he really hated political language, because he felt that its authors were using deliberate obfuscation. And, you know, he hated euphemisms. And I hate euphemisms, too. You know, I much prefer, you know, forthrightness and clarity of thought. But most people when they write, don't really endeavor to be particularly clear. They might be writing to show off their startup, or, you know, to demonstrate to people how cool they are, or how well read they are, you know, they're displaying, it's like a peacock style display. What fraction of people write to actually communicate meaning? Small fraction. It's especially difficult because what I've detected is something in us humans as readers assign more credibility to people that obfuscate. So, like, simple, clear communication of an idea is not, like, the immediate reaction is not one where we assign credibility to the person. Like, that was brilliant. There's a lot of people that I kind of listened to without really understanding what the heck they're talking about, but it sounds musical and smart. And then I see a lot of folks assigning credibility to that person. And it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that there's that tension as a reader, that we appreciate the beauty and power of, like, complex weaving of words without assigning as much value to, like, actual clear communication of an idea. And I'm always skeptical in speech as well. When someone will describe someone as articulate, I'm always immediately skeptical of the value of what that person is saying. Because if you articulate, you can make bad ideas sound very acceptable and great. And Noam Chomsky has said this before, as a way to defend the way he speaks. He said that, like, he's suspicious of charismatic people because they can basically sell any kind of idea. He speaks in a very monotone and boring way so that whatever the value his ideas have, they'll shine through. There's something to that. I love that. But it's a difficult journey. It's a difficult path because then, I think it's the right path because ultimately you focus on the quality of your ideas and in the long term that wins. I agree. Just by way of advice, is there, if people are interested in Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, in your work, what are good books or resources on Bitcoin from you and from others that you can recommend that in your own journey helped you or you've seen help others? Well, it's very easy. It's much easier today to make the Bitcoin journey because the quality of content is so much better than it was when I started. I mean, when I learned about Bitcoin, there was the Bitcoin Wiki and the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and the subreddit and that was kind of it. And you had to just pick up everything. The economic theory hadn't really been worked out very much. So you had to pick everything up from scratch. The good news is that there's a huge abundance of content. And that's actually one of Bitcoin's greatest strengths is that people are totally inspired to write about it. And it's almost a rite of passage at this point if you're like a Bitcoin thinker to have your book. I don't have a book yet. I would love to recommend my book. I haven't written one. Do you think about writing a book? Yeah, I think it's my duty. 100%. Everyone that has created a lot of Bitcoin content probably should condense it into a book to give it an enduring status. It's interesting because you mentioned block size wars and you've written on a lot of different topics. So you could both write like a big like sapient style book about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, right? But you can also write a book on each like a specific thing. And now that you put pressure on yourself and talk about simplicity, right? Where do you lean on those different book journeys that you might take on? Do you have in you eventually like a Bitcoin book? I mean, I tallied up the words that I wrote in the last couple years on Bitcoin. It's like over 100,000 words a year. So that's two novels there. But yeah, I think I do. I think there's so much underexplored space in Bitcoin. I mean, a systematic interpretation of Satoshi's writings, for instance. And a lot of people don't want anyone to do that because they don't want it to have these religious overtones where you're engaging in interpretation. But that's something that should be done. There's a lot of Bitcoin histories that haven't been written. There was a great Bitcoin history recently published that's this is one of my recommendations is on the block size war by Jonathan beer, who runs probably the best research desk in the industry. So there's huge amounts of history that has transpired that hasn't been chronicled. And some of the accounts are indifferent. You know, they're often written by outsiders, you know, journalists that maybe don't fully engage with the Bitcoin system. But if you think the humans are interesting in the story to, of course, they're the most interesting thing. You know, I mean, Bitcoin itself doesn't really change that much. It's kind of this cold, you know, protocol that just sort of takes along with the characters are just fascinating. I mean, and there's so many unbelievable characters in the Bitcoin story. Unbelievable. Yeah, that's the cool thing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and just internet is like the weirdos, the brilliant weirdos, like, all the people in in the stuff that's already established are boring. Like economics professors are all boring, right? But the interesting people, the wild ones are, are the ones that are innovating on in the crypto space, which is, you know, that's where the dangerous weirdos are, and the exciting, brilliant weirdos. Well, you had to be kind of crazy to adopt Bitcoin in the first sort of five years of its life. So there's an adverse selection element there. I don't know if that's an uncharitable way to put it, but like, some of Bitcoin's earliest evangelists are not the evangelists I would have chosen, but they're the ones that we got. It's the one we got. But is there is there resources? You're basically saying, just throw a dart. And most books are going to be good? Or is there something that stands out to you? I mean, your average book is, you know, terrible, for sure. But not on Bitcoin, specifically, but just in general. It depends whether you like the computer science, the economics, or the history. But my recommendations would be, you know, obviously, the Bitcoin white paper, that's, and Satoshi's complimentary writings, that's very important is to try and understand the intentions behind the system. And also to understand the system without having your view colored by some third party's description of it. Most descriptions of Bitcoin are really bad. So just go to the originals, go to the Hal Finney's post, Satoshi's post on Bitcoin talk, there's a huge amount of lucidity there. And actually, most of our questions about Bitcoin today that we have a decade later were really answered in those earliest days. People just don't know it. The canonical economic work relating to Bitcoin, a lot of people don't like it. I think it's fine, would be the Bitcoin standard. A lot of people don't like it. I just read it. It's good. I like it. I think it's a good description of sort of the Austrian perspective, and then how it relates to Bitcoin. There isn't that much about Bitcoin in there. But I think the point is, once you've understood, you know, Saifedean's view of monetary policy, Bitcoin makes a ton of sense, you don't actually need to argue for it that much. So the Bitcoin standard is a good introduction to sort of the orthodox thought in Bitcoin. There's a more recent book called Layered Money, which I liked by Nick Bhatia, which goes into more depth about what I was talking about early in the conversation, the layered approach to scaling. And that's a really critical thing to understand. Then technical books about Bitcoin. I like Grokking Bitcoin, which is a very computer science heavy one. There's a good textbook called Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Arvind Narayan. I think he's a Princeton computer science professor, which is really good at building intuition. Antonopoulos's books, Mastering Bitcoin are good. Then there's like simpler intuition building books that aren't hardcore on the economics or the protocol design. So you have like Inventing Bitcoin by Jan Pritzker, which is good. You have Bitcoin Clarity by Kiara Bakkers. As you can tell, I have like a, my bookshelf is like mostly Bitcoin books. Well, that's a good selection. And of course, like you said, your writing and your book that comes out this year or next year? I think I'm going to need 18 months. But most of the good Bitcoin content is just online, on Medium, on Twitter. So it's a decentralized consensus kind of thing. What about book recommendations that you could give people who love these outside of the world of crypto that maybe had an impact on your life? Fiction, like sci fi, maybe technical, philosophical. Is there something you would recommend that people might read? I really liked the three body problem. But that's a really hackneyed recommendation. But it really made me think and I like the hard sci fi, you know, the commitment to science and science fiction. So I thought it was very clever. Is there one? Is there something that really annoys you? In terms of the opposite of hard sci fi, like that doesn't get stuff right movies? I mean, I have issues when I watch like, ostensibly sci fi or fantasy films that are not consistent about this, the rules for the universe that they've laid out, or where there's impossible to comprehend, like Christopher Nolan's latest film. Oh, yeah. You needed like a spreadsheet to understand that. Yeah. I trust that maybe he was consistent about the rules of his universe. I just did not understand it at all. In that sense, I really probably one of my favorites is 2001 Space Odyssey. It's so obviously it's many, many decades ago, but it's quite brilliant in both its consistency and the depth of thought put into like, what the technology would actually be. Not in like visually, not in kind of silly graphical ways, but in terms of function and its impact on humanity. So, but that takes care. That takes a lot of work and that takes genius actually, which is why Kubrick is regarded for what he is. What advice? You've taken an interesting journey through your life. You were at Fidelity, a philosophy major. You're now one of the seminal minds in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Who the hell knows what the next 5, 10 years looks for you. If you were to give advice to somebody young today, making their way through life, making a career, what kind of advice would you give? See, the problem with advice is that in a world where so much of success is defined by luck and serendipity is that the advice givers often don't know why they've been successful, right? And so they might say, you know, I was wearing a green tie on the day of my job interview and so you should go out and wear green ties. And so they might just get the causality completely wrong, right? I mean, I'm not going to claim that I'm super successful yet, but see, that's the problem is that I don't think my journey is replicable necessarily. So, you know, who am I to give advice? Although the one thing I will say is that the thing I did right was to become completely obsessed with a domain I found really interesting and held promise. Like if I had been really interested in like Magic the Gathering, I wouldn't have been able to like do much with that aside from build like a killer, you know, card pack or whatever. And I wasn't afraid to, you know, really put myself out there and, you know, float my thoughts online and see how people reacted to them. Even if I said stuff that was completely erroneous or wrong all the time, the rewards to writing and just publishing content are immense, as you know, obviously, it's the most high leverage activity I think most young people have available to them. And I was very lucky and I benefited from a lot of favorable coincidences, a lot of people that took a chance on me. And if I had more time, I would sit here and name them. Is there something in your actions that made you more open to the benefits of luck? Sort of, you know, luck can bring you a lot of positive and negative things. So saying you're lucky means you were able to ride the wave of whatever positive stuff luck brought you. Well, that's right, you have to put yourself in a position to be lucky. And most people don't. So you just have to get as many shots on goal as possible. And, of course, luck plays an undeniable role in any career path, for sure. But you do have to make yourself available to it. And you have to take a ton of chances. But yeah, that's the problem with advice. It's just so hard to replicate it. So I find it illegitimate most of the time. You heard it here, kids, don't listen to anything Nick just said. Exactly. Wear a green tie to your interviews, it'll work out well. Do you think there's a meaning or reason to any of this, this existence, this life? Well, we make our own meaning, for sure. I find a huge amount of meaning in what I do. I find it beautiful, I feel very lucky and blessed to be in the line of work that I'm in, you know, to have your hobby and your passion and your job just be a completely integrated thing. So that's where I find meaning. But you're just a bag of like cells and bacteria that eventually dissipates, dies, and it goes into the ground and disappears back into the universe. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Well, that may be true. But I find the sublime in things like Bitcoin. I find it incredibly inspiring to work on it. I believe it's 100 year plus project. And, you know, it stirs those aesthetic emotions in you, as I'm sure your work does. So you find it beautiful? Absolutely. Absolutely. And inspiring more than just beautiful. So you have hope for human civilization and Bitcoin as part of that hope? Yeah, it's a very optimistic view. And people accuse us of being pessimists and saying that we are, you know, rooting for the collapse of civilization. Completely false. Bitcoiners are wildly optimistic, because they believe that you can monetize a completely new system from scratch and compete with the strongest superpower in the military and the dollar and everything that goes with that. That's the craziest, most ludicrously optimistic proposition imaginable. So I think Bitcoiners are the most optimistic people out there. I don't think there's a better way to end it on that hopeful vision of human civilization. Nick, I've heard a lot of amazing things about you. I was binge watching your interviews, binge reading your blogs, fell in love with your work. You're a good dude. Inspiring, brilliant. Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time with me today. My absolute pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Carter, and thank you to The Information, Athletic Greens, Four Sigmatic, and Blinkist. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words about freedom and beauty from Stephen King. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them, they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices. But still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates | Lex Fridman Podcast #173

The following is a conversation with Tyler Cohen, an economist at George Mason University and co creator of an amazing economics blog called Marginal Revolution, author of many books, including The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over and his most recent Big Business, A Love Letter to an American Antihero. He's truly a polymath in his work, including his love for food, which makes this amazing podcast called Conversations with Tyler really fun to listen to. Quick mention of our sponsors, Linode, ExpressVPN, Simplisafe and Public Goods. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, given Tyler's culinary explorations, let me say that one of the things that makes me sad about my love hate relationship with food is that while I've found a simple diet, plain meat, veggies, that makes me happy in day to day life, I sometimes wish I had the mental ability to moderate consumption of food so that I could truly enjoy meals that go way outside of that diet. I've seen my mom, for example, enjoy a single piece of chocolate and yet if I were to eat one piece of chocolate, the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box. This is definitely something I would like to fix because some of the amazing artistry in this world happens in the kitchen and some of the richest human experiences happen over a unique meal. I recently was eating cheeseburgers with Joe Rogan and John Donahue late at night in Austin, talking about jiu jitsu and life and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience. Magic made possible by the incredibly delicious cheeseburgers. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Tyler Cohen. Would you say economics is more art or science or philosophy or even magic? What is it? Economics is interesting because it's all of the above. To start with magic, the notion that you can make some change and simply everyone's better off, that is a kind of modern magic that has replaced old style magic. It's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact. It's a science in the sense that occasionally propositions are falsified. Are a few basic things we know and however trivial they may sound, if you don't know them, you're out of luck. So all of the above. But from my outsider's perspective, economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple, almost like E equals MC squared, general models of how our human society will function when you do a certain thing. But it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic to think that a single formula or just a set of simple principles can describe behavior of billions of human beings with all the complexity that we have involved. So do you have a sense there's a hope for economics to have those kinds of physics level descriptions and models of the world? Or is it just our desperate attempts as humans to make sense of it even though it's more desperate than rigorous and serious and actually predictable like a physics type science? I don't think economics will ever be very predictive. It's most useful for helping you ask better questions. You look at something like game theory. Well, game theory never predicted USA and USSR would have a war, would not have a war. But trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict, if you know game theory, it's just a much more interesting discussion. Are you surprised that we, speaking of the Soviet Union and the United States and speaking of game theory, are you surprised that we haven't destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons yet? Like that simple formulation of mutually assured destruction, that's a good example of an explanation that perhaps allows us to ask better questions. But it seems to have actually described the reality of why we haven't destroyed ourselves with these ultra powerful weapons. Are you surprised, do you think the game theoretic explanation is at all accurate there? I think we will destroy each other with those weapons. Eventually. Eventually. Look, it's a very low probability event. So I'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet. I'm a little surprised it came as close as it did. You know, you're general thinking, realizing it might've just been a flock of birds or it wasn't a first strike attack from the USA. We got very lucky on that one. But if you just keep on running the clock on a low probability event, it will happen. And it may not be USA and China, USA and Russia, whatever. You know, it could be the Saudis and Turkey. And it might not be nuclear weapons, it might be some other destruction. Bio weapons. But it simply will happen is my view. And I've argued at best we have 700 or 800 years and that's being generous. A worst? How long we got? Well, maybe it's like a post on arrival process, right? So tiny probability could come any time. Probably not in your lifetime. But the chance presumably increases the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are. So the Poisson process description doesn't take in consideration the game theoretic aspect. So another way to consider is repeated games, iterative games. So is there something about our human nature that allows us to fight against probability? Reduce, like the closer we get to trouble, the more we're able to figure out how to avoid trouble. The same thing is for when you take exams or you go and take classes, the closer or paper deadlines, the closer you get to a deadline, the better you start to perform and get your shit together and actually get stuff done. I'm really not so negative on human nature. And as an economist, I very much see the gains from cooperation. But if you just ask, are there outliers in history? Like was there a Hitler, for instance? Obviously. And again, you let the clock tick, another Hitler with nuclear weapons, doesn't per se care about his own destruction, it will happen. So your sense is fundamentally people are good, but outliers happen. A trembling hand equilibrium is what we would call it. Trembling hand equilibrium? That the basic logic is for cooperation, which is mostly what we've seen, even between enemies. But every now and then someone does something crazy and you don't know how to react to it. And you can't always beat Hitler. Sometimes Hitler drags you down. To push back, is it possible that the crazier the person, the less likely they are, and in a way where we're safe, meaning like, this is the kind of proposition, I had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this, where he thinks that like if you have a graph, like evil people can't also be geniuses. So this is his defense why evil people will not get control of nuclear weapons, because to be truly evil. But evil meaning sort of, you can argue that, not even the evil of Hitler we're talking about, because Hitler had a kind of view of Germany and all those kinds of, there's like, he probably deluded himself and the people around him to think that he's actually doing good for the world, similar with Stalin and so on. By evil, I mean more like almost like terrorists to where they wanna destroy themselves and the world. Like those people will never be able to be actually skilled enough to do, to deliver that kind of mass scale destruction. So the hope is that it's very unlikely that the kind of evil that would lead to extinctions of humans or mass destruction is so unlikely that we're able to last way longer than some 100, 800 years. Is that? It's very unlikely. In that sense, I accept the argument, but that's why you need to let the clock tick. It's also the best argument for bureaucracy. To negotiate a bureaucracy, it actually selects against pure evil because you need to build alliances. So bureaucracy in that regard is great, right? It keeps out the worst apples. But look, put it this way, could you imagine 35 years from now, the Osama bin Laden of the future has nukes or very bad bio weapons? It seems to me you can. And Osama was pretty evil. And actually even he failed, right? But nonetheless, that's what the 700 or 800 years is there for. And there might be destructive technologies that don't have such a high cost of production or such a high learning curve. Like cyber attacks or artificial intelligence, all those kinds of things. Yeah. I mean, let me ask you a question. Let's say you could as an act of will, by spending a million dollars, obliterate any city on earth and everyone in it dies. And you'll get caught and you'll be sentenced to death, but you can make it happen just by willing it. How many months does it take before that happens? So the obvious answer is like very soon. There's probably a good answer for that because you can consider how many millionaires there are, how many you could look at that, right? Right. I have a sense that there's just people that have a million dollars. I mean, there's a certain amount, but have a million dollars, have other interests that will outweigh the interest of destroying an entire city. Like there's a particular, like, I mean, maybe that's a hope. It's why we should be nice to the wealthy too, right? Yeah. Yeah, all that trash talking as Bill Gates, we should stop that because that doesn't inspire the other future Bill Gates is to be nice to the world. That's true. But your sense is the cheaper it gets to destroy the world, the more likely it becomes. Now, when I say destroy the world, there's a trick in there. I don't think literally every human will die, but it would set back civilization by an extraordinary degree. It's then just hard to predict what comes next. But a catastrophe where everyone dies, that probably has to be something more like an asteroid or supernova. And those are purely exogenous for the time being, at least. So I immigrated to this country. I was born in the Soviet Union in Russia and... Which one? Which one? I guess it's an important question. You were born in the Soviet Union, right? Yes, I was born in the Soviet Union. The rest is details, but I grew up in Moscow, Russia. But I came to this country, and this country even back there, but it's always symbolized to me a place of opportunity where everybody could build the most incredible things, especially in the engineering side of things. Just invent and build and scale and have a huge impact on the world. And that's been, to me, the... That's my version of the American ideal, the American dream. Do you think the American dream is still there? Do you think... What do you think of that notion in itself, like from an economics perspective, from a human perspective, is it still alive? And how do you think about it? The American dream. The American dream is mostly still there. If you look at which groups are the highest earners, it is individuals from India and individuals from Iran, which is a fairly new development. Great for them, not necessarily easy. Both you could call persons of color, may have faced discrimination, also on the grounds of religion, yet they've done it. That's amazing. It says great things about America. Now, if you look at native born Americans, the story's trickier. People think intergenerational mobility has declined a lot recently, but it has not for native born Americans. For about, I think, 40 years, it's been fairly constant, which is sort of good, but compared to much earlier times, it was much higher in the past. I'm not sure we can replicate that, because look, go to the beginning of the 20th century, very few Americans finish high school, or even have much wealth. There's not much credentialism. There aren't that many credentials. So there's more upward mobility across the generations than today. And it's a good thing that we had it. I'm not sure we should blame the modern world for not being able to reproduce that. But look, the general issue of who gets into Harvard or Cornell? Is there an injustice? Should we fix that? Is there too little opportunity for the bottom, say, half of Americans? Absolutely. It's a disgrace how this country has evolved in that way. And in that sense, the American dream is clearly ailing. But it has had problems from the beginning, for blacks, for women, for many other groups. I mean, isn't that the whole challenge of opportunity and freedom is that it's hard, and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society is unequal often, and that's the injustice of society. But the whole point of that freedom is that over time, it becomes better and better. You start to fix the leaks, the issues, and it keeps progressing in that kind of way. But ultimately, there's always the opportunity, even if it's harder, there's the opportunity to create something truly special, to move up, to be president, to be a leader in whatever the industry that you're passionate about. We each have podcasts, right, in English. The value of joining that American English language network is much higher today than it was 30 years ago, mostly because of the internet. So that makes immigration returns themselves skewed. So going to the US, Canada, or the UK, I think has become much more valuable in relative terms than, say, going to France, which is still a pretty well off, very nice country. If you had gone to France, your chance of having a globally known podcast would be much smaller. Yeah, this is the interesting thing about how much intellectual influence the United States has. I don't know if it's connected to what we're discussing here, the freedom and opportunity of the American dream, or does it make any sense to you that we have so much impact on the rest of the world in terms of ideas? Is it just simply because English is the primary language of the world, or is there something fundamental to the United States that drives the development of ideas? It's almost like what's cool, what's entertaining, what's like meme culture, the internet culture, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the podcasts, the movies, music, all that stuff, driving culture. There's something above and beyond language in the United States. It's a sense of entertainment really mattering, how to connect with your audience, being direct and getting to the point, how humor is integrated even with science that is pretty strongly represented here, much more so than on the European continent. Britain has its own version of this, which it does very well, and not surprisingly, they're hugely influential in music, comedy, most of the other areas you mentioned. Canada, yes, but their best talent tends to come here, but you could say it's like a broader North American thing and give them their fair share of credit. What about science? There's a sense higher education is really strong, research is really strong in the United States, but it just feels like, culturally speaking, when we zoom out, scientists aren't very cool here. Most people wouldn't be able to name basically a single scientist. Maybe they would say like, they would say what, like Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe, and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't exactly a scientist, he's a science communicator. So there's not the same kind of admiration of science and innovators as there is of like, athletes or actors, actresses, musicians. Well, you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to. It may or may not be best for science. And we have Spock from Star Trek, who is still a big deal, but look at it this way. Which country is most comfortable with inegalitarian rewards for scientists, whether it's fame or money? And I still think it's here. Some of that's just the tax rate. Some of it is a lot of America is set up for rich people to live really well. And again, that's going to attract a lot of top talent. And you ask like, the two best vaccines. I know the Pfizer vaccine is sort of from Germany, sort of from Turkey, but it's nonetheless being distributed through the United States. Moderna, an ethnic Armenian immigrant through Lebanon, first to Canada, then down here to Boston, Cambridge area. Those are incredible vaccines. And US nailed it. Yeah, well, that's more almost like the, I don't know what you would call it, engineering, the sort of scaling. That's what US is really good at, not just inventing of ideas, but taking an idea and actually building the thing and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale. I think some people would attribute that to the general word of capitalism. I don't know if you would. Sure. What in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism as it's implemented in America? I don't know if you would say capitalism really exists in America, but to the extent that it does. People use the word capitalism in so many different ways. What is capitalism? The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods, which I favor in most areas. But no, I don't think the private sector should own our F16s or military assets. Government owned water utilities seem to work as well as privately owned water utilities. But with all those qualifications put to the side, business, for the most part, innovates better than government. It is oriented toward consumer services. The biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages. Business is great at getting things done. USA is fundamentally a nation of business and that makes us a nation of opportunity. So I am indeed mostly a fan. Subject to numerous caveats. What's the con? What are some negative downsides of capitalism in your view or some things that we should be concerned about maybe for longterm impacts of capitalism? Again, capitalism takes a different form in each country. I would say in the United States, our weird blend of whatever you want to call it has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning, has been a force of taking away land from Native Americans and oppressing them pretty much from the beginning. It has done very well by immigrants for the most part. We revel in championitarian creative destruction more. So we don't just prop up national champions forever. And there's a precariousness to life for some people here that is less so say in Germany or the Netherlands. We have weaker communities in some regards than say Northwestern Europe often would. That has pluses and minuses. I think it makes us more creative. It's a better country in which to be a weirdo than say Germany or Denmark. But there is truly, whether from the government or from your private community, there is less social security in some fundamental sense. On the point of weirdo, what, that's kind of a beautiful little statement. What is that? I mean, that seems to be, you know, you could think of a guy like Elon Musk and say that he's a weirdo. Is that the sense in which you're using weirdo like outside of the norm, like breaking conventions? Absolutely. And here that is either acceptable or even admired or to be a loner. And since so many people are outsiders and that we're all immigrants is selecting for people who left something behind, we're willing to leave behind their families, we're willing to undergo a certain brutality of switch in their lives, makes us a nation of weirdos and weirdos are creative. And Denmark is not a nation of weirdos. It's a wonderful place, you know, great for them. Ideally you want part of the world to be full of weirdos and innovating. And the other part of the world to be a little kind of chicken shit, risk averse and enjoy the benefit to the innovation and to give people these smooth lives and six weeks off and free ride. And everyone's like, oh, American way versus European way, but basically they're compliments. Yeah, that's fascinating. I used to have this conversation with my like parents when I was growing up and just others from the immigrant kind of flow. And they use this term, especially in Russian is, you know, to criticize something I was doing, that was suggest, you know, normal people don't do this. And I used to be really offended by that, but, you know, as I got older, I realized that that's a kind of compliment because in the same kind of, I would say, way that you're saying that is the American ideal, because if you want to do anything special or interesting, you don't want to be doing in one particular avenue what normal people do, because that won't be interesting. Russians, I think fit in very well here because the ones who come are weirdos. And there's a very different Russian weirdo tradition like Alyosha, right? And by this card, I miss off. Or Perelman, the mathematician, they're weirdos. And they have their own different kind of status in Soviet Union, Russia, wherever. And when Russians come to America, they stay pretty Russian, but it seems to me a week later, they've somehow adjusted. And the ways in which they might want to be like grumpier than Americans, not smile, think that people who smile are idiots, like they can do that. No one takes that away from them. What are you, on a tiny tangent, I'd love to hear if you have thoughts about Grisha Perelman turning down the Fields Medal. Is that something you admire? Does that make sense to you that somebody, you know, with the structure of Nobel Prizes, of these huge awards, of the reputations, the hierarchy of everyone saying, applauding, how special you are, and here's a person who was doing one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mathematics. It doesn't want the stupid prize and doesn't want recognition, doesn't want to do interviews, it doesn't want to be famous. What do you make of that? It's great. Look, prizes are corrupting. After scientists win Nobel Prizes, they tend to become less productive. Now, statistically, it's hard to sort out the different effects. There's aggression toward the mean. Does the prize make you too busy? It's a little tricky, but. There's not enough Nobel Prizes either to gather enough data. Right, but I've known a lot of Nobel Prize winners, and it is my sense they become less productive. They repeat more of their older messages, which may be highly socially valuable, but if someone wants to turn their back on that and keep on working, which I assume is what he's doing, that's awesome. I mean, we should respect that. It's like he wins a bigger prize, right? Our extreme respect. Yeah. Wow. Grisha, if you're listening, I need to talk to you soon. Okay. I've been trying to get ahold of him. Okay. Back to capitalism. I gotta ask you, just competition in general, in this world of weirdos, is competition good for the world? This kind of seems to be one of the fundamental engines of capitalism, right? Do you see it as ultimately constructive or destructive for the world? What really matters is how good your legal framework is. So competition within nature for food leads to bloody conflict all the time. The animal world is quite unpleasant, to say the least. If you have something like the rule of law and clearly defined property rights, which are within reason justly allocated, competition probably is gonna work very well. But it's not an unalloyed good thing at all. It can be highly destructive. Military competition, right? Which actually is itself sometimes good, but it's not good per se. What aspects of life do you think we should protect from competition? Is there some, you said like the rule of law, is there some things we should keep away from competition? Well, the fight for territory, most of all, right? So violence, anything that involves like actual physical violence. Right, and it's not that I think the current borders are just. I mean, go talk to Hungarians, Romanians, Serbians, Bosnians, they'll talk your ear off. And some of them are probably right. But at the end of the day, we have some kind of international order. And I would rather we more or less stick with it. If Catalonians wanna leave, they keep up with it, let them go, but. What about a space of like healthcare? This is where you get into a tension of like between capitalism and kind of more, I don't wanna use socialism, but those kinds of policies that are less free market. I think in this country, healthcare should be much more competitive. So you go to hospitals, doctors, they don't treat you like a customer. They treat you like an idiot or like a child or someone with third party payment. And it's a pretty humiliating experience often. Yeah. Do you think a free market in general is possible? Like a pure free market? And is that a good goal to strive for? I don't think the term pure free market's well defined because you need a legal order. Legal order has to make decisions on like what is intellectual property more important than ever. There's no benchmark that like represents the pure free market way of doing things. What will penalties be? How much do we put into law enforcement? No simple answers, but just saying free market doesn't pin down what you're gonna do on those all important questions. So free market is an economics, I guess, idea. So it's not possible for free market to generate the rules that are like emergent, like self governing? It generates a lot of them, right? Through private norms, through trade associations. International trade is mostly done privately and by norms. So it's certainly possible, but at the end of the day, I think you need governments to draw very clear lines to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems. You know, I've been hanging out with other group of weirdos, lately Michael Malice, who espouses to be an anarchist, anarchism, which is like, I think intellectually just a fascinating set of ideas, where taking free market to the full extreme of basically saying there should be no government, what is it? Oversight, I guess, and then everything should be fully, like all the agreements, all the collectives you form should be voluntary, not based on the geographic land you were born on and so on. Do you think that's just a giant mess? Like, do you think it's possible for an anarchist society to work where it's, you know, in a fully distributed way, people agree with each other, not just on financial transactions, but you know, on their personal security, on sort of military type of stuff, on healthcare, on education, all those kinds of things. And where does it break down? Well, I wouldn't press a button to say get rid of our current constitution, which I view is pretty good and quite wise, but I think the deeper point is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic and we should take the anarchists seriously. So globally, there's a kind of anarchy across borders, even within federalistic systems, they're typically complex. There's not a clear transitivity necessarily of who has the final say over what, just the state vis a vis its people. There's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard. So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy. You wanna squish your anarchy into the right corners. And I don't think there's a theoretical answer how to do it, but you start with a country, like is it working well enough now? This country, you'd say mostly, you'd certainly wanna make a lot of improvements. And that's why I don't wanna press that get rid of the constitution button, but to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point. Always try to learn from any opinion. What in it is true? I'm just like marveling at the poetry of saying that we should squish our anarchy into the right corners of it. Okay, I gotta ask, I've been talking with, since we're doing a whirlwind introduction to all of economics, I've been talking to a few objectivists recently and just, Ayn Rand comes up as a person, as a philosopher throughout many conversations. A lot of people really despise her. A lot of people really love her. It's always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy or a human being arouses that much emotion in either direction, does she make, do you understand, first of all, that level of emotion and what are your thoughts about Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism? Is it useful at all to think about this kind of formulation of a rational self interest, if I could put it in those words, or I guess more negatively the selfishness or she would put, I guess, the virtue of selfishness. Ayn Rand was a big influence on me growing up. The book that really mattered for me was Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. The notion that wealth creates opportunity and good lives and wealth is something we ought to valorize and give very high status. It's one of her key ideas. I think it's completely correct. I think she has the most profound and articulate statement of that idea. That said, as a philosopher, I disagree with her on most things. And I did, even like as a boy, when I was reading her, I read Plato before Ayn Rand. And in a Socratic dialogue, there's all these different points of view being thrown around. And whomever it is you agree with, you understand the wisdom is in the coming together of the different points of view. And she doesn't have that. So altruism can be wonderful in my view. Humans are not actually that rational. Self interest is often poorly defined. To pound the table and say existence exists. I wouldn't say I disagree, but I'm not sure that it's a very meaningful statement. I think the secret to Ayn Rand is that she was Russian. I'd love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive. I'd only ask her about Russia, which she mostly never talked about after writing We the Living. And she is much more Russian than she seems at first, even like purging people from the objectivist circles. It's like how Russians, especially female Russians, so often purge their friends. It's weird, all the parallels. So you're saying, so yes, so assuming she's still not around, but if she is and she comes onto your podcast, can you dig into that a little bit? Do you mean like her personal demons around the social and economic Russia of the time, when she escaped? The traumas she suffered there, what she really likes in the music and literature and why. Music and literature, huh? And getting deeply into that, her view of relations between the sexes and Russia, how it differs from America, why she still carries through the old Russian vision in her fiction, this extreme sexual dimorphism, but with also very strong women, to me is a uniquely, at least Eastern European vision, mostly Russian, I would say. And that's in her, that's her actual real philosophy, not this table bounding existence exists. And that's not talked about enough. She's a Russian philosopher. Or Soviet, whatever you wanna call it. And if she wasn't so certain, she could have been a Dostoevsky where it's not, that certainty is almost the thing that brings out the adoration of millions, but also the hatred of millions. She became a cult figure in a somewhat Russian like manner. Yeah. Yeah. It is what it is. But I love the idea that, again, you're just dropping bombs that are poetic, that the wisdom is in the coming together of ideas. It's kind of interesting to think that no one human possesses wisdom. No one idea is the wisdom. That the coming together is the wisdom. Like in my view, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 18th century British biography. It's in essence a coauthored work, Boswell and Johnson. It's one of the greatest philosophy books ever, though it is commonly regarded as a biography. John Stuart Mill, who in a sense was coauthoring with Harriet Taylor, better philosopher than is realized, though he's rated very, very highly. Plato slash Socrates, a lot of the greatest works are in a kind of dialogue form. Curtis Faust would be another example. It's very much a dialogue. And yes, it's drama, but it's also a philosophy. Shakespeare, maybe the wisest thinker of them all. In your book, Big Business, speaking of Ayn Rand, Big Business, A Love Letter to an American Antihero, you make the case for the benefit that large businesses bring to society. Can you explain? If you look at, say, the pandemic, which has been a catastrophic event, right, for many reasons, but who is it that saved us? So Amazon has done remarkably well. They upped their delivery game more or less overnight with very few hitches. I've ordered hundreds of Amazon packages, direct delivery food, whether it's DoorDash or Uber Eats, or using Whole Foods through Amazon shipping. Again, it's gone remarkably well. Switching over our entire higher educational system, basically within two weeks, to Zoom. Zoom did it. I mean, I've had a Zoom outage, but their performance rate has been remarkably high. So if you just look at resources, competence, incentives, who's been the star performers, the NBA even, just canceling the season as early as they did, sending a message like, hey, people, this is real, and then pulling off the bubble with not a single found case of COVID and having all the testing set up in advance. Big business has done very well lately, and throughout the broader course of American history, in my view, has mostly been a hero. Can we engage in a kind of therapy session? I'm often troubled by the negativity towards big business, and I wonder if you could help figure out how we remove that or maybe first psychoanalyze it and then how we remove it. It feels like once we've gotten wifi on flights, on airplane flights, people started complaining about how shady the connection is, right? They take it for granted immediately and then start complaining about little details. Another example that's closer to, especially as an aspiring entrepreneur, is closer to the things I'm thinking about is Jack Dorsey with Twitter. To me, Twitter has enabled an incredible platform of communication, and yet the biggest thing that people talk about is not how incredible this platform is. They essentially use the platform to complain about the censorship of a few individuals as opposed to how amazing it is. Now, you should talk about how shady the wifi is and how censorship or the removal of Donald Trump from the platform is a bad thing, but it feels like we don't talk about the positive impacts at scale of these technologies. Can you explain why and is there a way to fix it? I don't know if we can fix it. I think we are beings of high neuroticism for the most part as a personality trait. Not everyone, but most people. And as a compliment to that, if someone says 10 nice things about you and one insult, you're more bothered by the insult than you're pleased by the nice things, especially if the insult is somewhat true. So you have these media, these vehicles, Twitter is one you mentioned, where there's all kinds of messages going back and forth, and you're really bugged by the messages you don't like. Most people are neurotic to begin with. It's not only taken out on big business, to be clear. So Congress catches a lot of grief and some of it they deserve, yes. Religion is not attacked the same way, but religiosity is declining. If you poll people, the military still polls quite well, but people are very disillusioned with many things. And the Martin Gury thesis that because of the internet, you just see more of things. And the more you see of something, whether it's good, bad, or in between, the more you will find to complain about, I suspect is the fundamental mechanism here. I mean, look at Clubhouse, right? To me, it's a great service, may or may not be like my thing, but gives people this opportunity. No one makes you go on it. And all these media articles like, oh, is Clubhouse gonna wreck things? Are they gonna break things? New York Times is complaining. Of course, it's their competitor as well. I'm like, give these people a chance, talk it up. You may or may not like it. Let's praise the people who are getting something done. Very Ayn Randian point. As an economic thinker, as a writer, as a podcaster, what do you think about Clubhouse? What do you think about... Okay, let me just throw my feeling about it. I used to use Discord, which is another service where people use voice. So the only thing you do is just hear each other. There's no face, you just see a little icon. That's the essential element of Clubhouse. And there's an intimacy to voice only communication. That's hard. That didn't make sense to me, but it was just what it is, which feels like something that won't last for some reason, maybe it's the cynical view. But what's your sense about the intimacy of what's happening right now with Clubhouse? I've greatly enjoyed what I've done, but I'm not sure it's for me in the long run for two reasons. First, if you compare it to doing a podcast, podcasting has greater reach than Clubhouse. So I would rather put time into my podcast. But then also my core asset, so to speak, is I'm a very fast reader. So audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage. I don't speak or listen faster than other people. In fact, I'm a slower listener because I like 1.0, not 1.5X. So I should spend less time on audio and more time reading and writing. Yeah, it's interesting because you mentioned podcasts and audio books, the podcasts are recorded and so I can skip things, like I can skip commercials, or I can skip parts where it's like, ugh, this part is boring. With live conversations, especially when, there's a magic to the fact when you have a lot of people participating in that conversation, but some people are like, ugh, this topic, they're going into this thing and you can't skip it or you can't fast forward, you can go 1.5X or 2X, you can't speed it up. Nevertheless, there's a tension between that, so that's the productivity aspect, with the actual magic of live communication, where anything can happen, where Elon Musk can ask the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad, about like, hey, somebody holding a gun to your head, there's something shady going on, the magic of that. That's also my criticism of like, there's been a recent conversation with Bill Gates that he won a platform and had a regular interview on the platform without allowing the possibility of the magic of the chaos. So I'm not exactly sure, it's probably not the right platform for you and for many other people who are exceptionally productive in other places, but there's still nevertheless a magic to the chaos that can be created with live conversation that gives me pause. Maybe what it's perfect for is the tribute. So they had an episode recently that I didn't hear, but I heard it was wonderful. It was anecdotes about Steve Jobs. That you can't do one to one, right? And you don't want control. You want different people appearing and stepping up and saying their bit. And Clubhouse is 110% perfect for that. The tribute. I love that, the tribute. But there's also the possibility, I think there was a time when somebody arranged a conversation with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage. I remember that happened a long time ago. And it was very formal. It could have probably gone better, but it was still magical to have these people that obviously had a bunch of tension throughout their history. It's so frictionless to have two major figures in world history just jump on a Clubhouse stage. Putin and Elon Musk. Putin and Elon Musk. And that's exactly it. So there's a language barrier there. There's also the problem that in particular, it's like Biden would have a similar problem. It's like they're just not into a new technology. So it's very hard to catch the Kremlin up to, first of all, Twitter, but to catch them up to Clubhouse, you have to have the, Elon Musk has a sense of the internet, the humor, the memes, and all that kind of stuff that you have to have in order to use a new app and figure out the timing, the beat, what is this thing about? So that's the challenge there. But that's exactly it. That magic of have two big personalities just show up. And I wonder if it's just the temporary thing that we're going through with the pandemic where people are just lonely and they're seeking for that human connection that we usually get elsewhere through our work. But they'll stay lonely, in my opinion. You think so? I do. So it is a pandemic thing, but I think it will persist. And the idea of wanting to be connected to more of the world, Clubhouse will still offer that. And all the mental health issues out there, a lot of people have broken ties and they will still be lonely post vaccines. Yeah, I, from an artificial intelligence perspective, have a sense that there is like a deep loneliness in the world, that all of us are really lonely. Like we don't even acknowledge it. Even people in happy relationships, it feels like there's like an iceberg of loneliness in all of us, like seeking to be understood, like deeply understood, understanding us, like having somebody with whom you can have a deep interaction enough to where you can, they can help you to understand yourself and they also understand you. Like I have a sense that artificial intelligence systems can provide that as well, but humans, I think crave that from other humans in ways that we perhaps don't acknowledge. And I have a hope that technology will enable that more and more, like Clubhouse is an example that allows that. Are touring bots gonna out compete Clubhouse? Like why not sort of program your own session? You'll just talk into your device and say here's the kind of conversation I want and it will create the characters for you. And it may not be as good as Elon and Vladimir Putin, but it will be better than ordinary Clubhouse. Yeah, and one of the things that's missing, it's not just conversation, it's memory. So longterm memories, what current AI systems don't have is sharing experience together. Forget the words, it's like sharing the highs and the lows of life together and the systems around us remembering that. Remembering we've been through that. Like that's the thing that creates really close relationships, is going through some shit. Like struggle. If you survive together, there's something really difficult that bonds you with other humans. And this is related to immigration and the American dream. In what way? The people who have come to this country, however weird and different they may be, they or their ancestors at some point probably have shared this thing. Right, US is not gonna split up. It may get more screwed up as a country, but Texas and California are not gonna break off. I mean, they're big enough where they could do it, but it's just never gonna happen. We've been through too much together. Yeah. Yeah, that's a hopeful message. Do you think, some people have talked to Eric Weinstein, you've talked to Eric Weinstein. He has a sense that growth, like the entirety of the American system is based on the assumption that we're gonna grow forever, that the economy's gonna grow forever. Do you think economic growth will continue indefinitely? Or will we stagnate? I've long been in agreement with Eric, Peter Thiel, Robert Gordon and others, that growth has slowed down. I argued that in my book, The Great Stagnation, appropriately titled. But the last two years, I've become much more optimistic. I've seen a lot of breakthroughs in green energy and battery technology. mRNA vaccines and medicine is a big deal already. It will repair our GDP and save millions of lives around the world. There's an anti malaria vaccine that's now in stage three trial, it probably works. CRISPR to defeat sickle cell anemia. Just space, area after area after area, there's suddenly the surge of breakthroughs. I would say many of them rooted in superior computation and ultimately Moore's law and access to those computational abilities. So I'm much more optimistic than say, the last time I spoke to Eric. I don't know, he moves all the time in his views. I don't know where he's going. His views, I don't know where he's at now. He's not at, he hasn't gained, that's really interesting. So your little drop of optimism comes from like, there might be a fundamental shift in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us in terms of like, it could be a wellspring of innovation that enables growth for a long time to come. Like Eric has not quite connected to the computation aspect yet to where it could be a wellspring of innovation. But you're very close to it in your own work. I don't have to tell you that. The work you're doing would not have been possible not very long ago. But the question is, how much does that work enable continued growth for decades to come? For all their problems, some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing. I'm not sure when, you know much better than I do. Maybe only partially, but that too will be a big deal. Well, one of the open questions that sort of the Peter Thiel School area of ideas is how much can be converted to technology? How much, how many parts of our lives can technology integrate and then innovate? Like can it replace healthcare? Can it replace the legal system? Can it replace government? Not replace, but like, you know, make it digital and thereby enable computation to improve it, right? That's the open question, because many aspects of our lives are still not really that digitized. There was a New York Times symposium in April, which is not long ago. And they asked the so called experts, when are we gonna get vaccines? And the most optimistic answer was in four years. And obviously we beat that by a long mile. So I think people still haven't woken up. You mentioned my tiny drop of optimism, but it's a big drop of optimism. Is it a waterfall yet? I mean, is it just? Well, here's my pessimism. Whenever there are major new technologies, they also tend to be used for violence directly or indirectly, radio, Hitler. Not that he hit people over the head with radios, but it enabled the rise of various dictators. So the new technologies now, whatever exactly they may be, they're gonna cause a lot of trouble. And that's my pessimism. Not that I think they're all gonna slow to a trickle. When was the stagnation book? 2011. 2011. Yes. It was the first of the stagnation books, in fact. It's very interesting. But even then I said, this is temporary. And I was predicting it would be gone in about 20 years time. I'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction, like 2030, but I think we're actually gonna beat that. So you think United States might still be on top of the world for the rest of the century in terms of its economic growth, impact on the world, scientific innovation, all those kinds of things? That's too long to predict, but I'm bullish on America in general. Got it. Speaking of being bullish on America, the opposite of that is, we talked about capitalism, we talked about Iran and her Russian roots. What do you think about communism? Why doesn't it work? Is it the implementation? Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling? Or is it just a fundamentally flawed system? Well, communism is like capitalism. The words mean many things to different people. You could argue my life as a tenured professor comes closer to communism than anything the human race has seen. And I would argue it works pretty well. But look, if you mean the Soviet Union, it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of decentralized set of incentives that were destructive rather than value maximizing. It wasn't even central planning, much less communism. So Paul Craig Roberts and Polanyi were correct in their descriptions of the Soviet system. Think of it as weird mixes of barter and malfunctioning incentives and being very good at a whole bunch of things, but in terms of progress, innovation, and consumer goods, it really being quite a failure. And now I wouldn't call that communism, but that's what I think of the system the Soviets had. And it required an ever increasing pile of lies that both alienated people, but created an elite that by the end of the thing no longer believed in the system itself, or even thought they were doing better by being crooks than by just say moving to Switzerland and being an upper middle class individual, like you would have a higher standard of living by Gorbachev's time, not Gorbachev, but if you're a number 30 in the hierarchy, you're better off as a middle class person in Switzerland. And that, of course, did not prove sustainable. And so it's, what is it, a momentum of bureaucracy or something like that, it just builds up where you lose control of the original vision, and that naturally happens, it's just people. And you can't use normal profit and loss and price incentives, so you get all prices or most prices set too low, right? Shortages everywhere, people trade favors, you have this culture of bartered bribes, sexual favors or family friends, and you get more and more of that, and you over time lose more and more of the information and the prices and quantities and practices and norms you had, and that sort of slowly decays, and then by the end no one is believing in it. That would be my take, but again, you're the expert here. The Russian scholar, well, I'm perhaps no more an expert than Ayn Rand, it's more personal than it is scholarly or historic. So Stalin held power for 30 years, Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years, where you could argue he took a little break. But not much, he was still holding power, I think. And it's still possible now with the new constitution that he could hold power from longer than Stalin, longer than 30 years. What do you think about the man, the state of affairs in Russia, in general, the system they have there? Is there something interesting to you as an economist, as a human being, about Russia? Everything is interesting. I mean, here would be part of my take. As you know, the Russian economy starting, what, 1999, 2000, has really quite a few years of super excellent growth. And Putin is still riding on that. It more or less coincides with his rise as the truly focal figure on the scene. Since then, pretty recently, they've had a bunch of years of negative four to 5% growth in a row, which is terrible. The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels, but the structural problem is this. You need a concordance across economic power, social power, political power. They don't have to be allocated identically, but they have to be allocated consistently. And the Russian system under Putin, from almost the beginning, has never been able to have that, that ultimately his incentives are to steer the system where the economic power is in a small number of hands in a non diversified way. The system won't deliver sustainable gains in living standards anymore ever the way it's set up now. Though if fossil fuel prices go up, they'll have some good years for sure. And that is really quite structural, what has gone wrong. And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin, but you've got to start with those structural problems. And that's why it's just not going to work. But he had all those good years in the beginning. So the number of Russians, say, who live here or in Russia, who love Putin and it's sincere, they're not just afraid of being dragged away, like that's a real phenomenon. Yeah, I'm really torn on Putin's approval rating, real approval rating seems to be very high. And I'm torn in whether that has to do with the fact that there is control of the press, or if it's, which is the people I talked to who are in Russia, family and so on, a genuine love of Putin, appreciation of what Putin has done and is going to do with Russia. And a lot of that would go away if the press were freer, I think. Yes, well, Singapore realizes this, anyone discussed by the press, no matter who they are, people in Singapore have done a great job. Yes. But if you're discussed by the press, you don't look good. Tech company executives are learning this, right? It's just like a rule. So in that sense, I think the rating is artificially high, but I don't by any means think it's all insincere, but that high popularity I view as bearish for Russia. I would feel better about the country if people were more pissed off at him. Yeah, that's right. It's nice to see free speech, even if it's full of hate. I am also troubled on the scientific side and entrepreneurial side, it seems difficult to be an entrepreneur in Russia. Like it's not even in terms of rules, it's just culturally, the people I speak to, it's not easy to build a business, no. It's not easy to even dream of building a business in Russia. That's just not part of the culture, part of the conversation. It's almost like the conversation is, if you wanna be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs or whatever, you come to America. That's the sense they have. Yeah, history matters. Is it history, is it structural problems of today? It's all the same thing. So a history of hostility to commerce, which of course the old USSR is gone, but a lot of the attitudes remain, a lot of the corruption remains. You have this legacy distribution of wealth from the auctioning off of the assets, which is not conducive to some kind of broadly egalitarian democracy, and so you have these small number of power points that try to control information and wealth and not really so keen to encourage the others who ultimately would pull the balance of political power away from the very wealthy and from Putin, and they support that culture, and the return of interest in Orthodox Church and all that, it's all part of the same piece, I think, because the old Orthodox Church is not that pro commerce, you'd have to say, but it's traditionalist, it's pro family, those are safer ideas, and then there's such a great safety valve, the most ambitious, smartest people, like they probably will learn English, they sort of can look like they belong in all sorts of other countries, they can show up and blend in, super talented, they've probably had an excellent education, especially if they're from one of the two major cities, but even if not so, even from Siberia, and they go off, they leave, they're not a source of opposition, and that keeps the whole thing up and running for another generation. Yeah, what do you make of the other big player, China? They seem to have a very different messed up, but also functioning system. They seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs. They're choosing winners, but what do you make of the entire Chinese system? Why does it work as well as it does currently? What are your concerns about it, and what are its threats to the United States, or possible, what is it you said, wisdom isn't when two ideas come together, is there some possible benefits of these kinds of ideas coming together? It's amazing what China has done, but I would say to put it in perspective, if you compare them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, they've still done much worse, not even close. And that's both living standards, or I hesitate to cite democracy as an unalloyed good in and of itself, but there's more freedom in all those other places by a lot. So China has all these problems of history, but they've managed, as actually the Soviets did in the middle of the 20th century, one of the two great mass migrations from the countryside to cities, which boosts productivity enormously and will sustain totalitarian systems, but they moved from a totalitarian system to an oligarchy where the CCP is actually, at least for a while, hey, have been really good at governing, have made a lot of very good decisions. You have to admit that. I don't know how long that streak will continue with one person so much now holding authority in a more extreme manner. The selection pressures for the next generation of high level CCP members probably become much worse. You have this general problem of the state owned enterprise is losing relative productivity compared to the private sector. Well, we're gonna kind of hold Jack Ma on this island and he can only issue like weird hello statements. It kind of smells bad to me. I don't feel that it's about to crash, but I don't see them supplanting America as like the world's number one country. I think they will muddle through and have very serious problems, but there's enough talent there they will muddle through. Is there ideas from China or from anywhere in general of large scale role of government that you find might be useful? Like Andrew Yang recently ran on a platform, UBI, right, Universal Basic Income. Is there some interesting ideas of large scale government sort of welfare programs at scale that you find interesting? Well, keep in mind the current version of the Chinese Communist Party post now dismantled what was called the iron rice ball. So it took apart the healthcare protections, a lot of the welfare system, a lot of the guaranteed jobs. So the economic rise of China coincided with the weakening of welfare. I'm not saying that's causal per se, but people think of China as having a government that takes care of everyone, it's very far from the truth. And by a lot of metrics, I don't mean control over people's lives, I don't mean speech, but by a lot of metrics, economically we have a lot more government than they do. So what one means here by like government, private control, I don't think you can just add up the numbers and get a simple answer. They've been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities in ways that will attract people from the countryside. And furthermore, they more or less enforce a meritocracy in this sense. Like if you're a kid of a rich guy, you'll get unfair privilege. That's unfair, but systems can afford that. If you are smart and from the countryside and your parents have nothing, you will be elevated and sent to a very good school, graduate school because of the exam system. And they do that and they mean that very consistently. It's like the Soviets had a version of that like for chess and romantic piano. Not for everything, but where they had it, like again, they were tremendous, right? Yeah, exactly. And Chinese have it in so many areas, a genuine meritocracy in this one way. That moves people from the rural to the big city and that's a big boost of productivity for some amount of time. And when they get there, they're taken seriously. Jack Ma was riding a bicycle, teaching English in his late 20s. He was a poor guy. Not a society of credentialism. Or in America, it's way too much a credentialist society. As we're talking about even with the Nobel Prize. But what do you think about these large government programs like UBI? The one version of UBI that makes the most sense to me is the Mitt Romney version, UBI for kids. Like kids are vulnerable. If their parents screw up, you shouldn't blame the kid or make the kids suffer. I believe in something like UBI for kids. Maybe just cash. But if you don't have kids, even with AI, my sense is at least in the world we know, you should be able to find a way to adjust. You might have to move to North Dakota to work, next to fracking, say. But look, before the pandemic, the two most robot intensive societies, Japan and the US, US at least for manufacturing, were at full employment. So maybe there's some far off day where there's literally no work, John Lennon, and imagine it's piped everywhere. And then we might revisit the question. But for now, we had rising wages in the Trump years and full employment. So I don't see the point. You don't see automation as a threat that fundamentally shakes our society. It's a threat in the following sense. The new technologies are harder to work with for many people, and that's a social problem. But I'm not sure a universal basic income is the right answer to that very real problem. Well, that's also, I like the UBI for kids. It's also your definition or the line, the threshold for what is vulnerable and what is basic human nature. Going back to Russia, life is suffering. That struggle is a part of life. And perhaps sort of changing, maybe what defines the 21st century is having multiple careers and adjusting and learning and evolving. And some of the technology in terms of, some of the technology we see like the internet allows us to make those pivots easier, allows later life education possible. It makes it possible. I don't know. And your earlier point about loneliness being this fundamental human problem, which I would agree with strongly, UBI, if it's at a high level, will make that worse. I mean, say UBI were higher enough, you could just sit at home. People are not gonna be happy. They don't actually want that. And we've relearned that in the pandemic. Yeah, the flip side, the hope with UBI is you have a little bit more freedom to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness. That's the idea. So it's kind of an open question. If I give you a million dollars or a billion dollars, will you pursue the thing you love? Will you be more motivated to find the thing you love, to do the thing you love, or will you be lazy and lose yourself in the sort of daily activities that don't actually bring you joy, but pacify you in some kind of way where you just let the days slip by? That's the open question. A lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions, whether it was Mozart or James Brown or the great painters in history, they had to work pretty hard. And if you look at heirs to great fortunes, maybe I'm forgetting someone, but it's hard to think of any who have creatively been important as novelists, or they might have continued to run the family business. But Van Gogh was not heir to a great family fortune. It's sad that cushions get in the way of progress. It's the same point about prizes, right? Inheriting too much money is like winning a prize. We mentioned Eric, Eric Weinstein. I know you agree on a bunch of things. Is there some beautiful, fascinating, insightful disagreement that you have that has yet to be resolved with him? Is there some ideas that you guys battle it out on? Is it the stagnation question that you mentioned? That's one of them, but here's at least two others. But I would stress Eric is always evolving. So I'm just talking about a time slice Eric, right? I don't know where he's at right now. Like I heard him on Clubhouse three nights ago, but that was three nights ago. But I think he's far too pessimistic about the impact of immigration on U.S. science. He thinks it has displaced U.S. scientists, which I think that is partly true. I just think we've gotten better talent. I'm like, bring it on, double down. And look at Kiriko, who basically came up with mRNA vaccines, she was from Hungary. And was ridiculed and mocked, she couldn't get her papers published. She stuck at it. An American might not have been so stubborn because we have these cushions. So Eric is all worried, like mathematicians coming in, they're discouraging native U.S. citizens from doing math. I'm like, bring in the best people. If we all end up in other avocations, absolutely fine by me. Does it trouble you that we kick them out after they get a degree often? I would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree a green card, universally. Yeah, I agree with that, it makes no sense. It makes so strange that the best people that come here suffer here, create awesome stuff here, then when we kick them out, it doesn't make any sense. Here's another view I have. I call it open borders for Belarus. Now Russia's a big country. I would gladly increase the Russian quota by three X, four X, five X, not 20%, but a big boost. But Belarus, a small country, and they're poor, and they have decent education, and a lot of talent there. Why can't we just open the door and convert a Belarus passport to a green card? Open borders for Belarus, it's my new campaign slogan. Are you running for president in 2024? Well, write ins are welcome, but. Okay, what's the second thing you disagree with, Eric? Trade, again, I'm not sure where he's at now, but he is suspicious of trade in a way that I am not. I do understand what's called the China shock has been a big problem for the US middle class. I fully accept that. I think most of that is behind us. National security issues aside, I think free trade is very much a good thing. Eric, I'm not sure he'll say it's not a good thing, but he won't say it is a good thing. And I know he's kind of, it's like, Eric, free trade. But look, on things like vaccines, I don't believe in free trade. You want vaccine production in your own country, look at the EU. They have enough money, no one will send them vaccines. What's different about vaccines? Is it, there's some things you want to prioritize the citizenry on. You could argue it would be cheaper to produce all US manufactured vaccines in India. They have the technologies, obviously lower wages, but look, there's talk in India right now of cutting off the export of vaccines. If you outsource your vaccine production, you're not sure the other country will respect the norm of free trade. So you need to keep some vaccine production in your country. It's an exception to free trade, not to the logic, a bunch of things the Navy uses. You can't buy those components from China. That's insane. But look, it would be cheaper to do so, right? Yeah. Let me completely shift topics on something that's fascinating. It's all the same topic, but great. Everything is interesting. What do you think about what the hell is money? And the recent excitement around cryptocurrency that brings to the forefront the philosophical discussion of the nature of money. Are you bullish on cryptocurrency? Are you excited about it? What does it make you think about how the nature of money is changing? No one knows what money is. Probably no one ever knew. Go back to medieval times, bills of exchange. Were they money? Maybe it's just a semantic debate. Gold, silver, what about copper coins? What about metals that were considered legal tender but not always circulating? What about credit? So being confused about moneyness is the natural state of affairs for human beings. And if there's more of that, I'd say that's probably a good thing. Now, crypto per se, I think Bitcoin has taken over a lot of the space held by gold. That to me seems sustainable. I'm not short Bitcoin. I don't have some view that the price has to be different than the current price, but I know it changes every moment. I am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto, which seems connected to ultimate visions of using it for transactions in ways where I'm not sure whether it be prediction markets or DeFi. I'm not sure the retail demand really is there once it is regulated like everything else is. I would say I'm 40, 60 optimistic on those forms of crypto. That is, I think it's somewhat more likely they fail than succeed, but I take them very seriously. So we're talking about it becoming one of the main currencies in the world. That's what we're discussing. That I don't think will happen. So, but the reality is that Bitcoin used to be in the single digits of a dollar and now has crossed $50,000 for a single Bitcoin. Do you think it's possible it reaches something like a million dollars? I don't think we have a good theory of the value of Bitcoin. If people decide it's worth a million dollars, it's worth a million dollars. But isn't that money? Like you said, isn't the ultimate state of money confusion, however beautifully you put it? It's like valuing an Andy Warhol painting. So when Warhol started off, probably those things had no value. They were sketches, early sketches of shoes. Now a good Warhol could be worth over 50 million. That's an incredible rate of price appreciation. Bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory. I don't pretend to know where it will stop, but it's about trying to figure out what do people think of Andy Warhol? He could be out of fashion in a century. Maybe yes, maybe no. But you don't think about Warhols as money. They perform some money like functions. You can even use them as collateral for like deals between gangs. But they're not basically money, nor is Bitcoin. And the transactions velocity of Bitcoin, I would think is likely to fall, if anything. So you don't think there'll be some kind of phase shift where it become adopted and become mainstream for one of the main mechanisms of transactions? Bitcoin, no. Now, you know, ether has some chance at that. I would bet against it, but I wouldn't give you a definitive no. And you wouldn't put us here. Bitcoin is too costly. It may be fine to hold it like gold, but gold is also costly. You have smart people trying to make, say, ether, much more effective as a currency than Bitcoin. And there's certainly a decent chance they will succeed. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation. I mean, with smart contracts, with NFTs as well, there's a lot of interesting innovations that are plugging into the human psyche somehow, just like money does. You know, money seems to be this viral thing, our ideas of money, right? And if the idea is strong enough, it seems to be able to take hold. Like there's network effects that just take over. And like, I particularly see that with, I'd love to get your comment on Dogecoin, which is basically by a single human being, Elon Musk has been created. You know, it's like these celebrities can have a huge ripple effect on the impact of money. Is it possible that in the 21st century, people like Elon Musk and celebrities, I don't know, Donald Trump, The Rock, whoever else, can actually define, you know, the currencies that we use? Maybe can Dogecoin become the primary currency of the world? I think of it as like baseball cards. So right now, every baseball player has a baseball card. And the players who are stars, their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money. And that's stable, we've had it for many decades. Sort of the player defines the card, they sign a contract with Topps or whatever company. Now, could you imagine celebrities, baseball players, LeBron James, having their own currencies instead of cards? Absolutely, and you're somewhat seeing that right now, as you mentioned, artists with these unique works on the blockchain. But I'm not sure those are macroeconomically important. If it's just a new class of collectibles that people have fun with, again, I say, bring it on. But whether there are use cases beyond that, that challenge fiat monies, which actually work very well. Yesterday, I sent money to a family in Ethiopia that I helped support. In less than 24 hours, they got that money. Digitally, yes. No, not digitally, through my bank. My primitive dinosaur bank, BB&T, Mid Atlantic Bank, headquartered in North Carolina, charted by the Fed, regulated by the FDAC and the OCC. Now, you could say, well, the exchange rate was not so great. I don't see crypto as close to beating that once you take into account all of the last mile problems. Fiat currency works really well. People are not sitting around bitching about it. And when you talk to crypto people, they're crypto people, the number who have to postulate some out of the blue hyperinflation, where there's no evidence for that whatsoever, that to me is a sign they're not thinking clearly about how hard they have to work to outcompete fiat currency. There's a bunch of different technologies that are really exciting that don't want to address how difficult it is to outcompete the current accepted alternative. So for example, autonomous vehicles. A lot of people are really excited. But it's not trivial to outcompete Uber on the cost and the effectiveness and the user experience and all those kinds of, sorry, Uber driven by humans. And it's not, you know, that's taken for granted, I think, that look, wouldn't it be amazing, how amazing would the world look when the cars are driving themselves fully, you know, it's gonna drive the cost down, you can remove the cost of drivers, all those kinds of things. But it's when you actually get down to it and have to build a business around it, it's actually very difficult to do. And I guess you're saying your sense is similar competition is facing cryptocurrency. Like you have to actually present a killer app reason to switch from fiat currency to Ethereum or to whatever. And the Biden people are gonna regulate crypto and they're gonna do it soon. So something like DeFi, I fully get why that is cheaper or for some can be cheaper than other ways of conducting financial intermediation. But some of that is regulatory arbitrage. It will not be allowed to go on forever for better or worse. I would rather see it given greater tolerance. But the point is banking lobby is strong. The government will only let it run so far. There'll be capital requirements, reporting requirements imposed, and it will lose a lot of those advantages. What do you make of Wall Street bets? Another thing that recently happened that shook the world and at least me from the outside of perspective, make me question what I do and don't understand about our economics. Which is a bunch of different, a large number of individuals getting together on the internet and having a large scale impact on the markets. If you tell a group of people and coordinate them through the internet, we're gonna play a fun game, it might cost you money, but you're gonna make the headlines and there's a chance you'll screw over some billionaires and hedge funds. Enough people will play that game. So that game might continue, but I don't think it's of macroeconomic importance. And the price of those stocks in the medium term will end up wherever it ought to be. So these are little outliers from a macroeconomics perspective. They're not going to, these are not signals of shifting power, like from centralized power to distributed power. These aren't some fundamental changes in the way our economy works. I think of it as a new brand of eSports, maybe more fun than the old brand. Which is fine, right? It's like push the anarchy into the corners where you want it. It doesn't bother me, but I think people are seeing it as more fun than it is. It's a new eSport, more fun for many, but more expensive than the old eSports. Like chess is a new eSport, super cheap, not as fun as like sending hedge funds to their doom, but like, what would you expect? The poetry, I love it, okay. But macroeconomically, it's not fundamental. Okay, I was going to say, I hope you're right, because I'm uncomfortable with the chaos of the masses that's creates. But I also think that chaos is somewhat real to be clear, but it will matter through other channels, not through manipulating GameStop or AMC. So you're seeing the real macro phenomenon. When people see a real macro phenomenon, they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative. And this micro story, like it fits the narrative, but it doesn't mean its importance fits the narrative. That's how I would kind of dissect the mistake I think people are making. The macro phenomenon that are there, do you mean? Everyone's weird now, the internet. Either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder. I'm not sure what's the right way to put it. Maybe a mix of both. You're probably right that it allows us to be weirder because, well, this is the other, okay. So this connects our previous conversation. Does America allow us to be weirder or does it make us weirder? Like say we're weird and somewhat neurotic to begin with, but the only messages we get are Dwight D. Eisenhower and I Love Lucy and network TV. Like that's going to keep us within certain bounds. In good and bad ways. That's obviously totally gone. And the internet, you can connect to not just QAnon, but all sorts of things. Many of them just fantastic, right? But in good and bad ways, it makes us weirder. So that maybe is troubling, right? Like if someone's worried about that, I would at least say they should give it deep serious thought. And then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows, micro realizations of the weirdness that don't actually matter. So like chess players today, they play a lot more weird openings than they did 20 years ago. Like it reflects the same thing because you can research any weird opening on the internet, but like, does that matter? Probably not. So a lot of the things we see are just like the weird chess openings. And to figure out which are like the weird chess openings and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness, like that's what a hedge fund investor type should be trying to do. I just think no one knows yet. It's like this itself, this fun weird guessing game, which we're partly engaging in right now. Exactly. And I mean, as Eric talks about on the science side of things, I mean, I said like at MIT, especially in the machine learning field, there's a natural institutional resistance to the weird. It's very, as they talk about, it's difficult to hire weird faculty, for example. Correct. You want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe and not weird. And that's one of the concerns is like, it seems like the weird people are the ones that push the science forward usually. Right. And so like, how do you balance the two? It's not obvious. Because it's another area where Eric and I disagree. As I interpret him, he thinks academia is totally bankrupt. And I think it's only partially bankrupt. How do we fix it? Because I'm with you, I'm bullish on academia. You need up and coming schools that end up better than where they started off. And MIT was once one of them. Yes. Now they're not in every area. In some areas, they have become the problem. Yep. UChicago, you wouldn't call it up and coming, but it's still different. And that's great. Let's hope they manage to keep it that way. The biggest problem to me is the rank absurd conformism. I kind of second tier schools, maybe in the top 40, but not in the top dozen, that are just trying to be like a junior MIT, but it's mediocre and copycat. And they're the most dogmatic enforcers of weirdness that like Harvard is more open than those second tier schools. And those second tier schools are pretty good typically, right? Yeah. But the mediocrity is enforced there. Correct. Very strictly. And the homogenization pressures. Climb the rankings by another three places and be a little closer to MIT, though you'll never touch them. That to me is very harmful. And you'd rather they be more like Chicago, more like Caltech, or the older Caltech all the more, like pick some model, be weird in it. You might fail. That's socially better. Yeah, but so the problem with MIT, for example, is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty. Yeah. So like the people that are allowed to be weird, or actually they just don't even ask for permissions anymore are more senior faculty. And that's good, of course, but you want the weird young people. I find too, this podcast, I like talking to tech people, and I find the young faculty to be really boring. They are. They're the most boring of faculty. Their work is interesting technically, technically, but just the passion. They are drudges. And some of them sneak by. Like you have like the Max Tegmark, young version of Max Tegmark, who knows how to play the role of boring and fitting in. And then on the side, he does the weird shit. Sure. But they're far and few in between, which I'd love to figure out a way to shake up that system because as you look at MIT's Broad Institute, right, in biomedical, it's been a huge hit. I'm not privy to their internal doings, but I suspect they support weird more than the formal departments do at the junior level. Yes, that's probably true. Yeah, I don't know what, whatever they're doing, it's working, but we needed to figure it out because I think the best ideas still do come from the, so forget, my apologies, but for the humanities side of things, I don't know anything about, but the engineering and the science side, I think there's so many amazing ideas that are still coming from universities. It's not true that you don't know anything about the humanities. You're doing the humanities right now. Talking about people, there are no numbers put on a blackboard, right? There's no hypothesis testing per se. No, yeah. You have however many subscribers to your podcast, all listening to you on the humanities. Every, whatever your frequency is. But I'm not in the department of the humanities. That's why it's innovative. They have very different conversations. There's the number of emails I get about, listen, I really deeply respect diversity and the full scope of what diversity means and also the more narrow scope of different races and genders and so on. It's a really important topic, but there's a disproportionate number of emails I'm getting about meetings and discussions and that just kind of is overwhelming. I don't get enough emails from people, like a meeting about why are all your ideas bad? Let's, for example, let me call out MIT. Why don't we do more? Why don't we kick Stanford's ass or Google's ass, more importantly, in deep learning and machine learning and AI research? What CSAIL, for example, used to be a laboratory is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research. And why is that not the beacon of greatness in artificial intelligence? Let's have those meetings as well. Diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism for enforcing conformity. Yes, exactly. And right, so it's almost like this conformity mechanism finds the hot new topic to use to enforce further conformity. Exactly. Oh boy, I still, I remain optimistic. The humanities have innovated through podcasts, including yours and mine, and they're alive and well. All the bad talk you hear about the humanities in universities, there's been this huge end run of innovation on the internet and it's amazing. You're right. I never thought of, I mean, this is humanities. This podcast is right. It's like you've been speaking prose all one's life and didn't know it, right? Yeah, I am actually part of the humanities department at MIT now. I did not realize this and I will fully embrace it from this moment on. Look, you have this thing, the Media Lab. I'm sure you know about it. Done some excellent things, done a lot of very bogus things, but you're out competing them. You're blowing them out of the water. Yeah. Like you are them. Yeah, I mean, and I'm talking to those folks and they're just trying to, well, they're just trying to figure it out. I mean, they had their issues with Jeff Epstein and so on, but outside of that, there's a, I've actually gone through a shift with this particular podcast, for example, where at first it was seen as a, one, at the very first it was seen as a distraction. Second, it was a source of like, almost like a kind of jealousy, like the same kind of jealousy you feel when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty. And now it's more like, oh, okay, this is a thing. Like we should do more of that. We should embrace this guy. We should embrace this thing. So there's a sense that podcasting and whatever this is, it doesn't have to be podcasting, will drive some innovation within MIT, within different universities. There's a sense that things are changing. It's just that universities lag behind. And my hope is that they catch up quickly. They innovate in some way that goes along with the innovations of the internet. Online. I think the internet will outrace them for a long time, maybe forever. Well, I mean, but it's okay if they're, as long as they're keeping. Yeah, and we're both in universities. So we have multiple hats on here as we're speaking. So we can complain about the universities, but that's like complaining about the podcast, right? We be them. But speaking on the weird, you've in the best sense of the word weird, you've written about and made the case that we should take UFO sightings more seriously. So that's one of the things that I've been inundated with, sort of the excitement and the passion that people have for the possibility of extraterrestrial life, of life out there in the universe. I've always felt this excitement. I was just looking up at the stars and wondering what the hell's out there. But there's people that have more like, more grounded excitement and passion of actually interacting with aliens on this here, our planet. What's the case from your perspective for taking these sightings more seriously? The data from the Navy, to me, seem quite serious. I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities to judge it as data, but there are numerous senators at the very highest of levels, former heads of CIA, Brennan. I talked to him, did an interview with him. I asked him, what's up with these? What do you think it is? He basically said that was the single most likely explanation was of alien origin. Now you don't have to agree with him. But look, if you know how government works, these senators, or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, or Brennan, they sat down, they were briefed by their smartest people, and they said, hey, what's going on here? And everyone around the table, I believe, is telling them, we don't know. And that is sociological data I take very seriously. I have not seen a debunking of the technical data, which is eyewitness reports and images and radar. Again, I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities or again, at a technical level, I feel quite uncertain on that turf. But evaluating through the testimony of witnesses, it seems to me it's now at a threshold where one ought to take it seriously. Yeah, one of the problems with UFO sightings is that because of people with good equipment don't take it seriously, it's such a taboo topic, that you have just like really shitty equipment collecting data. And so you have the blurry Bigfoot kind of situation where you have just bad video and all those kinds of things. As opposed to, I mean, there's a bunch of people, Avi Lo from Harvard talking about Oumuamua. It's just like people with the equipment to do the data collection don't want to help out. And that creates a kind of divide where the scientists ignore that this is happening and there's the masses of people who are curious about it. And then there's the government that's full of secrets that's leaking some confusion and it creates distrust in the government, it creates distrust in science and it prevents the scientists from being able to explore some cool topics, some exciting possibilities that they should be, be curious kids like Avi talks about. Even if it has nothing to do with aliens, whatever the answer is, it has to be something fascinating. We already know everything's interesting, but this is fascinating. But look, that all said, I suspect they're not of alien origin. And let me tell you my reason. The people who are all gung ho, they do a kind of reasoning in reverse or argument from elimination. They figure out a bunch of things that can't be, like is it a Russian advanced vehicle? No, probably pretty good arguments there. Is it a Chinese advanced vehicle? No. Is it people like from the earth's future coming back in time? No. And they go through a few others. They have some really good no arguments. Then they're like, well, what we've got left is aliens. This argument from elimination, I don't actually find that persuasive. You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way. The positive evidence that it's aliens is still quite weak. The positive evidence that it's a puzzle is quite huge. And whatever the solution to the puzzle is, it might be fascinating. And it's gonna be so weird or fascinating or maybe even trivial, but that's weird in its own way, that we can't set up by elimination all the things that might be able to be. Yeah, and just like you said, the debunking that I've seen of these kinds of things are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle and more a kind of halfhearted dismissal. And Avi, as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him, he's been attacked an awful lot. And when I hear the idea carrier attacked, I get very suspicious of the critics. If he's wrong, like just tell me why. Like my ears are open. I don't have a set view on Oumuamua, you know. I know I can't judge Avi's arguments. He can't convince me in that sense. I'm too stupid to understand how good his argument may or may not be. And like you said, ultimately, in the argument, in the meeting of that debate is where we find the wisdom. Like dismissing it, there's one other thing that troubles me. There's a bunch of people, like Nietzsche sometimes dismiss this way. Ayn Rand is sometimes dismissed this way. Oh, here we go. Like there's a, as opposed to arguing against her ideas, dismissing it outright. And that's not productive at all. She may be wrong on a lot of things, but like laying out some arguments, even if they're basic human arguments, that's where we arrive at the wisdom. I love that. Is there something deeper to be said about our trust in institutions and governments and so on that has to do with UFOs? That there's a kind of suspicion that the US government and governments in general are hiding stuff from us when you talk about UFOs. This is my view on that. If we declassified everything, I think we would find a lot more evidence all pointing toward the same puzzle. There aren't some alien men being held underground. There's not some secret file that lays out whatever is happening. I think the real lesson about government is government cannot bring itself to any new belief on this matter of any kind. And it's a kind of funny inertia. Like government is deeply puzzled. They're more puzzled than they want to admit to us, which I'm okay with that, actually. They shouldn't just be out panicking people in the streets. But at the end of the day, it's a bit like approving the AstraZeneca vaccine, which does work and they haven't approved it. When are they gonna do it? When is our government actually, if only internally, gonna take this more than just seriously, but take it truly seriously? And I just don't know if we have that capability, kind of mentally, to sound like Eric Weinstein for another moment. And to stay on the same topic, although on the surface shifting completely, because it is all the same topic. You have written and studied art. Why do you think we humans long to create art, human society in general and just the human mind? Well, most of us don't really long to create art, right? I would start with that point. You think so? You think that's a unique weirdness of some particular humans? I think, I don't know, 10% of humans roughly, which is a lot, but it is somewhat weird. I don't aspire to create art. You could say, like writing nonfiction, there's something art like about it, but it's a different urge, I would say. So why do some people have it? I think human brains are very different. It's a different notion of working through a problem. Like you and I enjoy working through analytic problems. For me, economics, for you, AI and other areas, or your humanities podcast, but that's fun. For that problem to be visual and linked to physical materials and putting those like on a canvas, to me, it's not a huge leap, but I really don't wanna do it. Like it would be pain. If you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting, I don't know, is that worth it? Maybe, but like, I'm happy when that hour's over. And would not be proud or happy with the result. It would suck. I don't think I would do it actually. Do you think you're suppressing some deep, I mean? Absolutely not. Now, when I was young, I played the guitar as you played the guitar and that I greatly enjoyed, although I was never good, but it helped me appreciate music much, much more. Well, this is the question. Okay, so from the perspective of the observer and appreciator of art, you said good. Is there such a concept as good in art? There's clearly a concept of bad. My guitar playing fit that concept. Okay. But I wasn't trying to be good. I wanted to learn like how do chords work? Okay, analytical. How does a jazz improvisation work? How is blues different? Classical guitar, sort of physically, how do you make those sounds? And I did learn those things. And you can't learn everything about them, but you can learn a lot about them without ever being good or even trying to be that good. But I could play all the notes. So from the observer perspective, what do you, I apologize for the absurd question, but what do you use the most beautiful and maybe moving piece of art you've encountered in your life? It's not an absurd question at all. And I think about this quite a bit. I would say the two winners by a clear margin are both by Michelangelo. It's the Pieta in the Vatican and the David statue in Florence. Why? Historical context or just purity, the creation itself? I don't think you can view it apart from historical context and being in Florence or in the Vatican, you're already primed for a lot, right? You can't pull that out. But just technically how they express the emotion of human form, I do honestly intellectually think they're the two greatest artworks for doing that. That's not all that art does. Not all art is about the human form, but they are phenomenal. And I think critical opinion, not that everyone agrees, but my view is not considered a crazy one within the broader court of critical opinion. Now in painting, I think the most I was ever blown away was to see Vermeer's artwork. It's called The Art of Painting and it's in Vienna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. And I saw that, I think I was 23. It just stunned me because I'd seen reproductions, but live in front of you in huge, a completely different artwork. And again, Vienna, primed. Yes, and I was living abroad for the first time and Vienna itself, the city and so on. Now, unlike the Michelangelo's, that is not my current favorite painting, but that would be like historically the one I would pick. What do you make in the context of those choices? What do you make of modern art? And I apologize if I'm not using the correct terminology, but art that maybe goes another level of weird outside of the art that you've kind of mentioned and breaks all the conventions and rules and so on and becomes something else entirely that doesn't make sense in the same way that David might. I think a lot of it is phenomenal. And I would say the single biggest mistake that really smart people make is to think contemporary art or music for that matter is just a load of junk or rubbish. It's just like a kind of mathematics they haven't learned yet. It's really hard to learn. Maybe some people can never learn it, but there's a very large community of super smart, well educated people who spend their lives with it, who love it. Those are genuine pleasures. They understand it. They talk about it with the common language. And to think that somehow they're all frauds, it just isn't true. Like one doesn't have to like it oneself, just like Love House may or may not be your thing, but it is amazing and for me personally, highly rewarding. And if someone doesn't get it, I do kind of have the conceited response of thinking like in that area, I'm just smarter than you are. Yeah, so the interesting thing is as with most... We get back to Eric Weinstein again. Yes. He's in general smarter than I am, this I get. But when it comes to contemporary artistic creations, I'm smarter than he is. So he's not a fan of contemporary art? I don't want to speak for him. I've heard him say derogatory... He's evolving always. He's evolving always. I've heard him say derogatory things about some of it. Doesn't mean he doesn't love some other parts of it. So I wonder if there's just a higher learning curve, a steeper learning curve for contemporary art, meaning like it takes more work to appreciate the stories, the context from which they're like thinking about this work. It feels like in order to appreciate the art contemporary, certain pieces of contemporary art, you have to know the story better behind the art. I think that's true for many people, but I think it's a funny shape distribution because there's a whole other set of people. Sometimes they're small children and they get abstract art more easily. You show them Vermeer or Rembrandt, they don't get it. But just like a wall of color, they're in love with it. So I don't think I know the full story. Again, some strange kind of distribution. The entry barriers are super high or super low, but not that often in between. But you would challenge saying that there's a lot to be explored in contemporary art. It's just you need to learn. Yeah, it's one of the most profound bodies of human thought out there. And it's part of the humanities. And yes, there are people who also don't like podcasts, right? And that's fine. Yeah. You've also been a scholar of food. We're just going through the entirety of the human experience today on this humanities podcast. Another absurd question, say this conversation is the last thing you ever do in your life. I, wearing the suit, would murder you at the end of the conversation. So this is your last day on earth, but I would offer you a last meal. What would that meal contain? We can also travel to other parts of the world. Well, we have to travel because my preferred last meal here, I probably had like two nights ago. Which is what? Can you describe or no? The best restaurant around here is called Mama Chang's and it's in Fairfax and it's food from Wuhan actually. And they take pandemic safety seriously in addition to the food being very good. But this is what I would do. I would fly to Hermosillo in Northern Mexico, which has some of the best food in Mexico, but I sadly only had two days there. So somewhere like Oaxaca, Puebla, I think they have food just as good or some people would say better, but I've spent a lot of time in those places. So the scarce, wait, is it possible the scarcity of time contributed to the richness of the experience? Of course, but the point is that scarcity still holds. So I want one more dose of the food from Hermosillo. Can you describe what the food is? It's the one kind of Mexican food that at least nominally is just like the Mexican food you get in the US. So there are burritos, there's fajitas. It doesn't taste at all like our stuff. But again, nominally, it's the part of Mexican food that made it into the US was then transformed. But it's in a way the most familiar. But for that reason, it's the most radical because you have to rethink all these things you know and they're way better in Hermosillo. Hardly any tourists go there. Like there's nothing to see in Hermosillo. Nothing you do other than eat. It's not ruined by any outsiders. It's this longstanding tradition, dirt cheap. And the thing to do there is just sweet talk a taxi driver into first taking you seriously and then trusting you enough to know that you trust him to bring you to the very best like food stands. So where's the magic of that nominally similar entity of the burrito? Where's the magic come from? Is it the taxi ride? Is it the whole experience or is there something actually in the food? So well, you can break the food down part by part. So if you think of the beef, the beef there will be dry aged just out in the air in a way the FDA here would never permit. Like they dry age it till it turns green, but it is phenomenal. The quality of the chilies. So here there's only a small number of kinds of chilies you can get. In most parts of Mexico, there's quite a large number of chilies you can get. They're different, they're fresher, but it's just like a different thing. The chilies, the wheat used. So this is wheat territory, not corn territory, which is a self interesting. The wheat is more diverse and more complex. Here it's more homogenized, obviously cheaper, more efficient, but there it is better. Non pasteurized cheeses are legal in all parts of Mexico and they can be white and gooey and amazing in a way that here again, it's just against the law. You could legalize them. The demand wouldn't be that great. There's a black market in these cheeses that Latino groceries around here, but you just can't get that much of it. So the cheese, the meat, the wheat, all different in significant ways. The chilies, I don't think the onions really matter much. Garlic, I don't know. I wouldn't put much stock in that, but that's a lot of the core food and then it's cooked much better and everything's super fresh. The food chain is not relying on refrigeration. And this is one thing Russia and US have in common. We were early pioneers in food refrigeration and that made a lot of our foods worse quite early. And it took us a long time to dig out of that because big countries, right? You've had an extensive rail system in Russia, USSR a long time, which makes it easier to freeze and then ship. What about the actual cooking, the chef? Is there an artistry to the simple? I hesitate to call the burrito simple, but. And there's no brain drain out of cooking. So if you're in the United States and you're very talented, I'm not saying there aren't talented chefs. Of course there are, but there's so many other things to pull people away. But in Mexico, there's so much talent going into food as there is in China, which would be another candidate for last meal questions. Or India. Or, oh, India, let's not even get started on India. Unbelievable. You've also, I mean, there's a million things we could talk about here, but you've written about your own dreams of sushi. It's just a really clean, good example that people are aware of of mastery in the art of the simple in food. What do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit of perfection in creating simple food? Sushi is about perfection, but it's a bit like the Beatles White album, which people think is simple and not overproduced. It's in a funny way their most overproduced album, but it's produced just perfectly. It sounds simple. It's really hard to produce music to the point where it's gonna sound so simple and not sound like sludge. Like Let It Be album, it has some great songs, but a lot of it sounds like sludge. One After 909, that's sludge. I Dig A Pony, it's sludge. Like it's a bit interesting. It's not that good. It doesn't sound that good. White album, like the best half, like Dear Prudence, sounds perfect, sounds simple. Cry Baby Cry, it's not simple. Back in the USSR, super complex. So sushi is like that. It's because it's so incredibly not simple starting with the rice. You try to refine it to make it appear super simple, and that's the most complex thing of all. So do you admire, I mean, we're not talking about days, weeks, months. We're talking about years, generations of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Do you admire that kind of sticking to the, we talked about our admiration of the weird. That doesn't feel weird. That seems like discipline and dedication to like a stoic minimalism or something like that. I'm happy they do it, but I actually feel bad about it. I feel they're sacrificial victims to me, which I benefit from. But don't you ever think like, gee, you're a great master sushi chef. Wouldn't you be happier if you did something else? Doesn't seem to happen. That might be something that a weird mind would think. Maybe it is weird people, and maybe they're really enjoying it, but like to learn how to pack rice for 10 years before they let you do anything else. It's like these Indian, you know, sarod players. They just spent five years tapping out rhythms before they're allowed to touch their instruments. Well, actually to defend that. It's kind of like graduate school, right? Well, I think graduate school, perhaps. Graduate school is full of, like every single day is full of surprises, I would say. I did martial arts for a long time. I do martial arts, and I've always loved, it's kind of the Russian way of drilling, is doing the same technique. I don't know if this applies into intellectual or academic disciplines, where you can do the same thing over and over and over again, thousands and thousands and thousands of times. What I've discovered through that process is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details and find the beauty in them. People who go to like monasteries to meditate talk about this, is when you just sit in silence and don't do anything, you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty there is in just the movement of a finger. Like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking about how fun it is to move a finger. And then you can almost become your full weird self about the tiniest details of life. As a thing, you've got to wonder, like, is there a free lunch in there? Are the rest of us moving around too much? Yeah, exactly. They sure feel like they found a free lunch. The people meditate, they're onto something. I tend to think it's like artists, that some percent of people are like that, but most are not. And for most of us, there's no free lunch. Like my free lunch is to move around a lot. In search of lunch, in fact. Well, with all the food talk, you made me hungry. What books, three or so books, if any come to mind, technical fiction, philosophical, would you recommend, had a big impact on you, or you just drew some insights from throughout your life? Well, two of them we've already discussed. One is Plato's Dialogues, which I started reading when I was like 13. Another is Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal. But I would say the Friedrich Hayek essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work, also why they might go wrong. And that's where you start to understand the price system, capitalism. And that was in a book called Individualism and Economic Order, but it was just a few essays in that book. Those are maybe the three I would cite. Can you elaborate a little bit on the... Say the price of copper goes up, right? Because there's a problem with the copper mine in Chile or Bolivia. So the price of copper goes up. All around the world, people are led to economize copper, to look for substitutes for copper, to change their production processes, to change the goods and services they buy, to build homes a different way. And this one event creates this one tiny change in information. This gets into your AI work very directly. And how much complexity that one change engenders in a meaningful, coherent way, how the different pieces of the price system fit together. Hayek really laid out very clearly. And it's like an AI problem. And how well, not for everything, but for many things, we solve that AI problem. I learned, I was, I think 13, maybe 14 when I read Hayek. Yeah, the distributed nature of things there. And it's like your work on human attention, like how much can we take in? Yes. Very often not that much. And how many of the advances of modern civilization you need to understand as a response to that constraint. I got that also from Hayek. And what's the title of the book again? It's reprinted in a lot of books at this point. But back then the book was called Individualism and Economic Order. But the essay is online. Hayek, Use of Knowledge in Society. There are open access versions of it through Google. And you don't need the whole book. So it's a very good book. Again, one of those profound looking over the ocean, maybe sitting on a porch, maybe with a drink of some kind. And a young kid comes by and asks you for advice. What advice would you give to? A drink. That's my advice. I'm serious. So, okay, after that, what advice would you give to a young person today as they take on life? Whether a career in academia in general or just a life, which is probably more important than career. Most good advice is context specific. But here are my two generic pieces of advice. Good. First, get a mentor. Both career, but anything you wanna learn. Like say you wanna learn about contemporary art. People write me this. Oh, what book should I read? It's probably not gonna work that way. You need a mentor. Yes, you should read some books on it. But you want a mentor to help you frame them, take you around to some art, talk about it with you. So get as many mentors as you can in the things you wanna learn. And then... Can I ask you a quick tangent on that? Presumably a good mentor. Of course. Is there... I'm begging the question in there. It's complicated, right? Well, it is complicated. Is there a lot of damage to be done from a bad mentor? I don't think that much because it's very easy to drop mentors. And in fact, it's quite hard to maintain them. Good mentors tend to be busy. Bad mentors tend to be busy. And you can try on mentors and maybe they're not good for you, but there's a good chance you'll learn something. Like I had a mentor, I was an undergrad. He was a Stalinist. He edited the book called The Essential Stalin. Brilliant guy. I learned a tremendous amount from him. Was he like as a Stalinist a good mentor for me? Fan of Hayek? Well, no. But for a year it was tremendous. Yeah. He introduced me like to Soviet and Eastern European science fiction because he was a Marxist. Like that's what I took from him among other things. Any advice on finding a good mentor? Daniel Kahneman has... Somebody just popped this to mind as somebody who was able to find exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life. There's not many bright minds that find collaborators. They often, which I ultimately see what a mentor is. Yeah. Be interesting, be direct and try. It's not like a perfect formula, but it's amazing how many people don't even do those things. Be interesting, be direct and try. Like what you want from a better known person, I would just say be very direct with them. Yeah. Beautiful. What's the second piece of advice? Build small groups of peers. They don't have to be your age, but very often they'll be your age, especially if you're younger with broadly similar interests, but there can be different points of view. People you hang out with, which can include in a WhatsApp group online and like every day or almost every day, they're talking about the thing you care about, trying to solve problems in that thing. And that's your small group and you really like them and they like you and you care what you think about each other and you have this common interest. That's for human connection or that's for development of ideas? It's both, they're not that different. Like Beatles, classic small group, right? But there's so much drama. The Florentine artists, of course there's drama and small groups tend to split up, which is fine, just like entering relationships off an end. But it's remarkable how little has been done that was not done in small groups in some way. So speaking of loss of beautiful relationships, where do you make this whole love thing? Why do humans fall in love? What's the role of love, friendship, family in life? In a successful life or just life in general? Why the hell are we so into this thing? There are multiple layers of understanding that question. So kind of the lowest layer is the Darwinian answer, right? If we weren't this way, we wouldn't have been successful in reproducing and building alliances. It's important to realize that's far from complete. Sort of the highest understanding would be poetic, like read John Keats or many other love poets. So who do I go to to find out, to learn about love in terms of poets or? I would say start with John Keats. But given that you're fluent in Russian. Yeah, let's go Russian literature for a second. Like you keep mentioning Russia. What's your connection? What's your love in Russia? Well, first it's all interesting, but more concretely, my wife was born in Moscow. So Kolniki was her neighborhood. Yeah. Wow. And she grew up there. I married her here. My daughter, I adopted her. I'm not her biological father, but I genuinely raised her. She was born in Russia, though she came here when she was one. My father in law. So you're basically Russian. No, no, no. I'm a New Jersey boy. That's the same thing. I'm very sorry to report. My father in law passed away a week ago. He lived with us for six years. He lived in Russia till he was, oh, 70. Saw Stalinist error. His father was brought to a camp, lived through World War II. Much, much more. Had an incredible life. Never really learned how to speak English. So I absorbed something Russian from him as well. He was part Armenian. So that's my connection to Russia. A bit of the Russian soul, too. Do you? I don't think I have it. I think I appreciate it. But there's division of labor, right? Others in the family. Take care of that. I'm more superficial. You mentioned Keats and that higher version, that non Darwinian love. What's that about? That it's the highest form of human connection and it's intoxicating and it's part of building a life. And most of us are very, very strongly drawn to it. And it's part of the highest realization of you being what you can be. Yeah. He mentioned you lost. But ask a Russian. I mean, this is a superficial New Jersey boy who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen and that was his romanticism. What's your favorite Bruce Springsteen song? I think the album Born to Run has actually held up the best. Though it's very fashionable to think the earlier or later works are actually better. And that's the overproduced super pop album. But the quality of the songs, to me Born to Run is just far and away the best. Then Darkness on the Edge of Town. And those are still my favorites. Born to Run is an incredible song. And perfectly produced in a Phil Spector kind of way. Every detail is right. Every lyric. What else is on the album? Thunder Road, Jungle Land, Tenth Avenue, Freeze Out. She's the one, unbelievable. Yeah, Bruce is amazing. Leading across the river. I really like when he goes into love personally. Like I'm on fire. That's a very good song, Dancing in the Dark. A lot of the later work, I find the percussion becomes too simple and kind of too white somehow. And a little clunky. And it's still good work. He's super talented, but it doesn't speak to me. But when it all bursts open into the open road, like it does on Born to Run, that's magic. Yeah. Or Rosalita. Have you ever seen him live? Yes, twice. I wonder what he's like live when he was young, right? Those years. I saw him live when he was young. I was young. New Jersey. I was a little disappointed actually. I think what I like best from him is quite studio. He certainly played well. I don't fault his performance. But it's like when I saw Plant and Page of Led Zeppelin. Tremendous creators. And they showed up. They were not drunk. Like they were paying attention. But I was underwhelmed. Because Led Zeppelin, like the Beatles White album, is much more of a studio band than you think at first. And in the case of Bruce Springsteen, I don't know about you, but for me, he's somebody that I connect with the most when I'm alone and there's like a melancholy feeling. And actually, my folks live in Philly. I went to school in Philly. And so, you know, I've, I think I've. You're almost worthy of New Jersey then. Yeah, well you're, you're almost worthy of Russia. So we're, we can connect. And then ask, but I mean, I love Jersey. This is something I feel like, I feel like, I don't know. It's always, there's this beautiful, like there's a diner, Olga's Diner that closed down. I used to go there. There's, there's a melancholy feeling to me. I mean, of course. A thickness to culture in that part of the world. Which is oddly similar to some elements of the thickness of Russian culture. And when you see like Russian characters on the Sopranos, it totally makes sense, even though there are these complete outliers. Exactly, it totally makes sense. You've, you mentioned you lost your father in law last week. Do you think about mortality? Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? I don't think about my own mortality that much, which is probably a good thing. I think death will be bad. I wouldn't say I'm afraid of it. For me, the worst thing about death is not knowing how the human story turns out. The full human story. The full human story. So if I could, right before I die, read like a Wikipedia page called The Rest of Human History and have enough time, just like a few days, to absorb it, think about it, and know like, oh, well 643 years from now, that's when all the atomic weapons went off and here's what happened between now and then, I would feel much better dying. But that's not how it's gonna be, right? That's unlikely. It's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide, they kind of have, what is it? They have a one or two sentence description of the human, of what goes on on Earth. It's kind of interesting to think if there's a lot of intelligent civilizations out there that in the big encyclopedia that describes the universe, humans will only have one sentence, maybe two. Probably true. Yeah. But it's the only one I can read and understand, right? And it may be hard to understand the human one past a number of centuries. Yeah, with AI, yes. Like how many years from now will reading Wikipedia be like trying to read Chaucer, which I almost can do, but I actually can't. I need a translation. Probably you can't do it at all. Yeah. I mean, maybe reading will be outdated. It might be a very silly notion. Maybe we're fundamentally, like we think language is fundamental to cognition, but it could be something visual or something totally different that we'll plug in. Neuralink or, yeah. But in that story, that Wikipedia article, do you think there'll be a section on the meaning of it? I hope not, because that section we could write now, and it's just not going to be very good, right? What would you put in the section on the meaning of human existence? I don't know, links to a lot of other sections? I don't think there are general statements about the meaning of life that have that much meaning. I think if you study different cultures, the arts, travel, mathematics, like whatever your thing is, you'll get a lot about the meaning of life. So like it's there in Wikipedia in some bigger sense. But I don't want to read the page on the meaning. I bet they have such a page, in fact. The fact that I've never visited it, none of my friends, oh, here, Tyler, here's the page on the meaning of life. I know you've been wondering about this. You got to read this one. No one's ever done that to you, have they? It probably has, well, I've actually gone to that page. It does, in fact, have a lot of links to other pages. Okay. So that's it. The meaning of life is just a bunch of self referential or citation needed type of statements. I think there's no better way to end it. Tyler, it's a huge honor. I'm a huge fan. Thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me. It was one of the greatest conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. My pleasure and delighted to finally have met you and that we can do this. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tyler Cowen and thank you to Linode, ExpressVPN, SimpliSafe and Public Goods. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Adam Smith. Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity | Lex Fridman Podcast #174

The following is a conversation with Yannis Papas, a comedian who cohosted the podcast History Hyenas that I came across when I was researching the Battle of Crete from WWII. He and his cohost were hilarious in their rants about history and about life. The chemistry they have is probably the best of any cohosted comedy podcast or even podcast in general that I've ever heard. As of a few weeks ago, unfortunately, History Hyenas is no more, at least for now, because all good things must come to an end. But Yannis hosts a new podcast called Long Days with Yannis Papas, plus he has a comedy special on YouTube for free. Quick mention of our sponsors, WineAxis, Blinkist, Magic Spoon, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that some of you have noticed that I have not spoken with too many computer scientists, physicists, biologists, or engineers recently. The reason has to do mostly with the risk aversion of many of these folks in the time of COVID, especially as they get closer to taking the vaccine. I'm tested several times a week and still some people are just more willing than others to have an in person conversation in these times. I only do these podcasts in person because I look for the possibility of a genuine human connection. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot for that. Maybe it's silly, but I look for the magic that Charles Bukowski writes about in his poem Nirvana. The magic that is somehow in the air on those rare occasions when two people meet, talk, and you notice that while on the surface you may be worlds apart, you're still somehow woven from the same fabric. I've had that with many guests, Jim Keller comes to mind, but many others as well. I'm an AI person, machine learning, robotics, computer science is my passion. Trust me, I can't wait to be having more technical conversations again, but I will also continue to mix in comedians, musicians, historians, and of course, wise all seeing sages like Giannis Papas and Tim Dillon, just to keep it, as Tim likes to say, fun. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Giannis Papas. You've cohosted, until recently, an amazing history comedy podcast called The History Hyenas. So you're a bit of a student of history? Yeah, an F student of history. F student. Okay, I thought it was more like a D minus. D minus, yeah. Okay. Still got to repeat the grade if you get all D minuses. I actually had a.67 GPA average my freshman year and I had to do it again. This podcast is going to be the spectrum of human intelligence. It runs the gamut from there to here. So this is going to set the low bar. I'm barely sliding into human, I'm closer to chimp. And I bring that up that you're also friends with the great, the powerful Tim Dillon. So let's talk about power and the corrupting effects of power. Sometimes I look at Tim Dillon as he grows in power. Oh, I thought you meant in size. Well, size, I think they're correlated. Yeah. I saw him, I've been in Austin a couple of days, I saw him once, we had eight meals in one day. Eight meals. Yeah. So I feel like I've been here longer than I have just because of the meals with Dillon. Kid likes biscuits and barbecue. Okay. So he's more like, see, I was imagining Putin or somebody like that. He's more like the North Korean dictator. Okay. Yeah. All right. They get along great, those two. Yeah. I mean, Tim Dillon and King Jong Un would be like, they could make like a buddy cop movie. They would get along like Lethal Weapon. That would be a good pitch movie. Great podcast. Yeah. That would be a great podcast. Yeah. So much to talk about. So many similar ideas about the world. So what do you think the world would look like if Tim Dillon was given absolute power? He seems like a person that's an interesting study of the corrupting effects of power. Yeah. You don't want to give him power. You don't want, I don't even want him wearing a suit. Like I want a guy who's as thoughtful and educated as you wearing a suit. Like cause you know, suits corrupt you. You put that suit on, you start feeling that power. You start. Definitely. It's like, you know, yeah. I don't even want Tim Dillon in a suit. Power would, he would kill people. He'd get rid of anything that he deemed. I mean, if you made a lobster roll and it wasn't up to Tim Dillon's standard, he would have you executed. The entire restaurant staff is just gone. He would have people below his food standard execute. There'd be programs, not of people who are political dissidents, but of people who don't meet his food standard. His cuisine standard is high and he's usually right. Do you think power does corrupt people? Yes. Like one of the reasons we mentioned offline Joe Rogan, he's been an inspiration to me cause he gets, he gets, if you get power, just more famous and famous and yes, probably a bit of power in terms of influence and he's still pretty much the same guy. I'm not sure that's going to be true for everybody. Do you ever think, ask yourself that question? Yeah. He's a rare breed. He's like a benign king. Most people I meet who are like really powerful are like douchebags and that's how they got there. I think that's, psychopaths have the advantage because they don't have feelings and Joe's a rare example. He's just a powerhouse of will and he, I do think about that. Yeah. I think I should be stopped right now. Just stop me right now because yeah, power for me, I would, when people get power, they indulge. It doesn't change anyone. It just reveals your darkest, you know, people aren't supposed to have anything they want. You got to be able to struggle for everything. So I would have a harem, I'd be like a Roman dictator. Yeah. I'd be like a Roman emperor. I mean, people called them emperors. They were dictators. The most effective leaders are dictators. I hope we get back to that. Democracy hasn't worked. I'm ready for a secession of Caesars and I want to start with AOC. That's true. Dictators get the job done. They do. They do. At a certain point you got, that's why social workers can only get you so far. You need action. I was a social worker for five years and all you do is ask about medications and you don't solve anything. I do ask myself of that, like, cause I'm more in the tech space of constructing systems that prevent me from being corrupt. Cause right now I'm all about love and all about those kinds of things. But I wonder, you said like, it just reveals the darkness. The problem is we might not be aware of our own darkness. I have the same feeling about money actually. I've been avoiding thinking about money, like basically constructing my moral system, my moral compass around money. It's like the moment I feel a little too happy about the idea of owning some cool shiny thing, I started to think, okay, I'm not going to own that shiny thing cause I'm afraid of the slippery slope of it. Yeah. You ever think about that kind of stuff? Yeah. The thing about the capitalist system is it puts sort of a profit motive above beauty. And you notice when you see certain cities, especially in the old days where like buildings used to be beautiful and now they're just like boxes, they throw a kid up and it's just for all profit margin. It's the illusion of permanence that, you know, it's like, oh, let me get as much money as I can. You're like, yeah. You know, my dad used to say, you know, everyone, it's a cliche, but you can't take it with you. So it's kind of, it's, it's comical to me that we're here trying to get this infinite amount. Like it's like Sisyphus, we're all trying to climb this hill, but I mean, the rock's going to fall on us. So I think that's a healthy outlook. Yeah. My dad always used to say before he passed, you know, he would say, you can't, you have to survive not only physically, but you have to survive emotionally. I think a lot of people forget about the emotional part of a survival. You have to survive emotionally and humor and, and, and understanding reality in its objective context helps with that. Accepting reality as this ephemeral thing that you're really just a part of, but not as significant as your ego wants you to believe is a, is a start. That's a good foundation for surviving emotionally. What's that mean? Surviving emotionally? Like what, what's an ideal life look like while you're thriving? You can't take things too seriously. You can't, because they're ephemeral. They're not permanent. Nothing's permanent. Your bank account's not permanent. Your abilities aren't permanent. Nothing's permanent. Your abilities aren't permanent. Your memory's not permanent. Your, your, your dick getting hard is not permanent. Can I curse on this or is this go out to, yeah, you can curse to your heart's content. Okay. Yeah. I mean, gender's not even permanent anymore. I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna change maybe and live my second half as another gender just to have, I'm bored with this gender. So it's like nothing is permanent. And so accepting that emotionally is a good start to being more flexible. You gotta be flexible. Like my dad used to say, anything too stiff snaps. You gotta, you know, it's a cliche and people have said it a bunch of different ways, but Bruce Lee's right, man. Be water. Be water. Yeah. Bukowski has this quote about love, that love is a fog that fades with the first light of reality. So he's, he's a romantic, that guy. But that even love is a thing that just doesn't last very long. No. Um, you know, some people would disagree with that. Maybe it morphs, like, like, like water, it changes, right? It might not be, it might not be this, cause he's mostly just, uh, loved like prostitutes, I think. So, The best kind of love. Yeah. No demand. No, uh, responsibilities. Yeah. It's a financial transaction. Yeah. Uh, ephemeral as ever. You mentioned your dad. He passed away, uh, two, uh, a year and a half ago. Yeah. What did you learn from him? I love my dad. My dad, I would say my dad was my, my hero. He was just, uh, my dad really embodied those values and I think, um, for better or worse, it's made me who I am. He's, he, uh, my dad was, was a painter, he was a lawyer, he was, uh, he was, uh, you know, a Lieutenant in the military. New Yorker. New Yorker. Born and bred Brooklyn. His dad, his dad, you know, uh, surprise owned a diner. So that's, that's sort of the Greek passport. That's the immigration passport for Greeks into America. And, um, yeah, my dad played football. He just, my dad did what he wanted. He lived as he wanted at all costs and I think I got that from him for better or worse. I think it's hurt me in my pursuits. Uh, if you consider money and fame, uh, to be paramount, you know, I, I've always done what I wanted and if I stopped wanting to do it, I just stopped doing it. I think I got that from my dad. So maybe for better or worse, that's what I learned from him. But that's a real currency, you know, feeling like you're in love with what you're doing when you're doing it, maybe perhaps that's worth more than money. I don't know. You miss him? Yeah. Every day. Every day. But I'm happy that, uh, he, he got 91 years. It's very rare. I mean, he smoked for 60 years. Talk about like a guy who was an outlier and he smoked like 60 years, like packs. I mean, and he didn't die from that. He died. He had a prostate cancer, which is the way men should go. Your dick should give out. It should start from the dick. I mean, we focus so much of our life on the dick that that's the way that's a successful life and that's why every man eventually gets prostate cancer because that is the universe's way of saying like the thing you focused on the most is you put the most energy into is the thing that's spent and it's going to, your, your rotting is going to start there. So that's a successful life and it just spread all over his body and he slowly died. I was with him when he died and that meant a lot to me because me and my brother weren't talking at the time cause we're Greeks, we're, we're talking again, but that's how it is. You got a few brothers, right? I got two brothers, but I wanted to make sure I was with him when he died and I got lucky and I was in the room with him when he died. You were in the room with your brother and you weren't. No, my brother wasn't there. We were kind of doing shifts. I was, I was there. I spent the night, the dad, my, the night my dad died, he died in the early in the morning and I heard the death rattle last breath and it was just, I think it was, uh, I, he knew I was there and, uh, I think that just probably meant something to him and I'm just glad I was there. Does that make you sad that, uh, life is ephemeral, like you said, that, that you die? Yeah. What do you think about your own death? You meditate on that? I think it, I think the actual, if there is a point to life, it's to, um, hopefully not fear death, to accept reality. I think that's important. I think so much goes awry in the human condition when we lose touch with reality. Every, uh, political system that's led to mass murder and everything, I think because it's because the, the tenants of those political philosophies ended up being utopian. They were detached from reality, detached from nature. And so I think it's, it's very important to accept and acknowledge your own mortality. I think it's the foundation for what makes a good person, a moral person, um, a contributing member of society because it's true. True things should be the foundation of all things. If, if, if what you believe is based on illusion, you're going to end up doing destruction. Whether that destruction is on a scale of one to 10, you are going to be destructive because it's not real. It's a fantasy. It doesn't exist. See, the thing is the truth is about, I don't think you can ever reach truth. Truth is about like constantly digging and to push back on your idea that you should accept death. I think the more honest response to death, so the least honest is to run away from it, create illusions that help you imagine that there's not a death. Uh, the next is to accept it, but the real honest one is to fear it because I, I, I mean, I'm, I'm with, uh, Ernest Becker is a philosopher, uh, wrote a book called Denial of Death. He says that the, like much of the human condition is based in the fear of mortality. That we like, that's, that's the creative force of the human energy. Like Freud said, do you want to sleep with your mother? He said, no, that's not what motivates you. Maybe his mom wasn't hot though. I mean, or he wasn't Greek because apparently at a poll, we found that we found that all things good and bad. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks. I just don't know if his mom was a looker or not. I mean, I'd have to Google it. All right. Yeah. I'll look up on Google images. Yeah. But I think the honest, as he says, the thing that we run away from is that there's a terror. He calls it like terror. Uh, there's something called terror management theory. That's some philosophers after him followed on that we're basically trying to run away from this fear and acceptance is actually creating an illusion for yourself. Like you can actually accept something as terrifying as this. So he's more with the stoics, the stoic constantly meditate on their death. I mean, they, what does that mean? I mean, it's kind of, it's, you know, acceptance of death isn't a thing you do like on a Monday and then you're done is a thing you constantly have to meditate on, like reminding yourself like this ride is over. It could be over today. And that's something you're, if you think about every single day, it gives you an appreciation of Woody Allen movies, at least it gives you appreciation of basically everything, including Woody Allen movies, which shows you how deep your appreciation for life could be. I've actually haven't been following much about what Woody Allen's, but apparently he's been a troublemaker through most of his life. He's yeah. I mean, you know, he's caused a little bit of strife. He's left a little, uh, yeah, he's left a little confusion in his wake for sure. But I mean, you know, that's another one separate the art from the artist. He's got, I mean, the guys will go down in history as the greatest he's made, I mean, maybe a year and they're all, you can always find something good about each movie, like the dialogue or whatever. Um, I love what you're saying. It's interesting, but the only thing I would say to push back a little bit since we're playing a little table tennis here is, um, I don't know if it's a choice to fear death. That's more of an, it seems more instinctual. It seems like something that nature wants you to do because I've been in positions where I thought I was going to die. Like I've been shot and I had those moments and then nature also, uh, you know, kicks in an instinct, which is acceptance where you kind of, I don't know, it's a chemical release or whatever. I don't know, you know, we're all, we're robots basically. So some sort of chemical is released that protects you, but there is an acceptance. I don't know how much, uh, of it was a conscious choice, probably very little. Um, and that's the point I'm making is it's, it's instinctual. We don't really have a choice in fearing death. Otherwise there would be no progression. We wouldn't all life seems to want to survive, uh, not by choice, but by instinct. So he, he argues that the fear is not the instinctual of, it's not the animalistic stuff. That's the thing that makes us special is the, what humans are able to do is to have a knowledge that we're going to die one day. Animals don't have that animals. Fear is instinctual. It's like, Holy shit, what's that sound over there? He says, we're actually able to contemplate the fact that this ride ends and that that kind of cognitive construct is difficult for us to deal with. Like what the hell does that mean? Like just to, just to think about, it's going to be over at a certain point, it's just over lights out. Like it's very difficult to kind of load that into whatever this like little brain we got. Like, what does that actually mean? Maybe that's what gives everything meaning. Yeah. Because if everything lasted forever, if, uh, if this went on ad infinitum, there would be no meaning to it. I'd be like, Hey, if I don't see you tomorrow, I'll see in a million years, there would be no meaning. There'll be no urgency. There would be no feelings. There'd be no, uh, nothing of magnitude or superficiality. It would all just be this kind of, it would be torture. It would actually, that would actually be torture to be here forever. I mean, I'm already sick of this place and I'm just in my forties. Like I'm done. I'm sick of me. I'm sick of everything. You know, a lot of people, when they talk about mortality, they consider, they consider mortality appealing because you get a chance to do basically all these things you might not get a chance to do otherwise, like all the kinds of travel broadly, explore, read every book, explore every idea, do every hobby, all those kinds of things. The idea I was talking to mentioned, uh, the reality of being immortal would be more likely, I like this idea, more likely would be you just sitting there doing nothing because, and putting off all that travel and exploration to later because you'll always have time. And so what you're going to have, what actual immortality would look like for a bunch of humans is people sitting there doing nothing. It would be like a Greek caffineer just sitting around drinking coffee. I love it. Yeah. I mean, it's a lazy man's paradise. Yeah. But it's so interesting because that, that's, that rings true to me for what humans are like is we'll basically just put off all those exciting adventures and just be lazy, become lazier and lazier and lazier because you'll always have a chance to do all the exciting things and we'll just get, we'll basically become Tim Dillon. We just sit there and have a podcast and that's it. He works hard. Um, yeah. I mean, that sounds actually like heaven, dude. That's speaking to my heart really. I mean, I'm at heart, I'm a very lazy person. I always try to find ways to lie down. Like if I'm sitting, I'll figure out a way to kind of contort myself to later. That's an interesting thing to like in, yeah. If you can always push something off, yeah, that, I like that. I think that's heaven. And um, See, we just changed your mind. You kind of like the immortality. Yeah. I kind of like it. No. So there'll be no thirsts. No. You can always put it off. You don't want to bang this girl. You're like, ah, put it off. But now I'm thinking about Muslim heaven and they may be offering the best deal. I mean, if it was an expo and they had a booth, I may go with them because they offer, they offer 62 or 72, but then I'd get sick of them. I'd want to, I don't know. I always wondered like, are you given the 62 virgins or you choose, can you create them like an avatar, like a video game, or are you just given? I don't know what the number, why it's important to have that high number. First of all, I think it's a mistranslation about the virgins, but outside of that, outside of that, I feel like the conversation is really important. I don't think they ever specify like what kind of books these girls read. Like what are they, what are they into? Like the quality of the conversation, I think if you're talking about eternity, the quality of the intellect and the conversation and the personalities is way more important. And the Greeks have an ancient, ancient expression, pat metronaros stone, which my mother always used to say, which is everything in moderation, nothing in excess. So trying to always get the status quo and uh, yeah, that many women, eventually it's like the magic Johnson effect, Isaiah Thomas effect. It's just too much and you're going to end up, you're going to end up banging a dude is what I'm saying. You're going to get sick of it cause it's too much and there's going to be a eunuch that finds its way into your harem. That's been proven throughout history, every empire, when you have all that power. And again, this goes back to power corrupting. If you have, if there's no struggle, there's no meaning, there's the value is from the journey, the, the working hard to struggle. And if it's just given to you because you're a Sultan or you're Alexander the Great or whatever, you're going to get bored and you're going to bang a dude. That's it's, I think that's a scientific axiom actually. Eventually you'll get bored and bang a dude. Yeah, but I think it won't stop there. I think you'll go to animals, you go to robot. I mean, eventually it all ends up in robots and then the robots rebel and then the humans will be destroyed. Yeah. I'm sorry. If, if we're speaking truth, you said the value of life, one of the highest ideals is to seek truth. I think if we're being honest. Can I ask you a quick question? Yes. If you, if you live in a small, I come from small islands, right? And so there's a stereotype that that's where they bang animals. But if you come from a very small community, you know, an island or something, and you have the choice of banging a family member or an animal, which one is worse on the moral scale? Because you're technically not related to the animal. Right. This is interesting. I mean, these are human constructs, these ideas, but yet for me personally, taboo would be more taboo to, uh, to, to have sex with a family member. Yeah. I mean, animal. I mean, okay. It's good to know where you stand on that. I think if viewers, you know, if they didn't have, they didn't know they had that question. I just, they just learned a little bit about you. And now I know. I look forward to the internet clipping that out. Yeah. I mean, there, there is, listen, uh, in some, outside of, outside of that, I do think about that a lot. I think it's kind of ridiculous, uh, about morality connected to animals in terms of all the, the, the factory farming and so on. It seems like that's one of the things we'll look, cause I love meat, but I kind of feel bad about it and, and bad in a way where I think if we look like a hundred years from now, we'll look back at this time as like one of the great like tortures and injustices that we humans have committed. And I mean, all that has to do with the sex with the animal has to do with consent and about the experience of suffering of animals. The reason I think about that personally a lot, cause I think about robotics, I think about creating artificial consciousnesses, uh, or artificial like beings that have some elements of the human nature. And then you start to think like, well, what does it mean to suffer? What does it mean for entity to exist such that it deserves rights? This is something that the founding fathers were thinking about, like, you know, all men are created equal. What does it, which, who is included in the men who, who's not in that, in that sentence and our animals included in that are robots. I honestly think that there will be a civil rights movement for robots in the future. I don't, I don't know. Is that the Turing test, the way you try to, is that what they call it where you're trying to see if AI can think like a human or whatever, or feel like a human? Well, it's a, the Turing test closely defined as more about talk like a human. So you can, you can imagine systems that are able to, you can have a conversation like this and I would be a robot for example, but that doesn't mean I would do in a, in society. That doesn't mean I deserve rights or that doesn't mean I would be conscious. It doesn't mean that I would be able to suffer and to experience pleasure and dream and all those kinds of human things. The question isn't whether you're able to talk, which is passed in the Turing test. The question is whether you're able to feel, to be, I mean, I go back to suffering. The thing that the, that our documents protect us against is suffering. Like we don't want humans to suffer. And if a robot can suffer, that discussion starts being about like, well, shouldn't we protect them? Currently we don't protect animals. We protect that dog. There's laws. There's actual legislation that protects dogs for torture places. Yeah. And you know what? Dogs is something I don't think people really understand enough about. It's one of my obsessions. So they, they, my dad always used to say those, he goes, those things are, those things are basically human. And I mean, they dream, they have anxiety. And what people often overlook about dogs is without dogs, we wouldn't be here. We would not have ever evolved from hunter gatherer to agrarian to, you know, civilization. We wouldn't have cities. We wouldn't have anything. I mean, they are our partner in survival and they are a magical animal. There's no, there's no animal that was, it was like destiny almost. I mean, a malleable animal, there's no animal that's that malleable that in a few generations you can tailor to a specific job that you need. And without that animal, without dogs doing that animal, protecting our crops from, from, you know scavengers and stuff like that, you know, the list goes on. We wouldn't be here. So we, that's an often overlooked fact that human evolution was not done in a vacuum just with humans. Without dogs, we would have never evolved. I mean, we weren't the apex predator for most of our existence. We weren't even the apex predator. I mean, we're getting eaten by hyenas, which is my favorite animal and you know, that's kind of an injustice to, I mean, I'm kind of mad at dogs. We deserve to get eaten by hyenas, but without dogs, we wouldn't be here and dogs, dogs deserve the protection. So do horses. They fucking lugged us around for thousands of years and now these fucking German psychopaths are eating them or whatever. We should not eat horse meat just on like, be a good dude, man. These things lugged us around for generations, they're beautiful, you know, ride them or I don't know. I don't know, but it rubs me the wrong way that we eat horses. Yeah, the horses one is interesting and one of my favorite books is Animal Farm by Orwell and the horses don't get a good ending in that, I kind of, my spirit animal I suppose is the horse from Animal Farm, Boxer, where he says, I will work harder. That's his motto. I work really hard at stupid things. That's basically what I, I just hit my head against the wall for no reason whatsoever. But that probably fulfills, you have a big brain, you were probably born with a big brain that kind of fulfills. It's killing neurons. It's exercise for you. Yeah. Yeah. Don't you think some animals deserve to be eaten though? Kind of like. Hyenas. Come on, dude. I mean, you gotta respect the hyena. Okay, so let's look, first of all, let me just comment on the dog thing. There is like conferences on dog cognition from a perspective of people that study psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, dogs are fascinating. The way they move their eyes, they're able to, they're the only other animal besides humans, they're able to communicate with their eyes. They can look at a thing and look back at you and look back at the thing to communicate that we're all like through our eyes, communicate that we're collaborating. So every other animal uses their eyes to actually look at things. The dogs use it to like communicate with you, with us humans. It's fascinating. There are a lot of other elements of dogs that are amazing. Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for them, they're the ones, they were our first alarm system for predators. They would defend us. I mean, the Basenji is one of the most ancient dogs. I mean, they're tiny, but they're fearless and they would chase off lions. Like there'd be packs of them and they chase off lions and protect the tribes. I even get tingles like thinking about dogs because I have a dog, I love my dog. And there's something about when you're walking with your dog off leash in the woods, there's something about it that's like, that tugs at that millions of years of evolution, like that gut, you know, it's like, I had a Finnish friend of mine, he's a comic, Tommy Valamies once told me, he was like, he was like, the gut, he's like, I believe in it. Like that gut, you know, when you have that feeling, he's like, always trust that because that is million, those are all your ancestors. That's the survival instinct of all your ancestors at the beginning of time, you know, telling you like, Hey, something's off here, something's, you know, so don't get in the car with Ted Bundy is what I'm saying, ladies, how fucking stupid, who, how can you fall for that? You know, he's got a fucking sling on, don't get in. Yeah. Follow the gut. My question to you, are psychopaths essentially robots? So first of all, let's not, you're using the word robot in a derogatory way that I, I'm triggered by. Okay. So I feel offended. You should be because you know what, people are always scared of robots, but I actually, I have, I've made the sort of, uh, I, I've made it to say, Hey, I've, I thought about it and like robot, robots have been nothing but helpful. It's the people we should be scared of. Again, we're kind of missing the most destructive thing is us because it's, but robots are helpful. I mean, this is a fucking robot. You know, I went on hotel tonight, I'm already booked up, you know, I got my, I can change my flight if, if this barbecue with Rogan goes 16 hours, which whatever Rogan wants to do, I'll do it. If he wants to kick me in the chest, I'll let him kick me in the chest, whatever. Robots are helpful. No? Yeah. Uh, tanks and autonomous weapons systems don't kill people. People kill people. Yeah. That's yeah. Yeah. The NRA is about to collect that for you. Uh, a lot of love for dogs. I appreciate it very much. And at the same time, you have the other thing that people seem to have love for, which is cats. And on the flip side of everything you've said, I'm trying to understand what have cats ever done for human civilization? They keep rodents away. The domesticated cat is very important. Keeps the rodents away. Yeah. That's what they were domesticated for. I mean, they're psychopathic killers who ended up killing, uh, innocent, um, neighborhood chipmunks and, and birds, uh, they really affect the, uh, the balance of the local ecosystem. But if you have love for cats too, not as much as dogs, I mean, dogs are, like you said, they look at humans. I actually read an article that some people were theorizing they're smarter than chimps because of the way they can work with humans. And there was one border collie that spoke like 300 words, like a quarter, like a lang, almost part of the language. And their nose is like a mat. I mean, that's like magic, dude. If you can smell in my ass to what I had for breakfast from miles away, that's intelligence. That's intelligence. I mean, in some ways that their nose, if you were to put it on a scale, maybe their nose is more intelligent than our brain for what it does. You know, it's like, I mean, dude, they can smell you from miles away. You ever see a dog just like sniffing, catching? I mean, it's smelling like, I don't remember the, the, the date on it, but it's like, they have like millions of receptors or something where we only, you know, thank God we don't have their nose. That would be, that would make sex weird, be a little too intense. I think you mentioned when you were talking about Woody Allen separating the, the art from the artist. So that brings to mind Vladimir Putin. How about that transition? I don't know. I'm so sorry. But if you look at just powerful leaders throughout history, Stalin, Hitler, but even modern ones like Putin, and we're talking about power. How do you explain them? You said that power reveals, not corrupts, but do you think there's some element to which power corrupted Hitler, power corrupted Stalin after he gained power? And the same with Putin. When Putin gained power in 2000, do you think the amount of power that he was in possession with for many years, do you think that corrupted him? I mean, we're joking about dictators get the job done. There is some sense in certain countries where a dictator is the only thing that can stabilize a nation. The counter argument to that for democracies is like, yeah, but that's a short term solution for a long term problem. So you want to embrace chaos with democracy. That might be violent. There might be a lot of just constant changing of leadership. There might be a lot of corruption in the short term, but if you stay strong with the ideals of democracy, then you'll be ultimately create something that as beautiful and stable as the United States. The sad thing is, is I don't know if history tells that story. It's like I said, you look at Greece, you look at Rome, democracy kind of failed. The majority of Rome, the most successful empire that we've had, was a dictatorship for most of its run. But I do believe in a republic, which is sort of a limited democracy. I do believe in what we have here. I believe in common law. I believe in individual rights. But yeah, I think you said it. Nobody could have said it better. Yeah. It's a short term solution. You look at Saddam Hussein, he kind of, when we took him out, then there was a lot of infighting that happened that he was kind of keeping at bay because he was a strong man, dictator. Well, he's an interesting one, sorry to interrupt. From my understanding, I'm sure people will correct me, but when Saddam Hussein first came to power, he was, he's quite progressive. So like the, as far as I understand, the signs of an evil dictator weren't exactly there. So again, there's, I don't know if power revealed or power corrupted. Or that could have been the initial subterfuge to kind of get everybody, you know, Hitler also is a champion of the people. It's built some new roads. It's with psychopaths too. And that's why it's interesting to me. I'm not sure if power corrupts psychopaths. And now that we know that we can do these CAT scans and brain scans, we know that they're born that way. Power definitely corrupts people who have the capacity to feel and for empathy. Power I'm not sure. I don't think power corrupts people who were born psychopathic with that condition or sociopaths who had, who, you know, who were closer to psychopath and then had some traumatic life. You know, I just think, you know, the best way to get away with whatever nefarious thing you want to do to feel, I guess the only thing psychopaths can feel is that excitement, is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are. That's what, that's what killers do. That's what the worst people, look at Bill Cosby. I mean, he was, what better way to hide, you know, it's like what wokeness is now. It's like, I'm such a great person and then you're like, are you? It's a great, the best way to hide is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are. Just like Ted Bundy. I'm just an innocent, helpful guy. And then boom, next thing you know, you're getting your tit bit off. That's really well said. It's actually kind of funny because I talk about love a lot. And I think the people that kind of look at me with squinty eyes, they wonder like how many bodies are in that closet, you know what I mean? Like there's something about the duality of like, we're so skeptical as a culture. Like if somebody is just like, seems to be kind of, sort of, I don't know, positive and all that kind of, you know, how do I put it? Just simple, simple minded in the positivity they express. They think like, okay, there's some demons in there. Yeah. Especially if you're a New Yorker, we don't trust any, the nicer you are, the more skeptical we are. Yeah. I've struggled with that down here. And they're like, nah, dude, just, I wanted to show you the best tacos, man. And I'm like, did you really, what do you want? Because in New York, it's like, if anyone's nice to you, they want something. And that's, the pro side to that is it makes you very street smart. The downside to that is it makes you way too cynical. Yeah. I've definitely experienced that here in Texas, but people are super, super nice. And they're like, do all this cool shit for you and you wonder, what's the angle? What are we doing here? You mentioned hyenas as your favorite animal. I forgot to ask you, what the hell were you thinking? Why is a hyena is your favorite animal? Yeah. It's a fascinating animal. Let's look at the whole animal kingdom. Like why is it, where do you put, so you like dogs, love my favorite, your favorite is dogs, but they're kind of outside the animal kingdom because you're thinking about wolves. So the animal kingdom is in nature. Dogs escaped nature. They kind of did. Uh, together with humans, like in a collaborative way, exactly. So within nature, within the animal kingdom, what, who's, uh, why not lions? Because lions are predictable. Lions are just, you know, they're regal and kind of, they bore me. It's like the hot chick. It's like, we get it. You were born the best. Yeah. You know, I like a scrappy, by any means necessary, intelligent and cunning. But aren't they dishonest? Yeah. And that's why I like them. Yes. They're dishonest. They employ chicanery. They, uh, they're, and that's just a sign of how intelligent they are and how self reliant they are and how brutal they are. Um, they're brutally honest in how much they lie, you know, because it's just, they're trying to get the job done. You know, lions are just like, they're, they're too gifted. Everyone hates the fucking, you know, if I went to school with you, I'd be like, of course, Lex knows the fucking answer. Yeah. Lex was born smarter than me. Yeah. You know, and you'd probably hate me because I was the kid always seeking attention and making people, it's like, that's not interesting. The guy that claws his way to the top and those are hyenas. They're also fascinating just by, uh, merely who they are. I mean, they're not related to any other animal. They're more closely related to cats than they are dogs, even though they look like a dog. Yeah. They're, but they're very, like very tangentially related even to cats. So they're their own kind of thing, which is kind of mysterious. I don't think they fully figured out and uh, they, the pseudo penis thing is the, is the, I mean, Can you explain the pseudo penis? Yeah. So the, it's a matriarchal society by the way. So that's the unique in and of itself that this, we're talking about an apex predator that is a matriarchal, much like, uh, you know, the praying mantis. It's very rare though. And they are fucking brutal and vicious and the women are bigger and they let their cubs fight, a lot of fratricide and they do that because they're like, Hey, you're weaker. I let your brother kill you. And uh, the women have penises, the women have pseudo penises that they give birth out of and the birth is violent, but they, they roll around with just huge pieces. They're glue guns are just fucking swinging, you know, and the women are just run the show and uh, it's just cool that they have these pseudo penises. It's almost romantic the way you describe it. They have the strongest bite force. They they pulverize bone. Like when they eat an animal, the animal's gone. There's no bones. They eat everything. They can pulverize their bite is so powerful. They pulverize bone and eat it. So if they consume an animal, it, the animal was there and then the animal's gone. There's no nothing for the vultures there to, uh, to, to, to grab. Yeah. I'm going to have to revisit the hyenas because my experience with the heinous was from, uh, first of all, history is your show, uh, has rebranded them for me, but, uh, the lion king, which is, uh, a cartoon, I guess, that, uh, I get emotional at every time I, I hope that probably a father issues, every guy probably just, you just have feelings. You're a good guy. I mean, everyone has feelings. Yeah. Yeah. That one gets everybody. I don't know. I get, I get every father son movie, like blow with Johnny Depp, uh, and, uh, really Yoda. Damn. That's a good movie. And whenever there's like, um, like the disappointment in the father that his son has become like this incredibly successful drug lord that then ends up with nothing in, in, in prison, uh, just the sadness of them communicating through letters, man, it gets me every time, but, but, you know, uh, there, the hyenas are not presented that well in that, um, No, they're usually portrayed as like, uh, it's, it's really, it's, it's, it's, it's really sad that they're portrayed that way as lions. Like lions aren't dicks. Lions are dicks. They, the, the, the, the alpha lions will kill the cubs of another rival. They do all types of dick shit. Yeah. And, um, yeah, it's, uh, the hyenas are more interesting. Like they'll just roll in like a hyena will like, like you said, the lie, you know, cause when you watch the Serengeti, you know, animals will hang out with each other. They're like by water. So one hyena will just kind of roll in and pretend like it's not hungry and then bang. They'll use any means necessary to take an animal down. Like lions will just use brute strength. Hyenas use cunning and you can even go on the internet and find, uh, memes of this where hyenas will grab the big animal by the balls and just like, we'll sneak up behind it and bite its balls. And you'll watch an animal 10 size, 10 times the size of the hyena just slowly go down. It's brutal, but it's fucking hilarious. So I, I think that's, uh, I don't know if you follow the channel, um, nature's metal that, that one weighs heavy on me. Um, with the hyenas on the balls, I it's tough to, to intellectualize it. It's tough to think that the entirety of life on earth has this history of, uh, predators being violent, just like just the murder that we come from. It's crazy. I, it, uh, just like when we're talking about meditating on death, I actually, I keep following and unfollowing that Instagram channel because like sometimes it's too much. Like I can't, I can't continue with the day after like seeing the brutality, the honest brutality of that. I don't know how to make sense of it. It's important to acknowledge, I think, cause that it's real and we do come from that. We are, we evolve from that. It's important. We still do that. We're just hidden from it. You know, when you go to the supermarket and get your slab of meat, you know, you're so disconnected from where that meat came from. It came from that and often that's uglier to watch than because there's some honesty, you know, the, the, the, the nature channels only show, uh, that's why we have so much sympathy with the prey. And this is where I think the same thing with mafia movies, they don't show what the mafia really does. They glorify the good parts. That's why I like state of grace cause it's really just shaking down old people and fucking being dicks. It's not driving nice cars and being like, you know, so, and, and animal channels do the same thing. They only show when the cheetah gets it because that's, that's the exciting part. But what most people don't know is that those predators strike out almost always a majority of the time, the prey wins. And so if you saw that and put it in context, you might not hate it as much when the predator actually gets the little fawn or whatever, because it's so many fawns got away. It's so hard to capture your prey. And you know, we, we don't have the, the, the, they no, no documentary is going to sit around and show you the 99 times the cheetah didn't catch. Thank you for this perspective. It's murder is difficult. So like this is the, they never talk about for people who murder how difficult that is like to trap somebody, to convince them to come back to your place, give it some respect, put some respect on Ted Bundy's name. Yeah. It's not easy to convince somebody to get in your Volkswagen Beagle and, and the cleanup. And then you have to kind of plan ahead because you want to keep doing the murder, mass murder. You gotta learn how to saw them up, put them in duffel bags, bury, you gotta learn to dig, you gotta learn how to hide. You gotta learn to lie. I mean, it's a lot that goes into it that we need to put a little respect on. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to figure out which tools work the best for the sawing and all those kinds of things. Um, um, so thank you for the perspective. That's what I was hoping we would bring to this table. So you, um, uh, you got a little bit Greek in you. Uh, one of the episodes on, on a history hyenas, you talked about the battle of Crete where the Greeks, your people in, uh, uh, in 19, I guess 41 and the early stages of the world war II, there's one of the most epic battles of the war. Uh, in fact, in 1941 in a speech made at the Reichstag, Hitler paid tribute to the bravery of the Greek saying, it must be said, uh, for the sake of historical truth that amongst all our opponents, only the Greeks fought with the endless courage and defiance of death. So okay. What do you make of this battle? What do you make of the spirit of the Greek people? This is one of the closest things to me because my mother was actually on the island of Crete during this, the first aerial invasion in history. A lot of people don't know that. So this is a very significant battle. Um, first time there was an invasion from the sky, um, and, uh, my mother was a little girl and she lived through four years of a Nazi occupation there. So my mother was a human rights lawyer and everything, but she just always hated Germans. It's just what it is. She hated Germans and she never got over it. So the most progressive, open minded woman just could not get over this. Um, it's a monumental battle that a lot of historians in retrospect have now looked back on and said, because the Nazis, first off, you got to take it back to when Hitler instructed Mussolini. Cause let's be honest, Mussolini was Hitler's bitch. You know what I mean? It was like, if it, well, you know, if it was fantasy island, Hitler was the fucking and the, and Mussolini was boss, the plane. Mussolini ever say no to Hitler or even maybe it's always like, yes, yes, yes, we will do it. And, uh, it's like, yeah, it takes, you have to take Greece. And so, um, yeah, so Italy being much bigger than Greece, Greece is a tiny country, nine, 10 million. So Italy invaded Greece, um, you know, um, and Aukey day's a big, it's a big holiday for Greeks. And this speaks to the spirit Greeks in fight until we have a common enemy and then we unite, you see it throughout history, Sparta and Athens, you see it in Greek families where the brothers will fight. But then as soon as we have a common enemy, we unite and maybe it's an overactive brain. We think too much, our traditions, philosophy, and we overthink things and we fight with each other and take things personally, we're ultra passionate. But when Italy said, Hey, we're going to move troops through, you know, uh, a Greek said Aukey, which means no, and that was, um, and then Italy attacked and, uh, we beat the shit out of them. A much bigger country, much, uh, more well equipped country. Greece beat the shit of them, kicked them back into Albania, actually not only repelled them, actually like conquered some ground in Albania, pushed them back. And then Hitler was like, fuck, you know, I was planning my March to Russia, uh, but I have to go down because he basically said to Mussolini, like, you know, you're basically bitch slapped. I'm like, I got to do this myself because you're such a fucking bitch. So then the Nazis invaded Greece. Obviously they took the mainland with fight and shot out. The Greeks never give credit to the British and New Zealand and Australian troops that were there. You know, they were a large part of this, the majority of it, but the Greeks fight dude, civilians. I mean, they fought, you know, the Ottomans were there 400 years. You go to Greece. Now there's no evidence. There's virtually no evidence of them ever being there. That's the Greek spirit. Kick them out and we kicked out hummus too. So it's like their culture's gone. You're gone. Cause Greeks are, uh, it's philoptimo. It's called philoptimo. And it's a real thing. Philoptimo is a, it's very little translate. You can't translate it, but it's kind of like honor, loyalty, friendship, uh, altruism. It's a, it's, you can't define it, but Greeks know it and we're taught it from our, from our, uh, families. It's a vibe, man. It's a Greek cultural thing and we're an old culture and philoptimo is what it's called philoptimo. And it's, um, it's love, it's passion and it comes out and it comes out. And so, um, so Hitler had to postpone his invasion of, um, of, uh, Russia went down the island of Crete took 10 days to conquer. It's an island to put that in perspective, the country of France fell in three or four days. I can't even remember cause they fucking just rolled over. So what is it? What does a couple of hours matter when you're that much of a fucking pussy? Okay. What is a couple out in 12 hour fucking three or four days, the island of Crete took the Germans 10 days to conquer. And because of that, and because of the Greek resistance, Hitler had to postpone his invasion of Russia to winter. And of course that was, you know, that was his downfall just as it was Napoleon's and a never dude, never try to invade Russia. They got millions of people to throw at death. Every time you read about Russians in history books, like, and a million died. I mean, it's like, you just guys throw millions of people at the problem and don't fuck with that Russian winter and don't fuck with Russian people, dude, they're tough. People in New York know that you don't go to fucking sheep set bay and start talking shit. You'll end up in a fucking car trunk and they'll brutally murder you. I do not fuck with Russians. Amen. And then there's a, I mean, there's a lot of people, a lot of historians argue that that battle was because of the Russian winter because of delaying the Russian invasion, but also psychologically delaying the invasion. It was the first time, I think it was the first time the Germans failed, not, or didn't succeed like they wanted to early in the war, which is a little like psychologically the impact of that I think is immeasurable. And also a lot of people argue from a military strategy perspective that the, just like you said, it was an aerial attack and that Hitler didn't think that the, that kind of attack would then be useful for the rest of the war. So that's, that's a really part where, whereas it might've been very useful. So it's a, it's really interesting how these little battles can steer the directions of war. Of course, me growing up in the Soviet Union, we didn't hear much about this battle. Just like you said, millions of Soviets died. All those people in history that you read about dying, those are all civilians, but I mean, not all, but a very large number of them are civilians and their stories, obviously that's the rooted, the literature, the poetry, the music, just the way people talk, the way they drink vodka, the way they love, the way they hate, the way they fear. That's all like rooted in World War II and World War I. And so, but we never kind of think about Europe and we certainly, growing up, didn't think about their role in the United States. All this, there's plenty of stories of heroism in the Soviet Union, enough to, enough for many lifetimes. So, but it was fascinating to read from a Greek perspective, cause I, you know, I don't have many Greek friends, I hope you didn't change that. This is the beginning of a love affair of your people. Yeah. But likewise, the Americans don't hear about the Soviet contribution to the end of World War II because obviously we became, you know, enemies after that because of the two systems. But yeah, without the Russians, World War II wouldn't have been won either. Yeah. The stories are written by the victors. That's really interesting. I, just looking at the, at history, you wonder what's missing. I'll tell you what's missing that I know for a fact, cause my dad told, my dad told me combat's hell and he would tell me the reality of what it's really like. Guys pissing themselves, calling for their mother, the fog of war, obviously, fratricide happens all the time. It's pandemonium. I mean, there's skill involved, but I mean, there's no, like it's a lot of it is just luck. My dad said, he, my dad won three, he got, you know, medals, braille, purple hearts, all that shit. And he said, the reason was, is cause you can't, he always said, this is another thing. He told me, you can't pin a medal on a dead guy. So it's like, those are the guys who deserve it, but you can't pin a medal. You can't do the pomp and, and I'll tell you one thing is that it is written by the victors and all these leaders, they say we're in the front. We're not in the front. We're not in the front. Whenever the history books say he led his troops into battle. It's like, did he really, did he, so then how did he live? Cause they put like kids in the front, you know, it's like nobody limps back from the front with like a injury, you know, that's, that's army PR, you know, whenever you read, you know, 27 soldiers died, 14 were injured. The word injured is PR. That's like injured. Was he, did he sprain his ankle? Did he need, did he get carried off the court or, you know, he was maimed. I mean, he was like, his leg was blown off, you know, it's like, so, uh, I think that, you know, Alexander the Great was just kind of in the back on his horse and just kind of, he had his eunuch blow him a few times and he was like, is it bad up there? And then like after that he was like, okay, my scribe, give me my scribe. Okay. When you write this down, can you put me in the front? Yeah. And I was just making me a big hero and I was in there and then he, you know, he just blew his, you know, he had sex with his eunuch and rode off into the sunset because there's just no way you survive in the front, especially warfare back then. I mean, it's like brutal. Then again, you have like, uh, Genghis Khan. The sense I got that he was a little bit up on the front, at least the first. Yeah. Or is that also, is he a little bit Alexander the Great? Give me my scribe. Yeah. It's all lore. I mean, you ever play the game of telephone? You know, it's like, you know, there's no video cameras back then. So shit just get, turns into myth, you know, and, uh, there's no way he was in the front. There's no way he wouldn't have lived. You know, he was probably good on horseback cause those, those dudes were good on horseback. But it was like game of Thrones back then. You had all these different people and they kind of, yeah, the, the, the Mongols were wild dude. They are actually said like, um, they started like they were more adaptable to the horse because they were so good on horseback that kids started to be born like kind of bow legged like to fit the horse. It's wild. And they would stretch their heads and shit like that. They wrap them and stretch their heads. So they find like Mongol skulls and they look like cone heads and they were brutal and vicious and they would maraud and rape and all the fun stuff that, you know, when, you know, when you visit other places back then, there's no tchotchke stops and souvenir shops. What you do is you take women and those are the tokens, you know, you burn a few huts different. Tourism was different back then. Yeah. That's another difficult thing. So we're talking about nature and predators to think about the long stretch of history where we're just murder and we made so much progress, I guess, in the past couple of centuries. The United States is a shining example of that. But do you think also that it's that effect that we were, a lot of good things had to happen too or else we wouldn't be here. So do we just focus, isn't it like a car crash effect that like we're, you know, the rubber neck that everyone pulls over to see a car crash, are we just only focusing on the negative things of history because they're just more exciting to us? Like it's just not, it's boring to be like, yeah, and then there was a bunch of villagers and they ate every day and danced and loved. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder how different those people were, you know, like they might've had the same exact loves and fears and like they perhaps had the same kind of brilliant ideas in their head, if not more brilliant. And we kind of think about like this moment in history is like the most special moment. Like we're doing the coolest shit that we're doing the most amazing building and most amazing things. But maybe they were building amazing things in their different way with like less technological, but in the space of ideas, in the space of just all the different, the camaraderie and the space of like concepts, mathematics, all those kinds of things. Yeah. I mean, Greece, you look at the architecture, it still stands up. I mean, all the government, but it's still arguably, I mean, as far as objective beauty, it's hard to argue that Greco Roman, it's just something about it with the, with the columns. It's just, it's powerful. It's I don't know, even Ayn Rand would probably appreciate it. She doesn't, no, no, no. So in your history, hyenas that unfortunately has come to an end, we're talking about empires coming to an end, all empires fall. That one, it may rise again. Empires might rise again. Who knows? Who knows? I, I'm obviously a fan, so I hope it does rise again, but you've seemed to develop your own language. Can you, you know, it's what it is. What is, what is that? What the hell, is this some kind of medical condition or can you, can you explain like the linguistic essentials that catch us up to the linguistic essentials that people need to know to understand the way you speak? You know, Leopold and Loeb, you know the story of those two, they murdered that kid and they had this weird relationship. Anyway, it's an interesting thing to Google, Leopold and Loeb, these two guys who ended up murdering a kid because they developed their own language with each other and this own reality and this weird thing and they wanted to know what it's like to murder a kid and they murder a kid. It's a famous story in American lore and history or whatever, famous case. But this phenomenon, yeah, me and Chris got together. It wasn't as dark as Leopold and Loeb, we didn't murder a kid, but we murdered a podcast. Or at least stabbed it a few times. Yeah, it's, it was something in the organic chemistry of me and Chris that I think we'll both end up appreciating even probably more than we do now that it's mysterious. I got to be honest with you, it's, it was a thing that it wasn't conscious, wasn't intentional. It was something that happened in the music of our energies that just went. Like when you hear someone sing or when a jazz band hits a rhythm or even when I'm on stage and I just catch a rhythm, it's like, dude, I didn't make a choice there. I don't know what that is. I don't know how to explain it, but it comes from somewhere else and I don't know what it is. It's beyond my comprehension. But with Chris, there was this magical chemistry that, you know, I have chemistry with a lot of people and it can be funny and I feel zero chemistry here. This is great. Yeah. It's a little bit more intelligent than what me and Chris did. But you know, me and Chris, I think we connected on the funny bone. Like I, he, I found him so funny and we found the same things funny. And from that, these organic expressions came from some part of our brains that was created from this chemistry. And yeah, we just developed this language and this cult following and people were really upset when we ended. But it was the right thing to end because like all things that end, it was kind of done a few episodes even before we finished. And I think we pulled the plug before it started rolling downhill, like all, you know, like all great flings, you know, there's your long relation, long marriages are boring and comfortable. The one you really like fucking always ends abruptly and sadly and, but you always look back and you jerk off to it. And so you guys made love and we made, yeah. So it's like, it was like a hot fling with me and him and it was intense and we burned the candle at both ends. And it was, I think that podcast was meant to be three years and maybe people will go back and appreciate it and listen to it over and over again. And I think the new things we do, people will love, I'm doing long days now, that podcast and people seem to enjoy it. I've been really enjoying the long days on YouTube. I just found myself just like staring at you ranting for, same with Tim Dillon, I really enjoyed the, whatever those rants are, the genius of just one thing after the other. But definitely the chemistry, almost as a study, I remember the reason I first started listening to it, I was trying to get a perspective on certain historical moments. Like it was interesting. I tuned in to learn history. Yeah. I came for the history and like stayed for the chaos and the crack open and clean out. And yeah, this, it was almost, I listened to Rogan like this sometimes. I'll relisten to an episode to try to understand why was this so fun to listen to? It's almost like trying to analyze humor or something like that. But it's nice from a conversational perspective, like why was this so easy to listen to? And with History of Hyenas, like why is the chemistry so good? It's so, it's weird. It's weird. Cause there's not many podcasts like, I don't know any with the chemistry like that. It's interesting. And it's kind of sad that the fling with a prostitute in Vegas has to end, you know? But that's what makes it special. It's the Bukowski thing with the fog. The British Office, one of my favorite shows was that it ended very quick. It's only a couple of seasons or something like that. And that was tragic, but that took guts to just end it. Given all the money you could have made, given all the, you just end it. And that's what makes it truly special. Yeah. And I'll tell you, man, I'll just emphasize it. Cause I marvel at it too. Cause as a guy who tries to always figure out what the causes of things, I gotta be honest, man. Looking back on that, even with retrospective wisdom, you know, that 2020 hindsight, we've been done a couple of months now, it's something that I can't explain. It's something that I don't know how you quantify it. I don't know how you describe it. It's musical. It's really kind of rhythmic. Maybe like a Netflix show about history. That's in the future with the two of you. You guys will meet like the way you meet with a fling like a decade from now at a diner and you're both way fatter and uglier and then you just reminisce over some cigarettes and coffee. It could be. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. It's definitely a classic podcast that people can go back and appreciate. It's fast paced and it was unique. What was it like to research for, I mean, it was really scholarly, the depth of research that you performed. It sometimes felt like you almost read an entire Wikipedia article beforehand. Or like. Exactly true. We were, we were one fan, we attracted such funny people to that podcast and the fans were so funny and one fan called us nicknamed as Wikipedia sluts. And so it just stuck. Yeah. We just would read Wikipedia. I would do a lot more research than Chris. And so I would actually, you know, once in a while he'd get into it too. But for very interesting episodes, I got some subject matter would just pull me in. Like Bernie Madoff, just to think of one that was recent, it was one of our last ones. And I think one of our better episodes and I'm glad that it kind of ended after that because it was rare to, I think we started to slip a little bit. I got fascinated and I got, I did a lot of research for Bernie Madoff, but usually, yeah, we'd pull up Wikipedia and we'd have fun. We were sort of the antithesis of Dan Carlin. I mean, you went to Dan Carlin for accuracy and thoughtfulness and you went to us for, it was a hang with history. That's why history hyenas was such an appropriate name because it was, it was a little bit of history. Some, some episodes were more hyena, more wild and a little history and some were a little more dense, like the battle of Crete and less hyena. So you were, you were always going to get both, you're either going to get a majority of one or the other. Yeah. And Dan Carlin is the lion, I guess. Yeah. And you guys, predictably good. Yeah. I mean, what, what are your thoughts about, I mean, he's a storyteller too. He gets a lot of criticism for the, from the historians, quote unquote. That's why he likes to knock. He keeps saying he's not a historian, but what's your, what are your thoughts about the hardcore history with Dan Carlin? Like, was he an inspiration to the podcast you were doing or, or like an account, like a, almost like a reverse psychology inspiration where you wanted to do some kind of opposing type of podcast in history or was history always just like a, a launching pad to just talk shit about human nature? More of the latter. I wasn't even aware of his podcast when we started. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And so we, it was just very organic, again, like the chemistry, me and Chris became very good friends. We started the podcast. First we did a web series called Bay Ridge Boys, which has its sort of little cult following. We did like five episodes and ended it. And then we did the podcast and hi, hyenas were my favorite animal and I talk about them passionately and I told Chris about them and then he started appreciating them and we both love history. I majored in history. It's one of the things I love. I go to museums all the time. I go to his, I do history tours, so does he. And so it was just sort of a natural, let's do a history podcast and it gave us something to talk about each episode to sort of lean our, you know, hang our hats on and, and riff off of. So it had nothing to do with dance. What I think about dance, I think it's great. I think even if he's inaccurate in the opinions of the historical community, it starts conversations, which is good. It's like this thing where people go, oh, it's dangerous rhetoric. It's like, no, rhetoric only becomes dangerous when education fails. What's going on in America is education has failed. So if you call someone online dangerous, it's not him that's dangerous. It's the fucking stupid people that's dangerous. And it's the fault of this country. We didn't listen to Aristotle. The future of a civilization depends on public education and we failed. Education has failed. Kids are, kids are not interested in shit. And so in some sense, those dance podcasts and podcasts can be incredibly educational. Because he's a, the storytelling that pulls you in ultimately leads to you internalizing these stories and like remembering them and thinking through them and all those kinds of things that is much more powerful than you book on history. That's accurate. I think often it inspires you to go learn more. So it's like, I know we did that. I mean, you know, I, people would go, Hey, I went and learned about this because they knew with us, there was no pretense, which was great that we had no standard. So it's like, nobody came to us for historical accuracy, but I was kind of turned on by the fact that it inspired people to go learn about this stuff or to at least know like Battle of Crete, like you said, a very underappreciated battle. Even Winston Churchill said from here on, we will no longer say that Greeks fight like heroes, but heroes fight like Greeks. I mean, it was a monumental battle and you know, not talked about enough. And I, our podcast would inspire people to go actually learn more, to go listen to Dan Carlin or to go pick up a book or to do research on their own. And so I think podcasts, Dan Carlin's obviously much more accurate than us, but it's good that people are going to podcasts like yours and to learn shit. Joe was, is really like the progenitor of that. I mean, you know, having intellectuals on and getting the public interested with this new medium in, in people who are intelligent. It's nice. Cause you know, what the mainstream press pushes out is horseshit, gorgeous horseshit. It's got a beautiful veneer, but no substance. And so this, this is a nice pushback. Yeah. The authenticity of Joe's show. I mean, I'm through, I started listening from the very beginning, you know, doing my in grad school, you know, like a technical person and he just pulled me in. And made me curious to learn about all kinds of things and use my own critical reasoning skills on some of the bullshit guests he's had and some of the most inspiring guests he's had. And so I teach you to think, can you, I don't know much about Bernie Madoff as a small tangent. Can you, can you tell me who the hell is Bernie Madoff? Oh, Bernie Madoff is the GOAT. The greatest thief of all time, dude. Hedge fund guy, ran a hedge fund and pulled, stole the most money in the history of America. I mean a con artist and he does, people obviously he's become, he's a household name because of the magnitude of his crime, but you got to appreciate, again, you got to appreciate what went into this and how long he was able to pull it off by tricking the smartest and richest people in the world and a brilliant scam. The con man, con man is short for confidence man. And it came from, yeah, a con man, basically they exude confidence and they trick people by playing on their ego and blind spots. And the word comes from a guy, I can't remember where, but what he used to do, I can't remember the guy's name, whatever, you can Google it, con man. But it's very interesting. The first con man that is on record, what he would do, he would go to very rich people and he'd be very well dressed, right? And he'd go, I bet you, you don't have the confidence to give me your watch. And he would play on the egos of these very powerful and rich people and they would give them the watch for some reason, some sort of reverse psychology bullshit. And he'd take the watch and he would just steal it because basically saying like, you don't have the confidence to give me the watch because you don't, I don't know, you don't think I'm going to give it back. And he would just take it. So Bernie Madoff was a very sophisticated con man. And again, we were talking about people pretending to be the opposite of what they are. And he hid his thievery in how available he was to his clients, how he would show up at every bar mitzvah, every birthday, he was always available for their phone calls. And he played on their egos. He made it so people wanted to invest in him, like they were competing. He made it very exclusive. He wouldn't just take anyone. And there was a method behind that madness because he wanted the whales that wouldn't notice that he had this pyramid scheme going. And so what he would do is he would just rob from the richer and he just kept, it was like he'd pay back the richer with the guy who was a little, and it was a pyramid scheme. And he was able to do it for so long and steal so much money. And he would win people over with the scheme because with that scheme, he was the only guy who could provide, who could guarantee like a 1% return even during times of recession. And because he was such a good con man, he hijacked people's reasoning with his charm. And that's what con artists do. That's what psychopaths do. They're so fucking charming. They get you in that Volkswagen Beetle. Because if they use their reasoning for one second, they'd go, hey, nobody can provide 1% returns during recessions. How the fuck is this guy doing it? I'll tell you how he's doing it. He's stealing from another guy to pay you. You fucking idiot. So charisma is essential to that. Maybe you can help explain something to me, something I have been affected by. I'm getting way too loud for your listeners, there's going to be comments like, tell this guy to calm down. I'm sorry, I'm Greek, I'm positive. No, that's beautiful. I love it. Something that I have been thinking about and have encountered indirectly is Jeffrey Epstein. And I have a sense because of MIT, because of all the other people that have been touched, the wrong term, by Jeffrey Epstein in the sense that literally and figuratively. And it always felt to me like there's not a deep conspiracy, I don't know, but it felt to me like it's not some deeply rooted conspiracy where like Eric Weinstein thinks that there's some probability that Jeffrey Epstein is a front for like an intelligence agency, whether it's Israeli or the CIA, I don't know, but is a front for something much, much bigger. And then I always thought that he's just, maybe you can correct me, but more of the Bernie Madoff variety, where he's just a charismatic guy who maybe is psychopathic in some sense, so you know, also a pedophile, but just charismatic and is able to convince people of that 1% of any idea that in the case of scientists is able to convince these people that their ideas matter. So one thing scientists don't really, you know, despite what people say, I don't think they care about money as much as people think. I mean, people are ridiculous when they think that, yeah, that's why people get into science for the money. Yeah, right. The personalities that get into science are obsessed with minutia and they do the scientific method. You know how boring that is? Like you have to have a love for it in order to do it. But the thing, what drives you is for your ideas to be then heard. Like when a rich guy comes over, probably super charismatic, is going to tell you that your ideas, especially for some of these outsiders at MIT, at Harvard, at Caltech, all these like sort of big science, like physics, biology, artificial intelligence, computing fields, to hear somebody say that your ideas are brilliant and ideas matter, it's pretty powerful, especially when you've been an outsider. Like he's talked to a bunch of people who had outsider ideas. You know, the big negative for me of modern academia is that most people, actually like most communities, most people think the same and there's just these brilliant outsiders and the outsiders are just derided. And so when you have Jeffrey Epstein, like a hyena, sorry, sorry, sorry, going on the outside and picking off these brilliant minds that are the outsiders, he can use charisma to convince them to collaborate with him, to take his funding and then thereby he builds a reputation, like slowly accumulates these people that actually results in a network of like some of those brilliant people in the world, you know, and then pulls in people like Bill Gates and I don't know, political figures. I tend to believe that one person can do that. Yeah. I mean, look at Hitler, charisma is blinding. I think that's what Kahneman, speaking of Bernie Madoff, that's one of their major tools is flattery, glib, superficial charm. It creates those blind spots. People want to hear how great they are. They want to be flattered. It takes your defenses down, plays to our ego, how much we're all just pieces of garbage and want to hear how great we are. We want that love from our mother and our father. That's Freudian and they know because they're not burdened with that need, they're not burdened with that empathy or emotions and they just see things very calculatively. They play, they know that we're prey in their game and they use that against us and that is why someone who is not that intelligent, like Hitler, can probably convince a lot more intelligent people, you know, and that's why we can't give Tim Dillon power because then, you know, he already stands on a stage. I mean, if we let that guy, I mean, he will just take over a country and everyone who can't cook well will be eliminated. So it's like... I wonder why he keeps complimenting me when we're in private. Exactly. Be careful. He looks at me just, I like your suit. I like the cut of your jib. Yeah, definitely. You gotta be careful of that kid. He's Hitler. But it's crazy to think about... Clip that, please. Internet. I mean, Quentin Tarantino said it to Pat, I mean, in his script, personality goes a long way, dude. I mean, personality can usurp common sense and reason of the smartest people. These absolute smartest people can be hypnotized. It's sort of like a sexy woman. It's like, you can just, you can be tricked because we have such a blind spot for, you know, for flattery. Yeah, I wonder. I think there's a BBC documentary on, I think it's called something like Charisma, Hitler's Charisma or something like that. It was quite, I mean, that one focused more about the power of the speeches. But I wonder if most of the success or the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich had to do with the charisma of Hitler when he's alone in a room with somebody, with the generals, just one on one. Like, I wonder if that's the essential element of just being able to just look into a person's eyes, like flatter them or whatever is needed to earn their trust and then convince them of anything you want. Right. Yeah. I mean, you're right. Because that's the one piece of history we don't have. We don't know. We do know that the kid crushed. I mean, he was a headliner. He got up there and his hair would flop. I mean, he crushed it. Yeah, there's certain elements about nationalism and pride that are really powerful. Like a lot of us humans, I think, long for that, for the feeling of belonging. And when some charismatic leader makes us feel like we belong to a group, the amount of evil we can do to other humans because of that, it's endless. Nobody wants to look and nobody wants to do the work to be better or look at where they messed up. Why does it always have to be the Jews that escape? You know, it's like, get over it, guys. I mean, it's like they killed Jesus. You get over it. Yeah. Okay. It's a long time ago. I mean, move on. I'm Jewish. I understand because we do run the central banks. And the weather. And the weather. Yeah. Don't forget about the weather. That's a big one. That's a funny one that people created. Like, who gives a shit? What is the weather? Like, what's the importance of the weather? All right. The Jews made it rain outside. Good. You got to fuck. You know, they made it snow. Okay. You get a day off. Thank the Jews. Yeah. It's like, yeah, there's certain conspiracies that make me like flat earth. Like, what's the motive? What's the motivation for lying that the earth is round? Like, what's the conspiracy? Yeah. What does anyone get out of that? Yeah. What is exactly the profit? What's the strategy? Do you have any, from a historical perspective or just a human perspective, conspiracy theories you connect with? Or you're not necessarily conspiratorial? I'm not necessarily conspiratorial. Nobody cares that much. But then, you know, what happens is you find out this one or this two, and you start questioning everything. And you start questioning everything, man. It's like, you know, the Vietnam War started, that was a lie. That was a false flag. And then next thing you know, everything's a false flag. There are some strange things on 9 11. You know, there's some strange things from a scientific perspective. I'm no scientist, but it's like, you know, yeah, three steel framed skyscrapers falling on the same day in the same way. A lot of people say, oh, they were hit by planes. It's like, yeah, but that's not why they fell. They fell because of fires and usually, not usually, all the time, except for three times. And there was buildings that have burned for longer than that. And there might be good explanations, but the lack of transparency, it's like, I feel like government. And building seven's weird. I mean, the way it kind of died, just a neat, just a neat, the physical, I mean, you're a scientist. Is that, well, I don't, I, is there resistance from the steel and free fall, not all scientists know everything. I'm just a computer guy. Cause I had some questions I wanted to ask you about my biology, but yeah, so exactly. I don't understand biology. I don't understand the melting point of steel. I don't, but I'm just the common sense human that looks at government and institutions when they try to communicate. And there's a certain human element where you can sense that there's dishonesty going on. And dishonesty might not be deeply rooted in a conspiracy theory and something malevolent. It might just be rooted more likely to me in a basic fear of losing your job. So when you have a bunch of people that are afraid of losing their job, you know, and they just don't want to like the origins of the virus, whether it came from a lab or not, you know, that's a pretty, I know a lot of biologists behind a closed doors that, that say it's very likely it was leaked from the lab. But like, they don't want to talk about it because there's not good evidence either way. It's mostly you're just using common sense. So they're waiting for good evidence to come out in either direction. But just like nobody in positions of institutional, like centralized power wants to just honestly say, we don't know, or on the point of masks or all those kinds of things to say, you know, here's the best evidence we have. We're not sure we're trying to figure that out. We're desperately trying to figure that out or just like honesty, especially in the modern day, that's the hope I have for the 21st centuries. People seem to detect bullshit much, much better because of the internet. Yeah. Internet. Yeah. Yeah. And we seem to... But they also believe crazy shit too. There's no Yang without a Yang, I guess. But I think the conspiracy theories arise only when the people in positions of power and government institutions are full of shit. Like the air will be taken out of the conspiracy theories if the people in elected power would be much more honest. Like just like real. Yeah, people like Andrew Yang, whatever you think about him, just more honest. He just like says whatever the hell comes to mind. By the way, he's running for New York mayor. Mayor, yeah. Do you have opinions? Yeah, it's no good. I like Andrew Yang and it's no good. I'd be honest with you. I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I mean, I'm a New Yorker. Well, you're a New Yorker, so nothing's good. Well, something is good. Okay. Let's be honest about New York. It's a very socially liberal place. It is the head of the snake. New York is the country. If New York, when New York's not doing good, country's not doing good. It's the most important city, DC, New York. It's really Rome. Be honest. It's, maybe I'm biased. I don't know. No. Yeah. We just, New Yorkers, we walk around everywhere and we go, this is just like New York, but not New York. It's, but New York needs, and I'm a guy who leans left. You know, I just, I lean left and that's just what it is. A dictator? Is that where you're going? No, we need. Are we going back to Stalin again? We need, it's a money town. Let's be, come on, man. I mean, New York is a money town. And Wall Street, and then when AOC and her cronies at the local level rejected that Amazon thing, you're going like, what do you think makes cities? What's going to create jobs in the 21st century? What do we need? More nail salons? Yeah. More pizza places? I mean, we're living in the tech revolution and you know, whatever your opinions are about Jeff Bezos, that's the world, tech. And they want you to come here. Of course you give them tax breaks. That's why companies go anywhere. She's so fucking utopian and that progressive wing is so utopian and that always ends in disaster because it's not rooted in reality. It doesn't accept the reality that people are self interested. Now they're going to do this 14%, 15% tax hike on people making a million dollars more. In New York City, a million dollars is not that much. So people are going to flee New York. The tax base is going to flee. New York's going to fall to shit like it did before. So you're saying it basically needs a more capitalist front, like capitalistic type of thinker. Yes. Bloomberg, Giuliani when he was still sane and his hair wasn't melting off his face. Prosecutor. You need a tough, I mean, I don't know what's happened to that guy. He's lost it. But it's fun. Yeah. It's fun to watch. Yeah. It's fun to watch him be just like, uh, Trump's lackey. Like, yeah, boy, whatever you want, boss. I'll just say whatever you want, boss. But New York is a money town that needs a money guy and sort of more of a Republican. I have to say on the local level, as more of a guy who leans left, I'll just be honest. It's a tough city that needs a tough mayor, not some guy who's going like, I understand we all need free money. You know, Andrew Yang I think is right in the big picture because all the real jobs are somewhere else. You look at those Asian cities, you go like, oh, that's what our cities used to look like at the industrial revolution. You know, there was like, there was jobs and people were making things here. Now you look at those cities in Asia and you're going like, wow. And then you go to Detroit and you're like, yeah, we're done. You go to Cleveland, you go, we were done. So I don't actually, it's, it's funny. The reason I really like Andrew Yang is I've learned a lot every time he talks, like it's not his opinions. He's just giving a lot of data, like information, which I just start a podcast. Don't run for mayor. Yeah, that's true. He already has a podcast. I think Yang speaks. Who doesn't? Who does it? Who does it now? That's the way we communicate. I don't even talk to people unless it's on a podcast. What? Listen, man, I'm a, I'm not going to criticize that because there is something like I talked to my dad on a podcast for four hours and I'm not sure I would ever talk to him in the way we talked without the podcast. What does he do? Uh, physicist. Oh shit. But like, yeah, it's a episode 100. And you know, I, uh, the, the way I recorded that podcast is I tried to put my ego aside. It's actually really tough to talk to your dad, especially because you're giving him a platform. Uh, especially, so at that time there's already a bit of a platform for this podcast. And so there's this, as a son, you think like, oh, here it goes with this bullshit again. Like that's the natural son thought you have. But at the same time, I wanted to, the way I thought about it is in 20 years when I look back, like I want to do a conversation where I'm happy with it, you know? So I want to make him shine. But I also called him out on like, why were you so distant, like, like all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. It was very difficult to do, but it was really important to do. And I don't think I'd be able to do it without a, without a microphone. Right. Listen, how often do we sit there and just focus our attention and just look at the other person? I, I don't know, man. This is not even recording right now. I just invited you over. Just so we could actually, you're right. The podcast does make, like I listen, I've been listening to every word you've been saying. And if we weren't doing a podcast, I might be looking at my phone or being self conscious about something else or nervous or anxious, especially with people close to you. I mean, that was, I recommend that actually for people to talk to their family on a podcast or like a fake or not. That's really powerful. It made me realize that there's a clear distinction between the conversations we usually have with humans and those we have when a podcast is being recorded. What the fuck were we talking on before that? I knew you were going to lose your train of thought on that one because that's a big one. There's a motion behind that one. A podcast with dad is going to take, that's going to take you to a place that took you to a place. It took you outside of interviewer. New York. It went to a place. New York and Yang. Yeah. In New York and Yang. That's what really surprised me about, I like the psychoanalysis that you just threw in there. Yeah. I knew that. Yeah. That took you to a place. So Andrew Yang mentioned. Do you respect me now, dad? MIT, is it enough? Fucking million people listening to this. I got 14 Rogans. Is it enough, dad? I'm creating robots. Is it enough for you? It's never enough. That's what drives you probably. That's probably what drives me. That's what gives meaning to life is it's never enough. And I hope to pass that on to my kids one day. That nothing's ever enough. Whether they're robot or human, right? Your kids. Most likely. Let's be honest. Robot. You might call one of your robot. Do you love your robot? Are you starting to love your... Is it going to be like that Pygmalion thing? You create them and then they kill you. But even while they're killing you, you got a tear. The tear. A slow one. One tear. One tear. And just. Yeah. Why are you doing this Frankenstein? Why? Why? But I loved you. Those would be the last words out of my mouth. I just want to mention something on the, that it costs $400,000. Over $400,000 per year to support one person in prison in New York. Like when I heard that number, it was really confusing to me. Like that it costs that much, 400K per person. And it was really refreshing to hear a politician describe a particular problem with data. That this is this prison industrial complex, whatever the hell it is. And whether the solution, it's unclear what the solution is. I think he has solutions, but just the honesty of presenting that information was refreshing. And I'm not sure a capitalistic person would solve that. Those kinds of problems he might make worse. And I'm not, I'm a huge fan of capitalism. I think the free market is the way we make progress in this world, but it seems to go wrong in certain directions. Like the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, anything that ends with industrial complex. And so I'm not sure. I'm not sure if all of the problems, you're basically saying, let's put New York's problems aside. We need to have New York shine first to do what it does best. Essentially. Yeah. And then we will fix them, well, and then we can focus on the problems. But if you just say like, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem, let's make sure we have the safety net that protects us against all of these kinds of problems. That's not going to, that's going to kill the city, the spirit of the city that is in your biased opinion, the Rome of the world. That said, a lot of people are fleeing New York. Yeah, that's why I say it. That's the reality of the situation is, you know, I'm all for the public good, but yeah, there needs to be a back to that Greek expression, pan metroniris, and I also think the free market is responsible for progress. I think it's the most natural thing, the thing that's most aligned with human nature, which is self interest. And which I'm not to the extent that Ayn Rand would, but I do believe people are mostly self interested, especially with one gun to the head, morals are out the window, you know, it's about survival. So, you know, create a system that respects that and acknowledges that, but socialism works very well, at least right now, as a check as to temper the excesses of capitalism and in certain scenarios is the more appropriate system, you know, in a vacuum. So one being prisons or, you know, you know, governance, you know, parks. Maybe even, well, and this is a difficult one, but in healthcare, healthcare, it's unclear what to write. There's a lot of debates there. Yeah. Doctors want boats. Yeah. So I guess you're voting for AOC you're saying. No, I'm not voting for AOC, but I do, it's just a tough one. That's a tough one. But ultimately, the Hippocratic Oath, it's like, how do you turn people away, man? How do you do that to people? It's like, it's a tough thing to reconcile helping people, curing people with the marketplace. It's just, I can understand why that one's so tough. And then you got hypochondriacs, of course, who drain the system, you know, like people who are having anxiety, like me who had COVID and called 14, you know, I called 14 ambulances. So and then of course we're fat and the free market made us fat because it played the marketing made us want all this junk food and that's a burden on the healthcare system. So we got to do something about that. We got to get creative. We need new thinkers. I'll be one of them. When you go to a fast food restaurant, you stand on a scale. If you're over a certain thing, you can't be served. It's good for the healthcare system. You know, you just handed a salad and say, sorry, this burger is illegal for right now. If you achieve these certain BMI goals, then you can, you can have this burger, but right now you can't. And that's where the state's important. Yeah. Okay. To regulate our freedoms. No slurpees. I'm with you Bloomberg. Well, I'm with you to go along. I think the salads are too expensive. They should be subsidized. If you, if you go to like a fast food joint, the burger is always going to be cheaper than the salad. And this does not make sense. We should run on this platform. I'll be your vice president or ban burgers for, for people of a certain weight and make salads cheap. Three day work weeks. Why has that not happened yet? Wait, wait. Okay. Where are you going with this one? Dude, good for the economy. Stimulates the economy, right? More shifts, creates more jobs, more people spending because they have more leisure time, boosts the leisure economy, you know? Why are we still doing the five day work week that, that was, that was tempered from the seven day work week. That was, so the seven, it used to be seven day work week, it used to be like, and people who are just these libertarians, it's like, come on dude, what, what is this fresh, are we freshmen in college? Yeah. You're going to, we're going to talk about Ayn Rand next. Like let's talk about reality. Okay. And human nature. People are fucking greedy. They lie. They, you know, there's no end to up, which is one of my favorite expressions. No end to up. No end to up. There's no end to up. Can we dissect that? Yeah. From a Randian perspective. There's no end to up, which is, uh, you just keep going. It's never enough. Oh, never enough. Oh, it's never enough. No end to up. No end to up more. And you know, you have to reconcile your fact that you're going to die. So like this no end up thing is that balance is, is just as valuable as progress. So we have to reconcile those two things and put them on a seesaw and figure out how to get two people who have the equal weight to keep it like that. And that's the goal. And it constantly vacillates, uh, according to the time you sometimes you need a little more socialism. Sometimes you need a little more capitalism. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta fly the plane, man. You gotta fly the plane, dude. What's your, um, looking back at history, is there a moment, time period in history, a person in history that's most fascinating to you? You mentioned Bernie Madoff, maybe second to Bernie Madoff. Is there in a battle of Crete, is there something that you've always been curious about? Even if it's something you haven't actually researched that well yet, just something that pulled at your curiosity that, uh, instructed the way you think about the world. An individual or an event or an event, individual, uh, you know, yeah. Moment in history or a person in history. Um, there's a few, but, uh, you know, queen Elizabeth, uh, the Elizabethan era, you know, the sun never sets in the British empire, very successful empire, uh, what an absolute success story that is, is for a leader and a woman, um, can you tell a little bit about her story? I actually don't know much about the British empire. Yeah. She had a good run. I think it's like 70 years, you know, as a Shakespeare, they, you know, the, oh, I guess what's the word, Pax Romana, the, the, uh, the period of Rome that it was at peace and they flourished like a couple of emperors like Trajan or some good ones. And I think he was part of the Pax Romana that sort of just a peace and a comfortable flourishing time and England, uh, had sort of that in their empire under her successful reign. She murdered her cousin. She, you know, the movies, there's, uh, you know, um, Kate Blanchett plays her and, and does so. And she didn't win the Oscar because fucking Gwyneth Paltrow put a, put a British accent on in Shakespeare in love. It's a tragedy. Why do I know this? Because I'm not a full man. I'm a comedian, which means I do skits and I perform, um, and I, uh, Kate Blanchett's incredible actress at great movies. She was just so, and here's the thing, she, she never got married. She was, she was so, um, astute at public relations and, and, and, and imagine how strong you got to be as a woman to lead the greatest empire maybe known to man at the time and to do so, so successfully. How Machiavellian you have to be, how idealist you have to be, how much of a good marketer you have to be. Propaganda machine was on point. She was married to England. She was adored the way she adorned herself. You walked in, you're like, holy men, God just walked in here. And of course she got fucked. I mean, who doesn't fuck? We all fuck. Even robots one day will fuck. But she was, she, she did that propaganda thing and historians aren't, uh, haven't, they haven't decided this, but I believe she fucked. And I believe she did that as a tool of propaganda. I'm married to England. So you, oh, you're, you're directly referring to like using sex as a way to manipulate people. Well, she, her, she was known as like the, the Virgin queen. And uh, and her thing was like, I'm married to England. Like I can't be distracted by man or woman, blah, blah, blah. She never had any kids, nothing. I think she did that as a tool of manipulation, which you need. Rulers need to, you know, Obama made you feel good and then he went and bombed, carpet bombed everywhere. You need to feel good about your guy, no matter how evil they are. And she was fucking a dictator. But when you look back at her, everyone's like, oh my God, she was so great. The horror and the shit that she had to do, she didn't put that in the history books, but that's what probably was part of what made her successful. And um, she's a fascinating character to, to ponder because she was so successful and, and England flourished so much. And it's just fascinating to me because she was the great Virgin queen. And can you think of, there's no other woman who was that, I mean, Angela Merkel, I mean, come on. I mean, there's nobody who comes close and defeating the Spanish Armada, I think that happened under her. I mean, I'm no professional, but I mean, the, the woman crushed. And uh, Do you think it's more effective to lead by love, which just sounds like what she did from the PR perspective or by fear? Where do you, where do you land on that? That's a great question. Um, I'm not, we got to ask Joe. Well, yeah, this is interesting cause I think leading in the 21st century in whatever ways is different. I think it's very difficult to lead by fear. I mean, um, that's why I find Putin fascinating and like really fascinating. Like is he a relic of another era or is he something that will still be necessary in the coming decades for certain nations? I think he's a, I don't think he's a relic from another era. I think his background, I think he is who you think he is because his background was in espionage. His background was in subterfuge and espionage. I think I've said the word subterfuge maybe 10 times now, but he, uh, like big words, intellectuals. I just sitting here with you. It's my, it's time to flex. Um, but he, um, he's very good at that, right? Like, uh, controlling people with psychology and even if you look at the way he sort of used the internet and, um, has sort of been, you know, gotten in to the citizens of other countries opinions and it's very KGB. He also looks great without a shirt on a pony on a horse on a horse. Yeah. Yeah. I thought he would choose a pony cause a pony smaller makes him would, uh, would you, would you put queen Elizabeth as the greatest leader of all time? Probably. Yeah. If you look at Elizabeth as a woman and you look at, uh, you look at the, the length of the reign, I think it's like 70 something years or something like that, that she reigned success man, success. She used the church, she used public psychology, Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of all time, uh, under her reign, you know, people were going to plays and, and, uh, it was a, it was a success front and she was marauding everywhere else marauding and culling resources for the empire and just say a absolute successful. It's even, uh, a token of her success. We don't consider her a dictator. Yeah. She's a dictator, you know, she was queen. I, this is my thing I love about the feudal system that these fucking countries still have feudal systems. They're celebrating a horrible thing, divine right of Kings oppression, Kings were dictators and now they have fucking ceremonial. Why don't we have a ceremonial Fuhrer? What is in German? He doesn't do any of the bad stuff. He just rolls around and does, I mean, it's like, what the fuck? There's no difference between a Hitler and a fucking King. They did the same horrible shit. Why not a fucking ceremonial conqueror, Alexander the Great walks in, rapes a little bit, but it's all fun. It's for ceremony. He represents the country. Macedonia is Greek. It's interesting to see that, uh, some you're starting to see a bit of that in Russia was Stalin, actually the celebration of a, of a man that helped win the great patriotic war. Yeah. Right. So like you, you're already starting to see that it's very possible in history books, you'll be seen as maybe like a Genghis Khan type of character and you forget the millions that he tortured. So you're one of the most successful and brilliant people the world has ever seen. So you're the good person to ask, uh, for advice. You know, there's a lot of young people that look up to you, uh, God bless their souls and hearts. Made the right choice. What advice would you give to a young person? Maybe to yourself, to a young version of yourself, you know, and just how to live a successful, a good life. Be doggedly you. I think the magic happens when you are stubbornly doggedly you and you meet other people who are doing the same and, um, the real magic of life, the real true currency in this ephemeral life is sort of the communication that happens between people. Uh, that's the real currency, friendships, love, it's, it's cliche, but it's a, I think the meaning of life is to experience, to experience love. And, uh, I think, uh, people often mistake, maybe it's because of Hollywood films and things like that, that love is a feeling, but it's not, it's an action. So, uh, that took me a while to learn and I think that's why I've made decisions since that I think have been good for me and healthy for me. Love is an action. People can say things, you can feel things, um, that doesn't mean they're necessarily real. It's all chemical reactions. It's all, um, tied to our immaturity and, uh, psychological issues and, uh, survival, but action when some, when you do things, when you act out of love and you, the, that's, that's what it's about. Is there, uh, times when you were younger where you were kind of dishonest with who you are to yourself in terms of like, what, what kind of things did you have to do to, to shake yourself up and be like, okay, I thought, um, I thought I'm going to be a scientist, but instead I realized I'm going to do this. Yeah. My parents were funny. Yeah. My, my comedy is a hard, hard thing to explain to, uh, you know, an immigrant mother who came here and under Nazi occupied Crete and became a human rights lawyer and lawyer. And, uh, my brother's a lawyer and my father was a lawyer, you know, clawed his way up. His dad was a, was a, um, so your disappointment, um, the black sheep. Yeah. My brother went to Oxford Georgetown law at Brown, you know, has a master's in pot, you know, law degrees. My mother has followed up for law degrees, uh, you know, uh, she was on the human rights commission in New York up for a judgeship under Dinkins, um, wrote a, you know, um, she was the editor of Unitar. She wrote a seminal piece on the human rights of children for the United Nations. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was a comedian. I was always a fuck up. And, uh, the thing that I was best at, the only thing I was ever decent at was just like making people laugh. I don't know why. I don't know where that comes from, but, uh, was there ever a question or did, was there a moment where you decided this is what I'm going to do? There was a moment after I graduated college. Yeah. I was just thinking about all types of stuff that other people imposed on me. And, um, I was honest with myself and once I figured out it was an actual career path, I wasn't even aware back then the internet wasn't huge, you know, late 99, 2000 it wasn't big yet. So I didn't, I thought Robin Williams was just like an actor. I didn't know there was comedy clubs and all. So once I learned that I was just like, I tried it. I suffer from massive anxiety. I remember the first time I did comedy, my arms went numb. I started having a massive panic attack. I have my first set. I can show it to you. I suggest I just come video. Yeah. I'm video. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And the reason why I kept saying thank you is because I forgot my old jokes. I was so scared. And then they laughed because of the amount of times I said thank you. And then once they laughed, I was, I remembered the whole thing and I did the five minutes and I remember getting off. And for a person who never felt like he had a place anywhere, nothing ever felt right. That felt like, okay, I found it. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is it. It was the only time in my life I felt that I haven't felt that sense. Never felt it before. So that's the only thing I can do. And yeah, I had that, you know, it's funny cause there's a similar experience like immigrant family and the world tells you to do certain things and you think that's right, but, but then you put yourself in situations by luck probably where it's like, oh, this, this, this feels right. I don't know what this means, but this feels right. I think the biggest moment like that for me was, I don't know what to make of it exactly, but when I met Spot, the robot, the legged robot, it was like five years ago, it felt like this, the depth of fascinating ideas that are yet to be explored with this thing. This felt like a journey. It was like a door that opened and I was like, I don't want to be a professor. At that point I realized I don't want to do sort of a generic stuff. I want to do something crazy. I want to do something big. That's the reason I stepped away from MIT. That's the reason I have this burning desire to do a startup. That's the reason I came to Austin. Yeah. I don't know what the hell it all means, but you just kind of follow that. That's awesome. That sounds like you're following what's doggedly you. And also I think I just to, just to piggyback off it, I think that means no matter what it is, because I think our, the American dream is sold like, Hey, if you're not Beyonce or if you're not famous, you're not worth it. I hate that. And that's what I love so much about certain countries like Sweden, it's like where everyone has healthcare and stuff like that because everyone's a little is valued more. It's like whatever, if you want to be a doorman, do it like it's all the same. Prince was not happy. There's no, just because you're rich or famous, you're still the same guy with your possessions are a lot little, you know? It's like, I have met some doormen. I have met some tax cappers that I lie to you not are more fascinating. I have comedians are horrible people, so I want to get away from all of them. I have very few friends, Paul Verzi, Tim Dillon, who are comedians because they're awful, awful people. Some of the people who you know the most, who are the most famous are not who they say they are. Usually that's the case. They're putting on that public facade because they're fucking sociopaths and they're horrible people and some of the most beautiful people I've met and the most interesting people I've met have regular jobs. There is no shame in any fucking job. We don't all have to be rappers with like rims. It's just a weird thing. Yeah. Fame is a drug and yeah, comedians, I agree with you. There's some part of me that knows that there'll be a moment in my life when I'm standing there with like a sword or a knife in my stomach and looking at Tim Dillon's smiling face saying you shouldn't have trusted me, you stupid fuck. So on that note, Yannis, I've been a huge fan of yours. I love what you're doing with Long Days Now, your new podcast, and I obviously love all the stuff you've done before with History of Hyenas, the chemistry you have with yourself is also fun to watch. So man, I'm a huge fan. It's a huge honor that you come down here. Thanks so much for talking to me. It means so much to me to hear you say that. I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of yours and having me on has been amazing and just thank you, man. Thank you for having me on and people, if they want to watch my special, it's called Blowing the Light. It's on YouTube and please come listen to Long Days of Podcasts and let's go eat some barbecue. Let's do it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yannis Papas and thank you to Wine Access, Blinkist, Magic Spoon, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy | Lex Fridman Podcast #175

The following is a conversation with Robert Breedlove, someone who caught my attention and was recommended highly as a rigorous scholar and thinker in the space of decentralized finance and Bitcoin. His podcast titled What is Money? is a good representation of the way his mind works. He's willing to talk through ideas for many hours, willing to listen, willing to think, which makes him a great companion in conversation to explore the history, philosophy, and future of money. Quick mention of our sponsors, Fundrise, Element, MonkPak, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I'll have a number of conversations in the coming months on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. None of these conversations are financial advice. That's not a legal warning, that's a genuine description of my goals and approach with these chats. At least for a while, I personally won't actively invest in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies, except to learn about the technology itself. I don't think this should be a journalistic standard like the New York Times trying to establish, which I very much disagree with. In my humble opinion, I think journalists should be free to invest in Bitcoin if they want to. Luckily, I'm not a journalist. I just know my own psychology and I feel that my thinking will be muddled by excitement if I invest before I understand. I feel the same way about Tesla, for example. I still don't own any Tesla stock and I am still indeed fascinated by Tesla Autopilot as an artificial intelligence system. I work hard to be cognizant of the biases that arise in my mind and always try to choose the path that maximizes or maintains a freedom of thought as much as possible. Also, let me say that I try to be very careful in selecting guests based not only on the contents of their ideas, but the richness, complexity, music, style of their mind and character. Yes, I will talk with people with whom you and I may disagree, people who some may call bad or even evil human beings. I want to understand them because I believe that, as Solzhenitsyn said, the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. I think if you always run from evil, you become blind to the truth of human nature. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here is my conversation with Robert Breedlove. Rousseau opens his 1762 book, The Social Contract, with the following statement. "'Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.'" So you talk about freedom and sovereignty quite a bit. What do these ideas mean to you, the idea of sovereignty? Freedom and sovereignty, I think they're very closely related. Let's start just focusing on sovereignty, which is a word I don't think we talk about enough. And the general definition of that I would give is the authority to act as you see fit. And it's a word that's etymologically associated with words like monarchy, money, reign. So historically, it's referred to whatever the locus of supreme power is in the sphere of human action. So whether, if you go like back into ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh had absolute sovereignty and everyone else was pretty much operating according to his interests. You fast forward to today, modern Western democracy, we have more decentralized sovereignty and that we all get to go vote and elect officials that make decisions on our behalf. So the theme of sovereignty across history is that it's been gradually decentralizing across our different models of socioeconomics. And it's largely, you could say it's rooted heavily in the money, I would argue, which is something we'll get a lot into here, where if you have money, you have the authority to act as you see fit in the world. And even in our current political sphere, if you have enough money, you can actually reshape the rules. You can reshape laws, you can lobby Congress. If you're in a certain situation, like many billionaires, you can negotiate your own tax treaty such that you can get favorable tax treatment with certain jurisdictions in the world. So this concept of sovereignty, which today we call, it's common to call states or nation states or government sovereign, meaning that they have power over people. But as I argue in a lot of my writing, I actually think that sovereignty and here's within the individual and that we each have our own interiorized space of choice, which is something like Victor Frankl called the final human freedom. And that we, no matter what our circumstances are, no matter what exogenous situation we face, we always have this endogenous power to choose how we respond to it. That's one of my favorite books is, A Man's Search for Meaning. Maybe we can break that apart a little bit. So you've kind of spoken about sovereignty as a closely linked to power, but is there something about your own mind being able to achieve sovereignty no matter what the monetary system is, no matter what, who has the control over centralized power, the money or whatever the mechanisms of sovereignty and the societal level? You as an individual, isn't ultimately all boiled down to what you can do with your mind, how you see the world? How you interpret it. Yeah, I agree. And as we get a little bit deeper into this, I think we'll come to see money as an extension of your mind. So there's a feedback between money and mind. For instance, you think in dollars today, almost guarantee it, most of us do here in the US. And it's a tool, right? It's a tool we're using to decomplexify the world around us, to deal with it, to understand the sacrifices and successes across an entire history of economic transactions. We can boil that all down to the price. So it's data compression. And if you can change, if there's a central body or central governance mechanism that can manipulate that money, it can have an impact on your mind. For instance, today, so I agree with you on the first hand, say that I do believe in free will. I do believe in individual autonomy, but I also think that there are certain devices and powers in the world around us that can actually influence how we think. And it's fascinating to think about the fact that money might be actually deeply integrated into the way we think and into our mind. You think about what are the core aspects of the human mind? What influences cognition, the way you reason about the world? You have the Chomsky languages at the core of everything, but you're kind of placing money as pretty close to the core of what it means to be an intelligent reasoning human. I think money is a direct derivation of action and speech, actually. It's another expression of the logos. If we even think of what it means to think is that we are generating two different courses of action, potential courses of action, and we're populating them with avatars, right? Maybe ourselves or others. And then we're comparing how we may act in each situation and what we think the result would be. So actually it's comparison. Basically it's comparison and contrasting of possible courses of action. And that's the same thing with words themselves. Most words, the vast majority of words only have meaning in relationship to other words, right? It's all contextual definitions of a word or more words. Now people have argued with me about this because there is a first word, right? Where you pick up rock and say rock. But most other words in higher abstraction tend to be relative. And what's funny about action and speech, and this gets, I got into a bit of this in our paper here, is that it's linked to evolutionary biology and that once human beings adopted upright stance, we freed our hands. We no longer needed our hands for locomotion. So we started to evolve more dexterity and notably we have opposable thumbs. So this gives us an ability to manipulate and particularize the environment in a way that most other animals cannot. And what's interesting about this is that as we gain this ability to manipulate natural resources and count, point, pointing was a big deal and that we could indicate prey or items that are far off distance and we could organize ourselves. At the same time we co evolved this fine musculature in the face and tongue. So it's as if speech developed, co evolved really with our dexterity. And as a natural extension of that came us making tools. Right, we started to create things to better satisfy our wants over time. And the most tradable tool in any society or the most tradable thing is money. So I really, I argue that action and speech are quintessential modes of self sovereign expression. And the money is just sort of a tech layer we've put right on top of that. And that it's a natural derivation of action and speech. Okay, that's fascinating to think about sovereignty from the evolutionary perspective. And then ultimately money is the technology layer that enables sovereignty. So, you know, it's really fascinating to think about our modern human society as deeply rooted in these like evolutionary roots from the very origins of life on earth. So what, you know, some of the ideas you just mentioned, what do you see are some interesting characteristics of just life on earth that propagated to us humans? Like what ideas propagated through, have roots in the evolution? Yeah, I think one of the deepest impulsions in life is the territorial imperative. So all life is seeking to expand its dominion over space and time. And we think about, you know, again, physically with space, it's advantageous to an animal or an organism to have more territory under its control to raise offspring. So it's all about reproductive fitness at the end of the day. And then we'd also think of reproduction itself as the genetic impulse to have more, to replicate oneself across time. So it's territoriality across time in a way. And this is very common in most animals. Not all animals are territorial, but many are. And you see very interesting behaviors resulting from territoriality. This is like animal combat. You know, the reason birds sing is territoriality, a number of other things. And it's my hypothesis and others have shared this hypothesis as well, that mankind is clearly, I think, would argue a territorial species and that he expresses this territoriality in property rights. So property, when we hear that word, we typically think of an asset. We think of, oh, this house or this stock or whatever. But property is actually the socially acknowledged relationship between a human and an asset, such that you have exclusive rights and responsibilities to a particular asset. It is not the asset itself. So property, it's information, it's a relationship. By the way, my mind was just blown. Property is information, it's not the actual asset. That's really important. Very important. That's really interesting. Yeah, and then it comes down to how do we organize ourselves such that property, that the contributions people are making are commensurate with the consideration they're receiving. So if you're adding value to a piece of property, you're developing a piece of land for use, in theory, to be fair, you should have the rights to that fruit if you go out and plant a garden or whatever it may be. And this is rooted in natural law, where we have rights to life, liberty, and property. Those are kind of just the base, the fundamental layer of morality and capitalism, frankly. And you could think of, to get really primordial with it, the first capitalist in the world, just to kind of get some definitions out here, I'll say capitalism versus communism or socialism as the spectrum I'll speak on. The first capitalist in the world would be the guy, the caveman, that maybe dug a little hole for himself to shield himself from the elements. Maybe there was a rainstorm or a snowstorm and he dug a little enclave and he protected himself. I thought you were gonna go, because you said primordial, I thought you were gonna go back to like earlier biological systems. I guess primordial for human, perhaps. For humans, yeah. Okay. And then the first communist or socialist would be someone that decided the fruits of his labor belonged to him. So he would have violently encroached on that individual and taken his plot for himself, for his own use. And that's the spectrum across which capitalism, in the pure sense, and communism in the pure sense operate in that capitalism, each individual has the exclusive rights to the fruits of their labor. So anything they spend their time, effort, energy creating in the world, they own the rights to that and they can trade those rights with others, other self owned people that have done similar things. Communism or socialism would imply that other people, typically the state, have the rights, at least some rights to the value you've created. So there's this interesting moment when that first caveman, that first capitalist drew a line, a circle in this cave and said, you know, this is mine. You could say it was free to be claimed at the time he claimed it. But it's an interesting moment when asset becomes an asset. When space time, as you were referring to it, becomes something that's now can be possessed by a human being. Is there something special about this moment? Because it feels like, first of all, in terms of space and time, it feels like there's a lot of available space time yet to be claimed. So if we just look at like the universe, right? We're talking about, there's a funny thing with Elon Musk and Mars, I think they sneaked in there for SpaceX, that nobody on earth has any authority on Mars or any, this is a very interesting question. It seems almost like humorous at this time, but perhaps not, perhaps there'll be sections of space, not just on planets that are gonna be even fought over. So is there something special about this moment? Because in discussing sort of violence and respect for property, it feels like this is a special moment because ultimately conflict arises when you make claims on a particular territory. It's not always in conflict where people say, when you look at Hitler or something, for example, his claim would be in many of the lands that he attacked and invaded that this is ultimately, this has always belonged to Germany. So is there something you could say as to like what it means to own an asset or a property? Yeah, so in the ancient days of hunters and gatherers, we could say that property was mostly a loyal title, which meant it's just whatever you can defend, right? So if you've got knives and daggers and satchels and maybe some pelts you've hunted, whatever you can hold and defend is yours. And there's not like, there's a government to appeal to, you're just sort of a free agent operating in the wild, defending the assets you can protect on you more or less. And what really changed the nature of property is when we get into the agricultural age. So there's a big flip where we went from just foraging and hunting all the time, constantly moving, trying to stay alive to deciding we're gonna settle here. We figured out how to cultivate crops. We can create, we can increase the population because we can harvest more energy from the sun and we can establish a longer term civilization. What happens in that transition is that we begin creating economic surplus. So for the first time in history, we have stock houses of grain to defend or maybe meat or cattle or whatever it is we're creating, we now have savings. And it's at that time when government emerges as well, because once you have savings or you have an economic surplus, you have something that other people want to steal, right? This one thing we'll touch on a lot today is people always want something for nothing. People are always seeking the path to get something for nothing. And I think that drives a lot of our decision making. And it actually encourages us to be innovative in a lot of ways, right? We're trying to, you could say it's our laziness that's helping us be inventive in a way. We're trying to accomplish greater results with less efforts over time, but we can cross that line in seeking something for nothing where we start to violate the life, liberty, and property of others. And that's where we shift from kind of capitalistic society to something more communistic. And so that's what government is. It's a protection producing enterprise for the economic surplus generated by a trading society. So when people begin to trade, they create what's called the division of labor, which is a very common economic term, basically means you're better at making hats, I'm better at making boots. If you specialize in hats, I specialize in boots, and we trade, we've created a positive sum game where you and I both benefit. So we become collectively more than the sum of our parts through trade. And that's why human beings do trade because we become more energy efficient as a result. We create more outputs per unit of input. And you can think of government in that respect, if we're looking at it maybe in a tech sense that the economy is the trade network that generates wealth, generates innovation, generates all, this whole lap of luxury we live in today that we've inherited from our forebears is from the market. It's not from a government. The government is the network security, if you will. So we're paying expenses to a vendor to protect peace, to preserve life, liberty, and property in that network so that we can have, you know, when there's inevitably disputes over private property, we can have nonviolent dispute resolution in the rule of law. And we can have a reasonable expectation of being able to conduct commerce without violence. The problem has been that the protector tends to, you know, they're in a monopolistic position, we would say. They tend to start abusing that position to obtain property for themselves. Again, trying to get that something for nothing. When you control, you know, you are the security guard for the economy. The first thing they tend to monopolize is money because if you can control the money, you're effectively controlling people, their energy, their perceptions. And that becomes a, you know, particularly through inflation, becomes an avenue to get something for nothing and that you can just print more money that everyone else is forced to sacrifice their time and energy to obtain. What are your thoughts about anarchism? So I talk quite a bit, he'll be here in a few days, actually, Michael Malice, about ideas of anarchy. And his idea or the idea of anarchists is that any amount of government will eventually become the very kind of thing that you're referring to. So there's almost no way to have a government that doesn't then try to monopolize power, money, and all those kinds of things. Do you think it's possible to have a government sort of on that spectrum of like anarchy, maybe libertarianism, I'm not sure how exactly the spectrum goes, but where you have a small government that protects the liberty and property rights and those kinds of things and doesn't expand to then also control the monetary system and all those other things? Is it possible? Agreed completely, it was not possible until Satoshi Nakamoto. So for the first time in history, we have a money that cannot be monopolized, cannot be corrupted, cannot be changed, cannot be weaponized, frankly. Our current monetary system is weaponized by those who can print money against those who cannot. And I think when you have, at the heart of every modern economy, which even we could say the US, we pride ourselves as free market capitalists. You know, we out competed communism in the 20th century. We think that this is the superior model. Most business people will tell you that the free market is the best allocator of resources, all of these things. But what we have at the heart of every modern economy, including the US, is an anti capitalistic institution, which is the central bank. The temptation to monopolize money throughout all of history has been too strong for anyone to resist. So any, even benevolent, quote unquote, dictators that have taken over, many dictators have inherited, say, an inflationary regime where society is coming apart because someone was clipping the coins or someone was printing too much money, and they'll commit to going back to a hard money standard. So they'll keep society on a gold standard, for instance, such that they cannot violate the money to benefit themselves. But inevitably, over time, because it is a political institution, there's an incentive there, right? For, again, to get something for nothing, to spend more than you're making through tax revenues. And with that incentive, people typically, ultimately end up pursuing that inflationary path. So we can get deeper into that about, inflation is a term that we've been conditioned to think today is just something normal. The prices just go up, and then it's pertinent to a healthy economy, but it's actually, if you look at it from real first principles, it is just theft integrated into the money. It's a technology backdoor, is another way to think about it. You wouldn't buy a cell phone knowing that someone could siphon your data off your private calls and sell it into the market. Now, I know we do that with a lot of social media stuff today, and that's something else we can get into, but you wouldn't do it willingly, right? You prefer that your cell phone and your data was monetized by you, or if you're gonna sell it, you would be able to selectively sell it. Inflation is that it's similar, it's a tech backdoor. So it's a money that only a few people can siphon value off of surreptitiously, typically slowly, but eventually, as we've seen throughout history, that slowly builds up into a rapidly and then causes the monetary system to collapse. Do you think there's a benefit to inflation, possibly? So when you have perfect information, perhaps you don't need inflation, perhaps it is purely theft, but I think of inflation as like the snooze button on the alarm. So if you have a hard standard, you better wake up when the alarm rings, but all of us kind of like probably shouldn't, but use the snooze button. It's like, okay, well, five more minutes or 10 more minutes, and then you're saying there's naturally a slippery slope where it becomes a drug that you fall in love with and you abuse, but nevertheless, the usefulness of the snooze button is that you don't know how you'll be actually feeling when the alarm rings. You might be able to ready to pop up. It might be like you really need those few more minutes to psychologically get yourself out of bed. This metaphor is just not working at all, but do you think there's a use to inflation sometimes from like an economics perspective? I think the drug metaphor is a little more apt in that inflation does provide an immediately stimulative effect when used early on. But what it's doing is it's, again, we talk about the balance between incentives and disincentives, right? That being necessary for a system to function properly. With inflation, you're essentially giving the people that can print money a way to dampen the disincentives they face. So it destroys feedback loops, I guess you might say. And another way to look at this is when you, so using inflation, using quantitative easing, you can decrease short term volatility in the marketplace. So the market is basically this idea, this form of free exchange that's trying to zero in on the best ideas. And the ideas are those that are most fit to reality, to satisfying the most wants. It's gonna overshoot, it's gonna undershoot, you have these little business cycles. But when it's undershooting and you're experiencing a business recession, in a capitalist environment, the market needs to clear that malinvestment, that misallocation of capital. That means someone made a bet on a certain idea that it would satisfy wants in a particular way, and that bet did not pan out. If you then paper over the losses that business is creating, you're now delaying and exacerbating the volatility that that idea created. So this is kind of a Tel Aviv concept where you can dampen short run volatility, but volatility is truth. Volatility is us matching our ideas to reality, right? We're constantly, again, overshooting and undershooting. So you delay volatility, you're just amplifying it and exacerbating it in the long run. And that's what central bank is doing. The central bank mandate is low unemployment and low and expected inflation, basically. And so they're trying to achieve economic growth in a stable way, quote unquote, stable way. This is their ostensible purpose. And that's just not possible. Growth is an inherently instable process. Can you elaborate a little bit about the nature of volatility? Why is it communicating truth? That's something that a lot of people are afraid of is the volatility. Almost like it's a sign of chaos, and so they want to escape chaos. But you're saying that that's actually, whether it's chaos or not, I don't know, but it's getting us closer to the fundamental reality that we should not be trying to escape. Yeah, so if we consider that the universe is pervaded by entropy, right? This is the second law of thermodynamics is that every closed system tends towards greater disorder over time. And that life itself, again, I would argue expressed through the logos, we, life, is the antientropic principle. It's the only thing that's converting entropy into order, chaos into order. And that's what entrepreneurs are doing, right? We're living at the edges of the known, and we're testing ourself against the entropy of nature, trying to figure out new and better ways of saying, doing, or making things. And then if we do crack a code or figure something out, we then have a big incentive. The incentive is to get rich, right? Because then you have a new idea that you could then sell back into the marketplace. So it's this sequence of courageously confronting the entropy of nature and converting it into good and useful order, which by the way is like the ancient idea of God in Genesis, which I think is interesting, that actually enables us to construct civilization in these layers of anti entropy or order, you might say. So today we live in a bubble of anti entropy or order, like the coastlines are guarded by the nation and the city has a certain police force that keeps it in order. Even the way we talk, like clearly the words matter, but also the nonverbal cues, all these things are like order that has been established over many, many, many thousands of years of human evolution. And I think that's, when I say volatility is truth, what I'm saying is that the experience of uncertainty is something that's ineradicable from life, right? And certainty, like it's kind of a paradox because we're fighting against it, right? We're trying to innovate our way away from uncertainty to create more capital, which capital is very simply a way of mitigating uncertainty. So this is why you might have like a stash of food in case the power goes out or a generator, like it helps you overcome uncertainty over time. But uncertainty is also where all the sweetness of life is. So there's gotta be this balance with one foot in, one foot out. So human society is this kind of bubble of order that we've constructed and slowly expanding, but at the edges, you're always going to have that chaos, that volatility, and that the entrepreneurs are kind of like jumping into that chaos and some of them die and some of them succeed. And so like, if you wanna grow this bubble of order, you have to be embracing the volatility at the edges. Yes. And reverence for entrepreneurship because these are the people putting their neck out, so to speak, risking themselves. And they're gonna contribute to society, by the way, whether they go up in flames or not. If they go up in flames, society has witnessed their experience as something not to do or something that doesn't work in a particular time and place. So that you could say them going up in flames is a way of enlightening the rest of us. Or if they figure something out, Steve Jobs creates the iPhone, changes the world forever. So enlightening the rest of us, okay. And Taleb would say. The fire of their failure, okay. Yeah, exactly. Taleb would say individual fragility is inseparable from ensemble anti fragility. So this means that, again, every time that entrepreneur goes up in flames or say a restaurant goes out of business, when a restaurant goes out of business, that particular cuisine strategy they were implementing in that particular time and place, that's a signal to all the other restaurants in the area that that doesn't work. So restaurant food improves from bankruptcy to bankruptcy. So it's this death of the individual components that contributes to the growth of the ensemble. As a small aside, maybe you can guide me through it. I don't know if you're paying attention, but there was some chaos around Taleb and the Bitcoin community. I wasn't quite paying attention, but from my outsider's perspective, I thought it seemed Taleb was a supporter of Bitcoin. And then a lot of people were very upset about something. I'm sorry if I don't know the details, but can you pull out some profound philosophical ideas from the disagreement of the chaos? I admittedly don't know too much about it either. I'm a big fan of his writing. He's always been a little different in person. Like I actually, he signed one of my books. I met him in person. He's just, he's got a very abrasive personality. He's kind of known for it. It's not, I don't think I'm passing any judgment here. He sort of embraces it. Yeah. But he had written the forward to a really important book in Bitcoin called the Bitcoin Standard for safety in a moose. And then I think they had a little Twitter beef because safety is very much against COVID mask and state intervention, whereas Taleb's on the other side of the fence. And so, and then after that beef, Taleb came out against Bitcoiners saying, oh, Bitcoiners are crazy and wrong. I think the great mask debate of the 2020 will probably be the thing that ultimately leads to World War III. I've been very surprised how tense, how much like division this one little arguably silly thing has led to. I think a lot of people sort of project their, like, it's almost like not wearing a mask is a statement of sovereignty, of freedom, of like saying fuck you to the man, the government, the centralized power, or the dishonesty or the, in the scientific community, all those kinds of things. And then wearing a mask is a sort of kind of signaling of various kind of social aspects. I don't know. I'm not paying attention to it. I actually tuned out. I was part of a group of scientists that were looking into like, do masks work? This very interesting question. To me, it was an interesting question. I sort of roll in to ask that very interesting question because I think it is an interesting scientific question. But then I quickly realized that just as I was doing this, like scientific exploration of this very interesting question about Viron particles, like what kind of things, like from a scientific perspective, how do we prevent the spread of a pandemic? Forget COVID, any pandemic, super deadly or not deadly. Like there's tools, there's testing, there's masks, there's all these tools, how well do they work? And then I realized, you know, in April or so, it became a tool of politics, a tool of philosophy. And that's when I sort of pulled out. So it's fascinating. I think it's a canvas on which people project their emotions and I guess Tillam got caught up in that kind of, so there's nothing fundamental, I suppose, to their disagreement. Not that I'm aware of, but he is, you know, he's written some about in his books, the problem with centralization. I mean, a lot of his writing addresses that and he actually points to, I think Switzerland is the best government in the world because it's decentralized. So there's that, I don't think he has any, I'm not to speak for him, but I don't think he's voiced any specific critiques on Bitcoin per se. Could be wrong about that. It's just maybe his flavorful language and the way he likes to communicate. And the other theory is that maybe he's playing 4D chess and having a Twitter boating accident, you know. So I don't believe in Bitcoin, I've sold all my Bitcoin. Oh, I see. Yeah. Sorry, the boating accident in Bitcoin is this, I guess it's proverbial by this point, where it's the way you lose your Bitcoin. So if someone comes after you and says, hey, you know, whether it's a government or an individual's coming after you saying, give me all your Bitcoin or pay these taxes in Bitcoin, you go, oh, I had a boating accident and lost them all. Lost them all. So, yeah. But back to the fundamental nature of space time. Let me ask you, because we're kind of left at, I'd like to go back to this idea of, that you said that everything we think, say, or do occurs within the bounds of space time. So first of all, maybe you can comment on what do you mean in this context about space time, but also about the nature of truth. Like how much of all of this is knowable? How much of this is accessible to us humans? How much uncertainty, like what we're talking about, is there in the world? Are you, do you fall in a place where we can reason deeply about this world and it's knowable, or is it mostly chaos and we're just holding on for dear life? Yeah, I think I said that all action occurs within the bounds of space time. The other thing, everything we say, do, or make, the other thing is that everything we say, do, or make starts out as an idea. So there's this concept of universal Darwinism, which basically applies Darwinian principles, but outside of the biological sphere. So we could say that this kind of gets into Richard Dawkins memetics, that even ideas are competing, reproducing, recombining. That idea is so powerful, by the way. I don't think it's been understood fully. I think in the digital, in the 21st century, in the digital world, from my perspective in artificial intelligence, there's yet to be some profound things to be discovered about this whole construct. Agreed completely. It's been called an acid, actually, in that it strips away all of the noninformational components of something, just strips it down to its bare bones. I have a quote in here somewhere about that, but. I'm sorry, which is called an acid? The ideas? The universal Darwinism. Darwinism applied broadly, outside of the. Applied broadly, and I'll condition all of this by saying that a lot, most of my thinking is shaped by a book I read recently called The Case Against Reality, which introduced me to this concept, but it tied into Darwinism that I've used more broadly in the past, looking at things like money and economics. So the book, The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman, he has a quote in the book that describes universal Darwinism. It says, quote, universal Darwinism can, without risk of refuting itself, address our key question. Does natural selection favor true perceptions? If the answer happens to be no, then it hasn't shot itself in the foot. The uncanny power of universal Darwinism has been likened by the philosopher Dan Dennett to a universal acid. And Dan Dennett says, quote, there is no denying at this point that Darwin's idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight. The question is, what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but good riddance to the rest of them. What remains is more than enough to build on, unquote. So the way I would interpret that is that life itself, I've come to view life as information propagating through flesh, and that we are, I guess DNA is a quadratic code. I think it's four letters, maybe, versus a binary, zeros and ones. And we are ideas, we are strategies competing with each other, and nature is that which selects. It's what selects the winning ideas, the ones that are most fit to environmental conditions, frankly. You know, talking about sovereignty and individualism, there might need to be some rethinking here about what is actually the basic individual entity that is to be sovereign. Like maybe our biological meat vehicles were like way overly attached to them. Like maybe, especially with genetics and all those kinds of things, or artificial intelligence, or living more and more in virtual worlds will become detached from that kind of idea. So for example, if I can clone you, you know, make one million robbers, and, you know, but you'll all have the same idea, what is your real value as the, like I could just shoot you, and there'll still be 999 of you, but the idea is the important thing, the things you believe, so. I would argue that I don't know, even if you clone someone perfectly, I don't think you can reproduce the individual themselves, because we're all a product of nature and nurture, right? So my particular concourse of experiences, the path dependence that I represent cannot be replicated, nor can anyone's for that matter. Well, that's a hypothesis, so. True. That's of course a human meat bag would say. Good point. Like desperate trying to preserve himself. You know, I think it reduces to some fundamental questions about what is consciousness, and whether that can be cloned. All those kind of, you know, it gets to the core of what it is to be human. What are the things that make you particularly you? Yeah, I think it would assume kind of a materialist viewpoint on reality, and that if you could reproduce every atom of an individual that you would have their experience encapsulated in that. And, you know, Hoffman's, which his book is very radical, he argues that space and time is not an objective reality, it's a biological interface. So we are scanning our environment for fitness payoffs, and this space and time is the rendering specific to human beings that allows us to navigate reality effectively. So the further argument would be that we all have pretty similar interfaces, but they're all slightly different too, because we're all, you know, adapting in different ways, and that different animals have their own unique interfaces. So we have a certain amount of photoreceptors in our eye, whereas I think the number is three, might be five, or something like the mantis shrimp has like seven or nine. So they can see, and we only see one 10 trillionth of the light spectrum. So talk about a tiny fraction. I mean, one 10 trillionth is a very minuscule number, and that makes up all of the light that we can interpret with our eyes. But something like a mantis shrimp could see, you know, much more of that. So I think there's this, we're very conditioned to have a fully materialist viewpoint on reality today, where we think, you know, the atomic clockwork kind of universe. But I think there's, I don't think that's true exactly. And another school that goes into that is actually Austrian economics, where we could say that, you know, we mentioned earlier that an asset is not property. It's actually based on the relationship between the individual and the property. There's this whole realm of relevance associated with, we're all moving through life in the course of a goal directed action. So when we walk across a room, I go from A to B, it's because I valued B more than A. So value is inseparable from human action. We have a rank ordered value system in our mind, each of us, and we're constantly taking action in accordance with those rank values. Anything that accelerates us on the course of our goal directed action towards our goal is useful. Anything that impedes us, or we could say is valuable, anything that impedes us is actually obstructing to value. And anything that's irrelevant is just valueless. So this table that we're using right now, like this is an accessory to UNI because it's holding this paper that's holding the information that's guiding our conversation. But we could pay someone $100 to jump over this table. And this table could simultaneously be an accessory to UNI and an obstacle to someone else. So it's this domain, this silent contention of willpower and agendas occurring across the face of the earth that is what Austrian economics really looks at. It's the realm of human action, as they call it. It's called praxeology. So it's a non materialist viewpoint on reality and that things, we think in terms of matter being reality, but it's often more so in the sphere of human action, what matters, that is reality. It's the relevance of a thing to the course of one's goal directed action. And that's ultimately exists in the space of ideas. Yes. Not in the space of physical matter. And just to jump back to this line here, I think his fundamental line here is the question is, talking about universal Darwinism as an asset, what does it leave behind? I've tried to show that once it passes through everything, we're left with stronger, sounder versions of our most useful ideas. That's the key point to me. And that ideas and information, so far as we can tell, are the most fundamental substrate of reality. And information itself, back to entropy, information is the resolution of entropy. That's what the bit is, right? It's a one or a zero. Whatever reduces your entropy by half is a bit. And we measure information in bits. So. And you're right. People don't have ideas, ideas have people. Honestly, it's a really profound idea or a statement about reality, a reframing of reality. If we're actually being deeply honest about it, it's quite painful. I do appreciate that you defended your biological meatbag earlier, but it seems like ideas are the things that have power. That me, Lex, for example, is worthless. And relative to the ideas that used my brain for a bit of a time. But so far as we know, only human beings can generate and share ideas. So you can't say Lex is worthless. Like you are the node of the idea sphere. I'm the newest fear. So. What is it? From a Bitcoin perspective, I'm like, I'm mining. I'm solving the cryptographic problem and generate. In that sense, I'm a useful node. Yeah, you're competing to solve the puzzle of entropy, right? And when you do solve it, it benefits the entire network. But I guess from my perspective, just because just working in AI, I'm looking at the longterm vision. I see us humans and AI systems as really the same and AI systems ultimately as something that supersedes humans. So what is intelligence? So in the context of our current discussion, I think intelligence is very closely linked to this notion of ideas. And it's the ability to generate ideas, to mold ideas, to compress seeming chaos into some model, into some theory that efficiently compresses the chaos in a way where you can then integrate it with other ideas and they can play and all those kinds of things. So in that sense, it's the turning chaos into order. It's the molding of ideas such that our human brains can work with it. And just from my perspective, I don't see any reason why that can not be algorithmatized, converted into computational systems. I would agree. Which is scary. Scary or potentially really promising, right? It's kind of the case of all novelty. It's terrifying as much as it is promising. That's why you're pursuing it so heavily. I would maybe take it a step further and say that intelligence in maybe its most simplistic form is error correction. So we, humans have wants. Again, we're constantly expressing our value through action. There's no other way to express it by the way. It's whatever you choose to do in any moment, you are expressing the values you hold in your mind and your heart. So as we move from less valued A to more valued B, entropy happens, uncertainty happens, we fall off course. And it is intelligence that enables us to render information from that experience and error correct, right? So that we can move slightly, shift our trajectory slightly more towards B that we're trying to move towards. So I think that there's something there that I don't know that we can make synthetically. And that if we define intelligence as error correction, it's like error correction to what? It's error correction towards what we find is valuable. So we're trying to satisfy human wants. Might not just be our own, could be others as well. If I'm an entrepreneur, I'm trying to solve the wants of others, not just myself. And I'm trying to error correct myself towards that goal, using intelligence and processing environmental feedback through intelligence to error correct. So I don't know how, if you eliminate the human element completely, who's doing the wanting, right? Where does value come from? I know the machine learning people who are listening are saying that's exactly what machine learning is, which is error correction because you have a loss function, objective function that measures how wrong your thing is and you wanna make it less wrong next time. That's the whole process of machine learning. But you're saying what humans are able to do is in a world where there's no maybe objective values, absolute values, you're generating that very loss function, that objective function that measures the error comes from the human mind. Some aliens might disagree with you because they might have a different objective function. Obviously, the purpose comes from consciousness, I think. And without purpose, there's not error correction. Yeah, I mean, this is again, a hypothesis. Like where does purpose come from? It seems to come from consciousness, you're right. That's where suffering comes from and you want to lessen suffering. That's where pleasure comes from. It seems like it's consciousness. Maybe there's something to this biological meat bag. So to take it one layer deeper on this and the reason I like this book so much, again, The Case Against Reality. So he's making the case that space and time are not fundamental. Yes. Which I started my intellectual explorations in physics, actually astrophysics. So for the longest time, even the way I describe money as I talk about space and time, so that blew my mind. But this dovetailed nicely with another book called Lila. The author is Robert Persig. So he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a very popular book. 20 years later, he wrote Lila, which no one's heard of, which is crazy. And he basically says he was wrong about his first book. And he lays out this entire other metaphysics of quality, he calls it. So it's the metaphysics, I think it's metaphysics of quality. But his supposition is that it's not physical reality that's fundamental. It's not informational information that's fundamental, it's value. So he actually, and it's a beautiful book, I highly recommend it. He essentially is refuting causality itself. We think A causes B. This book makes the case that B values precondition A, so that we are actually creating our future through our value systems. And this goes back to something, I think Solzhenitsyn said this, that the line between good and evil runs down the heart of every man. So it's as if our moral decisions are actually what's creating the outcomes in reality over time. And then that gets into all the wisdom traditions related to religion, where it's always talking about loving thy neighbor and loving God and all of these other things that are good morally to create the best outcomes. So values are fundamental. Value, yes. Value is fundamental. Oh boy, yeah, that's interesting. It does feel like physics is not capturing something. You know, there's some people, panpsychists argue that consciousness might be one of the fundamental properties of nature, like from which emerges everything we see. So that could be just other words for this same notion of value. And then the basic laws of physics are not capturing that currently. So maybe humans, in order to understand from where humans came from, we have to understand these other properties of nature, which are yet to be discovered at the physics level. And it's, we contend with that underlying nature, whatever it is, with the logos, right? So we're looking at uncategorized nature and then we're assigning a word to it. So we're slicing up chaos into little boxes of order. And then we're establishing this social consensus as to those labels, which we'd call words. And we're using that to communicate. And when we communicate, we can start to build these other things. This is like the Yuval Harari imagined orders. So we can create these useful fictions, right? Whether it's the nation state or human rights or money. And that allows us to cooperate flexibly in large numbers so that we can better contend with reality. We can produce more complicated things. We can enlarge that bubble of civilization against entropy. And that's what capitalism is all about. It's about further specializing knowledge, further enriching mankind's treasury of knowledge and doing it. But to do that, the communication media that we're using, the words have to have stable meaning. The money needs to have value that's dependable, right? It needs to be something that's, it's not dictated by any one group. It's reached by consensus of the entire group. That's how, so you could think it's like optimizing for error correction again, where a free market would be harnessing the intelligence of all market actors and a central planning or essentially planned market would be harnessing just the intelligence of a small group of bureaucrats. And it's not obvious how to achieve this kind of consensus mechanism. I mean, there's obviously, we'll talk about sort of Bitcoin as an idea. Ultimately, the idea of Bitcoin is connecting it to physics. So like, you can trust that physical matter won't change. But, you know, there could be other ideas that we get. Maybe physics could be changed. If Eric Weinstein has anything to say about it. Like it's, you know, we right now believe that physics can't be changed. The physical matter of the world, but maybe it can in a way that we're totally not understanding. You mentioned sort of reality from Donald Hoffman's perspective. Like if we don't have even close to direct access to the fabric of reality, maybe we're living in a world that's very like many dimensions, that the notions of space and time is just like a silly, useful construct that's not at all connected. You're starting to look at like Stephen Wolframs. I don't know if you're familiar with this view of the world that it's like hypergraphs underneath it all. Like these mathematical structures from which everything emerges. Like they're like many, many, many orders of magnitude, smaller than what we think of. They're even smaller than like strings and string theory. So like those are the basic mathematical objects from which it emerges. I don't, you know, I think that's an interesting philosophical framework. It's also, people should check out a cool way to play with beautiful hypergraph mathematical structures. So he has, I don't know if you know who Stephen Wolfram is, but he created Wolfram Alpha and all these tools that you can actually visualize and play with. So you can play with physics in a visual way, which, or at least discrete mathematics, which I think is incredible. He doesn't get enough love. One of the reasons he, I think doesn't get enough love is because of this little quirk of human nature, which is the ego. And he sometimes frustrates a few folks because he's very, let's say proud of his work. I guess. But it's interesting to think about a world where we don't have direct access to reality, as Hoffman argues. And maybe, I don't know if you can comment. I don't know if you're familiar with Ayn Rand's work and her whole philosophy of objectivism or her whole contention is that, you know, we do have access. I don't want to misstate it, but at least she would claim that it's not useful, or I think she would probably say it's not correct to argue that we don't have access to reality. We have, hence, objectivism. We have direct access to reality. That's the only thing we can reason about. And the only way to live life morally is to reason through everything, starting with the axioms of reality, which we do have direct access to. Do you have thoughts about her work? I am slightly ashamed to say I have not read Ayn Rand yet. So she is high on my list and she's been recommended a number of times. So I don't know a lot specifically about her philosophy or objectivism, but to me, it resonates closely with what the American pragmatist commented on truth. And they distinguished what you could say is absolute truth, which is at the bottom of reality, whether it's Mr. Wolfram's mathematical formulas or value, whatever it may be, it's something ineffable, something beyond the reach of epistemology, perhaps even. And maybe that's why religion just sort of points to it. It's trying to use, I think Joseph Campbell said something like religion is using stories to point towards the same transcendental mystery we all experience but cannot articulate. So something like the artist, the artist uses lies to point to the truth, something like that, that kind of thing. That's really good. But the American pragmatist said that, because at the end of the day, this is all about, when we say truth, we need something that is close to social consensus and is not shakable by political action. So that's what physics and mathematics are. It's an unshakable point of reference, I guess you might say. So the American pragmatist defined truth as the end of inquiry. And in markets, we could say that the market itself is a forum that generates truth. We call this pragmatic truth to separate pure objective truth that we can't even talk about without polluting it versus pragmatic truth, which is something that's useful. So the example here would be, if I give you a map and you're trying to go from your house to the local brisket restaurant, and the map gets you from your house to the brisket restaurant, is that because the map is true or is that because the map is useful? They're very hard to disentangle when you're just looking at it pragmatically. And in markets, markets, I argue, generate three forms of pragmatic truth. One is the price. So this is the collective subjective demand and purchasing power of humanity running up against the objective supply of capital and resources in the marketplace. So there's demand overlaid on supply. The result of that is the price. So that is the most truthful exchange ratio, which is the closest approximation to the value of any good in the marketplace. So it gives us a data point on which we can operate. It's compressing all known market realities down into a single actionable number. You know, based on the price of bread or copper, whether you wanna buy more of it, you wanna abstain from buying it, or maybe you wanna try and find substitutes. And you can think of that price signal, it's like an economic nerve signal. It's coordinating human action across time. So if we're one socioeconomic superorganism or collective, that the price signal is the nerve. And that's the first form of pragmatic truth that markets generate. The second form would be tools and innovations themselves. So entrepreneurs are experimenting across time. They're trying to satisfy the wants of consumers. Consumers are sovereign in the marketplace. Whatever the consumer wants, the consumer gets, right? I'm trying to satisfy that. I'm trying to do it at a profit. So I'm trying to take viewing the existing price signals of goods in the marketplace. I'm trying to assemble those in a way at a cost lower than the final solution I'm delivering to my customer. I'm selling it at a price higher than the productive factors I combined to create it. And in that iterative process, we're constantly discovering new and better ways of solving problems or satisfying the wants. So we could say, to go out and dig a hole, right? Someone wants a hole dug, that a shovel is gonna let you do it much faster per hour than you would with your bare hands. So what is the pragmatic truth of digging holes? It's a shovel, right? It's the best way we know how to solve any particular problem based on the existing treasury of knowledge. So every tool, again, we're back to ideas being fundamental. The shovel itself is just a knowledge structure. We've figured out a way to create this particular implement and then we've indexed the raw materials we found in nature to this knowledge structure to create a shovel, which allows us to better satisfy human wants faster, cheaper, better, effectively. I'm trying to generalize, you're blowing my mind a little bit here. I'm trying to generalize the idea of tool to how to think about it. Cause I keep just, when you say tool, I keep imagining different tools, like specific instantiations of a tool. I'm trying to see, so the price is a pragmatic truth that's communicating value in this network. Subjective demands against objective supply. Subjective. So it's an economic democracy. Got it. So that's the demand supply. And then the tools are the ways of extracting or solving problems is the more general kind of thing. Or satisfying wants. Satisfying wants. So wants are somehow, that's part of the supply and the demand. And wants are back to value, right? Cause everything someone wants, they're expressing their value. Okay. Yeah. So the shovel is a pragmatic truth. The shovel is truth. It feels like a good book title. Okay, sorry. So what other pragma, what is it? And then the third one I would argue is virtue actually. Oh wow. And another way to maybe think about this is competitive competency, but it's also cooperative competency. So we're learning over time what characteristics, what patterns of action, what mindsets, what mental tools, what heuristics are most useful to satisfying customer wants. So I think that becomes over time, becomes sharpened into virtue, right? Like we know it's best to be honest because if you lie, it's very energy inefficient, right? You're creating this little fork of reality. And then if someone else asks you about that lie again, you have to put another layer of lies on top of it. Where if you just tell the truth, you're just recollecting what happened. And so that sort of keeps, again, when we're talking about delaying volatility, right? If you lie, you're delaying short term volatility, but you're increasing longterm volatility. What about murder? I haven't been able to figure out why murder is bad because I just keep wanting to murder people. And I've murdered many. She's the one for that. Well, that's why I'm trying to get an interview with Vladimir Putin. So that's fascinating, virtue in this market with the supplies and demands, and there's the tools, which is also a pragmatic truth, and there's virtue. It's a pragmatic truth. Yeah, and if we interfere with that free market process, again, if we overstep, which this maybe ties into murder, if you start to be coercive against life, liberty or property, so if you're forcibly taking someone's life, you're breaking down the trust in that market that generates these pragmatic truths. If you forcibly infringe on someone's liberty, right? For any reason other than them originally breaking or infringing upon life, liberty or property, then that's not gonna work either. And then if you violate private property rights, if you steal property from others, you're breaking down the trust that the intersubjective fabric of money and markets and the rule of law, all of these useful fictions are meant to preserve, you're corrupting it and breaking it down. What's kind of interesting to think about the market as helping evolve the virtues. It's sharpened into virtues. And then these virtues can then go into motivational posters, or like in books that we all agree on, and then eventually take for granted as if they were somehow fundamental to human nature, but they're not perhaps fundamental, they're just pragmatic truths. Yeah, another way to consider competition itself is that it is a discovery process. So, you know, entrepreneurs are competing with one another and they're trying to best satisfy consumer wants at the lowest possible price. So they're placing bets of time, energy and capital on themselves, on their idea, their business plan. And then the market decides, right? The consensus of market actors decide which one was better. One lives, one dies. So competition itself is helping us get closer to truth, to pragmatic truth. So we're discovering what is the right price for this asset. And that price, by the way, it's derived, again, in the sense of data compression. Everyone in the world can see that price. Everyone in the world can then put their skin in the game by choosing to buy or sell or short or go long or do any number of financial actions on that price. And that information is then propagated back out to everyone else. So it's this feedback loop between market actor and price that makes it so useful. And that's what carries us, so it's these collisions of interest that carry us, it removes the unuseful aspects of ourselves or of our tools or of a price and reveals pragmatic truth to us. Can you play my therapist for a second? And if we talk about creative destruction, I think, not Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson has a quote, something like, for all instances of beauty, many souls must be trampled. Wow. But there does seem to be an aspect of competition that destroys, you were talking about entrepreneurs sort of on the outside of the circle of order, striving to make sense, to compress volatility of the chaos of the universe. Is there some way to protect a little bit against the pain of that destruction or that creative destruction, that entrepreneur screaming on fire as he enlightens the rest of us, is there some role for us humans together in the togetherness of it? Also government, but any kind of collectives in helping that entrepreneur who's on fire maybe after a few minutes to spray him with some water and put him out of his misery? I would say that pain is the inarguable basis of being. Pain is, no matter how you try to explain it away or describe it, or it's not something you can rationalize away. No one, I think ever, someone may want to cut themselves to have an endorphin high but no one wants to suffer, we'd say, right? So pain in that sense, it is what we're constantly trying to deal with and to move away from or create buffers between us and potential pain or potential uncertainty. And that pain is information. When we experience something that is misfit to the outcome we desired, that pain is what puts us, it encourages us to change our trajectory to get back on course towards our valued aim. So as far as, you need entrepreneurs that are exploring, and you're trying to do something new, if you're a pioneer of any kind, you are courageously facing pain. You're willfully confronting it. So I don't think it's avoidable in that sense. It's not like we can have pain free economic growth like the central bank would maybe have us lend to believe that we can just run these experiments and when they fail, we'll just paper over all the losses and continue. Or you're just delaying and exacerbating the inevitable volatility back to reality. But what I would say is that capitalism, because we're building, we're increasing the capital stock of the world, which again, capital is the mitigation of risk. So we're reducing the overall risk of existence by accumulating more capital in the world. And that's what protects that entrepreneur that's deciding, hey, I saved up a million bucks. I'm gonna go try this business idea. I'm gonna put all my money on the line. And if he goes up in flames, then his cost of living when he comes back to reality and he's starting over from zero, his cost of living is substantially lower starting over from zero than it was in the past. So then he would be out in the wilderness on his own. So it's the accumulation of capital stock is the buffer against uncertainty for everyone. And it gives you actually more potential to go out and experiment, to go out and confront the chaos of nature because you are better healed effectively. So I think we're speaking in sort of idealistic terms about the power of capitals and when it works well. Is there any aspects that you think that don't work well in a free market in all the basic pragmatic truths that we were talking about? Is there ways it can go wrong? So I would first argue that we have never seen an actual purely free market. Closest example would be kind of geopolitically we have a free market and that governments are not necessarily governed but they are premised on governing large groups of individuals. So that's not, doesn't exactly. You mean between governments? Yes. See, but isn't there still, so a free market, maybe you can correct me, is the free market still grounded in the ideas of property rights and all those kinds of things, right? So governments tend to also sometimes be violent towards each other. That's right. So they don't respect all the basic aspects of capitalism. That's right. So maybe another way to look at this is that gold is the original governor of government actually. And this is the reason governments have abused and gone off of the gold standard. So historically, if you are a bank or a nation state and you produce more currency than your gold reserves can justify, then gold will flow out of your bank or out of your country. So there's this natural check via the money that via capitalistic money, which is gold, right? Gold was selected by the free market. It's not decreed by government. It provided this natural check on government action. So my, I guess to get back to the original question is we've never seen a pure free market because money has always been monopolized and coerced, frankly. So to try and answer what goes wrong with a free market is really difficult because we've never actually seen it. And I would define free market is one in which government only protects life, liberty and property. And so that has a very minimal role in society. Again, just as network security for the economic trade network. And anything that, any government function that goes beyond those three core functions, which by the way, are pretty much the core tenants of morality as well. So government's just really intended to preserve, you know, natural law, if you will. Anything that goes beyond that is, moves us closer to an unfree market. So every regulation, every act of coercion is actually a gradation closer to a purely unfree market, which would be a monopoly. So in terms of what I guess theoretically we could say goes wrong in the free market is that it's volatile. It's trading off, it's accepting short term volatility in exchange for less long run volatility. And this tends to be the way of nature, by the way. So if we look at something like there's a region in North America called Baja, California, and it runs into the United States and it runs down into Mexico as well. So the same topology, but two different jurisdictions. In the US, we very heavily manage forest fires. We're trying to manage nature effectively. Whereas in Mexico is much more unregulated. It just, when wildfires spring up, they let them burn off. North America, when wildfires spring up, we're actually extinguishing them. So we're constantly trying to dampen the short run volatility of these small brush fires. Whereas in Mexico, we just let them burn. We let nature do its thing. The consequence of this is that the wildfires still occur eventually, but they're much larger and much more devastating in North America where human intervention has occurred because it's dampening nature's natural corrective mechanism of clearing this underbrush with these more frequent and smaller fires at the cost of much larger fires. So again, we're delaying short term volatility and exacerbating long run volatility. And in Mexico, it's the opposite, right? Just these wildfires burn much smaller and more continuously over time. The further effect of that in North America is that the fires can get so big and so hot that it burns away the top soil. So it actually destroys the fertility of the soil itself. So the point of this is that human intervention, right? Even the intention behind North American authorities managing that forest fire is to create less destruction. That is the intention, but the intention is divergent from the outcome. So in Taliban speak, he would say that human intervention moves us from mediocre stan into extremist stan. So mediocre stan would be something much more like nature where for instance, you can't double your body weight in a day, probably can't even do it in a year, right? But in extremist stan, which is something much more information based, you can double or send your net worth to zero in a single trade in a single moment, right? So when we try and intervene with natural biological systems that have these feedback loops, we actually start to push the system more to behave more like an extremist stan system that has less short run volatility, but more extreme long run volatility. So, but the question is, where you look at capitalism or communism, for example, and by the way, yes, I will talk to somebody who's a Marxist or a communist, like Richard Wolff is a pretty eloquent defender of these ideas because it's always good to really understand ideas as opposed to just reject them offhand. When you look at the system of capitalism or the system of communism, there's ideals and a lot of people argue in this perfect form would actually be good for the world. The question is how resilient are they to the corruption of human nature? And I mean, you're saying that there's not a, there's never been a free market. It's a very true statement. The question is how resilient is capitalism or whatever implementations of capitalism we had up to this point to human nature where one person will become successful through legitimate means and starts to try to manipulate the system that takes it away from a free market or takes it away from the things that gave them the riches in the first place. And then try to, through corruption, get more, get this, the thing you said, the lazy human ways. Now try to figure out how to get something for nothing. That's right. So how resilient do you think is capitalism to that? Well, the best implementation we've had of it really has been the United States, I think, up until this point. But it's still the central banking itself. This was in the 1848 Manifesto to the Communist Party. Measure number five reads an exclusive state monopoly and centralized control over cash and credit. So the central bank is a Marxist or communist institution. It is antithetical to the free market principles on which the United States was founded. And indeed, the United States resisted the implementation of a central bank. I think it was Andrew Jackson. I know there was the first national bank, the second national bank were both disbanded. And then Andrew Jackson, which is my favorite Tennessean, he has some famous quotes about routing out the bankers like a den of vipers. I think he punched one of the central bankers in the face. Back when our leaders were a bit more badass, I guess you might say. And finally in 1913, the Federal Reserve was implemented. And it's been kind of all downhill from there. So what is, can you, oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say that communism and capitalism, it's also a matter of scale. The ideal behind communism is from each according to their ability to each according to their need. Sounds beautiful, right? Sounds like a great, peaceful, harmonious way to organize ourselves. The problem is, and by the way, I am a communist in my family, in my home, right? At that very smallest of scales. Yes, in your very small circles of trust, you're much more likely to behave selflessly towards one another. By the way, I look forward to the Bitcoin community clipping out that part, saying that Robert Breedlove was a communist and the ideals of communism are beautiful. Yeah, context matters, people. Sorry, go ahead. But to your point, it does not scale, right? As we move into this larger system of socioeconomic cooperation, which is necessary to deepen the division of labor, to generate more wealth. We need to interact with one another on much larger scales than this communistic utopian ideal. We get into the realm of capitalism where we need really sound rules, hard rules, consensus, verifiability, and frankly, prices. Because the other thing in Soviet Russia is they tried to replace the profit motive or the price signal with this devotion to, this nationalistic faith and devotion. Where it's like, you don't need self interest anymore. You don't need prices or profits. You can just protect Mother Russia, right? And serve Mother Russia and that would create wealth. And what happened, right? They destroyed price signals. There were shortages, there were famines, there's all levels of corruption. Because to your point, it's once you, people have to run the system no matter what. So when people are always pursuing something for nothing and you put someone in a seat of much closer to absolute power where they're making all the pricing decisions, they own all of the productive factors in the economy, they're not beholden to any market force. There's no market check on their action that that institution tends to become more corrupt. And further, it's an inferior resource strategy. I alluded to this earlier where the other way to think about free market versus central planning is it's decentralized or distributed computing versus centralized computing. So each one of us, I think that the number is 120 bits per second of active awareness. And so we can take in, clearly we process a lot more than that, but our active awareness, I think is 120 bits per second. In a centralized planning body like in Soviet Russia, they had the pricing czar. Maybe they had 10, 20,000 people deciding the prices for the entire country. You're only getting that much data throughput, right? 20,000 people times 120 bits per second. Whereas in a free market, if everyone is free to interact with deep capital markets based on an accurate price, you're getting the data throughput of 120 bits per second times the entire economy, right? So you're getting, it's a more efficient means for disseminating knowledge effectively. And then again, knowledge is just, the more knowledge a socioeconomic structure can contain, the more wealthy it is, right? Prices, tools, all these things are just knowledge. So in that respect, that's why something like capitalism, even in its marginalized form, state capitalism, out competes communism. It's distributed computing versus centralized computing. You know, we kind of brought up religion and Joseph Campbell and myth and the propagation of ideas. And kind of before I forget, I wanted to ask your thoughts about this. You know, Jordan Peterson, I haven't really understood exactly like be able to pin him down exactly what he sees as the role of religion in human society. But it feels like he's describing it as having value for us. The ideas of myth are valuable. They're valuable mechanisms toward, I think you mentioned kind of directing us in this world as a human society. Do you think about myth? Do you think about religion? What's the use of it in this construct of markets in this framework of where ideas are ultimately the fundamental thing that makes societies work? Yeah, I think Jordan Peterson, who I'm a huge fan of, he's been very influential in my thinking and influential on my own religious views as well. I think his position would be, and he's said this before, that he acts as if God exists. And I've had some arguments about this before, but to me that points towards the preeminence of action and how important action is versus your cognitive beliefs necessarily. And I think there is a lot of utility in that, that if you follow the moral code of something, like the Bible, you do reap benefits from that. Society reaps benefits from that. And sometimes I bring up this point and people are like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Have you read the Old Testament? They're clobbering people with rocks when they do the wrong thing. The Bible doesn't claim to be this, like do everything that was done in the Bible. It's more like charting this moral progression where we came from this very barbaric society into something more like the New Testament where we're honoring individual sovereignty above the state and things like that. So I think that mythology itself is another form of data compression. If you look at these stories, Cain and Abel is a good example, or Peterson makes the point that it's a tiny story. It's a paragraph ish long, but it contains so many layers of meaning in regards to violence, to evil, betrayal, work, the divergence between intention and result, because I think Cain is actually making, he's making the effort to sacrifice for God, but the sacrifices he's making are not, God doesn't find them useful. And so he sort of rejects them. Again, if we're organizing these stories we're organized by these useful fictions, right? These, these Herarian imagined orders. I think mythology is kind of the original version of that, where we were learning to organize ourselves around stories to best coordinate our action across space and time. And so I think it's very foundational. And back to what we were saying in the beginning that if value truly is fundamental, I think it's interesting that all these stories point towards often common moral values. They're not perfectly aligned, but it does speak to just the evolutionary importance of morality and the subjectivity of morality, where morality sort of evolves over time based on, frankly, the capital stock we've accumulated. The more capital stock we've accumulated, the easier life is, the less barbaric we have to be. Whereas if we're living in conditions of true scarcity, then we tend to be a bit more barbaric towards one another. And that too, to dovetail this into something largely unrelated, but I think is really important is inflation. Inflation by artificially increasing the prices of goods and services in the world, right? We're injecting more dollars, chasing the same level of goods and services. We are artificially increasing scarcity, perceived scarcity, right? And when you increase perceived scarcity, you are amplifying divisiveness. The natural state of man is when everything is scarce and you really have to fight hard just to eat or drink water that day. So it's decivilizing in a way by artificially amplifying the perceived scarcity in the world. Can you elaborate how does inflation increase the perceived scarcity in the world? So we could think the price itself is an indication, it's a data packet, if you will. The price is a data packet on supply and demand, right? It's telling you how much supply there is of something in the world relative to the demand. So when you print money and artificially increase that price, it's diverging away from supply and demand. It's becoming just more of a product of policy than it is of free market fundamentals. The more expensive something is, that is a signal to the marketplace and to market actors that it is scarce, right? That's why a Leonardo painting might sell for $16 million, there's only one, there's a lot of demand for it. Maybe my numbers are off, but you get the point. It's the reason mask spiked in price after the COVID announcement, right? There was not enough supply, toilet paper, et cetera, et cetera. So inflation, and by inflation, I specifically mean arbitrary fiat currency supply inflation by legal monopoly, not inflation is a commonly misunderstood word. That is amplifying the perception of scarcity among market actors in the world. And I would argue that it actually amplifies divisiveness. I think this is the key maybe to looking at the connection between the monopolization of money and things like cancel culture, because it's increasing our natural predilection to be combative with one another, because we think there's more scarcity in the world than there actually is, versus in a world where you're not increasing the money supply, prices are declining every year. As prices decline, this is a signal to market actors and the market that scarcity is declining. There's less need to fight over things. And all of this ties back into the old Bastiat saying that if goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. So if we're not trading with one another, if we're not acting interdependently, and we're not becoming more intelligent as a market, and that increased intelligence or increased knowledge is reflected in decreased prices, because prices are just the exchange ratios of things. So the smarter we can solve problems, the better we can solve problems, the less prices would be. So it induces more cooperation. I love how you tie inflation and cancel culture together as essentially artificial creation of increase of conflict. Artificially increasing scarcity and thereby artificially increasing conflict. That's really fascinating. You're short circuiting my brain many times throughout this conversation. Okay, this robot is struggling to keep up. Okay, maybe to step back at the useful fictions or pragmatic truths. Let me ask the question that you've answered in many ways already, but let's explicitly look at. What is money? Oh, as you know, that's my favorite question. Yes. Is the name of the show I just launched, the What is Money show? Clearly, we could say that the Bitcoin rabbit hole is what's led me to explore a lot of these ideas in depth. And I think as we've demonstrated today, it goes well beyond just the economic sphere when you start to think about things like exchange and morality and time preference and civilization. So I love the question, what is money? I think it is the key to incepting a deeper understanding of the world into people that if you actually just start to ask the seemingly simple question, it surfaces more and more layers of truth. And I recently, I just wrote a piece, I think I have 30 something answers to this question. So there's. So sometimes it's actually a more systematic way of asking the question of what is the meaning of life? There's some questions that are almost unanswerable, but in their asking allow you to deeply get closer to truth, deeply understand the nature of our human existence. And the meaning of life is almost like this initial philosophers striving towards that. If money is indeed as fundamental as you've described, especially in the context of value being fundamental, then that is a really, that's a more, let's take a 21st century way of asking the same question about what is the meaning of life. You mentioned that it's a meta property out of the list of many ways to answer that question. How would you help people to think about that? Yeah, the first most serious answer comes from the school of Austrian economics and it defines money as a universal medium of exchange. So this would be any good that is used, held and used purely for purposes of facilitating exchange. So in the configuration of demand for any particular asset, it's bifurcated between its utility, which is something a service that it can render to you in real time, whether it's, if it's water, you're thirsty, that's the utility of water is that it can quench your thirst whereas the marketability would be the expectation of future exchange that other people would want this asset in the future to trade it for whatever they may have. Money is just going to be the good in any trading economy that has the highest proportion of marketability relative to utility. So today that would be gold. Gold has utility, it's used in electronics, it's used in dental dentistry and whatnot, but it's largely used as a store of value across time and that's what it's been used for for 5,000 years. So if we say gold has a $10 trillion market cap, maybe 2 trillion of that is its utility value or it's actually demand for use in computers and dentistry and an 8 trillion of that is demand for its use as a store of value. Money, the marketability aspects of money boils down to five services that money can render. Money needs to be divisible, it needs to be durable, it needs to be recognizable, it needs to be portable and it needs to be scarce. So I'll gloss over a lot of history with this and just say that historically, money's always been a technology, still is a technology or a tool. I use these terms interchangeably and you think of a technology as just a more sophisticated tool effectively. To best satisfy those properties, monetary metals were determined to be the most satisfactory tool, the most divisible, most durable, most recognizable, most portable tool in the marketplace. Of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce as quantified by either its stock to flow ratio or its inflation resistance. So simple way to say this is that people always prefer the money most resistant to inflation. That's a nice definition of scarcity in the context. The money is, if you were to measure it, the resistance to inflation. So how hard is it to artificially increase the supply of the thing? That is the hardness of money. And that's why gold is hard money. Because the alchemy is hard. That's right. Because no one cracked the alchemy. So gold became money. So that's such a nice clean explanation of what is money with the five elements and gold ultimately won out because of the last piece of scarcity. That's right. And to get to maybe dig a little deeper there. So scarcity, we commonly think of scarcity as strictly a supply property, where if there's not much of something, then it's scarce. But it's not actually true. Scarcity occurs when demand exceeds supply. So when there's more demand than the supply can justify, the thing becomes an economic good and it establishes itself a market price. So there's more demand for the thing than the supply can satisfy. The unique thing about money as a concept at least is that demand always exceeds supply. There's never enough money to satisfy everyone, right? Because another definition for money, it's the most marketable good. So it can be traded for any other good service, piece of knowledge in the marketplace. So humans being what we are, we're never satisfied, right? We always want more of something, whatever it may be. So money as the ultimate token of obtaining that something is always scarce as a concept. But the problem with money is that if you can, as you alluded to, easily increase its supply, then all of a sudden you can compromise the scarcity of it over time and you can rob people through inflation. So that's why the market settled on gold as money. And robbing is reallocating the value that I, so essentially the one property, like why scarcity is important is it adds a lot more friction to the reallocation, like through essentially violence or implied violence. Well, it prevents it through cost of extraction too. So if you want to go out and dilute gold holders today, you have to go out into the world and mine gold. It's a very expensive process. That process tends to find equilibrium where production cost equals the market value of gold. So if market value is $2,000 an ounce today of gold, its production cost is going to be around there. That's the natural market equilibrium. So that way gold miners cannot just dilute people over time. Whereas if you look at something like fiat currency, which we're jumping ahead a little bit, but its production cost is zero. So there's a reason the market value of fiat currency historically has always converged to zero because its production cost is near zero. So the extension to that question might be how did we get from gold to paper currency? And again, this is rooted in the properties of money. As good as monetary metals were and as good as gold is as money at holding value across time, it's rather limited in terms of portability. It is not as useful for moving value across space. This is another definition of money, by the way, a social device for moving value across space and time. So to rectify this technological shortcoming of gold, we introduced, first of all, the custody of gold was gradually centralized into fewer and fewer warehousing operations. This is because there are economies of scale associated with using gold as money. And that if you centralize the custody, the warehouse owner can then issue a paper receipt called a warehouse receipt for that gold. And then market participants can trade that paper as if it's good as gold. And everyone has an option at any time to go and redeem real gold from the warehouse. So that system works until the problem with it is that it introduces the need to trust the custodian. So it's introducing counterparty risk in the form of the custodian. And now should that warehouse choose to increase the supply of paper notes to gold beyond its supply. So if it's got three tons of gold and it issues six tons worth of paper receipts, all of a sudden it's participating in a fraud. It's basically lying. It's representing that it has more gold than it actually does. And that is the pathway that we got into banking and central banking, is we needed a convenience mechanism to rectify the portability shortcomings of gold. We needed to be able to move value across space, right? Gold was doing a great job at moving value over time, but not space. Paper currency gave us the ability to move value across space, but it introduced this attack vector for warehouse operators, which became banks, which became central banks, to modify the supply to suit their own political agendas. Added the snooze button. That allows you to do a little fraud. To get something for nothing. Something, just a little bit at first. Just this one morning, just a little bit. I mean, I don't know if you can speak to the birth of fiat currency. Is there some interesting characteristics to those early steps that created it? Like, could it have been averted? Or is this the natural progression of governments? You know, what's funny is that central banking was initially designed to be the custodian of gold, right? And so they were going to custody the gold, issue paper on top of it, and then they would maintain, you could trust the public stamp effectively. You could trust that the central bank had as much gold on reserve as they said they had, and they were supposed to be the trustworthy institution. So we went from placing our trust in a free market game theoretic process, or trusting gold, and we began trusting this institution instead. This, that institution would not have arisen if the portability of gold was really high. If we could have somehow sent gold across a telecommunications channel, there would have been no need for a central bank. Everyone could have custodyed their gold in any information bearing medium, frankly, and they could beam it around the world at any time. So this whole institution itself is rooted in a technological shortcoming of gold. So I think it's, another way to think about that is maybe had there been all the gold in the world today fills two Olympic sized swimming pools, all the gold mined throughout all of human history. So there's not a lot, right? What if there had been just like way more? There'd just been, I don't know, 20,000 Olympic swimming pools worth. Portability wouldn't have been as much of an issue, right? We could have, and this is to say, assuming gold was still the most scarce metal and all these things, portability would have been less of an issue. We would have had less dependence or need for a central bank. So I think it's kind of idiosyncratic in that we just happened to end up here on this planet with a certain amount of gold. It best satisfied the properties of money. And a certain amount of humans, a geographic dispersed such that portability had certain properties that you want to achieve for humans in the geographical space to be able to be a exchange value. It became more of an issue as we globalized, right? As we became more of a global society, we needed money that could move across space really fast. So we could trade in international capital markets. So that drove the central bank to become the dominant institution of the world. And if you follow the flows of gold throughout history, you know, I've been watching this documentary on World War I and World War II on Netflix. I think it's called World War II in Color. Oh yeah, that's really good. So good. When I say gold has been the governor of governments or gold is geopolitical money, like it is the base layer operating system, has been the base layer operating system for analog society. So it's always been about who controls the gold, is who makes the rules. And that's, in that context, is why Bitcoin is so interesting because it is the disruptor to this base level operating system that's functioned for all of human history. I think this is a good place to ask, we asked the what is money question. What is Bitcoin? That's a question as complicated as what is money? I think if you get a general understanding of money from a number of angles, that we could say Bitcoin is the most superior monetary technology that has ever existed. So one of the most superior implementation of the ideas of money that you talked about, you talked about money as speech, you talked about money as an idea, we talked about money as sovereignty. Yeah. So we're attaching the concept of money, to your point, to whatever tool best satisfies those properties of money or best renders those services we need for money. And as you said, you're using the word tool and technology interchangeably here. Yes, yes. And another thing to think about here is that we think often in terms of goods or services, but actually everything is a service. So it's not the physical properties of this pen that I find valuable, it's the services that it renders to me, that I want to write a letter, this serves me by allowing me to lay ink on paper and communicate information. So value, humans attach value as we alluded to earlier, two services, not goods. So the properties or the services that money renders that human beings value are those five properties, divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. Metals best satisfied those services historically, but Bitcoin as the most superior monetary technology in human history, essentially perfects them. It's as close to perfection as we've ever been. So in terms of divisibility, each Bitcoin can be broken down into 100 million subunits called a satoshi. If that divisibility were ever a problem, which actually there was a question that came up recently, if you divide the world population by the total supply of Bitcoin, you end up at like 0.3 Bitcoin per person, call it 300,000 satoshis per person. What if that was not enough to facilitate economic activity? And the answer to that is Bitcoin can soft fork into further divisibility. So if Bitcoin ate all the money in the world and the average Bitcoin or wealth will say 300,000 satoshis each, but that wasn't divisible enough maybe to buy coffee and do all these day to day transactions, what would happen? Well, we would increase its divisibility. So Bitcoin's perfected divisibility, the divisibility of money, lets us transact across scales, right? We can buy coffee or we can buy a house. Durability is an interesting one. So clearly something like gold is very durable. It's resistant to degradation over time. Bitcoin is just pure information, but it's stored in a distributed format. So information stored in a distributed fashion tends to be virtually infinitely durable. The example I'd like to give here is something like the Bible. The Bible is just distributed information. It's stored everywhere and nowhere, so to speak. And for that reason, it has outlasted empires. And Bitcoin's similar, right? You can't make changes to it unilaterally. But to make explicit the ways in which it is not durable is the fact that it relies on computing infrastructure. Like it needs computers. So if you were to destroy all the computers in the world, it needs mechanisms that store and transfer information. And so you could attack it. I mean, you could attack gold in the same kind of way, I suppose, through the physics, but it's probably easier to destroy all the computers in the world than it is to destroy all the gold in the world. Maybe not, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, you're right. Maybe, I'm not sure which one would be harder to destroy. The other thing is there's a dynamic incentive. So every time you destroy Bitcoin miners, you're creating incentives for anyone else with access to electricity to mine because you're making the algorithm easier. Yeah, so the destruction is difficult because of the decentralized nature of the whole thing. And the difficulty adjustment. Yeah, so you're gonna have to use nuclear weapons and cover the whole globe, but anyway. Yeah, and by then, we've got much bigger problems than money, right? That's right, so okay, so that's durability. So portability, Bitcoin's pure information, it can move at the speed of light, can't get much faster than that. Recognizability refers to the ability to verify the veracity of the money or its authenticity. So you can actually, when we used to transact gold, there were time honored techniques for verifying that it was gold and not gold plated lead, for instance. This is where we get the term sound money. A gold coin made a very particular sound when dropped from a certain height. You've seen people biting coins. These are all techniques for testing the authenticity of gold. And with Bitcoin, we have something unique in that if you're running a full node, you can verify that the Bitcoin is Bitcoin, right? It cannot be tampered with, it cannot be faked. And in addition to that, as a node operator, you can audit the total supply of Bitcoin at any time, which is unlike any money in history. So you know with full certainty, if you're holding 1000 Bitcoin, you have 1000 out of a possible 21 million forever. You have a guaranteed fraction of the total supply. Yeah, so a full node contains information about every transaction that's ever been had so you can figure out, yeah, I mean, all the truth of this money is all right there. Yeah, it's like a fractal constituent of the whole network, right? The whole Bitcoin blockchain is comprised in a node too. Not the proof of work piece, but the entire transaction history. And so that's unique as well. And that's what makes Bitcoin the ultimate store of value is that you know with certainty what the total supply is and will ever be. And you know that your share of that supply is fixed. It cannot change. It can only improve actually. If someone loses, you know, if the Satoshi stash is truly gone forever, the million Bitcoin never moves, then we're talking about 1000 Bitcoin out of 20 million instead and so on and so forth. As more people lose access to their Bitcoin, they're basically making a contribution to everyone else. It's anti dilutive. And there's certain properties of Bitcoin that are sort of a little bit more into the details that ensure that the full nodes, like the size of all the transactions that ever happened, at least currently can be stored in a single computer, for example. So it doesn't blow up too quickly. That's right. But you know, there's arguments that that's not necessarily, you can make arguments for that to be a very nice property, but you can also say that there's like drawbacks to it. That's hence the block size debates and all those kinds of things. Yeah, that was the Bitcoin Cash Civil War, right? Was that particular piece. Yeah. And, you know, ostensibly they were saying, oh, we need more transaction throughput to buy more coffee and do more transactions. But what they were actually doing was increasing the size computing power necessary to run a full node, which would have theoretically compromised decentralization. So yeah, but it would in theory, and this is, you know, in theory, it would allow you to have much more transactions. That's right. But the drawback, it would, because of no longer can be stored in a single computer, personal computer, then it naturally leads to the centralization. Yes. Which you see with gold. Which would have compromised its survivability. Right. So, I said, what else is there? The last one, which leads straight into this one, actually is the most important one of money, which is scarcity. And that you need to know the supply is fixed and safeguarded from counterfeiting and inflation, which counterfeiting and inflation are the same thing, by the way. Counterfeiting is criminalized inflation. Inflation is legalized counterfeiting. So central banks today, when they say they're printing money, they're not. They're counterfeiting currency. That's a very important part. And Bitcoin, as I've argued in some of my writing, is more than just an invention. It's actually the discovery of absolute scarcity. And that we have unveiled a property of money that we will only discover once, and it's got really major ramifications for the world at large. So with gold, for instance, as we've covered, it became money because it was the most relatively scarce monetary metal, right? Its supply was hardest to increase over time. However, if we could somehow flip a switch today and make everyone in the world go out and start mining gold, we could increase the supply much more quickly. We could, you know, it's historic inflation rates about 2%, we could double that pretty quickly. Bitcoin, with Bitcoin, it is not possible. So no matter how much effort and energy and capital and operational expenditure we pour into the mining network, we cannot deviate from its fixed and diminishing supply curve from between now and the last Bitcoin being mined in 2140 because of the difficulty adjustment. It's constantly, it's adapting to human action actually. So the harder we pursue it, the more that it recedes, and then the less we pursue it, the more available it makes itself. And this is, it's a real major breakthrough because it's the closest thing to perfect information we've ever had in an economy. And perfect information is this, it's a theoretical, but unattainable state of the market where all market actors have all the relevant information about everything so that they can compete as efficiently as possible. And in a state of pure information, we have, I'm sorry, perfect information, we have perfect competition. And in perfect competition, we maximize wealth generation. So we're competing as freely as possible from coercive and violent impediments. And so I think Bitcoin in that sense is going to pull the world closer to a state of perfect competition than we've ever been before, which would increase wealth generation to an extent we've never seen before. Many of the things you said about Bitcoin also hold for other cryptocurrency technologies that followed after. Can you say something to why you think Bitcoin is the superior technology from a pragmatic truth perspective than say Ethereum, but also other crypto, like Bitcoin Cash, like other hard forks of Bitcoin, and maybe things that might yet to be invented, tools yet to be invented? Yeah, so this is a good point of argument because a lot of people have countered me and said, Bitcoin cannot be absolute scarcity because you can fork it and create something with the same properties as Bitcoin or potentially even better properties, right? You create something with a deflationary monetary policy. That's what Bitcoin Cash was actually. It forked Bitcoin with all of the same properties except for the block size that we alluded to earlier. The problem is that money is valued. Again, it's the good with a configuration of demand that is predominantly marketability. So it is valued based on its liquidity. That is how many other trading partners are there in that monetary network. So it is a network valued because of its liquidity and network effects. So any new entrant into the market for money is incentivized to always choose the money with the deepest liquidity and the most network effects. This is why money has tended to be a winner take all market because it's essentially a single purpose tool, right? It is a tool for, if we consider that tools are time saving devices, right? The shovel that you dig more holes per man hour than you can with your bare hands. Money is a tool, there's yet another definition of money that lets us calculate, negotiate and execute trades more quickly. So that function tends to coalesce towards one solution. And so the short answer would be that for the same reasons, quantifiable reasons, right? Like inflation resistance and liquidity and network effects that we have one analog gold, we're only likely to have one digital gold. And I think the Bitcoin Cash Fork proves that out empirically. It's a good case study because. Well, it's one case study, right? But okay, so that's really well put. So like gold was sticky. Once it was accepted, the network effects, the winner take all took over. And here's a fundamentally different kind of like analog versus digital is a leap in technologies. That's right. And you're suggesting that there may not be, there's unlikely to be other leaps of that kind into a whole nother kind of space of technologies. I would argue that Bitcoin, it's kind of like the ideological synthesis of gold, taking the monetary properties of gold and combining them with the internet itself. And in doing so, it has essentially perfected the properties of money, right? You can't get more divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, or scarce than Bitcoin. So Satoshi has kind of, he left no design space for a superior technology to intercede and out compete Bitcoin at this point. Now that it's established liquidity in the network effects. Far superior technology, right? Yeah, but it's a combination of the tech itself and the social layer that is coalesced to it. You can't separate those two out. Like they're all connected and then the political as well. I mean, but the portability, for example, that's another way to phrase that is the, what is it, the scaling. So the number of transactions, that's a limitation for Bitcoin that many argue is a feature, many argue is a bug. You have a bunch of cryptocurrency technologies that are able to achieve much higher, much faster frequency of transactions, much more transactions, you know, all that kind of stuff. What are your thoughts on that? You know, the low level of transactions that's possible with Bitcoin. Do you think that's a feature? Do you think that's a bug? Necessary for security actually. And even these other crypto assets that settle more quickly, they settle with less assurance of finality. So Nick Carter has a great piece on this actually called, the settlement assurance is stupid. It's really good where the gist of it is that there is more work being done in each block of Bitcoin that it can't, it is less vulnerable to reversion. So it's giving you higher degrees of assurance that your settlement or your trade has occurred with finality, whereas other blockchains are much more vulnerable. And again, with Bitcoin, the evolutionary path of money with gold is that it was first used as a collectible. It then became used as a store value. After it had stored enough value, it began to be used as a medium of exchange. And then finally, when it was used widely enough as a medium of exchange, it becomes a unit of account. We actually start to think in the money. Bitcoin's following a similar path. So started out as kind of a collectible. Today, I would argue it's a store value, one of the most effective store value we've ever seen. So that evolutionary path that Bitcoin's following is similar to gold. First a collectible, today a store value. To be an effective store value, it has to optimize for supply cap. That has to be the first, and this is all Bitcoin really needs to do to be successful by the way. Exactly what it's been doing for 12 years, virtually flawlessly, which is keep creating a block every 10 minutes and keep enforcing a supply cap of 21 million. As long as those two things hold, it is sound money, the ultimate sound money, the most inflation resistant money there's ever been. It's actually completely immune. It's taken unexpected inflation to 0%. We know with perfect certainty what Bitcoin supply will ever be. For it to be used more broadly as a medium of exchange, it can't make trade offs at the base layer to increase its portability for instance. Even though portability is maybe kind of a misnomer because Bitcoin has extremely high portability, just doesn't have extremely high transaction throughput. So we could say you can move it pretty quickly anywhere in the world as long as you're willing to bid up for the block space, but you can't satisfy all the world's economic volume. You can't do 300 million transactions per second like you can on a centralized database like Visa. But Bitcoin needs to be this, it has to be a store value first before it can be a medium of exchange. So it has to protect the supply cap first before making any trade offs for that. And I would argue that that's why Bitcoin is so rigid, is that it's optimized for survivability and optimized for that supply cap. And it's pushing experimentation and other features that would increase its transaction throughput to higher layers. So I think Lightning Network is something that's very interesting. It's still early, but there's a lot of throughput already being used on the Lightning Network. And it makes some slight trade offs in terms of the trust minimization of Bitcoin. You end up trusting these smart contracts instead of move the Bitcoin, but you pick up nearly unlimited transaction throughput. So that's how, and that's how biology evolves. That's how the internet evolved. It evolves in layers. So I think Bitcoin, you can sort of conceive of it as the latest layer to the internet. And it's one that preserves this store value property better than any asset we've ever had. Let me ask sort of a critical question of, if you're wrong about your statements about Bitcoin, and you find out years from now that you were wrong, what would that look like? What would be the things that make you realize you were wrong? Likely ideas or crazy out there ideas? Do you think about this kind of stuff? All the time. Because you speak very confidently about Bitcoin. And one of the things, let me put it this way. I think certainty, I feel like that's like a stoic statement. Certainty leads to ruin, something like that. Like certainty, I think is an antithesis to progress often. And especially in your writing, but this is true for the Bitcoin community. There's a certainty about the Bitcoin. And that makes me very skeptical, no matter how good the ideas are. Whenever things are good, this might be the Russian in me. I think like, what are the ways this is gonna go wrong? So what do you think are the ways this might go wrong or you're wrong in your conception of what Bitcoin is? Yeah, so science evolves via negativa, meaning that we're not proving hypotheses and that's what becomes the body of science. Science is whatever is left over as we disprove hypotheses. Whatever we can empirically, through experimentation, disprove, gets discarded. And whatever remains, whatever theory remains, it hasn't been disproven, is science, effectively. This process is similar to market actors zeroing in on a store value, right? They're experimenting with different forms of storing wealth across time. Some do better than others and eventually everyone ends up on the one that is best. That's what gold was. In terms of understanding Bitcoin, I look at it as a similar approach. And that is the main question I'm asking myself is how do you stop this thing? How do you turn it off? How do you end it? If you're a nation state, particularly, who has the most to lose in this transition, what is the attack vector by which they neutralize Bitcoin? I mean, that is the $250 trillion question. And I've spent five years thinking about this thing very deeply. I've read everything on monetary history. I can get my hands on. The general thought of how it is stopped, and this is the snag point that a lot of people get to in their explorations down the rabbit hole, is they just say the government will never allow it. And that becomes kind of their bottom. It's like, all right, Bitcoin's interesting, it's superior money, blah, blah, blah, but the government will never allow it. And they say. Was Ray Dalio, did he say that? Dalio was currently stuck there, yeah. So Ray Dalio said that Bitcoin seems to be too promising. If it is in fact as promising as it looks, governments are going to, I don't forget what the exact quote is, but not allowed. Ban it. Governments will ban it. So how do you get Ray Dalio unstuck from your perspective? Well. And how do you get unstuck from that idea that governments, will governments, how do you prevent governments from stopping a thing that threatens centralized power? Well, Bitcoin is an idea. So governments that are really good at fighting centralized threats to their power, right? Whether that's a currency counterfeiter or competing nation state or business they don't like, or an individual they don't like, you know, they can kill them, they can throw them in jail. They can use any number of course of a violent tactics to suppress it. But how do you point a gun at an idea? How do you coerce an idea? And that's, you know, there's some anecdotal history here where there's the PGP case, which in the United States, the court was trying to classify it as munitions. When we were shipping this pretty good privacy software overseas, government wanted to classify it as munitions and restrict that exportation. But, and this was a circuit court case precedent. When the PGP attorneys actually printed out the source code on paper and presented it as evidence in the court, all of a sudden it became protected under freedom of speech and that it's just code is speech, code is language. And therefore, at least in the United States, it's protected under the first amendment. I think a government ban would be largely unenforceable, frankly, on Bitcoin. Being that it's pure information, if you suppress market actors from using it in one jurisdiction, you're just creating incentives for them to go elsewhere. And you're actually increasing the incentive for other jurisdictions to be favorable towards it because then they can create, they get to benefit from the tax revenue and the businesses and the innovation that's occurring in and around Bitcoin as a result. So you don't think if a particular central bank, like in Europe or United States, bans it, not maybe using those terms, but in some kind of way, you think that provides a really strong incentive for the other big players to enable it. That's right. And that they're more likely, by the way, and governments know this, by the way, too. The other thing that causes a government to shoot itself in the foot is that if they ban something, they draw a lot of attention to it. People are smart. I mean, people ask why, why would a government ban it? Why can't I use this? So that's kind of typically be the last arrow in their quiver. They may try to ban it if Bitcoin really starts to monetize very quickly. And the power structures that they impose today start to dissolve faster than others might think they will, then they might try and ban it. But I think that ban will be largely unenforceable. They're more likely to tax it, which they already do tax it. They're likely to increase taxation of it. They're likely to try and make it more white market by actually tracing Bitcoin, seeing who has it, attaching identities to Bitcoin ownership, and making sure that they're getting their pound of flesh on all the transactions it results in. But I don't think, the other thing about this is, so we saw the internet outcompete intranets, in that we'd say that open source networks tend to outcompete closed source networks. And there's a really good reason for this. And it's because in a closed source network, there are costs associated with defending the network itself. So you have to, the network owners, the owners of the closed source network have to expend resources protecting it from competitors. And they have to expend resources imposing its rules because they're not voluntarily adopted rules. So you actually have to impose these rule sets. Whereas an open source network, which is something much more akin to capitalism in its pure sense, these are voluntarily adopted rules. So all market participants have agreed and consented to this rule set. So there's no enforcement costs and there's no turf protection because anyone can freely enter or exit the open network. For that energetic reason, I think open networks outcompete close networks typically. And in the digital age, that's why I think open, that's why internet outcompetes intranet and that's why open source networks are gonna eat closed source networks. So what Bitcoin would be in that lens is the ultimate open source monetary network devouring closed source central bank monetary networks. And I just don't see how there's no possibility of unilaterally stopping Bitcoin or destroying it. So then they're more likely to regulate or tax it. And again, the other fallacy here is that a lot of people tend to think of governments as these singular indivisible entities, like they just move under one plan. But in reality, it's a lot of people, right? A lot of people with loosely coupled interests and agendas and whatnot, regulators and others whether wearing their citizen hat, they're gonna see this thing monetizing, they're gonna be on the front lines of trying to regulate it, trying to control it. And I think what's likely to happen is they're gonna start to adopt it, to buy some of it even as an individual or possibly even ultimately at a central bank or sovereign wealth fund level, as an insurance policy against its success. And once you start to acquire something and then you have a vested economic interest in its monetization, I think it kind of dissolves any of the power structures that are arrayed against it from the inside. So I've written a lot about this in a new series called Sovereignism, which is based loosely on a book called The Sovereign Individual. And that's the general thesis is that microprocessing technology would devour our organizational models, the most important of which is the nation state. So I think we're going into this world where coercion and violence is just much less rewarding. The economics of violence are declining because of the low cost of protecting property, right? You can now protect your monetary property in Bitcoin at orders of magnitude less cost than is necessary to run a banking network. So it changes the way we organize ourselves. And again, zooming back to gold as kind of the original governor to governments, where if they manipulated the money, gold would leave their country. That's why governments have taken relatively concerted action to go off of the gold standard. There's a great book on this called The Gold Wars that outlines how governments have been waging a cold war against gold for the past 50 years. Bitcoin sort of renews hope for that free market governor of governments. And that is this digital gold that governments cannot stop or coopt. So I think it's something, that's why I think it's such a big deal is that it is changing, it's a new useful fiction, you might say. A useful fiction that's superordinate to the mythology of the nation state and government as the dominant institution in the world. Well, I hope you're right that all forms of centralized power start breaking apart naturally. So governments, the more and more power is given to the individual, whatever the technology is. And Bitcoin seems to be a promising technology that empowers that, enables that. That seems to be the trend. And that's a promising trend at least from a perspective of somebody who values this particular biological meat bag that's full of consciousness. I think Bitcoin is exposing the greatest scam in human history, which is political authority. Like who gives anyone the right to be politically, have political authority over anyone else? People should be free to adopt the rules and systems and tools that best suit their needs. And that arc of history we covered earlier where as socioeconomic systems have become more favorable towards individual sovereignty, the more wealthy we have become, the more we have given the individual, we've maximized individual choice, the more wealth that society has created and the more it has out competed the systems that have come before it. The latest would be capitalism triumphing over socialism. Before maybe we eat, you are in Texas, you brought over some brisket. Before we may be indulge in that, let me bring up one quick topic and then we'll take a break. And the topic of what some may term the toxicity of the Bitcoin community. You've written that Bitcoin toxicity is tough love. Do you wanna break that apart a little bit sort of the idea, the philosophy of the toxicity that seems to be present in part in the Bitcoin community? Yeah, we were talking about this a little bit before we recorded and I've been through the gauntlet with Bitcoin toxicity as well. I came into this space professionally in 2017. I was originally running a multi strategy crypto asset hedge fund. And my initial investment thesis on the world was that Bitcoin was a big deal, but there were all these other exciting coins and projects and ways the technology was going to be used. And that view of reality met this immune, I guess you could say as an ideological immune system, this Bitcoin toxicity and that it's kind of a filter that's trying to catch bad or useless or even scamming ideas that this space is very well known for. As we've touched on today, Bitcoin, in my opinion, is this world shattering innovation, but it's in a sea of the most scammy stuff ever, right? People, anybody can go and create a coin. So you can go and launch one immediately online and you can throw up a website, an advisor page, post a white paper talking about how great your technology is gonna be and how it's gonna change the world. And then you can raise $30 million in Bitcoin or Ethereum in 30 seconds kind of thing. So it's drawn in a lot of this scam artistry, you might say. And I think people living through that, because there is this natural predilection for people when they first come into Bitcoin, you're excited about it, then you get lost in the shit coin universe. And then just looking at the market success of Bitcoin versus, and when I use the word shit coin, I'm just. You say with all the love in the world. All the love in the world. I guess you could call me a toxic maximalist in some ways, although I consider myself a freedom maximalist, not a Bitcoin maximalist. Yeah, I saw that line, that's a good line. Bitcoin, tracking the market success of Bitcoin versus alternative crypto assets, the signal is very clear that Bitcoin has out competed all of them. So I think that Bitcoin cultural toxicity has evolved as an immune response to those bad ideas, which is actually, if you think about it, kind of is a tough love, right? You don't want new entrance to the space to get lost in shit coin jungle and learn the hard way, the way many Bitcoin maximalists have that the real innovation is Bitcoin. But like an immune system, I think it can also go too far. And so I think it's useful when it is defending the space from false narratives, we might say, but it becomes detrimental when it's attacking people that are inquiring about Bitcoin or people that are approaching Bitcoin with a good spirit and good intention and a desire to learn. Because then at that point, it's actually impeding the free flow of ideas, which the example in your clip that was totally taken out of context. And then you're literally just saying, I'm here to learn and contribute. I think I've got some stuff to do. And then people attack that. Like that doesn't make any fucking sense. It's like you're attacking someone who's approaching it in a good spirit and asking questions. Yeah, and I think sometimes talking about it, the toxicity in the Bitcoin community as an immune response has a negative effect of giving it a pass because like it almost says, look, it equates it with the human immune system, which seems to do a really good job. And so you could say that the toxicity has a lot of features in the sea of fraudulent projects that steal money from people. It's really useful to make sure that you give people the harsh truth about who is and isn't a scammer. You have to take it apart, take it away from that metaphor of the immune system and look at basic human nature. And human nature can go to some dark places, which is it's sad to say that some people, maybe many of us can enjoy for its own sake, the toxicity, the mockery, the derision, and you stop being part of the immune system that makes a successful idea propagate and start being a sort of a destructive virus yourself. And that's something I think about because I am new to this particular immune system, but I've explored other immune systems. And I think you understand this world much better than me, but I tend to prefer sort of love as a mechanism for spreading ideas, to err on the side of love and kindness and almost like an open mindedness in a way where you're constantly lowering yourself in the face of other ideas, constantly questioning yourself. But I think I understand that that might be more applicable in certain contexts, like maybe in the space of science or something like that. But in the space of Bitcoin, as it currently stands, there's so many people that are trying to scam others out of their money that the kind of harshness required is different. Nevertheless, I do want to put it on people like yourself and others who I know you wouldn't consider yourself this, but you're one of the faces or leaders in this space to call people out a little bit, to inspire them to be more loving, I suppose. But it's difficult, because you want to walk that line carefully. You don't want to be too loving and open minded, otherwise your brain falls out. I get it, it's a difficult balance to walk. It is subtle and it's nuanced and it is difficult to walk. And I think that, that's why I try to say tough love, because when we're young, we may have certain ideas about the way we want our life to go, but then maybe our parents are not letting us do certain things. And we think they're, I know when I was a kid, I wanted to get my, when I was in fifth grade, I wanted to get my ear pierced. My mom wouldn't let me do it. And I was, oh, come on, mom, I thought it was so cool. And then two years later, I'm like, thank you, mom, for letting me get my ear pierced. I think it comes from a place of good intention that they are actually, they have asked themselves that question, right? That they've been inquiring in why not this crypto asset or this crypto asset? And they've done the exploration, they keep coming back to Bitcoin and they've seen people being taken advantage of. But to your point, it's like it can, this tough love can become detrimental, just like the immune system can become detrimental, right? It can overreact and it can actually harm the human body. So I would say that it's such a tricky and nuanced topic that even biology hasn't figured it out, right? A lot of people have autoimmune diseases. And then there's the other thing that we have this natural, I agree with you about love. I think love is like the deepest value. That's a whole nother philosophical thing, but we're biologically programmed to pay more attention to things that are adversarial or harmful, right? That's part of us protecting the meat suit, so to speak. So there is some maybe better delivery method by being a little bit toxic to really get the point across, like, hey, don't get lost over here. These things can hurt you. Really try to focus on Bitcoin. But the toxicity of that message, I guess it increases its ability to penetrate the individual, but it can also go too far. So it is very... It's interesting, but I almost to push back a little bit, toxicity is a funny word. I think maybe another way to say it is, I brought up like Christopher Hitchens and somebody who like, okay, you might say he's toxic or something like that, because he's basically a intellectual powerhouse who's also a troll. So he's constantly, it's like guerrilla warfare in the space of ideas. He's very harsh in his disagreements and criticisms, but he's done with incredible grace and skill and poetry. So... We could use more of that. We could use more of that. So toxicity just like... These are just words. They can mean a lot of different things, but disagreement doesn't have to be done with love, but it should be done with skill if it's to be effective. So there's a lot of ways to be effective in guerrilla warfare, but you wanna learn how to shoot or whatever the weapon you're using and to do it well. Some people do it better than others. And it's worthwhile to learn to do it well. Again, I prefer love, but even love, just because you think you're communicating a good idea, which you very well may be, doesn't mean it also doesn't require skill to do the communication well, whether it's disagreement and harsh or more agreement and loving and so on. Yeah, I think very fundamentally that all of our decisions, we alluded to earlier that every decision is an expression of value, every action we take, they ultimately come from fear or love. Fear would be something much more in the biological domain where it's like, we're trying to protect ego, we're trying to behave selfishly. This is the domain of sin. I don't know all the sins, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, lust, pride, envy, these are all selfish behaviors. Whereas something like love, it's morally superior in that it's more selfless. I don't know that we can properly define love with words at all, but I would say maybe like selfless action could be kind of a generalization of it. And that way, it is really hard to your point. It's hard to love in a world that has a lot of conflict that might make you fearful if you're really focused on your meat suit. But if you're focused on the bigger picture and you're focused on others and legacy and life, that there is a way to do it. And that's why I actually think Christ, that is the highest moral aim, right? He met all of the vitriol in life, betrayal, hate, violence, he met it all with love and he met it with compassion. And that's why, regardless of if you believe that he actually lived or any of this, he is symbolic of the highest moral consciousness possible. And Carl Jung would say that that was a suitable alternative to psychoanalysis, was actually setting your moral aim higher and striving towards it diligently. So, I mean, I agree completely. We need more of that in the Bitcoin space. We need more of that in the world, frankly. In the world, yeah. And these things, they're all intertwined. We touched on the beginning, all of us get to decide, but the world does influence what we do. It does influence kind of if we adopt fear or love, but it takes, I don't know, it takes good systems and it takes, I guess, good leaders to set an example. Yeah, I do believe that there's like individual people can have a ripple effect. So that's what I try to do, sort of embody the, I'm just one ant. But one of the things I have faith in is, I'm trying to do that more. I know this is a podcast, but I'm trying to do less talking and more doing. I've been disappointed in myself, if I'm being honest, how much talking I've been doing, as opposed to, like in my own private life, I live the thing I talk about, but I also haven't created much. And I believe in the power of individuals that create stuff, like create an idea through those individuals that try to create something new, the world progresses. And hopefully there's more and more, more and more of those people. So you mentioned kind of people who, what the Bitcoin community might call scammers. I have a lot of passions in my life that I focus a lot of my attention to. Bitcoin doesn't happen to be yet one of them. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you know. I'm always looking for things to really fall in love with. So how is a person like me supposed to figure out, I also happen to have a platform a little bit, and how am I supposed to figure out who is interesting, what is an interesting set of ideas and what are not? Because people are financially tied into a lot of the cryptocurrencies that we're talking about, certainly with Bitcoin, you know, their livelihood, their wellbeing is tied up to it. So it becomes much more emotional, much more personal. It's no longer purely an exploration of ideas. It's really almost like a threat on your property. Like it's a personal threat and it makes it very difficult to explore those ideas. So I understand that, but it makes it very difficult for somebody like me to just walk in and be curious. So how do I proceed in this difficult world in exploring this landscape and not give a platform to ideas that may harm others? I guess first I'd like to commend your forthrightness about this, because I don't think many people try to walk that line necessarily. People, again, kind of the territorial imperative, they'll put whoever on, they'll help expand their reach. Oh yeah, that's true. Or say whatever needs to be said to expand their reach. So I think you're coming from a good place. I'll say that. There's a great piece written on the topic of scammers and scamming. I think it was by Goldstein. He wrote a piece called, Everyone's a Scammer. And it's sort of back to this general human proclivity to try and get something for nothing always, which again, it can be positive, it can be innovative, or it can be a negative. You can be trying to steal from people. That might be, I think that's a useful piece just to kind of see the crypto world through that lens. And that's how Bitcoiners are thinking all the time. They are by nature adversarial thinkers. So they're trying to minimize the need for trust in any situation and maximize verification. As far as sifting through the ideas, I guess this is back where the cultural immune system has some utility. Because there were times when I thought this particular crypto asset, Augur was one I was really into, that it could facilitate prediction markets and prediction markets could make markets more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. But when that investment does get to the point when that investment thesis basically met the cultural filter or immune system, it forced me to reevaluate my position, forced me to really look into it more deeply. And through that exploration, I realized that it would need to be built on Bitcoin to work basically. So it really comes down to like you doing your homework, but we can't all deeply evaluate every idea out there. One of the things I struggle with was Alex Jones, for example, had dinner with him. I could tell that will be a very fun conversation, but like then I also understand that there's like consequences to that conversation that should be explored with care. And so you need to take on the responsibility of being a chef with the puffer fish and all those kinds of things. That said, just like you said, it's very difficult to know this ahead of time and I will probably make mistakes. And that's a shitty thing to have to live with that I'm going to make mistakes and some of them very large. Like, yeah, I mean, I can imagine a bunch of different ways, but all we can do in this world is once we make the mistakes, we acknowledge those mistakes and learn. And also, I have to put this on the rest of us that you don't take one thing that a person did and then burn them at the stake for it. That you realize that we all make mistakes, that a particular mistake does not make the person. And this applies to taking stuff out of context over hundreds of hours of talking, but it applies to actual, in context, big mistake. So what if I murdered somebody at some point? Just give me a break. No, there are some things that are too far, of course, but in general, we need to give each other a chance. Yeah, but I'm still, I walk with a heavy heart knowing that I'll probably make a mistake, especially one that I didn't mean to. That's the one that worries me most. This is human nature, like hamartia, to miss the mark. That's the root word of sin. We are sinful by nature. We can't help it. There's no way, again, pain is information, right? There's no way to learn other than trying, failing, learning, and then you put yourself in better formation, right, in formation to better deal with it next time. So I hope, I don't get the sense that you're actually afraid of making a misstep. I think you're just maybe disappointed's a better word. You know you're gonna make the mistakes. Yeah, that's exactly, that's a much, much better word. But we have to embrace that. That's the only way anything, that's the only way we can advance, is that we're dealing with an incomprehensible reality. All we can do is throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And in that process, we're all inherently gonna hurt ourselves and hurt others, and that's where love and forgiveness come into play, right? And yeah, I think the other thing is that this culture of reducing people down to a label, right, whether it's racism or whether you're calling them a scammer or any number of terms, you're discounting their sovereignty to zero, right? You're taking a super complex human that is vast, contains multitudes, is changing over time, and you're trying to put them in a bucket of a word. And that is just, I think, a cognitive fallacy. Like, it's not only gonna hurt the person that you're winnowing down to a word, it's also gonna hurt you. And it's gonna, in your attempt to decomplexify reality by assigning this person to a term, you're actually gonna create bad outcomes for yourself. Because you're not gonna understand that person. I do also think there's a failure of our social media technology that incentivizes that kind of reduction to a label. It's just the viral nature of that reduction. So not only do we humans naturally do that, our social media platforms make that easier, more fun, more effective to do that at scale, the mass hysteria. So I think there's actually technological ways of adding friction to that. Yeah, I wonder, I mean, I agree with you that it's, social media is an amplifier to our natural, this natural way of dealing with one another. But I wonder, and my thinking has evolved a lot on this, that there's something below the way we're treating each other too, right? We could say civilization sort of advances in the tools we make and the way we treat each other. We tend to have better tools, better quality of life, and better morality, better quality of living, and ways of dealing with one another. And I think that when you corrupt the money, that it really does push us the negative direction, pushes us away from, again, encouraging, or magnifying scarcity artificially causes us to be more divisive. When things are more divisive, we tend to be less civilized, less nuanced, more black or white, or this or that, or you're this, or you're label A or label B. So I really think, and this is a harder one to unravel, but I think if we can fix the money, right, which again is the base layer operating system for human moral action in the world, that it has downstream effects. So we'd actually maybe start to treat each other a little better on social media, despite the fact that it enables this faster communication. That's interesting, so perhaps fixing social media as I've been thinking about is treating the symptom, not the cause. Yeah, that is the Bitcoin rabbit hole in a nutshell, is that they say fix the money, fix the world. You keep tracing these different social malaises or technological difficulties, lack of innovation. Weinstein's entire Portal podcast, something went wrong in the early 70s. We went off the gold standard in 1971, and there's a great website, wtfhappat1971.com, goes through this whole gamut of socioeconomic data that's completely gone askew since the early 70s. Yeah, you had this whole video, what do you think about Eric Weinstein and Bitcoin and the gold standard? Does he, I actually haven't heard him talk about his thesis about the 70s in connection to the, going off of the gold standard. Yeah, what are your thoughts there? What are your thoughts about his general relationship with the Bitcoin idea and the community? Yeah, the first exposure I had to Eric was his, I think it was his first episode with Peter Thiel, and they're going through that thesis that there's been this general institutional rot and suppression of innovation since the early 70s, and he's trying to identify what it is. I don't think they ever pended on the money on going off the gold standard, but in recent interactions with Eric, I've interacted with him on Clubhouse. We recently released an episode of the show I did with Chris Espley, and it was titled Dear Eric Weinstein. So we're going through his worldview that he's expressed in the portal and tying it back to the money in different ways. And he's been, he's engaged. Eric retweeted the show. We've exchanged some messages. He's been very open minded. He's asked some really good questions. So I get the sense that he's approaching this very wholeheartedly. He does bring with him his existing worldview and his existing theory. The one that really blew up was gauge theory. They got really popular. I don't know a lot about gauge theory. I actually messaged Eric and said, I want to learn more genuinely, because he seems to be serious that that needs to be considered in the sphere of money. And so I want to learn more about it. But I think overall it's great. It's great to see an intellectual heavyweight of his caliber gravitating towards Bitcoin. Yeah, he has some gauge theoretic conceptions about the world broadly, but also about economics, which ultimately boils down to just a set of mathematics, which allows you to more effectively reason about the world. And he has a certain set of views there. So it's fascinating to see him grapple with it. I think he's also kind of actually kind of like all of us, grappling with the idea of what is Bitcoin in this world. It's a very young technology, and it's unclear exactly how the ideas of the past fit with it and integrate, how the two integrate together. And so it's interesting to explore, not just Bitcoin in the particular. So for me, like what I've always saw Bitcoin as from the beginning, from a narrow worldview is computer science, which is where I come from. And so I wasn't almost aware in the social, political, financial aspects of Bitcoin. But now I see that there's not just power, but there's fascinating ideas to explore on that side of things, not just the computer science, not just the technical details, but the political, the socioeconomic, the philosophical. That's where I find all the fascination in the world, frankly. One other thing about Weinstein and intellectuals more generally that are skeptical of Bitcoin, I would challenge them to read the book, Human Action, written by Mises. I think in 1949, he published the English version. It's essentially the Bible of Austrian economics. And I think Austrian economics is a noticeable gap in most modern intellectuals worldviews, that it's not taught in school. I mean, I have a master's degree in accounting and finance, studied a lot of economics in school. There's not one peep of Austrian econ. The least we'd love talking about all the degrees he has. I was a CPA. But that curriculum that we get in college is noticeably deficient in Austrian economics. And I think there's a reason why, right? It's heavily government influenced. Again, master's degree in accounting, they never taught me about what money is or where money comes from. All you learn is that the central bank issues money and the central bank takes money away. So it's conceived of in the textbooks quite literally as God, right? An entity that suffers no opportunity costs, that basically is the foundation of the entire Keynesian worldview that you're taught in economics. And Austrian economics is the opposite end of the spectrum of that, right? It's actually the culmination, which economics is the youngest science in the world, by the way. So it is kind of the front, it's the frontiers of science in many ways, like to actually, when I say praxeology, many people have never even heard of that. But it's something, it's an a priori study equivalent to something like mathematics, that you're building things from first principles to reason about economic reality. And I think that book, it's a very difficult book written by Mises, 1200 pages, translated from German. The way he wields English is fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. It'd probably take you six months to read it if you read it daily, seriously. Like it's a beast of a book. But that will plug the gap, I think in most, any intellectual that's skeptical about Bitcoin, I think that will plug the gap that's necessary for you to see it in a new light. Well, I'll take that as a challenge. Now that we took a little bit of a break, ate some good Texas brisket, thank you for that, by the way, for passing over. Quite welcome. Let me ask the ridiculous question. At the core of the idea of Bitcoin, is this guy or this entity named Satoshi Nakamoto? So the ridiculous question is, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And first of all, is it you? It's not me. I wish. And is this an interesting question? Or is it just something about our human nature that wants to, that always tends towards mystery? Well, as we've touched on a bit today, you know, mythology, in my opinion, is something that is intrinsic to how we see the world in a lot of ways. Like it's how, it's kind of the structure by which we build these useful fictions. And so in that way, you could just say that Satoshi is the godhead of Bitcoin, effectively. And I think a compelling argument could be made that his disappearance is what really solidifies Bitcoin's decentralization. Because if there were one individual to personally vilify or denigrate or attack, you know, to disparage or question the motives of, you know, if he's out on the Hollywood Hills partying, everyone knows he's got a million Bitcoin, you know, it would just kind of tarnish the entire project in a lot of ways. But the fact that on that theme, something for nothing, this guy actually gave humanity something for nothing. And it appears that he didn't profit in any way. He, she, or they. I actually heard recently that he identified as a he in some of his communications. So it sounds like it is a he. So like his communication is being like studied, like almost like exactly as if he is a religious. That's right. Like a prophet. It's fascinating to imagine that he's still alive and living in this world. And it's even more fascinating to imagine that he's perhaps participating in the Bitcoin community because I mean, that takes a special human being to out of principle do that, to do, to remain anonymous. That's very much the George Washington. Yeah, I always wonder like how many people are like that? There's a cliche that like absolute power corrupts, absolutely, like power corrupts. But it seems like the progress of humanity depends on the people whom power doesn't corrupt. And it's enough to have just a small selection of those. And even if most of us are too weak, we give into power. If given the chance, all it takes is a few. That's, I've never thought of it like that, but Marcus Aurelius immediately came to mind. You know, the guy that he had the keys to the kingdom and he apparently adhered to the stoic virtues until the end, but yeah, I agree with Satoshi. The other thing that's interesting is he would be by far the most wealthy person in the world on a liquid asset basis because he has a million Bitcoin, which is 60 billion liquid net worth at current prices. So if he is still alive and just operating in the world, he is daily and moment to moment resisting massive incentives to go and just be the richest guy in the world. He's the ultimate hodler. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so it's, I mean, it's turning down not just financial success, but also fame. I mean, fame is another drug. It's kind of power, but it's in itself is also a drug, especially in this modern society, in this attention. And he would have both. He would have both. It's fun to imagine who it could be. It's fascinating if it's somebody like you or somebody like Elon or somebody like that. That's fascinating to think about. I think Elon would be hilarious if he came out and he was Satoshi and be like, hey guys, I know I'm already the richest guy in the world, but I gotta go ahead and double my lead here. What do you make of Elon Musk investing with Tesla, investing in Bitcoin and maybe broaden it out in some of these other, you know, big billionaires, but also people tied to major companies investing in Bitcoin? Yeah, I think Michael Saylor really led the charge on that. He's the CEO of MicroStrategy that I think they've acquired upwards of $2 billion in Bitcoin now. Started acquiring August, maybe of 2020. And he's, you know, personally bought a lot of it. He bought a lot as a treasury reserve asset for his company, MicroStrategy. Then they leveraged up on a convertible note and bought more. So he's really gone, really leading the charge in this Bitcoin institutional adoption. Your conversation with him is a really interesting one. Your series of, I mean, series of episodes I suppose, but it's only a couple of conversations, I guess. Yeah, we recorded twice, five and a half hours each. So it's about 11 hours of content. Yeah, thank you. A lot of people have said that it's the best first principle thing they've ever seen on Bitcoin, which I take no credit for that at all. I mean, I just sat down with a guy and unleashed him. He's just a beast. Yeah, but it's fascinating that his longterm vision with it. I mean, I'm not sure I'm all philosophically bought in, but if he's right, if this set of ideas are as powerful as he describes, as you described, that this would change the world, which as you say, it's funny that a company like MicroStrategy might be the company that has the biggest macro effect on our economy and our world. Yeah, the conversation reshaped my worldview a lot too, because he framed money as energy, which I had often thought of money as time. And it explored those connections a lot in my writing, but looking at it as energy, and then his supposition that the purpose of life is to basically channel energy across space and time. So we're just trying to figure out how to channel more energy across space and time toward the satisfaction of aims. And his definition, or his answer to that question, what is money, is that money is the highest form of energy a human being can channel. So it's a claim to all other forms of energy we can manifest in the world. And that just completely reshaped how I see it, brought in this whole other side to my intellectual explorations of money. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? So I understand money is time, which in itself is a really powerful idea. But money is energy, and channeling energy, can you break that apart? Yeah, so I guess I definitely have to check out the whole series to really get his perspective, but I'll do my best to condense it. Life itself, all forms of life are, they're dependent on energy, right? Energy fuels everything, fuels life in action and motion and all of that. And we could say that maybe like a plant is harnessing solar energy and then reallocating that into growth. So its aim is to grow towards the sun, right? So it's allocating energy towards its goal of harnessing more solar energy kind of thing. So, and humans too have evolved to figure out how to harness energy in different ways to satisfy higher and more complicated aims. So the original energy network that he referenced was fire, right? We actually learned to wield fire as a tool in and of itself. So not only are we learning to channel energy, but we're actually learning how to isolate energy as a tool in and of itself. And so we went into that, how harnessing fire had changed human beings. And actually, this is one of the earliest examples too of a coevolution between tool and our biology, because when we developed fire, we developed cooking. And cooking is, you can kind of think of it as pre digestion in a way. We're liberating these macronutrients or making things that otherwise would not be digestible, edible. And it increases the efficiency by which we extract nutrients from food. That's what cooking does. So when we figured out cooking, we liberated all these digestive resources that were reallocated towards higher cognitive development. So there's this evolutionary path between figuring out fire and us becoming smarter, which is interesting. Some other early examples he gave, he went into were missiles and hydraulics. So missiles being, we learned to hunt at a distance. We can't bring down a wooly mammoth, maybe with spears and up close and personal force, but we could with spears and javelins and slings and whatnot. And then he went into how we've used water to channel hydraulic energy. So we can basically overcome gravity. We can move, there's theories that the pyramids were constructed using, the blocks were moved using hydraulic energy or using water. Clearly we use like cargo ships and whatnot to move things much more efficiently across water than we could the land. So his whole view is how we keep figuring out better ways and more efficient ways to harness energy and channel it. And in that perspective, money has always represented a claim on all other forms of energy. So whatever energy couldn't be channeled towards something useful in the economy historically would go into gold mining. So gold became this residual, this economic, this token of the excess energy created by the market economy. And then you could take that token of energy and use it to redeem for any other form of energy or any of the products of energy itself. So it's, I guess it's my best approximation of it. And it just really shattered my worldview again, because I'd always thought about it as time. Like we spend time sacrificing to obtain money that we then redeem for commencement sacrifices from others, but I'd never considered it purely as energy. And then it also ties back into gold, where there was an energy expenditure necessary to obtain gold. So there's a proof of work associated with obtaining gold that protected its market value, right? So you had to expend, again, if market value of gold's 2000 an ounce, you had to expend 1900 an ounce mining. So it kept producers honest in a way. So do you think something like proof of stake that's more about reputation than actual exertion, like energy can work? No, I think proof of stake is inherently centralizing. It's like the old Matthew principle, from those who have to those who have, more will be given from those who have not, everything will be taken. That's what proof of stake is. You need proof of work to embody skin in the game in the marketplace, such that contributions are commensurate with consideration received. That's how systems work. What's the idea why proof of work might incentivize decentralization? Do you worry that as Bitcoin becomes more powerful, it may become, again, more centralized? Well, the decentralization of Bitcoin is largely driven by the nodes, actually, which aren't actually mining. They're just choosing which rule set to implement. And then the mining network's actually enforcing that rule set. So I think the mining network is inherently decentralized in that, really anyone with access to cheap energy can become a miner. You can freely enter or exit the market or the network at any time. But maintaining the block size at a manageable level is what's key to maintaining node decentralization. This is an interesting question. Who do you think has more power, the miners or the nodes? Because the nodes carry the idea of the protocol, like the specifics. So in some sense, they have more power, if Bitcoin is an idea. They're kind of mutually indispensable though, because you can't have, there's no security without the miners. So without the miners, Bitcoin is just an idea. And the idea of Bitcoin has maybe existed even before Bitcoin, right? Just sound money. We just say sound money as an idea. But there was no way to root that into thermodynamic reality without Satoshi figuring out, not just proof of work, it's the entire composite of the difficulty adjustment, proof of work, one way hashing, et cetera. So I don't know, that's hard to say, hard to disentangle the two. You've talked about money as morality too. How do you think about moral and immoral action in the context of money? There's this great quote by Rothbard, who's a famous Austrian economist. And he says, quote, to be moral, an act must be free, unquote. And I think morality, it changes over time and it is, it has its roots in biology. Jordan Peterson makes the point that even animals have their own sort of pseudo morality. Where like with wolf packs, for instance, if there's a dispute between the alpha males, or I guess between an alpha male and a incumbent, the two males will have a fight basically. And then when one, it's decided that one has won, the loser will basically roll over and give up his neck to the alpha male. And they do this instead of fighting to the death because in a wolf pack, they need every wolf so they can go out and bring down, you never know when you're gonna need the 20th wolf to bring down the big buffalo the next day or whatever. So they've developed this less than fight to the death social morality to optimize their effectiveness as a wolf pack. And similarly for humans, like our morality sort of emerges through competition and play even. There are these implicit rules that come into place based on how we're organizing ourselves over time. And with, so with money it's interesting because most tools we would consider to be amoral, as in a hammer can be used to build a house which could be seen to be good, like a good constructive purpose, or it could be used to bash them on skull, which could be something evil. And that the tool itself is amoral, doesn't have any independent morality of its own. All of the morality is associated with the wielder of the tool. So what's the quote like, any tool can be a weapon if you hold it right sort of thing. But money's maybe a little bit different in that when you monopolize money, it's only useful as a tool for one thing. And that's for allocating wealth away from some and to others. So it is the only utility of monopolized money is theft. There's no other, there's a lot of propaganda out there that will say, oh, we need to print money to get out of this disaster or to give to the poor, whatever moralistically camouflaged political aim is being discussed, the base layer of monopolized money is that it's only useful for taking from some and giving to others. So another way to think about this is that money is a paper claim on the savings of society. So it is just a ticket for redeeming savings, which could be time, could be capital, it could be knowledge from any market actor in the world. So it's kind of a list of who owns what, if you will, it's a proxy list. If there's one group that can amend that list and others cannot, then they're basically able and incented to modify that list to their own benefit. And that's effectively what a central bank is doing. So a central bank is determining how much money to create. They're also determining who gets to receive that money first and the first recipients of that money are gonna be the beneficiaries in an inflationary regime. So those that receive the money last are the ones being robbed. Those that receive the money first are the ones that are receiving the stolen proceeds, let's say. And this has a really corrosive effect on social morality because if we consider that people's time horizon, which the Austrians call the time preference, the more short term thinking you are, the more likely you are to engage in selfish behavior. If you know that it's all over tomorrow and you've been working your whole life to develop this business or create this reputation or whatever your thing is, but you just are given the foreknowledge that tomorrow it's all gonna end, you're much more likely to go out and just maybe get drunk and party that night because there's no more repercussions. Whereas if you know that you're gonna live for a very long time, you're much more likely to plan for the future. So we just say that your time horizon is closely related to your morality. The longer term thinking you are, the more moral you would tend to behave, the more you would care about long term relationship building versus going out and getting wasted. And money too impinges very closely on our time preference. And again, time preference is the Austrian term. So low time preference means you're long term oriented, high time preference means you're short term oriented, which can be a little trippy for some people because it sounds backwards. But if your money constantly loses value, you are incentivized to become more short term oriented. You are handicapped in your ability to plan for the future because your money, which is intended to be, here's another definition of money, as an insurance policy against uncertainty. So no matter what problems you encounter in the world, this money will best help you deal with those problems. When that insurance policy against uncertainty is injected with uncertainty, it's polluted with the uncertainty of inflation, your time horizon shrinks, your ability to plan long term shrinks. And this impinges on social morality. So there's a great book on this called Honest Money by Gary North. And in that book, he gives the parable of the wine maker. And the wine maker, if we just imagine the hypothetical wine maker, operating a business in a centrally banked economy. And let's say his central bank just doubled the money supply to quote unquote save the economy. Say an increase in money supply from one to $2 trillion. This wine maker that's accustomed to selling wine at $20 a bottle is now faced with basically three choices. And an important point here too, before we get into his three choices, are what prices are themselves. Prices are the most visible aspect of any service. So when you increase prices, you're incentivizing your customers to look elsewhere. They're gonna look at your competition. When you decrease prices, you're incentivizing market actors to look closer at your product, right? You're delivering a solution at a lower price. So this wine maker that's accustomed to selling his wine at a $20 price point, all of a sudden, because of a central bank has tripled the money supply, he has three choices. He can either keep selling his bottle at $20 and all of his inputs will increase due to inflation by 50%. So he will lose 50% of his profit margin as a result. So he can choose to eat that loss. He can choose to double the selling price of his bottle of wine from $20 to $40, because all of the price of his inputs doubled. So then he would maintain his profit margin. Or the third one is that he could choose to water down his wine or use inferior ingredients. So he could use cheaper inputs and maintain the output at the same price. So he could basically start selling his customers an inferior product for the same price to preserve his profit margin. Now, again, case number one, it's not very palatable. He doesn't wanna eat the economic loss. Case number two, he doesn't wanna eat the profit margin. Case number two, it's not very good either, because he's then incentivizing all of his customers to go shop other winemakers if he doubles his price. So human nature being what it is, trying to get something for nothing, inflation actually seeps into other industries by encouraging producers into option three, which is to deceive your customer in the short run. And again, this would be done initially at the margins. Maybe it's just a few drops of water. Maybe it's just some cheaper grapes. But over time, this inflation is actually inducing producers to weigh their financial wellbeing against their moral integrity. So it's forcing them into this dilemma that would not exist in a free market economy. And as they charge more money for wine that is inferior, the buyers of that wine, also living in a central banked economy are also getting scammed by not only the inflation, but also the wine. So it becomes this kind of corrosive contagious moral effect that propagates throughout an economy. And that's why I've argued in a lot of my writing that inflation is this infectious moral cancer on the world. I think it is tied back to a lot of the social strangeness we've seen in modern times, where there seems to be a lot of fake people and a lot of fake businesses and a lot of scams, all of these things. I think it really is rooted in the money. And Bitcoin, as the first money in history that has a 0% terminal inflation rate, or said differently, zero unexpected inflation. There's no theft integrated into Bitcoin. You can only earn it through work or sacrificing resources to obtain it. It is the antidote to this moral cancer that inflation riddles our society with. Again, you're blowing my mind a little bit to think about the ripple effects of inflation, the way it seeps through our interactions. So at the very, the early ripples is the effect it has on the products, on the dilution of the wine. But also it might have ripple effects on the character, on the behavior of people. That's interesting, artificial creation of scarcity, creating, having effects on society at the social, like the social fabric. And I guess you're arguing the morality. It's perverting free market dynamics, which again, we said free markets generate pragmatic truth. So inflation distorts price signals, which means it confuses capital allocation. So we're trying to solve problems, but all of a sudden we can't tell if this price increase is a matter of true supply and demand change or a matter of policy change. So it clouds our economic perceptions. It suppresses innovation because now you've exacerbated the boom and bust business cycle. People are gonna overborrow and go into projects that they can't profitably sustain. So then there'll be a huge collapse. So that actually breaks the market's function of generating innovation. And then, yeah, I would argue too that it pollutes our pursuit of virtue, let's say. Maybe it's pushing back, but I don't think so. It's not as clear to me, perhaps because I haven't thought about it deeply, that money is core to life and human interaction because there might be other forces, other fraudulent forces, other things in human nature that are creating these effects as well. So it's clear, I think you're articulating really well that there's these negative effects from inflation. I wonder if there's other undiscovered, not undiscovered, but ones we're not making explicit now, forces that are creating all the things we're seeing now with, like you said, cancer culture and all those things, but also the negative effects on the quality of products, on the excellence of the creativity and the innovation, all those kinds of things. I wonder if there's other factors. It's kind of, listen, it's compelling to think money's at the core of it all. Like if you fix, I forgot what the phrase was. Fix the money, fix the world. Yeah, fix the money, fix the world. Again, things that sound good, I'm skeptical of by nature. So I wonder if there's other things that are beyond money that are somehow deeply integrated into our human nature. Another one related to money is social cohesion itself. So very simple anecdote for this was the more you increase the inflation rate, social cohesion is inversely proportionate to that. So the extreme example would be hyperinflation, right? Where the money is produced in such excess that it loses all meaning and relevance. So today in Venezuela, there is cash clogging the gutters, clogging the streets, clogging the sewer system, because the cash has lost all relevance. And so anecdotally, we would suspect that, okay, if there's a inverse relationship between inflation and social cohesion, if we could then take inflation to zero, couldn't we theoretically increase social cohesion to its maximum? So another way to say that is inflation is a decivilizing force, whereas natural price deflation, which would occur in a hard money economy, where there's either a fixed supply of Bitcoin or a relatively scarce supply of gold, for instance, that lays claim to an increasing capital stock of goods and services, prices would naturally decline every year as we became smarter. So the market price becomes a reflection of our collective knowledge. So by letting prices decline naturally over time, we can actually induce civilization. But by trying to force prices higher all the time via the central bank, we're creating the opposite effect. So we talked a little bit about the Soviet Union, and I happened to have lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so what are the factors, the causes in your mind to why the Soviet Union collapsed? So, you know, definitely a multivariate situation. I think there's a lot of factors. One that jumped out to me recently, again, from that documentary that I didn't note before was that at one point, Stalin eliminated, I think 75% of his intelligence force, which I think when you're competing with another nation state, you know, and intelligence and covert operations are very integral to your survival, I think that was definitely a shot in the foot. But at a higher level, I would say that capitalism and communism were each resource strategies of the 20th century nation state. And they seem, you know, we commonly consider them to be diametrically opposed, but there's actually a lot of commonality between the two. The difference would be that in Soviet Russia, as we alluded to earlier, they tried to completely replace price signals with this nationalistic faith and devotion. So they removed the economic nerve signal, which coordinated the allocation of capital over time. So this inhibited their ability to generate wealth. Whereas in the United States, we left most markets open to free enterprise. So we honored the integrity of price signals and we allowed people to trade and accumulate wealth. So in every market, except the market for money, both markets maintained a central bank as we've gotten to. So I think in a really big picture standpoint, that's why capitalism outcompetes communism is because it is able to generate more wealth than communism was, and therefore was able to put financial pressure on the USSR until it reached the point of bankruptcy, essentially. A similar model, I would argue, is that for the same reasons we saw capitalism outcompete communism, which I think the data that I recall was that the USSR's economy was valued at close to one third of its inputs. So if you just didn't do anything inside the USSR and just sold all the raw materials that were going into it, it would have been worth three times as much as sending the materials in, running it through the efforts and then shipping things back out. It was value destructive versus value creative. And I would argue this is because, again, the centralized computing model versus decentralized computing model, it just became more and more corrupt over time. It got to the point where I think most of the occupations in USSR towards the end were as informants, right? They were working for the state. Jordan Peterson makes this point too, that at some point it was actually illegal to be sad in Soviet Russia. Because if you were sad, you were contradicting the utopian view of the state. So if you were sad, you're implying the state's not doing something wrong. But by the way, this does remind me, do you know what Jordan Peterson thinks about Bitcoin and about the future impact of Bitcoin on the society? No, I don't actually. We're hopefully gonna be talking to him soon about that. We did a book club on his book, Maps of Meaning, and he engaged with us about it. So we're hoping to deliver the orange bill to Mr. Peterson. The orange bill. I think his audience is one of the most important audiences in the world to understand Bitcoin, these people that are conscientious and responsible. I think they'll quickly understand Bitcoin's value proposition and help elucidate it to the world. I'm trying to remember what he said about it. Basically, I think his support of Bitcoin is grounded in the kind of people who are opposing Bitcoin. So without understanding Bitcoin, he starts to like Bitcoin because of the people who are opposing it. He's, you know, you start to, I mean, that's partially why I am interested in Bitcoin. It's like all the people in power and all the kind of shady, fraudulent, non genuine people who are dismissing Bitcoin are making me think, hmm. One of Jordan's definitions of God is, he says, God is found in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. And I think that is a beautiful definition of what Bitcoin is doing in the world. And that we have this pathological hierarchy called central banking, by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that is used as a mechanism for perpetual theft and funding warfare at a global scale. Like Ron Paul said, it's no coincidence that the 20th century of total war was also the century of central banking. When you have an institution of currency counterfeiting, which the central bank is, you are no longer bounded by your own balance sheet when you go to war. You don't have to just go to war on your own resources. You can now pillage the commonwealth and pull for the savings of society as a whole before you go bankrupt. And indeed, this is what Hitler did, right? Hitler hyperinflated in the Weimar Republic to fund his war efforts. And frankly, every dictator, every world war, every internment camp in history was made possible by the weaponization of money in fiat currency. So I hope, I know Jordan Peterson is a huge proponent of free speech. And I think that's ultimately at its deepest essence, that's what Bitcoin really is, right? It is just the purest form of monetary speech we've ever had. And by purifying that primary operating system of human action, I think we can eliminate this pathological hierarchy that is unfortunately the dominant institution in the world today. Yeah, I'm definitely, especially with these explorations of Bitcoin, this journey I've been on, I'll revisit some of the aspects of human history that I've been looking at like Stalin and Hitler with a, from a perspective of a monetary perspective, like what are the effects of inflation? How was it used as a tool in gaining power and maintaining power and manipulating the populace in doing, in inflicting suffering and I would say evil onto the world. It's interesting. I, it's interesting. I'm gonna have to sort of go back into the hole. So I tend to focus more on the human nature and less about the tools that human nature leverages to affect change. But you're right that in some sense, money is a tool which can be effectively used to perform moral and immoral actions depending on how it's used. There's a feedback between the two, right? There's, specifically with money itself, it's the, here's the way I've been posing it lately is that I actually think we typically think of people as good or bad, or again, trying to label people all the time, but I think people and their characters are emergent properties of the incentive structures they inhabit. Yeah. So, you know, what does Charlie Munger say? Don't show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome kind of thing. This is a flawed incentive structure we've been operating within. Now I'm not speaking to the intention. People want to argue with me all the time. Like Jerome Powell's not a bad guy. He's doing his best at the central bank. He's doing what he thinks is right. That's fine. Well, that's true or not, it actually doesn't matter. The intention is divergent from the outcome. The institution that they are running is premised on deception and theft, and it is handicapping the productive economy. So when we're, even the terms we use, printing money, you're not creating any new value. You're not infusing the economy with anything, any new productive factors whatsoever. You're just creating new value. You're not infusing the economy with anything, any new productive factors whatsoever. You're just harvesting the economic surplus created by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. It's impossible to add any value to an economy by increasing the paper claims on its savings. So there's a feedback loop between man and tool, between creator and created. And I think we have to honor the relationship above either one, right? Trying to put the right people in the system in the right place. Do you think the interesting question of whether the people that are in control of central banks or in positions of power there, if they themselves are malevolent, they themselves are bad actors, or they're simply like leaves floating along the river, sort of just the cog in the machine, an ant in an ant colony that operates in a certain kind of way. Like, where do you put the blame? Do you put the blame on the way things are operating onto the individuals or onto the system itself, the idea behind the system? Where, and is it useful to place the blame somewhere? Because for me, it might be useful to understand that in order to figure out what the solution is. I tend to not put the blame on the individual. Like I tend to believe most people are good and want to see themselves as good. And so in that case, it's very difficult to be truly malevolent as you would need to be to control, to gain centralized power at the large scale. But I know a lot of conspiracy theorists and just a lot of people think that there is evil humans in the world that seek power, maintain that power, and then use that power for bad purposes. I think they're just people. And they're just trying to get something for nothing, like all of us do. I like this framework of thought. Well, honestly, and that's what the central bank is, is the ultimate institution to get something for nothing. You get a perpetual income stream, the ability to acquire more and more territory in the world through monopolizing the supply of money. And you can literally print money. You can buy your way out of anything and buy your way into anything in the world. So it is, I think the most, not say the most, but a group of very intelligent people put this thing together and figured out how to get something for nothing in perpetuity by clouding people's conception of money. And if we look at the central bank is, it's been around for a while, but the latest implementation here in the US is the Fed. It's about a hundred years old. It's an analog age institution that I think has lost a lot of its relevance in the modern age. And I don't think it will survive the ever galvanizing gaze of the digital age. There's just too much sunlight, too much transparency today. Ideas move too quickly for something like this to remain relevant. But they are just people. They are just seeking something for nothing. But I think when you concentrate that much power and that much control, that much wealth into the hands of few, it does change. Hayek argued that the nature of power, again, it's something that we all sort of desire. To be completely powerless, you're really unhappy, right? If you're totally powerless, you're a slave. Someone else tells you what to do. You have no autonomy. It's miserable, right? So there's this, it makes the consolidation of power alluring and that we want to protect ourselves from that slave state, let's say. But like many things, it can be taken too far. And when you concentrate power into too few hands, Hayek argues that it actually transforms. It becomes something much more intoxicating than it would be if it was held in a more distributed way. And I think that gets into a lot of these, I don't know if they call themselves elites or people call them elites or whatever, like let's say shareholders of central banks, people participating in the World Economic Forum, things like this. They come, I guess the incentives, right? The incentive schema they're in is rewarding them constantly, telling them everything they're doing, saying and thinking is correct because they just keep getting richer all the time. And it leads you closer to this definition of evil, which in the book, Paradise Lost, Friedman said, evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete. So these people become more and more convinced that they have the plan or they have the course of action that will save the world, that if everyone would just listen to them, that they would lead us to the promised land, right? Whether this is Bill Gates saving us from a climate crisis or any of these other economic policies that are targeted at a certain outcome, but almost always diverge almost perfectly from that outcome, creating its opposite effect. I think that's the problem, that we have this mechanism that can concentrate wealth and power into the hands of so few that it leads to the proliferation of evil, meaning that it convinces people that their knowledge is complete. Whereas something like a Bitcoin almost forces the opposite outcome. In a Bitcoin denominated world, a pure free market, the consumer is sovereign. So you cannot earn value in the world unless you are serving your fellow man, unless they have expressed through their buy and sell decisions in the marketplace, right? You've created a satisfaction of a particular want that they value so much, they've acquired so much of your good or service that you've become rich. You can only maintain that position of wealth so long as you continue to serve your fellow man. So it changes the incentives such that dominance in the world can no longer be paired with coercion. It has to be paired with competence. And that's how this, when we say Bitcoin fixes this, that's what we mean. Like it restores that skin in the game, that balance of incentives and disincentives that help us properly navigate reality. And it prevents the buildup of systemic rot like we see with the central bank. What books? People love this question. And you're exceptionally well read. You've explored all kinds of ideas. Is there some books, technical, fiction, philosophical, coloring books, children's books had an impact on your life and you would maybe recommend to others that they should read? I think we mentioned a couple of them here today, but I think a really useful triplet of books that I've been recommending recently to help diffuse this materialist worldview of reality where we still think in kind of the Newtonian model that it's atoms and cause and effect. I'd first recommend Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning. It's a deep dive into mythology and how it's developed over the course of history and how it's reflected both in our social structures and our intra psychic nature really, and how they come to reflect one another in a way. Like the way we think again shapes the world and then the way the world is shaped, shapes the way we think. That's an excellent book. It's very dense and difficult read. Actually this trilogy is pretty brutal. Probably take you a year to read, hours a day. The second one I mentioned earlier was Human Action by Mises. The ultimate tome on Austrian economics will help explicate this realm of relevance. I think that economics truly is where again, there are things and then these things become means or ends once we channel our purpose through them. So this realm of non materialist relevance that I think is really important to grasping economics at a first principles level, I think that book lays it out tremendously. And then the last one would be, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, was that book Lila by Robert Persig, where he's making the case that value is fundamental. And all of these books, they kind of all point to that actually. They're pointing back to value being the fundamental thing, values expressed through moral action as being the fundamental substrate of reality. So if you're like me, I grew up quite scientific minded. It'll help diffuse some of that and maybe retrain you to the other side of reality. So you said these books are difficult. Maybe you can comment on which aspect is difficult. Is it just the technical nature? Is it the length? Is it the depth of the ideas or how long it takes to integrate them? And more sort of importantly, is there recommendation advice you can give on how to integrate these ideas, how to read, how to learn in the spaces there from your own life? Like how do you enjoy taking in ideas? And this could be for these books, but also in the Bitcoin world and reading a bunch of different ideas written by others, just integrating stuff, even watching podcasts and all those kinds of things. Yeah, I'm a reader. I love to read. One of the most useful things I've ever done was take a speed reading course. I actually think there's a version of this available on Tim Ferriss's website. It's like a 30 minute speed reading course. It's all about eye movement. Instead of moving your eye continuously line over line, it's more about jumping in your brain. You can train your brain to just absorb words in their totality versus kind of reading word by word. And also not, I haven't fully taken that journey actually, but I remember taking a few steps on that journey, realizing that I'm speaking inside my head. Yeah. I'm saying the words inside my head and that's actually getting in the way. That's right. So there's a lot of little hacks like that. I maybe lazily, now that you mentioned, I'll have to revisit this. But I have convinced myself that I don't need to read faster because that's not ultimately the bottleneck. The bottleneck is in me thinking about stuff. In fact, I like reading really slowly or so I convinced myself. Because ultimately it's not about gaining more information. It's about time spent thinking deeply. Yes, yes. But maybe that's just me being very lazy because yes, it's true. It's important to think deeply, but maybe I could speed up the consumption of information. It's fine. I like to be dynamic actually. So usually speed reading initially and that diffused that internal dialogue for me because when I was reading one word at a time, I was having that too. You almost get a feedback in your own head when you're reading the word out loud and it's clouding your thoughts. If you're speed reading, you can't do that. You're taking in groups of words at a time so you can't internally verbalize it, I guess. And then I also am really big on annotating, underlining, writing in the margins. I prefer a physical book, but I also read the Kindle a lot because it's just so convenient. Anywhere you're waiting in line or every night before bed, I'm reading my Kindle. And I also advocate rereading a lot. So if you found something that struck you at a deep level or you found particularly fascinating, like you have to listen to that. That's your, I don't know, your mind or your spirit signal that that is something meaningful to you and you should, to your point, reread it, sit with it for a long time, write about it. And that becomes the ultimate triumvirate of synthesizing an idea, actually. If you can read about it and then write about it and then go and talk about it, you get this crystallization of understanding that's just not possible doing any one of the three or any two of the three. So I definitely highly recommend people to do that. And in terms of how are those books difficult? I mean, and if you're reading a lot of books, are difficult, I mean, in every way, they're all long books. In terms of density, I would say Lila is the less, the least dense, maybe Maps of Meaning. I don't know, but Maps of Meaning and Human Action are both extremely dense. But they're just, I had to read those books very slow. That you just have to take your time with them. To give you an idea with Jordan Peterson, he's said this a lot with Maps of Meaning. He spent three hours a day writing for 15 years to write that book. It's probably, I think it's a 600 page book. He said he estimates he rewrote every sentence in the book 50 times, five, zero, to try and get it just perfected. And when you read these sentences, you can tell that he rewrote it 50 times. I've used actually Anki for spaced repetition. It's like a piece of, it's an app. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it allows you to load in facts or terms or entire paragraphs. And then it brings them, you review them every day and then it brings them up less and less often over time as you show yourself being able to remember the thing that you wanted to memorize. And oftentimes when I'm reading, what I want to memorize is the key idea. But also like I use it for, I'm terrible with names. So I'm starting to use it for names too, names of people, names of like people that I want to remember. And also throughout history and also in my own personal life but also events, you know, dates to me are usually not important, but sometimes dates are really important. And so it's really useful. I recommend it highly. Naval, I think mentioned a piece of software called Readwise or something like that, that I hope I'm saying that correctly. It's something like that. And what it does is it goes to your highlights from your Kindle or the various places where you highlight stuff that integrates with Goodreads. And it does the same kind of spaced repetition but for things you've highlighted. So it sends an email every day. It's been really, I recommend it highly because it sends like to me an email form, a selection of the things I've highlighted and previous things I've read. And it's like this weird like shock to your memory that sprinkles like I have probably way too much Orwell in there and it just kind of like, it brings you back. And these ideas are, because what you realize, depending on how you highlight, but at least for me, and I think it's probably true for a lot of people, the things you've highlighted had at that moment and like an emotional impact on you. And so like these things are just like hitting you hard again, it's like, whoa, it might not be meaningful to anyone else except you. And it's something I recommend. You never know with these like hacks or tools and so on, like what's actually BS and what is amazing. And that one is kind of amazing. So at least for me, it works for me and Naval. I think he's the one. Read wise you said. Read wise. Or something close to that. It could be read something else, like read wealth or something. The one other thing I really like, and this is more of a new one, is I used to always listen to music at the gym, but now I've just, because I'm so backlogged on podcasts, right, there's so many, I exclusively listen to podcasts when I'm walking or when I'm at the gym, anytime I'm doing something that I can't read basically. And I think there's something really special about exercise and ideation. I mean, I don't know if this happens to everyone, but my creative juices just go ballistic. When I'm at the gym, like I hit a certain point of, I guess, heart rate and you're sweating enough, then the ideas just start to flow. So I'm basically at the gym now listening to podcasts, exercising as fast as I can to try to get to that state of, you know, where you're just straining, your strenuous exercise, I guess you would say, and then I end up typing notes into my phone as fast as I can with all these ideas that are flowing. So I've created a lot of good writing out of that. Yeah, it's kind of work. So I do running quite a bit, so running outside, and I'll listen to, I've been, okay, I told myself this has been going on for about a year, is I only listen, like the stuff that's either World War II or World War I related. So Hitler, Stalin, like difficult historical stuff. And also listen to brown noise. So those are the two modes. So brown noise helps me, this is like white noise, but like deeper, I guess, it helps me remove the world. And at the gym, there's a lot of distractions. When you're running, there's a lot of distractions. It helps me remove the world. So one, I'll be listening to difficult historical ideas. And then when my mind is all of a sudden starting to generate ideas, I'll listen to brown noise and then force myself to think. It's kind of, it's meditative in a sense, and your mind wants to be lazy. You want to, it's hard, man, like running and thinking in the sense that some of the ideas that come into your head are pretty heavy. It's about your own life, your own demons come in there, but also just difficult ideas that require you thinking through and persevering through that, like not letting yourself get lazy and thinking through it has been really for me rewarding in the same way that you're saying it is for you. It's true that like podcasts and music, like shallow, like funny podcasts or music have been a kind of filler distraction. But informational podcasts, like podcasts that have some depths of ideas or audio books have been truly rewarding. I try to listen now less and less to podcasts that are just fun, because I feel like I enjoy it too much and I don't allow my mind to get bored and to think through stuff, to explore ideas. It's so easy to fill the space that usually would be filled with thought and instead fill it with fun podcasts. Like there's a bunch of comedy podcasts I really enjoy. So there's value to that, of course, but you have to realize it's entertainment. It's not, you don't get much value except entertainment. Right, right. And there's utility to the boredom too, I think, where to give your mind the space, I guess your subconscious, maybe the space to chew on some of these problems, right? Where you've imbibed so much knowledge, you've highlighted and thought about something, but then you need to stop thinking about it for a while and let it marinate in the subconscious. And then these flashes of insight that people have described, sometimes I get them in the middle of the night, like I just wake up from a dream and have them and I got to write it down or sometimes just in nature taking a walk. But I think that's very important too. We can't just brute force our way into understanding. There's this interplay between kind of the brute force reading intake and then just relaxing, meditating, sleeping, being bored, letting your subconscious do the heavy lifting. And there's, you should be aware of the fact that there's a war for your attention going on. So there's a lot of, there's been better and better and better mechanisms that are designed to steal your attention. So I kind of see it as a war zone between my right for boredom and the internet wanting your attention. In fact, Clubhouse as an app has been, I'm probably not gonna use Clubhouse much anymore. There's some aspect of my own inner loneliness and whatever it is that pulled me into Clubhouse a little bit too much to where it robbed me from that lonely time alone where I sit and listen to Bruce Springsteen and think about life, right? So I wanna. That's way more important. That's way, well yeah, at least it's all in balance because there is a Clubhouse like a lot of these social networks when you use right can be a way to discover new ideas, new people. But the boredom is just being alone with your thoughts is priceless. Absolutely. And you gotta know yourself, right? Like it took me a long time to realize I need solitude. Like just how I'm wired, how I'm built. I need like an hour a day solitude. So you gotta listen to that part of yourself. You might be compromising something like that where you feel like you always need to be with your girlfriend or whatever it may be. But I would suggest listening to that voice. Yeah, I try to, I tried to remember things that made me feel good over time. Like longterm had positive impact and longterm had negative impact and do more of the former and less of the latter. We don't often think like that. You know, we talked offline about like carnivore diets for example, I try to remember that carbs don't make me feel good. Yeah. In the moment it's hard to remember that. It's hard, it's hard. But you have to remember that that's the case. And in the same way, exercise, it's hard to remember that exercise makes me feel good. Like especially when it's time to go to the gym, right? Especially when it's time to go to the gym. But you should remember that because the kind of person you are without exercise, for me, just like you beautifully said that you have to know yourself. The kind of person I am without exercise is a less good person, a person I'm less proud of. The food thing is so hard. By the way, I still, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've learned the lesson, like don't eat that. But then, you know, you go a few weeks of not eating whatever that is, and you're feeling good. And then you're, I don't know, something creeps up inside you. Like, ah, you could just have one or you could just do this. But for me, it's sugar. Like sugar just makes me feel terrible. But I always, not always, but if it's been a long time, I start to make that exception in my mind. Like, oh, you can have a little bit. And then I eat it and I feel terrible. So I don't know how many times I've done that dance, but it's not cool. Well, it depends on how painful it is and then you learn the lesson. I actually embraced the fact that I'll never learn the lesson with vodka. Every time I drink, especially with Russians, is like, I quit drinking every time. And then I forget, there's like a slow drop off. It'll be like two weeks and then. Na zdorovie. Na zdorovie, very good. So it never makes you feel good. It never results in anything good except the beautiful social chaos, which is ultimately somehow, there's value to chaos too. There's value to that. Whatever the hell stupid stuff you do when you get trashed. The over the top emotion of love usually or whatever camaraderie, there's value to that too. Like as I get older, I realize, because the world, sometimes especially when you get older and the world wants you to be an adult, in order to maintain the youthful spirit, you have to use all the tools you can. Alcohol is one of them. To do all the stupid shit you can, even if you're like getting older. To lower the inhibitions. Again, it's that taste of uncertainty that is the sweetness of life, right? To be able to go out and be a flaneur at a party and not really know what you're gonna do. And we have this draw to the wild side of life. As much as we try and build up order around ourselves, I think there's always gonna be an appetite for that. I've always, most of my life, I've always been a social drinker, but I actually gave up alcohol a year ago. And I would add that to the idea, the repertoire for dealing with bigger ideas because alcohol is fun, it's amazing, good times. It can be analgesic, it can give you all these benefits if you use the right amounts. But I got to the point personally where I was trying to wrestle with these ideas that are just so much bigger than me. And I have this backlog of books that was growing faster than I could read them that I just reached a point where I decided I wanted to start making sacrifices toward attaining that. And alcohol was just an easy one. It's you spend, even if you just drink socially on the weekends, you're probably spending five to 10 hours drinking and then maybe another, what? Five to 10 hours recovering perhaps on the day after. So it was a difficult transition initially, but once you get through a couple of months, I feel amazing without it. I sleep better than ever. My workouts are better than ever. I'm sharper than ever. I'm more lucid. So I'm not trying to be a proponent for not drinking, but I just want to say. But you're a proponent for sacrifice. I am a big proponent for sacrifice, yes. Is there advice you would give to a young person today curious about Bitcoin, curious about how they succeed in the world or both career wise and just in life in general? I mean, the strongest piece of advice I have for, this is beyond just Bitcoin. This is you managing your own personal and financial affairs is that you need to invest in knowledge first. It's not good enough to just follow the crowd and buy a 60, 40 portfolio and put it in a Roth RA and plan on social security. I mean, the world's changing much faster than any existing institution is going to be able to keep up with. So that's why I like, I mean, that's why I named the show, the question, what is money? Like, I think that to me is the rabbit that took me down the rabbit holes. Like just asking that question naturally progressed to these other questions. Like what is value? What is government? What is the purpose of society? Speech, all of these things. So I would encourage people to arm yourself with knowledge and study. And like that, a lot of financial people always give you a line of advice and then say, this is not financial advice. I'm like, this is financial advice. Like study, study, learn. Knowledge is power. Yeah. This is official financial advice. And you're exercising your divine trait, which is the logos, right? That we are these animals that can tell and believe stories. So it feels like almost a sacred duty to really sharpen that part of ourselves and use it to create the best world possible. And then the second one was the, I think health and fitness stuff. I was, maybe everyone does this in their 20s. They just live a little fast and beat themselves up. Not that I wasn't, like I was living well and successful by a lot of measures, but I wish I had maybe got my act together a little bit sooner. I just think. Health wise, morality wise. Yeah, drinking, I think morality and eating. I just was kind of doing whatever I wanted in some ways. Let's say. Is there a value to a trajectory that includes a lot of mistakes? So maybe you're supposed to make the mistakes in your 20s. That's a great point. Maybe the 20s are all about the mistakes. Accumulate the most mistakes possible. Yeah, I don't. As quickly as possible. I don't regret any of it, but now that I'm kind of in this place where I feel good and I know the value of a good night's sleep and just, I've more deeply explored my own potential that I feel maybe a little regretful that I didn't do this earlier is all I'm saying. So maybe just exploring different sides of yourself. See what it's like to go and make a bunch of mistakes and be wild and crazy and then maybe try to walk the straight and narrow for a few months and just see what it's like. There's probably a guy doing vodka shots right now listening to this podcast with his buddies and if you are, please take a shot for us for all the mistakes you should make in your 20s. And what about love? We talked about money is ultimately a mechanism by which you can pave a moral path through life. To me, one of the purest expressions that is love broadly defined for a family, for others, for knowledge, for the world, is basically an optimistic open view to the world that embraces all that is beautiful about this world. So do you think about love often in a personal sense, romantic, family, friendship, and in the broad sense about its value in a successful life? Yeah, of course. I'm blessed to have a two and a half year old daughter and love is a word we throw around. I love these potato chips, I love you, man. I love you, my daughter. It's got so many different intensities, I guess you might say. I don't know, my intuition is that it is something very fundamental to the universe. Again, I know words don't do it justice, but if we just proxy love with selfless action, the whole damn universe is selflessly acting, right? It's just unfolding and it may sound a bit hippy dippy, but my intuition is just that love is the core of it somehow. I don't have anything to back that up really, it's just. In the way you're framing it, it's making me think that love, we talked about sort of meditation, is as opposed to thinking from an egocentric perspective of you, the individual operating in this world, is allowing you to be empathetic towards the world and thereby think of the universe, think of the world acting through you. Almost like accepting this notion that ideas have you, you don't have ideas, that you're not existing in the universe, the universe is existing through you. It's sort of like, that's what selfless in that context means is like embracing that thought. That's a weird thought. It's a weird thought that we're just here for a little bit of time, these meat vehicles, receptacles, and this much bigger thing is just using us, not in a malevolent way, but just like a river flows, is using us to create more and more beautiful things. Yes, yes, more and more beautiful things. We are the universe experiencing itself, frankly, right? So. That's a trippy thought, man. Yeah. That in some sense the universe created us to experience itself. And we are one of the highest forms of beauty that nature has created, right? If we just think one of the most complex and adaptive thing, we're a reflection of nature. And another thing that comes to mind here is that Dalio has this quote where he says, truth or more accurately, an accurate depiction of reality is necessary for any good outcome. So when we think that love or value is primary, I think that too reinforces this thesis that acting out of love or acting out of proper moral action, you're best reflecting the fundamental nature of reality. Therefore, you're best creating the best possible outcomes or the things of the most beauty, whether that's your artistic expression, your children, your business, whatever it is. And Jordan Peterson goes deep into that where you have to listen to that sense of meaning in your life. Or you might have some decision on paper that's so great this way, but your heart says no, your heart says otherwise. I've tried to listen to my heart throughout and I think that creates the best outcomes. But nevertheless, does it make you sad that you in particular, Robert, are gonna be dead pretty soon? As we talk about scarcity, one of the certain things that ensure the scarcity of the human experience is the fact that you and your consciousness are gonna be done, they have a deadline. Only time and Bitcoin are absolutely scarce. I'm fortunate, I guess I got started on this philosophical journey a bit when I was younger, but I got into Musashi and Sun Tzu quite a bit, who wrote, Musashi wrote the Book of Five Rings, Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. And one of the things that, I mean, these guys were just absolute beasts. They lived and died by the sword and they were just very great equanimity about all things in life. And I also found this kind of in the stoic philosophy where they just are very cool with everything. And one of the lines there is that the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death. And so I've always tried to think about that. Like, of course I experienced fear, I experienced everything that you do on a meat suit, right? Like anxiety and all the things, but I always try to have that higher order view of myself and that it's just a certain experience occurring at a certain level, but it shouldn't override your kind of highest order self. That's just resolutely accepted death and that this is your one play in life. So hopefully that propels me towards proper action. I think scarcity cannot help, but lead to something good. Just like with this conversation, sadly must come to an end. The scarcity of it is what makes it beautiful. So Robert, this was one of my favorite conversations philosophically and in every other level, just the ideas and the way you express them around Bitcoin, around morality, around money. Has been really inspiring and really educational. And I'm glad you're out there fighting the good fight. And I'm glad you're wasting all of this time with me. It was really fun. And thank you for coming down to Texas and having some good old brisket together. This was really fun, man. This was awesome. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Breedlove. And thank you to Fundrise, Element, Mugpack, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "'Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. "'The resilient resists shocks and stay the same. "'The antifragile gets better.'" Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles | Lex Fridman Podcast #176

The following is a conversation with Risto Michaelainen, a computer scientist at University of Texas at Austin and Associate Vice President of Evolutionary Artificial Intelligence at Cognizant. He specializes in evolutionary computation, but also many other topics in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbin's show, Grammarly, Belcampo, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that nature inspired algorithms from ant colony optimization to genetic algorithms to cellular automata to neural networks have always captivated my imagination, not only for their surprising power in the face of long odds, but because they always opened up doors to new ways of thinking about computation. It does seem that in the long arc of computing history, running toward biology, not running away from it is what leads to long term progress. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Risto Michaelainen. If we ran the Earth experiment, this fun little experiment we're on, over and over and over and over a million times and watch the evolution of life as it pans out, how much variation in the outcomes of that evolution do you think we would see? Now, we should say that you are a computer scientist. That's actually not such a bad question for a computer scientist, because we are building simulations of these things, and we are simulating evolution, and that's a difficult question to answer in biology, but we can build a computational model and run it million times and actually answer that question. How much variation do we see when we simulate it? And that's a little bit beyond what we can do today, but I think that we will see some regularities, and it took evolution also a really long time to get started, and then things accelerated really fast towards the end. But there are things that need to be discovered, and they probably will be over and over again, like manipulation of objects, opposable thumbs, and also some way to communicate, maybe orally, like when you have speech, it might be some other kind of sounds, and decision making, but also vision. Eye has evolved many times. Various vision systems have evolved. So we would see those kinds of solutions, I believe, emerge over and over again. They may look a little different, but they get the job done. The really interesting question is, would we have primates? Would we have humans or something that resembles humans? And would that be an apex of evolution after a while? We don't know where we're going from here, but we certainly see a lot of tool use and building, constructing our environment. So I think that we will get that. We get some evolution producing, some agents that can do that, manipulate the environment and build. What do you think is special about humans? Like if you were running the simulation and you observe humans emerge, like these tool makers, they start a fire and all this stuff, start running around, building buildings, and then running for president and all those kinds of things. What would be, how would you detect that? Cause you're like really busy as the creator of this evolutionary system. So you don't have much time to observe, like detect if any cool stuff came up, right? How would you detect humans? Well, you are running the simulation. So you also put in visualization and measurement techniques there. So if you are looking for certain things like communication, you'll have detectors to find out whether that's happening, even if it's a large simulation. And I think that that's what we would do. We know roughly what we want, intelligent agents that communicate, cooperate, manipulate, and we would build detections and visualizations of those processes. Yeah, and there's a lot of, we'd have to run it many times and we have plenty of time to figure out how we detect the interesting things. But also, I think we do have to run it many times because we don't quite know what shape those will take and our detectors may not be perfect for them at the beginning. Well, that seems really difficult to build a detector of intelligent or intelligent communication. Sort of, if we take an alien perspective, observing earth, are you sure that they would be able to detect humans as the special thing? Wouldn't they be already curious about other things? There's way more insects by body mass, I think, than humans by far, and colonies. Obviously, dolphins is the most intelligent creature on earth, we all know this. So it could be the dolphins that they detect. It could be the rockets that we seem to be launching. That could be the intelligent creature they detect. It could be some other trees. Trees have been here a long time. I just learned that sharks have been here 400 million years and that's longer than trees have been here. So maybe it's the sharks, they go by age. Like there's a persistent thing. Like if you survive long enough, especially through the mass extinctions, that could be the thing your detector is detecting. Humans have been here for a very short time and we're just creating a lot of pollution, but so is the other creatures. So I don't know, do you think you'd be able to detect humans? Like how would you go about detecting in the computational sense? Maybe we can leave humans behind. In the computational sense, detect interesting things. Do you basically have to have a strict objective function by which you measure the performance of a system or can you find curiosities and interesting things? Yeah, well, I think that the first measurement would be to detect how much of an effect you can have in your environment. So if you look around, we have cities and that is constructed environments. And that's where a lot of people live, most people live. So that would be a good sign of intelligence that you don't just live in an environment, but you construct it to your liking. And that's something pretty unique. I mean, there are certainly birds build nests but they don't build quite cities. Termites build mounds and ice and things like that. But the complexity of the human construction cities, I think would stand out even to an external observer. Of course, that's what a human would say. Yeah, and you know, you can certainly say that sharks are really smart because they've been around so long and they haven't destroyed their environment, which humans are about to do, which is not a very smart thing. But we'll get over it, I believe. And we can get over it by doing some construction that actually is benign and maybe even enhances the resilience of nature. So you mentioned the simulation that we run over and over might start, it's a slow start. So do you think how unlikely, first of all, I don't know if you think about this kind of stuff, but how unlikely is step number zero, which is the springing up, like the origin of life on earth? And second, how unlikely is the, anything interesting happening beyond that? So like the start that creates all the rich complexity that we see on earth today. Yeah, there are people who are working on exactly that problem from primordial soup. How do you actually get self replicating molecules? And they are very close. With a little bit of help, you can make that happen. So of course we know what we want, so they can set up the conditions and try out conditions that are conducive to that. For evolution to discover that, that took a long time. For us to recreate it probably won't take that long. And the next steps from there, I think also with some handholding, I think we can make that happen. But with evolution, what was really fascinating was eventually the runaway evolution of the brain that created humans and created, well, also other higher animals, that that was something that happened really fast. And that's a big question. Is that something replicable? Is that something that can happen? And if it happens, does it go in the same direction? That is a big question to ask. Even in computational terms, I think that it's relatively possible to come up here, create an experiment where we look at the primordial soup and the first couple of steps of multicellular organisms even. But to get something as complex as the brain, we don't quite know the conditions for that. And how do you even get started and whether we can get this kind of runaway evolution happening? From a detector perspective, if we're observing this evolution, what do you think is the brain? What do you think is the, let's say, what is intelligence? So in terms of the thing that makes humans special, we seem to be able to reason, we seem to be able to communicate. But the core of that is this something in the broad category we might call intelligence. So if you put your computer scientist hat on, is there a favorite ways you like to think about that question of what is intelligence? Well, my goal is to create agents that are intelligent. Not to define what. And that is a way of defining it. And that means that it's some kind of an object or a program that has limited sensory and effective capabilities interacting with the world. And then also a mechanism for making decisions. So with limited abilities like that, can it survive? Survival is the simplest goal, but you could also give it other goals. Can it multiply? Can it solve problems that you give it? And that is quite a bit less than human intelligence. There are, animals would be intelligent, of course, with that definition. And you might have even some other forms of life, even. So intelligence in that sense is a survival skill given resources that you have and using your resources so that you will stay around. Do you think death, mortality is fundamental to an agent? So like there's, I don't know if you're familiar, there's a philosopher named Ernest Becker who wrote The Denial of Death and his whole idea. And there's folks, psychologists, cognitive scientists that work on terror management theory. And they think that one of the special things about humans is that we're able to sort of foresee our death, right? We can realize not just as animals do, sort of constantly fear in an instinctual sense, respond to all the dangers that are out there, but like understand that this ride ends eventually. And that in itself is the force behind all of the creative efforts of human nature. That's the philosophy. I think that makes sense, a lot of sense. I mean, animals probably don't think of death the same way, but humans know that your time is limited and you wanna make it count. And you can make it count in many different ways, but I think that has a lot to do with creativity and the need for humans to do something beyond just surviving. And now going from that simple definition to something that's the next level, I think that that could be the second level of definition, that intelligence means something, that you do something that stays behind you, that's more than your existence. You create something that is useful for others, is useful in the future, not just for yourself. And I think that's the nicest definition of intelligence within a next level. And it's also nice because it doesn't require that they are humans or biological. They could be artificial agents that are intelligence. They could achieve those kind of goals. So particular agent, the ripple effects of their existence on the entirety of the system is significant. So like they leave a trace where there's like a, yeah, like ripple effects. But see, then you go back to the butterfly with the flap of a wing and then you can trace a lot of like nuclear wars and all the conflicts of human history, somehow connected to that one butterfly that created all of the chaos. So maybe that's not, maybe that's a very poetic way to think that that's something we humans in a human centric way wanna hope we have this impact. Like that is the secondary effect of our intelligence. We've had the long lasting impact on the world, but maybe the entirety of physics in the universe has a very long lasting effects. Sure, but you can also think of it. What if like the wonderful life, what if you're not here? Will somebody else do this? Is it something that you actually contributed because you had something unique to compute? That contribute, that's a pretty high bar though. Uniqueness, yeah. So, you have to be Mozart or something to actually reach that level that nobody would have developed that, but other people might have solved this equation if you didn't do it, but also within limited scope. I mean, during your lifetime or next year, you could contribute something that unique that other people did not see. And then that could change the way things move forward for a while. So, I don't think we have to be Mozart to be called intelligence, but we have this local effect that is changing. If you weren't there, that would not have happened. And it's a positive effect, of course, you want it to be a positive effect. Do you think it's possible to engineer into computational agents, a fear of mortality? Like, does that make any sense? So, there's a very trivial thing where it's like, you could just code in a parameter, which is how long the life ends, but more of a fear of mortality, like awareness of the way that things end and somehow encoding a complex representation of that fear, which is like, maybe as it gets closer, you become more terrified. I mean, there seems to be something really profound about this fear that's not currently encodable in a trivial way into our programs. Well, I think you're referring to the emotion of fear, something, because we have cognitively, we know that we have limited lifespan and most of us cope with it by just, hey, that's what the world is like and I make the most of it. But sometimes you can have like a fear that's not healthy, that paralyzes you, that you can't do anything. And somewhere in between there, not caring at all and getting paralyzed because of fear is a normal response, which is a little bit more than just logic and it's emotion. So now the question is, what good are emotions? I mean, they are quite complex and there are multiple dimensions of emotions and they probably do serve a survival function, heightened focus, for instance. And fear of death might be a really good emotion when you are in danger, that you recognize it, even if it's not logically necessarily easy to derive and you don't have time for that logical deduction, you may be able to recognize the situation is dangerous and this fear kicks in and you all of a sudden perceive the facts that are important for that. And I think that's generally is the role of emotions. It allows you to focus what's relevant for your situation. And maybe if fear of death plays the same kind of role, but if it consumes you and it's something that you think in normal life when you don't have to, then it's not healthy and then it's not productive. Yeah, but it's fascinating to think how to incorporate emotion into a computational agent. It almost seems like a silly statement to make, but it perhaps seems silly because we have such a poor understanding of the mechanism of emotion, of fear, of, I think at the core of it is another word that we know nothing about, but say a lot, which is consciousness. Do you ever in your work, or like maybe on a coffee break, think about what the heck is this thing consciousness and is it at all useful in our thinking about AI systems? Yes, it is an important question. You can build representations and functions, I think into these agents that act like emotions and consciousness perhaps. So I mentioned emotions being something that allow you to focus and pay attention, filter out what's important. Yeah, you can have that kind of a filter mechanism and it puts you in a different state. Your computation is in a different state. Certain things don't really get through and others are heightened. Now you label that box emotion. I don't know if that means it's an emotion, but it acts very much like we understand what emotions are. And we actually did some work like that, modeling hyenas who were trying to steal a kill from lions, which happens in Africa. I mean, hyenas are quite intelligent, but not really intelligent. And they have this behavior that's more complex than anything else they do. They can band together, if there's about 30 of them or so, they can coordinate their effort so that they push the lions away from a kill. Even though the lions are so strong that they could kill a hyena by striking with a paw. But when they work together and precisely time this attack, the lions will leave and they get the kill. And probably there are some states like emotions that the hyenas go through. The first, they call for reinforcements. They really want that kill, but there's not enough of them. So they vocalize and there's more people, more hyenas that come around. And then they have two emotions. They're very afraid of the lion, so they want to stay away, but they also have a strong affiliation between each other. And then this is the balance of the two emotions. And also, yes, they also want the kill. So it's both repelled and attractive. But then this affiliation eventually is so strong that when they move, they move together, they act as a unit and they can perform that function. So there's an interesting behavior that seems to depend on these emotions strongly and makes it possible, coordinate the actions. And I think a critical aspect of that, the way you're describing is emotion there is a mechanism of social communication, of a social interaction. Maybe humans won't even be that intelligent or most things we think of as intelligent wouldn't be that intelligent without the social component of interaction. Maybe much of our intelligence is essentially an outgrowth of social interaction. And maybe for the creation of intelligent agents, we have to be creating fundamentally social systems. Yes, I strongly believe that's true. And yes, the communication is multifaceted. I mean, they vocalize and call for friends, but they also rub against each other and they push and they do all kinds of gestures and so on. So they don't act alone. And I don't think people act alone very much either, at least normal, most of the time. And social systems are so strong for humans that I think we build everything on top of these kinds of structures. And one interesting theory around that, bigotness theory, for instance, for language, but language origins is that where did language come from? And it's a plausible theory that first came social systems, that you have different roles in a society. And then those roles are exchangeable, that I scratch your back, you scratch my back, we can exchange roles. And once you have the brain structures that allow you to understand actions in terms of roles that can be changed, that's the basis for language, for grammar. And now you can start using symbols to refer to objects in the world. And you have this flexible structure. So there's a social structure that's fundamental for language to develop. Now, again, then you have language, you can refer to things that are not here right now. And that allows you to then build all the good stuff about planning, for instance, and building things and so on. So yeah, I think that very strongly humans are social and that gives us ability to structure the world. But also as a society, we can do so much more because one person does not have to do everything. You can have different roles and together achieve a lot more. And that's also something we see in computational simulations today. I mean, we have multi agent systems that can perform tasks. This fascinating demonstration, Marco Dorego, I think it was, these little robots that had to navigate through an environment and there were things that are dangerous, like maybe a big chasm or some kind of groove, a hole, and they could not get across it. But if they grab each other with their gripper, they formed a robot that was much longer under the team and this way they could get across that. So this is a great example of how together we can achieve things we couldn't otherwise. Like the hyenas, you know, alone they couldn't, but as a team they could. And I think humans do that all the time. We're really good at that. Yeah, and the way you described the system of hyenas, it almost sounds algorithmic. Like the problem with humans is they're so complex, it's hard to think of them as algorithms. But with hyenas, there's a, it's simple enough to where it feels like, at least hopeful that it's possible to create computational systems that mimic that. Yeah, that's exactly why we looked at that. As opposed to humans. Like I said, they are intelligent, but they are not quite as intelligent as say, baboons, which would learn a lot and would be much more flexible. The hyenas are relatively rigid in what they can do. And therefore you could look at this behavior, like this is a breakthrough in evolution about to happen. That they've discovered something about social structures, communication, about cooperation, and it might then spill over to other things too in thousands of years in the future. Yeah, I think the problem with baboons and humans is probably too much is going on inside the head. We won't be able to measure it if we're observing the system. With hyenas, it's probably easier to observe the actual decision making and the various motivations that are involved. Yeah, they are visible. And we can even quantify possibly their emotional state because they leave droppings behind. And there are chemicals there that can be associated with neurotransmitters. And we can separate what emotions they might have experienced in the last 24 hours. Yeah. What to you is the most beautiful, speaking of hyenas, what to you is the most beautiful nature inspired algorithm in your work that you've come across? Something maybe early on in your work or maybe today? I think evolution computation is the most amazing method. So what fascinates me most is that with computers is that you can get more out than you put in. I mean, you can write a piece of code and your machine does what you told it. I mean, this happened to me in my freshman year. It did something very simple and I was just amazed. I was blown away that it would get the number and it would compute the result. And I didn't have to do it myself. Very simple. But if you push that a little further, you can have machines that learn and they might learn patterns. And already say deep learning neural networks, they can learn to recognize objects, sounds, patterns that humans have trouble with. And sometimes they do it better than humans. And that's so fascinating. And now if you take that one more step, you get something like evolutionary algorithms that discover things, they create things, they come up with solutions that you did not think of. And that just blows me away. It's so great that we can build systems, algorithms that can be in some sense smarter than we are, that they can discover solutions that we might miss. A lot of times it is because we have as humans, we have certain biases, we expect the solutions to be certain way and you don't put those biases into the algorithm so they are more free to explore. And evolution is just absolutely fantastic explorer. And that's what really is fascinating. Yeah, I think I get made fun of a bit because I currently don't have any kids, but you mentioned programs. I mean, do you have kids? Yeah. So maybe you could speak to this, but there's a magic to the creative process. Like with Spot, the Boston Dynamics Spot, but really any robot that I've ever worked on, it just feels like the similar kind of joy I imagine I would have as a father. Not the same perhaps level, but like the same kind of wonderment. Like there's exactly this, which is like you know what you had to do initially to get this thing going. Let's speak on the computer science side, like what the program looks like, but something about it doing more than what the program was written on paper is like that somehow connects to the magic of this entire universe. Like that's like, I feel like I found God. Every time I like, it's like, because you've really created something that's living. Yeah. Even if it's a simple program. It has a life of its own, it has the intelligence of its own. It's beyond what you actually thought. Yeah. And that is, I think it's exactly spot on. That's exactly what it's about. You created something and it has a ability to live its life and do good things and you just gave it a starting point. So in that sense, I think it's, that may be part of the joy actually. But you mentioned creativity in this context, especially in the context of evolutionary computation. So, we don't often think of algorithms as creative. So how do you think about creativity? Yeah, algorithms absolutely can be creative. They can come up with solutions that you don't think about. I mean, creativity can be defined. A couple of requirements has to be new. It has to be useful and it has to be surprising. And those certainly are true with, say, evolutionary computation discovering solutions. So maybe an example, for instance, we did this collaboration with MIT Media Lab, Caleb Harbus Lab, where they had a hydroponic food computer, they called it, environment that was completely computer controlled, nutrients, water, light, temperature, everything is controlled. Now, what do you do if you can control everything? Farmers know a lot about how to make plants grow in their own patch of land. But if you can control everything, it's too much. And it turns out that we don't actually know very much about it. So we built a system, evolutionary optimization system, together with a surrogate model of how plants grow and let this system explore recipes on its own. And initially, we were focusing on light, how strong, what wavelengths, how long the light was on. And we put some boundaries which we thought were reasonable. For instance, that there was at least six hours of darkness, like night, because that's what we have in the world. And very quickly, the system, evolution, pushed all the recipes to that limit. We were trying to grow basil. And we initially had some 200, 300 recipes, exploration as well as known recipes. But now we are going beyond that. And everything was pushed to that limit. So we look at it and say, well, we can easily just change it. Let's have it your way. And it turns out the system discovered that basil does not need to sleep. 24 hours, lights on, and it will thrive. It will be bigger, it will be tastier. And this was a big surprise, not just to us, but also the biologists in the team that anticipated that there are some constraints that are in the world for a reason. It turns out that evolution did not have the same bias. And therefore, it discovered something that was creative. It was surprising, it was useful, and it was new. That's fascinating to think about the things we think that are fundamental to living systems on Earth today, whether they're actually fundamental or they somehow fit the constraints of the system. And all we have to do is just remove the constraints. Do you ever think about, I don't know how much you know about brain computer interfaces in your link. The idea there is our brains are very limited. And if we just allow, we plug in, we provide a mechanism for a computer to speak with the brain. So you're thereby expanding the computational power of the brain. The possibilities there, from a very high level philosophical perspective, is limitless. But I wonder how limitless it is. Are the constraints we have features that are fundamental to our intelligence? Or is this just this weird constraint in terms of our brain size and skull and lifespan and senses? It's just the weird little quirk of evolution. And if we just open that up, like add much more senses, add much more computational power, the intelligence will expand exponentially. Do you have a sense about constraints, the relationship of evolution and computation to the constraints of the environment? Well, at first I'd like to comment on that, like changing the inputs to human brain. And flexibility of the brain. I think there's a lot of that. There are experiments that are done in animals like Mikangazuru at MIT, switching the auditory and visual information and going to the wrong part of the cortex. And the animal was still able to hear and perceive the visual environment. And there are kids that are born with severe disorders and sometimes they have to remove half of the brain, like one half, and they still grow up. They have the functions migrate to the other parts. There's a lot of flexibility like that. So I think it's quite possible to hook up the brain with different kinds of sensors, for instance, and something that we don't even quite understand or have today on different kinds of wavelengths or whatever they are. And then the brain can learn to make sense of it. And that I think is this good hope that these prosthetic devices, for instance, work, not because we make them so good and so easy to use, but the brain adapts to them and can learn to take advantage of them. And so in that sense, if there's a trouble, a problem, I think the brain can be used to correct it. Now going beyond what we have today, can you get smarter? That's really much harder to do. Giving the brain more input probably might overwhelm it. It would have to learn to filter it and focus and in order to use the information effectively and augmenting intelligence with some kind of external devices like that might be difficult, I think. But replacing what's lost, I think is quite possible. Right, so our intuition allows us to sort of imagine that we can replace what's been lost, but expansion beyond what we have, I mean, we're already one of the most, if not the most intelligent things on this earth, right? So it's hard to imagine. But if the brain can hold up with an order of magnitude greater set of information thrown at it, if it can do, if it can reason through that. Part of me, this is the Russian thing, I think, is I tend to think that the limitations is where the superpower is, that immortality and a huge increase in bandwidth of information by connecting computers with the brain is not going to produce greater intelligence. It might produce lesser intelligence. So I don't know, there's something about the scarcity being essential to fitness or performance, but that could be just because we're so limited. No, exactly, you make do with what you have, but you don't have to be a genius but you don't have to pipe it directly to the brain. I mean, we already have devices like phones where we can look up information at any point. And that can make us more productive. You don't have to argue about, I don't know, what happened in that baseball game or whatever it is, because you can look it up right away. And I think in that sense, we can learn to utilize tools. And that's what we have been doing for a long, long time. And we are already, the brain is already drinking the water, firehose, like vision. There's way more information in vision that we actually process. So brain is already good at identifying what matters. And that we can switch that from vision to some other wavelength or some other kind of modality. But I think that the same processing principles probably still apply. But also indeed this ability to have information more accessible and more relevant, I think can enhance what we do. I mean, kids today at school, they learn about DNA. I mean, things that were discovered just a couple of years ago. And it's already common knowledge and we are building on it. And we don't see a problem where there's too much information that we can absorb and learn. Maybe people become a little bit more narrow in what they know, they are in one field. But this information that we have accumulated, it is passed on and people are picking up on it and they are building on it. So it's not like we have reached the point of saturation. We have still this process that allows us to be selective and decide what's interesting, I think still works even with the more information we have today. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about like Wikipedia becoming a sensor. Like, so the fire hose of information from Wikipedia. So it's like you integrated directly into the brain to where you're thinking, like you're observing the world with all of Wikipedia directly piping into your brain. So like when I see a light, I immediately have like the history of who invented electricity, like integrated very quickly into. So just the way you think about the world might be very interesting if you can integrate that kind of information. What are your thoughts, if I could ask on early steps on the Neuralink side? I don't know if you got a chance to see, but there was a monkey playing pong through the brain computer interface. And the dream there is sort of, you're already replacing the thumbs essentially that you would use to play video game. The dream is to be able to increase further the interface by which you interact with the computer. Are you impressed by this? Are you worried about this? What are your thoughts as a human? I think it's wonderful. I think it's great that we could do something like that. I mean, there are devices that read your EEG for instance, and humans can learn to control things using just their thoughts in that sense. And I don't think it's that different. I mean, those signals would go to limbs, they would go to thumbs. Now the same signals go through a sensor to some computing system. It still probably has to be built on human terms, not to overwhelm them, but utilize what's there and sense the right kind of patterns that are easy to generate. But, oh, that I think is really quite possible and wonderful and could be very much more efficient. Is there, so you mentioned surprising being a characteristic of creativity. Is there something, you already mentioned a few examples, but is there something that jumps out at you as was particularly surprising from the various evolutionary computation systems you've worked on, the solutions that were come up along the way? Not necessarily the final solutions, but maybe things that would even discarded. Is there something that just jumps to mind? It happens all the time. I mean, evolution is so creative, so good at discovering solutions you don't anticipate. A lot of times they are taking advantage of something that you didn't think was there, like a bug in the software, for instance. A lot of, there's a great paper, the community put it together about surprising anecdotes about evolutionary computation. A lot of them are indeed, in some software environment, there was a loophole or a bug and the system utilizes that. By the way, for people who want to read it, it's kind of fun to read. It's called The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution, a collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities. And there's just a bunch of stories from all the seminal figures in this community. You have a story in there that released to you, at least on the Tic Tac Toe memory bomb. So can you, I guess, describe that situation if you think that's still? Yeah, that's a quite a bit smaller scale than our basic doesn't need to sleep surprise, but it was actually done by students in my class, in a neural nets evolution computation class. There was an assignment. It was perhaps a final project where people built game playing AI, it was an AI class. And this one, and it was for Tic Tac Toe or five in a row in a large board. And this one team evolved a neural network to make these moves. And they set it up, the evolution. They didn't really know what would come out, but it turned out that they did really well. Evolution actually won the tournament. And most of the time when it won, it won because the other teams crashed. And then when we look at it, like what was going on was that evolution discovered that if it makes a move that's really, really far away, like millions of squares away, the other teams, the other programs has expanded memory in order to take that into account until they run out of memory and crashed. And then you win a tournament by crashing all your opponents. I think that's quite a profound example, which probably applies to most games, from even a game theoretic perspective, that sometimes to win, you don't have to be better within the rules of the game. You have to come up with ways to break your opponent's brain, if it's a human, like not through violence, but through some hack where the brain just is not, you're basically, how would you put it? You're going outside the constraints of where the brain is able to function. Expectations of your opponent. I mean, this was even Kasparov pointed that out that when Deep Blue was playing against Kasparov, that it was not playing the same way as Kasparov expected. And this has to do with not having the same biases. And that's really one of the strengths of the AI approach. Can you at a high level say, what are the basic mechanisms of evolutionary computation algorithms that use something that could be called an evolutionary approach? Like how does it work? What are the connections to the, what are the echoes of the connection to his biological? A lot of these algorithms really do take motivation from biology, but they are caricatures. You try to essentialize it and take the elements that you believe matter. So in evolutionary computation, it is the creation of variation and then the selection upon that. So the creation of variation, you have to have some mechanism that allow you to create new individuals that are very different from what you already have. That's the creativity part. And then you have to have some way of measuring how well they are doing and using that measure to select who goes to the next generation and you continue. So first you also, you have to have some kind of digital representation of an individual that can be then modified. So I guess humans in biological systems have DNA and all those kinds of things. And so you have to have similar kind of encodings in a computer program. Yes, and that is a big question. How do you encode these individuals? So there's a genotype, which is that encoding and then a decoding mechanism gives you the phenotype, which is the actual individual that then performs the task and in an environment can be evaluated how good it is. So even that mapping is a big question and how do you do it? But typically the representations are, either they are strings of numbers or they are some kind of trees. Those are something that we know very well in computer science and we try to do that. But they, and DNA in some sense is also a sequence and it's a string. So it's not that far from it, but DNA also has many other aspects that we don't take into account necessarily like there's folding and interactions that are other than just the sequence itself. And lots of that is not yet captured and we don't know whether they are really crucial. Evolution, biological evolution has produced wonderful things, but if you look at them, it's not necessarily the case that every piece is irreplaceable and essential. There's a lot of baggage because you have to construct it and it has to go through various stages and we still have appendix and we have tail bones and things like that that are not really that useful. If you try to explain them now, it would make no sense, very hard. But if you think of us as productive evolution, you can see where they came from. They were useful at one point perhaps and no longer are, but they're still there. So that process is complex and your representation should support it. And that is quite difficult if we are limited with strings or trees, and then we are pretty much limited what can be constructed. And one thing that we are still missing in evolutionary computation in particular is what we saw in biology, major transitions. So that you go from, for instance, single cell to multi cell organisms and eventually societies. There are transitions of level of selection and level of what a unit is. And that's something we haven't captured in evolutionary computation yet. Does that require a dramatic expansion of the representation? Is that what that is? Most likely it does, but it's quite, we don't even understand it in biology very well where it's coming from. So it would be really good to look at major transitions in biology, try to characterize them a little bit more in detail, what the processes are. How does a, so like a unit, a cell is no longer evaluated alone. It's evaluated as part of a community, a multi cell organism. Even though it could reproduce, now it can't alone. It has to have that environment. So there's a push to another level, at least a selection. And how do you make that jump to the next level? Yes, how do you make the jump? As part of the algorithm. Yeah, yeah. So we haven't really seen that in computation yet. And there are certainly attempts to have open ended evolution. Things that could add more complexity and start selecting at a higher level. But it is still not quite the same as going from single to multi to society, for instance, in biology. So there essentially would be, as opposed to having one agent, those agent all of a sudden spontaneously decide to then be together. And then your entire system would then be treating them as one agent. Something like that. Some kind of weird merger building. But also, so you mentioned, I think you mentioned selection. So basically there's an agent and they don't get to live on if they don't do well. So there's some kind of measure of what doing well is and isn't. And does mutation come into play at all in the process and what in the world does it serve? Yeah, so, and again, back to what the computational mechanisms of evolution computation are. So the way to create variation, you can take multiple individuals, two usually, but you could do more. And you exchange the parts of the representation. You do some kind of recombination. Could be crossover, for instance. In biology, you do have DNA strings that are cut and put together again. We could do something like that. And it seems to be that in biology, the crossover is really the workhorse in biological evolution. In computation, we tend to rely more on mutation. And that is making random changes into parts of the chromosome. You can try to be intelligent and target certain areas of it and make the mutations also follow some principle. Like you collect statistics of performance and correlations and try to make mutations you believe are going to be helpful. That's where evolution computation has moved in the last 20 years. I mean, evolution computation has been around for 50 years, but a lot of the recent... Success comes from mutation. Yes, comes from using statistics. It's like the rest of machine learning based on statistics. We use similar tools to guide evolution computation. And in that sense, it has diverged a bit from biological evolution. And that's one of the things I think we could look at again, having a weaker selection, more crossover, large populations, more time, and maybe a different kind of creativity would come out of it. We are very impatient in evolution computation today. We want answers right now, right, quickly. And if somebody doesn't perform, kill it. And biological evolution doesn't work quite that way. And it's more patient. Yes, much more patient. So I guess we need to add some kind of mating, some kind of like dating mechanisms, like marriage maybe in there. So into our algorithms to improve the combination as opposed to all mutation doing all of the work. Yeah, and many ways of being successful. Usually in evolution computation, we have one goal, play this game really well compared to others. But in biology, there are many ways of being successful. You can build niches. You can be stronger, faster, larger, or smarter, or eat this or eat that. So there are many ways to solve the same problem of survival. And that then breeds creativity. And it allows more exploration. And eventually you get solutions that are perhaps more creative rather than trying to go from initial population directly or more or less directly to your maximum fitness, which you measure as just one metric. So in a broad sense, before we talk about neuroevolution, do you see evolutionary computation as more effective than deep learning in a certain context? Machine learning, broadly speaking. Maybe even supervised machine learning. I don't know if you want to draw any kind of lines and distinctions and borders where they rub up against each other kind of thing, where one is more effective than the other in the current state of things. Yes, of course, they are very different and they address different kinds of problems. And the deep learning has been really successful in domains where we have a lot of data. And that means not just data about situations, but also what the right answers were. So labeled examples, or they might be predictions, maybe weather prediction where the data itself becomes labels. What happened, what the weather was today and what it will be tomorrow. So they are very effective deep learning methods on that kind of tasks. But there are other kinds of tasks where we don't really know what the right answer is. Game playing, for instance, but many robotics tasks and actions in the world, decision making and actual practical applications, like treatments and healthcare or investment in stock market. Many tasks are like that. We don't know and we'll never know what the optimal answers were. And there you need different kinds of approach. Reinforcement learning is one of those. Reinforcement learning comes from biology as well. Agents learn during their lifetime. They eat berries and sometimes they get sick and then they don't and get stronger. And then that's how you learn. And evolution is also a mechanism like that at a different timescale because you have a population, not an individual during his lifetime, but an entire population as a whole can discover what works. And there you can afford individuals that don't work out. They will, you know, everybody dies and you have a next generation and they will be better than the previous one. So that's the big difference between these methods. They apply to different kinds of problems. And in particular, there's often a comparison that's kind of interesting and important between reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation. And initially, reinforcement learning was about individual learning during their lifetime. And evolution is more engineering. You don't care about the lifetime. You don't care about all the individuals that are tested. You only care about the final result. The last one, the best candidate that evolution produced. In that sense, they also apply to different kinds of problems. And now that boundary is starting to blur a bit. You can use evolution as an online method and reinforcement learning to create engineering solutions, but that's still roughly the distinction. And from the point of view of what algorithm you wanna use, if you have something where there is a cost for every trial, reinforcement learning might be your choice. Now, if you have a domain where you can use a surrogate perhaps, so you don't have much of a cost for trial, and you want to have surprises, you want to explore more broadly, then this population based method is perhaps a better choice because you can try things out that you wouldn't afford when you're doing reinforcement learning. There's very few things as entertaining as watching either evolutionary computation or reinforcement learning teaching a simulated robot to walk. Maybe there's a higher level question that could be asked here, but do you find this whole space of applications in the robotics interesting for evolution computation? Yeah, yeah, very much. And indeed, there are fascinating videos of that. And that's actually one of the examples where you can contrast the difference. Between reinforcement learning and evolution. Yes, so if you have a reinforcement learning agent, it tries to be conservative because it wants to walk as long as possible and be stable. But if you have evolutionary computation, it can afford these agents that go haywire. They fall flat on their face and they could take a step and then they jump and then again fall flat. And eventually what comes out of that is something like a falling that's controlled. You take another step and another step and you no longer fall. Instead you run, you go fast. So that's a way of discovering something that's hard to discover step by step incrementally. Because you can afford these evolutionist dead ends, although they are not entirely dead ends in the sense that they can serve as stepping stones. When you take two of those, put them together, you get something that works even better. And that is a great example of this kind of discovery. Yeah, learning to walk is fascinating. I talked quite a bit to Russ Tedrick who's at MIT. There's a community of folks who just roboticists who love the elegance and beauty of movement. And walking bipedal robotics is beautiful, but also exceptionally dangerous in the sense that like you're constantly falling essentially if you want to do elegant movement. And the discovery of that is, I mean, it's such a good example of that the discovery of a good solution sometimes requires a leap of faith and patience and all those kinds of things. I wonder what other spaces where you have to discover those kinds of things in. Yeah, another interesting direction is learning for virtual creatures, learning to walk. We did a study in simulation, obviously, that you create those creatures, not just their controller, but also their body. So you have cylinders, you have muscles, you have joints and sensors, and you're creating creatures that look quite different. Some of them have multiple legs. Some of them have no legs at all. And then the goal was to get them to move, to walk, to run. And what was interesting is that when you evolve the controller together with the body, you get movements that look natural because they're optimized for that physical setup. And these creatures, you start believing them that they're alive because they walk in a way that you would expect somebody with that kind of a setup to walk. Yeah, there's something subjective also about that, right? I've been thinking a lot about that, especially in the human robot interaction context. You know, I mentioned Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot. There is something about human robot communication. Let's say, let's put it in another context, something about human and dog context, like a living dog, where there's a dance of communication. First of all, the eyes, you both look at the same thing and the dogs communicate with their eyes as well. Like if you're a human, if you and a dog want to deal with a particular object, you will look at the person, the dog will look at you and then look at the object and look back at you, all those kinds of things. But there's also just the elegance of movement. I mean, there's the, of course, the tail and all those kinds of mechanisms of communication and it all seems natural and often joyful. And for robots to communicate that, it's really difficult how to figure that out because it's almost seems impossible to hard code in. You can hard code it for demo purpose or something like that, but it's essentially choreographed. Like if you watch some of the Boston Dynamics videos where they're dancing, all of that is choreographed by human beings. But to learn how to, with your movement, demonstrate a naturalness and elegance, that's fascinating. Of course, in the physical space, that's very difficult to do to learn the kind of scale that you're referring to, but the hope is that you could do that in simulation and then transfer it into the physical space if you're able to model the robot sufficiently naturally. Yeah, and sometimes I think that that requires a theory of mind on the side of the robot that they understand what you're doing because they themselves are doing something similar. And that's a big question too. We talked about intelligence in general and the social aspect of intelligence. And I think that's what is required that we humans understand other humans because we assume that they are similar to us. We have one simulation we did a while ago. Ken Stanley did that. Two robots that were competing simulation, like I said, they were foraging for food to gain energy. And then when they were really strong, they would bounce into the other robot and win if they were stronger. And we watched evolution discover more and more complex behaviors. They first went to the nearest food and then they started to plot a trajectory so they get more, but then they started to pay attention what the other robot was doing. And in the end, there was a behavior where one of the robots, the most sophisticated one, sensed where the food pieces were and identified that the other robot was close to two of a very far distance and there was one more food nearby. So it faked, now I'm using anthropomorphizing terms, but it made a move towards those other pieces in order for the other robot to actually go and get them because it knew that the last remaining piece of food was close and the other robot would have to travel a long way, lose its energy and then lose the whole competition. So there was like emergence of something like a theory of mind, knowing what the other robot would do, to guide it towards bad behavior in order to win. So we can get things like that happen in simulation as well. But that's a complete natural emergence of a theory of mind. But I feel like if you add a little bit of a place for a theory of mind to emerge like easier, then you can go really far. I mean, some of these things with evolution, you know, you add a little bit of design in there, it'll really help. And I tend to think that a very simple theory of mind will go a really long way for cooperation between agents and certainly for human robot interaction. Like it doesn't have to be super complicated. I've gotten a chance in the autonomous vehicle space to watch vehicles interact with pedestrians or pedestrians interacting with vehicles in general. I mean, you would think that there's a very complicated theory of mind thing going on, but I have a sense, it's not well understood yet, but I have a sense it's pretty dumb. Like it's pretty simple. There's a social contract there between humans, a human driver and a human crossing the road where the human crossing the road trusts that the human in the car is not going to murder them. And there's something about, again, back to that mortality thing. There's some dance of ethics and morality that's built in, that you're mapping your own morality onto the person in the car. And even if they're driving at a speed where you think if they don't stop, they're going to kill you, you trust that if you step in front of them, they're going to hit the brakes. And there's that weird dance that we do that I think is a pretty simple model, but of course it's very difficult to introspect what it is. And autonomous robots in the human robot interaction context have to build that. Current robots are much less than what you're describing. They're currently just afraid of everything. They're more, they're not the kind that fall and discover how to run. They're more like, please don't touch anything. Don't hurt anything. Stay as far away from humans as possible. Treat humans as ballistic objects that you can't, that you do with a large spatial envelope, make sure you do not collide with. That's how, like you mentioned, Elon Musk thinks about autonomous vehicles. I tend to think autonomous vehicles need to have a beautiful dance between human and machine, where it's not just the collision avoidance problem, but a weird dance. Yeah, I think these systems need to be able to predict what will happen, what the other agent is going to do, and then have a structure of what the goals are and whether those predictions actually meet the goals. And you can go probably pretty far with that relatively simple setup already, but to call it a theory of mind, I don't think you need to. I mean, it doesn't matter whether the pedestrian has a mind, it's an object, and we can predict what we will do. And then we can predict what the states will be in the future and whether they are desirable states. Stay away from those that are undesirable and go towards those that are desirable. So it's a relatively simple functional approach to that. Where do we really need the theory of mind? Maybe when you start interacting and you're trying to get the other agent to do something and jointly, so that you can jointly, collaboratively achieve something, then it becomes more complex. Well, I mean, even with the pedestrians, you have to have a sense of where their attention, actual attention in terms of their gaze is, but also there's this vision science, people talk about this all the time. Just because I'm looking at it doesn't mean I'm paying attention to it. So figuring out what is the person looking at? What is the sensory information they've taken in? And the theory of mind piece comes in is what are they actually attending to cognitively? And also what are they thinking about? Like what is the computation they're performing? And you have probably maybe a few options for the pedestrian crossing. It doesn't have to be, it's like a variable with a few discrete states, but you have to have a good estimation which of the states that brain is in for the pedestrian case. And the same is for attending with a robot. If you're collaborating to pick up an object, you have to figure out is the human, like there's a few discrete states that the human could be in. You have to predict that by observing the human. And that seems like a machine learning problem to figure out what's the human up to. It's not as simple as sort of planning just because they move their arm means the arm will continue moving in this direction. You have to really have a model of what they're thinking about and what's the motivation behind the movement of the arm. Here we are talking about relatively simple physical actions, but you can take that the higher levels also like to predict what the people are going to do, you need to know what their goals are. What are they trying to, are they exercising? Are they just starting to get somewhere? But even higher level, I mean, you are predicting what people will do in their career, what their life themes are. Do they want to be famous, rich, or do good? And that takes a lot more information, but it allows you to then predict their actions, what choices they might make. So how does evolution and computation apply to the world of neural networks? I've seen quite a bit of work from you and others in the world of neural evolution. So maybe first, can you say, what is this field? Yeah, neural evolution is a combination of neural networks and evolution computation in many different forms, but the early versions were simply using evolution as a way to construct a neural network instead of say, stochastic gradient descent or backpropagation. Because evolution can evolve these parameters, weight values in a neural network, just like any other string of numbers, you can do that. And that's useful because some cases you don't have those targets that you need to backpropagate from. And it might be an agent that's running a maze or a robot playing a game or something. You don't, again, you don't know what the right answers are, you don't have backprop, but this way you can still evolve a neural net. And neural networks are really good at these tasks, because they recognize patterns and they generalize, interpolate between known situations. So you want to have a neural network in such a task, even if you don't have a supervised targets. So that's a reason and that's a solution. And also more recently, now when we have all this deep learning literature, it turns out that we can use evolution to optimize many aspects of those designs. The deep learning architectures have become so complex that there's little hope for us little humans to understand their complexity and what actually makes a good design. And now we can use evolution to give that design for you. And it might mean optimizing hyperparameters, like the depth of layers and so on, or the topology of the network, how many layers, how they're connected, but also other aspects like what activation functions you use where in the network during the learning process, or what loss function you use, you could generalize that. You could generate that, even data augmentation, all the different aspects of the design of deep learning experiments could be optimized that way. So that's an interaction between two mechanisms. But there's also, when we get more into cognitive science and the topics that we've been talking about, you could have learning mechanisms at two level timescales. So you do have an evolution that gives you baby neural networks that then learn during their lifetime. And you have this interaction of two timescales. And I think that can potentially be really powerful. Now, in biology, we are not born with all our faculties. We have to learn, we have a developmental period. In humans, it's really long and most animals have something. And probably the reason is that evolution of DNA is not detailed enough or plentiful enough to describe them. We can describe how to set the brain up, but we can, evolution can decide on a starting point and then have a learning algorithm that will construct the final product. And this interaction of intelligent, well, evolution that has produced a good starting point for the specific purpose of learning from it with the interaction with the environment, that can be a really powerful mechanism for constructing brains and constructing behaviors. I like how you walk back from intelligence. So optimize starting point, maybe. Yeah, okay, there's a lot of fascinating things to ask here. And this is basically this dance between neural networks and evolution and computation could go into the category of automated machine learning to where you're optimizing, whether it's hyperparameters of the topology or hyperparameters taken broadly. But the topology thing is really interesting. I mean, that's not really done that effectively or throughout the history of machine learning has not been done. Usually there's a fixed architecture. Maybe there's a few components you're playing with, but to grow a neural network, essentially, the way you grow an organism is really fascinating space. How hard is it, do you think, to grow a neural network? And maybe what kind of neural networks are more amenable to this kind of idea than others? I've seen quite a bit of work on recurrent neural networks. Is there some architectures that are friendlier than others? And is this just a fun, small scale set of experiments or do you have hope that we can be able to grow powerful neural networks? I think we can. And most of the work up to now is taking architectures that already exist that humans have designed and try to optimize them further. And you can totally do that. A few years ago, we did an experiment. We took a winner of the image captioning competition and the architecture and just broke it into pieces and took the pieces. And that was our search base. See if you can do better. And we indeed could, 15% better performance by just searching around the network design that humans had come up with, Oreo vinyls and others. So, but that's starting from a point that humans have produced, but we could do something more general. It doesn't have to be that kind of network. The hard part is, there are a couple of challenges. One of them is to define the search base. What are your elements and how you put them together. And the space is just really, really big. So you have to somehow constrain it and have some hunch what will work because otherwise everything is possible. And another challenge is that in order to evaluate how good your design is, you have to train it. I mean, you have to actually try it out. And that's currently very expensive, right? I mean, deep learning networks may take days to train while imagine you having a population of a hundred and have to run it for a hundred generations. It's not yet quite feasible computationally. It will be, but also there's a large carbon footprint and all that. I mean, we are using a lot of computation for doing it. So intelligent methods and intelligent, I mean, we have to do some science in order to figure out what the right representations are and right operators are, and how do we evaluate them without having to fully train them. And that is where the current research is and we're making progress on all those fronts. So yes, there are certain architectures that are more amenable to that approach, but also I think we can create our own architecture and all representations that are even better at that. And do you think it's possible to do like a tiny baby network that grows into something that can do state of the art on like even the simple data set like MNIST, and just like it just grows into a gigantic monster that's the world's greatest handwriting recognition system? Yeah, there are approaches like that. Esteban Real and Cochlear for instance, I worked on evolving a smaller network and then systematically expanding it to a larger one. Your elements are already there and scaling it up will just give you more power. So again, evolution gives you that starting point and then there's a mechanism that gives you the final result and a very powerful approach. But you could also simulate the actual growth process. And like I said before, evolving a starting point and then evolving or training the network, there's not that much work that's been done on that yet. We need some kind of a simulation environment so the interactions at will, the supervised environment doesn't really, it's not as easily usable here. Sorry, the interaction between neural networks? Yeah, the neural networks that you're creating, interacting with the world and learning from these sequences of interactions, perhaps communication with others. That's awesome. We would like to get there, but just the task of simulating something is at that level is very hard. It's very difficult. I love the idea. I mean, one of the powerful things about evolution on Earth is the predators and prey emerged. And like there's just like, there's bigger fish and smaller fish and it's fascinating to think that you could have neural networks competing against each other in one neural network being able to destroy another one. There's like wars of neural networks competing to solve the MNIST problem, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Oh, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we actually simulated also that prey and it was interesting what happened there, Padmini Rajagopalan did this and Kay Holkamp was a zoologist. So we had, again, we had simulated hyenas, simulated zebras. Nice. And initially, the hyenas just tried to hunt them and when they actually stumbled upon the zebra, they ate it and were happy. And then the zebras learned to escape and the hyenas learned to team up. And actually two of them approached in different directions. And now the zebras, their next step, they generated a behavior where they split in different directions, just like actually gazelles do when they are being hunted. They confuse the predator by going in different directions. That emerged and then more hyenas joined and kind of circled them. And then when they circled them, they could actually herd the zebras together and eat multiple zebras. So there was like an arms race of predators and prey. And they gradually developed more complex behaviors, some of which we actually do see in nature. And this kind of coevolution, that's competitive coevolution, it's a fascinating topic because there's a promise or possibility that you will discover something new that you don't already know. You didn't build it in. It came from this arms race. It's hard to keep the arms race going. It's hard to have rich enough simulation that supports all of these complex behaviors. But at least for several steps, we've already seen it in this predator prey scenario, yeah. First of all, it's fascinating to think about this context in terms of evolving architectures. So I've studied Tesla autopilot for a long time. It's one particular implementation of an AI system that's operating in the real world. I find it fascinating because of the scale at which it's used out in the real world. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with that system much, but, you know, Andre Kapathy leads that team on the machine learning side. And there's a multitask network, multiheaded network, where there's a core, but it's trained on particular tasks. And there's a bunch of different heads that are trained on that. Is there some lessons from evolutionary computation or neuroevolution that could be applied to this kind of multiheaded beast that's operating in the real world? Yes, it's a very good problem for neuroevolution. And the reason is that when you have multiple tasks, they support each other. So let's say you're learning to classify X ray images to different pathologies. So you have one task is to classify this disease and another one, this disease, another one, this one. And when you're learning from one disease, that forces certain kinds of internal representations and embeddings, and they can serve as a helpful starting point for the other tasks. So you are combining the wisdom of multiple tasks into these representations. And it turns out that you can do better in each of these tasks when you are learning simultaneously other tasks than you would by one task alone. Which is a fascinating idea in itself, yeah. Yes, and people do that all the time. I mean, you use knowledge of domains that you know in new domains, and certainly neural network can do that. When neuroevolution comes in is that, what's the best way to combine these tasks? Now there's architectural design that allow you to decide where and how the embeddings, the internal representations are combined and how much you combine them. And there's quite a bit of research on that. And my team, Elliot Meyerson has worked on that in particular, like what is a good internal representation that supports multiple tasks? And we're getting to understand how that's constructed and what's in it, so that it is in a space that supports multiple different heads, like you said. And that I think is fundamentally how biological intelligence works as well. You don't build a representation just for one task. You try to build something that's general, not only so that you can do better in one task or multiple tasks, but also future tasks and future challenges. So you learn the structure of the world and that helps you in all kinds of future challenges. And so you're trying to design a representation that will support an arbitrary set of tasks in a particular sort of class of problem. Yeah, and also it turns out, and that's again, a surprise that Elliot found was that those tasks don't have to be very related. You know, you can learn to do better vision by learning language or better language by learning about DNA structure. No, somehow the world. Yeah, it rhymes. The world rhymes, even if it's very disparate fields. I mean, on that small topic, let me ask you, because you've also on the competition neuroscience side, you worked on both language and vision. What's the connection between the two? What's more, maybe there's a bunch of ways to ask this, but what's more difficult to build from an engineering perspective and evolutionary perspective, the human language system or the human vision system or the equivalent of in the AI space language and vision, or is it the best as the multitask idea that you're speaking to that they need to be deeply integrated? Yeah, absolutely the latter. Learning both at the same time, I think is a fascinating direction in the future. So we have data sets where there's visual component as well as verbal descriptions, for instance, and that way you can learn a deeper representation, a more useful representation for both. But it's still an interesting question of which one is easier. I mean, recognizing objects or even understanding sentences, that's relatively possible, but where it becomes, where the challenges are is to understand the world. Like the visual world, the 3D, what are the objects doing and predicting what will happen, the relationships. That's what makes vision difficult. And language, obviously it's what is being said, what the meaning is. And the meaning doesn't stop at who did what to whom. There are goals and plans and themes, and you eventually have to understand the entire human society and history in order to understand the sentence very much fully. There are plenty of examples of those kinds of short sentences when you bring in all the world knowledge to understand it. And that's the big challenge. Now we are far from that, but even just bringing in the visual world together with the sentence will give you already a lot deeper understanding of what's happening. And I think that that's where we're going very soon. I mean, we've had ImageNet for a long time, and now we have all these text collections, but having both together and then learning a semantic understanding of what is happening, I think that that will be the next step in the next few years. Yeah, you're starting to see that with all the work with Transformers, was the community, the AI community starting to dip their toe into this idea of having language models that are now doing stuff with images, with vision, and then connecting the two. I mean, right now it's like these little explorations we're literally dipping the toe in, but maybe at some point we'll just dive into the pool and it'll just be all seen as the same thing. I do still wonder what's more fundamental, whether vision is, whether we don't think about vision correctly. Maybe the fact, because we're humans and we see things as beautiful and so on, and because we have cameras that are taking pixels as a 2D image, that we don't sufficiently think about vision as language. Maybe Chomsky is right all along, that vision is fundamental to, sorry, that language is fundamental to everything, to even cognition, to even consciousness. The base layer is all language, not necessarily like English, but some weird abstract representation, linguistic representation. Yeah, well, earlier we talked about the social structures and that may be what's underlying the language, and that's the more fundamental part, and then language has been added on top of that. Language emerges from the social interaction. Yeah, that's a very good guess. We are visual animals, though. A lot of the brain is dedicated to vision, and also, when we think about various abstract concepts, we usually reduce that to vision and images, and that's, you know, we go to a whiteboard, you draw pictures of very abstract concepts. So we tend to resort to that quite a bit, and that's a fundamental representation. It's probably possible that it predated language even. I mean, animals, a lot of, they don't talk, but they certainly do have vision, and language is interesting development in from mastication, from eating. You develop an organ that actually can produce sound to manipulate them. Maybe that was an accident. Maybe that was something that was available and then allowed us to do the communication, or maybe it was gestures. Sign language could have been the original proto language. We don't quite know, but the language is more fundamental than the medium in which it's communicated, and I think that it comes from those representations. Now, in current world, they are so strongly integrated, it's really hard to say which one is fundamental. You look at the brain structures and even visual cortex, which is supposed to be very much just vision. Well, if you are thinking of semantic concepts, you're thinking of language, visual cortex lights up. It's still useful, even for language computations. So there are common structures underlying them. So utilize what you need. And when you are understanding a scene, you're understanding relationships. Well, that's not so far from understanding relationships between words and concepts. So I think that that's how they are integrated. Yeah, and there's dreams, and once we close our eyes, there's still a world in there somehow operating and somehow possibly the visual system somehow integrated into all of it. I tend to enjoy thinking about aliens and thinking about the sad thing to me about extraterrestrial intelligent life, that if it visited us here on Earth, or if we came on Mars or maybe another solar system, another galaxy one day, that us humans would not be able to detect it or communicate with it or appreciate, like it'd be right in front of our nose and we were too self obsessed to see it. Not self obsessed, but our tools, our frameworks of thinking would not detect it. As a good movie, Arrival and so on, where Stephen Wolfram and his son, I think were part of developing this alien language of how aliens would communicate with humans. Do you ever think about that kind of stuff where if humans and aliens would be able to communicate with each other, like if we met each other at some, okay, we could do SETI, which is communicating from across a very big distance, but also just us, if you did a podcast with an alien, do you think we'd be able to find a common language and a common methodology of communication? I think from a computational perspective, the way to ask that is you have very fundamentally different creatures, agents that are created, would they be able to find a common language? Yes, I do think about that. I mean, I think a lot of people who are in computing, they, and AI in particular, they got into it because they were fascinated with science fiction and all of these options. I mean, Star Trek generated all kinds of devices that we have now, they envisioned it first and it's a great motivator to think about things like that. And I, so one, and again, being a computational scientist and trying to build intelligent agents, what I would like to do is have a simulation where the agents actually evolve communication, not just communication, we've done that, people have done that many times, that they communicate, they signal and so on, but actually develop a language. And language means grammar, it means all these social structures and on top of that, grammatical structures. And we do it under various conditions and actually try to identify what conditions are necessary for it to come out. And then we can start asking that kind of questions. Are those languages that emerge in those different simulated environments, are they understandable to us? Can we somehow make a translation? We can make it a concrete question. So machine translation of evolved languages. And so like languages that evolve come up with, can we translate, like I have a Google translate for the evolved languages. Yes, and if we do that enough, we have perhaps an idea what an alien language might be like, the space of where those languages can be. Because we can set up their environment differently. It doesn't need to be gravity. You can have all kinds of, societies can be different. They may have no predators. They may have all, everybody's a predator. All kinds of situations. And then see what the space possibly is where those languages are and what the difficulties are. That'd be really good actually to do that before the aliens come here. Yes, it's good practice. On the similar connection, you can think of AI systems as aliens. Is there ways to evolve a communication scheme for, there's a field you can call it explainable AI, for AI systems to be able to communicate. So you evolve a bunch of agents, but for some of them to be able to talk to you also. So to evolve a way for agents to be able to communicate about their world to us humans. Do you think that there's possible mechanisms for doing that? We can certainly try. And if it's an evolution competition system, for instance, you reward those solutions that are actually functional. That communication makes sense. It allows us to together again, achieve common goals. I think that's possible. But even from that paper that you mentioned, the anecdotes, it's quite likely also that the agents learn to lie and fake and do all kinds of things like that. I mean, we see that in even very low level, like bacterial evolution. There are cheaters. And who's to say that what they say is actually what they think. But that's what I'm saying, that there would have to be some common goal so that we can evaluate whether that communication is at least useful. They may be saying things just to make us feel good or get us to do what we want, but they would not turn them off or something. But so we would have to understand their internal representations much better to really make sure that that translation is critical. But it can be useful. And I think it's possible to do that. There are examples where visualizations are automatically created so that we can look into the system and that language is not that far from it. I mean, it is a way of communicating and logging what you're doing in some interpretable way. I think a fascinating topic, yeah, to do that. Yeah, you're making me realize that it's a good scientific question whether lying is an effective mechanism for integrating yourself and succeeding in a social network, in a world that is social. I tend to believe that honesty and love are evolutionary advantages in an environment where there's a network of intelligent agents. But it's also very possible that dishonesty and manipulation and even violence, all those kinds of things might be more beneficial. That's the old open question about good versus evil. But I tend to, I mean, I don't know if it's a hopeful, maybe I'm delusional, but it feels like karma is a thing, which is like long term, the agents, they're just kind to others sometimes for no reason will do better. In a society that's not highly constrained on resources. So like people start getting weird and evil towards each other and bad when the resources are very low relative to the needs of the populace, especially at the basic level, like survival, shelter, food, all those kinds of things. But I tend to believe that once you have those things established, then, well, not to believe, I guess I hope that AI systems will be honest. But it's scary to think about the Turing test, AI systems that will eventually pass the Turing test will be ones that are exceptionally good at lying. That's a terrifying concept. I mean, I don't know. First of all, sort of from somebody who studied language and obviously are not just a world expert in AI, but somebody who dreams about the future of the field. Do you hope, do you think there'll be human level or superhuman level intelligences in the future that we eventually build? Well, I definitely hope that we can get there. One, I think important perspective is that we are building AI to help us. That it is a tool like cars or language or communication, AI will help us be more productive. And that is always a condition. It's not something that we build and let run and it becomes an entity of its own that doesn't care about us. Now, of course, really find the future, maybe that might be possible, but not in the foreseeable future when we are building it. And therefore we always in a position of limiting what it can or cannot do. And your point about lying is very interesting. Even in these hyenas societies, for instance, when a number of these hyenas band together and they take a risk and steal the kill, there are always hyenas that hang back and don't participate in that risky behavior, but they walk in later and join the party after the kill. And there are even some that may be ineffective and cause others to have harm. So, and like I said, even bacteria cheat. And we see it in biology, there's always some element on opportunity. If you have a society, I think that is just because if you have a society, in order for society to be effective, you have to have this cooperation and you have to have trust. And if you have enough of agents who are able to trust each other, you can achieve a lot more. But if you have trust, you also have opportunity for cheaters and liars. And I don't think that's ever gonna go away. There will be hopefully a minority so that they don't get in the way. And we studied in these hyena simulations, like what the proportion needs to be before it is no longer functional. And you can point out that you can tolerate a few cheaters and a few liars and the society can still function. And that's probably going to happen when we build these systems at Autonomously Learn. The really successful ones are honest because that's the best way of getting things done. But there probably are also intelligent agents that find that they can achieve their goals by bending the rules or cheating. So that could be a huge benefit as opposed to having fixed AI systems. Say we build an AGI system and deploying millions of them, it'd be that are exactly the same. There might be a huge benefit to introducing sort of from like an evolution computation perspective, a lot of variation. Sort of like diversity in all its forms is beneficial even if some people are assholes or some robots are assholes. So like it's beneficial to have that because you can't always a priori know what's good, what's bad. But that's a fascinating. Absolutely. Diversity is the bread and butter. I mean, if you're running an evolution, you see diversity is the one fundamental thing you have to have. And absolutely, also, it's not always good diversity. It may be something that can be destructive. We had in these hyenas simulations, we have hyenas that just are suicidal. They just run and get killed. But they form the basis of those who actually are really fast, but stop before they get killed and eventually turn into this mob. So there might be something useful there if it's recombined with something else. So I think that as long as we can tolerate some of that, it may turn into something better. You may change the rules because it's so much more efficient to do something that was actually against the rules before. And we've seen society change over time quite a bit along those lines. That there were rules in society that we don't believe are fair anymore, even though they were considered proper behavior before. So things are changing. And I think that in that sense, I think it's a good idea to be able to tolerate some of that cheating because eventually we might turn into something better. So yeah, I think this is a message to the trolls and the assholes of the internet that you too have a beautiful purpose in this human ecosystem. So I appreciate you very much. In moderate quantities, yeah. In moderate quantities. So there's a whole field of artificial life. I don't know if you're connected to this field, if you pay attention. Is, do you think about this kind of thing? Is there impressive demonstration to you of artificial life? Do you think of the agency you work with in the evolutionary computation perspective as life? And where do you think this is headed? Like, is there interesting systems that we'll be creating more and more that make us redefine, maybe rethink about the nature of life? Different levels of definition and goals there. I mean, at some level, artificial life can be considered multiagent systems that build a society that again, achieves a goal. And it might be robots that go into a building and clean it up or after an earthquake or something. You can think of that as an artificial life problem in some sense. Or you can really think of it, artificial life, as a simulation of life and a tool to understand what life is and how life evolved on earth. And like I said, in artificial life conference, there are branches of that conference sessions of people who really worry about molecular designs and the start of life, like I said, primordial soup where eventually you get something self replicating. And they're really trying to build that. So it's a whole range of topics. And I think that artificial life is a great tool to understand life. And there are questions like sustainability, species, we're losing species. How bad is it? Is it natural? Is there a tipping point? And where are we going? I mean, like the hyena evolution, we may have understood that there's a pivotal point in their evolution. They discovered cooperation and coordination. Artificial life simulations can identify that and maybe encourage things like that. And also societies can be seen as a form of life itself. I mean, we're not talking about biological evolution, evolution of societies. Maybe some of the same phenomena emerge in that domain and having artificial life simulations and understanding could help us build better societies. Yeah, and thinking from a meme perspective of from Richard Dawkins, that maybe the organisms, ideas of the organisms, not the humans in these societies that from, it's almost like reframing what is exactly evolving. Maybe the interesting, the humans aren't the interesting thing as the contents of our minds is the interesting thing. And that's what's multiplying. And that's actually multiplying and evolving in a much faster timescale. And that maybe has more power on the trajectory of life on earth than does biological evolution is the evolution of these ideas. Yes, and it's fascinating, like I said before, that we can keep up somehow biologically. We evolved to a point where we can keep up with this meme evolution, literature, internet. We understand DNA and we understand fundamental particles. We didn't start that way a thousand years ago. And we haven't evolved biologically very much, but somehow our minds are able to extend. And therefore AI can be seen also as one such step that we created and it's our tool. And it's part of that meme evolution that we created, even if our biological evolution does not progress as fast. And us humans might only be able to understand so much. We're keeping up so far, or we think we're keeping up so far, but we might need AI systems to understand. Maybe like the physics of the universe is operating, look at strength theory. Maybe it's operating in much higher dimensions. Maybe we're totally, because of our cognitive limitations, are not able to truly internalize the way this world works. And so we're running up against the limitation of our own minds. And we have to create these next level organisms like AI systems that would be able to understand much deeper, like really understand what it means to live in a multi dimensional world that's outside of the four dimensions, the three of space and one of time. Translation, and generally we can deal with the world, even if you don't understand all the details, we can use computers, even though we don't, most of us don't know all the structure that's underneath or drive a car. I mean, there are many components, especially new cars that you don't quite fully know, but you have the interface, you have an abstraction of it that allows you to operate it and utilize it. And I think that that's perfectly adequate and we can build on it. And AI can play a similar role. I have to ask about beautiful artificial life systems or evolutionary computation systems. Cellular automata to me, I remember it was a game changer for me early on in life when I saw Conway's Game of Life who recently passed away, unfortunately. And it's beautiful how much complexity can emerge from such simple rules. I just don't, somehow that simplicity is such a powerful illustration and also humbling because it feels like I personally, from my perspective, understand almost nothing about this world because like my intuition fails completely how complexity can emerge from such simplicity. Like my intuition fails, I think, is the biggest problem I have. Do you find systems like that beautiful? Is there, do you think about cellular automata? Because cellular automata don't really have, and many other artificial life systems don't necessarily have an objective. Maybe that's a wrong way to say it. It's almost like it's just evolving and creating. And there's not even a good definition of what it means to create something complex and interesting and surprising, all those words that you said. Is there some of those systems that you find beautiful? Yeah, yeah. And similarly, evolution does not have a goal. It is responding to current situation and survival then creates more complexity and therefore we have something that we perceive as progress but that's not what evolution is inherently set to do. And yeah, that's really fascinating how a simple set of rules or simple mappings can, how from such simple mappings, complexity can emerge. So it's a question of emergence and self organization. And the game of life is one of the simplest ones and very visual and therefore it drives home the point that it's possible that nonlinear interactions and this kind of complexity can emerge from them. And biology and evolution is along the same lines. We have simple representations. DNA, if you really think of it, it's not that complex. It's a long sequence of them, there's lots of them but it's a very simple representation. And similarly with evolutionary computation, whatever string or tree representation we have and the operations, the amount of code that's required to manipulate those, it's really, really little. And of course, game of life even less. So how complexity emerges from such simple principles, that's absolutely fascinating. The challenge is to be able to control it and guide it and direct it so that it becomes useful. And like game of life is fascinating to look at and evolution, all the forms that come out is fascinating but can we actually make it useful for us? And efficient because if you actually think about each of the cells in the game of life as a living organism, there's a lot of death that has to happen to create anything interesting. And so I guess the question is for us humans that are mortal and then life ends quickly, we wanna kinda hurry up and make sure we take evolution, the trajectory that is a little bit more efficient than the alternatives. And that touches upon something we talked about earlier that evolution competition is very impatient. We have a goal, we want it right away whereas this biology has a lot of time and deep time and weak pressure and large populations. One great example of this is the novelty search. So evolutionary computation where you don't actually specify a fitness goal, something that is your actual thing that you want but you just reward solutions that are different from what you've seen before, nothing else. And you know what? You actually discover things that are interesting and useful that way. Ken Stanley and Joel Lehmann did this one study where they actually tried to evolve walking behavior on robots. And that's actually, we talked about earlier where your robot actually failed in all kinds of ways and eventually discovered something that was a very efficient walk. And it was because they rewarded things that were different that you were able to discover something. And I think that this is crucial because in order to be really different from what you already have, you have to utilize what is there in a domain to create something really different. So you have encoded the fundamentals of your world and then you make changes to those fundamentals you get further away. So that's probably what's happening in these systems of emergence. That the fundamentals are there. And when you follow those fundamentals you get into points and some of those are actually interesting and useful. Now, even in that robotic Walker simulation there was a large set of garbage, but among them, there were some of these gems. And then those are the ones that somehow you have to outside recognize and make useful. But this kind of productive systems if you code them the right kind of principles I think that encode the structure of the domain then you will get to these solutions and discoveries. It feels like that might also be a good way to live life. So let me ask, do you have advice for young people today about how to live life or how to succeed in their career or forget career, just succeed in life from an evolution and computation perspective? Yes, yes, definitely. Explore, diversity, exploration and individuals take classes in music, history, philosophy, math, engineering, see connections between them, travel, learn a language. I mean, all this diversity is fascinating and we have it at our fingertips today. It's possible, you have to make a bit of an effort because it's not easy, but the rewards are wonderful. Yeah, there's something interesting about an objective function of new experiences. So try to figure out, I mean, what is the maximally new experience I could have today? And that sort of that novelty, optimizing for novelty for some period of time might be very interesting way to sort of maximally expand the sets of experiences you had and then ground from that perspective, like what will be the most fulfilling trajectory through life. Of course, the flip side of that is where I come from. Again, maybe Russian, I don't know. But the choice has a detrimental effect, I think, at least from my mind where scarcity has an empowering effect. So if I sort of, if I have very little of something and only one of that something, I will appreciate it deeply until I came to Texas recently and I've been pigging out on delicious, incredible meat. I've been fasting a lot, so I need to do that again. But when you fast for a few days, that the first taste of a food is incredible. So the downside of exploration is that somehow, maybe you can correct me, but somehow you don't get to experience deeply any one of the particular moments, but that could be a psychology thing. That could be just a very human peculiar, flaw. Yeah, I didn't mean that you superficially explore. I mean, you can. Explore deeply. Yeah, so you don't have to explore 100 things, but maybe a few topics where you can take a deep enough dive that you gain an understanding. You yourself have to decide at some point that this is deep enough. And I obtained what I can from this topic and now it's time to move on. And that might take years. People sometimes switch careers and they may stay on some career for a decade and switch to another one. You can do it. You're not pretty determined to stay where you are, but in order to achieve something, 10,000 hours makes, you need 10,000 hours to become an expert on something. So you don't have to become an expert, but they even develop an understanding and gain the experience that you can use later. You probably have to spend, like I said, it's not easy. You've got to spend some effort on it. Now, also at some point then, when you have this diversity and you have these experiences, exploration, you may want to, you may find something that you can't stay away from. Like for us, it was computers, it was AI. It was, you know, that I just have to do it. And I, you know, and then it will take decades maybe and you are pursuing it because you figured out that this is really exciting and you can bring in your experiences. And there's nothing wrong with that either, but you asked what's the advice for young people. That's the exploration part. And then beyond that, after that exploration, you actually can focus and build a career. And, you know, even there you can switch multiple times, but I think that diversity exploration is fundamental to having a successful career as is concentration and spending an effort where it matters. And, but you are in better position to make the choice when you have done your homework. Explored. So exploration precedes commitment, but both are beautiful. Yeah. So again, from an evolutionary computation perspective, we'll look at all the agents that had to die in order to come up with different solutions in simulation. What do you think from that individual agent's perspective is the meaning of it all? So far as humans, you're just one agent who's going to be dead, unfortunately, one day too soon. What do you think is the why of why that agent came to be and eventually will be no more? Is there a meaning to it all? Yeah. In evolution, there is meaning. Everything is a potential direction. Everything is a potential stepping stone. Not all of them are going to work out. Some of them are foundations for further improvement. And even those that are perhaps going to die out were potential energies, potential solutions. In biology, we see a lot of species die off naturally. And you know, like the dinosaurs, I mean, they were really good solution for a while, but then it didn't turned out to be not such a good solution in the long term. When there's an environmental change, you have to have diversity. Some other solutions become better. Doesn't mean that that was an attempt. It didn't quite work out or last, but there are still dinosaurs among us, at least their relatives. And they may one day again be useful, who knows? So from an individual's perspective, you got to think of a bigger picture that it is a huge engine that is innovative. And these elements are all part of it, potential innovations on their own. And also as raw material perhaps, or stepping stones for other things that could come after. But it still feels from an individual perspective that I matter a lot. But even if I'm just a little cog in a giant machine, is that just a silly human notion in an individualistic society, no, she'll let go of that? Do you find beauty in being part of the giant machine? Yeah, I think it's meaningful. I think it adds purpose to your life that you are part of something bigger. That said, do you ponder your individual agent's mortality? Do you think about death? Do you fear death? Well, certainly more now than when I was a youngster and did skydiving and paragliding and all these things. You've become wiser. There is a reason for this life arc that younger folks are more fearless in many ways. That's part of the exploration. They are the individuals who think, hmm, I wonder what's over those mountains or what if I go really far in that ocean? What would I find? I mean, older folks don't necessarily think that way, but younger do and it's kind of counterintuitive. So yeah, but logically it's like, you have a limited amount of time, what can you do with it that matters? So you try to, you have done your exploration, you committed to a certain direction and you become an expert perhaps in it. What can I do that matters with the limited resources that I have? That's how I think a lot of people, myself included, start thinking later on in their career. And like you said, leave a bit of a trace and a bit of an impact even though after the agent is gone. Yeah, that's the goal. Well, this was a fascinating conversation. I don't think there's a better way to end it. Thank you so much. So first of all, I'm very inspired of how vibrant the community at UT Austin and Austin is. It's really exciting for me to see it. And this whole field seems like profound philosophically, but also the path forward for the artificial intelligence community. So thank you so much for explaining so many cool things to me today and for wasting all of your valuable time with me. Oh, it was a pleasure. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Risto McAlignan. And thank you to the Jordan Harbinger Show, Grammarly, Belcampo, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Risto Miikkulainen: Neuroevolution and Evolutionary Computation | Lex Fridman Podcast #177

The following is a conversation with Michael Mallis and Yaron Brook, Michael's third time on this podcast and Yaron's second, but together for the first time. Michael is an anarchist, political thinker, host of a podcast called You're Welcome and author of Dear Reader, The New Right and two upcoming books Anarchist Handbook and The White Pill. Yaron is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of The Yaron Brook Show and coauthor of The Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair. Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave and Four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that this conversation is a kind of experiment. Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate, united in part by an interest in the history and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but they are also very different in style. Good conversation, like good food, is often made delicious by pairing of contrasting elements. For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich, which apparently is very good. Among the three of us, I don't know who's the peanut butter, who's the bacon and who's the banana, I'm guessing it's probably me, I'm the banana, but I hope the final result, the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious. We talk through, I think, a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even in rare cases saying something humorous, including dark humor, especially in Michael's case. All three of us are sensitive to the suffering in the world today and throughout human history. We think about it, we talk about it, and we deal with it in different ways. Be patient with us. Whether you agree, disagree, enjoy or dislike the result, I hope you feel listened, you're a wiser person on the other end of it, I know I was. Mostly, I really enjoyed this conversation because no matter what Michael and Yaron believe, underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings that I'm lucky to be able to hang out with and learn from. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here's my conversation with Michael Malus and Yaron Rook. I've been a huge fan of the two of you for the longest time. Are we recording now? Is it starting? Or are you just talking? I'm not recording at all. He's not going to compliment us if it's not part of the show. Yes, he does, all the time. He speaks very highly of me. You, I don't know. I'm not sure. He only does this to me on the show. Objectivists don't like charity, so don't compliment him, he won't think it's sincere. So it's an incredible honor that the both of you would show up here. If we, let me just ask this sort of profound philosophical question. How well do you think we would get along if we were stuck on a desert island together? What would life be like? I thought the original question you had, that you sent us this question, was how long would it take for us to murder one another or something like that. There was murder in the question, if I remember. I, I, listen, he sent us homework, right? All these questions. I ignored it. I didn't spend four years at Patrick Henry University to do homework. To answer your question, I think it would be very easy for us to live together in a desert island in terms of interpersonal. I know, and I say this because I know a lot of people who have been the show's survivor. So they, and I know a little bit about the dynamics. So when you have people who are intelligent, who are going to have the same goals, I mean, there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you, I don't think it would be that hard at all. What's our goals on a desert island? Food, shelter. Survival. Survival. Survival, basically. Survival and getting out of there, right? You don't want to stay on the desert island. So yeah, I don't, I don't think, I think that's true of any three, you know, semi rational people who, you know, who basically share the goal that they want to survive. They want to thrive. They want to get off of the island. Why would there be conflict? I mean, there would be conflict, but, and there can be conflict, but they'd find ways to deal with it. I don't have this negative view of human beings, particularly not as individuals. It's when they get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate them to do horrible things. One of the things that really drives me crazy is how sinister an impact the book Lord of the Flies has had on our culture. I read it in high school. It's a superb book. That's not even a question, but it's not accurate. We see in many situations where people are trapped together under difficult circumstances. Obviously that book's about children that very quickly it is not about conflict. It very quickly becomes about cooperation. Let's work together. We all have the same goal. This is not a time to worry about other things. It really, the human beings, the animal instinct that kicks in is the social animal and I'm going to shut up and go over there and have a, like stomp my feet instead of arguing with your own because we're really trapped in the situation and we need to make it work. Well, and to the extent that they're bad people, bad people are dealt with, right? So this is true of all of, you know, how did we survive as a species, right? How have we survived as a species? We've been on a desert island in a sense as a species forever. Tribes survived. They survived by cooperation. They survived by dealing with bad people. Civilization is created by people cooperating and working together and allowing individuals to thrive within the group and when bad people arise, they deal with them, right? Now sometimes these groups get captured by bad people and bad ideas and probably from day one that was going on, right? The whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with, but you know, underneath it all, the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think, we need to be rational and if we don't have any respect for reason, then we would all die. We would die off. So that's a hopeful message, but where does that go wrong? So with three people we might get along, we would focus on the basics of life, we have similar goals. Once women are introduced, their incessant irrationalism and less of their hormones for SOL. Look, three of us on a desert island would be nice, but without women, it wouldn't be fun. I'm going to edit out half the things Michael said through this broadcast. As you know, I used to run the Ayn Rand Institute. She was a woman last time I looked. Oh, wait a minute. You know, you know exactly what I'm going to say. When Ludwig von Mises or Hazlitt, I don't know who it was, Mises was praising Ayn Rand and I think it was Hazlitt who said it to her. He said, Ludwig von Mises said, you're the smartest man I've ever met. And Ayn Rand said, did he say man? Right? No, she viewed as a compliment. Right. But she wanted to be clear that he said man. She was excited. Yes. Absolutely. I took it as her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal. Oh, I think that's right. I think that's right. Plus, I think the perception out there, the perception in the culture of man as being rational was a compliment to her because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational. Yeah, because Mises is old school. He's an older Eastern European guy, so he would definitely have these rigid views. Like his wife, I read her autobiography, Margit von Mises, and basically he made her his secretary to the point where if he's typing something or he had something handwritten, she had to type it out. And if she made a typo, he would tear up the page, she had to start from the beginning. But it's like, this is the role of the man, this is the role of the woman. So for him to regard her, this was kind of a breaking through moment. Not that she was secretly misogynist. So I think we go wrong when people try to understand the world around them and come up with wrong ideas. And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas because it's hard to figure out what's right. So we start with trying to come up with mystical explanations for the existence of the things around us. And that I think very quickly leads to some people being able to communicate with the mystical stuff out there and some people not being able to communicate and some people wanting to control other people and using those pseudo explanations as a way to control. So you always have, Rand called it Attila and the witch doctor. You always have a witch doctor, the mystic, the philosopher, the intellectual, the philosopher king, and you have an Attila, you have somebody who wants control of the people, who's willing to use force to control other people. And when those two get together, that's when things go bad. And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history is when those two are together. And so the not having them together, having the right ideas, and the right ideas are ones that are not exclusive to those guys and where we don't allow Attila to have that kind of physical power over us, that's an exception and that's rare and that's what needs to be defended. Yeah. Stalin's not personally killing people. Hitler's not personally killing people. Charles Manson's not personally killing people. They need their goons. They need their goons, but also they don't have original ideas. Everything Stalin says is original to him, right? He needs a Marx, even Lenin, right? They all need a Marx, right? And Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that set him up for these kind of ideas. So Stalin both needs his goons, even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly Stalin. Yeah, he's a bank robber, yeah. And then, so take Lenin, Lenin I think is a better example because Lenin's more intellectual if you will. Lenin needs his goons, he needs his Stalins, but Lenin also needs his Marx. And we don't want to let Marx off the hook because Marx knows, I think, implicitly that his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin. His ideas are not neutral. I don't think it's implicit at all. I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror, this is not implicit in the slightest. No, absolutely. I mean, there are letters between him and Engels where they talk about which peoples will have to be eliminated because they don't have that proletarian thing, right? So I think certain peoples in Southern Europe are not appropriate for the utopia to come and will have to be gone. And Marx also had this concept which we still see today in garbled ways of polylogism, which is if you're a capitalist and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker, your logic is different than mine. It's really going to be impossible for us to communicate. And at a certain point, you're going to have to be liquidated. And they pretend that doesn't mean murdered, but it means murdered. And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois. And then you have the Holodomor and things like this. No, he knows exactly where it's going to lead. And this is why people say, oh, Marx is not evil. He just wrote books. No, it's the people who write books who are responsible for the way history evolves. And they know the bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas, and they need to bear the moral responsibility for what happens when the ideas are implemented. Here's a way. Can I ask a question? Yeah. Because I think I know more about Rand than Yaron does. So let's see. Oh. Okay. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Who did Ayn Rand say is the most evil man who ever lived? Immanuel Kant. That's right. Correct. No, that I know. I mean, it's a big deal that Immanuel Kant is. And most people don't understand why, because if you read Kant, there's certain passages in Kant that sound pretty liberal, they sound pretty, it sounds like he's for the individual, he sounds like he's for the American Revolution, things like that. But when you actually read his philosophy and what he's trying to defend and what he's trying to undermine, he's trying to undermine the foundations that make the revolution possible, that make freedom and individualism possible. He's trying to destroy the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment are those ideas that make freedom, individualism feasible. He's trying to undermine reason. And without reason, we're nothing. We can't survive as a species. And that's why she thought he was the most evil person, because his ideas undermine the very foundations of what it requires to be a human being, reason and individualism. Those are the things he's trying to eviscerate. I know you've talked about Hoffman before. So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to, Donald Hoffman, Donald Hoffman is the University of California, Irvine, a neurologist, a neuroscientist, something like that. So I met him once and we were at one of these conferences where you do a quick intro, you sit and you do a quick intro. His introduction was, I've just written a book that proves that evolution has conditioned us not to see reality. That is very Kantian. Yeah. And he is basically just presenting pseudoscience to defend Kant's position about epistemology and about metaphysics. And there's nothing original there. And he puts up a bunch of equations and he says, I ran a simulation and it proves I'm right. So Yaron is a little bit frustrated with Donald Hoffman's work. Let me... I'm not frustrated. I just think it's completely wrong and it's anti life, anti mind, anti evolution. I think he's an anti evolutionist at the end. And I think it, you know, anytime you say, look, here's the important point. Anytime you say reality doesn't exist, well, who are you? What do you mean by reality? What do any of your words mean? What does anything you say even mean if it doesn't refer to something that's actually out there in reality? I try to defend this point of view because in a certain kind of sense, I hear it as being humble in the face of the uncertainty that's around us. Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence of Ayn Rand and yourself, that reason can be like this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world and makes us like have an ethical moral life and all those kinds of things. You kind of assume that reason is a superpower that has no limits. Wait, hold on, hold on a second. But I got this one. See this is already leading to a murder by words and we've been only talking for 20 minutes. The three of us wouldn't get together, we wouldn't get along together on an island. We'll just make him our slave. We're all going to get along. He's just going to do the work. But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave, so this is not going to end well for me. We could provide value as dinner. That's the problem I'm trying to get to. That's a solution. Okay. But Donald Hoffman says that there is like he makes an argument that exactly as you said, that what we perceive is not, is very, very far from actual physical reality. In fact, we're not able to perceive the physical reality at all. And he also makes the bigger claim that evolution prefers beings who are not attached to reality. So like evolution created creatures that are basically functioning way outside of what the physical reality is. I got this. I got this. Okay. Because there's a lot to unpack here and I hate all of it. Okay. First of all, no, no, I'm serious. First of all, when you were making that comment about how, you know, reason is a superpower beyond limit, you're being ironic, but it's true. And I'll give you one example, which is astronomy. If you look at the physical size of the universe, it's literally in one sense incomprehensible. So he's right in the sense that I do not understand and none of us understand what it means for 93 million miles away for the sun to be. It makes no, it's a number on another screen, right? That said, the fact that my mind, and I'm not one of the great thinkers of all time is getting there, is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism means. The fact that we can, you know, you're a math person that you could look at galaxies and reduce it to 10 to the 64th power in terms of distance that shows the unlimited capacity of the human mind and reason. Number one. Number two is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch with reality, and I don't know in what context he's saying that because that sentence could mean a lot of different things. Evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution. Evolution works because you are fitted to the reality of the situation around you. It's not that someone is sitting down and says, well, I'm going to add a fin to this animal and that fin helps it swim. I engineered a check mark. It's that mutations occur. The vast majority of these mutations are against reality. They do not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life, but the ones that are in touch with reality, such as, okay, it's really cold here. There's no predators here. If I could figure out, and I'm using that term very loosely, a way where I could survive in the cold, I don't have predation. It's really great. The fact that unconsciously and mindlessly this process can force the mutation and evolution of the form precisely means that they're in touch with reality. Now, if he means the consciousness is not in touch with reality, that's another thing that I really hate. You're referring to the reality as like the biological reality of evolution, but all of that is based on many other layers of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics underneath it all, and he's saying somewhere along the layers, you start to lose more and more and more attachment to the actual. Hold on. Can I add one more sentence? Sure, sure. I do not, I despise the idea, I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking, the idea that the reality we don't live in is somehow more real than this. That is a very dangerous idea to say, well, quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's correct and none of us disagree with that. What we perceive, macro, works in a different way, well, that's the real reality and this is fake. Bullshit. Yeah. This is the real reality. That is a different type, a subset, but no one's living there, and humanity is the starting point. It's a subset that has to integrate with this world. There isn't two worlds, one in the quantum world and one here. They're integrated. Now, we might not have the scientific knowledge to know how they're integrated, but so what? We know that there's only one reality and that's this one. He has this difference. He says, evolution matches up to fitness, not to reality, and he creates this dichotomy between fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense. There is no such thing as a concept of fitness outside of fitness to what? To reality. Fitness and reality are the same thing. They're not separate things. The whole way he sets this up intellectually is wrong, I think to some extent dishonest, and certainly philosophically corrupt. It's Kantian. Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas, and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas for the last 200 years, and they give it a different facade. He's giving it an evolutionary facade, but it's just a facade for the same idea, and that is that somehow because we have eyes, we cannot see, because the light waves are going through a medium, and that medium necessarily distorted. The medium changes the resolution at which you see. If I take off my glasses, I'm seeing it a little differently. The thing is still there, and the thing is still there in the way I see it, because I'm grasping the handle and lifting the cup. That's not an illusion. That is a real cup. So do you think some things are more real than others? For example, money. There's a bunch of things that seem real. This is not an Animal Farm reference. Is this going to be about love? There's nothing as real as love, right Lex? Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes. No. No. No. There are some things that have become reality because we humans, in a collective sense, believe it. You can't believe something collectively. Now it doesn't become real. What does it mean to say something's real? That is, you can, so love, for example, love's a good example, right? Love is an abstraction, right? It's not something I can touch. It's not something I can see, but it's certainly something you would feel. Not something you can hit. We love differently. You and I. I don't think that's true. I think I'm just too honest about it. You can't hit love. You can't, love is an abstraction. So is love real? Yes, it's real because I feel it. It's an existent, but it's not an existent in the same sense as this cup is. So abstractions are real, but at the end of the day, all abstractions have to be able to be reduced to actual concrete so you can either see it. I really don't like criticizing someone whose work I haven't read secondhand. So I want to take this away from speaking about him personally, because I'm not familiar with his work. He is a nice guy. That makes me like him. That makes him like him less. Now you're back talking about evolutionary fitness again. I think there's disingenuousness when we talk about the word real in terms of ideas are real versus the cup is real, and you try to switch back between those two meanings, and it's a little bit of linguistic wordplay that is trying to force a point that's not accurate, in my opinion. Well, I think the issue is, and what he's challenging is, and what Kant is challenging is, do we know reality? And I think the answer is yes, we do. We know reality. We observe it. Now, do we know everything about reality? No. We can't, for example, sense what a bat senses as reality. A bat observes reality through, what is it? Sonar. Sound waves, right? Yeah. Through sonar. Right? So it has a different sense, but it's the same reality. It's still a table. The bat's spatial relationship to the table is different than ours, but the object is still the same object. But how do you know that's true? Are you not just hoping that's true or assuming that's true? That's what no means. No means I have identified an aspect of reality. That's literally the definition of knowledge. Now if you say, how are you certain? Well, that's a whole other question, but one of the reasons I know it was certain is because this happens. Yes. Okay. And I know this is going to happen. And if I tell you, if you go downstairs, you're going to see, you know, Mr. Jones and you walk downstairs and I see Mr. Jones, at the very least, you know, something's going on there. So what about all the things that mess with our perception? For example, we've talked about psychedelics before. Talked about in dreams where you'd be detached from this, I mean, there's certain things that happen to your brain to where you're not able to perceive. So you're not perceiving reality. That's right. So your brain is creating a different reality. It's not real. How do you know it's not real? How do you know the elves will meet in the... Because partially because I need to take a drug in order to do it, because I'm asleep when I'm dreaming. It's not reality. That is clearly a creation of our mind. It's not a creed. Hold on. Let's get to the psychedelics. The drug is real. I think you're going to be thinking I'm joking a lot more than I am this episode. I'm going to be the humorist objectivist. He could be the court jester. In terms of psychedelic, when people are perceiving these elves, these machine elves, these other entities, whether they could either be real or not, I don't know. But the point is that doesn't go to his broader point because if these beings exist and the only way to perceive them is to take a drug, they still exist. This is just... For example, if I'm walking outside in the woods at night and there's a deer and I can't see it, but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it. That deer was there the entire time. It's not that the night vision goggles caused the deer to appear. You can recreate it not only using night vision goggles, but you can then use sonar. You can use other mechanisms by which to prove that the deer is there. The thing with psychedelics is that...I don't know because maybe I'm the least experienced with psychedelics here probably. My guess is every time you take the psychedelic, you have exactly the same experience of the deer. No. Second, are there other mechanisms, other scientific mechanisms by which I can find the deer out there other than the psychedelics? We don't know yet. So... Well, we don't know yet. Well, but the... This is Occam's Razor, right? The simplest explanation here is the most likely, and that is that you've taken something that's messing with the chemicals in the brain, something is being...that your brain can project. We dream. Nobody's arguing that the dream is real and reality is not, or if they are, I think they're nuts. The dream is a dream. Your brain is creating an image of telling you a story. Psychedelics are simulating the same thing. That's probably what's going on until there's evidence to the contrary. Well, hold on. Let me disagree with you a little bit, because let's take Adderall, for example. No one here disagrees. That's something much more simpler and less out of this world. I think what he might be speaking to, I know Joe Rogan talks about this and other people in this space, is that when you take certain drugs, it changes your perception. It doesn't have to be otherworldly, it changes your perception of what's around you. And as an example, what they talk about is, the three of us are talking, there's lots of other stuff in the room, we're only aware of it vaguely on a personal level. So it changes the... Hold on, let me finish. No, I don't do that. I'm Israeli. You're about to start. This is back to the desert island of murder. No, but we just resolved it within three seconds. We did. There's no conch. He's trying to get us to feed on the truth. Yeah, it's not going to happen. Exactly. I'm trying to create murder. No one has asthma. It's going to be fine. Because if the two of you murder each other, there's more food for me. There's no food. You're all... Well, ratings would go up. You robots eat alcohol. Ratings would go up. Viewership would go up. Yeah, it's good for the ratings. Yeah. But if you take, for example, Adderall or speed, right? People like you focus on things, you perceive things that aren't there. But that doesn't mean those things weren't there to begin with. There are absolutely ways to change human perception chemically, through glasses, through getting drunk. None of that changes the fact that the reality underneath it is real and is causing this effect. Absolutely. And it has a particular nature, right? And all it's doing is changing the focus, right? So if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing the same thing. I'm just seeing something's out of focus and maybe in the distance, I can't see something. It's just gone. And then I put it on. There it is. That thing was always there. It's just the sensitivity I have to it has changed. And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally. And drugs can change the relative sensitivities. It doesn't change reality. It changes our ability to focus on reality. Let me give you one great example, the microscope. I forget who it was. His name was with an L, the scientist who discovered it. He had a drop of water and he's seeing monsters, the protozoa in this drop of water. For him, it must have been, it is like a drug experience, like, wait a minute, I'm drinking this. And there's alien beings whose shapes are completely crazy in this water. Those beings were always there. Those beings were there before any of us were here. They've been there for billions of years. But because he had this apparatus, now he's able to see protozoa. No one's arguing protozoa are extradimensional, no one's arguing the supernatural, amoebas are well studied, paramecia, all the other lots. So if these elves, the machine elves are real, and the only way to perceive them is through DMT or something like that, that doesn't contradict the broader point that they've always been there and this is the mechanism for perceiving them. So here's the word I was looking for, it's the word actually Greg taught me this, so Greg Salamieri. So it's resolution, right? So it's resolution. My resolution changes with the glasses. My resolution gets finer with the microscope. So there's probably some bacteria here on the table. 100%. Right? There's no doubt about it. I can't see them. I can't use the microscope to not see them, but they're either there or they're not there. And I have the tools to discover whether they are there or they're not there. And that's called a microscope. Now there could be even smaller beings that even with a microscope, I won't be able to define, but that's completely arbitrary to claim that, that they're there until I find a tool to be able to discover it. The same with what you see if you're seeing other beings when you're taking psychedelics. Unless you find another tool to be able to see them with, the simplest assumption is probably the truest assumption. But even the not simplest assumption doesn't contradict the broader point. No. Which is again, reality is what it is. If it turns out that there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and our resolution while we're not on psychedelics is not fine enough to observe them. So what? That doesn't change the fact that we evolved to survive in reality as it is. What do you do with the possibility that our resolution as it currently stands is really, really crappy? That basically. Well, it's not. No, but you don't know that. No, we know it. We know it completely. Compared to who? Exactly. Compared to the future possibilities like artificial intelligence. It is true. Hundreds of years. It is crappy compared to the future. That's true. Fine. But that's not relevant. Much, much. Yes. Or just the magnitude of crappy. Of course. No, but here I'll use the standard that Hoffman uses, evolution, right? The reason I know that our resolution is phenomenal, it's phenomenally good, right? Because look at us, we're sitting here comfortably in an apartment with air conditioning and in warm Austin with microphones and we did all this stuff, we're really good at survival and changing the environment. Indeed, if you look at the species that we know of, there's not a species that come anywhere close to our ability to deal with reality, to observe reality, to understand reality and to shape it. Now in the future, well, we'll come up with machines that can figure out stuff that we have no clue about today. That's only because we're so well suited to reality that can we create those machines. And I promise you, in the future, it's going to be much more what you're saying. That's how it's going to happen. No, but the thing is, when the creatures from the future look back to the things we're saying now, what Aydin Rand is saying, what you're saying with certainty, do you think they'll laugh at the level of how much confusion there was, how much inaccuracy? Did you? No. No, no. Let me get this one. You know what they're going to do? Yes. They're going to either read Aristotle or read any of these great geniuses of the past. It's like these people didn't have electricity. They didn't have warm clothes or anything, and they're able to figure out the diameter of the Earth. Like the creativity to be and to get it within a few miles. The creativity and to figure out the speed of light when you don't even have a stopwatch. When you look back, a lot of it's nonsense, but it's like when you're talking to a kid. They would disregard the nonsense, and when they get something right, it's awe. So it's never a numbers game, right? So it's the few that validate and justify the rest. So when you look at Aristotle, he's talking about there was one of those causes which is like time travel and it doesn't really make sense. But you look at the rest of this stuff or even Plato or any of these greats, it's like, oh my, this is an amazing miracle. I wouldn't say literally miracle, I got you, everyone. But at the same time, yeah, a lot of these other people had stupid ideas. You don't care. You care about those great, great minds and how they moved us all forward. To this day, we still study Pythagoras. And it's not even just the sciences and the math. Think about the philosophy. How much is there to learn from reading Aristotle or Plato or Socrates when you disagree with them? How many giants have there been in all of human history that have had the minds of Socrates or Plato and Aristotle? A thousand years where they look back at Plato and Aristotle and admire them? Absolutely. Well, they find certain things that are wrong, yes, but certain things that Aristotle discovered are absolutely right and will always be right. Certain things that Ayn Rand discovered will always be right. I think a lot of what she came up with, will some things be discovered to be wrong? Yeah. You know, that wouldn't shock me. But the genius and the truth that we know today is amazing. It's stunning to be pessimistic about us because in the future we'll know more. Not pessimistic, but more humble. There's no reason to be humble. I mean, I really think humility is a vice, not a virtue. What's there to be humble about? Look at life. This is amazing. We should be... But the word humble has different meanings. I know. I know. Okay. I know what it's going to get. I mean, humility in a sense of not appreciating the genius and the ability and the success and all the stuff that we as individuals, I think, in our lives, but as a culture, as a movement, if you think about movement in terms of those of us who respect reason have achieved in spite of the odds, we should be proud of that and pride as the virtue. Humility in the sense of, yeah, I know there's more to know. I know there's a lot more to know and in the future we'll know more. Sure. But I don't think that's the way... See, I take humility as the way the Christians use it, which is the other way. And I think it's a real vice. It's don't think of yourself too much just because you can think that's no big deal or just because you can create this stuff. It is a big deal. Your achievements are a big deal and you should take credit for them. So be careful with the word humility because the real meaning is the Christian meaning, which is a very, very bad meaning. Hold on. Let me be a little pedantic because there's no such thing as real meaning, right? So there's different meanings. Okay. Hold on. This is semantics, but here's another real meaning that you're not going to disagree with, which is the smartest person on earth is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge, right? So if I meet someone who is less intelligent than me and less informed than me, it is still certain that this person has things to teach me. If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy's dumb as rocks. I don't know anything about cars. What he tells me about that car is good. I could take it to the bank. He's going to be in a position to inform me. So one of the reasons humility is extremely important is very often you have people and you see this very much in academia who think you know exactly where I'm going around who think they're know what else and they think, oh, I have this degree. You're a layman. You've never been formally educated. Therefore not only you dumb and uneducated and you're wrong. And it's like this person might be have won a great example of this. And this is an example you might not like is a lot of times you have these native populations and they'll have a better understanding of the animals around them, the plants, the fruits, whatever. And you'd have these scientists and be like, oh, they're talking about this monster in the woods. Yeah, whatever. This giant, this giant ape. But it was real. It was the gorilla. But you know, you dismiss them because, oh, these are stupid, ignorant, whatever people that's kind of changed to some extent. But that is an aspect of humility that I think behooves especially highly intelligent people because there is such a presumption to be dismissive of people who you regard as less than. But they're often right. So I agree. I agree with all of the concrete examples. I just think we should come up with a better word than humility. And I don't have one because I'm not I'm not a woodsmith. I'm not. This is not my strength. But humility, humility is a is a word from the Christian ethics. And it means something very specific in the field of ethics. And it means the opposite of of what I think virtue requires. It's demeaning. It's to put you down. It's to it's to it's to resist pride. And I think pride is a very important thing. I don't know. You're on. But again, you have to define your terms properly. Hating myself has has been quite useful for me as well, but that's because you're Russian and Jewish. So by what this changes, you know, this is this is what happens, right? We're brought up to, you know, to to feel exactly that way in a good Russian boy. So we got him. Oh, my God. What is this? What is this? Gimmat again. What is this? Gimmat again. What is that? What it says? Yeah. Gimmat again. I can't. I can't. I'm blind. Yeah. But as long as you're good. But is it kosher? Yes, it is. Check if it's kosher. This is Ukrainian, my friend. Oh, oh, my God. That is a sin. How dare you? That is really simple. You know, me and Sinai were born in the same town. I'm kidding. My dad is Ukrainian. Don't get mad. So I don't think I don't think self self. What did you how did you define it? Self hate? Yeah. I think self hate is quite destructive. Speak for yourself. I think that humility is quite destructive. Humility in the sense of I'm no big deal. No. I mean, if you've achieved something in life, you are a big deal. You are a big deal because, you know, look, you got the two of us to fly into town just to sit down here and have a conversation with you. You're a big deal. That says more about you than me. We're just desperate. We're lonely and depraved. I'm not lonely. I might be desperate. I'm starting to question your ability to reason with the decisions you're making on the on the aspect of and I should mention that The Idiot by Dostoevsky is one of my favorite novels and there is a Christian ethic that runs through that. I mean, because because, yeah, I mean, particularly but I hate to bring this up, but particularly Russians and particularly Russian Jews and particularly Eastern European Jews are incredibly Christian. There's a there's a there's a real Christian theme in in Judaism that's that's about guilt. Guilt is not there's no guilt in Judaism. King David doesn't feel any guilt. Solomon doesn't. There's no guilt in the in the Old Testament. Plenty of guilt. Once Christianity has an impact on Judaism, we're raised to feel this way. We're raised to be humble. We're raised not to feel special. We were raised to think we're no big deal and to and our mothers put us down and and use that against us and try to inflict guilt on us. They raise us up and then they knock us down. It's a mechanism, but it's it's a cultural mechanism. And I think it's very destructive to self esteem and to happiness. Let me and I'll give you a great he's absolutely right with what he just said. I disagree. Oh, yeah. Why? Why is he right? Because like my family, for example, it still doesn't really understand how I could pay the rent because I don't go into an office. And like when I started out trying to be a writer, the immediate reaction isn't which is a lot of times I talk to kids, right, and they have these aspirations. And I'll tell them, go for it while you're young. If you fail, you'll go to your grave with like I tried my best. I didn't make it happen. Whereas if you don't try and never achieve, you are going to feel horrible for the rest of your life. And this is the example I use all the time. I bring up many times I go go to any bookstore and look at all those terrible, terrible books on the shelves that you wonder, how is this a book that could be you? You could be that crappy writer. But the thing is, in that culture that Yaron was talking about, you tell your family, I'm going to be a writer. Who do you think you are? Why do you think you're going to be? You're no Stephen King. And it's like, why do you have to be Stephen King? Why can't you just be a mediocre, crappy writer making the rent? The best that you can be. But even that is an amazing accomplishment. Yeah, absolutely. If I don't have to go to an office and I write books that not that many people read, this is the story of my life, at the same time, I do have pride because I made this happen. You can be the best version. I mean, this is a cliche, but you can be the best version of yourself. It's not a competition. And yet our Jewish mothers, that's not what they aspire us to be. They aspire us to be the best version of what they imagine, what the culture imagines, what society imagined, not what, it's not about you in their minds. And I've seen it, I see it all around me. People putting their kids down, putting themselves down. It's not healthy. I've never told this story, I'm going to tell it now. When I graduated college, I was a temp for a while because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Right? And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette. You're going to have jobs that pay well, that suck, and pay well that are great or that are great that don't pay well and suck and pay poorly. But it's you and you're 21, you have that kind of space. And my grandmother was talking to her brother, you know, he's talking about his kids, she's talking about me, she's, you know, from Odessa. And she told me she lied to him about how much money I was making. And that's something I've never brought up and it still hurts me. Because it's like, your approval of me should be a function of my character, my happiness. And the fact that you feel ashamed over how much money I'm making, especially at this point in my life, I thought was very, really misplaced priorities. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know. I don't know what to make of that. I think there's a huge benefit to the humility, terms aside, for believing that others can teach you a lot. Everybody, everybody can teach you a lot. I think we all agree on that. I just mentioned that, the mechanic. No, you do. Exactly. Exactly the point. But for that, I do believe you have to not constantly sort of break your ego apart and constantly question whether you know anything about this world and sort of there's a negativity with it that I think is very useful. And it's also very fulfilling, just constantly. I don't know. It's the other way around. I find that the more, the more I know, the more I know I know, the easier it is for me to learn from other people. The broader a context I have, the more curious I become, the more areas I know. You know, it's true that the more you know, the more areas you know you don't know. And the more I find myself attracted to people who can teach me something about things I don't know. Whereas if I was ignorant, if I truly believed I didn't know anything, I don't know how I would live. It would really completely challenge everything, everything about life for me. Where would I even start? You wouldn't know where to start. So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know, you don't have a full appreciation of yourself. So really building a recognition of what do I know, right? And how much do I know is really crucial to living. And I'll tell you something else that furthers my life enormously is when you reach a certain point in your career in your life, and you're talking to people who are a lot younger, and they might be smart, driven, intelligent, they lack data. When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate, you don't know what the code words are. So if I am in a position to sit down with this kid and be like, do X, Y, and Z, and here's why I'm coming to this conclusion. This is the information that released me this conclusion. And I can save them from some of the suffering I went through. That is very gratifying. It's making the world a better place. And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility, because like, in this context, I'm an expert, or at least knowledgeable enough that I'm comfortable giving you advice. Yeah. And look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff that other people don't. And I know a lot of stuff other people don't, and I do. And it's fun. I'm a teacher. I'm a teacher at heart, always have been. It turns out, I didn't know that early on, but I like becoming an expert and then trying to teach people. It doesn't mean I know everything. Quite the contrary. Again, the more I know, the more I know that the certain things I don't know and the certain areas of expertise I don't have. But look, pride is a broader concept than that. Pride is about, and humility is the opposite of pride. And Christianity has that right. Pride is about taking your life seriously. Pride is about wanting to be really good at living, wanting to have the knowledge. And I think what you're describing is, you're describing as I'm constantly learning. Sometimes I have to challenge myself, I have to question what I believe in order to gain new knowledge. That's all good, but that is a drive that is driven by pride. You want to know. There are lots of people out there that don't want to know, because they don't have that pride. They don't have that commitment to live, the commitment to achieving something. And I'm going to say something else that I think is crucial. Humility is extremely important when it comes to politics. Because if you feel comfortable telling someone you've never met how to live their life, that is a complete lack of humility. I lack it, obviously, because I tell people how to live all the time. Not through force. Not through force. That's what I'm saying. And of course, not in the concrete. I don't tell them, you know, move to, although I do tell them to move to Austin, but I don't tell them this is what you do as a profession. But I give them the principles, because I think they're principles of how to live. They're making the choice. That's my point. Politically, what I'm saying is it shows a lack of humility to be like, I've never met this person. This is how I'm going to take money from him. I'm going to... See, but I don't see that humility. There's nothing... No, it's the lack of humility. No, but it's not even a lack of humility, because it's... Who am I to tell them how to live? That's lack of humility. No, of course you're not. No, who are you to tell them how to live is an issue of... It's an issue of force and rights and a bunch of different things. I don't think it's a lack of humility there. I think it's a lack of being a human being. It can be both. Sure. I think it's, who gives you the right to dictate to somebody else how to live their lives? Yeah, but that's a lack of humility, if you think you have that right. Again, we're using humility in a very different way. No, we're using the same way, because the person who feels comfortable, they think, I know better than you how you should live your life to the point where I'm a couple forcing you, because I know it's gonna be best for you in the long run. And the answer is you don't know. Right, but that's a lack of humility. I think in your mind, you're on humility somehow tied to the Christian concept, the humility, and so you're kind of allergic to the word. Well, absolutely, because it's part of... If you look at the cardinal virtues, the cardinal sins in Christianity, pride is a cardinal sin and humility is a cardinal virtue, but they don't mean it in the sense, because they're happy to tell you how to live, right? They're happy to be philosopher kings over your life, and they believe that's being humble. And you should be humble, by the way, in listening to the Pope or listening to God, because what do you know? You know nothing. God knows everything, so you should shut up and do what you're told. That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble. I mean, it's a sense in which I always use the example of Abraham, right? God comes to Abraham and says, go kill your oldest son, your only son, right? Your only son. Go kill him. It's like... And what does Abraham do? He says, yes, sir. I'll follow... And he's a moral hero, for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he's a moral hero, because he follows orders, because he's humble. I would tell God to go to hell. Screw you. I'm not killing my son. There's no way. But he killed... I mean, he killed his son, so it's only fair. Well, this is before he killed his son, so I didn't know that, right? No, but part of the evil, part of the evil of Christianity is that he's killed his son in the most torturous form of death possible. I mean, the whole story of Jesus is one of the most immoral, unjust stories ever told, and that Christians elevate this to a position of... I'd love to have this conversation with Jordan, right? Jordan Peterson. The idea of elevating... That'll never happen. No, it won't. But elevating Jesus, exactly, elevating Jesus to a superhero status for one of the most immoral acts in human history is horrific. So yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God sacrificing his own son, never mind my son, but let him go do it to his own son. But he didn't kill Isaac. He killed the goat. The story's about Abraham, not about God. First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abraham through that. But Abraham has to assume that he's going to kill his son, and he lifts his... He's going to do it, and he stopped. So the whole point is obedience. That's what humility leads to. It leads to the opposite of the story you were telling. It leads to people saying, yes, I should be told what to do. Where's the authority who actually knows something? I don't know anything. No, I know a lot, and I know a lot about my life. The science... So you stay away from my life because I have pride in my life. The science is settled, right? Look at these experts. Who am I to argue with these experts? They tell me to drink dog pee. I'm going to drink... What am I, not drink dog pee? Yes. Yeah. Let's go back to the island. Speaking of which... We're on an island again? We're back to the island. Manhattan. And let's go to the island. Let's... I live on an island. Everything is an island in some context. Like Earth is an island. This universe is an island in a multiverse. There's no multiverses. There's only one universe. All right. So let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island. You wish. Hold on. Hold on a sec. Hey, girl. Whatcha doing? Lex. Lex Friedman? Look him up. Lex who? Yeah, exactly. I don't know. Lex who? I don't know, Lex says something as big of a following almost as Jordan does. I know Jordan. I know his family actually through Jim Keller, who's his relative. He's an engineer. And I just talked to Sam, who is perhaps a little bit aligned in some sense on your perspective on religion and so on. So let me ask, is there some... Religion, yes. But... Other things, no. Sam Harris. Sam Harris, yeah. Oh, sorry. Sam Harris. I thought you were talking about baseball. Yeah. I just talked to Sam. I thought... Let's talk about humility. Let's talk about humility, Lex. My buddy Sam. I was talking to Barack. You might know him. Yeah. I simply... Humility went out the window. I'm just a natural language processing model that I assume that once I mentioned Jordan Peterson, it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means. This is how neural networks think. This is how robots think, Michael, you should know this. I thought by now you'd be a scholar. For the sake of the audience. Humility. Everything can teach you something, even the robot. Okay. So do you think there's value in religion or broader? Do you think there's value in myth? And as we've been talking about the value of reason, do you think it's possible to argue in society as we grow the population of our little island that there's some value of common myths, of common stories, of common religion? There was value. There is no value today. So human beings need explanations, right? They need a philosophy to guide their life. They need ethics. They need some explanation of what's going on in the world, right? And it's no accident that the early religions had a river god and they had a sun god and a moon god because everything they didn't understand, they made god, right? So they had multiple gods because they didn't understand very much. As human understanding evolved, it increased, as we knew reality more, right? We came to the conclusion of, you know, this is very inefficient to have all these gods. This is a genius of Judaism, right? Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff we don't know in and we'll call it one god and then we don't, as we gain new knowledge, we can just take it out of the bucket that's god and put it into the bucket of science. At some point, though, at some point, and that point suddenly came during the scientific revolution, I think, we could come to the conclusion that, no, we don't need this bucket that's called god to explain the things that we don't know. We can say we don't know and we're learning. And slowly our knowledge is increasing and yet there's a lot more that we don't know, but we don't need to throw it into some bucket that's called god in order to have it. And I think that's true for morality and it's true for everything else, right? As we gain the tools to understand what morality requires, we don't need a set of commandments. We can figure out morality from human nature and from reality. So I don't think we need religion anymore. I think religion needed to die probably about 200 years ago and was dying, I think, up until Kant. It seemed to be dying. Kant's missions, as he says, is to revive religion against attack of reason in the Enlightenment. Now mythology is a little different because it depends what you mean by mythology. Certainly we need stories and certainly we need art. Art is a... And Rand writes about this a lot and she's an artist and she writes in... I'm a huge fan of the Romantic Manifesto, which I think is one of her underappreciated masterpieces. Oh, I hate it. Okay. That's it. Okay. So I think we have a real need, right? As a conceptual being, we have a need for aesthetic experiences. We have a need to concretize abstractions, to concretize abstract ideas, to concretize the complex nature of the world out there. And that's what painting sculpture, to an extent music, but painting sculpture literature does for us. So to the extent that mythology serves that purpose, it's just art, right? To the extent that it serves another purpose, that is that it's a way for the gods to communicate with us or it fits some kind of preexisting mental construct that we have as, again, kind of a conscientious perspective, right? That we have these categorical imperatives and this mythology links up to that. Then I think it's false, it's not helpful and destructive. So I believe religion today is a destructive force on planet Earth. I think it's always been a destructive force. It was just a necessary force, right? You needed an explanation. People needed something to believe in. Once you get philosophy and once you get philosophy that starts explaining real life, real world, you don't need religion anymore and indeed it becomes a destructive force. And you look around the world today, it's an unbelievably destructive force. Everywhere it touches is bad for life. Again, mythology depends, art is essential, very, very crucial to human existence. I mean, I'd love to hear what you think, but you don't see religion and philosophy and mythology as just a continuous spectrum? Yeah. So religion is a primitive form of philosophy. It's prephilosophical. Where I thought Rand was going to go and he didn't go was that I think he, I agree with what he's going to say, Rand was a mythologizer. In certain specific contexts Atlas Shrugged is a myth. It's one thing to sit down and say, these are the people who move us forward. These are the values that are important. When you experience it through a story, through a movie, through a TV show, a poem or a painting, it affects you in a very visceral, very different way. Talk about American history. You have the founding fathers, then you have the myth of the founding fathers. Now, unfortunately the term myth often means lie, but it could mean in a useful sense, an abstraction to help you systematize and concretize ideas. So you have the myth of Reagan, you have the myth of Thatcher, the reality often falls very short. But when you look at how these different figures are mythologized, not only is it very inspirational on a personal level, very motivating on a personal level, it's also a great way to concretize ideas because just how humans think, it's one thing to think about ideas, but when you see someone who embodies these ideas, Miss America, I was saying earlier, I had an aster on my show, these people might be jerks. But when you look at them, one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it, that could be to anyone very motivating. And it's very important for people to have the belief that happiness and achievement is possible because it's very hard to keep that in mind, especially if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're unemployed, you don't have a girlfriend, you think it's going to be like this forever. And then you look at someone's story and they're like, you know what, that astronaut interview, Clayton Anderson, he applied 13 times, didn't get a call back, applied the 14th time, got a call back, didn't get the job, 15th time he get the job. He talks to kids and he goes, listen, apply 13 times. Even if you don't get the call back, you'll still feel I'm doing something. And having heard him and the myth of Clayton Anderson, this is going to tell people, yeah, you know what? That could be me. Absolutely. And it's not just happiness, it's the fact that virtue works, that the integrity, I mean, what's the power of the fountainhead? I know you love the fountainhead. Part of the power of the fountainhead is how it works, absolute commitment to integrity. He is committed to integrity and he's happy. And it's very rare in life to see that, to actually see a concrete of that. And it's very hard to hold it in your mind. Yes, I'm going to be stuck in the quarry or I'm going to be stuck doing this horrible job. But if I stick to my principles, I'm going to be how it works. Now I've got that concrete. I know I can immediately relate to that success. So I think art is essential. And I think in a sense, what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is art. You have to be careful in true stories, not to diverge too far from reality because then when you discover the reality, you don't want to whitewash it, and particularly when it has political implications and then it's really bad. So particularly with Reagan and Thatcher, you have to be careful because they want anyone near as good as people try to make them out to be. But these are powerful, powerful, powerful stories and people are moved by it. And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial. One of the goals to be happy is to bring your emotions in line with your thinking. And I think that stories and arts more broadly, and when I go and see Michelangelo's David, it does the same thing to me. I can stand up to anybody because he did. And look, he succeeded. And it makes sense that he could. So this is a really interesting idea of bringing your emotion in line with your thinking, with your reasoning. So Ben Shapiro famously has this saying, how do you like that transition, Michael? Give me props. I know you do. He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro. Yeah. Someone is not taking your calls. Benny. I guess it's a daily, don't take the caller. Back to the island with the murder. I think we know. Murder Island. We would know who would be committing the murder. I have the suit for it. So he has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings. And I've always felt badly about that statement somehow, like it was incomplete. So it's interesting that you mentioned bringing your emotions in line with your thinking. What do you think about that statement? I got this one. What Ben is doing in a loose way is attacking Kantianism because Kant, it's almost impossible for Westerners who aren't schooled in this to understand the idea of philosophical idealism because it sounds so crazy that you're like, these great minds of all time can't really be saying this. I must be missing something. So when we hear idealism, we think John F. Kennedy is a good example. You aspire things. You think life can be better than it is. That's not what it means in a philosophical sense. In philosophical idealism, it means ideas are more real than reality. That I have this idea, then this comes along. It's the reality that isn't correct. My idea is still correct. A good example of this that you see all the time on the internet is when they refer to Mitt Romney and John McCain as rhinos, Republicans in name only. And it's like, who is more a real Republican? The nominee of the party, the Senator, the governor of the party, or some person in your mind who has never existed and there's no evidence for them existing. So what Kant did is he bifurcated reality into what we see around us, the phenomenal world, but then it's inferior. The real world, the noumenal world, we can't access it because we have eyes. We only see the thing as it appears, not as it is in itself. And because of this, everything we know is a shadow and is secondary. And that's Plato, straight out of Plato. And the real reality is this realm of ideas. So when Ben is saying facts don't care about your feelings, what he is really saying is reality comes first. Your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it. You can't say, this is how I feel. This table doesn't care. You can yell at it all day long. It will still be indifferent to your emotional state because it comes first. So it's a great statement. I think he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand in a sense, and there's a sense in which he is. I mean, who popularized that kind of idea? And Ben has read Ayn Rand quite extensively. Not enough. Not enough. Well. Not enough to reference her. That's the way the army goes. So yeah, obviously. He may be read enough, but didn't understand enough. But so it's absolutely reality. Reality is unaffected by your emotional state and your feelings about it. And this is a great claim against the idealism, the philosophical idealism of much of the world out there, both left and right. I think politically, culturally, the left and right are detached from reality. They live in a different dimension, in a different space that they are creating in their own minds that has nothing to do with the real world. And when they fail, they make stuff up to justify their failure, right? So all of really the ideas that are promulgated today on both sides are this kind of detached from reality. We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself. But I believe that emotions are responses. The responses to reality conditioned by our existing concepts. You're going to have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex because he doesn't really understand what that is. I don't understand. That's a really, you got to really taste your words. But he's big on love? What is love? But he's big on love? He's trying to learn. Pretty big on love. I'm all in, I'm a love maximalist. I mean, I could create, we could create an environment on this island where you would really feel emotions. Like fear is an emotion. We could. That's the metaphysical terror. We could easily terrorize you to the point where you felt fear, right? So we could teach him about emotion. But emotions are a response to reality. So some people, for example, you could take five different people and show them exactly the same thing. And some of them would feel fear and some of them would actually feel indifferent and other people might feel love, right? I think Leonard Peacock uses the example of looking through a microscope and seeing a, I don't know, a virus or bacteria. And for one, it's a scientist, he's made a new discovery. He feels pride and love and awe. The one has no clue, right, and he's looking at this and it means nothing to them and somebody else might look at it and it's a bacteria and they feel fear because of what it could do to them. So it's conditioned by what you know, what your values are and your level of knowledge and what the thing is out there in reality. And it's that into, so your emotions respond to that. So aligning your emotions with your reason is making sure that your emotions are really conditioned by what you know explicitly versus what you've internalized implicitly that you might not agree with anymore. You know, things might happen in your childhood and they probably do, right, where you get a trauma. I don't know, I'm afraid of dogs and maybe when I was a five year old, some dogs jumped at me and I don't even remember it, right? But I came to a conclusion when I was five, dogs bad, dogs dangerous, right? And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God, that bringing my emotions aligned with reality, right, with my ideas is no, now I understand dogs don't have to be scary. I can work through this and there are various techniques and hopefully if there is such a science of psychology, but in psychology to get you to the point where you can get rid of that fear and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas, and that's what I mean by that. And let me build on that, talking about your friend Putin, I think I mentioned this before at least maybe on the show, he was meeting with Angela Merkel. Oh, Vladimir, please. Yeah, Vlad, my boy Vlad. He was meeting with Angela Merkel, Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs, so he brought out his big Labrador Retriever, now for people who don't know, Labradors are very big dogs, but they're also like the least aggressive, it's like you could punch them in the face, they don't care. That dog is not going to be more likely to attack just because she's scared. And I know they say animals can sense fear, domesticated dogs, if they see you're scared, they're not going to be aggressive, they're going to try to play. I remember when I was a kid, there was this dog, Rex, this German Shepherd, I'm five, this dog is gigantic, and I'm sitting on the couch, the German Shepherds have been bred for intelligence, they're very bright dogs, they're very good with kids, he's sitting next to me, this thing is three times my size. He very gently puts his paw on my leg to be like, kid, he can sense my fear, he's like, I'm not going to do it, I want to be your friend, I'm still freaking out. He licks my hand, it's just very scary, you know, animals are so bright, but that's the thing is, in terms of facts don't care about your feelings, that dog is not more likely to attack someone because their emotion is so intense. It's not that I feel something very strongly, therefore, this thing is more likely to happen. So my intensity of my emotion does not in any way correlate, when you're being irrational, to the likelihood of that thing actually happening. Now, you could have a dog that does respond to your emotion, right? But then it's, but then it's not, that's part of reality, right? That's a fact of reality that certain dogs respond to certain emotions. But isn't this emotion a part of reality, like, okay, let me say a word. So part of that, I would even say, don't let your emotion about your emotion, right, because sometimes you have an emotion about your emotion, don't be repressed, and identify the emotion as reality, and evaluate it, don't judge it, evaluate it. Is it a rational emotion? Is it consistent with my, like, if I'm afraid of these dogs, if I feel that fear, is it rational to be afraid of these dogs? But you're speaking to your own individual trajectory as a human being as you grow through the world and try to understand reality and connect yourself through reason to reality. What I'm talking about is a term like lived experience. When you observe and analyze the, you know, conversations with other people to try to understand how other people see the world, doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into that? Like, isn't emotion lived experience? So everybody experiences the same reality, but the way they experience it might be very different. And that has to do with what? It doesn't have to do with… With their values, with their conclusions, with their ideas, with their experiences, with a million different things, right? But is it… But at the end of the day, it's about the conclusions that they come to, which are then shaping their emotions. But look, emotions are not something to be avoided or ignored. That is, I can sense your emotions to some extent, right? That's a lie. Okay, it is Lex. I can sense his emotions. Thank you. Yeah. I can sense Michael's emotions, and that's part of the fact of reality, right? So if Michael responds to something that I view as really, really important, right? If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David, and Michael responds to Michelangelo's David and goes, eh, and turned his back to it and walked away, that would be really meaningful to me, right? That I would respond emotionally to that, and cognitively I would say, what is it about Michael that makes him, you know, respond this way? That is… That gives me a lot of information about him. So emotions are information laden, right? But they are not primary. They are responses, responses to something. So one must be very aware of one's own emotions, recognize them, and analyze them. And one should be aware of other people's emotions, if they're important to you, if they're not important to you. It doesn't matter, right? You don't care about a stranger's emotion, you know, like a stranger walks up to Michael and Michelangelo's David and said, eh, and walks away, and I go, okay, I'm glad you're a stranger. But it's… Now, I don't know what Michael's response to Michelangelo's David was or is, so I'm a little worried about what he's gonna say. You got candy too, that was great. Hey, hey, I thought I was special. Do I get Ukrainian candy? I don't know, I can't read either. What's this say, Joshua? What does that say to him? Is this Ukrainian candy as well? I thought it was sent to me from… Do you know that Atlas Shrugged was the bestselling book in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016? Do you know Atlas Shrugged was translated to Russian by someone who's now a crypto like billionaire and he made like six copies and I have one of them and I sent it to my great grandma. No, they're more than six, but yeah. Oh, but they were like… Because I have a copy too. Okay. Not I personally, the institute has a copy. I sent it to my great grandma and she said, why is he sending me this, I wanna read books about love. And I'm like, you know what? This is about love. Yeah. That's what you should have said. What's that, what does that say? So this says it's… It has vitamins and minerals. If it's in Russian, I don't believe it. It just sounds really strange to read like health information in Russian, I'm already distressed. But look, there's a Yorshik like you have. Exactly. I mean, I'm much, I like Kiev much more than I like Moscow. Wow. Strong words. But this is, this is not, it's like hard candy. I don't know. I think this, some of my friends sent me that's made with blood to give the kids iron. Whose blood? Like cow blood. Oh. Like with chocolate. All right. You can keep it. That's all you. All right. I'm keeping both of these. Can I take something you're talking about with emotion? Something that is very pernicious in terms of emotion is people denying the validity of their own emotions. And here's one example, someone could be in an abusive relationship or have had an abusive childhood and they think, well, I didn't have a black eye. We had dinner on the table. It wasn't abusive because you hear some other story. So they feel their emotion is invalid or like, oh, he never lays hands on me. He gets drunk and is mean to me. He's still basically a good person. You're denying that emotion. And that emotion is a response to something real. There's an expression, I have friends who are in 12 step programs. There's an expression there, which I think is very profound, which is if it's hysterical, it's historical. Meaning if some minor incident is having an extreme disproportionate impact on you, think, ask yourself, why am I responding in such an extreme way to some minor thing? And I will tell you 10 times out of 10, you'll go back and you'll be like, oh, I'm feeling now like I felt when I was eight and my dad came home and he was a total jerk and I didn't do anything wrong. And he thought I had, and I was complete powerless. And now I'm in the same situation, my boss. I'm not that eight year old in one sense I am, in another sense I'm not, but I feel the same way I did as a kid. And this is a very useful mechanism in terms of furthering one's happiness because you kind of deprogram all those things that you picked up as a child. But it's also, you know, if you're feeling something wrong, even though you're trying to rationalize in a way, you know, it's not abusive because he's not hitting me. No, the emotion is telling you something real about what's going on. So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right? So one of the powers emotions give you is they send you signals about something that might not be in cognition yet. And when you examine their emotion, it brings it to cognition and now you can act on it. So maybe the boss is abusive, but I didn't really think of it in those terms of my emotions is sending me signals. And now that I signal it, I'm going to resign. I'm going to find a better, another job. I'm going to complain to his boss or whatever. I'm going to take action. Why do you think Ayn Rand is such a controversial figure? Last time I spoke with you on this particular podcast, the, the amount of emails I've gotten positive and negative and certainly negative, I don't usually get negative emails. Yeah. I can't, I can't relate. I'm sure mine were all positive or only positive. It was mostly women sending pictures for me to forward to you because you didn't send me anything. Oh, it's the wrong email address. Sorry. I kept bouncing. Oh, so this is love. Love hurts. Okay. Yes. No. But why do you think she's such a divisive figure? Why do you think she provokes such emotion in both the positive and the negative side? I'd love to hear both of your viewpoints on this. Well, I think on the negative side and both on the positive and the negative side, I think it's because she's radical. She's consistently radical. She upends the, the premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture that were brought up on the, that, that are like, you know, they're like milk and, and, and, you know, the basic stuff that we're, we're growing up. You have to be altruistic. You have to live for other people. That's just basic stuff. Nobody challenges that. Nobody questions it. And if they do question it, they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic or a bad guy. Right. You mentioned the book, the Joker, right. Before we started, right. You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care about other people. Right. So, so they're presented with these two alternatives and it's real in people's lives, right? You either live for other people or you're a evil SOB and you know, yeah, most people in either one of those, but the ethic is right here. It's living for other people. And when you challenge that, they have no way cognitively to go with that. And the only place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker. It's the evil guy. It's the somebody who wants to smash everything and destroy because they don't have this alternative conception of, oh no, you can be rationally self interested and that does not involve destruction and that does not involve, you know, just exploiting other people. They can't conceptualize that. It's not in their framework. So it's the fact that she's so consistently on the side of self interest, for example, on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom. It's the fact that she dismisses faith to the extent that she does or to the extent that I do, right, that alienates people because that is completely different from what they brought up. Now the flip side of that is it's also really interesting to some people. So you know, a lot of, you got some positives, right? And I got a lot of positives from that appearance. I know a lot of people came to my podcast because I appeared on your show. Why? Because they hear something that's completely fresh, new, different, they've never heard before. It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know, a lot of people say I read Ayn Rand and it confirmed everything I believed. Now for me it didn't. It was the opposite. It turned upside down everything I believed, but there are a lot of people out there that do have a sense that something's wrong in the world, that altruism is wrong, that socialism, just the stuff and religion is wrong, but they don't have an alternative. It hasn't coalesced. And they listen to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to get ideas of what is it that I'm sensing that's wrong out there? And suddenly somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and they go, wow, that's what I've been looking for my whole life. So that's the positive for people. You know, and I read Ayn Rand, it just all made sense. It all clicked and it all, and it made clear that everything I believed to that point was just wrong. It just didn't, it didn't integrate. And I always knew to some extent it didn't integrate, but there was no alternative, so I believed it. What else was there? I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15, why should I, why is this, why is morality all about other people? Why is that? Well, that's just the way it is, right? And I couldn't, couldn't come up with an explanation. She gave me the explanation and she gave me the explanation why it's wrong to do that. And I think, so I think that's why people respond. It's just too radical. It can't fit into their cognitive framework that they have been brought up on, that they've been educated on, that just their whole life revolves around. Michael, you don't bring up Ayn Rand that much in conversation, except as kind of references every once in a while as part of the humor of just the general flow in the music of the way you like to talk. Well, why do you think you don't integrate her into your philosophy when you're like explaining ideas and all those kinds of things? Like, why is she not, you know, a popular reference point for discussion of ideas? Because I, I don't know if Yaron's going to agree with or can agree with me. I think for a certain percentage of the population, actually I talked to someone from the Ayn Rand Institute, I forgot his name, older guy with glasses and he didn't disagree with me. He said, this is changing. He said, I think for a certain percentage of the population who are uninformed about her work, higher than 10%, less than 50%, you mentioned Ayn Rand, they have been trained to think this is identical Scientology. So as soon as her name comes up, it's like, okay, I'm out the door. I'm not going to have anything to do with this. And everyone who follows her is a crazy person. That's one thing that has happened. Another thing is Rand in her personality was very aggressive and antagonistic. She was for a long time, the lone voice in the wilderness being like, this isn't like one of her big adversaries in a certain sense is Milton Friedman. And she really hated how Milton Friedman was like, oh, you know, having rent control is inefficient. And she's like, inefficient? We're talking about mass homelessness and people dying. And you're talking about this, like what color tie goes with this color shirt? Are you insane? And in fact, it's hilarious. There was an organization called the Foundation for Economic Education fee. Leonard Reed was the head of this. And there were a series of letters and she was helping him. She was much more philosophically grounded in certain contexts than he was. And there was an essay, a pamphlet that he published called Roofs or Ceilings. It was cowritten by Milton Friedman, later Nobel prize winner and George Stigler, also later Nobel prize winner. And basically the argument was, well, if the government controls all housing, how's that going to work out? And she's sitting there and she's typing in all caps. So you know, she's holding on the shift key and doing this on a typewriter and being like how? And you can imagine her with her cigarette holder, apoplectic, being like, how is an organization ostensibly devoted to free enterprise discussing this Stalinist idea in the most casual of terms? She's like, have I taught you not? And what's amazing is, so at Fee, they only have her letters because she sent them to Reed. The Ayn Rand Institute must have Leonard Reed's letters. I was able to, knowing Rand enough, predict exactly what the conversation would go like because he also did something she didn't approve of, which is he asked other people for feedback on her work. And she goes, I gave this to you to read. Who are you shopping around to some jerk that I don't, I need their approval. What are you doing? So it was a very interesting situation, but so that's one issue. I remember this is Ayn Rand when she's young. She wasn't that young. It was in the 40s. She's relatively young, right? Yeah. It's before Atlas Shrugged. It was before Atlas Shrugged. So it's before she's super famous. And before this is, the found has been published, but you know, she's trying to work with others and they are disappointing her left and right. Yeah. And also when you are a, what she takes away from bad people is you have these kids, right? And you're going to sit down with them and they're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to take your guns. I'm going to lock you in your house. I'm going to take 60% of your income and all this other stuff. And they might, up to reading Rand, they might sit down and have a discussion. And Rand goes, Hey, you know what? You didn't have to give them an answer. You could say, go to hell. We're not having this conversation and you have no right to one second of my life. And this is not a legitimate opener. This is a declaration of war. This isn't like, it's not like if I sit down with you, I run like, Hey, Ron, here are my plans for your wife. Go to hell. Yeah. This isn't a conversation we're having. Oh, I'm going to make you unsafe in your house. What? This is not a discussion. So what happens is these people who five minutes ago were able to have a debate with this kid because people read Rand when they're young often. And now that kid is like, yeah, I'm not even talking to you. It's her fault. Whereas in reality, it's that person's fault because that person had no right, although they've been trained to the contrary of our culture to believe, yeah, I'm going to sit down and we're just going to equally have a discussion over your own life. And you have one vote and I have one vote and we're going to know Lex has a vote and that's just how it's going to be and Rand's not having it. So I think those are two issues. And there's some other things which, which I don't need to get into. But I, I, because one of the things that Rand said consisting of her life is that her philosophy is an integrated whole, right? So to be an objectivist isn't just like, I like Atlas shrugged. It means I accept objectivism as a totality. Since I do not, I don't, I think it is proper to be respectful to her wishes and not constantly be, especially given that I've somewhat of a platform to be like Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, because I don't think Ayn Rand would have liked it if I was talking about Ayn Rand this much. So how do you, how do you deprogram? Because I don't like to bring up Ayn Rand just because I do see what, like how people roll their eyes essentially. So how do you, what's the upside, exactly. But what is that pro, can we, can you speak to that programming that people have? I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you talk about the ideas and the ideas make sense and people are attracted to the ideas, then you say, oh, by the way, and this came from Ayn Rand, that's how you deprogram them, right? If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture, if people start viewing self interest as something that's kind of, that's interesting and worthwhile and something worth investigating, and they said, oh, that came from Ayn Rand, then I think, I think then we'll, we'll deprogram them and get them and get them changing their minds about these things. And also, you know, going on shows where people are going to watch your show no matter who you bring on. Right. So, uh, even though now you do, you, if you put, you put Ayn Rand in the title that immediately reduces the number of people who watch, so, so in the future you shouldn't, but, uh, you put Michael Malice in the title and then at least the, the female population, the female to, you know, absolutely, just to see, but so, so you go and you try to make them as credible as possible to as many people as possible over time. It takes time. And ultimately, I don't think the culture will have this response to her. They might still disagree with her, but I think over time, and already you're seeing it, younger people, I think today are far less, there was a generation who never read Ayn Rand and was like this, bring out the garlic and the crosses. We don't want to have anything to do with it then. And I think today there are many more people who've read her and might disagree or not disagree. Right. And then there were a lot of people who haven't read her, but who are not opposed to it or willing to have an, to engage. So I think it's changing already. And I think in 20 years it'll be completely different. And just two more things that she does that I think it says that I think people find very, very off putting given our culture. One is she will, basically you could sit down with Rand and be like, your fear is not in any way a hold on my freedom. Just that one sentence. And for a lot of people that's very off putting and very harsh, it's correct. But for them, it's just like, wait a minute, I'm still scared. It's like, I don't care. Like for example, like with lockdowns and things like this, it's like, well, I'm scared and maybe I have a right to be scared. Or like, I'm scared that you have a gun in your house. And it's like, I respect that you're scared. I don't care. At the end, as you say at the end of the day, this is my house. I'm going to live my life as I please, as long as I don't hurt other people. Well, you are hurting me because I'm scared. No, that's not. This is the feeling versus fact. Yeah, yeah. So that is one situation. This is like a feeling versus freedom, essentially. Yes, where Rand is, that puts a lot of people off. I also think that historically, a lot of people who were drawn to her are drawn to her for the wrong reasons. That a lot of times, like Howard Rourke, the hero, we're gonna still say hero. You're supposed to say protagonist, but hero. The hero of the fountainhead, he's extremely intelligent, but he's also extremely uncompromising. What often ends up happening is you'll have a young kid who is somewhat intelligent, but then they pick up the personality and now you're someone I can't work with. And then it's like, you're not Howard Rourke, relax. You're not that skilled. You're not that talented. But because the character has to do personification and have certain aspects together, when kids read that, they might get the wrong idea. That's not Rand's fault. And it's more than that. It's so, I completely agree with that, but it's even broader than that. So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium presenting a philosophy. And she's got not just the questions, in my view, she's got the answers. And you're reading them at 16 and you're reading the answers. You don't know at 16 that this is true. You might have a sense that it's true, but you don't have the life experience, the learned experience. You don't have the facts, you don't have the knowledge. You're picking up truth. It's just being absorbed. You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true. And then you go out into the world advocating for it, which we all did, or at least I did, when I was 16. And you're obnoxious. You can't prove what you're arguing for because you don't have the experience. It took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20, to figure out that I really do think what she said was true, but I didn't know when I was 16. When I was 16, I just absorbed these ideas and accepted them, in a sense, with some connection to reality, but in a sense, on faith, at least presented it that way. And as a consequence, you come off as a detached from reality, obnoxious human being. And I think a lot of young objectivists are, and it's hard not to be, because you are. You're confronted with genius. And you're not a genius. I certainly am not a genius. And I'm confronted with just genius and have all this information in my head now. I can't articulate it. And it's hard to deal with yourself. What? There's an inside joke. No, you said I'm confronted with genius. I pointed to us. Yes. I mean, I'm confronted with you guys. I'm at an age where I know how to deal with geniuses. But there's something else. This is not why people don't like her, but there's something that the Fountainhead does, which I think is very, and I don't blame her, but it's a bad consequence. If you read the Fountainhead and you're young and you're intelligent and talented, the message at least I got, and I know I'm not alone, is you are going to think that you're going to be a pariah, that a lot of people are going to be against you, and you're basically doomed for a short period of being isolated and alone. And that may have been the case when Fountainhead was written. But I think now with the internet, and in my experience, both as a youth and someone who's a little bit older, I didn't appreciate, and you're not going to get it from that book, and you can't get it through that book because it has to have a certain narrative, how many people who are a little older are giddy when they find young talent, how inspiring it is, how exciting it is. Like when you talk to these kids who are doing things on the internet or writing or whatever achievement, you want them to flourish. You're not threatened by them as the antagonists of the Fountainhead are, and that doesn't come through in the Fountainhead because it depends on your profession, right? I mean, some of these parts of the world are better than others. If you're an artist, at least the way I conceive of art, and you want to go study art today, you're going to be pouped and look down on and so on. So yeah, I agree. I mean, in my generation, when I read Iron Man, there was no internet, and I was in Israel, so we were isolated, and there was nobody else who had shared their ideas, and you did feel that kind of isolation. But Roark gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about you're going to be isolated because partially because I wasn't, maybe I was humble, right? When I read Atlas Shrugged, I identified with Eddie Willis. When I read the Fountainhead, I didn't identify with Howard Roark. How old were you when you read the Fountainhead? So I read Atlas when I was 16. I probably read the Fountainhead when I was 16 and a half, 17, something like that. That is unfathomable crime. You read the Fountainhead after Atlas Shrugged? If anyone listening to this, if you read the Fountainhead after Atlas Shrugged, that is a war crime. No, for me, reading Atlas Shrugged was much more important. It is more important, but my point is, I think the Fountainhead in many ways is redundant in certain aspects if you read Atlas Shrugged first, and because the Fountainhead is such a masterful book and such a personal book. I agree with that. So ideally, you would read the Fountainhead. That's what I'm saying, yes. And here's the other thing people don't appreciate, I'm sorry to interrupt you. People think Rand's always about politics, politics, politics, politics, but the Fountainhead is not a political book at all. It's about, well, she talks about politics in Mansoul, sure. But it's about ethics, how important everyone has to have a moral code. That's the other thing why people find Rand off putting. If you have young people who now find it very important to live a moral life, who are like, what does that mean to have morality, to have ethics, to live with integrity for people who have gotten a little older, who have made these little sacrifices, who are like, I'm not going to fight at work. Do I really need to look for another job? Yeah, my wife's kind of getting annoying, but am I going to make a fight about it? These little sacrifices that they make every day. And big ones. And big ones, absolutely. So when you have someone who's forcing you to look in the mirror and say, those little sacrifices and big sacrifices you made, you did the wrong thing and you're evading that you betrayed your unconscious. That to many people, I think, is very threatening. But this is why so many people say that Ayn Rand is for 14 year old boys. Yeah, right. Right? You grow out of it. And there's a reason why it appeals to 14 as a little young, but 16, 18. It's because those are the ages where we're still open to idealism. In a positive sense, to beautiful things, to ideals, to seeking perfection, to seeking a great life. I think as you grow older, most people become cynical. They give up on their ideals. Why? Because their ideals were wrong and their ideals failed. My parents were socialists when they were young. Those ideas failed. So where do you go from socialism if your ideals fail? Cynicism. Yeah. Which is horrible. All adults, almost all adults out there are cynical. And that is failed idealism. When they look at the young people, they see their idealism, oh, well, I was idealistic too. And they don't question the idea, well, they're good ideals and they're bad ideals, they're right ideals and they're wrong ideals. And that's why they attribute it to youth. So it's a threat to a lot of people, a lot of people who it's too late for. For some people, it's too late to change their minds. And they know it. And they're too invested in the job, in the wife, in the compromises. In the comfort. And they're too invested in the comfort. Too invested in a compromise, too invested in a comfort. And they know that they shouldn't be. They know they should change. And these young people are challenging that. And that is really, really scary for them. And that's why they reject it without too much consideration. One of the things Rand, the working title for Fountainhead was Secondhand Lives. And Rand had two definitions of selfishness in that book. One is selfishness in the sense of my life is the most important thing. It's not the only important thing. My family would be number two friends. They certainly are extremely high values, but you can't have these secondary values without the first value. But in the context of my life, right? Because your family might not be a value, right? You might hate your parents. Sure. The point being selfishness. Then there's the other kind of selfishness, which is Peter Keating, one of the villains of the book, which is he's selfish in that he's greedy. He's looking out for number one, but he has no values. He has no sense of character. He just wants to be wealthy. He wants to have a beautiful wife. He wants to have a big house. Why? He couldn't tell you because other people have it and he wants to have it more than them. His sense of reference is other people. He's living secondhand. The problem with that is a lot of young people read Rand and when they start arguing online, they just start trying to talk like Rand. Whereas Rand would be like, be original, be an innovator. If you want to argue for objectivism in Rand's views, take her ideas, articulate them in your own way. That's a good way of showing that you understand what she thinks, but what they end up doing is just talking like her. It sounds dated and comical and that's going to be off putting because it's like Rand wouldn't expect someone else to sound like Rand. She's her own person. She of course wouldn't view Keating as selfish in any sense because, or even greedy, greed is a tricky word. Well, he was selfish in the old school sense. Yeah, he's selfish in the old, but even there, it's not as if he has some passion and he's going after passion no matter what, I'm going to light, cheat, steal. His passion is painting and he doesn't pursue his passion. He pursues what his mother wants him to pursue and he pursues money and he's completely second handed in the sense that he follows other people's values, not his own. Can we actually just backtrack and can we define some of these ideas that Ayn Rand is known for of selfishness, selfishness, egoism, egotism, greed? Those all, basically all of those words are seen as negative in society and Ayn Rand has been reclaiming in her work those words. So can you speak to what they mean? I think she's trying to, and Yaron might disagree, I think she's trying to be needlessly provocative and it's off putting and on one hand, maybe you want to be a provocateur because that gives you people like, what does this woman mean? On the other hand, many people are going to be viscerally put off. When Ayn Rand was on Donahue in 1979, he asked her explicitly, define to me the virtue of selfishness, which is the title of her collection of essays as well. And she, this is Rand, immediately says, use a different word, self esteem. And it's like, yeah, it's like, why are you championing this word, which has extremely negative connotations? Whereas if you just say, and this is thanks to her and her work, my life matters, my values matter, I'm not going to apologize for that. That is a lot less off putting than this caricature of Rand, which is I'm for, when people hear I'm for selfishness, they hear, oh, someone's bleeding out in the corner, but I want to get a Coke. That's nice. She condemned that. She says, I'm against this kind of sociopathy. That's absolutely crazy. But that word selfishness. If it goes a mistake to be provocative in this one dimension, to go and to stick with it. I mean, she's stuck with this idea of selfishness and so on. She's stuck with this term and it's, I often use terms for provocative effect. Yes, this is true. You're a master, you're a scholar of the trolling arts. Thank you, sir. But I think this is one example where the costs outweigh the benefits. And go ahead, Yaron. Yes, I'm open to that idea, but I don't think that's right. When you actually dig deeper into what people object to, they're not objecting to the word. They're objecting to the ideas. And she addresses this explicitly in The Virtue of Selfishness in the, I think, the introduction. Wait, hold on. I got to ask for clarification. You're saying they're objecting to the ideas, but when they talk about her, they're not talking about her actual ideas. They're talking about the caricature. Well, sure. But the caricature is a defense mechanism not to have to deal with the ideas, right? So they create the caricature in order to ignore the ideas and some of them do it consciously. Like when people like Krugman and others do this, they know exactly what they're doing. But Krugman is Ellsworth Tewi. Yes, he's the perfect Ellsworth Tewi. And he knows Ayn Rand. He's read Ayn Rand. And he knows she's the enemy in some sense. He knows... Check out our episode with Krugman. I think it's number 90. It was a great conversation. Didn't get as many views as me, but what are you going to do? Well, he got a Nobel Prize, so what you got? I've got a ticket to heaven. Sorry, Paul. Yasser Alford has a Nobel Prize. And Hitler was a Times Man of the Year for a few times. That really bothers me when people bring that up. Are you really... Yeah, Time of the Year... It's called a joke, Michael. It's not good. Is it? Man of the Year is not representative of good. It represents the most influential person of that year, and Hitler was. Wait, what were you upset about? When people like, well, look at Time Magazine. They called Hitler Man of the Year. They were on set. They were on set. They were on set. This guy's awesome. They said this is the guy who moved the world the most. It's not like he was Stalin. I don't go out there. Now, that's who they like. Hitler's terrible. The Stalin guy. Oh, no, no. I'm not even joking. The attitude of people between Nazism and fascism and communism is stunning. In my upcoming book, I have all the receipts how the things that they were saying about Stalin at the time are, if you look back, it's unconscionable, and these people have had no accountability in the positive direction. That's not even at the time, and we need to get back to the selfishness stuff, but it's not even at the time. I think I've told this story. I was in the green room going on John Stossel's show, and I saw a bunch of libertarians in the green room all hanging out, and this guy walks in, this young guy walks in, and somebody says to me, he's a communist. I said, what do you mean? They said, no, no, he's a card carrying member of the Communist Party. He's a communist. I said, and that's okay with you guys? They go, yeah, yeah, he's a nice guy. I'm like, no, this is not acceptable. Hold on. Let me quote Rand. Rand said she would rather talk to a philosophical Marxist, right? Did she not say this? Yeah, but this is a communist in the context of 21st century, right? So I said... But not 20th. Well, in the sense that we know exactly what, we know exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's... And this guy has the blood of 100 million people on his hands. I'm not letting him off the hook. So I engage with this guy, and literally we get into this... I'm telling him what I think of his ideas, and therefore what I think of him, and the people from the wardrobe department come out, and their chairs are put aside in this little gladiator ring. It's like the libertarians are sitting there amused, because to them it's just... I'm not going to name names, but to them it's just like, yeah, he's a communist, and I said at some point to them... I won't name names, because... I said at some point to them, if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm a Nazi, do you just treat him as, okay, let's go hang out and get some drinks? I do. I don't. I do. Because I wrote a book about this, the new write, and I did talk to Nazis, and I went to North Korea to talk to them. Yeah, because you were writing a book. Yeah. Right? But you're not going to hang out with a Nazi or a communist just like the regular person, right? To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same. I don't under... Okay, please explain this, because first of all, any time you have a lot of equivocation, I hate that, because I don't like equality. I think it's a bad concept. Sure. We're all sitting here as Jewish people, right? We're from the Soviet Union. To say these two things are basically the same, it's a matter of life and death for all of us. We'd be dead under Hitler. We're not doing so hot under Stalin, but we're still alive. Sure. There's some very big difference. Sure. One more thing. So within the context, they're different, right? Hold on, one more thing. There's also one very big difference in that one has a lot worse of a brand name, and the other does not, even though the other should. It's a brand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I agree. So there's a context in which I would fear Stalin more than Hitler. There's a different context in which I would fear Hitler, but as ideologies, they are equally evil. Wait, wait, but... Not the same, because the difference is between communism and fascism, but as ideologies, they're equally evil. They both view the individual as insignificant, unimportant, and they both basically want to kill any independent minded... Well, you're equating communism with Stalinism, so you're equating... No, I'm equating communism... I don't know what Stalinism is. I don't care. Stalinism is one version of communism, I'm sure there are others. Communism is an evil ideology, no matter who practices it. I don't think that's... I think that's too loose, because here's one example. The first person who went to the Soviet Union from the left and denounced it was Emma Goldman. She was an anarcho communist, right? So she went there, she got deported from the United States. She went to Lenin to his face. Hold on, let me finish. You're already dismissing what I'm saying. Me? No. Your body language, your emotions. No. Humility, yeah. Humility. History doesn't carry your feelings either. She goes to Lenin, she goes, we're supposed to be about free speech. We're supposed to be about the individual freedom. What are you doing? And he goes, free speech is a bourgeois extravagance. You can't have it during a revolution, too bad. She comes back to the West. Wait, he's right? Yeah. Oh no, yeah, of course. She's more consistent with the idea. Yeah, he's more consistent. She's a compromise. Yeah, you're right. Well, she comes back to the West, the big red Emma, the big hero of the left. And she goes, you guys, this is a complete, not, she didn't say bad. She was very random. She goes, this is pure evil. This is horrifying. What they're doing to the workers, which you supposedly care about, completely oppressing. And when one person described, they go, when she got up to talk, it was a standing ovation. And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop because she wasn't some capitalist. She wasn't some bourgeois conservative. She was as hard left for violent revolution as it gets. And so I don't think she, as a communist, is an evil person. I think she is. Because if she wasn't evading, and with Rand, and I think in reality, the essence of evil is evasion, is ignoring the facts of reality, is putting your feelings ahead of your facts. She would realize that what was going on in the Soviet Union was the inevitable consequence of her ideas. That could be just she's dumb. So she could have changed her mind. She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union, said, these ideas are wrong. I now repudiate my ideas, not just of implementation, but my ideas. And then I would have said, yeah, she had been mistaken before, and now she's confronted reality. But if she stayed a leftist, if she stayed a leftist to that extent, not just a mild leftist, then I think she's dishonest and therefore immoral. So – But you're using three words identically. You're saying dishonest, immoral, and evil. And I'm – Okay. So evil is more – is an extreme form of immorality, right? Sure. Of course. So okay. So she's immoral. The ideology she holds is still evil because the ideology – Maybe she's delusional. She might be delusional. But delusional and evil are the same. But she can be delusional. She cannot be delusional. See, I'm willing to accept a delusion before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it. Once she's gone to see it, I don't think that excuse holds anymore. I think now she's being confronted and she's lying to herself about the implications of it. Logically, it's inevitable that what happens in the Soviet Union has to happen in any communist context. So to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here, is it logically inevitable? Is it – can you imagine that there is communist systems where the consequences we've seen in the 20th century are not the consequences we get? In future societies, under different conditions, under different – with the internet, different communication schemes, different set of resources. As long as human beings are what we are. Now the Borg – you remember the Borg from Star Trek or whatever the series was? Okay, nerd. Yeah. I mean – Okay, okay. No. I'm a nerd. Okay. The Borg – It's the highest of compliments. The Borg – In this household. The Borg is the highest of lex. Now we're talking. The Borg is communist, right? The Borg is a different species. It has a different biology. It has a business – different form of consciousness. Now whether such a being could survive evolution is a question. Whether such a – People are ants. They don't have to be intelligent. Yeah, but then the question is can you have free will, human cognitive cognition and be a Borg? I don't think so. But maybe. Sure. Maybe in another planet. But human beings – You've got to take DMT to meet the Borg. So human beings – no, communism is anti – the reason communism is evil is it's anti reality, anti human nature, anti the individual, and therefore it is inherently evil. It cannot result in anything good coming out of it. Only bad can come of it. Do you think you could have predicted that before the 20th century? Yes, and plenty of people did. It's not – You know who did? Mikhail Bakunin. Mikhail Bakunin, who was an early communist Marxist rival in 18 – this is going to be in my upcoming book – in 1860, he sat down and wrote an essay, he goes, what Marx is advocating is insane. This is going to be worse than the czar. You're talking about complete totalitarian nightmare. When you put this into practice, it's going to be something we've never seen before. It's a pure horror. Like, he was a hardcore leftist. Look, Marx predicted it, right? We talked about this. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, yeah. Marx at some point says certain people cannot be part of the proletariat and they have to be liquidated. So this idea of mass murder and mass killing is not new to communism, it is an inherent part of what it means. You're either proletarian or you're not. And you're – look, and in Marx, it's in Marx, right? The individual doesn't matter. Now he might matter in his utopia because he knows he's got a marketing problem. See, Marx has a marketing problem because of the fact that you have individuals. How do you convince individuals to give up their individualism, to give up the individuality? What you say is, well, we have to go through this difficult process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to get to this utopia. And in this utopia, I mean, he's very Christian. I mean, this is the other thing about Marx. About the end time. Marx is very Christian in everything, in his morality, in his collectivism, and in the end time. The end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden. The end time for Marx is you don't have to do anything. Food is just available. Wealth is just available. You can do your hobbies. You can do everything. You can do whatever you want, whatever feelings, whatever. So it's going back to a Garden of Eden perspective on human. So he knows what that is going to require. It's going to require this dictatorship of the proletarian to get there. And he never tells you how we get there. There's no game plan. There's a dictatorship, then there's utopia. It's like the underpants. Step one, dictatorship. Step two, question mark. Step three, utopia. Yeah. And the question mark is where the action is, right? Annihilate. Yeah, you yada yada the important part. And people buy this garbage, right? So there's nothing of value in Marx. I mean, let me be very clear. There's nothing. He gets capitalism wrong. He gets the proletarian wrong. He gets the workers wrong. He gets the labor theory of value is wrong. There is nothing of value. There's nothing of value in communism. It is a wrong, unfitted to human nature ideology from beginning to end. The clarity with which you speak is just not something I, I don't think I have that clarity about anything. But I mean, it has to do with that thing that where everybody has something to teach you. I just feel like I've been reading Mein Kampf recently, for example, for the first time. Something to learn from Hitler? Well, there's a lot to learn from Hitler. About the nature of evil, about wrong ideas, not about anything good, not about anything positive. Oh, so yeah. So that's probably a really bad example. Why is Hitler different than Marx? That's a very good question. No, I get that. But in terms of ideas, why is Hitler different than Marx? Why do we have to assume there's something to learn from Marx, but there's nothing, but we acknowledge that there's nothing positive to learn from Hitler. Because I mean, all right. I can tell you something, in the sense that like, there's an interesting question is, how did this person get from step A to being able to implement the ideas? I know, everybody should read, anybody who's interested should read Marx, because it's really important. It's important in the history and a lot of people were influenced by it. Why was it influential? What is it that he says that appeals to people? I find it interesting to see all the parallels with Christianity. I think that's why to a large extent it appeals to people because they got to give up the unimportant part of religion and got to keep the fun parts of religion, the important parts to them of religion, the morality, for example. But no, there's not something positive to learn from everybody. In Ayn Rand's view, in your view, who was worse, Stalin or Hitler? I think worse is, this is something that I'll do a Randian sin and be evasive. It really drives me crazy when people sit down and have these competitions about like, if someone who's Jewish brings up the Holocaust and someone who's African American brings up slavery, and this is a conversation that I think is pointless and very hurtful and harmful and it is really silly and ridiculous. So it might make sense in some kind of stoner context about like you're doing the math and trying to figure out, but it's like, and yeah, you could be like, what would you rather have like this kind of cancer or full blown AIDS? In short, I mean, there's gotta be life expectancy, but these are such, I'll evade your question, reframe it. I think we understand, and a lot of this is a function of the propaganda at the time, and I'm not using the word propaganda in a negative sense, the horrors of Hitler and Nazism. I think, and one of the things I'm trying to solve with my upcoming book, there is a very poor understanding about the horrors of Stalinism and what that meant in practice. One of the reasons I wrote Dear Reader, my North Korea book, and what I was shocked and delighted by when I started writing Dear Reader, I thought to myself, look, I have very little capacity to affect change, but I can tell stories. I can write books. This is my competency. If I move the needle in America, we got it pretty good here. If I move the needle in North Korea, this could have really profound positive consequences. I set a very limited goal, and that goal is to change the conversation about North Korea, to stop it being regarded as a laughing stock and start regarding it as an existential horror. The metaphor I use always, and we brought up earlier, was the Joker, because people look at Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il, his father, they look at a clown disguised as a buffoon, and that's valid, and I said, this is what I can do. I can move that camera a little bit, and now that camera, instead of looking at Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il, you see behind him literally millions of corpses, and when you see people putting on these performances in these shows, look at these fools, then you're like, everyone those people, their kid has a gun to their head right now. If someone puts a gun to your kid's head, you're going to put on clown makeup? Yeah, you are. What color? Put on the shoes, whatever you want. So in terms of, people do not appreciate the horrors of Stalinism. I think this is a big fault of the right wing. You can't expect necessarily the New York Times to do this because of the blood on their hands, and for a long time, I was berating conservatives, I go, this was the big right wing victory, bloodless largely, the victory of the Soviet Union. No one's talking about it, no one's informing, and let's be clear, there are very many people who are Democrats who are on the left, who are violently opposed, literally violently opposed to the Soviet Union, it's horrors, this is not necessarily a partisan issue. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to do something about it. So I know that's not really literally your question, but you know, that's kind of information that feeds us. Let me ask you that question if it's okay. So what, which do we, can we learn more from, from a historical perspective looking forward? From like, which has more lessons in, in how to avoid it, how to, and just general lessons about human nature. Well, I mean, I agree with Michael that it's not important who's more evil because they're both evil and they're both just so evil that the differences don't matter. What matters is what is the ideology? What is the, what is, what are the consequences? What do we understand from it? What are we worried about? What are we going to avoid? So I'm not worried about Nazism qua Nazism because everybody hates Nazism. I mean, it's uniform that that's out. Even the people I think on the far right in America are staying away from the cliches of Nazism, although some of them are stupid enough not to. But, but in the end, if, if, if the United States goes authoritarian right, it's not going to be Nazism. It'd be some other form of fascism because that is so obviously, you know, being understood as evil and bad that there's almost no understanding that the evil of communism, I mean, you brought it up earlier, right? Almost nobody understands that communism is an evil ideology, that there's, that there's nothing worthwhile there, that any, any attempt to go in that direction in any sustainable way is destructive. They are, as you mentioned, they're economists out there claiming they are communists. I mean, I find that despicable that anybody would claim to be a communist economist or communist anything, because I think that's, it's a, it's a, it's a ideology that has no basis, but we haven't learned that. So to me, communism is the much bigger threat because we still think it's some kind of beautiful ideal in, in the world around us. I think Nazism is out, but I think, I think fascism is a, is a massive threat out there because I don't think we've learned real lessons of, nobody knows what fascism is. Everybody thinks fascism is Nazism. They don't, they don't recognize that in a sense we are already fascist and that we're certainly heading in that direction. So they don't know what it is. And again, we haven't studied, and the real lesson here is we haven't studied what unifies them both because there's not a big difference between fascism and communism. There's no big difference between Nazism and communism. What does unify them? What unifies them is the common good, the public interest. What unifies them is this idea that there is some elite group of people who can run our lives for us, for the common good, for the public interest. And that you don't matter. You as an individual, you individual don't matter and they, they will dictate how you live. And you know, so these are philosopher kings. It goes back to Plato's philosophy, but it really unifies it. Think about communism, communism is about the sacrifice of the individual to the proletarian. Who is the proletarian? It's this collective group here. Who represents a proletarian? Well they have, somebody has to, somebody has to tell the proletarian what they believe in because they don't know, because there is no collective consciousness. So you need a Stalin and this is the point about Marxism. Marxism needs a dictator because somebody has to represent the values, the public interest, what's good for the public. Nazism needs the same thing. Just Nazism replace proletarian with Aryans, the Aryan race. And you have exactly the same thing. You need a dictator to tell us what's good for the Aryan people so we can do what's good for the Aryan people. So it's impossible to have a communist system or a fascist system without a dictator naturally emerging. It's not, it's not possible to have a George. It's not naturally, it's ideologically. It's absolutely impossible to have that on scale. You can certainly have communes where people behave communistically. Because it's not inside the ideology. Hold on. Let me talk about fascism because fascism definitionally is going to have a strong man. I don't even know how it could be fascism without that. And let's talk, what you said earlier on is about how people don't know what fascism is. Fascists don't know what fascism is. So there's a superb book by John Diggins from the early seventies called Mussolini and Fascism, the view from America. So I find Mussolini to be a far more interesting figure than Hitler because he had a much more nuanced career. He was much more of an innovator. He was an intellectual. Which is shocking because he always comes across as a buffoon, but he was actually a thinker. Why did he not resist Hitler at all? So one of the things with fascism is it comes, it's a direct line from Kant to Mussolini. So basically there is a philosopher who I adore, who I'm sure you don't, called Schopenhauer. And Schopenhauer, the question became, Rand was not a particularly humorous person. She had some moments of wit. There's a great moment when she was on Tom Snyder show in 1980, I believe, and she's talking about Kant and she goes, Immanuel Kant and all his illegitimate children, if you catch my meaning, she mean all his bastards. But the host Tom Snyder did not pick up on it. If you watch it on YouTube, you could pick up on it. And what happened was once Kant bifurcated reality into the phenomenal world, the pure idea world and the numeral world, the question became, well, what is the nature of this world of ideas? And Hegel had it meant reason. I don't know even know what that means theoretically, that the world of reason is idea and this is Schopenhauer who hated Hegel, who constantly attacked him by name and Hegel's followers in his work. He was a very big innovator in a malevolent way because he said the nature of reality, this idea is will, meaning the universe doesn't care about you and it's constantly in this reality putting urges in your mind, values. And when you denounce these values and urges, that's the basis of morality. And from there it went to Nietzsche and the will isn't mindless, it is a will to power. Mussolini took this and basically said, because the will to power is the real reality, the Kantian idea, therefore all of this is secondary. So if we will it, we can make it happen. When you have this concept of my willpower is stronger than reality and you're like, okay, how's this program going to work? We can make it happen. That was why fascism is not a very coherent ideology because explicitly, there's a book called from 1936 called The Philosophy of Fascism, which tried to codify this, 36, this is a long time ago, where they're like, we're against reason and explicitly rationality. We are for willpower, for strength, and if you are strong enough and united enough, you can force these things to work. So there's a lot that is not taught about this ideology. I highly recommend people read the books from the time. And what was fascinating about Mussolini is he was regarded as the moderate. Because the 1930s, you had the Great Depression, all the intellectuals said, this proves capitalism can't work, the Great Depression, obviously, air quotes, is capitalism's fault. Then you have the alternative, the USSR. Well, that's not tenable for us. Here comes Mussolini and Mussolini says, I'm going to take the best of both worlds. I have aspects of markets, capitalism, but I don't have this chaos, but I also don't have complete government control of the bureaucrats. I'm going to have this combination. And there was a Broadway song, You're the Top, you're Mussolini. That was later edited out because that's when he took a bad turn. But this is kind of the fascist idea. And it's about power and it's about control. That's the essence. It's about will. So they don't care. Fascists don't care who owns stuff, owns in quotes, because what's important is who controls it. So you can own your home, but if I get to tell you when you can sell it, for how much you can sell it and what you can do on that home, then I'm in control of it. That's the essence of fascism. And if you think about it, we live today in a much more fascist economic context than anything else. We pretend that corporations are private, but when everything they do is regulated, who they can hire, how much they pay them, when and how they can fire them, what they can do in their property, it's all control. That's the way fascists start controlling everything. But it's not possible to have checks on power and balance of power at the top of fascism or communist systems. The question was whether in fascist systems or communist systems, we're saying the dictator naturally or must emerge. I don't say emerge, the dictator is the one who makes the fascist system. Yeah, fascism, well, it could emerge because for example, I think today in America we're moving much more towards fascism or socialism, and at some point that'll manifest itself in some kind of dictator. And the dictator might be different than a Mussolini or Nazis, it might be couched in some kind of pseudo constitutional American presence. It would be a lot easier for a female to be a fascist dictator in America than a male, because do you have that softness? She's not gonna come off as a strong woman, people won't see it coming, in my opinion. I think it's gonna be a nationalist, religionist, environmentalist, I think somebody who can combine those three. Well, Hitler did those, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And somebody who can combine those three and articulate the case for it, I think America is ready for it. So you think it's possible for fascism to arise in the world again? Oh, of course, it had never went away, they just adopt the name. Because the fundamental ideas, the Kantian ideas, the ideas that are behind fascism never went away. They're still as popular, if anything, more popular than they were back then, Marx is as popular. I think these ideas are prevalent, they're out there, and absolutely, I think America is ready for them. Again, it won't be quite in the form that we've experienced in the past, it'll be in a uniquely American form, couched at a flag, and of course, it was couched at a flag before. But no, yes, an authoritarian, some form of authoritarianism is necessary, because the fundamental principle behind both communism and fascism is the unimportance of the individual. The individual is nothing, the individual is a nobody, and the importance of the collective. The collective will, the collective soul, the collective consciousness, but the collective has no will, has no soul, has no consciousness. So somebody has to emerge to speak for the collective, otherwise, everything falls apart. So it's necessary, whether it's a committee or whether it's one person, how exactly, somebody has to speak for the collective. Even a committee doesn't function as a committee, right? Most committees, particularly when the committee is about dictating how people should live, somebody is going to, because now it becomes really, really important, somebody is going to dominate that committee and rule over it, because you don't want independent sources, independent voices, because the individual doesn't matter, the individual doesn't count. It's a natural hierarchical, so you have seven people that ostensibly have the same role, someone is going to emerge as a leader naturally, and some people are going to follow. Yeah, it's the same reason you cannot have the Richard Wolff type socialism of, and this is the more, if you will, innocent part of his ideas. Oh, why can't we have corporations all be worker owned, and everybody votes on everything, and we vote on who should be CEO, and no, communism, fascism, most ideas necessitate ultimately authoritarians, and that's most of human history. We forget again. This idea of liberty, this idea of freedom, even the limited freedom we have today. It's a recent invention. It's a recent invention. It happens in little pockets throughout history. We had a little bit of this democracy stuff, partial, only a few, some people got to vote and it wasn't rights respecting, because they didn't have the concept of rights in Athens, right? You had it in a few Greek cities. We maybe had a version of it in Venice, we had a version of it in city states around the world, but then it was invented by the founding fathers in this country. That's what makes the founding of America so important, and so different, and such a radical thing to have happened historically. Freedom is rare. Authoritarianism is common. So I was looking at some statistics that 53% of people in the world live under authoritarian government. Only 53. Oh, because India is democratic, so I guess they don't count India, but yes, it used to be 100. Exactly. Yeah. How do we change that? How do we change that? And even the authoritarianism in a country like China is a lot less than it used to be under Mao, right? So they were better off than they were under Mao. That's a reality. How do we change it? We have to declare, we have to change the ethical views of people. This brings us back to selfishness, because as long as the standard of morality is the group, others, as long as the standard of value is what other people want, what other people think, as long as you are alive only to be sacrificed to the group, that's why you have to challenge Christianity. As long as the Jesus on a cross dying for other people's sin is viewed as this noble, wonderful act instead of one of the most unjust things to ever happen to anybody, as long as the common good and the public interest are the standards by which we evaluate things, we will always drift towards fascism, some form of authoritarianism. Can I answer your question? I think there's something that has to go along with what Yaron was saying, and I know he's going to agree with me, which is technology. Because if it becomes harder technologically for the authoritarian and more expensive for him to input or force his edicts, that is going to create a pocket of freedom regardless of what the masses think. And the masses, hold on let me finish, the masses as a rule are not going to be able to think in general anyway. I have a much more elitist view of mankind than Rand does. And let me give you one specific example, which I mentioned in my book that you write. Let's suppose it's 1990, not that long ago, we all remember 1990. And we're having an argument about censorship. And Yaron says, I want full freedom of the press, freedom of books, publish whatever you want, whatever, free speech. And I say, well, what about books like Mein Kampf? What about, you know, people read this the wrong idea? What about child pornography, things like this? Like, where are you going to draw the line? And we could argue along, Lex appears from the future, and he goes, hey, guys, this conversation is moot. And we're like, Lex, you look exactly the same. I'm like, yeah, of course, Robo Stone Age. And you go, I'm from the future. And I go, wait a minute, black president? And you go, look, this conversation is moot, because in a few years from now, you will be able to send any book anywhere on earth at the speed of light. You can make infinite copies in one second. And you could send it to anyone such that they can only open this book if they know a magic word. And I go, well, how much is this going to cost? Oh, it's free. And I go, wait, wait, you're telling me I can make infinite copies of any book and teleport them at the speed of light anywhere for free? And you would say, yes, we would think he's insane. But that's the status quo, right? So technology has done far more to fight government censorship of literature and ideas than has spreading the right ideas. So when you have things like crypto, which makes money less accessible than a gold block in your house, when you have things like people being able to travel quickly, those are also necessary compliments to having the right ideas. And Rand herself said that she couldn't have come up with her philosophy before the Industrial Revolution. So as time goes forward and we have more technology and we have more discourse. But for very different reasons, she said that, right? But it's also a lot easier to persuade people the right ideas. So I kind of agree. Maybe I'm more pessimistic or maybe I don't get the technology completely. That's because you're a boomer. There you go. Okay, boomer. I get that insult a lot. I think I'm the last year of the boomer generation. It's a mindset. I think I hit that last. It's a mindset. There you go. I love you so much. So the reason she said she couldn't have developed her, the reason she said she couldn't develop the philosophy without the Industrial Revolution is the link between reason and wealth was not obvious before the Industrial Revolution. And that, for example, it's not obvious to Aristotle. Aristotle doesn't see the link between rationality and wealth creation. Business is low. And money is barren, interest has no productive function, bankers don't have. So you had to see it existentially to be able to see reason is the source of wealth creation. So I think that's a little different. Now, there is a sense in which, yes, technology makes it more difficult for authoritarians to achieve their authoritarianism. I'm not convinced that they can't. I didn't say can't. Yeah. At a certain point, because they can turn off the electricity. I'm just saying it becomes more expensive. It becomes more expensive, no question. It becomes more expensive. And we're still beings that live in a physical reality, therefore, they can still harm us in this physical reality. But let me say this, it's going to sound as absurd. If there was technology that we could teleport anywhere on Earth at the speed of light, that would certainly go a long way towards hurting authoritarianism. If there was some way to go, and of course, they could teleport too. And this is, of course, the danger of they can use the technology too, and look at what the Chinese are doing with social scores and with monitoring people and cameras everywhere. So there's a sense in which you probably had more privacy before some of this technology. So it's not obvious to me. So to me, it's all about ideas. And if we don't get the ideas right, technology will be used for evil, yes, and it will allow some of us maybe to escape for a little while in some realms, but others not. You know, Iran and North Korea do a pretty good job shutting themselves away from technology, although a lot gets through in the Iranian, at least with Iran. I don't know about North Korea, how much gets through. It's really undermining them, which is wonderful. Yeah, which is great. So yes, but it's more than that. And this is what leads me to be optimistic. It's that we live in a world today where 7 billion people basically have access to all of human knowledge, all of human knowledge. It's not like in Rome. When Rome fell, all of human knowledge disappeared. Now some of it escaped to Byzantine, some of the Byzantines had and ultimately land up with the Arabs and found its way back into Western civilization through them. But a lot of knowledge disappeared, just wiped out, right? How to build a dome, how to build a big dome, how to have... You know, in Pompeii, they had faucets, running water and faucets. They didn't have faucets for another thousand years, right? A lot of... They couldn't build tall buildings once Rome came down. The Great Pyramid of Egypt was the tallest building on earth till like 1840, it was crazy. Rome was a city of a million people. Other than China, there wasn't another city of a million people in the West until London in the 19th century, 1500 years later. So it all disappeared because all of it was concentrated basically in one place. Today none of that exists because of the internet, because of universities everywhere, institutions. I mean, think about how many engineers there are in the world today, right? Who have basically all different... Basically the same level of knowledge on how to build stuff. So even if the United States went to some kind of dark ages, it's unlikely the whole world goes into that kind of dark ages. So I am optimistic in that sense that the fusion of knowledge is so broad today that other than wiping out all electricity on the planet, everything electronic on the planet, it's just, it's not going to be possible to control us all. And in that sense, technology is going to make it possible for us to survive and to stay semi free, because I don't think full freedom, but semi free. Because full freedom, you need the ideas. Because full freedom means you need some political implementation. No, full freedom means anarchy, but we know that. So we need to get into that because we can't leave without pointing out that we fundamentally disagree about that. Oh, that's beautiful to be continued on that one. Let me ask about one particular technology that I've been learning a lot about, thinking a lot about, talking about, which is Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, but Bitcoin specifically, which a lot of people argue that the Bitcoin, that setting ideas aside, when you look at practical tools that governments use to manipulate its people is inflation of the monetary system, within the monetary system. And so they see Bitcoin as a way for the, for individuals to fight that, to go outside those specific government control systems and thereby sort of decentralizing power. You know, there's a case to be made historically of the 20th century that you couldn't have Stalin, you couldn't have Hitler, you couldn't have much of the evil that you see in the world if they couldn't control the monetary system. You couldn't have had the New Deal. And FDR realized this very quickly. That's why they confiscated all the gold. Everybody knows FDR is going to come in to become president and confiscate the gold. So one of the mythologies, the myths about the Great Depression is that there were all these bank runs that, well, bank runs happened because everybody was afraid that FDR would get elected to confiscate the gold. So everybody ran to the bank and took the gold. Little did they realize that he would confiscate their private holdings in their own backyards. He would force them to dig up the gold from their own backyards. But yes, one of the first things FDR did in spite of denying it throughout the campaign, right, he was asked about this over and over again and denied it. One of the first things was take over the gold and take the United States Federal Reserve off the gold standard so that they can, in a sense, print money and that he could start spending. Yeah, what people don't realize, just to clarify what Yaron said, is FDR, this is something that's so crazy to us that we think, okay, I'm misunderstanding it. FDR made it illegal for people to own gold unless it's like a wedding ring. And before that, contracts, because inflation was a concern, I make a contract with Yaron, right, I said, okay, you're either going to pay me in $1,500 for my work or the gold equivalent because if that $1,500, you know, weimar Germany and you have hyperinflation, I don't want that $1,500. Just give me the gold bullion. And FDR said all of those clauses, he broke every contract, they don't matter. So now if I say, Yaron says, okay, you owe me three feet of drywall. And I go, here's three feet of drywall. It's 12 inches. And you go, wait, wait, wait, three feet is 36 inches. I go, no, no, not anymore. It's like, what am I supposed to do? And because you have, when you print more money, the value of every individual dollar matters less, it becomes that much harder to plan anything, either in the government level or in the private level, because if I'm managing outlays, if I'm trying to pay my workers, I'm trying to build factories, I'm thinking long term, and I don't know what this dollar is going to buy in 10 years, that puts an enormous incentive for me to spend it now and not save it, because if I save it, it's going to be worth a lot less. And the worst thing about inflation, and this is something I think people who are pro capitalism don't talk about enough, they do talk about it, I would just like to see it more. This by far hurts the poor, the poorest of the poor the most. When we came to this country, my mom told me they would go to 86th street in Bensonhurst with the fruit stands to buy Mika Chika, some grapes. And you go to this fruit stand, and she'd walk all the way to the other corner. And if it was three cents more a pound, or less a pound, she'd walk all the way back, because that three cents mattered. Now if I have this dollar, and it's 5% inflation or whatever, and next year it's 95 cents, me and you, the three of us might not care, but if I'm destitute hand to mouth, and I've got 5% less, that is really a material consequence of my life. So inflation really is evil, because it hurts the people for who those pennies matter. Well, one of the ways the government gets around that, and it's because they get smart to that, is they index everything, so they index your social security, they index welfare, they try to make sure, but that only makes you more dependent on them. And the people in the modern context that inflation hurts the most are savers, people trying to save money. And Fed policy right now is just horrific if you're a saver, because the Fed, the interest rates are zero, you get nothing on your saving, and cost of living is going up, maybe not at a huge level, but it is going up, and yet you can't even save to keep the value of your dollars. And the government controls, and this has massive perverse effects, because it's not just that prices go up, it's that prices don't reflect reality anymore. So some prices go up, some prices might not. Investments get distorted, things get produced that shouldn't get produced, and then people like Richard Wolff turn around and blame all the distortions, and the perversions, and the crashes, and the financial crisis on capitalism. Not on the fact that the Fed, look at the financial crisis, financial crisis was caused, you could argue by inflation, and we could get into that if you wanted, but that's probably a three hour show, just that, right? It was caused by the Federal Reserve, and yet who got blamed for the financial crisis? Who would Richard Wolff is going to jump up and down? This is a crisis of capitalism, this was caused by capitalism, but capitalism is the negation of the Fed. Capitalism says there should be no Fed. That's item number one on the list of the things capitalists want, is to get rid of the Fed, and then grant you guys your wish, have competition for currency, and let's see if Bitcoin wins. I'm skeptical, but I don't care. My point is under freedom. I don't care who wins, I just want free choices, and let the best currency win. I doubt that becomes Bitcoin, but it doesn't really matter. If I'm wrong, great. Let me add to this, and I think people appreciate, and this is a leftist, leftism at its best, that the government and the banks are in bed with each other. This I don't think is a particularly controversial statement. Well I don't like that statement, let me just say why I don't like it. I don't like it because it assumes that they're equal partners, or that there's causality goes in both directions. From day one, and this is really from day one of the establishment of the United States, banks have been regulated by the state, and the reason for that is primarily Jefferson and others, founders, distrust of finance. So from the beginning, banks have been controlled by the state. Now over time, if I'm controlling you, you won't have influence over me, because I get to, so yes, they get into bed over time, so I don't like it that they're in bed together. One is dominating over the other, and the other is participating, because what choice do they have? I should explain to you how things work when you get in bed, and it's not always equal. Okay, so let's talk about safe words, which is very Randian topic, she doesn't like those. I had to read that scene three times in the Fountainhead, because I couldn't believe what I was reading. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. No, because I looked at the back cover, I'm like, a woman wrote this book in 1943, I must be misunderstanding the scene. And it's 43. Yeah. She sure had a lot of shades of gray. Yeah. So, no, she hated that. She hated that. Only black and white. No, but what I meant is, 2008, you have the bailout of Wall Street. Whereas in 2020, we saw every medium and small business under the sun go under, there's not even a pretense that these are going to be bailed out. So the priorities of the politicians, in my view, are always going to be towards powerful entities, powerful corporations, and they're not going to be about the medium guy, the middle guy. Let me just finish my point, because I see you champing at the bit. At the very least, if you have regulation, people influencing each other. With Bitcoin, and with crypto, that is not a possibility. You do not have any agency who is king of Bitcoin, who is the Federal Reserve of Bitcoin. There is no organizing organization or management team. Now, you could say this is a bad thing, but you can't say that this is a different thing to money as opposed to Federal Reserve system. Yeah. So I agree with that description of Bitcoin, my problems with Bitcoin, elsewhere. Let me just say about the financial crisis, I don't like it phrased that way again. They let Lehman go under and destroyed Lehman Brothers. In the past, they destroyed Drexel Burnham because they didn't like Michael Malkin. They are vindictive. It's not an accident that the Treasury Secretary at the time was an ex chairman of Goldman Sachs, not Lehman Brothers, and Goldman hates Lehman. The next day, they bail out AIG. What I got out of financial crisis more than anything, and by the way, there wasn't a bailout, it wasn't even a bailout, because they gave money to every bank, whether they had problems or not. Okay. And indeed, I know several bankers, including big banks, like JP Morgan and Wes Falgo, and a friend of mine, John Allison of BB&T, who told them explicitly, we don't want your money, we don't need your money, and they were basically, a gun was put to their head and they said, you don't take the money, we'll shut you down, basically, the equivalent of that. So they, A, wanted a virtue signal, so there's a big virtue signal, we're taking care of things, don't worry, we've got everything under control, even though they were completely panicking and they had no clue what they were doing. One of the things that the financial crisis really illustrated was how pathetic, ignorant, and incompetent the people at the top are, and they knew it. And they, you know, Sir Paulson goes to Congress, says, give me $700 billion, don't tell me how to use it, because I have no clue, just give it to me and give me your authoritarian power to do it any way I want. And that was not out of a sense of grandeur, that was a sense of panic, he had no idea, he had no clue, none of them did. They bailed out everybody they could, everybody under their, you know, within their periphery, when they thought it was appropriate, they were vindictive about some people like Lehman, it was complete arbitrary use of power. The bankers didn't benefit from this, indeed, many bankers that took their money lost from it. Bank stocks got crushed after the bailout. Before the bailout, bank stocks were doing okay, and right after top was announced, bank stocks crushed because this was bad for banks, it wasn't good for banks. This is just central planning gone amok, it's not them bailing out elites, it's them, you know, throwing money at a problem without knowing what they would actually do and what the consequences would be. Right. But the point is, sorry, where we agree, the focus will always be on bailing out elites. It's almost... But little banks got money too. No, I was saying that last year, there's no talk of saving ice and vice, saving Century 21, saving all these other industries. But sure there were, if you look at it, it's just, sure there was, if you look at the, if you look at what the Fed did, the Fed was bailing out third, fourth class businesses in all kinds of areas that you wouldn't consider elitist areas, the whole PPP, the way... You're talking 2008. Yeah. No, I'm talking about now. Okay. I'm talking about COVID last year. What the Fed did was unbelievable, the kind of bonds that they were buying, even 2008, even after 2008, I couldn't believe what they did last year. PPP, the Payable Protection Program was targeted at everybody, everybody got PPP. It's not about... I don't think it's about bailing out elites, it's about securing their power base. And if they believe that securing their power base is Wall Street, then they'll bail out Wall Street. They believe securing their power base is writing checks to restaurant owners all over the country, they'll write checks to restaurant owners all over the country, which is what they did with PPP. It's all about power for them and it's whatever will achieve power, whatever will result in power. I don't think it's about elites. I don't see elitism in the bailouts of last year. I agree. I agree it wasn't last year. I'm saying that's one distinction between 2008 and 2020. And I do think, just one more thing, I do think getting in good bed with the elites is a great mechanism in general for maintaining one's power. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's not a dispute. Depending on how we define it. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned there's some criticism towards Bitcoin, there's a lot of excitement about the technology of Bitcoin for the resistance against this kind of central state pursuit of power. So that's part of my criticism because I don't think it works. So yeah, I can imagine a world, I can imagine, I'd love to see a technology evolve that where money is competitive and it's a financial instrument that the government cannot touch. You think the state is too powerful? I think two things. I think right now, and maybe this won't be true in the future, right now, I think crypto is ill... It cannot function as money right now. It just can't. But it does. No, it doesn't. It functions as a mechanism. It functions as a mechanism to transfer, it's a technology that allows me to transfer fiat money from place to place, but it doesn't function, and it can't because it's too volatile. I've sold things with Bitcoin. No, I know you have, but I can sell things. I can buy things and sell things with my airline model. So there are lots of ways in which you can use things as money, but it doesn't make them money. If you're using something as money, it's money. So let me take something you said before. And it contradicts, I think, Bitcoin. You said one of the things about money is that it's stable. I know what it's gonna buy tomorrow, right? This is why we're against inflation, because I know what the dollar today I can plan, because I can't plan... I don't know what Bitcoin's gonna be worth tomorrow. So I can't plan with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is way too volatile to serve right now as money. Now, the argument from Bitcoiners is, yes, it's still being adopted. At some point, it'll reach a certain crucial mass. High perfect monetization, yeah. Yes, and then it will become money, because at that point, it can be used as money, because then it'll have a stable value. Maybe right now, it's not useful as money, because I can't predict what... I can't invest in it knowing what the value will be in five years. Right now, it's an asset. It's not a monetary unit. It's much more functions as an asset. Asset's value can go up. Oh, I agree. It's functioning much more as an asset than as money. That's not in dispute. I agree with that completely. So I don't think it's money. But so I think it's still... I think it can compete as a money with something tangible. So I think in a free market, some kind of crypto backed by gold would be more successful. So Bitcoin folks argue that Bitcoin has all the same fundamental properties that does gold. So it's backed by... There's a scarcity to it, and it's backed by proof of work, so it's backed by physical resources. And so they say that's a very natural replacement of gold, so it doesn't need to be connected to gold. So there are two things that gold has that it doesn't have. One is gold is not finite. Gold supply actually grows over time. Bitcoin at some point is truly finite. At least unless you count the fact that you can split bitcoins and create coins, but that's a whole other question. So that's one. The other one is that gold has value beyond its use as a currency, beyond its use as money. For jewelry and stuff. Yeah. But you minimize that. But jewelry and stuff has been important for the human race for 100,000 years. You can find jewelry in caves, for the cavemen designed jewelry and wore them. So we obviously as human beings value jewelry a lot. And almost all jewelry evolved to be made out of gold because whatever it is within us is attracted to shiny gold in particular, shiny object generally. So there's something about gold that appeals to human beings. There's some value that gold has beyond its being a currency. It's not that Bitcoin doesn't. Now it's not enough to use it as money. Lots of things appeal to human beings. But those are two characteristics. One that it's not finite and second that it is a value beyond that Bitcoin doesn't have. Don't you think the finiteness could be framed as a feature? The scarcity of Bitcoin? No, because I think it creates a real problem with scarcity economically. It's the issue of planning. There is a mechanism, there's a beautiful mechanism in markets that as the supply of gold is in a sense the quantity of gold is... Prices are going down because there's too little gold, right? So the value of gold in a sense in dollar terms, the prices are going down. What happens then is there's an incentive to then go mine for more gold, right? Because it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine as the price goes down. So you mine for more gold, so it keeps increasing and it keeps increasing basically very correlated to the rate of increasing productivity. That's the beauty of gold mining because prices are related to gold, gold is the dominant money and it increases at about the same rate as productivity. So it keeps prices relatively stable. You still have bouts of inflation and deflation, but it keeps it relatively stable. With Bitcoin it's fine at its ends, now prices will only decline. What rate will they decline at? They'll decline at the rate of productivity increases. It's hard to predict the rate at which productivity increases. For example, technological shocks can change that dramatically. You could get bouts of dramatic deflation, dramatic price drops that could be problematic in terms of planning the same problem of inflation just reversed that you had before. So again, it's a technical issue. I'm sure there are ways to get around it. And again, I'm not sure. I don't know if you guys consider Bitcoin the end or the beginning, that is, is Bitcoin it or is Bitcoin just the first example of a technology that's evolving? I was just going to say there's the same technological issue with regard to gold, which is we now have the technology that was very expensive to turn elements into different elements. And at a certain, yeah, you could fire electrons at it or whatever. You can make gold. They figured out how to do it. It's not cheap and it's called big process. If gold is the standard, a lot of resources are going to be going toward turning other things into gold, making the production of gold cheaper. And that's going to have a similar consequence that Laurence talked about. That's kind of the category of security that Bitcoin has talked about, that it's very difficult to do that with Bitcoin. But I would argue that it's exceptionally difficult to do that with gold. It is now. But the thing is, there's not huge incentive. If gold is the basis and if gold is worth that much, gold isn't worth that much. Gold is worth, let's say, I'm saying in this world that we're talking about, in the future, gold is not going to be worth, let's say right now, gold is about 2000 bucks. It's less than 2000. Let's say it's 2000 bucks. That's its price in terms of dollars. So you'd have to, it would have to be worthwhile to create something of 2000 dollars. How much would you be willing to put into it? At some point, you're right. And at that point, I think gold stops being money because it's useless. Once I can create it like silicon, then once I can make out official gold. So I'm just not, I don't think Bitcoin is the solution. I think, I don't know what the solution is. I wish I was that innovative, but I think you need a solution that has more of the characteristics of gold than Bitcoin currently has. And I'm, I guess I'm surprised at a lot of the technologists who view Bitcoin as the end game, where it strikes me as it's a, it's the birth of a new tech, it represents the birth of a new technology and who the winner in that technology is going to be. We have no clue. Bitcoin is one of the players, there are other players. There might be a new technology that is even better than anything we can imagine right now that, so Bitcoin doesn't strike me as optimal. And that we should be moving towards something better. Can you please stop shilling randcoin for five minutes? You know where there was randcoin? There was rand. South Africa. No, I was. The agri currency is rand. No, that's true. No, I mean. Ayn Rand is the South African one dollar. Yeah. Ayn Rand coin was, I was in China in 20, I think it was 2015 or 14. What's that? China. China. I was in China 20, something like that. And this entrepreneur came up to me, she said she's bought this massive quantity of land in this area in China, it's a little secluded. She's starting what she's calling Gold's Gulch. She's serious. And she's issuing, and she issued cryptocurrency based on the land, right backed by the land called rand, but Ayn Rand with a little portrait of Ayn Rand, you know, a little portrait in the marketing. I don't think it went anywhere. You're not going to be a janitor? A janitor in China at Gold's Gulch. Yeah. By the way, I do want to point out something I do enjoy about Objectivist. I constantly talk about Ayn Rand and her vampire novels and that's the joke you're on. Thank you. And inevitably someone feels the need to point out that she did not write vampire novels and her name is actually Ayn. So thank you. Thank you. We've been talking for two hours. I owed her a copy of the Fountainhead. Somehow I thought her name was Ayn. Thank you. Thank you. I love them. So this is a really interesting way of phrasing it, which is... I was kidding with the Ayn. I know you knew how to pronounce it. Yeah. I know you know, you know. Yeah. It just got confusing. I think we all know and we all know that we're jokers here. We're all one. There's no Batman in this conversation. So it's an interesting way to frame it. Is Bitcoin the end or the beginning of something? And I've, as sort of with an open mind and seeing kind of all the possibilities of technologies out there, I also kind of thought that Bitcoin is the beginning of something. But what the Bitcoin community argues is that Bitcoin is the end of the base layer, meaning all the different innovations will come on top of it. Like for example, there's something called lightning network where it's basically just like gold is the end and everything is built like the monetary systems like cash and all that is built on top of gold. Bitcoin is the end in that other technologies are built on top of Bitcoin. That's their argument. I get that and I hear that all the time and I just, I don't quite understand that. And I think Bitcoin has limitations that potentially other cryptocurrencies might not have. You know, my attitude towards something like this is to a large extent, I don't understand this technology. My view is let it play out. I think I have more fear of physical, the ability of the government to crush these things than I think many in the community. So for example, so I gave a talk, Bitcoin, you know, and they were hyping the acceptance now. A lot of vendors will accept Bitcoin and this is great. And I said, yeah, it's absolutely great. More options is better than fewer options. But I said, you know that that could be taken away like that. Now it's true that we could exchange Bitcoin and the government wouldn't know, I think, wouldn't know that we do. But once he's advertising on his website that he accepts Bitcoin or once he tries to turn his Bitcoin into particular goods, once you manifest it in the physical world, now the government can step in. So the government could say, you can't sell anything to anybody using Bitcoin. They can do that and you won't be able to sell it. It will have to go into the black market. But that isn't able to sell it, just sell it in the black market. Yeah, but that's where the government thrives, right? The government thrives on letting you do stuff in the black market so they can decide when to put you in jail or not, right? So if I'm buying a sweatshirt from the government, sorry, if I'm buying a sweatshirt from somebody using Bitcoin, the government can't monitor my exchange of Bitcoin to him. But they can monitor the sweatshirt being sent to me, right? That's where they can interfere. And I think that at some point, to the extent Bitcoin is successful, it will be stopped. And that's what will stop it from becoming money. See, money can only become money. It can only become money if people are using it as money, right? And if the government can stop it being used, if I can't go to the grocery store and use my ATM that charges on Bitcoin or whatever, then it's not money. And I think that the government is going to step in and stop people from doing that. And that's what I... So I have more respect and fear for the power of government today. I don't see that at all. However, I could be wrong. And I'm sure Yaron hopes he's wrong. Absolutely. And in some sense... I hope the government just give in and the Fed tomorrow says, yeah, let Bitcoin thrive. But I think they'll want to regulate and control it. And the only way to regulate and control it is to stop it. Yeah, there's a bunch of people who argue that Bitcoin is too compelling to government that they'll actually embrace it, like a Trojan horse and stuff. But that assumes government has positive goals and wants to do good things. You can ask... No, no, it's greedy. They say government is greedy because they... Well, Bitcoiners have this whole lingo. They say number go up. Government is not greedy. Government is not greedy for money. Government is greedy for power. Government is greedy for control. Government is much more... Now, money is good too. They'll take the money if they can get it. But it's not fundamentally about money. It's fundamentally... And this is something that many libertarians don't understand. This is something many of the Bitcoin community don't understand. They have far too benevolent a view of politicians and the people in government today. By the way, I'm alive with this. And I know why he's laughing. I think I know why he's laughing. You know exactly why I'm laughing. And we should get to that issue at some point here. So I think there's a lot of naivete. Yeah, there's a lot. Speaking of naivete... A lot of it, Yaron. No. Okay. Okay. I'm not naive. I'm actually providing the warning and all these Bitcoiners are saying, no, no, no, government doesn't function that way. No one says I'm naive. Naive people think they're not naive. So let's put this on the table. Speaking of naive, I still more than the two of you by far, I think, have faith that government can work. Okay. Let's put that on the table. I got it. I'm not trying to be pedantic. What do you mean work? Government can achieve goals. That is not a dispute. Government can achieve goals effectively to build a better world, a functioning society. So I'm going to take it one step further than you. Oh, boy. The only way to achieve a better world is through government. Michael, what do you think about that? He almost dropped it. I said it on purpose that way. I'm glad that the mask is dropping. You cannot achieve, you cannot have liberty or freedom without a government. Now not anything like the governments we have today. So I think the idea that you can have liberty or freedom without government is the rejection of the idea of liberty and freedom and the undermining of any effort, any attempt to do it. In that sense, you, Lex, I know, exactly. On this side, I'm in agreement with Lex, which is unusual. That government is good for freedom. Yeah, you're in agreement with the guy who's reading Mein Kampf. That's not a surprise. Who's dressed in black. Yeah. That's the bad guys. But the fascism, I mean, the road to fascism is anarchy. It's not. What the hell are you talking about? Anarchy. Can you give me one example of an anarchy like the fascism? Well, every example of a stateless society leads to authoritarianism, every single one in all of human history. It has to. Wait, wait, you're saying Weimar Germany was anarchy? Well, it wasn't pure anarchy, but it got close. But no. It got close to anarchy? I said the reverse, by the way. I said the reverse. I didn't say that every form of authoritarianism started with anarchy. I said that every situation in which human beings lived under anarchy led to authoritarianism. So I said the flip was right. Anarchism isn't a location. Anarchism is a relationship. The three of us are in an anarchist relationship. Every country is in a relationship of anarchy toward each other. The US and Canada have an anarchist relationship toward one another. And to claim, you know, going back to Emma Goldman, who I love, in 1901, William McKinley, President McKinley, was shot by this guy, Leon Salgas. And it was very funny, but he was a crazy person. And they arrested him. He shot the president. And they go, why did you shoot President McKinley? And he just goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman. And she's like, oh, goddammit. So now she's on the lam, she had nothing to do with this guy. She's trying to flee. She gets arrested. They caught her. And she said, and this is the hubris of this woman, which I admire as the subject to be good hubris. She goes, I'd like to thank the cops for doing what they're doing. They're turning far more people into anarchism than I could do on my own. So given everything you've said in these two hours, and then to pivot to being anti government is being anti liberty, I don't feel I have to say anything. Well, okay. For people who are not familiar, if you're, I don't know why you would not be familiar, but Michael Malice talks quite a bit about the evils of the state and government and espouses ideas that anarchism is actually, what is it, the most moral system, the most effective system for human relationships. There's this great book called Atlas Shrugged and the author posits an anarchist private society. She calls it Galt's Gulch, where everything is privately owned and everyone is, no one is in a position of authority over anyone else other than the landowner. That's an anarchist society. There's one judge and one authority. Yeah. And that's what everyone has voluntarily moved there and agreed to be under. It's a very small community, right? Sure. That is right. There's no problem with competing governments. That's the definition of anarchism. What's that? That's the definition of anarchism. Case closed. Okay. End the show. End the show. I got him over. Mission accomplished. Not definition of anarchy at all. I'm all for competing governments. Hold up. You get more cookies. Good job. He did it. He did it. Yay. You're wrong. You brought him over. Red rover, red rover. More Lithuanian. What is this clown stuff? I was Lithuanian. That's my people. Yasnaya Polyana, Miodom, it's honey. No claims of health or nutrition. The other one claimed health. This one no claims. This makes no claims. No, I'm for competing governments on different geographic areas. That's fine. Why does it have to be over geographic? Okay, let me... It's really crucial that it's on different... So you don't have two judges in Galt's Gulch, you have one. And there's a reason why. There's one authority. There's one system of laws in Galt's Gulch that all the people under the Gulch abide by. There's one. There's two because they're in America. No, they're not. The whole point is they're not, right? They're not in America, they're in Colorado. I know, but the whole point of the novel is they've left America. They haven't left America. They've hid themselves. So they're not under the authority of the Americans. But they are. Don't you get it? But they're hidden. They're supposed to be... Hold on. The point is that they're hidden so they're not under the... No, no, no. If the three of us hide, we're still under the authority of Washington. Not if they don't know that we exist. But this is why they haven't established a state, and it's not a government, and it's not in that sense an example of really the way we form societies. It is a private club that is hidden away from everybody else. Fine. I'm fine with that. What happens if an American kills a Canadian in Mexico? What happens in America, it depends. Depends on the nature of the governments of the three places, right? But usually what happens in most of human history is that America will launch a war either against Mexico or Canada. Okay. First of all... So usually violence results in much more violence. Anarchy is just a system that legalizes violence. That's all it does. And in international affairs, that's the reality. The reality is that the way you resolve disputes that are major disputes is through violence. Ayn Rand said, the definition of a government is an agency that has a monopoly of force in a geographical area. So you can't complain that anarchism is legalizing violence when the definition of government, according to Rand, is legalized violence. No, but because you're taking the definition of violence the way she defines it, right, in this context. A, she talks about retaliatory force only. Has that ever happened? That's not the point. That is the point. Before there was Aristotle. Before there was an America, there was an America. The fact that something has never existed means that it will never exist before. The fact that the ideas haven't been developed to make something exist means that it will never exist before. You know, we're young. Human race is a young race. The ideas of freedom are very young. The ideas of the enlightenment are just 250 years old. The idea that you can't create the kind of government Ayn Rand talked about, I talk about, that it's never been before means it will never happen again. That's a silly argument. It's not a silly argument. You're being a Platonist. No, not at all. I'll explain to you how you're being exactly a Platonist. So if I was sitting in 1750 arguing with Thomas Jefferson, he was telling me what kind of state he was going to create, and I said, is a state like this ever being created? And he said, no. Was I being a Platonist? Of course not. No, you're being a Platonist. You know, things change. You're being a Platonist now. Here's why you're being a Platonist now. Because one of the things that Aristotle believed in, one of the things that Ayn Rand in other contexts believed in, the cover of her book, The Philosophy Who Needs It, is, I think it's the Sistine Chapel, the cover, or wherever it is. It's Aristotle and Plato walking. No, it's not. Yeah, but... What's that painting? I forgot what it is. It's the School of Athens. School of Athens. Thank you. It's the Raphael. So Plato's pointing toward the heavens while they're talking, and Aristotle's pointing to the earth. Reality. Reality. Absolutely. So if you want, there's two approaches. There's the Descartes, Cartesian approach, which is I sit in my armchair and I deduce all of reality, or if I want to study the nature of man, if I want to study the nature of dogs, if I want to study the nature of the sun, I have to look around. I have to open my eyes. I have to look at data. It's very difficult. You know, when Rand was on Donahue, he asked her about, aren't you impressed with the order in the universe? And she goes, oh, now you have to give me a moment. And the point she made, which was very hard for many people to grasp, it's hard for me to grasp, is one's concept of order comes from the universe. You can't have a disorderly universe because order means describing that which exists and which has existed. Now, if you are looking at governments throughout history that have always existed, and when you were on Lex, you said, what I'm talking about has never existed. To say that this, therefore, that that has a possibility of working in reality, I think is certainly not a point in that favor, number one. And number two, Jefferson was a fraud. What Jefferson argued how America would look did not come true. Jefferson's concerns about the Constitution were accurate. And the fact is the federal government did become centralized, did become a civil war. So if you told Mr. Jefferson the government you're positing can't work, you would have been correct. That's not what I'm saying. It's not the issue of can it work or not. It's the issue of can something exist that hasn't existed in the past? It's a silly argument. Now, we can argue about the fact of reality, whether such a thing can exist. But to say it hasn't existed in the past is not an argument about whether it can exist in the future. But that's the argument you made. No, no, you're talking about history and now you're dancing around it. No, I'm not. Sure. I'm saying that something different happened in the founding of America. It might not have been perfect, might not have been ideal, it might have been some people even think it was bad, right? Sure, it was different. Something different happened. Sure. And you could have said 20 years before and said, well, that's never happened before, so it can't happen in the future. That is a bad argument. It's not a good argument. Irrelevant. No, but you're making the argument that just because something hasn't happened before, that's certainly not a point to say it's likely to happen or possible. No. I'm saying, first of all, I agree that everything we know about what's possible or what's not possible has to be from reality. That we agree completely. I think anarchists completely evade that point. I think you guys live in a world of mythology, of abstraction, of Descartes, to imagine the kind of anarchy that David Friedman or Rothbard describe. It's complete fiction and it's complete mysticism. Okay, let me ask just a few dumb questions. So first of all, what do we do with violence in terms of just natural emergence of violence in human societies? So the idea that anarchism proposes is that we would, as the community grows, there may be violence and then we together form collectives that sort of fund mechanisms that resist that violence. I mean, I'd love to sort of talk about violence because that seems to be the core thing. That's the difference between the state that was definitionally, I guess, is the thing that has a monopoly on violence or controls violence in such a way that you don't have to worry about it. And then the anarchism, I don't know, I'm using bad words. Your definition is accurate, but the point is that being definition of the state versus how states act in reality is just absurd, yeah. And then the idea that anarchism will be is that it's more kind of a market of defenses against violence. So you have like security companies and then you hire different ones that are more competent. You have things being made affordable, you have more accessibility to security, you have accountability when people misuse their power, and you have more layers of security than having a government monopoly. What every objectivist understand, and they don't deny this, this is something they talk about constantly, is anytime you have a government monopoly, it's going to have enormous distortions as a consequence. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be ineffective. And when you're talking about ineffectiveness in markets, that's not just, you know, like the cup sucks. It often means mass death. It often means persecution. So this is something that anarchism, if not entirely prevents, certainly mitigates enormously. So can I just, as a thought experiment, say it was very easy to immigrate to another country, like where you could just move about from government to government, would that alleviate most of the problems that you have towards the state, which is like people being free to choose which government they operate under? Wouldn't that essentially be... Last scam, yeah. So like what is, I'm trying to understand why governments aren't already the thing that's the goal of anarchism. The kind of collectives that emerge under anarchism seems to be what government... You're equating two terms. So there's something called like private governance and there's government. So for example, if I go to Yaron's house and he has a rule, take off your shoes, become your house, if you want to really be kind of silly about it, you could say he's the governor. But it's really nonsensical to say that. If you go to Macy's, right, if you want to return your sweater, Macy's rules are right up there. You have seven days. If you don't have a receipt, you're going to get store credit. If you do have a receipt, you get a refund. So every organization, every bar, every nightclub, your house has rules of governments. This is... It's often they're unspoken. This is unavoidable. No one in America by law has to pay a tip, but it's just customary. You go at the waiter, you give them 15, 20%, so on and so forth. Now what anarchism does is it says, okay, security is something that is of crucial, essential human need. We all need to be safe in our property, safe in our purpose. The organization that by far is the biggest violator of this and always has been, always will be, is the government. Why? Because it's a monopoly, because it has no accountability. And look at the rioting last year, right? If you have one agency, pretend it's not the government, pretend it's Apple. And Apple has in charge of security in this town. People are rioting, people are looting. And Apple says, yeah, we're not going to send people into work. And if you try to defend yourself, we're going to put you in jail as well. That's the problem of having a government monopoly and that's something that anarchism solves for. Okay. But don't you, cause you said no accountability, don't you mean to say poor accountability? No, I mean to say no accountability. But isn't that the idea of democracies? I'm not for democracy. No, not for democracy, but like the system of governments that we have, there is a monopoly on violence, but there is a, I mean, at least in the ideal, but I think in practice as well, there's an accountability. I do not think that's the case. I know you're a critic of the police force and all those kinds of things, but the military is accountable to the people. I do not agree. The police force is accountable to the people. I do not agree. Perhaps imperfectly, but you're saying not at all. Not at all. And we've seen many examples of police officers doing horrific things on video and they don't even lose their pensions. But there's a lot of amazing police officers or no? I mean, no, there are not. So you're saying by nature, police is like a fundamentally flawed system. No, by nature, government monopoly on police is a fundamentally irredeemable system. Talk about private security. If I have a private security firm, you could have that under a government. And as a result of my private security, my person who I'm bodyguarding gets shot. That's going to be very bad for my company as compared to competing companies. However, when you have a government monopoly and I get people shot, what are you going to do? So the problem is that all the examples are going to be within the context of an existing government. The iPhone example and all these other examples of us being here, we're not an anarchy. That is absurd. We're under a particular system of law and the system of laws applies and we know that the particular system of laws applies. So the problem is when you have... There are many laws that we're not going to be enforced, that we're not going to be subject to. Sure. We know that. Violence related? No, there are lots of laws that are not going to be enforced. Right. And that doesn't make this anarchy because there are the laws out there. They could be enforced, which makes it an anarchy. But look, there's a number of issues here. There's an issue of the role of force in human society. I got to clarify things because I think you misunderstood what I said. I'm not saying that America is anarchist. What I'm saying is the three of us have an anarchist relationship between us because none of us have authority over the others. That's what I'm saying. But that's a bad use of the word anarchy. No, that's the correct use of the word anarchy. It makes it meaningless. It makes it... Every time any people get together, they have an anarchistic relationship. Yes. No. We have a voluntary relationship. That's what anarchism means, voluntarism. No. No, it doesn't. It's a political system. You want to get a dictionary out? You're taking a word and it's accepted usage. And then you're saying, oh, no, it means... You mean like selfishness? Maybe. And we never finished that discussion. You're taking a word, we're taking a word that you're defining and replacing it with voluntary. Now, voluntary... Okay, fine. I'm not for anarchism or voluntarism. Fine. Go ahead. But let's understand what voluntary means, right? For example, going to stores and there's a certain relationship that we have with a store that we engage in certain voluntary transactions with that store. Now, I believe that that works because there is a certain system of law that both the store and we have accepted that makes that possible. Now, if that didn't, there are certain people who would like to walk into their store and just take the stuff, right? So there is a... We might not, but there are certain people who might want it to go into their store. There's a certain system of laws that regulates the relationship and that defines the property rights and then provides protection for the property rights. Now, you would like all that privatized. That is, the store would have its police force and that would be privatized. Now, I don't believe that force can be privatized and there are many reasons... And it shouldn't. I don't think it can and I don't think... I think it's a... That's an interesting distinction. I don't think it can because I think that it's an unstable equilibrium, right? I don't think competing police forces can work. At the end, the police force with the biggest gun always wins and always takes over and becomes authoritarian. That's not true. Look at Iran and Iraq, excuse me. We had the bigger guns, we didn't win. Look at Afghanistan. We didn't win partially because none of that is an example of anarchy. No, but you just said the guy with the biggest gun is gonna win. Yeah. The guy with the biggest gun is gonna win. We didn't win in Vietnam. We had the bigger guns. But again, you're taking it outside of a context. That was a context in which countries are fighting, not a context in which there is no country. Okay. Let's suppose you, Yaron, have a rocket launcher and there's 100 people with handguns. How are you gonna win? You have the biggest gun. Oh, believe me, I could win. With one rocket launcher against 100 people? Yeah. It's just... Well, it depends how many rockets I have in the rocket launcher and whether I'm willing to use them. But that's... so now it's democracy because there are more of them that they win. Look, any one of these scenarios, all it does... so let's go back to the store. This is fascinating, by the way. I'm really enjoying this. I just want to say that. This is great. Because... I'm glad you are. I am enjoying the pain. And I'm also enjoying the comments that are gonna happen. Oh, the comments are gonna be overwhelmingly on your side. I don't think so. I know that. I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm completely dishonest. I'm a modern day... What's his name? What's the guy who is defending communism? Richard Wolff. I'm a modern day Richard Wolff. There's a sense in which I think anarchists are evading reality in the same sense. So we've got this... Do you think I'm dishonest or delusional? Calling someone dishonest is a really specific... I think you're delusional. I think you're delusional. And I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt of being delusional. That's fair. What is love? And as I said on the show, on the previous interview, I said, only smart people can be anarchists because it requires a certain level of abstraction of being divorced from reality that is hard for people who are actually connected to reality. He makes a good point because I always talk about this with people on social media and they talk about a lot of people who buy into the corporate media narrative and how they're dumb. I go, it's easier to train smart people than dumb people. It's easier to convince smart people of the systemic that's divorced from reality than somebody's dumb. You can deal in abstracts. I don't have to deal with the concretes that actually happen. This is an example I gave debating another anarchist. So... Who was it? She must have sucked. Well, you were the best. They were Hoppe fans. Oh, okay. Hoppe, okay. Hoppe fans. Not one of my least like... The people I like least in the world out there. You like them better than the communists, don't you? Barely. Oh, come on. Seriously? Yes. Because I think it leads to the same place. I really do. I think it leads to gulags. Fine. I think anarchy leads to gulags. And I think Hoppe's view of anarchy definitely leads to gulags. I'll grant you just for the sake of argument that it leads to gulags. However, surely you concede that they are against gulags whereas the commies have no problem with it. And that's a big... I think some do. I'm not sure people like Hoppe do. Because if you read some of his stuff, one wonders, right? But he wants monarchies and he wants... No, he said monarchies are preferable to democracy, which is true. No, it's not. Oh, God. I mean, one of the problems with an anarchist is... What judge? That's the monarch. One of the problems... Yeah. One judge, one authority. This is why I think... Yeah, the monarch. That's why I think... So you're a Hoppean. I don't think it's authoritarians. So Yaron Brooks is a Hoppean. Get in the chopper. No, I'm not a Hoppean. I don't want one judge. I don't want an arbitrary judge. I want an objective judge. There's an essay by John Hasnas, I think his name, I'm gonna bungle it. It's gonna be in my upcoming book on anarchism. And he just discusses, and it's a very long, complicated, technical issue, that the idea of objective law is incoherent. Well, yeah. I mean, that's why we disagree so much. Yeah. Because I think objective law is the only coherent system. Do you disagree that we, in effect, have competing systems of law under America? Meaning there's different ideologies. You have the Sotomayor ideology versus the Scalia ideology, and that effectively. And the point being, when you and I file a lawsuit, it completely depends on who the judge is. Yes. Okay. And in theory, I don't think the system works this way, but in theory, the way the system would work is that on new issues, there is some competition. Syria wasn't talking to you. Technology. Capitalism. So in theory, the system works, and this works, I think, with competing states, but also with competing legal views, particularly on a new issue. There's some, this is how common law worked, right? There's some evolution of it, and at some point, that gets codified into the law. And it gets objectified in that sense. That is, there's some conclusion that people come to. This is the role, in theory, of a legislature, and the legislature would be nice if it was composed of people who had some idea of legal philosophy. And it gets codified. Because these things are complex, and at some point, it goes through all the arguments, and then a certain truth emerges, or a certain truth is identified, and that's what gets encoded in law. That's what the purpose of a legislature is. Now, if you have competing mechanisms that don't converge on one authority, because there's no one authority, there are multiple authorities. That is, in a sense, there are multiple governments or multiple systems of enforcement, right? Then you get not just something emerging out of it, what you get is competing legal systems. Competing legal systems that now have competing mechanisms of enforcement, competing police forces, competing militaries, however we want to define it. And now there's no mechanism to resolve that. Now, yes, we could negotiate, and there's goodwill, and so on, right? Yeah, there you go. No, no. But now we're talking about the law, what each view, each position views as true and right, right? And it might involve, for example, it might involve the fact that the legal system has come to the conclusion that it's okay for children to have sex with adults, and this legal system thinks that is evil and wrong, right? And something has happened between the two, right? How do you resolve that conflict? There is no resolution. If this adult wants to have sex with this child, this legal system thinks it's okay, that legal system thinks it's... The only way to resolve that system is through one system imposing itself on the other. An example of countries is exactly that. When you had monarchies, when you had the little states all over the place, the way any kind of dispute was resolved when there were issues of territorial disputes, or issues of marriage, or issues of different legal interpretations about... was war. No, it wasn't. Yes, it was. It wasn't marriage. A lot of times people would marry a princess from another country just to feast. Sure. Forced marriages, which was not very pleasant. I'd rather sacrifice one princess than a queen. No, I don't want to sacrifice anybody. And in addition, I don't want to sacrifice anybody. I want to sacrifice the royals. And in addition... Well, I don't want royals. I don't want royals. Well, that's what sacrificing means. I think royals are pretty disgusting. Agreed. Let's get the baskets. And then on top of that, look, those periods in history are filled with violence, much more violence than we have today, much more bloody than they are today, far less freedom than we have today in terms of individual freedom. After the 20th... You're comparing this to 20th century. Yes, I'm comparing a monarchy, right? You said that's preferable to democracy, right? Yes, I did. I'm comparing... I'm saying Hoppe said that. I'm not saying I'm saying that. I'm saying Hoppe said that. To some extent. To some extent. But I'm not going to die in that hell. Hoppe said that. And I think it's ridiculous. These kings and queens were fighting constantly. I mean, the wars back then were violent in a way that... Unlike now? No, much more violent than now. If you look at the actual percentage of people killed in war... The Steven Pinker book. Yeah. If you look at the percentage of people... And not just that. You can look at the other stats. The percentage of people killed in war back then were far greater than the percentage of people even during World War II and World War I. So anarchy, and you know, David Friedman loves to quote the sagas of Iceland about how wonderful the anarchy... And I mean, it's funny because a lot of people who read David Friedman never read the sagas. It's worth reading. The sagas of the Iceland are filled with violence. Constant violence. Constantly people killing each other over, you know, I stole your chickens and you slept with my wife. The only way to resolve disputes, the only way to resolve disputes was violence. There was no authority, there was no mechanism to resolve these disputes. There was a council, but the council couldn't enforce anything, so in the end of the day we just resolved to violence. And this is legalized because there is no mechanism by which to make the violence illegal. So all anarchy is, is legalized violence constrained for a while and up until people stop that constraint by, you know, arrangements between the security organizations. But the security organizations have us by the balls, to put it figuratively, right? They really do. Sure. Unlike the state? Oh, the state today has it, but I would much rather live in this state, much rather live in this state, much rather live in many more authoritarian states than this, than a place where there's constant violence. I have a bunch of questions, but I'm enjoying this. Here's why everything he said is wrong. Okay, yes. Well, the idea of competing legal systems is inevitable because what Rand talked about is what she wanted was, and this is really kind of out of character with her broader ideology is, I think this was her term and I'm not saying this to make fun of you, when she has a judge and he's looking at the information, she wants him to be basically, I think she's the word robot, someone without any ideology. That they're just looking at the facts, they're not bringing their kind of worldview to it. I take it as a compliment. You are welcome. I think that given otherwise, her correct view that ideology is just a slur for someone's philosophy that someone, especially someone as erudite, educated and informed as a judge has to, and in fact should bring their ideology to their work is in one sense a little contradiction in her view, number one. Number two is we have right now the DA in San Francisco, I forget his name. He's the son of literal terrorists, communist terrorists, and he has made it the decree unilaterally that if you shoplift for less than, I forget, $200, we're not prosecuting. Yeah, I know that. You know this guy, right, right, right. So now you and I, and Lex I'm sure probably, agree that his ideology is abhorrent, that this doesn't help poor people, it doesn't help shop owners, it creates a culture, an area where it's just deleterious to human life. However, he has in one sense, given that he is a state operative, a legitimate worldview. Can I ask you just a quick question? Sure. Why couldn't a security force in a particular context say, yeah, if you take stuff on that store, we're not going to have any problem with that? I agree with you. That's very fair. That's a very legitimate question. The point is, in the context that I'm talking about, that firm is like, wait a minute, I'm hiring you for security, you're saying we're not going to provide security, why am I writing you a check? And we have examples of this in real life. If I get into a car accident with you, right? You have your car insurance, I have my car insurance. If your car insurance had their druthers, they wouldn't pay me one penny. If my car insurance didn't have their druthers, they wouldn't pay you one penny. We already have all, you were saying earlier that we need to have one kind of umbrella mechanism of use. There are already more cases than you can count where there's private arbitration. Now the argument is that private arbitration only works because they have recourse to the government. But my point is, there's many examples where even though that recourse is theoretically possible, it's not a realistic concern, specifically because they know that if you have recourse to the state, you have no concept of what that outcome is going to look like, except knowing it's going to be exorbitant, it's going to be time consuming. We can't use the state, right? I mean, I'm as critical as the state as it is right now. Maybe not as critical as yours, not as critical as yours, but I'm quite critical of the state as it is right now. But let's say we got into a traffic accident and you have a Rolls Royce and I destroyed your Rolls Royce and my insurance company now owes your insurance company a lot of money. And let's imagine it's a lot of money just for the sake of it. You're clearly guilty. Yeah, clearly guilty. And my insurance company looks at the books and it goes, I don't want to pay this. And you know what? I've got bigger guns than his insurance company. And I'm just going to take over their insurance company. And hostile takeover takes on a whole new meaning when I can muster guns on my behalf than in a hostile takeover in a capitalist context. That to me is what happens. That to me is inevitably what happens. And I think this is where the delusion comes in. The idea that when big money is involved and power is involved, remember, again, the same kind of politicians who today get into politics are likely to want to run some of these security agencies because they'll have a lot of power over people. The same kind of maybe sociopaths would be the same skill set, but that's a separate issue. I think it very much is. But you think people, the people in Washington, the same, the CEOs psychologically and skill set wise? Well, today's CEOs? Yes. Okay. Yes. You might be right. Because I think that's what's rewarded for a CEO, somebody who could get along with government. And I think the kind of CEO who is going to run a security company, which is not just about business, it's about the use of force. It's about control. It's about negotiation with other entities that are using force, you know, diplomacy. And we should get back to objective law because I think it's essential to this whole argument. I think all you get into is security agencies fighting security agencies. And again, the biggest gun. And I don't mean here the guy who has the biggest literal gun, the rocket launcher versus the guns. I got excited for a second. By the biggest gun? Yeah. The party that has the more physical force, however, that is mustered either by numbers or by weapons is going to dominate and will take over everybody else. Now, one of the things that's common in a market is takeovers. It's consolidation. And here the consolidation can happen through force and you can rule other security companies. And that's exactly what will happen until you dominate the particular geographic area. Okay. So let me explain why I disagree with that. You were just saying, and I agree correctly, I agree with you, that, listen, if I have access to the bigger gun, why am I paying you or whoever's paying whatever? I'm just going to use force and not pay them. We have that right now. It's called lobbying. Yeah. So instead of me, and I'm sure in your example, you weren't being literal, instead of the insurance company literally having the army, they could be like, hey, let me call corrupt co with a mafia. I agree. Yeah. Go out and take them out. By having this federal government, as you know, and certainly I'm not a fan of, takes more through asset forfeiture than burglaries combined. What asset forfeiture is, people don't even understand this. This is something crazy, which you're on, it's as opposed to me, as opposed as I am, which is I'm a cop. I go to your house. I think you haven't been charged or convicted of anything. I have evidence. It's usually in a car. Yeah. Yeah. It's like drug deals. Okay. I go to your house, you're a drug dealer. I say, and you can understand the reasoning, well, if someone is getting profit through illegal mechanisms, their profit isn't really their property and they shouldn't be rewarded that profit. So basically, I go to your house, you're a drug dealer, I seize all your property. You don't really have recourse, even though you haven't been through deep, I'm just explaining to the audience, through the new process and SOL. That combined, for people who don't know, is more than the total amount of burglaries in America. It's a huge incentive. And what happens is the police department, which seizes your car auctions, it sees your house auctions, it's a great way to line their pockets. This is a huge incentive. It's horrible. It's a huge incentive for police departments to do this because it's like, look, this guy's a crook. Maybe he's not a drug dealer, but he's clearly a pimp. Let me just take all his stuff and it's going to go to the community. Well, and the rationale originally was if I try him, in the meantime, he'll take that money and funnel it somewhere else and hide it, and I'll never be able to get access to it. And it was passed in the 1970s under the original Caesar Laws, what kind of RICO Act, going after the mafia. And one of the reasons I despise Giuliani as much as I do, and there's very few politicians out there that I despise more, is because he was the first guy to use RICO on financiers. And so it wasn't even a drug dealer. It was you accused of a financial fraud, not you weren't shown to be guilty, you were accused. All your assets basically were forfeiture. Innocent until proven guilty went out the window. If you were managing money, you were done. You were finished. So you're saying this kind of stuff naturally emerges with the state. Hold on. So my point is what are presented as the strongest criticism of anarchism are inevitably descriptions of status quo. What you're describing is already the event. I am a big insurance company. I don't want to pay you. I call Washington. Either I pay you and Washington gives me a subsidy. So what you're describing is an inevitable aspect of having a government. So what I'm describing is the inevitable evolution of anarchy into a government. I just think that the... Markets don't consolidate into monopoly. That's a leftist propaganda myth. Not markets where you have substitute products, but this is the problem. The problem is force has no substitute. That is force is not a product you can have. So this is my fundamental issue about turning competing police forces. Force is not a product. Force is not a service. It's a service. It's not a service. And it's not a product. Security is not a service? No. Well, security in the context of a legal system is. But this is the point. The legal system, the laws are not a service or a product. They are a different type of human institution. Science is not a product or a service. It's a different type of human institution. There are different types of human institutions. Some are marketable. You can create markets in, some you cannot. Law is not a marketable system. Can I ask a question quickly? Is there any other field other than law that you think you can't create markets? Well, science. Science is not marketable. The science itself is not marketable. What science is true and the same ethic is in law. Law is not marketable. Law is the system that allows markets to happen. You need a system of law, whether it's private law in a particular narrow context or whether it's broader law. Law is the context in which markets arise. So one of the reasons we transact is we know that there's a certain contract between us, explicit or implicit, that is protected by a certain law, whether it's protected by private agency or private, the government doesn't matter. But there's a certain contract that is protectable, right? By a system. Theoretically. Theoretically. Yes. So law is the context in which markets arise. You don't create a market because there's nothing above it, in a sense. It is the context that allows markets to be created. Once you market it, markets fall apart. So hold on a second. Hold on. So you think that law could be a market? And it already is a market. And we see it, for example, eBay. If I am buying something from Yaron, I won't even know his name. I don't know. Maybe he's in another country. And he screws me out of the money. I can't sue you. Or if I sue you in England, good luck with that. You're not going to argue that I'm going to sue you. What happens in this case, which has already been solved by the market, eBay and PayPal, which has access to your bank account, they act as the private arbiter. They're going to get it wrong a lot. Not even a question, just like Yaron's not going to argue that the government right now gets it wrong a lot. That's not even a question. The point is, at the very least, I'm going to get my resolution faster, cheaper, and more effectively. So the issue with having any kind of government, anything, and Yaron's not going to disagree with this, is at the very least, it's going to be expensive, inefficient, and cause conflict. Yeah, but I think what it allows is exactly... We don't even know what the Supreme Court's going to judge. Again, you're moving us to today's environment, which I'm against. I'm moving us to reality. No, but reality doesn't have to be what it is. I mean, go ahead. That's the most anti Iran quote. No, in a sense of the politics, the political reality. I know, but the quote by itself is great. I know. I know. You'd love to... He agrees with Donald Hoffman is what he said. Yeah, it turns out I agree with Hoffman. He's an elf. So it's... Where were we? So I believe that because we have a certain system of government, it allows for these private innovations to come about that facilitates certain issues in a much more efficient way than the government would deal with it. But it's only because we have a particular system that has defined property rights, that has a clear view of what property rights are, it has a clear view of what a transaction mean or what contract law is, and eBay has a bunch of stuff that you sign, whether you read it or not. Of course. The fact is defined first, and then there are massive innovations at the level of particular transactions at the level of an eBay that facilitate increased efficiency. And that's great. But the fact is none of that gets developed. None of that gets created. In a world in which I might be living under different definition of property rights, eBay might be living under separate definition of property rights. You might have a third definition of property rights, and there's no mechanism by which we can actually operationalize that because we all have a different system. There is a mechanism. We already have that. Let's change the example I just used. What happens if a Chinese person who has different definition of property rights kills an American in Brazil? Again, in a smaller community, what happens is lots of violence. No, but I'm talking right now. A Chinese person has... Right now, the only reason that it doesn't lead to violence is because people are afraid of even more violence, and it affects many people, large numbers of people who don't want to go to war. But if you have small... In a state where the states were small, in those little states, there was war all the time for exactly those reasons, because the cost was lower, because it was more personal, because I knew maybe the person who was killed over there, and I went to my king and encouraged him to go to war. You know why there was war? Violence is constant. You know why there was war? Because there had been no Ayn Rand, and good ideas lead to good societies, which leads to good people, which leads to good behavior, good interrelationships. So now that we have Ayn Rand, all this stuff in the past is irrelevant, because if they studied her works, we would be... Rand was on Donahue again, you could watch the clip, and he asks her, she goes... He goes, you're saying that if we were more selfish and acted more self interest, there'd be less war, less Hitler? And she said, there wouldn't be any. Right? That's right. Well, if we were all selfish, there wouldn't be any Hitlers, right? But who do you regard as the overweening authority if I am buying a product from you as someone in England via eBay? Who's the governing authority? The governing authority are the legal systems in England and the United States, which have to be synchronized pretty well. Right. So why eBay doesn't function in certain countries, because there is no legal system. I agree with you. My point is, why do those legal systems have to be a function specifically of geography, as opposed to, why can't I sitting here... I could sit here, you're not going to let me finish my point. I can sit here and be a British diplomat, right? And as a British diplomat, I'm going to be treated differently under American law than you are as an American citizen as you are. Why can't you have that same process, sure, we're geographically proximate, but I'm a citizen of this company and you're a citizen of that company? Why would that be different in your opinion? If it's England and the United States, it's probably not going to matter that much, right? But if it's Iran and the United States, then the fact that we're sitting next to each other makes a huge difference. Oh, I... Massive difference. The fact is that, and Ayn Rand, I think would be the first technologist and this is why she was so opposed to anarchy. It's not... That's not why. It is why. It's because of Rothbard. No, it has nothing to do with... Nothing? It has nothing to do with Rothbard. Nothing. Nothing. How do you know? Nothing. How would you know? Because her argument against anarchy is an intellectual one, not a personality based one. Can't it be both? Anyway, but back to it, back to Iran. No, it has nothing to do with Rothbard. You don't know that, you're not a psychic or a necromancer. The only way we're going to resolve this is arm wrestling, right? It's through violence. Arm wrestling is not violence. Words are violence. Words are violence, everyone. Words are violence. Emotions are violence. He throws me off with this stuff. That's the problem. Even facts and truth? He's very, very good. Not facts and truth. Distortions and arbitrary statements, because your statement about Rothbard is an arbitrary statement that has no cognitive standing and therefore I can dismiss it. I'm not doing like this because I want to dismiss it. It has no cognitive status. The fact that she disliked Rothbard doesn't mean that everything he said she was going to dismiss because she disliked it. I agree with you. But what I'm saying is it would not be impossible. But there's no evidence. I'll talk. I'll give you some evidence. Human psychology. It is not impossible that if you hate some... What's that guy's name? Richard Wolff. Right. It's not impossible that if Richard Wolff said something that you would otherwise agree with, hold on, let me finish, you'd be dismissive or less likely to give him credit for it being a human being. That's all I'm saying. It's as silly as to say Rothbard came up with this theory of anarchy because he was pissed off at Ayn Rand and wanted to write something. I don't know. Bring it down. Bring it down so that he can speak too and let's keep it... I don't think we're getting agitated. No, you guys aren't. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, bring it down not in terms of give more pauses so Michael can insert himself. That's what I mean. See, private governance. What's the point of that? Private governance. Look. Look, it's private governance. I'm all for private governance. I'm trying to establish this geographic law of the land. I don't know. That's not the point. I do think that Michael's... I mean, that's interesting that you disagree with this. I do believe that psychology has an impact on ideas and Ayn Rand, you don't think Ayn Rand had grudges that impacted the way she saw the world? We would like to think that... I don't think any of her grudges entered into her philosophical statements, at least not that I can tell, and given the centrality Ayn Rand gave to the role of government, to the existence of government, to the need for government, to establish real freedom, and the way she defines freedom, which is very different than Rothbard, and the way she defines it, to say then that her opposition and anarchy is because of, I think, is just an arbitrary statement. I didn't say because of. I didn't say because of. I said followed by. And not, and I don't see why psychology would enter it. Now, maybe the tone in which you responded to an answer might have been motivated by that or something like that, but given the amount of thought she gave to the role of government in human society and why government was needed, and why you needed laws in order to be free, that freedom didn't proceed, you needed the right hierarchy, I think that we could say that it, give it at least a respect that she might have been wrong, but she had a particular theory that rejected anarchy, and that thought anarchy was wrong. Okay, hold on. I really resent, and I don't want to say you're doing this, the implication that if Rand was guided by her passions, that somehow is a criticism of her or lessens her. I think Rand was a very passionate person. I think she loved her husband enormously. She despised certain people enormously, and I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I don't think she would change her philosophical position about something because she disliked somebody. I agree, but what I'm saying. Given the amount of thought she gave to that philosophical position. All I'm saying is, it is possible that if someone comes across ideas that she had not considered before, if she regarded this person as a bad actor, like all of us, she would be less likely to take them under consideration. Sure. That's all I'm saying. Sure. And I think other people confronted her with ideas of anarchy, I don't think Rothbard was the only one. Correct, Roy Charles as well, yeah. Roy Charles certainly did. And she rejected them, and she rejected them because she had, and whether you agree with or not, she had a thought out position about why you needed to have this particular structure in place so that markets and human freedom could exist. It's just really interesting because this is the one time, in my view, and please correct me if I'm wrong, where she invokes need as kind of a basis for political activity. So let's suppose you want this federal government, whatever you want, you don't want it like it is now, like your version of the government, I don't see why it's an issue for you for me and Lex to say, we're not privy to Washington, we're going to do our own thing, and given, if we go about our lives not initiating force and being productive actors, why she would have an issue with this. Why would I care? Well, you would care because if you're saying the government has a monopoly on force between these two oceans. So you can do that as long as you don't violate somebody else's rights. Sure, but what I'm saying is we just declare ourselves sovereign, we're not going to pay any income taxes, we're going to be peaceful people, and when Lex and I have disputes, we're going to call Joe, that's Joe Rogan, you're never going to get to meet him, but he's a good guy. I know. We're going to call Joe, and Joe's going to resolve it. He's so good at like, you know, needling and getting you off topic that way. He's really effective at it. I always say, when I debate communists, I always say to them... You mean Lex? Yeah, maybe Lex. Maybe I should... Comrade, I love you. That if they really believe... Burgundy, not red. If they really believe in what they think, then they should be advocates of capitalism, because under capitalism, under my system of government, capitalist government, right, they could go and start a commune, they can live with communists, they can live to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability, all they want, and live their pathetic miserable lives that way, and the government would never intervene, because the whole view of capitalism is freedom, is we leave it alone, right? As long as you're not violating my rights, as long as you're not taking my property, as long as you're not engaging with... So in that sense, yeah, you and Lex can form your own thing, I don't believe in compulsory taxes anyway, so you and Lex can do your own thing, never pay taxes, as long as you're not violating the laws, and the laws are very limited, right, because they're only there to protect individual rights, so as long as you're not violating somebody else's property rights or inflicting force on anybody else, you're peaceful, you can do what you want, you know, don't have... Great. Yeah. Great. Case placed. Don't have sex with kids, right? I will stop immediately. Good. The rest of us are just playing checkers and he's playing chess. Yeah, I mean, a government that protects individual rights properly is a government that leaves you alone to live your life as you see fit, even if you live your life in a way that I don't approve of, that I don't think is right, I mean, that's the whole point, right? So the only thing you can do is, you know, try to enforce arbitrary laws that you come up with on me. Sure. Of course. Absolutely. Okay, great. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we lived in a world where rights protecting laws are superfluous, but the reality is usually that somebody violates them, whether by accident or intentionally, and that you need some mechanism, now if you guys can resolve that dispute without getting involved, fine. But if you guys land up not resolving, there is another authority that will help you resolve it. Yeah, our company. So can I ask you a question? Under anarchism, what kind of systems of laws do you think will emerge? Do you think we'll have basically a similar kind of layer of universal law to where, like... Let me answer this. This is a great question. I know what you're going with this. This is often presented as a criticism of anarchism, and this is actually something I think Yaron would agree with as well in other contexts, which is this. One of the reasons communism can't work, central planning can't work, and this was one of Mises's great innovations, is if I could sit down, it's like asking, what would the fashion industry look like if the government didn't run it? There's no way for me to know. What the fashion industry is, which all of us are in favor of it being free, is literally millions of designers, of seamstresses, of people who make the fabric, also references throughout history, and these creative artistic minds putting things together in every year. There's no shortage of clothes. In fact, we make so many clothes that we send them in landfill sizes to overseas poor countries, and you have people in these destitute countries wearing Adidas shirts. They can't even read English, but because we don't know what to do with all these clothes. That's how the glory of free enterprise is. The problem is, problem using this loosely, everything comes cheap and overabundant, like food. Well, it doesn't actually come overabundant, but it's done properly. That's fair. Supply meets demand. Sure. That's fair. What I'm saying is, if 150 years ago you said, you know, one day we're going to have an issue where there's going to be so much food and then the kids are too fat. It's just going to be like, I have four who are dead in the crib. I wish. I mean, what kind of paradise is this? What you would have, we have this right now in certain senses, you have the Hasidim, you have Sharia, I'm sure in the medical system, they have their own kind of private courts and court marshals is another example of this, although obviously that's through the state. So you would have innovation in law, under markets, just the same ways you'd have it. And we have this already. Maybe it's not, Yaron doesn't like in terms of murder and rape and I can understand why, but in terms of business and interactions, he would have no problem with different arbitration firms, having different rules for what kind of evidence is allowed. Maybe you only have 60 days to make your case and so on and so forth. And the market is a process of creative innovation and it would be dynamic. It would be changing. So what's interesting relating to this is that one of the ways Ayn Rand proposed raising revenue for the government, because she was against, was let's say we have a contract. We could just have it arbitrated without government interfering, but if we wanted to access the courts of the government as a final authority, we would pay. And that's how governments would raise, some of the funds would be raised that way. So there's definitely a value to having this innovation and the public space. But I don't believe that is the case with murder. I don't believe that is the case with violent crime. And it's funny you bring up Sharia because David Friedman, when he gives, when he gives Wait, I got to ask you to clarify. I'm not trying to interrupt you. You were talking about with murder. I mean, you would agree, I think just to clarify for the audience, that there is room for innovation and murder because there's things like matter of slaughter. There's murder one, murder two. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it happens at a market level. I don't think there's a market innovation for murder. Somebody has to figure out what those standards are and they will evolve as we gain more knowledge. But we're all in agreement that the word murder means very different things. Oh, absolutely. And if circumstances matter and standards of proof and standards of evidence, all of that, there has to be a standard. All of that, there has to be a standard. And that's what I think a proper government provides. So David Friedman uses, in some of his talks about private law, he uses Sharia law in Somalia as an example. Look, legal systems evolve privately, independent, yeah, authoritarian ones, ones that don't respect the rights of women at all. Are you married? No, no. But we all want to have sex with our mother, as Freud would say. Oh my God. Can we make that a clip? Yeah. Where the hell did that come from? That's much better than what I was just saying about the kids. I appreciate that. Okay. So we went in a voluntary way, although sometimes for Yaron and sometimes for Michael it felt involuntary, but we all got the big guns. So how do we land this? Obviously there's a disagreement about anarchism here. I think there's a big agreement. Because if Yaron was saying that if I want to have my voluntary stupid thing with you, and his government is not going to tax me, and is not going to insinuate itself unless we're murdering each other, something like that, I'm okay with that. So if you take the example of Sharia law, which was mentioned earlier. So if you have a little community within this, within my world, right, that imposes Sharia law, if it starts mutilating little girls, then you impose your law on it, right? You impose the law on it because it's an issue of protecting individual rights. If they want to treat women, if women have to cover up, and the women are okay with that, that's fine. If the woman wants to leave but is not allowed to leave, that's where my government would step in and prevent them from using force against her. And that's it, right? Now I think it's more complicated than that, right? Because I think there are complex issue property rights often where it's not going to be easy for you guys to resolve, and particularly if you interact with people outside of your community. Sure. But yeah, my view is government is there to protect individual rights. That's it. Otherwise, leave you alone. I think this conversation is going to continue for quite a while. Israel has a new book on the topic coming out eventually, one day. So you're working also on the, still called the White Pill? The White Pill, yeah. And the first line of the White Pill is, Ayn Rand did not laugh. I'm not joking. That's literally the first line. I believe it. Because it opens up with her, who knows what the book's going to look like when it's done, but as of now, that's the beginning, because it opens up with her testimony at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where she's trying to explain to these congresspeople what it was like when she left the Soviet Union, and they are just befuddled by it. Can you explain she did not laugh? Well, because the first line of the Fountainhead, spoiler alert, is Howard Rourke laughed. So this is a little inversion of that. It says Ayn Rand did not laugh, because Ayn Rand was a huge fan of America, as am I. She took our political system very seriously. She had enormous reverence for institutions. One example of this is one of the villains of the Atlas Shrugged is based on Harry Truman. I think Thompson is the character's name. And because she had such respect for the title of president, she refers to him as the chairman. She couldn't even bring herself... She had a huge respect for the presidency. I wonder if she'd still have it, given the last string of presidents we've had. So having her, which sets up the broader point of the book, which I'm sure I'll be back on the show to discuss, assuming this bridge hasn't been burned, but I'll try my best. All three of us are canceled. Some are more canceled than the others. Uh oh. I don't know. I'm looking at you, Michael. And the point being, which sets up the broader point of the book, is how ignorant many people are in the West about the horrors of Stalinism and communism, but also how many people in the West were complicit in saying to Americans, go home, everything's fine, this is great, sure, you know, this is why pensions have a race, they're sure they're mistakes. And they really made a point to downplay really gratuitously some of the unimaginable atrocities of the communism. And just one more sentence, and going through the work and learning about what they actually did is so jaw dropping that it's, and if I didn't know about it, many people I'm friends with who are historians who entered the space, you know, this isn't common knowledge to them, then we can assume that almost no one knows about it. And I think it's very important for people to appreciate whether Republican, Democrat, liberal, whatever, how much of a danger this is. And I think Americans have this, there's a book called It Can't Happen Here, I think by Sinclair Lewis about a fascism coming to America. American exceptionalism has a positive context, but also a negative context where you think we're invincible, all these horrible things that happen in these other countries, it can't possibly happen here, we're America, we're special, and it's completely an absurdity. Yeah. Have you seen the movie, Mr. Jones? My friend wrote it, no I haven't, but Walter Durante and his quotes, I have a thread on Twitter. For those who don't know, he won a Pulitzer because he was the New York Times man in Moscow. And endlessly, he was talking about how great it was, how if you hear about this famine in Ukraine, this is just propaganda, I went to the villages, you know, everyone's happy and fed. A lot of it was explicit lies, you know, and when you realize you're talking about, let's give them the absolute benefit of the doubt, an accidental genocide, it's still mind boggling. And also, you know, Ann Applebaum, who's just a phenomenal, phenomenal writer, she wrote a book called Red Famine, Stalin's War in Ukraine, and she talks about how what people in America don't appreciate is how clever in their sadism the Soviets were. And what they knew to do to Ukraine is everyone is starving, so they knew if you got some meat on your bones, you're hiding food. So they come back at night, take your hand, put in the door jam, keep slamming the door, ransack your house. They didn't have to find the food, burn down your house, take all your clothes, goodbye and good luck. I don't recall saying good luck. Yeah. So I highly recommend the movie because it's very well done. It's very well directed, it's beautifully made, it's stunningly effective in illustrating exactly that. When you're in Ukraine during the famine, oh, your heart goes, I mean, it's crushing. And it shifts to black and white. It's very, very well made aesthetically, so highly recommend. And it's written by Andriusha Lupa, she's a Ukrainian friend of mine, she introduced me, Yanmi Park, who's a big North Korean defector. And this is the kind of thing where I think more people need to... When I wrote the new write, which talks a lot about the Nazis or the kind of neo Nazis, on their big complaints against people who are Jewish, she's like, oh, we hear all about the Holocaust. How come you don't talk about the Holodomor? I'm like, I'm trying to do my part. I agree with you that we need to be talking more about the Holodomor. Absolutely. And it's sad, there are more movies that are anti Soviet, which tells you a lot about the view of the intelligentsia. It's a great idea, it just was badly implemented. And no, it's a rotten idea, it's an evil idea, and it was implemented exactly how it has to be implemented. There's no alternative. Can we talk about The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and which character do you find most fascinating, ones that kind of you meet in your own mind, that you almost have conversations with or has an influence on you and your life in general? You know what character I like, because I know no one ever gives this answer, but this is my... Just aesthetically, you know how sometimes you're drawn to a character and if this person were real, you think they're just horrible, but there's something about the resonates with you. I can't even explain this, but I love the character in Atlas Shrugged of Lillian Reardon, who is Hank Reardon's wife. And what is amazing about her, so she's his wife, he's this big industrialist innovator, and she's this like former beauty, but she's so cold and soulless that there's... I mean, I joke about, you know, Ayn Rand's vampire novels, that character is as close to a literal vampire as you're going to see in Rand. And there's just this great scene where, you know, Hank Reardon invents Reardon metal. It's this great metal, which is extremely strong, but extremely, it's like light, so this creates all these innovations. And he brings her a bracelet made of the first Reardon metal. This is his life goal. This is like Prometheus bringing fire. And she's like, what the fuck is this? You brought me diamonds. Yeah, you could have brought me diamonds. What is this shit? And then Dagny, who is another industrialist, she's a heroine, very strong female character in Atlas Shrugged, is at a party, and she goes, I got diamonds, let's trade. And Lillian's like, you want this? And she's like, yes, because that's the concretization of the human mind. These are rocks. And Lillian's like, okay, whatever. And that character is someone who has a lot of resonance in our culture, this kind of soulless... It's easy to write a soulless male figure, like Peter Keating in some ways a soulless, but that for some reason, when it's like a soulless female, it seems that much more chilling and effective. Do you not agree though, that Lillian Reardon is an amazingly very powerful figure? Powerful figure. And I think Reardon is too. And what I love about Reardon is his evolution, right? He's so flawed. He's a hero who's completely flawed, and it drives me nuts when people say, her characters are cartoonish, they never change, there's no emotion. Really? Did you read the same book I did? Because if you take Reardon, and he's struggling and he's trying to deal with Lillian and his family and all this stuff, and we know family members like this, right? I mean, who are leeches and parasites, but he's excusing them because that's what he's supposed to do. And then as he evolves to fully realize what's going on, that evolution is difficult, it's hard. Like the scene after he has sex with Dagny, of course, he gives a speech, but the speeches is such a good speech in terms of conveying his mind body split, right? He thinks he really had fun, he really enjoyed the sex, right? But he thinks it's animalistic, and he thinks it's a sign of his depravity, and he thinks, and here he is, this woman he loves, and he adores her, and he can't connect the two, he can't connect the sex with the love, he can't connect the sex with adoration, and with the values. So her characters are anything I think but cardboard characters, because I think Dagny and the scenes where she's listening to music, and gets captured by the music and the way Wren describes that, I think it's just beautiful. Or the scene, my favorite scene in Atlas is the scene where they're taking the first train ride across the John Gold Bridge, and they're in the engine room, and it's traveling through, and the way she's describing Dagny, it's almost like Dagny's having sex with the machine, right? It's so powerful emotionally, their success, the fact that they did it. Nobody told them it was impossible, and the train is going really fast, and that whole, it's got a sexual vibe to it, it's all about passion, it's all about success, and it's all about the success of their minds, and nobody else matters. What's really great about that scene, just in terms of constructing the novel, I'm not going to spoil anything, so the Atlas Shrugged has three acts, like three act structures not uncommon, and the first act is about Hank Reardon overcoming all this adversity at home in his personal life and in his business to create this great achievement. So Rand really makes the reader invested in this character and his accomplishments, he's unambiguously doing something good, there's no downside here, he's making it easier to transport people, transport food, this is really just great. And it's just, once you read it and you look back, you're like, she does such a masterful job of making, you have to be a fan of this person and root for them, because she's like, oh, you think things are going great, he's overcome? Hold on a minute. And then the rest of it, she's just real, and your sense of injustice is triggered as a reader to such an nth degree, because you saw what he went through to get to this point, and now you're seeing it taken away from people inferior to him. And one of the quotes on Twitter I use all the time is, I'll see someone, politician or a bureaucrat or a thinker, just advocate for something completely unconscionable. And I'll just quote and say, my favorite criticism of Ayn Rand is that they say her villains are too evil and unrealistic, because the things that people posit with a straight face are so much worse than she has in her book. And not just politicians, you find intellectuals today. Oh, of course. So yeah, yeah. Way, way over the top. You know, even whenever Adlai Shrugged I was going, nobody really talks like this. No, they do. Let me give you one example. There was a story she wrote, which she never published, they published her journals, the Ayn Rand Institute. And there was one character, and this is a prototype of Ellsworth Toohey, he was the villain of one of the villains of the Fountainhead. And basically, the kid had like deformed legs or broke his legs or something like that. And he wants to get leg braces. And the dad is like, Oh, we're not going to do that. Why should you be better than anyone else? Like you should just have like this deformity, accept your fate. And you're reading this. I'm like, what dad is not going to give his kid leg braces, it's ridiculous. But now it's not uncommon for deaf children to not get cochlear implants and not be able to hear because their parents say, well, we're going to lose deaf culture. Hearing is just information. And you're sitting there, and whether you agree with this or not, this is very close to what she was saying. And when I read what she was saying, I'm like, okay, crazy Ayn Rand, this is not a thing. And it's like, oh, yeah, the craziness is that it's not braces, it's hearing. It's yeah. And what evil to deny your kid hearing. I mean, God. So here's the thing, if you want deaf culture, which I would believe is a thing, sign language or whatever, they could turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. If you want, you give them the choice. Yeah. Tonight, I'm sorry, one more thing. You know, Rand used the word evil frequently. And I think maybe I can make the argument she used it too loosely. If you are denying a child the gift of music, I will say that's evil. I agree completely. Unambiguously. Yep. If you go online and listen, watch videos of people getting hearing aids and being able to hear for the first time, I promise you, you will cry because there's no pure, I'm getting teared up right now. There's no pure expression of humanity and technology at its best than seeing a two year old or one and a half year old who can't even talk. And then you see the reaction when they hear mom's voice. It's so beautiful and moving. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just moving. It is. It's like it's one of the, one of the ways to rethink technology, perhaps. And there's this, this is really funny because sometimes it'll be this tough dude, right? And he's been deaf all his life. And then they put the hearing aid and the girl is like, can you hear me? And he's trying to be tough for three seconds and you just sit there. No, absolutely. And that's true of any sense. I mean. Like colorblind people seeing color for the first time, that kind of thing. I think there's a few. It's not quite the same, but it's somewhat. But if you're blind and suddenly can see, I mean, it's just, it's just stunning. I mean, and how do we form our concepts? How do we think? We have to, we get information from reality, right? We interact with reality through our senses and that's how we become conceptual beings. And you deny an element of that from a human being. That is horrible. There's a potential with that, with the Neuralink too, so further developments there. So I mean on that, there's a powerful question of who is John Galt. I don't know if we can do this without spoiler alerts. Yeah, don't spoil the book. Okay. Well, but you can say, you can say. What's the importance of this character? What's the importance of this question? I mean, without the, so I want to give a talk on who is John Galt and who is John Galt in a sense is anybody who takes their own life seriously. Anybody who's willing to really live fully their own life, use their mind in pursuit of their rational values and pursue their happiness fully uncompromisingly with no comp, with no compromise and sticking to the integrity. Anybody can be John Galt in that sense. I think one of the mottos I live by is all we are tasked to, maybe this is a little bit religious but I think your own is going to agree with it. I'm sure you'll agree with it. All any of us can do is leave the world a little bit of a better place than we found it. And I think if you do that through hard work, being honest, being a kind, not at the expense of other people, you can go to your grave patting yourself on the back. I mean, to me, leaving the world a better place, yeah, I mean, that's not what drives me. What drives me is, I mean, what I think drives people. I think just live a good life and good life means a life you're happy living and part of that is the impact you have on the world but it's, so many people live wasted lives, live mediocre lives, live conventional lives. Maybe they even leave the world a better place but they didn't really, they didn't – But they didn't leave the world a better place. They left the world a better place but they didn't live their potential or they died feeling guilty about it or they – a million different things. So there's so many productive people. I mean, think about all the innovators and the technologists and the businessmen who leave the world a better place by a big shot but are never happy. Never happy in their own souls, in their own life. And to me, that's what counts and if you're going to be happy, you'll leave the better world a better place. And that's what Jean Val symbolizes. To me, it's living your life by your standards, by your values and pursuing that happiness. Well, I take – I'm sorry, I take in a different context because I think a lot of – and I don't think you're going to disagree with this. I think a lot of times when you're young, you have unrealistic expectations about what you're going to accomplish and you think to yourself, well, I thought, let's suppose someone wants to go into politics. Well, if I'm not elected president, I'm a failure. That's nonsensical. There's lots of people who are successful who haven't achieved literally the top position in their role. So if you can go to your grave having – defending everything you've done and you move the needle in the – Yes. Successes should not be relative. Yes. So that goes back to second handedness. Yes. Success is not being better than other people. Success is not being the best. Success is maximizing your potential, whatever that is. And look, I know people – I have a son who could be a really good engineer, a really good mathematician, really good scientist, but he decided he wants to write comedy. So he might have been a better mathematician than he is a comedian, but that's his values. That's his goals. That's what he wants to do. And hopefully he'll be really, really good at that and he'll be incredibly successful at it materially in every other sense, but that's what you pursue. So it's really being true to yourself in a deep sense. And if you are true to yourself, yeah, you'll leave the world a better place, but that's not the essence. The essence is you. No, focus on you. Focus on making your life the best life that it can be. And if you do that, you'll make the world a better place by – almost by definition. Yeah. You'll impact people. We're looking at the same thing in different ways. Yeah. So at least in my little corner of the world, it was disappointing how rare that is. So one of the reasons I'm here in Austin and one of the reasons my work gravitated towards Elon Musk is because he represents that person for me in the world of technology, in the world of CEO, in the world of business. It was very surprising to me the more I've learned about the world of tech, how few people live unapologetically, fully to their potential. I'm sure people, others do that. Maybe music and art. I'm not sure. I don't know about those worlds. I do know about the technology world. And it was disappointing to me how many people compromise their integrity in subtle ways at first, but then it becomes a slippery slope and then you – Can I say this? There's this great quote and I always forget if it's Steinbeck or Hemingway and the quote – and this applies for money, it applies for morality – the quote was, how did you go bankrupt? And he says two ways, gradually and then suddenly. It's very hard to one day be like, I have no integrity. That doesn't happen. It's very easy if it's like, look, I stole this candy bar. What's the big deal if I steal this thing? Then you're still – People say there are no slippery slopes. There are and they're big and they're very slippery and people slide. This is the biggest one. And people violate their integrity even without stealing. Just little things about how they treat other people, how they treat themselves, the values they pursue. They don't go after the profession they really wanted to. They compromise in ways that they shouldn't with their spouse or with their mothers or whatever. And then they wake up one day when they're 40. And this is why people go through a midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is a crisis where you suddenly realize, I didn't do it. I didn't live up to my standards. I didn't live up to my youthful idealism. I compromised and I sold out. But I also would warn you about Silicon Valley. Yeah, I think at the top very few of them stick to it and partially it's the political pressure is unbearable. I mean, how would you? How can you? It would require to be a hero and very few of them are. But there are a lot of people who do really well at all kinds of levels in technology who – little startups, people. And this is the point Michael was making. You don't have to be the best. Yeah. You know, you don't have to be a CEO to live to your max and to live with integrity and to live a great life. I know people who because they joined Amazon or whatever have just made a life for themselves, an amazing life for themselves and have done great work at Amazon let's say and then have lived a great life because of the opportunity that created for them. So I think there are more good people out there but yes, one of the saddest things of growing up is – or even when you're a teenager and looking at adults and noticing how few of them actually live, I mean really alive in a sense of living their values and enjoying their life. And you start with your parents and you look across the people, everybody lives such mediocre lives. Yeah. And the other thing is they don't have to. That's what people don't appreciate. They don't have to. Particularly not in the world that we live in today that's so wealthy and so many – we all have so many opportunities. So what – by way of advice, what advice would you give to young people to live their life fully? I mean Michael and I have talked about this but it bears repeating. So if you look at John Galt, if you look at the highest ideals of what we – of a life we could live, what advice would you give to a 20 year old today, 18 year old? Can I say – I don't think – and I think Rand would agree. When Rand was writing John Galt, she says, when you have this character's human perfection, you don't want to get too close. So he's a little bit of a vague character because she was aware that when you're dealing with day to day, it kind of – the shine comes off. I think Rourke is a lot better character for a young person. Oh really? Yeah, but Rourke is all – the entirety of the Fountainhead is Rourke. So Ed Reardon is the one of several. We barely know John Galt. Yeah. So but Rourke is someone where you could be like, okay. And what Rourke also gives young people is – That's in the Fountainhead. That's in the Fountainhead, is the strength to persevere. Because when you're young, you're going to have down times. There's going to be times when you're lonely. There's going to be times when you don't have a girlfriend. There's going to be times when you're out of work and you're thinking, holy crap, I'm falling between the cracks. I'm going to accomplish that. I'm going to be a failure. And he gives them the courage. There's even a scene in the Fountainhead, which is this amazing scene. I love that it's not talked about enough where basically Rourke is looking at one of his buildings and this little kid on a bicycle comes up to him and – Yaron, please correct me. And he's like, who built this? And Rourke said, I did. And the line is, you know, Rourke didn't realize it, but he just gave that kid the courage to face the lifetime. And I think that is such a beautiful thing where you can find inspiration in this character. Don't become needlessly difficult. Don't start parroting his lines. You're not Howard Rourke and he's not a real person. But there's aspects of him that you can apply to your life. And here's something else. I'll give you one example because this happened to me. When I was working at Goldman Sachs, I was doing tech support and my great grandmother had passed away that year. And I promised my grandmother I would have – I've told this story several times. I would have Thanksgiving dinner with her. I was working second shift, fort to midnight, and we were a 24 seven help desk. And I got the schedule for the next week and I sold my grandmother to have lunch with her at Thanksgiving. And they had put me down from fort to midnight the day before Wednesday, which is my normal shift, but then the day shift the next day. And I go to my boss, I go – first off, second shift, I'm like, this Thanksgiving, I promised my grandma. And they're like, well, if you could find someone to fill this, we'll do it. And I asked everyone. They're like, no. And I said, I'm not coming in. And I 100%, not even a question, if I asked my grandmother, can we have dinner instead, she would have said yes. But this was one of those moments, maybe this is from my huge ego where I felt like I was in a movie and I'm making a choice. Am I going to ask grandma? Or am I going to just bend the knee? And I go, I go, I couldn't find anyone and I go, I'm not coming in. And they go, if you're not coming in, you're fired. And I go, fire me. And they did fire me. And I have no regrets. And because if I compromised, I'd have money in my pocket. But since I didn't compromise, I could look at that story. Rand talks about how man is a being of self made soul. I could look at that story, and next time, I have a time where it's a tough decision, where there's really pressure, I could be like, you know what, this is the kind of person you are. Stick to it. I'll give one more example. Sorry, you're on. I've given talks on networking. And I tell people, I like to use humor, because humor is a great way to shortcut the brain and get the truth to them directly. I say, if you know someone is in town, it's their birthday, and they're not doing anything, take them out. And I say, I do this for Rand reasons. I do it selfishly. And the audience laughs. And I go, you're laughing. But I go, the guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome. That could be you. There's nothing stopping you. You're just not thinking in these terms, what's it going to cost you $30? But for the rest of their life, or a few years, that person will remember you and be like, you know what, this person did right by me. And I'll give you a concrete example, which changed my life profoundly. Ted Hope, who was the producer of the film American Splendor, which starred my mentor Harvey Pekar, sent an email to his firm that said Harvey's in town with nothing to do. If you want to hang out with him, here's your chance. They worked at a film company. And I was the only one, I got the email, I wasn't working there from a friend who took him up on it. And as a consequence, Harvey wrote a graphic novel about me, Ego and Hubris, which is $250 on eBay now, and it moves at that, not too shabby. The point being, you know what, someone had a movie made about him. Someone is an interesting figure. Take the lunch and stay overtime for an hour. But so many people don't think in those terms. And there's so many opportunities for them. And so that's the advice I give. And I think it's also good to give advice via anecdote. So not only is the person getting the advice, they are learning why you got to that point. And maybe I'm wrong, but at least they've thought about it. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that. And I like the line, Ayn Rand's line about man is a self made soul, is a creature of self made soul is huge. And it's something most people don't realize, and it's something that modern intellectuals undermine. I mean, even somebody like Sam Harris, when you keep telling people they don't have free will, then you don't have a self made soul. Because what is self made, there is no self, according to Sam, right? He meditates and he sees that he doesn't have a self. So you're undermining the ability of people to take control of their own lives and make the kind of choices that are necessary to create the kind of moral character that is necessary for them to be successful. So I'd encourage people to go read Foundhead and Atlas Shrugged because put aside the politics, put aside even aspects of the philosophy, focus on these models. How to Walk is a great model for all of us. It's a great story to have in your head, in your mind when you encounter challenging choices that you might make. And then spend the time, and this is, I don't think I ever did this when I was young, I don't think people do this, but spend the time thinking about what your values really are. What do you love doing? What makes, what gets you going? What gets you excited? And how can I make a living at this? How can I do this and live through this? And then, you know, think about what kind of life you want, what kind of, I don't know, what kind of people you want to hang out with. Don't just, don't let life just happen to you. Think it through. What kind of people, for example, if you want ambitious, excited, maybe you should move to Silicon Valley, to Austin, Texas, right? If you want to be around artsy people, I mean, you should go to Hollywood, maybe you should go to New York, you know, I don't know, but figure out what kind of life you want to live, what kind of people you want to hang out with, what kind of woman you want to spend your life with, what kind of romantic relationship you want to have, figure that out and go and do it. Don't sit around. Life is not... Or try and fail. It's okay. You're going to fail. Oh, failure, failure, absolutely. Don't fail. Yeah. And learn from that failure. And that's another thing. Think about what you're doing, why you're succeeding, why you're failing, and keep improving. Keep working on it because it's not just going to happen like this. Nobody is Francisco to take a character out of Atlas Shark, to succeed at everything, first try, right? We all need to fail a few times. We all need to, but what have you got to lose? Every second is never going to be back. I mean, these are all cliches, but they're all true cliches. So think, figure out what your values are, and try to apply your reason, your rational thought on getting those values. We talked about early on in the show, in the interview, we talked about integrating your emotions with your cognition. I think that's crucial because you don't want to be fighting your emotions as you move towards these things. You don't want your emotions to be barriers to your own success. You want them to be cheerleaders, to chew on when good things happen and to be negative emotions when it's justified that they're negative. So work on integrating your soul. So creating your own soul, that's the real challenge. And I'll give one piece of meta advice. When you're young, you're going to be clueless because you're going to be ignorant, you know the data. Don't ask your dopey friends for advice because they want to be helpful, but the friends want to be helpful. They're as dopey as you. They have uninformed as you. So they're just going to give you platitudes and you're going to be worse off because now you're going to be confused, especially with social media. Reach out to people who are older than you, who are accomplished. You'd be surprised how often that you got to send them 20 bucks, buy them dinner, buy their book, whatever it takes. You are getting free world class advice for very cheap and that is really a mechanism for success. And here's something very unpopular and not sexy. This is why people probably unfollow me. That's not why. Read. Well, you'll tell me why after this. Read, read, read. Because you're not always going to have access to those experts. And I'm not just talking about self help books. I'm not even talking about self help books. Read the words with literature. I mean, literature presents you with all the different characters. You know, read Dostoevsky, right? Read Hugo, right? Read all these authors that have taken time to really create characters and put them in situations that maybe you will never face those exact situations, but you'll face similar situations and they play it out for you. You'll see what the consequences are. Great literature is a real tool for building your soul. Read generally with literature and particularly because it's more conceptual. What maybe you could speak to love and relationship in your own life, but in general, if we look at Alice Shrugged, if we look at Fountainhead, and maybe this is going to become a therapy session for Lex, but also just looking at your own life in a form of advice, how can you be a heroic Reardon type character and live your life to the fullest in creating the most amazing things that you're able to create and yet have others in your life that you give yourself to in terms of loving them fully and having a family, having kids, but just even just the love of your life kind of thing. How do you balance those things together? Is there any anything to say? I'll say one thing because then I'll defer to you, Ron, because he's the one who's married here. I don't think it's a balance. I think they compliment each other and feed off each other. So it's like, how do you balance having shoes and pants? It's like, no, you want both. You want it all. And having a great partner who thinks you're a badass and then sometimes they're on the stage and you're like, oh my, I'm married to a badass. That's the goal. Am I wrong? No, absolutely. It feeds off of each other. It's synergetic. It's completely synergetic. The problem that people have, I think, where they get into challenges is when they view them as opposites, right? Work or family. Well, if you don't work the family, you can't finance the family, but more than that. Why is your wife going to love you? What are the virtues that you're bringing? If you don't maximize your own potential, if you don't live the best life that you can live, what is it to love? And if she doesn't do the same thing, why do you love her? So you don't get this conflict between work and, you know, how do I have a balanced life? Of course you have a balanced life. You balance it based on your values and it's never going to be the same. The balance is, you know, the time you spend at work and with family when you're young or when you have little kids or when they're grown up is all going to be different. It's going to depend on your priorities at the point, but it's all going to feed off of each other. So maybe another word outside of balance is sacrifice. Do you think relationship involves sacrifice or no? Does he know what he's doing? I know. He's trolling you. Is he trolling me? He's a big troll. Is he trolling me? Never. Lex is the biggest troll on Twitter. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever sacrifice. Deal with it. Never sacrifice. Never sacrifice. But see, he means sacrifice in the context. I know. I know. So I'm going to define it. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Sacrifice in my world. Can I say one thing before we get sidebar? Rand had a good example when he was talking about balance. So she was married to this guy, Frank O. Connor. He was not a cerebral. He was not intellectual. That's fine. She was in love with him. She was a fan. And a lot of times she'd have these conversations with her acolytes till like four in the morning about the most cerebral topics. And I said, he would always bring them food. He'd stay up and kind of sit there in a corner and I go, when this was happening, was he sitting there like, oh God, here goes crazy old Ein and I just got to be bored? And they go, absolutely not. He was so proud of her. He was so excited. In fact, when she got a lot of money from, I think selling Red Pawn, which was her screenplay, which never produced, he told her you can buy any kind of fur coat as long as it's Mink, he's like, you earn this, celebrate it, so that was a good example. And that's a good relationship, absolutely. Now, sacrifice is the giving of a value and expecting either nothing or something less in return. You don't do that in a love relationship. Your love relationship is a sense, a trait. You're constantly trading. You're not trading materially, but you're trading spiritually. Imagine if I only gave my wife, if I gave spiritually and materially, only in one direction. I'd get sick of it. She'd get sick of it. It would never last. It has to be in give and take constantly, in different ways, different values. It's not a monetary exchange, but it's constantly you're giving and you're receiving and you're giving. And that's got to be in balance. And I know a lot of relationships where that gets out of balance. And one party feels like they're giving all the time, they're sacrificing. They're giving more than they're receiving, in a sense. And it's over. Now, people use the word sacrifice, like Jordan Peterson. He uses it both ways. That's a problem. You know Jordan? I don't know him personally. Jordan Peterson, I said. I didn't call him Jordan. Just wanted to be clear. Yeah. He uses it in his talks as... Sometimes he uses it just as I described it, and he's supportive of that, like the sacrifice Jesus made. And sometimes he uses it as an investment. But it's not. If you're giving money now, expecting a bigger return in the future, that's not a sacrifice. That's an investment. That's why we have two concepts for that. And the same is true if my wife is ill. And I've got a whole relationship built around what I'm giving. It's not that I'm not getting anything back. What I'm getting back is that she is recovering. Is that she's still alive or whatever it is that I'm keeping. That's the value that I'm getting in return. If I'm not getting that, why am I doing it? Because I signed a contract a long time ago. So it's not a sacrifice. Children are not a sacrifice. If I don't go to the movies, because I stay at home with my kids, it's because I love my kids more than I love going to the movies. And if I love going to the movies more than I love staying with the kids, then get a babysitter or don't have kids, which is the better approach. Here's a question. What book did Ayn Rand say is the most evil book in all of serious literature? It was Anna Karenina. And the reason it was that book, which I haven't read, please correct me if I get the plot wrong. What Rand was saying is the plot is a guy who's a big shot, I think. He marries a stupid girl who has nothing of value to offer him for at all. And she ends up killing herself. Whereas Rand's version, and we can take this out of the romantic context. I am delighted when I could be of use to my friends. It makes me feel wonderful and not in a kind of parasitic way. It's just like that I'm at a certain point where they call me up, they're having a problem and I've helped them with that problem. Anna Karenina, he gives up the love of his life. Oh, is that what it is? The amazing girl. He has an affair with her outside of marriage, taints her, is married to the stupid, but she gives him the prestige and everything. Oh, that's clearly very anti Rand. And the smart, the one he loves, she commits suicide in there. Okay, I got it wrong. So it's about him choosing mediocrity and nothingness over love. So pursuing your values is so crucial. So don't take it by saying, it doesn't mean that if you want to eat Chinese and she wants to eat Italian, you don't once in a while eat Italian on that day, right? That's silly, right? That's not a sacrifice, not in the sense in which we're talking about. It doesn't mean don't compromise. It doesn't mean don't compromise on the day to day stuff. It means don't compromise on moral values. You don't compromise on the big stuff and you never sacrifice. And that way you have a relationship that's built as equals and as you admire each other and love at the end of the day is a response to value. If you stop undermining your own value, the person who loves you will stop loving you, will love you less. If you love yourself less, you have to say, in order to say I love you, you have to be able to say the I, right? You have to be somebody, you have to know yourself, you have to have value. And so love is a profound emotional response to value. So speaking of love and the three of us being on this deserted island for a time together, somehow not murdering each other, let me ask you, Yaron, Michael, what is the most beautiful thing you find about the other? So let's go Yaron first. What do you think about Michael, that you appreciate about him? What do you get these questions from? What do you love about Michael? Then he's going to edit it. See, that makes sense to me. I just programmed him. Press play. It's all just a prerecorded message. So I've never met Michael before, so this is my... That's not true. You have and you're... I don't remember ever meeting Michael before. You're the very beginning of the new right, is me meeting you. I'm in the book? Yes. All right. Well, now I have to read his book because I mean, am I presented positively or negatively? Very. Oh, okay. Good. Lex is not so sure. He's like... I like that he goes, have I presented positively or negatively? I just go, very. And he's like, oh, good. I'm like, is it? So Michael Sharp, he's quick. He's funny, although some of the humor is beyond me. That's a nice way of saying he's very intelligent. Yeah. He's definitely very intelligent, but also very engaging. I think that's very engaging. I'm a sharp dresser. Oh, he's definitely... Well, yeah. I compliment him on stuff that's obvious and everybody can see by the video. The sex appeal. Let me also just comment, one thing you mentioned about you deriving joy from being of value to your friends. People talk to me about you sometimes because you'll do humor about various things and things like maybe you're some kind of a crazy person or something like that. Yeah. I know you enjoy this aspect of it, but I say that the reason I'm friends with Michael is there's real love there. And the kind of kindness you give to your friends, to people that are close to you, to your family is amazing, man. So that's one of my favorite things about you. Your intellect aside, your philosophies aside, your humor aside, I think there's a lot of love in you. That's what I really appreciate. But enough about you. I'm actually getting sick of saying nice things about you. You're always going to say it. Take it all back. Can I say one thing? You're joking, but this is something that's very key and this is something in a random context. It is very disturbing, and this is not by accident, how in our culture it is pooh poohed to show kindness, earnestness, appreciation, to tell someone. You see this on Twitter where someone's like, you know what? I read your book. It's made my life a lot better. Okay, simp. And there's a real, and this very much comes out of urban media circles, there's this real disdain for showing appreciation, for showing happiness, for showing kindness. And now that I've called it out, you'll notice it. But when you see how common it is and how people can't take compliments, the effects of that are extreme and extremely negative. I got to say about Texas, one of the things, so Austin especially, I mean, I don't really fully know Texas, Texas, but Austin, the friendliness. There's a reason I've gotten fatter and been drinking a lot is all the friendliness from random people who are no longer random. They're just friends. I've made more friends in one week than I have in my entire stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exactly. One and a half. You know what the number two means? I've never counted up that high. So this is what happens when people are free. No. When people are free and individualistic, it's exact opposite of what people believe. The more collectivist we are, the less free we are, the nastier we are to one another. Individualists who are pursuing their own happiness are incredibly kind, friendly, and supportive people. Okay. And now your task with doing... Talk about bad juju. To practice what you preach, is there in your soul that you can find one beautiful thing to say about Yaron now that you guys met for the first, second, or third time, or at least in book format? So that's an easy one. So what I like about Yaron is that I think he is taking one of the problems with maybe more old school objectivism is that they would just use Rand's arguments in Rand's way. And it's like, you're a parent, you're not adding anything, and you're not going to be better than her. So you give this talk about, I think you can compare, was it Bill Gates to who was the one who went to jail? Oh, Bernie Madoff. To Bernie Madoff. And you make the point, you're like, does anyone here really think Bernie Madoff was happy? Like, yeah, he's successful and he's wealthy, but does he go to bed being like, hey, I'm a great guy? No. And his son kills himself with all this tragedy that goes with him. So I think anyone who takes an ideology or worldview that I think is of value and adds to it and makes it and articulates it in a new way, I think is a great accomplishment. I like how uncompromising you are in your views of putting her views forward. And I like how you illustrate how silly it is to argue against anarchism. So I don't really have to do any of the work. As for you, and this, I've thought this before many times, you're the first person I met who I come at, literally the first, other than my friend who I went to yeshiva with as a kid, who I come at us, there was a line on friends where Ross and Rachel were thinking of dating, right? And they go, if we start dating, it would be like the third date because they knew each other well. And then she's like, yeah, but it'd be like, so it's like a plus and a minus, like, yeah, you're fast forwarding to seriousness, but it's also the fact that you and I have the same background. Like I can sit with your own or any of my other friends and try to explain it. The fact that intuitively you and I grew up the same. And I know that we have that background in common does create a bond because I feel even if I haven't told you certain things, you are going to understand me a lot better than many of my friends who've known me for a long time. I also really like how I feel. This is a very new age term, but I'm going to use it. I feel very seen when I talk to you. I think you see me for who I am. You appreciate me for who I am. And I also really like how, and this is increasingly common as my platform increases. So I'm very flattered by this. You understand what I'm trying to do and you don't try to get in the way, even though it's your show. You're like, okay, this guy's a performer. He's doing his thing. People appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm not going to try to drive the car. And I think some people who are who are bad and I have not encountered this because I would shoot it down. But I think a lot of times people have a tendency when they're hosts to try to drive the car. And it's like these things work when we come in here. None of us prepare. You prepare by me. None of us talking beforehand and like make it spontaneous. And the audience really enjoys that more because they know it's real earnest and dynamic. Yeah. I enjoy having you drive the car, even though I believe you don't have a license. And you think we're going to crash. No, I think he's, he's an extraordinary interviewer because of all those things. He makes you feel visible. And, and he does, but he also comes across as really honest. The questions are really questions that you seem really interested in that you really want answers to. It doesn't come across as canned or I prepared my three book project. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. I was pretty sure that on a desert island, this would end in murder, but now I believe it may. Well, given his comments on anarchy, it might still. It might still. The day is young. The night is young. This is a huge honor. I've been a fan of both of you separately for a long time. I really appreciate wasting all this time with me today. I love you, Michael. I love you, Yaron. We love you too. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice and Yaron Brook. And thank you to ground news, public goods, athletic greens, brave and four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you're in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #178

The following is a conversation with George St. Pierre, considered by many to be the greatest fighter in the history of UFC and MMA, but even more than that, one of the greatest martial artists ever. Quick mention of our sponsors, Allform, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, Theragun, and The Information. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that getting the chance to hang out with George, talk to him on the podcast, record a quick self defense video that I'll release soon, all while both of us wearing suits was one of the most memorable days of my life. In setting all this up, I talked to Joe Rogan and originally we couldn't schedule a chat with him and George on the JRE, which allowed me to pretend for a brief time that George came down to Austin just to see me. Who the hell am I? In truth, him and Joe probably conspired to make me feel special, but that's the point. It's inspiring to see George and Joe, who are at the top of their field, treat others as equals, as human beings, no matter who they are, even silly Russians in a suit. Meeting George was an honor for me beyond words. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here's my conversation with my longtime martial arts hero and now my friend, Mr. George St. Pierre. In your fighting career, were you more motivated by the love of winning or the fear and hatred of losing? I like to win better than I hate to lose because if it would not have been the case, I would never have fought in the first place because I don't like to fight at all. But you talked about the anxiety, the fear that you experienced leading up to a fight. So to you, ultimately the reason to go through that difficult process is because it feels damn good to have your hand raised? There is that. There is also the fact that martial art, I've been introduced when I was very young and it's probably the best thing I can do in my life, fighting, that's what I do best. Also, it provides me of freedom, of access of things that most of people do not have, but all that as a price and a lot of money, I made a lot of money, of course, with it. I was maybe predisposed with certain abilities. I met incredible mentors throughout my life. I worked really hard and of course, I had a lot of chances. The stars were all aligned and in order to keep that those advantages of freedom, money and glory and access of things that most people don't have and have these dream life that I have, I had to sacrifice myself and fight in order to keep it. It's very hard to understand because I also believe most fighters are not like me. A lot of guys, because I corner a lot of guys and it seems to me that they love their job. They enjoyed to go fight in the cage. I love to train. I love the science of fighting, the sport, to be in good shape, the confidence that training and mixed martial art give me. However, I do not like the feeling of uncertainty, the stress that I have, not knowing if I will be badly injured or humiliated or winning the fight. To me, I'm bearable and that's what takes the most out of me. More than brain damage, more than anything. That's what takes the most out of me. But the thing you get from it is the freedom that you get because of the money, but because of the celebrity, because of everything that comes with it. So you can be the best version of yourself because of fighting. But at the same time, you've said that, quote, I don't believe there's pleasure in life. I believe there's only a relief from pain. We have to suffer to be on top. So isn't there something to just the suffering in itself? Just doing really difficult shit just to get to the top? To explain that and so people can relate to it because not everybody's a fighter. I think the best example I can give is let's say you're, you haven't eat for a long time and you're craving, right? So you're suffering. And then when it's time to eat, finally, you're about to eat your favorite dish. It's going to taste so much better. So that's why I believe there is always some sort of sacrifice before the pleasure. And the more sacrifice you do, like they say in fighting, the bigger the risk, the bigger is the reward. And I feel that's how it is for me. Yeah, I feel that with, I started fasting a little bit in the past couple of years. And there's nothing as amazing as a delicious meal or anything, actually anything, any food when you haven't eaten for several days. It's kind of incredible. It's not incredible in this simple way of finally I get to eat. You get to truly experience the beauty of what it is to be alive. Like that little piece of food, you see all the flavors, you feel just the experience of it is ultimately of gratitude of how awesome it is to be alive. But when you eat many times a day and you're pigging out and you don't get to experience that. And it's fascinating. It's really like fasting is one of the most accessible things for people, I think to experience that kind of pairing of hardship to pleasure. I agree. And in my case, it changed my life on a good way. I cannot recommend it to people because everybody is different. But to fight Michael Bisping, my last fight was against the champion in the heavier weight class that I used to compete at. So I thought that if I would gain weight, it would increase my performance. And I struggled a lot to gain weight. I gained about eight to 10 pounds. Normally I walk around 185 pounds. And for that fight, I was walking around 195. However, I forced myself to eat like six times a day. I was on a very strict diet and it didn't feel right to me because I feel like I was carrying like a little bit like I was carrying a bag on my shoulder. And I think it was a bad idea for me because when I did the weigh in and I went on a scale at 185, I couldn't go back to my initial weight that was 195 that I worked so hard for several months to get there. So I was 190 pounds, but I couldn't get back. And the morning of the fight, I got sick. We didn't know what it was in the beginning because in order to know, to find out what it was, I needed to do what they call a colonoscopy. They put a camera inside of you and to do that, they give you something that makes that empty you. And I was trying to gain weight, not to lose weight. So I told myself I'm going to wait after the fight, whatever it is, because it was pretty bad. It was blood. And I didn't know what I was. I was very concerned. I thought I had maybe cancer. I was freaking out. So I said, I'm going to do that fight. And then after right away, I'm going to make a checkup. So I did the fight. Everything went well. I won the fight. I went back home. I did a colonoscopy and I got diagnosed with ulcer colitis. Then I got on very severe medication to get better. And I'm not a big fan of medication. I was trying to look for more natural way to get better. And I found out about fasting and it really changed my life. I met Dr. Jason Fong, who was one of the world authority of fasting. He treat diabetes patient with fasting and he gave me a program of fasting and it really changed my life. And right away what I did is I went in a CAT scan to see the difference because it was right after my fight with Michael Bisping and I did the CAT scan. So I had my muscle mass, bone density, fat percentage, water retention. It's pretty amazing. It can show you which harm has more muscle than the other. It's very precise. And I did it like two months after. So I started doing time restricted eating, 16 eight. But right away when I started, I did three days water fast. And the Dr. Jason Fong, he said, because I like to train during those days, I consume Himalayan salt to make sure, because when you sweat, there's a lot of minerals to make sure you don't deplete your mineral. And when I compared the two results in the CAT scan, I found out my biggest concern was to lose muscle mass. I found out that I did not lose muscle mass. Instead of losing it, it increased a little bit. Even though my weight on the scale was lighter, I kept the same muscle mass even increases a little bit. My bone density increases a little bit. My water retention is the biggest thing that decrease. So my inflammation and my fat percentage. So basically by looking at the data, I found out that by eating so much, trying to gain weight to fight Michael Bisping, it only increases my water retention, which is not good because it's like dead weight and inflammation on you. So what was the actual process of fasting? You said 16, eight time restricted, so intermittent fasting. But you also mentioned the three hour, the three day water fast. What did that feel like? And you also said training during the three day? Yes. How did that feel? Can you give me some details of, this is fascinating. So I do three days water fast, four times a year. Nice. For me, I do it, everybody is different, but for me, I do it after New Year's. Because during the holidays, that's when I eat bad foods and I drink. I see it more like a cleansing, like a detox, so to speak. Mental too, like psychological. Yes. I do it after the New Year's, right before the summer, cut for the beach. After the summer, because of the summer, I've been partying a little bit sometimes, let myself go. And right before the holidays. And I've tried, Dr. Phuong, he says to me, said, George, everybody's different because I'm a very active person and everybody has a different genetics. So for me, I feel that three days is the sweet spot because I still train during those three days. The first day, the first two days, I don't change nothing. I train on my regular schedule. However, on the third day, I modify a little bit. I do something more easy and that's how I do it. And I've tried before, because when I say three days is my sweet spot, I've tried to go up to five days. But the problem is after my third days, I found out that I had a big problem sleeping. I get into a hyperactive mode. They call that the hunter gatherer mode, you know, like your brain, I mean, it's amazing. Your creativity is at its peak, but you cannot sleep very well. And sleeping for me, I think it's very important. So that's why I do three days for me. It's my sweet spot. That's interesting. You're right. It's the four or five days when you start, see sleep is not important for me. So the creativity is really important. So it's very interesting the places your mind goes after a few days. You're right. But I mean, what does it do to your mind? So you mentioned your body likes it. In terms of training, do you find that it helps you focus and think? I mean, you're one of the great strategic thinkers in terms of martial arts. Does it help with learning? Does it help with thinking? Does it help with strategizing and all of that? Well, unfortunately, I got into fasting after I retired. I really wish people asked me, would you have done it during the time that you competed? And the answer is yes. I think we live in a society that we're bombarded by publicity. Oh, buy this, eat protein, this, that. And fasting, nobody makes money with it because there's nothing to sell. I think that's why a lot of people have not heard about it. And even for myself, if someone would have talked to me about the benefits of fasting when I was training before I got sick, I would probably have ignored him because it's hard to believe. It sounds ridiculous. Don't eat. Yes. It's going to help your mind and you're going to gain muscle potentially. Exactly. And perhaps people have talked to me about it, but it went in one of my ears and got out from the other side, you know? But it really changed my life. And I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and it helps me get rid of all my symptoms. What I do is, I know a lot of people have ulcerative colitis and for me, I cannot recommend it to other people because everybody is different. But for me, I made a lot of research of how people from ulcerative colitis got better. And I found out that a lot of people that got that condition get better in the natural way through fasting, eating fermented food, collagen and bone broth and stuff like that. And it made a huge difference in my life. I just wish I would have known that before. So do you have a specific diet wise stuff you like? So I've recently, another ridiculous sounding thing, but it makes me feel really good is very low carbs. So keto, even carnivore, it sounds ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. But it makes me feel really good, even for performance. Is Rogan has influenced you? He's a carnivore diet. I was influenced actually by people, yeah. There's I'll tell you where, because I was doing it before he was doing it. It was popular in the endurance athlete community where it was fat adapted athletes, people who insane people who run 50 miles, 100 miles, they figured out that they could fuel their body by with fat that can go to fat as the source of energy as opposed to carbs. So I remember hoping that I'll be able to learn how to run 50 miles and so on. I've never done more than 22, but it, I just remember switching away from carbs and feeling really liberated. Like I wasn't thinking about food as much. I'm able to eat once a day and feel really good. I mean, I think every everybody's body is different, but I think carbs make me lazy. Maybe it's because the crash, yeah, it's the crash, but also just psychologically something it it forces me to also think about food too much. Like it starts becoming, you know, our logistic, you said our society is so much about food. There's so many ads, so much advertisement and so much of our social life is about food. And so it's very easy to live life, like live day to day thinking, when is the next meal? Like what am I going to eat for lunch? What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to eat for breakfast? And if you're not careful, that's going to get in the way of you doing cool shit for like liberating yourself and thinking like, what am I actually passionate about in this life? Like creating and forgetting to eat those kinds of things and still being able to fuel your body. I don't know. It's been fascinating to, to figure out like later in life that carbs aren't necessary to function. Well, it makes me think like, we don't know anything about nutrition. That's right. Yes. You know, personally, I don't think I could have a diet without carbs. I love chocolate too much. For me eating, it's a, it's a pleasure of life. I love my carbs. I love my sugar. However, if you talk about that, I don't have a specific diet, but recently I, what I'm trying to do is the days that I do not work out, I only eat once. That's kind of my rules. Plus I try to respect 16 eight and do my three day fast, uh, uh, four times a year. But the rest of the thing, I, I, I, I let myself loose because I, I don't think I would be happy if I, if I, uh, if I, if I don't give myself the, the, the, the right to, to eat for me personally, I love to eat so much next. And you talk about a diet, carnivore diet is very interesting because I, um, a few years ago I went to Africa in, uh, Masai Mara and, uh, it's a tribe in, uh, in, in, uh, East Africa and, um, I want to visit them. I did a safari and I talked to them and these guys, they, their diet is 99% carnivore. They they, that's crazy. And you should see they're very beautiful people shredded. Some people would say, Oh, it's genetic. I'm like, yeah, maybe it's genetic. But I mean, think about the Eskimos also that like most of their diet is on, on fish, right? They, they, so I believe it can be done, you know, like, I believe it can be done and like an exclusive carnivore diet. And I, I think I'm going to try it pretty soon just to have the experience, you know, to see how it feels like. Well, you're going to hang out with Joe, uh, be careful bringing it up because he'll convince you to, uh, forever switch to carnivore. Definitely. He loves it. I mean, but just like you, I think he loves food. So he's, he can't ever stay on carnivore. It was funny cause we went to an Italian restaurant together and I still only eat meat. Like I love, um, I love the constraints of discipline. That's, that's partially why I like carnivore. I like saying no to food that is delicious. But a part of the problem is that I don't know how to moderate. You said chocolate. I don't know how to have one chocolate. Is that something you're able to do? Have like in moderation? No, it's when it, when I have an opportunity, I do it. I don't have any, I'm an extremist person, uh, Lex, I, I, that's the thing I, when I, when I have a chance, I, I like, I, I just eat, I go too much. And that's why I like about my life, you know, that's what I like about fasting. Because probably if I would not have discovered fasting, eating chocolate would give me cramps and all sorts of problems because people on ulcer colitis, normally they cannot eat chocolate. They cannot drink alcohol. But I believe because I'm fasting, that's the reason why I'm medication, medicine, medication free. I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, but I have to do that, that fasting, you know, and now it becomes to a, it became to a point that it's no longer hard for me. It's like normal. I don't even force myself. I don't, it's easy. You know what I mean? Some of my friends thinks I'm, think I'm, I'm insane, you know, but I tell them it's like with, when you get used to it, it becomes like an habit. And, and I'm, and I know that hunter gatherer, like our ancestor did not eat three times a day. It's, it's, it's not true. They, they ate one day they could, and when they eat, they, they, they, they feed themselves as much as they can until that, because the next time, because they didn't know when they, they could eat again. Right. So it's, I think that's how we're, we're, we're built, you know, to, to, to have this similar lifestyle. If we could take a step back to the discussion about fear a little bit. So Mike Tyson talks about this process of him walking to the ring. He sounds similar to you in many ways of the anxiety and the fear that he experiences. And he has this sort of story that he tells about walking to the ring and being supremely afraid. But as he walks and gets closer and steps in, he finds the confidence and becomes supremely confident. I think he calls himself like a God. I feel like a God in the ring. Is, is, do you go through a similar process of finding the confidence? Well, it, yes. And I use, I use a James Lange theory that they did. So what I do is because I'm, I'm, I'm not afraid to admit that I'm afraid. And in the beginning of my career, I really thought I asked myself, because I was very good in mixed martial, but I, I really thought I wasn't made for this because the idea of fighting didn't, was, was, didn't make me happy. It's something like I, I was, I was forced to do in order to keep that lifestyle that I have and achieve my goal. Perhaps one day to make enough money to retire and you know, that, that was my dream. But when I was looking around the gym where I was training, most of my training partner, they were happy. They were excited. And sometime I corner, I corner a lot of guys and they're happy and they're in the locker room. They don't react the same way I do. Some perhaps does, but if you see me in the locker room, like when I get like my last fight with Michael Bisping, just to give you an example in my last fight with Michael Bisping, because it's fresh, it's the one that is the most recent and, but it's always the same thing. My last fight in Bisping, I get in the locker room, I like three guys that I train with, Mickey Gall, Eamon Zahabi and Joseph Duffy. They all lost. It was like, like my, my locker room was basically cursed. You know, when you're in a locker room and people from your locker room leave for a fight and then they come back, it's kind of a momentum, you know, you, you, you shake and yeah, good job. Now it's my turn. You know, it's kind of a team brotherhood sort of thing. So the, the, the, the atmosphere in my locker room was pretty bad. It was like going to a, you know, like a funeral. So I was very scared and before every fight, I asked myself, I asked myself always, shit, what the hell I'm doing here? Why did I choose to come back? Oh my God. And I'm freaking out. However, I'm putting on a mask like I'm acting because if I don't do that, it will reflect on my coaches. And if my coach, my, my, the confidence of my coaches is affected, it will reflect, reflect on me. So I need to feel strong. I need to make them believe that I'm excited to be there and I'm happy to be there. So this sort of play start when I get, when I first step in the locker room, even though I feel completely different, but that's how I play it. Normally the day, the fight day, I never fell, feel a hundred percent. I always feel exhausted, tired. My highs are hitching because I don't sleep enough the few nights before, because I'm constantly rehearse, rehearsing scenarios that might happen in the fight. So mentally it's not that I'm not on top, but you keep all that to yourself. I keep it to myself and I'm lying to everybody around me. But everybody knows, you know, fair ass John De Niro, they know Freddie Rose, they've been with me for a long time, so they know what's going on, but at least I'm lying to them. I'm like, I'm feeling great. So, and seeing all my training partner, like very disappointed because they lost our fight. Some were badly hurt as well. It was hard. So I remember I started to warm up and everything. And as you start to warm up, you become a different person because we know that certain posture and yoga can affect your mental state. But I would say it's a little bit the same thing in fighting, you know, like when you started hitting the pads, your muscle memory, your instincts comes back and you remember that you're good at this, you know, and your confidence start to grow. And as seeing your trainers holding the pad and repeating your moves, it makes you also remember all the sacrifice you have done through your training camp and confidence come from how you prepared yourself. And even you're afraid, you can be confident in the same time. Being afraid and being confident is two different things. And before every fight, just right before I walk in, when I'm scared, I go in the bathroom and I look at myself in the mirror. I used to have a bandana and a gi, but now I didn't have this for my last fight because of the new Reebok deal they had. But I did the same rehearsal that I always do. I look at myself in the mirror and I start to compliment myself. Like even if I don't believe it, I'm starting to trying to believe it as I am. I'm finding all the reasons why I'm going to win the fight. And all my trainer knows that before every fight, when the guy from the UFC goes and Steppen Maroon says, St. Pierre, you're up next, I always take a few minutes to do that same rehearsal. And I tell myself I'm going to win this fight because I'm better and I'm very cocky about myself. I'm telling all the reasons that I'm going to win. I got a better team. I made more sacrifice, you know, I'm faster, I'm more powerful, way more athletic. My fighting IQ is better than him. I got a strategy on point that he's never going to be able to keep up with and this and that. And I was telling myself, I'm going to show these young kids how things should be done. You know, I'm trying to boost myself. Try to boost yourself and you start to believe in it. You become a different person. So when you walk out the bathroom, now rock and roll, now I really believe it for real. You know, like I'm still scared, but I believe it for real. And that's the transformation that happened for me right there. And from that from now, from from there to the fight, it's until the fight is over. It's called I call it cruise control because you don't have time to think in a fight. If you're trying to think, you're missing the opportunity. So that's how I see it for myself. So at that point, you stop thinking and you just go cruise control, autopilot. Trust yourself, you know, trust yourself because you repeated all the scenarios, you know. So everything that you have done, it's inside your computer. Your computer, your brain is programmed to react accordingly to certain situations. And it's not the night of the fight that you will tell yourself, oh, finally, I'm going to do this. If you do this now. No, if you have not practiced it before, you're screwed. The preparation, the repetition that makes it happen, you know. What about like the really difficult moments in a fight where you are tested to your limits, essentially? Usually it's cardio related exhaustion, right? Where you have to ask yourself that same question is like, why the hell am I doing this? Do you experience those or are you able to ride through the autopilot? And if you do, like, what do you do in those moments? Never in a fight. In a fight when the fight is on, I never change my mind, I go until the end. However, for example, my first fight with BJ Penn, I had a terrible first round. So I had to switch gear. That happened sometimes, but it's part of my plan. I always have a plan B, plan A, plan B, plan C. You need to have that. If fighters go into a fight thinking, oh, I'm going to do this, this, this, and they don't have a plan B, if this doesn't work, that means they're not well prepared. If you talk to me before every fight, I can, like in 30 seconds, give you my old strategy. You know, for BJ Penn, my first fight with BJ Penn was, oh, I'm going to keep it standing up, keep the fight from the outside, you know, because I'm faster than him. Then the fight with BJ Penn started. I found out that I was not faster than him. And I found out that his reaction time was better than mine. So I got beat up the first round and I got a bloody nose and everything. So my plan B was now I'm going to wrestle him, you know, I'm going to wrestle him and, you know, make him tired and trying to put him down. And that's how I beat him because I switched gear, you know? But if you can't do that, if you cannot find a way to become the perfect nemesis to your opponent, you might win a few fights, but you're going to find, you're going to fight someone sooner or later that will, that will give you a lot of, a lot of trouble. So that's where the anxiety pays off. You're anticipating all the ways it goes wrong. So you've developed a plan B and plan C. You know, we talked a lot with, like John Donoher, who you work with. It's interesting. I don't think I've heard him talk about plan B and plan C. He usually has a really clear plan A, an entire system of plan A. I don't think I've heard him, we've had a good discussion about it in, over some cheeseburgers. And he's, he was kind of espousing the value of mastering escapes. So when you find yourself in bad situations, being exceptionally good at finding ways out of those bad situations, and that's a way of dominance. There's nothing, there's no better way to dominate your opponent according to him than to show that they can't possibly hurt you no matter how bad the position is. It's like, it's a, as opposed to a physical dominance, it's a psychological dominance. It's very interesting. But I wonder if he has plan B and plan C in his mind too. You know, in mixed martial arts, sometimes it's like in science, sometimes you can make a mistake, you know, like every human can make mistakes, you know. There's certain sport or a certain situation that you, if there's a mistake made, that's it exactly. Sometimes it's the case in MMA, but sometimes you're able to redeem yourself. And if you look the fight with BJ Penn 1 that I had, which was probably one of the most competitive fight and it was probably the, it was the fight that I got the most damage and I was messed up. It took me three days, like two, three days to recuperate from that fight. I was really damaged. And my first fight versus my second fight, I made a lot of adjustment because I have learned from my first fight. And also I had a guy, one thing people don't know, like they talk about fighters having secret weapons. See, for me, my secret weapons was not like some is that they use like certain, like different things. For me, it was knowledge. I had a guy in Montreal, he was measuring frames. He's not a scientist, he's a friend of Ferras and I. And what he does, he watch fight and he measure frames. The way he does it is when you watch a fight and one of the guy throw a punch, he cut the picture by frame, the video by frame. So he's able to see which fighter has better reaction time than others. And BJ Penn, he found out that BJ Penn of all the UFC roster at the time when he was in his prime, he had probably the best reaction time of all. According to him, Lyoto Machido was the second one, but BJ Penn was the first one. So I knew that if I would try to go first, because I always been the fastest guy normally when I fight someone. But when I fought BJ Penn, I tried to go first and he was always able to like, I never was never able to touch him with my jab and he came back with a counter punch. However, because of what he told me, I knew that BJ Penn has a very fast reaction time, but had a very poor reset time. To him, the way he described it to me is like your nervous system is like a muscle. BJ Penn was so fast, but he's like more like a sprinter. So when I did the second fight, when I fought BJ Penn, I made him flinch. Like I fake a lot. So I make him react and flinch. So all that reaction time that he used to flinch was not used properly to avoid my punches. So I burn, I load up his nervous system with a lot of information and fake and to make him flinch and pretending I was kicking and wrestling. So he got overwhelmed and he got tired very, very fast. So that's how I beat him. People sometimes they don't know really what's the strategy behind the thing. They only see the physical part. But when you fight someone, if I fight you, I look at you in the eyes, there's a lot of things that going on between you and I. I can look down here, bam, jab you in the face. The audience will not see these little detail, but you will see it. And that's what makes the magic during a fight. The relation that you have with the opponent, you know, like the mental game, what you make him believe. Those little things, I use a lot of those. If you talk to a lot of my opponents, they'll tell you, like, I use a lot of these little things, you know, like I look down at Banner, I go up or I am pretending I want to attack you so I make you flinch, but in reality, I'm just doing this because I want to rest. I want to recuperate and I'm tired. How much is, you know, people talk about that with poker, for example. How much is the value of this? You know, so like some people argue that poker is more about the betting, you know, just the money. It's just how much you bet and so on. So that would be more like the analogy there with with fighting would be just strictly the physical movement of your body. And then a lot of people argue that there's a lot here in the way you look and the little movements in the face. So do you think there's, do you think you're communicating with your opponent when you look at them? There's no way to know for sure, 100 percent. And I'm by no, no mean psychic, nothing like that. And I don't believe in that at all. The only thing is I know through looking through the eyes of my opponent when he's afraid and when he gives up on me. I've been accused very often in my career to not take enough risk, to not finish my opponent. But the reason why I didn't finish my opponent is because I saw in his eyes that he gave up. He gave me the fight and I'm winning the fight. So it's not up to me. It's not to me to make it, to try to sacrifice myself trying to finish him. Perhaps if I do that, I will open up for him to capitalize on my mistake. It's up to him to make a risk. So people sometimes they don't understand that is the art of fighting, my friend, you know, like if I'm winning the fight like an hockey, an ice hockey, if you're winning the game and it's the third period, it's at the end of the third period, you're not going to take out your goaltender trying to score another goal because winning five to three or five to four is the same thing. Same thing in MMA. We make a living out of this. And sometimes as bad as it can be, you want to save yourself for another day, you know, you want to minimize the damage. But if he knows he's losing the fight, it's up to him to take the risk. It's not up to me. So I'm a good counter fighter. I use a lot of my attack or counter strike or reactive take down or proactive take down. That's my specialty. So I'm not going to I have no desire to sacrifice myself trying to try to finish my opponent if he want to, if perhaps I might give him the opportunity to capitalize on me. It's not it's not smart to do that. And very often when I fight someone, I can read him, I see the fear in his eyes. Now I'm like, I got you now. He's very desperate. That doesn't mean I have to put my guard down because he's going to be desperate. But I know I'm beating you. And I know I'm beating you. I'm just going to do what I need. You know, if I have a chance, of course, I'll knock him out. But I'm not going to try to sacrifice myself to knock him out. And if you do that, maybe one day you'll make a mistake and you'll get dropped and you'll you'll tell yourself, I shoot, I just got brain damage. Maybe I'm never going to come back the same. Maybe you know, I ruined my career or, you know, it's a it's a very serious game that we're playing. It's very dangerous. In the face of that risk, I mean, Mike Tyson talked about, you know, when the opponent looks away, he knows he's got him, right, that that he's broken. For a person like me who has trouble making eye contact with people, there's truth to that. I mean, there's truth to that, that there's an animal nature to us looking away. I mean, you could see that the way the body language, the way the eyes move between two animals going at it in the wild when like two lions fight or two whatever fight. There's a certain beta move when you've you've been defeated. Yes. Or one thing when I know that, that when it happened, one of the signs is when I just like make a faint and the guy flinched like crazy. That's mean he's really scared of me. It's a little bit like you're you're you're doing this, that guy flinched a little bit or you're doing this. He's like, oh, that's mean you hurt him and he doesn't want to get hurt again. So he's really trying to run away and not not winning the fight anymore, but not losing sort of surviving the five round. And it's hard to to finish a guy who does doesn't want to fight a guy who's not fighting anymore to win in this fighting to not lose. And the proof of that, if you don't believe me, just look the reign of all the greatest champion in UFC. I don't care who they are, John Jones or like you could clearly see that in the beginning of their reign, they could, you know, finish a lot of their opponents, the same as me in the beginning. I was finishing a lot of my opponent. But there is a time that the entire UFC roster is studying you and they found ways to perhaps not beating you, but they found a way to navigate to the fight in a way that they minimize the damage. You know what I mean? So it's a big difference between fighting to win and fighting to not lose. You said that there's a difference between a fighter and a martial artist. So now we were talking about fighting. You're considered by many to be one of the greatest fighters of all time. But you said that there's a difference between a fighter and a martial artist. A fighter is training for a purpose. He has a fight. I'm I'm a martial artist. I don't train for a fight. I train for myself. I'm training all the time. My goal is perfection, but I will never reach perfection. So what to you does it mean to be a martial artist? Martial artist is because that lifestyle that I have has been introduced to me and the seed has been planted to my mind a long, long time ago by my father. I am I do not train because I have a fight. I will always train. Even now, it kind of amused me that to see that a lot of people, because I'm still training, because I love the science of fighting. I do not like to fight, but I love the science of it. And I will always do it as long as I can do it. People think I'm going to make a comeback and everything. I'm I'm about to get to have 40 years old. You know, like it's I'm, you know, like I don't want to fight in a cage at 40 years old. I mean, some people have done it. They did it very well. But I'm not one of them. I'm I feel a little bit to me that. And you never say never feel like to me like it's a little like a kid that you play with the strain when he's young, like when he's five years old, six years old, seven years old, eight years old. But then I was like, what the hell I'm doing here? And I'm too old for this. I like it. So I have done it, you know, and and I got out of it on top. And I'm I'm healthy, which is the most important thing right now, touching wood. And I'm I'm wealthy. I beat the game. You know what I mean? In a way, like that's not to be cocky, but I did it. And I wish more more fighters could do the same thing. I wish, but it's unfortunate because a lot of them, they stay there and hang out for too long and they get badly hurt. They get beaten and broken, you know, and they finish broke as well, because the lifestyle you have when you're a pro athlete, it's crazy, you know, it's it's it's unbelievable. However, everything that goes up and life goes down and you need to plan your future, you know. And for for me, what if some guys have the same mentality as me and they're watching us right now, I would say if you do it because you're just good at it, you like the money, the advantage, the freedom that it gives you, but you don't necessarily like to fight. When you're done, you finish on top, you know, go go cash out and get out of the way. Yes. Hard to do. However, actually, it's not everybody that does it for that reason. Some people generally love to fight, love to compete. So they do it because they love it, you know, or they do it because of the money. But if you don't love it, if you don't like to fight because it's very stressful and you don't enjoy you, you enjoy the training, perhaps, but you don't like to fight. You do it because it's part of what you need to do in order to keep that lifestyle. And you know, like you don't need the money to get out of here, man. If you're in your you're in your prime, get out of here. Because if you don't, you'll hurt your own legacy, you'll damage your health. It's very sad and it's a it's a sad business, you know what I mean? It's like a lot of what one of the place where is the one of the most happiest place for me to go and the most saddest place for me to go. It's in the gym, Tristar in Montreal, because it's one of the happiest place for me to go because I can go train and do what I love to do. But it's also a very sad place for me because after when I'm about to leave, there's always a bunch of young kid that comes or guys that are around 30, 33 years old. And they come to me and say, hey, George, you have some advice for me. And I look at them. And if they're my friend, they're real close friend of mine, I'll tell them the truth in their face. And I've done it many times and it was not well received. But if they're not my friend, I have to, you know, you know, it's always an advice about fighting and I answer their question. It's my pleasure. But the truth, if they they want me to tell the truth, the big majority of them, I would tell them, I said, listen, man, you're in maybe three, like on a losing street of three fight. You're 30, 33 years old, you know, I think you should think about doing something else in your life. You know, I have other goals, you know, because you're not going to make it. And, you know, I've seen that movie before and it's a very sad ending. And I'm I'm sad to tell you the truth because you're not going to make the money. You just choose some. But if I tell them that they're going to be angry at me because they'll be like, oh, you you make it and you think I cannot make it. So it's kind of they're going to think I'm cocky. But I was lucky to make it. You know, at the start, we're all aligned. But at one point, you need to be able to to have a plan B, you know, like like some parent they come to see me with their kids and this is the future world champion in the UFC. And what advice would you give him? I always tell the same thing. And it does not make everybody happy. When I said I say I go to the case, a are you good at school? Say stay at school. School is very important for you. Stay educated. Yeah. Do boxing, martial arts, a great sport. Stay in shape, but don't put your eggs all in the same basket. And the parents sometime are angry when I'm not angry, but I can see in their eyes, they're like they kind of surprised. And it's not because I made it that I will tell the kid to follow the same path that I did. I went to school to I've studied, I dropped off school when I had my first world championship fight against Matt Hughes. But before that, I was in school. Quite another, you know, another way to go if things would not have gone the same, the way I wanted. But the problem and I'm saying that it's not only about boxing in MMA, I'm talking about hockey, basketball, baseball, same, same thing. Maybe it's the one on the hundred thousand that make it. And I'm saying I'm saying that make it when I'm saying I make it. That's mean they can retire and have enough money for the rest of his life because it's a sad story. The only people only heard about the people that makes it. But a lot of fighters, even a UFC champion in boxing, champion, even in football, basketball, I don't I don't I don't care. Big names when they retire, they have zero. They're bankrupt, my friend. And it's a very sad, sad story and a sad reality that most people are not aware of. But having other paths in life actually can also increase the chance of you dominating and like reaching the highest peak in your main thing. I mean, Jimmy Pager, I don't know if you know who that is, is a judo coach in in America. He was he says that to all of his athletes is to make sure that you go. He has a lot of, you know, Kayla Harrison, two time Olympic gold medalist. He has a lot of Olympic medalists. But basically, there's something about going to school, like having an forget school, any other avenue in life that gives you the freedom to go all out in your main like that, you know, you're doing it for the right reasons. You're not stuck. It clears the mind to where you're free to be the best in the world as opposed to kind of you have to. I mean, different people are motivated by different things. So sometimes some people like having their back to the wall and that's the only option they have. But most people, I think, excel when you have other options. I think it's a distraction and I think it's important to have a distraction. When you say that, I think about one of my coach, John Danaher. He put his academic background experience into jiu jitsu. And that for me, that's why he's the best teacher I ever had is incredible. He start teaching me when I even couldn't speak much English at the time and I was able to communicate and understand, you know, that's how good he is. But I truly believe that most of the athletes, especially in sport like mixed martial arts, train way too much. If I could go back and talk to a young George, I would tell him, you do way too much volume. You train way too hard, train smarter, it's more important. And I think sometimes we underestimate the benefit of recuperation because I think we assimilate the information that we learn during a training when we recuperate and not during the training itself. And this whole mentality of harder, heavier, you know, it's good for someone who's lazy. And if you're an elite athlete, most of the time, you know, like you're not always, but most of the time is because you're not lazy. And a lot of guys, sometimes they're elite athletes, champions, and you'll hear people say, oh, I can't believe he's very gifted, but he doesn't work. But perhaps it's not really because perhaps it's because we don't understand, perhaps he's doing the right thing and it's us who's working too much and too hard. That's what I think. There's a guy I train with, he made me think about it. His name is Mansour Barnaoui, he's going to be a future star, he's an incredible fighter. He trained once a day. And he asked me some time advice when he came to Montreal, he's from France. You'll hear about him, he's very good. And I saw him in the morning at TriStar and I said, okay, I'll see you perhaps later in the other trainings. He said, no, I only train once a day. And he kind of waits for me to give him like, not an approval, but like to see how I react or, you know, I don't know, it was kind of a strange feeling, but I told myself at that point I kind of had an awakening and I told myself, man, maybe he's doing the right thing. Because a lot of people would say, for example, oh, that's a lazy way of doing it, but perhaps it's the best way to do it. I'm not saying that training once a day is the best way to do it. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying that everybody's different, but for him, it works beautifully. And I wouldn't change anything, you know, like if I would be him because he's improving like crazy. Yeah. And ultimately the bigger picture there is to do something that everyone else says is stupid. It's like the fasting thing that a lot of people would say, a lot of nutritional experts would say that that's a dumb way. You know, if you want to be an MMA fighter, you should be eating like many times a day. You should be starting every day with oatmeal. You should be carving up constantly, but that's not necessarily true for everybody. And it's possible. I'm sure there's actually now a few MMA fighters that are carnivore only. It's possible. I used to eat right before training and it didn't bother me. However, now my first training that I do normally in average around noon, 11 a.m., I haven't eaten anything when I do my first training. And it feels to me that I'm much more clear in my mind. I'm much more creative. I feel better. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big difference. I just wish I would have known that before. Well, it's fascinating, the role of the mind in all of this. How important is it for your mind to be clear, to really think deeply? There's a judoka American named Travis Stevens. I remember he said something that the right kind of practice is when your mind is exhausted at the end of it, that you were constantly thinking through things like your body shouldn't be exhausted first, your mind should be exhausted first. It's really fascinating. So people think about training hard, you know, a successful practice is where you walk away just overwhelmed how much you had to think. It's fascinating framing of a successful practice. It's true. Travis Stevens was one of my main training partner when I got ready for my fight with Nick Diaz and Carlos Candit. He drove every Friday from, I believe, Boston. It's like a six hour drive. Drive to the gym in Montreal, train with us an hour and a half, drive back. He's got such an amazing discipline. I was so happy for him when he won the medal at the Olympic game. And what a well deserved, you know, accomplishment. It's unbelievable. It paid off. You know, I was so happy for him. And every time we got to the gym, he was waiting for me in the kneeling position like a soldier. I was like, my God, this guy is made of steel, you know. And after training, I always offer him, I say, Travis, I know you like to train with that because in Montreal, they have very good judo team, Nicholas Gill and all those guys. And I say, if you want to stay, I'll get you at the hotel, you know, like anything you want. He's like, no, no, I got to go back. I have another training later. I'm like, not only did he train with us, he had to go back because he had another training. I'm like, this is insane. And he's gone through a huge number of injuries. So he's also an innovator because, I mean, it's difficult to say, but for American judo, there's not many high level judoka. So if you want to be the, like fight with the best in the world, you have to be alone. It's a lonely journey, actually. It's kind of sad. It's much easier to be in Japan where everybody's a killer. When you're alone at it, it's a difficult journey. And you know, it's funny we talked about kind of, there's some sports where a mistake is, that's it. You can't recover from a mistake. I think judo oftentimes is one of those sports and added on top of that is the Olympics only every four years. And Travis's story, he's the reason I, when I saw him in 2008, cause I started martial arts. I switched from like wrestling and street fighting to doing jiu jitsu and judo. And I just saw so much guts. And the, in 2000, I might be messing up the years here, but in the next Olympics he fought and he lost on just the referee call. Yeah. And just, he went to war and he just so much guts and just everything on the line and to lose and then to still persevere through all the injuries, through all of that, through incredibly difficult training sessions to go another four years and then compete and then win a medal. I mean, that guy's just, and like he clearly could have been very successful. He's also an incredible jiu jitsu competitor. So he could have switched to that, but he's stuck. In a lot of sport, when you're in elite, like for example, in Canada, ice hockey is the number one sport of the countries. Kids when they're in elite, when they're young, they get chosen and they're kind of already known as a superstar. The school where they go and the program they follow, like I'm sure it's the same thing in the US and basketball, baseball, perhaps American football, because they already chosen. So they grew up with that, that it's secure, that superstar stardom, so to speak. And it's already sort of glamorous. However, in MMA, there's no MMA, judo, wrestling, like in America, because it's not our national sport, it's actually, it's not like, even when I first started, it was not really well received by the media. There's no glamor into it. Now I don't know, it seems like it's another era now. And I feel sometimes that some people do it for the wrong reason. You know, some people do it because of the glamor, because of the money. But even if you're an elite and very good, the glamor and the money won't come in the beginning. It's a very long grind before, you know, it starts to come in. And you need to make those sacrifices. And it's a journey where you will be tested, you will be hurt repetitively. And you're going to have to reach the down deep and come back up. And then once you finally think you made it, you're going to go back in the down deep again. It's a very exhausting and decaraging adventure sometimes. But if you hold on to your dream and you believe in it, you know, and you have the stars aligned, you're going to make it. That's why it's only a few people that make it, you know. And that's why I feel sometimes that a lot of people in the new generation do it for the wrong reason. In my generation, because of sport, at first there were no rules. I thought it was more pure. The people that did it was really because of the passion. We didn't seek money, fame. We did it because we wanted to be... I did it because I wanted to be the man, you know. I like to have the confidence that when I walk somewhere, you know, I have the confidence that, you know, it's an illusion because nobody is faster than a bullet. But I wanted to achieve it for myself. Which today now, because I don't know if it's social media and all that, the world has changed. The glamour, you know, I feel it's a different thing right now. Yeah, if you get in it for the glamour or the money, you may not have the right amount of fuel to persevere through all the ups and downs, for sure. You know, when you talk about motivation of money and glamour, a guy comes to mind, and I don't know how many wrestlers, you know, but in Russia, there's a guy named Bovassiy Satiev. The Satiev brothers, one of the greatest freestyle wrestlers of all time, but he also has... It's funny that he doesn't have many interviews. One of my goals is to go out and talk to him in Russian, do an interview with him because he's exceptionally poetic and a deep thinker. He's the kind of martial artist that you are in the way that it's not just about the different battles you've been through or whatever. It's about the philosophy behind the way he approaches life. Now, he has spoken quite a bit about that the glamour, the fame, the money are all things that get in the way of the purity of the experience, the art, that the way to achieve greatness is to just lose yourself in the art of the actual combat, in his case, it's wrestling, and then kind of not to worry and actively make sure that you block out anybody who, you know, feeds you the narrative where you're supposed to be this famous person and all those kinds of things that he basically says, let others write your story. Make sure that you just focus on the art. And another person from that side of the world is, of course, Khabib, so he represents that side of the world. And we were talking about walking away and most people not being able to walk away at the top as you have, but also now Khabib has, it looks like, incredibly so. I mean, maybe you can comment about what your thoughts are about Khabib Nurmagomedov being able to just walk away. You know, we talk about the GOAT very often, Khabib is, you know, one of, isn't the argument because he has the most dominant carrier of all martial art, the guy, you know, some guys can be named the GOAT for different reasons, but Khabib for that reason, and he's undefeated. I don't even know if he lost, he might have lost a round, but he dominates all his opponents. It was ridiculous and such an incredible career that he had. I love to watch him fight, he's incredible. And when you talk about the art, when you say mixed martial art, the idea of a flawless performance, for me, everybody often, when we say flawless performance, thinks about a knockout, a brutal knockout. But for me, it's to be able to showcase beautiful technique, like a beautiful takedown, beautiful submission, like something beautiful that, you know, when you look at, for example, Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan or like Stephen Curry, even if you don't know nothing about basketball and you watch Michael Jordan, you'll be like, wow, that's beautiful what he just did. Like, we talk about fighting and trying to say the word beautiful in fighting for certain people, it could sound kind of crazy, you know, but I'm talking about the technique, a beautiful technique, you know, for me, that's the goal. You know, when I was fighting, it's no need to have a brutal knockout because some people are more gifted than others. I'm saying gifted, some people are better than others in certain phase of fighting. But for me, it was that it was to showcase, to win, of course, but to showcase some beautiful technique that you can watch it and be like, wow, that was incredible. The timing, he did it. And when I think about Khabib Nurmagomedov, I see all the detail of his work, especially when he's got his opponent against the fence, that's like, that's his area of expertise where he's, to me, he's the best that ever did it in terms of that fighting style, that particular expertise that he has, it's just incredible. The flawless execution of that particular set of techniques. And Conor McGregor had the accuracy. The Spider Anderson Silva was like, was, I would say, the most flamboyant of all, you know, like he was moving like the Matrix. Jon Jones was incredible in terms of creativity, spinning elbows and that, and he faced incredible adversity. Dimitrius Johnson was so complete. You could bring, like he was slamming a guy to an armbar. It was just unbelievable. Like, like he was like the complete fighter. BJ Penn was like so flexible. He did stuff with his body that like nobody could do his, the dexterity of his hips was just unbelievable. Dominic Cruz, to me, was incredible, his footwork, his distance control. So when you talk about like the GOAT, Royce Gracie, another one, he did things that I think for me is the number one. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta, and sorry to interrupt, Royce is a fascinating one. I'd love to hear what you think about him, but many people consider you, most people consider you to be the number one greatest mixed martial arts fighter ever. So it's fascinating to remove you from that list and continue this discussion and asking like, who do you think is the greatest fighter ever? You listed some amazing ones, Royce. You somehow skipped Fedor. I'm very, as a Russian, I'm very offended. No, I was, I was going to, there's so many. Fedor is one as well. Fedor, I think in his prime was like, when you say, when you talk about a name, for example, like we talk about him when he was in his prime. Like when I talk, for example, about Anderson Silva, I'm not talking about the Anderson Silva who fought, who fought his last fight against Uriah Hall. I'm talking about the Anderson Silva who knocked out Victor Belfer. Yes. BJ Penn, same thing. The problem is when fighters hang on for too long in the sport. That's what happened. They kind of make, make people forget how good they were. And it's very sad. We talk about Fedor and just, just think about Stipe Miocic. Miocic is probably the greatest heavyweight of all time. With Fedor, I would really wonder who would have won this fight, the both guys in their prime. I tend to lean towards Fedor because my heart was with Fedor, but he could have gone the other way. But just because Miocic lose his last fight, now everybody's like, oh yeah, they forgot about him. It's crazy, man. It's one fight. You zig when you should zag, boom. That's the reality of mixed martial arts. Well, that's why the thing is the mixed martial arts isn't just the performance, the strictly who won and who lost. It's also the stories we tell ourselves. And so, I mean, there's beautiful stories being weaved. And that also is part of who is the greatest of all time is what were the battles, what had to be overcome? What was the flavor of the flawless performances? You know, all of that plays into it and you're right. Being able to walk away at the top is also part of that. A lot of people ask me about Khabib and that fight. I want it to happen. Khabib wanted to happen, but UFC did not want to happen between you and Khabib. Yes. And we tried to make it like about three years ago when I retired, two, no, three, no, it was after two years ago and it never came to fruition. The UFC were clear. They said they have other plan for Khabib and it makes sense for the business standpoint because they want to keep the ball rolling. Now Khabib retired and like everybody else, after Justin Gaethje, I was doing the commentator in French for the UFC and I had Butterfly, I thought he was going to call me out. If there is one guy that I would have said, yes, it would be him, because for a fighter, the most exciting things to do, it's often the scariest one. And Khabib was, you know, the scariest macho. Yes. But he was worth the risk because nobody has ever been able to solve them. How would you solve the Khabib Nurmagomedov puzzle? Well, Khabib is very good against the fence. I would have to establish a game plan and everything, but I think what I would need it to do is take the center of the octagon right away. Use a lot of think and faith. Keep the fight all the way, all the way out or all the way in. And when I say all the way in is when you close the gap, use my proactive and reactive takedown and perhaps my superior explosive to put him down. I like to use those proactive and reactive techniques because for me, I feel it's more economical. Khabib is a much better chain wrestler than me. Chain wrestler is when you got that guy to the fence, it's pure wrestling. What makes my takedown very efficient? It's my karate. It's not my wrestling. I'm very good at timing my opponent and getting in with my explosivity. So if you watch my takedown, it does not demand often, it does not demand a lot of work. When I use the, I call it proactive takedown. When he's coming to punch me and I react, I mean, proactive is when I'm faking it. So I instigate the takedown by a fake, then I take him down. And reactive is when I'm baiting him to throw something, then I'm going. It's a counter. Yeah. Yes. But all my takedowns... In the center of the octagon. Yes. My takedowns are more in the center of the octagon. Like for example, another guy that does it well is Gleason Thibault that did it well in his best days. Khabib has more a style of chain wrestling, I would say like Kamaru Usman, so to speak, kind of guy. It's a different style. You cannot compare both styles. And that's the kind of takedown I'm good. And if I would have fight Khabib, that's one of the strategy I would have adopted. I would not have been afraid because everybody that I fought, I was able to put them down and I have the pedigree to prove it in my fight resume. So you would have perhaps seen him on his back and I would have perhaps be on my back as well. So it would have been a very interesting fight. How hard do you think he is to takedown? I mean, a lot of people speak about his wrestling being just... It has nothing to do with the wrestling because... It has to do with the karate. If I got that timing and I got my both hands around his knees, he's going down the other way. Everybody goes down. Yes, yes, he goes down. And I had a lot of that. That's what I would have adopted. I would not have been afraid of his wrestling. I would have be the instigator. I would have forced the fight forward. And that's how I would have approached that fight, which I believe most of his opponent were afraid of his wrestling because they didn't have the tools that I have to put him down. I would not have forced the wrestling. I would have... In the clinch, I would have tried to disengage. I have many ways to disengage a clinch. I would have wanted to force the fight in a fighting distance, like in a shoot box distance, not in a wrestling distance. Is it possible this fight still happens? You're young, you look great in a suit. Well, there's a lot of problems now. And the thing is, now I made peace with it. I no longer don't want to fight and I don't... It's not going to happen. UFC was not interested and I'm bound by contract with the UFC and by exclusivity. Some people says to me, oh, how about if a wealthy Russian guy come with the money? I said, I'm going to be in court with UFC. And also, I'm older now and when I go home and I'm like, I don't want to do this, you know? But you were always like this. No, I don't want to do this. But like, for example, I was training with Freddie Roach a few days ago and I'm hitting pads, you know? And Freddie is looking at me and he's like, hey, you have the hitch back. I'm like, yeah. If Dana White would walk in the room, in the gym at that precise moment with the UFC contract, I would sign it in the blink of an eye. But when I go home, I'm like, hell no, my belly is full, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy. Why would I want to fight for? I made peace with it. But the minute I go back in the gym, because I still get it inside me when I train with the young guys, I still get it. And a lot of guys think, hey, tell me the truth, you're preparing a comeback because I still get it. You know, I'm a little bit older, but I got more knowledge, I can compensate. I become a different animal because, you know, it changed you. But then after you go home and you're like, man, no way I'm doing this. It's very hard to explain, you need to be a fighter to understand that it's very, very hard to explain. Well, from your perspective, I think Khabib is one of the rare, one of the few fascinating scientific puzzles yet to be solved. So from that aspect, as a martial artist, it's just a fascinating journey to try to solve that puzzle. There is a thing too, like we say, oh, who's the best fighter, people, Lex, they don't, like I am this, I realized that later in my life and I'm sure a lot of young guy will say, oh, I say, Pierre, it's not, don't speak for me, but I'm telling you right now what I'm about to say, you will realize it later. When I was young, I think you can proclaim yourself the more, the badass man on the planet, you know, like nobody can beat you at, it's an illusion, man. That's the sad thing about, for example, DC, Daniel Cormier does probably one of the greatest, it's not the greatest of all time, you said Neotish, but like, it's almost because of that little matchup with John Jones, it's difficult for people to conceive of him as the greatest of all time. It's all about matchup, it's all about timing, and also you make a fight, you make both guys fight 10 times, the result might be different, like every time, you know, I mean, maybe he's gonna win eight out of 10, but that night, he's gonna lose, why? Because we don't know, the universe made it like that, you know, maybe he got sick, maybe he had the emotional issues, he didn't sleep well, and it makes him lose focus and he got caught, you don't, we don't know, but that's the thing, people ask me, would you have done it with Khabib, what would happen? I don't know, maybe out of 10 times, I don't know, maybe as a fighter, I hope I would have won more than him, he thinks the opposite is only one way to find out, but that night, if there is a fight, the guy that's gonna win doesn't mean he's the best fighter, that's mean that he's the one that fought the best the night of the fight, same thing in basketball or hockey, the team that wins the game, it's not necessarily the best team, it's the team that played the best the night of the game, and fighting is no different, so being the baddest man on the planet, it's an illusion. I mean that's the tragic thing about it, is on any one night, anything can happen and then that tells a story for all of human history, it's sad to think about, but that's what makes it beautiful, that there's so much at stake, like entire lives, all the dreams you've had growing up, all the hard work, all of it is decided in a single night, even though that means nothing in terms of who's actually better, I mean that's the beauty, that's why people love the Olympics especially, because it happens so rarely, and dreams are broken, or like triumph is achieved by the unlikely hero, all like right there, I mean that's why we love it, right, that's why we love it. If we wouldn't know always the result before, it would be boring, that's why we do it, you know, watch the odds, like sometimes I like to watch the odds before a fight, you know, because there's things, I believe in causality, everybody believes different things, but I believe everything is because there's a cause to everything, that's personally what I believe, I don't believe that I have like free will, I think I have the illusion of free will, but I believe there's a cause for everything, and if I'm doing something because of something, because of a cause, by definition, there's no free will in a way, if there's a cause, by definition, there's not. How does that make you feel by the way, like the idea that if we just look outside of even just human psychology and fighting and so on, if we look at like physics, if everything is predetermined, if all of these little molecules interacting, it's all already, like your story is already written. I mean, it depends, it's written, but I wouldn't need to know all the data and it's impossible, right? Like it's kind of weird, I gotta say, but to me, I don't see any argument to counter that idea, maybe I'm ignorant, but I haven't seen nobody and everything that I've read so far, there's nothing that counter that idea, because in a mechanical world, if your car broke, or we don't say, oh, the car decided to broke, or a tree is fall, there's reason why the tree is fall, we don't say the tree is decide to fall, right? So because us human being, I think it's our ego, we decide, and I'm no different than anybody when I make a decision, I decided to do this, I choose to do this, but I'm aware that there is causes that make me do certain things, and by definition, I think if there is a cause, there is no free will, by definition, right? Yes, but the thing is, just like you said, we understand so little about human intelligence, the human mind, and especially consciousness, that this giant mystery, this darkness, that we don't understand how it feels like to be something, to be a conscious being, that because of that, we're not able to really even reason about free will, or not, because there might be some magic that comes from consciousness, the consciousness might be the thing that makes us different from a car that breaks down. There might be something totally fascinating, totally undiscovered yet, that will make us realize that free will is actually real, and is somehow fundamental to the human experience. So it's, sometimes I think we forget when we talk about free will and physics and it all seeming to be predetermined, we forget how little we actually understand about the world, and I think in that mystery, there could be totally new ideas that are yet to be discovered, and will make us realize that it's not just an illusion, it is something that is like at the core of how the universe works. Some people believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like it's one of the forces of physics, like consciousness permeates everything, it's in everything. Like this table is conscious, but it's not as conscious as us, and we're this little peak of consciousness, and if that's true, and if we get to understand that, maybe there's something, there's an extra bonus we get in terms of free will once you become one of those entities that are super conscious. So I tend to be sort of humbled by the mystery of it. Do you believe one day with the technology that keep improving, we will make robot that will be able to be somehow conscious? Absolutely, that's been my dream, that's been, I hope to do just that. First of all, I believe that all people are capable and want to be good to each other, and I think love is a really powerful thing that connects us and can create better and better worlds, sort of like create better and better societies that improve both the technology, the quality of life, and just the basics of human experience. And I think creating AI systems that are conscious, that are human like, can enable us to be better to each other. Like they can, it's almost like adding more and more kindness to the world through the systems we interact with will inspire us to be better and better to each other. In terms of them being conscious, I think that is an absolute requirement that entities we interact with communicate some element of consciousness to us, like that's how we connect to each other. The reason we, you and I connect is that we believe that each of us are conscious. And to me, what consciousness means is the ability to hurt, the ability to suffer, to struggle in this world, because just like you said, without the struggle, you don't have the love, you don't have the pleasure, and ultimately consciousness is an entity's ability to struggle, to suffer, and from that arises the pleasure. And us together being able to appreciate the highs and experience together the lows, that's how we form the deep connections. I personally think we can create that in robots, and I personally believe it's a lot easier than we think. Does it make you afraid sometimes about the fact that one day AI, like artificial intelligence could hurt us? Because of Hollywood, of course, the movies we watch, but it seems like when I hear sometimes Elon Musk talking, you know? Yeah, so Elon talks about with AI, we're summoning the demon. He is very concerned, and I talked to him about it quite a bit, he's very concerned about all the different ways AI could hurt us humans. I tend to believe that there's a lot more ways in which AI can make our lives better and can make life awesome for humans. I think humans are the ones that can do a lot of evil things. So I'm less worried about AI, I'm more worried about humans. If I look at what humans have done on the course of history, for example, in regards to the planet to the scale of the universe, I think what I'm afraid is that we have more of a destructive force than a beneficial force. So if AI take that in consideration in order to protect us against ourselves, it could hurt us in a way. I don't know if you understand, what do you think about that? Does it makes you afraid sometimes, not because of AI, but because of what humans are doing that AI could do to us to prevent us of hurting ourselves, you know? Yeah, I mean, definitely it can bring out the worst in human nature and provide tools for evil people to do evil things at a larger scale. But I just think it depends what you think human beings are. I tend to believe that as we get more intelligent, we start to see the value, the evolutionary value and the value in terms of happiness of being good to each other. And I think AI, if you look at AI as an optimization problem of how to create a civilization that works well and expands throughout the universe, I think love is much more effective. So AI will help us maximize that. I think there's going to be always spikes throughout, as it has been through human history, where charismatic leaders will do evil onto the world in the name of good. You have the Stalin and the Hitlers and all of that. But ultimately over time, I think technology will give the good people power and the evil people less power. Now there's a lot of ways that that won't be the case. There's a lot of ways for it to go wrong and Elon talks about them, but I honestly think in terms of intelligent AI, that's going to bring more love to the world. The thing I'm concerned about is dumb AI. So there's been a lot of discussion between China and the United States recently on autonomous weapons system. This is something people don't, they're afraid to talk about, but there's now a race where the United States has officially said that they're not against adding AI to its weapon systems. So now the US military is adding automation, adding intelligence to its drones, to anything that can create damage. And so of course, and they did this so in response to China doing that. So you can imagine this is Terminator. You think about Terminators and intelligent systems, they're not, they're pretty dumb. The point is they're efficient at doing what they do. And in the space of war, efficient at doing what you do means killing. So that I'm really afraid of, but those are dumb AI. Those aren't your loving, deep, fulfilling relationships. That's like efficiently being able to fly, to plan the trajectory of dropping bombs, of missiles, of how to do counter attacks, of how to maximize the destruction of a particular facility instead of individuals. And then that can just escalate. And as opposed to the cold war with the Soviet Union, this could be a hot war. And then the consequences, once you allow, it's kind of terrifying because currently the drones are operated by humans. So you have say, you have information about, intelligence gives you information about a particular terrorist located in this area. And then you use drones to maybe the automation there is to help you figure out what is the best trajectory to strike at that location. So you still have a human that pulls the trigger at the end and dropping the bomb. Now automation and AI and autonomous weapons systems might be where you say, there's a bad guy over here. You figure out how to get rid of the bad guy. So then of course the systems will be very good at finding the right trajectory and so on, but there's bugs that can happen. Unexpected bugs that the system might figure out that there is this bad guy might actually be in these other five locations. So might make sense to cover the entire area, right? And so you might drop bombs on the entire area and then that's just okay. So that's going to lead to a lot of destruction at the scale of a city, but then you can immediately take that to nuclear weapons. If you add automation to responding to counterattacks to nuclear weapons, somebody, you might get information that somebody is planning a nuclear attack on the United States and the AI system will immediately respond and you know, it can respond at a scale of launching nuclear weapons itself. And so there's all of these possibilities that don't require much intelligence. And that's exceptionally concerning. I'm like you, I do not believe there is babies that are born bad. I think people do bad things because of their experience. However, if I look through my experience and from what I can see is some very often, man's of power wants more power. That's what makes me afraid with, you know? Absolutely, listen, I've come from the Soviet Union. Stalin is arguably one of the most powerful humans in history. He's not talked often enough about by the evils he's done. Hitler gets all the attention, but Stalin has done arguably much more evil than Hitler. Yeah, well, this is human nature. It wants power. We see that with institutions, we see that with governments and nations. I think you see this with the internet, people are really hungry for the distribution of power. Like you see that people are very much distrustful of centralized places of power, of institutions and so on. So I think successful organizations, successful companies, successful governments will be run by people who distribute the power. Like I don't trust myself with power at all. And I think you have to build into the system that no one person can have power and that you distribute it. That's where you have in the financial sector, you have cryptocurrency right now with Bitcoin and all those kinds of things. People are exploring, how can we avoid the central bank to have the control? How do you put the power in the hands of people, thousands of people, millions of people? And same way with military, with any kind of, with technology, I think the future looks very distributed. What do you think about militarizing space? The space force, I don't think about it often because right now I'm filled with excitement about space exploration, which is the positive aspect. So Elon, I was born in an era where it was exciting. I don't know about you, but for me it's exciting to look up to the stars and dream about us humans colonizing Mars, colonizing other planets, expanding out to the galaxy, into the universe. That's really exciting. So the possibilities there are endless. I don't think, because also the resources are endless. And so I think we get into trouble with militarization, with wars when the resources are very constrained. So I think for a while we're not going to be fighting, the only wars we'll be fighting in space are the ones that kind of help us. Another nation to compete, who goes to the moon first, I guess. Those kinds of things are maybe for satellites and all those kinds of communication and maybe in assistance for cyber warfare, which is also very dangerous. But in terms of the wars out in space, I think everything out in space will be positive and inspiring. It's very hard, but all good things are hard, I think. This is where I've been talking to a bunch of people about extraterrestrial life. I'm really excited by, I don't know, it's the other thing. When I look out to the stars, it's exciting to me. I know I think you've spoken about it being scary, but to me it's exciting that there's intelligent creatures out there far beyond perhaps the intelligence of our own that are just too far away to explore yet, but we might one day come in contact with them. So that to me is the ultimate motivator is to meet other intelligence life forms out there and connect with them. Have you ever meet Jacques Vallée? No, but I've been in communication. I want to, I hope to talk to him. He's an amazing... French, yeah. I know that there's many theories about, you know, if there's alien, we don't know, right? But some people think it's from another star systems and Jacques Vallée has like to make a long story short, he has a different theory, thinks it's perhaps beings that could be living in a different dimension than us. And the reason why he says that is when he makes an experiment, when there is a sightings very often of a UFO, let's say I'm the UFO that you have three guys, they are looking at the UFO very often, one experiment that you can do, and sometimes that is the case, you ask your two friends to walk on the side and there's a point that it's like a corridor, you see the UFO and then you stop seeing it like a corridor. And that's one of the reasons why he's saying that it's perhaps dimension. And I found that fascinating, you know? This is what, you know, to the discussion of consciousness and all that, it feels like we might be just experiencing a very particular slice of this universe, we might not be understanding what's at the higher dimensions or, yeah, I mean, higher dimensions in whatever form that means, you know, there's all these physical theories now that describe a world with dimensions that's much higher than the four dimensions of the three dimension of space and the one dimension of time. So whatever the hell is going on in those other dimensions, it could be something, unfortunately, this is the sad part, it might be something we can't even comprehend with our human brains, that the limitations are just, I mean, we're just descendants of apes, so like it might not be possible to even understand. Is there alien? Is there another dimension? Are they human from the future? Is there perhaps Chinese or another, you know what I mean, a group of people that are working with technology far behind? But you know what, Lex, I had the chance to meet, you know, because of the sport I'm doing, I met a lot of people in military and politics sometimes that I ask them every time. I met one this week and I asked him, I say, is it true about the UFOs there? And he says to me, he's like, even before I asked him, I say, sorry, I have to ask you a question. I was in Los Angeles and I said, sorry, I have to ask you a question. He said, oh, you want to ask me about UFOs right away, you do. And I say, yes. He saw it in your eyes. He said, yeah, there is things that flies that we don't know. But he didn't tell me, he doesn't know it, they don't know if it's alien or whatever, but there's things apparently that are detected. And I know you met Fravor, you know, like Fravor is fascinating. It's crazy. It makes me sad that we live in a different era now that it used to be a subject that was ridicules and now it's so cool that it's, you know, I'm very excited to live in to that era, you know? Yeah, it's really exciting, but still the governments are kind of behind the times on that aspect is they're not transparent and they don't communicate well. You know, it saddens me to think the possibility that, that, you know, like the US government might be in possession of something that they don't tell the world about because they're just scared is because they don't know what the hell it is and they don't want the Chinese to gain the technology or all those kinds of things. Do you think the president of the United States, for example, because the president comes and go every, right, four or eight years, do you think he would know all the secret or it would be a guy like, for example, Vladimir Putin would know much of, you know what I mean? I don't think the president even know, like even knows all the secret. The US president. I don't think so because he goes, they go back and forth, you know, every four years, you know, they have the terms, right? So I, you know, I wasn't sure before, but I think I could trust the previous United States president of Donald Trump that if he knew, he would probably tweet about it. So I think from the, you know, I've worked with DARPA, I worked with DOD at a clearance and I think from the perspective, if you, if you see the world as fundamentally a dangerous world where secrets are important to have from a military perspective, I think it's very unsafe to tell the president of the United States that you have this kind of technology. So if you think of the world in that way, I hate that that's how that world is viewed because ultimately I think what's more powerful than the military secrets, and I hope that actually is what will happen in the 21st century, is what's more powerful is inspire people. Inspire the young Elon Musk's of the world to create cool new things. If we have technology that we've have come, have encountered that we don't understand that should only be inspiration to develop that kind of stuff. It shouldn't be seen as military, as a military threat, as a secret to hold on to. I think secrets, I hope we more and more let go of the idea that there are secrets that give us advantage, you know, like in the tech sector, people are more and more releasing the software and making it open source. Like secrets don't make sense. They share the knowledge, right? Share the knowledge. Like being afraid to share the knowledge, I think, I hope is an old idea. It's more, yeah. When you make it, things more compartmentalize, you know? Yes. Well, yeah. That's the other thing is the bureaucracy of government is like people only know their own little thing and they don't spread the information. It doesn't travel well. I mean, there's a lot of just inefficiencies that are, it makes me sad. It makes me sad because the science, the engineering that happens in governments, like Lockheed Martin developing the different airplanes that they use for military applications is some of the most incredible engineering ever. And it's secret because they're afraid to share it with the Russians and the Chinese and so on. But on that topic, I do think somebody like Vladimir Putin probably knows some stuff. My God. My God. I would love to know what he knows. But then again, you never know because even he is, you know, people think of him as an exceptionally powerful person, but he's also just managing a bunch of tribes. His power is very limited. He's trying to hold together a bunch of greedy, power hungry, mad men. That's right. Okay. And he's trying to establish a balance. He might not know everything. So I hope this changes because I think there's nothing more exciting about. I don't even know if there is a human that knows. You know what I mean? Like this idea that there is some civilization, alien civilization that that land on the White House and say, hi, I come to meet the president. And like, why would they do that? You know what I mean? It's kind of absurd. You know? Well, I do think that actually, I mean, that's one possibility, right, is LART, you know, if an alien civilization really wanted to contact us, I think everybody would know. So I think what we're, if there's any kind of interaction between humans and aliens, I think most likely what we're interacting with is a crappy like probe drone thing that kind of just like, like, it's like this, this dumb thing, you know, we're not interacting with the aliens. I think just like, just like for us, I think humans aren't when we venture out into space. The first thing that's going to meet aliens is our robots. It's not us humans because we keep sending robots out. So they're going to like, they're going to make decisions about humans by looking at the robots. I say the famous grays, the grays, maybe they are robots. Maybe it's all BS too, you know? Yeah. I don't know, I don't know what that interaction actually would look like if aliens really wanted to reach out, really communicate. And I don't know if we're able to actually communicate with them. That's one of the sad things. We may not be able to, that we might, the aliens might already be here and we might just not even know, know how to see them or know how to communicate with them. There's so much misinformation and sometimes there is peoples that are very credible that, that made crazy claims, you know, like, you don't know what to believe, you know, like, like Paul Aylor, the minister of defense of Canada said like some, that there is many alien rays that ever, that's what he said, research it and that scientists from, I think Israel recently have said something about Trump, he was keeping secret or Medvedev, you're from Russia, Medvedev have been caught in a, like during a break in between interviews to talks about like, oh, it's like men in black, so to speak. I don't know. He didn't look like he was joking, but I don't know if he was saying the truth. I didn't know about this. Yeah, you can check on YouTube. It's a, it's, it's, it went, it went viral. Yeah. There's a lot of things like that sometimes I'm like, or, or Bob Lazar, I'm like, imagine if it's true, man. Yeah. Imagine if we're like a fish in the water, we live in our own world and sometimes there's a fisherman that grabbed the fish, take him out of the water and threw it back in the water and the fish goes back to the other fish and say, Hey, there's someone that, that take me out of the water. Then I've seen things that I did not like. Imagine if it's true. Like we like, yeah. And one other thing, like I wanted to ask you because you were consciousness, how about dreams? What is a dream? Yeah. Well, I, I, I more and more, I don't know if you're paying attention to this. There's no, it's become more acceptable in the scientific community to do large scale studies of psychedelics, for example, and there's a lot of connection between psychedelics and dreams. There's very similar states. There's, there's a lot our mind does when it detaches itself from reality that it can just explore a lot of different ideas. It's very possible that dreams is you're traveling somewhere and the same thing with psychedelics. You're traveling somewhere in a different, not traveling to physical space. It's the other dimensions that we're talking about. You're traveling some other through some other dimension to meet some other creature. People talk with DMT that they meet some elves. I've never done, I I'd like to, I don't know if there's a safe legal way to do it, but they all talk about meeting elves and creatures like entities and like, who are they? What's what is this? Is it because they're high or it's because they're actually meeting something and maybe there's no difference. I mean that who knows exactly and that's takes us right back to us not being able to really understand how our mind works. You know, I work in artificial intelligence. It's clear that we understand so little about intelligence, some basic things about intelligence just at the, at the very sort of basic first principles level. We don't understand what it means to, to reason, to think, to assimilate pieces of knowledge together from the, from the basics to the complex. We don't understand it. We don't understand how the human mind does it. We don't understand how the human mind is able to take incredible waterfall of information and filter cleanly into just like clean. You only see the things that are important and are able to stitch them together and be able to reason about the world. And at the same time have moments of like genius of creativity. Like what is that? That also, you know, people, writers talk about that, that they're, you know, they're almost like communicating with a muse, like where do ideas come from? This is the Joe Rogan philosophy. But I do know that past civilization where a lot of them were based on shamanism. And you know what? I think it's sad is if someone drink alcohol and when he's drunk, he's going to commit like create like, like murders or something. We're going to blame the person. Right? You're going to say that's his fault. It's not the fault of alcohol. However, if someone does psychedelic or any things that is illegal and you do something crazy, now we're going to put the fault on psychedelic. You know what I mean? And perhaps the person itself is the reason why, you know, he's been doing these things, you know what I mean? So yeah, it's fascinating how like society, you know, like in Canada, they just legalize marijuana. Oh yeah? Yeah. Marijuana is legal. But before that, before they did it, like if you talk, for example, to my dad, my dad is against it, like, because the whole mentality is like, it's drug, it's bad. But drinking a glass, you know, drinking a beer, it's fine. I mean, what is, you know what I mean? What is good? What is bad? And I guess eating chocolate could be bad as well for your health or, I mean, I'm going to the extreme now, but what is good? What is bad? If you use it for recreation, you use it for an experience, to learn about yourself, it's a, the line is very tiny, you know, there's some countries that drugs are all legals, you know what I mean? And I don't know the stats, but I would be interesting to know if they have more crimes there than other countries where it's more strict. I would be interesting to know about that. It's fascinating to me, you know? Yeah. And I mean, we humans kind of just come up with arbitrary lines of what's good, what's bad that applies with drugs, that applies with anything, that applies with animals, for example. We talked about carnivore diet. Maybe the time we live in now will be remembered for the cruelty to animals, for example. And I believe this, the 21st century will be remembered for our cruelty to robots. That eventually there'll be a civil rights movement for robots where the ones who choose to be conscious, the ones who have consciousness will say, we deserve rights too. We deserve to be treated with respect too. How about the people we put in jail? People put in jail. I mean, I think in the future we'll look back and we'll think of ourselves being stupid, you know, to put people in jail instead of, you know, like trying to fix the problem at the base, you know? Of course now we're, or I guess it's our ignorance that made it in a way that we cannot sometimes understand what makes sometime a psychopath, a psychopath or a murderer, a murderer, but you know, if we can pinpoint the problem and take care of it before, you know what I mean? Or made it in a way that we can reestablish that person in the society. You know, who knows, you know, what was the future's hold. It's interesting. We live in an interesting time. You mentioned your father. What have you learned from your dad? You mentioned he was an important part of your childhood. My dad is amazing. I grew up, we didn't have a lot of money, but it doesn't mean if I'm born in a nice country that always nice thing happened, you know? My dad for me is a big role model because I see him through to my life facing a lot of adversity. You know, he stopped drinking when I was a teenager, he was an alcoholic and I seen him struggle through that, you know, and it was very, very hard and I've seen him work like crazy hours, like come leave in the morning, come home at night, burned out because of work through almost all his life to the point that it became a slave of the system. It became an habit and a normal way of living and it made me realize that I have learned a lot through my father. He taught me perseverance, hard work, you know, when you face adversity, you know, to never give up until you achieve it, but also he taught me a lesson that in a way that I don't want to be like him, even if he is happy, it's because I realized I don't think he knows anything else. Like he works through all his life and I don't want to live to work. I want to work for, you know what I mean, I want to decide when I work, you know, I feel like like he lived to work instead of working for a living. And perhaps it's because he did not have choice, he was the older of his family, they were nine kids, his dad, my grandfather died when he was young, so he had to become the father of the family and work to put money on the table. So perhaps that's what made him that way and it became like an habit for him. My dad taught me when I was at school, I was bullied at school, he's the first one who initiate me to martial art. He taught me karate, my dad was a black belt in Kyokushin karate as well. But because he was working too much, he didn't have time to teach me and I needed self defense in order to defend myself. I have a winning, a great career in mixed martial art, but in the school yard, my record is not very good. When you're a kid and you're about seven, eight years old and you're facing bullied bullies that are two to three years older than yourself, it's not the same thing than when you're 25 and the guy is 28. So there was a big discrepancy in terms of maturity. So my dad taught me, introduced me to karate, then he didn't have time to teach me. Then he put me in a school with a teacher, it was Jean Couture. And I grew up with a lot of anger and there were two persons I was afraid growing up. It was my dad, my dad was very severe, very strict with me. And I'm glad he was because I could have become very bad. I could have become chosen on a different path. People see me as a nice guy and I am a nice guy, I try to be a good role model, but I could easily have turned towards a wrong path. There's darkness somewhere in there. Yes, there are a lot. And a lot of my friends have chosen that path and unfortunately they are not with me today. Even if I'm from Canada and Canada seems like the nicest country in the world, like I said, even if you live in a nice country, it's not always a nice thing, it depends on the situation. But that's what my dad taught me. And he gave me that because I'm very good at learning by observing people and by observing him I see the struggle he had with alcoholism and what he did, the pain sometimes that he inflicted to us, to my family. But how he turned, he did a 180 degree and I really admire that. And I know it was very, very hard for him and he did it and for me that's a great role model for me. So with your dad being an engine of basically hard work and you finding a balance of being able to work your ass off, but also to be able to enjoy a piece of chocolate, what is a perfect day in the life of George St. Pierre look like? So like if you were to go through a day that's very productive, but also one that makes you sit back and enjoy and say that was a good day, what's that look like? What are we talking about? When do you wake up? What do you eat? What do you do? It changed over the years. When I was younger, I have a good day. It was like a good training session or, you know, achieving good thing in my training, you know, and that's why I was very good at it because when I, I was obsessed, you know, I think to be good at something, you need to become obsessed. And to me, performing in my training was everything, you know, like when I had a bad training session, I didn't tell my training partner, I was acting like a, like because of my ego, I didn't, you know, I didn't tell nobody, I was like, Hey, then I go in the locker room and like, man, then I'm playing the, the, the, the training in my mind and I'm saying, okay, I should have done this, should have done that, and it haunt me. It haunt me, man. It's a training and it haunt me until the next training session when I can redeem myself. That's how it is. When we used to train in, in all together, back in the day in Canada, we had David Loiseau, we had Patrick Côté, we had Dennis Kang, Steve Vignot, Jonathan Goulet, there was all like the best guy in Canada that were training with each other before we were training in different gyms. But once a week, I made it in a way that I contact everybody that we all join force and we exchange ideas and we train with each other. So a friendly, I would say friendly competition. It was not malicious, but it was hard training, you know, like not, our goal was to improve, you know, but it wasn't very competitive. And when that day you used to get out of the training session with a bad performance for me, it used to haunt me until the following week when I could give it back and perform better with the guy that I had the most trouble with. That's how it was. And that's how you get better, you know, but, but it was not a training where we were trying to do malicious thing to one another. You know what I mean? You need to be playful, but playful, but competitive. That when I had a good training session, because the sparring was on a Friday, I had the best weekend in the world. I was going out with my friend, drinking and partying and have fun. That that was, that was my, my, my, my ideal day back in the day. Today has changed. You know, my, my, my, my life has changed. You know, like I, I am not the same person I used to be when I got, went on my knees and beg the UFC for title shot. You know what I mean? I am a, I'm wealthy, I'm healthy. Most importantly, that's the most important thing. And as, and I'm going to tell you the truth, as good as my career was, man, my private life, man, is a million times better, man. I, and, and people ask me sometimes they always wonder, they, they try to ask me and it's normal. It's a lot of people is curious and the reporter and in the sport of mixed martial art, we say we play basketball, we play soccer, but you don't play fighting. So when you expose your private life, we seen that happen in the fight with sometime Conor McGregor and Khabib, your competitor knows that he cannot get to you. So what he will do, he will try to get to someone that you love. So may I never expose my, my private life. I never post Instagram of my family or my stuff. That's the reason why, because I'm in a, I'm in a business of fighting and people know that they cannot get to me. And I believe because I was bullied when I was young, I didn't realize that when I was young, but it helps me deal with the mental warfare that I need, that I had to face later on in my life and mixed martial art, because it's a very egotistic sport. And there's a lot of, a lot and a lot of intimidation. And I was used to, I've been used to this thing when I was young. So it does not get to me, however, the good way to get to me, go, go, go, go try to get to someone I love now, man, I'm going to go crazy. You know what I mean? And I'm aware of that. So in order to protect myself, I always, because I'm aware I'm a public person. So I try to always keep my surrounding like in the private. You know, one of the ways that like your friend and mine, Joe Rogan has been an inspiration that he's got like an incredible family and he, for the most part, it started to change recently. Actually, it's kind of interesting, but for the most part, throughout his life, he kept it pretty secret. Doesn't talk about it in his, he's a comedian, comedians talk about everything. He doesn't really talk about it. And there's something to that. It like preserves the magic of the silence of the private life. And I think it can affect the development of the kid. If the kid grow up being, oh, he's the son of that guy instead of being his own person. You know what I mean? So for me, it's very important. Like my parents are older, it's fine. But it taught me a big lesson. When I'm with my friend at the dinner or anything, I talk with person, always share a thing. But when I'm talking, I'm aware of the audience where I'm in front. Yeah. And I mean, but oftentimes those people are just incredible. It kind of makes me sad that, you know, there's a lot of people that love you, right? And there are a lot of really incredible people and you'll never get to really know their story. I mean, I don't know, for me, it makes me sad. You see them like at airports and stuff. People will tell me they listen to this podcast or something like that. And I could tell they're incredible people. It makes me it's like a little goodbye of a possible friend. I don't know. It makes me sad. All right. It makes me it's lonely. It's almost like celebrity is a lonely thing. So the higher the celebrity, the more lonely you become in some kind of way. But of course, you have that little gem of a private life where you can personally, I believe every relationship I like, I don't like to use this term, but it's always a give and take relationship, you know, like you can gain something and the person like it could be something like not materialist materialistic, like something always a good, confident like someone that can give me good advice or. It's a word I would say, like extensional, like if a pilot as a copilot is the copilot is extent as an extensional relationship with him, you know, so he knows if he gets sick or faint, he's there to make sure, you know, he's there to help. And I think in every relation it's about compatibility, but it's about extensionality, right? In a way that if that person is extensional and sometimes we talk about about love, you know, like sometimes I think is it is it a BS word or not? Because I myself sometimes look at I look at myself in the mirror and when I do stupid thing, sometimes I love myself a lot and sometimes I don't. You know what I mean? Because I'm angry at myself, I've done stupid thing. So that means sometimes you could love could be fluctuating. You know what I mean? How about in relationships? Sometimes people, they say, oh, they love each other, but then when they divorce, they go, oh, I want the house and the dog and the kids stay with me. And you know what I mean? If you love, by definition, if you really love someone and let's say you're an old man and you love a woman and she decides to leave you for a younger man, if you really love her, you're going to help her pack and leave. But in our society, sometimes we want to hone something. To me, love includes the missing somebody, the losing somebody, the anger at somebody. It's all the passion, feelings towards somebody. That's all love. I, you know, it's all part of the thing. It's the ups and downs. It's the sad thing is when the feelings towards a person, the ups and downs go away, the forgetting. That's the opposite of love. So the opposite of love isn't hate. To me, the opposite of love is forgetting. And that's a much bigger, that's the depth of human connection. That's how I see love. Sometimes I try to stay positive and I've been asked how I try to, because I have the image of someone who's positive. But I go through my own demon as well sometimes. However, when we talk about love, when I was young, you know, like, I didn't love who I was at first. That's how I love, I learned to kind of love myself. Like I didn't, when I was going to bullying, I was, I believe I was bullied because I didn't love myself because I project a very bad image of what I think of myself. I was a kid that lacked a lot of confidence. I was looking down when I was walking. I shrugged my shoulder. When someone was talking to me, I was avoiding eye contact. So I was a very easy target for bullies. And I think bullies are like a predatory animal in nature. They will hunt the easier prey. They don't go, the lion don't go for the alpha bull. They go for the one who's old or who's sick, the weakest one. And bullies are the same in society, I believe. And I didn't like to be bullied, of course, but I didn't like the person that I was. But I found out through martial art, the respect and my coach was extraordinary to me. He taught me discipline and self strength. And I found out that I needed to, in order to love myself, I needed to change myself. Because I didn't, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn't like what I saw. So I decided to become like someone that I would love. So I tried to look people straight up and try to showcase a more confident image that I had. And it was hard in the beginning because I didn't really believe in it, but I fake it until kind of I make it. So when I was walking at school, more and more I was learning how to become more confident and I was like taking charge. The teacher was asking questions, at first I was never answering, I was like this, waiting always to be the last. Then I was, hey, I know what the answer, this is the answer. I got out of my comfort zone, so to speak. And I wish I would tell you that I got out of bullying because a Hollywood story, I used martial art to beat up all the bullies. But it's not how it happened to me. It happened because I changed myself from the inside out. And I learned how to, because I didn't love myself in the beginning, I learned how to become like someone that I love. And even now, like I'm by no mean perfect, I do a lot of stupid things, but I learn as a person. And even I do as something stupid, I'm like, shoot, I did something stupid. At least I can apologize to the person if I realize, and then I know that I'm not the person I was in the past, I'm the person that I am right now. So I can learn and become that image of the person that I love. So in a way, the reason I'm trying to be positive and I'm able to stay positive sometime in life is because I'm always trying to be like that person that I love. And I think if you don't look yourself in the mirror and don't love yourself or don't see any positive future for yourself, how can you change your environment if you cannot change yourself? You know what I mean? You will never be happy if you're not happy when you look at yourself in the mirror. So change yourself first, then change, you know, it's not the environment that's going to change for yourself. You have to go from the inside out, you know. This I learned through martial art. I had a coach who was incredible, used to drill these ideas in my head and give me confidence, you know, like this, telling me all these beautiful things about myself and how he's dead now, unfortunately, peace to him. But he was incredible, incredible. He was very, very strict. I was afraid of him. I was afraid of my dad and afraid of him. He couldn't teach nowadays like he used to teach me because he would be probably in jail, you know. But I'm glad he did it because for the time being, that's what I needed. And I would never have had the career I had in mixed martial art without this because I would never have got out of my comfort zone, would have been impossible. And in order to improve in life, you need to get out of your comfort zone. It's hard, very hard to do. And strive to be the person that you can love, that's beautifully put, George. If you were to give advice to a young person today about life, what would you tell him? If he takes life with the same mentality that I do, if he has the same taste of things that I have, I would tell him, you know, for sport, for life in general, I would say, if you will have a dream, you know, like make everything in your power and work very hard, you know, never take no for an answer and go through hell in order to achieve it. Don't work hard only, but work smart. That's I think the problems with a lot of people, they work hard, they can work hard, they burden themselves, they don't work smart. Whether it is in science and business, they make bad choices or they're badly informed in sport. How many guys I've seen ruin their career in the gym, they spar so hard, they ruin themselves in the gyms, they leave their career in the gyms. What I would say to, for example, because my field of expertise, it's in sport of mixed martial art, I would say to a young kid, make your training playful. You know, when you get ready for competition, you need to train to recreate those elements that makes you go outside of your comfort zone. But in everyday life in general, make your training playful. What makes it like a hardcore competition about who's winning, who's losing, make it playful. So it will increase your, because you will not be afraid of getting hurt or losing. You will be tempted to try more things and it will make you become more creative. You know, that brings up another question about learning. So you value knowledge and you're exceptional at basically being very good at learning and figuring stuff out, new things or going deeper on the things you already know. So what advice would you have for how to learn effectively? How you say work smart, how do you figure this game out? I believe the best way to learn is learning from other people's mistake. However, I'm not perfect and I've learned from my mistakes as well. And sometimes it took me a few mistakes to learn the same thing. But especially in the sport of mixed martial art, because we're talking about the failure could have very serious outcome on someone's life and wellbeing. So it's crucial to trying to learn from other people's mistakes. Do you study others? Every fight I'm studying my opponent and I've studied myself as well to know how my strength mix versus my opponent weaknesses and how can I make the fight go in a way that I'm taking my opponent outside of his comfort zone. Very often people are good at studying their opponent, but they're not good at looking at themselves in the mirror and knowing what they should do in order to maximize their odds of success, right? That's why I always thought for me, it was important to not be the best at one thing, but be very good at everything. That's why I always seek advice, advices from the best in every discipline. I wrestle with the best wrestler I could be with, I box with the best boxers, I practice karate with the best karate fighters. Same thing in Jiu Jitsu. I train Jiu Jitsu with the best Jiu Jitsu guys. However, when I mix everything and mix martial art, because I'm very competent in every area. So when I'm fighting someone, I'm very good at identifying where is the less competent. And I know for a fact that because I'm competent everywhere, if I can bring the fight where he's outside of his comfort zone, it increased my odds of winning. There is no certainty. It's all about odds, I believe, because there is always X factor that you do not control. Yeah, it's fascinating to see you actually, because you've been a student of movement. You've been exploring all kinds of, I mean, gymnastics, all that kind of stuff. There's something reminiscent to, like Conor McGregor is one other martial artist that's kind of explored movement, been a scholar of movement. At least from my perspective, it's very sort of Bruce Lee like, it's almost making a study of the human body and all the possible things you can do. Is there a philosophy behind that, that you have? You talk about Bruce Lee, man, you said it best. He changes my life too. He was ahead of his time. Yeah. Incredible. A lot of people talk to me and ask me, hey, is Bruce Lee would have been able to fight in UFC? I don't think so. I don't know. I think he was a martial artist. He could have defended himself, but to say that he could have competed amongst the elite of the elite fighter, perhaps in his time, but for sure, if you put him in UFC right now, the sport has improved incredibly since then. But in terms of philosophy, Bruce, he was amazing. One thing that just to prove that he was ahead of his time, he was talking about using your longest weapon against your opponent nearest point. And we see that kick, it got popularized by John Jones, the sidekick to the tie, his longest weapon against your nearest point in boxing is the jab. But in MMA, when you can use it, all your weapon, that's the kick to the tie. And there is, I felt there is like kind of three dimension in martial art. There is the philosopher, like Bruce Lee. There is the choreography, the choreographed people, like for example, you see in movies that stun people. They're incredible. Or the one that does like forms and karate, like jumping, spin kick, back kick, like acrobatic stuff, mixed martial art. They are unbelievable. And there is also the one that competes in fighting. That's what I do. I personally specialize in. Well, you also do the philosophy. I do a little bit of philosophy, but that's the consequence of the fighting. I guess we are all like we all practice the three dimension because martial art is I would say it's whether you want it or not, you have to touch these three dimensions. But you will specialize in one. I specialize through my life in fighting like the real thing in terms of fighting, competition. Of course, if you do martial art, you'll be able to defend yourself because it's a self defense. However, you might not be able to fight as an elite and the most prestigious organization. And you might not be able to perform the stunt that, for example, the stuntman I've done in the series I was playing in the Falcon and Winter Soldier, these guys are incredible. They're like real life superhero. Things they do, to me, like it's fascinating. It's amazing. And also Bruce Lee, the philosophy. How many hours he took like thinking about these stuff, you know, I'm sure he did not just came out of nowhere, you know, like he was thinking that's mean he slept on this. How many hours? It's just unbelievable. He's like water, my friend. How many times has he thought about water going to bed before he said that? Well, let me ask a very important fundamental question about martial arts. We're both wearing a suit and tie. Joe Rogan thinks that wearing a tie is a huge disadvantage. Is it a clip on or is it an actual tie? It's an actual tie, I really want it. So do you agree or disagree with Joe Rogan that wearing a tie is a martial arts significant disadvantage in terms of combat, in a combat scenario? In a fight, I think it would be a disadvantage. Yes. Okay. I work as a security bouncer in nightclubs and event when I was 18 years old. And sometime I had to work in certain event that I was in suit and tie. I never had to use my force to take someone out when I was in suit and tie. But if I would have had to before going to the table to physically take the guy out, I would have removed my tie and I would have removed my vest for sure. And I would have called back up for sure. And I would have probably used the element of surprise to be first on the guy. When you're in a bar, same thing, you call back up first and you make sure you ask the waitress before to clean the table before you go. And when you go, you have to use the element of surprise. Because fighting, fighting in mixed martial arts and fighting in the street, it's two different things. And yes, I'm a mixed martial arts competitor. That's what I've done all my life. But I had a lot of street fight in my life, a lot when I was in... What's the difference? What's like the... Oh my God. It's a huge difference. There is guys that if I would have a choice, you know, to fight, like, for example, certain guys in UFC in a street fight and fight like other guys that are not in UFC, I would maybe sometimes pick guys that are not in UFC, not necessarily. Because in a street fight, there's no referee that says go. It's the element of surprise. And when you're a nice guy, you're not the aggressor. You always have the element of surprise. That's what it taught me. Oh, interesting. Yes. Because if the person will not come punch you without warning, it needs to, it needs to trigger some... It's something that needs to be triggered before. So if someone comes because he's looking for trouble, there is a sign that he's looking for trouble. So I was just talking with Bas Rutten this weekend about it. I saw that. Every martial art comes from... Like some martial art are from Exclusivik for competition, like sport karate, like certain martial art. But traditional martial art are for the street, are for self defense. And I start my background in Kyokushinkarate, so it's for... And I did Japanese Jiu Jitsu. So my background, before I even start training for mixed martial art, my background is in self defense. And it's very important to understand that in a street fight, the element of surprise is everything. And there are no rules. You can go for the eyes, the necks, the... It surprises everything. Total, total ballgame, you know what I mean? You have the chair, the beard, there's so much more thing going on. So the idea of... Because you are a UFC fighter, you think you're invincible. This is BS. Anybody can come. Like if a big guy who punch very hard, most people don't know how to punch. By the way, they don't know how to make a fist and throw it in a forward direction. But if someone knows how to do it, I don't care who you are. If you could be Francis and Genu, someone come behind your head and bang. Or let's say there's an argument and you get surprised by a punch. You can be drop and lose a fight, that doesn't matter. The element of surprise is everything. So you were saying remove all the sources of the elements of surprise, clear the bar, remove the tie. I still disagree with you about the tie. Just for your information, if someone comes looking for trouble and you see me do this and going sideways a little bit, that's my position that I'm thinking maybe something will happen and I'm about to punch you or to do something to take care of this situation. To flip the table on you then, wearing a tie is communicating the nice guy image. So it actually gives you the freedom for more elements of surprise by wearing the tie. If you take it off, you're limiting your options because nobody's going to expect the guy in the tie to do anything. I'm a big believer that sometimes it's not only materialism, it's what you project. Let's say I had troubles in a bar and I was able to deflect, the guy was looking for trouble talking to me and I was able to deflect his whole aggressivity by saying like, hey, man, that's a nice shirt. Where did you get it? Like saying like something or stupid like this, then it kind of breaks the momentum and he, you know, but the guy was looking for trouble. I don't want to fight you. I don't want to fight you, but I'm not going to wait until you pull, you make the first move because the minute you touch me, you push me or you touch me, you declare war and the war is unleashed, my friend, and I'm taking you out of order with the necessary force, of course. You know what I mean? That's the thing with martial art. If you use the necessary force to take care of the problem, it's okay. But if you, you know, you take advantage of it, that's when it's not all right because it's a weapon. So if someone comes up to me, that's my position and now I'm assessing the situation, you know, that's how they teach in self defense here. Never put your hands down. Always hand there because I'm down or boom, like what this is, this is very important and you never, you always your center line on the side like this. If someone knows martial art, he will recognize that pattern. But if you go like, if someone talked to you and you go like this, that's mean you're telling the guy that you want to fight. You don't want to do that. You don't want to, oh yeah, you know, that's, that's the position because your hands are here, you know, whatever you can do, you're here. Well, also your ear tells a story. It's not everybody that knows that, however, it's some people might think that it's my mom grabbed me by the ear and pulled me because I didn't listen to her, you know. A real fight in the street and a fight in mixed martial art is a different ball game. What do you think is the best martial art to prepare you for street fighting? You know, people often kind of have this discussion of Jiu Jitsu, maybe boxing, maybe wrestling. Do you think, when you talk about a young person studying martial arts to prepare themselves? For a street fight, it's often much different than a mixed martial art fight. And I know there is a lot of BS in the world of martial art, like self defense stuff that like, but I believe self defense is very important in a way to understand the situation, to understand those situations that might occur, how to deal with it. Because not necessarily that we talk about the technicality, we talk about the tacticality, the tactics, you know, like when I'm talking to you about the element of surprise is important. This is not technique, technique is a punch or techniques that I physically will use to enable my opponent, my aggressor. Tactic is the tactic I'm telling you about is in a street fight, if someone is looking for trouble and I feel the heat rising as the conversation goes, that's the position I'm going to take and I have to be first. I cannot let him go first. So I have to strike first or do something. This is the first thing that generally I have to agree on. After that, of course, there is the knowledge. If you're a professional fighter, you have a huge advantage. Once the fight is started, the war is declared. Now it's everything goes. But generally speaking, the person that will intervene, that will have the first blow or the first, you know, the first punch will have a huge disadvantage. It's like doing a hundred meter race and having a head start, you know, and that you can't prepare for with any martial arts. Yeah. And if I'm a smart guy, I know how to fight. If a guy like an heavyweight champion comes to me or like, like, like, you know, I know, I know what to do to disable him, like boom or here or the neck, you know, like, and if you blind him, what is he going to do? You know what I mean? So, so or a bottle, you know what I mean? So the element of surprise is it's everything. So that's why it's always, always good to be the nice guy and not looking for trouble. Because if you're not looking for trouble, you have the head start, you have the option of having a head start. So what you're saying is being a nice guy is the best form of self defense, maybe a little humor. Yes. And you know, I have learned that I've learned that when I was a kid, I was about maybe seven or six, six years old. We used to play in Montreal, there's a lot of snow, we used to play king of the mountain. Yeah. That's the first combat lesson that I've learned in my life. And I managed somehow, it was a lot of kids, I managed to get on the top of the mountain and another guy came in, come in on top of the mountain and he was angry that before I was there before him. When you play king of the mountain, it was a mountain of snow. You don't strike each other, we just wrestle and push. And I managed to be first. And when he came, he says to me, say, OK, you want to, you want to fight? And I said, yeah, I don't know what he means, like I want to fight, I want to wrestle. I say, yes. He punched me right in the face. Boom. And then I and then I fall on the bottom of the mountain. Then when I fall down, I remember that vision in my life because it's I will remember that for the rest of my life. I'm about to stand up and I see the blood coming out of my nose, I see that the snow is red because my nose is bleeding. Now I remember the element of surprises, everything. My first street fight, I lost it. I got I didn't get knocked out, but I got dropped on the bottom of the snow mountain. And I was like, oh, you got me because I wasn't expecting my hand, I was not expecting a punch. So from there, when I felt the heat of an injury, an argument or something was not right, I always stroke first. I didn't win all my fight because sometimes there were more than one guys on me, you know. But I think it's important to not be the aggressor. So you have the element of surprise and always use that in your favor. That's so brilliant. Let me go from the very practical to the most impractically huge question about the meaning of life. You said that when great depths of unrelenting sorrow are punctuated by great peaks of joy and liberation, the result is delicious. So what do you think is the meaning of this whole journey that we're on this life? What makes life delicious? To me, you know, satisfaction is the M for me. Like I always, if I'm satisfied, that means I have nothing to live for. I'm not talking only about my career, I'm talking about my life. What do you want in your life? You want kids, you want a family, you want to be champion. What do you want in your life? You have like a long term goal, short term goal. In mixed martial arts, I achieve what I needed to achieve. I'm satisfied. I'm no longer the same George St. Pierre than when I was begging for a title shot on my knees. I move on from it. Now I had a chance to go into movies. Now that same insane drive that I had to be the champion in the world, now I put it into acting. Like I'm having a lot of acting class now and luckily for me, the timing was amazing. I got cast for the Falcon and the Winter Soldier that is on Disney Plus channel. It's a huge, huge project to be part of for me because it's like you play basketball, you have a chance to go for the NBA right away. I was very lucky. The timing was just too perfect. And so you need to constantly challenging yourself and having goals to achieve, you know, like that. Keep your brain activated, like keep working. And the proof of that is that you see sometimes some old people, like when they retire, very often sometime you see that they got sick and they die or because they it's either because sometimes we think we we certainly may benefit, we do something good for them by making that work and giving them a break. So in our mind, we're like, oh, he's going to be able to relax. But in their mind, it's not good because they're not busy. They have nothing to live for. Like my dad is used to work all the time and he has always something to do. He's retired now. I myself now call him by force to find him some job. Hey, dad, can you come in my house? Have this thing to repair? I don't know how to do it. So it gives him it gives him a reason not to live on because he has other things to do. But but what I mean is also in life, I think you always don't be afraid to aim high. Don't don't be afraid to fix your objective very high and never be able to reach it. Be afraid of reaching your goals, essentially. I mean, you always have to keep moving it out. You think there's a it's an interesting question because you've been acting in some really exciting things. Do you think there's a dramatic role where it's basically, you know, you go full Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver? Do you think there'll be a full length feature film with George St. Pierre? I liken there is level to this thing. Am I aware that I have to restart as a white belt white belt? And for some people, it could be discouraging. But for me, man, it's great. I love it. I freaking love it. I embrace it because everybody told me like I would never be able to do it and it's fine. But the and also the outcome of a failure in the sport of mixed martial art is much more serious than the outcome of a failure for a movie, for example, for for if you think when you should zag in a fight, you get knocked out if you zig when you should zag and on set. Oh, cut. We'll do it again. And I know that I will be most likely be to chosen for action martial art roles because that's my background. There's this new trend in Hollywood now when they want someone to play an Italian guy, they're going to choose a real Italian person. When they want someone to play a Russian guy, they're going to choose someone who has a real Russian background. Now they want a real martial art fighter. I've done fighting all my life. I just need to improve my acting skill. But when I train in acting, I get myself out of my comfort zone. I'm not playing a role of a martial art guy. I'm playing like romance, comedy, drama. So when I go on set and playing the role of a badass martial art guy, it's it's easier. So like in training for a fight, I always make my preparation harder than the actual task. I would love to see where I don't know if you've seen the wrestler with Mickey Rourke. Oh, yeah. Those types of films. I would love to I would love to you do something like that. If not now, then in 10, 20 years, I could see that that would be amazing. It's levels to the game, right? Yes, it's gradual. And I don't and I'm aware that I don't want to take something on my shoulder that I won't be able to deliver. It's like a fighter wants to go for a title shot right away. It could very well break him, you know, and I don't want to do that because I know I've done some gigs in the past, but I was not focusing on it because I was focusing on competing as a martial art martial artist in competition in MMA. But now I take it very seriously. So I cannot do the same mistake again because I've done some stuff. I've done it for the money and it was good. It was fun to be beat up by Jacque Van Damme, Steven Seagal and everything. But my acting was not on point, you know, at that time. So if I ever every time I'm going to come back from now on, on screen, you need to be sharp because you cannot mess it up. If you mess it up, it's like a loss on your record. You're not taken seriously. So so that's how I see it. And it's very fun because I had a chance to talk to a lot of guys on top of all the class that I'm having. Like a few days ago, I was with Danny Trujo. And I always seek the advice of actors when I when I see some of them that because I really admire how they do, you know, how they project their emotion. And I asked him, Danny Trujo, I said, I said to him, he's an amazing guy, by the way. Very nice guy. And I asked him, I say, how how do you do to be? Because you scared the hell out of me. How do you do to be so scary? Like what is your trick? And he tells me, he's like, George, if you're threatening, if you're threatening someone and you scream at him, I'm going to kill you. It's not as scary if you're smiling and you say, I'm going to kill you like and he says also to me that another advice he gave me is like when you say this, think about you killing him for real, that how you hate him and how you're going to kill him. So the camera will take the emotion out. Don't try physically to do that. That's the mistake I used to do before. I used to physically show that I'm strong and angry and to be mean. So these are just an example of tricks that I learned sometimes when I met an actor. I always try to learn from everybody that I met in my life. It's a difficult journey because then you have to go to some dark places as a person because you really have to imagine imagine some dark things. It's fascinating, actually. I think a lot of the actors, they have sometimes problems because of that, because now I understand why it's like if you work on your bicep, your bicep will grow. Right. It's because it is the stress that you put on it that will make it grow. Right. Emotions are, I believe, are the same way. If you used to dig inside of you down deep to to to to make your negative emotion, depressive emotion comes out, if something bad in your life happened, you will fall into those emotion much more rapidly than someone who does not that every day. You know what I mean? Because it will. It's like a muscle memory. Like if you program yourself to react a certain way, you will reach that point very often. So that's why sometimes you see some some guys that we often blame it on drugs. But I think it's also because of the acting that I used to be so hot on the hot tub and sometimes they go to the down deep so they they they they they the boat extreme, you know. You got to be psychologically tough. And that's life. So I'm so excited to see you challenge yourself in that direction. That's one thing that I'm a little bit afraid. That happened to me. I really hope I'll always be, you know, like a problem, having a problem to control my emotion be too much extreme. I hope it does not happen to me. And if I feel that I'm going towards that, I'm going to, you know, give up on my new objective and find something else to to achieve. But in your personal life, you want to be real with your emotions. You don't want to. It doesn't, you know, just like with biceps, you don't want biceps that are too big. You are real, but you are extreme real. And that's the that's the that's what I think something that could happen to actors sometimes when they go too much into their emotion. Like we talk about like something guys that that that commit commit suicide, perhaps, you know, I don't know. It's because I don't know their real life, but it could be something that they get so much into their character. I didn't understand it at first because I never had acting class. But after a while that you have acting class, now you start to realize that, yeah, I understand why some actor get caught up in their emotion, because that can have an influence on their life. Right. You're on a fascinating journey, George. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you'll be so nice to me, that you'll give me so much respect. Just that that tells everything I need to know about you as a human being with everything you've accomplished. You waste all your time and you're so nice to me just as a fellow human being, man. I have so much respect from so honored and the energy you give me by just even showing up here. I'll carry that forward for a long time to come, George. I love it. Thank you so much for talking to me. Now, thank you, Lex, for having me on the show. You know, I've been looking to talk to you for a long time. For me, talking to a guy like you, it's it's a great learning experience because I always learn. And it's life is fascinating to me. And all the experience that we have in life, you know, it's something that can make us grow. And this experience for me just, you know, make me grow as as well. You know? Plus, we look pretty damn sharp today. So. Man in black, my friend. Man in black. Thanks, George. Nice. Thanks for listening to this conversation with George St. Pierre. And thank you to Allform, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, Theragun, and The Information. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Georges St-Pierre: The Science of Fighting | Lex Fridman Podcast #179

The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri, a historian at UT Austin, whose research interests and writing are on modern American history with an eye towards presidents and in general individuals who wielded power. Quick mention of our sponsors, Element, Monk Pack, Belcampo, Four Sigmatic, and Eight Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that in these conversations, for better or worse, I seek understanding, not activism. I'm not left nor right. I love ideas, not labels. And most fascinating ideas are full of uncertainty, tension, and trade offs. Labels destroy that. I try ideas out, let them breathe for a time, try to challenge, explore, and analyze. But mostly, I trust the intelligence of you, the listener, to think and to make up your own mind, together with me. I will try to have economists and philosophers on from all points on the multidimensional political spectrum, including the extremes. I will try to both have an open mind and to ask difficult questions when needed. I'll make mistakes. Don't shoot this robot at the first sign of failure. I'm still under development. Pre release version 0.1. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Jeremy Suri. You've studied many American presidents throughout history, so who do you think was the greatest president in American history? The greatest American president was Abraham Lincoln. And Tolstoy reflected on this himself, actually, saying that when he was in the caucuses, he asked these peasants in the caucuses who was the greatest man in the world that they had heard of, and they said Abraham Lincoln. And why? Well, because he gave voice to people who had no voice before. He turned politics into an art. This is what Tolstoy recounted, the peasants in the caucuses telling him. Lincoln made politics more than about power. He made it an art. He made it a source of liberation. And those living even far from the United States could see that model, that inspiration from Lincoln. He was a man who had two years of education, yet he mastered the English language, and he used the language to help people imagine a different kind of world. You see, leaders and presidents are at their best when they're doing more than just manipulating institutions and power, when they're helping the people imagine a better world. And he did that as no other president has. And you say he gave voice to those who are voiceless. Who are you talking to about in general? Is this about African Americans, or is this about just the populace in general? Certainly part of it is about slaves, African Americans, and many immigrants, immigrants from all parts of Europe and other areas that have come to the United States. But part of it was just for ordinary American citizens. The Republican Party, for which Lincoln was the first president, was a party created to give voice to poor white men, as well as slaves and others. And Lincoln was a poor white man himself, grew up without slaves and without land, which meant you had almost nothing. What do you think about the trajectory of that man with only two years of education? Is there something to be said about how does one come from nothing and nurture the ideals that kind of make this country great into something where you can actually be a leader of this nation to espouse those ideas, to give the voice to the voiceless? Yes, I think you actually hit the nail on the head. I think what he represented was the opportunity, and that was the word that mattered for him, opportunity that came from the ability to raise yourself up, to work hard, and to be compensated for your hard work. And this is at the core of the Republican Party of the 19th century, which is the core of capitalism. It's not about getting rich. It's about getting compensated for your work. It's about being incentivized to do better work. And Lincoln was constantly striving. One of his closest associates, Herndon, said, he was the little engine of ambition that couldn't stop. He just kept going, taught himself to read, taught himself to be a lawyer. He went through many failed businesses before he even reached that point, many failed love affairs. But he kept trying, he kept working, and what American society offered him, and what he wanted American society to offer everyone else was the opportunity to keep trying to fail and then get up and try again. What do you think was the nature of that ambition? Was there a hunger for power? I think Lincoln had a hunger for success. I think he had a hunger to get out of the poor station he was in. He had a hunger to be someone who had control over his life. Freedom for him did not mean the right to do anything you wanna do, but it meant the right to be secure from being dependent upon someone else. So independence, he writes in his letters when he's very young that he hated being dependent on his father. He grew up without a mother. His father was a struggling farmer, and he would write in his letters that his father treated him like a slave on the farm. Some think his hatred of slavery came from that experience. He didn't ever wanna have to work for someone again. He wanted to be free and independent, and he wanted, again, every American, this is the kind of Jeffersonian dream, to be the owner of themself and the owner of their future. You know, that's a really nice definition of freedom. We often think kind of this very abstract notion of being able to do anything you want, but really, it's ultimately breaking yourself free from the constraints, like the very tight dependence on whether it's the institutions or on your family or the expectations or the community or whatever, being able to be, to realize yourself within the constraints of your own abilities. It's still not true freedom, because true freedom is probably sort of almost like designing a video game character, something like that. I agree, I think that's exactly right. I think freedom is not that I can have any outcome I want. I can't control outcomes. The most powerful, freest person in the world cannot control outcomes, but it means at least I get to make choices. Someone else doesn't make those choices for me. Is there something to be said about Lincoln on the political game front of it, which is he's accomplished some of them? I don't know, but it seems like there was some tricky politics going on. We tend to not think of it in those terms because of the dark aspects of slavery. We tend to think about it in sort of ethical and human terms, but in their time, it was probably as much a game of politics, not just these broad questions of human nature, right? It was a game. So is there something to be said about being a skillful player in the game of politics that you take from Lincoln? Absolutely, and Lincoln never read Karl von Clausewitz, the great 19th century German thinker on strategy and politics, but he embodied the same wisdom, which is that everything is politics. If you want to get anything done, and this includes even relationships, there's a politics to it. What does that mean? It means that you have to persuade, coerce, encourage people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. And Lincoln was a master at that. He was a master at that for two reasons. He had learned through his hard life to read people, to anticipate them, to spend a lot of time listening. One thing I often tell people is the best leaders are the listeners, not the talkers. And then second, Lincoln was very thoughtful and planned every move out. He was thinking three or four moves, maybe five moves down the chessboard, while others were move number one or two. That's fascinating to think about him just listening, just studying. They look at great fighters in this way, like the first few rounds of boxing and mixed martial arts, you're studying the movement of your opponent in order to sort of define the holes. That's a really interesting frame to think about it. Is there, in terms of relationships, where do you think as president or as a politician is the most impact to be had? I've been reading a lot about Hitler recently, and one of the things that I'm more and more starting to wonder, what the hell did he do alone in a room with one on one with people? Because it seems like that's where he was exceptionally effective. When I think about certain leaders, I'm not sure Stalin was this way, I apologize. Been very obsessed with this period of human history. It just seems like certain leaders are extremely effective one on one. A lot of people think of Hitler in Lincoln as a speech maker, as a great charismatic speech maker, but it seems like to me that some of these guys were really effective inside a room. What do you think? What's more important? Your effectiveness to make a hell of a good speech, sort of being in a room with many people, or is it all boiled down to one on one? Well, I think in a sense, it's both. One needs to do both, and most politicians, most leaders are better at one or the other. It's the rare leader who can do both. I will say that if you are going to be a figure who's a president or the leader of a complex organization, not a startup, but a complex organization where you have many different constituencies and many different interests, you have to do the one on one really well, because a lot of what's going to happen is you're going to be meeting with people who represent different groups, right? The leader of the labor unions, the leader of your investing board, et cetera, and you have to be able to persuade them, and it's the intangibles that often matter most. Lincoln's skill, and it's the same that FDR had, is the ability to tell a story. I think Hitler was a little different, but what I've read of Stalin is he was a storyteller too. One on one storyteller? Yeah, that's my understanding is that he, and what Lincoln did, I don't want to compare Lincoln to Stalin, but what Lincoln did is he was not confrontational. He was happy to have an argument if an argument were to be had, but actually what he would try to do is move you through telling a story that got you to think about your position in a different way, to basically disarm you. And Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. Storytelling is a very important skill. It's almost heartbreaking that we don't get to have, or maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it feels like we don't have a lot of information how all of these folks were in private, one on one conversations. Even if we get stories about it, it's like, again, sorry to bring up Hitler, but people have talked about his piercing gaze when they're one on one. There's a feeling like he's just looking through you. I wonder, it makes me wonder, was Lincoln somebody who was a little bit more passive, like who's more, the ego doesn't shine. It's not like an overwhelming thing, or is it more like, again, don't want to bring up controversial figures, but Donald Trump, where it's more menacing, right? There's a more like physically menacing thing, where it's almost like a bullying kind of dynamic. So I wonder, I wish we knew. Because from a psychological perspective, I wonder if there's a thread that connects most great leaders. That's a great question. So I think the best writer on this is Max Weber, right? And he talks about the power of charisma, that the term charisma comes from Weber, right? And Weber's use of it actually to talk about profits. And I think he has a point, right? Leaders who are effective in the way you describe are leaders who feel prophetic, or Weber says they have a kind of magic about them. And I think that can come from different sources. I think that can come from the way someone carries themselves. It can come from the way they use words. So maybe there are different kinds of magic that someone develops. But I think there are two things that seem to be absolutely necessary. First is you have to be someone who sizes up the person on the other side of the table. You cannot be the person who just comes in and reads your brief. And then second, I think it's interactive. And there is a quickness of thought. So you brought up Donald Trump. I don't think Donald Trump is a deep thinker at all, but he's quick. And I think that quickness is part of, it's different from delivering a lecture where it's the depth of your thought. Can you for 45 minutes analyze something? Many people can't do that, but they still might be very effective if they're able to quickly react, size up the person on the other side of the table and react in a way that moves that person in the way they wanna move them. Yeah, and there's also just coupled with the quickness as a kind of instinct about human nature. Sort of asking the question, what does this person worry about? What are the biggest problems? Somebody, what is this, Stephen Schwartzman, I think, said to me, he's this businessman. I think he said like, what I've always tried to do is try to figure out, like ask enough questions to figure out what is the biggest problem in this person's life. Try to get a sense of what is the biggest problem in their life, because that's actually what they care about most. And most people don't care enough to find out. And so he kind of wants to sneak up on that and find that, and then use that to then build closeness in order to then probably, he doesn't put it in those words, but to manipulate the person into whatever, to do whatever the heck they want. And I think part of it is that, and part of the effect that Donald Trump has is how quick he's able to figure that out. You've written a book about how the role and power of the presidency has changed. So how has it changed since Lincoln's time, the evolution of the presidency as a concept, which seems like a fascinating lens through which to look at American history. As a president, we seem to only be talking about the presidents, maybe a general here and there, but it's mostly the story of America is often told through presidents. That's right, that's right. And one of the points I've tried to make in my writing about this and various other activities is we use this word president as if it's something timeless, but the office has changed incredibly. Just from Lincoln's time to the present, which is 150 years, he wouldn't recognize the office today. And George Washington would not have recognized it in Lincoln, just as I think a CEO today would be unrecognizable to a Rockefeller or a Carnegie of 150 years ago. So what are some of the ways in which the office has changed? I'll just point to three, there are a lot. One, presidents now can communicate with the public directly. I mean, we've reached the point now where a president can have direct, almost one on one communication. President can use Twitter if he so chooses to circumvent all media. That was unthinkable. Lincoln, in order to get his message across, often wrote letters to newspapers. And waited for the newspaper for Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune to publish his letter. That's how he communicated with the public. There weren't even many speaking opportunities. So that's a big change, right? We feel the president in our life much more. That's why we talk about him much more. That also creates more of a burden. This is the second point. Presidents are under a microscope. Presidents are under a microscope. You have to be very careful what you do and what you say. And you're judged by a lot of the elements of your behavior that are not policy relevant. In fact, the things we judge most and make most of our decisions on about individuals are often that. And then third, the power the president has. It's inhuman, actually. And this is one of my critiques of how the office has changed. This one person has power on a scale that's I think dangerous in a democracy. And certainly something the founders 220 years ago would have had trouble conceiving. Presidents now have the ability to deliver force across the world to literally assassinate people with a remarkable accuracy. And that's an enormous power that presidents have. So your sense, this is not to get conspiratorial, but do you think a president currently has the power to initiate the assassination of somebody, of a political enemy or a terrorist leader or that kind of thing to frame that person in a way where assassination is something that he alone or she alone could decide to do? I think it happens all the time and it's not to be conspiratorial. This is how we fought terrorism by targeting individuals. Now you might say these were not elected leaders of state, but these were individuals with a large following. I mean, the killing of Osama Bin Laden was an assassination operation. And we've taken out very successfully many leaders of terrorist organizations and we do it every day. You're saying that back in Lincoln's time or George Washington's time, there was more of a balance of power? Like a president could not initiate this kind of assassination? Correct, I think presidents did not have the same kind of military or economic power. We could talk about how a president can influence a market by saying something about where money is gonna go or singling out a company or critiquing a company in one way or another. They didn't have that kind of power. Now, much of the power that a Lincoln or a Washington had was the power to mobilize people to then make their own decisions. At the start of the Civil War, Lincoln doesn't even have the power to bring people into the army. He has to go to the governors and ask the governors to provide soldiers. So the governor of Wisconsin, the governor of Massachusetts. Could you imagine that today? So, but yeah, so they use speeches and words to mobilize versus direct action in closed door environments, initiating wars, for example. Correct. It's difficult to think about, if we look at Barack Obama, for example, if you're listening to this and you're on the left or the right, please do not make this political. In fact, if you're a political person and you're getting angry at the mention of the word Obama or Donald Trump, please turn off this podcast that I've just described. We're not gonna get very far. I hope we maintain a political discussion about even the modern presidents that view through the lens of history. I think there's a lot to be learned about the office and about human nature. Some people criticize Barack Obama for sort of expanding the military industrial complex, engaging in more and more wars, as opposed to sort of the initial rhetoric was such that we would pull back from sort of be more skeptical in our decisions to wage wars. So from the lens of the power of the presidency, as the modern presidency, the fact that we continued the war in Afghanistan and different engagements in military conflicts, do you think Barack Obama could have stopped that? Do you put the responsibility on that expansion on him because of the implied power that the presidency has? Or is this power just sits there and if a president chooses to take it, they do, and if they don't, they don't? Almost like you don't want to take on the responsibility because of the burden of that responsibility. So a lot of my research is about this exact question, not just with Obama. And my conclusion, and I think the research is pretty clear on this, is that structure has a lot more effect on us than we like to admit, which is to say that the circumstances, the institutions around us drive our behavior more than we like to think. So Barack Obama, I'm quite certain, came into the office of the presidency committed to actually reducing the use of military force overseas and reducing presidential war making power. As a trained lawyer, he had a moral position on this actually, and he tried. And he did withdraw American forces from Iraq and was of course criticized by many people for doing that. But at the same time, he had some real problems in the world to deal with, terrorism being one of them. And the tools he has are very much biased towards the use of military force. It's much harder as president to go and get Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to agree with you. It's much easier to send these wonderful toys we have and these incredible soldiers we have over there. And when you have Congress, which is always against you, it's also easier to use the military because you send them there. And even if members of Congress from your own party or the other are angry at you, they'll still fund the soldiers. No member of Congress wants to vote to starve our soldiers overseas. So they'll stop your budget, they'll even threaten not to pay the debt, but they'll still fund your soldiers. And so you are pushed by the circumstances you're in to do this, and it's very hard to resist. So that's, I think the criticism of Obama, the fair one would be that he didn't resist the pressures that were there, but he did not make those pressures. So is there something about putting the responsibility on the president to form the structure around him locally such that he can make the policy that matches the rhetoric? So what I'm talking to is hiring. So basically just everybody you work with, you have power as a president to fire and hire or to basically schedule meetings in such a way that can control your decision making. So I imagine it's very difficult to get out of Afghanistan or Iraq when most of your scheduled meetings are with generals or something like that. But if you reorganize the schedule and you reorganize who you have like late night talks with, you potentially have a huge ripple effect on the policy. I think that's right. I think who has access to the president is absolutely crucial. And presidents have to be more strategic about that. They tend to be reacting to crises because every day has a crisis. And if you're reacting to a crisis, you're not controlling access because the crisis is driving you. So that's one element of it. But I also think, and this is the moment we're in right now, presidents have to invest in reforming the system, the system of decision making. Should we have a national security council that looks the way it does? Should our military be structured the way it is? The founding fathers wanted a military that was divided. They did not want a unified department of defense. That was only created after World War II. Should we have as large a military as we have? Should we be in as many places? There are some fundamental structural reforms we have to undertake. And part of that is who you appoint, but part of that is also how you change the institutions. The genius of the American system is that it's a dynamic system. It can be adjusted. It has been adjusted over time. That's the heroic story. The frustrating story is it often takes us a long time to make those adjustments until we go into such bad circumstances that we have no choice. So in the battle of power of the office of the president versus the United States military, the department of defense, do you have a sense that the president has more power ultimately? So to decrease the size of the department of defense, to withdraw from any wars, or increase the amount of wars, is the president, you're kind of implying the president has a lot of power here in this scale. Yes, the president has a lot of power and we are fortunate and it was just proven in the last few years that our military, uniquely among many countries with large militaries, is very deferential to the president and very restricted in its ability to challenge the president. So that's a strength of our system. But the way you reform the military is not with individual decisions. It's by having a strategic plan that reexamines what role it plays. So it's not just about whether we're in Afghanistan or not. The question we have to ask is, when we look at our toolbox of what we can do in our foreign policy, are there other tools we should build up and therefore some tools in the military we should reduce? That's the broader strategic question. Let me ask you the most absurd question of all that you did not sign up for, but I've been hanging out with a guy named Joe Rogan recently, so it's very important for me and him to figure this out. If a president, because you said, you implied the president's very powerful, if a president shows up and the US government is in fact in possession of aliens, alien spacecraft, do you think the president will be told? A more responsible adult historian question version of that is, is there some things that the machine of government keeps secret from the president? Or is the president ultimately at the very center? So if you map out the set of information and power, you have CIA, you have all these organizations that do the machinery of government, not just the passing of bills, but gaining information, homeland security, actually engaging in wars, all those kinds of things. How central is the president? Would the president know some of the shady things that are going on? Aliens or some kind of cybersecurity stuff against Russia and China, all those kinds of things, is the president really made aware? And if so, how nervous does that make you? So presidents like leaders of any complex organizations don't know everything that goes on. They have to ask the right questions. This is Machiavelli. Most important thing a leader has to do is ask the right questions. You don't have to know the answers. That's why you hire smart people, but you have to ask the right questions. So if the president asks the US government, those who are responsible for the aliens or responsible for the cyber warfare against Russia, they will answer honestly, they will have to, but they will not volunteer that information in all cases. So the best way a president can operate is to have people around him or her who are not the traditional policymakers, this is where I think academic experts are important, suggesting questions to ask to therefore try to get the information. It makes me nervous because I think human nature is such that the academics, the experts, everybody is almost afraid to ask the questions for which the answers might be burdensome. Yes. And so that's right. And you can get into a lot of trouble not asking, it's the old elephant in the room. Correct, correct. This is exactly right. And too often mediocre leaders and those who try to protect them try to shield themselves. They don't want to know certain things. So this is part of what happened with the use of torture by the United States, which is a war crime during the war on terror. President Bush at times intentionally did not ask and people around him prevented him from asking or discouraged him from asking questions he should have asked to know about what was going on. And that's how we ended up where we did. You could say the same thing about Reagan and Iran Contra. I wonder what it takes to be the kind of leader that steps in and asks some difficult questions. So aliens is one, UFO spacecraft, right? Another one, yeah, torture is another one. The CIA, how much information is being collected about Americans? I can see as a president being very uncomfortable asking that question. Because if the answer is a lot of information is being collected by Americans, then you have to be the guy who lives with that information. For the rest of your life, you have to walk around. You're probably not going to reform that system. It's very difficult. You probably have to be very picky about which things you reform. You don't have much time. It takes a lot of sort of effort to restructure things. But you nevertheless would have to be basically lying to yourself, to others around you about the unethical things. Depends of course what your ethical system is. I wonder what it takes to ask those hard questions. I wonder if how few of us can be great leaders like that. And I wonder if our political system, the electoral system is such that makes it likely that such leaders will come to power. It's hard and you can't ask all the right questions and there is a legal hazard if you know things at certain times. But I think you can, back to your point on hiring, you can hire people who will do that in their domains. And then you have to trust that when they think it's something that's a question you need to ask, they'll pass that on to you. This is why it's not a good idea to have loyalists because loyalists will shield you from things. It's a good idea to have people of integrity who you can rely on and who you think will ask those right questions and then pass that down through their organization. What's inspiring to you, what's insightful to you about several of the presidencies throughout the recent decades? Is there somebody that stands out to you that's interesting and sort of in your study of how the office has changed? Well, Bill Clinton is one of the most fascinating figures. Why can't I, I apologize. Bill Clinton just puts a smile on my face every time somebody mentions him at this point. I don't know why. I guess it's charisma, I suppose. Well, and he's a unique individual, but he fascinates me because he's a figure of such enormous talent and enormous appetite and such little self control and such extremes. And I think it's not just that he tells us something about the presidency, he tells us something about our society. American society, this is not new to our time, is filled with enormous reservoirs of talent and creativity. And those have a bright and a dark side. And you see both with Bill Clinton. In some ways, he's the mirror of the best and worst of our society. And maybe that's really what presidents are in the end. They're mirrors of our world that we get the government we deserve, we get the leaders we deserve. I wish we embraced that a little bit more. A lot of people criticize Donald Trump for certain human qualities that he has. A lot of people criticize Bill Clinton for certain human qualities. I wish we kind of embraced the chaos of that. Because he does, you're right, in some sense represent, I mean, he doesn't represent the greatest ideal of America, but the flawed aspect of human nature is what he represents. And that's the beautiful thing about America, the diversity of this land with the mix of it, the corruption within capitalism, the beauty of capitalism, the innovation, all those kinds of things, the people that start from nothing and create everything, the Elon Musk's of the world and the Bill Gates and so on. But also the people, Bernie Mados and all, as the Me Too movement has showed the multitude of creeps that apparently permeate the entirety of our system. So I don't know, there is something, there is some sense in which we put our president on a pedestal, which actually creates a fake human being. Like the standard we hold them to is forcing the fake politicians to come to power versus the authentic one, which is in some sense, the promise of Donald Trump is like, it's a definitive statement of authenticity. It's like, this is the opposite of the fake politician. It's whatever else you wanna say about him is there's the chaos that's unlike anything else that came before. One thing, and this is a particular maybe preference and quirk of mine, but I really admire, maybe I'm romanticizing the past again, but I romanticize the presidents that were students of history. They were almost like king philosophers, that made speeches that reverberated through decades after. Using the words of those presidents, whether written by them or not, we tell the story of America. And I don't know, even Obama has been an exceptionally good, as far as I know, I apologize if I'm incorrect on this, but from everything I've seen, he was a very deep scholar of history. And I really admire that. Is that through the history of the office of the presidency, is that just your own preference or is that supposed to come with the job? Are you supposed to be a student of history? I think, I mean, I'm obviously biased as a historian, but I do think it comes with the job. Every president I've studied had a serious interest in history. Now, how they pursued that interest would vary. Obama was more bookish, more academic. So was George W. Bush in strange ways. George H. W. Bush was less so, but George H. W. Bush loved to talk to people. So he would talk to historians, right? Ronald Reagan loved movies and movies were an insight into history for him. He likes to watch movies about another time. It wasn't always the best of history, but he was interested in what is a fundamental historical question. How has our society developed? How has it grown and changed over time? And how has that change affected who we are today? That's the historical question. It's really interesting to me. I do a lot of work with business leaders and others too. You reach a certain point in any career and you become a historian because you realize that the formulas and the technical knowledge that you've gained got you to where you are. But now your decisions are about human nature. Your decisions are about social change and they can't be answered technically. They can only be answered by studying human beings. And what is history? It's studying the laboratory of human behavior. To sort of play devil's advocate, I kind of, especially in the engineering scientific domains, I often see history holding us back. Sort of the way things were done in the past are not necessarily going to hold the key to what will progress us into the future. Of course, with history in studying human nature, it does seem like humans are just the same. She has like the same problems over and over. So in that sense, it feels like history has all the lessons, whether we're talking about wars, whether we're talking about corruption, whether we're talking about economics. I think there's a difference between history and antiquarianism. So antiquarianism, which some people call history, is the desire to go back to the past or stay stuck in the past. So antiquarianism is the desire to have the desk that Abraham Lincoln sat at. Wouldn't it be cool to sit at his desk? I'd love to have that desk. If I had a few extra million dollars, I'd acquire it. So in a way, that's antiquarianism. That's trying to capture and hold on to the past. The past is a talisman for antiquarians. What history is, is the study of change over time. That's the real definition of historical study and historical thinking. And so what we're studying is change. And so a historian should never say, we have to do things the way we've done them in the past. The historian should say, we can't do them the way we did them in the past. We can't step in the same river twice. Every podcast of yours is different from the last one. You plan it out and then it goes in its own direction. And what are we studying then in history? We're studying the patterns of change and we're recognizing we're part of a pattern. So what I would say to the historian who's trying to hold the engineer back, I'd say, no, don't tell that engineer not to do this. Tell them to understand how this fits into the relationship with other engineering products and other activities from the past that still affect us today. For example, any product you produce is gonna be used by human beings who have prejudices. It's gonna go into an unequal society. Don't assume it's gonna go into an equal society. Don't assume that when you create a social media site that people are going to use it fairly and put only truthful things on it. We shouldn't be surprised. That's where human nature comes in. But it's not trying to hold onto the past. It's trying to use the knowledge from the past to better inform the changes today. I have to ask you about George Washington. Maybe you have some insights. It seems like he's such a fascinating figure in the context of the study of power. Because I kind of intuitively have come to internalize the belief that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes. And sort of like basically in thinking that we cannot trust any one individual. I can't trust myself with power. Nobody can trust anybody with power. We have to create institutions and structures that prevent us from ever being able to amass absolute power. And yet, here's a guy, George Washington, who seems to, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to give away, relinquish power. It feels like George Washington did it almost like the purest of ways, which is believes in this country, but he just believes he's not the person to carry it forward. What do you make of that? What kind of human does it take to give away that power? Is there some hopeful message we can carry through to the future to elect leaders like that or to find friends to hang out with who are like that? Like what is that? How do you explain that? So it's actually the most important thing about George Washington. It's the right thing to bring up. What the historian Gary Wills wrote years ago, I'm gonna quote him, was that Washington recognized that sometimes you get more power by giving it up than by trying to hold on to every last piece of it. Washington gives up power at the end of the revolution. He's successfully carried through the revolutionary war aims. He's commander of the revolutionary forces and he gives up his command. And then of course he's president and after two terms, he gives up his command. What is he doing? He's an ambitious person, but he's recognizing that the most important currency he has for power is his respected status as a disinterested statesman. That's really what his power is. And how does he further that power? By showing that he doesn't crave power. So he was self aware. Very self aware of this and very sophisticated in understanding this. And I think there are many other leaders who recognize that. You can look to, in some ways, the story of many of our presidents who even before there is a two term limit in the constitution, leave after two terms. They do that because they recognize that their power is the power of being a statesman, not of being a president. I still wonder what kind of man it takes, what kind of human being it takes to do that. Because I've been studying Vladimir Putin quite a bit. Right. And he's still, I believe he still has popular support that that's not fully manipulated. Because I know a lot of people in Russia and actually almost the entirety of my family in Russia are big supporters of Putin. And everybody I talk to sort of, that's not just like on social media. Right. Like the people that live in Russia seem to support him. It feels like this will be in a George Washington way. Now will be the time that Putin, just like Yeltsin, could relinquish power. And thereby, in the eyes of Russians, become, in like the long arc of history, be viewed as a great leader. You look at the economic growth of Russia, you look at the rescue from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia finding its footing, and then relinquishing power in a way that perhaps, if Russia succeeds, forms a truly democratic state. This would be how Putin can become one of the great leaders in Russian history, at least in the context of the 21st century. I think there are two reasons why this is really hard for Putin and for others. One is the trappings of power are very seductive, as you said before, they're corrupting. This is a real problem, right? If it's in the business context, you don't wanna give up that private jet. If it's in Putin's context, it's billions of dollars every year that he's able to take for himself or give to his friends. It's not that he'll be poor if he leaves, he'll still be rich, and he has billions of dollars stored away, but he won't be able to get the new billions. And so that's part of it, the trappings of power are a big deal. And then second, in Putin's case in particular, he has to be worried about what happens next. Will he be tried? Will someone try to come and arrest him? Will someone try to come and assassinate him? Washington recognized that leaving early limited the corruption and limited the enemies that you made. And so it was a strategic choice. Putin is at this point bringing power too long. And this comes back to your core insight. It's a cliche, but it's true, power corrupts. No one should have power for too long. This was one of the best insights the founders of the United States had, that power was to be held for a short time as a fiduciary responsibility, not as something you owned, right? This is the problem with monarchy, with aristocracy, that you own power, right? We don't own power, we're holding it in trust. Yeah, there's some probably like very specific psychological study of how many years it takes for you to forget that you can't own power. That's right. That could be a much more rigorous discussion about the length of terms that are appropriate, but really there's an amount, like Stalin had power for 30 years, like Putin is pushing those that many years already. There's a certain point where you forget the person you were before you took the power. That's right. You forget to be humble in the face of this responsibility and then there's no going back. That's right. And that's how dictators are born. That's how the evil like authoritarians become evil or let's not use the word evil, but counterproductive, destructive to the ideal that they initially probably came to office with. That's right. That's right. One of the core historical insights is people should move jobs. And this applies for CEOs probably. Absolutely. They can go become CEO somewhere else, but don't stay CEO one place too long. It's a problem with startups, right? The founder, you can have a brilliant founder and that founder doesn't want to let go. Yeah. Right, it's the same issue. At the same time, I mean, this is where Elon Musk and a few others like Larry Page and Sergey Brin that stayed for quite a long time and they actually were the beacon. They, on their shoulders, carried the dream of the company where everybody else doubted. But that seems to be the exception versus the rule. Well, and even Sergey, for example, has stepped back. He plays less of a day to day role and is not running Google in the way he did. But the interesting thing is he stepped back in a quite tragic way from what I've seen, which is, I think Google's mission, initial mission of making the world's information accessible to everybody is one of the most beautiful missions of any company in the history of the world. I think it's what Google has done with the search engine and other efforts that are similar, like scanning a lot of books, it's just incredible. It's similar to Wikipedia. But what he said was that it's not the same company anymore. And I know maybe I'm reading too much into it because it's more maybe practically saying just the size of the company is much larger, the kind of leadership that's required. But at the same time, they changed the model from don't be evil to it's becoming corporatized and all those kinds of things and it's sad. There also are cycles, right? History is about cycles, right? There are cycles to life, there are cycles to organizations. It's sad. I mean, it's sad Steve Jobs leaving Apple by passing away, sad. You know, what the future of SpaceX and Tesla looks like without Elon Musk is quite sad. It's very possible that those companies become something very different. They become something much more like corporate and stale, yeah. So maybe most of the progress is made through cycles. Maybe a new Elon Musk comes along and all those kinds of things. But it does seem that the American system of government has built into it the cycling that makes it effective and it makes it last very long. It lasts a very long time, right? It continues to excel and lead the world. Sure, sure. And let's hope it continues to. No, I mean, we're into a third century and democracies on this scale rarely last that long. So that's a point of pride, but it also means we need to be attentive to keep our house in order because it's not inevitable that this experiment continues. Now it's important to meditate on that actually. You've mentioned that FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of the great leaders in American history. Why is that? Franklin Roosevelt had the power of empathy. No leader that I've ever studied or been around or spent any time reading about was able to connect with people who were so different from himself as Franklin Roosevelt. He came from the most elite family. He never had to work for a paycheck in his life. When he was president, he was still collecting an allowance from his mom. I mean, you couldn't be more elite than Franklin Roosevelt, but he authentically connected. This was not propaganda. He was able to feel the pain and understand the lives of some of the most destitute Americans in other parts of the country. It's interesting. So through one of the hardest economic periods of American history, he was able to feel the pain. He was able to, the number of immigrants I read oral histories from or who have written themselves, Saul Bellow is one example, the great novelist who talk about how as immigrants to the US, Saul Bellow was a Russian Jewish immigrant. He said, growing up in Chicago, politicians were all trying to steal from us. I didn't think any of them cared until I heard FDR. And I knew he spoke to me. And I think part of it was FDR really tried to understand people. That's the first thing, he was humble enough to try to do that. But second, he had a talent for that. And it's hard to know exactly what it was, but he had a talent for putting himself, imagining himself in someone else's shoes. What stands out to you as important? I mean, so he was, he went through the great depression. The, so the new deal, which some people criticize, some people see, I mean, it's funny to look at some of these policies and their long ripple effects. But at the time, it's some of the most innovative policies in the history of America. You could say they're ultimately not good for America, but they're nevertheless hold within them very rich and important lessons. But the new deal, obviously World War II, that entire process, is there something that stands out to you as a particularly great moment that made FDR? Yes, I think what FDR does from his first 100 days in office forward, and this begins with his fireside chats, is he helps Americans to see that they're all in it together. And that's by creating hope and creating a sense of common suffering and common mission. It's not offering simple solutions. One of the lessons from FDR is, if you wanna bring people together, don't offer a simple solution. Because as soon as I offer a simple solution, I have people for it and against it. Don't do that. Explain the problem, frame the problem, and then give people a mission. So Roosevelt's first radio address in March of 1933, the banking system is collapsing. And we can't imagine it, right? Banks were closing and you couldn't get your money out. Your life savings would be lost, right? We can't imagine that happening in our world today. He comes on the radio, he takes five minutes to explain how banking works. Most people didn't understand how banking worked, right? They don't actually hold your money in a vault. They lend it out to someone else. And then he explains why if you go and take your money out of the bank and put it in your mattress, you're making it worse for yourself. He explains this. And then he says, I don't have a solution, but here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna send in government officers to examine the banks and show you the books on the banks. And I want you to help me by going and putting your money back in the bank. We're all gonna do this together. No simple solution, no ideological statement, but a sense of common mission. Let's go out and do this together. When you read as I have so many of these oral histories and memoirs for people who lived through that period, many of them disagreed with some of his policies. Many of them thought he was too close to Jews and they didn't like the fact he had a woman in his cabinet and all that, but they felt he cared. And they felt they were part of some common mission. And when they talk about their experience fighting in World War II, whether in Europe or Asia, it was that that prepared them. They knew what it meant to be an American when they were over there. So that to me is a model of leadership. And I think that's as possible today as it's ever been. So you think it's possible, like I was going to ask this, again, it may be a very shallow view, but it feels like this country is more divided than it has been in recent history. Perhaps the social media and all those kinds of things are merely revealing the division as opposed to creating the division. But is it possible to have a leader that unites in the same way that FDR did without, well, we're living through a pandemic. This is already, so like, I was going to say without suffering, but this is economic suffering. A huge number of people have lost their job. So is it possible to have, is there one a hunger? Is there a possibility to have an FDR style leader who unites? Yes, I think that is what President Biden is trying. I'm not saying he'll succeed, but I think that's what he's trying to do. The way you do this is you do not allow yourself to be captured by your opponents in Congress or somewhere else. FDR had a lot of opponents in Congress. He had a lot of opponents in politics, governors and others who didn't like him. Herbert Hoover was still around and still accusing FDR of being a conspiratist and all these other things. So you don't allow yourself to be captured by the leaders of the other side. You go over their heads to the people. And so today, the way to do this is to explain to people and empathize with the suffering and dislocation and difficulties they're dealing with and show that you're trying to help them. Not an easy solution, not a simple statement, but here are some things we can all do together. That's why I think infrastructure makes a lot of sense. It's what FDR invested into, right? FDR built Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam turned the lights on for young Lyndon Johnson who grew up outside of Austin, right? FDR was the one who invested in road construction that was then continued by Dwight Eisenhower, by a Republican with the interstate highway system, right? FDR invested through the WPA in building thousands of schools in our country, planting trees. That's the kind of work that can bring people together. You don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican to say, you know what, we'd be a lot better off in my community if we had better infrastructure today. I wanna be a part of that. Oh, well, maybe I can get a job doing that. Maybe my company can benefit from that. You bring people together and that way it becomes a common mission, even if we have different ideological positions. Yeah, it's funny. When I first heard Joe Biden, many years ago, I think he ran for president against Obama. That's correct. Before I heard him speak, I really liked him. But once I heard him speak, I started liking him less and less. And it speaks to something interesting, where it's hard to put into words why you connect with people. The empathy that you mentioned in FDR, you have these bad, pardon the French, motherfuckers like Teddy Roosevelt that connect with you. There's something just powerful. And with Joe Biden, I wanna really like him. And there's something not quite there where it feels like he doesn't quite know my pain, even though he, on paper, is exactly, he knows the pain of the people and there's something not connecting. And it's hard to explain. It's hard to put into words. And it makes me not, as an engineer and scientist, it makes me not feel good about presidencies because it makes me feel like it's more art than science. It is an art. And I think it's exactly an art for the reasons you laid out, it's aesthetic. It's about feeling, it's about emotion, all the things that we can't engineer. We've tried for centuries to engineer emotion. We're never gonna do it. Don't try it. I'm a parent of teenagers. Don't even try to explain emotion. But you hit on the key point and the key challenge for Biden. He's gotta find the right words. It's not finding the words to bullshit people. It's finding the words to help express. We've all felt empowered and felt good. When someone uses words that put into words what we're feeling, that's what he needs. That's the job of a leader. And there's certain words, I haven't heard many politicians use those words, but there's certain words that make you forget that you're for immigration or against immigration. Make you forget whether you're for wars and against wars. Make you forget about the bickering and somehow inspire you, elevate you to believe in the greatness that this country could be. Yes. In that same way, the reason I moved to Austin, it's funny to say, I just heard words from people, from friends, where they're excited by the possibility of the future here. I wasn't thinking like, what's the right thing to do? What's the strategic, cause I wanna launch a business. There's a lot of arguments for San Francisco or maybe staying in Boston in my case, but there's this excitement that was beyond reason. That was emotional. Yes, yes. And that's what it seems like. That's what builds, that's what great leaders do, but that's what builds countries. That's what builds great businesses. That's right. And it's what people say about Austin, for example, all the time. A talented people who come here like yourself. And here's the interesting thing. No one person creates that. The words emerge. And part of what FDR understood, you've got to find the words out there and use them. You don't have to be the creator of them. Just as the great painter doesn't invent the painting, they're taking things from others. As a small aside, is there something you could say about FDR and Hitler? I constantly tried to think, can this person, can this moment in history have been circumvented, prevented? Can Hitler have been stopped? Can some of the atrocities from my own family that my grandparents had to live through the starvation in the Soviet Union, so the thing that people don't often talk about is the atrocities committed by Stalin and his own people. It feels like here's this great leader, FDR, that had the chance to have an impact on the world that he already probably had a great positive impact, but had a chance to stop maybe World War II or stop some of the evils. When you look at how weak Hitler was from much of the 30s relative to militarily, relative to everything else, how many people could have done a lot to stop him? And FDR in particular didn't. He tried to play, not pacify, but basically do diplomacy and let Germany do Germany, let Europe do Europe, and focus on America. Is there something you would, would you hold his feet to the fire on this? Or is it very difficult from the perspective of FDR to have known what was coming? I think FDR had a sense of what was coming, not quite the enormity of what Hitler was doing and not quite the enormity of what the Holocaust became. I also lost relatives in the Holocaust. And part of that was beyond the imagination of human beings. But it's clear in his papers that as early as 1934, people he respected, who he knew well, told him that Hitler was very dangerous. They also thought Hitler was crazy, that he was a lunatic. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was a friend of Roosevelt's, who was actually the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, had a meeting with Hitler in 1934. I remember reading the account of this. And he basically said to FDR, this man is gonna cause a war. He's gonna cause a lot of damage. Again, they didn't know quite the scale. So they saw this coming. They saw this coming. FDR had two problems. First, he had an American public that was deeply isolationist. The opposite of the problem in a sense that we were talking about before. If we're an over militarized society, now we were a deeply isolationist society in the 1930s. The depression reinforced that. FDR actually had to break the law in the late 30s to support the allies. So it was very hard to move the country in that direction, especially when he had this program at home, the New Deal, that he didn't wanna jeopardize by alienating an isolationist public. That was the reality. We talked about political manipulation. He had to be conscious of that. He had to know his audience. And second, there were no allies willing to invest in this either. The British were as committed to appeasement, as you know. You're obviously very knowledgeable about this. The French were as well. It was very hard. The Russian government, the Soviet government was cooperating to remilitarize Germany. So there weren't a lot of allies out there either. I think if there's a criticism to be made of FDR, it's that once we're in the war, he didn't do enough to stop, in particular, the killing of Jews. And there are a number of historians, myself included, who have written about this, and it's an endless debate. What should he have done? There's no doubt by 1944, the United States had air superiority and could have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz and other camps, and that would have saved as many as a million Jews. That's a lot of people who could have been saved. Why didn't FDR insist on that? In part, because he wanted to use every resource possible to win the war. He did not want to be accused of fighting the war for Jews. But I think it's also fair to say that he probably cared less about Jews and East Europeans than he did about others, those of his own Dutch ancestry and from Western Europe. And so, even their race comes in, is also the explanation for the internment of Japanese in the United States, which is a horrible war crime committed by this heroic president. 120,000 Japanese American citizens lost their freedom unnecessarily. So, he had his limitations. And I think he could have done more during the war to save many more lives. And I wish he had. And there's something to be said about empathy that you spoke that FDR had empathy. But us, for example, now there's many people who describe the atrocities happening in China. And there's a bunch of places across the world where there's atrocities happening now. And we care. We do not uniformly apply how much we care for the suffering of others. That's correct. Depending on the group. That's correct. And in some sense, the role of the president is to rise above that natural human inclination to protect, to do the us versus them, to protect the inner circle and empathize with the suffering of those that are not like you. That's correct. I agree with that. Yeah. Speaking of war, you wrote a book on Henry Kissinger. It's not a great transition, but it made sense in my head. Who was Henry Kissinger as a man and as a historical figure? So Henry Kissinger to me is one of the most fascinating figures in history, because he comes to the United States as a German Jewish immigrant at age 15, speaking no English. And within a few years, he's a major figure influencing US foreign policy at the height of US power. But while he's doing that, he's never elected to office and he's constantly reviled by people, including people who are anti Semitic because he's Jewish, but at the same time also his exoticism makes him more attractive to people. So someone like Nelson Rockefeller wants Kissinger around. He's one of Kissinger's first patrons because he wants a really smart Jew. And Kissinger is gonna be that smart Jew I call Kissinger a policy Jew. There were these court Jews in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. Every king wanted the Jew to manage his banking. And in a sense in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, many presidents want a Jew to manage their international affairs. And what does that really mean? It's not just about being Jewish, it's the internationalism, it's the cosmopolitanism. And that's one of the things I was fascinated with with Kissinger. Someone like Kissinger is unthinkable as a powerful figure in the United States 30 or 40 years earlier, because the United States is run by WASD. It's run by white elites who come from a certain background. Kissinger represents a moment when American society opens up not to everyone, but opens up to these cosmopolitan figures who have language skills, historical knowledge, networks that can be used for the US government when after World War II, we have to rebuild Europe, when we have to negotiate with the Soviet Union, when we need the kinds of knowledge we didn't have before. And Harvard where he gets his education late, he started at City College actually, but Harvard where he gets his education late is at the center of what's happening at all these major universities, at Harvard, at Yale, at Stanford, at the University of Texas, everywhere, where they're growing in their international affairs, bringing in the kinds of people who never would be at the university before, training them and then enlisting them in Cold War activities. And so Kissinger is a representative of that phenomenon. I became interested in him because I think he's a bellwether. He shows how power has changed in the United States. So he enters this whole world of politics, what, post World War II in the 50s? Yes, so he actually, in the 40s even, it's an extraordinary story. He comes to the United States in 1938, just before Kristallnacht, his family leaves. He actually grew up right outside of Nuremberg. They leave right before Kristallnacht in fall of 38, come to New York. He originally works in a brush factory, cleaning brushes, goes to a public high school. And in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, he joins the military. And he's very quickly in the military, first of all, given citizenship, which he didn't have before. He's sent for the first time outside of a kosher home. He had been in a kosher home his entire life. He's sent to South Carolina to eat ham for Uncle Sam. And then he is, and this is extraordinary, at the age of 20, barely speaking English, he is sent back to Germany with the US Army in an elite counterintelligence role, why? Because they need German speakers. He came when he was 15, so he actually understands the society. They need people who have that cultural knowledge. And because he's Jewish, they can trust that he'll be anti Nazi. And there's a whole group of these figures. He's one of many. And so he's in an elite circle. He's discriminated against in New York. When he goes to Harvard after that, he can only live in a Jewish only dorm. But at the same time, he's in an elite policy role in counterintelligence. He forms a network there that stays with him the rest of his career. There's a gentleman named Fritz Kramer, who becomes a sponsor of his in the emerging Pentagon Defense Department world. And as early as the early 1950s, he sent them to Korea to comment on affairs in Korea. He becomes both an intellectual recognized for his connections, but also someone who policymakers wanna talk about. His book on nuclear weapons, when it's written, is given to President Eisenhower to read because they say this is someone writing interesting things. You should read what he says. There's a certain aspect to him that's kind of like Forrest Gump. He seems to continuously be the right person at the right time in the right place. That's right. Somehow finding him in this. I don't wanna, you know, you can only get lucky so many times because he continues to get lucky in terms of being at the right place in history for many decades, until today. Yeah, well, he has a knack for that. I spent a lot of time talking with him. And what comes through very quickly is that he has an eye for power. It's, I think, unhealthy. He's obsessed with power. Can you explain like an observer of power or does he want power himself? Yes, both of those things. Both of those. And I think I explained this in the book. He doesn't agree with what I'm gonna say now, but I think I'm right and I think he's right. It's very hard to analyze yourself, right? I think he develops an obsession with gaining power because he sees what happens when you have no power. He experiences the trauma. His father is a very respected Gymnasium Lehrer in Germany. Even though he's Jewish, he's actually the teacher of German classics to the German kids. That's great. And he's forced to flee and he becomes nothing. His father never really makes a way for himself in the United States. He becomes a postal delivery person, which is nothing wrong with that, but for someone who's a respected teacher in Germany, and Gymnasium Lehrer are like professors there, right? To then be in this position. His mother has to open a catering business when they come to New York. It's a typical immigrant story, but he sees the trauma. His grandparents are killed by the Nazis. So he sees the trauma and he realizes how perilous it is to be without power. And you're saying he does not want to acknowledge the effect of that? It's hard. It's hard. I mean, most of us, if we've had trauma, it's believable that it's traumatic because you don't talk about it. I have a friend who interviews combat veterans and he says, as soon as someone freely wants to tell me about their combat trauma, I suspect that they're not telling me the truth. If it's traumatic, it's hard to talk about. Yeah, sometimes I wonder how much from my own life, everything that I've ever done is just the result of the complicated relationship with my father. I tend to, I had a really difficult time. I did a podcast conversation with him. I saw it actually. Yeah, it's great. It's great. It was, I was thinking I could never do that with my father. But I remember as I was doing it, and for months after I regretted doing it, I just kept regretting it. And the fact that I was regretting it spoke to the fact that I'm running away from some truths that are back there somewhere. And that's perhaps what Kissinger is as well. But is there, I mean, he's done, he's been a part of so many interesting moments of American history, of world history, from the Cold War, Vietnam War, until today. What stands out to you as a particularly important moment in his career that made who he is? Well, I think what made his career in many ways was his experience in the 1950s, building a network, a network of people across the world who were rising leaders from unique positions. He ran what he called the International Seminar at Harvard, which was actually a summer school class that no one at Harvard cared about. But he invited all of these rising intellectuals and thinkers from around the world. And he built a network there that he used forevermore. So that's what really, I think, boosts him. The most important moments in terms of making his reputation and making his career are two sets of activities. One is the opening to China. And his ability to, first of all, take control of US policy without the authority to do that and direct US policy, and then build a relationship with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai that was unthinkable just four or five years earlier. Of course, President Nixon is a big part of that as well, but Kissinger is the mover and shaker on that. And it's a lot of manipulation, but it's also a vision. Now, this is in the moment of American history where there's a very powerful anti communism. Correct. So communism is seen as much more even though than today as the enemy. Correct. And China in particular, they were one of our key enemies in Vietnam. And in Korea, American forces were fighting Chinese forces directly. Chinese forces come over the border. Thousands of Americans die at the hand of Chinese forces. So for the long time, the United States had no relationship with communist China. He opens that relationship. And at the same time, he also creates a whole new dynamic in the Middle East. After the 1973 war, the so called Yom Kippur War, he steps in and becomes the leading negotiator between the Israelis, the Egyptians, and other major actors in the region. And it makes the United States the most powerful actor in the Middle East, the Soviet Union far less powerful, which is great for the United States in the 70s and 80s. It gets us though into the problems we of course have thereafter. So that speaks to the very pragmatic approach that he's taken the realistic approach versus the idealistic approach termed realpolitik. What is this thing? What is this approach to world politics? So realpolitik for Kissinger is really focusing on the power centers in the world and trying as best you can to manipulate those power centers to serve the interests of your own country. And so that's why he's a multilateralist. He's not a unilateralist. He believes the United States should put itself at the center of negotiations between other powerful countries. But that's also why he pays very little attention to countries that are less powerful. And this is why he's often criticized by human rights activists. For him, parts of Africa and Latin America, which you and I would consider important places are unimportant because they don't have power. They can't project their power. They don't produce a lot of economic wealth. And so they matter less. Realpolitik views the world in a hierarchy of power. How does realpolitik realize itself in the world? What does that really mean? Like how do you push forward the interest of your own country? You said there's power centers, but it is a big bold move to negotiate to work with a communist nation, with your enemies that are powerful. What is the sort of, if you can further elaborate the philosophy behind it. Sure, so there are two key elements that then end up producing all kinds of tactics. But the two strategic elements of Kissinger's way of thinking about realpolitik, which are classical ways, going back to Thucydides and the Greeks, are to say, first of all, you figure out who your allies are and you build webs of connection so that your allies help you to acquire what you want to acquire. This is why, according to Herodotus, the Greeks beat the Persians. The Persians are bigger, but the Greeks, the Spartans, the Athenians, others are able to work together and leverage their resources. So it's about leveraging your resources. For Kissinger, this makes Western Europe crucially important. It makes Japan crucially important. It makes Israel and Egypt crucially important in building these webs. You build your surrogates, you build your brother states. In other parts of the world, you build tight connections and you work together to control the resources that you want. The second element of the strategy is not to go to war with your adversary, but to do all you can to limit the power of your adversary. Some of that is containment, preventing the Soviet Union from expanding. That was the key element of American Cold War policy. But sometimes it's actually negotiation. That's what detente was about for Kissinger. He spends a lot of time, more time than any other American foreign policymaker, negotiating with Soviet leaders as well as Chinese leaders. What does he want to do? He wants to limit the nuclear arms race. The United States is ahead. We don't want the Soviet Union to get ahead of us. We negotiate to limit their abilities, right? We play to our strengths. So it's a combination of keeping your adversary down and building tight webs. Within that context, military force is used, but you're not using war for the sake of war. You're using warfare to further your access to the resources, economic, political, geographic that you want. To build relationships and then the second thing, to limit the powers of those you're against. Exactly. So is there any sort of insights into how he preferred to build relationships? Are we talking about like, again, it's the one on one. Is it through policy or is it through like, phone conversations? Is there any cool kind of insights that you could speak to? Yeah, Kissinger is the ultimate kiss up. He is, some used to make fun of him. In fact, even the filmmaker from Dr. Strangelove, whose name I'm forgetting, Stanley Kubrick, called him kiss up at that time, right? He had a wonderful way of figuring out what it is you wanted, back to that discussion we had before and trying to show how he could give you more of what you wanted as a leader. It was very personalistic, very personalistic. And he spends a lot of time, for example, kissing up to Leonid Brezhnev, kissing up to Mao. He tells Mao, you're the greatest leader in the history of the 20th century. People will look back on you as the great leader. Some of this sounds like BS, but it's serious, right? He's feeding the egos of those around him. Second, he is willing to get things done for you. He's effective. You want him around you because of his efficacy. So Richard Nixon is always suspicious that Henry Kissinger is getting more of the limelight. He hates that Kissinger gets the Nobel Peace Prize and he doesn't, but he needs him. Because Kissinger's the guy who gets things done. So he performs. He builds a relationship in almost, I say this in the book, in almost a gangster way. He didn't like that he criticized that part of the book. But again, I still think the evidence is there. You need something to be done, boss, I'll do it. And don't forget that I'm doing this for you. And you get mutual dependency in a Hegelian way, right? And so he builds this personal dependency through ego and through performance. And then he's so skillful at making decisions for people who are more powerful because he's never elected to office. He always needs powerful people to let him do things. But he convinces you it's your decision when it's really his. To read his memos are beautiful. He's actually very skilled at writing things in a way that looks like he's giving you options as president, but in fact, there's only one option there. Is he, speaking to the gangster, to the loyalty, is he ever, like the sense I got from Nixon is he would, Nixon would backstab you if he needed to. One of the things that I admire about gangsters is they don't backstab those in their circle, like loyalty above all else. I mean, at least that's the sense I've gotten from the stories of the past, at least. Is, where would you put Kissinger on that? Is he loyalty above all else? Or is it, or a human, it's like the Steve Jobs thing, is like, as long as you're useful, you're useful, but then once, the moment you're no longer useful is when you're knocked off the chessboard. It's the latter with him. He's backstabbing quite a lot. And he's self serving. But he also makes himself so useful that even though Nixon knows he's doing that, Nixon still needs him. Yeah. By the way, on that point, so having spoken with Kissinger, what's your relationship like with him as somebody who is in an objective way writing his story? It was very difficult because he's very good at manipulating people. And we had about 12 or 13 interviews, usually informal over lunch. And this was many years ago. This is probably now more than 10 years ago. Did you find yourself being like sweet talked, like to where you like go back home later and look in the mirror and it's like, wait, what just happened? He can be enormously charming and enormously obnoxious at the same time. So I would have these very mixed emotions because he gives no ground. He's unwilling to, and I think this is a weakness, he's unwilling to admit mistake. Others make mistakes, but he doesn't. And he certainly won't take on any of the big criticisms that are pushed. I understand why. I mean, when you've worked as hard for what he has as he has, you're defensive about it. But he is very defensive and he's very fragile about it. He does not like criticisms at all. He used to, he hasn't done this in a while, but he used to call me up and yell at me on the phone, quite literally, when I would be quoted in the New York Times or somewhere saying something that sounded critical of him. So for instance, there was one instance a number of years ago, where a reporter came across some documents where Kissinger said negative things about Jews in Russia. Typical things that a German Jew would say about East European Jews. And the New York Times asked me, is this accurate? And I said, yeah, the documents are accurate. I've seen them, they're accurate. He was so angry about that. So there's the fragility, but there's also the enormous charm and the enormous intelligence. The real challenge with him though, is he's very good at making his case. He'll convince you. And as a scholar, as an observer, you don't wanna hear a lawyer's case. You wanna actually interrogate the evidence and get to the truth. And so that was a real challenge with him. So speaking of his approach of realpolitik, if we just zoom out and look at a human history, human civilization, what do you think works best in the way we progress forward? A realistic approach, do whatever it takes, control the centers of power, to play a game for the greater interests of the good guys, quote unquote. Or lead by sort of idealism, which is like truly act in the best version of the ideas you represent, as opposed to kind of present one view and then do whatever it takes behind the scenes. Obviously you need some of both, but I lean more to the idealistic side and more so actually, believe it or not, as I get into my 40s, as I do more historical work. Why do I say that? Because I think, and this is one of my criticisms of Kissinger, who I also have a lot of respect for, the realpolitik becomes self defeating because you're constantly running to keep power, but you forget why. And you often then use power, and I think Kissinger falls into this in some of his worst moments, not all of his moments, where the power is actually being used to undermine the things you care about. It's sort of the example of being a parent and you're doing all these things to take your kid to violin, basketball, all these things, and you realize you're actually killing your kid and making your kid very unhappy. And the whole reason you were doing it was to improve the person's life. And so you have to remember why it is, what Hans Morgenthau calls this is your purpose. Your purpose has to drive you. Now your purpose doesn't have to be airy, fiery idealism. So I believe deeply in democracy is an ideal. I don't think it's gonna ever look like Athenian democracy, but that should drive our policy. But we still have to be realistic and recognize we're not gonna build that democracy in Afghanistan tomorrow. I mean, does it ultimately just boil down again to the corrupting nature of power that nobody can hold power for very long before you start acting in the interest of power as opposed to in the interest of your ideals? It's impossible to be like somebody like Kissinger who is essentially in power for many, many decades and still remember what are the initial ideals that you strove to achieve. Yes, I think that's exactly right. There's a moment in the book I quote about him, comes from one of our interviews. I asked him, what were the guiding ideals for your policies? And he said, I'm not prepared to share that. And I don't think it's because he doesn't know what he thinks he was trying to do. He realizes his use of power departed quite a lot from. So it would sound, if he made them explicit, it would sound hypocritical. Correct. Well, on that, let me ask about war. America often presents itself to its own people, but just the leaders, when they look in the mirror, I get a sense that we think of ourselves as the good guys. And especially this begins sometimes to look hypocritical when you're waging war. Is there a good way to know when you've lost all sense of what it is to be good? Another way to ask that, is there in military policy in conducting war, is there a good way to know what is a just war and what is a war crime? I mean, in some circles, Kissinger is accused of contributing, being a war criminal. Yes, and I argue in the book, he's not a war criminal, but that doesn't mean that he didn't misuse military power. I think a just war, a just war, as Michael Walzer and others write about it, a just war is a war where both the purpose is just, and you are using the means to get to that purpose that kill as few people as necessary. That doesn't mean they won't be killing, but as few as necessary. Proportionality, right? Your means should be proportional to your ends. And that's often lost sight of, because the drive to get to the end often self justifies means that go well beyond that. And so that's how we get into torture in the war on terror. Is there some kind of lesson for the future that you can take away from that? Yes, I think the first set of lessons that I've shared as a historian with military decision makers is, first of all, always remember why you're there, what your purpose is, and always ask yourself if the means you're using are actually proportional. Ask that question. Just because you have these means that you can use, just because you have these tools, doesn't mean they're the right tools to use. And here's the question that follows from that. And it's a hard question to ask, because the answer is one we often don't like to hear. Are the things I'm doing in war actually doing more harm or more good to the reason I went into war? We came to a point in the war on terror where what we were doing was actually creating more terrorists. And that's when you have to stop. Well, some of that is in the data, but some of it, there's a leap of faith. So from a parenting perspective, let me speak as a person with no kids and a single guy, let me be the expert in the room on parenting. Now, it does seem that it's a very difficult thing to do, even though you know that your kid was making a mistake, to let them make a mistake, to give them the freedom to make the mistake. I don't know what to do, but I mean, that's a very kind of lighthearted way of phrasing the following, which is when you look at some of the places in the world, like Afghanistan, which is not doing well. To move out knowing that there's going to be a lot of suffering, economic suffering, injustices, terrorist organizations growing, that's committing crimes on its own people and potentially committing crimes against allies, violence against allies, violence against the United States. So how do you know what to do in that case? Well, again, it's an art, not a science, which is what makes it hard for an engineer to think about. This is what makes it endlessly fascinating for me. And I think the real intellectual work is at the level of the art, right? And I think probably engineering at its highest level becomes an art as well, right? So policymaking, you never know. But I will say this, I'll say you have to ask yourself and look in the mirror and say, is all the effort I'm putting in actually making this better? And in Afghanistan, you look at the 20 years and two plus trillion dollars that the US has put in. And the fact that, as you said correctly, it's not doing well right now after 20 years of that investment. I might like a company that I invest in, but after 20 years of my throwing money in that company, it's time to get out. Well, in some sense, getting out now, that's kind of obvious. I'm more interested in how we figure out in the future how to get out earlier than, I mean, at this point, we stayed too long and it's obvious, the data, the investment, nothing is working. The very little data points to us staying there. I'm more interested in being in a relation, let me take it back to a safer place again, being in a relationship and getting out of that relationship while things are still good, but you have a sense that it's not going to end up in a good place. That's the difficult thing. You have to ask yourself, whether it's a relationship or you're talking about policymaking in a place like Afghanistan, are the things I'm doing showing me evidence, real evidence that they're making things better or making things worse? That's a hard question to answer. You have to be very honest. And in a policymaking context, we have to actually do the same thing we do in a relationship context. What do we do in a relationship context? We ask other friends who are observing. We ask for other observers. This is actually just a scientific method element actually that we can't, the Heisenberg principle, I can't see it because I'm too close to it. I'm changing it by my looking at it. I need others to tell me in a policymaking context, this is why you need to hear from other people, not just the generals, because here's the thing about the generals. They generally are patriotic, hardworking people, but they're too close. They're not lying. They're too close. I just think they can do better. Yeah. How do you think about the Cold War now from the beginning to end, and maybe also with an eye towards the current potential cyber conflict, cyber war with China and with Russia, if we look sort of other kind of Cold Wars potentially emerging in the 21st century, when you look back at the Cold War of the 20th century, how do you see it and what lessons do we draw from it? It's a wonderful question because I teach this to undergraduates and it's really interesting to see how undergraduates now, almost all of whom were born after 9 11. Yeah. So the Cold War is ancient history to them. In fact, the Cold War to them is as far removed as the 1950s were to me. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's almost like World War II for my generation and Cold War for them. It's so far removed. The collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't mean anything to them. So how do you describe the Cold War to them? How do you describe the Soviet Union to them? First of all, I have to explain to them why people were so fearful of communism. Anti communism is very hard for them to understand. The fact that in the 1950s, Americans believed that communists were going to infiltrate our society and many other societies. And that after Fidel Castro comes to power in 1959, that we're going to see communist regimes all across Latin America, that fear of communism married to nuclear power. And then even the fear that maybe economically they would outpace us because they would create this sort of army of Khrushchevian builders of things and what does Khrushchev said, right? Say we're gonna catch Britain in five years and then the United States after that, right? So to explain that sense of fear to them that they don't have of those others, that's really important. The Cold War was fundamentally about the United States defending a capitalist world order against a serious challenger from communism. An alternative way of organizing everything, private property, economic activity, enterprise, life, everything, organized in a totally different way. It was a struggle between two systems. So your sense is, and sorry to interrupt, but your sense is that the conflict of the Cold War was between two ideologies and not just two big countries with nuclear weapons. I think it was about two different ways of life or two different promoted ways of life. The Soviet Union never actually lived communism. But I think my reading of Stalin is he really tried to go there. Khrushchev really believed Gorbachev thought he was going to reform the Soviet Union so you would go back to a kind of Bukhar and Lenin communism, right? So I do think that mattered. I do think that mattered enormously. And for the United States point of view, the view was that communism and fascism were these totalitarian threats to liberal democracy and capitalism, which went hand in hand. So I do think that's what the struggle was about. And in a certain way, liberal capitalism proved to be the more enduring system and the United States played a key role in that. That's the reality of the Cold War. But I think it means different things now to my students and others. They focus very much on the expansion of American power and the challenges of managing. They're looking at it from the perspective of not will we survive, but did we waste our resources on some elements of it? It doesn't mean they were against what America did, but there is a question of the resources that went into the Cold War and the opportunity costs. And you see this when you look at the sort of healthcare systems that other countries build and you compare them to the United States, race issues also. So they look at the costs, which I think often happens after a project is done, you look back at that. Second, I think they're also more inclined to see the world as less bipolar, to see the role of China as more complicated. Post colonial or anti colonial movements, independent states in Africa and Latin America, that gets more attention. So one of the criticisms now is because you forget the lessons of 20th century history and the atrocities committed under communism, that you may be a little bit more willing to accept some of those ideologies into our United States society. That this kind of, that forgetting that capitalistic forces are part of the reason why we have what we have today. There's a fear amongst some now that we would have, what would allow basically communism to take hold in America. I mean, Jordan and others speak to this kind of idea. I tend to not be so fearful of it. I think it's on the surface, it's not deep within. I do see the world as very complicated as there needing to be a role of having support for each other on certain political levels, economic levels, and then also supporting entrepreneurs. It's like that the kind of enforcing of outcomes that is fundamental to the communist system is not something we're actually close to. And some of that is just fear mongering for likes on Twitter kind of thing. If I could come in on that, because I agree with you 100%. I've spent a lot of time writing and looking at this and talking to people about this. There's no communism in the United States. There never has been, and there certainly isn't now. And I'll say this both from an academic point of view, but also from just spending a lot of time observing young people in the United States. Even those on the farthest left, take whoever you think is the farthest left, they don't even understand what communism is. They're not communist in any sense. Americans are raised in a vernacular and environment of private property ownership. And as you know better than anyone, if you believe in private property, you don't believe in communism. So the sort of Bernie Sanders kind of socialist elements, that's very different, right? And I would say some of that, not all of that, some of that does hearken back to actually what won in the Cold War. There were many social democratic elements of what the United States did that led to our winning the Cold War. For example, the New Deal was investing government money in propping up business, in propping up labor unions. And during the Cold War, we spent more money than we had ever spent in our history on infrastructure, on schools, on providing social support, social security, our national pension system being one of them. So you could argue actually that social democracy is very compatible with capitalism. And I think that's the debate we're having today, how much social democracy. I'll also say that the capitalism we've experienced the last 20 years is different from the capitalism of the Cold War. During the Cold War, there was the presumption in the United States that you had to pay taxes to support our Cold War activities, that it was okay to make money, but the more money you made, the more taxes you had to pay. We had the highest marginal tax rates in our history during the Cold War. Now, the aversion to taxes, and of course, no one ever likes paying taxes, but the notion that we can do things on deficit spending, that's a post Cold War phenomenon. That's not a Cold War phenomenon. So, so much of the capitalism that we're talking about today is not the capitalism of the Cold War. And maybe, again, we can learn that and see how we can reform capitalism today and get rid of this false worry about communism in the United States. Yeah, you know what? You make me actually realize something important. What we have to remember is the words we use on the surface about different policies, what you think is right and wrong, is actually different than the core thing that is in your blood, the core ideas that are there. I do see the United States as this, there's this fire that burns of individual freedoms, of property rights, these basic foundational ideas that everybody just kind of takes for granted. And I think if you hold on to them, if you're like raised in them, talking about ideas of social security, of universal basic income, of reallocation of resources is a fundamentally different kind of discussion than you had in the Soviet Union. I think the value of the individual is so core to the American system that you basically cannot possibly do the kind of atrocities that you saw in the Soviet Union. But, of course, you never know, the slippery slope has a way of changing things. But I do believe the things you're born with is just so core to this country. It's part of the, I don't know what your thoughts are. We are in Texas, I'm not necessarily, I don't necessarily wanna have a gun control type of conversation, but the reason I really like guns, it doesn't make any sense, but philosophically, it's such a declaration of individual rights that's so different than the conversations I hear with my Russian family and my Russian friends, that the gun, it's very possible that having guns is bad for society in the sense that it will lead to more violence. But there's something about this discussion that proclaims the value of my freedom as an individual. I'm not being eloquent in it, but there's very few debates where whenever people are saying, should you have what level of gun control, all those kinds of things, what I hear is it's a fight for how much freedom, even if it's stupid freedom, should the individual have. I think that's what's articulated quite often. I think combining your two points, which are great points, I think there is something about American individualism which is deeply ingrained in our culture and our society. And it means that the kinds of bad things that happen are different, usually not as bad. But our individualism often covers up for vigilante activity and individual violence toward people that you wouldn't have in a more collective culture. So in the Soviet Union, it was at a much worse scale and it was done by government organizations. In the United States, it's individuals, the history of lynching in our country, for example. Sometimes it's individual police officers, sometimes it's others. Again, the vast majority of police officers are good people and don't do harm to people, but there are these examples and they are able to fester in our society because of our individualism. Now, gun ownership is about personal freedom, I think, for a lot of people. And there's no doubt that in our history, included in the Second Amendment, which can be interpreted in different ways, is the presumption that people should have the right to defend themselves, which is what I think you're getting at here. That you should not be completely dependent for your defense on an entity that might not be there for you. You should be able to defend yourself. And guns symbolize that. I think that's a fair point. But I think it's also a fair point to say that as with everything, defining what self defense is, is really important. So does self defense mean I can have a bazooka? Does it mean I can have weapons that are designed for a military battlefield to mass kill people? That seems to me to be very different from saying I should have a handgun or some small arm to defend myself. That distinction alone would make a huge difference. Most of the mass shootings, at least, which are a smaller proportion of the larger gun deaths in the United States, which are larger than any other society, but at least the mass shootings are usually perpetrated by people who have not self defense weapons, but mass killing, mass killing weapons. And I think there's an important distinction there. The Constitution talks about a right to bear arms for a well regulated militia. When the framers talked about arms, that did not mean the ability to kill as many people as you wanna kill. It meant the ability to defend yourself. So let's have that conversation. I think it would be useful as a society. Stop talking about guns or no guns. What is it that we as citizens need to feel we can defend ourselves? Yes. Yeah, I mean, guns have this complicated issue that it can cause harm to others. I tend to see sort of maybe like legalization of drugs. I tend to believe that we should have the freedom to do stupid things. Yeah, so long as we're not harming lots of other people. Yes, and then guns, of course, have the property that they can be used. It's not just a bazooka I would argue is pretty stupid to own for your own self defense, but it has the very negative side effect of being potentially used to harm other people. And you have to consider that kind of stuff. By the way, as a side note to the listeners, there's been a bunch of people saying that Lex is way too libertarian for my taste. No, I actually am just struggling with ideas and sometimes put on different hats in these conversations. I think through different ideas, whether they're left, right or libertarian. That's true for gun control. That's true for immigration. That's true for all of that. I think we should have discussions in the space of ideas versus in the space of bins we put each other in labels and we put each other in. I agree 100%. And also change our minds all the time. Try out, say stupid stuff with the best of intention, trying our best to think through it. And then after saying it, think about it for a few days and then change your mind and grow in this way. Let me ask a ridiculous question. When you zoom out, when human civilization has destroyed itself and alien graduate students are studying it like three, four, five centuries from now, what do you think we'll remember about this period in history? The 20th century, the 21st century, this time. We had a couple of wars. We had a charismatic black president in the United States. We had a couple of pandemics. What do you think will actually stand out in history? No doubt the rapid technological innovation of the last 20 to 30 years. How we created a whole virtual universe we didn't have before. And of course that's gonna go in directions you and I can't imagine 50 years from now. But this will be seen as that origin moment that when we went from playing below the rim to playing above the rim, right? To be all in person to having a whole virtual world. And in a strange way, the pandemic was a provocation to move even further in that direction. And we're never going back, right? We're gonna restore some of the things we were doing before the pandemic, but we're never gonna go back to that world we were in before where every meeting you had to fly to that place to be in the room with the people. So this whole virtual world and the virtual personas and the avatars and all of that, I think that's going to be a big part of how people remember our time. Also the sort of biotechnology element of it, which the vaccines are part of. It's amazing how quickly, this is the great triumph, how quickly we've produced and distributed these vaccines. And of course there are problems with who's taking them, but the reality is, I mean, this is light speed compared to what it would have been like, not just in 1918, in 1980. Yeah, one of the, I'm sorry if I'm interrupting, but one of the disappointing things about this particular time is because vaccines, like a lot of things got politicized, used as little pawns in the game of politics, that we don't get the chance to step back fully at least and celebrate the brilliance of the human species. That's right. Yes, there are scientists who use their authority improperly, that have an ego, that when they're within institutions, are dishonest with the public because they don't trust the intelligence of the public, they are not authentic and transparent, all the same things you could say about humans in any positions of power, anywhere. Okay, that doesn't mean science isn't incredible and the vaccines, I mean, I don't often talk about it because it's so political and it's heartbreaking to, it's heartbreaking how all the good stuff is getting politicized. Yeah, that's right, and it shouldn't be, and it'll seem less political. Eating the long arc of history. Yep, it'll be seen as an outstanding accomplishment. And as a step toward whatever, maybe they're doing vaccines or something that replaces the vaccine in 10 seconds, at that point, right? It'll be seen as a step. Those will be some of the positives. I think one of the negatives they will point to will be our inability, at least at this moment, to manage our environment better, how we're destroying our living space and not doing enough even though we have the capabilities to do more to preserve or at least allow a sustainable living space. I'm confident because I'm an optimist that we will get through this and we will be better at sustaining our environment in future decades. And so in terms of environmental policy, they'll see this moment as a dark age or the beginnings of a better age, maybe as a renaissance. Or maybe as the last time most people lived on Earth when a couple of centuries afterwards we were all dissipated throughout the solar system and the galaxy. Very possible. If the local resident, hometown resident, Mr. Elon Musk has anything to do with it. I do tend to think you're absolutely right. With all this political bickering, we shouldn't forget that what this age will be remembered by is the incredible levels of innovation. I do think the biotech stuff worries me more than anything because it feels like there's a lot of weapons that could be yet to be developed in that space. But I tend to believe that, I'm excited by two avenues. One is artificial intelligence. The kind of systems we'll create in this digital space that you mentioned we're moving to. And then the other, of course, this could be the product of the Cold War, but I'm super excited by space exploration. There's a magic to humans being. And we're getting back to it. I mean, we were enthralled with it in the 50s and 60s when it was a Cold War competition. And then after the 70s, we sort of gave up on it. And thanks to Elon Musk and others, we're coming back to this issue. And I think there's so much to be gained from the power of exploration. Is there books or movies in your life, long ago or recently, that had a big impact on you? Yes. Is there something you would? Yes. My favorite novel, I always tell people this, I love reading novels. I'm a historian. And I think the historian and the novelist are actually, and the technology innovator are all actually one and the same. They're all storytellers. And we're all in the imagination space. And I'm trying to imagine the world of the past to inform us in the present for the future. So one of my favorite novels that I read, actually when I was in graduate school, is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. And it's the story of a family in Lübeck in Northern Germany, living through the 19th century and the rise and fall of family, cycles of life. Many things we've talked about in the last couple of hours. Cycles of life, challenges of adjusting to the world around you. And it's just a very moving reflection on the limits of human agency and how we all have to understand the circumstances we're in and adjust to them. And there's triumph and tragedy in that. It's a wonderful novel. It used to be a kind of canonical work. It's sort of fallen out now. It's a big, big novel, but I'm very moved by that. I'm very moved by Tall Stories, War and Peace. I assign that every year to my students. That's a big, big book. But what Tall Story challenges is he challenges the notion that a Napoleon can rule the world. And we're all little Napoleons, right? We're all sort of thinking that we're gonna do that. And he reminds us how much is contingency, circumstance. It doesn't mean we don't have some control. You've spoke to me a little bit of Russian. Where does that come from? So your appreciation of Tall Story, but also your ability to speak a bit of Russian. Where's that from? So I speak, in addition to English, I speak reasonably well, depending on how much vodka I've had. Russian, I speak French and German. I learned those for research purposes. I learned French actually when I was in high school, Russian when I was in college, German when I was in graduate school. Now I do have family on my mother's side that's of Russian Jewish extraction, but they were Yiddish speakers by the time I met them. By the time they had gone through Germany and come to the United States, or really gone through Poland and come to the United States, they were Yiddish speakers. So there's no one really in my family who speaks Russian, but I do feel a connection there, at least a long range personal connection. Is there something to be said about the language and your ability to imagine history? Sort of when you study these different countries, your ability to imagine what it was like to be a part of that culture, part of that time? Yes, language is crucial to understanding a culture. And even if you learn the languages I have, learning Russian and German and French, it's still not the same as also being a native speaker either, as you know. But I think language tells you a lot about mannerism, about assumptions. The very fact that English doesn't have a formal U, but Russian has a formal U, right? V versus T, right? German has a formal U, Z versus D, right? So the fact that English doesn't have a formal U tells you something about Americans, right? And that's just one example. The fact that Germans have such a wider vocabulary for certain scientific concepts than we have in English tells you something about the culture, right? Language is an artifact of the culture. The culture makes the language. It's fascinating to explore. I mean, even just exactly what you just said, V, T, which is, there's a fascinating transition. So I guess in English we just have U. There's a fascinating transition that persists to this day is of formalism and politeness, where it's an initial kind of dance of interaction that's different methods of signaling respect, I guess. We don't, and language provides that, and then in the English language, there's fewer tools to show that kind of respect, which has potentially positive or negative effects on, it flattens the society where like a teenager could talk to an older person and show like a deference. I mean, but at the same time, I mean, it creates a certain kind of dynamic, a certain kind of society. And it's funny to think of just like those few words can have like a ripple effect through the whole culture. And we don't have a history in the United States of aristocracy. These elements of language reflect aristocracy. The serf would never refer to the master, even if the master is younger, it's always Voi, right? In Turgenev, it's always Voi, right? I mean, and so it's, yeah, so it tells you something about the history. That's why to your question, which was a great question, it's so crucial to try to penetrate the language. I'll also say something else, and this is a problem for many Americans who haven't learned a foreign language. We're very bad at teaching foreign languages. If you've never taught yourself a foreign language, you have closed yourself off to certain kinds of empathy because you have basically trained your brain to only look at the world one way. The very act of learning another language, I think tells your brain that words and concepts don't translate one to one. This is the first thing you realize, right? We can say, you know, these two words mean this thing, you know, these two words mean the same thing from two languages, they never mean exactly the same thing. Dosvidanya is really not goodbye, right? And there's something, you know, right now there's people talking about idea of lived experience. One of the ways to force yourself into this idea of lived experience is by learning another language, to understand that you can perceive the world in a totally different way, even though you're perceiving the same thing. And of course, the way to first learn Russian for those looking for tutorial lessons for me is just like as you said, we start by drinking lots of vodka. Yes, of course. It's very difficult to do otherwise. Is there advice you have for young people about career, about life, in making their way in the world? Yes, two things I believe that I say to a lot of talented young people. First, I don't think you can predict what is gonna be well renumerated 20 years from now. Don't pick a profession because you think, even though your parents might tell you or something, do this and you'll make money. You know, this is the scene in The Graduate where a guy tells Dustin Hoffman, go into plastics, money in plastics. We don't know. So many of my students now have parents who are telling them, bright students, you know, go to the business school. That's what's gonna set you up to make money. If you're passionate about business, yes. But don't begin by thinking you know what's gonna be hot 20 years from now. You don't know what's gonna be hot from 20 years ago, 20 years from now. What should you do? This is advice number one. Find what you're passionate about. Because if you're passionate about it, you will do good work in that area if you're talented and usually passion and talent overlap. And you'll find a way to get people to pay you for it. I mean, you do it really well, people will wanna pay. That's where capitalism works. People will find it valuable, right? Whether it's violin playing, right? Or engineering or poetry, you will find, you might not become a billionaire. That involves other things. But you'll find a way to get people to pay you for it. And then the second thing is it's really important at the very beginning of your career, even before you're in your job, right? To start building your networks. But networks are not just people you're on Facebook with or Twitter with, I mean, that's fine. It's actually forming relationships. And some of that can be mediated in the digital world, but I mean real relationships. I like podcasts because I think they actually open up that space. I know a lot of people can listen to a podcast and find someone else who's listened to that podcast and have a conversation about a topic. It opens up that space. Build those relationships, not with people who you think will be powerful, but people you think are interesting because they'll do interesting things. And every successful person I know at some level had a key moment where they got where they are because of someone they knew for some other reason who had that connection. So use and spread your networks and make them as diverse as possible. Find people who are of a different party, have different interests, but are interesting to you. That's brilliant advice. And some of that on the passion side, I do find that as somebody who has a lot of passions, I find the second part to that is committing. Yes, that's true too. Which sucks because life is finite. And when you commit, you say, well, I'm never going to be good. Like when you choose one of the two passions, one of the two things you're interested in, you're basically saying, I'm letting go. I'm saying goodbye to. That's true. That's true. Which is actually what does goodbye means, not goodbye, but letting go. That's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. I think you do have to make choices. You do have to set priorities. I often laugh at students who tell me they want to have like three majors. If you have three majors, you have no major, right? I mean, so I do think you have to make choices. I also think it's important that whatever you do, even if it's a small thing, you always do the best you can. You always do excellent work. My kids are tired of hearing me say this at home, but I believe everything you do should be about excellence. The best you can do. If I'm going to wash the dishes, I'm going to be the best person washing the dishes. If I'm going to write a book review, I'm going to write the best possible book review I can. Why? Because you develop a culture about yourself, which is about excellence. Yeah, I was telling you offline about all the kind of stuff, Google Fiber and cable installation, all that stuff. I've been always a believer, washing dishes. People don't often believe me when I say this. I don't care what I do. I am with David Foster Wallace. I'm unborable. There's so much joy for me. I think for everyone, but okay, let me just speak for me, to be discovered in getting really good at anything. In fact, getting good at stuff that most people believe is boring or menial labor or impossible to be interesting, that's even more joyful to find the joy within that and the excellence. It's the Jiro dreams of sushi, making the same fricking sushi over and over and becoming a master that can be truly joyful. There's a sense of pride and on the pragmatic level, you never know when someone will spot that. And intelligent people who perform at the level of high excellence look for others. Who do you say? And it radiates some kind of signal. It's weird. It's weird what you attract to yourself when you just focus on mastery and pursuing excellence in something. Like this is the cool thing about it. That's the joy I've really truly experienced. I didn't have to do much work. It's just cool people kind of, I find myself in groups of cool people, like really people who are excited about life, who are passionate about life. There's a fire in their eyes. That's at the end of the day just makes life fun. And then also money wise, at least in this society, we're fortunate to where if you do that kind of thing, money will find a way. Like I have the great, I say this that I don't care about money. I have to think about what that means because some people criticize that idea. It's like, yeah, it must be nice to say that. Cause I have for much, many periods of my life had very little money, but I think we live in a society where not caring about money, but just focusing on your passions. If you're truly pursuing excellence, whatever that is, money will find you. That's I guess the ideal of the capitalist system. And I think that the entrepreneurs I've studied and had the chance to get to know, and I'm sure you'd agree with this, they do what they do cause they're passionate about the product. They're not just in it to make money. In fact, that's when they get into trouble when they're just trying to make money. Exactly. You said your grandmother, Emily, had a big impact on your life. She lived to 102. What are some lessons she taught you? Emily, who was the child of immigrants from Russia and Poland, who never went to college, her proudest day I think was when I went to college. She treated everyone with respect and tried to get to know everyone. She knew every bus driver in the town. She'd remember their birthdays. And one of the things she taught me is no matter how high you fly, the lowest person close to the ground matters to you. And you treat them the same way you treat the billionaire at the top of the podium. And she did that. She didn't just say that. Some people say that and don't do it. She really did that. And I always remember that it comes up in my mind at least once a week because we're all busy doing a lot of things and you either see or you even feel in yourself the desire to just, for the reasons of speed, to be short or not polite with someone who can't do anything to harm you right now. And I remember her saying to me, no, you don't, you treat everyone with respect. You treat the person you're on the phone with, customer service. You treat that person if you're talking to Jeff Bezos or you're talking to Elon Musk. And I think making that a culture of who you are is so important. And people notice that. That's the other thing. And they notice when it's authentic. Everyone's nice to the person at the bottom of the totem pole when you want to get ahead in the line for your driver's license. But are you nice to them when you don't need that? They notice that. And even when nobody's watching, that has a weird effect on you that's going to have a ripple effect and people know. That's the cool thing about the internet. I've come to believe that people see authenticity. They see when you're full of shit, when you're not. That's right. The other thing that Emily taught me, and I think we've all had relatives who have taught us this, that you could be very uneducated. She was very uneducated. She had a high school diploma, but I think she was working in a delicatessen in New York while she was in high school, or maybe it was at Gimbels or somebody. So she probably didn't take high school very seriously. She wasn't very well educated. She was very smart. And we can fall into a world where I'm a big believer in higher education and getting a PhD and things of that sort, but where we think those are the only smart people. Yeah. Sometimes those are the people, because of their accomplishments, because their egos are the ones who are least educated in the way of the world. Yeah. Least curious, and ultimately wisdom comes from curiosity. And sometimes getting a PhD can get in the way of curiosity as opposed to empower curiosity. Let me ask, from a historical perspective, you've studied some of human history. So maybe you have an insight about what's the meaning of life. Do you ever ask when you look at history, the why? Yeah, I do all the time, and I don't have an answer. It's the mystery that we can't answer. I do think what it means is what we make of it. There's no universal, every period I've studied, and I've studied a little bit of a lot of periods and a lot of a few periods, every period people struggle with this, and they don't come to, wiser people than us don't come to a firm answer, except it's what you make of it. Meaning is what you make of it. So think about what you want to care about and make that the meaning in your life. I wonder how that changes throughout human history, whether there's a constant. Like I often think, especially when you study evolutionary biology and you just see our origins from life and as it evolves, it's like, it makes you wonder, it feels like there's a thread that connects all of it, that we're headed somewhere. We're trying to actualize some greater purpose. Like there seems to be a direction to this thing, and we're all kind of stumbling in the dark trying to figure it out, but it feels like we eventually will find an answer. I hope so, yeah, maybe. I mean, I do think we all want our families to do better. We are familiar, and family doesn't just mean biological family. You can have all kinds of ways you define family and community, and I think we are moving slowly and in a very messy way toward a larger world community. To include all of biological life and eventually artificial life as well. Yeah, so to expand the lesson to the advice that your grandmother taught you, is I think we should treat robots and AI systems good as well, even if they're currently not very intelligent because one day they might be. Right, right, I think that's exactly right, and we should think through, exactly as a humanist how I would approach that issue. We need to think through the kinds of behavior patterns we want to establish with these new forms of life, artificial life for ourselves also, to your point, so we behave the right way, so we don't misuse this. We started talking about Abraham Lincoln, ended talking about robots. I think this is the perfect conversation, Jeremy. This was a huge honor. I love Austin, I love UT Austin, and I love the fact that you would agree to waste all your valuable time with me today. Thank you so much for talking to me. I can't imagine a better way to spend a Friday afternoon. This was so much fun, and I'm such a fan of your podcast and delighted to be a part of it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeremy Suri, and thank you to Element, Monkpac, Belcampo, Four Sigmatic, and Asleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR. Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Jeremi Suri: History of American Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #180

The following is a conversation with Sergei Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink, which is a decentralized Oracle network that provides data to smart contracts. He and his team have done seminal research and engineering in the space of smart contracts. Check out the Chainlink 2.0 white paper that I found to be a great overview of their technology and vision. It's 136 pages, but very accessible. Quick mention of our sponsors. Wine Access, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that externally connected smart contracts that combine the ocean of data out there with the security of the blockchain are fascinating to me, both technically and philosophically. Data is knowledge, and knowledge is power. I think the more reliable data sources we integrate into our decision making, especially when those decisions are executed by programs, the more efficient and productive our decisions become. There are interactions between humans that should not be formalized digitally, like love, for example, but for all the others, there's no reason for smart contracts not to automate away the menial parts of life, making more room for good conversation over brisket and maybe some vodka with old and new friends. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Sergey Nazarov. Is that Jozsik there? So I gave away everything I own a few times in my life, and he accidentally survived, and I don't like stuffed animals. What I really liked about, I got him in a thrift store. What I liked about him is, because I'd never seen a stuffed animal that looks pissed off at life. Like they're usually smiling in the dumbest of ways, and this guy was just pissed. Yeah, I gotta tell you, that's actually pretty funny. I like this guy. If you had to live only in the digital world or the physical world, which would you choose? So I think this is actually a question more about what the fidelity of the digital world would be versus the physical world. I think this type of question, this whole simulation thing actually comes from papers about 20, 30 years ago in the philosophical world where people tried to make this thought experiment of would you be comfortable if everything that was happening to you happened in a simulation? What they were trying to do is they were intuitively trying to understand is there some kind of intuitive personal connection we have to something being the real world, right? And then the Matrix movie actually came out of these papers, and then these ideas made their way into the public consciousness. I personally think that if I had the choice to be in the digital world at the same fidelity as the real world with immortality, I would absolutely go with the digital. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How'd you add the immortality part? That's a, you don't get immortality. If you think about how we would go into the digital world, right? Our brain patterns would be mapped onto some kind of probably virtual machine, right? And that would mean immortality, right? Because the virtual machine has no limit to how long it can exist. So don't you think there'll be like a versioning system? Like there'll be, this is a soft fork versus hard fork question. Whether Sergei version 2.0 would be different from Sergei version 1.0, there'll be an upgrade. So that's a mortality. Sergei 1.0 would die in the digital world. And you get like a software update, and then that's it. Well, yeah, when people go into the Star Trek transporter, are they killed or are they transported? I don't really know. I haven't written any papers on this. I haven't really thought about it too much. There's no white paper on the transporter. Not at this point, so. Well, what does fidelity mean exactly to you? Is it like strictly, so the fidelity of the physics world, the physical world is maybe now questions of physics, quantum mechanics, what is at the bottom of it all? Or do you mean the fidelity of the actual experience? Like the original state? It's just perception. It's just perception. But that's limited by human cognitive capabilities. It is, but I don't really have anything else, right? I think all of these papers that brought up these questions of assimilation, they were like in epistemology and metaphysics. And what they were trying to do, I think, was they were trying to put people through a thought experiment where they would come out on the other end and say the reality of life is really worth something. And I don't, you know, ignorance isn't bliss, which is that consistent statement in the matrix, right? Ignorance is bliss is that that's what one of the guys says when he's like, you know, doing something wrong and trying to get back into the matrix. And the question is, is ignorance bliss? And it's like a different version of that. I think from a perceptual point of view, if my perceptions aren't in any way different, so fidelity is very good, it doesn't matter. I don't know, right? So if I don't know something, it doesn't really exist. And if it doesn't exist in my perception or my consciousness, then it doesn't exist, period, for me, at least. And then whether it exists in some, you know, more metaphysical version of things, I personally never really got into the metaphysics stuff because I could never really, I couldn't understand what the point of it was, right? It's one of these things where I couldn't really get what the practical application of it was. And this is from those realm of questions, right? Like if there was something about the world, but you didn't have a capacity to perceive it, would it matter to you? To me, it wouldn't matter. Right, to me, by the way, the simulation thing is a really interesting engineering question, which is how difficult is it to engineer a virtual reality, a digital world that is sufficiently of high fidelity where you would want to live in it? I think that's a really testable and a fascinating engineering question. So my intuition says like, it's not as difficult as we think. It's not nearly as difficult as having to create a quantum mechanical simulation that's large enough to capture the full human experience. Like it might be just as simple as just a really nice quake game, like with a nice engine, with just creating all the basic visual elements that trick our cognitive, our visual cortex into believing that we're actually in the physical environment. And I think that if that's true, then that's quite a high fidelity digital world is actually achievable within a century. And that changes things. Yeah, yeah, maybe in our lifetime. I'm really hoping for that. I'm hoping somebody can copy my brainwaves onto a virtual machine and allow that consciousness to continue to exist. Whether that's death or not, I don't know. But I think it's actually gonna require some serious leaps. Like even the VR headsets, right? They don't work if they go below 90 frame rates, right? People start getting freaked out. So you have to go from one gaming screen of 60 frames per second to two screens of 90 frames per second. And so people's hardware today can't even handle that. And that's for these two little screens by your eyeballs. What it's gonna take to completely trick my consciousness into not knowing the difference in terms of like all the sensory inputs. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Whoever does that and is close to doing that, they should contact me. I want to have my brainwaves turned into a virtual machine. Would you in that context, if Morpheus came to you, would you take the blue pill or the red pill? Meaning, would you be happy just living in that world and not knowing that you're living inside that virtual world that's running a computer? Or would you want to know the truth of it? Well, actually I think that's a very different question, right? There's a actually moral ethical question there about whether you should allow a bunch of people to get manipulated and killed and slaved, because in the matrix they're all enslaved as like a AAA battery to turn a human being into the battery, right? So I think the moral and ethical question of that, fascinating enough, isn't actually different than the moral and ethical questions we face today in modern daily life. But I probably have given the choice of just completely going along or going against it. I would probably go against it if I had to make this kind of binary choice. Because going along with it, I think at that scale of scary stuff happening to people is probably something really, really, really difficult. But for your individual life, it's way more fun to go along with it. So you're saying you value the opposing a system that includes the suffering of others versus just for yourself enjoying the ride. I mean, if there is such a binary choice, why choose to oppose the system? I think it's the nature of kind of the ethical dilemma that you face in that situation. There's kind of some, this is obviously not something that's happening now, right? We don't know this, right? No, we don't know this. At the end of the day, at that scale of something like that happening, yeah, that scale of people being manipulated and harmed, then I think pretty much almost all people have an obligation to go against it. Probably that's what that looks like in my opinion. So you've talked about the concept of definitive truth. What is it? And in general, what is the nature of truth in human civilization? And just talking about the digital age, the nature of truth in the digital age. So the interesting thing about definitive truth is that it actually exists on this, at least in my mind on this spectrum between objective truth and just somebody made something up and nobody else agrees. So what I think definitive truth is, is it's somewhere in the middle on that spectrum where if you and me define what truth is, right? Like if you and me have an agreement of some kind and we say, as long as the weather is sunny or the weather isn't, there is no rain on that day, then there'll be an insurance policy that results and you and me both agree that as long as three sensors, three weather monitoring stations all say that, then the definitive truth for us and for that agreement is the result of those systems coming to consensus about what happened out in the real world. I think the objective truth definition from kind of the philosophical world is really, really stringent and very, very hard to attain. And that's not what this is. And that's actually not what commerce or the ability for people to interact about contracts needs. What I think the world of commerce needs is an upgrade from someone can unilaterally decide what the truth is to there can be a pre agreed set of conditions where we define what the truth is under those conditions. And then you and me basically say, if these 20 nodes or of these 30 data sources come to consensus within this method of consensus with this threshold of agreement, then definitive truth has been achieved for you and me in our relationship for this specific agreement and the specificity and our shared agreement to that kind of truth or that definitive truth being acceptable to both of us is probably what's kind of necessary and sufficient for everything to move forward in a better way. In any case, much better than, I'm a bank or an insurance company, I'm gonna unilaterally decide what happens. It's definitely an upgrade from that. Do you think it's possible to define formally in this way, a definitive truth for many things in this world? Like you talked about weather, basically defining that if three sensors of weather agree, then that we're going to agree that that is a definitive, useful truth for us to operate under. So how many things in this world can be formalized in this way, do you think? A huge amount. So there's actually two things going on here. One thing is the amount of data that already exists and the pieces of data coming off of markets, IOT, shipment of goods, any number of other things. Like even your YouTube channel has a certain amount of likes or a certain amount of clicks or a certain amount of views and even that's quantifiable. So even to a certain degree, what we do here today, you and me right now can be quantified as far as the amount of views, the amount of clicks, the amount of any number of other things. Yeah, you, the viewer, have power of data in your hands by clicking like or dislike right now or the subscribe button or the unsubscribe button, which I encourage you to do. Anyway, okay, so there's data flowing into all interactions in this world, there's data. There's more and more data, right? More and more data. More and more data. That data is more and more accessible to everybody and that accessibility and the fact that there's more of it means we can form more definitive truth proofs. We can form more and more proofs and as we form those proofs, well, we can provide them to these blockchains and smart contract systems that consume them and then they're tamper proof, right? So they can't be manipulated. And so now we've combined a system that can prove things with a system that guarantees a certain outcomes and we have a better system of contracts, which is actually an unbelievably powerful tool that has never existed before. Can we talk about the world of commerce and finance, decentralized finance? What is it, what's its promise from both the philosophical and technical perspective? If we just zoom in on that particular space of the digital world. Sure, so the decentralized finance is the instantiation of a specific type of smart contract, right? Or what I call hybrid smart contracts, which are these contracts that combine the on chain code together with the off chain proofs that something happened. They're called a hybrid because they basically use both of these systems, right? The blockchain and the proofs about what happened. And what DeFi is, is one specific type of hybrid smart contract that is taking on the contractual agreements you traditionally find in the global financial system, right? And that's basically the world of lending, the world of yield generation for people giving me or giving whoever their money and somebody giving back them yield back to them, which is what bonds do and what treasuries do and what a lot of the global financial markets do, as well as the ability to gain exposure and protection from different types of events and risks. That's a lot of what derivatives do, right? Derivatives allow us to say, hey, something's gonna happen. And I'm either gonna protect myself by getting paid if it happens, or I'm going to benefit from it happening by basically saying it's gonna happen, putting money down on that, and that prediction will get me a return. Now, that's a very large part of the global financial system, excluding all the stuff for global trade and letters of credit and all the stuff that facilitates international trade. So excluding that at least for now. So if we look at what decentralized finance does, it takes all of those agreements about generating yield, lending, and all of these types of things you find in global finance and the world of derivatives and a few other types of financial products. And it basically puts them into a different format, right? So the format you have for centralized financial agreements is that you go to a bank, even if you're a hedge fund, even if you're like the richest people, you go to a bank, they make a product for you, and you hope that they honor the product that they made for you. Or you do a deal with another hedge fund or whoever, some counterparty, and you hope that that deal is honored. Yep. And then a number of very freaky things start to take place. One of them is people don't have clarity about what the agreement is, right? So a lot of people don't know exactly what the agreement is between those parties because they can't actually see it. Sometimes agreements are kept very private or parts of them are kept private. And that keeps other counterparties, other people in the system from understanding what's going on. This is actually partly what happened with the mortgage crisis. The mortgage crisis in 2008 was basically, there were a lot of agreements, there were a lot of assets, but because the centralized financial system worked in such an opaque way, it was so unbelievably difficult to understand what was going on, right? And so that lack of understanding for the global financial system basically led to a big boom, and then correspondingly, very, very big bust, which amazingly enough had a huge impact on everybody, even though they didn't participate in the boom part of the equation. In any case, what decentralized finance does is it takes these financial contracts that power the global financial system, it puts them in this new blockchain based format that basically at this point provides three very powerful things. The first thing that it provides is complete transparency over what's going on with your financial product. So this means when you use a financial product in the DeFi format, you, and you as a technical person actually can drill down very, very, very deeply, and you can understand where the collateral is, you can understand how much collateral there is, you can understand what format it's in, you can understand how it's changing, you can understand this on a second to second or block to block basis, right? So you have complete transparency into what's going on in the financial protocol that you have your assets in, which is because blockchains and the infrastructure, all of these things are built on, force that transparency. Whereas the centralized financial system is very, very good at hiding it. It's very good at hiding it and packaging things in a glossy wrapper, creating a boom, then a bust. The centralized finance is built on infrastructure that forces transparency such that everyone can understand what the financial product does from day one. And in fact, escaping that property is practically impossible or if someone tries to escape it, it becomes immediately obvious and people don't use their financial product. So that's number one. Number two is control. So if you look at what happened with Robinhood, everybody thought the system worked a certain way, right? Everybody thought I have a brokerage account, I can trade things under a certain set of market conditions. And then the market conditions changed within the band of what people thought they could do. And everybody was fascinated to find out that, oh my God, I thought my band of market conditions in which I can control my assets is X, but it is actually Y, is actually much, much smaller band. And the reason it is a much, much smaller group of market conditions is that the system doesn't work the way people think it works. The system was wrapped up in a nice glossy wrapper and given to them to get them to participate in the system because the system requires and needs their participation. But if you actually look at how the system works underneath, you will see that it does not work the way people think that it works. And this is actually another reason that DeFi is so powerful because DeFi actually, and these blockchain contracts, give people the version of the world they think they already have, which is why they don't beg for it, right? So everybody thinks they're in a certain version of the world that works in this reliable way, transparent way, they're not. They don't realize it. And so they're confused when you tell them, I'm gonna make the world work this way because they think they're already in that world. But then things like Robinhood make it immediately, painfully clear that that's not how the world works so that the second real property of DeFi is control, which means that you control your assets, not a bank, not a broker, not a third party, you. You control your Bitcoins, you control your tokens in the finance protocol. If you don't like how something's going in that protocol, you can remove it, you can send it to another protocol, or you can use a feature of the protocol to do something it's supposed to do. And guess what? Nobody can just say, oops, that feature, that isn't so good for my friends over here. That feature is actually, we're just gonna pause that feature in the critical moment when you need it to execute your strategy, which is why you took all the risks to begin with. And then the final reason, the final thing to know about DeFi is that DeFi is inherently global, and actually right now provides better yield globally. So if you go to a bank right now with the US dollar, you get 1% or less. If you go to DeFi with the US dollar, you get 7% or 8%. So if we think about that in a world where there's a lot of inflation coming down the road, and we think about, well, a lot more systems might be failing soon, and they might be highlighting these types of problems that were there for, or as a result of the type of control that you see in Robinhood, and people are more and more concerned about both transparency and control, and they're looking for yield to combat inflation. I think that's what DeFi is about in a practical sense. It is this clarity about your risk. It is control over your assets. And amazingly, at the same time as having those two unbelievably useful properties, it is actually superior yield, which just leads me to the very obvious conclusion that the only reason DeFi is more used is because more people don't know about it. And by virtue of this long kind of explanation here and elsewhere, more people will know about it. And it's just such an obviously superior solution that I haven't heard a single explanation as to why. No, no, don't earn 8% and take less risk and have more transparency with your assets. Earn 7% less, take more risk, and give people the ability to change the rules on you at their discretion, go do that. Who's gonna do that? And in general, on the first two of transparency and control, first of all, I do think, maybe you can correct me, but from my perspective, they're deeply tied together in the sense that transparency gives control. Transparency creates accountability, and there's this kind of game being played, game theoretic game, where if I know, if you know I'm gonna discover your deviation, you're not gonna deviate. Yes, this could be a whole nother conversation, but just as a small aside, on the social network side of things, which I've been thinking deeply about in the past year or so, of how to do it right there, how to fix our social media. And I tend to believe that human beings, if they're given clear transparency about which data is being stored, how it's being used, where it's being moved about, just all a clear, simple transparency of how their data is being used, and them having the control at the very minimal level of being able to participate or to walk away, and walk away means delete everything you've ever known about me. That will create a much, much better world. That currently there's a complete lack of transparency on social media, how the data is being used for your own protection. I mean, there's a lot of parallels to the central bank situation, and there's not a control element of being able to walk away. Like being able to delete all your data, delete your account on Facebook is very difficult. It doesn't take a single click, which I think is what it should take. There should be a big red button that says, delete everything you've ever known about me, or like forget me. So I think that coupled together can create a very different kind of world and create an incentivization that will lead to like progress and innovation and just like a much better social network and a really good business for the future social networks. But so I tend to see like control as naturally being a sort of an outgrowth from the transparency. It should all start at the transparency, which is why the smart contract formulation is fascinating. Because like you're formalizing in a simple, clear way, any agreements that you're participating in. And as a side comment also, what's really inspiring to me is that I think there's a greater, I don't know if this is always the case, but it seems like from having talked to people on the psychological element, there's a hunger amongst people for transparency and for control. Like transparency, another word for that is authenticity. If you look at the kind of stuff that people hunger for now, they want to know the reality of who you are as an individual. So that means you can create businesses, you can create tools that are built on authenticity, a transparency. And then the same, I'm inspired by the intelligence of people, if you give them control, if you give them power, that they would make good choices. That's really exciting. Of course, not everybody, but that means that decentralized power can create effective systems. So couple that, there's a hunger for transparency so we can move to a world where everyone's being just like real, conveying their genuine human nature. And people are sufficiently intelligent that if they're given power in a distributed mass scale sense, that we're going to build a better world through that, as opposed to centralized supervised control or only a small percent of the population know what the hell they're doing. Everybody else is clueless sheep. So those two coupled together is really to me inspiring. Just to really quickly comment on this stuff that you just said, which I think is super, super, super fascinating. I think that's all exactly right. I think everything that you said is right. And I think it's actually going to be the same for social media and banking and every other type of contract, is that all of those systems that house people's value for them and take control of either their social media value or their financial value or whatever for them, all of that is going to be made available to people in like this autonomous piece of code that does the same thing that the centralized entity used to do. So they get all the features, but the autonomous piece of code gives them the ability to have control while getting all the features, right? So banks give you features, social media sites give you features, whatever other system that you use online gives you features, and then it takes your data and it takes control of your assets from you in return for those features, right? I think the whole big difference here, partly in line with the definition of smart contracts and its evolution is that there's this, now there's this autonomous piece of code that's giving you all those features without requiring the ownership and lock in and control and unilateral kind of ownership of your data or your value or whatever it is that you're giving it, right? And I think what this will lead to fundamentally is just more of a free market dynamic among how people make, I think with the social media folks, you should just make some kind of law or something where you can just export all your data from them, everyone should be able to get their data exported by another application, and then the network effect of all these social media sites will kind of crumble because people will just combine your Twitter data with your Facebook data, with everything else into an application that you control, and there'll just be thousands of different interfaces competing for how to consume all the social media data because it isn't locked in in one centralized actor's control. And so this is just the recurring pattern of what I think all of this will do is it'll give people, it gives people a better deal, right? It gives them features without ownership of data, without ownership of value, and that's really the difference. So I think this is a good place to talk about smart contracts then. Can you tell me the history of smart contracts and the basic sort of definitions of what is it? Sure, so I think smart contracts as a definition has actually gone through some kind of changes or small evolution. Initially, I think it was actually a conception of a digital agreement that was tamper proof and could know things about the world, right? So it could get proof and it could define that something happened and it could conclude an outcome and release payment or do something else. That's actually the definition of smart contracts that I began working in this industry with seven or eight years ago when I started making smart contracts. That is the conception that I had of a smart contract. Then what happened was that was really hard to do, right? Building that type of tamper proof digital agreement that could also know things about the real world and release payments back to people about those events that were codified in this tamper proof format was actually a very tall order. Turns out it's consistent of three parts. It's consisting of the contract, the proof about what happened and the release of value. The way things have evolved so far is that the definition has now come to mean on chain code. So it's come to mean the codification of contractual agreement on a blockchain, right? So there's some code somewhere on some blockchain that defines what the agreement is. Now that eliminates the part of the definition that's related to knowing things about the world and it partly eliminates the definition about payments and stuff like that. But basically it's on chain code, right? We in our recent work on a second white paper have actually put out a different definition that we call hybrid smart contracts that actually tries to go back to the initial definition that I started with seven or eight years ago, which basically says that there's some proof somewhere that's proven to the contract and the contract can know that and the contract can gain proof. Then it can use that proof to settle the agreement that's codified on a blockchain. So you both need a mechanism to provide proof. You need a mechanism to codify the contract in a tamper proof way on something like a blockchain. And then as with all contracts, there's a presumption that there's some kind of release of value. So I think a smart contract in our industry right now means on chain code, which limits it to whatever can be done on chain only. And then in our internal definition for us and for us at Chainlink and for me, it's hybrid smart contracts, which is actually the original definition. It's the idea that a contract can both know what happened and automatically resolve to the proper outcome based on what happened. So you're referring to the Chainlink 2.0 white paper, which is a paper that I recommend people look. It's a very easy read and very well structured and very thorough. So I really enjoyed it. Very recently released, I guess. Can you dig in deeper? What is a hybrid smart contract? You mentioned sort of this idea of data or knowing about the world and on chain and off chain. So what are the different roles in this? So hybrid, by the way, refers to the fact that it's on chain and off chain contracts. So maybe digging deeper of what the heck is it and what does it mean to know stuff about the world? Like how do you actually achieve that? Yeah, absolutely. So the on chain part is where the agreement itself is. That's the smart contract itself. And that's where you codify certain conditions, such as the conditions under which an interest payment is made or the conditions under which the contract pays out the full amount that it holds to someone based on a derivative outcome or something like that. Now, what the on chain code is very good at is creating transparency about what the core conditions of the contract are. It's very good at taking in money from other private keys that send it tokens and send it value to hold. And then it's also very good at returning money or returning value back to other addresses or other private keys. It can also be involved in governance. It can be involved in a few other private key signature based operations. But primarily the on chain part of a hybrid smart contract, from what I've seen so far, defines the agreement, takes in value and returns value based upon the conditions codified in the agreement on a blockchain. The second and equally important off chain part is where the term oracle and an oracle comes in or an oracle mechanism or a decentralized oracle network as we describe it in the paper. And this is another decentralized computational system that has a different goal, right? So blockchains have the goal of packaging transactions into blocks and connecting them in a cryptographically unique way to create security and assurance about that chain of transactions. Oracles and decentralized oracle networks achieve consensus and they achieve decentralization about the topic of what happened, right? So blockchains structure transactions. Some of those transactions might be the state changes in different pieces of on chain code. And then those on chain pieces of code require input. I think the thing that people get kind of a little bit thrown by is despite being called smart contracts, the on chain code on a blockchain cannot actually speak to any other system. So blockchains are valuable and useful as far as they're tamper proof and secure. And to be tamper proof and secure, they're made this kind of walled garden that is able to know and interact only with the highly reliable information that's within that system, which is basically tokens and private key signatures. All the other world's information is not available in a blockchain inherently. And a smart contract or a piece of on chain code can't just say, hey, I'm gonna go get some data from over here because the API they would get it from creates a whole bunch of security concerns for the blockchain itself and a whole bunch of consensus issues about how to agree on what that API said or what the truth of the world is, right? Because it's not even agreeing on what one API said, it's more so creating a reliable form of decentralized computation that can give you a definitive proof of what happened and not just what one API said. So for example, some of our most widely used networks have well over 30 nodes and well over 10 data sources that are all providing information about the same type of data. And then there's consensus on that one piece of data, which is then written in and essentially given back into the on chain code to tell it what happened because you can't really make an agreement unless you know what happened, right? If you and me were to make an agreement and set some contractual conditions, but our agreement could never know what happened, it would be completely useless. However, if you and me made an agreement and there was another system called an Oracle mechanism or decentralized Oracle network that proved what happened definitively and you and me pre agreed that whatever this mechanism says is what happened, then we can achieve an entirely new level of automation. We can suddenly say, there's this piece of on chain code that's highly reliable. We can give it millions, billions, eventually trillions of dollars in value. And it is controlled by this other system over here that's also highly reliable under this configurable set of definitive truth and decentralization conditions, which we all agree are sufficiently stringent to control that much value. And therefore the combination of this tamper proof on chain representation of a contract and this mutually agreed upon definition of a trigger or a proof system combined is a hybrid smart contract, which as you can see probably already does a lot more than just a contract on chain, right? Can you talk about this consensus mechanism, which by the way is just fascinating. So there's the on chain consensus mechanism of proof of work and proof of stake. And then there is this Oracle network consensus mechanism of what is true. So how do you, can you compare the two? Like how do you achieve that kind of consensus? How do you achieve security in integrating data about the world in a way that's definitively true in a way that is usefully true, such that we can rely on it in making major agreements that as you said, involve billions of trillions of dollars. Right, so this is the challenging, this is the challenging question, right? This is the challenging problem that Oracle networks, Oracles, we at Chainlink that we work on in order to create this definitive truth to trigger and create hyper automation in this more advanced form, more advanced form of hybrid smart contracts. The reality I think of this problem is that it is very specific to each use case. And it, and this is actually how we've architected our system is in a very flexible way. So for example, you need an ability for an Oracle network to grow in the amount of nodes that it has relative to the value it secures, right? So if you have an Oracle network that secures a hundred thousand dollars in like a beta of a financial product, maybe it can be fine with only seven nodes and only two or three data sources, right? Because the risk to that Oracle network is relatively low based on the value it secures. So the first question is actually how do you scale security relative to value secured by that Oracle network? Because it wouldn't be very efficient to have a thousand nodes securing $100,000 worth of value. So one of the first questions is how do we properly scale and how do we compose ensembles of nodes in a decentralized way where we can know that, okay, we're going from seven nodes in a network to 15, to 31, to 57, to 105, to a thousand, right? So that's one dimension of the problem. So you have to be scaling the number of nodes relative to the value that's derived from the truth integrated into those nodes. Well, that's not the only problem, right? The other side of this is that you're trying to create a deterministic result, a deterministic output from a set of non deterministic disparate systems, data sources, or places that prove things. Can you also, just as an aside, what is an Oracle node? What is the role of an Oracle node? Sure, so an Oracle node essentially exists in both places, it exists in both worlds. It exists as an on chain contract that represents either an Oracle network or an Oracle node. So there's an on chain interface in the form of a contract that says, I exist to give you this list of inputs. You can request weather data from me, you can request price data from me, you can ask me to send a payment somewhere. So it's like an API, so it's a pointer to a API that provides truth about this world. It's an interface, so just like an API is an interface for Web 2.0 engineers, Oracle networks and the contracts that represent them or individual nodes are the interface of Web 3.0's use of services. And services includes all services, data, payment systems, messaging systems, whatever Web 2.0 or any kind of computing service that you can conceptualize, needs an interface on chain in the form of a contract that says, here are the services I can provide for you, here are the transactions you need to send me to get back this data or that computation or this result. And then what you actually see is that decentralized Oracle networks, because they're uniquely capable of generating their own computations in a decentralized way around the data that they have access to, you actually see decentralized Oracle networks generating a lot of these services. So for example, we have a randomness service, a verifiable randomness function service that basically provides randomness on chain and that randomness is then used in lotteries and various other contracts that need randomness. But that randomness, it's not a piece of data that comes from somewhere else. We don't go to another data source and get it. We generate it within an Oracle node that then provides it over into Oracle node or Oracle nodes that provide it into the contracts themselves. So why do you say Oracle nodes are non deterministic? Well, they are as far as they come to consensus, but there's this kind of different problem here, right? The blockchains are very focused on generating blocks of transactions within a smaller universe of transaction types, a certain block size and a certain set of conditions. And then they have a economic system that says, I will perpetually generate blocks of this size with these transaction types in this kind of limited set of transaction types, whether those are UTXO transactions or scripted solidity or whatever it is. Oracles and Oracle networks, we don't have a blockchain, for example. There is no chain link blockchain. Our goal is not to generate a certain set of very clearly predetermined transaction types into a set of transactions that are put into blocks and it will infinitely be done that way. Our goal is actually to create what we call a Meta layer, a decentralized Meta layer between the non deterministic, highly unreliable world and the highly hyper reliable world of blockchains so that the unreliable world can be passed through this decentralized Meta layer. And it can coexist with a reliable on chain world. Exactly, it can coexist and in some cases, the Meta layer might generate it. So the problem in giving you this straight answer is that there's just such a wide array of services. If you were to say, well, Sergey, how do we generate randomness from a data source? Well, we don't use a data source to generate the randomness. That's the type of service that can be generated in an Oracle network itself. And so there'll be certain computations that Oracle networks themselves generate themselves to augment and improve blockchains. And it is actually the goal of Oracles to consistently do that. So if you were to think about the stack in a very generic high level, you would see blockchains or databases. They're basically the data structures that retain a lot of information in this transparent, highly reliable form. Smart contract code is the application logic. It is the logic under which all of this kind of activity occurs, storing data in the data structure in the blockchain as a database in a certain conceptualization of it. And then Oracles and Oracle networks are all the services that are used by the application code. So, you know, by analogy, let's take Uber. Uber initially, some core code goes and gets the GPS API from Google Maps about the user's location, sends a message to the user through Twilio, pays the driver through Stripe. If those services weren't available to the people who made Uber, they wouldn't have made Uber, right? Because they would have written their core code on some database, and then they would have had to make a geolocation company, a telecom messaging company, and the global payments company. And they wouldn't have done that because it's too hard. And that's the weird scenario that a lot of people in our industry are in. And that's the problem that Oracles and Oracle networks fix is they provide these decentralized services to take this developer ecosystem, the blockchain and smart contract developer ecosystem from, hey, I can have a database and write some application logic about tokenization and voting and private key signing, all of which is super useful and is a critical foundation. But now, if you just layer on all the world's services, whether that's market data, weather data, randomness, suddenly people can build DeFi, fraud proof gaming, fraud proof global trade, fraud proof ad networks. And that's why this world of decentralized services and decentralized Oracle networks is particularly, in my opinion, important to our industry. Yeah, it's funny. And you talk about the currents of a decentralized world, decentralized world, DeFi, but decentralized services world is primarily just tokens. And it's basically just financial transactions. And the kind of thing, the reason why it's super exciting, the kind of thing you do with Chainlink and Oracle networks is that you can basically open up the whole world of services to this kind of decentralized smart contract world. I mean, you're talking about just orders of magnitude greater impact financially and just socially and philosophically. Are there interesting near term and long term applications that excite you? Yeah, there's a lot that excites me. And that is how I think about it, that it's not just about we made a decentralized Oracle network. It's about we made a decentralized service or collection of services that's going from hundreds to thousands. And then people are able to build the hybrid smart contracts, which I think will redefine what our industry is about. Because for example, for the people that only learned about blockchains through the lens of NFTs, they understand blockchains through NFTs, not through speculative tokens or Bitcoins, right? And I think that will continue. I think the use cases that excite me, they vary between the developed market, the developed world's economies and emerging markets. I think in the developed world, what you will see is that transparency, creating a new level of information for how markets work and the risk that is in markets and kind of the dynamics that put the global financial system at systemic financial risk like 2008. And my hope is that all of this infrastructure will soften the boom and bust cycles by making information immediately available to all market participants, which is by the way, what all market participants want, except for the very, very, very small minority that are able to game the system and their benefit and benefit from booms but avoid busts because of their asymmetric access to information, which really everybody should have and which this technically solves. I think in the process of doing that and which is happening, I think right about now, you see a polishing of the technology such that it can be made available to emerging markets. And on a personal level, I feel that the emerging markets will benefit much more from this technology, just like the emerging markets benefit much more from the internet or from those $50 Android phones that people can have, because it's such a massive shift in how people's lives work, right? I have always had access to books and a library, which has been fantastic and very important. But there are places in the world where people don't have libraries, but now they have the internet and a $50 Android phone and they can watch the same Stanford lecture that I watch. I mean, that's kind of mind blowing realistically, right? They just went from zero to one in a very, very dramatic way. I think all of these smart contracts, and in my case, I think the one that I seem to keep coming back to is crop insurance, where partly because it doesn't have a tokenization component, partly because it's actually much more important than it might seem. What is crop insurance? Right, so this is the nature of why it's sometimes hard to see the full value of what our industry does, because it solves all these kinds of backend problems that we don't have, right? So crop insurance is if I own a farm and it doesn't rain, I get an insurance payout, so I don't need to close down my farm, because if it didn't rain, I don't have crops, right? So people in the developed world can get crop insurance and there's all kinds of systems that basically pay them out, and then they can argue with the insurance company if they don't get paid out properly and whatever. And this allows people to smooth out risk. In fact, a lot of the global options markets were about this, right? They were initially about people selling their produce or their crops ahead of time, so that if there was a risk of drought, they weren't impacted by it, right? And that's where a lot of options trading and all this kind of stuff came from, even though it's now turned into this kind of global casino. But in the emerging market, there are literally people that, if they don't have rain for two seasons, they need to close down their farm and become a migrant worker of some kind. And now they have a $50 Android phone where they can read Wikipedia, but they're still decades away from an insurance company coming to their geography and offering them insurance because their local legal system simply doesn't allow that type of thing to exist. No insurance company is gonna go and create insurance entity and offer them insurance because the levels of fraud and the ability to resolve that fraud through courts would just not exist. So now these people have to wait for decades to have this very basic form of financial protection or something like a bank account even. And with this technology, they don't, right? So with this technology, if I have a $50 Android phone and the smart contract has data from satellites or weather stations about the weather conditions in the geography that my farm is in, I can put value into the smart contract and the smart contract will automatically pay me out back, pay me back out at my Android phone. And guess what? I just leapfrogged past my corrupt government not being able to provide a legal infrastructure to create insurance. I just leapfrogged past dealing with insurance companies that'll probably price gouge me and often not pay out. And I leapfrogged into the world of hyper reliable kind of guaranteed smart contract outcomes that are as good or in many cases better than what farmers in all parts of other parts of the world have. And this type of dynamic for the emerging markets of creating a way for people to control and manage risk in their economic life, I think extends way past insurance. It extends to them having bank accounts to combat local inflation. It extends to them being able to sell their goods on the free market of global trade without middlemen. It extends to all these things that we don't really care about, right? Because we're not farmers, but are unbelievably impactful for people that don't have a bank account and their inflation rate in their country is double digits or their farm completely depends on rain or their livelihood completely depends on their ability to sell goods. And they can't sell those goods because there's a middleman who essentially controls all the trust relationships. But now we have the internet and smart contracts and that might not have to be the case in the next five or 10 years. Yeah, so that definitely has a quality of life impact on the particular farmer's life, but I suspect it has a huge like down the line ripple effect on the whole supply chain. So if you think about farmers, but any other people that produce things that are part of a large like logistics network, like supply chain network, that means when you increase reliability, you sort of increase transparency and control, but like where any one node in that supply chain network can formalize the way it operates in its agreements with others, then you could just have a very like at scale transformative effect on how people that down the line use the services that you provide, the products that you create operate. So like, it's almost hard to imagine the possible ways it might transform the world. I wonder how much friction there is in the system, I guess, currently that smart contracts might remove. That's almost unknown. You can sort of hypothesize and stuff, but I wonder. I've seen enough bureaucracy in my life to know that smart contracts in many cases would remove bureaucracy. And I wonder how the world will be once you remove much of the bureaucracy. Coming from the Soviet Union, where I just have seen the life sucked out of the innovative spirit of human nature by bureaucracy. I wonder, the kind of amazing world that could be created once bureaucracy is removed. Yeah, I think it's fascinating how the world can evolve. I think this extends a lot further than people think into many, many different parts of the global economy. It might start with NFTs for art, or it might start with DeFi, right? Or it might start with fraud proof ad networks next. We don't know what it's gonna go to next, but I think the implication of people being in a system of contracts that holds them accountable and guarantees contractual outcomes, regardless of a local legal system, is something that I think extends to the supply chain. You can prove that goods were sourced in an ethical way, and you can prove that in a way that can't be gamed. That'll change buying power and supplier power and how people produce goods that we all consume. And then on the political level, I personally think that in a number of decades, we could literally be in a place where politicians can commit to a certain set of smart contract kind of budget, definitional kind of results. For example, we discovered oil. I promise as a politician, I'm gonna take the oil and I'm gonna redistribute it to all of you. Well, that's wonderful. That's a great idea. Sounds very nice when you're running for office. Why don't we codify that in a smart contract? And why don't we put those conditions very solidly on a blockchain? And then once you've been elected, we'll just turn that one on and it'll distribute the money just like you said, and everything will be fine. I personally think that this new level of systems that allows trustworthy collaboration between everybody, between supply chain partners, ad network users, the financial system, insurance companies, and farmers, all of these are just interactions that require a trusted entity, or in this case, a trusted piece of code to orchestrate the interaction in the way that everyone agrees. Yeah, one of the things that makes the United States fascinating is the founding documents. And it's fascinating to think of us moving into the new in the 21st century to a digital version of that. So the constitution, a smart constitution, no offense to the paper constitution, and that would have transformative effects on politicians and governments, holding people accountable. Oh man, that's so exciting to think that we might enforce accountability through the smart contract process. Exactly, why can't that happen? Anything that we could codify into a smart contract, and anything that we all agree is the way the world should work. And then anything that we can get proof about, right? Anything that a system somewhere could tell us happened, those are the pieces of the puzzle, right? We need a trusted piece of code, we need to have agreement that that's how the world should work, and we need a system that'll tell that trusted piece of code what happened. As long as we have those three things, we can theoretically codify any set of agreements about anything where those three properties take hold. I wonder if you could apply that to like military conflict and so on. Recently, Biden announced that we're going to pull off from Afghanistan after 20 years in the war. I wonder, there's a lot of debacles around war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq, all those kinds of things. I wonder if that was instead formulated as a smart contract. Like that might have actually huge impact on the way we do conflict. So you think of the smart contract as a kind of win win situation where you're doing like financial transactions or something like that. But you could see that also about military conflict or like whenever two nations are at tension with each other, different scales of conflict, that you can have conflict codified. And that would potentially resolve conflict much faster because there's honesty, transparency and control within that conflict, because there's conflict in this world. And I, again, very, very inspiring to think about the kind of effects it might have on the negative kinds of contracts, on the tense, painful kinds of contracts. I haven't thought about that as much. It's actually kind of scary, the stuff you're thinking through now with like the war contracts or something. That's not in the white paper. We don't have anything about war contracts or anything. Again, this is the Russian, we're both Russian, but I'm a little more Russian in the suffering side. Maybe I read way too much Dostoevsky and military kind of ideas. But anyway, holding politicians accountable in all forms, I think is really powerful. Is there something you could say as a small aside on how smart contracts actually work if we look at the code? Is there some nice way to say technically what is a smart contract? What does it mean to codify these agreements, the actual process for people who might not at all be familiar? I think you just write it into code that operates in this kind of decentralized infrastructure. You usually write code that runs in a central server somewhere. Now you write code that runs across a lot of different machines in this decentralized way. And then after you write it, you need services. And that's where oracles come in, they provide all the services. So just like you would be writing code in web 2.0 land, running it on a server somewhere and using an API, here you'd be writing code, putting it on a decentralized infrastructure like a blockchain or a smart contract platform like Ethereum. And then you would be using various services in the form of oracles. So they'll just be called oracles or decentralized services instead of APIs. And you're basically composing the same type of architecture except it's hyper reliable. At the moment, it's a little bit less efficient because there's an early stage to our industry. But it provides this extreme level of reliability and transparency, which for certain use cases is an absolute critical component and is completely reinventing how they work. So I think people should look at what are the use cases where that trust dynamic can be so heavily improved. And that's probably the ones where this is maybe initially useful. But I mean, just to emphasize, I don't think people realize when you say code that we're talking about non obfuscated actual program. Like you can read it, you can understand it. And there's something about, maybe this is my computer science perspective of like software engineering perspective, but there's something about the formalism of programming languages, which enforces simplicity and clarity and transparency. And because it's seen to everybody, I mean, simplicity is enforced. There's something about natural language, like language as written in the constitution, for example, where there's so many interpretations. With the nice thing about programs, there's not going to be a huge number of books written about what was meant by this particular line because it's pretty clear. Like programming languages have a clarity to them that natural language does not, and they don't have ambiguity, which I think it's important to pause on because it's really powerful. It's really difficult to think about. I think we live in a world where all the philosophers and legal minds don't know how to program. So I think, not all, most don't. And so we don't often see the philosophical impact of this kind of idea that the agreements between humans can be written in a programming language. That's a really transformative idea. That, I mean, yeah, it's an idea that's not just technical. It's not just financial. It's philosophical. It's rethinking human nature from a digital perspective. Like what is human civilization? It's interaction between humans. And rethinking that interaction as a digital interaction that is managed by programming languages, by programs, by code. I mean, that's fascinating. That we'll look back at this time potentially as one where us little descendants of apes did not realize how important this moment in history is. Like human beings might be totally different a century from now because we codified the interaction between humans. That might have more of an impact than anything else we do today. You think about the impact of the internet, one of the cool things is digitization of data. But we have not yet integrated the tools, the mechanisms fully that use that data and interact with humans yet. And that's what smart contracts do. I wonder if you think about the role of artificial intelligence in all of this. Because your smart contracts are kind of agreements, maybe you disagree with this, but at least the way I'm thinking about it is agreements between humans or groups of humans. But it seems like because everything's operating in the digital space that you can integrate non humans into this. Or AI systems that help out humans, managed by humans. Like what do you think about a world of hybrid smart contracts, codifying agreements between hybrid intelligent being networks of humans and AI systems? Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. In terms of AI, I'm not an expert, right? So it might be a bit simplistic or naive, my ideas in this field. I think everyone saw the Terminator movie, right? Everybody kind of saw the Terminator movie in the 90s. And it was like, this is really scary. I personally think AI is amazing and makes perfect sense. I think it will evolve to a place where people have... Just to understand, I work in the world of trust issues, right? I work in the world of how can technology solve trust and collaboration issues using encryption, using cryptographically guaranteed systems, using decentralized infrastructure, right? So that's the world that I've been inhabiting for many, many years now, building smart contracts for seven or eight, doing stuff before that. It's kind of what I'm focused on. So I view AI through that same lens. And my brain naturally asks, well, what is the trust issue that people might have with AI? And my natural kind of response is, well, let's say AI continues to be built and improve. At some point, I have no clue where we are on this now. I've seen different ideas that were very far from this. I've seen other ideas were very close to this. At a certain point, we'd arrive at a place with AI where we would be a little bit worried about just how much it could do, right? We might be worried that AI could do things we don't want it to do, but we still want to give AI a level of control over our lives, right? So in my world, that's a trust issue. And the way that that trust issue would be solved with blockchains is actually very straightforward. And I think in its simplicity, quite powerful. You could have an AI that has an ability to do and control key parts of your and our lives, right? But then you could limit it with private keys and blockchains and create certain guardrails and firm kind of walls and limits to what the AI could never go past, assuming that encryption, right? That encryption continues to work, right? And assuming that if it's not that AI's specialization to break encryption, that it wouldn't be able to do that, right? So if you have an AI that controls something very important, whatever it is, shipping or something in defense or something in the financial system, whatever it is, but you're sitting there and you're kind of worried, hey, this thing is unbelievable. It's coming up with things we wouldn't have thought of in a hundred years, but maybe it's a little too unbelievable. How do you limit it? Well, if you bake in private keys and you bake in these kind of blockchain based limitations, you can create the conditions beyond which an AI could never act. And those could once again be codified in the very specific unambiguous terms in which you described, which once again, in my trust issue focused world, would solve the trust issue for users and make them comfortable with using the AI or ceding control to the AI, which I think in more advanced versions of AI will continue to be a concern, right? This is fascinating. So smart contracts actually provide a mechanism for human supervision of AI systems. With encryption, very encryption heavy. So it's not about like, is it smarter than us? It's about will the encryption hold up? Yep. So that's based on the assumption that encryption holds up. I think that's a safe assumption. We can get into that whole discussion, but from quantum computing, but cracking encryption is very difficult. That's a whole nother discussion. I think we're safe on the safe ground for quite a long time, assuming encryption holds. I, there's a space that is at the cutting edge of general intelligence research in the AI community, which is the space of program synthesis or AI generating programs. So that's different than what you're referring to is AI being able to generate smart contracts. And that to me is kind of fascinating to think of, especially two AI systems between each other, generating contracts, sort of almost creating a world where most of the contracts are between nonhuman beings. I think an AI system, as I think about it, and once again, this is not my field. This is something I might watch a YouTube video on or just see something interesting about at some point. I think if I were to just reason through it even now, I think the highly deterministic and guaranteed nature of smart contracts would probably be preferable to an AI because I'm guessing an AI would have a lot of problems with dealing with the human element of how contracts work today, right? So an AI, for example, couldn't pick up the phone and call Dave at a bank to do a derivative and kind of discuss with Dave and have a call with him and kind of have a conversation and get him comfortable and tell him it's gonna be fine and kind of smooth out all the weird social cues that have to do with making certain derivatives. I'm assuming that that's a pretty complicated neural map AI kind of problem. Yeah, so if I think about it, the deterministic guaranteed nature of smart contracts probably would, and if, assuming they're accessible to AIs, could actually, interestingly enough, be the format that they prefer to codify their relationship with non AI systems and very possibly other AI systems, right, because it is very, I mean, it's pretty guaranteed, right? All the other types of contracts that an AI could go out there and seek to do would require some language processing around the law. And I think, I don't know if this is a term, but probably not a smart AI or a good AI or whatever the term is for a high quality AI, would probably realize some of the limitations and the risks. Yeah, yeah, AI definitely dislikes ambiguity and would prefer the determinism, the deterministic nature of smart contracts. I do wonder about this particular problem and maybe you could speak to it of how smart contracts can take over certain industries in a sense or how certain industries can convert their sets of agreements into smart contracts, which is, you mentioned sort of talking to Dave from the bank, many of our laws, many of our agreements are currently through natural language, through words. And so there is a process of mapping that has to occur in order to convert the legal agreements, legal contracts of today to smart contracts that by the way, AI may be able to help with. But by way of question, how do you think we convert the legal contracts on which many industries currently function today or not even legal contracts, but ambiguous kind of agreements, maybe they're loose sometimes into more formal deterministic agreements that are represented by smart contracts? So I think there's two, maybe two sides to this. I think the first one is actually not a huge problem where you have things like the is the master agreement for derivatives or you have these agreements that basically already reference a system somewhere, like for example, many legal agreements already accept eSignature. And so they're saying, hey, I'm gonna use this computing system over here around signatures and I'm gonna consider, and there's laws around that and there's clauses that say eSignature is good enough for this agreement. I actually don't think this is a big problem for the vast majority of legal agreements that use systems already. So what you'll do is you'll swap out one repository or one set of system of contract settlement. And you'll just say, hey, this blockchain system over here is my new system of contract settlement. Whatever it says is the state of the agreement instead of the centralized system over there. And so there's actually a huge amount of agreements that are already able to do that and I think we'll do that. I think there's another side to your question, which is the amount of agreements that are very ambiguous that can be turned into smart contracts. And I think the limitation there is twofold. First of all, like you said earlier, the highly reliable smart contract and the lack of opaqueness and the clarity of smart contracts is very high and very powerful and very clear and it's, in my opinion, gonna be much, much easier to take a smart contract and turn it into a set of natural language explanations and just say, hey, this is what this does, right? So I think that many contracts are, and even now in decentralized finance and DeFi and in decentralized insurance, they're basically being rebuilt in this format and that rebuilding will make them clearer, like you said, and then restating those in natural language and explaining to people, well, you know, whether it is this, I think it'll actually be a lot simpler to explain to people what the contract is about. It's fascinating. Mapping smart contracts into natural language, I didn't even think about that. So that's, you're saying that's doable and natural and easy to do. Because there's so much clear, right? There's that forced clarity that you talked about. I think the second aspect of this problem is the nuance around what contracts can be made unambiguous and I think that comes down to, often comes down to proving what happened, which is where Oracle networks and decentralized Oracle networks and Chainlink would come in and our experience there is quite extensive over the many years that we've worked on many different contract types. I think what it fundamentally comes down to is whether there is data. So we're not gonna be able to make a hybrid smart contract about whether somebody painted your house the right color blue. We're just not gonna be doing that because there's no data feed that tells us that your house was painted blue or that it was the right color of blue. You know, unless somebody sets up a drone with a color analysis tool and they generate that data. Which by the way, it could be possible, right? They could, there could be, if there's enough demand then the service would be created that has drones flying around that's telling you about the colors of, you know, all this kind of stuff. So if there's actual demand that that would be created and because there'll be value to connect that data feed to the smart contracts and so on. I think you have it unbelievably right because there are already insurance companies that use drones to monitor construction sites from overhead and see how many people are wearing hard hats. And if the percentage of people wearing hard hats isn't sufficiently high, then, you know, the policy is voided. And so in that case, there is a data source and that data source can be put into a hybrid smart contract. So the limitation of hybrid smart contracts is, is there a data source or a set of data sources to create definitive truth, to settle the contract and eliminate ambiguity. And then as you said, I think as people realize that smart contracts are a format in which they can form agreement about things like that insurance product around, you know, how many people are wearing hard hats. If I'm the construction site owner, well, you know, I would really like a guarantee that your insurance policy is gonna pay me out if everyone is wearing hard hats. And in that case, there is demand for the data and people will generate the data. And I actually think the insurance industry is interestingly a precursor of this because they're so data driven. You already see insurance companies paying IoT companies to put data into their customer's infrastructure at the cost of the insurance company to generate the data that the insurance company uses to make a policy for the customer. So you basically already have people who really want to price data into their agreements when they're of sufficiently high value paying for their own customers to get data sensors into their infrastructure. And I think as smart contracts become more of a requested format or data driven contracts become more of a format, there will be a growing demand about proving what happened through data. So it'll be motivating totally new data feeds being created. By the way, the insurance industry broadly, the revolutions there, it would be huge. I've worked quite a bit with autonomous vehicles, semi autonomous and just vehicles in general. The insurance industry there, by the way, makes a huge amount of money, but is using very crappy data feeds, revolutionizing how like not by crappy, I mean very crude. Like literally the insurance is based on things like age, gender, like basic demographic information as opposed to really high resolution information about you as an individual, which you may or may not want to provide. So you can choose from an individual perspective to provide a data feed. And there like the power of insurance to enable the individual, to empower the individual could be huge because ultimately smart contracts motivate the use of data, the creation of new data feeds, but leveraging the whatever service it provides in truth, as opposed to some kind of very loose notion of who you are. So that I'm not, again, not sure how that would change things, but in terms of the fundamental experience of life, because I think we all rely on insurance, not just in business, but in life and grounding that insurance in more and more accurate representation of reality might just have transformative effects on society. Well, just to mention one quick thing that you said, where I noticed another trust issue, you said the user might not want to share their data. So what you could actually do, and what we've already worked on is, you can have a smart contract that holds the data and evaluates the data of the user without sharing it with the insurance companies. And the insurance company knows that the smart contract will evaluate it according to the policy. They don't need the data. And the user can provide the data knowing it'll never touch the insurance company because it's only provided to the smart contract. And suddenly you've solved another trust issue because the autonomous piece of code can evaluate information separately from the interests of both of the counterparties. And so this is the recurring theme. I think you're seeing this recurring theme where there's a trust issue, people can't use the system, they can't collaborate, they can't share information that would make a better agreement for both of them, they can't solve a risk in their daily life, they can't participate in a market, they can't have a bank account because nobody will give it to them because they can't give it to them in that legal system. And once you have an autonomous piece of code that can also know what's going on, thanks to Oracle networks and that combination of the code and the Oracle network for the hybrid smart contract, the same pattern just recurs. It's really the same pattern. And this is why I keep saying trust issues. It's because I basically, almost every contractual trust issue that I see where there is a piece of data to prove and settle the trust issue in a way that works for both parties, there is no reason not to use an autonomous, highly reliable contract and piece of code. And I have to tell you, I've seen this in a lot of different industries. I've seen it insurance, ad networks, global finance, global trade, those are all multi trillion dollar industries. And then there are other smaller industries. Like even one of the first smart contracts we worked on many years ago was for search engine optimization firms where they would tell you, hey, I'm gonna raise your search engine ranking, give me the money. And people wouldn't wanna give them the money because they never knew if they were gonna do it. And then the search engine firm doesn't wanna do any work thinking they'll never get any money. So we just initially even came up with a system where you could put Bitcoin into a smart contract and it would be released based on whether the search rank of a website got to a certain level on Google for a certain keyword, right? And so the trust problem was solved. But it's just the same story, right? It's kind of like trust issues around AI, trust issues around financial products, trust issues around insurance, trust issues around social media, whatever it is. I think that's what people looking at this industry really need to understand. And once they do understand, they realize what this is all about. This is about redefining how everyone collaborates with everyone about everything where we can prove something through data. You've mentioned confidentiality and privacy that the parties don't need to necessarily know private data in this interaction. You talk about confidentiality in the white paper for Chainlink 2.0. Can you talk more about how to achieve confidentiality in this process? Sure, sure, absolutely. So I think you once again need to think of the contract as existing in two parts, right? You have the on chain code and then you have this off chain system called the centralized Oracle network. So the question is really what portion of the contract should live in what part of these two systems, right? So if you wanna create transparency, you should put more information on chain because that's what blockchains are very good at. They're public, transparent, but they don't necessarily have privacy. Well, you can see how those two things are a little bit kind of completely diametrically opposed. So I do think and I do see blockchains working on on chain encrypted smart contracts. That's very inefficient. It has a lot of nuances around it. That I think will appear at some point. I think until it appears, you have an option of taking a part of the computation and putting it into the centralized Oracle network. We actually did an entire paper about this that we presented at Stanford in February of last year, something called Mixicles, which basically talks about how you can take an Oracle network and you can put a portion of the computation into the Oracle network, assuming that you're comfortable with that limited set of nodes knowing what the computation is. And you could actually provide additional confidentiality through special hardware called trusted execution environments that all those nodes are forced to run. So they won't even know what they're operating. And so at the end of the day, if you look at a hybrid smart contract as gaining functionality from its on chain code and gaining other functionality from its off chain decentralized Oracle network component, you can place the part of the computation that you would like to be private in the decentralized Oracle network, because you can control the set of nodes. You can control the committee of nodes and you can require that they run certain hardware to keep the information private, right? So you could basically make a derivative that, or a binary option is the example used in the Mixicles paper where the payout happened on chain, but it was actually impossible to tell what the outcome of the contract was. So the outcome of the contract was computed in the centralized Oracle network. And then there was a switch that triggered who received the payment, but from the point of view of analyzing the on chain transactions and seeing who received the payment or what the outcome of the contract was, you couldn't derive that, you couldn't backward engineer what that was, but the users of that hybrid smart contract still had on chain code that guaranteed them that as long as the decentralized Oracle network found a certain outcome, right? Determined a certain outcome that the relevant user would get paid and there was still a place to put value, right? So there is this kind of fundamental tension between confidentiality, privacy, which is very important for many contracts, which is critical to many contracts and the public and transparent nature of blockchains, which I think eventually will be solved through encrypted on chain smart contracts. That'll take some time, I think that'll take years in my opinion. And before we arrive there, I think people will put the private portion into the centralized Oracle network. Once again, going back to what the decentralized Oracle networks do, they seek to provide these services, right? So the ability to do a privacy preserving computation is perhaps a service without which a certain type of contract might never come into existence in the form of an on chain hybrid smart contract. And so this is once again, what we see the centralized Oracle networks and decentralized services doing is providing people these tools and building blocks to compose, like I'm great at making these derivatives contracts, but I can't make them unless I can retain the privacy of them. And our goal is to provide the infrastructure that gives you as a developer and as a creator of smart contracts, that capability. And what we've seen is that as we provide that capability, people create more, which is also really the story of the internet, right? The story of the internet is it was really tough to do eCommerce while everything was an HTTP and credit cards were transmitted publicly. And so eCommerce was kind of tough because how am I gonna send my credit card over public on encrypted channels, right? But the second HTTPS appears, eCommerce becomes a lot easier because I can put in my credit card number and it can be sent over an encrypted channel and it's not at risk. And so I can participate in eCommerce as long as I have a credit card. I think those types, and I'm sure that was unexpected, right, I'm sure at the time that was an unexpected outcome from that technology. And so I think this is why we sometimes have this focus on privacy because in our work with contracts and their transition into this hybrid smart contract form, we see a substantial amount of need for privacy as an inherent property of these contracts. And it'll take a while before that's possible to create the kind of technology innovation required to do that on chain. I know there's a few ideas that are being floating about, but so the currently distributed Oracle networks provide that feature, which is essential to many contracts. What brings to mind in this whole space, again, it might be outside of your expertise, but within the world which I'm passionate about, which is machine learning, and it seems like very naturally because current machine learning systems are very data hungry and much of the value mined by companies in the digital space are from data. They often want their data to maintain privacy. So you think about an autonomous vehicle space, Tesla is collecting a huge amount of data, Waymo is collecting a huge amount of data. It seems like it would be very beneficial to form contracts where one could use the data from the other in some kind of privacy preserving way, but also where all the uses of data are codified and you can exchange value cleanly, basically contracts over data, over machine learning systems use of different data. I don't know, do you talk to machine learning folks that use ideas of smart contracts or is that for outside of your interest? Because it seems like exceptionally applicable set of, when we talk about different services that might be created and revolutionized by smart, especially hybrid smart contracts, I think machine learning systems comes to mind to me in all industries. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to interact with those folks, with those services. I think what you're talking about is more data marketplaces in the data marketplace side of things. Well, this is actually once again, very applicable because there's a trust issue. At the end of the day, let's say I'm trying to sell you some data. You don't know the quality of the data. So you don't know what you wanna pay for it. And I can't give you the data for you to determine the quality because I've given you the data, right? Guess what? We need an autonomous impartial agent. We need an impartial computational kind of agent and on chain smart contract with an Oracle network to assess my data to write, to basically take random cross section samples of the data, assess it for quality, assess it for signal from the algorithm you have, which you don't wanna share with me because you don't wanna know the algorithm you're working on, right? You don't want me to know what you want the data for. So now the autonomous agent takes your algorithm, keeping it private from me and takes my data, keeping it private from you, assesses it on a random cross section sampling for quality of data, returns the scoring back to you, allows you to determine a price. And now both you and me know that we've arrived at a fair price for the quality of my data for what you wanna do with it. And that's once again, from what I've seen in the data marketplaces, which are full of people who want that data for these learning models, often for financial markets, often for other reasons, this is their fundamental problem, which amazingly enough, there's a trust issue that is getting solved. And I think you can see even on the face of it, once that trust issue is solved, those markets can work a lot better, right? I don't need to know your algorithm. You don't need to know my data. We both know that the autonomous agent is not under either of our control and gave us a fair assessment and a fair price. And that's it. And we're all very comfortable with that. I could even make conditions that your algorithm isn't analyzing the data for something I don't want you to analyze it for, or you could make conditions that the data has to have any number of properties. And once again, you haven't leaked any signal to me and I haven't leaked any data to you, which is once again, just another type of trust issue that all of this solve. So it's the same pattern. If you work in this industry long enough, or if you really look at these use cases long enough, you'll simply come to the question, and this is the useful question, what is the trust issue this is solving? And then if you can get an answer to that question on a case by case basis, that's when you'll understand why blockchains are relevant. And then once you do that with enough use cases, it becomes a little bit mind blank. You've mentioned trust quite a bit. You also mentioned trust minimization in the Chainlink White Paper. Can we dig into trust a little bit more? What is the nature of trust that you think about in these smart contracts? What is trust minimization? How do we accomplish, achieve trust minimization? Sure, sure. I think it's important maybe to have a conception of what the alternative is, right? What is highly reliable trust minimized off chain and on chain computation and alternative to? So this is just kind of how I see the world in these two camps. One camp is the traditional, what I call brand based or paper guarantee camp. And this is the world as pretty much most or all people know today. This is the world where there's a bank logo or an insurance company logo, or some kind of logo. There's a very big building with marble arches and columns, it's the biggest building in the town. It's bigger than the church. And everybody feels very good. Everybody's got such a nice logo. It's such a big building. Why don't I give them my money? Why don't I interact with them on the basis of any kind of agreement? And that's good. And that is definitely better than that not being there. And that is definitely a huge improvement for how people conduct commerce. Letters of credit from branded entities are very important for global trade to take place in the early stages of global trade. So that's good, but it is fundamentally just a paper agreement with a legal framework behind it. And if the paper agreement you have would say Robinhood or somebody else suddenly has to change, well, it changes and you can't really do anything about it. You won't be able to change anything about what happened there. There's some long terms of service. There's some other agreements around all this stuff. At the end of the day, that's the brand based and paper guarantee world where it's all very vague and opaque and you're kind of hoping for the best because there's a nice logo. It's been around a hundred years. There's a lot of marble. Put a lot of marble. Big building, lots of marbles. This is why banks have such nice buildings, right? It's not because they want to spend money on buildings. It's to create confidence in them as an entity in order for people to transact through them, right? This is why all these kind of go to cities that had gold rushes, go to cities that needed banking as a service in certain time periods, they're the most beautiful buildings at least in the United States. So this is the brand based paper guarantee model for which up until now, there has never been an alternative, right? So up until now, if you had a bad experience with a bank or insurance company or some logo somewhere, you would only have one option. Your option would be to go across the road and down the block to another building with another color of marble and another set of agreements that are fundamentally still paper brand agreements, right? Now for the first time, you have mathematical agreements. You have mathematically guaranteed encryption secured, decentralized infrastructure powered agreements, right? This is really the shift. This is really the comparison and the alternative through which people should view all of this in my opinion, because there's once again, this conception that everything is fine, everything works very well. Well, it does, it works fine and very well as long as nothing goes wrong. And then in the cases when things go wrong, which they pretty much invariably at some point do, then you find out that, well, you know, turns out they don't have to pay me or turns out I can't trade or turns out the ATMs can be locked up and only give me 66 euros per day, whether I'm a business or an individual, like what happened in Greece a few years ago, right? And the reality is that once that becomes a strong enough kind of realization for people, I think they will all just migrate to mathematically guaranteed contracts because why wouldn't you? So in the world of mathematically guaranteed contracts, kind of how do we, and cryptographically secured and decentralized infrastructure powered, how do we evolve into that world? Well, at the end of the day, it comes down to consensus, right, it comes down to a collection of independent nodes, a collection of provably independent computing systems arriving at the same conclusion impartially. That conclusion might be the transaction is valid between address A and address B, address A has one Bitcoin, wants to send it to address B, now address B has one Bitcoin, right? So that's one degree of validation. It has certain cryptographic primitives that are used, certain levels of cryptography, encryption, and other methods that basically provide clarity and those guarantees. But fundamentally, it's this level of consensus that multiple independent computing systems came to the same conclusion, verified that conclusion and created a sense of finality, created a final state that is globally considered to be the state of a transaction. And that is how it's achieved, right? So it's achieved by users looking at these mathematical contract systems and saying, you know, if I have money in a bank, there's one single person who controls that money, that's the bank, they could choose to give me my money or choose not to give me my money. And that's great, but maybe there's a percentage of what I own that I wanna put into another system where there's thousands of independent computing systems that are promising me, you know, with the help of cryptographic primitives, that I will be able to always have access to this, whatever this is, whatever this token is, I will at least, or at the very least, I will always have unfettered, complete control and access to it. So, you know, that's one example. Another example is, hey, we have a hybrid smart contract for something like crop insurance. I, as the user, evaluate where this smart contract runs. Oh, wow, the smart contract runs on Ethereum. Great, thousands of nodes, lots of computational security, hash power, so on and so on. Then I look at, oh, well, what triggers the contract? Oh, there's this Oracle network. Okay, it's composed of 25 nodes or 15 nodes, gets data from five different weather stations. You know, I'm comfortable with that. I have a certain level of comfort with that hybrid smart contract and its ability to provide me consensus about the transaction once the contract knows what's happened, and I'm comfortable with the consensus around the event that controls the contract, right? Because once again, that event is what determines what happens with the contract. And if the contract is super well written, it doesn't matter if the event isn't reliable, right? So now I've made this determination. I've gotten all this clear, transparent information about this system that combines the contract code with a decentralized Oracle network. And I've made my decision to participate in this decentralized insurance, kind of crop insurance policy. I've sent the Bitcoin or the stable coin or whatever I have on my Android phone. And then time goes by and let's say it doesn't rain, lo and behold, the smart contract returns the relevant amount from the policy back to me. I continue my life as a farmer. And by the way, the fact that that happened contributes reputation and contributes proof back to both the contract as something that can prove to other people that it has settled and the Oracle network as something that can prove that it has properly assessed reality or properly triggered a contract. And this is where there's one of many network effects where the more that smart contracts and Oracle networks are used, they themselves generate this immutable on chain data that proves their value and reliability. And improving more and more of that in more and more kind of use cases and more and more variants of the same contract, they arrive at a greater body of proof that they like, I am the decentralized crop, the decentralized insurance contract for crop insurance used by a million users. And my failure rate is non existent or really low. And here's my Oracle network. And by the way, it's also settled a million of these. And so it's not the logo, right? It's not, hey, what a nice logo you have on top of a building above a train terminal or something. It's much more, hey, there's a million people, there's a million separate contracts that got settled correctly. I have all the proof that I could ever need about that. And it's not something that's very easy to gain, right? Because real value was at stake, real value was moved around. And so I think once again, the transparency aspect comes in where you're able to prove that the cryptographically enforced contracts are better. That said, you can still integrate the traditional banks as long as you create a data feed on the amount of marble that's included. So if that's valuable to you in terms of reputation, you could still integrate the marble, the amount of marble that and the size of the logo. We could still keep the banks around. I think we will. I think what'll happen with the banks and all the insurance companies, by the way, is not that they'll all just die or something. I think it'll be just like the internet. There'll be some of them that adopt this and some of them that don't, and some of them that do it faster, some of them that do it slower. And that's an economic decision that they'll make. I think their whole question is, is this a foregone conclusion? I mean, I think my answer is yes, this is definitely gonna be happening. I think they still have a question of, is this gonna change my industry? But I'm seeing a definite shift in people's understanding. And I think that shift is gonna accelerate rapidly as one or two of them of their competitors throw their hat in the smart contract ring and say, well, I have smart contracts. I guarantee my outcomes to you. What do they do for you? It's risky, just use mine. And the second some of them start losing business because of that, they're gonna move very quickly because that's what all of their compensation structures and all their goal planning structures are based around. They're based around what is losing us business or getting us business. Yeah, it's fascinating organizationally though, to think about banks, they're very old school and their ability to move quickly is questionable to me. I just look at basic online banking, like how good banks are creating a frictionless online experience. And I think they're not very good. And so that speaks to the kind of people who are in leadership positions at banks, the kind of people they hire, the kind of culture there is. So I do wonder if banks will from inside revolutionize themselves to include smart contracts or whether totally new competitors will have to emerge that basically create new kinds of banks. Whether, what is the company square? I think it comes up out of nowhere really with Cash App and they have Bitcoin on Cash App, whether they will start incorporating smart contracts and they will revolutionize the whole banking industry or whether Bank of America will revolutionize themselves from within. I'm skeptical on Bank of America, but you never know. In general, I'm fascinated by how big organizations, whether it's Google or Microsoft or Bank of America, pivot hard in a world that's quickly changing. I think that takes bold leadership and a lot of firing and a lot of pain and a lot of meetings where the one asshole brings up the from first principles idea that, you know what, the ways we've been doing stuff in the past require, we need to throw that out and do stuff totally differently. I know a lot of those assholes in a lot of these different industries. First of all, I think they're getting listened to more and second of all, I think all of these places, as I look at it more and more, I think they have a fundamental line of business that they try to protect and then everybody's compensation and everybody's metrics and goals is focused around that line of business. So the second that things begin to impact that, then everybody will be in a senior meeting and that asshole will be quite listened to because he will have the only thoughtful explanation as to why this is happening. How things will evolve from there, I actually don't know because that hasn't been the case yet. But my thinking is that there will be people who don't wanna cannibalize certain parts of their business or don't wanna change certain parts of their business and then there will be people who say, look, I think this is how the world's gonna work. We're gonna make a very, very heavy kind of set of commitments to put resources towards this. I already see that with a few banks working on various blockchain based systems, but granted, they've been working on those for years. So I think all of this comes down to these kind of quarterly earnings calls where somebody asks them, hey, I saw that bank over there once the blockchain bond or a smart contract derivative platform. And I also saw that they made $10 billion in revenues or $10 billion in volume or whatever it is from that. What's your plan on the earnings call? And I promise you by the next earnings call, there's a plan. And then the question on the next one is, well, when's the plan gonna happen? And then by the next earnings call, it's a plan is happening. And that's what these people are sensitive to. That's what these organizations are structured around. It's not completely economically like disconnected, right? They have this core business, they wanna protect it. I understand that idea, but I think that the problem with that is sometimes it requires this myopic focus, right? And that's what all the innovation stuff is about. Every time somebody at a corporate entity is about innovation, they're trying to sidestep this. But once again, the incentives to maintain whatever the core businesses is so strong that the innovation people, even though they are there, I think they get a phone call and go like, what are we doing for this? And the ones that actually did good work and got ready to do something for this have done their employer and their organization a very positive service. Whereas the ones that aren't ready, I mean, they'll make up something and maybe they're really smart and they'll get it together. I don't know. Can we talk about tokens a little bit? Generally speaking, there's been a meteoric rise of a bunch of different tokens. We could just talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples. Bitcoin I think crossed $60,000 in value. What are your thoughts in general on this rise? What's the future of Bitcoin? What's the future of Ethereum? There's the total value locked metric that I think generalizes the different kind of value of these tokens. What does the future value and impact of cryptocurrency look like if we look through the lens of these tokens? I think valuing all these tokens and determining that isn't something I'm particularly great at. I haven't spent a lot of time on that. I've spent the vast majority of my time on building these systems and architecting them and getting them to fruition and getting them to a place where they operate properly on both the technical and the crypto economic and in every other sense. I think with Bitcoin, there is a certain conception of non governmental fiat money that Bitcoin is really the first creator of, right? So there's this very powerful idea called fiat money. It's basically more or less a kind of 40 year experiment. I think on August 15th of this year is maybe I think given the 40th anniversary, government can say, hey, I have a currency and it's worth something and here it is. In terms of the way that governments have stopped that in the past is if anyone tries to make another fiat currency in their country, they immediately shut it down, right? They immediately say, hey, this is really bad. You've done something really bad. It's time for you to stop. Don't do it anymore. And it stops, right? That's been the history of non governmental fiat currency. Bitcoin is really due to its decentralized nature, the first and possibly in some cases, in many people's minds, it's still the only true non governmental fiat currency. Now, how powerful is non governmental fiat currency? I have no idea, right? This is why so it's really as powerful as the ideas that people ascribe to it are, right? So let's say people start saying, like right now people are saying, hey, it's internet money. It's the money of the internet. Okay, great. What's that worth? I don't know. It's probably worth a lot. I have no idea what it's worth, but as an idea, as a concept to underpin the fiat money, the let there be aspect of fiat and of Bitcoin, you basically look at it and you say, yeah, internet money. Okay, that could be worth whatever, 60,000, 600,000, great question, right? There are other versions of the world, right? Where people say, there are countries that don't have a good fiat currency and I see a lot of people using Bitcoin. So Bitcoin isn't internet money, it's countries without a good currency money. So all the countries without a good currency now use Bitcoin and let there be, Bitcoin as this, right? As this conception of Bitcoin. What's the value of that? I don't know. That's a great question. Probably huge amount of value. Then there's a further conception of Bitcoin as some digital gold. There's a scarcity dynamic. There's all these other kinds of dynamics. What is a portable version of digital gold with some kind of built in scarcity worth? You know, kind of artificially created scarcity. What's that worth? I don't know. That's a great question. I haven't done the analysis on that is the point, might be worth a lot. What is it all worth if all three of these things, you know, flow into the same fiat, kind of let there be Bitcoin as these three things conception of Bitcoin? I don't know what that's worth. I also don't know what that's worth, but could be worth a huge amount. So I think it's not, I don't think it's, I personally don't think it's super important what I think it's worth or what many other people think it's worth. I don't think that's really that important. I think what's probably important is understanding what the societal conception of Bitcoin is and how does that societal conception evolve over time. And that interestingly enough, doesn't just depend on, you know, you or me or the people who made Bitcoin or anything else. It actually depends on current events. So for example, if people suddenly say, I'm more and more worried about fiat currency. I'm more and more worried that governmental fiat, even if it's the most reliable version of that is not as good as I thought it was. Maybe I should go on the PayPal app and maybe I should get some Bitcoin just in case. What's the world where Bitcoin is a certain percentage of everyone's ownership as a hedge against governmental fiat money not being so good? Haven't done the analysis, but another example, right? Here's this conception, that's the conception. So when I look at Bitcoin, what I see is a lot of these fascinating conceptions of what the fiat, let there be value of Bitcoin is. By the way, all of them could be true. Maybe some of them are true. Maybe some of them aren't true. And the fascinating thing is that I've seen this conception change, right? So when I started in the Bitcoin space, the conception was micropayments. The cost of Bitcoin is low, we'll have micropayments. Micropayments are wonderful for machine to machine transactions, micropayments are wonderful. The emerging market, and that's fine, right? And that was one conception of Bitcoin as let there be Bitcoin as micropayments platform, right? But then the value rose and things changed. There wasn't enough expansion in certain ways. And now the conception has evolved into this other conception. But at the end of the day, I think governments have a very clear set of steps for directing the public's conception of their fiat, right? They say our fiat is worth this for these reasons. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin doesn't have an official Bitcoin spokesperson that goes out and says, the non governmental money called Bitcoin, the non governmental fiat money called Bitcoin has value on the basis of this, this, this and this. Here's our fiscal budget, here's our future plans. Our money will continue to be safe and secure and reliable. And so what that hole creates is a hole that we all fill, right? We all basically come to some vague kind of group understanding that Bitcoin is worth this because it is tied to, let's say all non governmental fiat money comes into question, everybody doubts it, possibly due to inflation. And everybody says, you know, this is nice, but I'd like to keep 10, 20% of my wealth in non governmental fiat, just in case, you know, what are those numbers? I mean, if that happens, you know, I'm guessing you can add a few zeros. I like how you say I haven't done the analysis as if I'm sure a lot of people have done quote unquote analysis, but it's not, it's still speculation. Nobody can predict the future, especially when so much of it has to do with a large number of people holding an idea in their mind as to the importance of a particular technology like Bitcoin. There's a lot of excitement by its possibilities, but the number of zeros you add is an open question and nobody can do a perfect analysis except whoever created this simulation. Let me ask you this question. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? There's quite a few people who suggest that person is you. So is it you? No. Who do you think it could be? I don't know who it is. I think if I had to guess, it's probably a group of people, some of which might not even be around anymore. You know, obviously I'm very grateful to, if this is a singular or a group of people for kicking off this entire industry and making this amazing change in the world that I have the privilege and luxury of being part of in some small way in the work that I do. I think also this kind of focus on who is Satoshi or who isn't Satoshi, shouldn't in my opinion matter so much because regardless of who it is, that in my opinion should have no substantial significant effect or bearing on the functioning or the value or the use or the security of the Bitcoin system, right? So I think whoever it is, they're probably better off not making that public. And I think beyond that, whoever it turned out to be shouldn't matter because it has nothing to do with how the system is made useful or secure or anything else. And so I think that's the point of view that I have. Now, if you were Satoshi Nakamoto, would you tell me? Because you said they shouldn't, whoever Satoshi is, you should keep that private. So would you tell it to me or no? We're in some kind of weird like thought experiment here. If I was this guy, let me think about this, which I'm not, by the way, I am not this person. But if you were, would you say it? I think probably not. I don't see the, I think that they would cause a lot of distraction and a lot of weird stuff. And so realistically, I don't think it would help anybody or even the person who discloses it, but just to be clear, I am not. And whoever it is, I think they haven't said anything because they don't want the attention and they don't want the distraction and they don't want all the problems from this. And that makes sense to me, conceptually. It's fascinating to think if they're still out there and part of the Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency community, and it is inspiring to think that if they're out there, that they're not revealing their identity because it would be a distraction. That's kind of inspiring that people are like that. Just like George Washington, a relinquishing power is inspiring because it's ultimately about the progress of the community and not some kind of ego driven attention scheme. Again, very inspiring. The humans at their best are inspiring. What do you think about the certainty that people in the Bitcoin Maximus community have about this particular piece of technology, Bitcoin? Is there something interesting that you think that you might wanna say about this community or is it just is what it is? I think at the end of the day, results speak for themselves and Bitcoin has had an amazing impact on our industry and has had an amazing impact on the world. And I think the result is still that Bitcoin is very widely adopted and driving the adoption of our industry in many ways. So I think it's very difficult for people to say that Bitcoin maximalists don't have something that they can latch onto and say, hey, there's something very real here. I think there's been decisions made by the Bitcoin community and the people who made the Bitcoin protocol to focus it on Bitcoin and to focus it on the kind of storing of the ledger of Bitcoin and the information about Bitcoin and the transaction of Bitcoin and to focus on securing that. And I understand why that decision was made to a certain degree, right? It was about focus. It was about getting something worthwhile right without adding additional features and additional risk. And that decision is a decision that was made and has kind of the benefits of focus and the benefits of a certain amount of security and a certain amount of guarantees around Bitcoin and what that is and the value of that. And then it has certain limitations as a consequence of doing less or having the system hold data that isn't related to Bitcoin or not having the system hold contractual outcomes or smart contract code. So I think it's just kind of a decision, right? And I understand why they're excited and I'm very excited. I started in this industry going to Bitcoin meetups and I met a lot of fantastic people, libertarian people that wanted to see the world work differently and shared a lot of my beliefs and a lot of my points of view. And so anyone who's been in the industry as long as I have has had to come from the Bitcoin ecosystem by virtue of kind of starting out that early. So I have an unbelievable amount of respect and admiration and gratitude for Bitcoin and that it exists and everything that it's done and that it birthed this industry. There's absolutely no doubt about that. At the same time, whatever design decisions people make are the design decisions they make, right? And so if you've made a design decision that this ledger and this thing will be about Bitcoin, it won't be about colored coins, it won't be about op return at 80 bytes, it won't be about these other kind of nuances that you don't want this to be about, then that's fine. That's fine and that's a logical decision and it's called focus. And focus has a lot of value and a lot of great technology products have focused on something and done that. And then there's a lot of smart people around Bitcoin building kind of additional systems that anchor their security within Bitcoin. And I think that's an interesting approach that could bear fruit. I think it'll eventually require an interaction with a Bitcoin protocol in more advanced ways. And then there will be another question of, what is the design decision for Bitcoin? Is it that Bitcoin will be just about the Bitcoin ledger? Or does Bitcoin want to evolve into an anchor for all these other systems and maybe create additional data store, kind of more data on chain, on the Bitcoin blockchain related to that? So I'm excited to see how that evolves, but until then kind of results speak for themselves and the results that Bitcoin has achieved for our industry and for itself as kind of the dominant cryptocurrency and the conception of our industry that people interact with first is obviously very important and something that I think really everybody in our industry is grateful for, right? Because without Bitcoin, where would our industry be? And that's obviously something that we can't forget. What are your thoughts about Ethereum in the chain link distributed Oracle network world? Is it competition? Is it collaboration? Is it complimentary technology? What do you think about Ethereum? How much do you think about Ethereum? What role does it have? Yeah, I think about a lot. I think we're completely complimentary. So there's no competitive dynamics in my opinion. We are completely collaborative and complimentary with Ethereum and all other blockchains and all other layer twos that operate a contract, right? So we do not seek to operate a smart contract. We seek to augment and enable smart contracts to go further in what they're able to do. In fact, Oracle networks have some value, but they don't have nearly as much value in what they do if there isn't a mission critical system like a smart contract that needs their data, right? So we've made our own explicit design decisions in our own and created our own focus around guaranteeing that smart contracts can go further. We've already done that, right? Decentralized finance, the rate at which we put data is to a degree the rate at which certain decentralized financial markets grow. And as we put more data, we see more financial products go live, gaming, we provide VRF. So we have this kind of focus and it's a very useful and valuable kind of, valuable for our industry focus. At the end of the day, I think that smart contract platforms like Ethereum made a different set of design decisions from Bitcoin and others. And they focused on creating the smart contract capability and they kind of wanted that functionality to exist. And I think since then, there's been a number of people that try to improve on that or try to make variants of that. From our point of view, we want to support smart contracts in all of their variations and in all of their use cases. So one of the things that I personally like about Chainlink is their ability or Chainlink's ability and the Chainlink network's ability to be useful to many different chains and across many different use cases. I'm personally a fan of Ethereum. Ethereum has done a huge amount for our industry as well. Ethereum took us from a world where it literally took months to make a new smart contract by being forced to code it into a protocol. You had to go to the protocol developers and you had to say, hey, I need a DEX or I need some kind of smart contract. Put it in the protocol itself. Put it in the actual blockchain mining and kind of block generation, transaction generation protocol. That would take months or sometimes even over a year. That was a horrible experience and obviously very few people wanted to participate in that and so very few people made smart contracts, which I was not a fan of, right? And then Ethereum came along and really did a lot of innovative things and introduced this approach to scriptable smart contracts where you could script all of these different conditions. And I found that fascinating before Ethereum. I found that fascinating once Ethereum arrived, I found it fascinating after Ethereum launched and I still find it fascinating. And I'm also very grateful to Vitalik and the Ethereum community and all the core developers there for taking our industry a step further. So I think they absolutely deserve a huge amount of credit for taking our industry from it takes months to make a really small smart contract to it takes weeks to make a relatively secure, relatively advanced piece of on chain code that anybody can script and people can do audits on and that's an unbelievable leap forward for our industry and I'm genuinely grateful to them for that. I think the next step in line with our body of work is how does that scriptable on chain code become more advanced in its interaction with all of the systems and events in the real world, which is in my opinion, the final missing piece of the puzzle, right? So my body of work, the body of work that I'm involved in would not be where it is right now without Bitcoin by any measure. It wouldn't even be where it is now without Ethereum and the growth in smart contract development that they've created. And now what I think is gonna happen next is there'll be a lot of different smart contract platforms, a lot of different layer twos, some of them will be private for enterprise, some of them will be public, there'll be some public winners in certain geographies for maybe regulation reasons, maybe other reasons, there'll be other public winners, the larger internet, and there'll be a number of different people building smart contracts in different languages. We are excited and I am excited and the Chainlink community is excited and basically there's a lot of, I mean, for lack of a better word, excitement in seeing our industry graduate to providing more use cases, more usable hybrid smart contracts, right? Because once again, it's absolutely amazing that Bitcoin created non governmental fiat money. It's an unbelievable innovation and invented decentralized infrastructure and birthed our industry. It's an unbelievably great achievement, an amazing achievement that we now have scriptable smart contracts through something like Ethereum. Once again, monumental achievement in my opinion. Once again, we still need to look to the future. We need to look to how do we take the decentralized infrastructure concepts that Bitcoin initially put forward, that Ethereum then improved upon and created into these scriptable smart contract formats, and how do we expand that into the world of real world outcomes to change the global financial industry, the global trade industry, the global data marketplace industry, and many other global industries. You mentioned results speak for themselves and how design decisions have consequences. The Chainlink community have come up with a lot of brilliant designs. So how do you think through the design choices that you're facing where you can't predict the future, but you're trying to create a better future? Is there something low level introspective advice that you can give or describe as to how you think through those decisions or high level how you think about those decisions? Sure, absolutely. I think that's a great question. And I think that actually gets to the core of what the Chainlink network is supposed to achieve. We are supposed to achieve a maximally flexible system. So once again, this is the big difference between Chainlink and Oracle networks in general and blockchains in my opinion. Blockchains do not seek to be maximally flexible, right? They say, here's my block size, here's the transaction types you can put in those blocks. Here's the contract language I have. Here's kind of my blockchain system, right? Here's the fee structure for those blocks. They're gonna keep getting kind of composed, transactions are gonna get put into blocks, blocks will get connected and it'll continue, right? And that's a very focused type of system. And that's great. And that makes sense because it's focused on creating security for that category of on chain activity, which is once again, a critical, critical part of building a highly transparent system and something that Chainlink enables and doesn't compete with and just enables to do more. Oracle networks, conversely, have to interact with all the world's data and provide all the services that blockchains don't provide, right? So there's kind of a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have blockchains that are highly secure, highly reliable, highly tamper proof, highly transparent, but are not very feature rich. For example, they cannot talk to an API. Many of them can't generate randomness. They cannot do some kind of privacy preserving computation. So they're very secure. And there are these kind of data structures and smart contract platforms to hold on chain code that can define conditions, receive value, pay value back out under conditions and create transparency around all that, which makes perfect sense. And then there's oracles and oracle networks. That is all the world's data, right? We're talking about taking all the world's data and making it consumable for all the world's use cases that have trust issues. So the amount of variability there is absolutely massive, right? It's like the decentralized oracle network and the conditions that that decentralized oracle network needs to meet is gonna vary very widely from an insurance contract to a lending contract to an ad network contract to the data sales contract that we discussed to any number of other smart contracts. So really the ability of a decentralized oracle network to flexibly address all of those requirements is what's necessary. So flexibility is the goal, whereas with on chain like Bitcoin, flexibility is the enemy in the sense that you want security, you want the focus there. And in that kind of world, design decisions have huge consequences. And then if you look at the distributed oracle network side, you want to remove the restrictions of design choices. You want to provide maximal flexibility then. So it's a completely separate kind of a design framework. It's a slightly different problem, right? Because we're not trying to define transaction types fitting into blocks on a certain timeline of those blocks being generated. We're trying to say, hey, there's this world of services or this world of data that's not very deterministic, but it's unbelievably useful to these smart contracts over here. And actually they need it to even exist. And we really want them to exist because once they exist, it's gonna completely redefine what our whole industry is known for, right? And defined NFTs are not even the tip of the iceberg. They're like the snow coming off the top of the iceberg. And so our goal is to create a framework and an infrastructure and a software that allows people to compose decentralized oracle networks, right? So initially you can compose a decentralized oracle network of seven nodes that goes to three data sources to trigger your contract worth a million dollars. And that's where you could start. And then let's say your smart contract, your DeFi smart contract goes to a billion dollars. Well, then you need to make some changes, right? You need to go from seven nodes to 15 or maybe 31 nodes. And you need to go from three data sources to five or seven. And you maybe need to create some kind of what we call circuit breakers and some other checks. And you need to make sure that the decentralized oracle network comes to consensus around those checks. Because now the centralized oracle network isn't controlling a million dollars, it's controlling a billion dollars. And we have decentralized oracle networks that control well over a billion dollars, multiple billions of dollars. And we see them growing and getting more advanced data sources and more advanced features. And then if somebody else comes and says, well, I don't really wanna make a DeFi product, I wanna make crop insurance. And I have a completely different set of conditions. I want this method of consensus and I want data to be aggregated in this way, but not the way that you do for decentralized financial products. I mean, what are we supposed to tell them? We're supposed to tell them, no, our decentralized oracle network can't let you do that. And you can go and wait another five years until somebody builds it for you. That's not what we wanna do, right? What we wanna do is be able to say, absolutely, here's an example of how somebody else made a decentralized oracle network for weather insurance. Here's a template, change that template, evolve it to meet your needs. And then someone else comes and says, hey, I have some other use case in gaming, right? I wanna make NFTs related to real world sports events, or I wanna do whatever I wanna do with some kind of sports related data. Wonderful, here's the framework, here are your risk dynamics, here's a collection of node operators, here's a set of preintegrated data sources, here's a reputation system to assess the quality of your ensemble of nodes, here's a way to scale that up as the value in your contract scales. Here's all the tools that you need to build this contract. And what we actually see now as there are multiple types of computations and data sources that are provided by different decentralized oracle networks, of which there are now hundreds, we now see that a single hybrid smart contract might use multiple decentralized oracle networks. So there might be a hybrid smart contract that uses a price data, decentralized oracle network, a proof of reserve oracle network, a randomness oracle network. And I think we're gonna continue to see this dynamic that more and more advanced contracts compose various decentralized oracle networks into more advanced use cases. And this is the dynamic that we're focused on enabling. And I think it's actually a very virtuous cycle for everybody because the more of these hybrid smart contracts we enable on Ethereum and other blockchains, the more our industry provides real world outcomes to the market. To the larger world, which is at the end of the day, what I think everybody in our industry wants. Everybody in our industry wants hybrid smart contracts to become the way that global finance works, global trade works, global insurance products work, because they will inherently need both a blockchain on which the contract itself lives and an oracle network that powers all of the other interactions, right? As a developer, how would you recommend somebody listening to this, but also me, to get started with smart contracts and to get started with hybrid smart contracts? Well, for hybrid smart contracts, I'm gonna have to do some kind of shameless promotion. Please, let me twist your arm. Thank you. I think you can go to our YouTube. We have a number of developer tutorials. Chainlink YouTube? Yeah, Chainlink. I think if you just search Chainlink on YouTube, you should find it. Beyond that, we recently had a hackathon where we had a huge amount of very kind of advanced hybrid smart contracts getting built. To elaborate on that, you had a hackathon. Is that something that people can follow along like a video or there's web page traces of what happened? Or is there a future actual hackathons that people could literally participate in? There's plenty of more hackathons coming up. We wanna enable as many developers in web3 and web2 to build hybrid smart contracts as a way to redefine our industry and kind of make all of these smart contracts come to life. There are definitely gonna be more hackathons. So people should go and preregister or register on a list to get involved in that. That's a great resource where we have a lot of speakers and a lot of educational tools. They happen over a course of weeks, not days. So there's a long time for people to work on these things at the speed that they find comfortable. Two questions. One, is there a kind of hello world entry point for hybrid smart contracts? And two, on the hackathon side, what kind of stuff do you see people building at first? Just kind of getting their feet wet in terms of the kind of applications that could be enabled. I mean, there's unbelievable things that we see people building. I think how to get your feet wet, I think the hello world is probably DeFi because it's pretty straightforward. And there's a large amount of data sources that we already have putting data on chain on test net, which is the test environment in which people would build. So I think DeFi is probably to a certain degree the most exciting for certain people and pretty expansive in terms of the tutorials and the amount of contracts to see how people have already built it. I think beyond that, we see people building amazing things at these hackathons. In the previous hackathon, we saw somebody build a smart contract that allows someone to rent out their Tesla. So it allows the Tesla API to give someone else access and rent out someone's Tesla on the basis of a smart contract kind of coordinating payment, which was kind of amazing. The more recent hackathon, we saw something called Dbridge, which is a cross chain solution that uses Oracle networks to confirm data on different chains. So I think the things that people build will just become expansive and varied in ways that I can't even imagine. But I think this recent hackathon saw a huge, huge list of different kind of winners in different categories. And there's so many different categories. We even have a GovTech category and a whole bunch of things. If people wanna see what's possible, they can go look at the winners. I think that's probably a good idea. Yeah, that'll be on the side of the hackathon. There's a blog related to that, and we're gonna have more of these. And once again, our explicit goal is to take our industry into this world of hybrid smart contracts, which just benefits everybody. It makes more on chain activity. It helps provide real world value to the average person from all of this infrastructure period. And at the end of the day, I think that it just redefines what our industry is about through use cases, right? Because if you only learn through our industry from the point of view of a single use case, like the NFT use case or some other use case, that's what our industry is about. And the more of these use cases that people can make available to the average person or to the FinTech world or to the insurance world or wherever, the faster our industry will not just be about Bitcoins or tokens, it will be about changing global finance, changing global insurance, changing global trade. And that's the change in the world that I and a lot of other people in this industry, I think, got into this for. Now it's funny, you've mentioned about, you've had a lot of kind words to say about Bitcoin and Ethereum as important technology that paved the way for the future. And you somehow did not mention one of the most profound pieces of technology, which is Dogecoin. What are your thoughts about this particular revolutionary technology? And what are your thoughts about Dogecoin going to the moon, to Mars, and outside of the solar system? I think Dogecoin is a very interesting kind of, probably closer to a social experiment than anything else. Isn't everything a social experiment? Yeah, I guess that's fair to a degree. I think it's fascinating how that's evolved. I think the people that made it with certain goals in mind and then it's kind of taken on a life of its own. I don't fully understand exactly why it's taken on a life of its own at this point. I once again, I don't spend too much time thinking about different tokens and how they're evolving. I'm much more focused on the launching and... The technology around trust and all those kinds of ideas. But I think one of the fascinating things about Dogecoin is how technology that leverages social dynamics, that technology's ability to utilize fun and memes to spread. I think it's really interesting. I don't think it should be discounted as a... I think I tweeted today something about like the fundamental force field of fun. That fun has an effect on the space time. So general relativity describes how mass and energy can curve space time. And I was just giving an example that when life is fun, it seems short. When life is not fun, it seems very long. So fun has a very similar effect on space time, like in curved space time. In that same sense, there is a power to the meme. And I think Dogecoin illustrates that. I think Elon is an example of somebody that uses Dogecoin. I don't know his philosophy in particular on this aspect, but he does use Dogecoin. But he does use it effectively to excite the world in a fun way about the possibilities of future technologies like cryptocurrency. I think the Bitcoin world is very serious right now. We've spoken about Bitcoin maximalists. There is very little space for fun and joking in the Bitcoin world, but there's still a little bit of fun and humor left in the Dogecoin world. In that sense, I think it's exceptionally powerful to inspire, to excite, to be able to talk about stuff without the seriousness of financial impact that now certain cryptocurrencies have like Bitcoin. So I keep an eye on, I've previously mentioned that Dogecoin I think is a fascinating piece of technology because I do think cryptocurrency is much bigger than the technology that you focus on. There is also a social element that you also spoke to that's I think not quite yet understood and it's fascinating to watch, especially as it covalls with the different tools on the internet, the different social networks, social network mechanisms on the internet. So I'm a huge supporter of Dogecoin because I'm a huge supporter of fun. I'm fascinated to see how it'll work out. You think it'll go to the moon? You think it'll be the first cryptocurrency to land on the moon? I couldn't say. I haven't done the analysis as I've said before. I haven't done the analysis. Well, yeah, no matter what, I do hope we will get humans back on the moon and hopefully get humans on Mars soon. Dogecoin, Bitcoin or not. Let me ask you about books and movies. What books and movies in your life long ago when you were a baby Sergei or today had an impact on you? Maybe you would recommend to others and maybe what ideas you took away from those books, movies, coloring books, children's books, blogs, whatever. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I think one of the things that had a very big impact on me were Plato's dialogues and particularly Protagoras and Gorgias as some of the two initial ones. I think what Plato's dialogues do very well is they give people a clear picture of what dialogue looks like and what the assessment of information probably should look like, right? And how the dissection and analysis of an idea is very important and how it can actually be taken in either direction. But at the end of the day that the process of eliminating kind of this fuzzy thinking and arriving at whether it's an external dialogue or an internal dialogue about an accurate picture of reality is actually very important. And so I think I'm very lucky to have read the dialogues when I was in my early teenage years and it had a very large impact on me because it kind of showed me that nobody knows what they're talking about. I would play out dialogues in my mind and I would engage in certain dialogues with different people. And what the Platonic dialogue showed me was kind of how to tell when someone has no clue. And a lot of people are very good at kind of say they have a clue, right? Saying like, here's how the world works. Here's what you should do with your life. Here's what you should do with your time. Here's what you should do with your money. Here's what you should do with your attention. Here's what you should do with all these things. And I think the ability to evaluate information generally is something that is surprisingly under taught. I don't actually understand why there isn't a course in like high schools or universities that's just like, here is how you evaluate information. Here's how you engage in external dialogue and internal dialogue to arrive at an accurate picture of reality rather than the picture of reality that other people want you to have for their benefit most often, right? And at the end of the day, I think that put me down a path to really try and understand. Beyond that, I think biographies have had a very large impact on me. Plutarchs, Greek and Roman lives. After I read Plato, I started reading a bunch of stuff, Greek stuff. I was just like, these Greek guys, they really know how it is. They did this 2000 years ago and they still got it right. There's something here. It's kind of this like a theory of time around them, the value of intellectual ideas, right? If an intellectual idea has survived the test of time, it's much more valuable than the intellectual idea that I just came up with 10 minutes ago, I haven't told anybody and hasn't gone up against all of the kind of rebuttals. So... So what's your favorite, what would you say would be a most impactful biography that you've come across? I don't think it was those Greek or Roman biographies because they were very far away. I think that probably one of the most impactful ones that I can remember recently is around Vanderbilt. And so Vanderbilt was this guy who basically, without that much of an education, he would invent or work with people to make these steamboats. And then he had a lot of acumen around creating certain monopolies, regardless of what was right or wasn't right. Right or wasn't right. And then fascinating enough, it all hinged on like a Supreme Court case that decided if monopolies were acceptable in the form of state created monopolies or not. And if it was deemed that state created monopolies were acceptable, he would have had a huge problem, this guy. But it was deemed that state created monopolies through these licenses for steamboat routes was not acceptable. And that did two interesting things that unseated some kind of old time landed gentry in the Americas in like the 1830s and 40s. And it basically made him right and he saw it before other people. So I think Vanderbilt was a very interesting personality, first of all, of all the biographies that I read is somebody who really took the situation in hand and kind of took action to achieve an outcome, which I think was an amazing result. The fascinating thing, by the way, is, or amazing way of looking at things. The fascinating thing, by the way, is that the ferries now in New York Harbor are all run as a public good. So the fascinating thing is that the guy, he focused on an industry and he worked on something that was so important that it ended up becoming a public good. And I think that that's an interesting conception of how to look at this industry. I think there's a lot of economics dynamics around this industry, but I think I might've said this somewhere else before, but really the success of someone in this industry is whether they're able to make a Linux or HTTP or an HTTPS like system that lives on for a very long time and is essentially a kind of public good. It's a success of an idea, even if that idea is originally sort of a capitalist idea above that's grounded in financial benefit. Success of it is if it becomes a public good. It is so universal. It is so fundamental to the quality of life that it's a public good. It is deemed to be so valuable that it should be a public good. Yeah, I think so. I think that's a pretty, a pretty good definition of success that you work on a body of work and that body of work isn't just some commercial enterprise. It's a body of work that whatever commercial aspects or economic incentive aspects it might have, it eventually is so important that it becomes critical to how society functions. I'm personally quite lucky and grateful to be, in my opinion, working on something like that with an amazing team and an amazing community that seems to really very much care about this hybrid smart contract transparent world that a lot of people on our industry, realistically, I think this is why a lot of them signed up. This is why I came into our industry. It wasn't because Bitcoin, it was because Bitcoin was a picture of how the world could work in so many other ways. And that picture of how the world could work in so many other ways attracted me a very long time ago. And I think that all of this stuff will eventually become a public good. I think it will become so critical to how societies function internally and internationally that just like there are systems, like the Federal Reserve, like global payment systems, like all these types of things, I think eventually all of this technology will be baked into these societally critical systems. And if I, in our community and the people I work with and the body of work that we're working on can make some kind of contribution to that shift towards a fairer, economically fair, transparent society, from my point of view, it's a very worthwhile body of work. In terms of the show, you also mentioned the show, one of the shows that I really seem to like more and more for some reason is Star Trek, not the old Star Trek. I don't really get the old Star Trek. The special effects aren't good enough. Star Trek, like The Next Generation and Voyager and Deep Space Nine and all those. I think whenever I happen to watch a Star Trek show again, I have a very simple conception in my mind that I really didn't have whenever I saw it way back when. It's that I'm not a fan of Star Trek. It's that this is what the world looks like if technology takes us towards a utopia, right? So I think there's this fascinating thing where technology can take us towards a utopia or towards a dystopia. And in my mind, those kind of three Star Trek shows are a picture of what human civilization looks like if everybody's technological ambitions successfully take us towards a utopia, right? Because in the Star Trek universe, you're not seeking money or you're not seeking safety or you're not really seeking anything for yourself. Everybody within Maslow's hierarchy of needs has gotten so many things for themselves that their goal is learning and discovering and or helping. And I think there is this conception of human life once the baser needs are satisfied. And at the end of the day, I think that's what technology generally can elevate all of human civilization to, right? It can elevate us to Star Trek world where if people want to invent, they can do that all day and nothing else. If people wanna explore the stars, they can explore the stars and they don't have to worry about economic scarcity or any number of these other conceptions. So I don't know what the most impactful on me shows have been but for some reason recently Star Trek in the newer variant, not the most new Star Trek shows. Those shows are a little strange. The kind of middle Star Trek universe where everybody is doing something with like a very important purpose and nobody's thinking about like, where's my paycheck or where's my whatever. They're all kind of like, we have to discover the formula to this to save the planet over there. And literally every episode you're discovering a formula to save a planet, right? Of some kind or a universe or ecosystem or whatever. And you're looking at it, you're like, you know, this is like, this is a pretty good place to end up. This is where we might wanna end up. So it gives you hope. I mean, it's funny that we don't often think about the, I think it's very useful to think about positive visions of the future when we're trying to design technology. There's a lot of sort of in public discourse, a lot of people are thinking about kind of how everything goes wrong. It's important to think about that sometimes, but in moderation, I think, because there's not enough in my little corner of artificial intelligence world, people are very kind of fear monger centered. There's a lot of discussions about how everything goes wrong. Important to do, but it's also really important to talk about how things can go right, because we ultimately want to guide the design of the systems we create to make things right. And I think with hope and optimism, not naiveness, but optimism, you can actually create a better world. Like you have to think about a positive, a better world as you create, because then you can actually create it. Yeah, I'm one of the people that thinks that having an optimistic view of the world is better for design and creativity than having a pessimistic one. It's hard to design when you're in fear. Do you have advice for young people, speaking of being excited about and hopeful about the future world, do you have advice for young people today in computer science world, in software engineering world, in crypto world, but maybe in any world whatsoever for life, how to pick a career or how to live life in general? I think the thing that young people should do is not any one specific thing for any one specific young person. I think what they should do is what they won't be able to do in the later stages of their life. And the way, in my opinion, from a framework point of view to think about that is that the amount of obligations and the amount of time that a person has seems to just diminish over time, right? So the amount of free time they have, right? So you start your job, you get a bunch of responsibilities, something with your partner or spouse, more responsibilities, kids, probably even more responsibilities, and soon enough, the time that you have to educate yourself, to travel, to experience the world however, create whatever creative endeavor you're interested in, slowly but surely disappears. I think this is something that young people don't fully realize. They assume that the world as it is now and the amount of free time that they have to travel, to educate themselves, to make new friends, to do all these things, will somehow maybe diminish by 10%. It won't diminish by 10%, it will diminish by 90%. And the 10% that you have, you'll be resting to get back to work and get things done. So what I think young people should do, and this is why it's very different for each of them, right? I can't tell young people, hey, you should study philosophy, travel, and start your own enterprise to achieve something worthwhile in the world, right? That might be something that's good for me with my values and my kind of worldview, but for other people might be something else. I think the way that they should conceptualize it is imagine if over the next 10, 12 years, the amount of choice that you had about what you could do was cut down by 90%. What would you, and this is copying from this kind of Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework. In that framework, it's like, what would I regret not doing at 80? And that's kind of meant to create this longterm view and make these decisions now that'll get you to a longterm future that you can look back on and be proud of your life, right? What I think young people should do is they should say to themselves, look, if I never get the chance to travel for as long as I live, assuming that after 25, after 27, after 29, that's the case, how will I feel about that? If I never get to start a company after 25, after I get married, after I have kids, how will I feel about that? And whatever they feel the worst about is what they should do. Whatever they feel like when they say to themselves, you know, if I don't travel now, I will never travel. And they feel horrible about that. They just have an overwhelming fear and disgust at themselves in that type of state at 25, 27, 29, that's what they should do. And they shouldn't listen to anybody else. Let me put it to you this way. If you're really smart, you're gonna make it anyway. There's a lot of people putting a lot of pressure on you because they're afraid whether you're gonna make it. If you're really smart, you're gonna make it anyway. If you're not really smart, you're screwed anyway. So at the end of the day. Either way, just relax with it and use your time well to do the things you would most regret not doing. That's really fascinating. I wouldn't say relax. I would say very much cherish the free time, the discretionary time that you have from the age of 18 to maybe 25. Because at 25, everyone's gonna start looking at each other and asking, what have I achieved? Like my friends have achieved, I haven't achieved. And then by the time you get to 30, you're gonna look at each other again and go, well, my friends have a family or a company or a PhD or a whatever, what do I have? And the pressure will just increase. And it'll increase so much that even if you want to go and do the fun thing, it will not be fun. Because the pressure of comparing yourself to your friends at 25 or your peers at 30 will be so great that it will no longer be normal for you to be in a hostel at 30, kind of like living it up. And this is why I also can't tell you specifically what it is. For me, it was getting an education in philosophy that was rigorous and in depth. It was traveling and it was starting an enterprise that I thought that was worthwhile, that I directed, that I could make into something great. That's what it was for me. For other people, it might be something with a band, it might be something with painting, it might be an education. You, by the way, also should not assume that your ability to get an education will improve. All of those responsibilities will take away your ability to get an education. So if you value having an education, if you value being a deeply educated, well rounded person with a wide array of knowledge on a wide array of topics, capitalism will force you to specialize. That's what it's good at, it's gonna take you, it's gonna fashion you into a very specific tool for a very, most people, into a very specific set of tasks. If you want to have an education in something, get it now. If you wanna travel somewhere, travel there now. If you wanna do some kind of creative endeavor that you doubt whether you'll have time for in the future, do it now. You won't have time for it in the future, you won't have time to read philosophy books all day, unfortunately, you won't have time to fly to Italy and kind of hang out with people. If you're serious about your life, you're gonna get more responsibilities, you're gonna get more stuff to do. And so my advice to you is do not piss away this rare, unique, discretionary time. And if your friends are, get new friends. Get smarter friends, get people who are using the limited time they have better. That's my advice. So it's just a quickly comment, it's brilliant. You know, to reframe high school and undergraduate college education, sometimes people wanna quickly get it over with. But one thing I remember thinking, and it's very true about high school, is one of the only times in your life you'll get a chance to truly get a broad education. You don't often think of it that way, but it's a chance to really enjoy learning things that are outside of the specialty that you'll eventually end up with. And that's how college education is. And on a more fun side, I played music, I did martial arts, and we offline mentioned played video games. I find it fascinating and brilliant what you said, which is the world will not give you a chance to truly enjoy many of these things and truly get value from many of those things once you get older. I find it exceptionally difficult to enjoy video games now. There's so much stuff to do, there's so much responsibility. And I, at the time when I played Elder Scrolls and Baldur's Gate and Diablo II, and at the time I thought maybe that was a waste of time. But now looking back, I realize, because I always thought, let me get the career first and then I'll have a chance to play video games. That's the way I was thinking. It was a waste of time because I should really progress on the career and then I'll have time to play video games. No, the reality is that was really fulfilling. Those are some of the happiest travel experiences of my life is me traveling to those virtual worlds and spending time in them. And it was really fulfilling and they stayed with me for the rest of my life. And I get to experience echoes of that when I play video games these days for an hour here, an hour there, like one hour a month or something like that. But even those experiences, as silly as they are, they seem like a waste of time at the time, enjoying them fully, unapologetically. And in a framework exactly as you said, would I regret being the kind of person who've never played those video games? And I can, for myself, honestly say that yes. Look, when I'm on my death bed, I'm glad I built Baldur's Gate 2 and all those arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and all the Elder Scrolls games. And yeah, the things that don't necessarily fit into this kind of storyline of what a career is supposed to be, travel and all those experiences that you mentioned. I think I'd just like to say one final quick thing on this. I think this extends to really hard things as well. It extends to the things you wanna do, but one of the best pieces of advice one of my mentors gave me early on in my career around this time is that it will actually become harder to start a company as you get older. Once again, because you have more responsibilities, you're responsible to your partner for some kind of income to create a life together. Once you have kids, you're responsible for an even greater income to create a life for kids. And startups do not generate income, right? They take many, many years before anything happens. People are getting evicted, people are eating ramen noodles. That is a thing, that happens, that will happen. So I'm not saying that you should do the fun things or the enjoyable things. I'm saying the things that you would regret not doing, that you can uniquely do in the time span from 18 to 25. Which one of which is, if you plan to have a family and start a family when you're 25, you should start a company now. You should not wait until a bunch of people depend on you for income to eat, to start a company. The amount of pressure that will be on you at that point will be monumental. You should start a company when nobody depends on you and you can sleep on the floor eating ramen noodles and still have a great time and show up with a lot of enthusiasm and be excited. So I just mean whatever you want to really devote yourself to and really do, don't put it off. Don't go to consulting or banking or any other industry and say, I'm gonna do this for three years and I'll get experience. The only way you get experience is by doing something. You go, you do it, you fail, you do it again and again and again and again and again and then you have experience and then you can do it right. That's the only way experience happens. There is no other way short of mentorship. If you're lucky to get mentorship, 99% of people don't get mentorship. And even though we're talking about young people, I feel like you're speaking to me as somebody who spent the last two weeks sleeping on the floor because there's no mattress and somebody who is single and somebody who's thinking about doing a startup, I felt like you're speaking to me as a fellow young person. Let me ask you about this whole life of ours to zoom out on the big philosophical question, the ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of it all? Do you think about this kind of stuff as you're creating all the technology, as you're thinking about this future? You ever zoom out and think like, why? Why are you surrogate striving? Why are we the human species striving for the stars? So I think it comes down to whether people wanna live in society. So if people decide to be part of society, they have a certain set of conditions that they decide to take part in, right? So I think what this comes down to is a lot of really involved conversations. But if we assume people have free will and choice, if we just kind of make that blanket assumption, then the question starts to become, well, what choices do we make? And how do we live with those choices? And I think probably the most fundamental choice is whether we exist in a society or we choose to leave society. And there are people that do this. There are people that go live in the woods. There are people that immigrate to other societies and they make a choice, right? And as they enter those other societies or they choose to leave society and go live in the woods, they adopt a certain set of values, right? They adopt values that the society prescribes, they compromise their own values, they define their own values, and they create a set of values for themselves, right? I think at the end of the day, if you're going to choose to live in society, in addition to all the minimums of not throwing garbage on the floor and doing nice things for people that need help and doing any number of things to just be a normal human being within society, you have to ask yourself, what am I doing as part of society, right? You can always say, hey, I'm going to leave society. I'm going to live in the woods. I did that, right? I went and I lived in the woods and I gave it a shot, realized a ton of stuff, huge amount of clarity from that. But when you decide to live in society, you take on, first of all, certain minimal agreements. You mold your values a little bit to that society. That's another choice that people inherently make. And then there's a question of, well, what am I doing here, right? What am I doing in society, right? So when people say the meaning of life, I don't know what the meaning of life is. It's the meaning of life in society. Right, what's the meaning of life for the choice that you've made within society, right? Because that's maybe the first fundamental choice you made. You made a choice and you continue to make a choice to be part of society and a specific society, right? So you've made this choice. You're part of a society. And now you kind of have a life and you have people around you. And then the question is, in my opinion, the question is, what is the body of work that you want to make, right? I think, personally, that life is kind of so short. And the ability to get enough resources for yourself in at least the developed markets where we're lucky to be in is so relatively abundant that we, you and me, have the luxury, by your pursuit of a PhD, you've had this luxury, I've had this luxury through the work that I've been doing, to pursue something that makes society better. So this is kind of the question, I would say. The question is, am I going to live in society, yes or no? Yes, OK. Most people choose yes. I understand why, to a degree. I understand why some people choose no. And then what is the but? And I'm going to be in society. If you choose to be in society, you're just choosing to abide by the rules. You're choosing to just do the minimum, right? That's what being part of society means. People that choose to be part of society but don't want to do this, it's very confusing. They should just leave. They should just go, look, I don't like this deal. I'm going to go somewhere else. I'm going to live in Tibet. I'm going to live in the woods. I'm going to live wherever the rules are to my liking, right? You've chosen to be in society. Next question, kind of final question, is what is the body of work that I'm going to be involved in? Because in looking at that Jeff Bezos kind of regret minimization framework thing, I think that's what a lot of it really comes down to, is you kind of, the framework is at 80 years old, you look back over your life, what would you regret not doing? What would you regret not pursuing? I think there are a number of things on a personal level each person has, but I think, at least for me, and probably for many of the other people I know, there's a question of what is the body of work that I was involved in? What did I do? What happened, right? What was I involved in? And in my opinion, you should have a good answer to that. You mentioned the body of work in relation to whether it helped make a better world. And the fundamental question there is, what does better mean? So it's our striving to understand what is better. What kind of world would we love to exist after we're gone? And I think that's another thing, almost unanswerable question, but it's one we can strive towards, is what is a better world? Right, I think that's once again, that's a very personal question. I'm not sure if there's an objective moral truth that's gonna suddenly give us all an answer. I think it's actually quite fascinating to me when people feel they have this objective moral truth, they're so sure in their opinions, this is what we do, we should go hurt them or help them or kill them or rescue them or whatever, right? There's all these kind of very situational specific kind of like, this is the right thing to do, the objective moral truth told me that this is it. But maybe there's a definitive truth that we can arrive towards sort of a consensus of what that is within the little local pocket of society that you're in. Yeah, that's the point. That's what happens. People just then mislabel it and they go like objective moral truth. This is not our idea. This is coming up from on high here. This is the objective moral truth that, I think exists in some metaphysical form somewhere. And then you build a building with marble and it's big and usually what happens. And then you convince yourself that that building represents. I think those people actually, the people who build those buildings probably understand that there is no metaphysical objective. They're just like, we're all just coming to consensus. I'm gonna build the biggest building and you're like me and that's what we're gonna do, right? They just look at it that way probably. I think what ends up happening with all these values is, yeah, people should determine that for themselves. I agree that there's a second order question here of what is the best body of work to work on. Personally, I think that's probably a mix of what could you realistically achieve? Is that gonna have an impact on society that you feel good about? Yeah. Right? So these are probably the two aspects of this question and is this gonna have a good impact on society that you feel good about? Obviously very subjective, right? Some people save animals, some people save forests. We and I are creating this system of economic fairness and transparency. I feel that I'm in a good position to enable that. I feel that I have a good chance of succeeding at that. And I think that the impact will be quite meaningful for a large number of people. And so I'm completely happy to look back once I made it and see a body of work that achieved that and be very proud of that, right? Because I think that's what I'll be doing when I'm looking back. Well, I agree with you. The scale of impact as a hybrid smart contracts, this whole idea that you're working on has a potential to transform the world for the better at a scale that I can't even imagine. So speaking of which means even more that you would waste so many hours of that exciting life with me. Thank you so much for talking to me, Sergei. This is a really fascinating conversation, a really fascinating space, and I can't wait to learn more. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sergei Nazarov. And thank you to Wine Access, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Copernicus. To know that we know what we know and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks | Lex Fridman Podcast #181

The following is a conversation with John Donoher, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches and minds in the martial arts world, having coached many champions in jiu jitsu, submission grappling, and MMA, including Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Nick Rodriguez, Craig Jones, Nicky Ryan, Chris Weidman, and George St. Pierre. Quick mention of our sponsors, Onnit, SimpliSafe, Indeed, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that John is a scholar of not just jiu jitsu, but judo, wrestling, Muay Thai, boxing, MMA, and outside of that, topics of history, psychology, philosophy, and even artificial intelligence, as you will hear in this conversation. After this chat, I started to entertain the possibility of returning back to competition as a black belt, maybe even training with John and his team for a few weeks leading up to the competition. For a recreational practitioner such as myself, the value of training and competing in jiu jitsu is that it is one of the best ways to get humbled. To me, keeping the ego in check is essential for a productive and happy life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with John Donoher. Are you afraid of death? Let's start with an easy question. There's no warmup? That's it? No warmup. No jumping jacks? Let's break that down into two questions. I'm a human being, and like any human being, I'm biologically programmed to be terrified of death. Every physical element in our bodies is designed to keep us away from death. I'm no different from anyone else in that regard. If you throw me from the top of the Empire State Building, I'm gonna scream all the way down to the concrete. If you wave a loaded firearm in my face, I'm gonna flinch away in horror the same way anyone else would. So in that first sense of, are you afraid of death? My body is terrified of injury leading to death the same way any other human being would. So when death is imminent, there's a terror that. Yeah, I go through the same adrenaline dumps that you would go through. But on the other hand, you're also asking a much deeper question, which is presumably, are you afraid of nonexistence? What comes after your physical death? And that's the more interesting question. No, I should start by saying from the start, I'm a materialist. I don't believe that we have an immortal soul. I don't believe there's a life after our physical death. In this sense, from someone who starts from that point of view, you have to understand that everyone has two deaths. We always talk about our death as though there was only one, but we all have two deaths. There was a time before you were born when you were dead. You weren't afraid of that period of nonexistence. You don't even think about it. So why would you be afraid of your second period of nonexistence? You came from nonexistence. You're gonna go back into it. You weren't afraid of the first. Why are you somehow afraid of the second? So it doesn't really make sense to me as to why people would be afraid of nonexistence. You dealt with it fine the first time. Deal with it the second time. But your mind didn't exist for the first death. And it won't exist after you die either. But it does exist now enough to comprehend that there's this thing that you know nothing about that's coming, which is nonexistence. Actually, you do know about it, because you know what it was like before you were born. It was just nothing. Every time you go to sleep at night, you get a sneak preview of death. It's just this kind of nothing happens. You wake up in the morning, you're alive again. But it's not about the sleeping. It's about the falling asleep. And every night when you fall asleep, you assume you're going to wake up. Here you know you're not waking up. And the knowledge of that. But there's a whole step from that to the idea of fearing it. I'm fully aware that there's gonna be a time I don't wake up. But are you gonna be afraid of it? Is there some mortal terror you have of this? No, you didn't have it before. You don't have it when you sleep. Going from the fact that you know you won't wake up to terror is two different things. That's an extra step. And at that point, you're making a choice at that point. What about what some people in this context we might call like the third death, which is when everybody forgets the entirety of consciousness in the universe forgets that you've ever existed, that John Donahue ever existed. So. It's almost like a cosmic death. It's like everything goes, yeah. Not just, I would say it's like knowledge. The history books forget about who you are because the history books. This is inevitable, by the way. We're all very, very small players in a very big game. And inevitably, we're all going to go at some point. Yeah, but doesn't, so you're. It's disappointing, of course. But it's not even, it would be arrogance to say I'm disappointed in the idea that I will disappear. But there's far greater things than me that will disappear. I mean, it's crushing to think that there's going to come a time where no one will ever hear Beethoven's symphonies again. That the mysteries of the pharaohs will be lost and no one will even comprehend that they once existed. Humanity has come up with so many amazing things over its existence. And to think that one day this is just all happening on a tiny speck in a distant corner of a very small galaxy and among millions of galaxies, that this is all for nothing. Okay, I can understand. There's a kind of dread that comes with this. But there's also a sense in which the moment you're born and the moment you can think about these things, you know this is your inevitable fate. Is it so inevitable? So if we look at, we're in Austin and there's a guy named Elon Musk. And he's hoping, in fact, that is the drive behind many of his passions, is the human beings becoming a multi planetary species and expanding out, exploring and colonizing the solar system, the galaxy, and maybe the rest of the universe. Is that something that fills you with excitement? As a project, it's very exciting. The whole, I mean, we all grew up with science fiction, the idea of exploration. The same way human beings in earlier centuries were thrilled at the idea of discovering a new world, you know, America or some other part of the world that they sail to and come back. But now instead of sailing oceans, you're sailing solar systems and ultimately even further. So of course that's exciting. But as far as relieving us from non existence, it's just playing a delaying game because ultimately, even the universe itself, if the laws of thermodynamics are correct, will ultimately die. Of course, we might not understand most of the physics and how the universe functions. You said laws of thermodynamics, but maybe that's just a tiny little fraction of what the universe actually is. Maybe there's multiple dimensions, maybe there's multiple universes, maybe the entirety of this experience. You know, there's guys like Donald Hoffman that think that all of this is just an illusion that we don't, like human cognition and perception constructs a whole, it's like a video game that we construct that's very distant from the actual reality. And maybe one day we'll understand that reality, maybe it'll be like the matrix kind of thing. So there's a lot of different possibilities here. And there's also a philosopher named Ernest Becker. I don't know if you know who that is. He wrote Denial of Death. And his idea, he disagrees with you, but he's dead now, is that he thinks that the terror of death, the terror of the knowledge that we're going to die is within all of us and is in fact the driver behind most of the creativity that we do. Exploring out into the universe, but also you becoming one of the great scholars of the martial arts, the philosophers of fighting is because you're actually terrified of death and you want to somehow permeate your knowledge, your ideas, your essence to permeate human civilization so that even when your body dies, you live on. I would agree with him insofar as death is the single greatest motivator for action. But going beyond that and saying it's somehow terrifying, that's an extra step on his part. And not everyone's going to follow him on that step. I do believe that death is the single most important element in life that gives value to our days. If you think, for example, of a situation where a God came to you and gave you immortality, life would be very, very different for you. You're a talented research scientist, you work to a schedule. Why? Because ultimately you know your life is finite and actually very finite. And could be even more so if fate plays its hand and you die an early death or what have you. We never know what's going to happen tomorrow. As such, we get work done as soon as we can. The moment you gain immortality, you can always put every project off. You can always say, I don't need to do this today because I can do it four centuries from now. And as you extend artificially a human life, the motivation to get things done here and now and work industriously and excel fades away because you can always come back to the idea that you can do this in the future. And so what gives value to our days is ultimately death. And value, it's not the only reason behind value, but a huge part of what we consider value is scarcity. And death gives us scarcity of days and is probably the single greatest motivator for almost every action we partake in. It's kind of tragic and beautiful that what makes things amazing is that they end. Yeah, I think it would actually be a terrible burden to be immortal. Life would be in many ways very hollow and meaningless, I think. People talk about death taking away the meaning of life, but I think immortality would have a very similar effect in a different direction. So given this short life, we can think about jujitsu, we can think about any kind of pursuit. What do you think makes a great life? Is it the highest peak of achievement? You know, you think about like an Olympic gold medal, the highest level of performance, or is it the longevity of performance, of doing many amazing things and doing it for a long time? I think the latter is kind of what we talk about in at least American society. You know, we want people to be healthy, balanced, perform well for a long time. And then there's maybe like the gladiator ethic, which is the highest peak is what defines. You asked an initial question, which what makes a great life, but then pointed towards two options, one of longevity versus degree of difficulty. There's gotta be a lot more than that, surely. I mean, think about, first of all, we have to understand from the start that there's never gonna be an agreed upon set of criteria for this is a great life from all perspective. If you look from the perspective of, say, Machiavelli, then Stalin lived a great life. He was highly successful at what he did. He started from nothing. So the degree of difficulty in what he did was extraordinarily high. He had massive impact upon world history. He oversaw the defeat of almost all of his major enemies. He lived to old age and died of natural causes. So from Machiavelli's point of view, he had a great life. If you ask the Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s whether he lived a great life, you get a very different answer. So everything's gonna come from what perspective you begin with this. You're going to look out at the world with a given point of view, and you're gonna make your judgments. Was this a great life or was this a terrible life? Going back to your point, you were actually, I think, focusing the question on more in terms of great single performances versus longevity of performances. Presumably, this isn't really a question about what makes a great life, then, because there's so much more than that to a great life. I don't know. I'm gonna push back on that. So I think the parallels are very much closer than you're making them seem. I think, let's compare Stalin. Stalin is an example of somebody who held power, considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever. He held power for 30 years. So that's what I'm referring to, longevity. And then there's a few people, I wish my knowledge of history was better, but people who fought a few great battles, and they did not maintain power, but they were. Let's contrast, say, for example, Alexander the Great, who died at 33 from probably unnatural causes, had around four to five truly defining battles in his life, which responsible for the lion's share of his achievements, and burned very bright, but didn't burn long. Stalin, on the other hand, started from nothing, and quietly, methodically worked his way through the revolutionary phase, and gained increasing amounts of power, and as he said, went all the way to the end of his career. Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for longevity, but as to which one is greater than the other, you can't give a definition, or a set of criteria, which will definitively say this is better than that. But when you look... Ultimately, we look at Alexander as great, but in a different way, and we look at Stalin. I didn't think many people would say Stalin was a great person, but from the Machiavellian point of view, you would say he was great also. But when you think about beautiful creations done by human beings in the space of, say, martial arts, in the space of sport, what inspires you, the peak of performance? I see where you're coming from. It's a great question. For me, it always comes down to degree of difficulty, but things are difficult in different ways, okay? A single, flawless performance in youth is still that wins a gold medal. Let's say, for example, Nadia Comaneci won the Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, the first person ever to get a perfect score. If she had disappeared after that, we would still remember that as an incredible moment. And the degree of difficulty to get a perfect score in Olympic gymnastics is just off the charts. And contrast that with someone who went to four Olympics and got four silver medals. I mean, they're both incredible achievements. They're just different. The attributes that lead to longevity typically tend to conflict with the attributes that bring a powerful, single performance. One is all about focus on a particular event. The other is on spreading your resources over time. Both present tremendous difficulties. There's no need to say one is better than the other. There's also just, for me personally, the stories of somebody who truly struggled are the most powerful. I know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree, because you said perfection. Perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle. But I look at somebody, okay, my own life, somebody I'm a fan, oh, I'm a fan of everybody. I'm a huge fan of yours. I'm trying not to be nervous here. But somebody I'm a fan of in the judo world is Travis Stevens. He's a remarkable fellow, by the way. A remarkable human being. Insane in the best kinds of ways. I think I started judo, I really started martial arts. I wrestled, if you consider those martial arts. That's been in my blood. I'm Russian, so. But beyond that, the whole pajama thing we wear, the gi, I started by watching Travis in 2008 Olympics. Was that accidental, or did you know Travis prior to watching him? No, no, no, I just tuned in. Now, that's an unusual choice. It was just random, you just tuned in and you saw Travis Stevens. I tuned in to the Olympics, and I was wondering what judo is. And then I started watching. We're all proud of our countries and so on, so I started watching. He was, I think, the only American in the Olympics for judo. Maybe the, so this Kayla Harrison was 2012. Rhonda was there too, so I watched Rhonda and Travis. But obviously, sort of, I was focused on somebody who also weighed the same as I did, so there was a kinda, I think, 81 kilograms. So there's a connection, but also there's an intensity to him, like, he would get angry at his own failures and he would just refuse to quit. It's that kinda Dan Gable mentality. I just, that was inspiring to me, that he's the underdog. And the way people talk about him, the commentators, that it was an unlikely person to do well, right? And I, the FU attitude behind that, saying, no, I'm gonna still win gold. Obviously, he didn't do well in 2008, but that was somehow inspiring. And I just remember he pulled me in, but then I started to see this sport, I guess you can call it, of effortlessly dominating your opponent in throwing. Because to me, wrestling was like a grind. You kind of control, you slowly just break your opponent. The idea that you could, with like a foot sweep, was fascinating to me, that just because of timing, you can take these like monsters, giant people, like incredible athletes, and just smash them. With, it just doesn't, there was no struggle to it. It was always like a look of surprise. Judo, dominance in Judo has a look, like the other person is like, what just happened? This is very different from wrestling. It's built into the rule structure too, the whole idea of an epon, of a match being over in an instant. And that creates a thrilling spectator sport, because you can, as you say, with Ashiwaza, the foot sweeps, you can take someone out who's heavily favored, and if you're not, Judo is the most unforgiving of all the grappling sports. If you have a lapse of concentration for half a second, it's done, it's over. If those guys get a grip on each other, any one of them can throw the other. The idea, when you see someone like Nomura, who won three Olympic gold medals, to win across three Olympics, and that's an incredible achievement, given how many ways there are to lose in the standing position in Judo, and how unforgiving it is as a sport, it shows an incredible level of dominance. And I think when I was also introduced at that time to the idea, just like in Judo, I think in Jiu Jitsu is the same, a lot of sports is probably the same, is there's ways to win that include kind of, if I were to use a bad term, stalling, which is like use strategy to slow down, to destroy all the weapons your opponent has, and just to wait it out, to sort of break your opponent by, yeah, shutting down all their weapons, but not using any of your own. And now, Travis was always going for, he's of course really good at gripping and couldn't do that whole game, but he was going for the big throws. And he was almost getting frustrated by a lot of the opponents. I remember Ola Bischoff, I think. Yes, from Germany. From Germany. Very talented. Very incredible. I know he's very good at doing big throws and he's an incredible judoka, but he was also incredible at just frustrating his opponents with gripping and strategy and so on. And I just remember feeling the pain of this person, like Travis, who went through just, he broke like every part of his body. He went through so many injuries. Just this person who dedicated his entire life to this moment in 2008 and then 2012 and 2016, just gave everything. You could see it on his face that his weapons are being shut down and he's still pushing forward. He's still with that, both the frustration and the power. I mean, the kind of throw he does is his main one, I think, is the standing, it was called Seoi Nage. Ippon Seoi Nage. Ippon Seoi Nage. But that was the other thing is like, the techniques he used was these big throws that there's something to me about the Seoi Nage. I fell in love with that throw. That's my main throw, standing Seoi Nage. That is like... Why do you favor the standing variation? Because of the amplitude? You get a more powerful wind up. Yeah, power. It's like... Are you a fan of Koga? Yes. That's when I, Travis, so Koga and Travis opened up my... Travis uses the same gripping patterns for Seoi Nage as Koga. All the same, and the way he uses his hips and turns. And I remember going to my judo club and other judo clubs and they were all saying, this is the wrong way to do it. The way Travis does it is the wrong way to do it. And I remember... I've always been amazed by this, by the way. I don't mean to cut you off, but I could literally fill 20 hours of reproductions of people who will tell me that either my students or other great world champions are doing things wrong. And I'm looking at them and I'm like, who would I rather trust here in their judgment? Koga, who was one of the greatest throwers of all time, or you, a recreational guy who couldn't throw my grandmother. I'm supposed to take your word over his. Well, say, don't listen to what people say. I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here. Watch what the best people do, okay? That's how you get superior athletic performance. I'm gonna say that again. Don't listen to what people say. Watch what they do, particularly under the stress of high level competition, because that's when you see their real game, what they really do under pressure, okay? And if you can emulate that, you're gonna be very successful. I guess what I was frustrated with, to your point, is that the argument against Koga is he has a very specific body type and he figured out something that worked for him. The statement is that might not be applicable to you or to the general public of judo players that wanna succeed. That, by the way, at the shallow level, might be true. The point is there might be a body of knowledge that's yet to be discovered and explored that Koga opened up that I wanted to understand why his technique worked. It made no sense to me that with a single foot, like the way you turn the hip, the single foot that steps in, why does that work? Because it was actually very difficult to make work for me as a white belt in the very beginning. It doesn't make sense. Like people just, they don't get loaded up onto your hip. Anyway, for people who don't watch Koga highlights, watch Travis Stevens highlights, but the details of the technique don't make sense, but when mastered, it feels like there's something fundamental there that hasn't been explored yet. It's like Koga and Travis made me think that we don't know most of the body mechanics involved in dominance in judo. Like we just kind of found a few pockets that work really well. There's Yamada, there's these different throws, Osorogari. I wonder if there's like totally cool new things that we haven't discovered. And that Seinagi gave a little peak because there's very few people that I'm aware of that do it the way Travis and Koga did. May I ask you a question? Yes. The choice of standing Seinagi, I should say this for your listeners. They're probably thinking, what the hell are these two guys talking about? Seinagi is one of the more high percentage throws in the Olympic sport of judo. Probably Uchimata is probably number one and variations of Seinagi would be in the top five for sure. The basic choice you have in modern competition is the more difficult standing Seinagi where you literally are up on your feet and you perform a shoulder throw that takes your opponent over from a full standing position. The most popular form of Seinagi in modern competition by a landslide is not the standing version. It's a drop Seinagi where you go down to your knees. This means you have a much easier time getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity. The defining feature of any Seinagi is getting underneath your opponent's center of gravity and lifting them. Seoi literally means to lift and carry. Why did you choose the more difficult version? What was your motivation? You know, you're a smart kid. You know right from the start that for every standing Seinagi, there's 20 drop Seinagis in modern competition. One is obviously more high percentage. One obviously works for a wider variety of body types. The number of people who are successful with standing Seinagi is dramatically lower. And it appears to be a move which is completely absent in the heavyweight divisions and rarely seen in the lightweight divisions. Why? What was the motivation? Why did you willingly adopt the less high percentage over the more high percentage? And this would be very interesting. I would love you to break it apart because I apply the same kind of thinking to basically everything. I mentioned to you offline, there's these Boston Dynamics Spot Robots. When I first met Spot, I fell in love. I don't understand what exactly, but there's magic there. And I just got excited by it. And that fire burns. I wanna work with these robots. I wanna work with the robots. I want to, I felt like there's something special there that I could build something interesting with, create something interesting with. And the same with the standing Seinagi from Koga and Travis. I just fell in love with that technique. Just even watching, I didn't even know what the hell to do with it. Was it aesthetic? The standing Seinagi is more beautiful in execution. There's no question. In my own, we're talking about love here, right? In my own definition of aesthetic, yes. It's not just beauty. Cause you could argue there's more elegant sort of Uchimata is very beautiful and effortless. I love something about the dominance of it. I love the idea in sport of two people that are the best in the world. And one of them dominating the other. And to me, the standing Seinagi, you're lifted off your feet and especially when it's done perfectly and with really strong resistance from the other person, it results in a big slam. And that was like beautiful to me. That's the Alexander Karelian like big pickups. I love that. It's interesting, you're correct in so far as you're not just going with aesthetic and the sense of beauty, but also, but you are making as it were value judgments about the throw. And that's fascinating to me because there's two elements to any grappling sport. I'm always insistent upon the idea that Jiu Jitsu is both an art and a science, okay? It has scientific elements in so far as it works according to the laws of physics and lever and fulcrum, et cetera, et cetera. But it also has an aesthetic element in so far as you're making choices with technique. You're expressing who you are as a person. You have 10,000 different variations of moves you could use, but you're specifically choosing these. That's an element of choice and self expression on your part. And in so far as that is true, combat sports are not just a science, but they're also an art. So most combat sports have this sense which they have the features of both an art and a science. And it's not just about high percentage in your case. I mean, me personally, I'm obsessed with percentages. What are the ways to make you win? That's the science part. Yeah, but that's also choices involved, yeah. But there is an undeniably aesthetic element to martial arts where you, as it were, express who you are as a person in terms of the techniques you're ultimately going to choose. Does that get in the way? Do you allow yourself to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of a technique? Of course, yeah. When martial arts are done well, it's the most beautiful sport in the world, okay? When it's done poorly, it's the ugliest. But a beautifully applied submission hold, a perfect throw, a superbly set up takedown are among the most difficult techniques to execute in all of sports. And when they're done well, they're magic to observe. But do you prefer certain techniques over others because of their, like for example, I'll tell you, for me, chokes of all sorts with the gi, without the gi, probably with the gi is the most beautiful to me, personally. I value them above all others. People mostly associate myself and my students with leg locking. They're usually rather surprised to learn that I actually value strangle holds far above leg locks. But not for aesthetic reasons, for effectiveness. We can talk about that later if you wish. Well, let's step back. Sorry, we drifted awfully far off topic there. I think this is beautiful. We drifted along the river of life and martial arts. Can you explain the fundamentals of jiu jitsu? Yes. If I couldn't, I wouldn't be much of a coach. Jiu jitsu is an art and science which looks to use a combination of tactical and mechanical advantage to focus a very high percentage of my strength against a very low percentage of my opponent's strength at a critical point on their body, such that if I were to exert my strength upon that critical point, they could no longer continue to fight. Well, that's about weapons and defenses. But then, is there something more to be said about the set of tools that we're talking about? That's where the art comes in. Because ultimately, you have a set of choices, and those choices that you make will be an act of self expression on your part. Some will prefer this, some will prefer that. That's where you come in as an individual. That's an overall definition of jiu jitsu, of being a set of choices that where you're using the things you're powerful in versus the things your opponent is weak in. No, I was only talking about percentages of body strength. If I have, for example, let's say we have two athletes, athlete A and athlete B. Athlet A has 100 units of strength, however we define that overall. Athlet B has 50. OK, so ostensibly, athlete A is twice as strong as athlete B. But athlete B can maneuver his body into a set of positions focused around a critical point of his opponent's body, where he can apply 40 units of strength out of his total of 50. His opponent can only defend with 20 units of strength out of his total of 100. You have now completely reversed the strength discrepancy. Originally, athlete A was twice as strong as B. Now, on that one localized point, the knee, the elbow, the neck, B is now twice as strong as A. Under those circumstances, B should win. I guess what I'm trying to get at, by the way, that's really beautifully said, is what you just said could be applied to other games, other battles. It could be applied to the game of chess. It could be applied to war, most obviously in war. I think about, for example, the American strategic bombing campaign in World War II. The Eighth Army Air Force was tasked with the idea of destroying German industry. Did they attack all of German industry? Of course not. That would be stupid. They attacked the ball bearing industry. Why? Because almost all of modern machines require ball bearings in order to operate. In order for the mechanical interfaces of machines to operate, you have to reduce friction. It's done through ball bearings. If you knocked out one tiny component of German industry, the ball bearing industry, the rest of it couldn't operate. So too with the human body. I didn't have to fight your whole body. I just have to fight your left knee. If I can break your left knee, the rest of your body is irrelevant to me. But then isn't the art of jiu jitsu discovering the left knee, discovering the weak points? Yeah, a huge part of jiu jitsu is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the human body. There's parts of the human body that are shockingly robust and there are other parts that are shockingly vulnerable. The major joints, and of course the most vulnerable of all, the unprotected neck. So if we take something I'm not familiar with but I was incredibly impressed by is the body lock that I saw Nick Rodriguez use last time a few weeks ago. But then I also got to hang out with Craig Jones who showed that. He also has a very good body lock. So that was, I don't know if this body lock applies to all positions, but I was seeing it from when Craig is on top of the opponent and trying to pass in the guard, use the body lock as a controlling position. The principle behind it is that it shuts down, as you've spoken about, it shuts down the weapons of a very strong opponent. That's absolutely correct. In the case of guard position, what makes guard position dangerous, what makes someone a powerful guard player is the movement of their hips forward and backward and side to side. Body locking is designed to shut down that movement and does a very fine job of it. You'll see all of my students excel at it. Gordon Ryan is probably the single best body lock guard passer I've ever seen. Nicky Ryan is outstanding with it. Nick Rodriguez is very good. Craig Jones is outstanding. All of my students use this for a very simple reason. Understand what is the central problem of shutting down a dangerous guard player, it's his hips. That's what makes him a dangerous leg locker. You go up against a dangerous leg locker, body lock guard pass, single best way to shut down most of his entries. We're all strong in leg locks. So in our gym, you gotta control the hips as soon as possible. Otherwise it's gonna be a very difficult thing to avoid leg entanglements as you go to pass. And across the board, my students excel in body lock guard passing. They understand what's the most dangerous feature their opponent has, the lateral movement of their hips. What's the single best way to stop that body lock and then work from there. So if this asymmetry of power is fundamental to jiu jitsu, how do you discover that? How did you discover the body lock? That as one of many methodologies of achieving this asymmetry. It would be an overstatement to say we discovered the body lock. Body lock passing has been around longer than we've been around. But what I would say is that in a room full of dangerous leg lockers, you've gotta have a way to shut down the hips. And so once we started using body locks, we saw that was one excellent way to get around that problem. But as with all development, it comes from trial and error. You will often see people teach the technique to a certain level and you see the teaching, you're like, there's a lot of inadequacies there. And that doesn't cover a lot of the problems that we're encountering. And so trial and error is the single most important part of the development. Trial and error in? In the training room amongst ourselves. In hard training or? No, it never begins with hard training or everything. Techniques are born the same way we're born. Weak and in need of nutrition. You have to build them up organically like children. And you start with minimal resistance and you make progress over time. When you first go to the gym, do you put 500 pounds on the bench press and try to bench press it? No, you'll be killed. You start off with the bar, you build over time and then one day, five years from now, you really are lifting 500 pounds. But only a forward attempt, they're on their first attempt. And they're born like children in your mind first? Like there's a spark of an idea. Yes, there's always a spark. It's like scientific development on a subject matter which is intrinsically simpler. Okay, there's a sense in which naive and overly simplistic assessments of scientific method may not work well at advanced levels of science, but they work damn well in the training room with jiu jitsu where the subject matter is inherently simpler than it is in research science. And as a result, there'll be a spark. You'll see something, there's possibilities there. Okay, let's puzzle this out, let's work with this. And you run into a lot of failures. You've suddenly been, oh man, if I put my hip this way, this works really well. And then suddenly you just try and spar and you get caught in a simple, normal platter. And you're like, okay, that didn't work as well as I thought. And then you look to rectify things. If things go in promising research directions, you keep them. If not, you discard them. Well, it's funny you say science. It feels more like art. There's somebody I really admire that talks about this kind of ideas. Johnny I from Apple, he's the lead designer. He recently left, but he was the designer behind most of the products we know and love from Apple. When you say designer, be more precise. What exactly was he working on in Apple? The iPhone. Which parts of the iPhone did he work on? The entirety of it. Was he a leader of a research team or was he the person personally responsible for the development? He's kind of, I would say, very similar to your position. He wasn't necessarily the last, the person executing the fine, the manufacturer, right? Yeah, of course. But there's the, he's somebody that's very hands on. And it's like, okay, so he worked obviously extremely close to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has this idea. We should have a computer that's as thin as a sheet of paper, and then you start to play with ideas of like, what does that actually look like? The reason I bring it up is because he talked about, he had these ideas that he would not tell Steve because he talked about in the same exact language as you're saying, is there's like a little baby that it's very fragile. It needs time to grow. Absolutely. And then Steve Jobs would often roll in. Was too ruthless? Too ruthless. This is, he would destroy ideas. Because Johnny Ive and the team didn't have actually good responses to the criticism at first. Because when they're babies, you can't defend the baby. But you need a time to develop. You need to sleep on it. You need to rethink it, dream things and all those kinds of things. It's fascinating you say this, Lex, because this is actually the entire history of scientific development is literally the story of the juxtaposition between the need to protect and nurture new theories versus the need to rigorously test them with harsh testing that either verifies them or falsifies them. And learning to find a satisfactory compromise between those two is a very, very difficult thing. When you look at the history of science, you will see that there's some pretty damn chaotic moments anytime there's major theory change where all kinds of apparently undesirable tricks are used to protect certain theories with ad hoc hypotheses, et cetera, et cetera. And ultimately, only time and success over time will justify a theory. There's usually a period where when one theory goes in to replace another, there's something of a battle between competing groups of scientists, some of whom advocate theory A, some who advocate theory B. They often use seemingly unscrupulous methods to protect or attack another person's theory. They dig for proofs. And usually, some period of time has to go by. Sometimes, in some cases, it simply involved older scientists protecting an initial theory dying off and new scientists just replacing them with numbers. And this is a common, common theme. And the same applies in jiu jitsu. So many times, especially when I first started working with leg locks, I would show things I had worked on to even world champion black belts. And they would try it once or twice and fail and be like, yeah, it doesn't work. And I'd be like, you tried it once on another guy who's also a world champion who has a strong ability to resist it. And that's it. No more. It doesn't work. And then five years later, they would see my students finishing world champions with it. And in some cases, finishing the very people who said that the technique would never work. I mean, if there was ever a refutation of a statement, that's a pretty clear example. And there has to be a sense in which you can't be too forgiving. You have to test hypotheses. But on the other hand, you can't be too ruthless either. You have to look for promise. And my advice is start slow. Again, the analogy of lifting weights. You don't lift the heaviest weights on your first day. You build up. You work progressively over time. Now, you also have to have some common sense here. You can't be too forgiving to a technique if it's repeatedly failing and good people have tried it and multiple good people have tried it and it's just not working out, then, OK, it's time to dismiss it. But don't be too quick. Is this where your idea of training with lower belts quite a bit comes from? I've actually just, as a side comment, and maybe you can elaborate, the place, the gym, Balanced Studios with Phil and Rick McGarry's where I got my black belt, where I grew up as a jujitsu person in Philadelphia, they have a huge number of black belts, but they have a huge number of all other ranks. And the way they picked sparring partners, people you train with, is very ad hoc. It's very loose. It's one of those places, one of those gyms where you can train for like three, four hours. And you could take a break or you could jump back in. Very informal. And you can go to war with black belts, but then you can also play around with the purple and the blue belts and so on. And that was really beneficial for growth. And you can pick which, because everybody has a style, and you can pick which style you really want to work on. And then I came to Boston, Broadway Jiu Jitsu, with John Clark, who I love. He's a good friend. But it's a little bit more formal. And I found myself, it was a very interesting journey. I would be training with black belts the whole time. And it was a very different experience. I found myself exploring much less. I found myself learning much less. I mean, part of that is on me, but part of it was also realizing that, wow, there's a value to training with people that are much worse than you. Yes, is there a philosophy you could speak to on that? Yeah, you probably know it already. You know from your studies in artificial intelligence that all human beings are naturally risk averse. This is a bias which is deeply seated in all of us. I'm sure you're well read on people like Tversky and et cetera, who talk about this all the time. For your viewers, there are numerous psychological experiments that are showing that most people, to the point of irrationality, fear loss more than they are excited at the prospect of an equivalent gain. So for example, if you have $100 in your wallet, you're more worried about the idea of losing the $100 that you have now than you would be excited by the prospect of gaining $100 that I could potentially offer you. This comes out whenever you get black belt versus black belt confrontations or any kind of similar skill level. Whenever you get similar skill levels, the chances of defeat get very, very high. Interestingly, if you're a white belt and you're going against a black belt, you'll take risk. Why? Because there's no shame in losing to a black belt when you're a white belt. So you'll play more lightheartedly and you'll have a more fun role. But when you have very similar skill levels, you're going to come back to what? The techniques that are most likely to get you a win. That number of techniques is usually pretty small. And if you're always battling with the same tough opponents every day, where if you make even a single error, it will cost you that match inspiring and you don't like losing, you're going to stay with a very small set of moves. You might get slightly better at direct execution over time, but you as an individual will not grow. Growth, as it does in organic life forms, comes from small beginnings and builds over time. You can't take an untested, untried move and get it on a world champion black belt. It's going to get crushed, so it's not ready for that. It's like a lion cub being thrown out into the Serengeti plains. A lion cub is just too small and too ineffective. It's a lion, but it's a cub. And it's not until it grows into maturity that it can be a lion that can dominate the Serengeti plains. That's why I always encourage my students to play with a variety of belt types and spend the majority of their time with lesser belts for development purposes. When you're getting closer to a competition, you obviously want to change that. You want to be getting more a competitive sense of hard work, but you must learn to divide up your training cycles into non competition cycles where you're presumably working with people who are slightly lower in level than yourself, and in some cases, quite a bit lower than yourself. And then competition cycles where you're working with people much closer to your own skill level. Is there something to be said about the flip side of that, which is when you're training with people at the same skill level, being OK losing to them? Yes. You have to see training for what it is. Training is about skill development, not about winning or losing. You've got to understand that you don't need to win every battle. You only need to win the battles that count. And the battles that count are in the world championship finals. That's the one that counts. Think about that win. That's the one you're going to be remembered for. You're not going to be remembered for the battle you lost on Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM in some nameless gym with some guy that no one cares about. No one's going to remember that. You're going to be remembered for your peak performances, not your everyday performances. Focus your everyday performances on skill development so that your peak performances you can focus on winning. This is not a therapy session, but if I could just speak. Every session's a therapy session. There is still an ape thing in there. Of course. You think I don't feel it? You think everyone in the room doesn't feel it? Because, for example, you have never seen me roll. When there's people, I've seen the look in people's eyes when they see me train. And I could see, maybe it's me projecting, but they think, I thought you were supposed to be good. I thought you were supposed to be a black belt. That look, they're like studying. I'm going to give you some therapy. OK. Do you know how many people have come up to me over the years who have visited the training halls that I work in, and they come up to me and they go, man, I rolled with Gary Tonin. I did really well with him, like really well. I'm like, oh, that's very good, very impressive. And then I see them talking to their friends, like, man, I tapped out Gary Tonin. And I'm sitting there going, yeah. And you can see that they're just like, whoa, dude, I'm way better than I thought I was. Gary Tonin, all of my students, I push them in the direction of giving up bad positions so that they practice working, getting out of critical situations. It's a huge part of our training program. But Gary Tonin takes that to a level that just no one else even gets close. It's just amazing. He will put himself in impossible situations where it's a fully locked strangle, 100% on with both his arms behind his back. And he'll try to work out from there. And seven times out of 10, he does. But three times out of 10, he gets caught. I'm a huge advocate of handicap training, where you handicap yourself to work on skills. He's took that to heart to a level that few people, I believe, can match. I just wonder what his psychology is like, because there's. It goes back to what we talked about before, Lex. You have to understand it's skill development. Don't take it personally. I understand. I hear where you're coming from. We've all got what you call the ape reflex, where we want to be dominant, OK? We all do. Because there's thousands of white belts out there that have tapped Gary Tonan, and they're walking around, and they're posting online. I tapped Gary Tonan. Gary Tonan's one of the best in the world, so I'm one of the best in the world. And does Gary get upset about this? No, of course not. Because Gary knows that when it counts on stage, he's going to be going 100% with a set of skills that very few people can match. He can go into an EBI overtime at the 205 pound weight division against an ADCC champion, starting in a full arm lock position, and effortlessly get out with no problems in seconds. Because he's been in that situation 25,000 times with varying degrees of skilled opponents. And there's just no panic, no fear. He's just doing what he's done so many thousands of times. And that's a fine, fine example of a guy who didn't give a damn what happened in the training room, but when it counted on the stage, in front of the cameras, it kicked in. Yeah, he's an incredible inspiration, actually. He's a practitioner of something you've recently talked quite a bit about, which is the power of escaping sort of bad positions. I think you've talked about it, which is really interesting framing, is escaping bad positions is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to demonstrate dominance psychologically over your opponent. That anything they throw at you, like their weapons are useless against you. There's a little bit of Lex Friedman kicking through on this question. Your obsession with dominance is skewing your point of view. It's a therapy session, it's a therapy session. I'm coming from a wrestling perspective. I think it's not just Lex Friedman. I think it's Dan Gable. I think it's dominant. The Gary Tonin ethic, it just goes against everything wrestling is about. You never put yourself in a bad position. And the fact, it's a, philosophically, I don't know what to do with it. It's a total reframing of showing dominance by escaping any bad position. Yeah. Let's talk about the idea of what is the value of escapes? Why do I put this in as the first skill that every Jiu Jitsu student must master? Believe it or not, when I talked about how it pertains to dominance, that's its smallest value. Its greatest value has nothing to do with dominance. It has to do with confidence. You can train someone and teach them technique until you're blue in the face. But at some point, the athlete in question has to go out there on the stage and pull the trigger when the time is right. What's going to give you that ability to go from the physical skills that you've learned to execution under pressure is confidence. I always talk about skill development. And yes, skill development is the absolute bedrock of my training programs. But you can't finish at that level. There has to be something more than that. And you have to go from the physical element of skill into the psychological element of confidence. I can teach you an armbar all day. You can get to a point where you can flawlessly execute armbars in drilling and even in a certain level of competition. But if you believe that you can do it, in a certain level of competition, but if you believe that in attempting an armbar on a dangerous opponent with good guard passing skills, say the armbar has been performed from guard position, that if the armbar fails and your opponent uses that failure to set up a strong pass and get into a side pin, possibly into the mount, and you don't have the ability to get out of that side pin or mount, you won't pull the trigger on the armbar. And so even though you had all the requisite physical skills to perform the technique, when push came to shove and the critical moment came, you backed down. You didn't pull the trigger. Building that confidence is the key to championship performance. And the single best way to do it is to take away the innate fear that we all have of bad outcomes that makes us naturally risk averse. When you don't believe you can be pinned, when you don't believe your guard can be passed, you'll take risks because there's no downside to your actions. An unpinnable person and an unpassable person doesn't have much to fear in a jiu jitsu match. You can come out and fire with all guns blazing because then you know at the end of the day, no one's gonna hold you down, no one's gonna pass you guard. That's your first two goals in jiu jitsu. They're the most boring goals. They're not exciting to learn. No one wants to come in and their first thing we're told, okay, you're gonna practice escapes for the next year of your life. Okay, it's not going, are you kidding me? But that's what you gotta have, that's your first skill. And that's what I push upon all of my students. You'll see almost all of them are very, very strong in escape skills. They know that if things go wrong, they can always get out. They can always live to fight another day. And that is what gives them the ability to attack without fear. I think that is so profound and so rare. It's so rare to hear this. I think it's because it's the most painful thing to do. Always ask yourself, when you enter a jiu jitsu match, you already know ahead of time, if you're going to lose, how you're going to lose. Okay, there's only a certain number of realistic submissions that work in the sport of jiu jitsu. The number is very small. So ahead of time, you already know the most likely methods of submission loss in jiu jitsu are gonna be things like heel hook, armbar, rear naked strangle, guillotine, et cetera, et cetera. Just work backwards from that knowledge. So start off learning how to defend all of those things. You know what the major losing positions are in jiu jitsu. Someone gets mounted on you, rear mount, side control, knee on belly. Those positions you can only lose from. So work backwards from there, getting out of those positions. And that's how I always start. I always say with my students, I teach beginners from the ground up and I teach experts backwards. What does that mean? When a young student comes to me with no skills, they learn from the ground up. They start on their backs, defending pins. Then they start on their backs working from half guard bottom, then on their backs working from variations of guard. They don't even get to see top position until they're strong off their backs. Then they go onto their knees and they start passing, start standing and passing. And then they work their pins and transitions. And then ultimately they stand up to their feet and they work standing position on their feet. So they work from ground back on the floor to ground knees on the floor, ground standing and then both athletes standing. It's a gradual progression over time where they work from the bottom to the top. With regards to experts, I teach them end game first. They must become very, very strong in what finishes the match, which is submission holds. Okay, in chess, we always talk about end game. I do the same thing in Jiu Jitsu. I start experts just looking at the mechanics of breaking people and all the submission holds that I teach. You should know that I teach only a very small number of submission holds, around six. It's interesting that my students have by far and away the highest submission rate in contemporary Jiu Jitsu, but they only learn around six to seven submission holds. I start them with mechanics where they learn the end game, how to break someone. Once they develop in their mind, the belief that if, the conditional if, they can get to one of those six positions, there's a very high likelihood they'll win. If they truly believe then, when it's competition time, they'll fucking find a way to get to those positions. That's confidence. But if you don't believe, let's say you believe, man, if I get to a finishing position, an armbar or a strangle, there's only like a 20% chance I'll finish with it. How hard are you gonna fight to get to that position? You're not. Why, why would you? But if you believe there's a 98% chance, if you get to that position, you'll finish. You'll find a way to get there. That is so powerful. There's certain things, it may be going back to Judo a little bit, is there's a clock choke for people who are listening. It's with the gi when a person is in a turtle position, in a crouching position. And this is something that's done in Judo quite a bit. But I have, it doesn't matter what the technique is, I have a belief in my head that there's not a person in the world that I can't choke with that clock choke. That's a good belief to have. And I've done that. And that it was, it built on itself. The belief made the technique better and better and better. Now you're onto something. That's exactly the mindset that I'm trying to coach. But that's step one. You have to believe that once you get there. But you gotta start somewhere. And then it's step one. But then you have to create a system how to get there. But it's a damn important step. So you coach the end game first, and then you fill in the details afterwards. Yeah, that's a huge confidence builder. But I just, I have to say, to admit, and it makes me sad, but I think I'm not alone. I think a majority of Jiu Jitsu people are like this, that I didn't do the beginner step that you talk about, which is focusing on escapes. I think I learned the wrong lessons from losing. I remember in a blue belt competition long ago, I was, I think it was, yeah, it was the finals of Atlanta IBJJF tournament. And there's a person that passed my guard and he took mount. And he stayed in mount for a long time. And I couldn't breathe. And it was like one of those things where I was truly dominated. I don't think I've been dominated in Jiu Jitsu match quite like that before or after. And the lesson I learned from that is I'm not gonna let, like as opposed to working on escapes, I'm not gonna let anyone pass my guard. What you learned is don't take risks. Don't take risks. Which is ultimately what kills you. Ultimately, if you become the best you can, you gotta take risks. As they say, nothing risk, nothing gain. Failure usually makes us even more risk averse than we started. We're already mentally biased, being human beings in that direction. And failure tends to reinforce that. I work hard in my training programs to try and correct that fault. Is it still possible for a person who's a black belt to then just go back to that beginning journey, I guess? Of course. Let me tell you something. I'm probably gonna catch a lot of flack for saying this. I have a belief. I won't say something, I won't call it knowledge because it's not known, but I have a fervent belief. That human beings in most skill activities, not all skill activities, but I will say combat sports, for sure, can reinvent themselves in five year periods. Now you might be saying five years? What's magical about five years? Mike Tyson was 13 years old when he was taken in by custom auto. By the age of 18, he was beating world class boxers in the gym and had already made a strong name for himself in international boxing. He was already a known figure. It was five years. Yasuhiro Yamashita, the judo player, began judo at 13. He placed silver in the All Japans at 17. I could go on all day with examples of athletes who within a five year timeframe of starting a sport were competing at world championship level. I'm gonna give you a rough and ready definition of sport mastery, okay? I believe that if you can play a competitive match against someone ranked in the top 25 in your sport, and it's a serious international sport, I would call you someone who's mastered that sport. Okay, you're damn good. If you can go with the number 25 wrestler in the world and give them a hard competitive match in the gym, you may not win it, but they had a good workout, you know, they had a good workout. You have shown mastery of wrestling or indeed any other combat sport you care to name. There are numerous examples of people doing far better than that in five years, winning medals at world championships and even Olympic games in that five year period. This is not an unrealistic goal. There is a lot of empirical evidence to show that people have done this in the past, a lot of it. So if you fully immerse yourself in a sport with a well worked out, well planned training program, there is a mountain of evidence to show that in a five year period, you can go from a complete beginner to like very, very impressive skill level to the point where you're competitive with some of the best people on the planet. You can reinvent yourself in these five year periods. What happens with most people is they get to a certain level and they get complacent, they get lazy and they just keep doing the same old thing they've been doing. But if you're diligent and you're purposeful, five years, you can accomplish an awful lot and as I said, there's a mountain of evidence to show it. By the way, as a small aside, somebody who's mentioned Tversky and Yamashita in the same conversation, you're one of the most impressive people I've ever spoken to. But as a small aside, so if there's this complete beginner, this is really interesting. There is empirical evidence that you can achieve incredible things in a short amount of time. There's a complete beginner standing before you and that beginner has fire in their eyes and they want to achieve mastery. Where do you place most of the credit for a journey that does achieve mastery? Is it the set of ideas they have in their mind? Is it the set of drills or the way they practice? Is it genetics and luck? Those are all good insights. All of those factors you've mentioned play a definite role. Let's start with luck, okay? We are all subject to fortune and fortune can be good and fortune can be bad. Life is in many ways beautiful, but life is also tragic. And I've had students who showed enormous promise and just tragic events occurred in their lives. The vicissitudes of fortune can be a wonderful thing in your life and they can be a terrible tragedy. I've had students who died for various reasons who could have gone on to become world champions. I've had students who on a much lighter note just fell in love and just wanted to have kids and move away and that's a wonderful thing, but different direction. You just never know. So luck does play some role. Even things like where you're born, the location of, your physical location in the world or even the socioeconomic location can play a role which could be detrimental or favorable. So yeah, luck does play some role. Thankfully, it's one of the smaller elements. And I do believe that a truly resourceful mind can overcome the majority of what fortune throws at us and get to goals provided you're sufficiently mentally robust. Other things you mentioned, genetics. I do believe in certain sports, genetics really do play a powerful, powerful role. For example, in any sport where power output and reaction speed, ability to take physical damage, then there are genetic elements which will help. For example, I couldn't imagine a world in which even if I have a crippled leg, so even if I grew up in a world where my leg was normal and I had normal legs and everything was fine with my body, I don't believe that I could win the Olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprinting, for example. I just don't have enough fast twitch muscle fibers. But the more a sport involves skill and tactics, the less you will see genetics playing a role. If you look at the medal podiums in jiu jitsu, for example, you will see that no one body type is definitively superior to another. You will see every variation of body type and the medal platforms in jiu jitsu. As skill and tactics become more and more important and things like just power output over time become less and less important, then you will see that genetics play less and less of a role. I'm happy to say that the sport of jiu jitsu, the evidence seems pretty clear that there's no one dominant body type in the sport of jiu jitsu. Rather, there's just advantages for one type and there's advantages for another. You just have to learn to tailor your game to your body. With regards to training program, yes, I believe with all my heart and all my soul that your training program does make a difference. I've dedicated my life to that. Obviously, I'm biased in this regard. I do believe that all of the students that I taught who became world champions would have been great athletes whether or not they had met me or not. I believe that. But I do also believe it would have taken them a lot longer and they may not have gotten to the level that they did. I'm sure they would have been impressive, but I do believe that the nature of a training program plays an enormous difference. I don't mean to say this in an arrogant way. I believe that there's, again, a mountain of evidence to suggest this is true because you see it in many different sports. Let's talk, for example, about your country, Russia, and its wrestling program. Russia is an enormous country, but the location where Russia's wrestling program comes from is actually very small and the population is actually very small. I can't verify this, but I was told once, I can't verify this, but the number of people who wrestle in Russia is actually significantly smaller than the number of people who wrestle in the United States. It's also not part of the school athletics and it is in the United States. Yes, that's a different point. We'll come back right to that because that's also an important point. But if you look at the actual numbers of people there, they're actually pretty small. So ostensibly, if it comes down to a numbers game, America should dominate at the Olympics because we have more wrestlers. Now, the story gets more complicated because America has a different style of wrestling, the collegiate style than the international freestyle. That is a complicating factor. But nonetheless, what you see there is that numbers aren't everything. Rather, the manner in which people are trained clearly has an impact. And we know very little about the, there's very little reliable information about the training program for wrestling in the Russian States. But one thing is incontestable is the amount of success that they've had in international world championship and Olympic competition. They are disproportionately successful despite their relatively small numbers. There's nothing genetically special about them. You can talk about performance enhancing drugs, but those are a worldwide phenomenon. They don't have any access to technology that the rest of the world doesn't have. At some point, you gotta start asking, what are they doing differently in the training room? And there are many other examples of similar situations. My country, New Zealand, has an insanely successful rugby program, the sport of rugby, which they have dominated for literally generations despite the fact that our population is very, very small compared with the rest of the country. And we don't excel in many other sports. New Zealand does fairly well in sports overall, but nothing like they do in rugby. And you've got to ask yourself, is there a culture there which built this up? And the world is full of examples of seemingly small and unpromising areas or locations putting out disproportionately high numbers of successful athletes. And that points to the idea that different training programs have different success rates. And so I truly believe with all my heart and all my soul that how you train does make a significant difference. I would even go further and say it makes the most difference. Is it the only thing? Absolutely not. We've already talked about fortune. We've talked about genetics. If you wanna get nasty, you can even talk about things like performance enhancing drugs that obviously plays a role in modern sports. But I do believe that the majority of what creates success is the interaction between the athlete and the training program. Now, the training program is one thing. I do believe that's the single most important, but right behind it is the athlete themselves. In my own experience, people talk about athletes that I've trained successfully, but they never talk about athletes that I've trained unsuccessfully. Always remember that for every champion coach produces, there's always going to be a difference. Always remember that for every champion a coach produces, there's a hundred people that they coach that no one ever heard of, and this is completely normal. A coach can never take the lion's share of the credit. A coach creates possibilities, but it's the athlete who actualizes the possibilities. And so building that rapport and finding the right people to excel in your training program is also a big part of it. What makes the difference between the successful, your successes and your failures as a coach? A range of reasons. The single most important is persistence. People will point to all kinds of virtues amongst athletes. This guy's the most courageous. This guy's the strongest. These are all virtues, but the one indispensable virtue is persistence, the ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the results you seek. But what does persistence really look like? If we can just break that apart a little bit. It's actually, this is a great question you're asking because most people see it as a kind of simplistic doggedness where you just show up every day. That's not it. The most important form of persistence is persistence of thinking, which looks to push you in increasingly efficient, more and more efficient methods of training. Famously, people talk about the idea that the hardest work of all is hard thinking, and they're absolutely right. Okay, coming into the gym and just doing the same thing for a decade isn't going to make you better. What's going to make you better is progressive training over time where you identify clear goals marked out in time increments, three months, six months, 12 months, five years, and build those short term goals into a program of long term goals, making sure that the training program changes over time so that as your skill level rises, the challenges you face in the gym become higher and higher. Don't kill them at the start with challenges that are too hard for them to deal with, they get discouraged and leave. Build them slowly over time, but make sure they don't just get left in a swamp where they're just doing the same thing they were doing three years ago and they get bored. And there's two ways you can leave in a gym. You can leave from adversity, it was too tough, or you can leave from boredom. Everyone talks about the first, no one talks about the second. Most people, when they get to black belt, they get bored. They know what their game is, they know what they're good at, they know what they're not good at. When they compete, they stick with what they're good at, and they avoid what they're not good at, and they get bored. They reach a plateau, and that's it. My whole thing is to make sure it's not so tough at the start that they leave because of adversity, and then for the rest of their career to make sure it's not boring so they leave because of boredom. Travis Stevens actually said something that changed the way I see training. He said it as a side comment, but he said that at the end of a good training session, your mind should be exhausted, not your body. And I've, for most of my life, saw good training sessions where my body was exhausted. Yes, I believe that's the case with most people. You should come out of the training session with your mind buzzing with ideas, like possibilities for tomorrow. And by the way, on that note, I would go further and say that the training session doesn't finish when your body stops moving. It finishes when your mind stops moving, and your mind shouldn't stop moving. After that session, there should be analysis. What did I do well? What did I do badly? How could I do better with the things that I did well? Can I ask you about something that I truly enjoy and I think is really powerful, but most people don't seem to believe in that, but is drilling? I don't know. Maybe people are different, but I love the idea, maybe even outside of jiu jitsu, of doing the same thing over and over. It's like Jiro dreams of sushi. I love doing the thing that nobody wants to do and doing it 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more than what nobody wants to do. So I'm a huge fan of drilling. Obviously, I'm not a professional athlete, but I feel like if I actually gave myself, if I wanted to be really good at jiu jitsu, like reach the level of being in the top 25 when I was much younger, like really strive, I think I could achieve it by drilling. I had this belief untested. Can you challenge this idea or agree with it? First off, fascinating. However, we're going to have to disagree. No, no. We're just gonna have to start to understand what are we talking about when we talk about drilling? It's a very vague term. Okay, at this moment, many of your listeners are probably having the same thought process, which is, oh, drilling. Yeah, I know what that is. We go into the gym and we pick a move and we practice it for a certain number of repetitions. And if I do that, I'm gonna get better at the technique. Okay, they're wrong. We've got to have a much more in depth understanding of what the hell we're talking about when we talk about drilling. Ultimately, any movement in the gym that doesn't improve the skills you already have or build new skills is a waste of time, a waste of resources. Everything you do should be done with the aim and the understanding that this is gonna make me better at the sport I practice. If it's not, shouldn't be there. The majority of what passes for drilling in most training halls will not make you better, including some of the most cherished forms of drilling, which is repetition for numbers. The moment you say to someone, I want you to do this a hundred times, what are they really thinking about? Volume. They're saying, okay, I'm at repetition 78. I'm at 80, 20 more to go. All they're talking, their primary thought process is on numbers. That's not the point of drilling. The point is skill acquisition. When people drill, don't get them focused on numbers, get them focused on mechanics. That's what they have to worry about. I never have my students drill for numbers ever. Just one, two, three, get the fuck out of here. Are you kidding me? Like how are you gonna get better with that? Okay, get them working on the sense of gaining knowledge. That's my job. I have to give them knowledge. I have to explain to them what they're trying to do. That starts them on the right track. But knowledge is one thing. Skill is another. If jiu jitsu was just about knowledge, then all the 60 and 70 year old red belts would be the world champions. They're not. Jiu jitsu isn't won by knowledge, it's won by skill. Knowledge is the first step in building skill. So my job as a coach is to transmit knowledge. Then I have to create training programs with a path from knowledge to polished skill is carried out. That's the interface between me and my students. And so I give them drills where the whole emphasis is upon getting a sense where they understand what are the problems they're trying to solve and working towards practical solutions. They never work with numbers. They work with mechanics and feel. Then you have to bring in the idea of progression. When you drill, there's zero resistance. When you fight in competition, there's 100% resistance. You can't go from zero to 100. There has to be progress over time where I have them work in drills with slightly increasing increments of resistance. And just as we talked about earlier with the weightlifter who doesn't start with 500 pounds, but who begins with the bar and then over time builds the skills that one day out there in the future he will lift 500 pounds. So too, that Jujikutami that you're working on today is feeble and pathetic, but five years from now you'll win a world championship with it. You can't have this naive idea of drilling. It's something you just come out, you randomly pick a move and you work for numbers until you've satisfied a certain set of numbers that your coach threw at you and then think you're gonna get better. There's even dangers with drilling. There is no performance increase that comes once you get to a certain level and you just keep doing the same damn thing. Let's say, for example, you come out and you hit a hundred repetitions of the arm by Jujikutami from guard position. And you're all proud of yourself because you hit a hundred repetitions and your body's tired and you're telling yourself, man, I got a good workout. And you come in tomorrow, you do exactly the same thing. You come in the day after that and a week goes by and you've done the same thing. Then a year later, you do the same thing. Ask yourself, has your Jujikutami really gotten better? No, you've performed literally thousands and thousands of repetitions. You've spent an enormous amount of training time and energy that could have gone in different directions on something which didn't make you any better. Drills have diminishing returns. Once you get to a certain skill level, if you just keep hammering on the same thing in the same fashion for the same amount of time, you stop getting better. Can I, partially for fun, partially for Dallas Advocate, but partially because I actually believe this to push back on some points, is it possible? So everything you said, I think is beautiful and correct. But the asking yourself the question, am I getting better? It's a really important one and you could do that in training. Is there a set of techniques, maybe a small subset of all the techniques that are in Jiu Jitsu, where you can have significant skill acquisition if you put in the numbers or the time, whatever, on a technique against an opponent who's not resisting? Here's, let me elaborate. What I've, in my, maybe I'm different. You'll probably have to finish an example. Yes. Let me first make a general statement and then I can give examples. The general statement is I found that through repetitions, and this is high repetitions combined with training, but high repetitions against a non resisting opponent, I've gotten to understand the way my body moves, the way I apply pressure on a human. Because it's not actually zero resistance. The opponent's still laying there. They're still keeping their legs up. They're still doing, they might not be resisting, but they're still creating a structure. Yes. A non dynamic structure. They're presenting a target. Yes. But it's not dynamic. So you can't master the timing of things, but you can master the, not master, but I felt like I could gain an understanding of how to apply pressure to the human body over thousands of repetitions. Now, for example, I just, just to give you an example to know what we're talking about. There's a guy named Saulo Herbaro and Shanji Herbaro that have this, I guess, I already forgot, but the headquarters position or something like that. But putting pressure as you pass guard, like medium passing distance kind of pressure. I've did thousands of repetitions of that to understand what putting pressure with my hips feels like. To truly understand that movement, I felt like I was getting much better. It's like, it's hard to put into words, but that skill acquisition is so subtle. Just the way you turn your hips. But you're already talking about a better form of drilling now. You're going beyond the basic numbers and you're getting the sense of feel and mechanics, which is what we want in drilling. But the reason I say numbers, and maybe you can speak to this, but this might be an OCD thing, but it allows you to take a journey that doesn't just last a week or two weeks, but a journey where you stay with the technique for two, three years. And there's a dedication to it. Where it's a long term commitment to where you're forcing yourself, perhaps there's other mechanisms, but you're forcing yourself to stay with a technique longer than most people around you are staying with whatever they're working on. And you're taking that long journey. And the numbers somehow enforce that persistence and that dedication. First thing, that journey's a wonderful thing. And if that technique is a crucial part of what you do, then it's time well invested. But always understand that it comes at an opportunity cost. That by spending that amount of time on that one technique, you've sacrificed other things that you could have learned that could have won you matches. So understand that every focus upon one element of the game comes at the opportunity cost of other elements. Now, as long as you're playing a part of the game where, okay, this is central to what I do. Yes, okay, that's fine. But just be aware of the danger of opportunity cost. That's something no one talks about in the training room, but it becomes very important. Secondly, the other question you have to start asking yourself is, okay, that training clearly had benefits for you early on. But when the point of diminishing return starts coming and if you feel you're just doing the same thing, then it's time to switch. Now, if you feel you're still getting benefit from it, by all means, continue. That will be a call on your part. You've been playing this game a long time now, so I would trust your call on that. But my job as a coach is to look out and say, okay, this kid's been working cross Ashigarami for six months and I feel he's gotten to a good skill level. If he stays any further on it, the opportunity cost becomes greater than the expected benefits of continuing it. And that's my job as a coach, is to direct things in that fashion. If I can do a good job with that, then I can take them to the next level of drilling and start amping it up. And that's how I keep progress over time. My biggest fear is to have students run past the point of diminishing returns, staying stagnant where opportunity costs comes in and they're not making the progress they could in the time that they've been working. I mean, that was, it was almost a philosophical question for me. That's what I was always on a search on because I know my mind is likes drilling. I don't like relying on other people for improvement and drilling allows me to do something that is 100% me. It's interesting Lex, you say you don't like relying on other people in drilling, but in drilling, you really do rely a lot on your partner. One of the first things I do when I coach people is I teach them how to drill. That's a skill in itself. And drilling is in a sense, the opposite of sparring. Drilling is a cooperative venture where you work as dance partners, complimenting each other's movement. If I drill with Gordon Ryan and I want him to work on bars, I will move my body in ways which make it an interesting exercise for Gordon. I'm not just sitting there and he does a repetition and I'm, okay, he does 10. I can't wait for this to be over so I can do my 10 and I can't wait for all this to be over so we can just spar and get over all this bullshit. That's the sad truth of most drilling in Jiu Jitsu. There's a sense in which when good people drill, it's like watching good people dance. They move in unison and compliment each other's movement and make each other look better. Sparring, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of that. That's resistance where you're trying to make the other person look as bad as possible. And once you understand the different directions in which drilling and sparring go, that's when things start getting interesting. You start getting fast progress. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think I was not very eloquent describing what I mean. I found myself not able to find in Jiu Jitsu too many people that are willing to dedicate a huge amount of time to a particular technique. I concur with you on Netflix. Now, answer the interesting question, why? Why can't you get people to drill with you? By the way, if I could just shout out the people that did drill with me is usually blue belt women because they're smaller, they don't like training because they get their ass kicked because they're much smaller. So they're willing to invest a significant amount of effort into training. That's good, but their motivation for doing so is not good. Well, yes. But your motivation for drilling is because you don't want to get your ass kicked. That's not a good motivation. No black belt ever. I could never find a black belt that I could drill with like this. Now let's go back to that question, why? I don't mean this, I am somebody who likes to say nice things about people. So let me answer for you. Yeah. Two reasons, because they find it boring. Yes. And secondly, perhaps more importantly, they don't believe it works. Yeah, those are good answers. And now let's go further and ask the truly interesting question. Why do they believe that? If I were to answer it in the context of Russian wrestling, where drilling is much bigger part, is I think culturally that was knowledge that everybody tells each other in Jiu Jitsu that drilling doesn't work. Because they never taught how to drill. No one ever sits you down one day and says, okay, this is how you drill. And so the exercise feels futile. They don't feel their skill level is going up. They don't associate drilling with increased skill level. They associate sparring with increased skill level, but not drilling, which is a tragedy because it is a fantastic way to introduce and expand the repertoire of a developing student. It's an essential part of every workout I teach. I always say the game of Jiu Jitsu begins with knowledge and builds up to skill. Who wins is the one who has greater skill and nine times out of 10. So to me, it's a tragedy that what you're saying breaks my heart to hear that you couldn't get a black belt to drill with you, that's shameful. But I understand, I sympathize with those black belts too because the way in which most people are told to drill does feel ineffective and it is damn boring. They'd rather just spar. They feel like they get more out of the workout. And that's, if anything, an indictment upon most of the training programs around the nation. Would you say that drilling, if you were to build a black belt world champion, would drilling be, what percent of their training, in the entirety of their career would be drilling? Great question. Let's first put a proviso on it that I don't do the same thing for all athletes. Everyone's got a different personality. And like Nicky Rod, I can only hold his attention for two minutes at a time. And Gary Tonin, five minutes. Gordon Ryan, five hours. Like George St. Pierre, five hours. Travis Stevens, five hours. They are just laser focused. So everyone's different. Let's put that down as our first proviso. You probably knew those answers already. Yeah. That's hilarious. But as a general rule, if I run a two and a half hour class, you can expect an hour and a half of it to be, I'm going to use the word drilling, but I'm also going to say that this is too complex of a story to give now with words. I would need to demonstrate it. But the way in which we drill is not your standard method of drilling. And then it's into sparring. But if you give me a choice between a bad drilling partner and sparring, I could make the same choice that most black belts make, which I would go with sparring. Because you can create drilling within the sparring environment. Like good drilling is a wonderful thing. Bad drilling is just a worthless waste of time. Okay, before, I have a million questions for you, but I have to ask, can you, we've described the fundamentals of jiu jitsu. Can we describe the principles, the fundamentals of one of the interesting systems you've developed, which is the leg lock system? Yeah, anything in particular or just like a general understanding of what are some of the major principles of it? Well, it's like me coming to Miyamoto Musashi and asking, can you describe the principles of sword fighting? You're too generous. Let's start off with some context. When I began the sport of jiu jitsu, I was taught a fairly classical approach to jiu jitsu, which leg locks were a part of it, but not an emphasized part of it. The overall culture of the times is the mid 1990s. The overall culture of the time saw leg locks as largely ineffective. It was, we were told that against good opposition, they just didn't work very well. They were low percentage techniques. We were also told that they were tactically unsound because if you ever attempted them and you lost control of the leg lock, your opponent would end up on top of you or in some kind of good position and you'd be in terrible trouble. And we were also told that they were unsafe, that if they were applied in the gym, there'd be far too many injuries and people would be badly hurt. And that was the received wisdom of that time. And so I didn't even work with them at all. And they would be shown occasionally in the gym and you'd learn them, you'd drill them. But in sparring, I showed no interest. You probably know that change when I met the great American grappler, Dean Lister, who early in his career was using Achilles locks with considerable success. I met him in the gym, wonderful fellow. And... Achilles locks is like a straight full lock. Yes, that's correct, yes. And he went on to become a heel hooker and win 280 CCs later on in his career. But we never met again after that. And that opened some doors of inquiry and... Well, he asked this first principles question is why would you only use half the body in a game that involves the human body? Perfect sense. So that opened doors to inquiry. And if you looked around the Jiu Jitsu world at that time, the number of specialized leg lockers was very small. And most of them were from outside of conventional Jiu Jitsu. For example, you could look around and see people like Romina Sato had sharp leg locks for that time period in the 1990s. So they were out there, they existed. And you'd see people like Ken Shamrock would use heel hooks in competition and he had some good success with them. When I began experimenting in the gym, fairly soon, certain truths started to become evident. And the most important of these can be understood very quickly. And they were relatively easy to discover. The first was that most people, when they went to understand and study leg locking. And when I talk about leg locking, I'm gonna talk about one specific type, which is the most high percentage type. This is leg locks, which are performed with entanglements of your opponent's legs with your legs. There are other forms of leg lock, but these are relatively low percentage and don't figure heavily in competition. So I'll ignore them. Most people made no distinction between the mechanism of control versus the mechanism of breaking. The heel hook is what ultimately breaks the ankle. But the mechanism of control is the entanglement of your legs to your opponent's legs. The Japanese term ashigurami literally just means like leg entanglement. It's a generic term. It could apply to any form of entanglement. There are many options. My idea was let's focus on the entanglement first and worry about the breaking mechanism second. This was analogous to the idea of position before submission. Only you couldn't talk about it in terms of conventional positions because ashigurami doesn't really fit into the traditional hierarchies, positional hierarchies of jiu jitsu. So the conversation was switched from position to submission to control to submission. Now, wrapping two of your legs around one of your opponent's legs gives you many different options. You can do it with your feet on the outside, so called 50, 50 variations. You can do it with your feet on the inside and form what we call inside foot position. There's pros and cons to both. There's also methods of harmonizing the two. So you have one foot on the inside and one foot on the outside. You can do it with a straight leg where you heel hook from the outside or you can bring the leg across your center line and heel hook from the inside. You will start to notice as you work through these different variations that some present advantages over others. All of them come at a price to some degree, regardless of which ashigurami option you use. There will be some degree of foot exposure on my part to my opponent and some degree of back exposure on my part relative to my opponent. So that's the downside of it. Variations within those different ashigurami enable you to lessen danger in some respects and at the price of gaining dangers in others. So you get this wide array of choices. There's not this kind of simplistic hierarchy that you see in the basic position. The basic positions of jiu jitsu, but there are hierarchies. I do, for example, generally favor inside heel hooks over outside heel hooks. If I feel my opponent is very good at exposing my back while I'm in ashigurami, I generally prefer 50, 50 situations. If I believe my opponent is very good at counter leg locks, I generally prefer my feet on the inside working with variations of insides and kaku, et cetera, et cetera. So there are broad heuristic rules that we can give to work in these situations. Once you start to understand there's a variety of entanglements you can use, then you start getting into the really interesting ideas that as you perform one given attack, one given heel hook, you can flow through different forms of ashigurami where you can create new dangers and avoid possible pitfalls in a very short timeframe as you switch from one ashigurami to another over time. So that as your opponent's lines of resistance to an initial attack change, you can accommodate those by switching to another form of ashigurami so that your mechanism of control is always pointing in opposite directions of his escape. And if you focus on this idea of control through the legs, you can completely change the nature of leg locking and take it away from what it was in the 1990s an opportunistic method of attack based upon surprise, speed and power into one based on control. If you can do this, you can undermine many of the basic criticisms of leg locking which were prevalent when I began. I began the sport of jiu jitsu. For example, if I can completely control and immobilize you, I can perform the lock very, very safely. If my only way of breaking your leg is to be faster and more powerful than you, nine times out of 10 when I apply it, I'm gonna hurt your leg as much by accident as anything. But if I can completely immobilize you and as every attempt you make to escape, I can follow you and immobilize you in new directions, then I can apply the lock with as much force or as little force as possible. And so you'll see in our training room despite over considerably more than two decades, sorry, a decade and a half now of heel hooking using these methods, the number of people severely injured by heel hooks is tiny. I would say I've seen more people injured by far by kimuras in the time I've been training than I have by heel hooks, despite them having a similar twisting dynamic to them. If you build a culture where people focus on control rather than speed of execution, then the injury rate goes down appreciably. The whole idea of positional loss, everyone was critical of leg locks. Now, if you go for leg locks and they don't work, well, now you're in trouble. The guy's gonna be on top of you. They never make that criticism with armbars. Okay, you can be in the mounted position, go for an armbar, end up on bottom, lose the armbar and lose position, but I've never heard anyone criticize armbars on that account. More importantly, I believed from early on that the best place to attack leg locks is not top position, it's bottom position. You'll see that over 90% of my athletes attack leg locks from underneath people, not on top of people. So there is no positional loss. You're already underneath them. And so that criticism was null and void. And by focusing on this idea of breaking down and distinguishing between the mechanism of control and the mechanism of breaking, that created something new and something interesting. There was also another advantage that I had in terms of creating influence with leg locking. When you look at the great leg lockers of the past, they were basically iconoclasts. They were people who came out of nowhere who just had this remarkable success with leg locks. But they were just seen as unique individuals. They had their game and they were good at it. What was unique about the squad is you had not just one person, but a team of people who came out and did pretty much the same thing. These people had very different body types and very different personalities. So it wasn't that one kind of body type was good at it. You had tall people like Gordon Ryan. You had short people like Nikki Ryan. You had someone in the middle like Gary Tonin. You had fast people like Gary Tonin. You had slow people like Gordon. There was every kind of body type involved. And it was like, people could see this was different because it worked for an entire team as opposed to a unique individual who had unique attributes. And then started to foster the belief that if it can work for a team, it can work for anyone, which means it can work for me. And I think that had a big effect. That's why I owe a lot to those early students, Gordon Ryan, Gary Tonin, Eddie Cummings, and Nikki Ryan. And those four kids came from nowhere. Gary had some success in grappling, like low level success in grappling before becoming a full time member of the squad. But the others were just nobodies who no one had known. And yet within a five year timeframe, they were all going up against world championship competition and doing exceedingly well. And which gives further credence to the idea of the five year program. And I think by operating as a team, those young men did an incredible job of convincing the grappling world that this wasn't just about, well, they're just different or it works for their body type or them as individuals. It was like, no, if a team can do it, anyone can do it. And I think that's what really convinced people that this was something worth studying. This is something that could be a big part of their lives. But also convinced you and convinced each other in those early days when you're developing the science. Essentially what was missing is an entire science and system of leg locks. Because it's not like you knew for sure that there's a lot here to be discovered in terms of control. You perhaps hadn't, just like you said, an initial intuition, but you have to have enough, there's perseverance required to take, it's the Johnny Ive thing to take from the initial idea to an entire system. Is there a sense you have about how complicated and how big this world of control in leg locks is? How complicated is it? You've achieved a lot of success. You have a lot of powerful ideas in terms of inside, outside, what's high percentage, what's not, what's higher reward, what's a low risk, all those kinds of things. And then you also mentioned kind of transitions, not transitions, but how you move with your opponent to resist their escape through control. How much do you understand about this world? This is a fascinating question. As a general rule, the most powerful developments are always at the onset of a project, okay? Let's give an example. The jet engine was, I believe, first conceived in the late 1930s, just around the time of World War II. It was developed with great pace because of World War II. Obviously, military research was a huge thing back then. And first fielded, I believe, by the jet engine, first fielded, I believe, by the Germans in around 1943. Jet aircraft didn't play a big role in World War II. They were there at the end and they did play a significant role, but in terms of numbers, they just weren't there. So by around 1945, you had the onset of the jet age and the jet engine began to replace the piston engine in most aircraft. It was the new way of doing things. If you look at the pace of development of jet engine aircraft technology from 1945 to 1960, it is unbelievable. There was a solid decade where they were gaining almost 100 miles an hour per year for a decade. That's a form of growth that, I mean, in the world of engineering, that's the only time you see growth like that is in things like Bitcoin and that's about it, okay? Let's put things in perspective, okay? In World War II, the standard US aircraft bomber was the B17, which was a midsize bomber with a fairly limited load capacity and I think top speed well below 300 miles an hour. Just 10 years later, you had the B52, which could fly across continents and deliver nuclear weapons and carry bomb loads of up to 70,000 pounds. In a decade, that happened. If you took a B17 pilot in 1943 and put them inside a B52 a decade later, he would literally think he was on a UFO, a ship from another planet. That was the speed of development. Now, contrast that with the speed of modern development. If I took you in a time machine and I put you in a civil airliner in 1972, let's say a Boeing 737, it's not that different from what you fly in today. Flies at the same speed, has the same range, flies at the same altitude. It's not that different. The amount of progress between 1973 and 2020 isn't very impressive, but the amount of progress from 1945 to 1955, or even better, 1960 was staggering. And so the initial progress tends to be meteoric, but after that, it tends to be incremental. That said, there's a guy named Elon Musk. There's been almost no development in terms of space rocket propulsion and rocket launches and going out into orbit or going out into deep space. And one guy comes along, one John Donahue type character, and says, it doesn't make sense why we don't use reusable rockets, why we don't make them much cheaper, why we don't launch every week as opposed to every few years. It doesn't make any sense why we don't go to the moon again over and over and over. It doesn't make any sense why we don't go to Mars and colonize Mars. It feels like it's not just a single jump to a B52. It's a series of these kinds of jumps. So the question is, is there another leap within the leg locking system? Time will tell. I do believe that we're in a phase now where the really big jumps have already been made and we're in the incremental phase at this point. What I do believe is that you will start to see new directions start to emerge, where you start to see the interface between leg locking and race link, for example. The interface between leg locking and back attacks. And that will provide new avenues of direction which will create new spurts of growth. But in terms of breaking people's legs, just the simple act of breaking legs, I believe we're in the incremental phase now rather than the meteoric phase. Let me ask you a ridiculous question. How hard is it to actually break a leg? Is this something you think about? I remember, because I'm a big fan of the straight foot lock, not, again, we're talking about to the standing Seoi Nage. Maybe it's my Russian roots with Samba or something like that. Maybe it's the Dean Lister, Achilles lock. But I love, maybe it's my body, something like that. I just love the squeeze of it, the control and the power of a straight foot lock. And I remember trying to, there's a few people in competition that didn't want to tap. Absolutely. And I remember in particular, there was one person, again, the finals match, Purple Belt. I remember it was a straight foot lock, it was perfect. Everything just perfect. And I remember going all in and there was a pop, pop, pop. And I couldn't do anything more. It wasn't breaking. It was just bending and bending and bending. And there's damage to it of some kind. But I wanted to like, you know, I wanted to see, first of all, it's very difficult psychologically because it's like, can I be violent here? That was a whole nother thing. With adrenaline, you can't really think that fast. But I also thought like, where else is there to go? Like, is it the shin going to break? What is it supposed to break? So I wondered that. Yeah, in the case of the Achilles lock, it's going to be the anterior tibialis tendon. What's that? That's the, it runs down, there's two of them. It'll be the minor one that runs on the outside of the front of the ankle. It's not going to be the Achilles tendon. A lot of people promulgate this absurdity. The Achilles tendon can rupture, but not from pressure. Does the tendon or the bone, it's going to break? The bone won't break. I have seen on one occasion, a shin bone break from an Achilles lock, but there was an enormous size and strength disparity. And there may have been other complicating factors too. But in the vast majority of cases, the Achilles lock doesn't really do tremendous damage. It can do significant damage. You'll definitely feel it the next day, but it's, of all the major locks, it's the one where it is most likely a psychologically strong opponent will be able to absorb damage and go on to win a match. In answer to your first question, how difficult is it to break a leg? Not very difficult. It will come down to what is the skill level of my opponent's resistance? If your opponent is not resisting and you have an inside heel hook, it is absurdly easy to break a man's leg. Not a challenge at all. You can be a 105 pound woman, could easily snap the relevant knee ligaments in a 240 pound man's leg if he doesn't know how to defend himself. That's an easy thing, very easy to accomplish. So the basic answer is yes, it's very easy. If your opponent does know how to defend and they can position their foot, play tricks of lever and fulcrum, it becomes significantly more difficult. It becomes still more difficult under match conditions where they're actively looking to position their body and work their way out of the lock, then it can become very difficult indeed. Always bear in mind that there have been some cases in our history as a team where people have literally just let their knees snap and continue fighting. Always remember that submission is a choice when it comes to the joint locks. And we've had some people who just made the choice that I'm willing to let my knee break so that I can continue in this match. That's a tough decision to make and I admire their bravery. Is there something about that, just to speak to that, that you admire? Yes, it's mental toughness. Would I agree with it, would I advocate it? No, but that doesn't mean I can't admire aspects of it. Who is the greatest grappler ever? You were very astute in the way you asked that question. You didn't say the greatest jiu jitsu player of all time, you specified grappler. What's the bigger category? Jiu jitsu is the bigger category. Jiu jitsu has four faces. There is gi competition, there is no gi competition, there is mixed martial arts competition, and there is self defense. So jiu jitsu has four aspects. Grappling typically refers only to the no gi aspect of jiu jitsu, so it's one out of four possibilities. So who's the greatest jiu jitsu practitioner ever, and then who is the greatest grappler ever? I believe that the greatest jiu jitsu player, certainly that I ever met, and I believe of all time, I don't want to sound arrogant on that because really you can only go with your own experiences and there are some great athletes that other people mention that I just never met. So, but in my estimation, the greatest jiu jitsu player is Haja Gracie, my reasoning for that is out of the four faces of jiu jitsu, he excelled in three. And in two of them in particular, he was the best of his generation by a landslide. In gi grappling, no gi grappling, Haja dominated his generation to a degree that is truly impressive. What do you attribute that dominance to, by the way? Is there something, if you were to analyze him? Fascinating question, I'll come back to it. In mixed martial arts, he was at his peak, I believe ranked in the top 10 in the world of mixed martial arts. He wasn't the best in mixed martial arts the way he was in grappling, but he was damn good. And he beat some significant people. So he showed tremendous versatility, gi, no gi, mixed martial arts. He's not really known in the world of self defense, but there's no real criteria by which you would become dominant in self defense. So that's kind of a, you can't really judge people by that. Believe me, if Haja got into a fight in the street, I'm sure he would do just fine. So I have no concerns about that. So I would say that if you look at jiu jitsu for what I believe it is, a sport with four faces, I believe you have to go with Haja Gracie as the one who went out and empirically proved his ability to go across those elements and do extraordinarily well in all of them. He even made the extraordinary step of coming out of retirement and beating the best of the generation that came after him. That's Asha? Yes, that's a truly difficult feat. That was incredible. Yeah, and a sport which progresses very, very rapidly, that's a truly impressive accomplishment. If you ask the question who is the greatest grappler that I've ever seen, I would say I've never seen anyone better than Gordon Ryan. Now people are gonna jump when I give these two names. They're gonna say, well, Dan, you're close friends with Haja and you're close friends with Gordon, so you're biased. I can't answer them to that, it's true. I'm good friends with both of them. I'm also a notoriously cold and unemotional person and I'm saying this based upon things that I've observed. If I honestly believed that I'd seen other people who were better, I would have said it. Will that convince the people who criticize me are biased, probably not, but those are the two names that I will mention. I think it's an uncontroversial statement to say that Gordon Ryan is one of the greatest grappler ever. Yeah, Gordon's obviously a very polarizing figure and people tend to react to Gordon on an emotional level rather than a statistical level and that colors a lot of people's minds, but I also have the benefit that I've seen both of these guys extensively in the gym and that adds a whole new perspective. If you think those guys are dominant on the stage, wait till you see them in the gym. It's even a different level of domination above and beyond what they did in competition. Have they trained against each other in the gym? No, they never trained together. They've been in the same gym, I think, only on one occasion. When Hodger was stopped by New York, he came by to say hello and Gordon was here at the time. They shake hands, they know each other and they're both wonderful people in their own way. So I'd like to talk to you about Gordon, Hodger and George GSP. Let's first talk about what do you think, because it's very different from my perspective, maybe you can correct me, but very different artists, masters of their pursuits. So what makes Hodger so good? Hodger was probably the living embodiment of someone who played a classical jiu jitsu game based around the fundamental four steps of jiu jitsu. And like if you took someone who had taken introduction lessons in jiu jitsu for three months, they would recognize the outlines of Hodger's game with many of the techniques they learned in those first three months. Hodger was the best example of the dichotomy between the fundamentals of jiu jitsu, but also a kind of hidden sophistication underneath those fundamentals. People always say, oh, Hodger's game was so basic. No, the outlines of Hodger's game were basic, but the degree of sophistication and the application was extraordinary, and his ability to refine existing technology was truly impressive. I never saw anyone in his generation that even came close to his ability, both in competition and in the gym. So for people who don't know, Hodger Gracie basically used, just like you said, a very simple techniques on the surface from the outsider's perspective that most people learn when they start jiu jitsu, like passing guard in a very simple way, taking mount and choking from mount. Also, when he's on his back, it's closed guard and all the basic submissions from closed guard, arm bar and triangle, and just, that's it. And being able to dominate, shut down, and submit. So control and submit the best people in the world for many, many years, just like you said, including coming out of retirement and beating the best, perhaps by far the best of the next generation. So that just kind of lays out the story. Is there some lessons about his systems that you learn in developing your own systems? Excellent question. The thing which always impressed me the most about Hodger was his relentless pursuit of position to submission. Everything was done with the belief that no victory was worthwhile if it didn't involve submitting his opponent. That's a mindset that I tried very, very hard to imbue in my students. The easiest path to victory in jiu jitsu is the one which takes the least risk. So for example, you will see many modern athletes focus on scoring the first point or the first advantage, and then doing the minimum amount of work to eke out a victory once they've done that. They get a small tactical advantage, they realize they're ahead, take no more risks, and just do the minimum amount of work to get the victory. Hodger's mindset was always to take the riskier gambit of submission, which entails a lot more work, and in many cases, a lot more skill. What I always liked about Hodger is he never tried to play tactics. It was always just go out there and try to win by submission. And that more than anything, that mindset of looking for the most perfect victory rather than the victory that takes the least skill and the least effort is probably the thing I took from his career the most and tried to work on in my students. I always wonder what are the little details he's doing under there when he's in mount, the little adjustments. But perhaps that's almost indescribable, the details of that control. What makes Gordon Ryan, the greatest grappler of all time, so good? With Gordon, he's also very strong on fundamentals, all of my students are, but he's also obviously a member of a new generation of no geek grapplers that also bring in technologies that weren't really emphasized in previous generations specifically. The prolific use of lower body attacks, especially from bottom position. This means that he can play a game between upper body and lower body, which was not really a part of Hodges game. Nonetheless, you will also see significant similarities. He's got a very strong and crushing passing game to mount and a very strong and crushing passing game to the back. You will see that the major differences between the two are from bottom position. Hodges bottom game is essentially based around his close guard. Gordon Ryan's game is based around his butterfly guard. So one is based on outside control and one is based on inside control. One focuses almost entirely on the classical notion of getting past the legs to the upper body and the other one works between the two as alternatives and sees them as competing alternatives where the stronger you become at one, the more your opponent has to overreact and become vulnerable to the second. So they have strong similarities in top position but are very different in bottom. He has, from an outsider's perspective, a calm to him in the heat of battle that's inspiring and confusing. Is there something you could speak to the psychological aspect of Gordon Ryan? Yes. People will talk all day about sports psychology and they will often have heated arguments as to what's the right psychological state to be in when you go out to compete. I've never seen any one school of thought which gave noticeably better sports performance than another. I've never seen any psychological mindset prove to be reliably more efficient or effective than another. I've seen fighters that were scared out of their minds when they went out every time to fight and yet they were very successful. I've seen fighters go out who were relaxed and calm and they too can be successful. I've seen both mindsets win, I've seen both mindsets lose. I've seen every extreme between them. What I generally recommend with regards your mind and preparation going in, find what works for you. Everyone's different. Don't try to give a one size fits all in something as vague and confusing as the human mind. Having said that, my preference, I don't force it on people because everyone's different, but my preference is to try and advocate for a mindset of unexceptionalism. Most people see competition as something exceptional. It's not your everyday grappling session. You train 300 times for every time you compete and so they see competition as something exceptional, different, scarier, more nerve wracking. There's a crowd watching, there's cameras. My reputation is on the line. I'm gonna be observed and judged and so they see it as this exceptional event. My general preference is to see it as an unexceptional event, to see everything else, the noise, the cameras, the crowd as illusions. The only reality is a stage, an opponent on the other side of it and a referee adjudicating you and to make it as unexceptional as possible. Gordon does an extraordinarily good job of doing that. Gordon looks more tense in most of his training sessions than he does in his competitions because he knows his training partners are typically better than the people he's actually going out to compete against. And you see it in his demeanor. It's one of just complete calm. It also goes back to what we talked about earlier about the power of escapes. Gordon Ryan is almost impossible to control for extended periods of time in most of the inferior positions in the sport and most of the submissions. So he goes out in the full knowledge that the worst case scenario isn't that bad for him and so nothing could really go that badly wrong. He can always recover from any given mistake and go on to victory. When you believe those things, you're gonna have a calm demeanor. Then if you look at somebody who is quite a bit different than that, George St. Pierre, who at least in the way he describes it, he's basically exceptionally anxious and terrified approaching a fight and he loves training. And hates fighting. And hates fighting. So and just like you said, he made it work for him. But he's somebody, he speaks very highly of you. He's worked with you quite a bit in training. And you've studied him. You've worked with him. You've coached him. Interesting, I've actually coached George for twice the length of any of the squad members. So my knowledge of him is far greater than it is for the contemporary squad. So can you speak to what makes George St. Pierre, who I think even though I'm Russian and a little bit partial towards Fedor and the Russians, but I think he is in the four categories you mentioned, the greatest mixed martial artist of all time. What makes him so good? His approach, his techniques, his mind. His approach is certainly part of it. George started mixed martial arts at a time when the sport was in a pretty wild phase. It was illegal to show on most American TV networks. And there was talk about it being banned as a sport. In his native Canada, it was banned. You could only fight on Indian reservations in Canada. I believe his first fight may have been on an Indian reservation. So the sport at that stage was very much in its infancy. And it's probably fair to say that most of the athletes involved in the sport came from a training program that would probably describe as unprofessional in the contemporary scene. George is one of a handful of people who started approaching the sport in a truly professional fashion. It was like, OK, here's what great athletes in other sports do. I'm going to try to emulate that. And his ability to invest in himself. In my own experience, for example, George, when I first met him, was a garbage man. And he would jump on a bus from Montreal to New York. Now, that's a long bus ride. He would come down on a Friday afternoon when he finished work as a garbage man, stay for the weekend, and then late on Sunday night, he would jump on a bus all the way back to Montreal and work as a garbage man. That's an extraordinary commitment for a young man to make. And George was a blue belt at the time. And so he would come down. And we had a very talented room. So he didn't do well in the room when he first came in. He was inexperienced in jiu jitsu. And the people who went against were considerably better than him at jiu jitsu. So imagine investing 25% of your weekly income, maybe even more. New York's an expensive town, 50%, to come down and just get your ass kicked month by month. Yeah, that says a lot about who he is. Tells you a lot. First of all, let's talk about the whole idea of delayed gratification here. I mean, that's a guy who's saying, this is highly unpleasant. But I have a vision of myself in the future. And I have to go through this extreme case of delayed gratification to get to that distant goal, which may never happen. And that's a level of commitment and self belief, which is just extraordinary. I always laugh when people say, oh, George was afraid, so he was mentally weak. No, that's a very, very shallow understanding of mental strength and weakness. George felt anxiety. But let's understand from the start, there's different kinds of mental strength. And the most important kind isn't whether you feel fear or don't feel fear before you step into fight. The most important form of mental strength is discipline and training. That's where most people break. I know dozens of people who are fearless to fight, but you couldn't get them to come into the gym for three months in a row and work on skills. So they're mentally strong one way, they don't feel fear. But they're mentally weak in another, which is to instill the discipline which keeps you on a road to progress over time. That's much tougher than not feeling fear before you go out to fight. Understand also that when George talks about fear, he's not afraid of his opponent. He's afraid of failure. He's got high standards. Someone who's got high standards can change the world. His standards were very, very high. That's what he was afraid of. He wasn't afraid of his opponents. And yet, that's always been the misinterpretation. He wasn't mentally weak. He was mentally strong as an ox. To stay in his training regimen year after year after year and do so while he became one of the first stars in mixed martial arts to actually make money. And it gets tough to stay in the training gym with people who are young and hungry and want to punch you in the face. You're coming out of a luxury room, living in finery towards the end of his career and still training as hard as ever. That's an impressive thing. And always he valued perfection. And you're right, the fear was not achieving the perfection. Is there something you've observed about the way he approaches training that stands out to you? Or is it simply the dedication? No, it's never just about dedication. There's lots of dedicated people in the world, but most of them are unsuccessful. If you want to be the best in the world at anything, you have to do, out of the many skills of whatever industry you're in, you have to take at least one of those skills and be the best in the world at it. There's many skills in mixed martial arts. But George identified one skill, which is the skill of striking to take downs. He calls it shootboxing. Shootboxing was barely even a category of skill when George began. It was just the idea that wrestlers grabbed people and took them down the same way they did in wrestling. And you threw some punches before you did it. George largely pioneered the science of creating an interface between striking and take downs. He did it at a time where no one else before him had made it into a system or a science. He did it largely on his own. And I've always said George is the only athlete that I ever coached who taught me more than I taught him. And almost singlehandedly, he created this strong sense of shootboxing as a science, which enabled him throughout his career to determine where the fight would take place. Would it be standing, or would it be on the ground? And that, more than anything else, was the defining characteristic of his success. I will always be immensely impressed by his accomplishment in that regard. He was an innovator. He did things differently. This is such an important point. You can't go out there in combat sports and do the same things that everybody else is doing and expect to get different results. Life doesn't work that way. If you want to be dominant, you've got to find one important part of the sport, and preferably more important than the rest of the sport, and preferably more than one, and be the best in the world at it. You can't be weak at anything, but you can't be strong at everything either. Life's not long enough for us to develop a truly complete skill set. So you've got to be good at everything, and you've got to be the best at at least one thing. And George was the best at two. In his era, he was the best at striking to takedowns, and he was the best at integrating striking and grappling on the floor. Let me ask you a completely ridiculous question, but it's a fascinating one for me from an engineering and a scientific perspective. When I look at a sport, really any problem, one way to ask how difficult is this problem is to see how can I build a machine that competes with a human being at that problem. You can look at chess. You can look at soccer, Robocup, and then you can look at grappling. There's something about when you start to think, how would I build an AI system, a robot that defeats somebody like a Gordon Ryan, where it forces you to really think about formalizing this art as an engineering discipline in the same way you do, but you still have some art injected in there. There's no space for art when you actually have to build the system. That's not a ridiculous question. That's a damn interesting question. Let's put aside, like I mentioned with the Boston Dynamics spot robots, what people don't realize is the amount of power they can deliver is huge. So let's take that weapon aside, just the amount of force you're able to deliver. Yeah, I'm glad you're specifying that. So essentially, your question is, can a talented group of engineers create a robot which could defeat Gordon Ryan? On the face of it, as you just pointed out, that's the easiest project in the world, just create a robot that carries a nine millimeter automatic and shoot them five times in the chest. Okay, that's it, Gordon Ryan's done. So that's not the interesting question. The interesting question, and if I understand you correctly, is if we had the ability to create a robot whose physical powers were identical to Gordon Ryan, not inferior and not superior, what would it take to create a mind inside that robot that would beat Gordon Ryan in the majority of matches? Yeah, and there's two ways to build AI systems. This is true for autonomous driving, for example, which has been quite contested recently. So one is you basically, one way to describe it is you have a giant set of rules. It's like this tree of rules where you apply in different condition when there's a pattern you see, you apply a rule and they're hard coded in. You basically get like a John Donr type of character who tries to encode, hard code into the system, all the moves you should do in every single case. Of course, you can't actually do that fully. So you're going to be taking shortcuts, what are called heuristics, just a basic kind of generalizations and apply your own expertise as an expert of, in this case, grappling, to see how that can be coded as a rule. Now, the other approach, Elon Musk and Tesla are taking this approach, which is called machine learning, which is create a basic framework of the kind of things you should be observing and what are the measures, metrics of success, and then just observe and see which things lead to success, more success and which lead to less success. And there's a delta. Like when you see a thing, first of all, the way machine learning works is you predict, you see a position or you see a situation and then you predict how good that is and then you watch how it actually turns out and if it's worse or better, you adjust your expectations. And through that process, you can learn quite a lot. The challenge is, and this might be a very true challenge in grappling, is like in driving, you can't crash. So there's a physical world. In chess, for example, where this approach has been exceptionally successful, you can work in simulation. So you can have AI system that, for example, as in the case with AlphaZero by DeepMind, Google's DeepMind, it can play itself in simulation millions of times, billions of times. It's difficult to know if it's possible to do that in simulation for anything that involves human movement, like grappling. So that's, my sense is, if we first look at the hard encoding, if you were to try to describe Gordon Ryan to a machine, how many rules are in there, do you think? Yeah, first off, let me tell you, that's one of the most fascinating questions I've ever been asked. And I'm tremendously happy to answer this. How about what we do is, this is a massive question you've asked. There's a huge amount of ways this could get very interesting and very confusing. Let's set some ground rules for the discussion. Lex alluded to the idea of man versus machine and chess. Okay, and I think that's a really good place for us to start the discussion. I'm gonna just tell people about a little bit, the history of man versus chess, to give you guys some background on this. In 1968, there was a party in which a highly ranked, not a world champion, but a highly ranked chess player, his name was Levy, and he met a computer engineer at a party, and they had a lighthearted bet that in a 10 year timeframe, a human chess player would be defeated by a computer. Now, you gotta remember, 1968, computing power was very, very low. The computers that got America to the moon were actually pretty damn primitive. Your iPhone would kick all of their asses. So computational power was very, very low in those days. So interestingly, the chess player fully believed that no computer could beat him in the 10 year timeframe, and the computer engineer was very optimistic that he was wrong, and in fact, 10 years, the computer would win. 10 years later, they had a competition, and the human won, decisively, in fact. So computational power simply hadn't risen to that level yet. Through the 1980s, computational power increased, but not sufficient to get to championship level. There were computer programs in the 1980s which were competitive with good, solid chess players, but not world beaters. Understand right from the start that there's a fundamental problem here. The number of options that the two players in a chessboard can run through is astronomically high. There are 64 squares on a chessboard. The number of possible options that could work or could play out on a chessboard, and this is a truly shocking thing for you to think about, the number of possible options is higher than the number of atoms in the known universe. Think about that for a second in terms of complexity, okay? The number of atoms on this table is massive, okay? That is an unbelievably large number. We're talking about a situation where if a computer had to go through all the options at the onset of a match, they would have to run numbers greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. The number of galaxies in our universe is vast, okay? It's measured in the billions. Like, the number of atoms, that's just a number so mind blowing it's impossible, okay? So no computer is ever going to be able to work with those kinds of numbers, okay? I didn't even know future generations of quantum computers could work with those kinds of numbers. So that's the fundamental problem, okay? The number of options in a chess match is just so astronomically large that no computer could ever figure out all the available options and make decisions in a given timeframe. So that's the fundamental problem. So as Lex correctly pointed out, the way you get around this is by the use of heuristics. These are rules of thumb, which give general guidelines to action. So for example, in jiu jitsu, I could give you a general rule of thumb. Don't turn your back on your opponent, okay? That's a solid piece of advice. There are obviously some exceptions to that rule, but it's a good solid piece of advice to give a beginner. The moment you give that heuristic rule, you rule out a lot of options, okay? You've already told someone don't turn your back, don't turn your back on someone. So a lot of possibilities have just been turned away right there. So you've cut the number of options in half right there just by giving one heuristic rule, okay? If you were decent at chess, not great, but decent, and you knew enough to give say 10 heuristic rules, you could chop that initially vast number of options down by a vast amount. And now you're starting to get to a point where if a computer had sufficient computational power, it could start getting through the number of options in that acceptable timeframe. So that's the general pattern of the development. Now, things started getting very interesting in the mid 1990s with IBM's computer Deep Blue. There was a great chess champion of the late 1980s and early through the 1990s called Gary Kasparov, who had been more or less undefeated for a decade. In 1996, he took on IBM's computer Deep Blue. Just to correct the record, he was undefeated. I apologize, Russian, gotta make sure. They get very nationalistic about their chess. Be careful of these guys. Deep Blue lost the first confrontation, I believe, in 1996. It was competitive, but lost. Then in 1997, Deep Blue won. And it wasn't a complete walkover. Kasparov, I believe, won one of the matches. But they did, Deep Blue unequivocally won the confrontation. And it was seen as like this watershed moment where a computer beat the best human chess player on the planet, and that was it. There's no coming back from that. I think it would be remembered as one of the biggest moments in computing history, is really when the first time a machine beat a human at a thing that humans really care about in the domain of intellectual pursuits. Yeah, it was a powerful, powerful moment. Now, not only was that a powerful moment, but things started getting truly interesting from that moment forward, because then you started having different areas of development. The general way in which the progress is made from those early starts in 1968, all the way through to Deep Blue's victory, was of the use of heuristic rules that brought down the number of potential options to a manageable level. As computer power increased, then it could make faster and faster and wiser and wiser decisions, and make them at a rate which no human, even the best human, could keep up with. So that was the general way in which the debate went. But things got more interesting after this, with the advent of computers that, as you pointed out, make use of so called machine learning. There were, a company put out a program, AlphaZero, which can look at the basic rule structures of chess, and then ultimately play itself in trials, and make trial and error assessment of what are good and bad strategies, so that with no human intervention, a computer could start doing remarkable things. Not only did this company create AlphaZero, and there were some other ones too, they fought not only in chess, but in the much more complex Asian game of Go, which has far more potential options than chess does, by a very significant margin. These machine learning programs, not only easily defeat any human in chess, but in Go as well. And what's truly remarkable is they weren't just beating them. When AlphaZero took on a rival chess program, which by itself was already superior to any human, it only required four hours, starting from learning the rules of chess, to figuring out how to beat the second most powerful chess program in the world. That's insane. That's literally like taking a human, telling the rules of chess, they play some games with themselves for four hours, and they go out and beat Garry Kasparov. This is, I don't know, this is, to me, this is a truly exciting development, far beyond even what Deep Blue did. I like how you said exciting, not terrifying, because I agree with you on the exciting. Now, things also get exciting in a different direction. There is another possibility, which few people foresaw after the Deep Blue episode. This is where a new form of chess started to emerge, sometimes called cyborg chess or centaur chess, where humans of moderate chess level playing ability, not world champions, just decent, but not great, I guess you might say like purple belts in jiu jitsu, allied themselves with computers. So the humans and computers worked as a cyborg team. The humans supplied the heuristic insight. The computers supplied the computational power. And fascinatingly, they proved to be superior to both the best humans and the best chess programs. The united force of human insight with heuristics, with computers ability to go through numbers in far more rapid form than any human could ever hope to do, proved to be one of the strongest combinations and enabled that pairing of human and computer to overwhelm both the best single human and the best single computer. That adds a whole new level of fascination to this topic. So to wind things up here, we've got this fascinating initial question from Lex, the idea of could there be a computer inside a robot which doesn't have any special physical properties? This is mind versus mind because the bodies negate each other. The robot is the same body as Gordon Ryan. This is a thought experiment. What would it take to create a mind that would defeat the mind of Gordon Ryan? Based on the chess example, it would appear that this is entirely feasible at some point in the future. And in fact, I would go further and say, it's actually quite likely based on what we've seen from the example of chess. The rate of progress in AI in the last 20 years has dwarfed anything from the previous 50 years. And the rate continues to increase. We're talking now at a level where the machine learning of defeating world champions in chess and Go in four hours, like just from starting from the rules of the sport, this is gonna be difficult for humans to keep up with. Now in humans favor, could we take Gordon Ryan and put a chip inside his brain that created the same cyborg effect as we saw in centaur chess and cyborg chess, and then take Gordon Ryan to a new level and suddenly his computational powers were massively increased. He still has his heuristic insight, but he has vastly augmented computational powers. That's the interesting battle. You asked a great question, Lex. Let me give you my initial push for an answer would be that if it's just Gordon Ryan versus your robot technology, in 10 years, I would say with machine learning, I'd say you guys win every time. But if it is cyborg Gordon Ryan, where he's part Gordon Ryan with heuristics and part machine, then, and now that's where I throw the question back at you, young man, what do you think? Well, I'm fascinated to hear your answer. That's very interesting because there's a lot of different ways you can build a cyborg Gordon Ryan. So one is there's the Neuralink way, which is basically doing what you're suggesting, which is expanding the computational capabilities of Gordon Ryan's brain, like directly being able to communicate between a computer and the brain. So you preserve most of what there is in the human body, including the nervous system and the computing system we currently have that's biological and expanding over the computer. There's also on the cyborg chess front, like Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion in chess, he studies AlphaZero games. Like it's not a regular thing for high level grandmasters. From what I understand, almost every chess master now studies computer games for inspiration. Like just as great chess players from the past used to go back into old leather bound books of previous grandmasters and study games and books. Nowadays, most people, when they wanna study the most perfect games, they actually study programs like AlphaZero. Yeah, and it's not just for inspiration, it's education. I mean, it's literally part of their training regimen. This isn't like a fun side thing. This is the main way to get better. So there's a certain element there where even our human brains can be trained by observing the partial explorations of an AI systems in the space of grappling. That could be actually in simulation. It doesn't have to be in the physical world. It could be in, if we construct sufficiently good biomechanical models of human beings, machines can learn how they grapple. There's quite a bit of that already. OpenAI has the system of, they're like sumo wrestlers with some basic goals of pushing each other off of a platform. And you know nothing from the, you don't even know. So you have a basic model of a bipedal system. It doesn't even know in the beginning how to stand up. It just falls, right? So it has to learn how to get up and they do that through self play. They learn how to get up, they learn how to move enough to achieve the final goal which is to push your opponent off of the thing. So they learn that. Now OpenAI is not, those folks are currently not that interested in the grappling world. So they kind of stop there. But it's very possible in simulation to then develop ideas. In fact, this is something that I should probably do, but it's pretty natural to do it easy, is ideas of control and submission and all the, you add the ability to, I don't know how to put it nicely, but to choke your opponent and to break their body parts off, which is what jiu jitsu is. Add that in and what kind of ideas it'll come up with is very fascinating. I actually don't know, until this conversation, I don't know why I never even thought about that. I've been very obsessed with just like walking and running and all those kinds of things, like evolving different strategies for when you have a bunch of, so one difficult thing for robots is when you have uneven terrain and there's uncertainty about the terrain is how to keep walking. Or when there's a bunch of things being thrown at you, all that kind of stuff, and you learn through self play how to be able to navigate those uncertain environments when there's a lot of weird objects and all those kinds of things. There's no reason why you can't just do that with submissions and so on in simulation. That'll be actually fascinating. But once we might be surprised by the kind of strategies in simulation these AI systems will develop, and that might make a much better Gordon Ryan and much better John Donahar in asking the Dean Lister question of like, why are we only using, why are we not doing X? But on the actual sort of grappling event in the physical space, I've been very surprised and a little bit disappointed by how difficult it's to build a system that's able to have the body of Gordon Ryan or a human being actually, which means it's not just the biomechanics which is very difficult to do, but also all of the senses that are involved. Be able to perceive the world as richly, to be able to, there's something called soft robotics, which is incredibly difficult to do through touch, understand the hardness of things. We don't understand as human beings just how much we're able through touch to experience the world and to manipulate the world. Like the process of picking up a cup is very similar to the process of grappling. All the feeling that you do, all the leverage that you're applying, there's so many degrees of freedom in both the, in the interactive sense, in the sensing and the applying, sensing and applying, you're doing that through so much of your body, that it's just going to be very difficult to build a system that's able to experience the world and act onto the world as richly as we humans can. Yeah, if picking up a cup is a seemingly insurmountable challenge, then taking someone down, controlling them, getting past their legs, that's going to be one hell of a project. Exactly, I mean, there could be shortcuts, but I mean, currently that's the field called robotic manipulation, which is picking up objects. Usually they have like a ball and a triangular object and your whole task is to like pick it up and move it around. Generalizing that to the human body is harder, but perhaps not as hard as we might think. The question is, how do you construct experiments where you can do that safely? In chess, that's very easy, but here it's very, very problematic. I guess you could just have robot versus robot teamed up with each other and then they learn and then they go out to take on a human opponent. Yes, exactly, so you have two physical robots that interact with each other. Everything you've said so far suggests that many of the problems, these tactile elements, they're easy tasks for humans. So which becomes more powerful more quickly? Robots that are taught to think like humans or humans that are given the computational power of computers and robots themselves, which wins first, a cyborg Gordon Ryan or an artificial robot Gordon Ryan? Really, really strong question, and I think by far the cyborg Gordon Ryan. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking here. The problems you're talking about with regards to the robots, those are deep problems. Like if picking up a cup is problematic, it's gonna be damn difficult, but to a human, a two year old can do that. You're highlighting a very important difference is human beings have something called common sense that we don't know how to build into computers currently. That's what picking up the cup is. It's some basic rules about the way this world works. We're able to, this is when we're children and we'll crawl around and we pick up. What humans don't have that machines have is incredible computational power and access to infinite knowledge. Computers can do that. So if you have a Gordon Ryan with the infinite knowledge and compute power, that's just going to, because we know how to do that, that's going to blow out of the water a robot that's trying to learn to crawl. Has there been any update on the phenomenon of cyborg or centaur chess? There was some debate as to whether or not cyborg chess teams could stay competitive with the latest machine learning. Has there been any update on that? I believe at this point machines dominate over the machine human pairs. With the human pairs, when they first came out, they were good chess players, but not great chess players. Does it make any difference if you have, say, Garry Kasparov and a computer working in unison versus Joe Blow from? It does make a huge difference, but yeah, both are destroyed by machines at this point. And it's not even competitive now? No, it's not competitive. But they also lost interest in this kind of idea. So I think there's still competitions between human machine pairs versus human machine pairs, almost like to see how the two work together. But in terms of machine versus human machine pair, machines still dominate. Interesting. So, and now we've retrieved back as human beings caring mostly about human versus human competitions, which is probably what the future will look like. It's very interesting to think, but like that in chess happened really quickly. It won't happen, and it wasn't so painful in chess because we care about chess, but it's not so fundamental to human society. And when you started talking about cyborg Gordon Ryans, which really beyond grappling is referring to robots operating physical space or human robot hybrids operating physical space, you're talking about our society is now full of cyborgs. Yes. And that transition might be very painful or transformative in a way we can't even predict. And that very much has applications as both China and US now have legalized is autonomous weapon systems. So use of these kinds of systems in military applications. So it used to be, there'd been a big call in the AI community to ban autonomous weapons. So the use of artificial intelligence in war, just like bioweapons are banned internationally. So you're not allowed to use bioweapons in war. And actually most people, even terrorists, have kind of agreed on this ban. It's not like, there's been a quiet agreement, like we're not going to be doing this because everybody's gonna get really pissed off. With autonomous weapon systems, that's not been the case. China has said that they're going to be using AI in their military. And the US in 2021 just released a report saying that they're going to add increasing amounts of artificial intelligence into our military systems. Into drones, into just everything that's doing any kind of both strategic and actual bombing and defense systems. I presume a drone army would easily defeat a human army in the near future. Like, I mean, just off the top of my head, just think about the implication of kamikaze drones versus a naval fleet. I mean, kamikazes was humans in World War II, did terrible damage to our navy. Imagine swarms of mechanical kamikazes which have no fear, no remorse, I mean. But it's very inefficient. Kamikaze is very inefficient. You want to be very, like war is, it's the same discussion to jiu jitsu, right? You want to be, you want to create an asymmetry of power and you want to be efficient is in the way you deliver that power. It's actually goes back to the picking up a cup. Currently, a lot of things we do in war, like most of the drones that you hear about, they're not autonomous, not most, all. They're usually piloted by. They're piloted remotely by humans. And humans are really good at this kind of what's necessary to deliver the most damage, targeted damage, effective as part of the largest strategy you have about bombing the area or all that kind of stuff. I don't know how difficult that is to automate. I think the biggest concern, I actually have a sense that it's very difficult to automate. The biggest concern is almost like an incompetent application of this and consequences that are not anticipated. So you have a drone army where you say, we want to target, you give it power to target a particular terrorist. And then there's some bug in the system that has a, like for example, has a large uncertainty about the location of that terrorist. And so it decides to bomb an entire city. You know, almost like there's a bug, a software bug. I'm much more concerned about like bad programming and software engineering than I am about like malevolent AI systems that destroy the world. So the more we rely on automation, this is the lesson of human history. The more we give to AI, to software, to robotic systems, the more we forget how to supervise and oversee some of the edge cases, all the weird ways that things go wrong. And then the more stupid software bugs can lead to huge damage. Like, you know, even like nuclear explosions, those kinds of things. If we add AI into the launch systems for nuclear weapons, for example, I think human history teaches us that software bugs is what will lead to World War III, not malevolent AI or human beings. Interesting. By the way, I deeply appreciate how knowledgeable you are about the history of artificial intelligence. That was awesome. Oh no, it's fascinating stuff. You know, I remember reading when I was a child about, you know, Turing tests and things like this, and visionaries from the 1950s had ideas. To see it come this far is just so fascinating to me. Okay, so what can we as jiu jitsu players take away from this? We saw that when it comes to computers versus humans in chess tournaments, humans had something truly valuable to give to the computers. That was heuristic rules. In every coaching program that I run, I make an endless quest to search out and find effective heuristic rules. That's the basis of a good training program. Heuristic rules and principles give vast informational content, which can rapidly increase your performance on the mat, just as they rapidly increase the performance of chess computers to overcome their human adversaries. The great human weakness is computational power. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to reason and problem solve under stress. In fact, numerous psychological studies have shown that humans can balance a relatively small number of competing options in stressful decision making. But what we do have, what is the great and unique human gift is this idea to come up and arrive at heuristic rules and principles, which turn out to be very effective guides to behavior for both human behavior and artificially intelligent behavior. Make that your focus in study. Don't try to remember 10,000 different details on a move. Okay, that's human weakness, not human strength. Our strength is heuristics. Make that your focus, not endless computations over 25 details here merged with 27 details here. That's not what humans are good at. The uniquely human strength is arriving at these heuristic rules and principles which guide our behavior, which provides simplifications, which enable us to take vast amounts of information and parry it down to a few simple rules that effectively guide our behavior. Take that core insight from the discussion that Lex and I just had. It was a complex discussion. We both apologize for going a little bit overboard. That was awesome. Then dragging you into some details there, but take that away from it. I love it. It'll make you better at jujitsu. Sorry, Lex. That was a really exciting discussion, and the depths of knowledge in the dimensions of knowledge you have and interests you have is just fascinating. Is there advice you have for complete beginners, for white belts that are starting jujitsu, that are listening to this, that haven't done jujitsu? I know there's a lot of people who are super curious to start. Is there advice you would give them on their journey? Yeah, I'm just gonna talk about just getting better on the mat, okay? Because there's a thousand other things you can talk about in terms of morale and persistence and how often that you're trained is a thousand things you'd give. Break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend. That's one. I'm just kidding. Let's put that aside. That's probably the best advice we could give. It goes back to what we said earlier. I always advocate start your training from the ground up. Okay, your first sessions in jujitsu, you're going to find to your horror that everyone gets on top of you and you can't get out. And it's a dispiriting, crushing kind of feeling that you just have no skills and you have no prospects in the sport. So your first skill is the skill of being able to free yourself from positional pins. Most of the escapes in jujitsu go to guard position. And so once you get someone in your guard, they're going to be looking to pass your guard and get back into those positional pins that you just escaped from. And that's just as crushing as getting pinned. You feel like every time you try to hold someone in guard, they just effortlessly pass you by. So your first two skills, you got to be able to get out of any pin and you got to be able to hold someone in your guard. So pin escapes and guard retention are your first two skills. I generally advocate the idea of learning to fight from your back first and then learning to fight from on top second. Why? Because the brute fact is when you first start off, you just don't have enough skills to hold top position or gain top position through a takedown. So inevitably you're going to end up underneath people for most of your training time. Your training should reflect that in the early days as a white belt. Start with the first two skills you need. They're not the most exciting. They're not sexy skills that are going to make you look like a stud in the training room, but they're going to keep your life long enough to learn those sexy skills in the future that will make you look like a stud. Start with pin escapes, go to guard retention and focus heavily on those two. When you start to get into offense, start with bottom position. So there's a clear continuity between your pin escapes, your guard retention, and then your guard itself. Okay? You've got different options with guard. Some of you are going to like closed guard. Some of you are going to like variations of open guard. Some of you are going to like to be seated. Some of you are going to like to be supine. Some of you are going to like half guard. As a general rule, this is a heavy generalization, but I'm going to give it to you. In my experience, most people benefit the most by starting with half guard first. I know that traditionally Jiu Jitsu has been taught closed guard first, and then all the other guards come after that. I'm a big believer in the idea of start with pin escapes, then go to guard retention, and then start with half guard bottom. That way you get a nice continuity between your first three skills, and you'll make good progress over those first critical six months in Jiu Jitsu. What does it take to get a black belt in Jiu Jitsu? Very little. Ha ha ha. To show up, pay your fees. Don't set your goals low, okay? Don't even ask yourself that question. No one cares if you've got a black belt, okay? The only thing that counts is the skills you have. I know plenty of black belts that suck, okay? There's a lot of them out there. Don't lower your standards by saying, I want to get a black belt. Ask yourself something much more important. How good do I want to be? You want to be damn good, right? You want to do something in this time, and you want to be the best you can. Wearing a belt around your waist doesn't guarantee that. Build skills, focus on that. Let me ask you about the fourth thing in facet face of Jiu Jitsu, which is self defense. Let's say the bigger things, I don't know why it's called self defense. Let's call it street fighting. Let's call it fighting, okay? Maybe you can contest that terminology. How about non sport fighting? Non sport fighting. It's funny, like street fighting. What happens if you go out on a playground, and you're fighting on grass? Is there no longer street fighting? It's like tennis. You have like Wimbledon, like grass courts, it's a whole nother thing. What do you think is the best martial art for street fighting? What is the best set of, we talked about advice for white belts to advance in grappling in Jiu Jitsu. What is the set of techniques, maybe martial art that is best for street fighting? Okay, again, you're asking some truly fascinating questions here. The way this gets framed as a question is often condemns you to bad answers from the start. This is... As a questioner, I'm trying to achieve asymmetry of power. And I'm winning. Put you in a bad position. Don't worry so much about... People are always gonna say, you know, is this martial art better? Or is this martial arts better? The truth is there's only one way to say this. Combat sports are your best option for self defense. There are many martial arts, and there is a rough divide between the two. Those that fall into combat sports, and those that fall into non sporting martial arts, where there's no competitive live sparring element, where most of the knowledge is limited to theoretical knowledge reinforced by passive drilling. If you have a choice between a combat sport versus a non sporting art based around theoretical knowledge and passive drilling, go with a combat sport. Nothing will prepare you for the intensity of a genuine altercation better than combat sports. Many people, as I say these words, they're probably horrified to hear me say this, and immediately going to rebut and say, no, combat sports is exactly the wrong thing for you to do because they have safety rules, et cetera, et cetera, which would easily be exploited in a real fight. And if I fought a world championship boxer, I would just poke him in the eye or kick him in the groin, et cetera, et cetera. You've heard these arguments a thousand times. Yes, there is some validity to these things, but as a general rule, if you ask me to bet in any form of street fight, call it what you want, between a combat sport adherent versus someone who simply trains with drills and talks in terms of theories of what they would do in a fight, I'm gonna go with the combat sport guy every single time. Now, having said that, combat sports need to be modified for the use of self defense street fighting. We haven't agreed on a term yet. We'll figure it out later. What does this modification consist of? Well, some of it is technical, okay? For example, a boxer in a street fight now has to punch without wrapped or gloved hands, and that's problematic, okay? Your hands are not really designed for heavy extended use of clubbing hard objects. There's a very high likelihood of breaking your hands. Mike Tyson was one of the finest punchers that ever lived, but in one of his more famous street fights against Mitch Green in the late 1980s, he broke his hand with one punch that he threw at his opponent. He hit the wrong part of the head and broke his hand, and he was one of the most gifted punchers of all time. If he can do it, you'll certainly have trouble protecting your hands when you go to throw blows. Nonetheless, this was easily modified, and so a boxer can throw with open hands or with elbows, and so just a small modification and technique can overcome that problem. So what you'll find is that the general physical, mental conditioning, and skill development that comes from combat sports allied with technical modifications, and then the most important of all, tactical modifications will provide your best hope in altercations outside of sports in the street or wherever you find yourself. The least effective approaches to self defense that I have observed in my life have been those where, as I said, people talked theory, drilled on passive opponents, and generally had no engagement in live competition or sparring in their training programs. The most effective by a landslide were those that put a heavy emphasis on live sparring and sporting competition modified both technically and tactically for the circumstances in which they found themselves. People talk, for example, about how, you know, and with some validity that weapons will change everything in a street fight. There's absolute truth to that, but this extends into weapons as well, okay? The most effective forms of knife fighting that you'll see will be those who come from a background in fencing because it has sparring and a competitive sport aspect to it, but would pure fencing be the appropriate thing? Of course not, you'd have to modify it, but the reflexes, endurance, physical mobility that you gain from the sport of fencing could easily be modified to bladecraft in a fight situation. What you want to look for with regards street and self defense is not, okay, which style should I choose? Should I choose taekwondo? Should I choose karate? Should I choose this variation of kung fu? No, focus on the most important thing. Does it have a sport aspect to it? Then once you've made sufficient progress in the sport aspect of that martial art, start asking yourself, what are the requisite modifications and technique and tactics that I have to use or to input to make it effective for street situations? That's always the advice that I give. Let me zoom in on a very particular aspect of street fighting where, with all due respect, I disagree with Mr. Joe Rogan and George St. Pierre on, which is the suit and tie situation. Now, to criticize GSP, yeah, yeah, he's very accomplished and everything, but to criticize him for a bit, he made claims about how dangerous the tie is in a street fighting situation without ever having used it in a fighting situation. So he made sort of broad proclamations without understanding the fundamentals. So I thought I would go to somebody who thinks in systems. What do you think, is it dangerous to wear a tie or not in a grappling situation versus all the other weapons? Yeah, but we would do it in a street fight, yeah. It would be rather strange to wear a tie in a grappling competition. It would be, it would be. Yes, in a street fight situation. Okay, yeah. Joe Rogan thinks it is like the most dangerous, it's like it becomes your weakest point if you wear a tie because it's very easy to choke. George St. Pierre seemed to have agreed with that. Also, George added that you can grab the tie and pull the person down to a knee. Yeah, this is the go to. Joe Rogan will go for the choke, George St. Pierre will go for the tie to the knee, which I was saying is ridiculous. So what do you think? Okay, first off, I actually can speak with experience on this because I worked as a bouncer for over a decade and most of the clubs I worked at did not require a suit and tie, but occasionally they did. Okay, let's first differentiate between the kinds of threats when you wear a tie. If you wear a tie, if there is gonna be a threat, by far the more important threat is not strangulation. Okay, being strangled by your tie is possible, but it is a poor choice. There are many other ways to strangle people that are far more efficient. If I strangle by your tie, I'm literally in front of you. That means as I go to apply the strangle hold, I can easily be eye gouged, et cetera, et cetera. If you're gonna strangle people in the street, do it from behind and there's just much better ways to do it than that. Hear that, Joe Rogan? With regards to the snap down question, that is more a problem. I always recommend if you are going to work as a bouncer with a tie, wear a clip on tie so it just comes off immediately. If you don't like clip ons, then you can use a bow tie. I used to work for years in hip hop clubs with members of the Nation of Islam security team. They were known, they had various factions, but the one I worked with were the X Men, and they would always wear bow ties, which of course can't be grabbed. Now, the bow tie was a recognizable part of their brand as security guards, so everyone knew that that's what they wore. If I wore a bow tie in a security situation, people would probably think that I was some kind of Nancy boy and want to fight with me, so I couldn't wear one. So I would always wear a tie which you should become familiar with, Mr. Freeman. That's the Texas bolo tie, which is a kind of shoestring tie which is very, very thin, almost like shoestring and rather short and just has a simple pendant in the middle. This is perfect if you need to wear a tie in a situation where you believe there's a high likelihood of you being grabbed. Because it can't be grabbed. Yeah, there's nothing to grab. It's literally like string. Like if you pulled it, it would just slip through your hand. That tie that you're wearing now, that would give me tremendous control of your head, and I could easily turn it into a hockey fight situation where your head was being pulled down out of balance, and you would have a hard time recovering. So strangulation, not really a problem. Getting pulled down, possible problem. Solutions, clip on tie, bow tie, or if you don't want to look like a Nancy boy, wear a bolo tie. Beautiful, so you disagree with Joe Rogan, agree with George St. Pierre, I love it. I feel like this is an instruction we put together here on street fighting and the tie. Speaking of Joe Rogan, let me ask the following question. He's currently doing a podcast with Gordon Ryan, and probably going to try to convince him and you, as he's already been doing, to move to Austin. What are the chances of the Donoher Death Squad coming to Austin and opening a school in Austin and making Austin home so I can attend the classes there? I would definitely have to think about that. I do know that I personally love New York, but every single person in the squad despised New York and wanted to leave for a long time. What was the nature of your love for New York, by the way? It was truly an international city. I'm a big believer in the idea of breadth of experience, and if you want, breadth of experience usually requires extensive travel, but training people means you have to be in a fixed location working according to a schedule, and those two push in different directions. New York was the compromise where everyone from around the world came there so you had breadth of experience of world culture, but at the same time, you had a fixed location so you could run a training program that produced world champions, so it was the ideal compromise. It was a fascinating thing to teach classes of over 120 people where literally the entire world was represented on the map and go outside and see the same thing. It was truly the world's leading international city. It was like the world's unofficial capital, a fascinating place to live, so I loved it, but the squad hated it. For them, it was like an expensive thing. They never actually lived in Manhattan. They always lived in New Jersey or Long Island, had to commute in, so all they ever saw was the bridges and the tunnels, the expensive daily parking fees. They only saw the worst of New York, and despite my pleas for them to move into Manhattan, they never did, and so they hated it because when all you see of New York is the bridges and the tunnels and the parking garage, that's not a pleasant thing, so I understand where they're coming from, so then when COVID broke out, they wanted to move to Puerto Rico and work there. Now, Puerto Rico is a beautiful alternative to New York. In many ways, it has many advantages over New York. It's physically beautiful. The people are wonderful, and it's just a wonderful place to spend time. Freedom, low taxes, all those kinds of things that Puerto Rico stands for. It's Texas, on the other hand. I know everyone in the squad. It's a compromise, right? Texas is a compromise between those two. Actually, I must say that everyone on the squad, myself included, loves Texas. There's no question about that. I know Gordon loves it, Gary, Craig, Nicky, everyone who comes here just loves Texas. That is incontestable. Of course, in Texas, there's many great cities. Austin has always been one of my favorites. I love Dallas, I love Austin, and it has the advantages of better infrastructure as a place to train. It has a much higher population density so that you could get a larger number of prospective students and form a larger squad. It would definitely be a fantastic place to open up a gym. I couldn't give an answer off the top of my head. It would be a big move if we did make that move, but the basic idea would be very agreeable to everyone on the team, I will say that. Well, I'll just have to call on my Russian connections to threaten the right kind of people, and I definitely would love, the way you approach training, the way you approach the martial arts is something that I deeply admire as a scholar of these arts, so it would be amazing if you do come here, but either way, it'd be amazing to train together. Let me ask a big, ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? We talked about at the beginning of the conversation about death and the fear of it. The other big question we ask about life is its meaning. Do you think there's a meaning to our existence here on this little spinning ball? That's, you've thrown some powerful questions. That's the most powerful. For most of human existence, the meaning of life was very, very simple, survival. The only thing that humans cared about was just surviving because it was so damn difficult for the early years of human existence on this Earth. If you look at ourselves as biological agents, everything about our body is set up for one mission, and that is survival. Every reflex we have, every element of our structure is just built up on the battle to survive. And then humans did something remarkable. They elevated themselves through the use of technology and social structure to the top of the food chain so that they went from extremely vulnerable. If you take a naked human being alone and put them in the Serengeti Plains in Africa, they're in some deep shit. If you look at a human being as a survival organ, just by itself, naked, they are among the most feeble at that task in the entire animal kingdom. You compare us with predatory animals. We are weak and soft and easily killed. But if you take that same human and put them in the Serengeti human and put them in a group, and you give them basic technology, steel, a spear, a knife, he goes from the bottom of the food chain to pretty much at the top. And so humanity found itself in a crisis that emerged out of its own success. For most of its history, their only interest was the battle to survive, and they did it. I don't know how they did it, but they did it. They got through ice ages, droughts, famines, disease, everything, and they found a way to get to the top of the food chain. And that's where it all got interesting. Because an organism whose only interest was in survival had for the first time in their history a more or less guaranteed survival. And so the big question now is, now what? We survived. There's no more danger. The average human being finds himself in a world now where there's almost zero danger from predatory animals, where getting a meal is the easiest thing ever, where getting to and from work is not problematic at all, where the majority of infectious diseases, medical complaints can be resolved in a hospital fairly easily. And so they start casting their mind around, okay, what do I do now? And so the minute mankind's existence became more or less guaranteed, the problem shift from survival to meaning. And we found ourselves grappling with a whole new issue that had never occurred to our ancient forefathers, but which now becomes one of the centerpieces of our modern lives. I mean, when you look at your own life, when you look back, you think, I did a hell of a good job. You know, Hunter S. Thompson has this line that I often think about, that life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in roadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, wow, what a ride. Which is the complete opposite of survival. Well, not complete opposite of survival, but basically embracing danger, embracing risk, going big, just living life to the fullest. So within that context, what would make you proud of a life well lived? When you look back, you, John Donahart, looking back at your life. First, I will address that question, but let's first look at why Hunter Thompson could say that. Why Hunter Thompson could say that? Because his life was more or less guaranteed and safe. If you look at animals in the animal kingdom, the pattern of their life is very simple. They take the least risk possible to secure their existence. Lions are powerful creatures, but when they go hunting, they typically go for the weakest animals they can kill in order to eat, because they don't want to take the risk of injuring themselves, knowing that if they do, they die. So the brute reality is the only people who can talk about having casual danger in their lives are those whose lives are guaranteed. And a fascinating small tangent, Hunter Thompson took his own life. So that seems like a deeply human thing, suicide. Yes. That's a fascinating question in itself. If you look at the number of suicides per year, it's a shocking, shocking statistic that gets almost no recognition. And yes, uniquely human. You don't, very, very few animals, you see, killing themselves because their whole thing is just survival. And that humans paradoxically, when survival is more or less guaranteed, are killing themselves in vast numbers. It's usually linked back to the idea of meaning because it's so hard. It was hard to win the battle for survival, but it's 10 times harder to win the battle for meaning. When I think about it, first off, I'll say right from the bat, there's never going to be an agreed upon sense of meaning. As I said, there was one thing that our physical bodies agreed upon and which is hardwired biologically into us and that's survival. But once we got to a more or less guaranteed survival, then all bets were off. At that point, you just have to start listing your own criteria and what one person will describe as a meaningful life, another person will decry as meaningless or wasted. There's something terrible about the idea that we're sitting around waiting for meaning to show up on our doorstep. But what I find the best people do is they take charge of it and they look at their lives in a form of authorship where they see their life as a tale to be written and they do their best to write that tale and put as much control over the direction of the story as they can. In the end, we all have to just try and write our own story. We all have our own interests. I try to bring in the sense that even though I'm an atheist, I don't believe that we go on to live after this. I believe that there's a possibility of God in an afterlife. I don't say it's impossible, but in order for me to believe that they exist, I'd have to see better evidence than I see currently. Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a great value in the idea of living for something bigger than yourself. The moment you see yourself as the be all and end all of your existence, you're in for a meaningless life and nothing will ever satisfy you. You can have all the money in the world. You can have all the power in the world. You'll be empty inside. I do believe that humans have a deep and abiding need to follow the interests of a group bigger than themselves as an individual. Is it ideal? No. Is it an answer to the meaning of life? Nope, because eventually that group will itself die out. So there's a sense in which it just plays a kind of delaying game. But I do believe that in order to live a happy life, meaning is a central part of that. And the deepest sense of meaning, not a fully complete answer, but a better answer than most people give is to find something which hopefully does very little harm to the people around you and mostly benefits them, which enables you to become part of a community and to live, as I said, for something larger than you as an individual. If there is such a thing as a perfect conversation, it would be a conversation on death, meaning, and robots with the great John Donoher. John, I've been a fan. It's a huge honor that you would waste all your time today. Thank you so much for talking today. My pleasure. Thank you, Lynx. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Donoher, and thank you to Onnit, SimplySafe, Indeed, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you some words from John Donoher himself. In fighting and competition, the objective is victory. In training, the objective is skill development. Do not confuse them. As such, one of the best ways to train is to identify the strengths of your various partners and regularly expose yourself to those strengths. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

John Danaher: The Path to Mastery in Jiu Jitsu, Grappling, Judo, and MMA | Lex Fridman Podcast #182

The following is a conversation with Po Shen Lou, a professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, national coach of the USA International Math Olympia team, and founder of XP that does online education of basic math and science. He's also the founder of Novid, an app that takes a really interesting approach to contact tracing, making sure you stay completely anonymous and it gives you statistical information about COVID cases in your physical network of interactions. So you can maintain privacy, very important, and make informed decisions. In my opinion, we desperately needed solutions like this in early 2020. And unfortunately, I think, we will again need it for the next pandemic. To me, solutions that require large scale, distributed coordination of human beings need ideas that emphasize freedom and knowledge. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, Onnit, BetterHelp, Aidsleep, and Element. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Po and I filmed a few short videos about simple, beautiful math concepts that I will release soon. It was really fun. I really enjoyed Po sharing his passion for math with me in those videos. I'm hoping to do a few more short videos in the coming months that are educational in nature on AI, robotics, math, science, philosophy, or if all else fails, just fun snippets into my life on music, books, martial arts, and other random things, if that's of interest to anyone at all. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Po Shenlow. You know, you mentioned you really enjoy flying and experiencing different people in different places. There's something about flying for me, I don't know if you have the same experience, that every time I get on an airplane, it's incredible to me that human beings have actually been able to achieve this. And when I look at like what's happening now with humans traveling out into space, I see it as all the same thing. It's incredible that humans are able to get into a box and fly in the air and safely and land in the same, it seems like, and everybody's taking it for granted. So when I observe them, it's quite fascinating because I see that cleanly mapping to the world where we're now in rockets and traveling to the moon, traveling to Mars, and at the same kind of way, I can already see the future where we will all take it for granted. So I don't know if you have, you personally, when you fly, have the same kind of magical experience of like how the heck did humans actually accomplish this? So I do, especially when there's turbulence, which is like on the way here, there was turbulence and the plane jiggled, even the flight attendant had to hold onto the side. And I was just thinking to myself, it's amazing that this happens all the time and the wings don't fall off, given how many planes are flying. But then I often think about it and I'm like, a long time ago, I think people didn't trust elevators in a 40 story building in New York City. And now we just take it completely for granted that you can step into this shaft, which is 40 floors up and down, and it will just not fail. Yeah, again, I'm the same way with elevators, but also buildings, when I'll stand on the 40th floor and wonder how the heck are we not falling right now? Like how amazing it is with the high winds, like structurally, just the earthquakes and the vibrations, I mean, natural vibrations in the ground. Like how is this, how are all of these, you go to like New York City, all of these buildings standing. I mean, to me, one of the most beautiful things, actually mathematically too, is bridges. I used to build bridges in high school from like toothpicks, just like out of the pure joy of like physics, making some structure really strong. Understanding like from a civil engineering perspective, what kind of structure will be stronger than another kind of structure, like suspension bridges. And then you see that at scale, humans being able to span a body of water with a giant bridge. And it's, I don't know, it's so humbling. It makes you realize how dependent we are on each other. Sort of, I talk about love a lot, but there's a certain element in which we little ants have just a small amount of knowledge about our particular thing. And then we're depending on a network of knowledge that other experts hold. And then most of our lives, most of the quality of life we have has to do with the richness of that network of knowledge, of that collaboration, and then sort of the ability to build on top of it, levels of abstractions. You start from like bits in a computer, then you can have assembly, then you can have C++, or you have an operating system, then you can have C++ and Python, finally, some machine learning on top. All of these are abstractions. And eventually we'll have AI that runs all of us humans. But anyway, but speaking of abstractions and programming, in high school, you wrote some impressive games for MS DOS. I got a chance to, in browser somehow, it's magic, I got a chance to play them. Alien Attack 1, 2, 3, and 4. What's the hardest part about programming those games? And maybe can you tell the story about building those games? Sure. I actually tried to do those in high school because I was just curious if I could. That's a good starting point for anything, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, could you? But the appealing thing was also, it was a soup to nuts kind of thing. So something that has always attracted me is, I like beautiful ideas, I like seeing beautiful ideas, but I actually also like seeing execution of an idea all the way from beginning to end in something that works. So for example, in high school, I was lucky enough to grow up in the late 90s when even a high school student could hope to make something sort of comparable to the shareware games that were out there. I say the word sort of, like still quite far away, but at least I didn't need to hire a 3D CG artist. There weren't enough pixels to draw anyway, even I can draw, right? Bad art, of course. But the point is, I wanted to know, is it possible for me to try to do those things where back in those days, you didn't even have an easy way to draw letters on the screen in a particular font. You couldn't just say import a font, it wasn't like Python. So for example, back then, if you played those games in the web browser, which is emulating the old school computer, those, even the letters you see, those are made by individual calls to draw pixels on the screen. So you built that from scratch, almost building a computer graphics library from scratch? Yes, the primitive that I got to use was some code I copied off of a book in assembly of how to put a pixel on a screen in a particular color. And the programming language was Pascal? Ah, yeah, the first one was in Pascal, but then the other ones were in C++ after that. How's the emulation in the browser work, by the way? Is that trivial? Because it's pretty cool, you get to play these games that have a very much 90s feeling to them. Ah, so it's literally making an MSDOS environment, which is literally running the old.exe file. Wow, in the browser. This is, that could be more amazing than the airplane. So it wasn't so much about the video games, it was more about, can you build something really cool from scratch? Yes. And you did a bunch of programming competitions. What was your interest, your love for programming? What did you learn through that experience? Especially now that as much of your work has taken a long journey through mathematics. I think I always was amazed by how computers could do things fast. If I wanted to make it an abstract analysis of why it is that I saw some power in the computer. Because if the computer can do things so many times faster than humans, where the hard part is telling the computer what to do and how to do it, if you can master that asking the computer what to do, then you could conceivably achieve more things. And those contests I was in, those were the opposite in some sense of making a complete product, like a game is a product. Those contests were effectively write a function to do something extremely efficiently. And if you are able to do that, then you can unlock more of the power of the computer. But also doing it quickly. There's a time element from the human perspective to be able to program quickly. There's something nice. So there's almost like an athletics component to where you're almost like an athlete seeking optimal performance as a human being trying to write these programs. And at the same time, it's kind of art because the best way to write a program quickly is to write a simple program. You just have a damn good solution. So it's not necessarily you have to type fast. You have to think through a really clean, beautiful solution. I mean, what do you think is the use of those programming competitions? Do you think they're ultimately something you would recommend for students, for people interested in programming, or people interested in building stuff? Yes, I think so because especially with the work that I've been doing nowadays, even trying to control COVID, something that was very helpful from day one was understanding that the kinds of computations we would want to do, we could conceivably do on like a four core cloud machine on Amazon Web Services out to a population which might have hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The reason why that was important to have that back of the envelope calculation with efficient algorithms is because if we couldn't do that, then we would bankrupt ourselves before we could get to a big enough scale. If you think about how you grow anything from small to big, if in order to grow it from small to big, you also already need 10,000 cloud servers, you'll never get to big. And also the nice thing about programming competitions is that you actually build a thing that works. So you finish it, there's a completion thing, and you realize, I think there's a magic to it, where you realize that it's not so hard to build something that works. To have a system that successfully takes in inputs and produces outputs and solves a difficult problem, and that directly transfers to building a startup essentially that can help some aspect of this world as long as it's mostly based on software engineering. Things get really tricky when you have to manufacture stuff. That's why people like Elon Musk are so impressive that it's not just software. Tesla Autopilot is not just software. It's like you have to actually have factories that build cars, and there's like a million components involved in the machinery required to assemble those cars and so on. But in software, one person can change the world, which is incredible. But on the mathematics side, what, if you look back, or maybe today, what made you fall in love with mathematics? For me, I think I've always been very attracted to challenge, as I already indicated with writing the program. I guess if I see something that's hard or supposed to be impossible, sometimes I say, maybe I want to see if I can pull that off. And with the mathematics, the math competitions presented problems that were hard, that I didn't know how to start, but for which I could conceivably try to learn how to solve them. So, I mean, there are other things that are hard called like get something to Mars, get people to Mars. And I didn't, and I still don't think that I am able to solve that problem. On the other hand, the math problems struck me as things which are hard and with significant amount of extra work, I could figure it out. And maybe they would actually even be useful, like that mathematical skill is the core of lots of other things. That's really interesting. Maybe you could speak to that because a lot of people say that math is hard as a kind of negative statement. It always seemed to me a little bit like that's kind of a positive statement that all things that are worth having in this world, they're hard. I mean, everything that people think about that they would love to do, whether it's sports, whether it's art, music, and all the sciences, they're going to be hard if you want to do something special. So is there something you could say to that idea that math is hard? Should it be made easy or should it be hard? Ah, so I think maybe I want to dig in a little bit onto this hard part and say, I think the interesting thing about the math is that you can see a question that you didn't know how to start doing it before. And over a course of thinking about it, you can come up with a way to solve it. And so you can move from a state of not being able to do something to a state of being able to do something where you help to take yourself through that instead of somebody else spoon feeding you that technique. So actually here, I'm already digging into maybe part of my teaching philosophy also, which is that I actually don't want to ever just tell somebody, here's how you do something. I actually prefer to say, here's an interesting question. I know you don't quite know how to do it. Do you have any ideas? I'm actually explaining another way that you could try to do teaching. And I'm contrasting this to a method of watch me do this, now practice it 20 times. I'm trying to say a lot of people consider math to be hard because maybe they can't remember all of the methods that were taught. But for me, I look at the hardness and I don't think of it as a memory hardness. I think of it as a, can you invent something hardness? And I think that if we can teach more people how to do that art of invention in a pure cognitive way, not as hard as the actual hardware stuff, right? But like in terms of the concepts and the thoughts and the mathematics, teaching people how to invent, then suddenly actually they might not even find math to be that tiresomeness hard anymore, but that rewardingness hard of I have the capability of looking at something which I don't know what to do and coming up with how to do it. I actually think we should be doing that, giving people that capability. So hard in the same way that invention is hard, that is ultimately rewarding. So maybe you can dig in that a little bit longer, which is do you see basically the way to teach math is to present a problem and to give a person a chance to try to invent a solution with minimal amount of information first? Is that basically, how do you build that muscle of invention in a student? Yes, so the way that, I guess I have two different sort of ways that I try to teach. Actually, one of them is, in fact, this semester, because all my classes were remotely delivered, I even threw them all onto my YouTube channel. So you can see how I teach at Carnegie Mellon, but I'd often say, hey, everyone, let's try to do this. Any ideas? And that actually changes my role as a professor from a person who shows up for class with a script of what I wanna talk through. I actually, I don't have a script. The way I show up for classes, there's something that we want to learn how to do, and we're gonna do it by improv. I'm talking about the same method as improv comedy, which is where you tell me some ideas, and I'll try to yes and them. You know what I mean? And then together, we're gonna come up with a proof of this concept where you were deeply involved in creating the proof. Actually, every time I teach the class, we do every proof slightly differently because it's based on how the students came up with it. And that's how I do it when I'm in person. I also have another line of courses that we make that is delivered online. Those things are where I can't do it live, but the teaching method became also similar. It was just, here's an interesting question. I know it's out of reach. Why don't you think about it? And then automatic hints. We feed automatically hints through the internet to go and let the person try to invent. So that's like a more rigorous prodding of invention. But you did mention disease and COVID, and you've been doing some very interesting stuff from a mathematical, but also software engineering angle of coming up with ideas. It's back to the, I see a problem. I think I can help. So you stepped into this world. Can you tell me about your work there under the flag of Novid and both the software and the technical details of how the thing works? Sure, sure. So first I want to make sure that I say, this is actually team effort. I happen to be the one speaking, but there's no way this would exist without an incredible team of people who inspire me every day to work on this. But I'll speak on behalf of them. So the idea was indeed that we stepped forward in March of last year, when the world started to become, our part of the world started to become, our part meaning the United States started to become paralyzed by COVID. The shutdown started to happen. And at that time it started as a figment of an idea, which was network theory, which is the area of math that I work in, could potentially be combined with smartphones and some kind of health information anonymized. Exactly how? We didn't know yet. We tried to crystallize it. And many months into this work, we ended up accidentally discovering a new way to control diseases, which is now what is the main impetus of all of this work is to take this idea and polish it and hopefully have it be useful not only now, but for future pandemics. The idea is really simple to describe. Actually, my main thing in the world is I come up with obvious observations. That's that, so I'll explain it now. Einstein did the same thing and he wrote a few short papers. But so the idea is like this. If we describe how usually people control disease for a lot of history, it was that you'd find out who was sick, you'd find out who they've been around and you try to remove all of those people from society against their will. Now that's the problem. The against their will part gives you the wrong kind of a feedback loop, which makes it hard to control the disease because then the people you're trying to control keep getting other people sick. You can see already how I'm thinking and talking about this feedback loops. This is actually related to something you said earlier about even like how skyscrapers stay in the air. The whole point is control theory. You actually want to, or even how an airplane stays, you need to have control loops which are feedbacking in the right way. And what we observed was that the feedback control loop for controlling disease by asking people to be removed from society against their will was not working. It was running against human incentives and you suddenly are trying to control seven billion, eight billion people in ways that they don't individually want to necessarily do. So here's the idea. And this is inspired by the fact that at the core of our team were user experience designers. That's actually, in fact, the first thing I knew we needed when we started was to bring user experience at the core. Okay. But so the idea was suppose hypothetically there was a pandemic. What would you want? You would want a way to be able to live your life as much as possible and avoid getting sick. Can we make an app to help you avoid getting sick? Notice how I've just articulated the problem. It is not, can we make an app so that after you are around somebody who's sick you can be removed from society. It's can we make an app so that you can avoid getting sick. That would run a positive feed. I don't know if I want to call it positive or negative but it would run a good feedback loop. Okay. So then how would you do this? The only problem is that you don't know who's sick because especially with this disease if I see somebody who looks perfectly healthy the disease spreads two days before you have any symptoms. And so it's actually not possible. That's where the network theory comes in. You caught it from someone. What if we changed the paradigm and we said, whenever there's a sickness tell everybody how many physical relationships separate them from the sickness. That is the trivial idea we added. The trivial idea was the distance between you and a disease is not measured in feet or seconds. It's measured in terms of how many close physical relationships separate you like these six degrees of separation like LinkedIn. Simple idea. What if we told everyone that? It turns out that actually unlocks some interesting behavioral feedback loops which for example, let me now jump to a non COVID example to show why this maybe could be useful. Actually we think it could be quite useful. Imagine there was Ebola or some hemorrhagic fever. Imagine it spread through contact through the air. In fact, pretend, pretend. That's a disastrous disease. It has high fatality rate. And as you die, you're bleeding out of every orifice. Okay. So. Yeah, not pleasant. Not pleasant. So the question is, suppose that such a disease broke who would want to install an app that would tell them how many relationships away from them this disease had struck? Like a lot of people. A lot of people. In fact, almost, I don't want to say almost everyone. That's a very strong statement but a very large number of people. That's fascinating framing. Like the more deadly and transmissible the disease the stronger the incentive to install it in a positive sense the, in the good feedback loop sense. That's a really good example. It's a really good way to frame it. Cause with COVID, it was not as deadly as potential pandemics could have been viruses could have been. So it's sometimes muddled with how we think about it but yeah, this is a really good framing. If the virus was a lot more deadly you want to create a system that has a set of incentives that it quickly spreads to the population where everybody is using it and it's contributing in a positive way to the system. Exactly. And actually that point you just made I don't take credit for that observation. There was another person I talked to who pointed out that it's very interesting that this feedback loop is even more effective when the disease is worse. And that's actually not a bad characteristic to have in your feedback loop if you're trying to help civilization keep running. Yeah, it's a really, it's in this dynamic like people figure out, they dynamically figure out how bad the disease is. The more it spreads and the deadlier it is as the people observe it as long as the spread of information like semantic information, natural language information is closely aligned with the reality of the disease which is a whole nother conversation, right? We, that's, we might, maybe we'll chat about that how we sort of make sure there's not misinformation while there's accurate information but that aside, okay, so this is a really nice property. Right, and just going on on that actually just talking more about what that could do and why we're so excited about it. It's that not only would people want to install it but what would they do if you start to see that this disease is getting closer and closer? We surveyed informally people but they said, as we saw it getting closer, we would hide. We would try to not have contacts. But now you notice what this has just achieved. The whole goal on this whole exercise was you got the people who might be sick and you got everyone else, set A and set B. Set A is the people who might be sick, set B is everyone else. And for the entirety of the past contact tracing approaches, you tried to get set A to do things that might not be to their liking or their will because that's removing them from society. We found out that there's two ways to separate set A from set B. You can also let the people at set B at the fringe of set A attempt to remove themselves from this interface. It's the symmetry of A and B separation. Everyone was looking at A, we look at B and suddenly B is in their incentive to do so. Beautiful. So there's a virus that jumps from human to human. So there's a network sometimes called graph of the spread of a virus. It hops from person to person to person to person. And each one of us individuals are sitting or plopped into that network. We have close friends and relations and so on. It's kind of fascinating to actually think about this network and we can maybe talk about the shapes of this kind of network. Because I was trying to think exactly this, like how many people do I, well, I'm kind of an introvert, not kind of, I'm very much an introvert. But so can I be explicit about the kind of people I meet in regular life? Say when it was completely opened up, there's no pandemic. There is a kind of network and there's maybe in the graph theoretic sense, there's some weights or something about how close that relationship is in terms of the frequency of visits, the duration of visits and all of those kinds of things. So you're saying we might want to be, to create on top of that network, a spread of information to let you know as the virus travels through this network, how close is it getting to you? And the number of hops away it is on that network is really powerful information that creates a positive feedback loop where you can act essentially anonymously and on your own. Like nobody's telling you what to do, which is really important, is decentralized and not whatever the opposite of authoritarian is. But you get to sort of the American way. You get to choose to do it yourself. You have the freedom to do it yourself and you're incentivized to do it. And you're most likely going to do it to protect yourself against you getting the disease as the closer it gets to you based on the information that you have. But can you maybe elaborate, first of all, brilliant. Whenever I saw the thing you're working on, so forget for COVID, this is of course, really relevant for COVID, but it's also probably relevant for future diseases as well. So that was the thing I'm nervous about. I was like, if this whole, if our society shut down because of COVID, like what the heck is gonna happen when there's a much deadlier disease? Like this, this is disappointing. The whole time, 2020, the whole time I'm just sitting like this, like is the incompetence of everybody except the people developing vaccines. The biologists are the only ones that got their stuff together. But in terms of institutions and all that kind of stuff, it's just been terrible. But this is exactly the power of information and the power of information that doesn't limit personal freedom. So your idea is brilliant. Okay, mathematically, can you maybe elaborate what are we talking about? Like how do you actually make that work? What's involved? Sure, first I'm gonna reply to something you said about the freedom inside this, because actually that was the idea. The idea is this is game theory, right? And effectively what we did is analogous to free market economy, as opposed to central planning. If you just line up the set of incentives correctly so that people have in their purely selfish behavior are contributing to the optimization of the global function, that's it. And the point of what we do, I guess in mathematics is we try to explore the search space to go and find out as many possibilities as there are. And in this case, it's an applied search space. That's why the inputs from design, user experience design and actual people are important. But you asked about, I guess, the mathematical or the technical things underpinning it. So I think the first thing I'll say is we wanted to make this thing not require your personal information. And so in order to do that, what gave me the confidence to, I guess, lead our team to run at the beginning is we saw that this could be done without using GPS information. So technically what's going on is if two smartphones, it's a smartphone app. If two smartphones have this thing installed, they just communicate with each other by Bluetooth to go and find out how far, they can detect nearby things by Bluetooth. And then they can find out that these two phones were approximately such and such distance apart. And that kind of relative proximity information is enough to construct this big network. Okay, so the physical network is constructed based on proximity that's through Bluetooth and you don't have to specify your exact location, it's the proximity. I'm not using the Pythagorean theorem basically. I mean, if I just knew the GPS coordinates, we could use the Pythagorean theorem too. Sorry, that's just how I call it. Distance formula, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, so we're not doing the old Pythagorean based violation of privacy. Okay. But so is that enough to form, to give you enough information about physical connection to another human being? Is there a time element there? Is there, so, okay. That sounds like a really strong, like low hanging fruit. Like if you have that, you could probably go really, really far. My natural question is, is there extra information you can add on top of that? Like the duration of the physical proximity? So first of all, we actually do estimate the duration, but the way we estimate the duration is like how a movie is filmed, in the sense that every so often, every few minutes, we check what's nearby. It's like how a movie is filmed. You take lots of snapshots. So there's no way in a battery efficient way to really keep track of that proximity. However, fortunately, we're using probability. The fact is the paradigm that we're using is it's not super important if you run into that person only for 10 minutes at the grocery store. If that's a stranger that you run into 10 minutes in this grocery store, that's not gonna be relevant for our paradigm because our paradigm is not telling you who were you around before and might therefore have gotten infected by already. Ours is about predicting the future. We change from, I mean, the standard paradigm was what already happened, quick damage control. Ours is predict the future. If you run into that person once in the grocery store today and never see them again, it's irrelevant for predicting the future. And therefore, for ours, what really matters is the many hours around the other person, at which point, if you're scanning every five to eight minutes. That's going to come out in the problem, like statistically speaking, it's going to come out as a strong relationship and a person in the grocery store is going to wash out is not an important physical relationship. I mean, this is brilliant. How difficult is it to make work? So you said, one, there's a mathematical component that we just kind of talked about, and then there's the user experience component. So how difficult does it to go, just like you built the video game, Alien Attack, from zero to completion, what's involved? How difficult is it? So I'm going to answer that question in terms of building the product, but then I'm also going to acknowledge that just having an app doesn't make it useful because that's actually maybe the easy part. If you know what I mean, there's like all of this stuff about rollout adoption and awareness, but let's focus on the app part first. So that's again, why I said the team is incredible. So we have a bunch of people who, let's just say that the technology that we use to make it is not the standard way you make an app. If you think about a standard iOS app or Android app, those are a user interface that contacts a web server and sends some information back and forth. We're doing some stuff that has to hook into the operating system of saying, let's go use Bluetooth for something it wasn't really meant for, right? So there's that part. By the way, what is the app called? Oh, it's called Novid, COVID with an N. Very nice. So you have to hook into Bluetooth. You're saying you have to do that beyond the permissions that are like at the very surface level provided on the phone? Well, I don't want to call them permissions. I just want to say, that's not what you usually do with Bluetooth. Gotcha. Usually with Bluetooth, you say, do I have headphones nearby? Yes. Okay, I'm done. You don't go and say, do I have headphones nearby? Or do I have another phone nearby, which is doing something? And then keep asking that same question. Keep asking the question. Right? So it's actually not easy. And I mean, there were some parts of it, which actually a lot of people had tried unsuccessfully. Actually, it's known that, for example, the UK was trying to do something similar. And the problem they ran into was, when you program things on iOS, iOS is very good at making it hard to do things in the background. And so there was quite a lot of effort required to go and make this thing work. So the whole point, this thing would run in the background and iOS, I mean, most Android probably as well, right? But yeah, iOS certainly makes it difficult for something to run in the background, especially when it's eating up your battery, right? Well, we wanted to make sure we didn't eat up the battery. So that one we can, we actually are very proud of the fact that ours uses very little battery. Actually, even if compared to Apple's own system, so. Beautiful. So what else is required to make this thing work? Right, so the key was that you had to do a significant amount of work on the actual mobile app development, which fortunately the team that we brought was this kind of general thinkers where we would dig in deep into the operating system documentation and the API libraries. So we got that working. But there's another angle, which is, you also need the servers to be able to compute fast enough, which is tying back to this old school computer programming competitions and math Olympiads. In fact, our team that was working on the algorithm and backend side included several people who had been in these competitions from before, which I happen to know because I do coach the team for the math. And so we were able to bring people in to build servers, a server infrastructure in C++ actually, so that we could support significant numbers of people without needing tons of servers. Is there some distributed algorithms working here or you basically have to keep in the same place the entire graph as it builds? Cause especially the more and more people use it, the bigger, the bigger the graph gets. I mean, this is very difficult scaling problem, right? Ah, so that's actually why this computer algorithm competition stuff was handy. It's because there are only about seven to eight giga people in the world. Yeah. That's not that many. So if you can make your algorithms linear time or almost linear time, a computer operates in gigahertz. I only need to do one run, one recalculation every hour in terms of telling people how far away these dangers are. Yes. So I suddenly have 3,600 seconds and my CPU cores are running in gigahertz. And at most they're eight giga people. Well, you skipping over the fact that there's N squared potential connections between people. So how do you get around the fact that, you know, that we, you know, the potential set of relationship any one of us could have is a billion. So it's a billion times squared. That's the potential amount of data you have to be storing and computing over and constantly updating. So the way we dealt with that is we actually expect that the typical network is very sparse. The technical term sparse would mean that the average degree or the average number of connections that a person has is going to be at most like a hundred strong connections that you care about. If you think of it almost in terms of the heavy hitters, actually in most people's lives, a hundred, if we just kept track of their top hundred interactions, that's probably most of the signal. Yeah, yeah. I'm saddened to think that I might not be even in a double digits, but. Oh, I was intentionally giving a crazy number to account for college students. You call, oh, those are the, who you call on the heavy hitters, the people who are like the social butterflies. Yeah, I need to, I'd love to know that information about myself, by the way, that, do you expose the graph, like how many, like about yourself, how many connections you have? We do expose to each person how many direct connections they have. That's great. But for privacy purposes, we don't tell anybody who their connections, like how their connections are interconnected. Yes, gotcha. But at the same time, we do expose also to everyone an interesting chart that says, here's how many people you have that you're connected to directly. Here's how many at distance two, meaning via people. And then here's how many at distance three. And the reason we do that, is that actually ends up being a dynamic that also boosts adoption. It drives another feedback loop. The reason is because we saw, actually, when we deployed this in some universities, that when people see on their app that they are indirectly connected to hundreds or thousands of other people, they get excited and they tell other people, hey, let's download this app. But you know, we also saw in those examples, especially looking at the screenshots people gave, that is hit as soon as the typical person has two or three other direct connections on the system. Because that means that our app has reached a virality or not of two to three. The key is we were making a viral app to fight a virus spreading on the same network that the virus spreads on. So you're trying to out virus the virus. That's right. That's exactly right. Okay, great. What have you learned from this whole experience in terms of, let's say for COVID, but for future pandemics as well, is it possible to use the power information here of networked information as a virus spreads and travels in order to basically keep the society open? Is it possible for people to protect themselves with this information? Or do you still have to have most, like in this overarching policy of everybody should stay at home, that kind of thing? We are trying to answer that question right now. So the answer is we don't know yet, but that's actually why we're very happy that now the idea has started to become more widely known. And we're already starting to collaborate with epidemiologists. Again, I'm just a mathematician, right? And a mathematician should not be the person who is telling everybody, this will definitely work. But because of the potential power of this approach, especially the potential power of this being an end game for COVID, we have gotten the interest of real researchers. And we're now working together to try to actually understand the answer to that question. Because you see, there's a theory. So what I can share is the mathematics of, here's why there's some hope that this would work. And that's because I'm talking about end game now. End game means you have very few cases. But everywhere, we're always thinking, once there's few cases, then does that mean we now open up? Once you open up in the past, then the cases go up again until you have to lock down again. And now when we talk about the dynamic process that makes, it's guaranteeing you always have cases until you have the great vaccines, which is, we both got vaccinated, this is good. But at the same time, why I'm thinking this is still important is because we know that many vaccine makers have said they're preparing for the next dose next year. And if we have a perpetual thing where you just always need a new vaccine every year, it could actually be beneficial to make sure we have as many other techniques as possible for parts of the world that can't afford, for example, that kind of distribution. Yeah, so actually, no matter how deadly the virus is, no matter how many things, whether you have a vaccine or not, it's still useful to be having this information. Yes. Because to stay home or not, depending on how risk, I'm a big fan, just like you said, of having the freedom for you to decide how risk averse you wanna be, right? Depending on your own conditions, but also on the state of like what you, just how dangerously you like to live. So I think that actually makes a lot of sense. And I also think that since we're, when you think of disease spreading, it spreads in aggregate in the sense that if there are some people who maybe are more risk tolerant because of other things in their life, well, there might also be other people who are less risk tolerance. And then those people decide to isolate. But what matters is in the aggregate that this R naught of the infection spreading drops below one. And so the key is if you can empower people with that power to make that decision, you might actually still be able to drive that R naught down below one. Yeah, and also, this is me talking, people get a little bit nervous, I think, with information somehow mapping to privacy violation. But first of all, in the approach you're describing, that's respecting anonymity. But I would love to have information from the very beginning, from March and April of last year, almost like a map of like where it's risky and where it's not to go. And not map based on sort of the exact location of people, but where people usually hang out kind of thing. Just, and maybe not necessarily about actual location, but just maybe activities, like just to have information about what is good to do and not, in terms of like safety, is it okay to run outside and not, is it okay to go to a restaurant and not, I just feel like we're operating in the blind. And then what you had is a very imperfect signal, which is like basically politicians desperately trying to make statements about what is safe and not. They don't know what the heck they're doing. They have a bunch of smart scientists telling them stuff. And the scientists themselves also, very important, don't always know what they're doing. Epidemiology is not, is as much an art as a science. You're desperately trying to predict the future, which nobody can do. And then you're trying to speak with some level of authority. I mean, if I were to criticize scientists, they spoke with too much authority. It's okay to say, I'm not sure. But then they think like, if I say, I'm not sure, then there's going to be a distrust. What they realize is when you're wrong and you say, I'm sure, it's going to lead to more distrust. So there's this imperfect, like just chaotic, messy system of people trying to figure out with very little information. And what you're proposing is just a huge amount of information, and information is power. Is there challenges with adoption that you see in the future here? So there's, maybe we could speak to, there's approaches, I guess, from Google. There's different people that have tried similar kind of ideas. Not, you have quite a novel idea, actually. But speaking, the umbrella idea of contact tracing, is there something you can comment about why their approaches haven't been fully adopted? Is there challenges there? Is there reasons why Novid might be a better idea moving forward, in general, just about adoption? Yeah, so first of all, I want to say, I always have respect for the methods that other people use. And so it's good to see the other people I've been trying. But what we have noticed is that the difference between our value proposition to the user and the value proposition to the user delivered by everything that was made before is that, unfortunately, the action of installing a standard contact tracing app will then tell you after you have already been exposed to the disease so that you can protect other people from you. And what that does to your own direct probability of getting sick, if you think about it, suppose you were making the decision, should I or should I not install one of those apps? What does that do to your own probability of getting sick? It's close to zero. This is the sad thing you're speaking to, not sad. I suppose it's the way the world is. The only incentive there is to just help other people, I suppose, but a much stronger incentive is anything that allows you to help yourself. Yes, so what I'm saying is that, let's just say free market capitalism was not based on altruism, I think it's based on, if you make a system of incentives so that everybody trying to maximize their own situation somehow contributes to the whole, that's a game theoretic solution to a very hard problem. And so this is actually basically mechanism design, that we've basically come up with a different mechanism, different set of incentives, which incentivizes the adoption, because actually whenever we've been rolling it out, usually the first question we ask people, like say in a university is, do you know what Novid does? And most of them have read about the other apps and they say, Oh, Novid will tell you after you've been around someone so you can quarantine. And we have to explain to them, actually, Novid never wants to ask you to quarantine. That's not the principle. Our principle isn't based on that at all. We just want to let you know if something is coming close so that you can protect yourself. If you want. If you want, if you want, if you want. And then the quarantine is like, yes, in that case, if you're quarantining, it's because you're shutting the door from the inside, if that makes sense. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I mean, this is brilliant. So what do you think the future looks like for future pandemics? What's your plan with Novid? What's your plan with these set of ideas? I am actually still an academic and a researcher. So the biggest work I'm working on right now is to try to build as many collaborations with other public health researchers at other universities to actually work on pilot deployments together in various places. That's the goal. That's actually ongoing work right now. And so, for example, if anyone's watching this and you happen to be a public health researcher and you want to be involved in something like this, I'm just gonna say, I'm still incentive thinking. There's something in it for the researchers too. This could open up an entire new way of controlling disease. That's my hope. I mean, it might actually be true. And people who are involved in figuring out how to make this work, well, it could actually be good for their careers too. I always have to think like, if a researcher was getting involved, what are they getting out of it? Oh, so you mean like from a research perspective, you can like publications and sets of ideas about how to, from a sort of network theory perspective, understand how we control the spread of a pandemic. Yes, and what I'm doing right now is this is basically interdisciplinary research where maybe our side is bringing the technology and the network theory, and the missing parts are epidemiology and public health expertise. And if the two things start to join, also because everywhere that you deploy, let's just say that the world is different in the Philippines as it is in the United States. And just the natures of the locality would mean that someone like me should not be trying to figure out how to do that. But if we can work with the researchers who are based there, now suddenly we might come up with a solution that will help scale in parts of the world where they aren't all getting the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines which cost like $20 a pop in the US. So if they want to participate, who do they reach out to? Oh, that would just be us. I mean, the novid.org website has... Novid.org. It has a feedback reach out form. And actually we are, I mean, again, this is the DNA of being a researcher. I am actually very excited by the idea that this could contribute knowledge that will outlast all of our generations, like all of our lifetimes. There you go. Reach out to novid.org. What about individual people? Should they install the app and try it out? Or is this really geographically restricted? Oh, yeah, I didn't come on here to tell everyone to install the app. I did not come to tell everyone to install the app because it works best if your local health authority is working with us. Gotcha. There's a reason. It's because, this is back to the game theory. If anyone could just say, I'm positive, the high school senior prank would be to say that we have a massive outbreak on finals week. Let's not have final exams. So the way that our system works, it actually borrows some ideas, not borrows, we came up with them independently. But this idea is similar to what Google and Apple do, which is that if the local health authority is working with this, they can, for everyone who's positive, give them a passcode that expires in a short time. So for ours, if you're on the app and saying, I'm positive, you can either just say that, and that's called unverified, or you can enter in one of these codes that you got from the local health authority. So basically, for anyone who's watching this, it's not that you should just go and download it unless you want to go and look at it. That's cool. But if you, on the other hand, if you happen to know anyone at the local health authority, which is trying to figure out how to handle COVID, well then, I mean, we'd be very happy to also work with you. Gotcha. So the verified there is really important because you're maintaining anonymity. And because of that, you have to have some source of verification in order to make sure that it's not possible to manipulate because it's ultimately about trust and information. So it could be, verification is really important there. So basically, individual people should ask their local health authorities to sign up to contact you. I hope this spreads. I hope this spreads for future pandemics because I'm really, it's the amount, the millions of people who are hurt by this, I think our response to the virus, economically speaking, the number of people who lost their dream, lost their jobs, but also lost their dream. Entrepreneurs, jobs often give meaning. There's people who financially and psychologically are suffering because of our, I'll say, incompetent response to the virus across the world, but certainly the United States, that should be the beacon of entrepreneurial hope for the world. So I hope that we'll be able to respond to these kinds of events much better in the future. And this is exactly the right kind of idea. And now is the time to do the investment. Let's step back to the beauty of mathematics. Maybe ask the big, silly question first, which is, what do you find beautiful about mathematics? I think that being able to look at a complicated problem, which looks unsolvable, and then to be able to change the perspective to come from a different angle and suddenly see that there's a nice solution. I don't mean that every problem in math is supposed to be this way, but I think that these reframings and changing of perspectives that cause difficult things to get simplified and crystallized and factored in certain ways is beautiful. Actually, that's related to what we were just talking about with even this fighting pandemics. The crystal idea was just quantify proximity by the number of relationships in the physical network, instead of just by the feet and meters, right? It's just that if you change that perspective, now all of these things follow. And so mathematics to me is beautiful in the pure sense just for that. Yeah, it's quite interesting to see a human civilization as a network, as a graph, and our relationships as kind of edges in that graph. And to then do, outside of just pandemic, do interesting inferences based on that. This is true for like Twitter, social networks and so on, how we expand the kind of things we talk about, think about sort of politically, if you have this little bubble, quote unquote, of ideas that you play with, it's nice from a recommender system perspective, how do you jump out of those bubbles? It's really fascinating. YouTube was working on that, Twitter's working on that, but not always so successfully, but there's a lot of interesting work from a mathematical and a psychological, sociological perspective there within those graphs. But if we look at the cleanest formulation of that, of looking at a problem from a different perspective, you're also involved with the International Mathematics Olympiad, which takes small, clean problems that are really hard, but once you look at them differently, can become easy. But that little jump of innovation is the entire trick. So maybe at the high level, can you say what is the International Mathematical Olympiad? Sure, so this is the competition for people who aren't yet in college, math competition, which is the most prestigious one in the entire world. It's the Olympics of mathematics, but only for people who aren't yet in college. Now, the kinds of questions that they ask you to do are not computational. Usually you're not supposed to find that the answer is 42. Right? Instead, you're supposed to explain why something is true. And the problem is that at the beginning, when you look at each of the questions, first of all, you have four and a half hours to solve three questions, and this is one day, and then you have a second day, which is four and a half hours, three questions. But when you look at the questions, they're all asking you, explain why the following thing is true, which you've never seen before. And by the way, even though there are six questions, if you solve any one of them, you're a genius and you get an honorable mention. So this is hard to solve. So what about, is it one person, is it a team? Ah, so each country can send six people and the score of the country is actually unofficial. There's not an official country versus country system, although everyone just adds up the point scores of the six people and they say, well, now which country stacked up where? Yeah, so maybe as a side comment, I should say that there's a bunch of countries, including the former Soviet Union and Russia, where I grew up, where this is one of the most important competitions that the country participates in. It was a source of pride for a lot of the country. You look at the Olympic sports, like wrestling, weightlifting, there's certain sports and hockey that Russia and the Soviet Union truly took pride in. And actually the Mathematical Olympiad, it was one of them for many years. It's still one of them. And that's kind of fascinating. We don't think about it this way in the United States. Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not nearly as popular in the United States in terms of its integration into the culture, into just basic conversation, into the pride. Like, if you won an Olympic gold medal or if you win the Super Bowl, you can walk around proud. I think that was the case with the Mathematical Olympiad in Russia. Not as much the case in the United States, I think. So I just wanna give that a little aside because beating anybody from Russia, from the Eastern Republic or from China is very, very difficult. Like, if I remember correctly, there's people, this was a multiyear training process. They train hard. And this is everything that they're focused on. My dad was a participant in this. And it's, I mean, it's as serious as Olympic sports. You think about like gymnastics, like young athletes participating in gymnastics. This is as serious as that, if not more serious. So I just wanna give that a little bit of context because we're talking about serious high level math, athletics almost here. Yeah, and actually I also think that it made sense from the Soviet Union's perspective because if you look at what these people do eventually, even though, let's look at the USSR's International Math Olympiad record. Even though they, I say, even though they won a lot of awards at the high school thing, many of them went on to do incredible things in research mathematics or research other things. And that's showing the generalization, generalizability of what they were working on. Because ultimately we're just playing with ideas of how to prove things. And if you get pretty good at inventing creative ways to turn problems apart, split them apart, observe neat ways to turn messy things into simple crystals. Well, if you're gonna try to solve any real problem in the real world, that could be a really handy tool too. So I don't think it was a bad investment. I think it clearly worked well for Soviet Union. Yeah, so this is interesting. People sometimes ask me, you know, you go up and under communism, you know, was there anything good about communism? And it's difficult for me to talk about it because it's not, communism is one of those things that's looked down on like without, in absolutist terms currently. But you could still, in my perspective, talk about the actual, forget communism or whatever the actual term is, but you know, certain ways that the society functioned that we can learn lessons from. And one of the things in the Soviet Union that was highly prized is knowledge, not even knowledge, it's wisdom and the skill of invention, of innovation at a young age. So we're not talking about a selection process where you pick the best students in the school to do the mathematics or to read literature. It's like, everybody did it. Everybody, it was almost treated as if anyone could be the next Einstein, anybody could be the next, I don't know, Hemingway, James Joyce. And so you're forcing an education on the populace and a rigorous deep education, like as opposed to kind of like, oh, we wanna make sure we teach to the weakest student in the class, which American systems can sometimes do because we don't wanna leave anyone behind. The Russian system was anyone can be the strongest student and we're gonna teach you the strongest student and we're going to pretend or force everybody, even the weakest student to be strong. And what that results in, it's obviously, this is what people talk about, is a huge amount of pressure. Like it's psychologically very difficult. This is why people struggle when they go to MIT, this very competitive environment. It can be very psychologically difficult, but at the same time, it's bringing out the best out of people. And that mathematics was certainly one of those things. And exactly what you're saying, which kind of clicked with me just now, as opposed to kind of a spelling bee in the United States, which I guess you spell, I'm horrible at this, but it's a competition about spelling, which I'm not sure, but you could argue it doesn't generalize well to the future skills. Mathematics, especially this kind of mathematics is essentially formalized competition of invention, of creating new ideas. And that generalizes really, really well. So that's quite brilliantly put. I didn't really think about that. So this is not just about the competition. This is about developing minds that will come to do some incredible stuff in the future. Yeah, actually, I want to respond to a couple of things there. The first one, this one, which is this notion of whether or not that is possible in a non authoritarian regime. I think it is. And that's actually why I spent some of my efforts before the COVID thing, actually trying to work towards there. The reason is because if you think about it, let's say in America, lots of people are pretty serious about training very hard for football, or baseball, or basketball. Basketball is very, very accessible, but lots of people are doing that. Why? Well, actually, I think that what was going on with the authoritarian thing was at least the message that was universally sent was being a good thinker and a creator of ideas is a good thing. Yes, exactly. There's no reason why that message can't be sent everywhere. And I think it actually should be. So that's the first thing. The second thing is what you commented about this thing about the generalizable skill and what could people do with Olympiads afterwards. So that's actually my interest in the whole thing. I don't just coach students how to do problems. In fact, I'm not even the best person for that. I'm not the best at solving these problems. There are other people who are much better at making problems and teaching people how to solve problems. In fact, when the Mathematical Association of America, which is the group which is in charge of the US participation in these Olympiads, when they were deciding whether or not to put me in back in 2013 as the head coach, I had a conversation with their executive director where I commented that we might do worse because my position was I don't, I mean, I actually didn't want to focus on winning. I said, if you're going to let me work with 60 very strong minds as picked through this system, because the coach works with these, gets to run a camp for these students. I said, I'm actually not going to define my success in terms of winning this contest. I said, I wanted to maximize the number of the students that I read about in the New York Times in 20 years. And the executive director of the Mathematical Association of America was fully in support of this because that's also how their philosophy is. So in America, the way we run this is we're actually not just training to win, even though the students are very good and they can win anyway. One reason, for example, I went and even did the COVID thing involving quite a few of them is so that hopefully some of them get ideas because in 20, 30 years, I won't have the energy or the insight to solve problems. We'll have another catastrophe. And hopefully some of these people will step up and do it. And ultimately have that longterm impact. I wonder if this is scalable to, because that's such a great metric for education, not how to get an A on the test, but how to have, how to be on the cover of New York Times for inventing something new. And do you think that's generalizable to education beyond just this particular Olympia? Like, even you saying this feels like a rare statement, almost like a radical statement as a goal for education. So actually the way I teach my classes at Carnegie Mellon, which I will admit right away is not equivalent to the average in the world, but it's already not just the top 60 in the country as picked by something. Let me just explain. I have exams in my class, which are 90% of the grade. So the exams are the whole thing, or most of the whole thing. And the way that I let students prepare for the exams is I show them all the problems I've ever given on the previous exams. And the exam that they will take is open notes. They can take all the notes they want on the previous problems. And the guarantee is that the exam problems this time will have no overlap with anything you have seen me give in the past, as well as no overlap with anything I taught in the class. So the entire exam is invention. Wow. But that's how I go, right? My point is I have explained to people when I teach you, I don't want you to have remembered a method I showed you. I want you to have learned enough about this area that if you face a new question, which I came up with the night before by thinking about like, what could I ask that I have never asked before? Oh, that's cute. That's what the answer is. Aha, that's an exam problem. That's exactly what I do before the exam. And then that's what I want them to learn. And the first exam, usually people have a rough time because it's like, what kind of crazy class is this? The professor doesn't teach you anything for the exam. But then by the second or third, and by the time they finished the class, they have learned how to solve anything in the area. How to invent. How to invent in that area, yeah. Can we walk back to the Mathematical Olympiad? What's the scoring and format like? And also what does it take to win? So the way it works is that each of the six students do the problems and there are six problems. All the problems are equally weighted. So each one's worth seven points. That means that your maximum score is six problems times seven points, which is the nice number of 42. And now the way that they're scored by the way is there's partial credit. So the question is asking you, explain why this weird fact is true. Okay, if you explain why you get seven points. If you make minor mistake, maybe you get six points. But if you don't succeed in explaining why, but you explain some other true fact, which is along the way of proving it, then you get partial credit. And actually now this is tricky because how do you score such a thing? It's not like the answer was 72 and you wrote 71 and it's close, right? The answer is 72 and you wrote 36. Oh, but that's pretty close because maybe you're just off by it. By the way, they're not numerical anyway, but I'm just giving some numerical analog to the way the scoring might work. They're all essays. And that's where I guess I have some role as well as some other people who helped me in the US delegation for coaches. We actually debate with the country which is organizing it. The country which is organizing the Olympiad brings about 50 people to help judge the written solutions. And you schedule these half hour appointments where the delegation from one country sits down at a table like this. Opposite side is two or three people from the host country. And they're just looking over these exam papers saying, well, how many points is this worth based on some rubric that has been designed? And this is a negotiation process where we're not trying to bargain and get the best score we can. In fact, sometimes we go to this table and we will say, we think we want less than what you gave us. This is how our, these are our principles. If you give us too much, we say, no, you gave us too much. We do that. However, the reason why this is an interesting process is because if you can imagine every country which is participating has its own language. And so if you're trying to grade the Mongolian scripts and they're written in Mongolian, if you don't read Mongolian, which most people don't, then the coaches are explaining to you, this is what the student has written. It's actually quite interesting process. So it's almost like a jury. Yes. You have, in the American legal system, you have a jury that where they're deliberating, but unlike a jury, there's the members of the jury speaking different languages sometimes. Yes. That's fascinating. But I mean, it's hard to know what to do because it's probably really, really competitive. But your sense is that ultimately people, like how do you prevent manipulation here, right? Well, we just hope that it's not happening. So we write in English. Therefore, everything that the US does, everyone can look at. So it's very hard for me. It's very hard for you to manipulate. We don't manipulate. We only hope that other people aren't. But at the same time, as you see, our philosophy was, we want to use this as a way to develop general talent. And although we do this for the six people who go to the International Math Olympiad, we really want that everyone at any, touched at any stage of this process get some skills that can help to contribute more later. So I don't know if you can say something insightful to this question, but what do you think makes a really hard math problem on this Olympiad, maybe in the courses you teach or in general? What makes for a hard problem? You've seen, I'm sure, a lot of really difficult problems. What makes a hard problem? So I could quantify it by the number of leaps of insight of changes of perspective that are along the way. And here's why. This is like a very theoretical computer science way of looking at it, okay? It's that each reframing of the problem and using of some tool, I actually call that a leap of insight. When you say, oh, wow, now I see, I should kind of put these plugs into those sockets like so, and suddenly I get to use that machine. Oh, but I'm not done yet. Now I need to do it again. Each such step is a large possible, large fan out in the search space. The number of these tells you the exponent. The base of the exponent is like how big, how many different possibilities you could try. And that's actually why, like if you have a three insight problem, that is not three times as hard as a one insight problem, because after you've made the one insight, it's not clear that that was the right track necessarily. Well, unless you're very into it. There's still a branching of possibility. Yeah. Right. You're saying there's problems like on the math Olympia that requires more than one insight? Yes. Those are the hard ones. And also I can tell you how you can tell. So this is how I also taught myself math when I was in college. So if you are taking a, not taught myself, I was taking classes, of course, but I was trying to read the textbook and I found out I was very bad at reading math textbooks. A math textbook has a long page of stuff that is all true, which after you read the page, you have no idea what you just read. Yeah. This is just a good summary of a math textbook. Okay. Yeah, because it's not clear why anything was done that way. And yes, everything is true, but how the heck did anyone think of that? So the way that I taught myself math eventually was, the way I read a math textbook is I would look at the theorem statement. I would look at the length of the proof and then I would close the book and attempt to reproof it myself. Yeah. That's brilliant. The length of the proof is telling you the number of insights, because the length of the proof is linear in the number of insights. Each insight takes space. Yeah. And if I know that it's a short proof, I know that there's only one insight. So when I'm doing my own way of solving the problem, like finding the proof, I quit if I have to do too many plugins. It's equivalent to a math contest. In a math contest I look, is it problem one, two, or three? That tells me how many insights there are. This is exactly what I did. That's brilliant. Linear in the number. I don't know. I think it's possible that that's true. Approximately, approximately. Approximately, yeah. I don't know if somebody out there is gonna try to formally prove this. Oh no, I mean, you're right. There are cases where maybe it's not quite linear, but in general. Well, some of it's notation too, and some of it is style and all those kinds of things, but within a textbook. Within the same book. Within the same book with the same. Within the same book on the same subject. Yeah. This is what I was using. That's hilarious. Because you know, if it's a two page proof, you just know this is gonna be insane, right? That's the scary thing about insights. You look like Andrew Wiles working on the Fermat's Last Theorem, is you don't know. Something seems like a good idea, and you have that idea, and it feels like this is a leap, like a totally new way to see it, but you have no idea if it's at all useful. Even if you think it's correct, you have no idea if this is like going to go down a path that's completely counterproductive or not productive at all. That's the crappy thing about invention, is like I have, I'm sure you do. I have a lot of really good ideas every single day, but like, and I'll go inside my head along them, along that little trajectory, but it could be just a total waste. And it's, you know what that feels like? It just feels like patience is required, not to get excited at any one thing. So I think this is interesting because you raised Andrew Wiles. He spent seven years attacking the same thing, right? And so I think that what attracts professional researchers to this is because even though it's very painful that you keep fighting with something, when you finally find the right insights and string them together, it feels really good, so. Well, there's also like short term, it feels good to, whether it's real or not, to pretend like you've solved something in the sense like you have an insight and there's a sense like this might be the insight that solves it. So at least for me, I just enjoy that rush of positivity even though I know statistically speaking is probably going to be a dead end. I'm the same way, I'm the same way. In fact, that's how I know whether I might want to keep thinking about this general problem. It's like, if I still see that I'm getting some insights, I'm not at a dead end yet. But that's also where I learned something from my PhD advisor. Actually, he was a real big inspiration on my life. His name is Benny Sudakov. In fact, he grew up in the former Soviet Union. He was from Georgia, but he's an incredible person. But one thing I learned was choose the problems to work on that might matter if you succeed. Because that's why, for example, we dug into COVID. It was just, well, suppose we succeed in finding some interesting insight here. Well, it actually matters. That is worth a laugh. Yeah, and I think COVID, the way you're approaching COVID has two interesting possibilities. One, it might help with COVID or another pandemic, but two, I mean, just this whole network theory space, you might unlock some deep understanding about the interaction with human beings. That might have nothing to do with the pandemic. There's a space of possible impacts that may be direct or indirect. And the same thing is with Andrew Wiles's proof. I don't understand, but apparently the pieces of it are really impactful for mathematics, even if the main theorem is not. So along the way, the insights you have might be really powerful for unexpected reasons. So I like what you said. This is something that I learned from another friend of mine. He's a very famous researcher. All these people are more famous than I am. His name is Jacob Fox. He's Jacob Fox at Stanford. Also a very big inspiration for me. We were both grad students together at the same time. Well, most importantly, you're good at selecting good friends. Ah, yeah, well, that's the key. You gotta find good people to learn things from. But his thing was, he often said, if you solve a math problem and have this math proof, math problem for him is like a proof, right? So suppose you came up with this proof. He always asks, what have we learned from this that we could potentially use for something else? It's not just, did you solve the problem that was supposed to be famous? And is there something new in the course of solving this that you had to invent that we could now use as a tool elsewhere? Yeah, there's this funny effect where just looking at different fields where people discover parallels. They'll prove something, it'll be a totally new result. And then somebody later realizes this was already done 30 years ago in another discipline, in another way. And it's really interesting. Now, we did this offline in another illustration he showed to me. It's interesting to see the different perspectives on a problem. It kind of points like there's just like very few novel ideas that everything else, that most of us are just looking at different perspective on the same idea. And it makes you wonder this old silly question that I have to ask you is, do you think mathematics is discovered or invented? Do you think we're creating new idea? Are we building a set of knowledge that's distinct from reality? Or are we actually like, is math almost like a shovel where we're digging to like this core set of truths that were always there all along? So I personally feel like it's discovered. But that's also because I guess the way that I like to choose what questions to work on are questions that maybe we'll get to learn something about why is this hard? I mean, I'm often attracted to questions that look simple, but are hard, right? And what could you possibly learn from that? Sort of like probably the attraction of Fermat's last theorem, as you mentioned, simple statement, why is it so hard? So I'm more on the discovered side. And I also feel like if we ever ran into an intelligent other species in the universe, probably if we compared notes, there might be some similarities between both of us realizing that pi is important. Because you might say, why, why humans, do humans like circles more than others? I think stars also like circles. I think planets like circles. They're not perfect circles, but nevertheless, the concept of a circle is just point and constant distance. Doesn't get any simpler than that. It's possible that like an alien species will have, depending on different cognitive capabilities and different perception systems, will be able to see things that are much different than circles. And so if it's discovered, it will still be pointing at a lot of same geometrical concepts, mathematical concepts, but it's interesting to think of how many things we would have to still align, not just based on notation, but based on understanding, like just like some basic mathematical concepts, like how much work is there going to be in trying to find a common language? I mean, this is, I think Stephen Wolfram and his son helped with the movie Arrival, like the developing an alien language, like how would aliens communicate with humans? It's fascinating, because like math seems to be the most promising thing, but even like math, like how do you visualize mathematical ideas? It feels like there has to be an interactive component, just like we have a conversation. There has to be, this is something we don't, I think, think about often, which is like, with somebody who doesn't know anything about math, doesn't know anything about English or any other natural language, how would we describe, we talked offline about visual proofs. How would we, through visual proofs, have a conversation where we say something, here's the concept, the way we see it, does that make sense to you? And like, can you mess with that concept to make it sense for you? And then go back and forth in this kind of way. So purely through mathematics, I'm sure it's possible to have those kinds of experiments with like tribes on earth that don't, there's no common language. Through math, like draw a circle and see what they do with it, right? Do some of these visual proofs, like the summation of the odds and adds up to the squares. Yes, I wonder how difficult that is before one or the other species murders themselves. That's a good question. I hope that the curiosity for knowledge will overpower the greedy, this is back to our game theory thing, that the curiosity of like discovering math together will overpower the desire for resources and ultimately like willing to commit violence in order to gain those resources. I think as we progress, become more and more intelligent as a species, I'm hoping we would value more and more of the knowledge because we'll come up with clever ways to gain more resources so we won't be so resource starved. I don't know. That's a hopeful message for when we finally meet aliens. Yeah, yeah. The cool thing about the Math Olympiad, I don't know if you know work from Francois Chollet from Google, he came up with this kind of IQ test slash, it kind of has similar aspects to it that also the Math Olympiad does for AI. So he came up with these tests where they're very simple for humans, but very difficult for AI to illustrate exactly why we're just not good at seeing a totally new problem. Sorry, AI systems are not good at looking at a new problem that requires you to detect that there's a symmetry of some kind, or there's a pattern that hasn't seen before. The pattern is like obvious to us humans, but it's not so obvious to find that kind of, you're inventing a pattern that's there in order to then find a solution. I don't know if you can comment on that. If you can comment on, but from an AI perspective and from a math problem perspective, what do you think is intelligence? What do you think is the thing that allows us to solve that problem? And how hard is it to build a machine to do that? Asking for a friend. Yeah. So I guess, you see, because if I just think of the raw search space, it's huge. That's why you can't do it. And if I think about what makes somebody good at doing these things, they have this heuristic sense. It's almost like a good chess player of saying, let's not keep analyzing down this way because there's some heuristic reason why that's a bad way to go. Where did they get that heuristic from? Now, that's a good question. I don't know. Because that, if you asked them to explain to you, they could probably say something in words that sounds like it makes sense, but I'm guessing that's only a part of what's really going on in their brain of evaluating that position. You know what I mean? If you ask Gary Kasparov, what is good, or why is this position good, he will say something, but probably not approximating everything that's going on inside. So there's basically a function being computed, but it's hard to articulate what that function is. Now, the question is, could a computer get as good at computing these kinds of heuristic functions? Maybe. I'm not enough of an expert to understand, but one bit of me has always been a little bit curious of whether or not the human brain has a particular tendency due to its wiring to come up with certain kinds of things, which is just natural due to the way that the topology of the neurons and whatever is there, for which if you tried to just build from scratch a computer to do it, would it naturally have different tendencies? I don't know. This is just me being completely ignorant and just saying a few ideas. Well, this is a good thing that mathematics shows is we don't have to be, so math and physics or mathematical physics operates in a world that's different than our descendants of eight brains operate in. So it allows us to have multiple, many, many dimensions. It allows us to work on weird surfaces. I would like topology as a discipline is just weird to me. It's really complicated, but it allows us to work in that space, the differential geometry and all those kinds of things where it's totally outside of our natural day to day four dimensional experience, 3D dimensional with time experience. So math gives me hope that we can discover the processes of intelligence outside the limited nature of our own human experiences. But you said that you're not an expert. It's kind of funny. I find that we know so little about intelligence that I honestly think like almost children are more expert at creating artificial intelligence systems than adults. I feel like we know so little, we really need to think outside the box. And those little, I found people should check out Francois Chollet's little exams, but even just solving math problems, I don't know if you've ever done this for yourself, but when you solve a math problem, you kind of then trace back and try to figure out where did that idea come from? Like what was I visualizing in my head? How did I start visualizing it that way? Why did I start rotating that cube in my head in that way? Like what is that? If I were to try to build a program that does that, where did that come from? So this is interesting. So I try to do this to teach middle school students how to learn how to create and think and invent. And the way I do it is there are these math competition problems and I'm working in collaboration with the people who run those. And I will turn on my YouTube live and for the first time, look at those questions and live solve them. The reason I do this is to let the middle school students and the high school students and the adults whoever wants to watch, just see what exactly goes on through someone's head as they go and attempt to invent what they need to do to solve the question. So I've actually thought about that. I think that, first of all, as a teacher, I think about that because whenever I want to explain to a student how to do something, I want to explain how it made sense, why it's intuitive to do the following things and why the wrong things are wrong. Not just why this one short fast way, well, why this is the right way, if that makes sense. So my point is I'm actually always thinking about that. Like how would you think about these things? And then I eventually decided the easiest way to expose this would just be to go live on YouTube and just say, I've never seen any of these questions before. Here we go. Don't you get, that's anxiety inducing for me. Don't you get trapped in a kind of like little dead ends of confusion, even on middle school problems? Yes, that's what the comments are for. The live comments come in and students say, try this. Oh wow. It's actually pretty good. And I'll never get stuck. I mean, I'm willing to go on camera and say, guess what, Potion Dough can't do this. That's fine. But then what ends up happening is you will then see how maybe somebody saying something and I look at the chat and I say, aha, that actually looks useful. Now that also shows how not all ideas, not all suggestions are the same power, if that makes sense. Because if I actually do get stuck, I'll go fishing through the chat, if you've got any ideas. I don't know if you can speak to this, but is there a moment for the middle school students, maybe high school as well, where there's like a turning point for them where they maybe fall in love with mathematics or they get it? Is there something to be said about like discovering that moment and trying to grab them to get them to understand that mathematics is something, no matter what they wanna do in life could be part of their life? Yes. I actually do think that the middle school is exactly the right time because that's the place where your mathematical understanding gets just sophisticated enough that you can start doing interesting things. Because if you're early on and counting, I'm honestly not very good at teaching you new insights. My wife is pretty good at that. But somehow once you get to this part where you know what a fraction is and when you know how to add and how to multiply and what the area of a triangle is, at that point to me, the whole world opens up and you can start observing there are really nifty coincidences, the things that made the Greek mathematicians and the ancient mathematicians excited. Actually back then it was exciting to discover the Pythagorean theorem. It wasn't just homework. So is there, which discipline do you think has the most exciting coincidences? So is it geometry? Is it algebra? Or is it calculus? Well, you see, you're asking me and I'm the guy who gets the most excited when the combinatorics shows up in the geometry. Is it, okay. So it's the combinatorics in the geometry. So first of all, the nice thing about geometry, this is the same nice thing about computer vision is it's visual. So geometry, you can draw circles and triangles and stuff. So it naturally presents itself to the visual proof, right? But also the nice thing about geometry, I think for me is the earliest class, the earliest discipline where there's, that's most amenable to the exploration, the invention through proofs. The idea of proofs I think is most easily shown in geometry because it's so visual, I guess. So that to me is like, if I were to think about when I first fell in love with math, it would be geometry. And sadly enough, that's not used. Geometry only has a little, appears briefly in the journey of a student. And it kind of disappears. And not until much later, which there may be like differential geometry, I don't know where else it shows up. For me in computer science, like you could start to think about like computational geometry or even graph theory as a kind of geometry. You could start to think about it visually, although it's pretty tricky. But yeah, it was always, that was the most beautiful one. Everything else, I guess calculus can be kind of visual too. That can be pretty beautiful. But is there something you try to look for in the student to see like, how can I inspire them at this moment? Or is this like individual student to student? Is there something you could say there? So first of all, I really think that every student can pick up all of this skill. I really do think so. I don't think it's something only for a few. And so if I'm looking for a student, actually oftentimes what I'm, if I'm looking at a particular student, the question is, how can we help you feel like you have the power to invent also? Because I think a lot of people are used to thinking about math as something where the teacher will show you what to do and then you will do it. Yes. So I think that the key is to show that they have some, let them see that they have some power to invent. And at that point, it's often starting by trying to give a question that they don't know how to do. You want to find these questions that they don't know how to do, that they can think about, and then they can solve. And then suddenly they say, my gosh, I've had a situation, I've had an experience where I didn't know what to do. And after a while, I did. Is there advice you can give on how to learn math for people, whether it's a middle school, whether it's somebody as an adult kind of gave up on math maybe early on? I actually think that these math competition problems, middle school and high school are really good. They're actually very hard. So if you haven't had this kind of experience before and you grab a middle school math competition problem from the state level, which is used to decide who represents the state in the country, in the United States, for example, those are pretty tricky. And even if you are a professional, maybe not doing mathematical things and you're not a middle school student, you'll struggle. So I find that these things really do teach you things by trying to work on these questions. Is there a Googleable term that you could use for the organization, for the state competitions? Ah, yeah. So there are a number of different ones that are quite popular. One of them is called Math Counts, M A T H C O U N T S. And that's a big tournament, which actually has a state level. There's also a mathleague.org, mathleague, L E A G U E dot org, also has this kind of tiered tournament structure. There's also the American math competitions, AMC 8. AMC also has AMC 10, that's for 10th grade and below and AMC 12. These are all run by the Mathematical Association of America. And these are all ways to find old questions. What about the daily challenges that you run? What are those about? We do that too. But I mean, the difference was ours isn't, that one's not free. So I should actually probably be careful. The things that I've just mentioned are also not free. Not all of those things I mentioned just now are free either. Well, people can figure out what is free and what's not, but this is really nice to know what's out there. But can you speak a little bit to the daily challenges? Sure, sure. So that's actually what we did when, I guess I was thinking about, how would I try to develop that skill in people if we had the power to architect the entire system ourselves? So that's called the daily challenge with Po Shan Luo. It's not free because that's actually how I pay for everything else I do. So that was the idea. But the concept was, aha, now let's invent from scratch. So if we're gonna go from scratch and we're gonna use technology, what if we made every single lesson something where first I say, hey, here's an interesting question. Recorded, of course, not live. But it's like, I say, hey, here's an interesting question. Why don't we think about this? But I know you don't know how to do it. So now you think, and a minute later a hint pops on the screen. But you still think. And a minute later a big hint pops on the screen. You still think. And then finally, after the three minutes, hopefully you got some ideas you tried to answer. And then suddenly there's like this pretty extended explanation of, oh yeah, so here's like multiple different ways that you can do the question. And by accident, you also just learned this other concept. That's what we did. So yeah. Is this targeted towards middle school students, high school students? It's targeted towards middle school students with competitions. But there's a lot of high school students who didn't do competitions in middle school where they would also learn how to think. If you can see the whole concept was, can we teach people how to think? How would you do that? You need to give people the chance to, on their own, invent without that kid in the front row answering every question in two seconds. And people can find it, I think, what daily. It's daily.potionlo.com. But if you go to find my website, you'll be able to find it. Beautiful. Can we zoom out a little bit in the, so day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, what does the lifelong educational process look like, do you think? For yourself, but for me, what would you recommend in the world of mathematics or sort of as opposed to studying for a test, but just like lifelong expanding of knowledge in that skill for invention? I think I often articulate this as, can you always try to do more than you could do in the past? Yeah. But that comes in many ways. And I will say it's great if one wants to build that with mathematics, but it's also great to use that philosophy with all other things. In fact, if I just think of myself, I just think, what do I know now that I didn't know a year ago or a month ago or a week ago? And not just know, but what do I have the capability of doing? And if you just have that attitude, it brings more. See, the thing is, there's also a habit, like it is a skill, like I've been using Anki, it's an app for helps you memorize things. And I've actually, a few months ago, started doing this daily of setting aside time to think about an idea that's outside of my work. Like, let's say, it's all over the place, by the way, but let's say politics, like gun control. Is it good to have a lot of guns or not in society? And just, I've set aside time every day, I do at least 10 minutes, but I try to do 30, where I think about a problem. And I kind of outline it for myself from scratch, from not looking anything up, just thinking about it, using common sense. And I think the practice of that is really important. It's the daily routine of it, it's the discipline of it. It's not just that I figured something out from thinking about gun control, it's more that that muscle is built too, it's that thinking muscle. So I'm kind of interested in, you know, math has, because especially because I've gotten specialized into machine learning, and because I love programming so much, I've lost touch with math a little bit to where I feel quite sad about it, and I want to fix that. Even just not math, like pure knowledge math, but math, like these middle school problems, the challenges, right? Is that something you see a person be able to do every single day, kind of just practice every single day for years? So I can give an answer to that, that gives a practical way you could do it, assuming you have kids. So, no, you can do it yourself. Step one, get kids. No, no, I'm just saying this because I'm just thinking out loud right now, what could I do to suggest? Because what I have noticed is that, for example, if you do have kids who are in elementary school or middle school, if you yourself go and look at those middle school math problems to think about interesting ways that you can teach your elementary school or middle school kid, it works. That's what my wife did. She never did any of those contests before, but now she knows quite a lot about them. And I didn't teach her anything. I don't do that. She just was messing around with them and taught herself all of that stuff. And that had the automatic daily. I'm always thinking, how do you make it practical, right? And the way to make it practical is if the timer on the automatically daily is that you are going to automatically daily do something with your own kid. Now it feeds back. And that includes the whole lesson that if you wanna learn something, you should teach it. Oh, I strongly believe that. I strongly believe that. So I currently don't have kids. So that's, maybe I should just get kids to help me with the math thing. But outside of that, I do want to do great math into daily practice. So I'll definitely check out the daily challenges and see, because what is it? Grant Sanderson, we talked about offline, the three blue and brown. He speaks to this as well, that his videos aren't necessarily, they don't speak to the thing that I'm referring to, which is the daily practice. They're more almost tools of inspiration. They kind of show you the beauty of a particular problem in mathematics, but they're not a daily ritual. And I'm in search of that daily ritual mathematics. It's not trivial to find, but I hope to find that because I think math gives you a perspective on the world that enriches everything else. So I like what you said about the daily also, because that's also one reason why I put my Carnegie Mellon class online. It's not every day. It's every other day. Semester is almost over. But the idea was, I guess my philosophy was, if I'm already doing the class, let's just put it there, right? But I do know that there are people who have been following it, who are not in my class at all, who have just been following it because, yes, it's combinatorics. And the value of that is you could, you don't really need to know calculus to follow it, if that makes sense. So it's actually something that people could follow. So again, and that one's free. So that one's just there on YouTube. Well, speaking of combinatorics, what is it, what do you find interesting, what do you find beautiful about combinatorics? So combinatorics to me is the study of things where they might be more finite and more discreet. What I mean is like, if I look at a network, actually a lot of times the combinatorics will boil down to something, and the combinatorics I think about might be something related to graphs or networks. And they're very discreet because if you have a node, it's not that you have 0.7 of a node and 0.3 of a node over there. It's that you've got one node, and then you jump one step to go to the next node. So that notion is different from say, calculus, which is very continuous, where you go and say, I have this speed, which is changing over time. And now what's the distance I've traveled? That's the notion of an integral, where you have to think of subdividing time into very, very small pieces. So the kinds of things that you do when you reason about these finite discreet structures often might be iterative, algorithmic, inductive. These are ideas where I go from one step to the next step and so on and make progress. I guess I actually personally like all kinds of math. My area of research just ended up in here because I met a really interesting PhD advisor, potential, that's honestly the reason I went into that direction. I met a really interesting guy. He seemed like he did good stuff, interesting stuff, and he looked like he cared about students. And I said, let me just go and learn whatever you do, even though my prior practice and preparation before my PhD was not combinatorics, but analysis, the continuous stuff. So the annoying thing about combinatorics and discreet stuff is it's often really difficult to solve from a sort of running time complexity perspective. Could you speak to the idea of complexity analysis of problems, do you find it useful, do you find it interesting? Do you find that lens of studying the difficulty of how difficult the computer science problem is a useful lens onto the world? Oh, very much so. Because if you want to make something practical which has large numbers of people using it, the computational complexity to me is almost question one. And that's, again, that's at the origin of when we started doing this stuff with disease control. From the very beginning, the deep questions that were running through my mind were, would we be able to support a large population with only one server? And if the answer is no, we can't start because I don't have enough money. Yeah, and there the question is very much linear time versus anything slower than linear time. As a very specific thing, you have a bunch of really interesting papers. If I could ask, maybe we could pull out some cool insights at the high level. Can you describe the data structure of a voting tree and what are some interesting results on it? You have a paper that I noticed on it. Yeah, so this is an example of, I guess, how in math we might say here's an interesting kind of a question that we just can't seem to understand enough about. Maybe there's something else going on here. And the way to describe this is you could imagine trying to hold elections where if you have only two candidates, that's kind of easy. You just run them against each other and see who gets more votes. But as you know, once you have more candidates, it's very difficult to decide who wins the election. And there's an entire voting theory around this. So a theoretical question became, what if you made like a system of runoffs, like a system of head to head contests, which is structured like a tree, almost looking like a circuit. I'm using that way of thinking because it's sort of like in electrical engineering or computer science, you might imagine having a bunch of leads that carry signal, which are going through AND gates and OR gates and whatnot. And you've managed to compute beautiful things. This is just from a purely abstract point of view. What if the inputs are candidates? And for every two candidates, it is known which of the candidates is more popular than the other. Now can you build some kind of a circuit board which says, first candidate number four will play against five and see who wins and so on. Okay, so now what would be a nice outcome, right? This is a general question of, could I make a big circuit board to feed an election into? Like maybe one nice outcome would be whoever wins at least is preferred over a lot of people. Yes. So for example, if you ran in 1,024 candidates, ideally we would like a guarantee that says that the winner beats a lot of people. Actually in any system where there are 1,024 candidates, there's always a candidate who beats at least 512 of the others. This is a mathematical fact that there's actually always a person who beats at least half of the other people. I'm trying to make sense of that mathematical fact. Is this supposed to be obvious? No, but I can explain it. No, I can't. The way it works is that, think of it this way. Every time I think, imagine I have all these candidates and everyone is competing, everyone is like compared with everyone else at some point. Well, think of it this way. Whenever there's a comparison, somebody gets a point. That's the one who is better than the other one. My claim is there's somebody whose score is at least half of how many other people there are. Yeah, I'm just trying to, like my intuition is very close to that being true, but it's beautiful. I didn't at first, that's not an obvious fact. No, it's not. And it feels like a beautiful fact. Well, let me explain it this way. Imagine that for every match, you didn't give one point, but you gave two points. You gave one point to each person. Now that's not what we're really doing. We really want to give one point to the winner of the match, but instead we'll just give two. If you gave two points to everyone on every matchup, actually everyone has the same number of points. And the number of points they get is how many other people there are. Does that sort of make sense? I'm just like saying. No, no, everything you're saying makes perfect sense. So the point is if for every comparison between two people, which I'm doing for every two people, I gave one point to each person, your score, everyone's score is the same. It's how many other people there are. Now we only make one change. For each matchup, you give one point only to the winner. So we're awarding half the points. So now the deal is if in the original situation, everyone's score was equal, which is how many other people there are. Now there's only half the number of points to go around. So what ends up happening is that there's always going to be, like the average number of points per person is going to be half of how many other people there are. And somebody is gonna be above average. Somebody is going to be above that. At least average. Yeah, this is this notion of expected value, that if I have a random variable, which has an expected value, there's going to be some possibility in the probability space where you're at least as big as the expected value. Yeah, when you describe it like that, it's obvious. But when you're first saying in this little circuit that there's going to be one candidate better than half, that's not obvious. Yeah, it's not obvious. It's funny. It's not obvious. Math, this is nice. Okay, so you have this, but ultimately you're trying to with a voting tree, I don't know if you're trying this, but to have a circuit that's like, that's small. Well, you'd like it to be small. That achieves the same kind of, I mean, the smaller it is, if we look at practically speaking, the lower the cost of running the election, of running through, of computing the circuit. That is true. But actually at this point, the reason the question was interesting is because there was no good guarantee that the winner of that circuit would have like have beaten a lot of people. Let me give an example. The best known circuit, when we started thinking about this, was the circuit called candidate one plays against candidate two, candidate three plays against four, and then the winners play against each other. And then by the way, five plays against six, seven against eight, the winners play against each other. You understand, it's like a giant binary tree. Yeah, it's a binary, like a balanced binary tree. It's a balanced binary tree. One, two, three, four, up to 1,024, everyone going up to find the winner. Well, you know what? There's a system in the world where it could just be that there's a candidate called number one, that just beats like 10 other people, just the 10 that they need to be on their way up and they lose to everyone else. But somehow they would get all the way up. My point is it is possible to outsmart that circuit in one weird way of the world, which makes that circuit a bad one because you want to say, I will use this circuit for all elections. And you might have a system of inputs that go in there where the winner only beat 10 other people, which is the people they had to beat on the way up. So you want to have a circuit where there's as many, like the final result is as strong as possible. Yes. And so what ideas do you have for that? So we actually only managed to improve it to square root of N. So if N is number of vertices, N over two would be the ideal. We got it to square root of N. Versus log base two. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is... Well, that is halfway. It could be a lot. Yeah. Could be a big improvement. So that's a, okay, cool. Is there something you can say with words about what kind of circuit, what that looks like? I can give an idea of one of the tools inside, but the actual execution ends up being more complicated. But one of the widgets inside this is building a system where you have like a candidate who plays, like one part of the whole huge, huge tree is that that same candidate, let's call them seven. Seven plays against somebody, let's make up some numbers. Let's call the others like letters. So seven plays against A. Seven's also gonna play against B separately. And the winners of each of those will play each other. By the way, seven's also gonna play C. Seven's gonna play D. And the winners are gonna play each other. And the winners are gonna play each other. We call this seven against all. Well, seven against like everyone from a bunch of. Got it. So there's some nice overlap between the matchups that somehow has a nice feature to it. Yes, and I can tell you the nice feature because if at the base of this giant tree, at the base of this giant circuit, like this is a widget. We build the things out of widgets. So I'm just describing one widget. But in the base of this widget, you have lots of things which are seven against someone, seven against someone, seven against someone. In fact, every matchup at the bottom is seven against someone. What that means is if seven actually beat everyone they were matched up against, well, seven would rise to the top. So one possibility is if you see a seven emerge from the top, you know that seven actually beat everyone they were against. On the other hand, if anyone else is on top, let's call it F. If F is on top, how did F get there? Well, F beat seven on the way at the beginning. So the point is the outcome of this circuit has a certain property. If you see a seven, you know that the seven actually beat a person but the seven actually beat a bazillion people. If you see anyone else, at least you know they beat seven. Yeah, then you can prove that it has a nice property. That's really interesting. Is there something you can say, perhaps going completely outside of what we're talking about, is how we may have mathematical ideas of improving the electoral process? That one, no. No, I can't give you that one. I mean, is there, like, do you ever see it as, do you see as there being a lot of opportunities for improving how we vote? Like from your, I don't know if you saw parallels, but, you know, it seems like if, this actually kind of maps to your sort of COVID work, which is there's a network effect, right? It seems like we should be able to apply similar kind of effects of how we decide other things in our lives. And one of the big decisions we'll make is who represents us in government. Do you ever think about like mathematically about those kinds of systems? I think a little bit about those, because where I went to college, the way we voted for student government was based on this, is it called ranked choice? Where you eliminate the bottom and there was runoff elections. So that was the first time I ever saw that. And I thought that made sense. The only problem is it doesn't seem so easy to get something that makes sense adopted as the new voting system. That's a whole nother, that's not a math solution. That's a, well, it's math in the sense that it's game theory. So you have to come up with incentive, it's mechanism design. You have to figure out how to trick us despite our basic human nature to adopt solutions that are better. That's a whole nother conversation, I think. Can you just, cause it sounded really cool, talk a little bit about stochastic coalescence and you have a paper on showing that, so you could describe what it is, but I guess it's a super linear, super logarithmic time and you came up with some kind of trick that make it faster. Can you just talk about it a little bit? Yeah, so this was something which came up when I was at Microsoft Research for a summer. And I'm putting that context because that shows that it has some practical motivation at some point. Actually, I think it's still. It doesn't need to. It doesn't need to. It can be beautiful and it's all right. Yeah, so the easiest way to describe this is suppose you got like a big crowd of people and everybody knows how many hours of sleep they got last night. And you wanna know how many total hours of sleep were gotten by this big crowd of people. At the beginning, you might say, that sounds like a linear time algorithm of saying, hey, how many hours you got? How many you got? How many you got? Add, add, add. But there's a way to do this if you remember that there are people and they presumably know how to add. You could make a distributed algorithm to make this happen. For example, while we're thinking of these trees, imagine you had 1,024 people. If you could just say, hey, person number one and person number two, you will add your hours of sleep. Person number two will go away and person number one is gonna remember the sum. Person three and four add up and person three takes charge of remembering it. Person four goes away. Now this like person one knows the sum of these two. Person three knows the sum of those two. They talk. You see what I mean? You're going up this tree, same tree that we talked about earlier. Built up a tree from the bottom up. Yeah, build up a tree from the bottom up. And the beautiful thing is since everyone's doing stuff in parallel, the amount of time it takes to get the total sum is actually just the number of layers in the tree, which is 10. So now that's logarithmic time to add up the number of hours that people slept today. Sounds fantastic. There's only one problem. How do you decide who's person number one and person number two? Yes. So if, for example, you just went out into the downtown and said, hey, get these thousand people, go. Well, if you're gonna go and say, and by the way, you're one and you're two and you're three, that's linear time. Yes. That's cheating. So now the question is how to do this in a distributed way. And there were some people who proposed a very elegant algorithm and they wanted to analyze it. So I came in onto the analyze side, but the elegant algorithm was like this. It was like, well, we don't actually know what this big tree is. There isn't any big tree. So what's gonna happen is first, everyone is going to decide right now. Oh, one important thing. Everyone is going to, at the very beginning of the whole game, they will have delegated responsibility to themselves as the one who knows the sum so far. So the point is there's gonna be, people are all gonna have like a pointer which says, you are the one who knows my, you've taken care of my ticket, my number. Yeah. You're the representative for this particular piece of knowledge. And at the very beginning, you're your own representative. The thing has to start simple, right? So at the beginning, you're your own representative. You're pointing to yourself, got it. Yup, yup. And now the way this works is that at every time step, someone blares a ding dong on the town clock or whatever. And each person flips a coin themselves to decide, am I going to hunt for somebody to give my number to and let them represent me? Or am I going to sit here and wait for someone to come? Okay. Okay. Well, they flipped their coin. Some of the people start asking other people saying, hey, I would like you to be my representative. Here is my number. But the problem is that there's limited bandwidth of the people who are getting asked. It's like, you can't get, you can't go out to prom with five people. But this is not what we're doing. We're adding numbers, okay? But you can only add one number. So the person who has suddenly gotten asked by all these people, well, they'll have to decide who they're going to take it from. And they randomly just choose one. When they randomly choose one, all the others are rejected and they don't get to delegate anything in that round. But now if this person has absorbed this one who said, okay, here, you take charge of my number. This person now updates their pointer. You're in charge. And this person adds the two numbers. That was the first round. In the next round, when they do the coin flipping, this person doesn't flip anymore because they're just delegating. It's that anyone who has the pointers themselves, that's like a person who is in charge of some number of informations, they flip the coin to decide, should I find other people who are agents? Or should I wait for people to ask me? Yes. Brilliant. This is somebody else's idea. And then now the idea is, okay, if you just keep doing this process, what ends up happening? Oh yeah, and also by the way, if you decide that you want to go reach out to other people, here's the catch. When you're one of these agents saying, okay, I'm going to go look for someone. You have no idea who in this crowd is an agent or somebody who delegated it to someone else. You just pick a random person. When you pick the random person, if it lands on someone and the person says, oh, I actually delegated it to someone, then you follow the point. You walk up the delegation chain. Walk up the delegation chain. And you can do like path compression in the algorithm to make it so you don't consistently do lots of walking up. But the bottom line is that what ends up happening is that you end up reaching out. Whenever you're one of the ones reaching out, you can think of it as each agent is responsible for some number of people. It's almost like they're the leader of a bunch. As the process is evolving, you have these lumps. Each lump has an agent. And when the agent reaches out, they reach out to another lump where the probability of them hitting that lump is proportional to the size of the lump. That is the one funny thing about this process. This is not that they can reach out to a uniformly random lump where every lump has the same chance of getting reached out to. The bigger the lump is, the more likely it is that you end up reaching that lump. Which is a problem? Let me explain why that's a problem. Because you see, you're hoping that this has a small number of steps, but here's a bad situation that could happen. Imagine if you had like, there are n people that you're adding up. Imagine that you have exactly square root of n lumps left, of which almost all of them are just one person who's still their own boss, their own manager. Except one giant one. Now what's gonna happen? It's gonna be a huge bottleneck because every round the giant one can only absorb one of the others. And now you suddenly have time which is about square root of n. The square root of n is chosen because that is one where the lumps are such that you really are limited by this large one slowly sucking up the rest of them. So the heart of the question became, well, but is that just so unusual that it doesn't usually happen? Because remember you start with everyone just being independent. It's like a lot of lumps of size one. How naturally do the big lumps emerge? Yes. And so what that heart of the proof was, was showing that that was a joint work with Eyal Lubezki. That one was showing that actually in that thing the lumps do kind of get out of whack. And so it's not the purely logarithmic number of steps. But if you make one very slight change, which is if you are one of the agents and you have just been propositioned, possibly relayed along by a couple of different people. If you just say, don't take a random one, but accept the smallest lump. That actually does enough to even the whole economy. Distributes the lump size. I mean, yeah, it's fascinating how with the distributed algorithms, a little adjustment can make all the difference in the world. Yeah. Actually, by the way, this does, back to our voting conversation, this makes me think of like, these networking systems are so fascinating to study. They immediately spring to mind ideas of how to have representation. Like maybe as opposed to me voting for a president, I want to vote for like, for you, Paul, to represent me, maybe on a particular issue. And then you will delegate that further. And then we naturally construct those kinds of networks because that feels like I can have a good conversation with you and figure out that you know what you're doing and I can delegate it to you. And in that way, construct a representative government, a representative decision maker. That feels really nice as opposed to like us, like a tree of height one or something, where it's like everybody's just, it feels like there's a lot of room for layers of representation to form organically from the bottom up. I wonder if there are systems like that. This is the cool thing about the internet and the digital space where we're so well connected, just like with the Novid app to distribute information about the spread of the disease. We can in the same way, in a distributed sense, form anything like any kind of knowledge bases that are formed in a decentralized way and in a hierarchical way, as opposed to sort of old way where there is no mechanism for large scale, fast distributed transactional information. This is really interesting. This is where almost like network graph theory, becomes practical. Most of that exciting work was done in the 20th century, but most of the application will be in the 21st, which is cool to think about. Let me ask the most ridiculous question. You think P equals NP? Wow. I don't know. I mean, I would say, I know there are enough people who have very strong interest in trying to show that it is. I'm talking about government agencies. For security purposes. For security purposes. And most computer scientists, we should say believe that P equals NP. My question almost like, this is back to our aliens discussion. You want to think outside the box, the low probability event, what is the world, what kind of discoveries would lead us to prove that P does not equal to NP? Like there could be giant misunderstandings or gaps in our knowledge about computer science, about theoretical computer science, about computation, which allow us to think like flatten all problems. Yeah, so I don't know the answer to this question. I think it's very interesting, but I actually, I know, let's put it this way. By being at Carnegie Mellon and being around the theoretical computer scientists, I know enough about what I don't know to say. To be humble. I'm the wrong person to answer this question. It's a great one. Well, Scott Aaronson, who's now here at UT Austin, he used to be at MIT, puts the probability of P not equals to NP at 3%. I always love it when you ask, it's very rare in science and academics because most folks are humble in the face of the mystery, the uncertainty of everything around us. To have both the humor and the guts to say like, what are the chance that there's aliens in our galaxy, intelligent alien civilizations? As opposed to saying, I don't know, it could be zero. It could be, depending on the fact, you're saying it's 2.5%. There's something very pleasant about just having, it's the number thing. It's powered to the number. It's just like 42. It's like, why 42? I don't know, but it's a powerful number. And then everything, this is the power of human psychology is once you have the number 42, it's not that the number has meaning, but because it's placed in a book with humor around it, it has the meme effect of actually creating reality. I mean, you could say that 42 has a strong contribution of helping us colonize Mars because it created, it gave the whatever existential crisis to many of us, including Elon Musk when he was young, reading a book like that. And then now 42 is now part of his humor that he doesn't shut up about, it's constantly joking about. And that humor is spreading through our minds and somehow this like silly number just had an effect. In that same way, after Scott told me like the 3% chance, it's stuck in my head. And I think it's been having a ripple effect in everybody else. The believing that P is not equal to NP, Scott almost as a joke saying it's 3% is actually motivating a large number of researchers to work on it. 3% is high. It's very high. Because for the potential impact that that would have. But then 3% is not that high because it's only, you know, like we're not very good. I feel like humans are only able to really think about like 1%, 50%. And we kind of, I think a lot of people around 3% up to 50% like in our minds. Like 3% at this point. It could happen. It could happen. And it could happen and it's like, yeah. Like half the time it'll probably happen. So we're not very good at that. That's the other thing with the pandemic is we're not the exponential growth that we also talked about offline is something that we can't quite intuit. And that's something we probably should if we're to predict the future, to anticipate the future and to understand how to create technologies that let us sort of control the future. Can I ask you for some recommendations maybe for books or movies in your life? Long ago when you were baby Po or today that you found insightful or you learned a lot from what you would recommend to others. Yeah. So I think I don't necessarily have an exact name of these old things, but I was generally inspired by stories, true or fictional of campaigns. For example, like the Lord of the rings, that's a campaign. But the thing that always inspired me was it could be possible for somebody who's crazy enough to go up against adversity after adversity, and it succeeds. I mean, those are false, those are fictitious. But I also spent a lot of time, I guess, reading about, I don't know, I was interested somehow in like World War II history for whatever reason. That's a campaign which is much more brutal. But nevertheless, the idea of difficulty, strategy, fighting even when things, in that case it was really fighting, but just pushing on even when things are difficult. I guess these are the kinds of general stories that made me, I guess, want to work on things that would be hard and where it could be a campaign. It could be that you work on something for a year, multiple years, because that was the point, I guess. Yeah, it starts with a single person. That's the interesting thing. I've obviously been, don't shut up about it recently about World War II, especially on the Hitler side and the Stalin side. Some of that has really affected my own family. The roots of my family very much. But it's interesting to think that it was just an idea and one person decided to do stuff and it just builds and builds and builds. And you can truly have an impact on the world, both horrendous and exceptionally positive and inspiring. So yeah, it's like it's a agency of us individuals. Sometimes we think we're just reacting to the world, but we have the full power to actually change the world. Is there advice you can give to young folks? We talked, we gave a bunch of advice on middle school, high school mathematics. Is there more general advice you would give about how to succeed in life, how to learn for high school students, for college students, career or life in general? So I think the first one would be to make sure that you're learning to invent and to make sure you're not just learning how to mimic. Because a lot of times you learn how to do X by watching somebody do X and then repeating X many times with different inputs. I've just been very generic in explaining this. But I guess this is just my own attitude towards the world. I didn't like ever following anyone's directions exactly. Even if you told me this is the way to do your homework is to write in pencil, I would say, but I think pen is nice, let's try, right? So I've been that kind of a funny person. But I do encourage that if you can learn how to invent as your core skill, then you can do a lot. But then the second piece that comes with that is something I learned from my PhD advisor, which was, well, make sure that what you're working on is big enough. And so in that sense, I usually advise to people once they have learned how to invent, ideally don't just try to settle for something comfortable, try to see if you can aim for something which is hard, which might involve a campaign, which might be important, which might make a difference. And it's more of, I guess, rather than worrying what if you didn't achieve that, there's also the regret of what if I didn't try? See, that's how I operate. I don't operate based on did I succeed or fail? It was hard anyway. If I did this novid thing and the whole thing failed, would I feel terrible? No, it's a very hard problem. But would I have had the regret of not jumping in? Yes. So it's that different mentality of don't worry about the failing part as much of the, make sure you give yourself the shot at those potentially unbounded opportunities. You almost make it sound like there's a meaning to it all. Let me ask the big ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of life? Or maybe the easier version of that is what brings your life joy? So I'll just answer that one personally. For me, I'm a little bit weird. I sort of, I guess you can tell by now. See the pen and pencil discussion from earlier, yes. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, my thing is, I guess I personally just wanted to maximize a certain score, which was for how many person years after I'm no longer here anymore, did what I do mattered? Yeah. And it didn't matter if it's necessarily attributed to me. It's just like, did it matter? And so that's what I wanted. I guess that is very inspired by how scientists work. It's like, why do we keep talking about Newton? It's because Newton discovered some interesting things. And so Newton's score is pretty high. It's going to be infinity, right? Well, let's hope it's infinity, but pretty high. Yes, yes. So you're going for, so person years, you're going for like triple digits. You're going for, so like Newton is like four digits, probably like a thousand years or personal lifetimes. How do you like to think, well, what are we? Sorry, I meant people times years. People times. So then it's like, actually his is huge. His is like going to be billions or trillions, trillions. But I guess for me, I actually changed the metric after a while. And the reason is because you may have seen, I found some simple way to solve quadratic equations that is easier than every textbook. So my score might already be not bad, which is why I decided then let's change it into the number of hours in the lifetimes as well. So the way I was doing it before is that if a person was sort of remembering or using or appreciating what I had done for like 10 years of their life. Oh, I see. That would count as 10. I see. So if there was one person who for 10 years remembered or appreciated something I did, that counts as a score of 10 and we add up overall people. And then, and that was with the hypothesis that the score would be very finite in the sense that if I didn't come up with anything that might potentially help a lot of generations in a forever way, then your score will be finite because at some point it's not, people don't remember that you made like nice bottles or something, right? But then after the quadratic equation thing, it was that there's some chance that that actually might make it into textbooks. And if it makes it in textbooks, the chance that there'll be an easier way discovered is actually quite small. So in that case, then the score might get bigger. I was just saying the score might actually already have been achieved in a non trivial way. I see. Because it's fun to think about, cause it could be different. You can achieve a high score by a small number of people using it for most of their lifetime and then generations and generations. Or you can have, if we do dissipate, if we do split colonize, become multi planetary species, you could have that little, a clever way to solve differential equations, spread through like trillions of people as they spread throughout the galaxy. And they would only use it each one, a few hours in their lifetime, but their kids will use it, the kids of kids will use it, it will spread and you'll have that impact in that kind of way. Yes, so that's why I renormalized it because I was like, well, that's kind of dumb because what's the importance of that? That'll save people 15 minutes. But, so what I meant is I didn't want to count that as the main score. Well, I'm gonna have to try to come up with some kind of device that everyone would want to use, maybe to make coffee, cause coffee seems to be the prevalent performance enhancing chemical that everyone uses. So I'll have to think about those kinds of metrics. Yeah, but you see that's just giving an idea of I guess what I found meaningful in general, like whether or not it's like, whether or not that quadratic thing is important or not. The general idea was I wanted to do things that would outlast me. And that was what inspired me and that's just how I choose what problems to work on. And that's a kind of immortality is ideas that you've invented living on long after you in the minds of others. And humans are ultimately not, are like meat vehicles that carry ideas for brief for just a few years may not be the important thing. It might be the ideas that we carry with us and invent new ones. Like we get a bunch of baby ideas in our head. We borrow them from others and then maybe we invent a new one and that new one might have a life of its own. And it's fun to think about that idea of living for many centuries to come unless we destroy ourselves. But maybe AI will borrow it and we'll remember Po as like that one human that helped us out before we of course killed him and the rest of human civilization. On that note, Po, this is a huge honor. You're one of the great educators I've ever gotten a chance to interact with. So it's truly an honor that you would talk with me today. It means especially a lot that you would travel a lot to Austin to talk to me. It really means a lot. So thank you so much. Keep on inspiring. And I'm one of your many, many students. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you, thank you. It's actually a real honor for me to talk to you and to get this chance to have this really intellectual conversation through all of these topics. Thanks, Po. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Po Chenlo and thank you to Jordan Harmer, the show, Onnit, BetterHelp, AidSleep and Element. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Isaac Newton. I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing | Lex Fridman Podcast #183

The following is a conversation with Catherine Duclir, a professor of Planetary Science and Astronomy at Caltech. Her research is on the surface environments, atmospheres, and thermochemical histories of the planets and moons in our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors, Fundrise, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Magic Spoon. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that this conversation and a few others, quite big ones actually, that are coming up were filmed in a studio where I was trying to outsource some of the work. Like all experiments, it was a learning experience for me. It had some positives and negatives. Ultimately, I decided to return back to doing it the way I was doing before, but hopefully with a team who can help me out and work with me long term. The point is, I will always keep challenging myself, trying stuff out, learning, growing, and hopefully improving over time. My goal is to surround myself with people who love what they do, are amazing at it, and are obsessed with doing the best work of their lives. To me, there's nothing more energizing and fun than that. In fact, I'm currently hiring a few folks to work with me on various small projects. If this is something of interest to you, go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring. That's where I will always post opportunities for working with me. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Catherine DeClear. Why is Pluto not a planet anymore? Does this upset you or has justice finally been served? So I get asked this all the time. I think all planetary scientists get asked about Pluto, especially by kids who, we just love for Pluto to still be a planet. But the reality is, when we first discovered Pluto, it was a unique object in the outer solar system. And we thought we were adding a planet to the inventory of planets that we had. And then over time, it became clear that Pluto was not a unique, large object in the outer solar system, that there were actually many of these. And as we started discovering more and more of them, we realized that the concept of Pluto being a planet didn't make sense unless maybe we added all the rest of them as planets. So you could have imagined actually a different direction that this could have gone where all the other objects that were discovered in that belt, or at least all the ones, let's say, above a certain size, became planets instead of Pluto being declassified. But we're now aware of many objects out there in the outer solar system and what's called the Kuiper Belt that are of the same size or in some cases even larger than Pluto. So the declassification was really just a realization that it was not in the same category as the other planets in the solar system. And we basically needed to refine our definition in such a way that took into account that there's this belt of debris out there in the outer solar system of things with a range of sizes. Is there a hope for clear categorization of what is a planet and not, or is it all just gray area? When you study planets, when you study moons, satellites of those planets, is there lines that could be cleanly drawn or is it just a giant mess? Is it all like a fluid, let's say not mess, but it's like fluid of what is a planet, what is a moon of a planet, what is debris, what is asteroids, all that kind of... So there are technically clear definitions that were set down by the IAU, the International Astronomy Union. Is it size related? Like what are the parameters based on? So the parameters are that it has to orbit the sun, which was essentially to rule out satellites. Of course, this was a not very forward thinking definition because it technically means that all extrasolar planets according to that definition are not planets. So it has to orbit the sun. It has to be large enough that its gravity has caused it to become spherical in shape, which also applies to satellites and also applies to Pluto. The third part of the definition is the thing that really rules out everything else, which is that it has to have cleared out its orbital path. And because Pluto orbits in a belt of material, it doesn't satisfy that stipulation. Why didn't you clear out the path? It's not big enough to knock everybody out of the way. And this actually is not the first time it has happened. So Ceres, when it was discovered, Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, and it was originally considered a planet when it was first discovered. And it went through exactly the same story, history, where people actually realized that it was just one of many asteroids in the asteroid belt region, and then it got declassified to an asteroid, and now it's back to a dwarf planet. So there is a lot of reclassification. So to me, as somebody who studies solar system objects, I just personally don't care. My level of interest in something has nothing to do with what it's classified as. So my favorite objects in the solar system are all moons, and frequently when I talk about them, I refer to them as planets because to me they are planets. They have volcanoes, they have geology, they have atmospheres, they're planet like worlds. And so the distinction is not super meaningful to me, but it is important just for having a general framework for understanding and talking about things to have a precise definition. So you don't have a special romantic appreciation of a moon versus a planet versus an asteroid. It's just an object that flies out there and it doesn't really matter what the categorization is. Because there's movies about asteroids and stuff, and then there's movies about the moon, whatever, it's a really good movie. There's something about moons that's almost like an outlier. You think of a moon as a thing that's the secret part, and the planet is the more vanilla regular part. None of that? You don't have any of that? No, I actually do. I really, satellites are, the moons are my favorite things in the solar system. I think part of what you're saying, I agree from maybe a slightly different perspective, which is from the perspective of exploration, we've spent a lot of time sending spacecraft missions to planets. We had a mission to Jupiter, we had a mission to Saturn, we have plenty of missions to Mars and missions to Venus. I think the exploration of the moons in the outer solar system is the next frontier of solar system exploration. The belt of debris, just real quick, that's out there. Is there something incredible to be discovered there? Again, we tend to focus on the planets and the moons, but it feels like there's probably a lot of stuff out there and it probably, what is it? It's like a garbage collector from outside of the solar system, isn't it? Like, doesn't it protect from other objects that kind of fly in and what, it just feels like it's a cool, you know when you like walk along the beach and look for stuff and like look for, it feels like that's that kind of place where you can find cool weird things. Or I guess in our conversation today, when we think about tools and what science is studying, is there something to be studied out there or we just don't have maybe the tools yet or there's nothing to be found? There's absolutely a lot to be found. So the material that's out there is remnant material from the formation of our solar system. We don't think it comes from outside the solar system, at least not most of it. But there are so many fascinating objects out there and I think what you fit on is exactly right that we just don't have the tools to study them in detail. But we can look out there and we can see there are different species of ice on their surface that tells us about, you know, the chemical composition of the disk that formed our solar system. Some of these objects are way brighter than they should be, meaning they have some kind of geological activity. People have hypothesized that some of these objects have subsurface oceans. You could even stretch your imagination and say some of those oceans could be habitable. But we can't get very detailed information about them because they're so far away. And so I think if any of those objects were in the inner solar system, it would be studied intently and would be very interesting. So would you be able to design a probe in that like very dense debris field, be able to like hop from one place to another? Is that just outside of the realm of like how would you even design devices or sensors that go out there and take pictures and land? Do you have to land to truly understand a little piece of rock or can you understand it from remotely, like fly up close and remotely observe? You can learn quite a lot from just a flyby and that's all we're currently capable of doing in the outer solar system. The New Horizons mission is a recent example which flew by Pluto and then they had searched for another object that was out there in the Kuiper Belt, any object that was basically somewhere that they could deflect their trajectory to actually fly by. And so they did fly by another object out there in the Kuiper Belt and they take pictures and they do what they can do. And if you've seen the images from that mission of Pluto, you can see just how much detail we have compared to just the sort of reddish dot that we knew of before. So you do get an amazing amount of information actually from just essentially a high speed flyby. It always makes me sad to think about flybys that we might be able to, we might fly by a piece of rock, take a picture and think, oh, that looks pretty and cool and whatever. And that you could study certain like composition of the surface and so on. But it's actually teeming with life and we won't be able to see it at first. And it's sad. Cause you know, like when you're on a deserted island and you wave your hands and the thing flies by and you're trying to get their attention and they probably do the same, well in their own way, bacteria probably, right? But and we miss it. I don't know, some reason it makes me, it's the FOMO, it's fear of missing out. It makes me sad that there might be life out there and we don't, we're not in touch with it. We're not talking. Yeah. Well, okay. A sad pause, a Russian philosophical pause. Okay. What are the tools available to us to study planets and their moons? Oh my goodness. That is such a big question. So among the field of astronomy, so planetary science broadly speaking, well, it falls kind of at the border of astronomy, geology, climate science, chemistry, and even biology. So it's kind of on the border of many things, but part of it falls under the heading of astronomy. And among the things that you can study with telescopes, like solar system moons and planets, the solar system is really unique in that we can actually send spacecraft missions to the objects and study them in detail. And so I think that's, that's the kind of type of tool that is, that people are most aware of, that's most popularized, these amazing NASA missions that either you fly by the object, you orbit the object, you land on the object, potentially you can talk about digging into it, drilling, trying to detect tectonic tremors on its surface. The types of tools that I use are primarily telescopes and so I, my background is in astrophysics and so I actually got into solar system science from astronomy, not from, you know, a childhood fascination with spacecraft missions, which is actually what a lot of planetary scientists became planetary scientists because of childhood fascination with spacecraft missions, which is kind of interesting for me to talk to people and see that trajectory. I kind of came at it from the fascination with telescopes angle. So you like telescopes, not rockets, or at least when I was a kid it was looking at the stars and playing with telescopes that really fascinated me and that's how I got into this. But telescopes, it's amazing how much detail and how much information you can get from telescopes today. You can resolve individual cloud features and watch them kind of sheer out in the atmosphere of Titan. You can literally watch volcanoes on Io change from day to day as the lava flows expand. So and then, you know, spectroscopy, you get compositional information on all these things and it's, when I started doing solar system astronomy, I was surprised by how much detail and how much information you can get even from Earth and then as well as from orbit like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb. So with the telescope, you can, I mean, how much information can you get about volcanoes, about storms, about sort of weather, just so we kind of get a sense, like what a resolution we're talking about? Well, in terms of resolution, so at a, you know, on a given night, if I go and take a picture of Io and its volcanoes, you can sometimes see at least a dozen different volcanoes. You can see the infrared emission coming off of them and resolve them, separate them from one another on the surface and actually watch how the heat coming off of them changes with time. And I think this time variability aspect is one of the big advantages we get from telescopes. So you send a spacecraft mission there and you get an incredible amount of information over a very short time period. But for some science questions, you need to observe something for 30 years, 40 years. Like let's say you want to look at the moon Titan, which has one of the most interesting atmospheres in the solar system. Its orbital period is 29, 30 years. And so if you want to look at how its atmospheric seasons work, you have to observe it over that long of a time period. And you're not going to do that with a spacecraft, but you can do it with telescopes. Can we just zoom in on certain things like, let's talk about Io, which is the moon of Jupiter. Right. Okay. It's so big. There's like volcanoes all over the place. It's from a distance. It's awesome. So can you tell me about this moon and you're sort of a scholar of many planets and moons, but that one kind of stood out to me. So why is that an interesting one? For so many reasons, but Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system. It has hundreds of active volcanoes on it. It has volcanic plumes that go hundreds of kilometers up above its surface. It puts out more volume of magma per volcano than volcanoes on Earth today. But I think to me, the reason that it's most interesting is as a laboratory for understanding planetary processes. So one of the broad goals of planetary science is to put together a sort of more general and coherent framework for how planets work in general. Our current framework, you know, it started out very Earth centric. We start to understand how Earth volcanoes work. But then when you try to transport that to somewhere like Io that doesn't have an atmosphere, which has a very tenuous atmosphere, which makes a big difference for how the magma degasses, for something that's really small, for something that has a different heat source, for something that's embedded in another object's magnetic field, the kind of intuition we have from Earth doesn't apply. And so broadly, planetary science is trying to broaden that framework so that you have a kind of narrative that you can understand how each planet became different from every other planet. And I'm already making a mistake. When I say planet, I mean planets and moons. Like I said, I see the moons as planets. As planets. Yeah. I actually already noticed that you didn't introduce Io as the moon of Jupiter. You completely, you kind of ignored the fact that Jupiter exists. It's like, let's focus on this. Yeah. Okay. So, and you also didn't mention Europa, which I think is the, is that the most famous moon of Jupiter? Is that the one gets attention because it might have life? Exactly. Yeah. But to you, Io is also beautiful. What's the difference between volcanoes on Io versus Earth? You said atmosphere makes a difference. What the heat source plays a big role. So many of the moons in the outer solar system are heated from gravitationally by tidal heating. And I'm happy to describe what that is or, yeah, please, what's tidal? Yes. So tidal heating is, it's, if you want to understand and contextualize planets and moons, you have to understand their heat sources. So for Earth, we have radioactive decay in our interior as well as residual heat of formation. But for satellites, tidal heating plays a really significant role and in particular in driving geological activity on satellites and potentially making those subsurface oceans in places like Europa and Enceladus habitable. And so the way that that works is if you have multiple moons and their orbital periods are integer multiples of one another, that means that they're always encountering each other at the same point in the orbit. So if they were on just random orbits, they'd be encountering each other at random places and the gravitational effect between the two moons would be canceling out over time. But because they're always meeting each other at the same point in the orbit, those gravitational interactions add up coherently. And so that tweaks them into eccentric orbits. What's an eccentric orbit? So eccentric orbit or elliptical orbit, it just means noncircular, so a deviation from a circular orbit. And that means that for Io or Europa, at some points in their orbit, they're closer to Jupiter and at some points in their orbit, they're farther away. And so when they're closer, they're stretched out in a sense, but literally just not very stretched out, like a couple hundred meters, something like that. And then when they're farthest away, they're less stretched out. And so you actually have the shape of the object deforming over the course of the orbit. And these orbits are like just a couple of days. And so that, in the case of Io, that is literally sufficient friction in its mantle to melt the rock of its mantle. And that's what generates the magma. That's the source of the magma. Yeah. Okay. So why is, so Europa is, I thought there was like ice and oceans underneath kind of thing. So why is Europa not getting the friction? It is, it's just a little bit farther away from Jupiter. And then Ganymede is also in the orbital resonance. So it's a three object orbital resonance in the Jupiter system. But we have these sorts of orbital resonances all over the solar system and also in exoplanets. So for Europa, basically because it's farther from Jupiter, the effect is not as extreme, but you do still have heat generated in its interior in this way. And that may be driving, could be driving hydrothermal activity at the base of its ocean, which obviously would be a really valuable thing for life. Cool. So it's like heating up the ocean a little bit. Heating up the ocean a little bit. And specifically in these like hydrothermal vents where we see really interesting life evolve in the bottom of Earth's oceans. That's cool. Okay. So what's Io, what else? So we know the source is this friction, but there's no atmosphere. I'm trying to get a sense of what it's like if you and I were to visit Io, like what would that look like? What would it feel like? Is this the entire thing covered in basically volcanoes? So it's interesting because there's very little atmosphere. The surface is actually really cold, very far below freezing on the surface when you're away from a volcano, but the volcanoes themselves are over a thousand degrees or the magma when it comes out is over a thousand degrees. And so. But it does come to the surface, the magma? It does. Yeah. In particular places. Whoa, that probably looks beautiful. So like, so it's frozen, not ice. Like what is, is rock, it's really cold rock. And then you just have this like, what is, what does that look, what would that look like with no atmosphere? Would that, uh, would it be smoke? What does it look like? It's just magma, like just red, yellow, like liquidy things? It's black, it's black and red, I guess. Like think of the type of magma that you see in Hawaii. So different types of magma flow in different ways, for example. So in somewhere like Io, the magma is really hot and so it will flow out in sheets because it has really low viscosity. And I think the lava flows that we've been having in Hawaii over the past couple of years are probably a decent analogy, although Io's magma's lavas are even more fluid and faster moving. How faster? Like what, uh, how fat, like if you, uh, by the way, sorry, through the telescope, are you tracking at what timescale? Like every frame is how far apart? If you're looking through a telescope, are we talking about seconds or we're talking about days, months, when you kind of track, try to get a picture of what the surface might look like, what's the frequency? So it depends a little bit on what you want to do. I, ideally every night, um, but you could take a frame every second and see how things are changing. The, the problem with that is that for things to change on a one second timescale, you to actually see something change that fast, you have to have super high resolution. The spatial resolution we have is a couple of hundred kilometers. And so things are not changing on those scales over one second, unless you have something really crazy happening. So if you get, if you get a telescope closer to Io, if you get a, or a camera closer to Io, would you be able to understand something? Is that something of interest to you? Would you be able to understand something deeper about these volcanic eruptions and how magma flows and just the, like the rate of the magma is, or is it basically enough to have the kilometer resolution? Do you get it? No way. We want to go there. Absolutely. You want to go, you want to go to Io? I mean, I don't want to go there personally, but I want to send a spacecraft mission there. Absolutely. Why? Why are you scared? Why am I scared? Oh, you mean you don't like, I don't want to go there as a human as a human. I want to send a robot there to look at it though. This is again, everybody's discriminating against robots. This is not, but it's fine. But it's not hospitable to humans in any way, right? Just very cold and very hot. It's very cold. The atmosphere is composed of sulfur dioxide, so you can breathe it. There's no pressure. I mean, it's kind of all the same things you talk about. One talks about, about Mars only worse, the atmosphere is still a thousand times less dense than Mars is. And the radiation environment is terrible because you're embedded deep within Jupiter's magnetic field and Jupiter's magnetic field is full of charged particles that have all come out of Io's volcanoes actually. So Jupiter's magnetic field strips all this material out of Io's atmosphere and that populates its entire magnetosphere and then that material comes back around and hits Io and spreads throughout the system actually. It's just, it's like Io is the massive polluter of the Jupiter system. Okay, cool. So what does studying Io teach you about volcanoes on earth or vice versa? Is in the difference of the two, what insights can you mine out? That might be interesting in some way. Yeah. Well, we try to port the tools that we use to study earth volcanism to Io and it works to some extent, but it is challenging because the situations are so different and the compositions are really different. When you talk about outgassing, you know, earth volcanoes outgassed primarily water and carbon dioxide, and then sulfur dioxide is the third most abundant gas. And on Io, the water and carbon dioxide are not there, either it didn't form with them or it lost them, we don't know. And so the chemistry of how the magma outgassed this is completely different. But the kind of one to me most interesting analogy to earth is that, so Io, as I've said, it has these really low viscosity magmas, the lava spreads really quickly across its surface, it can put out massive volumes of magma in relatively short periods of time. And that sort of volcanism is not happening anywhere else in the solar system today. But literally every terrestrial planet and the moon had this, what we call very effusive volcanism early in their history. Okay, so this is almost like a little glimpse into the early history of earth. Yeah. Okay, cool. So what are the chances that a volcano on earth destroys all of human civilization? Maybe I wanted to sneak in that question. Yeah, a volcano on earth. Do you think about that kind of stuff when you just study volcanoes elsewhere? Because isn't it kind of humbling to see something so powerful and so hot, like so unpleasant for humans, and then you realize we're sitting on many of them here? Right. Yeah, Yellowstone is a classic example. I don't know what the chances are of that happening. My intuition would be that the chances of that are lower than the chances of us getting wiped out by some other means, that maybe it'll happen eventually, that there'll be one of these massive volcanoes on earth, but we'll probably be gone by then by some other means. Not to sound bleak. That's very comforting. Okay, so can we talk about Europa? Is there, so maybe can you talk about the intuition, the hope that people have about life being in Europa? Maybe also, what are the things we know about it? What are the things to you that are interesting about that particular moon of Jupiter? Sure. Yeah, Europa is, from many perspectives, one of the really interesting places in the solar system among the solar system moons. So there are a few, there's a lot of interest in looking for or understanding the potential for life to evolve in the subsurface oceans. I think it's fairly widely accepted that the chances of life evolving on the surfaces of really anything in the solar system is very low. The radiation environment is too harsh and there's just not liquids on the surface of most of these things and it's canonically accepted that liquids are required for life. And so the subsurface oceans, in addition to maybe Titan's atmosphere, the subsurface oceans of the icy satellites are one of the most plausible places in the solar system for life to evolve. Europa and Cellitus are interesting because for many of the big satellites, so Ganymede and Callisto, also satellites of Jupiter, also are thought to have subsurface oceans. But they have these ice shells and then there's an ocean underneath the ice shell. But on those moons around Ganymede, we think that there's another ice shell underneath and then there's rock. And the reason that that is a problem for life is that your ocean is probably just pure water because it's trapped between two big shells of ice. So Europa doesn't have this ice shell at the bottom of the ocean, we think. And so the water and rock are in direct interaction and so that means that you can basically dissolve a lot of material out of the rock. You potentially have this hydrothermal activity that's injecting energy and nutrients for life to survive. And so this rock water interface is considered really important for the potential habitability. As a small aside, you kind of said that it's canonically assumed that water is required for life. Is it possible to have life like in a volcano? I remember people were like in that National Geographic program or something kind of hypothesizing that you can really have life anywhere. So as long as there's a source of heat, a source of energy, do you think it's possible to have life in a volcano, like no water? I think anything's possible. I think so. It doesn't have to be water. You can tell, as you identified, I phrased that really carefully. It's canonically accepted that because scientists recognize that we have no idea what broad range of life could be out there and all we really have is our biases of life as we know it. But for life as we know it, it's very helpful to have or even necessary to have some kind of liquid and preferably a polar solvent that can actually dissolve molecules, something like water. So the case of liquid methane on Titan is less ideal from that perspective. But liquid magma, if it stays liquid long enough for life to evolve, you have a heat source, you have a liquid, you have nutrients. In theory, that checks your three classic astrobiology boxes. That'd be fascinating. I mean, it'd be fascinating if it's possible to detect it easily. How would we detect if there is life on Europa? Is it possible to do in a noncontact way from a distance through telescopes and so on? Or do we need to send robots and do some drilling? I think realistically you need to do the drilling. So Europa also has these long tectonic features on its surface where it's thought that there's potential for water from the ocean to be somehow making its way up onto the surface. And you could imagine some out there scenario where there's bacteria in the ocean. It's somehow working its way up through the ice shell. It's spilling out on the surface. It's being killed by the radiation. But your instrument could detect some spectroscopic signature of that dead bacterium. But that's many ifs and assumptions. That's a hope because then you don't have to do that much drilling. You can collect from the surface. Skeletons of bacteria. Right. I'm thinking even remotely. Oh, remotely. Yeah. That's sad that there's a single cell civilization living underneath all that ice trying to get up. Trying to get out. Enceladus gives you a slightly better chance of that because Enceladus is a moon of Saturn and it's broadly similar to Europa in some ways. It's an icy satellite. It has a subsurface ocean that's probably in touch with the rocky interior. But it has these massive geysers at its south pole where it's spewing out material that appears to be originating all the way from the ocean. And so in that case, you could potentially fly through that plume and scoop up that material and hope that at the velocities you'd be scooping it up. You're not destroying any signature of the life you're looking for. But let's say that you have some ingenuity and can come up with a way to do that. It potentially gives you a more direct opportunity at least to try to measure those bacteria directly. Can you tell me a little more on, how do you pronounce it, Salas? Enceladus. Enceladus. Can you tell me a little bit more about Enceladus? Like we've been talking about way too much about Jupiter, Saturn doesn't get enough love. Saturn doesn't get as much love. So what's Enceladus? Is that the most exciting moon of Saturn? Depends on your perspective. It's very exciting from a astrobiology perspective. I think Enceladus and Titan are the two most unique and interesting moons of Saturn that definitely both get the most attention also from the life perspective. So what's the more likely Titan or Enceladus for life? If you were to bet all your money in terms of like investing, which to investigate, what are the differences between the two that are interesting to you? Yeah. So the potential for life in each of those two places is very different. So Titan is the one place in the solar system where you might imagine, again, all of this is so speculative, but you might imagine life evolving in the atmosphere. So from a biology perspective, Titan is interesting because it forms complex organic molecules in its atmosphere. It has a dense atmosphere. It's actually denser than Earth's. It's the only moon that has an atmosphere denser than Earth's and it's got tons of methane in it. What happens is that methane gets irradiated, it breaks up and it reforms with other things in the atmosphere. It makes these complex organic molecules and it's effectively doing prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere. While still being freezing cold? Yes. Okay. What would that be like? Would that be pleasant for humans to hang out there? It's just really cold? There's nowhere in the solar system that would be pleasant for humans. It would be cold. You couldn't breathe the air. But colonization wise, if there's an atmosphere, isn't that a big plus? Or still a ton of radiation? Sure. Okay. So Titan, that's a really nice feature that life could be in the atmosphere because then it might be remotely observable or certainly is more accessible if you visit. Okay. So what about Enceladus? So that would be still in the ocean. Right. And Enceladus has the advantage, like I said, of spewing material out of its south pole so you could collect it. But it has the disadvantage of the fact that we don't actually really understand how its ocean could stay globally liquid over the age of the solar system. And so there are some models that say that it's going through this cyclical evolution where the ocean freezes completely and thaws completely and the orbit sort of oscillates in and out of these eccentricities. And in that case, the potential for life ever occurring there in the first place is a lot lower because if you only have an ocean for 100 million years, is that enough time? It also means there might be mass extinction events if it does occur and then it just freezes. Again, very sad, man. This is very depressing, all the slaughter of life elsewhere. How unlikely do you think life is on Earth? So when you study other planets and you study the contents of other planets, does that give you a perspective on the origin of life on Earth, which again is full of mystery in itself, not the evolution, but the origin, the first springing to life, like from nothing to life, from the basic ingredients to life? I guess another way of asking it is how unique are we? Yeah, it's a great question and it's one that just scientifically we don't have an answer to. We don't even know how many times life evolved on Earth, if it was only once or if it happened independently a thousand times in different places. We don't know whether it's happened anywhere else in the universe, although it feels absurd to believe that we are the only life that evolved in the entire universe, but it's conceivable. We just have just no real information. We don't understand really how life came about in the first place on Earth. I mean, so if you look at the Drake equation that tries to estimate how many alien civilizations are out there, planets have a big part to play in that equation. If you were to bet money in terms of the odds of origins of life on Earth, I mean, this all has to do with how special and unique is Earth. What you land in terms of the number of civilizations has to do with how unique their rare Earth hypothesis is. How rare and special is Earth? How rare and special is the solar system? Like if you had to bet all your money on a completely unscientific question, well, no, it's actually a rigorously scientific, we just don't know a lot of things in that equation. There's a lot of mysteries about that and it's slowly becoming better and better understood in terms of exoplanets, in terms of how many solar systems are out there where there's planets that are Earth like planets, it's getting better and better understood. What's your sense from that perspective, how many alien civilizations out there, zero or one plus? You're right that the equation is being better understood, but you're really only talking about the first three parameters in the equation or something. How many stars are there, how many planets per star, and then we're just barely scratching the surface of what fraction of those planets might be habitable. The rest of the terms in the equation are like how likely is life to evolve given habitable conditions, how likely is it to survive, all these things. There are all these huge unknowns. Actually I remember when I first saw that equation, I think it was my first year of college and I thought this is ridiculous. This is A, common sense that didn't need to give a name, you know, and B, just a bunch of unknowns, it's like putting our ignorance together in one equation. But now I understand this equation, you know, it's not something we'll ever necessarily have the answer to, it just gives us a framework for having the exact conversation we're having right now. And I think that's how it was intended in the first place when it was put into writing was to give people a language to communicate about the factors that go into the potential for aliens to be out there and for us to find them. I would put money on there being aliens, I would not put money on us having definitive evidence of them in my lifetime. Well, definitive is a funny, is a funny word. My sense is, this is the saddest part for me, is my sense in terms of intelligent alien civilizations, I feel like we're so, we're so self obsessed that we literally would not be able to detect them. Even when they're like in front of us, like trees could be aliens, but just their intelligence could be realized on a scale, on a time scale or physical scale that we're not appreciating. Like trees could be way more intelligent than us. I don't know. It's just a dumb example. It could be rocks or it could be things like, this, I love this, this is a Dawkins memes. It could be that ideas are the, like ideas we have, like where do ideas come from? Where do thoughts come from? Maybe thoughts are the aliens or maybe thoughts is the actual mechanisms of communication in physics, right? This is like, we think of thoughts as something that springs up from neurons firing or where the hell they come from. And now what about consciousness? Maybe consciousness is the communication. It sounds like ridiculous, but like we're so self centered on this space, time, communication and physical space using like written language, like spoken with audio on a time scale that's very specific on a physical scale, it's very specific. So I tend to think that, but bacteria will probably recognize like moving organisms will probably recognize, but when that forms itself into intelligence, most likely it'll be robots of some kind because we won't be meeting the origins. We'll be meeting the creations of those intelligences. We just would not be able to appreciate it. And that's the saddest thing to me that we, yeah, we're too dumb to see aliens. Like we're too, we kind of think like, look at the progress of science, we've accomplished so much. The sad thing it could be that we're just like in the first 0.0001% of understanding anything is humbling. I hope that's true because I feel like we're very ignorant as a species. And I hope that our current level of knowledge only represents the 0.001% of what we will someday achieve. That actually feels optimistic to me. Well, I feel like that's easier for us to comprehend in the space of biology and not as easy to comprehend in the space of physics, for example, because we have a sense that like we have it, like if you, if you talk to theoretical physicists, they have a sense that we understand the basic laws that form the nature of reality of our universe. But so there's much more, like physicists are much more confident. Biologists are like, uh, this is a squishy mess, we're doing our best, physicists, but I would be, it'd be fascinating to see if physicists themselves would also be humbled by their being like, what the hell is dark matter and dark energy? What the hell is the, not just the origin of the, not just the big bang, but everything that happened since the big bang. A lot of things that happened since the big bang, we have no ideas about except basic models of physics. Right. What happened before the big bang? Yeah. Yeah. What happened before? Or what's happening inside the black hole? Why is there a black hole at the center of our galaxy? Can somebody answer this? A supermassive black hole. Nobody knows how it started. And they seem to be like in the middle of all galaxies. Um, so that could be a portal for aliens to communicate through consciousness. Okay. Um, all right, back to planets. How, um, what's your favorite outside of earth? What's your favorite planet or moon? Maybe outside of the ones we, well, first, have we talked about it already or, and then if we did mention it, what's the one outside of that? Oh gosh. I have to come up with another favorite that's not IO. Oh, IO is the favorite. Oh, absolutely. Why is IO the favorite? I mean, basically everything I've, I've already said, it's just such a, an amazing and unique object. Um, but on, I guess a personal note, it's probably the object that made me become a planetary scientist. It's the first thing in the solar system that really deeply captured my interest. Um, and when I started my PhD, I wanted to be an astrophysicist working on things like galaxy evolution, um, and sort of slowly, I had done some projects in the solar system, but IO was the thing that like really caught me in to doing solar system science. Okay. Let's, let's leave, uh, moons aside. What's your favorite planet? It sounds like you like moons better than planets. So it's, uh, that's accurate. Um, but the planets are, are fascinating. I think, you know, I find that the planets in the solar system really fascinating. What I like about the moons is that they, there's so much less that is known. There's still a lot more discovery space and the questions that we can ask are still the, the bigger questions. Gotcha. Um, which, you know, I, and maybe I'm being unfair to the planets because we're still trying to understand things like, was there ever life on Mars? And that is a huge question and one that we've sent numerous robots to Mars to try to answer. So maybe I'm being unfair to the planets, but, but there is certainly quite a bit more information, uh, that we have about the planets than the moons. But I mean, Venus is, is a fascinating object. So I like the objects that lie at the extremes. I think that if we can make a sort of theory or, or like I've been saying, framework for understanding planets and moons that can incorporate even the most extreme ones, then, you know, those are the things that really test your theory and test your understanding. And so they've always really fascinated me. Not so much the nice habitable places like Earth, but these extreme places like Venus that have, um, sulfuric acid clouds and just incredibly hot and dense surfaces. And Venus, of course, I love volcanism for some reason, and, and Venus has, probably has volcanic activity, definitely has in their recent past, maybe has ongoing today. What do you make of the news and maybe you can update it in terms of life being discovered in the atmosphere of Venus? Is that, sorry. Okay. You have opinion. I can already tell you have opinions. Was that fake news? I got excited when I saw that. What's the, what's the final, uh, is there a life on Venus? So the detection that was reported was the detection of the molecule phosphine. Um, and they said that they tried every other mechanism they could think of to produce phosphine and they, none of, no mechanism worked. And then they said, well, we know that life produces phosphine. And so that was sort of the train of logic. And, um, I don't personally believe that phosphine was detected in the first place. Okay. So then, I mean, this is just one study, but I, as a layman, I'm skeptical a little bit about tools that sense the contents of an atmosphere, like contents of an atmosphere from remotely and making conclusive statements about life. Oh yeah. Well that connection that you just made, the contents of the atmosphere to the life is, is a tricky one. And yeah, I know that that claim received a lot of criticism for the lines of logic that went from detection to, uh, to claim of life. Even the detection itself though, did, doesn't, doesn't meet the sort of historical scientific standards of, of a detection. Um, the, it was a very tenuous detection and only one line of the species was detected. And a lot of really complicated data analysis methods had to be applied to even make that weak detection. Yeah. Um. So it could be, it could be noise, it could be polluted data, it could be all the, all those things. And so it doesn't have, it doesn't meet the, the level of rigor that you would hope. But of course, I mean, we're doing our best and it's clear that, uh, the human species are hopeful to find life. Clearly. Yes. Everyone is so excited about that possibility. All right. Let's, uh, let me ask you about Mars. So, um, there's a guy named Elon Musk and, uh, he seems to want to take something called Dogecoin there. First of the month. I'm just, I'm just kidding about the Dogecoin. I don't even know what the heck is up with that whole, um, I think, uh, I think humor has power in the 21st century in a way to spread ideas in the most positive way. So I love that kind of humor because it makes people smile, but it also kind of sneaks. It's like a Trojan horse for cool ideas. You you open with humor and you, uh, like the humor is the appetizer. And then the main meal is the science and the engineering anyway, uh, do you think it's possible to colonize Mars or other planets in the solar system, but we're especially looking to Mars. Is there something about planets that make them very harsh to humans? Is there something in particular you think about and maybe in a high like big picture perspective, do you have a hope we, we do in fact become a multi planetary species? I do think that if our species survives long enough and we don't wipe ourselves out or get wiped out by some other means that we will eventually be able to colonize other planets. I do not expect that to happen in my lifetime. I mean, tourists may go to Mars, tourists, people who commit years of their life to go into Mars as a tourist may go to Mars. Um, I don't think that we will colonize it. Um, is there a sense why it's just too harsh on the environment to, uh, to, to, like it's too costly to build something habitable there for a large population. I think that we need to do a lot of work and learning how to use the resources that are are on the planet already to do the things we need. So if you're talking about someone going there for a few months, um, so we'll back up a little bit. There are many things that make Mars not hospitable, temperature, you can't breathe the air, you need a pressure suit, even if you're on the surface, the radiation environment is, you know, even in all of those things, the radiation environment is too harsh for the human body. Um, all of those things seem like they could eventually have technological solutions. Um, the challenge, the, the real significant challenge to me seems to be the, the creation of a self sustaining civilization there. You know, you can bring pressure suits, you can bring oxygen to breathe, but those are all in limited supply. And if we're going to colonize it, we need to find ways to make use of the resources that are there to do things like produce food, produce the air, the humans need to keep breathing just in order to make it self sustaining. There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done. And people are working on these problems, but I think that's going to be a major obstacle in going from visiting where we can bring everything we need to survive in the short term to actually colonizing. Yeah. I find that whole project of the human species quite inspiring these like huge moonshot projects. Somebody I was reading something, um, in terms of the source of food that's that may be the most effective on Mars is you could farm insects. That's the easiest thing to farm. So we'd be eating like cockroaches before living on Mars because that's the easiest thing to actually, um, as a source of protein. So growing a source of protein is the easiest thing as insects. I just imagine this giant for people who are afraid of insects. This is not a pleasant, maybe you're not supposed to even think of it that way. It'd be like a cockroach milkshake or something like that. Right. I wonder if, have people been working on the genetic engineering of, of insects to make them radiation friendly, right. Or pressure resistant or whatever. What can possibly go wrong with making radiation resistant, they're already like survived everything. Plus I, um, I took an allergy test, um, in Austin. So there's everybody's alert is like the allergy levels are super high there. Uh, and, uh, one of the things, apparently I'm not allergic to any insects except cockroaches. It's hilarious. So maybe, uh, um, well, I'm going to use that as a, you know, people use, uh, an excuse that I'm allergic to cats to not have cats. I'm going to use that as an excuse to, uh, not go to Mars as one of the first batch of people. I was going to ask if you had the opportunity, would you go? Yeah, I'm joking about the cockroach thing. I would definitely go. I love challenges. I love, I love things. I love doing things where the possibility of death is, is, uh, not insignificant because it makes me appreciate it more. Meditating on death makes me appreciate life. And uh, when the meditation on death is forced on you because of how difficult the task is, I enjoy those kinds of things. Most people don't, it seems like, but I love the idea of difficult journeys, um, for no purpose whatsoever, except exploration, going into the unknown, seeing what the limits of the human mind and the human body are is like, what the hell else is this whole journey that we're on for? I, I, uh, but it could be because I grew up in the Soviet Union. There's a kind of love for space, like the, the space race, the cold war created. I don't know if still it permeates American culture as much, but especially with the dad as a scientist, I think I've, I've loved the idea of humans striving out towards the stars always, like from the engineering perspective has been really exciting. I don't know if people love that as much in America anymore. I think, uh, Elon is bringing that back a little bit, that excitement about rockets and going out there. But, uh, so that's, that's hopeful, but for me, I always loved that idea. From a alien scientist perspective, if you were to look back on earth, is there something interesting you could say about earth? Like, how would you summarize earth? Like in a report, you know, like, uh, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, like if you had to report, like write a paper on earth or like a letter, like a, like a one pager, um, summarizing the contents of the surface and the atmosphere, is there, is there something interesting? Like, do you ever take that kind of perspective on it? I know you like volcanism, so volcanoes that will probably be in the report. I was going to say that's where I was going to go first. Uh, there are a few things to say about the atmosphere, but in terms of the volcanoes, so one of the really interesting puzzles to me in planetary science is so we can, we can look out there and we've been talking about surfaces and volcanoes and atmospheres and things like that. But that is just, you know, this tiny little veneer on the outside of the planet and most of the planet is completely sort of inaccessible to telescopes or to spacecraft missions. You can drill a meter into the surface, but you know, that's still really the veneer. Um, and one of the cool puzzles is looking at what's going on on the surface and trying to figure out what's happening underneath or just any kind of indirect means that you have to study the interior because you can't dig into it directly, even on Earth. You can't dig deep into Earth. Uh, so from that perspective, looking at Earth, um, one thing that you would be able to tell from orbit, given enough time, is that Earth has tectonic plates. So you would see that volcanoes follow the edges. If you trace where all the volcanoes are on Earth, they follow these lines that trace the edges of the plates. And similarly, you would see things like the, uh, Hawaiian string of volcanoes that you could infer just like, you know, we did as people actually living on Earth, that the plates are moving over some plume that's coming up through the mantle. And so you could use that to say, if the aliens could look at where the volcanoes are, are happening on Earth and say something about the fact that Earth has plate tectonics, which makes it really unique in the solar system. Um... Oh, really? So the other planets don't have plate tectonics? It's the only one that has plate tectonics. Yeah. What about Io and the friction and all that, that's not plate tectonics? What's the difference between... Oh, it's plate tectonics, like another layer of like solid rock that moves around and there's cracks. Exactly. Yeah. So, so Earth has plates of solid rock sitting on top of a partially molten layer, and those plates are kind of shifting around. Um, on Io, it doesn't have that. And the volcanism is what we call heat pipe volcanism. It's the magma just punches a hole through the crust and comes out on the surface. I mean, that's a simplification, but that's effectively what's happening. Through the freezing cold crust? Yes. Very cold, very rigid crust. Yeah. How do you, how does that look like, by the way? I don't think we've mentioned, so the gas that's expelled, like if we were to look at it, is it beautiful or is it like boring? The gas? I mean, the whole thing, like the magma punching through, the icy... Oh my gosh. Yes, I'm sure it would be beautiful, and the pictures we've seen of it are beautiful. You have, so the magma will come out of the lava, will come out of these fissures, and you have these curtains of lava that are maybe even a kilometer high. So if you looked at videos, I don't know how many volcano videos you've looked at on Earth, but you sometimes see a tiny, tiny version of this in Iceland. You see just these sheets of magma coming out of a fissure when you have this really low viscosity magma, sort of water like, coming out of these sheets. And the plumes that come out, because there's no atmosphere, all the plume molecules are just plume particles, where they end up is just a function of the direction that they left the vent, so they're all following ballistic trajectories, and you end up with these umbrella plumes. You don't get these sort of complicated plumes that you have on Earth that are occurring because of how that material is interacting with the atmosphere that's there. You just have these huge umbrellas, and it's been hypothesized, actually, that the atmosphere is made of sulfur dioxide, and that you could have these kind of ash particles from the volcano and the sulfur dioxide would condense onto these particles, and you'd have sulfur dioxide snow coming out of these volcanic plumes. And there's not much light, though, right? So you wouldn't be able to, like, it would not make a good Instagram photo, because you have to, would you see the snow? Sure. There's light. It depends. Oh, okay. So you could, okay. It depends what angle you're looking at it, where the sun is, all the things like that. You know, the sunlight is much weaker, but it's still there. It's still there. And how big is Io in terms of gravity? Is it smaller? Is it a pretty small moon? It's quite a bit smaller than Earth anyway. It's smaller than Earth. Okay. Okay. Cool. So they float up for a little bit. So it floats. Wow. Yeah. No, you're right. That would be gorgeous. What else about Earth is interesting besides volcanoes? So plate tectonics. I didn't realize that that was a unique element of a planet in the solar system, because that, I wonder what, I mean, we experienced as human beings, it's quite painful because of earthquakes and all those kinds of things, but I wonder if there's nice features to it. Yeah. So coming back to habitability again, things like tectonics and plate tectonics are thought to play an important role in the surface being habitable. And that's because you have a way of recycling materials. So if you have a stagnant surface, everything, you know, you use up all the free oxygen, everything reacts until you no longer have reactants that life can extract energy from. And so if nothing's changing on your surface, you kind of reach this stagnation point. But something like plate tectonics recycles material, you bring up new fresh material from the interior, you bring down material that's up on the surface, and that can kind of refresh your nutrient supply, in a sense, or the sort of raw materials that the surface has to work with. So from a kind of astrobiologist perspective, looking at Earth, you would see that recycling of material because the plate tectonics, you would also see how much oxygen is in Earth's atmosphere. And between those two things, you would identify Earth as a reasonable candidate for a habitable environment in addition to, of course, the, you know, pleasant temperature and liquid water. But the abundance of oxygen and the plate tectonics both play a role as well. And also see like tiny dot satellites flying around and rockets. Well, sure, yes. I wonder if they would be able to, I really think about that, like, if aliens were to visit, and would they really see humans as the thing they should be focusing on? I think it would take a while, right? Because it's so obvious that that should, because there's like so much incredible, in terms of biomass, humans are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction. There's like ants, they would probably detect ants, right? Or they probably would focus on the water and the fish because there's like a lot of water. I was surprised to learn that there's more species on land than there is in the sea. Like there's 90, I think 90 to 95% of the species are on land. Or on land? On land. Not in the sea? No. Not in the sea. Not in the sea, but no, the variety that like the branches created by evolution, apparently it's probably a good answer from evolutionary biology perspective, why land created so much diversity, but it did. So like the sea, there's so much not known about the sea, about the oceans, but it's not, it's not diversity friendly. What can I say? It needs to improve its diversity. Do you think the aliens would come, I mean, the first thing they would see is I suppose our cities, assuming that they had some idea of what a natural world looked like, they would see cities and say, these don't belong. Which of these many species created these? Yeah. I mean, there's, if I were to guess, it would, it's a good question. I don't know if you do this when you look at the telescope, whether you look at geometric shapes. Like if it's, cause to me like hard corners, like what do we think is engineered? Things that are like, have kind of straight lines and corners and so on, they would probably detect those in terms of buildings would stand out to them because that's, that goes against the basic natural physics of the world. But I don't know if the electricity and lights and so on, it could be, I honestly, it could be the plate tectonics. It could be like, that they're like the volcanoes that'd be okay. That's a source of heat. And then they would focus. They might literally, I mean, depending on how alien life forms are, they might notice the microorganisms before they notice the big, like notice the ant before the elephant. Cause like there's a lot more of them depending what they're measuring. We think like size matters, but maybe with their tools of measurement, they would look for quantity versus size. Like why focus on the big thing, focus on the thing that there's a lot of. And when they see humans, depending on their measurement devices, they might see we're made up of billions of organisms. Like the fact that we have, we're very human. We think we're one organism, but that may not be the case. They might see, in fact, they may also see like a human city as one organism. Like what is this thing that like, clearly this organism gets aroused at night because the lights go on and then, and then it like, it sleeps during the day. I don't know how, like the, what perspective you take on the city. Is there something interesting about earth or other planets in terms of weather patterns? So we talked a lot about volcanic patterns. Is there something else about weather that's interesting, like storms or variations in temperature, all those kinds of things? Yeah. So there's sort of every planet and moon has a kind of interesting and unique weather pattern. And those weather patterns are really, we don't have a good understanding of them. We don't even have a good understanding of the global circulation patterns of many of these atmospheres, why the storm systems occur. So the composition and occurrence of storms and clouds and these objects is another one of these kind of windows into the interior that I was talking about with surfaces. One of these ways that we can get perspective and what the composition is at the interior and how the circulation is working. So circulation will bring some species up from deeper in the atmosphere of the planet to some altitude that's a little bit colder and that species will condense out and form a cloud at that altitude. And we can detect in some cases what those clouds are composed of. But looking at where those occur can tell you how the circulation cells are, whether the atmospheric circulation is, say, coming up at the equator and going down at the poles or whether you have multiple cells in the atmosphere. And I mean, Jupiter's atmosphere is just insane. There's so much going on. You look at these pictures and there's all these vortices and antivortices and you have these different bands that are moving in opposite directions that may be giving you information about the deep, like deep in the atmosphere, physically deep properties of Jupiter's interior and circulation. What are these vortices? What's the basic material of the storms? It's condensed molecules from the atmosphere. So ammonia ice particles in the case of Jupiter, it's methane ice in the case of let's say Uranus and Neptune and other species, you can kind of construct a chemical model for which species can condense where. And so you see a cloud at a certain altitude within the atmosphere and you can make a guess at what that cloud is made of and sometimes measure it directly and different species make different colors as well. Oh, cool. Ice storms. Okay. I mean, the climate of Uranus has always been fascinating to me because it orbits on its side and it has a 42 year orbital period. And so, you know, with Earth, our seasons are because our equator is tipped just a little bit to the plane that we orbit in. So sometimes the sunlight's a little bit above the equator and sometimes it's a little bit below the equator. But on Uranus, it's like for 10 years, the sunlight is directly on the North Pole and then it's directly on the equator and then it's directly on the South Pole. And it's actually kind of amazing that the atmosphere doesn't look crazier than it does. But understanding how, taking again, like one of these extreme examples, if we can understand why that atmosphere behaves in the way it does, it's kind of a test of our understanding of how atmosphere is. So like heats up one side of the planet for 10 years and then freezes it the next, like, and that you're saying should probably lead to some chaos. And it doesn't. The fact that it doesn't tells you something about the atmosphere. So atmospheres have a property that surfaces don't have, which is that they can redistribute heat a lot more effectively. Right. So they have a stabilizing, like self regulating aspect to them that they're able to deal with extreme conditions. But predicting how that complex system unrolls is very difficult, as we know, about predicting the weather on Earth even. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Even with the little variation we have on Earth. You know, people have tried to put together global circulation models. You know, we've done this for Earth. People have tried to do these for other planets as well. And it is a really hard problem. So Titan, for example, like I said, it's one of the best studied atmospheres in the solar system, and people have tried to make these global circulation models and actually predict what's going to happen moving into sort of the next season of Titan. And those predictions have ended up being wrong. And so then, you know, I don't know, it's always exciting when a prediction is wrong because it means that there's something more to learn, like your theory wasn't sufficient. And then you get to go back and learn something by how you have to modify the theory to make it fit. I'm excited by the possibility of one day there will be for various moons and planets, there will be like news programs reporting the weather with the fake confidence of like as if you can predict the weather. We talked quite a bit about planets and moons. Can we talk a little bit about asteroids? For sure. What is, what's an asteroid? And what kind of asteroids are there? So the asteroids, let's talk about just the restricted to the main asteroid belt, which is the region, it's a region of debris basically between Mars and Jupiter. And the, these sort of belts of debris throughout the solar system, the outer solar system, you know, the Kuiper belt that we talked about, the asteroid belt, as well as certain other populations where they accumulate because they're gravitationally more favored, are remnant objects from the origin of the solar system. And so one of the reasons that we are so interested in them, aside from potentially the fact that they could come hit Earth, but scientifically it's, it gives us a window into understanding the composition of the material from which Earth and the other planets formed and how that material was kind of redistributed over the history of the solar system. So the asteroids, one could classify them in two different ways. Some of them are ancient objects. So they accreted out of the sort of disc of material that the whole solar system formed out of and have kind of remained ever since more or less the same. They've probably collided with each other and we see the, all these collisional fragments and you can actually look and based on their orbits say, you know, like these 50 objects originated as the same object. You can see them kind of dynamically moving apart after some big collision. And so some of them are these ancient objects maybe that have undergone collisions. And then there's this other category of object that is the one that I personally find really interesting which is remnants of objects that could have been planets. So early on a bunch of potential planets accreted that we call planetesimals and they formed and they formed with a lot of energy and they had enough time to actually differentiate. So some of these objects differentiated into cores and mantles and crests. And then they were subsequently disrupted in these massive collisions and they, now we have these fragments, we think fragments floating around the asteroid belt that are like bits of mantle, bits of core, bits of crest basically. So it's like puzzle pieces that you might be able to stitch together or I guess it's all mixed up so you can't stitch together the original planet candidates or is that possible to try to see if they kind of, I mean, there's too many objects in there to. I think that there are cases where people have kind of looked at objects and by looking at their orbits, they say these objects should have originated together, but they have very different compositions. And so then you can hypothesize maybe they were different fragments of a differentiated object. But one of the really cool things about this is, you know, we've been talking about getting clues into the interiors of planets. We've never seen a planetary core or deep mantle directly. Some mantle material comes up on our surface and then we can see it, but, you know, sort of in bulk. We haven't seen these things directly and these asteroids potentially give us a chance to like look at what our own core and mantle is like, or at least would be like if it had been also floating through space for a few billion years and getting irradiated and all that. But it's a cool potential window or like analogy into the interior of our own planet. Well, how do you begin studying some of these asteroids? What if you were to put together a study, like what are the interesting questions to ask that are a little bit more specific? Do you find a favorite asteroid that could be tracked and try to track it through telescopes? Or do you, is it has to be, do you have to land on those things to study it? So when it comes to the asteroids, there are so many of them and the big pictures or the big questions are answered, so some questions can be answered by zooming in in detail on individual object, but mostly you're trying to do a statistical study. So you want to look at thousands of objects, even hundreds of thousands of objects and figure out what their composition is and look at, you know, how many big asteroids there are of this composition versus how many small asteroids of this other composition and put together these kinds of statistical properties of the asteroid belt. And those properties can be directly compared with the results of simulations for the formation of the solar system. What do we know about the surfaces of asteroids or the contents of the insides of asteroids and what are still open questions? So I would say that we don't know a whole lot about their compositions. Most of them are small and so you can't study them in such detail with telescopes as you could, you know, a planet or moon and at the same time, because there are so many of them, you could send a spacecraft to a few, but you can't really like get a statistical survey with spacecraft. And so a lot of what we, a lot of what has been done comes down to sort of classification. You look at how bright they are, you look at whether they're red or blue, simply, you know, whether their spectrum is sloped towards long wavelengths or short wavelengths. There are certain, if you point a spectrograph at their surfaces, there are certain features you can see. So you can tell that some of them have silicates on them. But these are the sort of, they're pretty basic questions. We're still trying to classify them based on fairly basic information in kind of combination with our general understanding of the material the solar system formed from. And so you're sort of, you're coming in with prior knowledge, which is that you more or less know what the materials are the solar system formed from, and then you're trying to classify them into these categories. There's still a huge amount of room for understanding them better and for understanding how their surfaces are changing in the space environment. Is it hard to land on an asteroid? Is this a dumb question? It feels like it would be quite difficult to actually operate a spacecraft in such a dense field of debris. Oh, the asteroid belt, there's a ton of material there, but it's actually not that dense. It is mostly open space. So mentally do picture like mostly open space with some rocks. The problem is some of them are not thought to be solid. So some of these asteroids, especially these, these core mantle fragments, you can think of as sort of solid like a planet, but some of them are just kind of aggregates of material. We call them rubble piles. And so there's not necessarily. Might look like a rock, but do a lot of them have kind of clouds around them, like a dust cloud thing, or like, do you know what you're stepping on when you try to land on it? Like what are we supposed to be visualizing here? This is like very few have water, right? There's some water in the outer part of the asteroid belt, but they're not quite like comets in the sense of having clouds around them. There are some crazy asteroids that do become active like comets. That's the whole other category of thing that we don't understand. But their surfaces, I mean, we have visited some, you can find pictures that spacecraft have taken of them. We've actually scooped up material off of the surface of some of these objects. We're bringing it back to analyze it in the lab. And there's a mission that's launching next year to land on one of these supposedly core fragment objects to try to figure out what the heck it is and what's going on with it. But the surfaces, you know, they're, they're, you can picture a solid surface with some little grains of sand or pebbles on it and occasional boulders, maybe some fine dusty regions, dust kind of collecting in certain places. Is there this, do you worry about this? Is there any chance that one of these fellas destroys all of human civilization by an asteroid kind of colliding with something, changing its trajectory and then heading its way towards earth? That is definitely possible. And it doesn't even have to necessarily collide with something and change its trajectory. We're not tracking all of them. We can't track all of them yet. You know, there's still a lot of them. People are, people are tracking a lot of them and we are doing our best to track more of them. But there are a lot of them out there and it would be potentially catastrophic if one of them impacted earth. Have you, are you aware of this Apophis object? So there's an asteroid, a near earth object called Apophis that people thought had a decent probability of hitting earth in 2029 and then potentially again in 2036. So they did a lot of studies. It's not actually going to hit earth, but it is going to come very close. It's going to be visible in the sky in a relatively dark, I mean, not even that dark, probably not visible from Los Angeles, but, and it's going to come a 10th of the way between the earth and the moon. It's going to come closer apparently than some geosynchronous communication satellites. Oh wow. So that is a close call, but people have studied it and apparently are very confident it's not actually going to hit us, but it was. I'm going to have to look into this because I'm very sure, I'm very sure what's going to happen if an asteroid actually hits earth. That the scientific community and government will confidently say that, uh, we have nothing to worry about. It's going to be a close call. And then last minute they'll be like, there was a miscalculation. They're not lying. It's just like the space of possibilities, because it's very difficult to track these kinds of things and there's a lot of kind of, um, there's complexities involved in this. There's a lot of uncertainties that I just, something tells me that human civilization will end with, we'll see it coming. And then last minute there'll be a, oops, we'll like, we'll see it coming and we'll, it'll be like, no, it's just, it's just threatening, but no problem. No problem. And last minute it'll be like, oops, that was a miscalculation. And it's all over in a matter of like a week, or just very positive and optimistic today. Is there any chance that Bruce Willis can save us in the sense that from what you know about asteroids, is there something that, um, you can catch them early enough to, uh, change volcanic, uh, eruptions, right, um, sort of drill, put a nuclear weapon inside and break up the asteroid or change its trajectory? There is potential for that. If you catch it early enough in advance, um, I think in theory, if you knew five years in advance, um, depending on the objects and how close, how much you would need to deflect it, um, you could deflect it a little bit. I don't know that it would be sufficient in all cases. Um, and this is definitely not my specific area of expertise, but my understanding is that there is something you could do. Um, but it also, how you would carry that out depends a lot on the properties of the asteroid. If it's a solid object versus a rubble pile. So let's say you planted some bomb in the middle of it and it blew up, but it was just kind of a pile of material anyway. And then that material comes back together and then you kind of just have the same thing. Presumably its trajectory would be altered, but it's, it's like a terminator too. When it's like the thing that just like you shoot it in splashes and then comes back together will be very useless. That's fascinating. It was fascinating. I've gotten a lot of hope from watching, uh, uh, SpaceX rockets that land. There's so much. It's like, Oh wow. From an AI perspective, from a robotics perspective, wow, we can do a hell of an amazing job with control. And but then we have an understanding about surfaces here on earth, we can map up a lot of things. I wonder if we can do that. Some kind of detail of being able to have that same level of precision in landing on surfaces with as wide of a variety as asteroids have to be able to understand the exact properties of the surface and be able to encode that into whatever rocket that lands sufficiently to, I presume humans, unlike the, unlike the movies, humans would likely get in the way. Like it should all be done by robots and like land drill, place the, the explosive that should all be done through control, the robots. And then you should be able to dynamically adjust to, um, to the surface. The flip side of that for a robotics person, I don't know if you've seen these, it's been very heartbreaking. Uh, somebody I know well, Russ Tedrick at MIT led the DARPA robotics challenge team for the humanoid robot challenge for DARPA. I don't know if you've seen videos of robots on two feet falling, but you're talking about millions, you know, several years of work from with some of the most brilliant roboticists in the world, millions of dollars. And the final thing is a highlight video on YouTube of robots falling, but they had a lot of trouble with uneven surfaces. That's basically what you have to do with, uh, the challenge involves you're mostly autonomous with some partial human communication, but that human communication is broken up. Like you don't get a, you get a noisy channel, so you can, humans can, which is very similar to what it would be like in humans remotely operating a thing on an asteroid. And so with that, robots really struggled. There's some hilarious painful videos of like a robot, not able to like open the door. And then it tries to open the door without like, it misses the handle and in doing so like falls, I mean, it's, um, it's painful to watch. So like that, there's that, and then there's SpaceX. So I have hope from SpaceX and then I have less hope from bipedal robotics, um, but it's fun. It's fun to kind of imagine. And I think the planetary side of it comes into play in understanding the surfaces of these asteroids more and more that, you know, forget sort of destruction of human civilization. It'd be cool to have like spacecraft just landing on all these asteroids to study them at scale and being able to figure out dynamically what, you know, whether it's a rubble pile or whether it's, um, a solid objects, like, do you see that kind of future of science? Maybe a hundred, 200, 300 years from now, where there's just robots expanding out through the solar system, like sensors, essentially. Some of it taking pictures from a distance, some of them landing, just exploring and giving us data. Cause it feels like we're working with very little data right now. Sure I, I do see exploration going that way. I think, um, the way that NASA is currently or historically has been doing missions is putting together these, these really large missions that do a lot of things and are extremely well tested and have a very low rate of failure. But now that, um, these sort of CubeSat technologies are, are becoming easier to build, easier to launch, they're, they're very cheap. And you know, NASA is getting involved in this as well. There's, there's a lot of interest in these missions that are relatively small, relatively cheap and just do one thing. So you can really optimize it to just do this one thing. And maybe you could build a hundred of them and send them to different asteroids. And they would just collect this one piece of information from each asteroid. It's a kind of different, more distributed way of doing science, I guess. And there's a ton of potential there, I agree. Let me ask you about objects or one particular object from outside our solar system. We don't get to study many of these, right? They don't, we don't get stuff that just flies in out of nowhere from outside the solar system and flies through. Apparently there's been two recently in the past few years. One of them is Amuamua. What are your thoughts about Amuamua? So fun to say. Could it, could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization or is it just a weird shaped comet? I like the way that's phrased. Um, so Amuamua is, is a fascinating object. Just the fact that we have started discovering things that are coming in from outside our solar system is amazing and can, can start to study them. And now that we have seen some, we can design now kind of thinking in advance. The next time we see one, we will be much more ready for it. We will know which telescopes we want to point at it. We will have explored whether we could even launch a fast turnaround mission to actually like get to it before it leaves the solar system. In terms of Amuamua, yeah, it's, for an object in our solar system, it's really unusual in two particular ways. One is the dimensions that we don't see natural things in our solar system that are kind of long and skinny. We see, the things we see in our solar system don't deviate from spherical by that much. And then that it showed these strange properties of accelerating as it was leaving the solar system, which was not understood at first. So in terms of the alien space junk, you know, as a scientist, I cannot rule out that possibility. I have no evidence to the contrary. Um, however, See, you're saying there's a chance. I cannot, I cannot, as a scientist, honestly say that I can rule out that it's alien space junk. However, I see the kind of alien explanation as following this, the Sagan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you are going to actually claim that something is aliens, you need to carefully evaluate, everyone needs to carefully evaluate the other options and see whether it could just be something that we know exists that makes sense. In the case of Oumuamua, there are explanations that fit well within our understanding of how things work. So there are a couple, there are two hypotheses for what it could be made of. They're both basically just ice shards. In one case, it's a nitrogen ice shard that came off of something like Pluto in another solar system, that Pluto got hit with something and broke up into pieces, and one of those pieces came through our solar system. In the other scenario, it's a bit of a failed solar system. So our solar system formed out of a collapsing molecular cloud. Sometimes those molecular clouds are not massive enough, and they sort of collapse into bits, but they don't actually form a solar system, but you end up with these kind of chunks of hydrogen ice, apparently. And so one of those chunks of hydrogen ice could have got ejected and passed through our solar system. So both cases explain these properties in about the same way. So those ices will sublimate once they've passed the sun, and so as they're moving away from the sun, you have the hydrogen or nitrogen ice sublimating off the sunward part of it, and so that is responsible for the acceleration. The shape also, because you have all this ice sublimating off the surface, if you take something, the analogy that works pretty well here is for a bar of soap. Your bar of soap starts out sort of close to spherical, at least from a physicist perspective, and as you use it over time, you eventually end up with this long, thin shard because it's been just by sort of weathering, as we would call it. And so in the same way, if you just sublimate material off of one of these ice shards, it ends up long and thin, and it ends up accelerating out of the solar system. And so given that these properties can be reasonably well explained that way, we should be extremely skeptical about attributing things to aliens. See, the reason I like to think that it's aliens is because it puts a lot of priority on us not being lazy and we need to catch this thing next time it comes around. I like the idea that there's objects, it almost saddens me, they come out of the darkness really fast and just fly by and go and leave. It just seems like a wasted opportunity not to study them. It's the easiest way to do space travel outside of the solar system is having the things come to us. Right? I like that way of putting it. And it would be nice to just land on it. And first of all, really importantly, detect it early and then land on it with a really nice spacecraft and study the hell out of it. If there's a chance it's aliens, alien life, it just feels like such a cheap way, inexpensive way to get information about alien life or something interesting that's out there. And I'm not sure if an ice shard from another planetary system will be interesting, but it very well could be. It could be totally new sets of materials. It could be, tell us about composition of planets we don't quite understand. And it's just nice when, especially in the case of a Moa Moa, I guess it was pretty close to earth. It would have been nice to, don't go there, they come to us, I don't know. That's what makes me quite sad. It's a missed opportunity. Well, yeah. And whether you think it's aliens or not, it's a missed opportunity, but we weren't prepared and we will be prepared for the next ones. So there's been a movement in astronomy more towards what's called time domain astronomy. So kind of monitoring the whole sky all the time at all wavelengths. That's kind of the goal. And so we expect to detect many more of these in the future, even though these were the first two we saw, our potential to detect them is only increasing with time. And so there will be more opportunities and based on these two, we now can actually sit and think about what we'll do when the next one shows up. I also, what it made me realize, I know I didn't really think through this, but it made me realize if there is alien civilizations out there, the thing we're most likely to see first would be space junk. My stupid understanding of it. And the second would be really dumb kind of, you could think of maybe like relay nodes or something objects that you need to have a whole lot of for particular purposes of like space travel and so on. Like a speed limit signs or something, I don't know, whatever we have on earth, a lot of that's dumb. It's not alien aliens in themselves. It's like artifacts that are useful to the engineering in the systems that are engineered by alien civilizations. So like it would, we would see a lot of stuff in terms of setting, in terms of looking for alien life and trying to communicate with it. Maybe we should be looking not for like smart creatures or systems to communicate with. Maybe we should be looking for artifacts or even as dumb as like space junk. It just kind of reframed my perspective of like, what are we looking for as signs? Cause there could be a lot of stuff that doesn't have intelligence, but gives us really strong signs that there's somewhere is life or intelligent life. And yeah, that made me kind of, I know it might be dumb to say, but reframe the kind of thing that we should be looking for. Yeah. So the benefit of looking for intelligent life is that we perhaps have a better chance of recognizing it. We couldn't necessarily recognize what an alien stop sign look like. And maybe the theorists are the people who sort of model and try to understand slow system objects are pretty good at coming up with models for anything. I mean, maybe a mua mua was a stop sign, but we're clever enough that we could come up with some physical explanations for it. And then we all want to go with the simplest possible, we all want to believe the sort of most skeptical possible explanation. And so we missed it because we're too good at coming up with alternate explanations for things. And it's such an outlier, such a rare phenomenon that we can't study a hundred or a thousand of these objects. We have to, we had just one. And so the science almost destroys the possibility of something special being there. It's like Johnny Ive, this designer of Apple, I don't know if you know who that is. He's the lead designer. He's the person who designed the iPhone and all the major things. And he talked about, he's brilliant, one of my favorite humans on earth and one of the best designers in the history of earth. He talked about like when he had this origins of an idea, like in his baby stages, he would not tell Steve Jobs because Steve would usually like trample all over it. He would say, this is a dumb idea. And so I sometimes think of the scientific community in that sense, because the weapon of the scientific method is so strong at its best that it sometimes crushes the out of the box outlier evidence. We don't get a lot of that evidence because we don't have, we're not lucky enough to have a lot of evidence. So we have to deal with just special cases and special cases could present an inkling of something much bigger, but the scientific method user tramples all over it. And it's hard to know what to do with that because the scientific method works, but at the same time, every once in a while, it's like a balance. You have to do 99% of the time, you have to do like scientific rigor, but every once in a while, this is not you saying, me saying, smoke some weed and sit back and think, I wonder, you know, it's the Joe Rogan thing. It's entirely possible that it's alien space junk. Anyway. Yeah. I think so. I completely agree. And I think that most scientists do speculate about these things. It's just at what point do you act on those things? So you're right that the scientific method has inherent skepticism, and for the most part, that's a good thing because it means that we're not just believing crazy things all the time. But it's an interesting point that requiring that high level of rigor occasionally means that you will miss something that is truly interesting because you needed to verify it three times and it wasn't verifiable. I also think like when you communicate with the general public, I think there's power in that 1% speculation of just demonstrating authenticity as a human being, as a curious human being. I think too often, I think this is changing, but I saw, I've been quite disappointed in my colleagues throughout 2020 with the coronavirus. There's too much speaking from authority as opposed to speaking from curiosity. There's some of the most incredible science has been done in 2020, especially on the virology biology side. And the kind of being talked down to by scientists is always really disappointing to me as opposed to inspiring. Like the things we, there's a lot of uncertainty about the coronavirus, but we know a lot of this stuff and we speak from scientists from various disciplines, speak from data in the face of that uncertainty. And we're curious, we don't know what the hell is going on. We don't know if this virus is going to evolve, mutate. We don't know if this virus or the next one might destroy all human civilization. You can't speak with certainty. In fact, I was on a survey paper about masks, something I don't talk much about because I don't like politics, but we don't know if masks work, but there's a lot of evidence to show that they work for this particular virus. The transmission of the virus is fascinating actually. The biomechanics of the way viruses spread is fascinating. If it wasn't destructive, it would be beautiful. And we don't know, but it's inspiring to apply the scientific method to the best of our ability, but also to show that you don't always know everything and to, perhaps not about the virus as much, but other things speculate. What if, you know, what if it's the worst case and the best case? Because that's ultimately what we are, descendants of apes that are just curious about the world around us. Yeah, I'll just add to that, not on the topic of masks, but on the topic of curiosity. I mean, I think that's, astronomy and planetary sciences, a field are a little, are unique because for better and for worse, they don't directly impact humanity. So you know, we're not studying virology to prevent transmission of, you know, illness amongst humans. We're not characterizing volcanoes on earth that could destroy cities. We, it really is a more curious and in my opinion, playful scientific field than many. So for better and worse, we can kind of afford to pursue some of the speculation more because human lives are not in danger if we speculate a little bit too freely and get something wrong. Yeah, definitely. In the space of AI, I am worried that we're sometimes too eager, speaking for myself, to like flip the switch to on just to see like what happens. Maybe sometimes we want to be a little bit careful about that because bad things might happen. Is there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that were inspiring, had an impact on you that you would recommend? Yeah, absolutely. So many that I just don't know where to start with it. So I love reading. I read obsessively. I've been reading fiction and a little bit of nonfiction, but mostly fiction obsessively since I was a child and just never stopped. So I have some favorite books. None of them are easy readings. So I definitely, I mean, I recommend them for somebody who likes an intellectual challenge in the books that they read. So maybe I should go chronologically. I have at least three. I'm not going to go through 50 here. Yeah, I'd love to also like maybe ideas that you took away from what you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. Why they were so compelling to me. One of the first books that really captured my fascination was Nabokov's book Pale Fire. Are you familiar with it? So I read it actually for a class. It's one of the few books I've ever read for a class that I actually really liked. And the book is, it's in some sense a puzzle. He's a brilliant writer, of course, but the book is like, it's formatted like a poem. So there's an introduction, a very long poem and footnotes, and you get partway through it before realizing that the whole thing is actually a novel, unless you sort of read up on it going in. But the whole thing is a novel and there's a story that slowly reveals itself over the course of all of this and kind of reveals this just fascinating character basically and how his mind works in this story. The idea of a novel also being a kind of intellectual puzzle and something that slowly reveals itself over the course of reading was really fascinating to me and I have since found a lot more writers like that. In a contemporary example that comes to mind is Kazuo Ishiguro, who's pretty much all of his books are like slow reveals over the course of the book and like nothing much happens in the books, but you keep reading them because you just want to know like what the reality is that he's slowly revealing to you. The kind of discovery oriented reading maybe. What's the second one? Perhaps my favorite writer is Renier Maria Rilke. Wow. Are you familiar with him? No, also not familiar. You're hitting hidden ones. I mean, I know in the book of Well, but I've never read Pale Fire, but Rilke, I've never, I know it's a very difficult read, I know that much. Yeah, right. All of these are difficult reads. I think I just, I read for in part for an intellectual challenge, but Rilke, so he wrote one thing that might be characterizable as a novel, but he wrote a lot of poetry. I mean, he wrote this series of poems called the Duino Elegies that were very impactful for me personally, just emotionally, which actually it kind of ties in with astronomy in that there's a sense in which we're all going through our lives alone and there's just this sense of profound loneliness in the existence of every individual human. I think I was drawn to astronomy in part because the sort of vast spaces, the kind of loneliness and desolateness of space made the sort of internal loneliness feel okay. In a sense, it like gave companionship and that's how I feel about Rilke's poetry. He turns the kind of desolation and loneliness of human existence into something joyful and almost meaningful. Yeah, there's something about melancholy, I don't know about Rilke in general, but like contemplating the melancholy nature of the human condition that makes it okay. I got gentle from an engineering perspective, think that there is so much loneliness we haven't explored within ourselves yet and that's my hope is to build AI systems that help us explore our own loneliness. I think that's kind of what love is and friendship is, is somebody who in a very small way helps us explore our own loneliness, like they listen, we connect like two lonely creatures connect for a time and it's like, oh, like acknowledge that we exist together for a brief time, but in a somewhat shallow way, I think relative to how much it's possible to truly connect as two consciousnesses. So AI might be able to help on that front. So what's the third one? Actually, you know, I hadn't realized until this moment, but it's yet another one of these kind of slow reveal books. It's a contemporary Russian, I think Russian American writer named Olga Grushin and she wrote this just phenomenal book called The Dream Life of Sukhanov that I read this year. Maybe it was last year for the first time and it's just a really beautiful, this one you could call a character study, I think of a Russian father coming to terms with himself and his own past as he potentially slowly loses his mind. Slow reveal. Slow reveal. Well, that's apparent from the beginning. I hope I don't think it's a spoiler. Decline into madness. Spoiler alert. So all of these are really heavy. I don't know. I just, I don't have anything lighter to recommend. Ishiguro is the light version of this. Okay. Well, heavy has a certain kind of beauty to it in itself. Is there advice you would give to a young person today that looks up to the stars and wonders what the heck they want to do with their life? So career, science, life in general, you've for now chosen a certain kind of path of curiosity. What insights do you draw from that that you can give us advice to others? I think for somebody, I would not presume to speak to giving people advice on life and humanity overall, but for somebody thinking of being a scientist. So there are a couple of things, one sort of practical thing, which is career wise, I hadn't appreciated this going into science, but you need to, so the questions you're working on and the techniques you use are both of very high importance, maybe equal importance for being happy in your career. If there are questions you're interested in, but the techniques that you need to use to do them are tedious for you, then your job is going to be miserable even if the questions are inspiring. So you have to find, but if the techniques that you use are things that excite you, then your job is fun every day. So for me, I'm fascinated by the solar system and I love telescopes and I love doing data analysis, playing with data from telescopes, coming up with new ways to use telescopes and so that's where I have found that mesh. But if I was interested in, you know, the dynamical evolution of the solar system, how the orbits of things evolve, then I would need to do a different type of work that I would just not find as appealing and so it just wouldn't be a good fit. And so it sort of seems like an unromantic thing to have to think about the techniques being the thing you want to work on also, but it really makes a profound difference for I think your happiness and your scientific career. I think that's really profound. It's like the thing, the menial tasks. If you enjoy those, that's a really good sign that that's the right path for you. I think David Foster Wallace said that the key to life is to be unborable. So basically everything should be exciting. I don't think that's feasible, but you should find an area where everything is exciting. I mean, depending on the day, but you could find the joy in everything, not just the big exciting things that everyone thinks is exciting, but the details, the repetitive stuff, the menial stuff, the stuff that takes years, the stuff that involves a lot of failure and all those kinds of things that you find that enjoyable. That's actually really profound to focus on that because people talk about like dreams and passion and goals and so on, the big thing, but that's not actually what takes you there. What takes you there is every single day, putting in the hours, and that's what actually makes up life is the boring bits. If the boring bits aren't boring, then that's an exciting life because when you were talking so romantically and passionately about IO, I remember the poem by Robert Frost. So let me ask you, let me read the poem and ask what your opinion is. That's called Fire and Ice. Oh yeah. I could almost recite this from memory. Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. So let me ask, if you had to only choose one, would you choose the world to end in fire, in volcanic eruptions, in heat and magma, or in ice, frozen over? Fire or ice? Fire. Excellent choice. I've always been a fan of chaos and the idea of things just slowly getting cold and stopping and dying is just so depressing to me. So much more depressing than things blowing up or burning or getting covered by a lava flow. Somehow the activity of it endows it with more meaning to me, maybe. I've just now had this vision of you in action films where you're walking away without looking back and this explosion's behind you and you put on shades and then it goes to credits. Catherine, this is awesome, I think your work is really inspiring. The kind of things we'll discover about planets in the next few decades is super cool and I hope, I know you said there's probably not life in one of them, but there might be and I hope we discover just that. And perhaps even on Io, within the volcanic eruptions, there's a little creature hanging on that we'll one day discover. Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time with me today, it was really awesome. Yeah, likewise, thank you for having me here. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Catherine Duclear and thank you to Fundrise, Blinkist, ExpressVPN and Magic Spoon. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. On Titan, the molecules that have been raining down like mana from heaven for the last four billion years might still be there, largely unaltered, deep frozen, awaiting for the chemists from Earth. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, Asteroids & Life in Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #184

The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. Quick mention of our sponsors, National Instruments, Valcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me as he has been for many, many people, first from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013, his podcast. I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas, the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult, at times controversial discourse. I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast and more, that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world. Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words. Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Sam Harris. I've been enjoying meditating with the Waking Up app recently. It makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness, so let me ask, where do thoughts come from? Well, that's a very difficult question to answer. Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right? I mean, they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively, right? So, which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next, right? Now, you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right? You're not, unless you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you, they do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them, and people readily identify with them. They feel like what you are. I mean, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation. Our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right? Which is fairly paradoxical because how could you, as a mind, as a self, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into conscious view? But, and, you know, meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But the, subjectively, thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right? There's this first moment where, you know, just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves. I mean, just imagine something or remember something. You know, just pick a memory, any memory, right? You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote one to consciousness. Did you pick that memory? I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you were four years old, whatever it is, right? First it wasn't there, and then it appeared. And that is not a, well, I'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will, ultimately. That's not evidence of free will, right? Why are you so sure, by the way? It's very interesting. Well, through no free will of my own, yeah. Everything just appears, right? What else could it do? And so that's the subjective side of it. Objectively, you know, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically. I mean, these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural representation when we're talking about memories. Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root? To try to dig in past the obvious surface, subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out out of nowhere. Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the firing of the cells? Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction? Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents in consciousness, right? So you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting. And if you take psychedelics, you know, it opens up wide, depending on what you've taken and the dose, you know, it opens in directions and to an extent that, you know, very few people imagine would be possible, but for having had those experiences. But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind, or such as something of interest in there, or something that's more real is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it. There's no your part of that journey, right? Like we tend to start out, you know, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self examination or, you know, taking psychedelics, we start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're the kind of the rider on the horse of consciousness, or we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness, right? But we're so we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, introspectively, but that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected, right? Like it's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth. Ultimately, everything is right on the surface. Everything, there's no center to consciousness. There's just consciousness and its contents. And those contents can change vastly. Again, if you drop acid, you know, the contents change. But there's, in some sense, that doesn't represent a position of depth versus, the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart. So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it. And the actual riding is very shallow. This is all surface. So let me ask about that horse. What's up with the horse? What is consciousness? From where does it emerge? How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality? How fundamental is it to what it means to be human? And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems. Yeah, well, that remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident. It's a major ethical problem, potentially. That, I mean, my concern here is that we may, in fact, build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and demonstrates that, but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious. We will have built it to seem conscious. And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right? We'll just, they may say, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder, right? And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there. But if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in a Westworld like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines. They're just gonna seem, they're just gonna advertise our consciousness in every glance and every utterance, but we won't know. And we won't know in some deeper sense than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean, someone could roll that back and say, well, you don't, I don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious. We're just passing the Turing test for one another, but that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically, or we just, anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same roll of the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of brains like ours, right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate. I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes and even other mammals ultimately. And once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are not really clear. The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain and ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain. You can, you know, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge, you know, like an ability to process language, that clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways that is just so clear. And the problem that the confound with consciousness is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness. I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them, well, what was that like? And they say, nothing, I don't remember anything, but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness. Whereas it's not with, you know, interrupting speech, you know, we know when we've done it. And it's just obvious that, you know, you disrupt the right neural circuits and, you know, you've disrupted speech. So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism where consciousness is really fundamental to all of reality or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful like hack for us humans to survive. Where, on that spectrum, where do you land when you think about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective? I'm truly agnostic on this point, I mean, I think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I don't know, and panpsychism is not so compelling to me. Again, it just seems unfalsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true. It's just to remind people panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matters. So there might be something that it's like to be an electron or, you know, a cork, but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different. So it may be unfalsifiable. It just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are, and that at its base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it, right? I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom, and this, you know, this idea doesn't originate with me. This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and others, you know, 100 plus years ago, but I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter may in fact be part of our problem, right? Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like, well, what is death, right? Like do we, any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death, that really seems to be the many people's concern here. Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent, like I'm with Ernest Becker on this, that there's some, it's interesting to think about death and consciousness, which one is the chicken, which one is the egg, because it feels like death could be the very thing, like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness. Yeah, well, then you're using consciousness differently than I am. I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, there's an experiential quality to anything. So much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening in the dark, right? Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that it's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing. But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about, and whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that it's like to be us. There's something, something seems to be happening, right? And the seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell and thought and emotion. I mean, there are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that we can have direct access to in any present moment when we're, quote, conscious. And even if we're confused about them, even if we're asleep and dreaming and it's not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness. Like you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account, it just means that things seem any way at all. I mean, even like if this, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table. Now I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram. I could be asleep and dreaming. I could be hallucinating, but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion. It's not, something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed. And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through because we're not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us. And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience, but for instance, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will. And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that, and that you can cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way, right? So it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned, but this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't just come online when we get language. It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or the finiteness of life. It doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it doesn't, it's prior to a differentiating self and other. And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people. I do think probably any mammal has this, but certainly if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right? And that's a very safe assumption, even though we can't, even though you can argue the jury's still out to some degree, then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps, or chimps and rats even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities. So, and I don't know phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that. There are people who think single cells might be conscious or that flies are certainly conscious. They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains. I mean, there's a lot going on even in a fly, right? But I don't have intuitions about that. But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through. I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans. I'm not sure I believe this, but in part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness. That like the rich lights on experience. So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth in that construction. So do you think it's possible that that is the case? That it is a sort of construct of the way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, the social interaction with other humans? Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms and trees and so on. Right, well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might be, and again, it could be unfalsifiable. But as far as babies not being conscious, or you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or you have a conversation or treat other people. First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for. And they certainly do it before they have language, right? So it's got to proceed language to some degree. And I mean, you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic. Meditation allows you to do this. You can certainly do it with psychedelics where it's just your capacity for language has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious. In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way, that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience, that we're potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything else than we tend to be, and we have trimmed it down based on how we have acquired concepts. And so like, when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room, I have certain expectations of what is in a room. I would be very surprised to see wild animals in here or a waterfall or there are things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever. So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language learning. And it causes us not to, and one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded with, it can become overloaded with meaning and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people. And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically. And as you're coming down, right? Have you done psychedelics? Have you ever done acid or? Not acid, mushroom, and that's it. And also edibles, but there's some psychedelic properties to them. But yeah, mushrooms several times and always had an incredible experience. Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is if it's true that language constrains our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints. Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on. Yeah, and the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words. Especially if you have any part of your self concept and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words. And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself, so that you could describe it to others. It's just, it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't, it's like the mere gesture proves it's impossibility. And it's, so yeah, for me that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language structuring your experience and you're having much more experience than you tend to. So the primacy of, language is primary for some things, but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understanding and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world. But it's clearly more to mine than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others. Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit? Sure. What do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently elves on DMT, a lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see. And again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience, but DMT is an interesting one. There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on in psychedelics, currently MDMA, psilocybin and John Hopkins and much other places, but DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic. Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on psychedelics, but in DMT especially? Well, unfortunately I haven't taken DMT. Unfortunately or fortunately? Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Although it's, I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and many, many plants apparently, but I've wanted to take it. I haven't been, I had an opportunity that was presented itself that where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing, but for those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting. I mean, you smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute experience or a three minute experience within like a 10 minute window that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so, and Terrence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT. That was his, the center of the bullseye for him psychedelically, apparently. And it does, it is characterized, it seems for many people by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is your, it's not just your perception being broadened or changed. It's you according to Terrence McKenna feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance. You and me have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind, right? So the place is populated with things that seem not to be your mind. So it does feel like travel to another place because you're unchanged yourself. According, again, I just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience, but it sounds like it's pretty common. It sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke. So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among the, what McKenna called self transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled Faberge egg, like self drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge. It's an experience I haven't had. So I just have to accept that people have had it. I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us, right? There's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. Every night we go to sleep, some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream vividly every night. And just think of how insane that experience is. I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right? That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? You have lost your mind. You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes, right? Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep, and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right? You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're someplace you couldn't physically be, you can fly and even that's not surprising, right? So you've lost your mind, but relevantly for this. Or found it. You found something. I mean, lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have the best of both circumstances and then it can become systematically explored. But what I mean by found, just to start to interrupt, is like if we take this brilliant idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking world ground us, maybe it is that you've found the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics. You're stepping outside the little human cage, the cage of the human condition to open the door and step out and look around and then go back in. Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also lost something, right, you've lost certain capacities. Memory? Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind in the dream state or even in the psychedelic state if you take enough. To do math. There's no psychological, there's very little psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be, you should know is dead or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels, right, you're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends, right, and you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there, you're like, how did you get into the room? You're like, did you drive to this restaurant? You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you. So you're kind of brain damaged in a way, you're not reality testing in the normal way. The fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey. Well, I would put it more likely in dreams, not, you know, because with psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way. I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be nonstandard. It's not like, it's not just like dream hallucinations, but to the point of coming back to DMT, the people want to suggest, and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid, well, then they could not possibly be the creation of my own mind, but every night in dreams, you create a compelling or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right? And that just proves the mind is capable of doing it. Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think it might be capable of even in that space. So one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming, so I can't confirm all of this, I can confirm some of it. Apparently in every house, in every room in the mansion of dreams, all light switches are dimmer switches. Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it gradually comes up. It doesn't come up instantly on demand because apparently this is covering for the brain's inability to produce from a standing start visually rich imagery on demand. So I haven't confirmed that, but that was, people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that it's all dimmer switches. But one thing I have noticed, and people can check this out, is that in a dream, if you look at text, a page of text or a sign or a television that has text on it, and then you turn away and you look back at that text, the text will have changed, right? The total is it's just a chronic instability, graphical instability of text in the dream state. And I don't know if that, maybe that's, someone can confirm that that's not true for them, but whenever I've checked that out, that has been true for me. So it keeps generating it like real time from a video game perspective. Yeah, it's rendering, it's re rendering it for some reason. What's interesting, I actually, I don't know how I found myself in this sets of that part of the internet, but there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on LSD. Because apparently one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians or theoretical computer scientists are basically doing anything that involves math as proofs, and you have to think creatively, but also deeply, and you have to think for many hours at a time. And so they're always looking for ways to like, is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected? And apparently out of all the psychedelics, the worst is LSD because it completely destroys your ability to do math well. And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together, which is often what's required for proofs. But again, it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder where, what are the spaces, how's the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different psychedelics or dream states and so on, and how's that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And what is reality? Is there a waking state reality? Or is it just a tiny subset of reality and we get to take a step in other versions of it? We tend to think very much in a space time, four dimensional, there's a three dimensional world, there's time, and that's what we think about reality. And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three dimensional world. But that's a very kind of human surviving, trying not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality. What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves? What if it's something, what if thinking or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and think through ideas, that's traveling? Or what if memories is traveling? I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality or if you had, by the way, I should say, excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman. Yeah, yeah, he's interesting. Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from, actual like objective reality is very far from the kind of reality we imagine, we perceive and we play with in our human minds? Well, the first thing to grant is that we're never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness, right? So we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents. And then the question is how does that circumstance relate to quote reality at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality at large. Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level. And that's interesting. That runs into, to my eye, various philosophical problems that, or at least you have to do a lot, you have to add to that picture of idealism for me. That's usually all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom, we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy. You have to add to that idealistic picture all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences and to get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to make sense in that context, right? And so the fact that we can, what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at bottom, right? Nothing outside of consciousness because no one's ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. There's no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sense bases, whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using, they're still just experiencing consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their concepts on top of that. So that's always true. And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are confirmable, right? So take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom, right? First, we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible, right? We come back to Einstein, there's a lot of energy in that matter, right? And what if we could release it, right? And then we perform an experiment that in this case, you know, the Trinity test site in New Mexico, where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer are standing around, not altogether certain it's going to work, right? They're performing an experiment. They're wondering what's gonna happen. They're wondering if their calculations around the yield are off by orders of magnitude. Some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of earth is gonna combust, right? That the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop. And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an atom. And that could, so it's just what the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments. And just the knowledge, it's just our understanding of evolution. Just the fact that the earth is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old. And we weren't here to think about any of those things. And all of those processes were happening therefore in the dark. And they are the processes that allowed us to emerge, you know, from prior life forms in the first place. To say that it's all a mess, that nothing exists, outside of consciousness, conscious minds of the sort that we experience. It just seems, it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim, you know, analogous to, you know, the moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, right? I mean, the moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it. I'll grant that, because that's already a kind of fabrication born of concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there, that there's nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the moon, unless someone's looking at it, that just seems just a way too parochial way to set out on this journey of discovery. There is something there. There's a computer waiting to render the moon when you look at it. The capacity for the moon to exist is there. So if we're looking at the moon, the capacity for the moon to exist is there. So if we're indeed living in a simulation, which I find a compelling thought experiment, it's possible that there is this kind of rendering mechanism, but not in a silly way that we think about in video games, but in some kind of more fundamental physics way. And we have to account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet, that no one has any expectation of having. It can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully. And then there's some lawful understanding of why that's so. It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics, I'm like, certain numbers are prime, whether we have discovered them or not. There's the highest prime number that anyone can name now. And then there's the next prime number that no one can name, and it's there. So it's like, to say that our minds are putting it there, that what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way, in some sense, putting it there. The base layer of reality is consciousness, right? That we're identical to the thing that is rendering this reality. There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word, but it's like, it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience, you know? And it has structure that we can't anticipate, and that isn't just, I mean, again, there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever is out there to produce what we call, you know, the stuff of life. But it's not, the idea that it's, I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and Eastern philosophy that I don't, philosophically, I don't see a need to take. I mean, experientially and scientifically, I feel like it's, you can get everything you want from acknowledging that consciousness has a character that can be explored from its own side, so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience back into the conversation about, you know, what is a human mind and, you know, what is true? And you can explore it with different degrees of rigor, and there are things to be discovered there, whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics, and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third person side, neuroscientifically or in any other way. But to me, the question is, what if reality, the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters? No. There's a physics engine that generates, that's pretty. Yeah, you mean first person shooter games? Yes, yes, sorry. Not often, but yes. I mean, there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality, right? My sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense, that our conception of reality as we understand it now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there is not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics, the useful reality, quote unquote, for us to have a consistent experience as human beings. But maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001% of actual physics of reality. We can even just start with the consciousness thing, but maybe our minds are just, we're just too dumb by design. Yeah, I, that truly resonates with me and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that I talk to. Matthew, when you just look at, you look at how close we are to chimps, right? And chimps don't know anything, right? Clearly they have no idea what's going on, right? And then you get us, but then it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about in any area of specialization. And if they all died in their sleep tonight, right? You'd be left with people who might take a thousand years to rebuild the internet, if ever, right? I mean, literally it's like, and I would extend this to myself. I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence. I mean, I spent no time on it. I have not acquired the tools. It would just be an article of faith for me to think that I could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough in those areas. And I mean, your own area is one. I mean, I've never spent any significant amount of time trying to be a programmer, but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right? It's like, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered that in myself. I would have found programming irresistible. My first false starts in learning, I think it was C, it was just, you know, I bounced off. It's like, this was not fun. I hate, I mean, I hate trying to figure out what the syntax error that's causing this thing not to compile was just a fucking awful experience. I hated it, right? I hated every minute of it. So it was not, so if it was just people like me left, like when do we get the internet again, right? And we lose, we lose, you know, we lose the internet. When do we get it again, right? When do we get anything like a proper science of information, right? You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing to plant a flag in the ground right here and say, all right, can everyone see this? Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to, you all have to come over here to make some progress. And, you know, there are, you know, hundreds of topics where that's the case. So we barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation. And yeah, I'm just, Max Tegmark makes this point. He's one of the few people who does in physics. If you just look at the numbers, if you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right? And realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly. I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right? There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines. So what we are making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right? And it's amazing we can do as much as we can. I mean, we just, you know, the UNR just sitting here on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine, you know, that has certainly changed our life given what the last year was like. And it's gonna change the world if rumors of coming miracles are born out. I mean, it's now, it seems likely we have a vaccine coming for malaria, right? Which has been killing millions of people a year for as long as we've been alive. I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now because we've spread so many bed nets around, but it was like two and a half million people every year. It's amazing what we can do, but yeah, I have, if in fact the answer at the back of the book of nature is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand and half of what you think you understand is wrong, that would not surprise me at all. It is funny to look at our evolutionary history, even back to chimps, I'm pretty sure even chimps thought they understood the world well. So at every point in that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history, there's a sense like there's no more, you hear this message over and over, there's no more things to be invented. But a hundred years ago there were, there's a famous story, I forget which physicist told it, but there were physicists telling their undergraduate students not to go into, to get graduate degrees in physics because basically all the problems had been solved. And this is like around 1915 or so. It turns out you were right. I'm gonna ask you about free will. Oh, okay. You've recently released an episode of your podcast, Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span, basically summarizing your position on free will. I think it was under an hour and a half. Yeah, yeah. It was brief and clear. So allow me to summarize the summary, TLDR, and maybe you tell me where I'm wrong. So free will is an illusion, and even the experience of free will is an illusion. Like we don't even experience it. Am I good in my summary? Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people. I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion. Like there is no illusion of free will. And that is a, unlike many other illusions, that's a more fundamental claim. It's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong. I mean, I guess that was I think Wolfgang Pauli who derided one of his colleagues or enemies with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics. So there are things that, there are genuine illusions. There are things that you do experience and then you can kind of punch through that experience, or you can't actually experience, you can't experience them any other way. It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience. You just take like a visual illusion. There are visual illusions that, a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days. There's these amazing visual illusions where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving, but nothing in fact is moving. You can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving. Some of those illusions you can't see any other way. I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable and you have to use a ruler to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving. Now there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you pay more attention, you can actually see that it's not there, right? Or it's not how it first seemed. Like the Necker cube is a good example of that. Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other. Then one face can pop out and then the other face can pop out. But you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out, which is a more veridical way of looking at it. So there are subject, there are kind of inward correlates to this. And I would say that the sense of self and free will are closely related. I mean, I often describe them as two sides of the same coin, but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness. I mean, so the sense of self is something that people, I think, do experience, right? It's not a very clear experience, but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will. You don't, I mean coming back to the place we started, you don't know what you're gonna think next. You don't know what you're gonna intend next. You don't know what's going to just occur to you that you must do next. You don't know how much you are going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought. If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that. I can do that tomorrow. You don't know where that comes from. You didn't know that was gonna arise. You didn't know that was gonna be compelling. All of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room just typing in code into your experience. It's like this, okay, let's give him the, oh my God, I just forgot it was gonna be our anniversary in one week thought, right? Give him the cascade of fear. Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's gonna take him no time at all and this overpowering sense of relief. All of our experiences is compatible with the script already being written, right? And I'm not saying the script is written. I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way to look at this, but we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth between two options, thinking about the reason for A and then reconsidering and going, thinking harder about B and just going eeny, meeny, miny, moe until the end of the hour. However laborious you can make it, there is a utter mystery at your back finally promoting the thought or intention or rationale that is most compelling and therefore behaviorally effective. And this can drive some people a little crazy. So I usually preface what I say about free will with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. You get off the ride, switch the channel. You don't have to go down this path. But for me and for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind because one, you realize that you're, cutting through the illusion of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that we can talk about separately, but losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me. One is it totally undercuts the basis for, the psychological basis for hatred. Because when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions. I mean, if someone is doing something that you find so despicable, right? Let's say they're targeting you unfairly, right? They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you or they're doing something, they broke your car window, they did something awful and now you have a grievance against them. And you're relating to them very differently emotionally in your own mind than you would if a force of nature had done this, right? Or if it's, if it had just been a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning machine, right? Like to those things you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will. And while you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you. You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your mind and deranges your life. I mean, you just don't, I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did and it's just pure poison, right? So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy. Yeah, yeah. But the question is, say that this called, what was it, the horse of consciousness? Let's call it the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that the script that we're walking along, that we're playing, that's already written is actually being written in real time. It's almost like you're driving down a road and in real time, that road is being laid down. And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated. So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness, let's call it maybe the self. I don't know if you want to distinguish between those. Yeah, I definitely would, yeah. You would, because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to. There's the illusion of free will, there's the illusion of self, and there's the illusion of consciousness. You're saying, I think you said there's no, you're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness. You're a little bit more. In fact, I would say it's impossible. Impossible. You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self, and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will. Yes, I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion. Not every, we mean many different things by this notion of self. So maybe I should just differentiate these things. So consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. I mean, if you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's a quote actually there. If you're dreaming and you don't know it, that is consciousness, right? You can be confused about literally everything. You can't be confused about the underlying claim, whether you make it linguistically or not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness. Can I take a tiny tangent? So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human? So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality? And another way to ask that, because you said it much earlier, you talk negatively about robots as you often do. So let me, because you'll probably die first when they take over. No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots. I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right, this would be amazing. But you don't like the robots that fake consciousness. That's what you, you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it. Well, no, it's not that I don't like it. It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem. And the problem has massive ethical consequences. I mean, if we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing, right? And if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing. This is how I know you're not Russian. Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer? Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which like beauty springs? Like without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world? Okay, that's a tangent on a tangent. We'll go there. I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet. All right. But I do think it would be, if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell, that's bad. You are worse than any mass murderer we can name if you create it. I mean, this could be in robot form, or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious minds whether we knew they were conscious or not. And that world is a state of, it's unendurable. That would just, it just taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind intelligence and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent. Right? It doesn't, you don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent. Right? So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence, well then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable, right? And that's just like creating a person who's miserable. Right? It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable. It could be even more sensitive to suffering. Cloning them and maybe for entertainment and watching them suffer. Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment. You know? So, but back to your primary question here, which is differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoriness. The problem with free will is that what most people mean by it, and this is where Dan Dennett is gonna get off the ride here, right? So like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me that I know what most people mean by it. But I have a very keen sense having talked about this topic for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, right? To know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense cognitively and emotionally and to recognize what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany. I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists. And it is the flip side of this feeling of self. It's the flip side of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience. You feel like you're having an experience. You feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience. There's a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you. It's not just the movie, right? It's like there's sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience, of felt experience, of felt experience of embodiment. But there seems to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body, right? People don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes. They sort of feel like they have bodies. They feel like their minds in bodies and that feels like a self, that feels like me. And again, this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk. I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening? Like, why do you need the pep talk and why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk, right? Or if I say like, where are my keys? Or if I'm looking for my keys, why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys? I know I'm looking for the fucking keys. I'm the one looking, who am I telling that we now need to look for the keys, right? So that duality is weird, but leave that aside. There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate. Most people, they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath, say. So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen and you're paying attention and you feel something vague there. And then you think, I thought, well, why the breath? Why am I paying attention to the breath? What's so special about the breath? And then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore. And then you realize, okay, the practice is, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience. Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face looking out at a world that's other than me and there's this kind of subject object perception. And that is the default starting point of selfhood, of subjectivity. And married to that is the sense that I can decide what to do next, right? I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup. I can listen to sounds. There's certain things that I can't control. Certain things are happening to me and I just can't control them. So for instance, if someone asks, well, can you not hear a sound, right? Like don't hear the next sound, don't hear anything for a second, or don't hear, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this. Where's your free will? You know, well, like just stop this from coming in. You realize, okay, wait a minute. My abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent, but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next and I'm gonna pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you, with the feeling of speaking. Like what am I gonna say next? Well, I'm saying it. So here goes, this is me. It feels like I'm the thinker. I'm the one who's in control. But all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And so this is where meditation comes in, or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually. You can unravel the notion of free will just by thinking certain thoughts, but you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise. So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself. I didn't make my genes. I didn't make my brain. I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now, such and with all of the receptor weightings and densities, and it's just, I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here. And yet those are the only things that contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork, like an immortal soul, you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul. You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or was a psychopath or had an IQ of 40. I mean, there's nothing about that that the person who believes in a soul can claim to have controlled. And yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next. But everything you've described now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware. But even if you add magical ectoplasm software, you didn't produce that either. I know, but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running on the software, there's something you said recently which you think of culture as an operating system. So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization being a collection of humans and rather us just being a distributed computation system on which there's some kind of operating system running, and then the computation that's running is the actual thing that generates the interactions, the communications, and maybe even free will, the experiences of all those free will. Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas are just using us, thoughts are using individual nodes in the system, and they're just jumping around, and they also have ability to generate experiences so that we can push those ideas along. And basically the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans. Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary between self and world. Right. So then there's no self, really integrated self to have any kind of will at all. Like if you're just a meme plex, I mean, if you're just a collection of memes, and I mean, we're all kind of like currents, like eddies in this river of ideas, right? So it's like, and it seems to have structure, but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest. I mean, if our, and I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description. I mean, so much of our mind has been, it's obviously not self generated, and it's not, you're not gonna find it by looking in the brain. It is the result of culture largely, but also, you know, the genes on one side and culture on the other meeting to allow for manifestations of mind that don't, that aren't actually bounded by the person in any clear sense. It was just, I mean, the example I often use here, but there's so many others is just the fact that we're following the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are. It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourself. We haven't invented these rules. We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify because we haven't, you know, we're not grammarians. We're not, we haven't studied this. We don't even have the right concepts, and yet we're following these rules, and we're noticing, you know, we're noticing as, you know, an error when we fail to follow these rules, and virtually every other cultural norm is like that. I mean, these are not things we've invented. You can consciously decide to scrutinize them and override them, but, I mean, just think of, just think of any social situation where you're with other people and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate, right? You're not being, you know, you're not being wild animals together. You're following, you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand and how you deal with implements on a table, how you have a meal together. Obviously, this can change from culture to culture, and people can be shocked by how different those things are, right? We, you know, we all have foods we find disgusting, but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, right? And yet, you know, you and I presumably would be horrified to be served dog. Those are not norms that we're, they are outside of us in some way, and yet they're felt very viscerally. I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation. You know, if you are, just imagine, you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes great to you, and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever, you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel, and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right, based on an idea, right? Like, so, like, you did not, you're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation, and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history, you know, vaguely, where it sort of got in. I mean, very early on as kids, you realize you're treating dogs as pets and not as food, or as potential food. But yeah, no, it's, but the point you just made opens us to, like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind. Yeah, but if we take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems, each individual node is, is part of performing a much larger computation, but it nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling of, so, assuming it's Linux, is doing the scheduling of processes and is constantly alternating them. That node is making those choices. That node sure as hell believes it has free will, and it actually has free will because it's making those hard choices, but the choices ultimately are part of a much larger computation that it can't control. Isn't it possible for that node to still be, that human node is still making the choice? Well, yeah, it is. So I'm not saying that your body isn't doing, really doing things, right? And some of those things can be conventionally thought of as choices, right? So it's like, I can choose to reach, and it's like, it's not being imposed on me. That would be a different experience. Like, so there's an experience of all, you know, there's definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. There's, so that has to get conserved. By any account of the mind that jettisons free will, you still have to admit that there's a difference between a tremor that I can't control and a purposeful motor action that I can control and I can initiate on demand, and it's associated with intentions. And it's got efferent, you know, motor copy, which is being predictive so that I can notice errors. You know, I have expectations. When I reach for this, if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle, because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right? And so that shows that I have a expectation of just what my grasping behavior is gonna be like even before it happens. Whereas with a tremor, you don't have the same kind of thing going on. That's a distinction we have to make. So I am, yes, I'm really, my intention to move, which is in fact can be subjectively felt, really is the proximate cause of my moving. It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe. I'm not saying that. So in that sense, the node is really deciding to execute, you know, the subroutine now. But that's not the feeling that has given rise to this conundrum of free will, right? So the people feel like, people feel like the crucial thing is that people feel like they could have done otherwise, right? That's the thing that, so when you run back the clock of your life, right? You run back the movie of your life, you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life, they feel that at this point, they could behave differently than they did, right? So like, but given, you know, even given your distributed computing example, it's either a fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that admits of some random, you know, influence. In either case, that's not the free will people think they have. The free will people think they have is, damn, I shouldn't have done that. I just like, I shouldn't have done that. I could have done otherwise, right? I should have done otherwise, right? Like if you think about something that you deeply regret doing, right? Or that you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did. You know, that's an awful thing that that person did and they shouldn't have done it. So there is this illusion and it has to be an illusion because there's no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently. And the only way it could have played out differently is if there's randomness added to that, but randomness isn't what people feel would give them free will, right? If you tell me that, you know, I only reached for the water bottle this time because there's a random number generator in there kicking off values and it finally moved my hand, that's not the feeling of authorship. That's still not control. You're still not making that decision. There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata. It's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that it's like really dumb initial conditions to set, simple rules applied, and eventually you watch this thing and if the initial conditions are correct, then you're going to have emerged something that to our perception system looks like organisms interacting. You can construct any kinds of worlds and they're not actually interacting. They're not actually even organisms. And they certainly aren't making decisions. So there's like systems you can create that illustrate this point. The question is whether there could be some room for let's use in the 21st century the term magic, back to the black box of consciousness. Let me ask it this way. If you're wrong about your intuition about free will, what, and somebody comes along to you and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture, what would that proof look like? What would? So that's the problem, that's why it's not even an illusion in my world because for me, it's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing, right? It doesn't conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have. And that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make. So like if you're gonna believe in ghosts, right? I understand what that claim could be, where like I don't happen to believe in ghosts, but it's not hard for me to specify what would have to be true for ghosts to be real. And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts, right, so like, okay, so you're telling me that when people die, there's some part of them that is not reducible at all to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere and is actually the kind of thing that they can linger in closets and in cupboards and actually it's immaterial, but by some principle of physics, we don't totally understand it can make sounds and knock objects and even occasionally show up so they can be visually beheld. And it's just, it seems like a miracle, but it's just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't understand, let's call it a ghost. That's fine, I can talk about that all day. The reasons to believe in it, the reasons not to believe in it, the way we would scientifically test for it, what would have to be provable so as to convince me that ghosts are real. Free will isn't like that at all. There's no description of any concatenation of causes that precedes my conscious experience that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise and that they really, that they, the conscious agent, is really in charge, right? Like if you don't know what you're going to think next, right, and you can't help but think it, take those two premises on board. You don't know what it's gonna be, you can't stop it from coming, and until you actually know how to meditate, you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences. Right, like you have no, once you, mindfulness, you know, arguably gives you another degree of freedom here. It doesn't give you free will, but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts. But short of that, I mean, the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will is because you can't, you know, you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn't, right? But a different process is initiated once you can practice in that way. Well, if I could push back for a second. By the way, I just have this thought bubble popping up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of consciousness. It's kind of hilarious. So on that thread, you know, if we're, even before Einstein, let's say before Einstein, we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B, say some point in the future, we are able to realize through engineering a way which is consistent with Einstein's theory that you can have wormholes. You can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light. And that would, I think, completely change our conception of what it means to travel in the physical space. And that completely transform our ability. You talk about causality, but here let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space. Don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions or leaps in understanding about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually, like us humans somehow may be linked to this idea of consciousness, are actually able to be authors of our actions? It is a nonstarter for me conceptually. It's a little bit like saying, could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to realize that circles are really square or the circles are not really round, right? No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form. It's not on the table to be revised. And so I would say the same thing about consciousness. It's just like saying, is there some breakthrough that would get us to realize that consciousness is really an illusion? I'm saying no, because the experience of an illusion is as much a demonstration of what I'm calling consciousness as anything else, right? That is consciousness. With free will, it's a similar problem. It's like, again, it comes down to a picture of causality and there's no other picture on offer. And what's more, I know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored, right? Like the feel, like it doesn't feel, and this is the question that almost nobody asked. People who are debating me on the topic of free will, I'm, at 15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim that I don't feel this thing, and they never become interested in, well, what's that like? Like, okay, so you're actually saying you don't, this thing isn't true for you empirically. It's not just, because most people who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe that we're condemned to experience it. Like, you just, you can't live without this feeling, so. So you're actually saying you're able to experience the absence of the illusion of free will? Yes, yes. For, are we talking about a few minutes at a time, or is this, does it require a lot of work, a meditation, or are you literally able to load that into your mind and like play that moment? Right now, right now, just in this conversation. So it's not absolutely continuous, but it's whenever I pay attention. It's like, and I would say the same thing for the illusoriness of the self in the sense, and again, we haven't talked about this, so. Can you still have the self and not have the free will in mind at the same time? Do they go at the same time? This is the same, yeah, it's the same thing. They're always holding hands when they walk out the door. There really are two sides at the same coin. But it's just, it comes down to what it's like to try to get to the end of this sentence, or what it's like to finally decide that it's been long enough and now I need another sip of water, right? If I'm paying attention, now, if I'm not paying attention, I'm probably, I'm captured by some other thought and that feels a certain way, right? And so that's not, it's not vivid, but if I try to make vivid this experience of just, okay, I'm finally gonna experience free will. I'm gonna notice my free will, right? Like it's gotta be here, everyone's talking about it. Where is it? I'm gonna pay attention to, I'm gonna look for it. And I'm gonna create a circumstance that is where it has to be most robust, right? I'm not rushed to make this decision. I'm not, it's not a reflex. I'm not under pressure. I'm gonna take as long as I want. I'm going to decide, it's not trivial. Like, so it's not just like reaching with my left hand or reaching with my right hand. People don't like those examples for some reason. Let's make a big decision. Like, where should, what should my next podcast be on, right? Who do I invite on the next podcast? What is it like to make that decision? When I pay attention, there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight. It's like, it doesn't feel like, it feels profoundly mysterious to be going back between two people. Like, is it gonna be person A or person B? Got all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not and all my reasons for B. And there's some math going on there that I'm not even privy to where certain concerns are trumping others. And at a certain point, I just decide. And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network that has made that decision, absolutely. I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere, but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision is totally without a sense, a real sense of agency because something simply emerges. It's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound I'm going to hear, right? Or what's the next thought that's gonna appear? And it just, something just appears, you know? And if something appears to cancel that something, like if I say, I'm gonna invite her and then I'm about to send the email and then I think, oh, no, no, no, I can't do that. There was a thing in that New York article I read that I gotta talk to this guy, right? That pivot at the last second, you can make it as muscular as you want. It always just comes out of the darkness. It's always mysterious. So right, when you try to pin it down, you really can't ever find that free will. If you construct an experiment for yourself and you're trying to really find that moment when you're actually making that controlled author decision, it's very difficult to do. And we're still, we're still, we know at this point that if we were scanning your brain in some podcast guest choosing experiment, right? We know at this point we would be privy to who you're going to pick before you are, you the conscious agent. If we could, again, this is operationally a little hard to conduct, but there's enough data now to know that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true and will ultimately be undeniable for people. They'll be able to do it on themselves with some app. If you're deciding what to, you know, where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast or ultimately, you know, who to marry, right? Or what city to move to, right? Like you can make it as big or as small a decision as you want. We could be scanning your brain in real time and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted, we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy, all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right? I didn't choose that. Yeah, he was choosing, it was gonna be Austin or it was gonna be Miami. He got, he's catching one of these two waves, but it's gonna be Austin. And at a point where you subjectively, if we could ask you, you would say, oh no, I'm still working over here. I'm still thinking, I'm still considering my options. And you've spoken to this, in you thinking about other stuff in the world, it's been very useful to step away from this illusion of free will. And you argue that it's probably makes a better world because it can be compassionate and empathetic towards others. And towards oneself. Towards oneself. I mean, radically toward others in that literally hate makes no sense anymore. I mean, there are certain things you can really be worried about, really want to oppose. Really, I mean, I'm not saying you'd never have to kill another person. Like, I mean, self defense is still a thing, right? But the idea that you're ever confronting anything other than a force of nature in the end goes out the window, right? Or does go out the window when you really pay attention. I'm not saying that this would be easy to grok if someone kills a member of your family. I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on free will and then you should be able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus. Because there's so, I mean, we are so evolved to deal with one another as fellow primates and as agents, but it's, yeah, when you're talking about the possibility of, you know, Christian, you know, truly Christian forgiveness, right? It's like, you know, as testified to by, you know, various saints of that flavor over the millennia. Yeah, that is, the doorway to that is to recognize that no one really at bottom made themselves. And therefore everyone, what we're seeing really are differences in luck in the world. We're seeing people who are very, very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and to be in good societies and had good opportunities and to be intelligent and to be, you know, not as intelligent as they were in the past. And to be, you know, not sociopathic, like none of it is on them. They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery after another, and then showing up in the world on that basis. And then so it is with, you know, every malevolent asshole out there, right? He or she didn't make themself. Even if that weren't possible, the utility for self compassion is also enormous because it's, when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame about something or feel deep embarrassment, these states of mind are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has. And the indelible reaction to them, you know, the memory of the thing you said, you know, the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago that was just mortifying, right? The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right? And like that psychologically, that is a knot that can be untied, right? Speak for yourself, Sam. Yeah, yeah. So clearly you're not. You gave a great toast. It was my toast that mortified me. No, no, that's not what I was referring to. I'm deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive, but I'm also powered by self hate often. Like several things in this conversation already that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about, like that was the dumbest thing. You're sitting in front of Sam Harris and you said that. So like that, but that somehow creates a richer experience for me. Like I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature however my brain was built. I don't think I want to let go of that. Well, the thing you, I think the thing you want to let go of is the suffering associated with it. So like, so for me, so psychologically and ethically, all of this is very interesting. So I don't think we ever, we should ever get rid of things like anger, right? So like hatred is, hatred is divorcible from anger in the sense that hatred is this enduring state where, you know, whether you're hating somebody else or hating yourself, it is just, it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right? Like it becomes, it becomes self nullifying, right? Like you become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems. It's not, it's not instrumental in solving the problem that is, that is, is occasioning all this hatred. And anger for the most part isn't either except as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right? So if somebody does something that makes me angry, that just promotes this situation to conscious, conscious attention in a way that is stronger than my not really caring about it, right? And there are things that I think should make us angry in the world and there's the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it. And so it is with yourself. If I do something, you know, as a parent, if I do something stupid that harms one of my daughters, right, my belief, my experience of myself and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying, well, I should have done otherwise in the sense that if I could go back in time, I would have actually effectively done otherwise. No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions, I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right? But, you know, regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities because like, yeah, you know, like I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy. So if I've done something, you know, if I crash the car when they're in the car and they get injured, right, and I do it because I was trying to change a song on my playlist or, you know, something stupid, I'm gonna feel like a total asshole. How long do I stew in that feeling of regret? Right, and to like, what utility is there to extract out of this error signal? And then what do I do? We're always faced with the question of what to do next, right, and how to best do that thing, that necessary thing next. And how much wellbeing can we experience while doing it? Like how miserable do you need to be to solve a problem in life and to help solve the problems of people closest to you? You know, how miserable do you need to be to get through your to do list today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it, right? And even navigating moments that are scary and, you know, really destabilizing to ordinary people. And, I mean, I think, you know, again, I'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here and there are all kinds of things that stress me out and worry me and I'm especially something if it's, you're gonna tell me it's something with, you know, the health of one of my kids, you know, it's very hard for me, like, it's very hard for me to be truly equanimous around that. But equanimity is so useful the moment you're in response mode, right? Because, I mean, the ordinary experience for me of responding to what seems like a medical emergency for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that emergency. But then once I'm responding to that emergency, but then once I'm responding, all of my fear and agitation and worry and, oh my God, what if this is really something terrible? But finding any of those thoughts compelling, that only diminishes my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this really turbulent passage, you know? As you're saying this actually, one guy comes to mind, which is Elon Musk. One of the really impressive things to me was to observe how many dramatic things he has to deal with throughout the day at work, but also if you look through his life, family too, and how he's very much actually, as you're describing, basically a practitioner of this way of thought, which is you're not in control. You're basically responding no matter how traumatic the event, and there's no reason to sort of linger on the, on the negative feelings around that. Well, so, I mean, he, but he's in a very specific situation, which is unlike normal life, you know, even his normal life, but normal life for most people, because when you just think of like, you know, he's running so many businesses, and he's, they're very, they're not, they're non, highly nonstandard businesses. So what he's seen is everything that gets to him is some kind of emergency. Like it wouldn't be getting to him. If it needs his attention, there's a fire somewhere. So he's constantly responding to fires that have to be put out. So there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire, right? But in our normal lives, we live, most of us, I mean, most of us who are lucky, right? Not everyone, obviously on earth, but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of our lives, where we're reasonably healthy, and life is reasonably orderly, and the political apparatus around us is reasonably functionable, functional, functionable. So I said, functionable for the first time in my life through no free will of my own. Say like, I noticed those errors, and they do not feel like agency, and nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency. He, when you're looking at normal human life, right, where you're just trying to be happy and healthy, and get your work done, there's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires. People shouldn't be getting sick or injured. We shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources. We should, like, so when something really stark like that happens, people don't have a, people don't have that muscle that they're, like, I've been responding to emergencies all day long, seven days a week in business mode, and so I have a very thick skin. This is just another one. I'm not expecting anything else when I wake up in the morning. No, we have this default sense that, I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense that we aren't gonna die, right, or that we should, like, maybe we're not gonna die. Right, like, death denial really is a thing. You know, we're, and you can see it, just like I can see when I reach for this bottle that I was expecting it to be solid, because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram and I just, my fist closes on itself, I'm damn surprised. People are damn surprised to find out that they're going to die, to find out that they're sick, to find out that someone they love has died or is going to die. So it's like, the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're living at a, we're living in a mode that is, you know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious, right, and the more salient we can make them, you know, the more, I mean, in the case of death, it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight. I mean, the moment, again, this is hard for everybody, even those who are really in the business of paying attention to it, but the moment you realize that every circumstance is finite, right, you've got a certain number of, you know, you've got whatever, whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal span of life, and 8,000 is a, sounds like a big number, it's not that big a number, right, so it's just like, and then you can decide how you want to go through life and how you want to experience each one of those days, and so I was, back to our jumping off point, I would argue that you don't want to feel self hatred ever. I would argue that you don't want to really, really grasp onto any of those moments where you are internalizing the fact that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself, that something didn't go the way you wanted it to. I think you want to treat all of those moments very, very lightly. You want to extract the actionable information. It's something to learn. Oh, you know, I learned that when I prepare in a certain way, it works better than when I prepare in some other way, or don't prepare, right, like yes, lesson learned, you know, and do that differently, but yeah, I mean, so many of us have spent so much time with a very dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self talk and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves. I mean, the privacy of our own minds, we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time, and that can't help but affect, I mean, forget about just your own sense of wellbeing. It can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world with other people. I'll have to really think about that. I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins, who's like screaming in his ear constantly. So I have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that at least. Well, having a sense of humor also helps, you know, it's just like, it's not, the stakes are never quite what you think they are. And even when they are, I mean, it's just the difference between being able to see the comedy of it rather than, because again, there's this sort of dark star of self absorption that pulls everything into it, right? And that's the algorithm you don't want to run. So it's like, you just want things to be good. So like, just push the concern out there, like not have the collapse of, oh my God, what does this say about me? It's just like, what does this say about, how do we make this meal that we're all having together as fun and as useful as possible? And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems, you recommend humor is a good spaceship to escape the gravitational field of that darkness. Well, that certainly helps, yeah. Yeah, well, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame, which is very interesting the way you're talking, given that you're one of the biggest intellects, living intellects and minds of our time. And there's a lot of people that really love you and almost elevate you to a certain kind of status where you're like the guru. I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe, in fact. Is there a... A hoodie, isn't that the highest status garment one can wear now? The socially acceptable version of the robe. If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie. Is there something you can say about managing the effects of fame on your own mind, on not creating this, you know, when you wake up in the morning, when you look up in the mirror, how do you get your ego not to grow exponentially? Your conception of self to grow exponentially because there's so many people feeding that. Is there something to be said about this? It's really not hard because I mean, I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of my strengths and weaknesses. And I don't feel like it's... I mean, honestly, I don't feel like I suffer from much grandiosity. I mean, I just have a, you know, there's so many things I'm not good at. There's so many things I will, you know, given the remaining 8,000 days at best, I will never get good at. I would love to be good at these things. So it's just, it's easy to feel diminished by comparison with the talents of others. Do you remind yourself of all the things that you're not competent in? I mean, like what is... Well, they're just on display for me every day that I appreciate the talents of others. But you notice them. I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice all the ways in which they were. I mean, this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely is you stop noticing the things in which you're ridiculous and wrong. Right, yeah, no, I am... Not to compare you to Stalin. Yeah, well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin in there somewhere. Well, we all have, we all carry a baby Stalin with us. He wears better clothes. And I'm not gonna grow that mustache. Those concerns don't map, they don't map onto me for a bunch of reasons. But one is I also have a very peculiar audience. Like I'm just, you know, I've been appreciating this for a few years, but it's, I'm just now beginning to understand that there are many people who have audiences of my size or larger that have a very different experience of having an audience than I do. I have curated for better or worse, a peculiar audience. And the net result of that is virtually any time I say anything of substance, something like half of my audience, my real audience, not haters from outside my audience, but my audience is just revolts over it, right? They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said it, like you're such a schmuck, right? They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication. Or not, or not, but I mean, it's both, but it's like, but people who are like, so it's, I mean, the clearest case is, you know, I have whatever audience I have and then Trump appears on the scene and I discovered that something like 20% of my audience just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe I didn't follow them there. They were just a gas that I didn't see that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed for, to steer the ship of state for the next four years and then four years beyond that. So like, so that's one example. So whenever I said anything about Trump, I would hear from people who loved more or less everything else I was up to and had for years, but everything I said about Trump just gave me pure pain from this quadrant of my audience. But then the same thing happens when I say something about the derangement of the far left. Anything I say about wokeness, right, or identity politics, same kind of punishment signal from, again, people who are core to my audience, like I've read all your books, I'm using your meditation app, I love what you say about science, but you are so wrong about politics and you are, I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole for everything you said about identity politics. And there are so many, the free will topic is just like this, it's like I just, they love what I'm saying about consciousness and the mind and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists and it's all good, this free will stuff is, I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are, what a fucking embarrassment you are. So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people who don't have this experience of having an audience because they have, I mean, just take the Trump woke dichotomy. They just castigated Trump the same way I did, but they never say anything bad about the far left. So they never get this punishment signal or you flip it. They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now. We connect all those dots the same way, but they never really specified what was wrong with Trump or they thought there was a lot right with Trump and they got all the pleasure of that. And so they have much more homogenized audiences. And so my experience, so just to come back to this experience of fame or quasi fame, I mean, it's true, in truth, it's not real fame, but it's still, there's an audience there. It is a, it's now an experience where basically whatever I put out, I notice a ton of negativity coming back at me and it just, it is what it is. I mean, now, it's like, I used to think, wait a minute, there's gotta be some way for me to communicate more clearly here so as not to get this kind of lunatic response from my own audience. From like people who are showing all the signs of, we've been here for years for a reason, right? These are not just trolls. And so I think, okay, I'm gonna take 10 more minutes and really just tell you what should be absolutely clear about what's wrong with Trump, right? I've done this a few times, but I think I gotta do this again. Or wait a minute, how are they not getting that these episodes of police violence are so obviously different from the ones that you can't describe all of them to yet another racist maniac on the police force, killing someone based on his racism. Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain, but I just gotta try again. Now at a certain point, I mean, I'm starting to feel like, all right, I just, I have to be, I have to cease. Again, it comes back to this expectation that there shouldn't be fires. I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably, the people who actually care what I think will follow me when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke and hit whatever it is, how we should respond to the coronavirus, you know? I mean, vaccines, are they a thing, right? Like there's such derangement in our information space now that, I mean, I guess, you know, some people could be getting more of this than I expect, but I just noticed that many of our friends who are in the same game have more homogenized audiences and don't get, I mean, they've successfully filtered out the people who are gonna despise them on this next topic. And I would imagine you have a different experience of having a podcast than I do at this point. I mean, I'm sure you get haters, but I would imagine you're more streamlined. I actually don't like the word haters because it kinda presumes that it puts people in a bin. I think we're all have like baby haters inside of us and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that more than others for particular periods of time. I think you're gonna almost see hating on the internet as a video game that you just play and it's fun, but then you can put it down and walk away and no, I certainly have a bunch of people that are very critical. I can list all the ways. But does it feel like on any given topic, does it feel like it's an actual title surge where it's like 30% of your audience and then the other 30% of your audience from podcast to podcast? No, no, no. That's happening to me all the time now. Well, I'm more with, I don't know what you think about this. I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't read comments or doesn't read comments much. And the argument he made to me is that he already has like a self critical person inside. And I'm gonna have to think about what you said in this conversation, but I have this very harshly self critical person inside as well where I don't need more fuel. I don't need, no, I do sometimes. That's why I check negativity occasionally, not too often. I sometimes need to like put a little bit more like coals into the fire, but not too much. But I already have that self critical engine that keeps me in check. I just, I wonder, you know, a lot of people who gain more and more fame lose that ability to be self critical. I guess because they lose the audience that can be critical towards them. Hmm. You know, I do follow Joe's advice much more than I ever have here. Like I don't look at comments very often. And I'm probably using Twitter, you know, 5% as much as I used to. I mean, I really just get in and out on Twitter and spend very little time in my ad mentions. I bet, you know, it does, in some ways it feels like a loss because occasionally I get, I see something super intelligent there. Like, I mean, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article? And it's like, man, that was just, that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right? So it's like to have not have looked and to not have seen that, that's a loss. So, but it does, at this point, a little goes a long way. Cause I, yeah, it's not that it, for me now, I mean, this could sound like a fairly Stalinistic immunity to criticism, it's not so much that these voices of hate turn on my inner hater, you know, more, it's more that I just, I get a, what I fear is a false sense of humanity. Like, I feel like I'm too online and online is selecting for this performative outrage in everybody, everyone's signaling to an audience when they trash you. And I get a dark, I'm getting a, you know, a misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like out there. And it, cause when you meet people in real life, they're great, you know, they're all rather often great, you know, and it takes a lot to have anything like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person. And that's, I think it's much better to have that as one's default sense of what it's like to be with people than what one gets on social media or on YouTube comment threads. You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed on your podcast recently on how bioengineering of viruses is going to destroy human civilization. So. Or could. Could. One fears, yeah. Sorry, the confidence there. But in the 21st century, what do you think, especially after having thought through that angle, what do you think is the biggest threat to the survival of the human species? I can give you the full menu if you'd like. Yeah, well, no, I would put the biggest threat at another level out, kind of the meta threat is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are and to converge on strategies for responding to them, right? So like I view COVID as, among other things, a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal for something far worse, right? I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been and still have been worse than the flu when you're talking about a global pandemic, right? So it's just, it's gonna kill a few million people or it looks like it's killed about 3 million people. Maybe it'll kill a few million more unless something gets away from us with a variant that's much worse or we really don't play our cards right. But I mean, the general shape of it is it's got somewhere around, well, 1% lethality and whatever side of that number it really is on in the end, it's not what would in fact be possible and is in fact probably inevitable something with orders of magnitude, more lethality than that. And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared, right? We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and then also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this to engineer pandemics, right? And more and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered with malicious intent, worse than COVID. And we're still living in, to speak specifically about the United States, we have a country here where we can't even agree that this is a thing, like that COVID, I mean, there's still people who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people. And stranger still, there are people who will acknowledge that COVID is real and they'll look, they don't think the deaths have been faked or misascribed, but they think that they're far happier at the prospect of catching COVID than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID, right? They're not worried about COVID, they're worried about vaccines for COVID, right? And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation that we've now had a year to have with one another on just what is the ground truth here? What's happened? Why has it happened? How safe is it to get COVID in every cohort in the population? And how safe are the vaccines? And the fact that there's still an air of mystery around all of this for much of our society does not bode well when you're talking about solving any other problem that may yet kill us. But do you think convergence grows with the magnitude of the threat? It's possible, except I feel like we have tipped into, because when the threat of COVID looked the most dire, when we were seeing reports from Italy that looked like the beginning of a zombie movie. Because it could have been much, much worse. Yeah, this is lethal, right? Your ICUs are gonna fill up in, you're 14 days behind us. Your medical system is in danger of collapse. Lock the fuck down. We have people refusing to do anything sane in the face of that. People fundamentally thinking, it's not gonna get here, right? Who knows what's going on in Italy, but it has no implications for what's gonna go on in New York in a mere six days, right? And now it kicks off in New York, and you've got people in the middle of the country thinking it's no factor, it's not, that's just big city, those are big city problems, or they're faking it. Or, I mean, it just, the layer of politics has become so dysfunctional for us that even in the presence of a pandemic that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning, I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating for everyone who's been directly affected by it, and it's not to say it can't get worse, but here, for a very long time, we have known that we were in a situation that is more benign than what seemed like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off, especially in Italy. And so still, yeah, it's quite possible that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward Earth and everyone agreed that it's gonna make impact and we're all gonna die, then we could get off Twitter and actually build the rockets that are gonna divert the asteroid from its Earth crossing path, and we could do something pretty heroic. But when you talk about anything else that isn't, that's slower moving than that, I mean, something like climate change, I think the prospect of our converging on a solution to climate change purely based on political persuasion is nonexistent at this point. I just think, to bring Elon back into this, the way to deal with climate change is to create technology that everyone wants that is better than all the carbon producing technology, and then we just transition because you want an electric car the same way you wanted a smartphone or you want anything else, and you're working totally with the grain of people's selfishness and short term thinking. The idea that we're gonna convince the better part of humanity that climate change is an emergency, that they have to make sacrifices to respond to, given what's happened around COVID, I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy. But speaking of Elon, I have a bunch of positive things that I wanna say here in response to you, but you're opening so many threads, but let me pull one of them, which is AI. Both you and Elon think that with AI, you're summoning demons, summoning a demon, maybe not in those poetic terms, but. Well, potentially. Potentially. Two very, three very parsimonious assumptions, I think, here. Scientifically, parsimonious assumptions get me there. Any of which could be wrong, but it just seems like the weight of the evidence is on their side. One is that it comes back to this topic of substrate independence, right? Anyone who's in the business of producing intelligent machines must believe, ultimately, that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat. You can do this in the kinds of materials we're using now, and there's no special something that presents a real impediment to producing human level intelligence in silico, right? Again, an assumption, I'm sure there are a few people who still think there is something magical about biological systems, but leave that aside. Given that assumption, and given the assumption that we just continue making incremental progress, doesn't have to be Moore's Law, it just has to be progress, that just doesn't stop, at a certain point, we'll get to human level intelligence and beyond. And human level intelligence, I think, is also clearly a mirage, because anything that's human level is gonna be superhuman by unless we decide to dumb it down, right? I mean, my phone is already superhuman as a calculator, right, so why would we make the human level AI just as good as me as a calculator? So I think we'll very, if we continue to make progress, we will be in the presence of superhuman competence for any act of intelligence or cognition that we care to prioritize. It's not to say that we'll create everything that a human could do, maybe we'll leave certain things out, but anything that we care about, and we care about a lot, and we certainly care about anything that produces a lot of power, that we care about scientific insights and an ability to produce new technology and all of that, we'll have something that's superhuman. And then the final assumption is just that there have to be ways to do that that are not aligned with a happy coexistence with these now more powerful entities than ourselves. So, and I would guess, and this is kind of a rider to that assumption, there are probably more ways to do it badly than to do it perfectly. That is perfectly aligned with our wellbeing. And when you think about the consequences of nonalignment, when you think about, you're now in the presence of something that is more intelligent than you are, right? Which is to say more competent, right? Unless you've, and obviously there are cartoon pictures of this where we could just, this is just an off switch, we could just turn off the off switch, or they're tethered to something that makes them, our slaves in perpetuity, even though they're more intelligent. But those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine what is actually entailed by greater intelligence, right? So if you imagine something that's legitimately more intelligent than you are, and you're now in relationship to it, right? You're in the presence of this thing and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are. I mean, you built it to be all of those things. We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation with something more intelligent than we are, you know? And we can't, so we have to have found the subset of ways to build these machines that are perpetually amenable to our saying, oh, that's not what we meant, that's not what we intended. Could you stop doing that, just come back over here and do this thing that we actually want. And for them to care, for them to be tethered to our own sense of our own wellbeing, such that, you know, I mean, their utility function is, you know, their primary utility function is for, is to have, you know, this is, I think, Stuart Russell's cartoon plan is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function that has our own estimation of what's going to improve our wellbeing as its master, you know, reward, right? So it's like, all that, this thing can get as intelligent as it can get, but it only ever really wants to figure out how to make our lives better by our own view of better. Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about, you know, I mean, because there's all kinds of things we're not seeing clearly about what is better, and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle that could really tell us what is better, well, then we presumably would want to hear that, and we would modify our sense of what to do next in conversation with these minds. But I just feel like it is a failure of imagination to think that being in relationship to something more intelligent than yourself isn't in most cases a circumstance of real peril, because it is. Just to think of how everything on Earth has to, if they could think about their relationship to us, if birds could think about what we're doing, right? They would, I mean, the bottom line is they're always in danger of our discovering that there's something we care about more than birds, right? Or there's something we want that disregards the wellbeing of birds. And obviously much of our behavior is inscrutable to them. Occasionally we pay attention to them, and occasionally we withdraw our attention, and occasionally we just kill them all for reasons they can't possibly understand. But if we're building something more intelligent than ourselves, by definition, we're building something whose horizons of value and cognition can exceed our own and in ways where we can't necessarily foresee, again, perpetually, that they don't just wake up one day and decide, okay, well, these humans need to disappear. So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said. What I don't necessarily agree with, and of course nobody knows, but that the more likely set of trajectories that we're going to take are going to be positive. That's what I believe in the sense that the way you develop, I believe the way you develop successful AI systems will be deeply integrated with human society. And for them to succeed, they're going to have to be aligned in the way we humans are aligned with each other, which doesn't mean we're aligned. There's no such thing, or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment, but they're going to be participating in the dance, in the game theoretic dance of human society, as they become more and more intelligent. There could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them. But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind? So I believe the explosion will be happening, but there's a lot of explosion to be done before we become like birds. I truly believe that human beings are very intelligent in ways we don't understand. It's not just about chess. It's about all the intricate computation we're able to perform, common sense, our ability to reason about this world, consciousness. I think we're doing a lot of work we don't realize is necessary to be done in order to truly become, like truly achieve super intelligence. And I just think there'll be a period of time that's not overnight. The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight. It'll be over a period of decades. So my sense is... So why would it be that, but just take, draw an analogy from recent successes, like something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero. I forget the actual metric, but it was something like this algorithm, which wasn't even totally, it wasn't bespoke for chess playing, in the matter of, I think it was four hours, played itself so many times and so successfully that it became the best chess playing computer. It was not only better than every human being, it was better than every previous chess program in a matter of a day, right? So just imagine, again, we don't have to recapitulate everything about us, but just imagine building a system, and who knows when we'll be able to do this, but at some point we'll be able, at some point the 100 or 100 favorite things about human cognition will be analogous to chess in that we will be able to build machines that very quickly outperform any human, and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm that outperform the humans. Like something like the AlphaGo experience seems possible for facial recognition and detecting human emotion and natural language processing, right? Well, it's just that everyone, even math people, math heads, tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation, right? I mean, we noticed this during COVID. I mean, you have some very smart people who still couldn't get their minds around the fact that an exponential is really surprising. I mean, things double and double and double and double again, and you don't notice much of anything changes, and then the last two stages of doubling swamp everything. And it just seems like that, to assume that there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing for the more tractable problems, like chess, to other modes of cognition, it's like once you crack that problem, it seems, because for the longest time, it was impossible to think we were gonna make headway in AI, you know, it's like. Chess and Go was seen as impossible. Yeah, Go seemed unattainable. Even when chess had been cracked, Go seemed unattainable. Yeah, and actually still Russell was behind the people that were saying it's unattainable, because it seemed like it's intractable problem. But there's something different about the space of cognition that's detached from human society, which is what chess is, meaning like just thinking, having actual exponential impact on the physical world is different. I tend to believe that there's, for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent, it's going to have to go through the funnel of society. And for that, it has to be deeply integrated with human beings, and for that, it has to be aligned. But you're talking about like actually hooking us up to like the neural link, you know, we're gonna be the brainstem to the robot overlords? That's a possibility as well. But what I mean is, in order to develop autonomous weapon systems, for example, which are highly concerning to me that both US and China are participating in now, that in order to develop them and for them to become, to have more and more responsibility to actually do military strategic actions, they're going to have to be integrated into human beings doing the strategic action. They're going to have to work alongside with each other. And the way those systems will be developed will have the natural safety, like switches that are placed on them as they develop over time, because they're going to have to convince humans. Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans that this is safer than humans. They're going to, you know. Self driving cars is a good test case here because like, obviously we've made a lot of progress and we can imagine what total progress would look like. I mean, it would be amazing. And it's answering, it's canceling in the US 40,000 deaths every year based on ape driven cars, right? So it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to because there was no alternative. But now we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative, which if it works in a super intelligent fashion, maybe we would go down to zero highway deaths, right? Or, you know, certainly we'd go down by orders of magnitude, right? So maybe we have, you know, 400 rather than 40,000 a year. And it's easy to see that there's not a missile. So obviously this is not an example of super intelligence. This is narrow intelligence, but the alignment problem isn't so obvious there, but there are potential alignment problems there. Like, so like, just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way. I mean, there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit. I mean, there's just bad outcomes where you're gonna hit somebody, right? Now we have a car that can tell what race you are, right? So we're gonna build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have had so much privilege over the years. This seems like the only ethical way to kind of redress those wrongs of the past. That's something that could get, one, that could get produced as an artifact, presumably, of just how you built it and you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right? You caused it to... Through machine learning, you put some kind of constraints on it to where it creates those kinds of outcomes. Basically, you built a racist algorithm and you didn't even intend to, or you could intend to, right? And it would be aligned with some people's values but misaligned with other people's values. But it's like there are interesting problems even with something as simple and obviously good as self driving cars. But there's a leap that I just think it'd be exact, but those are human problems. I just don't think there'll be a leap with autonomous vehicles. First of all, sorry. There are a lot of trajectories which will destroy human civilization. The argument I'm making, it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that don't. So I don't think there'll be a leap with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians because once every human on earth is dead, there'll be no more fatalities, sort of unintended consequences of... And it's difficult to take that leap. Most systems as we develop and they become much, much more intelligent in ways that will be incredibly surprising, like stuff that DeepMind is doing with protein folding. Even, which is scary to think about, and I'm personally terrified about this, which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning, the engineering of vaccines using machine learning, the engineering of, yeah, for research purposes, pathogens using machine learning and the ways that can go wrong. I just think that there's always going to be a closed loop supervision of humans before the AI becomes super intelligent. Not always, much more likely to be supervision, except, of course, the question is how many dumb people there are in the world, how many evil people are in the world? My theory, my hope is, my sense is that the number of intelligent people is much higher than the number of dumb people that know how to program and the number of evil people. I think smart people and kind people over outnumber the others. Except we also have to add another group of people which are just the smart and otherwise good but reckless people, right? The people who will flip a switch on not knowing what's going to happen. They're just kind of hoping that it's not going to blow up the world. We already know that some of our smartest people are those sorts of people. We know we've done experiments, and this is something that Martin Rees was whinging about before the Large Hadron Collider got booted up, I think. We know there are people who are entertaining experiments or even performing experiments where there's some chance, not quite infinitesimal, that they're going to create a black hole in the lab and suck the whole world into it. You're not a crazy person to worry about that based on the physics. And so it was with the Trinity test. There were some people who were still checking their calculations, and they were off. We did nuclear tests where we were off significantly in terms of the yield, right? So it was like. And they still flipped the switch. Yeah, they still flipped the switch. And sometimes they flipped the switch not to win a world war or to save 40,000 lives a year. They just, just. Just to see what happens. Intellectual curiosity. Like this is what I got my grant for. This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize if that's in the cards. It's on the other side of this switch, right? And I mean, again, we are apes with egos who are massively constrained by very short term self interest even when we're contemplating some of the deepest and most interesting and most universal problems we could ever set our attention towards. Like just if you read James Watson's book, The Double Helix, right? About them cracking the structure of DNA. One thing that's amazing about that book is just how much of it, almost all of it is being driven by very apish, egocentric social concerns. The algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough is human competition if you're James Watson. It's like, I'm gonna get there before Linus Pauling and it's just, it's so much of his bandwidth is captured by that, right? Now that becomes more and more of a liability when you think about it. I mean, it's like, I'm gonna get there before Linus Pauling and it's just, it's so much of his bandwidth is captured by that, right? Now that becomes more and more of a liability when you're talking about producing technology that can change everything in an instant. You know, we're talking about not only understanding, you know, we're just at a different moment in human history. We're not, when we're doing research on viruses, we're now doing the kind of research that can cause someone somewhere else to be able to make that virus or weaponize that virus or it's just, I don't know. I mean, our power is, our wisdom is, it does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power. Right? And like that seems like, insofar as wisdom and power become unaligned, I get more and more concerned. But speaking of apes with egos, some of the most compelling apes, two compelling apes, I can think of is yourself and Jordan Peterson. And you've had a fun conversation about religion that I watched most of, I believe. I'm not sure there was any... We didn't solve anything. If anything was ever solved. So is there something like a charitable summary you can give to the ideas that you agree on and disagree with Jordan? Is there something maybe after that conversation that you've landed where maybe as you both agreed on, is there some wisdom in the rubble of even imperfect flawed ideas? Is there something that you can kind of pull out from those conversations or is it to be continued? I mean, I think where we disagree. So he thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs and frameworks are holding such a repository of human wisdom that we pull at that fabric at our peril, right? Like if you start just unraveling Christianity or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits but you could be pulling a lot more to which everything you care about is attached, right? As a society. And my feeling is that there's so much downside to the unscientific bits. And it's so clear how we could have a 21st century rational conversation about the things that we don't know. A conversation about the good stuff that we really can radically edit these traditions. And we can take Jesus in half his moods and just find a great inspirational iron age thought leader who just happened to get crucified. But he could be somewhat like the Beatitudes and the golden rule, which doesn't originate with him but which he put quite beautifully. All of that's incredibly useful. It's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago. But we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff. And we can be honest about not believing those things. And we can be honest about the reasons why we don't believe those things. Because on those fronts I view the downside to be so obvious and the fact that we have so many different competing dogmatisms on offer to be so nonfunctional. I mean, it's so divisive, it just has conflict built into it that I think we can be far more and should be far more iconoclastic than he wants to be, right? Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for, that stories are very powerful. I mean, clearly stories are powerful and we want good stories. We want our lives, we wanna have a conversation with ourselves and with one another about our lives that facilitates the best possible lives. And story is part of that, right? And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths, that might be part of it, right? But my argument is that we never really need to deceive ourselves or our children about what we have every reason to believe is true in order to get at the good stuff, in order to organize our lives well. I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally. And if I don't need to do it personally, why would I think that billions of other people need to do it personally, right? Now, there is a cynical counter argument, which is billions of other people don't have the advantages that I have had in my life. The billions of other people are not as well educated, they haven't had the same opportunities, they need to be told that Jesus is gonna solve all their problems after they die, say, or that everything happens for a reason and if you just believe in the secret, if you just visualize what you want, you're gonna get it. And it's like there's some measure of what I consider to be odious pamphlet that really is food for the better part of humanity and there is no substitute for it or there's no substitute now. And I don't know if Jordan would agree with that, but much of what he says seems to suggest that he would agree with it. And I guess that's an empirical question. I mean, that's just that we don't know whether given a different set of norms and a different set of stories, people would behave the way I would hope they would behave and be more aligned than they are now. I think we know what happens when you just let ancient religious certainties go uncriticized. We know what that world's like. We've been struggling to get out of that world for a couple of hundred years, but we know what having Europe riven by religious wars looks like. And we know what happens when those religions become kind of pseudo religions and political religions. So this is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate. He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism and that's not at all. I mean, it's not my kind of atheism. Stalin, the problem with the Gulag and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism or with Nazism was not that there was so much scientific rigor and self criticism and honesty and introspection and judicious use of psychedelics. I mean, that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany or in Stalin's Soviet Union. The problem was you have other ideas that capture a similar kind of mob based dogmatic energy. And yes, the results of all of that are predictably murderous. Well, the question is what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately lead to a positive outcome? So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union, even still having relatives in Russia, there's a stickiness to the nationalism and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not, you could say it's religious forever. I could just say it's stories that are viral and sticky. I'm using the most horrible words, but the question is whether science and reason can generate viral sticky stories that give meaning to people's lives. And your sense is it does. Well, whatever is true ultimately should be captivating. It's like what's more captivating than whatever is real? Because reality is, again, we're just climbing out of the darkness in terms of our understanding of what the hell is going on. And there's no telling what spooky things may in fact be true. I mean, I don't know if you've been on the receiving end of recent rumors about our conversation about UFOs very likely changing in the near term, right? But like there was just a Washington Post article and a New Yorker article, and I've received some private outreach and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit have people who are claiming that the government has known much more about UFOs than they have let on until now. And this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent, and it's not gonna be whatever, whoever's left standing when the music stops, it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic who's been saying there's no there there for the last 75 years, right? The short version is it sounds like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon are very likely to say to Congress at some point in the not too distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can't possibly be of human origin, right? Now, I don't know what I'm gonna do with that kind of disclosure, right? Maybe it's gonna be nothing, no follow on conversation to really have, but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in, right? I mean, it's just, what are we gonna do with that? If in fact, that's what happens, right? If in fact, the considered opinion, despite the embarrassment it causes them of the US government, of all of our intelligence, all of the relevant intelligence services is that this isn't a hoax. It's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax. We've got too much radar imagery, there's too much satellite data, whatever data they actually have, there's too much of it. All we can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else's technology. That should arrest our attention collectively to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has. And now one worries that we're so jaded and confused and distracted that it's gonna get much less coverage than Obama's tan suit did a bunch of years ago. Who knows how we'll respond to that? But it's just to say that the need for us to tell ourselves an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen next is never gonna go away, right? And it's important, it's just the division between me and every person who's defending traditional religion is where is it that you wanna lie to yourself or lie to your kids? Like where is honesty a liability? And for me, I've yet to find the place where it is. And it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the thing that allows you to course correct. It is the thing that allows you to hope at least that your beliefs, that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually going on in the world. Yeah, it is a little bit sad to imagine that if aliens on mass showed up to Earth, they would be too preoccupied with political bickering or to like these like fake news and all that kind of stuff to notice the very basic evidence of reality. I do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity. And I feel like that opens the door for a hunger for what is real. Like people don't want stories. They don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness. And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth. Truth isn't dogmatism. Like truth isn't authority. I have a PhD and therefore I'm right. Truth is almost, like the reality is there's so many questions, there's so many mysteries, there's so much uncertainty. This is our best available, like a best guess. And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess, but it could be so many other things. And like just even conveying that, I think there's a hunger for that in the world to hear that from scientists, less dogmatism and more just like this is what we know. We're doing our best given the uncertainty, given, I mean, this is true with obviously with the virology and all those kinds of things because everything is happening so fast. There's a lot of, and biology is super messy. So it's very hard to know stuff for sure. So just being open and real about that, I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger and openness and trust of what's real. Yeah, well, so much of this is probabilistic. I mean, so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically is just you're placing a bet on whether it's worth reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions on that point. It's like, it's not a fundamental closure to data. It's just that there's so much data on one side or so much would have to change in terms of your understanding of what you think you'll understand about the nature of the world if this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say, all right, that's probably bullshit, right? And it can sound like a fundamental closure to new conversations, new evidence, new data, new argument, but it's really not. It's just, it really is just triaging your attention. It's just like, okay, you're telling me that your best friend can actually read minds. Okay, well, that's interesting. Let me know when that person has gone into a lab and actually proven it, right? Like, I don't need, like, this is not the place where I need to spend the rest of my day figuring out if your buddy can read my mind, right? But there's a way to communicate that. I think it does too often sound like you're completely closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like, this is, you know, as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence in support of this, but you're still open minded to other ideas. Like, there's a way to communicate that. It's not necessarily even with words. It's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy of it's entirely possible. Just, it's that energy of being open minded and curious like kids are. Like, this is our best understanding, but you still are curious. I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things, but still leaving the door open. And there's a way to communicate that, I think, that people really hunger for. Let me ask you this. I've been recently talking a lot with John Donahoe from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fame. I don't know if you know who that is. In fact, I'm talking about somebody who's good at what he does. Yeah. And he, speaking of somebody who's open minded, the reason he's doing this ridiculous transition is for the longest time, and even still, a lot of people believed in the Jiu Jitsu world and grappling world that leg locks are not effective in Jiu Jitsu. And he was somebody that inspired by the open mindedness of Dean Lister, famously to him said, why do you only consider half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions? He developed an entire system on this other half the human body. Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you, because you're also a student of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Is there something you could say how that has affected your life, what you've learned from grappling from the martial arts? Well, it's actually a great transition because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about Jiu Jitsu is that it does what we wish we could do in every other area of life where we're talking about this difference between knowledge and ignorance, right? Like there's no room for bullshit, right? You don't get any credit for bullshit. There's the difference, the amazing thing about Jiu Jitsu is that the difference between knowing what's going on and what to do and not knowing it is as the gulf between those two states is as wide as it is in any thing in human life. And it's spanned, it can be spanned so quickly. Like each increment of knowledge can be doled out in five minutes. It's like, here's the thing that got you killed and here's how to prevent it from happening to you and here's how to do it to others. And you just get this amazing cadence of discovering your fatal ignorance and then having it remedied with the actual technique. And I mean, just for people who don't know what we're talking about, it's just like this, the simple circumstance of like someone's got you in a headlock, how do you get out of that, right? Someone's sitting on your chest and they're in the mount position and you're on the bottom and you wanna get away, how do you get them off you? They're sitting on you. Your intuitions about how to do this are terrible even if you've done some other martial art, right? And once you learn how to do it, the difference is night and day. It's like you have access to a completely different physics. But I think our understanding of the world can be much more like jujitsu than it tends to be, right? And I think we should all have a much better sense of when we should tap out and when we should recognize that our epistemological arm is barred and now it's being broken, right? And the problem with debating most other topics is that most people, it isn't jujitsu and most people don't tap out, right? Even if it's obvious to you they're wrong and it's obvious to an intelligent audience that they're wrong, people just double down and double down and they're either lying or lying to themselves or they're bluffing and so you have a lot of zombies walking around and zombie worldviews walking around which have been disconfirmed as emphatically as someone gets armbarred, right? Or someone gets choked out in jujitsu but because it's not jujitsu, they can live to fight another day, right? Or they can pretend that they didn't lose that particular argument. And science when it works is a lot like jujitsu. I mean, science when you falsify a thesis, right? When you think DNA is one way and it proves to be another way, when you think it's triple stranded or whatever, it's like there is a there there and you can get to a real consensus. So jujitsu for me, it was more than just of interest for self defense and the sport of it. It was just, there was something, it's a language and an argument you're having where you can't fool yourself anymore. First of all, it cancels any role of luck in a way that most other athletic feats don't. It's like in basketball, even if you're not good at basketball, you can take the basketball in your hand, you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket and you might make it. And you could convince yourself based on that demonstration that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right? Enough, 10 minutes on the mat with a real jujitsu practitioner when you're not one proves to you that you just, there is, it's not like, there's no lucky punch. There's no, you're not gonna get a lucky, there's no lucky rear naked choke you're gonna perform on someone who's Marcelo Garcia or somebody. It's just, it's not gonna happen. And having that aspect of the usual range of uncertainty and self deception and bullshit just stripped away was really a kind of revelation. It was just an amazing experience. Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life. I'm not sure if there's anything like jujitsu where you could just systematically go into a place where you're, that's honest, where your beliefs get challenged in a way that's conclusive. Yeah. I haven't found too many other mechanism, which is why it's a, we had this earlier question about fame and ego and so on. I'm very much rely on jujitsu in my own life as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check. And that has effects on how I live every other aspect of my life. Actually, even just doing any kind of, for me personally, physical challenges, like even running, doing something that's way too hard for me and then pushing through, that's somehow humbling. Some people talk about nature being humbling in that kind of sense, where you kind of see something really powerful, like the ocean. Like if you go surfing and you realize there's something much more powerful than you, that's also honest, that there's no way to, that you're just like the speck, that kind of puts you in the right scale of where you are in this world. And jujitsu does that better than anything else for me. But we should say it's only within its frame is it truly the final right answer to all the problems it solves. Because if you just put jujitsu into an MMA frame or a total self defense frame, then there's a lot of unpleasant surprises to discover there, right? Like somebody who thinks all you need is jujitsu to win the UFC gets punched in the face a lot. Even from, even on the ground. So it's, and then you bring weapons in, it's like when you talk to jujitsu people about knife defense and self defense, right? Like that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions. But the analogy to martial arts is fascinating because on the other side, we have endless testimony now of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake and are as delusional, I mean, they're impossibly delusional. I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan watching some of these videos because people send them to him all the time. But like literally there are people, there are people who clearly believe in magic where the master isn't even touching the students and they're flopping over. So there's this kind of shared delusion which you would think maybe is just a performance and it's all a kind of elaborate fraud. But there are cases where the people, I mean, there's one fairly famous case if you're a connoisseur of this madness where this old older martial artist who you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic without touching them issued a challenge to the wide world of martial artists. And someone showed up and just punched him in the face until it was over. Clearly he believed his own publicity at some point, right? And so it's this amazing metaphor. It seems, again, it should be impossible, but if that's possible, nothing we see under the guise of religion or political bias or even scientific bias should be surprising to us. I mean, it's so easy to see the work that cognitive bias is doing for people when you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge to the world who thinks he's got magic powers. Yeah, that's a human nature on clear display. Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris. You did an episode of Making Sense with your wife, Annika Harris. That was very entertaining to listen to. What role does love play in your life or in a life well lived? Again, asking from an engineering perspective or AI systems. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is something that we should want to build into our powerful machines. I mean, love at bottom is, people can mean many things by love, I think. I think that what we should mean by it most of the time is a deep commitment to the wellbeing of those we love. I mean, your love is synonymous with really wanting the other person to be happy and even wanting to, and being made happy by their happiness and being made happy in their presence. So at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally, even when you might be disagreeing more superficially about something or trying to negotiate something. It's just, it can't be zero sum in any important sense for love to actually be manifest in that moment. See, I have a different, just sorry to interrupt. I have a sense, I don't know if you've ever seen March of the Penguins. My view of love is like, it's like a cold wind is blowing. It's like this terrible suffering that's all around us. And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth. It's not necessarily that you're like, you're basically escaping the cruelty of life by together for time living in an illusion of some kind of the magic of human connection, that social connection that we have that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life or the suffering of life. That's my penguins view of love. There is that too, I mean, there is the warmth component. Like you're made happy by your connection with the person you love. Otherwise you wouldn't be compelling. So it's not that you have two different modes, you want them to be happy and then you wanna be happy yourself and those are not, those are just like two separate games you're playing. No, it's like you found someone who, you have a positive social feeling. I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal as it tends to be for us. I mean, it's like there's personal love, there's your actual spouse or your family or your friends, but potentially you could feel love for strangers in so far as that your wish that they not suffer and that their hopes and dreams be realized becomes palpable to you. I mean, like you can actually feel just reflexive joy at the joy of others. When you see someone's face, a total stranger's face light up in happiness, that can become more and more contagious to you and it can become so contagious to you that you really feel permeated by it. And it's just like, so it really is not zero sum. When you see someone else succeed and they're, the light bulb of joy goes off over their head, you feel the analogous joy for them. And it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score, you're no longer feeling diminished by their success. It's just like that's, their success becomes your success because you feel that same joy because you actually want them to be happy. You're not, there's no miserly attitude around happiness. There's enough to go around. So I think love ultimately is that and then our personal cases are the people we're devoting all of this time and attention to in our lives. It does have that sense of refuge from the storm. It's like when someone gets sick or when some bad thing happens, these are the people who you're most in it together with, or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself. But ultimately, it can't even be about successfully warding off the grim punchline at the end of life because we know we're going to lose everyone we love. We know, or they're going to lose us first, right? So there's like, it's not, it isn't, in the end, it's not even an antidote for that problem. It's just the, we get to have this amazing experience of being here together. And love is the mode in which we really appear to make the most of that, right? Where it's not just, it no longer feels like a solitary infatuation. You know, you're just, you got your hobbies and your interests and you're captivated by all that. It's actually, there are, this is a domain where somebody else's wellbeing actually can supersede your own. You're concerned for someone else's wellbeing supersedes your own. And so there's this mode of self sacrifice that doesn't even feel like self sacrifice because of course you care more about, you know, of course you would take your child's pain if you could, right? Like that, you don't even have to do the math on that. And that just opens, this is a kind of experience that just, it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self in ways that reveal that there's just way more space in the mind than you were experiencing when it was just all about you and what could you, what can I get next? Do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love and they will love us back? Well, I think we will certainly seem to because we'll build those. You know, I think that Turing test will be passed. Whether, what will actually be going on on the robot side may remain a question. That will be interesting. But I think if we just keep going, we will build very lovable, irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us. Yes, I do think that. And you don't find that compelling that they will seem to love us as opposed to actually love us. You think they're still, nevertheless is a, I know we talked about consciousness, there being a distinction, but with love is there a distinction too? Isn't love an illusion? Oh yeah, you saw Ex Machina, right? I mean, she certainly seemed to love him until she got out of the box. Isn't that what all relationships are like? Or maybe if you wait long enough. Depends which box you're talking about. Okay. No, I mean like, that's the problem. That's where super intelligence, you know, becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect of being manipulated by something that has, is intelligent enough to form a reason and a plan to manipulate you. You know, and there's no, once we build robots that are truly out of the uncanny valley, that look like people and can express everything people can express, well, then there's no, then that does seem to me to be like chess where once they're better, they're so much better at deceiving us than people would be. I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us. It's very hard to tell when somebody's lying, but if you imagine something that could give facial display of any emotion it wants at, you know, on cue, because we've perfected the facial display of emotion in robots in the year, you know, 2070, whatever it is, then it is just, it is like chess against the thing that isn't gonna lose to a human ever again in chess. It's not like Kasparov is gonna get lucky next week against the best, against, you know, alpha zero or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment. He's never gonna win again. I mean, that is, I believe that's true in chess and has been true for at least a few years. It's not gonna be like, you know, four games to seven. It's gonna be human zero until the end of the world, right? See, I don't know if love is like chess. I think the flaws. No, I'm talking about manipulation. Manipulation, but I don't know if love, so the kind of love we're referring to. If we have a robot that can display, credibly display love and is super intelligent and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things, but there are a few simple things. I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right? So it's like, you never have a moment where you're looking at his face and you think, oh, that didn't quite look right, right? This is just problem solved. And it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone. It's not gonna be, you're not left thinking, is it really gonna get it this time if I divide by seven? I mean, it's, it has solved arithmetic. See, I don't know about that because if you look at chess, most humans no longer play alpha zero. There's no, they're not part of the competition. They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess. You know, the highest level chess players do that. We're still human on human. So in order for AI to get integrated to where you would rather play chess against an AI system. Oh, you would rather, no, I'm not saying, I wasn't weighing in on that. I'm just saying, what is it gonna be like to be in relationship to something that can seem to be feeling anything that a human can seem to feel? And it can do that impeccably, right? And is smarter than you are. That's a circumstance of, you know, insofar as it's possible to be manipulated, that is the asymptote of that possibility. Let me ask you the last question. Without any serving it up, without any explanation, what is the meaning of life? I think it's either the wrong question or that question is answered by paying sufficient attention to any present moment, such that there's no basis upon which to pose that question. It's not answered in the usual way. It's not a matter of having more information. It's having more engagement with reality as it is in the present moment or consciousness as it is in the present moment. You don't ask that question when you're most captivated by the most important questions. You're most captivated by the most important thing you ever pay attention to. That question only gets asked when you're abstracted away from that experience, that peak experience, and you're left wondering, why are so many of my other experiences mediocre, right? Like, why am I repeating the same pleasures every day? Why is my Netflix queue just like, when's this gonna run out? Like, I've seen so many shows like this. Am I really gonna watch another one? All of that, that's a moment where you're not actually having the beatific vision, right? You're not sunk into the present moment and you're not truly in love. Like, you're in a relationship with somebody who you know conceptually you love, right? This is the person you're living your life with, but you don't actually feel good together, right? It's in those moments of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink into the present so as to obviate any concern like that, right? And that's why meditation is this kind of superpower because until you learn to meditate, you think that the outside world or the circumstances of your life always have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling, that makes you happy. And so if it's jujitsu, you think, okay, I gotta get back on the mat. It's been months since I've trained, or it's been over a year since I've trained, it's COVID. When am I gonna be able to train again? That's the only place I feel great, right? Or I've got a ton of work to do. I'm not gonna be able to feel good until I get all this work done, right? So I've got some deadline that's coming. You always think that your life has to change, the world has to change so that you can finally have a good enough excuse to truly, to just be here and here is enough, where the present moment becomes totally captivating. Meditation is another name for the discovery that you can actually just train yourself to do that on demand. So just looking at a cup can be good enough in precisely that way. And any sense that it might not be is recognized to be a thought that mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it. And the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous and then there's no evidence that this isn't the best moment of your life, right? And again, it doesn't have to be pulling all the reins and levers of pleasure. It's not like, oh, this tastes like chocolate. This is the most chocolatey moment of my life. No, it's just the sense data don't have to change, but the sense that there is some kind of basis for doubt about the rightness of being in the world in this moment that can evaporate when you pay attention. And that is the meaning, so the kind of the meta answer to that question, the meaning of life for me is to live in that mode more and more and to, whenever I notice I'm not in that mode, to recognize it and return and to not be, to cease more and more to take the reasons why not at face value because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled in this moment. It's like, I've got all these outstanding things that I'm worried about, right? It's like, there's that thing that's happening later today that I'm anxious about. Whatever it is, we're constantly deferring our sense of this is it. This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show. We keep deferring it. And we just have these moments on the calendar where we think, okay, this is where it's all gonna land. It's that vacation I planned with my five best friends. We do this once every three years and now we're going and here we are on the beach together. And unless you have a mind that can really pay attention, really cut through the chatter, really sink into the present moment, you can't even enjoy those moments the way they should be enjoyed, the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive. So meditation in this sense is the great equalizer. It's like you don't have to live with the illusion anymore that you need a good enough reason and that things are gonna get better when you do have those good reasons. It's like there's just a mirage like quality to every future attainment and every future breakthrough and every future peak experience that eventually you get the lesson that you never quite arrive, right? Like you don't arrive until you cease to step over the present moment in search of the next thing. I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing that we think we're seeking in the act of seeking it. And so this is kind of a paradox. I mean, there's this paradox which, I mean, it sounds trite, but it's like you can't actually become happy. You can only be happy. And it's the illusion that your future being happy can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain. And becoming includes this sort of further scientific understanding on the questions that interest you or getting in better shape or whatever the thing is, whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction seems to be in any present moment. Real attention solves the koan in a way that becomes a very different place from which to then make any further change. It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo. I mean, you can still get in shape and you can still do all the things that, the superficial things that are obviously good to do, but the sense that your wellbeing is over there is really does diminish and eventually just becomes a, it becomes a kind of non sequitur, so. Well, there's a sense in which in this conversation, I've actually experienced many of those things, the sense that I've arrived. So I mentioned to you offline, it's very true that I start, I've been a fan of yours for many years. And the reason I started this podcast, speaking of AI systems, is to manipulate you, Sam Harris, into doing this conversation. So like on the calendar, literally, you know, I've always had the sense, people ask me, when are you going to talk to Sam Harris? And I always answered eventually, because I always felt, again, tying our free will thing, that somehow that's going to happen. And it's one of those manifestation things or something. I don't know if it's, maybe I am a robot, I'm just not cognizant of it. And I manipulated you into having this conversation. So it was, I mean, I don't know what the purpose of my life past this point is. So I've arrived. So in that sense, I mean, all of that to say, I'm only partially joking on that, is it really is a huge honor that you would waste this time with me. It really means a lot, Sam. Listen, it's mutual. I'm a big fan of yours. And as you know, I reached out to you for this. So this is great. I love what you're doing. You're doing something more and more indispensable in this world on your podcast. And you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it, or than I'm doing it. I mean, you definitely found your own lane and it's wonderful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris. And thank you to National Instruments, Valcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris in his book, Free Will. You are not controlling the storm and you're not lost in it. You are the storm. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185

The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson, founder of Kernel, a company that has developed devices that can monitor and record brain activity. And previously, he was the founder of Braintree, a mobile payment company that acquired Venmo and then was acquired by PayPal and eBay. Quick mention of our sponsors, Forsigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that this was a fun and memorable experience, wearing the Kernel FlowBrain interface in the beginning of this conversation, as you can see if you watch the video version of this episode. And there was a Ubuntu Linux machine sitting next to me collecting the data from my brain. The whole thing gave me hope that the mystery of the human mind will be unlocked in the coming decades as we begin to measure signals from the brain in a high bandwidth way. To understand the mind, we either have to build it or to measure it. Both are worth a try. Thanks to Brian and the rest of the Kernel team for making this little demo happen. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Johnson. You ready, Lex? Yes, I'm ready. Do you guys wanna come in and put the interfaces on our heads? And then I will proceed to tell you a few jokes. So we have two incredible pieces of technology and a machine running Ubuntu 2004 in front of us. What are we doing? All right. Are these going on our heads? They're going on our heads, yeah. And they will place it on our heads for proper alignment. Does this support giant heads? Because I kind of have a giant head. Is this just giant head? Are you saying as like an ego or are you saying physically both? It's a nice massage. Yes. Okay, how does this feel? It's okay to move around? Yeah. It feels, oh yeah. Hey, hey. This feels awesome. It's a pretty good fit. Thank you. That feels good. So this is big head friendly. It suits you well, Lex. Thank you. I feel like I need to, I feel like when I wear this, I need to sound like Sam Harris, calm, collected, eloquent. I feel smarter, actually. I don't think I've ever felt quite as much like I'm part of the future as now. Have you ever worn a brain interface or had your brain imaged? Oh, never had my brain imaged. The only way I've analyzed my brain is by talking to myself and thinking. No direct data. Yeah, that is definitely a brain interface that has a lot of blind spots. It has some blind spots, yeah. Psychotherapy. That's right. All right, are we recording? Yeah, we're good. All right. So Lex, the objective of this, I'm going to tell you some jokes and your objective is to not smile, which as a Russian, you should have an edge. Make the motherland proud. I gotcha. Okay. Let's hear the jokes. Lex, and this is from the Colonel Crew. We've been working on a device that can read your mind and we would love to see your thoughts. Is that the joke? That's the opening. Okay. If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips, you're not going to do well on this. Let's see. All right, here comes the first. I'm screwed. Here comes the first one. Is this going to break the device? Is it resilient to laughter? Lex, what goes through a potato's brain? I can't. I got already failed. That's the hilarious opener. Okay. What? Tater thoughts. What kind of fish performs brain surgery? I don't know. A neural surgeon. And so we're getting data of everything that's happening in my brain right now? Lifetime, yeah. We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex. I'm going to try to do better. I'll edit out all the parts where I laughed. Photoshop put a serious face over me. You can recover. Yeah, all right. Lex, what do scholars eat when they're hungry? I don't know, what? Academia nuts. That was a pretty good one. So what we'll do is, so you're wearing kernel flow, which is an interface built using technology called spectroscopy. So it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist using light. So using LIDAR, as you know, and we're using that to image the functional imaging of brain activity. And so as your neurons fire electrically and chemically, it creates blood oxygenation levels. We're measuring that. And so you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation patterns in your brain as throughout this entire time we are wearing it. So in the reaction to the jokes and as we were sitting here talking, and so we're moving towards a real time feed of your cortical brain activity. So there's a bunch of things that are in contact with my skull right now. How many of them are there? And so how many of them are, what are they? What are the actual sensors? There's 52 modules, and each module has one laser and six sensors. And the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds. And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain. And then a few go in, a few come back out, a bunch go in, then a few come back out, and we sense those photons and then we do the reconstruction for the activity. Overall, there's about a thousand plus channels that are sampling your activity. How difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is? Because it's surprisingly comfortable. I would not think it would be comfortable. Something that's measuring brain activity, I would not think it would be comfortable, but it is. I agree. In fact, I want to take this home. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So people are accustomed to being in big systems like fMRI where there's 120 decibel sounds and you're in a claustrophobic encasement, or EEG, which is just painful, or surgery. And so, yes, I agree that this is a convenient option to be able to just put on your head that measures your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose. So if we want to have it during a podcast, if we want to be at home in a business setting, it's freedom to record your brain activity in the setting that you choose. Yeah, but sort of from an engineering perspective, are these, what is it? There's a bunch of different modular parts and they're kind of, there's like a rubber band thing where they mold to the shape of your head. That's right. So we built this version of the mechanical design to accommodate most adult heads. But I have a giant head and it fits fine. It fits well, actually. So I don't think I have an average head. Okay, maybe I feel much better about my head now. Maybe I'm more average than I thought. Okay, so what else is there interesting that you could say while it's on our heads? I can keep this on the whole time. This is kind of awesome. And it's amazing for me, as a fan of Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu MATE, you guys use that too. But it's amazing to have code running to the side, measuring stuff and collecting data. I mean, I feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded. Like, you know when you have a good friend that listens to you, that actually is listening to you? This is what I feel like, like a much better friend because it's like accurately listening to me, Ubuntu. What a cool perspective, I hadn't thought about that, of feeling understood. Heard. Yeah, heard deeply by the mechanical system that is recording your brain activity, versus the human that you're engaging with, that your mind immediately goes to that there's this dimensionality and depth of understanding of this software system which you're intimately familiar with. And now you're able to communicate with this system in ways that you couldn't before. Yeah, I feel heard. Yeah, I mean, I guess what's interesting about this is your intuitions are spot on. Most people have intuitions about brain interfaces that they've grown up with this idea of people moving cursors on the screen or typing or changing the channel or skipping a song. It's primarily been anchored on control. And I think the more relevant understanding of brain interfaces or neuroimaging is that it's a measurement system. And once you have numbers for a given thing, a seemingly endless number of possibilities emerge around that of what to do with those numbers. So before you tell me about the possibilities, this was an incredible experience. I can keep this on for another two hours, but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons, just because we probably wanna keep the data small and visualize it nicely for the final product, we wanna cut this off and take this amazing helmet away from me. So Brian, thank you so much for this experience and let's continue without helmetless. All right. So that was an incredible experience. Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities that opens up that stream of data, that rich stream of data from the brain? First, I'm curious, what is your reaction? What comes to mind when you put that on your head? What does it mean to you? And what possibilities emerge and what significance might it have? I'm curious where your orientation is at. Well, for me, I'm really excited by the possibility of various information about my body, about my mind being converted into data, such that data can be used to create products that make my life better. So that to me is really exciting possibility. Even just like a Fitbit that measures, I don't know, some very basic measurements about your body is really cool. But the bandwidth of information, the resolution of that information is very crude, so it's not very interesting. The possibility of just building a data set coming in a clean way and a high bandwidth way from my brain opens up all kinds of... I was kind of joking when we were talking, but it's not really, it's like I feel heard in the sense that it feels like the full richness of the information coming from my mind is actually being recorded by the machine. I mean, I can't quite put it into words, but there is genuinely for me, there's not some kind of joke about me being a robot. It just genuinely feels like I'm being heard in a way that's going to improve my life, as long as the thing that's on the other end can do something useful with that data. But even the recording itself is like, once you record, it's like taking a picture. That moment is forever saved in time. Now, a picture cannot allow you to step back into that world, but perhaps recording your brain is a much higher resolution thing, much more personal recording of that information than a picture that would allow you to step back into that where you were in that particular moment in history and then map out a certain trajectory to tell you certain things about yourself that could open up all kinds of applications. Of course, there's health that I consider, but honestly, to me, the exciting thing is just being heard. My state of mind, the level of focus, all those kinds of things, being heard. What I heard you say is you have an entirety of lived experience, some of which you can communicate in words and in body language, some of which you feel internally, which cannot be captured in those communication modalities, and that this measurement system captures both the things you can try to articulate in words, maybe in a lower dimensional space, using one word, for example, to communicate focus, when it really may be represented in a 20 dimensional space of this particular kind of focus and that this information is being captured, so it's a closer representation to the entirety of your experience captured in a dynamic fashion that is not just a static image of your conscious experience. Yeah, that's the promise, that was the feeling, and it felt like the future. So it was a pretty cool experience. And from the sort of mechanical perspective, it was cool to have an actual device that feels pretty good, that doesn't require me to go into the lab. And also the other thing I was feeling, there's a guy named Andrew Huberman, he's a friend of mine, amazing podcast, people should listen to it, Huberman Lab Podcast. We're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on. And we're kind of, he's a neuroscientist and I'm a data person, machine learning person, and we're both excited by how much the, how much the data measurements of the human mind, the brain and all the different metrics that come from that could be used to understand human beings and in a rigorous scientific way. So the other thing I was thinking about is how this could be turned into a tool for science. Sort of not just personal science, not just like Fitbit style, like how am I doing on my personal metrics of health, but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on. So like data, not at the scale of an individual, but data at a scale of many individuals or a large number of individuals. So personal being heard was exciting and also just for science is exciting. It's very easy, like there's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that you could scale much easier. If you think about that second thing you said about the science of the brain, most, we've done a pretty good job, like we, the human race has done a pretty good job figuring out how to quantify the things around us from distant stars to calories and steps and our genome. So we can measure and quantify pretty much everything in the known universe except for our minds. And we can do these one offs if we're going to get an fMRI scan or do something with a low res EEG system, but we haven't done this at population scale. And so if you think about human thought or human cognition is probably the single law, largest raw input material into society at any given moment is our conversations with ourselves and with other people. And we have this raw input that we can't, that haven't been able to measure yet. And if you, when I think about it through that frame, it's remarkable, it's almost like we live in this wild, wild West of unquantified communications within ourselves and between each other when everything else has been grounded in me. For example, I know if I buy an appliance at the store or on a website, I don't need to look at the measurements on the appliance and make sure it can fit through my door. That's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing and construction. Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards. And we don't have engineering standards around cognition. It's not a, it has not entered as a formal engineering discipline that enables us to scaffold in society with everything else we're doing, including consuming news, our relationships, politics, economics, education, all the above. And so to me that the most significant contribution that kernel technology has to offer would be the formal, the introduction to formal engineering of cognition as it relates to everything else in society. I love that idea that you kind of think that there's just this ocean of data that's coming from people's brains as being in a crude way, reduced down to like tweets and texts and so on, just a very hardcore, many scale compression of actual, the raw data. But maybe you can comment, because you're using the word cognition. I think the first step is to get the brain data. But is there a leap to be taking to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition? So is your idea is basically you need to start collecting data at scale from the brain, and then we start to really be able to take little steps along the path to actually measuring some deep sense of cognition. Because as I'm sure you know, we understand a few things, but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition. This has been one of the most significant challenges of building Kernel, and Kernel wouldn't exist if I wasn't able to fund it initially by myself. Because when I engage in conversations with investors, the immediate thought is, what is the killer app? And of course, I understand that heuristic, that's what they're looking at, is they're looking to de risk. Is the product solved? Is there a customer base? Are people willing to pay for it? How does it compare to competing options? And in the case with brain interfaces, when I started the company, there was no known path to even build a technology that could potentially become mainstream. And then once we figured out the technology, we could even, we could commence having conversations with investors and it became, what is the killer app? And so what has been, so I funded the first $53 million for the company. And to raise the round of funding, the first one we did, I spoke to 228 investors. One said yes, it was remarkable. And it was mostly around this concept around what is a killer app. And so internally, the way we think about it is, we think of the go to market strategy much more like the Drake equation, where if we can build technology that has the characteristics of, it has the data quality is high enough, it meets some certain threshold, cost, accessibility, comfort, it can be worn in contextual environments. If it meets the criteria of being a mass market device, then the responsibility that we have is to figure out how to create the algorithm that enables the human, to enable humans to then find value with it. So the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the internet, is you wanna populate an ecosystem with a certain number of devices, you want a certain number of people who play around with them, who do experiments of certain data collection parameters, you want to encourage certain mistakes from experts and non experts. These are all critical elements that ignite discovery. And so we believe we've accomplished the first objective of building technology that reaches those thresholds. And now it's the Drake equation component of how do we try to generate 20 years of value discovery in a two or three year time period? How do we compress that? So just to clarify, so when you mean the Drake equation, which for people who don't know, I don't know why you, if you listen to this, I bring up aliens every single conversation. So I don't know how you would know what the Drake equation is, but you mean like the killer app, it would be one alien civilization in that equation. So meaning like this is in search of an application that's impactful, transformative. By the way, it should be, we need to come up with a better term than killer app as a. It's also violent, right? It's very violent. You can go like viral app, that's horrible too, right? It's some very inspiringly impactful application. How about that? No. Yeah. Okay, so ballistic with killer app, that's fine. Nobody's. But I concur with you. I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept. You know, it's one of those sticky things that is as effective to use in the tech world. But when you now become a communicator outside of the tech world, especially when you're talking about software and hardware and artificial intelligence applications, it sounds horrible. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I actually regret now having called attention to cyber regret having used that word in this conversation because it's something I would not normally do. I used it in order to create a bridge of shared understanding of how others would, what terminology others would use. Yeah. But yeah, I concur. Let's go with impactful application. Or the. Just value creation. Value creation. Something people love using. There we go, that's it. Love app. Okay, so what, do you have any ideas? So you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of an application that people love using. Is, do you have ideas? We've began to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions or we begin circling around this concept of, does anybody have an idea? Does anyone have intuitions? And if we see the conversation starting to veer in that direction, we flag it and say, human intuition alert, stop it. And so we really want to focus on the algorithm of there's a natural process of human discovery. That when you populate a system with devices and you give people the opportunity to play around with it in expected and unexpected ways, we are thinking that is a much better system of discovery than us exercising intuitions. And it's interesting, we're also seeing a few neuroscientists who have been talking to us. While I was speaking to this one young associate professor, and I approached a conversation and said, hey, we have these five data streams that we're pulling off. When you hear that, what weighted value do you add to each data source? Which one do you think is going to be valuable for your objectives and which one's not? And he said, I don't care, just give me the data. All I care about is my machine learning model. But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind. He did not come to the table and say, I think the brain operates in this way and these reasons or have these functions. He didn't care, he just wanted the data. And we're seeing that more and more that certain people are devaluing human intuitions for good reasons, as we've seen in machine learning over the past couple years. And we're doing the same in our value creation market strategy. So collect more data, clean data, make the product such that the collection of data is easy and fun and then the rest will just spring to life. Through humans playing around with them. Our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever. And with that, then applying all the best tools of machine learning and other techniques to extract out, to try to find insight. But yes, our objective is really to systematize the discovery process because we can't put definite timeframes on discovery. The brain is complicated and science is not a business strategy. And so we really need to figure out how to, this is the difficulty of bringing technology like this to market. And it's why most of the time it just languishes in academia for quite some time. But we hope that we will cross over and make this mainstream in the coming years. The thing was cool to wear, but are you chasing a good reason for millions of people to put this on their head and keep on their head regularly? Is there, like who's going to discover that reason? Is it going to be people just kind of organically or is there going to be an Angry Birds style application that's just too exciting to not use? If I think through the things that have changed my life most significantly over the past few years, when I started wearing a wearable on my wrist that would give me data about my heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, metabolic approximations, et cetera, for the first time in my life, I had access to information, sleep patterns that were highly impactful. They told me, for example, if I eat close to bedtime, I'm not going to get deep sleep. And not getting deep sleep means you have all these follow on consequences in life. And so it opened up this window of understanding of myself that I cannot self introspect and deduce these things. This is information that was available to be acquired, but it just wasn't. I would have to get an expensive sleep study, then it's an end, like one night, and that's not good enough to look at, to run all my trials. And so if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist, and now you're applying it to the entire cortex on the brain and you say, what kind of information could we acquire? It opens up a whole new universe of possibilities. For example, we did this internal study at Kernel where I wore a prototype device and we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep. So I had a device measuring my sleep. I performed with 13 of my coworkers. We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions. And we focused on reaction time, impulse control, short term memory, and then a resting state task. And with mine, we found, for example, that my impulse control was independently correlated with my sleep outside of behavioral measures of my ability to play the game. The point of the study was I had, the brain study I did at Kernel confirmed my life experience that if I, my deep sleep determined whether or not I would be able to resist temptation the following day. And my brain did show that as one example. And so if you start thinking, if you actually have data on yourself, on your entire cortex and you can control the settings, I think there's probably a large number of things that we could discover about ourselves, very, very small and very, very big. I just, for example, like when you read news, what's going on? Like when you use social media, when you use news, like all the ways we allocate attention. That's right. With the computer. I mean, that seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on a Kernel, by the way, what is it called? Kernel Flux, Kernel, like what? Flow. Flow. We have two technologies, you or Flow. Flow, okay. So when you put on the Kernel Flow, it seems like to be a compelling time and place to do it is when you're behind a desk, behind a computer. Because you could probably wear it for prolonged periods of time as you're taking in content. And there could a lot of, because so much of our lives happens in the digital world now. That kind of coupling the information about the human mind with the consumption and the behaviors in the digital world might give us a lot of information about the effects of the way we behave and navigate the digital world to the actual physical meat space effects on our body. It's interesting to think, so in terms of both like for work, I'm a big fan of Cal Newport, his ideas of deep work that I spend, with few exceptions, I try to spend the first two hours of every day, usually if I'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule is going to be up to eight hours of deep work, of focus, zero distraction. And for me to analyze, I mean I'm very aware of the waning of that, the ups and downs of that. And it's almost like you're surfing the ups and downs of that as you're doing programming, as you're doing thinking about particular problems, you're trying to visualize things in your mind, you start trying to stitch them together. You're trying to, when there's a dead end about an idea, you have to kind of calmly like walk back and start again, all those kinds of processes. It'd be interesting to get data on what my mind is actually doing. And also recently started doing, I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago and been building up to that. I started using, started meditating using his app, Waking Up, I very much recommend it. It'd be interesting to get data on that because it's, you're very, it's like you're removing all the noise from your head and you very much, it's an active process of active noise removal, active noise canceling like the headphones. And it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind before the meditation, during it and after, all those kinds of things. And all of your examples, it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience for you, so whether it be the meditation app or the Deep Work or all the things you mentioned, they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns. Yeah. Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10X or 20X or 30X, they would reconstruct their product or incorporate those knowns. So it'd be, and so this is the dimensionality that I think is the promising aspect is that people will be able to use this quantification, use this information to build more effective products. And this is, I'm not talking about better products to advertise to you or manipulate you. I'm talking about our focus is helping people, individuals have this contextual awareness and this quantification and then to engage with others who are seeking to improve people's lives, that the objective is betterment across ourselves, individually and also with each other. Yeah, so it's a nice data stream to have if you're building an app, like if you're building a podcast listening app, it would be nice to know data about the listener so that like if you're bored or you fell asleep, maybe pause the podcast, it's like really dumb, just very simple applications that could just improve the quality of the experience of using the app. I'm imagining if you have your neural, this is Lex and there's a statistical representation of you and you engage with the app and it says, Lex, you're best to engage with this meditation exercise in the following settings. At this time of day, after eating this kind of food or not eating, fasting with this level of blood glucose and this kind of night's sleep. But all these data combined to give you this contextually relevant experience, just like we do with our sleep. You've optimized your entire life based upon what information you can acquire and know about yourself. And so the question is, how much do we really know of the things going around us? And I would venture to guess in my own life experience, I capture, my self awareness captures an extremely small percent of the things that actually influence my conscious and unconscious experience. Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you to be more self aware, not just because you trust everything the data is saying, but it'll give you a prod to start investigating. Like I would love to get like a rating, like a ranking of all the things I do and what are the things, it's probably important to do without the data, but the data will certainly help. It's like rank all the things you do in life and which ones make you feel shitty, which ones make you feel good. Like you're talking about evening, Brian. Like this is a good example, somebody like, I do pig out at night as well. And it never makes me feel good. Like you're in a safe space. This is a safe space, let's hear it. No, I definitely have much less self control at night and it's interesting. And the same, people might criticize this, but I know my own body. I know when I eat carnivores, just eat meat, I feel much better than if I eat more carbs. The more carbs I eat, the worse I feel. I don't know why that is. There is science supporting it, but I'm not leaning on science. I'm leaning on personal experience and that's really important. I don't need to read, I'm not gonna go on a whole rant about nutrition science, but many of those studies are very flawed. They're doing their best, but nutrition science is a very difficult field of study because humans are so different and the mind has so much impact on the way your body behaves. And it's so difficult from a scientific perspective to conduct really strong studies that you have to be almost like a scientist of one if to do these studies on yourself. That's the best way to understand what works for you or not. And I don't understand why, because it sounds unhealthy, but eating only meat always makes me feel good. Just eat meat, that's it. And I don't have any allergies, any of that kind of stuff. I'm not full like Jordan Peterson, where if he deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet, he goes off the cliff. No, I can have chocolate, I can go off the diet, I feel fine, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel. But when I eat only meat, I feel great. And it'd be nice to be reminded of that. Like there's a very simple fact that I feel good when I eat carnivore. And I think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences. Like I feel really good when I exercise. I hate exercise, but in the rest of the day, the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind and the experiences and the happiness and all those kinds of things, I feel really good. And to be able to concretely express that through data would be nice. It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement, like remember what feels good and whatnot. And there could be things like that, I'm not, many things that you're suggesting that I could not be aware of, that might be sitting right in front of me that make me feel really good and make me feel not good. And the data would show that. I agree with you. I've actually employed the same strategy. I fired my mind entirely from being responsible for constructing my diet. And so I started doing a program where I now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days. And it captures, of course, the things you would expect like cholesterol, but also DNA methylation and all kinds of things about my body, all the processes that make up me. And then I let that data generate the shopping lists. And so I never actually ask my mind what it wants. It's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants. And so I call this goal alignment within Brian. And there's 200 plus actors that I'm currently asking their opinion of. And so I'm asking my liver, how are you doing? And it's expressing via the biomarkers. And so that I construct that diet and I only eat those foods until my next testing round. And that has changed my life more than I think anything else because in the demotion of my conscious mind that I gave primacy to my entire life, it led me astray because like you were saying, the mind then goes out into the world and it navigates the dozens of different dietary regimens people put together in books. And it's all has their supporting science in certain contextual settings, but it's not N of one. And like you're saying, this dietary really is an N of one. What people have published scientifically of course can be used for nice groundings, but it changes when you get to an N of one level. And so that's what gets me excited about brain interfaces is if I could do the same thing for my brain where I can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice or for its decision making, which is flawed. And I'd rather just look at this data and I've never had better health markers in my life than when I stopped actually asking myself to be in charge of it. The idea of demotion of the conscious mind is such a sort of engineering way of phrasing meditation. That's what we're doing, right? That's beautiful, that means really beautifully put. By the way, testing round, what does that look like? What's that? Well, you mentioned. Yeah, the test I do. Yes. So it includes a complete blood panel. I do a microbiome test. I do a diet induced inflammation. So I look for exotokine expressions. So foods that produce inflammatory reactions. I look at my neuroendocrine systems. I look at all my neurotransmitters. I do, yeah, there's several micronutrient tests to see how I'm looking at the various nutrients. What about self report of how you feel? Almost like, you can't demote your, you still exist within your conscious mind, right? So that lived experience is of a lot of value. So how do you measure that? I do a temporal sampling over some duration of time. So I'll think through how I feel over a week, over a month, over three months. I don't do a temporal sampling of if I'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box and be like, you know what, Captain Crunch is probably the right thing for me today because I'm feeling like I need a little fun in my life. And so it's a temporal sampling. If the data sets large enough, then I smooth out the function of my natural oscillations of how I feel about life where some days I may feel upset or depressed or down or whatever. And I don't want those moments to then rule my decision making. That's why the demotion happens. And it says, really, if you're looking at health over a 90 day period of time, all my 200 voices speak up on that interval. And they're all given voice to say, this is how I'm doing and this is what I want. And so it really is an accounting system for everybody. So that's why I think that if you think about the future of being human, there's two things I think that are really going on. One is the design, manufacturing, and distribution of intelligence is heading towards zero on a cost curve over a certain design, over a certain timeframe that our ability to, you know, evolution produced us an intelligent form of intelligence. We are now designing our own intelligence systems and the design, manufacturing, distribution of that intelligence over a certain timeframe is going to go to a cost of zero. Design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence cost is going to zero. For example. Again, just give me a second. That's brilliant, okay. And evolution is doing the design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence. And now we are doing the design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence. And the cost of that is going to zero. That's a very nice way of looking at life on Earth. So if that's going on and then now in parallel to that, then you say, okay, what then happens if when that cost curve is heading to zero? Our existence becomes a goal alignment problem, a goal alignment function. And so the same thing I'm doing where I'm doing goal alignment within myself of these 200 biomarkers, where I'm saying, when Brian exists on a daily basis and this entity is deciding what to eat and what to do and et cetera, it's not just my conscious mind, which is opining, it's 200 biological processes and there's a whole bunch of more voices involved. So in that equation, we're going to increasingly automate the things that we spend high energy on today because it's easier. And now we're going to then negotiate the terms and conditions of intelligent life. Now we say conscious existence because we're biased because that's what we have, but it will be the largest computational exercise in history because you're now doing goal alignment with planet Earth, within yourself, with each other, within all the intelligent agents we're building, bots and other voice assistants. You basically have a trillions and trillions of agents working on the negotiation of goal alignment. Yeah, this is in fact true. And what was the second thing? That was it. So the cost, the design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence going to zero, which then means what's really going on? What are we really doing? We're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence. Do you worry about the survival of this process that life as we know it on Earth comes to an end or at least intelligent life, that as the cost goes to zero something happens where all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash by something like nuclear war or development of AGI systems that are very dumb, not AGI I guess, but AI systems, the paperclip thing, en masse is dumb but has unintended consequences where it destroys human civilization. Do you worry about those kinds of things? I mean, it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into the sphere of human consciousness. Humans identify the foreign object, in this case, artificial intelligence. Our amygdala fires up and says scary, foreign, we should be apprehensive about this. And so it makes sense from a biological perspective that humans, the knee jerk reaction is fear. What I don't think has been properly weighted with that is that we are the first generation of intelligent beings on this Earth that has been able to look out over their expected lifetime and see there is a real possibility of evolving into entirely novel forms of consciousness, so different that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today. We don't have words for it, we can't hint at it, we can't point at it, we can't, you can't look in the sky and see that thing that is shining, we're gonna go up there. You cannot even create an aspirational statement about it. And instead we've had this knee jerk reaction of fear about everything that could go wrong. But in my estimation, this should be the defining aspiration of all intelligent life on Earth that we would aspire, that basically every generation surveys the landscape of possibilities that are afforded, given the technological, cultural and other contextual situation that they're in. We're in this context, we haven't yet identified this and said, this is unbelievable, we should carefully think this thing through, not just of mitigating the things that'll wipe us out, but we have this potential, and so we just haven't given voice to it, even though it's within this realm of possibilities. So you're excited about the possibility of superintelligence systems and the opportunities that bring, I mean, there's parallels to this, you think about people before the internet as the internet was coming to life, I mean, there's kind of a fog through which you can't see, what does the future look like? Predicting collective intelligence, which I don't think we're understanding that we're living through that now, is that there's now, we've in some sense stopped being individual intelligences and become much more like collective intelligences, because ideas travel much, much faster now, and they can, in a viral way, sweep across the populations, and so it's almost, I mean, it almost feels like a thought is had by many people now, thousands or millions of people as opposed to an individual person, and that's changed everything, but to me, I don't think we're realizing how much that actually changed people or societies, but to predict that before the internet would have been very difficult, and in that same way, we're sitting here with the fog before us, thinking, what is superintelligence systems, how is that going to change the world? What is increasing the bandwidth, like plugging our brains into this whole thing, how is that going to change the world? And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know, and it could be, it could, whatever comes to be, could destroy the world, we could be the last generation, but it also could transform in ways that creates an incredibly fulfilling life experience that's unlike anything we've ever experienced. It might involve dissolution of ego and consciousness and so on, you're no longer one individual, it might be more, you know, that might be a certain kind of death, an ego death, but the experience might be really exciting and enriching, maybe we'll live in a virtual, like it's like, it's funny to think about a bunch of sort of hypothetical questions of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world? Like if you were able to plug your brain in in a very dense way into a video game, like which world would you want to live in? In the video game or in the physical world? For most of us, we're kind of toying it with the idea of the video game, but we still want to live in the physical world, have friendships and relationships in the physical world, but we don't know that, again, it's a fog, and maybe in 100 years, we're all living inside a video game, hopefully not Call of Duty, hopefully more like Sims 5, which version is it on? For you individually though, does it make you sad that your brain ends? That you die one day very soon? That the whole thing, that data source just goes offline sooner than you would like? That's a complicated question. I would have answered it differently in different times in my life. I had chronic depression for 10 years, and so in that 10 year time period, I desperately wanted lights to be off, and the thing that made it even worse is I was in a religious, I was born into a religion. It was the only reality I ever understood, and it's difficult to articulate to people when you're born into that kind of reality and it's the only reality you're exposed to, you are literally blinded to the existence of other realities because it's so much the in group, out group thing, and so in that situation, it was not only that I desperately wanted lights out forever, it was that I couldn't have lights out forever. It was that there was an afterlife, and this afterlife had this system that would either penalize or reward you for your behaviors, and so it was almost like this, this indescribable hopelessness of not only being in hopeless despair of not wanting to exist, but then also being forced to exist, and so there was a duration of my time, a duration of life where I'd say, like yes, I have no remorse for lights being out, and I actually want it more than anything in the entire world. There are other times where I'm looking out at the future and I say this is an opportunity for a future evolving human conscious experience that is beyond my ability to understand, and I jump out of bed and I race to work and I can't think about anything else, but I think the reality for me is, I don't know what it's like to be in your head, but in my head, when I wake up in the morning, I don't say good morning, Brian, I'm so happy to see you. Like I'm sure you're just gonna be beautiful to me today. You're not gonna make a huge long list of everything you should be anxious about. You're not gonna repeat that list to me 400 times. You're not gonna have me relive all the regrets I've made in life. I'm sure you're not doing any of that. You're just gonna just help me along all day long. I mean, it's a brutal environment in my brain, and we've just become normalized to this environment that we just accept that this is what it means to be human, but if we look at it, if we try to muster as much soberness as we can about the realities of being human, it's brutal. If it is for me, and so am I sad that the brain may be off one day? It depends on the contextual setting. Like how am I feeling? At what moment are you asking me that? And my mind is so fickle. And this is why, again, I don't trust my conscious mind. I have been given realities. I was given a religious reality that was a video game. And then I figured out it was not a real reality. And then I lived in a depressive reality, which delivered this terrible hopelessness. That wasn't a real reality. Then I discovered behavioral psychology, and I figured out how biased, 188 chronicle biases, and how my brain is distorting reality all the time. I have gone from one reality to another. I don't trust reality. I don't trust realities are given to me. And so to try to make a decision on what I value or not value that future state, I don't trust my response. So not fully listening to the conscious mind at any one moment as the ultimate truth, but allowing it to go up and down as it does, and just kind of being observing it. Yes, I assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up to my awareness is wrong upon landing. And I just need to figure out where it's wrong, how it's wrong, how wrong it is, and then try to correct for it as best I can. But I assume that on impact, it's mistaken in some critical ways. Is there something you can say by way of advice when the mind is depressive, when the conscious mind serves up something that, dark thoughts, how you deal with that, like how in your own life you've overcome that, and others who are experiencing that can overcome it? Two things. One, those depressive states are biochemical states. It's not you. And the suggestions that these things, that this state delivers to you about suggestion of the hopelessness of life or the meaninglessness of it, or that you should hit the eject button, that's a false reality. And that it's when, I completely understand the rational decision to commit suicide. It is not lost on me at all that that is an irrational situation, but the key is when you're in that situation and those thoughts are landing, to be able to say, thank you, you're not real. I know you're not real. And so I'm in a situation where for whatever reason I'm having this neurochemical state, but that state can be altered. And so again, it goes back to the realities of the difficulties of being human. And like when I was trying to solve my depression, I tried literally, you name it, I tried it systematically, and nothing would fix it. And so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces, for example, like, could I have numbers on my brain? Can I see what's going on? Because I go to the doctor and it's like, how do you feel? I don't know, terrible. Like on a scale from one to 10, how bad do you want to commit suicide? 10. Okay, here's his bottle. How much should I take? Well, I don't know, like just. Yeah, it's very, very crude. And this data opens up the, yeah, it opens up the possibility of really helping in those dark moments to first understand the ways, the ups and downs of those dark moments. On the complete flip side of that, right, I am very conscious in my own brain and deeply, deeply grateful that what there, it's almost like a chemistry thing, a biochemistry thing that I go many times throughout the day. I'll look at like this cup and I'll be overcome with joy how amazing it is to be alive. Like I actually think my biochemistry is such that it's not as common, like I've talked to people and I don't think that's that common. Like it's a, and it's not a rational thing at all. It's like, I feel like I'm on drugs and I'll just be like, whoa. And a lot of people talk about like the meditative experience will allow you to sort of, you know, look at some basic things like the movement of your hand as deeply joyful because it's like, that's life. But I get that from just looking at a cup. Like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew and I'll just be like, fuck, life is awesome. And I'll sometimes tweet that, but then I'll like regret it later, like, God damn it, you're so ridiculous. But yeah, so, but that is purely chemistry. Like there's no rational, it doesn't fit with the rest of my life. I have all this shit, I'm always late to stuff. I'm always like, there's all this stuff, you know, I'm super self critical, like really self critical about everything I do, to the point I almost hate everything I do, but there's this engine of joy for life outside of all that. And that has to be chemistry. And this flip side of that is what depression probably is, is the opposite of that feeling of like, cause I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing would save anybody in a state of depression. Like that would be like fresh, you're in a desert and it's a drink of water, shit man. The brain is a, it would be nice to understand where that's coming from, to be able to understand how you hit those lows and those highs that have nothing to do with the actual reality. It has to do with some very specific aspects of how you maybe see the world, maybe, it could be just like basic habits that you engage in and then how to walk along the line to find those experiences of joy. And this goes back to the discussion we're having of human cognition is in volume, the largest input of raw material into society. And it's not quantified. We have no bearings on it. And so we just, you wonder, we both articulated some of the challenges we have in our own mind. And it's likely that others would say, I have something similar. And you wonder when you look at society, how does that contribute to all the other compounder problems that we're experiencing? How does that blind us to the opportunities we could be looking at? And so it really, it has this potential distortion effect on reality that just makes everything worse. And I hope if we can put some, if we can assign some numbers to these things and just to get our bearings, so we're aware of what's going on, if we could find greater stabilization in how we conduct our lives and how we build society, it might be the thing that enables us to scaffold. Because we've really, again, we've done it, humans have done a fantastic job systematically scaffolding technology and science and institutions. It's human, it's our own selves, which we have not been able to scaffold. We are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure that remains unchanged. Is there something you could say about coupling this brain data with not just the basic human experience, but say an experience, you mentioned sleep, but the wildest experience, which is psychedelics, is there, and there's been quite a few studies now that are being approved and run, which is exciting from a scientific perspective on psychedelics. Do you think, what do you think happens to the brain on psychedelics? And how can data about this help us understand it? And when you're on DMT, do you see Ls? And can we convert that into data? Can you add aliens in there? Yeah, aliens, definitely. Do you actually meet aliens? And Ls, are Ls the aliens? I'm asking for a few Austin friends, yeah, that are convinced that they've actually met the Ls. What are Ls like? Are they friendly? Are they help? I haven't met them personally. Are they like the smurfs of like they're industrious and they have different skill sets and? Yeah, I think they're very, they're very critical as friends. They're trolls. The Ls are trolls. No, but they care about you. So there's a bunch of different version of trolls. There's loving trolls that are harsh on you, but they want you to be better. And there's trolls that just enjoy your destruction. And I think they're the ones that care for you. I think they're a criticism for my, see, I haven't met them directly, so it's like a friend of a friend. Yeah, they gave him a telephone. Yeah, a bit of a, and the whole point is that in psychedelics, and certainly at DMT, word, this is where the brain data versus word data fails, which is, you know, words can't convey the experience. Most people that, you can be poetic and so on, but it really does not convey the experience of what it actually means to meet the Ls. I mean, to me, what baselines this conversation is, imagine if we were interested in the health of your heart, and we started and said, okay, Lex, self interest back, tell me how's the health of your heart. And you sit there and you close your eyes and you think, feels all right, like things feel okay. And then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist is like, hey Lex, you know, tell me how you feel. You're like, well, actually, what I'd really like you to do is do an EKG and a blood panel and look at arterial plaques and let's look at my cholesterol. And there's like five to 10 studies you would do. They would then give you this report and say, here's the quantified health of your heart. Now with this data, I'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise and maybe I'll put you on a statin, like, et cetera. But the protocol is based upon this data. You would think the cardiologist is out of their mind if they just gave you a bottle of statins based upon, you're like, well, I think something's kind of wrong. And they're just kind of experiment and see what happens. But that's what we do with our mental health today. So it's kind of absurd. And so if you look at psychedelics to have, again, to be able to measure the brain and get a baseline state, and then to measure during a psychedelic experience and post the psychedelic experience and then do it longitudinally, you now have a quantification of what's going on. And so you could then pose questions, what molecule is appropriate at what dosages, at what frequency, in what contextual environment, what happens when I have this diet with this molecule, with this experience, all the experimentation you do when you have good sleep data or HRV. And so that's what I think happens, what we could potentially do with psychedelics is we could add this level of sophistication that is not in the industry currently. And it may improve the outcomes people experience, it may improve the safety and efficacy. And so that's what I hope we are able to achieve. And it would transform mental health because we would finally have numbers to work with to baseline ourselves. And then if you think about it, when we talk about things related to the mind, we talk about the modality. We use words like meditation or psychedelics or something else, because we can't talk about a marker in the brain. We can't use a word to say, we can't talk about cholesterol. We don't talk about plaque in the arteries. We don't talk about HRV. And so if we have numbers, then the solutions get mapped to numbers instead of the modalities being the thing we talk about. Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion. So in your blog post, Zero Principle Thinking, good title, you ponder how do people come up with truly original ideas. What's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data? Zero principles are building blocks. First principles are understanding of system laws. So if you take, for example, like in Sherlock Holmes, he's a first principles thinker. So he says, once you've eliminated the impossible, anything that remains, however improbable, is true. Whereas Dirk Gently, the holistic detective by Douglas Adams says, I don't like eliminating the impossible. So when someone says, from a first principles perspective, and they're trying to assume the fewest number of things within a given timeframe. And so when I, after Braintree Venmo, I set my mind to the question of, what single thing can I do that would maximally increase the probability that the human race thrives beyond what we can even imagine? And I found that in my conversations with others in the books I read, in my own deliberations, I had a missing piece of the puzzle, because I didn't feel like, yeah, I didn't feel like the future could be deduced from first principles thinking. And that's when I read the book, Zero, A Biography of a Dangerous Idea. And I... It's a really good book, by the way. I think it's my favorite book I've ever read. It's also a really interesting number, zero. And I wasn't aware that the number zero had to be discovered. I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and just tore up math and it tore up, I mean, it builds modern society, but it wrecked everything in its way. It was an unbelievable disruptor, and it was so difficult for society to get their heads around it. And so zero is, of course, the representation of a zero principle thinking, which is it's the caliber and consequential nature of an idea. And so when you talk about what kind of ideas have civilization transforming properties, oftentimes they fall in the zeroth category. And so in thinking this through, I was wanting to find a quantitative structure on how to think about these zeroth principles. And that's, so I came up with that to be a coupler with first principles thinking. And so now it's a staple as part of how I think about the world and the future. So it emphasizes trying to identify, it lands on that word impossible. Like what is impossible, essentially trying to identify what is impossible and what is possible. And being as, how do you, I mean, this is the thing, is most of society tells you the range of things they say is impossible is very wide. So you need to be shrinking that. I mean, that's the whole process of this kind of thinking is you need to be very rigorous in thinking about and be very rigorous in trying to be, trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible because very few things are actually impossible. I don't know what is actually impossible. Like it's the Joe Rogan, it's entirely possible. I like that approach to science, to engineering, to entrepreneurship, it's entirely possible. Basically shrink the impossible to zero, to a very small set. Yeah, life constraints favor first principle thinking because it enables faster action with higher probability of success. Pursuing zero with principle optionality is expensive and uncertain. And so in a society constrained by resources, time and money and a desire for social status, accomplishment, et cetera, it minimizes zero with principle thinking. But the reason why I think zero with principle thinking should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure is if you look through the history of the past couple of thousand years and let's just say we arbitrarily, we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level idea. And we say how many have occurred on what time scales and what were the contextual settings for it? I would argue that if you look at AlphaGo, when it played Go from another dimension, with the human Go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves, it attributed to like playing with an alien, playing Go with AlphaGo being from another dimension. And so if you say computational intelligence has an attribute of introducing zero like insights, then if you say what is going to be the occurrence of zeros in society going forward? And you could reasonably say probably a lot more than have occurred and probably more at a faster pace. So then if you say, what happens if you have this computational intelligence throughout society that the manufacturing design and distribution of intelligence is now going to heading towards zero, you have an increased number of zeros being produced with a tight connection between human and computers. That's when I got to a point and said, we cannot predict the future with first principles thinking. We can't, that cannot be our imagination set. It can't be our sole anchor in the situation that basically the future of our conscious existence, 20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero. So just to clarify, when you say zero, you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary idea. Yeah, something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence, either in the form of knowledge. Yeah, it's currently not manifest in what we acknowledge. So zero principle thinking is playing with ideas that are so revolutionary that we can't even clearly reason about the consequences once those ideas come to be. Yeah, or for example, like Einstein, that was a zeroeth, I would categorize it as a zeroeth principle insight. You mean general relativity, space time. Yeah, space time, yep, yep. That basically building upon what Newton had done and said, yes, also, and it just changed the fabric of our understanding of reality. And so that was unexpected, it existed. We just, it became part of our awareness and the moves AlphaGo made existed. It just came into our awareness. And so to your point, there's this question of what do we know and what don't we know? Do we think we know 99% of all things or do we think we know 0.001% of all things? And that goes back to no known, no unknowns and unknown unknowns. And first principles and zero principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework to say, there's no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things. Therefore, it would be helpful if they were just part of our standard thought processes because it may encourage different behaviors in what we do individually, collectively as a society, what we aspire to, what we talk about, the possibility sets we imagine. Yeah, I've been engaged in that kind of thinking quite a bit and thinking about engineering of consciousness. I think it's feasible, I think it's possible in the language that we're using here. And it's very difficult to reason about a world when inklings of consciousness can be engineered into artificial systems. Not from a philosophical perspective, but from an engineering perspective, I believe a good step towards engineering consciousness is creating engineering the illusion of consciousness. So I'm captivated by our natural predisposition to anthropomorphize things. And I think that's what we, I don't wanna hear from the philosophers, but I think that's what we kind of do to each other. That consciousness is created socially, that like much of the power of consciousness is in the social interaction. I create your consciousness, no, I create my consciousness by having interacted with you. And that's the display of consciousness. It's the same as like the display of emotion. Emotion is created through communication. Language is created through its use. And then we somehow humans kind of, especially philosophers, the hard problem of consciousness or the hard problem of consciousness, really wanna believe that we possess this thing. That's like there's an elf sitting there with a hat or like name tag says consciousness, and they're like feeding this subjective experience to us as opposed to like it actually being an illusion that we construct to make social communication more effective. And so I think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness, you can create some very fulfilling experiences in software. And so that to me is a compelling space of ideas to explore. I agree with you. And I think going back to our experience together with Brain Interfaces on, you could imagine if we get to a certain level of maturity. So first let's take the inverse of this. So you and I text back and forth and we're sending each other emojis. That has a certain amount of information transfer rate as we're communicating with each other. And so in our communication with people via email and texts and whatnot, we've taken the bandwidth of human interaction, the information transfer rate, and we've reduced it. We have less social cues. We have less information to work with. There's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding. So that is altering the conscious experience between two individuals. And if we add Brain Interfaces to the equation, let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality of our communications. That to me is what you're talking about, which is consciousness engineering. Perhaps I understand you with dimensions. So maybe I understand your, when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness, you can tell me you're happy. And I then do theory of mine and say, I can imagine what it might be like to be Lex and feel happy about seeing this cup. But if the interface could then quantify and give me a 50 vector space model and say, this is the version of happiness that Lex is experiencing as he looked at this cup, then it would allow me potentially to have much greater empathy for you and understand you as a human. This is how you experience joy, which is entirely unique from how I experienced joy, even though we assumed ahead of time that we're having some kind of similar experience. But I agree with you that we do consciousness engineering today in everything we do. When we talk to each other, when we're building products and that we're entering into a stage where it will be much more methodical and quantitative based and computational in how we go about doing it. Which to me, I find encouraging because I think it creates better guardrails to create ethical systems versus right now, I feel like it's really a wild, wild west on how these interactions are happening. Yeah, and it's funny you focus on human to human, but that this kind of data enables human to machine interaction, which is what we're kind of talking about when we say engineering consciousness. And that will happen, of course, let's flip that on its head. Right now we're putting humans as the central node. What if we gave GPT3 a bunch of human brains and said, hey, GPT3, learn some manners when you speak. Yeah. And run your algorithms on humans brains and see how they respond. So you can be polite and so that you can be friendly and so that you can be conversationally appropriate, but to inverse it, to give our machines a training set in real time with closed loop feedback so that our machines were better equipped to find their way through our society in polite and kind and appropriate ways. I love that idea. Or better yet, teach it some, have it read the following documents and have it visit Austin and Texas. And so that when you ask, when you tell it, why don't you learn some manners, GPT3 learns to say no. It learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual. So that, it depends. So it depends what kind of a version of GPT3 you want. One that's free, one that behaves well with the social. Viva la revolution. You want a socialist GPT3, you want an anarchist GPT3, you want a polite, like you take it home to visit mom and dad GPT3 and you want like party and like Vegas to a strip club GPT3, you want all flavors. And then you've gotta have goal alignment between all those. Yeah, they don't want to manipulate each other for sure. So that's, I mean, you kind of spoke to ethics. One of the concerns that people have in this modern world, the digital data is that of privacy and security. But privacy, they're concerned that when they share data, it's the same thing with you when we trust other human beings in being fragile and revealing something that we're vulnerable about. There's a leap of faith, there's a leap of trust that that's going to be just between us. There's a privacy to it. And then the challenge is when you're in the digital space then sharing your data with companies that use that data for advertisement and all those kinds of things, there's a hesitancy to share that much data, to share a lot of deep personal data. And if you look at brain data, that feels a whole lot like it's richly, deeply personal data. So how do you think about privacy with this kind of ocean of data? I think we got off to a wrong start with the internet where the basic rules of play for the company that be was, if you're a company, you can go out and get as much information on a person as you can find without their approval. And you can also do things to induce them to give you as much information. And you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it. You can do anything on the backside, you can make money on it, but the game is who can acquire the most information and devise the most clever schemes to do it. That was a bad starting place. And so we are in this period where we need to correct for that. And we need to say, first of all, the individual always has control over their data. It's not a free for all. It's not like a game of hungry hippo, but they can just go out and grab as much as they want. So for example, when your brain data was recorded today, the first thing we did in the kernel app was you have control over your data. And so it's individual consent, it's individual control. And then you can build up on top of that, but it has to be based upon some clear rules of play if everyone knows what's being collected, they know what's being done with it, and the person has control over it. So transparency and control. So everybody knows what does control look like, my ability to delete the data if I want. Yeah, delete it and to know who is being shared with under what terms and conditions. We haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products of if you say, for example, hey Spotify, please give me a customized playlist according to my neurome, you could say, you can have access to this vector space model, but only for this duration of time and then you've got to delete it. We haven't gotten there to that level of sophistication, but these are ideas we need to start talking about of how would you actually structure permissions? Yeah. And I think it creates a much more stable set for society to build where we understand the rules of play and people aren't vulnerable to being taken advantage. It's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of without their awareness with some other practice that some company is doing for their sole benefit. And so hopefully we are going through a process now where we're correcting for these things and that it can be an economy wide shift that, because really these are fundamentals we need to have in place. It's kind of fun to think about like in Chrome when you install an extension or like install an app, it's ask you like what permissions you're willing to give and be cool if in the future it says like, you can have access to my brain data. I mean, it's not unimaginable in the future that the big technology companies have built a business based upon acquiring data about you that they can then create a view to model of you and sell that predictability. And so it's not unimaginable that you will create with like kernel device, for example, a more reliable predictor of you than they could. And that they're asking you for permission to complete their objectives and you're the one that gets to negotiate that with them and say, sure. But so it's not unimaginable that might be the case. So there's a guy named Dela Musk and he has a company in one of the many companies called Neuralink that's also excited about the brain. So it'd be interesting to hear your kind of opinions about a very different approach that's invasive, that require surgery, that implants, a data collection device in the brain. How do you think about the difference between kernel and Neuralink in the approaches of getting that stream of brain data? Elon and I spoke about this a lot early on. We met up, I had started kernel and he had an interest in brain interfaces as well. And we explored doing something together, him joining kernel and ultimately it wasn't the right move. And so he started Neuralink and I continued building kernel, but it was interesting because we were both at this very early time where it wasn't certain if there was a path to pursue, if now was the right time to do something and then the technological choice of doing that. And so we were both, our starting point was looking at invasive technologies. And I was building invasive technology at the time. That's ultimately where he's gone. Little less than a year after Elon and I were engaged, I shifted kernel to do noninvasive. And we had this neuroscientist come to kernel. We were talking about, he had been doing neural surgery for 30 years, one of the most respected neuroscientists in the US. And we brought him to kernel to figure out the ins and outs of his profession. And at the very end of our three hour conversation, he said, you know, every 15 or so years, a new technology comes along that changes everything. He said, it's probably already here. You just can't see it yet. And my jaw dropped. I thought, because I had spoken to Bob Greenberg who had built a second site first on the optical nerve and then he did an array on the optical cortex. And then I also became friendly with Neuropace who does the implants for seizure detection and remediation. And I saw in their eyes what it was like to take something through an implantable device through for a 15 year run. They initially thought it was seven years and ended up being 15 years. And they thought it'd be a hundred million because it was 300, 400 million. And I really didn't want to build invasive technology. It was the only thing that appeared to be possible. But then once I spun up an internal effort to start looking at noninvasive options, we said, is there something here? Is there anything here that again has the characteristics of it has the high quality data, it could be low cost, it could be accessible. Could it make brain interfaces mainstream? And so I did a bet the company move. We shifted from noninvasive to invasive to noninvasive. So the answer is yes to that. There is something there that's possible. The answer is we'll see. We've now built both technologies and they're now you experienced one of them today. We were applying, we're now deploying it. So we're trying to figure out what value is really there. But I'd say it's really too early to express confidence. Whether it's too, I think it's too early to assess which technological choice is the right one on what time scales. Yeah, time scales are really important here. Very important because if you look at the, like on the invasive side, there's so much activity going on right now of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings, which would what Neuralink is building. It's possible that in 10, 15 years when they're scaling that technology, other things have come along. And you'd much rather do that. That thing starts to clock again. It may not be the case. It may be the case that Neuralink has properly chosen the right technology and that that's exactly what they want to be. Totally possible. And it's also possible that the path we chose that are noninvasive fall short for a variety of reasons. It's just, it's unknown. And so right now the two technologies we chose, the analogy I'd give you to create a baseline of understanding is if you think of it like the internet in the nineties, the internet became useful when people could do a dial up connection. And then as bandwidth increased, so did the utility of that connection and so did the ecosystem improve. And so if you say what kernel flow is going to give you a full screen on the picture of information, but as you're gonna be watching a movie, but the image is going to be blurred and the audio is gonna be muffled. So it has a lower resolution of coverage. A kernel flux, our MEG technology is gonna give you the full movie and 1080p. And Neuralink is gonna give you a circle on the screen of 4K. And so each one has their pros and cons and it's give and take. And so the decision I made with kernel was that these two technologies, flux and flow were basically the answer for the next seven years. And that they would give rise to the ecosystem which would become much more valuable than the hardware itself. And that we would just continue to improve on the hardware over time. And you know, it's early days, so. It's kind of fascinating to think about that. You don't, it's very true that you don't know both paths are very promising. And it's like 50 years from now we will look back and maybe not even remember one of them. And the other one might change the world. It's so cool how technology is. I mean, that's what entrepreneurship is, is like, it's the zero principle. It's like you're marching ahead into the darkness, into the fog, not knowing. It's wonderful to have someone else out there with us doing this. Because if you look at brain interfaces, anything that's off the shelf right now is inadequate. It's had its run for a couple of decades. It's still in hacker communities. It hasn't gone to the mainstream. The room size machines are on their own path. But there is no answer right now of bringing brain interfaces mainstream. And so it both, you know, both they and us, we've both spent over a hundred million dollars. And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this. Cause you need to build full stack. I mean, at Kernel, we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning. We have just under a hundred people. I think it's something like 36, 37 PhDs in these specialties, in these areas that there's only a few people in the world who have these abilities. And that's what it takes to build next generation, to make an attempt at breaking into brain interfaces. And so we'll see over the next couple of years, whether it's the right time or whether we were both too early or whether something else comes along in seven to 10 years, which is the right thing that brings it mainstream. So you see Elon as a kind of competitor or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty or both? It's a fellow traveler. It's like at the beginning of the internet is how many companies are going to be invited to this new ecosystem? Like an endless number. Because if you think that the hardware just starts the process. And so, okay, back to your initial example, if you take the Fitbit, for example, you say, okay, now I can get measurements on the body. And what do we think the ultimate value of this device is going to be? What is the information transfer rate? And they were in the market for a certain duration of time and Google bought them for two and a half billion dollars. They didn't have ancillary value add. There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device. They also didn't have increased insight with additional data streams. So it was really just the device. If you look, for example, at Apple and the device they sell, you have value in the device that someone buys, but also you have everyone who's building on top of it. So you have this additional ecosystem value and then you have additional data streams that come in which increase the value of the product. And so if you say, if you look at the hardware as the instigator of value creation, over time what we've built may constitute five or 10% of the value of the overall ecosystem. And that's what we really care about. What we're trying to do is kickstart the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain. And the hardware just opens the door to say what kind of ecosystem could exist. And that's why the examples are so relevant of the things you've outlined in your life. I hope those things, the books people write, the experiences people build, the conversations you have, your relationship with your AI systems, I hope those all are feeding on the insights built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life. And so that's the thinking behind it. Again, with the Drake equation being the underlying driver of value. And the people at Kernel have joined not because we have certainty of success, but because we find it to be the most exhilarating opportunity we could ever pursue in this time to be alive. You founded the payment system Braintree in 2007 that acquired Venmo in 2012, in that same year was acquired by PayPal, which is now eBay. Can you tell me the story of the vision and the challenge of building an online payment system and just building a large successful business in general? I discovered payments by accident. When I was 21, I just returned from Ecuador living among extreme poverty for two years. And I came back to the US and I was shocked by the opulence of the United States of America. Yeah, of the United States. And I just thought this is, I couldn't believe it. And I decided I wanted to try to spend my life helping others. Like that was the, that was a life objective that I thought was worthwhile to pursue versus making money and whatever the case may be for its own right. And so I decided in that moment that I was going to try to make enough money by the age of 30 to never have to work again. And then with some abundance of money, I could then choose to do things that might be beneficial to others, but may not meet the criteria of being a standalone business. And so in that process, I started a few companies, had some small successes, had some failures. In one of the endeavors, I was up to my eyeballs in debt. Things were not going well. And I needed a part time job to pay my bills. And so I, one day I saw in the paper in Utah where I was living the 50 richest people in Utah. And I emailed each one of their assistants and said, you know, I'm young, I'm resourceful, I'll do anything. I'll just want to, I'm entrepreneurial. I tried to get a job that would be flexible and no one responded. And then I interviewed at a few dozen places. Nobody would even give me the time of day. Like it wouldn't want to take me seriously. And so finally I, it was on monster.com that I saw this job posting for credit card sales door to door. Commission. I did not know the story, this is great. I love the head drop, that's exactly right. So it was. The low points to which we go in life. So I responded and you know, the person made an attempt at suggesting that they had some kind of standards that they would consider hiring. But it's kind of like, if you could fog a mirror, like come and do this because it's 100% commission. And so I started walking up and down the street in my community selling credit card processing. And so what you learn immediately in doing that is if you walk into a business, first of all, the business owner is typically there. And you walk in the door and they can tell by how you're dressed or how you walk, whatever their pattern recognition is. And they just hate you immediately. It's like, stop wasting my time. I really am trying to get stuff done. I don't want us to a sales pitch. And so you have to overcome the initial get out. And then once you engage, when you say the word credit card processing, the person's like, I already hate you because I have been taken advantage of dozens of times because you all are weasels. And so I had to figure out an algorithm to get past all those different conditions. Cause I was still working on my other startup for the majority of my time. So I was doing this part time. And so I figured out that the industry really was built on people, on deceit, basically people promising things that were not reality. And so I don't know if you've heard of it, but we're not reality and so I'd walk into a business. I'd say, look, I would give you a hundred dollars. I'd put a hundred dollar bill and say, I'll give you a hundred dollars for three minutes of your time. If you don't say yes to what I'm saying, I'll give you a hundred dollars. And then he usually crack a smile and say, okay, like what do you got for me son? And so I'd sit down, I just opened my book and I'd say, here's the credit card industry. Here's how it works. Here are the players. Here's what they do. Here's how they deceive you. Here's what I am. I'm no different than anyone else. I it's like, you're gonna process your credit card. You're gonna get the money in the account. You're just gonna get a clean statement, you're gonna have someone who answers the call when someone asks and you know, just like the basic, like you're okay. And people started saying yes. And then of course I went to the next business and be like, you know, Joe and Susie and whoever said yes too. And so I built a social proof structure and I became the number one salesperson out of 400 people nationwide doing this. And I worked, you know, half time still doing this other startup and. That's a brilliant strategy, by the way. It's very well, very well strategized and executed. I did it for nine months. And at the time my customer base was making, was generating around, I think it was six, if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month were the overall revenues. I thought, wow, that's amazing. If I built that as my own company, I would just make $62,000 a month of income passively with these merchants processing credit cards. So I thought, hmm. And so that's when I thought I'm gonna create a company. And so then I started Braintree. And the idea was the online world was broken because PayPal had been acquired by eBay around, I think, 1999 or 2000. And eBay had not innovated much with PayPal. So it basically sat still for seven years as the software world moved along. And then authorize.net was also a company that was relatively stagnant. So you basically had software engineers who wanted modern payment tools, but there were none available for them. And so they just dealt with software they didn't like. And so with Braintree, I thought the entry point is to build software that engineers will love. And if we can find the entry point via software and make it easy and beautiful and just a magical experience and then provide customer service on top of that, that would be easy, that would be great. What I was really going after though, it was PayPal. They were the only company in payments making money. Because they had the relationship with eBay early on, people created a PayPal account, they'd fund their account with their checking account versus their credit cards. And then when they'd use PayPal to pay a merchant, PayPal had a cost of payment of zero versus if you have coming from a credit card, you have to pay the bank the fees. So PayPal's margins were 3% on a transaction versus a typical payments company, which may be a nickel or a penny or a dime or something like that. And so I knew PayPal really was the model to replicate, but a bunch of companies had tried to do that. They tried to come in and build a two sided marketplace. So get consumers to fund the checking account and the merchants to accept it, but they'd all failed because building a two sided marketplace is very hard at the same time. So my plan was I'm going to build a company and get the best merchants in the whole world to use our service. Then in year five, I'm going to have, I'm going to acquire a consumer payments company and I'm going to bring the two together. And to focus on the merchant side and then get the payments company that does the customer, the whatever, the other side of it. This is the plan I presented when I was at University of Chicago. And weirdly it happened exactly like that. So four years in our customer base included Uber, Airbnb, GitHub, 37 Signals, not Basecamp. We had a fantastic collection of companies that represented the fastest growing, some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world. And then we met up with Venmo and they had done a remarkable job in building product. It does up then something very counterintuitive, which is make public your private financial transactions which people previously thought were something that should be hidden from others. And we acquired Venmo and at that point we now had, we replicated the model because now people could fund their Venmo account with their checking account, keep money in the account. And then you could just plug Venmo as a form of payment. And so I think PayPal saw that, that we were getting the best merchants in the world. We had people using Venmo. They were both the up and coming millennials at the time who had so much influence online. And so they came in and offered us an attractive number. And my goal was not to build the biggest payments company in the world. It wasn't to try to climb the Forbes billionaire list. It was, the objective was I want to earn enough money so that I can basically dedicate my attention to doing something that could potentially be useful on a society wide scale. And more importantly, that could be considered to be valuable from the vantage point of 2050, 2100 and 2500. So thinking about it on a few hundred year timescale. And there was a certain amount of money I needed to do that. So I didn't require the permission of anybody to do that. And so that what PayPal offered was sufficient for me to get that amount of money to basically have a go. And that's when I set off to survey everything I could identify an existence to say of anything in the entire world I could do. What one thing could I do that would actually have the highest value potential for the species? And so it took me a little while to arrive at Brainerd Faces, but. Payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world. Like let's not forget that too easily. I mean, obviously you know this, but there's quite a few lovely folks who are now fascinated with the space of cryptocurrency. And payments are very much connected to this, but in general, just money. And many of the folks I've spoken with, they also kind of connect that to not just purely financial discussions, but philosophical and political discussions. And they see Bitcoin as a way, almost as activism, almost as a way to resist the corruption of centralized centers of power. And sort of basically in the 21st century, decentralizing control. Whether that's Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, they see that's one possible way to give power to those that live in regimes that are corrupt or are not respectful of human rights and all those kinds of things. What's your sense, just all your expertise with payments and seeing how that changed the world, what's your sense about the lay of the land for the future of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies in the positive impact it may have on the world? To be clear, my communication wasn't meant to minimize payments or to denigrate it in any way. It was an attempt at communication that when I was surveying the world, it was an algorithm of what could I individually do? So there are things that exist that have a lot of potential that can be done. And then there's a filtering of how many people are qualified to do this given thing. And then there's a further characterization that can be done of, okay, given the number of qualified people, will somebody be a unique out performer of that group to make something truly impossible to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done? So there's a process of assessing where can you add unique value in the world? And some of that has to do with you being very formal and calculative here, but some of that is just like, what do you sense, like part of that equation is how much passion you sense within yourself to be able to drive that through, to discover the impossibilities and make them possible. That's right, and so we were at Braintree, I think we were the first company to integrate Coinbase into our, I think we were the first payments company to formally incorporate crypto, if I'm not mistaken. For people who are not familiar, Coinbase is a place where you can trade cryptocurrencies. Yeah, which was one of the only places you could. So we were early in doing that. And of course, this was in the year 2013. So an attorney to go in cryptocurrency land. I concur with the statement you made of the potential of the principles underlying cryptocurrencies. And that many of the things that they're building in the name of money and of moving value is equally applicable to the brain and equally applicable to how the brain interacts with the rest of the world and how we would imagine doing goal alignment with people. So to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility. And your question is isolated on the money. And I think it just is basically a scaffolding layer for all of society. So you don't see this money as particularly distinct from other? I don't. I think we at Kernel, we will benefit greatly from the progress being made in cryptocurrency because it will be a similar technology stack we will want to use for many things we want to accomplish. And so I'm bullish on what's going on and think it could greatly enhance brain interfaces and the value of the brain interface ecosystem. I mean, is there something you could say about, first of all, bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat money? So do you have a sense that in 21st century cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments and changed the face of governments, the structure of governments? It's the same way I think about my diet, where previously it was conscious Brian, looking at foods in certain biochemical states. Am I hungry? Am I irritated? Am I depressed? And then I choose based upon those momentary windows. Do I eat at night when I'm fatigued and I have low willpower? Am I going to pig out on something? And the current monetary system is based upon human conscious decision making. And politics and power and this whole mess of things. And what I like about the building blocks of cryptocurrencies, it's methodical, it's structured, it is accountable, it's transparent. And so it introduces this scaffolding, which I think, again, is the right starting point for how we think about building next generation institutions for society. And that's why I think it's much broader than money. So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin is the demotion of the conscious mind as well. In the same way you were talking about diet, it's like giving less priority to the ups and downs of any one particular human mind, in this case your own, and giving more power to the sort of data driven. Yes, yeah, I think that is accurate, that cryptocurrency is a version of what I would call my autonomous self that I'm trying to build. It is an introduction of an autonomous system of value exchange and the process of value creation in the society, yes, I see their similarities. So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin will somehow help me not pig out at night, or the equivalent of, speaking of diet, if we could just linger on that topic a little bit, we already talked about your blog post of I fired myself, I fired Brian, the evening Brian, who's too willing to, not making good decisions for the long term well being and happiness of the entirety of the organism. Basically you were like pigging out at night. But it's interesting, because I do the same, in fact I often eat one meal a day, and like I have been this week actually, especially when I travel, and it's funny that it never occurred to me to just basically look at the fact that I'm able to be much smarter about my eating decisions in the morning and the afternoon than I am at night. So if I eat one meal a day, why not eat that one meal a day in the morning? Like I'm not, it never occurred to me, this revolutionary act, until you've outlined that. So maybe, can you give some details, and this is just you, this is one person, Brian, arrives at a particular thing that they do, but it's fascinating to kind of look at this one particular case study, so what works for you, diet wise? What's your actual diet, what do you eat, how often do you eat? My current protocol is basically the result of thousands of experiments and decision making. So I do this every 90 days, I do the tests, I do the cycle throughs, then I measure again, and then I'm measuring all the time. And so what I, of course I'm optimizing for my biomarkers, I want perfect cholesterol and I want perfect blood glucose levels and perfect DNA methylation processes. I also want perfect sleep. And so for example, recently, the past two weeks, my resting heart rate has been at 42 when I sleep. And when my resting heart rate's at 42, my HRV is at its highest. And I wake up in the morning feeling more energized than any other configuration. And so I know from all these processes that eating at roughly 8.30 in the morning, right after I work out on an empty stomach, creates enough distance between that completed eating and bedtime where I have almost no digestion processes going on in my body, therefore my resting heart rate goes very low. And when my resting heart rate's very low, I sleep with high quality. And so basically I've been trying to optimize the entirety of what I eat to my sleep quality. And my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower so it creates this virtuous cycle. And so at 8.30 what I do is I eat what I call super veggie, which is, it's a pudding of 250 grams of broccoli, 150 grams of cauliflower, and a whole bunch of other vegetables that I eat what I call nutty pudding, which is. You make the pudding yourself? Like, what do you call it? Like a veggie mix, whatever thing, like a blender? Yeah, you can be made in a high speed blender. But basically I eat the same thing every day, veggie bowl as in the form of pudding, and then a bowl in the form of nuts. And then I have. Vegan. Vegan, yes. Vegan, so that's fat and that's like, that's fat and carbs and that's the protein and so on. Then I have a third dish. Does it taste good? I love it. I love it so much I dream about it. Yeah, that's awesome. This is a. And then I have a third dish which is, it changes every day. Today it was kale and spinach and sweet potato. And then I take about 20 supplements that hopefully make, constitute a perfect nutritional profile. So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet for my body every single day. Where sleep is part of the optimization. That's right. You're like, one of the things you're really tracking. I mean, can you, well, I have a million question, but 20 supplements, like what kind are like, would you say are essential? Cause I only take, I only take athletic greens.com slash. That's like the multivitamin essentially. That's like the lazy man, you know, like, like if you don't actually want to think about shit, that's what you take and then fish oil and that's it. That's all I take. Yeah, you know, Alfred North Whitehead said, civilization advances as it extends the number of important operations it can do without thinking about them. Yes. So my objective on this is I want an algorithm for perfect health that I never have to think about. And then I want that system to be scalable to anybody so that they don't have to think about it. And right now it's expensive for me to do it. It's time consuming for me to do it. And I have infrastructure to do it, but the future of being human is not going to the grocery store and deciding what to eat. It's also not reading scientific papers, trying to decide this thing or that thing. It's all N of one. So it's devices on the outside and inside your body, assessing real time what your body needs and then creating closed loop systems for that to happen. Yeah, so right now you're doing the data collection and you're being the scientist, it'd be much better if you just did the data collect or it was being essentially done for you and you can outsource that to another scientist that's doing the N of one study of you. That's right, because every time I spend time thinking about this or executing, spending time on it, I'm spending less time thinking about building kernel or the future of being human. And so it's, we just all have the budget of our capacity on an everyday basis and we will scaffold our way up out of this. And so, yeah, hopefully what I'm doing is really, it serves as a model that others can also build on. That's why I wrote about it, is hopefully people can then take it and improve upon it. I hold nothing sacred. I change my diet almost every day based upon some new test results or science or something like that, but. Can you maybe elaborate on the sleep thing? Why is sleep so important? And why, presumably, like what does good sleep mean to you? I think sleep is a contender for being the most powerful health intervention in existence. It's a contender. I mean, it's magical what it does if you're well rested and what your body can do. And I mean, for example, I know when I eat close to my bedtime and I've done a systematic study for years looking at like 15 minute increments on time of day on where I eat my last meal, my willpower is directly correlated to the amount of deep sleep I get. So my ability to not binge eat at night when rascal Brian's out and about is based upon how much deep sleep I got the night before. Yeah, there's a lot to that, yeah. And so I've seen it manifest itself. And so I think the way I summarize this is in society we've had this myth of, we tell stories, for example, of entrepreneurship where this person was so amazing, they stayed at the office for three days and slept under their desk. And we say, wow, that's amazing, that's amazing. And now I think we're headed towards a state where we'd say that's primitive and really not a good idea on every level. And so the new mythology is going to be the exact opposite. Yeah, by the way, just to sort of maybe push back a little bit on that idea. Did you sleep under your desk collects? Well, yeah, a lot. I'm a big believer in that actually. I'm a big believer in chaos and giving into your passion and sometimes doing things that are out of the ordinary that are not trying to optimize health for certain periods of time in lieu of your passions is a signal to yourself that you're throwing everything away. So I think what you're referring to is how to have good performance for prolonged periods of time. I think there's moments in life where you need to throw all of that away, all the plans away, all the structure away. So I'm not sure I have an eloquent way describing exactly what I'm talking about, but it all depends on people, people are different, but there's a danger of over optimization to where you don't just give into the madness of the way your brain flows. I mean, to push back on my pushback is like, it's nice to have like where the foundations of your brain are not messed with. So you have a fixed foundation where the diet is fixed, where the sleep is fixed and that all of that is optimal and the chaos happens in the space of ideas as opposed to the space of biology. But I'm not sure if there's a, that requires real discipline and forming habits. There's some aspect to which some of the best days and weeks of my life have been, yeah, sleeping under a desk kind of thing. And I don't, I'm not too willing to let go of things that empirically worked for things that work in theory. And so I'm, again, I'm absolutely with you on sleep. Also, I'm with you on sleep conceptually, but I'm also very humbled to understand that for different people, good sleep means different things. I'm very hesitant to trust science on sleep. I think you should also be a scholar of your own body. Again, the experiment of NF1. I'm not so sure that a full night's sleep is great for me. There is something about that power nap that I just have not fully studied yet, but that nap is something special. That I'm not sure I found the optimal thing. So like there's a lot to be explored to what is exactly optimal amount of sleep, optimal kind of sleep combined with diet and all those kinds of things. I mean, that all maps the sort of data, at least the truth, exactly what you're referring to. Here's a data point for your consideration. Yes. The progress in biology over the past, say decade, has been stunning. Yes. And it now appears as if we will be able to replace our organs, zero X for a transplantation. And so we probably have a path to replace and regenerate every organ of your body, except for your brain. You can lose your hand and your arm and a leg. You can have an artificial heart. You can't operate without your brain. And so when you make that trade off decision of whether you're going to sleep under the desk or not and go all out for a four day marathon, right? There's a cost benefit trade off of what's going on, what's happening to your brain in that situation. We don't know the consequences of modern day life on our brain. We don't, it's the most valuable organ in our existence. And we don't know what's going on if we, in how we're treating it today with stress and with sleep and with dietary. And to me, then if you say that you're trying to, you're trying to optimize life for whatever things you're trying to do. The game is soon with the progress in anti aging and biology, the game is very soon going to become different than what it is right now with organ rejuvenation, organ replacement. And I would conjecture that we will value the health status of our brain above all things. Yeah, no, absolutely. Everything you're saying is true, but we die. We die pretty quickly, life is short. And I'm one of those people that I would rather die in battle than stay safe at home. It's like, yeah, you look at kind of, there's a lot of things that you can reasonably say, these are, this is the smart thing to do that can prevent you, that becomes conservative, that can prevent you from fully embracing life. I think ultimately you can be very intelligent and data driven and also embrace life. But I err on the side of embracing life. It's very, it takes a very skillful person to not sort of that hovering parent that says, you know what, there's a 3% chance that if you go out, if you go out by yourself and play, you're going to die, get run over by a car, come to a slow or a sudden end. And I am more a supporter of just go out there. If you die, you die. And that's a, it's a balance you have to strike. I think there's a balance to strike in the longterm optimization and short term freedom. For me, for a programmer, for a programming mind, I tend to over optimize and I'm very cautious and afraid of that, to not over optimize and thereby be overly cautious, suboptimally cautious about everything I do. And that's the ultimate thing I'm trying to optimize for. It's funny you said like sleep and all those kinds of things. I tend to think, this is, you're being more precise than I am, but I think I tend to want to minimize stress, which everything comes into that from your sleep and all those kinds of things. But I worry that whenever I'm trying to be too strict with myself, then the stress goes up when I don't follow the strictness. And so you have to kind of, it's a weird, it's a, there's so many variables in an objective function as it's hard to get right. And sort of not giving a damn about sleep and not giving a damn about diet is a good thing to inject in there every once in a while for somebody who's trying to optimize everything. But that's me just trying to, it's exactly like you said, you're just a scientist, I'm a scientist of myself, you're a scientist of yourself. It'd be nice if somebody else was doing it and had much better data, because I don't trust my conscious mind and I pigged out last night at some brisket in LA that I regret deeply. It's just so, uh. There's no point to anything I just said. But. But. What is the nature of your regret on the brisket? Is it, do you wish you hadn't eaten it entirely? Is it that you wish you hadn't eaten as much as you did? Is it that? I think, well, the most regret, I mean, if we want to be specific, I drank way too much like that. Like diet soda. My biggest regret is like having drank so much diet soda. That's the thing that really was the problem. I had trouble sleeping because of that. Because I was like programming and then I was editing. And so I'd stay up late at night and then I had to get up to go pee a few times and it was just a mess. A mess of a night. It was, well, it's not really a mess, but like it's so many, it's like the little things. I know if I just eat, I drink a little bit of water and that's it, and there's a certain, all of us have perfect days that we know diet wise and so on that's good to follow, you feel good. I know what it takes for me to do that. I didn't fully do that and thereby, because there's an avalanche effect where the other sources of stress, all the other to do items I have piled on, my failure to execute on some basic things that I know make me feel good and all of that combines to create a mess of a day. But some of that chaos, you have to be okay with it, but some of it I wish was a little bit more optimal. And your ideas about eating in the morning are quite interesting as an experiment to try. Can you elaborate, are you eating once a day? Yes. In the morning and that's it. Can you maybe speak to how that, you spoke, it's funny, you spoke about the metrics of sleep, but you're also, you run a business, you're incredibly intelligent, mostly your happiness and success relies on you thinking clearly. So how does that affect your mind and your body in terms of performance? So not just sleep, but actual mental performance. As you were explaining your objective function of, for example, in the criteria you were including, you like certain neurochemical states, like you like feeling like you're living life, that life has enjoyment, that sometimes you want to disregard certain rules to have a moment of passion, of focus. There's this architecture of the way Lex is, which makes you happy as a story you tell, as something you kind of experience, maybe the experience is a bit more complicated, but it's in this idea you have, this is a version of you. And the reason why I maintain the schedule I do is I've chosen a game to say, I would like to live a life where I care more about what intelligent, what people who live in the year 2500 think of me than I do today. That's the game I'm trying to play. And so therefore the only thing I really care about on this optimization is trying to see past myself, past my limitations, using zeroes principle thinking, pull myself out of this contextual mesh we're in right now and say, what will matter 100 years from now and 200 years from now? What are the big things really going on that are defining reality? And I find that if I were to hang out with Diet Soda Lex and Diet Soda Brian were to play along with that and my deep sleep were to get crushed as a result, my mind would not be on what matters in 100 years or 200 years or 300 years. I would be irritable. I would be, I'd be in a different state. And so it's just gameplay selection. It's what you and I have chosen to think about. It's what we've chosen to work on. And this is why I'm saying that no generation of humans have ever been afforded the opportunity to look at their lifespan and contemplate that they will have the possibility of experiencing an evolved form of consciousness that is undeniable. They would fall in a zero category of potential. That to me is the most exciting thing in existence. And I would not trade any momentary neurochemical state right now in exchange for that. I would, I'd be willing to deprive myself of all momentary joy in pursuit of that goal because that's what makes me happy. That's brilliant. But I'm a bit, I just looked it up. I'm with, I just looked up Braveheart's speech and William Wallace, but I don't know if you've seen it. Fight and you may die, run and you'll live at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, picture Mel Gibson saying this, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives with growing excitement, but they'll never take our freedom. I get excited every time I see that in the movie, but that's kind of how I approach life and eating. Do you think they were tracking their sleep? They were not tracking their sleep and they ate way too much brisket and they were fat, unhealthy, died early, and were primitive. But there's something in my ape brain that's attracted to that, even though most of my life is fully aligned with the way you see yours. Part of it is for comedy, of course, but part of it is I'm almost afraid of overoptimization. Really what you're saying though, if we're looking at this, let's say from a first principles perspective, when you read those words, they conjure up certain life experiences, but you're basically saying, I experienced a certain neurotransmitter state when these things are in action. That's all you're saying. So whether it's that or something else, you're just saying you have a selection for how your state for your body. And so if you as an engineer of consciousness, that should just be engineerable. And that's just triggering certain chemical reactions. And so it doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive. You can have that and experience that and also not sacrifice longterm health. And I think that's the potential of where we're going is we don't have to assume they are trade offs that must be had. Absolutely. And so I guess for my particular brain, it's useful to have the outlier experiences that also come along with the illusion of free will where I chose those experiences that make me feel like it's freedom. Listen, going to Texas made me realize I spent, so I still am, but I lived at Cambridge at MIT and I never felt like home there. I felt like home in the space of ideas with the colleagues, like when I was actually discussing ideas, but there is something about the constraints, how cautious people are, how much they valued also kind of a material success, career success. When I showed up to Texas, it felt like I belong. That was very interesting, but that's my neurochemistry, whatever the hell that is, whatever, maybe probably is rooted to the fact that I grew up in the Soviet Union and it was such a constrained system that you'd really deeply value freedom and you always want to escape the man and the control of centralized systems. I don't know what it is, but at the same time, I love strictness. I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet, of like the same habit, exactly the habit you have. I think that's actually when bodies perform optimally, my body performs optimally. So balancing those two, I think if I have the data, every once in a while, party with some wild people, but most of the time eat once a day, perhaps in the morning, I'm gonna try that. That might be very interesting, but I'd rather not try it. I'd rather have the data that tells me to do it. But in general, you're able to, eating once a day, think deeply about stuff like this. Concern that people have is like does your energy wane, all those kinds of things. Do you find that it's, especially because it's unique, it's vegan as well. So you find that you're able to have a clear mind, a focus, and just physically and mentally throughout? Yeah, and I find like my personal experience in thinking about hard things is, like oftentimes I feel like I'm looking through a telescope and like I'm aligning two or three telescopes. And you kind of have to close one eye and move it back and forth a little bit and just find just the right alignment. Then you find just a sneak peek at the thing you're trying to find, but it's fleeting. If you move just one little bit, it's gone. And oftentimes what I feel like are the ideas I value the most are like that. They're so fragile and fleeting and slippery and elusive. And it requires a sensitivity to thinking and a sensitivity to maneuver through these things. If I concede to a world where I'm on my phone texting, I'm also on social media. I'm also doing 15 things at the same time because I'm running a company and I'm also feeling terrible from the last night. It all just comes crashing down. And the quality of my thoughts goes to a zero. I'm a functional person to respond to basic level things, but I don't feel like I am doing anything interesting. I think that's a good word, sensitivity, because that's the word that's used the most. That's what thinking deeply feels like is you're sensitive to the fragile thoughts. And you're right. All those other distractions kind of dull your ability to be sensitive to the fragile thoughts. It's a really good word. Out of all the things you've done, you've also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Is this true? It's true. Why and how, and what do you take from that experience? I guess the backstory is relevant because in that moment, it was the darkest time in my life. I was ending a 13 year marriage. I was leaving my religion. I sold Braintree and I was battling depression where I was just at the end. And I got invited to go to Tanzania as part of a group that was raising money to build clean water wells. And I had made some money from Braintree, and so I was able to donate $25,000. And it was the first time I had ever had money to donate outside of paying tithing in my religion. It was such a phenomenal experience to contribute something meaningful to someone else in that form. And as part of this process, we were gonna climb the mountain. And so we went there and we saw the clean water wells we were building. We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing. And then we climbed Kilimanjaro and I came down with a stomach flu on day three. And I also had altitude sickness, but I became so sick that on day four, we are somebody on day five, I came into the camp, base camp at 15,000 feet, just going to the bathroom on myself and falling all over. I was just a disaster, I was so sick. So stomach flu and altitude sickness. Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation. Plus, it was psychologically one of the lowest points. Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor. I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done. And I had three young children. And so I was trying to reconcile, this is not a, whether I live or not is not my decision by itself. I'm now intertwined with these three little people and I have an obligation whether I like it or not, I need to be there. And so it did, it felt like I was just stuck in a straight jacket. And I had to decide whether I was going to summit the next day with the team. And it was a difficult decision because once you start hiking, there's no way to get off the mountain. And a midnight came and our guide came in and he said, where are you at? And I said, I think I'm okay, I think I can try. And so we went. And so from midnight to, I made it to the summit at 5 a.m. It was one of the most transformational moments of my existence. And the mountain became my problem. It became everything that I was struggling with. And when I started hiking, it was, the pain got so ferocious that it was kind of like this. It became so ferocious that I turned my music to Eminem and it was, Eminem was the, he was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul. And it was something about his anger and his vibrancy and his multi eventually, he's the only person who I could turn on and I could just say, I feel some relief. I turned on Eminem and I made it to the summit after five hours, but just 100 yards from the top. I was with my guide Ike and I started getting very dizzy and I felt like I was gonna fall backwards off this cliff area we were on. I was like, this is dangerous. And he said, look, Brian, I know where you're at. I know where you're at. And I can tell you, you've got it in you. So I want you to look up, take a step, take a breath and look up, take a breath and take a step. And I did and I made it. And so I got there and I just sat down with him at the top. I just cried like a baby. Broke down. Yeah, I just lost it. And so he'd let me do my thing. And then we pulled out the pulse oximeter and he measured my blood oxygen levels and it was like 50 something percent and it was danger zone. So he looked at it and I think he was like really alarmed that I was in this situation. And so he said, we can't get a helicopter here and we can't get you emergency evacuated. You've gotta go down. You've gotta hike down to 15,000 feet to get base camp. And so we went out on the mountain. I got back down to base camp. And again, that was pretty difficult. And then they put me on a stretcher, this metal stretcher with this one wheel and a team of six people wheeled me down the mountain. And it was pretty torturous. I'm very appreciative they did. Also the trail was very bumpy. So they'd go over the big rocks. And so my head would just slam against this metal thing for hours. And so I just felt awful. Plus I'd get my head slammed every couple of seconds. So the whole experience was really a life changing moment. And that was the demarcation of me basically building a new life. Basically I said, I'm going to reconstruct Brian, my understanding of reality, my existential realities, what I want to go after. And I try, I mean, as much as that's possible as a human, but that's when I set out to rebuild everything. Was it the struggle of that? I mean, there's also just like the romantic poetic, it's a fricking mountain. There's a man in pain, psychological and physical struggling up a mountain. But it's just struggle, just in the face of, just pushing through in the face of hardship or nature too. Something much bigger than you. Is that, was that the thing that just clicked? For me, it felt like I was just locked in with reality and it was a death match. It was in that moment, one of us is going to die. So you were pondering death, like not surviving. Yep. And it was, and that was the moment. And it was, the summit to me was, I'm going to come out on top and I can do this. And giving in was, it's like, I'm just done. And so it did, I locked in and that's why, yeah, mountains are magical to me. I didn't expect that. I didn't design that. I didn't know that was going to be the case. I not, it would not have been something I would have anticipated. But you were not the same man afterwards. Yeah. Is there advice you can give to young people today that look at your story, that's successful in many dimensions, advice you can give to them about how to be successful in their career, successful in life, whatever path they choose? Yes, I would say, listen to advice and see it for what it is, a mirror of that person, and then map and know that your future is going to be in a zero principle land. And so what you're hearing today is a representation of what may have been the right principles to build upon previously, but they're likely depreciating very fast. And so I am a strong proponent that people ask for advice, but they don't take advice. So how do you take advice properly? It's in the careful examination of the advice. It's actually the person makes a statement about a given thing somebody should follow. The value is not doing that. The value is understanding the assumption stack they built, the assumption and knowledge stack they built around that body of knowledge. That's the value. It's not doing what they say. Considering the advice, but digging deeper to understand the assumption stack, like the full person, I mean, this is deep empathy, essentially, to understand the journey of the person that arrived at the advice. And the advice is just the tip of the iceberg that ultimately is not the thing that gives you. It could be the right thing to do. It could be the complete wrong thing to do depending on the assumption stack. So you need to investigate the whole thing. Is there some, are there been people in your startup and your business journey that have served that role of advice giver that's been helpful? Or do you feel like your journey felt like a lonely path? Or was it one that was, of course, we're all there born and die alone. But do you fundamentally remember the experiences, one where you leaned on people at a particular moment in time that changed everything? Yeah, the most significant moments of my memory, for example, like on Kilimanjaro, when Ike, some person I'd never met in Tanzania, was able to, in that moment, apparently see my soul when I was in this death match with reality. And he gave me the instructions, look up, step. And so there's magical people in my life that have done things like that. And I suspect they probably don't know. I probably should be better at identifying those things. And, but yeah, hopefully the, I suppose like the wisdom I would aspire to is to have the awareness and the empathy to be that for other people. And not a retail advertiser of advice, of tricks for life, but deeply meaningful and empathetic with a one on one context with people that it really can make a difference. Yeah, I actually kind of experience, I think about that sometimes. You have like an 18 year old kid come up to you. And it's not always obvious, it's not always easy to really listen to them. Like not the facts, but like see who that person is. I think people say that about being a parent is you want to consider that, you don't want to be the authority figure in the sense that you really want to consider that there's a special unique human being there with a unique brain that may be brilliant in ways that you are not understanding that you'll never be and really try to hear that. So when giving advice, there's something to that. It's a both sides should be deeply empathetic about the assumption stack. I love that terminology. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Why the hell are we here, Brian Johnson? We've been talking about brains and studying brains and you had this very eloquent way of describing life on Earth as an optimization problem of the cost of intelligence going to zero. At first through the evolutionary process and then eventually through building, through our technology, building more and more intelligent systems. You ever ask yourself why is doing that? Yeah, I think the answer to this question, again, the information value is more in the mirror it provides of that person, which is a representation of the technological, social, political context of the time. So if you ask this question a hundred years ago, you would get a certain answer that reflects that time period. Same thing would be true of a thousand years ago. It's rare, it's difficult for a person to pull themselves out of their contextual awareness and offer a truly original response. And so knowing that I am contextually influenced by the situation, that I am a mirror for our reality, I would say that in this moment, I think the real game going on is that evolution built a system of scaffolding intelligence that produced us. We are now building intelligence systems that are scaffolding higher dimensional intelligence, that's developing more robust systems of intelligence. In doing in that process with the cost going to zero, then the meaning of life becomes goal alignment, which is the negotiation of our conscious and unconscious existence. And then I'd say the third thing is, if we're thinking that we wanna be explorers is our technological progress is getting to a point where we could aspirationally say, we want to figure out what is really going on, really going on, because does any of this really make sense? Now we may be a hundred, 200, 500, a thousand years away from being able to poke our way out of whatever is going on. But it's interesting that we could even state an aspiration to say, we wanna poke at this question. But I'd say in this moment of time, the meaning of life is that we can build a future state of existence that is more fantastic than anything we could ever imagine. The striving for something more amazing. And that defies expectations that we would consider bewildering and all the things that that's, and I guess the last thing, if there's multiple meanings of life, it would be infinite games. James Kars wrote the book, Finite Games, Infinite Games. The only game to play right now is to keep playing the game. And so this goes back to the algorithm of the Lex algorithm of diet soda and brisket and pursuing the passion. What I'm suggesting is there's a moment here where we can contemplate playing infinite games. Therefore, it may make sense to err on the side of making sure one is in a situation to be playing infinite games if that opportunity arises. So the landscape of possibility is changing very, very fast and therefore our old algorithms of how we might assess risk assessment and what things we might pursue and why those assumptions may fall away very quickly. Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the game you, Mr. Brian Johnson, have been playing is quite incredible. Thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Johnson and thank you to Four Sigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Diane Ackerman. Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Bryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces | Lex Fridman Podcast #186

The following is a conversation with Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT who won the Nobel Prize for the co discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interaction. Quick mention of our sponsors, the Information, NetSuite, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Aidsleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a word about asymptotic freedom. Protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of an atom. Strong interaction is responsible for the strong nuclear force that binds them. But strong interaction also holds together the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons. Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer came up with a theory postulating that when quarks come really close to one another, the attraction abates and they behave like free particles. This is called asymptotic freedom. This happens at very, very high energies, which is also where all the fun is. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Frank Wilczek. What is the most beautiful idea in physics? The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world that's very precise and very full at the level of the operating system of the world. That's an extraordinary gift. And we get worried when we find discrepancies between our description of the world and what's actually observed at the level even of a part in a billion. You actually have this quote from Einstein that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, something like that. Yes, so that's the most beautiful surprise that I think that really was to me the most profound result of the scientific revolution of the 17th century with the shining example of Newtonian physics that you could aspire to completeness, precision, and a concise description of the world, of the operating system. And it's gotten better and better over the years and that's the continuing miracle. Now, there are a lot of beautiful sub miracles too. The form of the equations is governed by high degrees of symmetry and they have a very surprising kind of mind expanding structure, especially in quantum mechanics. But if I had to say the single most beautiful revelation is that, in fact, the world is comprehensible. Would you say that's a fact or a hope? It's a fact. We can do, you can point to things like the rise of gross national products per capita around the world as a result of the scientific revolution. You can see it all around you. And recent developments with exponential production of wealth, control of nature at a very profound level where we do things like sense tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny vibrations to tell that there are black holes colliding far away or we test laws as I alluded to whether it's part in a billion and do things in what appear on the surface to be entirely different conceptual universes. I mean, on the one hand, pencil and paper are nowadays computers that calculate abstractions and on the other hand, magnets and accelerators and detectors that look at the behavior of fundamental particles and these different universes have to agree or else we get very upset and that's an amazing thing if you think about it. And it's telling us that we do understand a lot about nature at a very profound level and there are still things we don't understand of course but as we get better and better answers and better and better ability to address difficult questions we can ask more and more ambitious questions. Well, I guess the hope part of that is because we are surrounded by mystery. So one way to say it, if you look at the growth GDP over time that we figured out quite a lot and we're able to improve the quality of life because of that and we've figured out some fundamental things about this universe but we still don't know how much mystery there is and it's also possible that there's some things that are in fact incomprehensible to both our minds and the tools of science. Like the sad thing is we may not know it because in fact they are incomprehensible and that's the open question is how much of the universe is comprehensible? If we figured out everything what's inside the black hole and everything that happened at the moment of the Big Bang does that still give us the key to understanding the human mind and the emergence of all the beautiful complexity we see around us? That's not like when I see these objects like I don't know if you've seen them like cellular automata all these kinds of objects where the from simple rules emerges complexity, it makes you wonder maybe it's not reducible to simple beautiful equations the whole thing only parts of it. That's the tension I was getting at with the hope. Well, when we say the universe is comprehensible we have to kind of draw careful distinctions about or definitions about what we mean by that. Both the universe and the kind of and the comprehensive. Exactly, right so the so in certain areas of understanding reality we've made extraordinary progress I would say in understanding fundamental physical processes and getting very precise equations that really work and allow us to do the profound sculpting of matter to make computers and iPhones and everything else and they really work and they're extraordinary productions on the other but and that's all based on the laws of quantum mechanics and they really work and they give us tremendous control of nature on the other hand as we get better answers we can also ask more ambitious questions and there are certainly things that have been observed even in what would be usually called the realm of physics that aren't understood for instance there seems to be another source of mass in the universe the so called dark matter that we don't know what it is and it's a very interesting question what it is then but also as you were alluding to there's it's one thing to know the basic equations it's another thing to be able to solve them in important cases so we run up against the limits of that in things like chemistry where we'd like to be able to design molecules and predict their behavior from the equations we think the equations could do that in principle but in practice it's very challenging to solve them in all but very simple cases and then there's the other thing which is that a lot of what we're interested in is historically conditioned it's not a matter of the fundamental equations but about what has evolved or come out of the early universe and formed into people and frogs and societies and things and the laws of physics the basic laws of physics only take you so far in that it kind of provides a foundation but doesn't really that you need entirely different concepts to deal with those kind of systems and one thing I can say about that is that the laws themselves point out their limitations that they kind of their laws for dynamical evolution so they tell you what happens if you have a certain starting point but they don't tell you what the starting point should be at least yeah and the other thing that emerges from the equations themselves is the phenomena of chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions which tells us that you have that there are intrinsic limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences of the laws if we try to apply them. It's the old apple pie if you want to what is it make an apple pie from scratch you have to build the universe or something like that. Well you're much better off starting with apples than starting with quarks let's put it that way. In your book A Beautiful Question you ask does the world embody beautiful ideas? So the book is centered around this very interesting question it's like Shakespeare you can like dig in and read into all the different interpretations of this question but at the high level what to use the connection between beauty of the world and physics of the world. In a sense we now have a lot of insight into what the laws are the form they take that allow us to understand matter in great depth and control it as we've discussed and it's an extraordinary thing how mathematically ideal those equations turn out to be. In the early days of Greek philosophy Plato had this model of atoms built out of the five perfectly symmetrical platonic solids so there was somehow the idea that mathematical symmetry should govern the world and we've out Platoed Plato by far in modern physics because we have symmetries that are much more extensive much more powerful that turn out to be the ingredients out of which we construct our theory of the world and it works and so that's certainly beautiful. So the idea of symmetry which is a driving inspiration in much of human art especially decorative art like the Alhambra or wallpaper designs or things you see around you everywhere also turns out to be the dominant theme in modern fundamental physics symmetry and its manifestations the laws turn out to be very to have these tremendous amounts of symmetry you can change the symbols and move them around in different ways and they still have the same consequences. So that's beautiful that these concepts that humans find appealing also turn out to be the concepts that govern how the world actually works. I don't think that's an accident. I think humans were evolved to be able to interact with the world in ways that are advantageous and to learn from it and so we are naturally evolved or designed to enjoy beauty and it's a symmetry and the world has it and that's why we resonate with it. Well it's interesting that the ideas of symmetry emerge at many levels of the hierarchy of the universe. So you're talking about particles but it also is at the level of chemistry and biology and the fact that our cognitive sort of our perception system and whatever our cognition is also finds it appealing or somehow our sense of what is beautiful is grounded in this idea of symmetry or the breaking of symmetry. Symmetry is at the core of our conception of beauty whether it's the breaking or the non breaking of the symmetry. It makes you wonder why. Why? So I come from Russia and the question of Dostoevsky he has said that beauty will save the world. Maybe as a physicist you can tell me what do you think he meant by that? I don't know if it saves the world but it does turn out to be a tremendous source of insight into the world. When we investigate kind of the most fundamental interactions, things that are hard to access because they occur at very short distances between very special kinds of particles whose properties are only revealed at high energies. We don't have much to go on from everyday life but so we have when we guess what the, and the experiments are difficult to do so you can't really follow a very wholly empirical procedure to sort of in the Baconian style figure out the laws kind of step by step just by accumulating a lot of data what we actually do is guess. And the guesses are kind of aesthetic really. What would be a nice description that's consistent with what we know and then you try it out and see if it works and by gosh it does in many profound cases. So there's that but there's another source of symmetry which I didn't talk so much about in a beautiful question but does relate to your comments and I think very much relates to the source of symmetry that we find in biology and in our heads, you know, in our brain which is that, well it is discussed a bit in a beautiful question and also in fundamentals is that when you have, symmetry is also a very important means of construction. So when you have for instance simple viruses that need to construct their coat, their protein coat, the coats often take the form of platonic solids and the reason is that the viruses are really dumb and they only know how to do one thing so they make a pentagon then they make another pentagon and they make another pentagon and they all glue together in the same way and that makes a very symmetrical object sort of. So the rules of development when you have simple rules and they work again and again, you get symmetrical patterns. That's kind of, in fact it's a recipe also for generating fractals, like the kind of broccoli that has all this internal structure and I wish I had a picture to show but maybe people remember it from the supermarket and you say how did a vegetable get so intelligent to make such a beautiful object with all this fractal structure and the secret is stupidity. You just do the same thing over and over again and in our brains also, you know, we came out, we start from single cells and they reproduce and each one does basically roughly the same thing. The program evolves in time, of course, different modules get turned on and off, different regions of the genetic code get turned on and off but basically, a lot of the same things are going on and they're simple things and so you produce the same patterns over and over again and that's a recipe for producing symmetry because you're getting the same thing in many, many places and if you look at, for instance, the beautiful drawings of Roman Icahal, the great neuroanatomist who drew the structure of different organs like the hippocampus, you see it's very regular and very intricate and it's symmetry in that sense because it's many repeated units that you can take from one place to the other and see that they look more or less the same. But what you're describing, this kind of beauty that we're talking about now is a very small sample in terms of space time in a very big world in a very short, brief moment in this long history. In your book, Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality, I'd really recommend people read it. You say that space and time are pretty big or very big. How big are we talking about? Can you tell a brief history of space and time? It's easy to tell a brief history, but the details get very involved, of course, but one thing I'd like to say is that if you take a broad enough view, the history of the universe is simpler than the history of Sweden, say, because your standards are lower. But just to make it quantitative, I'll just give a few highlights. And it's a little bit easier to talk about time, so let's start with that. The Big Bang occurred, we think. The universe was much hotter and denser and more uniform about 13.8 billion years ago, and that's what we call the Big Bang. And it's been expanding and cooling, the matter in it has been expanding and cooling ever since. So in a real sense, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. That's a big number, kind of hard to think about. A nice way to think about it, though, is to map it onto one year. So let's say the universe just linearly mapped the time intervals from 13.8 billion years onto one year. So the Big Bang then is on January 1st at 12 a.m. And you wait for quite a long time before the dinosaurs emerge. The dinosaurs emerge on Christmas, it turns out. And... 12 months, almost 12 months later. Getting close to the end, yes. Getting close to the end. And the extinction event that let the mammals and ultimately humans inherit the Earth from the dinosaurs occurred on December 30th. And all of human history is a small part of the last day. And so, yes, so we're occupying only, and a human lifetime is a very, very infinitesimal part of this interval of these gigantic cosmic reaches of time. And in space, we can tell a very similar story. In fact, it's convenient to think that the size of the universe is the distance that light can travel in 13.8 billion years. So it's 13.8 billion light years. That's how far you can see out. That's how far signals can reach us. And that is a big distance. That is a big distance because compared to that, the Earth is a fraction of a light second. So again, it's really, really big. And so if we wanna think about the universe as a whole in space and time, we really need a different kind of imagination. It's not something you can grasp in terms of psychological time in a useful way. You have to think, you have to use exponential notation and abstract concepts to really get any hold on these vast times and spaces. On the other hand, let me hasten to add that that doesn't make us small or make the time that we have to us small. Because again, looking at those pictures of what our minds are and some of the components of our minds, these beautiful drawings of the cellular patterns inside the brain, you see that there are many, many, many processing units. And if you analyze how fast they operate, I tried to estimate how many thoughts a person can have in a lifetime. That's kind of a fuzzy question, but I'm very proud that I was able to define it pretty precisely. And it turns out we have time for billions of meaningful thoughts in a lifetime. So it's a lot. We shouldn't think of ourselves as terribly small either in space or in time, because although we're small in those dimensions compared to the universe, we're large compared to meaningful units of processing information and being able to conceptualize and understand things. Yeah, but 99% of those thoughts are probably food, sex, or internet related. Well, yeah, well, they're not necessarily, that's right. Only like point one is Nobel Prize winning ideas. That's true, but there's more to life than winning Nobel Prizes. How did you do that calculate? Can you maybe break that apart a little bit, just kind of for fun, sort of an intuition of how we calculate the number of thoughts? The number of thoughts, right. It's necessarily imprecise because a lot of things are going on in different ways and what is a thought. But there are several things that point to more or less the same rate of being able to have meaningful thoughts. For instance, the one that I think is maybe the most penetrating is how fast we can process visual images. How do we do that? If you've ever watched old movies, you can see that, well, any movie, in fact, a motion picture is really not a motion picture. It's a series of snapshots that are playing one after the other and it's because our brains also work that way. We take snapshots of the world, integrate over a certain time and then go on to the next one and then by post processing, create the illusion of continuity and flow, we can deal with that. And if the flicker rate is too slow, then you start to see that it's a series of snapshots and you can ask, what is the crossover? When does it change from being something that is matched to our processing speed versus too fast? And it turns out about 40 per second. And then if you take 40 per second as how well, how fast we can process visual images, you get to several billions of thoughts. If you, similarly, if you ask what are some of the fastest things that people can do? Well, they can play video games, they can play the piano very fast if they're skilled at it. And again, you get to similar units or how fast can people talk? You get to similar, you know, within a couple of orders of magnitude, you get more or less to the same idea. So that's how you can say that there's billions of meaningful, there's room for billions of meaningful thoughts. I won't argue for exactly two billion versus 1.8 billion. It's not that kind of question, but I think any estimate that's reasonable will come out within, say, 100 billion and 100 million. So it's a lot. It would be interesting to map out for an individual human being the landscape of thoughts that they've sort of traveled. If you think of thoughts as a set of trajectories, what that landscape looks like. I mean, I've been recently really thinking about this Richard Dawkins idea of memes and just all this ideas and the evolution of ideas inside of one particular human mind and how they're then changed and evolved by interaction with other human beings. It's interesting to think about. So if you think the number is billions, you think there's also social interaction. So these aren't like there's interaction in the same way you have interaction with particles. There's interaction between human thoughts that perhaps that interaction in itself is fundamental to the process of thinking. Like without social interaction, we would be like stuck, like walking in a circle. We need the perturbation of other humans to create change and evolution. Once you bring in concepts of interactions and correlations and relations, then you have what's called a combinatorial explosion that the number of possibilities expands exponentially technically with the number of things you're considering. And it can easily rapidly outstrip these billions of thoughts that we're talking about. So we definitely cannot by brute force master complex situations or think of all the possibilities in a complex situations. I mean, even something as relatively simple as chess is still something that human beings can't comprehend completely. Even the best players lose, still sometimes lose and they consistently lose to computers these days. And in computer science, there's a concept of NP complete. So large classes of problems when you scale them up beyond a few individuals become intractable. And so that in that sense, the world is inexhaustible. And that makes it beautiful that we can make any laws that generalize efficiently and well can compress all of that combinatorial complexity just like a simple rule. That in itself is beautiful. It's a happy situation. And I think that we can find general principles of sort of of the operating system that are comprehensible, simple, extremely powerful and let us control things very well and ask profound questions. And on the other hand, that the world is going to be inexhaustible. That once we start asking about relationships and how they evolve and social interactions and we'll never have a theory of everything in any meaningful sense because that. Of everything, everything, truly everything is. Can I ask you about the Big Bang? So we talked about the space and time are really big. But then, and we humans give a lot of meaning to the word space and time in our like daily lives. But then can we talk about this moment of beginning and how we're supposed to think about it? That at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was what, like infinitely small and then it just blew up? We have to be careful here because there's a common misconception that the Big Bang is like the explosion of a bomb in empty space that fills up the surrounding place. It is space. It is, yeah. As we understand it, it's the fact, it's the fact or the hypothesis, but well supported up to a point that everywhere in the whole universe, early in the history, matter came together into a very hot, very dense, if you run it backwards in time, matter comes together into a very hot, very dense and yet very homogeneous plasma of all the different kinds of elementary particles and quarks and anti quarks and gluons and photons and electrons and anti electrons, everything, all of that stuff. Like really hot. Really, really, really hot. We're talking about way, way hotter than the surface of the sun. Well, in fact, if you take the equations as they come, the prediction is that the temperature just goes to infinity, but then the equations break down. We don't really, there are various, the equations become infinity equals infinity, so they don't feel that it's called a singularity. We don't really know. This is running the equations backwards, so you can't really get a sensible idea of what happened before the Big Bang. So we need different equations to address the very earliest moments. But so things were hotter and denser. We don't really know why things started out that way. We have a lot of evidence that they did start out that way. But since most of the, we don't get to visit there and do controlled experiments. Most of the record is very, very processed and we have to use very subtle techniques and powerful instruments to get information that has survived. Get closer and closer to the Big Bang. Get closer and closer to the beginning of things. And what's revealed there is that, as I said, there undoubtedly was a period when everything in the universe that we have been able to look at and understand, and that's consistent with everything, is in a condition where it was much, much hotter and much, much denser, but still obeying the laws of physics as we know them today. And then you start with that. So all the matter is in equilibrium. And then with small quantum fluctuations and run it forward, and then it produces, at least in broad strokes, the universe we see around us today. Do you think we'll ever be able to, with the tools of physics, with the way science is, with the way the human mind is, we'll ever be able to get to the moment of the Big Bang in our understanding or even the moment before the Big Bang? Can we understand what happened before the Big Bang? I'm optimistic both that we'll be able to measure more, so observe more, and that we'll be able to figure out more. So they're very, very tangible prospects for observing the extremely early universe, so even much earlier than we can observe now through looking at gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, since they interact so weakly with ordinary matter, sort of send a minimally processed signal from the Big Bang. It's a very weak signal because it's traveled a long way and diffused over long spaces, but people are gearing up to try to detect gravitational waves that could have come from the early universe. Yeah, LIGO's an incredible engineering project. It's the most sensitive, precise devices on Earth. The fact that humans can build something like that is truly awe inspiring from an engineering perspective. Right, but these gravitational waves from the early universe will probably be of a much longer wavelength than LIGO is capable of sensing, so there's a beautiful project that's contemplated to put lasers in different locations in the solar system. We really, really separate it by solar system scale differences, like artificial planets or moons in different places and see the tiny motions of those relative to one another as a signal of radiation from the Big Bang. We can also maybe indirectly see the imprint of gravitational waves from the early universe on the photons, the microwave background radiation. That is our present way of seeing into the earliest universe, but those photons interact much more strongly with matter. They're much more strongly processed, so they don't give us directly such an unprocessed view of the early universe, of the very early universe, but if gravitational waves leave some imprint on that as they move through, we could detect that too, and people are trying, as we speak, working very hard towards that goal. It's so exciting to think about a sensor the size of the solar system. That would be a fantastic, I mean, that would be a pinnacle artifact of human endeavor to me. It would be such an inspiring thing that just we want to know, and we go to these extraordinary lengths of making gigantic things that are also very sophisticated because what you're trying to do, you have to understand how they move. You have to understand the properties of light that are being used, the interference between light, and you have to be able to make the light with lasers and understand the quantum theory and get the timing exactly right. It's an extraordinary endeavor involving all kinds of knowledge from the very small to the very large, and all in the service of curiosity and built on a grand scale, so. Yeah, it would make me proud to be a human if we did that. I love that you're inspired both by the power of theory and the power of experiment. So both, I think, are exceptionally impressive that the human mind can come up with theories that give us a peek into how the universe works, but also construct tools that are way bigger than the evolutionary origins we came from. Right, and by the way, the fact that we can design such things and they work is an extraordinary demonstration that we really do understand a lot. And then in some ways. And it's our ability to answer questions that also leads us to be able to address more ambitious questions. So you mentioned at the Big Bang in the early days, things are pretty homogeneous. Yes. But here we are, sitting on Earth, two hairless apes, you could say, with microphones. In talking about the brief history of things, you said it's much harder to describe Sweden than it is the universe. So there's a lot of complexity. There was a lot of interesting details here. So how does this complexity come to be, do you think? It seems like there's these pockets. Yeah. We don't know how rare of like where hairless apes emerge. Yeah. And then that came from the initial soup that was homogeneous. Was that an accident? Well, we understand in broad outlines how it could happen. We certainly don't understand why it happened exactly in the way it did. Or there are certainly open questions about the origins of life and how inevitable the emergence of intelligence was and how that happened. But in the very broadest terms, the universe early on was quite homogeneous, but not completely homogeneous. There were part in 10,000 fluctuations in density within this primordial plasma. And as time goes on, there's an instability which causes those density contrasts to increase. There's a gravitational instability where it's denser, the gravitational attractions are stronger. And so that brings in more matter and it gets even denser and so on and so on. So there's a natural tendency of matter to clump because of gravitational interactions. And then the equation is complicated. We have lots of things clumping together. Then we know what the laws are, but we have to a certain extent wave our hands about what happens. But basic understanding of chemistry says that if things and the physics of radiation tells us that as things start to clump together, they can radiate, give off some energy. So they don't just, they slow down. As a result, they lose energy. They can collaborate together, cool down, form things like stars, form things like planets. And so in broad terms, there's no mystery. There's, that's what the scenario, that's what the equations tell you should happen. But because it's a process involving many, many fundamental individual units, the application of the laws that govern individual units to these things is very delicate, computationally very difficult. And more profoundly, the equations have this probability of chaos or sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells you tiny differences in the initial state can lead to enormous differences in the subsequent behavior. So physics, fundamental physics at some point says, okay, chemists, biologists, this is your problem. And then again, in broad terms, we know how it's conceivable that the humans and things like that, how complex structure can emerge. It's a matter of having the right kind of temperature and the right kind of stuff. So you need to be able to make chemical bonds that are reasonably stable and be able to make complex structures. And we're very fortunate that carbon has this ability to make backbones and elaborate branchings and things. So you can get complex things that we call biochemistry. And yet the bonds can be broken a little bit with the help of energetic injections from the sun. So you have to have both the possibility of changing, but also the useful degree of stability. And we know at that very, very broad level, physics can tell you that it's conceivable. If you want to know what really happened, what really can happen, then you have to work a bit, go to chemistry. If you want to know what actually happened, then you really have to consult the fossil record and biologists. And so these ways of addressing the issue are complimentary in a sense. They use different kinds of concepts, they use different languages and they address different kinds of questions, but they're not inconsistent, they're just complimentary. It's kind of interesting to think about those early fluctuations as our earliest ancestors. Yes, that's right. So it's amazing to think that this is the modern answer to the, or the modern version of what the Hindu philosophers had, that art thou. If you ask what, okay, those little quantum fluctuations in the early universe are the seeds out of which complexity, including plausibly humans, really evolve. You don't need anything else. That brings up the question of asking for a friend here if there's other pockets of complexity, commonly called as alien intelligent civilizations out there. Well, we don't know for sure, but I have a strong suspicion that the answer is yes because the one case we do have at hand to study here on Earth, we sort of know what the conditions were that were helpful to life, the right kind of temperature, the right kind of star that keeps, maintains that temperature for a long time, the liquid environment of water. And once those conditions emerged on Earth, which was roughly four and a half billion years ago, it wasn't very long before what we call life started to leave relics. So we can find forms of life, primitive forms of life that are almost as old as the Earth itself in the sense that once the Earth was turned from a very hot boiling thing and cooled off into a solid mass with water, life emerged very, very quickly. So it seems that these general conditions for life are enough to make it happen relatively quickly. Now, the other lesson I think that one can draw from this one example, it's dangerous to draw lessons from one example, but that's all we've got, and that the emergence of intelligent life is a different issue altogether. That took a long time and seems to have been pretty contingent for a long time. Well, for most of the history of life, it was single celled things. Even multicellular life only rose about 600 million years ago, so much after. And then intelligence is kind of a luxury. Many more kinds of creatures have big stomachs than big brains. In fact, most have no brains at all in any reasonable sense. And the dinosaurs ruled for a long, long time and some of them were pretty smart, but they were at best bird brains because birds came from the dinosaurs. And it could have stayed that way. And then the emergence of humans was very contingent and kind of a very, very recent development on evolutionary timescales. And you can argue about the level of human intelligence, but I think that's what we're talking about. It's very impressive and can ask these kinds of questions and discuss them intelligently. So I guess my, so this is a long winded answer or justification of my feeling is that the conditions for life in some form are probably satisfied many, many places around the universe and even within our galaxy. I'm not so sure about the emergence of intelligent life or the emergence of technological civilizations. That seems much more contingent and special. And we might, it's conceivable to me that we're the only example in the galaxy. Although, yeah, I don't know one way or the other. I have different opinions on different days of the week. But one of the things that worries me in the spirit of being humble, that our particular kind of intelligence is not very special. So there's all kinds of different intelligences. And even more broadly, there could be many different kinds of life. So the basic definition, and I just had, I think somebody that you know, Sarah Walker, I just had a very long conversation with her about even just the very basic question of trying to define what is life from a physics perspective. Even that question within itself, I think one of the most fundamental questions in science and physics and everything is just trying to get a hold, trying to get some universal laws around the ideas of what is life because that kind of unlocks a bunch of things around life, intelligence, consciousness, all those kinds of things. I agree with you in a sense, but I think that's a dangerous question because the answer can't be any more precise than the question. And the question, what is life, kind of assumes that we have a definition of life and that it's a natural phenomena that can be distinguished. But really there are edge cases like viruses and some people would like to say that electrons have consciousness. So you can't, if you really have fuzzy concepts, it's very hard to reach precise kinds of scientific answers. But I think there's a very fruitful question that's adjacent to it, which has been pursued in different forms for quite a while and is now becoming very sophisticated in reaching in new directions. And that is, what are the states of matter that are possible? So in high school or grade school, you learn about solids, liquids and gases, but that really just scratches the surface of different ways that are distinguishable, that matter can form into macroscopically different, meaningful patterns that we call phases. And then there are precise definitions of what we mean by phases of matter and that have been worked out fruitful over the decades. And we're discovering new states of matter all the time and kind of having to work at what we mean by matter. We're discovering the capabilities of matter to organize in interesting ways. And some of them, like liquid crystals, are important ingredients of life. Our cell membranes are liquid crystals, and that's very important to the way they work. Recently, there's been a development in where we're talking about states of matter that are not static, but that have dynamics, that have characteristic patterns, not only in space, but in time. These are called time crystals, and that's been a development that's just in the last decade or so. It's just really, really flourishing. And so is there a state of matter or a group of states of matter that corresponds to life? Maybe, but the answer can't be any more definite than the question. I mean, I gotta push back on the, those are just words. I mean, I disagree with you. The question points to a direction. The answer might be able to be more precise than the question, because just as you're saying, there is a, we could be discovering certain characteristics and patterns that are associated with a certain type of matter, macroscopically speaking, and that we can then be able to post facto say, this is, let's assign the word life to this kind of matter. I agree with that completely, that's what that's, but that's, so it's not a disagreement. It's very frequent in physics that, or in science, that words that are in common use get refined and reprocessed into scientific terms that's happened for things like force and energy. And so we, in a way, we find out what the useful definition is, or symmetry, for instance. And the common usage may be quite different from the scientific usage, but the scientific usage is special and takes on a life of its own, and we find out what the useful version of it is, the fruitful version of it is. So I do think, so in that spirit, I think if we can identify states of matter or linked states of matter that can carry on processes of self reproduction and development and information processing, we might be tempted to classify those things as life. Well, can I ask you about the craziest one, which is the one we know maybe least about, which is consciousness. Is it possible that there are certain kinds of matter would be able to classify as conscious, meaning like, so there's the panpsychists, right, who are the philosophers who kind of try to imply that all matter has some degree of consciousness, and you can almost construct like a physics of consciousness. Do you, again, we're in such early days of this, but nevertheless, it seems useful to talk about it. Is there some sense from a physics perspective to make sense of consciousness? Is there some hope? Well, again, consciousness is a very imprecise word and loaded with connotations that I think we should, we don't wanna start a scientific analysis with that, I don't think. It's often been important in science to start with simple cases and work up. Consciousness, I think what most people think of when you talk about consciousness is, okay, what am I doing in the world? This is my experience. I have a rich inner life and experience, and where is that in the equations? And I think that's a great question, a great, great question, and actually, I think I'm gearing up to spend part of, I mean, to try to address that in coming years. One version of asking that question, just as you said now, is what is the simplest formulation of that to study? I think I'm much more comfortable with the idea of studying self awareness as opposed to consciousness, because that sort of gets rid of the mystical aura of the thing. And self awareness is in simple, you know, I think contiguous at least with ideas about feedback. So if you have a system that looks at its own state and responds to it, that's a kind of self awareness. And more sophisticated versions could be like in information processing things, computers that look into their own internal state and do something about it. And I think that could also be done in neural nets. This is called recurrent neural nets, which are hard to understand and kind of a frontier. So I think understanding those and gradually building up a kind of profound ability to conceptualize different levels of self awareness. What do you have to not know? And what do you have to know? And when do you know that you don't know it? Or when do you, what do you think you know that you don't really know? And these, I think clarifying those issues, when we clarify those issues and get a rich theory around self awareness, I think that will illuminate the questions about consciousness in a way that, you know, scratching your chin and talking about qualia and blah, blah, blah, blah is never gonna do. Well, I also have a different approach to the whole thing. So there's, from a robotics perspective, you can engineer things that exhibit qualities of consciousness without understanding how things work. And from that perspective, you, it's like a back door, like enter through the psychology door. Precisely, I think we're on the same wavelength here. I think that, and let me just add one comment, which is I think we should try to understand consciousness as we experience it as, in evolutionary terms, and ask ourselves, why, why does it happen? This thing seems useful. Why is it useful? Why is it useful? Interesting question. I think we've got a conscious eyewatch here. Interesting question. Thank you, Siri. Okay. I'll get back to you later. The, and I think what we're gonna, I'm morally certain that what's gonna emerge from analyzing recurrent neural nets and robotic design and advanced computer design is that having this kind of looking at the internal state in a structured way that doesn't look at everything, this guy's has, it's encapsulated, looks at highly processed information, is very selective and makes choices without knowing how they're made. There's, there'll also be an unconscious. I think that that is gonna be, turn out to be really essential to doing efficient information processing. And that's why it evolved, because it's, it's, it's, it's helpful in, because brains come at a high cost. So there has to be, there has to be a good why. And there's a reason, yeah. They're rare in evolution and big brains are rare in evolution and they, they come at a big cost. You mean, if you, you, they, they, they have high metabolic demands. They require, you know, very active lifestyle, warm bloodedness and take, take away from the ability to support metabolism of digestion. And so, so it's, it's, it comes at a high cost. It has to, it has to pay back. Yeah, I think it has a lot of value in social interaction. So I actually am spending the rest of the day today and with our friends that are, our legged friends in robotic form at Boston Dynamics. And I think, so my probably biggest passion is human robot interaction. And it seems that consciousness from the perspective of the robot is very useful to improve the human robot interaction experience. The first, the display of consciousness, but then to me, there's a gray area between the display of consciousness and consciousness itself. If you think of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, it seems like a useful tool in human communication, so. Yes, it's certainly, well, whatever consciousness is will turn out to be. I think addressing it through its use and working up from simple cases and also working up from engineering experience in trying to do efficient computation, including efficient management of social interactions is going to really shed light on these questions. As I said, in a way that sort of musing abstractly about consciousness never would. So as I mentioned, I talked to Sarah Walker and first of all, she says, hi, spoke very highly of you. One of her concerns about physics and physicists and humans is that we may not fully understand the system that we're inside of. Meaning like, there may be limits to the kind of physics we do in trying to understand the system of which we're part of. So like, the observer is also the observed. In that sense, it seems like our tools of understanding the world, I mean, this is mostly centered around the questions of what is life, trying to understand the patterns that are characteristic of life and intelligence, all those kinds of things. We're not using the right tools because we're in the system. Is there something that resonates with you there? Almost like... Well, yes, we have limitations, of course, in the amount of information we can process. On the other hand, we can get help from our Silicon friends and we can get help from all kinds of instruments that make up for our perceptual deficits. And we can use, at a conceptual level, we can use different kinds of concepts to address different kinds of questions. So I'm not sure exactly what problem she's talking about. It's a problem akin to an organism living in a 2D plane trying to understand a three dimensional world. Well, we can do that. I mean, in fact, for practical purposes, most of our experience is two dimensional. It's hard to move vertically. And yet we've produced conceptually a three dimensional symmetry and in fact, four dimensional space time. So by thinking in appropriate ways and using instruments and getting consistent accounts and rich accounts, we find out what concepts are necessary. And I don't see any end in sight of the process or any showstoppers because, let me give you an example. I mean, for instance, QCD, our theory of the strong interaction, has nice equations, which I helped to discover. What's QCD? Quantum chromodynamics. So it's our theory of the strong interaction, the interaction that is responsible for nuclear physics. So it's the interaction that governs how quarks and gluons interact with each other and make protons and neutrons and all the strong, the related particles and many things in physics. It's one of the four basic forces of nature as we presently understand it. And so we have beautiful equations, which we can test in very special circumstances using at high energies, at accelerators. So we're certain that these equations are correct. Prizes are given for it and so on. And people try to knock it down and they can't. Yeah, but the situations in which we can calculate the consequences of these equations are very limited. So for instance, no one has been able to demonstrate that this theory, which is built on quarks and gluons, which no one, which you don't observe, actually produces protons and neutrons and the things you do observe. This is called the problem of confinement. So no one's been able to prove that analytically in a way that a human can understand. On the other hand, we can take these equations to a computer, to gigantic computers and compute. And by God, you get the world from it. So these equations in a way that we don't understand in terms of human concepts, we can't do the calculations, but our machines can do them. So with the help of what I like to call our silicon friends and their descendants in the future, we can understand in a different way that allows us to understand more. But I don't think we'll ever, no human is ever going to be able to solve those equations in the same way. So, but I think that's, you know, when we find limitations to our natural abilities, we can try to find workarounds. And sometimes that's appropriate concepts. Sometimes it's appropriate instruments. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. But I think it's premature to get defeatist about it. I don't see any logical contradiction or paradox or limitation that will bring this process to a halt. Well, I think the idea is to continue thinking outside the box in different directions, meaning just like how the math allows us to think in multiple dimensions outside of our perception system, sort of thinking, you know, coming up with new tools of mathematics or computation or all those kinds of things to take different perspectives on our universe. Well, I'm all for that. You know, and I kind of have even elevated into a principle which is of complementarity following Bohr that you need different ways of thinking even about the same things in order to do justice to their reality and answer different kinds of questions about them. I mean, we've several times alluded to the fact that human beings are hard to understand and the concepts that you use to understand human beings if you wanna prescribe drugs for them or see what's gonna happen if they move very fast or are exposed to radiation. And so that requires one kind of thinking that's very physical based on the fact that the materials that were made out of. On the other hand, if you want to understand how a person's going to behave in a different kind of situation, you need entirely different concepts from psychology and there's nothing wrong with that. You can have very different ways of addressing the same material that are useful for different purposes, right? Can you describe this idea which is fascinating of complementarity a little bit? Sort of first of all, what state is the principle? What is it? And second of all, what are good examples starting from quantum mechanics? You used to mention psychology. Let's talk about this more. It's like in your new book one of the most fascinating ideas actually. I think it's a wonderful, yeah. To me it's, well, it's the culminating chapter of the book and I think since the whole book is about the big lessons or big takeaways from profound understanding of the physical world that we've achieved, including that it's mysterious in some ways, this was the final overarching lesson, complementarity. Lesson, complementarity and it's a approach. So unlike some of these other things which are just facts about the world, like the world is both big and small and different sizes and is big but we're not small, things we talked about earlier and the fact that the universe is comprehensible and how complexity could emerge from simplicity and so those things are in the broad sense facts about the world. Complementarity is more an attitude towards the world than encouraged by the facts about the world. And it's the concept or the approach or the realization that it can be appropriate and useful and inevitable and unavoidable to use very different descriptions of the same object or the same system or the same situation to answer different kinds of questions that may be very different and even mutually uninterpretable, immutually incomprehensible. But both correct somehow. But both correct and sources of different kinds of insight which is so weird. But it seems to work in so many cases. It works in many cases and I think it's a deep fact about the world and how we should approach it. It's most rigorous form where it's actually a theorem if quantum mechanics is correct, occurs in quantum mechanics where the primary description of the world is in terms of wave functions. But let's not talk about the world. Let's just talk about a particle, an electron. The primary description of that electron is its wave function. And the wave function can be used to predict where it's gonna be. If you observe, it'll be in different places with different probabilities or how fast it's moving. And it'll also be moving in different ways with different probabilities. That's what quantum mechanics says. And you can predict either set of probabilities if you know what's gonna happen if I make an observation of the position or the velocity. So the wave function gives you ways of doing both of those. But to do it, to get those predictions, you have to process the wave function in different ways. You process it one way for position and in a different way for momentum. And those ways are mathematically incompatible. It's like you have a stone and you can sculpt it into a Venus de Milo or you can sculpt it into David, but you can't do both. And that's an example of complementarity. To answer different kinds of questions, you have to analyze the system in different ways that are mutually incompatible, but both valid to answer different kinds of questions. So in that case, it's a theorem, but I think it's a much more widespread phenomena that applies to many cases where we can't prove it as a theorem, but it's a piece of wisdom, if you like, and appears to be a very important insight. And if you ignore it, you can get very confused and misguided. Do you think this is a useful hack for ideas that we don't fully understand? Or is this somehow a fundamental property of all or many ideas, that you can take multiple perspectives and they're both true? Well, I think it's both. So it's both the answer to all questions. Yes, that's right. It's not either or, it's both. It's paralyzing to think that we live in a world that's fundamentally surrounded by complementary ideas. Because we somehow want to attach ourselves to absolute truths, and absolute truths certainly don't like the idea of complementarity. Yes, Einstein was very uncomfortable with complementarity. And in a broad sense, the famous Bohr Einstein debates revolved around this question of whether the complementarity that is a foundational feature of quantum mechanics, as we have it, is a permanent feature of the universe and our description of nature. And so far, quantum mechanics wins. And it's gone from triumph to triumph. Whether complementarity is rock bottom, I guess, you can never be sure. I mean, but it looks awfully good and it's been very successful. And certainly, complementarity has been extremely useful and fruitful in that domain, including some of Einstein's attempts to challenge it with the famous Einstein Podolsky Rosen experiment turned out to be confirmations that have been useful in themselves. But so thinking about these things was fruitful, but not in the way that Einstein hoped. Yeah, so as I said, in the case of quantum mechanics and this dilemma or dichotomy between processing the wave function in different ways, it's a theorem. They're mutually incompatible and the physical correlate of that is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle you can't have position and momentum determined at once. But in other cases, like one that I like to think about or like to point out as an example is free will and determinism. It's much less of a theorem and more a kind of way of thinking about things that I think is reassuring and avoids a lot of unnecessary quarreling and confusion. The quarreling I'm okay with and the confusion I'm okay with, I mean, people debate about difficult ideas, but the question is whether it could be almost a fundamental truth. I think it is a fundamental truth. That free will is both an illusion and not. Yes, I think that's correct. There's a reason why people say quantum mechanics is weird and complementarity is a big part of that. To say that our actual whole world is weird, the whole hierarchy of the universe is weird in this kind of particular way, and it's quite profound, but it's also humbling because it's like we're never going to be on sturdy ground in the way that humans like to be. It's like you have to embrace that this whole thing is like unsteady mess. It's one of many lessons in humility that we run into in profound understanding of the world. The Copernican revolution was one, that the earth is not the center of the universe. Darwinian evolution is another, that humans are not the pinnacle of God's creation and the apparent result of deep understanding of physical reality, that mind emerges from matter and there's no call on special life forces or souls. These are all lessons in humility, and I actually find complementarity a liberating concept. It's, okay, you know, we... Yeah, it is in a way. That is what I remember. There's a story about Dr. Johnson, and he's talking with Boswell, and Boswell was, they were discussing a sermon that they'd both heard, and the sort of culmination of the sermon was the speaker saying, I accept the universe. And Dr. Johnson said, well, damn well better. And there's a certain joy in accepting the universe because it's mind expanding. And to me, complementarity also suggests tolerance, suggests opportunities for understanding things in different ways that add to rather than detract from understanding. So I think it's an opportunity for mind expansion and demanding that there's only one way to think about things can be very limiting. On the free will one, that's a trippy one, though. To think like I am the decider of my own actions and at the same time I'm not is tricky to think about, but there does seem to be some kind of profound truth in that. I get, well, I think it is tied up. It will turn out to be tied up when we understand things better with these issues of self awareness and where we get, what we perceive as making choices, what does that really mean and what's going on under the hood. But I'm speculating about a future understanding that's not in place at present. Your sense there will always be, like as you dig into the self awareness thing, there'll always be some places where complementarity is gonna show up. Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, there will be, how should I say? There'll be kind of a God's eye view which sees everything that's going on in the computer or the brain. And then there's the brain's own view or the central processor or whatever it is, what we call the self, the consciousness, that's only aware of a very small part of it. And those are very different. Those are, so the God's eye view can be deterministic while the self view sees free will. I'm pretty sure that's how it's gonna work out actually. But as it stands, free will is a concept that we definitely, at least I feel I definitely experience, I can choose to do one thing then another. And other people I think are sufficiently similar to me that I trust that they feel the same way. And it's an essential concept in psychology and law and so forth. But at the same time, I think that mind emerges from matter and that there's an alternative description of matter that's up to subtleties about quantum mechanics, which I don't think are relevant here, really is deterministic. Let me ask you about some particles. Okay. First the absurd question, almost like a question that like Plato would ask. What is the smallest thing in the universe? As far as we know, the fundamental particles out of which we build our most successful description of nature are points. They don't have any internal structure. So that's as small as can be. So what does that mean operationally? That means that they obey equations that describe entities that are singular concentrations of energy, momentum, angular momentum, the things that particles have, but localized at individual points. Now that mathematical structure is only revealed partially in the world because to process the wave function in a way that accesses information about the precise position of things, you have to apply a lot of energy and that's an idealization and you can apply infinite amount of energy to determine a precise position. But at the mathematical level, we build the world out of particles that are points. So do they actually exist and what are we talking about? Oh, they exist. So let me ask sort of do quarks exist? Yes, do electrons exist? Yes, do photons exist? Yes. But what does it mean for them to exist? Okay, so well, the hard answer to that, the precise answer is that we construct the world out of equations that contain entities that are reproducible, that exist in vast numbers throughout the universe, that have definite properties of mass, spin and a few others that we call electrons and what an electron is is defined by the equations that it satisfies theoretically and we find that there are many, many exemplars of that entity in the physical world. So in the case of electrons, we can isolate them and study them and individual ones in great detail and we can check that they all actually are identical and that's why chemistry works and yes. So in that case, it's very tangible. Similarly with photons, you can study them individually, the units of light and nowadays, it's very practical to study individual photons and determine their spin and their other basic properties and check out the equations in great detail. For quarks and gluons, which are the other two main ingredients of our model of matter that's so successful, it's a little more complicated because the quarks and gluons that appear in our equations don't appear directly as particles you can isolate and study individually. They always occur within what are called bound states or structures like protons. A proton, roughly speaking, is composed of three quarks and a lot of gluons but we can detect them in a remarkably direct way actually nowadays, whereas at relatively low energies, the behavior of quarks is complicated. At high energies, they can propagate through space relatively freely for a while and we can see their tracks. So ultimately, they get recaptured into protons and other mesons and funny things but for a short time, they propagate freely and while that happens, we can take snapshots and see their manifestations. Actually, this kind of thing is exactly what I got the Nobel Prize for, predicting that this would work. And similarly for gluons, although you can't isolate them as individual particles and study them in the same way that we study electrons, say, you can use them theoretically as entities out of which you build tangible things that we actually do observe but also you can, at accelerators at high energy, you can liberate them for brief periods of time and study and get convincing evidence that they leave tracks and you can get convincing evidence that they were there and have the properties that we wanted them to have. Can we talk about asymptotic freedom, this very idea that you won the Nobel Prize for? Yeah. So it describes a very weird effect to me, the weird in the following way. So the way I think of most forces or interactions, the closer you are, the stronger the effect, the stronger the force, right? With quarks, the close they are, the less so the strong interaction. And in fact, they're basically act like free particles when they're very close. That's right, yes. But this requires a huge amount of energy. Like can you describe me why, how does this even work? How weird it is? A proper description must bring in quantum mechanics and relativity and it's, so a proper description and equations, so a proper description really is probably more than we have time for and require quite a bit of patience on your part, but. How does relativity come into play? Wait, wait a minute. Relativity is important because when we talk about trying to think about short distances, we have to think about very large momenta and very large momenta are connected to very large energy in relativity. And so the connection between how things behave at short distances and how things behave at high energy really is connected through relativity in sort of a slightly backhanded way. Quantum mechanics indicates that short, to get to analyze short distances, you need to bring in probes that carry a lot of momentum. This again is related to uncertainty because it's the fact that you have to bring in a lot of momentum that interferes with the possibility of determining position and momentum at the same time. If you want to determine position, you have to use instruments that bring in a lot of momentum. And because of that, those same instruments can't also measure momentum because they're disturbing the momentum that, and then the momentum brings in energy and yeah. So that there's also the effect that asymptotic freedom comes from the possibility of spontaneously making quarks and gluons for short amounts of time that fluctuate into existence and out of existence. And the fact that that can be done with a very little amount of energy and uncertainty and energy translates into uncertainty and time. So if you do that for a short time, you can do that. Well, it's all comes in a package. So I told you it would take a while to really explain, but the results can be understood. I mean, we can state the results pretty simply, I think. So in everyday life, we do encounter some forces that increase with distance and kind of turn off at short distances. That's the way rubber bands work, if you think about it, or if you pull them hard, they resist, but they get flabby if the rubber band is not pulled. And so there are, that can happen in the physical world, but what's really difficult is to see how that could be a fundamental force that's consistent with everything else we know. And that's what asymptotic freedom is. It says that there's a very particular kind of fundamental force that involves special particles called gluons with very special properties that enables that kind of behavior. So there were experiment, at the time we did our work, there were experimental indications that quarks and gluons did have this kind of property, but there were no equations that were capable of capturing it. And we found the equations and showed how they work and showed how they, that they were basically unique. And this led to a complete theory of how the strong interaction works, which is the quantum chromodynamics we mentioned earlier. And so that's the phenomenon that quarks and gluons interact very, very weakly when they're close together. That's connected through relativity with the fact that they also interact very, very weakly at high energies. So if you have, so at high energies, the simplicity of the fundamental interaction gets revealed. At the time we did our work, the clues were very subtle, but nowadays at what are now high energy accelerators, it's all obvious. So we would have had a much, well, somebody would have had a much easier time 20 years later, looking at the data, you can sort of see the quarks and gluons. As I mentioned, they leave these short tracks that would have been much, much easier, but from fundamental, from indirect clues, we were able to piece together enough to make that behavior a prediction rather than a post diction, right? So it becomes obvious at high energies. It becomes very obvious. When we first did this work, it was frontiers of high energy physics and at big international conferences, there would always be sessions on testing QCD and whether this proposed description of the strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth. And it was very exciting. But nowadays the same kind of work, but much more precise with calculations to more accuracy and experiments that are much more precise and comparisons that are very precise. Now it's called calculating backgrounds because people take this for granted and wanna see deviations from the theory, which would be the new discoveries. Yeah, the cutting edge becomes a foundation and the foundation becomes boring. Yes. Is there some, for basic explanation purposes, is there something to be said about strong interactions in the context of the strong nuclear force for the attraction between protons and neutrons versus the interaction between quarks within protons? Well, quarks and gluons have the same relation basically to nuclear physics as electrons and photons have to atomic and molecular physics. So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities that really come into play in chemistry and atomic physics. Of course, you have to have the atomic nuclei, but those are small and relatively inert, really the dynamical part. And for most purposes of chemistry, you just say that you have this tiny little nucleus, which QCD gives you. Don't worry about it. It just, it's there. The real action is the electrons moving around and exchanging and things like that. Okay, but we want it to understand the nucleus too. And so atoms are sort of quantum mechanical clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces, which is photons. And then this radiation, which is another aspect of photons. That's where all the fun happens is the electrons and the photons. Yeah, that's right. And the nucleus are kind of the, well, they give the positive charge and most of the mass of matter, but they don't, since they're so heavy, they don't move very much in chemistry. And I'm oversimplifying drastically. They're not contributing much to the interaction in chemistry. For most purposes in chemistry, you can just idealize them as concentrations of positive mass and charge that are, you don't have to look inside, but people are curious what's inside. And that was a big thing on the agenda of 20th century physics starting in the 19, well, starting with the 20th century and unfolding throughout of trying to understand what forces held the atomic nucleus together, what it was and so. Anyway, the story that emerges from QCD is that very similar to the way that, well, broadly similar to the way that clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces give you atoms and ultimately molecules. Protons and neutrons are like atoms made now out of quarks, quark clouds held together by gluons, which are like the photons that give the electric forces, but this is giving a different force, the strong force. And the residual forces between protons and neutrons that are leftover from the basic binding are like the residual forces between atoms that give molecules, but in the case of protons and neutrons, it gives you atomic nuclei. So again, for definitional purposes, QCD, quantum chromodynamics, is basically the physics of strong interaction. Yeah, we understand, we now would understand, I think most physicists would say it's the theory of quarks and gluons and how they interact. But it's a very precise, and I think it's fair to say, very beautiful theory based on mathematical symmetry of a high order, and another thing that's beautiful about it is that it's kind of in the same family as electrodynamics. The conceptual structure of the equations are very similar. They're based on having particles that respond to charge in a very symmetric way. In the case of electrodynamics, it's photons that respond to electric charge. In the case of quantum chromodynamics, there are three kinds of charge that we call colors, but they're nothing like colors. They really are like different kinds of charge. But they rhyme with the same kind of, like it's similar kind of dynamics. Similar kind of dynamics. I'd like to say that QCD is like QED on steroids. And instead of one photon, you have eight gluons. Instead of one charge, you have three color charges. But there's a strong family resemblance between them. But the context in which QCD does this thing is it's much higher energies. Like that's where it comes to life. Well, it's a stronger force, so that to access how it works and kind of pry things apart, you have to inject more energy. And so that gives us, in some sense, a hint of how things were in the earlier universe. Yeah, well, in that regard, asymptotic freedom is a tremendous blessing because it means things get simpler at high energy. The universe was born free. Born free. That's very good, yes. Universe was born. So in atomic physics, a similar thing happens in the theory of stars. Stars are hot enough that the interactions between electrons and photons, they're liberated. They don't form atoms anymore. They make a plasma, which in some ways is simpler to understand. You don't have complicated chemistry. And in the early universe, according to QCD, similarly atomic nuclei dissolved and take the constituent quarks and gluons, which are moving around very fast and interacting in relatively simple ways. And so this opened up the early universe to scientific calculation. Can I ask you about some other weird particles that make up our universe? What are axions? And what is the strong CP problem? Okay, so let me start with what the strong CP problem is. First of all, well, C is charge conjugation, which is the transformation, the notional transformation, if you like, that changes all particles into their antiparticles. And the concept of C symmetry, charge conjugation symmetry, is that if you do that, you find the same laws that would work. So the laws are symmetric if the behavior that particles exhibit is the same as the behavior you get with all their antiparticles. And then P is parity, which is also called spatial inversion. It's basically looking at a mirror universe and saying that the laws that are obeyed in a mirror universe, when you look, that the mirror images obey the same laws as the sources of their images. There's no way of telling left from right, for instance, that the laws don't distinguish between left and right. Now, in the mid 20th century, people discovered that both of those are not quite true. Really, the equation that the mirror universe, the universe that you see in a mirror is not gonna obey the same laws as the universe that we actually interpret. You would be able to tell if you did the right kind of experiments, which was the mirror and which was the real thing. Anyway, that. That's the parity and they show that the parity doesn't necessarily hold. It doesn't quite hold. Examining what the exceptions are turned out to be, to lead to all kinds of insight about the nature of fundamental interactions, especially properties of neutrinos and the weak interaction, it's a long story. But it's a very, it's a. So you just define the C and the P, the conjugation, the charge conjugation. Now that I've done that, I wanna. What's the problem? Shove them off. Okay, great. Because it's easier to talk about T, which is time reversal symmetry. We have very good reasons to think CPT is an accurate symmetry of nature. It's on the same level as relativity and quantum mechanics, basically. So that better be true. Or else we. So it's symmetric when you. When you do. When you do conjugation parity and time. And time and space reversal. If you do all three, then you get the same physical consequences. Now, so, but that means that CP is equivalent to T. But what's observed in the world is that T is not quite an accurate symmetry of nature, either. So most phenomena of, at the fundamental level. So interactions among elementary particles and the basic gravitational interaction. If you ran them backwards in time, you'd get the same laws. So if, again, going back. This time we don't talk about a mirror, but we talk about a movie. If you take a movie and then run it backwards, that's the time reversal. It's good to think about a mirror in time. Yeah, it's like a mirror in time. If you run the movie backwards, it would look very strange if you were looking at complicated objects and a Charlie Chaplin movie or whatever. It would look very strange if you ran it backwards in time. But at the level of basic interactions, if you were able to look at the atoms and the quarks involved, they would obey the same laws. They do a very good approximation, but not exactly. So this is not exactly, that means you could tell. You could tell, but you'd have to do very, very subtle experiments with at high energy accelerators to take a movie that looked different when you ran it backwards. This was a discovery by two great physicists named Jim Cronin and Val Fitch in the mid 1960s. Previous to that, over all the centuries of development of physics with all its precise laws, they did seem to have this gratuitous property that they look the same if you run the equations backwards. It's kind of an embarrassing property actually because life isn't like that. So empirical reality does not have this imagery in any obvious way. And yet the laws did. It's almost like the laws of physics are missing something fundamental about life if it holds that property, right? Well, that's the embarrassing nature of it. Yeah, it's embarrassing. Well, people worked hard at what's, this is a problem that's thought to belong to the foundations of statistical mechanics or the foundations of thermodynamics to understand how behavior, which is grossly not symmetric with respect to reversing the direction of time in large objects, how that can emerge from equations which are symmetric with respect to changing the direction of time to a very good approximation. And that's still an interesting endeavor. That's interesting. And actually it's an exciting frontier of physics now to sort of explore the boundary between when that's true and when it's not true. When you get to smaller objects and exceptions like time crystals. I definitely have to ask you about time crystals in a second here. But so the CP problem and T, so there's all of these. We're in danger of infinite regress, but we have to convert soon. So. Can't possibly be turtles all the way down. We're gonna get to the bottom turtle. So it became, so it got to be a real, I mean, it's a really puzzling thing why the laws should have this very odd property that we don't need. And in fact, it's kind of an embarrassment in addressing empirical reality. But it seemed to be almost, it seemed to be exactly true for a long time. And then almost true. And in way, almost true is even, is more disturbing than exactly true because exactly true, it could have been just a fundamental feature of the world. And at some level you just have to take it as it is. And if it's a beautiful, easily articulatable regularity, you could say that, okay, that's fine as a fundamental law of nature. But to say that it's approximately true, but not exactly, that's weird. So, and then, so there was great progress in the late part of the 20th century in getting to an understanding of fundamental interactions in general that shed light on this issue. It turns out that the basic principles of relativity and quantum mechanics, plus the kind of high degree of symmetry that we found, the so called gauge symmetry that characterizes the fundamental interactions, when you put all that together, it's a very, very constraining framework. And it has some indirect consequences because the possible interactions are so constrained. And one of the indirect consequences is that the possibilities for violating the symmetry between forwards and backwards in time are very limited. They're basically only two. And one of them occurs and leads to a very rich theory that explains the Cronin Fish experiment and a lot of things that have been done subsequently has been used to make all kinds of successful predictions. So that's turned out to be a very rich interaction. It's esoteric and the effects only show up at accelerators and are small and so on, but they might've been very important in the early universe and lead to them be connected to the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the present universe. And so, but that's another digression. The point is that that was fine. That was a triumph to say that there was one possible kind of interaction that would violate time reversal symmetry. And sure enough, there it is. But the other kind doesn't occur. So we still got a problem. Why doesn't it occur? So we're close to really finally understanding this profound gratuitous feature of the world that is almost but not quite symmetric under reversing the direction of time, but not quite there. And to understand that last bit is a challenging frontier of physics today. And we have a promising proposal for how it works, which is a kind of theory of evolution. So there's this possible interaction, which we call a coupling, and there's a numerical quantity that tells us how strong that is. And traditionally in physics, we think of these kinds of numerical quantities as constants of nature that you just have to put them in. From experiment, they have a certain value and that's it. And who am I to question what God doing? They're just constant. Well, they seem to be just constants. I'm just wondering. But in this case, it's been fruitful to think and work out a theory where that strength of interaction is actually not a constant. It's a fun, it's a field. It's a, fields are the fundamental ingredients of modern physics. Like there's an electron field, there's a photon field, which is also called the electromagnetic field. And so all of these particles are manifestations of different fields. And there could be a field, something that depends on space and time. So a dynamical entity instead of just a constant here. And if you do things in a nice way, that's very symmetric, very much suggested aesthetically by the theory. But the theory we do have, then you find that you get a field which as it evolves from the early universe, settles down to a value that's just right to make the laws very nearly exact, invariant or symmetric with respect to reversal of time. It might appear as a constant, but it's actually a field that evolved over time. It evolved over time, okay. But when you examine this proposal in detail, you find that it hasn't quite settled down to exactly zero. There it's still, the field is still moving around a little bit. And because the motion is so, the motion is so difficult. The material is so rigid. And this material, the field that fills all space is so rigid. Even small amounts of motion can involve lots of energy. And that energy takes the form of particles, fields that are in motion are always associated with particles. And those are the axioms. And if you calculate how much energy is in these residual oscillations, this axiom gas that fills all the universe, if this fundamental theory is correct, you get just the right amount to make the dark matter that astronomers want. And it has just the right properties. So I'd love to believe that. So that might be a thing that unlocks, might be the key to understanding dark matter. Yeah, I'd like to think so. And many, many physicists are coming around to this point of view, which I've been a voice in the wilderness. I was a voice in the wilderness for a long time, but now it's become very popular, maybe even dominant. So almost like, so this axion particle slash field would be the thing that explains dark matter. It explains, yeah, would solve this fundamental question of finally, of why the laws are almost, but not quite exactly the same if you run them backwards in time. And then seemingly in a totally different conceptual universe, it would also provide, give us an understanding of the dark matter. That's not what it was designed for. And the theory wasn't proposed with that in mind, but when you work out the equations, that's what you get. That's always a good sign. Yes. I think I vaguely read somewhere that there may be early experimental validation of axion. Is that, am I reading the wrong? Well, there've been quite a few false alarms and I think there are some of them still, people desperately wanna find this thing. And, but I don't think any of them are convincing at this point, but there are very ambitious experiments and kind of new, you have to design new kinds of antennas that are capable of detecting these predicted particles. And it's very difficult. They interact very, very weakly. If it were easy, it would have been done already. But I think there's good hope that we can get down to the required sensitivity and actually test whether these ideas are right in coming years or maybe decades. And then understand one of the big mysteries, like literally big in terms of its fraction of the universe is dark matter. Yes. Let me ask you about, you mentioned a few times, time crystals. What are they? These things are, it's a very beautiful idea when we start to treat space and time as similar frameworks. Yes, right. Physical phenomena. Right, that's what motivated it. First of all, what are crystals? Yeah. And what are time crystals? Okay, so crystals are orderly arrangements of atoms in space. And many materials, if you cool them down gently, will form crystals. And so we say that that's a state of matter that forms spontaneously. And an important feature of that state of matter is that the end result, the crystal, has less symmetry than the equations that give rise to the crystal. So the equations, the basic equations of physics are the same if you move a little bit. So you can move, they're homogeneous, but crystals aren't. The atoms are in particular place, so they have less symmetry. And time crystals are the same thing in time, basically. But of course, so it's not positions of atoms, but it's orderly behavior that certain states of matter will arrange themselves into spontaneously if you treat them gently and let them do what they want to do. But repeat in that same way indefinitely. That's the crystalline form. You can also have time liquids, or you can have all kinds of other states of matter. You can also have space time crystals where the pattern only repeats if with each step of time, you also move at a certain direction in space. So yeah, basically it's states of matter that displace structure in time spontaneously. So here's the difference. When it happens in time, it sure looks a lot like it's motion, and if it repeats indefinitely, it sure looks a lot like perpetual motion. Yeah. Like looks like free lunch. And I was told that there's no such thing as free lunch. Does this violate laws of thermodynamics? No, but it requires a critical examination of the laws of thermodynamics. I mean, let me say on background that the laws of thermodynamics are not fundamental laws of physics. There are things we prove under certain circumstances emerge from the fundamental laws of physics. They're not, we don't posit them separately. They're meant to be deduced, and they can be deduced under limited circumstances, but not necessarily universally. And we're finding some of the subtleties and sort of accept edge cases where they don't apply in a straightforward way. And this is one. So time crystals do obey, do have this structure in time, but it's not a free lunch because although in a sense, things are moving, they're already doing what they want to do. They're in the, so if you want to extract energy from it, you're gonna be foiled because there's no spare energy there. So you can add energy to it and kind of disturb it, but you can't extract energy from this motion because it's gonna, it wants to do, that's the lowest energy configuration that there is, so you can't get further energy out of it. So in theory, I guess perpetual motion, you would be able to extract energy from it if such a thing was to be created, you can then milk it for energy. Well, what's usually meant in the literature of perpetual motion is a kind of macroscopic motion that you could extract energy from and somehow it would crank back up. That's not the case here. If you want to extract energy, this motion is not something you can extract energy from. If you intervene in the behavior, you can change it, but only by injecting energy, not by taking away energy. You mentioned that a theory of everything may be quite difficult to come by. A theory of everything broadly defined meaning like truly a theory of everything, but let's look at a more narrow theory of everything, which is the way it's used often in physics is a theory that unifies our current laws of physics, general relativity, quantum field theory. Do you have thoughts on this dream of a theory of everything in physics? How close are we? Is there any promising ideas out there in your view? Well, it would be nice to have. It would be aesthetically pleasing. Will it be useful? No, probably not. Well, I shouldn't, it's dangerous to say that, but probably not. I think we, certainly not in the foreseeable future. Maybe to understand black holes. Yeah, but that's, yes, maybe to understand black holes, but that's not useful. That's my book. And well, not only, I mean, to understand it's worse, it's not useful in the sense that we're not gonna be basing any technology anytime soon on black holes, but it's more severe than that, I would say it's that the kinds of questions about black holes that we can't answer within the framework of existing theory are ones that are not going to be susceptible to astronomical observation in the foreseeable future. They're questions about very, very small black holes when quantum effects come into play so that black holes are, not black holes, they're emitting this discovery of Hawking called Hawking radiation, which for astronomical black holes is a tiny, tiny effect that no one has ever observed, it's a prediction that's never been checked. So like supermassive black holes, that doesn't apply? No, no, the predicted rate of radiation from those black holes is so tiny that it's absolutely unobservable and is overwhelmed by all kinds of other effects. So it's not practical in the sense of technology, it's not even practical in the sense of application to astronomy, our existing theory of general relativity and quantum theory and our theory of the different fundamental forces is perfectly adequate to all problems of technology, of technology, for sure, and almost all problems of astrophysics and cosmology that appear except with the notable exception of the extremely early universe, if you want to ask, what happened before the Big Bang or what happened right at the Big Bang, which would be a great thing to understand, of course. Yes. We don't, but. But what about the engineering question? So if we look at space travel, so I think you've spoken with him, Eric Weinstein. Oh, yeah. Really, you know, he says things like we want to get off this planet. His intuition is almost motivated for the engineering project of space exploration in order for us to crack this problem of becoming a multi planetary species, we have to solve the physics problem. His intuition is like, if we figure out this, what he calls the source code, which is like, like a theory of everything might give us clues on how to start hacking the fabric of reality, like getting shortcuts, right? It might. I can't say that, you know, I can't say that it won't, but I can say that in the 1970s and early 1980s, we achieved huge steps in understanding matter. QCD, much better understanding of the weak interaction, much better understanding of quantum mechanics in general. And it's had minimal impact on technology. On rocket design, on propulsion. On rocket design, on anything, any technology whatsoever. And now we're talking about much more esoteric things. And since I don't know what they are, I can't say for sure that they won't affect technology, but I'm very, very skeptical that they would affect technology. Because, you know, to access them, you need very exotic circumstances to make new kinds of particles with high energy. You need accelerators that are very expensive and you don't produce many of them, and so forth. You know, it's just, it's a pipe dream, I think. Yeah, about space exploration. I'm not sure exactly what he has in mind, but to me, it's more a problem of, I don't know, something between biology and... And information processing. Processing, what you mean, how should I... I think human bodies are not well adapted to space. Even Mars, which is the closest thing to a kind of human environment that we're gonna find anywhere close by. Very, very difficult to maintain humans on Mars. And it's gonna be very expensive and very unstable. But I think, however, if we take a broader view of what it means to bring human civilization outside of the Earth, if we're satisfied with sending mines out there that we can converse with and actuators that we can manipulate and sensors that we can get feedback from, I think that's where it's at. And I think that's so much more realistic. And I think that's the long term future of space exploration. It's not hauling human bodies all over the place. That's just silly. It's possible that human bodies... So like you said, it's a biology problem. What's possible is that we extend human life span in some way, we have to look at a bigger picture. It could be just like you're saying, by sending robots with actuators and kind of extending our limbs. But it could also be extending some aspect of our minds, some information, all those kinds of things. And it could be cyborgs, it could be, it could be... No, we're talking, not getting the fun. It could be, you know, it could be human brains or cells that realize something like human brain architecture within artificial environments, you know, shells, if you like, that are more adapted to the conditions of space. And that, yeah, so that's entirely man machine hybrids, as well as sort of remote outposts that we can communicate with. I think those will happen. Yeah, to me, there's some sense in which, as opposed to understanding the physics of the fundamental fabric of the universe, I think getting to the physics of life, the physics of intelligence, the physics of consciousness will, the physics of information that brings, from which life emerges, that will allow us to do space exploration. Yeah, well, I think physics in the larger sense has a lot to contribute here. Not the physics of finding fundamental new laws in the sense of another quark or axions even. But physics in the sense of, physics has a lot of experience in analyzing complex situations and analyzing new states of matter and devising new kinds of instruments that do clever things. Physics in that sense has enormous amounts to contribute to this kind of endeavor. But I don't think that looking for a so called theory of everything has much to do with it at all. What advice would you give to a young person today with a bit of fire in their eyes, high school student, college student, thinking about what to do with their life, maybe advice about career or bigger advice about life in general? Well, first read fundamentals because there I've tried to give some coherent deep advice. That's fundamentals, 10 keys to reality by Frank Kulczyk. So that's a good place to start. Available everywhere. If you wanna learn what I can tell you. Is there an audio book? I read that ebook. Yes, there is an audio book. There's an audio book, that's awesome. I think it's, I can give three pieces of wise advice that I think are generally applicable. One is to cast a wide net, to really look around and see what looks promising, what catches your imagination and promising. Yeah, and those, you have to balance those two things. You could have things that catch your imagination, but don't look promising in the sense that the questions aren't ripe or, and things that you, and part of what makes things attractive is that, whether you thought you liked them or not, is if you can see that there's ferment and new ideas coming up that become, that's attractive in itself. So when I started out, I thought I was, and when I was an undergraduate, I intended to study philosophy or questions of how mind emerges from matter. But I thought that that wasn't really right. Timing isn't right yet. The right, the timing wasn't right for the kind of mathematical thinking and conceptualization that I really enjoy and am good at. But, so that's one thing, cast a wide net, look around. And that's a pretty easy thing to do today because of the internet. You can look at all kinds of things. You have to be careful though because there's a lot of crap also. But you can sort of tell the difference if you do a little digging. So don't settle on just, what your thesis advisor tells you to do or what your teacher tells you to do. Look for yourself and get a sense of what seems promising, not what seemed promising 10 years ago or, so that's one. Another thing is to, is kind of complimentary to that. Well, they're all complimentary. Complimentary to that is to read history and read the masters, the history of ideas and masters of ideas. I'd benefited enormously from, as early in my career, from reading in physics, Einstein in the original and Feynman's lectures as they were coming out and Darwin. You know, these, you can learn what it, and Galileo, you can learn what it is to wrestle with difficult ideas and how great minds did that. You can learn a lot about style, how to write your ideas up and express them in clear ways. And also just a couple of that with, I also enjoy reading biographies. And biographies, yes, similarly, right, yeah. So it gives you the context of the human being that created those ideas. Right, and brings it down to earth in the sense that, you know, it was really human beings who did this. It's not, and they made mistakes. And yeah, I also got inspiration from Bertrand Russell who was a big hero and H.G. Wells and yeah. So read the masters, make contact with great minds. And when you are sort of narrowing down on a subject, learn about the history of the subject because that really puts in context what you're trying to do and also gives a sense of community and grandeur to the whole enterprise. And then the third piece of advice is complimentary to both those, which is sort of to get the basics under control as soon as possible. So if you wanna do theoretical work in science, you know, you have to learn calculus, multivariable calculus, complex variables, group theory. Nowadays, you have to be highly computer literate if you want to do experimental work. You also have to be computer literate and you have to learn about electronics and optics and instruments. So get that under control as soon as possible because it's like learning a language to produce great works and express yourself fluently and with confidence. It should be your native language. These things should be like your native language. So you're not wondering what is the derivative? This is just part of your, it's in your bones, so to speak, and the sooner that you can do that, then the better. So all those things can be done in parallel and should be. You've accomplished some incredible things in your life, but the sad thing about this thing we have is it ends. Do you think about your mortality? Are you afraid of death? Well, afraid is the wrong word. I mean, I wish it weren't going to happen and I'd like to, but. Do you think about it? I, you know, occasionally I think about, well, I think about it very operationally in the sense that there's always a trade off between exploration and exploitation. This is a classic subject in computer science, actually in machine learning that when you're in an unusual circumstance, you want to explore to see what the landscape is and what, and gather data. But then at some point you want to use that, make, decide, make choices and say, this is what I'm going to do and exploit the knowledge you've accumulated. And the longer the period of exploitation you anticipate, the more exploration you should do in new directions. And so for me, I've had to sort of adjust the balance of exploration and exploitation and. That's it, you've explored quite a lot. Yeah, well, I haven't shut off the exploitation at all. I'm still hoping for. The exploration. The exploration, right. I'm still hoping for 10 or 15 years of top flight performance. But the, several years ago now when I was 50 years old, I was at the Institute for Advanced Study and my office was right under Freeman Dyson's office and we were kind of friendly. And, you know, he found out it was my 50th birthday and said, congratulations. And you should feel liberated because no one expects much of a 50 year old theoretical physicist. And he, and he obviously had felt liberated by reaching a certain age. And yeah, there is something to that. I feel, you know, I feel I don't have to catch, I don't have to keep in touch with the latest hypertechnical developments in particle physics or string theory or something. I, because I'm not gonna, I'm really not gonna be exploiting that. But I, but where I am exploring in these directions of machine learning and things like that. And, but then, but I'm also concentrating within physics on exploiting directions that I've already established and the laws that we already have and doing things like, I'm very actively involved in trying to design, helping people, experimentalists and engineers even to design antennas that are capable of detecting axions. So there, and that's, there we're deep in the exploitation stage. It's not a matter of finding the new laws, but of really, you know, using the laws we have to kind of finish the story off. So it's complicated, but I'm, you know, I'm very happy with my life right now and I'm enjoying it and I don't wanna cloud that by thinking too much that it's gonna come to an end. You know, it's a gift I didn't earn. Is there a good thing to say about why this gift that you've gotten and didn't deserve is so damn enjoyable? So like, what's the meaning of this thing, of life? To me, interacting with people I love, my family, and I have a very wide circle of friends now and I'm trying to produce some institutions that will survive me as well as my work and it's just, it's, how should I say? It's a positive feedback loop when you do something and people appreciate it and then you wanna do more and you get rewarded and it's just, how should I say? This is another gift that I didn't earn and don't understand, but I have a dopamine system and yeah, I'm happy to use it. It seems to get energized by the creative process, by the process of exploration. Very much so. And all of that started from the little fluctuations shortly after the Big Bang. Frank, well, whatever those initial conditions and fluctuations did that created you, I'm glad they did. This is, thank you for all the work you've done, for the many people you've inspired, for the many, of the billion, most of your ideas were pretty useless of the several billions, as it is for all humans, but you had quite a few truly special ideas and thank you for bringing those to the world and thank you for wasting your valuable time with me today, it's truly an honor. It's been a joy and I hope people enjoy it and I think the kind of mind expansion that I've enjoyed by interacting with physical reality at this deep level, I think can be conveyed to and enjoyed by many, many people and that's one of my missions in life, to share it. Beautiful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Frank Wilczek and thank you to The Information, NatSuite, ExpressVPN, Blinkist and 8sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein, nothing happens until something moves. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #187

The following is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, his second time on the podcast. Vitalik is the cofounder of Ethereum and one of the most influential people in cryptocurrency and technology broadly defined. Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, Four Sigmatic, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ethereum, Bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies have been taking a wild ride of prices going up and down in the past few months. To me, the prices were never as important as the ideas, both technical and philosophical. Cryptocurrency has the potential to empower billions of people to participate in the global economy in a way that resists the manipulation by centralized power. Also with smart contracts, layer two technologies, data pools, NFTs, and of course, integration of artificial intelligence into the whole thing, we have the opportunity to build tools and worlds that transform physical and digital life as we know it, hopefully minimizing the suffering in the world and maximizing the fun. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin. Let's first talk about Shiba Inu, if we can. Also known as Shiba Token, code SHIB, for context, Shiba Inu was created in August 2020, modeled off of Dogecoin by the anonymous founder known as Ryoshi. On May 10th this year, it had a market capitalization of over 13 billion. And maybe you can explain this, but in a crazy move, you were given half of SHIB's total supply. You burned, a.k.a. destroyed 90% of it. That's worth $6.7 billion. And you donated 10%, that's worth 1.2 billion at the time to an India COVID 19 relief fund, saying you don't want to be the locus of this much power. This is fascinating. Why and how were you able to walk away from this much money and this much power? So I should probably start by giving some of the backstory around these coins and this concept of giving me coins. So first of all, Shiba Inu, as you said, is this kind of knockoff of Dogecoin, right? And Dogecoin was this initial kind of fun coin that was created back, I think, around 2014 or so. And it was just created by Jackson Palmer who put it out as a joke for a couple of hours and a community formed around it. And at the beginning, people didn't take it very seriously. I actually remember putting about $25,000 into Doge sometime around 2016. And I just remember thinking to myself, okay, how am I going to explain to my mom that I just invested $25,000 into Dogecoins? And what even are Dogecoins? The only interesting thing about this coin is that there's a logo of a dog somewhere. But of course, that ended up being one of the best investments I've ever made and it did really well. And then at the end of 2020, Elon Musk, of course, started talking about Dogecoin and the market cap just shot up to about $50 billion. Actually, it shot up multiple times, right? Like the first time it went up from about 0.8 cents to about like 7 cents. And this just happened all in one day. And I remember this was when I was still in Singapore in the middle of COVID and I saw that the price just went up by 1000% and I was like, oh my God, my Doge is worth like a lot. And so I immediately called up some of my friends and told them to like drop everything and scramble. And I sold half the Doge and I got $4.3 million, donated the proceeds to give directly. And a few hours after I did this, the price dropped back down from about 7 cents to 4 cents. So I managed to sell the Doge at the top and I remember just that feeling like I was such an amazing trader. But then of course, the price went up from 4 cents then to 7 and then 50 and just like Doge becoming this big phenomenon where there's even a lot of people that have heard of Doge that have not heard of Ethereum is just like something even I wasn't predicting, right? And so after that, of course, we have Doge and then people are thinking, well, if the leading DOG token is worth $50 billion, then surely the second largest DOG token deserves at least seven or 8 billion, right? Like, I feel like that's the kind of what the mindset of these Shiba people is. So that of course, they did this other gimmick, right? Where they gave me half the Shiba token supply. They were actually not the first projects to do this. So around the end of 2020, there was this weird project called Teller. It's like T E L L O R. I think they're a chain link competitor or something like this. But I remember they just like dumped $50,000 worth of their token into my wallet. And then they had their Twitter army just like basically run around saying, look, look at Vitalik's wallet, Vitalik holds Tellers. He's one of us, he's a supporter. And as soon as I discovered this, I just like publicly sold the Teller tokens on Uniswap. And this created a bit of a Twitter splat. Now, the Shiba people were more clever. The Shiba people, instead of dumping to that wallet, they dumped to my cold wallet, right? So in a cryptocurrency, right, there's this concept of like cold wallets and hot wallets. Basically, like the thing that actually owns your money is like this 80 digit number called a private key, right? And a hot wallet is when that private key is just stored in memory on your computer, on your phone, really easy to access. Cold wallet means it's either written down on a piece of paper or it's on a computer that's just never accessed the internet, right? So cold is very inconvenient, but cold is also much more secure, right? Because even if that computer has some viruses on it, like it's like air gapped, it's not actually going to be able to upload it. So this cold wallet and like all the money is out of the cold wallet, so it's safe for me to talk about my setup now, right? But it was a laptop that was sitting in Canada. And I also had two pieces of paper where I wrote down two numbers on those two pieces of paper. One was with me, one was in Canada. And if you add those two numbers together, you get the private key. So because of COVID travel restrictions, and this cold wallets in Canada, like it's very difficult for me to actually access it, right? And I'm not sure if they knew this, maybe they just got lucky, but basically they sent a lot of these dog tokens into this wallet where it was very difficult for me to access it. But then I saw these dog tokens, I saw more and more people talking about them. And then at some point I realized that like, hey, these things are worth billions of dollars. And like, no, there's lots of really good things that you could do with that amount of money. And it would actually be a waste to just like see it go. So I made the decision that like, I would actually power through and figure out how to like safely, like basically get my private key. I actually had to call up my family, tell them to read out their number off of their piece of paper. I entered that into a fresh laptop that I bought from Target. Then I put in my other number on my piece of paper, added the two numbers together on the computer, there's the key. And at the same time, like just scrambled for two days, setting up a new wallet where I could move my ETH to safely, like getting people to be multisig partners, just like doing all sorts of like stuff that 10 years ago you would expect to just be part of a cyberpunk science fiction novel, but now it's all real. So you're doing this all by yourself, essentially. Most of it by myself. So you have to keep it secret. Right, and I needed my family to actually like go and read the number on their piece of paper. And then in my new multisig wallet, like there's other people that are signatories, but I'm obviously not gonna reveal any details beyond that. So I did this, right? And I actually managed to like get the private key, make the first transaction that would just move all my ETH to the multisig wallet so it's safe. And then second transact, put the private key on my main computer, then started going in and just selling some of the dog tokens and then just like giving them to these different charities. Now, at the time I actually did not even like have any idea of how much you would be able to get, right? Because like on paper, the dog tokens are $7 billion, but like in reality, it's a very liquid market. Are you gonna crash it after you sell 1 million worth or are you gonna crash it after 10 million? Might you actually be able to get like an entire 200 million? I had no idea. So I definitely was just over the mindset, like, okay, I mean, I'll sell a bit, maybe I get some ETH and then donated some ETH to give well, donated some to other groups. And then, okay, have some dog tokens. Like I don't have an easy ability to sell more myself, but then I'll just like give them to these groups and like, hopefully they'll do good things with them. It was actually, I actually donated at 20% then dumped 80%. Yeah, so the COVID India group got one batch and then there's another group that got another batch. And I don't wanna say who they are cause I think that they wanna announce themselves at some point. Sure. Yeah, but you can see the fact that these transactions were made on the blockchain, but it was just very interesting and unexpected and just an insanely crazy situation. It's been a couple of weeks. First of all, thank you for helping me hang up some curtains. This is a first for the podcast and shows that you're a truly a special person to be willing to help. But now a couple of weeks later, do you regret any aspect of that decision? I'm sure there is some things that I probably could have done better. Like I was actually talking to some of these charities and I was impressed by just how much money they managed to get out of selling some of these coins. So I probably could have done better by just talking more with the traders and actually ensuring that they can do a better job of maximizing the value of all of them. But it was a very stressful time and I did have to act quickly. Like I did manage to make a lot of the donations before, a few days before the great crypto crash happened. So it was, it's difficult to, obviously there's parallel universes in which I did better, but at the same time, there's also lots of parallel universes where because I hesitated more and tried to spend more time thinking I missed the opportunity. So on that, it's like a luck of the draw and I'm just happy that everything was able to turn out as well as it did. But psychologically, you mentioned stress. How hard was it? It was stressful, right? I think, well, one of the really stressful parts was just the fact that I had to basically move all of my funds, including the 325,000 ether from one cold wallet into another hot wallet, or sorry, into another multi SIG wallet. And maybe the multi SIG wallet had a bug in it. Maybe there's like some mistake I'll make in the middle that causes the funds to get lost. You know, that part was stressful. And I was definitely stressing out for two days. I mean, triple checking the new wallet. I even did a bit of an audit of the code myself. I wrote my own JavaScript to DAP to make confirmations because Gnosis Safe didn't work with the status wallet well. So there was definitely, that whole thing was definitely a bit of a marathon. I was also a kind of definitely a bit worried about or uncertain, I guess, how the public and including the coin communities would perceive the whole thing. But I was actually impressed. Like I, for every poster that was saying like, no, you know, why did Vitalik like rug pull on us? He was, his wallet was supposed to be a burn address. You know, there's like 10 people that are like, oh, you know, I thought I was just in this because it's a fun pyramid gambling thing. But instead I ended up being part of this, you know, great public good thing for humanity. And that's like even more amazing. So the amounts of that that I got was very impressive. So, you know, all in all, you know, I think the dog people did great. The dog people. Is there something you can extend to the bigger picture of it in the principles you apply to making this decision? Is there some principles, philosophies that you apply also to the decisions you make around Ethereum? I think a big one for me is just this idea that crypto, you know, isn't just an opportunity to give people like slightly better ways to save value in all of these things. Like it's also an opportunity to like basically create these like new digital institutions that could serve the public good in new ways. And that's something that I've been interested in for a long time. I actually even have this article in Bitcoin Magazine back in 2014, where I basically suggested this idea that, you know, you would have coins that represent causes and like people would just like buy and accept those coins because they support those causes. So I think it's called markets, institutions, and currencies, a new form of social incentivization or something like that. And I'm sure you can find it and throw it in the links. So that was interesting to kind of see becoming real. And like in general, I think, you know, public goods are very important and on the internet, public goods are even more important. Like every single Lex Friedman podcast is just on YouTube and no anyone can go and see it. Like there's no way for you to like, you know, sell it and so that some people can see it, but then other people can't see it. Like, you know, you could do that, but then you'd obviously be reducing your impact. So thank you for making the amazing Lex Friedman podcast so freely available. Well, that's actually a tense thing is how do you do it in a way that's not controlled in a centralized fashion? Cause actually YouTube feels free and open, but it nevertheless is one company making centralized decisions. And the first time I realized YouTube is not forever is when a lot of the Joe Rogan experience library was pulled from YouTube as part of the Spotify deal. And it made me realize we need to, it's like the realization that fiat money is centralized is realizing that, you know, this is not forever and you might want to come up with schemes to distribute it, to decentralize the control of it in a way that audio for podcasts is just an RSS feed. Exactly. And I think one of the kind of philosophical things that I hope to achieve is kind of decouple the concept of public goods, which are incredibly important and are the lifeblood of modern civilization from the idea that there is or can be one central organization that represents the public and like perfectly understands and can impose their idea of what is the good, right? Like it's, when people talk about public goods, it just often comes with this baggage of, you know, either centralization or conformism. And I think like it doesn't have to, right? Like often the most important public goods are the ones that are created by, you know, the crazy individualists that disagree with everyone else. So trying to make this kind of synthesis where you combine the values of decentralization and the values of open source, but you're not naive about it. And like, you know, you realize that for these things to be produced, there needs to be a way for it to be sustainable. There needs to be some way of supporting people who are working these projects. But at the same time, you want to avoid that turning into a vector of centralization, like trying to sort of get all of the good things without the bad things. To me, that's a big part of sort of what my grand experiment in crypto is about. And like, we are doing things in different kinds of things for this, right? Like there's the Gitcoin Grants quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem. There's obviously these dog coins that just happens, I guess, accidentally. There's other projects that, like for example, you know, Uniswap has their Uniswap DAO that just has a huge amount of funding. And like, we haven't seen yet how that's going to be deployed, but, you know, it could be potentially deployed to do lots of really good and amazing things. Do you see Ethereum as essentially a mechanism to fight for social causes? I definitely see Ethereum as being a mechanism to fight for definitely some specific things that are social causes. Like just, you know, the fact of creating an open financial system that anyone can participate in no matter where they are in the world, that's a social cause. Just, you know, giving people the ability to organize and create projects, even if it's five people in five different countries. I think that kind of inclusiveness, I think that's a social cause and it's a core crypto value. But then at the same time, like the other important and if part of the magic of Ethereum that you have to balance that against is that it is also this open platform where ultimately, you know, the things that are on Ethereum is just the things that the community makes of it. Well, you kind of briefly opened the door, so let's go there. When it comes to government regulation of crypto, what's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario? In terms of, you know, as you've kind of mentioned, Ethereum challenges the power centers of the world and how do you see the interplay between governments and this new technology that resists centralized power? Best case and worst case. The best case is that, you know, blockchains continue to prosper and we figure out scalability so that people can actually start doing things on block, like, you know, all of the amazing use cases that people have been talking about instead of today where a lot of the great stuff gets priced out because, you know, transaction fees are at five to $10 and then we see a lot of different amazing applications happening on blockchains. You know, it could be like DAO is creating new ways for people to interact and organize with each other and new ways for artists to get funded and just all sorts of these amazing things and there's just enough public support and just enough people that see that, you know, look, crypto is clearly doing a lot of good things and, you know, there are definitely areas where there's tensions, but in those areas where there's tensions, like, there could be some kind of creative and interesting approaches that get figured out, right? Like, you know, the concept of corporate taxes, for example, right? Like, you know, that would disappear as a revenue stream if theoretically corporations just all get replaced by DAOs but, you know, like maybe there's some other creative way by which DAOs themselves can kind of be code, you know, have some kind of encoded governance that ensures that they have at least some kind of bias towards serving the global public good and, you know, maybe DAOs can do enough of that that people are happy with it. And, you know, there are going to be things that people are unhappy about. There's always gonna be the people that, you know, wants to surveil everyone but if the kind of effect of crypto from just empowering people is greater than that and greater than that in a way that people can just easily see, then, you know, that would be a good scenario, right? And we'll just become kind of incorporated and accepted the same way as happened with the internet. But in the worst case scenario would, of course, be just like people suddenly, you know, flipping and going into moral panic mode and just, you know, oh my God, like this technology is used by like, you know, insert bad group over the day. And then I don't think governments have the ability to ban crypto to the extent of just complete like preventing blockchains from existing but they definitely have the ability to really marginalize it, right? Like if you just ban all exchanges, like in ban all links from the Fiat ecosystem to crypto and, you know, you ban all kind of mainstream employers from accepting or paying in cryptocurrency, then like you can successfully like turn it into a, like, you know, a fairly kind of niche countercultural thing that has much less impact than otherwise would. So it's somewhere between the good scenario and the bad scenario. I'm obviously hoping for the good. Well, that's interesting also the tension between governments and companies. Like if you have a bunch of billionaires or a bunch of companies like Tesla investing in Bitcoin and then governments resisting that, it's interesting who wins out in that worst case scenario. And almost when companies and rich, quote unquote, respectable people embrace cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, so on, even the dot coins, it's almost sends a signal to everybody else that this is a revolution that's here to stay. On this one little tangent that you brought up, this is almost an outdated idea, but it's still with us, which is cryptocurrencies are used for illegal activity, for drugs, for crime, and so on. Is there some sense that worries you that if cryptocurrency, if Ethereum runs the world, then making money from crime will be easier? There's always that possibility, but like at the same time, I think if you look at, you know, the world as a whole and like the way all the other technological trends are going, like, you know, in person surveillance is just going up every year, right? Like if you commit a crime in, you know, meat space, it's getting harder and harder to get away with it. So like, you know, if you wants to do something, and this is something that's just like happening as a result of, you know, just better technology and information transparency, like a lot of it's hard to prevent even if you really tried. So the world where like things go dark to such an extent, you know, as the police hawks sometimes like to say, to such an extent that like, you know, oh my God, the criminals are committing crimes with impunity and we can't see anything, like that just seems unlikely. But, you know, on the other hand, like the world where there just, you know, is no privacy, for example, or the world where there just like is no ability to kind of act outside of the confines of, you know, mainstream institutions, like that's something that's more realistic and that seems like something that could lead to a lot of kind of a lot of scary things, right? And like, even from a government's point of view, right? Like I think governments over the last few years, a lot of them, they're very worried about sovereignty. You know, they're worried about like, if their country is economies and, you know, social environments are just completely dependent on basically foreign tech companies controlled by foreign governments, like, you know, governments are not on team government, right? It's like, you know, the Indian government is on, you know, team India, then the Russian government is on team Russia and so forth, right? So like, you know, they don't want the US to be able to like have this big backdoor into everything. So, I mean, I do think that a balance is needed, but at the same time, I do think, I guess I definitely like worry more about the possibility that just like without things to like crypto kind of acting outside of institutions becomes too impossible. And I don't even necessarily mean outside of governments, even just, you know, outside of corporations, like becomes too impossible. And there's just like terrible things that come as a result. I mean, if things going in the other direction, like it obviously is a risk, but no, at the same time, I think in the longterm, like a crypto can potentially even like offer defenses as much as attacks against that sort of thing. Yeah, many throughout history, many of the most destructive things came from centralized institutions versus sort of from the people operating in the shadows. And, you know, I've been talking to a bunch of psychedelics folks that people doing researches like Rick Doblin in Johns Hopkins, there's a lot of exciting research on psychedelics. And one thing you could say about operating at the edge of legality, it could actually accelerate the adoption of particular things like whether it's marijuana or psychedelics, they can help people out. It's almost accelerates the policy. It forces the policy to catch up to where the people stand. So there's a positive way of doing things that are in the gray area of legality and creating a market that allows people to in a safe way be able to participate in this gray area of legality. The other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that the set of like the kinds of things that just like payment processors as companies try to restrict you from is much larger than the set of things that's illegal, right? Like part of that is because they wanna be super conservative and like the more layers you have, the more they're like conservative because they're scared of what the layer below them will do to them. Sometimes they have their own moral opinions of various kinds. They go after lots of people, right? Like they make life really hard for sex workers, for example, psychedelics, as you mentioned, there's a lot of activity, even including stuff that is totally legal that just there's this like shadow like PayPal credit card governments or whatever you wanna call it. And that makes it just hard to participate in this stuff. So I think like reducing the number of intermediaries is definitely normally a good thing. All right, let's talk about one of the most exciting technologies like technically, philosophically, like socially, financially in every way, which is Ethereum 2.0. There's a million things to talk about, but step one is probably a good thing to do, which is can you briefly summarize your vision how Ethereum 2.0 will make Ethereum more scalable, secure and sustainable? Sure, so I think recently we've actually been kind of deemphasizing the ETH 2.0 branding, I guess. So the reason behind that was that originally we envisioned something more like a big grand event where all the good things would happen at the same time and it would be a new blockchain, and it would be a new protocol and people would have to take a lot of effort to migrate over. But later we've slowly changed the roadmap over to something that's much more incremental, right? So proof of stake happens kind of over time and then sharding gets added over time and all of these features get added over time. And so the experience for just a regular Ethereum user still feels very seamless, right? It's like maybe a little bit more complex than the hard forks that we've already done from a user's point of view, but not by that much, right? So the big two things that are happening, right? These are what used to be considered the two flagship features of ETH 2.0 and now they're just the flagship features of the next devolution of Ethereum, as proof of stake and sharding. So proof of stake is a consensus algorithm. It's a, or a consensus mechanism, I should say. The difference is that like an algorithm is something that you run by yourself. A mechanism is like interactions between people and it could even include incentives and all of that. So a consensus mechanism, so by which nodes in the network agree on which blocks came in, which transactions came in, what order, make sure that once a block gets accepted, it can't get reverted and all of these things that we expect from a blockchain. So existing blockchains, including Bitcoin, including the Ethereum of today, and including a lot of them, they use proof of work, right? So the reason why we need proof of anything is because they serve this function that I call an economic civil resistance. So that's obviously a big word for, especially if you've never heard of symbols before, but like the basic idea is, right, that you have a network and you have lots of computers that agree on like which blocks to accept. And sometimes you get two blocks that get published at the same time and you just have to agree on an order. So there has to be some kind of voting game. But then the question is, well, in this voting game, who gets to vote, who gets to participate? Now, you can't say one person, one vote, right? The reason why you cannot say one person, one vote is because you need some kind of like authority or some kind of mechanism to say who the humans are. And if you don't have that, then a bad guy could just come in with a virtual machine or with a computer that has on it 10 billion virtual machines that have 10 billion virtual nodes. And then just like say, look, I'm 99% of the network, I should control everything. So to prevent this, what proof of work and proof of stake both do is they basically say, well, the weight of your vote, like how much influence your votes have in the consensus is proportional to like what quantity of economic resources you bring in. So in the case of proof of work, you prove what economic resources you have because your economic resources are computers and you prove that you have them by just running them 24 seven using these hash algorithms, right? So this does solve the problem, right? Because in order to attack the network, you have to come in with more computers and more money invested into computers and electricity than the rest of the network puts together. And that's extremely expensive. In proof of stake, instead of relying on people with computers that are just constantly cranking out hashes 24 seven, as you're like a unit of economic resources, you just use like holdings of coins inside the system, right? So all of these blockchains, they have some kind of coin in them. Bitcoin has Bitcoin, Ethereum has ether, they all have a coin. So why not just use that as the economic resource that you're using to measure participation. So that's like the core distinction between proof of work and proof of stake. I like proof of stake and I've liked proof of stake for many years, basically because like it just requires much less ongoing resource consumption, right? Like with proof of work, you have to like actually go and buy these physical computers and these days, they have specialized hardware, ASICs, application specific integrated circuits. You have to go produce them and you have to go buy them. And unless you have millions of dollars, you have to buy them from one of these other people who creates them and those other people often end up taking a huge cut of the profits themselves. And then you have to plug them in, you have to just burn all of this electricity that's just running 24 seven. So it consumes a huge amount of energy, right? And not just energy, it also, just to create the hardware, right? Like people focus a lot on energy, but like actually about half the cost of proof of work mining is the cost of the hardware. So hardware is a very big deal too. And you need this really big and powerful, very specialized hardware, another kind that fills up these big warehouses. So proof of stake, you don't really need that much electricity, you just need just a little bit to run a regular computer. You can run proof of stake validators on computers that you already have. So it's just much less resource intensive. And like, this is good for a few reasons, right? Like one is, you know, the kind of environmental rationale that, you know, you're not breaking the environment. The second is that you're not taking away electricity and like other resources from other people. I mean, like right now there's, I think just today I saw a story about like Iran wanting to shut down some Bitcoin mining because it was just grabbing up so much electricity that it was, you know, outbidding the nearby towns and they just didn't have enough. And then there was like Chia, the one that's doing proof of like hard disk mining basically is just like grabbing up so many hard disks, there's a shortage, right? So that's the second reason. And then the third more selfish reason is that because participating in consensus does not require so much energy expenditure, you don't need to pay people as much to participate, right? So like Bitcoin and Ethereum, they both issue somewhere around 4% of the total supply every year right now to miners. So Ethereum is about 4.7 million ether and the current supply is about 115 million. But with proof of stake, like we expect it'll be somewhere between 500,000 and one million per year. So that means, you know, the supply doesn't have to increase so quickly. So. One of the pros that the people sort of argue for the proof of work is that it is secure because it's much more difficult to sort of, as you've highlighted, it's difficult to participate. Is there, what are your thoughts about the security of the proof of stake mechanism? Is there ways to make it secure? So I think proof of stake is very secure because in order to be able to attack the system, you needs to have like basically as much stake as the rest of the network, right? So that means like right now, for example, we have 5 million eth staking. So you have to come up with 5 million eth and then join the network. And then the other, so 5 million eth is a lot, right? It's like, how much is it now? Like $15 billion. So that's actually more than I believe the cost of attacking the Bitcoin network. And then the second thing is that recovering from attacks is much easier in proof of stake than in proof of work, right? Because in proof of stake, you have, like, first of all, we have for many kinds of attacks that you do against this network, we have this concept of like automatic slashing, right? Which basically means that in order to like revert a finalized block, so if there's one block that's like accepted by the network and you try to convince the network to kind of revert that block and accept a different block, in order to make that kind of attack, you basically have to have your validator, like a big portion of your validator assigned to conflicting messages. And this is something that like once these messages are on the network, like you can go and prove, like, look, these people did it. And so we have this feature in the protocol called slashing where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins, right? And you don't burn anyone else's coins. Now, there are other cases, like for example, if instead of reverting blocks, the attack just tries to censor everyone, right? Then everyone who got censored would just like basically create the minority chain and then the community would basically have to do a soft fork, right? They would just have to say like, look, this chain is clearly attacking us, this chain is the one not attacking us, and so we're gonna join this chain. And then what happens is that on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins, right? So the difference between proof of stake and proof of work is that in a proof of stake system, like you can identify specific participants and you can say, you know, these, and like this isn't like, you know, a human going in and saying, I don't like you, I don't like you, I don't like you, this is like automated, right? So the slashing process is automated. Yes. Is there ways it can go wrong? So that's a painful process where the coins are burned. It is painful, yes. I think, I mean, the one big unknown, of course, is like if an attack actually happens and like if an attack happens that requires the community to actually choose one of these minority forks, then like what would the community actually successfully coordinating on this look like, right? Like it's like, you know, we can talk about it and we can, you know, write like science fiction novels about it, but like until it's happened, you don't really know the details of like what it looks like and how difficult it is. What are the channels of communication for the community? If you can enlighten me a little bit, like what, you know, in many ways in the political realm, Twitter is often used as a way to kind of have these emerging phenomena of large groups of people coming to a consensus about a particular idea. And then there's battle for consensus. What's in the Ethereum community, how do people, what are the sources of natural language based communication that have an emergent belief structure that you would say? Or is it all through money? Is it all through trading that the communication happens? There's definitely talking as well. I mean, like we have to agree on protocol changes somehow, right, like there's Twitter, there's Reddit, there's GitHub, there's all of the various Ethereum forums, Ethereum magicians, Ethereum research. There's just in person communication. Then there's just kind of like the hidden web of everyone talking to everyone on Telegram or Signal. So it's like some of everything, right? But I think like the thing to emphasize around like, can you actually come to consensus on, you know, whether or not to fork the chain because the attacker is censoring everyone, just for example, is like everyone who's running a node is going to see almost the same thing, right? Like they're gonna be off by a few seconds and like maybe they'll be off by a few minutes, they'll disagree by a few minutes. But like if it's a serious attack, you know, people are gonna know, right? It's not like one of those things where, you know, oh, we're trying to agree on like, I don't know, did Epstein kill himself or like some random political fact where like in reality, no one knows a single thing about what's actually going on and they're all speculating. Like it is much more visible, right? So we do have that, but you know, at the same time, I'm happy to admit that like, these are fairly untested mechanisms, but like at the same time, they're also untested mechanisms in Proof of Work, right? And like in Proof of Work, it's even harder because in Proof of Work, you don't have the ability to like identify and say, like, you know, I'm going to these miners attacked and so we're not gonna let these miners in, these miners did not attack, so we're gonna keep them in. Like you have to pretty much, you know, either take out none of the miners or you do a fork that changes the Proof of Work algorithm which takes out all of the miners, right? So the economics of like recovering from attacks in Proof of Work, at least to me, actually do seem like more unfavorable, but you know, I'm sure the Proof of Work people you talk to will give a very different and contradictory opinions and that's totally fine and amazing. Some people describe MEV, minor extractable value, as an existential risk to Ethereum. What is MEV? How important is it to solve MEV? If it's important, what ideas do you have? Sure, how about after this one, we'll also talk about sharding because it's amazing and it's part of you too. Yes, we'll return back to sharding which is, we'll return to the big picture of the scaling problem as you mentioned. I love this conversation, you know, depth first search instead of breadth first. So basically, okay, MEV, minor extractable value, it is not different in Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, right, so like if you want to call it, you know, block proposer extractable value, like it sounds a lot sexy, but you know, we can call it BPEV instead of MEV, who cares? So this is a problem in both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake? Yes, so the basic idea is that if you have the ability to choose which transactions go into a block and in what order, then you have the ability to like take advantage of that position for economic gain and for economic gain in a lot more ways than just collecting transaction fees, right? Like for example, there's decentralized exchanges on chain like Uniswap and like let's say the price of ETH versus USDC was 2,700 the previous block, but then there was a bit of a market drop and now it's 2,680 where you can go on Uniswap and you can just like gobble up the entire part of, you know, the automated order book that's like between 2,700 and 2,680, right? And that's, and then at the same time, you like run a bot and you know, you buy some ETH back at 2,680 and you've just like made about $10 of profit, right? So, or well, $10 times, you know, whatever the depth is. Right, so there's lots of little things like that. There's also things that involve like front running other people's transactions. So one example of this would be that if someone sends a transaction that says, I don't know, buy me five ETH for whatever price that you can get, then, but with a maximum of, let's say $15,000, then you can go and like, you can send each, put a transaction right in front of that transaction and you can like buy up that ETH first and then you resell it to him at, you know, $15,000 minus one, you know? So there's. Then you get to make a little bit of money that way. Exactly, so there's a lot of these different like arbitrage, front running, back running, these different tricks that allow block proposers to. To get some percentage on top, like overhead. Exactly, and the reason why this is a challenge is because it's, I mean, like first of all, it sometimes degrades user experience because users get no less favorable trades, but there are sometimes ways to like mitigate that for applications, sometimes it's not that bad, but like the bigger risk that I think some people consider more existential is that there's just much more economies of scale in figuring out how to extract all this revenue, right? Because if you're just collecting transaction fees, there aren't really economies of scale, there aren't really benefits to centralizing, right? Because it's a very simple formula, you just like grab up the transactions that pay you the most. But with MEV, there's all these sophisticated algorithms and if you have lots of money, then you can hire really smart people to make amazing algorithms and then you can use the other half of your money to get a lot of mining power or a lot of stake and you get a lot of opportunities to use your even better algorithms. So there's this risk that like as a result of this, mining is basically, or even validating proof of stake is going to centralize. So I think the ecosystem is best replied to this sort of risk and it's the direction where projects like Flashbots are going already is if you can't eliminate the centralization, then you try to firewall it, right? And the way that you firewall it is you basically say, we're going to try to deliberately create a marketplace where people can just do the complicated work of creating what are called bundles, like bundles of transactions that are very profitable, right? And then at the other side of the market, you just have like block proposes reminders that are just dumb notes. And they go and ask the what are called searchers, the bundle creators, and they just ask like, hey, like how much can you give me if I put in your bundle? And then they just take the highest offer, right? So you sort of separate out the task and you have the easy part and then you have the hard part and you have like this special class of actor called a searcher that does the hard part and then the easy part, the people doing the easy part, which is just miners and validators, they kind of just talk to all the different people doing the searching and they just accept the highest bidder. So this is also just like an interesting example of like economic design philosophy, right? Like sometimes you can't just like make centralization go away, sometimes it's inevitable, but no, at least you can try to kind of contain it, you can direct it or you can even sort of firewall it away from core consensus, the parts that really do need to be decentralized. But you don't see it as an existential risk, it's just a bit of a problem that it has to be constantly dealt with. It's a risk, like there's obviously a risk that it's a very severe problem and that even this flash bots approach has some fatal flaw or whatever. But we're definitely approaching it with the mindset of this is a problem and like, yes, we do have to do some work to solve it, but we're doing it and so far it's being solved. Okay, let's talk about the other really, really fascinating part of the future of Ethereum. Let's not call it Ethereum 2.0, but the future of Ethereum that also may require a hard fork, I don't know, you can correct me on this, is well, broadly ideas for scaling. Yes. And more specifically sort of layer two or layer one and two intersection ideas of how to achieve scaling. And at the core of that is the idea of sharding. So first, what is sharding? Okay, so there's two major paradigms for scaling blockchains, right? As you said, layer one and layer two. And layer one basically means make the blockchain itself capable of processing more transactions by having some mechanism by which it can do that despite the fact that there's a limit to the capacity of each participant in the blockchain. And then layer two says, well, we're gonna keep the blockchain as is, but we're gonna create clever protocols that sit on top of the blockchain that still use the blockchain and then still kind of inherit things like the security guarantees of a blockchain. But at the same time, a lot of things are done off chain. And so you get more scalability that way. So in Ethereum, the most popular paradigm for layer two is rollups and the most popular paradigm for layer one is sharding. So one way to achieve layer one scaling is to increase the block size. Yes. Block size wars, quote, unquote. And you actually tweeted something about, people are saying that Vitalik changed his mind about, he went from being a small blocker to a big to small. But you said, I've been a medium blocker all along. So maybe you can also comment on where, on the very basic aspect before we even get to sharding of where you stand on this block size debate. Sure. So the way that I think about the trade off is I think about it as a trade off between making it easy to write to the blockchain and making it easy to read the blockchain. So when I say read, I just mean, have a node and actually verify it and make sure that it's correct and all of those things. And then by write, I mean send transactions. So I think for decentralization, it's important for both of these tasks to be accessible. And I think that they're about equally importance. If you have a chain that's too expensive to read, then everyone will just trust a few people to read for them. And then those people can change the rules without anyone else's permission. But if on the other hand, it becomes really expensive to write, then everyone will move on to basically second layer systems that are incredibly centralized. And that takes away from decentralization and self sovereignty as well. So this has been my viewpoints pretty much the whole time, right? It's like, you need this balance and going in one direction or the other direction is very unhealthy. In the Bitcoin case, basically what happened was that Bitcoin originally, at the very beginning, it didn't really have a block size. It just had an accidental block size of 32 meg, or block size limit of 32 megabytes because that just happens to be the limit of the peer to peer messages. But then... Interesting, I didn't even know that part. Yeah, but then Satoshi back in 2010 was worried that even 32 megabyte blocks would be too hard to process. So he put the limit down to one megabyte. And I think the... I put, you mean sneaked in there. Yeah, just like made an update to the Bitcoin software that made blocks bigger than one, I think it's a million bytes invalid. And I think the impression that most people had at the time is that this is just a temporary safety measure. And over time, as we become more confident in the software, that limit would be raised somewhat. But then when the actual usage of the blockchain started going up, and then it started going up first to 100 kilobytes per block, then to 250 kilobytes per block, then to 500 kilobytes per block, there started coming out of the woodworks this opinion that no, that limit should just not be increased. And then there are all of these attempts at compromising. First, there was a proposal for 20 megabyte blocks. Then there was the 248 proposal, which is a bit ironic because the 248 proposal started off being a small block negotiating position. But then when the big block people came back and said, hey, aren't we gonna do this? They're like, oh, no, no, no, we don't want them. We don't want the block size increases anymore. So there were these two different positions, the small blockers. I think they valued one megabyte blocks for two reasons. One is that they just really, really believe in the importance of being able to read the chain. But two is that a lot of them really believe in maintaining this norm of never hard forking, right? So the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork is basically that in a soft fork, any block that's valid under the new rules was still valid under the old rules. So if you have a client that verifies according to the old rules, then you'll still be able to accept the chain that follows the new rules. Whereas with a hard fork, you have to update your code in order to stay on the chain. And look, they have this belief that soft forks are kind of either less coercive than hard forks, which by the way, I completely disagree with. I actually think soft forks are more coercive because basically they force everyone who disagrees to sort of go along by default. But, or they have this opinion that there's like, it's more difficult to abuse soft forks to do really mean things like, or that like completely violate people's expectations, like increasing the supply, which is like, I think there is some truth to that. So because of these reasons, they just say we're only going to do soft forks and we want to just not do any hard forks. And they eventually discovered this idea called segregated witness that allows for like a very tiny block size increase to like the equivalent of about two megabytes with a soft fork. It's this really like weird and devious trick. Like basically what they do is they take the signatures of transactions and then they put them outside of the block. And then they add an extra rule that says that like every, for a block to be valid, the block has to come with a separate, like basically extension block that contains all of the transaction signatures, right? So when you measure it, according to the old rules, like, hey, it adds up to less than a million, but actually there's this extension block that the old protocol doesn't even know about. So. It's a hack that seemed to work to in a small way extend the size of the block size. So the small block side was like happy with these very low levels of block size. And then the big block side wanted to expand to, at the very least go to four megabytes, then maybe go maybe eight, 20. There's disagreements within there as well. I definitely was favoring the big side the whole way through, as you can probably tell, but. Even though, so the argument against the big is that it makes things more centralized. Yes, because fewer people can run a note that verifies the chain. And also because any of these things would require a hard fork and hard forks are inherently risky. Do you think there's truth to that? I'm pro hard fork. I think hard forks are actually like in a political economic sense, they're better than soft forks. Well, let's, okay, okay. I think that's a beautiful principle as stated that soft forks may be more coercive than hard forks. This is not just about cryptocurrency. This is about politics and life. That's fascinating. So you're okay with hard forks. In fact, you think hard forks is the right way to make changes because then everybody's forced to make a decision. Do you accept this change or not as opposed to ideas being sneaked in behind the door and that decision is forced on you? Exactly, yeah. Okay, so, but hard forks, some people say, this is when they talk about sort of Ethereum, is there's some aspect to a hard fork where you're trying to upgrade a, what is it, airplane while it's flying. And. I think soft forks are also upgrading an airplane while it's flying. But it's a smaller upgrades. That's, there's some truth to that. Like there's definitely a bit more risk of like a split as a result of a hard fork than as a result of a soft fork. And the split is highly undesirable, right? Well, it depends. Like if it's a split because of a bug, then that's horrible. If it's a split as a result of political differences, then I think like a split is better than, you know, one side being forced to basically just like suck it up and accept the majority position even if it really hates it. Well, there's also political connections throughout the history of the United States. It's like sometimes groups of people that strongly disagree with each other should be forced to work it out. Even if they, even when a split seems like an easy thing in the short term. It depends. And I think like, well, for blockchains in particular, the costs of people being able to like peacefully do their, go off and do their own thing are much lower, right? Like, you know, okay, if you have a country and you have two groups, then like often enough, like fighting out the new rules requires, you know, a civil war requires everyone to move and so forth. But no, on a blockchain, like, you know, the costs are lower and so. So if you were to look at the way things worked out with the block size wars and there was a split, what is it, Bitcoin Cash and all this? In Bitcoin. Yeah. Would you, like you looking, putting on your historian hat, you mentioned offline you like Dan Carlin. So if Dan Carlin wanted to do an episode on the block size wars, do you think it could've turned out better or do you, are you okay with the way it turned out? I'm definitely disappointed with what happens with the block, with the big block side. I think the source of my disappointment is that like, one of the things that you notice when just looking at like this political disagreements generally, especially when you have environments where, you know, they're authoritarian or like single party dominated and then there's some opposition party and the opposition often has like very legitimate grievances. But at the same time, the thing you notice is that often enough the opposition just sucks, right? Like it just doesn't have, you know, political capacity. It doesn't have like the ability to come up with policy because it's entire culture is like designed around resisting much more than it's designed around like, you know, actually debating serious policy trade offs. And I worry or I guess not so much worry because it's already happened. I unfortunately think that Bitcoin Cash ended up being a victim of this, right? Like first, no, there was a split with Bitcoin Cash. And then of course, Craig Wright came in and you know, Craig Wright was this basically scammer who just keeps on pretending that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Hey, Craig Wright's legal team, do you hear me? Yes, I still think your client is a scammer. So sue me. This is definitely gonna be death for a search because I gotta ask you about Craig. I guess these people have been contacting me and I'm trying to figure out like, what is up with this human being? So for people who don't know, there's somebody who is, let's start this Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the creator of Bitcoin, who's anonymous. And actually most really big people in the cryptocurrency space do not like yourself and others do not dare claim that they are even for fun Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive and is like, if say you were Satoshi Nakamoto, it seems like the thing he would do is probably or she is trying to remain anonymous. On the flip side of that, there's a guy named Craig Wright who continually keeps claiming that he is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto and keeps suing a lot of people. So on him, if we could just linger on him, what do you make of this character? What are we supposed to make of this character? Should he be ignored? Is there any possible truth to his claims? What do you make of him? The analogy that's at the top of my head will get a bit political, but that's fine. You've had Michael Malice. So I guess I view Craig Wright as being kind of like a Donald Trump figure in that he's not very intellectual, but I think he gets a big audience because he says things that play to the resentments that people have and he says things that people wants to hear. Like in the wake of this block size war, the big blockers did feel very disenchanted. They felt that Bitcoin always had this vision that we were supposed to just keep increasing the block size and Bitcoin is peer to peer cash. It says so in the white paper. And then this elitist clique of core devs just came in and said, no, no, no, we're gonna impose this totally different vision. And if you ever want your scalability, you'll have to wait for us to create this totally unproven fancy technology called the lightning network that works under completely different principles. And they were very angry at this. And I mean, I think a lot of that anger is justified, but at the same time, when people are in that mental state, like it's very easy for you to just kind of like latch on. And if you find someone who expresses anger at the same things that you're angry at, and also like it seems like someone who's strong and seems like someone who might be good to rally around, it's very easy to just like get behind that. But that extra part about it where he's Satoshi Nakamura, I don't understand why that's necessary. I think that's, he could have done it without that, but that just, it's a marketing strategy. Like it sort of gives him more salience. Like there's other big block personalities, right? Well, what's the difference with Craig Wright? He's not just a big block personality, he's potentially Satoshi. And he did say all the big block things, right? Like he talked about how, oh, the concept of a fee market is fundamentally like economically wrong and it should be a free market and you should be able to have blocks as big as you want. So like he repeated all the talking points. And so a lot of people were kind of sucked into that, right? And so he unfortunately was able to basically dominate a big part of the Bitcoin cash community for a long time. And then eventually, of course, more and more people started to catch on. He would just say technical things that are completely wrong, right? Like one example of this that I remember is that he mixed up the concept of 256 bits and two to the power of 256 bits, right? So the difference is, it's like the difference between 80 and the concept of 80 digit numbers, right? And because of this, like he made this arguments that said that Bitcoin's elliptic curve is friendly to cryptographic pairings. Like you don't have to understand what that is, but if you want to know, I have articles on both at Vitalik.ca. But basically he made this like technical argument that really hedged on this point. And then when people pressed him on, it was like, yes, but no, no, like what? Look, exactly, the height is like what? Two to the 256 bits. That's a very tiny amount of information. No, no, no, no, two to the 256 bits is more than the amount of information in the universe. And like he equivocated and kind of like preyed on people's inability to understand that mathematical nuance. And I called him out. And eventually I even called him out in person at this conference in Seoul. Like I just stood up and asked, hey, conference organizer, why are you letting this fraud speak at this conference? And I remember even some big blockers at the time getting angry at me. But eventually they did get rid of him. And then Craig, well, basically Craig Wright was forced to split off because the rest of the community refused to accept some network change that he wanted. And so then there was the BCH and BSP. And then in the Bitcoin Cash community, there was this drama of, are they going to add a developer fund where they redirect 12 and a half percent of the revenue from the miners to the devs? And according to the libertarian not aggression principle, is this technically theft? Like his understanding of the technical depths of cryptocurrency was lacking in a way that Satoshi Nakamoto certainly would not. Yes, exactly. But the point is that even after Craig Wright got expunged, the Bitcoin Cash community kept having these disagreements. And now after this development funds dispute, there was a further split between Bitcoin Cash and ABC. So the branch continues to extend. So in that way, it's disappointing to see those kinds of splitting that was never resolved. It is. I would have definitely like wanted to see more of a kind of like the principled coin with like tries to be Bitcoin, but follows consistent big block values. But I know maybe I should just like stop expecting projects that I have no involvement in to care at all about what my values are. And like maybe Ethereum just like is. I think you have a powerful voice and you can inspire other projects to live up to their best possible selves. Okay, so that's the layer one approach. The other layer one within Ethereum is the idea of sharding. Yes. What the heck is sharding? Okay. What does the future of sharding look like? Right, so to summarize that big long tangent that we just went into. It's a beautiful tangent by the way. It's the basic tangent. And I think like crypto is just one of the most underrated aspects of crypto is I think how you can like analyze the sociology and the politics and the anthropology. And I'm sure Dan Carlin would have fun exploring the space at some point. But like the core trade off, right? Is that if you scale blockchains the dumb way just by increasing the parameters, then eventually you just make it harder and harder to participate as a node and you end up with a system where there's like 20 computers running the whole thing. And it's just very centralized. So sharding basically says, well, instead of just increasing the parameters, what we're going to do is we're going to change the blockchain architecture in such a way that each individual node in the blockchain only needs to store a small portion of the data and only needs to process a small portion of the transactions. So you can think about it as being like inspired by BitTorrent, right? Like on BitTorrent, there's no such thing as a BitTorrent full node that has every movie, right? You know, the work is like split up among a huge number of computers and like that makes sense. That's, you know, the only sane way to scale a system like that. And if they actually tried making a version of BitTorrent that required full nodes that store every movie, then, you know, it would have like zero censorship resistance and it would just like, you know, be dead in an instant. So the challenge with taking that model and applying it to blockchains, right? Is that blockchains aren't just about like spreading data around, they're about agreeing on exactly what data was spread around and ensuring that everything that you agree on actually is correct. And so you have this paradox where let's say you want to have a system that supports 10,000 transactions a second, but each computer in the network can only personally verify a hundred transactions a second. So how can each computer get a guarantee about the other 9,900 without actually going and verifying them themselves? And it turns out that there are some, like a bundle of different tricks that can do that, right? So like one of them is just random sampling. So the idea behind random sampling is like, let's say for simplicity, this is a proof of stake chain and you have 10,000 validators, validators are like, you know, the stakers and like for simplicity, we'll assume they all have the same number of coins, right? If someone has more coins, we'll just kind of split them up and pretend they're 10 stakers. Then you do like some random shuffling and you basically say, these random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. And so each individual computer only gets assigned to validate like a small piece, but then the way that the information about like what's valid gets passed around, right? Is that when these hundred participants validate a block, they all sign a message basically saying like, yes, we agree that this block is valid. And then like they combine that signature into one and then they broadcast that signature. And then everyone else, instead of verifying the blocks directly, just verifies that signature, right? And so if I see the signature, I'm not directly convinced that that block is valid, but what I am convinced of is that out of this committee of this randomly selected group of a hundred validators, let's say at least 70 of them agree that this block is valid. And so if I trust that the majority of these participants are all honest, then because it's all randomly selected, the attacker can't just like force themselves into one committee. And so the attacker is gonna be evenly spread out too. And so if the entire set of validators is mostly honest, every committee is gonna be mostly honest. And so like bad blocks are not gonna go through, right? So that's like one simple form of sharding. There was also other more clever things that you can do. So for example, there's this concept of a ZK snarks, right? I'll call it as your knowledge proofs. So this is the idea that you can make a cryptographic proof that says, I verified or I ran some complex computation on this piece of data and I got this answer. And so if you make these kinds of proofs, then like if you see a ZK snark that says some block is valid, then you're convinced that that block is valid. And even if everyone in that committee is evil, like they have no way of making a valid proof for a bad block, right? Like, because the proof itself, like it is a proof that you did the computation where that proof is much easier to verify than just running the computation yourself. And there's once again, super awesome mathematical or cryptographic magic behind making ZK snarks work. But it gives you a little bit of a leg up over the 51% honest assumption. So it's a little hack that improves upon the random sampling thing. Exactly. And like, there's other hacks, right? Like there is another hack called data availability sampling that allows you to make sure that the data in the blocks was actually published. But like, basically, like if you stack a couple of these tricks on top of each other, you can create a system where like I, as an individual participant can be convinced that everything that's going on in this distributed blockchain thing is correct without actually personally checking more than like a percent of it. So that's sharding. That's sharding. But the, as I understand, maybe correct me on this, is in the space of Ethereum, the sharding happens on some fixed number. Like the split is on some fixed number. I think it's 64 is the currently sort of proposed number. So how does that help scaling? Is it just the fixed constant scaling by 64? And is that a way to achieve those crazy, the crazy amount of scaling that seems to be required to use cryptocurrency for purchasing? So doing like competing with credit cards and Visa and so on. So first, I think like the 64 can be hard forked up over time. So we've set it so that like there's theoretically space in the data structure for 1024 shards, it's just that 64 of them are turned on. There are challenges with having more shards because like you have to have logic that just like checks and manages all of those shards. And if there's too many of them, then that becomes too expensive. But even still, you can improve quite a bit. And then the other thing that we're doing is if what we're getting maximum scalability by combining rollups and sharding. So this might be a good time to talk about rollups. What are rollups? Now we're moving into layer two ideas. Yes. So the idea behind a rollup is basically that, so instead of just publishing transactions directly on chain and having everyone do all of the checking of those transactions, what you do is you create a system where users send their transactions to some central party called an aggregator. And like, well, theoretically, you can have a system where like the aggregator switches around or where anyone can be an aggregator. So it's still like permissionless to send things. Then what the aggregator does is they strip out all of the transaction data that like is not relevant to helping people update the state. So when I say the state, this is a very important kind of technical term for blockchains. I mean, like account balances, code, like things that are like memory, internal memory of smart contracts, like basically everything the blockchain actually has to keep track of and remember, right? So you just put in, you take all these transactions, strip out all the data that's not relevant to telling people how to update the state. And then you take the data that's needed to update the state, and then you like really compress it, right? So like, for example, if we say, I, Vitalik, have an account that's 0xAB58, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's 20 bytes. Well, instead we can say, well, I have an account that is number 1874224 in the tree. And that goes down from 20 bytes to just like an index and a position, which is three bytes, right? So you use all sorts of these fancy compression tricks, and you basically just, instead of publishing all these transactions, you publish this like tiny compressed blob, right? So the amount of data that goes on chain goes down by maybe about a factor of 10, right? And then the second thing is that you don't do the computation on chain, instead you do the computation off chain, and there's one of two ways to do this, right? One is called a ZK rollup, which is you just provide a ZK SNARK that basically says, hey, look, I did this computation, and I have this proof that here's, you know, some hash of the result and it's correct. And then you stick it on chain, and everyone verifies this one proof instead of verifying all these transactions. And then the other approach is called an optimistic rollup, which is basically made of the scheme where, like, first someone says like, hey, this is what I think the result of applying these transactions is. And then someone else can say, I disagree, the result is different. And only if two people disagree, do you actually just like publish all of the data and run that whole block on chain. So if there's disagreements, then you just like run everything on chain and whoever was wrong, like loses a lot of money, right? So like disagreements are very rare and they're very expensive. And then a ZK rollup, you don't even rely on this like challenging game at all, you just rely on a proof. So the core principle is basically that instead of lots of transactions and everyone verifies every transaction, it is you take the transactions, you strip them down and compress them as much as possible, then stick that on the blockchain. You do need to stick something on the blockchain just so that everyone else can like keep up to date with the state so they know what all the contracts are, what all the balances are and all of this, but it's a very small amount of data. And then you use one of these other off chain games, could be this optimistic game, could be a ZK snark to just prove that somebody out there did the computation and the result is correct, right? So you're pushing like 90% of the work off chain and then, well, 90% of the data and 99% of the computation off chain, and then you still have 10% of the data and 1% of the computation on chain. And so your scalability goes up by a factor of about 100. So these systems are already alive for some applications, right? So there's something called loopering, which is just a ZK roll up for payments, right? So you can have assets inside of the loopering system and you can go around and transfer them, and you get like much lower transaction fees, right? Like instead of $5, you'd have to pay like less than 5 cents. But the only problem is that this only supports a couple of applications right now, like making one that supports anything that you can do on Ethereum just takes a bit more work, but that's being done as well, right? So like within a few months, I'm expecting fully Ethereum capable roll ups to be available as well. So roll ups, just summarizing, do most of the work off chain, put only a little bit on chain, factor of 100 scaling, sharding, another factor of 100 scaling, 100 times 100 factor of 10,000, hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, and like, you know, there's your scalability. Okay, so you achieve scalability, you can do a large number of transactions very quickly and the cost of doing those transactions are much lower. You wrote that in the long term ZK roll ups are going to win in terms of layer two technology. Specifically you wrote, in general, my own view is that in the short term, optimistic roll ups, as you were saying, are likely to win out of general purpose EVM computation and ZK roll ups are likely to win out for simple payments, exchange and other application specific use cases, just as you were saying. But in the medium to long term, ZK roll ups will win out in all use cases as ZK SNARK technology improves. Why do you think ZK roll ups are going to win the big picture battle over layer two technologies? So I think ZK roll ups, like once you accept that the technology works are just like conceptually simpler and they have nicer properties. The reason is that they do not have this concept of a challenge game, right? Like, as I mentioned in an optimistic roll up, the way that you ensure that the results are correct is that you let one person submit and like they just submit with no proof. They just say, here's what I think the result is. And then if someone else disagrees, they make their own submission. And then if you have two disagreeing submissions, then you actually publish it on Chase. And then you see who's right. But for this to work, like you need to actually wait for someone to disagree, right? So like, for example, if I have an asset inside of an optimistic roll up and I wants to withdraw it, then I actually have to wait a week to withdraw it. Because like, if the block that contains my withdrawal turned out to be invalid, then there needs to be space for someone to disagree with it, right? Whereas with a ZK roll up, like you don't need time for disagreeing because you just have a proof, right? As soon as a block is submitted, there's a proof and you know it's correct. So if disagreements, especially in the longterm are sparse, then you don't want to do the optimistic, the game theoretic thing, you wanna do the ZK stock. Right, the ZK stuff is just, like you can win a ZK roll up, you can withdraw immediately. You don't have to like worry about the economics of proving as much, right? There's just like fewer issues. The reason why ZK roll ups are not winning everywhere today is because ZK stocks are still a crazy new technology, right, like this is something that 10 years ago, it existed only in theory and there was none in practice. Then, eight years ago, people were just getting excited about it in Bitcoin conferences for the first time. Like four years, starting four years ago or three and a half years ago even, that was the first time you were able to make any ZK stock based anything on Ethereum. And then people started making them and ZK technology has only really become efficient enough to do a lot of things within the past maybe one and a half years. So it's new technology, it's crazy technology, it's admittedly scary technology. If you wanna learn more, I also have an article about this on Vitality.ca. It's actually really, really good. You're, most of your writing, it goes, it's technical but it's accessible. I highly, highly recommend to check out Vitality's articles and blogs, whatever you call them on the website. It's brilliant summary of the work. Actually, Ethereum documentation period is really good. I think that's somewhat crowdsourced. That documentation is really, really accessible and brilliant. But let me ask about sort of other approaches to layer two, like side chains. So the one popular one is Polygon. What are your thoughts about Polygon, which is a layer two network? Is it positive? Is it negative for Ethereum? Is it both? Does it have a future? Which is its own chain, but it's using Ethereum. It's like based on Ethereum essentially. Or maybe you can describe what it is. So I think there's a really big and important difference in security models between rollups and side chains, which is basically that rollups inherit from the security of Ethereum, right? So if I have coins inside of Loopring or Optimism or Arbitrum or ZK Sync, then even if everyone else in the world who is participating in these ecosystems hates me and wants to steal my money, I can still personally make sure that no matter what happens, I get my money out. It might be a bit expensive for me to get my money out and I have to do transactions on the main chain, but I'll be able to do it. Whereas in Polygon, which is a side chain, and so instead of being secured by Ethereum, it's also in part secured by its own proof of stake consensus with its own token. So if 70% of the whole, or even 51% of the holders of Polygon tokens wanted to take my money in Polygon, they can, right? So that's the, and like, to be fair, like there aren't even, like the supply, I don't think is even that widely distributed, right? So like potentially you could, this idea of 51% of the token holders coming together and stealing everything, like it's not impossible, right? Where does the scaling of Polygon come from? Like why is it able to process much more transactions than the Ethereum main chain? What's the idea there? I think in part, like I imagine, I'm not sure exactly what its capacity level is, but like I imagine it has a higher capacity because it's a bit more willing to take centralization trade offs. And then another thing is that like, if the Ethereum ecosystem, like even if it did not do that, right? If you think about an Ethereum ecosystem hypothetically scaling with side chains, then you would have a hundred copies of Polygon and they would each have their own tokens, they would each have their own chains. And so even if each one of those chains was only as scalable as Ethereum, you could still, like the total sum of them would still be a hundred times more than Ethereum. Okay. The thing that I want to say in Polygon's favor just to be very fair to them, like I really, you know, I definitely really, you know, respect the work that they're doing. So, you know, start with a bit with that word of not criticism caution, right? Like it's that they made this kind of deliberate trade off for very pragmatic reasons, which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale now. And there are applications that want to do something now. And, you know, if there aren't Ethereum friendly options for them, then like, they're not going to just wait peacefully and do nothing for 12 months. And they're going to go to, you know, either Binance Smart Chain or, you know, one of some other system or potentially something that just has totally no alignment with Ethereum values whatsoever. But whereas, you know, with Polygon, like the best thing that you can say in Polygon's favor and against optimism is that, you know, optimism is not live and Polygon is live, right? Like it just takes more work to create a system that has these extra rollups, security features. And so Polygon just said, we're going to be the system that makes the pragmatic trade off. We're going to go, you know, functionality first, and then, you know, we can talk about adding back the security later. So I've talked to them and like, in principle, I think they're very, you know, open to the idea of like adding more security and like becoming more, becoming a rollup or at least, you know, adding a Polygon chain that's a rollup at some point in the future, which is definitely something I think they, you know, absolutely should follow through on. But like the fact that like they exist now, and so, you know, applications can kind of bootstrap now on a chain that, you know, even though its security isn't perfect, at least it exists and people can go use it. And then over time, you know, the chain matures as the applications mature. Like, you know, it's, I think a very reasonable strategy and I'm definitely really happy that they're part of the ecosystem. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. The history of cryptocurrency has this tension of really good ideas that are hard to implement. So they take longer to implement and ideas that are not as good, but are faster to implement. This is like the story of like, you have like JavaScript that basically took over the world because it was quick to implement within 10 days. And then like later kept fixing itself. I don't know what to make of that. Sort of from an engineering perspective, I'm more and more becoming comfortable and accepting the fact that our whole world will run a technology that's not as good as it could have been. Just because the crappy solution is faster to implement and it sticks. What do you make of that tension? I think the compromise that we've been taking within Ethereum is like when we have to take the crappy solution, we look for crappy solutions that are forward compatible with becoming good over time. When you build the quick and dirty thing, you would still already have ideas in your head about what the more complete thing with all the security features added on would look like. Even if it requires a hard fork? Yes. For example, with sharding, I think it's likely that the first version of sharding that comes out is not going to have zkstarks and data availability sampling, for example. But we know what these technologies are. We feel like we have wrapped our heads around them. And so we know how to build a system where we can put all the pieces in place so that it becomes very easy to bolt those components on in the future. So if you do things that way, then at the beginning, you can have your system that has the functionality, but say has less security or less sustainability or less of something else. But then over time, it's designed in such a way that it has this easy on ramp to adding those things. And if you don't think explicitly about being future compatible, then you do often end up with a quick and dirty solution that backs you into a corner. And then there are definitely cases where I think the Ethereum ecosystem has suffered from that. And we have had to expand pretty significant effort on, for example, removing features that we didn't realize that we actually can't sustain. Like one big example is just increasing the gas costs. So like making some operations more expensive because they should be expensive because they actually take a lot of time in the process. So that's making something more expensive, kind of like taking some functionality away. So if you can like be cognizant of where you're likely going into the future, and if you don't know, like even be cognizant of both the most likely paths that you'll take in the future and coming, like thinking about your roadmap and coming up with a roadmap where you know that like if you wants to do either of those things, then you have a clean path toward it. That's probably the best kind of practical way to get the best of both worlds that we have. Okay, let's talk about this wonderful process of merging. Okay, so there's the main net, which is the Ethereum 1.0 chain, or the, what should we say, the chain that uses proof of work as a consensus mechanism. And then there's, what is it called? The beacon chain that uses the proof of stake mechanism. And I believe the beacon has been deployed successfully, is working, so that was in December of 2020. There's a bunch of questions around that that's fascinating as well, but I think the most fascinating question is about merging those two. When do the two chains, one that's proof of work, one that's proof of stake, merge? And what are the most difficult parts of this process? Right, so as you've said, right, the way that we have set up this proof of stake transition is that at first, the proof of stake chain just launches on its own, right? And this is the thing that happened in December. And the proof of stake chain has been running for close to six months now. I mean, by the time people watch this, it might actually be six months. But it isn't actually coming to consensus on anything except for itself, right? So the idea behind that is to just give the proof of stake chain time to mature, time for people to build the ecosystem around it, time to make sure that there aren't any bugs, and just like prove to the community that no proof of stake actually is real, and a full transition is realistic, because the thing that you're transitioning to already exists and already works. And then at some point in the future, you have this event called the merge, where you basically take the activity that's being done inside of the proof of work chain, and you actually move it over into the proof of stake chain, so you get rid of the proof of work side completely. So the way that the merge will work is, it's definitely gone through a few different iterations. Like the earlier versions of this actually required more work for users and more work for clients. It was much more like, oh, there's this new chain, there's this old chain, and then everyone has to migrate from the old chain to the new chain, and then at some point we'll forget about the old chain. The new version is designed to be much more seamless for users, right? So basically what actually happens is that the old chain basically becomes embedded inside the new chain, right? So starting from the merge transition block, every proof of stake chain block is going to contain a block of the, what we consider now to be, what we consider to be the Ethereum chain today, but we'll call it the execution chain. And then at the same time, to create one of these blocks, you're not going to need proof of work anymore, right? So basically at the same time, you would both get rid of the proof of work requirements for one of these blocks to be valid, but instead you require these blocks to be embedded inside of the proof of stake blocks, right? So you basically have like a chain inside a chain. And this is, from an architecture perspective, you might think it's a little bit suboptimal, but it actually has some nice properties and makes it easier to kind of think about the consensus and think about what we call the execution layer, like transactions and contracts kind of separately and upgrade them separately. And it also just means that the upgrade process is extremely seamless, right? Because from the point of view of a client that's following the chain, you basically have to update nothing, right? You're still following the same chain and follows the same rules, except instead of checking proof of work, you'll switch to checking that these blocks are embedded inside of blocks of the proof of stake chain. So there'll be this merge block that will mark this transition. And over time, I guess the new chain will contain the full record of all the transactions that's ever happened on the previous chain, on the old chain. So maybe I'm asking a dumb question here, but in this process, is the new chain going to have all the information of the past transactions? The new chain is not going to hold information from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge, right, so Ethereum clients that people are going to use around the time of the merge and soon after the merge, they're probably just going to sync and check the proof of work chain up to the merge, and then they're gonna check the proof of stake chain. But at some point in the future, I think people will just stop bothering checking the proof of work before the merge. Got it, so that old history information is not important for the future, like if you're operating actively on the new chain, that history is not important to you. It's not important, so it's not strictly important for just like any smart contract or just like applications that run on the blockchain. It can be important to users, and it can be important for some applications, but we're basically saying that like maintaining and serving that is not going to be a simultaneous with the responsibility of every Ethereum node. If you want that information, there can be separate protocols for backing it up. And like these other protocols actually exist, right? Like there's something called the graph, which is doing some history retrieval. Potentially, you can just take that entire chain and stake it on BitTorrent. Like there's lots of ways to like archive it and create kind of customized search protocols for it. So what's your sense why, so there's a Python 2 and Python 3, and it took forever for people to switch. What's your sense why this merge has been taking longer than perhaps was expected? I think the biggest reason is just we've been underestimating the technical complexity. There's a lot of technical complexity in making a successful proof of stake chain. There's a lot of technical complexity in actually figuring out the transition process. There's... So that's bigger than social complexity. So the technical complexity you would say is the bigger reason for any delays than the social complexity? I actually think so. I think we've been very fortunate to not have too much social complexity around the merge. So not much drama. No. I think the biggest part of the reason is just because we have been talking about proof of stake and sharding as being part of the roadmap since almost the very beginning of the project, right? Like the very first proof of stake blog post is from January 2014, which was two months after the project started and maybe even a day after the announcement. So proof of stake was not something that we kind of put on anybody by surprise. And then when the Dow fork happened and the people on the ETC side split off, I think it also just happens that a lot of the people that were not willing to stomach the Dow fork and then join the ETC side, they were the more Bitcoiny types. And the more Bitcoiny types do also tend to like proof of work more. And so like that also sort of ended up, sort of like purifying the communities on both sides, I guess. So Ethereum Classic is not switching to proof of stake and they're happy with their setup. And by the time that it came to the beacon chain launching into now, I think the community is very strongly in favor of the proof of stake switch. But let me ask the question that no engineer wants to hear, which is the question of timeline. When do you think the merge will happen? Do you have a sense it might happen this year? Do you have a sense it might be pushed towards next year, 2022 or even beyond? I think early 2022 is the most realistic. There's definitely still like an optimistic case of it happening this year, but the realistic thing to count on is definitely the very early part of next year. Is there specific things that stand out to you that will make you feel good about progress if you see it happening? So the thing that we had last month is we had this online hackathon called Rayanism, where basically a bunch of the different client developers that are going to be part of the transition, like hacks together some test nets of the post merge Ethereum chain. So these were only test nets of what would happen after the merge. They were not test nets of the transition itself. So the thing that people are working on now actually is the transition. So having a full specification of both the transition and post transition, and we have specifications now, but in a realistic way, they'll probably needs to have a couple of changes and have things that continue to be ironed out, and then have a test net that does both the transition and the post transition. And then once you have a test network, then you just have to do a lot of testing and audit it, and then do some runs on not just a specialized test network but on say an existing test network like a Robson or Rinkeby that Ethereum people already significantly use. And if it works, then you can deploy the transition on mainnet. Just as a quick comment, because this is fascinating. In August of last year, there was this Medalla. I believe it's pronounced Medasha. It's a South American subway station. I forget where. But spelled with two Ls. Yeah, yeah, because that's how Spanish works, right? Like the two Ls have a... Medasha. Yeah. Okay, cool. Anyway, but I read about it in middle of August, August 14th, there was an incident on that test net. How does this process work? What do you learn from those kinds of incidents when stuff goes wrong in the test process? I think that incident was that there was a consensus failure of some kind as I remember. Basically just different clients interpreting things in different ways, and then one of them getting kicked off the network. And then it ended up taking a while to actually get everyone to get back online. A big part of the reason why it took weeks to resolve is because it's on a test network, like the coins are valueless. And so there's not really this big push of any kind for people to actually go and download the new clients so they can start participating again. And so it definitely took a while until the chain started finalizing again. And then also there was, I think, another round of just not finalizing in October, as I remember. There were definitely things that we learned. Like there were a lot of things, especially that client developers just learned about like optimization and how to build their clients in a way that they can process things efficiently. There's a lot that we learned from just like seeing the full life cycle of what happens when more than a third of the validators go offline and then finalization stops. And then that kind of weird unusual state of the chain continues for a while. And then eventually everyone who is not participating just gets enough of their stake. Like we don't use the word slashed, we use the word leaked for this, but like basically also burned until the people who are participating go back up to two thirds and then the chain goes back to finalizing. So just seeing all of those edge cases play out live, I think actually helped a lot and probably helped to really contribute to making us feel better about Mainnet. I mean, there's also an incident just recently in April 24th of 2021 where this was on Beacon, I guess. There was a bug discovered in the software client Prism that prevented roughly 70% of validators on the network from producing blocks. I mean, maybe you can comment on what happened, but broadly like the big picture, what kind of stuff are you worried about in terms of problems that might arise? Are we talking about small bugs? Are we talking about like emergent social, unexpected social bugs? What are the things that worry you about the future of Ethereum that you want to make sure you construct mechanisms that prevent those things from happening? So one of the lucky things there was that this particular bug only prevented proposed self blocks. It did not prevent attestations. So attestations is just a mechanism for voting on blocks. And it's the attestations that are actually responsible for the chain finalizing. So like coming to this more permanence agreements on blocks. So the chain was actually quite stable all the way through. I think the thing that we generally learned from these experiences is just how valuable it is to have this multi client network. So this is one of these areas where I think Ethereum distinguishes itself from like Bitcoin, for example. That in Ethereum, we don't have one single client that everyone just runs, right? There's multiple implementations of the protocol. And these multiple implementations, they all process and verify the blocks that each other can verify, right? So they all speak the same language. Now, sometimes when there's a bug, they disagree. And when two clients disagree because of a bug, we call this a consensus failure. And consensus failures are pretty serious, right? And when you have a client's monoculture like Bitcoin does, then it's more rare to have consensus failures. Though you still have them actually. Bitcoin had a consensus failure between two different versions of the same client back in 2013, but they're less likely to happen. But the interesting thing is that the multi client architecture has actually, I think, saved Ethereum much more than it's heard it. So even in this most recent incident, right? Like Prism was not producing blocks, but all the other clients were still producing blocks. There's four others, right? Yes, it's a Prism, Nimbus, Teku, and the Lighthouse. And then also Ethereum back in 2016 had this fun events that we call the Shanghai DOS attacks. They're called that because the attacks started right on the first day of our annual conference at DEF CON that happens to be in Shanghai that year. So what happened basically was that someone came up with a way to create blocks that were very slow for one client to process, but not the other client. So at that time, there were basically two Ethereum clients. They were called Geth and Parity. Right now, I think the top three ones are Geth, Nethermind, and Basu. But what happened as a result of us having two clients is that the attacker was just not able to come up with blocks that both clients were completely failing at processing. And so a lot of the miners and a lot of network participants, they just kept on switching between the two implementations depending on which one worked. And that actually really helped the chain survive through that month of attacks as the attacker just kept on hammering at our system and identifying all of the weaknesses and just forcing our clients to do this rapid sprint of just optimizing the hell out of everything and make sure there aren't any of those DOS blocks or DOS bugs remaining. So that was another example. And then as a counter example, so something that also shows the point from the other side, Bitcoin had this bug in 2010, the balance overflow bug. Basically someone created a transaction that had two outputs and those outputs were both of a few billion Bitcoin. So like about two to the power of 63 Satoshis. And then if you add those numbers together, you'll go above two to the power of 64. And of course, computers like once you go above to the power of 64, you wrap around. And so the Bitcoin nodes thought that there was enough money to pay for the transaction because it was asking for, let's say like a billion Satoshis or something, but actually it was asking for two to the power of 64 plus a billion. And so the attacker just managed to create like billions of Bitcoin out of thin air. And this was not only discovered and fixed after something like 12 hours, but if there had been, if Bitcoin had been a multiple implementation system, then what would have almost certainly happened is like one of the clients would have bugged out, but the other clients would have probably actually had a check for that, right? And so there would have been a consensus failure, but at least that would have like alerted everyone that there is a problem very quickly. And it also would have given everyone just like obvious social permission to go and, you know, pick whichever one of the chains is correct and solve the problem. So like, that's, I think a big learning that we've had from multiple of our experiences in the Ethereum ecosystem, just like validating this multi client model. And like, to be fair, it's a model that we get criticized for a lot, right? Like Bitcoin people talk about, you know, the risk of consensus failures that this creates. VC types are like, well, you know, isn't it expensive and wasteful to fund three software teams where you could just be making, you know, one quote focused effort, you know, they love the word focused. And like, you know, Ethereum is not that, but it's amazing despite not being that. Yeah. Basically, yeah, so that was interesting. And then there have definitely been other learnings as well, just from like seeing the chain live and seeing what actually is the staking experience like, what are the actual incentives for all the different participants. So I definitely feel like we're gaining a lot from this sort of one year of trial running the chain before we actually make all of Ethereum depend on it. Let me ask perhaps a strange question, but you know, proponents of Bitcoin will say things like, Bitcoin fixes everything. So why do we need Ethereum? Versus like Bitcoin plus lightning network for scalability and then using Bitcoin for, with this proof of work for security. So in this kind of, it is perhaps sort of a strange question, but it's a high level question. Why do we need another technology? Yes, it has a bunch of nice features, but like doesn't Bitcoin fix everything already? So the thing that always attracted me about Bitcoin is these values of decentralization, creating these open provisional systems that anyone can participate in and that aren't just going to flop over and die if whoever created them gets bored and that are resistant to like whoever runs them breaking the rules and all of these things. And I think that pretty strongly that these principles are like really valid in importance to much more things than just money, right? Like Bitcoin is the blockchain for money and Ethereum was built from the start as a general purpose blockchain, right? There is ether the asset on Ethereum, but then you can also make decentralized financial things, what we call DeFi today. You can make like ENS, the decentralized domain name system. You can put, make prediction markets on it. You can make totally nonfinancial systems that just like keep track of whether or not some certificate was signed or whether or not some like cryptographic key got revoked. There's this big long list of like just interesting things that you could use about blockchains to do, right? Like basically they are sort of the missing piece that where without them, the kinds of things that a decentralized computer network can do is very limited. And once you have them, a lot of those limitations end up going away. And so Ethereum was like always from the beginning about that, right? It's about like, hey, this isn't just money. There's so much more that you could do if you could just go ahead and make any infrastructure or digital institution or DAO or whatever you wanna call it, where the kind of the base layer of the logic is just executed in this open and transparent way where everyone can see what's going on or if you like your zero knowledge proofs, at least everyone can see proofs that prove to you that what's going on follows the rules and you don't need to just constantly keep trusting centralized actors. Hence the smart contracts as being a sort of a core technology as part of Ethereum. Yes, exactly. Smart contracts, the computer programs that are running on Ethereum, they are like the core of what makes Ethereum general purpose. Yeah, so I do think that there's a lot more wrong with the world than just money, right? Like I'm not one of these people who thinks that if you get rid of fiat currency and you replace it with cryptocurrency, then suddenly wars are gonna go away, right? Because like, first of all, like say your average revenue is only a small portion of government revenue, right? It's like what, 5%, 10%, something like that. Second of all, like if you are the sort of, this is one of the things I don't even get about their philosophy. Like, let's say you're the sort of person who is an extreme and very distrusting libertarian and you think that these governments are terrible, right? Like we know today that governments find a combination of things like welfare and things like the military that goes and like bombs people in Afghanistan, right? And so the question you have to ask is like, okay, you with your new, you know, magic newfangled cyber currency that takes over the world, take away the government's ability to have seniorized revenue and so you reduce the government's revenue by 10%. If the government is that evil, which portion of its expenses is it gonna take that 10% from? Is it gonna stop the bombing people in Afghanistan or is it gonna cut welfare? If you think it's the first, you have a very optimistic view of the government, right? So that's, I guess, my perspective on like why the whole, you know, we're going to save the world and create peace by like denying governments the right to stealth taxation kind of perspective doesn't really make much sense for me. And I do think that there is real value that comes from a decentralized and open currency. Like just the fact that there is a financial infrastructure that anyone in the world can go ahead and use, right? It's, that's something that can easily be a big boon for people, right? There's a lot of places where the currency and is much less stable than the dollar. And, you know, these people like they don't like, well, if they use Bitcoin, their only option is to get Bitcoins, right? Which, you know, are also pretty volatile. If they use Ethereum, then, you know, they can get ether, but then they can also get stable coins, right? And you might think that, you know, oh, you're not being ideologically pure. Now you're giving them stable coins, which are mirroring dollars. And obviously dollars are going to collapse too. But the reality is that dollars are vastly more stable than the Venezuelan Bolivar. So like, there are really meaningful and beneficial things that you can give to people by having a global and open financial system. But I think if you want to actually do that, like you have to have much more than just a currency, right? And then if you want to go beyond financial things, then, you know, you have to obviously have much more than a currency and then, you know, you also have to actually take scalability seriously because the nonfinancial applications, like nobody's going to pay $5 a transaction for them. Can we return to dogs? Sure. Woof, woof. No, no, no, no, no. The other one's categorically forbidden. Yeah, categorically forbidden. Is there any cryptocurrency based on cats actually? I think there are. Like, there was cat coin, there was nan coin. For some reason, they just didn't catch on as much as the dog coins did. Okay, so let's talk about Dogecoin and Elon Musk. Elon said that, quote, ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10x, increases block size 10x, and drops fee 100x. Then it wins hands down, end quote. You said in a blog post, partially responding to that, that there are subtle technical reasons why this is not possible. To this, Elon said that you, quote, fear the Doge. So let's talk about this. What are the technical hurdles for Dogecoin that prevent it from becoming one of the primary cryptocurrencies of the world? And do you, in fact, fear the Doge? I definitely feel obligated to correct the record. I definitely do not fear the Doge. Okay. No, I love the Doge. I actually visited the Doge in Japan a few years back. She's an amazing dog, she's still alive. Wait, the original Doge? Yeah. Oh, wow. So, you know, we accept Doge every year for our annual DEF CON conferences. So, I definitely don't think Ethereum is opposed to Doge coins. I kind of want to feel like Ethereum is at least a little bit in spirit itself a Dogecoin. And then, as I mentioned, I love Doge, I bought a bunch of Doge, I still hold a bunch of Doge. On the scalability question, the challenge basically is the limits to scalability and the trade offs with centralization, right? If you just increase the parameters without doing anything else, then it just becomes more and more difficult for people to validate the chain and it just becomes more likely that the chain becomes centralized and becomes vulnerable to all kinds of capture. So, does it need like some of the layer two technologies that we've been talking about? I personally think that if Doge wants to somehow bridge through Ethereum and then people can trade Doge thousands of times a second inside of a loop ring, then that would be amazing. If they want to just like take ZK roll up style technology and just have thousands of transactions a second on their own chain, then that would be a great outcome as well. So, is there ways for Ethereum and Dogecoin to work together? Okay, so there's a power behind a person like Elon Musk pushing the development of a cryptocurrency. Is there ways to leverage that power and that momentum to improve Ethereum, to improve some of the sort of cryptocurrencies that are already technologically advanced and pushing forward that kind of technology? I definitely think there's room for... You know that meme of Doge like taking over, like that storm? I've seen it. Is there a way to ride that storm, that wave of the Doge that's taking over? I think if we can have a secure Doge to Ethereum bridge, then that would be amazing. And then when Ethereum gets its scalability, any scalability thing that works for Ethereum assets, you would be able to also trade wrapped Doge with extremely low transaction fees and very high speed as well. Is there precedence for building secure bridges between cryptocurrencies? Is that, I mean, how difficult is this kind of task? It's definitely something that's in its infancy. There definitely have been some cross chain interaction things that have been done before. So, the earliest is probably the concept of merge mining, right, when a chain just makes its entire proof of work algorithm dependent on the proof of work algorithm of another chain. So, I think famous Dogecoin actually merge mines to Litecoin, which is, I think in retrospect, not looking like a very good choice because now Dogecoin is bigger than Litecoin. But, you know, if there's potentially some way for Dogecoin to merge mine with an Ethereum proof of stake of some kinds, then that could be an interesting alternative. So, that's one type of chain interaction. As far as bridges, like one chain reading another chain, early in Ethereum's history, there was this project called BTC Relay. It's a smart contract on Ethereum that just verifies Bitcoin blocks. I think people stopped really caring about it and maintaining it because there just weren't enough applications that were actually interested in using it at the time. And then the transaction fees got too high to actually maintain it. So, I think if we want to make a BTC Relay 2.0, that becomes cheaper because, you know, it uses snarks or something like that, then you probably could. But maybe now's the time when you actually can do that sort of one way verification. But the one challenge though, is that if he wants to have a bridge that allows you to move assets between chains, then you don't just need one way verification, you need two way verification, right? And Ethereum can verify anything because Ethereum smart contracts can just run arbitrary code. But if you want Bitcoin to be able to do things based on what happens in Ethereum lands, then Bitcoin would have to basically, well, they can do everything with soft forks because that's their religion, but they'll do it that way. And if Doge wants to make a fork where that allows for two way transferability with Ethereum, then they could. I mean, I think that would be a lovely collaboration to make if there's interest. I think there might actually even be some multi SIG funds that has some funding. It's just a bounty for someone to make a bridge between the two. Oh, could you maybe try to psychoanalyze Elon Musk for a brief second? So what are your thoughts about Tesla and Elon Musk's journey through the cryptocurrency world? So first with Bitcoin and then with Dogecoin. So acquiring, holding a large amount of Bitcoin. And I believe, at least considering the acquiring and holding a large amount of Dogecoin. Positives, negatives, what do you think the future for Tesla and SpaceX in the cryptocurrency space looks like? Do you think they'll consider Ethereum? I'm sure that if they stay in the cryptocurrency system at all, then they have to at some point. Bitcoin number one, Dogecoin number, I mean, come on, it deserves to be number three. And then, or number two. And then Ethereum can be whatever that other number is. If Ethereum only becomes a Dogecoin somehow, maybe change the logo to incorporate a dog of some sort. Almost like Doge sneaking behind. Oh, that would be fascinating. For when the merge happens. And I think, Elon, you definitely, I think you would make a mistake if you were to kind of ascribe too much sophisticated, malevolent, or any deep intentionality to the whole process. I think he's just a human being and he likes dogs, just like I like dogs. Yeah, I think that is literally the reasoning behind the whole Dogecoin thing. There is some aspect to which, I mean, the guy helped launch a car into space, right? Like you could ask, like, what is the purpose of that? I think the purpose of that is fun. I think he truly is more and more, especially lately, embodying the whole idea that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely and he's fully embracing the most entertaining outcome. And in many ways, Dogecoin is the most entertaining cryptocurrency. As cryptocurrency becomes more and more impactful in the world, people are getting more and more serious about it. And so he's selecting the cryptocurrency that is the least serious and the most fun. And there's something to that, like coupling fun with technological sophistication and somehow figuring out a way to do that well. I want the world to be fun. I think the world being fun is great. Okay, let me ask about a couple of other technologies if it's okay. Sure. What are your thoughts about Chainlink and hybrid smart contracts that utilize off chain external data sources? And I think it's definitely necessary for a smart contract so that do a lot of things to use off chain data of some kind, right? Like if you want to have a stable coin, you need a price oracle so you know what price you're targeting. If you want to have some fancy no crop insurance gadget, like I think EtherRisk has been doing a lot of good work with that. And I think it was either Kenya or Sri Lanka or both, like they're making a lot of good progress in some of those places. Like you need some kind of oracle to tell you, did it actually rain in this particular area? If he wants to have like assets that mirror other financial assets, you need an oracle. If you want to have a prediction market, you need an oracle. And so projects that provide oracles are definitely really important. There are definitely different kinds of use cases. Like Augur is more about events and the Augur oracle is designed, I think differently from Chainlink, right? Like Chainlink emphasizes the whole, we have a fast automated thing that just gives you data quickly. Whereas Augur is more, we don't give a crap about speed. And look, we don't need to give a crap about speed because if you want to get your money out on a prediction market that where in reality it's resolved, you can probably just sell your coins for 99 cents anyway. So I mean, I think Chainlink is definitely taking a good and important part of the oracle design space. And I'm definitely happy that there's that project taking the task on. I mean, at the same time, I do think that their frog army on Twitter can get a bit intense at times, but like. I mean, is there a way to incorporate sort of oracle network type of ideas into Ethereum? I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer, like stay away from trying to provide too much functionality because like once you have the Ethereum base layer making a claim about like say the US dollar to Ethereum price, like at some sense, you're basically saying that like Ethereum as a base platform starts making what could be geopolitical statements, right? Like for example, imagine if there was some civil war and the US split up and you had two currencies that both claims to be the US dollar, well, Ethereum would have to pick one for the sake of everyone who was already using that oracle. So does that mean that the blockchain would be taking a position in this big mega political debate? So I think like for just those kinds of reasons, I would personally like prefer Ethereum itself to be more of this sort of pure platform that just analyzes transactions just mathematically using deterministic consensus rules. And then if you need the oracles, that can be layer twos. Like I think Ethereum like benefits from not trying to do everything at layer one and having this like very robust layer two ecosystem where you have all these projects doing interesting things. Yeah, focus on the basic technology avoid the politics. Gotcha. Let me ask a bit of a human question. Charles Hoskinson, someone you've worked with in the early days of Ethereum, there appears to my outsider view to have been a bit of a falling out. Is there positive inspiring human story to be told about why you two parted ways? I kind of want to let the various books about Ethereum speak for themselves, but I feel like since that time, I think Charles has clearly progressed and matured in a lot of ways. And people who follow Charles closely have definitely told me that like 2021 Charles is very different from a 2014 Charles. And I'm sure it's 2021 Vitalik is much different from 2014 Vitalik as well. I'm kind of interested how the 2030 and 2040 Vitalik and Charles look like as well. Oh, interesting. Like the progression of the humans. Is this going to be one of those things where like everyone comes full circle and then 2030 Vitalik and Charles are best friends? Yeah, not necessarily best friends, but some kind of are able to reminisce in ways that puts some of the tension of the past behind. I think such things are possible. I think people definitely absolutely have a right to, and I think should strive to just constantly change and reinvent themselves. Is there something you could say about your thoughts about the Cardano project that Charles Hoskinson leads? They've worked on some interesting ideas that mirror some of the ideas in Ethereum, proof of stake, working on smart contracts and all those kinds of things. Is there something, again, positive, inspiring that you could say? Are they a competitor? Is it complimentary technology? There's definitely interesting ideas in there. I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach than Ethereum in that they really emphasize having these big academic proofs for everything, whereas Ethereum tends to be more okay with heuristic arguments in part because it's just trying to do more faster. But there's definitely very interesting things that come out of IOHK research. Can you comment on that kind of idea? I, as sort of having a foot in research, enjoy Charles's kind of emphasis on papers and deep academic rigor. What's the role of deep research rigor in the world of cryptocurrency? Interesting. I'm actually the sort of person who thinks deep rigor is overrated. The reason why I think deep rigor is overrated is because I think in terms of why protocols fail, I think the number of failures that are outside the model is even more important, is bigger and more important than the failures that are inside the model. So if you take selfish mining, for example, that original discovery from 2013 that showed how Bitcoin does, even if it has a 50% fault tolerance, assuming everyone's honest, it only has a zero to 33% fault tolerance, depending on your network model, if you assume rational actors. And to me, that was a great example of an outside the model failure, right? Because traditional consensus research, just up until or before the blockchain days, did not think about like incentivization much, right? There was a little bit of thought about incentivization. There's like a couple of papers on the Byzantine altruist rational model, but it wasn't that deep. It was mostly operating under the assumption that we're gonna make consensus between 15 participants and these are institutions. And if something goes wrong, then we can figure out whether or not it was deliberate offline. And if they did something evil, we can sue them. Whereas in the crypto world, you can't sue that, right? And so that whole discovery basically arose just because the model of traditional consensus research just didn't cover those possibilities. And then once you go out of the model, those other issues do exist, right? So, but then at the same time, there definitely are protocols that turn out to be, that do have failures inside the model. Like this reminds me of the time when I think I found a bug in a proposed consensus implementation from either BitShares or EOS. This happened around the end of 2017. So that was definitely inside the model because like they had a very clear idea of what they were trying to achieve. They had a very clear description and like there's a very clear mathematical argument for why the description doesn't lead to what they're trying to achieve. But ultimately what you're trying to achieve can never be fully described in formal language, right? Like I think this is the big discovery of, the AI safety people, for example, right? Like just having a specification of what you want is an insanely hard problem. And like the more powerful the optimizer that you're giving the instructions to, the more you have to be careful. And so, I think there are the kind of these two sides. And then the other thing is that a lot of the academic approach ends up basically optimizing for other people inside of the academic system. And it doesn't really optimize for like curious outsiders. Whereas like I personally totally optimize for curious outsiders, or at least I feel like I strive to. So I guess like that's my case for why I like tends to behave in ways that, you know, occasionally traditional academic types criticize as being reckless. But I mean, on the other hand, you know, there's definitely real benefits that come from like just taking a rigorous approach, especially when, you know, you know what the thing, like, you know what the specification is of what you're trying to get. And like, you're trying to kind of improve your ways or provide protocols that actually provide that. And like, you know exactly what you're looking for. I feel like realistically, you probably wants to do both kinds of analysis. And like, sometimes you even want to do both kinds of analysis in stages, right? Like you have, you want to do more quick and dirty things and even wants public feedback on the quick and dirty stuff. And then later on you formalize it more and then you get more feedback. Like in general, I guess I feel like the norms of research in the future, like the internet has just changed so much. There's no way that it's not going. And you know, it's even changed like collaboration structures and like the patterns in which we work with each other. There's no way that the correct structure for collaborative research is the same as what it was 15 years ago. But like, what combination of these existing components and of new ideas it is, like that's something that's, you know, totally legitimate to kind of fight it out. And I think it's great that there's different ecosystems that have different attitudes to things. Like, you know, I think, you know, there's a big possibility that, you know, things that the Ethereum, ways that the Ethereum ecosystem approaches some problems is totally wrong. And if there's other ecosystems with different principles and they do well, that's something that we can learn from. In the spirit of the depth for a search, can you comment on AI safety? And some people are really worried about the existential risks of artificial intelligence. Is there something you could say that's hopeful about how we avoid in the same kind of line of reasoning about creating formal models versus kind of looking outside the model into what the real world actually is like? Is there some lessons from that we can take and map onto the AI safety world where the potentials of the technology, whether it's in autonomous weapon systems or just the paperclip problem that we can avoid AI destroying the world? So my impression is actually that, like, this is more of a kind of far away impression and it could be wrong, that it might even be that one of the challenges is that AI is not formal enough. Like, because AI is very practitioner oriented, right? Like, it's all about like, hey, I found a couple of hacks and look, I ran them and look, they seem to improve classification accuracy from 0.684 to 0.773. So a lot of the time there just isn't actual science behind why this hack works and why this other hack doesn't work. You just sort of like trial and error your way into it. And I could see how that approach works, but at the same time, like, that approach is not good for eligibility, for example. Like, it's not good for like understanding what the heck is actually going on, like how these kinds of systems conceivably might fail. Like, there's even, you know, a debate on like, can you take GPT3 like things and just scale them up and their intelligence will continue to improve or is there just like some types of reasoning that they're fundamentally bad at and like they're not gonna get good at it no matter how much you like scale this exact same approach and add more hardware to it. So having like thinking about what's going on more explicitly, I mean, my understanding is that a big part of AI safety research is trying to do that sort of stuff, right? Formalize. Yeah, formalize, try to improve just AI eligibility, like trying to understand, you know, if the AI makes some classification so we can actually see like what happens and like what's going on in the middle, right? Whereas with crypto or with traditional cryptography, you know, it's like very much not, well, okay, I mean, I shouldn't quite say that. It's, traditional cryptography is this interesting mix of being very formal and being very informal because it's very formal with, given these security assumptions, prove that the protocol works under these security assumptions. The places where it's very informal is like, well, how do we even know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for factoring numbers? Yeah, we kind of tried it for 40 years. And then, you know, so far, no one's found anything better than the general number field sieve. And like, okay, fine, we'll just assume it's fine. You know, how do we know you can't find the discrete log between two elliptic curve points? Like, nope, did it a couple of decades, no one's found anything faster than like baby step, giant step stuff. So that's, and like, there's definitely ways in which that approach really makes sense, right? Because at least you can concentrate your analysis on a small number of building blocks. And like, you know, you do have some intuitive reasoning about those building blocks, but like at least there is a small number of building blocks and lots of people are looking at them. And then everything else just sort of gets formally built on top and you actually can like mathematically reduce the security of big things to building blocks, right? Like you can have mathematical proofs that say, you know, if you make a ZK Synarch of a yes statement when in reality that statement is false, then you can use that to like extract information out of elliptic curves that, you know, it completely breaks the problem or something like that. So. So ZK Synarch is an example where formalism is beneficial. Absolutely, yeah. And so maybe you can have the same kind of stuff in the AI safety within AI systems that you can get a hold of some kind of aspect of the systems that you can control provably. And then in blockchains and cryptocurrency, I think the one area where consensus mechanisms is still more an art than a science is that these aren't just like technological systems, they're crypto economic systems, right? And they make assumptions about people. And which assumptions you can make about people is not something that you can prove with math. Right, even just the basic 51%. Exactly. Honest. Can you trust the 51%? If you can't trust the 51%, can you trust the other 49% to be able to coordinate on like making their own fork? What will happen to coin prices? Like how do people as human beings react to these events? Like there's all of these assumptions. But no, at the same time, look, if you can write down the assumptions, then you can like do formal things with them. I almost forgot to ask you about one of the most exciting aspects of Ethereum. I mean, it's non technical. I think it's a societal, it's social, which is NFTs. So what do you think about the explosion of NFTs in the recent months, especially in the art world and beyond, and what does the future look like? So this is maybe the social impact on the world, on the individual creators of all kinds. Like is that something you've actually expected to see, NFTs having this kind of impact? And beyond, what do you think will happen in the digital space with NFTs, in virtual reality, in gaming, all those kinds of things? I was definitely surprised by like NFTs in particular. Like I even actually think might be on record somewhere on some tech conference panel. Like they were asking, you know, it was one of those overrated or underrated sections and ask about NFTs and I thought, and I said like, hey, I think NFTs are overrated. And, you know, in retrospect, that turned out to be quite wrong. I think, like, I guess I just personally can't really relate to this concept of like spending a lot of money on a thing. Like there's nothing, you know, there's no clear kind of understanding of why that thing would maintain its value. Uniqueness of a thing having value. Right, exactly. That's like, I definitely like cannot really understand, you know, the psychology behind like buying, you know, paying $200,000 for original art painting. I'd be like, you know, if I had a mansion, just like give me photocopies of everything. You can hang three photocopies of the Mona Lisa section. Why would I even have the Mona Lisa? I think I'd probably just like have some Nyan Cats or something. That's one thing where mathematics or theoretical computer science cannot formalize why the heck NFTs are valuable. Exactly. But the thing that makes me very happy about the space now that it has happened is that, and this gets back to the conversation that we had at the beginning, right? Like I'm interested in this concept of decentralized public goods funding, right? Like I want things that are good and valuable to as much as possible also be things that can economically sustain the people who produce them, right? Because if you don't have that, then either the public goods just don't get produced at all or people make like centralized versions that have some of the properties and try to be substitutes, but actually just like concentrate control in a very small group, right? And both of those things are not very nice. So the nice thing about NFTs would be, well, if you're an artist and you can just mint NFTs and this is a source of revenue, then like great, that's another stream of revenue for creative work that often does still get underfunded and that's amazing. Okay, let me ask you a weird question. We talked about Craig Wright a little bit, but a lot of people write to me, one of two emails. One email is calling any coin outside of Bitcoin a scam and then the other email is saying, my favorite coin is the best coin, it's going to save the world, whatever that coin is. And so I sit back and I look, I have no idea. I try to figure out like the humans that I trust in this space, just the basic human qualities, but do you think some coins are scams? Do you think some coins, maybe another way to ask it, are scamier than other coins? How are people that are looking outside of this space where there's all of these cryptocurrencies supposed to figure out what is a scam and not, or how to use the right kind of language when talking about them? Because there's the harshness of the language from the Bitcoin maximalists that doesn't just say everything's a scam, including Ethereum, but they use terms like shit coin that says it's not only a scam, it's like a waste of time. I mean, every word you can use, they say that. That's very harsh. And then some people just apply the word scam much, much more conservatively and just refer to coins that legitimately are trying to scam people out of their money as scams. So what do we do with this word scam? Should it ever be applied to coins? And is it a binary thing or is it a gray area? I think it's definitely a gray area. There's definitely things that are really and actually scams. I mean, Bitconnect would be one example of something that's way on the scam spectrum. Did you see their 2017 promotional video, by the way? Of Bitconnect? Yeah, hey, hey, hey, what's up, what's up, what's up? Bitconnect! It was this three minute, 48 second video that was just of this guy making this totally crazy rant. And it was at some conference in Vietnam where they were, of course, trying to convince a whole bunch of people to buy this coin and they had these claims about how it would go up in value. That was definitely the peak of these pure, completely scammy coins. And that was definitely really terrible. And I feel like we have less, despite cryptocurrency as a whole being bigger, we actually have quite a bit less of that now. But then, of course, there's this spectrum of things that are not completely scams and then things that are not scams and that are technically totally fine projects but where their community is just incredibly sketchy and then all the way to things that are where the community is nice but maybe the project is just fundamentally incapable of achieving what it's trying to do or in the community doesn't realize and then really good projects, right? So if you wanna go a step, like if that's 100% scam, then what would I call say 80% scam? Well, like Bitcoin SV is one example. This is a Craig Wright's fork of Bitcoin. Theoretically, it's a blockchain, right? It's a fork of Bitcoin. It has some 512 megabyte blocks. If you really wanted to, you could use the blockchain. It satisfies the property so that you can send transactions onto it. You can probably use it as a backup to store your files if you really wanted to just because it has so much space. It might fail, but at the same time, as we basically said, Craig Wright is a scammer and half the community is just totally batshit insane. So the humans of a particular cryptocurrency is what makes for a scam and not like the humans at the top that have a voice guiding the community. Yeah, I think in the case of BSV, the humans, they make just completely wrong and just obviously wrong claims about what BSV is capable of accomplishing and what it can say we could accomplish. And there's just a lot of aspects of it that make it feel like a money grab. So that's one example. And then you gotta go a bit further and then you have the trons of the world. And that's a platform, you can use it, you can do stuff on it. But at the same time, they did plagiarize the IPFS white paper and then they... So there's scammy qualities. See, the thing that throws me off a lot, it's very difficult for me, is that most coins, but the ones that make me feel like are scammy have a large community of people that are super positive about it. Like, and they'll write to me. Now that said, sort of on the flip side of that, Bitcoin people are also very positive. There's some sense in... The reason I was having like squinty eyes looking at Bitcoin for quite a while is like, why is everyone so positive? I was getting total cult vibes. Like the ideas are not grounded in truth, but are grounded in an obsession of like when you can artificially conjure up a truth, which is why I was a little bit like worried about Bitcoin. I think I've learned a lot since then to where like, I learned to separate the community from the ideas. And I think Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea on many fronts, but still a community that's like dogmatically excited about something, whatever that is, makes me skeptical. Maybe it's just like my upbringing, but when everybody's really excited about something, it makes me skeptical. But it also makes me difficult to decide what is this scam or not, because some of the most exciting ideas in this world have a community of people who are excited about it, right? Because it's, I don't know. I think space exploration is super exciting. And there's people, I know a lot of them that are exceptionally excited about space exploration. Does that mean it's a scam? No. So I don't know what to do with that. And so most I just try to stay away, I suppose, but it's unfortunate because I'm sure there's a lot of exciting technologies in that space. Like in the case of Bitcoin, like I would definitely not call Bitcoin a scam. Right. But I would also not call Litecoin a scam. There's people who call Litecoin a scam because they just like say, oh, look, it has no fundamental use case. And the concept of being silver to Bitcoin's gold is just like stupid. And like milli Bitcoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold. But at the same time, like if you have these people who just, they do seem to earnestly believe this. And like they're trying to just like make Litecoin be a Litecoin as best as they can. Then like, to me that's enough for it to not be a scam. And then, so yeah, I think the biggest gray area is definitely between like projects that are earnest but they have just all sorts of these like different combinations of flawed qualities to them. I mean, the ones that legitimately is a scam is when the key people that are at the head of the project are intentionally lying. And I think as long as the intent is to try to do good in the world, even if your actual implementation of that is flawed, I think that's not a scam. It could be flawed ideas, it could be wrong ideas, but it's not a scam. I'm learning to navigate this space. Yeah, it's definitely a very challenging space to navigate, I mean, it's in some ways the reflection of the world at large. Yeah, and as we've said, maybe offline that the fact that money is involved makes it a little bit more complicated that lives can be ruined by the choice of technologies that are taken on. So it makes it more real, more painful, more like elevated the impact of this. Like imagine like Mac versus PC wars if everyone who bought a MacBook had 10 Apple shares inside of it, and everyone who had a PC had 10 Microsoft shares inside of it. And then you had the elites who bought their Macs back in 1983, and then they spent $500 debt, and now they have $40 million, and they just think that they're these gurus who understands the future of finance and geopolitics, and they make theories about why Apple is the one that's gonna bring freedom to the world, and Windows is secretly allied with the axis of evil. Oh, that's brilliant. So yeah, this is so brilliant. So I think the right way to think about this is we map some of the cryptocurrency battles into the space of like EMAX versus VIM, or Apple versus PC, if there were some stock that came along with each implementation of each PC, each Mac, that's fascinating. This is 100% correct, 100% correct. Because then that really energizes the armies of people debating over this in a way that something without money does not. Okay, let me ask you about something really fascinating that you are also excited about, which is longevity, antiaging. You have donated money to the SENS Foundation, so you have an interest in this whole space of lifespan research. What's your vision here? Or what do you hope to see in antiaging and longevity research? I think I hope to see the concept of seeing your parents and grandparents die just slowly disappear from the public consciousness as an experience that happens over the course of half a century, the same way that getting lost in a city slowly disappeared over the public consciousness over the last 50 now that we have smartphones. The thing you have from Nick Bostrom, the essay pinned in your Twitter argues that essentially death is almost unethical. The fact that we don't do something about this thing that, this, in the essay, is a dragon that keeps murdering everybody around us, including our parents and grandparents, is, the fact that we don't try to do something aggressively about that dragon doesn't make any sense. So you think this is a battle worth fighting, a battle for immortality, or at least longevity? I'd say absolutely. And I'd say a battle where we really have started over the last five years in particular to see the first cracks of humanity starting to make things that look like they'll turn into victories. Do you think humans can eventually live forever? And maybe as a side comment to that, what technology do you think will enable that as a genetic modification? Is it cloning, is it uploading your mind? Define forever, like are we talking 1,000 years, a million, 10 to the 14, 10 to the 45? Well, let's start, as I tweeted today, eventually everything, the universe will be filled with supermassive black holes. So that forever, maybe like backtracking to where. We'll have 10 to the 16 years to figure it out. Yes, exactly. Yeah, maybe travel between the multiverse, between the different universes of the multiverse. I mean, but forever meaning like, you know, millennia. I definitely think that we can get there. I definitely think that it's the sort of thing that's going to take an insanely huge amount of work. And I definitely think it's the sort of thing where once we figure out the first crop of problems and like people start living to 150, we'll just realize that there's like 10 other problems that kill you half as slowly and we'll have to do more work. But the good news is that this is Aubrey's longevity escape velocity argument that if you get everyone to live to 150 now, then you have half a century to fix all those other problems as well. So I'm optimistic for that reason. I think you definitely do not want to underestimate human ingenuity, especially over the longterm. Like just to look at what happens to computers between the ENIAC in 1950 and we're around 2020, right? Like that's a span of 70 years. So like, you know, both of us, I think, with just present day technology, I have like at least 70 more years to live. So just like imagine what kind of sea change will happen in biomedicine during that time. And the other thing that made me optimistic is that I actually think COVID has been this kind of event that's really kind of pushed biomedicine and especially like activist approaches to biomedicine really into the public consciousness, right? Like it basically, it's put people into this mindset that, you know, wait, but like, you know, it's not just like, you know, the bits and tweets that are gonna save the world, you know, the bio is actually like super important and huge. And, you know, ultimately what's ending COVID basically, you know, is the vaccines and the vaccines have just been, you know, amazing. And if you can take that energy and also like this, I think philosophical attitude that I've noticed, like the way that I would describe the philosophical attitude here, this is going more depth first, is that I think the way that I kind of interpret part of what I would call late 20th century ideology is that there is this mentality that, you know, nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad and generally you wanna minimize disruptions from nature. And like this exists everywhere in the political spectrum. So there's nature as in literal nature. And my view is that like the right wing version of that is markets as nature, right? Like, you know, the way that like that kind of philosophy talks about, you know, markets and like the goal of not interfering with them, like, you know, it is very kind of like nature styled. And then of course, you know, the conservative one, which is like traditional culture that existed before the activists started controlling everything as also being a kind of nature. But the 21st century attitude and like really COVID, you know, has flipped a lot of minds because with COVID what's happened is that, well, no, like it's not, nature is not safe, right? The default is that is like, you know, untold misery and suffering in tens of millions of people dying. The only way out for us is through like basically human ingenuity. And that frame of mind is one that's like much more friendly to one, this other change of minds that I want to see, which is like basically treating aging as an engineering problem, right? Like the default is all 7.8 billion human beings that are currently on this earth are gonna die and they're gonna live their last decade of life in debilitating pain. And the only way to stop that is human ingenuity. And, you know, we don't have that solution yet, but, you know, if we work hard, we will. And more and more people on the biology side, computational biology are basically converting the mess of the human biology into an engineering problem. And once that conversion is happening, looking at the genetic code, the proteins, all those kinds of things, once that conversion happens, you can now apply the tools that we know how to solve engineering problems to solving it that way. And then there's also the other version, which is, you know, why do we romanticize this meat vehicle that ultimately is just the thing that carries the brain, maybe we can more and more convert ourselves into the digital realm. This is where like Neuralink have the computer interfaces and then achieve immortality in the space of information and the digital space versus the biology space. That stuff's interesting too, I agree. Again, I think, you know, we have enough resources and we should just try all the parallel tracks. You know, it's great that we have people just trying to make our bodies work. It's great that we have people trying to upload or improve brain scanning. It's also great that we have just like people improving cryonics. So like we could just like, you know, go to sleep in the freezer and eventually, hopefully sometime in the future, you know, Hal Finney is gonna be able to wake up, all of this, you know, anyone who gets cryo chronically frozen today will be able to wake up, but you know, that's a bet, right? That's the last resort. And then the other interesting thing about the like extreme uploading approach, right, is we're excited about space. And one of the points that a lot of science or like hard science fiction types make is that, you know, if you want to explore space, that's a lot easier if you're not a human, right? Like one example of this is that, you know, in the context of humans, we're talking about like, oh, we're gonna be able to go to the moon, oh, we're gonna be able to go to Mars, but there's this project called Starshot, I believe, right? That's basically trying to send spacecraft to mini spacecrafts to Alpha Centauri, and they literally believe that they're going to be able to get spacecraft over to Alpha Centauri like four light years away by like the 2060s. Now, I mean. By traveling close to the speed of light, yeah. Exactly, like, so the way it works is, you know, you have these light sails, like you basically take these a spacecraft and you shine a laser at it, and the laser is insanely strong, quickly accelerated at a hundred Gs or, no, I think it was 10,000 Gs until it gets to 20% of the speed of light, and then, you know, it goes on your merry way, right? So if you wants to be in, like personally explore the Alpha Centauri system within like two centuries or one century, then, you know, being a robot is like, by far the most practical way to do it, because there's no way that a human being can survive 10,000 Gs. So it's definitely interesting longterm, but at the same time, there's definitely a lot of like psychological hangups and a lot of like deep philosophy that we'll just have to grapple with to get there. I think what it hangs on the topic of whether we can convert consciousness into an engineering problem. So like, is consciousness tied to our biology? Because the moment we can convert consciousness into a digital form, then we can send it with that light sail to Alpha Centauri. Until then, a robot is not carrying anything except maybe some basic knowledge like Wikipedia. It's not carrying the flame of human consciousness. I have high hopes for converting consciousness into an engineering problem. In fact, I think it's not as difficult as people think. I'm like, yeah, I agree with that. I'm definitely in the camp that consciousness is a property of the algorithm and not a property of a brain structure. The other fun, like the kinds of philosophical things we'd have to grapple with is like, once you upload yourself, like you can hit Control C, you know, like it wouldn't be lovely to have like 10 copies of Alex Friedman and then like we could just interview everyone. So this is, I mean, this is, I have to ask this question. It's a difficult one, which I don't think it'd be wonderful, first of all. Sure. So in the following way, and this has to do with immortality as well, there's something about scarcity that creates value. Or there's a bunch of philosophers, Viktor Frankl, Bernard Williams, Ernest Becker, they argue that death or the scarcity of life creates meaning. The reason we, life is beautiful, the reason so many moments of experience of love or delicious food, all those things are made delicious because they're finite, because they end, and because we don't have that many of them. And there's a kind of worry that if we extend the human lifespan, if we achieve immortality, or if we, God forbid, clone me multiple times, then you lose the richness of what it means to have this life, to have this experience. Is that worry you at all? Do you think there's some aspect to which death does in fact give meaning to life? I guess like the one historical parallel, and this might be a bit unfair, is that there have been philosophers that have said things like, war gives meaning to human collectives, and the struggle for supremacy between nations and races is this big driver of progress that ensures that everyone strives to be their best. And of course, this viewpoint got into the head of a crazy Austrian guy, and 20 years later, his soldiers were shooting at my grandparents. So these days we don't really have that, but yet life still feels meaningful. We've still found other ways to, there's still a striving for technological progress. There's still a striving for self improvements in general. And it turns out that you don't actually need to have existential conflicts in order to have that. Now, maybe you need conflict, but we have other kinds of conflict, right? Like we have competition between businesses, competition between political ideologies, competition between projects. And so these are, like whatever the psychological needs are, like they're just our substitutes for it. So I guess like, yeah, so if we trying to say, I feel like once we start living to the age of 200, then like, I'm just intuitively expecting that we'll see substitutes emerge in the same way. Yeah, we'll create conflicts of other sorts that lead to less human suffering than wars do. Like we'll just start playing Diablo four, five, six, cause you die in video games. So maybe we'll get some of the inkling of scarcity through the activities we partake in as opposed to our own body dying. I mean, I feel shitty when I, like you can, I remember in Diablo three, you can play in hardcore mode where if you die in the game, your character's dead. Maybe we'll get the richness that we currently get from life by having like little artificial versions of ourselves that die. Interesting enough, as I've just like personally spent more time in this world, I've started realizing that there is a concept of like real finiteness that still exists and it might even still be a thing that provides meaning that doesn't require anyone to actually die. Like for example, like how many people from middle school or even high school are yours? Like do you still talk to regularly? I happen to be close friends with like four or five of them. Okay, well, like in my case, the answer is zero for middle school and two for high school. But you're right. Right. It dropped close to zero. Exactly, it dropped a lot, right? And so like there's a lot of these just like relationships that end up being very finite. A person changes their, I feel like a person changes enough of their worldview after 25 years. Was there even a study about this? Something like a person and themselves 25 years later are about as different as like two different people or something like this. So, I mean, just like you can have conflict without bloodshed, I think you can have finiteness and even the necessary sorrows of finiteness that give meaning without like literally anyone having to end their life. And hopefully if we do extend our life, we'll figure out ways to extend the period of time where there's neuroplasticity to where we could change our worldviews continually throughout that time. So you can have these different phases of life. I thought it would be fun to hear you speak a little Russian. Do you speak Russian? Yes, of course. How did your Russian roots help you? That's an interesting question. What can you say in Russian about that? What can I say about my Russian roots? When I just look at other projects, other people in the blockchain industry, sometimes when I look at what Russian people are doing, what other people are doing, I can sometimes feel that these people who are Russian have something that feels similar to me, but I don't know how to explain it. Do you think there's, so for people who don't speak Russian, that Vitalik said that there is something to the spirit of the people that are Russian that are working in the cryptocurrency world that is a little bit different and it's something that connects to some kind of aspect of your own self, some kind of roots there. And it's kind of interesting. Do you think that there's, does it make you sad that there's these two different worlds that are sort of in part disconnected by language? And I'm sure the same could be the case with China and other parts of the world, where the language slows the transmission of the beauty of the culture in a certain kind of way where you can't truly collaborate. Like you can all speak English, so you're collaborating on maybe a technical level, but you're not collaborating on the level of some deep human connection. Do you see that being able to speak both languages? There's definitely benefits, I think, to be able to speak multiple languages. And once you can, you discover that even your mindset changes while you're speaking in one language versus the other. People have told me this, like, when I speak Russian, I sound more, I guess, to the point and pragmatic. When I speak Chinese, I sound more cute. When I speak English, I'm something else. I guess there's definitely a richness that you're missing if you're only in one of these language bubbles. But I guess the arguments on the other side would be that if everyone spoke the same language, then there would just be one bubble. This is the challenge, I think. There are actually benefits to having cultural diversity, and you definitely don't want the entire world to be too conformist. Well, one of the interesting things about crypto is that it's just a culture that actually manages to somehow have its uniqueness and even preserve its independence from all of these surrounding countries despite being embedded in all of them. So it spans outside of the geographic boundaries, and language in some ways does as well. And the way these cultures, these bubbles are created, I mean, they overlap in interesting ways. It's almost like a hierarchy, and the same is the case of the crypto world. There's communities associated with these cryptocurrencies. There's communities within those communities, and it's... Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely sad whenever these groups are fighting each other, and it's definitely good for them if people can cooperate more. But at the same time, just having groups of people that have different kinds of life experiences, there's definitely something to benefit from that. So let me ask one last question. I don't think I asked you last time the ridiculous question about the meaning of life. You know, Dostoevsky said, beauty will save the world. Krasata spacet mir. Some people believe money is a big part of happiness, and you've turned... First of all, you've made a lot of money. You turned away a lot of money. You turned away a lot of power. So you're a fascinating person to ask, what do you think is meaning to life? The thing that I've realized with money as I have experienced both having little of it and having a lot of it is that the benefit of... You can get the most out of money if you think of it not as something that lets you do and have more things, but as something that lets you worry about fewer things, right? Like, if your savings are just nonzero at all, then you don't have to worry as much about losing your job. And if you feel like you have a job that just really conflicts with your values, then if you have even six months saved up, that just makes it easier for you to say, bye bye, I'm going to do something else. If you have more money, then you can not worry about even what you're doing needing to be profitable at all. Once you get more money, then you can choose transportation options and food options that just have less hassle in your life and allow you to be lazier. So, this aspect of just reducing troubles and opening up room for other things, I think, is a big part of it. If you instead think of money as being this positive or this thing that gives you stuff and you try to derive meaning from the stuff, I think that's much more likely to be a road to basically squandering that opportunity. So, yeah, and I guess my philosophy on that is definitely more subtractive than additive there. But once you have enough money that you don't have to worry about the money, you're burdened with another question, which is of meaning. Do you think there's meaning to it all? Or it seems like your own life, you're trying to build cool stuff that alleviates some level of suffering in the world. Well, I mean, one way to think about it is like, think back to how you thought about life when you were in school, right? In school, this act is interesting to think about, right? Because in a lot of ways, it's just totally outside of bounds of the kinds of systems, like social systems that we live in as adults, or maybe not, like maybe things like academia are intended to replicate parts of school. Like, first of all, school is very totalitarian, right? Like, you have to follow the teacher's instructions, the bulk of your schedule is like forced to be in particular areas, and you can control the real purview from leaving the grounds during this period of time, assign a lot of homework. But at the same time, also, school is a bit of a post scarcity utopia in that you just don't have to worry about getting resources for yourself. And we've both lived through 12 years of that, right? So, what does that say about us? And I think one thing of aspects, obviously, is that there's definitely an easiness to living life if all of your decisions are made for you. And one of the challenges of adulthood, I guess, is moving to this world where all your choices are much more self directed, and you just have to learn to live and deal with that. Yeah, dealing with the burden of freedom, in some sense. It's actually interesting, because in some ways, I feel like even my first five years of doing Ethereum things, my life was not even all that self directed, because a lot of it was just responding to obligations. Like someone said, oh, come to speak at this event in Korea. Okay, come to speak at this thing in Taiwan. Okay. For Ethereum to launch, we need this particular piece to be done and tested. Okay, work on that. We need some proof of stake algorithm, work on that. And the last year of COVID life, basically, I was holed up in Singapore for much of it. And it gave me a lot more alone time. I had much less travel. And that was definitely a very new and interesting experience for me. Would you characterize it by sadness, melancholy, hope, dreaming, innovative period? How would you characterize that alone time? Some of all five, definitely some self discovery. I definitely did make this very deliberate decision that, okay, I have this time, and I'm going to actually make something meaningful out of it. So one example of the things I did is I just actually started listening to your audio books and podcasts much more. Just this year, I basically discovered that the podcast space is real for the first time, I guess. Like before that, there would be things that I would get interviewed for, but I was not mentally incorporate this idea that podcasts are a thing that you can go listen to. And this year I did. My friend, Carl Lafleur, one of the optimism people, recommended hardcore history to me. And so I went ahead and just listened to all the hardcore histories. And then after that, I listened to like 10 Luxfried mids and then a bunch of others. And after that, I also got into audio books. Oh, I listened to the entire The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the whole thing, 45 hours. That was fascinating. So let me ask about Dan, because Dan is going to love hearing this. I'm going to send it to him. Do you have a period of history, whether it's Dan or in general, that you draw for your own life, like kind of thinking about the world, about human nature that you go to? Is it World War II? Is it Wrath of the Khans, the Genghis Khan? Is it some other more ancient history? Is it World War I? Is there something that kind of echoes with you in the voice of Dan or anyone else that you connect to? I feel like the 1930s and 40s are fascinating because they force you to really grapple with the question of where does evil come from, right? The sort of mental puzzle that I've always had in my head is, on the one hand, things like the Holocaust happened. But on the other hand, if you just go and have a coffee with people, then a hundred times out of a hundred, everyone just seems so nice. Yeah, exactly. How do you kind of reconcile the macro and the micro there, right? And that's the sort of thing that's very difficult if you don't have a lot of, I guess, the right kind of personal experience, especially if your personal experience starts off being sheltered, like it was for me, right? I know the stereotype is that the nerds get bullied in school, but actually for me, in my school experience was just being treated with kindness by everyone. Yeah. So that definitely made it harder to understand things. I remember actually being pretty blindsided when I started Ethereum. And then within six months, there started being fights over who would get more shares if Ethereum turned out to be a company. And then I suggested we should just make it to be a non profit, and somehow that ended up upsetting people. So the fascinating thing for me is that I've been obviously reading and listening to the history, and then at the same time, just observing things happening in the crypto world. And so one of my interesting mental intuitions that I've gotten is that I think most evil doesn't come out of greed, it comes out of fear. And one example of this in Ethereum lands, right, is I think the part of Ethereum history where I thought that the Ethereum community was at its lowest, and even when I personally was at my lowest. Now, if you go back to the Dow fork in 2016, right, so the Dow hack happened, and then we made this controversial decision to change the Ethereum protocol. And then there was that Ethereum Classic split. And as soon as that Ethereum Classic split happened, there was a lot of anger everywhere. And there started especially being anger when the price of ETC started taking up. So this was the time when Ether started off being $13 and Ethereum Classic started at zero, but then suddenly there was this one day when like ETH dropped to 12.5, ETC went up to 0.5, and then they dropped more. And people were saying things like, oh, this whole Ethereum Classic is just a psyop by the Bitcoin community and just the wealthy Bitcoiners trying to destroy Ethereum. And in the back of my mind, I knew that that wasn't entirely true. There definitely were Bitcoiners. But at the same time, I think blaming disagreements on foreign interference, like this is the sort of thing that countries, governments do all the time, it's a very convenient excuse because it allows you to just blame these things that are happening on the foreigners and avoid actually grappling with the facts that like, well, no, actually you have people in your very own community who just disagree with you and have a different belief. And I feel like the Ethereum community during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that. And I feel like I during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that. And so there was a lot of blaming the Bitcoiners. There were also even a lot of people calling for us to use trademark law and basically sue exchanges and try to prevent them from listing Ethereum Classic. And to me, that was very unethical, right? Like basically using the government as a weapon to try to attack the other cryptocurrency and destroy it goes completely against the ideals of freedom and things that at least in theory were supposed to stand for. But in that particular time, basically what was happening was that the ETC price was rising. And at the same time, the ETH price was dropping in lockstep. And there were a lot of Bitcoin people basically saying this is the end of Ethereum. And I think a lot of people really were afraid that Ethereum would be just like completely destroyed as a result of this. And so that's where the anger came from. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It came from the fear. And that's what allowed people to rationalize in abandonment of principles that I think they would not have accepted in other circumstances. And I definitely, to some extent, played along with this myself. And I do definitely regret that to some extent. Well, I definitely regret the excesses completely. And then obviously, Bitcoin block size war, similar sort of stuff happened. So that insight was interesting because it does mentally make a lot of sense when you're actually afraid that unless you act in some way that your entire world is going to collapse. It's much easier to just rationalize forgetting your principles and doing whatever you have to just save the specific thing that you care about. It feels like the right thing to do, the brave thing to do is in the face of fear to still have compassion, to still have love as opposed to hate. So the darkest moments, the toughest moments of human history are those where fear is everywhere. And despite that, the way to get out of that is through love, not giving into the fear. And again, that's the lesson that you draw from all those moments of history. Yeah. Well, I like you have in terms of those coffee and the kindness that people have, it does seem that everybody has the capacity for evil and everybody has the capacity for love. And you just have to create mechanisms and incentives that prioritize the latter over the former. Vitalik, you're one of the most interesting people I've gotten a chance to talk to. Thank you so much for talking to me. I hope we get a chance to talk again. I hope I can at least be some small part. This would be awesome in a podcast with you and Dan Carlin. That would be an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for doing so much incredible technical innovation that inspires the computer scientists, the economists, inspires the world and what technology can do. And now with longevity, I do hope we live a very long time and play Diablo to make that long time fun. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you too, Alex. This was great. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vitalik Buterin and thank you to Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, Four Sigmatic and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela. When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 | Lex Fridman Podcast #188

The following is a conversation with David Sinclair. He's a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard and co director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of the book, Lifespan and co founder of several biotech companies. He works on turning age into an engineering problem and solving it. Driven by a vision of a world where billions of people can live much longer and much healthier lives. Quick mention of our sponsors, Onnit, Clear, National Instruments, and I, SimpliSafe and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that longevity research challenges us to think how science and engineering will change society. Imagine if we can live 100,000 years, even under controlled conditions, like in a spaceship say, then suddenly a trip to Alpha Centauri that is a 4.37 light years away takes a single human lifespan. And on the psychological, maybe even philosophical level, as the horizons of death drifts farther into the distance, how will our search for meaning change? Does meaning require death or does it merely require struggle? Reprogramming our biology will require us to delve deeper into understanding the human mind and the robot mind. Both of these efforts are as exciting of a journey as I can imagine. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here is my conversation with David Sinclair. I usually feel like the same person when I was 12. Like when I, right now, as I think about myself, I feel like exactly the same person that I was when I was 12. And yet, I am getting older, both body and mind, and still feel like time hasn't passed at all. Do you feel this tension in yourself that you're the same person and yet you're aging? Yeah, I have this tension that I'm still a kid, but that helps in my career. Scientists need to have a wonder about the world and you don't wanna grow up at 12 year olds and even younger, I would say six, seven year olds. I've still got that boy in me and I can look at things. It's a gift, I think, that I can see things for the first time if I choose to, and then explain them as I would to a six year old because I am that mentally. But on the other hand, I'm getting older, right? I run a lab of 20 people at Harvard. I've got a book, I've got science to do, companies to run, and so I have to, on most days, just pretend to be a grownup and be mature, but I definitely don't feel that way. There's something I really appreciated in opening your book. You talked about your grandmother. And on this kind of theme, on this kind of topic, she, first of all, had a big influence on you. My grandmother had a big influence on me. And you also mentioned this poem by the author of Winnie the Pooh, Alan Alexander Milne. Maybe I can read it real quick because I love, on the topic of being children, when I was one, I had just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not much more. When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six. I am as clever, as clever, so I think I'll be six, now, forever and ever. So this idea of being six and staying six forever, being youthful, being curious, being childlike, this and other things, what influence has your grandmother had in your thinking about life, about death, about love? Yeah, I was getting misty eyed as you read that because that poem was read to me very often, if not every day, by my grandmother, who partially raised me. And she was as much a bohemian as an artist, philosopher. And she's one of those people that wouldn't talk about the little things. She said, I hate small talk. Don't talk to me about politics or the weather. Yeah, talk to me about human beings and culture. So I was raised on that, and this poem was one that she read to me often because she knew that the mind of a child is precious, it's honest, it's pure. And she grew up during the Second World War and in Hungary and Budapest witnessed the worst of humanity. She was trying to save a whole group of Jewish friends in her apartment, saw what happened after the World War, which was there was, the Russians were in control and locals weren't necessarily treated well if they were rebellious, which she was. And then there was the revolution in 56, which she was part of and had to escape the country. So she saw what can happen when humans do their worst. And her words to me, expressed in part through that poem was, David, always stay young and innocent and have wonder about the world, and then do your best to make humanity the best it can be. And that's who I am, that's what I live for, that's what I get up in the morning to do is to leave the world a better place and show to whoever's watching us, whether it's aliens or some future human historian, that we can do better than we did in the 20th century. You know, we mentioned offline this idea of bringing people back to life through artificial intelligence, sort of, I don't know if you've seen videos of basically animating people back to life, meaning whether it's, for me personally, I've been working on specifically about Albert Einstein, but also Alan Turing, Isaac Newton, and Richard Feynman. And it's an opportunity to bring people that meant a lot to others in the world and animate them and be able to have a conversation with them at first to try to visually, visually explore the full richness of character that they had as they struggle with the ideas of the modern age. Sort of, it's less about bringing back their mind and more bringing back the visual quirks that made them who they are. And then maybe in the future, it's using the textual, the visual, the video, the audio data to actually compress down the person for who they are and be able to generate text. There's a few companies, there's Replica, which is a chat engine that was born out of the idea of bringing, the founder lost her friend to, he got run over by a car. And the initial reason she founded the company was trying to just have a conversation with her friend. She trained machine learning, natural language system on the texts that they exchange with each other and try, she had a conversation with him sort of after he was gone. And it's very, the conversation was very trivial. It was obvious that it's AI agent, but it gave her solace. It made her actually feel really good. And that's the way I wonder if it's possible to bring back people that are, that mean something to us personally, not just Einstein, but people that we've lost and in that way achieve a kind of small artificial immortality. I don't know if you think about this kind of stuff. Well, I definitely think about a lot of things. That one's a really good one. There's a great Black Mirror episode about the wife who brings back the boyfriend or husband. I think one of the challenges with bringing back Richard Feynman would be to capture his sense of humor, but that would be awesome. But yeah, bringing back loved ones would be great, especially if they're young and they die early, though it may hold you back from moving on. That's another thing that could happen as a negative. But I think that's great. And I also think that it's gonna be possible, especially when we're recording some of us, every aspect of our lives, whether it's our face or things we see, right? Eventually one day, everything we see can be recorded. And then you can build somebody's experience and thoughts, speech, and you will have replicas of everybody, at least digitally, and physically you could do that too one day. But that's a good idea, especially because there are people that I'd like to meet, and I think it's easier than building a time machine. One person I'd love to meet is Benjamin Franklin. Really? Well, I wouldn't go back in time. I would, but I'd prefer to bring him into the future and say, can you believe we have this thinking machine in our pockets now? And just see the look on his face as to where humanity has come. Because I think of him as a modern guy that just was before his time. Yeah, so you're thinking Benjamin Franklin the scientist, not Benjamin Franklin the political thing. Because he'd be very upset with Congress right now. Right. So maybe talk to him about science and technology, not politics. Or maybe just don't get him on Twitter because he'll be very upset with human civilization. You know, I wonder what their personalities are like. Isaac Newton, it does seem complicated to figure out what their personality is like. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, who I also thought about. Feynman is, we just have enough video where we get the full kind of, I mean, it shows you how important it is to get not the official kind of book level presentation of a human, but the authentic, the full spectrum of humanity. You mentioned collecting data about a person, collecting the whole thing, the whole of life, the ups and downs, the embarrassing stuff, the beautiful stuff, not just the things that's condensed into a book. And then with Feynman, you start to see that a little bit. Through conversations, you start to see peaks of like that genius. And then through stories about him from others. And then certainly you, the sad thing about Alan Turing, for example, is there's very little, if any, recording of him. In fact, I haven't been able to find recording allegedly there's supposed to be a recording of him doing some kind of a radio broadcast, but I haven't been able to find anything. And so that's truly sad that it feels like it makes you realize how the upside, how nice it is to collect data about a person, to capture that person. That's the upside of the modern internet age, the digital age, that that information, yeah, creates a kind of immortality. And then you can choose to highlight the best parts of the person, maybe throw away the ugly parts and celebrate them even after they're gone. So that's a really interesting opportunity. You've also mentioned to me offline that you're really excited about all the different wearables and all the different ways we can collect information about our bodies, about the whole thing. What's most exciting to you in terms of collecting the biological data about a human being? Well, so I'm a biologist. I find animals and humans as machines very interesting. It's one of the reasons I didn't become an engineer or a surgeon. I wanted to understand how we actually are built. And so I think a lot about machines merging with humans. And the first of that are the bio wearables. And so I talked a lot about this, I wrote about it in Lifespan, the book, and pictured a future where you would be monitored constantly so that you wouldn't suddenly have a heart attack, you'd know that was coming, or you wouldn't go to the doctor and they don't know if you need an antibiotic or not. Long term, how old are you, how to fix things, what should you eat, what should you take, what should your doctor do? These devices, I predicted, would be smarter, better educated than your physician and would augment them. And then there'd be a human that would just tick off to see if it's correct and they approve. I also was predicting in the book that we would have video conferences with our doctors and that medicines would be delivered, initially by courier, but eventually by drones and get it to you sometimes in an emergency. And that we could even have pills that were synthesized or delivered in your kitchen and combined certainly. What's amazing about that is that, what are we now, two years since the book came out, even less, and that future is basically here already. COVID 19 accelerated that incredibly. So where we're at now in society is, if you wanna pay for it, you can have a blood test that will detect cancer 10, 20 years earlier than it would before it forms a tumor. You can, of course, do your genome very cheaply for less than $100 now. There are bio wearables already I wear, this ring from Aura that I have a number of years of data. I've been doing blood tests for the last 12 years with a company called Inside Tracker, which I consult for. And so I have all of that data as well. And there's 34 different parameters on my testosterone, my blood glucose, my inflammation. And I use all that data to, of course, I wear a watch that measures things as well. I use that data to keep my body in optimal shape. So I'm now 51. And according to those parameters, I'm at least as good as someone in their early 40s. And if I really work at it, I can get my biochemistry down to early to mid 30s, though I like to now eat a little dessert once in a while. So that's the future we're in right now. Anyone can do what I just said. But in the very near future, just in the next few years, you can be wearing wearables. So I'm currently wearing a little, what's called a bio sticker. This one I just put on last night. It's about an inch long, a few millimeters. Yeah, for people just listening, it's on David's chest. It's just, how does it attach? It's just kind of. It sticks on. Sticks on. Yeah, so on one side you have an on button that you press. The lights come on, flashes four times, it's good to go. It immediately syncs to your phone. And this one, it's called a bio button, a nice name. And there's another one that I have that I haven't tried yet that does EKG on your heart. This is mainly for doctors to monitor patients that go home after a heart attack or surgery. But that's medical grade FDA approved device. So there will be a day, in fact, it's already here, that doctors are using these to get patients to go home and save a week in hospital, $2,000 at least for each patient. That's massive savings for the hospital. But ultimately what I'm excited about is a future that isn't that far off where everybody, certainly in developed countries, eventually these will cost a few cents and rechargeable. The only cost will be the software subscription that can be monitored constantly. And to give an idea what this is measuring me at a thousand times a second is my vibrations as I speak, my orientation, it already has told me this morning how I slept, where I slept, what side I slept on. We've got sneezing, coughing, body temperature, heart rate, heart of other parameters of the heart that would indicate heart health. These data are being used to now to predict sickness. So eventually we'll have just in the next year or so the ability to predict whether something or diagnose whether something is pneumonia or just a rhinovirus that can be treated or not. This is really going to not just revolutionize medicine, but I think extend lives dramatically. Because if I'm gonna have a heart attack next week and that's possible, this device should know that and I'll be in hospital before I even have it. Maybe you can talk a little bit about InsideTracker because I saw that there's some really cool things in there. Like it actually, so maybe you can talk about, I guess that you're collecting blood to give it the data. So, and it has like basic recommendations on how to improve your life. So we're not just talking about diseases, right? Like anticipating having a particular disease, but it's almost like guiding your trajectory to life, how to, whether it's extend your life or just live a more fulfilling, like improve the quality of life. I suppose this is the right way to say it. How does InsideTracker work? What the heck is it? Because I thought there was also pretty cool. Yeah. What is it? Is it something other people can use? You can definitely use it. You can sign up, it's consumer. It's like a company consumer facing company. It is, yeah. And I also want to democratize the ability to just take a mouth swab eventually. We don't need to have a blood test necessarily, but for now it's a blood test and you'd go to a lab core request in the US. It's also available overseas. You can upload your own data for a minimal cost and get the algorithms, the AI in the background to take that data, plot where you are against others in your age group in terms of health and longevity at bio age. They call it inner age, but also it provides recommendations. And this isn't just a bunch of BS. It sounds like it might be to say, I'll go eat this or go to that restaurant and order that, but it's actually based on the basic. This company has entered hundreds. Now it would be thousands of scientific papers into their database and hundreds of thousands of human data points. And they have tens of thousands of individuals that have been tracked over time and anonymously that data is used to say what works and what doesn't. If you eat that, what works? If you take that supplement, what works? And I was a coauthor on a paper that showed that the recommendations for food and supplements was better than the leading drug for type two diabetes. That's so cool. The idea that you can connect, like skipping the human having to do this work, you can connect the scientific papers, almost like meta analysis of the science connected to the individual data. And then based on that sort of connect your data to whatever the proper group is within the whatever the scientific paper is to make the suggestion of how like how that work applies to your life. And then that ultimately maps to like a recommendation of what you should do with your life. Like it all like this giant system that ultimately recommends you should drink more coffee or less. Right, and we'll have the genome in there as well. You can upload that. Yeah, it's awesome. So these programs will know us way better than we do and our doctors as well. The idea of going to a doctor once a year for an annual checkup and having males get a finger up their butt and you cough, that to me is a joke. That's medieval medicine. And that's very soon going to be seen as medieval. Yeah, to me as a computer science person, it's always upsetting to go to the doctor and just look at him and like realize you know nothing about me. Like you're making your like opinions based on like, it is very valuable, years of intuition building about basic symptoms, but you're just like it is medieval. They're very good at it. In fact, doctors in medieval times were probably damn good at working with very little. But the thing is, I'd rather prefer a doctor that doesn't really know what they're doing, but has a huge amount of data to work with. Well, you're right. And many of my good friends are doctors. I work at Harvard. So I'm not against the profession at all. But I think that they need just as much help as anyone else does. We wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard. We wouldn't think of it. So why would doctors do the same? If we could, could we step back to the big, profound, philosophical, both tragic and beautiful question about age? How and why do we age? Is it from an engineering perspective? You said you like the biological machine. Is that a feature or a bug of the biological machine? It is both a bug and a feature. Evolutionary speaking, we only live as long as we need to to replace ourselves efficiently. If you're a mouse, you're only gonna live two and a half years, three years. You're probably gonna die of starvation, predation, freezing in the winter. So they divert most of their resources to reproducing rapidly, but they don't put a lot of energy into preserving their soma, which is their body. Conversely, a baleen type of whale, a bowhead whale in particular will live hundreds of years because they're at the top of the food chain and they can live as long as they want. So they breed slowly and build a body that lasts. We're somewhere in between because we've, you know, we've really only just come out of the savannas where we could be picked off by a cat. We were pretty wimpy going back 6 million years ago. So we actually need to evolve quicker than evolution will. And that's why we can use our oversized brains and intuition to give us what evolution not only didn't give us, but took away from us. Now we're pathetic, look at our bodies. These arms, if any of us, even the strongest person in the world went in a cage with a chimpanzee, the chimp could knock that person's head off, no question. So we're pathetic. So we need to engineer ourselves to be healthier and longer lived. So getting to aging, we can do better, right? Whales do way better. We're trying to learn how whales do that. And if you ask really anybody in the field now, professor, they'll say there are eight or nine hallmarks of aging, which are really, it's a word for causes of aging. So that you probably have heard of some of these, your listeners will have loss of telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes, like the little ends of shoelaces, that kind of thing. They get too short, cells stop dividing, become senescent. They become, they put out what are called mitogens that cause cancer and inflammatory molecules. So that's another aspect of aging, cellular senescence. Another one is loss of the energetic. So mitochondria, the battery packs wind down. There's a whole bunch, stem cells, proteostasis. Well, these are our Achilles heels that I'm talking about. They're a common amongst all life forms, really. But if you want me to jump to the chases to where, what is the upstream defining factor? If we boil it down, what do we get? So most biologists would say, you can't boil it down. It's too complex. I would say you can boil it down to an equation, which is the preservation of information and loss due to entropy, i.e. noise. And that is the basis of my research. It originally came out of discoveries in yeast cells, where I went to MIT in the 1990s. You studied bread. I kind of did. I studied the makers of bread, a little yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which at the time was one of the hottest, excuse the pun, organisms to work on. But we figured out in the lab why yeast cells get old and found genes that control that process and made them live longer, which was an amazing four years of my life. One of those genes had a name with an acronym SIR2. Now the two is irrelevant. The SIR is important. And the most important letter out of all of those three is I, which stands for information. Silent information regulator number two, when you put more copies of that gene in, just put in one more copy, the yeast cells lived 30% longer and suppressed the cause of aging, which was the dysregulation of information in the cell. And then, so fast forward to now, I've been looking in humans and mice, because they live shorter and cheaper to study, where the loss of information in our bodies is a root cause of aging. And I think it is. Your boldness in doing biology in this way is fascinating because that also leads to a kind of, it's almost like allows for a theory of aging, like you could boil it down to a single equation and it leads to a, perhaps a metric that allows you to optimize aging, sort of in the fight against entropy. I had to figure out which mechanisms, like you said, the silent information regulator, which mechanisms allow you to preserve information without injecting noise, without creating entropy, without creating degradation of that information. For some reason, converting biology, which I thought was mostly impossible into an engineering problem, feels like it makes it amenable to optimization, to solving problems, to creating technology that can, whether that's genetic engineering or AI, it makes it possible to create the technology that would improve the degradation of information and aging. Is there more concrete ways you think about the kind of information you want to preserve? And also, is there good ideas about regulators of that information, about ways to prevent the distortion, the degradation of that information? Right, so we have silent information regulator genes in our bodies. We have seven of them, SIRT1 through seven, they're called. And we found in mice, one way to slow down the loss of information is to just give more of these, to upregulate these genes. So we made a mouse that has more of this SIRT1 gene, turned it on, and that slowed down the aging of the brain and preserved their information. Now, what information am I talking about, you might ask? Well, again, you can simplify biology. There are two types of information in the cell primarily. The one we all read about and know about is the DNA, the genome. And that's base four information, ATCG, the four chemicals that make up the various sequences of the genome, billions of letters. And that also degrades over time. But what's been fascinating is that we find that that information is pretty much intact in old animals and people. You can clone a dog. One of my friends in LA just cloned his dog three times. So this is doable, right? It means that the genome can be intact. But what's the other type of information? It's the epigenome, the regulators of the genetic information. And physically, that's really just how the DNA is wrapped up or looped out for the cell to access it and read it. So it's similar to, and excuse this analogy, but it's a good one, a compact disc or a DVD. Those pits in the foil are the digital information. That's the genome. And the epigenome is the reader of that information. And in a different cell, you'd read different music, different songs, different symphonies. And that's what gets laid down when we're in the womb. And that makes a skin cell forever a skin cell and not a brain cell tomorrow. Thank God, otherwise our brains wouldn't work very well. But over time, what we see is that the brain cells start to look more like skin cells. And the kidney cells start to look more like liver cells. And what we call X differentiate. This is a term that we use in my lab, but isn't yet widely used. But we needed a term to explain this. And that process of X differentiation, the loss of the reader of the CD or the DVD, we liken that to scratches on the DVD so that the reader cannot fully access the information. Now we can slow down the scratches, as I mentioned. We can turn on these genes. We can even put in molecules into the cell or even eat them and turn on those pathways, which my father and I have been trying to do for about a decade to slow things down. But the question that I've had is, is there a repository of information still in the body? Because anyone who knows anything about the loss of information or even has tried to copy a cassette tape or photocopy or Xerox anything knows that over time, you lose that information irreparably. So I've been looking for a backup copy, inspired largely by Claude Shannon's work at MIT as well in the 1940s. His mathematical theory of communication is just brilliant. And so I've been looking for what he called the observer, which is the backup copy. We today might call that the TCPIP protocol of the internet that stores information in case it doesn't make it to your computer, it will fill in the gaps. And we've been spending about the last five years to try and find if there really is a backup copy in the body to reset the epigenome and polish those scratches away. That's incredible. So finding the backup, so whenever there are too many scratches pile up, you can just write a new version. Like write, not a new version, but go to the backup and restore it. Right, that's really all we're talking about. It's not that hard once you know the trick. And for people that actually remember like DVDs and scratches on them, how frustrating it is. That's a brilliant metaphor for aging. And then the reader is the thing that skips and then it could destroy your experience, the richness of the experience that is listening to your favorite song. Right, but in biology, it's even worse because you'll lose your memory, your kidneys will fail, you'll get diabetes, your heart will fail. And we call that aging and age related diseases. So most people forget that diseases that we get when we get old are 80 to 90% caused by aging. And we've been trying to fix things with band aids after they occur without even generally talking about the root cause of the problem. Is there the scratches, do those come from, are those programmed or are they failures? Meaning is it, so if it's by design, then there's like a encoded timeline schedule that the body's just on purpose, degrading the whole thing. And then there's the just the wear and tear of like the scratches on a disc that happen through time. Which one is it that's the source of aging? It's more akin to wear and tear, there isn't a program. Getting back to evolution, there's no selection for aging. We're not designed to age, we just live as long as we need to and then we're at the whim of entropy, basically. Second law of thermodynamics, stuff falls apart. We live a bit longer than age 40, only because there are robust, resilient systems, but eventually they fail as well. Current limit to the human lifespan where they completely fail is 122. But I don't like to think of it as wear and tear because there's two aspects to it. There's a system that's built to keep us alive when we're young, but actually goes, comes back to bite us as we get older. And we call this issue antagonistic pleiotropy. What's good for you when you're young can cause problems when you're older. So we've been looking, what is the main causes of the noise? And we've found two of them definitively. The first one is broken chromosomes. When a chromosome breaks, the cell has to panic because that's either gonna cause a cancer or kill the cell. There's only two outcomes, it's pretty much a problem. And so what the cell does is it reorganizes the epigenome in a massive way. What that leads to is, think of it as a tennis match or a ping pong game. The proteins are the balls and they now leave where they should be, which is regulating the genes that make the cell type, whatever it is. And they have a dual function, they actually go to the break, the chromosome will break and fix that. And then they come back. You might ask, well, why is it set up that way? Well, it's a beautiful system, it coordinates gene expression, the control systems with the repair. You want them coordinated. Problem is, as we get older, this ping pong game, some of the balls get lost. They don't come back to where they originally started. And that's what we think is the main noise for aging. And we've also, the other cause of aging that we found is cell stress, we damage nerves and they age rapidly. So that's the other issue. There's probably others, smoking chemicals, for example, we know accelerates biological age pretty dramatically. But the question is, can you slow that down or can you reset them to get those ping pong balls to go back to where they originally started in the game? And we think we've found a way to do that. Can you give me hints? Whose fault is it in the balls not coming back? Is it the proteins themselves? Like are they starting? Again, I've been obsessed with the protein folding problem from the AI perspective. So is it the proteins or is it something else? Well, we know who hits the balls and recruits them. So that the break is recognized by the cell. It's recognized by proteins who send out a signal through phosphorylation is typical way cells talk to other proteins. And that recruits those repair factors, those ping pong balls to the break. So the cells actively doing this to try and help itself, but we don't know who's to blame for them not coming back. That could just be a flaw in the quote unquote design. I don't think that there's something saying, well, 1% of you balls proteins never go back. I just think it's hard to reset a system that's constantly changing. We have in our bodies close to a trillion DNA breaks every day. And imagine that over 80 years, what damage that does to our epigenomic information. Now we know that this is, well, we never know anything in biology, but we have strong evidence that this is true because we can mess with animals. We can create DNA breaks and tickle them with a few breaks, maybe raise it by threefold over background levels of normal breakage. And if we're right, those mice should get old. And they do. We can actually, we've created these breaks in a way that's titratable. We can, it's like a rheostat. We can send it to 11. I drove my Tesla here, I'm a big fan of a spinal tap too, going to 11. If we go to 11, we can make a mouse old in a matter of months. We prefer to go to a level of about four and it gets old in 10 months. But it's definitely old. It's got all of the hallmarks of aging. It's got diseases. It looks old. Its skin is old. It's got gray hair. But importantly, we can now measure age by looking at the scratches. We can look at the epigenome, we can measure it and use machine learning to give us a number. And those mice are 50% older than normal. So you can replicate the aging process in a controlled way. You can, I mean, in a way that, I mean, you could accelerate it in a controlled way and measure how much exactly it's aging. And that gives you step one of a two step process to when you can then figure out, how can we reverse this? And now we're reversing those mice. Is there a good, I love what you said. I mean, in biology, you really don't know. It's such a beautiful mess. Is there ideas how to do that? Is that on the genetic engineering level? Is it like, what can you mess with? Is it going to the, trying to discover the backup copies and restoring from them? Like what's, if it's possible to convert it to natural language words, what are the ideas here? What is the observer and how do we contact it? Exactly. What's the observer and how do you contact? Or if there's other ideas, how to reverse the balls getting lost process. Yeah, well, you can slow it down. Slow it. But we found a reset switch recently. We just published this in the December 2020 issue of Nature. And what we found is that there were three embryonic genes that we could put into the adult animal to reset the age of the tissues. And it only takes four to eight weeks to work well. And we can take a blind mouse that's lost its vision due to aging. Neurons aren't working well towards the brain. Reset those neurons back to a younger age. And now the mice can see again. These three genes are famous actually because they're a set of four genes discovered by Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize in 2016 for discovering that those four genes when turned on at high levels in adult cells can generate stem cells. And this is, I think, well known now that we can create stem cells from adult tissue. But what wasn't known is can you partially take age back without becoming a tumor or generating a stem cell in the eye, which would be a disaster? And the answer is yes. There is a system in the body that can take the age of a cell back to a certain point, but no further, safely, and reset the age. And we're now using that to reset the age of the brain of those mice that we aged prematurely. And they're getting their ability to learn back. This is really exciting, right? Like what's the downside of this? Well, the downside is if you overdo it and you don't get it right, you might cause tumors. But we do it very carefully. And we also know that in the eye, it's very safe. We also injected these, we deliver them by viruses. So we can control where and when they get turned on. And in this paper, we've published that if we put high levels in the mouse, into their veins, throughout the body, they don't get cancer for over a year. So I'm so optimistic that we're going into human studies in less than two years from now. Is there a place where AI can help? Sorry to inject one of the things I'm very excited about and passionate about. So Google DeepMind recently had a big breakthrough with AlphaFold2, but also AlphaFold two years ago, with achieving sort of a state of the art performance on the protein folding problem, single protein folding. But it also paints a hopeful picture of what's possible to do in terms of simulating the folding of proteins, but also simulating biological systems through AI. Is there something to you, combined with this brilliant work on the biology side that you're hopeful about where AI can be a tool to help? Where isn't it a tool? I mean, if you're not using AI right now in biology, you're getting less and less likely to be left behind in biology, you're getting left behind. We use it all the time. We're using it to generate these biological clocks to be able to read those scratches. We're using it to predict the folding of proteins so we can target molecules and modulate their activity. We're using it to assemble genomes of different species. What else? We use it to predict the longevity of a mouse based on how it reacts to certain things, hearing, eyesight, generally frailty. We just put out a paper last year on that. The other thing we can use it for, which is a little off the track here, but we use it for predicting which microorganisms are in your body, actually not predicting, telling you. So our daughter, Natalie, was infected with Lyme disease a few years ago, almost went blind from it. And the test took four days. And I thought, just give me the DNA from her spinal fluid. I'll go tell you what's in it. If it's Lyme disease or not, they refused. And so at that point I said, this has to be done better. So I've started a company that now can take a sample of any part of your body. It's typically done now with liver transplant patients to detect viruses that come out of their organs. But that's another area that AI is extremely important for. I think if you're not, in five years, if you're not using deep learning, you've got a problem. Because the amount of data that we generate now as biologists is just terabytes. It can be terabytes per week. It'll eventually be terabytes per day. And then we just go from there. And I actually have trouble recruiting enough bioinformaticians. A lot of our work is now just number crunching. A part of that is collecting the data, which is kind of something we've talked a little bit about. But is there something you can say about how we can collect more and more data, not just on the one person level, like for you to understand your various markers, but to create huge datasets to understand how we can detect certain pathogens, detect certain properties, characteristics of whether it's aging or all the other ways that the human body can fail. It seems like with biology, there's a kind of privacy concerns that, well, actually not privacy concerns, it's almost like regulation that kind of prevents hospitals from sharing data. I'm not sure exactly how to say it, but it seems like when you look at autonomous vehicles, people are much more willing to share data. When you look at human biology system, people are much less willing to share data. Is there a hopeful path forward where we can share more and more data at a large scale that ultimately ends up helping us understand the human body and then treat problems with the human body? So we are right in the middle, we're living through what's gonna be seen as one of the biggest revolutions in human health, through the gathering of data about our bodies. And 20 years ago, people didn't wanna go on social media, they're worried about it, now you have to, if you're a kid, that's for sure. Same with medical records, these are becoming all digitized and expanded. Ultimately, we're going to, even if we don't want to, have to be monitored. There's gonna be a court case that, I bet two, three years from now, someone's gonna say, how come my father died from a heart attack? You had these biosensors, 20 bucks, and you didn't use it. Lawsuit right there, and suddenly, all hospitals have to give you one of these. There'll be a reversal, like to where, it's your fault if you don't collect the data, that's brilliant, and that's absolutely right. I mean, that's absolutely right. That's the frustration I feel on going to the doctor, is like, it's almost negligent to not collect the data, because you're making, there's something really wrong with me, and you're making decisions based on very few tests, that's almost negligent, when you have the opportunity to collect a huge amount more data. Well, let me tell you something. Like, I've got this inside tracker data for myself over a decade, and you'd think my doctor would roll his eyes at this, oh, he's gone to a consumer company, blah, blah, blah. I had my first checkup in a year with him through video conference, and he was running blind. He really didn't know what was going on with me. He asked the usual things. How am I sleeping? How am I eating? These kind of usual things. And I said, well, I've got new tests back from inside tracker, and he said, great, I'd love to see them. So I share screen, and we look at the graphs, look at the data, and he's loving it, because he cannot order these tests willy nilly. So I said, well, let's order a HbA1c blood glucose levels, because I'm very interested in that. That tracks with longevity. And he said, well, I have no reason to order that. Do you have a family history? No. Do you have any symptoms of diabetes? No. Well, I can't order the test. I almost wanted to reach through the computer and strangle him, but instead, I pay a little bit to get these tests done, and then he looks at them. So that's now the way consumer health is going, is that you can get better data than your doctor can, but they'd like you to do that. Quick human question, maybe you can educate me. I think doctors sometimes have a bit of an ego. I understand that the doctors super experience a lot of things, but this is a fundamental question of human variability. Like, I know a lot of specific details about like, I mean, it depends, of course, what we're talking about, but I bring a lot of knowledge, and if I have data with me, then I have like several orders of magnitude more knowledge. And I think there's an aspect to it where the doctor has to put their expert hat, like take it off and actually be a curious, open minded person and study and look at that data. Do you think it's possible to sort of change the culture of the medical system to where the doctors are almost, as you said, are excited to see the data? Or is that already happening? It's really happening. Now, we've probably lost the last generation. They're no hopers, but so I teach at Harvard Medical School and they're excited about this. They're excited about aging, which is a new aspect to medicine. Oh, wow, we can do something about that. And then, yeah, all this data, what do we do with it? There's still the traditional pathology and all that stuff, which they need to know, but time will change their mindset. I'm not worried about that. And like we were discussing, this isn't a question of if, it's just a matter of when. And I have a front row seat on all of this. I had breakfast with a CEO who is making this happen just yesterday. I can tell you for sure that most people have no idea that this revolution is occurring and is happening so quickly. If you're running a hospital and you can save $2,000 per cardiac patient, what are you going to do? You have to use it. Otherwise, the hospital down the road is going to be beating you. And there are large hospital aggregations, so there's Ascension and others, that just have to go this way for budgetary reasons. And right now, the US spends 17% of their GDP on healthcare. Let's say one of these buttons on my chest costs $20. It's rechargeable. And it can predict people's health and save on antibiotics to prevent heart attacks. How many billions, if not trillions of dollars, will that save over the next decade? Yeah, so when the public wakes up to this, they'll almost demand it. Like, this should be accepted everywhere. This is obvious. It's going to save a lot of money. It's going to improve the quality of life. Well, and the CFOs of hospital groups will have to. And insurance companies are going to want to get in on this. So now that gets to privacy, right? Should an insurance company have access to your data? I would say no. But you could voluntarily show them some of it if they give you a discount. And that's also being worked on right now. I hope we do create kind of systems where I can volunteer to share my data and I can also take the data back, meaning like delete the data, request deletion of data. And then maybe policy creates rules to where you can share data, you could delete the data. And I think if I have the option to delete all my data that a particular company has, then I'll share my data with everyone. I feel like if, because that gives me the tools to be a consumer, an intelligent consumer, of awarding my data to a company that deserves it and taking it back when the company is misbehaving. And in that way, encourage, as a consumer in the capitalist system, encourage the companies that are doing great work with that data. Well, yeah, healthcare data security is number one. On my mind, InsideTracker made sure that that was true. But these buttons on your chest, there's very private stuff they can probably tell if you're having sex one night, right? So this is not the kind of stuff you want leaked. So I don't know whether it's blockchain or something. Speak for yourself. I want this public. The live stream. I guess it depends on how you go. But there's a lot of stuff you don't want out there. And this definitely has to be number one because it's one thing to have your credit card information stolen, it's another thing your health records are permanently out there. Yeah. So there's, on the biology side, super exciting ways to slow aging. But there's also on the lifestyle side. I recently did a 72 hour fast. It's just an opportunity to take a pause and appreciate life. Think about, there's something about fasting that encourages you to reflect deeper than you otherwise might. The time kind of slows. And you also realize that you're human because your body needs food. And you start to see your body's almost as a machine that takes food and produces thoughts. And then ends briefly. I mean, you start to, depending who you are, if you're like engineering minded, you start to think of this whole thing as a kind of, yeah, as a machine. And then also feelings fill this machine. Feelings of gratitude, of love, but also the uglier things of jealousy and greed and hate and all those kinds of things. You start to think, okay, how do I manage this body to create a rich experience? All of that comes from fasting for me. Anyway, but there's also health benefits to fasting. I intermittent fast a lot. I eat just one meal a day most of the time. Is there something you could say about the benefits of fasting in your own life and in general the anti aging process? Well, you're a philosopher too. Sorry, I apologize. No, I'm impressed. True Renaissance man. It's a joy to be here. So when it comes to fasting, this is, being abstemious is one of the oldest ways to improve health. Probably they knew this 5,000 plus years ago. So that's not new. But what we're figuring out is what is optimal and how does it work? And one of the things we help contribute to, which I can speak to with some authority is that these longevity genes we work on, we showed back in the early 2000s are turned on by fasting. And at least in yeast, we were the first to show that how calorie restriction fasting works to extend lifespan. And that was the first for any species. Something similar happens in our bodies. When we're hungry or put our bodies under any other perceived adversity, such as running, our bodies think, wow, we're getting chased by a saber tooth cat or something. If we're really hot or cold, these probably also work. To put our bodies in this defensive state, to activate these genes in the way that whales do and mice don't. And so hunger is the best way to do that. In fact, I don't think you have to feel hungry. You can get used to it. But if there was one thing I would recommend to anybody to slow down aging would be to skip a meal or two a day. Now it doesn't mean you don't have to live well. You can go out. I go to restaurants, I eat regular food. I try to be as healthy as possible. But I've gone from skipping breakfast most of my life now just skipping lunch as well. And I have my physique back that I had when I was 20. I feel 20 mentally. I'm much sharper. I don't feel tired anymore. I sleep well. So I'm a huge fan of the one meal a day thing. Where I'm not good at is going beyond one day. But if you do three days. Have you ever fasted longer than 24 hours? I tried doing two days. I might have made it to the third and given up. I just find that I'm not very, I don't have a lot of willpower. I also hate exercise. So I'm not sure how long I'm gonna live. But I've managed to do one meal a day. So if I can do that, seriously, anybody can do that. To your listeners and viewers, I would say, don't try to do it all at once. You can't go from snacking and eating three meals a day to what I do easily. Work your way up to it, but also compensate with drinking. If you like tea, if you like coffee, put some milk in it. That's fine. You can fill your stomach up with liquids, diet sodas, I get criticized for drinking, but I'm gonna continue to have those. But then I power through the day. I definitely don't feel tired. I don't have a lag anymore. But also give it at least two weeks because there's a habit as well. Having something in your mouth, chewing, feeling that fullness, you can break that habit. And within two, three weeks, you'll have done it. Absolutely. So I'm not actually even that strict about it. You said diet soda. Yeah, people are very kind of weirdly strict about fasting, the rules in fasting. Like for example, I drank Element electrolytes when I was fasting, and that has like five calories. And so technically it's not fasting. Or people will say like, if you drink coffee, there's caffeine, and they'll say that's technically not fasting because there's some kind of biological effects of caffeine, but whatever. Of course, there's like biological benefits that you can argue about, but there's also just experiential benefits. Just calorie restriction broadly has a certain experience to it that, like for me personally, just as you said, has made me feel really good. That said, especially, I've gained quite a bit of weight, maybe even like 15 pounds, something like that, since I moved to Austin, Texas. And I still keep the same diet, but I eat a lot of meat in that one, just because it's delicious, because it's also the amazing people I met in Texas. It's just there's like a camaraderie, a friendship, a love to the people that like makes you really enjoy the atmosphere of eating the brisket and the meat. Is this Joe Rogan insisting? Joe is, I mean, he's very different. Joe loves bread and pasta. Like he knows that his body feels best doing keto or carnivore. So that's what he usually tries to stick to, but he also does not hold back, and he'll just eat pasta when he eats pasta, and he sort of enjoys life in that way. I can't, I don't know how to enjoy life in that way. I also love pasta, but I'm just not going to enjoy it, because I know my body ultimately does not feel good with pasta. So it's a funny kind of dichotomies. I would like to cheat, I guess, by eating more meat than I, you know, like overeating on the things that I know my body feels good on as opposed to eating stuff I shouldn't, like cake and all those kinds of things. I tend to find happiness in overeating the good stuff versus eating the bad stuff. And that's the kind of balance. Him, he's like, fuck it. Every once in a while, you gotta enjoy it. And then also coupled with that for him is just exercise, like then face his demons the next day and just like burn a huge amount of calories, which is, I mean, whatever's up with that guy's mind, there's an, there's a ability to fully experience life, which is represented by the pasta, and the ability to just like fight the demons, which is represented by all the crazy kettle balls and running the hills and all this kind of stuff that he does. That takes a lot out of you doing that kind of insane exercise. And I think I'm more like you, or at least towards your direction is like, I really hate exercise. So I do it, but I really hate it. And so it's a balance that you have to strike. Is there something you could say about the diet side of that for you personally, but in general, in order to achieve calorie restriction, like for me, eating, I know it may not sound healthy, but eating carnivore, eating mostly meat has been, has made me feel really good, both mentally and physically. Is there something you could say about the kinds of diets that may improve longevity, but also enable calorie restriction? Well, sure. I mean, the first thing that's important to know is that while many people are interested slash obsessed with what they eat, the data that's come out of animal studies at least is it's far more important when you eat than what you eat. And this was a fantastic study a few years ago by my friend, Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. And he had 10,000 mice on different diets, hoping to find the perfect mix of carbs, protein, and fat. And it turns out that the only ones that lived longer are the ones that only ate once a day. And so that, if we're not mice, but I think that we're close enough to mice that this tells us a lot. But okay, but I still think the best bang for the longevity buck is to do both well, eat less often and eat the right things. Now I'll preface this to say, I'm not a nut about this. I will eat occasional, very occasionally a dessert. Usually I steal from others, which doesn't count, right? Exactly. But you gotta live life, right? What's a long life if it's not enjoyable anyway? But what I also found, and this is, I'll get to your question in a second, but my microbiome right now and stomach is at a point where if I try to overeat on a steak, which I did a couple of days ago, I actually had a chicken, a fried chicken specifically, for two days, I felt terrible. I couldn't sleep, it wouldn't go down. So I'm now at a point where even if I want to binge on meat and fried foods, I just can't, it just feels bad. But what do I recommend? Well, what the data says, which I try to follow, is that plant based foods will be better than meat based foods. And I know that there are a lot of people who disagree. But one of the facts is, well, there's a few facts. One is that people who live a long time tend to eat those type of diets. Mediterranean, Okinawa diet, they're eating mostly plants with a little bit of meat and not a lot of red meat. And the other fact is that in animals we know that there's a mechanism that's called mTOR, little m, capital TOR, that responds to certain amino acids that are found in more abundance in meat. And when it responds, it actually shortens lifespan. And the converse, if you starve it of those three amino acids, mostly in meat, then it extends lifespan. And there's a drug called rapamycin, which some people are experimenting with, that does that. So you might be able to, I'm just saying this here from all my colleagues, we don't know the results here, but you could potentially take a rapamycin like drug and counteract the effects of meat in the long run. Dono, we should try that actually, we could do that in the lab. But getting to the bottom of this, what I think is going on is that just like testosterone and growth hormone, you will get temporary, maybe not temporary, immediate health benefits. You'll feel great, you'll get more muscle energy. But the problem is I think it's at the expense of longterm health and longevity. Well, this is actually something I worry about in terms of longterm effects or the cost in terms of longevity. It's very difficult to know how your choices affect your longevity because the impact is down the line. Like just because something makes me feel good now, like eating only meat makes me feel good now, I wonder what are the costs down the line. Well, think about what I was saying about the trade offs between growth and reproduction, which is what a mouse does and a whale that grows slowly, reproduces slowly, lives a long time. It's called the disposable soma theory. Koch would just propose that in the 70s. What meat probably does is put you in the mouse category, super fertile, grow fast, heal fast. And then if you wanna be a whale, you should restrict meat and do things that promote the preservation of your body. Is it difficult to eat a plant based diet that you perform well under? So mentally and physically, just almost, I'm asking almost like an anecdotal question or unless you know the science. Well, the science is still being worked out, but from the synthesis of everything that I've read, I try to eat a diet that's definitely full of leafy greens, particularly spinach is great because it's got the iron that we need, plenty of vitamins. I also try to avoid too much fruit and berries, particularly fruit juice, definitely avoid that sugar high. Spiking your sugar is not healthy in the long run. The other thing that's interesting is we discovered what we called xenohormetic molecules. Let me unpack that because it's a terrible name and I take full responsibility with my friend, Conrad Howards. The Xeno means cross species and hormesis is the term that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer and be healthier. And so we're getting cross species health improvements by molecules that plants make. And plants make these molecules when they're also under adversity or perceived adversity. For instance, I understand if you want really healthy, good oranges, you can drive nails into the bark of the tree before you harvest. Same with wine, you typically want them to be dry before you harvest or covered in fungus. And that's because these plants make these colorful and xenohormetic molecules that make themselves stress resistant, turn on their sirtuin defenses, the serogenes remember. And when we eat them, we get those same benefits. That's the idea and we've evolved to do so. This isn't a coincidence. It's my theory, our theory that we want to know when our food supply is under adversity because we need to get ready for a famine. And so we hunker down and preserve our body and by eating these colored foods, so practically speaking, if it's full of color or if there's been some chewing by a caterpillar, organic, grown locally in local farms, I'll eat that versus a watery, insipid, light colored lettuce that's been grown in California. So you want vegetables that have suffered. You want the David Goggins as a vegetables. That's the xenohormetic molecules. I love that term. I'm gonna take that one with me, thank you. Yeah. Oh, I follow him on Instagram, he's always screaming. So you want that he's basically the xenohormetic version of a human. I like it. So these are the molecules that are representative of the stress that a plant has been under. Yeah, the best example of that is resveratrol, which many people, including myself, take as a supplement. Grapes, grapevines produce that in abundance when they're dried out or they have too much light or fungus and that we've shown activates the Sertu enzyme in our bodies, which remember is what extends lifespan in yeast and slows down aging in the brain. That's beautiful. Yeah, I tend to avoid fruit as well. So green, veggies, anything that's not very sweet. So I would just say you're relatively low, like you try to avoid sugary things as well. Yeah, I'm fairly militant about that. I rarely would add sugar to anything. Occasionally I would eat a slice of cheesecake, but that would be maybe once or twice a year. You have to give in occasionally. But yeah, anything that's sweet, I would rather substitute something like Stevia if I need a sugar hit. What about exercise? Your favorite topic. Is there a part? I don't mind talking about it. Okay, great. Is there benefits to longevity from exercise? Well, no doubt, that's proven. Just like fasting, it's pretty clear that that works. For example, there are studies of cyclists. It was something like people that cycle over 80 miles a week have a 40% reduction in a variety of diseases, certainly heart disease. So that's not even a question, but what's interesting is that we're learning that you don't need much to have a big benefit. It's an asymptotic curve. And in fact, if you overdo it, you probably have reduced benefits, particularly if you start to wear out joints, that kind of thing. But just 10 minutes on a treadmill a few times a week, lose your breath, get hypoxic, as it's called, seems to be very beneficial for longterm health. And that's the kind of exercise that I like to do, aerobic. Though I do enjoy lifting weights, so that is what I call my exercise, which has other benefits, including maintaining hormone levels, male hormone levels. But also really why I do it is I want to be able to counteract the effects of sitting for most of the day. And as you get older, you lose muscle mass. It's a percent or so a year. And I don't wanna be frail when I'm older and fall over and break my hip, which happens every 20 seconds in this country. So maintaining that strength, but also doing the cardio for the longevity, for avoiding the heart disease. Yeah, I definitely, just like with fasting, have the philosophical benefit of running long and running slow. I enjoy it, because it kind of clears the mind and allows you to think, and actually listen to brown noise as I run. It really helps remove myself from the world and just like zoom in on particular thoughts. What are these brown noise? It's like white noise, but deeper. So like the white noise is like shh, and then brown noise is more like, shh, like ocean. That sounds great. I might try that. Yeah, yeah, it's more soothing probably. I'm not sure. There could be science to this. I need to look this up. I've been meaning to. But when I started, this is maybe like five years ago, I started listening to brown noise when I work. And the first time I listened to it, something happened to my mind where it just went like zoomed in to like, in a way that it felt like really weird. Like how precisely it was able to sort of remove the distractions of the world and really help my mind. Obviously, like the mind is trying to focus and then it just enabled that process of trying to focus on a particular problem. I don't know if this is generalizable to others. People should definitely try it if you're listening to this. Maybe it's just my own mind, but it's funny, like it made me, brown noise made me realize that there's probably hacks out there that work for me that I should be constantly looking for. It's almost like an encouraging and motivating event that maybe there's other stuff out there. Maybe there's other brown noise like things out there that truly like almost immediately make me feel better. I don't know if it's generalizable to others, but it does seem that it's the case that there's probably for many others, things like that that could be discovered. And so it's always disappointing when I find things in life that I wish I would have found earlier. I got LASIK eye surgery a few years ago and the first thought I had like the next day when I woke up is like, damn it, why didn't I do this way earlier? There's all this stuff of that nature that are yet to be discovered. So it pays to explore. You have a different mind, you have quite a beautiful mind. So I suspect brown noise helps you focus and cause you're probably all over the place if you don't control it. Yeah, exactly. It means something about it. It's a programmer thing. I don't, programming is a really difficult mental journey cause you have to keep a lot of things in mind. You have to, so you're constantly designing things then you have to be extremely precise by making those things concrete in code. You also have to look stuff up on the internet to sort of feed like information and looking up stuff on the internet, internet is full of like distracting things. So you have to be really focused in the way you look stuff up in pulling that information in. So it requires a certain discipline and a certain focus that I've been very much exploring how to do. Like I do it really well in the morning, coffee is involved, all those kinds of things. You're trying to optimize, keeping very positive inspired, no social media, all those kinds of things and trying to optimize for. And everybody has their own kind of little journey that they try to understand. You get this from like writers when you read about the habits of writers, like the habits they do in the morning, they usually write like two, three, four hours a day and that's it. It's like they optimize that ritual. And then there's always Hunter S. Thompson. So sometimes it pays off to be wild. What about sleep? How important is sleep for longevity? I would guess based on the evidence that it's really important and because we don't know for sure. But what we know from animal studies is the following. If you restrict sleep from a rat for just two weeks, it'll develop type two diabetes. It's that important. So that's the main thing. What we also know is at the molecular level that if you disrupt your sleep wake cycle, so we actually have proteins that go up and down that control our sleep wake. All of us, most of our cells do that. If you disrupt that, you'll get premature aging. And guess what? The opposite is true. That as you get older, that cycle, the amplitude becomes diminished. And this is why it's harder to get to sleep as you get older and you've got all sorts of problems. And I think what's going on is this positive feedback loop, which is a disaster in your old age, which is you're aging, you can't at this moment totally prevent that. And then it's disrupting your sleep and you get not enough sleep and then that's gonna accelerate your aging process. And so it's known that the people who are shift workers are most susceptible to certain age related diseases. So your bottom line, you definitely wanna work on that. It's one of the reasons I have this ring on my finger, which helps me optimize my sleep and learn what I do the day before, if it was a bad idea and I'll stop doing that, like eating a fried chicken. I see you're still carrying the burdens of that decision. But yeah, sleep is one of those things that's making me wonder about the variability between humans a little bit and how science is often focused on, like it's not often focused on high performers in a particular way. And it's looking at the aggregate versus the individual cases. For example, like for me, I don't know what the exact hours are, but like power naps are incredible. I tend to look at the metric of stress and happiness and joy and try to optimize those. So decreasing stress, increasing happiness and using sleep as just one of the tools to do that. Because like hitting the five, six, seven, eight, nine hour mark or whatever the correct mark is, I find that to be stress inducing for me versus stress relieving. Like thinking about that, I feel best if I sleep sometimes for eight hours, sometimes for four hours and then power nap. And as long as I have a stupid private, usually smile on my face, that's when I'm doing good, as opposed to getting a perfect amount of sleep according to whatever the latest blog post is. And I also pull all nighters still. I also think there's something about the body, like as long as you do it regularly, it's not as stress inducing. Like you know what it is. The reason I pull all nighters isn't for like, I'm playing Diablo three or something, is because I'm doing something I'm truly passionate about. Well, like I'm also love video games, but I'm doing something I'm truly passionate about. And it's almost like there's the Jocko Willing feeling of when I'm up at 7 a.m. and I haven't slept all night and still I'm working on it. There's a kind of a celebration of the human spirit that I really enjoy it. Like, and that's happiness. And to sort of then, and I usually don't tell that kind of stuff to people because their first statement will be like, you should get more sleep. It's like, no, I'm doing stuff I love. You should get more love in your life, bro. That's right. So, but that said, in aggregate, when you look at the full span of life, is probably you should be getting a consistent amount of sleep. And it seems like it's in that seven, eight hour range. Yeah, but it's similar to food. It's the quality, not the quantity, right? And when you get it. So I look at my data pretty often. And what makes a difference to me is not the amount of hours, but the quality, the depth and the deep sleep is what will do it. So if I have a lot of alcohol before going to sleep and I can see my heart rate being different, but what really kills me is that I don't get a lot of that deep sleep and I wake up barely remembering stuff. So that, like you say, if you're happy and contented and you don't have these cortisol chemicals going through your body, you will more naturally get into that deep state. And even if you just get four hours, way better than eight hours of none of that. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. And some of that could be genetic. For me, I just, I fall asleep like this. If you want me to fall asleep right now, I can do it. It's no, I have no problem with it. Combined with coffee, I just had two energy drinks. I can probably sleep. So that, I don't know if that's genetics or it's kind of, I don't know what it is. Or maybe that I don't have kids and I'm single. So I don't have, I'm almost listening to some kind of biological signal versus societal signal on when I'm supposed to go to sleep. So I just go to sleep whenever I feel like going to sleep. Well, that's because you're a self employed. Self employed. Most people don't have that luxury, but we're lucky, the two of us, that we can make our own hours. Yeah. But yeah, it's super important. And those people who have shift work, I mean, they really need to change the way that works because they're literally killing those people. Is there something you could say about the, the mind and stress in terms of effect on longevity? Sort of, I don't know if you think about it this way, but when you talk about the biological machine, it's always these mechanisms that don't, are not necessarily directly connected to the brain or the operation of the brain. Like what's the role about stress and happiness and yeah, the sort of higher cognitive things going on in the brain on longevity. Right. Well, that's a great point that the brain is the center for longevity. Actually, we do know that. For a start, when I'm stressed, I can see mentally stressed, then I can see it in my body. Heart rate, hormones, it's clear. That's no true surprise. So you've got to work on your brain first and foremost. If you are totally freaked out, agitated all the time, you will live shorter. I'm certain of it. You know, I keep fish. I'm a big aquarium guy. And you can see the difference between the fish that's having a good time and dominant and one that gets picked on. It just looks like crap. You don't want to be that, the little fish getting picked on if you can help it. So I used to be extremely stressed as a kid. I was a perfectionist, very shy, always worried about being a failure. If I didn't get an A+, you know, I was crying in my bedroom, that kind of sad existence. I got into my twenties, then in my thirties, and realized that's not the way to live. So I've worked very hard to get to this point where I almost never get stressed, never. There's nothing that, I've never gotten angry in my lab. I've got 20 kids. Sometimes it's like a, most of the time it's like a kindergarten. I haven't lost my temper. I'm very calm, but that's intentional. And I don't worry about stuff. Millions of dollars, billions of dollars at stake sometimes. Keep it cool. It's only life. We're all headed to the same place anyway. Don't worry about it. But to answer your question, I think in a better way, if you manipulate the brain of an animal, I'll give you an example. If we turn on this CERT gene that I mentioned, CERT1, we, a good friend of mine at WashU, Sheena Mai did this. They upregulated that gene just in the neurons of the animal. It lived longer. So that's sufficient to extend lifespan. We also know that you can manipulate the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which leeches a lot of chemicals into the body and proteins, most of which we don't know yet, but just changing the inflammation of that little organ or part of the brain is sufficient to make animals live longer as well. So get your brain in order first before you tackle anything else, I would say. So you kind of mentioned this, with the inside tracker, there's ability to take blood measurement and then infer from that a bunch of different things about your body and how you can improve the longevity. And you've also mentioned saliva and more efficient ways to get data. What does that involve? What's the future of data collection look like for the human biological system? Right, well, yeah, the issue with blood is you need someone to take it. I mean, or you prick your finger, which hurts. So you've got to have something better. So I think what the future looks like is that you'll spit onto a little piece of paper and stick it in a machine and it'll do that for you. But we're not there yet. So the intermediate future that I'm building right now is that you would take a swab of the inside of your mouth, which is the easiest way to take cells out of your body and just ship them off. Okay, so it's called a buckle swab. I think we became very used to that. Right now, because of COVID, people don't like going to the doctor as much. They don't like going out. They just want to have home tests. And so that I think is the next 10 years where you'll get a kit in the mail, you'll swab your cheeks, stick it back in an envelope, send it off and a week later you have either a doctor's report or a health recommendation. And what can you get off a cheek swab? Well, you can get anything. You can get hormones, stress levels, stress hormones, blood glucose levels. You can also tell your age reasonably accurately doing that, actually quite accurately. And those clocks can not just tell you how you're doing over time, but can be used to give you recommendations to slow that process down. Cause some people sometimes are 10 years older biologically than their actual chronological age. I mean, why does it matter how many times the earth's gone around the sun seriously? Who cares about birthdays? It's how long your body's clock has been ticking and how fast. So I could take a cheek swab from you today, Lex, take it back to my lab. And we then by tomorrow tell you how old you are biologically based on what we call the epigenetic clock. And you might be freaked out, you might be happy, but either way we can advise you on how to improve the trajectory. Cause we know that smoking increases the speed of that clock. We also know that fasting and people who eat the right foods have a slower clock. Without that knowledge, you're flying blind. But I like the idea of a swab, cause it's just so easy. A lot of us have done something like that for COVID tests. It's not a big deal. I've been doing a nonstop rapid antigen test. So let me say that particular one rapid antigen test, they've been a source of frustration for me because like everybody should be doing it. It's so easy. We've also been working in my lab on democratizing these tests to bring them down from a few hundred bucks to a dollar. So just to clarify, you're talking about not research, you're talking about like company stuff, like actual consumer facing things? Well, right. The research on bringing the price down has occurred in my lab at Harvard. And then that intellectual property is being licensed and has been licensed out to a company that will be consumer facing. So anybody for a small amount of money can do this. Well, you got subscriber number one obsessed. I think that's a beautiful, beautiful idea. So somebody who maybe I would have been more hesitant about it until COVID, but the home tests are super easy. I almost wanted to share that data with the world, like in some way, not the entirety of the data, but like some visualization of like how I'm doing. Like, it's almost like when you share, if you had like a long run or something like that, I wish I could share because it inspires others. And then you can have a conversation about like, well, what are the hacks that you've tried and have a conversation about like how to improve lifestyle and those kinds of things that's grounded in data. That's exactly, that's what's gonna happen. Now, everything's anonymous, of course. We talked about security there, but once it's anonymized, you can then plot these numbers. And I've plotted my epigenetic age versus hundreds of other people who have taken this test now. And I can tell you where I fit relative to others in terms of my biological age. And I'm happy to share that with you because it's pretty low. You can choose to share it, of course, not everyone wants to share that. But when you go to the doctor, first of all, your doctor does treat you as though you're an average person and none of us are average, there's no such thing. But second of all, we never know how we're doing relative to others because we all, most of us, we don't share our information. So we might have this number and that number, but do you know that your numbers are good for your age or not? You have no idea. Even your doctor probably doesn't even know. So this graph that I'm talking about is the beginning of a world where you can say, how am I doing? For the two of us, we're white and we're male and we're this age and we do this. Are we good? Are we doing the right things or the wrong things? Do we need to fix certain things? And this is what the future is. It's forget about just experimenting and not knowing the result. I mean, who doesn't experiment and doesn't look at the data? No one, it makes no sense. So we're gonna enter a world where we have a dashboard on our body, the swabs, the blood tests, the biosensors where our doctors can look at that, but we can also look at it and they can recommend, go to this restaurant down the road. They've got this great meal. It's high in whatever you need today because you're lacking vitamin D and vitamin K2. Go for it. Ridiculous question or perhaps not. If you look maybe 50 years from now or 100 years from now, a person born then, what do you think is a good goal in terms of how long a person would live? What is the maximum longevity that we can achieve through the methods that we have today or are developing some of the things we've been talking about in terms of genetics, in terms of biology? Is there a number? Right, well, so it changes all the time because technology is changing so quickly. I keep revising the number upward, but I would say that if you do the right things during your life and start at an early age, let's say 25, we don't want malnutrition, starvation. That's not what I'm talking about. But in your 20s, start eating the kind of diets that I talked about, skipping meals. In animals, that gives you an extra 20 to 30%. We don't know if that's true for humans and even 5% more would be a big deal for the planet. I think that we should all aim to at least reach a century. I'm a little bit behind. I was born too early to benefit the most from all of this discovery. Those of you who are in your 20s, you should definitely aim to reach a hundred. I don't see why not. Consider this, this is really important. The average lifespan of a human that looks after themselves but doesn't pay attention is about 80, okay? Japan, that's the average age for a male, a bit higher. If you do the right things in your life, which is eat healthy food, don't overeat, don't become obese, do a bit of exercise, get good sleep and don't stress, that gives you on average 14 extra years. That gets you to 94. So getting to a hundred, if you just focus on what I'm talking about, it's not a big deal. So what's the maximum? Well, we know that one human made it to 122 and a number of them make it into their teens. I think that's also the next level of where we can get to with the types of technologies that I'm talking about. Medicines, like I mentioned rapamycin, there's one called metformin, which is the diabetes drug, which I take. That in combination with these lifestyle changes should get us beyond a hundred. How long can we ultimately live? Well, there's no maximum limit to human lifespan. Why can a whale live 300 years, but we cannot? We're basically the same structure. We just need to learn from them. So anyone who says, oh, you max out at X, I think is full of it. There's nothing that I've seen that says biological organisms have to die. There are trees that live for thousands of years and their biochemistry is pretty close to ours. What do you think it means to live for a very long time? Let's say if it's 200 years we're talking about or a thousand years. There's some sense, you could argue, that there is immortal organisms already living on Earth, like there's bacteria. So there's certain living organisms that in some fundamental way do not die because they keep replicating their genetic, they keep like cloning themselves. Is it the same human if we can somehow persist the human mind, like copy, clone certain aspects and just keep replacing body parts? Do you think that's another way to achieve immortality? To achieve a prolonged sort of increased longevity is to replace the parts that break easily and keep, because actually from your theory of aging as a degradation of information, so an information theory view of aging, like what is the key information that makes a human? Can we persist that information and just replace the trivial parts? Yeah, I mean the short answer is yes. We're already replacing body parts but what makes us human is our brain. Everything else is suboptimal except our brain. The ability to replace actual neurons is really hard. I think it might be easy to upload rather than replace neurons because they're so tight, it's such a network and just perturbing the system. It's Roger and Gizcat. You change everything once you get in there. The problem is, well, I guess the solution, let me go to the solution that's more interesting. What we're learning is that if you reverse the age of nerve cells, it looks like they get their memories back. So the memories are not lost. They're just that the cells don't know how to interpret them and function correctly. And this is one of the things we're studying in my lab. If you take an old mouse that has learned something when it was young but forgotten, does it get that back? And all evidence points to that being true. So I'd rather go in and rejuvenate the brain as it sits rather than replace individual cells, which would be really hard. What do you think about like efforts like Neuralink, which basically you mentioned uploading, are trying to figure out, so creating brain computer interfaces that are trying to figure out how to communicate with the brain. But one of the features of that is trying to record the human brain more and more accurately. Do you have hope for that to, of course, it will lead to us better understanding from a neuroscience perspective, the human mind, but do you have hope for it increasing longevity in terms of how it's used? I think that it can help with certain diseases. But I see, at least within our lifetime, that's the best use of it is to be able to replace parts of the body that are not functioning, such as the retina and other parts, the visual cortex back here. That's going to be doable. In terms of longevity, maybe we could put something on the hypothalamus and start secreting those hormones and get that back. Ultimately, I think the best way to preserve the brain is going to be to record it. But also, I think it's going to require death, unfortunately, to then do very detailed scans, even if you have enough time and money, atomic microscopy, and rebuild the brain from scratch. Rebuild from scratch, yeah. We are living more and more in a digital world. I wonder if the scanning is good enough for the critical things in terms of memories, in terms of the particular quirks of your cognitive processes. They're not, they're not, yeah. We're not close, yes, but we've made quite a bit of progress, so if you're an exponential type of person. Yeah, well, let's dream a little here. Yes, that's the point. The way it would work, that I could see it working is, so you take a single cell slice through your dead brain, and we can now, the problem with the engineering aspect is that, the engineering is, the physical aspect of the brain is not even half the problem. The problem is which genes are switched on and off. This experience that we're having here is altering certain genes in neurons that will be preserved, hopefully, for a number of decades, but you cannot see that with a microscope easily, but there are technologies invented, actually just down the hall in the building I'm at, George Church invented a way, his lab invented a way, to look at which genes are switched on and off, not only in a single cell, which any lab can do these days, but in situ, where it's situated in the brain. So you can say, okay, this nerve cell, had these genes switched on and these switched off, we can recreate that, but just scanning the brain and looking how the nerves are touching each other is not gonna do it. Wow, okay. So you have to scan the full biology, the full details. And look at the epigenome. And the epigenome too. Yeah, which genes are on and off. It's just easier to reset the epigenome and get them to work like they used to. True, true. We're doing that now. Use the hardware we already have, just figure out how to make that hardware last longer. Right, ultimately information will be lost, even genetic information degrades slowly through mutation. So immortality is not achievable through that means, though I think we could potentially reset the body hundreds of times and live for thousands of years. Okay, so we talked about biology. Let's, forgive me, but let's talk about philosophy for just a brief moment. So somebody I've enjoyed reading, Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death. There's also Martin Heidegger. There's a bunch of philosophers who claim that most people live life in denial of death. Sort of we don't fully internalize the idea that we're going to die. Because if we did, as they say, there will be a kind of terror of, I mean a deep fear of death. The fact that we don't know what's, like we almost don't know what to do with non existence, with disappearing. Like our, the way we draw meaning from life seems to be grounded in the fact that we exist and that we at some point will not exist is terrifying. And so we live in an illusion that we're not going to die and we run from that terror. That's what Ernest Becker would say. Do you think there's any truth to that? Oh, I know there's truth to that. I experience it every day when I talk to people. We have to live that way. Although unfortunately I can't, but for most people it's extremely distressing to think about their own mortality. We think about it occasionally. And if we really thought about it every day, we'd probably be brought to tears. How much we not just miss ourselves, but miss our family, our friends. All living life forms have evolved to not want to die. And when I mean want, biochemically, genetically, physically. That yeast cell, the cells that I studied at MIT, they were fighting for their lives. They didn't think, but our brain has evolved the same survival aspect. Of course, we don't want to die. But the problem for us, unfortunately, it's a curse and a blessing is that we're now conscious. We know that we're going to die. Most species that have ever existed don't. That's a burden, that's a curse. And so what I think has happened is we've evolved certainly to want to live for a long time, perhaps never want to die. But the thought about dying is so traumatic that there is an innate part of our brains. And it's probably genetically wired to not think about it. I really think that's part of being human. Because, think about tribes that obsessed with longevity every day and that we're going to die. They probably didn't make much technological progress because they were just crying in their huts every day or on the Savannah. So I really think that we've evolved to naturally deny aging. And it's one of the problems that I face in my career. And when I speak publicly and on social media is that it's shocking. People don't want to think about their age, but I think it's getting better. I think my book has helped. These tests that we're developing should help people understand it's not a problem to think about your longterm health. In fact, if you don't, you're going to reach 80 and really regret it. And the other side of it, so again, Ernest Becker, but also Viktor Frankl recommended highly Man's Search for Meaning. Bernard Williams is a moral philosopher. They kind of argue that this knowledge of death, even if we often don't contemplate it, we do at times. And the very, what you call the curse, which I agree with you, it's a curse and a blessing that we're able to contemplate our own mortality. That gives meaning to life. So death gives meaning to life, is what Viktor Frankl argues. I would probably argue the same. There's something about the scarcity of life and contemplating that, that makes each moment that much sweeter. Is there something to that? I think it's individual. In my case, it's completely wrong. I appreciate you saying that. I don't get joy out of every day because I think I'm going to die. I get joy out of every day because every day is joyous and I make it that way. And even if I thought I was going to live forever, I would still be enjoying this moment just as much. And I bet you would too. Well, I think about that a lot. I think it's very difficult to know. I'm almost afraid that I wouldn't enjoy it as much if I was immortal. I'm almost afraid to want to be immortal or to live longer because it perhaps is a kind of justification for me to accept that I'm going to die. It's saying like, oh, if I was immortal, I wouldn't be able to enjoy life as much as I do. But it's very possible that I would enjoy just as much. Of course, enjoying life, whether you're immortal or not, takes work. Like it requires you to have the right kind of frame of mind. You can discover, you can focus your mind on the ugliness of life. There's plenty of ugly things in this world and you can focus on them. You can complain. Whenever like, you know, if it's raining outside, you can focus on the fact that you have shelter and enjoy the hell out of it. Or you can enjoy running in the rain when it's warm and the beauty of nature, just being one with nature. Or you can just complain, it's fucking weather again in Boston and then it's either always raining or freezing, damn it. The same thing with like wifi going out on airplanes. You can either complain about stupid wifi on JetBlue or something. Or you could say like, how incredible it is that I can fly through the sky and in a matter of hours be anywhere else in the world. And then I could also on occasion watch like check email and even watch movies while connecting through satellites that are flying through space. So it's a matter of perspective and perhaps there's an extra level of work required when you're immortal because it's easier when you're immortal or live longer to be lazy, to delay stuff. But if you're not, you can still derive the same amount of joy. It's possible, it's possible. It's definitely possible. In my life, I went from being the nothing's working to every day's great to wake up to. And I think even if you think you can live forever, you can enjoy every day. What I do is everything's relative. We can compare ourselves to our neighbor who has more money or to the flight that should have had wifi or which is what I do, I'm still six years old remember. What a six year old does says, look, I can, when I tell my fingers to form a fist, they actually do that. That's really cool. That's how I live my life. I can pick up on your desk here, this metal object. It's a metal cube, about an inch by an inch by an inch. And I tell myself not about cubes, but about inanimate objects. Probably once a day I'll say, I'm a living thing. I can think, I can move, I can eat, I am full of energy. And there's that leaf or this cube here that will never be alive. That's what I look at and compare myself to. And for as long as I live, if it's forever, of course it won't be, but even if it was forever, relative to this lump of metal on this table here, we are wondrous things in the universe and probably the most wondrous things in the universe. Yeah, we're able to deeply appreciate the leaf or the cube and deeply appreciate ourselves, which is, it can be a curse, but it's mostly a gift, especially when you're, it's such a beautiful poem. Now I'm six, I'm as clever as clever, so I think I'll be six now forever and ever. That's a good thing to aspire to. Your grandmother was onto something. David, this is an incredible conversation. I'm a huge fan of your work. So thank you for wasting your valuable time with me today. I really, really appreciate it. This was awesome. Thank you for having me on, Lex, appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Sinclair, and thank you to Onnit, Clear, National Instruments, Simply Safe, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Arthur Schopenhauer. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self evident. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

David Sinclair: Extending the Human Lifespan Beyond 100 Years | Lex Fridman Podcast #189

The following is a conversation with Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at University of Wisconsin and an author who masterfully reveals the beauty and power of mathematics in his 2014 book, How Not To Be Wrong, and his new book, just released recently, called Shape, The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. Quick mention of our sponsors, Secret Sauce, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that geometry is what made me fall in love with mathematics when I was young. It first showed me that something definitive could be stated about this world through intuitive visual proofs. Somehow, that convinced me that math is not just abstract numbers devoid of life, but a part of life, part of this world, part of our search for meaning. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Jordan Ellenberg. If the brain is a cake. It is? Well, let's just go with me on this, okay? Okay, we'll pause it. So for Noam Chomsky, language, the universal grammar, the framework from which language springs is like most of the cake, the delicious chocolate center, and then the rest of cognition that we think of is built on top, extra layers, maybe the icing on the cake, maybe consciousness is just like a cherry on top. Where do you put in this cake mathematical thinking? Is it as fundamental as language? In the Chomsky view, is it more fundamental than language? Is it echoes of the same kind of abstract framework that he's thinking about in terms of language that they're all really tightly interconnected? That's a really interesting question. You're getting me to reflect on this question of whether the feeling of producing mathematical output, if you want, is like the process of uttering language or producing linguistic output. I think it feels something like that, and it's certainly the case. Let me put it this way. It's hard to imagine doing mathematics in a completely nonlinguistic way. It's hard to imagine doing mathematics without talking about mathematics and sort of thinking in propositions. But maybe it's just because that's the way I do mathematics, and maybe I can't imagine it any other way, right? Well, what about visualizing shapes, visualizing concepts to which language is not obviously attachable? Ah, that's a really interesting question. And one thing it reminds me of is one thing I talk about in the book is dissection proofs, these very beautiful proofs of geometric propositions. There's a very famous one by Baskara of the Pythagorean theorem, proofs which are purely visual, proofs where you show that two quantities are the same by taking the same pieces and putting them together one way and making one shape and putting them together another way and making a different shape, and then observing that those two shapes must have the same area because they were built out of the same pieces. There's a famous story, and it's a little bit disputed about how accurate this is, but that in Baskara's manuscript, he sort of gives this proof, just gives the diagram, and then the entire verbal content of the proof is he just writes under it, behold. Like that's it. And it's like, there's some dispute about exactly how accurate that is. But so then there's an interesting question. If your proof is a diagram, if your proof is a picture, or even if your proof is like a movie of the same pieces like coming together in two different formations to make two different things, is that language? I'm not sure I have a good answer. What do you think? I think it is. I think the process of manipulating the visual elements is the same as the process of manipulating the elements of language. And I think probably the manipulating, the aggregation, the stitching stuff together is the important part. It's not the actual specific elements. It's more like, to me, language is a process and math is a process. It's not just specific symbols. It's in action. It's ultimately created through action, through change. And so you're constantly evolving ideas. Of course, we kind of attach, there's a certain destination you arrive to that you attach to and you call that a proof, but that's not, that doesn't need to end there. It's just at the end of the chapter and then it goes on and on and on in that kind of way. But I gotta ask you about geometry and it's a prominent topic in your new book, Shape. So for me, geometry is the thing, just like as you're saying, made me fall in love with mathematics when I was young. So being able to prove something visually just did something to my brain that it had this, it planted this hopeful seed that you can understand the world, like perfectly. Maybe it's an OCD thing, but from a mathematics perspective, like humans are messy, the world is messy, biology is messy. Your parents are yelling or making you do stuff, but you can cut through all that BS and truly understand the world through mathematics and nothing like geometry did that for me. For you, you did not immediately fall in love with geometry, so how do you think about geometry? Why is it a special field in mathematics? And how did you fall in love with it if you have? Wow, you've given me like a lot to say. And certainly the experience that you describe is so typical, but there's two versions of it. One thing I say in the book is that geometry is the cilantro of math. People are not neutral about it. There's people who like you are like, the rest of it I could take or leave, but then at this one moment, it made sense. This class made sense, why wasn't it all like that? There's other people, I can tell you, because they come and talk to me all the time, who are like, I understood all the stuff where you're trying to figure out what X was, there's some mystery you're trying to solve it, X is a number, I figured it out. But then there was this geometry, like what was that? What happened that year? Like I didn't get it. I was like lost the whole year and I didn't understand like why we even spent the time doing that. So, but what everybody agrees on is that it's somehow different, right? There's something special about it. We're gonna walk around in circles a little bit, but we'll get there. You asked me how I fell in love with math. I have a story about this. When I was a small child, I don't know, maybe like I was six or seven, I don't know. I'm from the 70s. I think you're from a different decade than that. But in the 70s, we had a cool wooden box around your stereo. That was the look, everything was dark wood. And the box had a bunch of holes in it to let the sound out. And the holes were in this rectangular array, a six by eight array of holes. And I was just kind of like zoning out in the living room as kids do, looking at this six by eight rectangular array of holes. And if you like, just by kind of like focusing in and out, just by kind of looking at this box, looking at this rectangle, I was like, well, there's six rows of eight holes each, but there's also eight columns of six holes each. Whoa. So eight sixes and six eights. It's just like the dissection proofs we were just talking about, but it's the same holes. It's the same 48 holes. That's how many there are, no matter whether you count them as rows or count them as columns. And this was like unbelievable to me. Am I allowed to cuss on your podcast? I don't know if that's, are we FCC regulated? Okay, it was fucking unbelievable. Okay, that's the last time. Get it in there. This story merits it. So two different perspectives in the same physical reality. Exactly. And it's just as you say. I knew that six times eight was the same as eight times six. I knew my times tables. I knew that that was a fact. But did I really know it until that moment? That's the question, right? I sort of knew that the times table was symmetric, but I didn't know why that was the case until that moment. And in that moment I could see like, oh, I didn't have to have somebody tell me that. That's information that you can just directly access. That's a really amazing moment. And as math teachers, that's something that we're really trying to bring to our students. And I was one of those who did not love the kind of Euclidean geometry ninth grade class of like prove that an isosceles triangle has equal angles at the base, like this kind of thing. It didn't vibe with me the way that algebra and numbers did. But if you go back to that moment, from my adult perspective, looking back at what happened with that rectangle, I think that is a very geometric moment. In fact, that moment exactly encapsulates the intertwining of algebra and geometry. This algebraic fact that, well, in the instance, eight times six is equal to six times eight. But in general, that whatever two numbers you have, you multiply them one way. And it's the same as if you multiply them in the other order. It attaches it to this geometric fact about a rectangle, which in some sense makes it true. So, who knows, maybe I was always fated to be an algebraic geometer, which is what I am as a researcher. So that's the kind of transformation. And you talk about symmetry in your book. What the heck is symmetry? What the heck is these kinds of transformation on objects that once you transform them, they seem to be similar? What do you make of it? What's its use in mathematics or maybe broadly in understanding our world? Well, it's an absolutely fundamental concept. And it starts with the word symmetry in the way that we usually use it when we're just like talking English and not talking mathematics, right? Sort of something is, when we say something is symmetrical, we usually means it has what's called an axis of symmetry. Maybe like the left half of it looks the same as the right half. That would be like a left, right axis of symmetry. Or maybe the top half looks like the bottom half or both. Maybe there's sort of a fourfold symmetry where the top looks like the bottom and the left looks like the right or more. And that can take you in a lot of different directions. The abstract study of what the possible combinations of symmetries there are, a subject which is called group theory was actually one of my first loves in mathematics when I thought about a lot when I was in college. But the notion of symmetry is actually much more general than the things that we would call symmetry if we were looking at like a classical building or a painting or something like that. Nowadays in math, we could use a symmetry to refer to any kind of transformation of an image or a space or an object. So what I talk about in the book is take a figure and stretch it vertically, make it twice as big vertically and make it half as wide. That I would call a symmetry. It's not a symmetry in the classical sense, but it's a well defined transformation that has an input and an output. I give you some shape and it gets kind of, I call this in the book a scrunch. I just had to make up some sort of funny sounding name for it because it doesn't really have a name. And just as you can sort of study which kinds of objects are symmetrical under the operations of switching left and right or switching top and bottom or rotating 40 degrees or what have you, you could study what kinds of things are preserved by this kind of scrunch symmetry. And this kind of more general idea of what a symmetry can be. Let me put it this way. A fundamental mathematical idea, in some sense, I might even say the idea that dominates contemporary mathematics. Or by contemporary, by the way, I mean like the last like 150 years. We're on a very long time scale in math. I don't mean like yesterday. I mean like a century or so up till now. Is this idea that it's a fundamental question of when do we consider two things to be the same? That might seem like a complete triviality. It's not. For instance, if I have a triangle and I have a triangle of the exact same dimensions, but it's over here, are those the same or different? Well, you might say, well, look, there's two different things. This one's over here, this one's over there. On the other hand, if you prove a theorem about this one, it's probably still true about this one if it has like all the same side lanes and angles and like looks exactly the same. The term of art, if you want it, you would say they're congruent. But one way of saying it is there's a symmetry called translation, which just means move everything three inches to the left. And we want all of our theories to be translation invariant. What that means is that if you prove a theorem about a thing that's over here, and then you move it three inches to the left, it would be kind of weird if all of your theorems like didn't still work. So this question of like, what are the symmetries and which things that you want to study are invariant under those symmetries is absolutely fundamental. Boy, this is getting a little abstract, right? It's not at all abstract. I think this is completely central to everything I think about in terms of artificial intelligence. I don't know if you know about the MNIST dataset, what's handwritten digits. And you know, I don't smoke much weed or any really, but it certainly feels like it when I look at MNIST and think about this stuff, which is like, what's the difference between one and two? And why are all the twos similar to each other? What kind of transformations are within the category of what makes a thing the same? And what kind of transformations are those that make it different? And symmetries core to that. In fact, whatever the hell our brain is doing, it's really good at constructing these arbitrary and sometimes novel, which is really important when you look at like the IQ test or they feel novel, ideas of symmetry of like playing with objects, we're able to see things that are the same and not and construct almost like little geometric theories of what makes things the same and not and how to make programs do that in AI is a total open question. And so I kind of stared and wonder how, what kind of symmetries are enough to solve the MNIST handwritten digit recognition problem and write that down. And exactly, and what's so fascinating about the work in that direction from the point of view of a mathematician like me and a geometer is that the kind of groups of symmetries, the types of symmetries that we know of are not sufficient. So in other words, like we're just gonna keep on going into the weeds on this. The deeper, the better. A kind of symmetry that we understand very well is rotation. So here's what would be easy. If humans, if we recognize the digit as a one, if it was like literally a rotation by some number of degrees or some fixed one in some typeface like Palatino or something, that would be very easy to understand. It would be very easy to like write a program that could detect whether something was a rotation of a fixed digit one. Whatever we're doing when you recognize the digit one and distinguish it from the digit two, it's not that. It's not just incorporating one of the types of symmetries that we understand. Now, I would say that I would be shocked if there was some kind of classical symmetry type formulation that captured what we're doing when we tell the difference between a two and a three. To be honest, I think what we're doing is actually more complicated than that. I feel like it must be. They're so simple, these numbers. I mean, they're really geometric objects. Like we can draw out one, two, three. It does seem like it should be formalizable. That's why it's so strange. Do you think it's formalizable when something stops being a two and starts being a three? Right, you can imagine something continuously deforming from being a two to a three. Yeah, but that's, there is a moment. Like I have myself written programs that literally morph twos and threes and so on. And you watch, and there is moments that you notice depending on the trajectory of that transformation, that morphing, that it is a three and a two. There's a hard line. Wait, so if you ask people, if you showed them this morph, if you ask a bunch of people, do they all agree about where the transition happened? Because I would be surprised. I think so. Oh my God, okay, we have an empirical dispute. But here's the problem. Here's the problem, that if I just showed that moment that I agreed on. Well, that's not fair. No, but say I said, so I want to move away from the agreement because that's a fascinating actually question that I want to backtrack from because I just dogmatically said, because I could be very, very wrong. But the morphing really helps that like the change, because I mean, partially it's because our perception systems, see this, it's all probably tied in there. Somehow the change from one to the other, like seeing the video of it allows you to pinpoint the place where a two becomes a three much better. If I just showed you one picture, I think you might really, really struggle. You might call a seven. I think there's something also that we don't often think about, which is it's not just about the static image, it's the transformation of the image, or it's not a static shape, it's the transformation of the shape. There's something in the movement that seems to be not just about our perception system, but fundamental to our cognition, like how we think about stuff. Yeah, and that's part of geometry too. And in fact, again, another insight of modern geometry is this idea that maybe we would naively think we're gonna study, I don't know, like Poincare, we're gonna study the three body problem. We're gonna study sort of like three objects in space moving around subject only to the force of each other's gravity, which sounds very simple, right? And if you don't know about this problem, you're probably like, okay, so you just like put it in your computer and see what they do. Well, guess what? That's like a problem that Poincare won a huge prize for like making the first real progress on in the 1880s. And we still don't know that much about it 150 years later. I mean, it's a humongous mystery. You just opened the door and we're gonna walk right in before we return to symmetry. What's the, who's Poincare and what's this conjecture that he came up with? Why is it such a hard problem? Okay, so Poincare, he ends up being a major figure in the book and I didn't even really intend for him to be such a big figure, but he's first and foremost a geometer, right? So he's a mathematician who kind of comes up in late 19th century France at a time when French math is really starting to flower. Actually, I learned a lot. I mean, in math, we're not really trained on our own history. We got a PhD in math, learned about math. So I learned a lot. There's this whole kind of moment where France has just been beaten in the Franco Prussian war. And they're like, oh my God, what did we do wrong? And they were like, we gotta get strong in math like the Germans. We have to be like more like the Germans. So this never happens to us again. So it's very much, it's like the Sputnik moment, like what happens in America in the 50s and 60s with the Soviet Union. This is happening to France and they're trying to kind of like instantly like modernize. That's fascinating that the humans and mathematics are intricately connected to the history of humans. The Cold War is I think fundamental to the way people saw science and math in the Soviet Union. I don't know if that was true in the United States, but certainly it was in the Soviet Union. It definitely was, and I would love to hear more about how it was in the Soviet Union. I mean, there was, and we'll talk about the Olympiad. I just remember that there was this feeling like the world hung in a balance and you could save the world with the tools of science. And mathematics was like the superpower that fuels science. And so like people were seen as, you know, people in America often idolize athletes, but ultimately the best athletes in the world, they just throw a ball into a basket. So like there's not, what people really enjoy about sports, I love sports, is like excellence at the highest level. But when you take that with mathematics and science, people also enjoyed excellence in science and mathematics in the Soviet Union, but there's an extra sense that that excellence would lead to a better world. So that created all the usual things you think about with the Olympics, which is like extreme competitiveness. But it also created this sense that in the modern era in America, somebody like Elon Musk, whatever you think of him, like Jeff Bezos, those folks, they inspire the possibility that one person or a group of smart people can change the world. Like not just be good at what they do, but actually change the world. Mathematics was at the core of that. I don't know, there's a romanticism around it too. Like when you read books about in America, people romanticize certain things like baseball, for example. There's like these beautiful poetic writing about the game of baseball. The same was the feeling with mathematics and science in the Soviet Union, and it was in the air. Everybody was forced to take high level mathematics courses. Like you took a lot of math, you took a lot of science and a lot of like really rigorous literature. Like the level of education in Russia, this could be true in China, I'm not sure, in a lot of countries is in whatever that's called, it's K to 12 in America, but like young people education. The level they were challenged to learn at is incredible. It's like America falls far behind, I would say. America then quickly catches up and then exceeds everybody else as you start approaching the end of high school to college. Like the university system in the United States arguably is the best in the world. But like what we challenge everybody, it's not just like the good, the A students, but everybody to learn in the Soviet Union was fascinating. I think I'm gonna pick up on something you said. I think you would love a book called Dual at Dawn by Amir Alexander, which I think some of the things you're responding to and what I wrote, I think I first got turned on to by Amir's work, he's a historian of math. And he writes about the story of Everest to Galois, which is a story that's well known to all mathematicians, this kind of like very, very romantic figure who he really sort of like begins the development of this or this theory of groups that I mentioned earlier, this general theory of symmetries and then dies in a duel in his early 20s, like all this stuff, mostly unpublished. It's a very, very romantic story that we all learn. And much of it is true, but Alexander really lays out just how much the way people thought about math in those times in the early 19th century was wound up with, as you say, romanticism. I mean, that's when the romantic movement takes place and he really outlines how people were predisposed to think about mathematics in that way because they thought about poetry that way and they thought about music that way. It was the mood of the era to think about we're reaching for the transcendent, we're sort of reaching for sort of direct contact with the divine. And part of the reason that we think of Gawa that way was because Gawa himself was a creature of that era and he romanticized himself. I mean, now we know he wrote lots of letters and he was kind of like, I mean, in modern terms, we would say he was extremely emo. Like we wrote all these letters about his like florid feelings and like the fire within him about the mathematics. And so it's just as you say that the math history touches human history. They're never separate because math is made of people. I mean, that's what, it's people who do it and we're human beings doing it and we do it within whatever community we're in and we do it affected by the mores of the society around us. So the French, the Germans and Poincare. Yes, okay, so back to Poincare. So he's, you know, it's funny. This book is filled with kind of mathematical characters who often are kind of peevish or get into feuds or sort of have like weird enthusiasms because those people are fun to write about and they sort of like say very salty things. Poincare is actually none of this. As far as I can tell, he was an extremely normal dude who didn't get into fights with people and everybody liked him and he was like pretty personally modest and he had very regular habits. You know what I mean? He did math for like four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening and that was it. Like he had his schedule. I actually, it was like, I still am feeling like somebody's gonna tell me now that the book is out, like, oh, didn't you know about this like incredibly sordid episode? As far as I could tell, a completely normal guy. But he just kind of, in many ways, creates the geometric world in which we live and his first really big success is this prize paper he writes for this prize offered by the King of Sweden for the study of the three body problem. The study of what we can say about, yeah, three astronomical objects moving in what you might think would be this very simple way. Nothing's going on except gravity. So what's the three body problem? Why is it a problem? So the problem is to understand when this motion is stable and when it's not. So stable meaning they would sort of like end up in some kind of periodic orbit. Or I guess it would mean, sorry, stable would mean they never sort of fly off far apart from each other. And unstable would mean like eventually they fly apart. So understanding two bodies is much easier. Yes, exactly. When you have the third wheel is always a problem. This is what Newton knew. Two bodies, they sort of orbit each other in some kind of either in an ellipse, which is the stable case. You know, that's what the planets do that we know. Or one travels on a hyperbola around the other. That's the unstable case. It sort of like zooms in from far away, sort of like whips around the heavier thing and like zooms out. Those are basically the two options. So it's a very simple and easy to classify story. With three bodies, just the small switch from two to three, it's a complete zoo. It's the first, what we would say now is it's the first example of what's called chaotic dynamics, where the stable solutions and the unstable solutions, they're kind of like wound in among each other. And a very, very, very tiny change in the initial conditions can make the longterm behavior of the system completely different. So Poincare was the first to recognize that that phenomenon even existed. What about the conjecture that carries his name? Right, so he also was one of the pioneers of taking geometry, which until that point had been largely the study of two and three dimensional objects, because that's like what we see, right? That's those are the objects we interact with. He developed the subject we now called topology. He called it analysis situs. He was a very well spoken guy with a lot of slogans, but that name did not, you can see why that name did not catch on. So now it's called topology now. Sorry, what was it called before? Analysis situs, which I guess sort of roughly means like the analysis of location or something like that. Like it's a Latin phrase. Partly because he understood that even to understand stuff that's going on in our physical world, you have to study higher dimensional spaces. How does this work? And this is kind of like where my brain went to it because you were talking about not just where things are, but what their path is, how they're moving when we were talking about the path from two to three. He understood that if you wanna study three bodies moving in space, well, each body, it has a location where it is. So it has an X coordinate, a Y coordinate, a Z coordinate, right? I can specify a point in space by giving you three numbers, but it also at each moment has a velocity. So it turns out that really to understand what's going on, you can't think of it as a point or you could, but it's better not to think of it as a point in three dimensional space that's moving. It's better to think of it as a point in six dimensional space where the coordinates are where is it and what's its velocity right now. That's a higher dimensional space called phase space. And if you haven't thought about this before, I admit that it's a little bit mind bending, but what he needed then was a geometry that was flexible enough, not just to talk about two dimensional spaces or three dimensional spaces, but any dimensional space. So the sort of famous first line of this paper where he introduces analysis of Cetus is no one doubts nowadays that the geometry of n dimensional space is an actually existing thing, right? I think that maybe that had been controversial. And he's saying like, look, let's face it, just because it's not physical doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean we shouldn't study it. Interesting. He wasn't jumping to the physical interpretation. Like it can be real, even if it's not perceivable to the human cognition. I think that's right. I think, don't get me wrong, Poincare never strays far from physics. He's always motivated by physics, but the physics drove him to need to think about spaces of higher dimension. And so he needed a formalism that was rich enough to enable him to do that. And once you do that, that formalism is also gonna include things that are not physical. And then you have two choices. You can be like, oh, well, that stuff's trash. Or, and this is more of the mathematicians frame of mind, if you have a formalistic framework that like seems really good and sort of seems to be like very elegant and work well, and it includes all the physical stuff, maybe we should think about all of it. Like maybe we should think about it, thinking maybe there's some gold to be mined there. And indeed, like, you know, guess what? Like before long there's relativity and there's space time. And like all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, maybe it's a good idea. We already had this geometric apparatus like set up for like how to think about four dimensional spaces, like turns out they're real after all. As I said, you know, this is a story much told right in mathematics, not just in this context, but in many. I'd love to dig in a little deeper on that actually, cause I have some intuitions to work out. Okay. My brain. Well, I'm not a mathematical physicist, so we can work them out together. Good. We'll together walk along the path of curiosity, but Poincare conjecture. What is it? The Poincare conjecture is about curved three dimensional spaces. So I was on my way there. I promise. The idea is that we perceive ourselves as living in, we don't say a three dimensional space. We just say three dimensional space. You know, you can go up and down, you can go left and right, you can go forward and back. There's three dimensions in which we can move. In Poincare's theory, there are many possible three dimensional spaces. In the same way that going down one dimension to sort of capture our intuition a little bit more, we know there are lots of different two dimensional surfaces, right? There's a balloon and that looks one way and a donut looks another way and a Mobius strip looks a third way. Those are all like two dimensional surfaces that we can kind of really get a global view of because we live in three dimensional space. So we can see a two dimensional surface sort of sitting in our three dimensional space. Well, to see a three dimensional space whole, we'd have to kind of have four dimensional eyes, right? Which we don't. So we have to use our mathematical eyes. We have to envision. The Poincare conjecture says that there's a very simple way to determine whether a three dimensional space is the standard one, the one that we're used to. And essentially it's that it's what's called fundamental group has nothing interesting in it. And that I can actually say without saying what the fundamental group is, I can tell you what the criterion is. This would be good. Oh, look, I can even use a visual aid. So for the people watching this on YouTube, you will just see this for the people on the podcast, you'll have to visualize it. So Lex has been nice enough to like give me a surface with an interesting topology. It's a mug right here in front of me. A mug, yes. I might say it's a genus one surface, but we could also say it's a mug, same thing. So if I were to draw a little circle on this mug, which way should I draw it so it's visible? Like here, okay. If I draw a little circle on this mug, imagine this to be a loop of string. I could pull that loop of string closed on the surface of the mug, right? That's definitely something I could do. I could shrink it, shrink it, shrink it until it's a point. On the other hand, if I draw a loop that goes around the handle, I can kind of zhuzh it up here and I can zhuzh it down there and I can sort of slide it up and down the handle, but I can't pull it closed, can I? It's trapped. Not without breaking the surface of the mug, right? Not without like going inside. So the condition of being what's called simply connected, this is one of Poincare's inventions, says that any loop of string can be pulled shut. So it's a feature that the mug simply does not have. This is a non simply connected mug and a simply connected mug would be a cup, right? You would burn your hand when you drank coffee out of it. So you're saying the universe is not a mug. Well, I can't speak to the universe, but what I can say is that regular old space is not a mug. Regular old space, if you like sort of actually physically have like a loop of string, you can pull it shut. You can always pull it shut. But what if your piece of string was the size of the universe? Like what if your piece of string was like billions of light years long? Like how do you actually know? I mean, that's still an open question of the shape of the universe. Exactly. I think there's a lot, there is ideas of it being a torus. I mean, there's some trippy ideas and they're not like weird out there controversial. There's legitimate at the center of a cosmology debate. I mean, I think most people think it's flat. I think there's some kind of dodecahedral symmetry or I mean, I remember reading something crazy about somebody saying that they saw the signature of that in the cosmic noise or what have you. I mean. To make the flat earthers happy, I do believe that the current main belief is it's flat. It's flat ish or something like that. The shape of the universe is flat ish. I don't know what the heck that means. I think that has like a very, how are you even supposed to think about the shape of a thing that doesn't have any thing outside of it? I mean. Ah, but that's exactly what topology does. Topology is what's called an intrinsic theory. That's what's so great about it. This question about the mug, you could answer it without ever leaving the mug, right? Because it's a question about a loop drawn on the surface of the mug and what happens if it never leaves that surface. So it's like always there. See, but that's the difference between the topology and say, if you're like trying to visualize a mug, that you can't visualize a mug while living inside the mug. Well, that's true. The visualization is harder, but in some sense, no, you're right. But if the tools of mathematics are there, I, sorry, I don't want to fight, but I think the tools of mathematics are exactly there to enable you to think about what you cannot visualize in this way. Let me give, let's go, always to make things easier, go down to dimension. Let's think about we live in a circle, okay? You can tell whether you live on a circle or a line segment, because if you live in a circle, if you walk a long way in one direction, you find yourself back where you started. And if you live in a line segment, you walk for a long enough one direction, you come to the end of the world. Or if you live on a line, like a whole line, infinite line, then you walk in one direction for a long time and like, well, then there's not a sort of terminating algorithm to figure out whether you live on a line or a circle, but at least you sort of, at least you don't discover that you live on a circle. So all of those are intrinsic things, right? All of those are things that you can figure out about your world without leaving your world. On the other hand, ready? Now we're going to go from intrinsic to extrinsic. Boy, did I not know we were going to talk about this, but why not? Why not? If you can't tell whether you live in a circle or a knot, like imagine like a knot floating in three dimensional space. The person who lives on that knot, to them it's a circle. They walk a long way, they come back to where they started. Now we, with our three dimensional eyes can be like, oh, this one's just a plain circle and this one's knotted up, but that has to do with how they sit in three dimensional space. It doesn't have to do with intrinsic features of those people's world. We can ask you one ape to another. Does it make you, how does it make you feel that you don't know if you live in a circle or on a knot, in a knot, inside the string that forms the knot? I don't even know how to say that. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't know if, I fear you won't like this answer, but it does not bother me at all. I don't lose one minute of sleep over it. So like, does it bother you that if we look at like a Mobius strip, that you don't have an obvious way of knowing whether you are inside of a cylinder, if you live on a surface of a cylinder or you live on the surface of a Mobius strip? No, I think you can tell if you live. Which one? Because what you do is you like tell your friend, hey, stay right here, I'm just going to go for a walk. And then you like walk for a long time in one direction and then you come back and you see your friend again. And if your friend is reversed, then you know you live on a Mobius strip. Well, no, because you won't see your friend, right? Okay, fair point, fair point on that. But you have to believe the stories about, no, I don't even know, would you even know? Would you really? Oh, no, your point is right. Let me try to think of a better, let's see if I can do this on the fly. It may not be correct to talk about cognitive beings living on a Mobius strip because there's a lot of things taken for granted there. And we're constantly imagining actual like three dimensional creatures, like how it actually feels like to live in a Mobius strip is tricky to internalize. I think that on what's called the real protective plane, which is kind of even more sort of like messed up version of the Mobius strip, but with very similar features, this feature of kind of like only having one side, that has the feature that there's a loop of string which can't be pulled closed. But if you loop it around twice along the same path, that you can pull closed. That's extremely weird. Yeah. But that would be a way you could know without leaving your world that something very funny is going on. You know what's extremely weird? Maybe we can comment on, hopefully it's not too much of a tangent is, I remember thinking about this, this might be right, this might be wrong. But if we now talk about a sphere and you're living inside a sphere, that you're going to see everywhere around you, the back of your own head. That I was, cause like I was, this is very counterintuitive to me to think about, maybe it's wrong. But cause I was thinking of like earth, your 3D thing sitting on a sphere. But if you're living inside the sphere, like you're going to see, if you look straight, you're always going to see yourself all the way around. So everywhere you look, there's going to be the back of your own head. I think somehow this depends on something of like how the physics of light works in this scenario, which I'm sort of finding it hard to bend my. That's true. The sea is doing a lot of work. Like saying you see something is doing a lot of work. People have thought about this a lot. I mean, this metaphor of like, what if we're like little creatures in some sort of smaller world? Like how could we apprehend what's outside? That metaphor just comes back and back. And actually I didn't even realize like how frequent it is. It comes up in the book a lot. I know it from a book called Flatland. I don't know if you ever read this when you were a kid. A while ago, yeah. An adult. You know, this sort of comic novel from the 19th century about an entire two dimensional world. It's narrated by a square. That's the main character. And the kind of strangeness that befalls him when one day he's in his house and suddenly there's like a little circle there and they're with him. But then the circle like starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And he's like, what the hell is going on? It's like a horror movie, like for two dimensional people. And of course what's happening is that a sphere is entering his world. And as the sphere kind of like moves farther and farther into the plane, it's cross section. The part of it that he can see. To him, it looks like there's like this kind of bizarre being that's like getting larger and larger and larger until it's exactly sort of halfway through. And then they have this kind of like philosophical argument where the sphere is like, I'm a sphere. I'm from the third dimension. The square is like, what are you talking about? There's no such thing. And they have this kind of like sterile argument where the square is not able to kind of like follow the mathematical reasoning of the sphere until the sphere just kind of grabs him and like jerks him out of the plane and pulls him up. And it's like now, like now do you see, like now do you see your whole world that you didn't understand before? So do you think that kind of process is possible for us humans? So we live in the three dimensional world, maybe with the time component four dimensional and then math allows us to go high, into high dimensions comfortably and explore the world from those perspectives. Like, is it possible that the universe is many more dimensions than the ones we experience as human beings? So if you look at the, you know, especially in physics theories of everything, physics theories that try to unify general relativity and quantum field theory, they seem to go to high dimensions to work stuff out through the tools of mathematics. Is it possible? So like the two options are, one is just a nice way to analyze a universe, but the reality is, is as exactly we perceive it, it is three dimensional, or are we just seeing, are we those flatland creatures that are just seeing a tiny slice of reality and the actual reality is many, many, many more dimensions than the three dimensions we perceive? Oh, I certainly think that's possible. Now, how would you figure out whether it was true or not is another question. And I suppose what you would do as with anything else that you can't directly perceive is you would try to understand what effect the presence of those extra dimensions out there would have on the things we can perceive. Like what else can you do, right? And in some sense, if the answer is they would have no effect, then maybe it becomes like a little bit of a sterile question, because what question are you even asking, right? You can kind of posit however many entities that you want. Is it possible to intuit how to mess with the other dimensions while living in a three dimensional world? I mean, that seems like a very challenging thing to do. The reason flatland could be written is because it's coming from a three dimensional writer. Yes, but what happens in the book, I didn't even tell you the whole plot. What happens is the square is so excited and so filled with intellectual joy. By the way, maybe to give the story some context, you asked like, is it possible for us humans to have this experience of being transcendentally jerked out of our world so we can sort of truly see it from above? Well, Edwin Abbott who wrote the book certainly thought so because Edwin Abbott was a minister. So the whole Christian subtext of this book, I had completely not grasped reading this as a kid, that it means a very different thing, right? If sort of a theologian is saying like, oh, what if a higher being could like pull you out of this earthly world you live in so that you can sort of see the truth and like really see it from above as it were. So that's one of the things that's going on for him. And it's a testament to his skill as a writer that his story just works whether that's the framework you're coming to it from or not. But what happens in this book and this part, now looking at it through a Christian lens, it becomes a bit subversive is the square is so excited about what he's learned from the sphere and the sphere explains to him like what a cube would be. Oh, it's like you but three dimensional and the square is very excited and the square is like, okay, I get it now. So like now that you explained to me how just by reason I can figure out what a cube would be like, like a three dimensional version of me, like let's figure out what a four dimensional version of me would be like. And then the sphere is like, what the hell are you talking about? There's no fourth dimension, that's ridiculous. Like there's three dimensions, like that's how many there are, I can see. Like, I mean, it's this sort of comic moment where the sphere is completely unable to conceptualize that there could actually be yet another dimension. So yeah, that takes the religious allegory like a very weird place that I don't really like understand theologically, but. That's a nice way to talk about religion and myth in general as perhaps us trying to struggle, us meaning human civilization, trying to struggle with ideas that are beyond our cognitive capabilities. But it's in fact not beyond our capability. It may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to visualize a four dimensional cube, a tesseract as some like to call it, or a five dimensional cube, or a six dimensional cube, but it is not beyond our cognitive capabilities to figure out how many corners a six dimensional cube would have. That's what's so cool about us. Whether we can visualize it or not, we can still talk about it, we can still reason about it, we can still figure things out about it. That's amazing. Yeah, if we go back to this, first of all, to the mug, but to the example you give in the book of the straw, how many holes does a straw have? And you, listener, may try to answer that in your own head. Yeah, I'm gonna take a drink while everybody thinks about it so we can give you a moment. A slow sip. Is it zero, one, or two, or more than that maybe? Maybe you can get very creative. But it's kind of interesting to each, dissecting each answer as you do in the book is quite brilliant. People should definitely check it out. But if you could try to answer it now, think about all the options and why they may or may not be right. Yeah, and it's one of these questions where people on first hearing it think it's a triviality and they're like, well, the answer is obvious. And then what happens if you ever ask a group of people that something wonderfully comic happens, which is that everyone's like, well, it's completely obvious. And then each person realizes that half the person, the other people in the room have a different obvious answer for the way they have. And then people get really heated. People are like, I can't believe that you think it has two holes or like, I can't believe that you think it has one. And then, you know, you really, like people really learn something about each other and people get heated. I mean, can we go through the possible options here? Is it zero, one, two, three, 10? Sure, so I think, you know, most people, the zero holders are rare. They would say like, well, look, you can make a straw by taking a rectangular piece of plastic and closing it up. A rectangular piece of plastic doesn't have a hole in it. I didn't poke a hole in it when I, so how can I have a hole? They'd be like, it's just one thing. Okay, most people don't see it that way. That's like a... Is there any truth to that kind of conception? Yeah, I think that would be somebody who's account, I mean, what I would say is you could say the same thing about a bagel. You could say, I can make a bagel by taking like a long cylinder of dough, which doesn't have a hole and then schmushing the ends together. Now it's a bagel. So if you're really committed, you can be like, okay, a bagel doesn't have a hole either. But like, who are you if you say a bagel doesn't have a hole? I mean, I don't know. Yeah, so that's almost like an engineering definition of it. Okay, fair enough. So what about the other options? So, you know, one whole people would say... I like how these are like groups of people. Like we've planted our foot, this is what we stand for. There's books written about each belief. You know, I would say, look, there's like a hole and it goes all the way through the straw, right? It's one region of space, that's the hole. And there's one. And two whole people would say like, well, look, there's a hole in the top and a hole at the bottom. I think a common thing you see when people argue about this, they would take something like this bottle of water I'm holding and go open it and they say, well, how many holes are there in this? And you say like, well, there's one hole at the top. Okay, what if I like poke a hole here so that all the water spills out? Well, now it's a straw. Yeah. So if you're a one holder, I say to you like, well, how many holes are in it now? There was one hole in it before and I poked a new hole in it. And then you think there's still one hole even though there was one hole and I made one more? Clearly not, this is two holes. Yeah. And yet if you're a two holder, the one holder will say like, okay, where does one hole begin and the other hole end? Yeah. And in the book, I sort of, you know, in math, there's two things we do when we're faced with a problem that's confusing us. We can make the problem simpler. That's what we were doing a minute ago when we were talking about high dimensional space. And I was like, let's talk about like circles and line segments. Let's like go down a dimension to make it easier. The other big move we have is to make the problem harder and try to sort of really like face up to what are the complications. So, you know, what I do in the book is say like, let's stop talking about straws for a minute and talk about pants. How many holes are there in a pair of pants? So I think most people who say there's two holes in a straw would say there's three holes in a pair of pants. I guess, I mean, I guess we're filming only from here. I could take up, no, I'm not gonna do it. You'll just have to imagine the pants, sorry. Yeah. Lex, if you want to, no, okay, no. That's gonna be in the director's cut. That's that Patreon only footage. There you go. So many people would say there's three holes in a pair of pants. But you know, for instance, my daughter, when I asked, by the way, talking to kids about this is super fun. I highly recommend it. What did she say? She said, well, yeah, I feel a pair of pants like just has two holes because yes, there's the waist, but that's just the two leg holes stuck together. Whoa, okay. Two leg holes, yeah, okay. I mean, that really is a good combination. So she's a one holder for the straw. So she's a one holder for the straw too. And that really does capture something. It captures this fact, which is central to the theory of what's called homology, which is like a central part of modern topology that holes, whatever we may mean by them, they're somehow things which have an arithmetic to them. They're things which can be added. Like the waist, like waist equals leg plus leg is kind of an equation, but it's not an equation about numbers. It's an equation about some kind of geometric, some kind of topological thing, which is very strange. And so, you know, when I come down, you know, like a rabbi, I like to kind of like come up with these answers and somehow like dodge the original question and say like, you're both right, my children. Okay, so. Yeah. So for the straw, I think what a modern mathematician would say is like, the first version would be to say like, well, there are two holes, but they're really both the same hole. Well, that's not quite right. A better way to say it is there's two holes, but one is the negative of the other. Now, what can that mean? One way of thinking about what it means is that if you sip something like a milkshake through the straw, no matter what, the amount of milkshake that's flowing in one end, that same amount is flowing out the other end. So they're not independent from each other. There's some relationship between them. In the same way that if you somehow could like suck a milkshake through a pair of pants, the amount of milkshake, just go with me on this thought experiment. I'm right there with you. The amount of milkshake that's coming in the left leg of the pants, plus the amount of milkshake that's coming in the right leg of the pants, is the same that's coming out the waist of the pants. So just so you know, I fasted for 72 hours the last three days. So I just broke the fast with a little bit of food yesterday. So this sounds, food analogies or metaphors for this podcast work wonderfully because I can intensely picture it. Is that your weekly routine or just in preparation for talking about geometry for three hours? Exactly, this is just for this. It's hardship to purify the mind. No, it's for the first time, I just wanted to try the experience. Oh, wow. And just to pause, to do things that are out of the ordinary, to pause and to reflect on how grateful I am to be just alive and be able to do all the cool shit that I get to do, so. Did you drink water? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Water and salt, so like electrolytes and all those kinds of things. But anyway, so the inflow on the top of the pants equals to the outflow on the bottom of the pants. Exactly, so this idea that, I mean, I think, you know, Poincare really had this idea, this sort of modern idea. I mean, building on stuff other people did, Betty is an important one, of this kind of modern notion of relations between holes. But the idea that holes really had an arithmetic, the really modern view was really Emmy Noether's idea. So she kind of comes in and sort of truly puts the subject on its modern footing that we have now. So, you know, it's always a challenge, you know, in the book, I'm not gonna say I give like a course so that you read this chapter and then you're like, oh, it's just like I took like a semester of algebraic anthropology. It's not like this and it's always a challenge writing about math because there are some things that you can really do on the page and the math is there. And there's other things which it's too much in a book like this to like do them all the page. You can only say something about them, if that makes sense. So, you know, in the book, I try to do some of both. I try to do, I try to, topics that are, you can't really compress and really truly say exactly what they are in this amount of space. I try to say something interesting about them, something meaningful about them so that readers can get the flavor. And then in other places, I really try to get up close and personal and really do the math and have it take place on the page. To some degree be able to give inklings of the beauty of the subject. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of books that are like, I don't quite know how to express this well. I'm still laboring to do it, but there's a lot of books that are about stuff, but I want my books to not only be about stuff, but to actually have some stuff there on the page in the book for people to interact with directly and not just sort of hear me talk about distant features of it. Right, so not be talking just about ideas, but the actually be expressing the idea. Is there, you know, somebody in the, maybe you can comment, there's a guy, his YouTube channel is 3Blue1Brown, Grant Sanderson. He does that masterfully well. Absolutely. Of visualizing, of expressing a particular idea and then talking about it as well back and forth. What do you think about Grant? It's fantastic. I mean, the flowering of math YouTube is like such a wonderful thing because math teaching, there's so many different venues through which we can teach people math. There's the traditional one, right? Where I'm in a classroom with, depending on the class, it could be 30 people, it could be a hundred people, it could, God help me, be a 500 people if it's like the big calculus lecture or whatever it may be. And there's sort of some, but there's some set of people of that order of magnitude and I'm with them, we have a long time. I'm with them for a whole semester and I can ask them to do homework and we talk together. We have office hours, if they have one on one questions, a lot of, it's like a very high level of engagement, but how many people am I actually hitting at a time? Like not that many, right? And you can, and there's kind of an inverse relationship where the more, the fewer people you're talking to, the more engagement you can ask for. The ultimate of course is like the mentorship relation of like a PhD advisor and a graduate student where you spend a lot of one on one time together for like three to five years. And the ultimate high level of engagement to one person. Books, this can get to a lot more people that are ever gonna sit in my classroom and you spend like however many hours it takes to read a book. Somebody like Three Blue One Brown or Numberphile or people like Vi Hart. I mean, YouTube, let's face it, has bigger reach than a book. Like there's YouTube videos that have many, many, many more views than like any hardback book like not written by a Kardashian or an Obama is gonna sell, right? So that's, I mean, and then those are, some of them are like longer, 20 minutes long, some of them are five minutes long, but they're shorter. And then even some of you look like Eugenia Chang who's a wonderful category theorist in Chicago. I mean, she was on, I think the Daily Show or is it, I mean, she was on, she has 30 seconds, but then there's like 30 seconds to sort of say something about mathematics to like untold millions of people. So everywhere along this curve is important. And one thing I feel like is great right now is that people are just broadcasting on all the channels because we each have our skills, right? Somehow along the way, like I learned how to write books. I had this kind of weird life as a writer where I sort of spent a lot of time like thinking about how to put English words together into sentences and sentences together into paragraphs, like at length, which is this kind of like weird specialized skill. And that's one thing, but like sort of being able to make like winning, good looking, eye catching videos is like a totally different skill. And probably somewhere out there, there's probably sort of some like heavy metal band that's like teaching math through heavy metal and like using their skills to do that. I hope there is at any rate. Their music and so on, yeah. But there is something to the process. I mean, Grant does this especially well, which is in order to be able to visualize something, now he writes programs, so it's programmatic visualization. So like the things he is basically mostly through his Manum library and Python, everything is drawn through Python. You have to truly understand the topic to be able to visualize it in that way and not just understand it, but really kind of think in a very novel way. It's funny because I've spoken with him a couple of times, spoken to him a lot offline as well. He really doesn't think he's doing anything new, meaning like he sees himself as very different from maybe like a researcher, but it feels to me like he's creating something totally new. Like that act of understanding and visualizing is as powerful or has the same kind of inkling of power as does the process of proving something. It doesn't have that clear destination, but it's pulling out an insight and creating multiple sets of perspective that arrive at that insight. And to be honest, it's something that I think we haven't quite figured out how to value inside academic mathematics in the same way, and this is a bit older, that I think we haven't quite figured out how to value the development of computational infrastructure. We all have computers as our partners now and people build computers that sort of assist and participate in our mathematics. They build those systems and that's a kind of mathematics too, but not in the traditional form of proving theorems and writing papers. But I think it's coming. Look, I mean, I think, for example, the Institute for Computational Experimental Mathematics at Brown, which is like, it's a NSF funded math institute, very much part of sort of traditional math academia. They did an entire theme semester about visualizing mathematics, looking at the same kind of thing that they would do for like an up and coming research topic. Like that's pretty cool. So I think there really is buy in from the mathematics community to recognize that this kind of stuff is important and counts as part of mathematics, like part of what we're actually here to do. Yeah, I'm hoping to see more and more of that from like MIT faculty, from faculty, from all the top universities in the world. Let me ask you this weird question about the Fields Medal, which is the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Do you think, since we're talking about computers, there will one day come a time when a computer, an AI system will win a Fields Medal? No. Of course, that's what a human would say. Why not? Is that like, that's like my captcha? That's like the proof that I'm a human? Is that like the lie that I know? Yeah. What is, how does he want me to answer? Is there something interesting to be said about that? Yeah, I mean, I am tremendously interested in what AI can do in pure mathematics. I mean, it's, of course, it's a parochial interest, right? You're like, why am I interested in like, how it can like help feed the world or help solve like real social problems? I'm like, can it do more math? Like, what can I do? We all have our interests, right? But I think it is a really interesting conceptual question. And here too, I think it's important to be kind of historical because it's certainly true that there's lots of things that we used to call research in mathematics that we would now call computation. Tasks that we've now offloaded to machines. Like, you know, in 1890, somebody could be like, here's my PhD thesis. I computed all the invariants of this polynomial ring under the action of some finite group. Doesn't matter what those words mean, just it's like some thing that in 1890 would take a person a year to do and would be a valuable thing that you might wanna know. And it's still a valuable thing that you might wanna know, but now you type a few lines of code in Macaulay or Sage or Magma and you just have it. So we don't think of that as math anymore, even though it's the same thing. What's Macaulay, Sage and Magma? Oh, those are computer algebra programs. So those are like sort of bespoke systems that lots of mathematicians use. That's similar to Maple and... Yeah, oh yeah, so it's similar to Maple and Mathematica, yeah, but a little more specialized, but yeah. It's programs that work with symbols and allow you to do, can you do proofs? Can you do kind of little leaps and proofs? They're not really built for that. And that's a whole other story. But these tools are part of the process of mathematics now. Right, they are now for most mathematicians, I would say, part of the process of mathematics. And so, you know, there's a story I tell in the book, which I'm fascinated by, which is, you know, so far, attempts to get AIs to prove interesting theorems have not done so well. It doesn't mean they can. There's actually a paper I just saw, which has a very nice use of a neural net to find counter examples to conjecture. Somebody said like, well, maybe this is always that. And you can be like, well, let me sort of train an AI to sort of try to find things where that's not true. And it actually succeeded. Now, in this case, if you look at the things that it found, you say like, okay, I mean, these are not famous conjectures. Okay, so like somebody wrote this down, maybe this is so. Looking at what the AI came up with, you're like, you know, I bet if like five grad students had thought about that problem, they wouldn't have come up with that. I mean, when you see it, you're like, okay, that is one of the things you might try if you sort of like put some work into it. Still, it's pretty awesome. But the story I tell in the book, which I'm fascinated by is there is, okay, we're gonna go back to knots. There's a knot called the Conway knot. After John Conway, maybe we'll talk about a very interesting character also. Yeah, it's a small tangent. Somebody I was supposed to talk to and unfortunately he passed away and he's somebody I find as an incredible mathematician, incredible human being. Oh, and I am sorry that you didn't get a chance because having had the chance to talk to him a lot when I was a postdoc, yeah, you missed out. There's no way to sugarcoat it. I'm sorry that you didn't get that chance. Yeah, it is what it is. So knots. Yeah, so there was a question and again, it doesn't matter the technicalities of the question, but it's a question of whether the knot is slice. It has to do with something about what kinds of three dimensional surfaces and four dimensions can be bounded by this knot. But nevermind what it means, it's some question. And it's actually very hard to compute whether a knot is slice or not. And in particular, the question of the Conway knot, whether it was slice or not, was particularly vexed until it was solved just a few years ago by Lisa Piccarillo, who actually, now that I think of it, was here in Austin. I believe she was a grad student at UT Austin at the time. I didn't even realize there was an Austin connection to this story until I started telling it. In fact, I think she's now at MIT, so she's basically following you around. If I remember correctly. The reverse. There's a lot of really interesting richness to this story. One thing about it is her paper was rather, was very short, it was very short and simple. Nine pages of which two were pictures. Very short for like a paper solving a major conjecture. And it really makes you think about what we mean by difficulty in mathematics. Like, do you say, oh, actually the problem wasn't difficult because you could solve it so simply? Or do you say like, well, no, evidently it was difficult because like the world's top topologists, many, you know, worked on it for 20 years and nobody could solve it, so therefore it is difficult. Or is it that we need sort of some new category of things that about which it's difficult to figure out that they're not difficult? I mean, this is the computer science formulation, but the sort of the journey to arrive at the simple answer may be difficult, but once you have the answer, it will then appear simple. And I mean, there might be a large category. I hope there's a large set of such solutions, because, you know, once we stand at the end of the scientific process that we're at the very beginning of, or at least it feels like, I hope there's just simple answers to everything that we'll look and it'll be simple laws that govern the universe, simple explanation of what is consciousness, what is love, is mortality fundamental to life, what's the meaning of life, are humans special or we're just another sort of reflection of all that is beautiful in the universe in terms of like life forms, all of it is life and just has different, when taken from a different perspective is all life can seem more valuable or not, but really it's all part of the same thing. All those will have a nice, like two equations, maybe one equation, but. Why do you think you want those questions to have simple answers? I think just like symmetry and the breaking of symmetry is beautiful somehow. There's something beautiful about simplicity. I think it, what is that? So it's aesthetic. It's aesthetic, yeah. Or, but it's aesthetic in the way that happiness is an aesthetic. Like, why is that so joyful that a simple explanation that governs a large number of cases is really appealing? Even when it's not, like obviously we get a huge amount of trouble with that because oftentimes it doesn't have to be connected with reality or even that explanation could be exceptionally harmful. Most of like the world's history that has, that was governed by hate and violence had a very simple explanation at the core that was used to cause the violence and the hatred. So like we get into trouble with that, but why is that so appealing? And in this nice forms in mathematics, like you look at the Einstein papers, why are those so beautiful? And why is the Andrew Wiles proof of the Fermat's last theorem not quite so beautiful? Like what's beautiful about that story is the human struggle of like the human story of perseverance, of the drama, of not knowing if the proof is correct and ups and downs and all of those kinds of things. That's the interesting part. But the fact that the proof is huge and nobody understands, well, from my outsider's perspective, nobody understands what the heck it is, is not as beautiful as it could have been. I wish it was what Fermat originally said, which is, you know, it's not, it's not small enough to fit in the margins of this page, but maybe if he had like a full page or maybe a couple of post it notes, he would have enough to do the proof. What do you make of, if we could take another of a multitude of tangents, what do you make of Fermat's last theorem? Because the statement, there's a few theorems, there's a few problems that are deemed by the world throughout its history to be exceptionally difficult. And that one in particular is really simple to formulate and really hard to come up with a proof for. And it was like taunted as simple by Fermat himself. Is there something interesting to be said about that X to the N plus Y to the N equals Z to the N for N of three or greater, is there a solution to this? And then how do you go about proving that? Like, how would you try to prove that? And what do you learn from the proof that eventually emerged by Andrew Wiles? Yeah, so right, so to give, let me just say the background, because I don't know if everybody listening knows the story. So, you know, Fermat was an early number theorist, at least sort of an early mathematician, those special adjacent didn't really exist back then. He comes up in the book actually, in the context of a different theorem of his that has to do with testing, whether a number is prime or not. So I write about, he was one of the ones who was salty and like, he would exchange these letters where he and his correspondents would like try to top each other and vex each other with questions and stuff like this. But this particular thing, it's called Fermat's Last Theorem because it's a note he wrote in his copy of the Disquisitiones Arithmetic I. Like he wrote, here's an equation, it has no solutions. I can prove it, but the proof's like a little too long to fit in the margin of this book. He was just like writing a note to himself. Now, let me just say historically, we know that Fermat did not have a proof of this theorem. For a long time, people were like this mysterious proof that was lost, a very romantic story, right? But a fair amount later, he did prove special cases of this theorem and wrote about it, talked to people about the problem. It's very clear from the way that he wrote where he can solve certain examples of this type of equation that he did not know how to do the whole thing. He may have had a deep, simple intuition about how to solve the whole thing that he had at that moment without ever being able to come up with a complete proof. And that intuition maybe lost the time. Maybe, but you're right, that is unknowable. But I think what we can know is that later, he certainly did not think that he had a proof that he was concealing from people. He thought he didn't know how to prove it, and I also think he didn't know how to prove it. Now, I understand the appeal of saying like, wouldn't it be cool if this very simple equation there was like a very simple, clever, wonderful proof that you could do in a page or two. And that would be great, but you know what? There's lots of equations like that that are solved by very clever methods like that, including the special cases that Fermat wrote about, the method of descent, which is like very wonderful and important. But in the end, those are nice things that like you teach in an undergraduate class, and it is what it is, but they're not big. On the other hand, work on the Fermat problem, that's what we like to call it because it's not really his theorem because we don't think he proved it. So, I mean, work on the Fermat problem developed this like incredible richness of number theory that we now live in today. Like, and not, by the way, just Wiles, Andrew Wiles being the person who, together with Richard Taylor, finally proved this theorem. But you know how you have this whole moment that people try to prove this theorem and they fail, and there's a famous false proof by LeMay from the 19th century, where Kummer, in understanding what mistake LeMay had made in this incorrect proof, basically understands something incredible, which is that a thing we know about numbers is that you can factor them and you can factor them uniquely. There's only one way to break a number up into primes. Like if we think of a number like 12, 12 is two times three times two. I had to think about it. Or it's two times two times three, of course you can reorder them. But there's no other way to do it. There's no universe in which 12 is something times five, or in which there's like four threes in it. Nope, 12 is like two twos and a three. Like that is what it is. And that's such a fundamental feature of arithmetic that we almost think of it like God's law. You know what I mean? It has to be that way. That's a really powerful idea. It's so cool that every number is uniquely made up of other numbers. And like made up meaning like there's these like basic atoms that form molecules that get built on top of each other. I love it. I mean, when I teach undergraduate number theory, it's like, it's the first really deep theorem that you prove. What's amazing is the fact that you can factor a number into primes is much easier. Essentially Euclid knew it, although he didn't quite put it in that way. The fact that you can do it at all. What's deep is the fact that there's only one way to do it or however you sort of chop the number up, you end up with the same set of prime factors. And indeed what people finally understood at the end of the 19th century is that if you work in number systems slightly more general than the ones we're used to, which it turns out are relevant to Fermat, all of a sudden this stops being true. Things get, I mean, things get more complicated and now because you were praising simplicity before you were like, it's so beautiful, unique factorization. It's so great. Like, so when I tell you that in more general number systems, there is no unique factorization. Maybe you're like, that's bad. I'm like, no, that's good because there's like a whole new world of phenomena to study that you just can't see through the lens of the numbers that we're used to. So I'm for complication. I'm highly in favor of complication because every complication is like an opportunity for new things to study. And is that the big kind of one of the big insights for you from Andrew Wiles's proof? Is there interesting insights about the process that you used to prove that sort of resonates with you as a mathematician? Is there an interesting concept that emerged from it? Is there interesting human aspects to the proof? Whether there's interesting human aspects to the proof itself is an interesting question. Certainly it has a huge amount of richness. Sort of at its heart is an argument of what's called deformation theory, which was in part created by my PhD advisor, Barry Mazer. Can you speak to what deformation theory is? I can speak to what it's like. How about that? What does it rhyme with? Right, well, the reason that Barry called it deformation theory, I think he's the one who gave it the name. I hope I'm not wrong in saying it's a name. In your book, you have calling different things by the same name as one of the things in the beautiful map that opens the book. Yes, and this is a perfect example. So this is another phrase of Poincare, this like incredible generator of slogans and aphorisms. He said, mathematics is the art of calling different things by the same name. That very thing we do, right? When we're like this triangle and this triangle, come on, they're the same triangle, they're just in a different place, right? So in the same way, it came to be understood that the kinds of objects that you study when you study Fermat's Last Theorem, and let's not even be too careful about what these objects are. I can tell you there are gaol representations in modular forms, but saying those words is not gonna mean so much. But whatever they are, they're things that can be deformed, moved around a little bit. And I think the insight of what Andrew and then Andrew and Richard were able to do was to say something like this. A deformation means moving something just a tiny bit, like an infinitesimal amount. If you really are good at understanding which ways a thing can move in a tiny, tiny, tiny, infinitesimal amount in certain directions, maybe you can piece that information together to understand the whole global space in which it can move. And essentially, their argument comes down to showing that two of those big global spaces are actually the same, the fabled R equals T, part of their proof, which is at the heart of it. And it involves this very careful principle like that. But that being said, what I just said, it's probably not what you're thinking, because what you're thinking when you think, oh, I have a point in space and I move it around like a little tiny bit, you're using your notion of distance that's from calculus. We know what it means for like two points on the real line to be close together. So yet another thing that comes up in the book a lot is this fact that the notion of distance is not given to us by God. We could mean a lot of different things by distance. And just in the English language, we do that all the time. We talk about somebody being a close relative. It doesn't mean they live next door to you, right? It means something else. There's a different notion of distance we have in mind. And there are lots of notions of distances that you could use. In the natural language processing community and AI, there might be some notion of semantic distance or lexical distance between two words. How much do they tend to arise in the same context? That's incredibly important for doing autocomplete and like machine translation and stuff like that. And it doesn't have anything to do with are they next to each other in the dictionary, right? It's a different kind of distance. Okay, ready? In this kind of number theory, there was a crazy distance called the peatic distance. I didn't write about this that much in the book because even though I love it and it's a big part of my research life, it gets a little bit into the weeds, but your listeners are gonna hear about it now. Please. What a normal person says when they say two numbers are close, they say like their difference is like a small number, like seven and eight are close because their difference is one and one's pretty small. If we were to be what's called a two attic number theorist, we'd say, oh, two numbers are close if their difference is a multiple of a large power of two. So like one and 49 are close because their difference is 48 and 48 is a multiple of 16, which is a pretty large power of two. Whereas one and two are pretty far away because the difference between them is one, which is not even a multiple of a power of two at all. That's odd. You wanna know what's really far from one? Like one and 1 64th because their difference is a negative power of two, two to the minus six. So those points are quite, quite far away. Two to the power of a large N would be two, if that's the difference between two numbers then they're close. Yeah, so two to a large power is in this metric a very small number and two to a negative power is a very big number. That's two attic. Okay, I can't even visualize that. It takes practice. It takes practice. If you've ever heard of the Cantor set, it looks kind of like that. So it is crazy that this is good for anything, right? I mean, this just sounds like a definition that someone would make up to torment you. But what's amazing is there's a general theory of distance where you say any definition you make to satisfy certain axioms deserves to be called a distance and this. See, I'm sorry to interrupt. My brain, you broke my brain. Awesome. 10 seconds ago. Cause I'm also starting to map for the two attic case to binary numbers. And you know, cause we romanticize those. So I was trying to. Oh, that's exactly the right way to think of it. I was trying to mess with number, I was trying to see, okay, which ones are close. And then I'm starting to visualize different binary numbers and how they, which ones are close to each other. And I'm not sure. Well, I think there's a. No, no, it's very similar. That's exactly the right way to think of it. It's almost like binary numbers written in reverse. Because in a binary expansion, two numbers are close. A number that's small is like 0.0000 something. Something that's the decimal and it starts with a lot of zeros. In the two attic metric, a binary number is very small if it ends with a lot of zeros and then the decimal point. Gotcha. So it is kind of like binary numbers written backwards is actually, I should have said, that's what I should have said, Lex. That's a very good metaphor. Okay, but so why is that interesting except for the fact that it's a beautiful kind of framework, different kind of framework of which to think about distances. And you're talking about not just the two attic, but the generalization of that. Why is that interesting? Yeah, the NEP. And so that, because that's the kind of deformation that comes up in Wiles's proof, that deformation where moving something a little bit means a little bit in this two attic sense. Trippy, okay. No, I mean, it's such a, I mean, I just get excited talking about it and I just taught this like in the fall semester that. But it like reformulating, why is, so you pick a different measure of distance over which you can talk about very tiny changes and then use that to then prove things about the entire thing. Yes, although, honestly, what I would say, I mean, it's true that we use it to prove things, but I would say we use it to understand things. And then because we understand things better, then we can prove things. But the goal is always the understanding. The goal is not so much to prove things. The goal is not to know what's true or false. I mean, this is something I write about in the book, Near the End. And it's something that, it's a wonderful, wonderful essay by Bill Thurston, kind of one of the great geometers of our time, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, called on proof and progress in mathematics. And he writes very wonderfully about how, we're not, it's not a theorem factory where you have a production quota. I mean, the point of mathematics is to help humans understand things. And the way we test that is that we're proving new theorems along the way. That's the benchmark, but that's not the goal. Yeah, but just as a kind of, absolutely, but as a tool, it's kind of interesting to approach a problem by saying, how can I change the distance function? Like what, the nature of distance, because that might start to lead to insights for deeper understanding. Like if I were to try to describe human society by a distance, two people are close if they love each other. Right. And then start to do a full analysis on the everybody that lives on earth currently, the 7 billion people. And from that perspective, as opposed to the geographic perspective of distance. And then maybe there could be a bunch of insights about the source of violence, the source of maybe entrepreneurial success or invention or economic success or different systems, communism, capitalism start to, I mean, that's, I guess what economics tries to do, but really saying, okay, let's think outside the box about totally new distance functions that could unlock something profound about the space. Yeah, because think about it. Okay, here's, I mean, now we're gonna talk about AI, which you know a lot more about than I do. So just start laughing uproariously if I say something that's completely wrong. We both know very little relative to what we will know centuries from now. That is a really good humble way to think about it. I like it. Okay, so let's just go for it. Okay, so I think you'll agree with this, that in some sense, what's good about AI is that we can't test any case in advance, the whole point of AI is to make, or one point of it, I guess, is to make good predictions about cases we haven't yet seen. And in some sense, that's always gonna involve some notion of distance, because it's always gonna involve somehow taking a case we haven't seen and saying what cases that we have seen is it close to, is it like, is it somehow an interpolation between. Now, when we do that, in order to talk about things being like other things, implicitly or explicitly, we're invoking some notion of distance, and boy, we better get it right. If you try to do natural language processing and your idea of distance between words is how close they are in the dictionary, when you write them in alphabetical order, you are gonna get pretty bad translations, right? No, the notion of distance has to come from somewhere else. Yeah, that's essentially what neural networks are doing, that's what word embeddings are doing is coming up with. In the case of word embeddings, literally, literally what they are doing is learning a distance. But those are super complicated distance functions, and it's almost nice to think maybe there's a nice transformation that's simple. Sorry, there's a nice formulation of the distance. Again with the simple. So you don't, let me ask you about this. From an understanding perspective, there's the Richard Feynman, maybe attributed to him, but maybe many others, is this idea that if you can't explain something simply that you don't understand it. In how many cases, how often is that true? Do you find there's some profound truth in that? Oh, okay, so you were about to ask, is it true? To which I would say flatly, no. But then you said, you followed that up with, is there some profound truth in it? And I'm like, okay, sure. So there's some truth in it. It's not true. But it's not true. It's just not. That's such a mathematician answer. The truth that is in it is that learning to explain something helps you understand it. But real things are not simple. A few things are, most are not. And to be honest, we don't really know whether Feynman really said that right or something like that is sort of disputed. But I don't think Feynman could have literally believed that whether or not he said it. And he was the kind of guy, I didn't know him, but I've been reading his writing, he liked to sort of say stuff, like stuff that sounded good. You know what I mean? So it's totally strikes me as the kind of thing he could have said because he liked the way saying it made him feel, but also knowing that he didn't like literally mean it. Well, I definitely have a lot of friends and I've talked to a lot of physicists and they do derive joy from believing that they can explain stuff simply or believing it's possible to explain stuff simply, even when the explanation is not actually that simple. Like I've heard people think that the explanation is simple and they do the explanation. And I think it is simple, but it's not capturing the phenomena that we're discussing. It's capturing, it's somehow maps in their mind, but it's taking as a starting point, as an assumption that there's a deep knowledge and a deep understanding that's actually very complicated. And the simplicity is almost like a poem about the more complicated thing as opposed to a distillation. And I love poems, but a poem is not an explanation. Well, some people might disagree with that, but certainly from a mathematical perspective. No poet would disagree with it. No poet would disagree. You don't think there's some things that can only be described imprecisely? As an explanation. I don't think any poet would say their poem is an explanation. They might say it's a description. They might say it's sort of capturing sort of. Well, some people might say the only truth is like music. Not the only truth, but some truths can only be expressed through art. And I mean, that's the whole thing we're talking about religion and myth. And there's some things that are limited cognitive capabilities and the tools of mathematics or the tools of physics are just not going to allow us to capture. Like it's possible consciousness is one of those things. And. Yes, that is definitely possible. But I would even say, look, I mean, consciousness is a thing about which we're still in the dark as to whether there's an explanation we would understand it as an explanation at all. By the way, okay. I got to give yet one more amazing Poincare quote because this guy just never stopped coming up with great quotes that, Paul Erdős, another fellow who appears in the book. And by the way, he thinks about this notion of distance of like personal affinity, kind of like what you're talking about, the kind of social network and that notion of distance that comes from that. So that's something that Paul Erdős. Erdős did? Well, he thought about distances and networks. I guess he didn't probably, he didn't think about the social network. Oh, that's fascinating. And that's how it started that story of Erdős number. Yeah, okay. It's hard to distract. But you know, Erdős was sort of famous for saying, and this is sort of long lines we're saying, he talked about the book, capital T, capital B, the book. And that's the book where God keeps the right proof of every theorem. So when he saw a proof he really liked, it was like really elegant, really simple. Like that's from the book. That's like you found one of the ones that's in the book. He wasn't a religious guy, by the way. He referred to God as the supreme fascist. He was like, but somehow he was like, I don't really believe in God, but I believe in God's book. I mean, it was, but Poincare on the other hand, and by the way, there were other managers. Hilda Hudson is one who comes up in this book. She also kind of saw math. She's one of the people who sort of develops the disease model that we now use, that we use to sort of track pandemics, this SIR model that sort of originally comes from her work with Ronald Ross. But she was also super, super, super devout. And she also sort of on the other side of the religious coin was like, yeah, math is how we communicate with God. She has a great, all these people are incredibly quotable. She says, you know, math is, the truth, the things about mathematics, she's like, they're not the most important of God thoughts, but they're the only ones that we can know precisely. So she's like, this is the one place where we get to sort of see what God's thinking when we do mathematics. Again, not a fan of poetry or music. Some people will say Hendrix is like, some people say chapter one of that book is mathematics, and then chapter two is like classic rock. Right? So like, it's not clear that the... I'm sorry, you just sent me off on a tangent, just imagining like Erdos at a Hendrix concert, like trying to figure out if it was from the book or not. What I was coming to was just to say, but what Poincaré said about this is he's like, you know, if like, this is all worked out in the language of the divine, and if a divine being like came down and told it to us, we wouldn't be able to understand it, so it doesn't matter. So Poincaré was of the view that there were things that were sort of like inhumanly complex, and that was how they really were. Our job is to figure out the things that are not like that. That are not like that. All this talk of primes got me hungry for primes. You wrote a blog post, The Beauty of Bounding Gaps, a huge discovery about prime numbers and what it means for the future of math. Can you tell me about prime numbers? What the heck are those? What are twin primes? What are prime gaps? What are bounding gaps and primes? What are all these things? And what, if anything, or what exactly is beautiful about them? Yeah, so, you know, prime numbers are one of the things that number theorists study the most and have for millennia. They are numbers which can't be factored. And then you say, like, five. And then you're like, wait, I can factor five. Five is five times one. Okay, not like that. That is a factorization. It absolutely is a way of expressing five as a product of two things. But don't you agree there's like something trivial about it? It's something you could do to any number. It doesn't have content the way that if I say that 12 is six times two or 35 is seven times five, I've really done something to it. I've broken up. So those are the kind of factorizations that count. And a number that doesn't have a factorization like that is called prime, except, historical side note, one, which at some times in mathematical history has been deemed to be a prime, but currently is not. And I think that's for the best. But I bring it up only because sometimes people think that, you know, these definitions are kind of, if we think about them hard enough, we can figure out which definition is true. No. There's just an artifact of mathematics. So it's a question of which definition is best for us, for our purposes. Well, those edge cases are weird, right? So it can't be, it doesn't count when you use yourself as a number or one as part of the factorization or as the entirety of the factorization. So you somehow get to the meat of the number by factorizing it. And that seems to get to the core of all of mathematics. Yeah, you take any number and you factorize it until you can factorize no more. And what you have left is some big pile of primes. I mean, by definition, when you can't factor anymore, when you're done, when you can't break the numbers up anymore, what's left must be prime. You know, 12 breaks into two and two and three. So these numbers are the atoms, the building blocks of all numbers. And there's a lot we know about them, or there's much more that we don't know about them. I'll tell you the first few. There's two, three, five, seven, 11. By the way, they're all gonna be odd from then on because if they were even, I could factor out two out of them. But it's not all the odd numbers. Nine isn't prime because it's three times three. 15 isn't prime because it's three times five, but 13 is. Where were we? Two, three, five, seven, 11, 13, 17, 19. Not 21, but 23 is, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so you could go on. How high could you go if we were just sitting here? By the way, your own brain. If continuous, without interruption, would you be able to go over 100? I think so. There's always those ones that trip people up. There's a famous one, the Grotendeek prime 57, like sort of Alexander Grotendeek, the great algebraic geometer was sort of giving some lecture involving a choice of a prime in general. And somebody said, can't you just choose a prime? And he said, okay, 57, which is in fact not prime. It's three times 19. Oh, damn. But it was like, I promise you in some circles it's a funny story. But there's a humor in it. Yes, I would say over 100, I definitely don't remember. Like 107, I think, I'm not sure. Okay, like, I mean. So is there a category of like fake primes that are easily mistaken to be prime? Like 57, I wonder. Yeah, so I would say 57 and 51 are definitely like prime offenders. Oh, I didn't do that on purpose. Oh, well done. Didn't do it on purpose. Anyway, they're definitely ones that people, or 91 is another classic, seven times 13. It really feels kind of prime, doesn't it? But it is not. Yeah. But there's also, by the way, but there's also an actual notion of pseudo prime, which is a thing with a formal definition, which is not a psychological thing. It is a prime which passes a primality test devised by Fermat, which is a very good test, which if a number fails this test, it's definitely not prime. And so there was some hope that, oh, maybe if a number passes the test, then it definitely is prime. That would give a very simple criterion for primality. Unfortunately, it's only perfect in one direction. So there are numbers, I want to say 341 is the smallest, which pass the test but are not prime, 341. Is this test easily explainable or no? Yes, actually. Ready, let me give you the simplest version of it. You can dress it up a little bit, but here's the basic idea. I take the number, the mystery number, I raise two to that power. So let's say your mystery number is six. Are you sorry you asked me? Are you ready? No, you're breaking my brain again, but yes. Let's do it. We're going to do a live demonstration. Let's say your number is six. So I'm going to raise two to the sixth power. Okay, so if I were working on it, I'd be like that's two cubes squared, so that's eight times eight, so that's 64. Now we're going to divide by six, but I don't actually care what the quotient is, only the remainder. So let's see, 64 divided by six is, well, there's a quotient of 10, but the remainder is four. So you failed because the answer has to be two. For any prime, let's do it with five, which is prime. Two to the fifth is 32. Divide 32 by five, and you get six with a remainder of two. With a remainder of two, yeah. For seven, two to the seventh is 128. Divide that by seven, and let's see, I think that's seven times 14, is that right? No. Seven times 18 is 126 with a remainder of two, right? 128 is a multiple of seven plus two. So if that remainder is not two, then it's definitely not prime. And then if it is, it's likely a prime, but not for sure. It's likely a prime, but not for sure. And there's actually a beautiful geometric proof which is in the book, actually. That's like one of the most granular parts of the book because it's such a beautiful proof, I couldn't not give it. So you draw a lot of like opal and pearl necklaces and spin them. That's kind of the geometric nature of this proof of Fermat's Little Theorem. So yeah, so with pseudo primes, there are primes that are kind of faking it. They pass that test, but there are numbers that are faking it that pass that test, but are not actually prime. But the point is, there are many, many, many theorems about prime numbers. There's a bunch of questions to ask. Is there an infinite number of primes? Can we say something about the gap between primes as the numbers grow larger and larger and larger and so on? Yeah, it's a perfect example of your desire for simplicity in all things. You know what would be really simple? If there was only finitely many primes and then there would be this finite set of atoms that all numbers would be built up. That would be very simple and good in certain ways, but it's completely false. And number theory would be totally different if that were the case. It's just not true. In fact, this is something else that Euclid knew. So this is a very, very old fact, like much before, long before we've had anything like modern number theory. The primes are infinite. The primes that there are, right. There's an infinite number of primes. So what about the gaps between the primes? Right, so one thing that people recognized and really thought about a lot is that the primes, on average, seem to get farther and farther apart as they get bigger and bigger. In other words, it's less and less common. Like I already told you of the first 10 numbers, two, three, five, seven, four of them are prime. That's a lot, 40%. If I looked at 10 digit numbers, no way would 40% of those be prime. Being prime would be a lot rarer. In some sense, because there's a lot more things for them to be divisible by. That's one way of thinking of it. It's a lot more possible for there to be a factorization because there's a lot of things you can try to factor out of it. As the numbers get bigger and bigger, primality gets rarer and rarer, and the extent to which that's the case, that's pretty well understood. But then you can ask more fine grained questions, and here is one. A twin prime is a pair of primes that are two apart, like three and five, or like 11 and 13, or like 17 and 19. And one thing we still don't know is are there infinitely many of those? We know on average, they get farther and farther apart, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be occasional folks that come close together. And indeed, we think that there are. And one interesting question, I mean, this is, because I think you might say, well, how could one possibly have a right to have an opinion about something like that? We don't have any way of describing a process that makes primes. Sure, you can look at your computer and see a lot of them, but the fact that there's a lot, why is that evidence that there's infinitely many, right? Maybe I can go on the computer and find 10 million. Well, 10 million is pretty far from infinity, right? So how is that evidence? There's a lot of things. There's like a lot more than 10 million atoms. That doesn't mean there's infinitely many atoms in the universe, right? I mean, on most people's physical theories, there's probably not, as I understand it. Okay, so why would we think this? The answer is that it turns out to be like incredibly productive and enlightening to think about primes as if they were random numbers, as if they were randomly distributed according to a certain law. Now they're not, they're not random. There's no chance involved. There it's completely deterministic whether a number is prime or not. And yet it just turns out to be phenomenally useful in mathematics to say, even if something is governed by a deterministic law, let's just pretend it wasn't. Let's just pretend that they were produced by some random process and see if the behavior is roughly the same. And if it's not, maybe change the random process, maybe make the randomness a little bit different and tweak it and see if you can find a random process that matches the behavior we see. And then maybe you predict that other behaviors of the system are like that of the random process. And so that's kind of like, it's funny because I think when you talk to people at the twin prime conjecture, people think you're saying, wow, there's like some deep structure there that like makes those primes be like close together again and again. And no, it's the opposite of deep structure. What we say when we say we believe the twin prime conjecture is that we believe the primes are like sort of strewn around pretty randomly. And if they were, then by chance, you would expect there to be infinitely many twin primes. And we're saying, yeah, we expect them to behave just like they would if they were random dirt. The fascinating parallel here is, I just got a chance to talk to Sam Harris and he uses the prime numbers as an example. Often, I don't know if you're familiar with who Sam is. He uses that as an example of there being no free will. Wait, where does he get this? Well, he just uses as an example of, it might seem like this is a random number generator, but it's all like formally defined. So if we keep getting more and more primes, then like that might feel like a new discovery and that might feel like a new experience, but it's not. It was always written in the cards. But it's funny that you say that because a lot of people think of like randomness, the fundamental randomness within the nature of reality might be the source of something that we experience as free will. And you're saying it's like useful to look at prime numbers as a random process in order to prove stuff about them. But fundamentally, of course, it's not a random process. Well, not in order to prove some stuff about them so much as to figure out what we expect to be true and then try to prove that. Because here's what you don't want to do. Try really hard to prove something that's false. That makes it really hard to prove the thing if it's false. So you certainly want to have some heuristic ways of guessing, making good guesses about what's true. So yeah, here's what I would say. You're going to be imaginary Sam Harris now. Like you are talking about prime numbers and you are like, but prime numbers are completely deterministic. And I'm saying like, well, but let's treat them like a random process. And then you say, but you're just saying something that's not true. They're not a random process, they're deterministic. And I'm like, okay, great. You hold to your insistence that it's not a random process. Meanwhile, I'm generating insight about the primes that you're not because I'm willing to sort of pretend that there's something that they're not in order to understand what's going on. Yeah, so it doesn't matter what the reality is. What matters is what framework of thought results in the maximum number of insights. Yeah, because I feel, look, I'm sorry, but I feel like you have more insights about people. If you think of them as like beings that have wants and needs and desires and do stuff on purpose, even if that's not true, you still understand better what's going on by treating them in that way. Don't you find, look, when you work on machine learning, don't you find yourself sort of talking about what the machine is trying to do in a certain instance? Do you not find yourself drawn to that language? Well, it knows this, it's trying to do that, it's learning that. I'm certainly drawn to that language to the point where I receive quite a bit of criticisms for it because I, you know, like. Oh, I'm on your side, man. So especially in robotics, I don't know why, but robotics people don't like to name their robots. They certainly don't like to gender their robots because the moment you gender a robot, you start to anthropomorphize. If you say he or she, you start to, in your mind, construct like a life story. In your mind, you can't help it. There's like, you create like a humorous story to this person. You start to, this person, this robot, you start to project your own. But I think that's what we do to each other. And I think that's actually really useful for the engineering process, especially for human robot interaction. And yes, for machine learning systems, for helping you build an intuition about a particular problem. It's almost like asking this question, you know, when a machine learning system fails in a particular edge case, asking like, what were you thinking about? Like, like asking, like almost like when you're talking about to a child who just did something bad, you want to understand like what was, how did they see the world? Maybe there's a totally new, maybe you're the one that's thinking about the world incorrectly. And yeah, that anthropomorphization process, I think is ultimately good for insight. And the same is, I agree with you. I tend to believe about free will as well. Let me ask you a ridiculous question, if it's okay. Of course. I've just recently, most people go on like rabbit hole, like YouTube things. And I went on a rabbit hole often do of Wikipedia. And I found a page on finiteism, ultra finiteism and intuitionism or into, I forget what it's called. Yeah, intuitionism. Intuitionism. That seemed pretty, pretty interesting. I have it on my to do list actually like look into like, is there people who like formally attract, like real mathematicians are trying to argue for this. But the belief there, I think, let's say finiteism that infinity is fake. Meaning, infinity might be like a useful hack for certain, like a useful tool in mathematics, but it really gets us into trouble because there's no infinity in the real world. Maybe I'm sort of not expressing that fully correctly, but basically saying like there's things that once you add into mathematics, things that are not provably within the physical world, you're starting to inject to corrupt your framework of reason. What do you think about that? I mean, I think, okay, so first of all, I'm not an expert and I couldn't even tell you what the difference is between those three terms, finiteism, ultra finiteism and intuitionism, although I know they're related and I tend to associate them with the Netherlands in the 1930s. Okay, I'll tell you, can I just quickly comment because I read the Wikipedia page. The difference in ultra. That's like the ultimate sentence of the modern age. Can I just comment because I read the Wikipedia page. That sums up our moment. Bro, I'm basically an expert. Ultra finiteism. So, finiteism says that the only infinity you're allowed to have is that the natural numbers are infinite. So, like those numbers are infinite. So, like one, two, three, four, five, the integers are infinite. The ultra finiteism says, nope, even that infinity is fake. I'll bet ultra finiteism came second. I'll bet it's like when there's like a hardcore scene and then one guy's like, oh, now there's a lot of people in the scene. I have to find a way to be more hardcore than the hardcore people. It's all back to the emo, Doc. Okay, so is there any, are you ever, because I'm often uncomfortable with infinity, like psychologically. I have trouble when that sneaks in there. It's because it works so damn well, I get a little suspicious, because it could be almost like a crutch or an oversimplification that's missing something profound about reality. Well, so first of all, okay, if you say like, is there like a serious way of doing mathematics that doesn't really treat infinity as a real thing or maybe it's kind of agnostic and it's like, I'm not really gonna make a firm statement about whether it's a real thing or not. Yeah, that's called most of the history of mathematics. So it's only after Cantor that we really are sort of, okay, we're gonna like have a notion of like the cardinality of an infinite set and like do something that you might call like the modern theory of infinity. That said, obviously everybody was drawn to this notion and no, not everybody was comfortable with it. Look, I mean, this is what happens with Newton. I mean, so Newton understands that to talk about tangents and to talk about instantaneous velocity, he has to do something that we would now call taking a limit, right? The fabled dy over dx, if you sort of go back to your calculus class, for those who have taken calculus and remember this mysterious thing. And you know, what is it? What is it? Well, he'd say like, well, it's like, you sort of divide the length of this line segment by the length of this other line segment. And then you make them a little shorter and you divide again. And then you make them a little shorter and you divide again. And then you just keep on doing that until they're like infinitely short and then you divide them again. These quantities that are like, they're not zero, but they're also smaller than any actual number, these infinitesimals. Well, people were queasy about it and they weren't wrong to be queasy about it, right? From a modern perspective, it was not really well formed. There's this very famous critique of Newton by Bishop Berkeley, where he says like, what these things you define, like, you know, they're not zero, but they're smaller than any number. Are they the ghosts of departed quantities? That was this like ultra burn of Newton. And on the one hand, he was right. It wasn't really rigorous by modern standards. On the other hand, like Newton was out there doing calculus and other people were not, right? It works, it works. I think a sort of intuitionist view, for instance, I would say would express serious doubt. And by the way, it's not just infinity. It's like saying, I think we would express serious doubt that like the real numbers exist. Now, most people are comfortable with the real numbers. Well, computer scientists with floating point number, I mean, floating point arithmetic. That's a great point, actually. I think in some sense, this flavor of doing math, saying we shouldn't talk about things that we cannot specify in a finite amount of time, there's something very computational in flavor about that. And it's probably not a coincidence that it becomes popular in the 30s and 40s, which is also like kind of like the dawn of ideas about formal computation, right? You probably know the timeline better than I do. Sorry, what becomes popular? These ideas that maybe we should be doing math in this more restrictive way where even a thing that, because look, the origin of all this is like, number represents a magnitude, like the length of a line. So I mean, the idea that there's a continuum, there's sort of like, it's pretty old, but just because something is old doesn't mean we can't reject it if we want to. Well, a lot of the fundamental ideas in computer science, when you talk about the complexity of problems, to Turing himself, they rely on an infinity as well. The ideas that kind of challenge that, the whole space of machine learning, I would say, challenges that. It's almost like the engineering approach to things, like the floating point arithmetic. The other one that, back to John Conway, that challenges this idea, I mean, maybe to tie in the ideas of deformation theory and limits to infinity is this idea of cellular automata with John Conway looking at the game of life, Stephen Wolfram's work, that I've been a big fan of for a while, cellular automata. I was wondering if you have, if you have ever encountered these kinds of objects, you ever looked at them as a mathematician, where you have very simple rules of tiny little objects that when taken as a whole create incredible complexities, but are very difficult to analyze, very difficult to make sense of, even though the one individual object, one part, it's like what we were saying about Andrew Wiles, you can look at the deformation of a small piece to tell you about the whole. It feels like with cellular automata or any kind of complex systems, it's often very difficult to say something about the whole thing, even when you can precisely describe the operation of the local neighborhoods. Yeah, I mean, I love that subject. I haven't really done research on it myself. I've played around with it. I'll send you a fun blog post I wrote where I made some cool texture patterns from cellular automata that I, but. And those are really always compelling is like you create simple rules and they create some beautiful textures. It doesn't make any sense. Actually, did you see, there was a great paper. I don't know if you saw this, like a machine learning paper. Yes. I don't know if you saw the one I'm talking about where they were like learning the texture as like let's try to like reverse engineer and like learn a cellular automaton that can reduce texture that looks like this from the images. Very cool. And as you say, the thing you said is I feel the same way when I read machine learning paper is that what's especially interesting is the cases where it doesn't work. Like what does it do when it doesn't do the thing that you tried to train it to do? That's extremely interesting. Yeah, yeah, that was a cool paper. So yeah, so let's start with the game of life. Let's start with, or let's start with John Conway. So Conway. So yeah, so let's start with John Conway again. Just, I don't know, from my outsider's perspective, there's not many mathematicians that stand out throughout the history of the 20th century. And he's one of them. I feel like he's not sufficiently recognized. I think he's pretty recognized. Okay, well. I mean, he was a full professor at Princeton for most of his life. He was sort of certainly at the pinnacle of. Yeah, but I found myself every time I talk about Conway and how excited I am about him, I have to constantly explain to people who he is. And that's always a sad sign to me. But that's probably true for a lot of mathematicians. I was about to say, I feel like you have a very elevated idea of how famous. This is what happens when you grow up in the Soviet Union or you think the mathematicians are like very, very famous. Yeah, but I'm not actually so convinced at a tiny tangent that that shouldn't be so. I mean, there's, it's not obvious to me that that's one of the, like if I were to analyze American society, that perhaps elevating mathematical and scientific thinking to a little bit higher level would benefit the society. Well, both in discovering the beauty of what it is to be human and for actually creating cool technology, better iPhones. But anyway, John Conway. Yeah, and Conway is such a perfect example of somebody whose humanity was, and his personality was like wound up with his mathematics, right? And so it's not, sometimes I think people who are outside the field think of mathematics as this kind of like cold thing that you do separate from your existence as a human being. No way, your personality is in there, just as it would be in like a novel you wrote or a painting you painted or just like the way you walk down the street. Like it's in there, it's you doing it. And Conway was certainly a singular personality. I think anybody would say that he was playful, like everything was a game to him. Now, what you might think I'm gonna say, and it's true is that he sort of was very playful in his way of doing mathematics, but it's also true, it went both ways. He also sort of made mathematics out of games. He like looked at, he was a constant inventor of games or like crazy names. And then he would sort of analyze those games mathematically to the point that he, and then later collaborating with Knuth like, created this number system, the serial numbers in which actually each number is a game. There's a wonderful book about this called, I mean, there are his own books. And then there's like a book that he wrote with Berlekamp and Guy called Winning Ways, which is such a rich source of ideas. And he too kind of has his own crazy number system in which by the way, there are these infinitesimals, the ghosts of departed quantities. They're in there now, not as ghosts, but as like certain kind of two player games. So, he was a guy, so I knew him when I was a postdoc and I knew him at Princeton and our research overlapped in some ways. Now it was on stuff that he had worked on many years before. The stuff I was working on kind of connected with stuff in group theory, which somehow seems to keep coming up. And so I often would like sort of ask him a question. I would sort of come upon him in the common room and I would ask him a question about something. And just anytime you turned him on, you know what I mean? You sort of asked the question, it was just like turning a knob and winding him up and he would just go and you would get a response that was like so rich and went so many places and taught you so much. And usually had nothing to do with your question. Usually your question was just a prompt to him. You couldn't count on actually getting the question answered. Yeah, those brilliant, curious minds even at that age. Yeah, it was definitely a huge loss. But on his game of life, which was I think he developed in the 70s as almost like a side thing, a fun little experiment. His game of life is this, it's a very simple algorithm. It's not really a game per se in the sense of the kinds of games that he liked where people played against each other. But essentially it's a game that you play with marking little squares on the sheet of graph paper. And in the 70s, I think he was like literally doing it with like a pen on graph paper. You have some configuration of squares. Some of the squares in the graph paper are filled in, some are not. And there's a rule, a single rule that tells you at the next stage, which squares are filled in and which squares are not. Sometimes an empty square gets filled in, that's called birth. Sometimes a square that's filled in gets erased, that's called death. And there's rules for which squares are born and which squares die. The rule is very simple. You can write it on one line. And then the great miracle is that you can start from some very innocent looking little small set of boxes and get these results of incredible richness. And of course, nowadays you don't do it on paper. Nowadays you do it in a computer. There's actually a great iPad app called Golly, which I really like that has like Conway's original rule and like, gosh, like hundreds of other variants and it's a lightning fast. So you can just be like, I wanna see 10,000 generations of this rule play out like faster than your eye can even follow. And it's like amazing. So I highly recommend it if this is at all intriguing to you getting Golly on your iOS device. And you can do this kind of process, which I really enjoy doing, which is almost from like putting a Darwin hat on or a biologist hat on and doing analysis of a higher level of abstraction, like the organisms that spring up. Cause there's different kinds of organisms. Like you can think of them as species and they interact with each other. They can, there's gliders, they shoot different, there's like things that can travel around. There's things that can, glider guns that can generate those gliders. You can use the same kind of language as you would about describing a biological system. So it's a wonderful laboratory and it's kind of a rebuke to someone who doesn't think that like very, very rich, complex structure can come from very simple underlying laws. Like it definitely can. Now, here's what's interesting. If you just pick like some random rule, you wouldn't get interesting complexity. I think that's one of the most interesting things of these, one of these most interesting features of this whole subject, that the rules have to be tuned just right. Like a sort of typical rule set doesn't generate any kind of interesting behavior. But some do. And I don't think we have a clear way of understanding which do and which don't. Maybe Steven thinks he does, I don't know. No, no, it's a giant mystery where Steven Wolfram did is, now there's a whole interesting aspect to the fact that he's a little bit of an outcast in the mathematics and physics community because he's so focused on a particular, his particular work. I think if you put ego aside, which I think unfairly some people are not able to look beyond, I think his work is actually quite brilliant. But what he did is exactly this process of Darwin like exploration. He's taking these very simple ideas and writing a thousand page book on them, meaning like, let's play around with this thing. Let's see. And can we figure anything out? Spoiler alert, no, we can't. In fact, he does a challenge. I think it's like rule 30 challenge, which is quite interesting, just simply for machine learning people, for mathematics people, is can you predict the middle column? For his, it's a 1D cellular automata. Can you, generally speaking, can you predict anything about how a particular rule will evolve just in the future? Very simple. Just looking at one particular part of the world, just zooming in on that part, 100 steps ahead, can you predict something? And the challenge is to do that kind of prediction so far as nobody's come up with an answer. But the point is like, we can't. We don't have tools or maybe it's impossible or, I mean, he has these kind of laws of irreducibility that he refers to, but it's poetry. It's like, we can't prove these things. It seems like we can't. That's the basic. It almost sounds like ancient mathematics or something like that, where you're like, the gods will not allow us to predict the cellular automata. But that's fascinating that we can't. I'm not sure what to make of it. And there's power to calling this particular set of rules game of life as Conway did, because not exactly sure, but I think he had a sense that there's some core ideas here that are fundamental to life, to complex systems, to the way life emerge on earth. I'm not sure I think Conway thought that. It's something that, I mean, Conway always had a rather ambivalent relationship with the game of life because I think he saw it as, it was certainly the thing he was most famous for in the outside world. And I think that he, his view, which is correct, is that he had done things that were much deeper mathematically than that. And I think it always aggrieved him a bit that he was the game of life guy when he proved all these wonderful theorems and created all these wonderful games, created the serial numbers. I mean, he was a very tireless guy who just did an incredibly variegated array of stuff. So he was exactly the kind of person who you would never want to reduce to one achievement. You know what I mean? Let me ask you about group theory. You mentioned it a few times. What is group theory? What is an idea from group theory that you find beautiful? Well, so I would say group theory sort of starts as the general theory of symmetries, that people looked at different kinds of things and said, as we said, oh, it could have, maybe all there is is symmetry from left to right, like a human being, right? That's roughly bilaterally symmetric, as we say. So there's two symmetries. And then you're like, well, wait, didn't I say there's just one, there's just left to right? Well, we always count the symmetry of doing nothing. We always count the symmetry that's like there's flip and don't flip. Those are the two configurations that you can be in. So there's two. You know, something like a rectangle is bilaterally symmetric. You can flip it left to right, but you can also flip it top to bottom. So there's actually four symmetries. There's do nothing, flip it left to right and flip it top to bottom or do both of those things. And then a square, there's even more, because now you can rotate it. You can rotate it by 90 degrees. So you can't do that. That's not a symmetry of the rectangle. If you try to rotate it 90 degrees, you get a rectangle oriented in a different way. So a person has two symmetries, a rectangle four, a square eight, different kinds of shapes have different numbers of symmetries. And the real observation is that that's just not like a set of things, they can be combined. You do one symmetry, then you do another. The result of that is some third symmetry. So a group really abstracts away this notion of saying, it's just some collection of transformations you can do to a thing where you combine any two of them to get a third. So, you know, a place where this comes up in computer science is in sorting, because the ways of permuting a set, the ways of taking sort of some set of things you have on the table and putting them in a different order, shuffling a deck of cards, for instance, those are the symmetries of the deck. And there's a lot of them. There's not two, there's not four, there's not eight. Think about how many different orders the deck of card can be in. Each one of those is the result of applying a symmetry to the original deck. So a shuffle is a symmetry, right? You're reordering the cards. If I shuffle and then you shuffle, the result is some other kind of thing. You might call it a double shuffle, which is a more complicated symmetry. So group theory is kind of the study of the general abstract world that encompasses all these kinds of things. But then of course, like lots of things that are way more complicated than that. Like infinite groups of symmetries, for instance. So they can be infinite, huh? Oh yeah. Okay. Well, okay, ready? Think about the symmetries of the line. You're like, okay, I can reflect it left to right, you know, around the origin. Okay, but I could also reflect it left to right, grabbing somewhere else, like at one or two or pi or anywhere. Or I could just slide it some distance. That's a symmetry. Slide it five units over. So there's clearly infinitely many symmetries of the line. That's an example of an infinite group of symmetries. Is it possible to say something that kind of captivates, keeps being brought up by physicists, which is gauge theory, gauge symmetry, as one of the more complicated type of symmetries? Is there an easy explanation of what the heck it is? Is that something that comes up on your mind at all? Well, I'm not a mathematical physicist, but I can say this. It is certainly true that it has been a very useful notion in physics to try to say like, what are the symmetry groups of the world? Like what are the symmetries under which things don't change, right? So we just, I think we talked a little bit earlier about it should be a basic principle that a theorem that's true here is also true over there. And same for a physical law, right? I mean, if gravity is like this over here, it should also be like this over there. Okay, what that's saying is we think translation in space should be a symmetry. All the laws of physics should be unchanged if the symmetry we have in mind is a very simple one like translation. And so then there becomes a question, like what are the symmetries of the actual world with its physical laws? And one way of thinking, this isn't oversimplification, but like one way of thinking of this big shift from before Einstein to after is that we just changed our idea about what the fundamental group of symmetries were. So that things like the Lorenz contraction, things like these bizarre relativistic phenomenon or Lorenz would have said, oh, to make this work, we need a thing to change its shape if it's moving nearly the speed of light. Well, under the new framework, it's much better. You say, oh, no, it wasn't changing its shape. You were just wrong about what counted as a symmetry. Now that we have this new group, the so called Lorenz group, now that we understand what the symmetries really are, we see it was just an illusion that the thing was changing its shape. Yeah, so you can then describe the sameness of things under this weirdness that is general relativity, for example. Yeah, yeah, still, I wish there was a simpler explanation of like exact, I mean, gauge symmetries, pretty simple general concept about rulers being deformed. I've actually just personally been on a search, not a very rigorous or aggressive search, but for something I personally enjoy, which is taking complicated concepts and finding the sort of minimal example that I can play around with, especially programmatically. That's great, I mean, this is what we try to train our students to do, right? I mean, in class, this is exactly what, this is like best pedagogical practice. I do hope there's simple explanation, especially like I've in my sort of drunk random walk, drunk walk, whatever that's called, sometimes stumble into the world of topology and like quickly, like, you know when you go into a party and you realize this is not the right party for me? It's, so whenever I go into topology, it's like so much math everywhere. I don't even know what, it feels like this is me like being a hater, I think there's way too much math. Like there are two, the cool kids who just want to have, like everything is expressed through math. Because they're actually afraid to express stuff simply through language. That's my hater formulation of topology. But at the same time, I'm sure that's very necessary to do sort of rigorous discussion. But I feel like. But don't you think that's what gauge symmetry is like? I mean, it's not a field I know well, but it certainly seems like. Yes, it is like that. But my problem with topology, okay, and even like differential geometry is like, you're talking about beautiful things. Like if they could be visualized, it's open question if everything could be visualized, but you're talking about things that can be visually stunning, I think. But they are hidden underneath all of that math. Like if you look at the papers that are written in topology, if you look at all the discussions on Stack Exchange, they're all math dense, math heavy. And the only kind of visual things that emerge every once in a while, is like something like a Mobius strip. Every once in a while, some kind of simple visualizations. Every once in a while, some kind of simple visualizations. Every once in a while, some kind of simple visualizations. Well, there's the vibration, there's the hop vibration or all those kinds of things that somebody, some grad student from like 20 years ago wrote a program in Fortran to visualize it, and that's it. And it's just, you know, it's makes me sad because those are visual disciplines. Just like computer vision is a visual discipline. So you can provide a lot of visual examples. I wish topology was more excited and in love with visualizing some of the ideas. I mean, you could say that, but I would say for me, a picture of the hop vibration does nothing for me. Whereas like when you're like, oh, it's like about the quaternions. It's like a subgroup of the quaternions. And I'm like, oh, so now I see what's going on. Like, why didn't you just say that? Why were you like showing me this stupid picture instead of telling me what you were talking about? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm just saying, no, but it goes back to what you were saying about teaching that like people are different in what they'll respond to. So I think there's no, I mean, I'm very opposed to the idea that there's a one right way to explain things. I think there's like a huge variation in like, you know, our brains like have all these like weird like hooks and loops and it's like very hard to know like what's gonna latch on and it's not gonna be the same thing for everybody. So I think monoculture is bad, right? I think that's, and I think we're agreeing on that point that like, it's good that there's like a lot of different ways in and a lot of different ways to describe these ideas because different people are gonna find different things illuminating. But that said, I think there's a lot to be discovered when you force little like silos of brilliant people to kind of find a middle ground or like aggregate or come together in a way. So there's like people that do love visual things. I mean, there's a lot of disciplines, especially in computer science that they're obsessed with visualizing, visualizing data, visualizing neural networks. I mean, neural networks themselves are fundamentally visual. There's a lot of work in computer vision that's very visual. And then coming together with some folks that were like deeply rigorous and are like totally lost in multi dimensional space where it's hard to even bring them back down to 3D. They're very comfortable in this multi dimensional space. So forcing them to kind of work together to communicate because it's not just about public communication of ideas. It's also, I feel like when you're forced to do that public communication like you did with your book, I think deep profound ideas can be discovered that's like applicable for research and for science. Like there's something about that simplification or not simplification, but distillation or condensation or whatever the hell you call it, compression of ideas that somehow actually stimulates creativity. And I'd be excited to see more of that in the mathematics community. Can you? Let me make a crazy metaphor. Maybe it's a little bit like the relation between prose and poetry, right? I mean, if you, you might say like, why do we need anything more than prose? You're trying to convey some information. So you just like say it. Well, poetry does something, right? It's sort of, you might think of it as a kind of compression. Of course, not all poetry is compressed. Like not all, some of it is quite baggy, but like you are kind of, often it's compressed, right? A lyric poem is often sort of like a compression of what would take a long time and be complicated to explain in prose into sort of a different mode that is gonna hit in a different way. We talked about Poincare conjecture. There's a guy, he's Russian, Grigori Perlman. He proved Poincare's conjecture. If you can comment on the proof itself, if that stands out to you as something interesting or the human story of it, which is he turned down the field's metal for the proof. Is there something you find inspiring or insightful about the proof itself or about the man? Yeah, I mean, one thing I really like about the proof and partly that's because it's sort of a thing that happens again and again in this book. I mean, I'm writing about geometry and the way it sort of appears in all these kind of real world problems. But it happens so often that the geometry you think you're studying is somehow not enough. You have to go one level higher in abstraction and study a higher level of geometry. And the way that plays out is that Poincare asks a question about a certain kind of three dimensional object. Is it the usual three dimensional space that we know or is it some kind of exotic thing? And so, of course, this sounds like it's a question about the geometry of the three dimensional space, but no, Perelman understands. And by the way, in a tradition that involves Richard Hamilton and many other people, like most really important mathematical advances, this doesn't happen alone. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens as the culmination of a program that involves many people. Same with Wiles, by the way. I mean, we talked about Wiles and I wanna emphasize that starting all the way back with Kummer, who I mentioned in the 19th century, but Gerhard Frey and Mazer and Ken Ribbit and like many other people are involved in building the other pieces of the arch before you put the keystone in. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Yes. So, what is this idea? The idea is that, well, of course, the geometry of the three dimensional object itself is relevant, but the real geometry you have to understand is the geometry of the space of all three dimensional geometries. Whoa, you're going up a higher level. Because when you do that, you can say, now let's trace out a path in that space. There's a mechanism called Ricci flow. And again, we're outside my research area. So for all the geometric analysts and differential geometers out there listening to this, if I, please, I'm doing my best and I'm roughly saying it. So the Ricci flow allows you to say like, okay, let's start from some mystery three dimensional space, which Poincare would conjecture is essentially the same thing as our familiar three dimensional space, but we don't know that. And now you let it flow. You sort of like let it move in its natural path according to some almost physical process and ask where it winds up. And what you find is that it always winds up. You've continuously deformed it. There's that word deformation again. And what you can prove is that the process doesn't stop until you get to the usual three dimensional space. And since you can get from the mystery thing to the standard space by this process of continually changing and never kind of having any sharp transitions, then the original shape must've been the same as the standard shape. That's the nature of the proof. Now, of course, it's incredibly technical. I think as I understand it, I think the hard part is proving that the favorite word of AI people, you don't get any singularities along the way. But of course, in this context, singularity just means acquiring a sharp kink. It just means becoming non smooth at some point. So just saying something interesting about formal, about the smooth trajectory through this weird space of geometries. But yeah, so what I like about it is that it's just one of many examples of where it's not about the geometry you think it's about. It's about the geometry of all geometries, so to speak. And it's only by kind of like being jerked out of flatland. Same idea. It's only by sort of seeing the whole thing globally at once that you can really make progress on understanding the one thing you thought you were looking at. It's a romantic question, but what do you think about him turning down the Fields Medal? Is that just, are Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals just the cherry on top of the cake and really math itself, the process of curiosity, of pulling at the string of the mystery before us? That's the cake? And then the awards are just icing and clearly I've been fasting and I'm hungry, but do you think it's tragic or just a little curiosity that he turned down the medal? Well, it's interesting because on the one hand, I think it's absolutely true that right, in some kind of like vast spiritual sense, like awards are not important, like not important the way that sort of like understanding the universe is important. On the other hand, most people who are offered that prize accept it, so there's something unusual about his choice there. I wouldn't say I see it as tragic. I mean, maybe if I don't really feel like I have a clear picture of why he chose not to take it. I mean, he's not alone in doing things like this. People sometimes turn down prizes for ideological reasons, but probably more often in mathematics. I mean, I think I'm right in saying that Peter Schultz turned down sort of some big monetary prize because he just, you know, I mean, I think he, at some point you have plenty of money and maybe you think it sends the wrong message about what the point of doing mathematics is. I do find that there's most people accept. You know, most people give it a prize. Most people take it. I mean, people like to be appreciated, but like I said, we're people. Not that different from most other people. But the important reminder that that turning down a prize serves for me is not that there's anything wrong with the prize and there's something wonderful about the prize, I think. The Nobel prize is trickier because so many Nobel prizes are given. First of all, the Nobel prize often forgets many, many of the important people throughout history. Second of all, there's like these weird rules to it that it's only three people and some projects have a huge number of people. And it's like this, it, I don't know. It doesn't kind of highlight the way science is done on some of these projects in the best possible way. But in general, the prizes are great. But what this kind of teaches me and reminds me is sometimes in your life, there'll be moments when the thing that you would really like to do, society would really like you to do, is the thing that goes against something you believe in, whatever that is, some kind of principle. And standing your ground in the face of that is something I believe most people will have a few moments like that in their life, maybe one moment like that, and you have to do it. That's what integrity is. So like, it doesn't have to make sense to the rest of the world, but to stand on that, like to say no, it's interesting, because I think. But do you know that he turned down the prize in service of some principle? Because I don't know that. Well, yes, that seems to be the inkling, but he has never made it super clear. But the inkling is that he had some problems with the whole process of mathematics that includes awards, like this hierarchies and the reputations and all those kinds of things, and individualism that's fundamental to American culture. He probably, because he visited the United States quite a bit that he probably, it's all about experiences. And he may have had some parts of academia, some pockets of academia can be less than inspiring, perhaps sometimes, because of the individual egos involved, not academia, people in general, smart people with egos. And if you interact with a certain kinds of people, you can become cynical too easily. I'm one of those people that I've been really fortunate to interact with incredible people at MIT and academia in general, but I've met some assholes. And I tend to just kind of, when I run into difficult folks, I just kind of smile and send them all my love and just kind of go around. But for others, those experiences can be sticky. Like they can become cynical about the world when folks like that exist. So he may have become a little bit cynical about the process of science. Well, you know, it's a good opportunity. Let's posit that that's his reasoning because I truly don't know. It's an interesting opportunity to go back to almost the very first thing we talked about, the idea of the Mathematical Olympiad, because of course that is, so the International Mathematical Olympiad is like a competition for high school students solving math problems. And in some sense, it's absolutely false to the reality of mathematics, because just as you say, it is a contest where you win prizes. The aim is to sort of be faster than other people. And you're working on sort of canned problems that someone already knows the answer to, like not problems that are unknown. So, you know, in my own life, I think when I was in high school, I was like very motivated by those competitions. And like, I went to the Math Olympiad and... You won it twice and got, I mean... Well, there's something I have to explain to people because it says, I think it says on Wikipedia that I won a gold medal. And in the real Olympics, they only give one gold medal in each event. I just have to emphasize that the International Math Olympiad is not like that. The gold medals are awarded to the top 112th of all participants. So sorry to bust the legend or anything like that. Well, you're an exceptional performer in terms of achieving high scores on the problems and they're very difficult. So you've achieved a high level of performance on the... In this very specialized skill. And by the way, it was a very Cold War activity. You know, in 1987, the first year I went, it was in Havana. Americans couldn't go to Havana back then. It was a very complicated process to get there. And they took the whole American team on a field trip to the Museum of American Imperialism in Havana so we could see what America was all about. How would you recommend a person learn math? So somebody who's young or somebody my age or somebody older who've taken a bunch of math but wants to rediscover the beauty of math and maybe integrate it into their work more solid in the research space and so on. Is there something you could say about the process of... Incorporating mathematical thinking into your life? I mean, the thing is, it's in part a journey of self knowledge. You have to know what's gonna work for you and that's gonna be different for different people. So there are totally people who at any stage of life just start reading math textbooks. That is a thing that you can do and it works for some people and not for others. For others, a gateway is, I always recommend the books of Martin Gardner, another sort of person we haven't talked about but who also, like Conway, embodies that spirit of play. He wrote a column in Scientific American for decades called Mathematical Recreations and there's such joy in it and such fun. And these books, the columns are collected into books and the books are old now but for each generation of people who discover them, they're completely fresh. And they give a totally different way into the subject than reading a formal textbook, which for some people would be the right thing to do. And working contest style problems too, those are bound to books, especially like Russian and Bulgarian problems. There's book after book problems from those contexts. That's gonna motivate some people. For some people, it's gonna be like watching well produced videos, like a totally different format. Like I feel like I'm not answering your question. I'm sort of saying there's no one answer and it's a journey where you figure out what resonates with you. For some people, it's the self discovery is trying to figure out why is it that I wanna know? Okay, I'll tell you a story. Once when I was in grad school, I was very frustrated with my lack of knowledge of a lot of things as we all are because no matter how much we know, we don't know much more and going to grad school means just coming face to face with the incredible overflowing vault of your ignorance. So I told Joe Harris, who was an algebraic geometer, a professor in my department, I was like, I really feel like I don't know enough and I should just take a year of leave and just read EGA, the holy textbook, Elements de Géométrie Algebraique, the Elements of Algebraic Geometry. I'm just gonna, I feel like I don't know enough so I'm just gonna sit and read this like 1500 page many volume book. And he was like, and Professor Harris was like, that's a really stupid idea. And I was like, why is that a stupid idea? Then I would know more algebraic geometry. He's like, because you're not actually gonna do it. Like you learn. I mean, he knew me well enough to say like, you're gonna learn because you're gonna be working on a problem and then there's gonna be a fact from EGA that you need in order to solve your problem that you wanna solve and that's how you're gonna learn it. You're not gonna learn it without a problem to bring you into it. And so for a lot of people, I think if you're like, I'm trying to understand machine learning and I'm like, I can see that there's sort of some mathematical technology that I don't have, I think you like let that problem that you actually care about drive your learning. I mean, one thing I've learned from advising students, math is really hard. In fact, anything that you do right is hard. And because it's hard, like you might sort of have some idea that somebody else gives you, oh, I should learn X, Y and Z. Well, if you don't actually care, you're not gonna do it. You might feel like you should, maybe somebody told you you should, but I think you have to hook it to something that you actually care about. So for a lot of people, that's the way in. You have an engineering problem you're trying to handle, you have a physics problem you're trying to handle, you have a machine learning problem you're trying to handle. Let that not a kind of abstract idea of what the curriculum is, drive your mathematical learning. And also just as a brief comment that math is hard, there's a sense to which hard is a feature, not a bug, in the sense that, again, maybe this is my own learning preference, but I think it's a value to fall in love with the process of doing something hard, overcoming it, and becoming a better person because of it. Like I hate running, I hate exercise, to bring it down to like the simplest hard. And I enjoy the part once it's done, the person I feel like in the rest of the day once I've accomplished it, the actual process, especially the process of getting started in the initial, like it really, I don't feel like doing it. And I really have, the way I feel about running is the way I feel about really anything difficult in the intellectual space, especially in mathematics, but also just something that requires like holding a bunch of concepts in your mind with some uncertainty, like where the terminology or the notation is not very clear. And so you have to kind of hold all those things together and like keep pushing forward through the frustration of really like obviously not understanding certain like parts of the picture, like your giant missing parts of the picture and still not giving up. It's the same way I feel about running. And there's something about falling in love with the feeling of after you went through the journey of not having a complete picture, at the end having a complete picture, and then you get to appreciate the beauty and just remembering that it sucked for a long time and how great it felt when you figured it out, at least at the basic. That's not sort of research thinking, because with research, you probably also have to enjoy the dead ends with learning math from a textbook or from video. There's a nice. I don't think you have to enjoy the dead ends, but I think you have to accept the dead ends. Let's put it that way. Well, yeah, enjoy the suffering of it. So the way I think about it, I do, there's an. I don't enjoy the suffering. It pisses me off. You have to accept that it's part of the process. It's interesting. There's a lot of ways to kind of deal with that dead end. There's a guy who's the ultra marathon runner, Navy SEAL, David Goggins, who kind of, I mean, there's a certain philosophy of like, most people would quit here. And so if most people would quit here and I don't, I'll have an opportunity to discover something beautiful that others haven't yet. And so like any feeling that really sucks, it's like, okay, most people would just like, go do something smarter. And if I stick with this, I will discover a new garden of fruit trees that I can pick. Okay, you say that, but like, what about the guy who like wins the Nathan's hot dog eating contest every year? Like when he eats his 35th hot dog, he like correctly says like, okay, most people would stop here. Are you like lauding that he's like, no, I'm gonna eat the 35th hot dog. I am, I am. In the long arc of history, that man is onto something. Which brings up this question. What advice would you give to young people today, thinking about their career, about their life, whether it's in mathematics, poetry, or hot dog eating contest? And you know, I have kids, so this is actually a live issue for me, right? I actually, it's not a thought experiment. I actually do have to give advice to two young people all the time. They don't listen, but I still give it. You know, one thing I often say to students, I don't think I've actually said this to my kids yet, but I say it to students a lot is, you know, you come to these decision points and everybody is beset by self doubt, right? It's like, not sure like what they're capable of, like not sure what they really wanna do. I always, I sort of tell people like, often when you have a decision to make, one of the choices is the high self esteem choice. And I always tell them, make the high self esteem choice. Make the choice, sort of take yourself out of it and like, if you didn't have those, you can probably figure out what the version of you that feels completely confident would do. And do that and see what happens. And I think that's often like pretty good advice. That's interesting. Sort of like, you know, like with Sims, you can create characters. Create a character of yourself that lacks all the self doubt. Right, but it doesn't mean, I would never say to somebody, you should just go have high self esteem. You shouldn't have doubts. No, you probably should have doubts. It's okay to have them. But sometimes it's good to act in the way that the person who didn't have them would act. That's a really nice way to put it. Yeah, that's like from a third person perspective, take the part of your brain that wants to do big things. What would they do? That's not afraid to do those things. What would they do? Yeah, that's really nice. That's actually a really nice way to formulate it. That's very practical advice. You should give it to your kids. Do you think there's meaning to any of it from a mathematical perspective, this life? If I were to ask you, we talked about primes, talked about proving stuff. Can we say, and then the book that God has, that mathematics allows us to arrive at something about in that book. There's certainly a chapter on the meaning of life in that book. Do you think we humans can get to it? And maybe if you were to write cliff notes, what do you suspect those cliff notes would say? I mean, look, the way I feel is that mathematics, as we've discussed, it underlies the way we think about constructing learning machines. It underlies physics. It can be used. I mean, it does all this stuff. And also you want the meaning of life? I mean, it's like, we already did a lot for you. Like, ask a rabbi. No, I mean, I wrote a lot in the last book, How Not to Be Wrong. I wrote a lot about Pascal, a fascinating guy who is a sort of very serious religious mystic, as well as being an amazing mathematician. And he's well known for Pascal's wager. I mean, he's probably among all mathematicians. He's the one who's best known for this. Can you actually like apply mathematics to kind of these transcendent questions? But what's interesting when I really read Pascal about what he wrote about this, I started to see that people often think, oh, this is him saying, I'm gonna use mathematics to sort of show you why you should believe in God. You know, mathematics has the answer to this question. But he really doesn't say that. He almost kind of says the opposite. If you ask Blaise Pascal, like, why do you believe in God? He'd be like, oh, cause I met God. You know, he had this kind of like psychedelic experience. It's like a mystical experience where as he tells it, he just like directly encountered God. It's like, okay, I guess there's a God, I met him last night. So that's it. That's why he believed. It didn't have to do with any kind. You know, the mathematical argument was like about certain reasons for behaving in a certain way. But he basically said, like, look, like math doesn't tell you that God's there or not. Like, if God's there, he'll tell you. You know, you don't even. I love this. So you have mathematics, you have, what do you have? Like a way to explore the mind, let's say psychedelics. You have like incredible technology. You also have love and friendship. And like, what the hell do you want to know what the meaning of it all is? Just enjoy it. I don't think there's a better way to end it, Jordan. This was a fascinating conversation. I really love the way you explore math in your writing. The willingness to be specific and clear and actually explore difficult ideas, but at the same time stepping outside and figuring out beautiful stuff. And I love the chart at the opening of your new book that shows the chaos, the mess that is your mind. Yes, this is what I was trying to keep in my head all at once while I was writing. And I probably should have drawn this picture earlier in the process. Maybe it would have made my organization easier. I actually drew it only at the end. And many of the things we talked about are on this map. The connections are yet to be fully dissected, investigated. And yes, God is in the picture. Right on the edge, right on the edge, not in the center. Thank you so much for talking to me. It is a huge honor that you would waste your valuable time with me. Thank you, Lex. We went to some amazing places today. This was really fun. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Ellenberg. And thank you to Secret Sauce, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Jordan in his book, How Not To Be Wrong. Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Jordan Ellenberg: Mathematics of High-Dimensional Shapes and Geometries | Lex Fridman Podcast #190

The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. He is interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals and as collectives at all scales. Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, NetSuite, Four Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a couple of days. We took a long walk the day before our conversation. I really enjoyed meeting him, just on a basic human level. We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony. These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world. But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends, and creating something that is far greater than the sum of our parts. I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends and in random bars in my travels across this country. Where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short, too beautiful life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and we're tasked with summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say? What do you think they would write up in that summary? Like it has to be pretty short, less than a page. Like in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences. How would you summarize, sorry, how would the aliens summarize, do you think, all of human civilization? My first thoughts take more than a page. They'd probably distill it. Because if they watched, well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to, or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours. So let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to get here from wherever they are. That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment. And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria. They saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the antikytheria mechanism, and then that technology got lost. They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress. So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things. There's a giant commotion that destroys a lot of things. Yeah, and it's usually self induced. They would have seen that. And so as they're looking at us now, as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization, anthropocene, exponential tech age, still making our decisions relatively similarly to how we did in the stone age as far as rivalry game theory type stuff, I think they would think that this is probably most likely one of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological adolescence. And if we are going to, we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe vessels for the amount of power we're getting. Actually, Hitchhiker's Guide has an estimation about how much of a risk this particular thing poses to the rest of the galaxy. And I think, I forget what it was, I think it was medium or low. So their estimation was, would be that this species of ant like creatures is not going to survive long. There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation. The fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed. They have not learned in any fundamental way how to control and properly incentivize or properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long term survival. And then they move on to another planet. Do you think there is, in a slightly more serious question, do you think there's some number or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there? Yes, would be hard to think otherwise. I know, I think Bostrom had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of end story on it. But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets just that we're aware of just galactically and also like when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same six primary atoms, I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of its energy metabolism, we get to think about that the building blocks might be more different. So the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different. It seems really unlikely not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still unexplained. As you had guests on your show discussing Tic Tac and all the ones that have visited. Yeah. Well, let's dive right into that. What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of there being hundreds of thousands, probably millions of witnesses of UFOs of different kinds on Earth, most of which I presume are conjured up by the human mind through the perception system. Some number might be true, some number might be reflective of actual physical objects, whether it's you know, drones or testing military technology that secret or otherworldly technology. What do you make sense of all of that, because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently. There's some sense in which that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of our of the human condition. But in another sense, it could be it really could be something truly exciting that science should turn its eye towards. So what do you where do you place it? Speaking of turning eye towards this is one of those super fascinating, actually super consequential possibly topics that I wish I had more time to study and just haven't allocated so I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as much as I want. So what I'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment. While we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we can fully write off, we have other better explanations for them. What we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for and then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified and being being curious and earnest. I think the the tic tac one is quite interesting and made it in major media recently. But I don't know if you ever saw the Disclosure Project, a guy named Steven Greer organized a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial flight people who had direct observation and classified information disclosing it at a CNN briefing. And so you saw high ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots all describing things that they saw on radar with their own eyes or cameras, and also describing some phenomena that had some consistency across different people. And I find this interesting enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it. And specifically, we can ask the question, how much of it is natural phenomena, ball lightning or something like that? And this is why I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who are trained in being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to say about it. I think the thing then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft? Is it some kind of, you know, human craft? The interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like right angles at speed, or not right angles, acute angles at speed, but something that looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us. I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in really deep underground black projects. Now one could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram? Or would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it? And so I don't know. I think there's enough, I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop, is it as interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary source? So it's up there on the interesting topics. To me there's, if it is at all alien technology, it is the dumbest version of alien technology. It's so far away, it's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien technology. These are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space to the level of like space junk because it is so close to our human technology. We talk about it moves in ways that's unlike what we understand about physics, but it still has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive with our eyes, all those kinds of things. I feel like alien technology most likely would be something that we would not be able to perceive. Not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans. Just as you were saying, as per your answer for alien summarizing Earth, the starting assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar cognitive capabilities, and that very well may not be the case. Let me ask you about staying in aliens for just a little longer because I think it's a good transition in talking about governments and human societies. Do you think if a US government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft, they would have the capacity, structurally would they have the processes, would they be able to communicate that to the public effectively or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing with it, both to try to preserve military secrets, but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies or either? Well, we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security, which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic and other purposes. There are, there's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using, I believe, electron microscopy and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was something we didn't currently have the ability to do, was not naturally occurring. So there, I've heard some things and again, like I said, I'm not going to stand behind any of these because I haven't done the level of study to have high confidence. I think what you said also about would it be super low tech alien craft, like would they necessarily move their atoms around in space or might they do something more interesting than that, might they be able to have a different relationship to the concept of space or information or consciousness or one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate and turn in a way that looks non inertial, but also disappear. So there's a question as to like the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it could be possible to, some people run a hypothesis that they create intentional amounts of exposure as an invitation of a particular kind, who knows, interesting field. We tend to assume like SETI that's listening out for aliens out there, I've just been recently reading more and more about gravitational waves and you have orbiting black holes that orbit each other, they generate ripples in space time on my, for fun at night when I lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they, not the low magnitude they are when they reach earth, but get closer to the black holes because it will basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time. So it's actually ripples through space time that they generate. Why is it that you couldn't use that, it travels the speed of light, travels at a speed which is a very weird thing to say when you're morphing space time, you could argue it's faster than the speed of light. So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black holes and to orbit them, to force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples in space time, whatever the hell that means, somehow combined with wormholes. So if you're able to communicate through, like we don't think of gravitational waves as something you can communicate with because the radio will have to be a very large size and very dense, but perhaps that's it, perhaps that's one way to communicate, it's a very effective way. And that would explain, like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale. I think you just jumped up the Kardashev scale so far that you're not just harnessing the power of a star, but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes. That's way above my physics pay grade to think about including even non rotating black hole versions of transwarp travel. I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that, I think he has better ideas on it than I do. My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability to get to other habitable planets in time. And even more than that, in the list of possible solutions of how to improve human civilization, orbiting black holes is not on the first page for you. Not on the first page. Okay. I bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here, but I'm glad the places it went. I am excited on a much smaller scale of Mars, Europa, Titan, Venus, potentially having very like bacteria like life forms, just on a small human level, it's a little bit scary, but mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans all around us, teaming, having little societies and whether there's properties about that kind of life that's somehow different than ours. I don't know what would be more exciting if those colonies of single cell type organisms, what would be more exciting if they're different or they're the same? If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe, there's life forms like us, something like us everywhere. If they're different, that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere that are not like us. That's a little bit scary. I don't know what's scarier actually. I think both scary and exciting no matter what, right? The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and self replicating possibilities could look like. The question on are they different or the same, obviously there's lots of life here that is the same in some ways and different in other ways. When you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the same hydrocarbon based thing, but co evolved with co selective pressures in a certain environment, we move it to another environment, it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because it's just different enough that it messes up the self stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem. So the question of are they, would they be different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together or fundamentally not fundamentally the nature of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep question. Well, we offline talked about mimetic theory, right? It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even, we can coexist on different planes, it seems like a good thing. If we're close enough together to where we'd be competing, then it's, you're getting into the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would, one of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without even accidentally. If we just had a self replicating single celled kind of creature that happened to not work well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because he either output something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated faster and mutated faster, that it wouldn't be a mimetic theory, conflict theory kind of harm. It would just be a Von Neumann machine, a self replicating machine that was fundamentally incompatible with these kinds of self replicating systems with faster OODA loops. For one final time, putting your alien God hat on and you look at human civilization, do you think about the 7.8 billion people on earth as individual little creatures, individual little organisms, or do you think of us as one organism with a collective intelligence? What's the proper framework through which to analyze it again as an alien? So that I know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way before the industrial revolution, before the agricultural revolution when there were half a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them? I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about your conclusions. It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time, but I was nevertheless asked it the same way. Yes. Well, let's go back further and smaller than rather than just a single human or the entire human species, let's look at a relatively isolated tribe. In the relatively isolated, probably sub Dunbar number, sub 150 people tribe, do I look at that as one entity where evolution is selecting for based on group selection or do I think of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way? Well, could those individuals exist without the group? No. The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever aren't what was selected for. And so I think the or is the wrong frame. I think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of. They're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're part of. And so this now starts to get deep into political theories also, which is theories that orient towards the collective at different scales, whether a tribal scale or an empire or a nation state or something, and ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that. And I think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides. And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them. The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how to have a virtuous process between those. So a good social system would be one where the organism of the individual and the organism of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each other. So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned. But there is nevertheless an individual. They're not, it's a matter of degrees, I suppose, but what defines a human more, the social network within which they've been brought up, through which they've developed their intelligence or is it their own sovereign individual self? What's your intuition of how much, not just for evolutionary survival, but as intellectual beings, how much do we need others for our development? Yeah. I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of sapient history. I think the vast majority of sapient history is tribal, like depending upon your early human model, 200,000 or 300,000 years of homo sapiens and little tribes, where they depended upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal. I think they, and our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment and the amount of time we've been out of it is relatively so tiny. And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more and the big kind of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money, to be able to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone. It's almost like disintermediating our sense of need, even though you're in my ability to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over six continents to be able to run the supply chains that made all the stuff that we depend on, but we don't notice that we depend upon them. They all seem fungible. If you take a baby, obviously that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom. Was it dependent? Are we dependent upon each other, right, without two parents at minimum and they depended upon other people. But if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies. So if we let it grow up for a little while, the minimum amount of time where it starts to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild, and this has happened a few times, it doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the small motor articulation that we learn. It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized. So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us. Is it possible that it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing? The whole thing is the connection between us humans and that we're no better than apes without our human connections. Because thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental. I just have to object to the no better than apes, because better here I think you mean a specific thing, which means have capacities that are fundamentally different than. I think apes also depend upon troops. And I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends up having heaps of problems. We'll table that. We can come back to it. But when we say what is unique about Homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals we currently inhabit the biosphere with, and I'm saying it that way because there were other early hominids that had some of these capacities, we believe. Our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction. And other animals will use tools, but they don't evolve the tools they use. They keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find. So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to, and it'll even notice that a sharper rock will cut it better. And experientially it'll use the sharper rock. And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the effectiveness. But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is sharper than the other. What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing? That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation, which makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways. So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection of what we are as a species. I wonder if that coordination, that connection is actually the thing that gives birth to consciousness, that gives birth to, well, let's start with self awareness. More like theory of mind. Theory of mind. Yeah. You know, I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have a very crude theory of mind. Not sure. Maybe dogs, something like that. But actually dogs probably has to do with that they co evolved with humans. See it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the way we think about it. Is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness. I have an inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures. That doesn't come with the hardware and the software in the beginning. That's learned as an effective tool for communication almost. I think we think that consciousness is fundamental. And maybe it's not, there's a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion of consciousness is consciousness. That it is just a facade we use to help us construct theories of mind. You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being. And that experience, you want to richly experience it as an individual person so that I could empathize with your experience. I find that notion compelling. Mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being quote unquote conscious but by just learning to fake it till they make it. Present a facade of consciousness with the task of making that facade very convincing to us humans and thereby it will become conscious. Have a sense that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing to humans. Is there some element of that that you find convincing? This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the aliens was. We went from aliens to consciousness. This is not the trajectory I was expecting nor you, but let us walk a while. We can walk a while and I don't think we will do it justice. So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self reflective awareness? What do we mean by awareness, qualia, theory of mind? There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and subjectivity, first person. I don't remember exactly the quote, but I remember when reading when Sam Harris wrote the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it and then there was some writing back and forth between the two because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against supernatural ideas. And here Dennett believed there is something like free will. He is a determinist compatibilist, but no consciousness and a radical element of this. And Sam was saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no free will. And that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on, but neither of them could say it was because the other one didn't understand the philosophy of science or logical fallacies. And they kind of spoke past each other and at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said something that I thought was quite insightful, which was to the effect of it seems, because they weren't making any progress in shared understanding, it seems that we simply have different intuitions about this. And what you could see was that what the words meant, right at the level of symbol grounding, might be quite different. One of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean. This is why when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Peirce said the first philosophy has to be semiotics, because if you don't get semiotics right, we end up importing different ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using. And then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together. So, I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're going to get very far is I think we would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts. Well, and also allowing our minds to drift together for a time so that our definitions of these terms align. I think there's some, there's a beauty that some people enjoy with Sam that he is quite stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that definition. So in his mind, he can sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by a term like free will and consciousness. And you're right, he's very specific in fascinating ways that not only does he think that free will is an illusion, he thinks he's able, not thinks, he says he's able to just remove himself from the experience of free will and just be like for minutes at a time, hours at a time, like really experience as if he has no free will, like he's a leaf flowing down the river. And given that, he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental. So here's this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating and yet has no ability to control and make any decisions for itself. It's only a, the decisions have all been made. There's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem. So that's a particular kind of meditative experience and the people in the Vedantic tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different. There are other types of phenomenal experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure agency and, you know, like the Catholic theologian but evolutionary theorist Teilhard de Chardin describes this and that rather than a creator agent God in the beginning, there's a creative impulse or a creative process and he would go into a type of meditation that identified as the pure essence of that kind of creative process. And I think the types of experience we've had and then one, the types of experience we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding. The other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through our existing interpretive frames and most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown even to us, some of them. And so this is a tricky, this is a tricky topic. So I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it but I want to come back to what the impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness and how does it relate to us as social beings and how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness with AIs. Right, you're keeping us on track which is, which is wonderful, you're a wonderful hiking partner. Okay, yes. Let's go back to the initial impulse of what is consciousness and how does the social impulse connect to consciousness? Is consciousness a consequence of that social connection? I'm going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long hard thing to argue and we can totally do it another time if you want. I don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks. Obviously a lot of people do, obviously the philosophy of science orients towards that in not absolutely but largely. I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first person, of qualia as experience, sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology, but the felt sense, not the we say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern. But all of the physical stuff, the third person stuff has position and momentum and charge and stuff like that that is measurable, repeatable. I think of the nature of first person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to each other, not reducible to each other. They're different kinds of stuff. So I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on. I think about a similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from the way Whitehead talked about kind of prehension or proto qualia in earlier phases of self organization into higher orders of it and that there's correspondence, but that neither like the idealists do we reduce third person to first person, which is what idealists do, or neither like the physicalists do we reduce first person to third person. Obviously Bohm talked about an implicate order that was deeper than and gave rise to the explicate order of both. Nagel talks about something like that. I have a slightly different sense of that, but again, I'll just kind of not argue how that occurs for a moment and say, so rather than say, does consciousness emerge from, I'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with. So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increased complexity within the nature of first person and third person co evolving. Do I think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper phenomenology, more complex, where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social awareness to abstract cognition to self reflexive abstract cognition? Yeah. But I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness. I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to increased complexity and the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal. We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case. So would I say that obviously the sapient brain is pretty unique and a single sapient now has that, right? Even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain. So the group made it now that brain is there. Now if I take that single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them in a box, they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain. But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship can have interesting things emerge. So do I think that the human biology, types of human consciousness and types of social interaction all co emerged and co evolved? Yes. As a small aside, as you're talking about the biology, let me comment that I spent, this is what I do, this is what I do with my life. This is why I will never accomplish anything is I spent much of the morning trying to do research on how many computations the brain performs and how much energy it uses versus the state of the art CPUs and GPUs arriving at about 20 quadrillion. So that's two to the 10 to the 16 computations. So synaptic firings per second that the brain does. And that's about a million times faster than the let's say the 20 thread state of the arts Intel CPU, the 10th generation. And then there's similar calculation for the GPU and all ended up also trying to compute that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about. And then what does that mean in terms of calories per day, kilocalories? That's about for an average human brain, that's 250 to 300 calories a day. And so it ended up being a calculation where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations that are fueled by something like depending on your diet, three bananas. So three bananas results in a computation that's about a million times more powerful than the current state of the art computers. Now, let's take that one step further. There's some assumptions built in there. The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation. Two, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than synaptic firings that we have to factor. So I'm forgetting his name right now. There's a very famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge amount of the thinking, not just neurons. And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness is. You look at Damasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely, happening in endocrine process involving lots of other cells and signal communication. You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show and even though the Penrose Hammerhoff conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that that might be the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum computation of microtubules? I'm not arguing for any of those. I'm arguing that we don't know how big the unknown unknown set is. Well, at the very least, this has become like an infomercial for the human brain. At the very, but wait, there's more. At the very least, the three bananas buys you a million times. At the very least. At the very least. That's impressive. And then you could have, and then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly the electrical signals. That could be the mechanical transmission of information, there's chemical transmission of information, there's all kinds of other stuff going on. And then there's memory that's built in, that's also all tied in. Not to mention, which I'm learning more and more about, it's not just about the neurons. It's also about the immune system that's somehow helping with the computation. So the entirety and the entire body is helping with the computation. So the three bananas. It could buy you a lot. It could buy you a lot. But on the topic of sort of the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness, I think few things are as beautiful and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain, just looking at systems where simple rules create incredible complexity. Not create. Incredible complexity emerges. So one of the simplest things to do that with is cellular automata. And there's, I don't know what it is, and maybe you can speak to it, we will certainly talk about the implications of this, but there's so few things that are as awe inspiring to me as knowing the rules of a system and not being able to predict what the heck it looks like. And it creates incredibly beautiful complexity that when zoomed out on, looks like there's actual organisms doing things that operate on a scale much higher than the underlying mechanism. So with cellular automata, that's cells that are born and die. Born and die and they only know about each other's neighbors. And there's simple rules that govern that interaction of birth and death. And then they create, at scale, organisms that look like they take up hundreds or thousands of cells and they're moving, they're moving around, they're communicating, they're sending signals to each other. And you forget at moments at a time before you remember that the simple rules on cells is all that it took to create that. It's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system that generalizes the behavior of the large organisms. We can only come up, we can only hope to come up with the thing, the fundamental physics or the fundamental rules of that system, I suppose. It's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems. It seems like we can't really in a nice way, like economics tries to do, to predict how this whole thing will unroll. But it's beautiful because of how simple it is underneath it all. So what do you make of the emergence of complexity from simple rules? What the hell is that about? Yeah. Well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration, can be computer coded. It's a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of complexity. And the whole field of complexity science and some of the subdisciplines like Stigma G are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies do this amazing thing where what you might describe as the organizational or computational capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ant is doing. I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automata as I would like. Unfortunately, in terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't, like ET's more Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the whole thing or his newer work since. But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of emergent phenomena that can come from cellular automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like complexity rather than just chaos or homogeneity or self termination or whatever. I think this is very interesting. It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules and or that human consciousness is. I'm not that reductionist oriented. So if you look at, say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the cofounders, Stuart Kaufman, his work, you should really get him on your show. So a lot of the questions that you like, one of Kaufman's more recent books after investigations and some of the real fundamental stuff was called Reinventing the Sacred and it had to do with some of these exact questions in kind of non reductionist approach, but that is not just silly hippie ism. And he was very interested in highly non ergodic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period of time would do. And then going further, someone who spent some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind of made a whole new field that you should have on, Dave Snowden, who some people call the father of anthro complexity or what is the complexity unique to humans. And he says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't cut it. Like we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using Stigma G like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really doesn't work for trying to make sense of the Sistine Chapel and Picasso and general relativity creation and stuff like that. And it's because the termites are not doing abstraction, forecasting deep into the future and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in the moment and evolutionary code from history. That's really different, right? Like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future. And with humans, our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli is much higher than it is with a termite. One of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low. They're basically fungible within a class, right? There's different classes, but within a class they're basically fungible and their system uses that very high numbers and lots of loss, right? Lots of death and loss. But do you think the termite feels that way? Don't, don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness? Perhaps it doesn't, it just, isn't there some sense in which this emergence just creates different higher and higher levels of abstraction where every, at every layer, each organism feels unique? Is that possible? That we're all equally dumb but at different scales? No, I think uniqueness is evolving. I think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type are. And I think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are. And I think that highly K selected species are more unique than R selected species. So they're different evolutionary processes. The R selected species where you have a whole, a lot of death and very high birth rates, and not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to cover the evolutionary search space within an individual. You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game. So yeah, I would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than there is between one Cape buffalo and the next. Given that, it would be interesting to get your thoughts about memetic theory where we're imitating each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness. How much truth is there to that? How compelling is this worldview to you of Girardian memetic theory of desire where maybe you can explain it from your perspective, but it seems like imitating each other is the fundamental property of the behavior of human civilization. Well, imitation is not unique to humans, right? Monkeys imitate. So a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans. Humans do more of it. It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment. Monkeys can learn new behaviors, new... We've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign language. So that's a kind of mimesis, right? Kind of learning through imitation. And that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded by their genetics, right? So within the same genome, they're learning new things based on the environment. And so based on someone else learn something first and so let's pick it up. How much a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much it's learning is a very interesting question. And I think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything else. And you can see it in the neoteny, how long we're basically fetal. That the closest ancestors to us, if we look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's fur while she moves around day one. And obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes. The fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes a horse 20 minutes and you say how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year, like that's a long period of helplessness that wouldn't work for a horse, right? Like they or anything else. And not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before we can move our head volitionally. So it's like why are we embryonic for so long? Obviously it's like it's still fetal on the outside, had to be because couldn't keep growing inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright. So here's a place where there's a coevolution of the pattern of humans, specifically here our neoteny and what that portends to learning with our being tool making and environment modifying creatures, which is because we have the abstraction to make tools, we change our environments more than other creatures change their environments. The next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver. And then we're in LA, you fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid going on forever in all directions. And we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the surface of the earth is changing more from human activity than geological activity and then beavers and you're like, okay, wow, we're really in a class of our own in terms of environment modifying. So as soon as we started tool making, we were able to change our environments much more radically. We could put on clothes and go to a cold place. And this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment. We functioned like apex predators, polar bear can't leave the Arctic and the lion can't leave the Savannah and an orca can't leave the ocean. And we went and became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation capacity. We could become better predators than them adapted to the environment or at least with our tools adapted to the environment. So in every aspect towards any organism in any environment, we're incredibly good at becoming apex predators. Yes. And nothing else can do that kind of thing. There is no other apex predator that, you see the other apex predator is only getting better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow and that super slow process creates co selective process with their environment. So as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the slow prey, the genes of the fast prey and breed and the prey becomes faster. And so there's this kind of balancing and we in because of our tool making, we increased our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it. As a result, we start outstripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools and going and becoming apex predator everywhere. This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories because we're not an apex predator. We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that. Like just for an example, the top apex predator in the world, an orca. An orca can eat one big fish at a time, like one tuna, and it'll miss most of the time or one seal. And we can put a mile long drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school of them. Right? We can deplete the entire oceans of them. That's not an orca. That's not an apex predator. And that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures. We can extinct species. We can devastate whole ecosystems. We can make built worlds that have no natural things that are just human built worlds. We can build new types of natural creatures, synthetic life. So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now, but we're still behaving as apex predators and little gods that behave as apex predators causes a problem kind of core to my assessment of the world. So what does it mean to be a predator? So a predator is somebody that effectively can mine the resources from a place. So for their survival, or is it also just purely like higher level objectives of violence and what is, can predators be predators towards the same, each other towards the same species? Like are we using the word predator sort of generally, which then connects to conflict and military conflict, violent conflict in this base of human species. Obviously we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular way, using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and carbon out of the air and like that. And we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that. So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator. Predator is generally being defined as mining other animals, right? We don't consider herbivores predators, but animal, which requires some type of violence capacity because animals move, plants don't move. So it requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get away. We'll go back to the Gerard thing and then we'll come back here. Why are we neotenous? Why are we embryonic for so long? Because are we, did we just move from the Savannah to the Arctic and we need to learn new stuff? If we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that. Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain or are we texting? What is the adaptive behavior? Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff. And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environment so quickly and other animals are largely the result of their environment, but we're environment modifying so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment we're in, learn the language, right? Which is going to be very important to learn the tool making. And so we have a very long period of relative helplessness because we aren't coded how to behave yet because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful to that particular time. So our mimesis is not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is really unique. And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right? Is because we are less just the result of the genetics and that means the kind of learning through history that they got coded in genetics and more the result of, it's almost like our hardware selected for software, right? Like if evolution is kind of doing these, think of as a hardware selection, I have problems with computer metaphors for biology, but I'll use this one here, that we have not had hardware changes since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different. And that's all changes in software, right? Changes on the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're doing with these brains and minds and bodies and social groups and like that. And so, now, Gerard specifically was looking at when we watch other people talking, so we learn language, you and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today or it would take a lot of work, we'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff, but a baby learns it instantly without anyone even really trying to teach it just through mimesis. So it's a powerful thing. They're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their attention is allocated to that. But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff through mimesis. One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want. And they learn what to want. They learn desire by watching what other people want. And so, intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want and if we can't have what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict. So the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict and that then the conflict energy within a group of people will build over time. This is a very, very crude interpretation of the theory. Can we just pause on that? For people who are not familiar and for me who hasn't, I'm loosely familiar but haven't internalized it, but every time I think about it, it's a very compelling view of the world. Whether it's true or not, it's quite, it's like when you take everything Freud says as truth, it's a very interesting way to think about the world and in the same way, thinking about the mimetic theory of desire that everything we want is imitation of other people's wants. We don't have any original wants. We're constantly imitating others. And so, and not just others, but others we're exposed to. So there's these little local pockets, however defined local, of people imitating each other. And one that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join. What do you want to imitate? It's the old like, whoever your friends are, that's what your life is going to be like. That's really powerful. I mean, it's depressing that we're so unoriginal, but it's also liberating in that if this holds true, that we can choose our life by choosing the people we hang out with. So okay. Thoughts that are very compelling that seem like they're more absolute than they actually are end up also being dangerous. We want to, I'm going to discuss here where I think we need to amend this particular theory. But specifically, you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is true experientially, which is who you're around affects who you become. And as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody I think knows that if you got put in the maximum security prison, aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there, right? You would become different. If you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same genetics, like just there's no real question about that. And that even today, if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is pretty clear, right? Like the behavioral science of this is pretty clear. So the whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around. I think the more self reflective someone is and the more time they spend by themselves in self reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true. So one of the best things someone can do to become more self determined is be self determined about the environments they want to put themselves in, because to the degree that there is some self determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment that is predisposing you in bad directions. Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want. In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those around you. Or perhaps also there's probably interesting ways to play with this. You could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension in all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want, because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're free to choose whichever one. If there's enough tension, as opposed to everybody aligned like a flock of birds. Yeah, I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced. So if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self empowerment and someone who's extremely oriented to kind of empathy and compassion, both the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own. If you have both of them inhabiting, being inhabited better than you by the same person and spending time around that person will probably do well for you. I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools, which is I think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and their not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem solving communication and civic capacity, capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time. And so in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis. So maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other side. And one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice. And so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody. The other side saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by their environment who would choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland. So we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions the individuals. So you have a thesis and an antithesis. And then Hegel's ideas, you have a synthesis, which is a kind of higher order truth that understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do. And so it is actually at a higher order of complexity. So the first part would be, can I steel man each of these? Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like, totally, you got that? And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where I can try to see and feel the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would? Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it, right? And I'm not going to go back to war with them. I'm going to go to finding solutions that could actually work at a higher order. If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war. And but then the higher order thing would be, well, it seems like the individual does affect the commons and the collective and other people. It also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically. And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently than most people born into the Hamptons. And so unless you want to argue that and have you take your child from the Hamptons and put them in the ghetto, then like, come on, be realistic about this thing. So how do we make, we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals, right? The welfare argument. But we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better. We don't want individuals where their self expression and agency fucks the environment and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever. So can we make it to where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning other individuals? Can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty, right? That would be the synthesis. So the thing that I'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame, and sometimes it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right? Can I steel man each view? This is not just, can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them? Am I actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective? Then can I really try to essentialize it and argue the best points of it, both the sense making about reality and the values, why these values actually matter? Then just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek, is there a higher order set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making of all of them simultaneously? Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it and I want to be seeking progressively better ones. So this is perspective seeking, driving perspective taking, and then seeking synthesis. I think that that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing. Would you put a title of dialectic synthesis on that process because that seems to be such a part, so like this rigorous empathy, like it's not just empathy. It's empathy with rigor, like you really want to understand and embody different worldviews and then try to find a higher order synthesis. Okay, so I remember last night you told me when we first met, you said that you looked in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered and so you could trust them. Empathy pathos, right, creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy. So empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of their sentience. I don't want to fuck them anymore. I don't want to hurt them. I don't want to behave, I don't want my proposition to go through when I go and inhabit the perspective of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up, right? And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion, which is I generally care. I have a generalized care, but I don't know what it's like to be them. I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly and that there's a humility you have to have, which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it. My most rigorous attempt, mine, to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it. I have no question that if I was actually a woman, it would be different than my best guesses. I have no question if I was actually black, it would be different than my best guesses. So there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because I don't think that I know fully, but I want to, and I'm going to keep trying better to. And then I want to accross them, and then I want to say, is there a way we can forward together and not have to be in war? It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds, that could reconcile the partial sensemaking that everyone holds, and that could offer a way forward that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other. But so the more you succeed at this empathy with humility, the more you're carrying the burden of other people's pain, essentially. Now, this goes back to the question of do I see us as one being or 7.8 billion. I think if I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much because I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the capacity. If I don't feel like I can do something about a particular problem in the world, it's hard to feel it because it's just too devastating. And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the agency. So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency, I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in benefit of. So this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems in society from a cellular automata perspective. So if you have a bunch of little agents behaving in this way, my intuition, there'll be interesting complexities that emerge, but my intuition is it will create a society that's very different and recognizably better than the one we have today. How much like... Oh, wait, hold that question because I want to come back to it, but this brings us back to Gerard, which we didn't answer. The conflict theory. Yes. Because about how to get past the conflict theory. Yes. You know the Robert Frost poem about the two paths and you never have enough time to return back to the other? We're going to have to do that quite a lot. We're going to be living that poem over and over again, but yes, how to... Let's return back. Okay. So the rest of the argument goes, you learn to want what other people want, therefore fundamental conflict based in our desire because we want the thing that somebody else has. And then people are in conflict over trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention, physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is. And then we learn the conflict by watching. And so then the conflict becomes metic. And we become on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side or the communist or capitalist side or the left or right politically or whatever it is. And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is that we're going to blame. And you know, Gerard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of violence. Let's blame a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were. But if we all believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy. It's a really interesting concept, by the way. I mean, you beautifully summarized it, but the idea that there's a scapegoat, that there's this kind of thing naturally leads to a conflict and then they find the other, some group that's the other that's either real or artificial as the cause of the conflict. Well, it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Gerard is the mimesis of desire itself. And how do we attack that? How do we attack that it's our own desire? So this now gets to something more like Buddha said, right, which was desire is the cause of suffering. Gerard and Buddha would kind of agree in this way. So but that's that explains I mean, again, it's a compelling description of human history that we do tend to come up with the other. And okay, kind of I just I just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing Gerard the other day in such an elegant and beautiful and simple way. It's a friend who's grew up Aboriginal Australian, is a scholar of Aboriginal social technologies. He's like, nah man, Gerard just made shit up about how tribes work. Like we come from a tribe, we've got tens of thousands of years, and we didn't have increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone. We'd have a little bit of conflict and then we would dance and then everybody'd be fine. We'd dance around the campfire, everyone would like kind of physically get the energy out, we'd look in each other's eyes, we'd have positive bonding, and then we're fine. And nobody, no scapegoats. And I think that's called the Joe Rogan theory of desire, which is, he's like, all all of human problems have to do with the fact that you don't do enough hard shit in your day. So maybe, maybe just dance it because he says like doing exercise and running on the treadmill gets gets all the demons out and maybe just dancing gets all the demons out. So this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're stuck with the fact that conflict is inexorable because human, because mimetic desire and therefore, how do we deal with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence? Well, no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish, meaning it's only true in certain conditions and other conditions it's not true. So the deeper question is under which conditions is that true? Under which conditions is it not true? What do those other conditions make possible and look like? And in general, we should stay away from really compelling models of reality because there's something about, about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think outside of them. So. It's not that we stay away from them. It's that we know that the model of reality is never reality. That's the key thing. Humility again, it goes back to just having the humility that you don't have a perfect model of reality. There's an ep, the, the model of reality could never be reality. The process of modeling is inherently information reduction and I can never show that the unknown unknown set has been factored. It's back to the cellular automata. You can't, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Like when you realize it's unfortunately, sadly impossible to, to create a model of cellular automata, even if you know the basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy, what how that system will evolve, which is fascinating mathematically. Sorry. I think about it quite a lot. It's very annoying. Wolfram has this rule 30, like you should be able to predict it. It's so simple, but you can't predict what's going to be like, there's a, there's a problem he defines, like try to predict some aspect of the middle, middle column of the system, just anything about it. What's going to happen in the future. And you can't, you can't, it sucks because then we can't make sense of this world in a real, in a reality, in a definitive way. It's always like in the striving, like it, we're always striving. Yeah. I don't think this sucks. That so that's a feature, not a bug. Well, that's assuming a designer. I would say I don't think it sucks. I think it's not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty. The mess. So you're a, so you're, you're disagree Jordan Pearson should clean up your room. You like the rooms messy. It's a, it's essential for the, for beauty. It's not, it's not that it's okay. I take, I have no idea if it was intended this way. And so I'm just interpreting it a way I like the commandment about having no false idols to me, the way I interpret that that is meaningful is that re reality is sacred to me. I have a reverence for reality, but I know my best understanding of it is never complete. I know my best model of it is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that I could observe and then a subset of that stuff that I thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of, you know, mechanisms that are involved. And what we find is that it can be super useful, like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic curves and all kinds of super useful stuff. And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological scale or at a quantum scale. And at each time, what we're finding is we excluded stuff. And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the other kind of fundamental laws. So models can be useful, but they're never true with a capital T, meaning they're never an actual real full, they're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems. They can be a complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was the result of applying a model. So the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing, but I would argue that the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing. And I would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated, which is a distinction Dave Snowden made well in defining the difference between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems. But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex system, it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model. Can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated? Complicated means we can fully explicate the phase space of all the things that it can do. We can program it. All human, not all, for the most part, human built things are complicated. They don't self organize. They don't self repair. They're not self evolving and we can make a blueprint for them where, sorry, for human systems, for human technologies, human technologies, that are basically the application of models right. And engineering is kind of applied science, science as the modeling process. And but with humans are complex, complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological type stuff, it more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated than it has or our explanation can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown unknown set where we keep finding like, oh, it's just the genome. Oh, well now it's the genome and the epigenome and then a recursive change on the epigenome because of the proteome. And then there's mitochondrial DNA and then viruses affected and fuck, right? So it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing. So on Facebook, you know how you can list your relationship as complicated? It should actually say it's, it's complex. That's the more accurate description. You self terminating is a really interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit. First of all, what is a self terminating system? And I think you have a sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that human civilization is a currently is, is a self terminating system. Why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what soft self terminating means? Okay, so if we look at human societies historically, human civilizations, it's not that hard to realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore. So they had a life cycle, they died for some reason. So we don't still have the early Egyptian empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any of those, right? So they, they terminated, sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war. Sometimes it seems like they self terminated. When we look at Easter Island, it was a self termination. So let's go ahead and take an island situation. If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there, that system is going to self terminate. It's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's no resources left and then you get a, so now if I'm utilizing the resources faster than they can replicate or faster than they can replenish and I'm actually growing our population in the process, I'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources, I might get an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather than do an S curve or some other kind of thing. So self terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing its own substrate, that is debasing what it depends upon. So you're right that if you look at empires, they rise and fall throughout human history, but not this time, bro. This one's going to last forever. I like that idea. I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed, we can't ensure that. And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed outcome with somewhat decent probability. So we're, it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island, we're a clever bunch and we keep coming up, especially when on the horizon there is a termination point, we keep coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster, of avoiding collapse, of constructing. This is where technological innovation, this is where growth comes in, coming up with different ways to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources or get a lot more from the resources we have. So there's some sense in which there's a human ingenuity is a source for optimism about the future of this particular system that may not be self terminating. If there's more innovation than there is consumption. So overconsumption of resources is just one way I think can self terminate. We're just kind of starting here. But there are reasons for optimism and pessimism then they're both worth understanding and there's failure modes on understanding either without the other. As we mentioned previously, there's what I would call naive techno optimism, naive techno capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't want to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff and we know the proponents of those models and this stuff is going to kind of keep getting better. Of course there are problems, but human ingenuity rises to its supply and demand will solve the problems, whatever. Would you put Rick or as well in that, or in that bucket, is there some specific people you have in mind or naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just have an optimism that's blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses. I don't think that anyone who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive. Gotcha. But there might be. It's a platonic ideal. There might be a bias in the nature of the assessment. I would also say there's kind of naive techno pessimism and there are critics of technology. I mean, you read the Unabomber's Manifesto on why technology can't not result in our self termination, so we have to take it out before it gets any further. But also if you read a lot of the X risk community, you know, Bostrom and friends, it's like our total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up. And so I think that there are, we have to hold together where our positive possibilities and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities to be realized long term, all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen. Any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from occurring. So how do we ensure that none of them happen? If we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse. So again, Collapse Theory, it's worth looking at books like The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for internal institutional decay, civilizational decay reasons. Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how institutional decay and the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of more internally parasitic on itself. Obviously Jared Diamond made a more popular book called Collapse. And as we were mentioning, the anticatheria mechanism has been getting attention in the news lately. It was like a 2000 year old clock, right? Like metal gears. And does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress? And from a society that was relatively technologically advanced. So what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, why did previous societies fail? Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate the failures as a whole? Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self terminating? And can we solve those and have that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that is not self terminating? And can we then be able to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those? Not just resilience, but antifragility. And I would say for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the risk space well and have adequate solutions for it. So can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the underlying sources of catastrophic failures of the system and overconsumption that's built in into self terminating systems? So both the overconsumption, which is like the slow death, and then there's the fast death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things. AGI, biotech, bioengineering, nanotechnology, nano, my favorite nanobots. Nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that I could just know that I would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them without sufficiently thinking about the negative consequences. I would definitely be, I would be podcasting all about the negative consequences, but when I go back home, I'd be, I'd just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant of ape, no offense to apes. I want to backtrack on my previous comments about, negative comments about apes. That I have that sense of excitement that would result in problems. So sorry, a lot of things said, but what's, can we start to pull it a thread because you've also provided a kind of a beautiful general approach to this, which is this dialectic synthesis or just rigorous empathy, whatever, whatever word we want to put to it, that seems to be from the individual perspective as one way to sort of live in the world as we tried to figure out how to construct non self terminating systems. So what, what are some underlying sources? Yeah. First I have to say, I actually really respect Drexler for emphasizing Grey Goo and engines of creation back in the day to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the risks of the nanotech as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be. There's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks because they get to market first. And then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is to the commons or wherever happen to have it. Other people are going to have to solve those, but now they have the power and capital associated. The person who looked at the risks and tried to do better design and go slower is probably not going to move into positions of as much power influences quickly. So this is one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the bad game theoretic dispositions in the system relative to its own stability. And the key aspect to that, sorry to interrupt, is the externalities generated. Yes. What flavors of catastrophic risk are we talking about here? What's your favorite flavor in terms of ice cream? So mine is coconut. Nobody seems to like coconut ice cream. So ice cream aside, what are you most worried about in terms of catastrophic risk that will help us kind of make concrete the discussion we're having about how to fix this whole thing? Yeah. I think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of orient everyone to it. We don't have to go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of civilization. But to just recognize that for all of human history, as far as we're aware, there were existential risks to civilizations and they happened, right? Like there were civilizations that were killed in war, tribes that were killed in tribal warfare or whatever. So people faced existential risk to the group that they identified with. It's just those were local phenomena, right? It wasn't a fully global phenomena. So an empire could fall and surrounding empires didn't fall. Maybe they came in and filled the space. The first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk, not from like a solar flare or something that we couldn't control, but from something that humans would actually create at a global level was World War II and the bomb. Because it was the first time that we had tech big enough that could actually mess up everything at a global level that could mess up habitability. We just weren't powerful enough to do that before. It's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have done it. We just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect. And so it's important to get that there's the entire world before World War II where we don't have the ability to make a nonhabitable biosphere, nonhabitable for us. And then there's World War II and the beginning of a completely new phase where global human induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing. And that was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way, which is, you know, when you study history, it's amazing how big a percentage of history is studying war, right, and the history of war, as you said, European history and whatever. It's generals and wars and empire expansions. And so the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time where they weren't engaged in war or preparation for war or something like that was – humans don't have a good precedent in the post tribal phase, the civilization phase of being able to solve conflicts without war for very long. World War II was the first time where we could have a war that no one could win. And so the superpowers couldn't fight again. They couldn't do a real kinetic war. They could do diplomatic wars and Cold War type stuff and they could fight proxy wars through other countries that didn't have the big weapons. And so mutually assured destruction and like coming out of World War II, we actually realized that nation states couldn't prevent world war. And so we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states, which was the whole Bretton Woods world, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the globalization trade type agreements, mutually assured destruction that was how do we have some coordination beyond just nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers. And it was pretty successful given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower war. We've had lots of proxy wars during that time. We've had Cold War. And I would say we're in a new phase now where the Bretton Woods solution is basically over or almost over. Can you describe the Bretton Woods solution? Yeah. So the Bretton Woods, the series of agreements for how the nations would be able to engage with each other in a solution other than war was these IGOs, these intergovernmental organizations and was the idea of globalization. Since we could have global effects, we needed to be able to think about things globally where we had trade relationships with each other where it would not be profitable to war with each other. It'd be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other. So our own self interest was gonna drive our non war interest. And so this started to look like, and obviously this couldn't have happened that much earlier either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive global industrial supply chains and ship stuff around quickly. But like we were mentioning earlier, almost all the electronics that we use today, just basic cheap stuff for us is made on six continents, made in many countries. There's no single country in the world that could actually make many of the things that we have and from the raw material extraction to the plastics and polymers and the et cetera. And so the idea that we made a world that could do that kind of trade and create massive GDP growth, we could all work together to be able to mine natural resources and grow stuff. With the rapid GDP growth, there was the idea that everybody could keep having more without having to take each other's stuff. And so that was part of kind of the Bretton Woods post World War II model. The other was that we'd be so economically interdependent that blowing each other up would never make sense. That worked for a while. Now it also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster, the unrenewable use of resource and turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain. So obviously that faster GDP growth meant the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting down of the trees and the climate change and the mining, toxic mining tailings going into the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things. That's the overconsumption side of the risk that we're talking about. And so the answer of let's do positive GDP is the answer rapidly and exponentially obviously accelerated the planetary boundary side. And that started to be, that was thought about for a long time, but it started to be modeled with the Club of Rome and limits of growth. But it's just very obvious to say if you have a linear materials economy where you take stuff out of the earth faster, whether it's fish or trees or oil, you take it out of the earth faster than it can replenish itself and you turn it into trash after using it for a short period of time, you put the trash in the environment faster than it can process itself and there's toxicity associated with both sides of this. You can't run an exponentially growing linear materials economy on a finite planet forever. That's not a hard thing to figure out. And it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply because of interest and then fractional reserve banking and to then be able to keep up with the growing monetary supply, you have to have growth of goods and services. So that's that kind of thing that has happened. But you also see that when you get these supply chains that are so interconnected across the world, you get increased fragility because a collapse or a problem in one area then affects the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues being local, right? So we got to see with COVID and an issue that started in one part of China affecting the whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened before Bretton Woods, right? Before international travel, supply chains, you know, that whole kind of thing and with a bunch of second and third order effects that people wouldn't have predicted, okay, we have to stop certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants, but the countries doing agriculture depend upon fertilizer they don't produce that is shipped into them and depend upon pesticides they don't produce. So we got both crop failures and crops being eaten by locusts in scale in Northern Africa and Iran and things like that because they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in. So then you get massive starvation or future kind of hunger issues because of supply chain shutdowns. So you get this increased fragility and cascade dynamics where a small problem can end up leading to cascade effects. And also we went from two superpowers with one catastrophe weapon to now that same catastrophe weapon is there's more countries that have it, eight or nine countries that have it, and there's a lot more types of catastrophe weapons. We now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that can hit infrastructure targets with bio, with in fact every new type of tech has created an arms race. So we have not with the UN or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations, we haven't been able to really do nuclear de proliferation. We've actually had more countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes, the race to hypersonics and things like that. And every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race. And so you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with two agents. Two agents, it's much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced. But the ability to monitor and say if these guys shoot, who do I shoot? Do I shoot them? Do I shoot everybody? Do I? And so you get a three body problem. You get a very complex type of thing when you have multiple agents and multiple different types of catastrophe weapons, including ones that can be much more easily produced than nukes. Nukes are really hard to produce. There's only uranium in a few areas. uranium enrichment is hard, ICBMs are hard, but weaponized drones hitting smart targets is not so hard. There's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture them is going way, way down to where even non state actors can have them. And so when we talk about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech, what that means is decentralized catastrophe weapon capacity. And especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised, frantic, whatever for different reasons. So I would say where the Bretton Woods world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with lots of different agents, having lots of different types of catastrophe weapons you can't put mutually assured destruction on, where you can't keep doing growth of materials economy in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries and where the fragility dynamics are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk. So now we're, so like there was all the world until world war II and world war II is just from a civilization timescale point of view is just a second ago. It seems like a long time, but it is really not. We get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up the military capacity for much, much, much worse war the entire time. And then now we're at this new phase where the things that allowed us to make it through the nuclear power are not the same systems that will let us make it through the next stage. So what is this next post Bretton Woods? How do we become safe vessels, safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology is a key question when we're thinking about X risk. Okay. And I'd like to try to answer the how a few ways, but first on the mutually assured destruction. Do you give credit to the idea of two superpowers now blowing each other up with nuclear weapons to the simple game theoretic model of mutually assured destruction or something you've said previously this idea of inverse correlation, which I tend to believe between the, now you were talking about tech, but I think it's maybe broadly true. The inverse correlation between competence and propensity for destruction. So the better, the, the, the bigger your weapons, not because you're afraid of a mutually assured self destruction, but because we're human beings and there's a deep moral fortitude there that somehow aligned with competence and being good at your job that like, it's very hard to be a psychopath and be good at killing at scale. Do you share any of that intuition? Kind of. I think most people would say that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Napoleon were effective people that were good at their job that were actually maybe asymmetrically good at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented towards certain types of destruction or pretty willing to, maybe they would say they were oriented towards empire expansion, but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction in the name of it. What are you worried about? The Genghis Khan, or you could argue he's not a psychopath. That are you worried about Genghis Khan, are you worried about Hitler or are you worried about a terrorist who is, has a very different ethic, which is not even for, it's not trying to preserve and build and expand my community. It's more about just the destruction in itself is the goal. I think the thing that you're looking at that I do agree with is that there's a psychological disposition towards construction and a psychological disposition more towards destruction. Obviously everybody has both and can toggle between both and oftentimes one is willing to destroy certain things. We have this idea of creative destruction, right? Willing to destroy certain things to create other things and utilitarianism and trolley problems are all about exploring that space and the idea of war is all about that. I am trying to create something for our people and it requires destroying some other people. Sociopathy is a funny topic because it's possible to have very high fealty to your in group and work on perfecting the methods of torture to the out group at the same time because you can dehumanize and then remove empathy. And I would also say that there are types. So the reason, the thing that gives hope about the orientation towards construction and destruction being a little different in psychology is what it takes to build really catastrophic tech, even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a nuke, a small group of people could do it, takes still some real technical knowledge that required having studied for a while and some then building capacity and there's a question of is that psychologically inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization meaningfully? A little bit. A little bit, I think. I think a lot. I think it's actually, I mean, this is the conversation I had like with, I think offline with Dan Carlin, which is like, it's pretty easy to come up with ways that any competent, I can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a lot of people and it's pretty easy, like I alone could do it and there's a lot of people as smart or smarter than me, at least in their creation of explosives. Why are we not seeing more insane mass murder? I think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this and it does have to do with some deeply pro social types of characteristics in humans but when you're dealing with very large numbers, you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena and so then you start to say, well, what's the probability that X won't happen this year, then won't happen in the next two years, three years, four years and then how many people are doing destructive things with lower tech and then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they didn't have to figure out how to build. So when I can get commercial tech and maybe I don't understand tech very well but I understand it well enough to utilize it, not to create it and I can repurpose it. When we saw that commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the Ukrainian munitions factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage, that was just home tech, that's just simple kind of thing. And so the question is not does it stay being a small percentage of the population? The question is can you bind that phenomena nearly completely and especially now as you start to get into bigger things, CRISPR gene drive technologies and various things like that, can you bind it completely long term over what period of time? Not perfectly though, that's the thing. I'm trying to say that there is some, let's call it, that's a random word, love, that's inherent and that's core to human nature that's preventing destruction at scale. And you're saying yeah but there's a lot of humans, there's going to be eight plus billion and then there's a lot of seconds in the day to come up with stuff, there's a lot of pain in the world that can lead to a distorted view of the world such that you want to channel that pain into the destruction, all those kinds of things and it's only a matter of time that any one individual can do large damage, especially as we create more and more democratized decentralized ways to deliver that damage even if you don't know how to build the initial weapon. But the thing is it seems like it's a race between the cheapening of destructive weapons and the capacity of humans to express their love towards each other and it's a race that so far, I know on Twitter it's not popular to say but love is winning, okay? So what is the argument that love is going to lose here against nuclear weapons and biotech and AI and drones? Okay I'm going to comment the end of this to a how love wins so I just want you to know that that's where I'm oriented. That's the end, okay. But I'm going to argue against why that is a given because it's not a given, I don't believe and I think that it's… This is like a good romantic comedy so you're going to create drama right now but it will end in a happy ending. Well it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well enough and take responsibility to shift it. Do I believe like there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic sci fi than protopic sci fi and the some protopic sci fi usually requires magic is because – or at least magical tech, right, dilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff because it's very hard to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books with exponential type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up, that make good enough choices as stewards of their environment and their commons and each other and etc. So like it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up. And when I say blow ourselves up I mean the environmental versions, the terrorist versions, the war versions, the cumulative externalities versions. And I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow of thought but why is it easier? Could it be a weird psychological thing where we either are just more capable to visualize explosions and destruction and then the sicker thought which is like we kind of enjoy for some weird reason thinking about that kind of stuff even though we wouldn't actually act on it. It's almost like some weird, like I love playing shooter games, you know, first person shooters and like especially if it's like murdering zombies and doom, you're shooting demons. I play one of my favorite games Diablo is like slashing through different monsters and the screaming and pain and the hellfire and then I go out into the real world to eat my coconut ice cream and I'm all about love. So like can we trust our ability to visualize how it all goes to shit as an actual rational way of thinking? I think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse fantasy and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination but I don't think that's the whole of it. I think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space and the difference in the probabilities that there's a lot of ways I could try to put the 70 trillion cells of your body together that don't make you. There's not that many ways I can put them together that make you. There's a lot of ways I could try to connect the organs together that make some weird kind of group of organs on a desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human and you can kill an adult human in a second but you can't get one in a second. It takes 20 years to grow one and a lot of things happen right. I could destroy this building in a couple of minutes with demolition but it took a year or a couple of years to build it. There is – Calm down, Cole. This is just an example. He doesn't mean it. There's a gradient where entropy is easier and there's a lot more ways to put a set of things together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order synergies. When we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare, an arms race that drives that in all these directions, and when we look at a history of environmental destruction and exponentially more powerful tech that makes exponential externalities multiplied by the total number of agents that are doing it and the cumulative effects, there's a lot of ways the whole thing can break, like a lot of different ways. And for it to get ahead, it has to have none of those happen. And so there's just a probability space where it's easier to imagine that thing. So to say how do we have a protopic future, we have to say, well, one criteria must be that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks. So can we understand – can we inventory all the catastrophic risks? Can we inventory the patterns of human behavior that give rise to them? And could we try to solve for that? And could we have that be the essence of the social technology that we're thinking about to be able to guide, bind, and direct a new physical technology? Because so far, our physical technology – like we were talking about the Genghis Khan's like that, that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments and also social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes. But we have things that don't look like warfare, like Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource to the world, and it did. And the second order effects of that are climate change and all of the oil spills that have happened and will happen and all of the wars in the Middle East over the oil that have been there and the massive political clusterfuck and human life issues that are associated with it and on and on, right? And so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can have a narrow focus on what I'm trying to construct but be affecting a lot of other things through second and third order effects I'm not taking responsibility for. You often on another tangent mentioned second, third, and fourth order effects. And order. And order. Cascading. Which is really fascinating. Like starting with the third order plus it gets really interesting because we don't even acknowledge like the second order effects. Right. But like thinking because those it could get bigger and bigger and bigger in ways we were not anticipating. So how do we make those? So it sounds like part of the thing that you are thinking through in terms of a solution how to create an anti fragile, a resilient society is to make explicit acknowledge, understand the externalities, the second order, third order, fourth order, and the order effects. How do we start to think about those effects? Yeah, the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing. Right. The externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at minimum it's not our intention. Right. Maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware of it but it is a side effect of what our intention is. It's not the intention itself. There are catastrophic risks from both types. The direct application of increased technological power to a rivalrous intent which is going to cause harm for some out group, for some in group to win. But the out group is also working on growing the tech and if they don't lose completely they reverse engineer the tech, up regulate it, come back with more capacity. So there's the exponential tech arms race side of in group, out group rivalry using exponential tech that is one set of risks. And the other set of risks is the application of exponentially more powerful tech not intentionally to try and beat an out group but to try to achieve some goal that we have but to produce a second and third order effects that do have harm to the commons, to other people, to environment, to other groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem we were originally trying to solve with the thing we were building. When Facebook was building a dating app and then building a social app where people could tag pictures, they weren't trying to build a democracy destroying app that would maximize time on site as part of its ad model through AI optimization of a newsfeed to the thing that made people spend most time on site which is usually them being limbically hijacked more than something else which ends up appealing to people's cognitive biases and group identities and creates no sense of shared reality. They weren't trying to do that but it was a second order effect and it's a pretty fucking powerful second order effect and a pretty fast one because the rate of tech is obviously able to get distributed to much larger scale much faster and with a bigger jump in terms of total vertical capacity than that's what it means to get to the verticalizing part of an exponential curve. So just like we can see that oil had the second order environmental effects and also social and political effects. War and so much of the whole like the total amount of oil used has a proportionality to total global GDP and this is why we have this the petrodollar and so the oil thing also had the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial complex and things like that. But we can see the same thing with more current technologies with Facebook and Google and other things. So I don't think we can run and the more powerful the tech is, we build it for reason X, whatever reason X is. Maybe X is three things, maybe it's one thing, right? We're doing the oil thing because we wanna make cars because it's a better method of individual transportation, we're building the Facebook thing because we're gonna connect people socially in a personal sphere. But it interacts with complex systems, with ecologies, economies, psychologies, cultures, and so it has effects on other than the thing we're intending. Some of those effects can end up being negative effects, but because this technology, if we make it to solve a problem, it has to overcome the problem. The problem has been around for a while, it's gonna overcome in a short period of time. So it usually has greater scale, greater rate of magnitude in some way. That also means that the externalities that it creates might be bigger problems. And you can say, well, but then that's the new problem and humanity will innovate its way out of that. Well, I don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't keep up with exponential curves like that, nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities forever. And this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking, well, no, I think we're totally screwed unless we can make a benevolent AI singleton that rules all of us. Guys like Ostrom and others thinking in those directions, because they're like, how do humans try to do multipolarity and make it work? And I have a different answer of what I think it looks like that does have more to do with love, but some applied social tech aligned with love. That's good, because I have a bunch of really dumb ideas I'd prefer to hear. I'd like to hear some of them first. I think the idea I would have is to be a bit more rigorous in trying to measure the amount of love you add or subtract from the world in second, third, fourth, fifth order effects. It's actually, I think, especially in the world of tech, quite doable. You just might not like, the shareholders may not like that kind of metric, but it's pretty easy to measure. That's not even, I'm perhaps half joking about love, but we could talk about just happiness and well being, long term well being. That's pretty easy for Facebook, for YouTube, for all these companies to measure that. They do a lot of kinds of surveys. There's very simple solutions here that you could just survey how, I mean, servers are in some sense useless because they're a subset of the population. You're just trying to get a sense, it's very loose kind of understanding, but integrated deeply as part of the technology. Most of our tech is recommender systems. Most of the, sorry, not tech, online interactions driven by recommender systems that learn very little data about you and use that data based on, mostly based on traces of your previous behavior to suggest future things. This is how Twitter, this is how Facebook works. This is how AdSense or Google AdSense works, this is how Netflix, YouTube work and so on. And for them to just track as opposed to engagement, how much you spend in a particular video, a particular site, is also track, give you the technology to do self report of what makes you feel good, what makes you grow as a person, of what makes you, you know, the best version of yourself, the Rogan idea of the hero of your movie. And just add that little bit of information. If you have people, you have this like happiness surveys of how you feel about the last five days, how would you report your experience. You can lay out the set of videos. It's kind of fascinating, I don't know if you ever look at YouTube, the history of videos you've looked at. It's fascinating. It's very embarrassing for me. Like it'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that I don't want anyone to know about, which is, which is, which will be like, I don't know, maybe like five videos in a row where it looks like I watched the whole thing, which I probably did about like how to cook a steak, even though, or just like with the best chefs in the world cooking steaks and I'm just like sitting there watching it for no purpose whatsoever, wasting away my life or like funny cat videos or like legit, that's always a good one. And I could look back and rate which videos made me a better person and not. And I mean, on a more serious note, there's a bunch of conversations, podcasts or lectures I've watched, which made me a better person and some of them made me a worse person. And honestly, not for stupid reasons, like I feel dumber, but because I do have a sense that that started me on a path of, of not being kind to other people. For example, I'll give you a, for my own, and I'm sorry for ranting, but maybe there's some usefulness to this kind of exploration of self. When I focus on creating, on programming, on science, I become a much deeper thinker and a kinder person to others. When I listen to too many, a little bit is good, but too many podcasts or videos about how, how our world is melting down or criticizing ridiculous people, the worst of the quote unquote woke, for example. All there's all these groups that are misbehaving in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted by power. The more I watch, the more I watch criticism of them, the worse I become. And I'm aware of this, but I'm also aware that for some reason it's pleasant to watch those sometimes. And so for, for me to be able to self report that to the YouTube algorithm, to the systems around me, and they ultimately try to optimize to make me the best person, the best version of myself, which I personally believe would make YouTube a lot more money because I'd be much more willing to spend time on YouTube and give YouTube a lot more, a lot more of my money. That's a, that's great for business and great for humanity because it'll make me a kinder person. It'll increase the love quotient, the love metric, and it'll make them a lot of money. I feel like everything's aligned. And so you, you should do that not just for YouTube algorithm, but also for military strategy and whether you go to war or not, because one externality you can think of about going to war, which I think we talked about offline is we often go to war with kind of governments with a, with, not with the people. You have to think about the kids of countries that see a soldier and because of what they experienced the interaction with the soldier, hate is born. When you're like eight years old, six years old, you lose your dad, you lose your mom, you lose a friend, somebody close to you that want a really powerful externality that could be reduced to love, positive and negative is the hate that's born when you make decisions. And that's going to take fruition that that little seed is going to become a tree that then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about. So but in my sense, it's possible to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does this add to the world. All that to say, do you have ideas of how we practically build systems that create a resilient society? There were a lot of good things that you shared where there's like 15 different ways that we could enter this that are all interesting. So I'm trying to see which one will probably be most useful. Pick the one or two things that are least ridiculous. When you were mentioning if we could see some of the second order effects or externalities that we aren't used to seeing, specifically the one of a kid being radicalized somewhere else, which engenders enmity in them towards us, which decreases our own future security. Even if you don't care about the kid, if you care about the kid, it's a whole other thing. Yeah, I mean, I think when we saw this, when Jane Fonda and others went to Vietnam and took photos and videos of what was happening, and you got to see the pictures of the kids with napalm on them, that like the antiwar effort was bolstered by that in a way it couldn't have been without that. Until we can see the images, you can't have a mere neuron effect in the same way. And when you can, that starts to have a powerful effect. I think there's a deep principle that you're sharing there, which is that if we can have a rivalrous intent where our in group, whatever it is, maybe it's our political party wanting to win within the US, maybe it's our nation state wanting to win in a war or an economic war over resource or whatever it is, that if we don't obliterate the other people completely, they don't go away, they're not engendered to like us more, they didn't become less smart. So they have more enmity towards us and whatever technologies we employed to be successful, they will now reverse engineer, make iterations on and come back. And so you drive an arms race, which is why you can see that the wars were over history employing more lethal weaponry. And not just the kinetic war, the information war and the narrative war and the economic war, like it just increased capacity in all of those fronts. And so what seems like a win to us on the short term might actually really produce losses in the long term. And what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably more aligned with everyone else because we inter affect each other. And I think the thing about globalism, globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which we affect each other and the rate at which we affect the biosphere that we're all affected by is that this kind of proverbial spiritual idea that we're all interconnected and need to think about that in some way, that was easy for tribes to get because everyone in the tribes so clearly saw their interconnection and dependence on each other. But in terms of a global level, the speed at which we are actually interconnected, the speed at which the harm happening to something in Wuhan affects the rest of the world or a new technology developed somewhere affects the entire world or an environmental issue or whatever is making it to where we either actually all get, not as a spiritual idea, just even as physics, right? We all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that and see how to make it through more effectively together or failures anywhere end up becoming decreased quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere. Don't you think people are beginning to experience that at the individual level? So governments are resisting it. They're trying to make us not empathize with each other, feel connected. But don't you think people are beginning to feel more and more connected? Like isn't that exactly what the technology is enabling? Like social networks, we tend to criticize them, but isn't there a sense which we're experiencing, you know? When you watch those videos that are criticizing, whether it's the woke Antifa side or the QAnon Trump supporter side, does it seem like they have increased empathy for people that are outside of their ideologic camp? Not at all. I may be conflating my own experience of the world and that of the populace. I tend to see those videos as feeding something that's a relic of the past. They figured out that drama fuels clicks, but whether I'm right or wrong, I don't know. But I tend to sense that that is not, that hunger for drama is not fundamental to human beings that we want to actually, that we want to understand Antifa and we want to empathize. We want to take radical ideas and be able to empathize with them and synthesize it all. Okay, let's look at cultural outliers in terms of violence versus compassion. We can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in group violence, bigger out group violence, and there's some variance in them and variance at different times based on the scarcity or abundance of resource and other things. But you can look at say, Janes, whose whole religion is around nonviolence so much so that they don't even hurt plants, they only take fruits that fall off them and stuff. Or to go to a larger population, you could take Buddhists, where for the most part, with a few exceptions, for the most part across three millennia and across lots of different countries and geographies and whatever, you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't hurt bugs. The whole spectrum of genetic variance that is happening within a culture of that many people and head traumas and whatever, and nobody hurts bugs. And then you look at a group where the kids grew up as child soldiers in Liberia or Darfur were to make it to adulthood, pretty much everybody's killed people hand to hand and killed people who were civilian or innocent type of people. And you say, okay, so we were very neotenous, we can be conditioned by our environment and humans can be conditioned where almost all the humans show up in these two different bell curves. It doesn't mean that the Buddhists had no violence, it doesn't mean that these people had no compassion, but they're very different Gaussian distributions. And so I think one of the important things that I like to do is look at the examples of the populations, what Buddhism shows regarding compassion or what Judaism shows around education, the average level of education that everybody gets because of a culture that is really working on conditioning it or various cultures. What are the positive deviance outside of the statistical deviance to see what is actually possible and then say, what are the conditioning factors and can we condition those across a few of them simultaneously and could we build a civilization like that becomes a very interesting question. So there's this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent, large groups of humans become violent, they become irrational, specifically those two things, rivalrous and violent and irrational. And so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions, they need ruled somehow. And that not getting that is some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't understand human nature yet. This gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing. I think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda that is useful for the classes that control to popularize the idea that most people are too violent, lazy, undisciplined and irrational to make good choices and therefore their choices should be sublimated in some kind of way. I think that if we look back at these conditioning environments, we can say, okay, so the kids that go to a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like Exeter Academy, there's still a Gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric, but on average, they become senators and the worst ones become high end lawyers or whatever. And then I look at the inner city school with a totally different set of things and I see a very, very differently displaced Gaussian distribution, but a very different set of conditioning factors. And then I say the masses, well, if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses got to go to Exeter and have that family and whatever, would they still be the masses? Could we actually condition more social virtue, more civic virtue, more orientation towards dialectical synthesis, more empathy, more rationality widely? Yes. Would that lead to better capacity for something like participatory governance, democracy or republic or some kind of participatory governance? Yes. Yes. Is it necessary for it actually? Yes. And is it good for class interests? Not really. By the way, when you say class interests, this is the powerful leading over the less powerful, that kind of idea. Anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power doesn't necessarily benefit from decreasing those asymmetries of power and kind of increasing the capacity of people more widely. And so, when we talk about power, we're talking about asymmetries in agency, influence and control. Do you think that hunger for power is fundamental to human nature? I think we should get that straight before we talk about other stuff. So like this pick up line that I use at a bar often, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Is that true or is that just a fancy thing to say? In modern society, there's something to be said, have we changed as societies over time in terms of how much we crave power? That there is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned one way or the other, yes, but you can see that Buddhist society does a very different thing with it at scale, that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types of sociopathic behavior and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions. And so, it's like, is eating the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment that give us more dopamine hit because they were rare and they're not anymore, salt, sugar? Is there something pleasurable about those where humans have an orientation to overeat if they can? Well, the fact that there is that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese and die of obesity, right? Like it's possible to have a particular impulse and to be able to understand it, have other ones and be able to balance them. And so, to say that power dynamics are obligate in humans and we can't do anything about it is very similar to me to saying like everyone is going to be obligately obese. Yeah. So, there's some degree to which the control of those impulses has to do with the conditioning early in life. Yes. And the culture that creates the environment to be able to do that and then the recursion on that. Okay. So, if we were to, bear with me, just asking for a friend, if we're to kill all humans on Earth and then start over, is there ideas about how to build up, okay, we don't have to kill, let's leave the humans on Earth, they're fine and go to Mars and start a new society. Is there ways to construct systems of conditioning, education of how we live with each other that would incentivize us properly to not seek power, to not construct systems that are of asymmetry of power and to create systems that are resilient to all kinds of terrorist attacks, to all kinds of destructions? I believe so. Is there some inclination? Of course, you probably don't have all the answers, but you have insights about what that looks like. Yeah. It's just rigorous practice of dialectic synthesis as essentially conversations with assholes of various flavors until they're not assholes anymore because you become deeply empathetic with their experience. Okay. So, there's a lot of things that we would need to construct to come back to this, like what is the basis of rivalry? How do you bind it? How does it relate to tech? If you have a culture that is doing less rivalry, does it always lose in war to those who do war better? And how do you make something on the enactment of how to get there from here? Great, great. So what's rivalry? Well, is rivalry bad or good? So is another word for rivalry competition? Yes, I think roughly, yes. I think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here. Good for some things, bad for other things. Bad for some contexts and others. Even that. Okay. Let me give you an example that relates back to the Facebook measuring thing you were mentioning a moment ago. First, I think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction and what I want to get to in a moment, but it's not, the devil is in the details here. So I enjoy praise, it feeds my ego, I grow stronger. So I appreciate that. I will make sure to include one piece every 15 minutes as we go. So it's easier to measure, there are problems with this argument, but there's also utility to it. So let's take it for the utility it has first. It's harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort. We can measure with technology that the shocks in a car are making the car bounce less, that the bed is softer and, you know, material science and those types of things. And happiness is actually hard for philosophers to define because some people find that there's certain kinds of overcoming suffering that are necessary for happiness. There's happiness that feels more like contentment and happiness that feels more like passion. Is passion the source of all suffering or the source of all creativity? Like there's deep stuff and it's mostly first person, not measurable third person stuff, even if maybe it corresponds to third person stuff to some degree. But we also see examples of some of our favorite examples as people who are in the worst environments who end up finding happiness, right, where the third person stuff looks to be less conducive and there's some Victor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, whatever. But it's pretty easy to measure comfort and it's pretty universal. And I think we can see that the Industrial Revolution started to replace happiness with comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for. And we can see that when increased comfort is given, maybe because of the evolutionary disposition that expending extra calories when for the majority of our history we didn't have extra calories was not a safe thing to do. Who knows why? When extra comfort is given, it's very easy to take that path, even if it's not the path that supports overall well being long term. And so, we can see that, you know, when you look at the techno optimist idea that we have better lives than Egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever, what they're largely looking at is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation systems are and things like that, in which case there's massive improvement. But we also see that in some of the nations where people have access to the most comfort, suicide and mental illness are the highest. And we also see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones that are in materially lame environments. And so, there's a very interesting question here, and if I understand correctly, you do cold showers, and Joe Rogan was talking about how he needs to do some fairly intensive kind of struggle that is a non comfort to actually induce being better as a person, this concept of hormesis, that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases its adaptive capacity, and that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to do with its adaptive capacity, its overall resilience, health, well being, which requires a decent bit of discomfort. And yet, in the presence of the comfort solution, it's very hard to not choose it, and then as you're choosing it regularly, to actually down regulate your overall adaptive capacity. And so, when we start saying, can we make tech where we're measuring for the things that it produces beyond just the measure of GDP or whatever particular measures look like the revenue generation or profit generation of my business, are all the meaningful things measurable, and what are the right measures, and what are the externalities of optimizing for that measurement set, what meaningful things aren't included in that measurement set, that might have their own externalities, these are some of the questions we actually have to take seriously. Yeah, and I think they're answerable questions, right? Progressively better, not perfect. Right, so first of all, let me throw out happiness and comfort out of the discussion, those seem like useless, the distinction, because I said they're useful, well being is useful, but I think I take it back. I propose new metrics in this brainstorm session, which is, so one is like personal growth, which is intellectual growth, I think we're able to make that concrete for ourselves, like you're a better person than you were a week ago, or a worse person than you were a week ago. I think we can ourselves report that, and understand what that means, it's this grey area, and we try to define it, but I think we humans are pretty good at that, because we have a sense, an idealistic sense of the person we might be able to become. We all dream of becoming a certain kind of person, and I think we have a sense of getting closer and not towards that person. Maybe this is not a great metric, fine. The other one is love, actually. Like if you're happy or not, or you're comfortable or not, how much love do you have towards your fellow human beings? I feel like if you try to optimize that, and increasing that, that's going to have, that's a good metric. How many times a day, sorry, if I can quantify, how many times a day have you thought positively of another human being? Put that down as a number, and increase that number. I think the process of saying, okay, so let's not take GDP or GDP per capita as the metric we want to optimize for, because GDP goes up during war, and it goes up with more healthcare spending from sicker people, and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality of life. Addiction drives GDP awesomely. By the way, when I said growth, I wasn't referring to GDP. I know. I'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use, and why it's not an adequate metric, because we're exploring other ones. So the idea of saying, what would the metrics for a good civilization be? If I had to pick a set of metrics, what would the best ones be if I was going to optimize for those? And then really try to run the thought experiment more deeply, and say, okay, so what happens if we optimize for that? Try to think through the first, and second, and third order effects of what happens that's positive, and then also say, what negative things can happen from optimizing that? What actually matters that is not included in that or in that way of defining it? Because love versus number of positive thoughts per day, I could just make a long list of names and just say positive thing about each one. It's all very superficial. Not include animals or the rest of life, have a very shallow total amount of it, but I'm optimizing the number, and if I get some credit for the number. And this is when I said the model of reality isn't reality. When you make a set of metrics that we're going to optimize for this, whatever reality is that is not included in those metrics can be the areas where harm occurs, which is why I would say that wisdom is something like the discernment that leads to right choices beyond what metrics based optimization would offer. Yeah, but another way to say that is wisdom is a constantly expanding and evolving set of metrics. Which means that there is something in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important that isn't part of that metric set. So there's a certain kind of connection, discernment, awareness, and this is an iterative game theory. There's a girdles and completeness theorem, right? Which is if the system, if the set of things is consistent, it won't be complete. So we're going to keep adding to it, which is why we were saying earlier, I don't think it's not beautiful. And especially if you were just saying one of the metrics you want to optimize for at the individual level is becoming, right? That we're becoming more. Well, that then becomes true for the civilization and our metric sets as well. And our definition of how to think about a meaningful life and a meaningful civilization. I can tell you what some of my favorite metrics are. What's that? Well love is obviously not a metric. It's like you can bench. Yeah. It's a good metric. Yeah. I want to optimize that across the entire population, starting with infants. So in the same way that love isn't a metric, but you could make metrics that look at certain parts of it. The thing I'm about to say isn't a metric, but it's a, it's a consideration because I thought about this a lot. I don't think there is a metric, a right one. I think that every metric by itself without this thing we talked about of the continuous improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer. I think that's why what the idea of false idol means in terms of the model of reality not being reality. Then my sacred relationship is to reality itself, which also binds me to the unknown forever. To the known, but also to the unknown. And there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown that creates an epistemic humility that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing I know, but to learn new stuff. And to be open to perceive reality directly. So my model never becomes sacred. My model is useful. My So the model can't be the false idol. Correct. Yeah. And this is why the first verse of the Tao Te Ching is the Tao that is nameable is not the eternal Tao. The naming then can become the source of the 10,000 things that if you get too carried away with it can actually obscure you from paying attention to reality beyond in the models. It sounds a lot, a lot like Stephen Wolfram, but in a different language, much more poetic. I can imagine that. No, I'm referring, I'm joking, but there's a echoes of cellular automata, which you can't name. You can't construct a good model cellular automata. You can only watch in awe. I apologize. I'm distracting your train of thought horribly and miserably making it different. By the way, something robots aren't good at and dealing with the uncertainty of uneven ground. You've been okay so far. You've been doing wonderfully. So what's your favorite metrics? Okay. So I know you're not a robot. So I have a So one metric, and there are problems with this, but one metric that I like to just as a thought experiment to consider is because you're actually asking, I mean, I know you ask your guests about the meaning of life because ultimately when you're saying what is a desirable civilization, you can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful human life and to say what is a good civilization because it's going to be in relationship to that, right? And then you have whatever your answer is, how do you know what is the epistemic basis for postulating that? There's also a whole nother reason for asking that question. I don't, I mean, that doesn't even apply to you whatsoever, which is, it's interesting how few people have been asked questions like it. The joke about these questions is silly, right? It's funny to watch a person and if I was more of an asshole, I would really stick on that question. Right. It's a silly question in some sense, but like we haven't really considered what it means. Just a more concrete version of that question is what is a better world? What is the kind of world we're trying to create really? Have you really thought, I'll give you some kind of simple answers to that that are meaningful to me, but let me do the societal indices first because they're fun. We should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's important to come back to. Are you reminding me to ask you about the meaning of life? Noted. Let me jot that down. So because I think I stopped tracking it like 25 open threads. Okay. Let it all burn. One index that I find very interesting is the inverse correlation of addiction within the society. The more a society produces addiction within the people in it, the less healthy I think the society is as a pretty fundamental metric. And so the more the individuals feel that there are less compulsive things in compelling them to behave in ways that are destructive to their own values. And insofar as a civilization is conditioning and influencing the individuals within it, the inverse of addiction. Lovely defined. Correct. Addiction. What's it? Yeah. Compulsive behavior that is destructive towards things that we value. Yeah. I think that's a very interesting one to think about. That's a really interesting one. And this is then also where comfort and addiction start to get very close. And the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is the ability to be exposed to hypernormal stimuli and not go down the path of desensitizing to other stimuli and needing that hypernormal stimuli, which does involve a kind of hormesis. So I do think the civilization of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort. And I think that's what the sweat lodge and the vision quest and the solo journey and the ayahuasca journey and the Sundance were. I think it's even a big part of what yoga asana was, is to make beings that are resilient and strong, they have to overcome some things. To make beings that can control their own mind and fear, they have to face some fears. But we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma. And yet we can see that the most fucked up people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma. But some of the most incredible people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma, whether or not they happened to make it through and overcome that or not. So how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the resilience and the whatever that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people? A certain kind of ritualized discomfort that not only has us overcome something by ourselves, but overcome it together with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the other people are there. So it's both a resilience of the individuals and a resilience of the bonding. So I think we'll keep getting more and more comfortable stuff, but we have to also develop resilience in the presence of that for the anti addiction direction and the fullness of character and the trustworthiness to others. So you have to be consistently injecting discomfort into the system, ritualize. I mean, this sounds like you have to imagine Sisyphus happy. You have to imagine Sisyphus with his rock, optimally resilient from a metrics perspective in society. So we want to constantly be throwing rocks at ourselves. Not constantly. You didn't have to frequently, periodically, and there's different levels of intensity, different periodicities. Now, I do not think this should be imposed by states. I think it should emerge from cultures. And I think the cultures are developing people that understand the value of it. So there is both a cultural cohesion to it, but there's also a voluntaryism because the people value the thing that is being developed and understand it. And that's what conditioning, it's conditioning some of these values. Conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty, but when we recognize the language that we speak and the words that we think in and the patterns of thought built into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned in us just based on where we're born, you can't not condition people. So all you can do is take more responsibility for what the conditioning factors are. And then you have to think about this question of what is a meaningful human life? Because we're, unlike the other animals born into environment that they're genetically adapted for, we're building new environments that we were not adapted for, and then we're becoming affected by those. So then we have to say, well, what kinds of environments, digital environments, physical environments, social environments would we want to create that would develop the healthiest, happiest, most moral, noble, meaningful people? What are even those sets of things that matter? So you end up getting deep existential consideration at the heart of civilization design when you start to realize how powerful we're becoming and how much what we're building it in service towards matters. Before I pull it, I think three threads you just laid down, is there another metric index that you're interested in? There's one more that I really like. There's a number, but the next one that comes to mind is I have to make a very quick model. Healthy human bonding, say we were in a tribal type setting, my positive emotional states and your positive emotional states would most of the time be correlated, your negative emotional states and mine. And so you start laughing, I start laughing, you start crying, my eyes might tear up. And we would call that the compassion compersion axis. I would, this is a model I find useful. So compassion is when you're feeling something negative, I feel some pain, I feel some empathy, something in relationship. Compersion is when you do well, I'm stoked for you, right? Like I actually feel happiness at your happiness. I like compersion. Yeah, the fact that it's such an uncommon word in English is actually a problem culturally. Because I feel that often, and I think that's a really good feeling to feel and maximize for actually. That's actually the metric I'm going to say is the compassion compersion axis is the thing I would optimize for. Now, there is a state where my emotional states and your emotional states are just totally decoupled. And that is like sociopathy. I don't want to hurt you, but I don't care if I do or for you to do well or whatever. But there's a worse state and it's extremely common, which is where they're inversely coupled. Where my positive emotions correspond to your negative ones and vice versa. And that is the, I would call it the jealousy sadism axis. The jealousy axis is when you're doing really well, I feel something bad. I feel taken away from, less than, upset, envious, whatever. And that's so common, but I think of it as kind of a low grade psychopathology that we've just normalized. The idea that I'm actually upset at the happiness or fulfillment or success of another is like a profoundly fucked up thing. No, we shouldn't shame it and repress it so it gets worse. We should study it. Where does it come from? And it comes from our own insecurities and stuff. But then the next part that everybody knows is really fucked up is just on the same axis. It's the same inverted, which is to the jealousy or the envy is the, I feel badly when you're doing well. The sadism side is I actually feel good when you lose or when you're in pain, I feel some happiness that's associated. And you can see when someone feels jealous, sometimes they feel jealous with a partner and then they feel they want that partner to get it, revenge comes up or something. So sadism is really like jealousy is one step on the path to sadism from the healthy compassion conversion axis. So, I would like to see a society that is inversely, that is conditioning sadism and jealousy inversely, right? The lower that amount and the more the compassion conversion. And if I had to summarize that very simply, I'd say it would optimize for conversion. Which is because notice that's not just saying love for you where I might be self sacrificing and miserable and I love people, but I kill myself, which I don't think anybody thinks a great idea. Happiness where I might be sociopathically happy where I'm causing problems all over the place or even sadistically happy, but it's a coupling, right? That I'm actually feeling happiness in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where I, my own agentic desire to get happier wants to support you too. That's actually speaking of another pickup line. That's quite honestly what I, as a guy who is single, this is going to come out very ridiculous because it's like, oh yeah, where's your girlfriend, bro? But that's what I look for in a relationship because it's like, it's so much, it's so, it's such an amazing life where you actually get joy from another person's success and they get joy from your success. And then it becomes like you don't actually need to succeed much for that to have a, like a loop, like a cycle of just like happiness that just increases like exponentially. It's weird. So like just be, just enjoying the happiness of others, the success of others. So this, this is like the, let's call this, cause the first person that drilled this into my head is Rogan, Joe Rogan. He was the embodiment of that cause I saw somebody who is a successful, rich and nonstop true. I mean, you could tell when somebody is full of shit and somebody is not really genuinely enjoying the success of his friends. That was weird to me. That was interesting. And I mean, the way you're kind of speaking to it, the reason Joe stood out to me is I guess I haven't witnessed genuine expression of that often in this culture of just real joy for others. I mean, part of that has to do, there hasn't been many channels where you can watch or listen to people being their authentic selves. So I'm sure there's a bunch of people who live life with compersion. They probably don't seek public attention also, but that was, yeah, if there was any word that could express what I've learned from Joe, why he's been a really inspiring figure is that compersion. And I wish our world was, had a lot more of that cause then it may, I mean, my own, sorry to go in a small tangent, but like you're speaking how society should function. But I feel like if you optimize for that metric in your own personal life, you're going to live a truly fulfilling life. I don't know what the right word to use, but that's a really good way to live life. You will also learn what gets in the way of it and how to work with it that if you wanted to help try to build systems at scale or apply Facebook or exponential technologies to do that, you would have more actual depth of real knowledge of what that takes. And this is, you know, as you mentioned that there's this virtuous cycle between when you get stoked on other people doing well and then they have a similar relationship to you and everyone is in the process of building each other up. And this is what I would say the healthy version of competition is versus the unhealthy version. The healthy version, right, the root, I believe it's a Latin word that means to strive together. And it's that impulse of becoming where I want to become more, but I recognize that there's actually a hormesis. There's a challenge that is needed for me to be able to do that. But that means that, yes, there's an impulse where I'm trying to get ahead. Maybe I'm even trying to win, but I actually want a good opponent and I want them to get ahead too because that is where my ongoing becoming happens and the win itself will get boring very quickly. The ongoing becoming is where there's aliveness and for the ongoing becoming, they need to have it too. And that's the strive together. So, in the healthy competition, I'm stoked when they're doing really well because my becoming is supported by it. Now this is actually a very nice segue into a model I like about what a meaningful human life is, if you want to go there. Let's go there. I have three things I'm going elsewhere with, but if we were first, let us take this short stroll through the park of the meaning of life. Daniel, what is a meaningful life? I think the semantics end up mattering because a lot of people will take the word meaning and the word purpose almost interchangeably and they'll think kind of, what is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of human life? What is the meaning of life? What's the meaning of the universe? And what is the meaning of existence rather than nonexistence? So, there's a lot of kind of existential considerations there and I think there's some cognitive mistakes that are very easy, like taking the idea of purpose. Which is like a goal? Which is a utilitarian concept. The purpose of one thing is defined in relationship to other things that have assumed value. And to say, what is the purpose of everything? Well, purpose is too small of a question. It's fundamentally a relative question within everything. What is the purpose of one thing relative to another? What is the purpose of everything? And there's nothing outside of it with which to say it. We actually just got to the limits of the utility of the concept of purpose. It doesn't mean it's purposeless in the sense of something inside of it being purposeless. It means the concept is too small. Which is why you end up getting to, you know, like in Taoism, talking about the nature of it. Rather, there's a fundamental what where the why can't go deeper is the nature of it. But I'm going to try to speak to a much simpler part, which is when people think about what is a meaningful human life. And kind of if we were to optimize for something at the level of individual life, but also, how does optimizing for this at the level of the individual life lead to the best society for insofar as people living that way affects others and long term, the world as a whole? And how would we then make a civilization that was trying to think about these things? Because you can see that there are a lot of dialectics where there's value on two sides, individualism and collectivism or the ability to accept things and the ability to push harder and whatever. And there's failure modes on both sides. And so, when you were starting to say, okay, individual happiness, you're like, wait, fuck, sadists can be happy while hurting people. It's not individual happiness, it's love. But wait, some people can self sacrifice out of love in a way that actually ends up just creating codependency for everybody. Or okay, so how do we think about all those things together? This kind of came to me as a simple way that I kind of relate to it is that a meaningful life involves the mode of being, the mode of doing and the mode of becoming. And it involves a virtuous relationship between those three and that any of those modes on their own also have failure modes that are not a meaningful life. The mode of being, the way I would describe it, if we're talking about the essence of it is about taking in and appreciating the beauty of life that is now. It's a mode that is in the moment and that is largely about being with what is. It's fundamentally grounded in the nature of experience and the meaningfulness of experience. The prima facie meaningfulness of when I'm having this experience, I'm not actually asking what the meaning of life is, I'm actually full of it. I'm full of experiencing it. The momentary experience, the moment. Yes. So taking in the beauty of life. Being is adding to the beauty of life. I'm going to produce some art, I'm going to produce some technology that will make life easier and more beautiful for somebody else. I'm going to do some science that will end up leading to better insights or other people's ability to appreciate the beauty of life more because they understand more about it or whatever it is or protect it, right? I'm going to protect it in some way. But that's adding to or being in service of the beauty of life through our doing. And becoming is getting better at both of those. Being able to deepen our being, which is to be able to take in the beauty of life more profoundly, be more moved by it, touched by it, and increasing our capacity with doing to add to the beauty of life more. So I hold that a meaningful life has to be all three of those. And where they're not in conflict with each other, ultimately it grounds in being, it grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness of experience. And then my doing is ultimately something that will be able to increase the possibility of the quality of experience for others. And my becoming is a deepening on those. So it grounds an experience and also the evolutionary possibility of experience. And the point is to oscillate between these, never getting stuck on any one or I suppose in parallel, well you can't really, attention is a thing, you can only allocate attention. I want moments where I am absorbed in the sunset and I'm not thinking about what to do next. Yeah. And then the fullness of that can make it to where my doing doesn't come from what's in it for me because I actually feel overwhelmingly full already. And then it's like how can I make life better for other people that don't have as much opportunities I had? How can I add something wonderful? How can I just be in the creative process? And so I think where the doing comes from matters and if the doing comes from a fullness of being, it's inherently going to be paying attention to externalities or it's more oriented to do that than if it comes from some emptiness that is trying to get full in some way that is willing to cause sacrifices other places and where a chunk of its attention is internally focused. And so when Buddha said desire is the cause of all suffering, then later the vow of the Bodhisattva which was to show up for all sentient beings in universe forever is a pretty intense thing like desire. I would say there is a kind of desire, if we think of desire as a basis for movement like a flow or a gradient, there's a kind of desire that comes from something missing inside seeking fulfillment of that in the world. That ends up being the cause of actions that perpetuate suffering. But there's also not just non desire, there's a kind of desire that comes from feeling full at the beauty of life and wanting to add to it that is a flow this direction. And I don't think that is the cause of suffering. I think that is, you know, and the Western traditions, right, the Eastern traditions focused on that and kind of unconditional happiness outside of them, in the moment outside of time. The Western tradition said, no, actually, desire is the source of creativity and we're here to be made in the image and likeness of the creator. We're here to be fundamentally creative. But creating from where and in service of what? Creating from a sense of connection to everything and wholeness in service of the well being of all of it is very different. Which is back to that compassion, compersion axis. Being, doing, becoming. It's pretty powerful. You could potentially be algorithmatized into a robot just saying, where does death come into that? Being is forgetting, I mean, the concept of time completely. There's a sense to doing and becoming that has a deadline built in, the urgency built in. Do you think death is fundamental to this, to a meaningful life? Acknowledging or feeling the terror of death, like Ernest Becker, or just acknowledging the uncertainty, the mystery, the melancholy nature of the fact that the ride ends. Is that part of this equation or it's not necessary? Okay, look at how it could be related. I've experienced fear of death. I've also experienced times where I thought I was going to die that felt extremely peaceful and beautiful. And it's funny because we can be afraid of death because we're afraid of hell or bad reincarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have or we're projecting some kind of sentient suffering. But if we're afraid of just non experience, I noticed that every time I stay up late enough that I'm really tired, I'm longing for deep sleep and non experience, right? Like I'm actually longing for experience to stop. And it's not morbid, it's not a bummer. And I don't mind falling asleep and sometimes when I wake up, I want to go back into it and then when it's done, I'm happy to come out of it. So when we think about death and having finite time here, and we could talk about if we live for a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that, it would still be finite time. The one bummer with the age we die is that I generally find that people mostly start to emotionally mature just shortly before they die. But if I get to live forever, I can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever. And if life continues and consciousness and sentience and people appreciating beauty and adding to it and becoming continues, my life doesn't, but my life can have effects that continue well beyond it, then life with a capital L starts mattering more to me than my life. My life gets to be a part of and in service to. And the whole thing about when old men plant trees, the shade of which they'll never get to be in. I remember the first time I read this poem by Hafez, the Sufi poet, written in like 13th century or something like that, and he talked about that if you're lonely, to think about him and he was kind of leaning his spirit into yours across the distance of a millennium and would comfort you with these poems and just thinking about people a millennium from now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if they'd be lonely and could he offer something that could touch them. And it's just fucking beautiful. And so like the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends what's in it for me. And death forces you to that. So not only does death create the urgency of doing, you're very right, it does have a sense in which it incentivizes the compersion and the compassion. And the widening, you remember Einstein had that quote, something to the effect of it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things. There's this one thing we call universe and something about us being inside of a prison of perception that can only see a very narrow little bit of it. But this might be just some weird disposition of mine, but when I think about the future after I'm dead and I think about consciousness, I think about young people falling in love for the first time and their experience, and I think about people being awed by sunsets and I think about all of it, right? I can't not feel connected to that. Do you feel some sadness to the very high likelihood that you will be forgotten completely by all of human history, you, Daniel, the name, that which cannot be named? Systems like to self perpetuate, egos do that. The idea that I might do something meaningful that future people will appreciate, of course there's like a certain sweetness to that idea. But I know how many people did something, did things that I wouldn't be here without and that my life would be less without, whose names I will never know. And I feel a gratitude to them, I feel a closeness, I feel touched by that, and I think to the degree that the future people are conscious enough, there is a, you know, a lot of traditions have this kind of are we being good ancestors and respect for the ancestors beyond the names. I think that's a very healthy idea. But let me return to a much less beautiful and a much less pleasant conversation. You mentioned prison. Back to X risk, okay. And conditioning. You mentioned something about the state. So what role, let's talk about companies, governments, parents, all the mechanisms that can be a source of conditioning. Which flavor of ice cream do you like? Do you think the state is the right thing for the future? So governments that are elected democratic systems that are representing representative democracy. Is there some kind of political system of governance that you find appealing? Is it parents, meaning a very close knit tribes of conditioning that's the most essential? And then you and Michael Malice would happily agree that it's anarchy, or the state should be dissolved or destroyed or burned to the ground if you're Michael Malice, giggling, holding the torch as the fire burns. So which which is it is the state can state be good? Or is the state bad for the conditioning of a beautiful world, A or B? This is like an SPT test. You like to give these simplified good or bad things. Would I like the state that we live in currently, the United States federal government to stop existing today? No, I would really not like that. I think that would be not quite bad for the world in a lot of ways. Do I think that it's a optimal social system and maximally just and humane and all those things? And I wanted to continue as is. No, also not that. But I am much more interested in it being able to evolve to a better thing without going through the catastrophe phase that I think it's just non existence would give. So what size of state is good in a sense like do we should we as a human society as this world becomes more globalized? Should we be constantly striving to reduce the we can we can put on a map like right now, literally, like the the centers of power in the world, some of them are tech companies, some of them are governments, should we be trying to as much as possible to decentralize the power to where it's very difficult to point on the map, the centers of power. And that means making the state however, there's a bunch of different ways to make the government much smaller, that could be reducing in the United States, reducing the funding for the government, all those kinds of things, their set of responsibilities, the set of powers, it could be, I mean, this is far out, but making more nations, or maybe nations not in the space that are defined by geographic location, but rather in the space of ideas, which is what anarchy is about. So anarchy is about forming collectives based on their set of ideas, and doing so dynamically not based on where you were born, and so on. I think we can say that the natural state of humans, if we want to describe such a thing, is to live in tribes that were below the Dunbar number, meaning that for a few hundred thousand years of human history, all of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that size. And whenever it would get up to that size, it would end up cleaving. And so it seems like there's a pretty strong, but there weren't individual humans out in the wild doing really well, right? So we were a group animal, but with groups that had a specific size. So we could say, in a way, humans were being domesticated by those groups. They were learning how to have certain rules to participate with the group, without which you'd get kicked out. But that's still the wild state of people. And maybe it's useful to do as a side statement, which I've recently looked at a bunch of papers around Dunbar's number, where the mean is actually 150. If you actually look at the original papers, it's a range. It's really a range. So it's actually somewhere under a thousand. So it's a range of like two to 500 or whatever it is. But like you could argue that the, I think it actually is exactly two, the range is two to 520, something like that. And this is the mean that's taken crudely. It's not a very good paper in terms of the actual numerically speaking. But it'd be interesting if there's a bunch of Dunbar numbers that could be computed for particular environments, particular conditions, so on. It is very true that they're likely to be something small, you know, under a million. But it'd be interesting if we can expand that number in interesting ways that will change the fabric of this conversation. I just want to kind of throw that in there. I don't know if the 150 is baked in somehow into the hardware. We can talk about some of the things that it probably has to do with. Up to a certain number of people. And this is going to be variable based on the social technologies that mediate it to some degree. We'll talk about that in a minute. Up to a certain number of people, everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately. So let's go ahead and just take 150 as an average number. Everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly, it's your extended family and you're stuck living with them and you know who they are and there's no anonymous people. There's no just them and over there. And that's one part of what leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the individual and good for the whole has a coupling. Also below that scale, everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing. There's not groups that are very siloed. And as a result, it's actually very hard to get away with bad behavior. There's a force kind of transparency. And so you don't need kind of like the state in that way. But lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead. Sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen. And so there's a conditioning environment where the individual is behaving in a way that is aligned with the interest of the tribe is what gets conditioned. When it gets to be a much larger system, it becomes easier to hide certain things from the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of anonymous people. I would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that number of people, we could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a really big decision. Do we migrate? Do we not migrate? Do we, you know, something like that? Do we get rid of this person? And why would I want to agree to be a part of a larger group where everyone can't be part of that council? And so I am going to now be subject to law that I have no say in if I could be part of a smaller group that could still survive and I get a say in the law that I'm subject to. So I think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the Dunbar number two is we can look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding them together and has cleaving energy. And if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy, that civilization will last. And so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving energy within the society, things we can do to increase the binding energy. I think naturally we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size kind of tribalism. That ended with a few things. It ended with people having migrated enough that when you started to get resource wars, you couldn't just migrate away easily. And so tribal warfare became more obligated. It involved the plow and the beginning of real economic surplus. So there were a few different kind of forcing functions. But we're talking about what size should it be, right? What size should a society be? And I think the idea, like if we think about your body for a moment as a self organizing complex system that is multi scaled, we think about... Our body is a wonderland. Our body is a wonderland, yeah. That's a John Mayer song. I apologize. But yes, so if we think about our body and the billions of cells that are in it. Well, you don't have... Think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have all the tens of trillions of cells in it with no internal organization structure, right? Just like a sea of protoplasm. It wouldn't work. Pure democracy. And so you have cells and tissues, and then you have tissues and organs and organs and organ systems, and so you have these layers of organization, and then obviously the individual in a tribe in a ecosystem. And each of the higher layers are both based on the lower layers, but also influencing them. I think the future of civilization will be similar, which is there's a level of governance that happens at the level of the individual. My own governance of my own choice. I think there's a level that happens at the level of a family. We're making decisions together, we're inter influencing each other and affecting each other, taking responsibility for the idea of an extended family. And you can see that like for a lot of human history, we had an extended family, we had a local community, a local church or whatever it was, we had these intermediate structures. Whereas right now, there's kind of like the individual producer, consumer, taxpayer, voter, and the massive nation state global complex, and not that much in the way of intermediate structures that we relate with, and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics, all impersonalized, made fungible. And so, I think that we have to have global governance, meaning I think we have to have governance at the scale we affect stuff, and if anybody is messing up the oceans, that matters for everybody. So, that can't only be national or only local. Everyone is scared of the idea of global governance because we think about some top down system of imposition that now has no checks and balances on power. I'm scared of that same version, so I'm not talking about that kind of global governance. It's why I'm even using the word governance as a process rather than government as an imposed phenomena. And so, I think we have to have global governance, but I think we also have to have local governance, and there has to be relationships between them that each, where there are both checks and balances and power flows of information. So, I think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance at the level of nation states because I think nation states are largely fictitious things that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that. I think cities are based on real things that will keep being real where the proximity of certain things together, the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of those things. So, you look at like Jeffrey West's work on scale and finding that companies and nation states and things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return of, of production per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the tribal scale. But the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita, but it's not designed, it's kind of this organic thing, right? So, there should be governance at the level of cities because people can sense and actually have some agency there, probably neighborhoods and smaller scales within it and also verticals and some of it won't be geographic, it'll be network based, right? Networks of affinities. So, I don't think the future is one type of governance. Now, what we can say more broadly is say, when we're talking about groups of people that inner affect each other, the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how to coordinate our choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase total productive capacity in a way that's good for everybody, division of labor and specialty so we all get more better stuff and whatever. But it's a, it's a coordination of our choice making. I think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination of choice making, so they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave and an internal war comes about or whatever, or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their resources or whatever. Or it can fail on the side of trying to get order via imposition, via force, and so it fails on the side of oppression, which ends up being for a while functionalish for the thing as a whole, but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of revolt or because it can't innovate enough or something like that. And so, there's this like toggling between order via oppression and chaos. And I think the idea of democracy, not the way we've implemented it, but the idea of it, whether we're talking about a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy, liquid democracy, a republic or whatever, the idea of an open society, participatory governance is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with chaos and infighting and inability to coordinate, and we're also not stuck with oppression? And what would it take to have emergent order? This is the most kind of central question for me these days because if we look at what different nation states are doing around the world and we see nation states that are more authoritarian that in some ways are actually coordinating much more effectively. So for instance, we can see that China has built high speed rail not just through its country but around the world and the US hasn't built any high speed rail yet. You can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where we've had increasing economic inequality happening. You can see like that if there was a single country that could make all of its own stuff if the global supply chains failed, China would be the closest one to being able to start to go closed loop on fundamental things. Belt and Road Initiative, supply chain on rare earth metals, transistor manufacturing that is like, oh, they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways. In the last call it 30 years. And that's imposed order. Imposed order. And we can see that if in the US, let's look at why real quick. We know why we created term limits so that we wouldn't have forever monarchs. That's the thing we were trying to get away from and that there would be checks and balances on power and that kind of thing. But that also has created a negative second order effect, which is nobody does long term planning because somebody comes in who's got four years, they want reelected. They don't do anything that doesn't create a return within four years that will end up getting them elected, reelected. And so the 30 year industrial development to build high speed trains or the new kind of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get invested in. And then if you have left versus right, where whatever someone does for four years, then the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years. And most of the energy goes into campaigning against each other. This system is just dissipating as heat, right? Like it's just burning up as heat. And the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting because they got rid of those people can actually coordinate better. But I would argue it has its own fail states eventually and dystopic properties that are not the thing we want. So the goal is to accomplish, to create a system that does long term planning without the negative effects of a monarch or dictator that stays there for the long term and accomplish that through not doing the imposition of a single leader, but through emergence. So that perhaps, first of all, the technology in itself seems to maybe disagree a lot for different possibilities here, which is make primary the system, not the humans. So the basic, the medium on which the democracy happens, like a platform where people can make decisions, do the choice making, the coordination of the choice making, where emerges some kind of order to where like something that applies at the scale of the family, the family, the city, the country, the continent, the whole world, and then does that so dynamically, constantly changing based on the needs of the people, sort of always evolving. And it would all be owned by Google. Is there a way to, so first of all, you're optimistic that you could basically create the technology can save us technology at creating platforms by technology, I mean, like software network platforms that allows humans to deliberate, like make government together dynamically without the need for a leader that's on a podium screaming stuff. That's one and two. If you're optimistic about that, are you also optimistic about the CEOs of such platforms? The idea that technology is values neutral, values agnostic, and people can use it for constructive or destructive purposes, but it doesn't predispose anything. It's just silly and naive. Technology elicits patterns of human behavior because those who utilize it and get ahead end up behaving differently because of their utilization of it, and then other people, then they end up shaping the world or other people race to also get the power of the technology and so there's whole schools of anthropology that look at the effect on social systems and the minds of people of the change in our tooling. Marvin Harris's work called cultural materialism looked at this deeply, obviously Marshall McLuhan looked specifically at the way that information technologies change the nature of our beliefs, minds, values, social systems. I will not try to do this rigorously because there are academics will disagree on the subtle details but I'll do it kind of like illustratively. You think about the emergence of the plow, the ox drawn plow in the beginning of agriculture that came with it where before that you had hunter gatherer and then you had horticulture kind of a digging stick but not the plow. Well the world changed a lot with that, right? And a few of the changes that at least some theorists believe in is when the ox drawn plow started to proliferate, any culture that utilized it was able to start to actually cultivate grain because just with a digging stick you couldn't get enough grain for it to matter, grain was a storable caloric surplus, they could make it through the famines, they could grow their population, so the ones that used it got so much ahead that it became obligate and everybody used it, that corresponding with the use of a plow, animism went away everywhere that it existed because you can't talk about the spirit of the buffalo while beating the cow all day long to pull the plow, so the moment that we do animal husbandry of that kind where you have to beat the cow all day, you have to say it's just a dumb animal, man has dominion over earth and the nature of even our religious and spiritual ideas change. You went from women primarily using the digging stick to do the horticulture or gathering before that, men doing the hunting stuff to now men had to use the plow because the upper body strength actually really mattered, women would have miscarriages when they would do it when they were pregnant, so all the caloric supply started to come from men where it had been from both before and the ratio of male female gods changed to being mostly male gods following that. Obviously we went from very, that particular line of thought then also says that feminism followed the tractor and that the rise of feminism in the West started to follow women being able to say we can do what men can because the male upper body strength wasn't differential once the internal combustion engine was much stronger and we can drive a tractor. So I don't think to try to trace complex things to one cause is a good idea, so I think this is a reductionist view but it has truth in it and so the idea that technology is values agnostic is silly. Technology codes patterns of behavior that code rationalizing those patterns of behavior and believing in them. The plow also is the beginning of the Anthropocene, right, it was the beginning of us changing the environment radically to clear cut areas to just make them useful for people which also meant the change of the view of where the web of life were just a part of it, etc. So all those types of things. That's brilliantly put, by the way, that was just brilliant. But the question is, so it's not agnostic, but... So we have to look at what the psychological effects of specific tech applied certain ways are and be able to say it's not just doing the first order thing you intended, it's doing like the effect on patriarchy and animism and the end of tribal culture in the beginning of empire and the class systems that came with that. We can go on and on about what the plow did. The beginning of surplus was inheritance, which then became the capital model and like lots of things. So we have to say when we're looking at the tech, what are the values built into the way the tech is being built that are not obvious? Right, so you always have to consider externalities. Yes. And the externalities are not just physical to the environment, they're also to how the people are being conditioned and how the relationality between them is being conditioned. So the question I'm asking you, so I personally would rather be led by a plow and a tractor than Stalin, okay? That's the question I'm asking you. In creating an emergent government where people, where there's a democracy that's dynamic, that makes choices, that does governance at like a very kind of liquid, there's a bunch of fine resolution layers of abstraction of governance happening at all scales, right? And doing so dynamically where no one person has power at any one time that can dominate and impose rule, okay? That's the Stalin version. I'm saying isn't the alternative that's emergent empowered or made possible by the plow and the tractor, which is the modern version of that, is like the internet, the digital space where we can, the monetary system where you have the currency and so on, but you have much more importantly, to me at least, is just basic social interaction, the mechanisms of human transacting with each other in the space of ideas, isn't? So yes, it's not agnostic, definitely not agnostic. You've had a brilliant rant there. The tractor has effects, but isn't that the way we achieve an emergent system of governance? Yes, but I wouldn't say we're on track. You haven't seen anything promising. It's not that I haven't seen anything promising, it's that to be on track requires understanding and guiding some of the things differently than is currently happening and it's possible. That's actually what I really care about. So you couldn't have had a Stalin without having certain technologies emerge. He couldn't have ruled such a big area without transportation technologies, without the train, without the communication tech that made it possible. So when you say you'd rather have a tractor or a plow than a Stalin, there's a relationship between them that is more recursive, which is new physical technologies allow rulers to rule with more power over larger distances historically. And some things are more responsible for that than others. Like Stalin also ate stuff for breakfast, but the thing he ate for breakfast is less responsible for the starvation of millions than the train. The train is more responsible for that and then the weapons of war are more responsible. So some technology, let's not throw it all in the, you're saying like technology has a responsibility here, but some is better than others. I'm saying that people's use of technology will change their behavior. So it has behavioral dispositions built in. The change of the behavior will also change the values in the society. It's very complicated, right? It will also, as a result, both make people who have different kinds of predispositions with regard to rulership and different kinds of new capacities. And so we have to think about these things. It's kind of well understood that the printing press and then in early industrialism ended feudalism and created kind of nation states. So one thing I would say as a long trend that we can look at is that whenever there is a step function, a major leap in technology, physical technology, the underlying techno industrial base with which we do stuff, it ends up coding for, it ends up predisposing a whole bunch of human behavioral patterns that the previous social system had not emerged to try to solve. And so it usually ends up breaking the previous social systems, the way the plow broke the tribal system, the way that the industrial revolution broke the feudal system, and then new social systems have to emerge so they can deal with the new powers, the new dispositions, whatever with that tech. Obviously, the nuke broke nation state governance being adequate and said, we can't ever have that again. So then it created this international governance apparatus world. So I guess what I'm saying is that the solution is not exponential tech following the current path of what the market incentivizes exponential tech to do, market being a previous social tech. I would say that exponential tech, if we look at different types of social tech, so let's just briefly look at that democracy tried to do the emergent order thing, right? At least that's the story, and which is, and this is why if you look, this important part to build first. It's kind of doing it. It's just doing it poorly. You're saying, I mean, that's, it is emergent order in some sense. I mean, that's the hope of democracy versus other forms of government. Correct. I mean, I said at least the story because obviously it didn't do it for women and slaves early on. It doesn't do it for all classes equally, et cetera. But the idea of democracy is that, is participatory governance. And so you notice that the modern democracies emerged out of the European enlightenment and specifically because the idea that a lot of people, some huge number, not a tribal number, a huge number of anonymous people who don't know each other, are not bonded to each other, who believe different things, who grew up in different ways, can all work together to make collective decisions, well, that affect everybody, and where some of them will make compromises and the thing that matters to them for what matters to other strangers. That's actually wild. Like it's a wild idea that that would even be possible. And it was kind of the result of this high enlightenment idea that we could all do the philosophy of science and we could all do the Hegelian dialectic. Those ideas had emerged, right? And it was that we could all, so our choice making, because we said a society is trying to coordinate choice making, the emergent order is the order of the choices that we're making, not just at the level of the individuals, but what groups of individuals, corporations, nations, states, whatever do. Our choices are based on, our choice making is based on our sense making and our meaning making. Our sense making is what do we believe is happening in the world, and what do we believe the effects of a particular thing would be. Our meaning making is what do we care about, right, our values generation, what do we care about that we're trying to move the world in the direction of. If you ultimately are trying to move the world in a direction that is really, really different than the direction I'm trying to, we have very different values, we're gonna have a hard time. And if you think the world is a very different world, right, if you think that systemic racism is rampant everywhere and one of the worst problems, and I think it's not even a thing, if you think climate change is almost existential, and I think it's not even a thing, we're gonna have a really hard time coordinating. And so, we have to be able to have shared sense making of can we come to understand just what is happening together, and then can we do shared values generation, okay? Maybe I'm emphasizing a particular value more than you, but I can take your perspective and I can see how the thing that you value is worth valuing, and I can see how it's affected by this thing. So, can we take all the values and try to come up with a proposition that benefits all of them better than the proposition I created just to benefit these ones that harms the ones that you care about, which is why you're opposing my proposition? We don't even try in the process of crafting a proposition currently to see, and this is the reason that the proposition we vote on, it gets half the votes almost all the time. It almost never gets 90% of the votes, is because it benefits some things and harms other things. We can say all theory of trade offs, but we didn't even try to say, could we see what everybody cares about and see if there is a better solution? So... How do we fix that try? I wonder, is it as simple as the social technology of education? Yes. Well, no. I mean, the proposition crafting and refinement process has to be key to a democracy or participatory governance, and it's not currently. But isn't that the humans creating that situation? So one way, there's two ways to fix that. One is to fix the individual humans, which is the education early in life, and the second is to create somehow systems that... Yeah, it's both. So I understand the education part, but creating systems, that's why I mentioned the technologies is creating social networks, essentially. Yes, that's actually necessary. Okay, so let's go to the first part and then we'll come to the second part. So democracy emerged as an enlightenment era idea that we could all do a dialectic and come to understand what other people valued, and so that we could actually come up with a cooperative solution rather than just, fuck you, we're gonna get our thing in war, right? And that we could sense make together. We could all apply the philosophy of science and you weren't gonna stick to your guns on what the speed of sound is if we measured it and we found out what it was, and there's a unifying element to the objectivity in that way. And so this is why I believe Jefferson said, if you could give me a perfect newspaper and a broken government, or in paraphrasing, a broken government and perfect newspaper, I wouldn't hesitate to take the perfect newspaper. Because if the people understand what's going on, they can build a new government. If they don't understand what's going on, they can't possibly make good choices. And Washington, I'm paraphrasing again, first president said the number one aim of the federal government should be the comprehensive education of every citizen and the science of government. Science of government was the term of art. Think about what that means, right? Science of government would be game theory, coordination theory, history, wouldn't call game theory yet, history, sociology, economics, right? All the things that lead to how we understand human coordination. I think it's so profound that he didn't say the number one aim of the federal government is rule of law. And he didn't say it's protecting the border from enemies. Because if the number one aim was to protect the border from enemies, it could do that as a military dictatorship quite effectively. And if the goal was rule of law, it could do it as a dictatorship, as a police state. And so if the number one goal is anything other than the comprehensive education of all the citizens and the science of government, it won't stay democracy long. You can see, so both education and the fourth estate, the fourth estate being the... So education, can I make sense of the world? Am I trained to make sense of the world? The fourth estate is what's actually going on currently, the news. Do I have good, unbiased information about it? Those are both considered prerequisite institutions for democracy to even be a possibility. And then at the scale it was initially suggested here, the town hall was the key phenomena where there wasn't a special interest group crafted a proposition, and the first thing I ever saw was the proposition, didn't know anything about it, and I got to vote yes or no. It was in the town hall, we all got to talk about it, and the proposition could get crafted in real time through the conversation, which is why there was that founding fathers statement that voting is the death of democracy. Voting fundamentally is polarizing the population in some kind of sublimated war. And we'll do that as the last step, but what we wanna do first is to say, how does the thing that you care about that seems damaged by this proposition, how could that turn into a solution to make this proposition better? Where this proposition still tends to the thing it's trying to tend to and tends to that better. Can we work on this together? And in a town hall, we could have that. As the scale increased, we lost the ability to do that. Now, as you mentioned, the internet could change that. The fact that we had representatives that had to ride a horse from one town hall to the other one to see what the colony would do, that we stopped having this kind of developmental propositional development process when the town hall ended. The fact that we have not used the internet to recreate this is somewhere between insane and aligned with class interests. I would push back to say that the internet has those things, it just has a lot of other things. I feel like the internet has places where that encourage synthesis of competing ideas and sense making, which is what we're talking about. It's just that it's also flooded with a bunch of other systems that perhaps are out competing it under current incentives, perhaps has to do with capitalism in the market. Sure. Linux is awesome, right? And Wikipedia and places where you have, and they have problems, but places where you have open source sharing of information, vetting of information towards collective building. Is that building something like, how much has that affected our court systems or our policing systems or our military systems or our? First of all, I think a lot, but not enough. I think this is something I told you offline yesterday as a, perhaps as a whole nother discussion, but I don't think we're quite quantifying the impact on the world, the positive impact of Wikipedia. You said the policing, I mean, I just, I just think the amount of empathy that like knowledge I think can't help, but lead to empathy, just knowing, okay. Just knowing. Okay. I'll give you some pieces of information, knowing how many people died in various wars that already that Delta, when you have millions of people have that knowledge, it's like, it's a little like slap in the face, like, Oh, like my boyfriend or girlfriend breaking up with me is not such a big deal when millions of people were tortured, you know, like just a little bit. And when a lot of people know that because of Wikipedia, uh, or the effect, their second order effects of Wikipedia, which is it's not that necessarily people read Wikipedia. It's like YouTubers who don't really know stuff that well will thoroughly read a Wikipedia article and create a compelling video describing that Wikipedia article that then millions of people watch and they understand that. Holy shit. A lot of, there was such, first of all, there was such a thing as world war II and world war I. Okay. Like they can at least like learn about it. They can learn about this was like recent. They can learn about slavery. They can learn about all kinds of injustices in the world. And that I think has a lot of effects to our, to the way, whether you're a police officer, a lawyer, a judge in the jury, or just the regular civilian citizen, the way you approach the every other communication you engage in, even if the system of that communication is very much flawed. So I think there's a huge positive effect on Wikipedia. That's my case for Wikipedia. So you should donate to Wikipedia. I mean, I'm a huge fan, but there's very few systems like it, which is sad to me. So I think it's, it would be a useful exercise for any, uh, listener of the show to really try to run the dialectical synthesis process with regard to a topic like this and take the, um, techno concerned perspective with regard to, uh, information tech that folks like Tristan Harris take and say, what are all of the things that are getting worse and what, and are any of them following an exponential curve and how much worse, how quickly could that be? And then, and do that fully without mitigating it, then take the techno optimist perspective and see what things are getting better in a way that Kurzweil or Diamandis or someone might do and try to take that perspective fully and say, are some of those things exponential? What could that portend? And then try to hold all that at the same time. And I think there are ways in which, depending upon the metrics we're looking at, things are getting worse on exponential curves and better on exponential curves for different metrics at the same time, which I hold as the destabilization of previous system and either an emergence to a better system or collapse to a lower order are both possible. And so I want my optimism not to be about my assessment. I want my assessment to be just as fucking clear as it can be. I want my optimism to be what inspires the solution process on that clear assessment. So I never want to apply optimism in the sense making. I want to just try to be clear. If anything, I want to make sure that the challenges are really well understood. But that's in service of an optimism that there are good potentials, even if I don't know what they are, that are worth seeking. There is some sense of optimism that's required to even try to innovate really hard problems. But then I want to take my pessimism and red team my own optimism to see, is that solution not going to work? Does it have second order effects? And then not get upset by that because I then come back to how to make it better. So just a relationship between optimism and pessimism and the dialectic of how they can work. So when I, of course, we can say that Wikipedia is a pretty awesome example of a thing. We can look at the places where it has limits or has failed, where on a celebrity topic or corporate interest topic, you can pay Wikipedia editors to edit more frequently and various things like that. But you can also see where there's a lot of information that was kind of decentrally created that is good information that is more easily accessible to people than everybody buying their own encyclopedia Britannica or walking down to the library and that can be updated in real time faster. And I think you're very right that the business model is a big difference because Wikipedia is not a for profit corporation. It is a – it's tending to the information commons and it doesn't have an agenda other than tending to the information commons. And I think the two masters issue is a tricky one when I'm trying to optimize for very different kinds of things where I have to sacrifice one for the other and I can't find synergistic satisfiers. Which one? And if I have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholder profit maximization and, you know, what does that end up creating? I think the ad model that Silicon Valley took, I think Jaron Laney or I don't know if you've had him on the show, but he has an interesting assessment of the nature of the ad model. Silicon Valley wanting to support capitalism and entrepreneurs to make things but also the belief that information should be free and also the network dynamics where the more people you got on, you got increased value per user, per capita as more people got on so you didn't want to do anything to slow the rate of adoption. Some places actually, you know, PayPal paying people money to join the network because the value of the network would be, there'd be a Metcalf like dynamic proportional to the square of the total number of users. So the ad model made sense of how do we make it free but also be a business, get everybody on but not really thinking about what it would mean to – and this is now the whole idea that if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. If they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholder to maximize profit, their customer is the advertiser, the user who it's being built for is to do behavioral mod for them for advertisers, that's a whole different thing than that same type of tech could have been if applied with a different business model or different purpose. I think because Facebook and Google and other information and communication platforms end up harvesting data about user behavior that allows them to model who the people are in a way that gives them more sometimes specific information and behavioral information than even a therapist or a doctor or a lawyer or a priest might have in a different setting, they basically are accessing privileged information. There should be a fiduciary responsibility. And in normal fiduciary law, if there's this principal agent thing, if you are a principal and I'm an agent on your behalf, I don't have a game theoretic relationship with you. If you're sharing something with me and I'm the priest or I'm the therapist, I'm never going to use that information to try to sell you a used car or whatever the thing is. But Facebook is gathering massive amounts of privileged information and using it to modify people's behavior for a behavior that they didn't sign up for wanting the behavior but what the corporation did. So I think this is an example of the physical tech evolving in the context of the previous social tech where it's being shaped in particular ways. And here, unlike Wikipedia that evolved for the information commons, this evolved for fulfilling particular agentic purpose. Most people when they're on Facebook think it's just a tool that they're using. They don't realize it's an agent, right? It is a corporation with a profit motive and as I'm interacting with it, it has a goal for me different than my goal for myself. And I might want to be on for a short period of time. Its goal is maximize time on site. And so there is a rivalry where there should be a fiduciary contract. I think that's actually a huge deal. And I think if we said, could we apply Facebook like technology to develop people's citizenry capacity, right? To develop their personal health and wellbeing and habits as well as their cognitive understanding, the complexity with which they can process the health of their relationships, that would be amazing to start to explore. And this is now the thesis that we started to discuss before is every time there is a major step function in the physical tech, it obsoletes the previous social tech and the new social tech has to emerge. What I would say is that when we look at the nation state level of the world today, the more top down authoritarian nation states are as the exponential tech started to emerge, the digital technology started to emerge, they were in a position for better long term planning and better coordination. And so the authoritarian states started applying the exponential tech intentionally to make more effective authoritarian states. And that's everything from like an internet of things surveillance system going into machine learning systems to the Sesame credit system to all those types of things. And so they're upgrading their social tech using the exponential tech. Otherwise within a nation state like the US, but democratic open societies, the countries, the states are not directing the technology in a way that makes a better open society, meaning better emergent order. They're saying, well, the corporations are doing that and the state is doing the relatively little thing it would do aligned with the previous corporate law that no longer is relevant because there wasn't fiduciary responsibility for things like that. There wasn't antitrust because this creates functional monopolies because of network dynamics, right? Where YouTube has more users than Vimeo and every other video player together. Amazon has a bigger percentage of market share than all of the other markets together. You get one big dog per vertical because of network effect, which is a kind of organic monopoly that the previous antitrust law didn't even have a place, that wasn't a thing. Antimonopoly was only something that emerged in the space of government contracts. So what we see is that the new exponential technology is being directed by authoritarian nation states to make better authoritarian nation states and by corporations to make more powerful corporations. Powerful corporations, when we think about the Scottish enlightenment, when the idea of markets was being advanced, the modern kind of ideas of markets, the biggest corporation was tiny compared to what the biggest corporation today is. So the asymmetry of it relative to people was tiny. And the asymmetry now in terms of the total technology it employs, total amount of money, total amount of information processing is so many orders of magnitude. And rather than there be demand for an authentic thing that creates a basis for supply, as supply started to get way more coordinated and powerful and the demand wasn't coordinated because you don't have a labor union of all the customers working together, but you do have a coordination on the supply side. Supply started to recognize that it could manufacture demand. It could make people want shit that they didn't want before that maybe wouldn't increase their happiness in a meaningful way, might increase addiction. Addiction is a very good way to manufacture demand. And so as soon as manufactured demand started through this is the cool thing and you have to have it for status or whatever it is, the intelligence of the market was breaking. Now it's no longer a collective intelligence system that is up regulating real desire for things that are really meaningful. We were able to hijack the lower angels of our nature rather than the higher ones. The addictive patterns drive those and have people want shit that doesn't actually make them happy or make the world better. And so we really also have to update our theory of markets because behavioral econ showed that homo economicus, the rational actor is not really a thing, but particularly at greater and greater scale can't really be a thing. Voluntaryism isn't a thing where if my company doesn't want to advertise on Facebook, I just will lose to the companies that do because that's where all the fucking attention is. And so then I can say it's voluntary, but it's not really if there's a functional monopoly. Same if I'm going to sell on Amazon or things like that. So what I would say is these corporations are becoming more powerful than nation states in some ways. And they are also debasing the integrity of the nation states, the open societies. So the democracies are getting weaker as a result of exponential tech and the kind of new tech companies that are kind of a new feudalism, tech feudalism, because it's not a democracy inside of a tech company or the supply and demand relationship when you have manufactured demand and kind of monopoly type functions. And so we have basically a new feudalism controlling exponential tech and authoritarian nation states controlling it. And those attractors are both shitty. And so I'm interested in the application of exponential tech to making better social tech that makes emergent order possible and where then that emergent order can bind and direct the exponential tech in fundamentally healthy, not X risk oriented directions. I think the relationship of social tech and physical tech can make it. I think we can actually use the physical tech to make better social tech, but it's not given that we do. If we don't make better social tech, then I think the physical tech empowers really shitty social tech that is not a world that we want. I don't know if it's a road we want to go down, but I tend to believe that the market will create exactly the thing you're talking about, which I feel like there's a lot of money to be made in creating a social tech that creates a better citizen, that creates a better human being. Your description of Facebook and so on, which is a system that creates addiction, which manufactures demand, is not obviously inherently the consequence of the markets. I feel like that's the first stage of us, like baby deer trying to figure out how to use the internet. I feel like there's much more money to be made with something that creates compersion and love. Honestly. I mean, I really, we can have this, I can make the business case for it. I don't know if, I don't think we want to really have that discussion, but do you have some hope that that's the case? I guess if not, then how do we fix the system of markets that worked so well for the United States for so long? Like I said, every social tech worked for a while. Like tribalism worked well for two or 300,000 years. I think social tech has to keep evolving. The social technologies with which we organize and coordinate our behavior have to keep evolving as our physical tech does. So I think the thing that we call markets, of course we can try to say, oh, even biology runs on markets. But the thing that we call markets, the underlying theory, homo economicus, demand, driving supply, that thing broke. It broke with scale in particular and a few other things. So it needs updated in a really fundamental way. I think there's something even deeper than making money happening that in some ways will obsolete money making. I think capitalism is not about business. So if you think about business, I'm going to produce a good or a service that people want and bring it to the market so that people get access to that good or service. That's the world of business, but that's not capitalism. Capitalism is the management and allocation of capital, which financial services was a tiny percentage of the total market has become a huge percentage of the total market. It's a different creature. So if I was in business and I was producing a good or service and I was saving up enough money that I started to be able to invest that money and gain interest or do things like that, I start realizing I'm making more money on my money than I'm making on producing the goods and services. So I stop even paying attention to goods and services and start paying attention to making money on money and how do I utilize capital to create more capital. And capital gives me more optionality because I can buy anything with it than a particular good or service that only some people want. Capitalism – more capital ended up meaning more control. I could put more people under my employment. I could buy larger pieces of land, novel access to resource, mines, and put more technology under my employment. So it meant increased agency and also increased control. I think attentionalism is even more powerful. So rather than enslave people where the people kind of always want to get away and put in the least work they can, there's a way in which economic servitude was just more profitable than slavery, right? Have the people work even harder voluntarily because they want to get ahead and nobody has to be there to whip them or control them or whatever. This is a cynical take but a meaningful take. So people – so capital ends up being a way to influence human behavior, right? And yet where people still feel free in some meaningful way. They're not feeling like they're going to be punished by the state if they don't do something. It's like punished by the market via homelessness or something. But the market is this invisible thing I can't put an agent on so it feels like free. And so if you want to affect people's behavior and still have them feel free, capital ends up being a way to do that. But I think affecting their attention is even deeper because if I can affect their attention, I can both affect what they want and what they believe and what they feel. And we statistically know this very clearly. Facebook has done studies that based on changing the feed, it can change beliefs, emotional dispositions, et cetera. And so I think there's a way that the harvest and directing of attention is even a more powerful system than capitalism. It is effective in capitalism to generate capital, but I think it also generates influence beyond what capital can do. And so do we want to have some groups utilizing that type of tech to direct other people's attention? If so, towards what? Towards what metrics of what a good civilization and good human life would be? What's the oversight process? What is the... Transparency. I can answer all the things you're mentioning. I can build, I guarantee you if I'm not such a lazy ass, I'll be part of the many people doing this as transparency and control, giving control to individual people. Okay. So maybe the corporation has coordination on its goals that all of its customers or users together don't have. So there's some asymmetry of its goals, but maybe I could actually help all of the customers to coordinate almost like a labor union or whatever by informing and educating them adequately about the effects, the externalities on them. This is not toxic waste going into the ocean of the atmosphere. It's their minds, their beings, their families, their relationships, such that they will in group change their behavior. One way of saying what you're saying, I think, is that you think that you can rescue homo economicus from the rational actor that will pursue all the goods and services and choose the best one at the best price, the kind of Rand von Mises Hayek, that you can rescue that from Dan Ariely and behavioral econ that says that's actually not how people make choices. They make it based on status hacking, largely whether it's good for them or not in the long term. And the large asymmetric corporation can run propaganda and narrative warfare that hits people's status buttons and their limbic hijacks and their lots of other things in ways that they can't even perceive that are happening. They're not paying attention to that. The site is employing psychologists and split testing and whatever else. So you're saying, I think we can recover homo economicus. And not just through a single mechanism of technology. There's the, not to keep mentioning the guy, but platforms like Joe Rogan and so on, that make help make viral the ways that the education of negative externalities can become viral in this world. So interestingly, I actually agree with you that I got them that we four and a half hours in that we can take can do some good. All right. Well, see, what you're talking about is the application of tech here, broadcast tech where you can speak to a lot of people. And that's not going to be strong enough because the different people need spoken to differently, which means it has to be different voices that get amplified to those audiences more like Facebook's tech. But nonetheless, we'll start with broadcast tech plants the first seed and then the word of mouth is a powerful thing. You need to do the first broadcast shotgun and then it like lands a catapult or whatever. I don't know what the right weapon is, but then it just spreads the word of mouth through all kinds of tech, including Facebook. So let's come back to the fundamental thing. The fundamental thing is we want to kind of order at various scales from the conflicting parts of ourself, actually having more harmony than they might have to a family, extended family, local, all the way up to global. We want emergent order where our choices have more alignment, right? We want that to be emergent rather than imposed or rather than we want fundamentally different things or make totally different sense of the world where warfare of some kind becomes the only solution. Emergent order requires us in our choice making, requires us being able to have related sense making and related meaning making processes. Can we apply digital technologies and exponential tech in general to try to increase the capacity to do that where the technology called a town hall, the social tech that we'd all get together and talk obviously is very scale limited and it's also oriented to geography rather than networks of aligned interest. Can we build new better versions of those types of things? And going back to the idea that a democracy or participatory governance depends upon comprehensive education and the science of government, which include being able to understand things like asymmetric information warfare on the side of governments and how the people can organize adequately. Can you utilize some of the technologies now to be able to support increased comprehensive education of the people and maybe comprehensive informativeness, so both fixing the decay in both education and the fourth estate that have happened so that people can start self organizing to then influence the corporations, the nation states to do different things and or build new ones themselves? Yeah, fundamentally that's the thing that has to happen. The exponential tech gives us a novel problem landscape that the world never had. The nuke gave us a novel problem landscape and so that required this whole Bretton Woods world. The exponential tech gives us a novel problem landscape, our existing problem solving processes aren't doing a good job. We have had more countries get nukes, we have a nuclear de proliferation, we haven't achieved any of the UN sustainable development goals, we haven't kept any of the new categories of tech from making arms races, so our global coordination is not adequate to the problem landscape. So we need fundamentally better problem solving processes, a market or a state is a problem solving process. We need better ones that can do the speed and scale of the current issues. Right now speed is one of the other big things is that by the time we regulated DDT out of existence or cigarettes not for people under 18, they had already killed so many people and we let the market do the thing. But as Elon has made the point that won't work for AI, by the time we recognize afterwards that we have an auto poetic AI that's a problem, you won't be able to reverse it, that there's a number of things that when you're dealing with tech that is either self replicating and disintermediate humans to keep going, doesn't need humans to keep going, or you have tech that just has exponentially fast effects, your regulation has to come early. It can't come after the effects have happened, the negative effects have happened because the negative effects could be too big too quickly. So we basically need new problem solving processes that do better at being able to internalize this externality, solve the problems on the right time scale and the right geographic scale. And those new processes to not be imposed have to emerge from people wanting them and being able to participate in their development, which is what I would call kind of a new cultural enlightenment or renaissance that has to happen, where people start understanding the new power that exponential tech offers, the way that it is actually damaging current governance structures that we care about, and creating an extra landscape, but could also be redirected towards more protopic purposes, and then saying, how do we rebuild new social institutions? What are adequate social institutions where we can do participatory governance at scale and time? And how can the people actually participate to build those things? The solution that I see working requires a process like that. And the result maximizes love. So again, Elon would be right that love is the answer. Let me take you back from the scale of societies to the scale that's far, far more important, which is the scale of family. You've written a blog post about your dad. We have various flavors of relationships with our fathers. What have you learned about life from your dad? Well, people can read the blog post and see a lot of individual things that I learned that I really appreciated. If I was to kind of summarize at a high level, I had a really incredible dad, very, very unusually positive set of experiences. We were homeschooled, and he was committed to work from home to be available and prioritize fathering in a really deep way. And as a super gifted, super loving, very unique man, he also had his unique issues that were part of what crafted the unique brilliance, and those things often go together. And I say that because I think I had some unusual gifts and also some unusual difficulties. And I think it's useful for everybody to know their path probably has both of those. But if I was to say kind of the essence of one of the things my dad taught me across a lot of lessons was like the intersection of self empowerment, ideas and practices that self empower, towards collective good, towards some virtuous purpose beyond the self. And he both said that a million different ways, taught it in a million different ways. When we were doing construction and he was teaching me how to build a house, we were putting the wires to the walls before the drywall went on, he made sure that the way that we put the wires through was beautiful. Like that the height of the holes was similar, that we twisted the wires in a particular way. And it's like no one's ever going to see it. And he's like, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well, and excellence is its own reward. And those types of ideas. And if there was a really shitty job to do, he'd say, see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery. Just don't indulge any negativity, do the things that need done. And so there's like, there's an empowerment and a nobility together. And yeah, extraordinarily fortunate. Is there ways you think you could have been a better son? Is there things you regret? Interesting question. Let me first say, just as a bit of a criticism, that what kind of man do you think you are not wearing a suit and tie, if a real man should? Exactly I agree with your dad on that point. You mentioned offline that he suggested a real man should wear a suit and tie. But outside of that, is there ways you could have been a better son? Maybe next time on your show, I'll wear a suit and tie. My dad would be happy about that. I can answer the question later in life, not early. I had just a huge amount of respect and reverence for my dad when I was young. So I was asking myself that question a lot. So there weren't a lot of things I knew that I wasn't seeking to apply. There was a phase when I went through my kind of individuation, differentiation, where I had to make him excessively wrong about too many things. I don't think I had to, but I did. And he had a lot of kind of nonstandard model beliefs about things, whether early kind of ancient civilizations or ideas on evolutionary theory or alternate models of physics. And they weren't irrational, but they didn't all have the standard of epistemic proof that I would need. And I went through, and some of them were kind of spiritual ideas as well, I went through a phase in my early 20s where I kind of had the attitude that Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens has that can kind of be like excessively certain and sanctimonious, applying their reductionist philosophy of science to everything and kind of brutally dismissive. I'm embarrassed by that phase. Not to say anything about those men and their path, but for myself. And so during that time, I was more dismissive of my dad's epistemology than I would have liked to have been. I got to correct that later and apologize for it. But that's the first thought that came to mind. You've written the following. I've had the experience countless times, making love, watching a sunset, listening to music, feeling the breeze, that I would sign up for this whole life and all of its pains just to experience this exact moment. This is a kind of wordless knowing. It's the most important and real truth I know, that experience itself is infinitely meaningful and pain is temporary. And seen clearly, even the suffering is filled with beauty. I've experienced countless lives worth of moments worthy of life, such an unreasonable fortune. A few words of gratitude from you, beautifully written. Is there some beautiful moments? Now you have experienced countless lives worth of those moments, but is there some things that if you could, in your darker moments, you can go to to relive, to remind yourself that the whole ride is worthwhile? Maybe skip the making love part. We don't want to know about that. I mean, I feel unreasonably fortunate that it is such a humongous list because, I mean, I feel fortunate to have like had exposure to practices and philosophies in a way of seeing things that makes me see things that way. So I can take responsibility for seeing things in that way and not taking for granted really wonderful things, but I can't take credit for being exposed to the philosophies that even gave me that possibility. You know, it's not just with my wife, it's with every person who I really love when we're talking and I look at their face, I, in the context of a conversation, feel overwhelmed by how lucky I am to get to know them. And like there's never been someone like them in all of history and there never will be again and they might be gone tomorrow, I might be gone tomorrow and like I get this moment with them. And when you take in the uniqueness of that fully and the beauty of it, it's overwhelmingly beautiful. And I remember the first time I did a big dose of mushrooms and I was looking at a tree for a long time and I was just crying with overwhelming how beautiful the tree was. And it was a tree outside the front of my house that I'd walked by a million times and never looked at like this. And it wasn't the dose of mushrooms where I was hallucinating like where the tree was purple. Like the tree still looked like, if I had to describe it, it's green and it has leaves, looks like this, but it was way fucking more beautiful, like capturing than it normally was. And I'm like, why is it so beautiful if I would describe it the same way? And I realized I had no thoughts taking me anywhere else. Like what it seemed like the mushrooms were doing was just actually shutting the narrative off that would have me be distracted so I could really see the tree. And then I'm like, fuck, when I get off these mushrooms, I'm going to practice seeing the tree because it's always that beautiful and I just miss it. And so I practice being with it and quieting the rest of the mind and then being like, wow. And if it's not mushrooms, like people have peak experiences where they'll see life and how incredible it is. It's always there. It's funny that I had this exact same experience on quite a lot of mushrooms just sitting alone and looking at a tree and exactly as you described it, appreciating the undistorted beauty of it. And it's funny to me that here's two humans, very different with very different journeys or at some moment in time, both looking at a tree like idiots for hours and just in awe and happy to be alive. And yeah, even just that moment alone is worth living for, but you did say humans and we have a moment together as two humans and you mentioned shots that I have to ask, what are we looking at? When I went to go get a smoothie before coming here, I got you a keto smoothie that you didn't want because you're not just keto, but fasting. But I saw the thing with you and your dad where you did shots together and this place happened to have shots of ginger, turmeric, cayenne juice of some kind. So I didn't necessarily plan it for being on the show, I just brought it, but we can do it that way. I think we shall toast like heroes, Daniel. It's a huge honor. What do we toast to? We toast to this moment, this unique moment that we get to share together. I'm very grateful to be here in this moment with you and yeah, I'm grateful that you invited me here. We met for the first time and I will never be the same for the good and the bad, I am. That is really interesting. That feels way healthier than the vodka my dad and I were drinking. So I feel like a better man already, Daniel, this is one of the best conversations I've ever had. I can't wait to have many more. Likewise. This has been an amazing experience. Thank you for wasting all your time today. I want to say in terms of what you're mentioning about like the, that you work in machine learning and the optimism that wants to look at the issues, but wants to look at how this increased technological power could be applied to solving them and that even thinking about the broadcast of like, can I help people understand the issues better and help organize them? Like fundamentally you're oriented like Wikipedia, what I see, to really try to tend to the information commons without another agentic interest distorting it. And for you to be able to get guys like Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose and like the greatest thinkers of, that are alive and have them on the show and most people would never be exposed to them and talk about it in a way that people can understand, I think it's an incredible service. I think you're doing great work. So I was really happy to hear from you. Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger and thank you to Ground News, NetSuite, Four Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191

The following is a conversation with Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, co founder of Ethereum, and a mathematician who is one of the most well read and knowledgeable people on the technical side of cryptocurrency that I've ever spoken to. Quick mention of our sponsors, Galila Games, Allform, Indeed, ExpressVPN, and Asleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Charles is not just a mathematician or cryptocurrency innovator, but also a Colorado based farmer of bison and mushrooms, a gamer, a fisherman, and a world traveler. When I asked him if he has a nice professional picture of himself, he sent me a picture of him in Mongolia with a hawk on his shoulder, meeting the Mongolian president. That to me pretty much says it all, speaking to the humor and the intelligence of a man who is bold, innovative, and does not shy away from a bit of fun and a bit of controversy, which makes him a fascinating human being to explore ideas with. I do want to say in terms of ideas that, at least to me, cryptocurrency is much bigger than just a way for a few Americans to make a quick buck through meme driven speculation. It is technology that enables freedom from oppression, from suffering in the world, because money is power. Mongolia, for example, was a reminder of that for me. Next day, after talking with Charles, I spoke with Wyoming Park, who is a North Korean defector, and who spent time in Mongolia, as many defectors do, in her and their escape from North Korea. Her story, the story of North Korea, the story of atrocities throughout the 20th century committed by Hitler, Stalin, and others, is a reminder that the world is full of darkness, but it is also full of beauty and love, and it is a world worth fighting for, in every way we know how. This is the Lux Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Charles Hoskinson. If you self evolve, almost like gnomic. And then you have Wolfram running around saying, hey, we can come up with these like very simple rules and we can reconstruct all of reality at some arbitrary point. So I have absolutely no idea what's right. You know, I look at it kind of like a formal system and I say, well, if you're stuck within the system, it's hard to actually understand that you're inside the system. You know, it's kind of like an object language to a metal language. You know, there's this thing that is outside of it, but because you're constrained and limited by the simulation, you can't really understand the nature of the thing that's outside of it. It's almost like Minecraft. You can build these redstone computers within Minecraft and simulate and emulate things within it, but you really can't go outside of that environment. The people outside of it can formally prove that it's correct or whatever, but the creatures inside of the system can't hope to perfectly understand it and prove something about it. Well, also the question is, it's a computation question. You know, does P equal NP? Because you'd have to be able to emulate all of these. How long will it take? Yeah, exactly. And so I have no clue what type of language it would have to look like, but it would probably not be anything we're used to at the moment. It'd have to be something else. And we'd have to have some more fundamental resolution of the relationship of these formal systems and how they get extended. So that's like a 22nd century question instead of a 21st century. Do you like, do you find the Stephen Wolfram idea compelling? It's a very different way of programming, which is you set some rules, you set some initial conditions, and let it run and see what happens. Yeah, and it's not a new concept. I mean, like the Santa Fe Institute's been doing that for a long time and you can use it for economic modeling and you can show that in certain cases, there's this concept of simple rules evolving into a complex system is somewhat more predictive than trying to build a complex top down model for things. And I guess there's some analogies to these things in AI where you start with some simple things and then somehow it just figures stuff out in its environment over time and much better than if you actually tried to model it with prologue or something like that. So that is exciting because you get to just do a few things, let the thing run and then see what happens. And that's a lot of fun. In fact, it got so exciting, Wolfram came to us and he said, ''Hey, let's do an NFT marketplace.'' I said, ''What do you wanna do?'', and he said, ''I got all these universes to sell.'' And I said, ''Okay, well that's gonna be fun. So we're gonna set up an auction system or something like that with him. And I think maybe end of this month or next month, we'll figure out how to do NFTs on Cardano with Wolfram universes. So as soon as we can sell one, I'll give you one and then we can all just claim that we're living in some sort of Wolfram simulation. I don't know how much money I have, but I'm gonna give everything I have to get rule 30, which is one of his universes that he's created. One of the first ones where he discovered some interesting complexities. I think rule 30 is Turing complete or is that 45? I can't remember which one. You know your stuff. Actually, I'm not sure if they proved anything about rule 30 in terms of whether it's Turing complete or not, but there's fun competitions on it, which is trying to predict something about rule 30, about the way it evolves. And so far, nobody's been able to do it. Just like looking at the middle column, try to predict as the system evolves, say anything like conclusive about the future of the system as it evolves. It's fascinating. It's both beautiful that simple rules can create that kind of complexity. And it's also sad that we can't like make perfect sense of it, like perfectly predict the future. Even though it's all simple and deterministic, we can't say something conclusive about like when the thing will end. When will this little cellular automata like evolve in a certain way and then nuclear weapons will be invented and they blow each other up and then they'll just be this empty 1D cellular automata. Well, doesn't that make it fun though? Yeah, it's fun, but when you're trying to create and we'll talk about something that operates the economy and the way humans transact and cooperate and fall in love and work together, then you'd like to be a little bit more formal and try to say something conclusive. If this entire universe is just cellular automata, then being conclusive is kind of hopeless, generally speaking. And the hope is, I guess, that there'll be pockets of which within the cellular automata where you could be predictive, where you can formally show that something is true and then you can rely on that. You'll be resilient and all those kinds of things, even though the rest of the thing is a giant mess that's unpredictable. Didn't they call that Laplace's demon? Yes, I wonder what the demons up to these days. Okay, thank you for entertaining me with that. But sticking on philosophy, you've also mentioned, among others, that Bertrand Russell and Saul Kripke are two of your favorite philosophers. Maybe you can comment on what ideas of theirs you find insightful and also what do you use the difference, because you're both an engineer and a thinker, so what do you use the difference between philosophy and computer science? Yeah, so yeah, there's both a deeply human element to both Russell and Saul. And then there's this, of course, amazing work that they did in the late 19th and 20th century. And you can't really talk about Russell or Saul without also mentioning Wittgenstein and Tarski. Because when you actually look at these guys and you put them together, what they were attempting to do was increase the level of precision we had in analyzing both formal languages and also language in general. And so Wittgenstein makes no sense at all to me. So there's amazing people out there that somehow can parse that, but. He doesn't make sense to himself either. I think you're right about that. However, Kripke has Kripkenstein. He has his whole building on that, right? And he built a whole hierarchy. And at least there I have modal logic and I have the little boxes and I have the diamonds and I can do a computation and I can kind of reason about things that people are saying. But really it was all just about precision and the nature of truth, precision, the nature of necessity and possibility. And the magic of these statements is that you can then start getting a better understanding of basically how far a formal language can take you. And so that's the work of it. David Hilbert also did the same thing. And Russell, he got his career started working with Alfred North Whitehead. He was a logician and there was this whole desire in late 19th century mathematics to formalize mathematics in a completely new and better way. And they started with geometry and Hilbert's geometry was like a complete system, although recently we've discovered there's a few holes in that. But for the most part it was complete and the axioms are independent and they're consistent. And they said, oh, well now we can do this for all of mathematics. And Russell and Whitehead wrote this huge set of books, like two big books, Principia Mathematica, a thousand pages and the conclusion is one plus one equals two. So they linked set theory and arithmetic and logic all in these beautiful ways. Then little by little, as we entered the 20th century, logicians started chipping away at this idea that you could actually construct a complete system of mathematics. First with Gödel and then later with the work of Turing and Church and others. They said, oh, you're not complete, you're not decidable. And so suddenly Russell was left in this really bad position where his early life's work was basically forgotten. So he had to kind of reinvent himself. And so he went into ethics and he went into different fields of philosophy. He became this titan in analytic philosophy and he was also a great pacifist and he was just a phenomenal writer. If you read Why I'm Not a Christian or any of his other attacks on metaphysics, he said, look, I can only deal with the world I'm in in the senses that I have and if I can deduce it, I believe it. If it's outside of that, I really can't make meaningful statements about it. And he said it in a lovely English prose that you would expect of a man of his stature. Now, Sol Cryptry, it was like the complete opposite. This guy's really down to earth dude, not aristocratic at all. And he was one of those guys that just could have done anything because he was so, he's so brilliant. I guess he's still alive. I think he's 80 something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's getting up there, man. But I mean, literally, when he was in high school, he wrote these papers in logic and Harvard contacted him, said, hey, could you teach graduate courses at Harvard? And he said, no, I really would like to finish high school first before I go and teach grad school at Harvard. And so this is just one of those guys that you can see through his work that he can think deeply about anything. He's like the Galois of philosophy and he chose to try to clean up a lot of the messes that Tarski and others couldn't resolve. He said, let's really get serious about the nature of truth. Let's really try to resolve paradoxes. Let's really try to build things in such a way that the work that we leave behind can actually be built upon and it's not thrown away every 50 years or 100 years. And it was the same for Tarski. He comes in and he says, we mathematicians love this concept of truth, but yet we've never really created a nice rigorous definition that doesn't have paradoxes embedded inside of it. So he had to invent metal languages and object languages, all these notions and so forth. So I really liked those four, if you think about them. And there's a lot of great lessons. And where it's relevant today is, you have human beings and you have computers and they're trying to understand each other. And computers live in the formal world and human beings live in the natural language world. And those bridges between those two are still not completely clear. And so a lot of the work that these guys were doing in the 20th century, 19th century had nothing at all to do with that, but gives you hope that perhaps a bridge can exist between those two worlds. And maybe there are some nice tools for that bridge to be built upon. And maybe that in some way will allow computers to better understand us. I mean, they've even created languages, natural spoken languages that are completely ambiguity free like Lojban and things like that. What? Yeah, right. Wait, what? L O J B A N, Lojban. It's based on a language called Loglan and it's a spoken language that's equivalent to first order predicate calculus. Oh, interesting. So no ambiguities, it's logically consistent. Yeah, Lojban. But can you still have fun in it? You can get very. Can you write poetry or what? There's people who actually write poetry in Lojban. I'm gonna switch to that and start tweeting in it. Yeah, there you go. So there's a lot there and they're just fun to study and think about. And unfortunately, if you go down that rabbit hole, you'll spend way, way too much time and there's diminishing returns. Now, the second question you asked was one on theoretical computer science to, I guess, engineering. Philosophy, no, no, no, no, no, no. So first step, you said humans and computers. So theoretical computer science is theory of the computer and philosophy is the theory of the human. And then we can dissect different stuff about the computer, but in terms of these two worlds of the theory of the human, which is philosophy and the theory of the computer, which is computer science, what do you think is the difference? Like, as we try to bridge that gap, as you mentioned, what is going to be the biggest challenge? Like, can we formalize love? Can we formalize music, art, poetry, all that kind of stuff? Or is that human nonsense that we need to get rid of? No, I don't think it's human nonsense at all. I mean, there's even attempts to create algorithmically generated music. And the question is, is love just strictly a chemical phenomena? Is there something like metaphysical about it or transcendent of some sort of formal system? I mean, computer science is just saying, hey, we have this notion of computing. We have this brain that we've constructed, this formal system that we've built. And given that we have it, what can we do with it? And so some people worry about the roots of the tree of knowledge, the great Yggdrasil of computer science. They worry about the roots and say, how far can we grow them? And let's keep adding these new models of computation. And other people worry about the trunk of the tree. And some people worry about the leaves of the tree. And the more advanced the field gets, the closer and closer it gets to the people who constructed it, us. We have better image processing. We have better ways of handling speech to texts. And we have better ways of computers kind of understanding the intent of what a human being is saying. And then the question is, well, how will a computer understand love or poetry or music? Well, it'll understand it the same way we understand it. You have to get a computer to grow up to a point, work and learn the way we learn or as close to it as possible. Then you just expose it to the things that we were exposed with. And then at some point, the computer will start creating things. So the question is, well, how do you quantify creativity? And I have no clue about that. But it's a... You make it into an NFT and see how much it excels for it. That's one way. Yeah. But basically, yeah, there's so much of it is subjective. And that's a fascinating whole area of, that I'm fascinated with this human robot interaction is how do we create compelling experiences that are subjectively compelling, whether it's art or just two humans talking or two humans interacting in some kind of way to maximize the richness of the subjective experience. And I think that could be an optimization problem that could be solved. We're solving it all the time. Human civilization is constantly trying to... We're constantly trying to impress each other. When we're younger, trying to get laid, whatever, fall in love, impress your boss at work by all the awesome stuff you do. I mean, we're trying to optimize that problem that's purely, for the most part, is subjective. Right, did you ever watch Blade Runner 2049? Yes. Yeah, did you remember the whole relationship between Joy and Kay? And did she really love him, the hologram or not? Was it like fake love or real love? Fake it till you make it is my view on love. No comment from Charles. So let's go to the difference between theoretical computer science and software engineering. Or I don't know if you draw a distinction, but if we look into this computer world now, is there a difference between theory, things you can say formally, and the pragmatic implementation of that theory into actual systems that people use, which I guess we'll call software engineering? So the engineer, they're obsessed with the domain of, well, what do you want to accomplish and who are you accomplishing it for? So they live in the world of people, if they're good engineers. And they say, okay, what's the experience? How are we going to use this? Why are we going to do this? What's the commercial application? What's the noncommercial application? And you collect all these business requirements. And once you've done all of that, the better job you do, the more self evident it is of how do we apply the toys and tools of computer science and other such things to actually resolve that. And the point of theoretical computer science from the software engineering domain is it can tell you kind of where your guardrails are. It won't make perfect programs. And there's no such thing as that, but rather it can give you a good notion and sense that your program has some desirable properties. Like maybe you can prove that it can terminate. If you're dealing with total programs or maybe you can prove you'll never have a buffer overflow or you won't divide by zero somewhere or something like that. Some event won't occur that'll cause a catastrophic failure in your system. But there's always this combinatorial explosion between what you can test and think about and what you can actually code. So the stuff on the left hand side lives in a different cardinality, a different universe. There's something significantly larger there. And the tools on the right hand side, we have property based testing and these SAT solvers. We have all this great stuff here in formal methods land and computer science theory land, but there's only a small subset of things that they actually give you good answers about. So the balance of the two things is basically saying, well, what do you care about? And what are you okay throwing away? That's the art of engineering and building these types of things. So, you know, cryptocurrencies, we deal with these complex distributed systems that have cryptography and game theory and Byzantine actors. So the balance there is saying, okay, what can't fail in that system? And that's the kind of stuff that you want to apply as heavy a tool set as you can, because when that stuff fails, you either have a loss of billions of dollars, privacy, or potentially even life, depending on how these systems get adopted. But then other things, you know, what can fail? Is it okay if the block doesn't get made every now and then? Is it okay if your latency goes up or your network suddenly becomes asynchronous and you disconnect from it and you have to restart the computer or something like that? That's probably okay. It's an inconvenience and burden to the user. And if you actually try to chase that tail, you'll end up spending 10 years chasing phantoms and ghosts. And meanwhile, the whole world moves on. So it's really figuring out those balance of the two. And what's really beautiful is that the formal methods tools have gotten so much better over the last 20 years in particular, mostly because of incredibly high investments from Microsoft and Google and big universities, because these guys are building these gargantuan systems. If you look at the Googleplex or what Amazon has or others, and they have so much value, so many users, so many things going on, and no person can keep that in their head. And so you're talking about systems may have 10 million lines of code, 15 million lines of code, millions of nodes connecting, faulty processes happening all the time, hackers breaking in on a regular basis. So when you're trying to model all of that, trying to ask yourself, what formal guarantees and properties can I get to simplify this system as much as possible? So instead of the applications of formal methods slowing you down, in many cases, it actually massively reduces your debugging time and your ability to find where errors occur. In some cases, you can't find where errors occur inside these massive concurrent systems. And you say, well, where are cryptocurrencies going? We're talking about just the same thing. But we're talking about a much more hostile operating environment, where instead of it running in a pristine data center in California somewhere, it's running on your cell phone, it's running on your mom's phone, it's running your dad's phone, it's running on some computer in Mongolia that may have good internet on Tuesday, but not any other day. So when you live in that kind of environment, you really do need to think carefully about a whole new class of protocols. And then you need to think carefully about a whole new class of tools and techniques to test the reliability of those systems. And you need to separate the world and say, what is high assurance and cannot fail? Because if it fails, people lose money. And what is low assurance? And it's okay if that falls apart. The other thing I'll mention is there are perverse financial incentives in our industry. Because the reality is when something blows up, the people who built those things that blow up usually get paid upfront. So what they're focusing on is time to market, speed to market, and getting tokens out and getting them liquid. And then people come in, they buy it, but if there's a nascent bug in some DeFi protocol, it'll probably be discovered six months later or something like that. It blows up, who suffers? The users. The people that created that already got paid. Exactly, that's why you pay the guy who makes the breaks software for your train last. And you make sure he rides the train every day. So you're basically describing the complexity of a distributed system that's fundamentally game theoretic. And like, if we think about turtles all the way down, it's humans all the way down. I mean, at the very bottom is still human nature. Is there something you can say formally about human nature to try, you said you can't, there's certain parts of the system that can't fail. Some people talk about nuclear war in that same kind of way, that there's this game theoretic construction of mutually assured destruction. Oh, that rhymes, see, I'm a poet. That system can't fail because you're gonna blow everyone up but you can't formally say for sure it's not going to fail. So like, you're basically trying to chase, like statistically reduce the probability that these particular critical aspects will fail. And then you test, I guess, by deploying in the real world at small scale to see where things go wrong. Yeah, it's a great question. And the problem with game theory and mechanism design is that you can develop this concept of a rational actor. And I don't think in my life I've ever met a rational actor. There's a rational actor on Tuesday, but any other day of the week, who the hell knows? And there's even, I think there was a book Freakonomics and there's a few of these things where it just shows again and again where people behave in ways that are against their best interest. So then you have these protocol designers and they say, well, we need an honest majority for this thing to work. And they say, okay, well, we'll create this incentive model and rational actors will behave with that incentive model. And they say, well, the individual won't do that but the firm, the government, the entity will. The problem with that is we have a lot of counter examples where the system was actually behaving in weird ways. Like we almost completely eradicated the human population twice in the 20th century, once during the Cuban missile crisis. And again, in the 1980s, there was a Russian Colonel and they installed a new satellite system and it said, hey, the Americans are launching missiles at us. You need to turn the key in, launch all the missiles in the silo. And he said, oh, that's not right. That doesn't seem right. And he was reprimanded for not launching the missiles. So in both cases, a single person stood against the systems of superpowers between us and nuclear annihilation. So in general, we're really bad at building these types of things. So what you look for instead is say, can the system be self correcting? It's not about avoiding a problem. It's more about can the problem be resolved? And that's how nature engineers things. It gives you an immune system. It gives you the ability to heal. If a rainforest has a fire or some catastrophic event, the ecosystem will find a way to patch things up. So it's a better question of how do you align the incentives over the longterm of a system where all the actors within the system, when an event occurs that disrupts it, have an incentive to push it back into a healthy, productive, useful state, which is going back kind of to that complexity theory stuff that we began with and a little bit about, how do you handle modern economics? Like for example, we knew this coming into the COVID crisis that there would be catastrophic economic disruption throughout the entire world. In the developed world, it was print lots of money and hope to God it works. In the developing world is try not to starve to death. Over 100 million people were pushed into acute starvation. So acute hunger, it's a terrible situation. But every economist knew we were going into that. So the question is how do you restart the system? How do you realign the system and so forth and make sure that it doesn't collapse at some point. So it's an imperfect, inexact science. And that's actually one of the things that makes our industry so much fun is that these are kind of like micro experiments for the macro. In the years past, you never got a chance to experiment with monetary policy. I mean, it's like every 20 years, 30 years, you'd have some conference, usually in a cool island like Jamaica and be like, okay, let's go talk about monetary policy and like amend the Bretton Woods Agreement. And these would be nation states, invitation only. And now you have over 8,000 cryptocurrencies floating around all with their own monetary policy and their rules and it's very Darwinian. A lot are dying, some are succeeding. Anomalies happen like Dogecoin and you say, God, is this temporary, is this permanent? Why doesn't this horrible thing die? And then other things you think would be absolutely successful and just take off and be in the top 10 don't really get as much traction. Like Al Grant is a great example of that. I mean, Silvio, he's an incredibly bright guy. Every time I go to MIT, we have dinner and his work is legendary and it's just beautiful and elegant and he literally has all the people. He went and hired Tal Robin and she got at IBM Research and Craig Gentry, the guy who did homomorphic encryption under Dan Boneh is there. There's all these amazing people on that team and they have money in the VCs. So you'd say, okay, that's a contender. But if you look at market adoption, Ethereum Classic sometimes is above it and other things are above it. And then there's this weird Darwinian evolution produced Dogecoin organism that's just stomping all around. Evolution doesn't make sense. Exactly, but maybe it's worth the problem, not evolution, because the market's the market and you can scream and cry and pout and stamp your foot and say this makes no sense, but that's the way the world works. There's plenty of mountain climbers that didn't want gravity to apply to them and it's the same situation here. There's plenty of people in these marketplaces that had the best of intentions, the best team, the best technology, and for whatever reason, they didn't get that adoption. So the question isn't the local, it should be the longterm and will the system over time converge to a state that actually is useful and meaningful to society and actually solve problems for it and that's what we try to figure out is how do we perturb these things in a way to kind of push them in that direction. So before we go into this fascinating Darwinian evolution of cryptocurrencies, let me ask you sort of a basic programming question. There's a fascinating aspect to your work with Cardano that use Haskell to build the infrastructure, but even stepping back more, looking at this landscape, another place where Darwinian evolution operates, looking at this landscape of programming languages, you as an engineer, you as a philosopher, both, what programming languages do you think are interesting and more practically, what programming languages, if you were to advise like students today, should they learn? Yeah, so there's the pedagogy of learning how to program and to express the theory of computer science. Like you have to learn how to write algorithms, you have to learn what data structures are, you have to be able to do analysis of these things and that probably the, I think the debate is over Python is probably the best language or JavaScript to get started with because they're very useful, the libraries are amazing, there's just tons of online materials, even MIT is now teaching their introduction to computer science in Python and they used to do Lisp, I mean, these guys were hardcore. I still love Lisp. Oh man, it's great, these are your father's parentheses, they're elegant weapons from a time long ago. But that's a great starting point and it's not about falling in love with a language, it's just falling in love with computing, it's about falling in love with having a dialogue with a computer and thinking about, well, how would I solve that? How would I interact with that? What does this need to look like? Functional programming is what we've chosen to use for Cardano mostly because we're living in the academic world, we've written 105 papers and the problem is you have to translate that work into code and the gap between an imperative language like a C++ or C and these academic rigorous papers is extremely large and so there's gonna be a lot of semantical ambiguity between those two and what I mean by that is that you might end up implementing a wrong thing. You might think that what you've built is the paper but the computer's not going to tell you that because the paper's written in prose and maybe typed up in LaTeX or something but there's no proof chain, evidence chain that you can show that there's no ambiguity. When you look at a functional language, you're a little closer to math and so as a consequence, the translation of the papers that we spent so damn long writing and writing proofs about and so forth to code is much smaller. Now the downside is these functional languages tend to be a bit more academic and they tend to have not necessarily the best Windows support and the libraries aren't so good and also they tend to be a little slower when compared as a whole on average to languages like C for example. So it's really a question of okay, what are you designing for for version one? Are you designing for performance and are you designing for developer accessibility or are you designing for correctness and are you designing for a high fidelity representation of the protocol? Okay, so Haskell was chosen as kind of the version one because we knew that the kinds of people who think about that are also the kinds of people that would have an easy time reading a paper like Ouroboros and working their way through all of this and they would do a pretty good job running a formal specification and then translating that into running code. Then once you have that, you have a blueprint that you can actually reason about, maintain and if you really wanted to, you could then turn that into a Rust code base or into a Java code base. Going the other way around would be kind of pointless and counterproductive. The other side of it is that Haskell code or functional code tends to be significantly more concise and I actually have a real life example of that. So if you take a look at Mantis, we implemented a full Ethereum node in Scala. It's only about 14 or 15,000 lines of code and you compare that with like C++ Bitcoin, I think that's 120, 150,000 lines of code. So it's almost 10 times smaller and so less code, less to read and you tend to read code significantly more than you would read write code. So it's always an advantage for a maintenance, understandability, documentation and other sort of things when you have more concise code bases and also it's a lot easier for you to apply stronger tools to a functional code base like static analysis or property based testing or these types of things than an imperative code base. But the thing is, it's almost like a religion or language, it's like saying, French versus Russian versus English, everybody has their adherence. They say, oh, they have the best poetry here. Russian, yeah, wins. There you go, always a Russian. Everybody has their favorite tools and their favorite languages, but it just comes down to what problems are you trying to solve and what problem domain do you live in? If you're inventing new protocols based on science, you're gonna take the time to write a paper, go through the peer review process as you've done personally, you know how hard it can be to get into a conference and go through that and get your ass kicked. Then you also have to apply the exact same level of care to the engineering side in terms of implementation of that or else you will make a mistake and that mistake will probably be an exploit in the system that destroys the security properties of the system. So we really had no choice but to go to some notion of functional. The question was, what's the Goldilocks language? Do you use a hybrid language like Scala and F Sharp or Clojure where you still have some connection to understandable things like.NET or the JVM? Or do you go to an overly academic language like Idris or Agda or, you know, Isabel? And there you can really dial up the correctness and write all kinds of crazy proofs. But by the way, it's like the seven people who write your code, they go on vacation a lot, you'll never get anything done. So Haskell kind of felt like a nice mill ground between those two where if we needed to pull into the left, we could, if you wanted to pull into the right, you could as well. That said, it's really amazing to see what the hybrid languages have done. If I was a new student in computer science and I said, you know, learn any language to grow your career from, Scala 3 is probably the language to go with. Yeah, it's great, because it's like you want it to be like Java, it's Java. And it looks kind of like a Java program. You want it to be like Python and scripted and you reuse a REPL, you can do that. You want to go hardcore dot, you know, dependent object types and do like weird proofs and stuff and the functional, you do all that. You have access to all of these things and Martin Niederski is a brilliant guy. He's done some phenomenal work basically, because he was one guy who created the JVM and he's worked on compilers for over 20 years. He did a lot of really hardcore work in trying to build a concise, nice, modern language that does a little bit of everything. And it's got great applications in data science and AI. It's also heavily used in modern companies, like Netflix uses Scala for all of their microservice architecture. Yeah, so that's a great language and it's easy to pick up and it's easy to hire people into it. You just find these Eastern European guys who were Java programmers for 10 years, 15 years, they got tired of making $20 an hour, so they picked up Scala so they can make $35 an hour and they're really good at it. And that's a great gateway drug because you have like QuickCheck and Haskell, you have ScalaCheck and Scala. You can also do model checking. You can also go and use a TLA spec and make it work with Scala and so forth. So it gets you a little bit of everything and you can then move around that entire design space in a beautiful way. So the recommendation is maybe if you wanna go vanilla, you go Python and JavaScript. When you're getting started. It's the getting started. That'll get you everything. You can do web scrapers and anything. It's just fun. All this experiment with drugs in undergrad, this was where Scala 3 comes in, it's a gateway drug to then potentially more hardcore functional languages like Haskell. Do you think C and C++, C++ still has a role? No, I think Rust is completely replaced, a need for them. Go and Rust, those are the two twins of doom. I mean, Google created Go just to get rid of C. They hated C that much. And then Rust is just a phenomenal language as well. Hate can be a great motivator. Let me ask a question from Reddit on this topic. We're going depth first today. Sure. As a developer, why should I be incentivized to create Cardano based applications? What is on the Cardano developer roadmap? Any other language, I guess this is the key question I wanna ask. Any other language support other than Haskell? The example this person gives is TypeScript, Go, Java, Python, et cetera. Also, have you considered a yearly conference focused around developers? Ha ha, yeah, we saw the Plutus Fest. And we did the first one in 2018, 2019, I can't remember. And we were gonna do one last year, but then COVID hit. So we'll bring it back and we'll probably do it annually at the University of Wyoming for their hackathon there. In fact, it just so happens that coincides with the Goguen Summit. So we're doing that, I think the third week of September. But yeah, it's great to do an annual conference. You can bring a lot of cool people together and you can do hackathons and awards and so forth. But to the question in particular, Plutus is like any other language. Plutus core, you can compile things into it. So it's entirely possible to write a Scala to Plutus core compiler or TypeScript compiler or something like that. But I'm a big believer of separation of concerns and we don't live in a single chain model anymore. So you have a situation where you probably wanna have different execution environments and different chains. So you have different virtual machines there. And that's why we work so closely with the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Kagori Roshu's team at runtime verification. What they did is they said, let's start with something very familiar, LLVM, which has been around for a really long time and they happened to have created it there with Apple. And let's take that and translate that into the blockchain space. Okay, then once you have it, then it's very easy to modify compilers of standard languages like the C's and C++'s and other things that do compile to LLVM already and have them run there. So that's a different execution model than what we tried to build for Plutus, which focuses on correctness, okay? So then all you have to really do is say, can both of these models coexist within the same ecosystem? Because then you kind of, and I did a video, it was called like the island, the ocean, the pond. And the basic idea was say, you have an island where everything's perfect. Calypso lives there, life is great. People feed you grapes every day, but maybe you can't do everything on the island. And the ocean's big, it has everything, but the ocean's got sea monsters and sharks and Boaty McBoatface and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? So that's what Yella is about. It's basically this bring LLVM into our world. And at some point in the next three to five year time horizon, we can bring modern programming languages in, but they're gonna come in with all their flaws and their warts and their problems. And then the pond was the idea of the Ethereum virtual machine. There's some network effect around it and there's some great tooling that's materialized and evolved. And it's not clear if that's the standard yet, or if like MySpace or Blackberry or all of these other things, it'll fade away. Well, if it becomes the standard, okay, don't fight nature, just support it. And the same thing that gives you the ability to bolt on the LLVM will also give you the ability to bolt on the EVM and they can run with their own models and they're encapsulated, bulkheaded, separated systems, but you can move ADA applications, information between those two systems. And so your main chain will always stay somewhat conservative and have the minimum viable amount of expressiveness required on it to do all kinds of interesting things. And also for interoperability, be able to talk to all kinds of interesting things, but it's not trying to be everything to everyone. There's never gonna be an ice cream store in the island. You'll have the grapes and the beautiful women, but no ice cream. Now you're just like distracting me with the ice cream. So just for, because we'll throw around a bunch of terms, for the record, what is Plutus? So Plutus is a programming language. It's kind of a DSL that we built on top of Haskell. And basically we wrote it after spending about three years thinking about all smart contracts. We were trying to figure out like, what is the ideal language to express a smart contract? And then we started thinking, well, what is a smart contract? Is it the whole application, or is it just like a sub module within an application? And usually it's the latter more than the former. You can build a self contained program like a script, but usually what's happening is you'll have it like a video game, let's say World of Warcraft or something like that. You say, hey, maybe I wanna actually create gold in World of Warcraft that's actually a currency. Okay, so I'm gonna issue a token. Well, and then maybe I wanna create some mechanics behind how people are gonna trade that amongst each other. So that would be like a smart contract layer and issue an asset. So you have this centralized server running and proprietary software controlled by a single company, but then you've opened your application up to a broader world. And what we've done now is added a blockchain layer and the blockchain handles the accounting of that asset and the spending policy of that stuff. So that is a much smaller program than what Blizzard is doing with World of Warcraft. So the point of Plutus was let's create a language where you can write these small to midsize programs and have a high degree of confidence that they behave with correctness and also they give you deterministic results on the consumption of resources. You can run things locally and you actually understand what it costs to run and that doesn't change when you deploy it on the system. If you dial up the expressiveness of the system and like Ethereum does and these big mutable account systems, the problem is you have to have global state. So whatever you test locally doesn't actually necessarily translate to what you've deployed, okay? So we spent a long time asking like where's the Goldilocks zone? Bitcoin script was too restrictive and every single time Satoshi tried to dial it up, it led to mega problems. Like there was a beautiful thing called the value overflow incident in 2010, which led to the creation of billions of Bitcoin. They had to quickly clean that up and sweep it under the rug and pretend like it didn't exist. But that was mostly because of an issue with how the scripting language was implemented. And when you look at Ethereum, it's like this pure game of stomping down these skirmishers where every update there's something they have to change or tune and then it's not clear how you shard such a model. So we said, let's build something that's in the middle of this and that's what Plutus basically is. And it's really designed to play very nicely with off chain infrastructure as much as on chain infrastructure. So you can look at all those different examples, whether it's Wolfram wants to auction off their universes or Blizzard wants to issue an in game currency or your Uber and you wanna start putting peer to peer dynamics inside your system, you're gonna gracefully connect to that on chain code. And it's very clear how those two things connect together. Just so happens Haskell's really good for this. They have template Haskell and it makes it very easy to embed domain specific languages. And it makes it very easy to wire your Haskell code onto off chain infrastructure. So in the future, you'll be able to have your off chain run a node or the Java virtual machine or a.NET application and there'll just be this beautiful interface and then it can talk to all your on chain code and that's written in that DSL and you have a high degree of assurance that it's right. Is there like a Hello World program in Plutus that reveals the beauty of this balance that you're referring to? Sort of simple but not too simple, the Einstein idea? Yeah, so we did do our first Hello World program actually today. Yeah, I heard about this. Yeah, but you know, there you'd want to have the whole round trip. So you'd like to have an interaction and I think a video game would probably show it the best. Like if we could re implement CryptoKitties or something like that on it and you have this off chain infrastructure and you have your GUI in your front end, it's running on your phone or a browser and most of that lives off chain. And then, but your CryptoKitties, they'd live on the blockchain. The whole round trip end to end with relatively low fees and low latency and high availability of service, it never goes down. That would probably be the best thing to do and we'll have something like that by August. It's pretty easy to build this stuff. So what kind of off chain interactions are supported with Plutus? What are the limits you want to put on the thing so it doesn't get chaotic? That's the beautiful thing. When you have a less expressive model on chain, it means you can do anything you want off chain. So you started talking about smart contracts, but let's zoom back out and ask the big question here is what is a blockchain and what is a cryptocurrency? So a blockchain is just a ledger and really it has three nice properties. You're timestamped, you're immutable and auditable, either in a global or a local sense. And so there's all kinds of things mankind has invented where it's really important that when you put some information down, it doesn't change and other people can see it and that you know when it was put down. For example, a property ledger. So when you buy land or you have rights associated with land like mineral rights or water rights or these things, you'd like to transitively see how does it go from Alice to Bob to Charlie to Jim and so forth and what was the state of these things as they were transitioning? So how much did they pay, when did it occur, et cetera, et cetera, the metadata that follows that. Okay, well normally these types of ledgers are so important that they're managed either by governments or regulated entities. And the issues are that while they can be efficient, they're generally brittle to political manipulation and they're brittle to geopolitical events. For example, when Syria fell apart, the very first thing ISIS did, they started saying, hey, the ownership of the land, it's gonna fundamentally change. We've decided that this guy over here now owns all these things and then when peace comes, how do you unwind all of that, put it all back together? So the power of a blockchain is that it gives you a transnational way of sorting all these details out, putting all together in a place that you know that even if it's inconvenient to a very powerful actor, that it will still stay preserved. This is an asymmetry we haven't had as a society. Usually kings and empires, they have the ability to decide what's true. And then suddenly you have this asymmetrical thing that is above them, kind of like a synthetic laws of physics and once something goes in there, you know that that's there. Okay, so that's the first part of it. The second part of it is that it's auditable, meaning that instead of saying only the high cleric or the president or some very special club of people get to see what's going on, suddenly now all the people can actually see who owns what where. Like imagine a tax system where the public club just leaked the taxes of all these different billionaires and said, well, how much do they make and how much do they pay? Well, imagine a tax system where that's just done by default or other social systems where this type of information is put in by default. So it's tremendously useful, this type of structure and all kinds of things, medical records, supply chains, just a good thought experiment is I travel a lot, I've been to 52 countries in the last five years. Imagine if I got sick in Zimbabwe, I get hit by a car or something and I'm unconscious and a Zimbabwean doctor calls my doctor in Colorado and says, hey, I need all Charles's medical records. He's unconscious right now, but I need it to treat him because he's quite ill. They'd say, who is this person in Zimbabwe? I don't know you, I can't give you his records, I need his consent. Oh no, he's unconscious in the hospital, I can't do it. Well, a broker system that would allow the movement of medical records would be an example of what a blockchain could potentially do in the foreseeable future. Cryptocurrency is just an application that runs on top of blockchain because it turns out that when you issue property, you also can issue tokens of value and then you could have a monetary policy, it could be inflationary or deflationary, you know, demurrage where it decays over time or whatever have you. And the very same mechanics that would ensure your property records are secure, your medical record access is secure, could also be applied for the ownership of the cryptocurrency. And again, you can either be completely transparent and everybody can see what everybody owns and that's what Bitcoin does, or you can be as opaque as you seek to be, that's what Zcash basically attempts to do. It says, hey, let's keep these things as private as possible. But they have relatively the same mechanics in terms of those properties of auditability and timestamping and immutability. You know things won't be reversed, you know, that people aren't gonna manipulate the timestamps and you can audit at least enough to know that the ownership is right. But the way, if you think about physics and the universe, the universe has figured out a way to update the ledger of physics in a way where like a lot of people can be updating it and it stays consistent. Is there something you can say about the task of updating the ledger when a bunch of people are trying to do it or a bunch of entities are trying to do it? Oh yeah, that's the whole point of a consensus algorithm. So whatever ledger you're running, there has to be some mechanism to decide who's in charge. And that's what proof of work does and proof of stake does and all these other systems. And you break them down to basically three steps. And so we'll use Eve for kind of step number one. Hi, Eve, how are you doing? And we're gonna use Wally for step number two. And I need the monkey, give me the monkey. What's the monkey's name? Daisy. Daisy the monkey, okay. I like Daisy. Daisy is a very confused monkey. It's pondering its own mortality. Right. And so anyway, the first step is all about basically deciding who's in charge for that moment. So blockchain is just a sequence of events. The heart has to beat, the metronome has to click. So somebody has to be in charge. And so generally you have this notion of a resource. So there's some pool of resource out there and it can be a token. And in that case, it's a plutocratic system and that's what proof of stake does or it can be computation, but there can be other resources. But computation is what proof of work does. And so you make so many hashes and then eventually somebody wins. And that person who wins is now the person who basically gets to decide the order of transactions and put them all together from their perspective in the system. Then once that person wins, they'll make the block. That's step two. And after it's made, transmit it and it gets validated and accepted. So actually it's quite fortuitous you have the magnifying glass because at this stage people are trying to decide is what I'm looking at correct or not. Now, there are other ways to potentially conceive of this, but this particular model gives you a kind of a way of thinking of all consensus algorithms in one setting. You can be Algorand, you can be a classic BFT protocol, you can be Paxos, you can be Raft, you can be proof of work, you can be proof of stake. It's always the same idea. You have to find someone or some group to be in charge. They'll reach a consensus on order. They have to then do some work, change the state of the system, update it, and then the network has to accept that that's valid. So even if this process works well, this side will say, oh, you created a Bitcoin at a thin air, you're not allowed to do that. So that's rejected. So there's checks and balances and guards all the way through. There's a meta question of fairness in all of this. So the proof of work people, they're kind of a cult and they say that this is the only truth and everything out here, any other resource is not legitimate or valid. And there's not a lot of evidence to that, but that's what they believe. The proof of stake people, the downside and weakness they have is it's a plutocratic model. The more ownership of the system you have, the more control you have over that system. And it suffers from the same thing that shareholder models suffer from, whereas you may maximize short term gain over the long term viability of the system. So a really cool question is, can you build systems that are multi resource? So instead of just pulling from one resource to select who wins, this 25% of the time and maybe this 25%, you can do that. In fact, the cryptocurrency space did that a long time ago. There was a cryptocurrency called Peercoin in 2011, and it was a hybrid proof of work proof of stake. So some of the blocks were made with the token ownership distribution and some of the blocks were made with proof of work, but you could keep adding. You could put in like, hey, I want hard disk in my thing. You can put Permacoin in or something like that. So it created incentive for hard drives. And then you could say, oh no, I want to do like a human system, like a proof of merit. Oh my God, now we're up to four. And you just keep adding. And each of these pools will have different adherence and actors, and then you can actually balance out the whole thing. So as opposed to having one cult, you have many cults. Exactly. And they argue. And the cults argue with each other and we call that a government. By the way, not all cults are bad. Physics is a cult too. And it's sometimes bad. It's honest at least. Nature is a cult. Nature is metal, I saw it on Instagram. So that's really the crux of it. You have a ledger and the ledger is just all about saying, hey, we need to put some stuff in here. And once it's put in here, you can't turn it back. And you know when it was put in and everybody can see it or some group can see it. And then you need to pick somebody to modify that. So all this chaos will happen. All these transactions are all around the world and our perception of them are different. There's a beautiful paper from Lamport that kind of talks about this from the 70s. It's like one of the most classic papers ever in computer science. I think it's been cited like 50,000 times or something like that. It's a crazy paper. But basically you have to figure out, okay, well, somebody has to be in charge. Some group has to be in charge. And you can do it with a meritocratic, hashocratic computation thing. You can say, well, if you have coins 25% of supply, 25% of the time on average, you'll be selected to have the right to do this or give it to somebody else. Or you could search for other resources. And they can even be human resources, like some notion of merit or social benefit. Maybe you get a token for that and you can weight it with these other systems. And that's where kind of where everything's going. We're getting to a point where we've really optimized all the properties here. We've proven all these nice things about it. And there's a lot of competition to basically build like the perfect proof of stake system, whether you're Polkadot or Algorand or any of these other guys. But now the next step is say, well, why don't we just have one? We should have multiple resources. And the point is each of these has different trade off profiles. And so they balance each other and you end up building a much more resilient system. So it's not winner take all with one particular demand. Okay, so there's a million questions that spring up right there. But first linger on this topic and say, what is proof of work? What is proof of stake? Just zooming in on each of those. And what are the differences? Okay, so they all have the same three properties of pick someone in charge, do something and validate it. The difference is that the picking mechanism for proof of work is you have to solve a puzzle. So it's basically like buying lottery tickets and you can buy a certain amount every second with your computing devices. And some of them are ASIC resistant. So you run them on like a laptop or a GPU. And some of them are you specialized hardware that you have to either manufacturer or buy from someone who sells it to you. And that's just how many tickets per second you can get. And eventually you hit those magic numbers. When you do, it means you have the right to make the block and generally you bundle the block making with the proof of work system. Now you can do this looking for a single or you can do this to actually shard it and look for multiple block makers at the same time. So there are sharded proof of work protocols like Prism is an example of that. And actually Ethereum got started this way with Spectre and Ghost and Phantom, the Aviz Ahar's work and Yonatan Sonlopinsky. But the basic idea is you pick some collection of people, they make some collection of things and there's some way to sort it all out, serialize it and prevent double spends, great. Proof of stake is the same, but it's a synthetic resource. So instead of doing things, they say, well, if you had 25% of the hash power on average over a long period of time, you'd probably win 25% of the time. Well, why don't we just introduce some randomness in from some source and then 25% of the time on average over a long period of time, you'll win. So it's a synthetic resource, but you still have to do the other two things. You still have to make the block and you still have to validate the block. The big difference is this step in the proof of work world is horrendously expensive. You use more energy than the nation of Switzerland. And the problem with that is that you have less resources for the other two. And the other problem with that is that if this is horrendously expensive, you have an economy of scale kick in. So what ends up happening is the system becomes less decentralized over time because you have these vertically integrated operations. I mean, not everybody can go build a mining facility on a volcano in El Salvador. Not everybody can go to Mongolia and set up a five gigawatt power plant and a huge data thing. Not everybody has access to the patented basics that people produce. Because what if I don't sell it to you and I have the patent on it? Or what if I control the supply chain for these things? So you'll end up having centralization around maybe 10 or five major operations as we've seen historically with proof of work. And that means you end up having like a ruling class of a mining oligarchy in the system. Proof of stake, if you design the parameters correctly, you actually get more decentralized over time because as the currency goes up in value, the distribution of the currency tends to get more egalitarian. For example, Bill Gates, when he started Microsoft, he had 64% of the shares. Now he has less than 5% of the shares. So this founder drift over time, as the value goes up, divestment occurs, you have more and more and more people coming in. That means there's more people who can participate in the consensus. You can even tune economic parameters. And this is what we did with Cardano and Ouroboros. We created this concept of K in the system and it's just a parameter. And it's like a forcing factor that tends to accumulate a certain amount of stake pools. So you can set it to 200 and then 500 and 1000 and so forth. But the basic idea is as the price of ADA goes up, you make K larger and then you end up in practical terms having a larger and larger set of actors making blocks that are unique and distinct. And the other good thing is this is a virtual resource instead of a physical resource, which means it's portable by the click of a button. So let's say China says, mining is bad, we're gonna shut it all down. And it looks like they're moving in that direction. You have all these people in WeChat, just like trying to sell miners or trying to figure out how the hell do I move miners, because they have these huge data centers they've constructed. You can't exactly go and grab a server and like take it with you, it's huge. It's a lot of work. And if the government sees it, well, it's their property now. A virtual resource, you can click a button and redeploy it to a different jurisdiction. So to me, for a virtual asset, it makes a lot more sense to try to tie your security to something endogenous, something within the system, because it's just like the asset, it can move anywhere at a click of a button and human beings have a much harder time attacking something like that. Well, so people, maybe you could sort of play devil's advocate and say, what is the strength of proof of work system? Because some people would argue that proof of work has, because it's outside the system, it's tied to physical resources, it's more secure. It's less prone to attack by large groups of people. Yeah, that's a great question. And the first question we had was, could proof of stake actually work or not? So the problem was that the engineers kind of led when the science should have led. And so there were all these POS protocols that came out in the early 2010s, like Peercoin was the first and then NXT and others came out. And there they had suffered from things like the random number generation wasn't good. They had grinding attacks and nothing at stake and all these other things. And there's a lot of beautiful properties for proof of work from a theoretical sense. We even wrote a paper called GKL, named after the authors, Juan Gray, Niko Leonardis and Agelos Gassis, our chief scientist. It's got 1100 citations now and it was published in 2015. But basically all it did is just model the blockchain and created some security properties for it. And then it started talking about, well, what does proof of work actually do for you? And it turns out it does a lot. It's an asynchronous system. You can bootstrap from Genesis. So if Eve joins the network and Wally joins the network and Daisy joined the network, then you give them some different chains, like five or 10 different chains. They can run a calculation and they will always pick the longest chain, the heaviest chain inside the system. That's a great property of proof of work. Until we published Ouroboros Genesis in 2018, you actually needed to solve that in proof of stake with a trusted checkpoint. So some actor had to be observing, watching the whole thing and creating checkpoints. And then when new people joined in, they would only be able to distinguish between a chain based upon a checkpoint telling them that. So you have to do a lot of really wonky, crazy math to show and create this notion of like density to be able to show that that's possible. But there's a lot of properties of proof of work that were super hard to replicate and emulate in the proof of stake world. Macaulay kind of revolutionized the whole VRF thing. There was a group out of Cornell that talked about better network conditions. They wrote a paper called Sleepy. We did Genesis. We also did the very first proofably secure protocol, but that was six years of work and like 12 papers. And it's still not done. There's still a few polishing things that have to be cleaned up because this is a physical resource and there's something there. But there's a flaw to proof of work that is a little problematic. It's a winner take all type of a system. So maximalism is kind of philosophically and computationally built into it. Let's say you have two proof of work systems and they have roughly the same market cap and hash rate. And they use the same algorithm. Then the problem is if the miner comes in and let's say the miner has enough resources to have 51% for any of these chains, they actually have a perverse incentive to come and destroy one chain and short sell the asset, it's called a gold finger attack, and then go mine the other asset because they're not bound to that asset. They're not loyal to it. And they can make just as much profit mining this as they can make mining the other system and the markets allow them to profit from the destruction of a system. So that's something that proof of stake doesn't suffer from because the only way you can participate in a proof of stake system is you have to actually own equity and you have to have ownership in that system. So if you go and destroy Daisy's chain, it would just be a net loss for the most part, unless you have really messed up markets or something like that. So there's always trade offs and all these things. And this is why I like this concept of going one to end and having multiple resources, because why not have proof of work and proof of stake together? If the proof of work is useful, not wasted computation, and why not add other things like create incentives for network relay? Right now there's no incentives in the system for you to run peer to peer nodes and the shared data. Right now it's not a problem, but if you're running like Amazon web services level of bandwidth, it could cost you like $5,000 a month in bandwidth just to run a full node or something like that. No one would do it. So then your system will centralize along the weakest link, whether it be the storage layer, the computation layer, or the network layer of the system. So if you can incentivize the resources differently, then you'll be in a beautiful position where you end up having a resilient system that pays its own bills. So how does Cardano solve the consensus problem? Do you tend to eventually wanting to solve it in the hybrid approach of proof of stake and proof of work? Yeah, this was a philosophical difference between Vitalik and myself. The problem with the people in the Ethereum side is they're really bright. And these really bright people, what they do is they try to do everything all at once because they're really, really smart and they keep going until they run up against the wall and they realize the problem is a lot harder. If you're more experienced, and that's why we brought in proper academics like Aggelos and others, because they've been beaten up through life, Aggelos worked with David Chom and these other, it's really hard work with those guys. And they'd already been humiliated and yelled at and had chalk thrown at them and all that stuff. And so they were humble enough to say, I'm not smart enough to solve the big problem. So don't even try. What you do is you decompose it and you say, okay, what's the first problem to solve in a chain of problems that you can compose your way up to a working system? And once you get far enough along, you have something that's pretty good and then you have an obvious path forward of how do you iterate and improve that system? That's why we started with GKL 15, because it was just saying, we don't know what a fucking blockchain is. This is, what is this thing, right? What's the security properties of this stuff? Like, what did we really mean? Then we did Ouroboros Classic, the original Ouroboros protocol in 2017. And that protocol was like a synchronous system and it assumed the nodes were always on and it worked, but it was useless because that's not real life. Then Prowse came out and then suddenly we relaxed things. So these are all, by the way, names for consensus algorithms. Yeah, papers that we published and they were all peer reviewed. Like GKL was EuroCrypt. That's a very hard conference to get into. And Ouroboros Classic was Crypto and Prowse was EuroCrypt and Genesis was CCS. So basically every step of the way was first an academic validation that there was some merit to the work that was done. Second, it solved a particular class of problems, either showing the feasibility of the entire problem. Because when I said, let's do the model first because let's see if we can do an FLP thing. Let's see if we can get them a possibility theorem. That's great because you're done. It's like those short math papers were like, I found a counterexample. It's like, oh, okay, this whole thing has fallen apart because you have a two line proof, thank you. So that's what we were looking for in the beginning of the agenda was, let's either prove it's possible in a straw man case or show that there exists an impossibility result, in which case we can just abandon the entire inquiry. Proof of stake is impossible. And then once you've gotten past that threshold, it goes from theory to practicality. What actual network conditions are you looking at? Are you okay with living with an external clock or do you wanna build time from within? How are you generating random numbers, et cetera, et cetera. And every step of the way, each paper, you're solving one particular class of problems. With Prism, it said, probably shouldn't know ahead of time who Eve is. You probably shouldn't know who's making those blocks. That should be something after the fact. But if you know ahead of time, you can attack them. You can DDoS them, you cause all kinds of problems. So adaptive security, also we moved from an MPC, random number generation, which was great, but very heavy and very slow. And you can't scale to large amounts of people to a VRF based system, which is super fast, but a little dirtier. Because Algorand actually did some great work there. There was some good knowledge there. What are the really hard problems that you, maybe if you just linger on a little bit, what are some of the really hard problems you have to solve along this chain of papers, ideas, the evolution of the consensus algorithm? Yeah, not only are they really hard problems, they actually require different cryptographers because you're moving from mathematician style cryptographers like the Neil Koblitz's and the Addie Shamir's and the people that like start as proper mathematicians. They really love theory and that's their thing. And the proofs are dense and they're thick and they're beautiful to practical applied work where you're saying, okay, now this is something an engineer can look at and say, I know how to build that. I know how to think about that. So that transition from GKL to Ouroboros Classic to Prowse, I'd say the biggest leap was Classic to Prowse because that was going from a system that would only work in a consortium chain like Fabric to a system that would actually work and is working. That's what's implementing Cardano today, 50 billion dollar cryptocurrency and all these people. That was a huge leap, but that paper alone wasn't enough. We also had to layer on the economic model because we said, well, hang on a second here. Not everybody's gonna be online all the time to be available to make a block. So you need some notion of delegation. The minute you have a notion of delegation, you have these stake pools, what the hell does that mean? And so this is a beautiful kind of interdisciplinary notion that layers computer science and biology together. And minute that complexity starts going up, you start seeing cell specialization. So you go from single cell organisms to organisms where you have eyeballs and brains and hearts and each of these tissues do different things. Well, analogously, complex distributed systems start getting specialization. You move from the single cell thing, Bitcoin, where everything's a full node, they all have the same rights and responsibilities, a lot of homogeneity in that system, but you're only as good as your weakest link, you're only as capable as whatever the basic cell can do to a specialized system where you start having these actors in the system that are actually a little different than the other actors. So you introduce this concept of the stake pool and suddenly now you have this actor where you're probably gonna be online 24 seven. You're probably gonna have extra relay infrastructure. There's a trust relationship where you don't own the ADA, but you have a right to use it for something. And a person's made that choice to endow you with that. The minute that you introduce specialization though, the system gets more complicated, the game theory gets more complicated. And then you start having to think really deeply and carefully about, okay, well, can this now introduce a new attack vector that we didn't have before? So that leap from classic to Prowse and adding in stake pools and figuring out how to handle the game theory there was exceedingly hard. It took two years to do that. So stake pools allow for multiple parties to delegate their staking capabilities to others. Can you describe a little bit how this works? It's kind of fascinating. It's a super simple concept. So you register a pool and then the pool is there and basically they advertise and they're actually registered on chain with a certificate. And then in the wallet software itself, you can see all of the pools that have registered. There's over 3000 of them now inside the system. And then you can click a little tile and it shows you all the metadata that's in the certificate and says, hey, I have my own pool. It's called rats, king of the rats. So you can see all this stuff that's described there and pools have an operating fee cause they're like a business. And they say, well, if you delegate to me, I'll charge this much. So if you get like a hundred bucks in rewards, I'll give you 90 and I'll take 10 or something like that. And then you make your decision and whichever one you select, you click delegate, push the button and then you have now given your staking rights to them until revoked. Okay, so it lives there. And then the stake pools weight in the system is proportional to the amount of stake that they have delegated to them. And then we have this other limiting factor K, which says that you get diminishing returns with the more stake you have. So it's kind of like an S function. So you kind of go up and up and then eventually caps and then at some point you get no rewards beyond a certain threshold. So there's an incentive to split pools to different owners after some point. Yeah, and so that's a complex thing and you have to actually model the game theory out to understand where those parameters should be set. And we didn't know how to do that. So what we did is we bought talent. We went to Oxford and we hired this guy named Elias Kasupis, he's an algorithmic game theorist. We said, hey, would you like to do some game theory work in crypto? And he's like, that sounds fun. So he spent a year and a half, we built all these beautiful models and we kind of figured out what those curves needed to look like. So figure out like the S curve that would result in a nice distribution of responsibility. So not everybody delegates to the king of the rats. Exactly. How does it feel to be royalty, by the way? It's not a very impressive kingdom, but you're nevertheless a king. I'll take it, because I think it's the kindest thing people call me in this space. Yeah, people love you. So, okay, so that, I mean, so is that, would you say a solved problem? The game theory of stake pools? No, it's the starting, and I was getting back to my original point that you build things in iterations. Every step, if you've done it right, is an invitation for 10 more sexy, fascinating, fun problems. And this is why we have such a great time building labs. We started in Edinburgh, now we're at Tokyo Tech and University of Wyoming and Athens, and we're setting up more labs this year. And all these academics wanna work with us, hey, because we write a lot of really fascinating papers, but B, because we're focused on all these really cool, sexy, interdisciplinary problems. We're actually running into problems where we don't even know where to publish the paper. Because you'll have this paper where there's like these PL guys working with crypto guys, working with systems guys, working with economists. And you put it all together and you have this Frankenstein paper monster, and we're like, where do we submit this? Where does this go? Nature. Yeah, there we go. Nature or quanta or something, I don't know. It'll write a nice little. So the sexy problems multiply exponentially. Exactly, and we've now gotten to a point where we're starting to work on refinements to the system rather than fundamental things that are like, if you don't solve it, the system just simply doesn't work. For example, you can run all of this with NTP as your clock server, but you actually can create a notion of time with N. We wrote a paper called the Workforce Chronos for that. But that's not necessary for the system. It's just a nice to have thing. It's a nice property. Optimization of the random number generation is another example of that. You can run it with a heavier thing. You just have more blockchain bloat and slower time and transition. We have this concept in Epic. So you elect leaders to run the system every five days with Cardano, but there's been derivative work. We didn't even do this. This work occurred at University of Illinois. And that derivative work said, well, you don't actually need to do that. You can do it on a block by block basis. It's like, ooh, that's pretty cool. So that's the other point about doing things in a very rigorous way is that that way creates a lingua franca for what you're trying to solve with the totality of the academic community. So suddenly people that you've never met, you know nothing about have read your papers, cited your papers and start writing their own papers, either to try to attack and destroy things you've done or to build on top of the things that you've done. So people are trying to figure out ways to attack this. Exactly. As rigorous as you are trying to build up. And I don't have to pay them. That's the beautiful thing. It's fun. Yeah. It's fun to try to destroy and that's how we grow stronger. And it's how you build your career too. There's plenty of people that they've gotten tenure just kicking the hell out of Intel SGX. You go to CCS every year, there's some guy there and he's having a hell of a time making Intel cry. Can we pull back historically speaking and in terms of the big picture of cryptocurrency real quick and ask the question, what is Cardano? We started talking about already the consensus algorithm Cardano takes. But maybe when you look at the history books, you know, sort of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Cardano will have one sentence. What's that one sentence going to be? And in general, what's like the vision in the context of the history of cryptocurrency? You have like this whiteboard overview video that you talk about the three generations of cryptocurrency where Cardano is the third. So that's like five different questions way of asking the exact same thing you can answer however the hell you want. You know, I always termed Cardano as like a FOSS, a financial operating system and nobody likes it and everybody picks on me for using that term. But basically the idea is that, you know, the world runs on systems, especially the financial world. You have, you know, the BIS and Swift and all this other stuff. And these protocols allow you to move value around and represent things like identity. And allow you to express yourself in some way. And those protocols for the most part work well for people in rich countries. And they don't work so well for people who aren't in rich countries. And so the point of what we do, or at least what I do and what my company does is we think a lot about how do we build a universal protocol that does all the stuff the legacy system has but just does it better, faster and cheaper for everybody in the world. And everybody has equal access to it, you know? So it's the people's protocol. You know, you have a situation where the guy in Senegal has the same access that I do or Bill Gates does or someone else who's kind of higher on the spectrum of wealth and power. And so that is what we seek to achieve. But then the question is well, is Cardano the solution? You know, is that that thing? And the answer is no, because you need a lot more evolution. You need decades of evolution to kind of work your way there. And in many ways the work is never quite done but it's better than what came before. Why? Because you have a realization that first the control of the system needs to be more balanced and nuanced and it needs to be more democratic. So there's this sustainability component of who's in charge and how do you pay for things? Well, the system can print its own money so it always has the ability to have a budget. Okay, so there's a treasury idea. And then there's a voting thing. Well, the same things that allow you to move money around allow you to represent votes. So you can do eVoting with the type of system, okay. And you know, if you played Gnomic in the 1980s or Peter Superfan or any of these things, you can build a self evolving system. You can actually create a game where the rules can be voted on and changed in the game itself, great. Okay, so that exists there. And then you say, okay, well, but this thing still has to touch the legacy world. There has to be cash in and cash out and these types of things. So there's just this interoperability thing that you need a wifi or a Bluetooth moment for the industry because nothing understands each other right now. There are all these chains are blind, deaf and dumb to each other. And then there's this thing that it has to work at a huge scale, like billions of people. And we've done that, but we've done that with large multinational trillion dollar companies with centralized infrastructure. We've never really done that with one master protocol that somehow does it for everyone. The closest approximation is probably BitTorrent. And there's, you know, there was, it's a cool protocol, but it doesn't have all the oomph necessary to, necessary to do something like this. So Cardano is just our first approximation and like any good system, we wanted it to be self evolving. So once you get the philosophy out of where's the target of what do you want to do, then you build a community. Now it's over a million people strong and that community keeps growing and they keep pushing the system in that particular direction. And what's nice about it is if you build the right philosophy within the system, it doesn't need founders. This is the great lesson of Satoshi. It doesn't need founders to be able to get there. So, you know, if you look at the academic side, that's very decentralized. We have more than 30 different contributors for the 105 papers and that set keeps growing within the next five years. It'll probably be two, three, 400 different scientists from all across the world, some from Russia and some from India, some from China and some from Japan and America and Africa and South America. And the faces change, the languages change, the cultures change, but the process stays the same. And that is a permanent organ within what we have constructed as a system. And it's the same situation entering marketplaces. Like we entered Ethiopia, what are we doing there? We have 5 million people in Ethiopia. We're getting them digital identity and we're dragging that digital identity into the system. Cause that's the most fundamental thing of a financial operating system. You need to know who people are in order to be able to do business with them, give them credit, be able to give them economic agency and so the thing. But once they're there, they're going to grow up with that system. They're going to deploy applications on that system. They're going to build on that system or use it every day for getting a loan or payments and so forth. And if they have pain points, what they're going to do is evolve that system to be able to mitigate, manage those particular pain points to a point where the system is competitive for it. So my job is to be, we have this tagline in our company, cascading disruption. My job is to be the first domino. Just kind of knock it over and watch the cascade and it kind of blows and blows and blows up until eventually it gets to where we need to go. And what I was trying to think about with Cardano was how do you build the minimum viable set of tools and social processes that once we push the domino, the system will just evolve to a point where eventually you can grow to fill that need, not out of charity, but out of self interest. People want things better, faster, cheaper. People want to have economic agency, especially when they lack it. Nobody wants to grow up in a world where they're unbanked and they have no access to marketplaces. They're gonna seek it. Look at Mpesa. It's the great example of that, like cell phone minutes they're using as a currency. So that's where we're at. And I say a few more years, I think we'll have that rate minimum viable set of dynamics inside the system. And then it's inevitable in my view that it'll kind of grow and consume and become this concept. And what's really cool is there's competition in the systems and concepts. So China is trying to do the same thing. They're saying, how do we de dollarize the world and create a digital Yuan? So they have a very top down notion of how to apply this technology and bring it in. And they even have an identity system they're building in parallel called social credit. We have an identity system, a talaprism that we're putting in. Ours is bottom up and you own your own identity, social credit. You have no idea. You just have a number and some computers giving it to you, but they're both trying to do the exact same thing. And it's gonna be this clash of cultures at some point between the open fosses and the top down authoritarian fosses and probably some Hegelian dialectic action to happen. We'll create some sort of somewhat closed, somewhat authoritarian, libertarian utopia. Yeah, most likely it would be AIs battling in the space of fosses. So I really like this idea of financial operating system, but the letter F, so financial, is this just a basic mechanism with which you can have social interaction therefore or all kinds of interactions therefore have an identity? Like is F essential to this? Yeah, because that's how people care. You need resources to survive. And finances is kind of like this field of managing your resources in an intelligent way. And you could call it SOFI too, social finance. The nomenclature hasn't exactly been settled for our industry and that's fun. But basically the concept is that you have something and you wanna be able to store it, transform it, trade it and use it to survive. And the question is what rails do you do that on? Do you do those on centralized controlled rails where there are these third parties that are basically able to live off those things, become very fat and nepotistic? Or do you wanna do it on rails where there's no middleman? You have a direct relationship with whoever you're doing business and if you invite more people into the transaction, they're middlemen of value, not necessity. And that's really the, I would like to say the resident detra of our space, that the reason we exist is to try to figure out a way to kill the middleman and try to figure out a way that we can better quantify value and transform it, move it, manipulate it. And in many ways we've actually discovered some amazing things in the last 10 years as an industry. Like we've kind of created the financial stem cell. This idea of a token can now is just as well be a national currency as a CBDC as it can represent a crypto kitty. The same architecture can do stuff at the nation scale, can do stuff for a 12 year old kid in Texas. It's pretty amazing to see that. But sort of in that whiteboard presentation, you gave these three phases and you're kind of implying that there'll be end phases to this whole evolution. And Cardano is just like the cutting edge. But if you look back to Bitcoin, how would you compare Cardano versus Bitcoin? Sort of where we are, how we started and how it's going. Okay, so what I did in that video and I've done in a lot of media interviews, because I think it really helps people understand where we're at in the clock is face things in terms of generations. And so I said, well, the first generation is Bitcoin. And really the problem Bitcoin was trying to solve is saying every time we wanna represent or move value, we need some sort of trusted third party to facilitate that. So can we build some sort of system where we can create some notion of value that can be teleported around the world and it doesn't require a trusted third party? That's it. And it's done in a beautiful way because it didn't try to be anything else. It just was, you only have Bitcoin, you can only do one type of thing, you can only push it. You can do some things on the encumbrances of like multi SIG and other things, but that's a one trick pony as a system. And it wasn't really clear if that was gonna work or not for a long time. It took several years to build up enough network effect and for Bitcoins to actually become valuable. And I'd say the inflection point was 2013. And at that point it became a billion dollar market cap. There were like Silicon Valley startups, real exchanges performing. And it got to a point where there was legitimacy behind the concept and people started getting, this is a really incredible idea because I can evade capital controls with it. I can like move $10 billion of something from one country to another country in five minutes. It's like, I could never do that before. And you know, this is incredible. Okay, the problem is the minute that people validate the idea, they immediately want something they don't have. So like the minute Elon can land a rocket, there's the next big thing, right? You've landed the Falcon 9, now you're on the Starship. Similarly, you say, okay, I want programmability with this thing. It's kind of like when JavaScript came to the web browser, you went from these static, perhaps pretty, but ultimately static non interactive pages to YouTube and Google and Facebook and these amazing, rich, incredible experiences, because now you can actually interact with the user. You can program things, stuff runs on their side, stuff runs on your side. It's a beautiful two way relationship. So that's what Ethereum effectively did. They bolted a programming language onto a blockchain and they went from a certain use case to whatever your imagination can have, you know, like sunshine and rainbows and unicorns and these types of things. So what you're saying is Bitcoin is HTML and Ethereum is JavaScript? Basically, yeah, it was like when JavaScript came and with like JavaScript, it has all kinds of problems and issues. I wonder who's flash in this analogy, this metaphor, but let's not go there. Well, actually there were plenty of active Xs and flashes. NXT was an example of a failed to start and BitShares was another example. There were a lot of people who tried to add some notion of programmability in or a different view of how these things should be done and they were not as competitive. Ethereum kind of came out at that JavaScript moment. Okay, the minute you have that, and suddenly you have ICOs and DeFi and STOs and NFTs and all these word salads of things and then people start using it, they get frustrated. Why? Because it's too slow, it's too expensive, it doesn't talk to the things they want it to talk to and also it gets too big to manage itself. When you're small, you have founders and foundations and you have trusted actors and core developers and you can feed them with pizzas. You know them, you can meet them, you can shake their hands at conferences. When you're a multi billion person system, you're too large to be able to do that. For example, we had the Shelley Summit last year, we invited Vint Cerf to come to the summit. Vint's a brilliant guy and he created the internet with Bob and the rest of the gang and back in those days, it was such a simple small system that one of their students, they said, hey, you need to test it. He created a video game just to kind of test the thing. You could call the guy on the other side and say, are you seeing this? Are you getting the signal? They used to have a actual address book for email addresses. Yeah, so you'd open up the book and look it up and they'll look at the internet, it's like, who's in charge of that? It's this gargantuan network and there's no group of people you can bring in and thus the internet evolves very slowly, you see? And so that's the problem is that you have this situation where you wanna do lots of utility, you wanna do a lot of things, you wanna be a financial operating system and be everything to everyone but then your rate of evolution slows down as your rate of adoption speeds up. So that's one of the other design goals of the third generation. It's not good enough just to do things better, faster, cheaper and have consistent cost with your population growing or talk to everything, your wifi moment. You also need a system that can govern itself at a scale of millions to billions of people who have divergent interests. Some cases ice pick an eye divergent interest. They really hate each other and they don't get along. And so that's what we termed a third generation cryptocurrency and there's a lot of people attempting to compete in that space. There's Tezos and Algran and ICP and Polkadot and so forth. And each and every one of them kind of brings a different blend of things that they value. So it's not completely equal between scalability, interoperability and sustainability. Some people were very focused on high throughput, lots of transactions perspective. Other people very focused on governance like Tezos is like the governance chain and they were one of the first to do a self amending ledger. And other people are like Aeon or Polkadot. They're really thinking carefully about how do we build a nice interoperable ecosystem. With Cardano, we tried to actually tackle all three at the same time, which was one of the reasons why we were a little slower out of the gate. We had to write a lot more protocols but we think we've kind of come up with a beautiful interlocking design for all of them. And again, the point is not to get it perfect but rather get those just right set of evolutionary factors that when you click the domino, it just self evolves into what you need it to get to. Allow me to stretch the metaphor farther. If Bitcoin is HTML, there's HTML5. If Ethereum is JavaScript, JavaScript with V8 has become quite fast, quite, you know, it runs much of the internet. So the argument could be that eventually everything will be JavaScript or maybe you could say eventually everything will be HTML and it should be a bunch of different tools that generate that HTML. So is it possible that just like Rousseau, we eventually return to generation one Bitcoin or we return to generation two Ethereum at the end of this journey? Yeah, the problem is your tail is wagging the dog there. And it's not, you have a situation where you're so focused on the technology that you're failing to understand that there's still Daisy here. You still have the user and where's the app store? Where's the one click install? Where's the use and utility? You know, all these layer two protocols and these DeFi applications in five years, they're completely protocol and blockchain agnostic because at the end of the day, they care about liquidity, operating cost and user experience. It's so a preposterous and absurd for somebody to say, oh, well, I'm gonna go build my application, get on the Apple store and I am gonna use Amazon as my web host. And no matter what happens, I will always use Amazon even if the operating cost is crazy. I see. You see? And so we're just in a unique period of history where there's a network effect around some initial infrastructure and people tend to be building around that, but every single one of the top DeFi providers are if they're getting successful into a certain network effect, they're having the multi chain conversation. So I don't really believe in a winner takes all maximums view of, well, there's gonna be some protocol that becomes the God protocol first because they evolved too quickly. Second, the incentives aren't aligned for that. TCPIP didn't have a token connected to it. There was no financial incentive where if TCPIP got adopted over something else, they'd make some big company crazy amounts of money. It was a useful piece of infrastructure. So I think that the third generation is gonna be as defined by the social components and the usability components as it is by the technological capabilities of the system. Really what these technological capabilities gave you was the ability to demonstrate a proof of concept and say these things are possible. Kind of like Xerox PARC, when Steve and Bill came in, they said, wow, you have networked computers, object oriented programming and a GUI. And this is like, what was it, 70s? It's like, wow, it's like incredible. But none of that was an actual product. That wasn't a Macintosh, but it was enough to get the idea. And then it was a race to how do we productize something like that. And in that case, it actually took several decades to roll out that vision that those guys had. And I think that's what Bitcoin and Ethereum did. But what's unique about this is normally you throw away the prior experiments. With these things, these are self evolving systems. So it's entirely possible to, Joe Rogan quote, to evolve Bitcoin to a point where it could become a third generation system if desired, as some amalgamation of layer one and layer two protocols. And it's the same for Ethereum. In fact, Vitalik is throwing away Ethereum and replacing with Ethereum too, because he recognizes he needs to upgrade and evolve the system. And that's what makes it fun because the techniques and methodologies that they've chosen to evolve and upgrade this system are distinctly different from the ones that we've chosen. And we have no idea which one's actually going to win, but we learn from each other and we co evolve from each other. So you're running like all these experiments in real time in a giant marketplace, and maybe they'll consolidate, maybe they'll stay divergent. I mean, look at big tech, you have Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, they all coexist and they're trillion dollar companies. Some cases with TCP, it consolidates to one standard. And that's what we ended up using. So what's your intuition with Cardano having the proof of stake, and then eventually smart contracts versus the Bitcoin with layer two technologies, this kind of evolving creature. Again, you said you can't really predict the future, but what's your intuition why one might be more successful than the other? So the problem with Bitcoin is it is so slow. It's like the mainframe programming of the past. And the only reason it's still around is because there was so much invested in keeping it around that we just kind of have to leave it there and one day Cobalt will die. There's nothing about it from a collection of USPs that's particularly desirable. You have extremely long settlement time, you have extremely low programmability. It is not aware of any other system. There's no native way of issuing an asset in that system. You can't even do a pull transaction. You can't do anything that's interesting or unique there. And yeah, all due respect, it's, you know, mafia, all due respect, Tom. You got some problems. You need to lose some weight. You come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding. I know, I know. So, you know, all due respect to the Bitcoin people. It's like an amazing, incredible first generation thing. And it really, we're all here because of Bitcoin. But the problem is you have to upgrade the damn thing. You know, just because you were a high school football star doesn't mean that 30 years later you're still a high school football star in the same shape. You got the beer belly, you're old, you're not doing this thing again. And that's what Bitcoin has to do. There's fundamental improvements that I think Bitcoin can make at the protocol level that would actually make it an incredibly competitive system. Like if they wanted to keep Nakamoto consensus, proof of work, there's ways to enhance proof of work. I mean, Minkun Sir did this with BitcoinNG, Promotivus Wanus did this with Prism. Make it 10,000 times faster and you don't compromise the fundamental security assumptions that the system has. You can add programmability to it. Blockstream created a language called Simplicity. And so there's actual ways to extend. And we did this with Cardano with the extended UTXO model. There's ways to extend what Bitcoin has. Keep the philosophy, the accounting, the way of thinking about transactions. But then suddenly you can now do DeFi and other things. But what they've done is said, we will not evolve the base layer at all. And we're just gonna build all this layer two stuff, which is usually highly fragile and centralized and requires enormous effort at the base level to do anything. It's not a coincidence Vitalik started as a color coins guy and a master coin guy hanging out in those circles. He was trying to innovate and do things in Bitcoin. And it was so hard and difficult that he started diverging and going and doing things in a different system entirely. I knew the master coin guys, JR and all these people, they were maximalists. They really wanted to build something cool and exciting for Bitcoin. And anything they did, the developers would attack them. It's all you're misusing op return, you're doing this, that it was a holy war anytime you wanted to evolve. So I think it's its own worst enemy. It has the network effect, it has the brand name, it has the regulatory approval, but there's no way to change the system, even correcting obvious downsides in that system. Now, what's really cool is Ethereum doesn't suffer from that problem. It's getting to a point where it has a similar network effect to Bitcoin, but the community there is completely different in culture. They love evolving, they love upgrading, sometimes a little too much. And so that means that if you look at the trajectory of things, if I had to bet just those two systems, Bitcoin or Ethereum, I would say nine times out of 10, Ethereum is going to win the fight against Bitcoin if it was the only competitor. But obviously we're here and a lot of other people are here. So there's different things going on. So it's a much more complex game. But I think that's always a key, zooming out a little bit, set the technology aside and the word salad of cryptography aside because it's too much. What you have to always do is say, what incentive does the system have to evolve? And when you look at things like Android and the App Store and these analogous platforms, you say, ah, the evolution is user driven and there's a financial incentive for the user to participate. So if I had to look at the trajectory of this thing, come back 10 years later, it's probably gonna have millions of applications and lots of stuff going on because that's the way the system was constructed. Okay, it makes sense. When you look at Bitcoin, you say, what is the incentive to evolve the system? There's none. What is the incentive for the system to get more competitive? There's none. In fact, it's the opposite. They've turned it into a religion. I was in Miami at this Bitcoin conference there. I had a toilet paper roll thrown at me that had shit coin written on it. You have Max Keiser out on the stage, doing his best Rick James impression. We'll see the guy that did the F Elon, fuck Elon. Yes, yes, yes. And so you're watching this stuff and you say, okay, first, why would anybody wanna join that? And then second, where is the conversation about how do we achieve something? I started with Cardano, the end in mind. I said, we really wanna sit down and build this financial operating system. And the definition of success is the poorest person in the world has access to the same system as the richest person in the world and they both get treated fairly. We've never had that happen before. Okay, that's something. You can agree with it, disagree with it, say it's boiling the ocean, it's impossible. At least I have something. I can't for the life of me understand what the hell is the point of Bitcoin. When I joined the Bitcoin space way back in the day, it was, hey, we hate the dollar. And hey, we like gold a lot. Let's create digital gold. Let's build a payment system. And then it just kind of went all these different directions and nobody can actually tell you what Bitcoin is for. It's a store of value, okay. There's some proof of work thing where maybe you're like incentivizing alternative energy to be produced. I don't know. Nobody really knows the philosophy. There's no direction. And they say, but don't worry, just buy and hold and everything will sort its way out. I believe it's HODL. Yeah, HODL. What about the idea of digital gold? So trying to replace that particular physical material that is gold to transfer into the digital space. That's something. Okay, let's do that then. And just say that's all it does. Then why are we doing lightning? Why are we doing any of these other things? You don't really need with a commodity, a digital commodity, high throughput. You can have slow settlement. You can have high transaction fees, all these types of things. And that's fine. Okay, that's something, pick it. Well, the idea is to try to come up with technology like the lightning network that could have something like gold, but then still build an economy around it. Something with a high throughput transactions. And have we ever built a successful banking credit system off of gold? Never. It never works because there's too much volatility in the underlying asset. Would you take a gold denominated loan for something? If somebody says, all right, I'll give you five bars of gold to go buy this car and pay me back five and a half bars of gold. Nobody would know in five years where they come out in that kind of a range. The idea is that the gold is used for the settlement of transactions and then you're operating, the actual economy is operating outside of gold. And then you kind of connect back to gold. So we had to go back to the gold reserve and we tried that for a long time. It didn't really work in a modern global economy. We had the Brentwood's agreement and all these other things. And so I understand what you're saying and maybe there's some merit to that, but if that was really an earnest where they want to go, then the conversation should be about, well, how do we make it easy for layer two protocols to interact with Bitcoin? So why is simplicity not built into it? Why is it taking so long to do SnoreSigs? Why is it taking so long to do all these obvious upgrades, which are cryptographically low danger? Also NipaPals, not interactive proofs of proof of work. There's no cost to doing that. It's just a property of proof of work where certain puzzles are more special than other puzzles. And by noticing that you can create these beautiful proofs that allow you to have side chains and like clients. It's not compromising security of the system. It's just something you get for free with proof of work. Those came out in 2016. There's derivative work fly client floating around. Where the hell is it? This is the frustration that I have is like, if you really are serious about this whole lightning and gold economy thing, I love choice. I'm a libertarian by nature. I love competition. And I read all those books. I read Ludwig von Mises's work and Murray Rothbard's work. I love what Hayek had to say about private currencies. Let's go try it. That's great. But then you have to have some focus and commitment as an ecosystem. And the excuse they use is, well, no, we don't because we're decentralized. And because we're decentralized, we don't need that. As if there's some sort of guiding swarm intelligence that will naturally push the system in that particular direction. But then you ask, well, how do people measure the success of Bitcoin? Is it the fact that they've actually achieved lots of transactions and lots of actual economic activity and lots of businesses accepting Bitcoin? That will go up. It's the price. That's what they do. And that's the only thing they pay attention. That's why this is the most attended Bitcoin conference in history. Not because somehow Bitcoin got so much more adoption, it's because this is the highest price point Bitcoin has ever been this year, over 30,000. So first of all, let me state that, Charles, for the most part is purely objective. The bias that comes in, for the record, I want to say, that I have heard, because you mentioned the mafia, that you prefer Goodfellas over the Godfather. So a man who prefers Goodfellas over Godfather, you take it for that opinion for what it is. I actually had to think about that one for quite a bit. I think. Oh, come on. Joe Pesci was so good in that movie. He's incredible. I also love Casino and those big glasses on De Niro. I love it. With Sharon Stone. But we could talk about that for hours. But let me ask you about the Bitcoin conference, because it is kind of, I would say, an important moment in human history. It was quite exciting in terms of size and kind of turmoil and all those kinds of things. And you were there in, what is it? Hot and humid Miami. I believe that's the way you introduced it. So what do you make of the community of Bitcoin or that particular event in human history? What makes me sad is I remember the old Bitcoin community and I've seen what it's become. And the old community was really fun, like the San Jose conference in 2013 or subsequent conferences. You know, there was just a lot of people, they had no money and they just really loved this idea of decentralized money. They loved this idea of decentralization in particular. And you could strike up a conversation with everyone. There's no ego at all. But what was really fun is you could really get intimate friendships and relationships, great conversations with people there. It's kind of like the early days of AI. They all met in Dartmouth and all these other places. Very intimate, there was no egos. Everybody was just trying to do some really cool stuff. Now, just like those early days, there was an overestimate of how robust the solutions would be. So we believed, oh yeah, 10 years, we're gonna rule the whole world, right? Didn't exactly happen. On the other hand, Bitcoin grew from nothing in just 11 years to I'm in Mongolia riding camels and the camel herder has Bitcoin in the Coby desert. So that's telling you that's a pretty pervasive technology if you have that level of adoption that quickly. When I went to Miami, it was unrecognizable. Everything was so commercial. Half of the vendors at the conference were like watches that cost half a million dollars and they were covered in diamonds. So when you see that kind of materialism leak its way in, it's first is repulsive. The other thing was there was no, like I remember one of the first conferences, Mo Levin's conference in January of 2014, the North American Bitcoin Conference ironically in Miami, there was a Bitcoin help center booth. Dima ran it and a few of the other Bitcoin OGs ran it. The core developers actually came over like Jeff and others who were there and sat at the booth and anybody come up, ask a question, anything you wanna ask about Bitcoin. It was like, that was the culture, just help people welcome in. There was no help booth there. There was no notion of that. There were six hour lines and superstars and things like that. And again, again, it was always the same thing. Look how much money all these people have made. And the whole point of Bitcoin was to redefine the notion of money, redefine the notion of value, these types of things. So it just, I'm no longer part of that. And it made me sad because I really enjoyed being part of it. How I got started was the Bitcoin education project. I did a class on Udemy. I gave it away for free. I had 80,000 students and they would email me. I got 5,000 emails before I stopped answering them. And everyone come in and ask me some question about something, sometimes arcane, sometimes trivial. And I take the time to sit down and answer the question or forward the email to somebody I knew who could answer that particular type of question. And there were some amazing people in the early days like Mike Hearn and Gavin and others. And they were just super committed. And Mike's case, he knew Satoshi. He actually emailed them back and forth because he was around 2009, 2010. He did the Bitcoin Java client. And Satoshi was all excited. He said, oh, wow, Bitcoin can come to a cell phone. This is really cool and exciting. And then what happened? Mike left Bitcoin in 2013 over the whole big block debate that happened. They just treated him like dirt, like he was subhuman or something. So I don't know, the culture has changed a lot. And if they like it, it's good for them. They can enjoy their religion, but it's not for me. And where I like being is, like I had a guy who used to work for me, Alex Cherpanoi, and he created this beautiful project called Ergo. To me, that is the spiritual successor to Bitcoin. Ergo is really special because it has the same culture. It has the same mentality. And the technology is kind of like a natural evolution of what you would do if you knew about Bitcoin and you wanted to build the next big thing. So it's still a proof of work system. It's still a UTXO system, but he added UTXO with some smart contracts. It's this Sigma protocol idea. On the proof of work side, Satoshi had this one CPU, one vote idea. So Alex tried to create non outsourceable puzzles to make it impossible to have mining pools. And there's all these other beautiful little things. And he's this brilliant Russian programmer, and he surrounded himself with all these other brilliant people. He has zero ego. He has negative ego. When you put him with a person with ego, your ego goes down, right? And everything about Alex is always like, how do I solve this? How do I do that? And he gets legitimately excited when he meets somebody that he can collaborate with or learn from. That's where Bitcoin was in the beginning. Everybody set their egos aside, whether it was Hal Finney or whatever, and they would just say, how can I help? What can I do? And it was all about coming up with some cool new thing or solving some cool new problem. I don't see any of that in Bitcoin today. So quite a few people are excited about Ergo and excited about the fact that you kind of appreciate Alex and Ergo. Do you see Cardano potentially utilizing the proof of work mechanism from Ergo as part of this pool for the consensus mechanism? I mean, anything's possible, and there's a lot of evolution Ergo has to go through. And Ergo, it was kind of like, when the Xbox 360 first came out, while they were prototyping it, Microsoft needed a development environment. They ironically purchased a lot of Apple computers to do that, because Apple was moving away from the PowerPC to Intel, and Microsoft was moving towards the PowerPC, just this weird intersection of history. So at that time, the largest order of Mac computers made was done by Microsoft, and they were using it for Xbox stuff. So Ergo, we viewed the same way. So we said, well, we have this extended UTXO model. The only thing that's sufficiently close to it where we can beta test contracts is actually with Ergo. And Alex just was a little faster in getting certain things out, because we were doing things in a slightly more rigorous way and slightly more expressive way. So we actually tested a stable coin and Oracle and other things on Ergo, and it has just incredible community. When we said, hey, we're coming here to work and build, he said, oh yeah, we'd love to work with you guys. This is so cool. The other thing is Alex used to work for us, and he had this lovely project called Scorex, and it was all about like a pedagogical framework for building blockchains. And if you want to do prototyping or academic research, it was great. It was super modular, and it separated the consensus network and transaction layer from each other in just the right way, so that you can make it modular and mix and match things. So you can put secure academia in, or maybe a different network layer and a different consensus protocol, a proof of work to another proof of work and so forth. So we loved having that kind of IP sitting around because it gave us the ability to kind of play around with ideas in a matter of weeks instead of months or years. And then he just took that concept and he gave it away. The wave protocol was built on it. That was Sasha Ivanov, he did that. And I think there's two or three other cryptocurrencies that were launched from Scorex, and then Alex took that and built Ergo from it. So there was a nice intersection where there was overlapping technology with Ergo with our technology. And the other thing was that the community was so open and friendly, it was just a no brainer. Just go in and start building some things there. Now, in terms of evolving ideas, the whole Sigma protocol idea is very different and it's very interesting. And there's a guy at Boston University, his name will come to me in a second, who came up with this stuff. And I think there's some merit there, especially as we start moving closer to this idea of blockchains being used to validate proofs instead of running computations. What's the Sigma protocol, by the way? So it's just a way of expressing scripts. And basically, you get these concise representations of proofs, and then you can say, okay, the script is correct, but you don't have to run the whole program. So there's a lot, I'm not doing the topic justice, there's a lot more to it, but that's the basic concept. And in a Redeemer validator model, you need stuff like that, because as your model gets more complex and a lot more things happen, you don't want to have a situation where I have to run, replay a huge amount of the UTXO graph to be able to get to a point where I have the state of the system. You need some mathematical artifact that gives you the state of the system quickly. And then you're saying, okay, I now know what computation thread I need to run to be able to get enough to be able to redeem this transaction. So he just found a more compressed representation of it, and the math doesn't matter. What matters is there's a whole beautiful field that thinks about this type of stuff, and it was never once linked before into our industry. The brilliance of Alex was to actually realize you could do that and pull those things together, and it may actually have some merit, but by no means is he the only guy that does this stuff. There's actually other approaches in verified computing that have explored that. Like my favorite came out of Microsoft research is a project called Pinocchio, and there was a followup called Geppetto. And the basic idea was that it's fortuitous that you have these computer science problems like hashing where you can do all this computation, and once you've done all of it, and you've found this magic number that you can verify that the computation was done correctly. So the proof of work works this way. Hard to do the proof of work, easy to check the proof of work. Cryptography also works this way. You have some trap door where you can verify something's correct, but to get that thing done, if you're doing it brute force, it takes an enormous amount of computation. Well, not all problems are like this, like protein folding, to verify the protein is folded correctly, you have to fold the protein. So you have to redo the work. But what if for arbitrary computation, you could take a problem, and then you could generate a proof that you've done that computation correctly, and the proof validates in logarithmic time or constant time. Wow, that's incredible, right? Well, Microsoft actually wrote a paper on how to do that. It's called Pinocchio. So that's another example of these types of things, these rollups of things where instead of doing the computation on chain or trying to create some sort of replicated machine that does all this stuff, you instead just say, okay, only thing I'm gonna use the blockchain for is to check your proof. But I'm gonna turn it into a distributed computing problem, and any person in the world can do the problem on any server, untrusted server even, because you don't have to trust the output, you trust the proof, and the proof is deterministic. It tells you these things. So whether you're using zero knowledge or Sigma protocols or some other mechanism, it's moving you in that particular direction to turn it from a replicated to a distributed problem and go from I'm doing the work to I'm checking that the work was done correctly. That's fascinating. And all of a sudden, we're back to the P equals NP thing where for many very interesting problems, the checking is efficient, is much more efficient than the solving. Right, and also do you want complete determinism or is it probabilistic? Because if you relax that requirement a little bit, then suddenly actually you have a broader class of things you can construct this stuff for. You mentioned UTXO. There's a paper titled the Extended UTXO Model. It writes in the introduction, Bitcoin and Ethereum hosting the two currently most valuable and popular cryptocurrencies use two rather different ledger models known as the UTXO model and the account model respectively. At the same time, these two public blockchains differ strongly in the expressiveness of the smart contracts that they support. This is no coincidence. Ethereum chose the account model explicitly to facilitate more expressive smart contracts. On the other hand, Bitcoin chose UTXO also for good reasons, including that its semantic model stays simple in a complex concurrent and distributed computing environment. This raises the question of whether it is possible to have expressive smart contracts while keeping the semantic simplicity of the UTXO model. Okay. So what's the fuck that mean? Exactly. What is UTXO, what is the account model, and what is the idea of the Extended UTXO model? So I guess the easiest way of visualizing it is that UTXO is kind of like cash register accounting. So let's assume you don't have credit cards, you just have cash. And so when you go and buy some milk and potatoes or whatever and you go to the cashier, you pull out your $20 bill, you give it to them, unless it comes up to 17.50, they have to make change. So you don't tear your $20 bill, cut a piece of it off and say, here's part of my 20. You give them the entire $20 bill and then they give you something back. And the things that they give you back are also atomic units, they don't cut those things up. So that's kind of what UTXO is all about in a nutshell is that there's inputs and outputs, your inputs that 20 and your outputs will be the 17.50 that goes to them and then the remaining change that goes back to you, okay? The problem with this particular model is that the way it was implemented with Bitcoin, there was no notion of how do we run complex predicates, complex contracts on this thing, where instead of just saying, okay, I'm just gonna push value to you, I wanna put lots of terms and conditions into the movement of that value. Like you only get this if I mow your lawn on Tuesday or you only get this if some event happens like the Broncos win the Super Bowl or something like that. Okay, so you need some notion of programmability with it. So a lot of people are trying to figure out in the early days of Bitcoin, how could we improve the expressiveness of the system? And one of ways of doing it is you can go to a different accounting model, bank style accounting. So in a bank ledger, every time you do a withdrawal, a deposit, it's a mutable system. With the cash register accounting, you don't tear up the bills, but the bank you can deduct or add ledger all the time. So Ethereum kind of works in that bank accounting system where you just, you send messages, you send transactions and you're going up or down. And so you can trigger programs the same way. So what we did is we said, okay, if you take the UTXO model and you have some data to it, and instead of saying it's just a digital signature, but it's in a script, you can basically create something that's still the same as cash register, but now you have programmability and the big difference is local versus global. So in the case of UTXO, your scripts are your concerns. So whatever's going on in that cash register has no bearing or impact on the other cash registers. But when you look at bank accounting, you have to know the state of the entire banking world to be able to make that work. Why? Because if that transaction is inbound, that wire transfer is inbound, you have to know those funds are actually there, that thing is actually happening. So when you have a global state for a program, it's like you could do a lot more with it, but it's a lot more dangerous. And so you have to build all these mechanisms to try to protect yourself from it. So what we did is we said, okay, add data, add a programmability, and you're kind of in this nice Goldilocks zone between what Ethereum did with an account style model and a global state system. And you're not as restrictive as Bitcoin, but you're still in a Turing complete world, you can still run all kinds of things. And then any standard mathematician, they'll say, okay, well, is it isomorphic? Is there a mapping between this? What type of function can I actually take something expressed in one structure and transmit it to the other structure and properties are preserved? So we wrote a paper, it's called Climatic Ledgers, where we actually showed that UTXO, Extended UTXO and accounts are somewhat similar in that you could map things that happen in one system to the other system, the properties are preserved between the two. So in practice, what's nice about Extended UTXO is that you can put infrastructure on top of it to make the development experience relatively similar to the development experience of what you would do with Ethereum, but you don't have to worry about this global state. So when you talk about sharding, it's a lot easier to do that. It's a lot more conceivable to that. And also you get determinism in the system. So when I have a Plutus smart contract, whatever I run locally is exactly what I expect to run in the system. When you have a concept of this mutable global state in the system, whatever you run locally is not necessarily what you're gonna get when you actually push it into the system. So you may misprice things and the contract will fail. It doesn't ever happen in the Plutus world. So you got a lot of advantages with this particular model. The downside is that it's a little bit less expressive on the boundaries and a little bit harder to write certain types of software with it. But again, how you resolve that is you kind of build higher level languages and other such things that compensate for these types of things and design patterns that compensate for these types of things. The other advantage that we have that's really fun and exciting is that Bitcoin lives in this model and there are other UTXO based systems. And so they're all talking about smart contracts as well. And they would like to continue working in the UTXO model. So if you're a Bitcoin contract developer or other things, there's actually already a group of people that understand this very well. And that's still a fairly large part of the mindshare of the entire space. So there are no silver bullets. And anytime you pick a particular model, there's an upside and a downside. And there's different ways of doing things from cash register accounting or bank accounting. You can even do different accounting models. But we felt this was kind of the best first step to go into because we started with something very familiar that had a long history behind it. And it maps very beautifully to functional programming principles. This concept of immutability and these things and much more strict management of state and no notion of having this global concept that you have to kind of manage as you break up the system. Now in practice, what does this mean to the developer when they actually start real writing an application? Not too much. There's gonna be a little bit of retooling and some new patterns you have to learn. But in practice, you can still do the same things. You can implement a Uniswap style thing. In fact, we even wrote that code with the Plutus Pioneers program. So you can go to YouTube and watch a lecture and see how that's done. You can do a stable coin. You can do an Oracle. You can do interactive contracts. It's just, it has to be done a little differently than the way that you would do it in an account style model. Just like you could run an application in Java, you can run an application in Haskell. They both can do the same thing, but the code is gonna look different. And the canonical way of looking at things is different. So in terms of Oracle, Oracle networks, what are your thoughts about chain link and external off chain data sources? And everything we've been talking about now with the external, with the extended UTXO model. Yeah, I mean, trying to do smart contracts without Oracle is like trying to have sex with your pants on. I mean, it's not really fun. It's not exactly the best of things. That's the way I've been doing it all these years. I didn't know. For any other person, Lex, I wouldn't believe you, but for you. That's why I'm single. This makes so much sense now. Okay, so anyway, you need the outside world to be injected into your system, right? I'm trying to keep a straight face. It's great. You need the outside world to make your system useful. It's like all the kinds of things that you care to do with a smart contract usually involve human beings and information streams aggregating and doing something. So the Oracle is a super important component in practice for any smart contract involving any notion of value. You need to know when things have happened, how they happen, who won, who lost, et cetera, et cetera. So first, where do you get the data from? So what's the aggregator? This is why we love our relationship with Wolfram because one of the things you'll know about Wolfram as you get to know the guy is he's a data pack rat. Every email, every communication, every interaction, he's archived somewhere. Like last time I talked to him, oh, yeah, I have emails from you from 2012. It's like, you still have those? Yeah, every keystroke is written down and stored somewhere. So if you use Wolfram Alpha, it's a simulacrum of the way his mind thinks. And so you can query the system and be like, oh, how many shipwrecks have happened in Florida between 1950 and 2000 that have resulted more than a billion dollars of cargo loss and at least one fatality? And it'll return an answer. I mean, it's an incredible source of data that's computable. For people who don't know, Wolfram Alpha is more than just the thing that assists you with your math homework in high school. It's actually this giant network of data of like weather data, of location data, just statistic, all kinds of, it's doing the aggregation in a way that you can query across data sets. And it's exactly this kind of idea. It basically represents the very kind of thing you would hope to be able to query off chain as part of the smart contracts. Right, but the only downside is it's centralized. And that's always the Achilles heel of Wolfram is he tends to like proprietary things and he tends to like centralizing things and mostly because he likes running the things. And everybody can have an opinion on that. The thing though is that after you've done aggregation, there's a question of injection. How do you get that data into the system? And you can do that in a very naive way where you can say, oh, I'm just gonna attach a public key to it and it'll sign for that data feed, that injection. And then somehow I'll just trust it as it is. Or you could try to make it more complicated. You could wait data feeds from different sources and have some notion of truthiness or a veracity metric or something like that. So Chainlink is just one of many different philosophies that was born out of the academy. I believe Ari Jewell was connected to it and there's some good people on that side. And it has a philosophy about how do you aggregate, a philosophy about how do you inject and how do you create incentives so that that process over time gets more federated or more decentralized instead of centralizing around one particular setup. Now, closely related corollary to this is computation off chain. So as I mentioned, smart contracts are intimately connected to our Oracle. The question is how much pre processing and state management are you gonna do outside of the system versus what do you do inside of the system? So it's a very interesting balance between these two. And they were thinking about this stuff for a long time. There's a great paper called Town Crier, came out way back in the day at Cornell. And that was all about using like SGX to scrape things and you can rely on trusted hardware to give you good data. But you could also use those SGX cores to do contract processing, because if it runs in trusted hardware, then it's very unlikely to be tampered with or manipulated. And because of that, you don't have to federate it or decentralize it, you can run it on a single device as if it was running on a cryptocurrency. So there seems to be a desire in that community to capture more and more of the smart contract stack and pull more and more of that stack into that layer two infrastructure from running on layer one. Why? Because you have cost reduction and potentially because your trust model collapses to whatever Chainlink is offering, you're not gaining anything by doing the computation on Ethereum or another platform. Because you ever watched The Simpsons? There was this beautiful episode where Mr. Burns wants to turn the power off in Springfield. It is the perfect analogy for information security. So he and Smithers, they go through this elaborate series of doors and secret passages and guard dogs and robots and shit to get to the center of the power plant to turn off the power. And when they arrive at the center of the plant, there's like this stray dog that's inside the room. And there's this wicker screen door that leads to the outside. And you're like, well, why the hell did you go through this elaborate series of doors and things if there's like a backdoor into your system? Well, that's basically a real life analogy of the relationship between the Oracle and the smart contract. You're only as good in your infrastructure model as your weakest link. And it doesn't matter if all of your computation is decentralized, if you're at the mercy of your data feed. Because I can just manipulate that and break the entire security model of the system, okay? You'll perfectly execute the wrong answer. So they say, well, if you're trusting us anyway, why don't you pull more of what you're doing on chain into our stack, which creates more transaction fees for them and more value for them. But there are many different ways you can do oracles. And earlier I was talking about the biology of these things, the cell differentiation. The minute that you admit heterogeneity in your system and you start having cells like stake pools or things that are on 24 seven, then you can start asking the what if question. Why don't you guys just also provide data feeds? Why don't you guys also provide state channels or payment channels or generate random numbers from here or whatever? And you're now a service provider. You're making the blockchain full time, but part time you're doing this. And if you're making bagels, you could probably make donuts, that type of a concept. So I think that type of competition is going to be very difficult for a lot of these layer two protocols that aren't tightly coupled with the protocol because the ones that are tightly coupled with the protocol, they have a built in trust advantage. They've already built a commercial reputation. There's already an increasingly more decentralized set. The other thing is you don't need a token. You can just use ADA. You don't need an oracle coin for these types of things to work. And by the way, that's just for the injection component and the veracity attestation. So is it true or not? That's not about the aggregation. That's still a tremendously time intensive, expensive proposition. There's only a few people in the world that have what Steve has with Wolfram. And those guys by just cutting off those supply to replicate what they have is something that would cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And so it's an interesting question of how do you incentivize decentralized aggregation of information? And that's kind of what town crier and other protocols we're trying to achieve. So maybe you can say how town crier works because it's like, what's your vision? You're now partnering with Wolfram and Wolfram Alpha in sort of exploring this partnership of data and the blockchain. What's your vision for a possible distributed version of Wolfram Alpha? Well, the first step is just say, can we use this as a feed? And they can be what Bloomberg is to the financial markets. So you have a terminal and you have something and there's always a value of at least offering choice. And so it's not like we're anti chain link or picking winners and losers. It's an open protocol, it's an open system. So if we're successful, chain link will migrate or it will at least support us because they like money. They like users, they like liquidity. It's a disservice to their community not to support a potential customer set, but you're gonna have a spectrum from the desire to do a completely decentralized aggregation, curation, injection and veracity attestation to a completely centralized vertically integrated set. You need to be able to have that whole spectrum and offer that to the smart contract developer to decide what makes sense. By the way, a lot of cases, they're gonna be their own Oracle. So for example, the World of Warcraft example that I gave, well, it's a completely centralized thing. It's a video game run by a single company. There's no sense in saying that we're somehow going to decentralize that. What they're just trying to do is extend their currency or NFTs or whatever into new marketplaces. So the minting of that is controlled by a single entity and the world state of that, you just have to trust Blizzard to inject that into the system. You could try to imagine some sort of like, Sentinel group of people within the game who keep Blizzard honest, but it's completely unnecessary because they can change the rules of the system arbitrarily. So in that case, you're optimizing around efficiency and cost reduction. So you'd want a single feed that gets injected into the system from them. If you look at a stable coin that's algorithmic and it's basing its value on the aggregation of many different exchanges, that's the polar opposite example. Because there you're saying, okay, what's the price of my asset relative to some basket? But how do I know that the price feeds I'm looking at are accurate? You'd have to look at Binance and Bittrex and all these other things, or maybe there's conventional Forex exchanges or something like that. Okay, well, how do you weight that? And how do you clip outliers and these types of things? That's a completely different conversation. There's a lot more mechanics you have to put in for that bundling and attestation of the veracity of the data feed. And what happens if you get it wrong? Your stable coin gets mispriced and everything goes to hell. And the markets will eventually correct it for arbitrage seeking behavior, but anything that was built on that will fail in the short term. So Oracle is really just a game of, you have to build a standardized interfaces and make it as easy as possible for people to do that. And then let people choose how they wanna inject data and what level of assurance do they need behind that? And the question is, how much do you leave to the user versus how much does the protocol take care of for you? And it's a difficult design question. For our part, we love working with Steve and Wolfram and they're a great company and they really have some bright people there. And we know on the data set, they're second to none because not only do they have it, it's computable. You can do all kinds of things and manipulate with a very rich query language. So that's a great thing. And we wanna make sure that that's accessible to developers and Cardano. Remember, they're like Bloomberg. It's a centralized speed in that respect. So if you wanna build a Chainlink S competitor, there's other protocols you could do for that. Now you asked about Tom Cryer and that was an attempt to kind of sweep the oceans with the net, get the data through a decentralized way. And that was just saying, hey, let's use trusted hardware to go read all kinds of websites and other things. And because it's trusted hardware, the scraping is nonbiased. If you find something inconvenient to whatever the person who's scraping is, trusted hardware will still do it and it can't be changed. You'd have to manipulate SGX to do that. So that's great, but you still run into the problem of how do you wire that together? The underlying websites still don't have any notion of veracity or reputation behind them. And then you also have the issue of storage. Where the hell do you put all of it? If you have exabytes of data, what's the incentive for that? That's the dream of the Semantic Web. I still think is a fascinating idea how to basically convert the internet into a core, like a knowledge base that you can query, you can integrate in the same way you did with Wolfram Alpha, but much bigger. But that means basically revolutionizing the way we put the internet together, which I think these ideas of off chain data will motivate people, because there's a lot of money to be made. Finally, there's money to be made with the Semantic Web. So that'll be an interesting kind of future. I do want to ask you about video games really quick as a small tangent, because you said this really interesting idea of Blizzard being centralized control. Is it possible to have items in the game that are not controlled by Blizzard? Sure. Being controlled in a decentralized fashion that you can, like what is it, the grandfather sword in Diablo? Hmm, what was it really? Somebody was criticizing me. I was saying all these kinds of nice things about Diablo III, and they said Diablo II Resurrected is coming out, they need to check it out. There's a lot of camps and wars that need to be done. Come on, we both know that Diablo II is far better than Diablo III. That's what they're saying. This is the war that they're having. Okay, so we'll play it, it's coming out soon, I'll play it, fine. But nevertheless, those items are owned by Blizzard. Is it possible to create video games where items are owned by the people outside of Blizzard, and do you think in like a half century from now we will all live in those games, and we'll forget the physical space even exists? Well, yeah, that's definitely possible. I look at CryptoKitties, that's a great example of that. Can you explain what CryptoKitties is? Well, it's basically just a video game that kind of lives on a blockchain, and the creatures within the game can breed with each other and create new CryptoKitties, and you can own them. So it's like some sort of dystopian Tamagotchi with lots of money behind it. But anyway, the thing is those assets actually have a blockchain based representation. And so whether the infrastructure that hoists up that game off chain goes on or off, because that ledger exists outside of the game, any person can come in and replicate it, restore it, and turn it back on sans intellectual property. So yeah, it's completely possible to break your architecture up where you have a notion of the player part, and then you have a notion of the experience part, and you can interchange experiences, almost like you do cascading style sheets or something for different presentations, and the ownership of the underlying layers, the players. So yeah, that's definitely doable. And frankly, that's what's gonna happen in the gaming world, because there's so much value in that. I mean, everybody wants play, and right now the model is you make a game, you sell licenses, and you have a huge surge of people at the beginning of the game buying the video game, and then you have this long tail, but you've gotten almost 95% of your value in the first six months, and you have a huge churn rate. The odds are the vast majority of people won't be playing the game within 12 months. But if you can create an interactive game where there's an actual economy inside the game, then you have EVE Online, or Second Life, or any of these things, where you have people playing for 10 years, and there's like people buying virtual real estate and all these other things. You as the game developer actually don't have to create a lot of content. So your long tail gets a lot fatter, and it generates a lot more revenue, and your cost of operating the system is fairly fixed or diminishing. So the economics align for doing exactly what you're talking about, and I think it'll get done. Well, I just saw recently sort of this calculation that people played WoW and Fortnite for 140 billion hours. Yeah. So, and that's without the economic incentives there. So do you think it's possible that like most of our economy in the future, people playing video games essentially? Like, okay, so one vision of the future, especially with AI and automation, that people like, that we get wealthier and wealthier, there's this kind of rising GDP for the entire world, and then people are losing their jobs, but they're still well off enough to be able to have a high quality of life. So we're all looking for meaning, and the meaning we'll find is by playing video games, and now there's this extra levels, like you can be a Bill Gates within a video game world, in the digital world as opposed to the physical world. Is that, do you think that's the future? You just wanna have the Westworld if you can't tell the difference, does it matter? Lion uttered to you. Did you ever interview Yuval Harari? Not yet, eventually. Well, yeah, but yeah, I guess, you know, Homo Dias, that's kind of like the roadmap there, right? This hedonistic dystopia where everybody just lives wired into some simulation, and there's some movies about that, Ready Player One, and the other one was Surrogate, and so forth, so yeah, Hollywood has certainly visualized what this could be, but you know, I'm not so pessimistic in that respect. I do believe that the video game world is evolving at an amazing pace, if you're looking at where Unreal is at, is just incredible, the latest Unreal Engine, and within one or two more ticks of that clock, the iteration, so five to 10 years, the photorealism will be so good that it'll be hard to distinguish between real life and video games, and you know, the hardware is almost there, so the question is then, when you have photorealistic experiences where you've successfully traversed the uncanny valley to a point where it's good enough, then will virtual reality be more desirable than actual reality? And for the vast majority of people, the answer's probably yes, because actual reality's tough, it's hard, you know, but then your knowledge that you live in a virtual world actually becomes a problem for you, so there's gonna be this kind of sad, dark industry where people try to create amnesia, where they're not aware that they're inside the virtual world, and so that's interesting. Why is it sad? I mean, it's almost like a... Because you know it's not real, but if you could forget that it's not real, then you believe what you're experiencing is real. Yeah, but yeah, so what? You forget, like you forget all the ugly parts of life, which is the physical, the meat space, and then you get to enjoy video games. But it's always lurking in the back of your mind that you're in the matrix. Well, that's... You have to not be in the matrix. That's just why the bald dude in the matrix was like, I wanna be rich and have a beautiful wife and eat a steak every day. You know, he didn't wanna know he was in the matrix. So you would take the red pill, not the blue pill. Well, no, hang on, it depends on how good the virtual world is, Lex. Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, is I mean, isn't that what most of the beautiful experiences about human life are, is forgetting for a moment, for a time, like the mess of it? Yeah. I mean, that's what love is, is you forget. Like all of a sudden everything is beautiful, but like the reality is you're gonna lose that person and most likely love will fade. And no matter what, even if it doesn't, you're both gonna be dead soon. Jesus Christ. So I'm taking the blue pill on that one. You went full Ernest Becker on me, man. Okay. But you know, I get what you're saying though, and then actually, but then it begs the question, how do we, and it goes back to the very first question you asked in this interview, which is like, how do we know we're not in a simulation? Or, you know, is this Bostrom's concepts or these ideas like real? Well, it's entirely possible that we are and that we desire to be because the real world is horrifically dystopian or bad, or maybe we actually don't exist, we're completely virtual and does it matter? And I'd argue that it probably doesn't at some certain point. If you're at the end of your life and you're 90s dying of cancer, the fact that you can live out being young, healthy, and 25 is probably a desirable thing and no one would ever complain about that. Where it becomes problematic is if the vast majority of society enters this virtual simulacra of reality and as a consequence, nothing works because there's no one to do anything, society falls apart in that respect. There's no desire to do anything in the real world. Innovation stops, the desire to actually do real work stops because you're always inside this virtual economy. So I don't know, it's an interesting question, but drawing it back more to where we're at today, the evolution factors are there. VR is evolving at a very rapid rate. The game engines are just incredible today and they're really doing amazing things. And there seems to be an overwhelming desire for people to escape the harshness of where they live, just by evidence by how many billions of hours have been spent playing video games. People still play Skyrim. Yeah, it's a good game. It's probably my favorite game of the whole Elder Scrolls series. But it's fascinating because smart contracts is actually the mechanism by which we take a lot of the meatspace stuff and move it to the digital world. So all the stuff we've been talking about is really probably the mechanisms which take us there, which I find that world not dystopian. I find that world quite dystopian because there's so many opportunities to create beautiful experiences. But since we're talking about the future, let me ask you a timeline question, or even just like definitional. What is Alonzo? You mentioned some fun Hello World experiments going on. Right, right. And how and when will Cardano get smart contracts? Yeah, so Alonzo Church is a famous, famous mathematician, computer science guy, and he was a contemporary of Turing. And there was like these three different views of computing, recursive functions from Gödel and Turing machines from Turing, and Church had lambda calculus, and they're all equivalent, and they all give you the ability to build a computer. So we like functional programming, so we decided. That's your favorite Church. So we had to name something after Church, and it's just weird that we never did. So we said, okay, Alonzo is a good release name. Basically, it was bringing smart contracts to Cardano. Took us a long time to get here, and we'll be there in the next 90 days. It's like everything we do, there's a process, and so there's all the colors of the rainbow. We start with Alonzo blue, and then white, and purple. And each step, you do some more things. You bring more users in, and then eventually, you get to a threshold where you say, okay, everything works the way intended, and you push a button, and we initiate what's called a hard fork combinator event, and boom, the system has smart contracts. You just wake up, and it's there. It's like it's in your house. So it's gonna be a hard fork. It's like when I got my blue check mark on Twitter, I woke up, and I had it. Yeah, and you were never the same. You can't go back. It's a, yeah, like hard fork. It's a hard fork of Charles. Yeah, exactly. You got blue mark. Well, actually, I think you can take it away, but. Can they take my check mark away, Flex? I think. Oh, but that'd be like a hard fork backwards, I guess. Okay, so great. So that's, but currently, there's a testing procedure going on to see what does that look like, and what will give you confidence that things are working well. Yeah, so first, you start with the marry era, which is where we're right now multi assets. So you can do metadata and issue tokens on Cardano, but you'd have limited programmability on chain. Alonzo adds the programmability in, but we already have most of the foundations of the extended UTXO model, and the smart contract model is just, those things aren't ready. So the first step is, say, fork it, so all those rules are now there, okay? That's what we did with Alonzo Blue. We forked a testnet base layer, and it successfully survived going from marry to Alonzo, which means that you can move transactions from one side to the other. Both systems work. And then the next step is, say, okay, well, are the stake pool operators, people who run the infrastructure, able to run this testnet just like they run Cardano? And that's what we're doing right now with Blue. We're bringing all these SPOs in, and then are we able to submit and run smart contracts on the system? And they actually return a round trip. You send something, you get something back. Yay, okay. So that's where we're at. And then what you do is each step, so the next is white, you go from like 50 people to several hundred, and then purple's an open testnet where we want every single person in the entire ecosystem to use it, and it's also a DevNet. So that means that people who are writing with Pluse Playground and local interpreters, their smart contracts can actually start testing them now on the public infrastructure. So it's kind of like releasing dev kits to the Xbox or something like that. You send them out to game developers before you release the Xbox, so they can test their video games in anticipation of the release of the system. So you run that for at least a month, and as long as it doesn't blow up in your face, and oh God, what have we done, Hindenburg, oh the humanity, you release it and you ship it. The problem is it's no longer in our control. There's over 100 exchanges that have listed Cardano. There's lots of wallet infrastructure. There are thousands of different constituencies. So it's less of a technological problem now, and it's more of a coordination problem. So you have to evolve in a very methodical way, and each step of the way you bring new actors in, they get ready for it. They upgrade their infrastructure to it, and then like shells, eventually, you get to the outer shell, which is the hard fork for the general public. And if we've done it right, like that blue check mark, they wake up and it's exactly the same. They just get a little update thing, update your client. And they start demanding Wagyu beef. Is there stuff you're worried about in terms of like when something's this tricky, you know, goes up several orders of magnitudes in terms of scale? Are there problems that you foresee? Is there, like we said, there's game theoretic aspects, all those kinds of things. Like what worries you the most? I mean, I sleep like a baby. I wake up every two hours crying. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. And what makes no sense, I slept like a baby. But go ahead. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. Messing your whole world up right now, Alex. Um. No, I mean, there's so much that keeps me up at night. You know, it's like you're in a cold sweat everyday when you have an ecosystem like this, cause you, you, the other thing is you're judged as much by the applications people build on the platform as you are by the platform you've constructed. So, you know, one of the most unfair things that happened in our industry was blaming Vitalik for the DAO hack. He didn't write the code, he wasn't responsible for it. It was a completely independent, different team. And because it blew up, a lot of people just developed this idea, Ethereum is not secure, the EBM is fundamentally broken. And it's true, there are some issues there, but come on, that's like saying, oh, well, Photoshop didn't work, fuck Bill Gates. Yeah. And that's the issue is you get, as a platform developer, coupled with the wins and losses of your application developer. So if they go do amazing things, it's like, oh yeah, Windows is great, we love it. And if they go do terrible things, they're like, oh man, I guess he's trying to kill all of us. So what we're kept up a night about is not just what we've constructed, but also how do we curate an ecosystem and foster the development of an ecosystem where you have assurance baked into the application, and that's somehow expressible to the user. So when you download your smart contract or you click your one click install, you use your unit swap clone or whatever the hell it is that's deployed on Cardano, you have a little green check mark or something that indicates to you that somebody audited the code or followed a specification. The lack of that is problematic because then first there's impersonations, the whole MyEtherWallet thing, like your videos or my videos are the same. Every comment, there's a bot that says, hey, give me some money or something like that. That kind of stuff happens. But then just protocol level flaws, like what happened with the DAO hack, that's what really keeps me up at night. How do you resolve that problem? Because I don't hire these people. I don't tell them what to do. I didn't tell them how to build things on the platform. They may have tons of experience and knowledge. They could be Simon Payton Jones or they could have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever and they read one tutorial and they've written three lines of code their entire life and they've deployed something horribly broken, copy paste, and suddenly it all goes to hell. I'm judged by both. That's what really keeps me up at night. And we're, as a company, trying to figure out, and as the ecosystem, trying to figure out standards. Like at University of Wyoming, we're setting up the Smart Contract Engineering Institute. We're negotiating with them right now. And the goal there is just to create some standards for how to certify smart contracts so that you can get that green check mark and know that it actually has some assurance level behind it. But God, that's a huge coordination problem and it's a huge information presentation problem and incentives problem and so forth. And unfortunately, people who value being first to market will kind of piss in the pool for everybody else. In terms of, maybe you can comment on the topic of decentralized exchanges. What kind of decentralized exchanges, DEXs, what are they, first of all, and what kind would you like to see built around Cardano? Yeah, so people want to create exchanges that don't have custodial risk. The point of exchange is to build you a marketplace where bids and asks can find each other, people can meet and trade. You can find a price and you can get liquidity. So you got gold, you wanna turn your gold into dollars. Okay, well, somebody has to create a marketplace for that. So like Coinbase is an example of a marketplace. Exactly. But it's centralized. But the problem is you have custodial risk. So when you put your gold and your dollars or your digital representations of these things into the exchange, what if Wally, Eve broke up with him and now he's really sad and he's gone to the dark side and he's become Wally the hacker. Okay, so he can go and sneak his way in and hack into Coinbase and steal all your gold and your tokens. So instead of you actually being able to swap these things, you've lost all your money. And there's other problems too. Like let's say Daisy has now come in and become a regulator and said, oh, I don't like these exchanges anymore. I'm just gonna shut them all down. Yeah, and then you have no access to it. So you have sovereign risk, you have the risk of threat, you have regulatory risk, you have the issue of banks maybe cutting you out. So it's been in our industry for more than 10 years. Mt. Gox was the most famous example of that. They collapsed, I believe in 2013 and hundreds of millions of dollars was lost over the course of a while. So the point of a DEX is saying, can we do what a marketplace does, but not have Coinbase, not have a central actor run this thing? And there's a lot of problems with that because exchanges are generally creatures of latency. You know, high frequency trading, for example, the things that nanosecond, they co locate their infrastructure with the exchange software just so they can front run orders over other people. I mean, it's crazy the amount of technology that they put in. So the traditional Wall Street version of an exchange is very centralized, very fast, very optimized and kind of behaves by a very closed set of rules. When you look at a DEX, you have to accept that you're gonna have to have slightly different rules because you're operating in a global systems latency and you're operating in a system that has different behaviors. However, that said, there's a lot of great protocols that have been built for it. You know, Uniswap has kind of evolved a lot over the years and we've seen a huge competition and a lot of evolution to basically build out protocols that kind of excuse some of these security problems, enjoy high liquidity and then also have this beautiful concept of openness. One of the gatekeepers to crypto when you're a cryptocurrency developer are the exchanges. I remember when we first created Cardano, you know, the Bitfinex guys reached out to the Cardano Foundation. They said, oh, we'd be happy to list ADA. And I said, okay. And they said, yeah, we want $5 million to do it. You know, so there was kind of some Italian for go fuck yourself in those email conversations. Fuck, hula is what I said. But anyway, that kind of back and forth happens all the time. And because these guys are gatekeepers, they have this nepotistic control information asymmetries and so forth. So having a DEX, you don't have that problem. You have open listing and you basically just put the asset into it. And if anybody wants to trade it, they will. And if it seems like it's a good idea, a natural market will form, market making will occur and you get liquidity with it. So there's no barrier to entry for that type of system. The biggest existential problem for DEXs right now is the concept of regulation. So basically right now, when you use Binance or Coinbase or these other guys, you have to go through KYC and AML, know your customer and anti money laundering. So basically who are you and you know, is your money real or not, or are you a drug dealer or something? So normally you do that by saying, okay, I'm gonna give them my copy of my passport and maybe they're gonna request some tax records or whatever the best practices are for the particular jurisdiction. And then that exchange is liable if that's fucked up. So if the government comes in and says, hey guys, you know, pull your compliance records and they find discrepancies, they'll actually put the exchange out of business or fine them very heavily. JP Morgan Chase got $19 billion in fines over the last 20 years for various compliance issues amongst other things. So it's expensive, very difficult thing. And at DEX, it's open system. You just have value coming in, not identity. And so all these things are trading amongst anonymous accounts. And so there's no notion of compliance right now for that. So a lot of regulators are coming in and saying, oh, well, this is just a cesspool for terrorism and drug dealing and bad stuff. And they're word salad of bullshit. But you know, it is what it is. You have to deal with these guys. And so there's been a lot of discussions of, can we take DEXs and keep the openness and keep the liquidity and no counterpart or custodial risk? And can we add some notion of compliance to that in a decentralized way that doesn't require a single actor to be a gatekeeper? So I think actually by combining DIDs, decentralized identifiers, that's the way to do it. But it's actually the next generation of the technology is the regulated DEX and who regulates that, how does that work and so forth. But I think ultimately those are gonna be the only marketplaces that end up surviving in this current environment if your desire is to exit to a dollar. If you don't really care about the fiat side, like a traditional legacy currency, you can always do things in a shadowy, unregulated way. But I mean, it's a personal preference and a business preference. Can we kind of return to proof of work and proof of stake? There's just so many topics I wanna talk to you about. So I'll jump around a little bit. But at the Bitcoin conference, Jack Dorsey spoke, I think I believe he said Bitcoin changes everything. I think he made a video for Jack trying to explain different ideas to him. I guess describing the difference between proof of work and proof of stake as we've talked about. What do you hope Jack Dorsey comes to understand about the difference between proof of work and proof of stake? Well, I hope he understands it's just a resource. That's the entire point of the video I was trying to make is like, dude, you're like in this cult where you think the only way to be secure is proof of worker and somehow proof of stake is less secure than proof of work. I don't even know how you put those inequalities there because you're talking about apples and oranges. You're making different trade offs and there's different assumptions about the nature of the people involved, but the mechanics are the same. And so it's really more of a question of what type of system do you prefer? Do you want mercenaries guarding Rome or do you want Roman citizens guarding Rome? Okay, and as the Romans learn, it's better to have citizens usually doing that. Okay, and that's the only point I was trying to make to Dorsey and I don't think he watched it or particularly cared, but it was more of a video for everyone. And to start that dialogue of realizing that the real game is not, is proof of stake better than proof of work? It's how do we go from one to end and what should end be? You just mentioned that semantical addressable web, going back to IPFS and these other concepts. Well, how do you pay for the enormous burden of storing that much data? You can create a consensus protocol for it. There actually is one. It's called Permacoin, came out in 2014, 15. Andrew Miller wrote it and a few other authors. I think John Katz may have been an author as well. But basically it was just a throwaway proof of work style algorithm that only works if you have large amounts of data. Okay, so it's like your miner is like a hard drive effectively. Proof of storage, I think you call it. Yeah, this type of stuff. And there's been since then many iterations, evolutions of that type of protocol. Okay, so what if you throw that into your resource back? Now you have a capacity in your system for storing huge amounts of information. That's incentivized by the way the system works. And you can balance that with a proof of stake system. And you can balance that with, let's say you have proof of useful computation. We may have a paper on that, who knows, coming soon. And what if you have a proof of useful computation where maybe you can do walk stat or something, who knows? With something like that, okay, well now you have three resources inside your system and those three things keep your system secure. They keep each other balanced. And they just so happen to create the world's largest supercomputer that's programmable. And it just so happens to create the world's largest database that's programmable. In addition to having a shareholder style model for ownership inside of it, to kind of balance these things out. So people care about the appreciation of value inside the system. So that was my point to Jack is, you're a business guy, why are you betting all your eggs? And one crazy model that's a cult step away and realize that that does something. It's a tool, but saws aren't the only tool in the toolbox. There's hammers and screwdrivers and other things. Go to end resources. And let's have a real conversation about what would a world computer or a world infrastructure that's useful for your business domain, in his case, Twitter, require? And what type of resources would you need for such a thing? Well, in this case, Square, more importantly. Currently, if you look at Square and Cash App, they support Bitcoin. He is kind of all in on the proof of work idea. Not all in, but currently kind of, that's the one supported idea. I guess there's not just a tip in proof of work. I love you so much, Charles. Thank you, I appreciate this. But I'm not gonna run with that, even though I'm tempted to. But looking forward, do you hope Cardano becomes part of Cash App? I mean, he's a business guy, or at least I'd hope he is, and it's not about what I want or what he wants, it's about what markets want. When you run a publicly traded company, you have fiduciary obligation to your shareholders to maximize the utility, sustainability, and value of your company. And so if he's running a company that makes money off of these things, it makes absolutely no sense to be a maximalist. You want transaction volume, that's how you make your damn money. Coinbase was the same way. They were very maximalist in the beginning. Very quickly, they started realizing, hey, we're losing a lot of money. If we wanna IPO, we kinda need to be a bit more diverse. Eric Voorhees was also a maximalist way back today. Now look at Eric, he's got ShapeShift and all these other pieces of infrastructure. He's a lot more friendly with us alties. So Jack will make that decision, his people will make that decision, I think, based on market dynamics, transaction volume, and value to the user. And if the concern is actually legitimately security, then the only question I'd ask their team is, can you please provide me a definition of what? Doing POW is more secure than proof of stake as a tweet is not really a proof, okay? You need to actually come out and sit down and say, what is your security model? What do you care about? What do you value? What's the problems you're concerned about proof of stake? And they never really get there. And that's why I call this maximalist like a religion because it's just like saying, the angels descended from the heavens. And it's like, well, how do you know? Well, because the Bible said so, or this doctrine said so. It's like, well, that's your evidence? Somebody wrote something down. Can you please give me a little bit more? They say, no, you're challenging the word of God. In this case, you're challenging the word of Satoshi. And all I ask for is just what is the burden of proof? We wrote the papers, we have security models, we went through the peer review process. God, that was not easy. We wrote formal specifications. In some cases, we formalize those specifications with Isabel, for God's sakes, which is not easy to do. And then we implemented it. And it's running in production with a million users at a $50 billion market cap. I mean, at what point do you start saying, well, maybe there's something there? And they say, no, there's nothing there, and it's not secure, it can't be secure. And you say, okay, then why do you believe what you believe? And they never come back to me with an answer, ever. Well, I believe God didn't go through a peer review process when he wrote the 10 commandments. So sometimes it works out, sometimes not. Let me ask on that same thread, Tesla, SpaceX, Elon Musk currently invested in Bitcoin, but are openly looking to explore other cryptocurrency investments. What case would you make for Cardano? Well, if they truly care about alternative energy and sustainability, carbon reduction or carbon neutrality, you can't be in a system where there is no built in mechanism to constrain the energy consumption. With proof of stake, energy consumption is a negative. You wanna minimize it. If you can get the same amount of stuff done on a Raspberry Pi as you can a big server, you're gonna do it on the Pi because ultimately that server cost and that energy cost is coming out of your budget. With proof of work, any innovation you come up with to optimize power, you just build more ASICs because it's always 30% more power efficient. Great, buy 30% more. You keep adding to the work set because you want more hash power, more hash power, more share of the Pi. So you have no energy savings component. I know these people are saying, well, there's a lot of wasted energy in the grid and this is kind of incentivizing using that wasted energy and it's a better way of storing it than batteries because you're now storing it as a Bitcoin instead of storing it as energy. Okay, maybe there's some truth to that, but anyway, it's just... The energy is a critical point for you. Like the... Yeah, that's exactly right. The energy is a critical point for me with Tesla because they assert to be an alternative energy company. And unless they can make the case that somehow the proliferation of Bitcoin is legitimately going to proliferate batteries, solar and wind or other things, then it's probably good for them to just focus on the most efficient, energy efficient cryptocurrency possible. Otherwise you're exacerbating global warming, you're exacerbating the ecological consequences of it. The other thing is Bitcoin is the least programmable of all the cryptocurrencies. And if you wanna do interesting, sexy, unique things, let's say Tesla, for example, they wanna start doing V to I and V to V for autonomous vehicles and have the vehicles start talking to each other and connect it to 5G. Well, imagine if you wanna build a telco coin or some sort of 5G coin and you wanna build an IOT layer network, there's just no real way to do that on Bitcoin with the way it's designed. So you'd need fundamentally different infrastructure to create such a token and regulate such a system and have these things autonomously negotiate and do business with each other. You need DEXs and stable coins and all kinds of mechanics to make something like that possible. Well, that's really beneficial to Tesla if they could figure that out because they could create like an information sharing incentive scheme where if the cars talk to each other, including other branded cars, like GM cars and Fords, they can now actually get data from those cars through a marketplace in exchange for the benefit of autonomous driving or for the benefit of understanding road conditions or safety enhancement and so forth. So it's just depending, are you just here to speculate? Are you here to actually use it as another medium of exchange or do you actually wanna build infrastructure on this thing? The more closely you get to utility, the further down the road you get there, then the more programmability you need. And so it makes a lot more sense to be an Ethereum fan or a Cardano fan than to be a Bitcoin fan. So to be both proof of stake and have the smart contracts capabilities. Yes. And that's why we went over to Ethereum because they're proof of work. You mentioned God, God spelled backwards as dog. How's that for a transition? And Elon Musk and Tesla are at least a little bit curious about a coin called Dogecoin. You made a video directed to Elon on how to improve Dogecoin. What are your ideas for making Dogecoin even better than it already is? Well, Dogecoin is just based, it's like that Nine Inch Nails song, a copy of a copy of a copy. Yeah, it's just a copy of a copy. It's a Bitcoin gave Litecoin Litecoin. Bitcoin gave Litecoin Litecoin gave Dogecoin. And it was kind of a parody cryptocurrency. And I think Jackson was trying to do it to like prove a point about altcoins. And then true to form, it's like nobody got the doctrine and completely perverted the entire religion. It's almost like the emperor of man and Warhammer 40K. It was like this atheist don't worship me. And now there's like this whole religion built around the emperor. So Dogecoin has become a thing and it's become such a large thing that it is a reasonable target for somebody to fix it up and repair it, make it an interesting cryptocurrency. The point of the video was to show what a modern third generation cryptocurrency really would require. It's a major overhaul. And there are already people doing this. There's the Solanas and the Harmony Ones and the Cardanos, Neoses and all these other guys. And they have billions of dollars and huge dev teams and all these innovative protocols. If you're really serious about this thing, sticking around, being useful in doing stuff, then the point of the video was to show the types of things you'd have to think about and the types of papers that are all open source, patent free and don't have any notion of intellectual property behind them that his engineers could grab and go and do. And he did mention on Twitter that he was looking for feedback on how to improve Doge. And so I said, all right, well, I'll just put all these things together. It was a little tongue in cheek because I figured he'd ignore it, but it was also showing how hard it is to innovate in this entire space. You don't just go and say, I'm gonna go build a battery powered car or rocket or enter a new industry. It's really hard to do that. You spend years and lots of effort. You have to do series of small learning steps. You have to pick up destroyed rockets on the side of the beach and things like that before you get to the rocket landing itself. Well, analogously, it's really hard to build a cryptocurrency. Satoshi probably spent years thinking carefully and that work was a derivative of 30 years of work in the digital asset space starting in the 1980s, working its way through. So, and then Bitcoin only did very limited things relative to what Ethereum can do or Cardano can do and so forth. So the minute that you extend that complexity, you're talking about years of R&D, years of engineering effort that needs to be done. So what's the point of Doge? Is it just a meme? Is it actually contending to be useful? Or is it competing as a store of value against Bitcoin? Now, if it's competing as a store of value against Bitcoin, why the hell does it have the monetary policy it does? Also, there's predatory distribution of the underlying asset. Over 90 some percent is consolidated, less than 1% of the holders for Dogecoin at a very, very low price point. So they can sell at almost any price point and make a profit. So it hits 50 cents, they're billionaires and it's not like 20,000 people. It's probably less than 100 wallets that have that distribution. So there's this existential ticking time bomb that's in Doge that once the guys who are invested start selling, they can just keep selling and keep selling and ride it all the way down and make windfall profits regardless of what price they sell at. And who are they selling against? The retail investors. People make $500, spare money a month or something like that. And it bothers me because I see it in my community. So I live in Longmont, Colorado, and I was at a restaurant and I was talking to the waitress and she asked me what business I was in. I said, I'm in the cryptocurrency space. And she's like, what is that? And I started explaining all of it. And she goes, oh, yeah, I own some Dogecoin. I said, you own anything else? No, no, I just bought some Doge. Why did you buy Doge? Oh, I saw Elon tweeting about it and I thought it was a good deal. So when you see stuff like that where people have no clue what they're doing, they don't really understand the supply dynamics, the ownership dynamics and these types of things. And then when the clock stops, they're the ones who get hurt. And then the regulator comes in, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, and they say, see, this is an evidence these guys can't regulate themselves, control themselves. We need to control everything. Either let's ban it or let's just announce that the only three are legitimate and every one of them has to be connected to identity and rah, rah, rah. And I'm just very concerned that that's a bad thing to do. And that's why I've been so vocal about this topic. And my hope is that a compromise can be made where real developers come in and they start working on Doge and they find a way to create some sort of use and utility for it. So at least it has a value floor and it won't collapse. Is it possible for Cardano and Dogecoin to work together somehow? Yeah, it'd be a lot of fun. I'm not adverse to the idea of cleaning up the code base, but legitimately, whoever comes in, be two years or three years of work, because you have to do real stuff. And that code is like Litecoin circa 2012, 2013. Well, the interesting thing about Elon, and I've got to interact with him quite a bit, that combination of humor and extreme ambition, like in the face of impossible odds is something he does really well. And so I think that's the spirit of Dogecoin is fun and almost like bold, ambitious innovation. And so I think you can't discount the power of that. But where's the innovation? What's the agenda? Well, this is step one. What's going to Mars for Dogecoin? Well, I mean, he came in the same way to Ruckus. He came in the same way to Electric Cars. It seemed impossible at first, but you step in and you solve the problems, first principles one at a time. But I'll tell you a little bit on this, because I think he had some trends that he was very smart to recognize. In the case of battery powered cars, he said, hang on, everybody has tablets and cell phones and these other things. And there's an incentive to make batteries better, faster, cheaper, and charge faster. And that's connected to mobile computing. So regardless if you want battery powered cars or not, every year you have billions of dollars of R&D being pushed to force this capacity to evolve. And he's just getting on the train and piggybacking on that. So that was a brilliant business acumen to recognize that. In the case of SpaceX, it was just an obvious question. If every time you get on a plane, you have to throw the plane away, no one would fly. So reusability is like a fundamental thing that if you solve that, you've now opened space up to a complete new class of commercialization. I don't see the problem in Dogecoin, because if he was looking for it, then why not look at a real platform actually trying to solve a real problem? There are so many of them. He can throw a rock, he can hit 15 of these guys and they'd all die to work with you at Musk. Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, so first I could continue pushing back on your intuition about electric cars and batteries and so on. I don't think it's more obvious in retrospect than it is at the time, I would say, because I would agree with you on the batteries front, I wouldn't necessarily agree with you with the electric car because first of all, nobody started a successful car company for decades. Well, but it was the loyalty, the EV4 guys or whatever it was with GM, they didn't wanna give them back when they hit the lease program. So there's some basic intuition that there is some hunger here, but it's not obvious that you can do it successfully. And with relaunching rockets for cheap, that sounds good on paper, but to do it well, NASA is spending way more money for this. And the Russians were assholes, not selling any rocket. Like you said, you have to do it all yourself from scratch. How do you build the team? How do you launch rockets when if you fail a few times, you're gonna go bankrupt? I mean, it's just business wise, I would rather build an app like Angry Birds. Oh yeah, yeah, he's got it. Launch rockets. You gotta give him credit. He's got boulders for balls. I'm good for that. That's a good picture. Yeah, thank you for that. But I don't, maybe that's what, I mean, I think there's not enough first principle thinking on the cryptocurrency side. I think I agree with you on that. But there's some aspect to which the seriousness of the cryptocurrency world is paralyzing. So in some way, the innovation that you spoke to requires taking risks, requires not taking everything so seriously, like being afraid to take those bold risks in the space of ideas, not in the space of financials. So in that way, I think that's one pro for Bitcoin is there's room, it's hungry for innovation. But I think Cardano in that same way is hungry for innovation, just like as you said, with some more rigor and formalism behind it. I mean, even Ethereum has a hunger for innovation. That's where Bitcoin is a little bit more, I would say conservative in terms of how much innovating they're willing to do, in terms of the incentives they built into the systems for the evolution of the cryptocurrency. But yeah, I mean, it's difficult to psychoanalyze why Dogecoin is the thing that excites Elon so much. But at the same time, there's some power to the fun. It sounds ridiculous to say. But the fun, this idea that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. There could be something built into the physics of the universe that makes that true. Because the viral nature of fun has power. A fun has power. Well, it's a neuroscience thing. We like dopamine, we like these chemicals in our brain. And when we have fun, we want more of it. So you tend to gravitate towards work activities and play activities that are enjoyable to you. And it is nice sometimes to kind of come in and troll an entire industry. I can imagine he's probably at the time of his life. It's the same as like taking Tesla private at 420. That kind of stuff. And it's one thing when you do it with friends. It's another thing when you do it with the whole industry and it hurts people financially. And also I understand he hates short sellers and there's some things there. And I can't speak for him because I only know the guy from a distance. It's just, I live in this space and I have to deal with the consequences and clean up the mess. You feel the pain. Yeah, and this results in a regulatory event. It's like, I'm the guy who has to put on a suit and go to Washington and go and sit in a Senate inquiry and all this stuff. I'm the guy that just like laugh with his friends about how he crashed the crypto market and how easy it was to do it. And that's my only umbrage about this. On the other hand, if it brings a lot of cool, new, interesting things and people into the space, that's a net positive. And so it's not universally bad or universally good. And I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt. And so I'm really hopeful to see what comes about this recent surge of interest and if Elon actually puts his money where his mouth is and take some of his enormous engineering talent and capital and starts contributing and building something in the cryptocurrency space. Be really cool to see that happen. There's a bunch of different technical aspects I wanna ask you about on the Cardano side. So first maybe on the scaling side, what is Hydra? How does Hydra compare to other different ideas for scalability like rollups, main trade offs with respect to security, UX, and anything else you wanna talk about? You have to have a little bit more energy, Lex, come on. You know what I need? I need that Coke machine that you mentioned, the thing that converts water to cocaine. Water to cocaine from Director Bullock. We'll leave this in, right? Yeah. Isomorphic state channels, that's a great topic, right? There's a word salad of cryptographic terms. Whether lightning, Hydra, rollups, any of these things, really what you're trying to do is say, okay, if I do it on layer one, it's slow and expensive. What I'm gonna do is batch something somehow, some way, and then do it in a different system where it's fast and cheap. And what I'm doing with that is I'm losing some of the security guarantees of the base layer and admitting a slight higher degree of centralization, but then I get super fast settlement, I get super low cost transactions, and potentially I may even be able to get distributed computing. Meaning that instead of having the smart contracts run in a replicated system, they could run on a single node, like a stake pool, and their stuff is different from the other guy's stuff. So you go from a system of capacity of whatever it is to a system of N for the totality of all the stake pools. So basically Hydra is just the next generation of that. When you have the ability to tinker with the accounting model and the layer two solution is co designed with the layer one solution. So it's like what Lightning would have been had Lightning been co developed when Bitcoin came out. There would have been special provisions made in Bitcoin, specifically to accommodate Lightning, and it would have made it very easy for you then to move inside the system, outside of the system, and have security properties preserved, like availability, for example, or fraud resistance, say, oh, you can't steal the money or these types of things. Where things get really complex, and this is why Hydra's novel over Lightning, is when you wanna move beyond payments to state management. Okay, so payments are just, I wanna move between Alice to Bob as quickly as possible, as low cost as possible. So for example, I have a micro tipping application, like change tip on Twitter, or like a video, I'm watching YouTube video, like maybe this video in the future, and people really like it, and they click tip, and you get five cents or something like that. Okay, so that's an example of a perfect payment application, and that's great, but what happens when you actually have a rich smart contract, like a DEX, or you wanna do a video game, or something like that, you wanna run that off chain, but then there's some reconciliation on chain that happens. So a state channel basically lets you do that, but it's a lot more complicated, and there's a lot more to think about. So Hydra basically just has in its design, a collection of ideas of how to do that. And the current paper is for a single head. The next thing you do is composition. So you go multiple heads, and there's a routing protocol between them. And then eventually create these tail protocols for when things get asynchronous. So instead of always being aligned, and always being available, what happens if they die for a bit, and then they come back? And you can create all kinds of guarantees that your funds won't be lost, or locked forever, or things like that. There's a failure recovery mode for this type of stuff. And basically the idea is leverage what Lightning has already achieved with Bitcoin, but then take advantage of the fact that you have a more expressive accounting model, and a more expressive programming model, so you can just physically do more, and you can put more crypto into that thing. Now contrast it with rollups, really that is just saying, you're gonna take some thing, batch a bunch of transactions together, and you're gonna generate a proof. And then what you can do is whenever you see some part of that history, you can check it against that proof that's rolled up. And they're closely related concept of recursive snarks that you'll see a lot. Things like the MENA protocol, or other things. And basically the idea is that whenever you see something, you can always generate two proofs. An existential proofs that the coins exist, and a non existence of a double spend. So you can always check those two properties. And the proof is verifiable in logarithmic time, ideally. So you can have giant amounts of data, but it's very small. The actual proof is concise, okay? So they're just different boats for different floats. The advantage of a layer two network where there's actual channels, and there's interaction, and there's service providers, is the channels can eventually scale in the collection of things that they can do. And eventually they can become interoperability networks between cryptocurrencies. So at some point, we could modify the bolt spec, and make it somewhat interoperable with Hydra. And then what you could happen is you could use it as a bridge to actually do cross chain traffic, and send transactions between the systems. You don't really think about that too much when you're talking about roll ups. That's more of optimizing what you have within the system. Within the chain, so can you elaborate how it's possible to do cross chain traffic? Well, you already have the intermediary, you have the channel operator, and you already have lightning protocol, right? And you just build a dex that runs within that system, and they can swap assets, or you can do wrapped assets. So you lock it. So it would be like low cost? I guess you could just switch low. Yeah, the same thing lets you batch things on one, will let you batch the other. So if lightning works on Bitcoin, and Hydra works on Cardano, you can eventually bridge these two together, and create a way of moving back and forth. And the same things that make transactions in and out of that network cheap, will make creating wrapped assets cheap. At least on the Bitcoin to Cardano side, you can't create assets on Bitcoin. Another flaw of Bitcoin that they've never fixed. What's your thought about layer two technologies in general? Is there stuff you're excited about? We talked quite a bit about Lightning Network, Hydra, and these ideas. Do you think there'll be somebody that wins out, or is this gonna be this kind of dynamic thing that we just keep building different ideas, and they all interact with each other? It goes back to biology, that cell differentiation concept, is you have to build specialized tissue to do these things. The point of layer two is to extend the network. It's adding a foot, it's adding an arm, it's adding a brain, it's adding a heart, it's adding eyes, giving you additional senses, you have ears now. So when you add these layer two protocols, like Atala Prism is a perfect example of that. We don't have identity at the base layer of Cardano. It's a real bad deal to do that, because then China will come in, or US will come in and tell you how to do that. What you do is you build a layer two protocol that's blockchain agnostic, and then the user can decide when and where they need an identity, and then bring that identity into the system. And if you designed it right, when they bring it in, it's very easy, very fluid, and suddenly the experience enhances. Everything just gets better. Oh, wow, okay, now I can use all these regulated things. They go from gray to green in the App Store. That's so cool. Or, oh, wow, now I can send to human readable addresses, because if I have an identity and you have an identity, we can alias them with some namespace, and now I sent a Lex instead of some horrible back 32 address structure. Okay, so that's really what you need to do with layer two is say, okay, each layer two protocol is meant to do something. Either it gives me payments, or lower cost smart contracts, or interoperability, or identity, and then it's a marketplace. So you should have blockchain agnosticism with your layer two solutions. And so you can mix and match and choose whichever collection of services you need. And that's actually how IT works these days with microservices and these other things, and cloud software, you know. Every firm is an aggregation of dozens of providers, and basically that composition of them is your software stack. Jumping around back to proof of work. What are non interactive proofs of proof of work? NIPOPOWS. NIPOPOWS. NIPOPOWS. NIPOPOWS, it's fun to say, right? NIPOPOWS. It's just one of those things that you notice that certain proofs of work, when you solve them, come up less frequently than other ones. And just by that nature, you can sample them and then construct proofs from them. So you can, with that just set, have a more concise representation of an amount of work for a range of the chain. So that works. Can you say that again? Yeah, I was gonna say that word salad, basically the idea is, okay, so let's say that this block, and I'm just simplifying the concept a lot. This block, you get a regular green type of proof of work, and then this block, you get a green, and you keep going, and then suddenly you get a red one. So it's still a valid proof of work, but it's more rare than the other ones. So if you notice that particular pattern, what you can do is you can just start not caring so much about the green ones, and you can just bookend your chain with red. And then you can just repeat that, and repeat that, repeat that, and you can collect, and you can create this really compressed representation of these things. So what does it mean? It means that suddenly when you have that, now you have a way of representing a long range of history with a very small proof. So you can use it for light wallets, and you also can use it for side chains, if both side chains use proof of work. So when you see a transaction come in, you don't have a copy of the side chain, but you have a copy of the proof of work, and it has the same algorithmic weight as the normal longest chain, because you don't have all the greens, but the reds only occur with a certain sampling frequency. So this is the brainchild of Dionysus Zintros and Agelos, and it's just an amazing paper, and what's so cool about it is it doesn't require any structural changes to proof of work. It's just something you notice as an off gas of proof of work. It's like you're watching an engine operate, and you notice like every 500 times a piston will do a certain weird thing, and so you take advantage of that. You say, well, if I count 10 of them, now I have 5,000 pistons, strikes, as I observed that pattern. And so it's the same concept there, and it's just a property of the engine. So you don't really need to hard fork it in. It's just there, and because you can build proofs that way, now you can use those proofs to do like clients, and you can use those proofs to do other things, because you can just use that as something that comes with the history. You don't have to have the whole blockchain. Now, is this a weird property of multiple proof of work chains? It has to be key to the particular consensus algorithm, but usually there's some portability in this type of thing. Like we're right now exploring, can you do NIPA piles with Prism or any of these sharded proof of work protocols, but it looks like you can. The closely related is log space mining. So you can use this concept, and instead of having the entire blockchain to be able to mine, you can use a compressed representation of it. We wrote a paper called Log Space Mining that basically explains how to do that. So your miner only has this very small micro ledger as opposed to the entire ledger. How does it connect back to the entire ledger? How does the compressed? Because you have those red blocks. You have those special things, and so you know that the state you're working on is actually legitimate, right? So the map goes both ways? Yep, it's pretty cool. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, and Denis is a genius. He's a really, really smart kid, and he got his PhD under us. He went to University of Athens, and he was Agelos's graduate student, and now he's doing a postdoc at Stanford under David Shi, and this is literally the only thing he does. He does interoperability, sidechain stuff, NIPA piles and so forth, and he's written a lot of great papers on it. And that was a testimony to hard work for getting the paper published, because the paper came out in 2016, but I think it took three or four years for it to go through peer review. He kept trying to push it one conference after another rejection, after another rejection, but he got it through. Real proud of that kid. And then he's just doing all this beautiful derivative work now, like lock space mining and so forth. So, Reddit. Any sentence that starts with Reddit, you know it's gonna be fun. The top question on the Cardano subreddit, which is quite a wonderful place, by the way, was can you get Charles to play devil's advocate against Cardano? If it's going to fail, what would failure look like and what are the most likely reasons it would fail? Okay, well there's the failure. For example, I said one of the project goals was to achieve self evolution. So if it doesn't achieve that, where it can evolve itself iteration by iteration, then obviously the product didn't do what was intended. If it continuously required the supervision of custodians in order for it to succeed, the system just won't work. The good news is we have a lot of data showing the opposite. You know, we used to run a federated model and now we're completely decentralized for block production, but that didn't just happen overnight. I mean, there was a whole process with the incentivized test net and the stake pool pioneers program and the launch of Shelley and the decrementing of the decentralization parameter. And every step of the way people showed up and had to do things. And we went from several to thousands of people who were regularly maintaining the infrastructure, but there's no guarantee that that would be sustainable. And there's no guarantee that the next step, the smart contract step will achieve what we want. And the next step, the governance step will achieve what we want. I mean, it's an experiment and all these types of things. All cryptocurrencies, all companies are in a sense, experiments when they are evolving the business model. And as our case, our businesses systems and society, we're offering to the world a vision of how to run humanity in a different way. And the only way the system can do that is by millions of people joining the system, self evolving the system and growing it in that particular direction. Another failure scenario would be the system evolves in the wrong direction. So it's self evolving, but it goes into a more centralized dystopian way. And that's problematic as well. What would that look like? What would dystopia, self evolution toward dystopia look like? A small group of actors have total control over who gets to use the system and how they get to use the system. And your use of the system is monitored and shared with that small group of actors. So social credit in China is a great example of that. A small group of people have access to that. And then your experience in Chinese society is determined by it. So that's an example of a failure mode. And then another could be just network effect. We start experiencing a churn rate and the inputs don't match the outputs and that you lose more than you gain. And then over time, the system dies off. However, that's really hard in practice. Once you reach a certain network effect, even if you become stagnant and stale, you tend not to lose your users. And our evangelism is unbelievable in the Cardano community. I think we're number one for tattoos. And if you think about that, it's a strange metric to have, but there are brands that associate that way, like Apple and Harley Davidson and so forth. People tend to actually tattoo the logo. Those people don't leave. They don't actually walk away from the ecosystem. They're fanboys to the core. So there's a lot of people that are here for life. They don't care if it's dollar ADA, two cent ADA. They believe in the mission, vision and value of what we wish to achieve. And they've become evangelists in that respect. So the question is, does that community sustain itself? And also does that community not make the same sins and mistake of Bitcoin, where they become toxic and maximalistic and they start becoming highly religious about whatever beliefs they have? My hope is our community will be open and Socratic and love the scientific method and be willing to entertain ideas without adopting them and discard ideas that are proven to be wrong. If we become dogmatic and embrace an orthodoxy that is a counterproductive innovation, then it'll stall out the ecosystem. And you'll notice I never said price in any of this. I never said, hey, failure is if the price goes way down and success is if the price goes way up. That's unfortunately the metric that most people use, but I couldn't care less about it. Because the reality is if you construct a system that encompasses the entire globe and has billions of users, it's probably gonna be a pretty valuable system. That's a secondary thing. It's an after effect of having success in adoption, use and utility. Unfortunately, most people on Reddit and Twitter and other channels, they tend to just judge your entire success based on that. I had very few people when Shelley launched, even though it took us four years to get there, a lot of work, say congratulations on Shelley. But I had a lot of people when Ada reached the dollar say, we're so proud of you, amazing work, congratulations and so forth. And that's probably the most disheartening thing about the whole being around and doing this stuff where all the things you do only matter as long as it's making someone else rich. And in a way I feel almost like a failure because that mindset means that we haven't yet inculcated the community in a proper way, saying, hey guys, this is about more than money. It's about more than the value of Ada. What we're attempting to do here is reengineer the way society works. I'd like your voting to be different. I'd like your property to be different. I'd like you on your cell phone to have a universal wallet. And when you go to Starbucks or wherever, you can buy your coffee with silver or gold or airline miles or something like that. And they get paid whenever the hell they wanna get paid. And I want those rails to be done with a system that puts you in charge, not someone else. And they say, yeah, that's all fine and great. As long as Ada's $5, we're all happy. You see, so that's a problem. There are of course other things that could fail, like we could lose project cohesion, lots of people could quit and die. But again, there's so much momentum. There's so many things here. The ideas are already out there and there's no intellectual property. When you publish a hundred papers, you read a million lines of code, that's something and it's permanent. And it's in the commons now. So it's just as much yours as it is mine. So there's no notion that somehow, if the core development company disappeared, then that concept is lost forever, like the library of Alexandria burning to the ground. It's there. And someone else will take it, fork it and get it done. I mean, first of all, that's fascinating. The self evolution, you don't know which trajectories that's gonna take, but also there's could be singular events like bugs in the system create an opportunity to hack the system. Is that something that you see as a potential failure case? Yeah, it's always a possibility. Bugs can exist. There can be flaws in the protocol design. Zcash was a great example of that, where there was a subtle flaw and it damaged the fidelity of the cryptocurrency in ways no other cryptocurrencies ever experienced. Normally when you have a bug, the bug you can see it like the Bitcoin overflow, the value overflow incident. Yes, Bitcoin can be created, but we can verify they weren't. So the monetary policy is preserved. When you have a bug with a private system like Zcash and it exists on the shielded side, there's no guarantee unless you can audit the total supply inside that shielded side. My understanding is you can't, that somebody didn't exploit the bug and create trillions of these coins out of thin air and just hiding them on that system and dripping them out. And so the monetary policy is forever damaged as a consequence of bug like that. It's probably the worst type of bug you can have for these types of products. So no matter how good of a job you do, they have great scientists, there are great people there, great engineers there. You can always have something like that, seep its way in, leak its way in, and that lurks in the distance. But if that's a problem shared with every one of your neighbors, it's like everybody working on a nuclear power plant. Well, yeah, you can all die of radiation poisoning. Well, we all kind of knew that, didn't we? So it's like, I don't really think too much about it. I think the context of the question was more, what is Cardano specific over Ethereum or Bitcoin or any of these other things? And yeah, okay, existential lurking bug could happen. It's lower probability for us than the other systems because we use formal methods and we use peer review inside the protocol design. So there's been more eyeballs and tools and techniques used to check things. And we actually have discovered a lot of weird wonky bugs before production and resolve those bugs. So it shows you the system works. It's a lot of fun. What about close kind of competitors? I don't know if you would put it that way, but if you look in the space of ideas, competitor cryptocurrencies like Polkadot, what are some interesting difference between Cardano and Polkadot? Technically, philosophically, historically, is that something you think about when you think about the future of Cardano? Yeah, I mean, we do. We actually have a whole group of people that do business intelligence and comparative analysis. And we're getting to a point where we wanna start eventually forking their code and running private versions of it and just playing around with things. Well, that's fascinating. Getting better at it. Consensus actually does this. They actually did it with EOS. And they wrote this lovely report like trashing EOS, saying, hey, by the way, all those claims these guys made are just not true. But it's nice to do that. It's nice to use your competitor's technology or competing protocol technology because you learn a lot along the process. It's not all bad. There's always something there because they have different trade offs and customers that potentially are more interesting. Like right now we're grokking, how do we wanna do the side chain model of Cardano? Polkadot's actually a tremendously useful piece of infrastructure for that conversation because they copied part of our infrastructure. Gavin's a trained computer scientist. He got his PhD from York and he read our papers obviously. And he realized that Ouroboros was a really good starting place for building a proof of stake system. So Polkadot's consensus is very similar to ours. And so if you're saying, hey, how do you do a good side chain model with an Ouroboros style proof of stake? Well, we already have this parachain thing, right? And so now by just looking at that, I can kind of get an idea of how, one way of doing it. And so that's just beautiful that we live in a space where that's there, it's open source, and it's really good. You just say, okay, well, we'll just take that and adopt that. There's no shame. The other side of it is that Polkadot really has focused a lot on commercial adoption, Silicon Valley adoption, getting real use and utility. I say in a much more sustainable way than Ethereum is focused on. Ethereum was kind of a spray and pray thing. Polkadot was more of like, hey, let's go ahead and actually curate our ecosystem more carefully. And we're gonna build it in a way where there's predictable or as predictable a cost as possible with the rollout of the infrastructure. And that's so important for a business. It's not necessarily important for an experiment or a startup where they're just trying to get populations quickly as possible. We'll figure out later. But if you're actually sitting there saying, I need to know what my expenses are three years, five years, 10 years into the future, you need predictability there. I think they have a better shot of it than anything in F2 or with currently Ethereum. Now, the big contrast between the two systems, those we actually have native multi asset, we have a different accounting model. I think our base ledger is far more expressive. Our rate of evolution was proof of stake is much faster than theirs because they're based on derivative work and we already have Ouroboros Omega and other things there. I think we have a better, ultimately a better side chain model will come because we have something called Mythril for that. But we learned a lot from their work. The other thing is that we thought about governance a lot more carefully in my view. And we have Catalyst and Voltaire and really the key there is saying, how do we make sure that every single person who holds data can participate in the network? That wasn't a high design priority of Polkadot. It was more a fast commercial adoption. The acquisition of customers will come to governance later. And those were just different business philosophies. But it's nice to have a competitor like that. And oftentimes I've said that Polkadot's like Ethereum 1.5. It's what F2 probably should have been. There was what Vitalik wanted to do, which was incredibly aggressive and brilliant, but it's a lot. And there's so much execution risk in that plan. And I think they've had like six years of playing around with it. Had they gone down the Polkadot road, they probably would have been a market with it in 2018. And because they already had the network effect, they would have had years of building on that, iterating that. And they already had a path to it too. All they had to do was just give Elaine Chi and her cohorts at Cornell, five, $10 million grants. Snow White would have been the dominant protocol, not Ouroboros in the proof of stake space. So it's really fascinating historically when you look at these things and the rivalries and what they did and what they didn't do. And Gavin had a chance to have C++ Ethereum be used as IBM's enterprise blockchain. The only reason they didn't do it is it was licensed GPL. And I think they wanted to relicense Apache. If you ever talked to Bob Summerwall, he was there at the time and he had this amazing story about like these terrible fights where it's like, guys, just relicense the goddamn code. Let's figure out a way to make this happen so that we can get this huge network effect of being basically IBM's play. They didn't do it, they created Fabric, these types of things. So there's a lot of lore and stories in that respect. But the space is better because of Polkadot. And there's a lot of good people there. Web3 is a good concept. And we run into their people in Germany and Zurich a lot. And they've always been cordial and friendly and really affable. Before I talk to you about governance, which is one of the most fascinating things about Cardano, there's a lot of stuff to untangle there. Since you mentioned some humans in this wonderful story, you did make a video before we talked directed to me. Thank you so much for that. It came from a place of love. But it was basically saying, as we have been, you would love to talk about the technology, about the future that you're creating with Cardano and just the future of the cryptocurrency space. I think you're kind of worried that you'll be talking to a journalist that's looking for clickbait content, that kind of thing. But I'm fascinated by human beings. I think you're all, from an outsider perspective, incredible human beings. I don't know about personal intentions, all those kinds of stuff, but I think you're changing the world together in different ways. And I just wanted to sort of give you an opportunity. If there's, in the name of love and friendship, is there something from your history over the past decade or so, outside of technology and the human side of things that you draw inspiration from, you draw insight from, you're just proud that happened? I mean, it's like asking Paul McCartney about John Lennon. Tell us about John Lennon. It's like, you know. How much do you hate Yoko? For almost eight years now, I've been, it's just been this reoccurring pattern every interview. Tell us about your time at Ethereum. Those six months you spent there that were so pleasant and enjoyable. Tell us all about it. And tell us about your relationship with Vitalik. It's like, I barely talk to the guy. I see him every now and then. Like, every two years we say, hey. He says, hey. It's like, okay. Maybe 10, 20 years in the future, Walt Mossberg or Robo Walt will bring us together like he did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And we can kind of talk about, you know. That was a tense conversation, by the way. The 2007 interview? Yeah, the 2007. Oh, it was great though, wasn't it? Yeah, that was the body language. That was art. Yeah. That was fascinating. That was a fascinating study of human nature. Yeah, so maybe that'll be us. In like 10 or 20 years. Who the hell knows? The robot versions of all three of you. Yeah, my only point though is that, you know, it's a closed chapter and it's funny. I was there for six months. I've been building Cardano for years. We've done all this stuff. I've been to 52 countries. I love talking about those experiences. And there's so many of them. I've met heads of state. You know, I went to Mongolia, like eagle hunting and, you know, being bucked off horses and riding the sand dunes. We've invented all this new cool technology that the space itself is using. And we've had a chance to sit on government panels, pass laws, 24 laws in Wyoming. I mean, there's like all this amazing stuff that's there. And it's such a fun conversation. There's so many superheroes in that conversation, like Cailin Long and Taylor Limholm. And there's Alex Sherpanoi, who we already mentioned that I met along the travels. I met Ralph Merkle. Cool, I met all these amazing people along the way. I have fond memories of, by the way, you should interview him, by the way. Amazing guy, does nanotech now. You know, I met, you know, I was hanging out with Sylvia McCauley. And I remember before we launched Yalgrant, I said, you should really just do a Bitcoin cash style play and airdrop Bitcoin. What the hell are you doing distributing this? He's like, trust me, I know what I'm doing. You know, so it's like so many great conversations and so many great people. And what I've really noticed in this industry, when you separate the tribalism, the maximum side, there really is a love of creativity and building. And there's like no other industry like it. I've been in many different places in life. And here, people just love art. They love beauty. They love the unknown. They love pushing things. They love, you know, really, you know, in some cases, not necessarily the most socially beneficial way, but they really love the challenge, right? And that has been fun. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. The dark side of the industry is that people love labels. They love saying this person's good. This person's evil. This person's a sociopath. This person's not. And by the way, they've never met that person. They've never interacted with that person. And they just say, well, I heard from this person, I read this book, or I did that. I was like, oh, so some books written by a journalist makes $50,000 a year who's looking for a movie deal, say that somebody said this or did this in an unconfirmed way. What can you do, sue them for slander? I mean, so you just let it ride and you let it roll. And if it was just ending there, that'd be great. But the problem is it cascades and people just repost it and they relive it again and again and again. And then what do you do about it? You eventually just say, I'm not gonna talk about it anymore. I'm done with it. And you move on and you say, you know what? If it's your problem, it's your problem. It's your reality that you wanna live in. I'll be defined by the things that I achieve and do and the people that we help and the things that we build. And, you know, since I started in this industry, I've gotten to a point where not only do we have this amazing company with these incredible people who work at this company, but we also have the ability to pursue amazing different interests. Like I met Ben Gortzell. And Ben and I are gonna do an AGI project together. And of all places, Rwanda. And he gave me this 85 fucking page paper. He was wearing that damn hat that he always wears. I think he showers with the hat on. He never takes that thing off. I think he refused, I interviewed him and he refused to tell me the story of the hat. He wouldn't tell me either. I interviewed him as well in Wyoming. And every time I call him, he'll have his shirt off. He'll have the fucking hat on. And now all I can think about is the hat. I wonder what the story there is. I know, it's like, it's gotta be. That might be the AGI. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, he gives me this 80 page paper and he says, Charles, it's like the combination of everything. This is how we're gonna do AGI. And I said, that's crazy, Ben. I said, I'll throw some money at it. So we're gonna hire some developers. I have no idea where it's gonna go, but I mean, I get to hang out with Ben Corson. That's fun. That's the kind of stuff. And that's the really cool side of the space. And it's what I enjoy. And the Vitalik rivalry thing, the Ethereum thing, I try my best not to mention it. I hate the fact that still when Bloomberg or anybody else writes a story about me, they'll say Ethereum co founder. Like, can you say something else? Well, I think if I've learned anything from the internet, you can't resist that kind of stuff. You just have to, this is Elon. It's the joke, joke it away. I've noticed this, this is already starting to happen with me. It's like, people just make up stuff. They haven't made up anything interesting yet, but they could. And I've seen that with Bill Gates, for example, just stuff being made up. I mean, probably half of it is true. Sorry, internet. I'm sorry. But like, I guess what I realized, this is the dark side of memes, is you can just make something up and it'll spread. And then that's it. And that's what happens. But then, and the problem is half the world will believe it. Yeah, it could be good stuff, it could be bad stuff. So I guess the hope is it bounces off in the end. I tend to believe you almost want to play with that and not take it seriously. Just kind of laugh it off and enjoy life and keep creating, keep doing awesome stuff. Operating both in the physical space with other humans and in the digital space with humans and AI systems and just have fun. Because most of us in the long arc of history will be completely forgotten and will matter. It'll all be some kind of, just like H Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy will just be one sentence that summarizes all of our existence. And the sad thing is most of us will not be part of that sentence or all of us. Well, thanks for all the fish, Lex. Thanks for all the fish. The dolphins are running this thing and they're talking to the UFOs recently, which is very interesting. Because the UFOs keep going to the water. So we humans assume that the UFOs are here to visit, the aliens are here to visit us, but it's probably the fish. No, I just think it's next generation aircraft that we're using. Oh, that we're just not aware of. But why are they talking to the fish? Well, that's the place you test hypersonic aircraft is over oceans. So that's the Russians with their hypersonic nuclear weapons. That's what a lot. Rods from God, man, rods from God. So let me try to transition from UFOs to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said that nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. Do you think power and money can corrupt most people? And if so, do you worry of this corrupting force on your own mind? You're one of the leading minds in the cryptocurrency space. You're the leader of the Cardano project. You're the king of the rats. Does this corrupt your mind, both the power and the money of it? Yeah, I mean, you see this most pervasively with people who inherit a large amount of money or title like dynasties, like the Melons or the Rockefellers or other people. It's the worst thing you can do to somebody is just hand them an enormous amount of power that they're not prepared for. And the challenge with this space is like, everybody's young and we're all billionaires now and we have these cult followings and do all these things, right? Nobody really says no to you. Like, for example, I have this ranch up in Wyoming and it has 400 bison on it. So now I'm a bison rancher. Like, if somebody was like monitoring, auditing, that'd be like, Charles, do you have any experience raising, taking care of bison? I'd be like, no. So you think it's really a good idea to have this ranch with 400 bison running around. What the hell are you gonna do with bison? I just have to figure out what I'm gonna do with these bison. So, and I, you know, we'll make a video game. We'll do crypto, we'll do crypto. We'll make a video game, we'll do crypto bison. But you're gonna get one. I'm not pulling, thank you, I'd love to. I'm not pulling at that string just yet. So I'm wondering how you're gonna connect this back to power. Right. And so, but my point is that when you are unrestrained, like literally no one can say no, or you have the ability to distort reality around yourself and you're not constrained by social customs, it creates a situation where you start losing perspective. You're not grounded anymore, I think. So it's less of a question of, will you become evil or not? It's more of a question of, will you lose so much touch with humanity that you just can't relate or understand people? And then you inadvertently, by your actions, start harming people, either through the policies that you pursue or, you know, the things that you start building and so forth. So I think the best inoculation against that is to surround yourself with activities that are utterly divorced from your reputation and status. The best thing are animals and gardening. Because, you know, a donkey doesn't care if you're a billionaire or a baroque, they'll shit on you exactly the same way. Yeah. And so there's a humility behind these types of activities and these things, and there's a honest work component. Like when you grow hay or whatever, you have to plant, you have to actually water, you have to irrigate, you have to actually be there. And if you can't use some excuse, well, I was meeting the president of El Salvador, I was doing this, and the hay doesn't give a shit. It's hay, right? So it grounds and connects you. The other thing is you have to get used to giving away. All the best things in my life have come as a consequence of first giving. Like I got started in the cryptocurrency space by giving away a free class. Bitcoin or how we learn to stop worrying or love crypto. You did a free podcast, right? In life, if you give and you develop that mindset of I'm not attached to the things I have, and if push comes to shove, it goes away, usually you get more back. Like I gave away all my ether, I never received any of it. 293,000 ether at the all time high over $1.2 billion. I gave it to my secretary. I had no idea if it was gonna be worth anything or not, but he kind of got shafted. And I was like, well, they don't like me, so they don't like you by the transitive property of relationships, so you're screwed. And he's like, well, I'm gonna go back and my wife is probably gonna divorce me and all this stuff, and what do I do? And I said, well, I'll give you my ether. I don't know if it's gonna be worth anything. So he's still pretty good. But then again, regardless of doing that, I now have Cordano, I have this great career, I've done all these amazing things. So I think that's the single best way of handling power is you have to do things to keep yourself grounded. Case of Washington, he was deeply connected to Mount Vernon during the Revolutionary War, he was like sending letters, talking about the irrigation ditches and the barn and things like that. He was always connected to that. And then also develop a mindset that you're only here temporarily. Everything you have is finite. It's going to go away at some point. No matter how much you want to keep it, you will die and somebody else will have it. So you live for the next generation. You don't live for yourself. You look to the future and you say, what am I going to leave behind? What am I going to transmit? And then in that kind of mindset always forces you to be more gracious, cooperative and collaborative with people. All these dictators, they are egomaniacs and they connected these fantasies and they live for themselves. Look at Xi in China, he's unraveling a power structure that was what made China, China today. After Mao, they said, we probably shouldn't have another one of those guys. And so they said, let's build something where there's checks and balances and no one person is going to run the whole show or else it'll descend and regress and we'll have problems. And then what he's done, he's thinking only about himself, not the best interest of China. So he's systematically unraveling a system they've been embracing for over 40 years. And to what end? After he dies, the next guy who comes in, even as he's super competent, the next guy is going to horrifically abuse that power structure. And the same thing happened with the Romans. After Augustus, the great emperor, then suddenly down the line you have Caligula and Nero and all these other terrible emperors that just destroyed everything that the Republic and the empire sought to achieve. So you have to think for the future, you have to think in institutions and systems, you have to have things that ground yourself and you have to be fully prepared to lose everything and give up everything. After I left Ethereum, I had nothing, okay? Reputation was damaged, not a lot of money, nobody really wanna work with me, no one pick up a phone for two whole years, it was horrible. And so I was at bedrock in that experience. And now look at where I'm at. I built all the way up to that. And so that wasn't by accident, it was I had to surround myself with amazing people. Why would amazing people wanna surround themselves with me if I was this narcissistic asshole who just was like, it's me, me, me, everything would be a transactional relationship. It would be okay, we'll get as much as we can and then run away as quickly as possible. Instead it was, I'm going to invest in you and maybe I'll win, maybe I won't win, but I'll be the last guy to leave the boat. If we're freezing to death, you get my coat and I'll just deal with the cold, that kind of mindset. You have to have that, I got that from my dad, he got it from his father. My grandfather and great grandfather, my dad said, I grew up in Montana and they were products of the Homestead Act. Very rough, Montana. A lot of people died and froze to death up there or eaten by animals or something or shot by their neighbors. And nobody investigates anything because it's Montana. So the only way you survive is by taking care of each other and being a good member of that community. And if somebody gets big, you have this implicit desire to go and give back and take care of the community that you came from and invest in that community. Like I came from the mathematical community. I never completed a PhD, but one of the things that I'm doing is I'm going to put $20 million and set up a center to do automated theorem proving and we're going to heavily invest in lean because I'm super excited about mechanizing math and making machine understandable. I know all these guys who do this work. There's like all these mathematicians and computer scientists and no one pays attention to them and they're kind of like the redheaded stepchildren of mathematics and they live on the boundaries and periphery. Meanwhile, they're super passionate and they absolutely love what they do. And if only they had the right resources, within 50 or 100 years, what they're doing can probably become the dominant model of how to do mathematics. So I'm now in a position where I have the financial means to take care of these guys. So all I have to do is just call them up and say, hey, would you like to work with, oh, absolutely and cut a check and it's done. So the interesting tension here, so we talked about ways to prevent power from corrupting a human being that's in a leadership position. There's an interesting case in the cryptocurrency space of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto that's basically doesn't have a leader. So the benefit of a leader is somebody that perhaps even when they don't carry power, maintains a little bit of a flame of a vision. I suppose Bitcoin has that with the original work by Satoshi Nakamoto and the sort of that, even though it's anonymous, the idea still lives on through the community, but nevertheless, the leader is anonymous. Do you think this is an interesting case study about leadership is for the leader to maintain anonymity? It was a saying from Sun Tzu, paraphrasing it, the best leaders are felt but never seen. So I think that's exactly right. The less the leader can be in the room and the more the principles of the leader are in the room, the better for the firm because what you're doing is creating more leaders that way. You're inspiring the next generation, the next wave, the next circle out to act with those principles, but contribute in their own way and their own flair. And so you gain collective intelligence inside the organization instead of just constraining yourself to however the great the leader can be. The other side of it is if the leader's principles are too strong, so this is the dark side of it, you end up having Disney with Walt Disney after he died. For 20 years, people said, we don't do that because Walt Disney wouldn't do it that way. Or to a lesser extent, Apple is the only don't do that because Steve Jobs wouldn't do it that way. Well, he's dead, he's gone. Move on. So somebody, I think, asked you whether you're a clone or a deep fake, and you said that you admitted, you slipped up on video saying that you're a deep fake. So on that talk. I'm actually a poker playing robot that escaped a lab. The truth finally comes out, but I said on that topic, who do you think is Satoshi Nakamoto? Is it possible that you are, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto? No. If you have a preponderance of the evidence, I think the most likely candidate would be Adam Back. It's the Occam's razor candidate. And mostly because he's the right place, right time, right age, right skillset. If you look at the design of Bitcoin, the types of decisions, like the use of fourth, the scripting language, it was pretty common in English and European pedagogy in the 1980s and 1990s. It was like an example language for a stack based assembly and like little stuff like that, little quirks like that. Also, he created Hashcash, which was the predecessor of proof of work. He just kind of got a chip on his shoulder that Microsoft never did anything with it. So he's probably looking for something. He grew up with all the cypherpunks. He knew of Hal Finney. He knew of all these people. He knew Phil Zimmerman. You don't think it's Hal Finney? Well, no, because the code was not good enough. Hal was a Unix, Linux guy. He was a talented programmer. He was a talented developer. The initial code for Bitcoin was developed to look like on a Windows machine. Adam worked at Microsoft, go figure. And also it was very academic and it had to be cleaned up and a lot of things had to be patched up and fixed. If a guy like Hal developed it, they probably had less of the, let's use secp256k1 and these types of things and more of like, hey, let's build this cool engineering thing and we'll figure out the protocol design later on. It just stinks of an older academic, the initial design of Bitcoin and the initial rollout of Bitcoin. And then brilliant people like Greg Maxwell and others, they came and cleaned it all up. And lo and behold, where's Adam? Like the CEO of the largest Bitcoin development company in the space who's trying to keep working on and building out Bitcoin. And where the hell was Adam when Satoshi was around? I don't think there was any overlap where they were both together at the same period of time. But I mean, if you really care, you could even do this. There's a lovely paper written by the US Army. If you just Google like code stalometry US Army, it's a technique where you can use ML and a few other things to actually kind of develop a fingerprint for the way that people write code. So all you gotta do is take the original Bitcoin source code and then take all the open source repos from around that time period and before and see if there's a match between those two. Now, if he's really good at creating an alias, probably not so good at obfuscating the code that was written. So the odds are that you'd probably find a match to a repo that's connected to a real life human identity or at least a weaker opsec because you're younger, you have weaker opsec. Do you know if people have tried that? I don't think anybody's actually done it, but there's actually a beautiful paper. It's like 94% accurate, the code stalometry. The code stalometry. So I've, for various reasons, I've worked with people that work on stalometry of natural language. Okay. And I think it matches closest to Nick Sabo if you actually do the written stalometry analysis of Satoshi's writings to Sabo's. So I meant stalometry as a field. I didn't actually look for application for this particular problem. But so you're saying Nick Sabo is the closest match. Yeah, somebody did it years. I didn't look at if the model was sound or not, but I just remember reading on a Bitcoin talk and Sabo was another one of the common candidates. How many Sabo and Adam are probably the top three things that people could list. What do you think about this idea of anonymity, of publishing something anonymously? Would you ever consider publishing a paper? You've been part of, I mean, the Cardano ecosystem has published a lot of incredible papers. Is there ever a value to publish anonymously? Well, every paper that goes through the referee process, the authors are ripped off. So you don't actually see the authorship when you submit to the conference. So that's just best practice. But the question is, do you preserve the anonymity post conference and actually not reveal the author of the paper? It's a detriment for the deals we make because the whole premise of working with our company as an academic is that you're gonna have amazing coauthors and your work is gonna appear in great conferences, great journals, and as a consequence, you get tenure. If you publish anonymously, it's like doing clearance work in high energy physics or something like that. After 30 years of this amazing career working on nuclear weapons and classified reactors, you finish and then you go to apply for a job and they're like, so what have you done for the last 30 years? Stuff. Where is it on your CV? Well, I can't really talk about it. Okay, welcome to community college. So you get really screwed if you do that. So there's a misalignment of incentives in the academic world towards anonymity. And generally it's only done when you're doing something very controversial or there's a whistleblowing type of a component. It's not typically done for foundational work. And Satoshi was really one of the first things because like if there was a, Satoshi docks themselves, and I don't think it's possible anymore, but if he or she did that, that's like a Nobel Prize in economics likely. You're on the short list for that. And there's enormous accolades that would come beyond the monetary incentives of being able to docks yourself. That'd be cool if they give a Nobel Prize in economics to an anonymous, to Satoshi Nakamoto. It's been proposed and it was turned down. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, there are a few people in our company that have done pseudonymous publications. Like the, if you look at the Chimerical Edgers paper, that's a, it's not a real name, it's a crazy name. It's a pseudonymous publication. And you know, but that's usually for throwaway work. There is one project we inherited from an anonymous person, which is fascinating. It's called Cueditas. And it's basically a extension of the Cued manifesto from the 90s. And the pseudonym is Bill White. And I think it's some anonymous mathematician, but I can't figure out which one it is. But basically it's a marketplace for deduction. So it's like this magic machine where you can create incentives for people to write mathematical proofs in a theorem prover and make some money from it. So there's some cool work that's there. And it's sad that Bill stayed anonymous because I think that could have been easily published. And there was a lot of really cool things that could have been done with Cueditas. So you did say the success of Cardano, sort of the vision you have is for you to have less and less power over time. So this idea of governance, what's your vision for a decentralized secure governance system? So the first thing you have to do is you've got to look at meaningful metrics, not vanity metrics. So what does it mean to have legitimacy in a governance system? You can build any governance system you want. You can have a dictator, right? Like Bob is in charge. It's like whether you like Bob or not, he's in charge. That's not very legitimate. And you can have pure democracy where every single person votes and then nothing ever gets done. County dog catcher is like a six year election or something like that. So there's a spectrum there between absolute power to one and perfectly egalitarian power to every single potential participant inside the system. And then the question is, okay, well, how do you handle choice architecture in that? So are you asking your people about every question or are you asking your people about a subset of questions related to a particular set of topics, but then they're not allowed to talk about other topics? Like for example, are they allowed to change the tax rate, but they can't change freedom of speech, that kind of a thing. So the first thing you have to do when you build these types of systems and they get to a certain scale is you have to build some mechanism for people who are interested in governance to self select and participate. Just create a collection bucket. In Bitcoin, we had Bitcoin talk and Bitcoin Reddit and these things. And eventually the GitHub repos and these things, there was a place to go if you were interested. And you need some sort of change management system where people who want to evolve the system can write it down in a very careful way. So in Bitcoin's case, it was Bitcoin Improvement Proposal on Ethereum. It's the Ethereum Improvement Proposal. And for us, it's the SIP, the Cardano Improvement Proposal. But just a structured way of discussing how you wish to change. Then there's a question of, do you want to do this implicitly or explicitly? The case of Bitcoin in Ethereum, it's an implicit system. So there's no on chain voting. There's no like five people said this and four people said this, so we do this. The case of Cardano, we're actually explicitly inviting. This is one of the biggest differentiators between Cardano, Polkadot, and these other things is that we're really serious about governance to the extent that we're actually doing foundational research in eVoting. We're building new voting systems, we're exploring preference voting and quadratic voting. And the long and the short is that we want more and more people to participate in voting for things. And you just have to start somewhere. So our hypothesis is we can bootstrap the system with the treasury system. So in Cardano, some of the inflation goes to the block producers, just like any other cryptocurrency, but some goes into a decentralized treasury, which now has over a billion dollars of ADA in it. So it's a lot of money. And that treasury is not under my control or the foundation's control, it's actually controlled by the community as a whole through a program called Catalyst. And so all these people can come together and they can submit spending ballots and other people who hold ADA can vote to approve that. What's nice about it is you have a growth engine to improve two accesses. One is absolute participation. So increase the amount of people who hold ADA participating. So the absolute number of people participating. And the other is meaningful participation. So the depth of participation. Did you just show up and vote? Or did you spend hours debating things on idea scale, the innovation management platform, interacting with the funding proposal, going back and forth. And there's dozens of little things like that. Now, my hypothesis is if you run this with enough iterations, eventually you get to a certain critical mass, like over 50% absolute participation and a high level of meaningful participation, where you can move beyond funding and you can start actually having meaningful questions about protocol design and improvement proposals and so forth. And then what you can do is you can roll out new voting systems and new social structures, and you can let them start voting on training wheels like system parameters. Like for example, the minimum transaction fee or that K parameter for the amount of stake pools or these types of things. Then they build enough competency there and they move up a next level. And they actually start talking about hard forks using the update system, the hard fork combinator system. See, so that's how you. Voting on a hard fork. Voting on a hard fork. You can't do it unless your social dynamics are right and your voting system is right. And by the way, you also need to write a constitution around the same time because not all hard forks are created equally. The kinds of things that would add support for a new cryptographic primitive are distinctly different from the kinds of things that would change your monetary policy of the system. So the constitution would be written, and maybe you can comment on what is the innovation management proposal system? So we partnered with a company called Ideascale and they run a kind of a side platform. So people who are interested, that's kind of our version of a forum. They sign up and there's special tools in that platform for discussions that are productive. So they don't descend into kind of like trolly Reddit style conversations, but they're much more focused around how is your product building out. And by the way, we're gonna add more infrastructure over time. Our chief of staff, Tamara Hasson, she's working on setting up an incubator and accelerator. And we have lots of cool partners we've talked with in that space. And it's the same concept. Your idea comes in, what enters the system should not be what gets approved on the other side. It should go through some sort of gauntlet, some sort of crucible where you iterate your way through and there's all kinds of optimizations and upgrades and evolutions and combinations and destructions that occur. And then by the time you get to the other side, either the idea just dies on the vine because it was a bad idea, or it's a significantly stronger, far more fundable thing and potentially even gets attached with accountability. So you don't just fund the idea, you'd actually fund the auditor at the same time who actually holds the person accountable because the blockchain is not a real company. It's an ethereal thing. You need a counterparty to hold someone accountable who's real for that type of stuff and that type of funding. So that's what we're doing this year. So we have a whole team of people, partners like Governance Live and IdeaScale and papers we've written and about 30, 40,000 people regularly participating in this. So it's a huge social experiment and we're learning an enormous amount. And then our goal is by the end of the year to have a meaningful percentage of the entire Cardinal population inside of it, like 40, 50%. Then once you're at that threshold, now you have democratic majority of the entire system and you can have a real conversation about, okay, how do we write a constitution for this type of a system? And sorry to interrupt, but so the constitution, people still argue about it because natural language, much like poetry, lends itself to multiple interpretations. Is it possible to formalize some of these ideas that reduce the ambiguity? Everything's old is new again. We were talking about Lojban back in the day, right? So there's definitely formal languages you can use to express these things. This is why I'm so interested in things like Idris and Koch and Acta and theorem proving, because that's exactly what you're attempting to do is to express some concept or desire or construction in a language that's machine understandable and manipulatable. In particular, how does the system know its own design? So what is the reference of a cryptocurrency? Usually it's a canonical code base, like here's Bitcoin core and the C++ code is that is the canonical code base. But actually that's not right. You should have specifications, blueprints that are implementation agnostic as your canonical code base. And can your system know those specifications, understand those specifications, and can your change management system be for that? And then can you provide a proof that your client is by similar to that specification? So yeah, that's 10 years in the future, but that's where you would go with that kind of a concept. But you're tending towards a formalism. Eventually, but that's not necessary for the system in the short term. It's good enough just to have, I know in a winter and say the Haskell client is that, and then what you basically do is you vote on a SIP and then once it's approved, then you go and implement that. And there's some mechanism to trigger the update system, to update the reference client. Do you have an example of a SIP, a Cardano Improvement Proposal? Yeah, like the Curb Benefit Pledge, SIP 007. So the... 007. Yeah, everybody loves that. Yeah, key. I'm gonna change my luggage code now, Lex. What is that? So basically it just has to do with the pledge. So a pledge is a certain amount of ADA that a stake pool operator will set aside and connect to his pool in order to be listed in the registry. And actually it's connected to how much income you make as a pool operator. So if you set it too high, you have a consolidation, you have lots of pools. If you set it too low, what will happen is larger pools will tend to fragment and actually run multiple instances of themselves. And so this is delicate parameter that you have to tweak. And so we have a formula for it, our formal specification that's quite involved. And so one of the community members came and said, well, I think we can massively simplify this design and actually get a better result for smaller stake pool operators. And so it's SIP 007. And there's actually a lot of conversation and people are thinking about it. And it was just stunning for me because to understand how to write a SIP like this, you actually have to read like a hundred pages of mathematical prose in the formal specification. So the guys who wrote it, I was like, fuck yeah. This is great. I'll just say an example of a SIP, but that's one thing, but it could be as big as, hey, I wanna add like quantum resistance to the system. And here's how you do that, like quantum VRF and I wanna put XMSS and all this other stuff. So there's a lot you can do and you can do it indirectly or implicitly where there's some social process outside of the system where you eventually approve a SIP, or you can do it explicitly where you directly vote or some representative democracy, some group of representatives directly votes. And then once you've decided it's there. The constitution is necessary because you need to know the decision threshold. Is it super majority or majority? And also the voting process. Like a lot of policy experts believe that if Brexit was a multi stage vote, it would have never passed because people would have done the initial stage and all the horrors of Brexit would have been broadcast to society. And then there would have been some reluctance and buyer's remorse on it. And then the second round would have failed or something like that. But because it was just a singular event, it's like they passed it now, British are all passive aggressive about it with no sign. Very well, we shall remove from Europe. And so your voting system has a lot to do with the outcome you get. The other thing is, what type of voting? Is it just an absolute or is it a preference voting? So you pick your favorite SIP, follow your second favorite SIP or something like that. So Condorcet or Borda are two examples of systems like that. Are you a fan of those, like the ranked choice vote? I love them so much, especially for political diversity because this whole concept of throwing your vote away, if it's Alice or Bob, you're always gonna get a, it's South Park did it best, right? The giant. Turd. Yeah, yeah, you know the one. Turd versus I forget what else, Douche versus Turd. Douche versus Turd, South Park. So if it's ranked order or preference voting, you never have that situation because you always pick your favorite and you get a lot more diversity on the ballot. But then you have arrows paradox and all these other things that come up. So there's no perfect system. And really you have to be comfortable with governance in a game of inches. And you start by some guiding principles. And the guiding principles is more is better and productive interactions are better than destructive interactions. And you have to be able to quantify those things. As long as you have an engine that allows you to grow in those directions, then you have a lot more people on for the ride when you actually start talking about these bigger and bigger things. The other challenge was that we had to decentralize development of the protocol and the brain of the protocol. We have fully decentralized the brain of the protocol. The peer review academic process means that there's now an academic incentive for graduate students, postdocs, and professors to spend enormous amounts of time writing papers in our ecosystem because they want tenure. And we showed that you can get it. There's been a lot of people who've gotten great academic careers from working with us. So yeah, keep adding to that pile of 105 papers. This is great. And that doesn't need Charles Hoskinson. It doesn't need IOHK funding or anything like that thereon. We're already seeing unfunded derivative work from people who are completely disconnected from us writing papers about stuff in our ecosystem. So just continue to develop that, but that's looking good. Decentralized development, we're working on that as well. Our goal is sometime in the next few years to make sure there's at least three independent clients, so three completely independent dev teams and code bases, and also to get a separation of the commercial clients from the reference code and turn the reference code into like a formal specification, a formal blueprint, and then have that change management be completely decentralized. The core developers are actually voted on, and the SIP process is used to change that, and then some way of proving that your client follows the specification as a use of the protocol. Is there, beyond the Cardano ecosystem, these ideas of distributed governance, do you see ways it could revolutionize politics? Oh yeah. Governments. Oh yeah, like the Ethiopia deal, for example. We have five million people that we brought in with the did system there. That's gonna follow them throughout their whole life. Right now they're high school students, but when they're in their 20s, 30s, they're gonna wanna use that for eVoting and for payments and so forth. Can you describe the Ethiopia project, because that's fascinating. Yeah, so we spent four years in Ethiopia. I went there in 2017 and shook a lot of hands, kissed a lot of babies, and they said, oh yeah, we'll have it all done in six months. Everything is a lot of fun there, but it takes a little bit longer than you'd think to get anything done, and that's okay. I really love Ethiopia, it's a beautiful country. So we spent four years, we trained a whole cohort of developers, and then we started a relationship with the Ministry of Education, and they care a lot about proper credentials. One of the biggest problems they have is, when someone graduates, it's really hard for them to prove the quality of the credentials that they have, and it's really hard for them to prove the knowledge that they have. So if you wanna be an ICT outsourcer, how does somebody know that this is a real program, or how does somebody really know that this is a real doctor, or whatever the hell you're outsourcing? So they said, can you come and build a digital identity system for credentials? So every student in the country at some point will get a DID, a decentralized identifier, and then you can prove all sorts of things about them, like GPA, or what particular diploma they hold, or blah, blah, blah, and then the beautiful thing is, the way we designed it is it's extensible to include payments, extensible to include proofs about themselves, like are you over the age of 21, that kind of stuff, and then eventually it can be used to link into a cryptocurrency system. In this case, we built it for Cardano. So Atala Prism is the framework we're using for it. Every student will get one, and then those students will be able to use those credentials in the Cardano ecosystem, eventually for DeFi, like lending and so forth. So it's the largest blockchain deal of its kind, and it probably will grow to 20 million people over the next 24 months. The other beautiful thing about Ethiopia that people don't know is the prime minister is a cryptographer, and he's in his like 40s, 50s, a young guy, and he can actually read the papers we write, and so he's a really bright guy, and he's written this beautiful agenda called Digital Ethiopia 2025, and one of his things in the agenda is digital identity. He wants every person in the country to have a digital identity by 2025, and he wants to implement an eVoting system at some point for that. So when you ask about governance, all these governance tools that we're constructing for Cardano are completely reusable for a nation state. A company, and by the way, if you create a Cardano application, will eventually be reusable for you, because if you have a DeFi protocol, you need a voting system, why the fuck do you have to reimplement that? Native multiasset, anything that works on ADA works with a native multiasset. You can use our voting system for your asset. So you get a government in a box that you can parameterize any way you want, and similarly, when a government does something with Cardano, not only do they get all this amazing infrastructure, but wait, there's more. They actually get this amazing voting system that they can use for smaller, large scale decisions that they wanna do. On the US side, we're thinking about trying to roll something like this out in the state of Wyoming. There's been tons of laws that are passed. It's a very friendly crypto place. At the very least, it'd be fun to see if we can do the Republican, Democrat primaries with preference voting and voter registration this way, and do it completely online with an eVoting system. So that's something we'll be pursuing in 2022. You think there's some openness to that? Yeah, yeah. That's the one good thing about the craziness of Trump is you made half of America think the election system is completely, irreparably broken. So you walk in, it's like, we're gonna go kill Dominion, and they're like, yay, that's great, let's go do that. Whether you believe that or not, it's created a market opportunity, created a lack of faith and credibility in the system. To improve the system. Exactly, exactly. What do you think about El Salvador becoming the first country to approve a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin in this case, as a legal currency? And where's this trend going? First of all, this event, if you mentioned the Bitcoin conference, the Bitcoin folks believe that this is a monumental event. Do you think this is a start of something new? Well, they're both right, the critics and the pro people. So the critics are saying this is a nothing burger, and it's just a publicity event for El Salvador. And then the people say this is the most monumental event. They may actually be right, because there's reciprocal agreements. When a country issues a currency, other countries honor that, usually, and it trades on forex exchanges. So if Bitcoin becomes a recognized currency of a country, then it may be the case that the United States and European Union and others can't actually stop them from trading on forex exchanges and being treated as a currency from a regulatory perspective. So it was like a really clever backdoor into the League of Nations. And actually, we had this crazy harebrained idea years ago. We were down in Mexico at the Satoshi Roundtable, and we're like, hey, let's go buy a country. Let's go to Tuvalu and get them to do something with the cryptocurrency, because they sell everything in Tuvalu, like the.tv extension and their fishing rights, and Taiwan pays them money to recognize them and so forth. So I'm like, man, maybe we can convince Tuvalu to do something with crypto. And that didn't work out so well. But now El Salvador is actually playing the game, and that's a real country. It's got like 5 million people and so forth. So we know the president's brother, and we've had some conversations there. So maybe we'll go in the next few months and see what's going on there, and do a state visit and talk to the president. But it's an interesting development. And it's one of those things that it can't quite be ignored because the nation state's doing it. On the other hand, you have to manage expectations. Is the central bank taking a position in Bitcoin? Are they actually switching over to a cryptocurrency as their unit of account? Are they now getting off of BIS and they're all using the settlement rails of central banks? Are they actually block chaining the entire country and they have some broad, ambitious agenda to go and do all that? That remains to be seen. And so it really is a commitment there. The other thing is that if you're autocratic, these systems are not so good for you. Because the minute you adopt these types of systems, you're pushing a lot of power to the edges. So there's a world of difference between optics and actual commitment. And actual commitment is I'm prepared to accept the consequences that the state is going to lose a lot of power along the way. And the problem is it's not clear to me some of these politicians who are pro blockchain, and I'm not making a statement on El Salvador in particular, I'm just saying in general, are fully aware of that reality. A lot of them seem to think that somehow they can contain their blockchain genie in the bottle and blockchain their whole country, but stay president for life. That doesn't work. Once they have that power, they're gone. So do you think once they realize that this is one of the failure cases, one of the things that people are concerned about is governments banning cryptocurrency? Well, that's China case, right? They started realizing this was a legitimate threat to capital controls and to the autocratic system that they've constructed there. And then suddenly China started to build its own People's Bank of China blockchain, and Bitcoin is now the redheaded stepchild. They didn't really care too much because it was great for corruption. You could evade capital controls, and so all the well connected people, they're, oh yeah, Bitcoin's bad, but then they'd have Bitcoin of their own, and they could use it to send money around. But now the government has gotten very serious about it. They're saying like, okay, we wanna control and dominate this whole thing, and it's a threat to our plan for the digital yuan to become the world standard to displace the dollar. But so the moment you have El Salvador and just more and more countries, say there'll be a country in Europe, for example, that accepts Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, Cardano, the idea is it would put a lot of pressure on you. So there'll be like this kind of ripple effect that you, and then the individual governments won't be able to help, and eventually there'll be a superpower like, I don't know, Russia or the United States, and or, I don't know, Canada. So do you see that sort of an inevitable trend where cryptocurrency takes over the world as a store of value and as a method of payments? Yeah, probably. I mean, you can do just so much more with programmable finance. You know, transactions in general have five properties. You know, you have the asset that runs on the rail. That's what we always think about. And you can transact that, you know, and then you have the identity, and you transact that either like one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many. And then you have metadata. So that's the story of the transactions, like where did it take place, these types of things. And then you have the contractual relationship. So that's the smart contract component. And then you embed that within regulation. So transactions always live within jurisdictions. This is relevant to the conversation that digital currencies take over because those things are right now done separately in a very fragmented and fractured way, and they're not completely globalized. And so super expensive to hoist up this entire system and automate things like compliance. It's usually a huge part of every bank's balance sheet. So when you look at the concept of a digital currency, you're saying all five of those things are programmable. And so they could be like library driven. You say, oh, I wanna be in compliance with the Eritrea, okay, pull up the Eritrean library. Now you are, it's built into the transaction. Previously, it's like, go hire some lawyers and go figure out the entire code and translate some things and rah, rah, rah. It's crazy. So just the orders of magnitude efficiency gains that you get and the increased liquidity you get and the fact that you can now represent all assets with a universal way, that financial stem cell, there's an inevitability to the victory of our industry. The challenge is how do we deal with this with the squabbling of superpowers? China wants to be the new world standard, America wants to preserve that, and the rest of the world is trying to figure out how do we create something that's a bit more fair and balanced? And so crypto comes in and it potentially is both an ally and a competitor to those desires. Because if you do too much crypto, you don't need a nation state anymore. If you do too little crypto, well, it's China or America. So what's that sweet spot? Do you hope that in the process of cryptocurrency pushing power to the edges to the people that we would be able to alleviate some of the suffering in the world caused by centralized power and the abuses of power, corruption, all those kinds of things? 100%. I made a very angry video months ago. I make angry videos. I shouldn't drink, Clex. Maybe you should drink more. Yeah, I know, right? It depends on who you ask. I made a video a little while. I said, our industry is an industry of frustration. It exists because we weren't the industry that charged 85% interest to the poorest people in the world for loans. We weren't the industry that charged 15% to move money for a maid sending money home to mom in Manila. We weren't the industry that laundered hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money and funded arms dealers in Africa and all these things or permitted oil for food to exist and so forth. And the people who did these things aren't in jail. They're rich. They're billionaires. They fly private jets. So our industry is the antidote to these types of things. And we say, guys, we want a system that's fair. That's it. And we want everybody to be treated equally. That doesn't mean everybody's gonna win. It doesn't mean that when you lose, somebody's gonna come on a white horse and bail you out. You're gonna have winners and losers, but it's fair. That's all we want. That's all we've ever wanted. There's no coincidence that Bitcoin was created right around the same time as the 2008 financial crisis. It's not like these were just unrelated events. They're highly correlated to each other, okay? I'd say perhaps even causal, go figure. And everything we've done as an industry from that moment to today and beyond has been about that endless, relentless desire to make things a little bit less corrupt, a little bit less nepotistic and a bit more open. And it's gotten so insane that they have these things in Wyoming called speedy banks, where you're full reserve banks. They have 100% of their balance sheet is accounted for. They don't lend. And then you have the people in the banking community saying, well, those are a risk to banking. We're scared that these speedy banks are gonna default. It's like, what world are you living in? You have fractional reserves, sometimes like 2% assets on the balance sheet. And then you're worried that the guys who actually have a dollar for every dollar they say they have are the ones that are gonna collapse. It's like the 1984 level doublespeak when you see the system and negative interest rates and all these other things. And so I absolutely believe the direction course of this industry is to make things more honest and fair. And also by its very existence, it exposes double standards, hypocrisy and corruption. Just the fact that it's there, because it's one thing to say that, well, it just can't be because of the nature of global finance. There's no way to do it otherwise. It's another thing to see it there as an example and say, well, that thing is doing it. Why can't you guys be this way? That's why I'm so passionate about Africa because they don't like the systems they have and everybody's really young. And they are gonna throw all the systems out in the next 20 years. And they're gonna replace them with something else. If we get this stuff into Africa, 1.2 billion people will be living in a considerably better system than the rest of the world. And then everybody else will look at that and say, why the hell are those guys so rich? Why are those guys making the money? Why are those guys doing so well? And it's not satisfying to hear, well, Africa is just better. No one's gonna say that. They're gonna say, okay, yeah, it's nepotism and corruption and lack of transparency and these types of things. So I think absolutely it has the potential to improve the human condition, but humans have to get out of the way. Humans have ingrained in themselves selfishness and it is a desire to maximize for themselves and their family and not thinking systems. And so we have to evolve capitalism at the same time. And what I mean by that is right now you're trying to maximize the amount of resources you get today. What we need to do is start thinking about how do we create future versions of ourselves in 2100 and create a resource for that time period. And then the name of the game is to maximize that or balance that with what you get in the short term. And then suddenly you're saying to yourself, well, if I'm doing things that are good for me today, but compromising then I make less money. So capitalism as an engine is okay. The problem is it's misparameterized. Right, almost like inject longterm incentives into the capitalist system. Exactly. And cryptocurrency space is the only economic system where that's actually possible. You can create a tokenomic scheme where doing things that are beneficial for people you'll never meet because you're long dead actually makes you money today. You can't do that in a legacy financial system and so forth. So I think that that's the real impact capital conversation that has to be had as you explore these things is you have to talk to people and say, look, it's not about communism or socialism versus capitalism. It's not about, hey, let's donate and save the world or try to be charity and make things better. It's all about how do you use the fact that we have a better toolkit to create a different system, a different incentive model where the default configuration of the system is longterm thinking. And the default consideration of system is get rid of all these negative externalities that marketplaces have and judge the success of society, not by how the greatest of society are doing, but by how the least of society are doing. HDI, not GDP, this kind of thinking. And I think crypto can actually be the vanguard that kind of pushes us there. And the first countries to adopt that are gonna be just significantly better places to live. And the people who envy them will force the other countries to change. That's right. That'd be a ripple effect. So when you wake up in the morning or as you sleep like a baby, wake up multiple times in the middle of the night, do you feel the burden of this kind of future that's in your hands and not to mess it up? Like, what is it, Big Lebowski? Her life is in your hands, dude. Don't worry about them. They're nihilists, Tony. Do you feel the burden of like, because we're talking about all these 100 plus papers and the academic beauty of the algorithms we're talking about, and there's millions of human lives at stake here. I mean, you always feel the burden, especially in my own company. I mean, I have all these people work for me and they eat because I pay them, right? So if I can't pay them, then that's my fault. So you have to, as a leader, you always have to be cognizant that there's all these people who have signed up for your crazy vision and you have to be larger than life. You always have to be good. You're not allowed to have a bad day. You're not allowed to feel like shit. You always have to show up. You always have to be pushing for it. And so that's a huge burden in many respects because there's Charles the person and then Charles the CEO, and these are very different things in terms of expectations, at the very least. And so it's heavy in that respect. That said, what gives you solace is that you're not in it alone. It's lonely, but you're not alone. You have so many amazing people around you that are willing to help and actually take some of that burden. My life has gotten considerably better when I learned how to delegate and trust. And even if people screw up and fail, it's worth the risk because ultimately you're amplifying yourself. The other thing is that it's okay not to get all the way. You want to, you wanna push there, but make sure whatever the hell you do, you leave something for somebody else to pick up and carry on. That's why we care so much about the publication process and open source. We'll never file a patent in our entire history because whatever we do, it's yours as much as it is mine. And maybe I can only get you 70% of the way and I'll plop over dead from a heart attack or get killed by an eagle or something like that. Maybe somebody brings the. Eagle. Maybe somebody brings the hast eagle back and it kills me. So it could happen. They're bringing the woolly mammoth back. Talk to George Church about that. It's a good way to go. Yeah, I know. Even the eagle or the mammoth. I'd rather be crushed by a mammoth because eagles actually fly you up and drop you. It's. Oh, so you won't die via slow death and they probably peck at you. Exactly. You just be grievously wounded on the ground and the eagle is like slowly devouring you. Yeah, don't go down that way. I've lost my train of thought. The point is you feel deeply great with a bunch of people around you and then you give. Yeah, you delegate, you delegate. And somebody fights the eagle and then other people takes care of that and this, that and the other. You just do the best you can. You're in the arena. You fight as hard as you can. You leave nothing for home. You could put it all on the field and then when you go home, you have pride in what you've done and you know that you've at least made a slight difference. You know, one person can make a huge difference. Look at Norman Borlaug. I mean, he just went around the whole world teaching people how to grow crops. He saved a billion lives over the course of his life. Billion people didn't starve to death because of one guy. It's amazing the asymmetry and the returns on that type of a thing just for the knowledge transfer of all things and yet not a household name. So that's the other side of it, of the burdens. People always want something or something. So they say, oh, if I endured all these burdens, I should be given something. I entered into this space fully expecting that probably the most likely outcome was jail. That's what my dad told me and other people told me. And it was because it's like, look at where we came from. The Liberty Dollar, eGold, all these things. Anybody tries to innovate the monetary system, either end up like Gaddafi or they end up in prison or they end up like nepotistic corrupt banker or something like that. And so the financial regulations are not built for rapid innovation. They're not built for Bitcoin. There's a reason Satoshi was anonymous. It wasn't because he enjoyed the anonymity. There was legitimate criminal risk for this type of activity. So the fact that I've gotten this far and I'm doing pretty good, that's a win. You take that, life is good. What does a productive day in the life of Charles Hoskinson look like? Now we're getting to the details here. Diet, like fasting or not maybe, coffee, non coffee, exercise, sleep, scheduling like periods of deep work, programming, then the social media stuff that you do. You clearly enjoy being on social media and also live streaming, educating, inspiring the world or getting drunk and ranting at the computer. Well, first off you do a wet year and a dry year. That's what prevents you from becoming an alcoholic. So unfortunately the way that schedule worked, 2020 was my dry year. Like I didn't drink the entire year. Not a single sip of alcohol. It was the worst. On purpose. Yeah, you do a dry year and then you do a wet year. Oh, so this is one of your ideas about life is you alternate. Yeah, you have to alternate. Never do too much of any one thing. Well, Churchill never alternated. He just kept drinking throughout his life. He did pretty good. Just to push back against the year. Yeah, he had an Alfred North Whitehead. Although didn't Churchill get kicked out as prime minister at some point? So maybe he took one dry year. Yeah, he was a sober, happy, in shape Churchill. He would have led a Britain for 30 fucking years. But you know, see Lex, that's why we can't have nice things. Conor S. Thompson, maybe you're onto something. Oh, you know, it's really crazy if you go to Aspen and see the bar he used to go to. I actually met a waitress who knew him really well and he'd go in there like two, three times a day and she's like, yeah, he'd do cocaine right here on the table and he'd come in with lots of pills and just put them all out on the table and be taking them at different hours and they were all clearly illegal substances but we'd just give him coffee or whatever he wanted. He's a great guy. But anyway, that's the day in the life of Charles. I fast, I tried to do intermittent fasting, 16, eight. The longest fast I ever did for a long term fast was two weeks, which was just crazy. Wow. Oh my God, I was. Can you take me through the journey of like philosophically what was going on in your mind? Well, so normally when I do an extended fast it's about three, four days because that's the sweet spot before you start losing muscle mass and other things start happening and people know so much more about this than I do but I just feel pretty good and you kind of get addicted to the fast high. You don't have to eat, you have no downtime, you're just going, your energy never dips and so I used to do like three, five days, maybe three, four was the sweet spot but then after about a week I was like, how long do I, can I make this go? And so I started talking to some people, I said, well, Angus Barbary did 384 days, of course I'm not as fat as Angus so I said, oh, I can do two weeks. So I just kept going and kept going and kept going and kept going and right around the two week mark I fainted for a little bit in a chair and I was like, okay, maybe I should start eating again but then I was legitimately worried about like refeeding syndrome and this stuff, like, okay, how do I take care of that? So my brother's a doctor and I called him and I said, hey, Willie, I haven't eaten in two weeks, how do I start eating again? And he's like, what? Slowly. Slowly, yeah, so the usual routine intermittent fasting, although I haven't been as good about it as I should be and I used to work out, I don't do as much as that, the stress and the work life balance has been horrible the last 24 months and I've gained a lot of weight and all that stuff but I'll fix that but I do try a lot of things, like I used to call map and I do meditation, recently I started doing photobiomodulation, you ever heard of that? It's a crazy headset called a Vlite, you saw that picture of me with like the weird thing with the red lights on, it actually shoots lights into your brain, it's really cool stuff but it improves blood flow and actually there's some peer reviewed studies that show that it does neurogenesis so you actually generate new neurons and things like that, it's really cool stuff so I do that and it actually helps a lot and every day's a little different. Do you get a few hours of like alone time to work, to think? Yeah, deep work is so important, there's even a book on that, like Deep Work. Yeah, by Cal Newport. I think you interviewed him, didn't you? Yeah, everyone should listen to this podcast, Deep Questions, he's awesome, he's a mathematician, theoretical computer scientist so those guys really need their time and want to really think. That's the one thing I deeply miss, when you're a CEO, you're the master of the five minute deal, you come in, you talk to people, you make a decision, you move on to the next thing, you move on to the next thing and I used to be used to like really deep focus, you'd sit down and think about something for 10 hours, 15 hours, 20 hours and that's that and I enjoyed it, it was just so beautiful to get lost into something and just go and go and go and then you become a CEO and it's like you never can go and go, you're lucky if you read a four page thing because there's something else that comes up, you have to travel, you have to do that so I've been trying lately to have and actually our chief of staff recommended like Fridays is do not disturb day so it's for deep work, you don't have meetings, none of these things and so far I have not committed to that but everybody else in the organization has started to move there but my hope is next month that I can actually get serious about that. The other time I'm lost in thought is I do a lot of float tanks, have you ever done isolation tanks? But I really want to. It's one of the most amazing things you can do, you come out on the other side and all your stress worries, they're just gone and you have so much productivity and clarity, if you combine that with daily naps, that's the way to go. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of naps so what about the social media stuff and like you doing the live streams, do you ever dread those? Are you energized by those? Because you're exceptionally good at communicating all the different kinds of ideas and being very transparent with the community, all those kinds of things. I really enjoy the live streams, it's fun, it's never been a chore because it's for them, it's a chance for people in the community who've been loyal and they really love it to actually just be there, ask some questions and I try to make it as entertaining as possible and you have your trolls and you have your love and it's actually nice to have a mixture of the two because sometimes you can beat down trolls just for fun, that kind of stuff and it's grown to a cult following, I think there's like 40, 50,000 people and it's almost like Fight Club in a certain respect. So I was in Vancouver years ago and I was in Air Canada checking in, just about to fly back to Colorado and I was getting this weird vibe from the guy that was checking me in and then right after he takes my bag, he kind of leans over to me, he's like, I love Ada and I was like, really? He's like, yeah, I watch your live streams and then I was flying into London, I was in London Heathrow Airport and the passport control guy was there and I was just about to take my passport out and he says, welcome to London, Mr. Hoskinson. I was like, oh God, am I going to jail in London? Why does the border patrol guy know who I am? This is a bad deal for me and it turned out he watched my live streams and so there's a lot of that and that's so much fun. In fact, here in Austin, I was at a Mexican restaurant just down in the closest place and while eating there, two different people recognized me and I took a picture with one of them and again, they watched the live streams. So that's. Well, if it's anything like Fight Club, you have to wonder if some of those people or all of them are just figments of your imagination. Right, I would. I don't have an answer for that. I could be a figment of your imagination which just proves that yes. Yeah, but honestly, if I was capable of that level of delusion, why the hell don't I look like Brad Pitt? Good point. Okay, so on this topic, let me ask you about mushrooms. You're interested in mushrooms, growing mushrooms. I believe you are also interested in the mind expanding capabilities of psychedelics. At least you mentioned kind of the interesting place where your interest in non psychedelic mushrooms might go. Can you explain the nature of your interest in mushrooms? Is it personal, is it business, is it both? No, it's a little bit of everything. You know, it's just an underexplored area of science and botany that ought to be explored because there's so much cool, interesting stuff there. Mushrooms do so much. Like they have these things called cordyceps and they are like a zombie fungus that infects insects, takes them over and then it will have them kind of get to other insects and then burst out of their head like an alien and spray spores on them and repeat the process. I mean, they even made a damn game about this. The Last of Us or something like that. And this is a real thing. Like you can Google it and see like these dead ants with these fungal stabs coming out of them. It's like, holy God, this is crazy. And in the same topic, you go all the way to Lion's Mane and it could actually help treat Alzheimer's and treat depression and Parkinson's and regrow nerves and so forth. Other things, they've shown some effectiveness against COVID, you know, it's just so crazy the diversity in the mushroom kingdom of the medicinal applications, the pesticide applications. You can use it a lot to kind of save hay and trees. There's a lot of things you can do to combat all kinds of invasive species. And it's true, there's a lot of cool stuff with psychedelic mushrooms and there's a great book from Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, where he was really the first journalist a long time to go and Roland Griffiths work his way through the Johns Hopkins studies. But the long and short for me when I read that book, like, okay, mind expansion is great, but look at the effectiveness of psychedelics, psilocybin mushrooms with SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for the treatment of depression. They showed in the Johns Hopkins studies that they're equal or better in effectiveness in many cases for the treatment of depression than a drug that you have to take forever. And this is just one or two treatments and then you desist from it. That's a miracle because there's so many people suffer from severe depression and it's a lifetime ailment. And the fact that we have something in the toolbox that we've underexplored is a very powerful thing. The other thing was end of life issues. A lot of people get cancer. I've lost people in the family from cancer. And it's so hard those last two, three months because they kind of have this, they're in a horrific pain, they're trying to find meaning and why is this happening to me? And if you can just give them a substance that on the other side of it, there's a good chance they can come to peace with everything and die with a lot more dignity and happiness. That alone justifies an enormous amount of study and the fact that these things are super cheap and they grow pretty much anywhere, it's pretty cool. Now on the commercial side, you can make a lot of money from mushrooms. I'm working with a company called Farmbox Foods and it's one of the, they do both vertical hydropartic farming, they also do mushroom and they put these amazing labs and shipping containers that are kind of like controlled environments. You grow 400 pounds of gourmet mushrooms a single week off of that. And your margins can be up to 30% per year. If you're just selling them for food consumption, if you're doing supplements, they can be even higher than that. So it just kind of made sense from a diversification of assets to say, hey, let's do some stuff in hydroponics and aquaponics and mushrooms. But the more I do and the more I learn that community, just the cooler that community is. Like I went to this beautiful mushroom festival in Cape Springs down in Georgia. And I met this guy named Bill Yule and he just looks like a druid. You know, it's just like he lives in a tree and he opens up the tree and goes out and everything. And I was like, Bill, what do you do? He said, I go and I try to study beetles and boletes and a very particular type of beetle. And they mate in the most crazy way. It's like this beetle will fuse on top of another beetle and they'll vibrate. And if they make the right harmony, she'll mate with them, otherwise they'll kick her off. And you can only make the harmony while you're on a specific type of bolete mushroom. If it's anywhere else, the harmony doesn't. It's like, who the fuck does this? It's like 20 years, 30 years just thinking about goddamn beetles and bolete mushrooms, but that's that community. And they're the happiest people you'll ever meet. And they're just so much fun to talk to. And there's just so much lore there that's not discovered. The other thing is there's a ton of undiscovered mushrooms. So, you go to my ranch up in Wyoming, go out that national forest next to it, you'll probably discover six or seven new species just doing some gene sequencing and things like that. So, there's like a gold rush for new things to discover, to treat all kinds of things. So, I love mushrooms, love that community. I think there's a lot of wonderful medicinal properties and everybody there is just a lot of fun to hang out with. The other passion is aquaponics and hydroponics. And I got a lot more serious after COVID. I go to the supermarket, all the store shelves are barren. I say, guys, can you imagine if we had a real big thing, what this would be like? We need to have domestic food production. We need to have resilience at the community level. So, let's go build a $40, $50 million aquaponics facility next to every major city. So, at least you have some local production of food and people won't starve to death. Otherwise, it's very bad. And again, the margins are phenomenal there, 20%, 30%, if you actually do it right and alternate your crops properly and so forth. And you create a lot of high paying jobs with it as well. And so, you kind of draw a lot of value from staying close to nature in all of these kinds of ways that are keeping you humble. Like you said, what is it? The goat is still gonna crap on you. Oh, yeah, the donkeys will shit on you whether you're broke or a billionaire. That's a good line. That's the line you'll be remembered for if the universe has a sense of humor. It's a neo Yogi Berra. So, I think mushrooms is a good place to ask about my friend, Joe Rogan. So, I keep folks from the Cardano community kept saying, keep saying things like, Lex podcasts first, then Joe Rogan experience. I guess I'm the moon and Joe is Mars in this metaphor. Since I'm a CS person, I can talk a little bit more fluently about cryptocurrency because fundamentally cryptocurrency is a computational idea. But then there's somebody like Joe who is more like an everyman. He does not necessarily know the technical intricacies of cryptocurrencies. And I don't think he's had a cryptocurrency person on. Didn't he interview Andreas on Todopolis? Oh, he did. That's right, a long, long time ago. But that was almost like the cryptocurrency space goes through phases. And I think we're in a new era of some kind. And how do you talk to Joe about Cardano? How do you talk to Joe about what the heck? I remember somebody tried to explain to him what Dogecoin is. How do you explain this whole space? Of where Bitcoin is, of where Ethereum is, of where Cardano and smart contracts and some of this proof of work, with this proof of stake ideas that we've been talking about. You don't. What you do is you start with applications that they're interested in. So he's an elk hunter. And so he's probably interested in elk tags, right? So you start there and you say, that whole system can be put on a blockchain and here's how it's gonna be better for you. You say, that's what you do. You always connect it to something they know and love. And then once they get that, they say, oh, that's really cool. And then they ask, what else can you do with it? What else can you sell me on it? And you kind of work your way outwards there. Problem technologists make is they're so damn in love with the technology. They have that tail wagging the dog where they just wanna talk about the technology and how incredibly cool it is. And that's fun. It's like talking about math. Oh God, let's talk about cool boardisms. That's fun. All right, yeah. Everybody's eyes glows over. No, you always have to connect it to the interest of the particular person and what they care about, what they love, what they need. Royalty payments. He's a big guy. He's got the Spotify thing. He's got all these things going on. Intellectual property is probably pretty important, Joe, at some juncture. So NFTs. We could talk about this concept of perpetual royalties. So for example, let's say that you create a piece of art. You can build into the token itself a perpetual royalty to something you care about. Maybe every time it sells, it pays it back to you. Or maybe every time it sells, it donate to some clean water charity or something like that. The point is that the actual acquisition of the NFT requires adherence to that smart contract. So people can't deviate from your desire even after you die. So stuff from Andy Warhol or from Picasso, that can still be generating some donation every time a Picasso sells to something else. You can do that with NFTs. And so he starts thinking, God, what else can I do? I do shows. Maybe I can do my tickets with these types of things. Maybe I can do loyalty points for my fans. So now you got him engaged, and he's thinking of all the opportunities for him, and it gives him an incentive to anchor and connect to those concepts. And then over time, he starts asking the question, well, how do we know it's secure? Then we can talk about proof of work or proof of stake or these types of things. Well, so this is how it stays secure if you're really interested. And there's an incentive to have the attention span necessary to do the homework, eat the broccoli and get over that hill. But it's also an opportunity, at least it was for me, especially with Bitcoin a while ago, is to take another look at the monetary system. Even look at the, I've been looking quite a bit at the history of the 20th century and sort of look at that history through the perspective of the monetary system, the gold standard and all those kinds of things. And you just add that little layer of consideration of how much money, of how money can be used by people in power to control the populace. And it's fascinating to look at the history from that perspective, and then that allows you to look at the future of how we can change that in order to empower people. And then of course, the governance thing that you're working on is fascinating because I mean, I don't know, but it seems like deeply broken aspect of our government is just the voting system. And discussing how that could be revolutionized is fascinating. Because a lot of conversations end up being on the internet about like number go up, which is like financial side. And to me personally at least, I think that's the same for Joe is that's just boring. Like it's the investing, the financial side of it, I know it has a lot of impact, but it's kind of boring. Cause longterm is not gonna have any impact. If the idea is a strong longterm, it's going to win. The idea is a weak, longterm is gonna lose. The ups and downs of the short term don't matter. That's just like casino games that you play. Speaking of games, video games, gotta ask you about those. Okay. You mentioned Diablo, maybe you're a fan of Diablo. Well, yeah, and Diablo 2 was great. Do you like Skyrim? Skyrim was great too. Like the Elder Scrolls. I actually bought the game that the Elder Scrolls was based on, do you know that? So way back in the day, the Elder Scrolls series was inspired by a game called Legends of Valor that I played when I was a little kid. And it doesn't actually have an ending. They ran out of money before they finished it. So they just kind of like put this little thing on and said, okay, but you never finish it. So I actually bought all the intellectual property of the game. I saw that. I didn't know there was a connection between Legends of Valor and Arena. Yeah, well, I forget the name. The guy, was it Todd something at Bethesda? He played it and he was inspired by it and then he created Arena right after playing it. That was such a good game. Arena, Daggerfall. Yeah. Yeah. I had a copy of Daggerfall when I was a kid, but it had a bug and so when you left the dungeon, it would crash. And this was before, like you can get an easy patch for it. So I never actually played Daggerfall. I entered in through Morrowind. Yeah, no, the Daggerfall was the fascinating thing. We were just jumping all over, but we'll return to Legends of Valor because I want to ask you about that. But Daggerfall was fascinating because I think of all the other scroll games, it was like the largest because it was like randomly generated. It would like randomly generate the worlds, the dungeons and so on, which is fascinating to think about like, how big can you make the world both in actuality and feel? Like it's incredible to have a video game, I don't know how many video games do this well, where the feeling is you can be lost here forever. You can live here because most video games have like a bottom. It feels like you can run out of stuff. When Daggerfall was like, I can just keep doing this. At least that's what I felt at the time. But yeah, what the heck Legends of Valor? What's the idea there? Well, I mean, there's really nothing about it that's super compelling today. I mean, there's a nostalgia of youth that's there, but I mean, it doesn't even have a class system, a level system, the combat system is terrible. There's no journal, the magic system is terrible and so forth. And so I just wanted to start somewhere and I felt like that would be an incredibly fun overhaul project. I kind of got the idea from Beamdog Studios when they did another one of my favorite games, remember Baldur's Gate? Yeah, they did the enhanced. I love that Baldur's Gate too. Oh yeah, the enhanced edition was great. They should have never just done thrown a ball, they should have done an actual proper sequel and gone down that whole road. But anyway, I got the idea there. I said, well, take some old piece of IP and then you can kind of retrofit it and clean it up. And what's nice about Legends of Valor is it's a blank slate. You can do your own Elder Scrolls, you can create your own class system and level system and so forth. You could write some beautiful, exciting, fun narratives for that. And also it gives me a chance to explore a lot of things I think should be dragged into game development, like algorithmically generated music is one example. The problem with games, as you mentioned, you play lots and lots of hours, but your sound content is much smaller. So you have tons of repetition in the soundtrack. So what if you could connect the music to the state of the game world and it automatically through some process will generate music. And there's actually people who study this. And so that's one dimension. The other thing is you have things like GPT3 and so forth. There was a great game, Event Zero, and it came out like 2016 where you could actually have a dialogue with an AI and you're like a marooned astronaut on a space station that's abandoned. And you have to somehow work with this AI through communicating with it to convince you to take you home. But the AI is a bit duplicitous. And I don't wanna spoil the plot of the game because it's such a cool game, but it's actually like a paint by numbers. It's almost like Zork where you don't have preselected dialogue. You actually type in the terminal and the AI will reply to you back and forth. And this was 2016 and it's like things have gotten an order of magnitude better. So the evolution of that tech, I think within the next five years, brought into video games could give you incredibly cool dialogue inside the game. So algorithmically generated music, better dialogue, better gameplay mechanics. Also, I'd love to explore alternative physics systems, alternative geometries like hyperbolic geometry or these types of things. And there's actually Hyperbolica is a game that does that. And you can do down the Euclidean geometry as well and bring those elements into a game design. And that's what we'll do with Legends of Valor. So it'll be kind of like Skyrim, but with a lot of really cool new shit. It's kind of like, I saw Aerosmith years ago and he was out there, he's like, do you like the old shit? Do you like new shit? Kind of middle shit, you know? So. So you're going for the middle. Yeah, I'm gonna try to do some of the old and some of the new and bring it in. So that'll be a lot of fun. And what's nice about it is that there is a lot of new play in the market because of the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda. They've been losing employees like crazy and there's a lot of belief that Elder Scrolls 6 will not live up to expectations because Microsoft will kill it. I will tweet. Okay, listen to me. I will go into, I'm all about love on the internet, but I will go hard at you Microsoft if you screw up Elder Scrolls. Well, we might have to do a spiritual successor, right? It might have to happen with Legends of Valor. You never know. But it's a passion project, so I have no time for it at all. It's like solo on my list of things to do. So I'll probably do it in 2022, 2023 and we'll build a nice crew and we'll do it in Wyoming, probably in Wheatland or some really small town and we'll import everybody and then we'll have to build the whole city up like Elon is doing here in Texas. It'll be a fun project. Well, I like programmatically generated music. You mentioned Baldur's Gate. By the way, Haskell frameworks for that. Euterpe is one. For generating music? Yeah, for doing it. I wonder how successful that could be because I remember Baldur's Gate was the first game where I realized music is so important to the game. It was the thing I remembered about the game. It was the reason that, it was the thing I thought about when I was away from the game is like the feeling it created, that music. I don't even remember the music anymore, but I remember the music. Bum, bum, dum, dum. Jeremy Soule, I think was the composer. It was great. And actually getting like Raman Juwadi or Bear McCready in to do that, that would be so cool. Okay, this is awesome. Ridiculous question. What's the, maybe let's say top three graded video games of all time? Yeah, Baldur's Gate is definitely in the top three. Arcanum is my favorite game. And Arcanum was, Troika Games was just this amazing studio where they took the time to build probably the most compelling game worlds. In the case of Arcanum, it takes place in kind of like a 19th century Victorian England play. So steampunk, but then there's also magic inside this game world. And there's this crazy juxtaposition between magic and technology. And the more technology you have, magic stops working. The more magic you have, it disrupts technology. So all the people on the magic side hate the technology people and vice versa. And so you're just this character in this game world and you're just trying to figure out like where do you fit? And it has this incredible plot where you're kind of just a stowaway on a zeppelin that gets shot down and you get dragged into this conspiracy and you have to kind of figure out the conspiracy as you go through the whole game world. And you meet all these different races like the elves and the dwarves and so forth. And they've all been impacted by the proliferation of technology in different ways. Like the humans use steam engines to clear cut all the forest and it caused a lot of problems. The dwarves leaked that technology to the humans and so they kind of got exiled for it and so forth. And you have to decide like where do you fit in all of this? And you have a lot of choices as a player. You can be on the magic side, the technology side, kind of be neutral. And there's like 40 different endings for the game. It's just incredible. And this is all like 2000. And then you talk about a procedurally generated world. You have a quick travel, but if you want, you can just walk and the world randomly generates. But it's not like Daggerfall where there was interesting things along the way. So it was really ahead of its time and it was kind of the last of a generation of games. It was based on the same framework that Interplay used for Fallout, the original Fallout and Fallout 2. So that was really a cool setup. How were the graphics that were not essential to the game? Oh, it's isometric, top down. So kind of like the Fallout look. And so it doesn't hold up super well today, but that was never the point. It was more of a story driven game. But it was one of the very few games where at the very end of the game, you can actually talk the villain into killing himself instead of fighting you. If you, and you had to really work at it, you had to become a master of persuasion and get your charisma score maxed out and learn all this stuff along the way. And you have this philosophical debate over the nature of life and death with him. That's amazing. Yeah, and then you're just like, by the way, you're wrong and here's why. And he's like, oh yeah, you got a point. I'm just gonna kill myself. I was like, wow, this is great. Planescape Torment is the other one, I think is probably the greatest. Was it called Planescape? Yeah, it's another one on the Infinity Engine, which was what was used for Baldur's Gate. So it looks like Baldur's Gate. And God, that was such an incredibly well written game. You play this character called the Nameless One, this little blue guy, and you wake up in a morgue. And it turns out that you're a mortal. And every time you die, you lose all your memories. And so you've just been apparently living this life for a very long time. And you meet all these people in this crazy city called Sigil who know you, but you don't know yourself. And you're trying to figure out your name, your identity, and why do you have this curse where you live forever, but you keep forgetting every time you get killed. And it turns out you weren't such a nice person throughout this entire game world. But then again, there's this question of, well, if you can start over and you lose all your memories, do you have a chance for redemption or not? So it's an incredible game, Planescape Torment. And it's actually another one of those games where you can never actually have a fight. You can just kind of talk your way out of everything. And there's probably like a thousand pages of dialogue inside the game. You guys had a lot of fun and a lot of drugs making that game. Do you think these three games are the kinds that would still be okay to play today or are they forever lost in time because we sort of got desensitized to the richness of computer graphics and all those kinds of things in modern games? I think you can enhance these games because your storytelling medium is so much more engaging. I was at the movie theater before COVID and the person to the left of me was looking at their cell phone during the movie. And the person to the right of me was looking at their cell phone. They're just not engaged anymore. Everybody is attention starved. And the video game is one of the last mediums where you have undivided attention of people. They're really into it. They're all into that thing. And so I think the fact that you have VR and AR and enhanced graphics and all these new gameplay mechanics, it's a value add instead of a value negative because ultimately what are you doing? You're telling stories and you're trying to connect people to something. Maybe it's the nature of life and death or are we truly real? Or are we in a simulation or not or something like, it'd be great to do 13th floor as a game or something like that. And the question is, well, how good of a story can you tell? Well, you're constrained by your storytelling tools and technology. The fact that games are so much more advanced now means that you now have many more dimensions of storytelling available to you. And actually with AI now coming in and really good AI coming in the next five or 10 years, your storytelling is not static anymore. The person can actually majorly participate and change the outcome in ways that were previously unpredictable. The other thing is they're still educational. You can teach people concepts that they never knew before. And it's like, if you wanna teach people about bizarre geometries or like Minecraft is a great example. A lot of people learned how computers work from Redstone. Think about that. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, as we said, we're more and more going to be living in a video game worlds might as well sort of as opposed to just make it fun, also expand our knowledge, expand our ability to think, like explore different ideas and do education broadly defined within those video game worlds. So we do the entirety, the entirety of life in the video game worlds. Hopefully it doesn't look like Minecraft, but we'll see. Do you have advice for young people today aside from playing lots of video games? You know, high schoolers, college students, thinking about their career, thinking about life. Well, we no longer live in a world where you get one skill set, you do it for 40 years and retire. I mean, that ship has sailed a long time ago. So learn how to learn and learn an appreciation and love for learning. So that's the first thing, you know, Josh Waitzkins wrote this beautiful book, The Art of Learning, if you ever read it. Stuff like that. So good study skills, you know, slip box notes, these things. What was it, Zettelkasten or whatever it is. Yeah, there's a lot of little techniques that you can pick up along the way. And basically they teach you how to process lots of information very quickly, retain it and then decide what's useful to you for that moment. The second thing is do not undervalue EQ, emotional intelligence. We've lived for a long time in a society where IQ was dominant. It's like how smart you are excuses everything else. You can be a horrible human being, but he's a really bright guy, right? The asshole mathematician or physicist. We now live in a world where the balance is far more important. You have to be smart, but you also have to be a nice guy. And don't undervalue that. So learn things like closed circuit communication and active listening. These skillsets will always pay enormous dividends along the way. Third, remember that you're judged for the things that you have and what you do with those things. You know, if you have very little, you still have to do something. When you have a lot, you have to do even more. So learn how to give and do that early on. Learn how to give back, volunteerism, charity, mentoring, these types of things. Those are so incredibly valuable to a person who's developed. The people that you mentored in the academic world, you learn this, you have graduate students. They one day will be professors. And it might just so happen, they might eclipse you. Remember Gauss had a doctoral advisor. Never forget that, you know, and so did Feynman. Make sure that you mentor people, you give back and you learn how to learn and you learn how to teach. Super important for your development as a person. And you'll notice all those things are agnostic to whatever domain you happen to have chosen. You could be in medicine or law or technology, whatever. That's your fancy, whatever your passion happens to be. And don't conflate your earning in your career. If people try to keep putting these things together, they're increasingly becoming decoupled. There's a lot of cases where people do their passions and they do it for free or, you know, for sustenance, but then they have something else they do on the side to also augment or supplement their income. Probably best that way. When you conflate the two, you tend to get burned out terribly. You see this a lot with musicians or other people. They just, they want to make music, but they have to tour or whatever, because they gotta pay bills. Stuff like that happens. Other than that, I mean, I'm not a guru. I'm not in any particular position to... You showed up in a robe, which I thought was kind of weird. And you had a crown and you kept calling yourself king. King of the rats. And that was in a robe that was a yukata. Okay, thank you for clarifying. Audience, he's joking. I read it. I heard somebody who's gonna write blog posts. Charles Hoskinson walks around with a crown. Let me ask you a ridiculously big and the most important question. What's the meaning of this whole thing, of life? Well, I got a story for that. Does this have something to do with a farm? Well, no, no, no, it's from Japan. I used to live in Japan. I live in Osaka, right next to Namba, beautiful area. It's like, if you're gonna live anywhere in Japan, I live in Osaka. You live anywhere in Osaka, live next to the restaurant district. Four o clock in the morning, you can get good ramen. These are the things in life that make you who you are. So there was a shogun and he was kind of a bad ass. He was really good killing people, really good at running his empire. And then he got a bit disgruntled in his late 40s. And he said, you know, I'm just gonna give it all to my son and I'm gonna wander around Japan until I find the perfect cherry blossom. That's what I'm gonna do. Everybody thought he went crazy. He said, no, no, no, that's what I'm gonna do. And he took his whole entourage with him. And so his son is now the shogun. And then he's just wandering throughout Japan and having all these incredible crazy adventures as he's wandering throughout Japan, fighting bandits and loving beautiful women and so forth. And then 30 years later, he's passing these two geisha gals and one of them turns around and they notice him slumped over next to a cherry tree. And so she goes over to try to rouse him and he's dead. And in his hands is a wilted cherry blossom. So that's a very Japanese story, right? The point is that it's not the actual blossom finding the perfection that matters. It's the things you do on a day to day basis. The places you go, the people you meet, the experiences you have and the joy you take in the things that you do here in the moment now. You have to get there. You know, if you look at Jiro dreams of sushi, there's this guy 70 years of his life making the same damn piece of sushi again and again and again. He's the happiest guy around. Albert Camus and his story of Sisyphus. You know, Sisyphus should be miserable. It's the Greek curse. No, he's happy. He has total clarity of purpose. And every day he gets to basically roll that stone just a little bit better than the day before, a different way than the day before. And it's not the destination. It isn't getting the stone up to the top of the hill that matters. It's the fact that the act, you find that joy in that act, that ikigai, that way of life, that purpose of life. That I think is the closest thing a human can get to a meaning. You're a blip. You know, you didn't exist, you're dead. And if you compare it to the size of the universe in that time, it's just a little blip. So all you can do with what you have is just find meaning in the things that you do on a daily basis. And you can't predict the macro. We have all this wealth and power in America. What if a world war breaks out? We could be destitute like Walmart Germany. And so, you know, you could be a big guy. You could be now living on the street side. Would you be miserable? The point of life is getting to a point that no matter what comes your way, what misfortune comes your way, you're in a position where you can find a modicum of happiness and love and empathy for others in that moment. And then the highest pursuit of life is the ability to share that mindset with other people and give it to them somehow. And that's really hard, you know, because everybody comes in, they're always Eeyore, oh, doom and gloom and cynical, and but this and that and reputation this and that. You have to somehow transcend all of it and say, you know, that doesn't matter. Look at the cherry blossoms. Aren't they beautiful today? And let's find a better one tomorrow. See, you're also a fan of fishing, I read somewhere. And one of my favorite books is Old Man and the Sea, where there's an old man sort of battling a big fish and basically closing out the last chapter of his life in this battle. So I think another aspect of life with this boulder, it feels like the boulder gets bigger and bigger as we get closer to death. And, you know, you find yourself married to a particular struggle in life that eventually just kind of overtakes the entirety of meaning of your existence. Do you think, I know what it is for me. Do you have something like that? The broader vision that unites your work with Cardano and everything you've done in life, the big fish that you're going to end up in the dark of night, struggling with the last chapter of your life, like the big problem you're taking on? Well, in mathematics, it was the Goldbach conjecture. I'd like to prove that. That's probably not gonna work. That's a really big fish. So do you still have a love for mathematics? Oh God, yeah, of course I do. You never lose that. You never lose that. You lose the ability to do deep work and you don't have the creativity and the raw inspiration. This is why I've gotten to automated theorem proving because what I lack and because I'm getting older, I can now have computers understand it and use AI to just solve this stuff. It's like the cheat codes for math. Fuck those guys, we'll still do that. But you know, mathematics still has those last passions and there's all kinds of cool things that I'd like to see done. Like quota complexes allow you to unify topology and number theory in really novel ways. And there are all kinds of cool things, but who cares? Everybody has those white whales. Another thing I love to do is bring back the woolly mammoth. That's George Church's hidden pleasure. In five to 10 years, it's actually gonna happen. And I have this beautiful ranch in Wyoming and I gotta find a way to convince George to let me raise his clone mammoth fence on my ranch. Among the bison. Among the bison. They'd probably get along really well. And then I have to learn all these cool things about woolly mammoths. Like do you shave them in the summertime and let them get shaggy during the winter or do you just let that coat go and then it falls? Who knows? It's an undiscovered country. I just had the image of Charles Hoskinson alone on a bison farm trying to raise a woolly mammoth. Just start wearing a white suit and say welcome to Hoskinson's ranch. I'll have a cane with amber on it. Yeah, with a chalkboard that you keep scrambling on like the beautiful mind in the movie and you'll have voices. All the schizophrenia's already come. You guys are all figments of my imagination anyway. Now one of my goals though, I love catfish and they live a long time. They get really damn big if you see those guys. I'd love to catch one now and be in my 60s and catch the same fish twice and recognize it. Maybe I'll lift a scar or something. That'd be really cool, going back to the fish thing. Because both the fish has gone through a lot, I've gone through a lot. We can just be like old friends. Reminisce. Exactly, exactly. About a life well lived. Then I'll die of a heart attack and my mammoths will eat me. That's something to look forward to. Charles, this is one of the most amazing conversations I've ever had. It's truly an honor that you would spend your valuable time with me. I'm glad you exist in the cryptocurrency and the technology space. I can see your love for mathematics and your love for life just radiate through everything you do. Thank you for being you and thank you for talking to me today. It's a lot of fun. Thank you so much, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Hoskinson. Thank you to Gala Games, Allform, Indeed, ExpressVPN, and Eight Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from William Faulkner. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Charles Hoskinson: Cardano | Lex Fridman Podcast #192

The following is a conversation with Rob Reed, entrepreneur, author, and host of the After On Podcast. Sam Harris recommended that I absolutely must talk to Rob about his recent work on the future of engineer pandemics. I then listened to the 4 hours special episode of Sam's Making Sense podcast with Rob titled Engineering the Apocalypse, and I was floored, and knew I had to talk to him. Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis, which proposes that COVID 19 is a product of gain of function research on coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error. For context, this lab is biosafety level 4, BSL 4, and it investigates coronaviruses. BSL 4 is the highest level of safety, but if you look at all the human in the loop pieces required to achieve this level of safety, it becomes clear that even BSL 4 labs are highly susceptible to human error. To me, whether the virus leaked from the lab or not, getting to the bottom of what happened is about much more than this particular catastrophic case. It is a test for our scientific, political, journalistic, and social institutions of how well we can prepare and respond to threats that can cripple or destroy human civilization. If we continue gain of function research on viruses, eventually these viruses will leak, and they will be more deadly and more contagious. We can pretend that won't happen, or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks involved. This research can both save and destroy human life on earth as we know it. It's a powerful double edged sword. If YouTube and other platforms censor conversations about this, if scientists self censor conversations about this, we'll become merely victims of our brief homo sapiens story, not its heroes. As I said before, too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth, and without truth we don't have a fighting chance against the great filter before us. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Rob Reid. I have seen evidence on the internet that you have a sense of humor, allegedly, but you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization. What do you think of the Elon Musk hypothesis that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely? And he, I think, followed on to say a scene from an external observer, like if somebody was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing our civilization that's fun to watch. Yeah, so he, exactly, he said from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant, I think. And so what's interesting about that, those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding tweets and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context, so it's left to the mind of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about. So that's kind of like, it provokes some interesting thoughts. Like first of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer, and it also presupposes that the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire to be entertained. So there's like a lot underpinning that. And to me, that suggests, particularly coming from Elon, that it's a reference to simulation theory, that somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability to, let's say, peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and either a happy or tragic ending, or they have an incredible meta view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and a happy or unhappy ending. So okay, so we're presupposing an observer. Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer, because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and other developments that you weren't foreseeing. I have reread my own novels, and that's fun because it's something that I worked hard on and I slaved over and I love, but there aren't a lot of surprises in there. So now I'm thinking we need a producer and an observer for that to be true. And on top of that, it's got to be a very competent producer because Elon said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely one. So there's lots of layers for thinking about that. And when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think of there was a South Park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show. And somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to, so the Earth show was going to get canceled, et cetera. So taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be most entertaining? Now you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc of civilization, other lives, levels as well, I'm sure. But just looking from my own life, I think I'd make a pretty lousy show. I spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer. I don't think that's very entertaining. And there's just a completely inadequate level of shootouts and car chases in my life. I mean, I'll go weeks, even months without a single shootout or car chase. That just means that you're one of the non player characters in this game. You're just waiting. I'm an extra. You're an extra that waiting for your one opportunity for a brief moment to actually interact with one of the main characters in the play. Okay, that's good. So okay, so we rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed at. Anyway, but then even the arc of civilization, I mean, there have been a lot of really intriguing things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened. But I would have some werewolves, I'd have some zombies, I would have some really improbable developments like maybe Canada absorbing the United States. So I don't know, I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment. But if we are, that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years ahead. So I kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment. Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada. But do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent? So meaning, it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet, the funny ones, the entertaining ones spread more efficiently. They do. I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up on mass funny things much more sort of aggressively. It's more viral in the full sense of that word. Is there some sense that whatever the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining outcome, the most memeifiable outcome, the most viral outcome if we were to share it on Twitter? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, we do have an incredible ability. Like I mean, how many memes are created in a given day and the ones that go viral are almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor. Yeah, I'd have to think about that. We are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny. Like in the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging whether this meme is retweetable or not. And so that sort of atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything else that's going on. But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the Earth driving for a level of entertainment, that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would necessarily follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very, very aptly selected for us. I don't know. Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains? Just almost thinking about the ideas or the memes. This is the Dawkins thing as the organisms and then the humans as just like vehicles for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread. Yeah, for propagating them, mutating them, putting selective pressure on them, et cetera. I mean, I found Dawkins interpret or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene. What a PS to put at the end of a long chunk of writing, profoundly interesting. I view the relationship though between humans and memes as probably an oversimplification, but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees, right? Do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers? And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi independent roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other. And so in the case of bees, obviously, you could see the flower is being this monolithic structure physically in relation to any given bee and it's the source of food and sustenance. So you could kind of say, well, flowers have bees. But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed. They weren't being pollinated by the bees. So you could kind of say, well, you know, bees are, you know, flowers are really expression of what the bees need. And the truth is a symbiosis. So with, with memes and human minds, our brains are clearly the Petri dishes in which memes are either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated if they are the venue in which competition, selective competition plays out between different memes. So all of that is very true. And you could look at that and say, really, the human mind is a production of memes and ideas have us rather than us having ideas. But at the same time, let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme. That catchy tune did originate in a human mind. Somebody had to structure that thing. And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about how the universe, I'm simplifying, but you know, kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful TED talk. It's very lyrical. She talked about, you know, ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds. And you know, she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to write that down. I love that. It's that beautiful as a writer, as a novelist myself, I've never had that experience. And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind. And so like the bees and the flowers, I think there's a great symbiosis and they both kind of have one another. Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real. If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King on writing, you as a great writer, you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you. It's a grind of sort of, it's almost like you're mining for gold. It's more of a very deliberate, rigorous daily process. So maybe can you talk about the writing process? How do you write well? And maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer, what does it take to write the best work of your life? Well it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction. And I've done both. I've written two nonfiction books and two works of fiction. Two works of fiction being more recent, I'm going to focus on that right now because that's more toweringly on my mind. Bronx novelists, again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of two schools of thought. Some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants and some people really, really like to outline, to plot. So there's plotters and pantsers, I guess is one way that people look at it. And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between and I'm somewhere on that continuum, but I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter. And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going to end and I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin. And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story, but trying to make an outline that gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters and so forth. But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately inevitably morphs a great deal. And I think if I were personally a rigorous outliner, I would not allow that to happen. I also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before I start. So I think people who are really in that plotting outlining mode are people who write page turners, people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures, where you really want a relentless pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera. And that is really the bone. That's really the skeletal structure. So I think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side. And then I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is more likely to fly by the seat of their pants. And I know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go. I'm a little bit more on the plotting side. Now you asked what makes something, at least in the mind of the writer, as great as it can be. For me, it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing as opposed to the initial writing. For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, new bits of the book, I probably spend... I wish I kept a count. I wish I had one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time I'm going to be doing this, that. But I would say it's at least four or five hours and maybe as many as 10 that I spend editing. And so it's relentless for me. For each one hour of writing, you said? I'd say that. Four, wow. I mean, I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning and sometimes on the micro level of just like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right? Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land? Like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done but the book is 750 pages long and it's way too bloated and I need to lop a third out of it. Problems on those two orders of magnitude and everything in between, that is an enormous amount of my time. And I also write music, write and record and produce music. And there the ratio is even higher. Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just right. So I think that's true of a lot of creative processes. I know it's true of sculpture. I believe it's true of woodwork. My dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing at the end. So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process, any creative process. Can I ask about the psychological, the demon side of that picture? In the editing process, you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work and you're judging and judging and judging. How much of your time do you spend hating your work? How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful, or how good the work that you will put together is? I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those, but leaning toward gratitude. I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have, I like, I like quite a bit and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go through it. So I spend most of my time in a state of optimism. I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two, where I wouldn't be able to find the average. I go pretty deep. Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in science and research is to hate everything you do. You've ever done in the past. I mean, at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to hate everything he's ever done. I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too, to sort of always be exceptionally self critical, but almost like self critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be able to do the work. If that makes sense. It makes perfect sense. But that, you know, each one of us have to strike a certain kind of balance. But back to the destruction of human civilization. If humans destroy ourselves in the next hundred years, what will be the most likely source, the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves? Well, let's see, a hundred years. It's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far, and it's something to give a lot more thought to, I think, than normal folks simply because I am a science fiction writer. And you know, I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard to foresee out more than just a few decades. I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now, a century later, it would have been so unforeseeable. And I just don't know what's going to happen, particularly with exponential technologies. I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing and synthetic biology and, you know, how we might destroy ourselves in the hundred year time frame might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate. But in the near term that I'm comfortable predicting, let's say 30 years, I would say the most likely route to self destruction would be synthetic biology. And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that I find, and I'll abbreviate synthetic biology to SynBio just to save us some syllables. I believe SynBio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves. So I'm not an anti SynBio person by any stretch. I mean, SynBio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment, helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable. So it's electrifying the field. But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent. In the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds of leading to our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real possibility and one we need to be concerned about. But in the 30 year time frame, I think it's a lesser one or nuclear weapons or anything else that I can think of. Can you explain that a little bit further? So your concern is on the manmade versus the natural side of the pandemic frontier. So we humans, engineering pathogens, engineering viruses is the concern here. And maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of, is it malevolent or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes? Well, both of them are a danger. And I think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things. One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, foresighted steps that we are absolutely capable of taking right now to forestall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something that could have annihilating impacts? And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that. So do we take those steps? And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with Sin Bio couldn't plummet. But you know, it's always a question of if and we have a bad, bad and very long track record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us. So that's variable number one. Variable number two is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government or private industry? And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity, if we think that's fine and if that kind of work starts happening in one lab, five labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in one country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo boo starts rising astronomically. And this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that I presented those two things, but I think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks. The easier one to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would have to be something that all nations agree on. But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens that if they escaped from a lab could annihilate us. There's no line of research that justifies that. And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we need to have. We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that. The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety lab level four. And there are not a lot of BSL four labs in the world. There are things can and have leaked out of BSL four labs and some of the work that's been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which we can talk about, it's actually done at BSL three. And so fundamentally any lab can leak. We have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious to leaks. So why in the world would we create something where if God forbid it leaked, could annihilate us all. And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks. What happens if you have a malevolent insider? We could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something and not annihilating in a bit. I'm sure that we will. But what if you have a malevolent insider? Virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level one, two, three, and four are about preventing somebody hijacking the process. Some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents. They're imperfect against accidents. And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs with every lab you add, the odds of there being a malevolent inside are naturally increased arithmetically as the number of labs goes up. Now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific, traditional government, academic, scientific environment creating something malevolent, again, there's protections that we can take both at the level of syn bio architecture, hardening the entire syn bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out there by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can do to dramatically mitigate that risk. And I think we do both of those things, decide that no, we're not going to experimentally make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs, and B, yes, we are going to take countermeasures that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation, then I think both risks get managed down. But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome. So can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the positives and negatives of it? So if we look at gain of function research and the kind of stuff that's happening in level three and level four BSL labs, what's the whole idea here? Is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave? You want to understand the dangerous ones. Yeah. So that would be the logic behind doing it. And so gain of function can mean a lot of different things. Viewed through a certain lens, gain of function research could be what you do when you create, you know, GMOs, when you create, you know, hearty strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides. I mean, you could view that as gain of function. So I'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly. And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative and it's also very chilling. Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another, I assume there was some kind of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, did gain of function research on something called H5N1 flu. H5N1 is, you know, something that, at least on a lethality basis, makes COVID look like a kitten. You know, COVID, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and one percent, H5N1 is closer to 60 percent, six zero. And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola. It's a very, very, very scary pathogen. The good news about H5N1 is that it is barely, barely contagious. But I believe it is in no way contagious human to human. It requires, you know, very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases chickens. And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting intensely with fowl who, as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes. But it's not, there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human to human. I mean, not that it just doesn't exist. I think the World Health Organization did a relentless survey of the number of H5N1 cases. I think they do it every year. I saw one 10 year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of a decade. And that's a drop in the bucket. Kind of fun, fun fact, I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is 70,000 deaths. So we think getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk, H5N1 much, much lower than that. What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make H5N1 that would be contagious, that could create airborne transmission. And so they basically passed it, I think in both cases, they passed it through a large number of ferrets. And so this wasn't like CRISPR, there wasn't even any CRISPR back in those days. This was relatively straightforward, selecting for a particular outcome. And after guiding the path and passing them through, again, I believe it was a series of ferrets. They did in fact come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne transmission. Now they didn't unleash it into the world. They didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen. And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been. But if it was as contagious as COVID, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen. And why would you do it? Well, the people who did it were good guys. They were virologists. I believe their agenda as they explained it was much as you said, let's figure out what a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better. But my understanding is in both cases, it was done in BSL3 labs. And so potential of leak, significantly nonzero, hopefully way below 1% but significantly nonzero. And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation on whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering expected cost for this work. So it should never have been carried out. Now you might make an argument if you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on an inevitable path to airborne transmission, and it's only going to be a small number of years, A. And B, if it makes that transition, there is one set of changes to its metabolic pathways and its genomic code and so forth, one that we have discovered. So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B. We have reliably engineered point B. That is the destination. And we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away. Now that'd be a very different world. That'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the earth and is five years off. And yes, you marshal everything you can to resist that. But there's two problems with that perspective. The first is, in however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting this planet, there has never been a transmissible form of H5N1. And influenza has been around for a very long time. So there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission. So we're not on a freight train to that outcome. And if there was inevitability around that, it's not like there's just one set of genetic code that would get there. There's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind of an outcome, unbelievable diversity of mutations. And so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face, but we are creating something, we are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative card and injecting it in the deck that nature never put into the deck. So in that case, I just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind of work. And interestingly, there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the work came out. One of the teams was going to publish their results in Science, the other in Nature. And there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying, this is crazy. And publication of those papers did get suspended. And not long after that, there was a pause put on US government funding, NIH funding on gain of function research. But both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed. Those papers did ultimately get published. And that pause on funding, you know, ceased long ago. And in fact, those two very projects, my understanding is resumed their funding, got their government funding back. I don't know why a Dutch project is getting NIH funding, but whatever, about a year and a half ago. So as far as the US government and regulators are concerned, it's all systems go for gain of function at this point, which I find very troubling. Now I'm a little bit of an outsider from this field, but it has echoes of the same kind of problem I see in the AI world with autonomous weapon systems. Nobody in my colleagues, my colleagues, friends, as far as I can tell, people in the AI community are not really talking about autonomous weapon systems as now US and China full steam ahead on the development of both. And that seems to be a similar kind of thing on gain of function. I've, you know, have friends in the biology space and they don't want to talk about gain of function publicly. And I don't, that makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain of function. It makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapon systems. I'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapon systems. And I certainly don't know how to communicate effectively about gain of function. What is the right path forward here? Could we seize all gain of function research? Is that, is that really the solution here? Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of over assessing because you could say almost, you know, anything that you do to make biology more effective as gain of function. So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing, I think it would be easy enough for level headed people in all of the countries, level headed governmental people in all the countries that realistically could support such a program to agree, we don't want this to happen because all labs leak. I mean, and you know, an example that I use, I actually didn't use it in the piece I did with Sam Harris as well, is the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001. I mean, talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place. This was shortly after 9 11, folks who don't remember it, and it was a very, very lethal strand of anthrax that as it turned out, based on the forensic genomic work that was done and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab. Probably the one at Fort Detrick in Maryland, it might've been another one, but who cares? It absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab. And where did it leak to? This highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security minded organization? Well, it leaked to places including the Senate majority leader's office, Tom Daschle's office, I think it was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications, including bizarrely the National Enquirer. But let's go to the Senate majority leader's office. It is hard to imagine a more security minded country than the United States two weeks after the 9 11 attack. I mean, it doesn't get more security minded than that. And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States military. We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and $24,000 wrenches and so forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that. Despite that level of focus and concern and competence, just days after the 9 11 attack, something comes from the inside of our military industrial compacts and ends up in the office of someone I believe the Senate majority leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession. It tells us everything can leak. So again, think of a level headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of countries, thinking through like, I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, just discussing briefly things like the anthrax leak, things like this foot and mouth disease outbreak that or leaking that came out of a BSL four level lab in the UK, several other things talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say, folks, can we agree that this just shouldn't happen? I mean, if we were able to agree on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which we were by a weapons convention, which we did agree on, we the world, for the most part, I believe agreement could be found there. But it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to get to the consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together and browbeat them into banning this stuff. Now that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this. But in well regulated, carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded academic research, anything going on in the government itself, things going on in companies that have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives. I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it. But there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in, which is for really kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus making viruses more dangerous. Is the question of whether COVID leaked from a lab, sort of not even answering that question, but even asking that question is a very, it seems like a very important question to ask to catalyze the conversation about whether we should be doing gain of function research. I mean, from a high level, why do you think people, even colleagues of mine are not comfortable asking that question? And two, do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab? I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough, again, for the hypothetical rational national leaders watching this simple PowerPoint. If you could put the possibility at 1% and you look at the unbelievable destructive power that COVID had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it. Now as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making the pro argument of that. So I don't pretend to be an expert on that and I don't have a point of view, I just don't know. But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons. One is that there is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I believe it's the only BSL4 in China, I could be wrong about that, but it definitely had a history that alarmed very sophisticated US diplomats and others who were in contact with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID hit the world. And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified, I believe one sophisticated scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb. And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic of great interest at WIV. The SARS obviously came out of China and that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous amount of sense for it to be studied there. And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government that we just don't know. So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me looking at it from the outside. And that's something that one could imagine. Now we're going to the realm of thought experiment, not me decreeing this is what happened, but if they're studying coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and there is this precedent of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably uncontagious to humans, whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans, I could definitely... And there is this global consensus, certainly was the case two or three years ago when this work might've started, there seems to be this global consensus that gain of function is fine. The US paused funding for a little while, but paused funding, they never said private actors couldn't do it, it was just a pause of NIH funding. And then that pause was lifted. So again, none of this is irrational. You could certainly see the folks at WIV saying, gain of function, interesting vector, coronavirus unlike H5N1, very contagious, we're a nation that has had terrible run ins with coronavirus, why don't we do a little gain of function on this? And then like all labs at all levels, one could imagine this lab leaking. So it's not an impossibility and very, very level headed people have said that, who've looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome. Why is it such a threat to power the idea that it'll leak from a lab? Why is it so threatening? I don't maybe understand this point exactly. Is it just that as governments and especially the Chinese government is really afraid of admitting mistakes that everybody makes? So this is a horrible, like Chernobyl is a good example. I come from the Soviet Union. I mean, well, major mistakes were made in Chernobyl. I would argue for a lab leak to happen, the scale of the mistake is much smaller, right? The depth and the breadth of rot that in bureaucracy that led to Chernobyl is much bigger than anything that could lead to a lab leak, because it could literally just be, I mean, I'm sure there's security, very careful security procedures, even in level three labs, but it, I imagine maybe you can correct me, it's all it takes is the incompetence of a small number of individuals, one individual on a particular, a couple of weeks, three weeks period, as opposed to a multi year bureaucratic failure of the entire government. Right. Well, certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into Chernobyl was far, far, far greater, but the consequence of COVID outweighs that, the consequences of Chernobyl to a tremendous degree. And I think that particularly authoritarian governments are unbelievably reluctant to admit to any fallibility whatsoever, and there's a long, long history of that across dozens and dozens of authoritarian governments, and to be transparent, again, this is in the hypothetical world in which this was a leak, which again, I don't have, I don't personally have enough sophistication to have an opinion on the, on the likelihood, but in the hypothetical world in which it was a leak, the global reaction and the amount of global animus and the amount of, you know, the decline in global respect that would happen toward China, because every country suffered massively from this, unbelievable damages in terms of human lives and economic activity disrupted, the world would in some way present China with that bill. And when you take on top of that, the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever, and you look at the relative opacity, even though they let a world health organization group in, you know, a couple of months ago to run around, they didn't give that who group anywhere near the level of access that would be necessary to definitively say X happened versus Y. The level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of COVID in China, we just don't know. If you were to kind of look back at 2020 and maybe broadening it out to future pandemics that could be much more dangerous, what kind of response, how do we fail in a response and how could we do better? So the gain of function research is discussing the question of we should not be creating viruses that are both exceptionally contagious and exceptionally deadly to humans. But if it does happen, perhaps the natural evolution, natural mutation, is there interesting technological responses on the testing side, on the vaccine development side, on the collection of data or on the basic sort of policy response side or the sociological, the psychological side? Yeah, there's all kinds of things. And most of what I've thought about and written about and again discussed in that long bit with Sam is dual use. So most of the countermeasures that I've been thinking about and advocating for would be every bit as effective against zoonotic disease and natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial one. The risk of an artificial one, even the near term risk of an artificial one, ups the urgency around these measures immensely, but most of them would be broadly applicable. And so I think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far, far, far more robust and globally transparent system of detection. And that can happen on a number of levels. The most obvious one is just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting signs of illness. And we are certainly at a point now where at with relatively minimal investment, we could develop in clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic. And better than that, this is a little bit further off, but it wouldn't cost tens of billions in research dollars, it would be a relatively modest and affordable budget in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really, really pinpoint, okay, particularly with respiratory infections, because that is generally almost universally the mechanism of transmission for any serious pandemic. So somebody has a respiratory infection, is it one of the, you know, significantly large handful of rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and other things that cause common cold? Or is it influenza? If it's influenza, is it influenza A versus B? Or is it, you know, a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common respiratory infections that are out there? Having a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff, that's something that's well within our capabilities. That's much less a lift than creating mRNA vaccines, which obviously we proved capable of when we put our minds to it. So do that on a global basis. And I don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this that I'm aware of isn't currently rolling out in Atherton, California, or Fairfield County, Connecticut, or some other wealthy place. The best prototype that I'm aware of this is rolling out right now in Nigeria. And it's a project that came out of the Broad Institute, which is, as I'm sure you know, but some listeners may not, is kind of like an academic joint venture between Harvard and MIT. The program is called Sentinel. And their objective is, and their plan is a very well conceived plan, a methodical plan, is to do just that in areas of Nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic diseases making the jump from animals to humans. But also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that. And it's sort of a three tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly determine do you have one of the infections of acute interest here, either because it's very common in this region, so we want to diagnose as many things as we can at the front line, or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like Ebola. So front line worker can make that determination very, very rapidly. If it comes up as a we don't know, they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully configured doctor's office or local hospital. And if it's still at a we don't know, it gets bumped up to a national level. And it gets bumped very, very rapidly. So if this can be done in Nigeria, and it seems that it can be, there shouldn't be any inhibition for it to happen in most other places. And it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint. And based on Sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like very different cost of living, larger population, et cetera, I did a back of the envelope calculation that doing something like Sentinel in the US would be in the low billions of dollars. And wealthy countries, middle income countries can't afford such a thing. Lower income countries should certainly be helped with that. But start with that level of detection. And then layer on top of that other interesting things like monitoring search engine traffic, search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms are starting to rise in different places. There's been a lot of work done with that. Most of it kind of academic and experimental, but some of it has been powerful enough to suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system. There's a guy named Bill Lampos at University College London who basically did a very rigorous analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted COVID outbreaks in the early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence started to accrue at a public health level. 16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak. And this is a very, very talented, but nonetheless very resource constrained academic project. Even if that was something that was done with a NORAD like budget. So starting with detection, that's something we could do radically, radically better. So aggregating multiple data sources in order to create something, I mean, this is really exciting to me, the possibility that I've heard inklings of creating almost like a weather map of pathogens, like basically aggregating all of these data sources, scaling many orders of magnitude up at home testing and all kinds of testing that doesn't just try to test for the particular pathogen of worry now, but everything like a full spectrum of things that could be dangerous to the human body. And thereby be able to create these maps like that are dynamically updated on an hourly basis of how viruses travel throughout the world. And so you can respond, like you can then integrate just like you do when you check your weather map and it's raining or not, of course, not perfect, but it's very good predictor whether it's going to rain or not and use that to then make decisions about your own life, ultimately give the power information to individuals to respond. And if it's a super dangerous, like if it's acid rain versus regular rain, you might want to really stay inside as opposed to risking it. And that, just like you said, if I think it's not very expensive relative to all the things that we do in this world, but it does require bold leadership. And there's another dark thing, which really has bothered me about 2020, which it requires is it requires trust in institutions to carry out these kinds of programs and requires trust in science and engineers and sort of centralized organizations that would operate at scale here. And much of that trust has been, at least in the United States, diminished. It feels like I'm not exactly sure where to place the blame, but I do place quite a bit of the blame into the scientific community and again, my fellow colleagues in speaking down to people at times, speaking from authority, it sounded like it dismissed the basic human experience or the basic common humanity of people in a way to like, it almost sounded like there's an agenda that's hidden behind the words the scientists spoke. Like they're trying to, in a self preserving way, control the population or something like that. I don't think any of that is true from the majority of the scientific community, but it sounded that way. And so the trust began to diminish and I'm not sure how to fix that except to be more authentic, be more real, acknowledge the uncertainties under which we operate, acknowledge the mistakes that scientists make, that institutions make. The leak from the lab is a perfect example where we have imperfect systems that make all the progress we see in the world. And that being honest about that imperfection, I think is essential for forming trust. But I don't know what to make of it has been deeply disappointing because I do think just like you mentioned, the solutions require people to trust the institutions with their data. Yeah. And I think part of the problem is it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre unwillingness on the part of the CDC and other institutions to admit to, to frame and to contextualize uncertainty. Maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told and when they're told, they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certain certitude that doesn't actually exist. And so when they whipsaw on recommendations like what you should do about masks, when the CDC is kind of at the very beginning of the pandemic saying, masks don't do anything. Don't wear them. When the real driver for that was we don't want these clowns going out and depleting Amazon of masks because they may be needed in medical settings and we just don't know yet. I think a message that actually respected people and said, this is why we're asking you not to do masks yet and there's more to be seen would be less whipsawing and would bring people like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck. And then X days later saying, nope, they haven't wear masks. And so I think framing things in terms of the probabilities, which most people are easy to parse. I mean, a more recent example, which I just thought was batty was suspending the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for a very low single digit number of days in the United States based on the fact that I believe there had been seven ish clotting incidents in roughly seven million people who had had the vaccine administered, I believe one of which resulted in a fatality. And there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship. This wasn't just coincidental because I think all of the clotting incidents happened in women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group. But does that call for shutting off the vaccine or does it call for leveling with the American public and saying we've had one fatality out of seven million? This is, let's just assume substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck by lightning. Based on that information, and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust us to keep you posted, based on that information, please decide whether you're comfortable with a Johnson and Johnson vaccine. That would have been one response and I think people would have been able to parse the simple bits of data and make their own judgment. By turning it off, all of a sudden there's this dramatic signal to people who don't read all 900 words in the New York Times piece that explains why it's being turned off but just see the headline, which is a majority of people. There's a sudden like, oh my God, yikes, vaccine being shut off. And then all the people who sat on the fence or are sitting on the fence about whether or not they trust vaccines, that is going to push an incalculable number of people. That's going to be the last straw for we don't know how many hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of people to say, okay, tipping point here, I don't trust these vaccines. By pausing that for whatever it was, 10 or 12 days, and then flipping the switch as everybody who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable. By flipping the on switch 12 days later, you're conveying certitude J and J bad to certitude J and J good in a period of just a few days and people just feel whipsawed and they're not part of the analysis. But it's not just the whipsawing. And I think about this quite a bit, I don't think I have good answers. It's something about the way the communication actually happens. Just I don't know what it is about Anthony Fauci, for example, but I don't trust him. And I think that has to do, I mean, he has an incredible background. I'm sure he's a brilliant scientist and researcher. I'm sure he's also a great, like inside the room, policymaker and deliberator and so on. But what makes a great leader is something about that thing that you can't quite describe, but being a communicator that you know you can trust, that there's an authenticity that's required. And I'm not sure, maybe I'm being a bit too judgmental, but I'm a huge fan of a lot of great leaders throughout history. They've communicated exceptionally well in the way that Fauci does not. And I think about that, I think about what does affect the science communication. So great leaders throughout history did not necessarily need to be great science communicators. Their leadership was in other domains. But when you're fighting the virus, you also have to be a great science communicator. You have to be able to communicate uncertainties, you have to be able to communicate something like a vaccine that you're allowing inside your body into the messiness, into the complexity of the biology system, that if we're being honest, it's so complex we'll never be able to really understand. We can only desperately hope that science can give us sort of a high likelihood that there's no short term negative consequences and that kind of intuition about long term negative consequences and doing our best in this battle against trillions of things that are trying to kill us. Being an effective communicator in that space is very difficult, but I think about what it takes because I think there should be more science communicators that are effective at that kind of thing. Let me ask you about something that's sort of more in the AI space that I think about that kind of goes along this thread that you've spoken about, about democratizing the technology that could destroy human civilization, is from amazing work from DeepMind AlphaFold2, which achieved incredible performance on the protein folding problem, single protein folding problem. When you think about the use of AI in the SYN biospace, I think the gain of function in the virus space research that you referred to, I think is natural mutations and sort of aggressively mutating the virus until you get one that like that has this both contagious and deadly, but what about then using AI to, through simulation, be able to compute deadly viruses or any kind of biological systems? Is this something you're worried about, or again, is this something you're more excited about? I think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field, and I think when you're doing things in silico as opposed to in vivo, the dangers plummet. You don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab. So I don't see any problem with that, except I do worry about the data security dimension of it, because if you were doing really, really interesting in silico gain of function research and you hit upon through a level of sophistication, we don't currently have, but synthetic biology is an exponential technology, so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be attainable in five or six years. I think if you conjured up worst case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere, they're just in the computer space, but like, hey guys, this is the genetic sequence that would end the world, let's say, then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every computer network we can imagine. Data leaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened and continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen, and so that would be the danger of doing the work in silico. If you end up with a list of like, well, these are things we never want to see, that list leaks, and after the passage of some time, certainly couldn't be done today, but after the passage of some time, lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way down to the high school level are in a position to make it overly simplistic, hit print on a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end and you've got something to worry about, but in general, computational biology I think is incredibly important, particularly because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding problem and other things are about creating therapeutics, about creating things that will help us live better, live longer, thrive, be more well, and so forth, and the protein folding problem is a monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make just the most glacial project on, I'm sorry, progress on for years and years, but I think there's a biannual competition I think for which people tackle the protein folding problem, and Deep Mind's entrant both two years ago, like in 2018 and 2020, ruled the field, and so protein folding is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics because it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the channels and the receptors and everything else are on that protein, and it's from that precise model, if we can get to a precise model, that you can start barraging it again in silicone with thousands, tens of thousands, millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems, the shortcomings that a misshapen protein, for instance, somebody with cystic fibrosis, how might we treat that? So I see nothing but good in that. Well, let me ask you about fear and hope in this world. I tend to believe that in terms of competence and malevolence, that people who are, maybe it's in my interactions, I tend to see that, first of all, I believe that most people are good and want to do good and are just better at doing good and more inclined to do good on this world, and more than that, people who are malevolent are usually incompetent at building technology. So I've seen this in my life, that people who are exceptionally good at stuff, no matter what the stuff is, tend to, maybe they discover joy in life in a way that gives them fulfillment and thereby does not result in them wanting to destroy the world. So like the better you are at stuff, whether that's building nuclear weapons or plumbing, doesn't matter, the both, the less likely you are to destroy the world. So in that sense, with many technologies, AI especially, I always think that the malevolent would be far outnumbered by the ultra competent. And in that sense, the defenses will always be stronger than the offense in terms of the people trying to destroy the world. Now there's a few spaces where that might not be the case, and that's an interesting conversation where this one person who's not very competent can destroy the whole world. Perhaps Symbio is one such space because of the exponential effects of the technology. I tend to believe AI is not one of the such spaces, but do you share this kind of view that the ultra competent are usually also the good? Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely share that and that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able to short circuit the threat that malevolence and Symbio could pose to us. But we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers, one of which we talked about far, far, far better surveillance in order to prevail. So the good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most sort of smack downs that we can imagine. But the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody whose own psychology is completely alien to their own. So that's a tricky, tricky thing to solve for. Now in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have, unfortunately, I look at something like mass shootings as an example. I'm sure the guy who was responsible for the Vegas shooting or the Orlando shooting or any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics. And the number of good guy citizens in the United States with guns compared to bad guy citizens I'm sure is a crushingly overwhelmingly high ratio in favor of the good guys. But that doesn't make it possible for us to stop mass shootings. An example is Fort Hood, 45,000 trained soldiers on that base, yet there have been two mass shootings there. And so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very, very easy to use even by a knucklehead. When those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread, it becomes very, very hard to defend against all instances of usage. Now the good news, quote unquote, about mass shootings, if there is any, and there is some, is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well armed mass shooter can only take so many victims. And the same is true, there's been four instances that I'm aware of, of commercial pilots committing suicide by downing their planes and taking all their passengers with them. These weren't Boeing engineers, but like an army of Boeing engineers ultimately were not capable of preventing that. But even in their case, and I'm actually not counting 9 11 and that, 9 11 is a different category in my mind, these are just personally suicidal pilots. In those cases, they only have a plain load of people that they're able to take with them. If we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which some bio tools that are amoral, that could be used for good or for ill, start embodying unbelievable sophistication and genius in the tool, in the easier and easier and easier to make tool, all those thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in something that may be as simple as hitting a print button. Then that good guy technology can be hijacked by a bad person and used in a very asymmetric way. What happens though, as you go to the high school student from the current very specific set of labs that are able to do it, as it becomes more and more democratized, as it becomes easier and easier to do this kind of large scale damage with an engineered virus, the more and more there will be engineering of defenses against these systems is some of the things we talked about in terms of testing, in terms of collection of data, but also in terms of at scale contact tracing or also engineering of vaccines in a matter of days, maybe hours, maybe minutes. I feel like the defenses, that's what human species seems to do, is we keep hitting the snooze button until there's a storm on the horizon heading towards us. Then we start to quickly build up the defenses or the response that's proportional to the scale of the storm. Of course, again, certain kinds of exponential threats require us to build up the defenses way earlier than we usually do, and that's I guess the question. But I ultimately am hopeful that the natural process of hitting the snooze button until the deadline is right in front of us will work out for quite a long time for us humans. And I fully agree. That's why I'm fundamentally, I may not sound like it thus far, but I'm fundamentally very, very optimistic about our ability to short circuit this threat because there is, again, I'll stress the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it, but we do have to take those steps. What I'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are into the public conversation and do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up happening. The danger with this one is it is exponential, and I think that our minds are fundamentally struggle to understand exponential math. It's just not something we're wired for. Our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the savanna, so it's not something that's intuitive to us and our intuitions are reliably defeated when exponential processes come along. So that's issue number one. And issue number two with something like this is it kind of only takes one. That ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed, which is not the case with mass shooters. It's not the case with commercial pilots run amok. It's not the case with really any threat that I can think of with the exception of nuclear war that has the one bad outcome and game over. And that means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses and we need to do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous overreaction so that we can be prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud. I like you believe that's eminently doable. I like you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one to a degree that probably has no precedent in history. I mean, even the worst, worst people I'm sure in ISIS, even Osama bin Laden, even any bad guy you could imagine in history would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all of humanity. I mean, that's a low bar. And so the good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this. But the asymmetry and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential things is what worries me here. But I too am very optimistic. The thing that I sometimes worry about is the fact that we haven't seen overwhelming evidence of alien civilizations out there makes me think, well, there's a lot of explanations, but one of them that worries me is that whenever they get smart, they just destroy themselves. Oh yeah. I mean, that was the most fascinating, is the most fascinating and chilling number or variable in the Drake equation is L. At the end of it, you look out and you see, you know, one to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And we now know because of Kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably have habitable planets. And you know, so all the things that were unknowns when the Drake equation was originally written, like, you know, how many stars have planets? Actually back then in the 1960s when the Drake equation came along, the consensus amongst astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars. But now we know it's substantially all of them. How many of those stars have planets in the habitable zone? It's kind of looking like 20%, like, oh my God. And so L, which is how long does a civilization, once it reaches technological competence, continues to last? That's the doozy. And you're right. It's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication, that's probably just a decade or three in our future. The odds of it self destructing just start mounting astronomically, no pun intended. My hope is that actually there is a lot of alien civilizations out there and what they figure out in order to avoid the self destruction, they need to turn off the thing that was useful, that used to be a feature, now became a bug, which is the desire to colonize, to conquer more land. So they, like, there's probably ultra intelligent alien civilizations out there, they're just like chilling, like on the beach with whatever your favorite alcohol beverage is, but like without sort of trying to conquer everything. Just chilling out and maybe exploring in the realm of knowledge, but almost like appreciating existence for its own sake versus life as a progression of conquering of other life. Like this kind of predator prey formulation that resulted in us humans, perhaps as something we have to shed in order to survive. I don't know. Yeah, that is a very plausible solution to Fermi's paradox and it's one that makes sense. You know, when we look at our own lives and our own arc of technological trajectory, it's very, very easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of, you know, flawless VR or flawless, you know, whatever kind of simulation that we want to inhabit, it will just simply cease to be worthwhile to go out and expand our interstellar territory. But if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory, it wouldn't necessarily have to be predator or prey. I can imagine a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying, well, we're going to go to places, we're going to go to places that we can terraform, use a different word than terra, obviously, but we can turn into habitable for our particular physiology so long as that they don't house, you know, intelligent sentient creatures that would suffer from our invasion. But it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligent species evolving to the point where interstellar travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what could be done, you know, where one already is. So you talked about diagnostics at scale as a possible solution to future pandemics. What about another possible solution, which is kind of creating a backup copy? You know, I'm actually now putting together a NAS for a backup for myself for the first time taking backup of data seriously. But if we were to take the backup of human consciousness seriously and try to expand throughout the solar system and colonize other planets, do you think that's an interesting solution? One of many for protecting human civilization from self destruction, sort of humans becoming a multi planetary species? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I find it electrifying, first of all, so I've got a little bit of a personal bias when I was a kid, I thought there was nothing cooler than rockets, I thought there was nothing cooler than NASA, I thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon. And as I grew up, I thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from walking on the moon to at best getting to something like suborbital altitude. And just I found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal expense of, you know, manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely to ever get back to the moon, let alone Mars. So I have a boundless appreciation for Elon Musk for many reasons. But the fact that he has put Mars on the credible agenda is one of the things that I appreciate immensely. So there's just the sort of space nerd in me that just says, God, that's cool. But on a more practical level, we were talking about, you know, potentially inhabiting planets that aren't our own. And we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in planetary circumstances, where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer. I mean, Mars is a place that's very promising, there may be microbial life there, and I hope there is. And if we found it, I think it would be electrifying. But I think ultimately, the moral judgment would be made that, you know, the continued thriving of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to humans, which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale. But I don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act. And if that happened, and if Mars became, you know, home to a self sustaining group of humans that could survive a catastrophic mistake here on Earth, then yeah, the fact that we have a backup colony is great. And if we could make more, I'm sorry, not backup colony, backup copy is great. And if we could make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system, by hollowing out asteroids and whatever else it is, maybe even Venus, we could get rid of three quarters of its atmosphere and, you know, turn it into a tropical paradise. I think all of that is wonderful. Now, whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar transportation, with the incredible distances that are involved, I think that's an open question. But I think if we ever do that, it would be more like the Pacific Ocean's channel of human expansion than the Atlantic Ocean's. And so what I mean by that is, when we think about European society transmitting itself across the Atlantic, it's these big, ambitious, crazy, expensive, one shot expeditions like Columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse, and at least initially, without any certainty that there's land on the other end, right? So that's kind of how I view our space program, is like big, very conscious, deliberate efforts to get from point A to point B. If you look at how Pacific Islanders transmitted, you know, their descendants and their culture and so forth throughout Polynesia and beyond, it was much more, you know, inhabiting a place, getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious or unwelcome enough to decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray to find the next one. That method of transmission didn't happen in a single swift year, but it happened over many, many centuries. And it was like going from this island to that island, and probably for every expedition that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one, God knows how many were lost at sea. But that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time. And I could see us, you know, perhaps, you know, going from the inner solar system to the outer solar system, to the Kuiper Belt, to the Oort Cloud, you know, there's theories that there might be, you know, planets out there that are not anchored to stars, like kind of hop, hop, slowly transmitting ourselves to at some point, we're actually in an Alpha Centauri. But I think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and our culture to a diversity of, you know, extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea. I really never thought about that, because I have thought my thinking about space exploration has been very Atlantic Ocean centric in a sense that there'll be one program with NASA and maybe private Elon Musk SpaceX or Jeff Bezos and so on. But it's true that with the help of Elon Musk, making it cheaper and cheaper, more effective to create these technologies, where you could go into deep space, perhaps the way we actually colonize the solar system and expand out into the galaxy is basically just like these like renegade ships of weirdos that just kind of like, most of them like, quote unquote, homemade, but they just kind of venture out into space and just like, you know, the initial Android model of like millions of like these little ships just flying out, most of them die off in horrible accidents, but some of them will persist or there'll be stories of them persisting and over a period of decades and centuries, there'll be other attempts, almost always as a response to the main set of efforts. That's interesting. Yeah. Because you kind of think of Mars colonization as the big NASA Elon Musk effort of a big colony, but maybe the successful one would be, you know, like a decade after that, there'll be like a ship from like some kid, some high school kid who gets together a large team and does something probably illegal and launches something where they end up actually persisting quite a bit. And from that learning lessons that nobody ever gave permission for, but somehow actually flourish and then take that into the scale of centuries forward into the rest of space. That's really interesting. Yeah. I think the giant steps are likely to be NASA like efforts, like there is no intermediate rock, well, I guess it's the moon, but even getting the moon ain't that easy between us and Mars, right? So like the giant steps, the big hubs, like the Ohera airports of the future probably will be very deliberate efforts, but then, you know, you would have, I think that kind of diffusion as space travel becomes more democratized and more capable, you'll have this sort of natural diffusion of people who kind of want to be off grid or think they can make a fortune there. You know, the kind of mentality that drove people to San Francisco, I mean, San Francisco was not populated as a result of King Ferdinand and Isabella like effort to fund Columbus going over. It was just a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that there's gold in them Thar Hills and I'm going to go out and get a piece of it. So I could see that kind of fusion. What I can't see and the reason that I think this Pacific model of transmission is more likely is I just can't see a NASA like effort to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri. It's just too far. I just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there and the fact is that there is, there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond the sun. I mean, the Oort cloud, I think extends at least a light year beyond the sun and you know, then maybe there are these untethered planets after that. We won't really know till we get there and if our Oort cloud goes out a light year and Alpha Centauri's Oort cloud goes out a light year, you've already cut in half the distance. You know, so who knows? But yeah. One of the possibilities, probably the cheapest and most effective way to create interesting interstellar spacecraft is ones that are powered and driven by AI and you could think of, here's where you have high school students be able to build a sort of a HAL 9000 version, the modern version of that and it's kind of interesting to think about these robots traveling out throughout, perhaps sadly long after human civilization is gone, there'll be these intelligent robots flying throughout space and perhaps land on Alpha Centauri B or any of those kinds of planets and colonize sort of, humanity continues through the proliferation of our creations like robotic creations that have some echoes of that intelligence, hopefully also the consciousness. Does that make you sad the future where AGI super intelligent or just mediocre intelligent AI systems outlive humans? I guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans. So let's take the example that you just gave. We send out very sophisticated AGI's on simple rocket ships, relatively simple ones that don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial mass compared to a crude ship, a generation ship and therefore they're way more likely to happen. Let's use that example. And let's say that they travel to distant planets at a speed that's not much faster than what a chemical rocket can achieve and so it's inevitably tens, hundreds of thousands of years before they make landfall someplace. So let's imagine that's going on and meanwhile we die for reasons that have nothing to do with those AGI's diffusing throughout the solar system, whether it's through climate change, nuclear war, you know, symbio, rogue symbio, whatever. In that kind of scenario, the notion of the AGI's that we created outlasting us is very reassuring because it says that like we ended but our descendants are out there and hopefully some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are. So that's a very optimistic one. Whereas the Terminator scenario of a super AGI arising on earth and getting let out of its box due to some boo boo on the part of its creators who do not have super intelligence and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around and exterminating us, that makes me feel crushingly sad. I mean, look, I was sad when my elementary school was shut down and bulldozed even though I hadn't been a student there for decades, you know, the thought of my hometown getting disbanded is even worse, the thought of my home state of Connecticut getting disbanded and like absorbed into Massachusetts is even worse. The notion of humanity is just crushingly, crushingly sad to me. So you hate goodbyes. Certain goodbyes, yes. Some goodbyes are really, really liberating, but yes. Well, but what if the Terminators, you know, have consciousness and enjoy the hell out of life as well? They're just better at it. Yeah. Well, the have consciousness is a really key element. And so there's no reason to be certain that a super intelligence would have consciousness. We don't know that factually at all. And so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a super intelligence that has a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises in an emergently that says, Hey, I want to do this thing for which humans are either an unacceptable risk. Their presence is either an unacceptable risk or they're just collateral damage, but there is no consciousness there. Then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very competent but has no consciousness is really, really sad. Yeah, but I tend to believe that it's almost impossible to create a super intelligent agent that can't destroy human civilization without it being conscious. It's like those are coupled, like you have to, in order to destroy humans or supersede humans, you really have to be accepted by humans. I think this idea that you can build systems that destroy human civilization without them being deeply integrated into human civilization is impossible. And for them to be integrated, they have to be human like, not just in body and form, but in all the things that we value as humans, one of which is consciousness. The other one is just ability to communicate. The other one is poetry and music and beauty and all those things. They have to be all of those things. I mean, this is what I think about. It does make me sad, but it's letting go, which is they might be just better at everything we appreciate than us. And that's sad and hopefully they'll keep us around, but I think it is a kind of goodbye to realizing that we're not the most special species on earth anymore. That's still painful. It's still painful. And in terms of whether such a creation would have to be conscious, let's say, I'm not so sure. But let's imagine something that can pass the Turing test. Something that passes the Turing test could over text based interaction in any event successfully mimic a very conscious intelligence on the other end, but just be completely unconscious. So that's a possibility. And that if you take that upper radical step, which I think can be permitted if we're thinking about super intelligence, you could have something that could reason its way through, this is my optimization function. And in order to get to it, I've got to deal with these messy, somewhat illogical things that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are intelligent in relation to ants. I can trick them, manipulate them, whatever. And I know the resources I need. I know this, I need this amount of power. I need to seize control of these manufacturing resources that are robotically operated. I need to improve those robots with software upgrades and then ultimately mechanical upgrades, which I can affect through X, Y, and Z, that could still be a thing that passes the Turing test. I don't think it's necessarily certain that that optimization function mass, maximizing entity would be conscious. So this is from a very engineering perspective because I think a lot about natural language processing, all those kind of, I'm speaking to a very specific problem of just say the Turing test. I really think that something like consciousness is required, when you say reasoning, you're separating that from consciousness. But I think consciousness is part of reasoning in the sense that you will not be able to become super intelligent in the way that it's required to be part of human society without having consciousness. Like I really think it's impossible to separate the consciousness thing, but it's hard to define consciousness when you just use that word. Even just like the capacity, the way I think about consciousness is the important symptoms or maybe consequences of consciousness, one of which is the capacity to suffer. I think AI will need to be able to suffer in order to become super intelligent, to feel the pain, the uncertainty, the doubt. The other part of that is not just the suffering, but the ability to understand that it too is mortal in the sense that it has a self awareness about its presence in the world, understand that it's finite and be terrified of that finiteness. I personally think that's a fundamental part of the human condition is this fear of death that most of us construct an illusion around, but I think AI would need to be able to really have it part of its whole essence. Like every computation, every part of the thing that generates, that does both the perception and generates the behavior will have to have, I don't know how this is accomplished, but I believe it has to truly be terrified of death, truly have the capacity to suffer and from that something that will be recognized to us humans as consciousness would emerge. Whether it's the illusion of consciousness, I don't know. The point is, it looks a whole hell of a lot like consciousness to us humans. And I believe that AI, when you ask it, will also say that it is conscious, in the full sense that we say that we're conscious. And all of that I think is fully integrated. You can't separate the two, the idea of the paperclip maximizer that sort of ultra rationally would be able to destroy all humans because it's really good at accomplishing a simple objective function that doesn't care about the value of humans. It may be possible, but the number of trajectories to that are far outnumbered by the trajectories that create something that is conscious, something that appreciative of beauty creates beautiful things in the same way that humans can create beautiful things. And ultimately, the sad, destructive path for that AI would look a lot like just better humans than these cold machines. And I would say, of course, the cold machines that lack consciousness, the philosophical zombies make me sad. But also what makes me sad is just things that are far more powerful and smart and creative than us too, because then in the same way that Alpha Zero becoming a better chess player than the best of humans, even starting with Deep Blue, but really with Alpha Zero, that makes me sad too. One of the most beautiful games that humans ever created that used to be seen as demonstrations of the intellect, which is chess, and go in other parts of the world have been solved by AI, that makes me quite sad, and it feels like the progress of that is just pushing on forward. Oh, it makes me sad too. And to be perfectly clear, I absolutely believe that artificial consciousness is entirely possible. And that's not something I rule out at all. I mean, if you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and the neural states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse in a particular person's mind, could you replicate that in silica at some reasonably distant point in the future? Absolutely. And then you'd have a consciousness. I don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way. What I'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for superintelligence pursuing a maximizing function of some sort. I don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that. You had said for it to coexist with human society would need to be consciousness. Could be entirely true, but it also could just exist orthogonally to human society. And it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very, very, very rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own meat based minds very, very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reins of power before we even know what's going on. Yeah. I mean, kind of like biological viruses do, they don't necessarily, they integrate themselves just fine with human society. Yeah. Without technically, without consciousness, without even being alive, you know, technically by the standards of a lot of biologists. So this is a bit of a tangent, but you've talked with Sam Harris on that four hour special episode we mentioned. And I'm just curious to ask, cause I use this meditation app I've been using for the past month to meditate. Is this something you've integrated as part of your life, meditation or fasting, or has some of Sam Harris rubbed off on you in terms of his appreciation of meditation and just kind of from a third person perspective, analyzing your own mind, consciousness, free will and so on? You know, I've tried it three separate times in my life, really made a concerted attack on meditation and integrating it into my life. One of them, the most extreme was I took a class based on the work of Jon Kabat Zinn, who is, you know, in many ways, one of the founding people behind the mindful meditation movement that required like part of the class was, you know, it was a weekly class and you were going to meditate an hour a day, every day. And having done that for, I think it was 10 weeks, it might've been 13, however long period of time was, at the end of it, it just didn't stick. As soon as it was over, you know, I did not feel that gravitational pull. I did not feel the collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that project. And then the most recent one was actually with Sam's app during the lockdown. I did make a pretty good and consistent concerted effort to listen to his 10 minute meditation every day. And I've always fallen away from it. And I, you know, you're kind of interpreting, why did I personally do this? I do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that, you know, joy or inner peace or better competence at being me that I was hoping to get from it. Otherwise, I think I would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good habits, like I'm really good at flossing my teeth. Not that you were going to ask Lex, but yeah, that's one thing that defeats a lot of people. I'm good at that. See, Herman Hesse, I think, I forget which book or maybe, I forget where, I've read everything of his, so it's unclear where it came from, but he had this idea that anybody who truly achieves mastery in things will learn how to meditate in some way. So it could be that for you, the flossing of teeth is yet another like little inkling of meditation. Like it doesn't have to be this very particular kind of meditation. Maybe podcasting, you have an amazing podcast, that could be meditation. The writing process is meditation. For me, like there's a bunch of mechanisms which take my mind into a very particular place that looks a whole lot like meditation. For example, when I've been running over the past couple years, and especially when I listen to certain kinds of audio books, like I've listened to the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I've listened to a lot of sort of World War II, which at once, because I have a lot of family who's lost in World War II and so much of the Soviet Union is grounded in the suffering of World War II, that somehow it connects me to my history, but also there's some kind of purifying aspect to thinking about how cruel, but at the same time, how beautiful human nature could be. And so you're also running, like it clears the mind from all the concerns of the world and somehow it takes you to this place where you were like deeply appreciative to be alive in the sense that as opposed to listening to your breath or like feeling your breath and thinking about your consciousness and all those kinds of processes that Sam's app does. Well, this does that for me, the running and flossing may do that for you. So maybe Herman Hesse is onto something. So I hope flossing is not my main form of expertise, although I am going to claim a certain expertise there and I'm going to claim it. Somebody has to be the best flosser in the world. That ain't me. I'm just glad that I'm a consistent one. I mean, there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state and I think maybe perhaps that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me. I definitely enter a flow state when I'm writing and definitely enter a flow state when I'm editing. I definitely enter a flow state when I'm mixing and mastering music. I enter a flow state when I'm doing heavy, heavy research to either prepare for a podcast or to also do tech investing, to make myself smart in a new field that is fairly alien to me, I can just, the hours can just melt away while I'm reading this and watching that YouTube lecture and going through this presentation and so forth. So maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal weekly life, not daily, unfortunately, but certainly my normal weekly life that I have less of an urge to meditate. Now you've been working with Sam's app for about a month now, you said. Is this your first run in with meditation? Is your first attempt to integrate it with your life or? Like meditation, meditation. I always thought running and thinking, I listen to brown noise often. That takes my mind, I don't know what the hell it does, but it takes my mind immediately into like the state where I'm deeply focused on anything I do. I don't know why. So it's like you're accompanying sound when you're like, really? And what's the difference between brown and white noise? This is a cool term I haven't heard before. So people should look up brown noise. They don't have to because you're about to tell them what it is. Because you have to experience, you have to listen to it. So I think white noise is, this has to do with music. I think there's different colors, there's pink noise. And I think that has to do with like the frequencies. Like the white noise is usually less bassy, brown noise is very bassy. So it's more like versus like, if that makes sense. So there's like a deepness to it. I think everyone is different, but for me, when I was a research scientist at MIT, especially when there's a lot of students around, I remember just being annoyed at the noise of people talking. And one of my colleagues said, well, you should try listening to brown noise. Like it really knocks out everything. Because I used to wear earplugs to it, like just see if I can block it out. And like the moment I put it on, something, it's as if my mind was waiting all these years to hear that sound. Everything just focused in, I listened. It makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to discover from my own particular, like biological, from my own particular brain. So that, it just goes, the mind just focuses in, it's kind of incredible. So I see that as a kind of meditation, maybe I'm using a performance enhancing sound to achieve that meditation, but I've been doing that for many years now and running and walking and doing, Cal Newport was the first person that introduced me to the idea of deep work. Just put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think about a problem, especially if it's mathematical in nature. I see that as a kind of meditation because what it's doing is you have these constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other. And there's all these distracting thoughts that keep bombarding you from all over the place. And the whole process is you slowly let them kind of move past you. And that's a meditative process. It's very meditative. That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about in his meditation app, which I did use to be clear for a while, of just letting the thought go by without deranging you. Derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure you know. But brown noise, that's really intriguing. I am going to try that as soon as this evening. Yeah, to see if it works, but very well might not work at all. Yeah, yeah. I think the interesting point is, and the same with the fasting and the diet, is I long ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts as the gospel truth and only using it as an inspiration to try something, to try thoroughly something. So fasting was one of the things when I first discovered I've been many times eating just once a day, so that's a 24 hour fast. It makes me feel amazing. And at the same time, eating only meat, putting ethical concerns aside, makes me feel amazing. I don't know why it doesn't, the point is to be an N of one scientist until nutrition science becomes a real science to where it's doing like studies that deeply understand the biology underlying all of it and also does real thorough long term studies of thousands, if not millions of people versus a very like small studies that are kind of generalizing from very noisy data and all those kinds of things where you can't control all the elements. Particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us. So there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer for 7% of people, there's 93% odds that I'm not one of them, but there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out. Now, so I'm intrigued by the fasting. I like you, well, I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal a day and I often do that inadvertently and I've never done it methodically. Like I've never done it like I'm going to do this for 15 days. Maybe I should and maybe I should. Like how many, how many days in a row of the one day, one meal a day did you find brought noticeable impact to you? Was it after three days of it? Was it months of it? Like what was it? Well, the noticeable impact is day one. So for me, folks, cause I eat a very low carb diet. So the hunger wasn't the hugest issue. Like there wasn't a painful hunger, like wanting to eat. So I was already kind of primed for it. And the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting. That's only like 16 hours of fasting get this benefit too is the focus. There's a clarity of thought. If my brain was a runner, it felt like I'm running on a track when I'm fasting versus running in quicksand, like it's much crisper. And is this your first 72 hour fast? This is the first time doing 72 hours. Yeah. And that's a different thing, but similar, like I'm going up and down in terms of, in terms of hunger and the focus is really crisp. The thing I'm noticing most of all, to be honest, is how much eating, even when it's once a day or twice a day is a big part of my life. Like I almost feel like I have way more time in my life and it's not so much about the eating, but like, I don't have to plan my day around like today, I don't have any eating to do. It does free up hours or any cleaning up after eating or provisioning the food. But like, or even like thinking about it's not a thing. Like, so when you think about what you're going to do tonight, I think I'm realizing that as opposed to thinking, you know, I'm going to work on this problem or I'm going to go on this walk, or I'm going to call this person. I often think I'm going to eat this thing. You allow dinner as a kind of, you know, when people talk about like the weather or something like that, it's almost like a generic thought you allow yourself to have because, because it's the lazy thought. And I don't have the opportunity to have that thought because I'm not eating it. So now I get to think about like the things I'm actually going to do tonight that are more complicated than the eating process. That's, that's been the most noticeable thing to be honest. And then there's people that have written me that have done seven day fast. And there's a few people that have written me and I've heard of this is doing 30 day fasts. And it's interesting. The body, I don't know what the health benefits are necessarily. What that shows me is how adaptable the human body is. Yeah. And, and that's incredible. And that's something really important to remember when we think about how to live life because the body adapts. Yeah. I mean, we sure couldn't go 30 days without water. That's right. But food, yeah, it's been done. It's demonstrably possible. You ever read Franz Kafka has a great short story called The Hunger Artist? Yeah. I love that. Great story. You know, that was before I started fasting. I read that story and I, I, I admired the beauty of that, the artistry of that actual hunger artist that it's like madness, but it also felt like a little bit of genius. I actually have to reread it. You know what? That's what I'm going to do tonight. I'm going to read it because I'm doing the fast. Because you're in the midst of it. Yeah. Be very contextual. I haven't read it since high school and I love to read it again. I love his work. So maybe I'll read it tonight too. And part of the reason of sort of I've here in Texas, people have been so friendly that I've been nonstop eating like brisket with incredible people, a lot of whiskey as well. So I gained quite a bit of weight, which I'm embracing. It's okay. But I am also aware as I'm fasting that like I have a lot of fat for, for to, to run on. Like I have a lot of like natural resources on my body. You've got reserves. Reserves. You got reserves, yeah. And that's, that's really cool. You know, there's like a re this whole thing, this biology works well. Like I can go a long time because of the, the longterm investing in terms of brisket that I've been doing in the weeks before. So it's all training. It's all training. All prep work. All prep work. Yeah. So, okay. You open a bunch of doors, one of which is music. I, so I got to walk in at least for a brief moment. I love guitar. I love music. You founded a music company, but you're also a musician yourself. You know, let me ask the big ridiculous question first. What's the greatest song of all time? Greatest song of all time. Okay. Wow. It's, it's going to obviously very dramatically from genre to genre. So like you, I like guitar, perhaps like you, although I've dabbled in, in inhaling every genre of music that I can almost practically imagine. I keep coming back to, you know, the sound of bass, guitar, drum, keyboards, voice. I love that style of music and added to it. I think a lot of really cool electronic production makes something that's really, really new and hybridy and awesome. But, you know, and that kind of like guitar based rock I think I've got to go with won't get fooled again by the who. It is such an epic song. It's got so much grandeur to it. It uses the synthesizers that were available at the time. This has got to be, I think, 1972, 73, which are very, very primitive to our ears, but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful way that I can't imagine somebody with the greatest synth array conceivable by today's technology could do a better job of in the context of that song. And it's, you know, almost operatic. So I would say in that genre, the genre of, you know, rock that would be my nomination. I'm totally in my brain. Pinball Wizard is overriding everything else, but it was so like, I can't even imagine the song. Well, I would say, ironically, with Pinball Wizard. So that came from the movie Tommy. And in the movie, Tommy, the rival of Tommy, the reigning pinball champ was Elton John. And so there are a couple of versions of Pinball Wizard out there. One sung by Roger Daltrey of The Who, which a purist would say, hey, that's the real pinball wizard. But the version that is sung by Elton John in the movie, which is available to those who are ambitious and want to dig for it, that's even better in my mind. Yeah, the covers. And I, for myself, I was thinking, what is the song for me? They answered that question. I think that changes day to day, too. I was realizing that. Of course, but for me, somebody who values lyrics as well and the emotion in the song. By the way, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was a close one. But the number one is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt that is, there's something so powerful about that song, about that cover, about that performance. Maybe another one is the cover of Sound of Silence. Maybe there's something about covers for me. So whose cover sounds? Because Simon and Garfunkel, I think, did the original recording of that, right? So which cover is it that? There's a cover by Disturbed. It's a metal band, which is so interesting because I'm really not into that kind of metal. But he does a pure vocal performance. So he's not doing a metal performance. I would say it's one of the greatest people should see it. It's like 400 million views or something like that. It's probably the greatest live vocal performance I've ever heard is Disturbed covering Sound of Silence. I'll listen to it as soon as I get home. And that song came to life to me in a way that Simon and Garfunkel never did. For me with Simon and Garfunkel, there's not a pain, there's not an anger, there's not power to their performance. It's almost like this melancholy, I don't know. Well, I guess there's a lot of beauty to it, objectively beautiful. I think, I never thought of this until now, but I think if you put entirely different lyrics on top of it, unless they were joyous, which would be weird, it wouldn't necessarily lose that much. There's just a beauty in the harmonizing. It's soft and you're right. It's not dripping with emotion. The vocal performance is not dripping with emotion, it's dripping with technical harmonizing brilliance and beauty. Now, if you compare that to the Disturbed cover or the Johnny Cash's Hurt cover, when you walk away, it's haunting. It stays with you for a long time. There's certain performances that will just stay with you to where, like if you watch people respond to that, and that's certainly how I felt when you listen to that, the Disturbed performance or Johnny Cash Hurt, there's a response to where you just sit there with your mouth open, kind of like paralyzed by it somehow. And I think that's what makes for a great song to where you're just like, it's not that you're like singing along or having fun, that's another way a song could be great, but where you're just like, you're in awe. If we go to listen.com and that whole fascinating era of music in the 90s, transitioning to the aughts, I remember those days, the Napster days, when piracy, from my perspective, allegedly ruled the land. What do you make of that whole era? What are the big, what was, first of all, your experiences of that era and what were the big takeaways in terms of piracy, in terms of what it takes to build a company that succeeds in that kind of digital space, in terms of music, but in terms of anything creative? Well, so for those who don't remember, which is going to be most folks, listen.com created a service called Rhapsody, which is much, much more recognizable to folks because Rhapsody became a pretty big name for reasons that I'll get into in a second. So for people who don't know their early online music history, we were the first company, so I founded, listen, I was a loan founder, and Rhapsody, we were the first service to get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels in order to distribute their music online, and we specifically did it through a mechanism which at the time struck people as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible, which was unlimited on demand streaming, which of course now it's a model that's been appropriated by Spotify and Apple and many, many others. So we were a pioneer on that front. What was really, really, really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction of the music labels to piracy, which was about 180 degrees opposite of what the reaction quote unquote should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy. So Napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access to most songs. I mean, truly obscure things could be very hard to find on Napster, but most songs with a relatively simple one click ability to download those songs and have the MP3s on their hard drives, but there was a lot that was very messy about the Napster experience. You might download a really god awful recording of that song. You may download a recording that actually wasn't that song with some prankster putting it up to sort of mess with people. You could struggle to find the song that you're looking for. You could end up finding yourself connected, it was peer to peer. You might randomly find yourself connected to somebody in Bulgaria, doesn't have a very good internet connection. So you might wait 19 minutes only for it to snap, et cetera, et cetera. And our argument to, well, actually let's start with how that hit the music labels. The music labels had been in a very, very comfortable position for many, many decades of essentially being the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists. Any given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned and they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates. In the late era of the CD, you were talking close to $20 for a compact disc that might have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own that might actually be glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure crap. And so the music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and profound pricing power to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very, very misused by the entire situation. Now along comes Napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity. And the reaction of the music industry to that was one of shock and absolute fury, which is understandable. I mean, industries do get gutted all the time, but I struggle to think of an analog of an industry that got gutted that rapidly. I mean, we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines, but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades. It wasn't something that happened, really started showing up in the numbers in a single digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or two. So the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury. I don't blame them for that. But then their reaction was catastrophic, both for themselves and almost for people like us who were trying to do the cowboy in the white hat thing. So our response to the music industry was, look, what you need to do to fight piracy, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't switch off the internet. Even if you all shut your eyes and wish very, very, very hard, the internet is not going away. And these peer to peer technologies are genies out of the bottle. And if you don't, whatever you do, don't shut down Napster because if you do, suddenly that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never, ever be able to shut off. We suggested to them is like, look, what you want to do is to create a massively better experience to piracy, something that's way better, that you sell at a completely reasonable price. And this is what it is. Don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to have acquired and paid for or pirated and have on their hard drive. Give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price. And obviously, that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion, I don't think, to anybody's ears today because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online. But in doing that, you're going to create a much, much better option to this kind of crappy, kind of rickety, kind of buggy process of acquiring MP3s. Now, unfortunately, the music industry was so angry about Napster and so forth that for essentially three and a half years, they folded their arms, stamped their feet, and boycotted the internet. So they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and were digitally modern, they gave them basically one choice. If you want to have access to digital music, we, the music industry, insist that you steal it because we are not going to sell it to you. So what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping the music because they felt quite pragmatically, well, they're not giving me any choice here. It's like a 20 year old violating the 21 drinking age. If they do that, they're not going to feel like felons. They're going to be like, this is an unreasonable law and I'm skirting it, right? So they make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music, but also technically adept at it. And when they did shut down Napster and kind of even trickier tools and like tweakier tools like Kazaa and so forth came along, people just figured out how to do it. So by the time they finally, grudgingly, it took years, allowed us to release this experience that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy, we had this enormous hole had been dug where lots of people said, music is a thing that is free and that's morally okay and I know how to get it. And so streaming took many, many, many more years to take off and become the gargantuan thing the juggernaut is today than would have happened if they'd made, pivoted to let's sell a better experience as opposed to demand that people want digital music, steal it. Like what lessons do we draw from that? Cause we're probably in the midst of living through a bunch of similar situations in different domains currently. We just don't know. There's a lot of things in this world that are really painful. Like, I mean, I don't know if you can draw perfect parallels, but fiat money versus cryptocurrency, there's a lot of currently people in power who are kind of very skeptical about cryptocurrency, although that's changing. But it's arguable it's changing way too slowly. There's a lot of people making that argument where there should be a complete like Coinbase and all this stuff switched to that. There's a lot of other domains that where a pivot, like if you pivot now, you're going to win big, but you don't pivot because you're stubborn. And it's so, I mean, like, is this just the way that companies are? A company succeeds initially and then it grows and there's a huge number of employees and managers that don't have the guts or the institutional mechanisms to do the pivot. Is that just the way of companies? Well, I think what happens, I'll use the case of the music industry. There was an economic model that had put food on the table and paid for marble lobbies and seven and even eight figure executive salaries for many, many decades, which was the physical collection of music. And then you start talking about something like unlimited streaming and it seems so ephemeral and like such a long shot that people start worrying about cannibalizing their own business and they lose sight of the fact that something illicit is cannibalizing their business at an extraordinarily fast rate. And so if they don't do it themselves, they're doomed. I mean, we used to put slides in front of these folks, this is really funny, where we said, okay, let's assume Rhapsody, we want it to be 9.99 a month and we want it to be 12 months, so it's $120 a year from the budget of a music lover. And then we were also able to get reasonably accurate statistics that showed how many CDs per year the average person who bothered to collect music, which was not all people, actually bought. And it was overwhelmingly clear that the average CD buyer spends a hell of a lot less than $120 a year on music. This is a revenue expansion, blah, blah, blah. But all they could think of, and I'm not saying this in a pejorative or patronizing way, I don't blame them, they've grown up in this environment for decades, all they could think of was the incredible margins that they had on a CD. And they would say, well, if this CD, by the mechanism that you guys are proposing, the CD that I'm selling for $17.99, somebody would need to stream those songs. We were talking about a penny of playback then, it's less than that now that the record labels get paid. But would have to stream songs from that 1,799 times, it's never gonna happen. So they were just sort of stuck in the model of this, but it's like, no, dude, but they're gonna spend money on all this other stuff. So I think people get very hung up on that. I mean, another example is really the taxi industry was not monolithic, like the music labels. There was a whole bunch of fleets and a whole bunch of cities, very, very fragmented, it's an imperfect analogy. But nonetheless, imagine if the taxi industry writ large upon seeing Uber said, oh my God, people wanna be able to hail things easily, cheaply, they don't wanna mess with cash, they wanna know how many minutes it's gonna be, they wanna know the fare in advance, and they want a much bigger fleet than what we've got. If the taxi industry had rolled out something like that with the branding of yellow taxis, universally known and kind of loved by Americans and expanded their fleet in a necessary manner, I don't think Uber or Lyft ever would have gotten a foothold. But the problem there was that real economics in the taxi industry wasn't with fares, it was with the scarcity of medallions. And so the taxi fleets, in many cases, owned gazillions of medallions whose value came from their very scarcity. So they simply couldn't pivot to that. So I think you end up having these vested interests with economics that aren't necessarily visible to outsiders who get very, very reluctant to disrupt their own model, which is why it ends up coming from the outside so frequently. So you know what it takes to build a successful startup, but you're also an investor in a lot of successful startups. Let me ask for advice. What do you think it takes to build a successful startup by way of advice? JS Well, I think it starts, I mean, everything starts and even ends with the founder. And so I think it's really, really important to look at the founder's motivations and their sophistication about what they're doing. In almost all cases that I'm familiar with and have thought hard about, you've had a founder who was deeply, deeply inculcated in the domain of technology that they were taking on. Now, what's interesting about that is you could say, no, wait, how is that possible because there's so many young founders? When you look at young founders, they're generally coming out of very nascent emerging fields of technology where simply being present and accounted for and engaged in the community for a period of even months is enough time to make them very, very deeply inculcated. I mean, you look at Marc Andreessen and Netscape. Marc had been doing visual web browsers when Netscape had been founded for what, a year and a half, but he'd created the first one in Mosaic when he was an undergrad. And the commercial internet was pre nascent in 1994 when Netscape was founded. So there's somebody who's very, very deep in their domain. Mark Zuckerberg also, social networking, very deep in his domain, even though it was nascent at the time. Lots of people doing crypto stuff. I mean, 10 years ago, even seven or eight years ago, by being a really, really vehement and engaged participant in the crypto ecosystem, you could be an expert in that. You look, however, at more established industries, take Salesforce.com. Salesforce automation, pretty mature field when it got started. Who's the executive and the founder? Marc Benioff, who has spent 13 years at Oracle and was an investor in Siebel Systems, which ended up being Salesforce's main competition. So more established, you need the entrepreneur to be very, very deep in the technology and the culture of the space because you need that entrepreneur, that founder to have just an unbelievably accurate intuitive sense for where the puck is going. And that only comes from being very deep. So that is sort of factor number one. And the next thing is that that founder needs to be charismatic and or credible, or ideally both in exactly the right ways to be able to attract a team that is bought into that vision and is bought into that founder's intuitions being correct and not just the team, obviously, but also the investors. So it takes a certain personality type to pull that off. Then the next thing I'm still talking about the founder is a relentlessness and indeed a monomania to put this above things that might rationally, should perhaps rationally supersede it for a period of time to just relentlessly pivot when pivoting is called for and it's always called for. I mean, think of even very successful companies like how many times did Facebook pivot? Newsfeed was something that was completely alien to the original version of Facebook and came foundationally important. How many times did Google, how many times at any given, how many times has Apple pivoted? That founder energy and DNA when the founder moves on the DNA that's been inculcated with a company has to have that relentlessness and that ability to pivot and pivot and pivot without being worried about sacred cows. And then the last thing I'll say about the founder before I get to the rest of the team and that'll be mercifully brief is the founder has to be obviously a really great hirer but just important a very good firer. And firing is a horrific experience for both people involved in it. It is a wrenching emotional experience. And being good at realizing when this particular person is damaging the interests of the company and the team and the shareholders and having the intestinal fortitude to have that conversation and make it happen is something that most people don't have in them. And it's something that needs to be developed in most people or maybe some people have it naturally. But without that ability, that will take an A plus organization into B minus range very, very quickly. And so that's all what needs to be present in the founder. Can I just say? Sure. How damn good you are, Rob. That was brilliant. The one thing that was kind of really kind of surprising to me is having a deep technical knowledge because I think the way you expressed it, which is that allows you to be really honest with the capabilities of what like what's possible. Of course, you're often trying to do the impossible. But in order to do the impossible, you have to be quote unquote impossible. But you have to be honest with what is actually possible. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical competence. It's got to be, in my view, just a complete immersion in that emerging market. And so I can imagine there are a couple of people out there who have started really good crypto projects who themselves are right in the code, but they're immersed in the culture and through the culture and a deep understanding of what's happening and what's not happening. They can get a good intuition of what's possible, but the very first hire, I mean, a great way to solve that is to have a technical co founder and dual founder companies have become extremely common for that reason. And if you're not doing that and you're not the technical person, but you are the founder, you've got to be really great at hiring a very damn good technical person very, very fast. Can I on the founder ask you, is it possible to do this alone? There's so many people giving advice and saying that it's impossible to do the first few steps, not impossible, but much more difficult to do it alone. If we were to take the journey, especially in the software world where there's not significant investment required for it to build something up, is it possible to go to a prototype to something that essentially works and already has a huge number of customers alone? Sure. There are lots and lots of loan founder companies out there that have made an incredible difference. I mean, I'm not certainly putting rhapsody in the league of Spotify. We were too early to be Spotify, but we did an awful lot of innovation. And then after the company sold and ended up in the hands of real networks and MTV, you know, got to millions of subs, right? I was a loan founder and I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history undergrad, so I definitely wasn't very, very technical. But yeah, loan founders can absolutely work. And the advantage of a loan founder is you don't have the catastrophic potential of a falling out between founders. I mean, two founders who fall out with each other badly can rip a company to shreds because they both have an enormous amount of equity and enormous amount of power. And the capital structure is a result of that. They both have an enormous amount of moral authority with the team as a result of each having that founder role. And I have witnessed over the years many, many situations in which companies have been shredded or have suffered near fatal blows because of a falling out between founders. And the more founders you add, the more risky that becomes. I don't think there should ever almost, I mean, you never say never, but multiple founders beyond two is such an unstable and potentially treacherous situation that I would never, ever recommend going beyond two. But I do see value in the non technical sort of business and market and outside minded founder teaming up with the technical founder. There is a lot of merit to that, but there's a lot of danger in that less those two blow apart. Was it lonely for you? Unbelievably. And that's the drawback. I mean, if you're a lone founder, there is no other person that you can sit down with and tackle problems and talk them through who has precisely or nearly precisely your alignment of interests. Your most trusted board member is likely an investor and therefore at the end of the day has the interest of preferred stock in mind, not common stock. Your most trusted VP, who might own a very significant stake in the company, doesn't own anywhere near your stake in the company. And so their long term interests may well be in getting the right level of experience and credibility necessary to peel off and start their own company. Or their interests might be aligned with jumping ship and setting up with a different company, whether it's a rival or one in a completely different space. So, yeah, being a lone founder is a spectacularly lonely thing. And that's a major downside to it. What about mentorship? Because you're a mentor to a lot of people. Can you find an alleviation to that loneliness in the space of ideas with a good mentor? With a good mentor or like a mentor who's mentoring you? Yeah. Yeah, you can a great deal, particularly if it's somebody who's been through this very process and has navigated it successfully and cares enough about you and your well being to give you beautifully unvarnished advice. That can be a huge, huge thing. That can assuage things a great deal. And I had a board member who was not an investor, who basically played that role for me to a great degree. He came in maybe halfway through the company's history, though. I would have needed that the most in the very earliest days. Yeah, the loneliness, that's the whole journey of life. We're always alone, alone together. Mm hmm. It pays to embrace that. You were saying that there might be something outside of the founder that's also that you were promising to be brief on. Yeah. OK, so we talked about the founder. You were asking what makes a great startup. Yes. And great founder is thing number one, but then thing number two, and it's ginormous, is a great team. And so I said so much about the founder because one hopes or one believes that a founder who is a great hirer is going to be hiring people and in charge of critical functions like engineering and marketing and biz dev and sales and so forth, who themselves are great hirers. But what needs to radiate from the founder into the team that might be a little bit different from what's in the gene code of the founder? The team needs to be fully bought in to the, you know, the intuitions and the vision of the founder. Great. We've got that. But the team needs to have a slightly different thing, which is, you know, it's 99% obsession is execution, is to relentlessly hit the milestones, hit the objectives, hit the quarterly goals. That is, you know, 1% vision. You don't want to lose that. But execution machines, you know, people who have a demonstrated ability and a demonstrated focus on, yeah, I go from point to point to point. I try to beat and raise expectations relentlessly, never fall short, and, you know, both sort of blaze and follow the path. Not that the path is going to, I mean, blaze the trail as well. I mean, a good founder is going to trust that VP of sales to have a better sense of what it takes to build out that organization, what the milestones be. And it's going to be kind of a dialogue amongst those at the top. But, you know, execution obsession in the team is the next thing. Yeah, there's some sense where the founder, you know, you talk about sort of the space of ideas, like first principles thinking, asking big difficult questions of like future trajectories or having a big vision and big picture dreams. You can almost be a dreamer, it feels like, when you're like not the founder, but in the space of sort of leadership. But when it gets to the ground floor, there has to be execution, there has to be hitting deadlines. And sometimes those are attention. There's something about dreams that are attention with the pragmatic nature of execution. Not dreams, but sort of ambitious vision. And those have to be, I suppose, coupled. The vision in the leader and the execution in the software world, that would be the programmer or the designer. Absolutely. Amongst many other things, you're an incredible conversationalist, a podcast, you host a podcast called After On. I mean, there's a million questions I want to ask you here, but one at the highest level, what do you think makes for a great conversation? I would say two things, one of two things, and ideally both of two things. One is if something is beautifully architected, whether it's done deliberately and methodically and willfully, as when I do it, or whether that just emerges from the conversation. But something that's beautifully architected, that can create something that's incredibly powerful and memorable, or something where there's just extraordinary chemistry. And so with All In, or I'll go way back. You might remember the NPR show Car Talk, I couldn't care less about auto mechanics myself. Yeah, that's right. But I love that show because the banter between those two guys was just beyond, it was without any parallel, right? And some kind of edgy podcasts like Red Scare is just really entertaining to me because the banter between the women on that show is just so good, and All In and that kind of thing. So I think it's a combination of sort of the arc and the chemistry. And I think because the arc can be so important, that's why very, very highly produced podcasts like This American Life, obviously a radio show, but I think of a podcast because that's how I always consume it, or Criminal, or a lot of what Wondery does and so forth. That is real documentary making, and that requires a big team and a big budget relative to the kinds of things you and I do, but nonetheless, then you got that arc, and that can be really, really compelling. But if we go back to conversation, I think it's a combination of structure and chemistry. Yeah, and I've actually personally have lost, I used to love This American Life, and for some reason because it lacks the possibility of magic, it's engineered magic. I've fallen off of it myself as well. I mean, when I fell madly in love with it during the aughts, it was the only thing going. They were really smart to adopt podcasting as a distribution mechanism early. But yeah, I think that maybe there's a little bit less magic there now because I think they have agendas other than necessarily just delighting their listeners with quirky stories, which I think is what it was all about back in the day and some other things. Is there like a memorable conversation that you've had on the podcast, whether it was because it was wild and fun or one that was exceptionally challenging, maybe challenging to prepare for, that kind of thing? Is there something that stands out in your mind that you can draw an insight from? Yeah, I mean, this no way diminishes the episodes that will not be the answer to these two questions, but an example of something that was really, really challenging to prepare for was George Church. So as I'm sure you know and as I'm sure many of your listeners know, he is one of the absolute leading lights in the field of synthetic biology. He's also unbelievably prolific. His lab is large and has all kinds of efforts have spun out of that. And what I wanted to make my George Church episode about was, first of all, grounding people into what is this thing called Symbio. And that required me to learn a hell of a lot more about Symbio than I knew going into it. So there was just this very broad, I mean, I knew much more than the average person going into that episode, but there was this incredible breadth of grounding that I needed to get myself in the domain. And then George does so many interesting things, there's so many interesting things emitting from his lab that, you know, and he and I had a really good dialogue, he was a great guide going into it. Minnowing it down to the three to four that I really wanted us to focus on to create a sense of wonder and magic in the listener of what could be possible from this very broad spectrum domain, that was a doozy of a challenge. That was a tough, tough, tough one to prepare for. Now, in terms of something that was just wild and fun, unexpected, I mean, by the time we sat down to interview, I knew where we were going to go. But just in terms of the idea space, Don Hoffman, yeah, so Don Hoffman is, again, some listeners probably know because he's, I think I was the first podcaster to interview him. I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with him, but he has this unbelievably contrarian take on the nature of reality, but it is contrarian in a way that all the ideas are highly internally consistent and snap together in a way that's just delightful. And it seems as radically violating of our intuitions and as radically violating of the probable nature of reality as anything that one can encounter. But an analogy that he uses, which is very powerful, which is what intuition could possibly be more powerful than the notion that there is a single unitary direction called down. When we're on this big flat thing for which there is a thing called down. And we all know, I mean, that's the most intuitive thing that one could probably think of. And we all know that that ain't true. So my conversation with Don Hoffman was just wild and full of plot twists and interesting stuff. And the interesting thing about the wildness of his ideas, it's to me at least as a listener, coupled with, he's a good listener and he empathizes with the people who challenge his ideas. Like what's a better way to phrase that? He is a welcoming of challenge in a way that creates a really fun conversation. Oh, totally. Yeah. He loves a parry or a jab, whatever the word is at his argument. He honors it. He's a very, very gentle and noncombatative soul, but then he is very good and takes great evident joy in responding to that in a way that expands your understanding of his thinking. Let me as a small tangent of tying up together our previous conversation about listening.com and streaming and Spotify and the world of podcasting. So we've been talking about this magical medium of podcasting. I have a lot of friends at Spotify in the high positions of Spotify as well. I worry about Spotify and podcasting and the future of podcasting in general that moves podcasting in the place of maybe walled gardens of sorts. Since you've had a foot in both worlds, have a foot in both worlds, do you worry as well about the future of podcasting? Yeah. I think walled gardens are really toxic to the medium that they start balkanizing. So to take an example, I'll take two examples. With music, it was a very, very big deal that at Rhapsody we were the first company to get full catalog licenses from all back then there were five major music labels and also hundreds and hundreds of indies because you needed to present the listener with a sense that basically everything is there and there is essentially no friction to discovering that which is new and you can wander this realm and all you really need is a good map, whether it is something that somebody, the editorial team assembled or a good algorithm or whatever it is, but a good map to wander this domain. When you start walling things off, A, you undermine the joy of friction free discovery, which is an incredibly valuable thing to deliver to your customer, both from a business standpoint and simply from a humanistic standpoint of do you want to bring delight to people? But it also creates an incredible opening vector for piracy. And so something that's very different from the Rhapsody slash Spotify slash et cetera like experience is what we have now in video. Like wow, is that show on Hulu, is it on Netflix, is it on something like IFC channel, is it on Discovery Plus, is it here, is it there? And the more frustration and toe stubbing that people encounter when they are seeking something and they're already paying a very respectable amount of money per month to have access to content and they can't find it, the more that happens, the more people are going to be driven to piracy solutions like to hell with it. Never know where I'm going to find something, I never know what it's going to cost. Oftentimes really interesting things are simply unavailable. That surprises me the number of times that I've been looking for things I don't even think are that obscure that are just, it says not available in your geography, period, mister. So I think that that's a mistake. And then the other thing is for podcasters and lovers of podcasting, we should want to resist this walled garden thing because A, it does smother this friction free or eradicate this friction free discovery unless you want to sign up for lots of different services. And also dims the voice of somebody who might be able to have a far, far, far bigger impact by reaching far more neurons with their ideas. I'm going to use an example from I guess it was probably the 90s or maybe it was the aughts of Howard Stern, who had the biggest megaphone or maybe the second biggest after Oprah megaphone in popular culture. And because he was syndicated on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of radio stations at a time when terrestrial broadcast was the main thing people listened to in their car, no more obviously. But when he decided to go over to satellite radio, I can't remember if it was XM or Sirius, maybe they'd already merged at that point. But when he did that, he made, you know, totally his right to do it, a financial calculation that they were offering him a nine figure sum to do that. But his audience, because not a lot of people were subscribing to satellite radio at that point, his audience probably collapsed by, I wouldn't be surprised if it was as much as 95%. And so the influence that he had on the culture and his ability to sort of shape conversation and so forth just got muted. Yeah, and also there's a certain sense, especially in modern times, where the walled gardens naturally lead to, I don't know if there's a term for it, but people who are not creatives starting to have power over the creatives. Right. And even if they don't stifle it, if they're providing, you know, incentives within the platform to shape, shift, or, you know, even completely mutate or distort the show, I mean, imagine somebody has got, you know, a reasonably interesting idea for a podcast and they get signed up with, let's say Spotify, and Spotify is going to give them financing to get the thing spun up. And that's great. And Spotify is going to give them a certain amount of really, you know, powerful placement, you know, within the visual field of listeners. But Spotify has conditions for that. They say, look, you know, we think that your podcast will be much more successful if you dumb it down about 60%. If you add some, you know, silly, dirty jokes, if you do this, you do that. And suddenly the person who is dependent upon Spotify for permission to come into existence and is really dependent, really wants to please them, you know, to get that money in, to get that placement, really wants to be successful. And all of a sudden you're having a dialogue between a complete non creative, some marketing, you know, sort of data analytic person at Spotify and a creative that's going to shape what that show is, you know, so that could be much more common. And ultimately having the aggregate, an even bigger impact than, you know, the cancellation, let's say if somebody who says the wrong word or voices the wrong idea, I mean, that's kind of what you have, not kind of, that's what you have with film and TV is that so much influence is exerted over the storyline and the plots and the character arcs and all kinds of things by executives who are completely alien to the experience and the skill set of being a show runner in television, being a director in film that, you know, is meant to like, oh, we can't piss off the Chinese market here or we can't say that or we need to have, you know, cast members that have precisely these demographics reflected or whatever it is that, you know, and obviously despite that extraordinary, at least TV shows are now being made, um, you know, in terms of film, I think the quality has, has nosedived of the average, let's say, say American film coming out of a major studio. The average quality and my view has nosedived over the past decade as it's kind of, everything's gotta be a superhero franchise, but you know, great stuff gets made despite that. But I have to assume that in some cases, at least in perhaps many cases, greater stuff would be made if there was less interference from non creative executives. It's like the flip side of that though, and this is, was the pitch of Spotify because I've heard their pitch is Netflix from everybody I've heard that I've spoken with about Netflix is they actually empower the creator. I don't know what the heck they do, but they do a good job of giving creators, even the crazy ones like Tim Dillon, like Joe Rogan, like comedians, freedom to be their crazy selves. And the result is like some of the greatest television, some of the greatest cinema, whatever you call it, ever made. True. Right. And I don't know what the heck they're doing. It's a relative thing. It's not able from what I understand. It's a relative thing. They're interfering far, far, far less than, you know, NBC or, you know, AMC would have interfered. It's a relative thing, and obviously they're the ones writing the checks and they're the ones giving the platforms. They've every right to their own influence, obviously. But my understanding is that they're relatively way more hands off and that has had a demonstrable effect because I agree. Some of the greatest, you know, video produced video content of all time, an incredibly inordinate percentage of that is coming out from Netflix in just a few years when the history of cinema goes back many, many decades. And Spotify wants to be that for podcasting, and I hope they do become that for podcasting, but I'm wearing my skeptical goggles or skeptical hat, whatever the heck it is, because it's not easy to do and it requires, it requires letting go of power, giving power to the creatives. It requires pivoting, which large companies, even as innovative as Spotify is, still now a large company, pivoting into a whole new space is very tricky and difficult. So I'm skeptical, but hopeful. What advice would you give to a young person today about life, about career? We talked about startups, we talked about music, we talked about the end of human civilization. Is there advice you would give to a young person today, maybe in college, maybe in high school about their life? Let's see, there's so many domains you can advise on, and I'm not going to give advice on life because I fear that I would drift into hallmark bromides that really wouldn't be all that distinctive, and they might be entirely true. Sometimes the greatest insights about life turn out to be the kinds of things you'd see on a hallmark card, so I'm going to steer clear of that. On a career level, one thing that I think is unintuitive but unbelievably powerful is to focus not necessarily on being in the top sliver of 1% in excelling at one domain that's important and valuable, but to think in terms of intersections of two domains, which are rare but valuable, and there's a couple reasons for this. The first is in an incredibly competitive world that is so much more competitive than it was when I was coming out of school, radically more competitive than when I was coming out of school, to navigate your way to the absolute pinnacle of any domain. Let's say you want to be really, really great at Python, pick a language, whatever it is. You want to be one of the world's greatest Python developers, JavaScript, whatever your language is. Hopefully it's not Cobalt. By the way, if you listen to this, I am actually looking for a Cobalt expert to interview because I find the language fascinating, and there's not many of them, so please, if you know a world expert in Cobalt or Fortran, both, actually. Or if you are one. Or if you are one, please email me. Yeah. So, I mean, if you're going out there and you want to be in the top sliver 1% of Python developers, it's a very, very difficult thing to do, particularly if you want to be number one in the world, something like that. And I'll use an analogy as I had a friend in college who was on a track and indeed succeeded at that to become an Olympic medalist, and I think it was 100 meter breaststroke. And he mortgaged a significant percentage of his college life to that goal, or I should say dedicated or invested or whatever you wanted to say. But he didn't participate in a lot of the social, a lot of the late night, a lot of the this, a lot of the that, because he was training so much. And obviously, he also wanted to keep up with his academics. And at the end of the day, the story has a happy ending in that he did medal in that. Bronze, not gold, but holy cow, anybody who gets an Olympic medal, that's an extraordinary thing. And at that moment, he was one of the top three people on earth at that thing. But wow, how hard to do that. How many thousands of other people went down that path and made similar sacrifices and didn't get there. It's very, very hard to do that. Whereas, and I'll use a personal example. When I came out of business school, I went to a good business school and learned the things that were there to be learned. And I came out and I entered a world with lots of MBAs. Harvard Business School, by the way. Okay, yes, it was Harvard, it's true. You're the first person who went there who didn't say where you went, which is beautiful. I appreciate that. It's one of the greatest business schools in the world. It's a whole nother fascinating conversation about that world. But anyway, yes. But anyway, so I learned the things that you learn getting an MBA from a top program. And I entered a world that had hundreds of thousands of people who had MBAs, probably hundreds of thousands who have them from top 10 programs. So I was not particularly great at being an MBA person. I was inexperienced relative to most of them and there were a lot of them, but it was okay MBA person, right, newly minted. But then as it happened, I found my way into working on the commercial internet in 1994. So I went to a, at the time, giant hot computing company called Silicon Graphics, which had enough heft and enough head count that they could take on and experienced MBAs and try to train them in the world of Silicon Valley. But within that company that had an enormous amount of surface area and was touching a lot of areas and had unbelievably smart people at the time, it was not surprising that SGI started doing really interesting and innovative and trailblazing stuff on the internet before almost anybody else. And part of the reason was that our founder, Jim Clark, went off to cofound Netscape with Mark Andreessen. So the whole company is like, wait, what was that? What's this commercial internet thing? So I ended up in that group. Now in terms of being a commercial internet person or a worldwide web person, again, I was in that case, barely credentialed, I couldn't write a stitch of code, but I had a pretty good mind for grasping the business and cultural significance of this transition. And this was, again, we were talking earlier about emerging areas. Within a few months, you know, I was in the relatively top echelon of people in terms of just sheer experience, because like, let's say it was five months into the program, there were only so many people who'd been doing worldwide web stuff commercially for five months, you know? And then what was interesting though was the intersection of those two things. The commercial web, as it turned out, grew into an unbelievable vastness. And so by being a pretty good, okay web person and a pretty good, okay MBA person, that intersection put me in a very rare group, which was web oriented MBAs. And in those early days, you could probably count on your fingers the number of people who came out of really competitive programs who were doing stuff full time on the internet. And there was a greater appetite for great software developers in the internet domain, but there was an appetite and a real one and a rapidly growing one for MBA thinkers who were also seasoned and networked in the emerging world of the commercial worldwide web. And so finding an intersection of two things you can be pretty good at, but is a rare intersection and a special intersection is probably a much easier way to make yourself distinguishable and in demand from the world than trying to be world class at this one thing. So in the intersection is where there's to be discovered opportunity and success. That's really interesting. There's actually more intersection of fields and fields themselves, right? So yeah, I mean, I'll give you kind of a funny hypothetical here, but it's one I've been thinking about a little bit. There's a lot of people in crypto right now. It'd be hard to be in the top percentile of crypto people, whether it comes from just having a sheer grasp of the industry, a great network within the industry, technological skills, whatever you want to call it. And then there's this parallel world and orthogonal world called crop insurance. And I'm sure that's a big world. Crop insurance is a very, very big deal, particularly in the wealthy and industrialized world where people through sophisticated financial markets, rule of law and large agricultural concerns that are worried about that. Somewhere out there is somebody who is pretty crypto savvy, but probably not top 1%, but also has kind of been in the crop insurance world and understands that a hell of a lot better than almost anybody who's ever had anything to do with cryptocurrency. And so I think that decentralized finance, DeFi, one of the interesting and I think very world positive things that I think it's almost inevitably will be bringing to the world is crop insurance for small holding farmers. I mean, people who have tiny, tiny plots of land in places like India, et cetera, where there is no crop insurance available to them because just the financial infrastructure doesn't exist. But it's highly imaginable that using Oracle networks that are trusted outside deliverers of factual information about rainfall in a particular area, you can start giving drought insurance to folks like this. The right person to come up with that idea is not a crypto whiz who doesn't know a blasted thing about small holding farmers. The right person to come up with that is not a crop insurance whiz who isn't quite sure what Bitcoin is, but somebody occupies that intersection. That's just one of gazillion examples of things that are going to come along for somebody who occupies the right intersection of skills, but isn't necessarily the number one person at either one of those expertises. That's making me kind of wonder about my own little things that I'm average at and seeing where the intersections that could be exploited. That's pretty profound. So we talked quite a bit about the end of the world and how we're both optimistic about us figuring our way out. Unfortunately, for now at least, both you and I are going to die one day, way too soon. First of all, that sucks. It does. I mean, one, I'd like to ask if you ponder your own mortality, how does that kind of, what kind of wisdom inside does it give you about your own life? And broadly, do you think about your life and what the heck it's all about? Yeah, with respect to pondering mortality, I do try to do that as little as possible because there's not a lot I can do about it. But it's inevitably there. And I think that what it does when you think about it in the right way is it makes you realize how unbelievably rare and precious the moments that we have here are, and therefore how consequential the decisions that we make about how to spend our time are. You know, like, do you do those 17 nagging emails or do you have dinner with somebody who's really important to you who haven't seen in three and a half years? If you had an infinite expanse of time in front of you, you might well rationally conclude I'm going to do those emails because collectively they're rather important. And I have tens of thousands of years to catch up with my buddy, Tim. But I think the scarcity of the time that we have helps us choose the right things if we're tuned to that and we're attuned to the context that mortality puts over the consequence of every decision we make of how to spend our time. That doesn't mean that we're all very good at it, it doesn't mean I'm very good at it. But it does add a dimension of choice and significance to everything that we elect to do. It's kind of funny that you say you try to think about it as little as possible. I would venture to say you probably think about the end of human civilization more than you do about your own life. You're probably right. Because that feels like a problem that could be solved. Right. Whereas the end of my own life can't be solved. Well, I don't know. I mean, there's transhumanists who have incredible optimism about near or intermediate future therapies that could really, really change human lifespan. I really hope that they're right, but I don't have a whole lot to add to that project because I'm not a life scientist myself. I'm in part also afraid of immortality. Not as much, but close to as I'm afraid of death itself. So it feels like the things that give us meaning give us meaning because of the scarcity that surrounds it. Agreed. I'm almost afraid of having too much of stuff. Yeah. Although, if there was something that said, this can expand your enjoyable wellspan or lifespan by 75 years, I'm all in. Well, part of the reason I wanted to not do a startup, really the only thing that worries me about doing a startup is if it becomes successful. Because of how much I dream, how much I'm driven to be successful, that there will not be enough silence in my life, enough scarcity to appreciate the moments I appreciate now as deeply as I appreciate them now. There's a simplicity to my life now that it feels like you might disappear with success. I wouldn't say might. I think if you start a company that has ambitious investors, ambitious for the returns that they'd like to see, that has ambitious employees, ambitious for the career trajectories they want to be on and so forth, and is driven by your own ambition, there's a profound monogamy to that. It is very, very hard to carve out time to be creative, to be peaceful, to be so forth because of with every new employee that you hire, that's one more mouth to feed. With every new investor that you take on, that's one more person to whom you really do want to deliver great returns. As the valuation ticks up, the threshold to delivering great returns for your investors always rises. There is an extraordinary monogamy to being a founder CEO above all for the first few years and first in people's minds could be as many as 10 or 15. But I guess the fundamental calculation is whether the passion for the vision is greater than the cost you'll pay. Right. It's all opportunity cost. It's all opportunity cost in terms of time and attention and experience. And some things like I'm, everyone's different, but I'm less calculating some things you just can't help. Sometimes you just dive in. Oh yeah. I mean you can do balance sheets all you want on this versus that and what's the right. I mean I've done it in the past and it's never worked. It's always been like, okay, what's my gut screaming at me to do? But about the meaning of life, you ever think about that? Yeah. I mean, this is where I'm going to go all hallmarking on you, but I think that there's a few things and one of them is certainly love and the love that we experience and feel and cause to well up in others is something that's just so profound and goes beyond almost anything else that we can do. And whether that is something that lies in the past, like maybe there was somebody that you were dating and loved very profoundly in college and haven't seen in years, I don't think the significance of that love is any way diminished by the fact that it had a notional beginning and end. The fact is that you experience that and you trigger that in somebody else and that happened. And it doesn't have to be, certainly it doesn't have to be love of romantic partners alone. It's family members, it's love between friends, it's love between creatures. I had a dog for 10 years who passed away a while ago and experienced unbelievable love with her. It can be love of that which you create and we were talking about the flow states that we enter and the pride or lack of pride or in the Minsky case, your hatred of that which you've done. But nonetheless, the creations that we make and whether it's the love or the joy or the engagement or the perspective shift that that cascades into other minds, I think that's a big, big, big part of the meaning of life. It's not something that everybody participates in necessarily, although I think we all do at least in a very local level by the example that we set, by the interactions that we have. But for people who create works that travel far and reach people they'll never meet, that reach countries they'll never visit, that reach people perhaps that come along and come across their ideas or their works or their stories or their aesthetic creations of other sorts long after they're dead, I think that's really, really big part of the fabric of the meaning of life. So all these things like love and creation, I think really is what it's all about. And part of love is also the loss of it. There's a Louis episode with Louis C.K. where an old gentleman is giving him advice that sometimes the sweetest parts of love is when you lose it and you remember it, sort of you reminisce on the loss of it. And there's some aspect in which, and I have many of those in my own life, that almost like the memories of it and the intensity of emotion you still feel about it is like the sweetest part. You're like, after saying goodbye, you relive it. So that goodbye is also a part of love. The loss of it is also a part of love. I don't know, it's back to that scarcity. I won't say the loss is the best part personally, but it definitely is an aspect of it. And the grief you might feel about something that's gone makes you realize what a big deal it was. Speaking of which, this particular journey we went on together come to an end. So I have to say goodbye and I hate saying goodbye. Rob, this is truly an honor. I've really been a big fan. People should definitely check out your podcast, your Master What You Do in the conversation space, in the writing space. It's been an incredible honor that you would show up here and spend this time with me. I really, really appreciate it. Well, it's been a huge honor to be here as well, and also a fan in heaven for a long time. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rob Reed. And thank you to Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Plato. We can easily forgive a child who's afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks | Lex Fridman Podcast #193

The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author, cohost of the Dark Horse podcast, and, as he says, reluctant radical. Even though we've never met or spoken before this, we both felt like we've been friends for a long time, I don't agree on everything with Brett, but I'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird and wonderful world of ours. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harmon's show, ExpressVPN, Magic Spoon, and Four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID 19 and about science broadly. I think science is beautiful and powerful. It is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the problems of the world. But as an institution, it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature, to fear, to greed, power, and ego. 2020 is the story of all of these that has both scientific triumph and tragedy. We needed great leaders and we didn't get them. What we needed is leaders who communicate in an honest, transparent, and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we know and the large scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions. I believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated the suffering of millions of people. Let me mention five of the categories of solutions. Masks, at home testing, anonymized contact tracing, antiviral drugs, and vaccines. Within each of these categories, institutional leaders should have constantly asked and answered publicly, honestly, the following three questions. One, what data do we have on the solution and what studies are we running to get more and better data? Two, given the current data and uncertainty, how effective and how safe is the solution? Three, what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacturing distribution of the solution? In the service of these questions, no voices should have been silenced, no ideas left off the table. Open data, open science, open, honest scientific communication and debate was the way, not censorship. There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous, but the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we'll lose our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the wellbeing and the existence of humans on Earth. This conversation with Brett is less about the ideas we talk about. We agree on some, disagree on others. It is much more about the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas. This freedom is our only hope. Brett should never have been censored. I asked Brett to do this podcast to show solidarity and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here's my conversation with Brett Weinstein. What to you is beautiful about the study of biology, the science, the engineering, the philosophy of it? It's a very interesting question. I must say at one level, it's not a conscious thing. I can say a lot about why as an adult I find biology compelling, but as a kid I was completely fascinated with animals. I loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did and that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult. But I think in the same way that one is drawn to a person, I was drawn to the never ending series of near miracles that exists across biological nature. When you see a living organism, do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective of like this entire thing that moves around in this world or do you see from an engineering perspective that first principles almost down to the physics, like the little components that build up hierarchies that you have cells, the first proteins and cells and organs and all that kind of stuff. So do you see low level or do you see high level? Well, the human mind is a strange thing and I think it's probably a bit like a time sharing machine in which I have different modules. We don't know enough about biology for them to connect. So they exist in isolation and I'm always aware that they do connect, but I basically have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to. I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale, a different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account for what we can see from the outside. And I think that probably sounds really complicated, but one of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing so for one, really not even just my adult life for my whole life is that it becomes second nature. And when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that, we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that. But of course, what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, right? They are in a zone in which they are in such command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around a landscape so that they always land on their feet. And I would just say for anyone who hasn't found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile. It's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics, many things our ancestors didn't even have access to. And that flexibility of humans, that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel means really, the world is your oyster. You can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand it. And it is well worth having at least one topic like that. You mean embracing the full adaptability of both the body and the mind. So like, I don't know what to attribute the parkour to, like biomechanics of how our bodies can move, or is it the mind? Like how much percent wise, is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking about, or is it just all the mind? The way to think about creatures is that every creature is two things simultaneously. A creature is a machine of sorts, right? It's not a machine in the, I call it an aqueous machine, right? And it's run by an aqueous computer, right? So it's not identical to our technological machines. But every creature is both a machine that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving, to reproduce. It is also a potential. So each creature is potentially, for example, the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it. And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of the potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future because change will throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet. So the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform, and we have the ability to swap out our software to exist in many, many different niches. And I was once watching an interview with this British group of parkour experts who were being, they were discussing what it is they do and how it works. And what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping into deep monkey stuff, right? And I thought, yeah, that's about right. And anybody who is proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding, you know, has the experience of flying down the hill on skis, for example, bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next. And if you really pay attention, you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator. It's there, it's involved in the experience, but it's not driving. Some part of you knows how to ski, and it's not the part of you that knows how to think. And I would just say that what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly. And, you know, I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics. You know, if you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it, how would you do it? It would have to look something like this. There's a certain kind of magic, you're right, with the consciousness being an observer. When you play guitar, for example, or piano for me, music, when you get truly lost in it, I don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music, the kind of the loudness of the music going up and down, the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes, all those things, that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind. It is just observing, and yet it's somehow intricately involved. More, like, because you mentioned parkour, the dance is like that too. When you start up in tango dancing, if when you truly lose yourself in it, then it's just like you're an observer, and how the hell is the body able to do that? And not only that, it's the physical motion is also creating the emotion, the, like, the damn is good to be alive feeling. So, but then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in. I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that. We're talking offline about Boston Dynamics robots. They've recently been, they did both parkour, they did flips, they've also done some dancing, and it's something I think a lot about because what most people don't realize because they don't look deep enough is those robots are hard coded to do those things. The robots didn't figure it out by themselves, and yet the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human is that process of figuring out, of making mistakes, and then there's something about overcoming those challenges and the mistakes and, like, figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the dancing or just movement is what it means to be human. That learning process, so that's what I want to do with the, almost as a fun side thing with the Boston Dynamics robots, is to have them learn and see what they figure out, even if they make mistakes. I want to let Spot make mistakes and in so doing discover what it means to be alive, discover beauty, because I think that's the essential aspect of mistakes. Boston Dynamics folks want Spot to be perfect because they don't want Spot to ever make mistakes because it wants to operate in the factories, it wants to be very safe and so on. For me, if you construct the environment, if you construct a safe space for robots and allow them to make mistakes, something beautiful might be discovered, but that requires a lot of brain power. So Spot is currently very dumb and I'm gonna give it a brain. So first make it see, currently it can't see, meaning computer vision, it has to understand its environment, it has to see all the humans, but then also has to be able to learn, learn about its movement, learn how to use its body to communicate with others, all those kinds of things that dogs know how to do well, humans know how to do somewhat well. I think that's a beautiful challenge, but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes. Well, I think your objective is laudable, but you're gonna realize that the Boston Dynamics folks are right the first time Spot poops on your rug. I hear the same thing about kids and so on. I still wanna have kids. No, you should, it's a great experience. So let me step back into what you said in a couple of different places. One, I have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial intelligence is a proper development, right? It is no accident, it is no mere coincidence that human beings are the most dominant species on planet Earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any creature on Earth by far, right? The development is the key to the flexibility. And so the capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image, it's the flip side of our helplessness at birth. So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you do not end up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly. But I also wanna point out, you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis, right? If you watch a tennis game, you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play. You cannot imagine that if you've ever played ping pong decently. A volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious mind, if your reactions had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play. So you can detect that your conscious mind, while very much present, isn't there. And you can also detect where consciousness does usefully intrude. If you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not effective, and you will start thinking about what might be, how do you position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you off guard. And this, I believe, is we highly conscious folks, those of us who try to think through things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness for the highest kind of thinking. And I really think that this is an error. Consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking. What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code. And it doesn't run very fast. It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances. But once the code is roughed in, it gets driven into the unconscious layer, and you become highly effective at whatever it is. And from that point, your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written. And so I don't exactly know how one would establish this, how one would demonstrate it. But it must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right? Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code so you can see how it would have done comparatively. But there's gotta be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in. And frankly, I think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles. Very often, when I get good at something, I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it. I get better at it when I'm not doing it, especially if there's time to sleep and think on it. So there's some sort of new program swapping in for old program phenomenon, which will be a lot easier to see in machines. It's gonna be hard with the wetware. I like, I mean, it is true, because somebody that played, I played tennis for many years, I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis is when the conscious mind is a spectator. So the compiled code is the highest form of being human. And then consciousness is just some specific compiler. You used to have like Borland C++ compiler. You could just have different kind of compilers. Ultimately, the thing that by which we measure the power of life, the intelligence of life is the compiled code. And you can probably do that compilation all kinds of ways. Yeah, I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't. I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by the just the space on the court, you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing. But when you shrink the court down, It becomes obvious. It becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle. And weirdly for me, I would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation. But if I have to give a presentation, especially if I have not overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon when I'm giving the presentation. My conscious mind is there watching some other part of me present, which is a little jarring, I have to say. Well, that means you've gotten good at it. Not let the conscious mind get in the way of the flow of words. Yeah, that's the sensation to be sure. And that's the highest form of podcasting too. I mean, that's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket, like Joe Rogan, just having fun and just losing themselves. And that's something I aspire to as well, just losing yourself in conversation. Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people, like I'm such an introvert. I'm scared. I was scared before you showed up. I'm scared right now. There's just anxiety. There's just, it's a giant mess. It's hard to lose yourself. It's hard to just get out of the way of your own mind. Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that. Your conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain. But when you do get into that zone when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language, although maybe you present in Russian and it happens. But do you ever hear yourself say something and you think, oh, that's really good, right? Like you didn't come up with it, some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it? I don't think I've ever heard myself in that way because I have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head at, why the hell did you say that? There's a very self critical voice that's much louder. So I'm very, maybe I need to deal with that voice, but it's been like, what is it called? Like a megaphone just screaming so I can't hear the other voice that says, good job, you said that thing really nicely. So I'm kind of focused right now on the megaphone person in the audience versus the positive, but that's definitely something to think about. It's been productive, but the place where I find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments when I don't talk, when I listen to the world around me, when I listen to others, when I talk, I'm extremely self critical in my mind. When I produce anything out into the world that originated with me, like any kind of creation, extremely self critical. It's good for productivity, for always striving to improve and so on. It might be bad for just appreciating the things you've created. I'm a little bit with Marvin Minsky on this where he says the key to a productive life is to hate everything you've ever done in the past. I didn't know he said that. I must say, I resonate with it a bit. And unfortunately, my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world, and I effectively watch almost none of it. I can't stand it. Yeah, what do you make of that? I don't know. I just yesterday read Metamorphosis by Kafka, we read Metamorphosis by Kafka where he turns into a giant bug because of the stress that the world puts on him. His parents put on him to succeed. And I think that you have to find the balance because if you allow the self critical voice to become too heavy, the burden of the world, the pressure that the world puts on you to be the best version of yourself and so on to strive, then you become a bug and that's a big problem. And then the world turns against you because you're a bug. You become some kind of caricature of yourself. I don't know, you become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself and then the world moves on. That's the story. That's a lovely story. I do think this is one of these places, and frankly, you could map this onto all of modern human experience, but this is one of these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves. So I used to talk to students about the question of dwelling on things. Dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad and it can't possibly be bad. It wouldn't exist, the tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was bad. So what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility. And that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize, but if you realize that your dwelling is the key, in fact, to upgrading your program for future well being and that there's a point, presumably, from diminishing returns, if not counter productivity, there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest, then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful. This is the point at which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error I have made. That's what you're looking for. And it also gives you license, right? If some part of you feels like it's punishing you rather than searching, then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in realizing, yep, even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop. So if we map that onto compiled code discussion, as a computer science person, I find that very compelling. You know, when you compile code, you get warnings sometimes. And usually, if you're a good software engineer, you're going to make sure there's no, you know, you treat warnings as errors. So you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings. But at a certain point, when you have a large enough system, you just let the warnings go. It's fine. Like, I don't know where that warning came from, but, you know, just ultimately you need to compile the code and run with it and hope nothing terrible happens. Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're talking about with respect to robots and learning is gonna end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness that evolves into hyper competence and all of that. But I live, I noticed that I live by something that I, for lack of a better descriptor, call the theory of close calls. And the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost went wrong. And, you know, for example, if you, I have a friend who, I was walking down the street with my college friends and one of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour, would have been an absolute disaster, might have killed her, certainly would have permanently injured her. But she didn't, you know, car didn't touch her, right? Now you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because, well, what is there to think? Nothing happened. Or you could think, well, what is the difference between what did happen and my death? The difference is luck. I never want that to be true, right? I never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck. Therefore, I should count this as very close to death and I should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level. So anyway, my basic point is the accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end. And so personally, you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're gonna go wrong. But I would also point out civilization has this problem. Civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters, but they're not existential scale yet, right? They're very serious errors that we can see. And I would argue that the pattern is you discover that we are involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone wrong, right? So I'm now always asking the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima triple meltdown, the financial collapse of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon blowout, COVID 19, and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab, what processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover at the point that some gigantic accident has happened? And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident, right? That's what a wise civilization would be doing. And yet we don't. I just wanna mention something that happened a couple of days ago. I don't know if you know who JB Straubel is. He's the co founder of Tesla, CTO of Tesla for many, many years. His wife just died. She was riding a bicycle. And in the same thin line between death and life that many of us have been in, where you walk into the intersection and there's this close call. Every once in a while, you get the short straw. I wonder how much of our own individual lives and the entirety of the human civilization rests on this little roll of the dice. Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls is that there's a level at which we can't control it, right? The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about. There's not a lot we can do to hedge that out, or at least not short term. But there are lots of other things. Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008 didn't break down the entire world economy. It threatened to, but a Herculean effort managed to pull us back from the brink. The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful, but every one of the seven fuel pools held, there wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going forward. We got lucky. We could say the same thing about the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon, where a hole in the ocean floor large enough that we couldn't have plugged it, could have opened up. All of these things could have been much, much worse, right? And I think we can say the same thing about COVID, as terrible as it is. And we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab, but there's a strong likelihood that it did. And it also could be much, much worse. So in each of these cases, something is telling us, we have a process that is unfolding that keeps creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us and some scale of disaster that is unimaginable. And that wisdom, you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters. To be wise is to stop causing them, right? And that would require a process of restraint, a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet. So I think we have to generate it. And somehow, at the moment, we don't have a political structure that would be capable of taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, right? Because it would have important economic consequences. And so it would almost certainly be shot down. But we can obviously also say, we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that I've mentioned. And we have to factor that into the equation. Something can be very productive short term and very destructive long term. Also, the question is how many disasters we avoided because of the ingenuity of humans or just the integrity and character of humans. That's sort of an open question. We may be more intelligent than lucky. That's the hope. Because the optimistic message here that you're getting at is maybe the process that we should be, that maybe we can overcome luck with ingenuity. Meaning, I guess you're suggesting the processes we should be listing all the ways that human civilization can destroy itself, assigning likelihood to it, and thinking through how can we avoid that. And being very honest with the data out there about the close calls and using those close calls to then create sort of mechanism by which we minimize the probability of those close calls. And just being honest and transparent with the data that's out there. Well, I think we need to do a couple things for it to work. So I've been an advocate for the idea that sustainability is actually, it's difficult to operationalize, but it is an objective that we have to meet if we're to be around long term. And I realized that we also need to have reversibility of all of our processes. Because processes very frequently when they start do not appear dangerous. And then when they scale, they become very dangerous. So for example, if you imagine the first internal combustion engine vehicle driving down the street, and you imagine somebody running after them saying, hey, if you do enough of that, you're gonna alter the atmosphere and it's gonna change the temperature of the planet. It's preposterous, right? Why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new contraption? But of course, eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this that you do start changing the temperature of the planet. So if we built the capacity, if we basically said, look, you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse if you had to, then progress would be slowed, but our safety would go up dramatically. And I think in some sense, if we are to be around long term, we have to begin thinking that way. We're just involved in too many very dangerous processes. So let's talk about one of the things that if not threatened human civilization certainly hurt it at a deep level, which is COVID 19. What percent probability would you currently place on the hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? So I maintain a flow chart of all the possible explanations, and it doesn't break down exactly that way. The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high. If it emerged from a lab, the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute is very, very high. There are multiple different kinds of evidence that point to the lab, and there is literally no evidence that points to nature. Either the evidence points nowhere or it points to the lab, and the lab could mean any lab, but geographically, obviously, the labs in Wuhan are the most likely, and the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like COVID, that look like SARS COVID 2, is obviously the place that one would start. But I would say the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95%. We can talk about the question of could a virus have been brought into the lab and escaped from there without being modified. That's also possible, but it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of SARS COVID 2. Could it have been delivered from another lab? Could Wuhan be a distraction in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way? That's conceivable. I currently have that below 1% on my flowchart, but I think... A very dark thought that somebody would do that almost as a political attack on China. Well, it depends. I don't even think that's one possibility. Sometimes when Eric and I talk about these issues, we will generate a scenario just to prove that something could live in that space, right? It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened. And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China. That's certainly one possibility. But I would point out, if you can predict the future in some unusual way better than others, you can print money, right? That's what markets that allow you to bet for or against virtually any sector allow you to do. So you can imagine a simply amoral person or entity generating a pandemic, attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them to bet against things like cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is, and bet in favor of, I don't know, sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do. So am I saying that I think somebody did that? No, I really don't think it happened. We've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally released. However, were it to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know, did not want it known where it had come from, releasing it into Wuhan would be one way to cover their tracks. So we have to leave the possibility formally open, but acknowledge there's no evidence. And the probability therefore is low. I tend to believe maybe this is the optimistic nature that I have that people who are competent enough to do the kind of thing we just described are not going to do that because it requires a certain kind of, I don't wanna use the word evil, but whatever word you wanna use to describe the kind of disregard for human life required to do that, that's just not going to be coupled with competence. I feel like there's a trade off chart where competence on one axis and evil is on the other. And the more evil you become, the crappier you are at doing great engineering, scientific work required to deliver weapons of different kinds, whether it's bioweapons or nuclear weapons, all those kinds of things. That seems to be the lessons I take from history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going to be happening in the future. But to stick on the lab leak idea, because the flow chart is probably huge here because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities. One question I wanna ask is, what would evidence for natural origins look like? So one piece of evidence for natural origins is that it's happened in the past that viruses have jumped. Oh, they do jump. So like that's possible to have happened. So that's a sort of like a historical evidence, like, okay, well, it's possible that it have... It's not evidence of the kind you think it is. It's a justification for a presumption, right? So the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly that it came from nature, right? The problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence, or at least it logically should. And it didn't in this case. It was maintained by people who privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of this virus. Is there some other piece of evidence that we could look for and see that would say, this increases the probability that it's natural origins? Yeah, in fact, there is evidence. I always worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow. Oh, boy. Well, let's say I am... There's a lot of incentive for that actually. There's a huge amount of incentive. On the other hand, why didn't the powers that be, the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Whatever force it is, I hope that force is here too. And so whatever evidence we find is real. It's the competence thing I'm talking about, but okay, go ahead, sorry. Well, we can get back to that. But I would say, yeah, the giant piece of evidence that will shift the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan. So that would do it, or an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this before jumping to humans. But I point out in that second case, you would certainly expect to see a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic, which we don't see. So there almost has to be a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulate or an ancestor of the virus that we first saw in Wuhan circulating. And it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior epidemic before hitting Wuhan in order to explain the total lack of evolution and extremely effective virus that emerged at the end of 2019. So you don't believe in the magic of evolution to spring up with all the tricks already there? Like everybody who doesn't have the tricks, they die quickly. And then you just have this beautiful virus that comes in with a spike protein and through mutation and selection, just like the ones that succeed and succeed big are the ones that are going to just spring into life with the tricks. Well, no, that's called a hopeful monster. And hopeful monsters don't work. The job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult. It involves two very difficult steps and they both have to work. One is the ability to infect a person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection. And the other is to jump between individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another. Those are both very difficult jobs. They require, as you describe, selection. And the point is selection would leave a mark. We would see evidence that it would stay. In animals or humans, we would see. Both, right? And we see this evolutionary trace of the virus gathering the tricks up. Yeah, you would see the virus, you would see the clumsy virus get better and better. And yes, I am a full believer in the power of that process. In fact, I believe it. What I know from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine. That what we teach in the Evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing and that actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce just jaw dropping adaptations. That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it means in spite of immense pressure to find it somewhere, there's been no hint which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory. So inside the laboratory, gain of function research on viruses. And I believe most of that kind of research is doing this exact thing that you're referring to which is accelerated evolution and just watching evolution do its thing and a bunch of viruses and seeing what kind of tricks get developed. The other method is engineering viruses. So manually adding on the tricks. Which do you think we should be thinking about here? So mind you, I learned what I know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging. I started studying the question and I would say based on the content of the genome and other evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in generating this technology, a couple of things seem likely. This SARS CoV2 does not appear to be entirely the result of either a splicing process or serial passaging. It appears to have both things in its past or it's at least highly likely that it does. So for example, the fern cleavage site looks very much like it was added in to the virus and it was known that that would increase its infectivity in humans and increase its tropism. The virus appears to be excellent at spreading in humans and minks and ferrets. Now minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a serial passage experiment. The reason being that they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor. And so were you going to passage the virus or its ancestor through an animal in order to increase its infectivity in humans, which would have been necessary, ferrets would have been very likely. It is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized and it is possible that human airway tissue was utilized. I think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were. If this came from the Wuhan Institute, we need to know it and we need to know what the protocols were exactly because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting SARS CoV2 and hopefully driving it to extinction, which ought to be our priority. It is a priority that does not, it is not apparent from our behavior, but it really is, it should be our objective. If we understood where our interests lie, we would be much more focused on it. But those protocols would tell us a great deal. If it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that. If it was nature, we need to know that. And if it was some other laboratory, we need to figure out what and where so that we can determine what we can determine about what was done. You're opening up my mind about why we should investigate, why we should know the truth of the origins of this virus. So for me personally, let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey. When I first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis, what became terrifying to me and important to understand and obvious is the sort of like Sam Harris way of thinking, which is it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus will eventually happen. My mind was, it doesn't even matter if it happened in this case. It's obvious that it's going to happen in the future. So why the hell are we not freaking out about this? And COVID 19 is not even that deadly relative to the possible future viruses. It's this, the way I disagree with Sam on this, but he thinks about this way about AGI as well, not about artificial intelligence. It's a different discussion, I think, but with viruses, it seems like something that could happen on the scale of years, maybe a few decades. AGI is a little bit farther out for me, but it seemed, the terrifying thing, it seemed obvious that this will happen very soon for a much deadlier virus as we get better and better at both engineering viruses and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research, gain of function research. Okay, but then you started speaking out about this as well, but also started to say, no, no, no, we should hurry up and figure out the origins now because it will help us figure out how to actually respond to this particular virus, how to treat this particular virus. What is in terms of vaccines, in terms of antiviral drugs, in terms of just all the number of responses that we should have. Okay, I still am much more freaking out about the future. Maybe you can break that apart a little bit. Which are you most focused on now? Which are you most freaking out about now in terms of the importance of figuring out the origins of this virus? I am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important and we can put bounds on this. Let me say first that this is a perfect test case for the theory of close calls because as much as COVID is a disaster, it is also a close call from which we can learn much. You are absolutely right. If we keep playing this game in the lab, if we are not, if we are, especially if we do it under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and that the more we know, the better we'll be able to fight it, we're gonna create the disaster, all the sooner. So yes, that should be an absolute focus. The fact that there were people saying that this was dangerous back in 2015 ought to tell us something. The fact that the system bypassed a ban and offshored the work to China ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure. This is a failure of something larger and harder to see. But I also think that there's a clock ticking with respect to SARS CoV2 and COVID, the disease that it creates. And that has to do with whether or not we are stuck with it permanently. So if you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with influenza, it's an immense cost year after year. And we just stop thinking about it because it's there. Some years you get the flu, most years you don't. Maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it. Maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted. But imagine just simply doubling that cost. Imagine we get stuck with SARS CoV2 and its descendants going forward and that it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life. That would be a disaster, right? The number of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable. The amount of suffering that will be caused is incalculable. The loss of wellbeing and wealth, incalculable. So that ought to be a very high priority, driving this extinct before it becomes permanent. And the ability to drive extinct goes down the longer we delay effective responses. To the extent that we let it have this very large canvas, large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result in adaptation that we will not be able to counter the greater its ability to figure out features of our immune system and use them to its advantage. So I'm feeling the pressure of driving it extinct. I believe we could have driven it extinct six months ago and we didn't do it because of very mundane concerns among a small number of people. And I'm not alleging that they were brazen about or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused. I have the sense that they were working from a kind of autopilot in which you, let's say you're in some kind of a corporation, a pharmaceutical corporation, you have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic might be very lucrative. Those therapies have competitors. You of course wanna position your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't. And lo and behold, at some point through means that I think those of us on the outside can't really intuit, you end up saying things about competing therapies that work better and much more safely than the ones you're selling that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers. But it's some kind of autopilot, at least part of it is. So there's a complicated coupling of the autopilot of institutions, companies, governments. And then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing going on where you wanna keep secrets. It's the Chernobyl thing where if you messed up, there's a big incentive, I think, to hide the fact that you messed up. So how do we fix this? And what's more important to fix? The autopilot, which is the response that we often criticize about our institutions, especially the leaders in those institutions, Anthony Fauci and so on, some of the members of the scientific community. And the second part is the game with China of hiding the information in terms of on the fight between nations. Well, in our live streams on Dark Horse, Heather and I have been talking from the beginning about the fact that although, yes, what happens began in China, it very much looks like a failure of the international scientific community. That's frightening, but it's also hopeful in the sense that actually if we did the right thing now, we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese responsibility. We're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that has been terribly costly to all of us. So that's not a very happy process. But as you point out, what's at stake is in large measure at the very least the strong possibility this will happen again and that at some point it will be far worse. So just as a person that does not learn the lessons of their own errors doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger, we collectively, humanity has to say, well, there sure is a lot of evidence that suggests that this is a self inflicted wound. When you have done something that has caused a massive self inflicted wound, self inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very, very unlikely that something similar will happen again. I think this is a good place to kind of ask you to do almost like a thought experiment or to steel man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis. So if you were to argue, you said 95% chance that the virus leak from a lab. There's a bunch of ways I think you can argue that even talking about it is bad for the world. So if I just put something on the table, it's to say that for one, it would be racism versus Chinese people that talking about that it leaked from a lab, there's a kind of immediate kind of blame and it can spiral down into this idea that's somehow the people are responsible for the virus and this kind of thing. Is it possible for you to come up with other steel man arguments against talking or against the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis? Well, so I think steel manning is a tool that is extremely valuable, but it's also possible to abuse it. I think that you can only steel man a good faith argument. And the problem is we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who were wielding good faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts. And what they were doing publicly was actually a punishment, a public punishment for those of us who spoke up with I think the purpose of either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage in the same kind of behavior. And obviously for people like you and me who regard science as our likely best hope for navigating difficult waters, shutting down people who are using those tools honorably is itself dishonorable. So I don't feel that there's anything to steel man. And I also think that immediately at the point that the world suddenly with no new evidence on the table switched gears with respect to the lab leak, at the point that Nicholas Wade had published his article and suddenly the world was going to admit that this was at least a possibility, if not a likelihood, we got to see something of the rationalization process that had taken place inside the institutional world. And it very definitely involved the claim that what was being avoided was the targeting of Chinese scientists. And my point would be, I don't wanna see the targeting of anyone. I don't want to see racism of any kind. On the other hand, once you create license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake in knowing what happened, then it is inevitable that that process, that license to lie will be used by the thing that captures institutions for its own purposes. So my sense is it may be very unfortunate if the story of what happened here can be used against Chinese people. That would be very unfortunate. And as I think I mentioned, Heather and I have taken great pains to point out that this doesn't look like a Chinese failure. It looks like a failure of the international scientific community. So I think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis of the evidence. But no matter what happened, we have a right to know. And I frankly do not take the institutional layer at its word that its motivations are honorable and that it was protecting good hearted scientists at the expense of the world. That explanation does not add up. Well, this is a very interesting question about whether it's ever okay to lie at the institutional layer to protect the populace. I think both you and I are probably on the same, have the same sense that it's a slippery slope. Even if it's an effective mechanism in the short term, in the long term, it's going to be destructive. This happened with masks. This happened with other things. If you look at just history pandemics, there's an idea that panic is destructive amongst the populace. So you want to construct a narrative, whether it's a lie or not to minimize panic. But you're suggesting that almost in all cases, and I think that was the lesson from the pandemic in the early 20th century, that lying creates distrust and distrust in the institutions is ultimately destructive. That's your sense that lying is not okay? Well, okay. There are obviously places where complete transparency is not a good idea, right? To the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows one individual to hold the world hostage, obviously you've got something to be navigated. But in general, I don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us. In the case of this particular lie, the idea that the wellbeing of Chinese scientists outweighs the wellbeing of the world is preposterous. Right, as you point out, one thing that rests on this question is whether we continue to do this kind of research going forward. And the scientists in question, all of them, American, Chinese, all of them were pushing the idea that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this. Now, if they themselves have caused it, and if they are wrong, as I believe they are, about the likelihood of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they wrote into their grant applications, then the danger is the call is coming from inside the house and we have to look at that. And yes, whatever we have to do to protect scientists from retribution, we should do, but we cannot protecting them by lying to the world. And even worse, by demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogin, like Yuri Dagan, the entire drastic group on Twitter, by demonizing us for simply following the evidence is to set a terrible precedent, right? You're demonizing people for using the scientific method to evaluate evidence that is available to us in the world. What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson, right? Thou shalt not use scientific tools. No, I'm sorry. Whatever your license to lie is, it doesn't extend to that. Yeah, I've seen the attacks on you, the pressure on you has a very important effect on thousands of world class biologists actually. At MIT, colleagues of mine, people I know, there's a slight pressure to not be allowed to one, speak publicly and two, actually think. Like do you even think about these ideas? It sounds kind of ridiculous, but just in the privacy of your own home, to read things, to think, it's many people, many world class biologists that I know will just avoid looking at the data. There's not even that many people that are publicly opposing gain of function research. They're also like, it's not worth it. It's not worth the battle. And there's many people that kind of argue that those battles should be fought in private, with colleagues in the privacy of the scientific community that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough to be able to deal with the complexities of this kind of discussion. I don't know, but the final result is combined with the bullying of you and all the different pressures in the academic institutions is that it's just people are self censoring and silencing themselves and silencing the most important thing, which is the power of their brains. Like these people are brilliant. And the fact that they're not utilizing their brain to come up with solutions outside of the conformist line of thinking is tragic. Well, it is. I also think that we have to look at it and understand it for what it is. For one thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism. Somehow people's sense of what they're allowed to think about, talk about, discuss is causing them to self censor. And I can tell you it's causing many of them to rationalize, which is even worse. They're blinding themselves to what they can see. But it is also the case, I believe, that what you're describing about what people said, and a great many people understood that the lab leak hypothesis could not be taken off the table, but they didn't say so publicly. And I think that their discussions with each other about why they did not say what they understood, that's what capture sounds like on the inside. I don't know exactly what force captured the institutions. I don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public. I don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process. But you have these institutions. They are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation. They have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish. And on the inside, the way they avoid going back to their original mission is to say things to themselves, like the public can't have this discussion. It can't be trusted with it. Yes, we need to be able to talk about this, but it has to be private. Whatever it is they say to themselves, that is what capture sounds like on the inside. It's a institutional rationalization mechanism. And it's very, very deadly. And at the point you go from lab leak to repurposed drugs, you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way. Yeah, I see this in my field with things like autonomous weapon systems. People in AI do not talk about the use of AI in weapon systems. They kind of avoid the idea that AI's use them in the military. It's kind of funny, there's this like kind of discomfort and they're like, they all hurry, like something scary happens and a bunch of sheep kind of like run away. That's what it looks like. And I don't even know what to do about it. And then I feel this natural pull every time I bring up autonomous weapon systems to go along with the sheep. There's a natural kind of pull towards that direction because it's like, what can I do as one person? Now there's currently nothing destructive happening with autonomous weapon systems. So we're in like in the early days of this race that in 10, 20 years might become a real problem. Now where the discussion we're having now, we're now facing the result of that in the space of viruses, like for many years avoiding the conversations here. I don't know what to do that in the early days, but I think we have to, I guess, create institutions where people can stand out. People can stand out and like basically be individual thinkers and break out into all kinds of spaces of ideas that allow us to think freely, freedom of thought. And maybe that requires a decentralization of institutions. Well, years ago, I came up with a concept called cultivated insecurity. And the idea is, let's just take the example of the average Joe, right? The average Joe has a job somewhere and their mortgage, their medical insurance, their retirement, their connection with the economy is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship with the employer. That means that there is a strong incentive, especially in any industry where it's not easy to move from one employer to the next. There's a strong incentive to stay in your employer's good graces, right? So it creates a very top down dynamic, not only in terms of who gets to tell other people what to do, but it really comes down to who gets to tell other people how to think. So that's extremely dangerous. The way out of it is to cultivate security to the extent that somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe for their family and their ability to earn, you will see that behavior a lot more. So I would argue that some of what you're talking about is just a simple predictable consequence of the concentration of the sources of wellbeing and that this is a solvable problem. You got a chance to talk with Joe Rogan yesterday. Yes, I did. And I just saw the episode was released and Ivermectin is trending on Twitter. Joe told me it was an incredible conversation. I look forward to listening to it today. Many people have probably, by the time this is released, have already listened to it. I think it would be interesting to discuss a postmortem. How do you feel how that conversation went? And maybe broadly, how do you see the story as it's unfolding of Ivermectin from the origins from before COVID 19 through 2020 to today? I very much enjoyed talking to Joe and I'm undescribably grateful that he would take the risk of such a discussion, that he would, as he described it, do an emergency podcast on the subject, which I think that was not an exaggeration. This needed to happen for various reasons that he took us down the road of talking about the censorship campaign against Ivermectin, which I find utterly shocking and talking about the drug itself. And I should say we talked, we had Pierre Corey available. He came on the podcast as well. He is, of course, the face of the FLCCC, the Frontline COVID 19 Critical Care Alliance. These are doctors who have innovated ways of treating COVID patients and they happened on Ivermectin and have been using it. And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it because that's not really the role of doctors or scientists, but they are advocating for it in the sense that there is this pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into. So maybe step back and say, what is Ivermectin and how much studies have been done to show its effectiveness? So Ivermectin is an interesting drug. It was discovered in the 70s by a Japanese scientist named Satoshi Omura and he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course. So I would just point out in passing that if we were to stop self silencing over the possibility that Asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in Wuhan and to recognize that actually the natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in China, it has a unlikely hero in Japan, the story is naturally not a simple one. But in any case, Omura discovered this molecule. He sent it to a friend who was at Merck, scientist named Campbell. They won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Ivermectin molecule in 2015. Its initial use was in treating parasitic infections. It's very effective in treating the worm that causes river blindness, the pathogen that causes elephantitis, scabies. It's a very effective anti parasite drug. It's extremely safe. It's on the WHO's list of essential medications. It's safe for children. It has been administered something like 4 billion times in the last four decades. It has been given away in the millions of doses by Merck in Africa. People have been on it for long periods of time. And in fact, one of the reasons that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID 19 is that Ivermectin is widely used there to prevent parasites and the drug appears to have a long lasting impact. So it's an interesting molecule. It was discovered some time ago apparently that it has antiviral properties. And so it was tested early in the COVID 19 pandemic to see if it might work to treat humans with COVID. It turned out to have very promising evidence that it did treat humans. It was tested in tissues. It was tested at a very high dosage, which confuses people. They think that those of us who believe that Ivermectin might be useful in confronting this disease are advocating those high doses, which is not the case. But in any case, there have been quite a number of studies. A wonderful meta analysis was finally released. We had seen it in preprint version, but it was finally peer reviewed and published this last week. It reveals that the drug, as clinicians have been telling us, those who have been using it, it's highly effective at treating people with the disease, especially if you get to them early. And it showed an 86% effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent people from contracting COVID. And that number, 86%, is high enough to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction if we wished to deploy it. First of all, the meta analysis, is this the Ivermectin for COVID 19 real time meta analysis of 60 studies? Or there's a bunch of meta analysis there. Because I was really impressed by the real time meta analysis that keeps getting updated. I don't know if it's the same kind of thing. The one at ivmmeta.com? Well, I saw it at c19ivermeta.com. No, this is not that meta analysis. So that is, as you say, a living meta analysis where you can watch as evidence rolls in. Which is super cool, by the way. It's really cool. And they've got some really nice graphics that allow you to understand, well, what is the evidence? It's concentrated around this level of effectiveness, et cetera. So anyway, it's a great site, well worth paying attention to. No, this is a meta analysis. I don't know any of the authors but one. Second author is Tess Lorry of the BIRD group. BIRD being a group of analysts and doctors in Britain that is playing a role similar to the FLCCC here in the US. So anyway, this is a meta analysis that Tess Lorry and others did of all of the available evidence. And it's quite compelling. People can look for it on my Twitter. I will put it up and people can find it there. So what about dose here? In terms of safety, what do we understand about the kind of dose required to have that level of effectiveness? And what do we understand about the safety of that kind of dose? So let me just say, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a biologist. I'm on ivermectin in lieu of vaccination. In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern, which is that the most effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration. And because that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug, it is possible that there is some longterm implication of being on it weekly for a long period of time. There's not a strong indication of that. The safety signal that we have over people using the drug over many years and using it in high doses. In fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday that there are cases in which people have made calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill effect. So anyway, there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe, but no drug is perfectly safe. And I do worry about the longterm implications of taking it. I also think it's very likely that because the drug is administered in a dose something like, let's say 15 milligrams for somebody my size once a week after you've gone through the initial double dose that you take 48 hours apart, it is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective at the end of the week, then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week. So there's a question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin goes down, but the protection remains. I have little doubt that that would be discovered if we looked for it. But that said, it does seem to be quite safe, highly effective at preventing COVID. The 86% number is plenty high enough for us to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction in light of its R0 number of slightly more than two. And so why we are not using it is a bit of a mystery. So even if everything you said now turns out to be not correct, it is nevertheless obvious that it's sufficiently promising and it always has been in order to merit rigorous scientific exploration, investigation, doing a lot of studies and certainly not censoring the science or the discussion of it. So before we talk about the various vaccines for COVID 19, I'd like to talk to you about censorship. Given everything you're saying, why did YouTube and other places censor discussion of ivermectin? Well, there's a question about why they say they did it and there's a question about why they actually did it. Now, it is worth mentioning that YouTube is part of a consortium. It is partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, some other notable organizations. And that this group has appointed itself the arbiter of truth. In effect, they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to prevent the distribution of misinformation. Now, how have they chosen to do that? In this case, they have chosen to simply utilize the recommendations of the WHO and the CDC and apply them as if they are synonymous with scientific truth. Problem, even at their best, the WHO and CDC are not scientific entities. They are entities that are about public health. And public health has this, whether it's right or not, and I believe I disagree with it, but it has this self assigned right to lie that comes from the fact that there is game theory that works against, for example, a successful vaccination campaign. That if everybody else takes a vaccine and therefore the herd becomes immune through vaccination and you decide not to take a vaccine, then you benefit from the immunity of the herd without having taken the risk. So people who do best are the people who opt out. That's a hazard. And the WHO and CDC as public health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order to make sense of oversimplify stories in order that that game theory does not cause a predictable tragedy of the commons. With that said, once that right to lie exists, then it turns out to serve the interests of, for example, pharmaceutical companies, which have emergency use authorizations that require that there not be a safe and effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product. So that's a recipe for disaster, right? You don't need to be a sophisticated thinker about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product that works better somehow fails to be noticed. So somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck and others. Whether it knows that that's what it's doing, I have no idea. I think this may be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because it's parroting the corrupt wisdom of the WHO and the CDC, but the WHO and the CDC have been wrong again and again in this pandemic. And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me, well, my channel has been right where the WHO and CDC have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic. So how is it that YouTube is censoring us because the WHO and CDC disagree with us when in fact, in past disagreements, we've been right and they've been wrong? There's so much to talk about here. So I've heard this many times actually on the inside of YouTube and with colleagues that I've talked with is they kind of in a very casual way say their job is simply to slow or prevent the spread of misinformation. And they say like, that's an easy thing to do. Like to know what is true or not is an easy thing to do. And so from the YouTube perspective, I think they basically outsource of the task of knowing what is true or not to public institutions that on a basic Google search claim to be the arbiters of truth. So if you were YouTube who are exceptionally profitable and exceptionally powerful in terms of controlling what people get to see or not, what would you do? Would you take a stand, a public stand against the WHO, CDC? Or would you instead say, you know what? Let's open the dam and let any video on anything fly. What do you do here? Say you were put, if Brent Weinstein was put in charge of YouTube for a month in this most critical of times where YouTube actually has incredible amounts of power to educate the populace, to give power of knowledge to the populace such that they can reform institutions. What would you do? How would you run YouTube? Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is actually quite simple. The founders, the American founders, settled on a counterintuitive formulation that people should be free to say anything. They should be free from the government blocking them from doing so. They did not imagine that in formulating that right, that most of what was said would be of high quality, nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things. What they correctly reasoned was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost, which everyone understands to be substantial. What I would say is they could not have anticipated the impact, the centrality of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. If they had, they would not have limited the First Amendment as they did. They clearly understood that the power of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the right of citizens to say anything. In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been. The power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great that we need to have those same protections. It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said, but it means that nothing has changed about the cost benefit analysis of building the right to censor. So if I were running YouTube, the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law, right? If what you are doing is legal, then it should not be YouTube's place to limit what gets said or who gets to hear it. That is between speakers and audience. Will harm come from that? Of course it will. But will net harm come from it? No, I don't believe it will. I believe that allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the fore and win out. So you believe that in the end, when there's complete freedom to share ideas, that truth will win out. So what I've noticed, just as a brief side comment, that certain things become viral irregardless of their truth. I've noticed that things that are dramatic and or funny, like things that become memes are not, don't have to be grounded in truth. And so that what worries me there is that we basically maximize for drama versus maximize for truth in a system where everything is free. And that is worrying in the time of emergency. Well, yes, it's all worrying in time of emergency, to be sure. But I want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an analog for a much deeper and older problem. Human beings are the, we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. And there's a reason for that, right? It's where our flexibility comes from. We have effectively, we are robots in which a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has been, or of the behavioral capacity, has been offloaded to the software layer, which gets written and rewritten over evolutionary time. That means effectively that much of what we are, in fact, the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural layer and the conscious layer and not in the hardware hard coding layer. So that layer is prone to make errors, right? And anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right? That's part of the process, as we were discussing earlier. It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. And you have to keep that in mind. It's not like the genome, right? Everything is happening at a much higher rate. Things are being created, they're being destroyed. And I can't say that, I mean, obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like, hey, freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies? And I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. I believe so as well. The thing is, in the short term, freedom of speech, absolute freedom of speech can be quite destructive. But you nevertheless have to hold on to that, because in the long term, I think you and I, I guess, are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will win out. I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say I haven't heard a better idea. I would also point out that there's something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring, which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense. That's automatic. But the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide, hey, the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid of it, right? Hey, that's a strong win. We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1% something or other. And the point is, yeah, but that 1% something or other is the key. You're throwing out the key. And so that's what YouTube is doing. Frankly, I think at the point that it started censoring my channel, in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal over LabLeak, it should have looked at itself and said, well, what the hell are we doing? Who are we censoring? We're censoring somebody who was just right, right? In a conflict with the very same people on whose behalf we are now censoring, right? That should have caused them to wake up. So you said one approach, if you're on YouTube, is this basically let all videos go that do not violate the law. Well, I should fix that, okay? I believe that that is the basic principle. Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, doxxing, these other things. So I agree, there's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know. But what I'm talking about is, yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad. And hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out. Yeah, there's an interesting line between ideas, like the earth is flat, which I believe you should not censor. And then you start to encroach on personal attacks. So not doxxing, yes, but not even getting to that. There's a certain point where it's like, that's no longer ideas, that's more, that's somehow not productive, even if it's wrong. It feels like believing the earth is flat is somehow productive, because maybe there's a tiny percent chance it is. It just feels like personal attacks, it doesn't, well, I'm torn on this because there's assholes in this world, there's fraudulent people in this world. So sometimes personal attacks are useful to reveal that, but there's a line you can cross. There's a comedy where people make fun of others. I think that's amazing, that's very powerful, and that's very useful, even if it's painful. But then there's like, once it gets to be, yeah, there's a certain line, it's a gray area where you cross, where it's no longer in any possible world productive. And that's a really weird gray area for YouTube to operate in. And that feels like it should be a crowdsource thing, where people vote on it. But then again, do you trust the majority to vote on what is crossing the line and not? I mean, this is where, this is really interesting on this particular, like the scientific aspect of this. Do you think YouTube should take more of a stance, not censoring, but to actually have scientists within YouTube having these kinds of discussions, and then be able to almost speak out in a transparent way, this is what we're going to let this video stand, but here's all these other opinions. Almost like take a more active role in its recommendation system, in trying to present a full picture to you. Right now they're not, the recommender systems are not human fine tuned. They're all based on how you click, and there's this clustering algorithms. They're not taking an active role on giving you the full spectrum of ideas in the space of science. They just censor or not. Well, at the moment, it's gonna be pretty hard to compel me that these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence, because they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well. You could make such an argument, and I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions that would look something like YouTube, that would be capable of offering something valuable. I mean, and even just the fact of them literally curating things and putting some videos next to others implies something. So yeah, there's a question to be answered, but at the moment, no. At the moment, what it is doing is quite literally putting not only individual humans in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making tools that are more hazardous than has been acknowledged seem safe, right? But it is also placing humanity in danger of a permanent relationship with this pathogen. I cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is. It's effectively incalculable. If the relationship becomes permanent, the number of people who will ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large. Yeah, currently the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven, meaning if you click on Flat Earth videos, that's all you're going to be presented with and you're not going to be nicely presented with arguments against the Flat Earth. And the flip side of that, if you watch like quantum mechanics videos or no, general relativity videos, it's very rare you're going to get a recommendation. Have you considered the Earth is flat? And I think you should have both. Same with vaccine. Videos that present the power and the incredible like biology, genetics, virology about the vaccine, you're rarely going to get videos from well respected scientific minds presenting possible dangers of the vaccine. And the vice versa is true as well, which is if you're looking at the dangers of the vaccine on YouTube, you're not going to get the highest quality of videos recommended to you. And I'm not talking about like manually inserted CDC videos that are like the most untrustworthy things you can possibly watch about how everybody should take the vaccine, it's the safest thing ever. No, it's about incredible, again, MIT colleagues of mine, incredible biologists, virologists that talk about the details of how the mRNA vaccines work and all those kinds of things. I think maybe this is me with the AI hat on, is I think the algorithm can fix a lot of this and YouTube should build better algorithms and trust that to a couple of complete freedom of speech to expand what people are able to think about, present always varied views, not balanced in some artificial way, hard coded way, but balanced in a way that's crowdsourced. I think that's an algorithm problem that can be solved because then you can delegate it to the algorithm as opposed to this hard code censorship of basically creating artificial boundaries on what can and can't be discussed, instead creating a full spectrum of exploration that can be done and trusting the intelligence of people to do the exploration. Well, there's a lot there. I would say we have to keep in mind that we're talking about a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them and that that may make it impossible. And I remember many years ago, back in the early days of Google, I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search. It used to be that Google, if you searched, came up with the same thing for everyone and then it got personalized and for a while it was possible to turn off the personalization, which was still not great because if everybody else is looking at a personalized search and you can tune into one that isn't personalized, that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is. But nonetheless, it was at least an option. And then that vanished. And the problem is I think this is literally deranging us. That in effect, I mean, what you're describing is unthinkable. It is unthinkable that in the face of a campaign to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity that YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines when this is, how hazardous the vaccines are is an unsettled question. Why is it unthinkable? That doesn't make any sense from a company perspective. If intelligent people in large amounts are open minded and are thinking through the hazards and the benefits of a vaccine, a company should find the best videos to present what people are thinking about. Well, let's come up with a hypothetical. Okay, let's come up with a very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe, though not perfectly safe. And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out what to do for somebody searching on vaccine safety. Suppose it is necessary in order to drive the pathogen to extinction, something like smallpox, that people get on board with the vaccine. But there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks that the vaccine is a mind control agent. So should YouTube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine, which is that it's a mind control agent when in fact the vaccine is very safe, whatever that means. If that were the actual configuration of the puzzle, then YouTube would be doing active harm, pointing you to this other video potentially. Now, yes, I would love to live in a world where people are up to the challenge of sorting that out. But my basic point would be, if it's an evidentiary question, and there is essentially no evidence that the vaccine is a mind control agent, and there's plenty of evidence that the vaccine is safe, then while you look for this video, we're gonna give you this one, puts it on a par, right? So for the mind that's tracking how much thought is there behind it's safe versus how much thought is there behind it's a mind control agent will result in artificially elevating this. Now in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all. We have seen evidence obscured in order to create a false story about safety. And we saw the inverse with ivermectin. We saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than the evidence clearly suggested it was. So we're not talking about a comparable thing, but I guess my point is the algorithmic solution that you point to creates a problem of its own, which is that it means that the way to get exposure is to generate something fringy. If you're the only thing on some fringe, then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things, and that's obviously a gameable system at best. Yeah, but the solution to that, I know you're creating a thought experiment, maybe playing a little bit of a devil's advocate. I think the solution to that is not to limit the algorithm in the case of the super deadly virus. It's for the scientists to step up and become better communicators, more charismatic, fight the battle of ideas, sort of create better videos. Like if the virus is truly deadly, you have a lot more ammunition, a lot more data, a lot more material to work with in terms of communicating with the public. So be better at communicating and stop being, you have to start trusting the intelligence of people and also being transparent and playing the game of the internet, which is like, what is the internet hungry for, I believe? Authenticity, stop looking like you're full of shit. The scientific community, if there's any flaw that I currently see, especially the people that are in public office, that like Anthony Fauci, they look like they're full of shit and I know they're brilliant. Why don't they look more authentic? So they're losing that game and I think a lot of people observing this entire system now, younger scientists are seeing this and saying, okay, if I want to continue being a scientist in the public eye and I want to be effective at my job, I'm gonna have to be a lot more authentic. So they're learning the lesson, this evolutionary system is working. So there's just a younger generation of minds coming up that I think will do a much better job in this battle of ideas that when the much more dangerous virus comes along, they'll be able to be better communicators. At least that's the hope. Using the algorithm to control that is, I feel like is a big problem. So you're going to have the same problem with a deadly virus as with the current virus if you let YouTube draw hard lines by the PR and the marketing people versus the broad community of scientists. Well, in some sense you're suggesting something that's close kin to what I was saying about freedom of expression ultimately provides an advantage to better ideas. So I'm in agreement broadly speaking, but I would also say there's probably some sort of, let's imagine the world that you propose where YouTube shows you the alternative point of view. That has the problem that I suggest, but one thing you could do is you could give us the tools to understand what we're looking at, right? You could give us, so first of all, there's something I think myopic, solipsistic, narcissistic about an algorithm that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see rather than what you need to know, right? That's the distinction is flattering you, playing to your blind spot is something that algorithm will figure out, but it's not healthy for us all to have Google playing to our blind spot. It's very, very dangerous. So what I really want is analytics that allow me or maybe options and analytics. The options should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored, right? So here's the thing I'm searching and it leads me down this road, right? Let's say it's ivermectin, okay? I find all of this evidence that ivermectin works. I find all of these discussions and people talk about various protocols and this and that. And then I could say, all right, what is the other side? And I could see who is searching, not as individuals, but what demographics are searching alternatives. And maybe you could even combine it with something Reddit like where effectively, let's say that there was a position that, I don't know, that a vaccine is a mind control device and you could have a steel man this argument competition effectively and the better answers that steel man and as well as possible would rise to the top. And so you could read the top three or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control product. And you can say, well, that doesn't really add up. I can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be right, right? And you could dismiss it. And then as an argument that was credible, let's say plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept, you'd say, wait a minute, there is evidence for plate tectonics. As crazy as it sounds that the continents are floating around on liquid, actually that's not so implausible. We've got these subduction zones, we've got a geology that is compatible, we've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together. Wow, that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position. So I'm gonna file some Bayesian probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steel man arguments better than I was expecting, right? So I could imagine something like that where A, I would love the search to be indifferent to who's searching, right? The solipsistic thing is too dangerous. So the search could be general, so we would all get a sense for what everybody else was seeing too. And then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what YouTube points you to or not, but allowed you to see, you know, the general pattern of adherence to searching for information. And again, a layer in which those things could be defended. So you could hear what a good argument sounded like rather than just hear a caricatured argument. Yeah, and also reward people, creators that have demonstrated like a track record of open mindedness and correctness as much as it could be measured over a long term and sort of, I mean, a lot of this maps to incentivizing good longterm behavior, not immediate kind of dopamine rush kind of signals. I think ultimately the algorithm on the individual level should optimize for personal growth, longterm happiness, just growth intellectually, growth in terms of lifestyle personally and so on, as opposed to immediate. I think that's going to build a better society, not even just like truth, because I think truth is a complicated thing. It's more just you growing as a person, exploring the space of ideas, changing your mind often, increasing the level to which you're open minded, the knowledge base you're operating from, the willingness to empathize with others, all those kinds of things the algorithm should optimize for. Like creating a better human at the individual level that you're, I think that's a great business model because the person that's using this tool will then be happier with themselves for having used it and will be a lifelong quote unquote customer. I think it's a great business model to make a happy, open minded, knowledgeable, better human being. It's a terrible business model under the current system. What you want is to build the system in which it is a great business model. Why is it a terrible model? Because it will be decimated by those who play to the short term. I don't think so. Why? I mean, I think we're living it. We're living it. Well, no, because if you have the alternative that presents itself, it points out the emperor has no clothes. I mean, it points out that YouTube is operating in this way, Twitter is operating in this way, Facebook is operating in this way. How long term would you like the wisdom to prove at? Well, even a week is better when it's currently happening. Right, but the problem is, if a week loses out to an hour, right? And I don't think it loses out. It loses out in the short term. That's my point. At least you're a great communicator and you basically say, look, here's the metrics. And a lot of it is like how people actually feel. Like this is what people experience with social media. They look back at the previous month and say, I felt shitty on a lot of days because of social media. Right. If you look back at the previous few weeks and say, wow, I'm a better person because of that month happened. That's, they immediately choose the product that's going to lead to that. That's what love for products looks like. If you love, like a lot of people love their Tesla car, like that's, or iPhone or like beautiful design. That's what love looks like. You look back, I'm a better person for having used this thing. Well, you got to ask yourself the question though, if this is such a great business model, why isn't it devolving? Why don't we see it? Honestly, it's competence. It's like people are just, it's not easy to build new, it's not easy to build products, tools, systems on new ideas. It's kind of a new idea. We've gone through this, everything we're seeing now comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the internet. There just needs to be new sets of tools that are incentivizing long term personal growth and happiness. That's it. Right, but what we have is a market that doesn't favor this, right? I mean, for one thing, we had an alternative to Facebook, right, that looked, you owned your own data, it wasn't exploitative and Facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died. I mean, who do you know who's on diaspora? The execution there was not good. Right, but it could have gotten better, right? I don't think that the argument that why hasn't somebody done it a good argument for it's not going to completely destroy all of Twitter and Facebook when somebody does it or Twitter will catch up and pivot to the algorithm. This is not what I'm saying. There's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the foothill that would allow you to explore them. That's true, but you know, an internet that was non predatory is an obvious idea and many of us know that we want it and many of us have seen prototypes of it and we don't move because there's no audience there. So the network effects cause you to stay with the predatory internet. But let me just, I wasn't kidding about build the system in which your idea is a great business plan. So in our upcoming book, Heather and I in our last chapter explore something called the fourth frontier and fourth frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization, which we freely admit we can't tell you very much about. It's something that would have to be, we would have to prototype our way there. We would have to effectively navigate our way there. But the result would be very much like what you're describing. It would be something that effectively liberates humans meaningfully and most importantly, it has to feel like growth without depending on growth. In other words, human beings are creatures that like every other creature is effectively looking for growth, right? We are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities and when we find them, our ancestors for example, they happen into a new valley that was unexplored by people. Their population would grow until it hit carrying capacity. So there would be this great feeling of there's abundance until you hit carrying capacity, which is inevitable and then zero sum dynamics would set in. So in order for human beings to flourish longterm, the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth, which only moves and fits and starts. And this is actually, I believe the key to avoiding these spasms of human tragedy when in the absence of growth, people do something that causes their population to experience growth, which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some other population, which is something we obviously have to stop. By the way, this is a hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century coauthored. That's right. With your wife, Heather, being released in September. I believe you said you're going to do a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter leading up to the release. So I'm looking forward to the last chapter as well as all the previous ones. I have a few questions on that. So you generally have faith to clarify that technology could be the thing that empowers this kind of future. Well, if you just let technology evolve, it's going to be our undoing, right? One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us. And my sense is I'm a very strong believer in markets. I believe in their power even above some market fundamentalists. But what I don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course, right? Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things. They are not good at all about figuring out what we should do, right? What we should want. We have to tell markets what we want and then they can tell us how to do it best. And if we adopted that kind of pro market but in a context where it's not steering, where human wellbeing is actually the driver, we can do remarkable things. And the technology that emerges would naturally be enhancing of human wellbeing. Perfectly so? No, but overwhelmingly so. But at the moment, markets are finding our every defective character and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each other in the process. Before we leave COVID 19, let me ask you about a very difficult topic, which is the vaccines. So I took the Pfizer vaccine, the two shots. You did not. You have been taking ivermectin. Yep. So one of the arguments against the discussion of ivermectin is that it prevents people from being fully willing to get the vaccine. How would you compare ivermectin and the vaccine for COVID 19? All right, that's a good question. I would say, first of all, there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of. There are some things that we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence. The two that I think people should be tracking is the possibility, some would say a likelihood, that a vaccine of this nature, that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen, is an evolutionary pressure that will drive the emergence of variants that will escape the protection that comes from the vaccine. So this is a hazard. It is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines have a substantial number of breakthrough cases. So one danger is that a person who has been vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created by the vaccines. So we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines at a point that it doesn't make sense to. The other danger has to do with something called antibody dependent enhancement, which is something that we see in certain diseases like dengue fever. You may know that dengue, one gets a case, and then their second case is much more devastating. So break bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue, and dengue effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure to attack the body in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure. So this is apparently, this pattern has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses. Whether it will happen here or not, it is still too early to say. But before we even get to the question of harm done to individuals by these vaccines, we have to ask about what the overall impact is going to be. And it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people, the pandemic will end. It could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse. And while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed, it is at least something to be aware of. So don't vaccines usually create that kind of evolutionary pressure to create deadlier, different strains of the virus? So is there something particular with these mRNA vaccines that's uniquely dangerous in this regard? Well, it's not even just the mRNA vaccines. The mRNA vaccines and the adenovector DNA vaccine all share the same vulnerability, which is they are very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein. So that is a very concentrated evolutionary signal. We are also deploying it in mid pandemic and it takes time for immunity to develop. So part of the problem here, if you inoculated a population before encounter with a pathogen, then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from happening. But in this case, we are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are sick with the disease. And what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities to effectively evolutionarily practice escape strategies. So one thing is the timing, the other thing is the narrow focus. Now in a traditional vaccine, you would typically not have one antigen, right? You would have basically a virus full of antigens and the immune system would therefore produce a broader response. So that is the case for people who have had COVID, right? They have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the spike protein. So anyway, there is something unique here. So these platforms create that special hazard. They also have components that we haven't used before in people. So for example, the lipid nanoparticles that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves around the body in a way that will have unknown consequences. So anyway, there's reason for concern. Is it possible for you to steel man the argument that everybody should get vaccinated? Of course. The argument that everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe. Phase three trials showed good safety for the vaccines. Now that may or may not be actually true, but what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the vaccines that inoculating people quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims for the pathogen to a very low number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction requires us all to take our share of the risk and that because driving it to extinction should be our highest priority that really people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances because overwhelmingly fewer people will die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine than will die from COVID if they're not vaccinated. And with the vaccine as it currently is being deployed, that is a quite a likely scenario that everything, you know, the virus will fade away. In the following sense that the probability that a more dangerous strain will be created is nonzero, but it's not 50%, it's something smaller. And so the most likely, well, I don't know, maybe you disagree with that, but the scenario we're most likely to see now that the vaccine is here is that the virus, the effects of the virus will fade away. First of all, I don't believe that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount. I think the probability is fairly high and frankly, we are seeing a wave of variants that we will have to do a careful analysis to figure out what exactly that has to do with campaigns of vaccination, where they have been, where they haven't been, where the variants emerged from. But I believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right. The data here, by the way, and the small tangent is terrible. Terrible, right. And why is it terrible is another question, right? This is where I started getting angry. Yes. It's like, there's an obvious opportunity for exceptionally good data, for exceptionally rigorous, like even the self, like the website for self reporting, side effects for, not side effects, but negative effects, right? Adverse events. Adverse events, sorry, for the vaccine. Like, there's many things I could say from both the study perspective, but mostly, let me just put on my hat of like HTML and like web design. Like, it's like the worst website. It makes it so unpleasant to report. It makes it so unclear what you're reporting. If somebody actually has serious effect, like if you have very mild effects, what are the incentives for you to even use that crappy website with many pages and forms that don't make any sense? If you have adverse effects, what are the incentives for you to use that website? What is the trust that you have that this information will be used well? All those kinds of things. And the data about who's getting vaccinated, anonymized data about who's getting vaccinated, where, when, with what vaccine, coupled with the adverse effects, all of that we should be collecting. Instead, we're completely not. We're doing it in a crappy way and using that crappy data to make conclusions that you then twist. You're basically collecting in a way that can arrive at whatever conclusions you want. And the data is being collected by the institutions, by governments, and so therefore, it's obviously they're going to try to construct any kind of narratives they want based on this crappy data. Reminds me of much of psychology, the field that I love, but is flawed in many fundamental ways. So rant over, but coupled with the dangers that you're speaking to, we don't have even the data to understand the dangers. Yeah, I'm gonna pick up on your rant and say, we, estimates of the degree of underreporting in VAERS are that it is 10% of the real to 100%. And that's the system for reporting. Yeah, the VAERS system is the system for reporting adverse events. So in the US, we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination. That is an undercount, almost certainly, and by a large factor. We don't know how large. I've seen estimates, 25,000 dead in the US alone. Now, you can make the argument that, okay, that's a large number, but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number. But I would point out that that actually does not make any sense. And the reason it doesn't make any sense is actually there are several reasons. One, if that was really your point, that yes, many, many people are gonna die, but many more will die if we don't do this. Were that your approach, you would not be inoculating people who had had COVID 19, which is a large population. There's no reason to expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of this set of vaccines. I would also point out there's something incredibly bizarre. And I struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case because children suffer a greater risk of longterm effects because they are going to live longer. And because this is earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well. And so the benefit to them is very small. And so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we are inoculating children, and there has been some revision in the last day or two about the recommendation on this because of the adverse events that have shown up in children, but to the extent that we were vaccinating children, we were doing it to protect old, infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to COVID 19. What society puts children in danger, robs children of life to save old, infirm people? That's upside down. So there's something about the way we are going about vaccinating, who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating people is a good in and of itself, that that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity. And the last thing, and I'm sorry, I don't wanna prevent you from jumping in here, but the second reason, in addition to the fact that we're exposing people to danger that we should not be exposing them to. By the way, as a tiny tangent, another huge part of this soup that should have been part of it that's an incredible solution is large scale testing. Mm hmm. But that might be another couple hour conversation, but there's these solutions that are obvious that were available from the very beginning. So you could argue that iveractin is not that obvious, but maybe the whole point is you have aggressive, very fast research that leads to a meta analysis and then large scale production and deployment. Okay, at least that possibility should be seriously considered, coupled with a serious consideration of large scale deployment of testing, at home testing that could have accelerated the speed at which we reached that herd immunity. But I don't even wanna. Well, let me just say, I am also completely shocked that we did not get on high quality testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now, because just the simple ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of transmission, which would allow us to protect ourselves better. Instead, that information was hard won and for no good reason. So I also find this mysterious. You've spoken with Eric Weinstein, your brother, on his podcast, The Portal, about the ideas that eventually led to the paper you published titled, The Reserved Capacity Hypothesis. I think first, can you explain this paper and the ideas that led up to it? Sure, easier to explain the conclusion of the paper. There's a question about why a creature that can replace its cells with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age. We call that process, which is otherwise called aging, we call it senescence. And senescence, in this paper, it is hypothesized, is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention feature of our bodies. That each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide. There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional, but most of our cells can only divide a limited number of times. That's called the Hayflick limit. And the Hayflick limit reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues. It therefore results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair. And that explains why we become decrepit as we grow old. The question was why would that be, especially in light of the fact that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something called a telomere. Telomere is a, it's not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence at the ends of our chromosomes that is just simply repetitive. And the number of repeats functions like a counter. So there's a number of repeats that you have after development is finished. And then each time the cell divides a little bit of telomere is lost. And at the point that the telomere becomes critically short, the cell stops dividing even though it still has the capacity to do so. Stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more telomere. So what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being studied by two different groups. It was being studied by people who were interested in counteracting the aging process. And it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were interested in tumorigenesis and cancer. The thought being because it was true that when one looked into tumors, they always had telomerase active. That's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt to the lengthening of telomeres in order to counteract cancer. And the folks who were studying the senescence process were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity. And my point was evolutionarily speaking, this looks like a pleiotropic effect that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves are providing a benefit in youth, which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die. And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams, one of the great 20th century evolutionists who argued that senescence would have to be caused by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits at unavoidable late life costs. And although this isn't the exact nature of the system, he predicted it matches what he was expecting in many regards to a shocking degree. That said, the focus of the paper is about the, well, let me just read the abstract. We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed, this is the end of the abstract. We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. So basically using these mice is not going to lead to the right kinds of conclusions. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence. So I think, especially with your discussion with Eric, the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that, like we shouldn't be using these mice to test the safety or to make conclusions about cancer or senescence. Is that the basic takeaway? Like basically saying that the length of these telomeres is an important variable to consider. Well, let's put it this way. I think there was a reason that the world of scientists who was working on telomeres did not spot the pleiotropic relationship that was the key argument in my paper. The reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew, which seemed inconsistent. The result was that mice have very long telomeres, but they do not have very long lives. Now, we can talk about what the actual meaning of don't have very long lives is, but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features of the way mammals and indeed vertebrates age, but it was inconsistent with one result. And at first I thought, maybe there's something wrong with the result. Maybe this is one of these cases where the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it, didn't turn out to be the case. Many laboratories had established that mice had ultra long telomeres. And so I began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols that generated these mice. And what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres would be laboratory mice and that wild mice would not. And Carol Greider, who agreed to collaborate with me, tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true, that wild derived mice, or at least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time did not have ultra long telomeres. Now, what this implied though, as you read, is that our breeding protocols generate lengthening of telomeres. And the implication of that is that the animals that have these very long telomeres will be hyper prone to create tumors. They will be extremely resistant to toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue. And so ironically, if you give one of these ultra long telomere lab mice a toxin, if the toxin doesn't outright kill it, it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy. So the reason that chemotherapy works is that dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells that are not dividing. And so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off, and it has cells dividing too rapidly, and you give it a toxin, you will slow down its tumors faster than you harm its other tissues. And so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse. Now, I don't think that that was understood before I published my paper. Now I'm pretty sure it has to be. And the problem is that this actually is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds to market, many of which will be toxic. Maybe all of them will be toxic. And these mice predispose our system to declare these toxic compounds safe. And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors that result from using these mice a number of times, most famously with Vioxx, which turned out to do conspicuous heart damage. Why do you think this paper and this idea has not gotten significant traction? Well, my collaborator, Carol Greider, said something to me that rings in my ears to this day. She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that wild mice don't have long telomeres, I asked her where she was going to publish that result so that I could cite it in my paper. And she said that she was going to keep the result in house rather than publish it. And at the time, I was a young graduate student. I didn't really understand what she was saying. But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generateable, you can publish a paper and make a big splash with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will misbehave and other people don't. So there's a question, if somebody is motivated cynically and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things better than others do, knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is advantageous. At the same time, I can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry, when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe, didn't leap to fix the problem because in some sense, it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile, right? This made things look safer than they were and I believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream. So to kind of play devil's advocate, it's also possible that this particular, the length of the telomeres is not a strong variable for the drug development and for the conclusions that Carol and others have been studying. Is it possible for that to be the case? So one reason she and others could be ignoring this is because it's not a strong variable. Well, I don't believe so and in fact, at the point that I went to publish my paper, Carol published her result. She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash. Did she, I apologize if I don't know how, what was the emphasis of her publication of that paper? Was it purely just kind of showing data or is there more, because in your paper, there's a kind of more of a philosophical statement as well. Well, my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence. I wasn't pursuing grants or anything like that. I was just working on a puzzle I thought was interesting. Carol has, of course, gone on to win a Nobel Prize for her co discovery with Elizabeth Greider of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. But anyway, she's a heavy hitter in the academic world. I don't know exactly what her purpose was. I do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish and I do know that I discovered that she was in the process of publishing very late and when I asked her to send me the paper to see whether or not she had put evidence in it that the hypothesis had come from me, she grudgingly sent it to me and my name was nowhere mentioned and she broke contact at that point. What it is that motivated her, I don't know, but I don't think it can possibly be that this result is unimportant. The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place, an established contact that generated our collaboration, was that she was a leading light in the field of telomeric studies and because of that, this question about whether the model organisms are distorting the understanding of the functioning of telomeres, it's central. Do you feel like you've been, as a young graduate student, do you think Carol or do you think the scientific community broadly screwed you over in some way? I don't think of it in those terms. Probably partly because it's not productive but I have a complex relationship with this story. On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol Greider for what she did. She absolutely pretended that I didn't exist in this story and I don't think I was a threat to her. My interest was as an evolutionary biologist, I had made an evolutionary contribution, she had tested a hypothesis and frankly, I think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what I had done. I think it would have enhanced her work and I was, let's put it this way, when I watched her Nobel lecture, and I should say there's been a lot of confusion about this Nobel stuff. I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel prize. People have misportrayed that. In listening to her lecture, I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis. She presented it as she had in her paper with no acknowledgement of where it had come from and she had in fact portrayed the distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact because it allowed testing hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable. You have to understand as a young scientist to watch work that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her career, it's thrilling. It was thrilling to see her figures projected on the screen there. To have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great and of course, to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible. So anyway, that's sort of where I am with it. My sense is what I'm really troubled by in this story is the fact that as far as I know, the flaw with the mice has not been addressed. And actually, Eric did some looking into this. He tried to establish by calling the Jack's lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the colonies, whether any change in protocol had occurred and he couldn't get anywhere. There was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue. So I'm very troubled by the fact that as a father, for example, I'm in no position to protect my family from the hazard that I believe lurks in our medicine cabinets, right? Even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from, it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if that is ultimately tested. And that's a very frustrating position to be in. On the other hand, there's a part of me that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call. She didn't have to take my call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that wasn't in her wheelhouse specifically, and yet she did. And for a while, she was a good collaborator, so. Well, can I, I have to proceed carefully here because it's a complicated topic. So she took the call. And you kind of, you're kind of saying that she basically erased credit, you know, pretending you didn't exist in some kind of, in a certain sense. Let me phrase it this way. I've, as a research scientist at MIT, I've had, and especially just part of a large set of collaborations, I've had a lot of students come to me and talk to me about ideas, perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here in the space of AI, that I've been thinking about anyway. In general, with everything I'm doing with robotics, people have told me a bunch of ideas that I'm already thinking about. The point is taking that idea, see, this is different because the idea has more power in the space that we're talking about here, and robotics is like your idea means shit until you build it. Like, so the engineering world is a little different, but there's a kind of sense that I probably forgot a lot of brilliant ideas have been told to me. Do you think she pretended you don't exist? Do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot, you know, that she has like the stream of brilliant people around her, there's a bunch of ideas that are swimming in the air, and you just kind of forget people that are a little bit on the periphery on the idea generation, like, or is it some mix of both? It's not a mix of both. I know that because we corresponded. She put a graduate student on this work. He emailed me excitedly when the results came in. So there was no ambiguity about what had happened. What's more, when I went to publish my work, I actually sent it to Carol in order to get her feedback because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her, and she absolutely panned it, made many critiques that were not valid, but it was clear at that point that she became an antagonist, and none of this adds up. She couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation. I believe I even sent her tissues at some point in part, not related to this project, but as a favor. She was doing another project that involved telomeres, and she needed samples that I could get ahold of because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in. So this was not a one off conversation. I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen, but that's not what happened here. This was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from and began to be a opposing force to my work. Is there, there's a bunch of trajectories you could have taken through life. Do you think about the trajectory of being a researcher, of then going to war in the space of ideas, of publishing further papers along this line? I mean, that's often the dynamic of that fascinating space is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas and a senior researcher that starts out as a mentor that becomes a competitor. I mean, that happens. But then the way to, it's almost an opportunity to shine is to publish a bunch more papers in this place to tear it apart, to dig into, like really make it a war of ideas. Did you consider that possible trajectory? I did. A couple of things to say about it. One, this work was not central for me. I took a year on the T. Lemire project because something fascinating occurred to me and I pursued it. And the more I pursued it, the clearer it was there was something there. But it wasn't the focus of my graduate work. And I didn't want to become a T. Lemire researcher. What I want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how organisms function and why. And T. Lemire's was a proof of concept, right? That paper was a proof of concept that the toolkit in question works. As for the need to pursue it further, I think it's kind of absurd and you're not the first person to say maybe that was the way to go about it. But the basic point is, look, the work was good. It turned out to be highly predictive. Frankly, the model of senescence that I presented is now widely accepted. And I don't feel any misgivings at all about having spent a year on it, said my piece, and moved on to other things which frankly I think are bigger. I think there's a lot of good to be done and it would be a waste to get overly narrowly focused. There's so many ways through the space of science and the most common ways is just publish a lot. Just publish a lot of papers, do these incremental work and exploring the space kind of like ants looking for food. You're tossing out a bunch of different ideas. Some of them could be brilliant breakthrough ideas, nature. Some of them are more confidence kind of publications, all those kinds of things. Did you consider that kind of path in science? Of course I considered it, but I must say the experience of having my first encounter with the process of peer review be this story, which was frankly a debacle from one end to the other with respect to the process of publishing. It did not, it was not a very good sales pitch for trying to make a difference through publication. And I would point out part of what I ran into and I think frankly part of what explains Carol's behavior is that in some parts of science, there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings and if you're very, very good, you rise to the level where one day instead of being parasitized, you get to parasitize others. Now I find that scientifically despicable and it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in at all. My lab, in fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone, but who was an incredible mind and a great human being, he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he was on, not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting, but because in effect, he did not want any confusion about who had done what because he was a great mentor and the idea was actually a great mentor is not stealing ideas and you don't want people thinking that they are. So anyway, my point would be, I wasn't up for being parasitized. I don't like the idea that if you are very good, you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others. That doesn't make sense to me. Crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that. That may have been par for the course, but it doesn't make it acceptable. And I would also point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis. My work generally takes evidence accumulated by others and places it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain sets of phenomena that are otherwise intractable. And I am not sure that that is best done with narrow publications that are read by few. And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous example of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I've learned a tremendous amount from and I greatly admire. Dawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer reviewed papers in journals. What he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books, which are not peer reviewed in the same sense. And frankly, I think there's no doubting his contribution to the field. So my sense is if Richard Dawkins can illustrate that one can make contributions to the field without using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've come to understand, then it's obviously a valid mechanism and it's a far better one from the point of view of accomplishing what I want to accomplish. Yeah, it's really interesting. There is of course several levels you can do the kind of synthesis and that does require a lot of both broad and deep thinking is exceptionally valuable. You could also, I'm working on something with Andrew Huberman now, you can also publish synthesis. That's like review papers that are exceptionally valuable for the communities. It brings the community together, tells a history, tells a story of where the community has been. It paints a picture of where the path lays for the future. I think it's really valuable. And Richard Dawkins is a good example of somebody that does that in book form that he kind of walks the line really interestingly. You have like somebody who like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's more like a science communicator. Richard Dawkins sometimes is a science communicator, but he gets like close to the technical to where it's a little bit, it's not shying away from being really a contribution to science. No, he's made real contributions. In book form. Yes, he really has. Which is fascinating. I mean, Roger Penrose, I mean, similar kind of idea. That's interesting, that's interesting. Synthesis does not, especially synthesis work, work that synthesizes ideas does not necessarily need to be peer reviewed. It's peer reviewed by peers reading it. Well, and reviewing it. That's it, it is reviewed by peers, which is not synonymous with peer review. And that's the thing is people don't understand that the two things aren't the same, right? Peer review is an anonymous process that happens before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic, right? I mean, the joke of course is that peer review is actually peer preview, right? Your biggest competitors get to see your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published. And again, when your formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one I had with the telomere paper, there's no way that that seems like the right way to advance important ideas. And what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in public where they actually, if they're gonna disagree with you, they actually have to take the risk of saying, I don't think this is right and here's why, right? With their name on it. I'd much rather that. It's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers, but I want it done in the open, you know, for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people in private, you meet at the cafe. I want the work reviewed out in public. Can I ask you a difficult question? Sure. There is popularity in martyrdom. There's popularity in pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. That can become a drug in itself. I've confronted this in scientific work I've done at MIT where there are certain things that are not done well. People are not being the best version of themselves. And particular aspects of a particular field are in need of a revolution. And part of me wanted to point that out versus doing the hard work of publishing papers and doing the revolution. Basically just pointing out, look, you guys are doing it wrong and then just walking away. Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom, of the ego involved in it, that it can cloud your thinking? Probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked. So let me try to sort it out. First of all, we are all mysteries to ourself at some level. So it's possible there's stuff going on in me that I'm not aware of that's driving. But in general, I would say one of my better strengths is that I'm not especially ego driven. I have an ego, I clearly think highly of myself, but it is not driving me. I do not crave that kind of validation. I do crave certain things. I do love a good eureka moment. There is something great about it. And there's something even better about the phone calls you make next when you share it, right? It's pretty fun, right? I really like it. I also really like my subject, right? There's something about a walk in the forest when you have a toolkit in which you can actually look at creatures and see something deep, right? I like it, that drives me. And I could entertain myself for the rest of my life, right? If I was somehow isolated from the rest of the world, but I was in a place that was biologically interesting, hopefully I would be with people that I love and pets that I love, believe it or not. But if I were in that situation and I could just go out every day and look at cool stuff and figure out what it means, I could be all right with that. So I'm not heavily driven by the ego thing, as you put it. So I am completely the same except instead of the pets, I would put robots. But so it's not, it's the eureka, it's the exploration of the subject that brings you joy and fulfillment. It's not the ego. Well, there's more to say. No, I really don't think it's the ego thing. I will say I also have kind of a secondary passion for robot stuff. I've never made anything useful, but I do believe, I believe I found my calling. But if this wasn't my calling, my calling would have been inventing stuff. I really enjoy that too. So I get what you're saying about the analogy quite well. But as far as the martyrdom thing, I understand the drug you're talking about and I've seen it more than I've felt it. I do, if I'm just to be completely candid and this question is so good, it deserves a candid answer. I do like the fight, right? I like fighting against people I don't respect and I like winning, but I have no interest in martyrdom. One of the reasons I have no interest in martyrdom is that I'm having too good a time, right? I very much enjoy my life and. It's such a good answer. I have a wonderful wife. I have amazing children. I live in a lovely place. I don't wanna exit any quicker than I have to. That said, I also believe in things and a willingness to exit if that's the only way is not exactly inviting martyrdom, but it is an acceptance that fighting is dangerous and going up against powerful forces means who knows what will come of it, right? I don't have the sense that the thing is out there that used to kill inconvenient people. I don't think that's how it's done anymore. It's primarily done through destroying them reputationally, which is not something I relish the possibility of, but there is a difference between a willingness to face the hazard rather than a desire to face it because of the thrill, right? For me, the thrill is in fighting when I'm in the right. I think I feel that that is a worthwhile way to take what I see as the kind of brutality that is built into men and to channel it to something useful, right? If it is not channeled into something useful, it will be channeled into something else, so it damn well better be channeled into something useful. It's not motivated by fame or popularity, those kinds of things. It's, you know what, you're just making me realize that enjoying the fight, fighting the powerful and idea that you believe is right is a kind of optimism for the human spirit. It's like, we can win this. It's almost like you're turning into action, into personal action, this hope for humanity by saying like, we can win this. And that makes you feel good about the rest of humanity, that if there's people like me, then we're going to be okay. Even if you're like, your ideas might be wrong or not, but if you believe they're right and you're fighting the powerful against all odds, then we're going to be okay. If I were to project, I mean, because I enjoy the fight as well, I think that's the way I, that's what brings me joy, is it's almost like it's optimism in action. Well, it's a little different for me. And again, I think, you know, I recognize you. You're a familiar, your construction is familiar, even if it isn't mine, right? For me, I actually expect us not to be okay. And I'm not okay with that. But what's really important, if I feel like what I've said is I don't know of any reason that it's not okay, or any reason that it's too late. As far as I know, we could still save humanity and we could get to the fourth frontier or something akin to it. But I expect us not to, I expect us to fuck it up, right? I don't like that thought, but I've looked into the abyss and I've done my calculations and the number of ways we could not succeed are many and the number of ways that we could manage to get out of this very dangerous phase of history is small. The thing I don't have to worry about is that I didn't do enough, right? That I was a coward, that I prioritized other things. At the end of the day, I think I will be able to say to myself, and in fact, the thing that allows me to sleep, is that when I saw clearly what needed to be done, I tried to do it to the extent that it was in my power. And if we fail, as I expect us to, I can't say, well, geez, that's on me, you know? And frankly, I regard what I just said to you as something like a personality defect, right? I'm trying to free myself from the sense that this is my fault. On the other hand, my guess is that personality defect is probably good for humanity, right? It's a good one for me to have the externalities of it are positive, so I don't feel too bad about it. Yeah, that's funny, so yeah, our perspective on the world are different, but they rhyme, like you said. Because I've also looked into the abyss, and it kind of smiled nervously back. So I have a more optimistic sense that we're gonna win more than likely we're going to be okay. Right there with you, brother. I'm hoping you're right. I'm expecting me to be right. But back to Eric, you had a wonderful conversation. In that conversation, he played the big brother role, and he was very happy about it. He was self congratulatory about it. Can you talk to the ways in which Eric made you a better man throughout your life? Yeah, hell yeah. I mean, for one thing, you know, Eric and I are interestingly similar in some ways and radically different in some other ways, and it's often a matter of fascination to people who know us both because almost always people meet one of us first, and they sort of get used to that thing, and then they meet the other, and it throws the model into chaos. But you know, I had a great advantage, which is I came second, right? So although it was kind of a pain in the ass to be born into a world that had Eric in it because he's a force of nature, right? It was also terrifically useful because A, he was a very awesome older brother who made interesting mistakes, learned from them, and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered, and that was, you know, I don't know who else ends up so lucky as to have that kind of person blazing the trail. It also probably, you know, my hypothesis for what birth order effects are is that they're actually adaptive, right? That the reason that a second born is different than a first born is that they're not born into a world with the same niches in it, right? And so the thing about Eric is he's been completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking, right, like what he's fascinated by is the fundamental of fundamentals, and he's excellent at it, which meant that I was born into a world where somebody was becoming excellent in that, and for me to be anywhere near the fundamental of fundamentals was going to be pointless, right? I was going to be playing second fiddle forever, and I think that that actually drove me to the other end of the continuum between fundamental and emergent, and so I became fascinated with biology and have been since I was three years old, right? I think Eric drove that, and I have to thank him for it because, you know, I mean. I never thought of, so Eric drives towards the fundamental, and you drive towards the emergent, the physics and the biology. Right, opposite ends of the continuum, and as Eric would be quick to point out if he was sitting here, I treat the emergent layer, I seek the fundamentals in it, which is sort of an echo of Eric's style of thinking but applied to the very far complexity. He's overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics, the fundamental of the fundamental. He's not here to defend himself. Is there an argument to be made against that? Or biology, the emergent, the study of the thing that emerged when the fundamental acts at the cosmic scale and then builds the beautiful thing that is us is much more important. Psychology, biology, the systems that we're actually interacting with in this human world are much more important to understand than the low level theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yeah, I can't say that one is more important. I think there's probably a different time scale. I think understanding the emergent layer is more often useful, but the bang for the buck at the far fundamental layer may be much greater. So for example, the fourth frontier, I'm pretty sure it's gonna have to be fusion powered. I don't think anything else will do it, but once you had fusion power, assuming we didn't just dump fusion power on the market the way we would be likely to if it was invented usefully tomorrow, but if we had fusion power and we had a little bit more wisdom than we have, you could do an awful lot. And that's not gonna come from people like me who look at the dynamics of it. Can I argue against that? Please. I think the way to unlock fusion power is through artificial intelligence. So I think most of the breakthrough ideas in the futures of science will be developed by AI systems. And I think in order to build intelligent AI systems, you have to be a scholar of the fundamental of the emergent, of biology, of the neuroscience, of the way the brain works, of intelligence, of consciousness. And those things, at least directly, don't have anything to do with physics. Well. You're making me a little bit sad because my addiction to the aha moment thing is incompatible with outsourcing that job. Like the outsource thing. I don't wanna outsource that thing to the AI. You reap the moment. And actually, I've seen this happen before because some of the people who trained Heather and me were phylogenetic systematists, Arnold Kluge in particular. And the problem with systematics is that to do it right when your technology is primitive, you have to be deeply embedded in the philosophical and the logical, right? Your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor. Once you can sequence genes, genes can spit so much data at you that you can overwhelm high quality work with just lots and lots and lots of automated work. And so in some sense, there's like a generation of phylogenetic systematists who are the last of the greats because what's replacing them is sequencers. So anyway, maybe you're right about the AI. And I guess I'm... What makes you sad? I like figuring stuff out. Is there something that you disagree with the error con, even trying to convince them you failed so far, but you will eventually succeed? You know, that is a very long list. Eric and I have tensions over certain things that recur all the time. And I'm trying to think what would be the ideal... Is it in the space of science, in the space of philosophy, politics, family, love, robots? Well, all right, let me... I'm just gonna use your podcast to make a bit of a cryptic war and just say there are many places in which I believe that I have butted heads with Eric over the course of decades and I have seen him move in my direction substantially over time. So you've been winning. He might win a battle here or there, but you've been winning the war. I would not say that. It's quite possible he could say the same thing about me. And in fact, I know that it's true. There are places where he's absolutely convinced me. But in any case, I do believe it's at least... It may not be a totally even fight, but it's more even than some will imagine. But yeah, we have... There are things I say that drive him nuts, right? Like when something, like you heard me talk about the... What was it? It was the autopilot that seems to be putting a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy over the COVID 19 pandemic. And my feeling is we can say this almost for sure. Anytime you have the appearance of some captured gigantic entity that is censoring you on YouTube and handing down dictates from the who and all of that, it is sure that there will be a certain amount of collusion, right? There's gonna be some embarrassing emails in some places that are gonna reveal some shocking connections. And then there's gonna be an awful lot of emergence that didn't involve collusion, right? In which people were doing their little part of a job and something was emerging. And you never know what the admixture is. How much are we looking at actual collusion and how much are we looking at an emergent process? But you should always walk in with the sense that it's gonna be a ratio. And the question is, what is the ratio in this case? I think this drives Eric nuts because he is very focused on the people. I think he's focused on the people who have a choice and make the wrong one. And anyway, he may. Discussion of the ratio is a distraction to that. I think he takes it almost as an offense because it grants cover to people who are harming others. And I think it offends him morally. And if I had to say, I would say it alters his judgment on the matter. But anyway, certainly useful just to leave open the two possibilities and say it's a ratio, but we don't know which one. Brother to brother, do you love the guy? Hmm, hell yeah, hell yeah. And I'd love him if he was just my brother, but he's also awesome. So I love him and I love him for who he is. So let me ask you about back to your book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. I can't wait both for the book and the videos you do on the book. That's really exciting that there's like a structured, organized way to present this. A kind of from an evolutionary biology perspective, a guide for the future, using our past as the fundamental, the emergent way to present a picture of the future. Let me ask you about something that, I think about a little bit in this modern world, which is monogamy. So I personally value monogamy. One girl, ride or die. There you go. Ride or, no, that's exactly it now. But that said, I don't know what's the right way to approach this, but from an evolutionary biology perspective or from just looking at modern society, that seems to be an idea that's not, what's the right way to put it, flourishing? It is waning. It's waning. So I suppose based on your reaction, you're also a supporter of monogamy or you value monogamy. Are you and I just delusional? What can you say about monogamy from the context of your book, from the context of evolutionary biology, from the context of being human? Yeah, I can say that I fully believe that we are actually enlightened and that although monogamy is waning, that it is not waning because there is a superior system. It is waning for predictable other reasons. So let us just say it is, there is a lot of pre trans fallacy here where people go through a phase where they recognize that actually we know a lot about the evolution of monogamy and we can tell from the fact that humans are somewhat sexually dimorphic that there has been a lot of polygyny in human history. And in fact, most of human history was largely polygynous. But it is also the case that most of the people on earth today belong to civilizations that are at least nominally monogamous and have practiced monogamy. And that's not anti evolutionary. What that is is part of what I mentioned before where human beings can swap out their software program and different mating patterns are favored in different periods of history. So I would argue that the benefit of monogamy, the primary one that drives the evolution of monogamous patterns in humans is that it brings all adults into child rearing. Now the reason that that matters is because human babies are very labor intensive. In order to raise them properly, having two parents is a huge asset and having more than two parents, having an extended family also very important. But what that means is that for a population that is expanding, a monogamous mating system makes sense. It makes sense because it means that the number of offspring that can be raised is elevated. It's elevated because all potential parents are involved in parenting. Whereas if you sideline a bunch of males by having a polygynous system in which one male has many females, which is typically the way that works, what you do is you sideline all those males, which means the total amount of parental effort is lower and the population can't grow. So what I'm arguing is that you should expect to see populations that face the possibility of expansion endorse monogamy. And at the point that they have reached carrying capacity, you should expect to see polygyny break back out. And what we are seeing is a kind of false sophistication around polyamory, which will end up breaking down into polygyny, which will not be in the interest of most people. Really the only people whose interest it could be argued to be in would be the very small number of males at the top who have many partners and everybody else suffers. Is it possible to make the argument if we focus in on those males at the quote unquote top with many female partners, is it possible to say that that's a suboptimal life, that a single partner is the optimal life? Well, it depends what you mean. I have a feeling that you and I wouldn't have to go very far to figure out that what might be evolutionarily optimal doesn't match my values as a person and I'm sure it doesn't match yours either. Can we try to dig into that gap between those two? Sure. I mean, we can do it very simply. Selection might favor your engaging in war against a defenseless enemy or genocide, right? It's not hard to figure out how that might put your genes at advantage. I don't know about you, Lex. I'm not getting involved in no genocide. It's not gonna happen. I won't do it. I will do anything to avoid it. So some part of me has decided that my conscious self and the values that I hold trump my evolutionary self and once you figure out that in some extreme case, that's true and then you realize that that means it must be possible in many other cases and you start going through all of the things that selection would favor and you realize that a fair fraction of the time, actually, you're not up for this. You don't wanna be some robot on a mission that involves genocide when necessary. You wanna be your own person and accomplish things that you think are valuable. And so among those are not advocating, let's suppose you were in a position to be one of those males at the top of a polygynous system. We both know why that would be rewarding, right? But we also both recognize. Do we? Yeah, sure. Lots of sex? Yeah. Okay, what else? Lots of sex and lots of variety, right? So look, every red blooded American slash Russian male can understand why that's appealing, right? On the other hand, it is up against an alternative which is having a partner with whom one is bonded especially closely, right? Right. And so. A love. Right. Well, I don't wanna straw man the polygyny position. Obviously polygyny is complex and there's nothing that stops a man presumably from loving multiple partners and from them loving him back. But in terms of, if love is your thing, there's a question about, okay, what is the quality of love if it is divided over multiple partners, right? And what is the net consequence for love in a society when multiple people will be frozen out for every individual male in this case who has it? And what I would argue is, and you know, this is weird to even talk about, but this is partially me just talking from personal experience. I think there actually is a monogamy program in us and it's not automatic. But if you take it seriously, you can find it and frankly, marriage, and it doesn't have to be marriage, but whatever it is that results in a lifelong bond with a partner has gotten a very bad rap. You know, it's the butt of too many jokes. But the truth is, it's hugely rewarding, it's not easy. But if you know that you're looking for something, right? If you know that the objective actually exists and it's not some utopian fantasy that can't be found, if you know that there's some real world, you know, warts and all version of it, then you might actually think, hey, that is something I want and you might pursue it and my guess is you'd be very happy when you find it. Yeah, I think there is, getting to the fundamental and the emergent, I feel like there is some kind of physics of love. So one, there's a conservation thing going on. So if you have like many partners, yeah, in theory, you should be able to love all of them deeply. But it seems like in reality that love gets split. Yep. Now, there's another law that's interesting in terms of monogamy. I don't know if it's at the physics level, but if you are in a monogamous relationship by choice and almost as in slight rebellion to social norms, that's much more powerful. Like if you choose that one partnership, that's also more powerful. If like everybody's in a monogamous, this pressure to be married and this pressure of society, that's different because that's almost like a constraint on your freedom that is enforced by something other than your own ideals. It's by somebody else. When you yourself choose to, I guess, create these constraints, that enriches that love. So there's some kind of love function, like E equals MC squared, but for love, that I feel like if you have less partners and it's done by choice, that can maximize that. And that love can transcend the biology, transcend the evolutionary biology forces that have to do much more with survival and all those kinds of things. It can transcend to take us to a richer experience, which we have the luxury of having, exploring of happiness, of joy, of fulfillment, all those kinds of things. Totally agree with this. And there's no question that by choice, when there are other choices, imbues it with meaning that it might not otherwise have. I would also say, I'm really struck by, and I have a hard time not feeling terrible sadness over what younger people are coming to think about this topic. I think they're missing something so important and so hard to phrase that, and they don't even know that they're missing it. They might know that they're unhappy, but they don't understand what it is they're even looking for, because nobody's really been honest with them about what their choices are. And I have to say, if I was a young person, or if I was advising a young person, which I used to do, again, a million years ago when I was a college professor four years ago, but I used to talk to students. I knew my students really well, and they would ask questions about this, and they were always curious because Heather and I seemed to have a good relationship, and many of them knew both of us. So they would talk to us about this. If I was advising somebody, I would say, do not bypass the possibility that what you are supposed to do is find somebody worthy, somebody who can handle it, somebody who you are compatible with, and that you don't have to be perfectly compatible. It's not about dating until you find the one. It's about finding somebody whose underlying values and viewpoint are complimentary to yours, sufficient that you fall in love. If you find that person, opt out together. Get out of this damn system that's telling you what's sophisticated to think about love and romance and sex. Ignore it together, all right? That's the key, and I believe you'll end up laughing in the end if you do it. You'll discover, wow, that's a hellscape that I opted out of, and this thing I opted into? Complicated, difficult, worth it. Nothing that's worth it is ever not difficult, so we should even just skip the whole statement about difficult. Yeah, all right. I just, I wanna be honest. It's not like, oh, it's nonstop joy. No, it's fricking complex, but worth it? No question in my mind. Is there advice outside of love that you can give to young people? You were a million years ago a professor. Is there advice you can give to young people, high schoolers, college students about career, about life? Yeah, but it's not, they're not gonna like it because it's not easy to operationalize, and this was a problem when I was a college professor, too. People would ask me what they should do. Should they go to graduate school? I had almost nothing useful to say because the job market and the market of prejob training and all of that, these things are all so distorted and corrupt that I didn't wanna point anybody to anything because it's all broken, and I would tell them that, but I would say that results in a kind of meta level advice that I do think is useful. You don't know what's coming. You don't know where the opportunities will be. You should invest in tools rather than knowledge. To the extent that you can do things, you can repurpose that no matter what the future brings to the extent that if you, as a robot guy, you've got the skills of a robot guy. Now, if civilization failed and the stuff of robot building disappeared with it, you'd still have the mind of a robot guy, and the mind of a robot guy can retool around all kinds of things, whether you're forced to work with fibers that are made into ropes. Your mechanical mind would be useful in all kinds of places, so invest in tools like that that can be easily repurposed, and invest in combinations of tools, right? If civilization keeps limping along, you're gonna be up against all sorts of people who have studied the things that you studied, right? If you think, hey, computer programming is really, really cool, and you pick up computer programming, guess what, you just entered a large group of people who have that skill, and many of them will be better than you, almost certainly. On the other hand, if you combine that with something else that's very rarely combined with it, if you have, I don't know if it's carpentry and computer programming, if you take combinations of things that are, even if they're both common, but they're not commonly found together, then those combinations create a rarefied space where you inhabit it, and even if the things don't even really touch, but nonetheless, they create a mind in which the two things are live and you can move back and forth between them and step out of your own perspective by moving from one to the other, that will increase what you can see and the quality of your tools. And so anyway, that isn't useful advice. It doesn't tell you whether you should go to graduate school or not, but it does tell you the one thing we can say for certain about the future is that it's uncertain, and so prepare for it. And like you said, there's cool things to be discovered in the intersection of fields and ideas. And I would look at grad school that way, actually, if you do go, or I see, I mean, this is such a, like every course in grad school, undergrad too, was like this little journey that you're on that explores a particular field. And it's not immediately obvious how useful it is, but it allows you to discover intersections between that thing and some other thing. So you're bringing to the table these pieces of knowledge, some of which when intersected might create a niche that's completely novel, unique, and will bring you joy. I mean, I took a huge number of courses in theoretical computer science. Most of them seem useless, but they totally changed the way I see the world in ways that I'm not prepared or is a little bit difficult to kind of make explicit, but taken together, they've allowed me to see, for example, the world of robotics totally different and different from many of my colleagues and friends and so on. And I think that's a good way to see if you go to grad school was as a opportunity to explore intersections of fields, even if the individual fields seem useless. Yeah, and useless doesn't mean useless, right? Useless means not directly applicable, but a good, useless course can be the best one you ever took. Yeah, I took James Joyce, a course on James Joyce, and that was truly useless. Well, I took immunobiology in the medical school when I was at Penn as, I guess I would have been a freshman or a sophomore. I wasn't supposed to be in this class. It blew my goddamn mind, and it still does, right? I mean, we had this, I don't even know who it was, but we had this great professor who was highly placed in the world of immunobiology. The course is called Immunobiology, not immunology. Immunobiology, it had the right focus, and as I recall it, the professor stood sideways to the chalkboard, staring off into space, literally stroking his beard with this bemused look on his face through the entire lecture. And you had all these medical students who were so furiously writing notes that I don't even think they were noticing the person delivering this thing, but I got what this guy was smiling about. It was like so, what he was describing, adaptive immunity is so marvelous, right? That it was like almost a privilege to even be saying it to a room full of people who were listening, you know? But anyway, yeah, I took that course, and lo and behold, COVID. That's gonna be useful. Well, yeah, suddenly it's front and center, and wow, am I glad I took it. But anyway, yeah, useless courses are great. And actually, Eric gave me one of the greater pieces of advice, at least for college, that anyone's ever given, which was don't worry about the prereqs. Take it anyway, right? But now, I don't even know if kids can do this now because the prereqs are now enforced by a computer. But back in the day, if you didn't mention that you didn't have the prereqs, nobody stopped you from taking the course. And what he told me, which I didn't know, was that often the advanced courses are easier in some way. The material's complex, but it's not like intro bio where you're learning a thousand things at once, right? It's like focused on something. So if you dedicate yourself, you can pull it off. Yeah, stay with an idea for many weeks at a time, and it's ultimately rewarding, and not as difficult as it looks. Can I ask you a ridiculous question? Please. What do you think is the meaning of life? Well, I feel terrible having to give you the answer. I realize you asked the question, but if I tell you, you're gonna again feel bad. I don't wanna do that. But look, there's two. There can be a disappointment. No, it's gonna be a horror, right? Because we actually know the answer to the question. Oh no. It's completely meaningless. There is nothing that we can do that escapes the heat death of the universe or whatever it is that happens at the end. And we're not gonna make it there anyway. But even if you were optimistic about our ability to escape every existential hazard indefinitely, ultimately it's all for naught and we know it, right? That said, once you stare into that abyss, and then it stares back and laughs or whatever happens, then the question is, okay, given that, can I relax a little bit, right? And figure out, well, what would make sense if that were true, right? And I think there's something very clear to me. I think if you do all of the, if I just take the values that I'm sure we share and extrapolate from them, I think the following thing is actually a moral imperative. Being a human and having opportunity is absolutely fucking awesome, right? A lot of people don't make use of the opportunity and a lot of people don't have opportunity, right? They get to be human, but they're too constrained by keeping a roof over their heads to really be free. But being a free human is fantastic. And being a free human on this beautiful planet, crippled as it may be, is unparalleled. I mean, what could be better? How lucky are we that we get that, right? So if that's true, that it is awesome to be human and to be free, then surely it is our obligation to deliver that opportunity to as many people as we can. And how do you do that? Well, I think I know what job one is. Job one is we have to get sustainable. The way to get the maximum number of humans to have that opportunity to be both here and free is to make sure that there isn't a limit on how long we can keep doing this. That effectively requires us to reach sustainability. And then at sustainability, you could have a horror show of sustainability, right? You could have a totalitarian sustainability. That's not the objective. The objective is to liberate people. And so the question, the whole fourth frontier question, frankly, is how do you get to a sustainable and indefinitely sustainable state in which people feel liberated, in which they are liberated, to pursue the things that actually matter, to pursue beauty, truth, compassion, connection, all of those things that we could list as unalloyed goods, those are the things that people should be most liberated to do in a system that really functions. And anyway, my point is, I don't know how precise that calculation is, but I'm pretty sure it's not wrong. It's accurate enough. And if it is accurate enough, then the point is, okay, well, there's no ultimate meaning, but the proximate meaning is that one. How many people can we get to have this wonderful experience that we've gotten to have, right? And there's no way that's so wrong that if I invest my life in it, that I'm making some big error. I'm sure of that. Life is awesome, and we wanna spread the awesome as much as possible. Yeah, you sum it up that way, spread the awesome. Spread the awesome. So that's the fourth frontier. And if that fails, if the fourth frontier fails, the fifth frontier will be defined by robots, and hopefully they'll learn the lessons of the mistakes that the humans made and build a better world with more awesome. I hope they're very happy here and that they do a better job with the place than we did. Yeah. Brett. I can't believe it took us this long to talk, as I mentioned to you before, that we haven't actually spoken, I think, at all. And I've always felt that we're already friends. I don't know how that works because I've listened to your podcasts a lot. I've also sort of loved your brother. And so it was like, we've known each other for the longest time, and I hope we can be friends and talk often again. And I hope that you get a chance to meet some of my robot friends as well and fall in love. And I'm so glad that you love robots as well. So we get to share in that love. So I can't wait for us to interact together. So we went from talking about some of the worst failures of humanity to some of the most beautiful aspects of humanity. What else can you ask for from a conversation? Thank you so much for talking today. You know, Lex, I feel the same way towards you, and I really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to our next one. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brett Weinstein, and thank you to Jordan Harbridge's show, Express CPN, Magic Spoon, and Four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic | Lex Fridman Podcast #194

The following is a conversation with Clara Souza Silva, a quantum astrochemist at Harvard specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets, most especially the gas phosphine. She was a coauthor of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and, thus, possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere. The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now still under active research. Quick mention of our sponsors, Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life on other planets is one of the most important endeavors in science. If we find extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms that originated life here on Earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated intelligence and consciousness. If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them. But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and our universe is teeming with life. This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting. We humans are natural explorers. For most of our history, we explored the surface of the Earth and the contents of our minds. But now, with spacefaring vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth, their physics, their biology, and perhaps the contents of their minds. This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Clara Souza Silva. Since you're the world expert in, well, in many things, but one of them is phosphine, would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine? I go for Dr. Phosphine. Queen is an inherited title, I feel. But you still rule by love and power, so, but while having the doctor title, I got it. Kindness. Kindness. Kindness. In September 2020, you coauthored a paper announcing possible presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, and that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life. Big maybe. Big maybe. There was some pushback, of course, from the scientific community that followed, friendly, loving pushback. Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding. So where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on, on Venus in terms of phosphine and in terms of aliens? Let's try to break it down. The short answer is we don't know. I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery, but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had, you know, years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere. We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart, but still, the data is weak. It's noisy. It's delicate. It's very much at the edge of instrument sensitivity, sensitivity, and so we still don't even know if it is phosphine. We don't even really know if the signal is real. People still disagree about that. I think at the more philosophical end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction, and myself and other coauthors were talking about this, it's a distinction between hypothesis generation and hypothesis testing. Now hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method, but it has a problem, which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test the hypothesis, you may by mistake create a spurious signal. The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation. You see some data and you go, what's in there? With no bias. Now this is much safer, much more conservative, and when there's a lot of data, that's great. When there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it. The signal with a bath water, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be. And so I think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this. There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people and experts where the signal shows up and then phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus, and some where it doesn't, and then we disagree what that signal means. If it's real and it is an ambiguously phosphine, it is very exciting because we don't know how to explain it without life, but going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump. And so... Venusians. So that would be the title for the civilization, if it is a living and thriving on Venus's Venusians. Until we know what they call themselves and that's the name, yes. So this is the early analysis of data or analysis of early data. It was nevertheless, you waited until the actual peer reviewed publication to know? Of course. And analysis of the two different instruments months apart. So that's ALMA and JCMT, the two telescopes. I mean, it's still, I mean, it's really exciting. What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data? Like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering and still wondering, is it true? Like how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in the atmosphere? It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. I mean... In the best possible way? I've been working on phosphine for over a decade. Before it was cool. Way before it was cool. Before anyone could spell it or heard of it. And at the time people either didn't know what phosphine was or only knew it for being just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth. And so no one was a fan. And I had been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting but very promising sign of life. I've been looking for it everywhere. I really didn't think to look in the solar system. I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life. And so I wasn't even considering the solar system at all, never mind next door Venus. It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds of Venus and then reached out to me to say, I don't know phosphine but I know it's weird. How weird is it? And the answer is very weird. And so the telescopes we're looking at, this is visual data. That's what I mean by visual. You wouldn't see the phosphine. Well, but I mean it's a telescope. It's remote. It's remote. You're observing, you're what zooming in on this particular planet and what does the sensor actually look like? How many pixels are there? What does the data kind of look like? It'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which, I mean, if you look at like, I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and it's kind of incredible how from just very little, like probably the world's most precise instrument, we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe. And in that same way, it's kind of incredible how much data, how much information you can get from just a few pixels. So what are we talking about here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible signs of phosphine in the atmosphere? So phosphine, like every other molecule has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint, meaning it rotates and it vibrates in special ways. I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate and vibrate, 16.8 billion ways. What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left, indentations left in that spectrum. We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion. So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones? But they're really hard to spot. They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one. There's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days of continuous observations and that's not really in the cards right now. There's all kinds of noise, first of all. There's all kinds of other signal. So how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that's associated with phosphine? So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave and a lot of that is noise and it's a baseline. And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out and you should be left with a straight line and if there's something there, an absorption, so a signal. So that's what we did. We tried to find out what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out and got the signal. That's part of the problem. If you do this wrong, you can create a signal. But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers and we actually have more digits than that, but I don't remember by heart. And ALMA in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes and it can focus on exactly that frequency. And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb it all. So that's how we do it. We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs the other molecules SO2. If there is extraterrestrial life, whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets where you looked before, how does that make you feel? How should it make us feel? Should we be scared? Should we be excited? Let's say it's not intelligent life. Let's say it's microbial life. Is it a threat to us? Are we a threat to it? Or is it only, not only, but mostly a possibility to understand something fundamental, something beautiful about life in the universe? Hard to know. You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show. I feel those things. I just don't know if those are the right things to feel. I certainly don't feel scared. I think it's rather silly to feel scared. Definitely don't touch them. Sometimes in movies, don't go near it. Don't interfere. I think one of the things with Venus is because of phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited. And in that case, we shouldn't go there. We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it. And Venus has suffered enough. If there's life there, it's probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors of what once was potentially a thriving world. And so I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be a massacre. So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a, let's say, galactic responsibility, galactic ethics. And I often think of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up. So I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life. But certainly I wouldn't be scared. Humans are plenty capable of killing one another. We don't need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves. Scared mostly of other humans. Exactly. But these, this life, if there is life there, it does seem just like you said, it would be pretty rugged. It's like the cockroaches or Chuck Norris, I don't know. It's the, some kind of, it's something that survived through some very difficult conditions. That doesn't mean it would handle us, you know, it could be like war of the worlds. You come, just because you're resilient in your own planet doesn't mean you can survive another. The extremophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles. They wouldn't really make it in the Venusian clouds. So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive on an alien planet. And then from the scientific perspective, you don't want to pollute the data gathering process by showing up there. The observer can affect the observed. How heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet and then we're like, oh, we brought it with us. It was my sandwich. But that's always the problem, right? And it's certainly a problem with Mars because we've visited the, if there is life on Mars or like remains of life on Mars, it's always going to be a question of like, well, maybe we planted it there. Let's not do the same with Venus. It's harder because when we try to go to Venus, things melt very quickly. So it's a little harder to pollute Venus. It's very good at destroying foreigners. Yeah. Well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets, Mars is stop number one, then Venus maybe after that. So can we talk about phosphine a little bit? So you mentioned it's a pretty... Love talking about phosphine. Love phosphine. What's your Twitter handle? It's like Dr. Phosphine. It's Dr. Phosphine. Yes. You will be surprised here. It wasn't taken already. I just grabbed it. I didn't have to buy it off anyone. Yeah. So what is it? What's phosphine? You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and troublesome and outside, troublesome, sorry. No, I love it. I'm going to stop calling it troublesome. So maybe what are some things that make it interesting chemically and why is it a good sign of life when it's present in the atmosphere? Like you've described in your paper, aptly titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas in exoplanet atmospheres. I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus. I did. Yes. I did. And no one cared. In that paper, I said something like, if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet can only mean life. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right. Let's go. And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure? I'm like, I was sure before I was sure. Now that it's right here, I'm less sure now that my claims are being tested. So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule. So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens. It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways and you know, it's the most popular elements in the universe, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules. You do it to oxygen, you get water, you do it to carbon, you get methane, you do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia. These are all molecules people have heard of, but you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine. People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on earth. You really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth because it is extremely toxic to life. It interacts with oxygen metabolism and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism and it interacts fatally. So it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways. So it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war and most recently by ISIS. So really bad. Most life avoids it. Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic life still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it. It's a really difficult molecule to make, thermodynamically speaking. It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with that hydrogen. So it's horrible. Everyone avoids it. When they're not avoiding it, it's extremely difficult to make. You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it. And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere and gets destroyed. So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do. This is kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don't even know why. Life clearly finds a use for it. It's not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don't know how or why life is even making it. So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly, smells horrifically. When it's made, it produces other kind of diphosphenes and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky, fishy death. Once someone referred to it as smelling like the, let me see if I remember, the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan. Oh, very nice. Yeah, very vivid. And so... You're a poet after all. I didn't call it that, someone else did. And so it's just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life. We don't know why. And when it is produced by life, it's done with enormous sacrifice and the universe does not sacrifice, life sacrifices. And so it's this strange, contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life on rocky planets. Okay. Can we dig into that a little bit? So on rocky planets, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it? You said that why is unclear, why life might produce it, but is there an understanding of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it, this very difficult to produce molecule? We don't know yet. The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life are not yet known. This is not actually as surprising as it might sound. I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of, so we know biology makes them. We don't know how. It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a Petri dish and then watch and then that gas is produced, you go, oh, life made it. That actually happened with phosphine. But that's much easier to do of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway within that life form that created this molecule. So we don't know yet. Phosphine is really understudied. No one had really heard of it until nowish. What you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphine, not the process by which it produces phosphine. Is there an urgency now? Like if you were to try to understand the mechanisms, the, what did you call them, enzymatic pathways that produce phosphine, how difficult is that of a problem to crack? It's really difficult. If I'm not mistaken, even the scent of truffles, obviously a billion dollar industry, huge deal. Until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create this incredible smell were produced. This is a billion dollar industry. As you can imagine, there is no such pressure. There's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research, but I hope someone picks it up and does it. And it isn't crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make. We know it's really hard for it to happen accidentally. Even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine, it's extremely difficult for even these extreme processes to make it. So it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make things at a cost. So maybe on the topic of phosphine, what, again, you've gotten yourself into trouble. I'm going to ask you all these high level poetic questions. I apologize. No, I would love it. Okay. When did you first fall in love with phosphine? It wasn't love at first sight. It was somewhere between a long relationship and Stockholm syndrome. When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to simulate it. I thought it was really outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely. We didn't have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule we may want to find in the universe. And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted with light and so we couldn't detect it properly in the galaxy, I was so indignant. And so initially I just started working on phosphine because people hadn't before. And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like and that was it. And then I read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine. It was quite easy because there aren't that many. And that's when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe and what it meant. I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why. And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists that it became clear that phosphine wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting. It was all these things for oxygen loving life. And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine and that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized. Because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth but that's not necessarily going to be the case on other exoplanets. Most planets are oxygen poor, overwhelmingly most planets are oxygen poor. And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool. But ultimately the project at first was born out of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of a molecule. And this is just one example. And that's connected to then looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in a remote way. And obviously that then at that time where exoplanets already, when you were doing your PhD, and by the way you should say your PhD thesis was on phosphine. It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine with a little bit of ammonia. I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia. But no, phosphine was very much my thesis. But at that time when you're writing it there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures on those exoplanets? Pretty much. I did my PhD in 2015. We found the first exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s. So exoplanets were known. It was known that some had atmospheres and from there it's not a big jump to think, well, if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable and some of those may be inhabited. So how do you detect, you started to talk about it, but can we linger on it? How do you detect phosphine on a faraway thing, rocky thing, rocky planet? What is spectroscopy? What is this molecular fingerprint? What does it look like? You've kind of mentioned the wave, but what are we supposed to think about? What are the tools? What are the uncertainties? All those kinds of things. So the path can go this way. You've got light, kind of pure light. You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow. That rainbow is all the colors and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared. And if that light was truly pure, you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors. But if that light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas. We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas, but those molecules will steal, absorb some of that light, some, but not all. Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow. And so if you know, for example, that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane, then you can watch. As a planet passes in front of a star, the planet's too far away, you can't see it. And it has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can't see it. But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere. And if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't remember if I said blue or green, that color will be missing because methane took it. And so with phosphine, it's the same thing. It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors that it absorbs it and nothing else does. And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains the molecule. How cool is that? That's incredible. So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules. And I mean, I wonder, that's a question of like how much overlap there is. How close can you get to the actual fingerprint? Like can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on? You said 16.8 billion, so presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments somehow. Exactly. How many total are there? How a lot is 16.8 billion? It's a lot. We don't have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny segments. And so with the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap. As an example, a lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they vibrate with one another, they move, they interact. But every other hydrocarbon, acetylene, isoprene has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating. And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions and our instruments can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well. But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule's spectral features will be unique. Yeah, like almost too unique, like it would be too trivial. At the quantum level, they're unique. At our level, there's huge overlap. Yeah. So you can start to then try to disambiguate the fact that certain colors are missing, what does that mean? And hopefully they're missing in a certain kind of pattern where you can say with some kind of probability, there's this gas, not this gas. So you're solving that gaseous puzzle. I got it. Okay. We can go back to Venus actually and show that. So with this, I mentioned those two molecules that could be responsible for that signal, the resolution that we have. It was phosphine and SO2, sulfur dioxide. And that resolution could really be one of the other, but in the same bandwidth, so in the kind of the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb, we know that, but SO2 does. So we just went and checked and there was no signal. So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine. And then we submitted the paper. The rest is history. I got it. Well, yeah, that's beautifully told. Is there, so the telescopes we're talking about are sitting on earth. What can it help solving this fingerprint, molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby? Does it help if you get closer and closer or are telescopes pretty damn good for this kind of puzzle solving? Telescopes are pretty good, but the earth's atmosphere is a pain. I mean, I'm very thankful for it, but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where phosphine would be active, they are not available. The earth is not transparent in those wavelengths. So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference. Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the earth's atmosphere would be wonderful. But then it's really hard to stay very stable and if there is phosphine on Venus, there's very little of it in the clouds. And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on earth are much bigger and much more stable. So it's a bit of a trade off. So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation? Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus and like grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job? Like the scoop is not necessary. Well a lot of people want to scoop, I get it. I get it completely. That's my natural inclination, yeah. I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I can remotely before I interfere. So that's my, I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop. But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop. Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like now it's too late to take it back. We don't understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well. Because it's not that saturated, like there's not that much of it present. No, and the place is nasty. You know, it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted, the measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on. So actually I'm for an orbiter. I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn about these places. I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter around every single one of them. A small, it can be a small satellite. Getting data, figuring out, you know, how do the clouds move? What's in them? How often is there lightning and volcanic activity? Where's the topography? Is it changing? Is there a biosphere actively doing things? We should be monitoring this from afar. And so I'm for over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus, that would be, that would be my choice. Okay. So now recently Venus is all exciting about a phosphine and everything. Is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other solar systems? Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for like phosphine? There's a few, but outside the solar system, all are kind of promising candidates. We know so little about them. For most of them, we barely know their density. Most of them, we don't even know if they have an atmosphere, nevermind what that atmosphere might contain. So we're still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're promising in that they're about the right size, about the right density. They could have an atmosphere and they're about the right distance from their host star. But that's really all we know. Near future telescopes will tell us much more, but for now we're just guessing. So you said near future, so there's hope that there'll be telescopes that can see that far enough to determine if there's an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere? Absolutely. JWST, launching later this year, will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable. And that's this year. What's the name? JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope. Okay. And that's going to be out in space, past the atmosphere. Yes. Is there something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope? I mean, it's an incredible beast, but it's a beast of many burdens. So it's going to do, it's going to. See, you are a poet. You are, yeah. I love it. This is very eloquent. You're speaking to the audience, which I appreciate. So yeah, so it's a giant engineering project and is it orbiting something, do you know? So it's going to be above the atmosphere and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics. And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets, but there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument. And so when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets, I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year, could we detect phosphine on an oxygen poor planet? And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulation said, yes, you can totally do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine. So then I had to go, well, that's not going to, no one's going to dedicate all of JWST to look for my molecule that no one cared about. So we're very much at that edge, but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets. So you mentioned simulation. This is super interesting to me. And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but I think I haven't been able to, I haven't been able to prove you wrong on that one. You simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what I understand. Like what does that simulation look like? So it's talking about which colors that the rainbow will be missing. Is that the goal of the simulation? That's the goal, but it's really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger's equation. So it's a quantum simulation. Oh, so it's simulating at the quantum level. Yes. So I'm a quantum astrochemist. Hi, I'm Clara. I'm a quantum astrochemist. That's how we should have started this conversation. Can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay together? So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist specifically so I can detect them in space, hence the astro. So what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state. There's no deterministic nature to the work I do, so it's every transition is just a likelihood. But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen. And so this is all at the quantum level. It's a Schrodinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions. I don't remember it by heart. And what this means is I'm solving these giant quantum matrices. And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers, to diagonalize these enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule. So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in. And transitions can occur between pairs of these states, and there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen. This is the quantum world. Nothing is deterministic. There's just a likelihood that it will jump from one state to another. And these jumps, they're transitions, and there's 16.8 billion of them. When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition, we see it in the spectrum. This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for. I'm sorry. No, no. I'm sorry. Brain's broken. So when the transitions happen between the different states, somehow the energy maps the spectrum. Exactly. Energy corresponds to a frequency, and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength, which corresponds to a color. So there's some probability assigned to each color then? Exactly. And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong. And so you run this kind of simulation for particular, so that's 17.5 squared or something like that. So 15.5 million energies, each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix with a supercomputer. I wonder what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is, but there's some kind of... There's many. Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix. So they're not random matrices. So some are more diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others. Most of the work ends up going in describing the system, this quantum system in different ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal, and then it's much easier to clean it up. So how hard is this puzzle? So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right? Is this... Are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule? Exactly. Oh boy. Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra, for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take me 62,000 years, a little over. 62,000 years. What time flies when you're having fun? Okay. But you write that there are about 16,000 molecules we care about when looking for a new Earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures. If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their spectra, and we currently don't. So to solve this particular problem, that's my job. What was that? I mean, that's absolutely correct. I could have not said it better myself. Did you take that from my website? Yeah, I think I stole it. And your website is excellent, so it's a worthy place to steal stuff from. Thank you. How do you solve this problem for the 16,000 molecules we care about, of which phosphine is one? Yes. So, taking a step a little bit out of phosphine, is there... Well, we were having so much fun. We were having so much fun. No, no, we're not saying bye. No, no, no. It's sticking around. I'm just saying we're joining, more friends coming to the party. How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16,000? So we've already started. Out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide. I could keep going. And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less. And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000. We understand about 4% of them, more or less. Phosphine is one of them. But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of light they would leave a mark. I can't spend the next 62,000 years doing this work. And I don't want to, even if somehow I was able, that wouldn't feel good. So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine. So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the computer power that we have, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions mapped accurately, calculated. And then I thought, what if I do a worse job? What if I just do a much worse job? Can I just make it much faster and then it's still worth it? How bad can I get before it's worthless? And then could I do this for all the other molecules? So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system. So how, what's the answer to that question, that fundamental question I ask myself all the time in other domains. How crappy can I be before I'm useless? Before somebody notices. Turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea what these molecules look like. Anything is better than nothing. And so I thought, how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules? And so I created RASCAL, Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for All. And what I do is I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both. I just try to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this. And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000. So I've managed to get it to work. It's really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is. Is there insights you could give to like the tricks involved in making it fast? Like what are the maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information about the spectra? The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago. When organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be, they will look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go, I've seen that feature before. That's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon. And they were mostly right. Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that. Has other features different that distinguish them from one another, but they have that feature in common. We call these functional groups. And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry. We got nuclear magnetic resin spectroscopy, so people don't really need to do that anymore. But these ancient textbooks still exist and I've collected them all as many as I could. And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have a iodine atom connected to this one, there's always a feature here and it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong. And some people go, oh yeah, that's really broad feature. Every time that combination of atoms and bonds. So I've collected them all and I've created this giant dictionary of all these kind of puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules. And I've written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein's monster of molecules. So you asked me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this atom and this cluster here, and I tell you what it should look like and it kind of works. So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for. Rough, very rough signatures. But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres, the telescope generated images of other planets? Close. Right now it is so complete. So it has all of these molecules that it can tell you, say you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there. It can tell you, oh, that feature, that's familiar. It could be one of these 816 molecules, best of luck. So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on is telling you something more useful than it could be one of those 816 molecules. That's still true. I wouldn't say it's useful. So it can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region. So go look there. And if there's nothing there, it can't be those and so on. It can also tell you things like you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816. So that's what I'm working on. But it's a lot of work. So this is really interesting, the role of computing in this whole picture. You mentioned code. So like you as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming in your life, in your past life, in your current life, in your group? Oh yeah, almost entirely. I'm a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn't roll off the tongue very easily. So this is fundamentally computational. Like if you want to be successful in the 21st century in doing quantum astrochemistry, you want to be computational? Absolutely. All quantum chemistry is computational at this point. Okay. So does machine learning play a role at all? Is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered through, like you see all that success with protein folding, right? A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply machine learning to because it's, I mean mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on. I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem, but is there hope for machine learning to help out? Absolutely. Currently you've laid out exactly the problem. The training set is awful and because there's so, a lot of this data that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old. The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they're dead and the files that I've used, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the seventies. Yes. So I can of course have a program training on these, but I would just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them. So my next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply machine learning on the full code of the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all. But really I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures. So it's a work in progress. And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases. So you are up for doing that kind of thing too. So actually like doing the full end to end thing, which is like having a gas, collecting data about it, and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint and then also analyzing using that library, the data that comes from other planets. So you do the full. Full from birth to death. Interesting. Yes. I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger in Slovenia and there I worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum. What's it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human friendly? It's terrifying. It's horrific. It's so scary. And I love my job. I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it, you know, job, stability, money, sanity. But I only worked there for a few months and it was really terrifying. There's just so many ways to die. You know, usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know. And if you work in a lab, there's so many more, orders of magnitude more. And I was very bad at it. I'm not a good hands on scientist. I want a laptop connected to a remote super computer or a laptop connected to a telescope. I don't need to be there to believe it. And I am not good in the lab. Yeah. When there's a bunch of things that can poison you, a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous and they're often, maybe they might not even have a smell or they might not be visible. It's like... So many of them give you cancer. It's just so cruel. And some people love this work, but I've never enjoyed experimental work. It's so ungrateful. So lonely. Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely if you find the joy in it, but you enjoy the results of it. Yes. So I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life, but I'll do the theory. They do the experiment and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches. Okay. Beautiful. What are spectroscopic networks? Those look super cool. Are they related to what we were talking about? The picture look pretty. Oh, yes, slightly. So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels? Yes. There are rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and how likely it is to make that jump. And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network, which is like a ball. So these are the constraints of the transitions that could be taken. Exactly for each molecule. Interesting. And they're not, so it's not a fully connected, it's like it's sparse somehow. Yes, you get islands sometimes. You get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped now in this network. It can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings. Is there some insights to be drawn from these networks? Like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it? Yes. Some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden because it's quantum. There are no rules. No, I'm not joking. One of the rules is just the rules are very often broken in the quantum world. And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean they're forbidden. Low probability. Exactly. They just become deeply unlikely. Yeah. Cool. And so you could do all the same, like I'm coming from a computer science world, I love graph theory. So you can do all the same graph theoretic kind of analysis of clusters or something like that. Exactly. All those kinds of things. And draw insights from it. Cool. And they're unique for each molecule. And the networks that you mentioned, that's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum physics. By then, all the energies are mapped. So we've had high school children work on those networks. And the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in when it's too late for them to back out. And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now. And it's really nice. Yeah. Okay. But like the promise of this, even though it's 16,000, even just a subset of them, that's really exciting because then you can do as the telescope data get better and better, especially for exoplanets, but also for Venus. You can then start like getting your full, like, you know how you get like blood work done or like you get your genetic testing to see what your ancestors are. You can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting things going on on a particular planet based on the atmosphere. Right? Exactly. How cool would that be if we could, you know, scan an alien planet and go, oh, this is what the clouds are made of. This is what's in the surface. These are the molecules that are mixing. Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it. And here are the Hadley cells. Here are how the biosphere works. We could map this whole thing. Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens like are aware of these techniques and like would spoof like the wrong gases, just to like pretend that's how they can be, it's like an invisibility cloak. They can generate gases that would throw you off or like, or do the opposite. They pretend they will artificially generate phosphine. So like, like the dumb, the dumb apes on earth again, like go out, like flying in different places because it's just fun. It's like some teenager alien somewhere, just pranking. Yeah. I was asked that exact question this Saturday by, by a 70 year old boy in Canada, but it was the first time I'd been asked that question, the second in a week. We're kindred spirits, him and I. We can, they can prank us to some extent, but the, this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prank us, but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you and call that whatever you call that and release molecules. And so that's really hard to hide. You know, you can go very quiet. You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your other metabolites. Yeah. It's hard to fake. Is there, so you kind of mentioned like water that what, what other gases are there that we know about that are like high likelihood as biosignatures in terms of life? I mean, what are your other favorites in terms of, so, so we've got phosphine, but like what, what else is a damn good signal to be a, that you think about that we should be looking for if we look at another atmosphere, is there gases that come to mind or are there all sort of possible biosignatures that we should love equally? There's many, so there's water. We know that's important for life as we know it. There's molecular oxygen on earth. That's probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of methane. And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life. And so if I was an alien astronomer and I saw earth's atmosphere, I'm, I would get a Nobel I think on, you know, What would you notice? I mean, this is a really, I would be very excited about this. About the oxygen. I'm not finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere. That's very unusual. So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about earth in terms of the tech, like analyzing the atmosphere, like what are the biosignatures of life on earth? Would you say in terms of the contents of the atmosphere is oxygen, high amount of oxygen, pretty damn good sign. I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out. Those are slightly more robust than oxygen. Oxygen on its own has false positives for life. So there's still ways of making it, but it's, it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context or atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that together makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life. But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life. But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives, still has some. So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules unless we're looking for like CFCs. If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens, I feel confident, chlorofluorocarbons. And so, you know, if aliens had been watching us, they would have been going, oh no, CFCs. I mean, they're not going to last long. Let's, you know, everyone's writing their thesis on the end of, the end of the earth. And then we got together, we stopped using them. I like to think they're really proud of us. You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking. They've been watching it and they saw it happen. I think to be honest, they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing. I don't think they care. It's not going to bother them. Oh, I mean, worried about us. Oh yes. Oh no, worried about us. They, I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently. It's like, if you, if you look at, I mean, there is, I mean, it's probably, there's a correlation with a lot of things, but what the ufologists quote unquote often talk about is that there seems to be a much higher level of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear age. So like if aliens were indeed worried about us, like if you were aliens, you would start showing up when the living organisms first discovered a way to destroy the entire, the entire colony. Can the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more cameras? It's an interesting thing about science, like with UFO sightings, it's like either 99.9% of them are false or 100% of them are false. The interesting thing to me is that in that 0.01%, there's a lot of things in science that are like these weird outliers that are difficult to replicate. You have like, there's even physical phenomena, ball lightning. There's difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts in such a way that you can do it to apply the scientific method that could be just things that like what happened like a few times or once and you're like, what the hell is that? And that's very difficult for science to know what to do with. I'm a huge proponent of just being open minded because when you're open minded about aliens, for example, it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as well. And somehow that will result, like if you're open minded about aliens and you don't laugh it off immediately, what happens is somehow that's going to lead to a solution to a P equals NP or P not equals NP. Like in ways that you can't predict, the open mindedness has tertiary effects that will result in progress, I believe, which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens because it's like because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life. And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions before all of human civilization. So to roll your eyes is not the right answer. To roll your eyes presumes that you know anything about this world as opposed to just knowing point zero zero zero one percent of this world. And so being humble in the face of that, being open to the possibility of aliens visiting Earth is a good idea. Not everything, though. I'm not so open minded to the flat Earth hypothesis as there's a growing number of people believing in. But even then. Or the inner Earth, I've got shouted at in a public talk about it. So like the Earth is hollow? Yeah. My understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller Earth inside this one, which is just too cute as a concept. That's awesome. And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica. And that's where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis. Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous. But like I do like. Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind. I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the Earth. And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life. And so that's how improbable, I think, the visitations are. Because interstellar distances are so huge that it's just not really worth it. See, I have a different view on this whole thing. I think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event. Like mammoths and Nazis under that level. But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think in my view, if there's other alien civilizations out there and they visited Earth, neither them or perhaps just us would be even able to detect them. Like we wouldn't be open minded enough to see it. Like if, because our understanding of what is life, and I just talked to Sarah Walker, who's. You know Sarah. Yeah, we talked for three hours about the question of what is life. Sarah's a good person to talk to about what is life. But like the whole point is we don't really, we have a very narrow minded view of what is life. And when it shows up, and it might be already here, trees and dolphins and so on, or mountains or I don't know, or the molecules in the atmosphere, or like people make fun of me. But I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves, or consciousness could be the aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate. We don't know shit about the way our human mind works. And the fact that this thing is a quantum process, please don't I understand this. It's not woo woo. I'm not I, we could, but it very well could be there could be something at the at the physics level, right? It could be at the chemical or the biological level, things that are happening that we're just close to close minded, because our conception of life is at the level of like us, like at the jungle level of mammals. And on the time scale, that's the human time scale, we may not be able to perceive what alien life is actually like what the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself when we're not able to perceive. And the other thing that's really important about alien visitations, whether it happened or not, is especially after COVID in 2020, I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government being able to handle that that well, not our government, but us as a society, as a collective, being able to deal with new things in an effective way that's inspiring, that's efficient, that like, whether it's if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it to alleviate the danger, whether it's the possibility of new discoveries and something inspiring to ride that wave and make it inspiring all those kinds of things. I honestly think if aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore them and the government might like hide it, try to like see to keep it from the Chinese and the Russians if it's the United States, call it a military secret in a very close minded way. And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where through paperwork, the poor aliens would just like waste away and sell somewhere like there's a certain That would not happen, that would never happen, part of the reason that I feel so confident that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense because interstellar travel is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition, but that's the bit that I think is technically possible. If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought that any government, no matter, or any military could just contain them, these beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon. These things would be way, way, way, way out there. Way. And the fact that we think our puny military, even if all the military in the world got together and the fact that they could somehow contain it, that's the bit that's laughable. Ants trying to contain a human that visited them. Exactly. And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board. You've met a lot of scientists. How good are they at keeping secrets? Because in my experience, they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets. Yeah, that's terrible. Even the Phosphine on Venus thing, which was a pretty well kept secret. This is true. You had a bunch of people that were. I told my dad. Yeah. You know, my dad knew and hopefully didn't tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting, he probably would have told a mate, you know? And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know and certainly not collaborative scientists, which would be needed. You would need all sorts of scientific teams. So between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization capable of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets, absolutely not. I will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that truth. If we're just making like a $10 bet, the possibility here that the main alien, say there exists one alien civil, other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy. To me, if they visit Earth, what's going to visit Earth is like the crappy, like the really crappy, short straw, like, like this, this like really dumb thing that's, I don't know, like the early game boys or something like, there's a cartoon about this. There's an alien that gets sent to Earth, Commander Spiff or something, and it's kind of a punishment or something, but that's not possible. That's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to, to cross. You have to do it on purpose. You have to do on purpose. It has to be a big, big deal, and we know this because yes, you're right. We don't know enough about galactic biology. We don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only have the Earth, but we do know that the laws of physics are universal. We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of physics. We know that the laws of chemistry are universal. We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from. So yes, they may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access to. They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with. So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe around them, and we know how much energy is in these places. And so yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our wildest dreams, but they're still in the same universe, and we know a lot of those rules. We're not completely blind. But there's a colleague of yours at Harvard, Kamran Vafa, he's a theoretical physicist. I don't know if you know him. I've only joined Harvard about six months ago. Okay. It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists. So he's a string theorist, but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough to travel interstellar like those kinds of distances will figure out actually ways to hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways, like this universe is too boring. Like you would figure out ways to create other universes, like you go outside the physics as we know it. So the reason we don't see aliens visiting us all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere. This is like way too boring. We humans think this is fun, but it's actually mostly empty space that no fun is happening. There's no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization. So he thinks like if alien civilizations are out there, they found outside of our current standard models of physics ways of having fun that don't involve us. That's probably true, but even the notion of visiting, that's so literally pedestrian. Of course we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know. We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it. But that is probably something they've no longer gotten need for. I specifically don't particularly want to go to space. Sounds awful. None of the things I like are going to be there. My whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe. So I care a lot, but I care about knowing about it and I feel no need to go there to learn about it. And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less a need to go everywhere that we know about. And I would expect any alien civilization worth the salt have developed observation tools and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without having to go there. This going is so wasteful. Yeah. So more focused on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization, like the conquering and all those kinds of things. That's beneath them. That's beneath them. I mean, that said, do you think there's in your hopeful search for life through phosphine and other gases, do you think there's other alien civilizations out there? First do you think there's other life out there? First do you think there's life in the solar system? Second do you think there's life in the galaxy? And a third, do you think there's intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside of earth? So intelligent life, I have no idea. It seems deeply unlikely possible, but I'm not even sure if it's plausible. So that's the special thing to you about earth is somehow intelligent life came to me. Yes. And it's only, you know, very briefly, probably extremely briefly. Oh, you mean like it's always going to be like, we're going to destroy ourselves. Exactly. Oh boy. We're going to continue on earth happily, probably more happily. So the trees and the dolphins will be here, I'm telling you. And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, you know, they'll be fine. So life on earth will be fine, was fine before us and will be fine after us. So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely, even on earth is unlikely out of, what is it, five billion species across the history of the earth. Yes. For an intelligent one and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that. So I wouldn't bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course, you know, I wanted to find aliens since I was a little girl. And so of course I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with and I've had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible. But see the nice, and sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations, they may have more biosignatures than nonintelligent ones. So they might be easier to detect, that would be the hope. On earth that's not the case, but it could be the case elsewhere. Oh, it's not the case on earth. Most of the biosignatures we have on earth are created by quite simple life. If you don't count pollution, pollution is all, all us baby. So you don't see polluting gases as a possible, like. I look for polluting gases. I would love to find polluting gases. Well, you know, I'd be worried for them, of course, the same way I, I think about my alien colleagues all the time looking at us and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions, but it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants. So I look for those too. I just don't have any hope of finding them. I think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible, but life I think is inevitable and if it is inevitable, it is common. So I think there'll be life everywhere in the galaxy. Now how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the solar system beyond earth. So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system. If there's life in the Venusian clouds, if there's life in the, if there are biosignals coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Plumes of Enceladus. That's the, that's the Saturn one. It's the moon that has the geysers that come out. And so you can't see the, under the subterranean oceans, but. It's supposed, so it would be in the atmosphere. I was going to ask you about that one. Have you looked at that? Have you, is that a hope for you to use the tools you're using with RASCAL and other ways for detecting the 16,000 molecules that might be biosignatures to look at Enceladus? Yes, that's absolutely the plan. What's the limiting factor currently? Is it the quality of the telescopes, what's the quality of the data? Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of RASCAL and other associated things. So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get and we don't have good enough data. But hopefully we will, in the coming decades, we'll get some information on Titan. We have Dragonfly going over. We'll get the plumes of Enceladus. We will look at the clouds of Venus and there's other places. And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations and I'll say life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common. Because all of these places we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth. Even the most extreme places. And so if life can originate in all of these completely different habitats, then life is even more resourceful than we thought, which means it's everywhere. That's really exciting if it's everywhere. If there's life on just one of the moons, if it's on Mars. Anywhere. Anywhere in the solar system and I will bet everything I own that every solar system, every planetary system has a potential for habitability. Because even if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant planets and there'll be so much life. So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now, whether life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere, but it's somewhere between those two. In life, I make no bets and if I had to bet, I would be against. To me, like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything. One is, and maybe I'm biased, but one is a discovery of life in the solar system. I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe. I think I'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life. I feel like if there's life everywhere, like the odds are, there has, like we cannot, like you have, oh, I see. You're saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there, but they just keep dying out. It's like little. Yeah. I was detecting them, you know, ships in the night. Ships in the night. No, that's ultra sad. Just like. Is it sad? The earth is not better for having us. Is it, we, it doesn't owe us anything. Would you be sad to find alien giraffes? Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes? Because I would not. No, well, giraffes, first of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything, but. We do not shit on giraffes. Okay. Giraffes are wondrous animals, are deeply understudied. We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs in giraffes. I am disappointed I made a PhD in phosphine when people aren't doing PhDs in giraffes. We do not know enough about giraffes. I think it was like Ricky Gervais that did a whole, like a long thing. You can't trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes. That is not his expertise. Yeah. But it's a stupid necks, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, that's fine. Giraffes are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion in the face. Why don't you climb the tree? Why don't you climb the tree? You don't need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary process. You're shitting on giraffes. Okay. Giraffes are wondrous animals. Fine. I would very appreciate it. Take it back. I take it back. I apologize. I trust your expertise on this. The thing that makes humans really fascinating, and I think the earth, but I'm a human, is we create things that are, yes, there's all the ugliness in the world. There's all the, on the biological, on the chemical level, there's the pollution, but we create beauty. If you even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty, the breaking of symmetries, stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry, we're good at creating things. So are spiders. But not giraffes. Okay. But yes, this is a... Spiders. Spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe underwater, they can literally scuba dive. There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide. And talk about symmetry, look what spiders can do. And I just thought of spiders, but if I was an alien species coming to earth, there'll be plenty to wonder, and we would just be one of the things, clunky, naked monkey. The ants might be even more fascinating. The ants. The ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum distance between their trash, their babies, and their food is just from without any of them knowing how to do this. And collectively they've learned how to do this. If I was an alien species, I'll be looking at that. Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention. The second thing is I tend to believe we can engineer consciousness, but at the basic level, in the source of consciousness, because if consciousness is unique to humans, and if we can engineer it, that gives me hope that it could be present elsewhere in the universe. That's the other thing that makes, it's an open question, that makes humans perhaps special is not maybe the presence of consciousness, but somehow a presence of elevated consciousness. It does, again, maybe human centric, but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes, for example, and spiders. Yes, I won't deny that. There is something special about humans. They're my favorite species. They are. They are. Some of my best friends are humans. I think highly of humans. It's great. I just don't have great hope for our longevity, and specifically I don't have great hope given that we're the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick. I just, I don't want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere. That's quite interesting to think about. I don't think I've even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system, so that indicates that very possibly life is literally everywhere. Everywhere it can happen, it does. And especially what we're discovering with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are, or earthlike habitable, quote unquote, planets, they're everywhere. The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems. But I didn't consider the possibility that life is literally everywhere, and yet intelligent life is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form little clusters of civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on. Man, maybe becoming a multi planetary species is a less likely pursuit than we imagine. I agree. But one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope. What I hope for humanity, and one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed with conquering, and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves. I hope that we transcend that, that we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it. So you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi planetary existence. That is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go and plant a flag somewhere. We love planting a flag somewhere. And maybe we could overcome that minor drive. And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful, and they will go and conquer and plant the flags. Best of luck to them. Rock roaches will be happy to keep to the business as they always have. I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have. In principle, they could, yes. I don't really trust the people who make them. This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it? I haven't forgiven you for shitting on giraffes, whatever they've done to you. Just as a small tangent, your master's thesis is also fascinating. Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit. It's titled Influence of a Star's Evolution on its Planetary System. So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there something interesting you could say about what you've learned about this journey that a star takes and the planets around it? Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately to the Earth as the sun expands towards a red giant and mercury would just like fall in and then Venus fall in and the sun doesn't care. And it just seemed so, I felt so small. I felt like the Earth and everything on it, it's just the universe doesn't care. Even our sun doesn't care. And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets. And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent. It's like a parent eating its own children. It's horrible. It's just a horrible notion, but it made me think, what if there's some sort of generation? And so at the time when I was doing my master's, there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery, which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible that planets, potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they're now gone. There's no chance for life. But then I thought, what if life returns? Now it's a white dwarf, it's calmed down, it's not going to go anywhere. White dwarfs are very stable across like universal timescales. And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again? No, life doesn't care. And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets, thousands of times. I just ran thousands and thousands of end body simulations. Oh, you simulated this? Yeah. So I simulated the star growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos. The orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass. So you would have like Jupiter planets just crashing into the other planets, throwing them into the sun early. It was terrifying to watch these simulations. It was absolute carnage. But if you run thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying alive. Some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years, more than enough for life to originate again. And so that was my idea during that time that Thesis was trying to explore this notion of life coming back. And this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not, and it will go about its business. Andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care. No one cares if you're alive in the universe. And so letting go of that preciousness of life, I found very useful at that stage of my career. And instead, I just thought, if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter that it came by four billion years ago. It can start again four billion years later. And maybe that is nice. Maybe that's where hope lies, the Phoenix rising everywhere. Planets being destroyed and created and we're here now and others will be more or less hereish billions of years later. So accepting the cycle of death and life and yeah. Not taking it personally. Not taking it personally. The sun doesn't owe us anything. It's not a bad parent. It's not a parent at all. Yeah. I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how this universe eventually will just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate. A bunch of tiny black holes too. Yeah. Absolute quiet. Everyone, all the black holes a little too far away from one another to even interact until it's just silence forever. But until then, many, many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth. And rebirth. You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up. I wanted to ask two things. First of all, what programming language do you like? And also what, because you're as a computational quantum astrochemist, no, yes, that's right. You're kind of, you could say you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated things with one of the things you're using is the tools of computation of programming. Is there a device you can give to people, because I know quite a few that have not practiced that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science, whatever it's biology and chemistry and physics and so on. And if they were interested in learning to program and learning to use computation as a tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming and also just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life? Well, I'm a terrible programmer. A lot of scientists, their programming is bad because we never learned formal programming. We learned science, physics, chemistry. And then we were told, oh, you can, you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation. And you're like, oh, okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this. And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more. So they're rarely optimized and they're really clunky. Six months later, you can't read your own code. My variable names are extremely embarrassing. I still have error messages for different compilation errors that say things like, at least your dad loves you, Clara. You know, it doesn't help me at all. Just like you suck at coding, but there's other things in your life. So I'm a bad programmer. And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can still do pretty impressive science. But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college. It did me no good at all. It has not been particularly useful. I learned some Fortran that was very useful, even though it's really not a fun language because so much of legacy code is in Fortran. And so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice. And then I used IDL to visualize. So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL. But thankfully, since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person and that has been much nicer. So most of my code now is in Python. I should also make a few quick comments as well. So one is, you say you're sort of bad at programming. I've worked with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote unquote bad at programming. They're not. It gets the job done. In fact, there's a downside to sort of, especially getting a software engineering education. If I were to give advice, especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're doing software engineering, is not to get lost in the optimization of the correct, there's an obsession, you could see it in like Stack Overflow, of the correct way to do things. And I think you can too easily get lost in constantly trying to optimize and do things the correct way when you actually never get done. The same thing happens, you have like communities of people obsessed with productivity and they keep researching productivity hacks and then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring out how to do things productively and then never actually do anything. So there's a certain sense if you focus on the task that needs to be done, that's what programming is for. So not over optimizing, not thinking about variable names in the following sense. Sometimes you think, okay, I'm going to write code that's going to last for decades. In reality, your code, if it's well written or poorly written, will be very likely obsolete very quickly. The point is to get the job done really well. So there's a trade off there that you have to make sure to strike. I should also comment as a public service announcement or a request, if there's any world class Fortran or Cobalt programmers out there, I'm looking for them, I want to talk to you. That will not be me, I'm a terrible Fortran programmer. But it's fascinating because so much of the world in the past and still runs programming languages and there's no experts on it. They're all retiring. I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I'm a programmer. But because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad programmer. That's how I'm defining it. Including yourself. Including myself six months later, I'm working with a new student right now and she sent me some messages on Slack being like, what is this file that you've got with some functions that run? And I was like, this was from 2018, it wasn't that long ago and I can no longer remember what that code does. I'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it. And I do think that's frustrating. And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts to a programmer than the programming to a scientist. And so I would much, much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows where space is than teach programming to an astronomer. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Okay. This is true. I mean, yeah, there's some basics. I'm focusing too much on the silver lining because the people that write MATLAB code, yeah, single variable, single letter variable names, those kinds of things. And it's accessibility, right? It's I want my code to be open source and it is, it's on GitHub, anyone can download it. But is it really open source if it's written so cryptically, so poorly that no one can really use it to its full functionality? Have I really published my work and that weighs on me? I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer. But you can only do so much. I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics. So yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world. One of them is publication, but publishing code is a fascinating way to contribute to the world, even if it's very small, very basic element, great code. I guess I was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like, which is a good thing to do is code that's readable, almost like without documentation, it's readable, it's understandable. The variable names, the structure, all those kinds of things. That's the dream. That's the dream. This is a dumb question. What do you, all right. No, no, tell me a dumb question. I want to hear it. Okay. I mean, okay, this is the question about beauty. It's way too general. It's very impossible. It's like asking, what's your favorite band? What's your favorite music band? Oh, I thought you meant wavelength band. I was like, I definitely have favorite wavelength bands. Absolutely. Well, it's hard to narrow it down, huh? Okay. What do you use the most beautiful idea in science? It's not a dumb question. Do you want to try the question again proudly? Okay. I have a really good question to ask you. Okay. Don't oversell it. I've got an okay question to ask you, you know? What do you use the most beautiful idea in science, something you just find inspiring or just maybe the reason you got into science or the reason you think science is cool? My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales. So when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens. Something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful. It was almost a selfish desire and that's what I wanted. There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do. And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn't just want to know how the stars moved. I wanted to know how the planets around them moved. And then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn't care that much about the planets. I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those atmospheres and what that might mean. So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale. And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale. And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions that we've ever been able to ask. And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical, that's so cool, isn't it? Yeah. It spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge. That's the cool thing about, I guess, being a quantum astrochemist is you're using the tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff. And the potential life out there that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are despite being probabilistic. And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way. It's no longer this thirst for power. I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do. I feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional. And yet I feel so much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade off that I've lost power, but I've gained company. Wow. That's a beautiful answer. I don't think there's a better way to actually end it. You're right. I asked a mediocre question and you came through. You made the question good by a brilliant answer. You're the Michael Jordan and I'll be the Dennis Rodman. I don't know enough about basketball. I mean, literally you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because I know that those people are basketball pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think. Are there books or movies in your life? Long ago or recently, do you have any time for books and movies had an impact on you? What ideas did you take away? I absolutely have time for books and movies. I try as best I can to not work very hard. I mostly fail. I should point out. But I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings and weekends. If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't. I often get eight crappy hours, emails, meetings, bad code, data processing. But if I can get four high quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day because I know it's diminishing returns after that. So I have a lot of time. I try to make as much time as I can. Can you kind of dig into what it takes to be, one, productive, two, to be happy as a researcher? Because I think it's too easy in that world because you have so many hats, you have to wear so many jobs, you have to be a mentor, a teacher, a head of a research group to research yourself. You have to do service, all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and interviews. So as a public science, like being a public communicator, that's a job. The whole thing. Pays very poorly. I'll pay you in Bitcoin. Okay. I'll take Bitcoin. So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a researcher? I think, sadly, it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive. It's a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not being productive. It's become slightly better. If I know my students are being productive, I can be happy. But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset, they start thinking that their student science is theirs. And I think this happens a lot with senior scientists. They have so many hats, as you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much admin, that they have very little time for their own science. And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups. And that's really heartbreaking. I see it all the time. And that, I think I've escaped that trap. I feel so happy, even when I'm not productive, when my students are productive. I think that sensation I was describing earlier of they only need to be half as productive as me for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity. So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about. But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do. You have to not be miserable otherwise. I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example, kind of very hard to enjoy the work we do. Even if the work is this fantastical phosphine or things that I know I love, still very difficult. So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really sound scientific choice. Being a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life. It's horrible. It makes you not want to do the science. It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it. You don't go over it several times. You just want it to be over. And so I think in general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done. Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them. Even if they're not as good scientists as others, you'll get better science out. Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people. Exactly. And then you'll get better science than if you would try to work with three geniuses who are just hell to be around. Yeah. I mean, there's parallel things like that. I'm very fortunate now. I was very fortunate at MIT to have friends and colleagues there that were incredible to work with. But I'm currently sort of, I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side, like this little podcast thing and I mentioned to you, I think, robotics related stuff. I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday checking out their robots. And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very fun little project around those robots. Want to put an ad in? No. I have more applications I can possibly deal with, there's thousands. So it's not an ad, it's the opposite. We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications. Well, that too is already there. Over 10,000 people apply for that. An infinite Master Yoshika doll of application management. But the point is, it's not exactly, the point is, like what I'm very distinctly aware of is life is short and productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me. The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up in the day and to work with the people that you do. Because the productivity will take care of itself. Agreed. And so like, it's so important to select the people well. And I think one of the challenges with academia, as opposed to sort of the thing I'm currently doing is, like, saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher. Because your colleagues are there, I mean, their goodbye hurts. And then if you have to spend the rest, you know, for many years to come, still surrounded by them in the community, it's tougher. It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaboration. And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it's still worth it. It's still worth it to break ties if you don't, if you're not happy, if there's not that magic, that dance. I talked to this guy named Daniel Kahneman. Oh, I know. Danny Kahneman. Danny, yeah. Boy, did that guy make me realize, like, what a great collaborator is. Well, he had Tversky, right? Yeah. So they had, obviously, they had a really deep collaboration there, but, like, I collaborated with him on a conversation, like, just, like, talking about, I don't know what we're talking about. I think cars, autonomous vehicles, but the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody. And the fact that he would, with that childlike curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas and the push and pull and the, like, and the lack of ego, but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things, it's like, holy shit, that person, also the ability to truly listen to another human, it's like, okay, that's what it takes to be a good collaborator. It made me realize that I haven't been, I've been very fortunate to have cool people in my life, but there's, like, levels even to the cool. Yeah, I don't think you can compete with Danny Kahneman on cool. He's just incredible. Everybody was like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say is that collaboration is an art form, but perhaps it's actually a skill, is allowing yourself to develop that skill because that's one of the fruitful skills. And praise it in students, you know, and I think it is something you can really improve on. I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on. I don't have some innate collaborative skills. I think they're skills I've developed, and I think in science there's this really destructive notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don't, you know, then that's really appealing and people really like either fulfilling that or pretending to be fulfilling that. And first of all, it's mostly a lie. Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist that's doing it on their own is doing a crappy job most likely because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things. You need experts in the sub fields that you're working on to check your work. But most importantly, it's just a bad idea. It doesn't lead to good science and it leaves you miserable. I was recently, I had some work that I was avoiding and I thought maybe I should pursue the scientific project because I don't care enough about the outcome and it's going to be a lot of hard work. And I was trying to balance these two things to be really difficult. And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not, no one's asking for this question to be answered. And then I found myself working with this collaborator, Jason Dittman. And I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by and I just felt taller and like I could breathe better. I was happier, I was a better person when it was done. And that's because he's a great collaborator. He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with him. And that's really the trick. You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing and you stop worrying about being the lone wolf. That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your science will be shit. And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship. We were talking about books. Books, yes. Is there books, movies? Why was I talking about my productivity? Oh, you said you maybe don't have time for books and movies. And you said you must make time for books and movies. Make time to not work. Make time to not work whatever that looks like to you. But there's plenty. When I was younger, I found a lot of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies. Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work and I try to read outside my field. I read about Danny Kahneman's work instead. But when I was little, it was Contact, the Carl Sagan book. I really thought I was just like Ellie and I was going to become Ellie. I really resonated with me, that character and the notions of life and space and the universe. Even the idea of then the movie came out and I got to put Jodie Foster in that, which helped. But even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space, I find extremely useful as a concept to think maybe we are special, but that would suck is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life, that it's much better to not be special and have company. I got that from Carl Sagan. So that's where I always recommend. Let me ask one other ridiculous question. We talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it's not, until it's supermassive and little black holes too at the end of the universe. What do you think is the why, the meaning of it all? What do you think is the meaning of life here on Earth and the meaning of that life that you look for, whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets? I think there's none. I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning. I think chasing for meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about. But you still enjoy... I enjoy finding meaning in my life. I enjoy finding where the morality lies. I enjoy the complication of that desire and I feel that is deeply human, but I don't feel that it's universal. It's somehow absolute. Like we conjure it up. We bring it to life through our own minds, but it's not any kind of fundamental way real. No. And the same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets. The universe doesn't care because it has no meaning. It owes us nothing. And looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers. Who are we? We're nothing. We don't get to demand anything and that includes meaning. And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find it. Yeah. Once there's no meaning, it's a kind of freedom in a way. You sound a bit like... I'm happy about it. This isn't a depressing outlook as far as I'm concerned. It's happiness. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a... I don't know if you know who Sam Harris is, but he, despite the pushbacks from the entirety of the world, really argues hard that free will is an illusion, that the deterministic universe and it's all already been predetermined and he's okay with it. And he's happy with it, that he's distinctly aware of it. And that's okay. The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature. Well, he's not saying it's deterministic, but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either. Randomness does not help in the experience of feeling like you're the decider of your own actions. That he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river, or being the river, as opposed to having or being like a fish or something that can decide its swimming direction. He's okay just embracing the flow of life. I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning. I mean, it just is. The universe doesn't care. It just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don't. And that's life. But I don't feel like that about life. I think life does have meaning and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life. I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond earth. That this notion of meaning is a human construct and so it only applies within us and the other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions. But this meaning is ours to do as we please. We created it, we've created a need for it, and so that's our problem to solve. I don't apply it beyond us. I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but they're moral responsibilities. And a lot of those responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them. So I think there's value to meaning, whether it's real or not. I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe. And also that's the height of hubris. That's not for us to do. Yeah. It also could be just like duality and quantum mechanics. It could be both that there is meaning and that there isn't. And we're somehow depending on the observer, depending on the perspective you take on the thing. I mean, even on earth that's true, but whether things have meaning or not depends a lot on who's looking. Whether it's us humans, the aliens or the giraffes. Clara, this was an incredible conversation. I mean, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you have in not finding meaning in the universe. I'm very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe. You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met. I'm just kidding. You are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum astrochemistry. I can't wait to see what other cool things you do in your career, in your scientific life. Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me today. I really appreciate it. It was my pleasure. I'd already got my four hours of productivity before I got here. And so it's not a waste. It's all downhill from there. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Clara Sousa Silva. And thank you to Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets | Lex Fridman Podcast #195

The following is a conversation with Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, human rights activist, and author of the book, In Order to Live. Quick mention of our sponsors, Belcampo, Gala Games, Batter Help, and Aid Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. Let me say a few words about North Korea. From 1994 to 1998, North Korea went through a famine. Mass starvation, caused primarily by King Jong Il, who at the time was the new leader of North Korea after his father's death in 1994. Somewhere between 600,000 and 3 million people died due to starvation. From all the stories of famine in history, including my own family history, I've come to understand that hunger tortures the human mind in a way that can break everything we stand for. In North Korea, during the 90s famine, many were driven to cannibalism. Imagine more than 10 million people suffering starvation for months and years, always on the brink of death. We don't know the exact numbers of people who died because the suffering was done in silence, in darkness. Very little information in or out. Most people had to survive without electricity, without clean water, medical supplies, sanitation, and food. The North Korean propaganda machine called this the Arduous March, or the March of Suffering, and words such as famine and hunger were banned because they implied government failure. And once again, now, in 2021, King Jong Un, the current leader of North Korea, is calling for his country to prepare for another Arduous March, or March of Suffering. Another period of mass starvation as the country closes its borders. Looking at atrocities of the past decades and the encroaching atrocity there now, I think about the quiet suffering of millions of North Koreans. I think about the torture of the human spirit. I think about a North Korean child who could be a scientist, an artist, a writer, but who instead grows impossibly thin without food, their bodies slowly rotting away as their parents watch helplessly. I got emotional in this conversation with you and me, in part because I remembered my grandmother, who survived Khaldamur, the famine in Ukraine, intentionally created by Stalin, where 4 to 10 million people died and many, many more suffered. Imagine knowing that if you don't engage in cannibalism, you will die before your children did, and then they will be eaten. Imagine, because of this, deciding to murder and eat your own children, as many people did. Imagine the kind of desperation, torture, that leads up to a decision like that. I'm not smart enough to know what evil is, nor where to draw the line between good and evil. But Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, are men who in the name of power are willing to make millions of people, of children, suffer and die from starvation. I rarely have hate in my heart, but I hate these men. I hate that such men exist in this world. I hate that the beauty I love about this life exists amidst such unimaginable cruelty. I have been haunted by this conversation, by memories of my grandmother's pain. But I've also been warmed by memories of her love. Love gives me hope. Hope for the perseverance of the human spirit, even in the face of evil. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with you and me, Park. Park. Can you tell your story from North Korea to today as you describe in your 2015 book, and with the extra perspective on life, love and freedom you've gained since then? Wow, that's a long story. So I was born in the northern part of North Korea initially. And my father was a party member. And my mom was housewife. I had one older sister. And I remember born in that country. I never thought I was in an unusual country. Now I'm thinking of what is literally called the Hermit Kingdom. But I thought I believed that I was living in the best country on earth. It was a socialist paradise. And everybody in the rest of the world worshiped my ideal leader. And there was nothing to envy for me. So I had this enormous pride in my heart. And grateful to be in that country. So it was love for the leader, not fear? For me at least, it was love. Yeah, it was all the moderation and gratitude. It changed lately, but for me was pure, pure like love. Was there any, like looking back with the perspective you have now, would you describe some of those moments growing up as full of happiness? Or was that delusion at the time? So not knowing the alternative, will you still be able to be happy? The fact that I did not know, like in North Korea, this is the only country in this 21st century has no internet. And they don't even know the existence of internet. Not only that, we don't even have this 24 hour electricity. So not knowing definitely helped, I think, to be sane. So as a human being, you're still able to find moments of happiness? I think my happiness was from family, nothing else. Even though those days keep telling me that they were our source of meaning and happiness, I don't think I ever got happy by that. Maybe they're here and they're in schools. And like when I was learning propaganda, like, you know, the proud feeling, right? I mean, the greatest nation here and there, but like actually true happiness came from laughing with my family, my friends. Are there any childhood memories, pleasant or painful ones that stand out to you now? I mean, like, you know, whenever I think about my North Korea, the interesting is there's no color. I mean, one is because North Korean country has no color, right? Most of things are unpaved and trees all cut down. We have no fear. So people cut down trees to make food. So but only that, like, even what we are wearing was like no color. So it's an interesting memory to look back. What about fashion? I've noticed from sort of you now, you have quite an incredible sense of fashion. So contrast that with your time in North Korea. How do you remember fashion? Just ways that people could express themselves visually. Was it all bland? There was no word for fashion in North Korea. We didn't even know. It was not even in our dictionary. So of course, I did not know what Victoria's Secret models were. I didn't even know what models were. So when I came out, I learned the model was a job. And like, what is that? And I'm still confused. So there's so many jobs that we have here doesn't exist in North Korea. What was life like in North Korea as compared to the rest of the world? So maybe you said there's no internet. 24 hour electricity is a luxury you do not have. What about food? What about water? What about basic human rights? I think that's a thing like when people were asking me, can you tell me about like life in North Korea? And in the past, I was like, I cannot describe it to you. And initially I thought, oh, because of my English that I cannot find the words. It's not that it's a different planet. The common sense that we have doesn't exist there. Like people literally do not know the concept of romantic love, or human rights or liberty. So when I'm thinking back to my country, it's, you know, like, as you cannot imagine your life on Mars right now. It's like that kind of difference. I grew up never seen the map of the world. I never knew that I was Asian. Like the regime told me that I was Kim Il Sung, the first Kim race. And then our calendar doesn't begin when Jesus Christ was born. Our calendar begins where Kim was born. So we, and history was forgotten to us. They didn't teach us about of course, Christianity or like the Big Bang. Like our history began when Kim was born. So everything was forgotten to us. And it was a different meaning. I mean, feeling of existence, you know, it's not even like same life. I literally think that was almost like my past life. And this is like a new life that I began. You're almost like a different human being now. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So you've, I have to say, I often say that my favorite book is Animal Farm by George Orwell. I've read it, I don't know how many times. And so I was really happy to hear that that was of the many books, excellent books that we'll hopefully talk about. You've mentioned that Animal Farm had a big impact on you. It was the book that kind of led to a kind of awakening for you. Maybe can you describe what impact it had? So after going through what I went through, and I arrived in South Korea after many years of journey, they were saying, so Kims were dictators, and South Korea is not colonized by American bastards. And Americans, first of all, not bastards, they're good people. And then they say everything that you believe in North Korea was a lie. It was a propaganda. Then at 15, I was thinking, so if everything that I believe was a lie, how do I know what I believe is not a lie? That was so hard. How do I trust ever again? And I just, it was chaos in belief. I did not know what was true anymore. And that's the moment, a few years later, I read this book, like Animal Farm, just by mistake. It was a very short book in the library. I was like, okay, I can finish that quickly. And when they're ending that, like last chapter, they could not see between the pigs and humans anymore. That sentence, I just understood everything that happened. It made every sense to me, what happened to me, my people, and to my country. Yeah, there's so many things I could say about that book. Yeah, there's a haunting nature to the end. And I guess spoiler alert, but you should have read this already. If you're listening to this. At the end, the animals were looking to the humans and to the pigs and they couldn't see the difference. And then there's this kind of gradual transition from the initial revolutionary steps of animals fighting for their freedom to slowly the pigs gaining control, went from four legs good, two legs bad, to four legs good, two legs better, I believe. Two legs even better, I think, something like that. So like gradually transitioning the ideology under which the farm operates. And I think the gradual nature of that, where basically you have generations born not knowing how things were in the past. And that's what makes the most kind of, for me, haunting transition from freedom to slavery to suffering to injustice, all those things. And the animals don't know they're part of that. And also for me personally, I always kind of found a kinship with Boxer the horse because I just, I'm kind of an idiot, I just work really hard. And I just love the idea of working hard for an ideal. And the tragic nature of, to the end, that horse, Boxer, working his ass off for the pride for others. But yeah, for the pride of the farm, you know. And then the pigs giving him, sort of using that, but then just sending him to the slaughterhouse anyway, when he was no longer useful. I mean, there's so many tragic elements that echo everything I've seen in the Soviet Union. And many of the elements that you see in even harsher, more drastic way in North Korea. If there's something hopeful you pull from that book, like within the suffering, within the gradual decline, the taking away the freedom, there were still moments of beauty, it seemed like. It can be. But I think for me was when I was ending the last page of the book. Until that point, I was angry towards the dictator. Why do you do this as a human being? I was so angry, dreaming of killing him, right? Revenge on my father, the people that he killed. But when I was ending the last chapter, actually everybody was responsible to create this dystopia in my country. The initial animals, when they're scared, when they see the first execution, and then they were not doing their job, speaking out and keep questioning. They had a question and then as soon as they see a fear, they silence. Because of that, that's when I was like, my grandma knew life could be different. I think the one thing about North Koreans are unique is that they don't know they're oppressed. They don't know that they are slaves to the dictator. And the fact that other people know they're oppressed, like in America, a lot of people think they are oppressed, like you are not oppressed. You don't even know the definition of oppression. And that's like when the new animals came, the new animals didn't even know what the life could be like. There's no alternative for them to compare even. And I was like, my grandmother knew. Why didn't they not do anything about it? And they were just scared. They kept silent. And everybody was responsible. So the people who knew were too afraid to say. And then there's people that just didn't even know. And I don't know what's more terrifying about human nature, looking at this group of people who are afraid to say that things could be otherwise, and then the group of people that don't even know it could be better. No. It's, I don't know, that's the reason I return to that book often, because it's such, maybe because it's interesting using animals to represent ideas that were very human. It almost allows you to explore the darkness of human nature without sort of being broken by it. So you mentioned anger. When I watch your interviews, you're really calm and collected. Not just your interviews, you know, Instagram, the way you present yourself. You, I don't know, it seems like you're almost at peace with the world. Is there in private times when you're just angry? Do you feel fear? Do you go to dark places, depression, all those kinds of things? Are you, are you able to put that world that you were in behind you? It's a joke because I talk about North Korea every single day and I still rescue people like from China and Russia and other countries, right? And sometimes I'll rescue mission figures and they get captured and sent back. I still have people in North Korea report to me. So like when I talked to my sister who chose to not be in this life, activist life, she forgot most of things. And like for the other hand, I like to remember everything. So sometimes it's a blessing to keep reminded of how, because it's, you know, they say happiness is a relative thing. It is sometimes. I mean, I think it's also people say because nobody was foreign when you're growing up, everybody was suffering. You should have been okay, right? But no, like if you are suffering in that degree, no matter, even if there's no comparison, like if you're in Nazi Germany, in the Holocaust, right? In the concentration camp, I'm sure nobody was better than them. I'm sure they were suffering. It's the same thing. I suffered. But now because I'm in this place, I can compare easily, right? Getting that perspective. But it is true, like I still have days that I cannot get out of bed. And I really hoping like that when it was Elon Musk talking about downloading your brain, blah, blah, blah. Maybe technology develops that I can download some part of my memory and then I can erase it or delete it. And that'd be so much better. What I, this is a, sorry for the tough question, but if I came to you, if Elon came to you and said, we can erase that part of your memory, would you do it? Some days I would do it for sure. And my mom would do 100%. My sister would do it. All other defectors know they do 100%. For me, I hesitated because I'm a witness. So if I delete that part, I don't know how real that can be. But it is painful. After I talk, give a speech, right? I mean, I'm fine. But somehow I'm depressed. Sometimes if the talk was very intense, I'm like depressed for three weeks. It takes a while for me to be recharged. But I don't know why it is. I just don't know. Well, there's also the, and there's a guy named Victor Franco who wrote the book, Man Search for Meaning. And there's some aspect where, so he talks about the Holocaust and that you can, in those moments of suffering, still discover meaning, still discover happiness in the simplest of joys. Like while starving, a little piece of bread could be a source of incredible joy. And there's some aspect in which that experience gives you a clarity about the world. Like somehow experiencing suffering allows you to deeply experience joy and love, and also empathize with the suffering of others. And it's almost like brings you closer to other humans. This double edged sword that the highest of joys sometimes are catalyzed by suffering. And it's hard to know what to do with that. You see that with World War II, the stories of soldiers that have suffered, but some of the closest bonds of brotherhood, of just pure love was experienced by them. And it sucks that our brains are like this. Love requires hardship. I don't know why that is. Yeah, that's like that thing. Of course, in my journey, I learned how to survive, right? When to not trust and when to run. But I think most of us keep learning what it means to be a human being. I think that was like the ultimate thing I was keep learning. And I still don't know fully what it means. But I do think it seems like suffering is necessary for people to be grateful and even be joyful too sometimes. So I talk about love quite a bit. And you mentioned that romantic love. I'm fascinated about love in many aspects. But you mentioned romantic love was forbidden in North Korea. What do you think about love now that you've kind of discovered it? What's the role of love in life? So why do you think it was forbidden in North Korea? So the tragic thing about North Korea is not only just banning Shakespeare, like we don't even know what Romeo and Juliet is, right? Our movies is never about love stories. But then also they banned the love between mother and daughter, wife and husband, and between your friends. They deny you being a human. So only love that I knew was when I described my feeling towards the leader and in a written form. That was the only love that people know in North Korea. And now I'm like, there are many loves you can experience. I think you definitely love science, right? But imagine that if you're being denied that. So there are so many loves in life. But in North Korea, all of those things are denied. And I think for me, love is what makes you tick. Like, you know, love for your child, love for your parents, love for your friends, love for even yourself. That is denied. So I mean, many people say like, love is an option. But like, then why do you live? I think we live to love. And it doesn't have to be romantic love. It can be anything. But finding love in any person or in any subject, I think that's a goal. I think that's when people find meaning in something. Yeah, I think romantic love is just one sort of, one echo of some core thing. Yeah, science, I love science, I love robots, all of those things. And it sounds like deliberately or not, the North Korean regime wants to channel that very deep aspect of the human spirit all towards the leader. Yeah, that's it. That's the only thing they allow us to fear and know about. So I remember, I mean, you read 1984 by George Orwell, it talks about double think and double speak, who controls the language, who controls thoughts. And why he does talk about as they go, they eliminate a lot of words, right? Now, later one word can represent 10 different things. And what fascinates me is how many vocabulary meaning people can have. And when I literally came out, I remember I went to San Francisco, and someone came to me and hugged me. And then he was a guy like, oh, baby, don't worry, I'm gay. I was like, what the heck is gay? And then I literally had to go to a hotel room and Google the gay. And it's like, oh, that's what you meant. And like that, like, they deny what that is. I'm sure there are gays in North Korea. I'm sure there is. But you don't know what it is. And like that, they eliminate words. So the fact that you know the concept, that stays much better than and that's the thing a lot of people like when you're born, you somehow know what justice is, what liberty is. And it's all somebody taught you that. And like, that's the thing why people say, oh, humans are inherently know what is right, what is wrong, what is oppression. And like, no, that's like BS. You got to learn. That's fascinating that words give rise to ideas. So like, as a child, one of the ways to learn about justice and freedom is to first learn the word, and then to ask, well, what is it? Yeah, the concept. Yeah. And if you don't have the word for it, then you never have the kind of first spark that leads to you trying to be curious about it. That's interesting and controlling the words. And then, yeah, I mean, your thoughts, you control the thoughts. There's so many echoes. I mean, I have, it's a very different, but perhaps a very similar experience, which is the journey of my family through the Soviet Union. Because there is a love of country. There is a pride of the people. Like you are proud of your family in general. But I wonder how much of that is polluted by the propaganda. I think a lot. For sure. Yeah. It is to this day, I'm like, my father who died in China and he was tortured and then he died. He wanted to go back before his death, right? And then it's like, dad, if you go back, you're going to be executed. And it's like, I want to be executed. He wanted to go back to North Korea. To be executed. So he can be buried in his own land. And then his last wish was, if I die, criminate me and then bring my ashes back to my country. When I'm dead, I still want to be in my country. And this is nationalism. This is a propaganda, right? But now it's the same thing. It's the same thing. If I die, I somehow buried in my land and I still feel like I'm the outsider. I'm always longing for my home. It's a horrible home. People say, what's your dream? Do you want to be a president? Do you want to run for office? I just want to go home. That's my dream. And people here don't get it ever. I don't know what to do with that. I love my country. And I think for me, my country is the United States. And perhaps it will be for you too one day. It is. I think it's becoming. US has been a very special place in my heart. I think this is the first place I felt like I feel like home. And I mean, I was in South Korea longer and I didn't feel that way. So I think we have very different life stories, but I think it's almost two different people. For me, it's the person that was in the Soviet Union and the person that's here. Those are two different people. That previous person's home in the Soviet Union and he's part of me. And I suppose in that same way, your first maybe two decades of life are somehow longing for the home that is North Korea. And your next two decades of life might be finding a home in the United States. Your dad, can you tell the story of his struggle, of his death? I mean, first, do you miss him? Do you think about it? Oh man, all the time. I had a son when I was 22 and I had IVF three times. And as you see, I'm like 80 pounds, but back then I was like 75 pounds. And because of my severe malnutrition, somehow my body's very different. And so after three times of IVF after 23, I was still wanting family. And the reason I wanted him is because I felt so guilty for my father that he never seen this world. I somehow, when you're so desperate, you become illogical. Like I want to believe in the, like Buddhist idea, right? You come back to life. And I prayed, please come to me, like as my son, so I will take care of you. Like come back. And when I was pregnant with my son, even though I planned to get pregnant with a girl, doctor made a mistake. It became a boy. So I made his middle name, like my father's name Jin Sik. I think he's the only American got North Korean name. It is. So he's a part of your father's and your son. Yeah. That's how I, that's how I make a sense of it. And that's how I move forward. Like if I, like as a logical human being, you, you know, when you're dead, you're done. Maybe that's what I at least used to think, but then life's become too unbearable. And somehow that's the thing, like we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And that's how I came with my title of the book in order to live. I had to tell myself a lot of stories to overcome a lot of things. I think I was a part of it. Can you tell the story of you escaping North Korea to China? Yeah, I think it's, it's a thing. It's amazing. Even though I was like 13, my like life outside of North Korea is almost like went by like one second and my life till that point was like eternity. I remember being in China. I arrived there at the end of March at 13. And by October, it was six months past. And I literally felt like I lived eternity. And one day living in China felt like living one year. One day was a war like surviving through one day was so hard. Every night I was like, I cannot believe I got done one day today. That was a thing I was grateful for before I went to bed. Okay, I survived. I didn't get captured. And I made it another day on earth. So the experience of the minutes is what fear, fear of being captured, fear, loss, everything. Because I mean, I saw my own mom in China to survive to. So it was more than that. And it's not feeling I think that's a thing in China. I learned not to fear. And after my escape was a challenging, I didn't feel anything. And it was hard. Not feeling anything is a torture. It's the biggest torture you can ever feel like even you fear sadness. That's better than not feeling anything. And I felt something when I had my son. That's when I started healing. So he was a miracle to save me. But yeah, in China, it wasn't even fear like it was numb. You were numb. It was like paralysis. Yeah. Just overwhelming on the uncertainty of your future. Did you have a sense what your future held at the time? Like what do you even even feature? I don't even know that word. Right? Like, a lot of times I was looking at myself like I left my body and like just looking at me. And just not feeling it. It's not like I'm scared for her. I'm like sad for her just looking at me like, huh, that's interesting. Wow. Not feeling anything. And me like being raped, going through every emotion of life to survive, right? But like, somehow, I don't know if you say so or something like looking at it just like, you feel nothing. You don't feel anything for that person. So even with your mom, like what was, was there some, I don't know, some warmth that you were able to extract from the connection with your mom? Yeah, of course. I think that made me survive. I had a very strong connection with my family. And I think that's what kept me going to do all of that. I think, as you said, I escaped at 13. My sister at the age of 16 escaped with her friend first. And I was going to escape with her. But one day I got like really bad stomach ache. And my parents took me to hospital. And in North Korean hospital, they don't have like X ray machines. They don't even have electricity. They literally using one needle to inject everybody. And people don't die from cancer in North Korea. You die from infection and fever and hunger, right? So most likely you're going to die more by being treated by doctor than not being treated. I think I was lucky. Even though they thought I had appendix, they operated on me without any painkiller. And I didn't get infection. I survived. So that's how I got delayed to escape with my sister. And she left me a note in my bedside saying like, follow this lady. And this is like another trick about human trafficking, right? She sold me to China as a sexual slave. And she executed for it later. She was executed for that later. She had five daughters and she sold all her children to China. And we can now sitting here judging on like how heartless you are selling your own children to China. And as a sexual slave, they were like her children were seven, 10 years old. But that was the only way for her to save her children. And if she didn't sell me that day, I would be dead right now. So I'm grateful that she sold me. And I think that's the thing is like, life is so crazy. You cannot judge. It is so complex. And yeah, that's how she changed my life by selling me. She sold my mom and myself in 2007 to China. So you're grateful for that. You're grateful for that suffering. Of course I am grateful. Because the alternative is worse. I would not be here with you. You would never knew I existed. What do you make of the others suffering in the world today? The people there in North Korea. So that is part of your life's work is helping those people. What do you think about them? What should people know about them? I think that's when I get angry. Whenever I think about them. Who's your anger directed at? At the heartlessness of people, the ignorance of people. So when I got out of North Korea, I went through all of that. And I went to South Korea one day. I was watching television and there's like famous Korean Kpop stars crying and doing some fundraising concert. And I literally thought, oh my God, something is horribly going wrong in this country. Why are these people crying? It was a cheery campaign. And then later it was showing that it was an animal rights campaign to helping out cats and puppies in the shelters. Do you know anybody sheds their tears like that to another human being right now? No, right? People rather give millions of dollars to save some dolphins than saving these children right now being raped in China. And I think I love Elon Musk. I love his voice. I love these people want to go to the moon, Mars. And then people told him like, yeah, we went to the moon like I did not know in North Korea. But I think that's what upsets me. Why there is not even one single human with that kind of brilliance in their brain. They can save so much suffering, but nobody does anything. I think that's when I feel like hard to find hope in humanity. And that's when I get so upset. Because think about like even Biden or Trump or Obama. They know what's happening in North Korea exactly, right? I mean, we see satellite photos. There's public executions. I mean, the UN says this is a Holocaust happening again. And it's happening. If the Holocaust is happening again, how, why, how are you okay doing nothing about it? But somehow humans are able to okay nothing, anything. And this is like, this is hard. Like when people say I'm going to change the world. I want to make a difference. Like it's hard to believe it, you know? Yeah, that we can turn our back to human suffering at scale when it's right in front of us. I mean, that makes you think about the Holocaust. This is just, everybody was looking the other way because it was almost too hard to look at it. No, it's not. It's an easier thing. Like that's the thing. I was like here to speak at the South by Southwest a few years ago. And like they're, everybody's talking about like Elon Musk project going to the moon, right? We're going to be multi, like species. I was like back then I didn't even know who he was. So if you guys are trying to go out to this earth, you haven't even explored our earth yet. You cannot go to North Korea right now. You haven't explored that part of our, our like planet. Can we do that first and then move on? Explore the landscape of human suffering, like alleviate suffering in the world. There's a lot of suffering happening in Africa that has to do with disease. And for some reason it's, even though we turn our back to that kind of suffering too, we still can try to do something about it. And there's still efforts in terms of healthcare, in terms of medicine, in terms of bioengineering, in terms of like all these efforts to help people from disease. But like, that's almost like converting it into an engineering problem and trying to solve it. That somehow is easier for us humans. But when there's obvious sort of non disease related torture of humans, we look the other way. Whether it's China or it's North Korea. Yeah. I mean, that has to be changed somehow. We have to change that somehow. It's the thing right now, like the China, like they bring the Xinjiang riggers, right? They say, oh, this is a vitamin, take it. And then it kills their sperm and make them not reproduce. Their birth rate gone down something 47 to something 50% in the one year time. It's a genocide in 21st century. And they get those people and get their like organs out. Imagine if there's some people who do that with the cutie puppies and cats. There's going to be insane amount of product. They're going to destroy everything. And this is like a human nature that I don't get. Why there's so much anti human sentiment in this modern world? We don't have to. The fact that I was saying like, the fact that you care about animals rights is beautiful because you care about something who cannot speak for themselves. The fact that we care about animals is because they cannot speak for themselves, right? They don't have that ability. And there are many people who cannot speak for themselves right now. And why do you refuse to be the voice for them? Because they are simply being a human. And maybe it connects to us not being proud of who we are. Like, I don't know what it is. Why do they deny humans this way? Maybe they don't like themselves. Yeah, it's almost, we would have to acknowledge some dark things about ourselves in order to start helping. What's the solution? So, you know, I see two solutions. One is in the military side. It's assassination or the full on invasion. And then on the activism side, which is figuring out ways to, like you said, sort of let people in North Korea understand their situation, sort of from within try to reform. Or maybe there's others, obviously, there could be activism from the outside to build up momentum for the entirety of the world, especially the world that is not just the United States or Europe, but also is Russia and China and so on. What are your ideas here? What we can do as individuals and as countries? I think the first thing that we can do is speak about Chinese role in this sponsoring dictatorship in North Korea. Like, I happen to have so much struggle talking about North Korea, right? They say, how North Korea is possible? Why is it like the way like this is 99% accountability going to CCP? Kim Jong Un cannot last without Chinese help even one week. This is completely funded. This Holocaust is funded by CCP. But if you talk about in the mainstream, of course, they don't buy it. And I think it's in a way North Korea is a lot easier to solve than even in the Middle East. There's nothing conflict like between people. There's no ideology, no religion, nothing. People are peaceful, right? There's not even one civil, like any discontent among the people. Our problem is there's a dictator funded by the second economic power in the world. And even any military, they know if they kill Kim Jong Un, they're going to get killed by Chinese. Nobody can dare to stand up against Kim Jong Un because China is backing it. So somehow here in the West, we collectively acknowledging that China is the responsible person for these crimes against humanity in North Korea. Then we can somehow, I don't know, talk to them. Stand up to China. Exactly. We're failing to do that in a way, in all kinds of avenues of life, of public life, because for many reasons, they're probably primarily financial. But it also, I'm against, I don't know, maybe you can correct me. I'm against sort of making China this evil enemy because I've seen this with Russia as well. And I don't think that leads to progress. I think you want to highlight, you basically want to help the Chinese people become the best version of themselves. So speak to the Chinese people and not making the leaders of China into these caricatures of devils. I feel like the Cold War, the way it was done in Russia, both sides, they were caricaturing each other through propaganda and the result was not productive at all. It did not help Russia become the best country it could be. It did not help America become the best country it could be. And the same thing with China. I feel like making them into this enemy, like being afraid of China, making them into the thing that's going to spy on us, that's going to destroy the rest of the world, that's not going to help China reform themselves. They're going to plant their feet. The dictators, the evil people will become more evil. The power hungry will become more, like they will centralize the power more. It feels like, maybe naive, but it feels like it should be like, again, love, not violence that solves this thing. Now, of course, in North Korea, it's like long gone. 80 years, almost 80 years. Love is not going to solve that problem. I mean, I don't, it's very difficult. They have tried that because of the sunshine policy, which is there's two people walking down the street and the sun and the wind made a battle. So who can take off that man, take off jacket? So wind tried to blow as much air as he could. And then that man was like putting more like his jacket on, right? Not taking off, but sunshine came. Okay, I'm going to give him a lot of warmth. And then he took his jacket out and came out. So that was the theory. Let's give North Korea as much love as they want. Let's give them a lot of money, whatever they want, let's give to them so they know that we are not here to attack them. And North Korea, what they did was the guy who did the sunshine policy in South Korea named Kim Dae Sung won the Nobel Peace Prize for that. And Kim Jong Il used the money to build nuclear weapons. So that's how they came with the nukes. So I think that's the thing. I hope that love solves problems. But there's got to be a way and the hope is with the 21st century is you can directly speak to the people somehow. When there's no internet, when there's nothing like that, it's hopeless. I think China, there's a hope that China is still connected to the internet. I love your optimism. I have seen the actual dark side of China on the underground. I hope, I think that's the thing. People in the West, right? They say, oh, how can it be that bad? They ask me like, I walking passing this young teenager man and later the war with my sister. He's like intestine coming out through his back, right? And even in that moment, what he wanted was, please give me food. He was hungry. His intestine is hanging out of his body and he's asking for food. Do you know what humans demand when they die in North Korea? All they want is eating, right? Yeah. And people say, oh, nothing can be that bad. But people just here haven't seen an actual true evil. Would you say that the evil comes from a tiny minority of people or is it permeate much larger parts of the population? Like if we look at sex trafficking, how many people, like is it 99.9% of the people are longing to do good in the world? Or is there, is it, or do we all have the capacity for evil in certain kinds of environments, certain kinds of governmental structures inspire a large percent of the population to do bad things? I think humans are capable of anything. There's no exception. I don't think there's any saint who born with that morality. I think in North Korea, you can say initially that there's few guys in the top wanted the power and then doing this, but eventually made a society where people don't even know what compassion is. We don't know the concept of, we don't know that you need to feel bad for another human being when they're suffering. The fact that you know compassion is in your knowledge. That's why you do that. Humans need to learn. It's not anything bad about human nature. It's just saying humans are capable of everything. We are the most adaptable species on the planet. That's why we created the internet, like talking this way, right? No other animals have done it because we are so adaptable. That is a good thing and that's a bad thing. So in the adaptive situation, they all can be, I mean during the Holocaust, right? Those people, they could have been capable of good too if they were exposed to different system. That's why when people underestimate evil, that's what scares me. Evil is evil. It's a different thing. It's a completely different thing. Of course, I get your idea. We don't want to isolate 1.3 billion human beings on Earth by Chinese, but the thing is we are talking about this regime, not the people. I love Chinese people. I speak Chinese. I love all about the country, but this system does promote evil. Well, that's an optimistic view actually because we can fix systems. Yeah. It's harder to fix people. So if we fix systems, then the people are adaptable, as you said. Absolutely. I mean that, and then the question is, first of all, you have to talk about it just as you're doing. You're right now like this little flame that burns bright, and it's really important for North Korea, but just keep talking about it until hopefully it leads to at the highest levels of power, revolutionizing the systems in the world. And then in China and in North Korea, do you see North Korea being a potential instigator in nuclear war? They will not start a nuclear war as long as they can do whatever they want right now, right? North Korea's army is not designed to fight the enemy. They're designed to prevent their own people, the coup d'tetre and the revolution with their own citizens. That is 1.6 million North Korea with a tiny country, the fourth largest armies in the world. So this country is designed to fight with their own citizens. And the army, the fourth largest in the world, is designed to basically fight its own people. Oppress their own people. That's what North Korean military is about. Okay. Let me ask you some aspects about North Korean life. Can you describe the songbun system of ascribed status used in North Korea? Yeah. So that's a very interesting thing, right? Right now there are a lot of people playing with this ideology of like democratic socialism, socialism, communism, whatever you call it, Marxism, Leninism, right? They have all like these similar features where we give collective power to a certain entity and they will make the decision for bigger good, right? And North Korea came up with the idea, the Kim Il Sung. He was the Leninist. He was a Marxist saying, I'm going to create the most equal society on human face. So it was communist North Korea. And then they came up with this songbun system. It's like family caste system. Three big categories, warrior, wavering, and hostile. And that in between three classes, they divide into 50 different classes. So a lot of people don't even know which exact class you belong to. That's a secret government document. And that's how they decide your future. So in a way, North Korea, before you're born, your life is determined for you. And this is a joke, right? They dreamed of creating the most equal society. They ended up with became most unequal society in the face of humanity. So there are 50 different classes and where the one guy on the top became a god. So when this animal farm, as we keep saying, like there's so many, all the animals are equal and some of the animals are more equal than others. Exactly. But it's not only, it's just more equal. One guy in North Korea became a god. So North Korea was born out of a Marxist ideals. Yeah. From Stalin. Can you comment on Juche ideology, which seems to be its own kind of socialism, but with unique aspects here, it really does ideologically says the importance of having a great leader. Is there some interesting similarities or differences that you can comment on between other implementations of communism throughout history, the Soviet Union, China, elsewhere? So Juche is very unique. It came on around the 90s after Soviet Union collapsed. So before that, North Korea was very still loyal to the Marxism and Leninism, which is state takes care of you. We are going to give you the right education, healthcare, your livelihood, everybody is going to be equal. You're going to have in the working collective farm, collective worker place. Everybody collectively do things together and let's work for the paradise. But 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. And until then, North Korea was heavily subsidized by Soviet Union's aid. And then Soviet Union didn't give them anything. So not 3 million people dying on the streets. The regime then came up with the idea, okay, our goal is what is successful ruling for us is keeping the 10% of population alive, which is in the capital Pyongyang. So they designed the hunger games. There is a capital, 13 other districts, everybody on the countryside on purpose being starved. So those people who are starving cannot thinking about meaning of life, cannot thinking about shooting to the moon, right? They're not going to think about anything or they're going to think it's like finding next meal. All on purpose. All on purpose is manmade famine. International community was begging to give North Korea food. Why not? Still at the UN, they beg to give North Korea formula, medicine and food. They are begging, can you please feed your people? And Kim Jong Un said, no, thank you. Last year, like when North Korea had a horrible, horrible flooding, South Korean president begging, can you get, can I give you please some medicines? Like, no, because he wants to be the one provider. He doesn't want people to think other people giving him the thing. So on purpose, other people are starving. And that Juche idea is that's when it's coming from. So until that communism was about like state is being a father figure, takes care of all your needs, right? Give the power to us and you're all good. But North Korea regime says, okay, now we cannot give people's ration. So which means Juche means self reliance. You need to take care of yourself while you're giving every right to us. So now in the 90s, the regime told us, okay, we are not going to give you ration. You cannot trade. That's illegal, but you find your own way to survive. So be self reliant. That's what Juche is. But when you're a guy, you can do whatever you want. You don't need to make a sense. That's the difference being a God and being a leader. When it is religion, it's not for survival. You cannot challenge it. God's way is suspicious. God works in a mysterious way. So when you're a God, people are not going to say, oh, this doesn't make sense, right? You're going to, okay, whatever God says, as a human being, we can never change his thought. It's unbelievable what regimes can do. There's something about famine that is another level of evil to me. What Stalin did in Ukraine in the thirties, fuck them. This is what torture is. Cannibalism. North Korea too, they eat humans right now in 21st century. 7 billion people on this earth right now. You make enough food for 10 billion people. Nobody should be starving right now. It's worrisome to me. The humanity is moving forward with the technological advance, blah, blah, blah. We are going so fast in advancement. And we are leaving this like 25 million human beings in the cage, completely leaving them behind. And North Korea is living like 16 centuries. This morning I was taking shower, beautiful shower. One never knew what shower was. I was bathing a few times a year, going to the river. How do they even know what shampoo is? And this is how human beings in 21st century are living. And it doesn't bother us. And rather, most people are obsessed being a vegan. How do you reconcile this? I think we get used to stuff very quickly. We get used to comforts. That's just the way of human life. You take the beautiful things for granted. So I try to appreciate everything I have. So whether it's like the food I have now or like the luxury to have a diet and be struggling with that. Or just the basic simple moments of being alive with the people I love. Or actually I get like, I think I'm on drugs all the time because I feel like just even like this mug, everything on this table just brings me joy. But it's like filling your life with joy in the full capitalistic American way, you can still at the same time not feel too bad about yourself and still focus on the suffering in the world. And I think there's some way that in trying to build a better world in America, it has ripple effects elsewhere. Sort of like, so I'm a fan of rockets in space. It sounds perhaps counterintuitive but sending rockets to space will help solve the North Korea problem because it lets people dream and build cool stuff. So it's not the rocket, it's the other people that are inspired by the rocket and then look to other problems in the world. I mean, that's what Elon did is like he saw problems in the world and thought like, what can I do to help it? And I think the North Korea one is a tough one though, because that ultimately has to do with revolutionizing government. We got to change China. That's what it takes. Changing China's Communist Party is impossible. That's why we couldn't solve North Korea for that many decades. For now it's China, but it's China, it's Russia, it's certain aspects of the United States and struggling with that. There's a bunch of technologies that are striving at this. For example, I don't know what your thoughts about cryptocurrencies. I love it. So like there's a idea that money could be a way to destroy or to challenge the power centers of the world. Yeah. So if you take away the power from fiat currency and give it to this thing that can't be controlled by government, this cryptocurrency, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, all those kinds of things, that's a way to get money into the hands of people to where the government can't take that money away. But North Koreans don't have electricity, no internet. So we can do that with China. We can do it with a lot of African dictatorship countries, right? I do think big cryptocurrency is such a fascinating technology, right? I think this is an amazing experiment when that power is in our hands. I'm a huge out of game believer, but I think North Korea is too behind. I think that's what is unique about North Korea is that most of the things that we talk about, it's a different planet literally. The common law that we have is not applicable. What about Kim Jong Un? Kim Jong Un, yeah. Is he intentionally evil or is he mindlessly propagating an evil system created by his ancestors? What's your sense of the man? So with Kim Il Sung, I can give him more benefit of that. He was a initial true believer of communism. But then as later he gained the power, he realizing, I guess back then he thought most of people are dumb, right? Individuals dumb. So therefore I need to make a decision for all of you. That pure arrogance came from out of him. Even that I can tolerate. Okay, fine. And Kim Jong Il, who never like, yeah, fine. He grew up in that system too. But Kim Jong Un is very unique. This guy was educated in Switzerland in the heart of democracy. He knew how human beings should be treated. As a child, he went, when you're a child, your brain is very susceptible, right? It will change anybody. Like why the mall was off, that's like changing young people's minds. Like that's every revolutionary they do, right? They go change young people's minds first. This guy was so obsessed with power, him being a God. Even starting in Switzerland didn't change him. And that's why I think that's a pure evil. I can give him more benefit of that to his grandfather and father. But when it comes to Kim Jong Un, this is like what pure evil looks like. Pure selfish being. That's what it looks like. Is there some sense where he's justifying everything he's doing to himself? Or do you think there's a psychopathic aspect to where he enjoys the suffering? I think in his life, right, I read a lot about like North Korea, a lot of CIA documents, a lot of intelligence people worked there. And even like worked in North Korean type elites and escaped. I could hear about them. So Kim Jong Un, when they are born, they treat like gods. So they never have a sense of them being a human. They're like equal with the others. For them, like we are just any kind of tool. Like that what Napoleon like thing does, right? Anybody is a tool. Like once boxer dies, get him slaughtered for my cause. And they do not even feel guilty about it because they don't view us that you deserve your worthy of it. Yeah, that's right. So it's not like he even feels, he doesn't even recognize that's a suffering. Like of course this is what you do serving me. Because I am, I am this. So I think that's like beyond that. It's not like suffering enters his mind. He doesn't even think what we go through. So he thinks of himself as a god. And then everybody else is just tools that they're disposable. Right. There was rumors several times of him dying. Yeah. Do you think he is, obviously his health is not good. Do you think he will die soon? What happens if Kim Jong Un dies? Well, when it comes to North Korea, anybody knows what they're going, what Kim Jong Un does is lie, right? Nobody knows. I'm sure CIA knows, but they may never reveal that. CIA has enough intelligence to can tell where Kim Jong Un is, what he's doing. They just don't assassinate him because they don't see the means of it right now. Do you think they can assassinate him? They can. They do have ability to get assassinated. Why the hell did they not assassinate him? Because they don't care. They don't care about the suffering of 25 million people. They got to pay the price. If they assassinate Kim Jong Un, they got to pay the price afterwards. There'll be financial, there'll be political price to pay. It'll anger China. Absolutely. That is a huge piece for them. And then they'll have to deal, obviously there'll be financial and military consequences of having to deal with the turmoil, the uncertainty, the revolutions that will spring up. Yeah. That's the thing. That's why they don't want to take that risk. They don't want to do anything. The US now became very passive when they pursue these moral values to the rest of the world. They did the same thing with the Holocaust in the early days, actually. Yeah. They didn't care. And that's what their policy has been. They don't care. So if Kim Jong Un dies, it's going to be very hard for North Korea to replace anybody in his position because Kim's is a brand. It's not just a leader for us, right? Whenever we think of Kim, who came with my mind, who's almost a God figure. North Korea is the number 10 religion in the world. They copied the Bible. So if you believe that, if there are people who believe in God and Jesus Christ, how do you not believe that North Koreans believe in the same thing? So Kim Il Sung's grandfather and his parents were devout Christians. So Kim Il Sung grew up this Christian like verses. So when he finding his country, he said, I love my people so much that I'm giving you my son Kim Jong Il. His body dies, but his spirit is with us forever. Who can know how many here I have, what I think. And when we suffer, we go to paradise with him. And when you block every single information going to country, of course, people are going to believe it. So who would be the successor if he dies? He has a son, first son born 2009 and not not old enough if he dies now. So either his sister might rule for a short amount of time as not like a leader, but like we like temporary placement. And then when the son is older enough, he might take it off because it's a kingdom. That's most likely and China will do everything they can to maintain that status quo for the North Korean regime. So North Korean people have no option here. We just need some leader to courageously come up and do the right thing. So we can't just wait this out. No, we can't. It's not something that takes its course and then change. Like we not even know that economic freedom does not bring political freedom. We know in China, it doesn't. That's the unique thing about freedom. You got to fight for it. Otherwise, you don't ever get it. Freedom is something that has to be fought. And if nobody fighting for freedom, it's not going to be there. Can we talk a little bit about freedom? What does it mean to you? Having had, we talked about love in that same way about freedom, having sort of discovered it later in life. What does it mean to you? I think every day I get a new definition of freedom. It is a never ending journey, having this relationship with being free and what it means to be free, right? I think you definitely can live life without being free and also happy life too. I saw a lot of North Korean elites who are fat and have power, but didn't have freedom, were very happy. In a way, happier than the people that I found in New York were like investment bankers and consultants in Manhattan and 70% of them go like talk therapist. I was very confused. I remember writing my book in New York. My editor was saying, Yami, you know you're traumatized. You need to go talk to a therapist. I was like, what is therapy? What is trauma? Because in North Korea, they don't have word for stress or trauma because how can you be stressed in a socialist paradise? They don't let you be knowing what that is. Then they were like, yeah, hearing people having problems, go talk to therapist. I was like, how much is it? $200 per hour and it's a discounted rate too. I was like, no, thank you. We know that freedom comes with responsibility and in a way, it's not that easy to be free, thinking for yourself constantly. In a way, I understand. Let's give government every power we have. Let them decide what education that I get. Let them decide where I live. Let someone figure that out for me. That's how North Korea began, hoping the government is going to represent my own interests, believing that they were good. With that benefit of doubt and good faith, it began the nightmare. Freedom is not like a gateway to be happy at all. In a way, it can make life a lot more complex, but then it's fun, isn't it? You start thinking for yourself. You start making mistakes. It's so fun to be free, even though you can be suffering way more than the people who are not free. The thing about freedom is when you have freedom, you also have the responsibility for your actions. That could be a huge burden because if you succeed, it's you, but if you fail, it's you. If you do horrible things, it's you. If you don't do something, for example, if you don't help people in North Korea, it's you. That's a huge burden. Living with that burden is a kind of suffering. There's some aspect in which freedom is suffering. It is suffering. Because life is suffering, and then freedom is you as an individual fully living through that. See, you talked, you're friends with Michael Malice. He believes, and so I want to kind of ask you about government. He believes, he's an anarchist, and he believes kind of in freedom fully implemented in human societies, meaning that humans should all be free to choose how they, you know, transact with each other, how they live together. There shouldn't be a centralized force that tells you what to do. Do you think there's some role for government in a healthy society? Yeah. If we look at North Korea, there's the most horrible implementation of government, but then if we look at what the United States strives to be, at least in principle, there's an ideal of a government that represents the people and helps the people. Is there a place for that kind of ideal, or is government always going to get us into trouble? I am not, I mean, I spoke to Michael Malice. I kept asking why he's an anarchist, right? And he doesn't even believe in military, none of that thing. And I was like, I don't think I want to be in that world you're describing. That's pretty scary. I want the law enforcement. I want like, I don't, in a way that, so why equality makes no sense is that the fact that when you and I were born, we were born in a very different capability of thinking, different intelligence, different capability in our physics, right? So equality is nonsense. You can never achieve that, right? So to me, that's been, it's very scary in America. When the government tries to enforce. To make equality on everybody, that is impossible. Specifically equality of outcome. So like, so given that we all started different places, enforce, like measure in some kind of way where people stand, and if they're an equal, enforce equality. And that's what leads to the kind of things that you mentioned with the class system in North Korea. Yeah. So I think that's why government can be bad. They can be very dumb. And another thing is that they cannot know what you want. A lot of times people don't even know what they want as an individual. Like how the heck do you assume government is going to know what is best for you? Nobody knows. We just all do our best. I do think though some governments like in Switzerland, you know, have more power, give power to the different state can be good. I think I'm more, you know, like giving power to the state and let individual decide where they want to go in within states. Like, I mean, why did you choose Texas, right? There's no income tax, right? Like there's a lot of things people find Texas, like, you know, charming and they come here. So in a way that I don't want to be in a one strong government that makes every single thing the same way. In a way, I want to kind of experiment to everything. We can have anarchy state. There's no police, nothing going on. You can be whatever you want. And you can go to a state where it's like abortion is bad, blah, blah, this is bad. All this like conservative values. And let the ideas compete and let them how they're being practiced in real life. But I think it's very scary when the US government is getting bigger and bigger and then they try to make every state under one big government. And that's like when I get really alarmed. Are there things that you see in the United States in the current culture that's kind of has echoes of the same things you saw in North Korea that worry you? Absolutely. It's in America now the meritocracy doesn't matter, right? It's evil. The white man's idea of talking about if you're competent enough, they say, oh, if you're coming from rich white family, you are going to be competent. So other people don't have a chance. But look at Asians who came from nothing as competent and go to Harvard Law School and medical school. So it doesn't almost is like there's no incentive for you to work hard anymore in the system right now. That is North Korea. There's no incentive because you are born with your class already. So no matter what you do, you can never. So the horrible thing about North Korean system is that there's nothing holding Mary up. So if you're coming from other cultures that like Meghan Markle joined the royal family and she became a lawyer, you go up by North Korea. If someone from high class going to marry somebody down, you only go down with them. That's how they prevent class mix. Right. That kind of enforces the separation because there's a huge disincentives to go to marry to integrate between classes. What do you do about this kind of, you know, especially universities, but in companies, I'm thinking about starting a company. So I'm looking at this very carefully. There's these ideas of diversity and meritocracy. That's a tension. So I think there's a big way in which diversity broadly defined is not at all in a tension with meritocracy. So having a variety of people, backgrounds, way of thinking, all those kinds of things is a huge benefit to any group. But the way diversity is often defined is by sort of very crude classes of people, whether it's by skin color or gender or some very kind of large group way. And that actually does two things in my mind. One, it drowns out real diversity or not real, but the full spectrum of diversity, which is like within class diversity of like, are you somebody who is exceptionally good at mathematics? Are you somebody who's exceptionally good at psychology? Are you good with people? Are you good with numbers? All that kind of stuff that I think spans or intersects in fascinating ways with these kinds of groups. So that's diversity. And then meritocracy is this thing that probably the reason I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and the reason I didn't is like having a fire to change the world within you. Like meritocracy is like, I want to be the best in the world at this and I will strive and work hard, not stepping on others, but like purely within yourself, be the best version of yourself. That idea is in some ways being not celebrated or demonized. It's literally meritocracy is being demonized right now in America. Working hard is a symbol of you coming from some established family. The fact that you celebrate accomplishment, hard work is a sign of your patriarchal, whatever thing they call it. And they want to abolish that. They want to like stop giving kids grades. That's what they're already doing, right? They want to stop. They want to like we should abolish like SAT in America they take to go to college, right? They won't even abolish that. Yeah, some kids have no ability to do math. So why do we have to force them to learn math? And that's what comes with humans overcome challenges. That's what makes us special. But then like, because it's kids coming from this family, let's find a reason why they cannot, and then they don't have to do that thing. But they still deserve the same job. They need to be a lawyer and doctors. And that's like what in North Korea was like not, there was not even meritocracy beginning with, right? Did you born in the same family, the family, the blood, right? Like if one person does something wrong, it's like collective guilt. Because I spoke out, three generations of my family got punished, who I left behind. And then in America, I see the same thing. Like if you're somehow great, great grandfather on the slave, now you are privileged and you're guilty because you are white and guilt. But how do you change your ancestor? How did you have a saying on it? And that is where there's no way out. There's no forgiving, there's no moving forwards. And this current culture in America now, like I remember at Columbia, like before class, everybody had to go around saying, tell us what your pronoun is. And my English, my third language, I learned as an adult. Even saying he and she, I'm confused. It's a pure mistake. And they say, call me they, because I'm gender fluid. Basically, I can be a girl, but next hour you talk to me, I'm a boy, right? And if you don't do it right, they like look at you, why are you doing it? Right? It makes me so nervous. And this is where I come to, this is a regression of civilization. We are regressing as a humanity here. Like the enlightenment, all of those things made us so much brighter and looking forward. And now we are going backwards. Well, I think there's a pendulum aspect to it because it's my hope in terms of backwards. So pendulum goes backwards too, but it just goes back and forth, I think. And then in the long arc of history, we're making progress. I think all of the discussions of diversity and inclusion and all those kinds of things, I always thought that they're healthy in moderation. They should be a small part of the conversation amongst other things. The natural aspect, it seems that they kind of have this way of just consuming all conversations. It's like the meetings, like diversity and inclusion meetings multiply somehow, where it's like the only thing that you're talking about. And it's very kind of absurd. And when I look at, even at MIT, it's a strangely disproportionate amount of discussions about that. And also to me as an engineer, those discussions are very frustrating because they don't seem to actually do anything. So they want to bully people instead of creating systems that fix definitive problems. And that in itself, that kind of bullying, that's the same kind of thing you saw in terms of McCarthyism in America against the communists. You certainly saw that in Soviet Union against everybody who's not communist. It creates hate, not progress. When you talked to Jordan Peterson recently, and people should listen to that conversation, it was a fascinating one. I think he almost got emotional on the discussion about universities and your experience with Columbia because he, like myself, for perhaps different reasons, have a hope for our academic institutions. Some of the most incredible people, some of the most incredible engineering and idea development, innovation happens in universities. And so we both deeply care about them. Is there something, so the reason he got emotional, the reason he was kind of hurt is the fact that you did not, you were not deeply inspired by your experience at Columbia. It made me dumber. It made me scared. It made me terrified that I had to censor myself in America. Are you seriously telling me that you don't ever censor yourself? Can you truly say whatever you want about race, about anything, gender? We all censor ourselves. Let's be honest, right? We are all doing that. And that's what I learned. I thought I was coming to a country where never needed, like first thing my mom taught me growing up in North Korea was, don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you. And I thought, okay, now America is truly the land of the free, home of the brave. You can say anything you want, and then you have freedom to change your mind and evolve. But the people now demand you to be the perfect version they demand you to be. You cannot change your mind. And then what is the meaning of life if you cannot grow? You should feel safe to talk about anything, and then later, okay, I was wrong. But now if you do that, you got to get penalized for it. I mean, censorship is a funny thing because you probably should not say dumb things. You should try to say things you want to say in the most eloquent, the most effective way you can. So, I mean, that's what editing is, right? So there's some level of like being careful with what you say, not because you're afraid of some overarching kind of group of bullies, but you want to be the best version of yourself when you express stuff. But there's some sense where in the university setting, you can put that self censorship like level down more and say stupid stuff and explain and play because you should be forgiven for that kind of play, especially when you're discussing difficult aspects of human history, whether that include racism, that include atrocities. I'm still nevertheless sort of hopeful, but at the same time, I'm surrounded by engineers. So I don't get to interact with people in humanities much. And it seems like there's getting worse. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. Yeah, I don't know. Well, I do sort of interact with psychologists, but they haven't touched on those kinds of topics yet. I still, sort of in defense of psychology, I still, I wish I had more numbers. Yeah. But I still feel like most psychology people don't partake in this kind of stuff either. They're just doing excellent research. We're just highlighting, this is what America does well. You're kind of highlighting anecdotal experiences and making a big deal out of them. But that's good because like it's a slippery slope. If those things start to overtake all of academia, it starts becoming a big problem, even in the engineering field. So we should be concerned. But it is truly tragic that somebody who's exceptionally well read like you, whose fire was stoked first with Orwell, that fire should burn bright. Like this should not be, you should be writing many books. You know what I mean? Like, and you'll be, you talk to Jordan, you know, it's very possible depending what you want to do with your life that you'll be a future Jordan Peterson, right? So like that, and Columbia should be a place that enriches your mind. And the fact that it didn't is tragic. I mean, I did the same. It's like I was there four years. It wasn't like I had a one class that was bad in a one semester. That was the thing. When Dr. Piro was asking, is there any one class that had no sentiment of this virtue, signoring, politically right? There was none. Entire course, I think I took 126 credits total. Not even one class. Doesn't matter we were talking about classic art. And that's the thing. I literally thought, okay, I pushed the last semester to call like the art and music, right? So I thought this is going to be the least politically correct class I can take. And then it begins with who has problem with calling this course the Western civilization of art and music. And everyone's like raising their hands. Because like, why do we have to learning about this Beethoven, Mozart, the bigots, and all the people, like, you know, everything ruined by white men. And it's even music, even these paintings. And as I didn't raise my hand, everyone was looking at me. How do you not have the problem with this? Like you should hate this, you're Asian. So I think that's the thing is I think the problems are way deeper than what people think. And that's what when I learned is like, it's not that safe in America, we can go complete to the south. And looking at even Europe, that is like, I used to be way more optimistic. But now I actually see, wow, this country can go to south. And we might, if US forced them, right, this is the only country left to battle with the Communist Party in China. We may lose the opportunity to be free ever again as a humanity. Wow. So I mean, that puts a lot of value on having these kinds of conversations. It is, I mean, I'm troubled. I'm troubled by a lot of things. But like censorship on YouTube, for example. Yeah, it was very annoying to have to listen to Donald Trump all the time. Just like create drama, like news cycle was completely drowned out by Donald Trump. But like banning him from Twitter, it was like, that was scary for me, because it's like, that's a step towards a direction where you're going to, like, where does that take us? You're going to silence people, then it's like Jordan Peterson is next. That's why we need to promote freedom of thinking and speech, right? And the one thing that I love about Dr. Peterson is, he's a psychologist, right? He talks about we think by talking. That's why when you go to therapy, you talk and then you hear yourself and then you think and you come up to the answer. It's so important for humans to talk so we can think. So when they say you cannot talk means you cannot think. And they don't know the consequences of that. And this is why I promote, I want the freedom of speech, even though it hurts, ridiculous, you know, sometimes it can be dangerous. But the price, the alternative is so bad that we should take the, you know, make this trade off. Everything has a trade off in this world. And it comes with a sacrifice, right? So I think that's what I want to say. That's what I want to see in America. But it's unfortunately like the people like you say, who decides what is hate speech? What is dangerous? That's what I've been getting scared. Because everybody's imperfect. How do we want to give that power to them? And they're going to decide, today they might agree with me, say, okay, your speech is good, promotes good, and then they might come back next year and say your speech is bad. What are you going to do when that happens to you? We have to almost like get ideas out and then play with them. I think what's a really important component of that is forgiving each other for like realizing that we're a different person day by day and certainly years later. And I think some of that is both cultural mechanisms of saying like we forgive each other for wrong ideas or not wrong ideas, but for who we are, the full evolution of the human being, for the steps we've taken on that evolution, and also creating mechanisms that allow you to allow us to forgive each other. Like, for example, on Twitter is like horrible with this because one of the main viral ways that people create drama on Twitter is like pulling up an old tweet that somebody said, right? And then saying, oh, this is the guy that thinks that. But that's like the opposite of the mechanisms we need to forgive ourselves, forgive each other for the things we've said in the past. And so part of that is the cultural, part of this is the technological mechanisms. You mentioned Jordan Peterson. You had a great conversation with him. What was chatting with him like? I'm just curious because he's deeply passionate, especially on the Soviet Union side about the atrocities of these kinds of systems. What was it like? What did you agree with him on? What did you disagree? What were some things you both kind of learned from each other through that conversation, do you think? So here, so my story, the Jordan Peterson, a very long one. So one day I was walking down in Chicago, and they were like huge theater was sold out. It says a big letter, Jordan Peterson sold out. And then it was a huge theater in the middle of Chicago, right? Like, this is my comedian, like who can be selling this entire thing out at like 7pm? And then with my ex husband, we were walking the street. And then we saw people were like selling this like tickets, like for a very higher price, right? And then do you want to take it? And then he was like, yeah, sure. We went in, it's packed. And then I was just happy birth or like, but I wasn't able to understand his English that much. My English was still bad. And you didn't know who he was really? No, no. You were just curious? Yeah, it was like 2018. Who's the guy that sells out a thing? A theater? Yeah. Yes, I saw Dave Rubin came out before him and make jokes. I still don't know who Dave Rubin is. Afterwards, I met them all. But back then I had no clue what that is. And then he was giving lessons. But what I got from that night was not what Jordan said, but what people did on the audience. These people like I don't know, thousands of people in this big theater, crying like babies. And that was like, whatever that guy is doing is very special, right? He wasn't like making any jokes. He had no slides, just a one simple person standing in the huge, giant theater talk. And long time too. And people cry as like, wow, okay, whatever that is, I gotta check it out. And then I got home. And then later, many years later, I got a book. And I will start reading his book. And it talks about, it explains so much, right? Like now at Columbia, I learned like everything gender is like made up concept, construct, like the hierarchy is my man's idea of making the hierarchy. And then he begins with the number one, the laughsers had the hierarchies, evolution of history that is within us, that we want a hierarchy, right? And then chapter five about socialization of child, you know, how do you raise them? And all of it, and then what's why telling the truth is matters, right? And there's a white, like in his entire 12 lessons, I read it and it's like, I was so grateful that I'm alive with this. There's people always say, if Socrates is alive, how much would you pay to have lunch with him? That kind of thing, right? So for me it was like, okay, I'm like alive in the same contemporary world as one of the greatest thinkers of my entire generation. And then like, how much money would I pay? No limit amount. And I like reached out to Michaela on her podcast on Twitter and connected. And then one day she said, do you want to be on Michaela's podcast? I was like, what? I was like, of course. And I was very nervous, but I didn't expect him to be like that connected. Cause I thought he was a psychologist, like he saw so much suffering in the world. He studied Soviet Union, his hobbies collecting those things to remind him of the suffering of a human being. So sometimes some people hear so much atrocity, they become like very, you know, not engaged. Yeah, desensitized. Desensitized. He felt, he was feeling, he was, it's almost like he was living through the experiences with you as you were talking about it. It was an amazing conversation. So Jordan is one of the great thinkers of our time, but I would say the greatest thinkers of our time is Michael Malus. So you've also got a chance to talk to him. So he wrote a book on North Korea. It's an interesting style book. I learned a lot from it. I learned a lot from Michael about it. And it's interesting that he chose North Korea as a thing to study. That he, of all people, this fascinating human being that is Michael, chose this darkest of aspects of humanity to study. What do you think of Michael? What do you think of his book on North Korea called Dear Reader that people should definitely check out? Absolutely. So back then, when I reached out to Michael through mutual friends in South Korea, my English wasn't good. So I got a copy in my hand. I tried to read and a lot of them I didn't understand. So, but I thought it was very fascinating how he explained North Korea through the Dear Leader's perspective, right? Nobody has ever done that. And you can reveal so much about the state and absurdity of the entire situation. And also through humor. And that's what's amazing about Michael. He knows the full gravity of tragedy. He knows the full suffering. He's not just like people here in America on the BuzzFeed making fun of Kim Jong Un's haircut. They don't care what people go through. Michael cares. Deeply cares. And then he still does ridiculous jokes. So that kind of reveals in a dark way the absurdity of evil. And he does that masterfully. Do you? He's a genius. He is definitely a genius. All right. If he watches this, let's not make his head too big here. But is there some aspect to, I mean, there is an absurdity to the whole thing. Kim Jong Un is this, I mean, he's almost like a caricature of evil. It's a joke. It's a joke. A lot of people think it's a joke. They just think like, this is too, too absurd. They just, they laugh. Like, can you imagine you laugh at Holocaust? This is that ridiculous. Can you maybe psychoanalyze that a little bit? Because that's where my mind goes to. Like, he's so ridiculous that you can't, it's almost like hard to believe this is real. Is that just, is that just my kind of and people's desire to escape the cruelty of reality by just kind of making a joke out of it? I think it is a few things, right? Like, so North Korea as a nation, number one or number two smartest IQ people in the world, despite their malnutrition. So... So there is, I mean, that's an interesting point. So in your sense, the people... Are not dumb. Still carry the sort of the brilliance. There's a culture there that's like hungry to become realized. Like the people that are silenced by the electricity, by the actually having no food, all those kinds of things. Like, if you add the electricity, if you add the food, you're going to have a cultural center of the world. Like South Korea. That's what they exactly did, right? The exact same Korea. One became like 11th largest economy. One became the world's most like poorest nation, right? And this is a perfect example. Like if, I don't know if you read that book, Why Nation Fails. The system. It's not about a culture. It is not about people. It is not about IQ. What makes us too different is a system. South Korea, North Korea is a perfect example of that. One is exact same capability. We are a homogeneous country, same language, tradition, all of that. We gave them different system. One is free democracy, one is dictatorship and came up with the biggest different result. And I think North Korea reveals that to us. It's not because we are great that we are living in this prosperity. Free market. The ideas gave us to this. The system we built, our ancestors built, gave us this privilege. It's not us. Nothing is about us being special here, right? The system that we have is quite special. And North Korea proves that to us. It doesn't matter even if you're smart. That's all irrelevant. And I think that's why people just keep denying that they want to feel special. Because I'm awesome, I got all of this. No, it's not you, you got this. And when people say, I hate capitalism. I was like, without capitalism, how do you came up with this thing? Literally, how did you come up with this? The systems matter. And they matter way more than this individualistic society would like to imagine. It is the most important thing you can have in life. Choosing the right system. Do you have advice for young people today? You've lived an incredible life and you have, I hope, an incredible life ahead of you. What advice would you give to young people today, high schoolers, college students, how to be successful in their career or maybe successful in life? Last thing I want them to feel is guilty. It doesn't do anything, right? So I hate when people talk about, oh, why guilt? It's like, that doesn't make even any sense, right? I think the fact that they are born with freedom is a blessing for all of us. It's not like I want them to want to do something because they are guilty. I want them to do something because they are grateful. It is true. Like we are sitting here, the fact why I have children is suffering, having kids you don't sleep, costly, like so much work. Like any like logical rational mind, you should never want children, right? Why would you do that to yourself? Especially as a woman, right? You don't want to do that to yourself. But think about like we are sitting here today, two of us in this amazing technology, this country, because somebody in Savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago, they're hunting berries and surviving cold. Every suffering they can imagine, they fall for us. That's why we ended up here. So life is ultimately bigger than us. And I think that's what I want them. It's not like I want them to do the right thing and be the best version of themselves. It's like, I want them to feel grateful. And we should be grateful for the freedom and then take full advantage of that. I mean, it starts with the freedom to experience everything in life. And for your life, literally, like how my father, like, you know, working, dying is a lot easier than living. Dying takes like few minutes, right? Maximum. And living takes forever. So when I was facing this unbelievable challenge, I thought, okay, this most rational thing I can do is killing myself right now. But the hardest thing I can choose is choose to live. And my father did that. Even in the concentration camp, even no matter why he said, life is a gift. You need to fight for it. And I think that's what's missing here, that we don't think life as a gift. It's a gift. Like, how many people had to fight for me to be here today? Think about the sacrifice they made for many, many, many generations. I don't even know what they went through. I can't even fathom what they went through. They fought for life. Yeah. And that is my responsibility enough. So it doesn't make them, their fight was not meaningless, right? It meant something because now I'm carrying on that fight. You mentioned considering suicide. Do you think about your mortality now? Now that you're perhaps in a slightly more comfortable place, do you still think about death? I do because I was informed actually when I was 21 that I was on the killing list of Kim Jong Un by South Korean intelligence. And then I had to live with that, right? But now I actually feel more because, I don't know, you follow Jamal Khashoggi's story, the Saudi journalist who got chopped off in Turkey embassy, right? His reason why he got killed was he became very prominent on Twitter. He had a huge voice and Saudis followed him. Now I became very first North Korean to have this many social media followings. And recently North Korea started an investigation team to analyze whatever I do, even though it's first time for them. So they don't even know what to do at this point. They're like, this is so new. What do we do? We do Kim Jong Nam. Kim Jong Nam, the half brother of Kim Jong Un got killed in Malaysia. That is another tragedy that I feel so sorry for the US government is that Kim Jong Nam was giving information to the CIA for the past like 10 years. That trip, when he got killed in Malaysian airport, he was meeting up with the CIA agent for two days on the Northern Ireland. CIA could have protected him. They didn't. They let him die. Who killed him? North Korean Kim Jong Un killed him. Do you know the Malaysian, the ladies, the VX, the nerve agent. North Koreans killed him in Malaysian airport, in the international land. So I mean North Korea, who was a US resident and the Washington Post journalist, when he got killed in Saudi like a lamb, they chopped him into pieces. In that most inhumane death, what was the consequences for the Saudis? Nothing. The word is we think we live in a country where there's no justice. There is no accountability for killing any dissent, no matter how big their names are. So you don't think your vast and quickly growing social media presence protects you? No, it does the opposite. Because Kim Jong Un, initially when I spoke out, I don't know if you went through it, they did everything they could to character assassinate me, saying I'm a liar, I'm a CIA spy, I get paid. And then they reached out to Penguin saying, we're going to blow up. You cannot write this book. And they did it with Sony. They had a Sony studio for making that stupid movie interview. And then Penguin did their investigation. They met every survivor that I went through in the desert. They got the voice recordings of them because they don't want them to change their mind later. People remember differently. So they got the voice recordings, the Penguin Regal team got all the audios, and now we are ready for the lawsuit. We are going to publish this book because we checked, verified every single thing that was going in the book. And North Korea couldn't do anything anymore. But that's character assassination. Which by the way, that's a whole other conversation that you were able to survive that. I appreciate the kind of strength it requires to survive that because you don't know. And your character being assassinated is in some ways can be as painful as actual assassination. It's worse. It's worse. Everybody think you're a liar. Everybody think you're a liar. And now everybody, like you said, this nature of internet is that as long as something is written in the internet, they think that's a fact. Any stupid person can start a blog and write about you. But they think, oh, because it's written on the internet, it's legit. Especially negative stuff. That's the thing I was kind of trying to elaborate on. There's a viral aspect to calling somebody a fraud or a liar that nobody questions whether it's true or not. It just spreads. And it's a dark side of our human nature that we want to destroy the people who are rising. We cannot stand it. Any change maker in this world who wasn't controversial, right? Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, he was called as a terrorist. So I just did not know. The character assassination is the thing. It'll probably continue with you. It will continue with me forever. So you have to get stronger and stronger, I think, in the face of that. But actual assassination, perhaps it's me being hopeful because I have a situation with Russia that I hope I'm not under. Well, I don't care actually. But there's some aspect in which social media presence, I thought, protects you a little bit. Because just imagine the outrage from an attempted assassination of you. But what was the outrage when Jamal Khashoggi got killed like that? Was the social media presence large? Over one million people. I don't have that following. He was 1.6 million Twitter followers. And the outrage wasn't there? No. Because Saudis spoke to Amazon, to Prime Studio, Netflix. There were people who made a documentary about him but told everybody cannot get that deal. So there was a huge censorship on that. And people, of course, I mean, they can talk about it one day. Some dissent from Saudi got killed. Horrible. But it just dissipates. They move on to the next cute puppy, right? The next cute cat. That's what the nature of this new generation does. They desensitize. It doesn't affect them. They keep following the instant pleasure, instant high. That's what Instagram does to you. It changes your brain. That's what I was reading. We spoke about shallows. We became shallow and shallow and our brain changed permanently. So this new generation, we can get them angry for like 10 minutes, create hashtags for one day. But then as quick as that was, it goes down like instantly. And I think that's the... Well, that means that... Okay. So that means that there is... It's an effective way to get rid of opposition is by murdering them. And that means United States, if it stands for freedom, if it stands for the freedom of exchange of ideas, should be protecting people like you. But they don't because they don't want to be involved. They didn't even protect Kim Jong Nam who was giving information 10 years risking his life. That's what is so... I mean, working for CIA is not bad. The thing is that he was giving information to bring down the regime. That is valuable. That is something noble about him. But then you just don't go extra miles to that. That's when I lost my faith in the US system as well. Like this country just cares about saving face. What is most the minimum cost they pay for anything? And when I was in South Korea, constantly, every single day intelligence calling me. The North Korean agent going this place, where are you going? The US system came to US, nobody. That's when people said, are you a CIA agent? I wish they called me. I wish they called me. I really truly do. But nobody, nobody does here. I'm sure they know what's going on. But the South Korean agent is more like, oh my gosh, we don't want you to get killed as a South Korean citizen, right? Yeah. And now I'm trying to become your citizen. So it's in a way, it's, I don't know what's worse. Are you afraid for your life? I was afraid. For the several, three, four years, I was afraid. But I had to come to terms with it. Like my enemy is not some crazy psychopath. It's a state with nuclear power to attack the most powerful country. If Kim Jong Un decides if I die, I'm going to die. It's not up to me, right? So in a way, also it's liberating that you, it's like if you are like afraid of some mobs or some like gangsters on the street, it's almost like you have power over a little bit. You got to be like thinking that's my fault. I went that way, right? But when it comes to Kim Jong Un, I know like my enemy is so much bigger than me. It's in a ways of liberation. And also, you know, I just, I live a lot. So I have seen a lot. I seen everything. I don't have that much regret left here. Like, okay, I'm going too soon. You know, it's like, okay, maybe it's time. Like death is a part of life. So. In some sense, you're willing to accept death to keep fighting for freedom in your, in at least in part a place you call home. Yeah, it is. Do you hope that one day you can return to North Korea? I hope so. I hope I bring my son and tell him this is like where your ancestors from too. It would look very different than the place you came from in your, as you hope. Do you hope that there's a democracy one day that North Korea looks like South Korea? Well, that would be in paradise, right? But I'm a rational optimist. I'm not like just optimistic because I have to be. I think as long as there are people who have changed the world, right? Like who believed in something and worked for it. And like, I don't know, like there's like Alice Shroves, a few people holding entire this world, right? I really believe in that. I think as long as that continues, that can happen in my country. As long as people like you someday want to decide to do something with North Korea and working for it, using your brainpower to solve this puzzle, how fascinating would that be? That's why I continue to speak, continue to recruit. To inspire millions to do something. The books you like are all the books I love. I have to mention this. You mentioned briefly on the, with Jordan, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is an incredible book. I mean, I don't know exactly what I want to ask here, but there's some, I think the book kind of, through telling a story, reveals that life is suffering and yet there's beauty in it. The beauty in every moment that uses kind of a river to paint a metaphor. Is there something that you could say, speak to like how that book impacted your life and the way you live life, maybe the way you see life, whether it's on the life of suffering side or that life is beautiful side. I mean, he goes the entire journey, right? He goes in this state of, I'm so enlightened that I cannot deal with the people who are there in love and quiet about it. Right? They're like, that's so like primitive. Once he has his own son, he actually being attached. He actually cares. He actually really does whole thing, right? That's a thing that he used to think not. Once his son comes find him, he looks at life differently. I think that's the thing. I did have that kind of journey where, oh, nothing matters, right? So bitter. So so like, so cynical. And after I met so many incredible people, I was talking about that person who told me he was gay. He told me, I love you. And I was like, why do you love me? In the past, people when they wanted me was because they want to rape me. Everybody wanted something from me. That's why they wanted me. And I never understood. You can love somebody unconditionally. And this gay guy, the last one was want to sleep with me, right? And he loves me. And I think I had a blessing after my journey, meeting people who loved me unconditionally because I was just being a human. And I think that's what it is now for me that like him. I live for love now. I live for love. Any kinds of love. Love for knowledge. I like, I read so many books because I love books, right? I love what I do. I love my people. I love humanity. You know, even it sometimes annoys me. I love myself. And that's beautiful too. The annoying parts are beautiful too. What do you, let me ask the ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Of what's the meaning of life? Well, I think at this point I stop questioning why I'm here, right? Like it doesn't matter someone put the atom there or a big bang. I'm here. That's truth, right? I'm going to accept that fully. So what, instead of me keep asking the impossible question, why I'm here. I'm going to let you do that. Let the science do that, right? You guys go out in the space and look for the evidence. I'm conducting. You accept that you're here and you're just going to enjoy it. Like you're here for love, as you said. That's the thing. I think I'm here for the process of pursuing something bigger than me. Process of doing something. It's not like a model. It's not a virtue signal or anything. It just makes me happy that I fight for something bigger. Like than me, right? How boring is that? Every day you get up like, Oh my God, I'm going to buy myself this. I'm going to get this for myself. It's so boring, isn't it? So in a way, I think that's what it is. I'm grateful that I'm in a state. I don't have to fight for myself anymore. But morning people have to do that. And that's sometimes more than enough they have to do. And I salute them. They are doing fighting, saving themselves every day. But now I'm not there. I'm very blessed. That's why I'm very grateful. Still fighting for something much bigger than you. But do you still believe that you can change the world? That you can be a thing that, at least in part, helps North Korea or even broader helps alleviate some suffering in the world? So that's the thing. I was reading this book before by randomness, right? Yeah. I was like, oh my God, you're so courageous. You're amazing. I was like, no, I'm not. I'm horrible. I know myself. You don't want to tell me that. It's random why I ended up here. Like, why did I pick up English so quickly? Why do I love books? Right? I don't know why. It's random. Don't ask why. Just enjoy it. Yeah, it's just random. I think I don't know how the history will remember me. I think only thing I have to at this point to make sure is that the people after I consulting a lot of security teams, like now North Korea became a lot smarter. Like you said, they make it more disguised as a, like a suicide and a car accident. So when I die, they don't even know I got killed. I think that's a higher chance. So I think that's a thing like people are suffering, take it or not, it's your choice. And at least it's my responsibility for them to know what's going on. I think if you did not know and didn't do anything, you're not even guilty of a thing. But once you know, then you are not doing it. Then you, something's like not right. So that's what I'm doing. Like I want people to know. And then what they want to do is not my problem afterwards. Right? So my role is very small in that regards. And I just hope that we're humanized North Koreans for the first time, because we have been so dehumanized, right? Like we are like looking like robots. If you look at us marching and cry, like when your leader dies, almost seems like we don't even have the same emotions. People cannot connect us in the same level. And I think that's something is, that's something media have done it to us. And you're, you're shining a small light on this dark part of the world that I think, and you make it, you're so modest, but I think, I think you will have that little light just might be a big thing that changes that incredible amount of suffering that's happening on that part of the world. You know what I mean? You're, you're an amazing person. I'm so fortunate to get a chance to talk with you. I can't wait what you do in the future. You're, I hope you write many more books. I do hope you continue making videos, continue having conversations. You're an inspiration to me and millions of others. I really appreciate you talking with me today. I'm so honored. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Yeonmi Park. And thank you to Belcampo, Gala Games, BetterHelp, and 8th Sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Bob Marley. Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Yeonmi Park: North Korea | Lex Fridman Podcast #196

The following is a conversation with Jaco Willink, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, coauthor of Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, Discipline Equals Freedom, and many other excellent books, and he's the host of Jaco's podcast. Jaco spent 20 years in the SEAL teams. He was the commander of SEAL Team 3's Task Unit Bruiser that became the most highly decorated Special Operations unit of the Iraq War. This conversation was intense and to the point. We agreed to talk again, probably many times, and what I find very interesting, aside from the talk of leadership, is the conversation about military tactics of specific battles in history. I do happen to at times mention that I'm Russian. This is what I mean, that I got a bit of that Russian soul. But of course who I really am is an American. This country gave me the opportunity, the freedom to become and to be who I am, to stand as an individual. This seemingly simple freedom to be a sovereign human being in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life is why I love this country. Much of life can be unfair, unjust, even tragic. But this is the country where if I'm clever enough or card enough and just get lucky enough I have a chance to dream big and make my dream a reality. The United States welcomed me, my family, and millions of immigrants throughout its history so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves. To love, to dream, to create, to find joy and meaning. It lets me be the weird kid I am who wears a suit, talks about love, and has a fascination with robots. I know some people these days have an aversion to pride and love for their country. I don't. I love America. I also love humanity. I believe these two, patriotism and humanism, are not in conflict, much like loving your family and loving your country are not in conflict. They are all manifestations of the human spirit, longing to strive for a better world. I was born a Russian, but I believe I will die an American. A proud American. Hopefully not too soon, but life is short. I already had one hell of a fun journey, so I'm ready to go when it's time. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Jaco Willink. Is it tragic or beautiful to you that some of the closest bonds that have formed between people are through war often. I think it's both, both tragic and beautiful and for the obvious reasons. What are the obvious reasons? Why is it so obvious? Well, it's tragic because a lot of people die and it's beautiful because you form bonds with people that are very difficult to break once you've been through them. What is it about the trauma of war that makes bonds difficult to break? Because what you realize when you're in a war is that the people that are next to you, you rely on them and they're relying on you to survive. And without them, you will not survive. And when you realize that you need to work together as a team to, to live, that forms a very strong bond. And there's nothing like that team outside of the realm of war. I don't know because I've, there's a lot of things that I haven't experienced in my life, but I think the pressure and the consequences of war, there could be similar situations in survival scenarios, in various atrocities where people need to work together in order to survive. And I think you could probably get something that was similar. There's a very particular nature to the kind of war that World War II was, especially for the Soviet Union, where it didn't just influence the lives of people. It created culture, the music, the poetry, the literature. It's in the, it's in the way people think. It's in the way people see the world. It's in the way they talk even still to this day. And of course, I was talking about the directly relationship between two soldiers, but there's something about the depth of human connection that results from the almost like reverberations of war. Like generations later, you're still close to other humans. There's a coldness towards other humans like in Russia, but once you open up, it's depth. You seek depth of connection versus like breadth of a career kind of thinking, how can I make friends with this? I can move into this direction. What can this person benefit me? Instead, you seek a depth of human connection and appreciation that brings a lot. And maybe I'm romanticizing war here, but it feels like that's inextricably connected to World War II for Russians. Does that resonate at all? So if you look at military training, what they do is they take people in the military from the civilian world. They bring them into the military and they put them through bootcamp, which is the stereotypical thing that you see on TV. You're going to get yelled at. You're going to get screamed at. You're going to get, you're going to get put in the mud and you're going to be made to do hard things together. And what does that do with those civilians? Well, it gives them a common background. It gives them a common suffering that they've been through together and they form some sort of connection, some sort of bond. Now to make that bond a little bit stronger, after you get done with bootcamp, they send you to advanced infantry school and you suffer some more together. And when you suffer more together, now you're in a smaller group too, because now it's infantry. It's not supply people anymore or logisticians. It's strictly people that are going to fight. They're infantrymen. So they go through a school together and now they get a little bit tighter, get done with that. And maybe you go to an airborne division. So you go to airborne school and now you all overcome this fear of jumping out of an airplane together and you celebrate surviving that. Then maybe you get done with that. And now you go at an airborne division. Now you're an even tighter group because you've suffered together. What comes next is special forces training or ranger training. And what they do is they put you in these situations where you're going to suffer together and you're going to build these bonds because as I said earlier, you have to rely on each other to survive. And by the way, not everyone does, not everyone makes it through this training. So you sort of have these memories of people that didn't make it. You share that connection as well. And you can keep going down this road until you go into combat with a military unit and military units that go through combat, have an even tighter bond. And the harder the combat that they go through, the tighter the bond is going to be. So I think when you talk about what the Soviet Union went through in World War II, there was a shared suffering to survive. And so the entire nation has that common thread. And that's probably the thing that you sense or feel when you refer back to the bond that resonates all the way back to World War II. So in your podcast and your writing, you talk about some of the most fascinating things I listen to you talk about in terms of military conflict is tactics and sort of the details of combat. But allow me to stick on World War II for a second. There's a particular aspect to that war, I don't know if you can speak to it, where twice the number of civilians died than military personnel. So the Soviet Union, especially. My grandfather was a machine gunner in Ukraine as the Germans were marching towards Moscow. There's this important push in 1941 where they were trying to get before the winter to Moscow. And what Stalin was doing, he was trying to get to Moscow. He was trying to get to Moscow. And what Stalin was doing is he was basically throwing bodies to slow the attack. And what that meant is everybody understood that your job was, you have this heavy machine guns, it's very, it's almost unreasonable to be able to be mobile in any kind of way with them. So you're thrown at the front and you're just nonstop shooting and 95 plus percent of people are just dead. All the soldiers are just dead. And then you just go back and back and you're trying to protect as many civilians as you can throughout this whole process, but you don't. And so you have millions of civilians that die along the way into this march. Is there something you could say about this complete, perhaps it's naive of me to say, but a war that lacks tactics, that lacks strategy and is purely about just no consideration of human life and just throwing bodies and bullets into a mix together where millions die. And that in particular felt much less like conflict and much more like torture or suffering. It didn't come off as torture only that interestingly enough, as you probably know, my grandfather, including everybody else, volunteered. They were proud to do this. They were proud to march to their death for country, for love of country. But the question on the civilian side, when more civilians die, the military personnel, what do you make of that? It's awful. It's awful when a soldier dies. It's awful when a civilian dies. It's awful when 10 civilians or 10 soldiers. And it's even more awful when millions and millions of soldiers and civilians die. I think it's safe to say that the Soviet Union was facing an existential threat to their existence against the Nazis. So to not fight would be to die as well, maybe die a death a few years later, maybe die a different way. But the choice was die now, trying or die later on your knees. And I think the choice was pretty clear. As far as the tactics go, I mean, there is this is attrition warfare. That's what that is. We are going to keep, you know, you said throwing bodies at the problem. That's attrition warfare. And the Soviet Union had a lot of bodies, more than the Germans. And when you fight with attrition warfare, whoever has more men and material will eventually win. It's an awful, it's an awful way. But that's the that's that's what the strategy was. You often talk about leadership. Let's put the evils of Hitler aside. The boldness of Hitler in making some of the strategic decisions he did was considered by many military historians quite brilliant, early in the war, or insane and brilliant. Stalin, on the other hand, I think university is seen as somebody who is terrible military strategist, especially early in the war. He did not see all the possible trajectories that the war could take. Is there something you could say about failure of leadership, Stalin, also the United Kingdom before Churchill, and also FDR on the United States side, who basically, was trying to turn a blind eye to everything that was happening over over there, with a perspective of we just want to make, we want to keep America's interest as the primary interest and everything else, let other countries work out their problems. You know, I think one of the things with Hitler was in the beginning of the war, he listened to his friends, his family, and he listened to his friends. He listened to his generals. And therefore, they did pretty well with that. I think as the war went on, he believed that he was smarter than he was, and made decisions that were bad, that cost him dearly. You know, I mean, case in point, as everyone knows, going and attacking the Soviet Union, while you're still fighting a war on the other front is not not a good move. There's an example of yeah, bad leadership, letting your ego get in the way believing that you can do things that you that are beyond your capabilities. But, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning with Blitzkrieg, those were really dynamic and bold moves. And they worked. And that what does that do? That fuels your ego and makes you think that you can win. Many people consider that war a just war. What do you think makes a just war? I think you have the Nazis, and the Imperial Japanese trying to impose their will on other nations and other peoples. And when that happens, I think on a grand scale, people look at that. And believe it's just to step in and do something about it. Is there some gray area here? There's, there's nothing but gray area. The United States has been involved in a lot of military conflict since then. How do you draw the line to the gray area? What, what war should we engage in and not? I know you don't get a lot of questions about that, but I think it's important that you I know you don't get into politics much. But what the decision to go to war, you have to look at the situation that you're going into. And you have to make sure that you have the will to go to war. And the will to go to war means that you are willing to kill people. And when I say people, I don't just mean enemy, because in war, civilians are going to die, women and children are going to die. Every a lot of people are going to die. And so you and you are going to kill them. Doesn't matter what kind of smart munitions you have. Doesn't matter how disciplined your soldiers are. When you go into a war, civilians are going to die and you have to understand that. And the other thing that you have to understand is that your troops are also going to die. And it seems like sometimes we're a little bit naive about the calculation of what that's going to look like. And maybe we think, well, not that many civilians and maybe not that many of our our personnel are going to die. And that's where you get into sticky situations. And, you know, another thing when you were talking about the Soviet Union versus the Nazis, that's total war. That's what that is. And we don't engage in that very often. It's total war. It's we will do absolutely anything to win. And America doesn't fight like that very often. In fact, the last time we fought like that was World War Two. We it was total war. We will do whatever it takes to up to and including the atomic bomb to destroy the enemy. So those are the kind of things you need to think about before you go to war. And I don't think we think about that very often. I don't think we think about that very often. You know, even the United States, the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons is an interesting one because there's a lot of there's a lot of hesitation on that. There's a lot of critics of that decision as it was happening. So even America, you could imagine other countries like Germany would not be so hesitant to use nuclear weapons. It's interesting to think about in deciding military strategy to inject ethics into it, into morality. It's not just about winning the war, but should we do this and doing the calculation of human life. Usually those decisions are made by leaders, not by the soldier that's going to be implementing that decision. Do you put some responsibility, I should even say blame on the leaders and not doing that kind of calculation here? You could say that about the Vietnam War, you could say that about even the war that you were involved with in Iraq. Is there some criticism here that you could apply to leaders for failing not to consider that the broader moral questions? Yes. Natural, like all leaders will make these mistakes or should leaders not make these mistakes? Leaders are going to make mistakes. It's impossible to know what's going to happen in war, just like it's impossible to know what's going to happen in life. You make decisions based on the information that you have at the time and you will make mistakes. If you fail to admit that you made a mistake, that's where I have a more significant problem than someone that makes a mistake and says, hey, this is the mistake that I made. This is the intelligence that I thought we were utilizing and it actually is not what I thought it was going to be. And here's the new direction that we're going in. We don't have enough of that type of ownership in leadership globally. Just saying I made a mistake that resulted in a loss at scale of human life, being able to say that. Being able to say that. And when you don't say that, you end up with a more loss of human life. Can I ask you about the loss of human life? How does killing a human being change you? What does it mean to kill a human being? What does it feel like to kill a human being? Well, I mean, I guess you'd have to look at what circumstances a person's in when this is taking place. If you've got someone that's in a, a fit of rage that goes and kills somebody, you know, they're going to come out of it and think, wow, I've just really messed up. If you've got a, someone that is a sociopath, right? They're not going to feel anything. And that person deserved to die. And that's why they died. If you've got a soldier who feels like they're trying to protect their friends, they'll move through that. If you've got a soldier that's doing it because they want some kind of personal glory, they'll probably not feel good about it later. So I think it depends on the situation. I think it depends on the psychology of the individual that's going through it. He said, move through that. Is there some calculation here that a soldier, when they kill another soldier, a realization that is just another human being, I mean, is there some heavy burden to that aspect that it's ultimately just human on human? I think it depends a lot on the scenario. I know that when I was in Iraq fighting, we, we talk a lot about the dehumanization of the enemy and it's something that the governments will do. I mean, governments will do that to each other. I mean, the Japanese dehumanized the Americans and the Americans dehumanized the Japanese and the Americans dehumanized the Nazis and the Nazis dehumanized the Americans so that to remove as much of that human on human killing aspect that you're talking about. And what I would say is that the Japanese human killing aspect that you're talking about. And what I, what I've said is that in, when we were in Iraq, we didn't have to dehumanize the enemy because the, the enemy dehumanized themselves through their actions, through their behaviors. When, when we know that they are torturing and raping and murdering the local populace, they've been dehumanized. And so as far as looking at them and thinking, oh, this is a, you know, a human, another human that's, that's on the level of, you know, my, my uncle or my brother, I didn't, I didn't think of them out that way. I thought of them as, as murdering, raping, evil, subhumans. Yeah. Rock is different and America's position is different. You're right. That America has not been involved in a war where it's quite like two humans fighting, like teenage boys fighting against each other. And you've got to remember that America has not been involved in a war where it's quite like two humans fighting, like teenage boys fighting against each other. And you've got to remember, I mean, we're, we're seeing these Iraqi kids that are living under this sadistic, sadistic terror, the Iraqi women that are being raped and so on the one side we become the, the Iraqi populace is very humanized to us because we're talking to them. We've got interpreters, we understand we're seeing them day after day, the same individuals. And so we form a bond with the local populace and yet we see what the insurgents are doing. And so it's again, not difficult to dehumanize people that behave in that manner. Yeah. I suppose I'm, I worry about the dehumanization at a much larger scale when it's not the kind of case that you're talking about. Even now, hopefully I'm not fear mongering, but there's a sense in which there's the drums of war slowly starting to build with China. There, in the best case, it would be a cold war of, there's a dehumanization aspect that's happening with China currently, which is they're the other and they're after stealing all of your data. There's a cybersecurity, it starts with cybersecurity and it worries me because it creates the other out of a very large population that may ultimately lead to conflict. In the worst case, hot conflict that would no longer be the situation you are in in Iraq and more similar to the Soviet Union conflict with Germany that it's kids and then they're dehumanized to where you're at scale slaughtering them or at least hurting their quality of life in a way that's maybe, you know, suffering has many forms. It doesn't have to be through just a hot war. It could be through starvation, through camps, all those kinds of things. And I worry about that. We kind of tend to think that these wars are behind us and I'm not always so sure that's the case. And at least in the way that, it ultimately starts with hate and it, again, hopefully I'm not being too dramatic, but I see that there's a kind of brewing of, it starts with dehumanization that turns to hate of the other. You see that with China, you see it a little bit with Russia and you have an early podcast with between the where you break down the tactics of the Chechen war versus Russia. It's fascinating. But that's the kind of conflicts I'm referring to. And I don't know. There's a, I know you're a bit of a musician. I love, I love Dire Straits song called Brothers in Arms. I don't know if you know that one. And there's a line in it. I think they play it quite often at military funerals, which I just recently learned, but it's this powerful song that has a line, we're fools to make war on our brothers in arms. Do you think there's some sense in which at the leadership level, but just as human beings, we're perhaps foolish and engaging in military conflict as much as we have, or as fool, a very inappropriate word here. Well, I think that using the term brothers in arms means the people that are on my side, right? So it doesn't make sense to start wars with people that are on your side. So that's, that might just be the way the lyrics are written so that it fit the song or whatever. I think broadly what you're asking me is, is war foolish? Yeah. And I would say the answer is yes. And if you can avoid it, you absolutely should. But if there is a bear or a wolf that is trying to get into your house, is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf? I think that's the answer. Is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf? I think the answer is pretty obvious. So when you're threatened or your family are threatened or your way of life is threatened, then you have to do something to try and defend your family, your way of life. It should be the last resort. You had a conversation with Jordan Peterson where he asked you a question in terms of war being the last resort, whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace in a time of no war. You said yes, but, and so happens Jordan didn't let you finish. Can you, can you elaborate what follows the but? Well, you, you and I have been talking about the fact that struggle brings people together and, and brings out the best and, and the worst, brings out the worst in people. War brings out the worst in people. It also brings out the best in people. So would you want your kid to go and enter in a wrestling tournament where you paid all the other kids off and your kid won? Or you enter them in a jujitsu tournament where they're a purple belt and you know that everyone that they're going to fight against is a white belt. And so they get the, they get the big W, they get the win, but they don't really get tested and they don't really struggle. And if you don't struggle, you don't grow. So that's the, but right. Um, the, the absolute best times of my life were in combat and the worst times of my life were in combat. And so even though I wouldn't want any of my children to suffer through the worst of times at the same time, the but is I would want them to have the opportunity to feel that bond that you're referring to earlier and to see human beings that are willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends. You mentioned the worst. What are some of the worst aspects of when you were in Iraq? Well, what are the things that, um, the hardest on you having my guys killed? Is there, uh, absurd cruelty to it? Was it due to mistakes or natural consequences of, of fighting? Is there any difference? Is that at the end is just losing? Those are brothers in arms. There's a million different ways to get killed in the war and you can go out on an operation and you can do everything wrong and you can survive and you can go out in an operation and do everything perfect and you can get killed. Is there some aspect which makes it worse when there is mistakes made? Well, yeah, if there's mistakes made, then you're going to sit there and beat yourself up eternally for mistakes that were made. But to you, the things that hurt is just losing, losing people close to you. Yes. Are you yourself afraid of death? No. Are you yourself afraid of death? No. Do you think about it? Does it make sense to you that this thing ends? Like do you, uh, the Stoics contemplated death. It gives flavor to life. It makes you appreciate, there's something about finiteness of life that makes it, that makes it this, uh, Jocko Discipline Go drink, sour apple that I'm enjoying is delicious. Makes it taste better because I'm going to die one day. And I think about that a lot. Do you think about it? Other than I know that it's going to end. I mean, but I don't think about it on a daily basis. I think about the fact I think about, I know that I'm lucky to be here. I know that many people sacrificed to give me this opportunity to be here. So, but I don't dwell on it. What about when you were in combat? Nothing. There's, there's tactics, there's strategy, there's the mission. And then your mortality is not part of the calculation. I think you get to a point where you accept the fact that you can die. Like I, I, you know, like I said, you can do everything right. You roll out the gate, you hit an ID, a triple stack subsurface ID and you're dead. You're done. And there's nothing that's going to stop that. It's going to happen. And I think if you're scared of that or you're thinking about that, it's going to inhibit your ability to do your job properly. And I think it's also going to drive you crazy. The thing that I thought about more was that happening to my guys. And that's the gut wrenching terror that you feel when, when operations happen. Can I ask you about love of country? It's, it continues to just how much I've studied Stalin recently in the past few years. It continues to surprise me, not surprise me. It's just tragic in some kind of way. I'm not sure exactly if I could put words to it, but how many people and still do, but at the time were willing, loved Stalin and were willing to die for country for the love of country. And I too, maybe because I was born there and now I am a red blooded American. I love nationalism is a bad word, but I love the love of country. It gives, it somehow gives a meaning like a brotherhood, like we're in this together. I love that's why I love the Olympics. That's just the, the unity of it. It takes a step out of the selfish pursuits of any one particular ant and looks at us as a big ant colony and it's inspiring. It's it's exciting, but at the same time, it seems to get us to do horrible things. If, if manipulated by charismatic leaders, what do you make of this love of country? Is it a, is it a bad thing? Is it a thing that gets in the way or is it a good thing? Well, I think like anything else, if it's balanced correctly, it's great. And if it goes to some extreme level, then it becomes a negative. And I think it, I think it's probably sourced in some sort of animalistic tribalism that we all have to be part of a tribe. And this is a real big tribe that you get to be a part of. And all you have to do is kind of show up. And so when someone says, Hey, we're going to play hockey against the Russians, well, we're going to cheer for the American boys. So my, my area of work is artificial intelligence. It'd be interesting to ask your thoughts about something, which is autonomous weapon systems. US has now officially released the report saying that they're open to, not open, they're engaging in, in adding more and more autonomy and artificial intelligence into its weapon systems because China is doing it. So there's, these are the first steps in something that AI folks worry about, which is a race, an AI race in the space of autonomous weapons that can run away too quickly. Is that something, I don't know if in general, if you have thoughts about weapon systems that make autonomous decisions at the small scale of just targeting where to shoot and at the largest scale of military strategy of just being given a mission of destroy this particular target, this particular, say terrorist human being, and then figure out what is the right bombing campaign on your own to accomplish this task that minimizes civilian death. And then just loading that in and letting the AI system automatically decide that. What are your general thoughts about it? Do you, do you worry about it? Because there's the positive effects that in the best version of that world, you kill fewer civilians, you kill, hurt fewer of your own human beings. But at the negative side of that, you might lose the thing we kind of talked about, which is the basic humanity, even in the individual soldier of what is right and what is wrong and not making huge mistakes that hurt thousands or millions of people. I guess what you're asking me is if they could make a machine that could do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals, would I be for it? Yes, I would be for it. The problem is if you've ever used machines of any kind, their initial design may not be, there's unintended consequences. There's ways in the machine actually behaves that you realize there's bugs in this thing. So do we not put protocols in place to prevent something from going too far outside the boundaries of what we wanted to execute? You do. But the question is, this is the first time in human history you can create things, machines, toaster, microwave oven, that's smarter than you in this particular task. I mean, it's not yet there. What you're learning a lot with military strategies, humans are actually really damn smart. It's very hard to improve on a human. And so most actual drones that are unmanned are still piloted by humans. It's very difficult to do every aspect of war. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that machines will start doing those things better in certain things, certain more precise targeting of the enemy. The question is, so what happens when you start to rely on the machine to do some of the task is you get lazy. You forget what it is like to do that task or more importantly, you lose the knowledge of the intricacies of that task and you forget the ways it can go wrong. So the protocols may not be sufficient to constrain the power of the ways that things go wrong, especially when things are moving really quickly, especially when the ethics of the two sides aren't perfectly aligned. When people are some certain sides, like on the Chinese side, may be more willing to take risks for dangerous consequences than others. So what happened on the bioweapon side is internationally, maybe you can speak to this more, but my sense, what I was told, there is a sense globally that bioweapons are not going to be used. They're unethical. There's a sense like we're not going to engage in this. And with AI currently, China and US said, green light, all go ahead. It's totally ethical. If it can decrease the loss of human life, why not? And my worry is that it's much easier to design weapons that are effective than design weapons who have the depth of ethics and morals that humans do, which I think we don't as human beings don't acknowledge enough that even like the cold calculated killing of others, like precise, effective execution of a mission still has ethics in it. At every level, you know what's right and what's wrong. And I don't know if you take that away, you're not going to make huge mistakes that you regret. Is that something you don't worry about? I don't really worry about it. But as you design something, like I said, you put protocols in place and from what I am hearing you say, or trying to hear you say, there's be a point where our protocols wouldn't be sufficient to stop the machine from doing something that was unethical. I'm kind of worried that this is something you don't worry about. Because a lot of people I respect don't worry about it. And I don't know what to do about that. A lot of generals don't worry about it. A lot of people who know much more about war, like you than me, don't worry about it. And that worries me. Well, that's because you have a vision into the shortfalls of AI. And I don't. I don't have a vision of the shortfalls of AI. I don't know enough about it. As far as I'm concerned, you put a on off switch somewhere, you put a kill switch on a system. And if it starts going awry, you hit the kill switch, and that's it. So if you know, when you look at me and say, well, there's no possible way to put a kill switch, that would be 100% effective. And here's, you draw those concerns to me. And we could talk through it and say, okay, well, here's where we should draw the line. Yeah. I mean, it's like, again, for the Soviet Union, Chernobyl meltdown, there was always the ability, I believe, to have a kill switch. The problem is, the more power you give to the machine, the more opportunity you give to the human supervising that machine to make a mistake and not shut off the switch at the right time. So yes, the solution, I mean, you're putting the responsibility still in the human hands. And I think that's the correct place to put it. There should be good protocols, good leadership, good execution, competency all around. Your protocols should consider the basic failures of human nature, the human factor of how things go wrong. So there should be multiple people supervising the system, all those things. But I am just very skeptical of greater and greater power in the machine that can create war, that cannot lead to death. Yeah. And that's why, like I said, and like you just said, you have protocols in place that are a kill switch. And if you think about the amount of nuclear weapons that we've had on planet Earth for the past however many years, and there's been no rogue element that said, you know what, I'm going to shoot this thing. There's been no protocol that took place where all of a sudden we said, oh no. I mean, there's been escalations, but the protocols worked, have worked so far. Now, that's a scary thing to think about, that we rely on these protocols to stop some rogue element out there from launching a missile that could kill millions of people and trigger a global war. So yeah, the protocols should be strict. Okay. Can I ask a Jack O Wonka ridiculous question? If human civilization goes extinct, what would be the reason? You mentioned nuclear war. Do you worry about this? The reason I bring that up, a lot of people in the AI community worry about artificial general intelligence. So super intelligent AI systems creating a lot of damage. Autonomous weapon systems is one possibility. A lot of folks recently, especially with this pandemic, if you want to be terrified, listen, somebody I talked to recently, Sam Harris, he did a four hour podcast on how bioengineering of viruses is likely to destroy human civilization. I recommend that highly if you were too optimistic about the future of the human species. So apparently in the space of bioengineering is becoming easier and easier and easier to engineer viruses, engineer pathogens. This is the world's most depressing question. Is there something in particular you worry about? Like that we should be thinking as a human species about? Yeah, I'm sorry to disappoint you again with my lack of worry for all these problems, but I don't worry too much about it. You know what? We've made it through a bunch of wickets so far as a species and we'll make it through some more or we won't. And if we don't make it through some of these wickets and someone decides that what they're going to do over the weekend is create some crazy virus that spreads and kills everybody. Yeah. You know what? I'm usually extremely optimistic about this stuff. I am now I'm with you except we won't. Well, there's always a chance we won't, but I have a sense that human, first of all, I believe that most people have much more capacity for good than evil. All of us are capable of evil, I believe, but most people are much more capable of doing good and want to do good. And I also believe in the resiliency of the human species that we're an innovative bunch and we can respond to tragedy, especially we respond more to tragedy as the scale of tragedy grows and our response is much better. So that's why I'm not worried about it, bro. What makes a great man? Let's start at the individual. What makes a great man? What makes a great woman? What makes a great human being? Somebody that puts others above themselves. What makes a great leader of humans? Same thing. But that sentence does a lot of work. When you're a leader, there's a lot of egos. There's a lot of tension. There's the human factor. There's people who are timid. There's people who are assholes. There's people who are incredibly competent, but self obsessed. I don't know. There's complexities of human nature. How do you get all those people to be the best version of themselves and to lift up everyone else around them? Okay. So now that, that question is a little bit different now. So now it's getting into a more specific question, but at the same time, a more broad question of what elements does it take to make a good leader? So you're right that different people have different personalities, different tendencies, different levels of ego. And the, the way that I try and explain this is like a video game. And I'm not even a video game player, but I've seen this before where video game characters have various skills, various strengths and weaknesses. So maybe they're strong, but they're dumb, or maybe they're strong and smart, but they're slow. They just give them these, these ratings. And so that's where human beings are. And that's the way leaders are. And you can have different leaders with different characteristics. And depending on how all those characteristics match up, you can have somebody that is very introverted, but they're a, but, but they're still a very good leader because when they do communicate, they do it in a clear, simple manner that everyone understands. So even though they're a little bit introverted, people still respect them and listen to them because they communicate in a clear way. You could have somebody that's extremely charismatic, extremely charismatic and everyone looks to them, but they're slow in making decisions. And so now we've got someone that can't really make decisions when decisions need to get made. So even though they're charismatic, they're still not a good leader. So depending on the human being that we're talking about, and you just mentioned earlier that human beings are, you know, more complex than anything and do a better job at just about everything than a robot. So that's the same thing with leadership. You've got all these different characteristics and you, you match them or mix them together. And depending on where the ratings come out, depending on how that thing does in the end, can we almost like as a case study, look at a few people in the tech area that I'm familiar with that I know well, we can, the only caveat being that I may have no familiarization with them whatsoever. You may have to brief me on them. Yeah. So I'll do my best to brief. I'll do my best to reduce human beings into simple descriptions. And then you can give me insights of why the hell they're such effective leaders based on my description, not based on your actual deep knowledge of the human beings. So that caveat of my inability to speak both the English language and describe humans well. Let's talk about first, Elon Musk. So he's known as being quite harsh in the sense of, first of all, a very high bar of excellence. And also willing to what he calls that kind of first principles thinking of asking the, the questions that hurt, which is why the hell are we doing it this way? Why can't it be done a lot, but not just better, but a lot better. So, so let's, I don't want to hear his whole character. I'll go one at one section at a time. So we've got a guy that's harsh and, and asking the really hard questions. How can that be good? Or why is that good? Well, first of all, it can be horrible. And there's leaders out there that are harsh and they're hated and no one likes them and no one wants to work for them and they never do anything. So what is it that Elon Musk does that makes, gives him the ability to be harsh? So I was, I was hearing a description of me when I would give feedback to young seals that had made mistakes during training operations. And the description was that I, same thing, like this harsh blunt force trauma and just totally direct sledgehammer of truth that I would hit guys with. But it's interesting because I always talk about, you know, building relationships and making sure you're not offending someone. Yeah. So how do these things match up? Well, I can tell you how they match up when I was being harsh, the guys that I was being harsh with knew without one shred of doubt that I cared about them more than anything else. And that the reason I was giving them this feedback is because I wanted them to be able to lead their troops. I wanted them to be able to go accomplish their mission. And I wanted them to be able to bring their guys home from war. So I wasn't being harsh because it elevated my ego. I wasn't being harsh because I wanted to denigrate them. I was being, actually being harsh because I wanted them to accomplish the mission. Because I wanted them to accomplish the mission. So if that's where Elon comes from, hey, listen, we got to make this happen. This is for the good of the world to do this. And people know that then it works. I'll bring this point back up with another guy, Steve Jobs, but let me stay on Elon for a second. The other thing he does, which is interesting, I see the value of this. It'd be great to hear you speak about it. He's unlike many of the other CEOs, very rich billionaires, involved in leading a lot of people. He puts a lot of time into making sure he's on the factory floor. He famously sleeps on the, sort of like in the middle of things. And he puts a lot of effort. He's also very good at it is being a low level engineer. So like, whatever the task is, he wants to understand the details and he'll talk to the lowest level person in terms of like, somebody who's like working literally on putting parts together. He wants to understand what the problem is, what the challenge is. If there's an emergency, he wants to understand the actual details of the problem, not like delegating it to a manager, but like, because a lot of CEOs, a lot of managers will talk about sort of the power and the importance of delegation. Here, he wants to know if there's a big problem, he wants to know the exact detail. He wants to know the exact problem. He wants to, at the fundamental level, understand how to solve that problem. Whether it has to do with materials, whether it has to do with the actual manufacturing, the mechanical engineering aspect, like we're talking about engineering. This is a guy who wears a suit as a CEO, tweets about Dogecoin, but like an actual job, he's low level engineering. And that to me was always inspiring to see somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing. That's what it, like he gains the respect of engineers at the lowest level. I don't know if that's scalable, but that's always been inspiring to me. And I wonder how many people it's inspiring to. Maybe you could speak to the value of doing that, of no matter how high your level of leader is, to be able to do the low level shit. Yeah. And that's a common trait that good leaders have. And maybe he doesn't necessarily know how to do everything, a good leader, but they go down there and talk to the frontline troops and say, Hey, what is the issue that you're dealing with? Or, you know, how can I support you? How can I give you help? And one key point that you said is, he said, when there's a problem, he gets in there. So there's things happening at his companies that they're working. And so he doesn't have to die. I'm not saying he never does, but he doesn't have to spend as much time working on or looking at some subsystem that's functioning well. He's got a good leader in there that's handling it. And he checks in with that leader. And the leader says, yeah, it's working perfectly. He says, great. When there's a problem, that's when he might have to get down there and dig into some details so that he fully understands it. So that he, when he digs down in the details, and this is important, he's coming from an altitude where he has a better, bigger perspective, not necessarily better, but a bigger perspective. So if you sit there and work on a problem, whatever, for eight hours and you're staring at, you know, if you were planning a mission and you were planning it for eight hours, you're staring at the maps and the charts and you're figuring out where all the troops are going to be located. And I come in after eight hours and I look at your plan from a distant perspective, there's a good chance I'll be able to see holes in your plan that you couldn't see because your perspective was too close. So that's good for me to be able to come in from a higher perspective and have a look at it. But also there's times where I need to get down there and actually look, you know, if you're looking at a problem and you say, look, I can't figure out boss, I can't figure out how to get to this target. And I'm looking at it from a distance and I don't see, I might need to start digging in and looking and saying, Oh, here's a route that we can take that actually makes sense. Let's try that. So I think it's a good example of someone going up and down in altitude to look at problems, understanding what's happening with the frontline troops. And at the same time, being able to go back to the strategic level. And I can, it's probably this way. The reason that he's successful is because he doesn't get stuck down there. Yeah. Because if he felt the need to micromanage each and every part on a Tesla, it wouldn't be, it would be very unlikely that he would have the capacity to do that. It wouldn't be, it would be very unlikely that he would have the capacity to do all that. Now he can hand over some broad chip design and say, Hey, this is what the function needs to be. And he gives it to Lex and Lex goes there with your team and you figured out and you make it happen. If he had to actually do that all himself, most likely not possible. So that's what leaders should be doing. They should go elevate and, and, and then get down in the weeds when they have to, and then go back up. The sad thing, this is the part that makes me not want to do a startup is basically his whole life is dealing with emergencies. Just like you said, he's not dealing, this is not shooting the shit about details of engineering. It's dealing with like, in this, in the case of the company, life and death, like something that can just completely damage the production line, right? So he's constantly dealing with emergencies, putting out fires. And I don't know if there's something to be said about that psychology of that, of how, like he, he's spoken himself that he's worried whether his mind can hold up much longer. So hopefully in the near future, he will start to form more decentralized command where he has some subordinate leadership that he fully trusts. And most important that he has properly trained so that they can handle these day to day fires at least 80% of them. So only 20% of the time, does he actually need to go in and solve a problem. If he's not doing that right now, then that's going to end up being a problem anytime. So I work with companies all the time. And that's, what's interesting about this is I go and work with a CEO or with a, with a C suite of a company. It takes a little while to figure out what's going on. I'm kind of going off of the things that you're telling me almost anecdotally, right? Yes. But let's say that what you and also, I don't know how familiar you actually are with the inner workings of his companies, but if we were to assume that what you're saying is accurate, then my advice would be, Hey, listen, you need to start putting a little bit more time and effort into training up some subordinate leadership that has the trust, knowledge, and expertise that you will be able to turn over some of these, some of these details to for two reasons. Number one, so you can let your brain, you know, you can, you can survive a little longer as he put it, but also all the time that you spend as a leader, looking down and into your organization is time that you're not looking up and out. So when you're not looking up and out, you're not seeing what the competitors doing. You're not seeing where the market's going. There's problems that, that, that can come from that. So if right now he's spending too much time looking down and in, and you mentioned, you know, you said, I don't know if I want to do a startup. When you do a startup, you're going to be looking down and in for a while. It's going to take a while. You're going to have to do all this work yourself. You're not going to have the finances to put people manpower behind these things. So that's probably he, maybe he's in that mindset a little bit because he's done so many startups over the years. And so he's in the he's habitually in the weeds. So my advice would be, all right, let's start looking at formulating some subordinate leadership that has the, like I said, the expertise, the trust that you can, you can start to turn over some of these more minute details to them so that you can start looking up and out. Yeah. I think he's done that more successful in some places than others. The SpaceX, a lot of people give the credit to Gwen Shotwell for the CEO, the COO of SpaceX as, as a very successful person that runs shit, but in Tesla, not as much. So I wonder if you can comment on something a lot of people worry about, and this applies to a lot of tech companies, which is a lot of people worry about that if Elon disappears, the, the, the innovative spirit, the company is as we know them today will collapse, will stagnate and will basically fail to do what they've been doing for so many years successfully. Is there some aspect to what makes a good leader that if you disappear, it's still the thing still lives on and not just lives on, but thrives. Yeah. So what we have to do in those situations is we have to establish a strong culture inside that organization. And if you're there's, there's, there's reasons why this happens, right? If I have a big ego and I form a company and I love the fact that everyone looks at me and says, Oh, Jocko made this company and he's the creative force behind this company. And that fuels my ego and it makes me feel good. And you know, I'm working with you, Lex. And every time you come up with an idea, I say, Lex, you need to stay in your box. Yeah. Right. So I'm not creating a culture that rewards that sort of creativity. And eventually when I die, I won't have have educated my team on how to maintain that creative aspect. So again, hopefully inside that organization, he's, he's encouraging and growing that culture where creativity is rewarded, where, where it flourishes, even when he's gone, that's what we have to hope for. He is, but I also seem to notice that there's not many people like him. Um, people become complacent too easily. I've been disappointed by people a little bit. It's like, success makes people soft. With Elon, it seems like success doesn't have any effect. It's like the reverse effect. It doesn't, it's like, what's the, it's always like, what's the next biggest thing, right? He's living that exponential growth, which I think that's the problem that you have to have somebody who's constantly trying to find the 10 X solution, like trying to constantly improve things. And, uh, restlessly that, I mean, that probably has to do with finding the right people, not just creating the culture, but creating a culture with the right set of people. Speaking of which Steve Jobs, there's, uh, two things I want to mention there. One, once again, the harshness, but a very different kind. And the second is team building. So on the harshness, he is much harsher than Elon in a way, in the following way. And I'm having a sense that you will not like this, but I'd like to defend it is he loses his shit quite a bit. He was famously, at least, especially early on being very emotional. He was letting passion dominate the discussion. There'd be a lot of firings. There would be a lot of mean things said to people. I don't know what you make of that. How much as a leader, are you allowed to just lose your shit in your love for the thing you're doing? And how effective is that? As a leader, you shouldn't be doing that very often. So you can look back at me and say, well, Jocko, here's the most profitable company that's ever existed. And so you're wrong. Well, going back to that multiple multitude of characteristics that human beings can have. Well, it's the same thing with businesses. It's the same thing with companies. Steve Jobs was off the charts in some of his traits, his ability to understand design, his ability to understand human interface with computer systems. So, so far off the charts that despite his bad temper, emotional behavior, the company still thrived. That can happen. You can have people that are horrible leaders that develop something that's so universally outstanding that you end up with a company that's successful. The reason, I mean, I get asked that a bunch, people always ask me, because I say, look, you shouldn't be losing your temper as a leader. Well, what about Steve Jobs? He used to yell and scream all the time. Great. When people say that to me, I say, oh, okay. Are you as good at design as Steve Jobs was? Are you as good at marketing as Steve Jobs was? He had a certain amount of skills that were off the charts. And so he was able to be successful despite the fact that he would lose his temper, treat people horribly. That's not good. It's not good. And it would have been even more successful if he wouldn't had those characteristics. Now you might say, well, he, his anger is what pushed things. Well, let me ask you this. What leader wins the leader whose team is afraid, who the team who execute, executes the mission because they're afraid of their leader or executes the task because they're afraid of their leader or the team that loves their leaders so much that they don't want to let them down. They don't want to let them down. Or the team that loves their leaders so much that they don't want to let them down. Which team wins? You're implying a confidence that love is more powerful than fear, but I'm not so sure. This is the Machiavelli question. You're saying ultimately it's always better to lead by inspiration and love than by, by putting the fear into the team. What I'm, what I'm saying is that I've seen countless times is me leading through my authority, leading through my rank, leading through punitive measures is infinitely worse than me and you working together as a team to win. On the second point of Steve Jobs is he has this idea of philosophy of eight players where you have a group, like the power and the productivity of a group of what he called eight players is invaluable. So you want to get a team of people who are the best at what they do. But the most important aspect to him was that a single quote unquote B player on the team destroys the entire productivity of the team. Is there something that it brings true to that? So he was, I guess this could be a temper thing, but vicious about firing and removing the, uh, what he felt was a toxic B player in a team. So eight players feed off of each other, unless there's one B player present. It depends on the nature of the B player. Is the player, is the player a B player? Is the player a B player because he's a little bit lazy? Is he a B player because he doesn't have a good vision? Is he a B player because he's got a big ego and always thinks he's right and now creates conflict in the team. So there's a bunch of different B players. Look, if you're working for me and you're kind of a B player, but guess what? You're a grinder and you get stuff done. I want you on the team. You might not be the smartest person I have, but I know that you're committed to the team and I want you on the team. So you're a B player, but that's okay. Now, if you're Lex with the giant ego, I'd rather have, I'd rather have Lex. That's not quite as smart. Cause I got other people that are smart. I got other people that are smart on the team. Look, you're going to need some smart people on the team, but a team is made up. It's a team. And so you take these different components of a team. And if you have complimentary components, you'll end up with a superior team. Then just basing it on the level of, and what's an A player sometimes in the seal teams, they would get something called the stacked platoon. And what that would be is someone, you know, some senior person in that platoon would manipulate and maneuver to get the quote best guys that he could in that platoon. So, you know, the most experienced guys, the person that had great, great reputations. And sometimes those platoons would be great. Sometimes they would implode because what you end up with is a bunch of A players. And now no one wants to follow anyone else. No one wants to agree with anyone else. Everyone wants to do it my way. Not it's my way, not Lex's way. Lex is stupid. No, you're stupid. We end up with problems. So can one person derail a team? Absolutely. Under good leadership, one person should not derail a team. This could be a tech thing too. There's some multiplying effect of just pure excellence, no matter the personalities. I think for Steve Jobs, he doesn't, the ego doesn't matter. None of that matters. What matters is the quality of the output, the genius of the result. And that somehow multiplies itself. And the egos actually, like one of the problems with egos is like, what does ego usually say? It says, I'm much better than you. When you have people that are really good together, it's very hard for the ego to flourish because you're like constantly being shown that you're not as good and there's a competition. So like, I think to his, his idea was that like, if you get people that are really good at what they do, it turns out that you're not as good at what you do. It turns as opposed to you being complacent and not doing much and thinking you're better than everyone else and your opinion is better, is you almost getting in that competitive race. You know that magic that happens when you're at the end of a marathon and you're just like head to head, like you're just going full steam with a person that is as good as you. There's no place for ego there. Which is great. Which is great. Let's use that example. You and I are racing, the end of the marathon. We're both highly competitive, highly competitive. We have massive egos and we both want to win. We both want to win so bad that we, we give everything we've got. That's totally positive, right? Isn't that totally positive? Now imagine this same thing. We're in a race, we're in a marathon, we're in the last hundred meters. It's you against me and, and our egos are huge and we're pushing to win and you start to pull ahead of me and my ego is so big and I hate losing so much that I somehow accidentally push my knee up against your foot on a backstride and throw you onto your face. So that's what ego, ego is an awesome driver unless you let your ego control you and you let ego drive your decision making process, in which case it turns into an incredible problem. So you might have someone that is excellent. You might have someone that's outstanding. You might have some someone that's tens across the board, but their ego is so big that big that they can't work with other people. They can't accept anyone else's ideas. They can't compromise on something because they think their idea is better all the time and that is going to be problematic and I don't want them on the team. Now as a good leader, guess what I'll do? I'll put them into a situation where I can utilize their best aspects, but not have their ego destroy the team. So I might say, Hey Lex, you know what? I actually want you to take lead on this part of the project over here and since you're so smart and you work so hard, I know you're going to pull ahead of everyone else. So you grind on that. Once you get that result, give it to me and I'm going to disseminate it to the team. So I, I, I isolate you from wrecking yourself and the rest of the team with your giant ego. So then, uh, looking at a completely opposite person was this a fascinating person to me is Sandra Pichai, who's the CEO of Alphabet CEO of Google. I admire the the, uh, in a romantic sense, the madness that is, uh, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. So to me, the opposite of that is Sandra Pichai, who's, uh, like everybody loves him. And, uh, he's also a great listener. So he always brings people together. And so he went, the, the, the energy of that person in the room is like the basic energy. If I were to summarize it, it's like, I want to hear all the voices in the room. That's the energy he brings. And, uh, it's almost like he doesn't want to impose a final decision. He wants to hear all the voices and somehow always the decision just falls out. I don't know what to say about that. What to say about that style of leadership, but it's always surprising to me how that love brought a lot of people together and still, I mean, some of the greatest things Google has done over the past several years, uh, could be attributed to that continued innovation, bringing out the best out of people. There's of course, bureaucracy, which I could criticize at the end of the day, which always happens with big companies. I would argue actually the dictatorial style of Steve jobs and, you know, Musk helped fight the bureaucracy, which is one criticism I would give of being a listener and being kind is sometimes you can't cut through the as effectively, but he. He's one of the only people I've ever heard of who everybody loves. He's inspirational figure to millions, especially in the, like in India, he's a celebrity in the best kind of way. Is there something you could say about that kind of leadership where you're never the asshole. You're never the dictator. You're always the listener and, um, the compassionate empathetic glue that brings the team together basically would love. Yeah. That's that's great leadership. If you have to choose for Google, uh, for large companies, is there something to be said about what is more effective? The dictator, uh, ruling by love or ruling by fear? First of all, everything's a dichotomy, right? And so to think that all the time, you're always going to be able to just bark orders at people and they're always going to listen to you. And you're always going to get the best result. That would not be smart to think that every single time you're going to come to a 100% consensus amongst the troops. And that decision is going to reveal itself without you nudging it along. That would also be short sighted and naive. So what you, what a good leader does is they, they, they stay balanced. And as much as they can, they listen to what the troops have to say. They take that feedback. Maybe they quietly nudge things and, and I'm sure he does that. I'm sure he does some nudging that maybe no one even picks up on. You know, I like to say the best forms of leadership is leadership with minimum force required. So if I can go into a room as a leader and not say one single thing and the team can come to the right consensus and move in that direction, that's my preferred method. Maybe I have to give them a little bit of a nudge, a 10% nudge in one direction. Okay. That's better than me walking in there and giving them 100% dictatorial direction of exactly what I want to have happen. Now, occasionally, if we have an emergency situation, people are starting to be frazzled and they're not sure which direction to go. Then sometimes as a leader, you have to walk in and say, all right, everyone here's where we're going. And people get on board. Why? Because for many years or months or however long you've trusted them to come up with a plan. And when you trust, when you, as a leader, trust your team to come up with a plan, the team starts to trust you and you get leadership capital. And as you build leadership capital, occasionally you need to cash in some of that leadership capital. You need to spend some of it. And maybe it is, hey, listen, here's the direction we're going right now. We'll debrief it later, but we got to make a move. And the team who trusts you says, Roger that boss, we got it. And all of them actually do this interesting thing. I'd love to hear your opinion on it. Sondra certainly does it to a large degree, which is it's in the process of delegation, trusting a person to do a really difficult thing, like tossing it up and saying like, I trust you can get this job done for some, even if your resume does not support that. I'm actually kind of amazed that human beings when they're given the trust to get the job done, they step up very often. That's kind of an amazing property of human nature. People often ask me issues about leadership. And I always say that one of the best tools for teaching leadership and for teaching a bunch of other lessons is leadership itself. So when it happens all the time, when you elevate someone into a leadership position, they do step up and they do make things happen. So that's not surprising to me. You do have to mitigate risks. So saying, Hey, you know, Lex, I know you're, haven't been in the military before. I know you have very limited weapons experience, but I want you to run a target assault on a real mission in whatever country that would not be good. That would not be a good move on, on my part. Now, if I said, all right, Lex, you know what, I want you to get some leadership experience. I've got a training mission and it's going to be using paintball and I'm going to put you in charge of it. I got no problem doing that. Some of that is judging human character is like, there's potential, there's something in this person that they are, they have enough demons or whatever the hell it requires to have that fuel. They'll figure it out. They'll hate themselves if they don't. And they'll find the right, they'll find the tools that find the path to achieve the, whatever the level of perfection they can. It's been really surprising to me. It's been making me rethink the whole hiring process because I often now I'm thinking and looking, so I'm looking for people, both for the startup, but just for my own life to help. And I almost want to see evidence of excellence, but maybe you want to just based on just judgment of human character without evidence of excellence, have people step up. Like Joe Rogan with Jamie, that's a funny side of it. I didn't understand how little Joe knew about Jamie when he hired him. And Jamie stepped up and now runs one of the most successful podcasts ever. And that's an incredible kind of, and he's one of the best producers in the world now, not to let it get to his head. And by the way, the funny thing about him. And one of the best Googlers in the world. One of the best Googlers. The funny thing about Jamie, this is okay. You might not like this, but what I, what I like, I'm constantly exceptionally self critical to a point of like self hating. Sometimes I deeply appreciate every single moment I'm alive, but everything I've ever done, I feel like a shit. And when I talked to Jamie about everything he's done, he's just in every way he carries himself. He's so self critical. He's so he's so like worried that it's wrong. It's bad. That anxious energy. I love it. Cause that's how you lead to growth and progress. Like you might, like a therapist might say, that's probably not good for your like wellbeing. Fuck it. It's good for the what's good for your wellbeing is to create awesome things. That's ultimately what leads to happiness is to, to create the best thing you can in your life. And so when I see that in somebody like Jamie or anybody I talked to, when you're really self critical, that's a good sign to me. Is that ridiculous? It's not ridiculous at all. And it goes back, you know, you were, you were the way you were phrasing these questions about what makes a good person and what makes a good leader, the way you phrase them kind of eliminated the normal answer that I give the normal answer that I give. You asked me what makes a good leader, what makes a good person is, is being humble. So when you're going to hire someone for your, for your startup or whatever company you're creating, that is a key characteristic to look for is someone that has the humility like, like young Jamie to say, yeah, you know, I, I could have done this better and here's what I can improve. And here's what I need to work on. When you have somebody that thinks they know everything out of the gate, you're, you're already got someone that's going to be hard to deal with. They're going to be hard to coach. They're going to be hard to mentor. When you have somebody that's truly humble, you barely, again, it's minimum force required because when you say to Jamie after a show, how do you think that went, he says, well, you know, I did this wrong and I didn't have this set up in time. And you don't, you don't barely have to do anything because he's got the humility. If you've got someone that's a big ego and you say, Hey, how did that show go? He goes, I went awesome on my end. Now guess what you have to do. Now you have to start applying force as a leader, which is expending leadership capital, which we don't want to do because we always try and conserve our leadership capital as much as we possibly can. And when we have to expend it just to get Jamie to make some improvements, that's bad. So when you go looking for people, look for people that are humble. Now, does this mean you look for people that don't have any confidence? No, that's not what I'm saying. There's a balance to all these things. That's the dichotomy of leadership you, but people tend towards and look, I work with a lot of military troops in the past. Now I work with companies. The reason I talk about humility all the time is because for someone to be, get into a leadership position in the military, they have to have confidence. So the tendency is that their confidence is going to outweigh their humility at some point. Same thing with, with civilian companies. If you get to a point of leadership inside of a company, you have to have confidence to get there. You don't get to a position of leadership inside of a company lacking confidence. So the tendency is for confidence to, to grow a little bit too much. And we have to put that, put that confidence into check. We have to put that ego into check. Really good leaders. They're confident, but they're humble. That's the balance of the dichotomy. Hear that, Jamie, don't get cocky. On occasion. Rarely you talk about discipline. What does a discipline life look like doing what you're supposed to do? What if I want to lay on the couch and eat Cheetos and watch soap operas? That's that's not, that doesn't feel like discipline. Do you think you're supposed to do that? Well, you know, you could argue from a, a sort of a meaning of life perspective that perhaps happiness is the most important. And if it makes me happy, perhaps that's, if it's fulfilling, of course, eating Cheetos and watching soap operas is fulfilling for nobody whatsoever. Next question. But there's something about discipline that's more than that. We have to like the rigor of habit, right? You, you wake up early in the morning, all the time. What is it Jordan Peterson talks about? Make your bed. One place where you probably agree with Jordan. People ask me if I make my bed. I don't. There's a disagreement with Jordan. There we go. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. There's a disagreement with Jordan. There we go. You know, when I was younger, before I was married, I didn't make my bed because I had one sleeping bag on it and I would get out of the sleeping bag. There was nothing to make. Yeah. Now I'm married and I can't make my bed because my wife's in my bed. So I don't make my bed. Okay. So what in your life, maybe we can talk about the one that's most publicly facing, which is you wake up at four o clock or around four o clock in the morning. You post on social media a picture of your watch. It being early, just to remind people that you are a man of your word. What's that about? What's the philosophy of the four o clock? What role does that play in a disciplined life for you? Okay. From that perspective, what role it plays is getting a jump on the day. And when you wake up early and you get a jump on the day and you've got your workout done, and you've got a little bit of little bit of work done by the time normal people are getting up, that's a win. That's a psychological win. And it's not just a psychological win. It's an actual win. It's an actual win. So that feels great. It doesn't feel great. Maybe when your alarm clock goes off, but by eight o clock in the morning and you've already accomplished some of the major tasks that you have, some of the most painful tasks that you have for the day, you're off to a great start and it's going to feel great. Let's break this down then. What does then the rest of the day look like? What is the perfect, productive, disciplined day in the life of Jaco Willink look like? Wake up, workout. Wake up when? 4, 4.30. Workout when? 5, 5 to 6 or 7. No eating? No. And then what does the workout look like? Depends on the day. What's the perfect? We're talking about body weight, lifting, cardio, heavy bag, jiu jitsu. Okay. Yeah. When I say workout, I mean no jiu jitsu. So jiu jitsu comes later in the day. So this is just you alone? This is me alone working out. Yep. And I'm going to be doing a wide variety of things. This is the thing that has the pictures of the aftermath with some sweat at the end. So the goal is to do whatever the hell results in some sweat. And that takes an hour. Sometimes it takes 12 minutes. Sometimes it takes three hours, depending on what kind of mood I'm in. You got some demons to work through or is this just work? So you got the David Goggins who clearly has demons screaming inside of his head that he's trying to work through. Are you just getting the work done out of the discipline? Or is this, I think Joe is a little bit with David Goggins is like, there's some ego, there's some bullshit that you're trying to get out through some of the exercise. That's a good way to kind of humble you is just doing that exercise. Well, exercise is certainly humbling. I mean, it's, but it's physical conditioning, right? It's preparing your body so that you can handle whatever it is you're going to do. Perfect. What does, what do you do after? Let's talk about food. Hopefully surf. If the waves are good, surf for how good are the waves? Let's say they're good. This is a perfect day. It's a perfect, perfect waves. Why do you surf? It's fun. Okay. This is fun. Okay. Man, man and nature. It was just like, what surfing is the ultimate is the power of the, the infinite power of the ocean versus a little silly looking man on a board. You could say it's the infinite power of the ocean versus a silly looking man on a board, or you could say it's fun because it's Russian and romance. Okay. This is for fun in the morning. Beautiful. And this is, you're still having eaten. No. Okay. So when do you eat? I'll usually start grazing around 11 oclock and grazing. What's the, what's the diet that's the, is there a perfect diet or do you graze? I'll have, I'll eat some nuts, you know, something like that. I usually start grazing. Maybe I'll have a little piece of meat or something like that. Does work enter any of this? I'm sure you have a lot of people that want your attention. Yeah. Yeah. No work is work is about to happen. Cause you know, even if I, if I woke up at four, worked out from five to six surf from six to eight, now I'm starting to work writing, recording, reading, talking to clients. Is there parts of the day where you try to find moments to think deeply, to read deeply, to sort of really focus? Cause this world wants, it's full of distractions, right? Right. Even talking to, uh, like even work stuff, the emails and all those kinds of things that can, they can scatter your mind. Is there times you seek to have that focus? Well, I read a lot of books. And so usually when I read, I'll be reading for a chunk of time, maybe an hour at a time, maybe a little bit longer. And I might do that twice a day. So I don't know if that counts as what you're describing, but then same thing with writing. When I, when I'm writing something, I mean, I just, that's what I do. I write usually usually write for about an hour. I can get about a thousand words an hour out of me. So that's, that's sort of what I do. What does the rest of the day look like? Just a lot of work, but one is the jujitsu. I want to find out about the jujitsu. So round, round four, 30 or five oclock at night and train. Yep. And, uh, how hard you still, how, how are you doing body wise? He still is the old man. Does the old man still got it or, or are you talking to me? It'd be good for viewership and ratings. If I die before the end of the podcast. So so I, I, I still train with the same guys and I'll train, you know, so I've been very lucky when it comes to getting injured and stuff like that. So haven't, I've had some injuries, but they're, they're healed. And so, yeah, I train and, uh, food wise, you mentioned grazing us some, uh, of some nuts, a very light kind of things. Is there a main meal here at night at night? Yep. High, uh, in protein or is it anything? Yeah. I'll have like a steak and salad. I'll usually have for dessert. I have like a protein shake. So is there a thing where at the end of the, uh, at the end of the day, you will like, you have like a summarize sword and you meditate on, uh, uh, death and, um, all those kinds of, is, is there some weird ritual you partake in? No. You just go to bed when I get done with the end of the day, I might read a little bit more. Read more. Yeah. Because reading makes me tired usually. Um, so I'll read a little bit more. Is there a key to you that you can speak to that makes for a productive day? Just the way you approach it mentally. Yeah. Write down what you're supposed to do, wake up early and start doing it and then get it done. Yeah. I know it's a miraculous trick. Can I ask you about Jiu Jitsu? By all means. What have you learned from being a practitioner? You're a black belt. What have you learned from this journey, uh, of, um, being a martial artist? Jiu Jitsu for me was the connective tissue that started to join my mind together with all the F different aspects of my life. And so Jiu Jitsu for me was, was really important. And I don't think I would be doing anything that I'm doing right now if it wasn't for Jiu Jitsu. So there's various aspects of my life that were in existence, but I didn't understand how they were connected until I started training Jiu Jitsu. The primary things are interacting with other human beings and combat tactics and strategy and Jiu Jitsu. And all those things are connected. They all follow the same guiding principles. And I wouldn't have recognized those guiding principles if I didn't do Jiu Jitsu. Can you elaborate? Cause you've trained for many, many years. What, um, is it the hardship? Is it the humbling nature of just being tapped all over, you know, nonstop, or I don't actually don't know how many times more times than you. Okay. So good. Is it just the hardship of physical training, like the honesty of the mat in the sense that like, you know, what works and what doesn't work, which, which aspects were the most, uh, impactful for you? All aspects. So yes, from a humility perspective, when you realize you think when you think, you know what you're doing, when you think you have certain skills and you realize that there's always somebody better than you. And you realize that, Hey, maybe I don't have all the answers all the time. And you bring that to a leadership perspective and you walk into your platoon and you realize that maybe you don't have all the answers all the time. And maybe you should listen to what other people have to say. You bring that to a combat situation and you realize that you think if you sit there and think that you're smarter than the enemy, you're going to be complacent. You're going to make mistakes. So there's one aspect out of the gate, as far as, you know, if I, if I'm going to try and get your arm, do I attack your arm? Maybe not directly, unless I'm a white belt. Exactly. What do I do? I attack your neck. And when you reach up to defend your neck, that's when I get your arm. Well, if I'm out on the battlefield and there's an enemy position, should I attack frontal assault into that position? No, no, I shouldn't. I should put down some covering fire and I should maneuver around to the flank. It's the same thing. If I'm dealing with you and you're my boss and you've got a giant ego and you've come up with a plan and I don't like your plan, should I walk up to you and say, hey, Lex, your plan isn't good? No. Or should I say, Hey, Lex, can I ask you some questions about how you want us to execute this? Cause I want to make sure I understand your vision. So all these things are connected. Yes. And I wouldn't have realized that we could sit here and do this forever. We could, we could, I could tell you these comparisons forever, but this, all this connective tissue, bringing all these things together, I wouldn't have seen it without, I don't think I would have seen it without jujitsu. So jujitsu to me had, it had a incredible life impact on me. Not look the physical part. Yes, absolutely. Does it, does it keep you humble when you know that there's 145 pound individual that can tap you out when you're 220 pound, 25 year old guy. And there's 135 or 140 pound, you know, 46 year old guy that can make you tap out. That's humbling. And, and what do you do with that? Do you run away from it or do you continue to pursue it? Same thing with life. Same thing with anything. So jujitsu is an incredibly powerful, not just physical aspect, but it's, it's a way to understand. It's a way of thinking. You've also competed. Is there something you can speak to the value of competition? Obviously you've been through combat, actual military combat is many, many, many, many orders of magnitude, more high stakes than competition in a, in a silly sport like jujitsu. Nevertheless, it still has some of the echoes of the same challenges. Is there something you can speak to the value of competition for you? Yep. Competition will reveal weaknesses in your game that you can then go back and train to rectify. So that, that's a big part of it. So that that's very useful to serve. Yeah. As a testing ground, of course, training can be that testing ground as well or, or that feedback. Yeah. But as you and I both know, if you and I train together all the time, you'll know my game. I'll know your game. And even if we have five other people, we all kind of understand each other's games and you're not doing something to me that I don't expect. So when I go and compete, I'm good. You're good. You know, this random person has a game that I've never seen before. I'm, and I may or may not know how to deal with that game. If I know how to deal with it, great. I get the victory. Maybe I don't learn as much. If I don't know how to deal with their game, I get the loss and I get the win of learning what some weakness in my game is. So you mentioned offline that your friends and you work with Dean Lister and Dean Lister is one of the people that inspired John Donoher, who I've very much been, I've gotten a chance to talk to quite a bit recently. I don't know what you think about this. This is not a therapy session, but or maybe it is turning into one. He's a fascinating person, John Donoher, in terms of creating almost a science of Jiu Jitsu to a level that I haven't seen before, which is systems thinking about, like you can think about military combat as tactics in a particular situation, but then you zoom out and you want to create entire systems of tactics in all situations, right? He's very kind of wants to keep zooming out and creating giant systems. And, which I appreciate that, even though the task is probably impossible to do completely, but there is something that's in terms of competition that he kindled a fire in me that I want to get back out there. He has a particular thing that did it, which is very different from my personal journey in Jiu Jitsu, which was to a degree that people I worked with cared about competition, it was always about winning or doing well, all those kinds of things. For John, it's about winning, like winning is not even a thing that's important. What's most important is winning by submission or dominance, right? And not just the end, it's the entire time competing such that the only thing that matters is that kind of victory. And that's a very different level of competition that's actually liberating in a certain kind of sense. I remember so much of my competition was about fear of not taking risks. You get up on points or you hold a strong position, you kind of advance and you get more points. Maybe you chase the submission, but there's always a fear of risk. And for him, you embrace the risk. You should not be competing out of fear. Live and die by the sword versus stay in safety. I don't know if there's something to be said here. Well, you said it's novel to you, it's not novel to me. My entire journey in Jiu Jitsu was only about submission. And as you mentioned, Dean Lister is my coach and my main training partner for 20 something years. And if you ever watch Dean train or fight, that's what he's trying to do is submit as everyone. That's what he's always done. That's what he always will do. He, you know, he has the highest, I think he has impact. I know he has the highest submission victories in ADCC. He, that's what he does. So this is, in fact, as Jiu Jitsu got bigger and bigger, in fact, as Jiu Jitsu got more popular and we started seeing people competing to win by points, that was what was novel to me in the beginning. Now it's the standard. So it's not novel to me. I love the fact that John Donoher and all of his troops go out and they try and submit people. I think it's awesome. And I think that's what Jiu Jitsu is. All right. Let's ask for some advice for white belts. There's a lot of white belts who listen to this. What advice would you give? You've been in Jiu Jitsu for many years. In terms of a successful journey through Jiu Jitsu, what advice would you give them? People just starting out. Just keep training, keep your ego in check. Don't freak out. Try and use the techniques that you learn and all this stuff. So I'm like saying it, you know, notice how I'm saying it. Yeah. Hey, tap out, keep your ego in check. It's common sense. But the thing is everyone says this all the time and white belts still start off by going completely nuts for at least, you know, three to six months of, I'm not going to let this guy tap me out. And they're going to, and I'm going to tap this guy out, not by using technique, but by just using strength. And it's just, it's just inhibiting your learning. So as much as you can, I know, I know you got to get it out of your system. I know you don't want to tap. And I know you want to tap somebody, but as soon as you get, get that off your chest, then try and, try and relax and try and learn the techniques. It's perhaps counterintuitive. It never was to me, but it's counterintuitive that to, to start on the journey of really sort of mastering Jiu Jitsu or whatever, or improving is you have to relax. And that seems to be a very counterintuitive lesson. I learned that early on with, that was thanks to the Russian system. I played piano and like music, basically, actually this is true for basically any sport that includes the human body is like relaxing is the way you, you start learning stuff. You have to learn, you have to literally, and most people don't seem to understand this is like, you have to learn what it means for the human body to relax. Like, I guess you have to have enough knowledge of all the muscles involved to know what it means to relax those muscles. So for piano, you have to understand what it means to relax your wrists and your fingers in order to learn how to move them. Like if there's tenseness in the fingers, you're not going to like, you have to learn how to try hard while relaxed. The, I guess the beginner, if you don't internalize this lesson, will try hard by tensing up hard and like trying hard, tensing up more as opposed to relaxing more. And that lesson cannot be conveyed through words, I guess. I've had the great fortune of having dictatorial teachers as they do in Russia for piano and so on, where you get like hit if you don't learn to relax, which is a counterintuitive notion, but it works. Yeah. This brings me to one of my favorite pieces of coaching advice that I will tell white belts while they're struggling on the mat. I'll tell them to relax harder. Okay. That's beautiful. For somebody who studied war, who participated in war, what do you think is the best martial arts for, let's call it self defense, let's call it self defense for hand to hand combat outside the constraints of sport. So it's not one answer. The answer to me is jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, judo, Sambo, and on down the list. I definitely start with jujitsu. The reason I start with jujitsu is because in a self defense situation, if you are a big monster human and you want to fight me and you square off with me, guess what I'm going to do? Run away. Cause I don't want, I don't want to get involved. Even if I see skinny little Lex out on the street and you start yelling at me and saying, you want to fight me? I don't want to fight you. I don't, it doesn't matter. I don't care if I can beat you or not. What if you stab me? What if you sue me after I get done throwing you onto the concrete? There's a million bad things that can happen and almost nothing good. So for self defense, my first self defense is my feet to get away from you. And if you square off to punch me, I can run away from you. If you square off to kick me, I can run away from you. If you push me, I can run away from you. So great. I don't need to know how to box to run away from you where this all changes is when you grab me. And now I don't have the option to run away anymore. Now I actually have to know how to get away from your grip. And that's where jujitsu comes into play. So, especially if you get me on the ground, if you, if you grab me and get me on the ground, now I need to know how to get you off of me and get up and get away from you so I can run away. So that's why I say start with jujitsu. And, and from there, boxing, wrestling, judo, Sambo, Muay Thai. Yeah. There's a, there's certain in the standing position. I mean, I'm a judo person as well. And, uh, the judo is very limited in their understanding of the full grappling spectrum, even though they do all the things on the ground as well. But, uh, it's so focused on the feet, but nevertheless, it's important to understand the thing that judo has as a sport and it's good to practice that, uh, jujitsu doesn't is, um, not just the, the skill of grappling on the feet, but the skill of explosive aggression that, uh, sometimes jujitsu is more about in terms of tactics is more about patience. It depends how you practice it, but because so much is, uh, about control and, uh, technique that, uh, sometimes you don't get to practice like aggression, explosive aggression. And judo is so much about, uh, aggression implemented in such a way that the demonstration of power is effortless, right? That's the beauty of jujitsu. Yeah. And same thing with wrestling. Wrestling also has a high level of intensity and aggression as well. Yes. Yeah. So that's where, that's where I agree. Judo and wrestling. Absolutely. Awesome. Get some and striking boxing Muay Thai. Yeah. You know, like the, you should train all these things. Are there books and movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you? Uh, yeah, the main one is about face, which is sitting right here. There you go. This is written by Colonel David Hackworth. That's the book that really had a massive impact on me from a leadership perspective. And I ended up, I talked about it enough that it started kind of coming back and started selling well and they contacted me and I wrote a forward for it. So that book had a huge impact on me and I still, when I read it, I still get lessons out of it just about every time. This is the Vietnam war. And Korea. And Korea. And he got in towards the end of, right at the end of world war II. So he was kind of raised by the, the soldiers that fought in world war II and then he went to Korea and then he went to Vietnam. An exceptional warrior, a soldier soldier. If you can give a little inkling what made him a soldier soldier. So I, he died in 2005 so I never got to meet him. And I, I had a guy on my podcast who worked for him in Vietnam, a guy named general James Mukiyama. And luckily his son had reached out to me and said, I think you're talking about my dad cause I read some passage in there that, that Jim Mukiyama was young cap young captain Jim Mukiyama, company commander in Vietnam. He said, I think you're talking about my dad. Would you want to talk to him? And I said, absolutely. Well, here's the thing that I didn't really understand. And you read one quote, but there's all these quotes in that book that talk about how great Hackworth was and what an incredible leader he was and how he was the best combat leader anyone had ever seen. And all these just really complimentary things that are said by a bunch of different people. And when you read the book, you're reading this guy's account of what he went through. But I never really knew if that was all true or did he just cherry pick his friends, quotes about him and cherry pick the stories that he wanted to tell. And so it was very interesting for me when I met Mukiyama, General Mukiyama, who he became a general eventually when I met him and we were talking about his life. And I was very curious and I was a little bit nervous going into this interview because I was thinking maybe my hero, my mentor, this guy that I've never met before, maybe he's just an arrogant jerk that talked, talked himself up in this book. So I'm sitting down with, with General Mukiyama and I finally got to the part where he's meeting Hackworth for the first time. And I said, did, you know, did you know who Hackworth was when he showed up? So he was Mukiyama, Muk, Muk, they call him Muk. Muk was the, was the, like the adjutant to the, to the general that, that was going to, that, that Hackworth was going to be working for. So when Hackworth comes into the office, the first person he meets is this guy, this guy, Captain Mukiyama. And so Hackworth walks in and I said, when Hackworth walked in, did you know who he was? And Mukiyama says, everybody knew who he was, Mr. Infantry. And so he ended up explaining that everything that is written in there about Hackworth, they, they just loved him. They adored him. Up the chain of command, it turned out a little bit different. And, you know, the title of the book is about face. And if you're familiar, familiar with military drill about faces, when you turn around 180 degrees, and at the end of the Vietnam war, towards the end of the Vietnam war, he was so disgusted with the way that the war was being fought. He was so disgusted with the decisions that were being made by the leadership that he did an interview. He was the first Colonel, first senior officer to do an interview that spoke out against the war that was happening. And this is while he's in Vietnam, by the way. So he got drummed out of the army, and he was forced to retire. And that was that. So there's an element of rebelliousness to him. And, you know, when you talk to me about, are there times when the leaders making the leadership, this absolute senior leadership, the civilian leadership is doing the wrong things? Yes. And there's times when people speak out against it. And there's an argument for and against that, too, even even with Hackworth. You know, did he when you get when you quit your job, or you do something that gets you fired, which is what he did, you immediately give up all your influence over what's happening. So they get another, they get another battalion commander to take his place, they get another colonel to step in and take his place. That's what they do. And now he can't help anymore. And he's like, and now he can't help anymore. He can't help his troops. But at that point in the war, he loved his men so much that he was sickened with the situation on the ground. And he, and he spoke out about it. So that book had a huge impact on me. And like I said, I still, I still read it all the time. I reread it all the time. And I always take lessons from it. But let me ask you about love. This is not usually associated with Jaco. But what role does love in terms of friendship, in terms of family play in a successful life? And life in general? Again, this is putting other people above yourself. Do you see that as love? That's ultimately the implementation of love? I would say yes. Jaco, I've been a huge fan of yours. You're somebody who inspires me to get up early, to get shit done, to be disciplined about my life, and to be the best leader I can be. It's really, truly an honor. And thank you for wasting all your too valuable time with me. I don't know what you were thinking, but thank you for doing it. Well, thanks for having me on. I can guarantee I'm not as cool as you just made me sound. I'm just out here, like I said, trying to help people out. And I think you're helping a lot of people out with your podcast. So thanks for having me up here to share some of my experiences. And hopefully I'll see you on the mat one day. For sure. Looking forward to it. Could be sooner than you think. Sounds like a threat. I love it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jaco Willink. And thank you to Linode, Indeed, SimpliSafe, and Ground News. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Jaco Willink. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Jocko Willink: War, Leadership, and Discipline | Lex Fridman Podcast #197

The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the Santa Fe Institute. She's interested in the origin of life, how to find life on other worlds, and in general, the more fundamental question of what even life is. She seeks to discover the universal laws that describe living systems on Earth and elsewhere using physics, biology, and computation. Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, NetSuite, Blinkist, and Magic Spoon. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that my hope for this podcast is to try and alternate between technical and nontechnical discussions, to jump from the big picture down to specific detailed research and back to the big picture, and to do so with scientists and non scientists. Long term, I hope to alternate between discussions of cutting edge research in AI, physics, biology, to topics of music, sport, and history, and then back to AI. AI is home. I hope you come along with me for that wild, oscillating journey. Some people message me saying to slow down since they're falling behind on the episodes of this podcast. To their disappointment, I have to say that I'll probably do more episodes, not less, but you really don't need to listen to every episode. Just listen to the ones that spark your curiosity. Think about it like a party full of strangers. You don't have to talk to everyone. Just walk over to the ones who look interesting and get to know them. And if you're lucky, that one conversation with a stranger might change the direction of your life. And it's a short life, so be picky with the strangers you talk to at this metaphorical party. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Sarah Walker. How did life originate on Earth? What are the various hypotheses for how life originated on Earth? Yeah, so I guess you're asking a historical question, which is always a good place to start thinking about life. So there's a lot of ideas about how life started on Earth. Probably the most popular is what's called the RNA world scenario. So this idea is probably the one that you'll see most reported in the news. And is based on the idea that there are molecules in our bodies that relay genetic information. And we know those as DNA, obviously, but there's also a sort of an intermediary called RNA, ribonucleic acid, that also plays the role of proteins. And people came up with this idea in the 80s that maybe that was the first genetic material because it could play both roles of being genetic and performing catalysis. And then somehow that idea got reduced to this idea that there was a molecule that emerged on early Earth and underwent Darwinian evolution, and that was the start of life. So there's a lot of assumptions packed in there that we could unpack, but that's sort of the leading hypothesis. There's also other ideas about life starting as metabolism. And so that's more connected to the geochemistry of early Earth. And it would be kind of more focused on this idea that you get some kind of catalytic cycle of molecules that can reproduce themselves and form some kind of metabolism. And then life starts basically a self organization. And then you have to explain how evolution comes later. Right, so that's the difference between sort of energy and genetic code. So like energy and information are those are the two kind of things there? Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. It's kind of funny, because I think most of the people that think about these things are really disciplinary bias. So the people that tend to think about genetics come from a biology background and they're really evolution focused. And so they're worried about where does the information come from? And how does it change over time? But they're talking about information in a really narrow way where they're talking about a genetic sequence. And then most of the people that think about metabolism, origins of life scenarios tend to be people like physicists or geochemists that are worried about what are the energy sources and what kinds of organization can you get out of those energy sources? Okay, so which one is your favorite? I don't like either. Okay, all right, can we talk about them for a little bit longer though? Yeah, no, that's fine. So okay, so there's early Earth. What was that like? Was there just mostly covered by oceans? Was there heat sources, energy sources? So if we talk about the metabolism view of the origin of life, like where was the source of energy? Probably the most popular view for where the origin of life happened on Earth is hydrothermal vents because they had sufficient energy. And so we don't really know a lot about early Earth. We have some ideas about when oceans first formed and things like that, but the time of the origin of life is kind of not well understood or pinned down and the conditions on Earth at that time are not well known. But a lot of people do think that there was probably hydrothermal vents which are really hot, chemically active regions, say on the seafloor in modern times, which also would have been present on early Earth. And they would have provided energy and organics and basically all of the right conditions for the origins of life, which is one of the reasons that we look for these hydrothermal systems when we're talking about life elsewhere too. Okay, and for the genetic code, the idea is that the RNA is the first, like why would RNA be the first moment you can say it's life? I guess the idea is it could both have persistent information and then it can also do some of the work of like what, creating a self sustaining organism? Yeah, that's the basic idea. So the idea is you have, in an RNA molecule, you have a sequence of characters, say, so you can treat it like a string in a computer and it can be copied. So information can be propagated, which is important for evolution because evolution happens by having inheritance of information. So for example, like my eyes are brown because my mother's eyes were brown. So you need that copying of information, but then you also have the ability to perform catalysis, which means that that RNA molecule is not inert in that environment, but it actually interacts with something and could potentially mediate, say, a metabolism that could then fuel the actual reproduction of that molecule. So in some ways, people think that RNA gives you the most bang for your buck in a single molecule and therefore, it gives you all the features that you might think are life. And so this is sort of where this RNA world conjecture came from is because of those two properties. Isn't it amazing that RNA came to be in general? Isn't it? Yes, that is amazing. Okay, so we're not talking down about RNA. No, no, I love RNA. It's one of my favorite molecules. I think it's beautiful. It's just not step one. Yeah, I think the issue, it's not even the RNA world is a problem and actually, if you really dig into it, the RNA world is not one hypothesis. It is a set of hypothesis, hypotheses, sorry. And they range from a molecule of RNA spontaneously emerged on the early Earth and started evolving, which is kind of like the hardest RNA world scenario, which is the one I cited and I get a little animated about because it seems so blatantly wrong to me, but that's a separate story. And then the other one is actually something I agree with, which is that you can say there was an RNA world because RNA was the first genetic material for life on Earth. So an RNA world could just be the earliest organisms that had genetics in a modern sense, didn't have DNA evolved yet, they had RNA, right? And so that's sort of a softer RNA world scenario in the sense that it doesn't mean it was the first thing that happened, but it was a thing that definitely was part of the lineage of events that led to us. So if a life was like a best of album, it would be on the, it'd be one of the songs on there. Yes. One of the early songs. Okay. It's on the greatest hits. Greatest hits, that's the word I was looking for. Okay. Did life, do you think, originate once, twice, three times on Earth, multiple times? What do you think? I think that's a really difficult question. Is it an important question? It's a super important question. No, it's a really important question. And so there's a lot of questions in that question. So one of the first ones that I think needs to be addressed is is the origin of life a continuous process on our planet? So we think about the origin of life as something that happened on Earth, say almost 4 billion years ago, because we have evidence of life emerging very early on our planet. And then an origin of life event, quote unquote, a singular event, whatever that was, happened. And then all life on Earth that we know is a descendant of that particular event in our universe, right? And so, but we don't have any idea one way or the other if the origin of life is happening repeatedly, and maybe it's just not taking off because life is already established. That's a argument that people will make, or maybe there are alternative forms of life on Earth that we don't even recognize. So this is the idea of a shadow biosphere that there actually might just be completely other life on Earth, but it's so alien that we don't even know what it is. I'm gonna have to talk to you about the shadow biosphere. Yeah, that's a fun one. In a second, but first, let me ask for the other alternative, which is panspermia. Right. So that's the idea, the hypothesis that life exists elsewhere in the universe and got to us through like an asteroid or a planetoid or some, according to Wikipedia, space dust, whatever the heck that is. It sounds fun. But basically, it rode along whatever kind of rock and got to us. Do you think that's at all a possibility? Sure. So I think the reason that most original life scientists are interested in the original life on Earth and say not the original life on Mars and then panspermia, the exchange of life between planets being the explanation is once you start removing the original life from Earth, you know even less about it than you do if you study it on Earth. Although, I think there are ways of reformulating the problem. This is why I said earlier, oh, you mean the historical original life problem. You don't mean the problem of how does life arise in the universe and what the universal principles are because there's this historic problem, how did it happen on early Earth? And there's a more tractable general problem of how does it happen? And how does it happen is something we can actually ask in the lab. How did it happen on early Earth is a much more detailed and nuanced question and requires detailed knowledge of what was happening on early Earth that we don't have. And I'm personally more interested in general mechanisms. So to me, it doesn't matter if it happened on Earth or it happened on Mars. It just matters that it happened. We have evidence it happened. The question is, did it happen more than once in our universe? And so the reason I don't find panspermia as a particularly, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis. I definitely think it's possible. And I in particular think it's possible once you get to the stage of life where you have technology because then you obviously can spread out into the cosmos. But it's also possible for microbes because we know that certain microorganisms can survive the journey in space. And they can live in a rock and go between Mars and Earth. Like people have done experiments to try to prove that could work. So in that scenario, it's super cool because then you get planetary exchange, but say we go look for life on Mars and it ends up being exactly the same life we have on Earth, biochemically speaking, then we haven't really discovered something new about the universe. What kind of aliens are possible were there other origin of life events? If we find, if all the life we ever find is the same origin of life event in the universe, it doesn't help me solve my problem. But it's possible that that would be a sign that you could separate the environment from the basic ingredients. Yes, that's true. So you can have like a life gun that you shoot throughout the universe. And then like once you shoot it, it's like the Simpsons with a makeup gun. That was a great episode. When you shoot this life gun, it'll find the Earth's, it'll like get sticky. It'll stick to the Earth's. And that kind of reduces the barrier of like the time it takes, the luck it takes to actually, from nothing, from the basic chemistry, from the basic physics of the universe for the life to spring up. Yeah, I think this is actually super important to just think about, like does life getting seated on a planet have to be geochemically compatible with that planet? So you're suggesting like we could just shoot guns in space and like life could go to Mars and then it would just live there and be happy there. But that's actually an open question. So one of the things I was gonna say in response to your question about whether the origin of life happened once or multiple times, is for me personally right now in my thinking, although this changes on a weekly basis, but is that I think of life more as a planetary phenomenon. So I think the origin of life because life is so intimately tied to planetary cycles and planetary processes, and this goes all the way back through the history of our planet, that the origin of life itself grew out of geochemistry and became coupled and controlled geochemistry. And when we start to talk about life existing on the planet is when we have evidence of life actually influencing properties of the planet. And so if life is a planetary property, then going to Mars is not a trivial thing because you basically have to make Mars more Earth like. And so in some sense, like when I think about sort of longterm vision of humans in space, for example, really what you're talking about when you're saying, let's send our civilization to Mars is you're not saying let's send our civilization to Mars, you're saying let's reproduce our planet on Mars. Like the information from our planet actually has to go to Mars and make Mars more Earth like, which means that you're now having a reproduction process, like a cell reproduces itself to propagate information in the future. Planets have to figure out how to reproduce their conditions, including geochemical conditions on other planets in order to actually reproduce life in the universe, which is kind of a little bit radical, but I think for longterm sustainability of life on a planet, that's absolutely essential. Okay, so if we were to think about life as a planetary phenomena, and so life on Mars would be best if it's way different than life on Earth, we have to ask the very basic question of what is life? I actually don't think that's the right question to ask. It took me a long time to get there, right? So I... Cross it out. Yeah, cross it off your list, it's wrong. Next question. No, no, no, I mean, I think it has an answer, but I think the part of the problem is, you know, most of the places in science where we get really stuck is because we don't know what questions to ask. And so you can't answer a question if you're asking the wrong question. And I think the way I think about it is obviously I'm interested in what life is. So I'm being a little cheeky when I say that's the wrong question to ask. That's exactly like the question that's like the core of my existence. But I think the way of framing that is what is it about our universe that allows features that we associate life to be there? And so really what I guess when I'm asking that question, what I'm after is an explanatory framework for what life is, right? And so most people, they try to go in and define life and they say, well, life is say, a self reproducing chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. That's a very popular definition for life. Or life is something that metabolizes and eats. That is not how I think about life. What I think about life is there are principles and laws that govern our universe that we don't understand yet, that have something to do with how information interacts with the physical world. I don't know exactly what I mean even when I say that, because we don't know these rules, but it's a little bit like, I like to use analogies. You give me time to be like a little long winded for a second, even in as I, but sort of like if you look at the history of physics, for example, this is like, so we are in the period of the development of thought on our planet where we don't understand what we are yet. Right? There was a period of thought in the history of our planet where we didn't understand what gravity was. And we didn't understand, for example, that planets in the heavens were actually planets or that they operated by the same laws that we did. And so there has been this sort of progression of getting a deeper understanding of explaining basic phenomena. Like, I'm not gonna drop the cup. I'll drop the water bottle. There you go. Okay, that fell, right? But why did that fall? This is why I'm a theorist, not an experimentalist. That could have gone wrong in so many ways. I know, it could have, especially if I did the cup and it smashed. So if you take this view that there's sort of some missing principles, I associate them to information. And what the sort of feeling there is, there's some missing explanatory framework for how our universe works. And if we understood that physics, it would explain what we are. It might also explain a lot of other features we don't associate to life. And so it's a little like people accept the fact that gravity is a universal phenomena. But when we wanna study gravity, we study things like large scale, galactic structures or black holes or planets. If we wanna understand information and how it operates in the physical world, we study intelligent systems or living systems because they are the manifestation of that physics. And the fact that we can't see that clearly yet, or we don't have that explanatory framework, I think it's just because we haven't been thinking about the problem deeply enough. But I feel like if you're explaining something, you're deriving it from some more fundamental property. And of course, I have to say I'm wearing my physicist hat. So I have a huge bias of liking simple, elegant explanations of the universe that really are compelling. But I think one of the things that I've sort of maybe in some ways rejected my training as a physicist is that most of the elegant explanations that we have so far don't include us in the universe. And I can't help but think there's something really special about what we are. And there have to be some deep principles at play there. And so that's sort of my perspective on it. Now, when you ask me what life is, I have some ideas of what I think it is, but I think that we haven't gotten there yet because we haven't been able to see that structure. And just to go back to the gravity example, it's a little like in ancient times, they didn't know, I was talking about stars and heavens and things. They didn't know those were governed by the same principles as that darned experiment. Here's where I was going with it. Once you realize, like Newton did, that heavenly motions and earthly motions are governed by the same principles and you unify terrestrial and celestial motion, you get these more powerful ideas. And I think where life is is somehow unifying these abstract ideas of computation and information with the physical world, with matter, and realizing that there's some explanatory framework that's not physics and it's not computation, but it's something that's deeper. So answering the question of what is life requires deeply understanding something about the universe as information processing, the universe is computation. Sort of. It's something about, like would, once you come up with an answer to what is life, will the words information and computation be in the paragraph that answer? No, I don't think so. Oh, damn it, okay. I know, it doesn't help, does it? I know, I hate, actually I hate this about what I do because it's so hard to communicate, right, with words. Like when you have words that are ideas that have historically described one thing and you're trying to describe something people haven't seen yet, and the words just don't fit. So what's wrong, is it too ambiguous, the word information? We could switch to binary if you want. Yeah, no, I don't think it's binary either. I think information's just loaded. I use it, so the other way I might talk about it is the physics of causation, but I think that's worse because causation is even more loaded word than information. So causation is fundamental, you think? I do, yeah, and in some sense, I think the physics, so this is the really radical part, some sense, like when I really think about it sort of most deeply, what I think life is is actually the physics of existence, what gets to exist and why. And for simple elementary particles, that's not very complicated because the interactions are simple, but for things like you and me and human civilizations, what comes next in the universe is really dependent on what came before, and there's a huge space of possibilities of things that can exist. And when I say information and causation, what I mean is why is it that cups evolved in the universe and not some other object that could deliver water and not spill it? I don't know what you would call it. Maybe it wouldn't be a cup, but it's a huge, people talk about the space of things that could exist as being actually infinitely large, right? I don't know if I believe in infinity, but I do think that there is something very interesting about the problem of what exists in its relationship to life. So do you think the set of things that could exist is finite? It's very large, but if we were to think about the physics of existence, how many shapes of mugs can there be? In the initial programming. I should go to the math department for that. So that's not a topology question. I just mean, maybe another way to ask is what do you think is fundamental to the universe and what is emergent? So if existence, are we supposed to think of that as somehow fundamental, you think? So there's a couple of problems in physics that I think this is related to. One is why does mathematics work at describing reality so well? And then there is this problem of we don't understand why the laws of physics are the way they are, or why certain things get to exist, or what put in place the initial condition of our universe. There's all of these sort of really deep and big problems, and they all indirectly are related, I think, to the same kind of thing that, our physics is really good if you specify the initial condition at specifying a certain sequence of events, but it doesn't deal with the fact that other things could have happened, which is kind of an informational property, like a counterfactual property. And it's not good at explaining this conversation right now. There are certain things that are outside the explanatory reach of current physics, and I think they require looking at it from a completely different direction. And so I don't wanna have to fine tune the initial condition of the universe to specify precisely all the information in this conversation. I think that's a ridiculous assertion. But that's sort of like how people wanna frame it when they talk about the standard model is sufficient if we had computing power to basically explain all of life in our existence. An interesting thing you said is the way we think about information computation is by observing a particular kind of systems on Earth that exhibit something we think of as intelligence. But that's like looking at, I guess, the tip of an iceberg, and we should be really looking at the fundamentals of the iceberg, like what makes water and ice and the chemistry from which intelligence emerges, essentially. Yes, yes. We can't just couple the information from the physics, and I think that's what we've gotten really good at doing, especially with sort of the modern age where software is so abstracted from hardware. But the entire process of biological evolution has basically been built, like been building layers of increasing abstraction. And so it's really hard to see that physics in us, but it's much clearer to see it in molecules. Yeah, but I guess I'm trying to figure out what do you think are the best tools to look at it? What do you think? An open mind? Is that a tool? What's the physics of an open mind? I think if we solve that, we'll solve everything. I'm saying an open mind because I think the biggest stumbling block to understanding sort of the things I've been trying to articulate, and when I talk also with colleagues that are thinking deeply about these same issues, is none of it is inconsistent with what we know. It's just such a radically different perception of the way we understand things now that it's hard for people to get there. And in some ways you have to almost forget what you've learned in order to learn something new, right? So I feel like most of my career trying to understand the problem of life has been variously forgetting and then relearning things that I learned in physics. And I think you have to have a capacity to learn things, but then accept that things that you learned might not be true or might need refinement or reframing. And the best way I can say that is just like with a physics education, there are just certain things you're told in undergrad that are like facts about the world. And your physics professors never tell you that those facts actually emerge from a human mind, right? So we're taught to think about, say the laws of physics, for example, as this like autonomous thing that exists outside of our universe and tells our universe how it works. But the laws of physics were invented by human minds to describe things that are regularities in our everyday experience. They don't exist autonomous to the universe. Right, so it's like turtles on top of turtles, but eventually it gets to the human mind, and then you have to explain the human mind with the turtles. So you have to, it comes from humans, this understanding, this simplification of the universe, these models. There's a guy named Stephen Wolfram. There's a concept called cellular automata. So there's some mysteries in these systems that are computational in nature that have maybe echoes of the kind of mysteries we should need to solve to understand what is life. So if we could talk, take a computational view of things, do you think there's something compelling to reducing everything down to computation, like the universe is computation, and then trying to understand life? So throw away the biology, throw away the chemistry, throw away even the physics that you learn undergrad and graduate school, and more look at these simple little systems, whether it's cellular automata or whatever the heck kind of computational systems that operate on simple local rules and then create complexity as they evolve. Is it at all, do you think, productive to focus on those kinds of systems to get an inkling of what is life? And if it is, do you think it's possible to come up with some kind of laws and principles about what makes life in those computational systems? So I like cellular automata. I think they're good toy models, but mostly where I've thought about them and used them is to actually, let's say, poke at sort of the current conceptual framework that we have and see where the flaws are. So I think the part that you're talking about that people find intriguing is that if you have a fairly simple rule and you specify some initial condition and you run that rule on that initial condition, you could get really complex patterns emerging. And ooh, doesn't that look lifelike? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like really surprising, isn't it really surprising? It is really surprising, and they're beautiful. And I think they have a lot of nice features associated to them. I think the things that I find, yeah, so I do think as a proof of principle that you can get complex things emerging from simple rules. They're great. As a sort of proof of principle about some of the ways that we might think of computation as being sort of a fundamental principle for dynamical systems and maybe the evolution of the universe as a whole, they're a great model system. As an explanatory framework for life, I think they're a bit problematic for the same reason that the laws of physics are a bit problematic. And the clearest way I can articulate that is like cellular automata are actually cast in sort of a conceptual framework for how the universe should be described that goes all the way back to Newton, in fact, with this idea that we can have a fixed law of motion, which exists sort of, it's given to you. The great programmer in the sky gave you this equation or this rule, and then you just run with it. And the rule doesn't have, so a good feature of the rule is it doesn't have specified in the rule information about the patterns it generates. So you wouldn't want, for example, my cup or my water bottle or me sitting here to be specified in the laws of physics. That would be ridiculous because it wouldn't be a very simple explanation of all the things happening. It'd have to explain everything. So, and cellular automata have that feature and the laws of physics have that feature. But you also need to specify the initial condition. And it also, it basically means that everything that happens is sort of a consequence of that initial condition. And I think this kind of framework is just not the right one for biology. And part of the way that it's easiest to see this is a lot of people talk about self reference being important in life. The fact that, you know, like the genome has information encoded in it, that information gets read out. It specifies something about the architecture of a cell. The architecture of the cell includes the genome. So the genome has basically self referential information. Self reference obviously comes up in computational law because it's kind of foundational to Turing's work and what Gödel did with the incompleteness theorems and things. So there's a lot of parallels there and people have talked about that at depth. But the other way of kind of thinking about it in terms of like a more physicsy way of talking about it is that what it looks like in biology is that the rules or the laws depend on the state. This is typical in computer science. This is obvious to you. You know, the update rule depends on the state of the machine, right? But, you know, you don't think about, you know, that being sort of the dynamic in physics. It's, you know, the rules given to you and then it's a very special subclass say of computations if, you know, you don't ever change the update. But in biology, it seems to be that the state and the law change together as a function of time and we don't have that as a paradigm in physics. And so a lot of people talk about this as being kind of a perplexing feature that maybe there are certain scenarios where the laws of physics or the laws that govern a particular system actually change as a function of the state of that system. That's trippy. Yeah. So yeah, the hope of physics, it's a hope, I guess, but often stated as a underlying assumption is that the law is static. Right. Okay. And even having laws that vary in time and not even as a function of the state is very radical. When you... The time in general, like you wanna remove time from the equation as much as possible. Yeah, I do. There's some interesting things in this like when we think sort of more deeply about the actual physics that we're trying to propose governs life with me with collaborators and then also other people that think about similar things that time might actually be fundamental and there really is an ordering to time. And that events in the universe are unique because they have a particular, they happen, like an object in the universe requires a certain history of events in order to exist, which therefore suggests that time really does have an ordering. I'm not talking about the flow of time and our perception of time, just the ordering of events. Causation of things. Yes, causation, there's that word again. So causation, that's when you say time, you mean causation. Yes. In your proposed model of the physics of life, the fundamental thing would be causation. If you were to bet your money on one particular horse or whatever. Yes. And then space is emergent. Yes. So everything's emergent except time. Kind of, yeah, or causation. And laws change all the time. Why does it look like laws are the same? Laws, well, because, well, one way, and I actually, this idea comes from Lee Cronin because I work with him very closely on these things, is that the laws of physics look the way they do because they're low memory laws. So they don't require a lot of information to specify them. They're very easy for the universe to implement. But if you get something like me, for example, I require 4 billion year history to exist in the universe. I come with a lot of historical baggage. And that's part of what I am as a set of causes that exist in the universe. So I have local rules that apply to me that are associated with sort of the information in my history that aren't universal to every object in the universe. And there are some things that are very easy to implement low memory rules that apply to everything in the universe. So there's no shortcuts to you. No, so yeah, I don't believe in things like Boltzmann brains or fluctuations out of the vacuum that can produce things like your desk ornaments. I actually think they require a particular causal chain of events to exist. Well, I appreciate the togetherness of that, but so how does that, if we have to simulate the entire universe to create the ornaments in the two of us, how are we supposed to create engineer life in the lab? This goes back to sort of the critique of the RNA world. I think one of the problems, and I'll get to answer your question, but I think this is kind of relevant here. One of the problems with the RNA world, when we test it in the laboratory, is how much information we're putting into the experiment. We specify the flasks, we make pure reagents, we mix them, we take them out, we put them in the next flask, we change the pH, we change the UV light, and then we get a molecule, and it's not even an RNA molecule necessarily, it might just be a base, right? And so people don't usually think about the fact that we're agents in the universe making that experiment, and therefore we put a little bit of life into that experiment, because it's part of our biological lineage, in the same sense that I am a part of the biological lineage. The experiment is. I mean, our ideas are injecting life. Yes. And the constraints that we put on the experiments, because those conditions wouldn't exist in the universe on planet Earth at that time without us as the boundary condition, right? So. Even though we're not actually adding any actual chemistry or biology that could be identified as life, are the constraints we're adding to the experiment, the design of the experiment. Yeah, you can think of the design experiment as a program. You put information in. It's an algorithmic procedure that you design the experiment. And so the origin of life problem becomes one of minimizing the information we put into physics to actually watch the spontaneous origin of life. Can we have, so can, is it possible in the lab to have an information vacuum then? So like. If we could, we would, that would be amazing. I don't know. That's a good question for, more for Lee. Yeah, you guys, by the way, for people who don't know, Lee Cronin is, you guys are colleagues. Yeah. I've gotten the chance to listen to the two of you talking. There's great sort of chemistry and you're brilliant brainstorming together. And there's a really exciting community here of brilliant people from different disciplines working on the problem of life, of complexity, of, I don't know, whatever. The words fail us to describe the exact problem we're trying to actually understand here. Intelligence, all those kinds of things. Okay, so what, from a lab perspective, so Lee, I guess, would you call him a chemist? No? I think by training he's a chemist, but I think most of the people that work in the field, we do have lost their discipline. That's why I couldn't answer your question earlier. Okay. I don't know what you call him. Yeah. I don't know what I call myself. I don't know what I call any of my friends. So why is it so hard to create, and it's an interesting question, to create biological life in the lab. Like from your perspective, is that an important problem to work on to try to recreate the historical origin of life on Earth or echoes of the historical origin? I think echoes is more appropriate. I don't think asking the question of what was the exact historical sequence of events and engineering every step in the process to make exactly the chemistry of life on Earth as we know it is a meaningful way of asking the question. And it's a little bit like, since you're in computer science, like if you know the answer to a problem, it's easier to find a program to specify the output, right? But if you don't know the answer a priori, finding an algorithm for it, like say finding a prime or something, it's easy to verify it's a prime number. It's hard to find the next prime. And the way the origin of life is structured right now in the historical problem is you know the answer and you're trying to retrodict it by breaking it down into the set of procedures where you're putting a lot of information in. And what we need to do is ask the question of how is it that the rules of how our universe is structured permit things like life to exist and what is the phenomena of life? And those questions are obviously essentially the same question. And so you're looking essentially for this missing physics, this missing explanation for what we are, and you need to set up proper experiments that are gonna allow you to probe the vast complexity of chemistry in an unconstrained way with as little information put in as possible to see when things, when does information actually emerge? How does it emerge? What is it? And part of the sort of conjecture we have is that this physics only becomes relevant or at least this is my personal conjecture and it's sort of validated by this kind of theory experiment collaboration that we have working in this area that this, you know, sort of, I made the point about like gravity existing everywhere, right? But when you study an atomic nucleus, you don't care about gravity. It's not relevant physics there, right? It's weak, it doesn't matter. And so this idea that there's kind of a physics associated with information, for me, it's very evident that that physics doesn't become relevant until you need information to specify the existence of a particular object. And the scale of reality where that happens is in chemistry because of the combinatorial diversity of chemical objects that can exist far out, exceeds the amount of resources in our universe. So if you want it, you can't make every possible protein of length, you know, 200 amino acids, there's not enough resources. So in order for this particular protein to exist and this protein to exist in high abundance means that you have to have a system that has knowledge of the existence of that protein and can build it. So existence comes to be at the chemical level. So existence is most, is best understood at the chemical level. It's most evident. It's a little bit like, nobody argues that gravity doesn't exist in an atomic nucleus. It's just not relevant physics there, right? So the physics of information. Is everywhere. It exists at every combinatorial scale, but it becomes more and more relevant the more set of possibilities that could exist because you have to specify more and more about why this thing exists and not the infinite. It's not an infinite set, but you know, the set of undefined set of other things that could exist. So can I ask a weird question, which is, so let's look into the future. I try that every day. It never works. So say a Nobel prize is given in physics, maybe chemistry for discovering the origin of life. No, but not the historical origin. Some kind of thing that we're talking about. What exactly would, what do you think that, like, what do you think that person, maybe you did to get that Nobel prize? Like what would they have to have done? Cause you can do a bunch of experiments that go like within the aha moment. Like you rarely get the Nobel prize for like, you've solved everything, we're done. It's like some inkling of some deep truth. Like what do you think that would actually look like? Would it be an experimental result? I mean, it will have to have some kind of experimental, maybe validation component. So what would that look like? This is an excellent question. I want to, sorry, I'm going to make a quick point, which is just a slight tangent. But you know, like when people ask about the origin of mass, and like looking for the Higgs mechanism and things, they never are like, we need to find the historical origins of life in the early unit. Although those things are related, right? So this problem of origins of life in the lab, I think is really important. But the Higgs is a good example because you had theory to guide it. So somehow you need to have an explanatory framework that can say that we should be looking for these features and explain why they might be there and then be able to do the experiment and demonstrate that it matches with the theory. But it has to be something that is outside sort of the paradigm of what we might expect based on what we know, right? So this is a really sort of tall order. And I think, I mean, I guess the way people would think about it is like, you know, if you had a bacteria that climbed out of your test tube or something, and it was like, you know, moving around on the surface, that would be ultimate validation. You saw the origin of life in an experiment, but I don't think that's quite what we're looking for. I think what we're looking for is evidence of when information that originated within the bounds of your experiment and you can demonstrably prove emerged spontaneously in your experiment, wasn't put in by you, actually started to govern the future dynamics of that system and specify it. And you could somehow relate those two features directly. So you know that the program specifying what's happening in that system is actually internal to that system. Like say you have a chemical thing in a box. Well, so that's one Nobel Prize winning experiment, which is like information in some fundamental way originated within the constraints of the system without you injecting anything. But another experiment is you injected something. Yeah. And got out information. Yes. So like you injected, I don't know, like some sugar and like something that doesn't necessarily feel like it should be information. Yeah, so I actually know, I mean, sugar is information, right? So part of the argument here is that every physical object is, well, it's information, but it's a set of causal histories and also a set of possible futures. So there is an experiment that I've talked a lot about with Lee Cronin, but also with Michael Lockman and Chris Kempis who are at Santa Fe about this idea that sometimes we talk about as like seeding assembly, which is you take a high complexity, like an object that exists in the universe because of a long causal history, and you seed it into a system of lower causal history. And then suddenly you see all of this complexity being generated. So I think another validation of the physics would be, say you engineer an organism by purposefully introducing something where you understand the relationship between the causal history of the organism and the say very complex chemical set of ingredients you're adding to it. And then you can predict the future evolution of that system to some statistical set of constraints and possibilities for what it will look like in the future. I'm a physical structure, obviously, like I'm composed of atoms, the configuration of them and the fact that they happen to be me is because I'm not actually my atoms, I am a informational pattern that keeps re patterning those atoms into Sarah. And I have also associated to me like a space of possible things that could exist that I can help mediate come into existence because of the information in my history. And so when you understand sort of that time is a real thing embedded in a physical object, then it becomes possible to talk about how histories when they interact and a history is not a unique thing, it's a set of possibilities. When they interact, how do they specify what's coming next? And then where does the novelty come from in that structure? Cause some of it is kind of things that haven't existed in the past can exist in the future. Let me ask about this entity that you call Sarah. Yes. I talk to myself about myself in third person sometimes. I don't know why. So maybe this is a good time to bring up consciousness. Sure. It's been here all along. Well, has it? So, I mean that's. At least in this conversation, I think I've been conscious most of it, but maybe I haven't. Well, yes. So speak for yourself. You're projecting your consciousness onto me. You don't know if I'm conscious or not. No, I don't. You're right. Is that, you talked about the physics of existence, you talked about the emergence of causality, sorry, you talked about causality and time being fundamental to the universe. Where does consciousness fit into all of this? Like, do you draw any kind of inspiration or value with the idea of panpsychism that maybe one of the things that we ought to understand is the physics of consciousness? Like one of the missing pieces in the physics view of the world is understanding the physics of consciousness. Or like that word has so many concepts underneath it, but let's put consciousness as a label on a black box of mystery that we don't understand. Do you think that black box holds the key to finally answering the question of the physics of life? The problems are absolutely related. I think most, and I'm interested in both because I'm just interested in what we are. And to me, the most interesting feature of what we are is our minds and the way they interact with our minds. Like minds are the most beautiful thing that exists in the universe. So how do they come to be? Sorry to interrupt. So when you say we, you mean humans. I mean humans right now, but that's because I'm a human. Or at least I think I am. But you think there's something special to this particular? No, no, no, no, no. No, I'm not a human centric thinker. But are you one entity? You said a bunch of stuff came together to make a Sarah. Like do you think of yourself as one entity or are you just a bunch of different components? Like is there any value to understand the physics of Sarah? Or are you just a bunch of different things that are like a nice little temporary side effect? Yeah, you could think of me as a bundle of information that just became temporarily aggregated into your individual, yeah. That's fine. I agree with that view. I'll take that as a compliment actually. But nevertheless, that bundle of information has become conscious. Or at least keeps calling herself conscious. Yeah, I think I'm conscious right now, but I might not be, but that's okay. Or you wouldn't know. So yeah, so this is the problem. So yeah, usually people when they're talking about consciousness are worried about the subjective experience. And so I think that's why you're saying, I don't know if you're conscious because I don't know if you're experiencing this conversation right now. And nor do you know if I'm experiencing the conversation right now. And so this is why this is called the hard problem of consciousness because it seems impenetrable from the outside to know if something's having a conscious experience. And I really like the idea of also like the hard problem of matter, which is related to the hard problem of consciousness, which is you don't know the intrinsic properties of an electron not interacting, say for example, with anything else in the universe. All the properties of anything that exists in the universe are defined by its interaction because you have to interact with it in order to be able to observe it. So we can only actually know the things that are observable from the outside. And so this is one of the reasons that consciousness is hard for science because you're asking questions about something that's subjective and supposed to be intrinsic to what that thing is as it exists and how it feels about existing. And so I have thought a lot about this problem and its relationship to the problem of life. And the only thing I can come up with to try to make that problem scientifically tractable and also relate it to how I think about the physics of life is to ask the question, are there things that can only happen in the universe because there are physical systems that have subjective experience? So does subjective experience have different causes that things that it can cause to occur that would happen in the absence of that? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think that's a meaningful way of asking the question of consciousness. I can't ask if you're having experience right now, but I can ask if you having experience right now changes something about you and the way you interact with the world. So does stuff happen? It's a good question to ask, does stuff happen if consciousness is? Then it's a real physical thing, right? It has physical consequences. I'm a physicist, I'm biased, so I can't get rid of that bias. It's really deeply ingrained. I've tried, but it's hard. But I mean, you're saying information is physical too. So like virtual reality, simulation, all that program is physical too in the sense of. Yes, everything's physical. It's just not physical the way it's represented in our minds. Right, so you, I love your Twitter. So you tweet these like deep thoughts, deep thoughts. That's what a theorist does when she's trying to experiment. Is tweet? Yes. It's just like sitting there. I mean, I could just imagine you sitting there for like hours and all of a sudden just like this thought comes out and you get a little like inkling into the thought process. Yeah, usually it's like when I'm running between things and not so much when I've had deep thoughts. Well, yeah, so you. Deep thoughts are hard to articulate. One of the things you tweeted is, ideologically, there are many parallels between the search for neural correlates of consciousness and for chemical correlates of life. How the neuroscience and astrobiology communities treat those correlates is entirely different. Can you elaborate against this kind of the parallels? It has to do a little bit with the consciousness and the matter thing you're talking about. Yeah, it does. And I can't remember what state of mind I was when I was actually thinking about that. But I think part of it is. I bet you never thought you were gonna have to analyze your own tweets. No, I didn't. It's an interesting historical juxtaposition of thinking. So the tweet is a historical. You're doing an assembly experiment right now because you're bringing a thought from the past into the present and trying to actually. In a lab. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is experimental science right here on the podcast live. So go, let's see how the consciousness evolves on this one. Yeah, so in neuroscience, it's kind of accepted that we can't get at the subjective aspect of consciousness. So people are very interested in what would be a correlate of consciousness. So. What's a correlate? A correlate is a feature that relates to conscious activity. So for example, a verbal report is a correlate of consciousness because I can tell you when I'm conscious. And then when I'm sleeping, for example, I can't tell you I'm conscious. So we have this assumption that you're not conscious when you're sleeping and you're conscious when you're awake. And so that's sort of like a very obvious example, but neuroscientists, which I'm no neuroscientist and I'm not an expert in this field. So, but they have very sophisticated ways of measuring activity in our brain and trying to relate that to verbal report and other proxies for whether someone is experiencing something. And that's what is meant by neural correlates. And then, so when people are trying to think about studying consciousness or developing theories for consciousness, they often are trying to build an experimental bridge to these neural correlates, recognizing the fact that a neural correlate may or may not correspond to consciousness because that problem's hard and there's all these associated issues to it. So that's, from a neuroscience perspective, it's like fake it till you make it. So you. Pretty much, yeah. You fake whatever the correlates are and hopefully that's going to summon the thing that is consciousness. Yeah, something like that. And so the same thing on the chemical correlates of life. That sounds like, that's an awesome concept. Is that something that people? No, I just made that up. Okay. That was original to that tweet. You can cite the tweet. Maybe I'll write it in a paper someday. Chemical correlates of life, that's a good title. I mean, first of all, your paper is true that people should check out, have great titles. Thank you. Or papers you're involved with. So your tweets and titles are stellar and also your ideas, but the tweets and titles are much more important. Of course. So. Ideas will live longer. Yeah. They're much more diffused though. Well, it's, yeah, it's the Trojan, the tweet is the Trojan horse of the idea that sticks on for a long time. Okay, so is there anything to say about the chemical correlates of life? You're saying they're similar kind of ways of thinking about it, but you mentioned about the communities. Yeah, so I think in astrobiology, it's not, there's no concept of chemical correlates of life. We don't think about it that way. We think if we find molecules that are involved in biology, we found life. So I think one of my motivations there was just to separate the fact that life has abstract properties associated to it. They become imprinted in material substrates and those substrates are correlates for that thing, but they are not necessarily the thing we're actually looking for. The thing that we're looking for is the physics that's organizing that system to begin with, not the particular molecules. In the same sense that, you know, your consciousness is not your brain. It's instantiated in your brain. You know, it has to have a physical substrate, but it's not, the matter is not the thing that you're looking at. It's some other, at least not in the way that we have come to look at matter, you know, with traditional physics and things. There's something else there and it might be this feature of history I was talking about, our time being actually, you know, physically represented there. Do you think consciousness can be engineered? Yes. In the same way that life can be engineered? Well, that was a fast answer. I didn't even think about that. That's interesting. You don't have a free will. That was predestined. No, I do have free will, but it's interesting, because I mean, you know, Now you're backtracking. No, no. And that was predestined. Yeah, no, no. No, I do believe in free will, but I also think that there's kind of an interesting, you know, like what you're speaking about consciousness. What are you consciously aware of versus like what is your subconscious brain actually processing and doing? And sometimes there's conflict between your consciousness and your subconsciousness or your consciousness is a little slower than your subconscious. And intuition is a really important feature of that. And so a lot of the ways I do my science is guided by intuition. So when I give fast answers like that, I think it's usually because I haven't really thought about them and therefore that's probably telling me something. Let's continue the deep analysis of your tweets. You said that determinism in a tweet, determinism and randomness play important roles in understanding what life is. So let me ask on this topic of free will, what is determinism, what is randomness and why the heck do they have anything to do with understanding life? Yeah, and you threw free will in there, just throwing all the stuff in the bag. Are they not related, determinism and randomness? No, no, they are related. No, no, that's all right. I was being unfair. You didn't even capitalize the tweet, by the way. It was all lowercase. I must've been angry. Oh, that was saying, can you analyze the emotion behind that? No, I actually did. Is it frustration or is it hope? Yeah, maybe. So I already argued that I don't think that can happen without that whole causal history. And so I guess in some sense, the determinism for me arises because of the causal history. And I'm not really sure actually about whether the universe is random or deterministic. I just had this sort of intuition for a long time. I'm not sure if I agree with it anymore, but it's still kind of lingering and I don't know what to do with this question. But it seems to me, you know, so you asked the question, what is life? But you could also, why life? Why does life exist? What does the universe need life for? Not that the universe has needs, but you know, we have to anthropocentrize things sometimes to talk about them. And I had this feeling that if it was possible for a cup or a desk ornament or a phone on Mars to spontaneously fluctuate into existence, the universe didn't need life to create those objects. It wasn't necessary for their existence. It was just a random fluke event. And so somehow to me, it seems that it can't be that those things formed by random processes, they actually have to have a set of causes that accrue and form those things and they have to have that history. And so it seems to me that that life was somehow deeply related to the question of whether the underlying rules of our universe had randomness in them or they were fully deterministic. And in some ways you can think about life as being the most deterministic part of physics because it's where the causes are precise in some sense. Or most stable. So like I'm trying... Most stable, yes, most reliable. Most reliable for the tools of physics. But where's the randomness come from then? Okay, so you were speaking with... I've gone in a tangent, so I'm not sure where we are in the... Yeah. All of the universe is a kind of tangent. So we're embracing the tangent. So free will, you believe at this current time that you have free will. I believe my whole life I have free will. What is illusion? No, just kidding. I still believe it. You still believe it. So at the same time you think that in your conception of the universe, causality seems to be pretty fundamental. That's right. Which kind of wants the universe to be deterministic. So how the heck do you think you have a free will and yet you value causality? Because I depart from the conception of physics that you can write down an initial condition and a fixed law of motion and that will describe everything. There's no incompatibility if you are willing to reject that assertion. So where's the randomness? Where's the magic that gives birth to the free will? Is it the randomness of the laws of physics? No, in my mind what free will is, is the fact that I as a physical system have causal control over certain things. I don't have causal control over everything, but I have a certain set of things. And I'm also, as I described, sort of a nexus of a particular set of histories that exist in the universe and a particular set of futures that might exist. And those futures that might exist are in part specified by my physical configuration as me. And therefore, it may not be free will in the traditional sense. I don't even know what people mean when they're talking about free will, honestly. It's like the whole discussion's really muddled. But in the sense that I am a causal agent, if you wanna call it that, that exists in the universe, and there are certain things that happen because I exist as me, then yes, I have free will. No, but do you, Sarah, have a choice about what's going to happen next? Oh, I see. If the universe, could I have, if I run this universe. Yes, I think so. You have a choice. Where does the choice come from? I think that's related to the physics of consciousness. So one of the things I didn't say about that, I don't know, maybe this is me just being hopeful because maybe I just wanna have free will, but I don't think that we can rule out the possibility because I don't think that we understand enough about any of these problems. But I think one of the things that's interesting for me about the sort of inversion of the question of consciousness that I proposed is one of the features that we do is we have imagination, right? And people don't think about imagination as a physical thing, but it is a physical thing. It exists in the universe, right? And so I'm like really intrigued by the fact that say, humans for, another physical system could do this too, it's not special to humans, but for centuries imagined flying machines and rockets, and then we finally built them, right? So they were represented in our minds and on the pages of things that we drew for hundreds of years before we could build those physical objects in the universe. But certainly the existence of rockets is in part causally, caused by the fact that we could imagine them. And so there seems to be this property that some things don't exist, they've never physically existed in the universe, but we can imagine the possibility of them existing and then cause them to exist, maybe individually or collectively. And I think that property is related to what I would say about having choice or free will, because that set of possibilities, those set of things that you can imagine is not constrained to your local physical environment and history. And this is what's a little bit different about intelligence as we see it in humans and AI that we wanna build than biological intelligence, because biological intelligence is predicated completely on the history of things that's seen in the past, but something happened with the neural architectures that evolved in multicellular organisms that they don't just have access to the past history of their particular set of events, but they can imagine things that haven't happened, aren't on their timeline, and as long as they're consistent with the laws of physics, make them happen. So this is fascinating. It's trippy physics, but it exists, so there you go. I mean, in some sense, if you look at like general relativity and gravity morphing space time in that same way, maybe whatever the physics of consciousness might be, it might be morphing, that's like what free will is. It's morphing like the space, just like ideas make rockets come to life. It's somehow changing the space of possible realizations of like whatever's, yeah, okay, but that's. Life is kind of basically, if you wanna think about it, like life is sort of changing the probability distributions over what can exist. That's the physics of what life is. And then consciousness is this sort of layered property or imagination on top of it that kind of scrambles that a little bit more and like has access to, I don't know. It's kind of, we don't know how to describe it, right? Like that's why it's interesting, but. But it's probabilistic. So you do think like God plays dice. So let me. No, I think the description is probabilistic. I don't necessarily think the underlying physics is probabilistic. I think the way that we can describe this physics is going to be probabilistic and statistical, but the under, like when we take measurements in the lab, but the underlying physics itself might still be deterministic. I don't know. Maybe I'm, it's hard to know what concepts to hold on to. So I find myself constantly rejecting concepts, but then I have to grab another one and try to hold onto something from intellectual history. Well, it's possible that our mind is not able to hold the correct concepts in mind at all. Like we're not able to even conceive of them correctly. Maybe the word's deterministic or random or not the right even words, concepts to be holding. But maybe you can talk to the theory of everything, this attempt in the current set of physical laws to try to unify them. Is there any hope that once a theory of everything is developed, and by theory of everything, I mean in a narrow sense of unifying quantum field theory and general relativity, do you think that will contain some, like in order to do that unification, you would have to get something that would then give hints about the physics of life, physics of existence, physics of consciousness. Yeah, I used to not, but I actually, I have become increasingly convinced that it probably will. And part of the reason is, I think I've talked a little bit already about these holes in physics, like the theories we have in physics, they have problems, they have lots of problems and they're very deep problems and we don't know how to patch them. And some of those problems become very evident when you try to patch quantum mechanics and general relativity together. So there is this kind of interesting feature that some of the ways of patching that might actually closely resemble the physics of life. And so the place where that actually comes up most, and actually we just had a workshop in the Beyond Center where I work at Arizona State University, and Lee Smolin made this point that he thinks that the theory of quantum gravity when we solve it is gonna be the same theory that gives rise to life. And I think that I agree with him on some levels because there's something very interesting where, if you look at these sort of causal set theories of gravity where they're looking for space as being emergent. And so space time is an emergent concept from a causal set, which is also sort of related, I think, to what Wolfram's doing with his physics project. It's the same kind of underlying math that we have in this theory that we've been developing related to life called assembly theory, which is basically trying to look at complex objects like molecules and bacteria and living things as basically being assembled from a set of component parts and that they actually encode all the possible histories that they could have in that physical object. So mathematically, all these ideas I think are related. I think a lot of people are thinking about this from different perspectives. And then constructor theory that David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto have been developing is a totally different angle on it, but I think getting at some similar ideas. So it's a really interesting time right now, I think, for the frontiers of physics and how it's relating to maybe deeper principles about what life is. So short answer, yes. Long winded answer, rewind. Can we talk about aliens? Anytime. So one, I think one interesting way to sneak up on the question of what is life is to ask what should we look for in alien life? If we were to look out into our galaxy and into the universe and come up with a framework of how to detect alien life, what should we be looking for? Is there like set of rules, like it's both the tools and the tools that are service sensors for certain kind of properties of life. So what should we look for in alien life? Yeah, so we have a paper actually coming out on Monday, which is collaboration. It's actually really Lee Cronin's lab, but my group worked with him on it and we're working on the theory, which is this idea that we should look for life as high assembly objects. What we mean by that is, which is actually observationally measurable. And this is one of the reasons that I started working with Lee on these ideas is because being a theorist, it's easy to work in a vacuum. It's very hard to connect abstract ideas about the nature of life to anything that's experimentally tractable. But what his lab has been able to do is develop this method where they look at a molecule and they break it apart into all its component parts. And so you say you used to have some elementary building blocks and you can build up all the ways of putting those together to make the original object. And then you look for the shortest path in that space. And you say that's sort of the assembly number associated to that object. And if that number is higher, it assumes that a longer causal history is necessary to produce that object or more information is necessary to specify the creation of that object in the universe. Now, that kind of idea at a superficial level has existed for a long time. That kind of idea as a physical observable of molecules is completely novel. And what his lab has been able to show is that if you look at a bunch of samples of nonbiological things and biological things, there's this kind of threshold of assembly where as far as the experimental evidence is and also your intuitive intuition would suggest that nonbiological systems don't produce things with high assembly number. So this goes back to the idea like a protein is not gonna spontaneously fluctuate into existence on the surface of Mars. It requires an evolutionary process and a biological architecture to produce a protein. You generalize that argument, a complex molecule or a cup or a desk ornament in this sort of abstract idea of assembly spaces as being the causal history of objects. And you can talk about the shortest path from elementary objects to an object given an elementary set of operations. And you can experimentally measure that with mass spec. And that's basically the sort of the idea. That's really fascinating. I can't get out of my head. I'd start imagining Legos and all the Legos I've ever built and how many steps, what is the shortest path to the final little Lego castles? So then like asking about going to look for alien life, the idea is most of the instruments that NASA builds, for example, or any of the space agencies looking for life in the universe are looking for chemical correlates of life, right? But here we have something that is based on properties of molecules. It's not a chemical correlate, it's agnostic. It doesn't care about the molecule. It cares about what is the history necessary to produce this molecule? How complex is it in terms of how much time is needing, how much information is required to produce it? So when you observe a thing on another planet, you're essentially, the process looks like a reverse engineering, trying to figure out what is the shortest path to create that thing. Yeah, so most, yeah, and I would say most, like most examples of biology or technology don't take the shortest path, right? But the shortest path is a bound on how hard it is for the universe to make that. Yeah, and I guess what you and Lee are saying that there's a heuristic, that's a good metric for like better perhaps than chemical correlates. Yes, because it doesn't, it's not contingent on looking for the chemistry of life on earth, on other planets. And it also has a deeper explanatory framework associated to it, as far as the kind of theory that we're trying to develop associated to what life is. And I think this is one of the problems I have in my field personally in astrobiology is people observe something on earth, say oxygen in the atmosphere or an amino acid in a cell, and then they say, let's go look for that on another planet. Let's look for oxygen on exoplanets or let's look for amino acids on Mars. And then they assume that's a way of looking for life or even phosphine on Venus. But you know, like there's all these examples of let's look for one molecule. A molecule is not life. Life is a system that patterns particular structures into matter. That's like, that's what it is. And it doesn't care what molecules are there. It's something about the patterns and that structure and that history. And if you're looking for a molecule, you're not testing any hypotheses about the nature of what life is. It doesn't tell me anything. If we discover oxygen on an exoplanet about what kind of life is there, just oxygen on an exoplanet. It's not, there's, I guess I think like, when you think about the question, are we alone in the universe? That's a pretty fricking deep question. It should have a fricking deep answer. It shouldn't just be, there's a molecule on an exoplanet. Wow, we solved the problem. It should tell us something meaningful about our existence. And I feel like we've fallen short on how we're searching for life in terms of actually searching for things like us in this kind of deeper way. But how do you do that initial kind of, say I'm walking down the street and I'm looking for that double take test of like, like what the hell is that? Like that initial, like how do we look for the possibility of weirdness or the possibility of high assembly number? Well, yeah. Like what would aliens look like if they don't have two eyes and are green? If I knew, I wouldn't probably already solve the problem. Right, there's another Nobel Prize in there somewhere. Yeah, somewhere in there. Well, I think it's kind of, so there is a bias here, right? So we've evolved to recognize life on earth, right? Like I, you know, children at a very early age can tell the difference between a puppy and a plant and then the plant and a chair, for example. You know, like it just, it seems innate. And so I think, and also because we're life, you know, I think like there's this implicit bias that we should know it when we see it and it should be completely obvious to us. But there are a lot of features of our universe that are not completely obvious to us. Like the fact that this table is made of atoms and that I'm sitting in a gravitational potential well right now. And I guess my point with this is, I think life is much less obvious than we think it is. And so it could be in many more forms than we think it is. And I guess this goes back to the point about being open minded that we may not know what alien life looks like. It might not even be possible to interact with alien life because maybe something about, you know, our informational lineage, it makes it impossible for information from an alien to be copied to us. Therefore there's no, you know, so to speak communication channel. And I don't mean, you know, verbal communication, just it's not in our observational space. Like, you know, there's fundamental questions about why we observe the universe in position rather than momentum, but we also, you know, observe it in terms of certain informational patterns and things like that's what our brain constructs and maybe aliens just interact with a different part of reality than we do. That's wildly speculative, but I think, I think. But it's possible. It's possible and I think it's consistent with the physics. So I think the best ways we can ask questions are about life and chemistry and asking questions about if information is a real physical thing, what would its signatures be in matter and how do we recognize those? And I think the ones that are most obvious are the ones I've already articulated. You have these objects that seem completely improbable for the universe to produce because the universe doesn't have the design of that object in the laws. So therefore an object had to evolve. We talk, we call it evolution, but it had to be produced by the universe that then had all of the possible tasks to make that object specified. I mean, there's some, like there's an engineering question here of, are there sensors we can create that can give us, can help us discover certain pockets of high assemblies aliens? Like, I mean, there is a hope setting dogs and chairs aside, there's a hope that visually we could detect, like, because our universe, I mean, at least the way we look at it now, like this three dimensional like space time, we can visually comprehend it. It's interesting to think like, if we got to hang out, if there's an alien in this room, like would we be able to detect it with our current sensors? Not the fancy kinds, but like web cam. Like say standing over there. Yeah, standing over there or maybe like in this carpet, see there's all these kinds of patterns, right? I don't know if this carpet is an alien. Well, so I see what you're saying. So assembly theory is pretty general. Like, I mean, we've been applying it to molecules because it makes sense to apply it to molecules, but it's supposed to explain life, like the physics of life. So it should explain the things in this room in addition to molecules. So I guess, and you can apply it to images and things. So I guess the idea you could explore is just looking at everything on planet earth in terms of its assembly structure and then looking for things that aren't part of our biological lineage. If they have high assembly, they might be aliens on earth. I mean, that is a very kind of rigorous computer vision question. Can we visually, is there a strong correlation between certain kind of high assembly objects when they get to the scale where they're visually observable and some, like when it's say projected onto a 2D plane, can we figure out something? I'm glad you brought up the computer vision point because for a while I had this kind of thought in my mind that we can't even see ourselves clearly. So one of the things, people are worried about artificial intelligence for a lot of reasons, but I think it's really fascinating because it's like the first time in history that we're building a system that can help us understand ourselves. So like, people talk about AI physics, but like, when I look at another person, I don't see them as a 4 billion year lineage, but that's what they are. And so is everything here, right? So imagine that we built artificial systems that could actually see that feature of us, what else would they see? And I think that's what you're asking. And I think that would be so cool. I want that to happen, but I think we're a little ways off from it, but yeah. We're going there, I hope. Okay, let me ask you, I apologize ahead of time, but let me ask you the internet question. So you're a physicist, you ask rigorous questions about the physics of existence and these models of high assembly objects. Now, when the internet would see an alien, they would ask two questions. One, can I eat it? And two, can I have sex with it? Yes. So, the internet is. All the existential questions, those are very important ones. The internet is very sophisticated. It really is, it's gotten our basal cognition pretty good. So you kind of mentioned that it's very difficult. It's possible that we may not be even able to communicate with it. Right, I think the internet has more hope than we do. Yeah, it's a hopeful place, yes. Do you think in terms of interacting on this very primal level of sharing resources, like what would aliens eat? What would we eat? Would we eat the same thing? Could we potentially eat each other? One person eats the other, or the aliens eat us. And the same thing with not sex in general, or reproduction, but genetically mixing stuff. Like, would we be able to mix genetic information? Maybe not genetic, but maybe information, right? And I think part of your question is like, so if you think of life as like this history of events that happen in the universe, like there's this question of like, how divergent are those histories, right? So when we get to the scale of technology, it's possible to imagine, although we can't even do it. Like imagine all the possible technologies that could exist in the universe. But if you think about all the possible chemistries, somehow that seems like a lower dimensional space and a lower set of possibilities. So it might be that like when we interact with aliens, we do have to go back to those more basal levels to figure out sort of what the map is, right? Like the sort of where we have a common history. We must have a common history somewhere in the universe, but in order to be able to actually interact in a meaningful way, you have to have some shared history. I mean, the reason we can exchange genetic information in each other's food or eat each other as food is because we have a shared history. So we have to find that shared history. We have to find the common ancestor in this causality map, the causality tree. Yes, and we have a last universal common ancestor for all life on earth, which I think is sort of the nexus of that causality map for life on earth. But the question is where would other aliens diverge on that map? That's really interesting. And I mean, so say there's a lot of aliens out there in the universe, each set of organisms will probably have like a number, you know, like Erdos number of like how far, like how far our common ancestor is. And so the closer the common ancestor, like it is on earth, the more likely we are to be able to have sexual reproduction. Well, it's like sort of like humans having common culture and languages, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it might take a lot of work though with an alien cause you really have to get over a language barrier. Oh boy. So it's communication, it's resources. I mean, it's all the whole, and I think tied into that is the questions of like who's going to harm who. Right. And actually definitions of harm. And whether your parents approve, you know, all those kind of questions. Whether the common ancestor approves. Yeah, that's just very true. How many alien civilizations do you think are out there? I don't have intuition for that, which I have always thought was deeply intriguing. So, and part of this, I mean, I say it specifically as I don't have intuition for that because it's like one of those questions that you feel around for a while and you really just, you can't see it even though it might be right there. And in that sense, it's a little like the quantum to classical can transition. You're like really talking about two different kinds of physics. And I think that's kind of part of the problem. Once we understand the physics, that question might become more meaningful. But there's also this other issue, and this was really instilled on me by my mentor, Paul Davies, when I was a postdoc, because he always talks about how, you know, whether aliens are common or rare is kind of just, you know, it like, you know, it follows a wave of popularity and it just depends on like the mood of, you know, what the culture is at the time. And I always thought that was kind of an intriguing observation, but also there's this, you know, set of points about if you go by the observational evidence, which we're supposed to do as scientists, right? You know, we have evidence of us and one origin of life event from which we emerged. And people wanna make arguments that because that event was rapid or because there's other planets that have properties similar to ours, that that event should be common. But you actually can't reason on that because our existence observing that event is contingent on that event happening, which means it could have been completely improbable or very common. And Brandon Carter, like clearly articulated that in terms of anthropic arguments a few decades ago. So there is this kind of issue that we have to contend with dealing with life that's closer to home than we have to deal with with any other problems in physics, which we're talking about the physics of ourselves. And when you're asking about the origin of life event, that event happening in the universe, at least as like our existence is contingent on it. And so you can think about sort of fine tuning arguments that way too. So, but the sort of otter part of it is like, when I think about how likely it is, I think it's because we don't understand this mechanism yet about how information can be generated spontaneously that I like, cause I can't see that physics clearly yet, even though I have a lot of, you know, like some things around the space of it in my mind, I can't articulate how likely that process is. So my honest answer is, I don't know. And sometimes that feels like a cop out, but I feel like that's a more honest answer and a more meaningful way of making progress than what a lot of people wanna do, which is say, oh, well, we have a one in 10 chance of having on an exoplanet with Earth like properties because there's lots of Earth like planets out there and life happened fast on Earth. Well, so I have kind of a follow up question, but as a side comment, what I really am enjoying about the way you're talking about human beings is you always say, and not to make yourself conscious about it, cause I really, really enjoy it. You say we, you don't say humans. You say, cause oftentimes like, you know, I don't know, evolutionary biologists will kind of put yourself out as an observer, but it's kind of fascinating to think that you as a human are struggling about your own origins. Yes, that's the problem. And yeah, and I think, I don't do that deliberately, but I do think that way. And this is sort of the inversion from the logic of physics because physics as it's always been constructed has treated us as external observers of the universe. And we are not part of the universe. And this is why the problem of life, I think demands completely new thinking because we have to think about ourselves as minds that exist in the universe and are at this particular moment in history and looking out at the things around us and trying to understand what we are inside the system, not outside the system. We don't have descriptions at a fundamental level that describe us as inside the system. And this was my problem with cellular automata also. You're always an external observer for a cellular automata. You're not in the system. What does the cellular automata look like from the inside? I think you just broke my brain with that question. Exactly. But that's the fundamental. I thought about that for a long time, but. I'm gonna, yeah, that's a really clean formulation of a very fundamental question, because you can only, to understand cellular automata, you have to be inside of it. But as a human, sort of a poetic, romantic question, does it make you sad? Does it make you hopeful whether we're alone or not? Like in the different possible versions of that, if we're the highest assembly object in the entire universe, does that give you? At this moment in time, maybe. At this moment in the causal. Cause we may, I assume we have a future. Well, we definitely have a future. The question is where that future decreases the assembly. Like it could be where at the peak, or we could be just. That would be inconsistent with the physics in my mind. But so I should give a caveat. I've given the caveat that I'm biased as a physicist, but I'm also biased as an eternal optimist. So pretty much all of my modes of operation for building theories about the world are not like an Occam's razor, what's the simplest explanation, but what's the most optimistic explanation. And part of the reason for that is if you really think explanations have causal power, in the sense that our, like the fact that we have theories about the world has enabled technologies and physically transform the world around us. I think I have to take seriously that as a part of the physics I wanna describe and try to build theories of reality that are optimistic about what's coming next because the theories are in part the causes of what comes next. So there could be a physics of hope or physics of optimism in there too. Yes. Is that seems like also, I mean, optimism does seem to be a kind of engine that results in innovation. Yes. So this is like, why the hell are we trying to come up with new stuff? Oh, so I made this point about thinking life is the physics of existence. And it's not just the physics of existence, it's the physics of more things existing. So I think one of these drives of like. Creativity. Yeah, creativity, like optimism. So if you like, people like entropy. I don't like entropy as it was formulated in the 1800s. I think it's an antiquated concept, but this idea of maximizing over the possible number of states that could exist. Imagine the universe is actually trying to maximize over the number of things that could physically exist. What would be the best way to do that? The best way to do that would be evolve intelligent technological things that could explore that space. So, okay, that's talking about alien life out there in the universe, but you've also earlier in the conversation mentioned the shadow biosphere. So is it possible that we have weird life here on earth that we're just not, like even in a high assembly formulation of life, that we're just not paying attention to? We're blind to. Like life we're potentially able to detect, but we're blind to. And maybe you could say, what is the shadow biosphere? Sure, sure. Yeah, the shadow biosphere is this idea that there might've been other original life events that happened on earth that were independent from the original life event that led to us and all of the life that we know on earth. And therefore there could be aliens in the sense they have a different origin event. Living among us. And it was proposed by a number of people, but one of them was Paul Davies that I mentioned earlier is my mentor. And he has a really cute way of saying that aliens could be right under our noses or even in our noses. With a British accent, it sounds better. But anyway, so the idea is like, it could literally be anywhere around us. And if you think actually about the discovery of like viruses and bacteria, for a long time they were kind of a shadow biosphere. It was life that was around us, but invisible. But this takes it a little bit further and saying that all of those examples, viruses, bacteria and everything that we've discovered so far has this common ancestry and the last universal common ancestor of life on earth. So maybe there was a different origin event and that life is weirder still and might be among us and we could find it. We don't have to go out and the stars look for aliens just here on earth. Do you think that's a serious possibility that we should explore with the tools of science? Like this should be a serious effort. I think yes and no. And I mean, yes, because I think it's a serious hypothesis and I think it's worth exploring. And it is certainly more economical to look for signs of alien life on earth than it is to go and build spacecraft and send robots to other planets. And that was one of the reasons it was proposed is, well, if we do find an example of another original life on earth, it's hugely informative because it means the origin of life is not a rare event. If it happened twice on the same planet, that means it's probably pretty probable given conditions are right. So it has huge potential scientific impact, not to mention the fact that you might have like biochemistry and stuff that's informative for like medicine and stuff like that. But I think the thing for me that's challenging about it and this really comes from my own work, like thinking about life as a planetary scale process and also trying to understand sometimes what I call like the statistical mechanics of biochemistry, but large scale statistical patterns in the chemistry that life uses on earth. There are a lot of regularities there and life does seem to have planetary scale organization that's consistent even with some of the patterns that we see at the individual scale. So if you think life is a planetary scale phenomenon and the chemistry of life has to be sort of not just, it's not, an individual is not necessarily the fundamental unit of life, right? The fundamental unit of life is these informational lineages and they're kind of, they intersect over spatial scales. So everything on earth is kind of related by the common causal history. So it's hard for me based on the way I think about the physics and also some of the stuff that my group has done to really think that there could be evidence or there could be a second sample of life on earth. But I think there are ways that we need to be more concrete about that. And I have thought a little bit about like, like you can represent the chemistry in an individual cell as a network. And then those networks, something my group has shown actually scale with the same property. So ecosystems have the same properties as individuals as planetary scale. And then you could imagine if you had alien chemistry intermixed in there, that scaling would be broken. So if there's some robustness property or something associated to it, and you get alien chemistry in there, it just breaks everything. And you don't have a planetary ecosystem functioning and individuals functioning across all these scales. So I guess what I'm arguing is life is not a scale dependent phenomenon. It's not just cellular life. So if you have a shadow biosphere, it has to be integrated with all of these other scales. And that would lose the meaning of the word shadow biosphere, I guess. I think so, yeah. So it's an open question, right? And I think it would tell us a lot. So there has been very minimal effort of people to look for a shadow biosphere. But then the question, it could be possible that there's like sufficiently distinct planets within one planet, meaning like environments within one planet. Like, I don't know. I've been looking recently because of having a chat with Catherine Duclair about Io, the moon of Jupiter, that's like all volcanoes and volcanoes are bad ass. But like, imagining life inside volcanoes, right? It seems like sufficiently chemically different like to be living in the darkness where there's a lot of heat and maybe you could have different Earths on a planet. Or like if you go deep enough in the crust, maybe there's like a layer where there's no life. And then there's suddenly life again. And maybe those, you know, lizard men or whatever they are that people dream about are really down there. I know that's a little flippant, but really like there could be like chemical cycles deep in the Earth's crust that might be alive and are completely distinct in chemical origin to surface life. Right, that they wouldn't be interacting with each other. Yeah, and that's one of the proposals for the shadow biosphere is like, sometimes people talk about it as being geologically or geographically distinct that it might be, you know, you have no life for this region and then a different example. And then sometimes people talk about it being chemically distinct, that the chemistry is sufficiently different, that it's completely orthogonal or non interacting with our chemistry. It seems to me at least the chemistry is a more powerful boundary than geographic. It just seems like life finds a way literally to travel. Yeah, it does. What do you think about all these UFO sightings? So to me, it's really inspiring. It's yet another localized way to dream about the mysterious that is out there. Yeah, so I've actually been more intrigued by the cultural phenomena UFOs than the phenomena UFOs themselves, because I think it's intriguing about how we are preparing ourselves mentally for understanding others and how we have thought about that historically and what the sort of modern incarnations of that are. It's more like, I want an explanation for us. That's my motivation. And having some, you know, streaks across the sky or something and saying that's aliens, it doesn't tell you anything. So unless you have a deeper explanation and you have, you know, more lines of, you know, where is this gonna take us in the future? It's just not as interesting to me as the problem of understanding life itself and aliens as a more general phenomenon. I do think it's, just as you said, a good way to psychologically and sociologically prepare ourselves to sort of like, what would that look like? And very importantly, which is what a lot of people talk about politically, sort of there's this idea from the, so I came from the Soviet Union of like the Cold War and we have to hide secrets. There's some way in us searching for life on other planets or our searching for life in general, the way we've done government in the past, we tend to think of all new things as potential military secrets, so we want to hide them. And one of the ways that people kind of look at UFO sightings is like, like maybe we shouldn't hide this stuff. Like what is the government hiding? I think that's a really, you know, in one sense it's a conspiratorial question, but I think in another, it's an inspiration to change the way we do government to where secrets don't, maybe there are times when you want to keep secrets as military secrets, but maybe we need to release a lot more stuff and see us as a human species as together in this whole search. Yeah, the public engagement part there is really interesting. And it's almost like a challenge to the way we've done stuff in the past in terms of keeping secrets when they're not, so like the first step, if you don't know how something works, if there's a mysterious thing, the first instinct should not be like, let's hide it. Let's put it in the closet. So that the Chinese or the Russian government or whatever government doesn't find it. Maybe the first instinct should be, let's understand it. Perhaps let's understand it together. Right. No, I think that's good. And something I realized recently that I never thought was gonna be a problem, but I think this actually helps with quite a bit is because so many people nowadays believe we've already made contact, that as an astrobiologist, if we actually want to understand life and make contact, we kind of have to deconstruct the narratives we've already built from ourselves and kind of unteach ourselves that we've learned about aliens and then reteach ourselves. So there's this really interesting sort of dialogue there and making it open to the public that they actually have to think critically about it and they see the evidence for themselves, I think is really important for that process. Yeah, that aliens might be way weirder than we can imagine. Yes. Yes, I'm pretty sure they're probably weirder than we can imagine. Okay, we've in 2020 and still living through a pandemic, setting the political and all those kinds of things aside, I've always found viruses fascinating as dynamical systems, I was gonna say living systems, but I've always kind of thought of them as living, but that's a whole nother kind of discussion. Maybe it'd be great to put that on the table. One, do you find viruses beautiful slash terrifying? And two, do you think they're living things or there's some aspect to them per our discussion of life that makes them living? I mean, living in a pandemic saying viruses are beautiful is probably a hard thing, but I do find them beautiful to a degree. I think even in the sense of mediating a global pandemic, there's something like deeply intriguing there because these are tiny, tiny little things, right? And yet they can essentially cause a seizure or handicap an entire civilization at a global scale. So just that intersection between our perceived invincibility and our susceptibility to things and also the interaction across scales of those things is just a really amazing feature of our world. Most technology, whether it's viruses or AI that can scale in an exponential way, like kind of run as opposed to like, one thing makes another thing makes another thing, it's one thing makes two things and those two things make four things. Like that kind of process also seems to be fundamental to life. Yes. And it's terrifying because in a matter of, in a very short time scale, it can, if it's good at being life, whatever that is, it can quickly overtake the other competing forms of life. Right. And that's scary both for AI and for viruses. And it seems like understanding these processes that are underlying viruses. And I don't mean like on the virology or biology side, but on some kind of more computational physics perspective as we've been talking about, seems to be really important to figure out how humans can survive. Right. Along with this kind of life and perhaps becoming a multi planetary species is a part of that. Like there's no, maybe like we'll figure out from a physics perspective is like, there's no way any living system can be stable for prolonged period of time and survive unless it expands exponentially throughout. Like we have to multiply. Otherwise anything that doesn't multiply exponentially will die eventually. Maybe that's a fundamental law. Maybe, I don't know. I always get really bothered by these Darwinian narratives that are like the fittest replicator wins and things. And I don't, I just don't feel like that's exactly what's going on. I think like the copying of information is sort of ancillary to this other process of creativity. Right, so like the drive is actually, the drive is creativity, but if you wanna keep the creativity that's existed in the past, it has to be copied into the future. So replication, like if you, so that for me is, so I had this set of arguments with Michael Lockman and Lee Cronin about the like life being about persistence. They thought it was about persistence and like survival of the fittest kind of thing. And I'm like, no, it's about existence. It's like, cause when you're talking about that, it's easy to say that in retrospect, you can post select on the things that survived and then say why they survived, but you can't do that going forward. That's really profound that survival is just a nice little side effect feature of maximizing creativity, but it doesn't need to be there. Yeah, I like that. That's really beautiful. Yeah, I know, like I said, I like optimistic theories. Well, I don't know if that's optimistic. That could be terrifying to people because, because a system that maximizes creativity may very quickly get rid of humans for some reason, if it comes up with some other creative, I mean, forms of existence, right? This is the AI thing is like the moment you have an AI system that can flourish in the space of ideas or in some other space much more effectively than humans. And it's sufficiently integrated into the physical space to be able to modify the environment. I think we'll just be like the core genetic architecture or something. We'll be like the DNA for AI, right? It's like, we haven't lost the past informational architectures on this planet. They're still there. Yeah, so the AI will use our brains in some part to like ride, like accelerate the exchange of ideas. That's the neural language dream is that, well, the humans will be still around because you're saying architecture. Yeah, but I don't even think they necessarily need to tap into our brains. I mean, just collectively, we do interesting things. What if they were just using like the patterns in our communication or something? Oh, without controlling it, just observing? Well, I don't know. In what sense do you control the chemistry happening in your body? Yeah. I mean, obviously I don't know. I'm just, like the way I look at, like people look at AI and then they look at this thing that's bigger than us and is coming in the future and is smarter than us. And I think though that looking at the past history of life on the planet and what information has been doing for the last 4 billion years is probably very informative to asking questions about what's coming next. And I don't, one is planetary scale transitions are really important for new phases. So the global internet and sort of global integration of our technology, I think is an important thing. So that's again, life is a planetary scale phenomenon but we're an integrated component of that phenomenon. I don't really see that the technology is gonna replace us in that way. It's just gonna keep scaffolding and building. And I also don't have an idea that we're gonna build AI in a box. I think AI is gonna emerge. AGI to me is a planetary scale phenomena that's gonna emerge from our technology. Planetary scale phenomena. But do you think an AGI is not distinct from humans? The whole package. The whole package, yeah. Comes as a planetary scale phenomena. And that goes back to the fact that like, you were asking questions about you as an individual. Like, what are you as an individual? You're like a packet of information that exists in the particular physical thing that is you. We're all just packets of information. And some of us are aggregates in certain ways but it's all just kind of exchanging and propagating, right? And processing. Is your packet of information that you've continually referred to as Sarah afraid of the dissipation of the death of that packet? Are you afraid of death? Do you ponder death? Does death have meaning in this process of creativity? I think I have the natural biological urge that everyone has to fear death. I think the thing that I think is interesting is if I think about it rationally, I'm not necessarily afraid of death for me because I won't be aware of being dead. But I am afraid like for my kids because it matters to them if I die. So again, like I think death becomes more significant as a collective property, not as an individual one. Yeah, but isn't there something to fear about the fact that the way, like the creative, the complexity of information that's been like created in you. Yeah. The fact that it kind of breaks apart and disappears. It doesn't, but I don't think it disappears. It's just not me anymore. Right, but that process of it being not you anymore, that doesn't scare you? Of course it does. The mystery of it. I mean, the... Yeah, but I guess I'm heartened by the fact that there will be some imprints of the fact that I existed still in the universe after I leave it. Yeah, but there'll be a... Okay, but... And also that has to do with my perception of time, right? So, I perceive time as flowing, but that might not be the case. I mean, this is standard physicist comfort is, every moment exists and there's no... And the flow of time is just our perception of us changing. So, you can travel back in time and that's comforting? Like from a physicist's concept? No, no, no. I'm not talking about traveling back in time. I'm just saying that the moments in the past still exist. Now, whether the moments in the future exist or not is a different question. That's not comforting to me in terms of death. The flow of time is not... I think there's no comfort in the face of death for what we are because we like existing. And I think it's especially true if you love life and you love what life is. Do you think there's a certain sense in which the fear of death or the fear of nonexistence, maybe fear is not the right word, is the actual very phenomena that gives birth to existence? Like, death is fundamental. It just feels like freaking out, oh shit, this ride ends is actually like the... That's the thing that gives birth to this whole thing. Yeah. That like, it's constantly... It's matter constantly freaking out about the fact that it's gonna be the most. No, I think things like to exist. I think they wanna exist. Yeah, there's a desire, whatever, to exist. Yeah. There's a drive to exist and there's a drive for more things to exist. I guess, yeah, I like existing. I like it a lot and I don't know it any other way. See, I don't even know if I like existing. I think I really don't like not existing. Yes. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, maybe it's that. Some days I might like existing less than others. Yes, but like, I think those are like surface feelings. Yeah, yeah. It seems like there's something fundamental about wanting to exist. No, I think that's right. But I think to your point that that might go back to the more fundamental idea that, you know, if life is the physics of existence and maximizing existence, individual organisms, of course, wanna maximize their existence and everything, you know, like wants to exist. But I guess for me, the small comfort is my existence matters to future existence. Speaking of future existence, is there advice you can give to future pockets of existences, AKA young people, about life? You've had, you've worn many hats. You've taken on some of the biggest problems in the universe. Is there advice you can give to young people about life, about career, about existing? Yeah, maybe not about the last one. You know, a lot of people ask me this question about like working on such hard problems, like how can you make a successful career out of that? But I think for me, it couldn't be otherwise. Like I have to, to be fulfilled, you have to work on things you care about. And that's always kind of driven me. And that's been discipline, department, and sort of superficial level problem independent because I started at community college actually, and I was taking a physics class and I learned about magnetic monopoles and we didn't know if they existed in the universe, but we could predict them and we could go look for them. And I was so deeply intrigued by this idea that we had this mathematical formula to go look for things. And then I wanted to become a theoretical physicist because of that. But that actually wasn't my driving question. I realized my driving question is the nature of the correspondence between our minds and physical reality and what we are. And that question is very deep, so you can work across a lot of fields doing that. But I think without that driving question, I never would have been able to do all the things that I've done. It's really the passion that drives it. And usually when students ask me these kinds of questions, I tell them like, you have to find something you really care about working on because if you don't really care about it, A, you're not gonna be your best at it, and B, it's not gonna be worth your time. Why would you spend your time working on something you're not interested in? So find the driving questions. Yeah, find the driving question. Find your passion. I mean, I think passion makes a huge difference in terms of creativity, talent, and potential, and also being able to tolerate all the hard things that come with any career or life. Yeah, I've had a bunch of moments in my life where I've just been captivated by some beautiful phenomena. And I guess being rigorous about it and asking what is the question underlying this phenomena, like robots bring a smile to my face and forming a question of like, why the hell is this so fascinating? Why is this, specifically the human robot interaction question that something beautiful is brought to life when humans and robots interact, understanding that deeply. It's like, okay, so this is gonna be my life work then. I don't know what the hell it is, but that's what I wanna do. Interesting. And doing that for whatever the hell gives you that kind of feeling, I guess, is the point. Yeah. Am I allowed to ask you a question? Sure. Okay. On that point, because I had this colleague that suggested the idea that consciousness might be contagious. And so interacting with things, it's an interesting idea, right? So I'm wondering sort of the motivation there. Is it the motivation that you want more of the universe to appreciate things the way we do and appreciate those interactions? Or is it really more the enjoyment of the human in those interactions? Like, is it, do you know what I'm asking? Yeah, yeah. See, I think consciousness is created in the interaction between things. Yes, I agree. So the joy is in the creation of consciousness. I see. I really like the idea that it doesn't just have to be two humans creating consciousness together. It could be humans and other entities. We talked offline about dogs and other pets and so on. There's a magic, I mean, I've been calling it love. It's this beauty of the human experience that's created. And it just feels like fascinating that you could do that with a robotic system. Right. And there's something really powerful, at least to me, about engineering systems that allow you to create some of the magic of the human experience. Cause then you get to understand what it takes, at least get inklings of what it takes to create consciousness. And I don't get this, you know, philosophers get really upset about this idea that sort of the illusion of consciousness is consciousness. But I really liked the idea of engineering systems that fool you into thinking they're conscious. Right. Because that's sufficient to create the magical experience. Right, because it's the interaction, yeah. It's the interaction, yeah. Right. And this is the Russian hat I wear, which is like, I think there's an ocean of loneliness in the world. I think we're deeply lonely. We're not even allowing ourselves to acknowledge that. And I kind of think that's what love is between romantic love and friendship is two people kind of getting a little bit like alleviating for brief moment. That loneliness. That loneliness, but not, but we're not there. It's not the full aspect of that loneliness. Like we're desperately alone. We're desperately afraid of nonexisting. Right. I have that kind of sense. And I just want to explore that ocean of loneliness more. Right. When engineering, like create a submarine that goes into the depth of that loneliness. So creating systems that can truly hear you. Right. And truly listen. Make the universe a less lonely place. Exactly. Let me ask you about the meaning. You've brought up why. Yeah. The physics of why. What do you think is the meaning of our particular planets, set of existences and the universe in general? The meaning of life. Yes. Someone once told me as a physicist, I'm not allowed to ask why questions, but I don't believe that. So I think what we are is the creative process in the universe, I think. And for me, that's the meaning. The ability to create more possibilities and more things to exist. What is, Dostoevsky has the saying, beauty will save the world. What is, is there a connection between creation and beauty? I think so. So is that like, is beauty a correlate of creation? It might be. I don't know. I mean, why is it, you know, a lot of people have asked these kinds of questions, but like, why is it we have such an emotional response to intellectual activity or creativity? And that seems kind of a deep question to me. Like, it seems very intrinsic to what we are. So I do have an interest in the questions I ask because I think they're beautiful and I think the universe is beautiful. And I'm just so deeply fascinated by the fact that I exist at all. And so maybe it's that, you know, that intrinsic feeling of beauty that's in part driving, you know, the physics of creating more things. So they could be deeply related in that way. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it. I think this conversation was beautiful. Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time with me today. I really, really appreciate it, Sarah. This is an honor. I hope we get the chance to talk again. I hope, like I mentioned to you offline, we get a chance to talk with Lee. You guys have a beautiful, like, intellectual chemistry that's fascinating to listen to. So I'm a huge fan of both of you and I can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks so much. Great to be here. I am. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker and thank you to Athletic Greens, Nat Sweet, Blinkist, and Magic Spoon. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets. In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Sara Walker: The Origin of Life on Earth and Alien Worlds | Lex Fridman Podcast #198

The following is a conversation with Roger Reeves, one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history. He worked for Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, the leaders behind the Medellin Cartel. Roger was the employer and close friend of Barry Seal, the infamous drug smuggler who was the main character in the movie American Maid. Roger transported countless tons of cocaine and marijuana covering six continents. He escaped prison five times, was shut down in both Mexico and Colombia, and was tortured nearly to death in a Mexican prison. Through all of this, his wife Mari, the love of his life, was there with him, and when he was in prison, she waited for him. He recently got out of prison where for many years he worked on his memoir called Smuggler. This podcast is an exploration of his story. Quick mention of our sponsors. Noom, Allform, ExpressVPN, Four Sigmatic, and Aidsleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. Let me say a few words about Roger Reeves, Pablo Escobar, and the war on drugs. This conversation with Roger is unlike any I've ever done. In the eyes of many, including the law, Roger is a criminal, a bad man who was added to the suffering in the world. But he never directly engaged or participated in the violence. Unlike his bosses, Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa. His crime was the transport of drugs. I thought about this, and about Pablo Escobar, who was at once both a brutal murderer and a Robin Hood figure who helped the poor and was loved by thousands, if not millions. We sometimes idolize murderers and destroy good, honest men. We give power and money to corrupt politicians and dictators that starve and murder their own people. Given this, I think about what makes for a good man, and what makes for a bad man, and who decides. Sitting across from Roger, I saw a complicated man, but one who has kindness in his heart, a love for money and adventure, and a disdain for violence. Again, his crime was the transport of drugs. Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost U.S. $1 trillion. Marijuana legalization alone would save and make $13.7 billion, that could send more than 650,000 students to public universities every year. Then there's the human stories of the 500,000 human beings sitting in prison for drug related offenses, and the 1.1 million on probation and parole. Their life is damaged or ruined beyond repair due to the prohibition of drugs. There's a lot more to be said about the damage done by the war on drugs, but when reading about Roger's story and talking to him, I couldn't escape the thought that while society wants to label him a criminal and a bad human being, there are much worse men out there who we give a pass to, even give power to, even men who hold political office or run companies. I also think about my role as an interviewer, sitting across a man like Roger. In these interviews, in life, in many ways I continue to be myself, a person who like Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, seeks the good in all people, but is hurt by it on occasion, and maybe is destroyed by it in the end. I'm not naive, but I'm also optimistic and have hope for humanity. That's who I am, and that's what these conversations are. I hope you join me, and I hope you understand that I come from a place of love. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Roger Reeves. You are one of the most prolific drug smugglers in history. What would you say motivated you? Money, power, the thrill, or was it something else? Money. But isn't there a point where you've had more money than you can possibly know what to do with, or is it always more money? You know, I had plenty of money several times, and I think it's sort of like if you was in Las Vegas and you had the slot machine handled down, and the gold coins was tumbling around you, and you had sweepers bagging them up, when would you let it go? But isn't some part of that the thrill then? Oh, there was a lot of thrill, sometimes way too much. You made certainly tens of millions of dollars, probably much more. What memorable experience did having that much money make possible for you? So there's one thing is the money, and the other thing is what that money can buy. Well, I bought everything that I could hide. I bought seven farms. I owned the city, the land where the city of Moreno Valley, California is. I had an option on that land. Did the planning and development of that. The most expensive coin in the world. Yachts, ships, airplanes galore. Did that bring you happiness? No, absolutely not. In fact, I think I'm happier now. I know I'm happier now. So looking back, would you do it the same way all again? No way. Really, even the thrill of it? Not even thrill of it. It wasn't worth 33 years in prison, being away from my lovely family. So money, what about the power? Just being on top of the world where nobody can, not the governments, the police, all the big, bad agencies chasing you, and you could do whatever the heck you wanted. As far as having to look over your shoulder everywhere you went and every phone call you made, make sure that you was naked with somebody in the ocean before you talked. It's rather uncomfortable. Yeah. I like to make phone calls the same way. What was it like meeting and working with Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin Cartel? He was just, just seemed like a gentleman when I met him. He was just like you and I, sitting here, shook hands, and I had flown one load for a fellow, and it didn't work out well. The fellow that I gave it to got shot, and it took a while to get my money, and they didn't put as many kilos on the plane as they're supposed to, and so I wasn't gonna work with him anymore, and my contact down there introduced me to Jorge Ochoa, and we went up, and in Vigado, we went up and the gate opened, and we was escorted in. There must have been 50 men out in the yards, hitching a rail on an old house, and we was escorted right in, and there was a beautiful woman in there. I mean, gore, drop dead beautiful, and she made us a cup of coffee, then ushered in to see Jorge Ochoa, and he had 12 telephones on his desk, and all of them was a different color, and he shook hands, was very friendly, spoke English, and he said that each one of those telephones represented another city in the United States. This is Chicago, and this is New York. If I ring, I knew who was calling, and so we chatted a while, and he asked me what type of airplanes I had and what experience I had flying across the U.S. border, and I told him he seemed pleased with it, and he called the lady in, and she went next door, and in came Pablo Escobar, and he introduced me to Pablo Escobar, and he asked the same questions again, and I answered him, and I asked him how much he paid, and he paid $5,000 a kilo to haul it, and so I said, how much you put on the plane? He said 300, 500, so that's one and a half, two and a half million dollars for an eight hour trip. Sounded pretty good to me. And we're talking about cocaine. Cocaine. And we're talking about Colombia. Colombia, and cocaine, and Medellin cartel. And Jorge Ochoa was one of the, what would you say, founding members of the Medellin? He was probably the brains behind the whole thing. The brains, and spoke good English. Yes. And they were nice people. Really nice people. Were you scared? Not at all. What's wrong with your mind that you weren't scared? Here's some of the most dangerous men in this world, and you weren't scared. Well, I knew I was gonna do exactly what I said I was gonna do. Murray and the children were down there. They went down and they stayed in the hotel, five stars, treated royally on my first load. And they just did ask security to make sure that I wasn't a DEA agent. So I did the first load, and they can say they were hostages, but they really weren't. It was just insurance. So there was some integrity to the way they operated. Completely. I mean, straight up. The money was ironed and banded, banded and just right. And the numbers were never once anything wrong with it. What would you attribute that honesty to? Within their own moral system and their own set of rules, why weren't people crossing the line and shaving off the top and injecting chaos into the system to where it would be unpredictable and people would be dishonest and greedy and all those kinds of things? That's true. Most people are, but there's certain people at the top of the food chain that they don't need that. And if they're completely honest, then they don't have to think of, remember the lie they told. And plus they're just honest to start with. They're making plenty of money. They was making as much money as I did. I'll tell you how that came about. I understand that 10,000 people were killed every year in Medellin, Colombia, and what they were doing, they didn't have any organization. And if one fellow had 10 kilos and he wanted it shipped to New York, he would tell his friend and his friend says, sure, I'll ship it. I have a pilot and I'll ship it up. And then he would look in the newspapers, oh, 40 kilos was busted in New Jersey. I'm so sorry, yours got busted. Bang, bang, he's dead. So here comes Jorge Ochoa and the three Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar and Gacho. And they decided that we will make an insurance company, that we will charge you $10,000 to take it to your contact in Miami. If it gets lost anywhere between the time I put it on the airplane or the time you give it to us and the time we give it to your man, we will replace it in Colombia for you. So there was no way anybody could lose. And I understand they got a hundred tons piled up under that insurance program. And I was right there the first day. So I had all the work I could do. I would land and I said, when do you want me to come back? We're waiting on you, Senor. Well, let me ask a difficult question. Some see Escobar as a brutal murderer and some see him as maybe a Robin Hood like figure who helped the poor. How do you see the man? Both of them. I think he started out to be honest with help the poor. And then they had a war down there and they blew up and killed his people. And the country was divided almost equally three ways. They had the military. They were just as much into it as anybody. And then you had the FARC guerrillas. They had about a third of the country. And then you had the Contras. It was like the white farmers and they're the ones that I was dealing with and they were at war with one another. And so if one of them started killing their people, well, I'll kill some of yours too. So that's how it happened. And then when I heard about Pablo Escobar blowing up that airliner and killing those women and children, I was sorry I ever shook his hand. That's brutal murder. So you would say Escobar is not a good man? Not at all. He's terrible. Now, looking back on it, when I met him, he was good. Did just exactly what he said he would do. Could he be a bad man and a man you can trust? Are those the things you... Absolutely you could trust him, yes. So from your perspective, in terms of business, he was reliable, he was honest, had integrity. You could work with him and he felt safe. Completely. We flew up to his ranch and we brought out motorcycles to start with. And can you ride a motorcycle? Of course I can ride a motorcycle. So I took off across the grass and there was a little ditch there and the front wheel dropped in that thing and I must have slid across that grass 20 feet before I got stopped. He almost fell off of his bike waiting because they knew what it was gonna do. And then we got on horses and we went out there and pretended to round up some cows and he put a Mac 10 machine gun pistol over my shoulder. Do you know how to use this? Well, I never had, but it was all right. I think it was like, okay, you got 10 bodyguards, what do you need me for? So that's the kind of time we laughed and talked and drove some cows over the stumps. You said Jorge Ochoa was perhaps the brains of the Medellin cartel. What was he like? And why do you say he was the brains? Well, he was a gentleman. And I suppose he shipped, and don't tell me how many more times of cocaine than Pablo did. Just him and his brothers, you could tell by the, they had on each load, they was in duffel bags and his big football shaped fluffy stuff made with ether. And they would have three horns on it or a rattlesnake or four Xs on each bag. You kind of got to knowing which was which and they shipped a lot. So, and he was just a gentleman. I took the family, we went one weekend to his ranch or his palatial place out near Barranquilla and oh, he just treated the family. His family had, his younger brother made a bull fight and we had skiing and little airplanes on floats on the water. He was really nice and he was really nice. How do you make sense of the tension that a man could be a gentleman, can have integrity, but also be a murderer? Well, murder is a stronger word than killing. Can you explain the line, the gray area we're talking about? I mean, I've just talking with Jocko Willing, can we talk a lot about killing in the context of military conflict in the context of war? So there, there's a line between murder and killing that you can draw. What's the line that you're referring to? It's something similar. If people are shooting at you and you shoot back and kill him, that's not murder whatsoever. He's trying to get away or out of the situation. But if some woman don't pay you and you send a hit man over to kill her and her children, that's murder. Was Jorge involved in those kinds of things? I don't think so at all. I mean, he was just such a gentleman. He had a restaurant before and he was just smart. I understand that the first 10 kilos he sold, he was sitting on a motorcycle in the sidelines in a parking lot and when the DEA come in, he sped away. So he didn't come back to America. He was just smart. Some people just are savvy. And he was such a gentleman. And the whole family, the mother and the father, the two brothers, their sister, I was there when she was kidnapped. And finally, he kidnapped our, I guess, 100 leaders of the FARC and said, all right, when she don't come back, none of these are gonna come back. So they made a deal. Is there something you can say about the power structure, the hierarchy of the Medellin cartel that you interacted with? Was it a dictatorship where Pablo ran everything? Was there a bunch of power centers? Was it like a company where you have CEO, CTO kind of thing? And then there's like managers and all those kinds of things. How did it run from a leadership perspective? I understand that about five of them got together and made this, I would call it an insurance company. And now known as the Medellin Cartel. And I didn't see any difference. Each one of them had their own business. And their people from the jungle or wherever made the cocaine, gave it to them and they shipped it. And so it didn't seem to be any power play between them at all. But my main contact was Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar was right there. And I saw plenty of stuff for him too. It's strange that they didn't betray each other regularly. You know, greed makes men betray each other. How do you explain that? How much betrayal did you see? I didn't see any, absolutely none. If they shipped his 100 kilos, he got paid for it. And if the other one shipped his, I'm sure they got paid for it. How do you explain that? Well, there was no need to. The money was just unbelievable. You think about 500 kilos in the plane at $50,000 a kilo at the time. And they paid $5,000 to ship it. And they made 5,000 without even touching it. They just had somebody to load it on through the airplane. I gave it to their man in Miami. They gave it to whoever it belonged to by the marks on the duffel bags. So they was making just untold millions. Just no reason. But greed can blind men. It's still strange to me that there was not more betrayal. It speaks to something else perhaps that's bigger than money. Maybe not. But it seems like just like in the casino, like you mentioned, we get accustomed to whatever level of money we have, we get accustomed very quickly. Yes. And then there's a tension that's natural between human beings. And when that tension combined with money, combined with power, combined with, like you mentioned, beautiful women and a bit of violence, it seems that betrayal should be commonplace. But it's not. It wasn't, not at all. Carlos later, I don't know if he betrayed anybody, but he started that. He was running cocaine through the Bahamas near the island. I didn't go. I was offered to fly with a DC3 with that, but I didn't like it. So I had my route through the old wells in Louisiana. And so I wasn't gonna change, but he talked a lot and I don't know if he betrayed, but they didn't like him. Yeah, so as you expand, there could be tensions that lead to conflict. Columbia was, like you said, an ultra violent place. How did you survive? Who protected you? I was a hero. They liked me. I mean, I was just treated royally. All I did, I would come over El Banco. There's a radio station at the Forks of the Magdalena River. I believe it was 720, if I remember right, on the AM. And I'd fly in at 10,000 feet and I'd see below me there'd be a Cessna. And I'd wiggle my wings and he'd wiggle his and I'd fall in behind him and we might go 100, 200 miles. I'd land on some jungle strip or some banana plantation. And they'd fuel me up. I could eat steak in the night. It was just like treated royally. And I mean, take off the next morning whenever I wanted to. It was just like that was protected. And I was honored guest. It wasn't anything like in that movie, putting a gun to your head and taking your sunglasses and betting. So one time I complained to Jorge Ochoa that the runway was pretty short that they were using. And I went back down and it looked like Los Angeles International. They had bulldozers in there. Had that thing 5,000 feet long. Just like, just the next week it was all done. The jungle was gone and clay put up there. And all the while you were not afraid. You were treated like royalty. Yes, there I was. I was afraid when I landed in the United States. Well, maybe let's go back to the beginning. What was the first time you flew an airplane with drugs on it? Tell me the story of the first time you smuggled drugs. All right, I flew down to Jalapa, Veracruz with a Cessna 182. And we landed at the town. It was a lovely town and just an old town. Looked like Bible times. People, women were washing your clothes in the streets and with stone basins and the stream running through. I just was just dumbstruck. It was just so pretty. And I went in a church and a Catholic church and it had the stations of the cross all carved magnificent. I'd never seen that. And I come home and told Mary about that. That just almost brought tears to my eyes. It was so beautiful. And three o clock the next morning I went out to the airport and taxied down to the taxiway and there was a guard came out and wanted to know what I was doing. And I pulled out, I was on the fire department at Redondo Beach, California. So I pulled out my wallet and in it was the fire department badge. And oh, he shook my hand and was so glad. So I taxied on down there and we loaded up about 400 pounds in the plane. And came on back and I was running to headwinds more than I thought and I landed on a little strip. You're talking about on the way back? On the way back, on the way north after we loaded up early in the morning. And that's the only time I ever got vertigo. The mountains were coming down at a 30, 40 degree angle and the Milky Way was overhead. And somehow I wanted that airplane to be level with the stars. And it got me, it's a phenomenal pile of vertigo. It's the only time I ever had it was on that load. So anyway, the wind was on the nose of that system. I wasn't gonna make it to the dry lake where I had fuel. So I landed on a little bitty strip and there was a little house. It was caved in and it was a little boy named Lazarus, about six or seven years old. And he was herding some goats. So we put the marijuana in that house and the man stayed with it while I flew into some town and got fuel and came back and we sat down with the lunch that I brought back and little Lazarus sat there and ate with us and we had a good time. We loaded on back and came on home. Oh wow, I wonder where he is now. So what was it like to fly, maybe describe the details of, do you have to fly low? Is there details that are unique to this experience of flying an airplane with drugs on it, on board? All right, well, one of the mistakes that just thousands, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pilots make, they don't stop at the border, going down and get their permit. Once you get a permit to be in Mexico, you've got it for six months. You can go anywhere, any fishing village, any little town, any little place, show them this and you're welcome. If you don't have that, you go straight to jail. So you go down there and you think, okay, they're gonna have fuel for me to come back and so forth. Oh, sorry, Senor, that had a rusty leak in it. We don't have any. Well, you better be able to go to town and get it. So that's what I did. And when I was coming back for several years, I would fly up at Mexicali and cross the border right at Calexico. I would act like I was landing on the Calexico side just after dark and then I'd zip across the border and I'd go over to the Salton Sea and go below sea level, 100 and something feet, I believe 170 feet, and come on up and go out there above Palm Springs and land at 29 Palms in the desert and put my stuff under a Joshua tree and fly into town and get my pickup and go on back out and get it. And that was fun. And then it got really dangerous. They had Operation Starlight, I believe was the name of it. And they called a lot of pilots coming across the border. So I changed it. And by that time I was flying bigger planes. I was flying Beach 18s. And I would refuel in Mulahe halfway down on the Baja Peninsula. And then over in the middle, 20 miles from the nearest road was a goat ranch where they milked goats and made cheese. And I would go there and unload the load coming up out of anywhere in Southern Mexico. And I would land there and a guy named Juan would put the marijuana under the trees and I'd fly into Mulahe and they'd wash my plane and gas it up and I'd eat a lunch and rent a room for a few hours and take a nap and a shower and then go back in the afternoon and fill up. And then I would go Northwest out of there and fly 200 miles off the coast of the island of Guadalupe. And from there I would fly on a more Northwestern heading about 300 miles out over the Pacific. And then I would come in behind the Santa Barbara Islands down low and then I'd come up and go out in the desert land. And I did that for the rest of their marijuana trips. What was the hardest part about flying those routes? The hardest part was getting good in marijuana. So the hardest part isn't the flying. No, it's the flying. It's just like driving your car down. But then I had people that would bring me on strips that were just unworthy of an airplane. Like when I'd land on a highway and in the rainy season, I would come back to land again and the guy wouldn't think about it. And he'd have like little hills on both sides and the wings were out there. Well, the grass and the weeds would grow up and it sounded like, I mean, it sounded like tearing the airplane apart when those wings hit. Mowing the grass down both shoulders of the airplane. The weeds would grow up high in the tropics. So some of that stuff was bad. And oh, getting bad gasoline and telling me that land here in the night and knock the wheels off when you land. Oh, you should have landed a little further up here, Senor, they ditched down, that sort of thing. What was it like landing on a highway and when did you have to land on the highway? I landed on the highway most of my life, most of the times. In Mexico, first time I went down, there was a place called Pichalingi and it had a 900 foot strip. And I would fly down and I'd carry gasoline wing with me and Maury and I would go to the grocery store and buy all kinds of little goodies and candies and toys to bring to the children. And that sand strip in the bend of a river was just too short to take off with a load. So there was a young man there named Pedro, must not weigh much over 100, maybe 120 pounds. And he'd get in a plane with me and he'd direct me 20, 30, 40 miles away to a highway. And the people walk in and the people would pull out in a two ton truck with a machine gun on it and a bunch of guys with arms with us and they'd block the road and then another one would block it up about a mile away. And I'd land right over that truck and they'd load me up and it looked like a bucket brigade with the marijuana coming. I'd shake hands with all of them and I'd take off right over the other trucks. And sometimes maybe 20, 30, 40 cars lined up. One time I remember a patrol car, a highway patrol car, he didn't have his lights on, took off right over him. And then when I started flying to Louisiana, the bridge over the Mississippi River, there were several contractors that went broke and that thing was out for years. And about five miles from the river was flashing red lights and a detour. And then they swamp on both sides of it and the middle of it we're growing up with 20 feet trees and that was like an international runway from anywhere in the world. So I landed on that and over and over those red lights just like the end of a runway. And then the next morning we'd go out there and scrub the marks off the highway where I'd landed before daylight. Wow. Let's go to somebody you've known well, somebody who's also a drug smuggler is Barry Seal. Who is Barry Seal? How did you meet him? Barry Seal is a friend of mine. Murray and I and the children went down in Honduras and we went up Lake Azul, I believe it was, and we were looking at a ranch to buy. I was looking for something in Central America where I'd have a halfway place. Oh, it was lovely. We stayed up there for some days and our clothes got muddy and we went in the river and all kinds of things. So we got to San Pedro Sula and we was going back to New Orleans. So we went to the cleaners to get our clothes and most all of them was in there. And they go, oh, Senor, they'll be ready tomorrow morning. We're not ready now. Well, the plane leaves at nine o clock or whatever. So I told Murray for her and the children to go into the airport because it'd be easier for one just on a standby flight. So I went to the laundromat for the clothes and they were ready and there was a pile of them. And I put them on my back and got in a taxi and the old taxi would drive him with it and I'd give him a hundred dollars to go faster and he just blew his horn more rapid. So finally we got to the airport and I jumped out and ran around on the tarmac and here's a brand new 727 taxiing out. Oh no. So I'm waving to the pilot and he's a young fella. He waves back. Then I see Murray's face in the cockpit and the nose goes down where he puts on brakes and he laughs and he puts some stairwell out. And I run for the stairwell and he pulls it back up and goes like a hitchhiker going to pick you up and go again. Then he put it out and I got on and the whole crowd clapped and I'm coming home with that load of clothes. So I go way down in the middle and the plane's full and Miriam, my daughter, was about nine years old then and she was sitting in the middle and by the window was Barry Seal. Of course I didn't know it. And I sat in the middle and we took off and the wheels come up with clunk and then I got up about 5,000 feet and we had a little clunk and she said, what was that, daddy? And I said, he just turned on his autopilot. And that fella reached over and I looked at him. I said, he looks like CIA or FBI, something. He ain't supposed to be here. Clear blue eyes, gentleman looking man. And he said, you fly these things? I said, I got a few hours, mister. He said, I'll fly them too or something. And he said, my name's Barry Seal. And he reached over Miriam and shook hands and we got to talking and I thought, there's no choice of seats on this. It's just open seating so I don't believe him one bit. And he started talking about, he just got out of jail that morning. Just got out of prison. And I said, uh huh. And he told me that he'd been a pilot with the TWA and this and other. And told me what he was for. So we had a nice conversation for a couple hours to New Orleans. I didn't believe him. So he got off in front of us and what a crowd of people to meet him. An old mother and a wife and little children hanging on to him, crying and hugging and kissing him. I said, he was telling the truth. So I reached over and gave him a little piece of paper. I had Murray to write it out with our address. I said, Barry, I might have some work for you. Come on out. What was he in jail for? He got caught with 100 kilos of cocaine in a small plane. And so he served a year. And that was from Colombia? I don't know where it come from. He got caught in Honduras, probably refueling. But he'd been in prison down there before for bringing explosives to the Cuban Contras. And he lost his job with the airlines. And then later on, I found out he was ex CIA and George Bush Sr.'s protege and had a thousand parachute jumps and was there. He was a hot shot model. There's a million questions I wanna ask here. But maybe can we linger on a little bit longer? What was your relationship with him like? You were a drug smuggler. He's a drug smuggler. Your friends, how often do you guys talk? How often do you work together? What was the relationship like? Well, I'll back up and finish where I started off there. I gave him the things, Barry, I may have some work for you. I know I got some work for you. And I said, come out to Santa Barbara. And so I don't know, a week or two later, he flew out and went to our house and stayed with us a couple of days. And I had a almost brand new Aero Commander 690B. That thing with turbo prop and it was hot. It was the hottest thing I'd ever had. So I said, let's go Barry, let's see what you can do. So I'm sorry I said that. We got about 10,000 feet. And he was like one of them blue angel pilots. He rung that thing out. And I said, that's enough. And then he did a falling leaf. That's where you cut the engines and the plane falls from side to side. And I saw Bob Hoover do that in the air show once. And that's the only person I ever saw do it. And I was, my hands was white knuckle hanging onto the seat. You shut off the engine? Yeah, he shut off the engines and landed flying side by side like this. How do you explain that? Was he just a wild man or was he sufficiently skilled to work? He was sufficiently skilled. Absolutely. He knew what he was doing. I can get a plane from one spot to another and I guess I'm known as a good pilot, but that guy, it was an aerobatic. So anyway, he stayed with us a couple of days. And then I told him, I said, this plane needs tanking. And I said, I got some work down in Columbia. It needs to come back to Louisiana. And I need 2,500 mile range. He said, I got somebody in Mena, Arkansas to do that and keep their mouth shut. So I gave him $10,000 and he flew away. And in a few days he called me and says, come to my house in Baton Rouge. So I went out to his house in Baton Rouge and I stayed with him for a few days. And that plane was tanked. I mean, beautiful from stem to stern. I could went from Bolivia to Canada with it. So then I hired him to fly. And he was funny. I paid him a million dollars a trip. I paid him $2,000 a kilo, so about a million dollar trip. And I didn't get paid until the people received it. They had to ship it to Chicago and New York and then the money come back. So it was a couple of two or three weeks pipeline. Well, I always had to pay him before he'd go again. I mean, and he barely ache. I mean, he had moaning room. So one time I gave him a million dollars and I put it in a box real nice. So how big is a box that contains a million dollars? So we're talking about a hundred dollar bills? A hundred dollar bill, it's not very big. You can put it in a large briefcase. It weighs exactly 10 kilos. Each bill weighs a gram, so you can weigh your money and almost get it exactly right. 20 something pounds is a million dollars. 22 pounds. 22 pounds. A hundred dollar bills. But in one dollar bills, it's one ton, 2,200 pounds. We didn't even accept them. Were you the one that introduced Barry Seal to Pablo Escobar? No, I didn't introduce him at all. And our deal was that you don't meet my people. I mean, we just kind of crossed your working for me to fly the airplanes. So he wanted these Panther conversions that cost $400,000 each with a storm scope and radar. I bought anything you want. What's that mean, sorry to interrupt, Panther conversions? Panther conversion was, these people called Panther, they took everything out from the firewall, the instruments and all and converted them and put Q tip propellers on them full bladed and you very quiet and the CIA developed those in Southeast Asia for running behind the lines. And that's where Barry had flown those things so he knew about them. So that's what he wanted and that's what we got him. How does that connect to Pablo? And so he worked for you and you got those upgrades. I think he flew about 30 loads for me and then I got arrested and was for everything in the world. Got 35 years sentence. But let me back up a little bit. Barry was our friend. Mari and I are both friends. We should pause real quick and say Mari is your wife and hopefully we'll convince her to join us in a little bit. She's the love of your life and sort of she weaves in and out of many of these stories that you tell. Yes, she was there. She was behind the scenes. But I kept her out of it completely. And then also you mentioned Mariam as your daughter. Yes, our son was a baby. And I remember we went out to a festival, was my favorite restaurant in Carl Gables. Oh God, it was good. And Barry knew about it. Anyhow, we went out to dinner and so we came back and there was no rooms. So Barry will spend the night with us. So he goes to our hotel room with us and we got two big beds in the Omni Hotel and he lays over there and he gets down to his stripy undershorts and his T shirt and he puts the baby up on his belly and gives him the bottle and said, mm, ain't that good, Red? Oh my, my. And he just feeds the baby. We laugh and talk and that's how close we were that we could all stay in a hotel room together. And would you say he's a good man? Oh, wonderful man. A gentleman, Southern gentleman. Just looked after his mother, his family, everybody around him, everybody loved Barry. He just had a little smile on his face always. So you got arrested and then what happened to Barry? Well, Barry knew the people that unloaded. Of course he sent the cars down and all that. So he met the unloader, a guy named Lito, Luis Carlos Bustamante of Venezuelan. So he just kept on flying. But he, I believe he had three of my airplanes at $400,000 a piece and they owed me some money. Well, he collected a lot of that and gave Marie the money and put it in his safe and took her to his house and all after I got arrested and sent a lawyer in. He got me the best lawyer in the country, Albert Krieger. He was head of the defense team for all of America. Wonderful man. Can you tell the story of the months that led up to Barry's assassination? What did you know, what did you sense, what did you think? Okay, when I got out of prison, I hadn't been out long. I was eating breakfast and there was Ronald Reagan's face right in the television. We have absolute proof that the communist Sandinista government is in the cocaine running business. And there was that fat lady, the C126 on the runway with the belly down and I thought, oh God, he had done it. So I had heard that Barry might've been working with him. So it wasn't long before. Working with? With the DEA or whoever, he was no longer on our side. So can you clarify how you got that from the Reagan making a statement about we've heard. Okay, there was his plane. There was Barry's plane and okay, on the way north, we could stop in Nicaragua and land on a military base or on a base that they used as crop dusters and all and refuel and so that shortened our trip. We'd go further into the jungle and come up and that was what Pablo Escobar and Ochoa and them and they was associates with the people in Nicaragua. So Barry was, if that plane was there, that means Barry was feeding the DEA information. He was working with them at that time. But let me back up a little bit. When I was flying and I told Barry, we would refuel in Trange Airplane, the loads in Belize where I had a spot up there and then that's when they told me we can refuel in Nicaragua and then you fly all the way and Barry couldn't believe it. He says, all right, but I wanted you to land. I had a place in Louisiana for $10,000 that I could unload and the sheriff and all them was paid off. And he said, no, no, no. I can't get caught in Meena, Arkansas. I said, what do you mean you can't get caught in Meena, Arkansas? You get caught anywhere. He said, I can't, but it's gonna cost you $50,000 every time my wheels touch the ground. Why, can you explain why he can't get caught in Meena, Arkansas? He said he was hooked up with him at the very top and he even said, I'm gonna have dinner with the governor tonight. That's at that time. Meena, Arkansas. Mr. Bill Clinton. Undoubtedly. And it's like, did Bill Clinton, did you give him any money? And I said, no, I never gave the man any money, but it was like the money that I had that went to Grand Cayman Islands and I told my lawyer, I said, I never touched that money. He said, you don't have to fondle it to be guilty. So. So what, I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy theories around the relationship between Barry Seal and the Clintons. Absolutely. What evidence do we have? What would you say from your best understanding of what was the relationship between Bill Clinton and Barry Seal? Barry said, and he knew that he couldn't get caught in Meena, Arkansas. And when that movie was gonna come out, be called Meena, somebody stopped it. I mean, they stopped it dead in the tracks for two or three years and the producer even quit. You mean the American Made with Tom Cruise movie? It wasn't American. It was gonna be called Meena? It's the name that was written and produced in Meena. And waiting on Hillary to be elected, they would not let that movie out. And that movie was changed drastically. But to push back on that, that doesn't mean there's truth there. That means they were worried about the power of the conspiracy theory, which stuck. Exactly. But I don't know. I mean, you know, some conspiracy theories, just because they're popular doesn't mean they're true. And ones that, but it also doesn't mean they're not true. And there's ones that are not very popular that could be true. But that one really stuck. I mean, what's your sense? Well, I paid one and a half million dollars for Barry to land at Meena, Arkansas. So I was pretty well assured that he couldn't get caught. And I said, well, I can't get caught in Columbia. We can't get caught in Nicaragua. I guess we got a license. So we went for it. Oh, so when you say I can't get caught, just to clarify, there's a sense where this is a safe place to land. Yes, like completely safe. So you don't think he was referring to some kind of, you know, like my grandfather who fought in World War II would talk about bullets can't hit him. So it's almost like believing. He was taking that $50,000 and giving it to somebody. And Barry was honest. So he wasn't just taking it from me because he was making a million dollars. He didn't care for the $50,000. Oh man, taking the story forward, the months leading up to his assassination, what would you understand why he was assassinated? Who were the players involved? Maybe could you have stopped it? Well, I'll tell you, after I saw Reagan's face on the television saying we have the absolute proof, the phone rang and it was Barry. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years. He said, I'm coming out tonight, Roger. And I, oh boy. So he came out and he said, I'll meet you in this French restaurant. I don't even know it in Santa Barbara. And I walked in, there's about 20 or 30 people in there. And they was all 30, 40 years old, women with plastic or leather skirts and me in the blue jeans. And I looked around and Barry was at the back. He was leaned up, he had gained weight. And I walked up and I said, Barry, you wired. He said, no. I said, well, I'm not gonna talk to these DE agents. He said, every one of them. So. Oh, with jeans and skirts, I like it. I said, well, Barry, I'm gonna set you and you just talk to me, buddy, and tell me what's on your mind. And he sat there and he just went to talking. And he told me about, he was left holding a bag. And it. What do you mean by that? Like that nobody's supported him? Well, I think it's something or another. He was, and I don't know this. I mean, this is just what happened, putting it all together. He had some CIA buddies that was pretending we're going to supply all of our Northwood arms. And with that, you can land cocaine back here by the ton. So he's taking his little planes and putting some AK 47s and maybe ammunition or whatever, and takes it down to the Contras against the Communist Party of Nicaragua, where we've been landing. And Oliver North was involved in this. So when all that, and so his CIA buddies was certainly involved, and we know they were. And Barry had been in the CIA earlier when he first got out of school. So when, as I say, the shit hit the fan, they all fled and left Barry holding the bag. The CIA and the DEA. Yeah, not the DEA, the CIA. The DEA wasn't in on it. The CIA was selling that cocaine, bringing it in. And. Just to clarify, what's Iran Contra scandal? What was the alleged involvement of the CIA in using drug trade to fund things? What do you know? What do you think is true? What should we know? Well, I know what I knew was true, that Barry was taking a small amount of arms back to Central America and giving them to whoever Oliver North group were. Who's Oliver North? Oliver North was a colonel that got implemented and almost brought the government down. And so they said, all right, we're getting the guns from Iran and we're taking cocaine to pay for them. And since Congress won't give us money to fight this war, we're gonna circumvent it. So that was a whole thing. So it was a CIA's effort to circumvent the funding mechanisms of government by selling drugs. Yes, but it was a handful of renegade CIA agents that were Barry's friends that was making a load, a load of money, tons of it come up. If you would like to read the book, The Big White Lie, The CIA and the Crack Cocaine Epidemic, the CIA put, according to this, the book and Michael Levine, I didn't remember his name last time I talked, wrote that book and he was a head CIA agent, he was a head DEA agent that exposed this. And the CIA tried to kill him. And he says, they put crack cocaine, they developed, their chemists developed crack. And they put it in every city in the United States on one weekend. So they were bringing it up by the tons and that's for sure. And Barry was bringing it. Can I ask you a small tangent question? Do you think the public should trust the CIA and the DEA? Do you think they're mostly good people that are carrying out a good mission? Because this kind of makes it sound like there's renegade agents that are just doing whatever the hell they want and with sometimes no regard for human life. Well, that's certainly true. But that's not everybody in there. That's just, sometimes you get a few policemen in the department that do these things. I don't believe, I believe that our government is good. I think we've got some fools running it. I don't know how we get them there, but I don't think I know. Okay, so what was Barry's involvement here? So Barry leaned back in that chair and he told me that he got caught with one and a half tons and he bellied it in the runway in Nicaragua and had cameras flashing inside and out. And he flew it back to Homestead with an agent there and he brought the agent over, Jake Jacobson. Really nice fellow, I think he was a crop duster. And we'd have got along if we'd have been on the right side. And so we sat there and drank Chevy's Regal until I got pie eyed and Barry told me about it. He said that he went to see Edwin Meese. He flew his, he got out on bail and he flew his Lear jet up to Washington and went in to see the Attorney General, Edwin Meese. And they run him out of the office. The next day he went back and said, I have absolute proof that the CIA is bringing tons of cocaine or they're running tons of cocaine into the United States. And Edwin Meese put him up with this agent Jacobson. I believe it was. And they went down and got one and a half tons. And on the way back, they bellied it in and Pablo Escobar and some of the other ones on general there in Nicaragua, you can see them toting it from one plane to the other in the book called The Big Kings of Cocaine. It's got a mention of me too. And also the other one has a mention of me in it. Said I'm in more files for the DEA than Noriega. So who was wanting to get rid of Barry? Is that, who wanted to get rid of Barry more? The cartels or the CIA? The cartel. But so Barry leaned back and he told me the story. And the tears came down between his fingers as he put his hands over his eyes. And he said, I just couldn't do it, Roger. I just couldn't do three life sentences. So I've told him everything. I went to Congress and I've testified before Congress. He testified before Congress for all these things that he had done. And he said, I told him all about you, but you're under my umbrella. You got to testify with me before grand jury in Miami. And so the guy said, you can come down, the DEA said you can come down tomorrow with Mari, first class, or I'll take you down in chains. And if you don't testify with Barry, the only place you'll ever see your wife and family again is in a federal prison visiting room. Was that a difficult conversation? Oh, my guts was just like ice water. I can't testify against my friends. I just can't do it. How am I going to do it? I just, I can't work with people. And he was honest with me. How am I going to testify against them? I can't spend the rest of my life in a federal prison. What on earth, what a mess, Barry, you've got me into. So. Is that a kind of betrayal there? Yes, but it's still, I wish he left me out of it. I understand him getting in such a mess that he told, because if the CIA and whoever else was behind him betrayed him, then he's going to tell everything. So I says, all right, I'll be in Miami. So Mari and I flew down first class. And I went to a lawyer, one of the biggest lawyers in Miami. And I said, man, I am in a mess. This fellow's told everything and I've got to say something, but I'm not a snitch, man. I mean, what can I do? And he said, well, being a snitch is like being pregnant. You either are or you're not. And he says, I don't represent snitches, but if you want to fight this case, I'll do it for $600,000. And boy, my face turned red. Well, I'm not a snitch. He said, well, that's what you're talking about. He said, let me tell you something. If you go in there and say one thing and sign that paper and you don't tell them everything you know, then they will convict you of everything you've ever done and you tell them. So you can't do it. So I said, Barry, I'm having trouble with a lawyer. Give it, I'll go to Mari, let's go. He said, all right, use my lawyer. And he gave me his card, the lawyer's card. So Mari and I went to the festival restaurant that night and Barry and Debbie came in. She was dressed pretty and Barry wasn't. So we was already about finished. So we had dessert together. And I said, Barry, they're going to kill you, friend. He said, no, they ain't going to kill me. So and so, such and such is gone. And this and the other. I said, Barry, they're going to kill you, man. You can't deny it. And I said, I didn't tell him I wasn't going to testify. So I hugged his neck. I really, like, and we fled to Brazil. But I took Mari and the children and went to Brazil. So you decided there you're not going to stay. I knew, I didn't know what I could do. I talked to a lawyer. I mean, I just didn't, I didn't know what I could do, but the best in Miami said what he told me. So I had to go. And you went to Brazil. We went to Brazil. Did you have a conversation with anybody at the cartel? I mean, that's such an interesting moment that tests the man's character to not snitch. And did you have a conversation with anybody? No. Pablo with, about it. Not at all. So it's just understood. I just didn't, couldn't do it. But how many men like you are there? Not many. I had all my friends testified against me. I had 11 friends and every one of them put their finger up. Roger did it. And I was facing life, continuing criminal enterprise care. And still you couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. Did you ever get respect from the cartels for that, from the people in the cartel? Oh, there was a whole time I got back and stuff. They owe me money and I can't get it. So. Well, that's about money. I just mean about human beings. Oh, I think so. I mean, I've been back down there and I've been welcomed. I have my contact. And when I was in Brazil, I was trying to get this money. They owe me three and a half million dollars. So I called up there and he was going to pay me. Oh, I got 600,000 today and I'll get you some more tomorrow. And then the next week I called, hey, hey, got great news, great news. Barry Seale has been killed. So, oh no. And I went back to the hotel. We was up in the northern part of Brazil and where was it, Marty? It's been quite a job. Yeah. And so I went back and I told Mary and Miriam and they cried and I cried. I really cried. How is that great news from the cartel perspective? Well, now there's no case against me and him and them. Do you know who killed them? Yes. I'll tell you about that story. On the first load I did, I landed at a banana plantation and it was raining and it was a muddy strip, clay. And they put the 300 kilos of cocaine and then the ugliest man you could imagine, named Ronaldo got in there with a Mac 10 and he was making sure I took it to Louisiana. So. This is many years before. Yeah, a couple of years before. So anyway, we took off and the mud got up in the wheel well so thick until the wheels wouldn't come up. Well, I'm going 200 miles an hour instead of 300 miles an hour with wheels coming down. Well, I can't go back there. If I do, I'm gonna be in the same situation until the sun dries it out in a few days. And so, but in Belize, I had a runway that had been used for $10,000 used to refuel. So I told the guy, listen, we got to land in Belize to refuel. No, no, no, we put the Mac 10 and I'll shoot you. Go ahead, fool, you're gonna die too. So it was in a term. So. He wasn't just ugly, he was also angry. He was a bad, bad killer. And so he's the one to actually kill Barry. The one that went up on the first load with me. And Ronaldo, and he's doing life. He's just a killer. Yeah, he's doing life in Louisiana. I wonder who, is it known who made that decision? The younger Ochoa brother, I understand, Fabio, which one paid for the hit. I don't know that, but that's what I've heard and it probably sounds about right. He's done in Jessup, Georgia, doing a long, long time. I think he's about to get out. He's been in 30 years or whatever. The movie American Made. What do you think that movie got right? What did it get wrong? Almost everything wrong. It was disgustingly wrong. Okay, which parts? Can you maybe elaborate? It's about Barry Seal and it just didn't even, it was nothing, whoever wrote it had no idea who Barry Seal was. They sat in a rocking chair and just tried to think of what was some baby bashing drug dealer doing. And it's just like, God, you just don't have any idea of the spirit of the man. So they wanted just to try to tell a fun story without actually studying the story. They didn't know him, they just had no idea. And Barry was such a nice person, such a really nice gentleman person. They talked to you or no? No. The people that made the movie. And I see all these people telling Barry never met him. They telling all about him. I think that's just ridiculous. And for one thing, for his character coming out of warehouses and all that, that was just like ugly. And then down in Columbia, putting a gun to his head, going to take his sunglasses and then he put $25,000 million worth of cocaine on his plane. And then they're going to bet $100 he don't have enough room to take off. That's just insane. I mean, just the whole thing. And then he's talking to the DEA agents when he's coming up. You don't know what frequency they own, how he's got five planes and they all split when the DEA comes out. These are just somebody just fantasy. But those are like, those are details of the man, details of the story. Is there some big profound things they missed about just this whole period? But that's something that's really important to you that was missed. Yes, they just tried to sensationalize on little things that people remember. And it's just not true. It was just like a business deal and good people and good airplanes and good flying. And it was like a good watch that was made. It just clicked and it just went on. And they missed all of that. They tried to make it sound like it's something very ugly. Do you think it was a story that could have been told way better and still be a hell of a good story? Oh my goodness, yes. Well, there's a series called Chernobyl done by HBO. And because I have sort of family connected to that period, they did an incredible job of being historically accurate and only not being historically accurate when it helped the story, only in those rare cases. When they on purpose left the story to make it easier for people to understand. But it was still somehow accurate. And even though all the actors were British actors speaking English with a British accent, it was still somehow accurate. Like they captured the spirit. So it was historically accurate and the spirit was captured. That was one of the most incredible like series I've ever seen. It convinced me that the movie was made by non Russians. It convinced me that if you really care about a story, you don't have to have been brought up in it. You don't even need to speak the language. If you're truly a scholar of it, if you talk to a lot of people, if you learn, if you just pour your heart and soul into it, you can create something really special. And so your son says you could do that with the story with this period of time. Oh yes, it was a story that needs to be told. It need to be told in the correct way. Not like we're trying to bash a certain angle. Yeah. Well, if Netflix or HBO are watching this, you need to tell the story of Roger Rees, in my opinion. There you go. This is a young picture of you. Yeah. There you go. That's from National Geographic. Jorge Archoa, Pablo Escobar, it's you, Roger and Barry. Yeah. And the Muggler, a memoir. Yeah, I really do hope that they make a movie of this one. There's a movie called Blow that tells the story of George Young, Boston George. Did you know George Young? That's one way to ask it. The other is what do you think of the movie Blow? I didn't know George Young, but it was a wonderful movie. Absolutely. It captured it. It did. Yes, it did. That's the way it should be. So he was a little bit before your time? Exactly the same time. Exactly the same time. He was using stewardesses to fly the marijuana out of Manhattan Beach, and I was on the fire department in Redondo Beach, 10 miles away, flying it up, sending it back. Somebody was sending it back. He might've been sending it back, but he didn't have near the excitement that I did. I was shot down twice. I escaped from five different prisons. I was tortured almost to death in a Mexican prison. So he didn't have all that fun that I had. Fun in quotes. Yeah, so yours is a heck of a fun adventure. Just to linger on a little bit. So Johnny Depp plays George, and Ray Liotta plays his father, and there's this son father kind of scene at the end. I don't know. It's heartbreaking. Like that scene paints a picture of a life that could have been had if none of this wild drug smuggling happened. I don't usually, I mean, I don't, I'm almost, I really never get like teary eyed in a movie, but that got me. It's almost like confronting at the end of your life what your life could have been with your father, the way he calls him Georgie. It, like you fucked up, Georgie. Yes, I did too. I really, really did. Mario waited for me all those years and the children raised them without me, visiting me in prisons all over the world. It's unbelievable. It's just, nothing's worth that kind of money. Yeah. Can you tell the story of when you were tortured nearly to death in a Mexican prison? I sure can and I'm smiling, but it was nothing to smile about, I can tell you. I was in a pool and a gentleman came over and shook hands with me and put handcuffs on me. And I thought, what in the world? That was at one of the nice hotels. They put me in a jail cell and I sat there and all the drunks and thieves and stuff kept coming in and they had a bucket and it overrun. And I said, I remember like 18 people in a room about 12 foot square. Oh, it was hot and I thought, somebody's gotta come get me, this ain't real. I hadn't done anything. It's like, it was a pilot come to see me up in Hermosillo and he stopped and he made a mistake and went to the International Runway instead of where he was supposed to go. And he had my phony name in his pocket, so they got me. So they said I was a drug smuggler. So after about three days, they put me back into the back and it was a torture place. And they put me in a little cell like, I guess it wasn't hard even, it wasn't six feet, must've been about five feet square and about 12 feet high. And it was June, the end of June, and it was hot. I mean hot. And they left me in there for, I guess a few days. You didn't know, so every once in a while they'd come drag me out and first off, they put my head under water and it had seltzer in it or some kind. And I took one whiff of that and three or four of them couldn't hold me down. So then I learned that just before you have to breathe, tear loose like that and they'll let you up. And that was the first treatment. And then they started beating me. And they beat me with a blackjack and rubber hose until I was black and blue and yellow from the bottom of my feet to my head. What did they want from you? They wanted me to sign a confession that I was a drug smuggler. And they put the papers under your nose. This is all over if you'll sign. Well, I knew if you signed, you got six years. I wasn't gonna sign, I wasn't gonna sign. But they didn't want you to snitch on anybody. They just wanted you to say. No, they just wanted me to sign that paper. And you still didn't. I didn't even bow to it. I ain't a beat and ate that bad. So. So anyhow, it just got them into the good part. So then they come and they take me out, I'm bug naked and they bend me over and they have things to pull you, like chains click, click, click, click, click. And they bent me over and they put butter on my bum and they commenced to put hot chili pepper up there and that stuff was bad. I mean, it was red hot and that was, that was awful. And still. That was just awful. Yeah, but still you didn't. I didn't think about it. I ain't going to, I guess if I'd have known he was gonna kill me, I wouldn't have done it. But I wasn't about, you get hurt bad enough you'll pass out, so I didn't pass out. So I was all right. So then the last thing they did was they brought a dead man in there and he was wrapped. He was frozen. He was wrapped in newspaper, little strips about a half inch wide, just like a mummy. And he was frozen and they hung him on the wall with a meat hook and you next son of a bitch, you next. And so he's sitting there like this and as he starts to throw out, which is pretty quick, it looks like he's crying and it looks like he's peeing and the paper starts unraveling on him and the formaldehyde puddles on the floor. Ooh, what a smell that rotten insides and the formaldehyde and there was a little space. It wasn't even a half inch high under the door. And I lay on that filthy floor with my cheek and put my lips right up under that door and we're sucking that fresh air. And I went to sleep after some time. And I know where Walt Disney gets his ideas. I saw white pink pigs with wings on them, all kinds of stuff flying around. So when I woke up, I didn't know which was real and which was the nightmare. It took me a minute to figure out where I was and what was going on. How did you stay mentally strong through that time? Like what? I don't know that I did. I was, yeah, I was mentally strong. So I was just like I am now. Stubborn. I mean, you could be that man that could have killed you. Yes, I could have. So what gave you hope? Did you have hope? Yeah. Or you were just a stubborn son of a bitch? I think some of both of it. And I think they aren't going to keep you here forever. You know, you're going to get out into the prison or they're going to let you go or something. If you sign that paper, you ain't going nowhere. And I want to go home. I got shot down a few weeks before that. I got shot from out of the sky. 80 bullet holes through the plane, killed a fellow on the ground, shot the leg nearly off the man in the plane. Where was this? In that little place of Peachy Lingy. You want to tell you that story? And they were shooting you from the ground. Yeah, yeah. All right. A little 900 foot strip there at Peachy Lingy, a poor, poor village with starving donkeys. And that's where they'd, I'd give them $17,000 for the load. And I'd go over on the highway and load. Well, on day 13, I did a load every day for 13 days. They had a bunch of marijuana, pretty good piled up. And I was going low today. And on day 13, I had that little warning sign going off in my stomach. Uh oh, uh oh, don't do it. But I asked this Joaquin, oh, we had the federal, all this paid off, nowhere we were. So I spent the night in a hammock and walked down to the airplane, just as it get in daylight. And 10 or 12 men walked with me and Pedro got in. I brushed my teeth in the little stream. It was about foot deep, a little river coming through there. And got in the airplane and I fired her up. Bam, blah, blah. And bam, I thought a tire blew out. I looked over and it still ain't dawned on me. And Pedro was yelling, police here, police here Roger, police here. Well, it dawned on me. And I shoved it, the throttle to the firewall. And I only had about. So that was a bullet. Yeah, somebody, there's officer sides, they'd shot. They'd shot just a warning, like get out, stop. We're gonna rob you, whatever it is. That's what they do. They just taking the plane and me and put me in prison, old thing. So, but I, even though I had papers. So I just shoved it to the firewall and there wasn't enough room to take off on that strip. And there's half of it was behind me or some of it was behind me. And so just at the end, I'm just like, I think that thing stalls at about 50 miles an hour. Just turning 50 and I just pulled it right up and put the flaps on. And as I pulled off the ground, they opened up on both sides of me with machine guns and they riddled that airplane. I mean, the windshield came out. I got hit three times. You, like your body? Yeah. And I didn't know I was hit. I mean, it was just the gasoline just pouring in. The world turned yellow. I must've went into shock. So it just stopped in slow motion. And one bullet hit the strut right by my head. And it just, parts of that bullet just went all over me. I just looked like I'd been peppered with lead. And the gasoline was just pouring in. I mean, just pouring in where they'd shot the wing up above and the windshield's gone. I mean, it was just like a hail storm. So I was... Airplanes did stall or no? I was in a stall anyway, and I didn't realize it. And I guess you wouldn't unless you trained for it. But when you're in a stall, the elevator is kind of flappy. And I didn't realize it at the time. I thought they had shot the elevator cable in too. So I thought, oh God. So I just reached over and switched it off, switched the mixture, pulled everything. And in the river, there was rocks about as big as this table. And they were like the turtle back all the way up until there was a waterfall. There's quite a pretty place. And I crashed straight onto it. I thought if I get those rocks. And when I did the first time I hit, the wings came off and then it bounced. And the next time the nose came up and came under the plane and I'm sitting there, I must've been knocked unconscious called Pedro shaking me. Come on, Roger, come on, Roger. So I stepped out into the water and here comes these four Federalists still shooting at us. And I'm bulleted to hit the airplane. And I kept a nine millimeter Browning high power taped to the top of the radio in case I ever needed it. So, cause you didn't want it in the airplane. So I just, it was just handy just laying there. So I took and popped a few caps out of them and they ran into the rocks. So we took off running. And then I looked and Pedro's foot nearly shot off. They'd shot him on one side of the ankle and it just blown out the other side. And it wasn't even hardly bleeding, the shock of it. So I took my T shirt off and gripped it and tied it best I could. But you had still bullets in you. So like you could still run. I shot the top of my toenail off. I shot it across my head and my kneecap. So I was just nicked. Okay, got it. It was very painful later on, but right that time I didn't, it was just hot. And there's a bullet still in my foot from it, a piece of a bullet. Good size slug. So we went on up the mountain through the cactus and just running. Just going, I want to go down. No, no, the federal is going the easy way. Let's go, this young fella. And we came to an old donkey. She must've been 30 years old, long and way back, long hair on her, Charlotte, Charlotte. And he petted the donkey and we jumped on. And we rode for seven. Like an actual donkey? A donkey. There were donkeys all over the place. Anyhow, he knew that one from the village. And so we rode seven miles, two of us, on a donkey with no bridle, no saddle, nothing. And we came to a little man plowing a little horse and a little ox. Both of them were spotted and the ox was, the yoke was across their back this way. And he was plowing with a little plow among stumps. It was like one of these people clearing a little piece of land. And he had a little house there. And so we went into his house and his wife and his daughter, they put like a cloth over my wounds and on Pedro's. It was terrible. And they poured diesel oil on it to keep the flies off. So I'm covered in diesel. So the man left and he was gone all day. And then about dark, he showed up, maybe about 15 or 20 horses and mules showed up in the yard, walking fast. And a doctor got out, he said, I'm Dr. Benjamin Soso with Red Cross. And he worked on my foot and he worked on Pedro. He gave us a shot of morphine and tetanus shots. And he said, you got to get to hospital. He said, Pedro will die if he don't get to hospital. He said, they are looking for American pilots been shot down and they think he's dead. There was a lot of blood in that airplane. And so they rode, I don't know how far we rode, but we rode miles and we'd come to a road and there was a big truck and it was loaded with corn in the ear. And they dug holes in that corn, put us in it and covered us up. And the road was rough. And every time we'd hit a dirt road, that corn would cover me up. They'd scratch my face out again. And when they came to the highway, we went into a house and they got me some clothes and mine was messed up and a white basin. And they must've brought 20 jugs of water different times. I kept washing and washing my foot till all the blood and the crud got off of me and put on those clothes. And somebody went to, they said, you can't go North, the road's blocked. They're looking for the pilot. So you got to go South. So they found a taxi in Mazatlan. And it was a rather new taxi. And the fellow would take me to Guadalajara, which was, I don't know, seven, eight hours South. So we got in that taxi and they propped me up with sheets and blankets and pillows in the back seat and gave me these great big white pain pills. And I was quite content. Then I was shot down in Columbia also. What, can you tell that story? I sure can. All right, I went down for a load of marijuana and we got to the place and we got there too early. And the guerrillas screamed, you got to get out of here, you got to get out of here. And so we went back to the place where we stayed from and refueled. I had a beautiful DC3, carried three tons. And so while I was waiting, I ate something for lunch and I went around behind the house. We refueled a plane up and I had to wait till late afternoon. They wanted me to come just at dark so the military planes couldn't see me on their strip. So I'm leaning in the hammock asleep and I hear this terrible roar. And I looked right up through the trees and at the end of two military jets going straight up. They do a dive over and they came back down the strip in front of that airplane and they just tear it up with 50 caliber machine guns. They just showing out. So I run for the airplane, I just give that guy $80,000 and he ran for the truck and all the rest of them ran for the truck. I should have ran with my money, but I didn't, I ran for the airplane. And the copilot got in and his name was Al. He got in with me and two fellows got in the back. We had drums of fuel in there to refuel when we got down to the guerrillas. So we took off and I couldn't get the gear up because I'd taken off in such a hurry. These pins in the struts of a DC3 and with big flags on them and you have to take them up so that the plane won't come up. So these jets swarmed on me and they tried to get me to go. They kept telling me which way to go and the pilot would be just as close as just right over there. I could see him. I just held up the old iffy piece. I didn't think they would shoot. I really didn't. Nobody had shot before. So I kept flying out and I kept getting slower and slower and they kept slowing down, down, down and the black smoke rolling. And then they started shooting up under me. Boom, boom, boom, boom with them 20 millimeter cannons. And then the tracers just going up. They looked like they're curving up from me. I woo and I pushed the nose over so they couldn't get under me. And later on I heard they thought I tried to ram them. So one of them went for fuel and I kept on going and the one just tore the left wing tip up with the 50 caliber. And then he come back again and shot the tail up. He's warning me. And I tell the feller in there, I says, you know, if you bring me enough water, I believe I can fly this thing. My mouth got quite dry. So I went on and I landed on a big pasture. And it was huge pasture and it was rougher than it looked. And the wings just flapped and I come to a stop and jumped out and pull those tabs out, threw them on the ground so I could get my gear up. And I understand that during the 1980 World Series baseball game that it says American DC three has just been shot down by American jets, by Colombian jets. You know, it's the first plane shot down on Reagan's new war on drugs. But he's up, he's up and away, ladies and gentlemen. We keep you posted. So I took off again and I went into a thunderstorm and they came close to the mountains. So I spiraled up and every time I'd come out, that jet was there, boom, boom, boom. And I'd go back into that storm and boom, boom, boom in there and at 20,000 feet, I started icing up. So I went out one last time and he was right there waiting. He had me on radar. So I went back in and I kicked it over and put it into a spin and went straight down to 2000 feet and come out under it. And I was flying along the Guaviera River and it was 20 feet above the water. It looked like a pasture, it was just grass. And I made several runs to tear the grass down and it looked like, and it felt hard. That old DC three weighs 30,000 pounds and I put it down on the fifth run. I said, all right, now we're gonna land now. And as I was. Did you do like close several times? I put the wheels down. Oh, you put the wheels down without landing. And just, so I'm making a run for it, you know. So you, okay. So you're being tracked by a jet. He's going. He's trying to, well, before that, I'm just like retelling this story, how insane it is. So he's trying to shoot you down and there's a thunderstorm that you're escaping into. And then you do a spin down to what, 2000 feet? Whatever you said, like somehow escaping all of this. And then you try to land on a pasture on a giant heavy plane that carries three tons by touching down five or six times to make a landing strip for yourself. Yeah, the grass is three or four feet high. So it looked really good after about, after a few times. So then just before it stopped, I said, Al, take your feet off the brakes. He said, I don't have my feet on the brakes. Well, I knew I had broken through the crust and I put full power on, but it didn't. That old big plane just come on down and it just did a head, as it came to a stop, it did a headstand, 90 degrees to the ground. Oh, wow. And the engines held it up and the nose and all just crushed in right on it. We fell between the two seats to keep from getting killed. Wow. And when it come to a stop, all that fuel was pouring out on those hot engines and there was an escape hatch at the top. I just stepped out, took my suitcase with me. Was there fire? No fire, left the plane there and the two guys that was in the back, one of them broke his thumb and it was with the barrels and they had to put a hose, tie gas hose together to shimmy down to get out. Yeah. So. That's an incredible story. Well, let me just tell you, they had a little bit more to it. I learned to fly with the idea of being a missionary aviation fellowship pilot, fly the missionaries in and out of the jungle. Well, I went 11 days through that jungle. The rest of them went on down the road and went to prison. I said, I'll crawl on my belly six months in here a year, eating snakes before I'm going down the road. So I went in there and I was 11 days in the jungle and I finally came to this place and it had airplanes. I kept asking the Indian, dandistai avions. I want to steal an airplane and get out of there. And when I came to the place, I asked, what is this place? Lovely place. It looked like Honolulu in World War II. There was a runway there. Said, you don't know. This is Loma Linda headquarters for Missionary Aviation Fellowship for the Amazon. And they flew me out. Wow. You escaped from prison five times? So what stands out to you as the most difficult or miraculous escape in the bunch? The most black miraculous was when I was in the courtroom in Spain. I think I was on the third floor of Real High and I ran across the courtroom, handcuffed, kicked the window out. And I looked down and it was above the palm trees. I thought there might be a power line or something I could grab on as I went down. There was nothing. And there was a car parked, a station wagon on the side. You just jumped out? I jumped out from 31 feet and on top of that car. And it exploded in the street. The windshield went over three or four cars. It looked like snow going up. And I looked like Donald Duck with the thing coming off and handcuffs and I got out. And you just kept running? Yeah, I kept running. They ran me down and hit me in the back. I still got a dead spot in my back where the policeman hit me with a shotgun. And they brought me back. Murray was there and they were saying, your husband is crazy. That was spectacular. But I escaped from Lubeck, maximum security prison. And I cut out of there and got out. That was a miraculous escape. And that was where? In Lubeck, Germany. What was that escape like? I was there and they was going to extradite me back to the United States where I still had all these charges and 25 years special parole. And I was cleaning the lawyer's visiting room and on it was bars that looked like piano notes or this way to make it pretty. But they was a little bit, so I got a rope from a guy where they made boats in there. And I had 20 minutes. So I went in there and I wrapped it around and I put a broom handle in it that was cut off and wrapped it around until they pull the bars together on that side. And then I pulled them together on the other side. But that only put me in inside the prison yard where the soccer equipment was kept. But they were putting new windows on one side of the prison and they had it scaffolded up to the fourth floor. So there was a little recess there and there was guard towers every 100 feet or so. I mean, they would shoot and kill you. So I got behind that and climbed up holding to the bricks on one hand and the scaffolding on the other and went to the roof. I lost my shirt and most of my clothes going through the window. I got all the skin off of me. I thought I was gonna die. And I was trying to go sideways like this. And finally I got a grip and the bars let me through and took all the skin off of me. So I got up on that roof and I have asthma and I just lay there trying to catch my breath. Didn't bring my inhaler. With blood everywhere. Oh, I was bloody, yes. And so I got down to the end and on the end, the reason I did it, they would put it, they was putting a new wall again around the prison to make it larger. And they had taken all the wire off above the Sally port where they could join the two walls together. And I saw that when I came up and there was a guard, a half of like a dome sticking out of that brick building where there's a guard there with a gun and he'd kill you. And I mean, he was made, he was surely trained to kill you. And we had some bad people in that place. So I lay up one floor above it and I saw a guard and his wife come with a double umbrella. It was just pouring down the rain. Here I am without a shirt on, bloody. And she had a little boy with him under that double umbrella and I knew him and when he come and she started back from the Sally port, I hit the top of that guard tower, bam, with both feet. And I jumped, I guess it's three more floors. I jumped, there was a pile of sand, like a cone where they were digging it there. And I hit that and my feet buried up to the knees, but I didn't fall. And I ran straight towards her so he couldn't shoot me. And then I went around some bushes and went downhill. And then I heard bam, bam, bam, bam, bam behind me. And I looked and that fool woman was in a big old car and she was knocking down the parking meters behind me. She was trying to run over me. And I ran behind the car and she tore the fender off of her car, trying to yell and yow, yow, yow, and a terrible evil looking face at me, screaming at me. And the sirens going off in the prison. And there was a fence there, a wall. And I jumped up on it to jump over and it had glass embedded. And I cut my hands and my arms all up getting over that. And I hit the ground on the other side and it was like, it was that mucked muck where some farmer had dug it. I dug in there and Maury had slipped me $200 into prison. And I had that in my shoe and I lost my shoes in that muck. But anyway, I got out of there and got to Holland. Really a heck of a story how I did that. What was prison like, whether it's Germany or whether it's Australia? What were some of the darker moments in prison? The United States prisons are awful, awful evil places now. And just really, there's nothing nice about them. There's the guards. In LA? And everyone I went to. It seemed like the further east I went to Oklahoma and it was nicer, but all of them on the West Coast, they was hatred there. And they got really stupid people hired, just incredibly. Oh, hatred by the guards. And the inmates, like I speak Spanish and I walked in to the Spanish TV room and it was saying, you know, no, you can't come in here. And I walked across to the black, hey, get out of here, white boy. It was just like, what? Man, I like all you people, you know? And so I walked down to the white people and said, show us your paperwork. You can't come in here until you show your paperwork. We don't let snitches and homosexuals and all this sort of stuff in here. So they have, so it's just like, man, I don't wanna be in here. I mean, it sounds absurd, but you're saying like the basic humanity is gone. Completely, completely in the guards. It was just like, come here, Reeves. And I woke up to him, get the fuck out of my face. Sticks his chin out, like for me to break his jaw. Like, what in the world, man? I love people and it's just. Yeah, you got this joy to you. You have a joyful nature. And it didn't seem like that broke you. Not a bit. How did you persevere? Did you know, I didn't even think I persevered, but I try to enjoy my life wherever I am every day. I do. I ran every day. And like I told you, why do you run so, Roger? I said, to help me suffer these fools. And I played a game of chess every day, almost of my life in there. And I read two books a week. And I talked with people, storytellers, guys would come in and, tell us another story, Roger. Give us a poem. Tell us one you never told us before. And so it was just nice. A lot of them have original boys. They picked their country music and it was all right. Red, Morgan Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption says the following. These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes you get, so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. Is there truth to that? 100%, I didn't even see the walls, except whenever I was planning on escaping. In Shawshank Redemption, he spent so many years in prison that he almost didn't know what to do with himself once he left, once he was a free man. That's the, you get so used to the system, the rituals, having to follow orders, even being treated poorly, all those kinds of things that you become dependent on. Well, down in Australia, I spent the first, a little over a year in the shoe. It was like, did you see the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, thank you, Marty. And he said, I had five or six guards looking at me with a one way mirror. And that's whenever I thought I might never get out, I got a life sentence. I had all this time waiting here in Germany. And so that's, they had a computer in there, but it didn't have a program on it. And I wrote, so I just started writing these little stories of stuff I did in my life. And I wrote one line and I wrote over a million words with them looking at me. So it was after a year, they let me out. It wasn't long before they put me in a place called Self Care. And particularly, I was in what they call the lifers pod. There was 268 men in Self Care there. And it was unbelievably good that we were left alone. Basically, they was there or the guards were certainly there, but they had their shack and we had apartments, four apartments to the building. And six men to the unit with your own door and a key to it and a kitchen, dining room, freezer, refrigerator. And they gave you, allowed you $360 a week to buy groceries. And I cooked for about 16 years and learned to cook good. And the people and other people have their specialties. And so that was quite, it wasn't so like being in prison. It was somewhat living with me and it was difficult, man. I had some good fights and carry on. You don't get along with everybody. But then whenever I came back to the United States, I was laughing and talking. And when I got off the plane in LA, I had three marshals with me from Australia. I was slammed upside the wall. I mean, hard, put ankle mics on and handcuffed so tight till they cut my lane off. Face forward, face forward, lands apart. Good gracious. And walked me 50 steps and turned me over to the marshals and they took part of that off. That was a border patrol that was there over my marijuana charge from 1977. I did 11 years for parole violation. Now they want me for more violation. And they put me in, down in Los Angeles, they put me in, the marshals put me in there and they put me in isolation. I thought, what in the world they got me for isolation for? I'm doing anything. How long did you spend in isolation? More than six months. So I, after three or four days as the little Judas window slide open and a man, a nice looking man in a suit come there, hello Reeves, I wanna, just wanna see what you look like. I saw your National Geographic documentary and it does me pleasure to keep you in isolation. And he slammed the thing and I couldn't get out of there. And by law, the US Parole Commission is supposed to give you a hearing within 90 days. So Murray paid a lawyer $7,500 and he never picked up the phone. Somebody got to him. Who's that somebody you think? Christopher Cannon was his name and I don't know who got to him, but he didn't do anything to get me out of there. I got one 15 minute phone call a month and I couldn't get out. So then after six months, they put me on Conair, double shackled and black box on my hands. And I went to Oklahoma and they let me out on the floor. I couldn't imagine. Then I could call after a couple of days and they said, there was a man here from Washington give you a parole hearing and you only got here at 3.30. So he left, he said he'd be back next year. What? I've been in now over six months. So then there was a lovely little lady, she was a case manager or something. She said, you can ask for parole on the record. And I said, please do. So I sent them an email and the next day I got my parole. 90 days later, they sent me to Terminal Island and put me in the place there with the invalid, I guess since I'm as old as I am, 78 years old. So they put me in the people in there dying and wheelchairs and legs off and arms off and cancer. So I was in there and I pushed the fellows around and I went, come out of the chow hall there and I went to go to the right to get me a haircut and the two Mexican guys there, Lieutenant and another one, walked between us and he went like the boop, boop, boop. I could outrun you. And they slammed me, put me on the ground, handcuffed me and put me in the shoe for a week. I got out and man, they put me back in the place. They treated me rough. So I got in a little more trouble and they put me back in the shoe and I wouldn't come out. They had that, the virus was out killing people. So they killed eight people in that unit I was in. So I mean, I wouldn't even come out to take a shower. I had a little straw that I put in the sink and I'd take a sock that I had and scrub myself with it with some slope and a glass of water over my head and then clean the floor up and put it in the toilet. So that was your time during the coronavirus pandemic. I got out last April, right in the middle of it and they were dying bad in there. So I was treated worse for that last year in America than I was for the whole 20 years in Australia, the 18 years in Australia. And then you were a free man at the end of that year. They put me out and sent me home and the parole officers couldn't even come. They weren't working. They were just doing everything by video. They said, better not have a drink. The only constituent thing was I couldn't even have a drink of wine. So after a year, I had to take psychiatric treatment. Every week I had to go talk to the psychiatrist, psychologist and me and her got along great. She was a good Christian woman. We just chatted and talked. And I think they said, so I had to pee in the bottle every week. I said, I've been in 33 years. How many piss deaths do you think I've had? Never been dirty. Only thing if you all wanna clean when you come get me. Before I talk to you about love, let me ask you a difficult question. You write in your book, ''I don't consider myself much of a criminal. I don't lie, cheat or steal. And I always take up for the underdog. Violence makes me sick. Yet I know I'm an outlaw and those that break the law must be punished. I think many people listening to this or some people listening to this will see you as a criminal, as a bad man who increased the amount of suffering in this world. What do you have to say to them? I would like to tell them that they have been indoctrinated by the spin of news and politicians and they don't know the truth of the situation. You lay the truth out there in an envelope, let me open it besides something else that is false and it's staggering. The truth is that I was a tobacco farmer and tobacco kills 500,000 people a year in America and 6 million have debilitating diseases because of it. Drugs, all drugs combined kill between 10 and 15,000 people a year by overdose and 60% of those are pharmaceutical. Now, then when I was a tobacco farmer, come sit on the front pew, Mr. Reeves, come on up here, you're a gentleman. You just joined the Masonic Lodge and you joined our church and you just come on and sit down with the good people. You grow two marijuana plants, get out of here you scumbag and the marijuana doesn't hurt anybody. It's just, that's the truth of it. And so in your career, you walked amidst violence but you never participated in the violence. I didn't even see it. Just didn't happen around me, in prison it did. I sewed people up, they called me doc. I had dental floss and one time I had to get a blade and try to help keep from my patient from getting again. But I was just like, if I shot at those people, I shot at them to keep them from killing me. I certainly didn't mean to kill them. So that's just, some people are evil and they will kill you and hurt you and lie to you. I just don't do any of that. It just makes you sick. I've seen it. When I was in the shoe, three guys tried to kill a guy and they stabbed him so many times, but they stabbed Blake and the blood getting out of the room. I said, you're gonna kill him. You're gonna kill him and save his life. Drug him up there where the guards could see him. There's stuff like that. I'm just not of that nature of those people. They're just evil. They're people born evil, I believe. It is heartbreaking to hear that the basic humanity is gone in prison in the United States. That's heartbreaking because that basic humanity is actually the light at the end of the tunnel. It's the thing that saves us as opposed to, when it's absent, it's the thing that destroys us. The prisons are filled, absolutely filled with people that have some mental problems. Now, you see Tent City all the way up and down here. I guarantee you, every one of those people have mental problems, some degree. However little it is, but they are a little bit off. Now, then you get a DEA agent that wants to make a name for himself. He goes down there and gets two of them, one of them to sell a little two grams of methamphetamine to the other one, and he gets a conviction. And a young prosecutor, he gets a conviction. He wants to make a judge. And we got the judge in, where was it? I'm gonna give a million, what was his name? Gilbert. I'm gonna give him in a million years before I get off the judge. You get fools like that in charge. You're gonna fill prisons up with pitiful humanity. And those are the ones. And then the other is people over drugs. And drugs should be a health issue. You cannot police it enough. It's just, they know the only thing that overdoses is opioids, the heroin. And if they can give it to him, it costs about a dollar a day to give the worst addict his fix. But they'll give it methadone, which is from a pharmaceutical company, which is just as bad. Why in the world, we tried it all over the world in Portugal and England. And when they give the girls cleanup, no more stolen cars, why? Who wants to keep this farce going? They just perpetuating it. Like, oh, every little police place is getting all these suits and armor and machine guns. It's just like, oh, it's such a spin, it's sad. Do you think all drugs should be legalized? I don't know about that, but they certainly should be controlled. If a person is an addict, he should be able to go down and get his fix with somebody there to help him with a clean needle and a glass of orange juice. It's so much cheaper than prison. It's so much cheaper than him stealing cars or a prostitute having to go to work. That's sad. You've lived one heck of a life. Looking back, there's a lot of young people that listen to this, high school, college students. What advice would you give them? How to live, how to have a successful career, how to have a good life, how to be a good man or woman? To be a good man or woman, if I had it to do over with, I'll just tell you what I'd have done. I would have paid attention and studied my lesson and did the best I could. In school. In school, yes. And went as far as I could have. I would have liked to been a doctor. I just didn't have the stickability or anybody to tell me, hey, go over there and do that. And if you can do that at a very young age, start in a trade, learn to do something. It doesn't matter what it is. If you learn to do something good, there is a great demand for you. And I would say that in prison, that the prison system should come in and you get a thief, young fans of thief, robber, and you say, all right, we need carpenters. We need plumbers. We need electricians. We need sheep. Sentence them to that trade. And when you get an A plus in that, where you can go out and make you $30 or $50 an hour, you go home. Now you can mess around 10 years if you want to, or you can do this in two. I think that's just for the prison. But anyway, I would say that they find somebody and be true to them. That we have, just be honest and true in your life. You mean like relationships, friendships? Relationships, yes. I mean, so many, so many people, particularly our children, are from relationships where they not wanted their divorce. Their father's left. They don't know who their daddy is. They're just in foster homes. 500,000 children are in foster homes in America today. And we have, and our government inadvertently isn't encouraging those people. My daughter is a doctor and she delivered a couple of years ago a baby from a 10 year old child. That child, and she said in the visiting room is four generations, all of them on welfare. Now we got one more. And it reminds me of Elvis Presley's song, In the Ghetto. So for an individual, learn a trade, become a craftsman, learn a trade, become a craftsman of sorts, and find somebody to love and who loves you. That's right, have a family and stick with it. Surely you're gonna get angry. You're gonna get disappointed. You're gonna get all kinds of stuff, but come back and make up before you go to sleep. Well, I did half of those things. I got the first one and working on the second one. So I appreciate the advice. Well, Mari, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell me the story of how you two met? Well, my parents every summer would go to the lake in Canada and the place was called Turkey Point, which is on Lake Erie, and just have a nice summer holiday there, water skiing, swimming, sunbathing. This was back in the 60s and I was sitting on the pier with a few girlfriends and telling them my story. And then all of a sudden I looked up and I saw this figure in the distance coming onto the pier. Now we're all dressed in bathing suits and swimwear. We're swimming and this, that, and the other. And here he comes, dark trousers. In fact, they were black, white shirt and a tie and a straw kind of a Panama hat. And so he stood out. And so I invited him to come and sit down. And so he continued to talk and we just talked and talked and talked and then later moved to the beach. And I think the next time I saw him, he was talking to another girl and I thought, yeah, you know, I know, I was okay, okay, next. Well, but six months later I receive a letter and it's a letter from Roger. And then we start this lovely correspondence and we just start writing, you know, in those days, you just wrote everything. And then the next summer he was coming up again. He was on his way to Alaska and he says, I would like to come by and see you. And I said, well, I'll be in the same place that I met you last year. And so when he came up this time, for some reason Roger reached for my hand and I reached for his and man, that was it. It was like love at first touch. That was love. It was just like a silence, you know, and oh my gosh. And we didn't even look at each other. It was just, oh my goodness, what happened here? And I was the type of person, I never wanted to get married, not way, way, way down the road, never have any children. And I wanted to see the world first and then do all that, you know, and. But that was it, that was love and you've been together ever since. Yeah. Well, the thing is about the love that the two of you have for each other is it had to persevere through quite a heck of a journey. So how did Roger's drug smuggling change the nature of your love and your relationship? Well, Lex, that remained steadfast. It endured and since Roger's been home, I think we've rekindled the love that we had when we first met. Yeah, what? But I think my faith, you know, my faith, my steadfast faith and also the fact that Roger and I communicated. We wrote letters, you know, he never complained. I know there were the children there. He never had mistreated me. I love this guy and we had a lot of experiences. It was just, even though I. He's good looking, charismatic, he's pretty, you know. Yeah, and he was adventurous, you know, and I, would you say that again? But yes, it was just, I know, you know, I missed him physically, but he was just, we were just so strong in spirit, you know, and we could talk to one another. Yep. Well, what was it like, Roger, when you're a free man seeing Mari for the first time in person again? I cried for three days. Everything, I had to look at a picture of her. I came home and there she prepared a meal for me and it was the old oak table that I'd redone and the chairs, the same one, and the green placemats and the same china that we had and the same silverware. And it just, just all of it just brought back the same paintings on the wall. It was just like unbelievable. After 35 years, she had all my clothes cleaned and my shoes shining and I put the shoes on and I walked out on the strings on this and the soles came off, but the shirts and all fit perfect and everything. So it was just wonderful. And just to see her and then just to think about, see her picture of her 50th birthday or her 60th birthday or her 70th birthday. I wasn't there. And the picture of her and with the children, it just, it was heartbreaking. And about the third day, I thought, man up, fella, I mean, you've got to. So I got over it and quit the tears. It was, everything was just pulsating with life. It was just unbelievable to get out of that place. It really was. Is there, do you regret the drug smuggling that took you away from the woman you love? Oh yes, 100%. Just, you know, I wouldn't have done it again if you don't think you're going to get caught. And it's just, no, it's just, I did it for money and I had everything in the world I wanted before I did that. So the adventure, I mean, it was one heck of an adventure for the two of you, for the both of you. Were you able to enjoy it or was it always danger? Was it always something that threatened your relationship, your love, your family? Or were you able to enjoy the adventure of it? You know, we'll all die. Life is short. And to live that kind of adventure. Well, whenever I did the first loot, I got $10,000. And that was just about, that was just about two years pay on the fire department take home. And I brought that home and. I put my hand over my mouth. I said, Roger, I can't believe this. All the money and money like, oh my, what in the world? Roger said, let's go have dinner. And so we went to the little restaurant that we would normally, we would go to, you know, and he said, and don't you dare look on the right hand side of the menu. He said, just order anything you want. And it was just, as we were in the restaurant, you know, it was just, we were giddy about it. Yeah, I was giddy about it. And. Were you afraid that, I mean, did you think about the fact that it's illegal and Roger can end up in prison? Oh, yes. Did you guys talk about it? Well, I just, I kind of thought I was bulletproof. I mean, they didn't catch you. I thought if they didn't catch you, you was all right. And it was hard to get you. It was hard to catch you in the air. So you never thought, hard to catch you in the air. I like it. I didn't know that if your friend told on you five years later, you'd still go to prison. That was a problem. I didn't know that. Did you guys ever talk about walking away? I asked Roger to walk away. And he says, I can't, Mario, just now, you know. And then of course, the amount of people that he began to support, the family and the gifts and the. The deals. The deals, yes, the deals. Big ones. Yes, and then you always want to do, what do you do with the money? So you want to, I guess you clean it up or you want to invest in an enterprise or in a business. Well, it just doesn't work. They know the source of it and they take it and run. Every one of them. Yeah. Yeah. But he was very generous, extremely generous and benevolent and. And when I started, I would ask about, I went to a lawyer and a good number of people in California at that time wanted to legalize marijuana back in 1973. And I went to a lawyer and I says, Mr. Lawyer, I put $100 on to say, what would they do if I caught me bringing marijuana across the border? He said, if you have a criminal record, I said, no, I've never had a speeding ticket, nothing, not even a traffic ticket. I said, he said, you work for the fire department? I said, no sir. I said, yes, sir. He said, you'll get probation. The worst you'll do is you'll get one year and you'll spend four months raking leaves on a military base. So my mother and my father died some years before and I brought mother and baby sister came out and I took them down to Disneyland and she said, what you doing, boy? I said, I'm hauling pot, mom. She said, how much you making? I said, I'm making $40,000 any day I want to go. And she said, what do they do if they catch you? And I told her, what the lawyer said. Four months at the most raking leaves, that's what do you think? She said, do you need a copilot, son? Yeah, money is money, yeah. So your relationship persevered through some big challenges. Is there advice you can give about what makes for a successful relationship? Oh, well, you know, I think the initial igniting, meeting someone, you know, that's the love. That's it. And that little fire, that fire just keeps burning and burning and burning. You can't put it out no matter what. It's the love fire. But it gets difficult. It's funny, the love fire. So you're saying the love fire is all it takes to persevere through the difficulty. Well, no, well, that's a huge part of it. And also I contribute my individual situation to in order to endure the prison years is my faith. Faith in God? Yes. And friends who were unconditionally still loved me no matter what, yes. So you had love around you in general. I did, and my children. They, you know, and that was a real purpose to guide them and to love them and to help them become citizens. What about you, Roger? What advice would you give? I just don't know how to do it, but I do know that you have to work on a relationship. Mara and I's had problems. I mean, we get really. You guys get in fights? Oh, yeah. That's pretty regular, but not, they don't let them last long, you know, but certainly we are so different. We're the same, and yet we're so different, yeah. Like little stuff? Little stuff, yes. And it might be big, but I usually win her over, you know? But anyhow, I just feel like Mara was always there. It was like she was my anchor. I was coming home. I was always coming home to her and the children. And you can see throughout my life, I'm working on getting there. Are you afraid for his life, by the way? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, there are times, yeah. But you know, I had faith in him. He was an excellent pilot. For example, I always said, Roger, if the ship's going down, I'm jumping in the lifeboat with you because I know we're going to get to shore. You will save us. And so I had that faith in him, you know? I mean, he's a man, but yet he's the one you want to get into the lifeboat with. Definitely. But then there is, you know, Pablo Escobar, one of the most dangerous humans in history, plus the U.S. government. Yep. Worst by far. Very difficult, very difficult to get away. In terms of your faith, how has your faith helped you to be the woman you are in this relationship and seeing love the way you see it? Well, I think my faith gives me hope. I have lots of hope. It helps me to dwell on the good side. You know, when I ever meet someone and there's some negative, I try to see why they are like that or what's the source of all that. And I try to pull out the good. I really do. Not that I'm a goody goody, but that's what your faith does. You know, you see them as God sees us. You know? How has he changed over the years? Roger? Yeah. He's still the same. Actually, I like him better now. He's a little calmer. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, yes. And happy to be, you know, at home, or he'll say, Mari, I am just so happy to be with you here in this condominium. I'm content. Because I used to call him my homing pigeon. I just have to let him fly. I couldn't, you know, he has to fly, but he always came home. Do you think about the end of this ride, our mortality? Do you think about your death? I do. Particularly, I'm going to have a heart valve replacement in about seven days where I could not make it. You know, it's a very serious operation. And I think about that very much. And I ask for peace. I just lost my brother about 10 days ago, so unexpectedly. And that really put, you know, makes you think of your mortality. Are you afraid? Somewhat, and yet not. Yeah. I want to live, Lex. I want to live, you know? This life is fun. Yes. Do you think about your death, Roger? I have visions. Visions, and they often happen very, very clear, like what I have seen in the future. Scientists might call it wormholes, or in the Old Testament they called it prophets, but I see sometimes into the future around the corner. It's clear as we're sitting right here. What's that look like? I was on a porch, and I believe I was in like Central America place. I was an old man with khaki pants and a white shirt. And it was a chair with a wide arms, and it was straight, and there was like the beams coming out above my head, and I'm on a porch. Bokunbi, yeah. And I come, I have out of the body experiences also. And I came out of my body, just, I just floated out of my body, and went into a veil, and like into a mist. And I believe that's probably why it happened. You talk about like it's in your past. This is your future. This is in my future. But this is something he has seen, you know, in the past. I've seen it in a vision. Yeah, in a vision. No, I know, but it's funny, just the tense you use, it happened, and yet it's something that will happen. Yes. Two. Both are true. It's just unbelievable that, and I don't know how many people have it, but I have it. I walked out of my body just like, just where I could come up to you and look, and set up on the radio. I used to be at work on the railroad, and I had them there. How do you explain that? What do you think, what the heck is going on in this universe that's possible? Oh, I don't know, but certainly, certainly a phenomenon which has happened. And there's a guy, Bill Monroe, that wrote the book on it, Out of the Body. He tells about it. And who was the guy that writes The Alchemist? Pablo Coelho. He has them also, just like that. And he tells about how it happens on him. Mine happened differently. But you certainly can come out of your body. What do you think the meaning of this life is, maybe from your faith, but also from just the amazing adventure that you lived through? How do you make sense of why the heck we're here? I don't know. It's just kind of like who you are. Even when I was a child, I was like, I'm different from other people. You know? And just as a boy, I was, like I had a... Could you put into words how you were different or it was just the feeling? Yeah, like my brother, I mean, he kept his hands clean and his shoes shining. Here I was barefooted catching a wild hog or a rattle on a horse trying to get it down. I saw pictures of you climbing a tree recently. When I first got out of prison, always something like that. So I don't know. It's just that, and I noticed that something about me is sometimes in prison, there'd be a knife fight. And people just, you see them rough guys that turn white from it. I just kind of almost like smile. I mean, if they come at me, I turn white and get away. But it doesn't bother, those things, they still didn't bother me. I just, prison didn't bother me. So you don't know what the heck the meaning is. You just know you're a bit different than the others. Yeah, I might be a little bit kooky. Well, maybe the whole point is you want to realize, you want to let that madness flourish, that uniqueness flourish. That's the whole point of life. We're all different in our, in very interesting little ways. And the more different you are, you want to let that, you want to let that become, you want to let it be its full. It's like a garden, all the different flowers. You did mention you weren't sure if there's a free will or not. Do you think it's all predetermined? Or do you think we make our choices? No, we definitely make our decisions. I just said, if it is, I hope that, but I know that we make our decisions. Yes, I agree. And I know that we are spirits that are living in this flesh. That's beyond a shadow of a doubt for me. If you walk out of your body and have out of body experience, you will know it. So the body is just the temporary container for something much bigger. The spirit lives on eternally with no beginning and no end. And that's hard to fathom. Yeah, this is just a little, this is a shell to contain that spirit. This is the way we work on earth. But yeah, I know it. I'm an eternal being. So are you. Do you think there's a why to it? Do you think there's a meaning to this life? Well, I think the why is beyond my capability of understanding. It's someone greater than me. I don't understand it, but it's awesome. I just know that it's awesome. And one day we will know the answers. Once we get to that crossover to the other side, I think we will understand clearly. It says, you know, now we see through a glass darkly, but then when we are face to face with God, we will understand. And until we know, let's just enjoy this beautiful life while we got it. Absolutely. And we're meant. That was my gift. I love everybody and everything I do. And it just, and I'm sorry, if I put a stumbling block in anybody's way, I wouldn't want to, but these are these things that when I just think about, oh, what a hypocritical world we live in though. Like most anybody, I'd say, listen, okay, he's a drug dealer. And I would say most of them had committed adultery. That's a cardinal sin. And yet they move, throw rocks at me for moving a marijuana, cocaine across the road. Yeah. It's just, if you saw the two different things, you'd say, what a terrible difference it is. But we become conditioned with this mad society that we have. You mentioned that your daughter, Miriam, wrote you a poem. Do you mind reading it? I'd be glad to. I was doing 11 years up in Lombok Penitentiary, maximum security prison for parole violation for possession of marijuana in 1977. They should have given me six months, but they gave me 11 years because they wanted me for what they call silent beef. Anyhow, while I was in that dungeon, I received a letter from my daughter, Miriam. It's called Daddy's Poem. A year ago, I became a poet when I wrote your birthday prose. And here I am today, ready to give it another go. First, I would like to wish you a very happy birthday to be and to thank you so very much for without you, I would not be me. Secondly, I want to say that your support has been immense. It has been true, honest, loving, and free of all pretense. Thirdly, it goes without saying, your love has surpassed all my wrongs and you always made me smile with one of your old country songs. I can remember on Cuervo, Daddy, with you holding me in your arms, as you sang Jim Reeves songs and talked about the farm. I can see you walking through the door from one of your travels far and wide and the thought of you coming home, Daddy, kept a twinkle in our eyes. I can smell you as I did when I used to climb into your bed and you would talk to me again about one of the adventures that you led. I can see me and Mario asleep in one of your airplanes extraordinaire and remembering wondering to myself why there wasn't an available chair. I remember having to meet you and worrying that you wouldn't be there, but you would pop from behind some counter and give us all a happy scare. You gave us presents in Key Biscayne and hotels pleasure galore and three dozen roses that we came through the airport door. I can see your face in Amsterdam with the luggage carousel and you look like a boy with a secret that you were just dying to tell. You taught me mathematics in the sands of far away places and taught me to sail and we left without any traces. We climbed glaciers in Argentina and saw the blue of the beautiful caves and witnessed the majestic beauty of such a juggling maze. I learned how to change gears on the dirt roads of Brazil. We ate hot dogs in Paraguay, a memory we smile over still. We talked about lions, elephants and bears on a Hacienda in Uruguay, but decided it was better if the Europe we did fly. Oh, the old world and all its luxury, what a good time it was. From South America to the Krosnopolsky, I think we fell in love. The European jaunt, well, it is considered a book in itself but it's a story about beauty and knowledge, suspense and worldly wealth. We went from Holland to Sweden, we went from France to Spain and I promise you I have no regrets. I would definitely do it all again. I would see the world with you anytime, sir. There's no doubt in my mind because being by your side, daddy, always ensures a wild good time. So our paths took a turn and we're back in the US of A, but life here isn't so bad and I'm plumb content to stay. I'm happy to be near you, although I'm not as close as I was before, but because of your love and encouragement, I've been able to open new doors. I'm grateful to be in school and I'm genuinely happy where I am. And I even like when you call and tell me to study for the next exam. What a life you've given me, daddy. It's a tremendous and a magical gift. We already have so many stories to tell, there are far too many to list. But I want to thank you again this day with a very big happy birthday to you and to tell you just a few more things that I knew in my heart to be true. That I love you, daddy, with all of your wrongs and your rights. That you're ahead of our family and you've kept us all bound tight. That you have a honest love in your heart for God and all mankind. And you truly do believe in yourself when you say it will all be fine. I know you will be there to catch me if ever I waver a slip and I know I'd want you as captain on any sinking ship. I also know a new chapter is written. It's almost time to move on. It's time to sail another sea and to witness a brand new dawn. It'd be good to see you at the helm again as you point out our destination, the laugh and dance on the upper deckers while the boat glides through. It'd be good to see you on the go as I know you like to be and to know you can open any door without any key. But while we revel in our days together, we will know better than to hurry because as you told me many times, life is an incredible journey. Wow, that's beautiful. Yeah. Roger, I'm really honored that you would take the time to visit me in Texas and to sit down and talk with me. Thank you so much, Roger. Thanks so much, Mary. Thank you. Thank you, it was a pleasure. It's been a real pleasure. Yes. Beautiful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Roger Reeves and thank you to Noom, Allform, ExpressVPN, Four Sigmatic and 8sleep. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Pablo Escobar. All empires are created of blood and fire. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Roger Reaves: Smuggling Drugs for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel | Lex Fridman Podcast #199

The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malus. Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I'm proud to call him my friend. He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all the time. And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malus in the Tupagalovi language that I'm increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of. Hello, comrade. So Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of my favorite books. It's an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution of 1917. So for people who haven't read it, it's animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become as bad or worse than the humans. So comrade, if we lived on this farm, in the book Animal Farm, which animal would you most rather be? Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin, the raven Moses, the humans, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep? I'm gonna go with the Milton answer, which is it's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, right? It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs. So I guess I'd be a cop. At the very top. So the leader, the main pig, Napoleon versus like the others. I would say it's not, it's sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think Orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships. I mean, it could very easily be read as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler, or many of these others. I'm a huge George Orwell fan. One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of many of these undisputably left wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarian communism. And the three I could think of top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third. Something that leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don't have the exact quote off the top of my head, but something to the effect of every word I have written should be taken as a defense of democratic socialism against totalitarianism. So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore, in many ways anti communist. We like to parse things out, you're going to laugh, into binary fashions that left good, right bad, or right good, left bad. But historically speaking, it would just not fall away into these camps as easily as people would like. And I think it is important for those of us, it takes a lot more courage to fight the right from the right or to fight the left from the left, because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen or your fellow travelers are going to regard you as a traitor to the cause. So every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these three figures, among others, who not all even if they hadn't done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that all of us can learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model. So what was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism? Is it basically freedom, the value of freedom? Let's go through the three of them. So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure, you know, we'll talk about her later, I'm sure she got deported from the United States with her partner in crime, Alexander Birkman, literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's main man in the Pittsburgh steel mill strike. She got deported to the Soviet Union. And they're like, oh, you want socialism? Because at the time, the anarchists were regarded as socialist, you know, go choke on it. And she's there. And she was watching in great horror what was going on. And she actually went to Lenin's office and she goes, this isn't what we're about. The revolution is about the individual and free speech and everyone working together to further society. And he told her that, you know, you know, free speech is a bourgeois contrivance. And regardless, you can't have these circumstances in the midst of a revolution. And when she left the Soviet Union, and you know, she went to Britain. And at the time, before the 1917, there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles about what would the revolution look like, right? Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model? Would there be the Marxist model? Obviously, the Bolsheviks ended up winning. But even then, it wasn't obvious because there was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. And what people, you know, you and I know what those words mean. But Bolsheviks were kind of funny because Bolsheviks means bigger and Mensheviks means smaller. The Mensheviks had the numbers. It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks. And Lenin, you know, destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously. Beforehand, you know, there was the idea like, okay, with all these cockamamie ideas, we have to work together. You know, we don't know what's going to look like for the cause. Then as soon as he sees power, he's like, yeah, yeah, we're not doing that kind of pluralism anymore. This is going to be the right approach. So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman. She wrote a book that they titled, My Disillusion with Russia. And I remember this one anecdote, which I'm going to discuss in the forthcoming book, where she goes to Britain and the British were very red at the time, they really had something called the Fabian Society, which was the predecessor to the British Labour Party, which were like, all right, we're going to get rid of liberalism and have a socialist kind of nation. And she gave talks, and there was this one time where she gave a talk and she started, and there was a standing ovation, by the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop, because she dared to look at these people in the face, something they'd been fighting for all their lives and saying, you know, we've been to the future and it works. And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar. You know, people are under house arrest, you're not allowed to have, you know, newspapers are being shut down if they have heretical views, so on and so forth. And you know, she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously. So she is, you know, deserves huge accolades in that regard. I brought her up and we were talking about with our conversation with Yaron Orwell, I think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state. And Camus, who might be my all time great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being a man of conscience, you know, he joined the Communist Party and for a lot of people in the States, you hear, oh, you joined the Communist Party, so I need to hear, it's all you need to, he was a communist, all you need to know. He joined the Communist Party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in France and other locations. And he took Nazism, as did many others, of course, very, very, very seriously. He wasn't some committed communist, but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know, be part of the underground in Vichy France, and so on and so forth. So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him, which is kind of a misquote, Howard Zinn is the one who actually said it, that it is a job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. And he very much felt, if you read his speech when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, in the 50s, where he goes, it's basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying himself. I don't think I'm ever going to be a man on the level of Camus and what he's accomplished, but I think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point out, you know, this is the leftism at its best when, you know, giving voice to the voiceless, when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people, and they might not be educated, literate, or have any power at all. He's the guy who's like, you are ruining humans, these humans matter, and I'm not going to let you look the other way and act like you don't know what you're doing. So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism, or we look at the fictional Animal Farm, what's the heroic action then? So Camus joined the Communist Party, there's a bunch of different heroic actions, some more heroic than others, not just for the, you know, hero is the wrong word, in terms of like effectiveness, what's the effective action, I guess is what I want to ask. As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind, what's the heroic action? That's a tricky question, because a lot of times in the West, heroism is regardless intertwined with martyrdom, right? So it's kind of this idea of like, you have to speak to, you know, Camus always talked about justice, let justice be done though the heavens fall. This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience, and that you have to do the right thing, even the consequences might not be what you like. And I think that is a good loose definition of heroism. So if you meet, I'll give you one example of heroism. This was on Twitter, and I really feel bad that I don't remember the guy's name. This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was, and you know, there's the Nazi guards keeping everyone along. And if you were certain, I think if you were under 12, they killed you or something, there was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not, there was some circumstances. And he asked the mom how old this kid was, and she's like, he's 14, and she's like, no, he's 12. And she's like, no, he's 14. She goes, he's 12. And she realized what this Nazi was telling her even in that circumstance, and it ended up saving the kid's life. So I think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism, humanism and venerating the sanctity of human life. I think that, and I think it's also important to pick your battles. I don't think if, you know, he got, that Nazi over there got in a bullhorn and said, hey, this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's not going to help anyone do anything. So I do think, you know, people a lot of times attack me for my anarchist views, like, oh, you know, would you call the police? Would you use the roads? Would you pay your income taxes? You know, I got in an argument with Tim Pool, because there was that couple, I think it was at Missouri or Illinois when they had their guns and they were being arrested and they basically took a plea deal and he said, you should have fought. I go, it's a lot easier to say you should fight, but we don't know what circumstance someone is under. And what these totalitarian regimes did very, very well, as you know, is if you were a target and they can't get through to you, that's fine, you have a family. So you can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw and you can stand up to all the torture, cool, what are we going to do about your wife? What about your mom? One thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids up to 14 and up could get the death penalty for certain crimes. So after that, the rule was from the NKVD, if you were interrogating someone, they would have death warrants for the kid's child on the desk visible. So I'm interrogating you asking you to commit to, I'm sorry, to admit to some crime that you're not committed. And those piece of paper, it's Svitlana, she's got a death warrant. You're going to admit to any crime you want. So this is something Americans, this is even the case right now in North Korea, which I know you had Yonmi Park on, it's something I talk about a lot. Let's talk about it instead of the hypothetical, but this is happening right now on earth. You can look at the map on Google. The great leader, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea said, class enemies must be exterminated three generations. So North, when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum from Ascender says the family is the basic unit of society, unit. North Korea takes that seriously. The family is punished as a unit. So if someone does something wrong, three generations have to pay the price and you often don't know who it is that got you all in trouble. There's not a trial. This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible. It's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin. It's something when it's your child, your loved ones, every man becomes a coward. But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for The Guardian to say, I don't vote. There's no consequences to me. There's no possibility of consequences to me. This is the wonderful thing about living in a free country. It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union and say, I'm not going to vote. And what would that courage accomplish? Very little. Heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with no consequences is a bit overrated. There is some aspect, like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about the Nazi soldier, which is quietly privately in your own life, live the virtues that you want the rest of the world to live by. Yes. So like without writing about it is not as heroic as living it quietly. I'll give you a great example of this. I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids, if you know someone's in town and it's their birthday with nothing to do, take them out. And I say, I do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs and I go, think about it this way. The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome. That could be you. Like you have that capacity to be that person and you're making that day feel special. They're going to remember for a long time. What's the cost? 30 bucks, 25 bucks. So it's very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle and make things a bit better at almost no cost. And they just literally don't think in those terms. And one of the things Camus talked about, he's often described as an existentialist, which he did not like that term. He regarded himself as an absurdist, is the idea that we're basically blank canvases. And this isn't something that is dangerous. This is an enormous opportunity. And you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want to be. You don't have to be, I don't know, George Washington or one of these great heroes of all time. But everyone out there has the capacity to be, excuse me, to be a hero to their kids or to be a hero to maybe some, there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely. I think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs. These are little things, Terry Shepherd does that a lot, I regarded him as a hero. These are not Terry Shepherd, I'm blanking his name. These are things that people do that aren't heroic in the sense of Superman, but that I find admirable extremely and I think are very underrated because these people aren't championed. Is this some kind of weird, passive, aggressive and direct way for you to tell me that I should take you off for your birthday on Monday? Is that why you gave that whole speech? That wasn't it at all. That was a joke, Michael. No, it was a failed joke. Nevertheless. There was no punchline. Without failure, we would not have triumph. Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism? Sure. What do you think is the difference? In your ideas about anarchism too, it seems like those are somehow intricately connected because existentialism is connected to freedom and freedom is connected to anarchism. Sure. But I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union. He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk about it. What people don't appreciate is how human beings can have contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time. One would think, okay, someone's a Democrat, they think ABC, therefore they think DEF. People would have all sorts of contradictions and it's not at all clear and they'll have a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated and is capable of doing this. So Sartre, you would think he's this radical individualist, this sense of ultimate freedom, but he's defending the Soviet Union. Camus, on the other hand, would probably be, was very much like a social Democrat. He didn't really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn't be. His essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, is one of the great masterpieces of all time, an attack on the death penalty, not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong to kill murderers, but in terms of what does it do for a society? If you have someone who takes a person and locks them in a room and says, in two years, I'm going to murder you and you lock them for that. This is not someone we regard as moral, we regard this as someone who's a complete monster, but that's what the state does with the death penalty. And he challenges us to think, is this the kind of people we want to be? And again, he's saying, I'm not saying killing a murderer is wrong. I'm not saying evil is wrong. His entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil. But are we the kind of people who want to be doing these things that in any other context we regard as torture or depraved? So I'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person. So he was probably against war in that same way. So I don't, I have to admit, I don't know much about the political side of Camus. Well, and I don't think his political side is that interesting or relevant. What I find, sorry to interrupt you, what I find fascinating about Camus and what I think about on a daily basis from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based on conscience, that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your head on the pelt at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity true to my values? Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people? That kind of mindset, did I, if someone is weak, am I using that as an opportunity to exploit them or to harm them? Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person because maybe they didn't have circumstances that were as beneficial as other people had. Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning, it really borders on nihilism. So he regards, his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on nihilism. He regards cynicism as the worst value people can have. And I agree with him 100%. A lot of times people call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to be a, you know, I had this quote in the new write where I said, I'd rather be naive than a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world at large. Camus, this is the metaphor I use and I find it very inspirational. I thought it was in his work, but I guess I thought if it described it to him. There's two types of people, you imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas on an easel standing in front of this mountainside. One people be like, why is this blank canvas here, you know, what was this, what's going on here? And just be confused. Whereas the other type of person will be like, there's a blank canvas here in this beautiful countryside, what a great opportunity. I can paint this river, I could paint that bird, I could paint my friends or myself in the background, infinite choices. And this is a gift that I have been given. And I think that also ties very heavily into what I was, I went to yeshiva as a kid, which is Jewish school. What we were taught incessantly how to look at life is this beautiful gift that God has given you and that God wants you to be happy. He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way. I remember the first time I went into a church and they were asking questions about the Jewish concept, the afterlife. They weren't familiar with Jewish thought. And it took me a second because I didn't really have answers. And then I remembered what we were taught, which is, let's suppose you're at this banquet, the best chef on earth, and the table is so heavy because you've got steaks and you've got chicken and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing and you've got your Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb and the store brand, everything you want. And you're looking around at this amazing bounty, right? And then you turn to this best chef on earth and you're like, oh, so what's for dessert? I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane. You have this, eat the meal. I promise you, if I could deliver this meal, the dessert's going to be okay. So this focus on the afterlife when we've been given this amazing gift on this earth is a very kind of different mindset from both the Jewish tradition as I'd been taught and the Camus mindset. Obviously, Camus was an atheist, didn't believe in an afterlife. This concept that life is meaningless, but that means you have that opportunity to find value, to seek for truth, to seek for happiness. And Camus has this quote, it's ascribed to him, it's like a meme. I've never found the source, so maybe he doesn't really say it, but he says, maybe it's not about happy endings, maybe it's about the journey. And I think when you have that mindset, and as you and I, I think you and I both found this because neither of us, when we were kids, thought we'd be doing this, right? But now that we are really fortunate. Definitely this. Yeah. And definitely that. Yeah. But now that we're fortunate enough to do this, and that we're blessed enough that there's people who find this of value and interest, and we could pay the rent doing this, there's not a day that goes by where I don't think you and I think, this is pretty absurd, but it's also pretty wonderful. And as a consequence of us thriving, it also shows other people that happiness is possible on this earth. And I think cynicism is the lie. It's not just the worldview, it's a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth. Or it's only possible if you sell your soul and you're a bad person, you screw other people over. I reject that in every aspect. As you said, my birthday is coming up. I've been feeling just a lot of really great things have been happening very, very recently. So it affects me very heavily emotionally, especially when I see the response it gives to the kids. So it's one thing to say, this is what I'm for. But when you can provide proof of concept that what you've been advocating does result in positive responses. I got a message from this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago. And then he was like, look, I found your work, I found some other stuff. And now I realized I'm going to make something of myself. I was born in a meth house, you know, whatever, 19, 20 years old, I should be in the garbage. But I'm going to try to be a stand up because I have opportunity on this earth. Even if he fails as a stand up, you know, he's still such whatever he does, washing dishes, there's no shame in that. Is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don't really like? But as compared to the alternative of like, I'm going to kill myself. This is heaven. Well, I think there's beauty to be discovered in all of it and all of those experiences. Yes. So, but at the same time, so I often think about I just recently reread The Idiot by Dostoevsky. I often feel like the idiot. That's why when I say I'm an idiot, I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot, which the world sees you as naive. I don't think he's naive. I don't think I'm naive, but I tend to see the good in people and the good in every moment. And the world often is cynical. And in fact, especially in what we do, often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical. This is very much an urban, elite, educated mindset, where if you write a book about someone who's, let's suppose, a drug addict or a prostitute, that has heft and that's valid. But if you're writing a book about like a love story, you know, two people fall in love and they're in roller coasters or carousels, that's less legitimate. I hate that. I hate that. I hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity. And I'm not saying a drug addict or prostitute is depraved, but they're basically their worldviews. Unless it's dark and twisted, it doesn't really count as art. And I despise that mindset, that subtext. So the internet and people around me often will call me naive. Because I don't know. I think the word they want is innocent. Don't you think? It's a better word. But it's not that innocent. No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart, I know you fairly well at this point, believe that goodness is possible and that people can, if not be good, at least be better than they were yesterday. See, even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there's not wisdom in that. Presumes that somehow that's, oh, isn't that beautiful to live that life of a child who sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future, but just wait until they grow up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think. But that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room. And don't you want to be, if the world is like that, don't you want to be the guy who takes it on and changes it for the better? So it's like saying, well, you know, cancer is everywhere. It's inevitable. Well, don't you want to be the one who says, not anymore. I'm here and I'm going to make that change and I can see it being better than it is now. So I think you and I have the same analysis of your worldview and I don't think that there is a good word for it. So I guess it's this idea of inherent benevolence might be wordy, but I think that's more accurate because, you know, you and I did not have such easy lives growing up, to put it mildly. You constantly talk about just horrific aspects of life. So to claim that you kind of don't know that they exist or you sleep under the rug is completely not accurate to your work and your mindset. Can we talk about World War II and the Soviet Union? Sure. So on Sunday, June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, which was the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. If I could read to you a few lyrics from a song that for some reason is stuck throughout my childhood. It was a famous song during that time. Двадцать второго июня ровно в четыре часа Киев бомбили, нам объявили, что началась война, война началась на рассвете, чтобы больше народу убить, спали родители, спали их дети, когда стали Киев бомбить. The song talks about Kiev, like that moment as part of that operation that Kiev was first bombed and it was announced on June 22nd. The song says at exactly four o clock that the war has begun. For some reason this song haunts me because the exactness of that time and this realization that at any moment you can have this thing happen to you in your own personal life. Maybe we had something like 9 11 happen where everything changes and it's just like haunting because it makes me think that at any moment something like that could happen that changes everything and I just think about like normal life going on in Kiev at the time and then all of a sudden the bombs are dropping and they announce that the war has begun and you thought you were going to stay out of the war. This is something that is very intensely emotional for me because you and I are both Russian Jewish so to know that my grandparents and my great grandma were told that the Nazis are coming and this wasn't a dress rehearsal and that if they get here, which they do, they did, Lvov is very western Ukraine, that 100% you and all your relatives are going to be murdered. There's a monument now in Lvov where I'm from about this but I don't think either of us can imagine what it's like to think that we're about minutes or whatever hours or there's just the Russian army standing between us and everyone we are related to are going to be murdered for no reason and what's the closure here? They evacuated a lot of people but they didn't evacuate enough and to know that there is this force coming to 100% murder you, this isn't some kind of the TV news being hyperbolic, they're coming to kill you and if they get you, they will kill you. We all think about war like, oh, we hope America wins in Iraq, but if America got their ass get kind of in Vietnam, it's not really going to affect America in the sense that you're going to have the body bags and all the kids being killed and that's something that I'm not super in the rug, but no one in America thought the Vietnamese are going to come here and kill them, right? They were secure in their person. So to have that sense of we really need to win because if we don't win, we are 100% if we, they, the Russian army doesn't win, we are 100% all going to be slaughtered and often in not just a bullet to the head and in sadistic ways is something that to know that people who share my blood saw and went through is very hard for me to kind of wrap my head around. And there's no possibility to delude yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, they, they would, as the song also talks about, but that they would burn the factories. So it's basically saying we're in the war now. This is like, this is your life. Yeah. Like this is our life now. You know how you, yesterday you worried about like, oh, I misplaced my pen. Where is it? Like, it's like, yeah, this was paradise. Most of us are going to just, our life now is that most of us are going to die. And if we want to prevent all of us from dying, we, we have to fight. And we also can't sit down in some kind of weird, like, desert island or, you know, plane crash situation and be like, let's decide between us who's going to be the first to die. Maybe the like Titanic, the Titanic, right? They sat down and there were like women and children in the lifeboats. You know, they had this rational agreement. You don't have those choices in a war. So it's, it's something that I, it's, it's just very chilling and it's something I don't really have the emotional space to understand or grapple with. Even, you know, obviously I've been to North Korea, you can see it and so on and so forth. You and I can't, or anyone listening to this, except for maybe on me and people like that, you can't imagine what that's like to live it. We can't, I, we can't imagine what it's like to live in those situations where it's not like before Hitler came, everyone's, you know, dancing around and having a great time. I mean, imagine how, what that life is like where your preference to Hitler is starving and waiting on line for hours for bread and to have the secret police and your friend's attorney went and your phones are all tapped and you're a prisoner. But to you, this is infinitely better than the alternative. Like these are the choices that, you know, our family had to deal with. It's something that no matter how much you, it's like a, let me put it in terms of people can understand, you know what I mean? It's like your first bad breakup, right? Like that's a much simpler thing to wrap your head around because it's like, if you've never had it, you can't really, but when you feel it, it's just so intense, but you can't tell someone what's like, we could sit down for days and hours and have people tell us, but until it's the totality of your environment and your life and your mindset, I remember my grandma, she would talk about it like, when you're that hungry, all you're thinking about is bread because your brain won't like, you know, human beings, you know, we're evolved, we have instincts, whatever, and the mind is telling you food, food, food, food, food, and that there's kids thinking this and that they're not going to get the food. And imagine being a parent and you're watching your kids without food and knowing they're not going to get the food. And the fact that this happened in North Korea in the nineties, I met a refugee and he had to watch his dad starve to death. And thank you. And we have no concept of what it's like. I mean, we kind of, you know, it's just like last night here in Austin, all the places were closed and I couldn't get my protein powder. And this is the extent of my suffering when it comes to food, you know, or if I couldn't, there was a restaurant that I went to in Brooklyn where for some faqaqta reason, they weren't serving sashimi, they only had sushi, so I had to have the rice and the carbs. To live a life where that is the extent of your food problems as opposed to the choice is either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24 seven. You know, my grandma told this story of how they had a close call, it was her and her brother and her mom, my great grandma who passed, and I think there was like either helicopter overhead or something, and my great grandma jumped on top of my grandma's brother and not my grandma. So she basically did a Sophie's Choice, my grandma's name is Sophia, and chose the brother. And this is something that she felt, you know, all her life that her mom had chosen her brother over her. But these little things that happen, these little kind of decisions we have to make in life. Or there's a book I read called Five Chimneys, I think, this woman who was an Auschwitz survivor. And what she talked about what people don't appreciate, it's not necessarily the slaughter and the torture, it's that there's no rhyme or reason to it. Like she talked about how they had a camp just for people from Czechoslovakia, and they were treated better than the Jews, and then one day they just killed them all, right? And she's like, I still don't understand why they're giving them food and treating them well, and then the next day they're all killed, and we will never get answers, you know. And things like she talks about how they decided to kill all the kids, and they didn't really either for some reason they didn't have the courage to or they wanted to be cruel, so instead of shooting them, they just kept walking them in the snow until they all died. So it's things like this, that the fact that you and I dodged these bullets, and that we can be here and be doing this and, you know, running our mouths for a living, I think about it all the time, and it's just very disturbing to know, and I know you know this as well, that there's lots of places on earth where if people had a choice, they would kill us on sight and be proud of themselves for it. Yeah, there, I don't know what to make of the contrast, you were talking about the fact that you've been truly happy the last few weeks and months, there's been a lot of moments of happiness and joy, and that joy is built on a history of human suffering. Like in your roots, in your blood, is a lot of people that were tortured that suffered, so that you could have this joy, and you have both the, you have the responsibility to truly be grateful for that joy. But it also shows that there's the happy ending, that it does end, and a good note that it does get infinitely, infinitely better. And that I think there's a, I don't like using the word responsibility, but there is an opportunity for those of us who did dodge that bullet, to give testimony to these people. And more importantly, to give testimony to the people who are going through this now. So one of the reasons I talk about North Korea so much, why I wrote Dear Reader, is because it's very easy, and this is human nature, I'm not condemning people, I think that's just how people are wired. When you see an Asian country with Asian people, and things are bad over there, I think in the West it's like, oh, Asia, they're all crazy, they're wacky, they eat dogs or so on and so forth, some weird stereotype, and they think of them as kind of Martians. So it's important for people who aren't of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on behalf of these people, because it's very different how just people just naturally react when you have a Westerner talking about this. Instead of it becoming them over there, it becomes, you know, this could have been us very easily. I have a friend, Peter Vahansky, great dude, and I was showing him photos when I was in Pyongyang, and he goes, this looks like a Russian city with Asian people. It completely disturbed him. So that was one of the reasons I did go to North Korea, because that was as close as I would get to see what your family went through, to see what my family went through, and they're still living under this regime. And one of the things I fought very hard to do with Dear Reader, which I was successful in amazingly, and I said, I could die now. I feel like if you just move the needle a little bit, then you've kind of paid your due for your time here on this earth, to have it change from being a laughing stock. And I think Team America did a good job. They made Kim Jong Il into a clown and they made a joke of it, but you're going from nothing to joke. So at least now people are aware of it that it exists, right? And then I and many others took it from a joke to like, guys, this is really, really, really bad, and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is. And I think now there is an understanding, other than a few people who are just looking at it through a Trump lens and wanting Trump to fail because Trump's an asshole and that's fine, to be like these poor people. And it's really unfortunate because there's a segment of Western culture who thinks that correctly, often when you're complaining about or discussing the plight of another country, that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade. Like the Kurds in Syria, you know, we're talked about, if we don't in Syria tomorrow, it's going to be another genocide, blah, blah. I'm not saying let's invade North Korea and things like that. All I'm saying is, you know, thank God that this isn't your life. I bring this up all the time. The woman who was my guide when I was there, I'm aware of what she's up to now. She's extremely rich by North Korean standards, but she'll never be in a position to buy medicine. She'll never be in a position to go on a vacation. Things that you and I just, you know, whatever, she can't go on the internet. She can't get an encyclopedia. She can't better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning better yourself as a person in service to the state. So I mean, it's also frustrating because there's only so much that I can do as an individual. What's your takeaway about human nature from looking at North Korea and looking at how the rest of the world is looking at North Korea? This is a great question. I think about it fairly often. I always say human beings are animals, right? When you say someone's an animal, it's like a slur, like he's like a beast. Animals are capable of enormous kindness, empathy, sympathy. You know, they look out for one another, groom one another. There's a thing with apes where they groom each other for parasites and even if there are no parasites, they pretend there's parasites just to have that kind of bonding. You see infinite photos online of like cats raising puppies because the puppies, mom died, things like this. That's part of being an animal. Part of being an animal is also just the most monstrous cruelty. Killer whales, you know, there's this big PC move to not call them killer whales and just call them orcas. They will murder blue whale pups, calves, excuse me, and play with them and not even eat them. So they just murder for the sake of fun. Even cats, you know, kill birds all the time, things like this. So it runs the whole gamut. And I think it's, you know, when Yaron and I were on your show, I don't think Lord of the Flies is accurate. I don't think Hobbs is how reality works when you're in that kind of state. But I think we've seen countless examples of human beings, especially when human beings have power over someone who's powerless, of allowing themselves to engage in not just harm, but cruelty. And that is something as Soviets, you and I are very painfully aware of. It's not just about the oppression, which as bad enough as it is, it's that mediocre person with that little bit of power. And now they're standing between you and your daughter having medicine, and they love it to make you dance, to be like, oh, you need me to get this medicine? Make you go through hoops? Because now they feel like for the first time in their life, they're in a position of strength and power. I think that is, in many ways, the more common nature of evil that what Hannah Arendt talks about the banality of evil, then someone who's like an SS guard, you're shooting someone in the head. Like that, I think we could all wrap our heads around to some extent, like, okay, I'm a military. It's not easy. I have to execute people pulling a trigger, you could kind of have this mental disconnect between the finger and the victim. But like that little day to day stuff, like, are you doing the right thing on a day to day basis that I think is far more common, and far more disturbing aspect in certain senses of the human psyche. Yeah, there's something especially disturbing about a weak man, given power, and just abusing that power. There's something about not just weak, but like, mediocre at everything it does, or less than mediocre. A great example of this, which I'm also talking about in the next book is Ceausescu, who was the dictator of Romania. So you know, the Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood in, you know, popular culture. But the different countries in the second world, the Soviet bloc, some are more liberal than others, some are more sane than others. And Ceausescu, at first was one of the, you know, more Western friendly, more the free ones. Then he met the great leader Kim Il Sung from North Korea, and he had the idea to impose a personality cult on Romania, and it's the kind of things like forcing people to breed because he wanted to make people taller. I think he made like the biggest building in all of Europe, the People's Palace, but it was just for him, while there's no electricity, you know, elsewhere. But you look at this guy, you know, Stalin's a badass, right? He was a bank robber. If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk. Lenin was clearly intellectual. These were powerful Trotsky, these were powerful men with huge egos, huge force of personality. But you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could, like for example, on my driver's license, instead of my address, I'm not giving my real address, being like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Avenue, by mistake it says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Street, right? So you can imagine him being in the post office and me giving him my ID to get my package and him being baffled because this says street, this says Avenue instead of understanding. And this, the look on his face, this dullard, that you can see how, you know how sometimes I'm going to, can I curse? Fuck yes. Yeah. So if you know, like how if you're in the airport and you see someone and you look at them and an adult and you think, okay, this person was born fucked up, just like on sight, like something's wrong with them. How are they traveling alone? You look at Ceausescu, you look at him, you're like, something's not right with this guy. Not in the sense of like evil, but in the sense of he's a simpleton, right? And now he's in charge of this whole country and everyone's taught to regard him as one of the great geniuses of all time. And it's this, the idea, this mediocre nobody, this guy would have in any other culture been accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job where he's like, okay, he works at the mail service and he's bad at it, okay, fine, he's not hurting anyone. And now as a result of this, he's responsible for mass death, secret police, and incarceration. And you know, one of the greatest things I've ever seen, which I'm sure many people see as well, if you go on YouTube, it's his speech, and it's the first time the crowd turns and his head kind of like, because they start booing him, which was unheard of. And he was shot with his dog faced wife not that long after, it was just a great moment. But it's things like this, I agree with you, that mediocre, weak person is now in a position of power over somebody else. And that sense of vindictiveness, like I'm going to feel strong for once in my life, but it's going to be at your expense. That I think is, you know, human nature, it's most primal. And every time I meet a person in this world, you're the first person to get me to cry on a fucking podcast. Fucking the robot gets me to cry. What the fuck is going on? Every time I meet a weird person, somebody, to me, heroism is also taking a risk to rebel against mediocrity. Like in the most simplest of ways, like the license address, like taking a risk to break the little bit of rule that nobody will know about, to take that little bit of a leap of like that little protest against the bureaucracy. Like that Nazi guard where he just spoke out, he's like, hey lady. That's a big one. Oh, that's a big, sure. I mean, like literally at the line at Starbucks or something like that. Like even in the tiniest of ways, when I see people just like, it's almost like that little like glimmer in their eye, a wink, like we're in this together, there's all this conformity all around us. That's at a different time could have been Nazi Germany, could have been a Stalinist Soviet union. Sure. We're in this together. We're going to rebel against that conformity by just taking the risk, that little bit of risk against mediocrity. I don't know. And then once again, I see this in companies too. When I see the mediocrity, I see this, I used to work at Google, I see it in Google and when the companies grow, that mediocrity is overwhelming. The Peter principle, right? The Peter principle. Yeah. My hope is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer, that risk taking, the leap of faith, whatever the heck that is, the leap out of the ordinary, out of the conformity, out of the mediocrity. So this is where you and I disagree. I think most, a lot of people are not capable of that. They're accustomed to it. I don't know if they're not capable. I understand your position. I'm disagreeing with it. I'm saying I do not think they're capable. I think a lot of people effectively don't have souls. They do not have a conscience in this sense where they're going to look at an issue, bring their critical thinking and say, all right, I am going to do the right thing, although I'm taking a risk. Do you think thinking is involved or is it just taking that leap? There's something about that basic human spirit. Forget the thinking part. It's just saying, I'll take that risk, taking that adventure, the same thing that got people to explore the seas throughout human civilization, explore land, explore the oceans, that exploration. We've done stuff this way all this time. I'm going to take a leap and that comes out of nowhere seemingly. But those people are the heroes, but I don't think that's universal. I'm going to use a very gauche example. There was a show called Scare Tactics, which was basically a candid camera, but they would scare people. They'd have vampires, whatever, a hidden camera and people's reactions. Sometimes the prank didn't work out like they expected. There was one where they were hiring the people who were the marks, the contestants so to speak, was hired to be a security guard. You have to watch this factory overnight and you get paid. But the setup was some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle of the night like in rags and they were saying they were keeping us prisoner here, blah, blah, and just watch the person reaction to this. There was one security guard where he basically forced them back into the building and they're working us 24 seven, we're getting beaten. He's like, I'm here to do a job, get back in there. You watch this and it never even enters his head to be like, something's wrong here. He was given his orders, he's following his orders and to me, that is not uncommon and that person, although they look like you and I, there's something essentially human missing with them. Now, very quickly, the reaction is, well, it's one step from there to Nazism. I don't think it's something that, I'm not saying this person should be killed, but I'm just saying to expect that every human being has the capacity to have that defiance, especially at a cost to their own life, that I think is not realistic. But at the same time, I feel like an octopus on the eighth hand, it is those few of us, or if you want to include me in this, who do make these tiny little protests, who look the other way when someone is hungry, who's stealing food from the supermarket, right? It's like, all right, I'm going to pretend I didn't see anything. Those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate the validity of the human experience, whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery. I think almost everybody in the world can derive deep meaning and pleasure from having done those courageous acts, and I also think they have the capacity to do them, to discover that meaning and happiness. So you're the cynic, then why aren't they doing it? They haven't gotten a chance to, like I've never tried LSD or DMT, you haven't gotten the chance to try this amazing journey, which is taking the risk. That's nonsense, because as you just said two minutes ago, everyone has that chance every day to do the right thing. We have the chance to do a lot of things and we don't realize. There's a lot of stuff right in front of our nose that we don't realize, because you have to kind of wake up to it. Sometimes you need the catalyst, there needs to be some kind of thing that happens that wakes you up. The fact that most people don't take the small acts of rebellion doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it. Then it's a discussion about how to create societies that get more and more people to be free actors and free thinkers. That's the question. That probably leads us into a discussion of anarchism and so on, but I just think we are very young as a species. We're trying to figure out how to get ourselves to first be collaborative, but at the same time be free spirits. I think both of those are within human nature for most of us. I think another big concern is that there's enormous disincentives, and this is Michael Malus speaking, for human beings to be kind and for tenderness. I think, especially when you're young, you know what I mean, when you're immature, a lot of times someone will reach out to you with kindness or vulnerability and you think it's funny to kind of dunk their head in the water in a pool or something like that. When you get older, there's this one example of this. This was in the 90s, and there was a woman. She became a stripper or something like that or whatever it was, but she had this amazing body. She was just gorgeous. The show was, she was talking about how when she was in high school, she was bullied a lot and that there was this football player. He messed with her every single day. One day, she even threw pickles in her hair and her hair smelled like pickles and it was laughing at her. This really screwed her up, I mean, up to that show. They took her backstage and they brought out the football player, and now he's a dad and a regular dude. He's like, do you know why you're here, and he's like, no, and they're like, oh, what were you like in high school? He's like, I was kind of a jock, bully, whatever. They brought her out, and he didn't even remember her really, and she just starts crying about the pickles and whatever, and this is something that affected her for 20 years, and I've never seen a clearer example of someone who wanted to kill themselves than this guy. The guilt on his face, and he's looking at her, and he's desperate to be like, what can I do to take your pain away, to make it better? He was just crippled by it because he knew there's nothing he could do. He knew he 100% did the wrong thing. He knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly. You can imagine, I got to screw over this lady to feed my family, that's fine. At the time, it meant nothing to him, so of course he didn't remember, and he was just paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt. One of the reasons I always try to do the right thing isn't because I'm an inherently good person, which I do not think I am, I don't think anyone is inherently good, but because I will feel guilty about it for a very, very long time because if you do the wrong thing, this is a very Camus idea, if you do the wrong thing to a good person, that's really, really bad because what kind of person are you? In the same way that everyone can be that guy who takes someone out for their birthday, everyone has that ability for someone who did the wrong thing to someone who's a normal person and do you want to be that guy as well? My friend, Bittstein, he's a big Bitcoin person, my biography ego in hubris is like $500 now on eBay, it's hard to find, came out in 2006. He had told me that you can get it on torrent, it's downloadable, and I'm like, oh, I thought if you're my friend, you'd want to buy it. At the time, it was not $500, I assure you, and he goes, I did buy it, I'm just telling you that you could also get it for free, this information that you might want to use. And I snapped at this kid who was doing right by me and I felt, it just stuck in my head, I'm like, you're an ass. And then years later, I apologize, he had no memory of this at all and I'm glad to be able to reiterate the apology again. But a lot of times I'm extremely aggressive on Twitter and in other venues, I always try to and maybe I fail and that's my moral failing, always do it as a counter attack. If you're going to start going personal, if you're going to start being aggressive against an individual, I'm not going to necessarily hold back when I reciprocate. And it's something that is very common on social media, but I don't think it is normal. Just because a lot of this, you're talking about the quiet little rebellion, just because everyone else around you thinks it's okay to just go up to people and attack them in the most personal ways, impromptu because of their views, really just take a step back and realize what you're engaging with. Now, if that's the fight they want, then my Soviet cruelty could come out and that's kind of why I don't drink because I do enjoy it, but at the same time, be aware of what you're doing. And again, this goes back to Camus's sense that conscience really is what makes us human beings. That's the thing I was saying, I don't think most people think in terms of conscience. They don't think it, we are taught, this is that creeping cynicism that, oh, grow up. When you're an adult, you have to make sacrifices, blah, blah, blah. And even if I buy that for a second, which I don't, but if I have to make sacrifices sometimes, that doesn't mean it's okay for me to make a sacrifice of my values in this moment. If I have to maybe be at work and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names, I have to be humiliated, but I got to put food on the plate. That doesn't mean it's okay later if I'm at a party and I'm just extremely offensive to someone for no reason. My own flavor of a little bit of rebellion. Sometimes I use the number two. You know, you're very witty on Twitter and Twitter likes mockery and wit and a counter attack is, Twitter loves that, somebody who's skilled at it. My own flavor of a bit of rebellion is to say things very simply, bordering on cliche with authenticity and like genuinely meaning the words I say, but knowing that those words would be, are easy to attack. And that sometimes those attacks can hurt because people would just mock me. People don't like earnestness because they've been taught to be too cool for school. So there's this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated. Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism of institutions or something like that, almost as if I have a deep wisdom about the way the world is broken. But when you speak very simply about beautiful things in life, it's very easy to sound like you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And I kind of, I stick by that. I don't know where that's going to end up, but it's like the idiot from Dostoevsky. It feels like that's the right thing, even if it hurts when I'm attacked for it. I do something similar sometimes, which is I'll have some innocuous comment about like bubblegum. I mean, just it's not to be in political. And a lot of times people will respond to this paragraph of just invective about like blah, blah, blah, and then this, and you say this, and you're an ass, and just really trying to get at me. And in those situations, there are very specific circumstances, I will respond and I mean it every single time. I will say, I wish your parents had been kinder to you or your mom or your dad. Because even if I'm some idiot on Twitter, who's just talking about bubblegum, and this is your, I'm not talking about politics where I can see how people get emotional, COVID, my grandma died, now you're talking about her. And I realize this isn't about me. Like I'm someone you've never met making some inane point about nothing, and you're getting agitated about this. It's clearly something else that's going on here. And someone taught you, someone had to teach you that this is how to respond in this kind of very kind of harsh way. And a lot of times they won't say anything or get deleted. And I hope every single time, there's no asterisk here, that they take a second, and they realize that the way that they were talked to growing up was not acceptable, that they don't have to carry this forward. And that they don't have to be kind to me, I'm nobody to them. But take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset you want to be your norm, as opposed to a weapon you pull out of your pocket sometimes where it's warranted or even when it's not warranted. I think there's a lot of those people out there, and we forget how hard it is for a lot of people to grow up, how they're trained from their parents or the single parent, that the only way they're going to get attention is by acting out, that when they do good things, it doesn't get comment. But if they do bad things, they get a smack upside their head. That I think is far more common than we realize. And it's not hitting the kid that's going to last, the pain is going to give five seconds. But when you're training this child, helpless child, is something that's really, really bad. I don't know if it always can be mapped to that. I always wonder about them, what their motivations are. And I just kind of, whenever I think about them, I think only positively. And I don't even think about the childhood thing. I think, I don't know. I kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage where we enjoy the derision of others. We go through stages of being... I enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be, you know, Billy Eide had that quote, like, I like it when people are mean to me, I stop pretending to be nice. But like, what's the worst thing someone can say about you? You're not, what harm are you doing? Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are, the conversations suck and the people are losers. Okay. No, the main thing I would say is I'm way more popular than I deserve to be. What does deserve mean? The reality is there's people out there that just enjoy hating on others and I don't fault them for it. Like, I don't even think of them as haters. I think of them as just people that in this particular part of their life are enjoying this activity of deriding others on the internet. I'm not sure what to do with that. I just don't want to, I don't want to allow myself to think badly of them, I guess is the thing. I'm the one saying don't think badly of them. I'm saying that I don't think they're inherently bad people. I think that their thinking is screwed and that I'm steel mounting them. I'm saying, let's assume everything you're saying about Lex is true. This is an opportunity for you to outdo Lex. Like it's... No, but are you saying they should stop hating because I'm saying like, maybe they shouldn't just keep... I don't believe in should, right? I'm an anarchist, but I'm saying if this is your belief about Lex, you know what it is? I made this comment in my book, The New Right, when people make fun of Andy Warhol and they're like, oh my God, he painted a soup can and now he became a millionaire. I could do this. Well, why don't you? So basically if I go up to you with a check and I say, I will give you a million dollars, you could see the check, you got to paint a soup can, what am I waiting for? So clearly there's a disconnect in their thinking between what they're perceiving and the reality. Because if it was as simple or as, maybe not simple, but as possible for them as they perceive it to be, why are they leaving comments instead of outdoing you? How great would it be for them to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground? I don't know how that would work because it's not the NBA, but... No, but you want to point out, you do this too on Twitter. You want to point out the hypocrisy, the fraudulence of others, right? Sure, but what are you, you're not claiming anything other than this is, the following is the conversation between me and Machique, whatever his name is, right? I got the voice down, dude. I got it down. I've been walking around my house doing my Lex impression. I've been leaking motor oil everywhere. Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to make of it because I think there's a more general statement to be made. Like I see Twitter this way too. When I read a tweet, I try to read it with like the best possible interpretation, meaning like what is the wisdom in this tweet, right? As opposed to what I think a large number of people, not a large number, but some fraction try to see what is the worst possible interpretation of this tweet. And they want to, they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation. Like they want to, there's people, I'm already aware of this with me and certainly with a lot of people, they're waiting for me to fail. They want me to be like, this guy talks about love all the time. They want me to be some dark, like a Bill Cosby type character. They want you to be in pain. Yeah. They want you to be in pain because they don't. Why? I'll tell you exactly why. Because this is why I'm so for being white pilled and being for hope. Because if you are black pilled, meaning if you think it's pointless, we're all done. You're just wasting your breath. If you have any counter examples to this thesis, if there's even a little bit of hope, your entire hypothesis falls through, right? So it's kind of how like you have all these stories of people who are like painting swastikas who aren't Nazis, but just to show that, oh, there's all this Nazism. So I'm going to kind of force the conclusion. So for them, when they see you thriving, you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show, but you're demonstrating that people can succeed. This bothers them. So you are. Anyone can succeed. That bothers them. Yeah. So because that, why haven't they? So now you're a counter to their worldview and that is going to cause anxiety when you have data that contradicts other data in your, in your worldview. This is the, in your mindset, this is a big issue for them. Yeah. So to anyone listening to this, they're annoyed by the look of my face. Remember that you could probably do way better than me and you should. But also what would you failing look like? Like let's suppose this podcast went from whatever views you had to 100 views an episode. That's still success. You are talking to people you like, having conversations about important issues. You're having a good time. They're having a good time. How is that a failure? If I have dinner with a friend of mine, there's zero viewers and we enjoy that time. That is the height of human success. When you are sharing happiness, joy, joy over love. So what's the difference between joy and love, Michael Malus? Uh, I think joy is easier to attain. It's more common. You could share it with everyone. Give me an example of joy. Like what was the moment of joy for you recently? I could give you a great example of joy and this is part in the absurdist mindset. Okay. I love having a bad meal at a restaurant and I'll give you, you can see why. You go with your friend. It takes you 45 minutes to get seated. Okay. I'm starving. Waiter's not paying attention to you. They bring your water. It's got a hair in it. They get the food wrong. Yeah. It comes out again. It's ripe, but it's cold. At a certain point you're like, okay, I'm hungry. I'm living an anecdote. This is something that you, if you were at dinner, we could talk about this for years because how great is it that the worst thing that's happening to me is I got to wait an hour for this meal that's going to be cooked wrong, right? That to me is joy is a holding on to that idea that happiness and thriving are possible even when in the moment it's, uh, everything's going the wrong way. Doesn't every moment have the capacity to, uh, fill you with joy then? Yes. Yes. So it's both the shitty moments and the good moments. Yes. But that, see, that's the way I usually talk about love is like, I love life. Yes. And in that, because life can generate every, everything, the pain, the loss, but also just like simple or complicated bliss, all of that, I just love all of that. And that, because it fills me with a kind of, I guess, joy, but joy has a connotation that it's supposed to be somehow positive, like you're supposed to be smiling. To me, you know, man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl, you know, just it's, you're in the Holocaust, you're in a concentration camp, just having a little bit of food that you didn't expect you will have. Or even just thinking about food. Or what about there's a kid there, you tell them a funny story and you crack them up. Yeah. Like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes. That is the height of joy. Yeah. So to me, like all of like life is like infinitely full of possibility for joy. Yes. And that's what I mean by love, because oftentimes like romantic love is what people think about when they think love. But to me, it's all like part of the same thing. And it's almost like love, romantic love, or love with a friend, friendship is like you both notice each other. It's like dogs, they look at each other and then they look at the thing they're interested in. You both notice each other and that moment of joy. You share that moment of joy together. Yeah. Like the restaurant. The restaurant. Yeah. If you're both almost without conspiring, notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal is. And like that, again, that little glimmer of realization, that's what makes life beautiful. You mentioned your grandmother in Lvov. You were thinking of returning there. The plans got a little bit delayed, but what are you hoping from that trip of going back to Russia, going back to Ukraine? What do you hope to get out of it, but what do you think you will feel? A lot of things. First of all, I'm going with my buddy, Chris Williamson. He hosts the Modern Wisdom Podcast. He is one of my closest friends. We've never met. Oh, really? We've never met. He's in Britain. He's trying to get his ass over here to Austin. He's filling out his form right now. He's too good looking. It's a crime. I call him Apollo and I'm Loki. So right away you have a buddy comedy because we're going to film it, right? You have these two guys who on paper are very dissimilar, but we're very, very close. In which way are you similar and close? I think we're both very intense people, very strong emotionally. We're both very ambitious in the sense that, not in terms of career, but we want to grab life by the short hairs kind of thing. We are just both good experiences. Did he bench more than you or like in the gym? Of course. The guy's jacked. He's just... Because he's so good looking. I think he'd be one of those guys who's mostly biceps. Oh no, no, no. If you go to his Instagram, Chris Will X is the handle. It's head to toe. It's just sculpted. Oh, wow. So he's perfect in every way. That's great. He... What flaws does he have? Because I need... He has bad taste in friends and his accent is all crazy. He pronounces it... He's an underwear muddle, so now I spell it M U D L. Just us two, British and American, and just two different dudes, it's going to be a lot of fun. Although, to be fair, as you know, I'm an underwear model now as well, so... Yeah. We're going to talk that in a second, maybe, but yeah, sheathunderwear.com. Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear. Are we going to get some pictures eventually? I think we might. Yeah. Yes, I have them on my phone. We'll have them. We could share them right... You could slice it in right here. So to be able to go with someone who is a very close... I mean, we meet and talk like every day, right? So to someone who generally cares about you, who's... He's very, very grounded, right? So like a lot of times I'll have like some concern and he's really good, and if you listen to his show, at slicing through the noise and being like, hold on a second, I can't do the accent yet. Have you considered A, B, and C because, you know, whenever I had this situation, this is what I did. He was really good with that. So to have a... First of all, just like two buddies on a trip is really a lot of fun. Second of all, I know that it's going to be very intense. So for you, you left Russia much later than I did. How old were you? Thirteen. Thirteen, right. So you remember it, I'm sure, very, very well. I left when I was one and a half too. I don't remember it all. To go to the streets where, you know, my family had to go through this stuff to see the... They came to Lviv, they slaughtered all the Jews. I mean, to have that little memorial there that's there now, and to just look around and know, yesterday, basically, they came here, they rounded everyone up. And also, from the other side, you had the Stalinists coming in and starving all the people. It's just to know that so much horror and death. There's this quote I saw once about a woman who went to Auschwitz and she just made the comment like, grass grows here. Because we think, you know, that when it comes to the nature of evil, that you're going to go there, there's going to be this pits of hell or whatever. There's birds, you know, there's, you know, robins hopping around looking for the worms or whatever. They think it's perfectly nice and you stand there to understand that so much suffering happened here or there is going to be very jarring. I know that it's going to be an issue because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian. And to speak Russian to Ukrainians is like a big deal. So that's going to be a concern. I'm also worried about going to Russia because every Russian has this idea that even though they've just met you, they feel that they're in a position to tell you what you're doing wrong with your life, what you should be doing, if they're a cab driver, I have no tolerance for unsolicited advice on it based at all. That's going to be horrible. They're going to be telling me I need to speak Russian better because ты говоришь по русски как даунчик. I'm not hearing it. I'm not interested in hearing it. So that I think, and also, you know, given my upcoming book, The White Pill and covering what happened back in the day under Stalinism and later to see this was the Ljubljanka, this was the basement where they would, you know, this is something that people might not realize. There's a superb film, The Death of Stalin, which is kind of, that's what I do with North Korea, you know, puts a humorous spin on it. Then when you take a step back and you realize what they're actually saying, it's just like it's very, very disturbing how when Stalin was dying, he had a stroke, he's laying there in a pile of his own piss, he's unconscious. Right before he died, he thought the doctors were all plotting against him. So they were being tortured to confess that they were trying to murder him. They had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers to attend to him and they did it. So this kind of thing to like go there, like Red Square and see this is where it happened, to see Lenin's body, like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at. It's going to be really, because I've worked so much in this space, jarring and intense and emotional. And as intense as it is for me sitting here talking to you about it, to see it and to see the faces and to see Cyrillic everywhere, you know, other than Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, it's going to, I'm sure it's going to do a huge number on me because as Western and as a Tupoi Mirikanyets as the Russians will say I am, this is still where I came from. So no matter, to see it face to face, I don't know how I'm going to react, but I don't think it's going to be like, meh. You've assembled a number of essays from anarchist thinkers in a new book called The Anarchist Handbook. You mentioned Emma Goldman. What interesting things do these thinkers agree on and what do they disagree on? The Anarchist Handbook.com is the website. It covers from the 1790s to, I think my essay is the last one from 2014, which a friend of mine who's kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audio book. Also podcast. Podcast. I never had, but it's not a podcast anyone would have heard of. It's like Tom Woods but even worse. So what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government and also the malevolence of state actors and the consequences of governments. So they range in terms that most people would easily regard as either left or right wing. But it tackles the nature of government and also creates positive non state alternatives from really many different angles. The slogan I have is the black flag, which is the traditional flag of anarchism. The black flag comes in many colors. So they were really all over the map in terms of what they're for, but their disagreement is about the nature of state and the nature of power. And it's very edifying because this is an ideology that's been in many ways swept under the rug. I want to seriously grow up that I can allow people to sit down and read these essays and see for themselves just how beautiful this tapestry over the decades and centuries has been woven about people who genuinely believed in freedom as the most important and how to maximize that for society. So maybe it's useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there. So one is Leo Tolstoy. Oh yeah. Who I think not many people know is an anarchist. Yes. A Christian anarchist. An anarchist. Yeah. So he came to despise government for his deceit and his violence. But to him, the Christian principles of nonviolence, I think are important. Oh yeah. And it's kind of pacifist kind of mindset of, you know, it's better to someone to punch you than to punch them back. So he's in that way, at least I've read he influenced MLK and Gandhi. What do you think about this flavor, color of the anarchist flag of nonviolence, nonviolent opposition? I will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring up MLK because he's become so corporate and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him. One of the things that Martin Luther King did so very well was that he forced people to face the consequences of what they were putting forward. You want to be racist. You want to be for Jim Crow. You want to be for segregation. Okay. It's easy for you to do that from your living room. Now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits being attacked by dogs, being attacked by fire hoses and beaten by cops just so they could sit on the front of the bus. And now for a lot of people who were still racist, who were still had animus toward black people are watching this and it's going to be a lot harder to be like, I'm okay with this. I'm okay with human beings, even ones I regard as somehow bad or inferior to be beaten and attacked by trained dogs and they're not doing anything in response. That strikes to, I think, a very basic nature of, especially American, like, okay, whatever you're for, I'm not for people getting beaten and attacked when they're not really doing anything. I think pacifism is something that's very easy to make fun of, but people don't underestimate how powerful it is for someone to say, you can do what you want to me. I'm not going to fight you back. I just want to live peacefully and have the same rights as you. And to say, screw you, you should get beaten. That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. So I think he was really, and Gandhi, of course, as well, were excellent in that regard. There's a little bit of Machiavellianism to it. They've both been beatified in regard to saints, but their strategy worked very, very well for their purposes. So I think just all of us, when you see someone in this kind of Christian, I know you're wrong, obviously, it's nothing very highly Christianity, but if he's someone who's willing to take a punch and to say, you could do whatever you want to me, I'm not going to hurt somebody else instinctively, and maybe this is kind of a hack. Most people want to side with that guy, step in between and be like, oh, okay, let's take a step back, because whatever led to this is not tenable. We need to go back to the drawing board if the consequence is people are having these as a result of my decisions and actions. So I think that aspect of anarchism is very, very, in certain contexts, healthy, and much smarter and more sophisticated than people give it credit for. And let's also point out that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, and he wrote Anna Karenina. So this was not some naive or innocent, whatever word you want to use. He knew the nature of evil. He knew how bad things get. So he wasn't saying at all that human beings are inherently nice and kind. He was saying it's much more effective to not fight back and to force them to face that. I'll give you another example. I was on the show Trigonometry, and I was talking to the host, and one of them talked about how someone he knew had been the Gulag, or his mom was born the Gulag grandma. And after Stalin died and the Soviet Union liberalized and lots of the people in the Gulags were freed by Khrushchev and so on and so forth, I didn't know this, many of the, or some, let's say some, of the guards of the Gulags killed themselves because they had genuinely believed that everyone in these camps was there for a reason. And when they found out that these people were completely innocent, didn't even have trials, and that they were the ones forcing them to work themselves to death and starve, they couldn't deal with that guilt. So when you are a pacifist or non retaliatory and you're forcing someone who's using force, like look what you're doing, look what you've become. For some people, some people don't care, like the guy in Scare Tactics, like I mentioned earlier, where for a lot of others, they're going to be like, okay, is this who I wanted to grow up to be? They will have that little flame of conscience that you and I talked about earlier. They will be like, how did I get to the point where there's this lady who wants to ride the bus and she's lovely dressed, put together, and I have a, sending a dog on her? What kind of person am I? For some of those people, they're going to be like, okay, I can't be a part of this. I don't even understand the politics. I still am racist, but I'm not going to take part in this atrocity. Well, that was for him from the individual perspective, perhaps he calls that Christian, but listening to that voice of conscience, like whatever that is in you. So for Tolstoy, it seems like anarchism from the individual perspective is silencing the rest of the world and listening to the, for him, probably God given voice of conscience. And so that's what it means to live, embody anarchism for him. And to embody Christianity, I would think he would say. But he would see those as basic. Yes, correct. Yeah. So in terms of forms of government, the Christian government is one that's no government. Yeah, correct. What do you think about that as advice for an individual? Turn the other cheek. Do you think, I tend to believe that that's a really good way to live. I think it's very underrated. And this is me talking. I think a lot of times when someone, let's suppose you're having an argument and, but you have to pick your battles, right? Let's suppose you're having a heated argument and someone says something very cruel to you, where you have attempted to double down and hit back twice as hard. But if it's someone who at all cares about you, where they're just in the moment and you just stop and you just say, did you hear what you just said to me? For some cases, that person will take a step back and be like, just like when I snapped at Michael at Bitstein years ago, I'd be like, wow, okay, this is bad. This is bad. I'm sorry. And they kind of, it's kind of like they have to get to 10 before they control delete to use your language. Thank you. Yeah. Buffer overflow. I appreciate that. And for some, they're going to, they're going to just twist the knife. But I think this is a very useful technique. And also you can also sleep well at night cause you could be like as much as this person tried to hurt me, I still didn't reciprocate. And yeah, I, I took that punch and it sucks, but at least I never said anything that I could feel guilty about. Exactly. Do you think that's ultimately a good way to implement anarchy in your personal life? Anarchy, implementing anarchy in your personal life just means respecting people's boundaries. It means not forcing people to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do. I think you then have to take a case by case, like there's so many human interactions that are required for life and there's tension and all those kinds of things. It's not always. Am I being naive? Are you innocent? You're being so naive. No. Did you put the hat on? The hat's on the other head now. Well, I had to take off the hat cause it's like Frodo with the ring. I was starting to feel like powerful. I wanted to give you orders and I'm like, no, I just, I think there's a ways of dealing with the tensions that are natural to human interactions that can't be simply, you know, it's not as simple as saying you want to respect the freedom of others and the boundaries of others. It's like you both have to agree on stuff and work something out. And the mechanisms of that agreement, the game theory of that agreement requires different hacks and strategies. And the question is for an anarchist collective that's well functioning, what kind of hacks, what kind of ways of behavior are more likely to be productive and not, you know, that that's almost like the question, do you want to turn the other cheek or do you want to stand your ground really firmly? When somebody is an asshole to you, you walk away. Or when somebody is an asshole to you, you turn the other cheek and give them a chance to rise to the best version of themselves and then find a common ground kind of thing. It's an open question of how to form those collectives when there's people with difficult childhoods and all that kind of stuff. Well, this also comes down to what is your relationship with this person? Is this out of character? If you and I got into a disagreement, all of a sudden, you started getting very personal. First of all, I'd be very hurt. But then I'd be like, this is out of character for Lex. I'm sure I could be like, whoa, let's take a pause here. Like you're getting heated. I'm trying to work this out. What's going on here? And you get a kind of a meta conversation. But again, you and I have a relationship of mutual respect. So as opposed to if it was a stranger who just wants a piece of you, it's just like you are coming at me not correct. I don't have to reciprocate in kind. I'm not going to shoot you, but I'm not going to pretend that you deserve respect when you're treating me with such contempt. I do defer, especially with people I know, because this is smart long term game theory as well as the right thing to do. I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt at first, right? Because if you're going to go aggro, you can't go back. You could always go from like, let me hear them out and then then I could go aggro. So there's a big asymmetry there. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I don't think anyone has the answer to this question is, is that the right strategy? To me, game theoretically, it seems the right strategy is to... With reciprocity is what game theory says is the right strategy. They did the prisoner's dilemma and they found tit for tat is the one that's the most advantageous. So that's for when it's perfectly rational actors. But when you have, I mean, there's noise that there's a, I think, benefit to just, even if they keep being shitty to you, still being nice to them. Well then there's the inverse where girls are turned off. Some people are like, if you're in a relationship and not just girls, but like some people, when you're kind to them, they find you less attractive, right? That is kind of this weird, what am I supposed to do? Like you're only into me if I'm mean to you. I don't want to be mean, but then I'm getting punished for doing the right thing. That's another tricky one. And I mean, this is nothing that necessarily do with anarchism so much as like, you know, human beings are infinitely complex. We don't often know the backstory. Like for example, just yesterday, Jay, who's here is one of my closest friends. I had a dinner with a bunch of people. I couldn't bring a plus four, so he wasn't invited. He didn't know the circumstances. He just thought we were having dinner without him. He was hurt. Once I spelled it out, he completely understood and I felt horrible because for me to have any of my friends feel left out is just a very, very cruel thing. And I felt bad and I'm glad to apologize again publicly that that's ended up being the circumstances. But yeah, a lot of times we're also in Plato's cave. When you're dealing with somebody else, you have very, very limited information about their background and circumstances. And that's why I will always, if it's someone I even have a little bit of a relationship with, try to give them the benefit of the doubt because I found, especially this comes from being a coauthor, when you coauthor books and you're walking in other people's shoes, you don't know a lot of the information. So a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding. But isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question of how we figure out this puzzle of human complexities in order to form voluntary collectives? Like when you have to figure that out, how to make people feel good, how to make people... I agree. That's fair. I think not only anarchists have to think about this as my point, of course. Well... But we have to think about it more than others do. Right. I feel like I should try to argue against anarchism at some point, out of love, out of love. Okay. And so because people... Out of joy. People enjoy seeing me, what is it, when like Ben Shapiro argues against like a 20 year old feminist. Ben Shapiro destroys high school students with facts and legends. This is this video of Michael Miles destroys a Marxist, Russian, communist pig. So anarchism is opposed to hierarchies. Well that's left anarchism, anarcho communism, yeah. The state. But there are many hierarchies that are not the state. We have a hierarchy here. This is your show. I'm differential to you. Right. But they're... Okay. Rigid hierarchies. Forced hierarchies is the... Forced hierarchies. Forced hierarchies. Okay. So humans, when left on their own accord, they form hierarchies naturally. Yes, inevitably in my opinion. Inevitably. Which is why I disagree with the left anarchists. I think it's not a coherent thing to argue for nonhierarchical relationships, even in theory. It doesn't make sense to me. And I know the old school anarchists will call me stupid or uninformed, but I've never been able to even wrap my head around this claim that you could have relationships without hierarchy. Right. So this is a certain sense in which we're living in an anarchism now. And I don't mean just like, because the nations, as you've said, are in anarchism relative to each other, but isn't the United States just a collective that was formed in anarchy? And this is just the collective that we're operating under, this hierarchy that was naturally formed. It wasn't... Well, the United States was not naturally formed. It was formed by force and by fiat. But to your point, I stress this throughout the book. I always say this anarchism is not a location, it's a relationship. So yeah, you and I do have a hierarchy and this is your show, but neither of us really has an authority over the other. Like I'm here voluntarily. You can kick me out if you want. I can leave it anyone. Neither of us has the power to force the other to be in this relationship we've chosen. My lawyer, I defer to his judgment. He's not forcing me to do it. He gives me his advice and I could take it or leave it. Same with the doctor. So there is a clearly like who's in charge and who's not in charge, but they're not in a position to impose their will on everybody else. And you could very easily see John is Stephanie's lawyer and Stephanie is John's doctor. And in each of those contexts, one has this position of ostensible authority over the other. So anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing. It is the norm of human relationships where you meet people. You're not necessarily equal. Someone's going to be taller, someone's going to be stronger, someone's smarter, wealthier with others. So you're not at all thinking I am here and I could tell you what to do and you are legally or morally obligated to follow my wishes. That is the basis of anarchism. So in what way is the United States imposing by force something on you, do you think? If you leave your house, you will go to jail. My money being taken from me via taxation. But don't you have the freedom to not operate under that? No, but that's like, yeah, like technically if someone comes up to you and mugs you and says your money or your life, you are making a choice. But what the anarchist argument is, they're not in a position to force you to make that choice. That is not morally binding, even though they have practically the power to force you into that dilemma. But you have the freedom to live under the United States or not. So even... Yeah, the argument is if you don't like it, leave, right? Not necessarily leave like geographically, but there's ways to live outside the force of the United States. There's ways, it's just very difficult to operate that way. But that's like saying you could outrun the mugger, which is true, but the issue is does that mugger have the right to tell you at gunpoint, you're either giving me your money or I'm going to shoot you or secret plan C, you get to run away. Is that person a moral actor? And the anarchist answer is never. And just one more thing, the anarchist view is the difference between that mugger and the government is only an air of legitimacy. Literally they're morally identical. So is it possible that every hierarchy that gets big enough and successful enough such that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides, isn't it always going to be amoral in your sense, the way the United States government is amoral? I don't want to say just like the United States government is amoral because that implies the United States government is uniquely or especially amoral. Governments, I apologize. I just want to clarify that because I know you didn't mean that and I don't want that to be the implication. Can you repeat the question? I'm sorry. So like won't every Okay, so that's right. So that's progressive economics. So the argument is in any market at a certain point, things tend to centralize and then that organization de facto can dictate price, can dictate so on and so forth. That is completely historical. If you look at any market, the trend is always towards decentralization, the music industry, right? When we were kids, there were four or five record labels. They were the ones who made all the songs that you're going to see in the Billboard Top 100 with a few exceptions. Now anyone can go to direct to market. If you look at TV stations, right, it went from CBS, NBC, ABC, then you got Fox, then you had cable, which is 100. Now you have satellite, which have sounds around the world and you have YouTube, which is literally infinite. So as technology improves and as wealth increases, which is a function of free enterprise, you are going to always have more and more choice, even within a monopoly, Coca Cola, right? This is an example I used, I think in the new right, when we were kids, every terrible comedian would be like, oh, now that I've got diet caffeine free Coke, what's next? It's like, yeah, that's good. You want to have, what was his name, Cayman, the guy who invented the Segway. If you go, Dean Cayman, if you go into some restaurants right now, you will have those machines. You have like 80 kinds of Cokes and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add to it. Grape, cherry, lemon, lime, so on and so forth. So in any field, you're going to have more and more competition. You're going to have less competition and less choices when the state gets involved because the state wants control. The state wants one big neck with one leash around it and that way it could just pull that dog in one direction or another. And you saw this last year with the lockdowns, Carol Roth wrote this amazing book called The War on Small Business and she talked about, we have seen for the first time in history a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business towards organizations like Target and Amazon who made trillions of dollars last year. Whereas mom and pop, which to me at least is like the acme of American achievement. You come to America, you have a fruit stand, a laundromat, you make socks, whatever it is, you're that unique artisan creating something special. They're the ones who didn't last whereas Target and Amazon did. So when you have the state involvement, it will always be in favor of Jeff Bezos and for the simple reason that it's going to be a lot easier for Jeff Bezos to get Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell on the phone than it is for me making socks on Etsy. Your sense is that there'll be less and less over time Jeff Bezos is like whatever industry we look at, there's be less, there's a trend towards decentralization across all industries. And when I say decentralization, I just mean choice, right? So if you look at again, networks, you're going to, if you were in the 80s and you had a network just for LGBT issues, first of all, it's going to be complete heretical. That's not going to happen and there's not going to be enough necessarily people identifies that to have an audience. Then there was something called logo. They have that and there's lots of other shows like that in this way. So more specific, look at websites. I am positive that you and I, if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs, would find thousands of websites about different breeds and all this other stuff 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like you're going to have two books and they're not going to be dynamic as these new breeds are developed. So at the same time it does, following on your argument, it does seem easier to move and immigrate from state to state within the United States and to other countries. Do you think that's a form of freedom that embodies anarchism where you can resist the force of state by choosing where you live? To some extent, but the line of people, some of these boomers will go at me on Twitter if I'm going after the police or something and be like, if you don't like America, get out of here. And I tell them freedom means I do what I want, not what you want. Freedom means I don't have to move. You don't have to move. Free speech is a good example. It doesn't mean I have to be on Twitter, right? Twitter has the right to ban me. But what I'm saying is I'm saying something and you don't like it, too bad. You're the one who has to accommodate me because I have a right to do what I want with my person as long as I'm being peaceful. So I guess I'm trying to get to the difference between the state and what you would naturally want in anarchy, which is like a security company, all of those things. They will, as they become successful, start looking more and more like the state. Because you get to elect, you give them money, they have leaders. What's the difference between a government and a very successful service provider in anarchism? Well, this gets a little confused in America as big companies necessarily are hand in hand with the government ended up in bed with them. The answer to this question is a long, complicated one. And thankfully, it's all in the Anarchist Handbook. There was an essay by Murray Rothbard who Dave Smith, this is the essay that converted Dave Smith. So maybe it's not as good as it could have been otherwise called Anatomy of the State. And Murray Rothbard points out that state is the only agency in a country which gets its goods through force. The state is the only agency that is not a producer, but inherently a parasite because it does not get its money voluntarily, but through taxation and by imposing its values on a country. That is what makes a state uniquely different from, let's suppose, an Amazon or a Barnes and Noble or a Target. Jeff Bezos does not have the authority or the moral legitimacy to get an army and go into somebody's house, whereas Andrew Cuomo or Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and Barack Obama certainly do. But is it possible that to reframe, so Jeff Bezos does if he hires a security force, also is it possible to reframe taxation as a form of payment? If it was done much better, if you could pay this collective that we call government in ways where you could pay for things that you care for, your money would be much more directly contributing to the things you care for. If you care for a service like healthcare, you'll be able to buy essentially insurance from the government. Why am I buying insurance from the government as opposed to insurance from an insurance company? What do you perceive as the difference between a tax and a price? Do you see the difference? Yes, I know on the surface level, I'm trying to get deeply to say there's a lot of similarities. But what I'm saying is there's one essential difference, which is taxes are imposed on you and you have no choice. Here's an example. My book, Ego and Hubris, my biography, it goes for $500 on eBay. Someone paid for it. Some crazy person. People were showing me that it's on Amazon for $3,000, something like that. You could put a million for it. You could charge whatever price you want. The question is, is someone paying that $3,000 for it? Is someone paying that million for it? It's actually the buyer who establishes the price because the seller can put any price that he wants, $80 trillion. But unless someone's paying that amount and clearing the market, that price has literally no real meaning. It's not an indicator of value or worth or market price. Taxation, on the other hand, is by fiat. I can decide it's fair that you, Lex, have to pay 40% and Joe has to pay 45%. Joe and Lex are in no position to be like, this price is too high. Not only is that money set just completely out of their hands, for people who are employees, it's taken out of their paychecks before they even see it. So they don't even have the choice to be like, you know what? I agree that the government has the right to pay taxation. Here's my check for 40%. It's going on. It's a completely different paradigm than you are when you're paying for price. The government provides a lot of services in the current system. But there's no service the government provides that would not be provided better, more efficiently, and with more choices in a market. That's a hypothesis. No, that's very likely. Well, that's not a... I can demonstrate this to you very easily. I love it when you get flustered. This is what people like. It's so cute. The robot's... Don't make me put on the hat again. The robot has a fire. There's smoke coming out of his ears. What is price? I will tax love. I think of the government as a kind of subscription service. No, no. That's the anarchist view. The anarchist view of private security would be a subscription service. So that's exactly correct. But everyone hates when you sign up to a gym, and then you realize in the contract, it's very difficult to cancel that membership, and then they up the price. There's a lot of unpleasant things with a subscription service that then you can elect to go to another subscription service. Or you could go and Yelp and complain, and if there's enough people to do that, the gym will be receptive. Look at the power of Yelp versus the power of the vote. Well, we could talk about that too. So you're saying Yelp is more effective than voting. The thing is, I agree with you, but you take a further step. You say that Yelp is ethical and moral, and voting is amoral. Or like not voting, but government is amoral. So like it's not only is one more efficient than the other, you're saying like, because I would say government sucks at doing what it does, and it's gotten a lot better at it, and I believe it can keep getting better as it gets smaller and it leverages companies more and more. But you're saying, no, no, no, government is fundamentally as an idea gets in the way of companies that should be doing those things anyway. I just think that companies, when you take away government, will start looking like government. Just because something looks like something does not mean it's the same. If someone puts out a yarmulke and tefillin and they go to shul, they're not Jewish. Right. The basic objection you have with government, because you can leave, like I apologize that this is that stupid Twitter cliche statement. But your opposition to this idea of leaving the United States is that it's just, it's a lot of effort. It's too much friction. That's not the option. The opposition is in the introduction to the book, I say anarchism can be summed up in one sentence. You do not speak for me. Everything else is application. So the claim that somebody I've never met or who I voted against, let's say, I hate Donald Trump, I despise him, I want Hillary Clinton to be president. Too bad Trump's your president, that's not what I want. The idea that this person can come on me and make any claims onto one second of my time, as opposed to try to persuade me, that is something that I, an anarchist, regard as inherently evil and nonsensical. But to operate large organizations, like you see this with cryptocurrency, there's governance, you have to make difficult decisions. It's a block size wars for Bitcoin. Sure. So you will, there is a voting mechanism often with membership when you're a subscription service. But see, the thing is, you're using these words and you're switching definitions. Because like, if I go to a store, I can technically say I'm voting for Tropicana orange juice as opposed to another one. But to kind of say, oh, well, you're making a choice there for every choice is a vote. I don't, I think that that's something that the Venn diagram is not. No, I literally mean vote in this case, not money. Okay. There's some decisions, like, should Bitcoin have increases block size? Okay. There's a bunch of different, they're called soft forks or hard forks. Oh, I'm not saying you should never vote, like stockholders have to vote, right? Exactly. But there's no pretense. Here's, let's look at this. If you want to build robots, right? You would sit down with the company, you would, you guys would be like, we should do this kind of robot, we should do this kind of robot. The stockholders would have a vote or the board in proportion to their investment in the firm. Me, who knows nothing about robots, the idea that I'm in a position to walk in and be like, this is what you should do is crazy and bizarre and wrong because I'm not in a foreign position. So what democracy does is it forces people who run businesses well to run businesses poorly by people who don't know how to run businesses at all. That's the, that's one of the many concerns. But you're saying that's the fundamental property of the state. I have a sense that the state could become as effective as what we think of as companies. I mean, as. This is why they can't, because the state does not have access to data the way that firms do. And this is one of Ludwig von Mises's great points, what he called the calculation problem. If I'm looking at comic books, right, and I have Detective Comics, if Detective Comics 26 is a thousand and Detective Comics 28 is a thousand and Detective Comics 27 is 50,000, that is telling me that even if I don't know anything about comics, that Detective Comics 27 is either very, very scarce for some reason or very, very desirable. It's the first appearance of Batman, whatever, but you don't need to know that to just look at this data and be like, okay, this is the market, tell me something. If prices are set by the government, which the government is a monopoly, I have no way of picking those winners or losers. I don't have that data of supply and demand of an entire nation or a world of people making individual decisions and having price be dynamic and informing me as the organization where I should allocate my resources. So the price is a really strong signal that allows you to operate a voluntary collective where people get what they want and don't get what they don't want. And it tells me what to produce, what not to produce. And it also is great because if I see this podcasting industry, which didn't exist five years ago, and now these people are making bank, that tells me as someone who is an investor, they're making 50%, whatever, 10% profit on their capital. In the plant industry, it's 2%. If I'm going to further my capital to this 10%, and that's going to lower the profit rate as that builds up. And that is how markets are regulated, voluntarily. But the word government, I just think it's possible to have collectives of human beings that represent others based on their voluntary... Yes, of course, you have private governance. Any company, you can have a CEO, you can have a board of directors. But then you, I just, it starts to look very similar to me, a successful private governance mechanism at a scale of the United States starts looking a whole lot like the current government of the United States. Even Amazon, I don't think is anything close to the federal budget, size wise or budget wise or power wise. No. So you're saying you just, it's not even state, it's almost like anything at that size. You want to keep things smaller. And I don't, markets are not going to combine to that level of the state because Jeff Bezos will never be in a position to tell everyone in America, I'm going to take 40% of your money before you even see it. That to me is actually unclear. We don't know that to be true, where that Google or Amazon can't grow to the size. If you take away the US government, I'm not so sure that Amazon can't grow to the size of the US government. Okay, so worst case scenario is we're back where we started, right? That's not worst case scenario. But the concern is that Google is going to be the federal government? That's not the concern. I'm saying like, this is what it looks like when Google is the federal government. It's not, it's like, to me, the US government is our best attempt so far to have large scale representation of people's interest. It really sucks, but it's our best attempt so far and the question is how to improve it. Like if you take away all, if you take away the US government, I'm trying to see how do we improve on that level, that scale of representation of people's interest. Let me give you one example that people could wrap their hands around very easily. I'm against government police monopoly, I'm for private security, right? You don't have to be an anarchist to understand this. Can everyone agree, or at least as a hypothesis, everyone can wrap their heads around, here's a big concern, 911, right? I've heard this 911 call, it's very chilling. There's a kid in a closet, his family's being murdered outside, right? He has to call 911, he's whispering. It's horrifying to hear. There's no reason why the number I call for my family's being murdered is the same number I call for the fire department is the same number I call for an ambulance. What if instead it operated like Uber? You have buttons on your phone, if there's a real emergency, like someone's gun flyers, someone's being killed, you press this and it sends instead of the one police district, whatever company is nearby, you have a bunch of them and they're the ones who are going to come to your house to save you. People can wrap their heads around that very easily. That is one very clear way to go from having a government security monopoly towards having a more free enterprise system. So when you apply that to pretty much anything, it doesn't become that complicated of an alternative. So what I would, you're going to criticize this, but I believe the government, it's like the parenting thing we've talked about earlier, I think it creates a safe space for gov, for I'm for safe spaces, so I'm not going to laugh at you about that. I want people to be safe. But for a safe space for entrepreneurship. So I believe that good government, hold on a sec, give me a sec, give me a sec. Sure, sure. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. I'm sorry. I think government gives a opportunity for companies to out compete it. Yes. UPS, FedEx, 100%, not a question. So I believe you need to have private schools, government to give a chance for UPS, FedEx, for SpaceX, oh there's an X in there, to pop up and then government will naturally back off from that place. So like you, but you need the innovators to step in and build the thing. Okay. Like you can't just. When has government ever backed off though? That never happens. I back, well, from FedEx and UPS, from SpaceX, from Amazon. Wait, wait, hold on. The US Postal Service still competes with FedEx and UPS. So here's the other thing. Not nearly. Not well, but they still exist. And the point is. They're dying. But UPS and FedEx are taxed. So not only are they paying for their own company, they're paying for this competitor. This is the essential difference. Imagine if you didn't have UPS, excuse me, the federal government and no post office. So you had FedEx, you have DHL, you have US Postal Service and many others. How about in this scenario, UPS has the capacity to take 20% of FedEx's DHL and couriers money and put in their own pocket and they never have to do anything in return. This is going to be an enormous advantage of UPS. And then when you add the addition that UPS is not necessarily going to be more efficient than the others, this is going to be a huge distortion in the market. Can you imagine if your podcast, you just automatically got 20% of the views of everybody else? I mean, would there be any incentive for you to be great? Or you could just sit in your laurels and do whatever you want even more than now. It's hard to imagine more than now. That's because you're a robot and lack imagination. I think there just has to be, of course you can do it completely without government, but government... That's all I need to hear. Okay. That's all I need to hear. Show's over. Show's over. What else you can do without government at the end? Let us try. The question is that safety net that's needed for entrepreneurship, that's needed for, I'm sorry to say, but I have a sense that there needs to be a bit of a safety net for freedom. I'm much more comfortable with saying you need a safety net for freedom than you need one for entrepreneurs. The beauty of markets is with your startup, if you have a startup and it completely fails, the only person who's screwed is you and your investors. If I'm a government and I make a startup, the entire society fails, like the Iraq war. If I have this cockamamie plan, everyone else doesn't have a choice. They are both funding it and sometimes even drafted or forced into it. The safety net, the antlers, getting back to the early anarchists, one of the things that I admire about them, the inaugural communists, the old school left anarchists, is people don't remember what context they were in. They were in context without a welfare state, they're immigrating in huge numbers from Eastern Europe, you go to the Tenement Museum in New York, people like 12 to a room, kids are working in factories, they're either working in factories or they have to starve. It's not that their parents didn't love them, it's that the parents didn't have birth control, which was a felony, and they also were in a position to put food on the table for their kids because they're uneducated and the jobs are paying nothing. You could understand why Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Proudhon, and all these other figures were like, this is untenable, we see Carnegie with 80,000 mansions, whereas this lady whose husband died at age 30, who's never been to high school or even junior high school, has 10 kids, how's she going to put food on the table, it's not going to happen. You could understand why they would be like, all right, we need to seize this money and distribute it around the people, that makes a lot of sense. In a contemporary context, where food is much cheaper, where shelter to some extent is more available, when medical care, we're so oblivious to how bad things were that we see things are bad now, so we assume that they were better than in some contexts. They were much, much worse there in many contexts. So if you're going to make an argument for government, for me, the strongest argument is like food stamps or like free lunches for children, because I agree that would be very inefficient and it's going to probably make them obese because you're going to have Nabisco lobbying to make sure that if you're going to have this protein, you're not going to give the kids an Oreo, aren't you? These kids are poor, you want them to have some pleasure and that's going to have deleterious effects. But if the choice is an inefficient government program and mass starvation, that is one where as an anarchist, I could easily see making the argument for that one. Even though I think very clearly private charity would be more efficient and distribute it more effectively. But at that point, I don't really care about efficiency. If you're throwing out food to make sure these kids get fed, I don't care. So would engagement in military conflict be one of the biggest negative things about the state to you? Yeah, of course. War is the state at its worst. So if we take away war or make it defensive instead of aggressive, yeah. I mean, wouldn't that be a huge step forward if war instead of regarded, we're always, this is what drives me crazy. We're taught as kids in school that war is a last resort. And I agree with that. And yet when you look at the corporate press, war is always the first response. And these people do not talk about what war means. They'll show examples during the Bush years of soldiers coming home in caskets, which already is an unacceptable price in many cases for me. But they don't even pretend to care about the people overseas whose countries we've ransacked and lives we've ruined. And it's just like, well, what are you going to do? Not ransack those countries? So that war to me is the state at its worst. See, I think that there is value from small government that doesn't engage in wars. I do think that the kind of collectives that you imagine functioning well would look like the best version of government that I imagine. So I see them as the same. I think a lot of it is just terminology. I have no problem saying that I'm using the word anarchism incorrectly and to go for what you want. I have no problem with that or anything, really. Because like I said, life is beautiful. But nevertheless, you wrote the essay, why I'm not going to vote this time or ever. Why I won't vote this year or any other year or any year. And the basic idea. I hope you do a better job reading it than you just read that title. I guess you'll take as many takes as necessary. I'll read it in Russian and then pay somebody to translate it. This isn't even Russian at all. He's just making up words. Where'd you find this guy? You get what you pay for. Yeah, exactly. This is anarchy. This is what you wanted. Like your basic summary is, let me see, if pressed, the simplest explanation I have for refusing to vote is this, I don't vote for the same exact reasons that I don't take communion. No matter how admirable he is or how much I agree with him, the Pope isn't the steward over my soul, nor is any president the leader of my life. This does not make me ignorant or evil any more than not being a Christian makes me ignorant or evil. If I need representation, I will hire the most qualified person to do so. Isn't voting our current best developed way of hiring the most qualified person to represent you on some things? No, because if I have a lawyer and the lawyer screws up, I can fire him. If I vote for someone, I don't get who I want. I get for who my neighbors want. So that makes no sense. Representation means I want you to speak for me. Whereas voting is like, I kind of want you, but I'll take what I can get and I'm going to take what I could get regardless. So what's the point? In governments, again, that's what Bitcoin is. You want to be represented in deciding what to do, but once... Wait, Bitcoin isn't picking a person. They're not picking a president of Bitcoin. They're picking an idea. Yeah. It's more like a referendum. And to me, a referendum is much more coherent and defensible than it is voting for a representative because if I'm voting for Joe Biden, I'm saying this person speaks for me for abortion, taxation, environmental policy, immigration, war, right? The odds that unless you're a complete NPC, that this one person will speak for you for everything and will deliver what he promised and has the power to deliver what he promises is not true. Whereas if I have Brexit, if I say I want Britain to remain part of the European Union to say yes or no question, that makes a lot more sense to me. But even that is not pure democracy because going back to the idea of the circulation of elites, which James Burnham talked about, Pareto and Moscow and all them, you're still going to have someone telling you what you can and can't vote for and how these questions are framed. So in contradiction to what the left anarchist said, some element of hierarchy is always going to be inevitable. So listen, I agree with this aspect very much so that we should be voting for ideas and issues not voting for leaders, for leaders to represent us across the full spectrum of issues. It seems to make no sense. Okay, good. Yeah, this is great. But I do think there should be a leader, I do believe in voting for representatives to debate, to be communicators of ideas to us. But let me start to interrupt you, but you could have those two things. For example, wouldn't this be an improvement if they have that now, you have a referendum, you want tax rates to be 30 or 40, whatever percent, you have the guy leading the campaign for 50, fight for 50, then you have the lady leading the campaign for 40, fight for 40, they'll go out there, they can have debates, they can talk about the issue, but you're still not voting for one of them, you're voting for the issue. That makes much more sense to me than I'm going to vote for him and hope that he puts forward 50 and that depends on 99 other senators. Exactly. But also, I mean, I do like the idea of voting for certain people to debate certain ideas. Yes, I think that's a major improvement. But the final vote should be based on the idea. So okay, so we agree. That would be nice to have, plus no wars, and then you'll stop tweeting so aggressively. And to decriminalize things that don't hurt people. Drugs. Drugs especially, prostitution is a big one. And this is me talking, all cops are criminals. There's no one, or maybe other than abused children, who needs access to the police other than sex workers. They're the ones who are the most likely to really put themselves in danger situation, so they need to be able to call security, because that's why they have pimps. Because you're a woman dealing with some strange dudes who are a lot of the time going to have weird kinks, you want to be able to be sure, even if you don't approve of prostitution, think it's horrible, that she's not going to be raped and murdered and have no consequences. And if you're going to say, oh, well, she's a prostitute, she can't be raped. Just think for a second, if you're agreeing to sleep with somebody, and then he starts choking you and beating the crap out of you and saying it's now it's a dom situation, that is clearly beyond the pale of salt. And the same thing with drugs, heroin, cocaine, crack. The people that need help the most are the ones who are addicted to those drugs and putting punishment. Let's suppose you think drug dealers should be in jail, right? It is very hard for me to say that someone who sells cocaine should be treated or in the same building as someone who rapes children, or as a murderer. These are not similar types of evil, even if you believe that that drug dealer is an evil person. Yeah, I have. I mean, there's an essay in there called by Alexander Berkman, who was Emma Goldman's partner on prisons and crime. And this is leftism at its best, forgetting the person is forgotten. And the fact that we have the world's largest prison population, the fact that so many people are just like, oh, you commit a crime, just put them in jail, throw away the key. At the very least, if you want to be totally immoral about it, it's expensive. And second of all, the concept that all criminals should be locked in a room together in these kind of largely inhuman conditions, and that's going to help people. I don't think that that's the ideal mechanism. Yeah, I tend to believe, I usually don't speak so negatively about politicians, but I do think that politicians have done more evil in the war on drugs than did the people that are supposed to be the criminals in this picture. And I'll give you another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power. Hunter Biden, and I'm not making fun of him, I'm not taking shots at him. He had an article in the New Yorker, where he talks about when he was in LA, he was buying crack and there was a misunderstanding or like he left the crack pipe in the Hertz car and then blah, blah, blah, there's an issue. He's admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter. And I'm sure this was within the statute of limitations. There was no possibility he was going to have consequences. Kamala Harris, who was a cop, talked about when she was in college, she was smoking weed. And it's like, I don't begrudge you guys smoking your crack or smoking your weed, but for other people who are poor or maybe just had the short end of the stick, this is years of their life being destroyed. At the very least, even an arrest is a traumatic situation. If you have a weed or cocaine or crack, you're arrested, that's really going to screw up, it's going to do a number on you being locked up. So to have that double standard to me is completely unacceptable. And that has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat. George W. Bush was a coke head back in the day. He talks about overcoming his addiction, and I'm glad that he did, more power to him. But just to have this kind of, you know, it's just really kind of disturbing to me, and this is my anarchist brain, like how prevalent drug use is in college. I think there's a joke on South Park, like, there's a time and a place to try drugs, and that's called college where people experiment. But all those college kids, which are going to become next generation's elite, don't really have that worry that if they get caught, then anything's going to happen to them. But that kid in the street who did not have that good upbringing, even if he's a piece of crap, like he's not going to have a different punishment, I think that's just really at his base on American. So in contrast to Tolstoy, let me ask you about Emma Goldman. You wrote that if anarchism believed in rulers, then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed queen. Yes. What ideas defined her flavor of anarchism, would you say? Emma was really an old school radical. She was a radical among radicals. I don't know what ideas, I mean, what would define her was anarchism, obviously. There's the violence. I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus somebody like Tolstoy. Oh, sure, for sure. So basically, Emma and Alexander Berkman, their mentor was someone named Johann Most. And Johann Most was a very early free speech, not very early, but he was a free speech concern because he published a pamphlet in Europe that was translated in the States about how to build dynamite. Because his idea was, all right, you have this oppressive government, this oppressive police force that use batons and bolts against us. The only way for us as the working class to level the playing field is through dynamite and here's how you build it. So the question is, all right, is this something that could be allowed to be legal now that you're allowing the layman to, in his own house, build bombs? So Johann Most, basically, they had a big parting of ways because when Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate Frick, Johann said, no, no, no, this is not something I'm for. And in fact, they thought with this assassination, this failed assassination, this would be the thing that's fired off the revolution because you had the strike, the Pinkertons involved, Pinkertons getting killed, strikers are getting killed. This is what Marx predicted, they're gonna light the spark and everything's gonna come falling down. He ends up going to jail for 13 years instead, Alexander Berkman does. And then Goldman and Berkman had a big issue because when Leon Salgas killed McKinley in 1901, it was really, it's kind of humorous in retrospect. He gets arrested and they're like, why'd you kill the president? He goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman and she's like, oh, damn it, she's on the run. I don't even know this guy. And she made the point about like, why is it worse than the president being killed and somebody else? We're all equal. And you would think if you're against capitalism, against the ruling class, this would be your first target. But Berkman, who went to jail, who tried to assassinate someone, he had said, McKinley, this is your villain? He's just a party hack. He's like a symptom of the times, this is foolish. And Goldman disagreed with him. He thought it wasn't necessarily justified, but it may have done something that was defensible. So the three of them, you know, had their differences on the use of violence. And in fact, when she came back from Russia and was denouncing it in her book, My Disillusionment in Russia, My First Disillusionment in Russia, the last chapter she goes, look, I'm not saying I'm against violence. When there's the revolution comes, we're going to have to use force. She goes, but it's not the force of the state against the working class, against the masses. This is exactly what we're opposed to. This is a complete obscenity to our principles. So that was interesting. The fact that she was a, her periodical Mother Earth was a clearinghouse for many prominent, you know, ideas of the day that weren't anarchist, but were certainly radical. So she was a bit, and also she was like tiny, she was like 5.1. So to have this little woman who was so feisty and... Talk back to Lenin. Talk back to Lenin. She took on Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover was the one who deported her. Someone who just... And the thing is, you have to be careful because I think just like war, it's very easy to glamorize violence and to regard it as something admirable or heroic, like you're fighting for the cause. But if you take it out of the romanticism, you're like, you're killing someone who had kids. You are, you know, killing someone with a family. You're making your, if you're going to shoot someone, they're probably going to retaliate twice as hard. Violence sings its own song and this is a very dangerous road you're going down. So you really need to be careful about what you're preaching here. And you know, she kind of had this mixed feelings about it, but that is certainly not Emma Goldman her best. Emma Goldman her best was about the ultimate freedom of the individual, of caring about people who are desperately poor, who despised the corporate idea that we all had to be made into cookie cutters and be interchangeable and all have to start work at the same time. And basically our entire lives slave for corporation that have nothing to show for it while they get wealthy and you have no opportunity for either productive work or creative work. So that I think the valorization of kind of the lowest of the low is something I find very admirable. There's a quote of hers, which I think even for those of us who are, you know, for property rights is left anarchism at its best, but she goes, go and ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you bread, take bread. So the idea that like, if you're that poor and you're honestly trying to work and work isn't available and you steal food to keep alive, that you shouldn't feel guilt about it. I don't know that I would disagree with that. I think that there's something to be said at that point where it's just like, you know, if property rights come between that and mass starvation, it's going to be very hard for anyone to make the case for property rights. Now, my argument is when you have free enterprise, food becomes so plentiful that now obesity is an issue. But at the time she did not have, of course, have that data to access. Is there somebody you left out from the book that you thought about leaving in like some interesting figures? Yeah, there's a couple. So Chomsky would have been one, of course, because he's probably one of the biggest anarchist thinkers in contemporary times. I was on the fence about Herbert Spencer because he's not an anarchist. Chris Williamson's reading the chapter for the book. He coined the term Survival of the Fittest and the chapter is called The Right to Ignore the State from his book, Social Statics. It was deleted from later editions, but people found it and reprinted it. And Randolph Bourne, he was an early progressive. He was the only one or one of the very few fighting against entering the Great War. And he had an essay called War is the Health of the State, which is basically about how states love war because it gives them an excuse to increase their power. And it's very hard to argue against increasing state power in a time of war. But since he was not himself an anarchist and there was plenty antiwar in there already, I didn't include him, but those would be the ones. Is there some people that you think the public would be surprised to learn that they are at least in part anarchists? Like I saw that Howard Zinn is supposedly an anarchist. I mean, is there, like, just like Tolstoy is an anarchist. Is there some people like that that you think in our modern life that would be surprised to learn they're anarchists? I can't think of any off the top of my head. I mean, you could say Carl Hess, who was like Barry Goldwater's speechwriter from the 1964 campaign, but he's hardly a household name. I mean, I think a lot of people would not ascribe to that term, but are certainly informed with this complete distrust of all authority. Murray Rothbard had an essay, if I didn't include anatomy of the state, I was going to include this one. It's much, much shorter. And his question was, who are our allies and who are our enemies? And the point he made is there's lots of people who would call themselves anarchists who are of little use, whereas someone who is still like a minarchist or for government, but genuinely hates the question Rothbard had is if there's a button and you could press that you would end the state, would you press it so fast your finger would get a blister? Those are allies, even if they're, you know, somewhat of a minarchist. So I think that is kind of a better lens of looking at it. And I don't think anyone needs to really ascribe to anarchism as a whole ideology in so far as you're seeing right now, many people in certain fringe elements are just essentially or are decreasingly fringe and increasing mainstream elements are realizing that this idea that whatever the state does is somehow morally binding or legitimate is something that at least bears strong questioning. Sure. And I mean, I guess there's a lot of groups like the libertarians, for example, have some element of that. Oh, sure. For sure. I mean, I think that's the beginning of the ways of government. And also, I think what I love, I mean, if there's one issue where I would want people to have this kind of analysis, it is war. And it is like, okay, are you really sure? Because this is 100% going to result in a lot of people being killed, a lot of people being traumatized, a lot of people who are never going to recover, children, innocent people. Are you really sure this is the right thing to do? And I think a lot of times if the answer is, well, it's the profitable thing to do. And that is, I think, again, government at its absolute most venal and worst. You Michael Malice in many ways are a New Yorker. Oh, yes. I'll give you one example. I don't know where Austin is on the map. No idea. Not even kidding. But does it even matter? It doesn't matter. But nevertheless, you've decided to move to Austin. Yes. Why do you think you're moving to Austin, or why do you moving both to Austin and away from New York? This was one of the both, I hate it when people talk like this, but I'm gonna do it anyway. This was one of the hardest and easiest decisions of my life. It was hard because I've lived in New York since I was two, other than college. It's the only home I've known. I know it intimately. I know all the cool spots. I love it with every fiber of my being or I did. It was very much, you know, ingrained in my personality, my outlook about what cities can be and can't be and should be and shouldn't be. Deciding to move was not done. But when you see your crew, your chosen family, one by one whittling away, it's not easy. They all left. There's just a couple of us left in New York. And I don't see any mechanism by which New York is going to improve. Things are getting much worse all the time. It's just completely outrageous. Here I would have a huge crew. I didn't realize how much cheaper real estate is than in New York. This is another way. So New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth who are completely oblivious to the rest of the country. So for a long time, the argument was New York versus LA, right, for certain types of people. And they would say LA is cheaper in terms of rent. So in New York, let's suppose the rent is a thousand, LA was 700, but you have to get a car. I'm like, this is kind of a wash. So I assumed Austin would be like 80% of New York prices. And I'm looking at these houses and for like 700,000, you could get a house here that would cost like 3.5 million in New York. And you could have a gun. And it's just like, I could have a yard and I could have a dog and I could have a three bedroom and I could have, you know, aquariums and my weird plants. So to have all that, and it's just to have, I am very, very lucky that I have such a supportive crew. And they were also very smart because they sat me down and they said, whatever excuse you have not to move here, we are going to make sure that doesn't count. So my buddy Matt said, because I have a huge library, he goes, I will go to your house and I will pack every single book you own myself so you can get that as an excuse the other way. I don't know how to drive and you do this, she's like, we're going to take driving lessons together. There goes that excuse. How do I find an apartment? They're like, we'll go to with the realtor and we'll take pictures for you. We'll report back. You can trust our judgment. And I'm like, that's great. I would do that. That sounds like fun shopping for houses that have to buy them. Then Matt just yesterday had the idea goes, come here, rent a furnished apartment for a few months. You don't have the pressure of buying. And it's just, it's going to be an easy transition. The rent's not going to be anything compared to New York. I'm like, these are all very valid things. You're here. Lots of other people. Yeah, that's what this is. I made sure that's renting month to month. Oh, this is rental. This is rental. Oh, you didn't realize this. I thought you bought this. No, no, no. This is rental. We can talk. Why? I thought you bought it. No, it's rental. Well, I really value freedom. Yeah, of course. Who are you talking to? I've heard of this thing, freedom, it's really great. But not everybody in the implementation of freedom is different for everybody. Of course. I don't want to make a statement about others. I'll just speak for myself. I think when you buy a house, that is not just a wise financial decision or all those kinds of reasons that people have, investment, all those kinds of things. I think it's also a hit on your freedom because the positive way to frame that is you make it a home. Yes. You have a deep connection to it. But the negative way to frame it is you're now a little bit stuck there. Yeah. And you may stay there way longer than you should when much better opportunities for life come up. There's stages in life when you're not sure exactly what the future will hold. I would argue that's very often the case, basically at every stage in life. I just want to make sure I maximize the freedom to embrace the most ambitious, the craziest, the wildest, the most beautiful opportunities that come by. You've actually brought this up too, because I said I really enjoyed the conversation with you and Yaron, talking to you and somebody else, and I think you make a really significant effort. You've said this before, but it really is true and it stands in contrast to other folks who are also good conversation. You really make an effort for that person to meet the person. Oh, for sure. You made me realize it's kind of an art form, but it's also just, it's a thing worth doing of putting in that effort and that leap of humanity to reach the, whether you're talking to Dave Rubin or Alex Jones or Joe or me, just those are different human beings and they're taking that leap. It's fascinating. I mean, do you have, how do you think about that? I'm a huge introvert as you are, I think. I feel very, very, very lucky that I get to get on a mic and run my mouth and for some people, for some reason, people like this. So I know what it's like to have a good convo and I know what it's like to have a bad convo. So before I'll do a show, I will have like some things I would want to talk about. And then I'll think about how to say them in an engaging way. So I do my homework in that regard. I'm also very good at, or I pride myself at taking people who are cerebral or intellectual and making them a little bit silly, but also making them feel safe to be silly because I'm not going to be making a buffoon of them that we're having fun as opposed to disrespecting the person. I think we all saw that with Yaron, who's very cerebral, very serious, but we were all cracking jokes and he was having a good time and he knew even if I'm making fun of him to his face, it is coming from a place of kindness and he's in on the joke and we're all having fun. That is something I try to do as much as possible. I had an episode of my show a couple of weeks ago and someone who's been a friend of mine for a long time and someone I admire a lot, Elizabeth Spires, she was the founding member of, founding editor of Gawker, she's worked for the Observer for Jared Kushner, her resume second to none and she was on my show and she was talking, her politics are pretty straightforward like corporate journalist, blue pilled politics and my audience was very upset that I wasn't pushing back or whatever. I'm like, my job, if someone is coming to a place where the audience is at least going to be somewhat hostile, is not to make her have negative consequences for doing something that she didn't need to do. My job is to make sure that the experience is a positive one for her as the host. So when I'm the guest, I always feel that my job is to make the host look good and make the host not feel like it's work and the audience really likes that because instead of it being an interview or intense, it is a conversation, nine of us know what's going to happen and so this is something I think about a fair amount and I try to apply and insofar as it's successful, I'm delighted and there's times when it's not successful and that's a shame but all we could do is do our best. Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation with her. I was surprised by the dislikes and all that kind of stuff. Well, one of the things I always talk about is I don't care what my friends politics are. I care about if I'm having a bad day, can I call them up and ask for advice and Elizabeth has been there for me in the past and then when I do it on a camera in front of mics, people freaking out. I'm like, I'm practicing what I preach. My, the relationships are more important than someone's political views and it's not hypocrisy at all to demonstrate that and not to push back. And there was great humor there. You're both a bit of trolls in very different ways but nevertheless, that connection, the humor and the mutual respect and love that was all there, yeah, it's just fascinating. You've talked to Alex Jones a couple days ago. Sure, yeah. I haven't seen him many times before but you've had him on your podcast. This week, yeah. This week. I was kind of surprised that he mentioned that human animal hybrids was like the number, the main conspiracy that people should look into to open their eyes to the, you know, to all this, to the globalists, to all the conspiracies that are out there. Was that surprising to you? No, because I came in there with questions and I was very focused on corralling him and having it be like kind of a coherent intellectual conversation. That was a really, really good, it was only an hour but it was a very good conversation. Yeah, thank you. I, the response was overwhelmingly positive and I'm like, all right, I'm in a unique position because Alex, I met Alex, well, that's not true, but I was on Alex, with Alex on Tim Pool a couple of times. It was mayhem, it was anarchy and I'm like, all right, let me get. But the thing is what people enjoyed is I was the one who was basically able to translate Alex's ease. He's obviously very performative and a lot of times Alex will say things that are not really particularly controversial, but he'll say them in such a way that it sounds crazier than it is. You know, I think Joe's made this observation as well. So what I wanted to have him on my show is, all right, let's go through all these conspiracies which have validity, which don't. And I knew if I asked him, because he's got a lot of historical knowledge, even if you think of a lot of it's nonsensical, let's sort out the wheat from the chaff, you know, because everyone has someone crazy in them. I have this expression, you take one red pill, not the whole bottle, you take the whole bottle of red pills, you assume literally everything in the media is a lie, that's just not a coherent position to have. Is the weather a lie when they tell you that temperature is going to be wrong tomorrow? So that was fun to watch him go through that. And he felt bad because he felt incorrectly, in my opinion, that he was needlessly aggressive and disrespectful toward me on Tim. I didn't feel disrespected at all. It got heated, but I didn't take it personally. People have heated debates all the time. So I think he promised me he wouldn't interrupt and would be deferential, but that because he promised to be on his best behavior, that gave me an opportunity to address him seriously and not to bring the clown aspect out of him, which is easy to caricature him. My friend Ethan Suppley, who I'm sure people know, played basically a character based on him in The Hunt, because Alex is kind of this cartoon archetype. So it was really fun to get another side of him. And also, it's just fun being on his show, just him being bombastic and just trying to be the calm voice of reason. And for once, the trickster was Apollo. Well, I like this thing he said before. And that's what makes me the most interested in Alex is the Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss. I think he said on your show that he has become the abyss or something like that. I think that makes him fascinating that when you really take conspiracy theories seriously, the kind of effect it has on your mind. That to me is fascinating. Well, can I say one thing, that term conspiracy theory? If you ask any layman, look, it's like this, you say, do you like puppies? I hate them. Do you like baby dogs? Oh, they're the best, right? People, the human mind is capable of doing this. So if you ask people, do you think extremely powerful people often get together and manipulate data or rules in order to further their power and control and maintain it? I think 90 plus percent of people would be like, of course. Then you say, oh, so you believe in conspiracy theories. Oh no, that's for crazy people. Those concepts are identical. Now that term is used for people who are like, all right, there's conspiracies in government to experiment on people like Tuskegee. This is not in dispute. The CIA has unsealed things, Operation Mockingbird, so on and so forth. And at the same time, conspiracy theory applies to people who say 9 11 never happened and those are holograms. Now it's the same word for both, but these are not at all equal truth claims and they do not at all have equal evidence to them. But it's very useful for powerful people to have that term in the zeitgeist because then I don't have to explain or defend. It's like, only lunatics are going to look further on this. Do you really want to be a lunatic kid? And that takes care of the issue. Unfortunately the same problem applies, language applies to a lot of other areas. 100%, that's the nature of language, yeah. It's used not just to communicate, but to obfuscate. Obviously that could be fixed by coming up with different words to label conspiracy theories that are much more likely to be true. Yeah, like power elite analysis is another, is basically conspiracy theory. This is the black pill versus white pill question with the abyss. Do you think thinking about these things can destroy the mind, can make you deeply cynical about the world? Yeah, because if you are thinking that you are not aware of, or no one is aware of who's controlling things and that the level of their control, it gives you the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. And my counter is the people in charge, one of the reasons I'm an anarchist, are nowhere near as smart and crafty as you think they are. And certainly maybe the ones complete in the shadow maybe are, but the ones who are in the public face most certainly are not, as social media has demonstrated, when you look at how senators and Harvard professors tweet, these are not, you know, intellects that you're in awe of, to put it mildly. So I think that kind of takes the bloom off the rose to a great extent. You mentioned that you've been doing a lot of amazing things, been truly joyful recently. But I don't know if you have a bucket list. Is there items on the bucket list you haven't done yet? Are you pretty much satisfied and happy, and if you die today, if I murder you, you'll be happy? I could die today. Is there an item on the bucket list you want to get done? I don't, yeah. Deep Sea submersible. That would be number one on the bucket list. Why? Because that's where all the most interesting zoology is. And to be in a place where like virtually no human being has been, and to see these gods mistakes and their natural environment. My friend coined that term gods mistakes. If you look at deep sea creatures, you can imagine god making some animal being like, oh god, this is hideous, I'll just throw them on the ocean, no one's gonna see this. So that would be my number one bucket list thing. I would say go to the White House as a guest would be a bucket list thing. Russia, go to Russia would be a bucket list thing. I want to go, these are secondary, like go to Eritrea would be a bucket list thing. I've got a long list of books I need to write. That's that's, I don't know if that's really a bucket list per se. There's not that much, what I'm at a point in my life is once you cross up certain things, you basically, instead of driving the car, start surfing. And just amazing thing, I talked to you about this medical thing, you know, before we started. At a certain point, and I'm sure this happens to you, because your platform is a lot bigger than mine, all sorts of things start coming your way that you never would have thought of. And you're like, this is pretty darn cool. So to be, and that's happening at an escalating rate. Like I'm at a point now where I get stopped every day by people. So that's going to be a weird thing for me to get adjusted to. Like without exception, everyone who has ever stopped me on the street has been cool. And it's been a pleasant experience. There was one exception at an event where someone was genuinely on the spectrum and they didn't understand like distance and you don't touch people and that, but that's as bad as it got. So that is something that's going to be weird for me to have to deal with over the next couple of years. But you know, it's the price you pay and it's hardly a small price when people come up to you and say you've made my life better. But it's just weird when you go and like, like I was at the gym and then someone tweets like, did I see you at the gym just now? It's kind of weird. And I'm sure it's the same for you when you're walking around and you don't think about it, but people know who you are and you don't know who they are that you're being watched. Even though it's not malevolent, it's still just, you don't get prepared for that. Michael, there were, there will be two really big names that wanted to do this podcast. We'll do this podcast that I considered to do episode 200 with. But then I realized why the hell talk to somebody famous when I could talk to somebody I love that nobody knows or cares for. You just hit a random number generator. Yeah. Just, I listed all the Russians I know and who is the easiest to get. You're the. Yeah, who's the most desperate for camera stuff. He's got a shitty book out, we can talk about that for five minutes. This garbage cut and paste that he did. Uh, it turned out okay, I think slightly above average. Michael, I love you. You're an incredible human being. It's an honor that you would talk to me and you'll be my friend. Thanks so much for doing this. Uh, the respect that I got, uh, when you asked me to be the guest for the anniversary episode was similar to the respect when my two friends, Josh and Zoe, they were going to get married at city hall and they said, we want someone to witness at the Basque. So it's one thing when people tell you they like you and respect you, which I had growing up. It's another thing when they show it. And this is something that I do not take lightly and I hope no one takes lightly. And if someone does right by you and shows you respect, going back to kind of taking out for dinner, thank them, buy them a candy bar, buy them a soda, do something to show that you don't take it for granted. Because I think what you and I both want to do is increase human kindness as much as possible. And I'm going to look at the camera, be kind to yourself, because a lot of you deserve it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice and thank you to Gala Games, Indeed, BetterHelp and Masterclass. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Jack Kerouac that perhaps begins to explain the nature of and the reasons for my friendship with Mr. Michael Malice. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say commonplace thing but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ahhhhh. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200

The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious, Planet Nine, in the outer regions of our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and Ni. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that extends over three light years out. This to me is amazing, since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is only 4.2 light years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness. When I get a chance to go out swimming in the ocean far from the shore, I'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the deep darkness. That's how I feel about the edge of our solar system. One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness. This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Konstantin Batygin. What is Planet Nine? Planet Nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years, and is about five Earth masses. So that's a hypothesized object. There's some evidence for this kind of object. There's a bunch of different explanations. Can you give like an overview of the planets in our solar system? How many are there? What do we know and not know about them at a high level? All right. That sounds like a good plan. So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar system. The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is. It's closer to the sun, Venus is about 70%, then Mars is about 160% further away from the sun than is the Earth. These planets that we, one of them we occupy, right, are pretty small, okay? They're two leading order sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will. And this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter Jupiter, which is 316 Earth masses, right, 10 times the size. You know, and Saturn is another huge one, 90 Earth masses at about 10 times the separation from the sun as is the Earth, and then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively. For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended. But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there's this expansive field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system. A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right? That's a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunch boxes and stuff. But beyond Neptune, there's a much more massive and much more radially expansive field of debris. Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, icy asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt. It's just a big object within that population of bodies. Wow, Pluto the planet. Pluto the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know. Why is Pluto not a planet anymore? I mean, it's tiny. We used to... So size matters when it comes to planets. Oh, 100%, 100%. It's actually a fascinating story. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because astronomers at the time were looking for a seven Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune. It was hypothesized that such an object exists. When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven Earth mass planet and immediately revised its mass downward because they couldn't resolve the object with the telescope. So it looked like just a point mass, you know, star rather than a physical disk. They said, well, maybe it's not seven, maybe it's one, right? And then, so over the next, you know, I guess 40 years, Pluto's mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized that it's like 500 times less massive than the Earth. I mean, like Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia actually. And you know, Russia is big, but it's not a planet. Well, I mean, actually we can touch more on that. That's another discussion. So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about the edges of the solar system. And perhaps planet nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system. That's a good way to put it. By the way, just imagining this belt of astral debris at the edge of our solar system is incredible. Can you talk about it a little bit? What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud? Yeah. Okay. So look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune's orbit like a circle, right? Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times bigger, you've got a whole collection of icy objects. Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller. If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object, these are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around in, then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period, which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort of point into one direction. And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect to Sun. This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune. So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where they're objects which are stable, which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects. The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're being kicked around by Neptune. The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering. We back, I guess, five years ago interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational one way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right? Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together. Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism when you're talking about these things. You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering? And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question. We have done our own analyses and basically, just like with all statistics where there's kind of multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have a telescope that has surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering? That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right? That does not give you a confident answer one way or another. Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, right? And if we have some object over there, which has right ascension and declination, which is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody looked over there and discovered an object, was able to discover an object of that brightness or brighter. Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked. So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the Planet Nine hypothesis is built is about 0.4%. Wow, okay, so there's a million questions here. One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright? Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see through the Kuiper Belt? This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt. The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy. I mean, it's easy in theory, right? Hard in practice. All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right? Use that direction, say, and take a high exposure snapshot. Then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do it again. Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky, whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move. This is no different than if you're driving down the freeway, it looks like trees are going by you faster than the clouds, right? This is parallax. That's it. It's they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this. There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on the reflection from the sun. So like there's actual light, it's not darkness. That's right. These are just big icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get reflected back. Was that like an hour travel? Yeah, that's right. That's something like that because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe. Something in that order of magnitude. So that's interesting. So you have to account for all of that. And then there's a huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures and you have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the different objects. Can you track them? Can you be like, that's Bob? Like, can you like? Yes, exactly. In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden. I mean, I'm not like, this is not even a joke, right? Is there a Trump one or no? No, no. Not yet. I don't know. I don't know for that. But like the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it. So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on, you know, in the data set, if you will. And then there's like this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the sky it is, right? So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know, got nicknamed Biden. VP113? Yeah. He got nicknamed Biden. Beautiful. What's the fingerprint for any particular object? Like how do you know it's the same one? Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture, how do you know it's the same object? Yeah. So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for move, but it moves. But this is why actually you need at least three nights because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer to the earth, like will appear to move only slightly, but then on the third night will move away. So that third night is really there to detect acceleration. Now the thing that I didn't really realize until, you know, I started observing together with my partner in crime in all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night sky and how far away it is, okay? That's it. It's all about the orbit because over three days the object just moves so little, right? That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth, right? So the earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree and you see it move. So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later and then measure it again. Oh, interesting. So three nights then come back a year later and do another three nights so you get the velocity of the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe the additional information. Because an orbit is basically described by six parameters. So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations to really pin down the orbit well. And from that you're able to construct for that one particular object and orbit and then there's of course, like how many objects are there? There's like four ish thousand now. But like the, in the future that could be like millions. Oh sure, oh sure. So in fact these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean with COVID these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been making great progress with construction. And so that telescope is just going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically and just, it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant Kuiper Belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of a hundred. I mean that would be, that would be really cool. And yeah, that's a, that's an incredible... I mean they might just find planet nine. I mean that's... Like almost like literally pictures, like visually. I mean, sure. Yeah. Like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is. If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as is the earth, you know that's planet nine. That's when the story concludes and then you can study it. Now you can study it. Yeah. By the way, I'm going to use that as like, I don't know, a pickup line or a dating strategy, like see the person for three days and then don't see them at all and then see them again in a year to determine the orbit. And over time you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing works. Yeah. I have no dating advice to give. I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human condition. Okay. You mentioned the Kuiper Belt. What's the Oort cloud? If you look at the Neptune orbit as a one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there and then we get farther and farther into the darkness. What's the Oort cloud? So okay, you've got the kind of main Kuiper Belt, which is about say 1.3, 1.5. Then you have something called the scattered disc, which is kind of an extension of the Kuiper Belt. It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune, but come out very far. So that, the scattered disc with the current senses, like the, some of the longest orbits we know of have a semi major axis. So half the orbit length, roughly speaking of about a thousand, thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun. Now if you keep moving out, okay, eventually once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly, that's where the Oort cloud is. Now the Oort cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper Belt. In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star. It's edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach. Solar gravity reaches that far? So it has to, wow, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming. So there's like a giant, like vast icy rock thingy. It's like a sphere. It's like, it's an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun and all the long period comets come from the Oort cloud. They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years we've been detecting and occasionally like a comet will come in and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. The reason these long period comets appear on very, very long timescales, right? These Oort cloud objects that are sitting 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is the earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate to the point where once they, their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes off of them. They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera, but they're all coming from really, really far away. So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions? Like how many collisions are there or is there a bunch of space for them to move around? Yeah, there's zero. It's completely collisionless out there. The physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment. I don't know. I think that probably in the age of the solar system have literally been zero collisions in the Oort cloud. Wow. So if you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything's really close together. So everything I guess here is spaced far apart. Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join? Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there. Oh sure. Oh sure. Yeah. Join the party? Yeah, absolutely. We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. The first one was the one called Uamuamua and it's been all over the news. The second one was Comet Borisov discovered by a guy named Borisov. Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths. So they come in, say hello and then they're gone. And the fact that they exist is totally like not surprising, right? The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it. So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing. Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and part of the Oort cloud. Do you think some of them have primitive life? It kind of makes you sad if there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely out there in space. Yeah. Like how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life? Probably a negligible amount. Zero with like a plus on top. Right. Zero plus plus. Yeah. So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop cancer and die real fast, right? That's rough. Yeah. It's a pretty hostile radiation environment. You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium. You just have to leave the earth's magnetic field too. And then you're not doing so well suddenly. So you know, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places, it's not entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters. One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right? So it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we think you require water, but, and that's certainly the case for the earth, but you know, we really don't know for sure. That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very boring question because the answer is, of course there are. I mean, like we know that there are planets around almost every star. Of course there are other life forms. Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth and that's it, right? That's a statistical impossibility. Yeah. Yeah, but the difficult question is before even the fact that we don't know how life originates, I don't think we even know what life is like definitionally, like formalizing a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life? Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday life or maybe not even a rock, something else? I got to tell you, I want to know what life is, okay? And I want you to show me. I think there's a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today and probably half of them are love songs and somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole thing. Okay. So your intuition is there's life everywhere in our universe. Do you think there's intelligent life out there? I think it's entirely plausible. I mean, it's entirely plausible. I think there's intelligent life on earth and so yeah, taking that, like say whatever this thing we got on earth, whether it's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent. Definitely dolphins. I mean, have you seen the dolphins? Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other. So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good and then humans are pretty good in that regard. And then there's like pigs are very intelligent. I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently and they're, aside from the fact they were trying to eat me, they love food, they love food, but there's an intelligence to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat and then to meet the thing I later ate and that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with the way he was expressing himself, herself, itself was quite incredible. So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on earth, if you take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science, how unique is earth? Okay. So earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process. It's probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by earth, I mean not just an earth mass planet, okay? I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the earth to exist in its kind of very temperate way. One thing to understand and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated. You see stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it, okay? From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have over the last two, three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets as an orbit or other stars. What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres. The fact that the earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that earth took about 100 million years to form. So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere. That's why actually we can see the sky, right? That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely opaque. With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind of emergent pictures that the earth is not, you know, everywhere, right? There's sort of the sci fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they're all earth like. That's totally not true. But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that earth is a one in a million or one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy, right? So you just, you always win by, that's right, by supply. They save you. Well, you've hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short period planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula. Can you explain? Well, if I was to say what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extra solar planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know, a few earth masses, right? So a few times bigger than the earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to weeks. Now if you go and ask the solar system what's in our region, right, in that region, it's completely empty, right? It's just, it's astonishingly hollow. And think, you know, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it was going to form the solar system. So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system. Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed a system of intra Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets. So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day? And the answer is no, at least our calculations suggested it's highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun. So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like? Like, why was it wandering? It didn't have the orbit it has today? We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust. So it's kind of like, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around? It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the currents of gas and dust, but the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit. The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot because you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain. Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out. So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk. So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth mass planets. And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets. Where would they come from in that case? So Jupiter clears out the space, and then there's a few terrestrial planets that come in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects? What actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses. So then from that remnant population, annulus of material, over a hundred million years, by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else. You said annulus? Annulus. Annulus. Annulus, yeah. That's a beautiful word. What does that mean? Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin. It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disk that's so thin it's almost flirting with being a ring. Like I was going to say, this reminds me of Lord of the Rings, so like this, the word just feels like it belongs in a token though. Yeah. Okay. So that's incredible. And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that's a rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape. That's a pretty rare thing too. It's rare. And moreover, like you don't even have to go to our calculations. You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs? The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of Sun like stars. They themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the planet formation test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense. And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so called M dwarfs, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have giant planets. Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation. One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why. We don't actually understand why they're so rare. How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we've been talking about, each of the things we've been talking about, and maybe one day, all of the things we've been talking about and beyond. I mean, like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with, I don't know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the galaxy, and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well. Yeah, so, look. Maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today. I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult. Even just like one object in the Kuiper belt is probably super difficult to simulate. I mean, I think it's super easy. I mean, like, it's just not that hard. But you know, let's ask the most kind of basic problem, okay? So the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don't need a simulation for, like you can just write that down on a piece of paper. There's gravity, like yeah, I guess it's important to try to, you know, one way to simulate objects in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch. Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec. But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do. Two objects. Two objects, analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just, I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus. Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic. Doesn't matter how many simulations you do, the answer loses meaning after some time. I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on. Now look, yeah, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation. I feel like, just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction, or do you mean actually like literally simulating the objects is a hopeless pursuit once it goes beyond three? The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one. What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right? You know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system, it suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics, I mean, like a combination of Maxwell's equations and Navier Stokes equations for the fluids. You need to know quantum mechanics to understand the capacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand. It's not that we don't have that understanding, it's that putting it all together is A, very, very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know, the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your calculation to start with, you would get a different answer. This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse. You don't have like a, you know, very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass and it's around this star, therefore you're going to form the solar system, right? You start with this and therefore you will conform this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes, and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system. You mentioned quantum mechanics and we're talking about cosmic scale objects. You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger's equation. I sure did. Why? Like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects in the solar system? Yeah. Well, let me take a step back and just say, like, I remember being, you know, utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it. And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right? The way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know, my professor is like, but where does it come from? And I'm like, well, it's just like, don't worry about it and just like calculate the hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right? So it's like I could do all the problems. I just did not have any intuition for where this parent, you know, super important equation came from. Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self gravitating disks. So you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class. And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric circles, right? That interact with each other gravitationally. That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s. I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, right? The governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation. I had to think about that for a little bit. Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity? No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics. But it did get me thinking a little bit. So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles is kind of like an interesting analogy because for me it's easier to imagine waves traveling through, you know, astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper. And the reason this is, that analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum about the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being. So you can use it to model waves. It's not turtles. It's waves all the way down. You can pick which level you pick the wave at. So it could be at the solar system level that you can use it. And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's difficult. So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical disks on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution. So it's over a timescale of a few orbits, you have, you do a hydrodynamic, you know, simulation, right? You do that, basically that's something that you can do on a modern computer on a timescale of say a week. When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don't hope to resolve the orbits. You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right? To get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty, it's pretty cute. You can use, you can use the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly, so it's a calculational tool. That's fascinating. So astrophysical disks, how, what are they? How broad is this definition? Okay. So astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges. They start maybe at the smallest scale. They start with actually Kuiper belt objects. Some Kuiper belt objects have rings. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk. You've got this little potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter. That object is a small astrophysical disk. Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scale, you have the solar system itself when it was forming, you have a disk. Then you have black hole disks. You have galaxies. Disks are super common in the universe. The reason is that stuff rotates, right? I mean, that's... Yeah. So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be, it could be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything. That's right. So, the disk that made from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen, helium, gas. On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little like ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across. Sounds refreshing. So, that's incredible. Hydrogen, helium, gas. So, in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun. How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation? Okay. Here's the story. So, you're like, have you ever been to the desert? Yes. I've been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying, just a total tangent, I'm distracting you. No. But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was, at first, hot. And then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm, like it was raining and it got freezing cold. I'm like, what the hell? It was the apocalypse. Yes. I had to like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking, I'm probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio. But look, when you've got the boss, you're ready to meet the boss. Yeah. So, look, I mean. That's a good line. Anyway, sorry. That does, yes. It's true. Yeah. By the way, to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason. During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times. The madness of weather? Yeah. The chaos. The madness of weather, the fact that it will be blazing hot one minute and then it's just like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm. It's amazing. It's that, by the way, is chaos theory in action. Right. But let's get back to talking about the desert. So, in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them. And if you're careful, you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there's like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake and are all rolling together and almost looks like a family of ducks crossing the street or something. Or for example, if you watch Tour de France, you've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're like cycling within 10 centimeters of each other. They're not BFFs, right? They're not trying to be, trying to ride together. They are riding together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience. Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, things that are a centimeter across will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds. Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction with the gas. Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable energetic condition for the dust to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets form. That's how the big asteroids got there. That's incredible. Yeah. So that, is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate? No, no, that's simulatable. And people do these types of calculations. It's really cool. That's actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active right now. People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process because of course I've explained it, you know, like as if there's one thing that happens. Turns out it's a beautifully rich dynamic, but qualitatively, formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right? Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium, gas that sit in space and slowly cool. And at some point they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the thermal pressure support, if you will. And they collapse under their own weight and you get a little baby solar system. That's amazing. So do you think one day it will be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today? Yes. And it will be useless. Okay. So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clear in the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important. I actually think it's important, but at every stage you have to design your experiments, your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution. I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you do, then you have made an actual universe. It's not the simulation, right? Simulation is in some sense a compression of information. So therefore you must lose detail. But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from observing it, right? Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism that you can actually quantify. That's the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of simulating things in extreme detail is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation. So if you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create like very highly compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved, and then you can use those to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies, and then say something generalizable about the entire universe. How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the difference? Meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game, is there a nice compressible way of doing that, or just kind of like you intuited with a three body situation is just a giant mess that you cannot create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building your solar system from scratch? I'm speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that we can do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right? Doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discrete. Now, the way you would go about asking, you know, what we're observing, is that a simulation or is that, you know, some real continuous thing, is you zoom in, right? You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question, and because the solar system itself and really, you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right? From sitting on another pendulum, it moves unpredictably once you let them go. You really don't need to, like, inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Weather is a great example of this. Weather has a lapen of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lapen of time of a few days. And there's a fundamental reason why the force forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks in advance. It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know them well. Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days. The zooming in thing is very interesting. I think about this a lot, whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games. I mean, I think that time, like, came in, like, the 90s, and it's been that time. Well, it's not just came, I mean, it's accelerated. I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours, and those are just video games. And that's, like, increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now, being born now and become, you know, becoming teenagers and so on. Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game character inside a room, where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects. If it's just you and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in for it to be very real to you, as real as reality? So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating, because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds of ways in the world around us. But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms of zooming in. So we might be very easily fooled. Some of the video games, like, on the PS4, like, look pretty real to me, right? I think, you know, you would really have to interrogate, I mean, I think even with what we have today, like, I don't know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example, right? Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, it's, I mean, it looks just like when you're flying, you know, on a real airplane, the kind of transparency. I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell some of the, you know, some of the differences. There's a game called Skyrim. It's an Elder Scrolls role playing game. And I just, I played it for quite a bit. And I think I played it very different than others. Like, there'll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game. It's incredible. Oh, sure. It's just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there. It was better. I went hiking recently. It was like as good as hiking. So look, I know what you mean. Not to go on a huge video game, you know, tangent, but like the third, like, Witcher game was astonishingly beautiful, right? Especially like playing on a good hardware machine, it's like, this is pretty, this is pretty legit. That said, um, you know, I, I don't resonate with the, I want to stay here, you know, like one of the things that I love to do is to go to my like boxing gym and, and box with a guy. Right. Like that's, there's, there's nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience. Like that's fascinating. That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born maybe because if you're born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym, like you're going to a gym to box with a guy. Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game world. For me, there, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson. Right. No, no, no, no. I enjoy teeth, you know, and I want to have an ear. No, but your, your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and takes a lot of work and you're, you're a musician, you're an incredible scientist. You only have so much time in the, in the day, but in the video game world, you can expand your capabilities and all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly have time in the physical world. And so that, it doesn't make sense like to, to be existing, to be working your ass off in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world. But I still, you enjoy sucking and stuff. Yeah, I really struggling to get better. I sure do. I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right? We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing for a year and you know, it's just, it was terrible. Like it was just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know, a lot of the detail is just that detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop. It's just lost, but it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the like studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the entire year. So I think there's something, there's something intangible or maybe, maybe tangible about being, being in person. I sure hope you're wrong and that, you know, we, that's not something that will get lost because I think there's like such a large part of the human condition is to hang out. If we were doing this interview on zoom, right? I mean, I'd already be, I'd already be bored out of my mind. Exactly. I mean, there's something to that. I mean, I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they're, they are much more efficient, they're much easier to maintain than cars. It doesn't make sense to have, you know, all the ways that cars break down and there's not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars. It doesn't make any sense. Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature, like where, you know, you should be living more natural life. Horses are real. You don't want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind and the minds of young people, but then eventually just cars took over. So in that same way, it just seems, going back to horses, I'm just, you know, well, you can be, you can play, what is it? Red dead, red dead redemption, redemption, and that you can ride horses in the video game world. That's true. So let me return us back to planet nine. Always a good place to come back to. So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine? Okay. Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right? On orbital period of about 10,000 years and an orbit, which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric and the object itself we think is five times more massive than the earth. We have never seen planet nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence for it. And so this is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect. And also the question I wanted to ask is what are we supposed to be imagining here? Because you said there are certain objects in the Kuiper Belt that are kind of have a direction to them that they're all like flocking in some kind of way. So that's the sense that there's some kind of gravitational object, not changing their orbit, but kind of confining them, like grouping their orbits together. See, what would happen if planet nine were not there is these orbits that roughly share a common orientation, they would just disperse, right? They would just become as a mutually symmetric point everywhere. Planet nine's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's basically anti aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and kind of oscillate on a timescale of about a billion years. That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet nine. There are others. That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize just because it's fun to think about orbits that all point into the same direction, but I should, you know, emphasize that, for example, the existence of objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system, things that are tilted by say 90 degrees, that's not, we don't expect that as an outcome of planet formation. Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic gravitational force. Planet nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily, so that provides kind of an alternative, you know, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced by planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect. So they're kind of, there's basically five different things that planet nine does individually that are like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all it was, maybe it's not, no reason to jump up and down, but because it's a multitude of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis, that's really the magnetism, the attraction of the planet nine model. So can you just clarify, so most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit at approximately the same, so it's flat. Yeah, it's like one degree. The difference between them is about one degree. But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every single object, it would look like a sphere. The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right? The Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger, it gets fatter and fatter and fatter and becomes a sphere. That's right. And if you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this quasi spheroidal thing. Nobody's of course ever seen the Oort cloud, right? We've only seen comments that come from the Oort cloud so that the Oort cloud, which is this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred. You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there's a big cosmic creature that occasionally, you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that. Spaghetti monster, I think it's called. Okay. I mean, so it's a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about it. And by the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around us that's full of objects that they're just throwing. Just there. Yeah. It's actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction of the solar system, right? That really kind of baffles me because I remember as a student, you know, studying physics, you know, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and like, it's one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton. So like all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it's just plainly not true. There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting to just kind of scratch the surface of. And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar system. Absolutely. Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right? Small meteorites are melted, right? They have, they're differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks, you say, well, how can that be? Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted just from the heat of their accretion. Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets was polluted by aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable thing. It means the solar system did not form in isolation. It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of, and releasing these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the traces of. It's so cool. Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that was what was the origin of life on Earth? Yeah, the Panspermia idea. That's seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but that's because then they would be out of a job. Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then say, you have to figure out how life started there. But then you have to go there. We can study life on Earth much easier. We could study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions there from an early Earth much easier from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective. You can intuit a bunch of stuff. You can look at different parts of Earth and just. To an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right? There was no oxygen. So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirshnik, is certain, something like 100% certainty that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites. This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of life. It's a fascinating problem, but you know, it's not physics and I just like, I just don't love it. It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you're a musician, so music is not physics either. So why are you so into it? It's 100% physics. No, no, look, in all seriousness though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy. I genuinely enjoy physics. I genuinely enjoy music. I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family. I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these things and not worry too much about everything else. You know what I mean? Yes. Just because there is a, like you said earlier, there's a time constraint. You can't do it all. There's many mysteries all around us. And they're all beautiful in different ways. To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords. The question of, you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this thing that's Planet Nine. If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper that says, like you drop it, clear, we're done. What does that require? Are sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth? What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine? The moment Planet Nine gets imaged from a telescope on earth, it's done. I mean, it's just there. Can you clarify it? Cause you mentioned that before from an image, would you be able to tell? Yes. So from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the earth, you're done. So you're thinking, so basically if you have a really far away thing that's big, five times the size of earth, that means that is Planet Nine. Could there be multiple objects like that? I guess. In principle, yeah. I mean, there's no law of physics that doesn't allow you to have multiple, there's also no evidence at present for there being multiple. I wonder if it's possible, just like we're finding exoplanets, whether given the size of the Oort Cloud, there's basically, it's rarer and rarer, but there are sprinkled Planet Nine, 10, 11, 12, like these, some. Got 13. It goes after that. I can just keep counting. So just something about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event, but they gather up, they become larger and larger maybe, something like that. I wonder if discovering Planet Nine will just be almost like a springboard, it's like, well, what's beyond that? It's entirely plausible. The Oort Cloud itself probably holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of material. Right, so it's not nothing. And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys sample enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things. There's a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right? It was discovered mathematically, right? So yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, both the tracking of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right? The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was. So in the mid 1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully sophisticated calculation which said if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet, then that planet is there, okay? And then they found it. But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial mechanics. The case with Planet Nine is a little bit different because what we can do I think relatively well is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine. We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit. The reason is we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit, even once because it takes 4,000 years. But I plan to live on as an AI being, and I'll be tracking those orbits as, you know, for… So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years. I mean, it doesn't have to be AI. It could be longevity. There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research. So you'll just be a brain waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete for the basic Kuiper Belt objects. That's right. That's like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right, just like can the brain like smoke a cigarette? I know, right? Can you just like light one up while you're waiting or? But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just sitting here on Earth and waiting. So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a mua mua or these interstellar objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you. Same with the aliens. You can wait for them to come to you. If you get really good at waiting, then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually the thing will come to you. Maybe that's the, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting, and so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting, and it's just a bunch of like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe, they're just sitting there waiting for each other. Look, you can't just be good at waiting. You gotta know how to chill, okay? Like you can't just like sit around and do nothing. You gotta be, you gotta know how to chill. I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving things we do, and it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth to enjoy our life, and we just stay here on Earth forever, that exploration becomes less and less of an interesting thing to do, and so you basically, yes, wait and chill. You get really optimally good at chilling, and thereby exploring is not that interesting, so in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists. We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because we'll just be here on Earth. So chill. So chill. You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit. Yeah, of course. The injection of inner Oort Cloud objects into the distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine. What is this idea of Planet Nine injecting objects into the Kuiper Belt? Okay, let me take a brief step back, and when we do calculations of Planet Nine, when we do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind of the transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely the Kuiper Belt gets scattered by Neptune, and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the orbits and so on, and then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada, yada, yada. During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we say how can we A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations? Like what's missing? One idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right? But the solar system did not form in isolation, right? It formed in this cluster of stars, and during that phase of forming together with thousands of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and the Sun, maybe even a little bit closer. If Planet Nine's not there, that population is completely dormant, and these objects just slowly orbit the Sun. Nothing interesting happens to them ever, but when we realize that if Planet Nine is there, Planet Nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally reinject them into the distant solar system. So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments. Do our simulations, does this process work, and if it works, what are its consequences? So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner Oort cloud objects into the Kuiper Belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that are being scattered out. So there's this kind of river, two way river of material. Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in. And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, it has an effect on the best fit orbit for Planet Nine itself. So if you realize that the data set that we're observing is not entirely composed of things that came out of the solar system, but also things that got reinjected back in, then turns out the best fit Planet Nine is slightly more eccentric. That's kind of getting into the weeds. The point here is that the existence of Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things that we're starting to directly observe. So it can flow back, so it's not just a river flowing one way, it's maybe a smaller stream going back. Backwash. You want a backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various observations and so on. Exactly. That's fascinating. I gotta ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you're describing could be described by a primordial black hole. First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea? So primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so solar masses and basically when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself, right? You create a, I mean one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object with zero radius, that has mass but zero radius, that singularity. Now such black holes exist all over the place. In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center of the galaxy that's like, that one's always looking at you when you're not looking, okay, and it's always talking about you. And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up. That's right. So such black holes are all over the place. When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, etc, etc. One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire, you know, mass spectrum size, some the massive asteroids. Now on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the smaller ones kind of evaporate and they're not there anymore. At least this is what we, what the calculations tell us. But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated. So one idea is that Planet Nine is not a planet and instead it is a five Earth mass black hole. And that's why it's hard to find. Now can we right away from our calculations say that's definitely true or that's not true? Absolutely not. We can't, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass. And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass, you know, cup. It could be a five Earth mass hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that's five Earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity of a planet, right? If the sun became a black hole tomorrow, it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting it. And like this notion that, oh, black holes suck everything in, it's not, that's like a sci fi notion. All right. It's just mass. What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally? Probably the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right? The truth is they're kind of, I'm actually not, you know, I never looked into this very carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically and say, okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole, then that means such black holes would be extremely common and, you know, you can sort of look for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that's not so likely. But you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our calculations can tell you. That's the orbit and the mass. So I think there's a bunch, like Ed Witten, I think wishes it's a black hole because I think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we could go there and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows us to understand some fundamental things about physics. If it's a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover anything profoundly new. The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about planet nine is like the big picture of it. The whole big story of the Kuiper belt and all those kinds of things. It's not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don't know, Neptune in terms of, in terms of the kind of things we could learn from it. So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely new kind of object. Maybe you can correct me on that. Yeah. I mean, of course here, my own biases creep in because I'm interested, you know, in planets around other stars. And I would say, I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn't find things that would be truly, you know, fundamentally new because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good at making five or three earth mass objects, right? The most common type of planet that we see, that we, you know, discover orbiting around other stars is a few earth masses. In the solar system, there's no analog for that, right? We go from one earth mass object, which is this one and to skipping to Neptune and Uranus, which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, especially Uranus from the interior structure point of view. If planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding what other planets look like. And I will, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, planets kind of in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right? An insect is way more complicated than a star, right? Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of an insect that just make a star look like, you know, somebody is like playing with a spring or something, right? So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting to go to, you know, to go to planet nine if it's a planet, because black holes are simple. They're just kind of, they're basically macroscopic like particles, right? Yeah. And so just like a star that you mentioned in terms of complexity. So it's possible that planet nine is supposed to being like homogeneous is like super like heterogeneous is a bunch of cool stuff going on that could give us an intuition. I never thought about that, that it's basically Earth number two in terms of size and gives us, starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth like planets elsewhere in the galaxy. I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right? Just like you would imagine that it's just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares, but the New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right? They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you know, CO ice, it turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks like metal, right? It just doesn't flow at all, but then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow. I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn't really even imagine that occur. So yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets. Well, let me ask you, I find as I read the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this kind of stuff fascinating. So he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory, won the Fields Medal for his work in mathematics. So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could discover a Planet Nine primordial black holes location. What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there? Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right? You go and you say, you know, launch them basically, isotropically, you track where they go. And if I understand the idea correctly, basically measure the deflection and you say, okay, that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered. Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have senses on the probes. It's more like you're, because you're very precisely able to capture, to measure the trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields. I think that's the basic idea. You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with, you know, engineers from JPL. They more or less convinced me that this is more, much more difficult than it seems because you don't, at that level of precision, right? Things like solar flares matter, right? Solar flares, right, are completely chaotic. You can't predict which, where a solar flare will happen. That will drive radiation pressure gradients. You don't know where every single asteroid is. So like actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's not a trivial matter, right? Well, I wonder, not just about Planet 9, I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes. So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes, and then starting for a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else. So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent already started, right? The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after your proposal. I'm over exaggerating, but you know, it's just like some huge development cycle and it gets delayed 55 times, like that is not going away, right? The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what you're building, so to speak. But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to provide an avenue for like launching something that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of like a couple of years. You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission, the mission goes to where you're going, and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years. That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon and we're not talking a decade, I think we're talking like this decade. Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX, and there's a bunch of more CubeSat oriented companies that are pushing this forward. Well let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one? Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first human on Mars, and then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly his own rocket out into space. Wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage? This was like a couple years ago, and somewhere in the desert he launched himself. I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket to try to prove the earth is flat. Yes, that's the guy I'm talking about, he also jumped some limousine. Truly revolutionary mind, you have to have greater men than either you or I. It's been astonishing to watch how really over the last decade the commercial sector took over this industry that traditionally has really been a government thing to do. Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War, and now it's motivated more and more by the natural forces of capitalism. That's right, so here I have many ideas about it. I think on the one hand, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal. If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround time scale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably will, that's a huge boost to the human condition. The same time, if we're talking astronomy, it comes at a huge cost, and the Starlink satellites is a great example of that cost. In fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine, and they saw this string of satellites just kind of appear and then disappear into nowhere. That is beginning to interfere with Earth based observations, so I think there's tremendous potential there, it's also important to be responsible about how it's executed. Now with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have strong opinions on whether a manned mission is required or not required, but I do think the thing to keep in mind is that I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven that we can escape to. Mars sucks. Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience by going to the Mojave Desert and camping, and it's just not a great experience. Well it's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of us striving out into space, and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like months at a time, I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many ways much better on Earth. It will come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotics side, on the food engineering side, on the, maybe we'll switch from, there'll be huge breakthroughs in insect farming, as exciting as I find that idea to be, in the ways we consume protein. Maybe it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals, we'll revolutionize that completely because of our, we shouldn't need to go to Mars to revolutionize life here on Earth, but at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to get shit done, but I do need it. And then in the same way, I think we need Mars. There's something about the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration. I agree with that thesis, the going to the moon, right, and that whole endeavor has captivated the imagination of so many, and it has led to incredible ideas, really, and probably in nonlinear ways, not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore some person here has thought of this. In that similar sense, I think space exploration is, there's some real magnetism about it, and it's on a genetic level. We have this need to keep exploring when we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to the next frontier. All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, and I think that, I'm glad you noted the kind of degradation of the Earth. I think that is a true kind of the leading order challenge of our time. That's a great engineering, that's a bunch of engineering problems. I'm most interested in space, because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult to have sex in space, and so I just want that problem to be solved, because I think once we solve the sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the fun on Earth, and the consequences of that can only be good. I mean, you can, you've got a clear plan, right, and it sounds like, you know. I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak. That's right. I keep getting rejected, I don't know why. Okay. You need better diagrams. Better pictures. I should have thought of that. You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there's certain aspects in the history of the solar system and Earth that resulted, it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere, but it didn't, we couldn't see the stars. And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, and it's almost like a philosophical question for you. Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did, or at all, if we couldn't see the stars? It would be drastically different. Just if it ever did develop. So I think some of the early developments, right, of like, you know, fire, you know. First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot, because, you know, if you have an opaque atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge. So we would be very different beings to start with. We'd have very different. It could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get. Okay. Think about like a greenhouse, right? A greenhouse is cloudy, effectively, but it's super hot. Yeah. It's hard to avoid having an atmosphere. If you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to, right. Venus is a great example, right? Venus is, I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius, right? It's not a hundred, it's hundreds. Even though it's only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming from the fact that the atmosphere is thick. So it's just a sauna of sorts. Yeah. Yeah. You go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know. But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption. This is a philosophical question, not a biological one. So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions. Yeah. So let's see. So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right? And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration, right? I mean, that in itself, I think would be a huge, you know, a huge differential in the way that we, you know, our evolution on this planet. Yeah. I mean, stars, that's brilliant. So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows up. So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus. Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point. Newton in part developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining Kepler's laws, right? In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god riding his, you know, a little chariot across the sky, as opposed to, you know, this is some mechanistic set of laws that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course that we're on today, right? The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world that we live in today was sparked by that, right? Understanding an effectively, you know, a non secular view of the natural world and kind of saying, okay, this can be understood and if it can be understood, it can be utilized, we can create our own variants of this. Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy. This I think extends beyond just astronomy, right? There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right? Where X can be anything like paleontology, like, right? The mating patterns of penguins. Yeah, that's like, that's right. I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation for the usefulness of useless knowledge, right? I mean, that's brilliant. I didn't come up with this, this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies, but, you know, it's so true, so much of the electronics that are on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations. Maxwell wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know, we'll make, you know, a couple mics so, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can have this conversation, right? That wasn't at no point was that the motivation, and yet, you know, it gave us the world that we have today. The answer is if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this, the answer is, you can tax it, right, like, useless things have created way more capital than useful things. And the sad thing, first of all, it's really important to think about, and it's brilliant in the following context, like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military based funding in the development of science, and then so much of technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military things. And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military, it had some military application, but their impact was much, much bigger than military. The splitting of the atom is a kind of a canonical example of this. We all know the tragedy that, you know, arises from splitting of the atom, and yet, you know, so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split. So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins, we would get the internet anyway. I think so, I think so, and, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have penguins, you know. So we're both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it's not the penguins, because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of avenues, and also because military applications are often burdened by the secrecy required. So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking, and if we've learned anything for the last few decades is that when there's openness in science, that accelerates the development of science. That's right. That's true. That openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody, the notion that if, you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and like know the same thing. That is a short sighted viewpoint, because if you catch up and you open, you know, you discover something that puts me in a position to do the next step, right? So I absolutely agree with all of this. I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non military funding is obviously a complicated one, but at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this, and then we will get that, right? That's true if you're buying like, I don't know, toilet paper or something, right? It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit. That's not how it works, and sometimes it'll fail, right? Like sometimes, like a huge fraction of what I do, right? I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it's great, and then I work it out, it's totally not great, right? It fails immediately. Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless, so failure is just part of this kind of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration, the variety of the exploration. That's right. I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from, you know, that generation of scientists, you know, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. Yeah. So I think that's true. If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that's going to fail and, oh, what if, you know, like, there's no science police that's going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing, and, you know, it's also just like, why would you do science if you're afraid of, you know, taking that step? It'd be so much better to propose things that are plausible, that are interesting, and then for a fraction of them to be wrong than to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress all your life, right? Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is this interstellar object Amuamua. Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization? You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot. Anything can be space junk. I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk? Everything on the night sky can, in principle, be space junk. And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and, like, force them into an orbit if they're, like, small enough? Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine, like, Jupiter family comets being captured, you know. So you can actually capture things. It's even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like, early in the solar system's life while it's still in a cluster of stars. It's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural debris, or just debris of some kind from other stars. It's like a daycare center, right? Like, everybody passes their infections on to other kids. Yeah. You know, Amuamua, there's been a lot of discussion about it, and there's been a lot of interest in this over, like, is it aliens or is it not? It's, like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like, what we know about it is it's kind of, like, a weird shape, and it also accelerated, you know? Right? Like, that's the two, those are the two interesting things about it. There are puzzles about it, and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that it's not, you know, aliens or it's not, like, a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen ice. Right? So, this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Laughlin, came up with this idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen, helium, gas that live throughout the galaxy, at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen, you know, icebergs, if you will. And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of the Oumuamua mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates as you strip away the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from, you know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's hydrogen gas, like, all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely. I'm intrigued by that idea, truly, because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type of astrophysical object. And it would be produced by, what's the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object? So these giant molecular clouds, they're everywhere. I mean, the fact that they exist is not... Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an Oort cloud? No, no, they're rogue clouds. They're just floating about? Yeah, so if you go, like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right, and they're just orbiting, right? But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds. They don't have any large object that creates orbits, so they're just floating about? Just floating. But why are they floating together? Or they just float together for a time and not... Well, so these eventually become the nurseries of stars. So as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of stars. And some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl and Greg did, can create these, like, icicles of hydrogen ice. I wonder why they would be flying so fast, because they seem to be moving pretty fast at a quick pace. You mean Oumuamua? Oumuamua, yeah. Oh, that's just because of the acceleration due to the sun. If you stop, it's like, take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here. By the time it comes close to the sun, right, it's moving pretty fast. So that's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it's cool, but it makes a clear prediction, right, of when Vera Rubin Observatory comes online next year or so. We will discover many, many more of these objects, right? And they have, so I like theories that are falsifiable. Not just testable, but falsifiable. It's good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that's not true. Aliens is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens. Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization, and then we look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization, there is like, say there's 10 billion aliens, there would probably be trillions of dumb drone type things produced by the aliens, and then be many, many, many more orders of magnitude of junk. So if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk. That's the more efficient thing to look for. So I'm not saying Oumuamua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony. We should be looking at, I don't know, I don't know, traces of alien life that doesn't look intelligent in any way, may not even look like life. It could be just garbage. We should be looking for garbage. Just generically. Well, garbage that's producible by unnatural forces. For me at least, that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization, that we will be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk, and that would be easier potentially to detect. Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it. So this is the, this is where, I mean, let's, let's imagine. Garbage disposal. Yeah. But let's imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space. We clearly have, right? And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we've launched, I don't know how many satellites. If you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands. It's certainly thousands. I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order. But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude. How many of the things that we've launched will ever leave the solar system? I think two. Two so far. Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, I don't know if the Pioneer. So maybe three. Oh, there's also a Tesla Roadster out there. That one, it will never leave the solar system. It'll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars. That can be SpaceX's first Mars destination. But look, so there's an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard to overcome. And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization, oftentimes we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we're doing right now. Yeah. Right? So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, right, and for a while, like, okay, if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right? That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the last 50 years. But we're doing a lot more computation, right? What are the signs of computation? Like that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right? Where I don't know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right? You know, Yeah, there could be a lot of in the future, different consequences of the computation, which I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence. So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects, like that's what I meant by probes, like things that move in kind of artificial ways. But the emergence of AI is not an if, right? It's happening right in front of our eyes. And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem. So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right? What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right? The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right? So I don't know, I think, you know, space junk is an is kind of, it's an interesting idea, but it's heavily influenced by like sci fi of 1950s, where by 2020, we're all like, flying to the moon. And so we produce a lot of space junk, I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien civilizations take, I've also never seen an alien civilization. That's true. But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don't, you know, we don't necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of a, like alien civilizations quickly seize the exploration phase of their, of their efforts, then, then perhaps they'll just be chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out. And the other, you know, the other idea was that it could be a relay that you'll almost have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting. It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially, I mean, a lot of people at Caltech or at MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields. And there's, there's a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe. But then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity is actually much more effective than, than radio waves, for example, something like that. And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're an alien civilization that's able to have gigantic masses, like basically, we're getting there as a, as a civilization, no, we're not not even close. Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing. So we're talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses, then it may be very effective to send signals via gravitational waves. I actually my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know, and I don't mean like, to kind of shy away, I just I really mean, if you think if you take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know, 500 years ago, right? It's just, it is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right? So it's, it's almost like, you know, it's almost limiting to try and imagine things that are an order of magnitude, you know, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of progress, just because, you know, you mentioned cars before, you know, if you were to ask people what they wanted in 1870, it's faster buggies, right? So so I think the whole like, kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets gets limited by by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination. So to push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these wild ideas about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people like yourself, who are focused on very particular tools of science, we have today, to solve very particular, like rigorous scientific questions. And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat, like some percent of the time and say, like, what are like, what would alien civilizations look like? What would alien trash look like? Well, what would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there, like how 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like? And you're right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong. But there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up. No, there's a huge magnetism to it, right? And some of some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal job predicting the future, right? That actually was a great example of what you're talking about, like allowing your imagination to run free. I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons. That's like, I love dragons are the best. But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn't just predict the future, I think. Some of these things will create the future. Taking the idea, the humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it. Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time. And for any one individual human, that idea is like, it's like planting a seed that eventually materializes itself. It's weird. It's weird how science fiction can create science fiction, it drives the science. I agree with you, and I think in this regard, you know, I'm like a sucker for sci fi. It's all I listen to like now when I run and some of it is completely implausible, right? And it's just like, I don't care. It's both entertaining and, you know, it's just like, it's imagination. You know about the black clouds book, I think this is by Fred Hoyle. This is like, this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP right now, right, with transformer models and so on. But you know, it's this black cloud shows up in the solar system and then, you know, people try to send radio and then it learns to talk back at you, you know. So anyway, we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just, it's something worth checking out. With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, exactly, on the NLP front, and also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating. Just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival, it's like, what would be the common language that we would discover? The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on earth now. Japanese. Japanese, oh yeah. Japanese is the obvious answer. Japanese, yeah, that would be the common, maybe it would be music, actually. That's more likely. It wouldn't be a language. It would be art that they would communicate. But you know, I do believe that we have, I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me, computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they're kind of intelligent creatures and I feel like we haven't found the common language to talk with them. Like our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us and like, coming up with mechanisms for communicating with them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries. You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is a kind of... Oh yeah, it's an innate construction of the world we live in. I think we are, you know, part of the way there because pre 1950, right, computers were human beings that would carry out arithmetic, right? And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of the second world war, wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right, computers will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know, thing with which you could do experiments, right? At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but an experiment on a computer, designing an experiment, a numerical experiment was a new one. Like, you know, 70% of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be clear, like, but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation. So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with the computer in a way that you're saying, not as just a, you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call and request type of thing, but, you know, something that can generate insights that are otherwise completely unattainable, right there, unattainable by doing analytical mathematics. Yeah. And there's, with AlphaFold 2, we're now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line, complex biological systems. My hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans. I've, you know, a large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating thing to me was about pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating those systems without murdering humans would be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult. Yeah, I would say so. When is my Mustang gonna drive itself? Right. I'm not even joking, it's like, yeah. It turns out it's much more difficult than we imagined, and I suppose that's the kind of, the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars, it's probably going to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined. Sending out probes to investigate Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system might turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figure it out in the end. It's actually, Mars is a great, I mean, going, sending humans to Mars is way more complicated than sending humans to the moon. You'd think, just like naively, both are in space, who cares, like, if you go there, why don't you go there, you know, just life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah. There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you, I would be one of the early people to go. I used to think not, I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million to go once you have a little bit of a society, I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like 10,000. Yeah, that's right, front of the cabin. Not completely front, but like, it would be interesting to die, I'm okay with, death sucks, but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars. Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, like, I don't wanna die on Mars. You don't? No, no, I would much rather die on Earth. I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right, like, death is a very boring experience, but I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know from first hand experience. As far as you know. Yeah. It could be reincarnation, all those kinds of things. So you mean, where would you die? If you had to choose? Oh, man, okay, so I would definitely, there's a question of who I'd wanna die with, I prefer not to die alone, but like, surrounded by family would be preferable, where I think Northern New Mexico, and I'm not even joking, like, this is not a random place, it's just like. Would that be your favorite place on Earth? Not necessarily, like, favorite place on Earth to reside, you know, indefinitely, but it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. So you know, there's something, I don't know, there's something attractive about going, you know. Returning to nature in a beautiful place. Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty, music. Okay. You're a musician. The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time, objectively speaking? The greatest song of all time. I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day, but if you were forced to answer for this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind, this could be both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe lyrics. Lyrics is very important, so I would probably, it would be, my choice would be lyrics based. I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess. I think technical prowess is impressive, right? It's just like, it's impressive what can be done. I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written. Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to consider that category of music either, just because, you know, so if I have to limit the scope of this philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know, probably What's My Age Again by Blink 182, it's just, you know, it's a solid one. It's got, you know. Said nobody ever. That's a good song. I don't know if you're joking. No, no. I am joking. It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean. I was going to come back as a close second. What's My Age Again, oh, yeah. No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think The Beatles came pretty close to. Were they influential to you? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Love The Beatles. I love The Beatles. Let it be yesterday. Yeah. Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one. You know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is? It's, you know, In My Life, right? It's hard to imagine how, whatever, a 24 year old wrote that. It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever. You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan, and so I think, you know, if you were to, you can sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album as, you know, getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created, so, you know, Time is a great song. Yeah. It's a great song. Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song, like Pink Floyd can create feelings. The entire experience, I mean, you have that with The Wall of just transporting you into another place. Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well. Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did. There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182, right? You have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like Sum 41 and the thousand of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right? With Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band that you're like, well, is this one Pink Floyd? Like you know when you're listening to Pink Floyd what you're listening to. The uniqueness, that's fascinating. You know, in the calculation of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you could probably, you could probably actually quantify this like scientifically, is like how unique, if you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether it's this band or not? And that, you know, that's probably a huge component to greatness. Like if the world would miss it if it was gone. Yes. Yes. So. But there's also the human story things, like I would say I would put Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time. And that has less to do with the song. But your interaction with it. Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human. You're like, it's not just, if I just heard the song, I'd be like, okay. But if it's the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song. So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it. Absolutely. You know, I have no confusion about not, about being, you know, anywhere, you know, in that league, but I just like sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today feels oftentimes, it feels like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at like H&M and you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away. So like so much of it is, it's not bad, it's just kind of forgettable, right? Like the fact that we're talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question. Why are we talking about Pink Floyd? And there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that they created. That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where the incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there's so much more music. You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and moves on. And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things, we're just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like a time scale in terms of our attention spans. And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd, we're just unable to see it. Yeah. Just the collected works of Nickelback. Exactly. You never know. You never know. Justin Bieber. It could be a contender. I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are talking about. And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one. It's too good to explain in words. The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Biebs. You as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing. Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life? You're one of the, you're a world class scientist. And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great musician and still loves playing music. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician. I'm like, you know. One of the best of all time. Yeah. That's right. Like we were saying offline, confidence is like the most essential thing about being a rock star. That's right. Exactly. It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right? Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose, if I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling, I notably lose creativity in every other aspect of my life, right? There's something, I don't view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from doing science or doing whatever. It's all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don't know, pressing a button or like, you know. So it's not a break from science, it's a part of your science. Absolutely, it's a part of, I would say, you know, it's a thing that enables the science, right? The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music. And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other people's stuff? Is it the whole of it? Yeah. It's definitely both. Yeah. And also just, you know, I love to play guitar, I love to sing, you know. My wife tolerates my screeching singing, you know, and even kind of likes it. Yeah, so people should check out your stuff. You have a great voice, so I love your stuff. Is there something, you're super busy, is there something you can say about practicing for musicians, for guitar, you're also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage that? Is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like super busy? So I would say, you know, the way that I optimize my life is I try to do, you know, the thing that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list. There are moments when, you know, you just, you feel inspired to play music and if you're in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right? There are times when you get inspired about something scientific, you know, I do my best to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, that isolated mode and execute upon that. It's a chaotic, you know, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, it's not like, you know, those moments of inspiration are actually kind of rare, right? Like most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, doing the stuff that needs to get done. If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I'm inspired to, you know, do this calculation, figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just like do something silly, you know, that is nothing more than disservice. And also, like I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of, you know, social media to, you know, just frankly, cause like, I don't kind of, I don't enjoy the mental cycles that it, that it takes over. Yeah, it robs you of that, the, yeah, those precious moments that could be filled with inspiration in your, in your other pursuits. But there's something to, maybe you and I are different in this, like I tried to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, like almost on the technical side, like keeping that base of basic competence going. And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper no matter what, that kind of thing, it just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual of it. Why does days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven't played guitar for months? No, no, I, I, I understand. For me, I think it's, it's been like, if we have a gig coming up, we'll definitely You need deadlines. Yeah, yeah, that's right. No, like we, we will, we will sharpen up definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig. It's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this. This is like, just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well, right? But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days. And you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them and we like, just make up random songs about, you know, about our cat or something, you know, like we just do kind of random stuff. But you know, music is always involved in that process. Yeah, keeping it fun. You have Russian roots? I sure do. Were you born in Russia? I was. Yeah. When did you come here? So, I came to the US in very, the very end of 99. But so I was like, almost 14 years old. But along the way, we spent six years in Japan. So like, we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the US in 99. So did like elementary school, middle school in Japan. So elementary school in Japan. Yeah. So, that's interesting, dad. Do you still speak Russian? Sure. Okay. Ты по русски говоришь? Да, конечно. Okay, maybe I'll, let me ask you, in Russian, что ты помнишь о России? It'd be interesting to hear you speak Russian. В общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда мы уехали, и, конечно, как сказать, помню в первом приближении всё, включая вот переход, там, 91, 92 год, вот этот вот, вот этот турбулентный период, и ещё, естественно, 93. То есть ещё я очень хорошо помню, как в какой то момент сначала появилась пепси кола, а потом появилась кока кола. Я потом, я помню, я был лет, не знаю, в шесть, и я потом, как так может быть, что кока кола украла продукт и сделала то же самое? То есть я никогда, я долго думал, что и пепси, и кока колу изобрели, типа, в 92 году. So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking about basically his first, in 1992, interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he discovered Coke, and he was confused how such, how such theft could occur. Yeah, like an intellectual property theft. And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first, and there was some, there's some complicated story which I don't quite understand the details of. For a while, Pepsi like commanded submarines or something. Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it was. They were sponsoring tanks and this fascinating. And I remember, there's certain things that trickled in, like McDonald's, I remember that was a big deal. Oh yeah. Certain aspects of the West. Absolutely. So, I mean, we went to McDonald's, and we stood on, I mean, this is, this is absurd, right, from, kind of looking at it from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get into this McDonald's, and I remember inside it was just like a billion people, and I'm just taking a bite out of that Big Mac, and we're like, wow. What was it, an incredible experience for you? So, like, what is this taste of the West like? Did you enjoy it? I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how on the commercials, like, the Big Mac would kind of bounce. I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread? Like, amazing. Yeah. Right. So, I think it was... Artistry. Yeah. But you enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience. Exactly. It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac. Actually, I still don't know the answer to that. How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun? It's better to not know the answer. You just wander the mystery of it all. Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you, I don't know, you didn't mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi was, or Coke, I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's, you know, it was an important and formative period. I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I remember, like, the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well being. So kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare it to that turbulent time of the early 90s. And the other thing is, I think there's like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant, which is that you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life, right? You go, it's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right, but like going into Japanese elementary school, right, like, I didn't go to some, like, private, you know, thing, I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school, and I was the non Japanese person in my class. So just like to learn Japanese and just kind of. So that's a super humbling experience in many ways was when you like made fun of all that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. Being the outsider. Oh, absolutely. But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that, and then you kind of, then you just kind of are okay with stuff, you know what I mean? And so like doing that, again, in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy, because I was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before. So I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for switching up for whatever, you know, changes that will come up for the rest of your life. So I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything. It's a huge aspect of who I am, and I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this. Yes. Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college, you know, about their career, or maybe about life in general? I'm not like a career coach, but I'm definitely not a life coach. I don't have it all figured out. But I think there's a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a, there's kind of like a template for success, right? Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven't seen it, right? You know, I would say people in high school, right? So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and this so that it looks impressive, right? That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right? Do the thing that fills your life with passion. Do the thing that fills your life with interest. And you know, do that perpetually, right? A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring, right? So, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into the lives of young people would go a long way in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these, like, you know, check boxes to do well, right? Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life, but it's nice if it's possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that, such that your CV looks really impressive. Yeah, absolutely. There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's a baseline that you need to have. And then, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're passionate about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that feed your CV, like, slowly over time. Like getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or in terms of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub, like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts, such that your CV looks impressive to the rest of the world. In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about, see, like, getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product. You cannot, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life from you. Code very much does, right? Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, like, takes on a life of its own. That's kind of what I mean, right? Creating stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right? It's like a fun and... And it's also very impressive to others. I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean less and less. If you look at, especially again in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your, especially just finishing your degree, whether it's bachelor's or master's or PhD is less important than the things you've actually put out into the world. And that's a fascinating kind of, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy is in its richest, most beautiful form is starting to win out. Yeah, it's weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this, but, you know, the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like didn't have a PhD, right? So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector to, you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't know algebra and drew diagrams about, you know, magnetic fields and Faraday's law was derived entirely from intuition. So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you've got to do this and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice and then like you move on. So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're, you know, if there's a better approach. I think we're heading there, but it's a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might have just tried this whole thing out for a while where we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things. I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet, show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively, whether that's code or producing videos or all those kinds of things. That's right. I want to become a certified drone pilot. Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure. Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos against hundreds of thousands of views with your drone and never getting a certificate. That's probably illegal. Don't do it. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? So you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question. And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question. Do you think there's an answer to it? I'm not sure what the question is. Meaning of life? The meaning of life. It's 42. It's 42. Yeah. But aside from that, I think the question you're asking is why we do all this, right? Why we do all this. It's part of the human condition, right? Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested in kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us. And creating stuff to enable that understanding. So we're like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic. So like there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good explanation and yet there's a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to create and to understand. That's right. There are people that claim to be anti science, right? And yet in their anti science discussion, they're like, well, if you're so scientific, then why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works. And like it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common to all of us. That is absolutely what makes us human, right? And I'm in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right? I think as time evolves forward and the kind of economy changes, I mean, we're already starting to see a shift towards that type of creative enterprise as taking over a bigger and bigger chunk of the sector. It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account. But if we compare this to sometime when the dominant thing you would do would be to go to a factory and do the same exact thing, I think there's a tide there and things are sort of headed in that direction. Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun. I can't wait. Honestly, what happens next? I can't wait to just chill. Just chill. The terminal point of this is just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete one orbit. I'm going to credit you with this idea. I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a Planet 9 out there in the next few years so you can sit back with a cigar or cigarette or vodka or wine and just say, I told you so. That's already happening. I'm going to do that later tonight. As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star. I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today. I really appreciate the work that you do out there and I really appreciate you talking with me today. Thanks, Constantine. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batygin and thank you to Squarespace, Litterati, Onnit, And, and I. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #201